Eight Men Speak is a Canadian agitprop play written in 1933 by a committee of E. Cecil-Smith, Mildred Goldberg, Frank Love, and Oscar Ryan.
On August 11, 1931, the Toronto offices of the Communist Party of Canada were raided by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and eight of its members were arrested on charges of sedition, including Tim Buck and Tom McEwen.
They were found guilty and sentenced to prison where, in 1932, an assassination attempt on Buck was made when shots were fired into his cell at the Kingston Penitentiary.
E. Cecil-Smith, Mildred Goldberg, Frank Love, and Oscar Ryan wrote an agitprop play based on the events.
[2][3] When the Progressive Arts Club had a meeting to protest this censorship, a former Manitoba Labour MLA, A. E. Smith, gave a speech endorsing the play and its presentation of the attempted assassination of the imprisoned Tim Buck.