In Bienfait: The Saskatchewan Miners’ Struggle of ’31, Stephen L. Endicott attempts to dispel the long-standing Canadian assumption and belief that communist organizers fomented rebellion in the Estevan[1] coal mines which eventually led to three civilian deaths.  Instead, Endicott argues, the strike and its ensuing bloodshed was neither the fault of the red-tinged labor organizers nor the miners themselves but “[…] the coal operators who advocated violence [and the] police who practised conspiracy and used firearms” (Endicott 137).  A retired Senior Scholar in History at York University, Endicott traveled around Canada to obtain Royal Canadian Mounted Police records, primary newspaper documents, and various related local and provincial government documents.  Not least of all, he interviewed dozens of “residents and former residents of Bienfait” in order to shape a social and factual context for the history.  Published in 2002, seventy-one years after the strike, it is extremely important for this book to have been completed before the remaining miners and their families—his essential primary oral sources—passed away.  As he writes in his conclusion, Endicott believes that “history is on the side of the people,”[2] and the facts of this event which “profoundly affected the thinking of a whole generation of Canadians” (127) are now becoming accepted as mainstream thought.  He attempts, in this work, to further the burgeoning remembrance of the Estevan strike as a “savage repression” of the working man, not a crazed revolt against upstanding coal mine operators and the RCMP.

            Endicott begins his portrayal of the society and the area with a portrait of Peter Gemby, who began a new life as a Canadian when he emigrated from western Ukraine in 1922.  It is fitting that the work begins with a sketch of a Ukrainian immigrant because so many of the miners involved in the Estevan Strike were from that ethnic background or nationality.  Instead of settling in one of the more attractive cities in the east or in Manitoba, Gemby, like so many others of his socio-ethnic class, found a home squatting with his ailing father (also a miner) in a shack on the land of Western Dominion Colleries.  This is a typical story in the years after World War I, as Bienfait “doubled in size to 500” people (11), mostly consisting of immigrants from Eastern Europe.  Gemby’s story is also indicative of the creativity and compassion with which Endicott narrates the personal and family accounts that elucidate the strike and its surrounding events.[3]

            These immigrants united with their British and Scandinavian counterparts, despite ethnic and cultural differences, to form the backbone of the workforce for the lignite coalfield owners in western Canada in the Depression era; as such, they were also the basis of the Estevan Strike.  As Eastern Europe was geographically and politically connected with Moscow, the world centre of communist activity, and the strike became an issue of economics and class struggle, questions of communism became central to the three week long strike.  Endicott does not disavow the “red” overtones of the movement, but instead attempts to authenticate the function of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) in terms of its aid to creating the Workers’ Unity League (WUL), which staunchly supported the coal miners.

            The WUL was formed as a sort of go-between for the miners, who wanted better working conditions and a brighter future and were willing to fight for it, and the CPC, which of course had goals regarding the elimination “exploitation of labour by capital” (43) and the like.  Unlike other Canadian labour unions at the time, then, the WUL was affiliated with the Moscow-based Red International of Labour Unions and was intended to be a revolutionary movement; its organizers (e.g. Joe Forkin, James Sloan, and especially Sam Scarlett[4]) were branded with the pejorative label of “communist agitators” and the negative connotations which those words carried.  In the past, histories have often vilified these men, along with Annie Buller and other key organizers, as inflammatory activists who became cowards and fled the miners as the strike marched toward its tragic end.  Endicott, however, again disagrees with the conclusions of past historians; he gives them a much more “sympathetic hearing” (7).

            The coal mine operators, however, receive no such treatment.  Endicott harshly notes time after time that the operators not only refused to negotiate with the union[5] but also repudiated its very existence despite the MWUC’s claim that it had signed up “one hundred per cent” of Bienfait miners (49).[6]  In order to avoid foreseen accusations of the union being “un-patriotic,” the central MWUC management selected only miners of British descent for local leadership positions.[7]  Relatedly, the MWUC instructed all of its members to remain strictly nonviolent in order to garner and maintain public support, and those orders were followed.  Again, it was the coal mine operators (via the RCMP) who incited the violence—their forecast of bloodshed came to fruition only due their own demands of continual police reinforcement and arrest of union interlopers.

            Though vilified alongside the corporations by the end of the work, the RCMP at the beginning are portrayed as having common sense and seeing the situation clearly.  Endicott writes of local officer William Mulhall as an objective, restrained sergeant whose honest testimony to the Regina RCMP proved that it was the operators, not the miners, who were provoking a strike.  After a propaganda campaign waged by the local elites[8], however, Mulhall was replaced in Bienfait; without his influence, the RCMP became more like strikebreakers than peacekeepers.  After the parade and the following massacre, the detachment even went on the offensive, “looking for wounded miners, making further arrests, and generally spreading an atmosphere of terror” (96).  Many of the involved miners were then stripped of their jobs and blacklisted;[9] the “communist agitators” went on trial along with the miners, often for “inciting riots.”  Most of them were convicted.  Annie Buller, for example, went to trial twice because the prosecution in her first trial was unable to procure a conviction.

            This incident, along with the remainder of Endicott’s arguments, is based soundly on extensive research, and therefore should be taken quite seriously, especially by students of western Canada, labour history, and class struggles.  Endicott utilized seemingly every informational outlet possible for a work of this type, and his work should consequently receive a fair amount of scholarly consideration.  He adds to the existing scholarship on the Estevan Strike, but does so in a very beneficial way, going beyond the typical negative approach to the subject.  Fueled by the Cold War, anti-communist sentiment lingered for years and resulted in an extremely pessimistic view of this episode, and only in the past decade has anyone began to look at this specific struggle as one of the origins of the labour movement.  Though Endicott clearly set out to rectify “the usual account of the communist organizers as a group of violence-prone criminal conspirators” (137), Bienfait is a masterful presentation of this goal.