Tag: 1926 Page 1 of 4

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. ↩︎

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.

Editor’s Note:

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

By Gregory Clark, May 15, 1926.

Toronto has no Bohemian colony, no Montmartre¹, no Greenwich Village, no Soho.

But the Bohemians are there, just the same, artists, art students, musicians, sculptors, stainers of glass, toolers of leather, batterers of brass, batikers of batik², designers of theatres, chapels, book covers, and writers of all the unprofitable branches of literature from sonnets and one-act plays to free verse, free in both senses.

Down in the basement of the Ontario College of Art, which is back of the new art gallery in Grange park, we talked to a crowd of smocked art students whose hands were all muddy with clay which they were piling up in shapeless masses that presently would emerge as symbolic figures.

“Is there a province of Bohemia in Toronto?”

“No. There are Bohemians, but they are not organized into a colony.”

“Where do most of them live? Is there no favored district?”

“Within walking distance of the college of art. That means anywhere from the Ward to the Humber or the Beach. And wherever rooms can be got cheapest, with a north light.”

“That’s vague.”

“Several have rooms over old-fashioned stables back of old-fashioned mansions.”

“That is better.”

“Many have attic rooms, and third floor backs, and hall bedrooms.”

“Bohemianer and Bohemianer!”

“Some move once a month or as often as the rent is due.”

“And is there a Bohemian restaurant, a popular cafe?”

“No. Eating…”

This art is a strange thing. It takes hold of men and maids, a passion transcending love. A large number of the parents of the younger art students feel that their offspring are addled. Everything founded on commonsense is sacrificed. There are girls studying art in Toronto today who are living on less than two dollars a week for their food. There are young men who have recently performed the miracle of existing the full eight months of the year’s course at art school on absolutely no income. Minimum of everything – food, furniture, clothing, comforts of the most elementary sort – is the rule.

Amongst the majority of the art students those students who have well-to-do parents back of them are referred to as the “Four Hundred.”

“What,” asked Arthur Lismer, who is vice-principal of the college, of one of the students who had several terms of experience, “is the very least you can get along with as living expenses?”

“Well, you can get a perfectly good room for little as two dollars a week, though three would be a more general minimum. It isn’t much of a room, of course, but it doesn’t need be does it?”

“Food?”

“Fifty or sixty cents a day will feed you nicely, that is, buying your meals. But of course, some of the girls can do it less than that by buying the raw materials and cooking their food. Some of them don’t even buy bread, but bake their own.”

Living on Nothing a Day

“So-and-so,” said Mr. Lismer, mentioning another student, “did it on less than that.”

“Ah yes, but he restricted himself to soda biscuits and milk. And then, of course, there Whatyoucallem” (and the clay-fisted students all grinned at the mention of the name), “who subsisted on the milk he used to pinch off doorsteps in his early morning foraging expeditions. Winter was a great hardship to him, when the early morning deliveries were cut off.”

“Tell us more about him!” we begged.

“There’s little enough. He was determined to study art and he had no means whatever. The only time the police nearly got him was when he broke into a cellar to steal a lump of coal for his grate and the police were called and he hid under the coal while they prodded around the cellar.”

“Why didn’t he work to put himself through?”

“How could he work?” retorted the students scornfully. “He worked at his art in the holidays.”

Adding all the conservatories of music, the art schools and other sources of instruction in the high arts, there are several hundred students of these what you might call unprofitable professions in Toronto, and a decided majority of them are the type who are smitten with that mysterious quest of an unnamable goal and who have back of them little or no financial support.

“A father,” said one girl student, “will help his son get an education to be a lawyer or engineer. But few fathers, other than wealthy and careless ones, will encourage their children in what they regard to be so crazy-headed and unprofitable an enterprise as art. Most of our relations are strained as a matter of fact.”

These students, whose Bohemianism is largely a blossom of youth, nevertheless swell the ranks of the graduate Bohemians of which Toronto is gradually collecting its quota.

“If a census were taken,” says Arthur Lismer, “of all the people who, in the secrecy of their rooms, are either painting pictures, designing in one of the crafts, writing poems or plays, or in some field of art seeking to express the mystery that is pressing from within, it would run into hundreds and hundreds.”

Few of the art students know what their goal is. They are making definite and practical sacrifices. They are living sparely, with conscious effort at economy. But few of them have any expectation of making even a moderate fortune out of their art. The student of engineering can suffer hardship with the vision before him of great rewards. But there are no examples of rich rewards in the arts around Toronto.

We asked about this from a group of students at the college.

“What do you expect to get out of it all?”

“It is hard to put a name to it. We are not at all painfully aware of restrictions or hardships of any sort. Sacrifice is part and parcel of the whole thing. You can’t imagine a fat and comfortable art student really getting ahead with his art.”

“And then,” put in another girl student in the group, “we have fun.”

Toronto’s Little Bohemian Club

They have fun. The art students’ ball last month was one of the most picturesque events of the social season. Masquerade, of the period of the Italian renaissance, original presentation of dramatic masque of Dante, directed by Roy Mitchell, and then the fox trot to one of the city’s smart orchestras on, on into morn, in costumes antedating the minuet by centuries. And the students were outnumbered, five to one, by Bohemians of all ages, from University professors to the pretty partners of bond salesmen whose experience of the plastic arts is lipstick – the partners, not the bond salesmen.

The college is open at nights. Where night classes are not going on, the students are free to work and to foregather. The Ontario College of Art is entirely co-educational. There is no segregating of sexes. And that is a very odd thing. Because the art school in Montreal, that city which is boasted to be so much freer in spirit than Toronto, segregates the men from the girls not merely in different wings of the school, but has different times of admitting and dismissing the two sexes – the men at 9 o’clock and the girls at 9.15 in the morning, and the same in the afternoon.

There are a number of little clubs of a Bohemian aspect in the city, the most active of which is the Theatre Arts Club, which actually puts on plays. These young people have their club in a quaint old building next door to the morgue on Lombard street, which formerly was a Catholic boys’ home. Some of the old churchy benches remain, and here they have erected a stage and prepared such properties as they can make with their own wits and hands entirely.

One thing about all the Bohemians, especially the younger students and practitioners of the arts, is that they want something else in their atmosphere besides air. There is an obvious approach, with self-conscious bravado, to those subjects which from time immemorial, but particularly within modern times, have belonged strictly to the arts. The Theatre Arts Club’s latest presentation, for example, was Oscar Wilde’s “Salome.” Who amongst us does not remember having quivered all over to the luscious music of this brilliant steal from the Song of Solomon in our undergraduate days?

Atmosphere is Bohemia. It appears to be a fact that unlike cows, fat and contented artists seldom produce anything worth while. The bare and limited life that results in all the compromises and makeshifts that comfortable people call Bohemia is somehow stimulating to the spirit. It is as if the restriction of all human desires such as the desire for comfort and food and property and everything else average people desire were a means of conserving a spiritual fuel for the fires that create.

There is, however, the story of a girl who came to the collage from a mansion on the Hill – the sort of girl who showed no promise of anything, not even beauty, couldn’t play, couldn’t sing, cook, fish, garden, play golf. But in her was a queer streak which her family, utterly baffled, as the famille of artists often are, diagnosed rather fearfully as art. So they sent her in all the trappings of one of the negligible “Four Hundred,” to the college. In a few months, the whole thing had captured her, body and soul.

Not Many Have Arty Look

And right before all eyes there went on the astonishing process of this girl denuding herself of all the comforts her family had accustomed her to, reducing her needs, unconsciously, almost, to a minimum, sacrificing, glorying in being admitted into the sacrificial intimacy of the hardest working students, reducing her life to the bare terms, as far as material things were concerned, in which the spirit can live in understanding with the unnamable mystery of art and creation.

That is all Bohemia is – an atmosphere, artificial, as art is artificial, in which there is subjugation of a lot of desires to spare fuel for the big desire and to free the vision far enough away to get the perspective of truth that artists must have to make art. Perhaps those who are nearest God’s image, of all mankind, are artists, who have inherited from on high a little more than others the passion to create. And it, naturally, is a mystery, from within and without.

Our Bohemians are not the least eccentric in their clothing. The reason is – no colony. If they could live and dine together they would wear their badge with pride. Amongst the elder members of the artistic cult are few even with odd haircuts. Look at the group of seven! They look more like a staff of schoolmasters than like the popular conception of artists. The only one who wears a fancy coiffure says he does it to spare himself being mistaken in railway smokers for a traveling man. It spares him a lot of conversation of that sort. Roy Mitchell, head of the stagecraft department of the college, has always had an arty look, even back before he wore the mackintosh cape, and that was about the time Red Dixon used to play fullback. An artist gets the same internal kick out of certain externals that a soldier gets out of his uniform or a golfer out of his plus fours. But until Toronto acquires a Bohemian resort, it can look for few picturesque figures among the artists.

The musical circle of Toronto contains no outstanding salons of Bohemia. Literary groups show no tendency towards the unconventionalities of what Soho, Montmartre and Greenwich Village used to be before tea rooms invited the slummer in and the artists out. Most of the literary clubs look like church socials, and sound like them, too.

Commercial art offers a way out for those students who can no longer resist the temptation of comforts, home and wife. The others head on for the larger theatres of art, New York, London, Paris, Brussels. Toronto does not hold many of its visiting art students – and a very large number of them come from far places in Canada. One of the most promising of them all comes from British Columbia, and we visited him in his attic room, vivid with sketches on every wall, a saucepan of shaving water steaming on a gas stove, a cello in a corner, paints, fragments of art material scattered about. When he welcomed us, I noticed a cigaret butt, caught and dangling from the tail of his sweater coat.

We had called with Arthur Lismer, who wanted to consult him about another picture to add to what this student was already asked to show in the group of seven exhibition. This was a great honor – the first time a student had ever been asked to show with his masters. Immediately after greeting us, this student began hunting for his cigaret butt. While Mr. Lismer talked, the student kept prowling about the attic studio with a mystified air. He looked on table, stove, shelf, floor. He stared intently at the floor. But no cigaret butt.

“Give us that one with the children bathing in the blue water,” said Mr. Lismer.

“Well, I would,” said the student. “But it won’t fit my frame, I’ve got only the two frames, and it won’t fit.”

They argued this quaint question – show held up for the want of a frame – and then the cigaret butt fell from its hiding place on to that space of floor where the student had looked most intently.

He looked at the butt with amazement. He glanced quickly about, with the air of one on whom impa are playing tricks. There was something so innocent, so elfin, so warmly comic about that whole scene, the spirited conversation between master and student, about pictures and treasured picture frames, the cigaret butt so eagerly sought and in hiding on his cost tall, and in the mysterious restoration of it, that it stood a perfect piece of all that innocence and asceticism which is all the Bohemia Toronto has.

Editor’s Note:

1. From the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th, Montmartre in Paris was where many artists lived, worked, or had studios. ↩︎
2. Batik is an Indonesian technique of wax-resist dyeing applied to cloth. There was an artist inspired craze in Europe and the Americas for Batik in the early 1920s. ↩︎