Able to Lead: Disablement, Radicalism and The Political Life of E.T. Kingsley. By Ravi Malhotra and Benjamin Isitt. Vancouver: UBS Press, 2021, 374pp. $58.47.
It is a commonplace that the nature of the Left, its membership, influence on the labor movement and popular life is different in each society and, indeed, usually within specific regions of a country. The Canadian Left, destined to be compared to that of the US and UK, has sometimes loomed both relatively large or at least influential and curiously scattered across a wide geographical range. It is also unique in the relatively slow assimilation of the immigrant/ethnic groups, often sustaining Left and labor movements through strong community ties.
E.T. Kingsley belongs to the founding decades of an organized socialist movement in Canada. His life mirrored a cross-border reality, with visiting Canadians affably known to US socialists as “tea-drinkers,” more likely involved in labor education than their southern counterparts. He is also indicative of the early generation of working-class socialists who had an extended moment in the political daylight and, often enough, disappeared into relative obscurity.
But the sui generis story of Kingsley begins with a railroad accident. In 1890, the thirty-three-year-old brakeman, having left behind a farmer’s life, had both legs sliced off in an accident, not something even unusual in that place or time. While recuperating in a Missoula, Montana, hospital, he had the time to read Karl Marx among others. Within the next few years, his wife filed for divorce, and he was on his own in California, with artificial limbs. He became active there in the small but hyperactive Socialist Labor Party, led by Daniel De Leon. He repeatedly ran for office, and was ever available for public events, well known for his oratory on the cruelty of capitalism and the hopes for socialism. His leadership in the “Free Speech Fights” had the added public interest of the man on two wooden legs.
The SLP, as fractious as it was small, encouraged a kind of resistance to reform movements, then known as an “impossibilism” that even shunned existing labor unions as barriers to class consciousness. As official California State Organizer responsible for branches far and wide, Kingsley was impossibly anti-reformist, and in the end expelled by his comrades. The national SLP had hopelessly split before the end of the 1890s anyway, and the Socialist Party, with Eugene Debs, emerged the overwhelming majority of the real socialist movement. Active for a couple years in Seattle, Kingsley move on toward his real destiny: Canada.
In Vancouver and sparsely settled British Columbia generally, Kingsley quickly made himself known as a speaker and thinker. The small Socialist Party of British Columbia obviously viewed him as a godsend. But the “high priest of socialism,” or rather, the most severe interpretation of the doctrine, remained an Impossibilist, unsympathetic toward unions and even toward woman suffrage as hinderances to the great revolution as sure to come as the collapse of capitalism.
The emergence of the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC) broadened his horizons. The SPC and its organ, the Western Clarion edited by Kingsley himself from Vancouver, propounded a scientific-sounding doctrine that few Canadians had heard with any clarity. He also ran repeatedly for office, never close to winning but attracting far more attention than in California. His acid wit, expressed even better in speeches than in his newspaper columns, cursed capitalism with a poetic vigor, much as the IWW’s songs of the time caricatured the myths of the system. He kept the Party’s newspaper afloat, meanwhile, by becoming a commercial printer, while investing in other regional businesses. All this ended with a Party dispute in 1912, but it had been, in some ways at least, a grand run.
The authors point toward the creation of a Canadian socialist culture, the kind of deep blue-collar milieu common in European Left parties but often difficult to maintain in the US, thanks to social or geographical mobility beyond the dense ethnic milieux. Perpetually on the road to branches large and small, Kingsley gave these common men and women a vision and a sense of class analysis. He was also a personal phenomenon in the Canadian commercial press, seen in humorous cartoons that, strangely, did not seem to take any note of his physical impairment.
The coming of the “European War” sent Kingsley into a political purgatory for a few years, for the sin of cursing the German socialists and the German working class as having failed socialist internationalism. But unlike the US, where socialist critics of the Germans departed the movement and sometimes earned career rewards, Kingsley had practically nowhere to go and was apparently forgiven his lapse. Signing on as editor of the British Columbia Federationist newspaper, he continued to espouse radical ideas, even turning against Conscription. By 1919, amidst an enormous strike wave and a “General Strike” in Winnipeg and Seattle, he declared “the class war is on” (p.185).
The Canadian state, fearful of this strange but compelling figure, slapped his movement down, raiding offices of newspapers, coordinating arrests, deportations and prosecutions with local, regional, and national forces. Kingsley himself escaped without arrest or trial, but his movement was badly damaged for a few years. He fought on for a while in the early 1920s, once again becoming a popular lecturer at large, from his Vancouver home base. By now in his sixties and unwilling to go along with the formation of a Communist movement, he slipped into apparent obscurity, except for a last run for office from Vancouver, with no party or union behind him. He died in 1929 from a carbon monoxide poisoning accident He was not quite forgotten—the authors describe a Canadian novel with a romantic hero that must be Kingsley—but certain to be an obscure memory with the passage of generations.
Throughout this book, Malhotra and Isitt have been careful to analyze the role of disablement, noting the prevalence of industrial accidents, the changing public attitudes and government approaches. We see on p.233 co-author Ravi Malhotra with crutches, disabled but undaunted. Perhaps, as they write, Kingsley was truly inspired toward a vision of revolutionary transformation from the industrial accident that left him without legs, but undaunted. Readers interested in the new literature on disability will find this book of special interest, and all those who look for details in the rise of socialist movements within the English-speaking countries will be happy to see another corner of history described well.
Paul Buhle,
Emeritus Professor, Brown University.
