With the Workers

Abstract

Reading these labour memoirs of Ben Hamper and Thomas Geoghegan called to mind Len DeCaux's Labor Radical, one of the most inspired books in this genre. In it, DeCaux charts a plebeian epic that begins in middle-class Belfast around the turn of the century and continues through Harrow, where the son of a church official began to question the stifling conservatism of his public school teachers and peers. Several forces conspired to drive the budding revolutionary inexorably leftward ? a stint at Oxford during World War I where he fell under the influence of Ruskin College socialists and labourists, the Bolshevik Revolution, a fortuitous trip to Italy in 1920 to witness the factory takeovers. By mid-war DeCaux had already chosen sides in the class war, enlisting in the army of labour as a sort of aide-de-camp doing picketline duty for the miners and other union militants. It dawned on him that this was no light decision. He was, after all, a man of impeccable bourgeois credentials who chose to identify with a class to which he didn't belong ... , a social point driven home again and again in face-to-face contact with his adoptive working-class comrades, who treated him with reserve. A union chairman inadvertently rubbed his nose in his class pedigree by calling me 'sir.' It rankled, recalled DeCaux with characteristic understatement. A solution to this dilemma began to emerge in conservations with American and Canadian students at Oxford, few of whom approved his project of joining the working class, but most of whom agreed that it was easier in the United States where politicians flaunted their popular origins, businessmen invented impoverished pasts, and workers needed all the help they could get. So in spring 1921 DeCaux hopped a steamer for the US, beginning an odyssey that would take him from pick and shovel work in the 1920s to the editorship of the CIO News. DeCaux not only signed on with the working class, he helped give it shape and form at decisive historical moment.