Abstract
Soon after a strike at the huge Sudbury mining operations of the International Nickel Company—also known as Inco—had begun on September 24, 1958, a wave of anticommunist hysteria swept the northern Ontario mining town of Sudbury. The press depicted miners’ families held ransom by union bullies and the events as a battle between Godless communists and faithful Catholics: “Two thousand Inco miners’ wives urge men to return to work”; “Inco wives defy goons, yell ‘Go back to Russia’ ”; “Inco wives form anti-Red faction.”2 Reports by “faithful” workers’ wives challenging the members of the union and their “Ladies’ Auxiliary” dominated the media. They claimed that the union’s “communist leaders” were being unreasonable in their unwillingness to accept the nickel giant’s offer. “It’s time we heard the truth from the union,” declared Mrs. Regina Talbot. “We want our men to go back to work, and they should have some say in the matter.” Ethel Lasalles, acting secretary for the Back to Work movement, a wives’ oppositional group, told the local radio station: “We women have taken the initiative and we feel that it is up to the men to follow through on our resolutions. How much longer are you going to permit yourselves to be hidden behind the Red Curtain?”3 The International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (Mine Mill), led by left-wing unionists, was under siege in both the United States and Canada.
We need a new recipe for Christmas cake, for the one the union baked. We can’t eat it, we can’t digest it. We need a union of fair-minded men ready to fight for the working men, we don’t want a union that starves and degrades our men.
Dorothy Dolman, striker’s wife1
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Notes
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 16; Franca Iacovetta, “Making New Canadians, Social Workers, Women and the Reshaping of Immigrant Families,” in Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women’s History, ed., Franca Iacovetta and M. Valverde (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 261–303; Veronica Strong-Boag, “Their Side of the Story, Women’s Voices in Ontario Suburbs, 1945–1960,” in A Diversity of Women, Ontario, 1945–1980, ed., Joy Parr (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 46–74.
See, e.g., Ruth Frager, Sweatshop Strife (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); F. Iacovetta, Such Hardworking People: Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto (Kingston: McGill University Press, 1992); Carmel Patrias, “Relief Strike: Immigrant Workers and the Great Depression, in Crowland, Ontario, 1930–1935,” in A Nation of Immigrants: Women, Workers, and Communities in Canadian History, ed., Franca Iacovetta, Paula Draper and Robert Ventresca (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 322–358; Varpu Lindstrom, Defiant Sisters: A Social History of Finnish Immigrant Women in Canada (Toronto: Multicultural Historical Society, 1992); Frances Swyripa, “The Ideas of Ukrainian Women’s Organization of Canada, 1930–1945,” in Beyond the Vote: Canadian Women in Politics, ed., Linda Kealey and Joan Sangster (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 239–257.
John Deverell and the Latin American Working Group, Falconbridge: Portrait of a Canadian Mining Multinational (Toronto: James Lorimer Press, 1975), 14. See also Wallace Clement, Hardrock Mining: Industrial Relations and Technological Changes at Inco (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981).
For an extensive discussion of the impact of cold war activities in Canada, see Reg Whitaker and Gary Marcuse, Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945–1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994).
Whitaker and Marcuse, Cold War Canada, 193, 277 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994).
Mercedes Steedman, Peter Suschnigg and Dieter Buse, eds., Hard Lessons: The Mine Mill Union in the Canadian Labour Movement (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1995), 6–9. See also John Lang, “A Lion in a Den of Daniels: A History of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers in Sudbury, Ontario, 1942–1962” (MA thesis, University of Guelph, 1970); Mike Solski and John Smaller, Mine Mill: The History of the Lnternational Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in Canada since 1895 (Ottawa: Steelrail Publishing, 1984); Al King, Red Bait! Struggles of a Mine Mill Local (Vancouver: Kingbird Publishing, 1998). The American CIO expelled Mine Mill in 1950.
For a discussion of the impact of the cold war on Canadian labor, see Irving M. Abella, Nationalism, Communism, and Canadian Labour: The CLO, the Communist Party and the Canadian Congress of Labour (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), chapter 6; Franca Iacovetta, “Making Model Citizens: Gender, Corrupted Democracy, and Immigrant and Refugee Reception Work in Cold War Canada,” Julie Guard, “Women Worth Watching, Radical Housewives in Cold War Canada,” and Mercedes Steedman, “The Red Petticoat Brigade, Mine Mill Women’s Auxiliaries and the Threat from within, 1940s–1970s,” all in Whose National Security? Canadian State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies, ed., Gary Kinsman, Dieter Buse, and Mercedes Steedman (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2000), 55–90.
For a discussion of attacks on Mine Mill in the United States, see Vernon Jensen, Nonferrous Metals Industrial Unionism, 1932–1954 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1954); and Laurie Mercier, “Instead of Fighting the Common Enemy: Mine Mill versus the Steelworkers in Montana, 1950–1967,” Labor History, 40, no. 4 (1999): 459–80.
J.R Winter, The Sudbury Area: An Economic Survey (Sudbury: Sudbury and District Industrial Commission and University of Sudbury, 1967).
As quoted in Sheila McLeod Arnopoulos, Voices from French Ontario (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1982), 108–109.
Solski and Smaller, Mine Mill, 125–132; Frank Southern, The Sudbury Incident (Toronto: York Publishing Co., 1978). See also M.J. Heale, American Communism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); and, Paula Maurutto, “Private Policing and the Surveillance of Catholics: Anti-Communism in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto, 1920–60,” in Kinsman, Buse, and Steedman, Whose National Security? 37–54.
Stuart Jamieson, Task Force on Labor Relations, Study no. 2 (Ottawa: Queens Printers, 1968), 372.
Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glitters: Class, Conflict and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 139; see also Mary Murphy, Mining Cultures, Men, Women and Leisure in Butte, 1914–1941 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Laurie Mercier, Anaconda: Labor, Community and Culture in Montana’s Smelter City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 160–172.
This echoes similar behavior in the 1960 Mine Mill strike in Kellogg, Idaho. K. Aiken, “When I realized how close Communism was to Kellogg, I was willing to devote day and night: Anti-communism, Women, Community Values, and the Bunker Hill Strike of 1960,” Labor History 36, no. 2 (1995), 182.
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© 2006 Jaclyn J. Gier and Laurie Mercier
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Steedman, M. (2006). Godless Communists and Faithful Wives, Gender Relations and the Cold War: Mine Mill and the 1958 Strike against the International Nickel Company. In: Gier, J.J., Mercier, L. (eds) Mining Women. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73399-6_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73399-6_13
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