Tom McEwen was a Scottish orphan who grew up to be the head of the Communist Party of Canada. This biography also tells much of the early labour movement in Canada. The personal memoirs of Tom McEwen are a uniquely eloquent story of the path travelled by a destitute Scottish immigrant blacksmith who rose to become one of Canada’s great labor and revolutionary figures. His leadership during some of Canadian labor’s most stirring days and mass movements of the ‘20s and ‘30s constitute an important part of our history too little told in the “official” histories. They are at once a source of information for students, scholars, researchers and those engaged in the practical movement today for labor and socialism. The author’s own hope is that incomplete and wanting as these pages are, they will nonetheless provide some inspiration to those young people seeking answers to the past, so that they may better serve in the working class and revolutionary movement of today.A feature of the book is the appearance in book form, for the first time to the author’s knowledge, of the full and authentic texts of the Farmers Unity League and Workers Unity League constitutions which left an imperishable mark on the labor and farm movement that followed and that exist today. The record of the achievements of Tom McEwen, blacksmith and Com-munist, and his comrades is not only reflected in these pages but in the many social and economic gains enjoyed as a matter of right by the Canadian working class today.
