Face-Off 1927 Montreal

Thomas G. Wells and Jules Crepeau, the two men who will be facing off in my story Milk and Water. Thomas is my husband’s grandfather, Jules, my grandfather. Thomas is the President of Laurentian Spring Water, a bottled water company and my grandfather is Director of City Services.

The picture of Fuddy Wells, was a Notman, taken in 1931. I assume the picture of my grandfather is taken at a similar time. He’s graying. Perhaps in 1928 on his 40th year at City Hall. So I will have them wearing these suits in my play. The collars are the same.. my grandfather’s tie is thicker and his lapels much wider and longer.(Fuddy is older, but he looks younger, fewer troubles. My grandfather had a load of them in 1927.)

Well, the 4th session of the 16th legislature of the Quebec General Assembly met in Spring 1927 and two debates are relevant to my story.

They debate whether to launch a Royal Commission or Inquiry in the recent Montreal Water and Power purchase. M. Houde, the member for Montreal Sainte Marie calls for it.

And they discuss the importance of Hygiene, I’m guessing in response to the Typhoid Epidemic, for which they don’t as yet know the cause. But not necessarily so.

Of course, the two issues are combined and I will explain this in Milk and Water.

Member Beaudoin of Marie Ste Jacques says “Comme l’a dit l’honorable député de Matane, l’hygiène supprime les épidémies, diminue les maladies contagieuses et par le fait même contribue à faire disparaître la contagion, l’une des causes les plus fréquentes de la mortalité. Mais il est une maladie dont il n’a pas parlé, que l’hygiène n’a pu encore faire disparaître, ni même atténuer et qui semble sévir à l’état endémique du côté de la droite: c’est celle qui consiste à chanter les louanges du gouvernement, afin de faire croire au peuple de cette province que sa santé est excellente et qu’il est heureux.”

As the honorable member from Matane, hygiene suppresses epidemics, diminishes contagious diseases and helps remove the contagion, the most frequent cause of mortality. But there’s an illness of which he doesn’t speak, that good hygiene can’t make go away, or even touch, that where the government sings the praises of the government, saying to the people that their health is excellent and that they are happy.”

I’ve written a great deal about the hygiene movement, from the anglo Presbyterian point of view: where purity and cleanliness means more than a healthy body, it means a healthy mind and spirit -a moral mind and spirit, a Protestant kind of mind that has a sour taint to it, the taint of racial superiority and even eugenics or social engineering. This wasn’t lost on French Canadians and immigrants.

Health-advocates, mostly Anglo, are the ones who tried to bring down the Executive Committee in 1923, forcing the Coderre Inquiry into Police Corruption. Their interest, stamping out the Social Evil or prostitution.

Seems to me, wherever there are  men with money, and women without,  there’s prostitution and it could be construed that up until lately, all women were prostitutes (except for nuns and Old Maids) as all young women were ‘on the market’ prepared to sell themselves and their wombs to the highest bidder.

I’ve read that in London, despite the fact that there’s virtually no taboo against premarital sex, even sex on the first date, that the use of Prostitutes doubled in the first decade of the 21st century.

Lots of high powered men (swinging dicks they are called) with money  and no time for real relationships – and lots of poor (eastern european) women.

In the old days, they thought that by eradicating the haunts of prostitutes and the reasons the haunts existed, (drink, gambling)they could eradicate prostitution.

At least one article in the Delineator Magazine back in 1910 suggested something radical: that to stamp out prostitution, you had to make it taboo for men to have premarital sex,too. As long as there’s this double standard, that young men must have ‘a sexual education’,the  magazine article said, there will be prostitution. Well, duh!

In England, there were plenty of prostitutes, (remember that scene from the French Lieutenant’s Woman with Meryl Streep’s actress character read the statistics?) but well off young men were supposed to get their sexual education on the Continent.

From reading a lot of Zola lately, I think young French men were supposed to get their sexual education from married women.

Alas..Today women are sexually liberated, but there’s still very much a market in female flesh. Indeed, the mass media trades in this commodity.

A woman can’t go around showing her boobs in public, and even breastfeeding in public causes a stir,  but our most respected media companies make a fortune selling pornography to average everyday middle class people. Weird society. Is it a case of “who’ll buy the cow…” I wonder. (Excuse the pun.)

That horrendous expression (spouted by many a 20th century mom and dad) says it all, really.  I wonder who coined it…

My play isn’t about prostitution, but it certainly is key historical factor.  Prostitution is the main reason Montreal Council changed the law  in 1925 or so (my grandfather announced it) forcing dance clubs to close at 12 am and not 1 am….(Sort of symbolic concession.)

So, all very very complicated, what was going on.. And I’m trying to sum it  up in my play.

Dark Secrets

Old Brewery Mission: A card from the Nicholson Collection. 1912

Well, I read the sections of Mariana Valverde’s book Light,Soap and Water, on “Social Purity, Sexual Purity and Immigration” and on the “The City as Moral Problem” and it bothered me all night, because it was even worse than I had figured out from reading the articles of the era in the online archives.

(She mentions two pamphlets (on these two subjects) by an influential Canadian ‘pundit’ of the times which I immediately searched for and found them on archive.org. More reading for me.

Now, Valverde says in her book,published in 1991, that this ‘immigration/racism/social purity’ issue has been covered by Canadian historians; she says she just clearly connects the dots between gender/race/class and Canadian Immigration Policy of the 1910 era.

But, frankly, this social purity/eugenics issue hasn’t filtered down into the consciousnes of Canadians, or into the high school history books, so it all still is effectively censored.

I think, anyway.

Case in point, In 2007, I attended a workshop given by the Quebec Anglo Heritage Network, where experts in the history of Montreal’s Chinese, Black, Italian and Native Communities gave talks about their people’s place within Quebec, and no one mentioned the social purity thing. The woman representing the Chinese Community mentioned the head tax, and that Chinese immigrants (men) who were decontaminted upon their arrival in Canada and the Aboriginal representative said that Native history has effectively been erased from Quebec culture despite earlier friendlier connections between the French and the natives, and the Black Historian told how their men only could work as porters and their women as maids. But that’s it.

No mention of the White Slavery hysteria or the eugenics movement or that dark subject underlying slum social work: suspicion of incest.

So with these two chapters, I have gained even more insight into the Nicholson experience, although it is not an especially pleasant insight. Tighsolas: House of Light, indeed. Were the Nicholsons racist? Most probably, since the Presbyterians Ministers were racist and the Nicholsons dutifully attended sermons, sometimes twice day. And Margaret was a member of the Missionary Society of her church, although she did not like the work or the Missionary Ladies. (They shunned her actually… Maybe because she was vain and loved to look good and wear nice dresses. A love of finery was considered a sin among the more conservative church types.)

The 1908-1913 letters reveal little racism against immigrants: the Nicholsons saved their ire for Englishmen (loathed and despised because they got the top jobs on the railway) and Methodists, (on occasion) and Conservatives, especially relations who voted Conservative, because these relations were likely more well off than they were.

And of course, in 1913, Marion Nicholson married Hugh Blair who had Cree blood and he looked it too. He also had a French Canadian mother. (Norman Nicholson mentions natives a few times in his letters from the bush, and he clearly admires them. And Herb Nicholson says this in a 1915 letter from out west “Sometimes I think we should never have taken the land away from the Indians. ” This is quite heretical as the fact the Indians were here first was generally ignored in the era. Natives were discussed in the same breath as new immigrants.

One interesting and relevant point I learned from Valverde’s book: between 1906 and 1919 in Canada the average salary for a man actually went down. Well, Norman fell on hard times right about 1906 and he never did get back on his feet. He died in 1922, still on the job.

And Valverde mentions how the Methodists tried (usually in vain) to convert RC Italians to their faith. Well, when Edith worked at Ecole Methodiste Westmount in 1912, she was successful in converting at least one Italian boy, because this man, Pascal Diflorio, kept a journal and his descendant has created a blog around it. Diflorio wrote he did try to resist, but that Edith’s arguments were too powerful, but in a good way.