This is the first post in a three-part series about socialism at McGill in the 1930s.
Raffaella Cerenzia
Tick tock, tick tock. “Time to wake up!” In January 1933, deep in the midst of the Great Depression, a new student publication announced its arrival on McGill University’s campus. The paper was the production of McGill’s Labour Club, to which all of its editors belonged. Featuring eight to twelve pages of serious and satirical leftist social commentary, The Alarm Clock professed itself to be a “means of expression… for the best thought of students on Canadian economics and politics.” The editors explicitly aligned themselves with the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the democratic socialist political party that had been founded the year before.[1]
Contributions to the paper were diverse. One reporter hit the streets to collect quotes from unemployed men, compiled to emphasize the humiliation and misery of their situation. A multi-page exposé reported that a nearby municipal homeless shelter gave its guests inadequate meals and vermin-infested beds. The charges were based on the experience of three Alarm Clock reporters, who had “dressed for the occasion” and passed a night incognito in the shelter. McGill professors and faculty members contributed articles promoting the CCF and explaining the meaning of “technocracy,” while another column rebutted common objections to socialism.[1]
Some columns were less informative and more biting. One, pithily entitled “Sage Sayings,” simply quoted wealthy businessmen on the Great Depression: “We bankers are all hopeful of a silver lining,” said the president of the Canadian Bank of Commerce. The editors indulged in the occasional quip—Henry Ford’s upbeat statement that “If this period… must be spoken of as a period of depression, it is far and away the finest depression we have ever had” was preceded by a note that “when better depressions are made Mr. Ford will make them”—but the quotes were not generally accompanied by any response or analysis.[2] Nestled between articles on inescapable unemployment and crushing poverty, they needed none.
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