Waterfront Warlord: The Life and Violent Times of Hal C. Banks

Allen Seager taught in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby.

Hal C. Banks, mobster-chieftain of the Seafarers’ International Union, was the leading author and main symbol of the notorious crime and corruption on the Canadian waterfront from the late forties to the early sixties. Long ignored, or treated with a very long spoon, by academic and investigative journalists alike, Banks, since his death at 76 in 1985, has been the subject of a spate of books as well as the 1986 docu-drama, “Canada’s Sweetheart,” which brought to life this historical character who is as significant a Canadian figure as Louis Riel, who was hanged for much lesser and more bravely-motivated crimes. Edwards’s book is recommended as a primer on the subject. It is lively and well written, covers most of the bases, and, relying on a remarkable range of interviews with Banks’s contemporaries, makes a significant if unwitting contribution to Banks scholarship. Edwards is of course a newspaperman who acknowledges neither the canons of scholarship nor the research and conclusions of anyone else, especially John Stanton, a lawyer who was writing on the subject in the early 1970s.

As a popular biographer, Edwards has intuitive insights and interesting “facts” worth pondering and pursuing further. Piecing his data together I found, for example, the first plausible explanation of the origins of the mysterious Mr. Banks — whose saving grace in the Canadian historical conscience is the fact that he was naturally an American. Banks was born and raised in far from respectable circumstances in the midwest; by the late l920s he was a small-time hood on the West Coast. He passed the early part of the Depression in San Quentin before finding a temporary livelihood as a worker on the mudsills of the maritime industry, shipping on Standard Oil tankers out of Richmond, California. He early acquired a reputation as an “exceptionally strange and violent young man”; he fit in well in Montreal in the fifties. His union credentials were always dubious; he apparently scabbed the 1934 strike led by the National Maritime Union, emerging centre of a Communist labour empire in the Bay area which, as Edwards notes, encompassed some of the more obvious extremes of American wealth and poverty. Banks was in fact as “class conscious” as any Red, with the difference that Banks sought to beat and humiliate the upper classes at their own power game. This is precisely what he did in Canada. His weapons included violence, megalomania, and guile, but most important an effective, albeit primitive, political instinct for the jugular of each of his enemies, the bourgeoisie, and the working class movement. And that, precisely, was the Communist Party.

Edwards is a bourgeois idealist with little knowledge of labour history. He moralizes about the waterfront wasteland and will not confront the Hobson’s choice in the thirties from which all else flowed. Most maritime workers had only two organizational alternatives: to cast their lot with the underworld, on with another disciplined cadre — the Communist Party. The Party, by all accounts, was a relatively honest and skillful manager. In Canada, the choice was delayed and somewhat obscured by the persistence of the old regime, what Edwards calls maritime feudalism, or perhaps, company and masters’ paternalism. Two events shattered that edifice in the forties: the breakthroughs of the Party’s Canadian Seaman’s Union, and the activism of the state, which built and operated the backbone of the wartime merchant marine. Most of it, on the deep sea, was later scuttled through privatization, but it was the state that made the crucial decision for all Canadian maritime workers after the war. The CSU was outlawed and decertified, and invitations sent to Banks and the SIU to take over its jurisdiction — “cleaning up” the Communist Party in the process — by force. By the mid-fifties, only remnants of craft or guild organization on the foredecks, the locks, and the docks stood between Banks and total control of a strategic waterway on the St. Lawrence. This proved to be a major blunder for the government and the shipping industry, about which the state has systematically prevaricated for years and years. And the matter is particularly serious because of its human dimension: the thousands of blacklisted seamen who were victimized by the mob, and scores of men and even masters who were maimed and killed during the waterfront war. The Canadian Labour Congress and its bureaucracy are equally culpable. Edwards interviews uncovered lies and dissembling. Fifty-one of 57 relevant files on a single matter — the attempted deportation of Banks in 1954 — remain closed under an Access to Information Act which has served at least one purpose very well. Jack Pickersgill claims that there are some grounds for “criticism” but that the matter is not “grave.” Pickersgill, as this understated account makes crystal clear, is either a fool or a knave.

Like the crimes of Vietnam or Watergate, the Banks affair can only be justified by appealing beyond the law or ethics — Edwards finds a “legal and ethical vacuum” surrounding the affair — to some higher political logic. Yankee banditti were a necessary evil, or so the argument goes, to fight the Communist Party, which was the greater evil. Canadians should be allowed to decide for themselves the value of this apologia. At present the only “evidence” for the Communist threat is a priori ideological reasoning: because the Party was a presence, it must have been a threat, to the business of shipping, international alliances, and so forth. Until the Canadian state comes at least as clean as the American state has done on certain issues, we can only conclude the worst. Pickersgill and company appear to have been accomplices to the mayhem and murder herein described.