IMMIGRANTS IN THE CITY: WINNIPEG'S NORTH END 1900-1920
J. E. Rea
One of the great enterprises in Canada at the beginning of the twentieth century was the completion of the grand design of Confederation the creation of a transcontinental Dominion. The last and crucial element in the development of a national economy was the settlement of the prairie West. To the business communities of Toronto and MontrΘal, the acquisition of this vast hinterland was one of the great goals of the Confederation scheme. It provided central Canada with a market and a source of raw materials, and the railways with a steady and profitable east-west trade. If only the settlers would come!
To stimulate interest in the West and encourage settlement, the federal Department of the Interior, under the direction of Clifford Sifton, began an intensified search for agricultural immigrants. The Department deployed its agents throughout the United Kingdom and the United States to extol the advantages of Canada's virgin prairie land. The response to this campaign was gratifying, not only to the government recruiters, but to agents of the railways and private colonization associations as well. However, the government was still not satisfied and turned to a new, non- traditional source for experienced farmers, the peasantry of south-eastern Europe, the exotic "men in sheepskin coats." They would break the prairie to the plough, make it produce and flourish and bring to fruition the great undertaking. This new direction in immigration policy, of course, coincided almost exactly with one of the great migrations of human history when millions of people left Europe for the settlement areas of the globe.
Almost all the immigrants who, for whatever reason, chose to settle in the Canadian West passed through Winnipeg. The burgeoning prairie metropolis, at the convergence of the national transportation routes, became a distribution centre for the new land. Many of the tens of thousands of people who poured into Winnipeg before the Great War, however, never got any farther. Hundreds of others, after a dispiriting attempt at unfamiliar prairie agriculture or disillusionment with marginal land, returned to the city to seek labouring jobs with the railways or other expanding industries. As a result, both the size and demographic character of Winnipeg's population went through an extraordinary change.
At the close of the nineteenth century, when the great flood of immigrants to the West was just beginning, the population of Winnipeg was 42,534. By 1905 it had nearly doubled to 79,975; in 1910 it had leaped to 132,720; and at the outbreak of war in 1914 it had reached 203, 255. This staggering rate of growth put enormous strains on services, the stock of available housing, health care facilities and other resources of the city. It was a booming, lusty, frontier community desperately trying to cope with problems of rapid growth and now further taxed by the presumed cultural challenge of the newcomers.
The expansion of the city created a series of neighbourhoods and urban communities which soon took on settled characters, products largely of class and ethnicity. These social barriers were made manifest by a very real physical isolation in Winnipeg. The three rivers, the Red, the Assiniboine and the Seine, highways of communication and commerce in an earlier time, became inconvenient obstructions in the urban context. When the railways came, first the Canadian Pacific, then the Canadian Northern, the Grand Trunk Pacific and Midland, Winnipeg was further divided into separate communities with little interaction. One of the largest of these areas was the North End, the bustling, teeming home of unskilled, working class immigrants. The main line of the C.P.R., with its gigantic marshalling yards and shops, became the southern boundary of the district. It has been a physical and psychological barrier dividing the city right up to the present. The result was the evolution of a distinctive community within Winnipeg, perceived in one way by the majority group in other areas of the city and in quite another way by those who lived in it.
Traditionally, North End Winnipeg has been described as the "foreign quarter" or an ethnic ghetto, implying that the vast majority of its inhabitants were non-British immigrants. In reality, however, the character of North End Winnipeg was originally a function of class rather than ethnicity. By the late 1890s, when the tide of non-British immigration began to set in, there was already a substantial population of working class people north of the C.P.R. tracks. The new European migrants invariably poor and unskilled gravitated naturally toward the area of cheapest accommodation. While it remained uniformly working-class until recently, the North End achieved an ethnic variety that was to become very quickly its distinguishing characteristic. This influx of immigrants was recognized by many Winnipeggers, among them the popular journalist, George F. Chapman, who wrote in the Canadian Magazine in 1909 that "the æNorth EndÆ has become a significant definition in the city. Not all the ænorth- endersÆ are foreign, but the majority converse in other than Anglo-Saxon speech."
Chapman was helping to create the considerably distorted stereotype of the "foreign quarter." But it had only limited relevance. By 1916 eighty- three percent of the city's Slavic population and eighty-seven percent of the Jews lived in the North End. Yet only two-thirds of the Scandinavians and just twenty-two percent of the Germans could be found there. At no point during these early years of the twentieth century did British residents comprise less than forty-five percent of the North End population. Yet clearly, the perception of the North End held by observers of British origin was determined by those groups who were least similar to the cultural majority. There was general agreement that Germans and Scandinavians, who had substantial cultural links with the British group, would soon take their place in western Canadian society. But young Chapman revealed an increasing doubt about the assimilability of Jews and Slavs. The fusion of races in the melting pot is increasing. The blast furnaces are developing the new Canadian but there is something defective in the system. The product is not satisfactory nor is the process sufficiently rapid and sure.
Thus the early image of North End Winnipeg as an ethnic ghetto was created by the majority group. It was real enough, of course, but the notion that this new immigration from eastern Europe constituted a threat to the dominant culture grew out of the insecurity of the leaders of the majority group. They were, after all, a rather recently established elite. The resolution of the Manitoba School Question in 1897, which marked the new achievement of cultural dominance by the Ontario migrants, coincided with the beginning of European migration to the West. The British majority group in Winnipeg had scarcely secured control of the major social institutions when they were challenged by this new threat. Their easy presumption that western Canada would be Anglo-Canadian and Protestant was now severely tested. The majority group reacted by emphasizing the cultural distinctiveness of the newcomers by invidious comparisons. British values and customs were held up as ideals to be emulated.
An example of this technique occurred in the work of Ralph Connor. Connor was the pseudonym of the Reverend Charles W. Gordon, a prominent Presbyterian minister in Winnipeg. His novels of muscular Christianity in the West were found in most middle-class English homes. In one of the best known, The Foreigner, written in 1909 at the peak of the new immigration, he concluded a long description of a Slavic wedding with the following passage:
Meantime, while respectable Winnipeg lay snugly asleep under snow-covered roofs and smoking chimneys, while belated revellers and travellers were making their way through white silent streets and under avenues of snow-laden trees to homes where reigned love and peace and virtue, in the north end and in the foreign colony the festivities in connection with Anka's wedding were drawing to a close in sordid drunken dance and sanguinary fighting.
Standards of acceptable conduct in the new land were made quite clear and immigrant traditions were condemned.
If Winnipeggers of British origin watched the expansion of the immigrant population of the North End with growing apprehension, the newcomers were oblivious of this fear. They had more pressing and immediate concerns. They were preoccupied with building a new life in the bewildering, callous and often fearsome city. Almost inevitably, East Europeans were drawn to the North End not only for cheap accommodation but for kinship. They had an understandable need for something familiar and stable in this frightening new world. Block by block, they tried to recreate the sense of village community they had left behind. They sought the solace of their languages, religious practices and old world customs. The North End became a series of neighbourhood communities Jewish, Galician, Bukovinian, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Finnish where the newcomers insulated themselves from the forbidding Anglo-Canadian world beyond the tracks.
North Enders had little need of the main shopping area of downtown Winnipeg. North along Main Street and west along Selkirk Avenue, commercial areas sprang up in which English retailers and small service industries were steadily replaced by ambitious immigrant tradespeople. Jewish tailors, Ukrainian builders and Polish butchers helped to create a business area in which a dozen languages were spoken. Local markets, where traditional foods could be obtained, became a colourful fixture of North End community life.
The temptation to romanticize, however, must be resisted. The North End was also a terribly congested world. Winnipeg's stock of housing was almost always inadequate before the Great War. This was especially true of inexpensive homes for working people. The result in the North End was an extraordinarily high density land use. Builders exploited the situation by using 7.5 and 10 metre lots, and throwing up whole blocks of inferior row tenements. The luxury of a single family dwelling was almost unknown. Friends from the village in the old country, homeless relatives and the economic need to take lodgers all contributed to incredible overcrowding. One graphic description of living conditions comes from an early social worker in the North End.
She lives in a room in a disreputable old tenement one of those human warrens which are multiplying with great rapidity in our city. The father has no work. The men boarders have no work. The place is incredibly filthy. The little girl has been ill for months all that time lying on a bed in which three or four persons must sleep and which also serves the purpose of table and chairs. For weeks this little girl has had an itch which has spread to the children of the surrounding rooms. She has torn the flesh of her arms and legs into great sores which have become poisoned. The other day I saw the mother dip a horrible dish rag into the potato dish and wash the sores
In some areas of the North End conditions were indeed shocking. There was almost no accommodation for the hundreds of seasonal labourers so single family homes often took in as many as twenty or twenty-five lodgers at nickel-a-night rates. In these overcrowded situations, rudimentary sewage systems and inadequate health care led to endemic disease. In the summer of 1912 the infant mortality rate among the so-called "foreign population" was placed at 28.2 percent. The incidence of tuberculosis in 1918 was 3.8 per thousand, the highest in Winnipeg.
Few of the eastern European immigrants had skills to offer. Most had been peasant, tenant farmers. They took whatever rough work they could get, at any rate of pay, much to the consternation of British labourers who saw wages being forced down. Indeed, organized labour in Winnipeg lobbied annually to stop the flow of immigrants who posed such an economic threat. It should be no surprise, therefore, that the Winnipeg Board of Trade was an enthusiastic supporter of immigration.
Railway and bush work took hundreds of men out of Winnipeg in the summer but they returned for the winter. Others found work in construction, in garment shops and in a variety of other unskilled jobs. It has been estimated that ninety-five percent of the Ukrainian population resident in Winnipeg in 1918 earned less than $100.00 per month. A very few went into business for themselves, usually with little capital and dependent on their own ethnic group for trade.
North Enders clung to their old country religious traditions as much for a sense of community as for spiritual sustenance. Most of the east Europeans were Orthodox, Jewish or Roman or Eastern Rite Catholics whose practices were in native tongues. Synagogues and the distinctive onion domed churches sprang up throughout the North End. Often they were built of scrap metal, discarded packing cases of whatever material came to hand. Quickly, the churches and their ubiquitous "halls" became a focus of community social life, a bulwark against the new society. The rhythmic peasant rituals of birth, marriage and death integrated the groups as they always had in the old lands. Not surprisingly, the retention of traditional language and religion was as important to the immigrants as their elimination was to the English Protestant majority.
The latter were firmly convinced that the only solution to this cultural challenge was to "Canadianize" the immigrant. All the important social institutions were employed in this great work, not just the obvious ones, such as the Protestant churches and the public school system, but the Y.M.C.A., the Boy Scouts and nurses' organizations as well. There can be little doubt that most of the activity proceeded as well from a generosity of spirit, especially on the part of those caught up in the Social Gospel movement of the time. Yet the motives of the Margaret Scott Nursing Mission or J.S. Woodsworth's All Peoples' Missions, while admirable for their sense of Christian duty, were ultimately derived from the premise that Anglo-Canadian society was inherently superior and the immigrants must be remade.
Much of the effort at assimilation was directed at immigrant children. Generational conflict within families thus became inevitable. The social implications of liberal Protestantism individualism and materialism confronted the peasant ethic which was communal and other-worldly. Since the majority group controlled the social institutions, there was an inevitable decline in the vitality of the immigrant culture. But there was a strong delaying action.
A rather remarkable phenomenon took place in the North End. As assimilationist pressures began to break down the integrity of some of the ethnic groups, the groups were strengthened by a gradually increasing sense of class identification. In 1912, Der Yid published this attack on Jews who left the community.
They thought that they would remain the stronger brothers in Winnipeg...they never came down to the North-End; they never heard the beating pulse of the Jewish street. The joy and pain of the Jewish community never interested them. Just one time did they come, to spread their wings and with the shine of their dollars and with the smoke of their cigars they try to place the Jewish North-End beneath their wings. The North-End they have realised is becoming stronger than they are and the language (Yiddish) which they have so vulgarized is the only language spoken by those Jews who are becoming more powerful; there is a Yiddish theatre in the North-End, a Talmud Torah is being constructed and once again in the North-End, a Yiddish newspaper is being published - all this in the North-End.
Indeed, there was a remarkable degree of cultural and intellectual activity among the ethnic groups of the North End at the time of the Great War. There were music, dancing and dramatic societies. Reading clubs attracted many members. There was considerable writing, although very little of it has yet been translated, and the ethnic press flourished. At the beginning of the war there were two Icelandic papers, one Swedish, one Norwegian, one German, one Yiddish, one Polish and five Ukrainian, all published in Winnipeg. They ranged from religious-nationalist organs through vehicles for Canadian political parties seeking ethnic votes to fiery, radical sheets.
While the intellectual community of the North End was small, it was very active. Leadership tended to come from the churches or from a vigorous, if variegated, socialist group, influential well beyond its numbers. But the Great War fought, ironically enough, so small nations could be free-stifled the intellectual vitality of the North End. Most of the Slavs and Jews had come from the ramshackle Austro-Hungarian Empire and they, as well as the Germans, were considered enemy aliens. In 1918, their newspapers were suppressed and their language virtually proscribed. The war also ended the heaviest immigration Canada has known. The North End entered a new phase of development after its conclusion. However it was the first dozen years of this century which set the image of Winnipeg's North End polyglot, colourful, often wretched, but spawning tough-minded men and women who carved out a place for themselves in the life of the city.
