Able to Lead: Disablement, Radicalism, and the Political Life of E. T. Kingsley

Socialism in early twentieth-century Canada has attracted a lot of attention from historians in recent years. One somewhat shadowy figure has always stood out in those studies— E. T. Kingsley, the leading voice of a particularly hard-nosed brand of Marxism centered in British Columbia that was dubbed “impossibilism.” Ravi Malhotra and Ben Isitt have undertaken to shed some long-overdue light on the life of that little-known charismatic radical.Unfortunately for the authors, Kingsley left behind no papers and rarely wrote anything about his personal life. So his story had to be reconstructed from scattered references in the public record and a few reminiscences by friends and associates. Several research assistants across North America helped them piece together the main contours of his public life, but his motivations often remained elusive. Despite their efforts, this portrait doesn't bring us much closer to the inner life of the man. The public side is nonetheless worth our attention.In the early 1890s, Kingsley left behind a wife and two children in Minnesota and migrated west to San Francisco, where he was drawn into political work with Daniel De Leon's new Socialist Labor Party. He rose quickly to prominence as a state organizer, highly effective orator, and electoral candidate for the party, before falling out with De Leon. In 1900 he headed north, first to Seattle, where he helped to create a new revolutionary group. Two years later, socialist coal miners in Nanaimo, British Columbia, invited him to apply his political skills there. After a year and a half, he relocated permanently to Vancouver, where he opened a successful print shop and became a dynamic socialist propagandist.Kingsley was legendary as a powerful communicator, lacing his speeches and articles with trenchant analysis, brilliant imagery, off-color humor, and biting invective. He quickly became a leader and chief ideologue of first the Socialist Party of British Columbia and then its successor, the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC). Over the next three decades, he ran unsuccessfully as a socialist candidate for provincial or federal office six times. He wrote for and edited the SPC's official organ, the Western Clarion, and often contributed to the paper of British Columbia's labor federation.Socialists’ major task, he believed, was educational. As the authors demonstrate, the message he delivered relentlessly from the 1890s to the 1920s varied little after his initiation into De Leonite Marxism. He was a scathing critic of capitalism, which he insisted was destined for inevitable collapse. That process would be accelerated when workers took control of the state through elections. Until then, all reforms to alleviate working-class life were a waste of time. Unions, in his eyes, were a needless diversion of working-class energy. He insisted that the SPC platform should have only one demand—the abolition of “wage slavery.” Hundreds of British Columbia socialist activists agreed with his dogmatic, doctrinaire stance, and in 1907 the party finally split into “impossibilist” and reformist wings.World War I was a trying time for Kingsley. In 1914 his surprisingly harsh, one-sided critique of German militarism prompted his SPC colleagues to dump him from his propagandistic work. At the end of the war, he bounced back to help found a new radical labor party and launch a new, short-lived radical newspaper. But his old “impossibilism” led him to criticize the general strikes of the postwar era and the One Big Union as fruitless diversions from the political struggle. He was soon left behind in the great split in the Canadian left that brought the Communist Party to life. He died in relative obscurity in 1929, his old brand of socialism largely ignored and forgotten.What makes this life even more remarkable was that Kingsley was disabled. As a railway brakeman, he had suffered an accident that led to the partial amputation of both his legs in 1890. He spent the rest of his life on prosthetic devices that enabled him to walk with a cane. There was a direct link between his accident and his radicalism: the weeks of recuperation in a hospital in Missoula, Montana, allowed him time to read the first volume of Karl Marx's Capital, which transformed his thinking and turned him into a revolutionary. His railway workmates had cultivated a tough masculinity capable of avoiding or overcoming accidents, but as a disabled man, the authors argue, he now turned to radical Marxism and an acceptable public role as a working-class intellectual as a different route to reaffirm his toughness. This new masculinity may also have had an abusive edge in his disintegrating marriage. For the rest of his life, we are told, he never showed much interest either in the political rights of women or in romantic relationships with them.The authors want to bring critical disability theory to bear on this narrative. They provide important contextual information on technology, medicine, and the law. The problem with making his disability a central thread in his story, however, is that he made every effort to avoid drawing attention to his weak legs. Moreover, he never showed any political interest in compensation for injured workers or the disabled more generally. The authors are right that he must have suffered pain and discomfort but note that, as a white male with a reasonable income, he would not have been subject to as much discrimination as many others in his condition. Indeed, they found no evidence of his mistreatment by an ableist society. He even escaped the scrutiny of Canadian border guards who might have blocked his entry to the country. So the story told here is predominantly about how Kingsley's tragic accident initiated his radical politics and only marginally about how it affected the rest of his life.While it is not clear how much this study adds to the emerging field of disability history, it does add a great deal to our understanding of early twentieth-century Canadian radicalism, with fascinating detail about the inner workings of parties with “Old Man” Kingsley at their center. His gruff, no-nonsense approach to politics defined a whole era of socialist agitation on the West Coast. For that he deserves this well-written, insightful biography.

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