That is the primary put up in a three-part sequence about socialism at McGill within the Nineteen Thirties.
Raffaella Cerenzia
Tick tock, tick tock. “Time to get up!” In January 1933, deep within the midst of the Nice Melancholy, a brand new scholar publication introduced its arrival on McGill College’s campus. The paper was the manufacturing of McGill’s Labour Membership, to which all of its editors belonged. That includes eight to 12 pages of great and satirical leftist social commentary, The Alarm Clock professed itself to be a “technique of expression… for the very best considered college students on Canadian economics and politics.” The editors explicitly aligned themselves with the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the democratic socialist political social gathering that had been based the 12 months earlier than.[1]
Contributions to the paper have been various. One reporter hit the streets to gather quotes from unemployed males, compiled to emphasise the humiliation and distress of their scenario. A multi-page exposé reported {that a} close by municipal homeless shelter gave its visitors insufficient meals and vermin-infested beds. The fees have been primarily based on the expertise of three Alarm Clock reporters, who had “dressed for the event” and handed an evening incognito within the shelter. McGill professors and school members contributed articles selling the CCF and explaining the which means of “technocracy,” whereas one other column rebutted frequent objections to socialism.[1]
Some columns have been much less informative and extra biting. One, pithily entitled “Sage Sayings,” merely quoted rich businessmen on the Nice Melancholy: “We bankers are all hopeful of a silver lining,” stated the president of the Canadian Financial institution of Commerce. The editors indulged within the occasional quip—Henry Ford’s upbeat assertion that “If this era… have to be spoken of as a interval of melancholy, it’s far and away the best melancholy we now have ever had” was preceded by a notice that “when higher depressions are made Mr. Ford will make them”—however the quotes weren’t usually accompanied by any response or evaluation.[2] Nestled between articles on inescapable unemployment and crushing poverty, they wanted none.
The Alarm Clock was an instantaneous hit on campus. All one thousand copies of the primary problem have been offered on the primary day, a big quantity for a scholar physique of solely 3,000. Even sorority members who claimed to symbolize the “Institution” took up their locations at Roddick Gates to promote the “underground radical paper.” 300 kilometers to the southwest, the Queen’s College Labour Membership positioned a standing order for the publication. The fruit of “months of formidable planning,” The Alarm Clock appeared off to a promising begin.[3] However because the supporters of labour and the merely curious scrambled to purchase their five-cent copies, others have been lower than happy with this upstart publication. Montreal’s businessmen—the identical demographic who dominated McGill’s board of governors and donor roll—have been fast to object.
Complaints instantly started pouring into the principal’s workplace, the place Sir Arthur Currie attended them with care. The Alarm Clock would haven’t any affect on the coed physique, Principal Currie wrote soothingly to at least one discontented governor. The perfect factor they might do was to easily “neglect about these troublesome folks, who actually don’t depend for a lot,” and anticipate The Alarm Clock to burn itself out. Actually, Currie stated, he “can be shocked if there have been a 3rd problem.”[4] However that didn’t imply that Currie was content material to take a seat on his palms and wait. There was injury management to be carried out.
Currie’s predominant concern was for the college’s popularity as an apolitical establishment. The Alarm Clock brazenly affiliated itself with the CCF, but additionally claimed an attachment to McGill. Already, Currie had heard, sure members of the general public had taken The Alarm Clock’s opinions “because the official views of the College.” In Currie’s eyes, this sullied McGill with the stain of political partisanship. A publication which promoted a nationwide political social gathering “couldn’t obtain any official recognition” by the college. Clearly one thing needed to be carried out, however what? Currie admitted that he couldn’t prohibit college students from writing for the paper, because it wasn’t printed on college property. Attempting to expel contributors would solely make McGill a “laughing inventory,” and open the college to lawsuits.[5] All that the principal might do was attempt to distance The Alarm Clock and its partisan proclamations from McGill’s good title. He set to this process with fervor.
Currie instantly banned the sale of The Alarm Clock on campus. He additionally organized a gathering with Lloyd G. Reynolds, the paper’s editor-in-chief, and met once more with all the editorial board shortly thereafter. The precise particulars of the conferences are not possible to know, however some issues could also be surmised from Currie’s letters and notes. It was “unfair,” the principal apparently admonished Reynolds, “to hyperlink in even the slightest diploma such a propagandist publication with the College.” To the editorial board, he seemingly known as The Alarm Clock a “purely propagandist physique,” and he used related wording elsewhere. Based mostly on his notes for a later assembly with them, which he half-jokingly titled “Notes from which to ‘harangue’ the Alarm Clock editors,” Currie might even have accused the scholars of propagating communist “sedition and revolutionary propaganda.”[6] (This can be a slightly dramatic studying of The Alarm Clock, and one which I don’t assume Currie himself believed.) He may have threatened them with expulsion, albeit extra as a scare tactic than as an precise risk.
Nonetheless, in his follow-up letter to the editors, Currie was nothing however civil. He claimed to “rejoice to see college students taking such a deep curiosity in issues which are of important import in our social construction.” He reiterated a praise that he had apparently paid the editors throughout their assembly. He additionally advised that they promote their publication at Strathcona Corridor, stating that it was so near campus that no “scholar would discover it inconvenient to go there for a paper.”[7] The discrepancy between his harsh assembly notes and well mannered letter possible mirrored his underlying technique: to scare the scholars into fast submission with discuss of sedition and expulsion, after which again off as soon as they have been subdued. If Currie did berate the editors, it was seemingly one thing of an act on his half, as advised by his use of quotes across the phrase “harangue” in his private notes. He knew that The Alarm Clock was not “seditious,” and that disciplinary motion was unrealistic, however he believed that “tak[ing] a powerful stand now at the start of time period… will do extra to cease [The Alarm Clock] than… making an attempt to cause with” the editors.[8]
Currie’s technique didn’t “cease” the paper altogether, however the college students did acquiesce to their principal’s calls for. Subsequent copies of The Alarm Clock have been offered at off-campus bookstores and newsstands.[9] Specific connections to McGill have been steadily scrubbed from the paper. The February problem’s subheading modified from “Wound Up and Set Month-to-month at McGill College” to “Wound Up and Set Month-to-month by the McGill Labour Membership.” By November 1933, it merely learn “Wound Up and Set Month-to-month Throughout the School 12 months.” Inside its pages, “the McGill Labour Membership” turned “the Labor Membership”—possible a results of Currie’s reminder that the group didn’t have the fitting to incorporate “McGill” in its title. From November 1933 on, The Alarm Clock additionally included a disclaimer: “Views expressed on this journal are to not be taken as these of the Governors, College, or College students Society of McGill College.”[10]
So the editors of The Alarm Clock acquiesced, however removed from silently. Within the February 1933 problem, they known as the campus gross sales ban “undesirable and unwarranted,” a direct violation of the Labour Membership’s “rights of self-expression.” They requested “the College students’ Council to take up the cudgels on our behalf,” and known as upon college students to assist The Alarm Clock’s reinstatement. The campus gross sales ban was by no means rescinded, however The Alarm Clock offered effectively sufficient off campus to finance the manufacturing of no less than seven whole points.[11] Below stress from complaining enterprise elites and clamoring scholar editors, and regardless of the paper’s continued gross sales, Currie neither moderated nor intensified his measures. Having banned The Alarm Clock’s sale on campus and compelled some concessions, he seemingly held no need to go additional. Currie died on the finish of November 1933, however The Alarm Clock continued to distance itself from McGill, as he had ordered, till it ceased publication in March 1934.
In The Alarm Clock and Currie’s response to it, a few noteworthy factors emerge. First, socialism clearly had its place amongst McGill’s scholar physique. Regardless of the small dimension of the Labour Membership—its membership numbered round six—its publication offered effectively sufficient to final three semesters.[12] Second, Currie’s modest response to socialism made him considerably of an outlier throughout the Nineteen Thirties McGill administration. He tried to disassociate The Alarm Clock from the college, however he by no means tried to kill the paper outright, or to in any other case dissuade the scholars from persevering with it. His leniency might be partially defined by his need to behave throughout the limits of the legislation, his perception that the paper would die out by itself, and his common willingness to let college students experiment intellectually. Maybe equally important, nonetheless, was Currie’s ambivalent angle in the direction of socialism. He didn’t assist socialism or the CCF, however he was additionally removed from enamored of the mainstream political events. Currie claimed that his private political beliefs have been irrelevant to the problem at hand, and that it was purely a matter of institutional coverage.[13] Nonetheless, I might argue that his tolerance for socialism normally did affect his selections: not like these with extra fervent anti-socialist views, Currie’s definition of educational freedom prolonged to defending socialist discourse on campus—as long as it remained clearly divorced from the college itself. As my subsequent put up will clarify, not all of McGill’s directors have been so prepared to incorporate socialism underneath the umbrella of educational freedom. Nor have been all of them as content material as Currie to restrict themselves to legally hermetic responses to it.
Raffaella Cerenzia is a fourth-year undergraduate historical past scholar at McGill College.
[1] The Alarm Clock, January 1933, 2, 3; The Alarm Clock, February 1933, 1, 6; The Alarm Clock, March 1933, 3, 8, 11, 12; The Alarm Clock, January 1934, 3.
[2] The Alarm Clock, January 1933, 4.
[3] The McGill Day by day, 12 January 1933, McGill College Archives [MUA], RG2 – Sir Arthur Currie Assortment [SACC], c49 c676, file 612, “Scholar Actions & Scholar Self-discipline: Labour Membership; Canadian Commonwealth Federation”; Eugene Forsey, A Life on the Fringe: The Memoirs of Eugene Forsey (Oxford College Press, 1990), 20; Edgar Andrew Collard, ed., The McGill You Knew: An Anthology of Recollections, 1920-1960 (Longman Canada Restricted, 1975), 30; The Alarm Clock, February 1933, 1; The McGill Day by day, 9 January 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612.
[4] Sir Arthur Currie to J.M. McConnell, 16 January 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612. “J.W.” was mistyped as “J.M.” within the letter.
[5] Sir Arthur Currie to H.J. Cody, 15 February 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612; H.J. Cody to Sir Arthur Currie, 17 February 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612; Currie to McConnell, 16 January 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612; Sir Arthur Currie to Ragnild Tait, 10 February 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612. “Ragnhild” was mistyped as “Ragnild” in Currie’s letter.
[6] The Alarm Clock, February 1933, 4; Currie to Tait, 10 February 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612; Currie to McConnell, 16 January 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612; Ragnhild Tait to Sir Arthur Currie, 9 February 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612; Currie to Cody, 15 February 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612; “Notes from which to ‘harangue’ the Alarm Clock editors,” MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612. The “Notes” usually are not signed, however on condition that they’re filed with Currie’s papers, and that they might logically be his, I’ve assumed that he’s the creator.
[7] Currie to Tait, 10 February 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612.
[8] “Notes from which to ‘harangue’ the Alarm Clock editors,” MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612.
[9] The Alarm Clock, February 1933, 4.
[10] The Alarm Clock, January 1933, 1; The Alarm Clock, February 1933, 1, 4; The Alarm Clock, March 1933, 4; The Alarm Clock, November 1933, 1, 4; The Alarm Clock, January 1934, 3; The Alarm Clock, March 1934, 3; Currie to Tait, 10 February 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612.
[11] The Alarm Clock, February 1933, 4. McGill College Archives holds copies from January, February, March, and November 1933, and January and March 1934. Different students have made reference to a December 1933 problem: Michiel Horn and Frank R. Scott, A New Endeavour: Chosen Political Essays, Letters, and Addresses (College of Toronto Press, 1986), 10.
[12] Paul Axelrod, “Spying on the Younger in Melancholy and Battle: College students, Youth Teams and the RCMP 1935-1942,” Labour/Le Travail 35, (1995): 46. A 12 months after its debut, the paper was reportedly promoting “like hotcakes” at Queen’s College. The Alarm Clock, January 1934, 11.
[13] Michiel Horn, Tutorial Freedom in Canada: A Historical past (College of Toronto Press, 1999), 130; Currie to Tait, 10 February 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612. Would The Alarm Clock have been a difficulty for Currie or the governors had it “propagandized” on behalf of an old-line political social gathering? The query is price contemplating, though I don’t have a solution.
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