The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (50 page)

“I fear that in our city we have not yet learned the vulgarity of a lavish expenditure of newly acquired wealth. Costly dresses, magnificent houses, expensive entertainments – those are the things we seek after. And the snobbishness that goes with such vulgarity! The pride of wealth.…”

No wonder he was unhappy at Grace Church! No wonder the congregation was uneasy with him! One leading member urged him to give “less ill-digested sociology and more simple gospel preaching,” but Woodsworth was having none of that. He could no more smother his opinions than he could smother one of his own children. Besides, he was having trouble with the literal truth of the Bible. Instead, he left Winnipeg, and after a spell in British Columbia he tried to leave the church. He was urged to stay and was offered the little mission on the wrong side of the tracks.

It’s typical of Woodsworth that he wasn’t content to operate a mission that catered to the immigrant poor near the North End’s rim. Nothing would do but that he plunge into the heart of that foreign world; and so within two years he moved the mission and his own family deeper in, where the unpaved streets were cluttered with pigs and chickens and the infant mortality in those overcrowded shacks was among the highest in Canada. It could not have been an easy move for a man who had known London and Paris and had taken courses at Oxford, but Woodsworth had as little interest in the comfortable life as he had in comfortable ideas. This was the man who one day, as head of the CCF, would sit up all night on the train from Ottawa to Winnipeg rather than charge the party with the expense of so much as an upper berth. This was the man who would rise in the Commons in the autumn of 1939, a solitary figure, utterly alone yet somehow ennobled, to announce that his conscience could not allow him to vote for a declaration of war. That act would spell the end of his public career, and Woodsworth knew it; but he had never been one to compromise.

His forthright character had bewildered his own parents. His children were in awe of him and so were his siblings, even when they were “grown men and women with no reason in this world to fear his poor opinion,” in the words of his son, Charles. They would, he recalled, “quail before his frown of irritation in some altogether trifling matter.” Even when they disagreed with his strongly held opinions, they found it simpler to hold their tongues rather than risk his active disapproval.

With his slight figure and pale eyes, he looked mild enough, but at
second glance those eyes took on a sterner look – resolute, unfaltering. He was a neat man with a neatly trimmed black beard, which resembled that of the reigning monarch. “King George! King George!” a swarm of small immigrant boys cried out mischievously as he chased them from his vegetable garden.

With his family he could be strict; rules were not to be broken. With the immigrants, struggling to learn a strange tongue, he was unfailingly patient. His daughter, Grace, remembers him trying to teach them basic English by carrying out familiar routines with words and gestures: “I wake up in the morning. I put on my shirt. I put on my pants. I put on my socks.…” In spite of what he had written in his book
Strangers within Our Gates
about the problems of assimilability, they were all instant citizens to Woodsworth. He stubbornly refused to list his father’s racial origin for the census taker, insisting that he was a Canadian. Once he corrected a newcomer who had identified himself as a European. “Canadian!” cried Woodsworth. The puzzled immigrant shook his head. “Not many of
dem
around,” he said.

To Woodsworth, whose fundamentalist beliefs were already shaken, personal salvation was no longer enough. He had seen the dreadful condition of the urban poor at first hand, and he knew that the missionary field was too narrow; it must be broadened. The activist doctrine of the “Social Gospel” was then sweeping the continent, especially among the lower echelons of the non-conformist Protestant churches. Its adherents included, besides Woodsworth, such luminaries as Salem Bland, the radical theologian from Wesley College, whose Old Testament features would soon be immortalized by Lawren Harris, and the Reverend Charles William Gordon, who, under the pseudonym of Ralph Connor, had become the nation’s best-selling author with an eventual three million copies of his books in print. These men were the conscience of the West.

Woodsworth expressed their credo in his sermon “The Sin of Indifference,” in which he attacked the social apathy of the booming prairies: “A curse still hangs over inactivity. A severe condemnation still rests upon indifference … Christianity stands for social righteousness as well as personal righteousness.… It is quite right for me to be anxious to save my never dying soul; but it is of greater importance to try to serve the present age.… If it is right to help the sick, it is right to do away with filth and overcrowding.… We have tried to provide for the poor. Yet, have we tried to alter the social conditions that lead to poverty …?”

It was largely through Woodsworth’s efforts that Winnipeg got its first juvenile court in 1908 and its first public playground in 1912. In the Great West Saddlery strike of 1910, with Bland and Gordon he took the side of the workers in their struggle against a union-busting corporation. It was inevitable that he would move into a wider field. In 1913, he left the mission and became the general secretary of the newly formed Canadian Welfare League. Like the Grain Growers and the suffragettes, this implacable clergyman was becoming politicized by the bubbling ferment in the West. His career had only begun: ahead lay the agony of the Winnipeg General Strike and after that the Regina Manifesto and the heady intoxication of a new political movement.

4
Our Nellie

If the dedicated Woodsworth provided the flint for the radical movement exploding in Winnipeg, Nellie Letitia McClung provided the spark. Like Ralph Connor, she was a best-selling author at a time when Canadian novels, and especially Western Canadian novels, achieved six-figure sales records. Her widely popular
Sowing Seeds in Danny
, based on her pioneer childhood in Manitoba, sold 100,000 copies; her later novel,
The Second Chance
, exceeded that. In those days the world wanted to read about Canada; no author needed to conceal his origins or hedge her locale; a Canadian setting was an asset, not a hindrance. Nellie was a celebrity before she became an activist.

She was also the kind of woman who inspires epithets. To her enemies, led by the arch-Tory Winnipeg
Telegram
, she was Calamity Nell. To her friends she was Our Nellie. To the Eastern journals she was Mrs. Western Canada. Breezily flamboyant, she provided a strong contrast to the serious, quiet-spoken Woodsworth and the sombre Salem Bland. She was the very antithesis of the mannish stereotype that the anti-suffrage journalists and politicians invented to caricature the women activists. She had an hour-glass figure, a rosy complexion, and handsome features. She piled her soft brown hair in the fashion of the day and surmounted it with one of a series of vast flowered hats. She had a passion for brightly coloured gowns and a talent for equally bright oratory. She radiated joyousness: she was never bitter, but she was also as tough as nails. Her credo was distilled into a single
sentence: “Never retract, never explain, get things done and let them howl.”

She had her Irish father’s turn of phrase, her Scottish mother’s sense of dedication. “You say that ‘women are angels’ and you plead that politics are ‘corrupting,’” she told an audience of males who believed that women should not sully themselves by a public career. “Well, in that case you can’t get women into public life too soon as there is a big shortage of angels in politics just now.”

She was a product of the prairies, as Western as Red Fife. Her parents had brought her west from Chatsworth, near Georgian Bay, when she was seven. The family of nine (Nellie was the youngest) travelled from Winnipeg to a homestead in the Souris Valley by ox cart. Her strict temperance views came partly from her mother, who felt that liquor was “one of the devil’s devices for confounding mankind” and partly from her own memories of drunken neighbours spoiling a peaceful picnic. Always theatrical, she had, at the age of thirteen, successfully staged a performance of
Ten Nights in a Barroom
.

In adulthood she became a leading member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union at a time when the anti-liquor movement had radical rather than moralistic overtones. No woman could enter a saloon. It was the men who squandered in the barrooms the money that should have gone into the family coffers. Liquor was a genuine social evil, and many who opposed it did so on humanitarian rather than moral grounds. The
WCTU
was a powerful force in the West, and it was not surprising that its leaders should move from this indirect exploitation of women to the broader political and economic discrimination against their sex in general.

Nellie McClung made her first public speech at a
WCTU
convention in Manitou in 1907, thrilled, if a little nervous, to be asked to give an address of welcome on behalf of the local chapter. Typically, she bought a new dress for the occasion, of navy blue and white striped voile trimmed with narrow white Valencienne lace and, of course, a white leghorn hat resplendent with red velvet flowers.

Sensibly, she decided to avoid all the boring statistics about drink and especially any reference to prohibition – “a hard sounding word worthless as a rallying cry.” She understood why Westerners drank: “It answered something in the blood, some craving for excitement and change.” She herself had known a similar feeling on the homestead when, as a young girl, she had swirled about enjoying a brief moment of dizziness, blotting out the familiar landscape. It was not enough to
banish the demon rum; something better must take its place. And so Nellie McClung, at the age of thirty-four, in her crisp new dress and her big, bright hat, talked of the need for parks and games, handicrafts, orchestras, folk dances, better housing – civilized substitutes for liquor that might help make life more bearable on the harsh prairies, but which the boosters had neglected. Whatever effect she had on her listeners, the effect on herself was electric. She saw the faces of her audience light up, and their eyes glisten. She felt the atmosphere crackle. From that moment on she was a political animal.

She arrived in Winnipeg in 1911, at the height of the Western boom. Her husband had sold his drugstore in Manitou and taken a post as district manager of Manufacturers Life. She was disgusted to learn that insurance companies, too, had a double standard. Men could be insured against various disabilities but women only against death.
Why?
Because, she was told, women were more sensitive than men; they could be more easily hurt in accidents; they were often the victims of pure nerves and “would like nothing better than to lie in bed for a week or two.” They would think they were hurt when they were not and “there would be no end of trouble.”

Winnipeg completed the political awakening of Nellie McClung. When Emmeline Pankhurst, one of the most fiery members of the British suffragette movement, came to town, the seeds of the Western women’s movement began to sprout. Conditions among women workers in the Winnipeg factories were appalling. The Local Council of Women decided that a woman factory inspector was needed. The council deputed Mrs. McClung and Mrs. Claude Nash, a friend of the Premier’s, to urge him to accompany them to see these conditions for himself. Reluctantly, he agreed.

Sir Rodmond Roblin, Premier of Manitoba, sits nervously in the rear seat of his limousine, his plump hands gripping the gold handle of his cane. He is a big, florid man in his sixties, more than a little pompous, and flanked now by two determined women: Mrs. Nash, in her grey lamb coat and crimson velvet hat, on one side and the splendidly attired Mrs. McClung on the other
.

Sir Rodmond is engaged in a monologue about working women. It is good for them to work, he says; there is far too much idleness these days. He himself worked a full day as a boy, and loved every minute of it! Are the ladies not being too sentimental about factory conditions? These young girls in the factories: are they really underpaid? No doubt
they live at home and work for pin money. At any rate, work won’t hurt them; it will keep them off the streets. Anyway, most workers are foreigners from countries where life is strenuous. They are used to hard work. Let them understand how money is made. Extravagant women are the curse of the age. And so forth. The monologue drones on. Mrs. Nash and Mrs. Mc Clung grit their teeth and say nothing
.

They reach a grubby factory, lead their man down a set of dark, slippery stairs and into an airless basement where naked light bulbs hang from smoky ceilings. The floor is ankle-deep in apple peelings and discarded cloth. There is no ventilation, no heat. A long line of untidy women crouch over sewing machines. Roblin takes one look, tries to leave; but his companions urge him to speak to the workers. Finally a question occurs to him: doesn’t anyone sweep the floors? He has to shout to make himself heard over the sound of the machines. No one answers. One woman shakes her head and keeps on working. Mrs. Mc Clung reminds the Premier that all are on piecework; they cannot afford the time for conversation
.

Again he tries to leave, but they will not let him go. They push him through a side door into a foul passage to show him a queue forming before a door marked “Toilet.” There are no separate facilities for women, and the plumbing isn’t working
.

“For God’s sake, let me out of here,” cries Rodmond Roblin. “I’m choking. I never knew such hell holes existed!”

But they are implacable. “These people work from 8:30 to 6:00, Sir Rodmond. Six days a week,” Mrs. Nash tells him sweetly. “But no doubt they get used to it.” Her sarcasm is lost on the Premier
.

Back on the street, he suddenly remembers an important interview and tries to break away, but they coax him into a shirt factory to witness young girls who are being “kept off the streets.” Here is a young woman whose hand, bound up with a dirty bandage, has been injured in a machine. Here is another who coughs continually with bronchitis but who cannot afford to stop work because she must support her family; if she takes time off somebody will be hired at once in her place. The manager arrives to tell the Premier that he doesn’t need any factory inspectors because “all the girls are glad of the work. I have no trouble with them.”