Ruth Goodman

 Ruth Goodman has led a life of resistance to war and commitment to the environment and social justice. Her family fled Eastern Europe at the turn of the last century to escape war and anti-Semitism, and she grew up in a working class family in Brooklyn, New York. Ruth worked in the shipyards during World War II, before moving to Seattle, Washington, where the Goodman family became involved with the Religious Society of Friends, more commonly known as the Quakers and counted among the historic peace churches. Ruth became active in the movements for peace, women’s and civil rights. In 1966, in part in response to US military aggression in Vietnam, she and her husband Henry moved with their two young sons to Canada. The Goodman family prospered in Canada working in the construction, real estate and property development area, and established a fund to benefit numerous social justice causes.

 

 

The late Howard Zinn famously said that it was the “countless small actions of unknown people” that lead to historic moments of social change. The needs of a struggle for social justice often throw a leader into the spotlight, but for every person on centre stage it takes myriad others toiling consistently behind the scenes.

 

Ruth Goodman is precisely the type of humble, dedicated and intelligent person that I believe Zinn had in mind. Goodman, now 89, has spent a good portion of her adult life participating in and supporting a range of movements for equal rights and justice.

 

Ruth grew up in a union household in Brooklyn. Her father was a member of the International Fur and Leather Workers Union. She had two younger brothers. Her family was working class, and suffered like millions of others through that most trying of decades, the 1930s: 

 

“We never knew how rich we were, how poor we were. I mean, I knew we were poor, because my mother would hock her ring … that was a way of bridging the gap during the Great Depression. Things only turned around for the U.S. economy with the advent of major war production.”

 

 

Ruth married Henry Goodman in 1940, and in 1942 her new husband went to work in the shipyards in Evansville, Indiana, at the southern tip of the state on the shores of the Ohio River. Ruth got a job in the office working for $20 a week. When she found out that welders made a $1.25 an hour, she applied and got the position, joining a wave of women’s participation in industrial production during wartime.

 

There was a massive workforce at the shipyard -- at its peak, there were over 20,000 men and women employed. Many of who had come up from Texas, Tennessee and other southern states. Jim Crow racism, Ruth explains, was still the order of the day, “There was still a lot of segregation in those days, Blacks did not eat in the same lunch room, did not use the same bathrooms.”

 

The commander of the shipyard ended up desegregating the lunchroom, but then he also belonged to a minority in Evansville. Ruth and her family stood out as well, “My husband, the commander of the shipyard and myself were probably the only Jewish people in that shipyard.”

 

The Goodmans experienced anti-Semitism. Even while they built the Tank Landing Ships and Thunderbolt fighter jets that would be used by the troops in Europe to fight Nazism, Jews, Blacks and other minorities face systemic racism at home.

 

That same shipyard commander invited Henry Goodman to join the Navy, and bestowed a great honour on Ruth, inviting her to launch a ship – “a very big deal in those days”. The framed picture of Ruth breaking the champagne bottle on the bow of ship still hangs in her East Vancouver home today.

 

It was in those war years that Ruth started to become politicized. She remembers reading I.F. Stone’s newsletter and being influenced by its critical and investigative reporting. Henry had come from a political family, and his influence also rubbed off. At his high school in Brooklyn Father Coughlin’s racist agitators had often come to distribute their newsletter, and arguments and fights had ensued. Henry had also been a supporter of the anti-fascist committees that financed the international brigades fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

 

 

In June 1945 the family moved to Washington State and found a lively political atmosphere. Ruth recalls that “there was something to do every night if you wanted to go to a lecture, there were a lot of people interested in social action.” Ruth was reading voraciously in those years – “as much as I could to keep up” with her educated and political active colleagues and friends.

 

In 1957 she was invited to volunteer with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a social arm of the Quakers. Ruth joined their peace education committee and was soon deeply involved in the work. Teaming up with professors at the University of Washington, their committee hosted speakers like Margaret Mead, Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal.

 

The AFSC was always part of peace and anti-war movement. Ruth was soon involved in organizing the annual peace marches in Seattle. Though Ruth explains that these were, at first, very modest, “In those years, if 100 people came out it was a lot.”

 

The pervasive fear engendered by the McCarthyism of the 1950s was still a big obstacle to political organizing in those years. Ruth explains that her AFSC committee would hold small house meetings to debunk the anti-communism that put a chill on all dissent:

 

“You would just try to gather your neighbours and have a small meeting. We would maybe get five or six people together in someone’s living room, and we would bring in a speaker to lecture about the constitution, about the right to belong to any organization. We were just trying to remind people that they had the right to dissent. People were so frightened. In the 1950s people didn’t want to talk to each other.”

 

Displaying her sense of humour, Ruth explains that these were the years when she decided to learn how to play bridge because “serious competitive bridge players don’t chat.”

 

Ruth was very serious about her anti-war activism as well. In the 1960s the movement grew and their protests took different forms. In the winter of 1964 – “rain or shine, mostly rain” – she and other peace activists held information pickets outside Boeing, because they were building war material. Once a week, Ruth took part in these actions, handing out pamphlets to graveyard shift workers leaving the factory at 8a.m.

 

The pamphlets were carefully made, and had headers like ‘build rapid transit, rather than war materials’. Ruth and her colleagues’ names and phone number were on all their printed information – the Quakers didn’t believe in doing things anonymously or covertly.

 

It took courage and fortitude to do this sort of political work openly. One morning a Boeing worker punched out one of the AFSC men Ruth was pamphleting with as they were handing out flyers. Ruth explains, “Nobody cared [about Vietnam], in those years it was still a popular war.”

 

 

By 1966, with two young sons, Ruth and Henry decided to leave the United States for Canada. Ruth explains that the War was a big factor in this decision:

 

 “There was nothing but meetings and meeting and meetings, but everything got worse and worse and worse. At that time it was still hard to convince people the war was wrong. The lies got worse and worse and worse. You felt like you just have to leave this place, you can’t go on.”

 

There was also the matter of their boys, Michael and Dean, who would soon have been coming up on draft age. Even children were under pressure to tow the government line on the war.

 

“My younger son Dean was in fifth grade when the teachers organized a debate about whether the U.S. should be in Vietnam. He took the side that we shouldn’t be there. And the teacher called him a communist. He was 11 or 12 years old. That’s what the Cold War was doing to people. ‘Communist’ was the most pejorative thing you could call anybody, the word was like ‘terrorist’ today. Back then if you said anything against the government you were called a communist.”

 

The move to Canada was easy, according to Ruth, “We made the proper applications and came as a family, and as my husband was a respectable business person there was no problem.”

 

Settling in Vancouver, the Goodmans found Canada relatively “quiet and benign”. Ruth and her family weren’t the only ones moving north because of the war. The city was crawling with draft dodgers from the U.S. “That did a lot to make Canada more vital, new people coming in with new ideas,” Ruth says.

 

In Canada, her peace activism took on new forms. “It was like a railway [from Seattle], since people knew I had moved up to Vancouver,” Ruth explains. The first stop was an anti-war house in Bellingham, and from there many war resisters crossed the border, often staying at Ruth’s house when they arrived.

 

Ruth volunteered two or three days a week at the war resisters’ support office, which was located at MacDonald and 4^th Avenue. With other women, she would cook and deliver meals to the group houses down by False Creek where a dozen or more draft dodgers would crash. The locals welcomed the Vietnam resisters with open arms, Ruth explains: “Canadians were really sympathetic, and not only sympathetic but generous”.

 

Ruth notes that for the young American men, it was sometime of a struggle to adjust: “It was such a shock to them, the guys that came from conservative states were truly shell-shocked, with a lot of drugs around, hippies all over the place.”

 

 

 

So it was that Ruth and her friend Dorothy Stowe were among the first volunteers for the Everywoman’ Health Centre, an abortion clinic in Vancouver originally located on Victoria Drive near 44^th Avenue. Prior to, and even following, the victory of legal abortion in Canada, abortion doctors faced assassination attempts and their clinics were firebombed, vandalized and otherwise attacked.

 

In addition to fundraising for this new clinic, Ruth volunteered one day a week, making appointments for women. At first, a doctor had new fly in from Quebec – two days a week – to perform the abortions. She sometimes stayed at Ruth’s home.

 

Ruth describes her role in making women feel comfortable, given the climate of threat and intimidation that existed:

 

“We would meet the women at a restaurant and carry a flower with us. We would drive them to the clinic and take them through the hostile crowds. These crowds were there every day in those years… One of the anti-choice groups even bought the house next door so they could demonstrate right on their lawn. They had a big sign on their lawn saying ‘Help with Abortions’. When women would come to have an abortion, sometimes they would walk in there by mistake, and [the anti-choice people] would try to talk them out of it… They would put paste in the locks of the clinic. Then we’d have to call the police, or wait outside for someone to change the locks.”

 

In 1992 a firebomb destroyed the clinic of Dr. Henry Morgentaler, a pioneer in the struggle for legal abortion in Canada. Two years later, in Vancouver, Dr. Garson Romalis was shot and seriously wounded by a sniper’s bullet. The B.C. NDP government of the day responded with the Access to Abortion Services Act, which disallowed protests outside abortion clinics, and doctors' offices and homes.

 

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Ruth’s son Michael established the Ruth and Henry Goodman Fund for Social and Economic Justice (http://ruthandhenrygoodmanfund.com/), which supports many initiatives in British Columbia and beyond.

 

Ruth explains the Fund’s mission in terms of her life experience:

 

“After the great depression and the Second World War, people such as ourselves from working class families began to hope that jobs, housing and education would be available for all, but it would seem that the cold war and the hot wars around the world subverted those dreams. Today there are increasing numbers of very poor people and by contrast a small percentage of people who are richer than some nations. There is no need for this, we could house cloth and feed all of humanity if the wealth was shared equitably and we practiced population control. Even in wealthy countries like Canada and the US many full time workers live below the poverty line. Extreme poverty and homelessness have become a normal part of our landscape.”

 

 

Typical of her unassuming nature, Ruth downplays her ongoing political contributions, though remains up-to-date on all matter of issues including the plight of Iraq War resisters seeking refuge in Canada today. She is still reading the Nation, and follows public affairs closely. Approaching her 90^th birthday, Ruth continues to quietly contribute the ‘countless small actions’ that nourish all movements for a better world.