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Listed as Unsolved' is the Brutal Murder Of Fishermen's Union Leader Frank Rogers But History Indicates a Different Verdict
By HAL GRIFFIN
THE three men were discussing the waterfront strike over a leisurely meal at Billy Williams' Social Oyster and Coffee House on Carrall Street when the elderly longshoreman remarked that it was past 11 o'clock and he had better be getting along. The other two men agreed and said they would walk with him to his rooming house near the corner of Water and Abbott streets.
As Lawrence O'Neill, the longshoreman, recounted it later, the meeting was accidental. He had gone into the coffee house that Monday night for a late supper and found the other two men there. As a union man himself, he knew them both well.
One, Tom Sabonia, was a fisherman, who worked as a longshoreman during the winter months like many other fishermen. The other, a short, stocky man with a strong face and a quiet way of speaking, was Frank Rogers — and there were few workers along the Vancouver waterfront who did not know of Frank Rogers after the Fraser River fishermen's strikes. Rogers was a, seaman, but he could claim equally to be a fisherman or longshoreman, both of which occupations he had followed since his arrival in Vancouver.
It was natural then, that they should have been discussing the waterfront strike. They were still discussing it as they rounded the corner of Carrall Street and turned west on Water Street. At the corner of Abbott Street they stopped for a few minutes and they were standing there, talking, when they noticed a group of men across the CPR tracks at the approach to Stimson's Wharf. Rogers suggested they go over to find out what was going on.
As they neared the tracks, shots rang out in quick succession. One ricochetted along the roadway to the corner of Abbott and Cordova streets. O'Neill and Sabonia turned to run. Rogers, who was directly beneath the light over the tracks, crumpled with a bullet in his stomach.
With the aid of passers-by attracted by the shots, O'Neill and Sabonia helped him to the Great Western Hotel nearby and sent for a hack to take him to City Hospital. There, two days later, he died.
FIFTY-SEVEN years afterward, the murder in 1903 of Frank Rogers, the pioneer Socialist and union organiser who led some 8,000 fishermen in the Fraser River strikes of 1900-1901, is still officially an unsolved case, And, it may be asked, why comb the brittle pages of old newspapers and records to prove something that now has passed into history?
True, many things have changed. The trade union movement has become strong enough to compel recognition—but not yet so strong or united that it cannot be destroyed. The fishing industry has been transformed, a united union has come into being to combat the monopoly which even in Rogers' day had taken shape, but the struggle remains essentially the same.
This is why the story of Rogers' murder is important, so that another generation of trade unionists may know something of their own origins, the militancy and unity that enabled their organisations to live and grow in face of all the ruthless attempts to crush them.
The murder of Rogers cannot be separated from its background in the labor struggles that were taking place in British Columbia and elsewhere across the continent in those opening years of the century.
The first frenzied rush to the Klondike was over, but Vancouver was still flourishing as an outfitting centre and jumping off place for the Yukon. Everywhere there was talk of expansion. New railroads were being promoted, new mines were opening, construction was booming and labor was in demand.
Among the newcomers who flocked into the city were many
who brought with them socialist ideas and experience in union struggle for which they found a ready audience. Behind them came the organised expression of those ideas, t,he Western Federation of Miners, the American Labor Union and its affiliate, the United Brotherhood of Railway Employees, for which scores of convinced unionists, many of them members of Socialist groups, acted as voluntary unpaid organisers.
The men who had built empires out of government giveaways, extolling the virtues of hard work, thrift and anti-unionism for the working man, found it hard to cope with these men who lived by a principle, moving from industry to industry and always organising. Then, as now, their resort was to labor spies and stool-pigeons with the ever ready bribe for the labor leader who could be bought.
FRANK Rogers was one of those dedicated organisers who sought only to give substance to his convictions. His past, before he came to Vancouver some time after 1897, is obscure. The newspapers of the day, which devote columns to his murder, reveal nothing of his career, not even his age or birthplace. Nor is there anything in the scanty records of Vancouver police department beyond a five-line entry in the daily record book made by Brown, the beat constable who took Rogers to the hospital.
One of the few links with Rogers, perhaps the only one, is Mike Vidulich of Ladner. Now 81, Vidulich joined the Fraser Ri er Fishermen's Protective Association on its formation in 1893 —the first union in the BC fishing industry. And over the past 67 years he has been a member of every union that has succeeded it in the proud lineage of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union.
As a member of the BC Fishermen's Union, organised in the winter of 1899-1900, and one of the strike patrolmen, Vidulich met Rogers on many occasions.
He recalls him now as a stocky man, quite short but broad in the shoulders, with a strong open face and dark hair beginning to grey at the sides. He places his age at the time he was shot as
Union, but he does not appear to have sought office. At the time he was shot, he was again a rank and file member of his Union, organising along the waterfront as he had organised on the fishing grounds.
It was part of his pattern as a member of the United Socialist Party, for which he spoke occasionally on such subjects as "Socialism and Trade Unionism," supporting its appeal "to educate your fellow unionists on questions of socialism and the labor movement on economic and political lines."
Will McClain, the English sailor who made his way to Vancouver after jumping ship in Seattle, may have been the more colorful figure on the platform — he was elected to Vancouver Trades and Labor Council executive in 1900 and nominated as the first Socialist to contest a provincial election that same year—but it was Rogers who became the outstanding strike leader on the fishing grounds.
IT was Rogers who became the main target for the cannery operators in the 1900 strike when every form of intimidation, every inducement to disunity among whites, Native Indians and Japanese, failed to break the fishermen's ranks in their demand for a sockeye price of 25 cents a fish.
On July 23, Rogers was arrested at Steveston on trumped up charges and taken to Vancouver. At midnight the same day, on the order of three justices of the peace signed under the Militia Act after-the federal government itself had refused, the militia — the derided "Sockeye Soldiers"— were on their way to Steveston.
The strike ended with a settlement of 19 cents a fish after some of the Japanese, intimidated by the show of force and misled by false reports that the operators had agreed to pay 20 cents, started fishing. But the Union was established on the river, it had compelled the operators to recognise it and forced the price up four cents from the 15 cents first offered. The operators had every reason to fear and hate Rogers.
It was Rogers who was again their target when the truce ended in 1901 and the battle over prices was resumed. During the winter months, Rogers and others had
son. Then the operators broke off negotiations and began trying to conclude agreements with individual fishermen on the basis of their first offer of 12 cents to July 27, with the threat of a still lower price to those not signing before July 5.
The outline of the conflict the operators were bent on provoking became apparent with the arrival in Vancouver of the first of a large number of Japanese from •Seattle. As non-residents, they could not obtain fishing licences, but they could be and were hired as boat pullers and helpers.
In new negotiations on July 4, the Union committee qualified its stand on prices with the demand that Union fishermen be given preference over the Japanese. To the operators' offer of 15 cents up to 400,000 cases, 12% cents up to 500,000 cases, 11 cents up to 600,-000 cases on a declining price scale, they replied that they would be prepared to fish for 11 cents for the season, provided their rights were recognised. But no agreement was forthcoming.
Spurred by reports that the Japanese were going fishing and had been supplied with arms, Union boats began patrolling the river. Rogers issued a statement: "The fishermen consider this arming of the Japanese as a step which means civil war and will ask all white men and Indians to govern themselves accordingly. Union pickets too, began carrying j arms, but under strict orders to f use them only if they were fired upon by strikebreakers.
Inevitably there were clashes along the Fraser River and in the Gulf of Georgia. Union fishermen boarded Japanese boats, disarmed the strikebreakers and cut their nets. Some they effectively eliminated from the battle by marooning them on an island.
—Courtesy Vancouver Archives
• CORDOVA STREET is pictured here in 1898, looking west from Carrall Street. The street car has just turned off Carrall. Billy Williams' Social Oyster and Coffee House, last stop for Frank Rogers before his murder, was located just a block away at 201 Carrall Street, where it joins Water Street.
POLICE patrol boats made no effort to disarm the strikebreakers. But they did arrest six Union patrolmen, R. Opeaga, Louis Ludden, C. Forrest, G. Sullivan, C. Willig and W. Willig, on several charges, including intimidation of a Japanese with firearms.
The day the six men appeared in court in Vancouver, Rogers and a Union member named Des-plains were arrested. Later, Captain Anderson, a member of the Union negotiating commjttee, and
• ClLLNETTING ON THE the century.
being in the thirties, although George Bartley, an early labor historian, writing in the BC Fed-erationist in 1912, gives his age as only 25.
"He was Scottish, as far as I know, and he had been a seaman before he came to Vancouver," Vidulich says. "He was a good speaker, but quiet, not like Will McClain (another leader of the 1900 strike), who used to shout and storm when he spoke. Rogers was an organiser, one of the best the fishermen ever had. The can-ners could never buy him."
The picture of Rogers that emerges from the three turbulent years before his death is that of a man whose talents as an organiser made him the natural choice for leadership of the fishermen he had united in struggle for their demands.
He accepted and gave leadership, first as vice president, then president of the BC Fishermen's
FRASER was conducted by two man sailing vessels at the turn of
been organising and a Grand Lodge of the BC Fishermen's Union had been formed, with local unions at New Westminster, Vancouver, Canoe Pass, Eburne and Port Simpson, where the Natives joined the Union despite opposition from the local Indian agent.
Anticipating a heavy sockeye run, the operators offered only 12 cents a fish when negotiations opened in May. All Native and the majority of white fishermen held out for 15 cents. Japanese fishermen, who had organised their own "union," the Japanese Fishermen's Benevolent Society, under direction from the Japanese consul, promised their full cooperation.
Negotiations continued through offer and counter-offer, the operators proposing 12 cents, first to July 27, then to August 3, and 10 cents thereafter, the Union demanding 12% cents for the sea-
• SOUTH SIDE OF CORDOVA at Carrall Street 62 years ago. and the Army and Navy Department Store, in that order, now ex
—Courtesy Vancouver Archives
A drug store, second hand store, tend from the south corner.
his boat puller, Arthur Emery, were also taken into custody. All faced similar charges, with 15 counts, kidnapping and marooning among them, against Rogers alone.
The first trials at Vancouver ended in acquittal for Rogers and the patrolmen. W. J. Bowser, the prosecutor, who was to go down in history as the venal attorney general of a corrupt Conservative government, complained that "the Crown could not get a fair trial," although the court had made every appeal to prejudice to secure a conviction.
The season was over and the strike had long been settled by a compromise agreement of 12% cents for one quarter of the pack and 10 cents thereafter, before Rogers and the others faced new trials before the Assize Court at New Westminster in October. The shadow of prison still hung over them when the Grand Lodge held its convention at New Westminster on September 26, electing Fred Taylor as grand president and Charles Durham as grand secretary treasurer.
Again the Crown failed to obtain a conviction from a prejudiced court. On October 8, the six patrolmen were found not guilty. On October 20, Desplains, Anderson and Emery were acquitted. The jury reported it could not reach agreement on the charges against Rogers and the case was laid over to the spring assizes. But Rogers remained in jail.
That night the acquitted unionists were guests of honor at a fishermen's supper held at Bloom-field's restaurant in Vancouver, where the campaign to win Rogers' release was launched. It took four months of protest meetings and delegations, but at the end of that time Rogers was free on an exorbitant $10,000 bail. When the spring assizes opened, the case did not come up. Rebuffed in two trials, the government preferred to let it drop.
•
THE fishermen's victories heartened the struggle for union organisation throughout the prov-
ince. Whatever the industry and whatever the demands of its workers, union recognition was the central issue. And whatever they might concede, the employers were determined not to recognise the right of their workers to organise. The BC Fishermen's Union had been obliged to compromise on prices, but it had forced the operators to recognise it as the bargaining agency for the fishermen. That alone was a victory.
How great a victory it was became apparent in 1903 when the Western Federation of Miners invaded the Dunsmuir coal empire, founded on a government giveaway of coal and forest lands on Vancouver Island. Soon the Federation claimed the majority of coal miners at Ladysmith and Extension as members. James Dunsmuir, a former premier, forced a strike, announcing that rather than recognise the Union, he would "keep the mines closed for years."
At the same time, the United Brotherhood of Railway Employees began organising unorganised CPR employees. In March 1903, when CPR freight office employees at Vancouver went on strike, H. E. Beasley, divisional superintendent, declared that the CPR was prepared to spend $1,000,000 "to kill the organisation."
In their anti-union stand, the Dunsmuir interests and the CPR had the full support of the Mc-Bride Conservative government.
In 1901, J. H. Hawthornthwaite had won a provincial byelection in Nanaimo to become the first Socialist to sit in a Canadian legislature. At the 1903 session he introduced a bill described as An Act to Further Amend the Law Relating to Trade Unions. It pro-i vided that employees "shall at all i times be at liberty to join any trade union or similar labor association, international or otherwise" and proposed penalties for employers discriminating against employees for union membership.
Premier Richard McBride asked Hawthornthwaite to withdraw the bill. Hawthornthwaite refused and forced the bill to a vote. Only three members joined him in voting for it.
All this was the broad background to the murder of Frank Rogers.
THE CPR strike began on March 2, 1903 as a walkout of 25 freight office employees protesting discrimination against union members. Within a few days half the city was embroiled in the dispute.
The CPR brought in scabs from the east and longshoremen promptly refused to load CPR freight. Union painters refused to touch cars repaired by scabs. Union teamsters walked out in sympatny. Union ferrymen refused to transport cars from Vancouver to Lady-smith. Even the telegraph messenger boys went on strike. Sympathy with the strikers was so widespread that the CPR threatened to put Vancouver on its "waiting list" — this meant postponement of waterfront and hotel improvements—to retaliate
against wholesalers for withdrawing their patronage.
The one exception to the general support was the Railroad Brotherhoods, which saw the UBRE as a rival because its declared purpose was to unite all railway employees in one union.
Demonstrating its readiness to spend $1,000,000 to crush the union even while publicly denying it, the CPR brought in scabs and special police by the score. On March 3, the New Westminster Daily Columbian reported that the "system of patrol and surveillance" had been redoubled. "A line of constables paced up and down the CPR platform and all along the wharf and tracks, although no person came in contact with them," it said.
On March 31, only two weeks before Rogers was shot, 125 Italian laborers who had been brought to Vancouver ostensibly to lay tracks, refused to act as strikebreakers when they were ordered to load freight and conducted a five hour battle with CPR special police sent to clear them out of their railway cars.
This was the immediate background to the murder of Frank Rogers.
ROGERS must have known that the outcome of the CPR strike would be decisive for union organisation along the waterfront, as indeed it was, for the longshoremen's union was smashed when the strike ended after four months. Since the strike began, he had been active in organising support for it. But there is no indication that he was motivated by anything more than curiosity when he walked down Abbott Street to his death on the night of April 13.
His two companions, O'Neill and Sabonia, told an identical story. The three of them had walked over from Billy Williams' Social Oyster and Coffee House at 201 Carrall Street below what was then the Alhambra Hotel and still is the Herman Block. The time was around 11:20 p.m.
They stopped at the corner of Abbott and Water streets to talk and saw the group of men at the entrance to Stimson's Wharf. They were walking toward the men when the shots were fired and Rogers was hit. Not even the closest cross examination in the witness box shook their evidence.
Rogers, in an ante - mortem statement made to stipendiary magistrate H. O. Alexander told the same story. "There was no row, no dispute with anyone and I have no idea who fired the shots," he is quoted as saying. "I have no quarrel with anyone and no person threatened me." But he refused to make a dying deposition on the night of April 14, believing, according to the Vancouver Daily Province, "that he might possibly recover," although he died at 3:30 p.m. the following day.
The labor movement's reaction to his death was both a denunciation of the CPR and a demonstration of its own solidarity.
The UBRE posted a $500 reward for the arrest of the mur-
See THE MURDER OF FRANK ROGERS—Page 14
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