by Ross King
2 A SEPTENARY FATALITY
THE LAST SOLDIER killed in the Great War was a Canadian. Two minutes before the guns fell silent on the Western Front, a German sniper killed Private George Pierce in the Belgian village of Ville-sur-Haine. Private Pierce’s cruelly pointless death emphasized the enormous Canadian sacrifices: 60,661 dead and many tens of thousands more wounded.
The Great War was by far the most traumatic event endured by the country since Confederation. Many believed the heroism and sacrifices of the war years could cement a foundation for the elusive national identity. “Canada is only just finding herself,” Lucy Maud Montgomery had written in 1910. “She has not yet fused her varying elements into a harmonious whole. Perhaps she will not do so until they are welded together by some great crisis of storm and stress.” 1 That crisis of storm and stress had come at Ypres, at Vimy Ridge, at Passchendaele. By the end of the war it had become axiomatic that “a true Canadian nation” (as Talbot Papineau called it) was being born on the battlefields of Europe. A charismatic Montreal lawyer and decorated officer in the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, Papineau wrote in 1916 that the Second Battle of Ypres represented “the birth-pangs of our nationality.” He himself died at Passchendaele, joining the ranks of those whose deaths in a distant land would, he believed, help Canada become “a nation respected and self-respecting.” 2
Papineau’s hopes seemed to be fulfilling themselves as Canada took its first tentative steps towards sovereignty and self-respect in the months following the armistice. Sir Robert Borden had been the principal author of Resolution ix at the Imperial War Conference in 1917. Its objective for Canada to become an autonomous nation and gain a voice in foreign policy was realized two years later when Borden led a delegation at the Paris Peace Conference and then when Canada became a member of the League of Nations. This new role in global politics was undeniably the result of Canada’s participation in the war. When the United States Secretary of State Robert Lansing (a one-time supporter of American neutrality) tried to veto Canadian representation at Versailles, he was bluntly reminded by Lloyd George that Canada lost more men in the war than the United States.3
Any optimism about a new Canadian nationhood was tempered by the profound social, political and racial divisions exposed by the war. Borden wrote gloomily in his private diary on the day the armistice was signed: “The world has drifted from its old anchorage, and no man can with certainty prophesy what the outcome will be.” 4 The immediate outcome, in Canada at least, was unemployment, inflation, industrial unrest and riots. Waves of industrial action in the months following the armistice climaxed with the Winnipeg Trades and Labour Council calling a general strike on May 15, 1919. On
June 21 a non-violent protest ended with a charge by the Royal Northwest Mounted Police that left one striker dead and the streets of Winnipeg occupied by federal troops. The authorities hastily turned their attention from pacifists to the perceived threat from Bolshevism. Borden believed there existed in Canada what he called “a deliberate attempt to overthrow the existing organization of Government and to supersede it by crude, fantastic methods founded upon absurd conceptions of what has been accomplished in Russia.” 5 Police raided labour temples in Vancouver, Regina and Winnipeg. Printing presses were seized and the houses of foreigners searched. Anyone suspected of anarchist or communist sympathies was swiftly deported.
Political as well as industrial unrest divided the country. The violent clashes in Winnipeg tragically reprised the anti-conscription riot in Quebec City in the spring of 1918, when a crowd ransacked and burned the office of the military registrar after a twenty-three-year-old named Joseph Mercier was arrested at a bowling alley for failing to produce his conscription papers. The crowd broke into a hardware store in hopes of finding firearms and attacked the offices of the Quebec Chronicle, whose owner, Sir David Watson, was a veteran of Vimy Ridge and Commander of the Canadian 4th Division. The Easter Monday anniversary of Vimy Ridge arrived with Quebec City under military rule and soldiers on horseback charging through fogbound streets with swords drawn. Shots from the crowd were met with machine-gun fire, leaving four civilians dead, sixty-five under arrest, and relations between English and French Canada smouldering in ruins.6
Four months later, there had been further unrest and more military rule, this time in Toronto. On the night of August 1, 1918, Greek waiters forcibly ejected a disabled and inebriated veteran from the premises of the White Cafe at Yonge and College. For the next three days, mobs in their thousands, led by returned war veterans, ran riot through the streets, fighting the police and demolishing more than forty Greek-owned businesses. One of the country’s finest achievements, Canada’s Hundred Days, began with Toronto under martial law and the city’s downtown core a shambles of shattered glass and looted shops and restaurants.
This ugly and shameful display of xenophobia raised wider questions about the place in Canada of the many tens of thousands of non-British immigrants who had arrived over the previous two decades. Pink-faced Canadians were still in the majority in Toronto, but the Prairie provinces and British Columbia offered a more multi-hued complexion. The Prince of Wales voiced the fears of the Toronto rioters when, alarmed at the number of recent immigrants from all lands in Western Canada, he wrote to his father, King George v, that Canada must be kept British: “It is up to the Empire and particularly the uk to see that its population is British and not alien!!” 7
Poverty, unemployment, strikes, riots, class polarization, enmity between French and English, hostility to immigrants—what, if anything, could heal Canada’s scarred and broken body politic?
A.Y. JACKSON, FOR one, believed that artists could serve a palliative function in society during such troubled times. Two months after the end of the Winnipeg General Strike, he published an article in the Canadian Courier entitled “The Vital Necessity of the Fine Arts.” The fine arts were not a side issue, he wrote, since they could serve as “the common meeting ground for all classes” and become “one of the most potent factors in overcoming the problems of social unrest.” 8
How was this artist-led transformation of society to come about? Jackson believed the unrest could be quelled if the fine arts were allowed to provide society, from top to bottom, with a visual makeover. Cities such as Toronto were notoriously unlovely, but all that could be changed. The ugly manifestations of crass and uneducated tastes—“silly furniture, badly proportioned houses, worse pictures and tiresome wallpapers”—would be transformed into things of beauty as artists and designers made beautiful “what before was only dull and pretentious. Instead of going to museums to peer at dim darkened old masters we will see beauty all about us.” Those who saw beauty all about them did not, presumably, riot in the streets.
Jackson’s appeal was neither new nor original. Many others believed the fine arts could play an active role in creating a better and healthier society. For the previous two decades, social and moral reformers in Canada, Britain and America had been hoping to tame violent passions, improve morals, inspire patriotism and uplift the spirits of their populations—especially the more downtrodden and aggrieved enclaves—through a provident use of everything from architecture and monuments to music and public murals.
This type of civic reform (known in the United States as the City Beautiful Movement) had a strong advocate in Canada in the painter and architect George A. Reid, principal of the Ontario College of Art and former president of the OSA. Reid was a founding member of the Arts and Crafts Society of Canada, the Toronto Guild of Civic Art and the Toronto Theosophical Society. He had been promoting the beautification of Toronto since the 1890s, donating two of his murals to adorn the entry hall of City Hall when a full program was rejected owing to lack of funds. In 1909 he was involved with Sir Edmund Walker and others in drafting the Report on a Comprehensive Plan of Systematic Civic Improvements in Toronto, an elaborate plan to transform the city’s visual appearance and moral complexion. It championed tu
rning the unsightly metropolis into a miniature Paris: wide boulevards, attractive government buildings, opera houses, concert halls, art museums, public murals, a waterfront, a system of parks and other green spaces.
The philosophy of the City Beautiful Movement conveniently overlooked the fact that social disaffection and moral decay thrived in Paris despite the Beaux Arts architecture, spacious boulevards and thronging art museums. But the point was that art was not an ivory-tower pursuit removed from the everyday life of society. Art was too important, Jackson believed, to become “a rich man’s hobby.” 9 In one of his public lectures Reid spoke of his wish “to cultivate a taste and appreciation for art” among the people of Toronto and to make it “a part of everyday life.” 10 This democratic view put them at odds with some avant-garde theorists, such as the American Symbolist poet and self-styled “King of the Bohemians,” Sadakichi Hartmann. In 1910 Hartmann proclaimed that “art is by the few and for the few.” It was preposterous, he claimed, to believe “a pale seamstress or a fatted tradesman” could experience the same joy in contemplating a work of art as a critic or a connoisseur.11 But Reid and Jackson wanted to reach out to pale seamstresses, fatted tradesmen and indeed everyone else. The health of Canadian society, they believed, depended on it.
Although Toronto’s bureaucrats paid little heed to Reid’s 1909 report, painters in the Studio Building besides Jackson shared his ideas. Reid was Lismer’s superior at the Ontario College of Art and both a former teacher of MacDonald and, with his City Hall murals, one of his first sources of artistic inspiration.12 Lismer’s indoctrination in the ideas of John Ruskin meant he shared Reid’s aspirations to educate and enlighten the socially disenfranchised. In Halifax Lismer took art out of the galleries and into the community, bucking the school governors who believed the fine arts were “an exclusive & cultured subject for the edification of the few.” As he remarked in one of his own public lectures, if the “art impulses of a nation” were stirred, people would be able to rise above their “trivialities and differences.” 13
These “art impulses,” in other words, would promote a cohesive national identity and a healthy society. Trivialities and differences existed because Canadians, even after the shared sacrifices of the war, still possessed no strong or agreed sense of themselves as a nation. The country’s “confused elements” (in Laurier’s phrase) stubbornly frustrated any broad definition of nationhood.
The familiar obsessions of Canadian art—the desire to capture or produce something distinctively Canadian in spirit—therefore returned with a new urgency after the war. Canada needed men and women who could communicate with a wide audience and tell what Lismer called “the Canadian story” in a way that would enrich the “national consciousness.” 14 Reid’s plan to do the job with public murals came to naught, but the Canadian War Memorials Fund demonstrated how effectively art could begin to foster a national identity by telling this Canadian story. What Lord Beaverbrook did for Canadian soldiers now needed to be done, in paint and print, for the Canadian people as a whole. As Lismer later wrote, many artists and writers in Canada “began to have a guilty feeling that Canada was as yet unwritten, unpainted, unsung . . . In 1920 there was a job to be done.” 15
If the painters in the cwmf provided the inspiration for a new program of national self-definition, so too did the men commemorated in their works. Canadian soldiers had distinguished themselves in Flanders, MacDonald believed, in a way exemplary of the national character. “In initiative, energy, and stamina, they have established a distinctive Canadian character,” he wrote a few months after the armistice. “They have made new inroads of achievement in a no man’s land of tradition and precedent.” The same qualities could now be used by artists. As Jackson expressed this idea in his usual breviloquent style: “We are no longer humble colonials. We’ve made armies, we can also make artists, historians and poets.” 16
THE CWMF EXHIBITION at the CNE closed on September 6, 1919. Little more than a week later, several painters from the Studio Building returned to paint in Algoma for the second successive autumn. Jackson was now part of the expedition, which again included Harris, MacDonald and Johnston but not, on this occasion, the group’s cook and general skivvy, Dr. MacCallum. Lismer was unavailable because of duties at the Ontario College of Art and Carmichael because of his job at Rous and Mann and the demands of a young family. Varley, now renting premises in the Studio Building, was either uninvited or, busy with his other projects, chose not to participate.
The expedition followed almost exactly the same itinerary as 1918. The men took the train to Sault Ste. Marie and once again hired a specially adapted carriage from the Algoma Central Railway. This year the car was the fabled acr 10557, previously used as an office for the company’s work crews. It was comfortably outfitted with a table and chairs, a stove, a water tank, a sink, cupboards and shelves, a coal box and, of course, bunks. The exterior, freshly painted in a bright red, was decorated by the artists with the skull of a moose, sprigs of holly and the painted motto Ars longa, vita brevis. Their meals were a campsite menu of pork and beans, scrambled eggs and bacon, porridge, and toast and marmalade.17
The painters might have known that danger lurked along the tracks; an “organized gang of bandits” (as a newspaper described them) was operating in the area. Only days before the painters arrived in Algoma, an acr crew was bound, gagged and robbed by the gang. The area was also a scene of tragedy. Most of the miners at the pyrite mine at Goudreau, connected by a spur to the acr mainline, had died in the influenza epidemic.18
The only problem encountered by the painters, however, was the weather. Continual rain made outdoor sketching difficult. “All the waterproofs, umbrellas, and weatherproofs have proven their worth on a dozen occasions,” Johnston wrote to his wife, Florence, “and many a sketch of mine has been saved by my oilskin slicker and the umbrella.” He reported that despite these conditions he and MacDonald were each managing three sketches per day, Jackson and Harris four. He was impressed with the efforts of his companions when they spread their work out for appraisal in the boxcar each evening. “Mac is doing some very nice work, very much finer than what he did last year,” while “Lawren’s four sketches today were very very beautiful. I think quite the finest things of his I have seen—and that is saying a good deal.” He was even pleased with his own work, telling Florence how he and MacDonald had gone under the trestle bridge “down by the falls and I think I made one of the best sketches I have made up here.” His one regret—no doubt kept to himself—was that Florence was not there with him. When the others were in bed, he wrote letters to her by lamplight. “I feel quite homesick when I think of you all and what I am missing being away from you all.” As for his companions, “These chaps don’t seem to miss their womenfolk much.” 19
THE TORONTO PAINTERS were not the only group venturing by train into the Ontario hinterlands in September 1919. A few days before the party left Toronto, a nine-carriage Royal Train transported the Prince of Wales along the same track through Algoma from Sault Ste. Marie. The twenty-five-year-old Prince Edward, who had visited Earlscourt a few days earlier, was three weeks into his three-month-long tour of Canada. Like so many others in search of an authentically Canadian outdoor experience, the prince and his entourage headed for the lakes and rivers of Northern Ontario. Leaving Toronto, the royal party made its way along the North Shore of Lake Superior to the southern fringe of Lake Nipigon. The prince spent three days camping and fishing on the Nipigon River, living, according to an American reporter, “the rough-and-ready life of a woodsman.” With the help of Aboriginal guides, he even navigated a length of rapids in a birchbark canoe. The hazards of the bush became evident when a fierce hailstorm snapped the flagpole bearing the Royal Standard and sent a pine tree crashing into his tent.20
Anyone pondering the Canadian task of self-definition and the uphill struggle of the country’s artists could have done worse than follow Prince Edward’s cross-country iti
nerary. Besides his exploits on the Nipigon, he rode a bronco at a Saskatoon rodeo, gazed on the Rockies at Lake Louise and bought a four-thousand-acre cattle ranch in Pekisko, Alberta. In Saint John he passed through a triumphal arch made from drums of cod-liver oil festooned with the carcasses of dried codfish. Cultural events were largely absent from his schedule. When culture did intrude, it came from what must have been, to the prince at least, an unexpected direction. In a gesture that must have galled Canadian artists, the prince’s visit to Western Canada was commemorated with the presentation to him of a painting by Charles M. Russell, the American “cowboy artist” from Montana. Russell was a popular painter with an international reputation. His nostalgic scenes of cowboys and buffalo hunts earned him high prices (his works changed hands for as much as $10,000 each) and solo exhibitions in New York and London. Will Rogers collected his paintings, and among Russell’s friends was the Hollywood cowboy star William S. Hart. The Prince of Wales must nevertheless have been taken aback when his Canadian hosts in High River gave him a painting of a Canadian scene—two Mounties arresting horse thieves—done by this famous American artist.21