The Social History of Canada 9781487578107

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The social history of Canada MICHAEL BLISS, EDITOR

The Americanization of Canada SAMUELE. MOFFETT WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALLAN SMITH

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

© University of Toronto Press 1972

Reprinted in 2018 Toronto and Buffalo

All rights reserved ISBN (casebound) 0-8020-1880-7 ISBN 978-0-8020-6143-0 (paper)

Microfiche ISBN 0-8020-0219-6 LC 79-189601 Printed in the United States of America

The original edition of this work, a Columbia University PH D thesis, appeared in 1907

An introduction BY ALLAN SMITH

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THE NEW WORLD had a profound impact on the quality of European life and the shape of European thought. To some observers it was a raw and barbarous place requiring the civilizing hand of European man; others pronounced it virgin and unspoiled, a land of purity, youth, and innocence, where man might be remade. All, however, were very nearly mesmerized by it. From the Halls of Montezuma to the Kingdom of the Saguenay it seemed a fabulous place, its treasure and potential far exceeding anything to be found in the world they knew. In time many commentators found its incredible promise most fully realized in the United States. There liberty and abundance had combined to produce a spectacularly successful civilization, one committed to, and apparently able to sustain, a society of opportunity and freedom for all. With the making of a successful revolution, the special virtues of American society came to be viewed not simply as an emanation of place but as a function of politics, for the republican order seemed simultaneously to confirm and amplify American freedoms. American political and social principles, it was thought, would redeem Europe from the lassitude of aristocratic domination. 1 If much of the American impact on the European world before 1900 occurred at the level of idea and inspiration, the imperialism of the l 890s joined with Theodore Roosevelt's aggressive foreign policy to transform America's presence in world affairs into one which was hard, tangible, and real. 2 European observers noted with concern the rise of this new constellation in the heavens of their world. 'One hears,' wrote the French historian Henri Hauser in 1905, 'nothing spoken of in the press, at meetings, in parliament, except the American peril. ' 3 In 1899 the same ominous phrase had formed the title of two articles written by Octave Noel for Le Correspondant. 4 Italians and Germans, too, noticed the new phenomenon. 5 The emergence of America turned, of course, on more than the war with Spain or the antics of an exuberant chief executive; its foundations rested upon America's maturing economic order, the rise of modern communications, and a mastery of technique and organization evident even then. These elements combined with the appeal of American popular culture to ensure a massive American

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influence abroad. In 1901 the British newspaperman W.T. Stead suggested in a volume entitled The Americanization of the World that it was the special flavour and energy of American civilization which powered its thrust to a kind of world domination. American business techniques, organizational principles, machinery, magazines, dress, sports, slang, capital, and values were making their way around the world. They were at once altering the style of the globe and making it tributary to the United States. The American phenomenon had particular meaning for Britain. Especially vulnerable to Americanization, it also had the most to lose by the rise of American power. If its exposure to that power meant, Stead wrote, that it was 'beginning to be energized by the electric current of American ideas and American methods,' it also meant that 'we can never again be the first ... ' 6 But the United States, he continued, was not yet strong enough to become the arbiter of the world. Serious thought, therefore, should be given to an Anglo-Saxon union. Only in this way could continuing AngloSaxon hegemony be assured. More, only in this way could a continuing British presence at the centre of the world's affairs be guaranteed. 2

Americans had believed from the beginning of their history that they must be a people of moment in the world's affairs. Convinced of their society's unique and special character, they could not doubt (in John Winthrop's famous formulation) that 'the eyes of the world are upon us.' And no wonder, for, as the Puritans conceived it, their task was nothing less than the undertaking of an errand in the wilderness for the purpose of realizing God's plan for mankind. Other men, other societies, in watching them would see how the job was to be done. They might, then, reorder their affairs and so build the perfect state so far as such an end was within the means of men. 7 In time, some Americans suggested a more active role for their society. It must function as a haven for the oppressed. Its task was to uplift the masses of the Old World by inviting them to renew themselves in its midst. 8 As the expansionist impulse in American life deepened, Americans began to argue that there was propriety and justice in being yet more active in the world. The principles of

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freedom were not to be served passively in the hope that other societies would of their own volition respond to the American model. America must actively seek to enlarge the area of true democracy, ensure the best use of available resources, and act in the interests of less fortunate peoples. Power must be exercised in the service of liberty. Present as a factor in American expansionism across the North American continent in the nineteenth century, this complex of beliefs served at its end to provide a powerful rationale for the American thrust into the Caribbean and across the Pacific. 9 While many Americans doubted that establishing a formal empire was the way for America to be active in the world, few questioned the wisdom of involvement itself. Imperialism of the old and conventional variety might be frowned upon, but what lay short of formal empire was not. Military intervention in Latin America, the establishing of Asian spheres of influence, the marshalling of the fleet, and, especially, the ever-growing interest in exporting American capital and culture became features of American activity abroad. Even refonners might support America's growing influence overseas, for it seemed plainly to involve activity in the interests of freedom. Imperialism was in fact closely linked to reform. It sought to do beyond the borders of the United States what reformers wished to do at home. Proponents of the Social Gospel like Josiah Royce might advocate expansion, while Progressives could do the same. They, like other Americans, believed in economic growth and national prosperity. Their tendency to take a paternal interest in American blacks disposed them to the adoption of a similar attitude towards non-white peoples in general. Above all, they approved imperialism because they understood the United States to be the land, indeed the home, of free and open institutions. Any extension of its domain, therefore, was per se an extension of freedom and democracy. 10 3

No country was more fully aware of the United States, both as a symbol and an intractable reality, than Canada. Canadians had noticed for some time the impact that America was having on their society. Commentators pointed regularly to cultural invasion, close economic links, and what to them seemed the indisputable facts of

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geography as circumstances which would insure a large and effective American influence in Canada. Upper Canada, Sir George Arthur was informed at the end of the 1830s, must 'be materially affected by the state of Politics and of the popular mind in the neighbouring Republic.' 11 In the 1860s Thomas D'Arcy McGee pointed out that while American ideas had an influence on 'all the populations of the New World,' it had been brought most fully to bear on 'those of us nearest their source ... ' 12 By the last years of the century Sara Jeannette Duncan found Canadian cultural life rapidly being assimilated to American. 13 In 1889 a lengthy article in Canada's leading periodical, the Week, concluded that America's great power, reinforced by the facts of geography, made some form of union with the United States inevitable. 14 And in 1891 Goldwin Smith drew his continentalist argument together between the covers of a single book, Canada and the Canadian Question, 15 the burden of whose message was that Canada was a geographical, cultural, and economic absurdity - given these considerable disabilities, faced with the vitality that was America, it could not hope to survive. 4

Samuel E. Moffett's The Americanization of Canada has relevance in each of these several traditions. By examining at length and in detail the manner in which Canadian society was affected by the new industrial America of the late nineteenth century, he revealed something of the manner in which American power was making itself felt around the world. The book in that sense became a case study with a broad significance: technology, communications, and the flow of culture did not simply work to fuse the United States and Canada; they underlay the process by which the world itself was becoming Americanized. Indirectly the book was a contribution to the literature of AngloAmerican solidarity. The foundations of the special relationship between England and the United States, laid by the Treaty of Washington in 1871 and largely the result of the changing power situation which required England to take an emerging America seriously, were strengthened in the 1890s by a further alteration in the relative fortunes of the two powers coupled with a vigorous insistence on the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. The

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argument for Anglo-Saxon solidarity, advanced in such books as Sir Charles Dilke's Greater Britain (1867), J.R. Seeley's The Expansion of England (1883), and J.A. Froude's Oceana (1886), generated much enthusiasm for the notion that the Anglo-Saxon peoples of the world were a superior force and ought to act in harmony and cooperation. It was not long before Americans overcame enough of their distrust of the Old World in general and Britain in particular to argue a similar case. In the 1890s Captain Mahan 's suggestions that the Anglo-American relationship should be close and firm were greeted with enthusiasm on both sides of the Atlantic, 16 while in 1903 John R. Dos Passos of New York called for 'a complete and sympathetic entente between the Anglo-Saxon peoples ... ' Canada occupied a vital place in all of this, for 'with Canada a separate nation, as she is now, a real, lasting entente between the British Empire and the United States, is impossible,' 17 The implication of Moffett's argument for the fact of Canada's Americanization was to suggest that one of the principal steps on the way to a reunion of the Anglo-Saxon peoples had already been taken. Moffett - an American - was also providing a document in the literature of American expansionism. Despite his moderate and judicious tone, he was mounting an argument for the triumph of continentalism. In doing so he made clear his belief that the continental society he saw in the making was American in its contours. The process by which Canadians were being assimilated to the American way of life would eventually produce a victory, muted and not to be described in the florid language of a Benton or a Beveridge, but no less real, for manifest destiny. The American idea would at last comprehend the continent, its sway undisputed. Moffett, of course, was a progressive expansionist. Scholarly books and articles pointing to the manner in which government and democracy had been subverted by concentrations of economic power, 18 a brand of journalism which allowed him to place his views on these matters before a wide public, and a cool and persuasive style of argument gave him impeccable progressive credentials. It was precisely his progressivism that allowed him to view with such satisfaction the obliteration of Canada. By becoming assimilated to the United States, Canada was fulfilling itself as a liberal and progressive society. Released from its bondage to the institutions of an Old World community, Canada would at last be free. The original

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title of Moffett's volume was, in fact, The Emancipation of Canada. 19 Nothing could have made clearer his conviction that Canada's wellbeing lay in absorption by the United States. Americanization and emancipation were synonymous and interchangeable terms. Finally, the book had relevance to the continuing continentalist debate in Canada. That debate, near the centre of Canadian politics for twenty years, had hitherto had few serious American participants. Although politicians and newspapermen had called on countless occasions for the annexation of the British territories to the north, only a limited number of Americans had attempted a full and coherent case for either the desirability or the inevitability of such a development. Benjamin F. Butler, addressing the alumni of Colby College in 1889, had emphasized the great value of Canadian land and resources on the one hand and spoken of annexation as a prelude to the reunion of the Anglo-Saxon peoples on the other, 20 while Dos Passos considered the fusion of the two peoples an essential preliminary to the Anglo-American reunion. Moffett's contribution was, however, the first to be made in detailed and comprehensive terms. And, as an argument which the Review of Historical Publications Relating to Canada found to be written with 'insight and accuracy,' it was the first to be taken seriously in Canada. While the book lacked the polemical force of Goldwin Smith's earlier text, it had considerable power, much of which derived from the capacity of its author, using his training in the social sciences, to mobilize and order quantities of information. Despite its brevity, it was in fact a more detailed and substantial argument than had yet appeared on either side of the border. All of this made it the first modern study of the processes making for continental integration. 5

Moffett's principal contention was that communications and the flow of trade now bound the two countries together, while a single North American civilization, founded upon the intermingling of peoples, the sharing of a democratic impulse born of life in the New World, and a common exposure to the popular culture of the United States, had already emerged. Contemplation of these phenomena led inexorably, said Moffett, to the conclusion that while 'the Englishspeaking Canadians protest that they will never become Americans -

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they are already Americans without knowing it' (p. 114). They might be politically distinct and deeply concerned to maintain their political distinctiveness, but their separate institutions contained a society in no other respect than its being thus enclosed dissimilar to its southern neighbour. Within the framework of those institutions an American society, bound to the United States in every way, had grown up. Only recently has scholarship begun to address itself to some of the questions raised by Moffett. His concern with the manner in which Canadians viewed their collective experience, his examination of the way in which American culture had influenced the shape of the Canadian mind, his suggestion that Canadian interest in the empire grew out of nationalist motives, and his observation that investment flows as well as trade patterns were influential in the integration of the North American economy, rested upon important and early insights. In some of what he wrote, of course, he merely followed the path marked out by earlier commentators; his observation that steam and communications had operated to unify North America, for example, testified to the prescience of the New York Herald's 1867 observation that the new technology would make American power as irresistible on the continent at large as it had in the American South. 21 Even where his book followed an outline established by others, however, it made a contribution of its own. Where much of the argument for the unity of the Canadian and American peoples had come to rest on grounds of race and a shared patrimony, Moffett founded his case on arguments drawn from the new social sciences. What impelled the Americans and Canadians to move together was not a mystical bond inhering in peoples ultimately drawn from the same stock; nor was it a common language, for the process affected even the French-speaking population of North America. The impulse, instead, derived from the most solid and tangible of factors, for it was the material logic of commerce, capital, and ultimately geography which drew the two societies together. The power of the environment, indeed, was such that it created a frame of mind in all essentials the same on both sides of the border. Canadians were not remade in the image of Americans by their reading of American news. They craved that news because they were already attuned to the things with which it dealt. 'It is,' wrote

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Moffett, 'largely a case of supply accommodating itself to demand. The newspapers print what experience has taught them their patrons wish to read' (p. 98). Moffett's book depended for its effect not so much upon the brilliance and flash of its argument as upon the weight of its accumulated evidence. Statistics concerning population movements, railway construction, trade flows, investment patterns, and the circulation of American publications in Canada fill its pages. Quotations from Canadian, American, and British sources were deployed with effect. Evidence for old truths was found in new and uncommon places - the fact, for example, that Canadians paid streetcar fares as did Americans, at a single rate, or the presence in Canada of American fraternal associations. The mark of the social scientist was evident, too, in the presence of theoretical concepts. By pointing to the fact that 'a metropolis diffuses a potent influence on all sides' and that, therefore, 'there is no city in Canada which does not have to meet the competition of a more important American city within drawing distance of its own constituency' (p. 67), he at once focused attention on a hitherto largely unappreciated circumstance making for continental integration and pressed his claim to be taken seriously as a man who knew what made society work. Finally, his argument offered testimony to the utility of the comparative method. Its validity depended upon the absence of significant distinctions between the two societies and there was but one way in which that absence could be demonstrated. 6

Yet, for all its interest, Moffett's book is not above criticism. Too frequently its author's pronouncements on Canada were informed by ignorance or incomprehension. A paragraph on the relationship between responsible government, the elective principle, and Durham's proposal for a British North American union defied understanding (p. 24 ). Another on the nature of the Canadian executive branch wrongly implied that 'tacit British convention' was inferior to 'formal law' (p. 31 ). A third misrepresented the character of Canadien society before the Conquest - New France contained no imitation noblesse 'whose supremacy was humbly recognized by the mass of the people' (p. 48). On more than one occasion misunderstanding

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yielded to error and contradiction. If it was misleading to assert that New Brunswick 'practically secured' responsible government in 1837, it was simply wrong to say that Nova Scotia got it in 1840 (p. 24). And, whereas his readers were told on page 48 that 'the United Empire Loyalists were strongly predisposed to aristocratic ideas,' on page 54 they were informed that, on the contrary, the Loyalists were of the egalitarian New World, 'simply Americans, differing in no respect from those they had left behind in the States ... ' The argument itself was, in various of its stages, confused and uncertain. A number of Canadians were cited in support of Moffett's assertion that their countrymen felt only a weakening sense of attachment to Englishmen and even England; they had indeed noted the signs that the tie binding Canada to Britain was no longer what it once had been; but the tone and substance of their remarks made it clear that this was not for them a matter of indifference, much less celebration. By thus showing themselves possessed of a considerable body of imperial sentiment they deprived Moffett's point of much of its force (pp. 45-6). Quotations from Canadian newspapers were paraded in support of the claim that the Americanization of English Canada's cultural life was well advanced (pp. 96-7). That Canadians could so argue might indeed be proof that their culture was in process of erosion, but their concern also offered undeniable testimony to the fact that the process was incomplete. Had it not been, there would have been no vantage point from which this development could be assessed, much less (as the newspapers clearly hoped it would be) halted. If Moffett's anxiety to press his case sometimes led him in peculiar and unintended directions, the rigour of his argument was further diminished by the character of some of its principal parts. 'The Silken Tie,' a chapter devoted to consideration of the imperial link, was designed to expose the weak and insubstantial nature of that link, and so suggest how inevitable was the tightening of Canada's North American ties. Yet the chapter was confused in almost all of its principal assertions. It began with the observation that 'at present' imperialism in Canada was no more than 'effusive loyalty to the British connection .. .' (p. 40) - an airy sentiment without foun Industrial Commission, vol. vii, p. 268.

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Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada' was formed by a Congress held at Pittsburg. This body was so purely continental in spirit that it seemed to act on the assumption that the workers of the United States and Canada were already citizens of one country. It adopted a resolution declaring: 'It behooves the representatives of the workers of North America in Congress assembled, to adopt such measures and disseminate such principles among the people of our country as will unite them for all time to come, to secure the recognition of the rights to which they are entitled.' 4 In 1886 the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor developed into the American Federation of Labor. 5 This body, with nearly two million members, had in March, 1906, seventy affiliated international unions with jurisdiction over Canada. 6 4 Declaration of principles of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada, adopted at the first annual session at Pittsburg, Nov. 15, 1881. Official Report. 5 Testimony of Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, before the Industrial Commission, April 18, 1889. Report of the Industrial Commission, vol. vii, p. 596. 6 Official list of organizations affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, March 15, 1906. The organizations extending over Canada were kindly designated for the writer by Mr. Frank Morrison, Secretary of the Federation. They comprised the following unions: Bakery and Confectionery Workers' International Union of America Barbers' International Union, J oumeymen Bill Posters and Billers of America. National Alliance International Brotherhood of Blacksmiths Brotherhood of Boiler Makers and Iron Ship Builders of America International Brotherhood of Bookbinders Boot and Shoe Workers' Union International Union of United Brewery Workmen International Brick, Tile and Terra Cotta Workers' Alliance International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers International Broom and Whisk Makers' Union United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners International Carriage and Wagon Workers International Wood Carvers' Association of North America

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Cigarmakers' International Union of America Retail Clerks' International Protective Association United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers of North America Commercial Telegraphers' Union of North America Coopers' International Union of North America International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers of America International Union of Elevator Constructors International Union of Steam Engineers International Association of Fur Workers of the United States and Canada United Garment Workers of America Glass Bottle Blowers' Association of the United States and Canada Amalgamated Glass Workers' International Association International Glove Workers' Union of America International Hod Carriers' and Building Laborers' Union of America International Union of Journeymen Horse Shoers of Unite