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For other people named David Lewis, see David Lewis (disambiguation).
David Lewis
File:Davidlewis.jpg
David Lewis circa 1970
Leader of the New Democratic Party
In office
1971–1975
Preceded byTommy Douglas
Succeeded byEd Broadbent
ConstituencyCanada
Federal Member of Parliament
In office
1962–1963
Preceded byWilliam G. Beech, Progressive Conservative
Succeeded byMarvin Gelber, Liberal
ConstituencyYork South
Majority3,678 plurality
Federal Member of Parliament
In office
1965–1974
Preceded byMarvin Gelber, Liberal
Succeeded byUrsula Appolloni, Liberal
ConstituencyYork South
Personal details
BornJune 23 or October, 1909[1]
Svisloch, Russia
DiedMay 23, 1981
Ottawa, Ontario
Political partyCo-operative Commonwealth Federation
& New Democratic Party
Spouse(s)Sophie Lewis, nee Carson
ChildrenStephen Lewis, Michael Lewis, Janet Solberg, Nina Libeskind
Residence(s)Toronto/Ottawa, Ontario
OccupationLawyer
  1. ^ Smith,p.93


David Lewis (born Losz)[1] , CC, MA (June 23, or October 1909 -May 23, 1981)[2] [3] was a Russian-born Canadian labour lawyer and social democratic politician. He was national secretary of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation from 1936 to 1950, and, with Stanley Knowles, was one of the key architects of the New Democratic Party (NDP) in 1961. He was the NDP's national leader from 1971 to 1975.

Early life in Russia

Birth

David Lewis, his family's original name was Losz, was born sometime after Svisloch, Russia's, first snowfall in October 1909 (officially, he was born on June 23, 1909 because that was the date he gave the immigration officer in Halifax, Nova Scotia, when he arrived in Canada.).[4] His parents were Moishe and Rose Losz. His father was a the leader of the Jewish Labour Bund in his hometown and worked in the Tanneries. [5]

The Bund and Jewish life in the Pale

To understand David Lewis's political activism requires an examination of his roots in the Shetal he lived in from 1909 until 1921. Svisloch was located in the Russian Empire's Pale of Settlement or Pale for short, near the Polish and Russian border in present-day Belarus.[6] The old market town was overwhelmingly Jewish, with 3500 of its 4500 residents being of that faith.[7] Unlike many of the the other Shetals in the Pale, it had an industrial economy based on the Tannery business.[8] This meant there were factory workers that could be mobilized into Labour organizations. Which is why the Jewish Labour Bund, or Bund for short, was so prevalent in the town in the early twentieth century. [9] Moishe Losz was Svisloch's Bund Chairman. [10] Lewis spent his formative years immersed in the Bund's culture and philosophy. The Bund was an outlawed socialist party that called for overthrowing the Tsar, equality for all, and national rights for the Jewish community. [11] The Bund's membership, although mostly Jewish, was actually secular humanist in practice. [12] The Bund was both a working political party and a Labour movement. [13] It was preoccupied in changing the system that was at the roots of low pay and dangerous, harsh working conditions.[14] At its beginning, the Bund realized that its project could only be successful if it were local in focus. A notion that is seen in one of its maxims, “a real revolutionary movement must have it roots...in its own environment.”[15] Another important maxim that would influence Moishe, David, and his son Stephen was: “It is better to go along with the masses in a not totally correct direction than to separate oneself from them and remain a purist.”[16] This philosophy of compromise, has been part of both the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and New Democratic Party's (NDP) practices, and came into play between their “ideological missionaries and the power pragmatists when internal debates raged about policy or action.[17] As Cameron Smith puts it in his book Unfinished Journey: The legacy of the Bund is their sense of social justice, the identification with workers, the focus on organization, the commitment to equality and democratic procedures, fierce anti-communism, secular humanism, multi-culturalism, the sense of international community, the anger with exploitation – in these things the genes of the Bund live on. [18]

The Russian Civil War

When the Russian Civil War was at its fiercest, in the summer of 1920, Poland invaded, and the Red Russian Bolshevik army counter-attacked. The Bolshevik's were on Svisloch's border in July 1920. Moishe Losz openly opposed the Bolsheviks and would later be jailed by them for his opposition.[19] He barely escaped with his life. When the Polish army recaptured Svisloch on August 25, 1920, they executed five Jewish citizens as “spies.” [20] This was a false charge and was more of a tactic to keep the locals scared and not to participate in counter insurgency. Seeing that he wasn't safe under either regime, and the prospects for the future of his family, he left for Canada in May 1921, to work in his brother-in law's clothing factory in Montreal. By August, he saved up enough money to send for his family, including David, Charlie, and Doris.[21]

Religous education

David Lewis was secular Jew -- just like his father Maishe. However his maternal grandfather, Usher Lazarovitch, was religous and in the brief period between May and August before David emigrated, gave his grandson the only real religous training he would ever receive.[22]. Even though he wasn't yet thirteen, the age when Jewish boys have their Bar Mitzvah and complete their religious instruction, his grandfather proceeded to teach him how to wear the phylacteries. Besides attending morning services with his grandfather during this period, Lewis would not actively take part in a relgious service again until his granddaughter Ilna's Bat Mitzvah in the late 1970s.[23] In practice the Lewis clan is aethist which includes David, his wife Sophie, and their children Janet, Stephen, and Michael.[24]

Life in Canada

The family came to Canada by boat and landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They then went by rail to Montreal to meet-up with Maishe Lewis.

Learning English

David Lewis came to Canada as a native Yiddish speaker, understanding very little English. He learned the language by buying a copy of Charles Dickens' novel The Old Curiosity Shop, and a Yiddish - English dictionary. A teacher of Welsh descent at Fairmont Public School where Lewis was a student, helped him. But he also passed on his Welsh accent to Lewis.[25]

Baron Byng High School

He entered Baron Byng High School in September 1924. He soon became friends with A.M. (Abe) Klein, who was to become one of Canada's leading poets. He also met Irving Layton another giant of Canadian literature. Lewis played political mentor to Layton.[26]

Baron Byng High School was predominately Jewish in population because, at the time, it was in the heart of Montreal's non-affluent Jewish community. It was ghetto-like because Jews from outside the school district were not allowed to go other high schools, like Montreal High.[27]

Besides making friends with some of Canada's future literary stars, he met the woman that would eventually become his wife: Sophie Carson. Klein intoduced them, as he was their mutal friend. She came from a second generation Jewish-Canadian family, that maintained a religious home. Her father did not approve of David due to him being a recent immigrant to Canada, with what originally looked like no prospects. [28]

McGill University

David spent five years at McGill University in Montreal: four in arts, and one in Law. He helped found the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL).[29] While at McGill he lectured at this anti-communist socialist club, and was its nominal leader.[30]

In his third year, Lewis founded The McGilliad campus magazine.[31] Many of his anti-communist views were printed in it during 1930-31. Even though he ws an anti-communist, he published in the December 1930 issue his approval of the Russian Revolution and called for a greater understanding of the Soviet Union.[32] Throughout his career, he would attack communism, but would always have a sympathy for the grand experiment of 1917.[33]

While at McGill, he met and worked with prominant Canadian socialists like F.R. Scott, Eugene Forsey, J. King Gordon, and Frank Underhill. He would later work with all of them in the CCF party in the 1940s and 1950s.[34]


Political foundations

Lewis' Marxism

He rejected the need for both the necessity for violent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. These were rejected due to his Bundist roots. The Bund insisted, to the point of obsession, that the revolution should be sought through democratic means, as Marx had judged possible in the late 1860s, and that democratic procedures should continue to prevail for everyone after the revolution.[35]

Lewis' views not the same as followers of the Bolshevik revolution. For Lenin called those who insisted on full democratic procedures "liquidationsts," meaning that they had fallen prey to reformism and bourgeois tendencies.[36] Stalin referred to Lewis' type of social democratic Marxism as "social fascists."[37]. It is not surprising that Lewis had an undying antagonism towards Communists.

Fabian socialism influenced David mainly because of its reach was so expert, its approach so humane, and its focus on issues so practical and immediate.[38] Fabianism mainly influenced him in terms of policies that could be implemented and in procedures that underlined democratic practices, not in his determination to lay siege to the power structure.[39] The British Labour Party, with its parliamentary approach to attaining power, and its organizational prowess similar to the Bund's.[40] As Lewis biographer Cameron Smith points out: "So what he ended up with was a modified Bundist interpretation of Marxism. Call it, if you will, Parliamentary Marxism. It was a Marxian analysis of economics and a parliamentary approach to politics. And if David were forced to choose, he would have chosen Parliamentary over Marxism."[41]

Rhodes Scholarship and Oxford

When David Lewis entered Oxford in 1932, he immediately too up a leadership role in the university's socialist-labour circles. Michael Foote , the future leader of the British Labour Party in the 1980s remanising about Lewis, "the most powerful socialist debater in the place. I don't think with any rival....He had a very powerful influence indeed amongst students, partly because he had so much more experience than the rest of us but partly because he had brilliant debating powers. I mean one of the best I'veever heard. If you talk of tough political debates, well, he was absolutely unbeatable....I knew him [at Oxford] when I was a Liberal [and] he played a part in converting me to socialism." [42]

Labour Club

When Lewis came to Oxford, the Labour Club was a tame organization adhering to Christian activism, or the not-quite-so-scrappy-socialist theories of people such as R.H.Tawney and his book The Acquisitive Society. David's modified Bundist interpretation of Marxism, that Smith lables "Parliamentary Marxism," ignited the renewed interest in the club after the dissappointment with Ramsey's Labour government.[43]

The Oxford newspaper Isis noted Lewis' leadership ability at this early stage in his career in their February 7, 1934 issue: "The energy of these University Socialists is almost unbelieveable. If the Socialist movement as a whole is anything like as active as they are, then a socialist victory at the next election is inevitiable."[44]

In February 1934, British facist William Joyce, (Lord Haw Haw), visited Osford. Lewis and future Ontario CCF leader Ted Jolliffe , organized a noisy protest against the facist, by simply plantin Labour Club members, in the dance hall that Joyce was speaking in, and causing a commotion as groups of two and three, left making much noise on the creaking wooden floors. The speech was foiled. Afterwards, the blackshirt contigient had a street battle in Oxford with members of the Labour Club and the townsfolk.[45]

Lewis prevented the communists from really making inroads at Oxford. He increased membership by three quarters by the time he left.[46] Ted Jolliffe stated "there was a diference between his speeches at the Union and his speeches at the Labou Club. His speeches at th Union had more humour in them; the atmosphere was entirely different. but his speeches at th Labour Club were deadly serious.... His influence at th Labour Club, more than anyone else's, I think, explains the failure of the Communists to make headway there. here were so many naive people around who could have been taken in.[47]


British Labour Party

David Lewis was a very bright star in the British Labour Party. Upon his graduation, in 1935, the Labour Party had offered him a safe seat in the British House of Commons.[48] At the time of his graduation, Lewis hit a proverbial fork-in-the-road: he could stay in England, be a partner in a prominent London law firm, and become a cabinet minister the next time Labour formed government. Stafford Cripps, then a prominent barrister and Labour Party official was grooming David Lewis to Prime inster of England. Or he could return to Montreail, and help build the fledgling CCF, with no financial assurdiness. In the end, he gave up certain success in England and sailed back to Canada to work for the CCF.[49]

File:David Lewis.jpg
M.J. Coldwell and David Lewis looking over some papers together

CCF's Formative years

An active member of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, Lewis became the party's national secretary in 1936 and was for many years the party's sole paid employee. He ran for the Canadian House of Commons in 1940, 1943, 1945 and 1949 but was defeated on each occasion. In the 1943 by-election in Cartier, Quebec, he lost to Fred Rose (politician) who became Canada's first and only Member of Parliament (MP) for the Communist Party of Canada).

Private Labour Law practice

Lewis resigned as national secretary in 1950 and moved to Toronto to practise law in partnership with Ted Jolliffe. He became the chief legal advisor to the United Steel Workers of America's Canadian division, and assisted them in their organizing efforts and in their battles with the Communist-led Mine, Mill union.

1962: Finally elected to House of Commons

Lewis was elected as a Member of Parliament from 1962 to 1963 and 1965 to 1974. He established himself as one of the leading debaters in the House of Commons.

Leader of the NDP

In 1971, he ran to succeed retiring NDP leader Tommy Douglas, and won the leadership convention. He led the NDP through the 1972 federal election in which he uttered his best known quotation calling Canadian corporations "corporate welfare bums". That election campaign returned a minority government and elected the greatest number of NDP MPs until 1988, and left the NDP holding the balance of power until 1974. Lewis and the NDP propped up the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau in exchange for the implementation of NDP proposals such as the creation of Petro-Canada as a crown corporation.

In the 1974 election, however, Lewis lost his seat in Parliament, leading him to resign as party leader. It was revealed immediately after the election that he had been battling cancer. It is reported that Lewis had kept everyone, including his family, unaware of his condition.

Awards and death

In 1976, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.

David Lewis completed his memoirs, The Good Fight: Political Memoirs 1909–1958 in 1981. He died shortly thereafter on May 23,1981. He is the father of Stephen Lewis, a former Ontario New Democratic Party leader who is now the United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, and Michael Lewis, former Ontario New Democratic Party Secretary, and a leading organizer in the NDP. He is also the father of Janet Solberg, former president of the Ontario New Democratic Party in the 1980s.

Those related to Lewis include:

References and notes

  1. ^ Smith 1989, p. 93
  2. ^ Smith 1989, p. 93
  3. ^ His actual date of birth is unknown. When he emigrated from Russia to Canada in 1921, he did not speak English, and according to David's daughter Janet Solberg, June 23 was the first date that popped into his head when the immigration officer asked him when he was born. (Smith,p.93,542) As Smith points out in his book, October is a best guess, since the only specifics given were that he was born "right after the first snows in 1909". (Smith,p.93,542)
  4. ^ Smith, p. 93
  5. ^ Smith, pp.17-19
  6. ^ Smith,pp.9-10
  7. ^ Smith, p.11
  8. ^ Smith, p.11
  9. ^ Smith, p. 17
  10. ^ Smith, p.11
  11. ^ Smith, p. 1
  12. ^ Smith, p. 133
  13. ^ Smith,p.127
  14. ^ Smith, p.127
  15. ^ Smith,p.63
  16. ^ Smith,p.63
  17. ^ Smith,p.63
  18. ^ Smith, pp.132-133
  19. ^ Smith. pp.17-19
  20. ^ Smith, pp. 114-15
  21. ^ Smith, p. 115
  22. ^ Lewis, p.12
  23. ^ Smith, p.152
  24. ^ Smith, p.396
  25. ^ Smith, p.125
  26. ^ Smith, p. 146, 148-149
  27. ^ Smith,p. 146
  28. ^ Smith, p. 150
  29. ^ Lewis, Memoirs, pp.29-30
  30. ^ Smith, p.155
  31. ^ Smith, p.157
  32. ^ Smith, p.157
  33. ^ Smith, p.157
  34. ^ Smith, p.159
  35. ^ Smith, p.186
  36. ^ Ascher, p.28
  37. ^ Penner, Canadian Communism
  38. ^ Smith, p.187
  39. ^ Smith, p. 187
  40. ^ Smith, p. 187
  41. ^ Smith, p. 187
  42. ^ Smith, p.161-162 interview with the author.
  43. ^ Smith, p.187
  44. ^ The Isis, February 7, 1934, p. 9
  45. ^ Smith, pp.194-195
  46. ^ Smith, p.196
  47. ^ Smith, p.196. Ted Jolliffe in an interview with the author.
  48. ^ Smith,p.197
  49. ^ Smith, p.197
  • Ascher, Abraham (1976). The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution: Documents of Revolution. London: Thames and Hudson. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  • Caplan, Gerarld (1973). The Dilemma of Canadian Socialism: The CCF in Ontario. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  • Horowitz, Gad (1968). Canadian Labour in Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  • Smith, Cameron (1989). Unfinished Journey: The Lewis Family. Toronto: Summerhill Press. ISBN 0-929091-04-3. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  • Stewart, Walter (2003). Tommy: the life and politics of Tommy Douglas. Toronto: McArthur & Company. ISBN 1-55278-382-0. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  • Stewart, Walter (2000). M.J.: The Life and Times of M.J. Coldwell. Toronto: Stoddart Publishing Co. Limited. ISBN 0773732322. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

See also



Preceded by New Democratic Party of Canada leaders
1971-1975 		Succeeded by
Preceded by
William G. Beech, Prog. Cons.
 Member of Parliament for York South (first time)
1962-1963 		Succeeded by
Marvin Gelber, Liberal
Preceded by
Marvin Gelber, Liberal
 Member of Parliament for York South (second time)
1965-1974 		Succeeded by

Template:NDP Leaders

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