Lunch-Bucket Lives: Remaking the Workers’ City

By Craig Heron

Lunch-Bucket Lives takes the reader on a bumpy ride through the history of Hamilton’s working people from the 1890s to the 1930s. It ambles along city streets, peers through kitchen doors and factory windows, marches up the steps of churches and fraternal halls, slips into saloons and dance halls, pauses to hear political speeches, and, above all, listens for the stories of men, women, youths, and children from families where people relied mainly on wages to survive.

Heron takes wage-earning as a central element in working-class life, but also looks beyond the workplace into the households and neighbourhoods—settlement patterns and housing, marriage, child care, domestic labour, public health, schooling, charity and social work, popular culture, gender identities, ethnicity and ethnic conflict, and politics in various forms—presenting a comprehensive view of working-class life in the first half of the twentieth century.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Release date: Dec 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781771132138

Craig Heron

Craig Heron is a professor of history at York University. One of Canada’s leading labour historians, he is the author of numerous works on Canadian history, including The Workers Festival: A History of Labour Day in Canada, Booze: A Distilled History , and Lunch-Bucket Lives: Remaking the Workers’ City .

Book preview

Cover: Lunch-Bucket Lives: Remaking the Workers’ City, by Craig Heron. Cover photograph shows a worker’s table with his lunch box opened, revealing a water bottle, sandwiches, apple and tiny carrots. Cup cake pan, flour sifter, an alarm clock, flask, a cap, newspaper and a milk bottle all seen on the table. The wall has a calendar and family portrait hanging.

Lunch-Bucket Lives

"Lunch-Bucket Lives is far more than a local study of working-class people in Hamilton. It’s a multifaceted history that uses insights from various fields of research to construct a comprehensive and theoretically rich history of working people during a period of significant social and economic upheaval and change. It is a complex, engaging, and carefully detailed exploration of the history of Canada’s working class. This polished and professional work marks a significant achievement in the field."

— Julie Guard, Associate Professor of History and Labour Studies, University of Manitoba

Craig Heron captures the essence of Hamilton like few other historians; he tells the story of the city’s working class during the 50 years prior to WWII with the critical eyes of an outsider and the heart of an intimate lover. We meet the activists and leaders, people like Allan Studholme and Mary McNab. We witness the intriguing rise and fall of the Independent Labor Party as a significant force in a city tinged with radical politics. We share the frustrations as women and men march and strike, but find that their nascent industrial unions cannot break the iron grip of Hamilton’s powerful industrial oligarchs. Heron takes us on a journey through lives lived locally — to the dining rooms and dance halls, the theater galleries and the religious gatherings, the drinking establishments and the streets — as Hamilton’s wage-earners and their families forge a class identity against the hegemonic backdrop of imperialism, patriarchy, and the emerging welfare capitalism of the day. These resilient people living lunch-bucket lives shape a city and build a foundation that still undergirds Hamilton in the 21st century.

– Tom Atterton, Hamilton and District Labour Council

"Expansive in reach, engaging in style, and filled with fascinating local details, Lunch-Bucket Lives is ‘total history’ at its best."

– Steve Penfold, Associate Professor of History, University of Toronto, and author of The Donut: A Canadian History

"Craig Heron provides in Lunch-Bucket Lives an outstanding histoire totale of Hamilton’s workers in the first four decades of the 20th century. Delivering on the promise of the new working-class history of the 1960s and literally a lifetime’s research on Hamilton, Heron successfully describes workers in all aspects of their public and private lives. His nuanced account considers the importance of gender, ethnicity, and race but never loses track of the pervasive importance of class."

– Gregory S. Kealey, Professor Emeritus of History,University of New Brunswick

"Rodolfo Walsh, an Argentinean writer killed by the dictatorship in 1976, said, ‘Bosses don’t want workers to know their history because workers who don’t know their history are always starting again.’ We see already in place at the beginning of the past century in Hamilton, Ontario, many of the common employers’ actions like using private guards to escort scabs during a strike, the use of foreigners to pay cheaper wages or to divide workers, and ‘experts’ used to bust the union. We also see the resistance of workers in the workplaces and in the community, the configuration of groups and organizations to defend their interests and find their voice. Lunch-Bucket Lives is a complex, detailed, and rich description of working-class life that deserves to be read."

– Jorge Garcia-Orgales, United Steelworkers staff representative — Global Affairs

"Like a well-stocked lunch bucket, this beautifully crafted and illustrated book will both nourish and delight its readers. The research is prodigious, the analysis sophisticated, the prose accessible, even moving. The most inclusive history yet of a working-class community in Canada, Lunch-Bucket Lives brings to life the city’s many diverse men, women, girls, and boys."

– Franca Iacovetta, Professor of History, University of Toronto, and author of Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada

Lunch-Bucket Lives

Remaking the Workers’ City

CRAIG HERON

Between the LinesToronto

Lunch-Bucket Lives

© 2015 Craig Heron

First published in 2015 by

Between the Lines

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photo-copied, 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 (for photocopying in Canada only) Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, M5E 1E5.

Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. Between the Lines would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Heron, Craig, author

Lunch-bucket lives : remaking the workers’ city / Craig Heron.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77113-212-1 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-77113-213-8 (epub).—ISBN 978-1-77113-214-5 (pdf )

1. Working class—Ontario—Hamilton—Social conditions—19th century. 2. Working class—Ontario— Hamilton—Social conditions—20th century. 3. Hamilton (Ont.)—Social conditions—19th century. 4. Hamilton (Ont.)— Social conditions—20th century. I. Title.

Text and cover design by David Vereschagin,

Quadrat Communications

Cover art by Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge

Printed in Canada

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

As winner of the 2012 Wilson Prize for Publishing in Canadian History, Between the Lines thanks the Wilson Institute for Canadian History for its recognition of our contribution to Canadian history and its generous support of this book.

Between the Lines gratefully acknowledges assistance for its publishing activities from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program and through the Ontario Book Initiative, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

Logo: Canada Council for the Arts; Logo: Conseil des Arts du Canada; Logo: Government of Canada; Logo: Ontario Arts Council, an Ontario government agency; Logo: Conseil des Arts de L’Ontario, un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

List of Tables

Map: Hamilton c.1930

Opening the Lunch Bucket

Part I:The View from the Mountain

Hobson’s Hamilton

Studholme’s People

Part II:Keeping the Wolf from the Door

Labouring for Love

Bringing Home the Bacon

School Bells and Factory Whistles

Spending the Hard-Earned Bucks

The Last Resort

Part III:Punching the Clock

Hold the Fort

The Whip Hand

Standing Up to the Boss

Part IV:The Ties That Bind

The Family Circle

One of the Girls

Boys Will Be Boys

Our Kind

True Blue

The Classes and the Masses

Unassailable Rights

Lunch-Bucket Politics

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

The writing of this book has been a long intellectual journey. I have been thinking about the working people of Hamilton for decades. Way back in the fall of 1977 I first walked through the doors of the Hamilton Public Library to begin a PhD dissertation on work and politics in that city in the early 20th century. I completed it four years later, but set it aside for several years before deciding to rework and expand it into a more wide-ranging study of Canada’s best-known factory town. That work proceeded in fits and starts, and was interrupted repeatedly by other projects, all of which, over time, influenced what I wanted to say here.

When I started this project more specifically in the late 1980s, I had the goal of bringing together the insights of several distinct fields of research to inform the history of working people in Canada. In addition to the work on the wage-earning experience, unions, and working-class politics that had originally inspired me, writers and scholars were producing wonderful new studies of working women, family economies, children, schooling, health care, sexuality, religion, ethnic and racial groups, popular culture, social policy and practice, and a variety of state programs, many of which illuminated particular aspects of working-class life. The fragmentation and dispersion were frustrating, and I thought all these new voices needed to sing in the same choir, to produce a richer oratorio of working-class history. I kept my focus on the half-century before World War Two because that was a period of profound change in the lives of Canada’s working people. I also continued to believe that only in a close reading of the experience in one community could I find the fine-grained detail that would reveal the complexities of class experience. Those ideas took me back, again and again, to Hamilton.

I have no personal connection to Hamilton. I was not born there, and have spent few nights there. Like millions of Canadians, I grew up with a stark visual image of Hamilton as seen across its large, murky harbour from the heights of the Burlington Skyway – a conglomeration of dark, menacing structures belching smoke and spitting huge flames into the night sky. As a PhD student in the late 1970s, I chose Hamilton as a subject for my dissertation because of its status as one of the country’s leading industrial centres. Eventually I would visit it countless times for research purposes and, later, for heritage work. I made friends there and became a sympathetic outsider and staunch defender of the self-styled Lunch-Bucket Town.

I hope the people of Hamilton will find much here to appreciate. Their city’s fascinating history deserves a thorough study. Yet I also hope that all readers will see a larger picture in which Hamilton stands in for many other communities in Canada and elsewhere. The relevance of what is discussed here grows with every year of this new century, as so many of Canada’s working people now face the kinds of precarious uncertainty that Hamilton’s workers and their families had to cope with a century ago.

Acknowledgements

Intellectual work is necessarily a co-operative enterprise, and this project would not have been possible without the kind, valuable assistance, encouragement, and inspiration of many people. The doctoral dissertation that preceded this book took shape in the stimulating environment of the Dalhousie University History Department in the late 1970s, where I was particularly grateful to Ian McKay, David Frank, Nolan Reilly, John Manley, Bruce Tucker, Michael Cross, David Sutherland, Judy Fingard, John O’Brien, Tina Simmons, and Linda Kealey for an exciting atmosphere of rigorous discussion and critique, as well as critical engagement with my work. At that stage, I benefited above all from the support and helpful guidance of my enthusiastic supervisor, Greg Kealey.

As I was completing the dissertation, I was drawn into an ambitious project in the McMaster University Labour Studies Program, which aimed to collect interviews and images of Hamilton working-class life and ultimately produced a beautiful book. We reached out across the city for photographs and stories and visited the archives of many of the city’s largest employers. That process brought me into regular contact with the incomparable Wayne Roberts, a superb historian (and now an outstanding journalist) whose intellectual nimbleness and wacky sense of humour were a huge influence on me and my writing. That project also led to a deeply rewarding friendship with Bob Storey, my sociological sidekick, with whom I shared intellectual inspiration, political commitment, and endless good fun for years to come.

In the early 1980s, as I settled into a new teaching job at York University, I found myself immersed in new networks of imaginative scholars in the Division of Social Science, eventually including Paul Axelrod, Linda Briskin, Eduardo Canel, Paul Craven, Gina Feldberg, Pablo Idahosa, Engin Isin, and Harriet Rosenberg, and in the Department of History, especially Stephen Brooke, Ramsay Cook, Susan Houston, Kate McPherson, Nick Rogers, Adrian Shubert, and Marc Stein. Starting in the early 1990s, I also had the pleasure of working with a steady flow of outstanding graduate students, from whom I learned so much.

There were also important connections beyond York. In 1981 I began participating in a remarkable reading group, the Labour Studies Research Group (casually renamed the Toronto Labour Studies Group in the 1990s), which has met monthly ever since to discuss unpublished papers (including many of the chapters that appear here). The group has brought together a stellar series of nearly 100 graduate students and faculty in history, sociology, economics, law, and women’s studies. Among those, I owe special debts to the critical insights of Franca Iacovetta, Ian Radforth, Eric Tucker, and Steve Penfold. For a few years in the 1980s I was also part of a large group of like-minded political economists who met regularly for richly rewarding discussions of labour relations in capitalist society. A decade later another short-lived but lively and engaging reading group met monthly to discuss the history of masculinities; it included Mike Birke, Stephen Brooke, Rob Krist-offerson, Steven Maynard, Carolyn Podruchny, Steve Penfold, Mark Rosenfeld, and Marc Stein. My continuing friendship with Steven Maynard remained a valuable source of intellectual inspiration and comradeship.

At the same moment that I decided to write this book, I was swept up into a new project in public history, the Workers’ Arts and Heritage Centre, which provided many years of incomparable learning experiences with some of the finest minds I have ever encountered: Carol Anderson, Karl Beveridge, Carole Condé, Rosemary Donegan, Jim Miller, Glen Richards, D’Arcy Martin, David Sobel, and Renée Wetselaar, among many others. Much that appears in this book passed through the analytical lenses that I developed through those amazing associations. After the Centre opened in Hamilton in 1996,I was able to deepen my contact with many fine people in that city, notably Fast Eddie Thomas and Wayne Marston.

Researching this book took me to many libraries and archival repositories, where I was always fortunate to find competent, helpful staff. Large public institutions were important: the Archives of Ontario (Toronto), Library and Archives Canada (Ottawa), Provincial Archives of Manitoba (Winnipeg), and several university libraries – the Killam Library at Dalhousie University, the York University libraries, the Mills Library at McMaster University, the many University of Toronto libraries (including the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library), the Special Collections Department at the University of British Columbia Library, Industrial Relations Library of Cornell University, and Littauer Library of Harvard University. I also benefited from the services of the Multicultural History Society of Ontario, the Presbyterian Church of Canada Archives, and the United Church of Canada Archives. In Hamilton I was grateful to several private organizations that opened their collections to me: the Ambrose McGhee Medical Museum, Big Brothers Association of Hamilton, Educational Archives and Heritage Centre, Girl Guides of Canada (Escarpment Branch), Greening-Donald, the Hamilton Group, the Hamilton YWCA, Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (Municipal Chapter), International Harvester, Westinghouse Canada, and Workers’ Arts and Heritage Centre. It would be impossible to exaggerate how important the Hamilton Public Library’s Local History and Archives Department (formerly Special Collections) was for this project. I am most grateful to Bruce Shaw, Bryan Henley, and Margaret Houghton for years of unfailing help and support. I am also grateful to Myer Siemiatycki, Gene Homel, and Nathan Smith for sharing their own research material and to John Weaver for giving me access to his archive of student papers on Hamilton history. In finding my way through much of the voluminous material, I was aided by a string of excellent research assistants: Will Baker, Emily Bradbury, Rob Kristofferson, Alfonso Licata, Lynne Marks, Vienna Paolantonio, Glenda Peard, Steve Penfold, David Sobel, Peter Stevens, Eric Strikwerda, Ryan Targa, and Melissa Turkstra.

I owe a large debt to the many people whose writing on Hamilton made my work much easier. They include many scholars who were also interested in Hamilton: George Addison, Catherine Annau, Peter Archibald, Peter Baskerville, John Benson, Pat Bird, Nancy Bouchier, Dianne Brandino, June Corman, Mark Cortiula, Ken Cruikshank, Enrico Cumbo, Dianne Dodd, Michael Doucet, Kenneth Draper, Karen Dubinsky, Bill Freeman, Rosemary Gagan, Michael Gauvreau, Jason Gilliland, Adam Givertz, Carolyn Gray, Richard Harris, Peter Hanlon, Ann Herring, Andrew Holman, Michael Katz, Rob Kristofferson, Patricia Lilley, David Livingstone, Richard Lucas, Meg Luxton, Douglas McCalla, Diana J. Middleton, Cheryl MacDonald, Bryan Palmer, Doris Ragonetti, Wayne Roberts, Wally Seccombe, Matt Sendheuhler, Adrienne Shadd, Zofia Shahrodi, Myer Siemiatycki, Ted Smith, Elizabeth Smyth, Mark J. Stern, Robert Storey, R.M. Stott, James Sturgis, Jane Synge, Nicholas Terpstra, Melissa Turkstra, David F. Walker, and, above all, John Weaver. Hamilton has also had several excellent local historians whose writings have kept the history of their city alive for many years and helped orient me to its past: Mel Bailey, Marjorie Freeman Campbell, Gary Evans, Lois C. Evans, Robert Fraser, Brian Henley, Margaret Houghton, Bill Manson, John M. Mills, and Dennis Missett. I also benefited enormously from five oral-history projects conducted in Hamilton at various times beginning in the 1970s by the late Jane Synge, McMaster University Labour Studies Program, Multicultural History Society of Ontario, Peter Archibald, and Workers’ Arts and Heritage Centre. I am standing on the broad shoulders of all these people.

This book came together with relatively little financial support. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Council for a doctoral fellowship that sustained me in preparing the dissertation that started it all, and to the Association for Canadian Studies for a Writing Award that helped to sustain the momentum. At York University a Research Development Leave also gave me a year without teaching to push on.

When I finally completed a draft of a huge manuscript, I was fortunate to have five friends who volunteered to read and comment on it: Bettina Bradbury, Franca Iacovetta, Ian McKay, Steve Penfold, and Ian Radforth. After many weeks of reading, they convened for a rigorous discussion of my project. I was deeply touched by their encouragement, invigorated by their challenges, and nourished by their supportiveness. It was a wonderful privilege to be able to share in the intellectual comradeship that would bring people together in this way.

I am indebted to Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge for their skill and imagination in turning my loose ideas into a wonderful cover image. I am also grateful to my friends at Between the Lines, whose enthusiasm for this book was heart-warming. Robert Clarke once again performed his copy-editing magic in tightening up and smoothing out a dauntingly huge manuscript.

Along the way I have had personal support from some important people in my life, including my parents, the late Harold and Margaret Heron; my daughters, Anna and Emily Bradbury; and my partner, Randy Goldman, all of whom were somewhat mystified by what I did with my time, but nonetheless showed they cared. Most important was the loving support I have enjoyed from Bettina Bradbury, a remarkable scholar in her own right, who understood what I was trying to do and urged me on. It wouldn’t have been possible without her.

Tables

A series of 44 tables are available to back up and supplement the information and points made in this book. The tables can be found at https://btlbooks.com/book/lunch-bucket-lives.

Birthplace of the Hamilton Population, 1891–1941

Birthplace of Hamilton’s European-born Population, 1891–1941

Ethnic Origins of Hamilton’s European Population, 1901–41

Transiency on Six Hamilton Blocks, 1900–40

Religious Denominations in Hamilton, 1891–1941

Marriages, Births, Deaths, Maternal Mortality, and Infant Mortality in Hamilton,1890–1940

Causes of Death in Hamilton, 1897–1940

Deaths from Major Contagious Diseases in Hamilton, 1897–1940

Risk of Death from Major Contagious Diseases in Hamilton, 1901–40

The Hamilton Workforce by Occupational Group, 1911–1941

Selected Male Skilled and Unskilled Workers in the Hamilton Workforce, 1911–41

Percentage of Males and Females within Occupational Groups in Hamilton, 1911–1941

Professional Groups in Hamilton, 1911–41

Employment in Manufacturing in Hamilton, 1911–41

Occupations of Household Heads in Six Hamilton Working-Class Neighbourhoods, 1900–30

Labour Force Participation in Hamilton, 1911–41

Leading Female Occupations in Hamilton, 1911–41

Average Hourly Wage Rates of Selected Male Wage-Earners in Hamilton, as Reported by the Federal Depart-ment of Labour, 1900–40

Average Weekly Wages among Selected Unionized Workers in Hamilton, as Reported by Unions to the Ontario Bureau of Labour, 1905–14

Average Weekly Wages of Selected Male Wage-Earners in Hamilton, as Reported in Censuses, 1921–41

Average Weekly Wages of Selected Female Wage-Earners in Hamilton, as Reported in Censuses, 1921–41

Average Earnings of Wage-Earners’ Families in Hamilton, 1911–41

Average Weeks of Unemployment per Year for Male Wage-Earners in Hamilton, 1911–41

Employment Levels, as Reported by Employers on 1 Dec. 1922–40

Workplace Injuries in Hamilton Reported to Factory Inspectors, 1890–1916

Workplace Injuries in Wentworth County Reported to the Workmen’s Compensation Board, 1915–40

Unions in Hamilton, 1901–40

Costs and Indices of Weekly Family Budget of Staple Foods, Rent, Fuel, and Lighting in Hamilton, 1910–40

Indices of Cost of Consumer Goods in Hamilton, 1890–1940

Expenditures of Hamilton’s City Relief Department, 1911–30

Full-time Student Enrolment in Hamilton’s Secondary Schools

Distribution of Hamilton’s Public High-School Population by Sex, 1920–40

Occupations of Fathers of Students in Hamilton’s Public Academic High Schools, 1895–1932

Occupations of Fathers of Day Students in Hamilton’s Technical Schools, 1917–33

Occupations of Fathers of Hamilton’s Commercial School Students, 1929–33

Exemptions from the Adolescent Attendance Act in Hamilton, 1924–40

High-School Dropouts (Measured by Retention Rates of Form 1 Students in Subsequent Years), 1933–39

Voter Turnout in Provincial Elections in Hamilton, 1898–1929

Voter Turnout in Federal Elections in Hamilton, 1904–1930

Results of Provincial Elections in Hamilton, 1890–1937

Results of Federal Elections in Hamilton, 1891–1935

Hamilton Independent Labor Party in Municipal Elections, 1915–40

Left-Wing Parties in Hamilton Municipal Elections, 1932–40

Membership in Five Fraternal Societies, Hamilton, 1890–1939

Hamilton c. 1930

Map of Hamilton city in 1930, showing important locations, wards and major businesses in the city.

Dominion Foundries and Steel

Imperial Cotton

International Harvester

Mercury Mills

National Steel Car

Ontario Rolling Mills (Ontario Works, Steel Company of Canada)

Steel Company of Canada

Tuckett Tobacco

Westinghouse

1

Illustration of a smiling Canadian worker sitting on a crate with his lunch box.

(LN, 5 Jan. 1912, 2)

Opening the Lunch Bucket

The screech of the noon whistle pierced the din inside the factory walls. A sudden silence quickly spread across the plant as workers downed their tools and turned off their machines. The next half-hour would be theirs. Some pulled together rough benches near their work stations. Some headed outside. Others looked for a table in the company lunchroom. Wherever they went, almost all of them sat down in small groups and opened their lunch buckets.

Those simple, unadorned metal containers, also known as dinner or lunch pails, have long been as symbolic as they were practical. Most commonly, whether tucked under an arm or swinging from a fist, they marked working people who could not afford to buy lunch at work or had too little time at noon to get home for a meal. The lunch buckets were visible reminders of the material constraints of being a wage-earner. They were a public display of class identity.

Just as often they were symbols of manhood, as teenage boys quickly learned after they left school and went off to work. Carrying a lunch bucket gave men the mature, respected status of a breadwinner for their families. When they left their doorsteps each morning with one in hand, their neighbours would know they had a job and were helping to support their families. Politicians who promised a full dinner pail recognized this concern.¹ Handing in his dinner pail became a popular euphemism for dying.² For manual workers lunch buckets often served as badges of distinction that separated their valuable labour from that of the pasty-faced office clerk or frail professional. Many working girls also carried some kind of lunch bucket, announcing to neighbours that they too were factory workers who were bringing home much-needed wages.³ Yet, not surprisingly, many other women preferred to avoid threats to their femininity by hiding their lunches in their handbags.⁴

An advertisement, placed in newspapers offering lunch boxes for 59 cents.

(HS, 12 April 1917, 16)

The symbolism also operated less publicly. Workers opened their lunch buckets to find a nourishing meal prepared by wives or mothers with care, skill, and usually at least a modicum of love. The term dinner pail suggested that the container held the big meal of the wage-earner’s day.⁵ What went into it had to refuel the body at the halfway point of the nine or ten hours on the job. Wives and mothers prided themselves on packing good lunches, and family members used the quality of the meal provided as an indication of how well their womenfolk managed the household budget, even when low wages or underemployment severely taxed abilities to make ends meet. The lunch bucket, then, was a link in the family circle and a reminder of the unpaid domestic labour that sustained wage-earners through long working days. It brought a small breath of domestic nurturing into the rough harshness of the factory environment.

The time allowed to open a lunch bucket was also time away from the intense pressures of the job. It represented an island of free time in the middle of a lengthy work shift. It was a moment to relax and let the senses savour the food and drink. In the lunch bucket a worker might also have stowed away a newspaper, a religious tract, a political pamphlet, or a novel, along with some tobacco or even illicit alcohol. Briefly freed from factory production’s multiple assaults on the senses, the mind, body, and spirit might get nourished in various ways.

Opening a lunch bucket was also almost always done with others – it was a symbolically social act. On the one hand, it exposed a worker to scrutiny. Did the contents reveal what good wages and regular employment could provide, or was the food meagre, cheap, and stale – a sign, perhaps, of problems at home with a lazy or angry wife, or of a worker’s drinking problem that ate away at family income? Was the food familiar to the ethnic group gathered together, or did the Englishman’s soft white bread or the Italian’s garlicky sausage make the other workers cringe? A worker’s respectability could be at stake.

Yet, on the other hand, opening lunch buckets together was a quiet, everyday ritual of communal sociability, creating a small oasis of humanity and togetherness, which was implicitly a tiny nucleus of subversion that pushed back the harsh indignities of wage labour. As often the case in human experience, food and drink brought people together. When wage-earners consumed their noon meal with workmates, they used the occasion to discuss sports, politics, courtship, shop-floor problems, and much more. The storytelling and speechifying in these moments helped to knit together a sense of community among workers – an experience that might well continue after the final whistle blew, whether in a saloon, church basement, or union hall, or outside on a playing field.

The lunch bucket encapsulates what this book is about. It is a symbol of both the hard-metal reality of surviving on wage labour and the many practices that workers engaged in to make a life worth living. In its stark simplicity, it conveys both subordination and resistance. It was a little package of determined independence and high aspirations carried into the tightly structured world of capitalist waged labour. It also contained the bonds and tensions of gender, ethnicity, and race.

Over many years the lunch bucket became a prominent symbol of Hamilton, Ontario, and its workers. Outsiders often used the lunch-bucket label to disparage Hamilton’s allegedly rough urban culture. Over more recent decades, as smokestack industries declined, civic leaders tried to slough off that identity, even publishing an official commemorative book in 1971 entitled Pardon My Lunch Bucket.⁶ This book invites the people of Hamilton (and other industrial cities) to look more closely at the rich complexities of their lunch-bucket history and, perhaps, to embrace it with considerably more enthusiasm.

Studying Workers

Writers and scholars carry into their studies of working people some deeply etched, often contradictory stereotypes, around which they all too often assemble their evidence – the male clenched fist waving above an angry crowd of strikers, the slumped figure of the drunkard sprawling across a sidewalk, the weary face of the overworked housewife, the spindly limbs of the ragged street urchin, the hard expression of the adolescent delinquent, and many more such stark representations of working-class life. These are images that have been created for the most part by activists of one kind or another, most often from outside the working class – crusading journalists and photographers, child-savers and other social workers, public-health advocates and sundry urban reformers, socialist and feminist organizers, and many more. Each image captures an element of what it means to be subordinated in a society based on wage labour, but most of them remain too rigid, lacking movement, flexibility, and human resource-fulness and frailty. None adequately conveys the complexities of class relationships in capitalist societies.⁷

An advertisement, selling “the OLD HOME Potato LOAF” made with potato flour mixed with wheat flour, from a company called Brown’s Bread Limited.

(HS, 23 June 1925, 11)

The image of the wage-earner with a lunch bucket can, by itself, be just as limited, but, even if it doesn’t capture the full range of working-class experience, it does get at something basic and unavoidable. At the crack of dawn, six days a week, workers clutching lunch buckets or handbags stepped across the thresholds of thousands of households in cities like Hamilton. They muttered goodbyes to those left behind to keep house and trudged off to workplaces where someone had agreed to pay them for their ability to labour. These individual acts added up to a massive movement of humanity around a city every day (repeated nine or ten hours later for the homeward trek). They made starkly visible the central, unifying commonality that wage-earning and dependence on wages provide to all working people. No matter how inevitably varied were their experiences, no matter how much they squabbled and disagreed about what makes life worth living, no matter how much they avoided each other and went their own ways, they all knew that they had to work for wages to ensure the survival of themselves and their families. A shared sense of necessity sent them all into the streets at the same time.

So much in working-class households hinged on what those people earned – the size of the house they lived in, the quality of the food they ate, the health care they received, the years their children could spend in school, the pleasures they could enjoy, the confidence to stand up to the boss. Good wages opened up possibilities. Bad or insecure wages put up real barriers and constraints. No wages at all threatened a family’s very survival. A dependence on wages set workers apart from the self-employed and others with substantial incomes.

Earnings, however, were the result of the class experience, not its central definition. For a deeper understanding we have to look at the role of power. As wage-earners entered their work-places, they had to set aside their lunch buckets and give themselves over to the control of owners and managers. Their time was no longer theirs, and their bodies and minds were at the service of those who paid their wages. Until the whistle blew to turn them loose many hours later, they were subordinate in a rigid authority system. They and their families were also subordinate outside those workplaces. Political and legal bodies (cabinets, legislatures, courts) and social and cultural institutions (schools and hospitals) were largely beyond their control. Laws and the enforcement of laws by police and courts regulated public behaviour, whether it was playing or flirting in the street, drinking and fighting, setting up a picket line, or mounting a soapbox on a street corner to deliver a socialist speech.

Those forms of subordination arose from the relationships that workers had with other classes. Broadly speaking, workers encountered two major social groups in their daily lives. An upper class (or bourgeoisie) controlled the key economic levers and had the capacity to organize large projects of capital accumulation that brought other classes into a state of subordination. The members of that class had built a distinctive class solidarity through their economic alliances and closed, exclusive social networks (separate residential areas, schooling, summer resorts, clubs, church congregations, and cultural activities, such as art, symphony, or opera).⁸ Workers also engaged with members of a loosely defined middle class – the shopkeepers who sold them goods, doctors who lectured them on their children’s health, clergymen who exhorted them to moral purity, engineers who set performance standards in factories, plant superintendents who oversaw production, school teachers who filled their children’s heads with odd ideas, or wives in certain households who supervised servant girls from working-class families. In contrast to workers, middle-class people had more independence in organizing their own economic and social lives, and they exercised more authority over others. They were not as well off as the upper class, but their material prosperity was generally sufficient to allow them to enjoy comfortable respectability.⁹

Power was imbedded in these social relationships between classes, but it did not flow only from a single, centralized source. Capitalists did not dictate all working-class behaviour in any mechanistic way, and, despite plenty of evidence of strikebreaking and red-baiting, state policy has seldom relied simply on overt coercion. Power confronted workers in many sites in their daily lives – workplaces, schools, churches, streets, parks, courtrooms, immigration offices, public-health clinics, and more.¹⁰

These inequalities of wealth and power are what many writers refer to as the economic or material dimension of working-class lives, a dimension that provided the crucial structure of their existence.¹¹ Yet other major structuring forces also limited the earning capacities, employment possibilities, and other social entitlements of particular groups of working people. For the housewives who lingered by the door watching their family members heading off to work, or the working girls who joined the throngs of men carrying their lunches through a plant gate, gender expectations kept them tied to a destiny within domesticity and under patriarchal authority. Immigrant workers and people of colour found their options similarly constrained by racializing theories and practices. Class, gender, and ethnicity/race inevitably intersected; class was always present and may have predominated in particular moments, but it was not always primary and was always shaped by the other forces. Most importantly, structure meant dynamic relationships – between the broad social classes, genders, and racial and ethnic groups, and among people within those categories. None of these structural patterns was fixed; they were constantly shifting and changing, being reconstructed and reformulated.¹²

Living within a realm of pressures and constraints undoubtedly had a strong impact on how members of particular classes (and groups within classes) conceived of themselves and their material situations. People in such circumstances were strongly disposed to similar behaviour and attitudes.¹³ Yet their structural situation did not lead predictably and straightforwardly to any particular way of thinking and acting, whether it was to hunker down in compliance or rise up in resistance. Individually and collectively, people engaged in some independent reflection and assessment, and exercised some degree of agency, albeit within the narrative limitations of the language through which those actions were expressed.¹⁴

Workers used familiar cultural lenses to assess their experience within the structural constraints on their lives. The meaning that they drew could vary, particularly because there were always many different discourses at work attempting to ascribe that meaning, often through symbolic representation, and to encourage particular behaviour or action. Some of those discourses were dominant, or hegemonic, and most often flowed through institutionalized channels such as the government, mass media, or education system. They encouraged workers’ consent to the apparently intuitive common sense of the status quo.¹⁵ Sometimes workers seized upon those hegemonic ideas and gave them a twist that emphasized their own needs and concerns. Other discourses arising perhaps from workers’ movements or through informal modes and practices of communication over their lunch buckets, in their neighbourhoods, or around their kitchen tables challenged hegemonic ideas and practices more directly. Discourses might mutually reinforce a compelling social vision, but the divergences among them could create plenty of cross-currents. Workers listened and accepted, complied and ignored, confronted and rejected, mixed and integrated the discursive elements swirling around them. They therefore understood the world around them through a complex kind of awareness shaped by the structured patterns of their daily lives, the information, ideas, and language available to make sense of them, and their own willingness and ability to accept, reject, or adapt those understandings.

Class awareness varied among the major social classes depending on the power and resources (or capacities) at their disposal.¹⁶ Class-consciousness has always been particularly vigorous among the upper and middle classes, but workers have always constituted the loosest, least coherent, least unified of the social classes, the one least able to express its own sense of itself. New patterns of labour-market recruitment regularly brought people into wage-earning from pre-industrial backgrounds or experiences outside wage-earning. They brought with them values and practices rooted in those previous class locations that persisted in the new proletarian context. Others, such as young women or Sicilian or Polish peasants in the early 20th century, saw wage-earning as only short-term episodes that they would soon leave behind, even though their collective labour sustained whole industries – in one case, clothing and textiles, food production, and retailing, and, in the other, mining, resource-processing, and construction.¹⁷ Even among those who settled into wage-earning, the struggle to survive typically took priority over developing larger political strategies, and followed an individualized course, which could be reinforced by segmented labour markets, industrial paternalism, charity and social work practices, and more. Workers brought together as the raw material of a working class generally had to learn over time to co-operate, and could be highly vulnerable to constructions of their experience from elsewhere.

Class, then, is rooted in the material reality of the wage relationship and all that flowed from it, but has different meanings depending on gender and ethnicity or race. But class awareness can be expressed in many diverse ways and can be eclipsed by competing perspectives on social realities, especially where class-based organizations are weak (union, coops, political parties). Certainly, to determine what workers thought about their situations we can look back to find often articulate proletarian voices set forth in writing, whether manifestos and editorials, or poetry and song. In working-class history, where the material and cultural resources to produce intellectual statements can be limited, however, words may often be less important than behaviour and actions – that is, practices. Beyond the spoken and written text, we may well find insights in such compliant habits as willingly accepting the direction of a priest, factory foreman, and Conservative politician, or in such contrary behaviour as quitting jobs, striking, dropping out of school, refusing to attend church, and avoiding baby clinics. Workers also expressed their attitudes in informal but ritualized performances in their daily lives.¹⁸ The street gangs’ swagger, the working girls’ promenades, the workingmen’s barroom treats, the families’ holiday frolicking, the factory workers’ initiations, the picket line’s manoeuvres, the angry crowd’s disciplined movements in the streets – all were part of the repertoire of collective action in which working people used their bodies to make public statements.¹⁹

Workers also revealed a good deal through their use of space in the city: from the arrangements of their households to the patterns of interaction in their immediate neighbourhoods and then across the city. Thanks to real-estate markets and limited incomes, working people most often lived apart from other social classes. Yet they also lived a good deal of their lives in public. They travelled to and from work, and they gathered for many purposes on street corners, in parks, at factory gates, and in such quasi-public settings as stores, churches, theatres, sports arenas, dance halls, saloons, and bingo halls. Their behaviour in those places was often governed by moral regulations of various kinds and subject to police oversight. But they repeatedly challenged limitations on their use of all that space and created new modes of collective behaviour that made the city more theirs.

Given that they lived and worked alongside so many other workers, they are often assumed to have built tight-knit working-class communities. Certainly working-class neighbourhoods and workplaces brought them into regular contact and facilitated exchange. But that does not necessarily imply homogeneity and unanimity. Just as inside the working-class household, where sparks could fly among men, women, and children, tensions could burst out among people associating together in neighbourhoods every day. Cross-class networks based on bonds of gender, ethnicity, religion, and more could also reach outward. Community must be demonstrated, not assumed.²⁰

The extensive writing on the diversity of working-class practice suggests a loose consistency running through all of it – what I like to call working-class realism. While it was not a fixed political position and certainly not a synonym for conservatism, the practice suggests a propensity among workers across the past century and a half to evaluate what is possible and realizable in any given context and to act on that understanding. The practice was not all a matter of individual judgments, but generally followed widespread patterns across the working class in the same period. Workers tended to work out this class awareness, at least in part, through their social networks of family and kin, workmates, neighbours, and others they met through sports, church, lodge meetings, union activities, and politics. At such historic moments as 1886, 1919, or 1946, the scope of realistic possibilities could expand dramatically. At other times it contracted just as abruptly. The differences in those moments related to how workers evaluated their social circumstances through the cultural and discursive lenses available to them.²¹

This book, then, looks at how workers dealt with the profound changes in their lives as wageearners, family members, and participants in various social networks. It builds on the large body of writing focused directly on working-class experience in Canada and elsewhere, and on the many other studies that looked at workers through the lenses of such people as industrialists and engineers, public-health and social workers, civil servants and politicians, and retailers and showmen. The book turns the lens around to investigate how workers engaged with all these outside forces and managed to negotiate their way through the constraints and opportunities that confronted them in a period – lasting roughly from 1890 to 1940 – of broad and deep social change. The study takes wage-earning as a central element in working-class life, but also looks beyond the workplace into the households and neighbourhoods in which so much more of workers’ lives were lived.

A Moment in Time

Industrial capitalism is inherently unstable. Individual enterprises often have short lives, and wildly fluctuating business cycles can drag down many more operations. Yet since the mid-19th century capitalist development has tended to fall into distinct phases, running close to half a century at a time. Each phase involved significantly new investment patterns, managerial systems, state institutions and policies, social programs and practices, and cultural resources – what has been called social structures of accumulation.²²

A distinct phase, which began in the 1890s, is often referred to as the age of monopoly or corporate capitalism and the era of the Second Industrial Revolution. Towards the close of the 19th century the industrial world reflected huge changes that had taken place since the first stirring of an Industrial Revolution in the 1840s. The craft workshop and family household had already been replaced as the primary sites of production for a wide range of goods, which were now turned out in larger, more centralized workplaces known as manufactories or factories. New modes of work and work discipline were solidly established. New recruitment patterns for a workforce of wage-earners had drawn in many newcomers, including women and children. New household economies had emerged to sustain those wage-earners. New state policies had been put in place to promote all this development and to guarantee the untrammelled rights of private property. New forces reshaped cultural life, emphasizing individual self-discipline and constraint. New classes emerged. As more people settled into a life of more or less full-time wage-earning, the first working-class organizations appeared to promote and defend their class interests. By the 1890s a particular kind of industrial-capitalist society had congealed.²³

This book is concerned with the ways in which the key elements of that first phase of industrial capitalism were reconstructed, starting with the emergence of the corporation as the dominant economic unit in much of the economy. That phenomenon quickly extended to new workplace regimes, new social programs and state policies, new cultural forces, and new working-class responses at home, in the paid workplace, and in public life, so much so that by the 1920s a starkly different kind of industrial-capitalist society had taken shape in Canada. Yet its instability persisted, and the economic slumps of the years between the two world wars provoked widespread concern and debate. A solution was ultimately found in a new, more interventionist role for the state during World War Two, which continued to some extent after the war. A new phase of capitalist development thus began in the 1940s.

To understand the distinctiveness of the years between 1890 and 1940, then, is to be constantly aware of what went before and what followed. Much historical writing in Canada and other industrialized countries has tended to assume some kind of dramatic watershed at the turn of the 20th century that brought the working class to its knees, under the combined onslaught of mass production and mass culture.²⁴ But studies of the onset of industrialization decades earlier should make us suspicious of that perspective. We now know that the First Industrial Revolution involved many continuities with the past – industrial paternalism, limited mechanization, survival of craft skills, and older patterns of domestic production, for example.²⁵ As we turn to the early 20th century, we will be watching for the ways in which social change was not simply imposed, but negotiated, so that, by the end of the period, changes in working-class life might not seem quite so catastrophic.

Why Hamilton?

What is the most appropriate framework for a study in working-class history? Biographies can sometimes allow for a sensitive treatment of the social context in which a particular figure operated.²⁶ At the other extreme, nationwide studies allow writers to make broad strokes on a vast canvas and to fashion compelling international comparisons.²⁷ But it is difficult to synthesize the diversity of working-class experience within one nation-state into a single picture. Some writers preferred to narrow their focus to workers across a single industry. They got closer to the rhythms of particular occupational groups, but their gaze seldom left the world of wage-earning.²⁸ Many other writers chose single towns or cities for tightly focused community studies, addressing various aspects of working and living in particular towns and cities. Many thought they were writing case studies of a larger social experience that could be easily generalized. Others insisted on the integrity and distinctiveness of particular local experiences that could be no more than suggestive of broader trends.²⁹

I chose to study Hamilton initially because it was the largest of Canada’s predominantly industrial centres in the early 20th century and nurtured key new industries of Canada’s Second Industrial Revolution. It is the largest of a cluster of manufacturing centres in south-central and southwestern Ontario, and thus conveys a taste of the regional flavour of such communities as Peterborough, Brantford, Kitchener-Waterloo, and Windsor. Through a wider lens, its industrial specialization makes it similar to other larger sites of heavy industry scattered around the Great Lakes, such as Cleveland and Buffalo, and to some extent at least, with some industrial centres on other continents. Its large population also puts it into the range of the big-city experience in Canada alongside Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Vancouver. So, in many ways, Hamilton resembled many other North American towns and cities in which a substantial portion of the population relied on wage-earning for survival. This book is therefore self-consciously comparative and draws insights from a huge variety of studies of comparable geographical entities on both sides of the Atlantic (and beyond).

Hamilton was like other places in part because it was exposed to countless outside influences. It encountered the same new trends in management, retailing, social reform, public health, and popular culture that percolated throughout the continent in the early 20th century. Its workers also felt the effects of such state policies and programs as tariffs, immigration, industrial relations, and warfare. Moreover, the early 20th century was a period of human migration on an enormous scale. Workers moved into a city like Hamilton and often moved on again, looking for new jobs or heading home. People arrived with diverse experiences – from British and US industrial centres to Polish and Italian peasant villages. They carried with them distinctive practices, but also, as they moved about, helped to generalize certain kinds of social and cultural processes. Many settled residents maintained close links with kin in a previous homeland, or travelled outside the city – and the country – often for conferences and conventions. They read newspapers and magazines that connected them with ideas and events far away. Hamilton’s workers were certainly part of a much larger world.

The city at the western head of Lake Ontario nonetheless also stood on its own. Its work-force was unusually dependent on factory jobs. Labour had its own particular ethnic and racial complexion and a distinctive history of social conflict and accommodation. The city differed sharply from coal-mining towns, company-owned mill towns, or major ports. It was not a metropolitan centre with radiating transportation links or a government town brimming with goods and services for state officials and closely related voluntary associations. Moreover, on a daily basis, its working people, like those in all other industrial centres, did not operate on a national or regional scale (unlike their corporate employers), but were enmeshed in local practices and relationships. Life was lived locally. Arguably, class awareness most often found voice primarily at this level. For all the similarities and cross-influences, there was no typical industrial centre with a typical working-class population. National or continental working-class experience was the sum of these small parts, with their mixture of similarities and striking diversity.

This book is a local study, not a case study, but it attempts to draw out how Hamilton workers shared the larger working-class experience across Canada and the United States in the years between 1890 and 1940. It attempts to reveal local variations and adaptations within the larger picture – and thus to speak not just about one city’s workers but also about many more who lived hundreds of miles away.

Part I

The View from the Mountain

2

Billboard with electrical lighting, welcomes people who visited Hamilton, advertising Robert Hobson’s Hamilton City plans.

(HPL)

Hobson’s Hamilton

Hamilton was never a company town, nor was it ever in the grip of a single industry. So all eyes were not on one industrial patriarch who dominated the city’s life, as they might have been in a British Columbia coal town or the auto town of Oshawa, Ontario.¹ Yet between the 1890s and the 1920s, one man stood out as a particularly influential figure in shaping the industrial landscape of Hamilton.

Robert Hobson acquired a social and economic stature within the local business community to match his robust, dignified, six-foot-four frame and jaunty, convivial manner. Hobson, trained as a civil engineer, married the daughter of a prominent iron merchant who was at the centre of the city’s new primary iron and steel company in the mid-1890s. He moved quickly to the top of that firm, joined the boards of several other local and national corporations, and gave time to promoting local economic and social development. He filled high offices in broader business organizations concerned with public policy, and was consulted by national governments. He was certainly a great captain of industry, with a high ranking across the continent, but, even more, he was a kind of industrial statesman who, along with a handful of others, gave leadership to Hamilton’s version of the Canadian bourgeoisie in the early 20th century.²

A new Hamilton emerged after 1900 – new industries, new structures of economic power, new arrangements of urban space, new public and private cultures, all of which reflected the aspirations of the small circle of men and women who shared Hobson’s vision. To be sure, this was a story of how a dominant class enhanced its power and wealth, but it also involved their successful reframing of popular common sense about economy, politics, culture, and society. In particular, the vision of this group cast the most important new institution of industrial capitalism, the privately owned corporation, as the quintessence of progressive modernity. They made its promotion and protection central to the development of the surrounding community and raised its highly undemocratic internal dynamics to the status of universal template for the rest of society.

Photograph of Mr. Robert Hobson.

Robert Hobson. (HPL)

A promotional booklet published by the Times printing company in 1892, promoting Hamilton as the future Birmingham of Canada.

This 1892 promotional booklet was the first in Hamilton to feature photographs of industrial and commercial buildings and public institutions.

Over the years bourgeois Hamiltonians would re-create the city in countless ways and lay down the broad terrain on which other social groups had to build a life that met their own needs and concerns – from middle-class doctors to street-corner shopkeepers to wage-earning factory workers and working-class housewives. The growing power of the bourgeois elite enabled them to remain in the driver’s seat, but the road could be rough and unpredictable as they encountered many challenges from below.³

The Ambitious City

At the turn of the century, Robert Hobson volunteered to help Hamilton civic officials coax new manufacturers to set up factories in the city. He no doubt handed them promotional literature that advertised the area’s distinctive advantages and virtues. The pamphlets and booklets that the city fathers produced over the years are far from objective studies of local resources, but they are benchmarks of the city’s development. In 1892, for instance – despite being in the midst of a decade that brought hard times to Hamilton, as it did throughout most of urban Canada⁴ – civic boosters were not deterred from producing a glossy, oversized booklet that staked out the city’s claim to industrial prominence as The Birmingham of Canada. The booklet was chock full of detail about individual firms and their owners, products, and, inevitably, successes.

Anyone leafing through these pages would have been struck by how most of the Hamilton success stories were factories. Few other business activities of any size found their way into the publication – only a few wholesaling or financial firms, no railways shops, and no major port facilities, despite the city’s location at the head of Lake Ontario. Even more striking was how many different commodities were being turned out. After four decades of industrialization, Hamilton’s entrepreneurs were producing goods to satisfy almost every consumer taste – beer, pork, glass, furniture, cutlery, carriages and wagons, lamps, wooden ware, sundry leather goods, vinegar, coffins, pianos and organs, drugs, shoe polish, and countless other products. Some of the larger enterprises, such as Senator W.E. Sanford’s ready-made clothing company, two good-size cotton mills, John McPherson’s shoe factory, and George Tuckett’s tobacco plant, were even reaching out to a national market. The reader did not have to look too hard to discover why the city was being compared to Birmingham. Metal goods were particularly prominent. Among the city’s most distinctive products were cast-iron stoves and furnaces, especially those manufactured by the Gurney-Tilden Company, one of the country’s biggest foundries. The Sawyer-Massey Company, a subsidiary of the Massey firm in Toronto since 1889, turned out farm machinery, and other local firms manufactured engines, wire products, iron pipes, tin cans, and structural iron. The Ontario Rolling Mills also kept up a flow of heavier producer-goods (materials to be used by other industries). The heads of these firms were almost all local men who had built up their businesses over the previous 40 years.⁵

In 1913, in honour of Hamilton’s centennial, the city council proudly produced a smaller but fatter book that reveals how much could change in two decades. The thick 200-page volume informed visitors of the city’s astonishing industrial achievements on display in the Centennial Industrial Exposition. There was now a small railway, the Toronto, Hamilton, and Buffalo, to connect with the major lines running through the region and to service local industry. Still, although many firms found the harbour useful for their own shipping needs, Hamilton was not a major transportation hub. Nor did this book report any new growth of financial institutions. Instead, it presented a picture of a city dominated even more thoroughly by factories. There were many more of them – in the previous three years alone, over 30 new plants worth more than $6 million had started up production. The visitor clutching this handbook would certainly have been encouraged to ride a streetcar out into the new east-end district on the narrow plain below Hamilton Mountain, where the largest and newest factories were locating.⁶

The centrepiece of the factory district was the sprawling plant of the Steel Company of Canada, eventually known as Stelco. Since the turn of the century, many large new firms had located production facilities near that site, notably the massive plants of International Harvester and Canadian Westinghouse. Mostly these new-comers turned out heavy producer-goods. A few of the older firms serving the consumer market, especially Tuckett Tobacco and Sawyer-Massey, had grown and expanded. A few large canning operations benefited from the city’s place in the heart of Ontario’s market-gardening area. The ready-made clothing business was larger, and the textile industry now included booming knit-goods factories. Yet it was metalworking and metal fabrication that now overshadowed all else in the city’s industrial life. All this production was facilitated by the huge hydro-electric facilities that the centennial book highlighted. Dominion Power (initially as Cataract Power) had been transmitting cheap power from DeCew Falls just outside the city since 1897 and had won for Hamilton the new nickname of The Electric City of Canada.

The city’s handbook would also have confirmed visitors’ visual impressions that many new names had appeared over the factory gates. The city boasted that its 45 US-owned companies worth over $35 million had brought in more United States capital . . . than any other Canadian city, and more than likely, in all the cities of Ontario combined. Corporations, both domestic and foreign, now seemed much more important than did individual entrepreneurs. Hamilton had evidently moved into a new phase of industrial development based on much larger units of production, much more specialization on a narrower range of producer-goods, and much more external control.⁷

By the late 1920s the city’s industrial commissioner was routinely publishing smaller booklets to promote the city’s assets. By then, revealingly, most of the older consumer-goods industries that had dotted the industrial landscape of the 1890s, including the venerable Sanford clothing firm and all the old stove foundries, had disappeared from the printed pages. In the commissioner’s glowing reports on industrial success, the original downtown manufacturing district figured hardly at all. The survivors were the local enterprises that had joined in the specialization in iron and steel production and fabrication and, to a lesser degree, in textile production. The east-end factory district had several large new plants, most of them US branch operations. Generally, the trends evident in 1913 had been consolidated, though some surprising postwar newcomers, notably Firestone Tire and Rubber, were present. The commissioner had even dropped references to Hamilton as the Canadian Birmingham, now using the more appropriate title of The Pittsburgh of Canada.⁸

A great transformation had clearly taken place over the decades.⁹ How had such massive changes come about? The driving force behind industrial growth in the second half of the 19th century had been the remarkable aggressiveness of the city’s capitalists, who had won for Hamilton yet another long-standing nickname, The Ambitious City. At mid-century they had aspired to turn the community that nurtured their businesses into a commercial metropolis