Seven Oaks Magazine.

Ginger Goodwin is largely remembered as he lived – a controversial defender of working class rights, a dedicated socialist and a representative of the radicalism of the BC labour movement. While these basics are pretty much secure, few other facts of Ginger’s life have been confirmed. At least, until the recent publication of Roger Stonebanks’s Fighting For Dignity, a thoroughly researched consideration of Goodwin’s life and death that puts much of the factual controversy to bed even as it leaves Goodwin’s controversial political role largely intact.

The rudiments of the story that Stonebanks describes are fairly well known. Albert “Ginger” Goodwin was a coal miner, born in Yorkshire in the late 19 th Century, who emigrated to Canada in 1906. He participated in a vicious coal strike in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, in 1909, before crossing the country in the hopes of finding steady employment.

It was in Cumberland, on Vancouver Island, that Goodwin would become a prominent Socialist. Although he only played a small part in organizing the 1912 walkout that would become the Great Coal Strike, Goodwin soon established himself as an orator speaking about the conditions of the striking miners for the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC). After the strike, he could not find any work in the Island mines, and so left for the interior in 1915, eventually reaching Trail.

When Goodwin arrived in Trail he started on with Cominco, as a smelterworker. He soon joined the SPC local, and within two months ran as their candidate in the provincial election of 1916 for the Trail riding. One of Goodwin’s trademarks at this time was his anti-militarism, and his aggressive rhetoric against the war in Europe. He decried it as an attack on the international working class, and encouraged all workers to refuse to go. In 1917, when the draft was introduced in BC, Goodwin demanded the labour movement use the general strike should any workers be drafted against their will. Soon after his demand, Goodwin became involved in an organizing drive at the Cominco smelter with the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelterworkers (Mine-Mill). As the drive began, Goodwin was drafted, and reported for his physical. The first physical classified him D – temporarily unfit but subject to re-examination later. A month later, and eleven days after he led the Mine-Mill members out onto the picket lines, Goodwin was recalled to the draft board. This came immediately on the heels of a Prime Ministerial announcement that Class D draftees would not be recalled or called up to the front. Sensing treachery, Goodwin’s Mine-Mill local protested, but to no avail. Goodwin was re-examined, and classified A – ready for the front. He was given a month to report for duty.

Goodwin fled instead, and hid in the hills on Vancouver Island near Cumberland. He lived off the land there with a small group of other draft dodgers, whose general whereabouts were known but who had been successful in hiding for a few months. A frustrated provincial police force turned to locals for help, and hired a local barkeep and hunter named Dan Campbell to assist in hunting the fugitives. Along with a few of the Island’s legendary cougar hunters, Campbell led provincial police into the woods near Comox Lake. On July 27, 1918, Campbell happened upon Goodwin, and shot him, killing him with a bullet in the throat. There were no witnesses, an important fact in the aftermath.

In the days after Goodwin’s murder, BC underwent its first general strike, and Cumberland was overrun as thousands of people turned out for Goodwin’s funeral. Buried with all the attendant rites the labour movement could offer, Goodwin became a symbol for an increasingly radicalized population. When workers in Vancouver downed tools across the city to protest his murder, they offered a brief preview of the labour strife that would become a six-week general strike in the spring of 1919. When, after a short investigation, Campbell was not even charged with Goodwin’s murder, further protest occurred. By the time the war ended a few months later, Goodwin had become a martyr of the left in BC, a role he fills to this day.

Although the basics of Goodwin’s life have been well known for a long time, especially among leftists and locals of Vancouver Island, the specifics have been hidden since his death. Other work has been done on Goodwin, including another biography, but Stonebanks’s research sets Fighting For Dignity apart. He carefully reconstructs Goodwin’s early life, including doing extensive research on his roots in England. From there, he painstakingly traces him across the continent, highlighting time in Nova Scotia, the Crowsnest Pass and Cumberland. Not only does he explore Goodwin’s political and industrial life, he reconstructs his social life as well, giving his readers glimpses into Goodwin’s friends, and his living conditions. Stonebanks writes about Goodwin’s success on the soccer pitch as well, and so builds a comprehensive view of a man who is often reduced to a caricature by his supporters and detractors alike.

The most important aspect of Fighting For Dignity is this research, and the factual basis it offers for future analysis. Not only does he reconstruct the events of Goodwin’s life, he dispels a number of rumors that have plagued Goodwin’s legend. He definitively puts to rest the belief that Goodwin was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical union of the time, and places him more squarely in the political camp of the SPC. He also clarifies his brand of socialism, though, separating him from the scientific socialists (sometimes called impossibilists) that characterized much of the SPC leadership.

The most stubborn rumor that Stonebanks tackles and finally dispels surrounds Goodwin’s death, however. Goodwin has long attracted conspiracy theorists, who have argued the government targeted him specifically for murder. This view reduces the murder of Goodwin to the work of a small handful of nefarious bureaucrats, and removes it from its larger context. Stonebanks replaces the murder in this context, carefully demonstrating Dan Campbell’s personal vendetta against the draft-dodgers, but also arguing that the murder was simply the normal behavior of the state. That is, Stonebanks, taking a cue from labour historian Mark Leier, recognizes that Goodwin was murdered in the normal run of police action on Vancouver Island. While Campbell may have exceeded his role as a special constable in shooting Goodwin, and may have even planned the murder, there is no evidence that anyone above him ordered Goodwin murdered. They did not have to, after all – they were perfectly within their rights to order a private citizen with a gun into the woods to hunt down draft dodgers. The ‘crime,’ if there was one committed, is that the state functioned this way on a day-to-day basis. Stonebanks powerfully undermines the claims that government members conspired to have Goodwin murdered, and in the process demonstrates that for the government hunting Goodwin with armed men was simply part of their role as enforcers of the law, and thus Goodwin’s murder should be understood as the de rigeur behavior of a capitalist state.

Stonebanks, who clearly has some affection for Goodwin, does not spend too much time debating Goodwin’s politics. Instead, he has written an account of his life that focuses on rebuilding the actual events, and emphasizes the day-to-day context within which Goodwin became a socialist and union leader. By retaining this focus, Stonebanks has crafted an excellent book, one that will perhaps end many of the debates around Goodwin’s life. From there, much as Goodwin himself would likely have wanted, interested parties can debate Goodwin’s politics, all of them empowered with a more complete view of the life and times of a labour martyr.