THE PROVINCE of New Brunswick", commented one western Canadian radical sheet during the 1920s, "stands as a black splotch on this Dominion. Its backwardness... an anathema to those who would advance civilization's progress." 1 Certainly the province's experience stands as virtually a blank page in the history of radical, working-class, and popular movements in this country. 1 Although this phenomenon is partly accounted for by a tradition of scholarly neglect, it is also reflective of the fact

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... f the relative quiescence of New Brunswick in terms of an explicitly political context of class conflict and popular protest. The province was left largely undisturbed, for example, by the great socialist and populist movements of the 1930s. As New Brunswick's submission to Roweli-Sirois in 1938 dourly noted, the "men and women of our Province have buckled down to work, and have taken, as necessity compelled them, whatever measures were possible in working out their livelihood." 3 These measures, however, could include protest and rebellion. Situated in the geographical heartland of the province, on the north shore of Grand Lake, 40 miles east of Fredericton, lies Minto, during the inter-war period, the centre of a bustling coal industry. Here, in the late 1930s, was fought one of the most bitter strikes which accompanied the rise of the c.l.O. in Canada, when close to 1000 mine workers struck for recognition of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW). "Nowhere on the American continent," commented the UMW Journal in 1937, "is there a strife which combines the elements of greed,