Fighting the Klan

Princeton, 1932 to 1933. The Ku Klux Klan torches a sinister cross; local vigilantes kidnap a labour organizer; the town seethes with sensationalist attack on Soviet-inspired Reds. This is not Woodrow Wilson’s Princeton; these are not United States happenings. Rather, this all takes place in an industrial hamlet in southern British Columbia’s Similkameen Valley, site of a number of bitter strikes by the Mine Workers Union of Canada.

Provocatively titled, Soviet Princeton: Slim Evans and the 1932–33 Miners’ Strike is authored by two residents of the small B.C. town whose population is roughly double that of the 1,000 who lived and worked there in the early 1930s when the Tulameen coal mine was the major employer. Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat are musicians who collect and perform traditional ballads, shanties and folk songs. This musical vocation originally piqued their curiosity about Princeton’s seemingly forgotten labour past.

Vancouver Folk...