Early Twentieth-century Canada Research Articles

Capitalism as Death: Loss of Life and the Finnish Migrant Left in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract In early twentieth-century Canada and the United States, Finnish migrants faced dangerous working conditions and regularly lost lives on the job. To counter government and company inaction, migrant workers supported each other through grassroots community systems of reciprocity and participation in unionism and socialism. This article pairs migrant labor history with the history of death and mourning to explore how the relationship between the two may mutually develop our understandings of everyday life. Three case studies are at the center of analysis: the Italian Hall Tragedy of 1913 (Calumet, Michigan), the Hollinger Gold Mine Disaster of 1928 (Timmins, Ontario), and the deaths of lumber union organizers Viljo Rosvall and Janne Voutilainen in 1929 (Thunder Bay District, Ontario). By focusing on the death, grief, and mourning at the core of these events and on the days immediately following the tragedies, I demonstrate that death and loss were central to Finnish migrant workers’ everyday encounters with community and class-consciousness. I analyze newspaper coverage of these deaths in order to investigate the strategies of the Finnish language socialist press and leadership to emphasize the deadly power of the capitalist socioeconomic structure, but also seek the everyday spaces, feelings, and relationships caught among labor tensions. In analyzing the cases, I aim to highlight opportunities for new types of dialogue on migrant social history that come from bringing together death, the everyday, and the political.

From Labrador to Leipzig: Film and Infrastructures along the Fur Trail

Background: Since 1919, the Hudson’s Bay Company has sponsored films to document and advertise its trading operations. Films such as Hudson’s Bay Company Centenary Celebrations (1919), The Heritage of Adventure (1920), and Leipzig Exhibition footage (1930) offered views of North American landscapes and Hudson’s Bay Company trading posts and department stores alongside ethnographic footage of Indigenous Peoples.Analysis: Drawing on archival research conducted at the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives and textual film analysis of these “fur films,” this article theorizes their production and circulation within settler visual culture.Conclusions and implications: Tracing the films’ paths from the Eastern Arctic to Montréal, and from London, England, to Leipzig, Germany, this article demonstrates how these moving pictures participate in the entanglement of settler and infrastructural projects that characterize early twentieth-century Canada.

El Dorado in the White Pines

AbstractThis article considers the role played by photography as both a chronicler and an agent of change in the development of industrial capitalism on Canada’s northern frontier. Landscape photography of early twentieth-century Canada highlighted raw natural resources or not yet commodified nature, training viewers to associate abundance and national destiny with the resource-rich north through an aesthetic of “wilderness as surplus.” As a genre, landscape has meanings that are mutable and often contradictory that reflect shifting relationships to the natural world. This article will chart some of the different ways that landscape was evoked in a region defined by geography but where land held competing meanings. Through an analysis of two neighboring communities on the Canadian Shield—Cobalt, a mining community, and Temagami, a logging community and wilderness vacation destination—I demonstrate that the instrumental and preservationist gazes were not so distinct as they are now. The conventions of landscape were utilized to naturalize capitalist domination over nature by presenting the natural world as something external to human society that could be controlled, owned, exploited, or protected. Photography was a mode of representation that enabled viewers to envision a place where commerce, industry, and art would come together in a nation-building project.

‘I live off this land:’ Tahltan women and activism in northern British Columbia

ABSTRACTTahltan territory of northern British Columbia has been flooded with some of the largest industrial extractive projects in the world. One critical point of conflict is centered on how Canada legislates and regulates access to lands without regard to Indigenous sovereignty. This article illustrates the centrality of gender to such struggles. It argues that historic forms of dispossession paved the way for these contemporary threats to Indigenous territories. It offers a case study on how an aspect of colonial policy—the trapline registration system established in early twentieth-century Canada—prioritized white trappers and registered Indian traplines in ways that were at odds with Tahltan matriarchal systems of governance and land management. Despite colonial attempts to undermine the Tahltan’s relationship to their land and to reorder it according to gender norms, Tahltan women have adamantly revitalized and exercised their matriarchal authority to fulfill their role as protectors of lands and water.

Hockey, Violence, and Masculinity: Newspaper Coverage of the Ottawa ‘Butchers’, 1903–1906

This case study of violence and masculinity in Canadian hockey examines newspaper reports of Stanley Cup matches involving the Ottawa Silver Seven between 1903 and 1906. It assesses media narratives of rough and aggressive hockey in relation to gender and class identities in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada. Sports like hockey played a significant role in the social construction of masculinity during this time period, helping to counter the fear that overcivilization was making men weak, effeminate, and over-sophisticated. Media coverage of Ottawa’s championship hockey team frequently made reference to violent incidents and rough tactics. Newspapers constructed cultural narratives of hockey that combined elements of ‘brutal butchery’ and ‘strenuous spectacle’. These narratives spoke to different ways of experiencing and enjoying hockey, and to various tensions within public perceptions of the sport. Depictions of ‘brutal butchery’ combined outrage and fascination; accounts of ‘strenuous spectacle’ portrayed violence as part of an absorbing, masculine display. Thus, descriptions of robust and hard-hitting hockey expressed both ideals of respectable, middle-class masculinity and characteristics of rough, working-class masculinity. In addition, the admiration of rugged and physical hockey articulated in early twentieth-century newspaper accounts is still prominent in the culture of hockey today.

All equal in the sight of God: economic inequality and religion in the early twentieth century

A link between religion, estate division behavior, and economic inequality is demonstrated. Economic inequality varied across religious affiliations in early twentieth century Canada. Wealth inequality was higher for Anglicans and Roman Catholics relative to Presbyterians. Earnings inequality was higher for Anglicans and Presbyterians relative to Baptists and Catholics. In explaining differences in wealth inequality, estate division differences across religions are a factor with partibility associated with less inequality. However, these differences cannot be neatly categorized into watertight compartments according to the effects of differences in salvific merit or liberal/conservative divides suggesting the simple act of belonging had important network effects.

“I’se in Town, Honey”: Reading Aunt Jemima Advertising in Canadian Print Media, 1919 to 1962

Between 1919 and 1962, the Aunt Jemima advertising trademark made frequent appearances in Canadian print media. While scholars have documented how the image of the faithful, happy-to-please Black slave woman captivated the American cultural imagination, the advertising trademark has received much less scholarly attention in Canada. As Canadian culture modernized in the 1920s, withstood a Depression and the Second World War, and witnessed the birth of the suburbs, Aunt Jemima advertisements reflected the changing milieu. Using textual and visual analysis, this essay argues that English-language media, primarily the Toronto Daily Star and Chatelaine magazine, publications which had the highest circulations in early twentieth-century Canada, were significant outlets for White middle-class Canadians. The presence of Aunt Jemima, a prototypical “Mammy” plucked from the plantation South, thus stands as an example of how race, class, and gender were constructed in English-language media, and by extension, dominant Canadian society in the first half of the twentieth century.

“Something occult in the science of flag-flying”: School Flags and Educational Authority in Early Twentieth-Century Canada

Abstract: In 1907 and 1908, the governments of four provinces – Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, and British Columbia – introduced policies to encourage the display of flags on public school buildings and grounds. In British Columbia, the question of flag-flying provoked a heated debate, pitting the provincial minister of education, a proponent of the Union Jack, against city school boards that favoured the Canadian Red Ensign. On one level, school flag policies were part of a well-documented patriotic curriculum and suggested the influence of American patriotic practices. The debate in British Columbia underlined the division in Canadian imperialist sentiment between those who favoured a centralized imperial federation and those who saw Canada as an autonomous state within the British Empire. On the other hand, based on a comparative reading of the four provincial policies and the public responses to them, this article contends that the flag-flying controversy, particularly in British Columbia, reflected a process of jurisdictional negotiation as much as a contestation of identity. Drawing upon Alfred Gell's anthropological theory of art, the article suggests that flags draw their power not only from their status as figurative emblems but also from their employment as physical expressions of political agency.

"The Master Problem of the Age": Print Culture and the Sex Trade in Canada, 1880-1920

An historical case study of the moral panic which characterized anti-prostitution efforts in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada both on and off the page provides evidence for the influence print media can have on social thought and marginalizing practices. A selection of reformist publications is examined to highlight parallels that existed between print media and common attitudes towards and regulation of the sex trade. One significant parallel is a tendency to interpret the trade as rooted in the perceived moral and behavioural aberrancies of young wage-earning women. Various developments in print and information culture during this period are then explored to suggest why such commonalities may have existed. An ever-deepening connection between Canadian society and the printed word increased the ability of print material to reach and influence the general public. This connection offers a possible explanation for similarities in attitude towards female sex workers in print and in reality, which serves as an example of the printed word’s strong potential for social influence. Keywords : information history, print culture, sex trade, reform, marginalization

The “Taint of Self”: Reflections on Ralph Connor, his Fans, and the Problem of Morality in Recent Canadian Historiography

This article is an examination of the protestant moral world of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada, as presented in the novels of the popular Canadian writer Ralph Connor, and the fan-mail that he received. At the same time the article discusses the difficulties encountered by modern day social and cultural historians when interpreting this protestant moral vision. The article suggests that we look to the ideas of philosopher Charles Taylor and historian Gertrude Himmelfarb in order to better appreciate how the language and understanding of morality changed over the course of the twentieth-century, and thereby re-examine our assumptions about the inherent usefulness of categories such as regulation and discipline in our historical accounts of morality.

Westward Bound: Sex, violence, the law, and the making of settler society (review)

Reviewed by: Westward Bound: Sex, violence, the law, and the making of settler society Laurie K. Bertram Westward Bound: Sex, violence, the law, and the making of settler society Lesley Erickson . Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011. Lesley Erickson's fascinating new survey uses prairie regional court records to explore the creation, perpetuation and subversion of race- and gender-based mythologies of crime and victimhood between 1886 and 1940 in western Canada. The book draws from court cases during five decades within in five judicial districts in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Questions related to women's entanglement in racist and sexist systems of violence loom large in Erickson's timely book. As discussed further in her introduction, her work responds in part to the legacy of missing and murdered Aboriginal women in the Canadian West, including Pamela George, an Aboriginal woman killed in 1995 by two young White Saskatchewan men, in a field where Erickson used to play as a child. Proceeding from more recent instances of gendered and racist violence that permeate western Canadian communities, courts and everyday space, Erickson examines a longer history of gendered and racialized discourses of victimhood and criminality on the Canadian prairies. Published as part of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History series, Erickson's book joins a broader body of scholarship on sexual regulation and the consolidation and contestation of gendered and racialized identities in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Canada. As in other critical histories of both the sex trade and heterosexual marriage and companionship in the Canadian West, Erickson balances her coverage of state regulation with defendants' myriad of responses. The lived experiences and voices of western Canadian women resisting domestic and sexual violence as well as those of madams and other women involved in the sex trade ground her discussion of larger developments in the region. Her presentation of both the success and limits of women's agency in court records and criminalized activities is particularly strong. Employing an intriguing array of cases, she traces the challenges that these and other court cases and defense strategies posed to "mythic images of Canada's prairie West as a land of opportunity, a place of fruitful land and happy homes" (12). So doing, Erickson unveils a fascinating series of other criminal specters that haunted regional court systems, social order and popular imagination in western Canada. Westward Bound is organized thematically, according to actual cases shaped by popular caricatures of prairie offenders. The main argument is that the courts "served as a stage upon which larger developments and conflicts—between Native and newcomer, men and women, capital and labour and adults and youth—played out" (12). Each chapter focuses on a series of narratives and cases that hinged on racial, gender and class stereotypes, including those that evoked images of sexually aggressive Aboriginal men, prairie prostitutes, immigrant wife-murderers, and predatory farmhands. The prosecution of such figures, writes Erickson, did not simply bolster dominant cultural values, but transformed courtrooms into venues in which defendants could resist or manipulate stereotypes about their race, class and gender to benefit their cases. Erickson's survey framework makes several important contributions to scholarship on colonialism in the Canadian West. The project traverses numerous English-speaking, French-speaking, ethnic and Indigenous communities in the region during this period and offers a broader overview that scholars will find beneficial for an array of future investigations. The scope of the study extends to 1940 in a field where analyses of settler society often end on the eve of World War One. This scope reflects the distinct shape of the colonial project in the Canadian West, particularly its more recent and arguably ongoing features. Erickson's substantive incorporation of elements beyond the text, including courthouse architecture, prairie visual culture and police photography, also enliven her discussion of legal and sociocultural developments. The book's survey of five districts is compelling, though additional information regarding the extents to which these areas differed would have further strengthened Erickson's study. For example, references to the frequency with which Aboriginal women became involved in the sex trade appear to vary between cities and rural centres in Manitoba and Alberta in the...

Visual Interpretations, Cartoons, and Caricatures of Student and Youth Cultures in University Yearbooks, 1898–19301

Students have always been integral in the development of the university in Canada. Driven by personal, professional, and political agendas, student experiences, understandings, and narratives helped construct the academic and intellectual cultures of universities. In their relationships with professors, administrators, and the spaces they inhabit, students crucially contributed to the university as a historically vibrant idea and social institution. As cast by the students, the university was clearly expressed in variant and creative ways through the annual yearbook. In particular, within the yearbook, the practice of parody in cartoons and caricatures was powerful in depicting the imagined worlds of academe as seen through the students’ eyes, and importantly how the students saw themselves and their life on campus. Using yearbooks from three universities — Toronto, Alberta, and British Columbia – visual images are studied that reveal underlying intentions to comment, marginalize, ridicule, and esteem groups of students according to both ascribed and self-imposed socialized hierarchical structures and codes of expectations and behaviour. Among the universities, the visual satire was consistent in tone and image, exposing the historic place and activities of students in the early university and in society, the contingent formation of student identities, and the nature of the pursuit of academic knowledge and credentials by youth in early-twentieth Century Canada.

“Maggid of Montreal”: Rabbi Hirsch Cohen on the dilemmas of the Canadian rabbi

Tzvi Hirsch Cohen was one of those pioneering eastern European clergy who immigrated to North America in the early twentieth century. So many others stayed put. His goal was to provide a foundation for traditional Judaism in the New World, which he sought to fulfill while serving for decades as Montreal’s first Chief Rabbi. In his speeches, sermons, and writings, Cohen considered how to merge his traditionalist eastern European values and customs with the social mores of democratic and egalitarian Canada. He found particularly vexing the multiple roles rabbis in the New World were called upon to play. In Europe, rabbis were specialized. Some were preachers, others halakhic experts. Cohen viewed the two as being in a state of perennial tension, and he had great difficulty seeing how one rabbi could function as both. Using himself as an example, Cohen’s description of his internal struggles offers a glimpse into the challenges rabbis in the immigrant Orthodox community in early twentieth century Canada had to face.

'Maggid of Montreal': Rabbi Hirsch Cohen on the dilemmas of the Canadian rabbi

Tzvi Hirsch Cohen was one of those pioneering eastern European clergy who immigrated to North America in the early twentieth century. So many others stayed put. His goal was to provide a foundation for traditional Judaism in the New World, which he sought to fulfill while serving for decades as Montreal’s first Chief Rabbi. In his speeches, sermons, and writings, Cohen considered how to merge his traditionalist eastern European values and customs with the social mores of democratic and egalitarian Canada. He found particularly vexing the multiple roles rabbis in the New World were called upon to play. In Europe, rabbis were specialized. Some were preachers, others halakhic experts. Cohen viewed the two as being in a state of perennial tension, and he had great difficulty seeing how one rabbi could function as both. Using himself as an example, Cohen’s description of his internal struggles offers a glimpse into the challenges rabbis in the immigrant Orthodox community in early twentieth century Canada had to face.

Modernity and the Denominational Imperative: The Children’s Aid Society of Halifax, 1905-1925

This study of the Children's Aid Society in Halifax offers a challenge to traditional narratives which see the agency as a harbinger of de-institutionalisation and professionalisation in early twentieth-century Canada. In Halifax, the Society was not part of an imposed and deliberate programme of modernisation, but was seen as a means to reinforce the existing system during a period of social and economic upheaval. Its foundation was integrally linked to the peculiarities of the city's circumstances, to fears about threats to childhood ideals, and to the operation of the denominational imperatives of existing institutions. Indeed, there was continued strong support for denominational, institutional care in the city, fostered in large part by shared ideas between institutional and governmental child care workers about the priorities and philosophies of their child-welfare system.

People and Place: Historical Influences on Legal Culture (review)

Reviewed by: People and Place: Historical Influences on Legal Culture Clive Emsley People and Place: Historical Influences on Legal Culture. Edited by Jonathan Swainger and Constance Backhouse. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003. Pp. 288 , illus. $85.00 cloth, $29.95 paper It may be a statement of the blindingly obvious, but laws are made and enforced by individual human beings. Sometimes, however, especially in [End Page 856] the Anglo-Saxon world, the law is granted an indulgent reverence with the implication that it is organic, functioning and developing for the benefit of people, but somehow without the involvement of people, with all that such involvement might mean, given human behaviours such as compromise and discretion, corruption and duplicity. This essay collection, focusing primarily on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada, underlines the impact of different individuals upon the law. At the same time, it reveals ways in which different contexts of time and place have also affected the interpretation and enforcement of the law. The essays were written in honour of the Canadian legal historian Louis A. Knafla. The contributors are both well-established scholars and promising postgraduates; the quality is of a consistently high standard. The subjects addressed range widely. John McLaren discusses the impact of Justice Robert Thorpe on the ideas of constitutional government in Upper Canada. Thorpe has been generally regarded as something of a maverick, but McLaren makes a convincing case for a lasting legacy stemming from his Whig and Irish perspectives. Turning to the lower reaches of the legal profession, Joan Brookman and Dorothy E. Chunn provide a fascinating portrait of the prim and proper Janet Gilley, one of the first woman solicitors in British Columbia. No legacy here, but a lifetime of quiet dedication to her profession, her church, her siblings and their families, and to her conservative values. Miss Gilley would not deal with criminal, divorce, or sexual cases, but such niceties were scarcely available to men administering the law on the prairies such as Justice James F. Macleod. A key point made in Roderick G. Martin's survey of Macleod's career is how the man used the law with flexibility and discretion to ensure that what he perceived as 'justice' was done. Macleod had a liking for the bottle; so too did William Augustus Miles. But whereas Macleod's career was a success and led to power and influence, Miles, as described by David Philips, never achieved what he might have done and ended his days a noted drinker and heavily in debt. Miles's career as a moral entrepreneur in early nineteenth-century England and then as head of the police in Sydney, Australia, illustrates how patronage worked, and was expected to work across Britain and her colonies during the period. A short review cannot do justice to the significance of personality and context highlighted in this stimulating volume. All the individuals noted above are carefully situated in their social, political, and economic context. Community, class, and gender remain key issues for the legal historian. These issues are also foregrounded as, for example, in Constance Backhouse's description of an early twentieth-century rape case and Charleen P. Smith's account of prostitution in the Kootenays during [End Page 857] the mining boom. The law might be exercised with discretion, given what was understood as the 'necessity' of prostitution and the benefits that brothels could bring to economic development. The law might also be used with discretion by community leaders, as Jim Phillips, Rosemary Garton, and Kelly DeLuca show, to have religious enthusiasts committed to an asylum. The offenders in this instance, the Creffield sect in Oregon, were clearly not insane, but their behaviour appeared to threaten accepted bounds of religious and social beliefs. The main thrust of Jonathan Swainger's account of the British Columbia Provincial Police is to contrast the mundane nature of 'ordinary' policing with the romantic, myth-making tales of getting their man whatever the difficulties. And myth making, in turn, can have a significant impact on criminal cases as they come to court. This is the subject of Lesley Erickson's analysis of the portrayal of men who murdered women in the Canadian West in...

On the Natural Intelligence of Women in a World of Constrained Choice: How the Feminization of Clerical Work Contributed to Gender Pay Equality in Early Twentieth Century Canada

(2003). On the Natural Intelligence of Women in a World of Constrained Choice: How the Feminization of Clerical Work Contributed to Gender Pay Equality in Early Twentieth Century Canada. Journal of Economic Issues: Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 1045-1074.

The Gender of Professionalism and Occupational Closure: The management of tenure-related disputes by the 'Federation of Women Teachers' Associations of Ontario' 1918-1949

This article examines how the gender of professionalism is central to an understanding of occupational closure. Using the social history of the Federation of Women Teachers' Associations of Ontario (FWTAO) as an example, the author shows how the executive allegiance to the gender of professionalism incited a moral concern with rural women teachers employed in the elementary public school system in the early twentieth century, and how this concern interfered with the delivery of protective services to country teachers involved in contractual disputes. The model of professionalism was based on a composite portrait of the older masculinised European ideal of professional rationality, and distilled through a feminine ideal of conduct intelligible to white middle- and upper-class women in early twentieth-century Canada. The professional ideal was used as a measure of occupational success and applied as a criterion for granting or withholding protective services. As a result, rural women falling short of the ideal were denied protective services when embroiled in tenure-related disputes and, ultimately, they were excommunicated from the profession.

Linearity, Nonlinearity, and the Competing Constructions of Social Hierarchy in Early Twentieth-Century Canada: The Question of Language in 1901

Linearity, Nonlinearity, and the Competing Constructions of Social Hierarchy in Early Twentieth-Century Canada: The Question of Language in 1901

State Formation and Institutionalized Racism: Gambling Laws in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Canada

State Formation and Institutionalized Racism: Gambling Laws in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Canada