Racial Attitudes in English-Canadian Fiction, 1905-1980

By Terrence Craig

Racial Attitudes in English-Canadian Fiction is a critical overview of the appearances and consequences of racism in English-Canadian fiction published between 1905 and 1980.

Based on an analysis of traditional expressions in literature of group solidarity and resentment, the study screens English-Canadian novels for fictional representations of such feelings. Beginning with the English-Canadian reaction to the mass influx of immigrants into Western Canada after World War One, it examines the fiction of novelists such as Ralph Connor and Nellie McClung. The author then suggests that the cumulative effect of a number of individual voices, such as Grove and Salverson, constituted a counter-reaction which has been made more positive by Laurence, Lysenko, Richler and Clarke. The “debate” between these two sides, carried on in fictional and non-fictional writing, is seen to be in part resolved in synthesis after World War Two, as attitudes are forced by wartime alliances and intellectual pressures into a qualified liberalism. The author shows how single novels by Graham, Bodsworth, and Callaghan demonstrated a new concern for the exposure and eradication of racial discrimination, an attitude taken further by the works of Wiebe and Klein.

The book concentrates on single texts that best portray deliberately or not, racist ideology or anti-racist arguments, and attempts to explain the arousal in Canada of such ideas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Oct 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9781554586615

Terrence Craig

Terrence Craig is Assistant Professor of English at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick.

Book preview

Racial Attitudes in

English-Canadian Fiction,

1905-1980

Terrence Craig

Racial Attitudes in English-Canadian Fiction is a critical overview of the appearances and consequences of racism in English-Canadian fiction published between 1905 and 1980.

Based on an analysis of traditional expressions in literature of group solidarity and resentment, the study screens English-Canadian novels for fictional representations of such feelings. Beginning with the English-Canadian reaction to the mass influx of immigrants into Western Canada before World War One, it examines the fiction of novelists such as Ralph Connor and Nellie McClung. The author then suggests that the cumulative effect of a number of individual voices, such as Grove and Salverson, constituted a counter-reaction to the English-Canadian attitude, a counter-reaction which has been made more positive by Laurence, Lysenko, Richler, and Clarke. The debate between these two sides, carried on in fictional and non-fictional writing, is seen to be in part resolved in synthesis after World War Two, as attitudes are forced by wartime alliances and intellectual pressures into a qualified liberalism. The author shows how single novels by Graham, Bodsworth, and Callaghan demonstrated a new concern for the exposure and eradication of racial discrimination, an attitude taken further by the works of Wiebe and Klein.

The book concentrates on single texts that best portray, deliberately or not, racist ideology or anti-racist arguments, and attempts to explain the arousal in Canada of such ideas.

Terrence Craig is Assistant Professor of English at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick.

Racial Attitudes in

English-Canadian Fiction,

1905-1980

Terrence Craig

Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Craig, Terrence L., 1951-

    Racial attitudes in English-Canadian fiction,

1905-1980

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-88920-952-9

1. Canadian fiction (English)—20th century—

History and criticism.* 2. Racism in literature.

I. Title.

PS8191.R33C73 1987           C813'.5'09355           C87-093825-8

PR9192.6.R33C73 1987

Copyright © 1987

WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5

87 88 89 90 4 3 2 1

Cover design by Polygon Design Limited

Printed in Canada

No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system, translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher.

To

Orma and Ernie Bradley

Contents

Preface

Chapter One

Introduction

Chapter Two

The English-Canadian Attitude, 1905-1939

Chapter Three

The Immigrant Reaction Before 1939

Chapter Four

The Immigrant Reaction, 1939-1980

Chapter Five

The Synthesis of Multiculturalism, 1939-1980

Chapter Six

Klein and Wiebe

Chapter Seven

Conclusion

Selected Bibliography

Index

Preface

This book was written to illustrate the racial attitudes that have been written into Canadian prose fiction in English in this century. I have not had any particular axe to grind, nor am I trying to make this topic out to be anything more than what it is—one of the many themes that constitute Canadian literature. I have tried to be comprehensive in my coverage of significant works that demonstrate racial concerns, and any failings in that respect I regret. Despite the recent increasing number of more sociological books appearing in Canada on the topic of race relations, there has been little attention paid to its appearance in literature. Although the focus of this book is somewhat specialized, I have tried to strike a balance between the necessity of some plot summary and the discussion of theme, a balance that I hope will attract the attention of readers with interdisciplinary interests.

There are a number of people who must be thanked for their contributions to this study, although, of course, its weaknesses and omissions are entirely my own responsibility. I owe much to the patience and discipline of Professor W. J. Keith of the University of Toronto, without whose advice and encouragement the work would be far less than what it is. In an earlier form this study benefited from the constructive criticism of Professors Frank Watt and Jack MacLeod of the University of Toronto, and Professor John Moss of the University of Ottawa. I thank Fred Bodsworth and Austin Clarke for their interviews on this and other subjects. So many people provided tips along the way that they cannot all be mentioned, but I would like to thank Professor Tom Tausky of the University of Western Ontario, Professor Russell Brown of the University of Toronto, Professor Jack Healey of Carleton University, and Dr. Henry Makow. I thank Beth Miller, Head of Special Collections at the D. B. Weldon Library at the University of Western Ontario, and Richard Bennett, Head of Archives and Special Collections of the University of Manitoba libraries, for their assistance in obtaining the unpublished Grove material. Finally, I am greatly indebted to Kenna Marshall of London, Ontario, whose speedy and careful proofreading was a great help at a difficult time.

Parts of this book have appeared in different forms in the Journal of Canadian Studies, Studies in Canadian Literature, and The Native in Literature: Canadian and Comparative Perspectives.

I am grateful to Mount Allison University for a grant in the summer of 1985 towards the preparation of the manuscript for publication.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Chapter One

Introduction

One of the primary objects of racism is to turn the victim against himself.

Racism and National Consciousness, by F. I. Case

I

The terms race and racism are used to define a social problem as serious in the present as it has ever been in the past. Hardly a day passes without the Canadian press reporting incidents of racial discrimination against one minority or another, and periodically opinion polls on the subject reveal widespread feelings of an intensity approaching and at times reaching racism. Traditionally, English-Canadians have considered themselves free of the most blatant forms of prejudice which have so obviously afflicted the histories of Central Europe and the Southern United States. If we disregard, for the purposes of this study, the tensions between the French and English groups in Canada, we are left with what might be termed the multicultural tensions of a multi-ethnic nation, and these tensions have at times, sporadically and often independently, achieved the level of racial prejudice. While the artistic intentions behind works of literature are as varied as they are difficult to determine, this study is predicated on the belief that, among its other purposes and effects, literature has a responsibility and an established function to draw attention to social problems and to provide the moral leadership to search for solutions. In exploring ethnic tensions in Canadian prose fiction in English in the twentieth century, I am restricting myself to a sociological view of literature, but as I am concerned with a sociological phenomenon which has the kind of ideological ramifications that humanists have traditionally protected by means of literature, this approach seems not only necessary but legitimate.

In general the popular sense of the word race has several discrete meanings, and its appearance in literature is consequently often ambiguous and vague, particularly in situations where confusion with nationalism has arisen.¹ There is a popular sense of races being well-defined divisions of humanity, with recognizable boundaries which should be respected as fixed and unalterable. This approach leaves science behind as it merges with cultural and religious prejudices to approximate the equally loose term of ethnic group. Thus anti-Semitism, which may be simply religious intolerance, takes on a racial aspect when Jews are perceived as a race, as they officially were in the first half of this century by Canadian immigration authorities. Used in such a manner, the concept of race provides a means of over-simplifying a complex and still controversial question, reducing a physically diversified community to a limited racial group. Within this study the broader, popular meaning of race is usually used in the same sense as it so often appears in literature, but with the important qualification that as such it is almost always mistaken and misleading. Much that has nothing to do with race, in the limited scientific sense that may justify its maintenance as a term, is popularly used in a practical sense that attempts to force a philosophy out of unfounded prejudices.

Nativism, the historiographical term applied so usefully to the United States by John Higham in Strangers in the Land (1963), and applied with equal success to Alberta by Howard Palmer in Patterns of Prejudice (1982), has not been used in this study, for I have concentrated on the ethnic component of nativism. Although some of the attitudes discussed below may seem more nativist than ethnic, it is their contributions to the effects of ethnocentrism (contributions which are often neither predictable nor logical, but rather emotional) that I am most interested in. In addition, nativism seems a very mild, almost euphemistic term for such a destructive ideology.

Modern theories of race owe much to Arthur Gobineau, whose notorious Essai sur l’inegalité des races humaines (1853-55) solidified in prose a topical aristocratic argument, derived in part from Boulainviller’s distinction between the plebian Gauls and the Frankish nobility,² to found a comprehensive theory of racial determinism which was presented as the explanation for history. Gobineau’s pessimistic racism is so closely linked to class or caste, and so concerned with the power and authority that his own (adopted) group, the royalist nobility, had lost in the French Revolution, that the racial logic he presses into service seems an unnecessary varnish applied to a bitter class-conscious interpretation of French history. A separation of class-and race-oriented historiography took place in the nineteenth century, and Gobineau was chiefly responsible for providing a pseudoscientific and quasi-philosophical literary status for an ideology which could be used to counterbalance the atheistic, materialistic egalitarianism of Marx. Michael Biddis has summarized this dichotomy most succinctly:

The major works of Marx and Gobineau, directing loyalty to Class on the one hand and Race on the other, are in essence responses to the same crisis—that of alienation from the social, economic, and cultural state of contemporary Europe.³

Darwin’s theory of natural selection, applied to humanity by Herbert Spencer, provided an additional intellectual stimulus and support for Gobineau’s basic tenets. The argument that only the stronger races survive and succeed supported rising racial pride among Northern Europeans who could thereby explain their apparent superiority over non-whites in their various empires. By the time Houston Chamberlain further idealized Social Darwinism and Gobineau’s racism, the importation of the philosophy of race (as distinct from the omnipresent background noise of public prejudice) into the New World had begun. Here the European line of argument was imported whole, and a new American racism arose to protect a new American race. Repeating the established European race myths and falsehoods, American racists produced a spate of pretentiously erudite texts in an attempt to give their theories respectability.

Two books in particular stand out from the rest on account of their unabashedly racist tenor. Madison Grant, a curator at the New York Museum of Natural History and one of the founding members of the American Eugenics Society in 1905, was a well-known racist propagandist before 1916 when his book, The Passing of the Great Race, first appeared, to be followed by three more editions within seven years. Condemning the destructiveness of the melting pot theory, demanding an end to immigration, justifying the continuation of slavery for the good of the uncivilized slaves, and denying the possibility of inferior peoples ever rising to the level of the New American Master Race, itself composed of the best Nordic strains from Europe, Grant brings together almost every racial argument possible. The personal bitterness, the sense of a heritage of privilege lost or endangered, which permeates Gobineau’s gloomy writings, is detectable in Grant’s prose as well. The new American Nordic aristocracy is presented as threatened by hordes of inferior immigrants. Essentially a desperate conservative attempt to have history halted and the current situation preserved by forbidding further immigration, the book represents a class attitude elaborately but weakly disguised as racial fact. Grant’s elitism, threatened by egalitarian idealism, is repressed into racism. A member of the upper class, denied privileges he feels are his due, and with his elitism threatened politically and socially, he could not employ Marxist analysis without betraying his own class interests and going against his own class consciousness. Grant must walk the tightrope of defending privilege and heredity in a self-conscious democracy, and he uses racism to keep his balance. One might predict that one’s own class allegiance should determine the intensity of one’s beliefs in racial determinism, upper-class conservatives holding extreme racial opinions and lower-class leftists proposing universal brotherhood. Reality, of course, is not so simple: anti-Semitism has been practised by both extremes, and internal racial conflict has disfigured the progress of labour movements in times of economic stress.⁴ However, as a general principle, class allegiance often is reflected in the attitudes of writers in the same privileged yet threatened position as Grant. The clear facts of class protection, showing through the transparency of his desperate racial rhetoric, point the way to a better understanding of some Canadian writers who later fictionalized similar situations, Charles Gordon (Ralph Connor) being the best example.

Two other points raised in The Passing of the Great Race which appear in the 1920s in Canadian literature are the suggestion of polygenism and the claim that certain races, notably Jews, could never become good white Americans because of their inherent disqualifications. Particularly antagonistic towards the Polish Jew, whose dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration on self-interest are being engrafted on the stock of the nation,⁵ Grant laid the foundation of fears that certain races could not possibly be assimilated into the American dream, and could only be a sore on the body politic. This attitude, imported with some enthusiasm, was to persist selectively in Canadian letters, making a notable and influential appearance in James S. Woodsworth’s Strangers Within Our Gates (1909). Polygenism, which Hannah Arendt has noted as an increasingly important theme in nineteenth-century English racial ideology,⁶ was crudely represented by Grant as the diluting effect of miscegenation, which invariably left a product inferior to both original strains, thus causing degeneration and eventually race suicide.⁷ This idea occurs frequently in later Canadian literature, notably in Charles Gordon’s novel, The Gaspards of Pine Croft (1923).

Grant’s influential book is neither original nor very truthful, but it did define a North American white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideology of race that assumed the respectability of anthropological science to exploit fears that could be better defined in terms of economics and class conflict. Another American, Emerson Hough, had taken it upon himself seven years before Grant’s book to bring the same kind of fears and solutions to the attention of Canadians. In The Sowing (1909), subtitled a ‘Yankee’s’ View of England’s Duty to Herself and Canada, Hough referred to the American experience as leading through unsupervised immigration and through the guidance of personal greed, directly to the extermination of the American race.⁸ Much as Grant was to do, Hough defined this American race as pioneer heroes of Nordic ancestry, about to commit race suicide. Most of his racial argument is actually about economic competition, foreign labourers being blamed for underpricing the more deserving true Americans. Despite the fraudulent logic of much of his book, Hough is important because he imported the new American model of racism into Canada, appealing to established Canadians to protect their basically Nordic culture (he ignores French-Canadians) from the inevitable deterioration that more immigrants would bring. It is an ostensibly anti-socialist message, an appeal to preserve an economic status quo, and its first publication serially in Canada Monthly must have propagated its ideas widely.

Deepening interest and speculation about a truly Canadian race is expressed in many books and numerous articles in the popular and scholarly periodicals from 1900 on. A few prominent writers virtually appropriated this subject, relating it to their own various personal concerns with immigration, religion, economic conditions, and Empire. Some of their individual studies are referred to below in the appropriate chronological contexts, but certain individuals should be considered here in the context of European and American race literature. The English-Canadian view was much milder on the whole than the alarmist rhetoric of Hough and Grant. It supported English and Scottish immigration first, and followed a qualitative ranking system downwards thereafter.⁹ While this was justified frequently on practical grounds such as the expense of educating non-English speakers, the fears of communicable diseases, and the desire to create a greater British Empire, blatantly racial judgements underlay these excuses in the assumption that alien races were as fixed in their inferior characteristics as the Nordic race was in its superior qualities.¹⁰ The desire to see English farmers settle on the prairies and become Canadians presupposed that a new Canadian nationality (which was interpreted in racial terms by many) already existed as an ideal for them by 1900, and that ideal gained strength especially with the impetus of nationalist fervor during World War One. This Canadian race had its superiority guaranteed by its predominately English and Nordic content, which itself was considered to have been proven great by the undeniably unprecedented achievement of the British Empire. When Stephen Leacock set out his wildly impractical plans for millions of new immigrants, he specifically meant Britishers within this Imperial context.¹¹ His theory, if not his numbers, was supported by many prominent men of letters, including Andrew Macphail, who wrote in the University Magazine in 1920:

Immigration is war,—war by the new comers upon those already in possession. . . . There are breeds of men as there are strains of animals and classes of plants. They have their own affinities and their own repulsions. . . . When all immigrants are equal before the law, and have the same power over government through the instrument of the vote; when mental attainments and physical courage count for naught, the lower breeds will prevail. . . . The lower races, of course, deny the validity of this law. Without a flag or language, without surnames save such as they assume for themselves, they are the great apostles of the brotherhood of man, and sentimentalists among ourselves encourage the delusion in the belief that they are giving assent to Christian doctrine.¹²

So much for the brotherhood of man. Such an echo of Social Darwinism was not uncommon immediately after the Great War and the appearance of Grant’s book (in 1916). In fact, it formed a considerable part of the English-Canadian view of race, which then was simply the natural ethnocentric pride of the majority Canadian charter group multiplied by Imperial accomplishments and peculiarly North American anxieties concerning both American pressures and, increasingly, the threat of alien immigration. English-Canadians have never been a race, but clearly in the first part of this century many viewed themselves as one, closely related to Grant’s Nordic-American ideal but without the stigma of republicanism. They defined themselves against their opposition—the aliens—who were induced to metamorphose into the labouring-class version of English-Canadianness, at which point they became acceptable immigrants in that they no longer threatened upper-class Canadians with their foreign and therefore inferior politics, religions, or customs. A qualified and limited version of Canadianness was made available to aliens, often presupposing their innate inabilities to ever fully approach the basically British ideal of intelligence and civilization. English-Canadian opinion was divided between extremists who saw alien immigrants as innately unassimilable and therefore a threat to the new Canadian race, and those who believed in the possibility of varying degrees of assimilation through the suppression of alien cultural qualities and the inculcation of essentially British ones. An uneasy compromise existed in practice.

The idea of British immigrants leavening the alien influx, thus exercising some control over the future, was quite popular, the term itself being widely used.¹³ A few direct refutations of racism did appear to counter the above opinions, but they were rare and usually aimed at only the most rabid and obviously fanatical aspects of racism. John Murray Gibbon, author of several romantic novels and an administrator of the CPR (Canadian Pacific Railway) colonization scheme, and Robert England, a well-known prairie educator, both increasingly propagated pro-assimilationist views throughout the 1920s and 30s.¹⁴ To them, and especially to Watson Kirkconnell, then on the staff of Wesley College in Winnipeg, must go much of the credit for defending and interpreting in a favourable light the cultural traditions of alien immigrants which were threatened with extinction by the selective melting pot many Canadians still insisted on. They countered the most blatant racism with a less potent strain which, while welcoming the cultures of Paderwsky and Tsevchenko, still insisted on socio-political subservience to their own established sense of Canadian norms. To them assimilation to the Anglo-Canadian norm meant, as Frederick Philip Grove astutely pointed out in Maclean’s in 1928, the forced acceptance by aliens of the Anglo-Canadian socio-cultural status quo. Apart from the continuous controversy in the serious press on the subject of race relations, there is quite a lot of similar evidence throughout the more popular periodicals of English-Canadian patronization of aliens, their acceptance of and respect for the white man’s burden, their anti-Semitism, and their general smug ethnic complacency. What little rabid rhetoric did achieve publication usually referred to what was considered the absolute necessity of excluding Asiatics from the West Coast.¹⁵

Religious intolerance, frequently defined and expressed in racist terms, was largely directed against Mennonites and Doukhobors, whose settlements en bloc aroused the hostility of the assimilationists, despite the welcome these immigrants had received on arrival and the promises made to them concerning freedom of education and exemption from military service. As cohesive groups physically and culturally, these and other religious sects had more