The Workers' Festival: A History of Labour Day in Canada 9781442657342

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Making of Labour’s Day
Chapter One. Holy Days, Holidays, and Labour Days
Chapter Two. The Craftsmen's Spectacle
Chapter Three. Sharing Labour Day
Chapter Four. The Universal Playday
Chapter Five. Marching to Different Tunes
Chapter Six. Clenched Fists, Clowns, and Chilling Out
Conclusion: The Legacy of Labour’s Day
Abbreviations
Notes
Index

Citation preview

THE WORKERS’ FESTIVAL: A HISTORY OF LABOUR DAY IN CANADA

For most Canadians today, Labour Day is the last gasp of summer fun: the final long weekend before returning to the everyday routine of work or school. But over its century-long history, there was much more to the September holiday than just having a day off. In The Workers’ Festival, Craig Heron and Steve Penfold examine the complicated history of Labour Day from its origins as a spectacle of skilled workers in the 1880s through to its declaration as a national statutory holiday in 1894 and finally to its reinvention throughout the twentieth century. The holiday’s inventors hoped to blend labour solidarity, community celebration, and increased leisure time by organizing parades, picnics, speeches, and other forms of respectable recreation. As the holiday evolved, so too did the rituals, with trade unionists embracing new forms of parading, negotiating, and bargaining, and other social groups reshaping the day and making it their own. Heron and Penfold also examine how Labour Day’s monopoly as the workers’ holiday has been challenged since its founding by alternative festivals such as May Day and International Women’s Day. The Workers’ Festival ranges widely into many of the key themes of labour history: union politics and rivalries, radical movements, religion (Catholic and Protestant), race and gender, and consumerism/leisure; as well as of cultural history: public celebration/urban procession, urban space and communication, and popular culture. From St John’s to Victoria, the authors follow the development of the holiday in all its varied forms. CRAIG HERON

is a professor in the Department of History at York Univer-

sity. STEVE PENFOLD is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto.

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The Workers’ Festival: A History of Labour Day in Canada

Craig Heron and Steve Penfold

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2005 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-3847-6 (cloth) ISBN 0-8020-4886-2 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Heron, Craig The workers’ festival : a history of Labour Day in Canada / Craig Heron and Steve Penfold. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-3847-6 (bound) ISBN 0-8020-4886-2 (pbk.) 1. Labour Day – Canada. I. Penfold, Steven, 1966– II. Title. HD7791.H47 2005

394.264

C2005-901356-7

Every effort has been made to obtain permission for the illustrations that appear in this book. Any oversights brought to our attention will be corrected in future printings. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: The Making of Labour’s Day xi

chapter one: HOLY DAYS, HOLIDAYS, AND LABOUR DAYS

3

chapter two: THE CRAFTSMEN’S SPECTACLE 41 chapter three: SHARING LABOUR DAY 81 chapter four: THE UNIVERSAL PLAYDAY

115

chapter five: MARCHING TO DIFFERENT TUNES

143

chapter six: CLENCHED FISTS, CLOWNS, AND CHILLING OUT 193

Conclusion: The Legacy of Labour’s Day Abbreviations 281 Notes

293

Index

329

271

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors of this book owe many debts to:

the helpful, patient staff of all the archival repositories listed at the end and the newspaper section of the Toronto Reference Library, as well as Allan Lundgren at IWA Canada, Local I-80, in Duncan, BC; a small army of research assistants: Robert Cupido, Kathryn Harvey, Jennine Hurl, Rob Kristofferson, Christine McFarland, Glenda Peard, Adele Perry, Jarrett Rudy, David Sobel, Sylvie Taschereau, and Sharon Wall; the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, which supported Steve with a doctoral fellowship and Craig with a research grant; the participants at several conferences, public lectures, and seminars for lively discussion and helpful feedback: the Labour Studies Research Group (1995); the ‘Spectacle, Monument, and Memory’ conference in York University’s History Department (1995); the Pacific Northwest Labour History Association conference in Vancouver (1996); the University of Edinburgh’s Canadian Studies Program conference on ‘Boundaries’ (1996); the ‘All We Worked For’ conference of the Canadian Committee on Labour

Acknowledgments

History and the Workers’ Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton (1996); the Living and Learning in Retirement program at Glendon College (1999); the J.B. McLachlan Memorial Society in Sydney (2001); the Toronto Popular Culture Reading Group (2003); and the ‘In the Streets’ conference of the Montreal History Group (2004); Bettina Bradbury and Ian McKay for critical readings that prompted helpful revisions; the staff, board, and volunteers of the Workers’ Arts and Heritage Centre, who gave us the opportunity to showcase some this material in a different setting and format, especially Jim Miller, our exhibit designer, and Jill Armstrong, our curatorial assistant; the competent, supportive staff at University of Toronto Press, especially Len Husband, Curtis Fahey, Val Cooke, Frances Mundy, Melissa Pitts, and Doug Hildebrand; our partners Diane Swartz and Bettina Bradbury for support and encouragement, and Anna and Emily Bradbury for patience with Craig’s obsession with the project and for their continuing commitment to social justice, which made him realize that someone out there might still care about this kind of history; and finally, Ruby Swartz for distracting Steve at all the right times.

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INTRODUCTION: THE MAKING OF LABOUR’S DAY

The marshals had their hands full pulling together the three thousand workers who converged on Market Square in London, Ontario, on 3 September 1894. It was the first nationally recognized Labour Day in Canada, and the local labour movement was out in force. Eventually, the first union contingents headed off down the city’s main streets under the blazing noonday sun. Leading the way was a group of seventy-five butchers on horseback, who set the tone of respectable craftsmanship with their crisply white shirts and hats and clean baskets on their arms. Several other groups presented themselves in identical outfits – the firemen from the railway car shops in their white shirts and black felt hats, the printers in their navy blue yachting caps (the apprentices wore brown), the barbers in their plug hats and white jackets. At a bare minimum, each group of unionists sported a distinctive badge pinned to the lapels of their best suits. Interspersed in the procession were floats depicting groups of craftsmen at work as they rolled along the streets. The plumbers showed men fitting pipes below ‘a statue of Venus taking a shower bath in public’ (‘clad in cheese cloth and looking wet but cool and beautiful withal’). The Industrial Brotherhood injected a political message with a small but impressive float, which ‘conveyed a world of meanUnionists gather on the Champs de Mars in Montreal for the 1904 Labour Day parade. (La Presse [Montreal], 6 September 1904, 1)

Introduction

ing,’ according to a local newspaper: under a ‘Strike Here’ banner, a large ballot was suspended over a ballot box with the words ‘Masses’ and ‘Classes’ and a large X beside the ‘Masses.’ Another display was described simply as ‘Coxey’s Army on a wagon,’ a reminder of the great march of 10,000 men on Washington, D.C., earlier that year. The city firemen’s sparkling equipment also caught plenty of attention. Spread throughout the parade were several marching bands and the decorated delivery wagons of three butchers, three steam laundries, a fuel company, a newspaper, a roofing company, and two furniture companies, whose exhibits, according to a local newspaper, ‘gave the young people matrimonially inclined something to talk about in their evening rambles.’ The press reported that thousands had greeted the marchers along the route and followed them to Queen’s Park. There, after brief words of welcome from the mayor and labour leader Joseph Marks, they cheered their favourites in a series of amateur sporting events. Among them, the Patrons of Industry tug-of-war team overwhelmed the Grand Trunk railwaymen, Norval Wanless easily won the hundred-yard race, and Mrs A. Lockwood triumphed in the married ladies’ race. The day concluded with ‘burlesque’ performers in oriental outfits waging mock battles between China and Japan.1 Even before the parade began, however, the London celebration was losing focus. While large crowds lined the streets to view the procession, other Londoners obviously preferred sports and voted with their feet by heading to the grandstand to find the best seats. ‘Long before the procession reached its destination – before it started from the square, in fact – citizens began to flock to the park,’ the Advertiser reported. Nor were all the desires of pleasure-seeking Londoners contained within the official celebrations. Many residents used the day off to get out of the city, like the members of the London Bicycle Club, who travelled to nearby Seaforth, or young parishioners of the Church of St John, who left town for a picnic. Others found alternative pastimes around London, ranging from respectable to rough. The day after the holiday, the local police court showed the after-effects of exuberant celebration. ‘There were many persons troubled with “that tired feeling” and swelled heads in the Police Court today,’ the

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Advertiser commented. ‘They had started out to celebrate Labour Day, but got into the wrong.’2 The spectacle of the parade, the draw of the grandstand, and the appeal of rough and respectable pleasure highlighted the possibilities and tensions of Labour Day as a workers’ festival and an official statutory holiday. For local craft unions, the day offered time off work to mount an elaborate celebration, ranging from a respectable parade down the main streets to organized sporting events at the park. These events both articulated the pride and respectability of craft unions and invited the wider community into the celebration. To start the celebration, local unionists mounted impressive displays that highlighted their work and its importance in building civilized communities, their feelings of craft brotherhood and pride, their status as breadwinners, and their sense of citizenship and respectability. These skilled workers carefully chose costumes and regalia, produced striking works of art on wheels, and arranged themselves purposefully into highly symbolic marching formations. For the afternoon, they organized sporting events that attracted both participants and spectators, pitting craft against craft and worker against worker in entertaining athletic contests that reflected and reinforced informal bonds among workmates, family members, neighbours, and citizens. Throughout all these events, craft unions reached out to their local community by taking over the significant public spaces of their cities, marshalling in central squares, marching down the main streets, and assembling afterwards in large parks to accommodate bustling crowds of all classes. From the perspective of the residents of London, from workers up to capitalists, the new national statutory holiday offered the choice of many activities: the spectacle of the craftsmen, the speeches of politicians and labour leaders, the sporting events at the park, the semi-private events of fraternal orders and church groups, the excursions of railway companies, the commercial offerings of local taverns, and many more privatized and informal activities. Craftsmen marched along the main streets to focus attention on one idea of the celebration, and politicians announced their own commitment to the value of labour, but spectators brought their own

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expectations and other Londoners simply ignored these events, combined them with their own priorities, or used the day for other purposes. Even in its first year as a statutory holiday, Labour Day was already open to the influence of many different social groups. For more than a century, without any national coordination, Labour Day events have been organized across the country. Initiated by craft unions on a local basis in the 1880s, the day was institutionalized as an official statutory holiday in 1894. Over the next century, the evolution of Labour Day was the product of many forces and influences: the tensions and contradictions inherent in its original conception, the internal politics and external challenges of the labour movement, and wider social and cultural developments. As in London in 1894, the making of Labour Day involved the combination of and competition between the priorities of both workers’ movements and wider communities. Craftsmen initiated the day, and in many communities unions continued to shape it actively, but organized labour never had a singular notion of the holiday’s meaning. For organized labour, Labour Day originally combined three distinct impulses. First, it should be a workers’ festival, a chance for organized labour to celebrate its own strength and dignity. Workers used the day to proclaim their respectability, to advance political positions, and to demonstrate the products and process of their work. Second, as a public celebration, Labour Day should be a day for the public to salute the worker’s contribution to industrial society. Not satisfied with talking among themselves, unionists actively courted the wider community, both through parades in the main streets of the city and by reaching out to newspapers, photographers, civic leaders, the clergy, and other groups. Finally, as a statutory holiday, Labour Day should be a day of leisure, a release from the pressures of work in capitalist industry. After the parade, workers should have a chance for recreation. Even on their own, each of these ideas would mean challenges for trade unions that were often weak and divided. But a larger problem stemmed from the difficulty of fitting the three demands together. From the beginning, it was a challenge to shape the new public holiday to celebrate labour’s dignity and solidarity, connect with the wider community, and satisfy workers’ recreational needs.

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To build a festival that focused attention on workers, organized labour largely relied on parades through the main streets of cities. Over the following century, the composition and style of the parade would change, but many workers would turn to this form of street performance for broadly similar purposes. The ‘art’ involved in these events was simple, sometimes crude, but always colourful and engaging. While borrowing heavily from many familiar forms of public celebration, it created the most visible, persistent, and widespread form of collectively created working-class cultural production that Canada has ever seen. The various projects of creating this art nonetheless contained tensions and contradictions from the outset. The parades were usually the product of the most organized and active trade unionists and represented performances of particular ideas in the house of labour and its relationship to wider communities. Labour Day processions relied on the strength of workers’ movements in the country, a fact that linked the fate of the festival to institutions facing both external and internal challenges. In Canada, workers’ movements had a constant struggle for survival before the Second World War. Their confidence and morale was regularly sapped by bitter, union-busting strikes, hostile courts, unemployment, and transient memberships. In many parts of the country, Labour Day would eventually die out completely as a workers’ festival or limp on as a spiritless exercise in commercialized civic boosterism on a public holiday without clear focus or common purpose. Even within the labour movement, workers did not always agree on the proper way (or the proper day) to honour labour. The original craftsmen’s parades would die out by the First World War, and, while the practice of mounting a parade each September would be revived and reinvented in some places, Labour Day parades never came back in others. Various groups of workers became disgusted with the evolution of Labour Day and began to organize new workers’ festivals. In the early 1900s, Marxist and Catholic workers’ movements in some regions of Canada mounted serious cultural alternatives that drained away much of Labour Day’s early vitality. By the 1930s, May Day in particular had replaced or seriously competed with the blander September events. Much later, International Women’s Day (IWD)

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would emerge as an alternative feminist festival for working women. Labour Day parades thus lost their monopoly on annual working-class celebration. Labour leaders were no more successful at controlling the meaning of their festival in the wider community. They had convinced the government to give a legal holiday not just to the workers being honoured but to the whole country. Turning to that community with familiar forms of celebration and earnest messages, they soon found other interests and groups taking hold of the holiday for their own purposes. Newspaper editors, clergymen, politicians, advertisers, and sporting associations, among others, shaped and reshaped the labourist message of the holiday and opened the day up to other interpretations. These groups did not simply respond to union messages; they brought their own ideas of labour, leisure, and community into an ongoing discussion of what the annual holiday would mean. At times, some labour leaders questioned the results, but these groups were not simply trying to distract attention from some authentic, union version of Labour Day. Rather, from the beginning, the wider community was part of making the day. A more diffuse (and ultimately more difficult) problem was the openendedness of Labour Day as a public holiday. Wage earners and their families could easily turn their time off the job to private pleasures rather than cultural solidarity. In the beginning, craftsmen hoped to contain much of this impulse in their own earnest, respectable events, but commercializers mounted a range of alternative activities and citizens found more privatized, informal ways to spend the day. Eventually, the tension between public celebration and private leisure would eat away at the grand ideals of the festival’s original proponents. Over time, as it took its place in a more regular series of public holidays and private vacations through the warmer months in Canada, Labour Day came to carry quite different meanings – as an occasion for major sporting events, a seasonal turning point signalling the end of summer vacation time and the beginning of the school year for children, and an opportunity for extra shopping. Yet union leaders helped to create and reinforce this development, in the early days by lobbying for a statutory holiday that gave every

xvi

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Canadian a day off (opening up the day to both commercial and informal leisure for both workers and other citizens alike) and later by bargaining for higher wages, more time off, and other benefits that moved some workers into a more secure place in an emerging mass-consumption society. This book, then, explores the ups and downs and twists and turns of the workers’ festival, a term we use both descriptively and somewhat ironically. On the one hand, the story of Labour Day turns a spotlight on the solidarities, exclusions, cross-currents, and broad cultural developments that affected workers’ ability to forge cultural projects closely linked to their social, economic, and political goals. On the other, it is a story of a holiday that never really belonged to workers. Craftsmen initiated the day, and unions continued to shape its meaning in important ways, but organized labour’s conception never represented the whole meaning of Labour Day, which was a holiday of many voices that at once reinforced and competed with each other, subject to shifting configurations of class relations, political culture, public celebration, and popular leisure that transcended the particular history of trade unions. Our discussion starts by laying out the basic social and cultural dimensions of Victorian public celebrations and special days, which formed the raw material of Labour Day, and the efforts of organized craftsworkers to have their new celebration recognized as a national statutory holiday. The next chapters trace different threads of the early history of the new celebration. Chapter 2 discusses ‘the craftsmen’s spectacle,’ organized labour’s first attempt to create a workers’ festival by parading the streets of many cities across the country. These processions presented a set of ideas about the house of labour and its relationship to the broader community, built on a vision of craft respectability. The following two chapters discuss alternative ways of thinking about Labour Day. Chapter 3 focuses on the efforts of newspaper editors, politicians, clergymen, and others to wrestle with the meaning of the new holiday. Seeing both promise and peril in Labour Day, their reports, editorials, illustrations, speeches, and sermons embraced some of the messages of the craftsmen’s spectacle and sought to downplay and reshape others. Chapter 4 describes the impulse

xvii

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to leisure, both commercial and more private and informal, developments that had their seeds in the original idea of Labour Day but soon diverged from it. Chapter 5 examines the decline of the craftsmen’s spectacle in the first decades of the twentieth century and the rising challenge to it by different working class festivals, particularly in the inter-war period. The final chapter carries the story forward into the second half of the twentieth century, when Labour Day parades underwent a partial revival but broader changes in culture and social life altered Labour Day’s meaning. Much of our discussion is based on a review of annual reports on Labour Day events in local newspapers in major Canadian cities from St John’s to Victoria, supplemented with research in union records, surveys of other kinds of celebrations and holidays, and other related material. These sources provide a rich sense of the products of a century of Labour Day celebrations – parades, speeches, sermons, advertisements, illustrations, and photographs – but hardly offer perfect windows into events. Our study is necessarily focused on the products of Labour Day rather than the process of creating them or the reactions of spectators. When possible, we have consulted union minutes and other sources to provide clues, but little direct evidence of planning and executing the diverse activities has survived, and the priorities of the social groups who produced the day live on mainly in the products themselves. These products – the trappings of workers’ festivals – were a kind of popular art that no cultural institutions cared about then or now. Most of the floats, costumes, banners, and placards were not made to last and have largely vanished. Today, little of their artistry survives outside old photographs. In this sense, our book is more than a narrative – it is an exercise in cultural retrieval, though one that hopes to avoid simple nostalgia. That is why we have included so many pictures of the creative elements in these festivals. They provide the last remaining glimpses of working-class cultures whose possibilities, exclusions, silences, and contradictions deserve to be taken seriously in the wider cultural history of the country. In the words of a nineteenth-century labour banner, ‘Art Is Long, Life Is Short.’3

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THE WORKERS’ FESTIVAL: A HISTORY OF LABOUR DAY IN CANADA

chapter one

HOLY DAYS, HOLIDAYS, AND LABOUR DAYS

Holidays have a long history. They had always meant a break from the daily routines of work, whether tilling the soil or toiling in a factory. Today, we tend to use the term holiday interchangeably with vacation, but our modern notion of a vacation – a concentrated two to four weeks of private relaxation or travel each year – has not been around for more than half a century for most of the population. More often in the past, everything came to a halt at the same time, and the whole community threw itself into holidaying together. Holidays were always public. In preindustrial times, these moments might be folk festivals connected to the seasonal cycle – especially a spring fertility festival around May Day and, at the end of the year, collective merry-making for two weeks around Christmas and New Year, when families had their feasts but also participated in dancing in the streets, skating on frozen ponds and rivers, and mumming (Newfoundland) or ‘belsnickling’ (Nova Scotia) from house to house. The Catholic Church also insisted on setting apart from secular life a large number of religious celebrations, including special saints’ days such as Quebec’s beloved Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day. While church services were always a central part of these holidays, they were also occasions for carnivalesque public fun – feasting and drinking, dancing and fighting, Working men join the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day parade in Montreal in 1879. (LAC, C72234)

The Workers’ Festival

parading and performing. So, too, were special public feasts held in honour of royal marriage or birth.1 In the nineteenth century, public celebrations gradually won state sanction. They could have large political purposes. In many Western nations in this period, they became carefully orchestrated ceremonies dedicated to cultivating citizenship in a stronger nation-state. In the United States, 4 July became this kind of event, with orderly processions, military displays, fireworks, and inspirational speeches. Canada moved in this direction more slowly. Before Confederation, the only ‘official’ public holiday was the celebration of Queen Victoria’s birthday, launched in the 1840s as part of the process of binding the British North American colonies more tightly to the British empire. A new public holiday known as Dominion Day first appeared in 1867 to mark the inauguration of the new semi-autonomous nation-state known as Canada. For decades after, Canadians left work behind on 24 May and 1 July to participate in these public acknowledgments of Canada’s status within the empire.2 By the late nineteenth century, when craft workers in industrial cities initiated early Labour Day demonstrations, holidays had taken on a basic structure, including some mix of parades, organized sports, dances, excursions, and other pastimes. None of these elements was created or sustained by holidays alone. Each had a broader history that flowed into holidaying, and each had its own particular social dynamics and tensions. Parades, speeches, and official celebrations were the clearest attempt to endow holidays with civic and public purpose, but they could never control audience reaction or behaviour and always faced competition from more diffuse activities. Even leisure was not immune to confusion and tension, as respectable elites increasingly confronted commercialized events and rough pleasures. Early Labour Day celebrations flowed out of this broader popular culture of celebration.

Into the Streets Parading was a well-established, extremely popular form of public display in the streets of nineteenth-century Canadian towns and cities. In

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Holy Days, Holidays, and Labour Days

London, for example, Labour Day was far from the first time that formations of respectable looking men had taken to the streets in the summer of 1894. The warm-weather parading season had been kicked off four months before, when a costumed theatre troupe toured the streets to advertise its upcoming performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, accompanied by two bands (‘one white and one colored’), half a dozen bloodhounds, and a donkey. The following Sunday, 150 members of the local branch of the Independent Order of Oddfellows followed the band of the First Hussars to a Methodist church for their annual services. Queen Victoria’s birthday on 24 May passed off quietly with no parade at all, but only five days later a procession of Liberal Party groups accompanied Ontario Premier Sir Oliver Mowat from the railway station to the Opera House, where he gave a speech. In early June, fellow workers and lodge brothers mourned the death of Grand Trunk Railway brakeman Robert Johnson by falling in behind his funeral cortege as it wound solemnly through the streets. The Free Masons marched as usual on St John’s Day (24 June) but did not outdo their fraternal rivals, the Foresters, who had taken to the streets a week before. Londoners were not the only marchers on the city’s main thoroughfares that summer – Cook and Whitby’s Circus arrived in mid July and ‘gave a street parade that was witnessed by thousands.’ And so it went, on and on. By the time London’s workers marshalled their floats and formations in September, local citizens had taken to the city’s sidewalks to witness over thirty separate processions. The fact that ‘thousands of spectators’ lined up the sidewalks to watch yet another parade of the season, then, is testimony to the power of this performative act in Victorian cities.3 London’s summer schedule of parading in 1894 was fairly typical for the Victorian era. Across Canada, civic leaders organized parades to celebrate both the Canadian and the imperial public holidays – Dominion Day and the Queen’s Birthday (later known as Victoria Day and in some parts of the country as Empire Day), as well as municipal anniversaries. Other groups marched on their own special days. The Irish paraded on their respective religious holidays, St Patrick’s Day in March and the ‘Glorious Twelfth’ of July. The Catholic Church staged huge public processions, especially in Quebec, where religion and ethnicity were interwo-

5

The Workers’ Festival

Parades helped to solidify and assert ethnic identity in Canadian cities in the nineteenth century. Here, the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society is shown in Montreal in 1874. (LAC, C61319)

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Holy Days, Holidays, and Labour Days

ven, especially on Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day on 24 June. Politicians and political parties mobilized their supporters into parades before and after elections. Some voluntary associations, from fire companies and fraternal orders to Sunday schools and temperance groups, developed their own parading traditions, while funerals produced parades of varying size depending on the social status of the deceased. In the first hint of commercialization of these events, circuses also heralded their arrival in town with exotic, colourful parades. There were, in addition, much more disorderly parades – burlesques of public events or rowdy protests, from charivaris to impromptu marches of angry strikers.4 Parading had considerable political and cultural importance in the nineteenth century. By occupying public space, marchers made a clear and direct claim to public attention. Organizers normally planned a parade route to cover the main public thoroughfares and significant central spaces of a city: Yonge Street and King Street in Toronto, Barrington Street in Halifax, Dundas Street in London, Portage Street in Winnipeg, and so on.5 Residents in towns and cities in Victorian Canada carefully observed activities in the central streets, an impulse tied to both the meaning of public streets and the nature of urban geography. The street was not only a route for circulating goods and people but also a public space where urban residents could gather and communicate. Formal political and cultural activities like parades co-existed with a variety of activities that helped to establish and reinforce social identities: promenading, rioting, gossiping, hawking, advertising, and much more were woven together to form the tapestry of public urban life.6 The shape of cities reinforced the importance of these social uses. Cities were changing in late Victorian Canada, under growing pressure from industrialization, population increases, ethnic diversification, new transportation technologies, and related cultural transformations, but central streets still dominated the daily routines of urban life, with homes, grocery stores, churches, manufactories, and other buildings often intermingled and tightly packed. Unlike today, when most people live far from downtown and typically experience parades as highlight packages on the local news, most city dwellers in the Victorian period could easily walk to central streets

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The Loyal Orange Order used parades like this one in Toronto in 1874 to promote the cause of Protestant Britishness. Large numbers of its members were workingmen. (LAC, C61356)

and witness parades first hand. By claiming public space, then, parades could directly communicate important messages to a wide array of urban residents.7 Parades ranged in size, composition, and level of choreography. Large civic celebrations could literally take over the whole centre of a city, but a surprising number of smaller processions simply passed through the normal rhythms of street life. The Guelph Orangemen, for example, contributed to the local parading calendar for 1881 by marching behind a band right through other street activities to the railway station for an excursion to Toronto. Similarly, in Ottawa one morning, people paused in their daily routines to watch an elderly aboriginal man carrying ‘a small coffin covered with red cloth and ornamented with fringe and beads’ followed by ‘two younger Indians [and] ... a solitary squaw.’8 These proces-

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Holy Days, Holidays, and Labour Days

In 1874 members of Toronto’s lodges of Foresters held a summer parade en route to their picnic. Typically, women watched rather than marched. (LAC, C61376)

sions played out small, relatively brief social dramas. Yet they held the attention of urban residents, who carefully examined the display and comportment of even minor processions for moral lessons. In 1872 the Ottawa Citizen reported on the meeting of two funeral processions, an occurrence that ‘pleasantly illustrate[d] the good feeling which existed between Protestants and Roman Catholics of this city.’ The two processions came to a major corner along Richmond Street at the same time, but, rather than bickering or taking to violence, they joined, with the Roman Catholic cortège in the lead. When the two processions reached the Catholic cemetery, ‘instead of passing on [the Catholic group] turned slightly aside and played the other procession past before they turned in to their own grounds. This courtesy was remarked on by all who saw it.’9 The hallmark of all legitimate claims to public space was respectabil-

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The Workers’ Festival

Trades processions were occasions for workingmen to publicly display the ‘arts and mysteries’ of their crafts and manufacturers to show off their goods. They often formed part of other civic events, as in this Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day parade in Montreal in 1897. This float in the Saint-Cunégonde section proclaimed ‘Honour to the Workers.’ (Le monde illustré, 10 July 1897, 165)

ity. Respectability was a powerful notion in all arenas of social life in the late nineteenth century. As an idea, it was both prescription and practice. It encapsulated clearly understood expectations of behavior – sobriety, order, thrift, honour, dignity, to name a few – and some more dimly glimpsed notions about character, comportment, class, gender, and race.10 In parades, it was forcefully announced in a standard structure that was repeated over and over again, and was evidently learned with little formal prescription. The Union Jack headed almost every parade. Many Canadians simply assumed that they were citizens of the British empire and positioned the flag prominently to acknowledge the imperial connection.11 But this symbol of British identity was also a key part of the

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Holy Days, Holidays, and Labour Days

informal code of respectable public performance, which demanded that the flag accompany all other emblems of identity. ‘It is at least the law of custom in all public processions that the national flag shall be carried in advance of or alongside any other colors that may be carried,’ the Hamilton Spectator reported in 1892, condemning a local march that did not follow the code.12 Behind the flag, parade organizers marshalled more immediate identities. A respectable procession was rarely a haphazard collection of individual citizens. Marchers were always grouped by membership in a formal organization – a political party, a church, a school, or, most commonly, a voluntary or ethnic society. How carefully the groups were coordinated depended on the nature of the event. On important civic occasions like the arrival of the Prince of Wales in 1860, a declaration of city status (as in Guelph in 1879), or the funeral of a prominent politician like D’Arcy McGee in 1868, processions included politicians, ethnic societies, religious institutions, schools, employers, trades organizations, fraternal orders, military bands, and sundry others.13 Organizing committees (generally composed of prominent citizens appointed by the city or town council) often planned the event to acknowledge hierarchy or community, building a parade where the order of marching was determined by social status, historical importance, or some other clearly understood criterion.14 Many parades required less coordination for the simple reason that they contained only one or a few types of organizations. Large, elaborately choreographed civic processions were much less common than marches organized by one particular social group – for example, on the African Canadians’ Emancipation Day, the Irish Catholics’ St Patrick’s Day, or the Irish Protestants’ Glorious Twelfth. In many cases, one particular society or club held the only parade on a broader public holiday. In Ontario, many cities would have had no parade on Dominion Day without the efforts of the Independent Order of Foresters, who adopted the anniversary as ‘their special fête day’ shortly after they arrived in the province in the early 1870s.15 The military served a similar function elsewhere. ‘There would have been nothing to mark the occasion but for the efforts of the Artillerymen and Band to do it honor,’ the Guelph Mercury com-

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Torchlight processions on election night were common in the nineteenth century. Here, rowdy crowds of Tories celebrate a victory in Hamilton in 1874. (LAC, C7627)

plained of the Queen’s Birthday in May 1882.16 Firemen were another group that ensured some public recognition of significant days, marshalling their colourful displays in the streets of many cities.17 For most cases, the use of the word ‘marching’ can be taken quite literally, since the respectable parade borrowed the style of the militia.18 Organizations moved along in square, sober formations, followed the syncopation of brass bands, and were often marked off with separate banners and distinctive uniforms, even when marchers joined a parade as individuals. ‘Brethren’ who were ‘not a member of any lodge’ marched in a Toronto Masonic procession, but the marshals were careful to arrange them ‘two and two’ between the 18th Battalion Band and the lines of assembled lodges. The ‘Irishmen and descendants belonging to no particular society’ who joined an Ottawa St Patrick’s Day parade were

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Holy Days, Holidays, and Labour Days

placed behind the Temperance Society and directly in front of a marshal on horseback, perhaps so he could keep an eye on any potential disorder.19 Regardless, such unorganized formations were rare and easily controlled amid the more numerous groups distinguished by banner or other regalia. There were some exceptions to these militia-style formations. Election crowds, for example, could be boisterous and rowdy. On election night, no doubt under the influence of a few drinks, members of the victorious party would parade the streets blowing horns and cheering their candidate. They often happened upon supporters of the defeated party out to cause trouble.20 Other parades teetered constantly on the edge of violence, especially those that inflamed sectarian passions. Protestant and Catholic Irishmen clashed whenever one invaded the streets allegedly controlled by the other. As a result, some Catholics and Protestants conspicuously avoided each other’s neighbourhoods to prevent sectarian strife, reinforcing the importance of carefully choosing the parade route. The day after an Orange march in Ottawa, the Citizen reported that with ‘due consideration to the feelings of those who are opposed to them in principle, the route of the procession was so planned as to avoid those sections of the city where their appearance might appear aggressive, and confined to that portion of the city in which the large majority were Protestants. This may be looked upon as a courteous recognition of the action of the Roman Catholic church, which for several years past has confined the procession of the Corpus Christi to the lower wards, chiefly inhabited by Roman Catholics.’21 The bawdiest alternative to the ordered style of parading was the colourful tradition of the carnival. For generations, the most common variant had been the charivari, an old form of crowd action that commonly ‘made the night hideous’ in communities across North America. Participants established a carnivalesque atmosphere by donning masks and absurd costumes, making loud ‘discordant’ music with primitive noisemakers, and generally acting rowdy and raucous. They used these rituals to shame and punish offenders against public morality, such as elderly men with young brides. By the time workers took to the streets in

13

The Workers’ Festival

In 1872 the firefighters of London, Ontario, held a torchlight parade to welcome the governor general to town. (LAC C58857)

the first Labour Day parades, however, charivaris were rarely seen in major urban centres.22 The burlesque style of presentation lingered on in the more formally organized marches of street-theatre by groups calling themselves Calithumpians, Polymorphians, Terribles, and the like. They often joined other celebrations, becoming spectacles within the spectacle, sometimes as a unique form of social or political satire aimed at both elites and the lower orders, or as light entertainment for official ceremonies and private advertising.23 By the 1870s, Calithumpians and Polymorphians trailed civic leaders, capitalist employers, military bands, and church groups in civic pageants and public holidays across Canada. In 1878, in Strathroy, ‘a hideous giant, horrible and high,’ frightened children along the route of

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Holy Days, Holidays, and Labour Days

Some parades presented carnivalesque street theatre, intended to offer satirical comment on local community life. In 1877 this group of two hundred paraders in Kingston, Ontario, calling themselves the Society of Physiognoscospochriphals, decked themselves in outlandish costumes and marched after dark through streets crowded with laughing spectators. (Canadian Illustrated News, 13 October 1877, 229.)

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The Workers’ Festival

the town’s otherwise staid daytime celebration on 1 July. In Ottawa the last attraction of the 1885 Dominion Day celebration saw local dignitaries, including members of the city council, don ‘masks of the most ludicrous description’ for a torchlight procession through the capital.24 Ultimately, the traditions of the carnivalesque or rowdy street presentation flowed into the circus parade, which commonly announced the arrival of the big top in a city.25 In the twentieth century, they would continue on in still tamer form in Santa Claus parades.26 Most parades, however, were respectable in style, adopting rectangular formations, fine clothes or uniforms, banners and regalia, brass bands, and often in-step marching. Indeed, to read newspaper reports of organized processions by virtually any group in Victorian Canada is to confront a wearying succession of compliments for their ‘most orderly and respectable appearance.’ Parades were typically complimented as ‘extremely handsome’ in appearance, acclaimed for their ‘careful and patient drill,’ lauded for being ‘uniform and dressy,’ saluted for their ‘decorum and regularity,’ or praised for the way ‘the costumes were neatly and tastefully got up.’27 Superlatives abounded, as in the case of one correspondent’s unlikely (but not atypical) claim that a Dominion Day procession in Norwich was ‘the most interesting turnout of the kind ever witnessed in the country.’28 The litany of compliments for ordered presentations is a testimony to the civic boosterism of Victorian newspapers, as well as to the dominance of the respectable, militia style of parading. Few groups, it seemed, contemplated any parade style besides marching soberly down the street in a reasonably straight line, carrying banners, wearing uniforms, and following the inevitable brass bands.29 By the time workers took to the streets for early Labour Day marches, the respectable tradition of parading was clearly dominant. Respectability had a special meaning for women. The dominant gender ideology of the period relegated women to the ‘private,’ domestic sphere and assigned the ‘public’ sphere to men, but these were virtual, prescriptive categories rather than exact descriptions of daily life. Women were commonly found walking the streets in this period, but it was certainly not considered appropriate for women to march in public proces-

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Holy Days, Holidays, and Labour Days

Circus parades, such as this Barnum and Baily version, combined fantasy and carnival with commercialism. (Le monde illustré, 3 August 1895, 194)

sions.30 Though they sometimes marched in early temperance parades,31 this seems to have been the exception rather than the rule and was certainly not universally accepted. Women participating in the trades procession held in Halifax to celebrate Confederation in 1867, for example, drew the ire of a newspaper editor.32 Parade organizers typically incorporated women in carefully circumscribed ways. Sometimes they used women as mythical figures or as symbols of such abstract concepts as liberty or justice. Women represented ‘Britannia’ and the eleven provinces and territories during the 1889 Dominion Day parade in Vancouver.33 In other cases, feminine images (rather than actual women) were used as parody, poking fun at ‘hen-pecked husbands’ or at women who transcended their proper sphere by participating in the cash economy.34 When actual women appeared as themselves, they rarely walked with the other marchers. Typically, they rode in proper vehicles. The ‘ladies’ in one

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The Workers’ Festival

Glorious Twelfth procession ‘were carried at the head of the parade’ in ‘open carriages.’35 The most common roles for women were more hidden or passive. They often contributed their volunteer labour to constructing floats, serving as faithful behind-the-scenes helpers, sewing, decorating, and trimming. ‘No. 7 Guardian Lowery’s reel owed much of its splendor to several young ladies of Dalhousie Ward,’ the Ottawa Citizen reported in a rare public recognition of women’s volunteer labour. Spectatorship was another important female role, if a somewhat passive one. Unlike behind-the-scenes help, newspapers frequently commented on the important role of women as spectators, lending not only an audience for the event but a respectable character to proceedings. ‘The sidewalks all along the route were well lined with spectators, whilst windows and verandas were filled with gaily dressed ladies, many of whom greeted the Orangemen as they passed with the waving of handkerchiefs and approving smiles,’ the Globe reported of one march. The example also hints at the way the division between all-male formations and mixed audience helped to distinguish a respectable spectacle from surrounding city life, which was less ordered and more open to informal and chaotic uses. Like buildings and sidewalks, spectators defined the border between the territory of respectable processions and the rest of urban space.36 Respectability had a racial dimension as well. Faces of marchers were usually white, although some racial minorities could be found organizing their own parades or marching in other processions in this period. Like circuses, travelling minstrel shows used rowdy, carnivalesque processions to announce their arrival in town and to advertise upcoming performances, but African Canadians held more respectable parades for Emancipation Day37 and also occasionally turned up in civic pageants and processions, although they were often assigned the least favourable positions.38 Spectators could be hostile. The Victoria Rifles, Halifax’s black volunteer company, faced frequent ridicule for their participation in the city’s parades.39 Despite these slights, participation by African Canadians and other minorities in such marches could be well received by the local press. The Hamilton Spectator praised an Emancipation Day march

18

Holy Days, Holidays, and Labour Days

Racial minorities also took to the streets in respectable processions. For many years, African Canadians organized their own Emancipation Day events to celebrate the abolition of American slavery. This parade was photographed in Amherstberg, Ontario, in 1894. A year later in Vancouver, Chinese residents marched down Hastings Street. (LAC, PA163923; VPL, 53)

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The Workers’ Festival

in that city for its ‘utmost decorum,’ gushing (in familiar style) that ‘the turnout [was] the largest and most respectable looking of the kind which the city had ever seen.’40 Other visible minorities might find a place in urban festivals. A group of ‘Micmacs,’ for example, marched in the middle of the Halifax centenary parade in 1849. Eleven years later, an ‘Indian chief and two braves’ brought up the rear of the Prince of Wales procession in Saint John.41 In Toronto in 1875, the ‘Tuscarora Indian Band and some dozen redskins’ from a lacrosse club appeared in an otherwise disappointing Dominion Day procession.42 In Victoria, Chinese Canadians participated in the city’s Victoria Day parade in 1900.43 More often, however, non-white faces (often whites in disguise) appeared as exotica, comedy, or stereotype, putting racist images on display as small spectacles within the confines of the broader respectable march. ‘One of the most amusing of the Terribles,’ the Ottawa Citizen gushed in 1886, ‘was Mr. Joe O’Connor of burnt-cork fame, who, mounted upon a donkey and made up as a clown, acted his part to perfection.’44 The march of the city’s teamsters in London in 1893 also used racist images as comic relief: ‘Alderman Coo presented an extremely comical appearance upon his wheel. Over his head was a large umbrella, and about him was a veritable market garden. The rider had his face blackened, and when obstreperous bystanders interfered with his progress he would warn them off in negro dialect.’45 In many cases, then, racist images could be used to give carnival touches to otherwise staid marches, preserving respectability for white faces and adding colour without fundamentally altering the respectable character of the procession. Access to the streets, apparently, did not necessarily mean acceptance in broader culture.

Proletarian Parading Class also intersected with respectability. Craft workers often marched in civic processions, helping their communities mark significant events or anniversaries. In Saint John’s railway celebration in 1853, for example, various trades marched with banners and fine uniforms, leading floats

20

Holy Days, Holidays, and Labour Days

Processions of natives through the main streets of Canadian cities were not common in the nineteenth century. Here they are led by Catholic clergy in a Corpus Christi Day procession in 1870 at Caughnawauga. (LAC, C50306)

that depicted their own particular labour process. Seven years later, several trades joined politicians, temperance societies, and other groups in welcoming the Prince of Wales to the city.46 Contingents of craftworkers also appeared in Saint-Jean-Baptiste parades in Quebec in this period. In joining such marches, workers drew primarily on the nearly half-century British North American experience of ‘trades processions,’ a parading tradition stretching back through generations to the processions organized by craft guilds in early modern Europe. These European craft organizations had not reappeared in the New World to any significant extent, but organizations of artisans had emerged and reasserted what they understood to be the symbolic and ceremonial forms of the craft. Trades processions became familiar features of important public celebrations, in which master craftsmen and early industrialists led their jour-

21

The Workers’ Festival

neymen and apprentices through the streets as part of civic events. As the crafts began to splinter along the dividing line between capitalist employer and waged worker, the new craft unions adopted some of the ‘ancient’ symbols of the craft. They, too, were often incorporated into such public ceremonies as welcoming a new governor general, opening a railway, burying a prominent politician, or launching a nation-state in 1867.47 In the 1860s and 1870s, craftsmen in Canada began to hold their own street processions as part of their first struggles for rights and recognition. In June 1867 a huge procession through the streets of Montreal organized by l’Union nationale, a local labour federation led by the charismatic Médéric Lanctôt, was undoubtedly the first craftsmen’s parade wrenched out of its previous place in the hierarchically structured civic and religious parades.48 Similarly, five years later, the Nine-Hour Leagues in southern Ontario and Quebec sponsored public demonstrations in support of shorter hours. The most celebrated, held in Hamilton on 15 May 1872, was a strike parade that wound through the industrial district of the city with dramatic, colourful craft and industrial displays.49 A decade later, the practice was revived as the workers’ movements in mining communities and larger cities found their feet. Strike parades remained a separate and recurring tradition throughout the twentieth century. In other cases, workers used parades for political purposes ranging from celebration to protest. On two separate occasions in 1874, Ottawa craft unionists organized a torchlight procession to salute D.J. O’Donaghue, a local printer and member of the provincial Legislative Assembly.50 On some occasions, workers’ processions were not so tame and respectable.51 Unemployed workers marched on city halls in Ottawa and Montreal in 1877 and Toronto in 1891. These angrier, more menacing marches, which in a later time would be called ‘demonstrations,’ would continue through the twentieth century.52 Another tradition of workers’ procession was established with the arrival of the Salvation Army in 1882. The Army launched a class-based critique of mainstream churches and a popular, alternative model to the staid respectability of much of nineteenth-century official public life. It attracted attention and encouraged spirited

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Holy Days, Holidays, and Labour Days

In 1871, about 1,500 members of Montreal’s Workingmen’s Mutual Benefit Society and families took advantage of the Dominion Day holiday to travel down river to Sorel for a picnic and then dancing on board their rented steamers on the way home. (LAC, C56370)

participation through boisterous meetings and marches, colourful banners, participatory music making with simple instruments, and hymns using melodies adapted from popular songs. In many ways, Salvation Army marches were unique. Though boisterous and emotional, they were quite different from the burlesque style of the Calithumpians, circuses, or minstrel shows, since the Army’s soldiers did not don masks, use floats or exotica, or engage in choreographed performance. On the other hand, as parades composed mainly of workers, they were quite different from respectable trades’ processions. Notably, despite the Army’s military metaphors and stylized uniforms, the marches did not conform to dominant standards of fragile femininity: women were not passive symbols or satirical images in Army marches, they were active participants, march-

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The Workers’ Festival

By 1872, workers were beginning to create their own parades. Hundreds marched through Hamilton streets that spring to demand a nine-hour working day. (LAC, C58640)

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Holy Days, Holidays, and Labour Days

Sometimes workers parades had a more militant message. In February 1891 a thousand unemployed men marched down Toronto’s then fashionable Jarvis Street before confronting city officials about their plight. (LAC, NL19387)

ing in the street alongside men. Moreover, Army marches flowed across the boundaries that normally contained respectable spectacles, leading to complaints that they spilled off the street and jostled ‘ladies’ on the sidewalk. Unlike trades processions, moreover, which were saluted for their respectability and included in official civic celebrations, the boisterous ‘Sally Ann’ marches faced ongoing criticism by elites and often official

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The Workers’ Festival

With its arrival in the 1880s, the Salvation Army started a new tradition of working-class processions. The message of members, like these in Calgary in 1893, was religious, but elites disapproved of the Army’s street performances. In these marches, unlike respectable processions, music was loud and boisterous and women marched in the streets. (GA, NA-2954-2)

repression, from dismissive insults about sounding like ‘a Negro minstrel show’ to by-laws enforcing outright bans. In style and participation, then, trades processions, carnivalesque displays, and the boisterous Salvation Army marches occupied separate spheres of processional culture, even if a few workers marched in all kinds of workers’ parades.53 Despite this diversity of parade forms, workers typically participated in holiday celebrations in more respectable trades processions, which continued to be a common and popular way to celebrate holidays even after unions had launched their own ‘demonstrations.’ The term ‘trades procession’ continued to have had a fairly flexible meaning. On the one hand, the term could be applied to parades that combined manufacturing

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Holy Days, Holidays, and Labour Days

products, labour process, and strong union messages. On the other, especially in smaller towns, the term was applied to parades that seemed to be simply rolling advertisements for manufacturers’ products, with less emphasis on labour process and virtually no union content. Between these two poles, workers organized their own contributions to civic celebrations, sometimes simply joining marches organized by other groups while at other times organizing their own processions to mark some larger civic purpose. Halifax tradesmen helped the city welcome Confederation in 1867. Twelve years later, Guelph workers, including a troupe of butchers on horseback, joined the city’s celebration of its new city status. In 1883 Saint John craftsmen organized their own mammoth parade to mark the centenary of the Loyalists’ arrival.54 Throughout the early years of the Dominion, workers in various cities joined other social groups in marking Dominion Day and the Queen’s Birthday by parading the main streets of their communities.55 These workers’ processions fit nicely into the respectable model of parading and hinted at the future form of Labour Day marches. Almost all of the workers in trades processions were skilled craftsmen, committed to the prevailing wisdom about what defined a respectable use of public space. Military bearing, uniforms, brass bands, all-male formations, white faces, and carefully marked-off sections were as typical of craftworkers’ participation in processional culture as the experience of other groups.

Private Pleasures Parades were only one part of civic celebrations and special days, and in some years, owing to a variety of circumstances, no parades took place at all. Even important public holidays like Dominion Day and the Queen’s Birthday – days that were not ostensibly associated with a particular ethnic or religious group – were often said to have ‘passed off very quietly,’ with no procession or officially sanctioned activity of any kind. Violent conflicts between Orange and Green paraders often caused the cancellation of Glorious Twelfth and St Patrick’s Day marches, but parades could

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The Workers’ Festival

Like Montrealers in 1880, Canadians found many ways to enjoy the national 1 July holiday then known as Dominion Day (now Canada Day). (LAC, C75488)

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Holy Days, Holidays, and Labour Days

be infrequent and sporadic for much less dramatic reasons as well: lack of funds, lack of interest, disorganization, or the fact that groups often travelled to large meetings in other cities.56 In some years, city councils, local elites, or fraternal or ethnic organizations simply did not bother to organize an official event, leaving the day to more diffuse and privatized pleasures. Even by the 1870s, holidays already marked changing seasons as much as great public purposes. ‘The twenty-fourth of May has cut a deep groove in Canadian history and Canadian life,’ the Globe noted in 1878. ‘Every year sees its influence steadily widening. Besides being the anniversary of a Sovereign for whom our people have nothing but the highest respect and unbounded loyalty, the day falls in a pleasant period of the year. It marks a boundary between uncertain days and fine weather. Moreover, it is really the first holiday after the long winter and young and old look forward to its arrival with pleasure and make it the occasion of recreation. Only those who cannot help it give themselves over to work on this day.’57 ‘Quiet,’ informal pleasures were hardly immune to conflicts over respectability, however. Holidays – and holy days – faced increasingly severe attacks in the first half of the nineteenth century. Evangelical Protestants scorned the sinful indulgences of the flesh and lack of selfcontrol that they saw in these unnecessary breaks from morally healthy labour. They rejected the many religious celebrations in favour of the sober weekly Sabbath. By the middle of the century, the Catholic Church was also militantly campaigning for a more pious, morally restrained society, though, rather than rejecting the many special religious occasions, it moved to take tighter control of them. Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, for example, was turned into a more orderly, church-centred festival of conservative, Catholic French-Canadian nationalism. At the same time, an emerging class of bourgeois businessmen and professionals was also preaching industriousness, sobriety, and punctuality as key values for commerce and industry and saw social ruin in all the revelry and disorder of holidays. Alongside the well-known public campaigns to control alcohol consumption and to keep the Sabbath holy – temperance and sabbatarianism – were consistent efforts to curb the number of holidays

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The Workers’ Festival

and to tame those that survived. The major Christian holidays were slowly transformed into quieter, more privatized, more family-centred occasions with little of the outdoor revelry of the past.58 Forms of rough and bawdy pleasures nonetheless continued to erupt in the late nineteenth century. Newspapers in Ingersoll and Woodstock reported extensive prize blood sports on the Queen’s Birthday, including both humans and animals. ‘Drunkeness was very prevalent in the city – more, so the police say, than they can remember of any previous holiday,’ the Globe complained after a particularly rowdy holiday in Toronto. The paper also reported on nine fires caused by careless handling of firecrackers (the city council having resisted pressure to ban them), and numerous fights, including one where the combatants and a member of the gathering crowd turned on the police officers who arrived to intervene. Increasingly, municipal governments tried to contain offending behaviour. Toronto finally banned firecrackers in the early 1880s, a by-law that the Globe reported to be relatively successful.59 Civic leaders also responded to such concerns by organizing respectable or official civic entertainments, usually including sports, picnics, and an evening dance, sometimes in conjuction with a parade earlier in the day. These efforts, however, never succeeded in taking over or wiping out rougher or disreputable pleasures. By the late nineteenth century, more and more of these pleasures were commercial. The cash economy had already integrated into holidaying early in the century, though expenditures were still typically small and haphazard. Tavern owners, for example, often sponsored horse races with considerable betting. Yet, in the late Victorian period, many more commercial influences were creeping into celebrations and turning them into larger-scale entrepreneurial operations. Improved transportation networks and more regularized work time opened more opportunities for travelling shows, circuses, and vaudeville theatre troupes. Sports events also benefited from the development of industrialism: businessmen could enlist the best regional or national team to attract large crowds of paying customers, and large commercial horse-racing tracks were operating across Canada by the latter decades of the century. Toronto’s Industrial Exhibition attracted many entertainment and retail entrepreneurs hoping to feed, and feed off, the assembled crowds, who came ready to spend their

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Holy Days, Holidays, and Labour Days

money. Once large crowds assembled for holiday events, smaller entrepreneurs, from food vendors to gamblers, arrived to seek out customers, while taverns, pool halls, and other businesses reached out to capture the throngs of potential customers passing by.60 Commercial leisure was a key part of holiday pleasure but never took it over entirely. When a holiday ‘passed off quietly,’ citizens usually engaged in a variety of pleasures, combining small expenditures, spectatorship, participation, community membership, rough pastimes, and privatized activities to mark the day in semi-public ways or to just head off on their own. Torontonians ‘who cared still less for the society of their fellow beings, seized their fishing tackle and walked off alone to the enjoyment of the “gentle art” of angling; and a few amused themselves in sailing and rowing’ on Dominion Day in 1871, while ‘large numbers of patrons went over to the Island by the ferry boats, and while there angled, strolled on the beach, or amused themselves in other ways.’61 The lines between commercial, respectable, passive, and private were never absolute: taking ferries or trains might involve some expenditure, strolling along the beach with family or friends might be respectable, but the activity itself might be informal and free. Commercial spaces like taverns might involve relatively little expenditure as the price for extended participatory socializing. Ordered and contained events like industrial exhibitions always included activities that provided light diversions. Even respectable events often charged admission for fund-raising purposes, leading some local residents to exploit such events simply to enjoy themselves. In Woodstock, local residents watched organized sports events for free by sitting on tombstones in a nearby cemetery, much to the chagrin of local elite athletic associations, who lost both the gate and the opportunity to control behaviour.62

Labour’s Day When the Canadian House of Commons passed legislation declaring the first Monday of September a statutory holiday known as Labour Day, then, tensions around public purpose and procession, respectability, com-

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The Workers’ Festival

By the 1880s, working men were organizing annual celebrations across the English-speaking world. The ‘Grand Demonstration of Workingmen’ organized in New York City on 5 September 1882 is usually recognized as the first Labour Day celebrated in the United States. (LC, USZG2-083164-215151)

mercialism, and private pleasure shaped the meaning of public holidays and special days. Parliament’s decision was not momentous: the only words exchanged in the House of Commons about the new holiday were a question about whether workingmen wanted the measure and Prime Minister Sir John Thompson’s reply that there had been ‘hundreds of petitions presented to this House from all quarters.’63 Nor does it seem to have been part of any grand strategy on the part of Thompson’s government. Canadian labour leaders had been lobbying for this legislation since the mid-1880s and had won the support of the Royal Commission on the Relations of Capital and Labour in 1889. Labour Day was the only recommendation of that commission that the federal government actually implemented, much to the chagrin of many unionists. When a delegation of craft unionists met Thompson in April 1894, he put off most of their

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Holy Days, Holidays, and Labour Days

demands but agreed ‘to endeavor to meet their wishes on the subject of Labor Day.’ He warned them, however, that proclaiming the national holiday and actually benefiting from it were two separate things, since ‘there were many holidays not observed, and it required the cooperation of other authority.’ Some unionists apparently shared Thompson’s lack of enthusiasm. Four months later, during a debate on allotting money for delegates to attend the annual meeting of the Dominion Trades and Labor Congress, Toronto labour leaders tried to defend the body by noting its success in securing official recognition of Labour Day, to which one union delegate replied ‘it was all they had got.’64 From the government’s perspective, however, the timing may not have been accidental, since 1894 was a year of remarkably intense industrial conflict across the United States. Thousands of the unemployed in Coxey’s Army had marched on Washington that spring. Coal miners walked out in unprecedented numbers at the same time. The new American Railway Union was then forced into the bitter strike at Chicago’s Pullman works that soon tied up much of the American railway system with sympathetic strikes. Then some of the political fallout of these developments to the south began to be felt in a new political alliance between the central Canadian labour movement and the hugely popular farmers’ organization, the Patrons of Industry (whose membership was soaring and which would win seventeen seats in the Ontario election in June 1894). Certainly, legalizing Labour Day was a painless gesture towards workingclass voters by a national party beginning to crumble.65 Legalizing this labour festival only confirmed what it had already become – an established event on the local holiday calendar in several cities and towns. It was first celebrated in Nova Scotia coal-mining towns in 1880, Toronto in 1882, Hamilton and Oshawa in 1883, Montreal in 1886, St Catharines in 1887, Halifax in 1888, Ottawa and Vancouver in 1890, and London in 1892, typically either as a self-declared day off work or as a local civic holiday proclaimed by the mayor. In many smaller towns and cities, however, the local labour movement used the new legal recognition in 1894 to launch its first annual celebrations; others would not begin until the turn of the century.66 Workers’ movements across North America had begun organizing this

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The Workers’ Festival

In parallel with Labour Day, Nova Scotia’s Provincial Workmen’s Association, founded 1879, celebrated its anniversary each year. Here a trainload of PWA men and their families head off with a band and full regalia for a picnic at Mira, Nova Scotia, in 1894. (LAC, PA187001)

kind of festival in the early 1880s. The Central Labor Union of New York City is usually credited with declaring the first Labour Day in North America and holding the first labour festival with a parade and picnic in September 1882. But the Nova Scotian coal miners organized in the Provincial Workmen’s Association staged what appear to have been Canada’s first workers’ holiday in 1880, on the first anniversary of the union’s founding. From that point on, several mining towns in the province held annual celebrations of ‘PWA Day,’ with parades, sporting events, and picnics.67 Elsewhere, the Knights of Labor took the lead in sponsoring many of the first labour holidays. Toronto’s unions actually took to the streets several weeks before the New York ‘pioneers.’68 The supposed ‘father’ of Labour Day in the United States, the New York carpenters’

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Holy Days, Holidays, and Labour Days

In Hamilton in the mid-1880s, as in many other parts of North America, the Knights of Labor took the lead in organizing the first Labour Day celebrations. (LAC, PA103086)

leader P.J. McGuire, was invited to speak at the 1882 Toronto ‘demonstration’ but was unable to attend because of his wife’s illness.69 Local labour organizations evidently responded to this inspiration at their own pace, though there was a more centralized call in 1884 from the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada (the predecessor to the American Federation of Labor [AFL]), which urged its affiliates to organize their own Labour Days. In 1885 it was widely celebrated in the United States. City councils and, after 1887, state governments legalized the holiday. In 1894, in the same month that the Canadian Parliament took action, the American Congress designated the first Monday in September as Labour Day and declared it to be a national holiday in the District of Columbia and the territories.70

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The Workers’ Festival

The rationale for the timing of this labour festival is not immediately apparent. Unlike May Day, it does not correspond with any well-established pre-industrial celebration. Initially it was a mid-summer event. Although Nova Scotia’s miners chose September, the Toronto workers kicked off their first ‘labor demonstration’ in late July 1882, and most of the Labour Days of the 1880s were held in July or early August, sometimes piggy-backing onto regular half-day holidays on Saturday or Wednesday or onto municipal civic holidays.71 Gradually, the timing shifted to the end of the summer and was eventually fixed on the first Monday in September by Parliament – probably to correspond with the American holiday. This was a date chosen by labour leaders, not politicians, and it suggests a working-class interest in regularizing leisure time alongside capitalist worktime – like the parallel demand for the shorter work week with Saturday afternoon off.72 Labour Day fell at the end of what would normally be the effective change of seasons and rhythms of manual work in the communities where it first took hold. It was also a convenient time to fill a hole in a rationalized holiday calendar between Dominion Day and Thanksgiving that did not interfere with the many local civic holidays. Agitating for this late-summer holiday set the Canadian and American labour movements apart from most of the rest of the industrialized world, where the workers’ holiday most often became May Day (or an equivalent in the southern hemisphere73). Eventually, as we will see, this difference would become overtly political, but in the late nineteenth century Canadian and American workers were not rejecting May Day in favour of Labour Day. It has too often been assumed that there was a right-left split from the beginning of May Day and Labour Day.74 In fact, the first May Day was declared in 1886 in the United States in the same working-class upsurge that created the demand for a labour festival in the fall. The nascent American Federation of Labor declared a ‘day of revolt – not of rest’ on 1 May 1886 to demand the eight-hour day for wage earners, and it continued to call for such annual spring protests until the turn of the century. Beginning in 1890, European socialists and anarchists emulated the American example and embraced May Day as an occasion to demon-

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Holy Days, Holidays, and Labour Days

strate for shorter hours and other political demands. Only intermittently did they roll recreational and folkloric dimensions into the event (the initial 1889 resolution calling for the first European May Day made no mention of a festival, which was actively opposed by some political groups). May Day, then, was a day of protest, Labour Day one of celebration. In practice, the major difference was that May Day was a voluntary, one-day work stoppage often launched in defiance of government edict and employer wrath, not a state-sanctioned holiday – a distinction that would have considerable implications.75 In Canada, there seems to have been no public celebration of May Day until 1906. Labour Day emerged out of the more aggressive, class-conscious workers’ movements of the 1880s, which were drawing together a broad range of workers into new miners’ unions, craft unions, local assemblies of the Knights of Labor, trades and labour councils, the first independent labour political campaigns, and, beginning in 1886, the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada.76 Like so much else in this ‘Great Upheaval,’ the new workers’ festival marked a major shift in the consciousness of many wage earners. They were rejecting well-established forms of industrial paternalism from their employers and recognizing that they had separate interests in industrial-capitalist society that had to be promoted and defended. The first, unofficial Labour Days were often appropriately called ‘Labor Demonstrations.’ In the nineteenth century, the word ‘demonstration’ had not taken on its late-twentieth-century connotation of protest. Many other groups had ‘demonstrations’ – fraternal societies, the YMCA, and so on – that were intended to be public shows of strength, determination, and high moral tone. Labour leaders set out to invent a new labour festival that built on well-established traditions of public celebration but was designed to serve new needs. In this process they parallelled other social groups that also undertook in the nineteenth century to redesign annual public holidays for their own large purposes, notably francophone Catholics who had already refashioned Saint-JeanBaptiste Day, Protestant clergymen who aimed to infuse the Canadian Thanksgiving with religious, moral, and national purpose, African Canadians who made Emancipation Day both a celebration of the victory over

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slavery and an ongoing critique of racism in white society, and AngloCanadian imperialists who would attempt to transform Victoria Day into a more jingoist Empire Day at the turn of the century.77 As they began inventing their own local holiday in the 1880s, and then approached federal authorities for national recognition, labour leaders both occupied and responded to a broader popular culture of celebration, one characterized by tensions around grand public purpose, respectability, commercialism, audience reaction, and privatized pleasures. A space had been opened up on the Canadian calendar for a national labour festival each September. The precise shape of that event was still an open question. In inventing their holiday, labour leaders dipped into this basic raw material of Victorian holidays, creating a celebration of many parts: a parade, speeches, spectator sports, concerts, dancing, and more. In the beginning, however, the parade was the centrepiece of the festival. Workers would convene in local parks later in the day for picnics and sports, or perhaps spend the day in private recreation with their families or church group, but the local organizers of the workers’ holiday clearly intended that their first message be delivered in the parade.

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chapter two

THE CRAFTSMEN’S SPECTACLE

The members of the Halifax Typographical Union had plenty of business on their agenda on the evening of 15 June 1889. They had been summoned to a special meeting to hear the report of the Labour Day committee they had elected two weeks earlier. First, they examined and debated sample badges and sashes and decided which to order. Then they agreed on the flags to be carried and voted to get a horse for their marshal and a carriage for elderly members. Headgear was more controversial. The committee recommended bowler hats, but an amendment in favour of top hats (‘beavers’) resulted in a tied vote. The president broke the tie, casting the deciding vote in favour of bowlers. The next year, the same sharp division of opinion brought another tied vote, but this time the president opted for top hats. Voting not to carry canes in the procession, and to allow apprentices to join them, also sparked deep disagreements. In both cases the members reversed the votes at the next regular meeting. For them, these were all decisions of great significance and not to be taken lightly. The distinctive costume of Halifax printers had thus been set. The silk hats, dark clothes, and white gloves and ties that they wore

In 1902, when these Halifax printers gathered for a group portrait on Labour Day, they presented themselves in formal outfits that were intended to display their dignity and respectability, with just a flash of carnival in the figure of the ‘printer’s devil’ in the front row. (PANS, MG 20, vol. 334)

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for many years to come suited these ‘aristocrats’ of labour, who regularly headed the Halifax parade.1 The meetings of Halifax printers followed well-understood conventions about how to plan a Labour Day procession in the years before the First World War. Organization was largely decentralized. Local trades and labour councils appointed Labour Day committees to coordinate the overall shape of the event and to determine the order of the participants – perhaps drawing lots or giving the oldest union or a group of newly organized workers a place of prominence near the head of the parade. These committees would also try to stimulate creativity by offering prizes for the best displays, and occasionally they discussed complaints from individual unions about the organization of the parade. But they did not choreograph the elements with a heavy hand or in great detail. Individual unions and groups of company employees put together their own contributions to the processions. Typically, in mid-summer, a union local would vote on whether to participate and then appoint a committee to organize its part of the show. Its tasks might involve contacting suppliers of union regalia and local tailors, getting a banner made or repaired, hiring a marching band, finding a wagon for the float and a horse for the marshal, arranging to borrow machinery from employers, and making numerous other arrangements. It could also involve mobilizing the volunteer labour of the brothers to build a float (no reports of this process have survived, but we can assume that wives and other family members became involved, especially when sewing was required). All decisions about costumes and equipment came back to the union local for approval – because the public image of the craft was extremely important and because members usually had to dig into their own pockets to pay for hats, gloves, canes, badges, and other paraphernalia. All these groups in their separate meetings across the city shaped the ceremonial form for their new public celebration.2 Yet, in many ways, early Labour Day parades appeared remarkably consistent across the country and over time. Each parade got its own special flavour from the leading industries and occupations in the community, the ethnic mix of the local population, the texture of recent industrial relations, and the pool of resident artistic talent, but organiz-

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Like these Toronto and Halifax merchants, businessmen quickly learned that there was money to be made in providing unionists with their Labour Day regalia. (Toiler [Toronto], 2 September 1904, 2; Citizen [Halifax], 28 August 1919, 8)

ers shared some broad working principles that transcended (while never fully eliminating) their differences. For its early years, the Labour Day parade was intended to be a spectacle of craft respectability, a fundamental impulse that shaped the style of presentation, the messages delivered, and the people who appeared in formation. It was not a participatory event; there were no calls for onlookers to join in – in contrast to the first European May Day marches. This was instead a spectacle to be watched and admired, conveying important lessons about the house of labour to the wage earners’ families, neighbours, and fellow citizens.

Ever Respectable Early Labour Day organizers built processions that fused together their ideas of respectability, their belief in the value of their work to the economy and society, and their sense of belonging to various kinds of

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As in Vancouver in 1894, the Labour Day parade moved through the streets in orderly, almost military fashion. (CVanA, Bailey Bros. Photo, Str P225N139)

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communities. They tried to show that workingmen were worthy of respect as producers and citizens, and also to proclaim the kind of communities they wanted to live in. These ideas were built right into the shape and structure of the parade: into the clothing and the comportment of marchers, the banners they carried and the slogans they broadcast, the theatre they constructed, and their decisions about who should march and who should watch. Craft-workers announced their claim to respectability in many ways. Like so many other parade makers in the period, labour leaders modelled their marches on the dominant respectable style, one derived from militia parades and repeated in countless fraternal marches.3 Each Labour Day parade was headed by a marshal mounted on a horse, often followed by a contingent of policemen, mounted or on foot, or uniformed firemen. Behind the marshals, participants were grouped in square formations, clearly marked off by banners or separated by bands and floats. Within each formation, all participants marched in disciplined and orderly style, kept in line by assistant marshals, ‘marking time with soldierly precision,’ according to one reporter.4 The bands interspersed through the parade specialized in heavily syncopated marching music. Little or nothing in the parades drew on the more disorderly customs of masking and mocking that had flourished on urban streets (even in respectable marches) throughout the nineteenth century. The ‘rougher’ traditions of parading surfaced only in a few settings. At the turn of the century, for example, press reports in Sydney, Moncton, Port Colborne, Stratford, Victoria, and Toronto mentioned Calithumpian or Polymorphian contingents, meaning some costumed paraders who engaged in mocking street theatre. But this kind of display was uncommon in early Labour Day parades, and, when it did appear, it was usually only one small part of a generally respectable march.5 Marchers also announced their respectability by dressing up. Local newspapers often commented on the way clothing signalled the unpretentious propriety of the marchers. ‘There was not an ill-dressed man in the parade,’ the Toronto Globe commented in 1895, ‘and the vast majority of them possessed an appearance, if not of absolute prosperity, yet of comfort, well-being, and of independence, resolution and responsibility ...’6

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Dressing up for Labour Day could take many forms. In 1907 Toronto artist C.W. Jeffreys recorded these images of the different versions of respectable dress. (Star [Toronto], 3 September 1907, 3)

Unionists must have appreciated such comments, since their planning meetings indicated that appearance was extremely important, as we saw for the Halifax printers. However heated and contentious, those debates expressed a narrow range of opinion about style and presentation, representing only differences about how, not whether, to dress up. Marchers never appeared in their actual work clothes, although some unions wore uniform-like costumes that set them apart as an occupation. Boilermakers in ‘spotless overalls of blue,’ painters in ‘natty white uniforms,’ blacksmiths in ‘coarse brown aprons emblazoned with a horseshoe,’ and fur workers in ‘the regulation costume of white, not omitting caps and aprons’ in the 1900 Toronto parade were typical. This kind of costuming accented the tight bonds among the group of marchers and set them apart from their audience. Other groups of workingmen strode forth in their best shirts, ties, jackets, and hats. Like the Halifax printers with their hats and canes, a union often decided to deck out all its marching members in the same dress-up clothes.7 In one Toronto procession, for example, the cigarmakers wore black alpaca coats and white trousers, the bread drivers straw hats and white coats, the machinists blue coats and matching

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Men joined the parade with badges like these pinned to their lapels. (NBM)

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caps, the moulders ‘neat dark suits,’ the plumbers straw hats, dark suits, and matching ties, and so on. In several cities, the tinsmiths used their skills to make some combination of identical hats, ties, cuffs, and canes out of tin.8 Tailors in Ottawa and Toronto wore frock coats and silk hats to highlight their occupation.9 Parade clothing, therefore, sent several messages at once, distinguishing occupations from each other, articulating their common craft respectability, and identifying themselves with the norms of the wider community. Unions also adorned their fine clothes with colourful decoration. Marchers sometimes wore floral corsages on their lapels. Fine badges or pins were often placed on jackets, typically made of brightly coloured silk with a gold fringe and held in place by an elaborate bar and pin at the top. This metal clasp might incorporate crossed flags, maple leaves, a beaver, or some other intricate pattern. On the silk would be printed in gold some combination of the name of the union local, the union insignia, an artistic symbol of the craft, and an appropriate slogan. Typically, locals ordered these from a commercial supplier, often in the United States, and individual unionists bought their own.10 In a few cases, leaders also got to wear sashes. Those worn by the officers of the Halifax longshoremen’s union in 1909 – made in the city – featured blue velvet, fringed with heavy gold lace and decorated with a star and tassel, two gold crossbars, and, on a silk insertion, the name of the organization in gold and ‘a handsome painting of one of the big ocean liners.’11 Respectability, as the hallmark of legitimate claims to public space, was linked to workers’ sense of belonging to wider communities. The paraders insisted on full public acceptance in the local public sphere by marching along the main streets of the towns and cities, not merely in the working-class districts where they lived. Generally, the only non-unionists regularly invited to join the march were the mayor and aldermen, who were invariably given places of prominence, sometimes in carriages near the head of the parade, as the popularly elected representatives of the people. Belonging extended to national and imperial communities as well. The symbol of citizenship, the Union Jack, appeared prominently at many points in every procession. At the turn of the century, working-class

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Partisan politics were kept out of Labour Day parades, but democratic government was honoured. As in many other places, Edmonton’s municipal leaders rode in carriages behind the marshal at the head of this 1906 procession. (PAA, B.4800)

identity in Canada could have an international dimension – jingoistic allegiance to the British empire. Beginning with Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and extending through the Boer War, some paraders wove the imperial theme into their presentations. Union Jacks fluttered from many more floats, and Queen Victoria’s portrait appeared occasionally. The figure of Britannia surrounded by symbols of the colonies in the empire graced floats in Toronto in 1900 and Winnipeg in 1902.12 Themes of militaristic adventure and male heroism also creeped into the presentation. In the Toronto march, ‘big Jim Kennedy,’ ‘one of the recently returned heroes of Paardeberg,’ led the city mail carriers in his khaki uniform, showing ‘no sign of the eleven wounds he carried away from the front of Cronje’s stronghold.’13

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Labour Day was an occasion for unionists to connect their aspirations for respectability with their citizenship. As in other centres with many francophone workers, the French tricolour joined the Canadian ensign and the Union Jack fluttering over the heads of marchers in Montreal in 1900 . (Star [Montreal], 4 September 1900, 4)

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Yet it is equally clear that such British symbols could co-exist, overlap, and occasionally conflict with other allegiances. In Quebec parades (and often in Ottawa ones), the flag most often fluttering above workers’ heads was the French tricolour.14 In many English-Canadian cities, imperial symbols were paired with the Stars and Stripes in an assertive declaration of international unity. Not everyone embraced this sort of solidarity, however. In 1894 London printers decided to show the value of international unionism by wearing badges depicting both the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes above the motto ‘In Union There Is Strength.’ But two members refused to don the American flag. One, having ‘served his time in the old country,’ marched with a blank lapel, while the other removed the U.S. flag and ‘walked through the streets with a mutilated badge.’15 In fact, in the early years of Labour Day parading, and from time to time thereafter, there could be hints that citizenship was a contested concept. The Saint John ship labourers carried a banner in 1894 declaring, ‘The Bone and Sinew of This Country Must Be Recognized in Its Politics.’ The slogans in a Montreal procession included ‘We Want to Be Aldermen,’ ‘We Want Honest Government,’ and ‘Abolish Property Qualifications for Aldermen,’ along with calls for free public education, playgrounds, and free libraries. As we saw, some London workers used their float in 1894 to assert the rights of the ‘masses’ over the ‘classes.’ In the same spirit, two independent labour candidates for local offices rode in the 1902 Saint John procession.16 Some kinds of politics were explicitly excluded: after a long discussion, the Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council refused to allow the prohibition plebiscite committee to put a float in the parade ‘on the ground that the question was a political one and the trades unions take no part in politics on occasions of this kind.’17 Yet, occasionally, the parade included a glimpse of a still wider citizenship. In 1895 the Winnipeg parade makers included a wagon festooned in sunflowers and yellow roses bearing the motto ‘Equal Suffrage,’ organized by the local suffragist organization, from which several children tossed suffrage pamphlets. Nearly two decades later, the Canadian Suffrage Association, represented by Flora McDonald Dennison and four other activists, would be cheered in the Toronto parade as their decorated carriage passed

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The costumes of the Vancouver bakers’ union in 1892 were a spotless version of their daily work clothes combined with shirt-and-tie formality. The men also carried products of their labour to remind spectators of their valuable contribution to the community. (CVanA, Port P1653N944)

through the streets bearing the provocative sign ‘Votes for Women.’ A similar contingent rode in automobiles through Port Arthur that year.18

Labour’s Worth Marchers blended their ideas of respectability and belonging with their commitments to the value of craft labour. In most Labour Day parades, skilled workmen carried on the tradition of trades processions by putting their craftsmanship itself on display.19 Some carried the tools of their

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Tinsmiths often presented an artistic product of their craft for Labour Day. These Winnipeg men are shown with their float around 1915. (PAM, Foote 43 N1643)

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trades – such as the moulders’ tampers or the boilermakers’ hammers held high in the Toronto parades, the Halifax and Victoria bricklayers’ huge trowels, and the Ottawa retail clerks’ ‘large imitation lead pencils.’20 Some showed off the equipment they used. Longshoremen in several ports marched with huge, elaborately decorated models of ships, sometimes with men working inside.21 The firemen were the hits of most parades with all their glittering wagons and apparatus. Electrical workers, a new craft group at the turn of the century, dazzled the crowds with electrified floats often fully equipped with telegraph, blazing lights, and ringing telephones.22 In 1910 Fort William’s grain trimmers operated on their float ‘a miniature elevator from which grain was poured into a small counterpart of the steamer Ames.’23 Many groups also showed off the products of their crafts. In Toronto in 1900, for example, heaps of bakers’ bread, ‘several handsome specimens of bookbinding,’ a stuffed bear cub from the fur workers, and much more rolled past the admiring crowds.24 Occasionally, skilled men presented a symbolic creation constructed from the materials of their trade – such as the Toronto and Winnipeg carpenters’ intricate banners of the 1890s made of different coloured wood shavings, and the Ottawa tinsmiths’ 1898 float constructed entirely of zinc in the patterns of fancy cornice work.25 More theatrical floats showed craftsmen at work – what late-nineteenth-century journalists liked to call ‘allegorical cars.’ Printers often ran a printing press from which a printed sheet was thrown to the crowds. In London’s 1892 parade, it was a special poem entitled ‘The Song of the Printer’ and in Vancouver the same year a one-sheet newspaper called the Vancouver Typographer.26 Cigarmakers regularly showed how they made ‘stogies’ and tossed them to eager young smokers.27 Children also trailed along waiting for samples from bakers, who, according to an Ottawa reporter, ‘demonstrated how bread was baked and also how the palatable tea biscuits are manufactured.’28 Barbers could sometimes be seen shaving faces or cutting hair.29 Almost everywhere, building tradesmen put on a good show: bricklayers built walls, chimneys, or even small cottages, stonecutters shaped granite, lathers nailed up their wooden frames, plasterers fashioned fancy arches, painters slapped on paint or

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In 1894, for their formal Labour Day portrait, Vancouver’s longshoremen brought together many of the ingredients of craft respectability: formal dress, union ribbons, silk banner, and a full-scale model of their work place (the S.S. Umatilla). (CVanA, Str P371N329)

papered a room, and carpenters constructed small buildings, all while riding atop a wagon.30 Blacksmiths, boilermakers, and moulders often put on dazzling displays of sound and light with their small furnaces and hot iron.31 In Nanaimo, coal miners presented a tableau of their work underground, ‘even to the miner with his fuse about to set off a blast, and an immense lump of coal ...,’ while fishers from the Fraser valley had two boats in their floats in the 1900 Vancouver parade ‘illustrating the catching of sockeye.’32 Allegorical cars did not simply put craft work on display; they connected it to sweeping social visions. Parade makers normally built their presentations around the twin pillars of craft union ideals, producer ideology and labour theory of value, expansive notions that connected

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In Moncton’s 1905 Labour Day parade, the machinists’ union displayed a miniature locomotive that they had built. (PANB, P75-3A)

economic ideas to symbolic and cultural values. Producer ideology imagined that the world divided into the idle and the producer. In the context of small-scale capitalism and in the absence of industrial disputes, the term producer could make room for employers or allegiance to a particular workplace and also extend to loyalty to craft, pride in products, and a belief in the ideal of gentlemanly cooperation between employer and worker.33 Labour Day parades included these ideas in many forms. Many parades had industrial or commercial displays, and marchers occasionally tipped their hats when passing good employers. Appearing in their first parade in Winnipeg, unionists from the Canadian Pacific Railway shops thanked their employers for meeting them like ‘gentlemen.’ On the other hand, producer ideology could also be turned against employers or politicians. Winnipeg tailors attracted attention with their 1898 display (a display apparently ignored by mainstream newspapers), consisting of a

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The carpenters of Rossland, British Columbia, proudly show off a house under construction in 1900. (RHM, 2925)

float representing a tailor shop in operation and another showing a ‘sweat shop’ emblazoned with a streamer bearing the words ‘Patronized by the City Council,’ a reference to a recent contract for firemen’s uniforms.34 Labour theory of value, which imagined that work was the source of all worth in society, was closely related to producer ideology. ‘Skilled labor is the foundation of a nation’s prosperity,’ declared a banner carried by employees of Macdonald and Company in Halifax.35 Value was not measured in strictly economic terms. Labour did not just create products but rather laid the foundation of all civilized communities. One float in Victoria in 1912 featured a large globe mounted on a poll and a banner declaring, ‘Labour Supports the World,’ while London bricklayers made a clever reference to this connection in 1894 by declaring, ‘We Build on a Sure Foundation.’36 Banners were a particularly clear indication of this expansive idea and the diversity of its inspiration. Early banners wove together

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In 1907, the plumber’s union brought this bathroom-on-wheels to Calgary’s parade to highlight their important skills. (GA, NA-2779-2)

symbols of labour with fraternal language, Christian ideas, social lessons, imperial symbols, and political ideals. Ottawa painters and decorators were committed to ‘Organization, Education, Fraternity’ and promised ‘Not by Might but by Right We Shall Conquer.’37 Two banners carried in Saint John in 1894 showed the importance of Christian symbolism. The banner of the Saint John’s clothiers and tailors (one of the few surviving examples of this early labour heraldry) showed, on one side, Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden and evidently in need of clothes, and, on the other, a coat of arms above the motto ‘Concordia Parvae Res Crescunt’ (‘From Unity, Little Things Grow’). The carpenters in the same parade carried a banner emblazoned with the often repeated ‘Labor Conquers Everything’ and containing a representation of St Paul’s Church and ‘squares, compasses, saws, planes, hammers and other carpenter’s imple-

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Electrical workers like these in Victoria in 1912 liked to rig their floats with poles, wires, and electrical gadgets. (CVicA, 98102-04-1629)

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Many Labour Day parades had moulders, like these in Moncton in 1905, making castings in a small foundry on the back of their float and tossing souvenirs to the crowds. (PANB, P75-3A)

ments.’ Banners in Halifax’s early Labour Day parades similarly drew widely for ideas and symbols. The carpenters’ was red silk with a blue border (originally imported from London, England, in 1861 and never before used), with ‘a carpenters’ outfit of tools’ on the middle of one side and a scene of felling logs in a forest on the other, inscribed with a Latin motto meaning ‘By Diligence and Perseverance We Overcome All Things.’ A local artisan had made the printers’ red silk banner and had painted on their name and date of founding on one side and on the reverse a representation of the rising sun and the words ‘The Press – The Light of the World.’ 38 Banners also addressed the political issues of the day. The local branch

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Like these Victoria carpenters in 1912, unionists often used the Labour Day parades to proclaim broad principles, such as ‘Labour Supports the World.’ (CVicA, 98102-04-1628)

of the bricklayers and masons carried a banner that moved out of the metaphorical into the immediate issues of the 1880s: it had ‘a representation of two men working on an arch, and another about to put on his coat, at the same time pointing to a clock in the background and exclaiming: “Nine Hours Constitutes a Day’s Work.”’ The labourers’ new banner was more conciliatory, displaying two happy human figures representing labour and capital.39 As these latter examples suggest, Labour Day banners increasingly contained less allegory and more slogans and allusions to current concerns, but, even so, they continued to embody the ambiguity of

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One thread of craft respectability was the use of Christian symbols. In early labour parades, Saint John tailors carried this handsome image of Adam and Eve. (NBM)

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At the turn of the century, some unionists still wanted artists to paint images of their crafts onto their banners. In 1903, the women’s auxiliary of the Toronto machinists’ local presented this beautiful banner to the men of the union. In Calgary, the bricklayers and masons proudly displayed a similarly artistic banner. (LAC, C142095; GA, NA-1279-1)

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In the early 1900s, unions began to carry more banners without images, showing little more than their union names. Yet, as with these Calgary carpenters, the banners were still central to the performance of craft respectability. (GA NA1791-9)

producer ideology, which could be used to reach out to employers, to argue against them, or (occasionally) to do both at the same time. The banners announced themes of craft brotherhood, the value of the manual producer and his toil, a commitment to shorter hours, and a determined but openhanded approach to employers. Those in St Catharines’s first Labour Day parade in 1887 proclaimed ‘Labor, Rise and Defend Your Dignity’ and ‘We Must Abolish Idleness in Every Walk of Life.’ In Saint John in 1894, the ship labourers reminded spectators, ‘Our Aim and Object Is to Secure for Labor Its Just Rights and Privileges,’ but this was coupled with ‘Capital and Labor Should Go Hand and Hand in the March of Progress.’ Slogans from the Single Tax movement, such as ‘Raise All Taxes from Land Values’ and ‘The Land for the People,’ also floated over these early pa-

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These parades were also occasions for carrying the labour movement’s immediate concerns to wider audiences. Edmonton’s cigar makers urged spectators to buy goods with a union label. (CEA, EA-274-03)

rades.40 The more common messages on union banners promoted the posture of the particular groups of workers towards each other and towards their bosses. Montreal cigarmakers promised to ‘Educate, Agitate, and Organize.’ ‘Co-operation is the Desired Result,’ the Toronto stonecutters announced in 1896. Toronto printers were ‘United to Support, not Combined to Injure.’41 By the turn of the century, more of these messages were appeals to consumers to buy goods marked with the union label or to support the early closing of retail shops.42 As these examples suggest, parade messages did not always present a single, coherent social vision or political interpretation but reflected different emphases and trajectories of particular crafts and local unions. A call to join a union local might be followed by a less militant message: in

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Toronto in 1901, the Toronto blacksmiths announcement that ‘Union Will Release Blacksmiths from Drudgery and Poverty’ came just before the less political entry from the plumbers, which simply declared: ‘Strike up the Band, Here Come the Plumbers.’43 Different interpretations of producer ideology or labour theory of value could co-exist in the same parade. But, whether drawing on Christian and fraternal ideas or making reference to contemporary political concerns, banners wove together diverse ideas into a loose craft ideology that was built into early Labour Day parades in several cities across the country. At the end of the parade in St Catharines in 1903, the president of the local labour council summed up the combination of ideas that must have been on the minds of many trades unionists across English Canada: local workers had marched that day, he declared, in support of ‘that true spirit which is found in those who “love the brotherhood, fear God, and honor the King.”’44

Solidarity and Exclusion Using the broad languages of Christianity, fraternalism, imperialism, and producer ideology could open up the parade message to many social groups, but this was a procession of wage earners, and participation by other groups was sporadic and carefully contained. Only occasionally, in the 1890s and at the end of the First World War, were farmers’ organizations invited to join as fellow ‘producers.’45 Despite the debt to military conventions, the militia itself, with all its pomp, hierarchy, and weaponry, was never invited to participate (that is, until veterans joined the processions after the First World War).46 Here was perhaps the sharpest contrast with the celebrations on the other major public holidays, Victoria Day and Dominion Day, when military displays were frequently the centrepiece of the day’s festivities in Canadian cities.47 Nor were the clergy included. Labor Day parades contained considerable religious imagery but, until the Catholic labour movement reached sufficient strength to hold separate mass processions after the First World War, almost no actual members of the clergy. While Catholic bishops could bless the

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marchers beforehand, as they often did in Quebec cities,48 and clergymen might grace Labour Day platforms later in the day, churches and their various moral-reform offshoots were never invited to contribute floats or marching contingents to the parades.49 Indeed, as in these cases, the participation of non-workers was usually contained. Politicians were always an important feature of spectacles that claimed membership in political culture, but their location seemed to emphasize an outsider status: inspecting the parade from hotel balconies or riding in carriages at the front or back of the parade, both places of honour, but also ones that separated ‘guests’ from the formations of ‘labour’ who marched in the street.50 Likewise, unions actively courted yet controlled assistance from employers. Craftsmen celebrated the high value of skilled manual labour, both to their specific firms and to the wellbeing of their communities in general. Sometimes businesses provided entertainment, with employees working on the back of a float and occasionally offering free samples. In Winnipeg in 1895, for example, spectators got glimpses of workers making soda water, binding books, baking buns, shaving faces, making tents, and milling lumber – all on wagons sponsored by companies, not unions. Three years later, one of the city’s brewers had quite a crowd following his wagon.51 There were limits to this style of presentation, however. Most parades included employers’ wagons at the back, in a special section for industrial and commercial displays. Sometimes, confused choreography could undermine such planning. ‘The place in line reserved for manufacturers’ wagons was not properly understood by some of the drivers, or else it did not suit them,’ the London Free Press complained in 1894, ‘because they somewhat injured the effect by forming a procession of their own ahead of the main body.’52 Moreover, as much as the practice of their craftsmanship might be tied to specific local firms, their employers were rarely invited to march with them.53 Most striking, perhaps, was what was missing from this presentation of ‘Labour.’ Labour Day parades were processions of particular kinds of wage earners. Until at least the 1930s, the only white-collar workers in these spectacles were a few male retail clerks (most unionized clerical

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and quasi-professional workers, including teachers, kept their distance from the labour movement in any case). And rarely did the less skilled find their way into the parades before the First World War. One of the earliest processions in the 1880s that emerged out of the more expansive spirit of the Knights of Labor made some space for a contingent of ‘Unorganized Labour,’54 but, as craft unions began to get more cautious towards the end of the decade, these opportunities rarely opened up again.55 Rare indeed were the ‘unorganized bodies of saw mill men, rolling mill men and employees of the cotton factories’ that were invited to join the Saint John’s Labour Day in 1903. When unskilled workers did appear, they were typically those specialized workers such as builders’ labourers whose close working relationship with the craftsmen in their industry gave them some leverage in organizing and bargaining, or particular groups of transportation workers such as longshoremen, trainmen, or street-railway conductors and motormen who struggled to adapt the craft-union model to their needs.56 Unlike the craftworkers, poorly paid seasonal workers might not even be able to afford the time off for an unpaid holiday. In 1900 the Montreal Gazette noted that waterfront workers were not able to get off work, ‘the stevedores claiming that the season is too short for sentiment,’ according to a reporter. ‘If a man wants to get off there are others to take his place said a foreman yesterday, the absentee being simply checked for lost time.’57 The tendency towards skilled workers was reinforced by the structure of participation, which relied heavily on union locals for planning each presentation, persuading workers to participate, grouping them into formations, and organizing each group into a coherent order. Formations were typically organized by union locals, although it is possible that nonunionists were marching alongside their craft brothers. The parade was partly intended to show the massed strength of the local labour movement, and every local tried to get maximum turnout from its membership, even threatening fines for absentees.58 One of the audiences for this message was the unorganized: the Halifax Trades and Labour Council told the local press, for example, that one of the reasons for the parade was to attract the unorganized to the union movement. But the parade

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organizers obviously intended the spectacle itself (not participation in it) to be the draw. To create an impressive display, prizes for the largest union contingents were incentives to put on an impressive show, so that the entire community could see how big and powerful the local movement was. In addition to inspiring the unorganized, organizers hoped that these events would build stronger bonds among unionists, and impress the general public with the worthiness of their cause. In Toronto’s first celebration, a labour leader went further: ‘Such a demonstration,’ he thought, ‘would teach their detractors that within the workshops there were men of sufficient executive ability to plan and carry out works of magnitude and importance ...,’ including filling public office.59 A few years later, the Montreal Gazette carried a similar report: ‘The capitalist, if he was looking on, as no doubt he was, got a very good idea of the strength of the united labor organizations of the city.’ ‘The demonstration as an object lesson to the public and to the participants is very valuable,’ a Halifax unionist explained in 1890. ‘The public see the power of unions and the workers themselves get a new idea of their importance in society.’60 Certainly, non-union craftsmen appeared in the parades on occasion, although this could be a source of some dispute. Employers could be included in producer ideology, but many craft unionists wondered if parades ought to include employers who ran non-union shops or, worse, were actively hostile to the trade union movement. In 1900 Toronto’s Labour Day demonstration committee voted to exclude the displays of several master bakers ‘on account of non-union employees being employed in these shops.’61 In both newspapers and union minutes, evidence of such divisiveness is rare, however, and remarkably tame compared to vociferous debates about hats and canes. In a typical meeting of the Toronto Trades and Labor Council in 1895, one member questioned the Stonecutters’ use of horses loaned by a firm that was opposed to union labour. Delegate Tennyson of the stonecutters replied that his union was not aware of any difference between the firm in question and union labour and the matter was apparently dropped. The lack of debate may suggest an underlying consensus: perhaps most craftsmen simply as-

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Native peoples rarely appeared in Labour Day parades. When they did, as in Vancouver in 1900, they were shown as exotic or comical, much as in the popular Wild West Shows of the same period. (CVanA, CVA 371-1156)

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sumed rather than consciously decided that union membership would structure the parade.62 By the early 1900s, the absence of the less skilled and non-union workers meant that Labour Day parades consisted preponderantly of white anglophones and francophones. There was rarely any space for African and native Canadians or for the newcomers from Asia and southern and eastern Europe who increasingly filled the jobs at the bottom of the occupational ladder and were rarely unionized before the First World War.63 On the few occasions when people of colour appeared in these marches, they were presented as curiosities, not fellow workers. Two ‘coloured men’ marching with the Ottawa local of the builders’ labourers in 1901 caught the eye of an obviously amazed reporter. ‘It ... amused some spectators to see White’s Express led by a black man,’ a Saint John reporter noted in 1904. The ‘coloured gentlemen’ who threw out plug tobacco at the end of Montreal’s parade the same year were also an unusual sight and were, in fact, on board a company, not a union, float. Plumbers’ unions sometimes used black youngsters as comic accents to the gleaming white-enamel fixtures on their float. In one case in Toronto, the tableau was an older woman trying to scrub the ‘dirt’ off a black boy. In a similar vein, a float in the 1911 Calgary parade depicted what a newsman called ‘a big black nigger wench’ trying to do her laundry amid domestic turmoil, in contrast to the electrical appliances on display at the other end of the float.64 The few native people who appeared were incorporated as exotic athletes and as circus clowns. The 1883 and 1884 parades in Hamilton integrated an ‘Indian Band of musicians and their dusky comrades in feathers and paint, who were to contribute to the afternoon’s amusement, a game of lacrosse’; the Spectator reporter recorded their image as ‘quite ferocious and romantic and all that sort of thing.’ Twenty years later, the three natives who appeared on a float of the Montreal Harbour Commission employees were reported to have ‘caused lots of amusement with their antics.’65 No Asian workers from British Columbia’s fish-packing plants and sawmills ever got invitations to join the west coast marchers. In fact, Victoria’s tailors carried a banner in 1901 blaming the Chinese for their plight: ‘Only a few of us left; the

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Women appeared in early Labour Day parades in much smaller numbers than men. Like these Hamilton boot and shoe workers in a 1913 trades procession, they rarely marched in the street and were almost always confined to carriages or wagons. (MULSP, 300)

rest driven out by Mongolian competition.’ And Winnipeg’s labour newspaper, the Voice, found the ‘tidy looking costumes’ of the female laundry workers in that city’s procession a ‘strange contrast to the hideous looking Chinamen that so many of our citizens feel bound to patronize.’66 Women were equally rare sights in the labour parades themselves, though they were crucial participants in the cheering crowds. The few spaces they found in the processions epitomized the gender identities taking shape in working-class communities. No more than a handful of the thousands of ‘working girls’ who were filling industrial jobs in Canada’s First Industrial Revolution had a place in the processions.67 They entered the parades as wage earners in two different ways, depending on whether it was employers or unions who organized their participation (women

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Company floats sometimes featured women workers as well, such as these Hamilton Cotton Company operatives in the 1880s. (MULSP, 678)

seemed never to have been allowed to organize themselves in these early parades). Long before the emergence of distinct Labour Day celebrations, some firms had incorporated women into the working tableaux on their company floats. In Halifax’s first Dominion Day festivities, the Virginia Tobacco Company had women making tobacco and cigars, and, in the Hamilton Nine-Hour march in 1872, the Wilson and Lockman float had six young women running the sewing machines that the firm manufactured. In 1891 the lone woman on the Halifax telephone company’s carriage ‘ran the office, attended the switch board and answered the messages which poured in from every occupant of the conveyance (each of whom had a telephone).’ In later years, a Brantford rag merchant had six girls sorting rags on the back of a wagon, a Winnipeg bottler had women packing pickles, and Halifax’s Moir’s had six girls wearing sailor suits throwing candy kisses to spectators.68

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On the rare occasions when unions organized a contingent of female unionists, the women were almost never shown at work or in any version of their work clothes. There were exceptions: a Toronto bookbinder’s float showed ‘a ruling machine which was being operated by a girl with flaxen ringlets’ and a Winnipeg tailor’s float included men and women at work.69 Usually, however, women were presented as respectable, well-dressed young ladies. In the first Labour Day march in Hamilton in 1883, the Knights of Labor gathered together ‘a representative body of female operatives in the shoe and other factories of the city’ and paraded them ‘with true gallantry’ in union cabs. The next year, they were led by the Knights’ only prominent female activist in Canada, Katie McVicar, and, according to the local press, ‘whenever the ladies in the procession passed along they were greeted with loud cheers and continued applause.’ The featured speaker in the 1884 event, Henry George, also praised the female participants in the procession and quoted one local unionist: ‘The women are the best men we have.’ Yet, a decade later, a man in the Toronto parade also won applause for cross-dressing to clown as a woman on a bicycle, no doubt mocking the pretensions of the ‘New Woman’ of the late nineteenth century. In a more serious vein, the Winnipeg tailors arranged an unusually provocative melodrama on a moving wagon in 1898 to attack the sweating system, which highlighted the victimization of working women and, presumably, the degradation of the craft: ‘Several women, young and old, were busily plying their needles while over them stood the foreman whip in hand, ready to lay it across the shoulders of the first unfortunate wretch whom he should discover straightening her back for an instant.’ Women were treated with similar patronizing ambivalence elsewhere in succeeding years.70 Generally, as paraders, women were constrained both by the masculine aura of military-style processions and by the nineteenth-century bourgeois standards of feminine respectability that frowned on women walking in the street.71 Only two parades before the First World War had women actually putting their feet on the pavement. In Montreal in 1907, the garment workers included ‘a strong contingent of women, who all walked, and were ornamented with brilliant sashes, thrown over one’s

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Children such as these on a paper workers’ float in Ottawa in 1910 usually appeared as costumed adornments to floats, rather than as workers in their own right. (LAC, C34405)

shoulder and knotted at the waist.’ Six years later, one female shoemaker created a sensation in London by marching with her fellow unionists and carrying ‘her share of the regalia.’ Despite the applause she received, this form of participation was rare. Well into the twentieth century, women in Labour Day parades would normally be seen only waving safely and primly from union carriages or automobiles.72 In a few other instances, women appeared not as workers but as symbols of some higher principles – including nationalism or imperial sentiment. They would then play the role of a classically draped symbolic figure.73 In 1872 a Hamilton sewing-machine manufacturer presented six women not only as seamstresses but also as clearly labelled symbols of the Canadian provinces. At the turn of the century, the Winnipeg draymen’s union put a woman at the centre of heaps of Manitoba grain to represent

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Canada, while the Ottawa painters’ union sat a female statue of ‘Art’ on their white and gold float, with ‘four little girls in white and wreathed in flowers.’ In Nanaimo a woman posed as the ‘Goddess of Commerce’ and in Victoria as Queen Titania.74 On a number of occasions, women on floats played the familiar role of Britannia.75 A few floats might promote specific products for domestic use, such as sewing machines or furniture, but nothing in these early Labour Day parades ever portrayed women’s work in the home or gave any recognition to women’s domestic labour or to their importance in the collective survival of the working-class family. In a partial departure from this pattern, an Ottawa float in 1900 organized by the Ottawa Co-operative Store – essentially a commercial element in the parade – had ‘a dozen children ... being supplied with a substantial meal.’76 In a few places, they were honoured as supportive housewives in ladies’ auxiliaries or union label committees, a role designated for them by the male union leadership. Again, they had to climb into the respectable patriarchal safety of carriages in order to participate.77 Of course, behind the scenes, women often played a vital role in these labour festivals in preparing food for the spectators of the sporting events later in the day.78 Children were equally rare in the parades as clearly defined wage earners. In some cases, apprentices might march behind the journeymen in their craft, although few crafts still had them. In a few cities, a contingent of newsboys might appear (in Montreal, newsgirls regularly joined the boys but rode in carriages like the other female paraders.)79 Yet, aside from the two hundred boys from Tuckett’s tobacco factory in the Hamilton parade in 1895 and a number from the local lumber mills in Ottawa the same year,80 the children working in these and other large mills never marched with their fathers, brothers, and neighbours. In early Montreal parades, banners decried child labour, and in 1893 London cigarmakers carried a large imitation cigar bearing the motto, ‘No Child Labor.’81 Children typically found a role only as ornaments or symbols of innocence – the printer’s devil, the driver of a tiny pony cart, or figures in a symbolic tableau or a display of products.82

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Affirming Craft Parading through the streets on a labour holiday, then, was intended to both define the boundaries of the house of labour, to weave it into local community life, and to publicize its particular alternative to the apparent degradation of work in the new industrial order. The craftsmen’s spectacle was not a single event: it was organized across the country by local labour councils at different times, and newspapers provide us with evidence of local debates, exceptions, and inconsistencies. In each city, craft unions debated whether to carry the American flag, what hats to wear, and whether to invite non-union employers. Even after these debates ended, parades did not express a singular sense of belonging: marchers simultaneously announced their allegiance to a particular craft, to conceptions of the broader house of labour, to international organizations of workers, and to their local, national, and imperial communities. Marchers spent considerable time separating themselves from each other, stressing their differences through different slogans, distinct uniforms, unique regalia, and precise formations. One formation or float did not necessarily blend perfectly together with the one that followed. Each parade in itself could be viewed as both a single event and a collection of different presentations. There is even some evidence of difference within particular formations: some marchers might prefer British imperialism to continental solidarity, and so they marched without their union badge. Some might object to non-union workers marching in the parade, so they pressed their claims on the organizing committee. Yet, given the potential for so much difference and inconsistency, the early Labour Day parades were remarkably consistent across time and space. From St John’s to Victoria, early Labour Day parades were craftsmen’s spectacles, celebrations of the respectable, male, white, skilled worker, and reflected both the expansiveness and the exclusiveness of his aspirations. In retrospect, debates, though heated, seem extraordinarily narrow, built upon an often largely unspoken agreement about the proper form of the processions. Dickering about hats never went beyond narrow

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debates about fashion to dispute the idea of respectability itself. It was easier to wonder if apprentices should appear once unions had assumed that the unskilled would not. Baking and printing made for a more honourable and interesting display than digging a canal. Exceptions to the craft character of the spectacles seemed rare, and always carefully contained. Inviting a children’s band from an Indian school was quite different from inviting adult aboriginals who worked for wages. Allowing female laundry workers to appear was less dangerous to the masculine ethic of the march when craft unions never even considered inviting Chinese workers doing similar work. Native people, Asian workers, and other ethnic minorities might be included as curiosities or comic spectacles, set apart from the formations of ‘workers.’ Though women served a different role in the spectacle, they were in an analogous situation: placing a woman in a carriage at the front of the march might have been seen as elevating and honouring her – it was also the place for mayors and union officials, after all – but it also separated her from the ‘real workers’ who marched in the street. These processions were affirmations of respectable white craft ‘manhood’ – from the pride in manual strength and craft skill to the clear message that these men were both respectable breadwinners, who did not need other family members in the paid labour force, and valuable citizens with much to contribute to the public good. In the words of an Ottawa labour columnist, Labour Day was the ‘practical recognition of brotherhood and fatherhood.’83 Labour Day parades grew out of a movement in search of acceptance by other classes in Canadian society, not an expression of permanent hostility towards them. It suggested that labour needed a secure niche in industrial capitalist society through separate organization but implied no fundamental opposition to employers and politicians who accepted the terms of producer ideology. Labour Day emerged out of the milieu of determined craft unionists and ‘Labour Reformers,’ who were appalled at the degradation of their workplace customs and routines that the first generations of industrial capitalists had brought about since mid-century. They had strengthened their craft organizations (in some cases by joining hands across the forty-

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ninth parallel with their American counterparts) and had established tighter procedures for controlling their craft practices. They had also built organizational links of solidarity across occupational boundaries. In the ‘Great Upheaval’ of the 1880s, they expressed their outrage at the accelerating pace of capitalist industrialization and the hollow promises of an earlier form of industrial paternalism. They also vigorously re-asserted the dignity of the respectable workingman, the wage-earning craftsman. Holding onto that respectability meant standing tall against the use of cheaper labour to degrade their crafts, including women and children. In the parade, such ostensibly universal principles as respectability, cooperation, and brotherhood were connected to such implicitly political claims as shorter hours or a wider franchise. These values went beyond their slogans and symbols: by marching through the streets, craftsmen proclaimed their craft pride and respectability, weaving them into the uniforms and fine clothes they wore, marshalling them into their orderly, military formations in central streets, and building them into the physical labour they performed on floats. Most of all, they embodied these principles simply by appearing, by making space for and linking symbols and slogans to certain groups of workers and not others. This was a spectacle of craftsmen: they shared rhetoric, comportment, and styles of presentation with other respectable groups, but they connected them to claims for justice for particular workers and embodied their notions of respectability and pride in work in decisions about who should join and who should not. Yet, unlike contemporary European May Day demonstrations, in which the marchers carried a petition to state authorities, the craftsmen’s spectacle was not intended as an overt act of protest. Its challenge to the central tendencies of industrial capitalism was buried in the symbolism of the event – proclaiming the dignity and worth of skilled manual labour and the importance of craft unions in protecting them. As American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers wrote in 1893, ‘Walking of itself is not an educator, but the parade on Labour Day is a protest against wrong, and an educator to many thousands of men who will read of the buyoant spirit and the manly bearing of the toilers in their march.’84

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chapter three

SHARING LABOUR DAY

‘Labor Day was celebrated throughout the dominion in a quiet and orderly fashion,’ the Montreal Gazette remarked in 1894, ‘contrasting strongly with the festivals held on the European continent with the same end in view.’ While Canadian workers went to church, walked in military-style processions under the ‘guardianship’ of police, and passed the afternoon in respectable ‘amusement,’ European workers marked May Day with ‘violent’ speeches and deeds, rioting and bloodshed, and skirmishes with police and soldiers. As far as the Gazette was concerned, the difference was the result of a whole project of political socialization: Canada’s Labour Day showed the genius of the ‘British habit of self-government,’ which trained men to ‘work out their own salvation.’ Other lessons could be drawn from the contrast as well. More than just a holiday manifesting imperial political culture, Labour Day could remind Canadians of the proper approach to material and political progress. ‘Just as the British people gained political liberty by constitutional methods,’ the Gazette noted, ‘so the workingmen of today in Canada and Great Britain are gradually obtaining better conditions of work and life by mutual help and organization.’ For workers, the result of this moderate and gradual apAt the turn of the century, most newspapers knew Labour Day to be important. They featured the festival in detailed stories, dramatic illustrations, and long editorials. (News [Toronto], 31 August 1901)

The Workers’ Festival

proach was progress in wages, working conditions, and social independence, surpassing even ‘France with her republican institutions or Germany with her state socialism.’1 For the Gazette, then, Labour Day was an opportunity to offer extended commentary that was part history lesson, part philosophical reflection, and part prescription for future behaviour. The point was not simply to assess the local celebrations but to tie them to broader ideas: the respectability, sobriety, and Christianity of Canadian workers, the danger of irresponsible demagogues at home or abroad, and the hope of continued progress in the future. The Gazette editorial also expressed the relationship between the craftsmen’s spectacle and the broader public sphere of ideas. As we saw, street processions were often judged against the memory of other local parades: it was common to note that a particular demonstration was the best of the year, the greatest in recent memory, or the finest ever seen in the city. For the Gazette, however, the relevant comparison was not between different examples of local performance but between a local celebration and international events. On Labour Day, an actual parade could be judged and assessed, but, since no May Day celebrations existed in Canada until 1906, its lessons reached Montreal in the form of the wire report, transmitted as a distant, virtual event through a growing network of communication technologies. At the creation of Labour Day as a national holiday, its contrast with May Day already held a key place in the Canadian bourgeois imagination, but the comparison was just as much the creature of an international public sphere of ideas as it was a product of the uses of local public space. Creating a public holiday was never just a question of marching down the street in a straight line. While organized labour used parades to proclaim their sense of dignity and self-worth in a direct and immediate way, journalists, photographers, priests, illustrators, and others put their own particular skills to the task of shaping and interpreting the day. Each year, these groups took Labour Day as an opportunity to reflect on a whole host of issues: the condition of workers, the place of labour in society, the state of human progress, and even the nature of the public good. In the newspaper, in the photograph, at the podium, or in the pulpit, these groups helped to create Labour Day: to guide interpretations, to set

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In their Labour Day coverage, newspapers commonly presented local labour leaders as solid, respectable citizens. (La Presse [Montreal], 2 September 1900, 1)

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boundaries on meanings of events, and to shape the messages of the workers’ festival. In this sense, Labour Day was not so much an event as a touchstone, a chance for many social groups to imagine the kind of society that Canadians ought to create. Thus, while Labour Day organizers could invent a holiday, they could not control it. They could define a form for its celebration – a parade, speeches, a picnic, respectable amusement – and get their holiday recognized through municipal declaration and later federal statute, but Labour Day was not the exclusive property of the working class at all. From the beginning, it was the product of many groups speaking at once, never forming a single, unified voice. The efforts of editors, journalists, photographers, artists, clergymen, civic officials, and advertisers lacked the quality of a coherent ideology: there were simply too many groups speaking in different ways and in different forms of media. It is possible, however, to reconstruct two core ideas (each with their own subthemes), which we call the bourgeois Labour Day and Labour Sunday. The bourgeois Labour Day was most commonly articulated in newspapers: in the coverage of the events, in editorials reflecting on the meaning of the holiday, in artistic and photographic representations, and in advertisements placed by capitalists paying tribute to workers. Labour Sunday, the Christian spin on the holiday, emerged first from the interaction of the religious aspirations of Labour Day organizers and the efforts of local clergy, but gradually it became a creature of more systematic efforts in larger religious institutions. Each of these two main ideas contained a number of distinct themes, which overlapped with the craftsmen’s spectacle but did not exactly mirror it. Each, moreover, was ultimately somewhat conflicted about the meaning of Labour Day, imagining it to be a holiday of both possibility and peril.

Bourgeois Voices Labour Day was a key public event in the life of the city, and few observers (at least those in print) saw anything menacing in respectable

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At the turn of the century, newspapers sometimes sent out an artist to record highlights of the celebrations. Unlike photographs, these illustrations often conveyed the power of the parade by combining key images into a compressed montage. Montreal’s J.S. Brodeur left this impression of the 1901 parade in that city. (La Presse [Montreal], 3 September 1901, 1)

craftsmen soberly marching down the public streets. Newspapers gave considerable space to reporting the day’s events, describing the marches and sports in great detail. Floats and formations were carefully enumerated, the colours and design of each uniform noted, and the overall presentation assessed. Newspapers often supplemented such descriptions with visual representations. Until the early 1900s, hand-drawn illustrations captured the drama and artistry of the events, portraying the floats, uniforms, flags, and banners of the craft unions’ pageantry.

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Photographs gradually supplanted these artistic efforts as photography became a more important part of journalism in the early years of the twentieth century. By the First World War, newspapers were commonly including one or more small photographs of marching units or floats, and the number and size of photos increased over the next few decades. Even much earlier, however, as commercial photography had become affordable at the close of the nineteenth century, many groups of unionists posed for a picture proudly displaying their costumes, floats, and overall respectability. Other local elites participated in events and helped shape their meaning. At a labour council’s invitation, politicians arrived to watch the parade, rode in carriages at the front, and delivered platitudinous speeches about the value of labour to society. On occasion, city councils even donated money to assist in making the celebration.2 Editorialists likewise published lengthy philosophical tracts on the importance of labour, sparing no melodramatic rhetoric in commenting on the meaning of the holiday: ‘Hail to them ... with brush and broom, with picks and shovels, with drills and sledges, with barrows, with cart and horse, with sinewy thongs, muscles and frames of Goliath strength,’ the Vancouver Sun declared in 1913, articulating a typical celebration of manual toil.3 In some ways, such celebrations were surprising, given the fragile recognition of unions in this period and the common references to organized labour as menacing and fearsome.4 In celebrating Labour Day, bourgeois observers picked up some of the original ideas in the craftsmen’s spectacle. Such ideas – notably the labour theory of value – were widely shared by capitalists and bourgeois thinkers, although not always in the precise form articulated by craftsworkers. Even politicians and employers saw work as the foundation of prosperity, city, nation, and civilization. In reporting on Labour Day events, for example, journalists normally went beyond simple observation to evaluation. The point was not to simply celebrate the success of the day but to make it a creature of civic boosterism, regional or national patriotism, or broader ideas of civilization. And so, despite the Globe’s traditional hostility to trade unions, its reporter scanned the assembled

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By pulling the camera back from the specific floats, this photographer presented not only the parade and its spectators, but framed the spectacle within the towering walls of Belleville’s prosperous, downtown business district. (LAC, PA10532)

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masses at the 1883 Toronto parade and concluded that ‘the crowds of well-dressed, intelligent men, attended by wives, sisters and sweethearts equally well dressed and as intelligent, show that elevating tendencies have been at work.’ In another burst of boosterism sixteen years later, the Globe described local citizens’ ‘thrill of pride in a city which can turn out such a large number of robust, intelligent, contented and well-dressed mechanics and workmen ... The Labour Day parade is a good barometrical index of the industrial progress of Toronto.’5 For their part, newspaper photographers liked to frame their pictures of the tidy, orderly parades within the solid walls of downtown business buildings – a visible connection to urban prosperity and boosterist pride. Labour contributed to larger projects as well. ‘In the work of men lies the wealth of Canada,’ Member of Parliament D.C. Fraser told a Kingston, Ontario, Labour Day audience.6 ‘Labour exalteth a nation,’ Ontario’s attorney general told a Hamilton crowd a year later. Bourgeois observers also imagined that work was part of the story of how civilized societies grew out of savagery, a development that lay at the core of evolutionary thinking and contemporary notions of racial superiority. In 1903 Sir William Mulock (the cabinet minister responsible for the new federal Labour Department) reminded a Welland, Ontario, audience that the ‘working classes’ had ‘carved the country from the primeaval forest.’ A decade later, the Toronto Globe celebrated the way local workers contributed to a larger imperialist project of building ‘civilization’: ‘The power that builds cities, laces continents with railways, bridges oceans with ships, feeds, clothes, and shelters the race, “makes money” (without always getting it), supplies man’s diversified material wants, and brings civilization out of savagery has been holding a day of festival in Toronto.’7 Though associated with organized labour, then, ideas like producer ideology, labour theory of value, and citizenship through work were not inherently dangerous ideas. Indeed, they lay at the core of the Victorian imagination and the Protestant work ethic. ‘For this is the era of work,’ declared the London Advertiser in 1913. ‘To be idle is a disgrace; to work is honorable.’8 Yet speeches, reports, and commentary also contained hints of under-

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lying anxieties. As a permanent statutory holiday recognizing workers, Labour Day implied that class difference was an enduring condition in the country. ‘Objections have been offered to the establishment of this holiday on the ground that it is a recognition of a working class as a distinct element in the community,’ the Globe noted in 1894. ‘This feeling is strengthened by the fact that the chief movers in the establishment of the holiday ... have been unions composed of mechanics and unskilled laborers ... That they should be recognized as a distinct and separate working class, having a legal holiday of their own, is certainly opposed to the democratic spirit which is still alive in both Canada and the United States.’9 Certainly, all holidays articulated a sense of imagined community that included some groups and excluded others,10 but what did it mean when a country set aside one day a year for the labour movement to march? Did not a permanent holiday devoted to unions imply that differences between capital and labour were permanent as well? How could the general community make a public holiday that recognized one class within it? One way to deal with this problem was to expand the meaning of ‘worker’ beyond the craftsmen who had initiated the day. ‘Labor Day should be every man’s day and a proper observance of the holiday should not be regarded as the exclusive province of any section of the community,’ opined the Globe in 1894. ‘There is a common error in defining “labor,”’ the Peterborough Examiner argued in 1910. ‘In many minds the laboring man is only associated with manual toil, coarse, hard, bonewearying work. But it is still the fact that no matter what a man’s or woman’s occupation, if its duties are met and its duties are faithfully performed, it becomes work and hard work at that. A man sitting all day at a desk and wielding a tool no heavier than a pen may go home at the end of the day as tired as any man who has toiled his ten hours in a trench ... Truly, we all work, no matter what our calling, and we all have our share of Labor Day.’ Fifteen years later, the Halifax Herald made the same point more bluntly: ‘We are all workers; we are all qualified to celebrate Labor Day.’ The idea of broadening the labour meaning of the holiday often had a local or regional spin. In introducing its Labour Day

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Using many different visual metaphors, illustrations emphasized the interdependence of capital and labour. One common image was a single worker and capitalist standing together before a prosperous city. (Journal [Ottawa], 7 September 1897, 6)

thoughts on the state of agriculture in the west, the Manitoba Free Press noted that, although the day was originally proclaimed to honour the ‘artisan, mechanic and the manual toiler ... its conception has broadened a good deal in recent years. In a country like Canada, in an area like the western provinces, labor is an all-inclusive term.’11 Even the word ‘labour’ did not fix the meaning of the holiday. When craftworkers called their holiday ‘Labour Day,’ they chose a name that was loaded with meaning but ambiguous in definition. By the late nineteenth century, ‘labour’ could refer to the trades unions that initiated the new holiday, to an abstract class of people who performed manual work, or to the idea of work itself.12 Editorialists and speechmakers were prone to subtle rhetorical movements between different meanings of ‘labour.’ Bourgeois commentary often passed back and forth between these three definitions, admitting the day’s origins in trade unions before celebrating producer ideology or a broader Protestant work ethic.

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‘This is the Day! The Hour! The Year! The Age!’ Wartime Labour Day images linked the worker to a broader patriotic project. (Herald [Halifax], 31 August 1918, 5)

One common tendency was to represent labour in a single figure. An early illustration depicted a boss and worker standing before a modern city, separated by a sign declaring ‘Labor Creates Wealth, Wealth Creates Labor.’ The illustration made many points at once: it celebrated labour’s contribution to prosperity, recognized the existence of a distinct figure of labour, and muted differences between workers and capitalists. Dress and facial hair distinguished the two figures, but they appeared to share much more: aside from reaping the benefits of prosperity (in the form of a modern city in the background), they are both embodiments of respectable masculinity, with white faces, solid, healthy bodies, and dignified posture.13 These kinds of images of workers were quite common in the early years of Labour Day. Beyond editorial cartoons and illustrations, they also appeared in the tribute ads taken out by companies to salute workers on their special day and in commercial advertisements that played on images of workers to sell products. Most tribute ads depicted a ‘generic worker,’ focusing directly on the physical stature of male, blue-collar workers. Workers’ bodies were put on display as almost erotic physical specimens, often with strong arms exposed and occasionally partially

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naked. Many of these ads were stirring tributes to workers, especially during wartime, when manual labour was explicitly connected to a broader national good. In 1918, under the headline ‘Brothers in Arms – Worker and Soldier,’ the Halifax Herald featured a muscled worker (again, with arms exposed) shaking hands with a uniformed soldier above a melodramatic text about reaching the summit of victory. ‘They must climb together – the soldier over THERE and the worker over HERE,’ the paper argued. ‘One cannot lag behind.’14 By the middle decades of the twentieth century, this kind of iconography had become quite sophisticated in both message and design. Artists picked up the trend towards social realism in art, which portrayed workers, farmers, and other ‘ordinary people’ as dignified, powerful, and proud figures.15 The ads also intersected with increasingly sophisticated efforts to create positive corporate images by weaving a recognition of workers into a broader public-relations agenda. In some cases, tribute ads saluted the ‘generic worker’; in others, the message focused on the company’s own employees. An International Nickel Company of Canada ad featured a driller at work in a company mine, but the text moved from a recognition of work to the broader importance of nickel in the modern economy, which touched even households, represented by the ‘enduring beauty’ of a washing machine tub. The gender contrast is instructive: while the male miner’s drill ‘reverberates through the timbered chamber in the Frood Mine’ and ‘bites into the ore wall,’ running the washing machine (though likely hard work) is a slim and demure woman, both machine and worker recognized not for power but for beauty.16 In a more generic tribute during the Second World War, under the headline “Blood, Sweat and Tears,” and in language dripping with masculine rhetoric, Eaton’s celebrated the Sweat that turns out the weapons of war. It’s not heroic, not in the common sense of the word ... It’s often monotonous with long, hard hours at lathe or drill, blast furnace or blow torch. It’s often dirty with oil and grease, soot and smoke. It’s frequently dangerous with angry machines, touchy explosives, lightning-edged tools, searing cohesives. But it’s Labour ...

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Companies often took out large advertisements to honour Canadian workers. Though Eaton’s was no friend of organized labour, it often saluted the worker, as in this dramatic ad during the Second World War. (Globe and Mail [Toronto], 4 September 1944, 22)

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Several local employers might co-sponsor a single tribute ad, emphasizing labour’s contribution to industrial prosperity. As in so many of these ads, the worker depicted here combines many types of masculine imagery. Beyond the skilled work of the blacksmith that he performs, his body exudes eroticism, beauty, muscular strength, and dignity. (Herald [Halifax], 1 September 1952)

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During the Second World War, tribute ads often celebrated the contribution of both men and women but continued to ignore unions and the labour of visible minorities. (Herald [Halifax], 4 September 1943)

the stuff that since the world began has earned man’s daily bread, has built his house, raised his family, guarded his pride and self-respect. Now it does more, this Labour ... From its hands come fleets of ships ... flights of planes ... phalanxes of guns ... For this there are no medals, no fancy ribbons ... just toil and sweat ... an honest living made, a just cause worked for. On this the day of labour, we salute you.17

Tributes continued in the early post–Second World War period. A Dawes Black Horse Brewery advertisement appeared in several newspapers in 1947, featuring a male blue-collar worker with his muscled arm exposed, standing in front of a working factory, above a caption paying tribute ‘to the ability of men to plan, to build, to work together towards a common aim.’18

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The Limits of Labour Workers were shown as powerful, dignified, and sympathetic figures, often at work making products and building the country. As moving as these tributes could be, however, their vision of labour was sharply limited. Most conspicuously avoided references to organized labour or other forms of working-class solidarity. Instead, the ‘generic worker’ was portrayed as a solitary figure. As in the craftsmen’s spectacle, he was white, male, dignified, powerful, and proud, but, in contast to labour’s own imagery, the worker here was a heroic individual with no evident class solidarities or union affiliation (though sometimes he is connected to broader patriotic identities). Only fleetingly during the Second World War, moreover, did any female figures appear, and the faces of visible minorities were never used to represent the Canadian worker. For bourgeois thinkers, then, the issue was not whether to recognize the class implications of Labour Day, but how. Everyone knew that the new holiday was tied to organized labour, but that fact did not fix its social meaning; it was merely the point of departure. ‘We can all, as fellow-countrymen, rejoice on this, the national holiday of labor,’ noted Toronto MP John Ross Robertson. ‘We can remember with pride that we live in a land where honesty is the mark of worth, a land which recognizes no class privileges, but offers all the prizes in its gift to ability, whether it come from the cottage of the ploughman, the home of the mechanic, or the mansion of the millionaire. (Applause).’19 Physical appearance was often the key evidence of the lack of class privilege. On the first official Labour Day, the London Free Press observed the crowds at one local Labour Day celebration and drew social lessons from the way class distinction disappeared in a broad democracy of appearance. ‘To see a vast assemblage of people on our streets or parks, as it was yesterday, is to be at once impressed with the external similarity of all. Well dressed, well fed, what a striking uniformity of pleasant countenances, and the outward appearance at least of content! Any stranger from afar looking on at yesterday’s proceedings would have exclaimed at the absence of those indications of distinction as between men ...’20 Comments like these

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On Labour Day, these two Montreal newspapers depicted workers in dramatically different ways. La Presse saw a muscular workman, tired and sweaty, dressed in his work clothes, while the Star’s workingman was plump, self-satisfied, and respectably dressed. (La Presse [Montreal], 31 August 1907, 1; Star [Montreal], 4 September 1905)

made the day symbolic of the end of class difference rather than a recognition of it. Artists were particularly adept at combining difference and similarity in their images, distinguishing capitalist from worker in ways that communicated common interests. A rich image in La Presse in 1909 contained many of the common visual strategies: worker and boss met each other, shaking hands, in front of a working factory (the smokestack – oddly, to our more pollution-conscious eyes – billowing smoke as a symbol of prosperity), surrounded by local union labels. Above this central image, the boss and worker each did his own labour, different in kind but noble in appearance. Below, the similarities and differences were extended to home life. While the boss sat in a plush parlour room with his family, the worker met his own wife and children in a humbler, but still respectable,

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The handshake at the centre of this full-page illustration, ringed by union labels, brings together the separate but similarly respectable worlds of worker and boss. (La Presse [Montreal], 4 September 1909, 1)

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home. Difference and similarity co-exist: bosses and workers wear different clothes, do different work, and make different wages, but both are producers, breadwinners, fathers, and husbands, performing valuable labour, living respectable lives, and enjoying common prosperity.21 Observations about social similarity within difference had political parallels. The new holiday represented a turn from being ‘too busy in legislating in the interests of capital to give due and deserving consideration of the rights of labour,’ the Peterborough Examiner argued in 1894.22 Class-based grievances might have a legitimate place in the past, but not in the present or future. Indeed, far from setting workers apart, proclaiming Labour Day itself showed the inclusion of workers in the body politic: ‘The setting apart by the Government of one day in the year in honor of labor is an indication of the changing phases of human society ... Labor is no longer a dishonorable thing. The laborer ... is recognized as an essential part of the social organism, as one whose existence must be recognized, whose needs must be considered, whose welfare is as important as that of any other man.’23 That same year, the Vancouver Sun, declared that the establishment of Labour Day reduced ‘to an undefinable minimum’ the ideas that had been ‘the basis of conscious class distinctions in society. The nation, as such, has risen to the recognition of the rights of the “producer.”’24 Like many other bourgeois voices, Ontario Premier A.S. Hardy saw this progress closely related to ideas of evolution: ‘As humanity rose the cause of labour was elevated, but as humanity receded and deteriorated, so would the cause of labour suffer ... The labour cause and its advancement owe much to that great principle which underlies society, the principle of evolution. The cause has advanced slowly but firmly. It had advanced year by year in such a way that it could hardly be recognized, but from decade to decade and from quarter century to quarter century, there could be seen great landmarks showing that the great body of the people were rising to the occasion and that they were advancing in material welfare.’25 Yet, if bourgeois thinking focused on social similarity on Labour Day, it still recognized that class relations contained the potential for conflict and division. Editorialists were fond of lecturing unionists on the need for

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Shaking hands was the most common image of labour-management cooperation. (Herald [Halifax], 31 August 1929, 11)

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Emphasizing management’s responsibility to workers was always combined with suggestions that workers should be good team players. (Gazette [Montreal], 6 September 1948, 6)

responsibility, connecting Labour Day to an ideal of an organic and united society. They imagined that the foundation of a healthy society was cooperation, mutual responsibility, and fair dealing on both sides. The way to maintain prosperity, argued the Vancouver Sun, ‘is to cultivate a spirit of mutual consideration and forbearance. Neither employer nor employee should strive to take advantage of the other. Only thus can they both flourish.’ Calls for cooperation placed obligations on both capital and labour. On the one hand, editorialists urged bosses to honour the rights of workers. ‘The employer cannot afford to disregard the rights of those whose labor he has purchased,’ the London Advertiser cautioned in 1913. On the other hand, recognizing the rights of workers almost always involved lecturing them on restraint and respect for their bosses. ‘The employee,’ continued the Advertiser, ‘cannot afford to disregard the interests of the man for whom he works.’ Cooperation was a slippery concept in industrial relations. Looking to progress and to cooperation both recognized and transcended the sense that Labour Day entrenched the sepa-

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Unlike Labour Day, May Day garnered little respect from editorialists. In this rich cartoon, radical miner J.B. McLachlan was ridiculed as the cross-dressing ‘Queen of the May’ while the scruffy ‘Red Element’ tied up Canada in the background. (Herald [Halifax], 1 May 1920, 1)

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rate interests of capital and labour. But, if notions of progress implied that Labour was now a natural part of the body politic, appeals to cooperation suggested that the mutual dependence of the classes had to be constantly nurtured and refined. Indeed, to sew together the classes, ideas like fair dealing and gentlemanly conduct had to bear considerable ideological and practical weight. They tapped into powerful metaphors of cooperation in popular culture. In the early years of the century, capitalists and workers were often shown shaking hands, the widely recognized masculine symbol of both cementing a deal and expressing friendly greetings. Later, as mass-spectator sports became more popular, team metaphors became more common.26 The flip-side of urging cooperation was condemning radicalism. May Day was a particular foil. Even if union leaders did not originally intend Labour Day to conflict with May Day, comparing the two events quickly became an editorial-page staple. Already in 1895, only a year after Labour Day was made a statutory holiday and eleven years before a single May Day parade would be organized in Canada, the Ottawa Free Press looked south for contrasts with labour’s official holiday: ‘The foolish demonstrations of foreigners in certain parts of the United States bear no relation whatever to Labour Day, and those for whom the holiday has been called into existence will be the first to repudiate the course pursued by riotous Socialists.’ Comparisons continued after Canadian socialists began to celebrate May Day in 1906. Radical miner J.B. McLachlan was ridiculed as ‘the Queen of May,’ wearing a dress exposing his muscled arms and dancing for ‘Winnipeg Reds,’ all while the scruffy ‘red element’ tied up Canada in the background. ‘Your costume is rotten, Jim,’ the ‘Public’ declared.27 While Labour Day was associated with respectable labour and honourable toil, May Day was considered a menacing day of worker radicalism. Nonetheless, the obsession with distinguishing the two celebrations revealed the underlying anxiety about Labour Day itself. Comparing the two celebrations was not automatic, particularly before 1906, when Canadian workers did not meet publicly on May Day. If the Citizen, for example, wanted to celebrate the British respectability of Canadian workers, there were much more convenient symbols available

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closer to home, such as workers’ sober participation in numerous Dominion Day or Empire Day celebrations. Underlying the comparison was an implicit recognition that Labour Day was a holiday about class. What May Day shared with Labour Day, after all, was status as a workers’ festival. Bourgeois thinking on Labour Day was not simple: it saw both possibility and danger, promise and anxiety, in the new holiday. The bourgeois Labour Day shared some symbols and ideas with the craftsmen’s spectacle – ideas like the labour theory of value were woven into such staples of liberal thinking as evolution, progress, the public good, and cooperation. Yet for every tribute there seemed to be a corresponding anxiety: labour might be the foundation of civilization, but recognizing manual labour was never enough; social similarity might be clearly evident on Labour Day, but this was striking mainly because the day implied difference to begin with; organized workers could be responsible and respectable but also potentially disruptive. Unions were clearly not hostile to much of this bourgeois philosophizing. In fact, leaders like Samuel Gompers explicitly recognized the value of Labour Day coverage. ‘All the newspapers, weeks before each Labor Day and on Labor Day and the day after, give space to labor’s cause which it would be impossible for labor to purchase in the form of advertisement. We spend large sums of money for agitation and education and yet ... we can obtain it at the small cost of a Labor Day parade and without the expenditure of more than a few dollars ...’ Moreover, trades councils often invited civic officials to appear and speak and urged boards of trades to contribute ads and articles to Labour Day souvenirs.28 Yet not every craftworker was comfortable with these interventions. ‘Workingmen cannot feed their families on flags and loyalty,’ pioneering Canadian unionist Alf Jury complained bluntly during his Labour Day speech in 1894. Progress and improvement ‘had been obtained year by year by the efforts of men spoken of with contumely as labor agitators,’ he continued, most likely with an eye to other speakers that year, including the mayor and lieutenant governor, ‘and yet there was no greater boast of statesmen and lawyers than that they placed the labor agitators’ ideas in the statute

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books. (Applause).’ More often, such frustrations were not made explicit on the stage but emerged from the audience as sarcastic remarks. In Toronto in 1896, for example, E.B. Osler’s patronizing ‘advice’ to workingmen was interrupted when an audience member called out ‘we should work fewer hours,’ while Ontario Premier A.S. Hardy’s tribute to the labour movement’s wise and honest leadership caused one listener to wonder, ‘What does it amount to?’29 Such comments, though rarely recorded, disrupt the usual image of a shared consensus between bourgeois rhetoric and craftsmen’s spectacle. Though some themes overlapped, in the end, the two were not perfectly parallel.

Labour Sermons Churches showed a similar ambivalence about Labour Day, embracing it as a key moment in their spiritual calendar while expressing worries about its basic meanings and trying to refashion it to fit their frame of reference. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, many Christian clergy were worried about the accelerating materialism of the Western world, which seemed to be manifested in many spheres of life and was producing new secular ideologies and institutions: great corporations, a more modern state, international craft unions, larger urban centres, leftwing ideologies, and others. Though Christianity was an important part of working-class life, relations between clergy and unionists were not always close. Demoninational issues were often seen as divisive within union halls, so religious expression was often discouraged, apart from vague rhetoric and symbolism. Unionists were also often frustrated with the clergy’s distance from their daily struggles.30 For the clergy, Labour Day was a new holiday whose origins were unambiguously modern, emerging from the great international organizations of craftworkers, and might suggest a resignation to the materialism of the age. ‘Labour Day is not a festival of the Christian year,‘ the Reverend D.N. McLachlan lamented in the Winnipeg Free Press in 1929, ‘nor has it a place in the calendar of the Church.’31

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Clergymen often preached on labour-related themes in the day before Labour Day, known as ‘Labour Sunday.’ In the early 1900s the Catholic Church in Montreal held special masses for unionists before their parade. (La Presse [Montreal], 6 September 1904, 1; 5 September 1905, 1; 3 September 1907, 1)

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At the same time, however, clergy had many tools at their disposal, both old and new, to insert Labour Day into the canon of Christian thinking and endow the workers’ festival with religious meaning. In broad terms, Victorian ideas of labour across the political and social spectrum were partly Christian in origin, deriving from biblical notions of work as both a curse and a duty. ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,’ God told Adam and Eve as he cast them from the Garden of Eden. Thus, work to Christian clergy was ‘the great law of the universe, the law God had stamped on all creation.’ At the same time, religious figures promoted their own labour theory of value by portraying work as the creative force that made people human, and as a possible source of redemption. ‘The curse that God pronounced upon our first ancestors when they sinned was that they should toil,’ the Reverend J. Gibson Inkster told the First Presbyterian Church in London in 1910. ‘This curse has been turned into a blessing by the touch of human personality.’ In a Winnipeg church three years later, the Reverend G.A. Sinclair declared that those ‘who work by the hand and brain are the real makers of nations. The rest are parasites.’32 Moreover, despite its ostensibly secular focus, Labour Day itself (like most Victorian holidays) contained some Christian symbolism and content. As we saw in the last chapter, workers paraded behind banners rife with Christian symbolism: Adam and Eve, ideas of international brotherhood, the redemptive and transformative power of labour, and so on. More than simply parallel ideologies, Christian attempts to wrestle with the meaning of the new holiday were part of a conscious strategy by both clergy and labour leaders to bring the holiday’s messages into church and religious themes into the holiday. Before the turn of the century, some local Protestant clergy began preaching ‘labour sermons’ on the day before the holiday, often prompted by the requests from local unions. ‘I shall have much pleasure falling in with the wishes of the Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council,’ J.A. Richardson wrote to local unionists in 1897, ‘by making some phase of the labor question the subject of one of my sermons on September 5th.’ This ad-hoc strategy soon intersected with the emerging agenda of the so-called social gospel, a Protestant doctrine

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that hoped to make Christianity more relevant to everyday life in the modern world. Adherents of the social gospel took up a wide variety of topics, from the status of Canadian Indians to child welfare, prison reform, and temperance, but they were especially interested in reconciling Christianity to the problems of an urban-industrial society. Labour sermons fit nicely with this impulse. In the United States, the Reverend Charles Stelzle spearheaded the Protestant churches’ decision in 1905 to designate the day before Labour Day as ‘Labor Sunday,’ an occasion for sermons devoted to labour themes. North of the border, the non-denominational Social Service Council of Canada eventually issued guidelines for these occasions.33 Labour Sunday sermons both injected Christian messages into Labour Day and brought the theme of the workers’ festival into church services. Christian thinking about Labour Day shared many of the basic narrative strategies of bourgeois Labour Day, rephrased in spiritual terms. The Christian Guardian’s 1911 editorial, for example, could have easily been drawn from any local newspaper: celebrating the moderation of Canadian unionists and their concern for the public good, condemning radicalism in other countries, and marshalling standard words like ‘sanity,’ ‘intellegience,’ and ‘conscientious,’ but also pointing these ideas to a religious conclusion: ‘This is simply saying that the men who compose the labor unions have become more truly Christian in spirit.’34 There were other parallels as well. Like bourgeois commentators, the clergy played with the meaning of labour and work, moving between thoughts on unions and work more broadly. Many clergy reminded parishioners that Christ was a worker. The Reverend A.E. Cooke of Vancouver told his parish that ‘Jesus, the Carpenter, is in sympathy with every man who earns his bread by the sweat of his face. He too worked for His living. His hands were calloused by daily toil. His fingers were cramped to the hammer handle.’35 Others reconceived labour as Christian good works. ‘Labour not for meat which perishes, but for that which endureth into everlasting life,’ said the Reverend R.S. Laidlaw in 1920, quoting the Gospel of John. Many social gospel clergy used Labour Sunday sermons to reconcile broad Christian messages with the daily business of urban

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life. The Reverend Dr Crummie, pastor of Wesley Methodist Church in Vancouver, delivered a Labour Sunday address titled ‘Bear Ye One Another’s Burdens.’ After a plea for taxation of wealth, Crummie found time to advance a Christian justification for higher street car fares. If fares were too low to afford both fair wages and reasonable return on investment, the clergyman argued, then ‘the spirit of the text would place upon those ready to live up to it in earnest the obvious obligation to meet increased fares for streetcar service in order that the employees alone should not have the burden to bear.’36 The Reverend J.C. Cochrane of Sudbury defended the Winnipeg General Strike by arguing that workers were merely fighting for a living wage, suggesting that ‘it would look more like justice if machine guns and bayonets were turned on the profiteers.’ To keep workers in the fold, he argued, following the line of the most radical thread of the social gospel, the church ‘must lay new emphasis on the socialistic principles of Jesus Christ. It must take sides with the brotherhood of man against ruthless competition.’37 Most often, however, Labour Sunday sermons looked past the specifics of worldly industrial relations to articulate higher (and sometimes vaguer) spiritual principles. In progressive hands, such sermons could be biting critiques of the inhuman qualities of capitalism. But it was equally true that many Labour Day sermons spent as much time critiquing all forms of materialism as they did advocating economic justice for the worker. A great number of Labour Sunday sermons contained the same basic lament: Christians lived in an era when ‘social ambitions and bitter struggle to lead in worldly accomplishments’ trumped spiritual ideals. This thinking applied to unions as well. In its 1916 pamphlet for Labour Day, the Social Service Council of Canada expressed clear sympathy with the goals of labour but made sure to place its support within the context of their larger, Christian objectives. ‘The church represents, or ought to represent, all classes of the community,’ the pamphlet declared. ‘It ought to strive to interpret these classes to each other ... The church ought to point the way towards industrial justice and industrial peace. Its work is not done until the Prince of Peace is crowned lord of the kingdom of industry.’ The Council went on to say that the church was a ‘moral force, not a police

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force’ and declared its broad sympathy with labour, leaving unanswered the question of whether industrial justice and industrial peace were ever at odds.38 The social gospel was a largely Protestant phenomenon, but in Quebec the Catholic Church was equally aggressive in trying to give Labour Day a religious tone, as part of the emerging ‘social Catholicism’ of the period. In 1905, for example, services held at Notre Dame Church in Montreal the night before the march drew some 14,000 francophone workers. College adminstrator Abbé Labelle lectured on ‘the church as the guide and friend of the workingman’ and ‘the respective duties of employer and employee with Christ, the Workingman, as the model.’ Archbishop Paul Bruschesi followed up with the central message for unionists from social Catholicism: avoid strikes, show deference to employers, put industrial disputes into the hands of church arbitrators, and ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’ Two thousand English-speaking Catholic workers heard the same message at St Patrick’s Church. Similar services took place in Quebec City and other centres in the province where local labour movements pulled together a celebration, such as Valleyfield and SaintHyacinthe. French-Canadian nationalist newspapers featured these religious events at the forefront of their Labour Day coverage and reinforced the message that organized workers should bind themselves to the church.39

‘We All Have Our Share of Labor Day’ The framing of the Labour Day festival by elements outside the labour movement – journalists, editorialists, photographers, illustrators, religious leaders, ad writers, and so on – made it clear that participation in the public sphere was never just a question of strutting down streets with banners and floats. Initiating and naming a holiday was not the same as creating and controlling it. Marshalling respectable white workers in the central streets of Canadian cities was only one part of creating a celebration that proved remarkably flexible in accommodating a variety of inter-

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pretations and messages. Even the name ‘Labour Day’ was sufficiently flexible to open it to multiple voices and competing ideas. To say that the day was about ‘labour’ was both to recognize and to transcend the day’s origins in organized labour, opening space alongside the craftsmen’s spectacle for bourgeois and Christian versions. Labour Day could have many different meanings. Perhaps, in the end, this was a source of both strength and weakness: its connection to broad principles like civic boosterism, imperialism, and civilization was at once the source of its cultural power and the cause of its dilution. Yet Labour Day was not a random cacophony of voices; its structure of thought was bound together by two basic ideas. First, participants in this conversation assumed that they were talking about a workers’ festival, a fact that did not fix its meaning precisely but did provide the basic vocabulary of the conversation and set limits on its reinterpretation and reframing. This starting point was taken seriously. Labour Day was not simply an excuse for generic holiday comment but a particular set of questions to be wrestled with earnestly. If Labour Day was about imperialism, it was most often about building the empire through dedicated and productive work; if it was about universal Christian brotherhood, the question almost always came back to whether this was possible in a capitalist economy and class-divided society. Meanings might be flexible, but they were not infinite. The second touchstone was the extent to which the participants in this conversation shared a common vocabulary, drawn from the raw material of respectable Victorian thinking about work and labour, with all its limits, silences, and possibilities. In one sense, Labour Day was a generic holiday: like Christmas, it was a day to make wishes, a chance to declare allegiance to values that might be dimly glimpsed and little practised the rest of the year. But it is equally striking that so many different voices made these wishes by tapping a common set of words, symbols, and ideas that had deep resonance in the Canadian imagination: commitments to the labour theory of value, the Protestant work ethic, and ideas of manhood, boosterism, patriotism, imperialism, and civilization. Observers might adopt different conventions of presentation, disagree on the precise

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lesson to be drawn, clash over their precise meaning and significance, dispute the way the symbols should be combined, add some different words, and choose to amplify or soften different aspects, but the conversation shared a common set of symbols, words, and ideas. Labour was celebrated, even if not in the precise way craftsmen would have hoped. In the cut-and-thrust of performance and commentary, meanings were not so much invented as resorted and recast for new purposes. In the end, however, not everyone shared this basic vocabulary or agreed to participate in this particular version of the Labour Day conversation. More than other groups, merchants and entrepreneurs noticed a different aspect of the original Labour Day ideal: it was a holiday, an opportunity for leisure, a chance for freedom and release. These ‘merchants of leisure’ spoke to Canadians, therefore, in a different language, one that saw the day not as a question to be answered but as an opportunity to be exploited.40

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chapter four

THE UNIVERSAL PLAYDAY

The struggle for Labour Day in the 1880s had also been a struggle for a day of rest. It was part of the larger demand for time away from paid work that focused primarily on the eight-hour day. With a public holiday in their honour, workers were expected to gather for collective fun and frivolity that would reinforce their solidarity. As the president of the Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council explained at the city’s first celebrations in 1894, ‘we may set aside our tools of industry and meet together for the purpose of enjoying ourselves. We will also have an opportunity of becoming better acquainted with each other and of establishing that good feeling which should prevail amongst the toilers of the land.’1 Once governments recognized Labour Day as a national holiday, however, labour leaders found themselves involved in a new struggle to hold an audience. By the early 1900s, workers and other citizens were increasingly drawn to other organized attractions and, even more, to far-flung private pleasures.

Spreading the Light For their first ‘labour demonstrations,’ local labour movements simply encouraged wage earners to take the day off and most likely negotiated The cover of Toronto’s 1896 ‘Labor Day Souvenir’ caught the tension between the figure of Liberty bringing the message of working-class emancipation and the reclining workman who seems to prefer to relax with his family. (TRL)

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Businesses did not always shut down completely on the early Labour Days. At the turn of the century, some stores in Toronto, for example, still opened their doors in the morning. (Star [Toronto], 3 September 1904, 2)

with employers to shut down for the day.2 Gradually, in the late 1880s and early 1890s, they managed to convince many mayors to proclaim local municipal holidays, and in 1894 they persuaded Parliament to declare a public holiday. It is not clear how completely waged work stopped on these days, especially since the law set no penalties for non-compliance. Legally, only banks and public offices had to close, but eventually most businesses seemed to accept the informal public pressure to shut their doors. An Ottawa paper reported in 1892 that ‘pretty nearly half the stores in the city were closed in honor of Labor day, and ... those that were open were for repairs and renovating purposes chiefly.’3 At the beginning, it appears that the day was no more than a half-holiday in many communities. In Halifax and Montreal, only the banks and public offices were closed in 1894, while all other business and work went on as usual. Toronto shops were open in the morning, but ‘by noon it was recognized on all hands that no business was being done, and the storekeepers

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Like these in Montreal in the early 1900s, unions organized a busy program of sports, music, and speech making. (La Presse [Montreal], 1 September 1902, 1)

followed the example set by the courts and banks and factories and closed their doors.’ In Victoria the press reported that most businesses stayed open, but over the next two years more seemed to shut down.4 At the same point, the Ottawa Journal noted that Quebec seemed to be ignoring the holiday and that even the courts were open.5 The general shutdown must have been more complete by 1898, however. That year, the leading mouthpiece of business opinion, the Monetary Times, grumbled that ‘the closing down of shops and factories and the stoppage of traffic for a day on the very threshold of the autumn season’ had caused great ‘inconvenience and loss of time’; ‘the effects are far reaching and extend beyond the loss of returns from a single day’s trade.’ By the turn of the century, such sentiments seemed to be fading. All towns and cities recognized the event, and only a few occupational groups (like

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Montreal’s longshoremen and many other transportation workers) were required to stay at work.6 The national director of munitions production in the First World War, Sir Joseph Flavelle, discovered how completely the holiday had taken hold. ‘Investigation here and in Hamilton in both munitions and steel plants indicates unquestionably universal practice to shut tight [on] Labour Day,’ his director of labour relations, Mark Irish, reported from Toronto in 1918. ‘Labour Day seems peculiarly significant to organized work people [,] they especially resenting nonobservance [of] this day.’7 As on other public holidays, retailing generally stopped completely – shopping was not a holiday activity before the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, carefully spaced public holidays were increasingly respected by employers as a more rational outlet for recreation and leisure. This was especially true of those holidays that fell in the warmer months, beginning with Victoria Day in the spring, running through Dominion Day and the August civic holiday, and ending with Thanksgiving in the fall. There was no easy consensus about appropriate working-class amusements in late-nineteenth-century Canada, not even among workers themselves. Campaigns to bring more sobriety and gentility to workers’ lives had emanated from middle- and upper-class prudes but had also attracted growing working-class support. The Knights of Labor achieved probably the highest expression of the search for respectable forms of leisure. They barred purveyors of alcohol from their ranks, promoted adult education as a valuable way to spend time off the job, and adopted the popular forms of family-based recreation – picnics and various sporting events. The labour leaders who initially framed the remarkably durable structure of Labour Day activities were earnest men who wanted to encourage wage earners and their families to deepen their solidarity by sharing recreational time together but also to maintain the decorum and respectability that the parades had highlighted. So they scheduled a series of wholesome activities that would bring working people together as participants and spectators.8 Initially, they had hoped that Labour Day could be educational. In the words of a Kingston writer in 1894, ‘the workingmen of the city should assemble themselves together for discussion and study of economic and

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Many labour leaders wanted the workers’ holiday to have an educational message. Often local labour councils produced pamphlets known as ‘Labor Day Souvenirs’ that contained inspirational articles (among the many advertisements). (HPL)

social subjects.’9 This was also the message emanating annually from the president of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers. In the 1880s and 1890s, Labour Day organizers regularly scheduled speeches by local labour leaders, clergymen, and politicians, in which labour’s noble ideals were proclaimed and praised.10 Often great crowds showed up for the scheduled oratory. ‘Even with a charge of admission there was an attendance such as is rarely seen in the heat of an election contest,’ the Hamilton Spectator reported when the popular American writer Henry George gave an address in 1884.11 The earnestness of this recreational activity was evident five years later, when Toronto labour leaders decided not to hold a parade and organized a mid-summer excursion across Lake Ontario to hear a labour speaker at a chautauqua at Niagara.12 From the beginning, working-class audiences became impatient with these too often tedious platitudes of public virtue, especially as politicians more and more often used the occasions for long-winded self-congratulation.13 As early as 1883, Toronto Labour Day organizers decided to cancel the speeches rather than engage in a futile effort to have speech making compete with dancing and games,14 and a decade later they still regretted that ‘many of the people found more to interest them in the sports than in the oratory.’ ‘Listening to the best of speakers on a very hot day and with all kinds of distressing noises in front and on both sides is not the pleasantest of occupations for even those who are anxious to gather the pearls from the lips of the speakers,’ the Hamilton Spectator observed in 1897. ‘And for those who didn’t care whether school was open or not, provided they could sit under the trees or stroll about listening to the

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Like the workers of Moncton and Nova Scotia’s Pictou County, unionists almost always arranged picnics and sports on their Labour Day programs. (Eastern Federationist (New Glasgow), 30 August 1919, 6)

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Women and girls, like these in Montreal in 1905, were encouraged to participate in their own races at Labour Day athletic events. (L’album universel, 23 September 1905, 645)

music of the bands, the oratory had no attraction whatsoever.’ In fact, that year, the more appealing draw of sports events was made quite explicit by the Hamilton audience: the speeches ended prematurely when the impatient crowd interrupted the Reverend S.S. Craig’s address with shouts of ‘Play Ball!’ They got their wish: in the middle of ‘applying his moral,’ Craig simply picked up his umbrella and hat and left the stage. In Winnipeg in 1901 the speeches were cancelled when organizers surmised that the crowds were not ‘in a humor to listen to labor or pastoral addresses.’15 By that point, there were no speeches at the celebrations in Montreal, London, or Ottawa either, though the oratory continued in subsequent years at Berlin, Kingston, Peterborough, Port Colborne, St Catharines, Windsor, Fort William, and Toronto. In 1910 the Fort William press nonetheless commented on the ‘comparatively small’ turnout to hear ‘the excellent orations.’ Bowing to the popular mood, Regina’s labour paper, Labor’s Realm, had already assured workers the year before that there would be ‘no time wasted in speechifying.’ In Toronto, bland speeches nonetheless flowed across the tables at luncheons hosted by the directors of the Canadian National Exhibition. They were dutifully reported in the

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The players in a Labour Day lacrosse match in Vancouver. (CVanA, W.P. Turner photo, CVA 788-1)

press year after year as the voice of responsible, respectable labour.16 National labour congress leaders and provincial and federal politicians eventually developed the custom of issuing ‘Labour Day Messages’ through their own journals and the daily press, which were usually intended to inspire unionists and their fellow citizens with the vision and accomplishments of the labour movement and to draw attention to larger issues over current industrial conflict or government policies.17 In some of the larger cities, local Labour Day committees issued booklets that became known as ‘Labour Day Souvenirs.’ Like the emerging labour newspapers of the period, they carried the same high-toned messages as the speeches. In 1891, for example, one such publication distributed in Montreal contained long, didactic articles on ‘Le Capital et le Travail,’ the eight-hour question, and apprenticeship, as well as a

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A foot-race in a British Columbia mining town on Labour Day 1919. (UBC, BC 1449/69i)

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couple of inspiring songs penned by the editor, Remi Tremblay. These booklets were soon overwhelmed by the advertising that sustained them and eventually degenerated into revenue-generating media for local businesses, containing little more than the program of Labour Day events, a bit of local civic boosterism, and scarcely any social or political commentary.18 Ultimately, the model of earnest self-improvement that had run through so much of the ‘Great Upheaval’ and the late-nineteenth-century craftunion movement was hard to sell in a new era of rapidly diversifying forms of leisure.19 From the beginning, labour leaders put far more energy into organizing an afternoon and evening of healthy fun each Labour Day. Normally, they arranged for space in a local park where families could bring picnic lunches and buy a cheap entrance ticket to a variety of events. The programs they organized there drew in part on the emerging working-class fascination with amateur track-and-field events.20 These were informal, mass-participatory activities. Athletic workers and members of their families could enter any of the many races organized by distance, age, sex, marital status, and even weight. ‘Fat men’s’ races cropped up regularly, while ‘needle-threading’ races appeared occasionally.21 The less fit could buy tickets to watch, and thousands did. These races were originally restricted to union members, but after 1900 there were more often ‘open’ events that allowed star athletes from the local YMCA or other clubs to enter.22 At some point in the day’s festivities, games of non-professional or, later, semi-professional baseball, lacrosse, or soccer gave the spectators still more excitement. Horse races often also added to the colour. Locals bands provided musical concerts, and young couples might be found dancing late into the night.23 None of these activities was unique to the labour festival – many groups, from fraternal societies to Sunday schools, organized similar programs at various points in the summer. But, as so often in the past, labour leaders put them to good use to extend workplace-based connections into fuller social identities that included family and friends.24 They also had a distinctly working-class flavour: the broad-based, participatory quality of so many of the athletic events ran against the grain of the new,

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more restrictive, and tightly organized spectator sports that were under the upper-class thumb of local amateur athletic associations, and the boisterous, strenuous forms of play were a far cry from the notions of bourgeois gentility that expected these public spaces to be used only for quiet, contemplative strolls and other sedate forms of relaxation (increasingly enforced through municipal by-laws).25

Merchants of Leisure In the 1880s and 1890s this official program of Labour Day activities might be the major attraction in the town and might draw a good percentage of the local population. After witnessing the 1888 celebrations, which drew some 15-20,000 people, the Montreal Gazette’s reporter believed that ‘at no picnic ever held in Montreal was there such a large attendance.’ And, as late as 1913, the Windsor crowd that turned out for the races and athletic events was reported to be ‘the largest ... that ever passed through the gates of Wigle Park.’26 Yet, from the beginning, holidaying workers and citizens found their way to many other forms of leisure not arranged by labour. Petty entrepreneurs quickly arrived at the site of official Labour Day sports and picnics, attracted by potential customers (and dupes) among the assembled crowds. As early as 1884, carnival distractions were creeping in around the edges of the official Labour Day festivities in Hamilton. ‘Panoramas of the war in Egypt, side shows, fat women and other tented attractions of all sorts, sally men and patent medicine vendors were here and there over the grounds,’ the Hamilton Spectator reported. A few years later, Montreal and Ottawa faced the same invasion in the form of ‘wheels of fortune, sweat boards, paddle wheels, pool-sellers, etc.’ ‘A number of fakirs sold their wares on the grounds yesterday, and reaped a good harvest,’ the Peterborough Examiner reported in 1894.27 The more serious problems for the Labour Day organizers were the other forms of entertainment and amusement in and around the city. In 1894 the Montreal Gazette noted that ‘the attendance of spectators was

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Outings and excursions with family or friends, like this one in Dawson in 1906, were extremely popular ways to spend Labour Day and sometimes drew local residents away from labour-sponsored activities. (LAC, PA22493)

not so great as one might have expected from the extent of the parade, the grand stand not being more than half filled.’28 In 1903, after more than a decade of successful Labour Day programs, the Ottawa Journal remarked that the sports at Landsdowne Park ‘did not attract as large a crowd as was expected ... due to several counterattractions’ – a large church picnic, the relaxation of a ‘quiet go as you please afternoon at Rockliffe Park’ rather than ‘sitting in the stands looking at sports,’ and ‘the attractions of the theatres.’29 Many other organizations in the larger centres started holding their own social and athletic events to draw Labour Day crowds. Sports associations in particular took full advantage of this late-summer holiday to stage competitions and meets.30 And in most major cities, large exhibitions or fairs ran during the week of Labour Day to drain away funseekers – including the Pacific National Exhibition (opened in 1910), the

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There were lots of ways of having fun on Labour Day besides attending laboursponsored events. (News [Toronto], 2 September 1899, 4)

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Labour had no monopoly on holiday attractions. Out-of-town excursions became popular. (Manitoba Free Press [Winnipeg], 2 September 1918, 5)

Calgary Stampede (started in 1912), and, in particular, the older Canadian National Exhibition, which drew heavily from towns across southern Ontario.31 Taverns, pool halls, vaudeville and movie theatres, amusement parks, and ice-cream parlours likewise opened their doors to eager holidayers. ‘Baseball, football, automobile racing, and hundreds of private picnics, ministered to the pleasure of the holiday makers,’ a Winnipeg reporter noted in 1905. ‘Performances were given afternoon and evening at the various theatres.’32 The Halifax Herald’s 1912 survey of Labour Day activities outside Halifax found ‘a general observance of the day – horse races, track contests and baseball proving popular pastimes. Shelburne alone, of the towns reporting, observed labor day by sticking closely to “labor.”‘ In smaller communities, little might be happening publicly at all. A 1909 press report from North Sydney, Nova Scotia, for example, claimed that holiday ‘passed off very quietly here, there being no local attractions outside of a yacht race on the harbour and a baseball match.’33 Many city residents simply took to the streets to enjoy the holiday casually. In 1913 a Globe reporter found on Toronto’s Yonge Street ‘one long incessant crowd wandering aimlessly for the most part, but apparently enjoying to the full this easy, innocent form of Labor Day recreation.’

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He encountered congestion at the entrance to every restaurant and movie theatre, and was particularly struck by the steady streams of workingmen who ‘kept the doors in constant swing’ outside saloons.34 Alcohol was certainly a central point of contention here between the wholesome, ‘rational’ pursuits presented by the Labour Day organizers and the blowzier male working-class culture of turn-of-the-century Canadian cities. Unionists who showed up drunk to the parade might be fined by their local, and beer was often officially banned from the Labour Day picnics. In 1892 the Halifax unions even took the unusual step of banning any advertisements of liquor from their parade. But drinking went on regularly on Labour Day with supplies from private flasks and nearby saloons, although prohibition and then tighter provincial liquor laws would put an end to these pleasures after the middle of the First World War.35 Rather than spend the holiday in the town or city, more and more urban dwellers wanted to escape for the day. From the outset, railroads and steamer companies arranged special Labour Day excursions to parks, beaches, or other points in the countryside.36 ‘Main Street presented a very quiet appearance except for an occasional pedestrian hurrying to catch the bus,’ the Welland Telegraph reported in 1910. ‘The entire population scattered through the waterways and trails of the neighbouring coast,’ the Vancouver Sun noted in 1918. ‘Every outdoor resort, every seaside and riverside picnic ground was utilized to the full extent. A great crowd went to Seattle, to Nanaimo, Victoria, and up the Chilliwack valley. The city beaches were black with pleasure-seekers, and the recreation grounds were jammed.’ After 1920, more of these travellers found their own way out of town in automobiles. At Long Branch, ten miles west of Toronto, car traffic on Labour Day more than doubled in the first decade after the First World War. By the 1940s, the colourful Labour Day parades may have disappeared in much of Canada, but other parades were reported extensively in local newspapers – the long lines of cars leaving and entering the city on Labour Day weekend. It was highly symbolic that, by the early 1950s, the annual Labour Day editorial in many newspapers concerned safer driving on the holiday weekend, rather than the traditional musings on the role and significance of labour.37

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Many retailers urged workers to buy new outfits for Labour Day. (Citizen [Ottawa], 1 September 1917, 8; La Presse [Montreal], 5 September 1903, 13; Province [Vancouver], 1 September 1905)

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Of course, ‘commercialization’ can be a loose, misleading term for these developments. Some cultural products were made available for paid consumption – booze, vaudeville, movies, horse races, professional sports, in particular. Moreover, advertisers explicitly sought to commercialize the day, jumping on Labour Day themes to sell products. ‘In no other country in the world is it more fitting that tribute should be paid to labor than in Canada,’ an Eaton’s Groceteria ad declared in 1929. ‘For it was by ... labour [that] Canada was hewn from the virgin forest ... Labour, the backbone of the Country, is sustained by ‘FOODS OF QUALITY AT LOW PRICES.’38 Yet most reports of local Labour Day pastimes suggest that they involved little expenditure. Far more important was the fact that they were activities pursued with family or friends, rather than part of collective public celebrations. Many people simply stayed around the house tending to various tasks. ‘Victory gardens can be weeded, lawns and hedges trimmed and the basement cleaned and made ready to receive the winter supply of fuel,’ a Winnipeg reporter suggested in 1944. In a rare departure from the typical press fixation on male activities, a Toronto Globe and Mail reporter actually noticed the same year that, in their own version of Labour Day, women had to do laundry for the children’s return to school the next day.39 For most youngsters, this must have been the overarching significance of the end-of-summer holiday.40 Observers increasingly noted that the original balance of educative spectacle and purposeful leisure was swept aside by more privatized activity. ‘Labor Day is becoming recognized as the universal playday when all business care is forgotten in the relaxation of recreation,’ the Vancouver Sun concluded in 1918. Some labour leaders watched with particular amazement and disgust as workers drifted away from the forms of earnest, rational leisure envisioned by the founders of Labour Day towards more commercial and individualized pursuits. In vain, Ontario’s regional labour paper, the Industrial Banner, had reminded its readers in 1902 that Labour Day ‘is more than a mere day to enjoy oneself, it is an occasion for serious reflection and to lay to heart the lesson of the growing power and influence of the American labor movement.’ A year later, the Toronto Toiler regretted that Labour Day had

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become ‘merely a day of meaningless parades and silly picnics.’ After all, ‘in addition to furnishing an opportunity for pleasure seeking, [it] was intended to have a serious side ... The opportunity to set workingmen thinking when thus brought together is practically lost sight of. The day is permitted to be brought down to the level of an ordinary holiday ... No one likes fun better than we, but we do protest against this making of Labor Day a very commonplace picnic day. Let our celebration be not onesided; let there be a proportion of fun and wisdom; and we shall have strengthened our cause and compelled the respect of our enemies.’ One unnamed ‘prominent laborite,’ standing amid the bustle of activity outside a bar on Yonge Street in 1913, declared that ‘it was a shame the bars were allowed to keep open on Labor Day in view of the weakness of many who might better have been with their families spending the nickels on innocent and educative entertainment at the Exhibition.’ Labour Day had become yet another terrain on which groups of workers split over an appropriate culture within industrial-capitalist society, but it seemed that after 1900 the moralists lost ground and the commercializers made rapid headway in providing leisure outlets.41 Some of these complaints may have been simple nostalgia, yet it is clear that forms of commercial leisure in particular were becoming more numerous and varied in Canada in this period, and some Labour Day organizers were simply frustrated at their inability to be better commercializers. All too often, their efforts to turn their programs of sports and entertainment into successful fund-raisers for local trades and labour council projects floundered in the face of competing activities.42 They added in more commercial entertainment – notably vaudeville acts, baby contests, and boxing tournaments.43 They badgered local merchants to contribute funds so that the official Labour Day festivities could appeal to holidayers, keeping them in town where they could be expected to spend money. The trend to fund-raising by labour councils was not uncontested within the union movement. ‘As time goes on,’ a Hamilton labour newspaper editor lamented in 1914, ‘each successive year seems to develop more keenly a commercial spirit toward a day which had, in the beginning, no thought of commercialism.’ A more cynical British Colum-

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bia socialist thought that Labour Day had become equivalent to ‘Dollar Day, Raisin Day, Mothers’ Day and sundry other such days as Commercial Democracy bestows on us once in a while.’ Some, like the Halifax Trades and Labor Council in 1913, abandoned all celebrations completely.44

The Hollowness of Holidays Moreover, bourgeois observers were by no means united behind the increasing commercialism of the holiday. While retailers, railway companies, tavern owners, sports promoters and other entrepreneurs eagerly marshalled their skills to sell products, spectacles, and attractions, local editorialists seemed more conflicted. For its part, the Halifax Herald was not unhappy: ‘The Labor Day celebrations we used to have, with great processions, involving large expense and the putting forth of great energy, no doubt had their uses; but they destroyed the day as a day of relaxation and healthful change for body and mind; and it is therefore not to be regretted that the more private use of Labor Day has come into vogue, and that every man and his family are left free to make use of the holiday as pleases them best.’ Other observers expressed more regret, however, not only because they shared some of the impulses behind the craftsmen’s spectacle, but because they believed that respectable public celebration could help Canadians transcend their everyday concerns and glimpse broader and better principles.45 ‘Devoted as its name suggests to a recognition of the rights of the toilers of the world,’ a Peterborough paper lamented, ‘it has become in this city, at least, like most of our other holidays, merely a day off work and a good opportunity to get out of town.’46 As this comment suggested, the problem was not the decline of collective purpose on Labour Day so much as a growing trend towards fragmented, individualistic pursuits across a range of special days and holidays. ‘Of late there has been some complaint of the paucity of local attractions on holidays,’ the Hamilton Spectator noted in 1895. ‘Of the many holidays during the summer Labor Day is one of the few where there is something

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Products aimed at the female shopper also occasionally had a Labour Day twist, though the acknowledgment of domestic labour in this ad was rare. (Canadian Unionist [Ottawa], September 1929, 43)

going on here to keep citizens at home,’ the paper lamented a decade later.47 By the early years of the twentieth century, newspapers were filled with laments about the way Canada’s main public holidays had largely become occasions for private pleasure more than public spectacle, though (as on Labour Day) they increasingly co-existed with a less earnest impulse to embrace some forms of relaxation and recreation as part of a balanced life.48 The two leading holidays – Victoria Day on 24 May and Dominion Day on 1 July – rarely involved any central ceremonies or celebrations that promoted a public culture of citizenship or patriotism. Local newspapers alone shouldered the burden of explaining the significance of these special days. On the day before the Victoria Day weekend, schools across the country staged various programs of speeches, music, cadet drills, and pageants to recognize ‘Empire Day.’ But, on the holiday itself, the only part of the Canadian state that rose to the occasion was the military, which in some cities put on a colourful display in a central place or perhaps a parade. On Dominion Day in 1900, for example, Halifax

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Beer and liquor companies were among the many advertisers that reached out to workers on Labour Day. (Globe [Toronto], 2 September 1907, 7)

residents could watch a set of full-scale military manoeuvres involving an attack on and defence of the city. After the First World War, there might also be some local ceremony to honour fallen soldiers. Yet even these occasional attempts to rally national sentiment around themes of imperial warfare had plenty of competition for public attention. ‘Throughout the day there had been little demonstration of a patriotic nature,’ the Montreal Gazette noted after Victoria Day in 1900. ‘The holiday, rather than its significance, was the feature.’ There were similar complaints from clergymen that Thanksgiving was sliding into unfocused, secular holidaying.49 Everywhere Canadians would head out of doors for some fun on public holidays. ‘Empire Day was observed by British subjects in this part of the

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Businesses also liked to preach to workers on Labour Day. This Montreal bank ran a long series of advertisements in both French and English, urging workers to save their earnings. (Syndicats Catholiques et Nationaux de Montréal, ProgrammeSouvenir de la Fête du Travail [Montreal, 1923])

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(Manitoba Free Press [Winnipeg], 7 September 1925, 11)

world mainly in improving their British constitutions by indulging in outdoor recreation,’ a Vancouver Sun reporter quipped in 1930. The Montreal Gazette thought that the healthy outdoor recreation might make people better citizens of the empire, but few Canadians were so earnest on their day off work. As on Labour Day, the biggest organized attractions in cities and towns across the country were sports and athletic events, most of them amateur and professional – usually some combination of track and field, baseball, lacrosse, and football. Private clubs staged golf and other competitions. Regattas, horse and automobile races, and band concerts also drew crowds in many places. Local vaudeville and movie theatres enjoyed a booming business. Amusement parks and dance halls drew the young. And thousands of all ages headed off for day-long picnics at local parks and beaches, or for longer weekend excursions to nearby summer resorts and fishing holes or across the American border. ‘Every person who could do so got out of town and the city was almost deserted,’ the Halifax Herald’s correspondent in Saint John, N.B., reported in 1900. ‘There was no special celebration to keep the people at home.’ The press across the country reported this exodus repeatedly. Thirty years later, the Manitoba Free Press called Victoria Day ‘the

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To attract more interest, Labour Day organizers added baby shows to their programs. Here a proud father shows off his son, who won the contest in Toronto in 1924. (CTA, Globe and Mail 3670)

official opening of the summer vacation period.’ By that point, holiday automobile traffic (and accidents) had become front-page news, as they had on Labour Day.50 Only some smaller towns (such as Westville in Nova Scotia, Valleyfield in Quebec, New Hamburg in Ontario, and Manitou in Manitoba) kept alive the parading tradition with boosterist processions of children, war veterans, marching bands, firemen and their equipment, decorated automobiles, and a few company floats (before the First World War, the Polymorphians or Calithumpians sometimes staged these parades).51 A florescence of flags and colourful bunting might give communities a holiday atmosphere, children’s firecrackers might disrupt urban tranquility, and organized fireworks displays in many towns might focus the attention of citizens on a spring or summer evening. But, unquestionably, private enjoyment overwhelmed any strong sense of public occasion on all official holidays on the calendar. The important exception to this pattern was Quebec’s Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day on 24 June, known as ‘La Fête

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In 1942 unions in London, as in other centres, held a draw to raise money and attract interest. (UWO, 8 September 1942.)

Nationale’ and celebrated with unrelenting enthusiasm throughout the twentieth century. The francophone nationalist societies, the Catholic Church, and local politicians collaborated to produce public programs of religious services, speeches, lengthy parades with marching bands and floats depicting scenes from French-Canadian history, and huge bonfires. Thousands thronged the streets for these festivities – in contrast to most English-Canadian holiday celebrations.52 Bourgeois commentary was ambivalent on the overall drift towards fragmented leisure on public holidays, reflecting the broader uncertainty about pleasure and leisure in a society creeping away from Victorian containment but not ready to embrace a freer, more open view of rest and relaxation. Should not holidays have a grand public purpose? ‘Canadians take holidays apologetically,’ the Manitoba Free Press concluded on Victoria

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Day in 1920. ‘The deadliest seventh of the sins against nationality here is “showing off,” and there is always a harassing fear of the Canadian mind that any demonstration may come under this head.’53 A Peterborough editorialist was gloomier five years later: Victoria Day, Dominion Day, Civic Holiday, and Labour Day all have lost their own peculiar importance, and it is unfortunate indeed that all four are allowed to pass by with no attempt to stress that importance. These anniversaries have been allowed to become just holidays, that’s all – meaning nothing save that the stores are closed, and the factory whistles cease to blow. It is not a development upon which we as a community have any reason to congratulate ourselves; rather should the lack of enterprise indicated by such a lapse be regretted as a sign of dry rot in the community structure.54

Labour Day, then, was a victory for workers in the form of more free time – even the earnest craftsmen who initiated the celebration in the 1880s had wanted to give workers a holiday. But, from the beginning, Labour Day’s status first as a local civic and then later as a national statutory holiday laid the groundwork for more individualized and commercialized pleasures than the earnest craft leaders had anticipated or hoped for. Craft unions, as we have seen, could create a holiday, but they never controlled it. Other groups – from entrepreneurs to citizens – helped to shape the meaning of the day, either by marshalling their skills to advertise and sell or simply by deciding to watch a ball game or lie on a beach rather than listen to speeches. Craft unionists found themselves marginalized in the leisure activities on Labour Day, serving little role in actively shaping popular culture to reflect their collective aspirations. Yet, while the merchants of leisure eagerly fashioned and followed these trends, creating alternative spectacles in sports stadiums and theatres, running excursions across the bay or out of town, or just feeding off crowds in streets and parks with smaller, more diffuse entrepreneurial efforts, even some bourgeois observers became concerned. These worries went beyond the sense that everyone had a stake in Labour Day; they

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extended to the whole range of public holidays, growing from a feeling that commercial and privatized leisure detracted from the sense of imagined community that earnest, respectable festivals could create.55 But the fact remained: wherever labour leaders managed to keep alive a labour festival on the first Monday in September, it remained only one of many activities from which wage earners and their families could choose on their day away from the job. The balance they envisioned, of earnest parading, community recognition, and respectable leisure, had been thrown off. The craftworkers faced other challenges as well.

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MARCHING TO DIFFERENT TUNES

The ‘golden age’ of the craftsmen’s spectacle dawned at the end of the 1890s as the Canadian economy lifted itself out of the doldrums and craft unions began sweeping up thousands of new members. In this turn-ofthe-century period, Labour Day parades were staged in far more industrial centres across the country, drew in many more workers, and blossomed into impressive street performances. The public loved Labour Day parades, even if the processions never dominated holiday activity. Local newspaper reports suggest that, at the turn of the century, such parades were among the most popular street events on the holiday calendar.1 Shopkeepers readily strung up coloured bunting and flags along the parade route. Thousands of spectators packed the sidewalks each year to watch and to applaud their favourite union contingents. Here in particular, local journalists found the women and children of working-class families waving at their menfolk, demonstrating the bonds of community between paraders and their audiences; ‘many gay quips were passed from the marching men to their friends and relatives among the spectators,’ a Halifax reporter observed.2 Well into the early 1900s, the processions and

Here in Winnipeg in the early 1900s, as in many other Canadian cities and towns, thousands of family members, friends, and curious spectators came out to watch Labour Day parades. (PAM, Winnipeg – Streets – Main ca. 1905 13 [N10342] [ON253])

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other official Labour Day activities were front-page news in local newspapers the next day. By the 1920s, however, the craftsmen’s spectacle had all but disappeared in most cities in Canada. Though it would limp on in a few places between the wars, the turnouts were usually disappointing, the theatre frequently unspectacular, the public regularly unmoved, and the labour content often muted. A series of developments conspired against the aims of the original festival – notably, changes in work and demoralized unions – but more noticeable on the streets of Canadian cities were groups of workers marching to different tunes, some nationalist, some religious, and some more radical, who mounted serious challenges to the craftsmen’s spectacle and to its monopoly on workers’ parades. A brief revival of parading after the First World War seemed to halt the decline, but only temporarily, and by 1940 the craftsmen’s spectacle would be spent as a living tradition.

Decline In fact, even in its golden age, there were signs of underlying weakness, and the craftsmen’s spectacle was in trouble well before the First World War. The parade had never been the entire day, but it appeared that the sparkle was disappearing from the spectacle. Journalists in many places reported fewer floats and uniforms. ‘It was nothin’ but a lot of men walkin’,’ a Winnipeg boy was heard to complain as early as 1901.3 In Hamilton a reporter observed in 1904 that there were ‘not enough floats in the procession to make a respectable showing.’ The next year’s procession showed some improvement, but the 1906 outing again had few floats or ‘small rigs and delivery wagons’ and was criticized in the press as ‘a disappointment to many.’4 That was the last Labour Day parade in the city for forty years. Elsewhere, some unions began ignoring the call to participate. Those that still showed up sometimes had to threaten fines for members who failed to appear for the march.5 In the decade before the

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First World War, many trades and labour councils cancelled their processions to concentrate on sports and entertainment, or gave up holding any kind of ‘demonstration’ at all. Labour Day parading stopped for the duration of the war almost everywhere. In most of western Canada it never revived again. Only the lower-profile picnics and sporting events would return in some cases.6 By the First World War, Labour Day parades survived as annual events only in capital cities and metropolitan centres – notably Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and Winnipeg. These places generally had a long and still active tradition of public processions. Most often too, the local labour leadership in these larger cities was still solidly attached politically to the labourist struggle for integration of organized workers into local community life. The parades were much weaker, more sporadic, or non-existent in predominantly industrial communities where unions’ strength had been undermined and where civic celebrations seemed less vibrant – cities like Saint John, Hamilton, and Windsor. Labour festivals were rare in small-town Nova Scotia and Quebec and sporadic in the many small southern Ontario factory towns. Only Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal had regular annual processions well into the twentieth century. Indeed, until Montreal unionists stopped parading for good in 1953, they were unquestionably the most persistent and numerous adherents to this tradition.7 What had gone wrong? Organizing parades with limited funds and volunteer labour had always taxed local unions. Few trades and labour councils could pull together a march every year before the turn of the century. Despite their well-established parading traditions, for example, workers in Halifax, Hamilton, and Toronto had no procession for the first ‘official’ Labour Day in 1894. After a lull in parading for a few years, regalia was often found to be in bad shape, or to have disappeared altogether. Often heavy rain or critical commentary in the local press about how a parade had not measured up to past performances could be demoralizing.8 In some smaller centres, instead of making their own parade, a large contingent of marchers might leave town to join a proces-

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sion in a neighbouring community. Cancelling the main event could drain interest, however; ‘without the parade, the holiday would not be nearly so attractive,’ a Halifax paper argued.9 There were deeper problems, too. The deterioration of the parading tradition often reflected what has been called the ‘crisis of the craftsman.’ The first Labour Day parades had always drawn on the buoyancy and confidence of local craft unions, and it was the revival of these organizations across the country at the turn of the century that had sustained the celebrations. After 1903, however, craft unions were increasingly on the defensive in the face of employer hostility and state indifference. In fact, the foundations of craft unionism were under systematic attack. Many skilled men witnessed their role in industrial production destroyed or diminished in an emerging Second Industrial Revolution. Across the rapidly changing industrial landscape, fewer workers probably felt the craftsman’s independent pride in their contribution to industry and may well have been more interested in escape than in celebration.10 In this context, craft unions could often ill afford the time and money to prepare for a parade that apparently did little to strengthen their positions in the community. Many Canadian unionists seemed to abandon quietly the expectations of the earnest Labour Day founders that public displays of pride and determination could make much difference to the ongoing battles for the well-being of workingmen. By the early 1900s, craft unionism in Canada, as in the United States, had not given up the fight, but it had undergone a significant shift towards more caution and less visionary flourishes.11 For those who kept any celebration alive, it was a time for building the bonds of solidarity among the existing membership with picnics and games, rather than broadcasting wider goals to their fellow citizens. As the Saint John Globe noted in 1903: ... such turnouts are expensive and it is a considerable draught upon the resources of each union participating. The parade of last year was a costly thing, and it is the opinion of many that more attention should be paid [to] the financial standings of the individual unions and the Labor Council as a whole. This would be a far more beneficial procedure, they argue, than to

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Many Labour Day parades included rolling advertisements for private businesses, such as this insurance company float in Vancouver in 1892. (CVanA, Trueman and Caple photo, CVA 289-19)

rush headlong into debt and compromise the chances of organized labour through lack of funds. The more serious side of the question is the binding together for mutual advantage and good. Bands and parades are first class mediums for the booming of labour at times but not all times. A big picnic or an outing of some kind would be a drawing card, others think as well as a money earner. By this means the treasury of the labor party might be made fairly full.12

Decay The surviving Labour Day celebrations often began to lose their earnestness and take on a more commercial cast. Labour leaders came to see

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Some firms, such as this one in Windsor, linked their advertising in the parades and the local newspaper. (Record [Windsor], 30 August 1913, 7)

Labour Day programs as a source of funds for their other activities throughout the year and often grumbled about the poor returns for all the effort and expense involved in putting together the street spectacles.13 To encourage the unions to create interesting displays, cash prizes had to be offered.14 The money for prizes most often had to be raised from local merchants and businessmen, who had to be convinced that holding a

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The Belleville plant of the Steel Company of Canada (which had no union) used the 1913 Labour Day parade to advertise its horseshoes. (LAC, PA10585)

parade would keep townsfolk in town and even draw in visitors to stimulate the local economy. Volunteers on the Labour Day committees found this fund-raising time-consuming and often unrewarding work, especially as competing events in town or in the countryside on Labour Day became more attractive. In Kingston the labour movement allowed the local Humane Society to organize the street spectacle in 1913 with a ‘Work Horse Parade.’ Immediately after the First World War, the Labour Day parading tradition in several smaller communities passed briefly to veterans’ organizations. In these communities, the range of participants included merchants, manufacturers, schoolchildren, and other community organizations, but few unions. Thereafter, most small-town Labour Day parades, such as the perennial event in Bridgetown, Nova Scotia, had a variety of sponsors and a broad social mix of participants (that is, unless

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This Winnipeg clothing company made big hit with its Labour Day float. (LAC, PA10994)

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In Quebec City in 1929, this bakery tossed out goodies its workers made on their float. (LAC, PA209250)

some serious labour struggle disrupted the community). In Windsor, Ontario, the firemen took over sponsorship of a community parade each year from the 1920s to the 1940s.15 Even the surviving union-sponsored parades often abandoned some of the core elements of the craftsmen’s spectacle. With the emergence of more mass-production labour processes, it was increasingly difficult to present small tableaux of workers practising their trade on the back of a wagon. Reporters across the country noted with regret the gradual disappearance of the ‘allegorical cars.’ In Vancouver’s last parade in 1913, only one commercial float showed any men at work – a group of metal workers.16 By that point, generally only the construction trades could easily and regularly put together such demonstrations – and, given the huge construction boom that Canada was experiencing, these skills were prob-

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Toronto’s 1933 Labour Day parade included a surprising entry – a float sponsored by the staunchly anti-union T. Eaton Company. (CTA, Globe and Mail 31054)

ably no novelty to urban audiences.17 By the 1920s, in fact, some paraders were deliberately contrasting ‘old-time’ manual methods with the modern, mechanized system. Firemen, street railwaymen, and even barbers liked to show off antiquated equipment, but the floats of Montreal’s bootand-shoe workers presented the most striking contrasts between aging cobblers bent over their work and ‘the most up-to-date machinery.’18 There was a noticeable shift to emphasizing the product, rather than the process, of workers’ labour and thus a higher identification with specific firms. Rather than showing their actual work process, for example, Ottawa papermakers used the paper mass-produced in local mills to construct a colourful float with flowing streamers and two little girls seated in a large paper canoe.19 More and more, the parades relied for their colour and attractiveness on the company-sponsored floats, car-

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riages, and cars that had always been woven through or tacked on to the end of the parade – as rolling versions of the companies’ increasingly elaborate shop windows and exhibition displays. By 1901, for example, the Toronto parade included twenty-six bakery wagons, seventy-three dairy wagons, twenty-eight delivery vans from the Simpson’s department store, and dozens more. ‘There were in the procession some features which were not, strictly speaking, illustrative of Labor,’ a Hamilton newspaper commented in 1902, ‘but as they helped to make up the show, their presence may be excused.’ As an Ottawa paper noted the next year: ‘This is usually done for advertising purposes and while it detracts somewhat from the real labor aspect of the demonstration it always lends bulk.’ In 1903 the Welland Telegraph’s report on the floats in the ‘best trades procession ever seen in Port Colborne’ said that ‘the business men are to be congratulated on the earnest manner with which they took hold of the affair.’ From the beginning, organizers had often awarded specific prizes for merchant and industrial floats, decorated cars, and so on. Well before the war, however, private firms contributed the only floats in many parades. In 1918 the industrialists and merchants of Hull provided virtually the entire procession.20 Perhaps the most remarkable indication of the contradictions in this growing commercialization appeared in Toronto’s parade in 1933. That year the local craft unionists had openly begged for company floats to sustain the parade. The T. Eaton Company, one of the city’s most hated anti-union employers and soon to be exposed in the Royal Commission on Price Spreads for its harsh treatment of its employees, sponsored an elaborate float carrying three symbolic figures of ‘Inspiration,’ ‘Achievement,’ and ‘Labor’ over the banner, ‘The Reward of Labor.’21 With this kind of commercial content to guarantee enough sparkle in the spectacle, Labour Day parades began to lose some of their distinctiveness. Unions had always been happy to include community and industrial floats in their parades, but many unionists became frustrated as these elements took over more and more of the march. The union content was certainly watered down by such additions and by the invitations to any automobile owners to decorate their vehicles and join the parade. As early as 1905, a

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Vancouver’s street-cleaning apparatus was on display in 1914. (CVanA, Ci Dept P4N27)

western labour paper’s report on the decaying Labour Day parade dripped with sarcasm: The parade ... consisted of a motley collection of police, fire apparatus, breakfast food advertisements, laundry wagons, two sheep in a box, a coop of chickens and about two hundred and fifty workingmen. All the participants in this street cavalcade were fairly well-behaved, more especially the chickens, sheep and police. Also the laundry wagons. Just what significance these vehicles could have in a ‘labor parade’ is not known unless it were a gentle hint that the Vancouver citizen ought to have his shirt washed oftner. The display of the breakfast food was suggestive enough as the most distinctive feature of two-thirds of the working class on that day was a ‘lean and hungry look.’22

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A city’s old firefighting equipment became a novelty. This contraption appeared in Toronto’s 1924 parade. (CTA, Globe and Mail 3748)

Revival in Revolt Amidst the decline of the craftsmen’s spectacle, however, there were flashes of a more energetic and aggressive celebration. For a few years after the First World War, workers drew on a long-standing practice of strike and protest parades to revive, if only briefly, the declining Labour Day tradition. As we saw in chapter 1, even as nineteenth-century craftsmen defined a sober and orderly style of marching the streets, workers had used parades to promote their immediate struggles for better workplaces. The most famous of this style of procession was the Nine-Hour March in Hamilton in 1872, but it was also a common practice in other communities, especially while the Knights of Labor remained powerful. Strikers continued to stage processions through their communities in the

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Parades were still important ways for strikers to communicate with their fellow citizens. Shortly before the First World War, the striking miners of South Porcupine in northern Ontario took to the streets. (AO, Acc.9160, S13722)

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twentieth century. Before the Second World War, especially in smaller cities and towns, this highly public act of solidarity was still the cheapest, most effective way for workers to broadcast their concerns and to express publicly their collective determination to win – particularly since local newspapers were rarely sympathetic. So in Hamilton, during a tumultuous strike of street-railway workers in 1906, the Trades and Labour Council organized a parade of union locals to show support for the workers. Over the next decade, striking miners, their families, and supporters in Nova Scotia and Vancouver Island coal towns expressed their solidarity in parades. So did those in northern-Ontario hard-rock mining camps. The most famous strike parades were undoubtedly those that flowed through Winnipeg’s streets during the six-week general strike in May and June 1919, many of them made up of returned war veterans. The last, a protest against the arrest of the strike leaders, provoked the brutal repression by police that became known as ‘Bloody Saturday.’ The bloodshed in Winnipeg did not end the practice of solidarity parades. In 1923 a brass band led a procession of 3,000 Nova Scotia coal miners from Glace Bay to Dominion in support of striking steelworkers.23 Alongside strike parades ran a parallel tradition of protests aimed at governments – what came to be called ‘demonstrations’ in the late twentieth century. Before the Second World War, these processions most often highlighted demands for action to deal with unemployment. Jobless workmen had marched on city halls in Ottawa and Montreal in 1877 and Toronto in 1891. In the deep depressions that hit the country in 1913–15, the early 1920s, and the 1930s, processions of the unemployed were common in many cities. After 1920, they were frequently organized and led by Communist militants.24 All of these strike and protest parades dated back to the actions of unorganized crowds in nineteenth-century Canada, when working people banded together without much formal structure for direct action to solve a current problem.25 By the early twentieth century, however, protest marches were generally following the conventions of the orderly labour parade – respectable clothing, military formation, and marching bands

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In 1913 striking coal miners included a marching band and many children in their parade through Ladysmith, British Columbia. (AO, F1405-023-015-127MSR 8361-file 1-photo 62)

where available. Workers rarely put on an elaborate display in these processions, beyond union insignia, simple signs and banners, maybe some musical instruments, and, where socialist influence was strong, a brace of red flags.26 The banners often raised grand principles beyond the immediate struggle. ‘Workers of the World Unite,’ declared one carried in northern Ontario in 1912. The strike veterans marched in Winnipeg beneath banners proclaiming ‘Britons Shall Never Be Slaves,’ ‘Down with Profiteers,’ and ‘We Fought the Hun over There. We Fight the Hun Everywhere.’27 Each of these moments of labour parading came to an end with the victory or defeat of the workers’ immediate struggle, but in 1919 the forms of communicating that developed within them spilled over into the Labour Day festivals, grafted onto the surviving elements of the craftsmen’s

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In 1914 railway workers marched on the provincial legislature in Winnipeg to win support for their strike. (PAM, Foote Coll., 1668)

spectacle. The Great War had ended, and workers across the country had responded to the call of unions and labour parties to demand a different kind of society – a ‘New Democracy,’ as some called it. The old craft unions had revived with new vigour and in many cases looked beyond their narrow exclusiveness to make common cause with other workers. This new spirit of solidarity was at the heart of the Winnipeg General Strike and many other struggles. At the same time, many new industrial unions appeared to organize all workers in one workplace – coal miners, steelworkers, rubber workers, packinghouse workers, and so on. Even publicsector workers like municipal employees, firefighters, and police officers were joining unions and walking out on strike.28 In many places, Labour Day parading was revived at that point to showcase the new working-class solidarity. Determined unionists organized processions (along with other Labour Day events) in dozens of

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At the end of the First World War, some labour floats presented sharper messages. Although this contribution to a Saint John parade in 1919 had the familiar trappings of the virtuous female figure and patriotic flags, it also proclaimed the main goal of post-war labour movements: ‘True Democracy.’ (PANB, P71-13)

centres where it had died out and faded into commercial boosterism. In some places, such as Espanola and Gananoque, Ontario, and New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, it appeared for the first time. Between 1917 and 1921, impressively large Labour Day parades wound their way through most industrial towns and cities.29 These marches seemed to look forward and backward at once. The form of the revived Labour Day parade was familiar – the banners, matching outfits, marching bands, decorated wagons, commercial floats, and so on – but new features appeared that reflected the new mood of most local workers’ movements. For the first time on a large scale, many marchers set aside the politeness and used the occasion to announce their outrage at the way specific employers were treating them or governments were ignoring them. ‘Labor Has Made the

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Some workers continued to produce displays of their work, but by the time these female match-workers took their float into the streets of Hull in 1924, the larger project of the craftsmen’s spectacle was in decline. (ANQ-O, V12-125N)

Day and Everything Should Make Way for Labor’ was the defiant slogan of the Halifax Trades and Labor Council. The local labour press predicted that Labour Day would ‘mark the beginning of a new chapter in the storied drama of working class development’: ‘The big words on the banners of Labor will be education, organization, and co-operation. These are terms freighted with great potentialities, and the more the workers try to apply them to the Labor movement, the sooner will come a realization of those ideals of brotherhood and class consciousness that will make for a better civilization ... the strength and unity of labor in the big parade will be a visible demonstration of that potential power that some day will make its vote felt in the political arena.’30 The new angry tone was often visible in the art of the events. In 1919

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the Winnipeg Women’s Labor League contributed an impressive float draped with Union Jacks and carrying three female figures. ‘A woman gowned in white, holding a balance in her hands and with her eyes bandaged represented justice blindfolded,’ a Winnipeg paper reported. ‘Fraternity was a woman in a college cap and gown, and the third figure, a woman in housedress and headgear with a child on her knees, represented motherhood’ (according to the sign on the wagon, she also signified ‘Liberty’!).31 The renewal of Labour Day parades after the First World War was too short-lived to halt the long-term decline of the craftsmen’s spectacle. The severe depression that began in 1920 drained union membership, and the hostility of employers and the state defeated local workers’ movements across the country in the early 1920s. In the handful of cities where Labour Day celebrations continued every year – notably, Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto – the parades reflected the local militancy as long as it lasted and then reverted to their lacklustre form. In 1926 the Montreal Gazette noticed how few ‘posters bearing labor propaganda’ could be seen in the procession and, two years later, how no ‘placards bearing propaganda and mottoes favoring labor and subjects dear to the hearts of the worker’ appeared at all. Elsewhere, the parades disappeared completely when the spirit of protest died.32 What may have seemed like a turning point in 1919 turned out to be no more than a short detour in the overall deterioration of the craftsmen’s spectacle.

Nationalist Cross-Currents By this point, however, the weakness of the craftsmen’s spectacle was hardly its only problem. Three distinct groups of organized workers unleashed harsh attacks on the craftworkers’ annual spectacle in the few decades after 1900. Each saw the problems with Labour Day as symptomatic of the failings of the particular brand of unionism that had taken hold in Canada at the end of the nineteenth century. The first group of critics were nationalists in English and French Canada who objected to Cana-

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Nationalist unionists staged their own Labour Day celebrations. In 1938 they were still parading in Toronto. (CTA, Globe and Mail 52702)

dian labour’s close affiliation with the American labour movement. The second were Quebec’s Catholic unionists, who accepted their clerical leaders’ fears of godless secularism in this American connection. The third were socialists, and later Communists, who found the craft unionists’ structures too restrictive, their behaviour too cautious and bureaucratically minded, and their political horizons too limited – well exemplified, they believed, in the polite, increasingly bland Labour Day parades. Each of these groups organized separate celebrations with their own processions and social activities. In particular, they turned their backs on the

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existing craftsmen’s spectacle and recast the working-class parading tradition to reflect the aspirations of their new movements. Local workers’ movements had suffered splits as early as the late 1880s, most notably in Montreal, as craft unionists and the Knights of Labor parted company.33 But, in the early twentieth century, the first seriously divisive issue that spread throughout organized labour was the craft unions’ link with the ‘international’ unionism of the American Federation of Labor.34 In 1902 the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada expelled from its ranks any independent and national unions that competed with AFL affiliates. Within a few years, the small nationalist labour movement that pulled itself together in the aftermath began holding separate marches on Labour Day in a few cities.35 In Nova Scotia, the regional union that stayed out of the international labour movement, the Provincial Workmen’s Association, stuck to its annual celebrations of ‘PWA Day,’ now held in mid-August (the union merged into a new Nova Scotia miners’ union in 1917).36 By the 1920s, many EnglishCanadian nationalists had extended their critique to the structure of craft unionism and begun to use their beefed-up annual celebrations to promote all-inclusive industrial unionism. As the magazine of the threeyear-old All-Canadian Congress of Labour argued in its 1930 Labour Day editorial: Labour Day has always been a craftsman’s day, an opportunity for the skilled worker to strut with fellow aristocrats and, with overalls for uniforms, to give visual proof of the innate nobility of the honest toiler, cunning at his trade. Labour has not adjusted its outlook to the industrialization which has robbed the tradesman’s tool of its heraldic dignity ... But the day of mass organization in unionism is approaching fast: the integral industrial union is replacing the craft unions that have passed their age of usefulness. When the new organization has replaced the old, Labour Day will regain its significance.37

The issue of craft versus industrial unionism surpassed nationalism in

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1940, when most nationalists merged into a new central body, the Canadian Congress of Labour, along with the new industrial unions affiliated to the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the United States.38 Although there would be a few examples of cooperation, some major cities then had two distinct, mutually hostile celebrations, one sponsored by the craft-union council and the other by the industrial-union council,39 until the 1956 merger that created the Canadian Labour Congress and single local labour councils. However different the message these new unionists were attempting to communicate, the forms they used for their own workers’ festivals closely resembled those of the craft unionists. Meanwhile, nationalism had taken a different turn among many Quebec workers. A large new Catholic labour movement had emerged out of the charged atmosphere of the workers’ revolt at the end of the First World War, a movement that was based on the teachings and direct tutelage of the Catholic Church and that offered a vigorous alternative to international unionism. It pulled its celebrations aside and created a new fête du travail centred on the movement’s patron saint, St Joseph, first in Quebec City in 1919 and then in Montreal in 1921.40 Some of the recruits to this new workers’ movement were the small national unions in Quebec, which had occasionally staged their own labour parades in the standard North American mould. Now, however, Catholic unions’ celebrations in Montreal and Quebec City were held on the Sunday before Labour Day, when major sermons usually delivered outdoors by prominent church leaders drove home the message of respectful service to employers and the avoidance of strikes. The processions centred on the churches dedicated to St Joseph, and Catholic clergy presided over the solemn occasion. Clergy and lay people, including politicians, papal Zouaves, boys and girls, and even members of the Quebec Automobile Club, marched with the unionists in processions that broadcast solemn deference and Catholic belief. Unlike their secular counterparts, the Catholic unionists wore no occupational uniforms in these sombre events. They marched behind banners of simple blue-and-scarlet bunting with gold letters announcing the names of the unions. A band sometimes enlivened the procession, but no floats appeared. Souvenir booklets distributed on these occasions

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promoted the principles and accomplishments of Catholic unionism. By 1938, 10,000 people were reported to be participating in this ritual in Montreal – alongside some 20,000 in the secular Labour Day parade the next morning. The Catholic unions outside the largest cities often held no parade and concentrated instead on church services, picnics, and sporting events.41

Thunder on the Left Working-class nationalists were not the only critics of the craft unionists’ Labour Day. Sceptical voices also rose on the left. As early as 1891, one of Canada’s pioneering socialists, Phillips Thompson, expressed doubts about Labour Day festivities: ‘Unless the labor procession has some other significance and some more far reaching result than the assembling of many thousand people together to enjoy the fine weather and have a good time, the occasion is not one calling for any special enthusiasm,’ he argued. ‘Experience has shown that men will march the hurrah and enthuse at a public celebration, and the next day or the next week, forget all about their cause, and when their means, their time or their vote is needed to forward the movement, exhibit an indifference to the result.’ A decade later, the editor of the socialist Western Clarion referred to the holiday less politely as ‘Slave Day’ and to the parade as a ‘display of toadyism’ and ‘a tawdry, vulgar display of commodities for sale, including the commodity of labor-power.’ In Fort William/Port Arthur, local socialists occasionally staged their own more radical Labour Day parades before the First World War, but, well before that point, most socialists had withdrawn from the fall festivities to turn May Day into the preferred workers’ celebration.42 In 1906 Montreal socialists became the first to take to the streets on May Day. Some three hundred members of local socialist organizations and the garment workers’ union formed up behind a huge red flag and the city’s most prominent socialist, Albert Saint-Martin, as marshal. Sporting special red ribbons and pins, they wended their way through traffic on

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Montreal’s socialists were the first to celebrate May Day in Canada in 1906. The next year, police intervened to disperse the crowd. (La Patrie [Montreal], 2 May 1907, 1)

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In Port Arthur’s May Day celebrations in 1912, the red flag and the Union Jack were carried side by side. (LAC, PA127075)

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The women’s athletic club was prominent in Port Arthur’s May Day parade in 1912. (AO, F14.05-15-127-MSR 8361-file 29-645)

downtown streets before returning to their rented hall for speech making in English, French, Russian, and Italian. Their loud public denunciations of Catholic institutions, especially l’université Laval, en route had repercussions the following year. Fearing a counter-demonstration, city officials tried to convince the socialists not to march and to restrict their celebration to a rally on the Champs de Mars. The police more bluntly refused to let them unfurl a red flag. Ten thousand people showed up on the square for the event. So did two hundred police, some of them mounted on horses. They stopped socialists leaving their meeting hall and seized or destroyed the red flags, torches, and ‘transparencies’ they were carrying, alleging that the socialists were about to begin a procession. The police had a particularly dramatic tussle with a woman who insisted on defending a large flag, which vanished into police custody along with two

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Just before the First World War, Port Arthur’s socialists beamed respectability as they posed in front of their banners and wagon, wearing their sashes and socialist ribbons. (LUA)

socialist men. On the Champs de Mars, the police moved in to curb rowdy nationalist university students, who insisted on singing ‘O Canada’ to drown out ‘La Marseillaise’ and the ‘Internationale,’ and then brusquely drove the whole crowd from the square. A year later, on the eve of May Day, the Montreal police finally returned the large red flag they had snatched, but, at the same time, they banned outdoor demonstrations of all kinds. When the socialists nonetheless gathered at the Champs de Mars with red flag, banners, and a marching band, the police moved in with their truncheons, dispersed the crowd, and once again seized their

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flag and regalia. The socialists counter-attacked with twenty-two assault charges in court, which were dropped in exchange for the right to parade and carry the red flag publicly in the future. A few acts of police harassment angered local socialists on subsequent May Days in Montreal – arrests for obstructing the sidewalks in 1909 and for distributing circulars in 1910 – but the public meetings and marches became established annual events. In 1914, in the midst of a campaign that spring to organize the unemployed, the procession of 6,000 marchers, each wearing red ribbons, set off with a woman flag-bearer (wearing red) at the head, an Italian band, several foreign-language contingents, members of the cloakmakers’ and tailors’ unions, and a large delegation of the unemployed. In the midst of the parade, a cart draped in red cloth with the inscription ‘Travail vs. Capital’ presented a shabbily dressed worker operating a sewing machine and a well-dressed capitalist with a top hat smoking a cigar and ignoring him. Tens of thousands watched the parade and showed up for the speeches. Here, as elsewhere in the country, the event attracted large numbers of more recent immigrants, especially Jews, Russians, Italians, Finns, and Ukrainians. Each of eight language groups could gather around separate platforms in the Champs de Mars to hear the radical oratory in its own tongue.43 The Finns of northern Ontario also had lively public May Day celebrations, and some other centres held quieter meetings in theatres or rented halls.44 But, before the war, none approached the scale of the Montreal events, which continued through the war years. The Russian Revolution reinvigorated May Day organizing in many cities at the end of the First World War. After 1920, the new Communist Party of Canada made even more vigorous efforts to make May Day a real alternative, at first in association with other local workers’ groups but eventually on its own. It organized parades or public meetings in cities from Glace Bay to Vancouver, including several prairie towns and cities. This new workers’ festival drew its greatest support where Labour Day had always been weakest and where left-wing politics had made the greatest impact on the local labour movement – notably, in smaller mining and manufacturing towns and within large eastern-European immigrant communities in major

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Police in most cities came down hard on May Day marchers. In 1934, Toronto’s police continued their long standing policy of repression by seizing a banner they considered offensive. (CTA, Globe and Mail 33194)

cities. In Glace Bay, Montreal, Timmins, and a few western Canadian cities, May Day parades became significant local events in the 1920s that could draw as many as 3–4,000 marchers.45 Civic officials must have been appalled at the large crowds that turned out to watch these processions with evident interest. In Glace Bay in 1924, officials of the British Empire Steel Corporation threatened miners, and teachers badgered students not to take the day off. But the community shut down nonetheless.46 Elsewhere, as a result of persistent harassment or blunt repression at the hands of local police, May Day events had been forced out of public streets and parks in most cities by the end of the 1920s. Police even urged hall owners not to rent space for indoor gatherings. The radical ideas of May Day organizers were construed as a threat

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In Toronto’s 1934 May Day parade, men, women and children marched together. (CTA, Globe and Mail 33192)

to public order, and freedom of association and assembly evaporated. After a period of renewed struggle to re-establish the marches in the early 1930s – which in Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton, St Catharines, Sudbury, Timmins, and Fort William/Port Arthur meant confronting police batons, firemen’s hoses, and, in some cases, specially recruited squads of war veterans47 – most local Communist sponsors won a grudging acceptance of their festivities, partly by creating May Day committees that included social democrats and other progressives.48 At this point, May Day parades in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, and

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Communists usually took the leadership in organizing May Day parades, but in some cities the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation participated as well, as here in Edmonton in 1937. (CEA, EA-160-1234)

Vancouver swelled to major proportions and often rivalled the Labour Day processions in size and impact. In the west, May Day marches replaced Labour Day parades altogether. (In eastern cities where May Day marches appeared, Labour Day parades became the cultural expression of the less radical wing in the local labour movement.) In the new era of tolerance that lasted from 1935 to the banning of the Communist Party in 1940, participation peaked at 2,000 in Edmonton, 6,000 in Winnipeg, 15,000 in Vancouver, and 25,000 in Toronto, and many thousands more watched from the curb or gathered for the speeches in public parks. The May Day celebrations blossomed into major working-class cultural events on city streets in Ontario and western Canada.49 While the May Day parades of the inter-war era had some similarities

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May Day was also a time to sell radical newspapers, as this dedicated man was doing in Vancouver in the 1930s. (VPL, 8839)

with Labour Day events, there were many more sharp divergences. In the period of heaviest repression, they had only the simplest trappings, but by the mid-1930s they were evolving into more colourful, expressive celebrations. Participants had some of the same concerns with respectability as Labour Day marchers – they put on their best clothes and moved along in the familiar quasi-military order with marshals to keep them tightly in line. Yet, in contrast to parading craftworkers, they emphasized their common working-class identity rather than highlighting occupational differences with badges, sashes, uniforms, and special outfits. The parade organizers drew in a broader range of working-class participants than the craft unionists of the past, including radical politi-

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May Day marches like this one in Toronto in 1936 drew thousands of participants and spectators in the 1930s. (CTA, Globe and Mail 39963)

cal organizations, ethnic groups, and unemployed workers. In a few cases in the 1920s and much more regularly by the mid-1930s, union locals joined the processions, especially coal miners, garment workers, and waterfront workers. Women and children also marched with the men, though in smaller numbers and often in separate contingents. In fact, the apparent acceptance of women on a more equal basis masked a continuing reluctance to acknowledge symbolically their domestic labour (beyond a sentimentalized motherhood) and a readiness to assign them the traditional tasks of women’s auxiliaries – such as organizing food and entertainment and working through the crowds alongside the march selling red ribbons. In some cities, mothers did create ‘baby-carriage brigades,’ and in Vancouver they marched under the banner of a Mother’s Council.50 Children, kept home from school, also appeared frequently in choirs and

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At least some unions marched in most May Day parades. In Drumheller, Alberta, the whole labour movement came out. (GA, N-3472-1)

were often given prominent roles in leading the chants of revolutionary slogans. By the late 1920s, the scarves and uniforms of the Communist Party’s Young Pioneers added more splashes of red to the marches; and by the late 1930s, May Day parades had drawn in groups of veterans, youth, neighbourhood councils, and fraternal societies, as well as sprinklings of middle-class sympathizers – Protestant clergymen, intellectuals, and so on.51 The Communist-inspired May Day clearly embodied many of the traditions of protest parades that preceded and continued to parallel it – in fact, Communists helped to extend the ‘demonstration’ to a much wider range of social and political issues from the 1920s onward. Like the Labour Day parades, May Day processions were intended to impress spectators with the size and commitment of the workers’ movement and

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The parades could be used to highlight ongoing strikes as well, such as the struggle of Vancouver restaurant workers. (VPL, 8806)

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May Day parades also included organizations of unemployed workers, like these in Toronto in 1934. (CTA, Globe and Mail 33197)

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Like these contingents in a Vancouver parades in the 1930s, workers from other than British or French backgrounds generally played a much bigger role in May Day parades than in Labour Day processions. (VPL, 8799)

the dignity and proud respectability of working people. But, even more, they aimed to exhort and educate. The principle audience was not an undifferentiated ‘general public’ but rather the workers of each community, who were expected to spearhead radical social change. ‘May Day has become a demonstration for working class emancipation from the profit system altogether,’ the editor of the Worker wrote in 1926.52 Parade routes were more likely to twist through working-class neighbourhoods, as well as the public thoroughfares of the city (indeed, Toronto’s marches in the mid-1930s had three separate components that snaked their way from opposite ends of the city to converge on Queen’s Park). The processions were intensely serious and overtly didactic and generally relied on less subtle symbolism than Labour Day processions. Floats were far less common until the mid-1930s. When they appeared, they

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Like these Winnipeg marchers, some groups highlighted international issues. (UTL)

tended to offer simple satire or melodramas of social realism, rather than the old occupational tableaux. At various times in Vancouver, for example, an effigy of the mayor reading the Riot Act during the relief workers’ strike and a replica of a relief-camp bunkhouse were dragged along on wagons, while an anti-fascist float portrayed ‘a white garbed girl, representing B.C. democracy, bound and menaced by a pair of masked brown shirts with swastika arm bands.’ In Toronto the 1935 floats included an eviction scene, a large wooden tank bearing anti-war slogans, and one with a huge globe wrapped in chains except for the Soviet Union, with a muscular worker on each side smashing the chains with sledgehammers.53 The few bands that might be used invariably played the ‘Internationale’ or ‘The Red Flag,’ rather than familiar marching music. Paraders commonly chanted slogans and sang revolutionary and labour

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In contrast to earlier Labour Day parades, women marched in the streets on May Day. Some appeared as wage earners, including these textile workers in the Toronto parade in 1937. (CTA, Globe and Mail 44406).

songs as they moved along, sometimes led by choirs. Banners fluttering over their heads and the increasingly common placards were generally covered with words, not allegorical symbols – either the name of the marching contingent or, more commonly, a variety of slogans denouncing capitalism and inspiring action. They called for working-class unity in the fight for immediate goals (unemployment insurance, better housing, the right to organize unions, and so on) and the longer-term struggle for socialism, including defence of the Soviet Union (the content of the slo-

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Women like these in Vancouver in 1938 might present themselves as auxiliaries to the labour movement. Ann Lundgren, standing to the left, sewed this banner. (IWA)

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Other women, like these in Vancouver May Day parades in the 1930s, extended their mothering into politics. (VPL, 8090)

gans changed with the shifting party line). By the late 1930s, the efforts to build a popular front on the left had brought simpler slogans aimed at the widest possible audiences, such as the 1936 call in Toronto for ‘Peace, Liberty, and Better Living Conditions.’ A few banners might have cartoonlike art work to illustrate a point; the Winnipeg police censored one in 1934 that showed ‘a fat member of the “boss” class’ about to chop off the heads of a poor working-class couple. The red flag was always carried as well, in preference to the Union Jack or the Stars and Stripes, and nothing vexed local authorities more. Some municipalities passed bylaws requiring a Union Jack in every parade. Until the mid-1930s, police regularly seized red flags from marchers (in 1924 paraders in Montreal responded to this police harassment by flourishing hundreds of small red flags). At the end of the march, speeches were more common than games

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Large numbers of children, like these in Edmonton in 1937, took time off school to march on May Day. Besides proclaiming their political commitments, they showed their concern about schooling for working-class children. (CEA, EA-160-1231)

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Floats were less common in May Day parades than in their Labour Day counterparts. Where they appeared, they usually had blunt political messages, such as this wagon in the 1935 Vancouver parade, which drew parallels between Hitler and the city’s mayor, who had dealt with a strike of relief recipients by reading the Riot Act. (VPL, 8809)

and sports; indeed, in years when the May Day march was not held, meetings in parks or halls to hear speakers were the typical form of celebration, sometimes lightened by performances of children’s choirs, ethnic orchestras, and gymnastics displays by the Communist-led workers’ sports clubs – all collective, rather than individualistic, cultural forms.54 Overall, May Day was a serious spectacle intended to provide some entertainment but far more education.55 None of these activities resonated with local politicians and businessmen and their boosterist aspirations in the way that the earlier Labour Day parades had. No local firms ever contributed commercial floats or wagons. No newspapers published favourable reports. On the contrary,

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Many May Day parades in the 1930s featured the struggle against fascism. In 1937 Edmonton’s parade included this vivid depiction of the war against Franco in Spain, which Canada’s Dr Norman Bethune was supporting. The artistry here dipped into the socialist-realist imagery of the period to portray a sexually charged message of male heroism and female victimization. (CEA, EA-160-1233)

May Day was portrayed by politicians and newspapermen as an explicit threat to the social order. News headlines signalled the violence allegedly lurking just beneath the surface. ‘Some Rioting on May Day in the Dominion, but the Day Went off Quieter Than Expected’ was the Hamilton Spectator’s headline on its 1932 May Day story. Three years later, the Winnipeg Tribune kept the likelihood of violence in the public mind by heading a report of peaceful, non-violent parading in many cities with ‘No Disorders Mark May Day across Canada.’56 Ultimately, May Day’s challenge to Labour Day was halted when Canada again plunged into a World War in 1939 and the Communist Party was banned a year later. The springtime celebrations returned in

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These parades also featured cartoon-like figures of the fat capitalist in a top hat, like this complacent character pulled in a Vancouver parade by a number of equally symbolic figures, including a woman, a carpenter, a teacher, a doctor, and a political prisoner (jailed under the repressive Section 98 of the Criminal Code). (VPL, 8822)

some western cities after the war, but they withered under the repression and general hostility toward communism during the Cold War. Labour Day, then, was a shadow of its former self. It had begun as the ‘invented tradition’ of unionized craftsmen who created a popular festival of craft pride, determination, and respectability and convinced the Canadian state to honour it. In its original design, parades were the most important public element in the day’s planned activities. They became perhaps the richest collective art form that organized workers in Canada ever developed – even though their dominant motif of orderly respectability certainly kept the fanciful and the fantastic under raps. They were a dramatic public statement by organized craftworkers about themselves

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Repression of workers was a common theme of May Day celebrations, especially the symbols of prison bars and striped convict uniforms, such as these in Vancouver in the late 1930s. (VPL, 8793)

and their society. Within a decade after its official recognition by the Canadian Parliament, however, Labour Day parading was losing much of its original earnest moral tone and symbolic impact. The public spectacles declined along with the craftsman and his vision. Soon after the turn of the century, craft unions found themselves driven from the heart of the new mass-production industries, and their ancient symbols meant less and less in the new industrial order that had so little respect for the ‘arts and mysteries’ of craftsmanship. In addition, after 1900, Labour Day had been challenged and sometimes eclipsed by other festivals devoted to workers. A sober Catholic version had emerged in the inter-war period, but, as we shall see it faded away in the 1950s. In many parts of the country, the alternative of May Day had blossomed into large, colourful celebrations, but it, too, was destined to die out along with the Commu-

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The theatrical element of May Day parades often included coffins as dramatic symbols. These members of District 1 of the International Woodworkers of America presented a deathly scene to highlight safety hazards in their jobs. (IWA)

nist Party that had promoted it. By the middle of the twentieth century, then, the original form of Labour Day had been challenged and sometimes eclipsed by other festivals devoted to workers. The craftsmen’s vision of cooperation and mutual tolerance with capital was shattered by aggressive industrialists and challenged by sceptical socialists and pious Catholics, who organized alternative festivals. As an official statutory holiday, Labour Day went on, of course, but with less symbolic focus than when it began.

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chapter six

CLENCHED FISTS, CLOWNS, AND CHILLING OUT

Labour Day approached its fiftieth official anniversary as a diffuse holiday, an aggregate of various local and regional events, celebrations, pleasures and pastimes, with little coherent focus to endow it with overarching meaning. The original craftsmen’s spectacle was barely more than a dim memory. Few labour councils across Canada were bothering to organize a parade by the 1930s (fewer still in the early years of the war), and, even where the parades survived, they were usually spiritless exercises in commercial display and civic boosterism. As a day off, the craft leaders’ goal of earnest, respectable leisure had been pushed and pulled by a variety of social groups and cultural developments. Labour Day offered the potential for a variety of pastimes: unions sponsored a few, entrepreneurs and capitalists organized many more, but most were simply informal, familial, private, or individual. Many Canadians took the day off to catch up on housework, to take a trip, to watch a sports event, or to lounge around a local park or beach. In a broad sense, Labour Day in the second half of the twentieth century would be a combination of similar dynamics, a holiday of many

This Kitchener photographer caught the new mix of post-war Labour Day parades, as a clown strolls alongside a hard-hitting attack on the rising cost of living. (UWL, 49-1665)

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voices, sometimes competing, sometimes building on each other, sometimes focusing the gaze on workers, sometimes articulating other identities. Yet the voices were resorted and combined in different ways, with different points of emphasis, owing to the broad social and cultural developments of the post-war period. Here, we trace three main threads. First, parading traditions underwent a partial revival and reinvention after the war, followed by another period of relative decline and modification. Throughout, however, the new parades fit into a different kind of city with different standards and contexts of communication. Second, commercialism and leisure became more prominent themes, owing to the broader development of Canada’s consumer society after the war. Third, Labour Sunday and bourgeois Labour Day became somewhat more muted themes – still present, but with less drama, energy, and ubiquity than in the past, and increasingly drowned out by other developments. These three themes were not unrelated: new forms of popular culture, for example, could both be integrated into parades and distract attention from them. Labour Day continued to be a complex cultural product, combining union, commercial, and popular influences, pushed and pulled by conscious and unconscious impulses, by changes in urban life and communication technologies, by its own internal tensions and contradictions, and by broader social forces and cultural changes that unions and workers participated in but did not control. To a degree, each of these elements had been present since the beginning of Labour Day, and however much the form and mix of the factors changed, the basic question remained: what would Labour Day mean?

Militiant Revival The seeds of the post-war revival of Labour Day parading had been sewn in the late 1930s, when a new wave of union organizing rolled through Canadian mass-production industries. Unionizing at the Cornwall textile plants in 1936–7, for example, gave workers the confidence to parade the streets in large numbers on Labour Day.1 But it was in the massive new

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At the end of the Second World War, thousands of workers across the country took a stand for higher wages, new benefits, shorter hours, and more union security. Labour Day parades became showcases for their concerns, as in Hamilton in 1946, where four of the city’s leading industrial employers were strike-bound that fall. The huge masks were caricaturing Prime Minister Mackenzie King, antilabour city councillor Nora Henderson, and Stelco president Hugh Hilton. (LAC, PA120506)

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Many of the post-war Labour Day parades also had a sharper political edge than the old craft spectacles. In 1946 one of the two parades in Toronto included these stock figures of the rich, insensitive politicians (Wartime Prices and Trade Board Chairman Donald Gordon, Minister of Munitions and Supply C.D. Howe, and Minister of Labour Humphrey Mitchell), who were accused of holding back workers’ wages. (CTA, Globe and Mail 107631)

wave of working-class organizing in the mid-1940s that the new tradition of Labour Day celebration became firmly established. By 1943, battles over wages and union recognition were fuelling an extraordinary upsurge in worker militancy: union membership soared, the number of strikes exceeded even the peak level in 1919, and radicals found the ear of many Canadian workers. As the war ended, workers in communities across Canada took to the picket lines in unprecedented numbers, shutting down almost every major industry at various points between 1945 and 1947. The peak year was 1946, when strikes (sometimes on a regional and

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even national scale) affected logging, rubber plants, ports, newspaper publishers, and steel mills, alongside dozens of individual workplaces across the country.2 Amidst this surge of strikes, labour councils in many cities started marching again, organizing huge celebrations with vigorous parades. In Hamilton, bitter strikes at four of the city’s leading firms in 1946 prompted the Labour Council to re-establish a consistent annual parading tradition a full forty years after the last Labour Day procession in the city. In Brantford, Ontario, parades returned in 1948 after a twenty-nine-year lull. In other cities, the upsurge of working-class militancy breathed new life into existing parades. Unionists in Windsor had ceded control of the parades to the fire department between the wars, but in 1945 they reappeared in large numbers on Ouellette Street, entering the parade ‘straight from hearing the announcement that a favourable vote for a strike action by Local 200, UAW-CIO had been carried by a large percentage.’ Four years later, they took full control of the organization of the parade, banishing commercial floats and increasing union participation. In Toronto, which never completely stopped marching before the war (even as the parades declined into bland exercises in commercial boosterism), Labour Day attracted a record-breaking 25,000 marchers in 1947.3 Many other cities across central and eastern Canada re-established Labour Day parades for at least a short time after the war. Some smaller communities held their first ever Labour Day march.4 Drawing on the militant energy of the post-war years, political and union messages rippled through these parades. In 1946 ‘the largest Labour Day demonstration witnessed in several decades’ wound its way through Sydney, Nova Scotia, where Labour Day parading had occurred only sporadically between the wars. In addition to the general aim of showing ‘the solidarity of organized labor in Cape Breton,’ groups of civic workers, police officers, coal miners, members of the Labour Progressive Party, and other organizations declared their support for striking steelworkers, already several weeks into a struggle for higher wages and a forty-hour week. That same year, several Toronto paraders wore ‘on strike’ armbands

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Prison bars were also used to remind spectators that some workers were jailed for their union activities. In Toronto in 1948 members of the Canadian Seamen’s Union dramatized their bitter struggle for survival. Their float portrayed a policeman, a fat capitalist, and two ship’s officers pulling along a jail full of striking sailors. (YUA)

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After the war, newly unionized workers, like these textile workers in Valleyfield, Quebec, proudly took to the streets for the first time. (LAC, PA122274)

and carried placards focusing on issues raised on their picket lines: ‘The 40-hour Week, the 10 Cent Maximum Wage Boost, Inflation and the Use of Police to Discipline Picket Lines.’ The organizers of the campaign to unionize Eaton’s Toronto department store between 1948 and 1952 put considerable energy into their floats for the Labour Day parades, which were then driven around the Eaton’s downtown store at noon hour later in the month.5 These events also became more overtly political. Labour’s demands for new legislation to regulate collective bargaining and introduce social security were splashed across banners, placards, and floats in many cities. In 1945 the industrial unionists’ parade in Toronto was sprinkled with signs demanding jobs and security, while the craft unionists carried placards demanding ‘The 40-hour Week, Jobs for All and Severance Pay

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In 1944 Sudbury’s miners were also newcomers to the Labour Day parading tradition. Their procession had few touches of colour, but spoke loudly of their pride, dignity, and determination. Standards of respectability loosened slightly, and some workers did not don a jacket and tie. (AO, F-1280-10-1, Box B-800, file 7, 69-MISC-3.1)

for All Laid-Off War Workers.’ The next year, placards in Sydney’s parade attacked the wage policies of federal Labour Minister Humphrey Mitchell and included not only a Union Jack but also two red flags emblazoned with hammer and sickle.6 Three Toronto men paraded in 1946 as caricatures of federal politicians in top hats and morning coats and beating a drum that proclaimed, ‘To Hell with the Workers.’ In Hamilton, a Westinghouse worker and artist who had helped to organize Local 104 of the Artists’ Union, Murray Thompson, contributed huge masks of unpopular politicians and businessmen for the 1946 Labour Day parade. In 1947 Toronto’s paraders denounced both Mitchell and Ontario Premier George Drew. The high cost of living was a particular sore point, and

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Lithographers in Toronto in 1949 and Canada Skate employees in Kitchener in 1953 used the city’s Labour Day parades to publicize their current disputes. (CTA, Globe and Mail 136367; UWL, 53-4935)

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May Day celebrations declined during the Second World War and then returned with new energy immediately after. Like the messages on this fishermen’s union float in Vancouver, many of the issues and themes echoed those of Labour Day parades in the same period. (UBC, BC 1532/187)

painters won regular applause from spectators for their banner: ‘Fight for the Right to Eat as Well as Work.’7 Politicization had a particular character in Quebec, where Catholic unions began to shake off their clerically inspired caution and engaged in more militant strikes. Symbolically, in some places (such as Hull), they moved their festivities back to Monday. Although church services the night before would still set the moral tone for the events, this branch of the labour movement in Quebec was heading along a path that would break the ceremonial link with the Catholic Church and lead to complete secularization in 1960.8 The scope and depth of this revived practice of parading should not be exaggerated, however. Even where Labour Day parading occurred, efforts were often sporadic. Many local labour councils held one or a few Labour

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Day parades through the post-war period (sometimes to support a particular local struggle, at other times for more idiosyncratic reasons) but few established an ongoing practice of parading.9 More striking was the cancellation of Montreal’s long-standing procession in 1953, ending the most consistent annual practice of Labour Day parading. Moreover, as before the war, workers’ parades continued to be local and regional in character. In the west and some parts of Ontario, Labour Day parades never returned. Instead, in some places, May Day was revived after disappearing in the war years while the Communist Party was banned. Now, however, political radicals aimed to give May Day a calmer, less defiant cast, a product of ‘United Front’ patriotic fervour. These celebrations continued in some cities after the war, notably Vancouver.10 At the other end of the country, in Cape Breton, unions both marched on Labour Day and continued their own local workers’ event, the anniversary of the 1925 shooting of coal miner William Davis by company police. Davis was shot dead on 11 June 1925 at New Waterford during a bitter coal miners’ strike. For many years, coal miners stopped work on what became known as ‘Davis Day’ to remember the violent class conflict in these coalfields. In 1939 the United Mine Workers rechristened the event ‘Miners’ Memorial Day’ and turned it into a day of remembrance for those killed in the mines. But the old name stuck. By the 1950s, miners and numerous other labour representatives would march through town, lay wreaths, and hear speeches about the hazards of work and the need for labour-management cooperation to ensure safety on the job. Marching bands provided music, but no festive costumes or floats appeared in such a sober event.11 In the main industrial cities of southern Ontario – Windsor, Sarnia, London, Brantford, Kitchener, St Catharines, Hamilton, and Toronto – labour councils made annual Labour Day parades their main cultural expression in the post-war period. Each of these parading traditions emerged in the initial burst of militance in the mid-1940s but continued as unions settled into the calmer industrial relations of the 1950s. In shaping these celebrations, labour leaders crafted a new kind of march, one that combined older traditions of workers’ parades and new forms of

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Rather than focusing on the craft and the work process of craftsmanship, the new industrial unions tended to highlight the products they made and the companies they worked for. In 1943, in the midst of the Second World War, Toronto rubber workers proclaimed that what they made would help to ‘rub out the Axis.’ In 1946 the St John’s workers who made cordage for the fishery reminded spectators of the importance of that industry. (CTA, Globe and Mail 86943, 92281; MUN, COLL-079)

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procession and popular culture. Strikes and political issues were still important elements of these parades, but workers also integrated other forms of performance and presentation.

Re-Inventing Tradition Marchers still made it a priority to establish the worth of working people to local industry and community life. In a familiar vein, the president of the Oshawa autoworkers’ local, Harr Benson, called on members of Local 222 to use the 1946 Labour Day ‘to demonstrate to the community, yes, and to the country at large, how proud we are to be members of a union and a vital, living part of the Canadian Labor Movement.’12 Yet, compared to the ornate artistry of the craftsmen’s spectacle, paraders now carried banners with simpler industrial motifs and often incorporated the name of their employer into their designs. Whereas the old crafts had each organized their locals on a city-wide basis, the locals of the new industrial unions were usually based in a single enterprise and identified strongly with its products. Presentations showed allegiance to specific firms, which often cooperated in building or sponsoring floats. In Toronto in 1955 Goodyear broadcast the tight bonds between product, company, and union local by giving equal space to each on its float. The Canada Packers float made the point explicit, displaying a prominent sign reading, ‘Labour, Management, Cooperating for Better Foods.’13 Indeed, unionists in these new parades liked to highlight the products of their labour much more than the process of making them. ‘At least three-quarters of the floats consisted of advertisements for the products made by the workers, while almost all the vehicles belonged to the companies,’ the Globe and Mail reported in 1946. Demonstrations of work within the parades, such as the Montreal machinists building an aircraft in 1947, Sudbury miners with their drills a year later, or Toronto postal workers sorting mail in 1952, were rare. More typical were the Montreal dressmakers who had a fashion show on their float and the tobacco workers who each carried a cigarette between their fingers as they walked along.14

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Some effort was made to promote labour peace in parades such as this one in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, around 1950. (PANL, NA 2439; UWL, 67-847)

The nature of performance also changed. Respectability remained important, but a new informality was creeping into the parade presentation, in terms both of dress and of comportment. Workers still did not march in work clothes, but they began to dress more casually, pulling slightly away from the formal respectability of the late Victorian period. While many wore quasi-military uniforms, costumes, or stylized work clothes, photos of parades in the 1940s and 1950s also show many sleeves rolled up and collars loosened. Marching style changed more slowly. Most formations continued to stride along in military fashion (perhaps because many men and women in the parades were war veterans). In the 1960s, however, marchers, besides dressing casually, strolled in looser clusters.

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By then, too, the colourful union T-shirt and baseball cap had replaced the more restrained union badge or the more elaborate stylized uniform of the past. Forgetting that bowlers and ‘dark business suits’ were once the standard garb of marchers, a Globe and Mail reporter mocked the Toronto plumbers who decked themselves out in this way in 1971 as ‘British businessmen on parade.’15 Changes in performance went beyond dress and comportment. For women, older notions of fragile and symbolic femininity gave way to sexual objectification, a change that began earlier but expanded after the war. From the 1920s through the 1960s, labour councils included beauty contests in their festivities.16 Over the same period, spectators commonly saw young, scantily clad women draped across floats as alluring ornaments. Sometimes they were female workers from a given industry, who were presented to spectators more as sex symbols than as workers. The clothing unions used them as models for fur coats or dresses. A highlight of the 1946 Montreal parade was the float of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, which used young women to draw attention to its main goals: ‘Mounted by 11 pretty midinettes the float represented the progress made by the union since its inception in this city, with the 40– hour five-day week as the most important slogan.’ A year later, the same union put women on bicycles in 1890s costumes and also added a fashion show of old dresses. In 1947 the rubber workers’ prize-winning float in Toronto was an ‘eye-appealing scene of pretty girls holding gladioli.’ It was a big year for that particular flower – women from the Inglis plant carried them as well and, according to their union magazine, ‘turned a mere [float] into a colourful display.’17 Other unions used ‘pretty girls’ who had nothing to do with their trade or occupation. In 1930 Montreal’s printers stood ‘a blond beauty’ atop a globe on their float as an apparently gratuitous bauble above the typesetters working below. In 1943 the prize for the best float in the Toronto Labour Council’s parade was the entry from Research Enterprise, which, according to the Globe and Mail, ‘featured a large telescope surrounded by several pretty girls peering through binoculars.’ One Toronto parade in the 1940s proved to the Globe and Mail that ‘there are a lot of pretty girls

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Labour’s views of women were changing, along with their role in Labour Day events. Unions began to incorporate beauty contests into their festivities between the world wars. Here the contestants in London present themselves to the judges in 1944. (UWO, 5 September 1944)

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Instead of sitting primly in carriages, young women now pranced along the street as majorettes in short skirts, like this one in Toronto. (AO, 3618)

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By the 1940s, women were often being used as sexual adornments to union floats, such as the Massey-Harris workers contribution to the Toronto parade in 1944 and the civic employees’ float in the London parade in 1948. (CTA, Globe and Mail 92278; UWO, LFP, 6 September 1948)

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Women officeworkers were also transformed into sex symbols on this publicservice union float in Toronto in 1961. (YUA)

in the union movement – it might almost have been a beauty parade. They stood on the floats, smiled prettily, and waved at the throngs on the sidewalk.’ The height of this sexist imagery was probably the 1961 display of the Allied Printing Trades in Toronto, which had ‘pretty girls splashing in a pool set on a mobile float.’ Five years later, the Hamilton Spectator reported that, along the Labour Day parade route, there were still ‘whistles for the nine girls vying for the title of Miss Labor Union and cheers for the six groups of majorettes, some of them pre-schoolers.’ Although Hamilton abolished its beauty contest in 1970, Stratford continued to honour a Labour Day Queen, and Sudbury unionists still crowned a Miss Midget Steelworker, a Miss Teenage Steelworker, and a Miss Steelworker for the next decade.18 The nineteenth-century image of fragile femininity had been replaced with cheesecake. Yet women also joined these parades as unionists in much larger numbers than ever before. The revival of unions in the late 1930s and early 1940s brought far more of them into the streets, this time as full-

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As in this 1962 parade, Toronto’s Allied Printing Trades liked to use the women on their floats as overtly sexual objects. (YUA)

fledged marchers. They were quite noticeable kicking up the dust in the streets of Montreal and Toronto in 1937, and even more during the Second World War, when female employment expanded so dramatically. In 1943 many Montreal women paraded in their special uniforms behind a float showing the bombs they produced in local munitions plants, and ‘smartly apparelled’ women from the machinists’ local at Victory Aircraft won first prize for their impressive turnout in Toronto a year later. Some of the women marched in their familiar capacity as domestic managers, but with a new militant edge, such as the Ladies’ Auxiliary of Mine-Mill Local 598, which headed the 1946 parade in Sudbury. A year later, a militant brigade from the Housewives Consumers’ Association joined the Toronto parade carrying rolling pins and demanding price controls on bread.19 Of course, many of the same parade makers who welcomed women as marching workers also presented them as sexual objects adorning various floats and as beauty queens. Changes in gender norms were

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In 1971 the Kitchener-Waterloo labour movement was still crowning a Labour Day Queen. (UWL, 71-2705)

thus ambiguous for women: they could now join the men in the parades but were still denied the imagery of full equality. The record of the reinvented post-war Labour Day parade was similarly mixed on the issues of race and ethnicity. Racist images continued: in Brantford’s first post-war parade, a group of children in blackface won the decorated bicycle prize; seventeen years later, a local child won the same category for dressing up as a ‘cannibal’ and towing ‘a mock up of a huge boiling pot with a head of next day’s dinner peaking over the top.’20 Yet, beginning in the late 1930s, many of the participants were newcomers to Labour Day parading. Far more of them were less skilled workers enrolled in industrial, rather than craft, unions. In Montreal in 1937, for example, dress workers, taxi drivers, sailors, and steelworkers were new faces in the parade.21 Within these unions was a greater diversity of ethnic and racial groups as well, a theme that some unions liked to highlight with flags or costumes from different countries. After the war,

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The cheesecake image was not the only one available to women in post-war Labour Day parades. Some women, like those connected to Toronto’s transit workers’ union in 1940 or to Lake Cowichan’s woodworkers in 1947, presented themselves as committed auxiliaries of their menfolk’s unions. (CTA, Globe and Mail 68567; IWA)

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During the 1940s, many more women began to appear as wage earners in spotless factory uniforms. In Toronto the members of a machinists’ local at Victory Aircraft marched in tight formation in 1944, and two steelworkers from Inglis displayed their wares. (CTA, Globe and Mail 92274, 107633)

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Like these Toronto textile workers in 1952, some women workers still put on their best dresses and waved from the top of a float, as their grandmothers would have done at the turn of the century. (YUA)

Labour Day organizers embraced the new, folkloric style of multiculturalism current in popular culture.22 By far the most common version of this impulse was to feature immigrants on floats in stylized native costumes, often underneath banners calling for interracial tolerance or international friendship. In 1952 Massey-Harris workers in Toronto won first prize for a float featuring ten women of diverse backgrounds in their national costumes beneath a sign calling for an end to discrimination by ‘Race, Colour or Creed.’ In Windsor five years later, a United Automobile Worker (UAW) float featured ‘the Windsor All Nations Girls’ in their native dress.23 Most of these celebrations of ‘friendship’ featured women (or less frequently children), suggesting that Labour Day organizers still saw a place for women as symbolic features in their parades.

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Paraders also announced a much clearer commitment to overcoming ethnic and racial divisions between workers. The 1951 float promoting an end to discrimination was part of the labour movement’s campaign for new human-rights legislation. The next year, Massey-Harris workers in the same city won first prize for a float featuring ten women from diverse ethnic backgrounds beneath a sign denouncing discrimination. (LAC, PA139576; YUA, Toronto Telegram photograph collection, 1974-001/354[2347])

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In 1960 hundreds of newly organized residential construction workers, mostly recent immigrants from Italy and eastern Europe, also joined the Toronto parade for the first time. (YUA, YU Neg. 1517)

These depictions of ethnic friendship were often folksy, emphasizing stereotypical national dress, but other displays gave the question of ethnic and racial discrimination a more political edge. The struggles of minorities for acceptance within the house of labour were not over after the Second World War, but the appearance of representatives of minority groups on Labour Day signalled their determination to be admitted as full members. Two contingents of marchers in Toronto Labour Day parades of the 1950s symbolized their own triumph over racist indifference and hostility inside unions – the all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the so-called Brandon Group of residential construction workers, the majority of them Italian. By the 1970s, banners in the Toronto parade were in many languages, including Chinese and Greek, though a group of African-Canadian carpenters still felt a need to attach them-

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selves to the end of Toronto’s parade in 1971 with banners reading: ‘Too Many Racist Carpenter Foremen’ and ‘Stop Racist Hiring of Carpenters.’ The overall ‘whiteness’ of most parades underlined the difficulty most unions had organizing in sectors where many immigrant workers of colour had found jobs.24

Bring on the Clowns The organizers of the reinvented Ontario parades of the post-war period incorporated new kinds of colour and carnival. Their marches included commercial and tourist floats, like the Planter’s float (decorated with peanuts) in Toronto, which featured Miss Peanut sitting on her throne (made of peanuts) while the company’s mascot (himself a peanut) looked on. These sorts of floats went beyond companies lending trucks, products, and names to their employees’ efforts: they were rolling commercials for products, often very artistic and professionally designed. Clowns were another common feature. In Conistan, Ontario, for example, a clown took the old place of the marshal at the head of the 1946 parade, and in London that same year a clown band ‘slipped in among the spectators and made the most of the clown’s long-standing prerogative of kissing the prettiest girls.’ Clowns were popular with spectators, especially children, even if they could distract the public from the labour theme of the parade. ‘Shrieking juvenile voices testified to the fact that a clown is a clown – whether he wears a union label under his clown suit or not,’ the Windsor Star reported in 1950. Many other entertainers joined the clowns along Labour Day routes. Icons of mass culture, like cowboys and Indians, were also common, suggesting that parade organizers were drawing on the most popular forms of culture. In Toronto’s 1952 parade, the Teamsters included natives ‘in full regalia’ and members in ten-gallon hats. In Brantford two years later, one float featured ‘Indians’ clad in ‘full dress including war feathers and tomahawks.’ The new expectations were clear in Hamilton in 1972, when a four-year-old watched the last float pass and tearfully asked, ‘How come Santa didn’t show up?’25

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Planters Peanuts continued the tradition of commercial floats in one of Toronto’s two 1947 parades. (CTA, Globe and Mail 118336)

In fact, it was a good question: as in the past, Labour Day existed in a broader processional culture. There were always different forms of parading available, but, in many processions after the Second World War, new kinds of colour exerted a strong influence, providing an almost automatic answer to the question, ‘What does a parade look like?’ The original craftsmen’s spectacle could be seen as the last of the great nineteenthcentury parading traditions, part of a processional culture intended for public holidays, ethnic and religious festivals, and civic celebrations. Though these demonstrations might involve some carnival, the watchwords of such parades had been order, sobriety, and respectability. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, the ground had shifted. Though some parades continued in a sober, ordered style, and marching units remained a part of almost all mainstream processions, there was a clear

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Everywhere in post-war Labour Day parading, clowns popped up to amuse the crowds. In London, Labatt’s regularly sponsored a band known as the ‘Clown Syncopaters Local No. 1,’ shown here in 1940. Three decades later, a clown in the Kitchener parade entertained young spectators. (UWO, 3 September 1940; UWA, 69-891)

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shift in emphasis. Increasingly after the 1920s, and almost constantly by the 1940s, urban parades merited a whole new set of adjectives, words like ‘colourful,’ ‘boisterous,’ and ‘gay.’ Reporters praised the ‘noise, color and spectacle’ of parades, complimented the ‘brightly-colored floats,’ delighted in the ‘zaniest, most colorful parade,’ a city had seen, cheered the ‘festive air and dashing costumes,’ or (our personal favorite) applauded the ‘ding-dongest, sim-sammest, wee-whistling thing that ever happened to this city.’26 These new descriptions hinted at broad changes in processional culture that had started in the 1920s but accelerated after the war. All of the main features of post-war Labour Day marches – loosened standards of respectability, cheesecake femininity, folksy depictions of ‘New Canadians,’ professionally designed floats, clowns and other circus-like features – could be found in the typical civic parade in post-war Canada. Numerous city anniversaries, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953, Canada’s centennial in 1967, all witnessed parades across the country with some combination of these basic features.27 The proliferation of commercial spectacles was even more striking, the most famous of which was the Santa Claus parade, founded in 1905 by Eaton’s but growing in sophistication and quality beginning in the 1920s and extending across the country in the post-war period. Eaton’s transported parts of the parade to other cities like Montreal (from 1925 to 1973) and Winnipeg (from 1906 to 1968), and by 1949 the company was organizing Christmas parades in Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver as well. More numerous were Santa Claus parades organized by local entrepreneurs, boards of trade, and service organizations in cities and towns across the country. In London, for example, the Downtown London Association organized the city’s first Santa Claus parade in 1957, with the Junior Chamber of Commerce taking over in subsequent years. Communities that lacked the will to organize their own parade could simply rent one. Benjamin Matlock of Windsor ran a Santa Claus parade, obviously modelled on Eaton’s procession, which he rented to twenty cities from Oshawa to Sarnia.28 Santa, however, was only one example of this powerful new trend in parading. Many community, commercial, and tourist spectacles (in big

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Some parade participants were modelled on the characters of popular television shows and movies. In 1955 a Kitchener credit union featured Davey Crockett on its float, and six years later the autoworkers’ local at Massey-Ferguson in Toronto played on the typical image of native peoples in contemporary westerns. (UWL, 55-7542; YUA, Toronto Telegram photograph collection)

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Earlier in the twentieth century, Labour Day parades had already had to match the new standards set by commercially sponsored parades, such as the Eaton’s Santa Claus parade, which had picked up colourful elements of the carnival, the circus, and the storybook. (CTA, Globe and Mail 38497)

cities and small towns) adopted a form of this common-sense style: the Merriton Community Days (founded 1947), the Grey Cup Parade (1948), the St Catharines Grape and Wine Festival Grande Parade (1951), the Brampton Flower Festival (1961), Waterloo’s Oktoberfest (1969), and so on. By taking over downtown streets, moreover, Santa Claus and other commercial spectacles dispersed new standards and ideas across space, attracting tourists who could carry their impressions back to their local communities.29 The effect of this process is difficult to reconstruct, but unions often contributed floats to these celebrations, and some adapted their Labour Day presentations to the new developments by sponsoring floats rather than making them with their own volunteer labour.30 It is tempting to read Labour Day’s clowns, cowboys, and commercial

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With its palm trees, umbrellas, and Hawaiian dancers, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ float in Kitchener in 1964 symbolized the muting of labour-related themes in many parts of post-war Labour Day parades. (UWA, 64-1177)

floats as symbols of the decline of post-war militance and the onset of the calmer 1950s, but the parades of this time resist such simple dichotomies. Even some of the combative parades of the 1940s contained folksy floats and clowns, while militant political and union messages continued through the 1950s and 1960s. For many unionists in the post-war period, there was nothing contradictory about mounting a labour parade and participating in the larger redefinition of processional culture. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the thousands of spectators who lined Ouellette Street in Windsor for the annual Labour Day parade took in a mix of displays typical of cities across Ontario. Boy Scouts did an ‘Indian war dance’; ‘Miss Western Ontario’ contestants waved to the crowd; a UAW Local 195 entry featured ‘the Windsor All Nations Girls’ in the dress of their native

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Even militant unions like Sudbury’s miners were willing to join in community parades such as this one celebrating Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953. They used the opportunity to show off how they used timbers underground to support the mines and to proclaim the principles of ‘Organization, Education, and Independence.’ (AO, F-1280-10-1, Box B-800, file 8 [1], 69-MISC-1.42)

countries; the organizers of the Niagara Grape and Wine Festival advertised their event; Popeye rode on a fire engine; and ‘hordes of clowns’ danced their way down the route. But, amidst this kind of colour, spectators were also treated to an impressive display of union pride and solidarity. UAW Local 200 called for ‘Jobs for All’ and a ‘National Health Plan.’ In a ‘controversial float,’ autoworkers from Local 444 at Chrysler depicted labour as ‘a knight in armour’ fighting a dragon labelled ‘high profits.’ Another float, promoting the Union Label, celebrated ‘The Good Workmanship in Union-made Clothing.’31 At Windsor’s parades, as in many other Ontario cities, Labour Day blended solidarity and fun.

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For some unionists, however, the blend was never comfortable. Back in 1949, Windsor labour leaders had been sufficiently disturbed by the commercial elements to banish them. But they returned with new vigour in subsequent years, mainly because they were popular with working families and the wider public, who by then expected to see a colourful presentation in the downtown streets. ‘The commercial aspect of the parade was developed much more than in recent years, and it tended to improve the quality,’ the Star reported of the Windsor parade in 1957. ‘The clowns, antique cars and novelties added zest.’32 Across Ontario by the mid-1960s, this balance of commercial and union content confronted decreasing attendance by workers and public and increasing militance within unions. In the decade after 1965, a new aggressiveness was creeping into union activity, and workers took to the picket lines in unprecedented numbers, often over the objections of national labour leaders.33 In addition, large numbers of public-sector workers joined the house of labour for the first time. For Labour Day across Ontario, the new militancy raised more questions about the combination of commercialism and politics common in the parades. In Windsor, many unionists became dissatisfied, both with the turnout and with the form of the parade, and in 1974 the local Labour Council finally cancelled the parade in disgust. The people ‘prefer being entertained to being educated about the trade union movement,’ a union official complained. ‘They want bands and clowns.’ London’s Labour Council had made the same move in 1967; ‘it had become much too commercial, with too much non-union participation,’ the Labour Council’s president told the press two decades later. The marshal of the last parade, however, looked back with regret at what had been lost: ‘The Labor Day parade was an opportunity to march down the street and say “Here I am, I am a trade unionist.”’ he recalled in 1989. ‘That provided people with a sense of pride.’34 There was no easy solution to this tension. In Windsor, Labour Council President Ed Baillargeon summed up the dilemma faced by parade organizers. ‘We’ve attempted a number of approaches to it,’ he said. ‘One time we eliminated many of the commercial sectors but it didn’t inspire attendance. A parade obviously is not very attractive to the public without something other than marching units.’35

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In 1967, in the midst of clowns and cowboys, Kitchener’s rubber workers still reminded spectators of the benefits of collective bargaining. (UWL, 67-847)

What could labour councils do? By the late 1960s, a number of different approaches had emerged. In St Catharines, unionists continued to live with the problem, bringing their political banners and union slogans to the Merriton Community Fun Day parade, an event held on Labour Day but organized by the Lions’ Club. Labour participation in the parade never exceeded five hundred, less than one-third of the typical turnout at a Community Fun Day march, and was smaller in many years.36 Nonetheless, the union banners and floats were impressive, whether demanding action on unemployment, calling for peace in Vietnam, or criticizing moderate labour leaders.37 In Sarnia, labour-organized processions bent over backwards to embrace the rhetoric of community. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, Labour Day spectators saw ‘more than an hour of marching workers, bands, clowns, floats, antique cars, huge trucks, fire engines, costumed youngsters and decorated bicycles’ but few protest

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The post-war parades highlighted political demands for such social-security measures as health insurance and pensions, as in these Toronto marches in 1962 and 1965. (YUA, Toronto Telegram photograph collection, 1974-001/354[2347])

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Like these paraders in Toronto in 1959 and Kitchener in 1963, some linked their political demands to support for the social-democratic organization founded in 1961, the New Democratic Party. (YUA, YU Neg. 0-312; UWL, 63-1074)

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New challenges to workers and their unions began to appear as parade themes. In 1963 Kitchener’s rubber workers worried about automation. (UWL, 63-1074)

signs or banners. In 1986 the parade marshal explained that the event was intended ‘to show the public how the unions work in the community and to chronicle their history’; three years later, the new marshal said that ‘the parade’s theme – United We Stand – reflected the relationship unions have with the local United Way as well as the relationship between Chemical Valley unions and management working together to achieve common goals.’38 Yet, however diluted the union content, the parades remained popular with the Sarnia public. In 1973 a report estimated that 20,000 spectators lined up to watch the city’s Labour Day parade, a figure equal to one-half of the local population. Even through the 1980s, Sarnia’s parade remained a popular community event, drawing thousands of spectators, who sometimes arrived over an hour early to set up lawn chairs at the best viewing points along the route.39 Few other Canadian unionists were comfortable trying to strike these

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sorts of bargains. London unionists, like so many of their brothers and sisters across Canada in the twentieth century, simply gave up on the parade and turned their efforts to more informal activities like picnics, which were less expensive, easier to organize, and generally more popular with unionists and public.

Festivals of Protest In Toronto and Hamilton, parade makers took a different approach, stripping away the circus elements and focusing the parade more clearly on politics. Reinvented as more determined festivals of protest these parades were hybrids of two parading styles: traditional Labour Day processions with floats and signs and newer peace and civil rights demonstrations, with explicit and direct political slogans and loose, informal walking replacing military-style formations. By this point, too, paraders could regularly be heard singing labour songs as they marched, especially the anthem of the labour movement, ‘Solidarity Forever’ – music that might also be blasting from sound systems on union floats. In the same spirit, parade organizers in Toronto and Hamilton announced a theme for each of their events. In 1971, for example, Hamilton’s theme was unemployment and in 1973 outlawing strikebreakers. In 1975 the emphasis in Toronto was on full employment, the next year wage and price controls, in 1980 plant closings and job losses, in 1987 affordable housing, and in 1988 free trade. By this point, it had also become common to use Labour Day parades to promote New Democratic Party candidates. At the end of these angrier marches, hard-hitting speeches picked up the same themes for the assembled crowds, who then drifted off to labour picnics or other private pleasures.40 Street theatre and artistic colour continued to be a part of the politically charged parades in Toronto and Hamilton, but, more often than not, puppets, floats, and theatre were used to deliver political points rather than fun and entertainment. Two images appeared repeatedly in postSecond World War parades as indicators of heavy-handed state labour

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Changing employment practices for government workers, as well as teachers, hospital workers, librarians, social workers, and many others working for public bodies and agencies, brought many more public-sector unionists into the labour movement. By the 1970s, groups like these Hamilton city workers in 1973 made up an ever-larger part of Labour Day parades. (ET)

policies: prison bars and a coffin. These were not new images in workers’ festivals, but they appeared with increased regularity amidst the new militancy that erupted after the mid-1960s. In 1966 a float of the autoworkers’ local at Massey-Ferguson combined ‘a prison scene in which workers in striped attire were behind bars and a funeral tableau of mourners gathered around a draped casket,’ over which hung the sign ‘Let’s Bury Injunctions.’ That same year, the Toronto printers, who had been on strike since 1964, wore black armbands, carried a casket, and

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As in Toronto in the 1990s, militant teachers’ organizations also joined the parades. (CH)

marched behind a black-draped banner declaring ‘680 Printers’ Jobs Killed by Injunction.’ The same motif was used in 1970 to attack the federal government’s 6 per cent wage guidelines and in 1976 to mourn the ‘death’ of collective bargaining under the government’s new wage-controls program. In 1980 Toronto marchers highlighted plant shutdowns with coffins bearing the logos of the Montreal Star, the Ottawa Journal, and the Winnipeg Tribune. Hamilton steelworkers carried a coffin calling for the death of new legislation to change workers’ compensation benefits. The prison motif returned when Ontario’s civil servants carried their collective-bargaining struggles into the 1974 Toronto parade with an elaborate float emblazoned with a ‘Free the Servants’ banner. It included a cartoon effigy of Premier Bill Davis in front of a small building showing Queen’s Park’s unmistakable columns on the front and jail bars on the

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As in the past, prison bars drew attention to anti-union measures by governments. Here, CUPE President Grace Hartman (recently jailed during an illegal hospital workers’ strike) rode the float of Hamilton members in 1981. (ET)

side, through which workers dressed in prison garb and ball and chain waved at the crowds.41 As these entries show, art was used to make political points. In 1975 postal workers constructed a float with children in robot costumes to advertise their struggle against automation. In 1988 the leading float had a puppet of New Democratic Party leader Ed Broadbent dumping garbage bags marked ‘Free Trade’ on effigies of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and opposition leader John Turner. Farther along, another float showed a replica of the White House draped with a banner that said: ‘Brian’s New House ... Canadians Enter by the Back Door.’ By the 1980s, giant puppet heads of the most unpopular politicians towered over the marchers, some of them made by Toronto artist Mike Constable. In the 1980s the art of the labour banner was also revived, particularly by Toronto artists Carole

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Effigies of political leaders returned in the 1970s and 1980s. Here, in Toronto’s 1988 parade, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and President Ronald Reagan are depicted behind the ‘garbage’ of the Free Trade Agreement. (CH)

Conde and Karl Beveridge, whose productions wove together some older labour imagery of pride in craft with new themes of technological change and racial diversity. Some of these features had been present since the 1940s and even before, but what was notable was what was missing: gone were the clowns, beauty queens, and other circus-like spectacles. The Toronto parade in particular became noticeably more serious in tone; in 1985 the Globe and Mail reporter saw ‘no clowns, no balloons, no cartoon characters – no Santa Claus.’42 Cheesecake femininity gradually disappeared as well, first to focus parades more clearly on politics and then as part of a larger redefinition of gender politics within the union movement. Hamilton’s parade organizers cancelled Miss Labour Day in 1970, and later in the decade, parades began to highlight working women’s issues under the assault of the new

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Many artists made significant contributions to visual attractiveness and the spirit of protest in the parades of the 1970s through the 1990s. Among those most prolific were Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge. As in their banner for the Communications, Energy, and Paper Workers (CEP), they combined the older tradition of highly symbolic banners with modern images and styles. (CB)

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Some unions, including the southern Ontario local of Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees shown here in Toronto’s 1999 parade, reached out to many more people of colour. (CH)

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women’s movement and the arrival of the powerful new public-sector unions, with their large numbers of female members. These same issues flowed into a new parading tradition as well: in the mid-1970s, for the first time in Canada, women in several Canadian cities began taking to the streets en masse to celebrate International Women’s Day (IWD) on 8 March – the date in 1908 when New York working women first marched for higher wages, a shorter work day, and an end to child labour.43 Women (and their male supporters) would typically head off in loud, boisterous parades and gather for speeches, performances, and dances. These were also the years when women union members first took a stand against male control of the labour movement. By the early 1980s, union contingents (of both men and women) made up a growing proportion of the IWD marchers. Both unions and provincial and national labour centrals formally recognized the event as an important moment on the annual labour calendar and put growing resources into helping to organize it. Perhaps most symbolic of the importance of union women to the events was the on-the-spot decision of Toronto’s IWD paraders in 1985 to march through the huge downtown Eaton’s store to show support for the company’s striking workers – only one of the many alliances being built between the women’s movement and women strikers.44 These celebrations covered the entire range of women’s experience, but women’s work was always central. In fact, the women’s movement turned an old song about the struggles of working-class women into their anthem – ‘Bread and Roses.’ The banners and placards directly addressed women’s oppression in the paid workforce, where so many more of them now spent most of their adult lives, calling for pay equity and affirmative action, in particular. In contrast to older labour processions, the definition of work expanded to include women’s unpaid labour in the home and raised issues about childcare, reproductive rights, parental leave, and same-sex benefits. Union women carried banners and signs that might also appear in Labour Day parades (or in May Day events in Quebec), but the whole spirit of the event was different – women marched arm-in-arm, swaying to the music, with none of the stern quasi-military masculinity or the exalted maternalism that had haunted labour parading for more

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In the 1970s women’s groups began to organize a more public celebration of International Women’s Day on 8 March, with rallies and marches in many Canadian cities. In Toronto, Organized Working Women participated regularly. (WAHC)

than a century. Feminism on parade was more flamboyant, free-flowing, and defiant, less interested in trying to appear polite and respectable. The women used their parades to present a collective alternative vision of gender equality, sisterhood, creativity, and compassion. After 1980, the labour movement moved slowly but decisively to integrate that vision into its own festivals. The shift in gender presentation was encapsulated almost perfectly in the Toronto Labour Day parade in 1981, which included a small contingent from the Canadian Association of Burlesque Entertainers, who marched as workers rather than as adornments.45 In the 1960s and 1970s, as workers’ parades were reinvented, traditions continued to be regional and local. While some Ontario labour councils mounted Labour Day parades with sharper political edge, union-

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By the time of this 1981 march in Toronto, unions were recognizing International Women’s Day as an important event on labour’s calendar. (Photographer: Frank Rooney)

ists and political radicals in other regions put that energy into alternative festivals. In Cape Breton, unionists re-energized Davis Day, returning to the old name (which had never really died) and organizing a sharper, more militant parade that also drew on ideas of community to pressure the federal government and to articulate regional and local grievances.46 In the west, radical workers tried to revive May Day, which had dwindled into insignificance with the onset of the Cold War and the fierce internal battles over communism within unions in the late 1940s.47 The renewed parades and meetings sponsored by the remnants of the Communist Party or other small left-wing groups were usually no more than tiny replicas of those of the 1930s. Although Vancouver organizers managed to draw out 1,500 in May 1983 as part of the resistance to the Social Credit

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As the Cold War set in, May Day suffered from its association with Communism and soon died out across the country. However, when union militancy and renewed radicalism began to percolate again in the 1970s, the celebrations were revived. In western Canada these events often had support and participation from the local labour movement, as in this 1976 parade in Winnipeg. (WCPI, A1140-34166)

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By far the largest May Day celebrations in the 1970s were staged in Quebec, such as this huge turnout in Montreal in 1975. (CSN)

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government’s harsh new anti-labour legislation, the typical May Day parade in that city in the 1970s and 1980s was less than a third of that size.48 Here, as elsewhere, a few labour leaders participated, only handfuls of workers showed up, and the public was largely oblivious. Unionists in Quebec were more successful in their efforts to revive the springtime demonstrations. In 1970 the workers’ movement across the province made May Day its official festival, a symbol of the radicalization that was sweeping through the province. This time, all branches of labour in the province participated, along with a host of radical, nationalist, citizens’, and single-issue organizations – including the once-arch-conservative Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society, the newer Parti Québécois, and militant immigrant groups from Greece, Latin America, Portugal, and elsewhere. Since this was not a legally sanctioned holiday, the festivities were generally held in the evening. But many workers – even teachers and nurses – informally turned the day into a holiday by booking off work or shutting down their workplaces to participate. From 3,000 marchers in 1970, the numbers swelled to more than 30,000 three years later, as part of the campaign to get the province’s top three labour leaders released from jail – despite competition from the ever-popular Stanley Cup playoffs. For the next few years, the number of paraders in Montreal ran at about 15,000 and across the province at 30–35,000.49 The marches through downtown Montreal and as many as thirty-two other communities across the province in the 1970s resembled the much older European May Day celebrations with their heavy political flavour. They wove together the welter of political issues of the 1970s – the demand for self-determination for Quebec, the struggles of public-sector workers to win better terms of employment from reluctant governments, heavy-handed repression of strikers, the soaring cost of living, rising unemployment, and the need for workers’ control in a socialist society. In Joliette’s fête populaire in 1974, banners proclaimed ‘Combattons le cheap labor et l’American power’ and ‘Les bosses sont les rats.’ ‘Some waved red banners, others carried blue-and-white Quebec flags, and most wore blue jeans in a colorful and peaceful demonstration on a clear mild evening,’ the Canadian Press reported in 1977. As photographs of these

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These revived May Day parades included women’s groups and ethnic organizations, such as these in Montreal in 1977. (CSN)

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Marchers took to the streets on May Day in many Quebec communities, including Saint-Hyacinthe in 1981. (CSN)

events make clear, the sprinkling of placards and banners in parades forty years earlier had blossomed into a forest of signs, most of them mass-produced, identifying particular groups of marchers and announcing their causes. There were also union floats depicting their immediate concerns and sound trucks blasting out inspiring music. Many Montrealers leaned out their windows to cheer. ‘I’m not a member of any special group,’ a librarian told the Gazette in 1980, ‘but I come every year because it’s important for all workers to stand up together.’ In contrast to the earnest sobriety of the past, Montreal’s parades ended with officially sanctioned drinking and dancing in an east-end arena.50 If Montreal’s May Day, which wove workers’ movements into broader nationalist ideas and organizations, attracted some public attention, the reinvented Labour Day in Toronto and Hamilton, which stripped away circus elements of the 1950s and 1960s to focus more on politics, enjoyed no such success. Though politically vibrant and popular with union activ-

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Unions continued to organize recreational activities, sometimes in conjunction with parades and sometimes as alternatives. Here is one of the amateur sporting events among the textile workers of Valleyfield, Quebec, in 1948. (LAC, PA107338)

ists, the reaction of the public made it clear that the new approach did not resolve the basic tensions of workers’ festivals any better than the strategies of unionists in St Catharines, Sarnia, or London. Indeed, as a demonstration making sharp political points and drawing unionists together in solidarity, the Hamilton and Toronto parades were successful; as exercises in attracting public attention, they were more disappointing. In Toronto, for example, unionists marched in neat formations and pulled attractive floats through virtually empty streets, past sidewalks with a sprinkling of curious onlookers but hardly the thousands of spectators typical of earlier marches, which had been large community events. The trend seemed to be the same in many cities. In 1973 the president of the Windsor Teamsters’ local noted the disinterest of the wider community: ‘Most of those there to watch have husbands, wives or kids in the pa-

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rade.’51 Ultimately, the most troubling problem for parade organizers was the dwindling interest of workers themselves. Whatever the kind of parade that survived, fewer and fewer workers came to march or to watch. ‘We’ve tried everything,’ the president of Windsor’s UAW Local 200 complained back in 1973. ‘We’ve offered shirts and caps at discount prices and drinks afterward for those who show up but very few of the rank-and-file do.’ Local labour activists could offer prizes, free gifts, and other inducements, but their efforts were battling much larger social and cultural developments that, in many ways, transcended parading as a form of communication.

Missing the Message By the late twentieth century, processional culture had changed in both form and context. Sophisticated new mass media were beaming out messages once conveyed face-to-face, orally and visually, in nineteenth-century streets. Nearly all workers could read, and local newspapers and national magazines had been reaching out to a large readership since the late nineteenth century. National (and international) labour leaders had already recognized this trend by the First World War by releasing their annual Labour Day speeches through the wire services, rather than concentrating on public speech-making. After 1920, radio broadcasting increased this tendency to rely on distant, impersonal sources of information that could reach right into the Canadian home – and almost every family had a radio by the end of the 1930s. Visual images too were spread far and wide by mass, mechanical processes. Workers saw more photos in newspapers, moving images in the movie theatres, and, by the 1950s, television programming in their own homes.52 Labour Day reports had been a staple of the nineteenth century newspaper, filling many columns with detailed descriptions of floats, banners, sports and festivities. But the union-sponsored celebrations did not attract much attention from these new mass media, and never rivalled the exposure of large commercial spectacles like the Santa Claus and Grey

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Tug-of-wars were regular features of Labour Day sports programs, for both women and men. Here, the women are competing in Sudbury in the 1950s and the men in Kitchener in 1962. (AO, F1280-10-1, Box 795, file 3, 25-CS-1:45; UWL, 62-885)

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These Sudbury miners liked to show off their skills and physical prowess in horseshoe-pitching and mucking events at their Labour Day picnics in the 1950s. (AO, F1280-10-1, Box 795, file 3, 25-CS-1:59 and 1:73)

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In 1957 children’s races were popular in Port Colborne’s celebrations. (AO, F128010-1, Box B794, file 1, 25-P.C.-2:13)

Cup parades, which reached many more citizens than the spectators standing on sidewalks. In the 1930s, Eaton’s distributed films of the Santa Claus parade to over 40 movie houses in Canada, and after 1952, the CBC televised the Toronto parade nationally. Indeed, by the 1970s, Eaton’s was aiming the Santa Claus parade in Toronto at the television cameras over the heads of the half million spectators lining Yonge Street. ‘Television coverage has become as important as the event itself,’ a Toronto Star television reporter noted, ‘reaching millions more children across the country in places as far away as Prince Rupert, British Columbia and St. John’s, Newfoundland. Television’s influence is so strong, in fact, that costumes are designed for the cameras: some fabrics look better than others, some colors don’t show up at all.’53 Labour parades, on the other hand, attracted only sporadic attention

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(Globe and Mail [Toronto], 4 September 1937, 9)

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from electronic media. The CBC attached a radio broadcasting unit to follow the Montreal Labour Day parade in 1945, but the experiment was apparently never repeated. Years later, in Windsor, Channel Nine televised ‘special coverage’ of the 1982 Labour Day parade, including ‘indepth reports and interviews of the day’s events.’ These local, ad hoc efforts were exceptional, and hardly competed with the national coverage of large commercial spectacles. Even newspaper coverage became noticeably briefer than in the past, often simply hitting the highlights, describing the prize winners, or noting the oddest or most colourful float. In 1947 Toronto’s large Labour Day demonstrations didn’t even warrant a full story in the Globe and Mail, which printed a few photos of the mammoth parade but no detailed report.54 Compared to coverage in early days, when detailed reports ran many columns in fairly short newspapers, Labour Day coverage warranted barely a blip in newspapers after the war. The messages of the Labour Day parade were still communicated in the street, but parading through the city streets was losing its importance as a mode of communication for workers and many others. Soon after the turn of the century, the larger Canadian industrial cities began to sprawl outward, and lost the compact, tight-knit familiarity of the nineteenth century. Working-class neighbourhoods were no longer so concentrated and centrally located. More and more workers bought or built their homes in blue-collar suburbs on the far edges of the major cities in the early twentieth century. These trends accelerated after World War Two, when downtown populations stagnated while fringe areas exploded. By the late 1950s, large corporate builders were taking over the housing industry, sweeping massive subdivisions and rows of high rises across the outskirts of Canadian cities. Shopping malls and supermarkets began to attract business away from older central retail districts. Even workplaces noticeably decentralized, as older core industrial areas declined under the growing competition of suburban industrial parks. Many workers followed the flow outward, taking advantage of cheaper land and housing to pursue the dream of suburban living.55 Not all workers had the financial security to realize the suburban

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(Standard [St Catharines], 5 September 1961, 8)

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dream to the same degree as middle-class Canadians. Still, unions negotiated hard at the bargaining table for workers’ access to the post-war ideal of mass consumption, ceding to management the right to control the labour process in exchange for higher wages, cost-of-living adjustments, pensions, and other benefits while pressuring governments to shore up purchasing power through rudimentary social-security programs.56 In pursuing such agendas, unions tried to claim a ‘standard of living’ that included a ‘fair share’ of post-war affluence, themes that union leaders hinted at in Labour Day messages throughout the 1950s. To a degree, as well, local unionists expressed the ideal in parades. In one reference to the trend to suburbanization for workers, the Niagara Peninsula Labour Council constructed a float that depicted ‘the benefits of unionism via a graphic tableau showing a typical prosperous suburban settlement of attractive homes.’ The entry won first prize.57 While unionists celebrated these trends in their parades and claimed a share of them at the bargaining table, the wider effect made downtown main streets more remote to large numbers of workers and citizens. The trend was never simple – many Canadians, especially working families, continued to live in traditional core neighborhoods, and some parades still attracted great numbers of spectators to downtown streets – but, for more and more Canadians (including many unionized workers), living, working, and shopping occurred in the suburbs. Going downtown was a special trip and a more conscious decision than when city folk could encounter a procession close to their front door. Many workers and citizens might think twice about taking a streetcar or driving their car into the downtown area to watch a local Labour Day parade. For others, the automobile disrupted the very idea of a local parade. The expanding separation of work and home was made clear in Brantford in 1966: several members of UAW Local 707, residing in Brantford, marched in that city’s parade, but Local 707 represented workers at Ford’s Oakville assembly plant, forty-five miles away.58 Indeed, across Canada, the use of the street for driving rather than marching communicated the most powerful meaning of Labour Day in the post-war period. As new forms of transportation pushed cities out-

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(Cape Breton Post [Sydney] 7 September 1970, 10)

ward, the idea of the street itself changed. More and more, streets were seen as traffic corridors rather than rich public spaces, as places for speed and movement rather than communication. In 1946 the London Free Press pointed explicitly to the conflict between communication and circulation on main streets by introducing a new theme into its Labour Day report, the parade as traffic jam: ‘Extending over two miles in length, the colourful pageant ... attracted thousands of spectators and tied up traffic at most of the city’s main intersections for an hour.’59 The trend to car traffic had been clear even before the war. Statistics collected at Long Branch, ten miles west of Toronto, already showed almost 20,000 cars passing on Labour Day in 1926, more than double the figure from six years earlier.60 Wartime controls on both gasoline distribution and automobile production stemmed the tide somewhat, but many Canadians

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announced their preference for leisure over earnest parading by fleeing the city by car pools, bus lines, and trains during the war and immediately after. ‘Thousands of persons, for one reason and another, but chiefly for recreation, left Toronto for Niagara Falls, Detroit, Montreal and the northern sections of Ontario,’ the Globe and Mail reported. ‘Other thousands with this and that idea in mind, but mainly for recreation, left Niagara Falls, Detroit, Montreal and the northern sections of Ontario and came to Toronto.’ With the incremental dismantling of rationing and the return to a civilian economy after the war, the car increasingly swept through social classes, turning Labour Day over to auto tourism with each passing year. ‘The Labor Day week-end ended last night as record numbers of Nova Scotians crowded the Province’s highways and transportation facilities in a homeward rush after celebrating the last long week-end of the summer season,’ the Halifax Chronicle Herald commented in 1952.61 The evolution of work time reinforced the changes in urban space. For those who wanted to get out of the house on a public holiday, the spread of the forty-hour week after the Second World War and the greater mobility made possible by cars created the three-day ‘long weekend’ – with wages paid for the statutory holiday – that allowed families the time to travel farther from home, especially to simple summer homes (variously known as cottages, cabins, or camps in different parts of Canada), or to take cheap holidays in the large number of new public campgrounds. ‘To the general public,’ the Windsor Star noted of Labour Day in 1973, ‘it means a parade that many won’t bother to attend. It also means a long weekend, the last before the kids return to school, and an opportunity to go to the cottage one last time.’ As with wages and consumption, union officials were conscious of their own role in creating this new leisure regime: along with increased purchasing power, more time to enjoy it had been a key demand at the negotiating table. ‘We’ve been negotiating leisure time and people are gearing their lifestyles to it. People flee the cities on long weekends and who can blame them,’ a Windsor autoworker explained in 1977. ‘Much to their credit, a lot of labor people now have cottages which they didn’t have before,’ a retired London labour leader noted in 1989. ‘I

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think that’s nice, but sometimes I wish they would stick around and do something significant on the one day they’re recognized.’62 In fact, the place of the summertime public holiday in the annual cycles of work and leisure had changed significantly for most working people. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, each one-day holiday was an important break in the relentless routine of work for people who put in long hours on the job – typically ten hours a day and six days a week, dropping in some cases to nine per day in the period between the world wars.63 Other than the weekly Sabbath and perhaps Saturday afternoon, workers could expect no other regular period of rest through the hottest season other than Victoria Day, Dominion Day, the August civic holiday, and Labour Day – unless they were hit with unemployment or lengthy ‘down time’ at their place of work (which was less common in the summer). Before the Second World War, fixed annual vacations of two or more weeks were generally limited to white-collar workers and a small percentage of production workers.64 By the 1950s, however, more than a decade of labour agitation had brought clauses in collective agreements and provincial legislation establishing the right to two days off each week and a longer break of one or more weeks (with pay) each year, usually during July or August (when schools were also closed).65 Summer began to stretch out as a more extended time of holidaying, when the actual days in a paid workplace shrank dramatically. In this new context, Labour Day took on a special new cultural significance as a painfully clear symbolic end of summer. After that point, schoolchildren and wage earners could be expected to leave behind their slower rhythms and looser leisure habits and knuckle down to serious work. The Canadian Tourist Association recognized this change in the holiday’s status in 1951, when it tried to convince the Canadian labour movement to join its campaign to push Labour Day back to the third Monday in September so that there would be two more weeks of holidaying (and tourist spending). Like their American counterparts, they failed. Most Canadian workers would probably have agreed with the observation of columnist Harry Bruce in 1978 that ‘Labor Day is the prelude to work and the death of play ... Labor Day is a bummer.’66

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(Free Press [Winnipeg] 1 September 1952, 13)

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A Festival of Shopping In this context, Labour Day’s potential as a festival of consumption became more dramatic, and entrepreneurs and retailers accelerated its commercialization as the end of the summer holiday. Like the spread of cars and changes in work time, this trend had been clear even in the 1920s and 1930s, but as many workers moved more decisively into Canada’s (still developing) mass-consumer society after the war, and as mass consumption itself became more sophisticated and far-reaching, ads for a dizzying array of products, bargains, and sales adopted Labour Day themes. In 1948 a General Electric ad extolled the virtues of kitchen appliances under the headline ‘Make Every Day Labour-Saving Day.’67 This was a clever reworking of the labour theme, but many more ads picked up on the growing sense that ‘Labour Day weekend’ marked the end of summer. Supermarkets filled local newspapers with ads for hotdog buns, hamburger patties, condiments, and barbeque accessories, but they did not outdo other retailers, who offered sales of cameras and film, beach ware, and other summer-weekend products. Many retailers also reminded parents of the pending return to classes, advertising back-toschool specials of clothing, binders, paper, and other accessories. A surprising number of advertisements simply ignored any particular meaning of the day, whether to do with work or leisure, adopting ‘Labour Day’ as nothing more than a fill-in-the-blank name for a sale. Trade unionists of the pre-war period, accustomed to melodramatic tributes to the power and dignity of labour, would no doubt have been bemused to discover Shopper’s Drug Mart’s particular spin on the holiday, offering customers a ‘Labour Day Weekend Special’ on two-ply bathroom tissue. In 1989, workers scanning their paper in Thunder Bay for an annual recognition of their toil and sweat would find only Bargain Harold’s $1.94 Labour Day special on Mennen Speed Stick. The following year, a Zeller’s store in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, made a similar contribution to workers’ dignity by offering its Labour Day customers nude-heel pantihose for forty-seven cents.68 Since working people had never been securely rooted in post-war prosperity, they were no doubt anxious to save a few pennies on consumer

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Rather than saluting workers, General Electric played off domestic work and the Labour Day theme in this clever ad aimed at women. (Globe and Mail [Toronto], 6 September 1948, 7)

staples. For unionists eager to broadcast pride in labour to local citizens, however, the competition had long been disturbing. Back in 1961, the president of Hamilton’s labour council complained, ‘This year, several [retailers] have advertised sales,’ and urged local workers to boycott any stores that stayed open on Labour Day.69 Certainly, ads had been a common part of Labour Day for some time, though the day never took on the commercial power of Christmas or Valentine’s Day.70 For many years, however, invitations to buy had appeared alongside bosses’ efforts to honour their workers. By the mid1950s, ads for products became more common as tribute ads faded from

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Some advertisements grafted tributes to workers onto self-serving promotions for the company’s products. (Star [Windsor], 4 September 1954, 8)

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view. Initially, ads paying tribute to workers became smaller – shrinking from a full page to a half or quarter – or shifted to other concerns. In 1956, for example, a number of Ottawa companies joined together to warn drivers about traffic safety rather than to pay tribute to workers. In Winnipeg a decade later, Clark’s Discount Department store took a halfway position, ‘Honoring the Canadian Worker’ while imploring everyone to ‘Drive Carefully over the Holiday.’71 By the 1970s, advertisements that honoured labour had all but disappeared or were reduced to small ads placed sporadically, often by a single company.72 In the absence of glowing tributes to workers, it seemed that companies increasingly envisioned Labour Day as simply another excuse for shopping. To many observers, leisure and consumption seemed to be sweeping aside all the traditional Labour Day themes. ‘When it became a statutory holiday in 1894, a 10 hour day was common enough, working conditions were often dreadful and there were no fringe benefits,’ the Hamilton Spectator editorialized in 1972. ‘Technology, economic and social change and a phenomenal rise in living standards have swept old attitudes into oblivion ... As he drives his car off to the cottage, or to go fishing or whatever he wishes to do, the chances are that battles for workers’ rights are far from his thoughts. He is the beneficiary of long ago battles, hard fought and won ...’73 Other newspapers followed suit. Some newspapers continued the practice of publishing Labour Day editorials, often simply updating pre-war themes emphasizing labour’s relationship to the public good and the need for responsibility on the part of unionists. By the 1960s, public-sector workers, now joining the house of labour for the first time, were held out for particular scorn. Other editorials focused on more narrow issues, often expressing sympathy for workers displaced by automation, increasing prices, or deindustrialization, or mocking politicians for courting labour votes before elections while delivering little after. Yet, over the post-war period, fewer and fewer newspapers took Labour Day as a time to publish extended editorials about labour issues. Increasingly, editorialists shortened their remarks, skipped the day entirely, or aimed editorial comments at travellers, as though Labour Day was simply another day off. The Ottawa Citizen’s Labour Day editorial in 1947

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By the 1970s, the labour movement was worried about the number of businesses that opened on Labour Day. (Citizen [Ottawa], 1 September 1973, 22)

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Cartoonists, like editorialists, still reminded unionists of the responsibilities of power. (Globe and Mail [Toronto], 1 September 1952, 6)

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gushed at length about Canada’s ‘remarkable record of improved employee-employer relations.’ Five years later, it made sure to leave space to lecture motorists, as well as unionists, on their responsibilities: ‘With roads more crowded than usual this weekend, demands on patience, good sense and courtesy of motorists will be more exacting than ever.’74 In Winnipeg, the Free Press’s 1948 editorial dissected what it called ‘The Crisis of Labor,’ advising trade unions to learn ‘the simplest of all economic facts, that in the end it is goods, not money wages, that determine our standard of living.’ By 1956, the paper’s Labour Day thoughts had been reduced to a short editorial on the importance of time off work, observing that ‘the man who whiles away the hours of Labor Day in hedonistic idleness will not be desolated by the thought that summer ... must end, and the crisper and more energetic days of autumn lie ahead.’75 The decline of Labour Day editorials was not always smooth or complete, but the long-term trend was unmistakable. In St Catharines, the Standard spent the early 1950s exploring many of the key themes of Labour Day editorials across the country: comparing Labour Day to May Day, paying tribute to workers as the great vital force of the nation, lecturing workers on their responsibilities, and warning of traffic hazards.76 The paper often combined two or more of these concerns in a single editorial. In 1951, for instance, it grafted a warning about bad driving onto a tribute to local autoworkers: ‘Labour, skilled and unskilled, has made the motor car possible for great masses of people, but there is no conquest, either by law or by commonsense and reason, of the juggernaut of the highways.’ But, over the course of the 1950s, the Standard gradually lost interest in union and worker themes, skipping several years in the middle of the decade. Labour Day returned to the editorial page in 1959, although there was not much enthusiasm in the paper’s conclusion that ‘Labour Day now ranks as one of the most generally celebrated holidays.’ By 1964, the Standard could barely muster fifteen uninspired lines on Labour Day, before warning of hazardous driving the following year and then dropping Labour Day as an editorial subject for good by 1967.77 Other staples of pre-war interpretations of Labour Day declined by the

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In 1961 the Kitchener-Waterloo Record highlighted an outing to the beach and a backyard barbeque as typical Labour Day activities. (UWL, 61-859)

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1950s and 1960s. Religious meditation on worker themes virtually disappeared from post-war reports on Labour Day. The Social Service Council dutifully continued to issue annual Labour Sunday topics through the inter-war period, and the clergy continued to preach about labour themes through the 1930s. After the war, however, observers were beginning to notice the trend away from Labour Sunday. In 1947, the Globe and Mail commented that ‘even the churches, which at one time found the opportunity valuable, now largely disregard their obligations in the matter, less than half a dozen in the Toronto area considering it important enough to mention in their announcements.’78 As with editorials, the trend was uneven. Some clergy still preached on labour topics well into the 1960s. In 1961, for example, Ottawa Christians at various city churches were treated to Sunday sermons on ‘Labor and Love,’ ‘Slaves or Freedom?’ and ‘Labour That Has Imperishable Wages.’ In 1966 the Westminster United Church in Winnipeg featured a Labour Sunday sermon titled ‘Danger – Men and Equipment Working.’ Few other local churches joined in addressing the labour theme, however.79 Some religious figures tried to resist the decline of Labour Sunday. In St Catharines, Ben Vandezande noted that ‘Labour Day has become rather non-Christian in its focus,’ imploring local Christians to ‘get religion back into labour so that Labour Day is once more a holy day and not just the day before school starts or the last holiday of the summer.’ Such religious pleas were rare, however, and even Vandezande admitted that churches had given up commenting on the day.80 In one way, Vandezande had missed the point: even if churches began to comment on Labour Day, would anyone want to listen? After all, many labour leaders were voicing similar laments about the priorities of their own union members. More and more, Canadians simply voted with their feet, choosing cottages, sporting events, television, and barbeques over parades or earnest philosophizing. In the post-war period, Labour Day parades initially underwent a revival, but the pattern turned out to be partial, uneven, and ultimately unsuccessful. By the 1970s, they survived only in a few cities, mainly in southern Ontario, and, even then, many of them limped along as relatively weak public events, unable to attract much attention from either local publics or, more important, new commu-

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nication media. Meanwhile, some staples of pre-war and wartime philosophizing – particularly long, melodramatic editorializing, company tribute ads, and religious meditation – declined noticeably after the war. Leisure seemed the only trend with any momentum, now encouraged with increasing sophistication by commercializers. But even this trend was not simple: Labour Day was hardly just a struggle between unions or churches trying to focus attention on labour and commercializers trying to draw citizens away. Where parades were organized, trade unionists could easily go to the parade in the morning and catch a ball game in the afternoon, and, in targeting consumers on Labour Day, commercializers had bigger problems than union processions. For many Canadians, Labour Day entered its second century not as a purely commercial festival but as a chance to play with the kids in the backyard, stroll through a park, play a game of touch football, or putter in the garden. In this sense, though parade traditions rose and fell, and Labour Day lost some of its earnest, philosophizing tone, the holiday stood not far from where it had been in 1939. New technologies and attractions had replaced older ones – a television rather than a radio, a car rather than a streetcar, a suburban lawn rather than a front stoop, a major league team rather than a local one, a supermarket rather than a neighborhood grocery store, a drive on the highway rather than a walk on main street – but Labour Day remained a holiday, a chance to relax. Whether they marched, played, shopped, or relaxed and whether or not unions were on their minds, Canadians enjoyed the fruit of the long struggle for leisure time, one that animated the craftworkers’ original demand for a September holiday. As the Halifax Chronicle-Herald reminded readers in 1961, Labour Day was ‘A Hard Won Day of Rest.’81

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CONCLUSION: THE LEGACY OF LABOUR’S DAY

A festival has always been a special moment in the rhythms of a community. Normal life comes to a halt. People are released from daily routines and pressures and encouraged to join with others in their community in common celebration. What happens at that point can vary a lot. If the festive events are controlled by social forces that normally dominate that community, they can be an occasion for reaffirming relationships between the governors and the governed, the rich and the poor, the men and the women, and so on. Ruling figures, social hierarchies, and all the institutions that sustain them are given centre stage. For many years in Canada, pious religious festivals such as Thanksgiving or Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day and sombre civic rituals such as the Queen’s Birthday (or Empire Day) or Remembrance Day had that goal in mind. If the festival is less tightly controlled from the top, however, it can have quite a different impact on the community. It can become a time for escaping the normal and trying out the imagined – an opportunity to behave outrageously, to play unusual social roles, to act out new possibilities, to assert different priorities, to dream and fantasize, or, at the very least, to retreat from the constraints of daily social relationships. In pre-industrial times, many festivals erupted into colourful, earthy, theatrical celebrations, as people

(Citizen [Halifax], 30 August 1940, 1)

Conclusion

congregated in the streets to watch and participate. More recently in North America, Mardi Gras, Halloween, Caribana, and Gay Pride events have carried on some of those festive forms. Of course, breaking free from normal constraints could also involve less public rituals, especially as the close intimacy of communities gave way to larger, more impersonal cities. Getting drunk with friends, snoozing on a beach, ambling through a park, paddling across a lake, preparing a special meal, and other relatively mundane activities, on their own, were not all that exceptional, but on festival days they often meant stepping out beyond the immediate confines of home and neighbourhood and, for many, reflected small-scale fantasies of an easier, happier life.1 By the 1880s, Canada had a long history of people taking over the public spaces of towns and cities for popular festivals. In that decade, unionized craftworkers in the country took hold of the festive traditions and made up a new one. They borrowed heavily from the festive practices of their fellow Victorian Canadians – respectable processions, speech making, amateur athletics, and family picnics. Yet these forms became the vessels into which the proud craftworkers poured their ideas, values, and aspirations. They put together a festival that allowed them to leave behind the harshness and indignities of the new work world in factories and mines and to construct an image of how the world should work. Their message was unmistakably clear. Workingmen were not downtrodden drudges; they were dignified ‘knights’ of labour. Their work was crucial to the life of their community and worthy of the highest esteem – ‘Labor Omnia Vincit’ (Labour Conquers All), as their banners so often proclaimed. That respectability rested not in the individual but in the collective fraternalism of each craft. They were able to assert their identity as proud craftworkers, solid breadwinners for their families, and full citizens in a democratic, British society because of the strength they drew from their craft unions. This was certainly a festival of solidarity, though unquestionably selective – women and children, native peoples, and ethnic and racial minorities had little place here. This message received symbolic form in the artistry of their celebrations – richly decorated banners, intricate badges, elaborate costumes, fascinating ‘allegorical’

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floats of men at work, and even the overall organization of the processions themselves. The ‘fun’ organized for mass participation after the parades also had implicit messages: it was participatory and convivial among union ‘brothers,’ family members, and neighbours, but, as much as possible, it was also earnestly educational, sober, and thus respectable. On the first Monday in September, then, Victorian craftworkers used the streets and parks of Canadian towns and cities as a large stage on which to act out their view of how the evolving industrial-capitalist society should work. They did not present a wildly fanciful carnival, but a more orderly, rational vision of social justice. They were trying to assert their own sense of order in a society that was changing rapidly and chaotically. Labour Day gave them the space to make their case, especially once they convinced the federal government to create a legal public holiday. Now, as the wheels of all commerce and industry stopped, they had the time for a mighty festival. The burden of this book has been to show that, even as the craftworkers’ festive project blossomed, it was moving in directions that those labour pioneers might never have expected or approved of. Sustaining a festival was often beyond the means of a craft-union movement hammered by the strike-breaking, union-busting, and skill-diluting of the Second Industrial Revolution after the turn of the century. At the same time, others in society took hold of Labour Day for their own purposes – political, civic, religious, commercial, and what have you – and remade the public holiday in many ways. The great majority of workers eventually voted with their feet for less earnest celebrations that allowed them to relax in more privatized ways. Those choices were reinforced by large structural changes – much bigger cities with growing suburban populations, sophisticated new mass media, and a rapid commercialization of more and more areas of social life – all of which made the nineteenth-century form of street spectacle a far less compelling medium for communicating ideas and dreams. These processes seem to invite metaphors of decline and decay. But that would be misleading and too simple. As we pointed out in preceding chapters, the pattern was not one of linear decline but rather of periodic

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Conclusion

Over the course of the twentieth century, when people took to the streets, they presented different images of themselves and what they stood for. Labour Day parades once highlighted formal respectability, male craftsmanship, and military-like order, as in the case of Edmonton cigarmakers in 1906 and Toronto’s elevator constructors in 1933. (EA-274-02; CTA, Globe and Mail 31059)

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Conclusion

Over time, the form and content of the parade changed. By 1951, when textile workers appeared in Valleyfield, Quebec, women had joined men in the street (with Madeleine Parent in the lead). Marchers wore no special outfits but still turned out in their best clothes. In 1971, Kitchener’s rubber workers dressed much more casually, and everywhere, official union regalia was more often a T-shirt or baseball cap than a badge or sash. (LAC, PA121639; UWL, 74-1059)

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revival and reinvention. Craftworkers may have been losing ground, but other groups of workers turned to new kinds of unions in the twentieth century and often looked again at how they could use a workers’ festival for their new purposes. There were several forms. In some of the bigger cities with long parading traditions, they held onto the basic elements of the day as best they could. In many other cases, labour leaders just turned over the main events to other community leaders and let the day become a more diffuse celebration of civic pride, which might be highly commercialized and in which labour might or might not participate. In many parts of the country, especially western Canada, working-class radicals were disgusted at such compromises and shifted their celebrations to a springtime May Day, which flourished until the Cold War squeezed the life out of it. In others, revived and reinvented Labour Days grafted some of the spirit of protest onto the remnants of the craftsmen’s spectacle and the new elements of commercialism. The results were certainly varied. It would not be helpful to see these developments as the purity of the Labour Day pioneers eroding into decadence. As we have shown, the first workers’ festivals in Canada were not pristine cultural creations; they were constructed to a great extent out of the familiar materials of Victorian respectability, with all the accompanying possibilities and limitations. At different points in the twentieth century, new groups of workers turned to new cultural forms to help capture public attention for their festival. If that meant slipping off the cloak of Victorian conventionality and finding a place for clowns, cowboys, and beauty queens, they would rise to the occasion. These changing outer forms should not lead us to overlook some fundamental continuities from the days of the craftsmen’s spectacle. On this day when all work stopped, a large number of working people still wanted their fellow citizens to appreciate the value of their labour, their essential dignity and respectability, the centrality of union solidarity, and their commitment to an ideal of social justice. Now they often gave these old messages an angrier, blunter, more political edge and made their festival one of both celebration and protest. Their willingness at the same time to weave the fanciful and frivolous into their celebra-

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tions need not be seen as a rejection of those traditions; it could also be read as a new part of the working-class vision – one that insisted on a place for humour and fantasy in a society driven by the frenzied pace of wage labour. The dilemma for working-class organizers was far less how to express themselves culturally than how to hold public interest. If they still had the resources and determination to arrange a workers’ festival, their project had become only one of many that jostled for attention on the public holiday each September – from celebrations of male athletic prowess to mass participation in Hollywood escapism, to special family renovation projects in the home, and weekend-long excursions to the recreational hinterland. Most important was the deeply held belief in working-class and most other neighbourhoods that simply relaxing selfindulgently far from any reminders of the paid workplace on this day away from the intensity of the job was the most effective form of celebration. Forgetting work was more important than using precious weekend time to focus on it. This attitude was part of a broad cultural trend, best encapsulated in many beer commercials and in the phrase ‘Thank God It’s Friday,’ which envisioned leisure fun as the compensation for work pain. The real victim was not a particular form of holiday in early September but rather the notion of a public realm that could draw people out of their private spheres. On the hundredth anniversary of the first legalized Labour Day, the London Free Press published prominent articles on the state of unions, middle managers, the slumping standard of living, and unemployment, but on the streets ‘labour’ had no profile to compare with that of 1894. The few hundred unionists who gathered in Thames Park for a barbeque and games were more interested in having fun together than in making a public display. The Labour Council president had assured the Free Press that ‘we won’t be getting up and making speeches.’ Their picnic fit the general pattern of seeking out quieter pleasures. Many were commercialized activities – shopping for furniture in Patton Place’s ‘Holiday Sale,’ fixing the backyard fence with materials from Beaver Lumber’s ‘Inventory Clearance,’ munching popcorn while watching Tom Hanks in Forest

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Gump, or heading off to Hamilton to see the Argos beat the Tiger-Cats in their annual Canadian Football League ‘Labour Day Classic.’2 Of course, London’s working people could also have travelled to Sarnia, Hamilton, or Toronto to see large parades, where unionists continued to put on a festival with a public face. There were fewer of these events than in the past, and they caught the local imagination much less than their turn-of-the-century predecessors. But they revealed how important it has been to many Canadian workers to remind their fellow citizens that this was not just another day off work. They still have a message to deliver.

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Labour Day, Toronto, 1999. (CH)

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ABBREVIATIONS

ANQ-O AO CB CEA CH CSN CTA CVanA CVicA ET GA HPL IWA LAC LC LUA MULSP MUN NBM

Archives nationales du Québec, Centre d’archives de l’Outaouis (Hull) Archives of Ontario (Toronto) Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge Collection (Toronto) City of Edmonton Archives Craig Heron Collection (Toronto) Conféderation des syndicats nationaux (Montreal) City of Toronto Archives City of Vancouver Archives City of Victoria Archives Ed Thomas Collection (Hamilton) Glenbow Archives (Calgary) Hamilton Public Library, Special Collections Industrial, Wood, and Allied Workers of Canada, Local 1-80 (Duncan, B.C.) Library and Archives of Canada (Ottawa) Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.) Lakehead University Archives (Thunder Bay, Ont.) McMaster University, Labour Studies Program (Hamilton) Memorial University of Newfoundland, Centre for Newfoundland Studies Archives (St. John’s) New Brunswick Museum (Saint John)

Abbreviations

PAA PAM PANB PANL PANS RHM TRL UBC UTL UWL UWO

VPL WAHC WCPI YUA

Provincial Archives of Alberta (Edmonton) Provincial Archives of Manitoba (Winnipeg) Provincial Archives of New Brunswick (Fredericton) Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador (St. John’s) Public Archives of Nova Scotia (Halifax) Rossland Historical Museum (Rossland, B.C.) Toronto Reference Library, Baldwin Room University of British Columbia Library, Special Collections and University Archives Division (Vancouver) University of Toronto Library, Rare Books and Special Collections, Kenny Collection University of Waterloo Library, Special Collections University of Western Ontario, D.B. Weldon Library, London Free Press, Collection of Photographic Negatives (London, Ont) Vancouver Public Library, Special Collections Workers’ Arts and Heritage Centre (Hamilton) Western Canada Pictorial Index (Winnipeg) York University Archives (Toronto)

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NOTES

Introduction 1 Advertiser (London), 4 September 1894, 1. 2 Ibid., 6. See also Free Press (London), 4 September 1894, 7. 3 Quoted in Bryan D. Palmer, A Culture in Conflict: Skilled Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Hamilton, Ontario, 1860–1914 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1979), 141. In 1997 the authors of this book undertook to find the ephemeral artifacts of workers’ festivals for an exhibition at the Ontario Workers’ Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton (‘As We Go Marching, Marching: Canadian Workers on Parade’). We found surprisingly little in Ontario’s union offices, and often what survived was poorly stored and in danger of imminent destruction. 1 Holy Days, Holidays, and Labour Days 1 Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700–1850 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press 1973), 15–33; J.A.R. Pimlott, The Englishman’s Christmas: A Social History (Hassocks, U.K.: Harvester Press 1978), 1–48; Herbert Halpert and G.M. Story, eds., Christmas Mumming in Newfoundland: Essays in Anthropology, Folklore, and History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1969); Caroline Carver, Canadian Christmas Book: A Handsel from Our Victorian Past (Montreal: Tundra Books 1975);

Notes to pages 4–7

Jean Provencher, Les quatres saisons dans la vallée du Saint-Laurent (Montreal: Boréal 1988), 62–80, 348–63, 449–81; Allan Greer, The Patriots and the People: The Rebellion of 1837 in Rural Lower Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993), 107–13; Bonnie Huskins, ‘From Haute cuisine to Ox Roasts: Public Feasting and the Negotiation of Class in MidNineteenth-Century Saint John and Halifax,’ Labour/Le Travail 37 (spring 1996), 9–36; Susan G. Davis, ‘“Making Night Hideous”: Christmas Revelry and Public Order in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia,’ American Quarterly 34, no.2 (summer 1982), 185–199; Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 1995), 19–23. 2 Although celebrated regularly in the late nineteenth century, neither of these holidays had secure legal status throughout the period. Typically, local town councils were left to proclaim holidays each year. As a result of Nova Scotia’s reservations about the whole Confederation project, Dominion Day was not made a national celebration until 1879. The ‘Queen’s Birthday’ was not formally transformed into the permanent Victoria Day holiday until after Queen Victoria’s death in 1901. Nancy B. Bouchier, ‘“The 24th of May is the Queen’s Birthday”: Civic Holidays and the Rise of Amateurism in Nineteenth-Century Towns,’ International Review of the History of Sport 10, no.2 (August 1993), 164–6, 185. See also James Ernest Murton, ‘Public Celebrations and Public Meaning: The Queen’s Birthday in Victoria, 1859–1901’ (Extended Research Paper, Department of History, University of Victoria 1995). On 4 July in the United States, see Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press 1983), 65–90. 3 The figures for London are based on a survey of the London Advertiser and Free Press for 1894. Other historians have found similar figures for other cities in different years. Residents of Toronto, for example, were treated to twenty-two street demonstrations in 1855; Hamiltonians enjoyed thirty-four in 1872. See Peter G. Goheen, ‘Symbols in the Streets: Parades in Victorian Urban Canada,’ Urban History Review 18, no.3 (February 1990), 134, and ‘The Ritual of the Streets in Mid-19th-Century Toronto,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11 (1993), 139. 4 Peter G. Goheen, ‘Symbols in the Streets’; ‘Ritual of the Streets’; ‘Parading: A Lively Tradition in Early Victorian Toronto,’ in Alan Baker and Gideon Biger, eds., Ideology and Landscape in Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press 1992), 330–51; and ‘Negotiating Access to Public Space in Mid-Nineteenth Century Toronto,’ Journal of Historical Geography 20, no.4 (1994), 430–49; Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nine-

284

Notes to page 7

teenth-Century Philadelphia (Berkeley: University of California Press 1986); Mary Ryan, ‘The American Parade: Representations of the NineteenthCentury Social Order,’ in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press 1989),131–53; Bonnie Huskins, ‘Public Celebrations in Victorian Saint John and Halifax’ (PhD Thesis, Dalhousie University 1990); J.M.S. Careless, ‘The First Hurrah: Toronto’s Semi-Centennial of 1884,’ in Victor L. Russell, ed., Forging a Consensus: Historical Essays on Toronto (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1984),141–54; Michael Cottrell, ‘St. Patrick’s Day Parades in Nineteenth-Century Toronto: A Study in Immigrant Adjustment and Elite Control,’ Histoire Sociale/Social History 49 (May 1992), 57–73; Cecil J. Houston and William J. Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore: A Historical Geography of the Orange Order in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1980), 122–4; Gregory S. Kealey, Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism, 1867–1892 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1980), 115–23; Remi Tourangeau, Fêtes et spectacles du Québec: Région du Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean (Quebec: Nuit Blanche Editeur 1993); Palmer, Culture in Conflict, 152; Earl Chapin May, The Circus from Rome to Ringling (New York: Dover Publications 1963); Doug A. Mishler, ‘“It Was Everything Else We Knew Wasn’t”: The Circus and American Culture,’ in Ray B. Browne and Michael T. Marsden, eds., The Cultures of Celebrations (Bowling Green, Oh:o: Bowling Green State University Popular Press 1994), 127–44. 5 Goheen, ‘Ritual,’ 127; ‘Symbols,’ 238. Where urban mental maps contained some important psychic division – ethnicity, religion, and so on – routes could be chosen to bring the parts together, or carefully mapped to keep the groups apart. In Ottawa, Sapper’s Bridge, which united Protestant Upper Town with Catholic Lower Town, was an important destination for parades. In many cities, on the other hand, Catholics and Protestants conspicuously avoided each other’s neighbourhoods to prevent sectarian strife. Whether marching on or avoiding the central streets, parade organizers acknowledged their cultural importance. 6 Many historians have pointed out that the street was a basic part of the nineteenth century ‘public sphere,’ a place where citizens assembled to construct and effect public opinion. The concept of the public sphere was analysed by Jurgen Habermas. See especially Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1991), and Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1991). There is a growing international literature on the uses of public space and the streets. In addition to works cited in n.2, see Peter C. Baldwin, Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850–1930

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Notes to page 8

(Columbus: Ohio State University Press 1999); Tamara Myers, Kate Boyer, Mary Anne Poutanen, and Steven Watt, eds., Power, Place and Identity: Historical Studies of Social and Legal Regulation in Quebec (Montreal: Montreal History Group 1998); Laura Swartzbaugh, ‘Public/Private Geographies: Constructing Order in Chicago’s City Streets, 1893–1922’ (PhD Thesis, University of Minnesota 1997); Mary Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press 1997); Andrew Brown-May, ‘“The Itinerary of Our Days”: The Historical Experience of the Street in Melbourne, 1837–1923’ (PhD Thesis, University of Melbourne 1994); James Winter, London’s Teeming Streets, 1830–1914 (London: Routledge 1993); David Scobey, ‘The Anatomy of the Promenade: The Politics of Bourgeois Sociability in Nineteenth Century New York,’ Social History 17, no.2 (1992), 203–27. Many insights into the nature of Victorian urban culture can be found in Keith Walden, Becoming Modern in Toronto: The Industrial Exhibition and the Shaping of Late Victorian Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1997). 7 The change in physical and psychic construction of urban space in Victorian Canada is a complex question. In the 1970s and early 1980s, much useful work was devoted to the physical side of this phenomenon, focusing especially on the construction of urban services like sewers, utilities, and roads and on initial attempts to exploit new transportation technologies like radial streetcars. Often building on these studies, more recent scholarship has turned more dramatically to the question of the cultural meanings of new city spaces. See Peter Goheen, Victorian Toronto: The Pattern and Process of Growth (Chicago: Department of Geography, University of Chicago 1970); Paul Rutherford, Saving the Canadian City: The First Phase, 1880–1920 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1974); Carolyn Strange, Toronto’s Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1995); Kay Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1991); Robert McDonald, Making Vancouver: Class, Status and Social Boundaries, 1863–1913 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 1996); Walden, Becoming Modern in Toronto. The process can also be traced in several useful local histories. See especially the various essays in Gilbert Stelter and Alan Artibise, eds., The Canadian City: Essays in Urban and Social History (Ottawa: Carleton University Press 1984); John Taylor, Ottawa: An Illustrated History (Toronto: Lorimer 1986); Patricia Roy, Vancouver: An Illustrated History (Toronto: Lorimer 1980); John Weaver, Hamilton: An Illustrated History (Toronto: Lorimer 1982); John Jackson and

286

Notes to pages 8–11

8 9 10

11

12

13 14

Sheila Wilson, St. Catharines: Canada’s Canal City (St. Catharines, Ont.: St Catharines Standard 1992); Alan Artibise, Winnipeg: An Illustrated History (Toronto: Lorimer 1977); M.J. Dear, J.J. Drake, and L.G. Reeds, Steel City: Hamilton and Region (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1987); Frederick H. Armstrong, The Forest City: An Illustrated History of London, Canada ([Northridge, Calif.]: Windsor Publications 1986); Leo Johnson, History of Guelph 1827–1927 (Guelph, Ont.: Guelph Historical Society 1977). Mercury (Guelph), 12 July 1881, 1; Citizen (Ottawa), 15 July 1871, 3. Citizen (Ottawa), 14 July 1872, 3. A classic work on respectability is Peter Bailey, ‘Will the Real Bill Banks Stand Up? Towards a Role Analysis of Mid-Victorian Working Class Respectability,’ Journal of Social History 12, no.3 (1979), 336–53. For Canada, see especially Magda Fahrni, ‘“Ruffled” Mistresses and “Discontented” Maids: Respectability and the Case of Domestic Service, 1880–1914,’ Labour/Le Travail 39 (Spring 1997), 69–97; Robert McDonald, Making Vancouver, 24; Kate Boyer, ‘Re-working Respectability: The Feminisation of Clerical Work and the Politics of Public Virtue in Early Twentieth-Century Montreal,’ in Myers, Power Place and Identity, 151–68; Judith Fingard, ‘Race and Respectability in Victorian Halifax,’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 20, no.2 (May 1992), 169–95. The classic work on the relationship between British imperialism and Canadian identity in this period is Carl Berger, A Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970). See also Greg Marquis, ‘Commemorating the Loyalists in the Loyalist City: Saint John, New Brunswick, 1883–1934,’ Urban History Review 33, no.1 (fall 2004), 24–33. Spectator (Hamilton), 15 August 1892, 1. In a letter to the editor three days later, one Hamilton citizen was even more critical: ‘I trust that, whether legally or otherwise, no procession will ever again be permitted to use the streets of this city unless headed by the Union Jack ... Whether they want to or not, and whether the flag is disgraced by being borne by unworthy hands or not, all those coming under the protection of our laws must respect the sentiment and nationality of the country, and must show that respect by carrying aloft that flag ... or in some suitable way.’ Spectator (Hamilton), 18 August 1892, 1. On these celebrations, see Goheen, ‘Symbols,’ 237–43; Johnson, History of Guelph, 261; Huskins, ‘Public Celebrations,’ chapter 5. Goheen, ‘Symbols,’ 238. On the organization of processions by committee, and the order of marching, see also Huskins, ‘Public Celebrations,’ 190–4; Goheen, ‘Ritual,’ 133–5. In Strathroy, the mayor was petitioned by local

287

Notes to pages 11–16

15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24

25

26 27

citizens to hold a public meeting to organize a grand civic celebration for Dominion Day. Eventually, H.E. Ketchum, an agricultural-implement manufacturer, was appointed to coordinate activities. Age (Strathroy, Ontario), 1 June 1877, 5; 24 May 1878, 5. Globe (Toronto), 3 July 1876, 4. Foresters marches on Dominion Day were especially common in Toronto and London but noticeable in other cities as well. See, for example, Advertiser (London ), 2 July 1875, 1; 2 July 1879, 1; 3 July 1882, 4; Spectator (Hamilton), 2 July 1875, 3 July 1876; Globe (Toronto), 3 July 1877, 1; 2 July 1879, 4; Mercury and Advertiser (Guelph), 2 July 1878, 1. Mercury and Advertiser (Guelph), 25 May 1882, 1. See, for example, British Whig (Kingston), 3 July 1873, 2. On this point, see especially Davis, Parades and Power. Globe (Toronto), 2 July 1873, 1; Citizen (Ottawa), 18 March 1871, 2. Goheen, ‘Negotiating Access,’ 440; Citizen (Ottawa), 30 January 1874, 1; Advertiser (London), 27 June 1894, 2. Kealey, ‘Orange Order’; Citizen (Ottawa), 14 July 1884, 3. In North America, a classic and useful work on charivaris and other rowdy traditions is Bryan Palmer, ‘Discordant Music: Charivaris and Whitecapping in Nineteenth Century North America,’ Labour/Le Travailleur 3 (1978), 5– 62. Palmer dates the final decline and disappearance to the 1890s, although he points out that some local traditions of charivari seemed to exist after this time. Palmer, ‘Discordant Music’; Huskins, ‘Public Celebrations.’ Age (Strathroy), 5 July 1878, 5; Citizen (Ottawa), 2 July 1885, 4; Globe (Toronto), 25 May 1878, 8 (report on Hamilton); Age (Strathroy), 1 June 1877, 1 (report on May 24); Bouchier, ‘24th of May,’ 166–7. In June 1872, the Ottawa Citizen reported that ‘Cole’s Circus entered the city this morning in gorgeous array, and paraded the principle streets with music, banners, knights, ladies and cages of wild animals ...’ Later that year, the paper described the arrival of O’Brien’s Circus in the city: ‘This immense consolidated circus entered the city yesterday with 40 cages containing wild animals, drawn by 140 dapple-gray horses, many of them of great beauty. As the long procession, headed by its splendid band, wound its way through the streets, it was followed by admiring crowds. The elephants were, of course, great objects of attraction.’ Citizen (Ottawa) 14 June 1872, 4; 10 August 1872, 4. Leslie Bella, The Christmas Imperative: Family, Leisure, and Women’s Work, (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing 1992). ‘The greatest decorum and regularity’ is from a Spectator (Hamilton), 1 August 1851 report on an Emancipation Day march by African-Canadians,

288

Notes to pages 16–18

28 29

30

31 32 33 34 35

36

37

cited in Paul Sousa, ‘Orderly Manners: Nineteenth Century Street Processions in Hamilton,’ unpublished paper, McMaster University 1993, 12. A Welland, Ontario march on the ‘Glorious Twelfth’ in 1876 was ‘extremely handsome’ and ‘presented an exceedingly fine and interesting spectacle.’ Tribune (Welland), 13 July 1876, 3. A Glorious Twelfth parade in Toronto had the ‘careful and patient drill.’ Globe (Toronto), 13 July 1889, 5. The ‘uniform and dressy’ phrase is from a Kingston Dominion Day report in the British Whig (Kingston), 3 July 1873. Toronto’s Irish Catholics ‘presented a quite creditable appearance’ when they paraded the main streets of Toronto in 1870. Globe (Toronto), 18 March 1870, 3. Costumes that were ‘tastefully got up’ comes from a Foresters march, Dominion Day, Toronto, 1877. Globe (Toronto), 3 July 1877, 1. Globe (Toronto), 2 July 1881, 4, reporting on Norwich, Ontario. On Victorian newspapers, see Paul Rutherford, A Victorian Authority: The Daily Press in Late 19th Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1982). Election crowds were an exception to the widespread practice of saluting the respectability of almost all parades. Reports about election parades were coloured by highly partisan reporting. Compare Advertiser (London), 27 June 1894, 5, and Free Press (London), 27 June 1894, 3. The literature on separate-spheres ideology is vast. In Canada, good starting points are Suzanne Morton and Janet Guildford, eds., Separate Spheres: Women’s Work in the 19th-Century Maritimes (Fredericton: Acadiensis Press 1994), and the two volumes of Alison Prentice and Susan Mann Trofimenkoff, The Neglected Majority: Essays in Canadian Women’s History (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1977, 1985). Huskins, ‘Public Celebrations,’ 153–4; Jan Noel, Canada Dry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1994). Huskins, ‘Ceremonial Space,’ 154. McDonald, Making Vancouver, 33–4. See also Huskins, ‘Ceremonial Space,’ 153. Huskins, ‘Ceremonial Space,’ 151. Globe, 13 July 1889, 5. In London, the Advertiser congratulated women for walking parts of a parade route where ‘it was impossible to ride,’ making it clear how exceptional the practice was. Advertiser (London), 13 July 1874. Young girls occasionally marched with boys in parades. Citizen (Ottawa), 2 July 1890; Huskins, ‘Ceremonial Space,’ 148; Globe (Toronto), 13 July 1882. On the importance of women spectators in another context, see Colin Howell, Northern Sandlots: A Social History of Maritime Baseball (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1995), 76–7. Paul Sousa notes that African-Canadians in Hamilton marched to celebrate

289

Notes to pages 18–22

38

39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Emancipation Day almost every year from 1847 to 1859, but then only twice in the 1860s, with the last march occurring in 1864. Sousa, ‘Orderly Manners,’ appendix 1. Peter Goheen notes that, by 1855, Emancipation Day parades had disappeared in Toronto. Goheen, ‘Ritual of the Streets,’ 130. Colin McFarquar, however, indicates that these celebrations continued past the turn of the century in some Ontario cities. See ‘Difference of Perspective,’ 147–60. For a discussion of African-American participation in parades in an earlier period, see Shane White, ‘“It Was a Proud Day”: African Americans, Festivals, and Parades in the North, 1741–1834,’ Journal of American History 80, no.1 (June 1994), 13–50. According to Peter Goheen, members of the ‘Colored Societies,’ native Canadians, and some fraternal organizations (which typically had humble memberships) were placed at the front of the parade – ‘as remote in space and status from the Prince as possible’ – to welcome the Prince of Wales to Toronto in 1860. Goheen, ‘Ritual,’ 133. In other cases, African Canadians were given slightly better positions but apparently were never honored with the lead. See Huskins, ‘Public Celebrations,’ 181–3. Quite often, reports noted the presence of other races as unanticipated exceptions. One Globe correspondent pointed with surprise to a single ‘aged colored gentleman’ in Toronto’s Glorious Twelfth festivities. Globe (Toronto), 13 July 1889. Huskins, ‘Public Celebrations,’ 196. ‘Negro minstrels’ (travelling musicians) might also parade the streets to advertise their performances. Citizen (Ottawa), 20 October 1875, 4. Sousa, ‘Orderly Manners,’ 12–14. Huskins, ‘Public Celebrations,’ 182, 184. Globe (Toronto), 2 July 1875, 4. Murton, ‘Public Celebrations and Public Meaning,’ 53. Citizen (Ottawa), 2 July 1886. Advertiser (London), 22 August 1893. Huskins, ‘Public Celebrations,’ 197–202. Ibid., 176–217; Eugene Forsey, Trade Unions in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1982), 10–13, 311; Palmer, Culture in Conflict, 56–7. Jacques Rouillard, Histoire du syndicalisme québécois: des origines à nos jours (Montreal: Boréal 1989), 25–6. Globe (Toronto),16 April 1872, 1; Mail, 16 April 1872, 4; Palmer, Culture in Conflict, 141–2; John Battye, ‘The Nine-Hour Pioneers: The Genesis of the Canadian Labour Movement,’ Labour/Le Travailleur 4 (1979), 25–56. Strike parades could be small. In 1870 the editor of the Goderich, Ontario, Signal reported on ‘a strange procession of some 30 men marching down West Street: it was a strike of the Coopers. It seems they want an advance of one

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Notes to pages 22–7

50 51

52

53

54

55

cent on each square headed barrel made and two cents on the round heads.’ Signal, 30 June 1870, 2, cited in Andrew Holman, ‘Aspects of Middle Class Formation in Victorian Ontario Towns, 1850–1891’ (PhD Thesis, York University 1994). Citizen (Ottawa), 21 January 1874, 4; 23 December 1874, 4. See, for example, Ruth Bleasdale, ‘Class Conflict on the Canals of Upper Canada in the 1840s,’ Labour/Le Travail 7 (spring 1981), 9–39; Scott W. See, Riots in New Brunswick: Orange Nativism and Social Violence in the 1840s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993); Judith Fingard, Jack in Port: Sailor Towns of Eastern Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1982), 126–7. Debi Wells, ‘“The Hardest Lines of the Sternest School”: Working-Class Ottawa in the Depression of the 1870s’ (MA Thesis, Carleton University 1982), 87–106; Peter Baskerville and Eric Sager, Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late Victorian Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 30–6. For an example of more spontaneous crowd actions by workers, see Palmer, Culture in Conflict, 143. On angrier marches and their use in the twentieth century, see chapter 5. On the Salvation Army in Canada, see Lynn Marks, ‘The Knights of Labor and Salvation Army: Religion and Working Class Culture in Ontario, 1882– 1890,’ Labour/Le Travail 28 (fall 1991), 89–128; Marks, ‘Religion, Leisure and Working Class Identity,’ in Paul Craven, Labouring Lives: Work and Workers in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1995), 303; Marks, Revivals and Roller Rinks: Religion, Leisure, and Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Small-Town Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), 140–5. For one example of a positive report of an Army march, see Mercury and Advertiser (Guelph), 25 May 1887, 4. Mercury and Advertiser (Guelph), 25 May 1887, 1; 2 July 1891, 1; Globe (Toronto), 2 July 1881, 4; Reporter (Galt), 29 May 1885, 4; 5 July 1889, 4; Globe (Saint John), 2 October 1883, 1, 2; Huskins, ‘Public Celebrations,’ 203–7; Johnson, History of Guelph, 241. Various trades joined employers, schoolchildren, and the local field battery in a Dominion Day procession in Port Colborne in 1876. Tribune (Welland), 7 July 1876, 3. In Strathroy, civic leaders, military bands, and a cavalry brigade led off a Dominion Day march, followed by various local trades. ‘Some wagons contained exhibits of goods, some simply painted signs, some displayed goods in the actual process of manufacture,’ the Age reported. No union content was reported. Age (Strathroy), 5 July 1878, 5. In this case, the parade organizer, local manufacturer H.E. Ketchem, in his speech to the first organizational meeting for the celebration, had called on local tradesmen to

291

Notes to pages 29–32

56

57 58

59 60

61 62 63

participate. Highlighting workers’ importance to community boosterism, he declared: ‘Let every tradesman be fully represented at this coming event in such a manner as will give credit to himself and the Town.’ Age (Strathroy), 31 May 1878, 5. For butchers on horseback in civic celebrations: Globe (Toronto), 2 July 1890, 1. For trades appearing in other civic celebrations, see Reporter (Galt), 29 May 1885, 4 (Queen’s Birthday); 5 July 1889, 4 (Dominion Day); Globe (Toronto), 3 July 1876, 4 (Dominion Day in Port Colborne, Ontario); Mercury and Advertiser (Guelph), 2 July 1891, 1. See especially Gregory Kealey, ‘The Orange Order in Toronto: Religious Riot and the Working Class,’ in Gregory S. Kealey and Peter Warrian, eds., Essays in Canadian Working Class History (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1976), 13–34. The infrequency of parades for less dramatic reasons has, understandably, drawn much less attention, yet some parading traditions were quite uneven. Peter Goheen provides a short discussion of the ‘fragility’ of some parading traditions in Toronto. See his ‘Ritual of the Streets,’ 132–3. ‘Passed off very quietly’ quotation is from Globe (Toronto) report on Malton, 2 July 1882. Globe (Toronto), 25 May 1878, 8 E.P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,’ in Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press 1993), 352–403; Alun Howkins, ‘The Taming of Witsun: The Changing Face of a Nineteenth-Century Rural Holiday,’ in Eileen and Stephen Yeo, eds., Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590–1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure (Brighton, U.K.: Harvester Press 1981), 187– 208; Douglas A. Reid, ‘The Decline of Saint Monday, 1766–1876,’ Past and Present 71 (1976), 76–101; John R. Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1996). Bouchier, ‘24th of May,’ 180–1; Globe (Toronto), 26 May 1879, 4; 25 May 1881, 4. Walden, Becoming Modern; Donald G. Wetherell with Irene Kmet, Useful Pleasures: The Shaping of Leisure in Alberta, 1896–1945 (Regina: Great Plains Research Centre 1990); Colin Howell, Blood, Sweat and Cheers: Sport and the Making of Modern Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2001), 18. Globe (Toronto), 2 July 1871. Bouchier, ‘24th of May,’ 181–2. The law was passed in June 1894. At the time, there were only three other secular statutory holidays: New Year’s Day, Victoria Day, and Dominion Day. Canada, House of Commons, Debates, 1894, vol.1, 2410; vol.2, 4594; Canada,

292

Notes to pages 33–4

64

65

66

67

68

Statutes, 1894, 57–8 Vic., c.55. Many later newspaper reports claimed that the country’s leading Tory workingman and former leader of the Knights of Labor in the United States, A.W. Wright, was responsible for convincing Prime Minister Thompson to make this concession to labour; see, for example, Free Press (Winnipeg), 30 August 1947, 1; Free Press (London), 4 September 1976, 24. Globe (Toronto), 12 April 1894, 1; 18 August 1894, 16. At the 1894 convention of the Trades and Labor Congress, the executive committee noted that ‘while the usual promises ... have resulted in the consummation of the establishment of a Dominion Labor Day, still we have to record again a general disregard to our requests.’ Evening Star (Toronto), 4 September 1894, 1. Gregory S. Kealey, ed., Canada Investigates Industrialism: The Royal Commission on the Relations of Labor and Capital, 1889 (Abridged) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1973), 15, 36, 54; Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. 2: From the Founding of the A.F. of L. to the Emergence of American Imperialism (New York: International Publishers 1955), 261–78; Ramsay Cook, ‘Tillers and Toilers: The Rise and Fall of Populism in Canada in the 1890s,’ Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers, 1984, 1–20. Before 1894, it appears that unionists approached employers about shutting down for the day and petitioned the mayor for a public holiday. Trades Journal (Stellarton), 13 September 1882, 2; Globe (Toronto), 24 July 1882, 6; 4 August 1883, 2; Herald (Halifax), 3 August 1888, 3; 9 July 1892, 3; Acadian Recorder (Halifax), 23 July 1889, 3; 18 July 1890, 3; Morning Chronicle (Halifax), 20 July 1891, 1; Advertiser (London), 6 September 1892, 5; Spectator (Hamilton), 4 August 1883, 1; Palladium of Labor (Hamilton), 11 August 1883, 1, 6; 18 August 1883; Journal (Ottawa), 30 August 1890, 6; Gazette (Montreal), 7 September 1886, 3; 3 September 1889, 5; Palmer, Culture in Conflict:, 57; Forsey, Trade Unions in Canada, 1812–1902, 293–9, 302, 311–12, 315, 317–18, 320, 324–5, 330–1, 335, 339. See Trades Journal (Springhill/Stellarton), 17 August 1881, 3; 14 September 1881, 2; 13 September 1882, 2; 5 September 1883, 2; 12 September 1883, 2; 24 September 1884, 2; 19 August 1885, 2; 2 September 1885, 2; 5 September 1888, 2; 18 September 1889, 2; 18 September 1889, 3; Herald (Halifax), 13 August 1906, 1–2. Initially, the celebration was held on the actual anniversary of the union’s founding in September, but in the early 1900s the PWA Grand Council fixed the date for celebration as the second Saturday in August. Jonathan Grossman, ‘Who Is the Father of Labor Day?’ Labor History 14, no.4 (fall 1973), 612–23.

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Notes to pages 35–8

69 Globe (Toronto), 24 July 1882, 6. 70 Michael Kazin and Steven J. Ross, ‘America’s Labor Day: The Dilemma of a Workers’ Celebration,’ Journal of American History 78, no.4 (March 1992), 1294–1323. 71 Free Press (London), 10 July 1886, 3; Acadian Recorder (Halifax), 30 July 1888, 4; 23 July 1889, 3; 16 July 1890, 3; 23 July 1891, 2. 72 Gary Cross, A Quest for Time: The Reduction of Work in Britain and France, 1840–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press 1989), 9–12. 73 In New Zealand and Australia, the celebration was known as Eight-Hour Day in honour of victories in shortening the working day. Roth, ‘Labour Day in New Zealand,’ 304–14; Andrew Reeves, Another Day, Another Dollar: Working Lives in Australian History (Carleton North, Australia: McCulloch Publishing 1988), 74–105. 74 See, for example, Claude Larivière, Le 1er mai: fête internationale des travailleurs (Montreal: Éditions cooperatives Albert St-Martin de Montréal 1975), 24, for a labelling of the first Labour Day as ‘une diversion des boss.’ 75 Philip S. Foner, May Day: A Short History of the International Workers’ Holiday, 1886–1986 (New York: International Publishers 1986); Maurice Dommanget, Histoire du premier mai (Paris: éditions de la Tête de Feuilles 1972); George Seguy, 1er mai: les 100 printemps (Paris: Messidor/Éditions sociales 1989); Michelle Perrot, ‘The First of May 1890 in France: The Birth of a Working-Class Ritual,’ in Pat Thane, Geoffrey Crossick, and Roderick Floud, eds., The Power of the Past: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press 1984), 143–71; Andrea Panaccione, ed., May Day Day Celebration (Venice: Marsilio Editori 1988); Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Mass Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914,’ in Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, 283–91. Some Canadian workers at least tried to distance themselves from European socialist traditions in these parades; in Montreal in 1892, in the only known incident in which a union contingent showed up with a red flag, the parade’s marshals swooped in and had it removed. Gazette (Montreal), 6 September 1892, 3. 76 On Canadian workers’ movements in the 1880s, see Forsey, Trade Unions in Canada; Gregory S. Kealey and Bryan D. Palmer, Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press 1982); Ian McKay, ‘“By Wisdom, Wile or War”: The Provincial Workmen’s Association and the Struggle for Working-Class Independence in Nova Scotia, 1879–97,’ Labour/Le Travail 18 (fall 1986), 13–62; Bryan D. Palmer, Working-Class Experience: Rethinking the History of Canadian Labour, 1800–1991 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1992), 117–54. 77 See Robert M. Stamp, ‘Empire Day in the Schools of Ontario: The Training of

294

Notes to page 42

Young Imperialists,’ Journal of Canadian Studies 8, no.3 (August 1973), 32–42; Murton, ‘Public Celebrations’; Alan Gordon, ‘Inventing Tradition: Montreal’s Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day Re-Examined’ (paper presented to the Canadian Historical Association Meeting, 1996); Peter A. Stevens, ‘A Wealth of Meanings: Thanksgiving in Ontario, 1859–1914’ (Major Research Paper, York University 1999); McFarquhar, ‘A Difference of Perspective.’ 2 The Craftsmen’s Spectacle 1 Public Archives of Nova Scotia (PANS), MG 20, Halifax Typographical Union Records, vol.332, 15 June, 6 July 1889; 5 July 1890. 2 In the 1890s, it was not unusual to hold a special meeting of the local just to discuss the preparations for Labour Day, and to follow this up with more discussion of the same topic at three or four additional meetings. Each local’s Labour Day committee would also organize refreshments for the picnic or the “smoker” to follow the parade (beer, cheese, and crackers were popular). For examples of this decision-making process, see PANS, MG 20, United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, Local 83, Records, vol.1634, 24 June, 2, 17, 22 July, 3 September 1889; 18 June, 1, 3, 16, 21 July, 5 August, 17 September 1890; 15 July 1891; 7 June, 5, 13 July 1892; 27 June, 14 July 1893; 16, 19 July, 7, 28 August 1895; 29 June, 18 July, 31 August 1899; 6, 20 August 1901; 22 July, 5, 19 August, 2 September, 1 October 1902; 25 June, 21 July, 18 August, 1, 4 September, 6 September 1903; 18 July, 15 August 1905; 2, 8, 15 July, 12, 27 August 1907; 20 April, 18 May, 13, 22 June, 3, 31 August 1909; Halifax Typographical Union Records, vol.332, 7, 14 July 1888; 1, 15 June, 6 July 1889; 7 June, 5 July 1890; 20 June, 4 July 1891; 2, 9 July, 6 August 1892; 8 July 1893; 20 July, 3 August 1895; 5 August, 2 September 1899; 6 April, 1 June, 13 July, 3, 23 August, 4 October 1901; 5 July, 27 August, 4 October 1902; 7, 30 August 1920; Dalhousie University Archives, MS 9, 48 (Caulkers’ Association of Halifax and Dartmouth, Business Book, 1882– 95), 10, 17 July, 9 October 1888; 17 July 1889; 11 July 1890; 11 May, 11 July 1892; MS 9.24 (United Association of Journeymen Plumbers, Gas Fitters, Steam Fitters, Steam Fitters’ Helpers of the United States and Canada, Local Union No.56, Minutebook, 1909–13), 4, 13, 17, 27, 31 August 1909; 14 June, 9, 23, 30 August, 6 September 1912; Provincial Archives of Manitoba (PAM), MG 10, A14–2 (R.B. Russell Papers), Iron Molders’ Union of North America, Local 74, Minutes, 16 August 1898; 19 August 1902; 24 August 1903; 22 August 1904; P3351 (United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, Local 343), Minutes, 18, 25 August 1896; 24, 31 August 1897; 9, 23 August 1898; 25, 31 July, 9, 22 August, 12 September 1899;

295

Notes to pages 45–51

3

4 5

6 7

8

9 10 11 12

13 14 15

28 August 1900; MG 10, A29 (Winnipeg Typographical Union), box 1, Minutes, 6 August, 3 September 1898; 8 July, 2 September 1899; 4 August 1900; British Columbia Archives and Records Services, Add. Mss. 423 (Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, Victoria Branch), Minutebook 1/1, 28 August 1901; 1/2, 16 September 1901, 4 September 1902, 3 June, 29 August 1904, 14 August 1907. Davis, Parades and Power, 49–72. Mary Ryan has suggested that ‘this particular type of celebratory performance seems to have been an American invention.’ See ‘American Parade,’ 132. Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 2 September 1913, 1. The Calithumpian troupe in Toronto, apparently a dozen or so youths, actually appeared well in advance of the actual parade, the Globe’s report indicating that ‘a few minutes’ passed before the front of the Labour Day procession arrived. Herald (Halifax), 3 September 1901, 1; Transcript (Moncton), 5 September 1905, 1; Globe (Toronto), 3 September 1901, 12; 6 September 1904, 11; Colonist (Victoria), 4 September 1901, 5; Davis, Parades and Power, 113–54. Globe (Toronto), 3 September 1895, 6. For example, Globe (Saint John), 3 September 1894; 2 September 1895; 1 September 1902, 1; 7 September 1903, 1; Acadian Recorder (Halifax), 2 August 1888, 4; Herald (Halifax), 5 September 1899, 1; 3 September 1901, 7. Silk top hats also appeared in Moncton; see Sun (Saint John), 24 September 1908, 1. Journal (Ottawa), 5 September 1893, 5; 4 September 1894, 3, 5; 3 September 1895, 5; 5 September 1899, 5; 4 September 1900, 3; 3 September 1901, 6; Globe (Saint John), 2 September 1895; Spectator (Hamilton), 2 September 1902, 5; Herald (Calgary), 8 September 1908, 1; 6 September 1910, 1; Globe (Toronto), 5 September 1911, 7; Citizen (Ottawa), 5 September 1917, 3. Globe (Toronto), 12 September 1892, 6; 3 September 1895, 6; Journal (Ottawa), 8 September 1903, 6. For a detailed description of some of those used in Halifax, see Acadian Recorder, 12 August 1899, 3. Herald (Halifax), 6 September 1909, 3. Globe (Toronto), 7 September 1897, 2; Journal (Ottawa), 6 September 1898, 5; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 6 September 1898, 5; Globe (Toronto), 5 September 1899, 7; 4 September 1900, 7. Globe (Toronto), 4 September 1900, 7. Gazette (Montreal), 4 September 1888, 3; Journal (Ottawa), 2 September 1890, 1; 7 September 1891, 1; 6 September 1892, 1. Spectator (Hamilton), 4 August 1883, 1; Acadian Recorder (Halifax), 19 July

296

Notes to pages 51–4

16

17 18 19 20

21

22

23 24 25

26

27

1893, 2; Herald (Halifax), 7 September 1909, 2. Advertiser (London), 4 September 1894, 1. Globe (Saint John), 2 October 1883, 1; 3 September 1894; Gazette (Montreal), 8 September 1891, 2; New Brunswick Museum, Diane Beattie, ‘Labour Day: An Expression of the Saint John Working Class, 1894–1909’ (typescript 1981), 6. Voice (Winnipeg), 26 August 1898, 1 Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 3 September 1895, 1; Globe (Toronto), 2 September 1913, 9. For early examples of these craft performances in Saint John and Halifax, see Huskins, ‘Public Celebrations,’ 199–203. Herald (Halifax), 3 September 1901, 7; 7 September 1909, 12; Colonist (Victoria), 4 September 1912, 8; also, the Halifax electrical workers’ giant wrench and hammer: Herald (Halifax), 7 September 1909, 12. Spectator (Hamilton), 4 August 1883, 1; 3 September 1895, 5; 2 September 1902, 5; Globe (Toronto), 24 July 1882, 6; 12 September 1892, 6; 7 September 1897, 9; 6 September 1898, 2; 5 September 1899, 7; Globe (Saint John), 3 September 1894; 2 September 1895; 1 September 1902, 1; 7 September 1903, 1; Colonist (Victoria), 4 September 1912, 8. Herald (Calgary), 5 September 1911, 8; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 5 September 1911, 20; Colonist (Victoria), 4 September 1912, 8; Leader (Regina), 3 September 1913, 8; Globe, 4 September 1906, 14; 5 September 1911, 7; 2 September 1913, 9. Times Journal (Fort William), 6 September 1910, 1. Globe (Toronto), 4 September 1900, 7; Herald (Halifax), 8 September 1903, 1; Times Journal (Fort William), 8 September 1903, 1. Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 3 September 1895, 1; Globe (Toronto), 8 September 1896, 1; 7 September 1897, 9; Journal (Ottawa), 6 September 1898, 5; Sun (Saint John), 8 September 1903, 7. Globe (Toronto), 24 July 1882, 8; Palladium of Labor (Hamilton), 18 August 1884, 7; Free Press (London), 10 July 1886, 3; Journal (Ottawa), 7 September 1891, 1; 6 September 1898, 5; 7 September 1909, 3; Advertiser (London), 6 September 1892, 5; 3 September 1893, 3; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 6 September 1898, 5; Globe (Saint John), 3 September 1894; Vancouver Typographer, 11 August 1897 (copy in Vancouver City Archives). Journal (Ottawa), 6 September 1892, 1; 6 September 1910, 3; Globe (Toronto), 24 July 1882, 6; 23 July 1883, 6; 3 September 1895, 6; 4 September 1900, 7; Gazette (Montreal), 2 September 1890, 5; Globe (Saint John), 1 September 1902, 1; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 2 September 1920, 7.

297

Notes to pages 54–5

28 Journal (Ottawa), 8 September 1903, 6; Globe (Toronto), 7 September 1897, 9; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 2 September 1902, 7. 29 Free Press (London), 10 July 1886, 5; Journal (Ottawa), 3 September 1895, 5; 2 September 1902, 6; Spectator (Hamilton), 5 September 1905, 5; Colonist (Victoria), 4 September 1912, 8; Whig Standard (Kingston), 3 September 1918, 3. 30 Journal (Ottawa), 7 September 1891, 1; 5 September 1899, 5; 3 September 1901, 6; 6 September 1910, 3; Globe (Toronto), 24 July 1882, 6; 3 September 1895, 6; 3 September 1896, 1; 7 September 1897, 9; 5 September 1899, 4; 3 September 1912, 8; 2 September 1913, 9; Gazette (Montreal), 2 September 1890, 5; 8 September 1908, 7; 2 September 1913, 12; Sun (Saint John), 8 September 1903, 7; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 8 September 1903, 8; 5 September 1905, 1; Times Journal (Fort William), 8 September 1903, 1; Examiner (Peterborough), 8 September 1903, 5; Herald (Calgary), 2 September 1902, 4; 3 September 1907, 1; 8 September 1908, 1; Leader (Regina), 2 September 1907, 3; 7 September 1909, 9; 3 September 1913, 8; Citizen (Ottawa), 3 September 1912, 2; Colonist (Victoria), 4 September 1901, 5; 4 September 1912, 8; Working Lives Collective, Working Lives, 140; Smith, Let Us Rise, 22. 31 For blacksmiths, see Globe (Toronto), 24 July 1882, 6; 12 September 1892, 6; 3 September 1896, 1; 7 September 1897, 9; 5 September 1899, 7; 3 September 1901, 12; 2 September 1902, 12; Journal (Ottawa), 3 September 1895, 5; Gazette (Montreal), 8 September 1896, 6; 2 September 1902, 5; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 6 September 1898, 5; Colonist (Victoria), 6 September 1899, 8; 4 September 1912, 8; Spectator (Hamilton), 5 September 1905, 5; Citizen (Ottawa), 3 September 1912, 2; for boilermakers, see Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 7 September 1897, 1; 2 September 1902, 7; 5 September 1905, 1; Globe (Toronto), 5 September 1899, 7; 3 September 1901, 12; Gazette (Montreal), 3 September 1901, 7; 2 September 1902, 5; Colonist (Victoria), 4 September 1901, 5; Herald (Halifax), 6 September 1904, 1; 5 September 1905, 1; Journal (Ottawa), 3 September 1907, 10; Herald (Calgary), 3 September 1907, 1; for moulders, see Globe (Toronto), 3 September 1895, 6; 3 September 1896, 1; 7 September 1897, 9; Examiner (Peterborough), 3 September 1903, 1; Palladium of Labor (Hamilton), 18 August 1883, 7. 32 Colonist (Victoria), 6 September 1898, 6; 6 September 1899, 8; Province (Vancouver), 4 September 1900, 8. In addition to these examples, spectators could see, from time to time, tableaux of the following old-time crafts: carriage-making, coopering, tanning, tinsmithing, butchering, woodworking, and tailoring. (Globe [Saint John], 3 September 1894; Advertiser [London], 6 September 1892, 5; 3 September 1893, 3; Globe [Toronto], 5 September

298

Notes to pages 56–65

33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40

41

1899, 4, 7; Journal [Ottawa], 5 September 1893, 5; 8 September 1896, 1; 8 September 1903, 6; Colonist [Victoria], 3 September 1920, 8; Manitoba Free Press [Winnipeg], 5 September 1911, 1.) Even some new skills working with machinery were on display. Saint John millmen contributed a float in 1894 that showed all the stages of production of wood products from chopping a tree to sawing lumber on a small saw mill. (Globe [Saint John], 3 September 1894; Sun [Saint John], 5 September 1903, 8; Journal [Ottawa], 6 September 1892, 2. Spectators could also sometimes see machinists handling a variety of lathes. (Globe [Toronto], 7 September 1897, 9; 6 September 1898, 2; 5 September 1899, 7; Manitoba Free Press [Winnipeg], 7 September 1909, 1; 5 September 1911, 1. Some of the less skilled might occasionally put on a show as well. Winnipeg’s civic workers produced remarkable floats in 1899 showing how they built roads and laid waterworks. Several years later, the maintenance-of-way men entered a float with a hand car and signals. Manitoba Free Press [Winnipeg], 5 September 1899, 1; 5 September 1911, 1; 8 September 1914, 14; Herald [Calgary], 6 September 1910, 1. Palmer, Culture in Conflict, chapter 4, remains the best discussion of producer ideology. Voice (Winnipeg), 9 September 1898, 1. Herald (Halifax) 24 July 1889, 1. Daily Colonist (Victoria), 4 September 1912, 19; Advertiser (London), 4 September 1894, 1. Journal (Ottawa), 7 September 1897, 6; 5 September 1899, 5. Globe (Saint John), 2, 3 September 1894; Herald (Halifax), 3 August 1888, 3; 24 July 1890, 3. Virtually all these early banners have disappeared, but a few known to exist in Saint John and scattered references in nineteenthcentury newspapers suggest that the first probably came from British banner makers. Rosemary Donegan, ‘The Iconography of Labour: An Overview of Canadian Materials,’ Archivaria, 27 (winter 1988–9): 36–45; R.A. Leeson, United We Stand: An Illustrated Account of Trade Union Emblems (Bath, U.K.: Adams and Dart 1971); John Gorman, Banner Bright: An Illustrated History of the Banners of the British Trade Union Movement (London: Allen Lane 1973), and Images of Labour (London: Scorpion Publishing 1985); Forsey, Trade Unions, 10–13. Herald (Halifax), 3 August 1888, 3; 24 July 1890, 3. Globe (Toronto), 16 August 1887, 3; Gazette (Montreal), 3 September 1889, 5; 8 September 1891, 2; 5 September 1893, 1; Globe (Saint John), 3 September 1894. Gazette (Montreal), 3 September 1895, 6; Globe (Toronto), 3 September 1896, 1; Journal (Ottawa), 7 September 1897, 6; 5 September 1899, 5; Globe (Toronto), 2 September 1902, 12.

299

Notes to pages 65–7

42 See, for example, Acadian Recorder (Halifax), 3 September 1895, 2; Herald (Calgary), 3 September 1907, 1; Herald (Halifax), 7 September 1909, 1; Globe (Toronto), 3 September 1912, 8. 43 Globe (Toronto), 3 September 1901, 12. 44 Standard (St Catharines), 8 September 1903, 5. 45 Advertiser (London), 4 September 1894, 1; Globe (Toronto), 2 September 1919, 3. 46 Hamilton workers provided an exception in 1895 when they integrated army and navy veterans into their Labour Day parade. Spectator (Hamilton), 3 September 1895, 5. 47 See, for example, Gazette (Montreal), 25 May 1900, 3; Globe (Toronto), 25 May 1900, 6; Herald (Halifax), 25 May 1900, 1. 48 See, for example, Gazette (Montreal), 5 September 1893, 5; 4 September 1894, 5. 49 In Calgary, local clergymen were invited to ride as guests in a carriage. Herald (Calgary), 3 September 1907, 1; 8 September 1908, 1. This is certainly not to argue that religion was irrelevant to these workers, only that they wished to avoid the divisiveness of Christian denominations. On working-class religion, see Lynn Marks, ‘The “Hallelujah Lasses”: Working-Class Women in the Salvation Army in English Canada, 1882–92,’ in Franca Iacovetta and Mariana Valverde, eds., Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women’s History (Toronto: University of Toronto 1992), 67–117; Norman Knowles, ‘Christ in the Crowsnest: Religion and the Anglo-Protestant Working Class in the Crowsnest Pass, 1898–1918,’ in Michael Beheils and Marcel Martel, eds., Nation, Ideas, Identities: Essays in Honour of Ramsay Cook (Toronto: Oxford University Press 2000), 52–72; Eric Crouse, ‘They “left us pretty much as we were”: American Saloon/Factory Evangelists and Canadian Working Men in the Early Twentieth Century,’ Canadian Society of Church History, Historical Papers, 1999, 51–71; Brian P. Clarke, Piety and Nationalism: Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1850–1895 (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press 1993); Lucia Ferretti, Entre Voisins: La société paroissiale en milieu urbain, Saint-Pierre-Apôtre de Montréal, 1848–1930 (Montreal: Boréal, 1992); and several essays in the special issue of Histoire sociale/Social History 26, no.1 (May 2003). 50 Typically, the only male unionists to ride in carriages were union officials. In Halifax in 1893, for example, carriages contained civic officials, officers from the labour council, and ‘guests’ of the various unions. In St Catharines ten years later, orphans, parade judges, city councilors, the local member of the Legislative Assembly, and the MP for the city rode in carriages at the end of the procession. Herald (Halifax), 8 September 1903, 1; Standard (St Catharines), 8 September 1903, 6.

300

Notes to pages 67–71

51 Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 9 September 1895, 1; 6 September 1898, 5. For years, Winnipeg had the most elaborate company floats. See also Journal (Ottawa), 5 September 1893, 5. 52 Daily Free Press (London), 4 September 1894, 3. 53 Herald (Halifax), 3 August 1888, 3; 24 July 1889, 1; 24 July 1890, 3; 23 July 1891, 3; 21 July 1892, 6; 20 July 1893, 6. In most cities, employers clearly cooperated in the production of the craftsmen’s street theatre, allowing the men to use valuable machinery and raw materials and often to use company vehicles. 54 Spectator (Hamilton), 4 August 1884, 4; Palladium of Labor (Hamilton), 9 August 1884, 7. 55 Sun (Saint John), 17 August 1903, 8. 56 In Saint John in 1902 and 1903, for example, freight handlers’ and hod carriers’ unions contributed major floats showing their work on trains and building sites respectively. Globe (Saint John), 1 September 1902, 1; 7 September 1903, 1. 57 Gazette (Montreal), 4 September 1900, 8. 58 See, for example, PANS, MG 20, United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, Local 83, vol.1634, 3, 16 July, 17 September, 7 October 1890; 13 July 1892; 28 July 1895. 59 Herald (Halifax), 24 July 1890, 3; Globe (Toronto), 24 July 1892, 6. Fourteen years later, a Halifax unionist still saw the Labour Day parade as ‘literally a parade of the strength of labor – it is an object lesson to employers and politicians.’ Herald (Halifax), 22 August 1907, 3. 60 Free Press (London), 10 July 1886, 3; Gazette (Montreal), 4 September 1894, 5; Journal (Ottawa), 4 September 1894, 4; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 3 September 1901, 3. 61 Star (Toronto), 24 August 1900, 2; 7 September 1895, 5. 62 Star (Toronto), 7 September 1895, 5. 63 The only exceptions that have surfaced are in Montreal, where an ‘Italian Brotherhood,’ decked out in Italian army uniforms, marched in the 1901 and 1902 parades and where separate groups of English, French, and Jewish carpenters participated in the 1906 event: Gazette (Montreal), 3 September 1901, 7; 4 September 1906, 5. 64 Journal (Ottawa), 3 September 1901, 6; Globe (Toronto), 5 September 1899, 7; 3 September 1901, 12; 2 September 1902, 12; Spectator (Hamilton), 2 September 1902, 5; Herald (Calgary), 5 September 1911, 8. 65 Gazette (Montreal), 4 September 1894, 5; 8 September 1903, 6; Palladium of Labor (Hamilton), 11 August 1883; Spectator (Hamilton), 4 August 1883, 1; 4 August 1884, 4; see also Record (Windsor), 30 August 1913, 1.

301

Notes to pages 72–5

66 Colonist (Victoria), 4 September 1901, 5; Voice (Winnipeg), 11 September 1897, 1. 67 Susan Mann Trofimenkoff, ‘One Hundred and Two Muffled Voices: Canada’s Industrial Women in the 1880s,’ in Michael S. Cross and Gregory S. Kealey, eds., Readings in Canadian Social History, Volume 3: Canada’s Age of Industry, 1849–1896 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1982), 212–29; Bettina Bradbury, ‘Women and Wage Labour in a Period of Transition: Montreal, 1861–1881,’ Histoire sociale/Social History 33 (May 1984), 115–33; ; Sharon Myers, ‘“Not to Be Ranked as Women”: Female Industrial Workers in Turnof-the-Century Halifax,’ in Guildford and Morton, eds., Separate Spheres, 161–84. 68 Bonnie Huskins, ‘The Ceremonial Space of Women: Public Processions in Victorian Saint John and Halifax,’ in Guilford and Morton, eds., Separate Spheres, 154; Palmer, Culture in Conflict, 142; Globe (Toronto), 4 September 1894, 3; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 6 September 1898, 5; Herald (Halifax), 2 September 1919, 1; Acadian Record (Halifax), 18 July 1890, 3. 69 Globe (Toronto), 12 September 1892, 6; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 7 September 1897, 1. 70 Globe (Toronto), 3 September 1895, 6; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 6 September 1898, 5; Palladium of Labor (Hamilton), 11 August 1883), 1; 9 August 1884, 1; Spectator (Hamilton), 4 August 1883, 1; 4 August 1884, 4; Globe (Toronto), 5 August 1884, 5; 2 September 1902, 4, 12; Free Press (London), 10 July 1886, 3; Advertiser (London), 6 September 1892, 5; 3 September 1900, 8; 8 September 1903, 3; Manitoba Free Press, 7 September 1897, 1; 5 September 1899, 1; 4 September 1906, 1; 7 September 1909, 1; Gazette (Montreal), 5 September 1903, 7; 8 September 1908, 7; 2 September 1913, 12; Leader (Regina), 3 September 1913, 8; Record (Windsor), 30 August 1913, 1. In 1899 the Ottawa labour leaders solicited an article for their “Labour Day Souvenir” from Lady Aberdeen, feminist wife of the governor general, rather than from a local working woman. Journal (Ottawa), 2 September 1899, 9. 71 Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press 1990); Huskins, ‘Ceremonial Space of Women.’ 72 Gazette (Montreal), 3 September 1907, 7; Advertiser (London), 2 September 1913, 9. 73 Advertiser (London), 6 September 1892, 5; 1 September 1900, 8; 8 September 1903, 3; Gazette (Montreal), 5 September 1903, 7; 2 September 1913, 12; 2 September 1919, 5; Herald, 2 September 1919, 1; Manitoba Free Press, (Winnipeg), 4 September 1903, 2; 2 September 1919, 10; Ryan, ‘American Parade,’ 148–51.

302

Notes to pages 76–86

74 Colonist (Victoria), 5 September 1900, 6; 4 September 1901, 5. 75 Huskins, ‘Ceremonial Space of Women,’ 154; Palmer, Culture in Conflict, 142; Journal (Ottawa), 4 September 1900, 3; Globe (Toronto), 4 September 1900, 7; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 2 September 1902, 7; Herald (Calgary), 8 September 1908, 1. 76 Journal (Ottawa), 4 September 1900, 3. 77 Herald (Halifax), 6 September 1909, 3; 7 September 1909, 2 78 Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 6 September 1904, 7; 6 September 1910, 9; Times Journal (Fort William), 2 September 1913, 1; Examiner (Peterborough), 30 August 1919, 1; sometimes, too, they sold tags for labour causes. Herald (Halifax), 3 September 1920, 16. 79 Acadian Recorder (Halifax), 23 July 1891, 2; Chronicle (Halifax), 20 July 1891, 1; 21 July 1892, 2; Spectator (Hamilton), 3 September 1895, 5; 7 September 1897, 7; Gazette (Montreal), 6 September 1904, 5; 5 September 1905, 7; 4 September 1906, 5; 3 September 1907, 7; 8 September 1908, 7; Journal (Ottawa), 6 September 1910, 3; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 9 September 1914, 14. 80 Spectator (Hamilton), 3 September 1895, 5; 3 September 1895, 5. 81 Gazette (Montreal), 2 September 1890, 5; 2 September 1902, 5; Advertiser, 3 September 1893, 3. 82 Free Press (London), 10 July 1886, 3; Globe (Toronto), 4 September 1894, 3; Free Press (Winnipeg), 4 September 1900, 2; Spectator (Hamilton), 5 September 1905, 5; Herald (Calgary), 5 September 1905, 1; Times Journal (Fort William), 6 September 1910, 1; Citizen (Ottawa), 5 September 1917, 3; Whig Standard (Kingston), 3 September 1918, 3; Journal (Ottawa), 5 September 1899, 5; 6 September 1904, 3. In 1910 the J.R. Booth Company had five little girls sitting on its float, ‘wearing capes and hats made of light paper of variegated colors.’ Journal (Ottawa), 6 September 1910, 3. In the early 1900s, Calgary’s parade organizers introduced contingents of marching school children. Herald (Calgary), 6 September 1904, 1; 5 September 1905, 1. 83 Journal (Ottawa), 2 September 1899, 2. 84 Stuart B. Kaufman and Peter J. Albert, eds., The Samuel Gompers Papers: Volume 3, Unrest and Depression, 1891–94 (Chicago: University of Ilinois Press 1989), 355. 3 Sharing Labour Day 1 Gazette (Montreal), 4 September 1894, 4. 2 See, for example, Star (Toronto), 23 May 1896, 2. 3 Sun (Vancouver), 1 September 1913, 6.

303

Notes to pages 86–99

4 Michael Bliss, A Living Profit: Studies in the Social History of Canadian Business, 1883–1911 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1974), 74–94. 5 Globe (Toronto), 23 July 1883, 6; 5 September 1897. 6 Globe (Toronto), 8 September 1896, 9. 7 Telegram (Welland), 10 September 1903, 6; Globe (Toronto), 2 September 1913, 6. 8 Globe (Toronto), 1 September 1913, 6; Advertiser (London), 1 September 1913, 4. 9 Globe (Toronto) 31 August 1894, 4. 10 See, for example, Gordon, ‘Inventing Tradition’; Marquis. ‘Commemorating the Loyalists’; Stamp, ‘Empire Day.’ 11 Globe (Toronto) 31 August 1894, 4; Examiner (Peterborough), 3 September 1910, 10; Herald (Halifax), 7 September 1925, 6; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 7 September 1925, 11. 12 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Glasgow: Fontana Press 1989), 176–9; Keith Thomas, The Oxford Book of Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999). 13 Journal (Ottawa), 7 September 1897, 6. 14 Herald (Halifax), 31 August 1918, 5. 15 See, for example, Barbara Melish, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theatre (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). 16 Globe (Toronto), 8 September 1936, 3. On growing corporate concern for public relations, see David Nye, Image Worlds: Corporate Identities at General Electric, 1890–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1985); Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press 1998). 17 Globe and Mail (Toronto), 4 Sept. 1944, 22. 18 Spectator (Hamilton), 2 September 1947, 24. The ad also appeared in Star (Sudbury), 2 September 1947, 7. 19 Globe (Toronto), 8 September 1896, 1. 20 Free Press (London), 4 September 1894, 4. 21 La Presse (Montreal), 4 September 1909, 1. 22 Examiner (Peterborough), 1 September 1894, 4. 23 Advertiser (London), 1 September 1913, 4. 24 Sun (Vancouver), 1 September 1913, 6 25 This quotation is from a speech in Hamilton. Globe (Toronto), 7 September 1897, 2. On ideas of evolution in liberal thought, see David Fewson, ‘Society in Decline: Evolutionary Theory and the Idea of Degeneration in the Toronto Globe, 1896–1909’ (MA Thesis, Queen’s University 1998).

304

Notes to pages 103–12

26 Colin D. Howell, Blood, Sweat, and Cheers: Sport and the Making of Modern Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2001). 27 Free Press (Ottawa), 3 September 1895, 4; Herald (Halifax), 1 May 1920, 1. On the origins of May Day in Canada, see chapter 5. 28 Stuart B. Kaufman and Peter J. Albert, eds., The Samuel Gompers Papers: Volume 9, the American Federation of Labour at the Height of Progressivism, 1913–17 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press 2003), 453. See also Journal (Ottawa), 5 September 1903, 6. 29 Globe (Toronto), 4 September 1894, 8; 8 September 1896, 1 30 Melissa Turkstra, ‘Encounters between the Working Class and Protestant Churches in English Canada’ (Paper presented to the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, Toronto, 2002). 31 Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 31 August 1929, 33 32 Advertiser (London), 5 September 1910, 1; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 1 September 1913, 11. 33 For the Richardson quotation, see replies to a circular sent by the Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council, printed in the Voice (Winnipeg), 28 August 1897, 1. On the social gospel and its relationship to Labour Day, see Richard Allen, The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada, 1914–1928 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1973). See also Acadian Recorder (Halifax), 18 July 1892, 2; Voice (Winnipeg), 2 September 1897, 1; 11 September 1897, 1; 26 August 1898, 1; Globe (Toronto), 8 September 1896, 9; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 6 September 1897, 1; Colonist (Victoria), 3 September 1900, 2; Spectator (Hamilton), 2 September 1901, 5; 7 September 1903, 8; 2 September 1911, 4; 6 September 1915, 5; 4 September 1916, 8; Eastern Labor News (Moncton), 31 August 1912, 4; Leader (Regina), 1 September 1913, 5; Sun (Vancouver), 2 September 1933, 8. 34 Christian Guardian, 6 September 1911, 5. 35 Sun (Vancouver), 7 September 1914, 8. See also Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 1 September 1913, 11; Sun (Vancouver), 6 September 1920, 7. 36 Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 6 September 1920, 12; Sun (Vancouver), 1 September 1913, 4. 37 Star (Sudbury), 3 September, 1919, 2. 38 Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 7 September 1903, 7; Labor News (Hamilton), 25 April 1916, 4. 39 Gazette (Montreal), 2 September 1895, 2; 5 September 1904, 5; 4 September 1905, 8. See also La Croix (Montreal), 7 September 1907; La Presse (Montreal), 27 August 1907; 3 September 1907; La Patrie (Montreal), 30 August 1907; 3 September 1907; Le Soleil (Quebec City), 8 September 1908. 40 The phrase ‘merchants of leisure’ is taken from Frances Couvares, ‘The Triumph of Commerce: Class Culture and Mass Culture in Pittsburgh,’ in

305

Notes to pages 115–18

Michael Frisch and Daniel Walkowitz, eds., Working Class America: Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1983), 123. 4 The Universal Playday 1 Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 4 September 1894, 1. 2 In 1886 several union cigarmakers in London were fired for attending the city’s first labour demonstration. Six years later, the London labour movement threw together a hastily organized Labour Day, but it found that many companies had already granted half-holidays for their annual outings. Free Press (London), 16 July 1886, 5; Advertiser (London), 6 September 1892, 5. See also PANS, MG 20, Halifax Typographical Society Records, vol.332, 5 July 1890. 3 Journal (Ottawa), 6 September 1892, 1. 4 Colonist (Victoria), 4 September 1894, 5; 3 September 1895, 5; 8 September 1896, 1. 5 In 1899 major retailers in Toronto were still giving only the afternoon off on Labour Day; Globe (Toronto), 3 September 1898, 17, 28; 2 September 1899, 11, 12; 4 September 1899, 7. 6 Globe (Toronto), 4 September 1894, 3, 7; 5 September 1899, 4; Herald (Halifax), 3 September 1894, 1; 4 September 1894, 1; Gazette (Montreal), 8 September 1896, 6; 4 September 1899, 3; 6 September 1904, 5; Journal (Ottawa), 6 September 1898, 5; 6 September 1910, 10; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 6 September 1898, 5; 5 September 1899, 1; Herald (Calgary), 6 September 1904, 1; 5 September 1905, 1; Monetary Times, 9 September 1898, 338. There were a few holdouts, however. From 1898 to 1901, Saint John, New Brunswick, schools did not honour the holiday. Manufacturers in Amherst, N.S., were reported as not observing it in 1898 or 1908, nor were the Shelburne shipyards in 1912; and Calgary’s shopkeepers were reported to be firing employees who would not show up for work on Labour Day in 1907. Sun (Saint John), 8 January 1901, 2; News (Amherst), 6 September 1898; Herald (Halifax), 8 September 1908, 2; 5 September 1912, 2; David Bright, The Limits of Labour: Class Formation and the Labour Movement in Calgary, 1883–1929 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 1998), 62, 65. 7 Library and Archives of Canada (LAC), MG 30, A 16 (Sir Joseph Flavelle Papers), vol.38, File, 1918–19, 1924, Mark Irish to Flavelle, 26 July 1918. 8 See Robert E. Weir, Beyond Labour’s Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 1996), especially 277–319; Palmer, Working-Class Experience, 127–32.

306

Notes to pages 119–24

9 British Whig (Kingston), 1 September 1894. 10 Advertiser (London), 3 September 1893, 3; Globe (Toronto), 4 September 1894, 7–8; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 4 September 1894, 1; Herald (Halifax), 4 September 1900, 1; Herald (Calgary), 6 September 1904, 1. 11 Spectator (Hamilton), 5 August 1884, 5. 12 Globe (Toronto), 23 July 1883, 6. 13 Spectator (Hamilton), 4 August 1884, 4. 14 Globe (Toronto), 23 July 1883, 6. When the local Trades and Labour Council organized its excursion to the Niagara chautauqua to hear a lecture in 1889, officials were disappointed that ‘so many of the excursionists went on to the Falls or stayed down in Niagara’ rather than listening to the address. Ibid., 5 August 1889, 5. The Montreal Labour Day speeches had to be cancelled that year as well as a result of competition from other sporting and musical events. Gazette (Montreal), 3 September 1889, 5. 15 Globe (Toronto), 3 September 1895, 6; 7 September 1897, 2; Spectator (Hamilton), 7 September 1897, 7; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 3 September 1901, 3; 6 September 1904, 7; Telegraph (Welland), 10 September 1903, 6; Labor’s Realm (Regina), 2 August 1909, 2; Times Journal (Fort William), 6 September 1910, 1. 16 See, for example, Globe (Toronto), 4 September 1900, 5; 2 September 1913, 1; 2 September 1919, 9; 5 September 1933, 11. 17 For example, Globe and Mail (Toronto), 3 September 1945, 4; 4 September 1948, 9; see also the annual messages in the August and September issues of the Trades and Labor Congress Journal and the Canadian Unionist. The tameness of this process was evident on 2 September 1974, when part of the Labour Day message of Canadian Labour Congress President Joe Morris was reprinted in the column of the Globe and Mail’s society columnist, Zena Cherry. 18 See, for example, Le Repos du Travail (Montreal, 1890); Le Travail (Montreal, 1891); Souvenir Programme: Moncton’s Labor Day Celebration, September 1st, 1919, Moncton, New Brunswick (Moncton: Moncton Amalgamated Central Labor Union 1919). See also Examiner (Peterborough), 5 September 1903, 1; Journal (Ottawa), 5 September 1903, 6; 2 September 1910, 2, 11; 30 August 1919, 1. 19 The management of the Canadian National Exhibition faced the same shift from the educational to the entertaining; Walden, Becoming Modern, 245–91. 20 Alan Metcalfe, ‘Working Class Physical Recreation in Montreal, 1860–1895,’ Working Papers in the Sociological Study of Sports and Leisure, 1, no.2 (1978); Nancy Howell and Maxwell L. Howell, Sports and Games in Canadian Life: 1700 to the Present (Toronto: Macmillan 1969), 89–95.

307

Notes to pages 124–9

21 Journal (Ottawa), 2 September 1890, 1. 22 As in Toronto, most games were ‘under the rules of the Amateur Athletic Association of Canada.’ Globe (Toronto), 5 September 1898, 12. See also Bouchier, ‘24th of May,’ 168–78. 23 See, for example, Acadian Recorder (Halifax), 19 July 1893, 3; Sun (Saint John), 8 September 1903, 7. 24 See, for example, the programs organized in 1894 in Peterborough; Examiner (Peterborough), 4 September 1894, 1. 25 See Robert A.J. McDonald, ‘“Holy Retreat” or “Practical Breathing Spot”?: Class Perceptions of Vancouver’s Stanley Park, 1910–1913,’ Canadian Historical Review 65, no.2 (June 1984), 127–53; Mary Ellen Cavet et al., ‘Social Philosophy and the Early Development of Winnipeg’s Parks,’ Urban History Review 9 (June 1982), 27–39; Roy Rosenzweig, ‘Middle-Class Parks and Working-Class Play: The Struggle over Recreational Space in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1870–1910,’ Radical History Review 21 (fall 1979), 31–46; Walden, Becoming Modern, 224–32. 26 Record (Peterborough), 2 September 1913, 1. 27 Spectator (Hamilton), 5 August 1884, 4; Gazette (Montreal), 8 September 1891, 2; Journal (Ottawa), 5 September 1893, 5; see also 4 September 1894, 5; Examiner (Peterborough), 4 September 1894, 1. These diversions were also crowding into the Canadian National Exhibition in the same period. See Walden, Becoming Modern in Toronto, 259–63. 28 Gazette (Montreal), 4 September 1894, 5. 29 Journal (Ottawa), 8 September 1903, 6. A few years later, the Halifax press reported the organizers’ disappointment with poor attendance at the sports program. Herald (Halifax), 5 September 1905, 1; 3 September 1907, 1. 30 Bouchier, ‘24th of May.’ 31 Herald (Calgary), 2 September 1902, 4. David Breen and Kenneth Coates, Vancouver’s Fair: An Administrative and Political History of the Pacific National Exhibition (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 1982); Walden, Becoming Modern. 32 Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 5 September 1905, 1; see also 3 September 1907, 1. 33 Herald (Halifax), 3 September 1912, 1; 7 September 1909, 2. 34 Globe (Toronto), 2 September 1913, 8. 35 PANS, MG 20, United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, Local 83, Records, vol.1634, 3, 16 July 1890; 13 July 1892; Acadian Recorder (Halifax), 1, 3 August 1888, 3; 18 June 1892, 3; Robert A. Campbell, Demon Rum or Easy Money: Government Control of Liquor in British Columbia from Prohi-

308

Notes to pages 129–33

36 37

38 39 40 41

42 43

44

bition to Privatization (Ottawa: Carleton University Press 1990); Craig Heron, Booze: A Distilled History (Toronto: Between the Lines 2003). Journal (Ottawa), 2 September 1919, 3. Telegraph (Welland), 6 September 1910, 2; Sun (Vancouver), 4 September 1918, 9; Journal (Ottawa), 31 August 1929; Citizen (Ottawa), 7 September 1943, 6; 1 September 1945, 10; 3 September 1946, 12; Tribune (Welland), 3 September 1929, 1, 5; Citizen (Ottawa), 30 August 1952, 6; 31 August 1956, 6; 2 September 1961, 6; Gazette (Montreal), 2 September 1961, 6. R. Louis Gentilcore and C. Grant Head, Ontario’s History in Maps (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1984), 164. Marion Clawson, ‘The Development of Recreation in the United States and Canada and Its Implications for the National Parks,’ in J.G. Nelson, ed., Canadian Parks in Perspective (Montreal: Harvest House 1970), 35–45; Bella Hall, Parks for Profit (Montreal: Harvest House 1987); Alexander Wilson, The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (Toronto: Between the Lines 1991), 19–44; Witold Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend (Toronto: Penguin Books 1991), 162–85; Michael Dawson, ‘Consumerism and the Creation of the Tourist Industry in British Columbia, 1900–1965’ (PhD Thesis, Queen’s University 2001). On traffic safety editorials, see chapter 6. Star (Sudbury), 28 August 1929, 15. Free Press (Winnipeg), 2 September 1944, 1; Globe and Mail, 5 September 1944, 5. See John Craig’s reminiscences in ‘Labor Day Signaled Kind of Surrrender,’ Examiner (Peterborough), 5 September 1981. Industrial Banner, September 1902; Toiler (Toronto), 18 September 1902, 2; Globe, 2 September 1913, 8; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 3 September 1900, 6. This tension is discussed in Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil; Francis G. Couvares, The Remaking of Pittsburgh: Class and Culture in an Industrializing City, 1877–1919 (Albany: State University of New York Press 1984); Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will. See, for example, Herald (Halifax), 30 August 1906, 6; 3 September 1907, 1. Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 3 September 1900, 6; 2 September 1902, 7; Advertiser (London), 4 September 1900, 8; 6 September 1910, 8, 10; Telegraph (Berlin), 4 September 1900, 1; Globe (Toronto), 8 September 1903, 16; Spectator (Hamilton), 5 September 1911, 7; Record (Windsor), 2 September 1913, 1; Examiner (Peterborough), 30 August 1919, 1; 4 September 1920, 11; Herald (Halifax), 16 August 1919, 12; Free Press (London), 3 September 1946, 24. Labor News (Hamilton), 4 September 1914, 2; Working Lives Collective, Working Lives, 141; Herald (Halifax), 2 September 1913, 3.

309

Notes to pages 133–44

45 H.V. Nelles, The Art of Nation Building, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1999); Walden, Becoming Modern in Toronto. 46 Herald (Halifax), 2 September 1913, 4; Examiner (Peterborough), 8 September 1925, 4. 47 Spectator (Hamilton), 3 September 1895, 5; 5 September 1905, 5; see also 6 September 1904, 9. 48 The following comments are based on an examination of newspaper coverage of events on Victoria Day and Dominion Day at ten-year intervals between 1900 and 1950 in the Herald (Halifax), Gazette (Montreal), Globe (Toronto), Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), and Sun (Vancouver), each of which provided reports from across the region in which it was located. The most persistent exception was Victoria, B.C., where the Queen’s Birthday and later Victoria Day were celebrated more energetically than almost anywhere else in the country. See Murton, ‘Public Celebrations and Public Meanings.’ 49 Gazette (Montreal), 25 May 1900, 10; Stevens, ‘A Wealth of Meanings,’ 79–102. 50 Sun (Vancouver), 26 May 1900, 20; Gazette (Montreal), 24 May 1940, 8; Herald (Halifax), 3 July 1900,1; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 2 July 1930, 7. 51 Herald (Halifax), 2 July 1930, 2; Gazette (Montreal), 3 July 1930, 5; Globe (Toronto), 25 May 1910, 4; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 2 July 1910, 12. 52 See, for example, Gazette (Montreal), 25 June 1900, 3; 24 June 1909, 5; 29 June 1921, 6; 29 June 1930, 4, 5; 24 June 1940, 11; 25 June 1940, 2, 11; 26 June 1950, 15; Alan Gordon, Making Public Pasts: The Contested Terrain of Montreal’s Public Memories, 1891–1930 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2001). 53 Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 25 May 1920, 11. 54 Examiner (Peterborough), 8 September 1925, 4. 55 See, for example, Nelles, Art of Nation Building; Gordon, Making Public Pasts; Ronald Rudin, Founding Fathers: The Celebration of Champlain and Laval in the Streets of Quebec, 1878–1908 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2003); and the special issue of Histoire sociale/Social History 29, no. 58 (November 1996). 5 Marching to Different Tunes 1 2 3 4

See, for example, Journal (Ottawa), 2 September 1890. Herald (Halifax), 2 September 1919, 1. Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 3 September 1901, 3. Spectator (Hamilton), 6 September 1904, 9; 5 September 1905, 5; 4 Septem-

310

Notes to pages 144–6

5 6

7

8

9

10

ber 1906, 7. For further comments on declining participation in the parades and the absence of labour-sponsored floats and fancy outfits, see Globe (Toronto), 2 September 1902, 12; 6 September 1904, 11; 5 September 1905, 4; 4 September 1906, 10; 3 September 1907, 11; 8 September 1908, 1; 5 September 1911, 7, 11; 3 September 1912, 8, 11; Journal (Ottawa), 2 September 1902, 6; 5 September 1905, 9; 4 September 1906, 10; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 2 September 1902, 7; 6 September 1904, 7; 4 September 1906, 11; 3 September 1907, 1; Leader (Regina), 5 September 1911, 9; Gazette (Montreal), 5 September 1905, 7; 8 September 1908, 7; Herald (Halifax), 6 September 1904, 1; 5 September 1905, 1; Herald (Calgary), 4 September 1906, 1; 8 September 1908, 1. Globe (Toronto), 7 September 1920, 6; 3 September 1929, 16. Winnipeg had no march in 1908; Toronto and Calgary none in 1909; Halifax had only three between 1906 and 1913 and none at all after 1919; Hamilton’s 1906 march was the last for forty years; and Vancouver had no parade after 1913. Herald (Halifax), 1 September 1913, 4; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 29 August 1946, 3; Working Lives Collective, Working Lives, 141. Sun (Saint John), 21 July 1905, 4; Gazette (Montreal), 3 September 1956, 7. Jacques Rouillard, ‘La Fête du Travail à Montréal: Expression de la solidarité ouvrière (1886–1964),’ Le bulletin du Regroupement des chercheurs–chercheuses en histoire des travailleurs et travailleuses 22, no.2 (fall 1996), 9–14. In 1895 the Halifax Herald published a blunt critique of that year’s ‘demonstration,’ and no festivities were organized again until 1899. Herald (Halifax), 4 September 1895, 6; 8 September 1896; 7 September 1897, 8; 6 September 1898, 8; 5 September 1899, 1; 6 September 1904, 1. For other mildly critical comments see Herald (Calgary), 4 September 1906, 1; 8 September 1908, 1. Globe (Toronto), 8 September 1896, 9; 7 September 1897, 2; 5 September 1899, 4; Spectator (Hamilton), 8 September 1903, 1; 6 September 1904, 9; Acadian Recorder (Halifax), 3 September 1985, 2; Sun (Saint John), 19 August 1905, 11. Ian McKay, ‘Strikes in the Maritimes, 1901–1914,’ in P.A. Buckner and David Frank, eds., The Acadiensis Reader: Volume Two, Atlantic Canada after Confederation (Fredericton: Acadiensis Press 1985), 216–59; Craig Heron, ‘The Crisis of the Craftsman: Hamilton’s Metalworkers in the Early Twentieth Century,’ Labour/Le Travailleur 6 (autumn 1980), 7–48; ‘The Second Industrial Revolution in Canada, 1890–1930,’ in Deian R. Hopkin and Gregory S. Kealey, eds., Class, Community and the Labour Movement: Wales and Canada, 1850–1930 (Aberystwyth, U.K.: Llafur/Canadian Committee on

311

Notes to pages 146–53

11

12 13

14

15

16 17 18 19 20

Labour History 1989), 48–66; Working in Steel: The Early Years in Canada, 1883–1935 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1988); Craig Heron and Bryan D. Palmer, ‘Through the Prism of the Strike: Industrial Conflict in Southern Ontario, 1901–14,’ Canadian Historical Review 58, no.4 (December 1977), 423–58. These trends are discussed in Robert H. Babcock, Gompers in Canada: A Study of American Continentalism before the First World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1974); Mark Leier, Red Flags and Red Tape: The Making of a Labour Bureaucracy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1995). Beattie, ‘Labour Day,’ 8. Sam Landers, ‘Labor Day and Its Origins: Why a Day Is Observed,’ Citizen (Ottawa), 2 September 1911, 12; Herald (Halifax), 26 July 1912, 5; 1 September 1913, 4; 6 September 1937, 11. In 1909 the Moncton Labour Day festivities netted an unexpected profit of $300, which local unionists decided to put towards a new labour temple; ibid., 4 October 1909, 10. When they were cancelled in Montreal in 1908 ‘to cease offering further encouragement to the circus parade features of the procession,’ the Montreal Gazette noticed a decline in their quality; ‘there was practically no attempt at decorative effects; even the traditional silk hat only shone out occasionally in faded splendor.’ Gazette (Montreal), 6 September 1910, 6. As floats began to dwindle in the Fort William and Port Arthur parade in 1913, the judges also concluded that larger prizes were needed ‘to encourage more decoration.’ Times Journal (Fort William), 1913, 1. Standard (St Catharines), 3 September 1918, 3; 2 September 1919, 1, 3–5; 4 September 1920, 9; Tribune (Welland), 28 August 1919, 11; Herald (Halifax), 4 September 1917, 2; 8 September 1925, 2; 4 September 1929, 2; 5 September 1933, 3, 14; 4 September 1937, 3; 6 September 1937, 11; 31 August 1944, 9; 3 September 1946, 9; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 1 September 1919, 7; Free Press (London), 3 September 1946, 10; Star (Windsor), 7 September 1946, 5; 7 September 1948, 3; 30 August 1975, 33. Unionists had certainly instilled a deep popular expectation that parades should be held on Labour Days: the Canadian Armed Forces even held one in the Netherlands in 1945, along with the usual sporting events. Gazette (Montreal), 5 September 1945, 10. Sun (Vancouver), 4 September 1913, 3. Gazette (Montreal), 8 September 1925, 4; 3 September 1929, 4. Gazette (Montreal), 7 September 1926, 5; 6 September 1927, 4; 4 September 1928, 5. Citizen (Ottawa), 3 September 1912, 2. Keith Walden, ‘Speaking Modern: Language, Culture, and Hegemony in

312

Notes to pages 153–7

21

22 23

24

Grocery Window Displays, 1887–1920,’ Canadian Historical Review 70, no.3 (September 1989), 285–310; and Becoming Modern in Toronto, 119–64; Chronicle (Halifax), 21 July 1892, 2; 5 September 1899, 5; Globe (Toronto), 3 September 1901, 12; Spectator (Hamilton), 2 September 1902, 4; Journal (Ottawa), 8 September 1903, 6; Journal (Ottawa), 6 September 1892, 1; Advertiser (London), 3 September 1893, 3; 2 September 1913, 9; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 4 September 1894, 1–2; 2 September 1913, 3; Telegraph (Welland), 10 September 1903, 6; Record (Welland), 8 September 1903, 1; Herald (Halifax), 7 September 1909, 2; 2 September 1919, 1, 7 September 1920, 10; Standard (Cornwall), 10 September 1925, 2; Journal (Ottawa), 3 September 1918, 8. When the Halifax unions decided in 1893 to eliminate the ‘advertising element,’ the local press found the parade ‘more compact and effective as a display of Workingmen.’ Acadian Recorder (Halifax), 19 July 1893, 2. Globe (Toronto), 5 September 1933, 1. The other non-union firms that came to the rescue of the parade with floats were Macdonald Tobacco, Canada Packers, Swift Canadian Company, Dominion Stores, and Ontario Laundry. In contrast, the next year Labour Day marchers dipped their banners in disgust as they passed the Eaton store. Eileen Sufrin, The Eaton Drive: The Campaign to Organize Canada’s Largest Department Store, 1948 to 1952 (Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside 1982), 14. Western Clarion (Vancouver), 9 September 1905, 1. Palmer, Culture in Conflict, 213–4; McKay, ‘Strikes in the Maritimes,’ 256–9; David Jay Bercuson, Confrontation at Winnipeg: Labour, Industrial Relations, and the General Strike (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1974); Norman Penner, ed., Winnipeg 1919: The Strikers’ Own History of the Winnipeg General Strike (Toronto: James Lewis and Samuel 1973); Carmela Patrias, Relief Strike: Immigrant Workers and the Great Depression in Crowland, Ontario, 1930–1935 (Toronto: New Hogtown Press 1990), 38; Victor Howard, ‘We Were the Salt of the Earth!’: The On-To-Ottawa Trek and the Regina Riot (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre 1985); Maritime Labor Herald (Glace Bay), 23 June 1923, 1. Wells, ‘“Hardest Lines,”’ 87–106; Baskerville and Sager, Unwilling Idlers, 30–6; Geoffrey Ewen, ‘Quebec: Class and Ethnicity,’ in Craig Heron, ed., The Workers’ Revolt, 1917–1925 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 94–7; David Schulze, ‘The Industrial Workers of the World and the Unemployed in Edmonton and Calgary in the Depression of 1913–1915,’ Labour/Le Travail 25 (spring 1990), 47–76; James Naylor, The New Democracy: Challenging the Social Order in Industrial Ontario, 1914–1925 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1991), 248; Patricia V. Schulz, The East York Workers’ Associa-

313

Notes to pages 157–64

25

26 27 28 29

30 31 32

33 34 35

36

37

tion: A Response to the Great Depression (Toronto: New Hogtown Press 1975); Patrias, Relief Strike; Ivan Avakumovic, The Communist Party in Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975), 74–81; Howard, We Were the Salt of the Earth. See, Riots in New Brunswick; Linda Little, ‘Collective Action in Outport Newfoundland: A Case Study from the 1830s,’ Labour/Le Travail 26 (fall 1990), 7–35; Bleasdale, ‘Class Conflict on the Canals’; Michael S. Cross, ‘The Shiners’ War: Social Violence in the Ottawa Valley in the 1830s,’ Canadian Historical Review 54, no.1 (March 1973), 1–26; Ian McKay, ‘The Crisis of Dependent Development: Class Conflict in the Nova Scotia Coalfields, 1872– 1876,’ in Gregory S. Kealey, ed., Class, Gender, and Region: Essays in Canadian Historical Sociology (St John’s: Committee on Canadian Labour History 1988), 9–48. As in Springhill in 1910; see McKay, ‘ Strikes in the Maritimes,’ 259. Penner, Winnipeg 1919, 115. Heron, ed., Workers’ Revolt. Herald (Halifax), 4 September 1917, 2; 6 September 1921, 1; Star (Sudbury), 31 August 1918, 4; Amalgamated Journal, 11 September 1919. In this period, there were also parades at St John’s, Sydney, Stellarton, Halifax, and Moncton. Herald (Halifax), 16 August 1919, 12. Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 2 September 1919, 10. The decline and fall of local Labour Day parades can be traced in Eastern Federationist (New Glasgow), 6 September 1919, 1; Citizen (Halifax), 10 September 1920, 1; 9 September 1921, 1; Workers Weekly (Stellarton), 10 September 1921, 1; 1 September 1922, 6; 31 August 1923, 1, 2; Standard (Saint John), 2 September 1919, 2; Times (Moncton), 7 September 1920, 1; 6 September 1921, 1. Kealey and Palmer, Dreaming of What Might Be; Jacques Rouillard, Histoire du syndicalisme au québec, 78–80. Robert Babcock, Gompers in Canada. See, for example, the reports on Ottawa, Quebec City, and Montreal in Globe (Toronto), 3 September 1907, 3; 6 September 1910, 4; Journal (Ottawa), 3 September 1910, 11. Herald (Halifax), 13 August 1906, 1. That year a procession with six hundred marchers appeared on the streets of Glace Bay, while a large picnic was celebrated at Springhill. Globe (Toronto), 2 September 1913, 9; Canadian Unionist, September 1927, 64; October 1928, 55, 58; August 1930, 60; August 1931, 37–8; August 1934, 56; August 1935, 69; August 1936, 60; August 1937, 66–7; August 1938, 58–9; August 1939, 69, 78; August 1940, 60, 64.

314

Notes to pages 165–72

38 Irving Martin Abella, Nationalism, Communism, and Canadian Labour: The CIO, the Communist Party, and the Canadian Congress of Labour, 1935–1956 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1973). 39 See, for example, Globe and Mail (Toronto), 3 September 1946, 3; 2 September 1947, 3. 40 Geoffrey Ewen, ‘The International Unions and the Workers’ Revolt in Quebec, 1914–1925’ (PhD Thesis, York University 1998). 41 Jacques Rouillard, Les syndicats nationaux au Québec de 1900 à 1930 (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval 1979); Histoire du syndicalisme au Québec, 221–6, and ‘La Fête du travail à Montréal.’ Ewen, ‘Quebec: Class and Ethnicity,’ 118–21; and ‘International Unions and the Workers’ Revolt,’ 339–41; Journal (Ottawa), 3 September 1918, 8; 1 September 1919, 3; 2 September 1919, 2; Citizen (Ottawa), 7 September 1937, 15; Gazette (Montreal), 4 September 1922, 4; 3 September 1923, 4; 1 September 1924, 11; 7 September 1925, 4; 6 September 1926, 4; 5 September 1927, 4; 3 September 1928, 4; 5 September 1932, 4; 3 September 1934, 4; 7 September 1936, 4; 6 September 1937, 11, 19; 5 September 1938, 11; Syndicats Catholiques et Nationales de Montréal, Programme-Souvenir de la Fête du Travail, 3 septembre 1923 ... (Montreal, 1923); Programme-Souvenir: Fête du Travail des Syndicats Catholiques Nationaux (Montreal, 1931) (copies in Bibliothèque Nationale in Montreal). 42 Labor Advocate (Toronto), 11 September 1891, 324; Western Clarion, 10 September 1904, 1; 9 September 1905, 1; 10 September 1906, 1; 10 September 1910, 1; Leader (Regina), 8 September 1908, 1; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 2 September 1913, 3. 43 La Presse (Montreal), 29 April 1907, 14; 30 April 1907, 14, 16; 1 May 1907, 10; 2 May 1907, 1, 9; Star (Montreal), 29 April 1908, 6; 1 May 1908, 6; 2 May 1908, 32; 4 May 1908, 1; 1 May 1909, 17; 3 May 1909, 1; 25 April 1910, 1; 2 May 1910, 2, 5; 1 May 1914, 9; 2 May 1914, 2; Gazette (Montreal) 1 May 1906, 4; 2 May 1906, 12; 1 May 1907, 5; 2 May 1907, 42 May 1914, 4; Larivière, Le 1er mai; Rouillard, Histoire du syndicalisme québécois, 109; Varpu Lindstrom-Best, ‘Canadian Mining Towns: A Photo-Montage,’ in Hopkin and Kealey, eds., Class, Community, and the Labour Movement, 212. 44 Robert Cupido, ‘Parks, Parades, and Popular Protest: May Day in Toronto, 1929–1939’ (Major Research Paper, Department of History, York University 1995), 2. 45 Ian Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks: The Early Years of the Communist Party of Canada (Montreal: Vanguard Publications 1981), 17; Worker (Toronto), 15 May 1922, 1, 4; 16 May 1923, 1, 4; 17 May 1924, 1, 4; 16 May 1925, 1; 15 May 1926, 1, 2; 14 May 1927, 1, 2; 19 May 1928, 1, 2; 18 May 1929, 1, 2;

315

Notes to pages 172–4

46 47 48

49

3 May 1930, 1, 2, 4; Globe (Toronto), 7 September 1920, 6; Tribune (Winnipeg), 2 May 1924, 8; Sun (Vancouver), 2 May 1920, 5; 1 May 1924, 2; 2 May 1927, 4; 2 May 1929, 7; Smith, Let Us Rise, 21, 79, 84; Working Lives Collective, Working Lives, 178–9. A Worker correspondent from the Lakehead was struck by the predominance of Ukrainians and Finns in local May Day celebrations: ‘It seems as if the English-speaking workers like to bow the knee to the boss, and are satisfied with the Labour Day handed to them on the first Monday in September’; 15 May 1926, 2. Maritime Labor Herald (Glace Bay), 3 May 1924, 1. Worker (Toronto), 3 May 1930, 1; 9 May 1931, 4; Cupido, ‘Parks, Parades, and Popular Protest,’ 8–28. The artistic dimensions of the ‘popular front’ that was being created on the left in North America in the mid-1930s is explored in Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Verso 1997). Gazette (Montreal), 2 May 1919, 5; 3 May 1920, 5; Sun (Vancouver), 2 May 1920, 5; 2 May 1929, 7; 2 May 1935, 1; 2 May 1936, 2; 2 May 1938, 20, 21; 1 May 1939, 1, 2; 1 May 1940, 27; 2 May 1940, 17; Tribune (Winnipeg), 2 May 1921, 6; 2 May 1922, 16; 2 May 1924, 8; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 2 May 1930, 10; 2 May 1932, 1; 2 May 1933, 1; 2 May 1934, 1; 2 May 1935, 1; 2 May 1936, 1; 2 May 1937, 1; 2 May 1938, 1; 2 May 1939, 2; 2 May 1940, 1; Worker (Toronto), 14 May 1927, 1; 9 May 1931, 1, 4; 7 May 1932, 1, 2, 4; 6 May 1933, 1, 2; 13 May 1933, 3; 5 May 1934, 1; 12 May 1934, 5; 2 May 1935, 1, 2; 1 May 1939, 3; Clarion (Toronto), 1 May 1939, 3; 2 May 1939, 1; 3 May 1939, 1, 3; May Day Celebration Souvenir Program (1940) (copy in City of Vancouver Archives, Pamphlet 1940–124); Cupido, ‘Parks, Parades, and Popular Protest’; Lisa-Rose Betcherman, The Little Band: The Clashes between the Communists and the Political and Legal Establishment in Canada, 1928–1932 (Ottawa: Deneau 1982); Andrée Lévesque, Virage à gauche interdit: les communistes, les socialistes, et leurs énnemis au Québec, 1929–1939 (Montreal: Boréal Express 1984), 121–45; Communist Party of Canada, Canada’s Party of Socialism: History of the Communist Party of Canada, 1921–1976 (Toronto: Progress Books 1982). At various points between 1920 and 1940, May Day parades appeared on the streets of Glace Bay, Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton, Welland, London, Guelph, Kitchener, Windsor, Sudbury, Timmins, Kirkland Lake, Fort William/Port Arthur, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Lethbridge, Drumheller, Blairmore, Vancouver, and Victoria. In Quebec the repression of May Day marches never relented and indeed increased with the passing of the so-called ‘Padlock Law’ in 1937. Outside Glace Bay, the celebration never took root in Atlantic Canada.

316

Notes to pages 176–97

50 Maritime Labor Herald (Glace Bay), 3 May 1924, 1, 4; Sun (Vancouver), 1936, 2; Irene Howard, ‘The Mothers’ Council of Vancouver: Holding the Fort for the Unemployed, 1935–1938,’ BC Studies 69–70 (spring-summer 1986), 249–87. 51 Worker (Toronto), 17 May 1924, 1; 16 May 1925, 1; 3 May 1930, 2; 7 May 1932, 2; 6 May 1933, 1; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 2 May 1930, 10; Cupido, ‘Parks, Parades, and Popular Protest,’ 72. 52 Worker (Toronto), 4 May 1926, 4. 53 Sun (Vancouver), 2 May 1935, 1; 2 May 1938, 20; Cupido, ‘Parks, Parades, and Popular Protest.’ 54 Cupido, ‘Parks, Parades, and Popular Protest,’ 53–4, 61, 66; Bruce Kidd, ‘“We Must Maintain a Balance between Propaganda and Serious Athletics”: The Workers’ Sports Movement in Canada, 1924–36,’ in Morris Mott, ed., Sports in Canada: Historical Readings (Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman 1989), 247–64. 55 For a sampling of the cultural products of radical politics in this period, see Sean Purdy, Radicals and Revolutionaries: The History of Canadian Communism from the Robert S. Kenny Collection (Toronto: University of Toronto Library 1998). 56 Spectator (Hamilton), 2 May 1932, 1; Tribune (Winnipeg), 2 May 1935, 2. 6 Clenched Fists, Clowns, and Chilling Out 1 Ralph Ellis, ‘The Unionization of a Mill Town: Cornwall in 1936,’ The Register, 2, no.1 (March 1981): 83–101; and ‘Textile Workers and Textile Strikes in Cornwall, Sherbrooke, and St. Gregoire de Montmorency, 1936–1939’ (Paper presented to the Canadian Historical Association, Montreal 1985). 2 Craig Heron, The Canadian Labour Movement: A Short History (2nd ed., Toronto: James Lorimer 1996). 3 Spectator (Hamilton), 3 September 1946, 4; Expositor (Brantford), 7 September 1948, 13; Globe and Mail (Toronto), 2 September 1947, 3; Star (Windsor), 4 September 1945, 5; 6 September 1949, 5. In Windsor, the Fire Department continued to organize the picnic and field day after the Labour Council took control of the parade. 4 In the late 1940s towns and cities that held Labour Day parades (with some union content) included St John’s, Corner Brook, Sydney, Halifax, Liverpool, Quebec, Montreal, Valleyfield, Hull, Ottawa, Cornwall, Peterborough, Toronto, Hamilton, Brantford, Kitchener, London, St Thomas, Windsor, Goderich, Sault Ste Marie, Owen Sound, Sudbury, Little Current, Coniston, Espanola, and (on the west coast) Lake Cowichan. In this enumeration, we do not include parades like ‘Gala Day’ in Berwick, Nova Scotia, community

317

Notes to pages 199–207

5 6 7

8

9

10

11

12 13 14 15 16

organized events with no labour content or participation that happened to be held on Labour Day. Post (Sydney), 3 September 1946, 3; Globe (Toronto), 3 September 1946; Sufrin, Eaton Drive, 87, 104–5, 127, 166. Steelworker and Miner (Sydney), 7 September 1946, 1. By this point there was no celebration of May Day in Cape Breton. Gazette (Montreal), 7 September 1943, 16; 3 September 1946, 13, 15; Globe and Mail (Toronto), 4 September 1945, 13; 2 September 1947, 3; Gazette (Glace Bay), 2 September 1946, 1. Citizen (Ottawa), 7 September 1937, 15; 2 September 1946, 3; 2 September 1947, 11; 7 September 1948, 10; 2 September 1952, 9; Gazette (Montreal), 6 September 1937, 11, 19; 5 September 1938, 11; 1 September 1945, 14; 6 September 1948, 2; 5 September 1950, 19; 3 September 1951, 11; Globe and Mail (Toronto), 6 September 1948, 12; Rouillard, Histoire du syndicalisme au Québec. In Sudbury, for example, a successful parade in 1946, featuring Mine Mill members from several workplaces and the union’s ladies auxilliary, was followed by a more disappointing effort two years later. ‘Two floats brightened the otherwise drab march,’ a local journalist reported, noting that the parade took ‘two minutes and 20 seconds to pass in review.’ There were no further parades in Sudbury until 1969, when the two key local unions, Mine Mill and Steel, joined forces in a combined march through the city, an effort not repeated in subsequent years. Star (Sudbury), 3 September 1946, 12; 7 September 1948, 1; 2 September 1969, 2. In Timmins, for example, the 1944 banners carried startlingly new slogans: ‘Hitler Is Our Main Grievance’ and ‘Make Your Dollars Fight.’ The celebrations also became more respectable. In Edmonton that year, the local Labour Council sponsored the parade, which included ‘a motorcycle detachment of city police and massed bands of the RCAF’ as well as many union contingents. Tribune (Toronto), 13 May 1944, 3. Gazette (Glace Bay), 11 June 1946, 3; Cape Breton Post (Sydney), 12 June 1957, 27; 12 June 1967, 10. Christina M. Lamey, ‘Davis Day through the Years: A Cape Breton Coal Mining Tradition,’ Nova Scotia Historical Review, 16, no.2 (1996): 23–33. Oshaworker (Oshawa), 15 August 1945, 3. Canadian Unionist, September 1955, 350, 351. Globe and Mail (Toronto), 3 September 1946, 3; Star (Sudbury), 7 September 1948, 10; Gazette (Montreal), 2 September 1947, 3, 11. Globe and Mail (Toronto), 7 September 1971, 5. Gazette (Montreal), 6 September 1932, 3; Free Press (London), 3 September

318

Notes to pages 207–19

17 18

19

20 21 22

23 24

1946, 24; Sufrin, Eaton Drive, 127, 166. In the 1960s Hamilton unionists were still crowning ‘Miss Labour Union’; Spectator (Hamilton), 6 September 1966, 62. In Kitchener the woman chosen was known as Miss Labour Day. Gazette (Montreal), 3 September 1946, 3; Globe and Mail (Toronto), 2 September 1947, 3; Steel Labour, October 1947, 12. Gazette (Montreal), 7 September 1920, 4; 3 September 1922, 3; 3 September 1929, 4; 2 September 1930, 4; 3 September 1946, 13; Globe and Mail (Toronto), 7 September 1943, 4; 5 September 1944, 4; 7 September 1948, 1; 2 September 1952, 1; 5 September 1961, 5; 6 September 1966, 5; 2 September 1947, 3; Sun (Vancouver), 5 May 1947, 9; Spectator (Hamilton), 6 September 1966, 62 (the winner of Hamilton’s Miss Labour Union beauty contest that year was a secretary in a real estate office sponsored by the boot-andshoe workers’ union); Free Press (London), 5 September 1970, 49; Star (Sudbury), 7 September 1971, 1, 17; 7 September 1976, 3; 6 September 1977, 3; 8 September 1981, 3. By 1981, a male beauty contest had been added, but that seems to have been the last year for such events in Sudbury. Gazette (Montreal), 7 September 1937, 11; 7 September 1943, 15; Star (Sudbury), 3 September 1946, 12; Globe (Toronto), 7 September 1937, 4; 5 September 1944, 4; also 4 September 1945, 13; Spectator (Hamilton), 3 September 1946, 4. Expositor (Brantford), 7 September 1948, 10; 7 September 1965, 13. Gazette (Montreal), 7 September 1937, 11. This style of multicultural friendship, which looked to both international events, like the United Nations, and to the local ethnic mix as a source of cosmopolitan interest, co-existed with continuing discrimination. On the same dynamic in other contexts, see Kay Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1991), 155–77; Franca Iacovetta, Such Hardworking People: Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1992), 103–23; Iacovetta, ‘Making “New Canadians”: Social Workers, Women, and the Reshaping of Immigrant Families,’ in Franca Iacovetta and Mariana Valverde, Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women’s History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 261–303. Robert Cupido discusses the idea for an earlier period. See his ‘“Sixty Years of Canadian Progress”: The Diamond Jubilee and the Politics of Commemoration,’ Canadian Issues/Thèmes canadiens 20 (1998), 19–33, and ‘Appropriating the Past: Pageants, Politics, and the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation,’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 9 (1998), 155–86. Star (Windsor), 3 September 1960, 3. Stanley G. Grizzle with John Cooper, My Name’s Not George: The Story of the

319

Notes to pages 219–22

25

26

27

28

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in Canada (Toronto: Umbrella Press 1998), 48; Frank Colantonio, From the Ground up: An Italian Immigrant’s Story (Toronto: Between the Lines 1997); Globe and Mail (Toronto), 7 September 1971, 5; 4 September 1973, 4; Star (Windsor), 5 September 1972, 12. Star (Sudbury), 3 September 1946, 12; Free Press (London), 3 September 1946, 24; Star (Windsor), 5 Sept 1950, 5; Globe and Mail (Toronto), 3 September 1952, 2; Tribune (Bathurst), 7 September 1972, 12; 5 September 1973, 3; 4 September 1974, 1, 4; 8 September 1976, 13; 7 September 1977, 1, 3; 7 September 1978, 13; Expositor (Brantford), 7 September 1954, 11; Spectator (Hamilton), 5 September 1972, 10; 4 September 1979, 10. Sun (Vancouver), 30 November 1963, 2 (Grey Cup parade); Free Press, (London), St Thomas edition, 1 December 1958, n.p. (Santa Claus parade in Simcoe, Ontario); Star (Toronto), 24 November 1951, 1, 2 (Grey Cup parade); Star (Sudbury), 2 July 1967, 4 (centennial parade); Free Press (London), 23 November 1957, 23 (Santa Claus parade sponsored by Downtown London Association). The literature on twentieth-century parades in still underdeveloped, but see Cupido, ‘“Sixty Years” and ‘Appropriating the Past’; Timothy Kelly, ‘Suburbanization and the Decline of Catholic Public Ritual in Pittsburgh,’ Journal of Social History (winter 1994), 311–30; Robert E. Walls, ‘Green Commonwealth: Forestry, Labor, and Public Ritual in the Post-World War II Pacific Northwest,’ Pacific Northwest Quarterly (summer 1996), 117–29; Jack Kugelman, ‘Wishes Come True: Designing the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade,’ Journal of American Folklore 104 (1991), 443–65; Kim Carter, ‘Put on a Parade,’ Canadian Heritage (December 1986), 14–20; Eva-Marie Kroller, ‘Le Mouton de Troie: Changes in Quebec Cultural Symbolism,’ American Review of Canadian Studies (winter 1997), 523–44; Peter Jackson, ‘The Politics of the Streets: A Geography of Caribana,’ Political Geography 11, no.2 (March 1992), 130–51; Joe McCarthy, ‘The Gra-a-and Parade,’ American Heritage (February 1969), 54–9. These works were supplemented with a survey of some major parading traditions in large cities across Canada, including Orange Order celebrations, Grey Cup, Santa Claus, Vancouver’s Pacific National Exhibition parade, the Calgary Stampede parade, the St Catharines Grape and Wine Festival, Oktoberfest, several city anniversaries, celebrations of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953; centennial parades in 1967; and others. This enumeration is meant to be suggestive rather than complete. Considerably more work needs to be done on the shape and meaning of parading traditions in the twentieth century, especially in more sprawling and automobile-dominated cities. ‘Coming to Town,’ Saturday Night, 20 December 1949, 19; Free Press (Lon-

320

Notes to pages 224–6

don), 23 November 1957, 3; 27 November 1961, 3; ‘Santa Claus C.O.D.,’ Saturday Night, 27 December 1949, 9; Canadian Business, (December 1949), 52. 29 The Grey Cup parade was the most famous parade linked to a sports event and was part of a three-day celebration designed to make money off tourists. The Financial Post estimated that Toronto ended up $1,000,000 richer by hosting the Grey Cup in 1956. The parade was started somewhat spontaneously by a group of Calgary fans in 1948. In 1951, seeing its value as part of the larger spectacle, the Junior Board of Trade stepped in to organize a formal (and mammoth) parade. When the Grey Cup game first travelled to Vancouver in 1955, the parade idea went with it. See Financial Post, 30 November 1957, 1; Globe and Mail (Toronto), 29 November 1948, 1; Saturday Night, 24 November 1951, 14, 35; Sun (Vancouver), 26 November 1955, 10. For Vancouver, the Pacific National Exhibition (PNE), an industrial exhibition in its early days, became a huge tourist boon for the local economy, attracting well over 800,000 visitors by 1954. The PNE opened with a parade each year. Financial Post, 20 March 1954, 48. By 1972, KitchenerWaterloo’s Oktoberfest was attracting visitors from around the Golden Horseshoe, from the American northeast and midwest and even from outside North America. See J. Hutchinson and G. Wall, ‘Oktoberfest: Anatomy of a Festival,’ in G. Wall, ed., Recreational Land Use in Southern Ontario (Waterloo, Ont.: Department of Geography, University of Waterloo 1979), 220–1. Besides these and other exhibitions, there was an astonishing proliferation of parades meant to honour various types of flora, fauna, and consumables. A partial list includes: the Chilliwack Cherry Carnival, the Welland Rose Festival, the Niagara Falls Blossom Festival, the Annapolis Valley Apple Blossom Festival, the Brampton Flower Festival, the Niagara Grape and Wine Festival (centred in St Catharines), Oktoberfest (Waterloo), and on and on and on. For examples, see Robert Meyer Jr, Festivals U.S.A. & Canada (New York: Washburn 1967). 30 On union participation in commercial celebrations, see, for example, Sun (Vancouver), 26 August 1936, 2 (Sheet Metal Workers Local 280 float in PNE parade); Standard (St. Catharines), 26 September 1966, 7 (Welland Labour Council float in Grape and Wine parade). On union-sponsored floats, the Windsor Star noted in 1952 that ‘professional talent’ built three of the four floats in the parade that year. Star (Windsor), 2 September 1952, 6. In response to the increasing use of professional floats, organizing committees in many cities awarded separate prizes for professional and amateur floats. 31 Star (Windsor), 4 September 1956, 17; 3 September 1957, 3, 6; 2 September 1958, 6; 6 September 1960, 3; 5 September 1961, 3, 6.

321

Notes to pages 227–32

32 Star (Windsor), 3 September 1957, 3, 6. 33 Heron, Canadian Labour Movement, 85–106; Palmer, Working Class Experience, 313–33. 34 When the parade was revived for one year in 1980, there were clowns tossing candy to the crowds and a female impersonator on roller skates sporting the sign ‘union maid.’ Paul Vasey, ‘The Labor Day Parade ... an Obit,’ Star (Windsor), 30 August 1975, 33; Free Press (London), 2 September 1980, A9; 4 September 1989, C1. The Windsor parade returned with much less commercialism in 1982. 35 Star (Windsor), 1 September 1973, 3, 4. 36 In 1971, for example, only 125 of 8,000 members of the mighty UAW Local 199 showed up, and only 16 of the 1,200 UAW Local 676 members marched. Standard (St Catharines), 7 September 1971, 7. 37 Some of the banners that St Catharines unionists carried in the Merriton Community Fun Day parade included ‘311,000 Unemployed. Ensure a Better Future for Our Children. Demand Action Now. You May be Next!’ (Niagara Falls Labor Council, 1960) and ‘The People’s Voice Must Be Heard. Peace in Vietnam’ (UAW, 1968). In 1966 a railway workers float protested back-towork legislation and censured their bosses for not meeting their demands and ‘their [union] leaders for “selling them down the river.”’ Standard (St Catharines), 7 September 1971, 7; 6 September 1960, 3; 3 September 1968, 7; 6 September 1966, 7. The St Catharines and District Labour Council continues to participate in the Merriton Community Day parade. It makes for some strange contrasts. In 2000, even as Tim Lambert, president of CAW Local 676, asserted that Labour Day is ‘a way of expressing our solidarity together,’ parade organizer and former Lions Club president Robert Schram was reminding the Standard reporter that ‘It’s a fun day parade, not a labour day parade.’ Standard (St Catharines) 5 September 2000, A10. 38 Free Press (London), 3 September 1985, C1; 2 September 1986, C1; 5 September 1989, B7; see also 4 September 1990, B2; Tribune (Bathurst), 7 September 1972, 12; 5 September 1973, 3; 4 September 1974, 1, 4; 8 September 1976, 13, 7 September 1977, 1, 3; 7 September 1978, 13. 39 Free Press (London), 4 September 1973, 3. Between 10,000 and 15,000 spectators typically watched Sarnia’s Labour Day parade each year through the 1980s – an impressive figure for a city with a population around 80,000. Free Press (London), 7 September 1982, C15; 6 September 1983, B1; 4 September 1984, C1; 3 September 1985, C1; 2 September 1986, C1; 5 September 1989, B7. 40 Spectator (Hamilton), 4 September 1976, 6; 7 September 1976, 7, 47; 2 September 1980, 7; 4 September 1984, A10; 8 September 1987, D1; Globe

322

Notes to pages 235–44

41

42

43

44

45

46

47 48

and Mail (Toronto), 5 September 1978, 7; 8 September 1987, D1; 6 September 1988, A16; Star (Sudbury), 2 September 1975, 1; Star (Windsor), 7 September 1971, 20; 7 September 1982, A1, A6; 6 September 1983, A1; 4 September 1984, A1, A4; 3 September 1985, A1, A4; 8 September 1987, A3; 4 September 1990, A1, A4. Globe and Mail (Toronto), 6 September 1966, 5; 8 September 1970, 5; 3 September 1974, 5; 2 September 1975, 4; 6 September 1977, 1; 8 September 1981, 5; 6 September 1983, 5; Spectator (Hamilton), 5 September 1989, B3; Star (Sudbury), 2 September 1980, 5. Globe and Mail (Toronto), 2 September 1975, 4; 3 September 1985, 17; 8 September 1987, A19; 6 September 1988, A16; Rosemary Donegan, Industrial Images/Images industrielles (Hamilton: Art Gallery of Hamilton 1987), 66–8. Communist women in Canada celebrated International Women’s Day as early as the 1920s, holding large public meetings that featured speech making in many languages, singing, poetry readings, and entertainment. These meetings were normally held indoors, and it does not appear that parades were a normal part of IWD in Canada until the 1970s. On early IWD celebrations, see Joan Sangster, Dreams of Equality: Women on the Canadian Left, 1920–1950 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1989), 43. Carolyn Egan and Lynda Yantz, ‘Building Links: Labour and the Women’s Movement,’ in Linda Briskin and Linda Yantz, eds., Union Sisters: Women and the Labour Movement (Toronto: Women’s Press 1983), 361–75; Patricia McDermott, ‘The Eaton’s Strike: We Wouldn’t Have Missed It for the World!’ in Linda Briskin and Patricia McDermott, eds., Women Challenging Unions: Feminism, Democracy, and Militancy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993), 23–43; Linda Briskin, ‘Union Women and Separate Organizing,’ in ibid., 89–108; Julie White, Sisters and Solidarity: Women and Unions in Canada (Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing 1993). Spectator (Hamilton), 8 September 1970, 10 (the first year that the Miss Labour Day and baby contests were not held in Hamilton); Globe and Mail (Toronto), 8 September 1981, 5. Six ‘exotic dancers’ also marched in 1983; ibid., 6 September 1983, 5. Gazette (Glace Bay), 11 June 1946, 3; Cape Breton Post (Sydney), 12 June 1957, 27; 12 June 1967, 10; Lamey, ‘Davis Day.’ In a similar vein, in 1984, Canadian unionists began to set aside 28 April as a memorial day for those injured and killed on the job in Canada.; see Ed Thomas, Dead But Not Forgotten. Monuments to Workers (Hamilton: privately published, 2001), 6. Sun (Vancouver), 1 May 1946, 1; 5 May 1947, 9; 3 May 1948, 3; 2 May 1949, 17; 9 May 1949, 17; 1 May 1950, 6; 5 May 1952, 17. Gazette (Montreal), 3 May 1982, A1; Sun (Vancouver), 1 May 1971, 20; 1 May

323

Notes to pages 244–53

49

50 51 52

53

54

55

1972, 12; 2 May 1977, 17; 1 May 1978, 11; 3 May 1982, A3; 2 May 1983, A3; 2 May 1985, A12; 2 May 1986, B3; Express (Vancouver), 2 May 1979, 7. Rouillard, Histoire du syndicalisme québécois, 339; Beatrice Chiasson et al., History of the Labour Movement in Quebec (Montreal: Black Rose Books 1987), 218–19; Gazette (Montreal), 2 May 1970, 1, 2; 1 May 1973, 1 May 1974, 4; 2 May 1974, 3; 2 May 1975, 1, 3; 1 May 1976, 1, 4; 3 May 1976, 3; 2 May 1977, 2; 1 May 1978, 3; 2 May 1978, 8; 2 May 1979, 2; 2 May 1980, 2; 2 May 1981, 1; Carla Lipsig-Mumme, ‘The Web of Dependence: Quebec Unions in Politics Before 1976,’ in Michael D. Behiels, ed., Quebec since 1945: Selected Readings (Toronto: Copp-Clark Pitman 1987), 133–56; Ralph Peter Guntzel, ‘The Conféderation des syndicats nationaux (CSN), the Idea of Independence, and the Sovereigntist Movement, 1960–1980,’ Labour/Le Travail 31 (spring 1993), 145–73. Gazette (Montreal), 2 May 1974, 3; 2 May 1980, 2; 3 May 1982, A1. Star (Windsor), 1 September 1973, 3–4. Rutherford, A Victorian Authority; and When Television Was Young: Primetime Canada, 1952–1967 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1990); Donald G. Wetherell with Irene Kmet, Useful Pleasures, 247–308. Bella, Christmas Imperative; Gazette (Montreal), 1 September 1945, 14. Star (Windsor), 4 September 1982, A1, A6 Starweek, 11–18 November 1972, n.p. The paper’s parade coverage consisted of six brief paragraphs of highlights in the main Labour Day stay, a handful of photos, and a story on prize winners. Globe and Mail (Toronto), 2 September 1947, 3, 7. The pattern across Ontario was similar, though uneven. In 1954, for example, the London Free Press noted that the local parade was one of the best in the city’s history, but the paper devoted much more space to the baby contest (three photos and a full stay) than to the parade (nineteen words). Free Press (London), 7 September 1954, 3, 6, 16. The Windsor Star’s coverage tended to be more complete than that in other cities, but even then the paper sometimes simply mentioned who entered floats rather than describing them in detail. James W. Simmons, Toronto’s Changing Retail Complex: A Study in Growth and Blight (Chicago: University of Chicago, Department of Geography, Research Paper no.104, 1966); James Lorimer, The Developers (Toronto: Lorimer 1978); Gareth Shar, ‘Shopping Centre Developments in Toronto,’ in John A. Dawson and J. Dennis Lord, Shopping Centre Development: Policies and Prospects (New York: Nichols Publishing Co 1985), 105–25; Richard Walker and Robert D. Lewis, ‘Beyond the Crabgrass Frontier: Industry and the Spread of North American Cities, 1850–1950,’ Journal of Historical Geography 2, no.1 (2001), 3–19; Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The

324

Notes to pages 255–6

56

57 58

59 60

Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003), 257–89. Heron, Canadian Labour Movement, 75–91; Palmer, Working Class Experience, 269–72; Sam Ginden, The Canadian Autoworkers: The Birth and Transformation of a Union (Toronto: Lorimer 1995), 107–38. Cohen, Consumers’ Republic, 62–165. See, in particular, Canadian Labour, August 1956, 25; Standard (St Catharines), 6 September 1955, 5. On the spreading out of cities, Doug Owram writes: ‘In Montreal, in 1991, two thirds of the population lived within 6.5 kilometres of the city centre. By 1961 the same population would be spread out over a 13-kilometre radius.’ Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), 68. See also Richard Harris, Creeping Conformity: How Canada Became Suburban (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2004); ‘Home Ownership and Class in Modern Canada,’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 10, no.1 (1986), 67–86; and Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto’s American Tragedy, 1900 to 1950 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press 1996); S.D. Clark, The Suburban Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1966); John R. Miron, Housing in Canada: Demographic Change, Housing Formation, and Housing Demand (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1988); Miron ed., House, Home, and Community: Progress in Housing Canadians, 1945–1986 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1993); Expositor (Brantford), 6 September 1966, 13. On commuting patterns by Ford Oakville workers, see Don Wells, ‘The Impact of the Postwar Compromise on Canadian Unionism: The Formation of an Auto Worker Local in the 1950s,’ Labour/Le Travail 36 (fall 1995), 161, 172. Free Press (London), 3 September 1946, 24. R. Louis Gentilcore and C. Grant Head, Ontario’s History in Maps (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 164. A classic academic analysis of this change in street culture, a view not universally accepted by scholars, is Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York: Columbia University Press 1994). Others have tackled the question with varying degrees of polemicism. See also Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books 1961); Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (New York: Vintage Books 1992); Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Noonday Press 1994). James Baldwin argues that some, but not all, of the streets in Hartford were transformed from public spaces to traffic corridors by 1930. See his

325

Notes to pages 257–60

61 62

63 64 65

66

67

Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850–1930 (Columbus: Ohio State University 1999). A useful Canadian study of the regulation of the streets is Stephen Davies, ‘Reckless Walking Must Be Discouraged: The Automobile Revolution and the Shaping of Modern Urban Canada to 1930,’ Urban History Review 18, no.2 (October 1989), 123–38. Globe and Mail (Toronto), 3 September 1946, 5; Chronicle-Herald (Halifax) 2 September 1952, 20. Star (Windsor), 3 September 1977, 5; Free Press (London), 4 September 1989, B3; Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend, 162–85; Clawson, ‘Development of Recreation’; Hall, Parks for Profit; Wilson, The Culture of Nature, 19–44. The series of new and revised acts covering shorter work days and work weeks that passed through provincial legislatures in the 1940s are summarized in Canada, Department of Labour, Provincial Labour Standards ... (Ottawa: King’s Printer [annual]). Heron, ‘Factory Workers.’ Margaret E. McCallum, ‘Corporate Welfarism in Canada, 1919–1939,’ Canadian Historical Review 71, no.1 (March 1990), 68. In 1944, for example, the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada demanded that ‘all workers be granted at least two weeks holidays with pay and the making available of transportation to health[y] and natural recreation centres at a minimal cost.’ Labour Gazette (Ottawa), November 1944, 1430. The average number of weeks of vacation per year in manufacturing rose from 2.3 in 1949 to 3.6 in 1979; Canada, Royal Commission on Economic Union and the Development Prospects for Canada, Report (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services 1985), vol.2, 646. George A. Martin, ‘Postponing Labour Day,’ Canadian Unionist, February 1951, 32–3; Harry Bruce, ‘Labor Day: The Holiday That Makes You Grow Up,’ Citizen (Ottawa), 2 September 1978 (The Canadian), 2. Star (Sudbury), 28 August 1929, 15; Globe and Mail (Toronto), 6 September 1948, 7. The historical literature on consumption in Canada after the Second World War – and especially the place of the working class within it – is still underdeveloped. For instructive starting points, see Donica Belisle, ‘Toward a Canadian Consumer History,’ Labour/Le Travail, 52 (fall 2003), 181–206; Magda Fahrni, ‘Under Reconstruction: The Family and the Public in Postwar Montreal, 1944–1949’ (PhD Thesis, York University 2001); Joy Parr, Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1999); Bryan Palmer, Working Class Experience, 229–36, 386–92; Cynthia Wright, ‘Feminine Trifles of Vast Importance: Writing Gender into the History of Consumption,’ in Franca

326

Notes to pages 260–9

68 69

70 71 72

73 74

75

76 77

78 79 80 81

Iacovetta and Mariana Valverde, eds., Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women’s History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1992), 229–60. Chronicle Journal (Thunder Bay), 2 September 1989, 2; 1 September 1990, B6; Chronicle-Herald (Halifax), 5 September 1970, 23. Globe and Mail (Toronto), 5 September 1961, 31. In 1970 both Eaton’s and Simpson’s stayed open on Labour Day, citing consumer demand. A Simpson’s spokesperson noted that suburban shopping centre volumes proved that consumers wanted to shop on holidays. Star (Toronto), 2 September 1970, A10. See chapter 4. Citizen (Ottawa), 31 August 1956, 6; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 3 September 1966, 7. There were some exceptions to this trend, mainly in union towns. In Sydney, Nova Scotia, for example, eight local taverns jointly placed a medium-sized ad to salute labour in 1970. Cape Breton Post (Sydney), 7 September 1970. In Sudbury in the early 1980s, a few tribute ads reappeared, often depicting both sexes as workers and including a variety of jobs, including traditionally female jobs like nursing. These ads were co-sponsored by local unions and companies. See Star (Sudbury), 4 September 1982, 17; 30 August 1986, 21. Spectator (Hamilton), 2 September 1972, 6. Citizen (Ottawa), 30 August 1947, 32; 30 August 1952, 6. In 1956 the paper had one of each kind of editorial. See 31 August 1956, 6, for traffic editorial and 1 September 1956, 6, for labour editorial. Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 6 September 1948, 11; 3 September 1956, 11. In a curious twist, a Canadian Press story about striking nurses in Montreal in 1976 counterposed their rights as unionists to their potential threat to patients injured in automobile accidents on provincial highways; Spectator (Hamilton), 4 September 1976, 15. Standard (St Catharines), 2 September 1950, 4; 1 September 1951, 4; 30 August 1952, 4; 5 September 1953, 4. Standard (St Catharines), 1 September 1951, 4; 4 September 1954, 4; 2 September 1955, 4; 1 September 1956, 4; 5 September 1959, 4; 5 September 1964, 6; 4 September 1965, 6; 3 September 1966, 10; 2 September 1967, 10. After 1967, the paper occasionally printed an ‘op ed’ piece on labour issues. Globe and Mail, 1 September 1947, 6. Citizen (Ottawa), 5 Sept. 1961, 2; Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 3 September 1966, 33; Standard (St Catharines), 4 September 1976, 3. Standard (St Catharines), 4 September 1976, 3. Chronicle-Herald (Halifax), 2 September 1961, 1.

327

Notes to pages 272–8

Conclusion: The Legacy of Labour Day 1

2

The social and cultural openness of such events has been called ‘liminality.’ The concept is developed in Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (London: Penguin 1974). For Canadian applications, see Walden, Becoming Modern in Toronto; Rogers, ‘Halloween in Urban North America,’ 461–77. Free Press (London), 2 September 1994, B1, B10; 3 September 1994, A1, A4, E5, D5; 6 September 1994, A5, B1, B5, D1.

328

INDEX

Aberdeen, Lady Ishbel, 302n70 aboriginal peoples, 20, 21, 70, 71, 219, 223, 225, 272, 290n38 advertisements, xvi, 84, 119, 124, 131, 136, 147, 148, 205, 260, 261, 313n20; as tributes to workers, 91–6, 261–3, 269, 327n72 affirmative action, 239 African Canadians, 18, 19, 37, 71, 127, 218, 289n37, 290n38, 290n39 aircraft workers, 205 alcohol, xii–xiii, 13, 29–30, 118, 129, 135, 246, 272. See also temperance; taverns All-Canadian Congress of Labour, 164 allegorical cars. See floats, work depicted on American Federation of Labor, 35, 36, 79, 119, 164 Amherst, N.S., 306n6 amusement parks, 128, 137. See also exhibitions Annapolis Valley Apple Blossom Festival, 321n29 apprentices, xii, 22, 41, 76, 78, 122 artists. See banners; Beveridge, Karl;

Brodeur, J.S.; Conde, Carole; Constable, Mike; illustrators; Jeffries, C.W.; Thomson, Murray Artists’ Union, 200 automation, 231, 235, 263 automobiles, 52, 75, 129, 137, 138, 153, 165, 201, 223, 227, 228, 256–7 automobile workers, 197, 205, 216, 223, 225, 226, 233, 248, 255, 266, 322n36, 322n37 Australia, 293n73 baby-carriage brigades, 176 baby contests, 132, 138, 323n45, 324n54 badges, xi, 41, 43, 47, 48, 51, 53, 55, 58, 170, 175, 272, 275 bakers, 46, 52, 54, 151 bands, xii, 4, 11, 12, 14, 16, 42, 45, 71, 124, 138, 147, 157, 158, 165, 170, 171, 181, 221, 227, 228, 318n10 banners, 12, 16, 42, 45, 51, 55, 57–66, 71, 76, 158, 160, 161, 165, 170, 182, 183, 199, 201, 203, 228, 231, 234, 237, 239, 244–6, 248, 272, 299n38, 318n10

Index

Calgary, Alta., 26, 58, 63, 64, 71, 222, 300n49, 303n82, 306n6, 311n6, 321n29 Calgary Stampede, 128, 320n27 Calithumpians, 14, 23, 45, 138, 296n5 camping, 257 Canada Day. See Dominion Day Canada Packers, 205 Canada Skate workers, 201 Canadian Congress of Labour, 165 Canadian Labour Congress, 165 Canadian National Exhibition, 30, 121, 128, 307n19 Canadian Tourist Association, 258 Cape Breton, 203, 241, 318n6. See also Glace Bay, N.S.; Sydney, N.S Caribana, 272 carnival(esque), 3, 13, 14–16, 18, 20, 23, 26, 45, 125, 127, 138, 219–32, 273 carpenters, 34, 54, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 64, 218–19, 301n63 carriage-makers, 298n32 carriages, 17–18, 41, 49, 51, 67, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 86, 153, 300n50 Catholicism, 3, 5, 9, 13, 21, 29, 37, 66–7, 106, 110, 165–6, 169, 189, 190, 202 Caughnawauga, Que., 21 charivari, 13, 14, 288n22 chautauqua, 307n14 Chicago, Ill., 33 children, 14, 54, 75, 76, 79, 121, 131, 138, 143, 149, 152, 158, 165, 173, 176–7, 184, 185, 213, 214, 216, 219, 221, 228, 235, 247, 272, 291n55, 300n50, 303n82 Chilliwack Cherry Carnival, 321n29 Chinese Canadians, 19, 71, 72, 180, 218

barbers, xi, 54, 152 beauty contests, 207, 208, 211, 212, 213, 225, 236, 276, 319n16, 319n18, 323n45 belsnickling, 3. See also carnival (esque); mumming benefits, 195, 228 Berlin, Ont. See Kitchener, Ont. Beveridge, Karl, 236, 237 bicycles, 74, 207, 213, 228 blackface, 20, 213 blacks. See African Canadians blacksmiths, 55, 66, 94, 298n31 boilermakers, 43, 46, 54, 55, 298n31 bookbinders, 54, 74 boosterism, xv, 16, 86–8, 111, 186, 224 Booth, J.R., 303n82 boot and shoe workers, 72, 74, 75, 152 Boy Scouts, 225 Brampton Flower Festival, 224 Brantford, Ont., 73, 197, 203, 213, 219, 255, 317n4 bricklayers, 43, 54, 57, 63 Bridgetown, N.S., 149 Bridgewater, N.S., 260 British Columbia, 55, 71, 123, 129 British Empire Steel Corporation, 172 Britishness, 8, 10, 48–51, 58, 66, 75–7, 81–2, 103–4, 111, 272 Broadbent, Ed, 235, 236 Brodeur, J.S., 85 Bruschesi, Archbishop Paul, 110 building trades, 54, 68, 151, 218, 264. See also bricklayers; carpenters; electricians; hod carriers; lathers; painters; plasterers; plumbers burlesque entertainers, 240 butchers, xi, xii, 27, 298n32

330

Index

Communist Party of Canada, 157, 163, 171, 173, 174, 177, 186, 187, 188, 189–90, 197, 203, 241, 242, 323n43 concerts, 38, 124, 127 Conde, Carole, 235–6, 237 conductors, 68 Congress of Industrial Organizations, 165 Conistan, Ont., 219, 317n4 Constable, Mike, 235 construction. See building trades consumerism, 194, 255, 257, 260–4, 263, 277–8, 326n67, 327n69 continental solidarity, 51, 77, 78–9 cooperation between labour and capital, 56, 64, 65, 79, 100–1, 103, 104, 190, 203, 205, 206. See also shaking hands Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, 174 coopers, 290n49, 298n32 cordage and twine workers, 204 Corner Brook, Nfld., 317n4 Cornwall, Ont., 194, 317n4 Corpus Christi, 13, 21 cost of living, 192–3, 196, 199, 200, 201, 244, 255, 263 costumes, 13, 16, 46, 52, 203, 206, 213, 217, 225, 272 cottages, summer, 257, 259, 263 Coxey’s Army, xii, 33 cowboys, 219, 224, 228, 276 craftsmen’s spectacle, xii–xviii, 86, 96, 105, 133, 143, 158–9, 164; decline, 144–54, 161–2, 189–90, 193, 195, 204, 205, 273, 276 Crockett, Davey, 223 cross-dressing, 74, 102, 322n34

Christmas, 3, 111, 261. See also Santa Claus Chrysler, 226 churches, xiii, 11, 14, 38, 66–7, 105– 12, 126, 139, 180, 202. See also Catholicism; Protestantism; social gospel cigarmakers, 46, 54, 65, 73, 76, 274, 306n2 circus, 5, 7, 17, 18, 23, 222, 224, 232, 236, 288n25 citizenship, 4, 43, 45, 48–52, 77, 88, 272 civic leaders, xiv, 14, 16, 20, 29, 35, 48, 57, 86, 139, 291n55, 300n50 civic workers, 154, 159, 210, 233, 299n32 clergy, xiv, xvii, 66–7, 135, 165–6, 268, 300n49 clerical workers, 211 cloakmakers, 171 clothiers. See tailors clothing, xi–xii, 13, 16, 40–3, 45–8, 47, 48, 55, 58, 74, 77–8, 130, 157, 170, 175, 206–7, 248, 274–5, 312n14 clowns, 20, 192–3, 219, 221, 222, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 236, 276, 322n34 coffins, as symbols, 190, 233–5 Cold War, 188, 241, 242, 276 collective bargaining, 161, 64–5, 99, 203, 206, 228, 234, 255, 257 commercialism, xvi–xvii, 17, 30–1, 38, 43, 48, 91–6, 112, 118, 124, 125–33, 135, 137, 140–1, 147–51, 153–4, 160, 186, 194, 197, 219, 222, 224, 227, 253, 264, 269, 273, 276, 321n30 communication, new forms of, 194, 248, 253, 273

331

Index

Canadian National Exhibition; Pacific National Exhibition

dancing, 3, 4, 23, 30, 38, 119, 124, 137, 239, 246 Davis, William (miner), 203 Davis, William (Ontario premier), 232 Davis Day, 203, 241 Dawson, B.C., 126 Dennison, Flora McDonald, 51 domestic labour, 76, 131, 134, 176, 260, 261 Dominion Day, 4, 5, 11, 16, 17, 20, 23, 27, 28, 30, 66, 104, 118, 134–5, 140, 258, 284n2, 291n55, 293n63 Dominion, N.S., 157 draymen. See teamsters dressmakers. See garment workers Drew, George, 200 drivers. See teamsters Drumheller, Alta., 177

farmers, xii, 33, 66, 92 feasts, 3 femininity, 15–18, 72–6, 207–15, 222, 236–40 feminism, xvi, 51, 238–40, 245, 323n43 Finnish Canadians, 171, 316n45 firefighters, xi, xii, 7, 12, 14, 45, 54, 138, 151, 152, 154, 155, 159, 197, 317n3; repressing May Day, 173 fireworks, 4, 127, 138 fishers, 55, 202 flags, 138, 160, 213; Canadian ensign, 50; French tricolour, 50, 51; Quebec, 244; red, 166–71, 184, 200, 294n75; Stars and Stripes, 50, 51, 77, 184; Union Jack, 10–11, 44, 48–9, 50, 162, 168, 184, 200, 287n12 floats, xi, 42, 51, 75, 85, 144, 153, 165, 198, 199, 205, 210, 211, 212, 215, 216, 222, 223, 224–6, 228, 230, 232, 235, 236, 246, 247, 248, 321n30; commercial, 56, 151 153, 154, 160, 186, 197, 219, 220, 224–5; company, xii, 56, 67, 71, 73, 75, 76, 138, 147, 150, 152, 152–3, 301n51, 313n21; May Day, 180–1, 186, 187, 189; prison bars on, 189, 198, 233– 5; products on, xiv, 27, 54, 76, 149, 150, 152–3, 205; work depicted on, xiv, 21, 27, 52–61, 67, 74, 151, 152–3, 204, 273, 298n32 Ford (Oakville, Ont.), 255 Foresters, Independent Order of, 5, 8, 11, 288n15 forty-hour week, 197, 199, 207, 257

Eaton’s, 92–4, 131, 152, 153, 199, 222, 224, 239, 251, 313n21, 327n69 Edmonton, Alta., 49, 65, 174, 185, 187, 222, 274, 318n10 effigies, 195, 234, 235, 236 eight-hour day, 115, 122. See also forty-hour week electricians, 43 electrical workers, 54, 59 elevator constructors, 274 Emancipation Day, 11, 18, 19, 37, 290n37 Empire Day. See Victoria Day employers, 11, 14, 22, 42, 67, 69, 86, 149, 171. See also floats, company Espanola, Ont., 160, 317n4 ethnicity, 11, 29, 71, 176, 213–19, 222, 225, 245, 272, 319n22 excursions, xiii, 4, 23, 34, 120, 126, 128, 129, 224, 257, 307n14, 321n29 exhibitions, 31, 126–8. See also

332

Index

246–8, 261, 278, 284n3, 289n37, 300n46, 311n6, 317n4, 319n16, 319n18, 323n45 Hardy, A.S., 99, 105 Hartman, Grace, 235 health insurance, 226, 229 hod carriers, 301n56 holidays, idea of, 3, 29, 82, 133–41; public/statutory, 31–8, 116–18, 133–40, 257–8, 273, 284n2, 292n63 hospital workers, 233, 235 hotel and restaurant workers, 177, 178, 238 hours of work, 30, 61,64, 65, 115, 122, 195, 197, 207, 258. See also eighthour day; forty-hour week; NineHour Movement Housewives’ Consumers’ Association, 212 housing, 232, 253, 254, 262 Howe, C.D., 196 Hull, Que., 153, 161, 202, 317n4 Humane Society, 149

fraternal societies, xiii, 7, 11, 29, 37, 45, 58, 66, 124, 177, 290n38 free trade, 232, 235, 236 freight-handlers, 301n56 fur workers/furriers, 46 gambling, 30, 125 Gananoque, Ont., 160 gardening, 131 garment workers, 74, 75,176, 205, 207, 213, 225 Gay Pride, 272 gender, 10–18, 23, 91–5, 187, 207. See also femininity; masculinity General Electric, 260 George, Henry, 74, 119 Glace Bay, N.S., 157, 172, 314n36, 316n49 Glorious 12th (12 July), 5, 11, 18, 27 Goderich, Ont., 290n49, 317n4 Gompers, Samuel, 79, 104, 119 Goodyear, 205 grain trimmers, 54 Grand Trunk Railway, 5 ‘Great Upheaval,’ 37, 79, 124 Greek Canadians, 218, 244 Grey Cup parade, 224, 251, 320n27, 321n29 Guelph, Ont., 8, 11, 27

ice-cream parlours, 128. See also commercialism illustrators, xvii, 82–6, 97–9 immigrant workers, 171, 218–19, 244 imperial identity. See Britishness Independence Day (4 July), 4 industrialization, 22, 30, 79, 146, 151–3, 164, 273 Ingersoll, Ont., 30 Inglis, 207, 215 injunctions, 233–4 International Nickel Company of Canada, 92 International Women’s Day, xv, 239–40, 323n43 Irish Canadians, 5, 11, 12, 13, 28

Halifax, 17, 18, 20, 27, 33, 40–2, 43, 46, 54, 57, 60, 68, 69, 73, 116, 129, 133, 143, 146, 300n50, 301n59, 308n29, 311n6, 311n8, 317n4 Halloween, 272 Hamilton, Ont., 11, 12, 18–20, 22, 24, 33, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 88, 118, 119, 121, 125, 133, 144, 145, 153, 155, 157, 173, 195, 197, 200, 203, 211, 219, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236,

333

Index

60, 104, 114, 119, 165, 302n70; statutory holiday, xiv, 31–3, 84, 115–18, 189, 190, 292n63, 293n66; timing of, 34–6; women in, 72–6. See also commercialism labourers, 61 Labour Progressive Party. See Communist Party of Canada labour-standards legislation, 258 Labour Sunday, 106, 108–12, 194, 268 labour theory of value, 55, 57–60, 66, 86–8, 104, 107, 111 Lake Cowichan, B.C., 214, 317n4 Lanctôt, Médéric, 22 lathers, 54 Latin-American Canadians, 244 laundry workers, xii, 72, 78 leisure, xii–xiii, xiv–xvii, 3, 27–31, 38, 112, 257, 263, 267, 269, 277; privatized 29, 30, 115, 131–40, 193; respectable, 118–22, 129, 193; rough, 30; shopping as, 118; tensions over, 29, 118–22, 129; working-class demands for, 36. See also alcohol; commercialism; holidays; hours of work; sports Liberal Party, 5 librarians, 233, 246 lithographers, 201 Little Current, Ont., 317n4 Liverpool, N.S., 317n4 loggers, 197 London, Ont., xi–xiv, 5, 7, 14, 20, 33, 51, 54, 57, 67, 75, 76, 96, 121, 139, 203, 208, 210, 219, 221, 222, 227, 232, 246, 257, 284n3, 288n15, 289n35, 306n2, 317n4 Long Branch, Ont., 129, 256 longshoremen, 54, 55, 68, 118

Italian Canadians, 169, 171, 218, 301n63 Jeffreys, C.W., 46 Jewish workers, 171, 301n63 journalists, 82–8 Jury, Alf, 104–5 King, William Lyon Mackenzie, 195 Kingston, Ont., 15, 88, 121, 149 Kitchener, Ont., 121, 201, 203, 213, 221, 223, 225, 228, 249, 274–5, 317n4, 319n16, 321n29 Knights of Labor, 34, 68, 74, 118, 155, 164, 293n63 Labatt’s, 221 labour, conceptions of, xiii–xiv, 57–61, 90; relationship with capital, 90–1, 97–9, 100–2, 122–3, 171, 188; religious origins, 107 labour councils, 42, 132, 193, 197, 202, 207, 227, 255, 261, 277, 300n50, 305n33, 307n14, 317n3, 318n10, 321n30, 322n37 Labour Day, bourgeois version, 84– 105, 194; as change of seasons, xvi, 36, 131, 254, 258, 259; compared with May Day, 36–7, 79, 81–2, 102– 4, 171–3, 174–88; as generic holiday, 111, 132, 257–69; meaning of, 81–112, 131–2, 140, 164, 193–4; messages issued by unions, 122; organizing, 41–3, 46, 68–9, 77–8, 122–4, 145–6, 149–51, 153, 295n2, 321n30; origins, xvii, 31–6, 89, 115– 19, 140; parades not held on, 119, 144–7, 311n6; prizes, 42, 69, 153, 248, 321n30; revivals and reinvention of, 159–62, 194–269; souvenirs,

334

Index

miners, 22, 33, 34, 36, 37, 55, 123, 157, 158, 159, 164, 172, 176, 177, 203, 205, 226, 314n36, 318n9 Miners’ Memorial Day. See Davis Day minstrel shows, 18, 23, 26. See also blackface Mira, N.S., 34 Mitchell, Humphrey, 196, 200 Moncton, N.B., 45, 56, 60, 120, 312n13 Montreal, 6, 22, 23, 28, 33, 50, 51, 68, 69, 71, 74, 76, 106, 110, 116, 117, 118, 121, 122, 125, 135, 145, 157, 162, 164, 165, 166–71, 172, 173, 184, 203, 205, 207, 212, 213, 222, 234, 243, 244, 245, 253, 294n75, 301n63, 307n14, 312n14, 317n4, 327n75 moulders, 46, 48, 54, 55, 60, 298n31 Mowat, Oliver, 5 Mulock, Sir William, 88 Mulroney, Brian, 235, 236 multiculturalism, 216, 319n22 mumming, 3 music. See bands; concerts; dancing; songs

long weekend, 257, 260 lumber mills, 76 machinists, 46, 63, 205, 212, 215, 299n32 majorettes, 209 Manitou, N.B., 138 marching, xiii, 11, 12, 16, 44, 45, 206, 175, 215, 220, 227, 228, 232, 247 Mardi Gras, 272 Marks, Joseph, xii masculinity, 74, 77–8, 80, 91–5, 111, 129, 239 masks, 13, 16, 45, 195 Masons, 5, 12 Massey-Ferguson, 223, 233 Massey-Harris, 210, 216, 217 matchworkers, 161 May Day, xv, 36; in Canada, 37, 166– 90, 202, 203, 239, 241–6, 276, 318n6, 318n10; children in, 173, 176–7; compared with Labour Day, 36–7, 79, 81–2, 102–4, 171–3, 174– 88, 266; early history of, 3, 36–7; in Europe, 36, 43, 79; origins of, 36–7; repression of, 167, 169–71, 172–3, 188, 241, 316n49; in United States, 103; women in, 173, 176–7, 182, 183 McGee, D’Arcy, 11 McGuire, P.J., 35 McLachlan, J.B., 102, 103 McVicar, Katie, 74 Merriton Community Days, 224, 228, 322n37 militancy, 155–62, 194–205, 227, 233, 242. See also ‘Great Upheaval’ military, 4, 11, 12, 14, 66, 127, 134, 291n55, 312n15 millmen, 76, 299n32

Nanaimo, B.C., 55, 76, 129 nationalism, French-Canadian, 2–3, 6, 7, 10, 21, 29, 37, 138–9, 165–6, 244; in labour movement, 162–6. See also Britishness New Democratic Party, 230, 232, 235 New Glasgow, N.S., 160 New Hamburg, Ont., 138 newsboys, 76 newsgirls, 76 newspapers, xvi, xvii, 16, 81–8, 110, 138, 144, 145, 157, 186–7, 248, 253, 269, 324n54; editorials in, 81–2, 90,

335

Index

paper workers, 75, 152 parades, xii–xvii, 4–28, 38, 134, 138; carnivalesque, 7, 15; circus, 16, 17, 18; commercial, 224–6, 248; election, 7, 12, 13, 289n29; of fraternal societies, 45; funeral, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11; illustrating, 85; International Women’s Day; Labour Day, 41–79, 120, 126, 132, 142–3, 143–62, 194–248; May Day, 166–90; meaning of, 11, 82; military, organization of, 11, 41–3, 206, 232, 274, 287n14, 291n55, 301n53; religious, 6, 11, 21, 165–6; respectable, xi–xii, 9–28, 118, 289n29; routes of, 7, 13, 180; rowdy, 7; Salvation Army, 22, 23, 25, 26; Santa Claus, 16, 219, 222, 223, 251, 320n27; strike, 22, 24, 155–62, 290n49; temperance, 17; torchlight, 12, 14, 16, 22; trades, 21, 23, 26, 72, 291n55; women in, 15–18, 23–6, 176, 182–4. See also craftsmen’s spectacle Parent, Madeleine, 275 Parti Québécois, 244 Patrons of Industry. See farmers pattern makers, 46 pay equity, 239 pensions, 229, 255 Peterborough, Ont., 121, 133, 317n4 photographers, xiv, 82–7 picnics, 23, 30, 34, 118, 124, 125, 129, 132, 137, 144, 146, 147, 166, 232, 249–51, 272, 295n2, 317n3; company, 306n2, 313n36 Pictou County, N.S., 120 placards. See signs plant closings, 232, 234, 263 Planter’s Peanuts, 220 plasterers, 54

129, 263, 266, 327n74; illustrations in, 80–6 New Waterford, N.S., 203 New Year’s Day, 3, 292n63 New York City, 32, 34 New Zealand, 294n73 Niagara Falls Blossom Festival, 321n29 Niagara Grape and Wine Festival, 224, 226, 320n27, 321n29, 321n30 Nine-Hour Movement, 22, 23, 73, 155, 61 North Sydney, N.S., 128 Norwich, Ont., 16 Nova Scotia, 128, 145, 157 nurses, 244, 327n74 occupational health and safety, 190, 203, 234, 323n46 Oddfellows, Independent Order of, 4 O’Donaghue, D.J., 22 Oktoberfest, 224, 320n27, 321n29 Ontario, 128, 145, 174, 203, 268; northern, 156, 157, 158, 171 Orange Order, 8, 17, 18, 320n27. See also Glorious 12th Organized Working Women, 240 Oshawa, Ont., 33, 205, 222 Ottawa, Ont., 8, 9, 12, 13, 16, 18, 20, 22, 33, 48, 51, 54, 71, 75, 76, 78, 116, 121, 125, 126, 145, 152, 153, 157, 162, 234, 263, 268, 285n5, 288n25, 302n70, 317n4 Owen Sound, Ont., 317n4 Pacific National Exhibition, 126, 320n27, 321n29, 321n30 packinghouse workers, 159, 205 painters, 54, 58, 76 panoramas, 125

336

Index

Queen’s Birthday. See Victoria Day Queen Victoria, 49

plumbers, xi, 48, 66, 71, 207 police, in parades, 45, 154, 159; repression by, 167, 169–73, 198, 199 politicians, xvi, xvii, 11, 22, 67, 86, 104, 187, 195, 196, 200, 232, 235, 263. See also civic leaders politics, xi–xii, 49, 51, 58, 60–6, 195, 228, 230, 240, 246 Polymorphians, 14, 45, 138 Port Colborne, Ont., 45, 121, 251, 291n55 Portuguese Canadians, 244 postal workers, 205 Prince of Wales, 11, 20, 21, 290n38 printers, xi, 40–2, 46, 54, 60, 76, 197, 207, 211, 212, 233–4 prison bars, as symbols, 198, 233–5 processions. See parades producer ideology, 45, 55–7, 66, 88, 90, 99 progress, idea of, 99, 103, 104 Protestantism, 8, 9, 13, 29, 37, 105– 10, 177. See also social gospel Protestant work ethic, 88, 90, 111 Provincial Workmen’s Association, 34, 164, 293n67 public-sector workers, 159, 211, 227, 233, 234, 235, 239, 244, 263. See also civic workers public space, xiii, 7, 8, 9, 20, 48, 82, 125, 172, 256, 285n5, 285n6, 286n7 public sphere, 16, 82, 134–5, 285n6 puppets, 232, 235 PWA Day. See Provincial Workmen’s Association

race, 10, 18–21, 71, 77, 91–6, 213–29, 236, 238, 272 radicalism, 196, 241, 242, 244, 276. See also Communist Party of Canada; feminism; May Day; New Democratic Party; socialists radio, 248, 253 railway companies, 133 railway workers, 159, 299n32, 322n37 Reagan, Ronald, 236 Regina, Saskatchewan, 121 religion, 58, 62, 66, 82, 105–12, 268, 269, 300n49. See also Catholicism; Protestantism Remembrance Day, 271 resorts. See excursions respectability, xiv, 4, 9–30, 38, 74, 77, 82, 83, 97–9, 118–19, 129, 133, 170, 175, 180, 193, 206, 220, 240, 272, 274, 276; craft, xi–xii, 40–52. See also clothing; parades, respectable restaurants, 129. See also commercialism retail clerks, 54, 67–8 retailers. See commercialism Rossland, B.C., 57 Royal Commission on Price Spreads, 153 Royal Commission on the Relations of Labour and Capital (1889), 32 rubber workers, 159, 192, 107, 204, 207, 228, 275 Russian Canadians, 169, 171

Quebec City, 110, 145, 151, 165, 317n4 Quebec (province), 21, 117, 145, 165–6, 202, 239, 243–6, 316n49

sabbatarianism, 29 sailors, 197, 198, 213 St Catharines, Ont., 33, 64, 66, 121,

337

Index

socialists, xv, 158, 163, 166–90, 244, 294n75 social realism, 92–5 social security, 199, 226, 229, 255 Social Service Council of Canada, 108, 109, 268 social workers, 233 songs, 124, 181–2, 232, 239 Sorel, Que., 23 South Porcupine, Ont., 156 spectators, xiii, xviii, 5, 15, 18, 38, 45, 50, 60, 72, 87, 118, 124–5, 142–3, 202, 207, 219, 221, 231, 247, 248, 251, 289n36, 322n39 speeches, xvii, 4, 38, 86, 88, 90, 96, 99,104–5, 117, 119–22, 139, 171, 184, 232, 239, 248, 272, 307n14 sports, xii, xvi, 4, 30, 34, 38, 117, 118, 119–28, 137, 145, 166, 247, 248, 249–51, 272, 278, 307n14, 307n17, 308n22, 308n29, 317n3 Springhill, N.S., 314n36 stevedores, 68 Stratford, Ont., 45, 211 Strathroy, Ont. 14, 291n55 steelworkers, 157, 159, 195, 197, 211, 213, 215, 318n9 Stelco, 195 stone cutters, 46, 54, 63, 69 stone masons. See bricklayers street railway workers. See transit workers streets, use of, 7–8, 16, 87, 128 street theatre, 4, 14, 45, 52, 195, 196, 198, 232, 301n53. See also belsnickling; Calithumpians; charivari; coffins, as symbols; craftsmen’s spectacle; floats; mumming; Polymorphians; prison bars, as symbols; Terribles

173, 203, 224, 228, 247, 268, 300n50, 321n29, 322n36 Saint-Hyacinthe, Que., 110, 246 Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, 3, 6, 7, 10, 21, 29, 37, 138, 272 Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society, 6, 244 Saint John, N.B., 20, 27, 51, 58, 62, 64, 68, 71, 137, 145, 146, 160, 299n32, 299n38, 301n56, 306n6 St John’s, Nfld., 204, 251, 317n4 St John’s Day, 5 Saint-Martin, Albert, 166–7 St Patrick’s Day, 5, 11, 12, 27 St Thomas, Ont., 317n4 saloons. See taverns Salvation Army, 22, 23, 25, 26 Santa Claus, 219, 222, 223, 236, 248, 251, 320n27 Sarnia, Ont., 203, 222, 228, 231, 246, 278, 322n39 Sault Ste Marie, Ont., 317n4 schools, 7, 11, 124, 254, 257, 260, 306n6 seamstresses. See garment workers Seattle, Wash., 129 shaking hands, 91–2, 97–8, 100, 103 sheet metal workers, 321n30 Shelburne, N.S., 306n6 shipbuilders, 306n6 ship labourers, 51, 64 shopping malls, 253 signs, 158, 162, 182, 199, 229, 230, 231, 232, 239 Simpson Company, Robert, 153, 327n69 Single Tax movement, 64 sleeping-car porters, 218 smokers, 295n2 social gospel, 107–10

338

Index

203, 205, 207, 209, 210, 212, 216, 218, 219, 223, 232, 234, 236, 238, 239, 240, 241, 246–8, 251, 253, 268, 278, 279, 284n3, 288n15, 290n37, 307n14, 311n6, 317n4 Toronto Industrial Exhibition. See Canadian National Exhibition tourism. See excursions Trades and Labor Congress of Canada, 37, 164, 293n64, 326n64 trades and labour councils. See labour councils trades processions. See parades, trades traffic, automobile, 129, 138, 252, 256, 263, 325n60 transit workers, 152, 214 travelling. See excursions Turner, John, 235 Twenty-Fourth of May. See Victoria Day

strikebreakers, 232 strikes. See militancy students, 170, 172 suburbs, 253, 255, 262, 273 Sudbury, Ont., 173, 205, 211, 212, 226, 249, 250, 318n9 suffrage, female, 51–2 supermarkets, 253, 260 Sydney, N.S., 45, 197, 256, 317n4 tailors, 48, 56, 58, 62, 74, 171, 298n32 tanners, 298n32 taverns, xiii, 30, 31, 128, 132, 133 taxi drivers, 213 teachers, 68, 172, 233, 234, 244 teamsters, 20, 46, 75, 219, 247 telephone workers, 73 television, 248, 251, 253 temperance, 7, 12, 29, 51, 118 Terribles, 14, 20 textile workers, 182, 194, 199, 216, 275 Thanksgiving, 37, 118, 135, 271 theatres, xii, 126, 128, 129, 137, 248, 251 Thompson, Phillips, 166 Thompson, Sir John, 32–3, 293n63 Thomson, Murray, 200 Thunder Bay, Ont., 54, 121, 166, 168, 169, 170, 173, 260, 312n14, 316n45 Timmins, Ont., 172, 173, 318n10 tinsmiths, 48, 53, 298n32 tobacco workers, 76, 205 Tories, 12 Toronto, 7, 8, 9, 12, 18, 22, 25, 30, 33, 34, 43, 45, 46, 48, 49, 54, 63, 66, 69, 71, 74, 88, 114–15, 116, 118, 119, 121, 128, 129, 131, 137, 145, 152, 153, 155, 157, 162, 163, 173, 174, 179, 181, 182, 184, 197, 198, 199,

Ukrainian Canadians, 171, 174, 316n45 unemployed workers, 22, 25, 33, 157, 171, 176, 179 unemployment, 199–200, 226, 228, 232, 244, 258, 277, 322n37 uniforms, 12, 44, 46–7, 158, 160, 165, 175, 206 union label, 65, 114–15, 219, 226 l’Union nationale, 22 unions, Catholic, xv, 66, 144, 163, 165–6, 189, 202; craft, xii–xxvii, 22, 27, 32–8, 41–79, 124, 146–7, 159, 164–5, 175–6, 199; industrial, 164, 199, 205; nationalist, 144, 162–6; public-sector, 159, 211, 227, 233, 234, 235, 239, 244, 263; railway, 33, 56, 68. See also American Federa-

339

Index

Westinghouse, 195, 200 Westville, N.S., 138 white-collar workers, 67, 258. See also clerical workers; librarians; publicsector workers; retail workers; social workers; teachers Windsor, Ont., 121, 125, 145, 148, 151, 197, 203, 216, 222, 225, 226, 247, 248, 253, 317n3, 317n4, 322n34 Winnipeg, 7, 49, 51, 53, 54, 56, 67, 73, 74, 75, 115, 121, 128, 131, 142–3, 144, 145, 157, 158, 159, 162, 173, 174, 181, 184, 222, 234, 242, 263, 268, 299n38, 301n51, 311n6 Winnipeg General Strike, 109, 157, 158, 159 women, 8, 16, 17–18, 63, 72–6, 78, 79, 91, 95–6, 121, 131, 143, 161, 169, 171, 173, 205, 207–16, 225, 272; in sports, 117, 121, 124, 249; as symbols, 17–18, 75–6, 160, 162, 181, 187, 216, 236–40; walking in parades, 74–5, 176, 182, 183, 205, 209, 212–13, 215, 289n35. See also spectators women’s auxiliaries, 76, 183, 212, 214 Women’s Labor League, 162 Woodstock, Ont., 30, 31 woodworkers, 183, 190, 214, 298n32 Workingmen’s Mutual Benefit Society, 23 Wright, A.W., 293n63

tion of Labor; Knights of Labor; Provincial Workmen’s Association union security, 195 United Empire Loyalists, 28 unorganized workers, 68 unskilled workers, 68 vacations, paid, 257, 258, 326n65 Valentine’s Day, 261 Valleyfield, Que., 110, 138, 197, 199, 247, 275, 317n4 Vancouver, B.C., 19, 33, 44, 52, 54, 55, 70, 129, 147, 151, 154, 174, 175, 176, 178, 180, 181, 183, 186, 188, 189, 202, 203, 222, 241, 242, 311n6, 321n29 Vancouver Island, 157 veterans, 49, 66, 138, 149, 158, 177, 206, 300n46; repressing May Day, 173 Victoria, B.C., 20, 45, 57, 59, 61, 71, 76, 129, 310n48 Victoria Day, 4, 5, 27, 29, 30, 38, 54, 66, 104, 117, 118, 134, 135, 137, 139–40, 258, 272, 284n2, 292n63, 310n48 Victory Aircraft, 212, 215 violence, 3, 13, 27, 30, 170, 187 wage and price controls, 232, 234 wages, 195, 197, 199, 255 Washington, D.C., xii, 33 waterfront workers, 176 Waterloo, Ont., 213, 224, 321n29 Welland, Ont., 88, 129, 153, 321n30; Rose Festival, 321n29 western Canada, 172, 174, 203, 242

Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 37, 124

340