Throughout the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, ‘constituted authority’ served as a rhetorical banner under which the interests of the state and capital overlapped. Throughout the six-week walkout, representatives of all three levels of the state and members of the shadowy Citizens’ Committee of 1,000 repeatedly returned to the language of ‘constituted authority’ in order to illustrate what was threatened by the strikers. Tapping into post-war fears of ‘enemy aliens,’ Bolsheviks, and Soviet revolution, the Winnipeg Citizen, capital’s mouthpiece during the strike, was adept at conflating the goals of the strikers with those of an attempted revolution. Even when the Western Labour News, the...
