“Time to Wake Up!”: Principal Currie and the McGill Labour Club’s Alarm Clock

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.

The Alarm Clock was an immediate hit on campus. All one thousand copies of the first issue were sold on the first day, a significant number for a student body of only 3,000. Even sorority members who claimed to represent the “Establishment” took up their places at Roddick Gates to sell the “underground radical paper.” Three hundred kilometers to the southwest, the Queen’s University Labour Club placed a standing order for the publication. The fruit of “months of ambitious planning,” The Alarm Clock seemed off to a promising start.^[3] But as the supporters of labour and the merely curious scrambled to buy their five-cent copies, others were less than pleased with this upstart publication. Montreal’s businessmen—the same demographic who dominated McGill’s board of governors and donor roll—were quick to object.

Complaints immediately began pouring into the principal’s office, where Sir Arthur Currie attended them with care. The Alarm Clock would have no influence on the student body, Principal Currie wrote soothingly to one discontented governor. The best thing they could do was to simply “forget about these troublesome people, who really do not count for much,” and wait for The Alarm Clock to burn itself out. In fact, Currie said, he “would be surprised if there were a third issue.”^[4] But that didn’t mean that Currie was content to sit on his hands and wait. There was damage control to be done.

Currie’s main concern was for the university’s reputation as an apolitical institution. The Alarm Clock openly affiliated itself with the CCF, but also claimed an attachment to McGill. Already, Currie had heard, certain members of the public had taken The Alarm Clock’s opinions “as the official views of the University.” In Currie’s eyes, this sullied McGill with the stain of political partisanship. A publication which promoted a national political party “could not receive any official recognition” by the university. Clearly something had to be done, but what? Currie admitted that he couldn’t prohibit students from writing for the paper, as it wasn’t printed on university property. Trying to expel contributors would only make McGill a “laughing stock,” and open the university to lawsuits.^[5] All that the principal could do was try to distance The Alarm Clock and its partisan proclamations from McGill’s good name. He set to this task with fervor.

Currie immediately banned the sale of The Alarm Clock on campus. He also organized a meeting with Lloyd G. Reynolds, the paper’s editor-in-chief, and met again with the entire editorial board shortly thereafter. The exact details of the meetings are impossible to know, but some things may be surmised from Currie’s letters and notes. It was “unfair,” the principal apparently admonished Reynolds, “to link in even the slightest degree such a propagandist publication with the University.” To the editorial board, he seemingly called The Alarm Clock a “purely propagandist body,” and he used similar wording elsewhere. Based on his notes for a later meeting with them, which he half-jokingly titled “Notes from which to ‘harangue’ the Alarm Clock editors,” Currie may even have accused the students of propagating communist “sedition and revolutionary propaganda.”^[6] (This is a rather dramatic reading of The Alarm Clock, and one which I don’t think Currie himself believed.) He may also have threatened them with expulsion, albeit more as a scare tactic than as an actual threat.

However, in his follow-up letter to the editors, Currie was nothing but civil. He claimed to “rejoice to see students taking such a deep interest in matters that are of vital import in our social structure.” He reiterated a compliment that he had apparently paid the editors during their meeting. He also suggested that they sell their publication at Strathcona Hall, pointing out that it was so close to campus that no “student would find it inconvenient to go there for a paper.”^[7] The discrepancy between his harsh meeting notes and polite letter likely reflected his underlying strategy: to scare the students into quick submission with talk of sedition and expulsion, and then back off once they were subdued. If Currie did berate the editors, it was seemingly something of an act on his part, as suggested by his use of quotes around the word “harangue” in his personal notes. He knew that The Alarm Clock was not “seditious,” and that disciplinary action was unrealistic, but he believed that “tak[ing] a strong stand now at the beginning of term… will do more to stop [The Alarm Clock] than… trying to reason with” the editors.^[8]

Currie’s strategy didn’t “stop” the paper altogether, but the students did acquiesce to their principal’s demands. Subsequent copies of The Alarm Clock were sold at off-campus bookstores and newsstands.^[9] Explicit connections to McGill were gradually scrubbed from the paper. The February issue’s subheading changed from “Wound Up and Set Monthly at McGill University” to “Wound Up and Set Monthly by the McGill Labour Club.” By November 1933, it simply read “Wound Up and Set Monthly During the College Year.” Within its pages, “the McGill Labour Club” became “the Labor Club”—likely a result of Currie’s reminder that the group didn’t have the right to include “McGill” in its name. From November 1933 on, The Alarm Clock also included a disclaimer: “Views expressed in this journal are not to be taken as those of the Governors, Faculty, or Students Society of McGill University.”^[10]

So the editors of The Alarm Clock acquiesced, but far from silently. In the February 1933 issue, they called the campus sales ban “undesirable and unwarranted,” a direct violation of the Labour Club’s “rights of self-expression.” They asked “the Students’ Council to take up the cudgels on our behalf,” and called upon students to support The Alarm Clock’s reinstatement. The campus sales ban was never rescinded, but The Alarm Clock sold well enough off campus to finance the production of at least seven total issues.^[11] Under pressure from complaining business elites and clamoring student editors, and despite the paper’s continued sales, Currie neither moderated nor intensified his measures. Having banned The Alarm Clock’s sale on campus and forced some concessions, he seemingly held no desire to go further. Currie died at the end of November 1933, but The Alarm Clock continued to distance itself from McGill, as he had ordered, until it ceased publication in March 1934.

In looking at The Alarm Clock and Currie’s response to it, a couple of noteworthy points emerge. First, socialism clearly had its place among McGill’s student body. Despite the small size of the Labour Club—its membership numbered around six—its publication sold well enough to last three semesters.^[12] Second, Currie’s modest response to socialism made him somewhat of an outlier within the 1930s McGill administration. He tried to disassociate The Alarm Clock from the university, but he never tried to kill the paper outright, or to otherwise dissuade the students from continuing it. His leniency can be partially explained by his desire to act within the limits of the law, his belief that the paper would die out on its own, and his general willingness to let students experiment intellectually. Perhaps equally significant, however, was Currie’s ambivalent attitude towards socialism. He didn’t support socialism or the CCF, but he was also far from enamored of the mainstream political parties. Currie claimed that his personal political views were irrelevant to the issue at hand, and that it was purely a matter of institutional policy.^[13] However, I would argue that his tolerance for socialism in general did influence his decisions: unlike those with more fervent anti-socialist views, Currie’s definition of academic freedom extended to protecting socialist discourse on campus—so long as it remained clearly divorced from the university itself. As my next post will make clear, not all of McGill’s administrators were so willing to include socialism under the umbrella of academic freedom. Nor were they all as content as Currie to confine themselves to legally airtight responses to it.

Raffaella Cerenzia is a fourth-year undergraduate history student at McGill University.

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^[1] The Alarm Clock, January 1933, 2, 3; The Alarm Clock, February 1933, 1, 6; The Alarm Clock, March 1933, 3, 8, 11, 12; The Alarm Clock, January 1934, 3.

^[2] The Alarm Clock, January 1933, 4.

^[3] The McGill Daily, 12 January 1933, McGill University Archives [MUA], RG2 – Sir Arthur Currie Collection [SACC], c49 c676, file 612, “Student Activities & Student Discipline: Labour Club; Canadian Commonwealth Federation”; Eugene Forsey, A Life on the Fringe: The Memoirs of Eugene Forsey (Oxford University Press, 1990), 20; Edgar Andrew Collard, ed., The McGill You Knew: An Anthology of Memories, 1920-1960 (Longman Canada Limited, 1975), 30; The Alarm Clock, February 1933, 1; The McGill Daily, 9 January 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612.

^[4] Sir Arthur Currie to J.M. McConnell, 16 January 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612. “J.W.” was mistyped as “J.M.” in the letter.

^[5] Sir Arthur Currie to H.J. Cody, 15 February 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612; H.J. Cody to Sir Arthur Currie, 17 February 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612; Currie to McConnell, 16 January 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612; Sir Arthur Currie to Ragnild Tait, 10 February 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612. “Ragnhild” was mistyped as “Ragnild” in Currie’s letter.

^[6] The Alarm Clock, February 1933, 4; Currie to Tait, 10 February 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612; Currie to McConnell, 16 January 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612; Ragnhild Tait to Sir Arthur Currie, 9 February 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612; Currie to Cody, 15 February 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612; “Notes from which to ‘harangue’ the Alarm Clock editors,” MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612. The “Notes” are not signed, but given that they’re filed with Currie’s papers, and that they would logically be his, I have assumed that he is the author.

^[7] Currie to Tait, 10 February 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612.

^[8] “Notes from which to ‘harangue’ the Alarm Clock editors,” MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612.

^[9] The Alarm Clock, February 1933, 4.

^[10] The Alarm Clock, January 1933, 1; The Alarm Clock, February 1933, 1, 4; The Alarm Clock, March 1933, 4; The Alarm Clock, November 1933, 1, 4; The Alarm Clock, January 1934, 3; The Alarm Clock, March 1934, 3; Currie to Tait, 10 February 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612.

^[11] The Alarm Clock, February 1933, 4. McGill University Archives holds copies from January, February, March, and November 1933, and January and March 1934. Other scholars have made reference to a December 1933 issue: Michiel Horn and Frank R. Scott, A New Endeavour: Selected Political Essays, Letters, and Addresses (University of Toronto Press, 1986), 10.

^[12] Paul Axelrod, “Spying on the Young in Depression and War: Students, Youth Groups and the RCMP 1935-1942,” Labour/Le Travail 35, (1995): 46. A year after its debut, the paper was reportedly selling “like hotcakes” at Queen’s University. The Alarm Clock, January 1934, 11.

^[13] Michiel Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada: A History (University of Toronto Press, 1999), 130; Currie to Tait, 10 February 1933, MUA, RG2 – SACC, c49 c676, file 612. Would The Alarm Clock have been an issue for Currie or the governors had it “propagandized” on behalf of an old-line political party? The question is worth considering, although I don’t have an answer.