The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (49 page)

The authorities were generally lackadaisical in enforcing the law. In 1906, the Calgary chief of police, Thomas English, insisted there was less gambling and prostitution in his city than in any community of comparable size on the continent. “There may be houses of prostitution in Calgary but I do not know of them,” he declared. Two days later the
Morning Albert an
identified nine brothels within the city known to everyone “except the chief of police.”

Even during the periodic vice cleanups, prosecutions were difficult to achieve. When the Mounted Police raided one Nose Creek brothel and found a customer in bed with one of the girls, they were sure they would get a conviction. The accused got off, even though he admitted he was in a house of prostitution, by swearing that the woman was ill and he was simply nursing her.

In Winnipeg, in 1909, there was a concerted effort on the part of churchmen and reformers to expose the brothels. As a result the city fathers tacitly gave the chief of police the right to find a district where prostitutes could be segregated, away from the eyes of respectable citizens. The chief, John C. McRae, went to the fount of all knowledge, Minnie Woods, “The Queen of the Harlots,” the best-known madam in town. With her help he selected the MacFarlane–Rachel–Annabella streets area north of the
CPR
tracks, suitably enclosed by a gas plant, a lumberyard, and a power station and within easy walking distance of the
CPR
depot and the major hotels. Here, in a space of two city blocks, some two hundred prostitutes began to ply their trade.

There was, of course, a profit to be made from the kind of mass segregation undertaken by the city of Winnipeg. Into town one day before the decision was made crept a mysterious figure, one J. Beaman,
a so-called real estate operator with no real estate experience and no affiliation with any local firm. Beaman stayed in Winnipeg for one year only – the year the city moved the brothels. And it was to Beaman that Chief McRae went for help in the switch of location. Beaman bought twenty-two buildings and resold them to the madams at sky-high prices, making a total profit of seventy thousand dollars before he vanished. He was almost certainly a front man for the chief, or the chief’s friends, or the local politicians, or perhaps all three.

Nobody paid any heed to the fifty-odd immigrant families living in the area, who complained, vainly, that intoxicated men were stumbling into their homes looking for girls, that residents were being propositioned going to and from work, that drunks, bounced from the brothels, lay on the sidewalks or in the gutter, and that on occasion bare-breasted women could be seen dashing through the neighbourhood and even riding horseback up Annabella Street.

An April evening in 1910. Three men knock on the door of the Bradley home at 70 Higgins Avenue, at the corner of Annabella. Mrs. Bradley hears the knock and thinks it’s a little early for the
Tribune
carrier. As she goes through the kitchen toward the front door, she hears a man cough. Then, just as she enters her front parlour, a stranger catches hold of her dress
.

“Don’t be scared,” he says and calls to two friends on the doorstep. “I say, come in, it’s all right.”

Before she can remonstrate, all three sit down on the sofa and throw their hats on the floor
.

“I’ll lie down,” one says, and proceeds to do so
.

The man holding Mrs. Bradley’s dress rises and tears it from waist to shoulder, then pulls off her skirt. All three lay some crumpled bills on the table and ask for drinks. Mrs. Bradley tries to explain that this is neither a bawdy house nor a tavern. There are no girls here, she says, but the men search the bedroom for women and the cellar for drinks. They find nothing
.

One loosens his pants, pulls them off, and starts to remove his underclothes. Mrs. Bradley runs out into the yard, finds a neighbour, a teamster, and asks him to run for her husband. As Mr. Bradley appears, the three strangers can be seen leaving hastily
.

Mr. Bradley calls a policeman. The policeman produces a notebook and pencil and begins to take down the details. Mr. Bradley becomes impatient
.

“Why aren’t you going after the men?” he asks
.

“I have to report it,” says the policeman
.

But there is no report filed, and when, some weeks later, Mrs. Bradley finally sees an inspector and asks for police protection, he is not helpful
.

“You can’t expect the police at your door all the time,” he tells her
.

The city fathers may have been complacent about their red-light district, but they certainly didn’t want it publicized, especially in the East, as the Reverend Dr. J.G. Shearer discovered in 1910. Shearer told the Toronto
Globe
that “they have the rottenest condition of things in Winnipeg in connection with the question of social vice to be found in any city in Canada.” The Toronto papers were delighted with this intelligence.
“WINNIPEG WALLOWS IN VICE”
was the
Star’s
headline.

Shearer was no fly-by-night cleric. He was secretary of the powerful Moral and Social Reform League and was a key figure among those who, in 1907, had forced the Lord’s Day Act through the federal parliament. But he was reviled in his home town by the city fathers and the business community. The church considered Winnipeg’s red-light district a disgrace. But Mayor W.S. Evans, who was up for re-election, cleverly muddied the argument by switching it away from the evils of white slavery to the question of the city’s image. “As citizens of our community, we should be, if possible, even more jealous of the good name of our city than of our homes,” he declared. “…  It is patent that those who have the welfare of the city at heart would not advertise it abroad as the rottenest city on the continent. I stand for the best and cleanest and purest city in the world – for Winnipeg and the reputation of such.” After all, real estate values had to be maintained.

Evans’s opponent, E.D. Martin, backed by church and reform groups, didn’t stand a chance. Even the
Free Press
tacitly supported Evans, though his opponent was a Liberal. In December 1910, the Mayor took fifty-seven out of seventy-two polls. Every incumbent was returned. A hurriedly organized royal commission of inquiry reassured the world that Winnipeg was definitely
not
the “rottenest” city in Canada. The city’s image was restored, and the brothels on Rachel, Annabella, and MacFarlane streets were allowed to operate openly for the next three decades with no obstruction apart from the quarterly payment of a fine.

3
The Social Gospel

The immigrants had little say in the policies and destinies of the Western cities; the power lay in the hands of the white Anglo-Saxon businessmen who controlled the municipal governments. In Winnipeg, for instance, every mayor and every controller from 1896 to 1914 was a
WASP
. Of 515 councillors elected in the city between 1874 and 1915, only three represented labour. Financial success was the key to both social status and political power. Since there was no established élite of old families, the business entrepreneurs had the control of the city to themselves.

The drain on public funds to support boosterism left little for social welfare programs. In Regina in 1908, the local council turned down as too costly a by-law that would have required all milk to be delivered in sealed bottles to prevent disease. One alderman, Dr. W. A. Thomson, led a battle to improve the city’s health. He wanted a new incinerator for the immigrant district, but his opponents called that “a monument across the track.” They even went so far as to hide blocks of ice in the garbage so that the incinerator would fail an official test. When Thomson ran for mayor in 1908 he lost.

Woods worth, in his report on Regina, pointed out that seven of the ten aldermen were in the real estate business. In his mild way, he argued that “it is not wise to entrust the government of the city so largely to a group of men representing one particular class.” The greatest danger, however, was “the indifference of the majority of the citizens to public affairs.” Those who might care – the immigrants, the poor, and the working people – had no vote because they rarely owned property. Only landowners had the franchise, and, since they could vote in any ward in which they owned real estate, some entrepreneurs had several votes. Thus, again in Woodsworth’s words, “public welfare has been sacrificed to private gain.”

In spite of the prairie dogma that every man was as good as the next, some were, in Orwell’s classic phrase, more equal than others. The Calgary
Herald
might sneer at the English nobility, but it devoted more columns to the city’s small power élite than it did to exposing immigrant conditions on the wrong side of the tracks. Most of Calgary’s leaders were Anglo-Saxon Protestants from Ontario or the Maritimes (Pat Burns, the Irish Catholic, being a notable exception). They may have rejected Eastern domination, but they aped Eastern
high society, sending their offspring to private schools, such as the exclusive Bishop Pinkham’s, where the students wore Eton jackets and collars and played cricket and football to “build character.” They played polo, rode with the hunt (chasing coyotes, not foxes), had their own exclusive copy of Montreal’s St. James’s Club – the Ranchmen’s Club – and their own exclusive subdivision, significantly labelled Mount Royal. Yet, as one student of the period, Paul Voisey, has shrewdly pointed out, this pseudo-nobility could scarcely label themselves members of the leisure class because, in spite of their cavernous sandstone mansions, they were unable to break the work habit and so enjoyed little leisure.

Nor did the workingman, earning as little as fifteen dollars for a grinding sixty-hour week. His newly rich employer, convinced that hard work was its own reward, secure in the belief that every Westerner was capable of rising in the world (
he
had made it, hadn’t he?), kept wages as low as possible and fought the labour unions as ruthlessly as he fought his competitors. In 1910 in Regina, where the cost of living was the highest in the West, wages were the lowest because, so the Trades and Labour Congress claimed, contractors were flooding the market with workers to keep wages down. Here unskilled men were paid only twenty cents an hour. They got little help from the established churches. As one Regina clergyman put it, “workingmen have no right to organize to force their masters to pay higher wages.… Servants, obey your masters, for it is right.”

Given these attitudes and conditions, it’s not surprising that a radical reformist movement should spring up in Western Canada. Its epicentre was Winnipeg, the oldest and largest city on the prairies, the community with the greatest immigrant population, the worst slums, and, since it was the major manufacturing centre in the West, the most extensive factories and the most appalling factory conditions.

In Winnipeg, five skeins of social protest were, by 1910, woven together into a concerted radical fabric. These were the temperance movement, the trade union movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the agrarian reform movement, and the “Social Gospel” of the evangelical Protestant churches. All had a common purpose: to change the established order; and, though each had separate goals, these goals often overlapped as the individual movements raised their sights and evolved from narrow objectives to broader ones.

Thus the leadership and rank and file of the Woman’s Christian Temperance movement, one of the most powerful and acceptable of the activist groups in the West, found themselves also adopting the cause of female suffrage. This came about because the
WCTU
set up reading rooms and sponsored debates on topical subjects, thus providing a central focus for concerned women. Fighting discrimination against women and recognizing women’s rights became an obvious cause. The
WCTU
, therefore, launched an investigation into conditions under which female factory workers laboured. That led to a common front in Winnipeg with the radical Methodists, themselves temperance advocates-men like James Shaver Woodsworth, who had left the established wing of the church to minister to the poor through the All Peoples’ Mission in the city’s North End.

The cross-fertilization continued. In 1910, the Ministerial Association appointed Woodsworth delegate to the Winnipeg Trades and Labour Council, forging a link between the radical churchmen and the union movement. Meanwhile the Grain Growers’ Association, with its widely read
Guide
, was also supporting the burgeoning female suffrage movement. The Western farmers considered women equal partners in building the homestead; why shouldn’t the politicians also treat them equally? And Woodsworth himself had strong links with agrarian reform; he wrote articles for the
Guide
and the book
Studies in Rural Citizenship
, which carried an introduction by the president of the Manitoba Grain Growers.

Thus it could be said that this slight, ascetic figure was the hub of the radical wheel in Western Canada. Ruthlessly honest, totally dedicated, utterly without interest in personal gain or fame, Woodsworth came to the All Peoples’ Mission in 1907 with a social conscience already nurtured in the Methodist Church and honed in the slums of London. Six years later, when he left to pursue broader interests, the experience had thoroughly politicized him.

He was a child of the West, brought from the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke by his father, a Methodist minister, to Portage la Prairie in 1882 when he, the oldest of six children, was only eight. Like Clifford Sifton, another Methodist, he was raised from the age of ten in Brandon, but Woods worth’s idealism – implacable, unswerving – was the antithesis of Sifton’s pragmatism. Woodsworth never ducked an issue. One can imagine the consternation of the Winnipeg establishment, sitting in their comfortable Grace Church pews, when Woodsworth first arrived in the city and began to preach his radical sermons from the pulpit. These were some of the wealthiest and most powerful leaders in the community; but that had no influence on him: