Winnipeg's red scare: as thousands of strikers took to the streets in 1919, the press waged its own propaganda war against the workers. Wasn't the Winnipeg's General Strike really a Bolshevik plot? Almost all Canadian newspapers said so--except one.

On Sunday afternoon, May 18, 1919, William "Main" Johnson, the Toronto Daily Star's thirty-two-year-old roving reporter, disembarked at Winnipeg's North End Canadian Pacific Railway station. Only hours earlier, the Star's owner and publisher, Joseph Atkinson, had telegraphed Johnson in Sudbury, Ontario, telling him to stop reporting on the Mathers Commission hearings, which was investigating the country's ongoing industrial unrest, and take the first train to Winnipeg. Once there, he was to cover a breaking news story--the general sympathetic strike, which had been sparked by metal and construction workers for union recognition and higher wages. The strike was entering ...