Albert (Ginger) Goodwin has been the subject of four books, numerous newspaper and magazine articles, quite a few speeches, several folksongs, two plays, a national radio documentary, and an annual remembrance at Cumberland Cemetery that attracts several hundred people every June at Miners’ Memorial Day. And, now – a musical is to be staged next year in the Comox Valley.

Why, almost 90 years after he was shot and killed while dodging the draft in the First World War, is his memory so rarely out of the news?

For some, it is probably ideological – Goodwin was a Socialist who saw war as an inevitable conflict between capitalist countries whose private companies (and their governments) sought and fought over new markets for profits. Every movement needs a hero and if he can also be a martyr – even better.

But Goodwin’s appeal is broader than political ideology reaching as it does – and did for him - into mainstream trade unionism. His unions were the United Mine Workers of America and the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers – not, as sometimes mistakenly stated, the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World.

His appeal is, I suggest, that of one man (and there were others) who stood up to oppression and, especially, was able to inspire others through his message and his charisma. In the space of only a few years he rose from a Cumberland miner who attended union conventions but held no office to full-time secretary of the Trail Mill and Smeltermen’s Union, president of Mine Mill District 6, president of the Trail Trades and Labour Council, candidate in a provincial election for the Socialist Party of Canada and, in 1917, election as a regional vice-president of the B.C. Federation of Labour. His future seemed assured.

But - the 1914-18 world war taking place in Europe and rather than fight in what he saw as capitalism’s war, he showed what some would consider a great deal of courage and publicly opposed the war – certainly not a popular position to take. He backed up his words by refusing to fight when conscripted.

Goodwin was the underdog, the fighter for the “little guy,” the man who wanted to change society from capitalism to socialism, but who also believed in the ‘here and now,’ in the ‘bread and butter issues’ of the workplace. And it was while leading one such “commodity struggle” (as some of his fellow Socialists derisively referred to strikes by unions) – for the universal eight-hour workday at the huge Trail lead-zinc smelter in 1917 – that he suddenly found himself conscripted when the conscription board reclassified him from “temporarily unfit” to “fit” for the trenches in France. Thus was set in motion a chain of events that led to his death on July 27, 1918, on what is now named Mount Ginger Goodwin west of Cumberland.

The very kind of forces that railed against Goodwin 90 years ago ago have been reflected since then. In 2001, for example, one provincial government (BC Liberal) changed the decision of another provincial government (NDP) and removed the “Ginger Goodwin Way” signs from the Inland Island Highway above the cemetery where he rests.

But, Ginger lives on in the hearts and minds of the many and diverse people who agree with his ideas for a better world and the struggle to achieve it. And one day, the Ginger Goodwin Way signs will be returned to their original and rightful place on the Inland Island Highway where it passes Cumberland, above the village cemetery.

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Roger Stonebanks is the author of Fighting For Dignity: The Ginger Goodwin Story, published in 2004, which is available at the Cumberland Museum.