Albert F. Canwell

Representative Albert F. Canwell
Member of the Washington House of Representatives from the Fifth District (Spokane) district
In office 1947–1949
Succeeded by	Don Magnuson
Personal details
Born	Albert Franklyn Canwell (1907-01-11)January 11, 1907 Spokane, Washington, USA
Political party	Republican
Occupation	journalist, state representative, professional anti-communist
Known for	Canwell Committee

Albert Franklyn Canwell (1907–2002) was an

Albert Franklyn Canwell, known as "Al" to his friends, was born January 11, 1907, in Spokane, Washington.

His paternal grandfather, James Canwell (1840-1876), was a farmer from the

His father mustered out of the cavalry in 1900 and with his wife, Ingeborg Christina Espelund Canwell (1876-1967), the Norwegian daughter of immigrants to the United States, decided to settle in a rural part of Eastern Washington near the city of Spokane.^[1]

Due to their physical distance from the facility Canwell was held out of the local one-room school until the age of 8, being taught to read and write at home under the tutelage of his mother.^[1] The family moved to Spokane in 1916, where his father would ultimately become a member of the Teamster's Union. Albert passed the years of World War I as a schoolboy in various public schools of the city.^[1]

Career

In the years after the war, the young Canwell took time off school to work as an itinerant fruit picker, earning money and traveling to see the states of the Pacific coast.^[1] He also worked briefly as an assistant to an explosives specialist in the construction of a dam on the Hood River.^[1] He would continue traveling seasonally, working somewhat more lucratively as a fruit and produce packager until 1928 — a trade which included short stints riding freight trains and staying for a day or two in hobo camps.^[1]

It was in this period that Canwell was first exposed to radical industrial unionism in the form of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), commonly known as "Wobblies." Canwell later recalled:

The Wobbly organization or IWW was very, very prominent and very active. In general they were not a very desirable lot. I remember one incident. I was coming home from the Kennewick area. I had worked down there and ended up with a little money — not very much — and decided to ride a freight train back to Spokane. I boarded a flatcar and somewhere along the line a couple of fellows were working the train. You either had to have a Wobbly card or get off the train. That's cold turkey — supposed to pay a dollar for a red card, and that wasn't the sort of think I was likely to do. In Kennewick, I had bought a regular horse pistol. It was a .45 Colt; badly worn and dangerous to shoot, but I bought it for five dollars and I had this. When I was confronted with 'Either pay for this red ticket or get off the train!' I decided that wasn't the way it would be and I displayed this firearm that should have had wheels on it. Anyway, these two guys just took off, jumped off the train into the sagebrush head-over-heels. That's all I saw of them. That was one of my experiences with labor organizing.^[1]

After 1928, Canwell left produce packing for good, taking a job as an employee of a large Spokane bookstore for two years before going to work for the

Canwell became a general assignment news reporter for International News Service (INS), for whom he covered such fare as ongoing labor disputes in the Detroit auto industry and the 1933 Chicago World's Fair.^[1] He continued to maintain a home base in Yakima throughout this period.^[1]

In covering the sometimes sensational labor strife in the

In the early 1940s, Canwell worked as the chief of the Spokane County Identification Bureau, attached to the Spokane County Sheriff's Office, replacing an individual who had been called up for military service during World War II. He also simultaneously worked for one year with the Identification Office of the Federal Narcotics Bureau. Although he anticipated being drafted himself, Canwell was never called into military service during the war years.^[1]

With the end of the war Canwell left the employ of the Sheriff's Office and took up life as a small scale cattle rancher.^[1]

Washington House of Representatives

Canwell was elected to the Washington state House of Representatives in November 1946. He made two primary promises to the voters of his Spokane district during the 1946 campaign — to oppose new taxes and to take action against the spread of Communism in America. In an effort to fulfill this campaign promise, Canwell actively participated in helping to write the House resolution which established a Washington State legislative committee to investigate the activities of the Communist Party USA in the state.^[1]

Canwell committee

On March 8, 1947, the legislature's House Concurrent Resolution No. 10 established a Joint Legislative Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities. Speaker of the House Herbert M. Hamblen — also hailing from the Eastern Washington city of Spokane — tapped Canwell as the chairman of this interim committee. The committee consisted of 5 Republicans and 2 Democrats. The committee consequently became known as the Canwell Committee among the public and in the press.

The committee was funded by the private donation of Fritz Jewitt, a wealthy lumberman and conservative political activist.^[1]

The Canwell Committee met for the first time on January 27, 1948, at the Seattle Armory.^[1]

Canwell's national supporter was

In the election of 1948 Canwell attempted to move from the House to the State Senate, running as the Republican nominee in the November general election. He was defeated in that bid.[1]

Not deterred by his 1948 loss, Canwell ran for the United States Senate in 1950, but fell to defeat in the Republican primary.^[1]

In 1952, Washington was awarded another seat in Congress as a result of the census of 1950 and Canwell ran for the new at-large seat. Although he emerged victorious in the Republican primary, he was defeated by Democrat Don Magnuson in the November general election.^[1]

American Intelligence Service

Following his electoral defeat Canwell continued as a professional anti-communist, launching a business called the American Intelligence Service from a downtown Spokane office.

Canwell died age 95 on April 1, 2002, in Spokane of an unspecified illness.[5]

See also

• Canwell Committee
• Washington House of Representatives
• Anti-Communism
• Alfred Kohlberg

References

Further reading

• Jim Camden, "Seeing Red: Northwest Communist Hunter Offers No Apologies 50 Years Later," Spokane Spokesman-Review, Jan. 18, 1998.
• Verne Countryman, Un-American Activities in the State of Washington: The Canwell Committee. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1951.
• Jane Sanders, Cold War on Campus: Academic Freedom at the University of Washington, 1946-64. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1979.
• Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986.