Historiography
Studies done by David Bercuson, author of various revisions on radicalism in the westernised society as well as a participant of the symposium explains that the radical unionism was an essentially a western phenomenon attributed to the rapid development of a resource-based industrial economy that fostered intense class conflict. A man named Danny Shur who wrote and produced the musical "strike" in 2005 revisited the Winnipeg general strike by stumbling across new pictures never seen before. According to Shur, the street car was rocking and was not fully tipped over which proclaimed to be the only reason the police acted upon the violence killing two people. Anti-strikers claim that the tipped street car was the catalyst for the violence and the shootings so discovering these photos were big to Shur.
Another historian named Donald Avery expressed his views via essay and surveyed the ethnic labour movement in Winnipeg declaring that no one has written the important role of immigrant workers when speaking about the Winnipeg general strike of 1919. Avery states that it is clear from the evidence that no non- Anglo Saxon leader played a particular significant role through the duration of the strike. Another author by the name of J.E Rae depicted the notion that the strike established Winnipeg s class division so severely in the decades after Winnipeg was marked as a class polarization. David Yeo and his article "Rural Manitoba view the 1919 Winnipeg general strike" sheds a light on many views that the rural community was hostile to the strike and undermined the chances of farmer-labour cooperation's years after the strike.
It is known that through many historian's views, women were not included as partakers in the strike and a lot of articles roared with male commitment and determination. Mary Horodyski changed this pattern and showed the readers the thousands of women who were active as strikers and striker-breakers. Mary states that one in four workers in the city was female and even if they did not participate solely in the strike, they were affected on the sidelines trying to feed protesters while feeding their own families daily. There are different viewpoints in regards to the West and the East of the province of Winnipeg. Historians of the labour revolt in east part of Winnipeg deem the eastern workers as innately conservative.
Many essays by historians show that maritime labour revolt went further than the radical violent battles in the Cape Breton coal fields to range elsewhere in the country. Indifferently on the western side radicalism is played down and depicted strikes as strategies rather than ideological commitments to settle certain demands. There are many viewpoints that historians have that open new perspectives that may have been left out before. With these different and unique feedback about Canadian history, people from the present and the future can understand what really happened in Winnipeg during the famous general strike of 1919.
Read more about this topic: Winnipeg General Strike