Return to Canada Sophie Carson had accompanied Lewis to Oxford, and they wed on August 15, 1935, shortly after their return. The wedding took place in his parents' home; though a rabbi officiated, most traditional Jewish practices were not observed. In 1935, David Lewis became the National Secretary of the CCF. As Smith puts it: Into this political whirlwind stepped David. A centralist in a nation that was decentralizing. A socialist in a country that voted solidly capitalist. A campaigner for a party with no money, facing two parties each of which was big, powerful, and affluent. A professional, in a party of amateurs who mostly thought of themselves as a movement, not a party. An anti-Communist at a time when Canadian Communists were about to enter their heyday. A publicist seeking a unified voice for a party riven with dissent. An organizer whose leader, J.S. Woodsworth, really didn't believe in the organization, thinking that the CCF should remain a loosely knit, co-operative association and believed this so implicitly that when it came time to appoint Lewis full-time to the job of the national secretary [in 1938], he resisted, fearing the CCF would lose its spontaneity. That Lewis not only survived but prevailed is a testament to his skill and perseverance. Most of the founders of the CCF – including Woodsworth,
Tommy Douglas,
M. J. Coldwell, and
Stanley Knowles, – were informed by the
Social Gospel, to which Lewis, with his Marxist socialism balanced by the Bund's democratic principles, felt an affinity. Both the Bund and the Social Gospel were focused on the material present rather than the afterlife. Both called on people to change their environment for the better rather than hoping that God might do it for them. Social justice, the brotherhood of man, and moral self-improvement were common to both. F. R. Scott pointed this out to Lewis in a letter, recommended moderating some of the party's policies, and advised that "in the political arena we must find our friends among the near right." In August 1938, Lewis quit his job at the Ottawa law firm of
Smart & Biggar to work full-time as the CCF National Secretary. His starting salary was $1,200 per year, a low sum of money, even at that time, for a job with so much responsibility.
Trying to create an organization As National Secretary, Lewis emphasized organization over ideology and forging links to
unions. Lewis, federal leader M.J. Coldwell, and
Clarie Gillis would spend the next 19 years trying to modify this declaration, finally succeeding with the 1956
Winnipeg Declaration. At the 1944 CCF convention, Lewis won a concession "that even large business could have a place in the party – if they behave." Rather than opposing all private enterprise, Lewis was concerned with preventing monopoly capitalism. He passed a resolution reading "The socialization of large-scale enterprise, however, does not mean taking over every private business. Where private business shows no signs of becoming a monopoly, operates efficiently under decent working conditions, and does not operate to the detriment of the Canadian people, it will be given every opportunity to function, to provide a fair rate of return, and to make its contribution to the nation's wealth." This resolution allowed for a mixed-economy that left most jobs in the private sphere. , England.
Pictured from left to right:
Clarie Gillis, MP for
Cape Breton South; David Lewis, National Secretary;
M.J. Coldwell, National Leader, MP for
Rosetown—Biggar,
Percy E. Wright, MP for
Melfort; and
Frank Scott, National Chairman. Lewis did not share the desire of some members to keep the CCF "ideologically pure" and adhered to the Bundist belief that "it was better to go along with the masses in a not totally correct direction than to separate oneself from them and remain 'purist'." However, the CCF was as much a movement as it was a political party, and its own members frequently undermined it with radical proclamations. Lewis criticized the
British Columbia CCF for such comments, saying what we say and do must be measured by the effect which it will have on our purpose of mobilizing people for action. If what we say and do will blunt or harm our purpose ... then we are saying and doing a false thing even if, in the abstract, it is true ... When, in heaven's name are we going to learn that working-class politics and the struggle for power are not a Sunday-school class where the purity of godliness and the infallibility of the Bible must be held up without fear of consequences. He would tolerate some criticism of the party by its members, but when he believed that it rose to self-mutilation, he suppressed it ruthlessly. Lewis and Scott further argued that its wartime success could translate to peacetime, and that Canada should adopt a
mixed economy. They also called for public ownership of key economic sectors, and for the burden to be placed on private companies to demonstrate that they could manage an industry more effectively in the private sector than the government could in the public sector. The book also outlined the history of the CCF up to that time and explained the party's decision-making process. By Canadian standards, the book was popular, and sold over 25,000 copies in its first year of publication.
1943 Cartier by-election Lewis first ran for the CCF in the
1940 federal election in
York West. He placed a distant third, receiving 8,330 fewer votes than the second-place Liberal candidate, Chris J. Bennett. Despite his poor showing in his first election, the party asked Lewis to run in the 1943 by-election in the Montreal,
Quebec, federal
riding of Cartier, which had been made vacant by the death of
Peter Bercovitch. Lewis's opponents included
Fred Rose of the communist
Labor–Progressive Party. It was a vicious campaign, immortalized by A. M. Klein in an uncompleted novel called
Come the Revolution. The novel was broadcast in the 1980s on
Lister Sinclair's
Ideas programme on
CBC Radio One. Rose won and became the only (as of 2013) Communist to sit in the House of Commons. Lewis placed fourth. The sizable Jewish vote mostly went to Rose. The leftist "common front" punished Lewis by supporting Rose, who was seen to be of the community; Lewis lived in Ottawa at the time. It took Lewis many years to recover from this campaign, and its reverberation coloured Lewis's decision on where to run.
1945 elections: disappointment and defeat The
Canadian federal and the
Ontario elections of 1945 were possibly the most crucial to Canada in the 20th century. diminished the CCF's initially favourable position: the September 1943
Gallup poll showed the CCF leading nationally with 29 percent support, with the Liberals and Conservatives tied for second place at 28 percent. By April 1945, the CCF was down to 20 percent nationally, and on election day it received only 16 percent. It guaranteed a split in the left-of-centre vote. Lewis ran in
Hamilton West instead of the CCF-friendly
Winnipeg North riding that had elected CCF and Labour Party candidates since the 1920s and had a substantial Jewish population. Historians and activists disagree on Lewis's reasons for doing so, with Caplan suggesting that the shock of the Cartier election probably made him reluctant to fight another intense campaign against a Jewish Communist candidate.
Fighting Communist influence The 1945 defeats were partially the result of an alliance between the Liberals and the communist
Labor–Progressive Party (LPP). The LPP focused in on CCF-held seats, deliberately splitting the vote, and declared a "Liberal–Labour" coalition on May 29, 1944. They declared open warfare on the CCF in 1944, with spokesman John Weir stating in the LPP's
Canadian Tribune newspaper that "a resounding defeat of the CCF at the polls must be [their] the main objective." The
Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL) supported the CCF, but the
Trades and Labour Congress (TLC) refused to provide official endorsement. This lack of unity between the two main Canadian umbrella labour organizations hurt the CCF, and was part of the Liberal–Communist alliance: TLC president Percey Berough was a Liberal, and vice-president Pat Sullivan was a Communist. In the Ontario provincial election, the communists urged trade union members to vote for the right-wing
Conservative George Drew rather than the CCF. Their first target was the
Sudbury, Ontario, CCF riding association and its affiliated
International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (Mine-Mill) Local 598. However, Local 598 was not under Communist control: out of 11,000 dues-paying members, fewer than 100 were communists. Over the next twenty years, a fierce and ultimately successful battle was waged by Millard's
United Steel Workers of America (USW) to take over Local 598. The attacks on the Sudbury CCF were even more costly, at least in terms of voter support. Sudbury's
Bob Carlin was one of the few CCF
Members of Provincial Parliament (MPPs) to survive the Drew government's 1945 landslide victory. Carlin had been part of Ted Jolliffe's team that had orchestrated the CCF's 1943 breakthrough, but was first and foremost a union man. He was a long-time labour organizer, going back to 1916 and the predecessor to the Mine-Mill: the
Western Federation of Miners. Carlin was loyal to his union, in whose service he had spent ten years, and to the men and woman who helped build it, regardless of their political affiliation; this made him unpopular with the CCF establishment in both Toronto and Ottawa. Millard, Jolliffe, and Lewis did not directly accuse Carlin of being a communist. Instead, they attacked him for not dealing with communists in Local 598, which was built by both communists and CCFers (with the latter firmly in control of the executive). Lewis and Jolliffe made the case to expel him from the Ontario CCF caucus at a Toronto special meeting of the CCF executive and the legislative caucus on April 13, 1948. It was not until the CCF became the New Democratic Party (NDP) and the Mine-Mill versus USW war was over, in 1967, that another social democrat –
Elie Martel in
Sudbury East – was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from the city. Lewis and Millard's crusade to limit communist influence received an unexpected boost from the
Soviet Union, in
Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of
Stalinism. In his "Secret Speech",
On the Personality Cult and its Consequences, delivered to a closed session of the
20th Party Congress of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev denounced Stalin for his cult of personality and his regime for "violation of Leninist norms of legality". When the excesses of
Stalin's regime were exposed, it caused a split in the communist movement in Canada and permanently weakened it. By the end of 1956, the LPP's influence in the trade union movement and politics was spent. ==Private labour law practice==