Jack Houston’s Editorials in the OBU Bulletin: 27 September 1919

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Not Gall, Just Stupid

In Saturday’s issue, the Free Press editor takes his second slam at Mr. Ivens for his reference to the truth-telling proclivities of the Winnipeg press.

In our last issue we took occasion to refer to the putative characteristics of the editor’s first effusion. With the second example of that vicious method of reasoning before us, we are prepared to maintain that the writer never has to be able, in all his lifetime up to the present, to do a piece of straight thinking. That editor’s mind is one cyclonic whirl of fog and confusion.

He paints a lurid, word-picture of a putative Russia, conjured out of his imagination, and then imputes to Ivens and fellows the intention of putting that whole bag of tricks over on the people of Canada. Bless his childlike simplicity, Ivens and his fellows were merely trying to win a strike to enforce the principle of collective bargaining an integral part of Labor’s Magna Charta, granted by the Peace Conference and the League of Nations, by withholding their skill and efficiency in the hope that bosses would be sufficiently embarrassed to come across, rather than call in the powers of the state to drive the workers back to their jobs. Ivens and the others did not expect the state to interfere. If they made a mistake it was in not having made the right guess.

Page revised: 27 July 2013