Working-class hero put body on the line
Remarkable memoir depicts life battling for rights and freedoms, at home and abroad
Jim Higgins never stopped fighting for democracy. He faced down police brutality In Canada and Falange gunfire in the Spanish Civil War, and he played an active role in union organizing and electoral politics for the rest of his life after he returned to Canada from the war.
And in a moving sidebar to his battle heroics, he stepped away from combat one day in Spain to save a child's life. The kid he rescued, Manuel Alvarez, tracked Higgins down decades later, an adventure Alvarez recorded in his own book The Tall Soldier (1980.)
“A working-class hero is something to be,” John Lennon reminded us in one of his post-Beatles songs. Jim Higgins was the genuine article.
Higgins, born in 1907 in England, emigrated to Canada at 21. Like many of the best of his generation, he responded to the economic catastrophes of the Great Depression and the many assaults on working people's rights launched by the employer class in its wake by becoming politically engaged. He organized resistance among the unemployed men the government had penned up in what many called “the slave camps,” and he was part of the On to Ottawa Trek protest when it was attacked in Regina in 1935.
One of the many vivid action scenes in this remarkable
memoir places the reader with Higgins in the crowd as the RCMP galloped into the protesting workers, breaking heads with long, heavy clubs.
Again, like many of the best of his generation, Higgins knew that General Francisco Franco's right-wing attack on the democratic Spanish Republic represented a danger to the entire world. Like the over 35,000 international volunteers who flocked to Spain to help defend the republic, and the 1,700 volunteers from Canada he joined on the trek, Higgins clearly saw the imminent dangers of authoritarian regimes and put his body on the line to stop it.
Fighting for Democracy is based on memories Higgins recorded in 1939 and in 1977. After his death in 1982, his daughter Janette Higgins wove them together to produce a moving portrait of a good man and beloved father.