by Tim Higgins
Winnipeg, Manitoba
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This essay, and the following three articles, are offered in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. Eds.
On 28 June 1914, in the Bosnian town of Sarajevo, a world ended. The Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, was touring the provincial capital with his wife when their driver took a highly unfortunate wrong turn. Waiting along the alternate route was a young Serb terrorist, Gavrilo Princip, who succeeded in assassinating the royal couple.
What followed was Armageddon—fifty bloody months that washed away 10,000,000 lives, four empires and a hundred years of social and political certainties. It was immediately followed by the worst pandemic since the Black Death. The ‘Spanish’ Flu may have killed 50,000,000 people worldwide. [1] In six horrible years, nearly 3% of the entire world’s population was gone, and with it, the nineteenth century.
Something else died on those battlefields and hospital beds—optimism. Before the Great War, people believed in the inevitable march of ‘Progress’. The question was not whether society was perfectible; it was simply a matter of method. Reformer or revolutionary, jingoist or cynic, the underlying assumption was the same. War might be possible, even probable. But such a conflict would, at worst, be only a temporary corrective on the road to an ever better future.
As Carstairs and Higgins have noted, [2] when Rudyard Kipling chided the United States for failing to take up the ‘white man’s burden’ in the Philippines, he was not criticizing Americans’ lack of stomach for empire. What he took exception to was their reluctance to do their duty as an advanced society and help a “lesser” people better themselves. Even as detached an observer as Oscar Wilde remarked, in all seriousness, that “a map of the world that doesn’t include Utopia isn’t worth even glancing at.” The direction of History was clear; the tide, unstoppable.
And then, the unthinkable happened. Instead of ‘home for Christmas’ after a glorious explosion of duty and heroism, we created one of the worst disasters in the history of humanity. The loss, disillusionment and sense of dislocation were, for many people, overwhelming. After Kipling, the great imperialist, lost his son in the conflict, he had little time left for the white man’s burden. In 1923 he wrote:
When you come to London Town,
(Grieving-grieving!)
Bow your head and mourn your own,
With the others grieving.
For those minutes, let it wake
(Grieving-grieving!)
All the empty-heart and ache
That is not cured by grieving.
For those minutes, tell no lie:
(Grieving-grieving!)
“Grave, this is thy victory;
And the sting of death is grieving.” [3]
It is difficult to overestimate the effect that the First World War had on the psyche of Canadians. The butcher’s bill in Manitoba was 7,760 dead [4] from a total population of just over 600,000, with thousands more wounded in mind and body. It is little wonder there was a spike in interest in the afterlife and participation in séances in the 1920s. The temptation offered by the chance to communicate with departed loved ones, so many of whom had been in the prime of their lives, must have been irresistible.
One of the most high-profile participants in these sessions was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. He, like Kipling, had lost a son in the war and was convinced they had succeeded in communicating through the offices of a medium. It is interesting that Doyle singled out Winnipeg as a shining example of such activity during his 1924 visit. [5]
The social costs of the war, though obvious and real, present challenges to quantification. Of the economic consequences, however, there is no doubt whatever. As Niall Ferguson has argued in his book The Pity of War:
Quite apart from the killing, maiming and mourning, the war literally and metaphorically blew up the achievements of a century of economic advance … One estimate of the cost of the war puts it at $208 billion (about $2.5 trillion in 2009 $US); that grossly underestimates the economic damage done. The economic misery of the post-war decades—a time of inflation, deflation and unemployment due to monetary crises, shrinking trade and debt defaults—could not have contrasted more bleakly with the unprecedented prosperity which had characterized the years 1896-1914, a time of rapid growth and full employment based on price stability, growing trade and free capital flows. The First World War undid the first, golden age of economic ‘globalization.’ [6]
For an economy driven by commodity exports and external investment, the results were devastating. Winnipeg’s golden years of growth ended, never, as it has turned out, to return.
A taste of things to come. New recruits at Manitoba’s Camp Sewell train in trenches similar to ones they would encounter in Europe.
Source: Rob McInnes, MN0888
As has been noted previously, the global influenza epidemic of 1918–1919 may have killed far more people than the war itself. The strain seems first to have appeared in a military training camp in the US Midwest during the late summer of 1917 and subsequently transported to Europe on American troop ships. [7] Once there it mutated, reappearing in the much more virulent form that swept around the world beginning in the spring of 1918.
Aside from the astounding death toll, which included 55,000 Canadians, the most unsettling thing about this disease was who was attacked. Against all common sense, many of the most vulnerable proved, once again, to be people in their prime—the stronger and healthier the patient, it seemed, the higher the risk. This was a time when respected authorities had been suggesting that man had already learned everything worth knowing. The realization that our most esteemed doctors not only had no cure, but could not even identify the cause of this ruthless killer served only to reinforce post-war disillusionment. Meanwhile, the rising death toll amplified the grief of an already stricken society.
In Winnipeg, another 1200 fatalities were added to the toll that had been mounting relentlessly since 1914. But the ramifications of the pandemic went beyond the appalling death rate. As Esyllt Jones points out, quarantines and the banning of public gatherings had significant economic impact, particularly for the working class of Winnipeg’s North End. [8] Not only were these decisions ineffectual; they took no account of the hardship imposed on people who supported their families payday to payday in a time before benefits. The result was a further exacerbation of social tension in Canada’s most ethnically diverse city.
“Our boys off to the War.” Winnipeggers at the CPR station send their sons and daughters to the European battlefields.
Source: Rob McInnes, WP1809
The third major event that defined the mental landscape of post-war Winnipeg was, of course, the famous General Strike of 1919. Portrayed at the time as a great victory over the scourge of Bolshevism, the strike was, in reality, yet another symptom of post-war malaise.
With the fall of the Roblin government in 1915, the extremely cozy relationship between public and private sectors—so thoroughly exposed by the Kelly case [9]—began to unravel. Subsequent challenges to the established order—the move toward a professional public service, enfranchisement for women and the escalating unrest among workers who seemed to have forgotten their place in society’s hierarchy—were troubling to the business elite, a group who believed that they and the ancien régime they had supported were largely responsible for Winnipeg’s golden age.
After all, in addition to the grand homes south of the Assiniboine, the period’s legacy included the Shoal Lake aqueduct that guaranteed clean water for a growing city; the Manitoba Telephone System and Winnipeg Hydro, which substantially lowered the costs of doing business here; and, despite the corruption that attended its construction, the new Manitoba Legislature, by general agreement, one of the finest public buildings on the continent.
Winnipeg’s elite had made very comfortable lives for themselves, particularly during the pre-war expansion. What had become clear to these men as the war ended was that if the state were no longer to be a part of this compact, then it would have to be managed. It is an approach documented by Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell in their analysis of the correspondence between A. J. Andrews and Arthur Meighen [10] in their book When the State Trembled: How A.J. Andrews and the Citizens’ Committee Broke the Winnipeg General Strike. [11]
Andrews and the Committee of 1000—a group of prominent citizens formed to resist industrial action—had a very effective tool at hand as the strike got underway. It was the widespread fear that communist revolution had spread to Canada.
That a great power like Russia could fall to what many saw as a rabble of communist agitators came as a huge shock to the entire world. In the chaos following the war, it was not hard to convince oneself that, if it could happen once, it could happen again. The evidence was everywhere. In January 1919, with civil war raging in Russia, papers were full of the attempted Spartacist coup in Berlin [12] and the mass arrests of communists in the United States.
Although unusually widespread and well organized, the Winnipeg General Strike still largely concerned complaints about poor wages and working conditions—a situation only exacerbated by the economic recession that began almost as soon as the war ended in November 1918.
However, the rhetoric of the strike leaders, some of whom had called for the end of capitalism by whatever means necessary, as well as the presence of so many eastern European ‘aliens’ in Winnipeg made it much easier to sell the public and the government on the idea that the strike might actually be the precursor to a Bolshevist coup. Given the devastation and loss so many families were experiencing in the aftermath of war and disease, the shift from seeing the strikers as ‘not really one of us’ to ‘dangerous Other’ was easier to orchestrate than might otherwise have been the case.
In this sense, the strike can be seen as a competition. The elite, through the Committee of 1000, were attempting to use public opinion to pressure the state into dissipating what they considered to be an existential threat. Success would help them reduce the pressure the end of economic expansion was exerting on their privileged existence.
On the other hand, labour and the activists who helped bring the new Norris government [13] to power—prominent among them suffrage and temperance groups [14]—were interested in taking advantage of the chaos of war to change society, [15] though there was little agreement between them as to what form that change should take.
In addition, the war had created a fourth player— the returned veterans. These were men who had grown up listening to sermons on the social gospel and the perfectibility of society as expressed through the British Empire in churches barely able to accommodate their burgeoning congregations; who had left a city still in the twilight glow of its golden age to fight for King and Country; who were brutalized beyond the comprehension of non-combatants. While ‘our boys’ were idolized in the general sense on their return, many of the ‘heroes’ who stepped from trains in their hometowns soon became, to borrow the American phrase, forgotten men.
Remember my forgotten man,
You put a rifle in his hand;
You sent him far away,
You shouted, “Hip, hooray!”
But look at him today! [16]
As a group, they shared a strong and understandable desire to return to the world they had left, as well as a huge antipathy for those who hadn’t served, or who didn’t appear to share the ideals upon which the war was fought—most recognizably the “alien” foreigners who had arrived during the great wave of pre-war immigration. The former preoccupation made the veterans natural allies of the Committee, the latter, convenient weapons. The parallels between these men and their counterparts in Germany—the demobilized soldiers who provided muscle for the anti-Communist Freikorps and later on, shaped by different historical pressures, formed the core of Hitler’s Brownshirts—are unmistakable.
The tone was set in the months leading up to the strike. On 25 and 26 January 1919, groups of returned soldiers rampaged through the Exchange and North End, demanding that owners fire any aliens they employed and make the resulting jobs available to real Canadians, i.e., men of British descent. Those who demurred had their premises vandalized. Interestingly, the Free Press reported that the police followed the mob from place to place, making little attempt to intervene. [17]
Once the strike began, many of these same men were enlisted as special constables, initially to support the police, then to replace them when much of the Force joined the strike. Once the Citizens had successfully co-opted the state’s monopoly on the use of force, the arrest of the strike leaders for sedition and subsequent violent defeat of the strike became only a matter of time. The status quo had triumphed. Unfortunately, pre-war Winnipeg, the ‘Chicago of the North’ Winnipeg, had never been about the status quo.
War. Disease. Economic turmoil. Class struggle. It was a perfect storm. By 1921, most of the icons of Winnipeg’s Golden Age had died or were spending their declining years contemplating their legacies. With few exceptions, their sons and daughters were not up to the challenges posed by the birth of the twentieth century; through the 1920s, businesses closed and the new generation began to abandon the city their parents had built.
As the last of the great golden-age projects, the Legislative Building, was completed, it was becoming clear that Winnipeg’s elite had moved from expansion to consolidation. The 1922 victory of John Bracken and the Progressives (who were anything but), [18] was merely punctuation for a story and time that had already ended.
If neither government nor business is committed to progress; if both have lost the imagination that vision demands and the will to carry it forward, the result is stagnation. This was Winnipeg as the world headed into post-war recession—a city no longer driven to become, but merely content to be.
1. Johnson NPAS and Mueller J. 2002. Updating the Accounts: Global Mortality of the 1918-1920 “Spanish”Influenza Pandemic. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76:105-15. Reprinted in Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching. Gerger, M. Lantern Books. New York, 2006.
2. Carstairs, S., Higgins, T. Dancing Backwards: A Social History of Women in Canadian Politics. Heartland Associates. Winnipeg, 2004.
3. Excerpted from “London Stone,“ as published in the Wellington (NZ) Evening Press, 10 November 1923.
4. Higgins, T. Broadway. Heartland Associates. Winnipeg, 2001.
5. Homer, M. W. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventures in Winnipeg. Manitoba History. Vol 25, Spring 1993.
6. Ferguson, N. The Pity of War: Explaining World War I. Basic Books. New York, 1999.
7. Barrie, J. M. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Penguin Canada. Toronto, 2004.
8. Jones, E. Influenza 1918: Disease, Death and Struggle in Winnipeg. University of Toronto Press. Toronto, 2007.
9. Thomas Kelly was convicted of fraud in the construction of the Legislature and served two years at Stony Mountain Penitentiary. Although Premier Sir Rodmond Roblin’s involvement was never established, the case was largely responsible for his resignation.
10. A. J. Andrews was a Winnipeg lawyer and spokesperson for the Committee of 1000. Arthur Meighen was federal Minister of the Interior and acting Justice Minister in the Borden Government.
11. Kramer, R., Mitchell, T. When the State Trembled: How A. J. Andrews and the Citizens’ Committee Broke the Winnipeg General Strike. University of Toronto Press. Toronto, 2010.
12. The Spartacus League, led by Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Leibkneckt, were a hard-left faction of the German Social Democrats. The coup was defeated by the German Army, supported Freikorps militias, leaving nearly 1000 dead. Both Luxembourg and Leibkneckt were executed as soon as they were captured.
13. T. C. Norris was elected Premier of Manitoba on 6 August 1915. A Liberal, he served until 1922.
14. On 28 January 1916, Manitoba women became the first in Canada to be able to vote. Prohibition, also enacted in 1916, was defeated by referendum in 1921.
15. Carstairs and Higgins, op. cit.
16. Dubin, A., Warren, H. Remember My Forgotten Man, Warner Brothers, 1932.
17. Manitoba Free Press, 27 January 1919.
18. The case is made cogently by W. L. Morton in Manitoba, A History. University of Toronto Press. Toronto, 1957.
Page revised: 4 November 2018
