Province of Manitoba » Culture Heritage, Tourism and Sport » Historic Resources » People, Places and Events » Manitobans Who Made a Difference » Difference Makers » Arthur W. Puttee

Manitobans Who Made a Difference

(Courtesy of the Archives of Manitoba)

As a founder of the Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council (WTLC), official of the International Typographical Union (ITU), Manitoba's first Labour Member of Parliament (M.P.), and publisher and editor of the weekly labour newspaper, The Voice, Arthur Puttee was an influential spokesman and advocate of the moderate centre in all developments affecting labour in the 25 years before the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. His public career was devoted to peaceful, orderly, and gradual change and he had a reputation as the most reticent Western Canadian radical.

Puttee, son of William and Elizabeth Puttee, was born at Folkestone, Kent, England, where he attended school and at age 15 was apprenticed as a printer in Woolwich. After being introduced to the British trade union movement, he immigrated to Canada in 1888 and lived in Brandon before working for a few years in the United States at the West Publishing Company in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he joined the ITU, in Seattle, and then at the state printing office in Olympia, Washington. Puttee settled in Winnipeg in 1891. On a visit to England in 1892, he married Gertrude Marg Strood, also of Folkestone. They had two sons and three daughters.

On return to Canada, Arthur Puttee worked as a printer and was a member of the board of directors of The People's Voice (TPV), a paper established in 1894 by the WTLC, which he had helped to found earlier that year, to represent and to promote the views of labour. He was also active in the ITU, serving as Winnipeg local 191's president in 1893 and secretary in 1895, and as a union organizer from 1894-96. In 1897, he became one of the principals in The Voice Publishing Company, publisher of TPV, as well as its editor. Puttee renamed the paper The Voice and doubled its size. The paper popularized Puttee's reform ideals, emphasizing the link between labourism in Canada and labour's political representation in Great Britain. Puttee resembled a British Labourite more than a Marxist; he wished to change the system from within, not destroy it. For example, he advocated reforms such as government ownership of railways, abolition of the Senate, and creation of a federal Department of Labour.

In February, 1899, Richard Willis Jameson, M.P. for Winnipeg, died suddenly and Puttee became one of the leading voices calling for a labour candidate to contest the seat. In June, Puttee himself was nominated as an Independent Labour candidate by the Labour Party and the Trades Council. He ran on a reformist platform that advocated direct legislation, a land tax, and public ownership of monopolies. Splits and rivalries within the Liberal and Conservative parties prevented them from fielding official candidates, and in the highly contested by-election of January, 1900, Puttee, who obtained two-thirds of the vote cast by working class electors within Winnipeg's North End, very narrowly defeated his opponent, Edward D. Martin, a former Liberal running as an independent candidate. In the House of Commons, on the invitation of Sir William Mulock, federal Minister of Labour, he seconded the Liberal government of Sir Wilfrid Laurier's Current Wage Bill, passed in 1900.

Puttee ran again in the general election of November, 1900, and with the backing of Liberals loyal to Clifford Sifton, the federal Minister of the Interior from Brandon, once more defeated Martin, this time by nearly 1,200 votes. Puttee was an "advanced" Liberal, not a socialist, and was not a supporter of the pacifist opposition to Canadian participation in the South African War (1899-1902). A socialist-labour split in 1902 caused the collapse of the Labour Party in Winnipeg. Because he favoured public, not private, ownership of the railways involved in the transcontinental expansion under Laurier, Puttee was susceptible to the charge that he was opposed to furthering Winnipeg's prosperity. As a result of these developments, and the entrance of official representatives of the two major political parties, in the general election of 1904 Puttee was defeated by Liberal David Wesley Bole amid accusations that Puttee was backed by "revolutionists" and "assassins".

After his defeat, Puttee resumed the editorship of The Voice, continuing to advocate social reforms and calling for the creation of a political party, such as the Manitoba Labour Party of which he was chairman in 1906, which emulated its British counterpart. He was also elected in 1916 as a member of the City of Winnipeg Board of Control, serving until 1918 (when electors voted the Board out of existence) on five committees, the playgrounds and social welfare commissions, the civic charities bureau, and the Greater Winnipeg Water District board, and was the labour representative on Manitoba's first compensation commission.

During World War I, Gertrude Puttee became vice-president of the Women's Labour League (1917), and Arthur Puttee, along with most other labour leaders, argued strongly against military conscription, believing that it was not only an attack against trade unionism, but an attempt to destroy collective bargaining. He was also a critic of radical militant industrial unionism, such as the American-based revolutionary union, the Industrial Workers of the World (the I.W.W., also known as the "Wobblies"). In 1902, The Voice had published a short novel, "The Great Tribulation", by "Libertas Brummell", which predicted a general strike in Winnipeg in the near future. In 1918, during a sympathetic strike of Winnipeg's civic workers, Puttee contended that "a strike is not in the best interests of the Labour movement", because a strike against the public would destroy any sympathy for labour that might exist; he advocated arbitration of grievances instead. The proposals by a City committee of aldermen and headed by Puttee to avert the strike were unsuccessful at first, but, after federal government involvement, were largely accepted after a ten-day walkout.

Puttee's position on the strike and strikes in general (only as a last resort), combined with his criticism of "I.W.W. methods", caused him to be replaced by younger and more radical candidates and to lose favour with the Labour Council which withdrew its official support from The Voice and hired another editor, Reverend William Ivens, as the editor for its newspaper, The Western Labor News. This led to the cessation of publication of The Voice in July, 1918. The following year, the cautious Puttee refused to endorse the Winnipeg General Strike, completing his fall from grace in labour circles. In 1923, he became the manager of the Printers' Roller Company, from which he retired 25 years later.

The Puttees lived for several decades on College Avenue in Winnipeg's North End, then for a few years on Queenston Street in the city's southern district of River Heights. Arthur and Gertrude Puttee were active charter members of the First Unitarian Church of Winnipeg, and Arthur Puttee was an avid golfer. Although he did not take an active part in politics after World War I, Puttee supported the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation as best representing the interests of the working class. The Puttee Collection is at the Archives of Manitoba.