George "Paddy" Stanton 1901-1960
Workers Vanguard, Mid-May 1960
Tribute to George Stanton
Union Militant & Socialist
By Ross Dowson
With the death of George Stanton on April 25 the American labor and
socialist movement suffered a grievous loss. Affectionately known as
Paddy, he was a colorful figure, widely known over the past 35 years on
the West Coast and Eastern Canada, and in the previous decade in Chicago
and on the US West Coast.
He was a rebel and a fighter—every inch of him. All his time, his great
energy, what goods he possessed were always on call, without reservation,
at the service of the union and socialist cause. Steeped in the great
revolutionary traditions of his class and supremely confident of its
future victory, his voice, his manner, everything about him was cut from
the one cloth. His dramatic postures, his booming voice, his vivid earthy
imagery were a familiar part of union meetings, conferences, political
forums, street corner rallies, from coast to coast for almost four
decades.
Stanton collapsed and died as he picked up his welding torch on a job
at Malton just outside Toronto, in the harness of the class of which he
was so proud to be a member.
One of the pioneers of American industrial unionists, as the unions
became consolidated he saw many erstwhile associates metamorphize into
conservative office holders. But Stanton always stayed with the ranks. He
had a healthy contempt for the "pie cards" and the aspirants for seats in
the parliamentary "gas house." He was totally unconcerned with the
scramble to accumulate the material goods of this world. No ascetic, he
indulged himself whenever he was, as he would put it, "steaky." But he
traveled light, always with his eye on the future.
Generous to what the average person would consider the extreme, warm
and considerate, he had a healthy hatred and intolerance for ignorance and
weakness whenever they would show up in the circles that he moved. Stanton
knew many defeats, strikes broken, unions collapse, associates weaken,
falter and fall in the course of the struggle, splits and schisms, but he
never lost the long view.
He became a materialist and a class conscious militant very early. He
was launched off in this course, to which he unfalteringly adhered until
the end, by a group of German socialist prisoners of World War I which, as
a stripling soldier, he had been placed in charge of. Born in Dublin,
1901, of a petit bourgeois family, upon his arrival in America in the
early twenties he came into contact with the Wobblies. Stanton absorbed
the best that was in the Industrial Workers of the World and the One Big
Union movement which inspired a generation of radicals with their
revolutionary spirit—and it never left him.
Stanton was at his best, he was in his element when the workers were
moving in militant anticapitalist struggle and needed a voice. He was a
powerful agitator and popularizer of the socialist program. He was no
writer, nor was he a theoretician in the ordinary meaning of the word. But
he was a serious student not only fully acquainted with all the major
writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, their associates and their
opponents, but he grasped the most complex of their ideas. He possessed a
great gift and tireless enthusiasm to translate them in terms that the
average worker found interesting and could grasp readily.
When the class moved forward Paddy moved forward with it to hold posts
of leadership and responsibility. He attended many national CCL-CIO
conventions as a rank and file delegate from the various unions of which
he was a member. It was at the height of the war, when the
Stalinist-influenced delegates were attempting to saddle the CCL
convention with a no-strike pledge that Stanton delivered the major
opposition address.
At the climax of his speech, he turned to the Stalinist caucus to
declare his solidarity with "the greatest strike in history" led by Lenin
and Trotsky in the midst of a war which "started the October Revolution of
1917 and which will continue until the last capitalist bond and debenture
is shriveled up on the funeral pyre of the last imperialist warlord."
Shortly after transferring from Vancouver Local No. 1 of the
Boilermakers Union in 1943, he became president of the Prince Rupert Local
No. 4 and president of the Prince Rupert Labor Council. For a period he
was chairman of the Educational Committee of the Toronto area council of
the United Steelworkers, for whom he wrote a popular history of the
Canadian labor movement. In 1950 when the CCL organized the National
Federation of Unemployed Workers he was appointed the full-time organizer
for the Toronto Labor Council.
Not only did Stanton vigorously strive to give a class understanding to
and develop the militancy of his fellow workers but he persistently
explained how their struggle was part of a world wide class struggle. A
newspaper clipping reporting his decisive re-election as president of the
Prince Rupert Boilermakers records a motion that he presented and was
passed unanimously, condemning the Churchill government for its counter
revolutionary terror against the Greek people.
Very early in the struggle, Stanton identified himself with the
revolutionary socialist views of Leon Trotsky. Before Canadian supporters
had sufficient resources to publish a paper on their own, he became an
enthusiastic promoter of the US weekly The Militant. He took a
large bundle which, together with all the books and pamphlets put out by
Pioneer Publishers, he vigorously promoted throughout the Vancouver labor
and socialist movement.
Not one to stand aside from broad movements of his class, as early as
1934, just one year after it was founded, he joined the BC CCF to fight
within it for a revolutionary socialist program.
In 1954, as the right wing of the Ontario CCF decided to finally cut
itself off from the socialist past of the movement, they moved in against
the left and formally expelled some fifteen. Stanton appeared as their
spokesman at the dramatic appeal to the provincial convention.
Two years later the top brass of the Ironworkers Union laid charges
against him for, among other things, urging his local and sister locals to
protest plans to bring the infamous US Senator McCarthy to Toronto for a
public rally. On both occasions Stanton put up a splendid fight in which
the accused became the accuser. The union brass did not dare to deprive
him of his card but struck at him by depriving him of his voice and vote
in the local.
As a union man Stanton knew the power of organization. He was a
revolutionary socialist and an internationalist to the core. The great
aim, the meaning of his life, was the building of the Canadian party of
the world socialist revolution. At the time of his death he was chairman
of the Socialist Educational League. His comrades and the thousands who
were influenced by his vibrant personality and ideas will sorely miss him
in the days ahead.
He Never Betrayed in Smallest Degree
by (Mrs.) G. M. Langs, White Rock, BC
I have indeed been sorry to read in your mid-April issue of the death
of an old comrade, "Paddy" Stanton. The working people of our country have
lost a valuable friend. And at a time surely, when we need every
enlightened mind that can be mustered. Another old BC comrade said of
Paddy last year "Nobody can ever say of him that he betrayed the working
class in the smallest degree." Surely a fitting tribute.
Recall When Paddy…
by Reg Bullock, Vancouver
A dozen of us, some who knew Paddy in the old days were discussing the
loss to the working class occasioned by his death and reminiscent
anecdotes were flying. Remember Paddy’s curb newsstand at Georgia and
Granville, said one. Then the stories really flew. "Remember how Paddy
always had a raft of Trotskyist literature stashed away under the daily
papers? He had half the dentists and doctors in the Birks Building buying
them because they were fascinated and the other half bought them anyway to
avoid remaining the objects of his sardonic tongue."
"Yes," chimed in another (who had felt the lash) "he sure had all the
Stalinists pegged. They would slink down the other side of the street to
escape his eye. Otherwise, if they were spotted his stentorian Irish
baritone would name them and greet them as fronts for
‘counter-revolutionary murderers.’ The guy was really fearless with these
denunciations."
"Sure Paddy was a great salesman," someone topped it off. "He had a
word for everyone and an ear-compelling descriptive phrase for everything.
I remember a couple of us young punks were coming down the street to get
our current injection of revolutionary literature—it was the only place we
could get it—and we could hear Paddy’s voice a block away as he did a land
office business peddling the final edition of the local daily press. That
day two inch headlines were describing how a young accountant from
Vancouver, working for a Victoria firm, had embezzled a hundred thousand
dollars. Paddy’s sales pitch was: "Read all about it. Local boy makes
good."’ Such was Paddy—a salesman of the Revolution and a deathless
Revolutionist.
Fought to Preserve Costly Lessons
of Past Struggles
By Bill Whitney, Vancouver
Those of us on the Pacific Coast who were associated with Paddy
Stanton, whose death you announced this month, would appreciate the
opportunity to express our feeling that the cause of Marxism was
considerably advanced because of his efforts.
Paddy Stanton, at one period almost alone in this area, carried on the
work of Marxism’s preservation so that today another generation inherits
it intact, without the painful process of rediscovery.
For several years before the war he operated a newsstand on the corner
of Granville and Georgia in Vancouver, under the Birks Clock—famous
meeting place of the city. Paddy acted as the central information bureau,
literature agent and bookstore for all the socialists of the area. His
supply of international papers and pamphlets seemed to be inexhaustable
and he must have deprived himself of many of the necessities of life in
order to maintain his stock. He had a vast knowledge of international news
from the workers movement that could only have been obtained by voluminous
correspondence.
In those days when Stalinism and its goon squads were riding high,
perverting the truth with apparent great success, beating, slandering, and
bedevilling the isolated true heirs of the Bolshevik tradition, Paddy
stood up and defied them.
To Paddy Stanton’s comrades and friends in Eastern Canada, allow me, as
one who knew him for many years, one who worked, fought and also played
with him, to express my condolences for a great loss, and also my
confidence that his example will inspire many others in the future.
An Appreciation of Stanton
by BC CCF Leader Cameron
The following are excerpts from a letter by Colin Cameron in
appreciation of George "Paddy" Stanton. At the time of writing, Cameron,
who has held leading positions in the BC and national CCF, was the member
in the federal house for Nanaimo. While in disagreement with many of
Stanton’s views, Cameron addressed this letter to the 1955 Ontario CCF
convention in solidarity with Stanton who was the spokesman for a score of
revolutionary socialists fighting against their expulsion by the right
wing.
… I regard with the very greatest concern the attempts which are made
from time to time in different sections of our movement to rid the CCF of
those difficult persons who ask awkward questions—those exasperating
people who play the role of watchdog and bark at our heels whenever, in
their view, we tend to stray too far from the socialist path on which we
set our feet twenty-odd years ago.
Of such is Paddy Stanton. I do not for one moment deny that he can be
the most exasperating creature. Nor do I deny that he has very little of
what most of us would call practical political sense. But that is not the
function of the Paddy Stantons of this world. Theirs is the role of goads,
spurs, prickly thorns in the flesh of our complacency.
He and his kind juggle with ideas—and that of course is a hanging crime
to those who find ideas disturbing and distressing. But this CCF movement
will die without ideas....
I have no doubt that there will be among you those who are convinced
that Paddy Stanton is a sinister and dangerous character. Of course he is
a dangerous character—he is a socialist and he has the unpopular habit of
proclaiming his socialist views in season and out of season. Yes indeed,
he is dangerous, but only to those who seek to protect the status quo of
capitalist society.
I have known Paddy Stanton for many years. I have argued with him,
fought with him, worked with him. I know him for an exasperating,
infuriating comrade. But I know him also as that none too common
phenomenon—the man without an axe to grind—that is except the axe of
socialism. I have heard Paddy on the busy streets of Vancouver selling
papers with one hand and socialism with the other. I have watched him
successfully battling with and outwitting the Communists in the trade
union movement, long before many of today’s leaders were even in the trade
union movement. And I have seen him do this without abandoning, as so many
have abandoned, his socialist conviction or his socialist fervor.
Paddy Stanton is an agitator, a rabble rouser, an embarrassment to all
respectable, conventional people. He has a lamentable lack of respect for
those in authority. But among the working class there are a great many who
are not very respectable, not very conventional, people who regard those
in authority, whether in business, in a political party, or a trade union,
as objects of the deepest suspicion. And it is the support of just such
people that the CCF sorely needs, and nowhere more than in Ontario. For
such people Paddy Stanton has a message. It is a socialist message
delivered in terms that the man in the factory can understand and
appreciate.
Paddy Stanton is that valuable type of worker in the socialist movement
who is at one and the same time an intellectual with an abiding interest
in abstract ideas and also a down-to-earth, common-as-dirt member of the
working class. We need his kind to present to the ordinary worker in
language he can understand, those abstract ideas on which any successful
program must be based.
So I beg you to consider very carefully before you deprive the CCF of
his talents. He will infuriate you, embarrass you, enrage you without end,
but he will not betray the fundamental ideas on which the CCF was founded.
You need him and his kind—and if you do not know it, that is the
frightening measure of your dire need of ideas and those who can voice
them.
