THE COSMOPOLITANS AND THE DAWN OF MULTICULTURALISM AT THE CANADIAN LAKEHEAD

Ken Morrison

On June 7, 2002 a local couple well known in musical, bridge and political circles celebrated their golden wedding anniversary at a reception at a local hotel.  Due to better nutrition and medical miracles the event itself was not that unusual.  More unusual was the fact that the whole wedding party - bride, groom, matron of honour, best man, and flower girl were alive, well and in attendance.  Also present were a significant number of men who in their youth styled themselves "The Cosmopolitans", lived in Fort William's East End, were close friends, and in the immediate post Second World War period attended Fort William secondary schools.  On the whole they had successful careers including a number who went into the professions.

The thesis of this paper is that the members of the Cosmopolitans reflected in miniature a great social transformation, a transformation which saw a once marginalized group of people, who in this paper will be referred to as "the ethnics, come to be accepted after 1945 politically and socially as full citizens of Canada with World War II being an important reason for this development.

The ethnics were people whose origins were in the great post 1896 wave of immigration which saw not only people from the British Isles, but also people from other areas in Europe including eastern and southern Europe, encouraged to come to Canada to populate the great empty spaces of the West.  The non-British immigrants especially filled important gaps in the Canadian work force often taking the tough and dangerous work settled Canadians and immigrants from the British Isles avoided.

Their low social status was reflected in the popular terminology used to identify them hunkies, ukes, wops, polocks, and so on.  Anti-Semitism was also widespread and such, now unacceptable, expressions as "J***** one down along with "an n***** in the woodpile" were widely used even in polite society. Their handicaps of lack of fluency in English, frequent low levels of education, and predominant Catholic allegiance in mainly Protestant Ontario were aggravated by their initial lack of Canadian citizenship.  As a result the immigrant ethnics tended to be badly exploited, marginalized, and ghettoized in most communities across Canada. Hardly surprisingly many from immigrant communities were attracted to radical political movements such as the Communists.

Fort William's East End was such a ghetto. We use this term to designate the area of the city east of May Street in that city including the community across the CPR tracks known from its once dominant economic activity as "the coal docks".  In the period under review these ethnic immigrants, and particularly their children, came to be fully accepted members of Canadian society with the disparaging language used to identify them in days gone by gradually ceased to be used in anything but in a joking way among friends.  Using the pre- amalgamation city of Fort William as an example we will attempt to demonstrate that indeed this development took place, a development mirrored in many other localities across Canada, leading to official multiculturalism reflected in the Multiculturalism Act of 1987, and personified in Fort William in the lives of the Cosmopolitans.

We will test our thesis that a sea change in social relations took place over the broadly Second World War period in a number of ways.

The success of persons with ethnic names running for and being elected to civic office (and later higher offices) in the city.

1. Their success in securing employment with the City of Fort William.
2. The success of their children in gaining access to an educational institution, Fort William Collegiate Institute, which was geared to graduating students intended for university instead of these students. Previously ethnic youth had submissively trooping off the Selkirk High School whose main mandate was to prepare young people for a career in the trades.
3. And, finally, the acceptance of these "ethnics" by the traditionally dominant community which we will call the "Anglos" for sake of simplicity  (although they would be more accurately described as persons whose ancestors came from the British Isles and had British names) which was reflected in a significant increase in ethnic-Anglo marriages.

Since the Anglos were predominantly Protestant and the ethnics predominantly Catholic religious as well as cultural barriers also often to be overcome before such marriages could take place. The extent of the religious differences can be seen in the fact the coal docks area of the East End with a landscape dominated by places of worship had no Protestant churches. The two existing Protestant churches, one Anglican and one United, were west of the tracks as was the Jewish community's synagogue.

Our chief informant, the groom in the above-mentioned wedding party, identified 23 persons as being members of the Cosmopolitans.  Of these the predominant number were Ukrainians, 12, followed by 4 Finns, 3 Anglos, and one each Estonian, Japanese, Italian and Greek.  Of these twenty-three five never married to the best of our informants knowledge. Seven attended Fort William Collegiate Institute.

ELECTION TO PUBLIC OFFICE

To test our thesis we sought to compare the situations in Fort William fifteen years apart - 1938 and 1953 - beginning with civic politics and the examination of the elections of December 5, 1938 and December 7, 1953. In the former election the offices of mayor, hydro commissioner, twelve aldermen, and five board of education trustees were on the ballot, for a total of nineteen positions in contest.   Thirty-six persons were nominated.  Of these only Hubert Badanai, the future mayor and Member of Parliament, had a discernibly ethnic name . [1]

Badanai was unsuccessful, but his time would come.  Interestingly enough only one woman, Mrs. Laura M. Anderson, ran and was elected as a school trustee.  Whether she was aided by the fact that the popular future NDP MPP, Garfield Anderson, was a successful candidate for council is an interesting speculation. test

In the December 7, 1953 sixteen offices were contested: the hydro
commission, six council positions, six for the board of education, and three for the parks commission.  At this time there were annual civic elections, but only half the council was on the ballot each year, and the mayor was elected every second year.  This appears to have been a year when the mayoralty was not in contest.  Seven people with ethnic names sought council positions, and two, Mrs. Katherine Seppela and Mr. James V. Colosimo were elected, a third of the aldermen positions open.   One ethnic ran for the board of education, but was not elected.  Ethnics did not seek the other offices.  The results were not a tremendous victory for ethnic candidates, but the results did show that ethnics could be elected, and the way was paved for the Badanais, the Assefs, the Laksins, and the Boshcoffs of the future to achieve the mayor's chair.

CIVIC EMPLOYMENT

At least in the past, employment in government institutions was often much more a matter of who you knew than what you knew.  How much this was true of the City of Fort William in the years under investigation would require research beyond the scope of this paper.  What can be safely said is that as result of the unionization of civic workers, the developing success of ethnics seeking public office, the improvements in the education and language skills of ethnics reflected in the fact that in 1938 the police had an interpreter on their payroll and in 1953 did not, plus changing public attitudes an increase in the employment of ethnics by the city should reasonably be expected.  This, in fact, did happen. The December 16, 1938 civic payroll recorded 40 people we would identify as ethnics out of a total of 319 employees or 12.5%.  The December 15, 1953 payroll identifies 106 ethnic employees out of 435 or 24.4%, a significant increase.  The 1938 payroll also included those who were on cash relief. They numbered 218 of whom 118, or 51.8% were ethnics.

However, these figures have to be approached with some caution.  In the first place identifying who is an ethnic is a somewhat subjective affair with the problems mentioned above in play.  And then the city employment pattern changed.  Employees of the Fort William Gardens and the Fort William Manor (a senior citizen' home) were now on the payroll. Also, with the coming of rubber tired buses and trolleys public transit was an evolving operation demanding new skills.  Probably significant, also, was the influence of the re-employment of veterans and the demands of veterans' preference legislation.  Thus all one can safely say is that the percentage of ethnics employed by the city did improve, but how significantly is problematic.   No ethnic was yet a policeman but by l953 ethnics had a small presence in the fire and telephone departments where none had been employed in 1938.

EDUCATION

As noted above, the option of attending the Fort William Collegiate Institute, and thus potentially get to university and have a career in the professions, can be taken as another sign of upward mobility and social acceptance of ethnics. The 1938 FWCI Year Book indicates that 63 graduated in that year.  Of these only 2 had distinctively ethnic names thus constituting a mere 3.2% of the Grade 13 class.  Fifteen years later the graduating class was smaller, 49, but contained either 5 or 6 ethnics. The reason for this uncertainty is that one of the graduates without a strikingly ethnic name was nicknamed "Finn".  We are inclined to accept that he was indeed a Finn, and include him among the 12.2% of the class who were ethnics.  This was an important, but hardly a dramatic increase in ethnic attendance at FWCI considering the size of that community in Fort William at the time.  More telling, probably, was that the head boy that year was Don Andrychuk whose ethnic origins are beyond question.

This improvement was accomplished in face of considerable pressure for the ethnics to take their "proper place" at Selkirk High School.  One of the Cosmopolitans records having been called to the principal's office and being very strongly "invited" to make the transfer.  He resisted successfully, and went on to a very successful professional career.  His absence would have been an immense loss to the young women of FWCI, mostly Anglos, since his friends report that he had an abundance of those qualities which caused young girls to pine for male attention.  He ended up marrying an Anglo.

However, his interview with the FWCI principal was just the culmination of many such pressures to stay away from an academic high school, and not to date Anglo girls.  The principal at Ogden Street Public School, the main elementary school for non-Catholic ethnics, also put considerable pressure on our subject to go to Selkirk High School.  And, at FWCI, dating of his future wife, an Anglo brought other pressures.

The Geography teacher gave what was apparently an annual lecture to all his Geography classes on the danger of mixing the races, and took both our informant and his Anglo girl friend aside and instructed them to break up their relationship.  When in the final year our informant was chosen to be the head of the male Athletic Society the yearbook editors, apparently under staff pressure, excluded his picture from the yearbook (and to be "fair also the picture of his female counterpart).  Looking back one cannot but be amazed that results of racial bigotry so strikingly revealed in World War II so singularly failed to penetrate the thick skulls of educators who were supposed to have had themselves a liberal education and be relatively well informed.  To be fair, it must be noted that in this, and some other cases commented upon by our informant, the marriage of an ethnic to an Anglo was much more openly opposed in the ethnic household than in the Anglo.

MARRIAGE

As noted above our contention was that a wider acceptance of "ethnics" would result in an increase of intermarriages between young people with British ancestry and the children of ethnic immigrant families.  Because of confidentiality concerns the files of the provincial registry office are not open to research in this area, so we had to resort to an expediency, which could not produce a scientific result, but is suggestive of a trend.

It is generally accepted that the United Church is the most liberal of the main line denominations on marriage matters.  Many of its ministers were prepared to perform marriages for persons ineligible for marriage in their home denominations because of divorce, proposing to marry someone outside the faith, and not being a churchgoer at all.  If cross cultural marriages, which often meant Protestant - Catholic marriages, were preformed then the evidence would most likely to be found in the marriage registry of a United Church.

We chose Wesley United Church to test this hypothesis.  It is just outside the area we have designated as "East End", has a significant presence in Fort William, and has a tradition of engaging liberally minded and Social Gospel ministers.  If any church were going to show a trend in mixed marriages, Wesley United would be it.  We again chose the years 1938 and 1953,  to test our thesis.  In 1938 Rev. Elgin W. Turnbull performed 33 marriages. Twenty-seven involved persons with British-originating names, and no serious religious differences.   Of the remainder I would designate two as "all ethnic" unions.  One involved a Roman Catholic marrying a Greek Orthodox, and the other was for an Austrian born couple who designated their religion as "United Church" although that tag is suspect since at the time "no religion" was not an acceptable, and people had to assume any convenient church identity.

The remaining  four involved  either ethnic differences or Roman Catholic - Protestant couplings.  In one case a person with an Italian name but Presbyterian  connections married an Anglican.  In the second a Roman Catholic married a United Church adherent.  In the third a Greek Orthodox married a United.  And, in the fourth a Presbyterian married a person of
Greek Orthodox roots.  Thus mixed  marriages accounted for 12.1% of the marriages performed at Wesley United in l938.

In l953 forty-three couples were married in  the same church whose minister  then was Rev. R.G. McMillan.   Of these twenty-nine were mainstream without any  ethnic or religious differences of note.  Four of the remainder we would designate as "all ethnic"  On April 25 two German born divorced Roman Catholics were married.  In May a Finnish Lutheran was joined with an ethnic Roman Catholic. In July a Roman Catholic married a Lutheran, while in September two Buddhists became man and wife!  These four marriages are all in the category of a United Church minister generously assisting  people not of his faith who fifty years later  would also have justices of the peace and Unitarian lay chaplains to accommodate their special circumstances.   Of the remaining ten, which I would designate as "inter ethnic",  half involved a United Church person marrying a Roman Catholic or a Greek Orthodox, in all cases meaning an Anglo married an ethnic, while the remaining five marriages involved a Protestant with an ethnic name marrying an Anglo Protestant.  Thus the inter ethnic marriages represented a l00% increase from 1938 and almost a quarter of the marriages at Wesley United.  While this limited sample does not prove the fact, it does suggest that trend toward inter-ethnic and inter-faith marriages, which is now one of the  features,  we would say that one of the glories, of Thunder Bay's multiculturalism was already underway.

This development was also reflected  in the marriage patterns of the Cosmopolitans.

It would not be unrealistic to even suggest that the Cosmopolitans were standard bearers in this development.  Of the eighteen Cosmopolitans known to have been married eight took Anglo wives.  Further, of the seven identified as having proceeded to FWCI  three were from among the Anglo-marrying ethnics.  Traditional patterns of upwardly social mobility
were thus in play - the upwardly mobile marrying one social step up.  Of the remainder three married into their own clan and seven married ethnics, but not of their clan.  One coupling is hard to categorize.  Is a Ukrainian marrying a German an inter-ethnic union, or an ethnic-Anglo marriage?  We would opt for the former in the environment of Cosmopolitans' immigrant
community, but one could reasonably call it the other way.

The marriage records of St. Dominic' Roman Catholic church, at that time the parish church for the Roman Catholic, and especially the Italian, community in the coal docks district of the East End do little to confirm or deny this trend.  At a time when Protestant-Catholic unions met much resistance the marriages in St. Dominic's would almost certainly been Catholic-to-Catholic or Catholic to converted Protestant.  In 1938 the priests of St. Dominic's performed fourteen services of marriage three of
which (23%) we would describe as an Anglo-ethnic wedding, and the four (28.5%) as an inter-ethnic wedding.  In the post war boom new opportunities arose for humble East Enders to marry and start a family.  Thus weddings at St. Dominics more than doubled to twenty-nine in 1953.  Of these eight, or
27.5% could be described as Anglo-ethnic weddings only a very modest, and probably not statistically significant, increase, and the number of inter-ethnic weddings fell to two,  or 7%, again probably not a statistically significant change either.

SUMMARY

What happened in the fifteen years between 1938 and 1953, which dramatically changed inter-ethnic relations in Thunder Bay?  The obvious answer is the experience of World War II, with, probably, an assist from the fact that the second-generation ethnics  were coming of age. These young people were both culturally Canadians and Canadian citizens although still honouring the heritage of their parents. 

The initial core of the local unit, the Lake Superior Regiment,  may have mirrored the chiefly British ancestry of the pre-war militia unit,  but that changed as the unit recruited to full strength and reflected the reality that the war swept people of every ethnic background into its service.   Those of non-British background  found that the army and the navy tended to recruit their officer corps chiefly from the old Anglo establishment  with preference for those with  some university education, or the prospect of same.  Thus relatively few ethnics in these two services achieved the prestige of officer rank. The notable exception was Jews who had both the educational qualifications and the anti-fascist commitment to make them excellent officers in spite of hangovers of  anti-Semitic prejudices.  Future Thunder Bay mayor, Saul Laskin, was a captain in a Nova Scotia regiment, while Lt. Col. David Croll  came home to win the heavily Jewish riding of Toronto-Spadina in the 1945 federal election. 

The air force, on the other hand, created officers with relative indifference to social and educational backgrounds beyond reasonable minimums. Skill, commitment, and a considerable amount of luck, were the essentials for achieving officer status in that service. (Something like 10% were granted commissions upon receiving their wings and many more were commissioned overseas ).  Unlike the US Air Force which commissioned pilots, navigators and bombardiers only, in the RCAF air crew who were gunners and wireless operators could also be officers so that persons of relatively modest education and social status could be commissioned in this service and  receive decorations for valour at every level including the Victoria Cross for the very Ukrainian named FO A.C. Mynarski of Winnipeg whose rear gunner hailed from Fort William.  [2]   Likewise some of the most celebrated heroes of the Battle of Britain were Polish, Czech, and other  airmen from allied nations whose achievements,  along with those of Canadian ethnics in the RCAF,  cannot but have reflected favourably on those of like background in Canada.

At home the demands of the war economy swept up people, and in particular women, who had previously been confined to the home or to low rank and low pay occupations like domestics, into war factories where  for the first time in their life they received "real money",  and pay packets which were all their own.  A new independence and a new refusal to be pushed around appeared as workers of every religious and ethnic background joined unions and organized  social and war-supporting activities. Immigrants, and children of immigrants now operated on a par with those whose ancestors had arrived in Canada many decades before.  Inevitably, social, ethnic and religious barriers which had ghettoized the ethnics before 1939 were broken down, and could not be reconstructed after the war.

A final development finished the job which the war experience had begun. After 1945 Thunder Bay received a flood of new immigrants from Great Britain, from the exiled armies of Poland, from displaced persons from all over Europe, and from former enemies like Germany and Italy whose citizens not only fled their battered homelands for new opportunities, but wanted to
journey to a land where some had had positive experiences as prisoners-of-war.  These were more welcome and accepted  than previous waves of immigrants had been for two reasons.  Firstly, the post war boom created a labour shortage, especially for workers in the less pleasant jobs such as bush work,  mining, and railroad track maintenance.  Immigrants were welcomed because they filled these jobs, and left pleasanter tasks for already established Canadians.  And then came the Cold War.  A significant number of the post-war immigrants were persons who had fled communist rule, or who refused to return to a homeland now controlled by communists.  Their
anti-communism was a fit with the dominant political ethos of the day.

Governments, most successfully  federal Liberal governments, catered to this new immigrant community, gave grants to their cultural organizations, overlooking the  darker wartime backgrounds of some, and  helping all feel accepted in every way as members of the Canadian community.  All these
developments made the Multicultural Act almost inevitable,  and made Thunder Bay the glorious  multi-ethnic,  inter marrying, and inter faith, community that it has become.  This was a development which the Cosmopolitans' experiences heralded, and which the Cosmopolitans in their own modest way promoted.


My thanks to the Cosmopolitans I interviewed, and to the staffs of Wesley United and St. Dominic's Roman Catholic churches,  the City of Thunder Bay archives, and the staff of FWCI for their assistance in this enterprise.

Ken Morrison
98 Peter Street
Thunder Bay, ON
P7A 5H5