Renegades: J.L. Cohen, Bill Walsh, and the Tragedies of the Canadian Left

A Very Red Life: The Story of Bill Walsh. Cy Gonick. St. John's, Newfoundland: Canadian Committee on Labour History, 2001. Renegade Lawyer: The Life of I.L. Cohen. Laurel Sefton MacDowell. Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History/University of Toronto Press, 2001. These books narrate the lives of two men. They shared much. Both were born the sons of Jewish immigrant families newly-arrived to Canada in the first decade of the last century. Anti-semitism was not something they could escape, yet they were the archetypal, secularized non-Jewish Jews and invested little in identifications with either the orthodox religious beliefs or standard institutional life of the traditional Jewish community.1 Growing to adulthood, they proved to be perfectionists, tough taskmasters with whom it was difficult to undertake common projects. Workaholics, they expected as much from everyone around them as they themselves were perpetually prepared to give. Publicly men of the left, their private lives were something of a closed book, entry to which was rarely granted. Over the course of careers reaching from the 1920s to the 1990s, these two individuals embraced political views and causes often associated with the Communist Party, an institution that was anything but celebrated during the Cold War witch-hunt atmosphere of the 1940s; tarred with the brush of anti-communism on a number of occasions, both men suffered through the ways its pitch could sear a reputation. Sustained by devoted wives, this duo nevertheless placed family behind the travails of the moment, and were seldom at home when office work, appearances and activities in distant cities, or a crisis involving one union or another, demanded their attention. Both were present at the founding of the modern Canadian labour movement and at significant points in the twentieth-century history of struggles over civil liberties and political freedoms of speech. They were architects and workers within what has come to be known as the post-war settlement, a system of industrial relations and collective bargaining rights that put modern unionism in Canada's late 1940s on a secure footing for the first time in history. Makers of this history, they were also its victims. Difficult men, they reaped what they had sown, albeit not always in ways that they deserved or even seemed to entirely understand. Ironically enough the most well-known and affluent of these two men, pioneering labour lawyer, Jacob Lawrence Cohen, known to close friends and family as Jack and to his largely trade union clientele as J.L., came from the more impoverished background. When his mother was widowed prematurely at the age of 34, young Jack, the eldest son of 13 years, was thrust into the role of family breadwinner. As he provided for his mother and five siblings, Jack felt the weight of his father's demise. A portion of his conscious childhood was forever lost as Jack occupied the rank of surrogate father, bookkeeping to earn money and then clerking in a law office, a job that springboarded him into the profession at which he would eventually excel. No time was wasted on frivolities, and by the time he was 16 Cohen was making the important decisions for the family, a responsibility which undoubtedly contributed to the making of a somewhat authoritarian, patriarchal personality. Poor and Jewish, Cohen broke into the society and business of law with elan, distinguishing himself by graduating third in his Osgoode Hall Law School class, in spite of having no university preparation. Over the course of the 1920s, although his law practice was conventional enough, Cohen was notably different: anti-semitism in Toronto was sufficiently commonplace that his clients were largely Jewish, and mostly confined to the businesses of the garment sector. Contacts in New York, a center of Jewish business and culture, led to his courtship of a Russian Jewish social worker, Dorothy Aidman, whom Cohen married in 1923. …

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