Category: News Article Page 1 of 12

By Gregory Clark, October 3, 1925.

War Cries, Battles and Other Disturbances at University of Toronto Now Regulated By Students’ Council – Ruffianism Abolished by Democratic Rule – Varsity Made Safe for Male Shingle and Marcelle

A terrible thing happened up on the campus of the University of Toronto the other day.

A student yelled “Yah!”

Right out loud.

It was a most disgusting exhibition. He was rough-looking sort of person. Large, bony, with big thick shoulders and thick legs.

The campus was crowded with students at the time, passing to and fro respectably, to their lectures. They were models of deportment. Most of them had the latest Oxford bags¹ on, and nearly a hundred per cent. of them were wearing their hair long and slick², in the very best manner. Contrasted with them stood this thick person of whom he are about to speak.

We will call him Buck.

Buck walked, perfectly composed, half-way across the campus. He was wearing a nondescript sort of blue suit the trousers of which clearly showed the shape of his legs. His cap disclosed the fact that his hair was cut short and bristly. On his face was a look of puzzlement.

Then Buck suddenly stopped in his track. Glared about him at the throng.

Then he reared up on his toes, threw his arms high in the air, and in a hoarse, deep, brutal voice yelled:

“Yah!”

Of course, after the students had picked themselves up off the ground, there was a momentary outbreak of protest and just indignation. But five members of the Students’ Administrative five members of the Students’ Administrative Council who were amongst those affected by this terrible breach of the peace were first to collect their senses and remind the throng of students of the amenities.

“Steady, fellow students!” cried out one of these officers. “Stand fast! Remember the constitution!”

And all the students quieted their voices and brushed off their Oxford bags in silence.

The officials of the Students’ Administrative Council gathered in a body near Buck, where he stood all alone amidst the throng, and then they approached him.

“Do you realize,” said the spokesman, standing forth a safe distance from Buck, they fearing for his sanity. “Do you realize that you are guilty of a grave offense against the laws, not to mention the honor and dignity of this great university of which we assume you are an undergraduate?”

Buck opened his large mouth, full of big, strong teeth, but then closed it without emitting another of those fearful yells.

“Presuming you to be a freshman and unacquainted with the regulations and interior administration of this great university, we ask you, will you come, without the use of force, to be instructed in the laws of this institution?”

“What if I don’t?” answered Buck in a loud voice.

“Then,” said the spokesman in a gentle and sweet voice of warning, “we will be obliged to call a policeman.”

Wild Buck Swiftly Tamed

So they led Buck, at a safe distance, all the throng following wonder and dismay, to the University College, where on the walls appeared this notice:

“Students who take part in disturbances or offensive contests unauthorized by the Students Council will be liable to a heavy fine not exceeding $50.00³ each.

“R. Falconer, President.”

Buck read the above, removed his cap and reverently scratched his hard, bristly head.

Several dozens of the students were crowding around the councillors, crying out that their Oxford bags had been damaged by falling down when this frightful yell stunned them. “Compensation,” they kept crying. “Recompense for damages!” And one poor fellow showed how the yell had caused him to lose the $12 marcelle wave⁴ in his hair that he had got only last week.

But the councillors spoke to the mob of angry students and pleaded for Buck that he did not know the law. That was really, no excuse, of course. But still, there you are. Even in a self-governing country, there are those who escape the law.

Nothing like this has been heard of for several years. It is sincerely hoped that no further Bucks will appear amongst the student body of this great institution of learning. Buck has not been seen since the episode, and it is generally thought that he has left the university for some other, where his extraordinary qualities will not get him into trouble.

The incident demonstrates the most interesting fact about the University of Toronto. It is the most civilized university in the world. All the excesses that used to be linked with college students have been abolished. That roughness and intolerance that once upon a time shamed the fair name of learning has been dissipated. How? By the winning of self-government by the students.

While Sir Robert Falconer signs the warnings that are plenteously distributed all over the university buildings, the students themselves solemnly elect the Students’ Administrative Council, a body representing all colleges in the distinguished galaxy of colleges, and this council disciplines the students.

It shows the power of self-government to quell savage tribes. As you can see from the notice signed by Sir Robert, disturbances and offensive contests may still be held, but “with the authorization of the Students’ Council only.” You may apply to the council to hold an offensive contest. You may or may not get it, as the grave deliberations of the council may decree. In the old days of benevolent despotism, when the president ruled the roost, there were all kinds of terrible excesses. The world was certainly not safe for the cake-eater as it is to-day on ‘Varsity⁵ grounds. The students’ council has made the male shingle and the marcelle wave perfectly safe.

Old Relic of Barbarous Days

The last, dying gesture of old college rascaldom occurred four years ago, when a few returned soldiers, who had not had time to complete their university courses owing to an out break of ruffianism in which they felt impelled to take part, returned to their alma mamma to finish their education.

A relic of past barbarous days is an old ramshackle one-story wooden building hidden in behind New Trinity and south of the athletic stadium. This is called the old temporary gym. It is used for storage purposes and for holding. such “disturbances and offensive contests” as the students’ council may agree to on application and after due deliberation.

The sophomores of one of the faculties – we will spare their blushes by refraining from naming the faculty – got permission, just for old times’ sake, to hold an initiation of freshmen in this old building. Permission, sad to relate, was granted.

The freshmen of that year were invited to attend and be initiated.

Now these freshmen, amongst whom were a lot of rough, demobilized soldiers, had no idea of the great reform which had been effected in ‘Varsity. They thought an initiation was an initiation.

So the sophomores locked and barred themselves in the old Rough House, as the ramshackle building is called, and invited the freshmen to come in.

The freshmen attempted a frontal attack. Then some old soldier devised a gas attack. They made up some ammonia solution, climbed to the roof of the building and poured it through the holes in the roof.

They nearly killed the sophomores. A tragedy was narrowly averted. But the freshmen, so dim is the primitive mind, deemed it a victory. They gained entry into the Rough House, and all the sophomores went home to bed.

This incident, of course, is never referred to in polite academic circles. It is blamed on the war.

Three years ago the dental sophs took the freshmen and removed all their boots and threw them out an upper story window into College street.

The students’ council at once took action on this dastardly outbreak of hoodlumism, and fined every soph. the sum of $2.

Two years ago the medical faculty held a little celebration and then formed up and went on an entirely unauthorized parade down Yonge street. They raided the Italian fruit stores along the way and threw vegetables all about.

The students’ council at once called an emergency session and called the whole faculty before them. After a long and grave study of the crime, they fined the medical students who went in the parade three hundred dollars, collectively.

How do they collect the fines, you ask?

The students’ council does not permit a student to write his exams until he has paid the fine. It is quite simple.

When you consider the precedent set by the past, it is a wonderful thing the students have done in discipline by self-government. When you count up the suits of clothing destroyed even within the past fifteen years, it would fill the old Rough House.

Historic Cases of Ruffianism

 Here are certain historic cases.

The Model School Fence for example. Around the Model School on Gerrard street ran a drunken wooden fence that was unpainted, awry, staggered. For years the public and press cried out against it. Then one Hallowe’en, the students went down and held a bonfire. That was all.

The late Dr. Beattle Nesbitt was connected with an outrage that is remembered, even unto this day. A cow weighing fourteen hundred pounds, was somehow carried up the narrow stairway of the Old Grey Tower, and there left to moo and wail a greeting to the president the next morning. How they got it up was a mystery. For it took a gang of twenty workmen with block and tackle to get it down. It is the only time in the history of the place that a cow has ever been in the Old Grey Tower.

The picket fence around the athletic grounds, where the stadium now is, was burned year after year on Hallowe’en. It was one’ of the normal expenses of higher education, the renewing of that fence.

Theatre night used to be a night when everybody in Toronto used to try and get tickets to the show. The students’ atrocities in the theatre on these occasions used to be the talk of the town. Extraordinary sorts of confetti rained down from the gods. Strange musics afflicted the air.

But one night, the students poured flour down out of the gods. It was about this time Toronto began to feel that after all, there is nothing greater than property. The show chosen by the students for their theatre night was “The Middie Man” with E. S. Willard. When the riot and confusion was at its height, Mr. Willard rang down the curtain and came to the front.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said he, “I have come a long way to make this my humble offering of the drama. When I learned that the students had chosen to attend my poor performance as their annual theatre night, I was greatly flattered. But it seems I have been guilty of misunderstanding. It appears that the students have come with the intention of presenting the entertainment, not I. I have rung down the curtain to allow these gentlemen to file out of the theatre, and as they pass the box office, each will receive his money back.”

Dead silence for a moment. Then a burst of tumultuous applause – from the gods. Mr. Willard had won. The students were perfectly quiet for the remainder of the show.

Theatre night now – if they still have theatre nights – they do not form up on the campus and march in a body. The students go individually, with their girls.

Students didn’t have girls in other days, They couldn’t be afforded.

There was at one time a chiropodist on College street whose sign was a huge human foot, gilded. A small select society was formed at the university which for the purpose of the moment called itself Order of the Boot. The large gilt foot disappeared never to be seen again of mortal eye. It decorated a room in a residence.

Signs are safe to-day. It was only 1910 that no student felt he was a student until sundry street car signs, “keep out,” “office of the president,’ and similar notices graced their studies. Recently, a stop and go signal, complete taken by students. The police sent word they wanted it back. They got it back.

Initiation Now Means Less

The Literary Society for long years annually elected its moral suasion committee from the largest and heftiest members of each party. At the Lit elections, these two moral suasion committees met to settle their differences by moral strength alone. Their fights were epics. Hoses usually played a large part. It was about the time that self government was imposed on the student body that the Literary Society voted to do away with the moral suasion committees as not being in keeping with the dignity of the society. Now they have got the dignity, at least.

Serenading the ladies residences, St. Margaret’s College and other girls schools within reach of the campus used to be the gallant way in which incognito gentlemen used to pay their respects to the girls. This had the advantage of being collegiate. To-day, the student in his wide pants and oiled hair takes his lady to a dance pavilion. Yelling Adeline under school windows however, was cheaper. A college education to-day is not so rough but more expensive than it used to be.

No Man’s Land is the more modern name for that bit of road that lies between the east door of the Engineering Building and the south door of the Medical Building. Across, this space of road, hundreds of fierce battles have been fought. For some reason, probably propinquity, engineers and doctors seem to hate each other. Between lectures, groups of Meds and Engineers would gather at their respective doors. Taunts would be hurled. Then insults. Depending on the weather and the barometric pressure, these rival groups would or would not go any further than taunts. When they did, woe betide the poor Arts men who might be in the neighborhood. Being known to neither side, both sides regarded them as enemies, in the fierce hand-to-hand that would follow. The writer had the distinction of having a thumb-full of shoe blacking smeared into his right eye by the eminent school battler. Bull Ritchie who weighed, dry, nigh unto three hundred pounds. And the writer started out merely as spectator, Arts.

When these battles started, all yearly differences and antipathies were wiped out. For example, it might be School Freshmen and Meds third year that were engaged. But no sooner did battle engage than the roars and groans of the battlers would be heard in lecture rooms and corridors within the separate strongholds. And out would rush school men of all years to the side of their detested Freshmen, and Meds Freshmen would with swelling pride come to the defense of their conceited Third Years men.

And the late Dean Galbraith himself would have to come out, armed with a hose, perhaps, to put an end to the little difference.

A Freshman used to be an object of intense physical repugnance to his elders. The only parallel is the feeling in a small boy’s soul when a new baby arrives in the house. No Freshman could be allowed to join the sacred circle without having a few mushings to indicate to him his physical deficiencies. For a university is a place of the intellect.

All this is gone. The parable of our good simple friend Buck and his indiscreet “Yah” illustrates what self government can do to a wild people.

If Buck yells “Yah” a second time, he is likely to be fined fifty dollars by a grave assembly of his peers.

Initiation, too, has fallen upon materialistic times. Initiation means initiation fees.

The dollar has tamed Varsity.

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Editor’s Notes:

1. Oxford Bags were very baggy trousers popular with male students at the time. ↩︎
2. Slicked back hair using pomade or other oils was also the style at the time. ↩︎
3. $50 in 1925 would be $915 in 2025. ↩︎
4. On the subject of hair, Marcel waves were more common on women, but some men had them too. ↩︎
5. Varsity was a generic term used at the time for the University of Toronto. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, September 26, 1914.

Toronto Archimandrate¹ Says Bulgarians Are Looking to Great Britain to Save Independence Of the Small Nations From Victorious Russia – Bulgaria a Democratic Nation.

If the great war goes as it should go – in favor of the allies, a problem as great, if not greater than the struggle itself, will arise out of that much-troubled and troublous region, the Balkans. If the Germans are defeated, Austria will have to give back the territory it has taken from the Balkan States, and Russia’s insistent demands for a Mediterranean port may have to be accorded more than the usual attention they have had in the past.

The gravity of the situation may be gathered from the explanation of it given by the Archimandrate Theophilact, the Greek Orthodox priest-missionary for Toronto and the district about it.

“The feeling in the Balkans,” said the Archimandrate, “is first, pro-Russian, and second, pro-British. Russia comes first, because of the ties of Slav blood. Although there had been, previous to the war, some hard feeling between the Balkan States, it took but little time for them to agree on friendly relations with the allies, though menaced by Austria on their borders.”

“The complexity of the situation does not arise, however, until the issues of the war are considered. Bulgaria is the most important State, because of its progressiveness and its firm, immoveable policies. Now, Bulgaria has set forth these two issues:

“The powers must agree to the revision of the Bucharest Treaty, must agree to the formation of a Balkan League, giving Macedonia to Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina to Servia, Transylvania to Roumania, and Epeira to Greece; thus setting the States of the league on their old and sound basis.”

“Or, as the second issue, if the Bucharest Treaty is not revised, and there is no Balkan League, then Bulgaria, as the pivotal state, must form a strong alliance with those powers that most favor her national aspirations. And those powers, there is little doubt, will be Britain and France.”

“For, although the Balkans are now pro-Russian first of all, they see quite well the menace of Russia – the menace of a conquering Russia, empowered to make great demands, one of which may be an extension of her territory southward through the Balkans.”

They Look to Britain

To Britain, then, who does not want our territories, but who does want our independence, to checkmate the moves of other world powers, we look for our guarantee of liberty. In fact, we place utter confidence in Britain, because we feel sure Britain could do nothing else but guard our independence, to protect her in the Suez.

“We feel that while Britain is helping us, she is helping herself. Good! We say! That smacks of plain-dealing, of honesty. But Russia whispers to us of Pan-Slavism. And Germany and Austria pats us as a man pats a horse on the back preparatory to straddling it!

“We Bulgarians are what might be called realists! The business-like attitude of Britain appeals to us. Race ideals and race movements do not sway us. We are looking for real, material things. After centuries of being battered and torn and our garments apportioned, we cannot be blamed for seeking material good.

“And so,” said the archimandrate, “on my last visit to Sofia, I found English ideas uppermost. English is the principal study in the colleges. England’s history and politics usurp the public attention. I found myself in general respect because I spoke English. I had the entree to the best circles.

“It is somewhat disconcerting to me to see the extent of the ignorance in Europe and America regarding Bulgaria. Of course, the ‘atrocities’ printed largely during the Balkan wars were shown to be ignorant lies by the Carnegie report. But it is not generally known that women’s suffrage has a stronghold in Bulgaria, that not even the most inaccessible hamlet is without a school, that elections are as fair as in England-that the whole tone is utterly democratic.

Governed by the People

Why, the Greek Church in Bulgaria is governed by the people. From priest to bishop, the clergy is elected. For instance, I studied for the priesthood, and then, upon qualifying, I offered myself as candidate for one of the towns or churches. There is an election every four years. Bishops and more famous priests, however, are usually elected for life.

“In the Parliament of 205 deputies, 37 are Social Democrats, 14 are democrats, 47 are agriculturals, or representatives of the farmers.

“Our literature has only been on a firm foundation for about 100 years. Turkish influences were too powerful against it in preceding centuries. Even now our literature is profoundly influenced by Russian and French literature.”

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Editor’s Note: This is just a news story by Greg after the first world war started, and before he signed up.

1. The Archimandrite is a leader in the Orthodox Church. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, August 12, 1950.

When Gregory Clark’s father, the late Joe Clark, was demon bowler of the Parkdale Cricket Club, Toronto, the team went to Berlin, Ont., for a match in the early nineties. When the train palled into Berlin, a chunky youth jumped aboard the coach and asked Clark if he might carry the cricket bag.

“Certainly, my boy,” said Clark, “and what’s your name?”

“William Lyon Mackenzie King,” said the youth. And that began a friendship that resulted in two generations of Clarks carrying the King bag.

Gregory Clark knew Mackenzie King from his own boyhood, interviewed him on countless occasions, visited Laurier House and Kingsmere, both on and off the record; and when the wartime Prime Minister flew by bomber to Britain in 1942, Gregory Clark, was one of the three newspapermen chosen to accompany him.

“It was the only time in his life,” says Greg, “that the old gentleman had both feet off the ground at the same time.”

The chances are better than good that Mackenzie King will be perceived by history as a figure of romance.

This suggestion may appear preposterous, even to those who saw in him most of the elements of greatness.

But history has an ironic way of brushing off the contemporaries of those whom history loves. And in Mackenzie King were those baffling elements of personality and performance which keep historians digging far deeper than the documents.

What they come up with in the next few years may be as romantic a story as can be found anywhere. It is this: that with his flesh and bones, and with his hours and days and months and years, he erected a monument dedicated to his rebel grandfather.

Right by the little elevator in Laurier House, up which he took you to the attic tower of his den, there is small framed handbill or poster. It is yellow with age. It offers a thousand pounds for the capture of the rebel, William Lyon Mackenzie.

Mackenzie King used to lead you to the elevator in such a way as to make it impossible to fail to see this curious memento. When you exclaimed upon it, he would give that awkward little twisted smile and wave you into the elevator.

Emerging into the tower room, you saw instantly, and to the exclusion of everything else, a lighted portrait. It glowed, as shrines glow. It was the well-known profile portrait of his mother, with an aura of misty white hair as she sits gazing with serenity into an unseen hearth, a book on her lap. The portrait was always lighted. It is probably lighted now.

When you had paid your respects to the portrait, you turned to find Mackenzie King at the desk shuffling papers; and when he raised his eyes, they had tempestuous expression characteristic of them at all times, save when he was meeting strangers or having his picture taken.

Thus you could not get into that attic den, in that old house that was more like a Madame Tussaud setting than a man’s home, without an impression of the past, and some ritual dedication to it.

Now, the stories a child hears in its awakening years sometimes shape its destiny. The stories Mackenzie King heard at his mother’s knee, he, bearing the name he did, must have been of a more gripping quality than most.

Here is one he heard – and it is on the record:

One hundred and thirteen years ago next December, William Lyon Mackenzie, the rebel leader, escaped over the border and immediately set about rousing American and refugee Canadian sympathizers to attempt raid back into Canada, with him at the head of it.

The Americans charged him with an offence against the peace and he was sent to prison for 18 months in Rochester. By the time he got out of jail, the enthusiasm of his friends had subsided, the little newspaper he was attempting to publish while in prison slowly perished and William Lyon Mackenzie faced his future a broken and penniless man.

His wife, children and 90-year-old Scottish mother were with him in Rochester. They lived in an anxious house, with doors barred with scantlings; and Mackenzie walked the streets cautiously. For there was still some thousands of dollars reward on his head, to which his Canadian political enemies from time to time added larger sums. And gangsters from Buffalo and adventurers from Canada were well aware of that handsome prize.

Amid all these desperations, a new baby was expected in the Mackenzie home. There were days, so the record stands, that they had not a scrap of food in the house.

The baby arrived.

“Mr. Mackenzie,” said the doctor, when he came out of the room, it is a girl, but I fear that, due to the privations and anxieties to which your wife has been subjected, it will not survive.”

“It will be God’s mercy,” said the broken rebel, “if she does not.”

But she did live. And she became the mother of a man who, in the time of the breaking of nations, throughout a period of earthquakes in the politics of the world, ruled the land his grandfather fled for 21 years as Prime Minister, headed his political party for close to 30 years, sat in the councils of nations as a statesman, laid as much as any man the foundations of the British Commonwealth, steadied the helm of his country through storms of unparalleled violence while its public opinion slowly and rationally accepted social and industrial reforms that place it amongst the most happily situated nations on earth.

From the earliest records of him, he was a dedicated man. He employed scholarship as the means to the end he had in view: and he ran up an impressive string of degrees at the universities of Toronto, Chicago and Harvard. He created and leaped into the first opening in public life when he became the youthful deputy minister of labor. Soon after, he ran for the House of Commons and was elected. When politics closed down on him for a few years, with the defeat of Laurier in 1911, he chose the field likeliest to increase his experience and powerful connections the Rockefeller Foundation. When he returned to politics, in 1919, it was as chosen leader of his party.

In all this time, he wanted nothing of life but employment leading towards his goal. They say he had not many friends. He had hosts: but the friendship was formal and did not intrude upon the dedication.

They say he was iron-handed with his cabinet colleagues and his secretaries: no more iron-handed than with himself.

It may well be that Mackenzie King belonged to history before he was born.

There are too many strange coincidences for it to be otherwise. In 1838, William Lyon Mackenzie called a secret congress in Rochester, NY “to be composed of Canadians, or persons connected with Canada, who are favorable to the attainment of its political independence, and the entire separation of its government from the political power of Great Britain.”

In 1926, that man’s grandson, the Prime Minister of Canada, went to the Imperial Conference at Westminster and threw into it the challenge of the Byng controversy¹. He returned to Canada to inform his Parliament:

“I think it can be said there is no longer any possibility of doubt that the Governor-General is the representative of His Majesty the King and is in no way representative of the government of Great Britain or any department of that government.”

We cannot make history out of a couple of stories and a few instances. But the stories of dedication may now be told; and the instances, even in the short time since his death, are already coming to mind in the press all over the country.

In the process of serving his country with tireless devotion, many a great man has contrived to make himself into something of a monument.

Mackenzie King, with the light burning always over the lady born in exile and committed to God’s mercy by an irascible and broken old treasonist, did a job of sculpture with his life for somebody other than himself. That is evident in the way he downed mallet and chisel on his retirement from office and waited in utter silence for the end.

He was a romantic. His life was dedicated, probably from boyhood. That makes him easier to understand, more exciting to contemplate, now that he is safe in the clasp of history.

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Editor’s Notes: William Lyon Mackenzie King died on July 22, 1950.

1. The King-Byng Affair was a Canadian constitutional crisis that occurred in 1926, when the governor general of Canada, Lord Byng of Vimy, refused a request by the prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, to dissolve parliament and call a general election. King’s government then sought at an imperial conference to redefine the role of the governor general as a personal representative of the sovereign in his Canadian council and not of the British government. The change was agreed to at the Imperial Conference of 1926. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, August 2, 1913.

Hughie Gallagher A Flagman For 26 Years

For a Dozen Years He Has Watched Yonge Street Crossing.

Born At Beaverton

Lost an Arm Years Ago – Not Afraid of Losing Job When Viaduct Comes.

Hughie Gallagher is the flagman¹ at the Yonge street crossing. You see him as you cross the tracks to the Niagara boats and to the R.C.Y.C. dock. The photograph shows Hughie with his beard. In the summer he wears only a moustache, but the beard makes little difference, because of his eyes – twinkling and kind. You shout: “Hello, Hughie!” And you are answered by a wave of his flag and the glistening eye, as Shakespeare might say.

Gallagher was born near Beaverton. He was bitten by the railroad bug at an early age, and at eighteen years of age, in 1879, he was a brakeman on the Grand Trunk. The first year he was stringing together some box cars near Port Hope, and a coupling pinched his left arm off at the elbow.

“That was the end of my dream, just when I had reached the beginning of them. You can’t be much of a railroad man with one arm,” said Hughie.

So Hughie started on a long and dreary existence of signaling and flagging. For fourteen years he worked with his red cotton and his lantern in the yards at Port Hope.

For twelve years he has been on the Yonge street crossing, and in all those years, in spite of the danger of the spot, which receives so much attention from calamity howlers. he has never seen an accident on it.

“And I sneak a little credit to myself,” says Hughie, “because several times I have been in on some narrow squeaks.”

“Well, it’s a dangerous spot. But how about your job when the viaduct is built?”

“Oh, that ain’t worrying me none,” says Hughie. “I says to myself when I think of the viaduct, I says, ‘Hughie you have years of useful life ahead of you here.'”

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Editor’s Notes: This is the forth in a series of pieces about people in Toronto when Greg was still new and had to write these filler stories. He often did “man-in-the-street” or stories about the poor at this time.

1. A flagman directs rail traffic when there are people who could be on the tracks. Toronto Historic Maps shows that in 1913 the train tracks were near The Esplanade at Yonge Street, and you had to walk over them to get to the Harbour. The Viaduct is the elevated train bridge over Yonge Street that was built so a flagman at the location would not be needed anymore. ↩︎

Which Costs More ~ Keeping Cool or Keeping Warm

By Gregory Clark, July 31, 1926.

Which costs more – keeping cool or keeping warm?

Here we are shoveling out hard cash at furious rate in the vain effort to keep cool. In another fourteen weeks or so, we shall be shoveling coal.

Is winter more costly than summer? Heat costs money, whether we are trying to get it or trying to escape it.

“Ah, it’s lovely,” says Mrs. Fatt, as she fans herself in the discreet shadow of her verandah awning, “the money we save this time of year. No coal, no expensive winter clothing, no large winter dinners to prepare.”

“Yes,” says Mrs. Thynne. “It must be cheap living in Florida and other parts of the tropics.”

“I fancy,” says Mrs. Fatt, who is one of those straightforward talkers, “we must save a good deal from May to October.”

“I’m sure we do,” says Mrs. Thynne.

The ladies, of course, remember the furnace but forget the ice box. They remember the roast beef but forget the fruits in season. They recall the fur coats but overlook the dimity¹.

Starting with the man on the street, his summer clothes are cheap. A light suit costs around $30². His light shoes can be as low as $4 or $5. His underwear is a cotton garment that can be got for $1. His straw hat is a good one for $2.

The same man in winter rig-out wears an overcoat that ran him not much less than $40. His suit is heavy worsted at $40, his boots are heavier, his felt hat ran him $5, his underwear was a bargain at $12 the suit. Then he has goloshes, neck scarf, two or three handkerchiefs in place of the purely ornamental doiley he wears in his breast pocket in summer; gloves. A man in winter carries around over a hundred and twenty-five dollars worth of clothes on him all the time, while in summer, less than fifty dollars covers him amply.

A dollar a day it takes to feed the furnace in the average eight-roomed house in winter. In summer, the cellar is the coolest place in the house. That is poetic justice. A ton of coal at $16 will last roughly two weeks. Ice, which costs from 15 to 25 cents a day, for those who have too much pride to keep their perishable foods, in the cool cellar, is no offset for the coal bill. For there are nearly six months that you have to burn some coal in the furnace, while there are only two and a half to three months that ice is absolutely an essential -though some folks keep their refrigerators iced all the year round.

On the other hand, the gas bill increases from May onward, after the furnace goes out, supplying hot water. The Consumers Gas Company says that the average bill would mount about $1.25 to $2 a month for the heating of water by gas after the end of the furnace season.

Eat More in Winter

Food, according to the dominion and provincial government Labor department figures on cost of living, does not vary greatly through the year. Eggs and butter swoop up and down across the seasons, but the staples, bread, meat, and vegetables, remain constant enough to keep the grocery bill pretty stationary fifty-two weeks of the year. We eat more in winter, unquestionably. All the restaurants say so.

“We cut our solid food dishes more than in half when summer comes,” says the manager of one of the city’s busiest dining places. “But the light stuff we prepare costs just as much as the solid food. So the check will be about the same year round.”

But if we eat more in winter, the cost of eating grows greater in summer because of the demand for fancy foods, fruit, salad, vegetables and fancy comestibles of all sorts. Ice cream, for example. Cantaloupe for two examples. The good old routine of beef and potatoes from November to April suddenly gives way to the maddest irregularity of exotic foods from afar, until by mid-summer, a man never knows what he is coming home to for supper. It may be a gorgeous salad containing head lettuce, radishes, cress, pepper grass, pimentoes, celery and fruit or it may be something soggy out of a can.

Fuel and clothing are two great departments of the family budget which demand many times the outlay in winter that they do in summer.

“Take a fur coat,” said the manager of the apparel department of one of Toronto’s big stores. “We have nothing to correspond in expense to the fur coat in our summer sales. Dresses run all the way from a couple of dollars for a little print frock to $300 for our most exclusive French creations. But there are thousands of $300 fur coats sold in winter for one $300 frock sold in summer. But there is this about it. A girl will be content with a very limited variety of costume in winter. She wears the one coat, the one suit and one or two dresses from November to Easter. Bu summer demands a great variety, three or four little dresses, with accompanying slips; blazers, sweaters, smocks, sport skirts, two or three pairs of shoes of different kinds, pumps, white shoes, formal shoes. Stockings can be limited in winter, but summer calls for half a dozen different pairs in varied shades.

“So you see, the summer clothing bill can creep up, almost imperceptibly.”

Creeping up imperceptibly is a beautiful phrase to describe the insidious spirit of spending which characterizes the summer season.

The summer vacation may be a two week one or it may be a summer cottage proposition. The house rent and expenses in the city keep right on while $200 to $300 has to be whacked out for rent of a very modest little summer cottage indeed. No end of cottages nowadays in Muskoka go as high as $700 and $800 for the summer.

While the family is nominally consuming its normal food supplies and wearing out summer clothes at the $300 summer cottages, Dad is home using the gas heater for his bath, electric light, paying either rent or mortgage interest on the city house, and eating downtown at a cost that cannot be less than $1.50 to $2.50 a day, unless he is one of those men of conscience who starve themselves that their dear ones may frolic into the great open spaces.

If the vacation is a two week family affair, then it takes the form either of a visit to a summer hotel or resort or motor trips. Either way, it costs money. It is a rare summer hotel that does not charge $30 a week per person. For two weeks, for a couple, bang goes $120, without a single mention of a single incidental. Railway fares, side trips, boat hire, would fetch the cost of the two weeks closer to $200.

Motor tripping looks cheap. All you have to do is put a lot of baggage on the running board and away we go. Gas, however, costs forty cents a gallon not far from the main highway. Hotels are no cheaper on rainy days than on fair, and the bill is the same even if you sneak up to a hotel in a motor car.

“The best part of a motor trip, anyway,” says a member of The Star Weekly staff, “is not the going but the stopping. And it is the stops, look you, that cost the money when you are moving.”

Does anybody spend $300 on Christmas? Yet there are tens of thousands of people in Ontario who pay $200 up for a summer cottage.

Do they give motor tires or grind your valves for Christmas? That’s the kind of present a fellow likes in August.

Doctor’s bills are much higher in winter than summer. But the visits of people to the corner drug store for bathing caps, face powder, ice cream and phonograph records are more numerous in summer than they are for pills in winter.

At first glance, the high cost of keeping warm appears to be greater than the cost of keeping cool. But the more you study the question, the greater the doubt that rises in your mind.

“I don’t think it is possible,” said an official of a government department whose job it is to compile colossal statistics, “to ever get to the bottom of such a question as this. There is a funny thing about budgets. If you study them, you will find that they never itemize human nature. They have fuel, clothing, food, etc., but they leave out the most important ingredient of all budgets.

“I think the truth of the matter is, human nature makes all the seasons kin. The average man spends all he has and a little more besides, whether it is January or August.”

Is it hot jinx – or cold?

---

Editor’s Note:

1. Dimity is a sheer cotton fabric of plain weave in checks or stripes. I’m not sure of the context for the summer, perhaps for awnings that are placed on windows to reduce the heat? ↩︎
2. I won’t bother calculating all of the prices in the article to modern values, but suffice it to say that $10 in 1926 is the equivalent of $178 in 2025. ↩︎

Troupe of Actors and Actresses Direct From China Present Drama Thousands of Years Old With All Color of the Orient

No Curtain – No Intermission – No Scenery – Property Man Always Moving About Stage Shifting Cushions, Covers, Etc.

Orchestra on One Side of Stage Provides Weird Music – Actors Sing in a High Falsetto – Gorgeous Costumes.

By Gregory Clark, June 10, 1922.

(Editor’s Note: since this was written over 100 years ago, the attitudes of a westerner to Chinese theatre emphasized the strangeness and the novelty of it all).

Is your appetite for amusement jaded?

Have you made the rounds of the entertainments Toronto provides and found them all flavored alike?

Then there is one thing you have overlooked. You haven’t seen the Chinese players at the National Theatre¹ in the heart of the Ward.

In a little old theatre, far off the well-beaten tall of amusement, there is going on every night before crowded houses of thrilled Orientals something so bizarre, quaint, beautiful and gorgeously colorful, that it stuns the senses of the few white people who have been fortunate enough to discover it.

It is a troupe of thirty Chinese actors and actresses direct from China, with a repertory of about forty of the classic tragedies and romances of Chinese literature. They have played in Vancouver and are spending a few weeks in Toronto before proceeding to the States.

They are playing to the Chinese, of course. Not a word and scarcely a movement of the play is intelligible to the stranger in the audience.

But to get the shock of your theatre-going life, you don’t need to understand it.

The gorgeous costumes, which make Oriental spectacles on the English stage seem tawdry, the posturing, miming and gesturing of the actors, the weird, shrill music and the constant din of the great brass gongs of the orchestra, creates a sensation that is new and fresh and stimulating to us who are the victims of realism on the stage.

For there is no atom of realism in the Chinese drama. It is a monstrous mixture of the ballet, pantomime, marionettes and grand opera, clothed in a symbolism that reaches back through the centuries. The Chinese stagecraft has not changed in a thousand years.

The Chinese players on Teraulay street² have not adapted themselves to the National Theatre. They have ignored the theatre. It has seats in it, and a stage. That’s all they need.

The rest is a simplicity that takes the breath out of you. There is no scenery, no curtain, the auditorium is not darkened. Stage and audience are both brightly lighted.

The orchestra does not sit in the pit. It sits on the stage, to one side. It is in shirt-sleeves. In slack moments of the play, while gorgeously garbed mandarins strut and posture in front of the ever-changing hangings on the back-wall of the stage, the orchestra lights up cigarets, or drinks from a dipper.

There is no curtain, and therefore no intermission. The Chinese play moves at furious speed. The property man is not off-stage, but is always on the stage, dressed in conventional black, a strangely intrusive figure among all the fantastic actors. But this property man manages the few properties required, which are a couple of small tables, three chairs, about fifty different silk curtains and a hundred gorgeous silk covers. Never leaving the stage for a moment, he quickly switches the scene from the home of a humble magistrate to the palace of the emperor in the capital, merely by changing the silk covers on the two tables and the three chairs, and the gorgeous curtains on the two entrances to the stage.

There is the reverse of realism for you. This property man and his properties occupy the center of the stage, and yet you are not supposed to see him. You are expected to have enough imagination to see that it is a garden on the stage, though not a stick or a twig is there to indicate it.

And when the two gorgeous lovers, in the midst of the imaginary garden, sing their formal love song, the orchestra in its shirt sleeves and suspenders ten feet from them, producing the weird music of the Orient, you must sustain the illusion when this black clad property man steps out, at the proper moment, and coming between the lovers, places a silken cushion for the girl to kneel on.

Your first moments of the Chinese drama will fill you with a confusion of amusement and alarm. All plays are accompanied by music. This music consists of the sound of two huge brass cymbals, one brass gong, one small ox-horn fiddle with a range of one octave, one small mud-turtle shell mandolin, a wooden banjo, and a time-keeper, which is the beating upon two hollow wooden boxes with bamboo sticks. At times, the string players lay aside their instruments and take up the pipes, which are much like a single pipe of the Scotch bagpipes, and have the same wild, uncertain note.

Parts of the play are sung to the sound of these instruments, and the rest is chanted to the endless accompaniment of the gongs and cymbals and the ox-horn fiddle. The gongs crash at the end of every line of verse, for the dramas are always written in verse.

To add to the westerner’s confusion at these crashing and screaming sounds, the actors do not sing or chant in a normal voice, but use a conventional stage voice, which is falsetto, both with the men and the women, with regular droppings of the voice to a low key for contrast.

Often, the voices cannot be heard at all, so high are they, and so violent is the musical accompaniment.

Everything is ruled by a conventionality that has the ballet and the pantomime outclassed for subtlety. There being no scenery, the actor comes on the stage, but is not seen by, and does not see the other characters on the stage, until he “enters” the imaginary room the others are in. This he does by lifting one foot, as if he were stepping over the door frame of the room. To see these actors all striding and mincing about the bare stage, lifting their feet over the door sill as faithfully as if the door were there, pushing the sliding panels of doors to and fro, manipulating the latches of gates thinner than air, come in prancing on imaginary steeds, which act must be performed just so, allowing the steed to caracole, and come to a spirited halt, then the rider throwing his leg over the saddle to dismount, and hanging his tufted whip on an unseen saddle horn, (the whip falling to the floor), needs an imagination to cope with it. It is so easy to be realistic, to have a stage crammed with realistic properties, instead of a couple of chairs, a few resplendent arrases of hand embroidered silk, and a thousand quaint gestures and postures.

Each actor, as he comes on the stage, is heralded by a tremendous to-do on the gongs. The greater the personage, the greater the racket. He advances to the front of the stage, and in a queer falsetto voice, in a monotonous rhythm, announces who he is and what he is about to do. Then he turns his back, lifts one foot as if stepping over the door frame, and is then supposed to be in the presence of the other actors.

Regardless of the action of the drama, the property man, who is not supposed to be noticed, keeps continually changing the magnificent curtains which cover the two entrances at the back of the stage. This change of curtains has nothing to do with the scenery. Like the music, it is merely something beautiful to attend the action of the play. And many of the curtains bear on them embroidered Chinese characters. These curtains are gifts to the company from audiences or individuals, and the writing on them expresses appreciation of the actors, collectively or individually. Combining, thus, entertainment and advertising.

The costumes are, one would say, the originals from which Chu Chin Chow³ costumes were economically copied. They are simply gorgeous.

There are several Chinese girls in the cast. Slight, inexpressibly/ graceful, mannered, swaying, the flowers of an ancient childlike civilization.

The scene shifts from the home of the hero to the high court of the province. It is managed thus: The actors march out the door on the right, and march in the door on the left. The property man has swiftly hung up two new and still more beautiful curtains. We have traveled a hundred miles.

We see them worshipping the ancestors before departing on a journey. We are present at the prayers before the execution of the heroine, when tapers are lighted and incense floats up, and to the weird tumult of the orchestra, with both big and little pipes going, the actors sing the prayers for all about to depart. Yet there, on one side of this artistic scene are the musicians in their shirt sleeves, in the full glare of the footlights, sweating hard; and the drab property man moves to and fro in the scene, a distressing embodied spirit.

This is the oldest drama in the world. It dates back beyond the Greek, beyond the sacred dancers of Israel. Surely we have got our ballet, our drama, our grand opera from these quaint people out of the east, though our stage carpenters and property men have made it for us so real that there is no more drama and no more imagination in it.

What of the audience? Out there in the lighted auditorium, the swarthy rows sit, thrilled, smiling at the antics of the comedian, who dances and postures like the Russians, who learned of the ballet across the Siberian plains from these yellow mannequins. At the love music, their faces light up with a strange look. It is queer, bitter music to a westerner. It is the love song of home to these stolid, peering Cantonese.

The audience is all munching something. Is it peanuts?

“No!” protests our guide and interpreter, “they are eating melon seeds, which it is customary to do at the theatre.”

Customary!

Custom, rule, convention, every gesture, every note of music, every syllable proclaimed just so, in high falsetto voice, after rules and customs laid down hundreds of years ago, unchanged and changeless, and full of a precise beauty swathed in riotous colors that must fill the white-clad angels with envy.

The Chinese drama, in its humble theatre and its homely surroundings, is a mental burr that sticks to the brain. It is meaningless to the stranger.

But he can’t forget it.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. The National Theatre started out as the Big Nickel and later became the Rio Theatre. It was at 373 Yonge Street and was torn down around 2019. ↩︎
2. Today, Terauley street is known as Bay Street. ↩︎
3. Chu Chin Chow was a musical comedy that was very popular from 1916 to the time of this article in 1922. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, April 3, 1926.

In Canada, here, we have ringside seats for one of the greatest spectacles in history.

For the next couple of generations, we are going to witness the drawing of the Melting Pot.

The United States, by restricting immigration almost to the vanishing point, has mixed in the last of the crude ore into her gigantic crucible. Now she is dropping in pinches of British, a dash of Scandinavian, a gram of German, as the chemist drops in traces of refining chemicals to flux the molten mass.

And we shall watch the great drama of the final drawing of the Melting Pot, the sparks, the pyrotechnic flames and at last the flow of gold, if any.

The first of the flares in this most colossal chemical enterprise is already lighting the sky low down on the horizon.

Round and around a fifteen-foot red brick wall marches a procession of two thousand men, women and children, two by two.

In the high wall are iron barred gates. In the gates stand squads of policemen armed with clubs. Past the policemen you can see a huge, silent, one-storey factory.

At the head of the straggling procession march a score of young men and half a dozen girls wearing brand new steel helmets and second hand gas masks.

The remainder of the motley parade are unarmed and unpicturesque in any way save by the fact that they represent thirty-seven different races of humanity.

As the helmeted head of the parade passes the main gate, the young men raise their voices and shout:

“Boo!  BOO!”

The insulting sound is instantly taken up along the straggling procession and a ribald roar passes around the tall brick wall.

“My country ’tis of thee,

Sweet land of liberty…”

The young men in helmets and gas masks at the head of the procession burst into ironic song,

“My gondree tees off dee,

Svee land da da da da…”

That is what broad-faced man with a yellow mustache makes of it as he surges past in the endless shuffle.

What is all this? Is it an Olympic games parade of the nations of the earth? Is it a demonstration in behalf of the league of nations? No, it is just a picture of the big textile strike in Passaic, New Jersey.

Thirteen thousand workers are out. Seven great spinning mills stand practically idle. Freelance labor organizers from New York are in charge of the strike and are performing the newest stunts of high-class university trained industrial revolt. The mill owners will not have a word to say to the “outside agitators” who are leading the strike. Washington has agreed to an “investigation.”

New Kind of Labor Leader

In broad outline, the situation is this: textile workers are not highly skilled. There are about a million of them in the United States, only a small fraction of whom are organized into unions – the higher ranks, the few skilled artisans. In and around Passaic, New Jersey, an hour out of New York city, in Lawrence, Mass., Manchester, N.H., and in Philadelphia, hundreds of thousands of the simpler orders of textile workers earn their twenty-odd dollars a week. Poles, Russians, Hungarians, Austrians, Czechs and Italians, in the main.

The great textile industry in the United States has never had any trouble with its labor. For there was always an endless supply surging, sweeping like a tide through the wide open gate of the immigration ports. It only takes three or four weeks to make a textile worker. For the thirty-five years that the Botany Worsted Mills in Passaic have been functioning there has never been any lack of European peasants to be taken on and converted into textile workers in a fortnight.

But now the tide of peasants has ceased!

Last October, because its earnings had fallen from two million eight hundred thousand in 1923 to one million seven hundred thousand in 1924 and then to one million four hundred thousand in 1925, the Botany Mill made a wage cut of 10 per cent. This affected 6,400 workers.

There had been three strikes in Passaic since 1907. All had failed. Time after time labor organizations had tried to organize in Passaic – the Amalgamated Textile Workers, the United Textile Workers, the I.W.W., the Hungarian Workers’ Federation, the W.I.I.U. All had failed.

In November Albert Weisbord, a Harvard graduate, a Phi Beta Kappa, a twenty-five-year-old Jew who has publicly embraced the most advanced Labor theories up to, if not quite to, Communism, came over from New York and began organizing the United Front Committee. He called the strike. He organized the workers. He originated the stunts which have gained the strike world-wide publicity. If he succeeds in organizing a union in Passaic, it means that the million other unorganized textile workers in Lawrence and Manchester and Philadelphia will be organized. A new and powerful group will enter the stage of American labor politics.

“I wish to heaven,” said one of the mill owners of Passaic, “that we had helped some of those other more moderate unions to organize years ago, instead of fighting them. Now we have to contend with a man who reads messages of sympathy from Moscow to his meetings!”

The strike did not take long to get more than front page position in all the New York newspapers and half the papers of America. As soon as the strike was called Weisbord organized mass picketing of the big mills. He called meetings and after fervid and inflammatory speechmaking in English, Hungarian, Italian and half a dozen other languages, formed processions and marched through the streets of Passaic, Paterson, Lodi and Garfield – these textile towns run one into the other in that vast human map that surrounds New York city – and began to march around the buildings.

Steel Helmets and Gas Bombs

The idea was to excite those workers who had not yet struck into coming out. Two by two the strikers marched around the buildings, singing, booing, or in ominous and picturesque silence.

Politics, of course, plays a part in this strike as it does in all things American. The police officials are appointed by the party which is friendly to the large mill owning interests of the district. When this strike of Weisbord’s failed to dissolve as all other strikes had done, there was alarm and the association of textile manufacturers called on the police to control the demonstrations. On March 2, in the seventh week of the strike, when mass picketing had succeeded in bringing out thousands of workers who could no longer face the booing and singing and derision of the paraders, the police in Passaic at last made a forcible effort to halt the ever-growing processions.

The chief of police of Passaic on that day turned out his full force and tried to stem the parade as it marched to the Botany Mill. He may have been genuinely alarmed that this parade would attempt to do violence to the premises. At any rate, he threw two tear gas bombs which he had in his motorcycle sidecar with him. Then he ordered out the fire department and ordered the hose turned on the strikers. The police also obstructed the advance of the strikers and, according to affidavits, used their clubs freely.

Albert Weisbord – knowing that publicity was worth more to his cause than any other factor – immediately got over a supply of steel helmets and gas masks from New York. If the police clubbed heads, the heads would wear steel helmets. If the police would use gas bombs, the strikers would wear gas masks. If the police turn fire hose on the parade, the strikers would put women shoving baby carriages at the head of the procession.

The following day, March 3, the newspaper camera men of New York went wild. Here was a story the like of which had not been seen since the war for dramatic human interest. All the cameramen and movie men in New York were on hand in Passaic that next day for the parade of the strikers in steel hats and gas masks with baby carriages in the lead. What would the police do now?

It was, in a sense, comic what the police did. They attacked the camera men. The New York newspapers estimate the damage to still and motion picture cameras that day at $3,000. The police of Passaic had hired a number of rather humorous truck horses as mounts and rode the cameramen down. It was the worst error of a number of errors committed by the police, for it turned the sympathy of the New York papers definitely away from the police and the mill operators. “Cossack” and other strong words appeared in the newspaper headlines. What Weisbord wanted he got. The police were effectively stopped from any further forcible interruptions in the business of mass picketing. They arrested several people on a charge “of singing without a permit in the public streets.” But the strikers promptly retaliated with charges against Police Chief Cober and two constables for striking unoffending citizens with clubs. If nothing is done about the clubbing, it is more than likely nothing will be done about the singing in the streets.

Picketing by an Army

This mass picketing is a new thing in America. The police claim it is disorderly. But when the strikers neither sing nor boo, but simply march – at noon and closing hour – stolidly and in silence around the mills, they claim they are not disorderly and cannot be interfered with. And this mass of men, women and children has a profound moral effect on the couple of hundred workers who might still be in the mills on maintenance work.

So far the strikers are away ahead on points.

Now for the other side of the argument.

“The strike will not succeed – there will be no effective union formed – simply because there are thirty-seven races of people involved,” said Col. Charles F. H. Johnson, vice-president of the Botany Mills and principal figure amongst the mill owners.

Col. Johnson came into the textile business via the war. The Botany Mills as well as a number of other textile mills in the district were founded twenty to thirty years ago, by great German textile interests. They were controlled by Germans at the outbreak of the war, and the Botany Mill was taken over by the United States government when the war was entered and Col. Johnson was put in to take charge for the government. When the war ended, Col. Johnson was instrumental in securing for the former German owners the right to purchase back the property and with a syndicate of other Americans bought a considerable interest in the mills. At the same time, he and his syndicate acquired other textile properties in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Latvia and Holland. It is now an international concern.

“This affair at Passaic,” said Col. Johnson, “is not a strike but a Communist demonstration. We will not treat in any way with the outside agitators who have fomented the strike.”

Albert Weisbord is more than amused by the stand of the mill owners.

“I cannot understand this unreasonable antipathy of the proprietors towards outside agitators. Surely the proprietors are all from outside. Some of them come from New York but others come from as far outside as Germany. Then why object to the workers calling in outside help in the management of their affairs?”

“A friend of my family,” said one of the directors of the Botany Mill, “is a young woman who does social work teaching in poor districts. She came to me reproachfully, after the strike had taken on its spectacular proportions, and told me of the children of one of the families employed in our mill who were underfed, half clothed, dirty and uncared for and begged me to look at that one example of what I was doing as a proprietor of the mill. I have a good deal of this to bear. I cannot tell that young lady that the conditions in our mill are governed absolutely by the general conditions prevailing throughout the textile industry – that I have to compete with Lawrence and Manchester just as the workers have to compete with the workers in those textile districts. However, I did investigate this one outstanding instance. We found that the parents of these children had put aside some five thousand dollars in the bank and were preparing to return to the Old Country.”

Two tremendous facts, nevertheless, stand out from the Passaic strike.

American industry has been safeguarded for a great many years by the safe and sane organization of the American Federation of Labor. The radicalism which has deeply affected the political life of all the rest of the world in the past ten years through new philosophies of labor has been kept out of America. Now, even if this strike in Passaic fails, it is unquestionable but that the textile industry will have to be organized. The unlimited supply of raw labor which made the industry unorganizable has ceased. Therefore, on to the stage so long dominated by the A. F. of L. comes a powerful new body, thoroughly drilled in the new philosophies of labor and life.

That is one important thing.

The other is the Melting Pot is on the last, great boil.

“We have had no idea,” said Col. Johnson in a private interview, “to what an enormous extent the expansion of American industry and the creation of wealth has depended upon the constant flow of raw new labor into the country. That supply is already limited. Now, I do not at all admit the charges of the agitators who have seized upon our mills as the first demonstration of the new state of affairs in industrial America. Our mills are modern, up to date in every respect. Our wages are the equal of any other wages in the industry. When orders are slack, how can we employ workers full time?

“But I am aware – and I am not sure but that my discovery is shared by a very large number of industrial managers in the United States – that a revaluation of all values is imminent in America that the simple factor of the supply of workers having ceased is certain to create fundamental changes in industrial relations. And there has to be a lot of thinking done on all sides.”

America – where the cops have more personal power than peers of the realm of Britain -well, the cops got a set-back the day the Passaic strikers donned the steel helmets and gas masks.

America, with its twenty-five thousand new war millionaires, its colossal wealth produced endlessly by the tireless army of inspired workers flooding in all her gates – and now the army is in and wants to know, like Cromwell’s, about the rates of pay.

A Tremendous Industrial Problem

unlimited

In one hall in Passaic we saw a Hungarian speaker take the platform and start to address the meeting in his queer “nick-nock-nuck” language, to be greeted by a volley of hisses.

“What’s that?” we demanded of Margaret Larkin, the girl directing publicity for the strikers.

“Those are other nationals who want to hear their own language spoken.”

The Melting Pot is on the, boil. The crucible is full. The bellows are blowing the fire to silver heat.

“Hundreds of our workers,” said Col. Johnson, “have not yet drawn their last pay. They think that holds their job open. They tell us that as soon as the demonstrations die down, they will be overjoyed to come back to work for us at any old conditions.”

In one grey painted frame house, divided into three room family compartments, we found Daki Prizka sitting in his shirt sleeves facing his family, wife and six children. (His boy, being born in Passaic, may be a future president of the United States.)

Daki, frightened by the strike, frightened of the strike rations which friendly unions contributed – one New York bakery sent over six truck loads of bread – had just returned from New York, an hour away by bus, where he had secretly been looking for work.

New York had terrified him. Those tall temples in the sky, symbols of power and wealth illimitable – those thunderous streets – millions of cold-eyed, hasting tollers – Daki had gone into grim, terrible by-streets where he thought a job might be hiding in some sort of shame. But he found no man who knew his language. There were no jobs. He came home to the strike-broken town where his countrymen knew him.

“Bad!” said Daki. “Bad, bad, bad!”

One of his babies coughed rather terribly.

Daki is worried, Colonel Johnson is worried, Albert Weisbord has been worrying ever since he went to Harvard and began thinking about things.

“Are you a Communist?” we asked him.

“Twenty-five thousand war millionaires in the United States of America,” replied Weisbord, his cold eyes stilled behind scholarly spectacles. “The American Legion came into my meeting last night with a Stars and Stripes. They crashed their way up to the platform and held the flag up to me. In the tumult, I bent down and took it and held it to me. Everyone was still. The strikers were astonished. The Legion men were dumb. ‘Thank you, comrades,’ I said, in the quiet, ‘thank you for this flag. I accept it in the spirit in which it is given – symbol of the spirit of revolution in which it was born!’ Then they all went out.”

We have ringside seats for the most spectacular pyrotechnic display of the ages – the running off of the gold from the Melting Pot.

---

Editor’s Note: This story is in reference to the 1926 Passaic textile strike, the first Communist-led work stoppage in the United States. 

By Gregory Clark, March 27, 1926.

“How would forty dollars a month and board do you?”

“Good stuff,” replied the unemployed and down-and-out young man in the government employment bureau – single, in good health and unaware of the source of to-day’s supper and to-night’s bed.

“All right; there’s a man here from an Algoma pulpwood camp looking for men…”

The lively expression on the unemployed young man’s face instantly fled.

“No, I don’t want to leave town… I got the prospect of a job as soon as spring comes…”

What is it about pulpwood and lumber camps that frightens the unemployed of the cities? What false traditions and misunderstanding fill the cities’ slushy and hopeless streets with jobless men all the long winter through when the beautiful northland, where every day is Christmas, calls in vain?

Is it the cold? The thin, dank cold of Toronto at ten above zero strikes closer into the bone than forty below in Algoma.

Is it the work? Of course, it may not be work they are looking for; 7 a.m. to supper time – those are the hours!

Is it the hard life? Oh, boy! – seven kinds of pastry not including pies; bunks about a red-bellied stove; a concertina droning and all voices raised.

What is it? Why should there be a single unemployed man in the south after the first snow falls in the great north country?

When the Lake Superior Pulp and Paper Company gave us a letter to their woods boss and we went a couple of hundred miles north from Sault Ste. Marie to see the first steps in the great pulpwood industry of Canada, we expected to find hard, strong men-who-are-men living a cold, rough life just for the glory of it and pitting their brute force against the cruel elements. Ralph Connor¹ and the movies had primed us for the big surprise,

Mile by mile, as we went north from the Soo, the country grew wilder, darker. The hardwood mountains gave way to the vast unbroken seas of spruce. Endless spruce, dark and motionless in the snow. The villages ceased and our stops were at little section houses. Even the section houses grew smaller, lonelier. The dark spruce was closing in.

“Mile 229 next stop,” said the conductor. “Do you know Fred Landry to see him? I’ll introduce you.”

Fred Landry is the woods superintendent for the paper company, boss of a whole township of this engulfing spruce. The train pulled up amidst little village of spotless white log houses in the snow – a Christmas card scene.

And the first thing we saw as we detrained with our packsacks and snowshoes was a young lady nine months old, wrapped in her shawl – Barbara, the little daughter of the assistant to the boss, out to see the choo-choo go by.

A Christmas Card Country

Well, here was our first shock. Something of what literature and the movies had bequeathed us was instantly and completely lost at the sight of this dainty baby. Fred Landry shook hands with us in a firm, friendly way. (“Landry,” had said a huge mackinaw figure in the smoking compartment, “drives his horse without a whip, you’ll see. He has funny dogs around him that no other man would keep for a minute. Somehow, he attracts to him the best damn cooks and foremen in the whole of Algoma. You’ll like Landry.”)

We liked Landry, a Nova Scotian, one of those dark men with about ten words an hour. His eyes have a permanent, silent smile in them. We met his wife, his assistants, in a log house the interior of which was simply the modern bungalow, even to the radio set. We went across the village square to the dining house.

“This,” said Fred Landry, “is just the headquarters, office, stores and so forth. The main camp where we are cutting is six miles back into the township.”

We visioned a long hike on foot by tote road.

“No, I’ve a horse and cutter.”

“Pretty rough going?”

“No, indeed; as fine a pavement as you will ever see; an ice road.”

“Ice?”

“Yes, we water the main road every day. The tractor hauling the pulp to the railroad needs a good pavement for its load.”

Pavements, tractors – and before us this dinner table heaped with such food as cafeteria proprietors aim at and never attain! Lumber camps must have changed since Glengarry days.

We walked through the sparkling afternoon (we get about two like it in a lucky winter down south) to where the horse and cutter were tabled near the ice road. There on the railroad siding lay a long train of empty flat cars waiting to be loaded from the ramp. We drove on to a pavement of ice, blue, hard, surely the slickest pavement man has ever invented. Standard width, it wound amidst the dark gothic spruce seeking the flattest levels. The little horse stepped out ahead of the red cutter. It was like driving straight into a Christmas card.

This road we have used now or five years,” said Fred Landry. “It takes years to cut a township. Each season we push the road back further into a fresh stand of pulpwood. We’ll be here another two years yet. Then when all the spruce is cut, we will move on to another stand, build new camps, new roads.”

“But has this been cut?” we asked, pointing to the dense thickets of evergreen on both sides of the road.

“This was cut five years ago.”

“Then you don’t clean it off?”

“No, indeed. We take only the big spruce. Plenty of young stuff is left to mature. In five years, that has taken on almost an untouched appearance. But you will see when we get back into the uncut stands that this section lacks the big spruce.”

Pulp Cutters Have Special Saws

After three or four miles through this enchanted green land on the sparkling blue pavement, we at last came to the water tank on sleighs – a huge home-made square box on runners that contains 3,000 gallons of water. It was hauled by a team of giant horses. Spouts of water were gushing on to the road to freeze hard and smooth between its banked-up kerbs of snow.

Then we reached the first piles of pulp wood. The wood is cut into four-foot lengths and stacked in neat piles on both sides of the ice road to await the big tractor and its trains of sleighs.

“Pulp wood is cut on two different plans. Sometimes the company cuts it, hiring the crews direct. Or contractors cut it,” said Landry. “In either case, the principle is the same. These crews are mostly Finns and Russians. In the. fall, when the cutting begins, we open camp and the crews arrive. Each contractor or gang is allotted a certain stand of spruce to cut. The main road is extended into these stands.

“Then the crews are stationed along the main road one man to a row. Pulp wood cutting is a one-man proposition. Each man is given a stand on the main road and he starts to cut in at right angles, using his one-man buck-saw – a Finn contribution to Canada’s pulpwood industry. He starts from the road with saw and axe and cuts a lane into the solid bush big enough for a sleigh to get up. He clears the brush and stumps and falls what spruce is in the road. Then he starts in on both sides of his lane, sawing down the spruce, limbing it with his axe, sawing it into four-foot lengths with his bucksaw and carrying it out to his lane and piling it ready for the sleighs to come and haul it to the main road.

“The cutting goes on until bout January. Each man is paid by the cord – $2.25 a cord, just now, and a good smart man can cut two cords a day. There are no gangs working and wasting time. Each man is alone in his lane off the main road, but he can see his neighbors a few yards off through the spruce. Picture it? – individual men driving their little roads off the main road and stacking, their spruce as they go.

“In addition to the incentive of pay, there is the rivalry of craftsmanship. There is great rivalry for the title of best cutter in the camp. It isn’t always the biggest or strongest man who stacks up the biggest piles, either.

“When the snow comes the contractor or the company sends in the small sleighs and they haul the wood out to the main road, where it is again piled – each man his own great pile with his number chalked on – and as soon as the cold weather arrives cutting ceases, the piece-work ends, and the cutters are taken on at a straight wage-$35 to $40 a month and board, to load. The loading and hauling consumes the rest of the season. The tractor -gasoline driven – can haul ten huge sleigh loads of six to seven cords a sleigh – sixty to seventy cords at a haul. Three trains of ten sleighs are kept busy by that tractor – probably the greatest modern addition to the lumber industry. When it delivers one sleigh train to the siding, the string just unloaded is picked up and hauled back into the far end where they are loading, and when it arrives there the third sleigh train is already loaded and ready to go out. We take out two loads a day, a hundred and ten to a hundred and twenty cords.”

Seven Kinds of Pastry

When we reached the main camp – all of logs and occupying a big clearing on the edge of a lake – the shadows were beginning to creep across the snow from the encircling forests of spruce. Smoke was climbing from the cook’s fires in the mess cabin. The camp was awaiting the return of the men from the bush.

“Come and taste a cup of tea and some of the cook’s art work,” said Fred Landry.

So help us, there were seven kinds of pastry heaped on those big refectory tables before us! Jam tarts, jelly tarts, jam roll, apple turnovers, plum turnovers, chocolate cake and caramel cake!

Then there were three kinds of pie – apple, raisin and red currant. Now, this was not the sort of fine, rough fare that you could properly apologize for two hundred and more miles north of the Soo. The pies and cakes were dainty as any you would get in a Toronto hotel. The pies were rich, brown, flaky – the kind that makes mother a legend in cities.

“What else do you give them to-night?” we asked the little French chef, who was watching us with interest.

“Beans,” he replied with a grin.

Ah, beans! We knew there would be a bit of the traditional lumber camp somewhere. The cook opened a huge iron kettle almost as big as an engine boiler and lifted out a plate of beans for us. Shades of Boston and the poor mushy dark brown fodder that passes as beans down in the effete and civilized south! These beans were as light as feathers, almost white in color, every bean as complete and unsquashed as when it came out of the bean bag. And the flavor, well, Boston beans have no more meaning for us. Give us lumber camp beans for a banquet!

“Hey! Go easy,” admonished Fred Landry. “This is only tea. You’ve got a dinner waiting for you back at headquarters, and we mustn’t insult the other cook!”

We shook hands very formally with the little camp chef.

Outside, with the rose-colored evening falling upon the world of white and dark green, the great tractor was coming past the main camp on its six-mile haul to the railroad. Behind it came ten huge sleighs – one tractor hauling sixty cords of pulpwood! It reached a slight unavoidable grade on the glassy ice road. The crew broke the sleigh train in half. Up went the first five loads, down the grade came the tractor and slid the second five sleighs into place, and then on its way! In the old days, double and treble teams of horses used to heave and tug at single loads through these miles of woods. It was more picturesque, but that was all.

The water tank is filled from holes cut in the lakes by a horse-windlass and a barrel. The road is repaved every day with polished glass.

Then out of the evening woods trooped the loading gang, its day done. These were all Finns. Broad-cheeked, blond northerners – splendid, monosyllabic fellows with only two faults recorded against them in all the north country: they don’t observe the game laws and they are slightly tinged with Red – that is, they are easily swayed by agitators, and strike without much difficulty. Another fault also heard against them from Canadian lips – they don’t mind work! But a feeling of envy filled our hearts when we saw these great, weary dumb giants sit down to the meals fit for demi-gods: a great envy – for we pictured the employment bureau in a far distant city, a grey, terrible scene, damp and smelly-a pitiful mob of shabby, hungry, ill-looking men leaning against soiled counters, waiting for something to turn up. These tousle-headed, wool-clad huskies of Finns, tucking into such a meal, with warm bunk houses to soothe their work-happy muscles. Already, a concertina was tuning up somewhere out in the Christmas scene. But the songs that were sung were unknown songs.

Lumber Camp Turkish Baths

Have we petered out? What these Finns are doing, the great grandfathers of the present Old Ontario were doing seventy-five years ago. The cities are betraying many a man out of his rightful inheritance. The Finns are taking the north country as they find it. The cities are filled with men wearing callouses on the soles of their feet.

“We sent a man down, to the cities,” said Fred Landry, as though reading our thoughts. “He couldn’t get any men.”

Despite the big tractor and its note of modernity, there are still no end of picturesque things in the great camp. One of the quaintest was the steam bath house. This, like the one-man bucksaw, is a gift of the Finns to Canada. No Finn will work in a camp without a steam bath house. This house is a low windowless log shanty, closely chinked. One whole corner is filled by a huge pile of stones, neatly piled over a hole or fireplace. The rest of the shanty is filled with benches. Early Saturday morning a fire is started in the fire-hole beneath the stones. It is kept afire all day long, until he stones are piping hot. Then the gang comes in from the bush and disrobes. They carry pails of water int the awfully hot shanty. The pails of water are thrown on the stones and the shanty fills with live steam. There the Finns – and all the rest of the camp to the boss himself – sit and stew for half an hour. The dirt is fairly gushed out of them by sweat. It is simply a Turkish bath. But it is a mighty sanitary one.

The blacksmith shop of a lumber camp makes everything from the huge runners for the wood sleighs to the sleighs themselves. Latches, windless beams, horseshoe nails, ten-ton water tanks – nothing is beyond the old-fashioned blacksmith whom the motor car has driven to his final halt in the lumber camp. He is a great man. He has a pile of iron bars and ingots. From them he will make you anything. We found him throwing together one of the gargantuan sleighs that follow the tractor over the ice highway. A little job like building a ship.

The bunk houses are like army huts, except that they are roomier and the bunks are bigger and more comfortable. Gas lanterns light the scene for the boys to read and write before “lights-out” at nine o’clock. The Daily Star arrives every day – just seven hundred miles!

“Well, it’s wonderful,” we said to Fred Landry, the boss of all these wonders. “Christmas every day.”

“It is a great life, he said quietly. “They grouse.”

“Just like the troops.”

“But we are all happy and healthy and it puts a spell on you.”

We drove away in the twilight down the road paved with palest green, between aisles of cathedral spruce and large silver stars snapping in the remote Algoma sky. We passed a little clearing where a Finn lived with his wife and sons. There was warm light in the windows and the bucksaws were hung by the door.

“They’re beginning to settle. He works with the gang and is doing a little clearing, too. His wife helps pile the pulpwood.”

We could now detect, in the dark woods, the tell-tale ghostly paths cut right and left, that showed the cutting done five years before. But the young spruce forest had already forgotten time and was busy restoring the great dark blanket of evergreen which, save for fire, lies over all that great lone land. At the railroad, a sleigh train was just being hauled on to the ramp. A loading crew stood ready to hand-heave the little logs from sleighs to flat cars to go down to the Soo where the company’s big paper mills are.

One year there were four hundred men in this camp – this township. The number changes with the season’s demand for pulpwood. But there are always Finns enough to supply the need for men – he-men, strong, willing men with a taste for producing wealth out of the raw.

Back at headquarters, with the radio bringing in comic cities and their inadequate compensation of sounds hundreds of miles to the south, Fred Landry showed us a map.

“After we’re through here, we’ll move up to one of these other townships.”

It is a great, romantic harvest – the beginning of the strange business that ends with this paper resting in your hands with this story and these pictures printed on it.

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Editor’s Note:

1. Ralph Connor was an author of romanticized versions of the Canadian West. ↩︎