The Mountie from Dime Novel to Disney

By Michael Dawson

Historian Michael Dawson digs deep into the written and pictorial record to reveal how the RCMP, since its inception, has constructed and zealously guarded its public image. Drawing on previously untapped sources, Dawson documents how consultants and entrepreneurs deliberately transformed and modernized the traditional symbolism of the Mountie. His trenchant analysis extends to the ironies of the recent licensing of the hallowed Mountie image to the ultimate dream-merchants——Disney.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Release date: Apr 30, 1998
• ISBN: 9781926662664

Michael Dawson

Michael Dawson is Professor of History at St. Thomas University, where he teaches courses on Canadian History, the global history of sport and tourism, and the comparative history of national identity and popular culture in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. In 2014 he was elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists.

Book preview

The Mountie

from Dime Novel

to Disney

Michael Dawson

The Mountie

from Dime Novel

to Disney

Disney_FM-1

Between the Lines

The Mountie from Dime Novel to Disney

© Michael Dawson, 1998

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Between the Lines, or CANCOPY (photocopying only), 6 Adelaide Street East, Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario, M5C 1H6.

Between the Lines gratefully acknowledges financial assistance for our publishing activities from the Ontario Arts Council, The Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

Every reasonable effort has been made to find copyright holders. The publisher would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Dawson, Michael, 1971 –

     The mountie from dime novel to Disney

Disney_FM-2

Includes index.

ISBN 9781926662664 (EPUB)

1. Royal Canadian Mounted Police — Public Relations — History.

2. Royal Canadian Mounted Police — In motion pictures.

3. Royal Canadian Mounted Police — In literature. I. Title.

HV8157.D38 1998     659.2'93632'0971     C98-930683-6

Cover and text design by Gordon Robertson

Cover collage by David Laurence

Goofy cartoon: Aislin—The Gazette; map: RCMP Centennial Souvenir Programme; still from Rose Marie: Glenbow Archives, Calgary, Alberta, NA-2947-I; watercolour: RCMP Centennial Calendar, courtesy of the Regina Chamber of Commerce; Estevan gravestone: Glenbow Archives, Calgary, Alberta, NA-2009-2

Printed in Canada by Transcontinental

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10      05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98

Between the Lines, 401 Richmond Street West, Studio 277, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 3A8, Canada

[phone]      http://www.btlbooks.com/home.php

Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

– OSCAR WILDE

If the culture of the nation is only so much wool, then the eyes over which it is pulled must belong to sheep. And so everything disappears, except the possibility of farming.

– PATRICK WRIGHT,

On Living in an Old Country

Contents

Preface

ONE Introduction:

Of Mice, Mounties, and Historical Magic

TWO Fiction and Film:

The Mountie as Antimodern Crusader, 1880–1960

THREE The Mountie and the Culture of Consumption, 1930–70

FOUR A Moment of High Nationalism (and Tension), 1968–73

FIVE Embracing Modernity, Liberalizing the Past:

The 1973 Centennial Celebrations

SIX Upholding the Image, Maintaining the Rights:

The Mountie Enters the World of Postmodernity, 1973–97

SEVEN Conclusion:

Re-Mounting the Force for the Twenty-First Century

Notes

Index

About the Author

Preface

Like a suspect tracked through the vast reaches of the Arctic tundra, I too have felt the cold, relentless stare of the Mountie. Any attempt to distance myself from this project was constantly subverted by the appearance of a Mountie on television, in department stores, in my mailbox, on my office door, on my Christmas tree, and even in a travel agent's office in Vienna. Sometimes the Mountie was plastic, and sometimes he was acrylic. But always, it seemed, he was there.

To conclude this project and thus escape the Mountie's gaze I came to rely on many people for advice, moral support, money, supplies, and occasionally a place to sleep …

This book began as my Master's thesis. As a graduate student in the History Department at Queen's University, I have benefited from the wisdom and support of a great many people. Ian McKay has been an extremely enthusiastic and supportive supervisor. His sound advice on research, secondary literature, and writing (he pleaded with me more than once to write more like a Mountie and less like Mackenzie King) is much appreciated. His interest in my work and his insights into Canadian history and cultural studies have been crucial to the completion of this project—and to my enjoyment of graduate school. Karen Dubinsky did not, I think, expect to be perusing local bookstores for Dale of the Mounted novels when she began teaching graduate students. I consider myself extremely fortunate that I began my Master's degree at Queen's just as she arrived. Her patience with me as a scholar and her support for this project were far beyond what any graduate student could expect. Her graduate course on Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective opened up an exciting world of historical research and debate for me. Sandra den Otter allowed me a great deal of latitude in creating my third doctoral field and offered enthusiastic support while I attempted to balance the early years of my Ph.D. with the writing of this book. I would also like to thank the members of my thesis examining committee for their helpful comments. Bryan Palmer, in particular, offered constructive and enlightening comments. Many thanks also to my undergraduate professors at the University of British Columbia, especially Bob McDonald and David Breen.

Bill Beahen, Stan Horrall, John Bentham, and the staff at the RCMP Public Affairs Directorate were most co-operative. I thank them for taking the time to answer my many questions. The staff at the Glenbow Archives in Calgary were also very helpful.

Russ Johnston, Jeff Grischow, and many other roommates and travelling companions have heard more than their fair share about this manuscript, and their support is much appreciated. Iain Brown suffered through this project at the thesis stage and deserves special consideration for that dark February evening in 1995 when, exhausted and frustrated by his own work, he joined me in attaining a new level of procrastination by alphabetizing the contents of our freezer.

I am grateful to my colleagues at Queen's for their encouragement, support, and comic relief, as well as for the many Mountie souvenirs that have come my way over the past few years. I would especially like to thank Catherine Adam, Angela Baker, Ross Cameron, Lara Campbell, Elise Chenier, Lorraine Coops, Gord Dueck, Ross Fair, Joy Frith, Catherine Gidney, Alan Gordon, Jeff Grischow, Martina Hardwick, Helen Harrison, Doug Hessler, Paul Jackson, Russell Johnston, Richard Kicksee, Dan Malleck, Alan MacEachern, Todd McCallum, Glenn McKnight, Roger Neufeld, Dave Plaxton, Andrew Sackett, and Robbin Tourangeau, and Elsie Watts.

Roger Neufeld generously shared with me some of his research notes on the Manitoba Daily Free Press. Thanks also to the History Department staff (past and present) that helped make the department an enjoyable place to be: Yvonne Place, Judy Vanhooser, Cindy Fehr, Norma St. John, Debbie Stirton-Massey, and Cindy Butts.

Many other people have given me help and support along the way: Chris Gittings, A.B. McCullough, Mimi Martin, Len Kuffert, Sara Posen, Gary David, and Scott Chamberlain. For on the road accommodation I would like to thank Willy and Alison Lyon, Dave Seglins and Bay Ryley, Vic Huard and Kathy Sutherland, and Bob and Ann Louise Plaxton. Back home in British Columbia, Jeff and Joanne Triggs and Scott and Jodi Phillips sent along primary sources as well as their encouragement. Thanks also to the Rawlings clan for books, support, and parsnips.

I am grateful to Bill Baker at the University of Lethbridge for a useful critique of the manuscript in its thesis form and for his encouragement over the past few years. Persse McGarrigle, most recently of University College, Limerick, also provided unwavering support.

Many thanks also to the folks at BTL. Jamie Swift showed unwavering patience in a rookie author and contributed ideas for revisions. Paul Eprile and Marg Anne Morrison were encouraging, while both Paul and David Peerla offered useful suggestions on how to improve the thesis version of the manuscript. Robert Clarke dazzled me with his editorial abilities. Writers Reserve Grants from the Ontario Arts Council were invaluable in allowing me to complete the manuscript.

B.C. and federal student loans made my Masters degree possible. Funding from the School of Graduate Studies at Queen's along with Teaching Assistant assignments from the History Department were also significant and much appreciated sources of financial support. Conference Travel Grants from the School of Graduate Studies also allowed me to present earlier versions of chapter 2 at the 1995 Imperial Canada Conference hosted by the Canadian Studies Department at the University of Edinburgh and the 1996 Canadian Historical Association conference in St. Catharines, Ontario.

An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared as ‘That Nice Red Coat Goes to My Head like Champagne’: Gender, Antimodernism and the Mountie Image, 1880—1960, in Journal of Canadian Studies 32,3 (Fall 1997).

Catherine Gidney has been a tower of strength throughout this project. Her support, advice, and criticism (of the book!) are very much appreciated. And, finally, I would like to thank my parents for their love and support. This book is for them.

It is customary at this point for the author of a book, having thanked many people, to accept full responsibility for the errors, omissions, and opinions within it. I am quite willing to honour this custom. All I ask is that those readers who maintain that the reading or decoding of a text is simply another encoding or the production of an entirely new text accept at least half of the blame.

Michael Dawson

Kingston, Ontario

April, 1998

The Mountie

from Dime Novel

to Disney

Disney_c001_f001

The timeless charge of the majestic Musical Ride. (RCMP Centennial Calendar. Reprinted with the permission of the Regina Chamber of Commerce.)

1

Introduction:

Of Mice, Mounties, and Historical Magic

How do you separate the idea of a Canadian writer and a Canadian publisher wanting to do a children's book about the history of this force we all admire so much and which we feel proprietary about… how do you separate that—which seems to be legitimate—from some company in … I'll just say Hong Kong without meaning anything … making stupid little dolls and getting rich on the backs of our image?

– Peter Gzowski, Morningside, Sept. 4, 1995

In June 1995 my underwear became the subject of a national debate. In newspapers, coffee shops, even on Parliament Hill, heated exchanges were erupting across the country. I felt besieged by questions. Some seemed quite straightforward. Were these boxer shorts legal? Where were they manufactured? Were they licensed? Other critics, however, demanded deeper contemplation. What vision did my underwear offer of the country's future? What did they say about Canada's national soul?

I own a pair of Mountie underwear. I didn't buy them. Like most of the Mountie souvenirs that adorn my office wall, they were a gift. They were designed by the Montreal artist Marc Tetro, whose art appears on coffee mugs, T-shirts, bookmarks, and a variety of other souvenirs. These souvenirs, straightfaced news reporters informed the Canadian public in summer 1995, were soon to be policed by an internationally known organization with more economic clout than many sovereign nations. Disney now owned the Mountie.

But it wasn't just the Mountie that Disney now owned, many Canadians lamented. It was our Mountie, and over the next few months Canadians eagerly expressed their opinions. Some thought the deal was a sell-out; others thought it was long overdue. Several CBC commentators and representatives of the Council of Canadians lamented the selling of a national icon to a U.S. firm and what was seemingly an attempt to cut out Canadian businesses from the profits.¹ Michael Valpy, a Globe and Mail columnist, expressed his concern that a national police force legally controlled its own image and questioned the sanity of welcoming aboard what he termed two of the country's most unreconstructed, loose-cannonball capitalists, Bill Pratt and Bill Mulholland, to co-ordinate the deal as members of the Mounted Police Foundation. Alan Fotheringham in Macleans magazine suggested that insufficient public outrage about the deal was a sign of Canadians' apathy in the 1990s.² About two years after the deal, former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed—a staunch supporter of free trade—lambasted the Disney deal while decrying the Americanization of Canada.³

Conversely, supporters of the deal championed the Force against shoddy, two-bit, third-rate souvenirs that flood our country from [other] nations.⁴ They also supported the deal as a money-saving measure for the cash-strapped federal government.⁵ Others celebrated the supposed family-values orientation of Disney and the effect this might have on the image of the Force itself. Syndicated columnist William Gold adopted this position:

You can be very sure that the Mounties reporting to Superintendent Disney will not be publicly portrayed as burning down barns in Quebec. No, the people who today so jealously guard Walt's legacy will leave that type of caper to the originals.

The images will not imitate life down such byways as a once-upon-a-time chapter in a misguided fight against Quebec separatism. There will be happier endings provided free of charge.

Indeed, if we leave everything to the Disney people, they'll soon wrap up the Case of the Air India Bombing and maintain forever pure the force's reputation for always getting its man.⁶

Gold's opinion was shared by the editors of Fredericton's Gleaner. Without question Disney symbolizes family and quality. Those are the qualities that the RCMP were looking for to ensure their reputation for professionalism and proper conduct is not sullied by cheap products.⁷

Yet those opposed to the deal maintained that it was a national disgrace for a symbol of Canadian nationhood to be auctioned off to a U.S.-based multinational corporation. The Mountie, they argued, was a part of our heritage. It was part of who we were as Canadians. For the most part even supporters of the Disney deal agreed with this point. Their argument hinged on the notion that because the Mountie was ours, Canadians had to do their best to protect it from misrepresentation and embarrassment. If the best way to do this was to call in a major U.S.-based multinational entertainment conglomerate, then so be it.

The Mountie, of course, was never just ours. Since the inception of the North-West Mounted Police in 1873, the image of the Force has been used by Canadians and non-Canadians alike. Mountie novels, especially prominent from the 1880s until the 1920s, were written by American, British, and Canadian authors. Hollywood dominated the Mountie movie industry from the 1930s to the 1950s. Throughout the twentieth century U.S. as well as Canadian companies enlisted the Mountie image for commercial purposes. Later, in an attempt to boost Canada's balance of payments in tourism and other industries during the 1970s and 1980s, the federal government got into the act and embarked upon a promotional program that saw Mounties escorting Canadian officials throughout the world. So why this feeling, in the summer of 1995, that the Mountie was somehow ours?

The image of the Mountie has a history as long as the Force itself, and questions about RCMP tradition clearly touch a nerve. Public outcries greeted attempts in 1931 to drop Mounted from the name of the Force as well as an attempt in the early 1970s to replace Royal Canadian Mounted Police with the more bilingually friendly Police Canada. In the early 1990s the wearing of turbans in the Force ignited a major controversy when Constable Baltej Dhillon, a Sikh in British Columbia, was granted permission to wear one while on duty. Debate over this break with the traditional uniform of the Force appeared in newspapers across the country as well as in Parliament and was even the occasion for a book.⁸

The Disney debate made one thing clear: even in the 1990s, many people considered the Mountie to be an important national symbol. The steel-chinned, scarlet-clad horseman was worth writing about in newspaper columns and discussing on television because he supposedly said something about who Canadians were. Yet what it is he actually says about us is not discernible from the Disney debate itself. The debate about the Disney deal has, in fact, obscured many important aspects of the Mountie image. Portrayed as a battle between Canadian and American business interests for control of the image of Canada's national police force, the history of this image has been overlooked—and with it the lessons it holds for students of English-Canadian nationalism and political culture. In short, the debate centred upon who owned the symbol, rather than upon its meaning; and despite all of the rhetoric from both sides of the debate about the importance of defending tradition, the symbol they were arguing about was very much a product of the early 1970s. This treasured symbol of Canada's heritage was, in many ways, not even a quarter of a century old. The Mountie, like national symbols generally, has been as created, edited, and revised as anything Walt Disney could have come up with.

Disney_c001_f002

(RCMP Centennial Calendar. Reprinted with the permission of the Regina Chamber of Commerce.)

A Battle For The Past: The Contested Terrain of RCMP History

History is useful. I am convinced of this. It is harder, at times, to convince others. Several years ago, when I worked as a bank teller during the summer, customers frequently asked me what I was studying in school. History, I answered. Sometimes they nodded approvingly. Often they greeted my response with something like, History? That's not very useful. Or, more pointedly, What kind of a job are you going to get with a history degree? That is a good question, but in actual fact, in our everyday lives most if not all of us do use history; and, what's more, we often employ the past to further our own ends.

In his 1961 polemic on the historical craft, E.H. Carr offered the intriguing scenario of Mr. Jones and the unfortunate Mr. Robinson—a scenario that, had it occurred in their jurisdiction, the RCMP would certainly have been called upon to investigate: Jones, returning from a party at which he has consumed more than his usual ration of alcohol, in a car whose brakes turn out to have been defective, at a blind corner where visibility is notoriously poor, knocks down and kills Robinson, who was crossing the road to buy cigarettes at the shop on the corner.⁹

Carr employed this anecdote as part of an all-out assault on the notion of chance in history, but the scenario he created is one in which the usefulness of history is clearly evident. It is quite easy to imagine a court case resulting from Robinson's mishap. That court case would very much be a battle for the past, with each lawyer attempting to have her or his version of events accepted as the truth. What, for example, was the cause of Robinson's death? Was it the faulty brakes? Mr. Jones's intoxicated state? Incompetent city planners? We might even blame Mr. Robinson's nicotine dependency, or the cigarette manufacturers for creating the craving that convinced Robinson to cross the road to get to the store.

What is true of the accident scene and the courtroom is just as true of the nation. A convincing argument about the nation's past is a weighty ally in soliciting support for a particular vision of the future. Not surprisingly, then, supporters of various ideologies and policies are often engaged in battles for the past. Frequently these battles concern a nation's long-standing institutions.

In Canada issues such as free trade and distinct society boast highly visible opposing sides clamouring to offer their particular view of the past—a view they offer as evidence of the lucidity of their position. Thus, battles rage on about the meaning of the Constitution. Battles rage as well over Aboriginal treaty rights, the role and shape of public education, and many other issues. Yet, surprisingly, no major public battle rages over the history of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, an institution called upon continually by the federal government to implement (sometimes very unpopular) governmental polices and legal decisions.

In my research on the history of the Force, I have consistently come across two very different versions of the RCMP's past. These two versions indicate clearly that despite the apparent lack of public debate, somewhere behind a veil of silence the battle for the RCMP's—and the country's—past goes on. The competing versions of RCMP history demonstrate how the Force's accomplishments, setbacks, and duties have been drawn upon to substantiate ideological positions on issues as varied as nationalism, immigration, sexuality, and Aboriginal rights. The RCMP's past has proved to be a very useful one indeed.

A Classic Story of the Mounties

The classic version of RCMP history was most pronounced in the first half of this century. It goes something like this:

The Royal