This
article was written for and first published in
Captive Canada:
Renditions of the Peaceable Kingdom at War,
from Narratives of WWI and the Red Scare to the Mass Internment of Civilians
Issue #68 of
Press for Conversion (Spring 2016),
pp.22-29.
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Religious
Guardians of the Peaceable Kingdom:
Winnipeg’s Key Social-Gospel Gatekeepers of Canada West
By Richard Sanders, Coordinator,
Coalition to
Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT)
With the
ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples from the prairies and the arrival of the
railway in the 1880s,
Winnipeg’s
train station was the “Gateway to the West.” By the onset of WWI, over a million
newcomers had been moved in to settle western Canada.
While Canadian churches maintained their
blissful silence about the imperial land grab, the mass confinement of Indians
on reserves, and the cultural genocide imposed by Christian residential schools,
they quickly created morally indignant narratives to decry the rapid influx of
nonAngloSaxons. In reaction to these immigrants, who they considered inferior,
some of
Winnipeg’s
most prestigious clergymen took it upon themselves to become the civil-society
“gatekeepers” of fortress
Canada.
These progressives were soon locked in a battle against the gate-crashing
“aliens” who had penetrated the walls of their sacred
Peaceable
Kingdom.
With brave and heroic tales about the
progressive spread of enlightened British culture across the untamed West,
mainstream Protestant churches saw themselves as the vanguard of a grand
imperial project called
Canada. In
waging their cultural war against First Nations, these self-appointed guardians
of national security created popular myths about their valiant mission to
protect Canada from savage attacks by religious, political and racial inferiours.
Later, when confronted by unwanted immigrants with religious beliefs and
political loyalties that competed with their own, AngloProtestants changed the
sights of their xenophobic narratives and worked themselves into a new, moral
frenzy.
To convey their collective panic, they
filled a host of traditional cultural vessels—from sermons, college lectures,
missionary tracts and other, more popular religious fictions, like novels—with
cautionary tales about strangers. These narratives were like church bells
sounding warning of an impending peril. East Europeans—seen as spiritually
backward, unassimilable and politically radical—were seen as a worrisome new
threat by respected gatekeepers of
Canada’s
Christian civilisation.
In their propaganda war against unwanted
foreigners,
Winnipeg
gatekeepers demonised a certain class of “enemy aliens.” This was soon followed
by their mass captivity in WWI-era, labour camps.
Invading the Kingdom
Between 1871 and 1911,
Canada’s
prairie population grew by 1.3 million: 375,000 in Alberta, 492,000 in
Saskatchewan and 430,000 in Manitoba.1 Most
settlers came west via Winnipeg on Canada’s new railroad. They were largely
Anglos, especially in Manitoba where 64% were British. While Germans and
Scandinavians made up 15% of the total, Francophones were only 6%. During this
preWWI spurt, the dominance of northwest Europeans began to decline. For
example, the prairies’ British population fell from 86% in 1901 to 77% in 1911.
During that same decade, east Europeans
became far more visible on the prairies.
Manitoba’s
Slavic community of Austro-Hungarians, Russians and Poles, almost quintupled
from 12,760 in 1901, to 59,230 in 1911. This increased their presence from 5% to
13% of the total population.2
Most of these Slavs were Ukrainian. About 170,000 of them had entered Canada
between 1891 and 1914, with a record number of 22,000 arriving in 1913,3 on
the very eve of WWI.
But gates are not just entry points, they
are also exits for expelling the unwanted. While between 1903 and 1908
Canada
deported 1,401 “undesirables,” 1,748 were thrown out in 1909 alone. This
followed an influx of aliens fleeing Czarist repression after the Russian
revolution of 1905-1907. (See pp.36-39). This record number of deportations was
not matched until 1914. During WWI, 5,943 were unceremoniously thrown from our
gates.4
By war’s end,
Canada was
engaged in “the deliberate and systematic deportation of agitators, activists
and radicals,” said historian Barbara Roberts. The “threat they posed was not to
the people of Canada” but to “vested interests such as big business,
exploitative employers, and a government acting on behalf of interest groups.”
Deportees included opponents of WWI and conscription, militant labour activists
and radical socialists. The excuse for deporting them was often that, as
indigents, they might need state assistance.5
Information Gateways
Winnipeg
clergymen, Charles Gordon, J.S.Woodsworth and J.W.Sparling, were on the front
line of a culture war to maintain the supremacy of Canada’s AngloProtestant
civilisation. Although they did not control the physical gates through which
aliens entered and exited Canada’s gates, these Social Gospellers did exert
control over the flow of information about aliens.
Social Gospellers were gatekeepers in the
sense invoked by Kurt Lewin, the Jewish-American father of social psychology who
fled
Germany
in 1933. In 1943, Lewin published his gatekeeping theory to explain how
individuals controlled the flow of commodities and data within social systems.
Interestingly, he was influenced by political scientist Harold Lasswell’s 1920s
research on the decision-making processes used to create WWI propaganda.
Lewin said that his gatekeeping model could
be used to understand social organizations and newsrooms. Since then, scholars
in many disciplines have developed Lewin’s gatekeeping theory to analyse how
data is filtered through various systems to construct social realities.6
As mass communications professors Pamela Shoemaker and Tim Vos have
explained:
“Gatekeeping is the process of culling and
crafting countless bits of information into the limited number of messages that
reach people each day.... [It] determines not only which information is
selected, but also what the content and nature of the messages, such as news,
will be.”7
Gatekeeping theory can explain how Social
Gospellers used ethnocentric religious and political filters to select data
about aliens that they then crafted into narratives to sway the minds of their
parishioners, politicians and the public at large.
Rev. Charles Gordon, aka “Ralph Connor”
The leading populariser of the Social
Gospel was best-selling author, Rev. Charles Gordon. His first three
swashbuckling novels sold over five million copies. The “sole purpose” of his
first book, he said, “was to awaken my church …to the splendour of the mighty
religious adventure being attempted by the missionary pioneers” in Canada’s
west.8
Using the alias Ralph Connor, Gordon was “the
most successful practitioner …in the world” of a genre called “imperial
adventure fiction.”9 His
thirty novels also captured the spirit of so-called “Muscular Christianity,” a
Victorian movement stressing a mix of pious athleticism with virile
masculinity. It was hardcore Christian evangelism on imperial steroids.
In The Social Uplifters: Presbyterian
Progressives and the Social Gospel in Canada, Brian Fraser—a Church History
professor at Vancouver’s School of Theology—praised Gordon as one of the “central figures in articulating and
implementing a social Christianity.”10 What
he does not explain is that Gordon used his literary pulpit to preach an
ethnocentric xenophobia that spread fear and hatred.
An avid imperialist, Gordon transformed fictive
Mounties—like Corporal Cameron—into graven macho images of biblical dimensions.
Mounties were to be idolised for defending what Gordon called “the ‘pax
Britannica’...of Her Majesty’s dominions in this far northwest reach of Empire.”11 Gordon’s
cartoonified cops, and their tough missionary helpmates, teamed up in novels
about the Northwest Rebellion. In Gordon’s racist mind, the villain’s role was
played by “thousands of savage Indians, utterly strange to any rule or law”12 who
were “thirsting for revenge upon the white man.” His narrative saw the
“insatiable lust for glory formerly won in war” as the “fiery spirit of the red
man, long subdued by those powers that represented the civilization of the white
man.”13
Gordon’s words captured the image of the Métis
as “ignorant, insignificant, half-tamed pioneers of civilization,” with their
leader, that “blood-lusting,” “vain and empty-headed Riel” who stirred up
“horror unspeakable in the revival of that
ancient savage spirit which had been so very materially softened and tamed by
years of kindly, patient and firm control on the part of those who represented
among them British law and civilization.”14
Gordon not only reflected the prevailing racism
of his time, he promoted, shepherded and covered up the savage cruelty of those
who saw themselves as being on the vanguard of a physically, culturally, morally
and spiritually advanced race.
Gordon’s zeal for assimilation was channelled
through a morality tale, The Foreigner (1908). His urgent plea for robust
missionary action conjures up the dire threat of depraved Slavs who had
penetrated Canada via Winnipeg’s gates. His allegory focuses on the rescue of
what he calls “a poor, stupid, Galician [Ukrainian] woman with none too savoury
a reputation.” Entering stage right, preparing to save the day, were the heroic
churches:
“Many and generous were the philanthropies
of Winnipeg,
but as yet there was none that had to do with the dirt, disease and degradation
that were too often found in the environment of the foreign people. There were
many churches in the city rich in good work ...but there was not yet one whose
special duty it was to confer and to report upon the unhappy and struggling and
unsavoury foreigner within their city gate.”15
Gordon molded this book’s hero, Brown, after
himself, an AngloProtestant missionary trying to uplift aliens in Winnipeg’s
North End. Gordon and Brown were both trapped by an overpowering obsession: to
Canadianise and Christianise foreigners. As Brown put it, he wanted “to make
them good Christians and good Canadians, which is the same thing.”16
Through Brown, Gordon articulated the common
Canadian phobia that east Europeans could not be absorbed quickly enough into
the vastly superiour AngloProtestant culture. This process of moral and social
absorption required “uplifting” inferiour races and cultures with what are now
commonly called “Canadian values.” As Brown saw it, east Europeans
“here exist as an undigested foreign mass.
They must be digested and absorbed into the body politic. They must be taught
our ways of thinking and living, or it will be a mighty bad thing for us in
Western
Canada.”17
But the novel’s secondary
hero—French—expressed the public doubt that Slavs could ever be instilled with
the values of
Canada’s
advanced civilisation. Calling them “a score of dirty little Galicians,” he says
“You go in and give them some of our Canadian ideas of living..., and before you
know they are striking for higher wages and giving no end of trouble.”18
But Gordon was no mere novelising
missionary, he was also a powerful mediator in “industrial disputes…on behalf of
the Dominion government.” While working for the government to bridge conflicts
between huge corporations and radical unions, he exchanged many cordial letters
with the Liberal’s Labour Minister, MacKenzie King.19
Gordon also “counted national leaders such as Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Theodore
Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson among his readers and friends.”20
To Gordon,
Canada was not
only a faithful servant of British imperialism, it was also part of a divine
empire of White nations led by God that was marching towards a glorious, global
conquest. As he told thousands gathered at the national missionary congress in
1909, Canada was:
“part of a Greater Empire...that knows no
boundary all round this great world, ...an Empire led on to the conquest of the
world not by any human mind or by any human hand, but ...by the great God
Himself. For this conquest
Canada must
gird herself now; and if ...Canada
is not able to maintain those high traditions for godliness... Canada [will]
fail of her destiny,...[to] keep pace with the greater Anglo-Saxon nations who
are marching on to evangelize the world.”21
Rev. James Shaver (J.S.) Woodsworth
Winnipeg was
the setting for an activist minister named James Shaver (J.S.) Woodsworth
(1874-1942). This Methodist Social Gospeller became the MP for Winnipeg North
Centre (1921-1942), initially for the Independent Labour Party and then later
for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). Woodsworth was a key founder
and first leader of the CCF (1932-1942), which joined with the Canadian Labour
Congress in 1961 to form the the NDP.
Many who still revere Woodsworth have no
idea that before WWI, he led the way in fearmongering attacks against unwanted
foreigners. In 1909, one year after Charles Gordon’s novel, The Foreigner,
Woodsworth released an utterly racist tome called Strangers Within Our
Gates. Published by the
Methodist
Church’s Missionary Society, it was one of Canada’s most influential Social
Gospel tracts. Rev. Charles Gordon loved it. “If you want to know something
about Canada and the perils of Canada,” Gordon told the huge crowd at Canada’s
1909 Missionary Congress, “get that very excellent little book of Mr.
Woodsworth’s, Strangers Within our Gates,... and you will find it is full
of instructive information.”22
Woodsworth opened his text with two Old
Testament quotations that reveal a grave contradiction in the Social Gospel’s
approach to “strangers.” The first passage exhorts people to treat the “stranger
that sojourneth with you” as if he was a “homeborn” and to “love him as thyself”
(much as Jesus is said to have urged “love thine enemy”). Woodsworth’s second
verse however is a rallying cry to absorb “strangers” and their children, into
one’s religion:
“Assemble the people, the men and the women
and the little ones, and thy stranger that is within thy gates, that they may
hear, and that they may learn, and fear the Lord your God.”23
This schema of loving indoctrination was an
ideological framework within which Woodsworth and other Social Gospellers saw
their sacred mission to civilise nonbelievers. Bound by this holier-than-thou
attitude, Canadian “gatekeepers” felt a pious duty to impose their religious
belief systems on the aliens in their midst.
The preface to Woodsworth’s treatise on
assimilation, introduces the “problem” of foreigners by humbly stating that
“this little book is an attempt to introduce
the motley crowd of immigrants to our Canadian people and bring before our young
people some of the problems of population...”24
The very title of Woodsworth’s “little book”
conjures up the image of Canada as a gated community threatened by troublesome outsiders. His virulence
in expressing this phobia may surprise many progressives who still idolise
Woodsworth as the ground-breaking leader of progressive Canadian politics.
Despite all his achievements as activist, organiser, politician and architect of
Canada’s social democratic movement,
Woodsworth held the same sort of racist and patronising attitudes of religious
and cultural superiourity that plagued those on Canada’s extreme right.
For instance, Woodsworth’s book Strangers
Within Our Gates, included vile stereotypes of Indians. Whatever his
reasoning, Indigenous peoples should never have been forced into the confines of
his book on immigrants. The strange idea that Aboriginals are “foreign” to
Canada was accepted within Woodsworth’s church. In 1906, Canada’s Methodist
Church divided its Missionary Society into two departments: “home” and
“foreign.” The work of Christianising, civilising and Canadianising native
people was placed in the Methodist’s foreign-mission department.25
Woodsworth lumped “Indians” and “Negroes” into
one chapter of his book because, he said, “they are so entirely different from
the ordinary white population.”26 And,
he segregated them from other “races” because of their “savagery.”27
One crucial fact that does tie these two
peoples together, but which Woodsworth blindly left unmentioned, is that both
endured centuries of state-sanctioned slavery at the hands of Canada’s
supposedly-civilised west European Christians. By forcing them into his book on
alien strangers, and crudely black-listing them as “savages,” Woodsworth added
insult to a long- ignored historic injury.
In contrast to his disdain for Indians and
Blacks, Woodsworth had the highest regard for Anglos. He considered the first
English in North America to be “pilgrims” and colonists, not immigrants.
“They came to an unexplored wilderness inhabited only by savages,” he explained.
“They had to create a civilization.”28
After hurling a variety of racist slurs at
Blacks, Woodsworth happily noted that “We may be thankful that we have no ‘negro
problem’ in
Canada.” He
concluded with this hopeful note: “Many negroes are members of various
Protestant churches, and are consistent Christians.”29
Woodsworth’s hateful view of the so-called
“Oriental Problem,” revealed his dogged fixation on religion as a filter for
judging aliens. Woodsworth’s section on “Chinamen” relied on a 15-page excerpt
from what he called “a splendid little book” by Rev. J.C.Speer, a missionary and
Methodist Minister like himself. Speer’s racist screed on “the heathenized
nature of the Chinaman,” declared that even “the baldest kind of congregational
service in a Christian church” is “far above and beyond” Chinese “heathen
worship.” Speer decried “the Chinaman” as a “darkened heathen” and a
“dark-minded heathen” who “bows down to demons.”30
Woodsworth also hurled vile insults at
newcomers from the
Middle East, calling them “one of the least desirable
classes of our immigrants.” The worst among them, he said, were Syrians who came
mostly from “Mount Lebanon...which
the Christian powers protect against the ‘unspeakable Turk.’” As evidence,
Woodsworth turned to J.D.Whelpley’s The Problem of the Immigrant (1905)
which calls Armenians and Syrians “a most undesirable class” whose “intellectual
level is low.” Woodsworth also cites another American, Dr. Allan McLaughlin,
who wrote in 1905 that “these parasites from the near East” are a “distinct
menace” who “lie most naturally and by preference.”31
(In 1908, McLaughlin was an US “colonial bureaucrat” in the Philippines
but by 1918 he was the US Assistant Surgeon General.32)
Perhaps the most slandered immigrants in
Woodsworth’s overtly racist book, Strangers Within Our Gates, were east
Europeans. He saw them as so politically inferiour that he urged the Canadian
government to “reform” matters by removing their right to vote. In his chapter
on “Assimilation,” Woodsworth insulted Ukrainians by saying “the vote of one of
these foreigners ‘kills’ the vote of the most intelligent Canadian!”33 Continuing
his anti-democratic polemic, Canada’s social-democrat crusader sermonised that:
“Peoples emerging from serfdom, accustomed
to despotism, untrained in the principals of representative government, without
patriotism...are utterly unfit to be trusted with the ballot... It is as absurd
as it is dangerous to grant to every newly arrived immigrant the full privilege
of citizenship.... The next reform should look to restriction rather than the
extension of the franchise.”34
Woodsworth’s policy proposal was ahead of its
time. It was not until nine years later that the Wartime Elections Act
“effectively disenfranchised most Ukrainians in Canada.”35
Prime Minister Borden’s government was concerned that conscription, introduced
in May 1917, would prove so unpopular that the Conservatives might lose the next
election. So, all “enemy-aliens” naturalised after March 31, 1902, lost their
right to vote, unless they had a close relative on active duty. Although the
Act also disenfranchised pacifists and conscientious objectors, it extended the
vote to women in the military, and to those with enlisted sons, husbands or
brothers.36 This was a
victory for those “progressive” suffragettes who had long argued
“that they needed the vote...to help offset
the detrimental effect which they claimed immigrants were having on prairie
society. Women’s groups pushing for the vote argued that certainly they deserved
the vote if ‘ignorant foreigners’ had it.”37
Woodsworth excelled at propagating this image of
“ignorant” east Europeans. Polish immigrants, he said, were “far from the best
class. They are poor, illiterate, and with a code of morals none too high.”38 As
for Austrians (who were mostly Ukrainians) and Russians, he said the:
“majority [are] illiterate and
superstitious; some of them bigoted fanatics, some of them poor, dumb, driven
cattle, some intensely patriotic,...some anarchists—the sworn enemies alike of
Church and State.”39
Woodsworth’s section on Ukrainians was penned by
journalist Arthur R. Ford of the Winnipeg Telegram. Ford, the son of
Methodist Minister James Ford, described “how difficult the problem of
Canadianizing” them could be. Warning that Ukrainians were “crowding to our
shores,” he revealed “the cold fact” that 125,000 had already arrived, and that
40,000 were within Manitoba’s gates. He then remarked that Canadians had “so
low an estimation” of them “that the word Galician is almost a term of
reproach.” He also associated Ukrainians with violence and criminality by
saying that their
“unpronouncable names appear so often in
police court news, [and] they figure so frequently in crimes of violence that
they have created anything but a favourable impression.”40
Calling Ukrainians “illiterate and ignorant,”41 he
opined that “Centuries of poverty and oppression have, to some extent,
animalized him. Drunk, he is quarrelsome and dangerous.”42
In his book’s preface, Woodsworth said he “was
glad to have had the co-operation of Mr. A.R.Ford.” The fact that Woodsworth
thought it was appropriate to include Ford’s extremely bigoted slurs speaks
volumes about his own beliefs.
A decade later, in 1919, Ford was writing
antiRed diatribes for The Times, a Toronto daily. Historian
Michael Dupuis, in studying distorted news coverage of the Winnipeg General
Strike, said Ford’s stories prove that “fact was often replaced by half-truths
and false accusation.”43
Interestingly, Ford, who became an Ottawa
alderman and then the longtime editor of the London Free Press, fathered
Robert Ford, the Liberal government’s longstanding ambassador to the
USSR (1964-1980) and later, it’s Special Advisor on East-West Relations
(1980-1984).44
Woodsworth’s solutions to the immigration
“problem” included:
(1)
Further restricting the immigration of
non-white, non-English-speaking aliens,
(2)
Opening the gates to white Christians from the
UK, Germany and Scandinavia,
(3)
Implementing better church- and state-run
assimilation programs for nonAnglos who were already “within our gates,” and
(4)
Curtailing the civil and political rights, such
as the right to vote, of certain immigrants who could not be trusted.
Woodsworth chose a mixture of metaphors used by
eugenicists, militarists and empire loyalists to describe the most desirable
filters for selecting immigrants:
“We need more of our own blood to assist us
to maintain in
Canada
our British traditions and to mould the incoming armies of foreigners into loyal
British subjects.”45
Woodsworth’s choice of sources is instructive.
All thirteen of his recommended books, which he said “proved helpful” in writing
Strangers Within Our Gates, were by US authors. Most were of west
European heritage and from a highly-privileged class. The first seven books
promoted overtly racist stereotypes, praised eugenics, advocated Anglo-Saxon
superiority, pushed US imperialism, and/or saluted the work of Protestant
missionaries.46
Five years later, just after the outbreak of
WWI, Woodsworth addressed Winnipeg’s prestigious Canadian Club on “The Immigrant
Invasion after the War: Are We Ready for it?” This was one of 16 lectures in
1914 that were attended, on average, by 430 of the city’s most powerful men.
His talk came between speeches by Solicitor General Arthur Meighen on WWI, and
Prime Minister Borden on “Canada and the Empire.”
Other speakers that year included the top brass from Canada’s
ultraconservative military, banking and press establishments.47 The
fact that Woodsworth was warmly welcomed by this powerful circle, reveals his
role as the Canadian elite’s favourite “socialist.”
No longer leading Winnipeg’s Methodist Mission,
Woodsworth was then secretary of the Canadian Welfare League (1913-1916). The
self-described purpose of this national, Winnipeg-based organisation was to
confront “emergent social problems caused,” in part, by Canada’s “large and
heterogeneous immigration.”48
The Canadian Club introduced Woodsworth’s speech
by saying that
“the war had clearly revealed to us... [t]hat
we had in our midst large numbers of undigested aliens who might cause a serious
disturbance within our body politic.”49
This phraseology, plagiarised Charles Gordon’s
1908 novel which had warned of “an undigested foreign mass” in “the body
politic” that must be “absorbed...or it will be a mighty bad.”50
(When Woodsworth gave his 1914 speech to the Canadian Club, Gordon—who
had cofounded the club in 1904 and been its president, 1909-1910—was in Europe
building a new career as Canada’s leading military chaplain.)
“The danger now to be guarded against,”
began Woodsworth in his speech, “is that a sudden panic may lead us to take
extreme positions and thus intensify and perpetuate racial bitterness and
animosities.”51 Woodsworth
must have known that just four months earlier,
Canada
had taken an “extreme position” by interning thousands of civilians in 12
slave-labour camps. Manitoba had two internment facilities, with one in
downtown Winnipeg. Was this not “extreme” enough for Woodsworth?
Woodsworth then presented what he saw as
extremely disturbing set of statistics. In 1901, he said, 57% of
Canada’s 5.4 million inhabitants were British but of the 2.9 million that had
been admitted since then only 38% were British. Of those allowed in since 1901,
27% were non-English speakers. Of these, two thirds were from south and eastern
Europe. British immigration had decreased by 10% over the previous two years
and the percent of non-English newcomers was rising. After listing 24
non-English nationalities pouring into
Canada’s gates, Woodsworth asked:
“Mix these peoples together, and what is the
outcome? From the racial standpoint it is evident that we will not longer be
British, probably no longer Anglo-Saxon. From the standpoint of eugenics it
is not at all clear that the highest results are to be obtained through the
indiscriminate mixing of all sorts and conditions.... From the religious
standpoint, what will be the outcome? For...most of our foreign immigrants do
not belong to the churches which are... dominant in
Canada. From
the political standpoint it is evident that there will be very great changes and
very serious dangers.”52
(Emphasis added.)
Besides basing his rabid xenophobia on
ethnicity, politics and religion, Woodsworth’s racism was also tied to
“eugenics.” This phobic pseudo-science sought to improve humankind—physically,
culturally and morally—through selective breeding, sterilisation and
segregation. In 1916, Woodsworth was promoting eugenics through his work as
Director of the Bureau of Social Research (BSR). This government agency
“actively campaigned for the segregation and sterilization of defectives.”53
Although this arm of the Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba governments
was created to deal with “mental defectives,” Woodsworth expanded its scope to
target other so-called “community problems,” such as “Our Immigrants.”54
The immigrants that most worried Woodsworth, and
Canada’s prairie governments, were the Ukrainians. Woodsworth’s BSR report,
Ukrainian Rural Communities (1917), contained some of the usual slurs
against this ethnic group:
“[T]he immigrant is invariably laboring
under the hypertrophy of racial, social, religious and mental traditions brought
from the old country. This is only natural, but it does not facilitate social
evolution. His marked racial physiognomy, temperament, habits and customs
hinder him...from merging into the Canadian society....”55
This section of Woodsworth’s report,
although rife with assimilationist views, was not penned by an AngloProtestant.
The author chosen by Woodsworth was Ivan Petruschevich, editor of the
Canadian Ruthenian,56 the
official organ of
Canada’s
Ukrainian Catholic Church. Between 1911 and 1927, this paper was financed by
Canada’s Catholic Bishops who were “solidly behind the Ukrainian eparch” in
Canada, and supported its leader Bishop Nykyta Budka.57 (See
pp.41-42.)
Rev. Joseph Sparling and Wesley College
The introduction to Woodsworth’s Strangers
Within Our Gates was written by another prominent Social Gospeller, Rev.
Joseph W.Sparling. Like Woodsworth, Gordon, and The Foreigner’s hero,
Sparling was also a clergyman. Best known as the founder of Winnipeg’s Wesley
College, Sparling was its first principal from 1888 until his death in 1912.
This prestigious Methodist college, said Paul
Phillips, a historian at St. Francis
Xavier University, was
“established as a major training centre for Social Gospelers.”58
Richard Allen, a leading historian of Christian socialism, explained that “by
the first decade of the new century,” Wesley
College was, “if not the only, then the most vigorous source of the social
gospel in Canada.”59 Among
Wesley’s famous graduates was J.S.Woodsworth, who received its bronze metal in
“Mental and Moral Science” and was its “senior stick” (student president) when
he graduated in 1896.60
Wesley’s faculty included Canada’s pre-eminent
Social Gospel leader, Rev. Salem Bland, who Sparling recruited in 1903. Bland
taught at Wesley until 1917,61
when he was fired thanks to College chair and Winnipeg mayor, James
Ashdown, who saw him as a fundraising liability.
Sparling’s introduction to Strangers
Within Our Gates, is the entry point through which to understand its key
message. Calling
Winnipeg
“the storm centre” of
Canada’s
immigration “problem,” Sparling framed Woodsworth’s book by saying: “Perhaps the
largest and most important problem” is how “incoming tides of immigrants of
various nationalities and different degrees of civilization may be assimilated
and made worthy citizens.”62
In crying out his alarm, Sparling exclaimed:
“[T]here 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.” He made it clear which aliens posed the biggest threat to progress: “We
must see to it that the civilization and ideals of
South Eastern
Europe are not transplanted to and perpetuated on our virgin soil.”63
Sparling concluded his fearmongering, warning
knell about dangerous aliens by saying: “I fear that the Canadian churches have
not yet been seized of the magnitude and import of this ever-growing problem.”
Having the principal of Wesley College ring out religious alarm bells from the
ivory tower of Canada’s Social Gospel movement was like shouting “Reds!” in a
crowded church.
But Sparling was not all doom and gloom. His
panicstricken entrée to Woodsworth’s textbook urged “all our young people” to
“read and ponder” its subject matter. “I can with confidence commend this
pioneer Canadian work,” said Sparling, “to the careful consideration of those
who are desirous of understanding and grappling with this great national
danger.”64
In his otherwise darkly ominous and
foreboding opening to Woodsworth’s primer, Sparling saw only one other
positive light at the end of the tunnel. That light was a wealthy capitalist and
Winnipeg’s
then-Mayor, J.H.Ashdown. (Ironically, five years after Sparling’s death, Ashdown
was responsible for firing Wesley’s most famed Social Gospeller, Salem Bland.)
In what reads like a paid political ad, Sparling praised Mayor Ashdown for
believing that the problem of assimilating foreigners was “vital and
fundamental.” He also lauded Ashdown as a “resident [of] the West for over
forty years” who had “perhaps given more time, attention, and money to the
working out of a solution of this question than any other layman in the West.”65
Although Sparling did not describe Ashdown’s
“solution” to the immigration problem, he must have known that the millionaire
mayor was rabidly averse to political radicals. This was public knowledge.
Ashdown’s “solution” included barring outspoken undesirables. In April 1908,
just two months before Woodsworth wrote the preface to his book, Ashdown—the
acclaimed “Merchant Prince of
Winnipeg”—tried to stop “Red Emma” Goldman from speaking in their city. Born to
a Jewish family in Russia, Goldman was a prolific
US
writer, lecturer and activist. She was also a philosopher, feminist, anarchist,
unionist, atheist and an advocate for peace, civil rights, free speech and birth
control.
Goldman had already visited
Winnipeg
twice. Her 1907 lectures included “The Curse of Religion” and “Trades Unionism
and the General Strike.”66 Wanting
to abort a repeat performance, Ashdown wrote to Liberal Interior Minister Frank
Oliver. (See below.) Ashdown explained:
“we have a very large foreign population in
this City, it consists approximately of 15,000 Galicians, 11,000 Germans, 10,000
Jews, 2,000 Hungarians and 5,000 Russians and other Slavs and Bohemians.
Many...have had trouble in their own country with their Governments and come to
the new land to get away from it but have all the undesirable elements in their
character that created the trouble for them before. They are just the right
crowd for Emma Goldman or persons of her character to sow seeds which are bound
to cause most undesirable growths in the future.”67
Some
Winnipeg
“NGOs” agreed. The Christian Women’s Temperance Union for instance, was fearful
that Goldman would further radicalise immigrants.
The Interior Ministry also tried to stop the
so-called “Apostle of Anarchy,” and her kind, from entering
Canada’s
gates. A 1908 memo to Minister Oliver from Superintendent of Immigration
W.D.Scott, said Ashdown’s letter had asked “whether the law could not be amended
in such a way as to keep such persons out.” Scott then suggested they “debar her
on the ground of insanity.”
Oliver however replied: “I am afraid that this is not sufficient warrant.”
Goldman’s lectures in late 1908 attracted over 1,500 Winnipeggers.68
Allowing US anarchists, like Goldman, to
enter
Canada’s
gates was also deplored by Boer-War veteran, Sir Sam Hughes. This bigoted
imperialist, Methodist and Conservative MP (1892-1921) was the WWI Minister of
Militia and Defence (1911-1916). “I would prefer a Hindu who has served the
Empire in the armies of
Great Britain,”
he said in July 1908, to a “Yankee who has been an anarchist ....[and] crosses
over to Canada, ...to disrupt the established laws.” Calling anarchists “a
class of animals,” he said many were “not worthy the name of human beings.”69
Although the government did not ban the entry of anarchists until 1910,
many were deported using such pretexts as poverty.
Besides their deeply shared aversion to
certain aliens, Sparling and Ashdown were both central to the
Methodist
Church’s Wesley College, Canada’s Social Gospel training centre. As its
founding president, Sparling had known Ashdown from Wesley’s board of directors
since its creation in 1888. Ashdown was the College’s bursar (1888-1890),
vice-chairman (1890-1908) and chair (1908-1924).70
Interestingly, during the Winnipeg General
Strike of 1919, said Norman Penner, “Ashdown’s hardware store... supplied
‘thousands’ of wagon spokes for clubs for the specials.”71 (The
“specials” were an 1,800-man force of ruthless, paramilitary thugs hired by the
city to attack strikers and protesters.) Later that year, Ashdown represented
western Canadian wholesalers at the government’s National Industrial Conference
in Ottawa.
It brought together handpicked government-friendly representatives from large
corporations, virulently antiCommunist labour unions and other captive,
civil-society organisations.
Culpability: Stirring the Pot
It is worth chewing on Gordon’s trope that
east Europeans were “an undigested foreign mass” to “be digested and absorbed
into the body politic.” In the Social Gospel’s heyday (1880-1920),
Canada’s
national dish was a banal daily fare of ethnocentric pottage that was as bland
and tasteless as it was racist. Spices were considered foreign and indigestible.
The garlic of east European cookery was particularly unpalatable, and communists
were the Red-hot chili peppers of politics, likely to provoke a revolting
upheaval from within.
When
Ottawa chefs
added so many immigrants to the prairie’s simmering nativist pot, the result was
a profound social dyspepsia. In their frenzy to dissolve these new ingredients
into the Canadian stock, AngloProtestants stirred the cultural stew into a
hateful froth of social frenzy. The mass phobia of mainstream culture saw east
Europeans as distasteful rabble-rousers who, unless contained and absorbed,
would spoil the tastefully civilised purity of Canada’s “Christian values.”
It was no wonder then that when the draconian
War Measures Act of 1914 passed unanimously through Parliament, thousands of
east Europeans were either deported without trial or sent into internal exile as
slaves in Canada’s remote gulag of WWI “concentration camps.” This huge
injustice occurred without any noticeable protest from AngloProtestant society.
Social Gospel leaders were not about to
protest WWI internment. They had long been among
Canada’s most
outspoken xenophobes, conjuring up fearmongeringly-hateful stereotypes of east
Europeans. Woodsworth, Gordon, Sparling and other leading Social Gospel
progressives, had long been ringing loud bells of warning to frame these
unwanted aliens as a special threat to Canada. When WWI provided the pretext to
remove “enemy aliens” from Canadian society, many Social Gospellers likely saw
this as a religious, economic and political godsend, not an injustice.
Similarly, the churches were not only key supporters of the genocidal program to
concentrate Aboriginals on reserves, they worked as faithful agents of the state
to administer residential schools.
Canadian chauvinism became a national
prisonhouse—if not a mental asylum—whose inmates were truly committed to their
national cult. Although trapped by the seductive allure of elitist
AngloProtestant institutions, and shackled by their collective narcissism,
prisoners of the Canada Syndrome were committed to spreading the mass delusion
that they were free. Dedicating themselves to building the very institutions and
narratives that had metaphorically captured them, those faithful to the
official myth of Canadian exceptionalism were duty bound to accept if not run
national programs that literally imprisoned the enemies of both church
and state.
Social Gospellers not only reflected the
religious and political bigotries that panicked Canada’s civil society, they
were influential social gatekeepers whose narratives greatly influenced
the mass psychosis of fear and loathing that spread throughout the
AngloProtestant mainstream.
By selecting, filtering and interpreting stories
about unwanted “strangers,” from a variety of intolerant sources, Social Gospel
gatekeepers created convincing narratives to rationalise, promote, shape and
prolong the chauvinism that dominated Canadian society. By shepherding
mainstream suspicions of foreigners into a virulent xenophobia, Canada’s Social
Gospellers went far beyond serving as wardens and guardians fixated on watching
the nation’s gates. These well-meaning, progressives became hardened cultural
warriors whose powerfully eloquent narratives aided and abetted the mass
physical captivity of aliens, as well as the ideological captivity of the
Peaceable Kingdom’s dominant AngloProtestant society.
http://books.google.ca/books?id=R1gsAAAAMAAJ