The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (11 page)

In spite of Roblin’s contention that “they used English with fluency,” most could not understand a word the politicians uttered when they toured their villages. Both parties were forced to use interpreters chosen from among those leading Galicians who spoke some English. Illia Kiriak has left a lively account of one local interpreter warming up a crowd of potential Liberal voters: “I am going to call upon the local candidate to speak and I want you to listen carefully. When I start clapping I want all of you to do the same. And when he finishes I want all of you to give him a great ovation. You won’t regret it and neither will I.” To such men, the Liberal party extended the expected patronage. After the election they went on the government payroll as weed inspectors, game guardians, fire wardens.

In Edmonton in 1904, Frank Oliver woke up to discover that his own riding was so crowded with Galicians that they could, if organized, defeat him. The newcomers had known no enemy more deadly than Oliver, who had called them scum and had declared a Galician was “only a generation removed from a debased and brutalized serf.” Westerners, he insisted, “objected to having this millstone of an alien
Slav population hung about their necks.” A more sensitive or less determined politician might have had some reservations about attempting to solicit the Galician vote after these attacks, but Oliver had no such qualms. He intended to collar that vote and put his considerable party machine into high gear for that purpose. Surprisingly, he succeeded.

J.G. MacGregor, Alberta’s best-known social historian, has an amusing account of Oliver speaking to a group of Galicians in a small general store in his riding. Except for the local party interpreter, none had any idea what the candidate was saying, and if they had would have had little interest in the subject, for Oliver was ranting on about the Department of the Interior, about high tariffs, about British preference and the Alaska border dispute.

“What’s he say?” one listener finally asked the interpreter.

“He’s glad we’re here. Canada was lucky to get us.…”

“What about the stupid fire regulations?”

“He’ll fix them.”

“What’s he say about the railroad?”

“I forgot to tell you that – he’s got it started for sure.”

“What about the mudholes around Whitford Lake?”

“He’ll fix them – he’ll do all he can for our area.…”

Griesbach, the so-called boy mayor of Edmonton, who was backing the Conservative candidate, Richard Secord, attempted to set up local organizations in every township to secure the Galician vote. Oliver bested him at every turn. A week before the election, parties of three or four men dressed as surveyors and carrying transits began appearing in areas organized for Secord. These men drove into the Galician farmyard, set up their instruments, and pretended to run a line directly through the barn, explaining to the worried farmer that they were locating Frank Oliver’s new railway.
Disaster!
When the despairing immigrant begged for a change of route, the pseudo-surveyors suggested he get in touch with the local Liberal agent who might just be persuaded to switch the direction of the line. In every case, of course, the Liberals agreed and the grateful farmer gave Frank Oliver his vote.

The Galicians were vague about voting dates, since they read no English, and an effort was needed to get out the vote, or, in some cases, to keep it away. Oliver had his organizers swarm over the Galician communities asking each man for whom he intended to vote. Those who were voting Liberal were told the proper date of the election, Monday. The Conservative voters were told it was Wednesday.

Oliver always got out the vote. In the 1904 election, 352 out of 458 Galicians turned up at the polls. Of these, 278 voted for the man who had called them “debased and brutalized.” As a result, Oliver was swept back into office and the following year replaced Clifford Sifton as Minister of the Interior. Not surprisingly, under Oliver the concept of unrestricted immigration was tossed aside.

4
The melting-pot syndrome

“Ethnic” has become a peculiarly Canadian word, but it belongs to a later era. At the turn of the century there were no discussions about “roots,” no talk of “multiculturalism,” little pandering to national cultures, and certainly no reference to a Canadian mosaic. The key word – the
only
word – was “assimilation.” Assimilation meant conformity: in dress, in language, in customs, in attitudes, in religion. It meant, in short, that every immigrant who arrived in the West was expected to accept as quickly as possible the Anglo-Celtic Protestant values of his Canadian neighbours. These attitudes were held almost universally and at every level of society, espoused by such diverse public figures as William Van Horne of the
CPR
; by the Reverend J.S. Woodsworth, the Methodist reformer; by John Wesley Dafoe of the
Manitoba Free Press;
by Nellie McClung, the suffragette and temperance activist; and by Clifford Sifton himself.

Everybody agreed that certain races could not be assimilated and had no place in Canadian society. Orientals, East Indians, and Blacks were not wanted. Anti-Semitism was universal, as the stereotype caricatures in the newspapers and periodicals make clear. And the press did not engage in racial niceties: Negroes were niggers; Orientals were Chinamen; Jews were sheenies.

Could the Galicians be assimilated, or would their presence mongrelize the nation? That was the crux of the controversy from the moment of their arrival. It was generally held that they were an inferior race; that was not the argument. The question was whether or not they could be turned into “white” Canadians. The anti-Sifton newspapers – Oliver’s
Bulletin
was the worst offender – did not believe it possible. “They have withstood assimilation in the country from whence they come for many generations. What reason have we to expect their ready assimilation here?” Others, such as the Hamilton
Times
, were
grudgingly optimistic: “They may never develop into such perfect Canadians as the Scotch or the Irish but the chances are they will turn out all right.”

That was the general sentiment. Everything would turn out all right. The prevailing attitude in the West was one of heady optimism. A new century was dawning – Canada’s century, Laurier called it – and the country was capable of working miracles. The men in sheepskin coats would quickly be transformed into well-cropped, bowler-hatted Canadians. As the
Manitoba Free Press
put it in the fall of 1897, “the land is here and the Anglo-Saxon race has great assimilating qualities.” Already William McCreary was reporting to Sifton that the Galicians were “dressing in a more civilized garb” and that the majority were “accepting Canadian customs and ways.”

It was widely held that those immigrants who did not come from northwestern Europe were inferior to others in terms of religion, education, and political outlook. Germans and Scandinavians were not really aliens. As John Dafoe put it in 1907, in an article for an American publication about the influx of immigrants, “a considerable percentage of those recorded as foreigners are of Teutonic and Scandinavian stock
and therefore akin
[my italics].… The only alien race represented at all strongly is Slavic.” Dafoe went on to reassure his American readers that there was no chance of “a mongrel race and a mongrel civilization” springing up in Western Canada because the Slavic peoples were “being Anglicized with a rapidity which sometimes results in startling transformations.… The Galician youth of five or seven years ago is now, in many cases, not easily distinguishable in speech or manners from his neighbour of Canadian birth and lineage.”

J.S. Woodsworth in his book
Strangers within Our Gates
was happy to quote an American view that a line drawn from northeast to southwest across Europe separated the “superior” races – Scandinavian, British, German, and French – from the “inferior” ones – Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Italian, and Turkish. Like almost everybody else, the future founder of the CCF was convinced that the Galicians must be assimilated to a uniform standard, which was the Anglo-Celtic norm. He went along with the view that “the Galician figures, disproportionately to his numbers, in the police court and penitentiary. Centuries of poverty and oppression have to some extent animalized him. Drunk, he is quarrelsome and dangerous. The flowers of courtesy and refinement are not abundant in the first generation of immigrants.”

One of Canada’s leading churchmen, J.W. Sparling, principal of
Winnipeg’s Methodist Wesley College, in his introduction to Woodsworth’s book urged everybody to read it:
“For there is a danger and it is national!
Either we must educate and elevate the incoming multitudes or they will drag us and our children down to a lower level. We must see to it that the civilization and ideals of Southeastern Europe are not transplanted to and perpetuated on our virgin soil.” To Sparling, these ideals were, of course, those of the Catholic religions.

To a generation that views Woodsworth as a socialist saint, his acceptance of these sentiments in a book that bears his name may seem shocking. But he was very much a man of his time, a Methodist activist who staunchly believed in the virtues of radical Protestantism and the civilizing effect of the British Empire. His motives were pure enough. In the All Peoples’ Mission in Winnipeg’s North End, he saw it as his duty to minister to the immigrant poor. His book was designed to familiarize Canadians with their problems and to help make his fellow countrymen more responsive to them.

The Methodists were proselytizers and therefore in the forefront of the active movement to assimilate the Galicians. Men like Woodsworth did not believe the process would work without a strong nudge from the church. That was very much in the Methodist tradition. Unlike the Anglicans, they did not wait for communicants to come to them; their circuit riders went out into the villages to spread the Word. Behind this activism lay the fear of the growing power and influence of the Roman Catholic Church. The move to assimilate the Slavs was bound up with the desperate battle in Manitoba over religious education. The Methodists were in the vanguard of the fight against parochial schools in the province. The leading politicians were Methodists. Sifton was a Methodist and so were many of his political cronies. Dafoe had been born a Methodist, and though he rejected dogma and became a nominal Anglican, he could not reject the tenets of Methodism’s social creed. The cant of the day was that while Catholicism bred ignorance, suspicion, and autocracy, Protestantism brought freedom, initiative, industry, and democracy. To a very large extent, this Methodist credo helped form the Western ethic.

In June 1908, the Methodist publication
Missionary Outlook
summed up the Methodist point of view: “If from this North American continent is to come a superior race, a race to be specially used of God in the carrying on of His work, what is our duty to those who are now our fellow-citizens? Many of them come to us as nominal Christians, that is, they owe allegiance to the Greek or Roman Catholic
churches but their moral standards and ideals are far below those of the Christian citizens of the Dominion.… It is our duty to meet them with an open Bible, and to instill into their minds the principles and ideals of Anglo-Saxon civilization.”

In this crusade, the Methodists had the help of both the Presbyterians and the Baptists. The Reverend Dr. James Robertson, superintendent of home missions for the Presbyterian Church, was on record as early as 1898 in declaring that “the interest of the state lies in its doing all it can to assimilate these and other foreigners and make of them Canadians. They should be put into the great Anglo-Saxon mill and be ground up; in the grinding they lose their foreign prejudices and characters.”

The Methodists had no intention of poaching on the territory of these other Protestants. After all, the ideal of a United Church was less than two decades away. When Woodsworth talked of “independence,” he clearly meant independence from Greek or Roman Catholicism: “Independence means that people are taught to think for themselves; it means that the Bible is placed in their hands; it means that their children attend the Public Schools instead of the parochial schools; it means that people ally themselves with Protestants rather than Catholics.
Independence offers the opportunity for reformation.”

Things did not work out as Woodsworth hoped. Nobody had asked the Galicians whether or not they wished to be ground up in the great Anglo-Saxon mill. They clung tenaciously to their religion; indeed, the presence of Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches in the rural Prairies acted as a spur to the retention of language and culture. Certainly, many were anxious to learn English and even more anxious that their children learn it. It is ironic that in this desire they were often frustrated by the lack of good teachers in their communities. But they also wanted to retain their original language, and this they did to a remarkable degree, producing an impressive body of prose and poetry in their own tongue.

In a sense Oliver was right when he said that the Slavic peoples had withstood assimilation for many centuries and would also withstand it in Canada. But the fears of mongrelization were groundless. The newcomers and their children managed to become Canadians while retaining a pride in their heritage, as the Scots did, as the Icelanders and others did. By the First World War, when immigration ceased, the talk of assimilation began to abate. By the 1920s, the term “Galician” had died out. By then most Canadians were beginning to understand the difference between Poles and Ukrainians, for by then Polish and Ukrainian social and political clubs were scattered across the West. The time was coming when Canadians of every background would be referring to the Canadian Mosaic and indeed boasting about it as if it had been purposely invented as an instrument of national policy to preserve the Dominion from the conformity of the American Melting-Pot.

Chapter Three
The Spirit Wrestlers