Improved Earth : Prairie Space As Modern Artefact, 1869-1944 [1 ed.] 9781442676039, 9780802087829

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IM PR OV E D E A RT H : PR A IR IE S PA C E A S MO D E R N A RT E FA CT, 1 8 69 – 1 9 4 4

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Improved Earth Prairie Space as Modern Artefact, 1869–1944

Rod Bantjes

UN IV ERS ITY OF TO RO NT O P RES S Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2005 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-8782-5

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Bantjes, Rod Improved earth : prairie space as modern artefact, 1869–1944 / Rod Banjes. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-8782-5 1. Landscape – Social aspects – Saskatchewan. 2. Rural development – Social aspects – Saskatchewan. 3. Land settlement – Social aspects – Saskatchewan. 4. Saskatchewan – Politics and government. 5. Saskatchewan – Rural conditions. I. Title. HN110.S35B35 2005

307.72’097124

C2004-905126-1

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

For the prairie idealists past and future

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Contents

ix

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

xi

1 Introduction

3

2 Groundwork: the Dominion Survey

15

3 Modernity in the Countryside: Contested Rural Space

36

4 Local Governance as Spatial Practice: State Formation

65

5 Utopics of Resistance: Agrarian Class Formation 6 Conclusion: The Trans-local and Resistance

Notes 127 Bibliography Index 195

163

117

91

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Illustrations

2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2 4.3

Cartesian grid 17 Township with internal grid 24 Sections 26 Agricultural colony, 1916 55 Closer-community plan, 1917 61 Hypothetical county of 30 townships 73 Rural municipalities 75 Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities, Tenth annual convention, 1915 84–5 5.1 Parklands school district, circa 1910 106

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This book is the outcome of a long research project to which many have contributed. Some I have already acknowledged in my PhD thesis. To that list I would like to add the idealists of the 1970s, including John Richards, who, circa 1973, suggested that I read Agrarian Socialism. Since completing the PhD I have benefited from the comments of referees on a series of articles I have published on prairie governance. Warren Magnussen was particularly thorough and encouraging in his suggestions. My partner Maureen Moynagh has read and commented on everything I have written. I have benefited greatly from her passion for modernism and cultural theory and her editorial savvy. I would also like to give special thanks to June Bantjes for her help with research at a distance, and unfailing love and support. The Saskatoon and Regina branches of the Saskatchewan Archives Board have provided invaluable service to this research. St Francis Xavier University provided funding and sabbatical relief for the final research leading up to the book. The Humanities and Social Sciences Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme has contributed to the publication costs. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the moral support of those who expressed interest in seeing the book published, including the participants of the Terms of Empire conference in Aberdeen, 2000.

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IM PR OV E D E A RT H : PR A IR IE S PA C E A S MO D E R N A RT E FA CT, 1 8 69 – 1 9 4 4

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Chapter 1

Introduction

A whole history remains to be written of spaces – which would at the same time be a history of powers (both of these terms in plural) – from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat.1

Prairie colonization from the Dominion Land Survey to the rise of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) offers an ideal frame for a Foucaultian history of ‘spaces.’ Here modernist projects born of the ‘culture of time and space’ in the metropolitan centres of the Western world unfolded with stark clarity. The elemental prairie environment revealed essential features of the making of ‘abstract spaces of modernity’ or, more accurately, modernist spatial projects in three areas: bourgeois governance-at-a-distance, socialist ‘resistance,’ and the transformation of ‘nature.’ A vast territory, thinly settled by newcomers,2 strangers to one another and to the environment, tested to the limits nineteenth-century techniques of governance-at-a-distance, in particular spatial techniques for the ‘autonomization’ of power that Foucault calls ‘panoptic.’ Spatial strategies of state formation, following nineteenth-century principles and modified for prairie conditions, had the unintended consequence of favouring a pattern of residential segregation and class homogeneity beneficial to a parallel and competing project of class formation. The surprising success of the latter project, culminating in the victory of the CCF in Saskatchewan in 1944, can in part be ascribed to a kind of counter-deployment of the spatial principles of governance. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, both projects were bound up with separate and competing projects for transforming ‘nature’ and the geographical setting. The idea was to pre-

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structure the ‘elementary forms’ of social action and political identity by influencing the shape of ‘community.’ This impulse to transform geography is an attractive focus for study in part because almost nothing has been written about it, but also for the reflexive dimension it reveals in this period of history. I argue that both statesmen and prairie farmers were infused with the modernist spirit of innovation, the will creatively (and destructively) to transform their worlds. Modernism was about both innovation within a frame as well as the reflexive critique of that frame and willingness to revolutionize it and supplant it with another. In their attempts to transform nature, prairie actors were attempting to transform the very ‘ground’ upon which they stood, in other words, the stage or conditions for their own action. This insight both deepens and complicates our understanding of the meaning of their action. Meaning takes shape relative to context. But moderns often do not accept the context as given and instead work actively to undermine it in favour of a counterfactual world of the possible. Their choices often make sense only in anticipation of the success of this groundwork. Understanding modernism calls for a counterfactual history, written not only by documenting actors’ ‘here and now’ (and certainly not by working back from what came to be) but also through uncovering what, for actors, might have been. The important contexts are projects that, regardless of whether or in what degree they were realized (and most were in some measure failures), had an irreducibly utopian character. Utopias of course exist in ‘no-place’; that is, they are not fully instanciated in the world of tangible things. A second intriguing and challenging outcome of this focus of study is the way in which it relativizes context. In interesting ways, none of the ‘realities’ that social scientists have taken as part of their explanatory framework for understanding prairie governance and revolt – geography and climate, the single-crop economy, the market economy itself – were unproblematically taken as ‘given’ by historical actors. The challenge is to write as though all contexts have at least to some degree the character of projects and not to allow them prematurely to be resolved into fixed, ineluctable ‘structure.’ While my approach is ‘anti-foundational’ to the extent that there is no one taken for granted ground, it is not ‘postmodernist’ in the sense of being epistemologically relativist. While I write about the past and focus consistently on spatial practices, this book is neither a work of history nor of geography as traditionally understood. It never strays far from fundamental sociological problematics – how to understand (and represent) the dialectic of agency and

Introduction

5

structure, and, closely tied to this, the dialectic of the individual and ‘the social.’ Improved Earth: Prairie Space as Artefact The utopian and the mundane, the abstract and embodied, intersect nicely in the concept of ‘improved earth’ that I have used as metonym for the whole range of modernist spatial projects on the prairies. The term refers to a now obsolete road classification. ‘Improved earth’ was the best that elected councillors of rural local governments could fashion with the resources available – horse-drawn equipment and sod. These dirt roads were fragile structures that had to be made and remade, as rain tended to resolve them into amorphous strips of mud. Since they followed ‘road allowances’ defined by the Dominion Lands Act of 1871, road improvements delineated in tangible media that abstract legal text. In ploughing up these ribbons of earth, local agents of the state were inscribing a Cartesian grid upon the land, making it ‘real’ in (at least some of) its social effects. The legal grid was, as I argue in the second chapter of this book, the groundwork of prairie space as a built environment. It was a project of colonial governance that defined social and class relationships and sought to guarantee the very natures of prairie inhabitants as ‘private individuals,’ as well as, I shall argue, gendered and raced subjects. Rural road building was also, at the same time, one of the grand failures of modernist spatial engineering. Or, more accurately, its success, as an infrastructure capable of supporting motorized travel year-round, came at least thirty years too late. ‘Good roads,’ capable of supporting motorized transport, were to be the twentieth century’s medium of speed of travel and ‘communication’ – far more flexible, and thereby more dynamic than rail. By the end of the nineteenth century the consciousness of time-space compression was acute. New inhabitants on the Canadian prairie, thousands of miles from their former homes, understood themselves to be agents of the new ‘world trade,’ collaborators in extending and accelerating what we would now call its ‘global reach.’ The grand networks of rail were understood to be the foundations of world commerce, and also of the trans-local ‘imagined communities’ of nation. But the flexible, capillary action of high-speed roads offered new possibilities for the fragmentation and recombination of local spaces. This new medium inspired a range of projects for re-engineering the locale, its face-to-face interactions, its forms of ‘community’ and of

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governance. Many in Western Canada hoped that by improving roads, rural councillors were building the infrastructure for a spatial reorganization of government that would render small rural municipal councils obsolete. In the fourth chapter of this book, ‘Local Government as Spatial Practice,’ I discuss competing projects of prairie governance as examples of what Foucault would call technologies of power,3 strategies of control that become, in surprising and unintended ways, resources of resistance. The notion of ‘improved earth,’ apart from its literal reference to road building, is also suggestive of turn-of-the-century optimism about the possibilities of remaking the soil and other ‘natural’ conditions of agricultural production. The idea of soil improvement was not new. What was new was a bold reappraisal of the ‘rural’ as a preserve of tradition. Radicals like Kropotkin imagined the rural landscape as a site of the dynamic and transformative possibilities of modernity. As an enabling condition for his pastoral model of anarchism, Kropotkin represented soil as a plastic medium amenable to transformation by industrial manufacture: ‘The soil can be improved by hand, but it need not be made by hand. Any soil, of any desired composition, can be made by machinery. We already have manufactures of manure, engines for pulverising the phosphates, and even the granites of the Vosges; and we shall see manufactures of loam as soon as there is demand for them.’4 By declaring ‘nature’ an artefact and proposing the industrialization of rural nature Kropotkin anticipated, in principle at any rate, the twentieth-century dissolution of rural space. In the third chapter of this book, ‘Modernity in the Countryside,’ I document the struggle in Britain and Canada to make sense of the spatial restructuring of agricultural production and, by extension, the meaning of the ‘rural.’ So many of the contributors to this discourse were misled, like Kropotkin, by the assumption that the changes must take place within the recognizable boundaries of rural landscapes. Yet as I argue, networks of agricultural production and exchange were being reorganized, as Giddens would put it, ‘across indefinite spans of time-space.’5 Agriculture increasingly occupied an intangible ‘space’ traversing the boundary between countryside and city, and rural and urban. Prairie wheat farmers in the early twentieth century exhibited an intuitive understanding of the implications of modernity in the countryside, more accurate on many counts than the analyses of agricultural experts and spokesmen of ‘rural reform.’ Their collective interventions in production and marketing, their creative approach to the making of

Introduction

7

‘community,’ and of class politics, all bear the imprint of this awareness, and of a willingness to occupy the abstract spaces of modernity. Their politics parallels the late-twentieth-century quest of the left for what Magnussen has called ‘political space,’ by which he means spaces of ‘freedom’ and ‘popular democratic action’ rescued from the flux of spatial restructuring and oriented towards new global forces.6 Their practice is interesting for not positing a simplistic conception of the ‘local’ as the privileged site of identity and point of resistance to the ‘global.’ In chapters 4 (‘Local Governance as Spatial Practice’) and 5 (‘Utopics of Resistance’) I make the case that agrarian practice reflected a trans-local conception of political community that accepted its dynamism and independence of circumscribed places. Dalby, writing in 1999, argues that the ‘politics of resistance to globalization’ cannot be grounded in ‘the traditional rural model of communities in situ and of places as culturally homogeneous home bases, often reinforced by geographical thinking and spatial ontological metaphors.’7 I argue that the practice of prairie wheat farmers, often taken to be the epitome of ‘grass-roots’ localism, offers instead historical insight into the new trans-local ‘critical geopolitics’ envisioned by Dalby and others. Different readers require different introductions. Those for whom the project sounds worth pursuing, and the outline of succeeding chapters palatable, may want to take up the ‘story’ where I begin it in chapter 2. The remainder of this introduction is for those who want more on the intellectual pedigree of the project, and perhaps more on its current relevance. In the following section, ‘Writing “Abstract Space,”’ I elaborate on what I mean by a ‘project’ and how I handle the dialectic between abstract and instanciated ‘moments’ of projects of spatial engineering. In the section ‘Theoretical Debts and Departures’ I acknowledge selected theoretical precedents that I have drawn upon in three areas: state formation, class formation, and the construction of nature and the built environment. Finally, in ‘The Historical Project and Contemporary Spatial Transformations’ I make a few observations on the current concerns that make a reconsideration of this much discussed episode of history again timely. Writing ‘Abstract Space’ The trick with writing a history of ‘abstract space’ is to avoid reification, the mistake of setting up ineluctable ‘things’ standing outside and above actors. As much as possible I resist using nominal language when

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referring to ‘space’ (despite the currency of phrases like ‘the social production of space’ or ‘the use of space as a technology of power’). I write instead (and in defiance of Kant’s dictum that space cannot be an attribute) about the spatial qualities of human interaction and of common projects. The notion of ‘project’ is temporal; it takes shape only in the context of a past and, more importantly, an imagined future, however immediate. Road building, for instance, takes form only in light of the memory of the surveyor’s work and the expectation of the point of connection between the roadbed under the builders’ feet and some distant spot meaningful enough to be considered a ‘destination.’ The shape of the project is in this sense more than the concrete movements of the builders mapped in space – the ragged star representing their daily convergence on the site and dispersal to their homesteads every evening – or even that map drawn out on a temporal axis – representing their daily rhythms like knots in a rope.8 Even the completed artefact, a dead-straight road oriented to the cardinal points, is only an incomplete embodiment of spatiality. It is fragile and needs physically to be renewed, but it also has a tenuous metaphysical hold that depends on the constant renewal of human projects of getting from one place to another. By the end of the twentieth century, most meaningful ‘places’ to which grid roads once led were gone. Buildings had been demolished or moved off like stage sets; grain elevators, towns, whole railway lines had simply been erased from the landscape. A road in this context might remain discernible as the same physical thing its builders envisioned. But orphaned from the abstract projects that animated their world, it could not have the same meaning or social effects. Mundane artefacts and the sensual interactions of those on the scene who construct them or put them to use are ‘abstract’ in this way. The ‘abstract spaces of modernity,’ by contrast, take form largely off-scene. Their ineluctable character derives from ‘trust’ in the sense that Giddens uses this term to refer to a faith in technical and organizational systems.9 This is trust in the performances of invisible others engaged in projects that parallel one’s own, but at a distance. So long as these projects are made and remade with sufficient competence and reliability they can seem a fixed and even inevitable context or ‘environment’ for local practices and interaction. Whether actors are engaged with their immediate fellows in activity intended to be in harmony with this social environment or in bitter opposition to it, they rarely attribute to this distant context the intentional, performative, and fallible character of their own projects.10 To use Marx’s language, the human, sensuous

Introduction

9

activity of distant others appears to them as an alien world set up over and against their particular and local struggles. My aim in writing historical sociology is to follow parallel projects, highlighting their performative and tenuous character, and never to take one as a fixed precondition for another. My approach is designed to avoid reifying both spatial abstraction as well as the spatially ‘concrete.’ The principle that physical things do not have social effects divorced from social projects that give them meaning rules out the possibility of simple geographic determinism. Even the tangible geographic setting, including topography, soil type, and climate, is in some measure both an ideal construct and a physical artefact (or at least is amenable to being remade through social projects). I would argue that the very notion of a prairie ‘region’ that inheres in nature is at best problematic.11 In this I go against the grain of a tradition of geographical writing about the prairies that is naively realist and to some degree geographic determinist. Theoretical Debts and Departures There are rich theoretical traditions to draw upon for making sense of each of the three broad projects that I track in this study: class formation, state formation, and the construction of nature. The choices that I make when threading through these literatures will no doubt be different from the reader’s.12 The real test of those choices is how I employ them in the coming chapters. However, I think an explicit account at the outset helps to set the stage for the theoretical dialogue that follows. It is impossible to write about ‘class’ without at least invoking the ‘ghost’ of Marx. Throughout the text I refer to his words on class formation. However, my notion of class formation as a historical and contingent project draws more from E.P. Thompson and subsequent Marxist historians, who have insisted that political classes are always ‘made’ by actors rather than produced by historical forces. Thompson was one of many influential figures in a renaissance of Marxist scholarship on class and class formation in the 1970s. They were responding to the political ferment of their time, both in the industrialized West, in the form of the ‘new social movements,’ and in the developing world, where ‘peasants’ again emerged as important players in socialist struggles as they had done in Lenin’s time. Neo-Marxist scholars sought to rescue the ‘agrarian petit bourgeoisie’ from the Leninists (for whom the petit bourgeoisie could never be genuinely anti-capitalist) and from liberal critics of

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agrarian ‘populism’ (for whom rural collectivism smacked of intolerance and irrationality). I take as given the New Left’s sympathetic reassessments of the ‘progressive’ potential of the agrarian petit bourgeoisie and re-evaluation of the history of ‘agrarian socialist’ movements.13 The politics that the urban left knew best was that of the new social movements.14 The players, the urban underclass and the ‘new’ middle classes, fit no more neatly into a Marxist class model than did the agrarian petit bourgeoisie. Innovations in the analysis of these classes brought to the fore their spatial character as political formations responding to the built environment of urban capitalism and the organization (through the agency of the state) of ‘collective consumption.’ The new classes were fighting over urban space, not directly with ‘capitalists’ but with representatives of the state, in particular the local state.15 Successes like the New Left’s brief dominance of the Greater London Council renewed interest in historical precedents – nineteenthcentury England’s ‘socialist boroughs,’ for example. Historical writing during this period emphasized many of the spatial principles of class formation that Marx had identified: residential segregation, the rise of working-class neighbourhoods, the ‘proxemics’ of class solidarity and class conflicts.16 I have adopted many of these principles and transferred them to a non-urban context. However, I owe a special debt to Calhoun, who provides a corrective to a tendency in this literature to represent the spaces of class formation almost exclusively in terms of embodied relations in the locale. He reminds us that modern classes (this was Marx’s conception as well) depend upon indirect, disembedded relationships. The relationships constituting politically effective classes must be both local and trans-local, mediated by ‘a developed infrastructure of communication and transportation.’17 The urban politics of the New Left was predicated on a conception of states as heterogeneous, and vulnerable, at least at the level of local state agencies, to transformation. But academic Marxists failed to develop a corresponding theory of the ‘capitalist state’ capable of acknowledging agency and resistance without appearing to capitulate to naive liberal pluralism. Foucault is largely responsible for leading a way out of the dense and ‘indigestible’ debates within state theory of the 1970s.18 He did not so much solve the problems of Marxist state theory as divert attention away from the typical institutions of the ‘state apparatus’ towards a set of institutions and ‘disciplinary’ practices operating in the sphere of ‘civil society’ or ‘the social.’ For Foucault, ‘governance’ (as opposed to ‘government’) becomes in modern societies an increasingly

Introduction

11

subtle and ubiquitous practice. Ironically, the ‘progressive’ social science disciplines, and ‘enlightened’ institutions such as nineteenthcentury prisons, schools, and asylums, are deeply implicated in this pervasive exercise of ‘power.’ Still, he is quite explicit that the disciplines as strategies of domination have paralleled and formed a precondition for the successful formation of modern states.19 Foucault’s example has led to a renewed interest in histories of projects of governance, histories that emphasize the ‘particular, the local, the specific.’20 Canadian historians have, for example, reassessed the role of formal education and urban social-welfare professions in moulding ‘governable subjects’ in nineteenth-century Canada.21 Notwithstanding Foucault’s own reluctance, there is no conceptual difficulty with extending his analysis of ‘panoptic’ strategies of power to understanding the making of bureaucracies of the state and of government per se.22 Many, such as Corrigan and Sayer, have taken this path and in the process rediscovered ‘Benthamism’ in government – nineteenth-century innovations for governing anonymous populations at a distance that relied upon new techniques of surveillance and documentation.23 They have also emphasized the ‘dark side’24 of Enlightenment-inspired efforts to democratize legislative practice. In other words, they have explored the ways in which ‘self-government,’ in particular local self-government, was deployed, not as a genuine transfer or relinquishment of power to the governed, but as a means of ‘autonomizing’ power. This work provides my point of departure. However, I pay closer attention to the explicitly spatial tactics of state making. I place greater emphasis than most on the fallibility of strategies of power, particularly those state-making projects aimed at centralizing power over wide territories. Otherwise there is a great danger of representing what Foucault calls ‘small-scale, regional, dispersed panoptisms’ as being swallowed up in monolithic state projects.25 While heeding the Foucauldian caution that neither ‘self-government’ nor ‘resistance’ may be as autonomous as they appear, I avoid theoretically prejudging the particular case. What is so interesting about projects of governance in Saskatchewan is their often perverse and unintended consequences. Furthermore, ‘state’ projects are not univocal. I pay particular attention to the often forgotten losers in the debates. The discourse on government in the prairies offers wonderful examples of drafting-table utopias, intellectual heirs to Bentham’s failed panopticon, but also to Fourier’s phalanx. The governmental utopias that so interest me treat rural space as an

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artefact. They form part of what I have designated as the third broad project, the making of the prairie landscape as a ‘built environment.’ My theoretical approach here draws initially from David Harvey. In his early work, Harvey represents the politics of class and state as taking shape within the dynamic context of the making of the built environment.26 The urban environment in twentieth-century American cities is for him both the setting and the outcome of struggles among classes with competing agendas. The scope for resistance is limited in his account, where ‘capital’ and ‘the state’ are ultimately, and perhaps inevitably, victorious in forging a spatial environment that favours their interests in subsequent rounds of contestation/struggle. Yet he establishes the principles that built environments are, as Winner would say artefacts ‘with politics,’ as well as artefacts of politics.27 The latter idea, that environments are the outcomes of struggle, has become increasingly prominent in work on ‘environmentalism,’ that is, contemporary conflicts over the ‘natural’ environment.28 Cronon, in his path-breaking Changes in the Land, offers a ‘history of nature’ that treats the pre-contact ‘wilderness’ on the eastern seaboard of North America as a subtle human artefact.29 The book is a corrective to a naive nostalgia within the environmental movement for a ‘nature’ outside the transformative (and by definition destructive) projects of human beings. Wilson (The Culture of Nature) brilliantly extends this insight to ‘suburban,’ ‘rural,’ and ‘wilderness’ landscapes of the twentieth century.30 These are all, he argues, products of cultural imagination and are wrought through often contentious landscaping practices. He is interested in recent movements in landscape design that reflect a renewed sensitivity to humane and ecological values. Following these precedents, I treat the ‘rural’ landscape of Saskatchewan both as an artefact of politics and as an artefact with political effects. This path has led me to a neglected but fascinating debate over prairie ‘landscape architecture’ that took place in the early twentieth century. The central dispute was over what Wilson would see as an example of a ‘modernist’ aesthetic – the cultivation of square fields and a wheat monoculture. This debate was animated not only by a politics of nature concerned with what is ‘beautiful’ and healthy for the soil and its fertility, but also by a politics of power, more or less explicitly concerned with what sorts of landscapes are governable, capable of fixing and locating inhabitants and their networks of exchange. The making of what I have called the ‘contested wheat field’ is interesting from a number of perspectives. It problematizes what is normally taken as a

Introduction

13

determining condition of Saskatchewan politics – the single-crop wheat economy and its violent unpredictability. Its result, still fragile and incomplete in 1944, was an exemplary case of an artefact with political effects. The politics of its making are surprising for the fact that the spatial strategies of ‘the state’ ended in failure. The landscape ideal of state officials was both backward looking, referencing traditional conceptions of rural social order, and, from a late modern perspective, surprisingly ecological in its sensibility, emphasizing species diversity and interdependence and adaptation to local conditions and resources. Wheat farmers, by contrast, embraced an aesthetic of modernism. By this I mean not just that they embraced monocultural square fields that had the look of colour field abstractions in modern art. Rather, they were willing to transform local realities embedded in ‘nature’ in the name of a universal that was trans-local and abstract in its logic. This element of the debate, over what we would now call ‘organic agriculture,’ is not yet settled, in Saskatchewan or anywhere else. After the Second World War, organic practices largely vanished from the Saskatchewan scene. Like other failed utopias it did not take hold in the tangibly ‘real’ and is therefore easy to dismiss as an ‘impractical fantasy.’ However, hindsight can lend a false concreteness to the projects that succeed. I am interested in writing about the past as though it were the indeterminate present, where ideas that we now know to have been grand failures seemed no more or less utopian than those that prevailed. Furthermore, I think it is important to emphasize ongoing debate to a greater extent than many historians do. There is a tendency that can be seen, for example, in the writings of Kuhn on ‘paradigms’ to underplay the dissenting, minority voices, those that ‘history proved wrong,’ in the interests of a neat periodicity. However, as Lakatos has shown, paradigms do not typically succeed one another in linear sequence, but rather parallel one another in ongoing engagement.31 So it is with projects of spatial engineering. To judge the relevance of such projects in terms of their subsequent defeats is too ‘presentist.’32 But even to dismiss them in terms of the ‘prevailing’ paradigms of their time is to bring premature closure to struggles that for participants had by no means been resolved. The Historical Project and Contemporary Spatial Transformations If one rereads The Communist Manifesto in light of the past decade of ‘globalization,’ two themes resonate with surprising currency. The first

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is the theme of fragmentation, Marx’s ‘all that is solid melts into air’ that Marshall Berman reads as a celebration of modernism.33 The second is the theme of recomposition across former local, spatial boundaries, the universalization of the market, and the violent forging of a ‘world economy.’ Giddens is right to see a continuity between the ‘modernity’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and what some like to call the ‘postmodern’ era of the end of the twentieth century.34 What unites these periods is intense innovation in technologies for large-scale space-time coordination (governance, if you will) that depend for their operation on being abstracted from or ‘disembedded’ from the particulars of face-to-face interactions in identifiable locales. The recent round of spatial restructuring brings into question the governing powers of nation-states. However, new forms of governance being developed exhibit some of the same principles of governance-at-adistance analysed in this book. There is the ever-finer grid of market governance promoted through the privatization of common property regimes and commodification of an expanding frontier of ‘nature.’ Under-resourced states are engaged in new rounds of ‘autonomization,’ seeking new ways to govern through local ‘community’ initiatives. For my part the most interesting innovations in trans-local, transnational governance are not state- or market-sponsored, but instead involve new networks of ‘resistance.’ There are surprising parallels between the trans-local structure of the current ‘alter-globalization’ movement and early-twentieth-century agrarian class networks on the prairies. Intriguing for me also are the contradictory currents of utopian localism, anarchism and pastoralism that attract many of the young participants of this movement and that resonate so strongly with nineteenth- and twentieth-century precedents. We are still playing out the same projects and engaged in the same debates as our ‘modern’ forebears.

Chapter 2

Groundwork: The Dominion Survey

The very first operation is to obtain land; and land, with the essential addition of a good title to it, can only be obtained by the action of government in opening the public waste to settlers by extensive and accurate surveys, and in converting it into private property according to law.1

A Survey of Imperial Possessions With transfer of the North-West Territories from the Hudson’s Bay Company to the newly formed Dominion of Canada all but complete, legislators in 1867 found at their disposal ‘a grand estate, larger than most kingdoms, the very cream of which is larger than England and Wales together,’ and upon which ‘nature’ had ‘showered her treasures.’2 Their first order of business was to plan for the ‘Dominion Survey’ of these possessions. An ‘extensive and accurate’ survey was, as Wakefield had advised in 1849, the groundwork for the ‘art of colonization.’ The Dominion Survey must not be conflated with its outcome – the uncompromisingly uniform grid that from the air can still be seen, imprinted in colour and line upon the prairie landscape. It was also a process, a set of discursive practices carried out in parliament, in various government, departments, and by an army of field staff from 1867 to the end of the century. These practices involved as much ‘writing up’ the landscape as ‘writing upon’ it, or inscribing on it tangible demarcations of property ownership. ‘To survey’ meant, after all, to view from a commanding perspective or, in usage more common in the nineteenth century, to write a comprehensive inventory of the assets of an estate. The grid provided a convenient template, a sort of artist’s frame, through which narrative

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could be ordered in ‘objective’ space abstracted from particular observers or natural landmarks. In 1873 the Department of the Interior began publishing land descriptions frame by frame, each frame being a square (six miles to the side) called a ‘township.’ For example, in 1882, W.F. King, inspector of surveys, described Township 19, Range 5, west of the 2nd meridian as ‘[r]olling prairie, with a number of small swamps and clumps of poplar and willow. Soil – generally second class.’3 The grid allowed the position of each township square to be uniquely identified by Cartesian coordinates (see figure 2.1). An official with the simplest of maps could locate King’s township by counting nineteen squares north of the 49th parallel (the boundary between western Canada and the United States) and five squares west of the second of five standard meridians running north and south. The ‘sampling grid’ ordered writing, but could also be used to catalogue physical specimens such as the one described by the surveyor Alex Russell to the surveyor general in Ottawa in 1878: ‘A large sample, dug at random, of this soil, shewing a vertical section of two feet, is herewith forwarded, as visible proof of its excellence. A further evidence of the capability of the soil was given by the wheat crop, specimens of which, collected from a small settlement about ten miles south-west of La Corne, unfortunately became damaged on the journey in.’4 Similar evidences of the ‘natural history’ of the North-West Territories were put on public display in an Ottawa museum.5 The practice of survey rendered the landscape visible for those at a distance. It was a means of representing its almost inconceivable spatial extent, as well as imagining a ‘history’ for it, overlaying it with domestic and pastoral imagery suggestive of the ways in which it was to be appropriated. Certain reports, on for instance route-finding expeditions, adopted the conventions of imperial travel writing.6 Space was offered to the reader as a panorama, and time compressed to provide a foretaste of an imagined future. A marsh north of Lake Winnipegosis is pictured ‘bounding the horizon, looking like an endless field of grain.’7 Of the land east of Fort Carleton the surveyor general writes: ‘The alternations of clumps of wood and prairie glade have a most pleasing effect, the landscape wanting but dwellings to give it the appearance of longestablished settlement.’8 John Macoun’s account of the Souris plain in the summer of 1879 aesthetically appropriates the landscape while reducing its original inhabitants to a picturesque landmark. Blue hills shut in the horizon to the north, 25 miles to the south-east lay the high ridges we had left the preceding day, and an interminable plain

Groundwork: The Dominion Survey 17

Figure 2.1 Cartesian grid (detail): Chester Martin memorably quotes Sir John A. Macdonald on the spirit of the Dominion survey: ‘[We] have the advantage of having one great country before us to do as we like, ... [and] one vast system of survey, uniform across the whole of it.’ Only a small portion of that survey is represented here, taken from a corner of a 1946 census map of Saskatchewan. The small squares represent townships. Larger numbered squares outlined in bold are census subdivisions, which normally also correspond to rural municipalities. The boundaries of rural municipalities occasionally conform to features of the landscape; township boundaries never do. (Source : adapted from Census of Canada, 1946)

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Improved Earth stretched away to the south, while in our front were the Cypress Hills themselves. We pitched our camp on a little meadow. Before us gurgled a small brook, behind us were thick groves of poplar and berry-bearing bushes, and high above us on a bare clay bluff was the burial-place of an Assiniboine. As night settled down on the scene we crowded round our camp fire, and reviewed the route of the last four weeks since we left Moose Mountain, and one and all agreed that none of the land seen was poor pasture and much of it had a good fertile soil well suited for agriculture.9

Macoun’s account is particularly significant since it is one of the key texts in a debate over representation.10 The pastoral impulse was not uncontested. Agents of the Hudson’s Bay Company had before 1867 disseminated reports of the territory as ‘sterile, ice-bound, unfit for colonization and the support of [European] human beings.’11 By Macoun’s time the debate focused on a particular region, the southwest of what was to become Alberta and Saskatchewan, which had been condemned by Captain Palliser as unfit for cultivation.12 The revisionists reexamined the region, provided rational explanations for the errors in previous observation,13 and recorded successful experiments in crop growing.14 By 1882 much of the south-west had been subjected to systematic township surveys, and Macoun was confident that [t]hese surveys have established, beyond doubt, that from the western boundary of Manitoba to the Moose Jaw Creek, heretofore called ‘The Barren Plains of the Souris,’ there is to be found some of the finest agricultural land in the world – indeed the bulk of the settlement of last summer was in this very region; while from the Moose Jaw Creek to the Bow River, shown on our earlier maps as the northern extension of the Great American Desert, it is now definitely established that but a comparatively small proportion of the land is unfit for cultivation.15

Despite their interest in what the prairies were to become, surveyors gave insufficient thought to a temporal sampling frame. The risk of drought was conceived spatially, as something that might affect the southwest or scattered pockets of sandy soil. Had they incorporated the oral knowledge of indigenous peoples into their ‘natural histories’ they might have discovered that drought had come in long cycles, periodically drying up sloughs and killing off buffalo throughout the region.16 Revisionists had their critics in the nineteenth century, and subse-

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quent commentators have tended to agree that they misrepresented the landscape.17 Their writing had obvious implications for the success of a grand development project upon which rested tremendous financial interests as well as national aspirations. It bears the stamp of a kind of partisan optimism. Propaganda based on it, aimed at prospective settlers, was undoubtedly misleading, perhaps intentionally so. Still, the pastoral was the landscape of (European) collective desire. By invoking it, writers offered the prairies not so much for what they were as what they could become. The pastoral aesthetic was after all drawn from art – European gardens and parks – rather than nature.18 Some of its features were echoed in ‘raw’ nature – notably the curvaceous surface and ‘pleasing’ balance of treed and open spaces of the ‘parkland’19 – others, such as tree- or hedge-lined borders, orchards, ponds, and attractive clusters of dwellings, could be made. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, we know that a nineteenth-century aesthetic was never achieved on the prairies. Yet there was no reason at the time to presume that tens of thousands of settlers, inspired by this vision, and armed with nineteenth-century ‘modern’ technology, could not have transformed the prairie landscape in the image of the pastoral. This faith persisted well into the twentieth century and can be seen in the strange insistence on the part of provincial departments of agriculture and agricultural experts that farmers ‘beautify’ their property. ‘Nature’ was never more than the raw material for the project of colonization. Land Claims The survey as discursive construction of landscape was a contentious exercise. But so in its own way was the inscription of the grid upon the land. Field tasks of surveyors included taking readings from sextant and compass, making calculations, and laying out distances with chains. The results were recorded in notebooks and represented on the land with physical markers, typically posts supported by cairns or mounds of earth (see figure 2.3 below). Surveyors discovered that bitter weather and short seasons on the prairies made work and movement difficult.20 The work was often done hastily and the results inaccurate. It was difficult to monitor at a distance from Ottawa and expensive to inspect.21 And its traces on the landscape were easily effaced. As the surveyor general complained in 1883: The prairie fires burn the wooden posts placed in earthen mounds, and

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Improved Earth bearing the marks indicating section number. Wherever there are herds of cattle they demolish the mounds; after this, the melting snows in spring float the posts away and little or no trace of survey remains. They are even subject to being effaced through the ignorance or perversity of the natives of the prairie region, who, if hearsay is to be credited, have when travelling across a stretch of prairie, where other wood or fire could not easily be obtained, been seen provided with a goodly cart load of fuel consisting of township survey posts, gathered on their way.22

The only way permanently to inscribe the grid was through land tenure and settlement. In this way the task of making and remaking its boundaries could be delegated to those ‘on the spot’ who had an interest in maintaining them. Under settlement the grid would become an autonomous system of order in which central powers need only intervene in cases of dispute. The simplicity of the grid was to ensure that misunderstandings about boundaries, and land disputes, were rare.23 The decisive discourse guaranteeing the survey was to be found in the legal texts that defined the system of land tenure and recorded deeds of ownership. The right of the state to define the terms of ownership and disburse lands to private owners depended upon the ‘extinguishment’ of the title of indigenous inhabitants.24 The carrying off and burning of township survey posts might well be read as a kind of guerrilla resistance to the land claims of the Canadian government. Certainly the local Metis made explicit counterclaims. In a parody of the tenuous, performative quality of the survey, they in 1870 erected ‘staked claims’ ‘by planting ... two posts on the front of the lot near the bank of the river, one post for each limit ... In many instances the claimants put up what they called the walls of a house, consisting usually of only a few poles.’25 They also staged ‘counter-demonstrations,’ standing on the surveyors’ chains and ordering them to ‘desist from further running the line.’26 The Metis were aware of the connection between land tenure and state making. They invoked the authority of ‘the government’ when ordering the expulsion of William MacDougall, sent in 1869 by Canada to the North-West Territories to be its first governor. When asked ‘what government,’ they replied, ‘the government they had made.’27 While the Metis stance was seen as audacious, Canada’s own legal claim to survey and to govern was at that point no less ad hoc. Shortly after hearing from MacDougall, Sir John A. MacDonald advised that the legal transfer of the North-West Territories to the British Crown and to Canada be postponed to preserve at least the ‘semblance of a government’ by the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Groundwork: The Dominion Survey 21 While the issue of the Proclamation would put an end to the Government of the Hudson Bay Company, it would not substitute Government by Canada therefor. Such a government is physically impossible until the armed resistance is ended, and thus a state of anarchy and confusion would ensue, and a legal status might be given to any Government de facto, formed by inhabitants for the protection of their lives and property.28

The Metis leader, Louis Riel, recognized the fragile legal position of the Canadian state and had begun to articulate in lay terms a competing legal paradigm for understanding aboriginal and Metis land claims in the North-west.29 English legal thought concerning such claims operated on the basis of two assumptions that undermined the aboriginal legal position. Aboriginal forms of governance were not recognized as states. Since only states could claim sovereignty over territory aboriginal peoples were not therefore considered sovereign over the lands that they occupied and could not claim the right to define a legal framework for land-tenure within them. Within the English land tenure system, the migratory and often non-exclusive character of aboriginal land-use practices entitled them only to ‘usufruct’ rights rather than the rights that come with ownership, most notably the rights to exclude others from possession or to dispose of the land through sale.30 Legally the compensations negotiated by the Canadian government to ‘extinguish native title’ were meant to be compensations only for usufruct rights. Politically they were meant to pre-empt any further claims to real ownership. Riel’s implicit position drew on nineteenth-century concepts of ‘nation’ as a competing source of sovereignty to ‘state.’ The Metis, like the aboriginal peoples, were ‘a people’ (constituted as such by God) with sovereignty claims to the North-West Territories.31 Since no legal agreement had been entered into between the British crown and either the Metis or the aboriginal peoples concerning either sovereignty or ownership, the status of the original Hudson’s Bay charter was in doubt (Flanagan argues that Riel viewed it as essentially a usufruct right). Therefore, the right of the Hudson’s Bay Company to sell its lands to Canada was highly questionable. Aboriginal peoples had since signed treaties, but the Metis had not. Metis ‘armed resistance’ in 1869–70 was ended for a time by the Manitoba Act of 1870. In response to Metis demands, the Canadian parliament established a small portion of the Territories as a province (Manitoba) in which land was granted to the Metis and certain protections were guaranteed for Metis culture and institutions, including a

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finite number of survey claims staked ‘against the grid.’ This legislative agreement did not unambiguously resolve the fundamental challenge that Riel had posed. Indeed, his reading of it was that the Canadian government had recognized his own Provisional Government as a legitimate representative of the Metis people. The Manitoba Act was therefore a treaty between nations in which one nation (the Metis) had joined Confederation as a province and ceded sovereignty in exchange for certain compensations.32 From his perspective, the principle of Metis sovereignty had been recognized and its specific claims had been extinguished only within the boundaries of Manitoba. To a twenty-first-century audience, familiar with the legal gains of ‘nations’ with territorial and governance claims at odds with the states that contain them, and aware of increasingly complex and overlapping conceptions of the meaning of ‘sovereignty,’ Riel’s reading is no doubt plausible, even attractive. However, in his time he was attempting to articulate a radical paradigm shift. Neither he nor his advocates had the legal scholarship to ‘translate’ his position into terms that made legal sense or that, more importantly, could alter existing legal interpretations. Law is an abstract discursive exercise. What was at stake in this instance was the right to draw lines upon the land and have them recognized and respected. In the last resort intractable disputes are, as Weber recognized, resolved by coercion – violence or the threat of violence. And states reserve a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence – this is the defining characteristic of their sovereignty according to Weber.33 In this context, the Metis’ second armed resistance, the Riel Rebellion of 1885, ostensibly over the right to define the survey along the banks of the South Saskatchewan River, can be understood as consistent with their ongoing claims to state-like sovereign powers. The military defeat of the Metis and their Cree allies and the hanging of Riel reasserted the Weberian monopoly of the Canadian state. In addition, the successful trial of Riel for treason implicitly refuted any claim that he might be acting in the name of a body with sovereignty claims independent of the Canadian state. ‘Treason’ makes sense only if Canada were the sovereign authority in the North-West Territories and the Metis were subjects of that authority.34 The deployment of state violence, as in the hanging of Riel, is key to understanding the mystery of what makes one set of scratchings upon the land more ‘real’ than another, the earthen mounds and posts of the surveyors any less flimsy that the poles of the Metis ‘staked claims.’

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While such violence is resorted to rarely and only under extreme tests of legal legitimacy, its promise invests the whole set of fragile discursive practices with an aura of inviolability that Bourdieu calls ‘symbolic violence.’35 The symbolic violence of legal texts guaranteed Canada’s right, for the time being, to define the system of land tenure. It also guaranteed individual owners’ exclusive rights of occupation and use, confirmed their interest in cultivating their bounded spaces, and in this way ensured the making and remaking of the physical features of the survey grid. Physical instantiation in this latter sense, manifest in the patterns of survey visible from the air, was in important ways still less ‘real’ than spaces discursively defined in legal texts. ‘Abstract space,’ as we shall see, could have more decisive social effects than tangible imprints on the land. Private Property The legal framework of land tenure favoured the individuation of ownership and of residence. Ownership was defined in a set of inscriptions within each square of the township grid. This ‘internal grid’ (see figure 2.2) was not part of the original conception of the survey’s eighteenthcentury American architects. They had imagined that whole townships would be sold to corporate buyers who would establish within them collective life along the lines of New England towns.36 But by the nineteenth century the primary unit of saleable land had been reduced to the ‘quarter section,’ which was made available to individual owners either through purchase or as a ‘free’ homestead with title contingent on the completion of specified improvements.37 Canada adopted this feature of the American survey. According to the Dominion Lands Act, every township was to be divided into thirty-six sections, each one mile square and numbering one to thirty-six from the southeast corner. Each section was then to be divided into four quarters, labelled ‘SE,’ ‘SW,’ and so on.38 As in the American survey, a simple numeric designation uniquely identified each parcel of land, located it in space, and defined both its boundaries and area. If one were to purchase ‘NW 31-19-5 W of 2,’ one would get a 160-acre square of the ‘rolling prairie, with a number of small swamps and clumps of poplar and willow’ in the northwest corner of section 31 in the township described by W.F. King, which was the nineteenth township north of the border with the United States and the fifth township west of the second meridian (located in Saskatchewan, near its eastern border). This was an innovation that made the

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Figure 2.2 Township with internal grid: Schematic diagram of a township with section numbers. Shading has been added to indicate those sections typically granted to the Canadian Pacific Railway (most odd squares), the Hudson’s Bay Company (8 and ¾ of 26), or sold by the Crown to finance the building of schools (11 and 29). Quarter sections in the white squares of the ‘checkerboard’ were made available to settlers through the homestead provisions of the Dominion Lands Act. Of the township Sebert writes: ‘In the early days of the new world, townships of six miles square had grown into custom. Units of this size, it was found, could support a church, a school, a unit of militia, and a public meeting house. All the public buildings in the township were within easy travel of all the township’s settlers, and thus a spirit of neighbourliness was generated in the community.’ On the prairies the township never became a unit of local government. If it had, it would never have had enough ratepayers to support anything more than a school, and that with difficulty. (Source: Base map abstracted from Township Map, 1921, Saskatchewan Archives, Saskatoon. Overlay based on C. Martin, ‘Dominion Lands’ Policy [Toronto: Macmillan, 1938], 18)

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paper records of land transactions infinitely easier to maintain than in any previous system of survey. Two further features of this internal grid within each township had tremendous implications for the character of land tenure. First, the quarter section (160 acres), was by most standards a huge area for one person or one family to inhabit alone or to cultivate (see figure 2.3). As the prime minister explained in 1883, ‘It is said, indeed that settlers from Europe ... get actually frightened and appalled at the extent of their possessions when they are placed in the middle of 160 acre farms instead of having neighbors close to them.’39 Second, many sections in each township were set aside as land grants to non-resident owners. The Hudson’s Bay Company received three-quarters of section 26, and, in every fifth township, the whole of section 26. Sections 11 and 29 were set aside for local authorities to sell for financing schools. Throughout much of the North-West Territories railway companies received all the remaining odd-numbered sections.40 Typically, only the even-numbered sections were available for homesteading. This checkerboard pattern of resident and non-resident ownership ensured that, for a time, enormous physical spaces intervened between the already isolated settlers.41 These features of the system of grants also spatially embodied a conception of land as mobile commodity. No one in the nineteenth century imagined that individual holdings would grow to the size of entire townships, as they did in many cases in the late twentieth century. However most assumed that prairie farming would follow ‘modern,’ scientific methods42 and employ labour-saving technologies.43 Many were aware that they were likely to grow to unprecedented size and that the uncultivated sections could act as ‘expansion units’ to accommodate future growth.44 In addition, the logic of the grants was that they were to make money for their non-resident owners. They were to do so not by yielding what Marx would have called ‘use-values,’ and not by the land being worked up or transformed in any way by its owners. Rather, they were to gain value as the surrounding land was cultivated, and the expenditure of labour and capital on these adjacent tracts began to yield economic returns. Non-resident ownership was a temporary, essentially speculative, opportunity for resale.45 However, tenure and use were also implicated in the logic of capital mobility. The expected growth in size of land holdings was predicated on the possibility of further land purchase. Perhaps more importantly, the principle that made individual proprietorship such a dynamic force, expected to transform the land and increase its value, was the fundamental impermanence of ownership, the ever-present

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Figure 2.3 Sections (detail): Based on a 1921 map of Township 37, Range 11, West of the Second Meridian published by the Department of the Interior. Double lines denote road allowances. Distances are in ‘chains.’ Sections are roughly a mile (80 chains) to each side, quarter sections are ½ mile (40 chains) to each side. Corners are marked in various ways: ‘I. Stands for old pattern iron post; Wo. For wooden post; Pit. For four pits; M. for mound; Wt. For witness; T. for trench.’ The work of inscribing them is ‘signed’ by an authorized person: ‘The name at a monument is that of the surveyor who erected or restored the monument. All monuments not so designated were erected or restored by A. Bourgeault in 1901.’ The whole sheet is approved and confirmed by the Surveyor General. These inscriptions were precarious before resident owners took up the task of cultivating fields, and building fences and roads. Earthen markers did not stand up well to the weather. Wooden posts were reportedly carried off for firewood by those who had little interest in, or were openly hostile to, the survey project. (Source : Township Map, 1921, Saskatchewan Archives, Saskatoon)

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possibility of being ‘bought out’ if one failed to turn a profit. These were principles of nineteenth-century ‘political economy.’ This is not to say that they were universally subscribed to. Most Canadian Tories would have been happier to see less provision for buying and selling of land and more promotion of honest toil in the development of the west than this model implied.46 Still, the principles of political economy were nonetheless embedded in the design of this ‘inner grid’ within each township. It was an accounting device that allowed for the mapping of time – keeping track of the ongoing transactions as holdings grew and land changed hands – as much as space. The dynamism it unleashed tended to reduce ‘places’ to economic conventions and ceaselessly erase and redraw their boundaries. It was designed to open prairie space to the flow of capital, but also to focus market forces upon individual proprietors. The realization of this atomistic vision of political economy also encountered resistance on the ground. Metis opposition was inspired in part by a conflicting vision of land tenure. Theirs was a more collective ideal favouring residential proximity and ease of communication. They preferred ‘river lots,’ long, narrow strips of land fronting a navigable waterway.47 These were contiguous, with no intervening ‘expansion joints.’ This spatial plan favoured enduring social relationships and made no accommodation for capital mobility. The Metis were also in the 1880s making a conscious transition from migratory to sedentary land use. However, it still made economic sense to spend much of the year away from their farms in traditional hunting- and trading-related pursuits. Many appear to have made claims to lots in Metis communities in order to guarantee their option to retire to farming once more attractive opportunities dried up. Such claims represented long-term commitments to specific communities and places. However, there was no way within the bureaucratic rules of the Dominion Lands Act to distinguish these claims from ‘squatting’ by speculators whose aim was not longterm settlement but quick profit through sale. The Canadian government made reasonable efforts to compromise on the form of survey and land-grant rules in established Metis settlements in Manitoba and Prince Albert.48 However, in the St Laurent settlement on the South Saskatchewan, where many were claiming land ‘late’ (in some cases after the rectilinear survey had been completed) and apparently without conviction, Dominion bureaucrats were less flexible. Here the government’s refusal to resurvey land from the grid pattern into river lots became a flash point for the 1885 Rebellion.49 The grid also met with the passive resistance of prospective settlers.

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Immigrants, so essential to the entire project, were not flooding into the North-West Territories at the rate that had been expected. Nor was the ‘right sort’ of settler being attracted.50 The most ‘desirable class’ included those whose ‘character’ made them self-governing. Experienced ‘agriculturalists’ could establish themselves with little oversight or expenditure on the part of the state. Anglo-Saxons were also favoured because their culture and institutions were thought to have imbued them in advance with the ‘spirit of accumulation’ and the English ‘genius’ for ‘managing their own affairs.’51 Self-ordering and self-motivating subjects were preferable in the vast territories where the building of institutional architecture had barely begun. However, farmers in the United States, Eastern Canada, and the British Isles were reluctant to relocate to the remote and unproven wilderness of Canada’s North-West Territories. Early immigration agents had better success interesting prospective settlers from the steppes of Eastern Europe. These people – Gallicians,52 Mennonites, Doukhobors, Hutterites53 – brought with them visions of land settlement closer to that of the Metis than to that embodied in the Dominion Lands Act. They opposed the constraints of individuated settlement, demanding to be located in contiguous ‘blocks,’ as well as in residentially compact agricultural villages. Certain of them rejected, to varying degrees, the principle of individual proprietorship. Their efforts to ‘play outside the lines’ and at cross purposes to the ‘checkerboard’ grid help to reveal its logic as well as some of its unresolved internal contradictions. Special provision was made allowing the minister of the interior, at his discretion, to ‘vary or waive’ homestead requirements under the Dominion Lands Act in order to accommodate those immigrants who wished to settle ‘in communities.’54 This was seen as a temporary concession to the ‘habits’ of some European settlers, habits that it was thought they would soon lose as they adapted to North American conditions. As the primer minister stressed in 1883, it was emphatically ‘not the desire of the government to encourage settlement in hamlets, by which people lose half their time in going to and from their farms.’55 The standard requirements for homesteaders to obtain legal title to their quarter section included building a house upon it, residing there for a specified period, and breaking a minimum acreage of land within three years.56 On the grid, whenever more than four families built their dwellings close together some had to be separated from their own quarter-section square. So the minister typically waived the residency requirement in cases of village settlement. However, many village communities attempted to redraw the lines of

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fields and reapportion ownership in a way that was spatially coherent for collective living. They all faced the fundamental incongruity that the quarter section on which the village dwellings were located had, legally, to be the property (or homestead claim) of only one member of the community. At the very least, some de facto convention for the apportioning of household lots had to be established and the status of the labour and land claims of the titular owner negotiated. The most satisfactory strategy was simply to agree to pool all landholdings and abide by a collective plan of reallotment. Mennonite communities typically designated a central quarter section as the village site. Here households were established on separate lots fronting a single street. The lots were narrow, allowing the houses to cluster along the street, but still providing ample space behind them for outbuildings, and an acre or more for growing garden crops and raising small livestock. Adjacent quarter sections were designated as common grazing land, often considered to be part of the village per se.57 The extensive remaining land was divided into fields for haying and fields for cultivation. These in turn were often divided into narrow strips and allotted to individual farmers.58 To accommodate such plans, the minister of the interior occasionally allowed cultivation on reapportioned fields to ‘stand for’ the required improvements on the homestead quarter.59 However, each villager had individually to register a claim to a quarter section, and in the end received title to that quarter section regardless of how the community had redrawn the boundaries of lots and fields. These villages were much admired by field agents of the Department of the Interior. The surveyor S.J. Jackson, after providing a detailed description of the physical assets and prosperous condition of a Doukhobor village that he observed in 1901, concluded, ‘I was most favourably impressed with the village system of settlement, especially for the women folks. Where 24 families can agree it is the ideal system.’60 George Newcomb, immigration agent for the department, writing in 1883 of a Mennonite village, was less sympathetic, but provided an analysis of what made the villages work, as well as what forces were expected eventually to dissolve them. [The village plan] ... is very well while the country is new, for they can assist each other more effectively in building &c., when close together, than when apart; they can have the benefit of their schools and churches at less inconvenience for the time being; they are not put to the expense of building fences or herding their cattle separately; and they can go in bodies,

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Improved Earth without risk, to the woods for their fuel, whereas if each went alone across the prairie, there would be more or less danger of suffering of exposure during the first winter’s existence of the settlements. But as roads are built, as fuel gets cheaper and wire fencing begins to be generally used, these advantages disappear, and the disadvantages of the system become apparent. The fact that they are all bound to submit to the direction of the ‘Schultz,’ that they are compelled to accept the strips of land apportioned to them, whether their neighbours on either side are poor farmers, who allow their ploughed up lands to grow up in weeds or the reverse, the quantity of land is limited to this strip, counterbalances the advantages referred to. I think it very probable that in the near future the villages will be erected along the lines of railroads now running through the reserve, and the majority of those settlers will be living each on his own homestead.’61

The arrangement offered spatial efficiencies in the provision of collective goods. Proximity made it possible to build more compact physical infrastructure – public buildings, roads, fences, wells – without the duplications that dispersal required. The Doukhobors often extended this principle to more types of facilities than did the Mennonites, building collective bathhouses, laundries, and bakeries.62 Proximity also facilitated mutual aid in the construction of these assets and in the provision of collective services, such as fire protection, health care, child care, and education. Despite Newcomb’s representation, the ‘Schultz’ was not a traditionalistic despot, but an elected official with circumscribed powers. An assembly composed of all male heads of households made most of the important decisions affecting the community.63 Villages were effective governmental institutions, self-forming, self-directing, and largely independent of state resources. Isolated settlers demanded much more attention from field agents of the department. State-sponsored local government proved difficult to establish on the grid, and it was long before central agencies could rely on settlers to provide for their own collective needs through these institutions. Even ‘colonization companies’ that tried to provide infrastructure on a for-profit basis could not match the effectiveness of clustered self-governing villages.64 Those villages that extended the principles of common property and mutual aid to field production also gained economic advantages, as Newcomb recognized in the case of collective grazing in Mennonite villages. Unlike the Mennonites, Doukhobor and Hutterite communities collectivized the land and machinery used in field cultivation. In a way

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that would have defied nineteenth-century official wisdom, this model proved admirably suited to large-scale mechanized farming. Indeed, the very success of Hutterites in accumulating capital and expanding their holdings was to become a ‘social problem’ in the twentieth century.65 True, the hybrid model of the Mennonites, in which large fields were divided into contiguous privately tilled strips, did, as Newcomb warned, make it difficult for individuals to expand without coming into conflict with other members of the village community over ‘internal’ space. Also, as commentators have repeatedly stressed, small or oddly shaped fields restricted the mobility of the huge steam-powered machines that began to be used for cultivation and harvesting in the early part of twentieth century.66 However, the Hutterites demonstrated that large, collectively owned fields suffered from neither of these limitations. Not only could they make space for large machines, but they could more easily finance them using their pooled capital. And community lands could simply be expanded outwards without any problem of reapportioning internal holdings. While some village forms were to favour mechanization, observers could not see this. Their vision was coloured by ideology as well as the cultural resonances that the organic, traditional appearance of the clustered villages evoked in them. The aesthetic of the village may have added a further, perhaps ambivalent, dimension to its attraction for nineteenth-century observers. Jackson was most impressed with the Doukhobors’ buildings, constructed as they were with clay chimneys, thatched roofs, and log walls finished in plaster, just as the stone walls of cottages would have been in England. (The typical homesteader’s dwelling was a squat mound made of sod, with an iron stovepipe sticking through a flat roof.) Freisen describes how Mennonites kept orchards and lined their streets with poplar trees.67 Their village sites were often situated near a pond or stream. Their fields were varied in layout and cultivation, and often planned in harmony with ‘natural’ features of the land rather than the square outlines of the grid.68 Villages were picturesque; ‘gems of sylvan beauty’ according to one observer.69 They provided an aesthetic counterpoint to the grid, highlighting how it ultimately constrained the pastoral ideal. Support for village settlement among officials ‘on the ground’ was such that in 1888 it was widely recommended as the only way successfully to settle the daunting southwest.70 People in Ottawa, however, did not share this enthusiasm. While self-governing villages made the lives of colonization agents easier, they were becoming a political liability for policy-

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makers.71 Opposition was mounting in the press and the legislature to the block ‘reserves’ for eastern European settlers as well as to concessions allowing village settlement. The two policies were often blurred in the public mind as being part of the same mistake of allowing foreigners to cluster together and insulate themselves from the surrounding culture. The dangers of these alien preserves were largely political. They were thought to threaten both the unity as well as the character of Canadian political culture.72 For example, in a speech in the house in 1883 Mr Royal argued that European immigrants were ‘polluted with ideas ... of socialism and Nihilism,’ and that Mennonites in particular had ‘a peculiar character which prevents them from assimilating with municipal institutions of the country where they reside.’73 Whenever the terms of debate about the grid became racialized, as they tended to in the 1880s and 1890s, there could be less questioning of the inferiority of ‘non-white’ spaces.74 The ‘real’ problems then became whether and by what means non-white races could be assimilated. If they could not be, then, as Tories like Royal generally maintained, eastern European immigration had to be restricted. The liberal position, most clearly articulated by Lord Durham in relation to the ‘problem’ of Quebec, was that environmental conditioning could eliminate racial distinctiveness. Durham was convinced that the character of the ‘backward’ habitants could be reformed, making them more ‘self-managing’ and entrepreneurial by imposing upon Quebec the institutions of British civil society – municipal government and more competitive market relations.75 The paternalistic principle of the ‘reservation’ as a kind of asylum from the cruel forces of political economy was more palatable to Tories than liberals. But it had few Tory defenders in the case of European immigrants.76 Liberals, responsible both for open immigration policies and concessions to group settlement, emphasized the transitional character of reserves and villages. These were represented less as asylums than reformatories. Reservations for non-white ‘others’ were seen as spaces in which character could be transformed.77 The minister of the interior in 1873 clearly expected ‘Indian reservations’ eventually to deliver their inmates into the surrounding whiteness. It is gratifying to observe that the Indians on several of the reserves are beginning to acquire individual property ... Even under the most favourable circumstances time must be given him to understand the motives and acquire the habits of the white man, who labours to accumulate wealth in order that he may have the means of support in sickness or old age, or of

Groundwork: The Dominion Survey 33 giving his offspring a start in life. But when these motives come to be understood and acted upon by the Indian, the evidence of which is the possession of considerable property acquired by his own industry and thrift, it shows that he may safely be entrusted with the rights of full citizenship. To grant enfranchisement to the intelligent and well-behaved Indians would probably train them to still further self-reliance, and encourage their brethren who are lagging behind to make greater exertions to overtake the Anglo-Saxon in the race of progress.78

Anglo-Saxons were thought to be innately creatures of a competitive market economy; conversely, the structures of political economy were believed to ‘Anglicize’ non-Anglo-Saxons. The primary mechanism of transformation here was the principle of individual property ownership within a market environment, which could operate subtly and very powerfully and was no doubt expected to be a corrosive force upon the collective spaces of the villages. The concessions to common property made by ministers of the interior under the ‘hamlet clause’ were fragile. In cases where communities were allowed to redraw the boundaries of fields, and institute common property usage, these determinations had no legal status and were no more than a kind of ‘geography of the will’ overlaid upon the legal grid.79 Title obtained under the homestead section of the Dominion Lands Act could only be granted to individuals and only to separate quarter section squares. Of course, any individual or corporation with the capital to purchase land was exempt from the conditions of the homestead section. A purchaser of a large enough tract of land, say a 36square-mile section, would be in a position to have it legally re-surveyed into lots in any pattern he chose.80 Settlers lacked these resources, and at the end of their three-year homesteading period, found themselves owners of quarter-section squares of land. They could sign these over to some sort of representative of the collective. Mennonites deeded the single quarter section on which the dwellings and church were erected either to the church or to the bishop.81 However, Canadian law offered no provision that would protect the rights and obligations associated with common property, or any mechanism that would facilitate the transition from private ownership to any form of democratically controlled co-operative.82 Individual community members in the end held on to the security of title. While they farmed according to the village pattern, the grid persisted as a kind of invidious phantom whose claims were guaranteed by the ‘symbolic violence’ of the state. That guarantee

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became a weapon that could be used by disaffected individuals in disputes within the common-property community. It was quite possible for the withdrawal of an individual quarter to precipitate the break-up of the whole community structure.83 Here the grid, as legal conceit, had effects independent of the physical determinations on the face of the land. While it was spatial, it was not always and not inherently ‘physical’ or locally embedded. Spatial determinations of property ownership, written into the checkerboard internal to each township, were to shape character and identity. The featured identity was racialized such that the Eastern Europeans, French Canadians, Metis, and aboriginal peoples who resisted the grid resisted ‘whiteness’ along with the ethic of Crusoean self-reliance and bourgeois accumulation. While this was not very explicit in the nineteenth century, resistance was also to become increasingly gendered. The design of village spaces, particularly in the case of the Doukhobors, drew inspiration from the intentional, secular, and ‘modern’ socialisms of the nineteenth century, in addition to pre-industrial tradition. Some of the Doukhobors’ plans for collective buildings could almost have been lifted from Fourier or Flora Tristan.84 Central to these socialist utopias was the collectivization of domestic spaces and tasks in such a way as to alleviate women’s domestic burdens. While prairie villages were never anything but patriarchal, observers did remark upon the special benefits that their physical structures offered women. Disadvantages were ascribed mostly to ‘masculine’ tasks associated with fieldwork. Women were thought to suffer more when deprived on the grid from the social and emotional life of community. Villages were kinder and more beautiful places than the ruthless grid. They were thought not only to sustain women, but also to be a sort of reflection of femininity in the landscape. The pastoral aesthetic that the village evoked was of nature inviting, nurturing, curvaceous, and soft-featured. By contrast, the huge empty squares that began to emerge upon the grid presented observers with a kind of rectilinear masculinity, a machine landscape, hard and intimidating. Cultural responses to this aesthetic were to remain deeply ambivalent.85 The Dominion Survey, an always unstable, never finalized project, was to provide an ‘environment’ within which individual subjects would be shaped, transforming their natures and motivating them in turn to transform ‘Nature’ by working up their individual plots of ground. It was a utopian project that produced its own monsters. One of the first to present itself plainly and visibly was the unprecedented and ‘ugly’ mod-

Groundwork: The Dominion Survey 35

ern landscape. Another, quite unexpected, was the emergence of modern class relations in the countryside. Self-consciously modern and ‘progressive’ farmers were to challenge ‘capitalist’ forms of competitive individualism and, eventually, relations of private property. Prairie women organized alongside their radical male counterparts, lobbied persistently for more humane solutions to the asocial features of the grid, returning again and again to spatial visions of collective life. Private property did not succeed in universalizing ‘whiteness.’ More than a century later, reserves persisted as neither asylums nor reformatories. Indian title had not been decisively extinguished. Indeed, the sort of legal challenge to state land claims that Riel pioneered only gained greater clarity and authority.

Chapter 3

Modernity in the Countryside: Contested Rural Space

The agricultural class ... are the class who have local attachments; and it is astonishing how much of character depends upon this one circumstance. If the agricultural spirit is not felt in America as a counterpoise to the commercial, it is because American agriculturists have no local attachments; they range from place to place, and are to all intents and purposes a commercial class.1

Landscape as Artefact America’s ‘mobile and uneasy’ rural population was a curious aberration to J.S. Mill when he wrote these lines in 1840. It was an anomaly for that ambiguous, fruitful, and mystifying conceptual dualism that nineteenth-century thinkers from Bentham to Marx used to understand their century. Dynamism, mobility, and progress – all the temporal motifs of the century were expected to animate the artificial space of the ‘urban.’ ‘Rural’ spaces and the social relations embedded within them could be relied upon to follow the deliberate and unvarying rhythms of nature. Soja has argued that space in critical modern consciousness has been conceived as ‘fixed, dead, undialectical’ – the accumulated material constraints hindering change, progress, and emancipation.2 This is an apt reading of nineteenth-century conceptions of rural space. However, the city gave much greater scope than Soja acknowledges to the spatial imagination of nineteenth-century ‘progressives.’ Reformers from Fourier to Bentham to Engels were fascinated by spatial inventions, and the possibilities of reordering social relations through remaking spatial structures. Haussmann demonstrated how easily the ‘material constraints’ of the built environment

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could be demolished to make way for change. New projects worked through increasingly plastic materials: bricks and mortar, cast iron and glass, and, towards the end of the century, reinforced concrete.3 Urban ‘space’ in this sense yielded to fragmentation and recomposition, the destructive-creative dialectic of modernity, and the city became the privileged site of the dynamic ‘maelstrom’ of modern life.4 As Berman points out, the experience of modernity has produced and continues to produce profound ambivalence. Even the most ardent embrace of modernity has coexisted with, indeed fuelled, the invention and reinvention of some form of pre-modern or pastoral ‘other.’ The ‘rural’ never has completely disappeared, and it is continually reinvested with properties that the urban has ‘lost.’ There was no clear conceptual ‘discovery’ of modernity in the countryside. Rural life began publicly to be debated as a ‘social problem’ in the first decade of the twentieth century. In the United States and Canada commissions of inquiry were established and voluntary associations formed to address questions of ‘rural reform.’ The discussions that ensued – nostalgic, conflicted, muddled by the deceptive language bequeathed from the last century – began to grapple with some of the structural transformations that were taking place within agriculture and reshaping the landscape. The rural reform imagination was emboldened by turn-of-the-century high modernism. This was the period of Einstein and Bergson, Cubism and cinematic montage. The very categories of time and space were being brought into question,5 and the dizzying creative possibilities were widely felt. Urban planners increasingly imagined spaces that flowed with traffic of all sorts: automobiles, commodities, people, ideas.6 As early as 1903 these innovations were being felt and appreciated in the prairie west. A promotional pamphlet issued by the Department of the Interior praises Winnipeg’s wide thoroughfares, ‘admirably planned to give scope to the architects’ of the city’s new skyscrapers. The writer goes on to celebrate the city’s dynamism, ‘as if some mighty force were astir beneath the ground,’ pushing up buildings and making the city vibrate with the rhythms of modernity. The power that creates these great structures is sending through the streets of Winnipeg and in and out its business houses an electrified current of financial strength. The vitality of prosperity is pulsing through the city’s arteries. The beatings of that pulse are not alone recorded in the pages of hundreds of business ledgers: they make themselves felt in the very air. Winnipeg is founded on the prairie, and the vitality, the immense potenti-

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High modernism was international and trans-local in outlook. The sentiments of this western Canadian pamphleteer are the same as those of Le Corbusier, in whose Plan Voisin for Paris the skyscrapers were to house ‘the tools that conquer time and space – telephones, telegraphs, radios; the banks, trading houses, the organs of decision for the factories: finance, technology, commerce.’8 Le Corbusier’s celebration of the machinery to conquer time and space is the key to high modernism. From this power comes the modernist indifference to the spatial or temporal particulars of locale. High modernism engendered visions of the radical transformation of the particularities of rural space. An American reformer, in a piece provocatively entitled ‘Back to Nature? Never! Forward to the Machine,’ anticipated a time when man ‘will substitute for the natural world an artificial world, molded nearer to his heart’s desire.’9 At the same time, the very success of the domination of space, and the turn-of-the-century sense that there were no new spaces left in the world to discover, settle, or exploit, engendered concerns for the preservation and conservation of nature’s finite assets.10 The initial terms of the rural reform ‘problem’ were Malthusian. The colonization of global spaces meant for Europeans that the world’s arable lands were now fully ‘occupied’ and employed in the production of food. So it was no longer possible to suppose that growing urban populations were being fed through trade with expanding frontier colonies. In Canada and the United States, 1911 census figures showed that the urban population threatened for the first time to outstrip the rural.11 Reformers recognized that Malthus was wrong in thinking that the capacities of the soil were fixed.12 ‘Dominion Experimental Farms,’ in Canada and, in the United States, ‘agricultural research stations’ were demonstrating that new techniques for the ‘intensive’ exploitation of land could at least double the amount of food produced per acre.13 Reformers applauded growing state support of ‘scientific’ efforts to conserve and further expand the capacity of the ‘soils of the country.’ Their productive powers should have the attention of our scientists that we may conserve the new soils, improve the old soils, drain wet soils, ditch swamp soils, levee river overflow soils, grow trees on thin soils, pasture hillside soils, rotate crops on all soils, discover methods for cropping dryland soils, find grasses and legumes for all soils, feed grains and mill feeds on

Modernity in the Countryside: Contested Rural Space 39 the farms where they originate that the soils from which they come may be enriched.14

Plant breeding offered possibilities for the control of both time and space. Speeding the growth cycle and shortening the time between seeding and harvest had extended the range of crops to new regions.15 Delicate fruit such as plums and pears could be grown in Manitoba. Climate on the prairies could be controlled through the growing of trees, which helped to retain water and reduce wind erosion.16 It could also be controlled by the machinery of irrigation and drainage. More absolute in their indifference to locale were the technologies for growing under glass. In 1861 the Crystal Palace, ‘that revealer of so many tendencies,’17 had shown that it was possible to grow tropical gardens in London.18 Soil type and fertility, which had hitherto constrained agricultural usage in particular locales, could also be overcome through greater understanding of soil chemistry and its application in the manufacture of synthetic supplements. Petr Kropotkin in the 1890s pointed out that French market gardeners already considered their soil to be an artefact. He envisioned the eventual manufacture and transportation of soil on an industrial scale. ‘Any soil, of any desired composition, can be made by machinery. We already have the manufactures of manure, engines for pulverising the phosphorites, and even the granites of the Vosges; and we shall see the manufactures of loam as soon as there is a demand for them.’19 One of Canada’s foremost popularizers of rural reform, John MacDougall, wrote in extravagant terms of the spatial indifference that would be made possible by the ‘work of the wizards of agriculture.’ The Sahara shall become an unroofed greenhouse, arcaded with palms, garlanded with vines, swarded with gourds; every mile of the tropics shall be pruned into exuberant largesse, and even the Arctic shall yield a richer tribute than temperate zones once gave – for it is a scientific fact that the moss covered tundras of our Northland ... are fitted to give as rich an output of food for man as do the grassy plains of Texas.20

MacDougall, an ambivalent modernist, also championed the pastoral principles of ‘good husbandry.’ This approach, favoured by many agricultural experts, demanded great sensitivity to the particularities of place: ‘minute conditions of soil texture, slope, drainage, rainfall, frostline, sunshine.’21 It called for scientific soil surveys that could provide a

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guide for the precise adaptation of crops to local conditions. The emphasis was on protecting and enhancing long-term soil fertility using local, ‘natural’ resources: manures and rotations that included nitrogenfixing crops such as clover.22 The implication was a restriction of the timing and placing of crops within natural limits. Where soil was thought to be vulnerable to erosion or the depletion of long-term fertility, pastoralists advocated shifting to hay, adopting silviculture, or else taking land out of production altogether.23 This pastoralist caution had enormous implications for the prairie west, or at least the semi-arid region of ‘Palliser’s Triangle’ that many argued should never have been broken to the plough. Despite ambivalence and debate, all commentators agreed on the necessity of intensifying agricultural production in order to support larger populations from the soil. They were also, strangely, united in the belief that intensive production could only be achieved by having a larger number of people actually on the land, physically involved with working up the soil. Even amateurs like MacDougall were aware of the increasing use of labour-saving machinery in field production. Writing in 1913, he marked 1886 as the threshold of the modern era of farm mechanization. That year ... which brought in the twine-binder brought also the gang-plow and the use of steam power in ploughing ... About the same period also began the widespread adoption of the modern barn, with its trolley underloader and its installation water system. The introduction of improved field machinery, the hay loader, the potato-digger, the manure spreader; the employment of the traction engine and the gasoline motor, has kept pace with the remodelling of the barn.24

He speculated that labour efficiency had increased by seven times in two generations. Why he and others were convinced that more workers were needed to increase yield is perplexing. There could be no doubt that the machinery he listed would increase output per person. Therefore, fewer people and more machines should have been enough to increase productivity. For some, the understanding might have been that machinery could not be responsible for an increase in output of food per acre. Still, from this standpoint, it would be difficult to explain the role of the manure spreader or even the gang-plough. The only rationale consistent with the new modernist understanding of agriculture was articulated most clearly by Kropotkin. It hinges on a mistaken association between urban space and modern organization.25

Modernity in the Countryside: Contested Rural Space 41 We know that a crowded population is a necessary condition for permitting man to increase the productive powers of his labour. We know that highly productive labour is impossible so long as men are scattered, few in numbers, over wide territories, and are thus unable to combine together for the higher achievements of civilization.26

The new economies of scale in industrial production demanded the coordination of large numbers of workers. In order for their actions to be coordinated, it was thought, these workers had to be physically copresent, as one found them in modern factories. The failure here was to understand the ways in which new organizational technologies could increasingly coordinate interaction at a distance. Modern agricultural production was increasingly, to use Giddens’s terms, being ‘disembedded’ from rural space and restructured through ‘distanciated’ relationships that were indifferent to the boundaries separating countryside and city. Rural population decline could be, and in fact generally was, associated with increased agricultural productivity. With few exceptions reformers refused to see this connection.27 No one therefore questioned the need to get more people ‘back to the land.’28 The ‘unsatisfactory movement of population’ from the country to the city was the defining social problem for rural reform. The lack of population density in the countryside offered an irresistibly concrete and spatial symmetry with the problem of overcrowding in the city.29 But this simple and powerful figure was too crude to capture the new and abstract spatial form of modern agricultural production. Foucault has offered the panopticon as ‘symptomatic’ of the spatial imagination of nineteenth-century bourgeois reform. Yet both the panopticon and the factory, as Kropotkin employed it, are deceptive as models for the spatial logic of modern organization. Neither fully realizes the radical potential of disembedding and distanciation. Disembedding is defined by Giddens as ‘the “lifting out” of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space.’30 Disembedding becomes technically possible only through the abstraction of ‘universal’ measures of time and space from the particularities of lived contexts. Abstraction yields accounting principles that can be deployed in technologies – the paraphernalia for the perforation, recording and filing, and transportation from office to office of employee time sheets, for example – that permit the organization of social relations ‘across indefinite spans of timespace.’ These technologies guarantee the spatial and temporal continuity of disembedded relationships independently of the memories or his-

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tories in common of particular persons, or the likelihood that their paths will cross and re-cross in any physical locale. Disembedded relationships can be carried on at-a-distance in space and time between people who are not and may never be physically co-present. In this sense they can be, although they are not always, ‘distanciated.’ Bentham’s panopticon disembeds relationships by abstracting them from particular persons, such that ‘any individual, taken almost at random,’ can exercise the power of the prison supervisor.31 However, the panopticon re-embeds relationships in a highly artificial, architectural locale, that depends for its efficacy on interactions that, while not face to face, must take place, as Bentham would put it, on ‘the spot.’32 While the observation tower depends not on the presence but on the ever-present possibility of a watchful eye for its effect on the minds of the prisoners, the inmates must still know that they are within visual range, within hailing distance of the tower and the observer it may contain. This sort of presence-availability is definitive of the locale. By contrast, it is the translocal character of modern organization that is crucial for understanding the restructuring of agriculture. Modern systems of agricultural production and distribution relied increasingly upon dense networks of relationships between far-flung actors whose compass of movement never brought them into physical proximity. The increased productivity of farmers in rural locales was made possible through distanciated relationships with others present neither in the field nor in rural space. The organizational machinery that complemented and made possible the use of binders, steam tractors, new plant hybrids, and cultivation techniques was not visible in the countryside in the same way as the organizational machinery of the panopticon or the factory was visible in the city. Rural reformers failed to recognize that, as Giddens puts it, ‘[w]hat structures the locale is not simply that which is present on the scene; the “visible form” of the locale conceals the distanciated relations which determine its nature.’33 The Contested Wheat Field Advances in trans-local organization allowed for new spatial divisions of labour in agriculture. Turn-of-the-century commentators recognized the emergence of a ‘world economy’ in agriculture.34 ‘To-day,’ observed Sir Horace Plunkett in 1912, ‘most large towns derive their household stuff from the food-growing tracts of the whole world.’35 The international trading regime was nowhere more advanced than in the market

Modernity in the Countryside: Contested Rural Space 43

for wheat. Hopkins Moorhouse, writing in 1918 of the wheat-growing prairies, celebrated the dynamism and scale of the new machinery for coordinating exchanges across time and space. He emphasized the subordination of physical distances to speed, as railways pushed ‘eagerly in every direction where new wheat lands could be tapped’ and as the wheat flowed, circling and eddying through the grain exchange ‘before in re-directed currents it rolled on its way to the ocean ports.’36 He also recognized in the giant grain elevators the physical machinery to regulate the erratic timing of the flow of wheat. They allowed for the deferral of delivery, but also, by ‘elevating’ and keeping the grain dry, arrested decay.37 At the centre Moorhouse placed the ‘steadily turning marketing machinery’ of the grain exchange. Thanks to this great ‘[t]imepiece of International Exchange ticking out the doings of nations, both buyer and seller can know what prices will govern their dealings. In office and farmhouse an ear to the telephone is all that is necessary.38 Its role was, as his metaphor suggested, to control time. Through the institution of futures trading, transactions could be made independently of the time the wheat was delivered to the final customer and often before it was actually produced in the field. This financial technology bridged both distance and time, allowing the buyer and seller to, in the words of Simmel, ‘exist so far apart that each of them may follow their own precepts to a greater degree than in the period when the owner and his possessions still stood in direct mutual relationship, and every economic engagement was a personal one.’39 ‘With the establishment of exchanges for conducting international buying and selling,’ Moorhouse wrote, ‘the universalizing of wheat was complete.’40 In other words, wheat as a ‘universal equivalent’ could appear anywhere on the globe stripped of the particularities of place or person of origin. Commodities moved in multiple directions in this new international nexus.41 Cities could draw their requirements from regions scattered around the globe. But so too could rural locales. The surprising result was that, increasingly, rural regions specialized in a narrow range of export crops and depended upon other locales for the remainder of their food needs. For many this was a perplexing and slightly alarming trend.42 ‘That the farmer should be a customer of the country storekeeper for such articles as butter, eggs and bacon,’ wrote the deputy head of the Department of the Interior on his tour through western Canada in 1884, ‘is almost beyond belief, but it seems to be the fact nevertheless.’43 By 1903 the universalization of wheat as abstract commodity was complemented by its universalization across the prairie landscape.

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The result was a novel and visually compelling manifestation of modernity in the countryside. Cross the Manitoba boundary in the month of July and travel northward by train or on horseback, and for fifty, for a hundred miles you will be moving through a sea of wheat rippling in the wind, with the heavy yellow heads ripening to the harvest. Travel from Winnipeg westward, and it is the same story; nothing between your eye and the sky-line but wheat, wheat. Leave the main lines of travel and strike off through the wheat-fields that stretch to the circling sky, and the story is the same. Here and there rise the tall, red, hump-shouldered elevators, where settlements cluster into villages; but across the fenceless, unbroken expanse, nothing but wheat, wheat!’44

Exclusive wheat growing looked strange and artificial to contemporary observers. Indeed, it was an artefact, one that became the subject of protracted struggle between agricultural experts and regional departments of agriculture who campaigned against it, and farmers who stubbornly persisted in it. The spread of a wheat monoculture did not reflect the ‘natural capacities’ of the region. On the contrary, agricultural experts recognized how this industrial uniformity made the crops unnaturally susceptible to outbreaks of disease and insect pests as well as the spread of weeds.45 The weed problem in Saskatchewan was epidemic and uncontrollable by manual weeding.46 No one foresaw the machinery of control that, after the Second World War, would be deployed in an effort to rescue monocultures from their own contradictions: the chemical herbicides and pesticides along with the mechanized infrastructure for producing, distributing, and applying them to the fields. Instead, they recommended the less heroic, more ‘ecological’ techniques known at the time to be effective in containing pest populations: increased crop diversity and crop rotation. Despite efforts to develop dryland varieties of wheat and less erosive methods of tillage, wheat remained unsuited to the natural cycles of prairie drought, particularly in the southwest. Experts had little success persuading farmers to grow trees, and large-scale irrigation projects required far more capital than provincial or local governments could hope to acquire. Wheat production was in a sense an ‘incomplete’ artefact, imposed in an environment that could not sustain it without extensive additional infrastructure. As a consequence, rarely a year went by without some ‘natural’ disaster, whether drought, hail, or grasshoppers, destroying crops in some corner of the prairies.47

Modernity in the Countryside: Contested Rural Space 45

To the eye, the prairie remained relatively untouched by the project of ‘pastoralization.’ In the ‘parkland’ region the expanse continued to be broken by sloughs and aspen bluffs that gave a degree of protection from the worst cycles of drought.48 Conditions favoured a greater diversity of planting, but here as elsewhere, the main crop continued to be wheat. The decisive pressures to transform this landscape came after the Great Depression, when sloughs were drained and bluffs cleared to make way for tilling and harvesting equipment of increasing scale (as well as to employ more land in order to pay for increased mechanization).49 In other words, the pressure was to conform to the ‘modernist’ aesthetic of the monocultural south. Economic logic dictated that prairie and parkland alike be blanketed in grain. The endless fields were a response to economies of scale, not, at least initially, in field production, but in the production and organization of the infrastructure of marketing and distribution. All of the physical equipment for specialized shipping and storage, the office hardware, personnel, and ongoing abstract relations involved in large-scale distanciated organization cost money to construct and maintain. Fixed investments, not in any one locale, region, or country, but strung out across abstract trans-local space, provided an organizing, coordinating logic for the autonomous decisions of tens of thousands of prairie farmers separated and apparently isolated upon their huge tracts of land. The great trans-local machine was both their burden and their opportunity. By lowering the unit costs of organizing sales and delivery it allowed them to sell their grain at competitive prices in markets around the world. Similar complexes propelled other agricultural commodities onto the world market at low cost. The astonishing fact was not only that Canadian grain could be sold more cheaply in other countries than it could be produced there, but that, as early as 1912, commodities such as butter from New Zealand could be sold in Canada for less than it could be produced locally.50 The problem was not so much the high cost of producing the butter as the high cost of establishing and maintaining sufficiently large markets for it. ‘Nature’ permitted a cornucopia of alternative possibilities for the prairie farm, from dairy cattle to orchards. Mennonites and other European immigrants had shown what could be done using traditional techniques and the degree of mutual aid afforded by their centralized agricultural villages. The agricultural experiment stations demonstrated the potential of improved varieties and techniques. And, according to the most visionary modernists, prairie fields could be ‘retooled’ to suit any pleasure. In the ongoing debate

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about the universalization of wheat across the prairie landscape, farmers and their organized representatives insisted that wheat growing was the only way that they could make money. In the words of one Saskatchewan farmer who claimed to have grown thirty-two different crops, wheat was ‘the only product we raise with a certainty of disposing of it.’51 The elevators and grain exchange handled wheat and ‘coarse grains,’ which included barley, oats, rye, and flax. Of these, wheat and, to a lesser extent, flax were the main export crops. The others may have ‘circled and eddied’ through the grain exchange, but they tended to ‘eddy out’ of the flow regionally. Oats in particular were not likely to enter the market stream, but rather to remain on the farm for horse feed. What to the untrained eye appeared as endless fields of wheat was probably more accurately described as ‘grain.’52 Still, with minor regional variations, wheat predominated in the fields. But in the market stream ‘tapped’ by the rail lines and country elevators, and flowing through the ports, its presence was overwhelming. Wheat was the ‘global commodity’ and farmers’ most lucrative cash crop.53 Saskatchewan farmers’ specialization in wheat made them vulnerable to its spectacular price fluctuations on the international market.54 The volatile market combined with the fragile monoculture meant that this new artificial environment was fraught with risk. Farm failure was epidemic, even before the Depression of 1930.55 Business investment was uncertain, and the flow of state revenues often erratic.56 The wheat economy was an ambiguous construct. It plugged the region into a global capitalist dynamic, but its local repercussions were so unpredictable that they discouraged capital accumulation. Boards of trade joined departments of agriculture in advocating that farmers abandon exclusive wheat farming in favour of diversification and ‘mixed farming.’57 The idea was that even if average prices for other farm products were lower than for wheat, they could provide a hedge against price fluctuations, stabilize farm incomes, and help to minimize the boom-and-bust cycles that made planning and investment in the region so precarious. At the very least, farmers could provide more of their own subsistence needs and would be less dependent on relief during the frequent agricultural depressions. Farmers persisted in their ‘stiff necked folly.’58 Many supposed that they must simply be lazy.59 Wheat farming demanded intensive activity during seeding and harvest, but left farmers relatively idle during the rest of the year. Surely they could use this time to pursue fruit growing, stock raising, or other lines of agricultural work.60 Farmers instead spent

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their slack seasons working not with the soil, but building organizations that bridged the distances between them and that, they hoped, could bring under control the trans-local forces that had such power over their lives. Wheat farmers wanted to reform ‘marketing,’ not production. Their leaders ridiculed mixed-farming orthodoxy. As the editor of the United Farmers of Canada (UFC) pages in the Western Producer put it in 1930, ‘[O]ur agricultural advisors are continually ignoring the fact that agricultural products are placed on the market in an unsound manner, and advising the farmer to place two products or ten products on the market in the same unsound manner.’61 Farmers understood that the production of value did not happen exclusively in the field. Without attention to marketing and distribution, earnest labour on unmarketable commodities could easily result in loss of money. They dedicated their efforts to wheat because the machinery for marketing was already in place; it simply needed to be overhauled. Through state and cooperative ownership and control they hoped to eliminate its anarchic ‘capitalistic’ features. At the same time, they embraced the ‘modern’ trends towards economies of scale and division of labour in agriculture. The UFC defended the wheat monoculture as an example of ‘industrial specialization’ and invoked Henry Ford’s assembly line as proof of the success of this principle.62 ‘Industrial specialization’ in marketing infrastructure created an economic ‘logic of the situation’ that shaped individual farmers’ investment decisions. They were responding to the trans-local as much as to local opportunities offered by soil or climate. The way that they ‘tooled up’ for these opportunities locally engaged them more firmly with that trans-local machinery. Almost all invested in technologies for grain production and therefore required equipment for seeding, harvesting, threshing, and transporting the grain.63 Those who specialized were under pressure to buy self-powered machines – a tractor, a truck, and eventually a combine harvester – and to expand their land holdings.64 Anyone who invested seriously in other commodities, such as livestock, found that they required a parallel set of on-farm investments in buildings as well as ‘windmills, ... chopping mills, ... fences, ... corrals, breeding stock and labour.’65 This sort of duplication was to become even more difficult to support in the wave of mechanization that took place after the Second World War.66 Official advocacy of mixed farming dovetailed with the promotion by agricultural authorities of the ecological methods of ‘intensive farming’ and ‘permanent agriculture.’ A number of international experts had

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cautioned that continuous cropping of wheat could exhaust the fertility of the soil.67 Canadian experts were not in favour of remedies that relied upon artificial fertilizers.68 Mixed farming, particularly if it involved raising livestock in addition to field crops, allowed for manuring as well as crop rotation.69 Fertility could be conserved and increased by employing local resources. Western farmers seemed impervious to this logic. Few rotated crops, and those who had livestock either burned their manure or allowed it to ‘accumulate for years’ rather than spread it on the fields.70 They appeared to have no concern for the long-term viability of the soil, being content simply to ‘mine’ it in the hope of immediate profit.71 Critics felt that western farmers compensated for their poor husbandry and failure to rebuild fertility simply by expanding their holdings. If farm size continued to increase, rural population would decline, leaving, as one prominent reformer put it, ‘paupers on half-tilled soils.’72 The problem, as rural reformers repeatedly stressed, was one of character.73 Yet as the debate over wheat increasingly made clear, western farmers did not suffer from what Marx called ‘the idiocy of rural life.’ They were not the reactionaries and unthinking traditionalists that one might expect ‘rural’ people to be. On the contrary, wheat farmers were too modern. They demonstrated insufficient attachment to place appreciation of natural rhythms and love of the land. They treated it like a commodity,74 investing in it opportunistically and rashly. Critics called them ‘gamblers’ and ‘speculators’ for risking all on the high stakes of wheat. They were, as Mill would have put it, a ‘commercial class.’ The hybridity of this landed yet mobile and commercial, rural yet modern class was monstrous. The wheat growing ‘mania,’ as Saskatchewan’s minister of agriculture put it in 1907, had disturbing moral consequences: Owing to the large returns obtained at times ... this system of farming ... is predisposed to encourage extravagance, imprudence, speculation, landlordism, and indifference to home-making as against money making, the credit system, elevator difficulties, the weed nuisance, together with a general tendency to drift off the farms into towns and villages in search of a less anxious and strenuous life.75

This astonishing last phrase, in which people are represented as fleeing to the towns to escape the dynamism and anomie of the countryside, represents a recognition, contorted within the rural-urban framework, of modernity in agriculture. The rationality of the new class of farmers

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produced by these conditions was not well understood and diagnoses of their character were typically somewhat off the mark. Critics expected to see farmers responding to the rural – the tangible realm of actions upon the soil embedded in place. Farmers themselves were more attuned than their critics to the abstract, trans-local relations emerging within agriculture. The ‘rural’ had become a site for the restless, transformative logic of modernity, and farmers’ readiness to embrace this logic showed them to be surprisingly ‘modernist.’ Landscape Architecture for ‘New Fangled Men’ It is as much a public work to create a community in the bush, or to re-create a district that has suffered through agricultural ignorance, as it is to build a dam or subsidize a steamer.76

‘New fangled men,’ proclaimed Marx in 1856, ‘are as much the invention of modern time as machinery itself.’77 He shared with his bourgeois contemporaries the idea that human beings, through their ability to transform nature and construct from it artificial environments had the capacity to transform their own natures. Unlike bourgeois progressives, he relished the irony of unanticipated consequences in this creative dynamic. Capitalist projects in machine production and the making of the tremendous trans-local infrastructure for the global circulation of commodities, including North America’s Cartesian land survey, grain exchanges, and transoceanic communications systems, generated monsters. In the city, the prime example was the birth of a class-conscious proletariat antagonistic to bourgeois legal and moral order. Nineteenthcentury observers were increasingly aware that the ‘natural’ pursuit of private self-interest failed to produce tolerable public order. Cities had become a crush of humanity where neither the victims nor the victors in the ‘competitive struggle’ could completely escape the effects of squalor, vice, and dissension. In the latter half of the nineteenth century creative energies were invested increasingly in ‘governmental’ projects that, while perhaps ‘functionally’ complementary to the inventions of financial and industrial capitalism, were articulated in terms that were distinct from and antagonistic to those of ‘bourgeois’ political economy. Reform discourse substituted the language of intentionality – planning, social engineering, moral obligation, and collective will – for that of ‘natural law.’ Progressive reformers embraced the artificiality of the city and of human moral character, and sought to remake both in opposi-

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tion to the pressures of ‘natural’ market forces and the Spencerian struggle for survival.78 The inventions of urban reform were designed to create natures in which egotistical calculus and the commercial spirit (as well as the violent antagonisms of class) were subordinated to what Mill described as the ‘more generous objects of the nobler instincts.’ Nineteenth-century designs for modern social order drew inspiration from conceptions of ‘natural’ or found order in the countryside. Urban problems had long been understood in terms of the difficulty of absorbing floating populations uprooted from rural places. While rural ‘local attachments’ and social order were often opposed uncritically to urban placelessness and anomie, there was a more determinate spatial logic in nineteenth-century understanding of the rural that is articulated in the following quote. Rural villages, as this observer explained in 1852, were spatially conducive to surveillance and ‘natural policing.’ A century and a half ago ... there was scarcely a large town in the island, except London – when I use the term large town, I use it with reference to the subject at hand, – I mean where an inhabitant of the humbler classes is unknown to the majority of the inhabitants of that town; by a small town, I mean a town where ... every inhabitant is more or less known to the mass of the people of the town; ... in small towns there must be a sort of natural police, of a very wholesome kind, operating upon the conduct of each individual, who live, as it were, under the public eye; but in a large town, he lives if he choose, in absolute obscurity, ... which to a certain extent gives impunity. Again, there is another cause [of crime] which ... I am disposed to consider very important, and that is the gradual separation of classes which takes places in towns which has gradually grown up, that every person who can afford it lives out of the town, and at a spot distant from his place of business. Now this was not so formerly. .. The result of the old habit was, that rich and poor lived in proximity, and the superior classes exercised that species of silent but very efficient control over their neighbours to which I have already referred. They are now gone, and the consequence is, that the large masses of population are gathered together without those wholesome influences which operated upon them when their congregation was more mixed; when they were divided, so to speak, by having persons of a different class of life better educated among them.79

The nineteenth-century social ‘disciplines’ sought to replace natural with artificial forms of policing. Bentham’s panopticon represents the modern principle that visibility and accountability can be enhanced

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through technologies of space and memory. These technologies did not depend upon particular persons to wield power and were not limited in their compass by any individual’s range of aquaintanceships or history in common with others. Nor were their effects limited to sites ‘commanded by buildings’ such as prisons, schools, hospitals, and reformatories. The intermittent action of surveillance was supposed to have enduring effects through transforming its subjects, instilling in them a reflex of self-scrutiny and a habit of self-control. Panoptic means for cultivating ‘self-disciplined’ subjects expanded the possibilities of governing large and even mobile populations from a distance. The nineteenth-century ideal was not merely a subject who had, as Foucault puts it, ‘interiorized’ a respect for law, a tolerance for factory discipline, or even an accumulative ethic. No matter how compliant or ‘useful’ these made one, they were private virtues. The ‘more generous objects’ referred to by Mill were other-regarding. What was demanded was a positive ‘public spirit.’ Foucault points out that the outer windows of the panopticon’s annular wall of cells were designed in such a way as to make the prison’s operations, and any potential abuse of power on the part of its administrators, open to public scrutiny. Yet he tells us little about the construction of the sort of character who would be interested enough in the welfare of convicts to visit a prison or read an exposé or commission report. ‘The public,’ while often ancillary to panoptic projects, and called into being by commissions of inquiry, was nonetheless organized independently of agencies of the state and of the professional ‘disciplines.’80 The appetite for knowledge had for its members a different meaning than it would have for a director of an asylum for the insane or the deputy minister of a department of labour. They were witness to panoptic investigations that made visible the lives and conditions of others who might be either less or more powerful than themselves – convicts and ‘fallen women,’ or monopolists and machine politicians – but whose actions were otherwise hidden because they took place at a distance. The world of published reports, and the literary, journalistic, and academic press that fed off it, was a mechanism of trans-local acquaintance. It allowed for the construction of public selves through the imagination not just of the other, but of others in abstract relation to the self. Durkheim articulated this idea most clearly. Modern divisions of labour increased interdependence, but through ties that were distanciated and abstract and that needed to be represented as concretely and compellingly as possible.81 If Plunkett can be taken as typical, this Durkheimian impulse to re-imagine what modern

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space had disassociated was a distinct element of urban reformers’ interest in rural life. In the transition we are now considering, the reciprocity between the producers of food and the raw materials of clothing on the one hand, and the manufacturers and general traders on the other, has not ceased; it has actually increased since the days of steam and electricity. But it has become national, and even international, rather than local ... But in the complexity of these trade developments townsmen have been cut off more and more from personal contact with the country, and in this way have lost their sense of its importance.82

Plunkett also illustrates how in the archetypical pre-modern rural context these relations of interdependence were thought to be spatially embedded and readily apparent. Within the last century every town relied largely for its food supply on the produce of the fields around its walls. The countrymen coming into the weekly market were the chief customers for the wares of the town craftsmen. In this primitive state of trade, townsmen could not but realise the importance of a prosperous country population around them.83

The ‘rural’ allowed not just for natural policing, but for a community of reciprocity that was concrete, because its ties were spatially bounded. Nineteenth-century efforts to construct selves imbued with a public ethic involved the construction of communities of reciprocity within ‘imaginary’ spaces, such as those that Durkheim proposed be dramatized in collective assemblies, or in artificial places, such as the ‘garden cities’ of town planners. While these inventions may have looked backwards for inspiration, their creative and self-consciously engineered qualities made them as modern and progressive as plans for dams and steamers. Town Planning Town planning became established in Canada through the Commission of Conservation. The commission itself was set up by the Canadian parliament partly in response to the North American country-life movement. It was also meant to raise ‘a strong and intelligent public opinion’ to encourage responsible ministers to take the path of ‘progress and

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improvement’ rather than, for want of organized public support, to fall back upon the easier and less controversial route of ‘laissez faire.’84 The Commission provided a forum for Canada’s fledgling social-reform movement – organizations such as ‘Canadian Clubs,’ Rotary Clubs, Women’s Civic Leagues, and Social Service Councils. Expanding the promotional circle between state and public, it also sponsored new organizations such as the Town Planning Institute and the Civic Improvement League of Canada, described in 1918 as ‘a voluntary organization of citizens, formed under the auspices of the Commission of Conservation, with the general object of stimulating public interest in municipal matters and promoting improvement of civic conditions.85 The Commission in 1914 hired Thomas Adams, who had been a student of Ebenezer Howard and a key player in the British garden-cities movement. In his position as Town Planning Advisor Adams became an energetic advocate of town planning as an approach to civic improvement, both urban and rural. Following Howard, Adams advocated integrated urban and rural planning. The guiding principle was ‘decentralization,’ the drawing of population out of the overcrowded urban centres and back into the depopulated countryside, where ‘towns’ and agricultural villages would be designed to accommodate them. These towns or ‘garden cities’ were aesthetically countrified, featuring cottage architecture, village greens, and provision for large gardens or allotments.86 Spatial scale was also carefully controlled so that population remained somewhere between the unhealthy extremes of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ size and density.87 Wide ‘green belts’ of untouched countryside were to separate these new towns from the great metropolises. This was spatial engineering on a grand scale. But proponents of decentralization were able to make plausible arguments that it was practicable given modern developments. Labour unrest in many large cities88 was fuelling a ‘natural and growing tendency’ towards the relocation of manufacturing plants to suburbs or small ‘satellite towns.’ Garden cities offered investors the prospect of healthy and contented workforces. Modern means of communication and transportation – railways plus the more flexible automobile and motor truck – promised an uninterrupted flow of traffic at unprecedented speed between centres and their satellites.89 Gasoline and, to a greater degree, electricity offered sources of power that could be deployed on a smaller scale and with greater spatial flexibility than steam. The possibilities of electricity for restructuring space were as exciting in 1900 as they were on the eve of the twenty-first century. It

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could be conveyed over great distances through copper wires or produced in most localities using small-scale hydroelectric generators.90 Kropotkin, an influential proponent of decentralization, argued that a new spatial logic of production was emerging in the late nineteenth century – one that bore resemblances to the post-fordist ‘flexible specialization’ supposedly emerging in the late twentieth.91 The ‘leviathan factories’ were not longer technically necessary for the manufacture of most goods. Indeed, they were increasingly at a disadvantage to their smaller, more agile competitors, since they could not as ‘rapidly reform their machinery according to the constantly varying demands of consumers.’92 Small-scale fabrication of ‘mathematical and optical instruments, of furniture, of small luxury articles, of pottery and so on’ was design-intensive, and required workers with technical and aesthetic skills and ‘the genius of invention.’93 A rural environment was congenial to this sort of worker. Semi-rural localities could have an advantage in attracting them and the industries that employed them. The growth of small urban centres dispersed throughout the countryside would provide local markets for a wide range of agricultural products and thereby support mixed and intensive farming. Farm households could also engage in small-scale manufacture. This more fine-textured integration of the ‘urban’ within the rural would facilitate greater flexibility in the allocation of time – allowing rural workers to remain productive during slack seasons. At the same time, it would support a larger workforce on the land. The ideal, exemplified in certain regions in France and Denmark, was of a petit-bourgeois pastorale: ‘Almost every house lies half hidden behind a thicket of fruit and rose trees, and behind the flower pots in the large windows, or sitting on the threshold, as the case may be, one sees the whole family in busy activity turning out ribbons, laces, brushes, combs, knives, baskets or whatever may be of special interest to the district.94 The vision was of cottage industry modernized, with labour-saving machinery and the co-operative organization of production and marketing. British town planners proposed spatial arrangements that were to facilitate co-operative production and intensive agriculture. A 1916 design sponsored by the Garden City and Town Planning Association (see figure 3.1) had farm dwellings physically concentrated and focused around a cluster of public buildings that were to house common social as well as productive activities.95 It is also notable for its annular structure and the ground plan of its public buildings, so reminiscent of Fourier’s Phalanx.

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Figure 3.1 Agricultural colony, 1916: Plan for a ‘Holding for a Fruit and Market Garden Colony’ proposed by the English Garden City and Town Planning Association in 1916. Note that the entire area is 1000 acres, equivalent to just over 1½ sections of the Dominion survey. Thomas Adam’s plan (see figure 3.2) is for a full township – 23 times the size of the plan pictured here. (Source : D. Hardy, From Garden Cities to New Towns (London: E. & F.N. Spon, 1991), 124)

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The town-planning vision of the rural was supposed to be economically practical and in line with modern trends, but also attractive. It offered pastoral beauty, but also self-fulfilment. In overcoming the spatial division of labour, town planning also overcame the occupational division of labour and promised to realize a widely held and enduring ideal of a fulfilling labour process. Marx, inspired by the utopian socialists, advocated the spatial reintegration of rural and urban.96 It figured in Fourier’s architecture of ‘attractive work,’ and was the implicit environment that would allow Marx’s unaliented worker under communism to ‘hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, [and] criticize after dinner.’97 The pastoral note in musings on the theme of the well-rounded occupation has persisted well into the twentieth century. Marx had sympathized with the aims of the utopian socialists. But he opposed efforts to implement them within capitalist conditions and through the patronage of enlightened investors. The collective machinery of socialism was bound under such conditions to be perverted to the ends of labour control and the extraction of surplus value.98 Even the countryside had first to undergo revolutionary upheaval. ‘In the sphere of agriculture, modern industry has a more revolutionary effect than elsewhere, for this reason, that it annihilates the peasant, that bulwark of the old society ... Thus the desire for social changes, and the class antagonisms are brought to the same level in the country as in the towns.’99 Rural planning was animated by a vague dread of revolutionary farmers. ‘Capitalism’ was understood not as an overarching system, but as a rather unnecessarily selfish and exclusively profit-oriented business ethic. Unleashed in the countryside it was likely to produce Americanstyle ‘bonanza farms.’ These vast corporate enterprises relied upon machinery to ‘mine’ the soil and, on land that might otherwise support numerous independent farm owners, employed a relatively small proletarianized rural labour force. Town planners and rural reformers generally promoted smallholdings as an alternative to proletarianization and as a defence against the ‘infection’ of the countryside by ‘Socialism of the predatory kind.’100 They were willing to support bold interventions in the market for land in order to shape the class character of rural life. The Garden City and Town Planning Association in its 1916 plan envisioned tiny individual holdings of five acres, supported by the spatial infrastructure for intensive farming. It also provided for much of the land of the agricultural colony to be held in common.101 State owner-

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ship of land with guaranteed tenure for individual leaseholders was another popular solution to the problem of preserving agricultural smallholdings.102 These borrowings from the socialist tradition were meant to protect rural life from revolutionary socialism, but also to protect it, both at ‘home’ and, especially, in the colonies, ‘from the mistakes and misfortunes that follow in the tracks of unrestrained individualism so often apparent in the development of a new country.’103 Town planning promised to preserve public life, to promote a corporate ethic in opposition to commercialism and class antagonism. It appealed to moderate socialists, but also to imperialists, including Canada’s colonial elite,104 who read in it a way of recapturing the virtues of the rural ‘old order.’ For imperialists, industrial growth and the transnational market served private ‘capitalistic’ interests, but threatened to weaken those great supra-individual unities of ‘race’ and nation. The global market compromised the territorial integrity of nations by making them economically dependent upon others and thereby vulnerable in times of war.105 Industrial labour and slum conditions in the city were shaping ‘a puny and stunted race, which [would] be unable to bear the burden of empire.’106 The shift of population from rural to urban represented a danger to the ‘body politic’ that was both physical and moral. Unreformed cities bred populations that could be trusted neither to defend the empire nor to govern it. The belief that the rural-bred were natural leaders was widely held, not only by the conservative imperialists.107 Rural places were uncritically assumed to be spheres, not just of ‘natural policing’ that made people governable, but also of mutual ties and obligations that made them responsive to interests other than their own and therefore more responsible as leaders of others. Imperialists were the most troubled by the potential of capitalist agriculture for driving people off the land and for transforming the farm owners who remained into a new ‘commercial class.’ They contributed to the racialized debate about settling the Canadian north-west in the turn of the century. As British nationalists they opposed any concessions to Eastern Europeans to settle in exclusive villages or agricultural colonies. At the same time, their appreciation of the antinomies of individualistic settlement called for a critique of the liberal construction of Anglo-Saxon ‘whiteness.’ Against the liberal privileging of Anglo-Saxon individualism and enterprise they sought to reclaim more traditionally ‘rural’ virtues that they saw reflected in French Canadians of the ‘humbler classes.’

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They supported planning efforts by the state to remake in Canada a truly rural British yeomanry properly attached to place and tradition. These projects involved engineered rural ‘places’ that were not unlike the village colonies of the despised Mennonites, Galicians, and Dukhobors. Rural Panopticons Canadian planners saw one of the greatest threats to the ‘character and stability’109 of the rural population in the legal and spatial organization of land by the Dominion Lands Act. ‘The American system, adopted in Canada, is unsound,’ wrote Adams in 1917, ‘to the extent that it falls short of this standard [economical, convenient, and healthy development], even if it could claim to be simple and accurate and to have succeeded for a time in attracting population by speculative means.’110 As we saw in chapter 2, the very simplicity of the checkerboard grid facilitated non-resident ownership and the buying and selling of land at a distance. Land grants of alternate sections helped to thin the population of actual settlers working up the soil. Since the efficiencies of intensive agriculture were thought to require more rather than fewer workers on the land, the inevitable result was a ‘prodigal wastage ... of manpower by scattering its productive energies too widely.’111 This inefficiency helped to explain the high failure rate of settlers and one aspect of their transience. But the speculative opportunities of the grid were also thought to promote the ‘cosmopolitan and restless’112 character of settlers by ‘appealing far too largely to a class of settler who will put in his stipulated amount of residence and clearing of the land, with the chief object in view of selling out as improved property as soon as possible after obtaining his patent rights.’113 In addition to thinning the population, the checkerboard ensured that it was spread out. There was no clustering of farm residences into

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anything that resembled a ‘place’ to which one could become attached. Without physical settlements, it was assumed that there could be no enduring social ties to provide support and anchorage for isolated homesteaders. Residency requirements of the Homestead Act prevented most farmers from making their homes in the small prairie towns established by the railways as stations and loading platforms for wheat. Makeshift and shoddy, laid out in an unvarying rectangular plan, these railway towns offered little to hold the affections in any case. They appeared, according to one observer, ‘as though turned out to the same pattern in the same machine, as lacking in individuality as factory-made furniture, with no ambition to be pretty, but serviceable, workable, dollar earning.’114 Planners saw little in these machine towns that could temper the restless commercial spirit. Like the checkerboard grid, their rectangular plan, according to Adams, suited ‘the interests of speculative owners who act without regard to the public welfare.’115 Most would have agreed with A.A. Stoughton, who in 1917 questioned ‘whether any ... common activity could be long maintained in the centre of the usual sort, utterly deformed, squalid and ugly, and lacking in the barest necessities for the inspiration of a civic spirit.116 Planners’ own inventions for community spaces were meant to reflect the particularities of place. Layouts were diverse and irregular since building sites and streets responded to natural features of topography and setting. Public spaces – village squares, parks, and playgrounds – featured prominently, along with arcadian imagery of trees and gardens. These plans also anticipated an elaborate and, critics said, overly optimistic, architecture of public life. In addition to churches and schools, they envisioned libraries, concert halls, moving-picture theatres, and even central heating plants. The promise of town planning’s comprehensive vision of spatial reform was that intensified rural manufacture and field production and an overall higher population density would provide more economic resources to support a generous public infrastructure. The ‘closer communities,’ as these villages were generally called, were also meant to physically concentrate population, encouraging some or all of the surrounding farmers to take up residence in the village proper or in linked clusters. This clustering allowed for the advantages of economies of scale in building and maintaining public institutions that Eastern European settlements had enjoyed over their scattered neighbours. Spatial economies in mutual aid were to be reinforced by co-operative associations, legally sanctioned and promoted by the state.

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A striking feature of all the closer community designs was the effort made to re-engineer the rural space surrounding the settlement by redrawing the lines of fields. Adams had argued that the rational features of the Dominion Survey were largely restricted to the Cartesian grid of township squares. The internal grid, the checkerboard according to which individual plots were to be apportioned within each township, was at fault not only for encouraging the abuses of speculation but also for rashly ignoring the natural features of the land and ease of social intercourse. A scientific re-survey of each township would allow for far more rational land use. Soils not suited to cultivation could be set aside as woodlots or common pastures; sections interrupted by lakes or streams could be redrawn to assure roughly equal areas of useable land to each owner. More importantly, fields could be redrawn to allow for greater communication and interaction between farmers and townspeople. Dwellings could be clustered in lines or at the foci of radial fields. Road planning could be rationalized, giving direct routes to key destinations and reducing the overall length of roads and the burdens of building and maintenance. Radial plans, with their satisfyingly simple geometry, were common. However, they were also the most vulnerable to criticism for their rigidity and for the supposed inconvenience that triangular fields posed for machine cultivation.117 Adams’s ingenious compromise, illustrated in figure 3.2, retained roughly rectangular fields, but facilitated the location of dwellings on ‘line plans,’ not unlike Mennonite villages, that followed roads radiating out from a central village. Closer communities were artificial spaces designed to facilitate faceto-face contact. Unlike the railway towns that contained a single commercial class (bankers, retailers, and traders), closer communities would allow for the spatial reintegration of agriculturists, artisans, and small manufacturers, as well as commercial tradespeople. They were panoptic devices that promoted public surveillance. As one planner wrote in his evaluation of a proposed radial settlement, it was ‘in these communities rather than the super-crowded urban centres where mob psychology rules, where the neighbour is a stranger and an Ishmael, and where the individual may conceal his anti-social activities – it is in these communities that the strength of a country appears to lie.’118 Clustered settlement also facilitated inspection by central agencies. Experts from the department of agriculture, for example, could visit a single destination and expect to find people already physically assembled there.119 Closer communities were spaces designed to foster the

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Figure 3.2 Closer-community plan, 1917: Thomas Adams illustrates how a township could be resurveyed. His proposal retains the rational features of the Cartesian grid (Fig. 2.1), but replaces the ‘checkerboard’ pattern of land grants (Fig. 2.2) with variants on ‘line plans.’ The resurvey allows for the clustering of farm dwellings and thereby facilitates spatial economies in mutual aid and infrastructure. For example, the length of road required by this survey is considerably less than in the conventional checkerboard. The proposal recalls earlier conceptions of the township as a social nexus with a geographic focus in centrally located public buildings and a geographic extent defined by ease of travel from the centre. In addition to accommodating social values, Adams argues that such resurveys could more flexibly adapt to natural features of the landscape. (Source : T. Adams, Rural Planning and Development [Ottawa, 1917], facing p. 62)

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autonomous formation of ‘the social’ in the further sense of a cross-class community of reciprocity. The aim of the Closer Settlement Movement established in Regina in 1914 was to ‘create a better spirit of responsibility to one’s neighbor than is usually accepted at the present moment.’120 Fostered by the architecture of rural space, this public spirit was to be embodied in individuals and in institutions of voluntary mutual aid separate from the machinery of the state and the market.121 Debate over closer communities followed the lines of debate over the spatial division of labour in field production. Critics assessing Adams’s plan argued that the fields were too small for extensive wheat growing. His and other designs assumed that field size would remain static, which would limit the possibility of individual enterprise and growth.122 Adams’s assumption was of course that mixed farming would replace wheat and that intensive cultivation would allow greater wealth to be extracted from a fixed area. There would be no need of the ‘expansion units’ designed into the checkerboard, since ‘expansion’ would come about through the redoubling of the capacity of the soil. Many farmers should have been able to make a living on fewer than 160 acres. After all, the British model for an agricultural village represented in figure 3.1 was based on five-acre plots (with a 230-acre commons shared by 112 farmers).123 Farmer leaders who participated in a conference on closer communities held in Regina in 1914 all favoured a more modernist conception of the future of prairie space. An opposition member of the Manitoba legislature suggested that the convention not look to architectural solutions to better field production, but instead focus on the marketing problem. ‘The country needs wider markets,’ he was reported as saying. ‘He did not wish to speak politically, but he thought it necessary that the farmers should get together and work for their own interests.’ After criticizing the banks and the implement and railway companies he concluded that if farming did not pay, ‘the whole economic structure was to blame.’124 Fred Green, a socialist and secretary of the Saskatchewan Grain Growers Association, argued that prairie community need not be constructed through the physical aggregation of dwellings. Technologies of trans-local organization – ‘telephone, daily mails, the farmers’ associations, etc.’ – would increasingly sustain these networks despite physical dispersal.125 Wheat farmers did not sympathize with the pastoralism of closer community designs. They embraced distanciation and the spatial division of labour. Nor were they seduced by the pastoral aesthetic. Increasingly they came to love their uniform square fields126 and ‘ugly’ machine vil-

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lages, particularly the great elevators so admired by LeCorbusier.127 They were to create and inhabit abstract organizational spaces. While their modernism highlighted the pastoral elements of town planning, the latter must be credited with one revolutionary insight. That was the recognition that there were no longer any such things as ‘natural’ rural communities. Whatever spatial guarantees ‘the rural’ had once given of local social order, these could no longer be counted upon. The spatial principles of ‘community’ had to be analysed and employed to re-engineer social networks in the countryside. The important discussions henceforth were concerned with how to construct rural local networks, not with whether they needed to be constructed. In 1917, with some fanfare, Saskatchewan passed an Act Respecting Town Planning and Rural Development.128 This legislation was touted as one of the most advanced of its kind in the country.129 The province went further than any other in institutionalizing town planning, setting up a special Town Planning and Rural Development Branch of the Department of Municipal Affairs, with a director and staff. Deputy Minister J. Norman Bayne, a progressive force in Canada’s Civic Improvement League, was committed to ‘the principle of sane arrangement of the layout of townsites in villages, towns and cities, and even of farms and farm land in the rural areas.’130 Members of his staff had published inventions for closer communities.131 However the legislation appears to have been an annoyance to rural and small-town municipalities.132 While the branch director publicly praised the ‘wise support of town planning’133 by the minister of municipal affairs, George Langley, the latter had been one of the farmer leaders who at the 1914 conference on closer communities had not just opposed but ridiculed the idea. The closest the branch came to instituting the grander aims of town planning was the design of one townsite on the garden-city model intended as a settlement for soldiers returning from the First World War.134 The project was to be financed largely by the Dominion Soldier Settlement Board, but it appears never to have been built. Closer communities, like Bentham’s panopticon, remained ‘architectural figures’ only. After the depression of 1920–1 the branch did no more than approve townsite plans. Nothing more was heard of its director’s ambitions in ‘landscape architecture.’135 The political struggle with modernist farmers over rural space was taken up instead by the Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture and, after 1910, the Department of Agricultural Extension of the University of Saskatchewan. They promoted intensive farming and the denser set-

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tlement that that would enable. The extension department also worked on the construction of rural communities in a form that could be responsive to its travelling instructors and advisers from the department. They abandoned the closer-communities model in favour of an ‘American’ approach to community engineering along the lines suggested by Fred Green in 1914. American rural sociologists promoted what Charles Galpin called ‘rurban’ communities. The idea was to use modern means of communication, the automobile in particular, to bind together face-to-face networks independently of proximity or of simple delineations of physical places.

Chapter 4

Local Governance as Spatial Practice: State Formation

The Art of Government In our colonies there is but little machinery at the seat of government for even pretending to operate at a distance.1 .

Thomas Jefferson provided nineteenth-century revolutionaries with a template for the design of self-government. The ward, or New England township, was, he declared in 1816, ‘[t]he wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government, and for its preservation.’2 Jefferson’s township was based on a spatial principle of design intended to ensure the maximum involvement of the governed in the governing of their own affairs. Its size was to be such ‘that every citizen can attend, when called upon, and act in person.’ The ‘local’ here is a spatial figure that transfers power to the governed, while at the same time authorizing ‘the state’ by collapsing the performative distance between it and the actions of all citizens, physically assembled at the town meeting. The boundaries of the township were implicitly defined by the physical constraints upon common action – not so much the size of manageable meetings in a public hall as the scope of daily, ongoing face-to-face interaction – for Jefferson also uses the term ‘neighborhood’ to describe it. Nineteenth-century anarchists admired the principle. Even Marx, writing in response to Bakunin, who had asked if the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ meant that millions of workers would actually be members of the government, retorted, ‘Certainly, because the thing starts with the self-government of the township.’3 For British Tories local self-government was an unequivocal danger, ‘an egg of sedition’4 that when hatched was sure to be an enemy of the

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central authority of the British Crown. Yet the more enlightened among colonial theorists believed that self-government could, with the proper ‘machinery’ in place, actually strengthen the power of the seats of government in London and the colonial capitals at diminished expense. Great changes were underway in British society that demanded innovation in the art of government. Natural policing, which had guaranteed order at the local level, was threatened by the changing geography of class relations. As Curtis puts it, ‘“Free labour” could no longer be governed through direct supervision and personal contact between rulers and ruled. New relations of production created a new physical and political distance between classes.’5 New spatial divisions of labour opened up ungoverned spaces in England’s industrial towns, and in the vast territories of the colonies. Tremendous strides were made during the century in the design and construction of formal machinery for governing at a distance employing Benthamite principles of transparency and accountability. Technologies of public memory – the census, commissions of inquiry reports, annual reports of inspectors and departments – were expanded and increasingly relied upon as guides in governmental decision making.6 While innovations in record keeping, such as those built into the Dominion Land Survey, helped to extend the spatial range of centralized fact gathering, nineteenth-century paper technologies encountered concrete limits. The weakest link in this cybernetic memory was at the point of fact gathering. Once on paper, knowledge was relatively weightless, transportable, and durable, and could bear the popular analogy with light. As John Stewart Mill put it, the central state could be ‘a focus at which all [the] scattered rays [of knowledge] are collected, that the broken and coloured lights which exist elsewhere may find there what is necessary to complete and purify them.’7 But getting knowledge onto paper required a network of physical persons ‘on the spot’ who could obtain ‘ocular experience’ of local persons and goings on and correspond about it.8 Purely automated systems of surveillance in which actors unwittingly conspired with machines to make records of their movements and habits were not to be devised until the late twentieth century. A complete saturation of governed territory with resident inspectors, such as that imagined by Bentham in his more excessive moments,9 was cumbersome and heavy and contrary to the principles of economy in institutional design. Mill thought it obvious that most local affairs were beyond the scope of formal knowledge gathering.

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I need not dwell upon the deficiencies of the central authority in detailed knowledge of local persons and things, and the too great engrossment of its time and thoughts by other concerns, to admit of its acquiring the quantity and quality of local knowledge necessary even for deciding on complaints, and enforcing responsibility for so great a number of local agents.10

Local ‘self-government’ was seen as a means of delegating the tasks, as well as much of the expense, of governing to those who were not in the formal employ of the state. The idea was that elected local councillors would work ‘gratuitously’ in the interests of their districts. The knowledge on which they based policy derived from ongoing direct contact with persons and conditions, and most of it could go unrecorded. Their formal records could be abbreviated and filtered to suit the needs of central agencies. Therefore, at little cost they could extend the powers of surveillance of the central body. By delegating power over a limited range of expenditure, as well as power to levy taxes, the central authority could confer one of its more odious functions on a body better able to justify it. In their exercise of governmental authority, local councillors could trade on the face-to-face character of their relationship with their constituents. Their sphere of influence was the key asset that they brought to government. The boundaries of their informal networks of contacts defined the ideal spatial limits of effective local government. Local mechanisms of surveillance and legitimation offered by selfgovernment relied upon embedded relations. For liberal theorists of government in the colonies local authority was meant to extended the reach of the trans-local machinery of central government through a kind of hybrid structure of abstracted and embodied components. Lord Durham had recommended it for Canada as the best means of guaranteeing order in the aftermath of the tax revolts of 1837–8. Durham’s successor, Poulett Thompson,11 also saw the value of self-government for central control. Without it, the provincial capital has neither any officer in its own confidence in the different parts of these extended provinces from whom it can seek information, nor is there any recognized body enjoying the public confidence with whom it can communicate, either to determine what are the real wants and wishes of the locality, or through whom it may afford explanations.12

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It was the missing ‘machinery,’ alluded to by Wakefield in the opening quotation of this chapter, that would allow colonial governments ‘to operate at a distance.’ Liberal confidence in local authorities in contexts where traditional class relations did not exist was founded upon enlightenment optimism. Yet the evidence at hand was not encouraging. The United States was acknowledged as the exemplar of ‘bad government.’ New local assemblies in British colonies were characterized by ‘a violence short of rebellion, faction-fighting, impeachment, and the stopping of supplies.’13 Wakefield thought that the ‘low standard of honour in the colonies’ could be attributed to ‘the insignificant proportion which emigrants of the better order bear to the other classes.’14 Lord Durham, when assessing the potential of Lower Canada for self government, wrote: ‘There is no class resembling English “country gentlemen” among the Canadians, nor do the doctors, notaries and lawyers who overabound in the colony, form an efficient substitute for such a class.’15 Contempt for the ‘money-making, trafficking’ spirit of the new commercial classes, particularly as it was manifest in the colonies, was general.16 Of America, Mill wrote: The private money-getting occupation of almost everyone is more or less a mechanical routine; it brings but few of his faculties into action, while its exclusive pursuit tends to fasten his attention and interest exclusively upon himself, and upon his family as appendages of himself; making him indifferent to the public, to the more generous objects of the nobler instincts, and, in his inordinate regard for his personal comforts, selfish and cowardly.17

Whatever other ‘bourgeois’ virtues colonial men of property already possessed, in order to be entrusted with government they still had to acquire an interest in ‘the prosperity of the many’ and a willingness ‘to labour for the advancement of their uninstructed neighbours.’18 This more universal interest in the public good could be learned, liberals believed, through the actual practice of self-government, which they styled as a great ‘normal school’ of public administration. Enlightenment faith in rationality and the ‘unity of mind’ provided them with the assurance that popular education in administrative and political skills would not be misused or diverted to the service of regional, class, or ‘racial’ interests. The British legal and constitutional framework and the laws of political economy presented a uniform ‘logic of the situa-

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tion’ to which any rational being, regardless of class or race and (for radicals like Mill) even gender, would respond in largely similar ways. The key was that local agents had to become alive to these conditions through facing them daily in the practice of administration under the didactic guidance of central offices and their agents and the panoptic gaze of public opinion. Class, race, and gender made an enormous difference, but only in the time and expense it would take to shape representatives into ‘intelligent’ self-governing agents. A similar Enlightenment universalism characterized Marxian analyses of the state, except that here the logic of the situation was defined by the accumulation of capital. When Marx speaks approvingly of self-government, he is speaking dialectically, because under capitalist property relations, selfgovernment could never be anything other than government in the interests of capital. The nineteenth-century principles of government were implicitly spatial. State making following these principles was to face unique challenges in the prairie west. Here the parallel projects of community engineering and landscape architecture made the spatial context unstable and its future unpredictable. Engineering efforts were frustrated on all three fronts and the resulting machinery was spatially incoherent and resulted in a form of local governance that worked in surprising and unintended ways. The Contested Shape of the Body Politic The ‘sublime audacity’19 of nineteenth-century engineering was what made the idea of governing the Canadian west from Ottawa thinkable. The region was separated from the capital by hundreds of miles of bare rock, muskeg, and forest. Commentators never ceased to marvel at its extent. Yet that awe was as much for the scale of the human endeavours of the survey, the railway, and the telegraph that were to annihilate distance and condense space. Confidence in these and in the promise of even more subtle and powerful technologies of communication was at its height in the first decade of the twentieth century when the boundaries of western provinces were established. Saskatchewan and the other Prairie provinces were given powers over territories that were large even by the standards of the American midwest. The efficient exercise of government within these spaces had to rest, at least initially, upon the design of effective institutions of local self-government. The first task was to determine the appropriate dimensions of the ‘local.’ Legislators

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adopted a tentative and flexible approach to this problem. By 1905 authorities with the Department of the Interior had instituted then dissolved a number of experiments, all of which had proved unsatisfactory. Conditions of settlement were changing rapidly and were understood to be malleable and responsive to direction through public policy. Even so, at the moment of decision the prairie environment had a shape that was startling in its novelty. Bentham had warned that the inspective function of administration was proportionally more expensive the thinner the population. ‘[W]here the population is dense, much less difficulty and delay will the ordinance of the superordinate functionaries, in the several departments and subdepartments, be exposed to, in respect of execution, than when it is thin: in a word, the facility will be as the density; the difficulty as the thinness.’20 The prairies at the turn of the century presented an acute instance of the problem of the ‘thinness’ of population. Bentham had also counselled that each functionary should not be too far distant from ‘the spot which ... is within the local field of his operations.’21 An entirely unique feature of the west was that for the majority of settlers there were no aggregations of population – neither clustered dwellings nor public buildings or squares in which people regularly gathered. There were, in effect, no ‘spots’ for inspectors to visit. Doubts about the manageability of the prairie population were articulated in terms of the threat to good government of individualism and racial divisiveness.22 The former was thought to be bred by the commercial incentives to western colonization and the latter by homogeneous and exclusive enclaves of eastern European settlers. No explicit attention was given to the issue of class, although perhaps it should have been. Class segregation was built into the homestead provisions of the Dominion Lands Act. Even the limited concessions to collective forms of land tenure were expected to give way to pressures toward individual proprietorship and an accumulative ethic. Residency requirements ensured that farmers and their families established their first homes in the open country rather than in the small railway towns. The initial result was agrarian petit-bourgeois class homogeneity to an unprecedented degree in the open country as well as spatial segregation of this class from the tiny enclaves of professional and commercial elites in the towns. J.S. Mill for one had had little faith in the potential of farmers for intelligent self-government.23 More ominously, during the period that the design of prairie local government was being contemplated, a

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debate had already begun among revolutionaries concerning the potential of the agrarian petty-bourgeoisie for Marxist revolution.24 While Lenin rejected them as ultimately unreliable allies, he recognized that their political potential was ambivalent, ‘Janus-faced,’ and that they were certainly no more reliable as traditional supporters of the ‘old order’ or of laissez-faire capitalism. Until prevailing conditions on the prairies changed, there could be no spatially coherent solution to the problem of government following nineteenth-century precepts of either local or distanciated forms of oversight. The dimensions of the American township adopted as the basic unit of the Dominion Land Survey in Canada provided a template for the design of units of the ‘local.’ Eighteenth-century architects of the American township had envisioned a form of block settlement, like that demanded by European immigrants in Canada. Indeed, townships were initially to be sold only to collective purchasers who were expected to establish within their boundaries the architecture of communities.25 It made sense to vest the authority of the state in townships such as these that were not only a convenient size for face-to-face interaction, but were organized as coherent collective agents. Each township, according to Jefferson, was to elect a representative to the county, a unit large enough to support a court and perhaps other administrative buildings. But the powers of the county were to be derivative from the townships, which would relieve it of ‘nearly all of its business.’ Townships themselves were expected to support a rather elaborate machinery of government: ‘A justice, ... a constable, a military company, a patrol, a school, the care of their own poor, the choice of one or more jurors to serve in some court, and the delivery, within their own wards’ – another term he uses for townships – ‘of their own votes for all elected officers of higher sphere.’26 Experiments with township-based administration in the Canadian prairies in the 1890s demonstrated that a six-mile square was a convenient size for mutual aid. The compass of rural interaction was limited by a constant – the speed of a draught animal on an unsurfaced road – that applied from the seventeenth through, in some places, well into the twentieth century. Farmers within townships organized as ‘Statute Labour and Fire Districts’ were required periodically to assemble with their own equipment to plough fire guards and build crude earth roads. The area was small enough that none of the participants would ever have to travel further than seven miles, or an hour’s drive behind a team of work horses. But absentee ownership and the new extensive farming

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practices meant that there were few taxpayers and little taxable property value within the compass of the prairie township. It could support public works rendered in kind, but little that required capital for equipment, salaried officials, or buildings in which to house them. Governance-at-a-distance could be most easily effected if there were some sort of physical architecture of government at the local level. Ideally the local should be a Benthamite ‘spot,’ a single destination for an inspector where local officials and staff could be found in offices at their desks during business hours. In an attempt to finance a local architecture consisting of a ‘court house, jail, registry office and other necessary buildings,’27 Canadian legislators tried erecting counties composed of numerous townships. They discovered that thirty townships (see figure 4.1) were not able to raise sufficient taxes. Worse, the thirtytownship area was far too large to enjoy the authority of the face-to-face. Representatives found travel to the county seat to be onerous and failed to attend county council meetings so frequently that it was difficult to get a quorum. Even a scaled-down experiment in ‘municipalities’ of twenty townships failed to garner legitimacy. Farmers organized ‘active movements’ for their dissolution in favour of Statute Labour and Fire Districts (later renamed ‘local improvement districts’) at the township level.28 Organizing local government on a township basis in Saskatchewan, as settlers preferred, would have created further difficulties for the provision of machinery of central control. Even if every township had been able to support some physical presence, a public centre that inspectors could visit, there would still be too many of them. The provincial government would have to oversee the affairs of some three thousand township administrations.29 By contrast, there would need to be no more than one hundred large counties. The volume of correspondence through central offices and travel by their agents and inspectors would in the latter case be large but nonetheless manageable. The environment that created this dilemma of size for the design of local government was rapidly changing. The conditions of prairie ‘space’ were not immutable, and legislators were aware of that. Before 1908 the territorial and provincial departments of agriculture had begun the campaign for mixed farming and intensive agriculture that promised to increase the density of rural population and the value of agricultural land. In the 1910s town planners began advocating a more radical transformation of the prairie environment that would reintegrate ‘urban’ manufacture into ‘rural’ space. Thomas Adams’s 1917 design for agricultural settlements anticipated that, with rural industry

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Figure 4.1 Hypothetical county of 30 townships: The horizontal axis in this figure is the 49th parallel, the vertical axis is the second meridian. To give an indication of scale, sections and the ‘checkerboard’ of land grants are indicated in township 1 range 1 west of the second meridian (see figure 2.2). The offset between townships in ranges 2 and 3 is a ‘correction line’ introduced in order to adapt a flat grid to a spherical surface. In 1886 Manitoba counties (of 30 townships) were dissolved in favour of 9township ‘rural municipalities’ because the area was found to be too large to administer given the slender tax base which the dispersed prairie population could provide. It was also difficult to get a quorum at meetings since councillors did not have the means to travel great distances. The idea of re-establishing counties persisted. In 1920 Patrick and Pilkington proposed an 81-township county, reasoning that ‘in these days of automobiles and long distance telephones, the contraction of distance and the annihilation of time, make the areas of counties established in Canada and the United States in earlier days, no criterion for Saskatchewan.’ (Source: Abstracted from Census Map, Census of Canada, 1946)

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and intensive farming, even a township could support a physical centre with public buildings. The plan would yield an immeasurable increase in taxable property. As Adams envisioned it, high density of population would support the construction of rail links between township centres. Travel times would be cut and the radius of convenient exchange enlarged to enable the formation of administrative units of considerable size. These reforms of the environment would take time. In the interim there had to be some, if only temporary, form of ‘governing environment’ to promote them at the local level. The solution was to abandon for the time being the idea of the county – as a second tier of local government encompassing a broad territory – and leave many of its functions under the control of provincial departments.30 Accordingly, the provincial attorney general’s office retained its responsibility for the administration of local justice.31 Likewise, the Department of Public Works kept its responsibility for constructing fixed assets such as bridges and ferries and the physical architecture of local government, including courts, prisons, sanatoria, and detention homes.32 These assets then remained under the authority of the relevant provincial departments. The local improvement district (LID) was replaced by the ‘rural municipality’ (RM), an eighteen-mile square (nine townships), as the basic unit of self-government (see figure 4.2). RMs were given responsibility for matters that could not be ‘satisfactorily controlled by the central power at Regina’33 – local agricultural improvement, the promotion of public health, and the administration of relief. Relevant provincial departments – Agriculture, Highways, and Public Health – did their utmost to guide policy, and an entirely new Department of Municipal Affairs was created to oversee RM administration. Municipal inspectors scrutinized RM account books and the minister had the power to review and approve all debentures34 and bylaws.35 The new system, enacted in 1908, encountered local resistance, not because it limited local autonomy, but because there was some lingering fear that the modest machinery of the RM would still be too expensive.36 Officials remained unhappy with the ‘abnormal and purely western shape’ of local government. Some argued that greater population density could perfect RM administration. Manitoba’s municipal commissioner in 1917 believed that more densely settled RMs were more likely to be ‘fired with youthful enterprise and ambition.’ ‘Populate these lands,’ he declared,

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Figure 4.2 Rural municipalities: The standard rural municipality in Saskatchewan was nine townships, although there was some variation (see, e.g., figure 2.1). The horizontal axis in this figure is the 49th parallel, the vertical axis is the second meridian. Sections are indicated in township 1 range 1 west of the second meridian. Rural municipalities endured throughout the twentieth century, although with little of the tangible institutional presence that many had envisioned for local government on the prairies. (Source : Abstracted from Census Map, Census of Canada, 1946)

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However, the hope of replacing RMs with counties or some other large unit persisted. A proposal for counties made in 1921 was notable for the new emphasis its authors placed on speed rather than population density as an enabling condition: ‘In these days of automobiles and long distance telephones, the contraction of distance and the annihilation of time, make the areas of counties established in Canada and the United States in earlier days, no criterion for Saskatchewan.’38 Their argument was that speed and the ‘annihilation of time’ should make possible the enlargement of the sphere of the local both for government and, correspondingly, for communities. The idea echoed a new, flexible, automobile-based model of community engineering being developed in the United States by Charles Galpin. Galpin had in 1915 ‘discovered’ that rural communities on the grid did not correspond to spatially homogeneous and bounded ‘places.’ If one were to map the face-to-face networks that bound rural people together – the loan manager and his farm customers, the open-country households connected through the common activities of their children – one would see different networks overlapping at different spatial scales. The physical embodiments of rural communities – open-country schools, churches, grain elevators, banks – were fragmented, scattered across rural space, and made claims upon catchment areas that were variable in size and non-congruent in outline. Galpin’s was a cubist rural space infused with dynamism. ‘The fundamental community,’ he wrote in 1915, ‘is a composite network of many expanding and contracting feature communities possessing the characteristic pulsating instability of all real life.’39 His engineering idea was to enlarge the scope of, as well as to channel, this dynamism. Galpin represented his vision of ‘social architecture’ in 1914 using fluid metaphors for a fluid geography.

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It only remains for some rural mind once to conceive of the entangling unity of all the farm homes that stand on the same slopes of the social water-sheds draining into one village or small city–the unity of these farm homes and those village homes. When this vivid idea is once visualized ... then we may look for rapid rural organization.’40

The ‘social water-sheds’ he refers to are the widest catchment areas of trade centres. In this passage he immediately shifts to the geological metaphor of rock cooling and solidifying into fixed features of the landscape: ‘Meanwhile the process of wide and deep systematic acquaintance will surely though slowly crystallize into organization, and outcrops of rural social institutions will appear on the land.’41 What was unique about Galpin’s vision was his recognition that these crystallizations would occur at different locations and spatial scales, yet still support linked networks through ongoing cross-country travel. This idea of a fragmented architecture, with rural people constantly moving hither and thither, would have seemed rather too restless and ‘unsettled’ to the British town-planning sensibility. However, it offered much greater flexibility in design. Networks involved in ‘feature communities’ could be established by fiat, through the erection of consolidated high schools or the creation of larger units of local government. These could be encompassed in the same ‘fundamental community,’ but without associated buildings having to be located on the same ‘spot.’ Perhaps more importantly, in the dynamic context of the developing west, these sprawling networks were much more amenable to restructuring than the fixed locales of town planning’s ‘closer communities.’ Galpin and other proponents of rural speed hoped that travel on improved roads would reconnect urban and rural classes separated by the new spatial division of labour in the west. These people would not be residentially proximate, but they would increasingly interact in his imagined ‘rurban’ communities, and in so doing develop common interests.42 Saskatchewan’s modernist advocates for counties also expected that the ‘contraction of distance and the annihilation of time’ could create ‘solidarity and community’ between rural and urban people and lessen ‘that mistaken antagonism which is the result of the entire separation of urban and rural municipalities.’43 A curious feature of the design of RMs in 1908 was the complete exclusion of all incorporated villages and towns. RMs were ‘perforated’ squares of exclusively rural space. This represented an unusual choice that disregarded, at some peril, the nineteenth-century principle that self-government

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should be an education in the common good. It made the RMs and their provincial association, the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM), entirely homogeneous with respect to class. Galpin’s cubist architecture was only possible through speed and the diffuse and flexible patterns of travel enabled by surfaced roads as opposed to the fixed, centralized routes of railway lines. There was no debate about the virtues of ‘good roads’ in the west. Still, despite determined effort, RM councils were incapable of creating them. With the little capital available the best they could do was what was called ‘improved earth.’ This involved ploughing up sod from either side of a road allowance, piling it in the centre, and levelling or ‘dragging’ it to form a crown. Stripped of vegetation this material had little structural integrity and when wet turned into what people aptly described as ‘gumbo.’44 Later, the mud furrows would dry rock-hard. Local farmers, who normally did the work, found themselves repeating it endlessly, like Sisyphus. RMs never raised enough money to surface their roads with gravel or any form of pavement. Nor did they have the resources to clear them of the drifting snow that was sculpted into high crests by winter winds. Horse-drawn vehicles were the only reliable means of transport in these conditions. While many Saskatchewan farmers owned automobiles, they could not let these machines define their ongoing patterns of local travel until the roads improved. The twentieth century was half over before the federal and provincial governments assisted Saskatchewan RMs in the construction of ‘all weather’ roads that could support new patterns of exchange in the open country.45 There is no doubt that the design of RMs was in part responsible for their failure to modernize the prairie landscape through speed. They presided over the modernization of field culture, that is, the shift towards exclusive specialization in wheat. Yet in this case they were under constant pressure to oppose it. The promotion of mixed and intensive farming and rural ‘beautification’ (i.e., pastoralization) was within their authority. On their own, RM councils showed little enthusiasm for this project. The efforts of the Department of Agriculture to mobilize their support hinged on the creation of an ‘agricultural representative’ service. This was to be a kind of rural inspectorate modelled after the American ‘county agent’ system. In the United States these resident inspectors were co-financed by government departments and counties. Counties on the American plains, with roughly thirty townships each, could just barely raise the funds required. RMs could not.46 As with roads, it was not until after the Second World War, and only with outside assistance, that a complete system of local agricultural represen-

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tatives was established in Saskatchewan. RMs did not ‘pastoralize’ the landscape, nor could they cope effectively with the contradictions of the modernist dependence on wheat – the epidemics of weeds and pests and the waves of relief claims that followed the frequent crop failures. RMs were able to do little to transform the landscape. They were unable to promote speed or increase population density. Extensive wheat farming prevailed, and after 1936 Saskatchewan’s rural population went into irreversible decline for the remainder of the century. The ‘abnormal’ environment for government and community remained practically unchanged from the end of the First World War, when there was so much will for reform, to the end of the Second, when that will was revived. As local bodies, RMs remained abstract and arbitrary determinations, with no organic links to ‘place’ or ‘community.’47 Throughout this period farm people identified, at the local level, with what Galpin and his followers called ‘open-country neighbourhoods.’ These were not settlements, but contiguous farms spread out, and largely invisible to one another, over an area slightly smaller than a township. Opencountry neighbourhoods were held together by networks of exchanges focused on the schoolhouse. Parents were drawn into contact through their children, farmers and their wives through mutual aid. The schoolhouse was typically the only public building and people gathered there for dances and other assemblies that helped to affirm their collective existence. People minimized travel beyond this sphere. Excursions beyond it were normally limited to a single grain shipping point on the rail line. Certain days of the month, informally designated ‘train days,’ were times for farm people to gather in the town. Contrary to what Galpin would have imagined, Saskatchewan farmers sought out each other’s company on these occasions and avoided contact with townspeople.48 Farmers identified with ‘their’ town or whistle stop only as a sort of ‘convention site’ for purely open-country networks. While the RM did not add a further sphere to these restricted local ties, SARM, the provincial association of RMs, in quite unexpected fashion, did. While bad roads made local travel perilous and slow, the train was as regular as a metropolitan subway. From any platform, a passenger could step onto a high-speed network that converged on the major cities of the province. For the hundreds of farmers who regularly attended SARM conventions in Regina, Saskatoon, or North Battleford and heard speakers from around the province or from the various departments of the provincial government, the province itself became part of their sphere of ongoing interaction, and one of the main focuses of their sense of ‘place.’

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Trans-local ‘Local Politics’ It only needs steady and cheerful support and it will take its place side by side with the Grain Growers Association in becoming a power for the popular good that cannot be ignored.49

The power of SARM as a governmental body was largely accidental. No doubt some official made the rough calculation that the provisional choice of an eighteen-mile square would mean there would be somewhere in excess of three hundred local government bodies in the province of Saskatchewan. The number had obvious implications for the costs of inspection. Still, its implications for the size of the collective assemblies that resulted when local representatives gathered for conventions could hardly have been anticipated. SARM conventions came to enjoy a dual status. They were bodies of elected representatives, but they also acquired, in the nineteenth-century tradition of the public demonstration, meaning as popular rallies. Consequently their size was read as a manifestation of legitimacy. Provincial officials welcomed the large crowds. Ministers and deputies of interested departments were regular guests and speakers. The convention was invaluable from their perspective as it assembled at a single spot and at little expense a far-flung and normally inaccessible population. They used their addresses as occasions to provide a kind of ‘short course’ on good government. Through listening to resolutions they discovered how popular thought ‘was lying along certain lines,’ without any obligation to disclose their own policy intentions or consult before making decisions.50 Watching the assembly in action, they could monitor the development of RM councillors as self-governing agents. This interest was reflected in regular ‘progress reports’ issued by N. Moulton, the editor of the Western Municipal News: [1910] It was a busy, cheery Convention, with less of the Obstructionist element present, less of a lack of point and concentration, more real work, more logical discussion than ever before. [1913] The growth of the Association in poise and thoughtfulness was shown in that no hasty action was taken in the matter of the books and no resolution passed even by the committee appointed, but time asked for to go carefully into the points of the paper and this with the Department responsible for the system.51

She recorded with some satisfaction the growing ‘intelligence’ of the

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assembly as well as the making of a public spirit that overrode the commercialism and ethnic exclusiveness that had been such a cause for anxiety. Describing the 1908 convention, she wrote: Listening, we heard the burr of the Scot, the brogue of the Celt, the soft ‘whatever’ of the Welshman, the drawl of the United States Westerner, the broad vowels of the Englishman, the quaint phrasings and accents of Russians, Swiss, French, Swedes, and Galicians, all cutting across and mingling with the unmistakable Canadian tongue. And over and over again we marvelled at the clear grasp so many of these newer citizens had of Canadian laws, of the workings of municipal systems, of the needs of their districts ... There was a sort of God-bless-you-you’re-one-of-us feeling that sent a glow over the whole convention.52

Councillors were eager to learn about the technical details of law and finance that governed the performance of their offices. J.N. Bayne, the first deputy minister of municipal affairs, and ‘unrelenting tyrant’ to the incompetent,53 was a great attraction at conventions. ‘Questions buzzed around his ears as usual. He enjoys the swarming interrogation points which he so successfully hives. His enjoyment is so evident it is sometimes amusing to watch the efforts of the officers to shoo away the swarm.’54 Yet SARM delegates quickly learned that they could also challenge and rewrite the legal framework that defined their local powers. Their signal success came in 1911, when they lobbied for legislation enabling an innovative program of municipal hail insurance. The SARM executive was regularly granted an audience with the premier and important ministers to discuss government responses to SARM resolutions. SARM delegates grew increasingly impatient with long addresses and insistent that the ‘real business’ of the convention was its resolutions. Here they sought amendments to the Rural Municipalities Act, often fine-tuning it to fit circumstances met with in the daily practice of administration. They also proposed new legislation on a range of issues often completely outside the sphere of local government. SARM acquired an unofficial status as a ‘parliament’ and its influence over the provincial legislature was frequently remarked upon. ‘I think,’ the minister of municipal affairs told the convention in 1921, ‘[that] these conventions sometimes have more authority over the legislature than we members who sit there.’55 Most of the province’s 301 RMs sent one or two delegates, and these, plus an increasing number of visitors, swelled the assemblies to between 600 and 1000 people (see figure 4.3, following p. 83). These numbers contributed to SARM’s public presence. Yet

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as the president of the Association implied in 1936, SARM delegates could also, to a far greater degree than members of the legislature, draw authority from the face-to-face quality of local representation. It has been stated on many occasions, and I have no apology for repeating the statement, that the delegates attending conventions of this Association are the most representative body of men in Saskatchewan. We come from all corners of the province and represent six hundred thousand residents of our rural area, or two thirds of our entire population. You are elected to office under the most democratic form of government in existence and are chosen for that office by your own friends and neighbors because they know you and have confidence in your integrity and ability to properly conduct public business.56

Young farmers entering municipal politics in the first decades of the twentieth century were caught up in a general reform optimism in the province. It was a world in the making that appeared to offer unparalleled scope for public participation.57 SARM was one of many voices of public opinion, and it took some time for its representatives to stake out for themselves a ‘useful field of labour’ and establish a clear political identity. They were drawn both to the agrarian ‘class politics’ of the Saskatchewan Grain Growers Association as well as to the ideals of ‘civic reform’ promoted by the Commission of Conservation. Even though there was no legislative intention that it should be constituted a class organization or act in class interests, SARM was nonetheless exclusively a farmer’s organization and most prairie farmers were owner-operators. Municipal farm leaders struggled against the restraints of the Rural Municipalities Act to advance the agrarian projects of ‘economic populism’ – democratic access to capital and the control of the marketing and transport infrastructure for farm products or, more specifically, for that controversial and highly politicized commodity – wheat. SARM delegates called unsuccessfully for legislation that would enable RMs to own and operate grain elevators and mills,58 and to act as people’s banks.59 They also sought ways to use the RMs’ existing powers to regulate the local activities of railway agents, grain dealers, and speculators.60 Unlike the RMs it represented, SARM itself had no legally delimited jurisdiction, and members took every opportunity to speak on matters that were clearly provincial, and in some cases national, in scope.61 In 1911 they resolved in favour of national ownership of the hated railway monopolies.62 In the 1920s delegates readily endorsed the efforts of the

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Saskatchewan Wheat Pool to displace completely the province’s private grain marketers.63 SARM’s unique contribution, which was to distinguished it from other farmers’ organizations in Saskatchewan and elsewhere, was its support of the ‘gendered’ interests of ‘civic reform.’ Violet McNaughton, a member of the S.G.G.A. executive and women’s editor of the Grain Growers’ Guide, was one of the most influential spokespersons for civic-reform discourse within the agrarian movement. Greater public responsibility for the ‘women’s sphere’ was one of the tenets of town planning. Its antecedents here were the utopian socialists, whose community architecture – co-operative kitchens, laundries, and child care – was meant to liberate women from domestic slavery. McNaughton was clearly attracted to this feminist promise and advocated common facilities for co-operative laundries, bakeries, creameries, and cultural facilities for women on the prairies. For Canadian town planners, attention to the ‘social side’ of rural settlement, so neglected in the accountant’s vision of checkerboard settlement, was key to landscape and environmental engineering. It would ensure that women remained ‘down on the farm’ providing an anchor to ambitious men and a foundation for building permanent and ‘beautiful’ homes within densely populated communities. McNaughton was also in touch with progressive and humanitarian spokesmen for the public health movement. She championed their ideas for municipally funded rural doctors and nurses, as well as municipal hospitals.64 Progressive reformers, under the sponsorship of the Canadian Commission of Conservation, between 1910 and 1920 promoted not just ‘public spirit’ and state regulation, but outright state ownership to curb the abuses of capitalism in sensitive areas of the public good. For reforms to foster ‘home and community’ the emphasis was on the local state and municipal ownership. ‘I think it is conceded,’ McNaughton wrote in 1916, that most of our future reforms must be brought about through the Municipality. This means that greater responsibility will rest on the municipal officers and greater intelligence and interest will need to be shown by the tax payers as a whole. ... I look to the time when tax payers will ask for a library tax, for the establishment of a recreational centre, and for such other reforms as will make country people forget that they contemplated ever ‘leaving the land!’ The West is God’s Own Land and it is through Municipal Administration it can be kept so.65

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Figure 4.3 Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities, 10th annual convention, Saskatoon, March 1915: ‘There was throughout the speeches and comments,’ observed the editor of the Western Municipal News in 1915, ‘a strong sentiment towards better and more permanent homes and community life in

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rural Saskatchewan.’ This was the first meeting at which women were in attendance (although one has to look hard to find them in this photo). (Source: Ralph Dill, Saskatchewan Archives Board, SB 9941.0)

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Women leaders in the west found their most sympathetic response in the area of rural health care. This was the era of the ‘cult of cleanliness.’ ‘As the dawn light creeps,’ wrote Moulton for the Western Municipal News in 1912, we are doing our best to be sanitary. We are trying to understand what we are told about the White Plague [tuberculosis], and more of us each year grow keen on ventilation. Sewage systems and incinerators are installed ... The Health Officer is attaining a more honoured position. Laboratories and sanitary engineers experiment for our good. The drinking cup on trains has become individual. And now exeunt Old Roller Towel.66

Farm women in Saskatchewan, conscious of this new world whenever they stepped onto a train, were doing their best at home with no running water, no mechanized appliances, and in many cases one- or two-room shacks with dirt floors. The Commission of Conservation indicted profitdriven machine settlement for its ‘wastage of human resources.’ This language struck a chord with farm women that must have been amplified against the background of the machine slaughter of the First World War. When the Women’s Grain Growers focused attention on the high mortality rates for rural children and mothers in 1915, and took their concerns to the RMs and SARM, the response was almost immediate. At the 1916 SARM convention the minister had already declared their cause a priority.67 ‘I would rather that ten roads remain unbuilt,’ he told the audience, ‘than that one woman should die.’68 By 1919 Moulton reported that the call had become ‘very loud’ from SARM ‘for the Public Health Nurse, increased hospital accommodation, and some subsidised form of medical assistance within reach of the remote settlers.’69 The enthusiastic support of SARM delegates for the ‘bourgeois idealism’ of civic reform was decisive in convincing the province to pass legislation enabling municipal doctor and hospital schemes. The majority of RMs, under the encouragement and support of local women’s organizations and the provincial Bureau of Public Health, eventually used their new powers to hire full-time physicians and offer free medical service to eligible residents.70 This was their greatest achievement in more than one sense. The commitment to the ongoing financing of a professional salary was perhaps the maximum that the small unit could support, and was only tolerated because residents saw the extra taxes as legitimate. RMs would not do it on this scale for chartered accountants, road engineers, or the Department of Agriculture’s hoped for District Agricultural Representatives.

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The details of the municipal hospital scheme, as worked out by SARM, acknowledged the limits of the small local unit. The legislation made provision for a number of RMs to combine into large districts that would finance a single hospital to be run by an independent board.71 Municipal support for a ‘bricks and mortar’ solution to the problem of the ‘white plague’ had to be organized at a provincial level. SARM in 1920 committed all of its members to making an ongoing contribution to the sanatorium being constructed by a provincial charity, the Saskatchewan Anti-Tuberculosis League. Tuberculosis tended to be thought of within the turn-of-the-century architectural idiom. It inspired some of the bronchial imagery of urban reform, in which parks and open spaces were meant to fill the consumptive city with fresh air. This and other diseases associated with dense populations were thought to be susceptible to the design of pipes, vents, and other physical structures. The idiom was reflected in Saskatchewan’s town-planning legislation, which called for attention to the shape and orientation of buildings ‘so that working, living and sleeping rooms shall receive a proper amount of sunlight and a sufficient circulation of air.’72 Fort San, as the League’s sanatorium was to be called, incorporated these architectural ideas, but left unresolved the spatial problem of how to get the dispersed prairie population to enjoy them. SARM’s initial motion to support the tuberculosis sanatorium in 1920 implicitly placed a condition of involvement by urban municipalities.73 There was a certain amount of resentment about the fact that the actual legislation had the ‘rurals’ contributing alone. The secretary of SARM suggested that the RMs’ contribution could at least be dedicated to defraying costs already incurred by RMs for ‘indigent’ patients.74 Following this suggestion, a ‘sanatorium pool’ was established in 1924 that transformed the RMs’ contribution from an outright gift into a scheme for distributing the RMs’ existing financial responsibility for TB patients.75 RMs already paid for over 90 per cent of the TB cases for their districts.76 Most patients were unable to pay the high cost of a long sanatorium stay and therefore could be classified as ‘indigent.’ The sanatorium pool was a trans-local mechanism that distributed the ‘risks’ of public support over space and time, making RM costs more predictable. It also ensured a more consistent and higher level of support for patients, since it eliminated the local interest in disallowing claims for aid. In 1929 SARM proposed to extend free treatment to urban TB patients as well, based on what was considered to be an equitable distribution of costs between the rural and urban municipalities, with a large share being given to the province.77

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This was, as the Western Municipal News put it, the ‘most advanced step yet taken.’78 The call for provincial involvement also marked the distance SARM had come from earlier optimism about the local. The ‘trans-local’ imagination had been evident since the collaborative scheme for municipal hail insurance in 1911. But the depressions of 1920 and 1929 confirmed the worst irrationalities of local administration within the modern spatial division of labour. It was not simply that money became scarce just when programs were most needed. The dense infrastructure of the local that had been envisioned in the pastoral project had failed to materialize. Since there was little crop diversity and no rural industry within the boundaries of the typical RM, local disasters struck with uncompromising universality. Often over half of the residents of the RM, responsible and irresponsible alike, would be forced on to relief. In 1935 RMs collected on average 21 per cent of the municipal taxes levied. Desperate local councils in many cases did all they could to refuse relief to their destitute neighbours. SARM became their only site for progressive action. Resolutions throughout the 1930s reflected an increasing demand for wider spatial distribution of risks and for greater provincial and federal responsibility for the local. Perhaps the best indicator of this was delegates’ insistent demand for ‘state medicine.’79 Despite SARM delegates’ implicit critique of the capacity of the RM, they were the main opponents of repeated efforts to create counties or some other form of larger unit to replace it. It was not so much their power at the local level that councillors were unwilling to relinquish, but the power that they enjoyed at the provincial level through SARM, which had, to use Galpin’s metaphor, crystallized into an outcropping on the political landscape. It laid claim to a collective will and common identity as the representative of the Saskatchewan farm ‘community.’ This was ‘community’ without the proximity that town planners envisioned for ‘closer communities’ and more abstract even than Galpin’s mobile and trans-local networks. SARM represented an ‘imagined community’ in Benedict Anderson’s sense that all members could never possibly meet face-to-face. The yearly gathering of the annual convention was a physical dramatization, amplified by media reports, of this intangible body politic. In a Durkheimian sense the convention was a ritual claim to the status of ‘social fact.’ Contrary to principles shared by proponents of ‘self-government,’ American ‘rurbanism’ and British town planning, SARM had become a medium for ‘community’ with a distinctly agrarian class identity. SARM

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was a class agent with some of the universal spatial scope of the provincial state and pretensions to state-like powers at the provincial level. Yet it also enjoyed state-like guarantees of permanence. The Saskatchewan Grain Growers Association was dissolved in 1926 when members voted to unite with the more militantly anti-capitalist Farmer’s Union. The new United Farmers of Canada (Sask. Section) that was formed from this merger was never able to regain the SGGA’s former provincial prestige. The UFC struggled to maintain its locals and fund its activities, and at one point during the Depression approached SARM with the idea that UFC membership should be compulsory and that RMs should exercise their authority to ‘aid agricultural societies’ by collecting dues.80 SARM survived this period with its status as a farmers’ ‘parliament’81 intact largely because its ‘locals’ enjoyed the kind of legal and financial guarantees that the UFC envied. SARM was unusual – nowhere else did the machinery of state take on such a class character and adopt to the same degree the ‘repertoire of contention’ of a social movement. Its hybrid state-movement status gave its members some play in their roles as agents of government. They mastered some of the techniques of governing at a distance. They understood documentary procedures of visibility and accountability. They became adept at tuning the abstract framework of law. They did also become aware, through their experience with the logic of credit, of the limitations of local government in a ‘capitalist’ context. A basic tool for overcoming temporal and spatial limits in local government was the ‘debenture.’ This was a long-term loan by which a municipality could draw capital from beyond its boundaries for local developments that could be expected to pay for themselves only in the future. The actual money was raised through bonds that the province sold on the market. Those with experience in government recognized that this meant that the local became hostage to distant investors. George Langley, a former SGGA. leader who had recently been appointed minister of municipal affairs, pointed out in 1914 that farmers’ reform zeal had already ‘created a tendency to discourage mortgage investment in this province.’82 Appreciation of the dispassionate weight of the atomistic, anonymous actions of distant others gave farm leaders Marxian insight into the mysterious transubstantiation of actors into trans-local ‘capital.’ Perhaps doubt among its members about the possibilities of separating translocal technologies from purely capitalist technologies of time and space made SARM one of the few organizations of Saskatchewan farmers that refrained from an outright indictment of ‘capitalism.’

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This is not to say that SARM delegates were co-opted by pressures from ‘above’ or that the radicals gave up on them. The scale of local representation did make RM councillors more responsible to their constituents. In the 1930s they were frequent guests at schoolhouse meetings of UFC locals, where members were not afraid to call them to account for their policies.83 ‘The exploited,’ wrote one agrarian socialist in 1935, know these men and women, they meet them day after day. It is to this kind of delegate the common man or woman can tell his or her needs. It is to this kind of a delegate the common man and woman can express his displeasure with the action of the council. And it is this kind of delegate that can be disciplined when necessary. In other words ‘All power is with the Soviets.’84

Benthamite transparency worked both ways. The smaller the sphere of the local, and the more dense and numerous its elected assemblies, the weaker the disciplinary power of the centre. Small RMs guaranteed that SARM remained ‘decentralized’ in this sense: responsive to the local but still politically effective at the provincial level. RM councillors understood the logic of governing in a capitalist context, but they did not always comply with it in the way that liberal theory predicted. Given the ‘logic of the situation,’ they should have supported intensive farming. Their ‘betters’ at both the provincial and federal levels advised it as the most rational way to ‘develop’ local jurisdictions and maximize their taxable value. Instead, they supported economic populism and made public health a spending priority. When they reached the limits of local finances during the Depression, they strained for a new structural framework. The president of SARM complained in 1935 that delegates still could not refrain from the sorts of resolutions that would require ‘a complete renovation of our monetary system and our domestic and international trade regulations.’85 They insisted on acting beyond the constraints of bourgeois rationality as well the mandate of the ‘local.’

Chapter 5

Utopics of Resistance: Agrarian Class Formation

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another.1

Agents of Capital / Agents of Class Resistance Notwithstanding the evidence of physical deconcentration of industry heralded by town planners at the turn of the century, the overriding logic of firms was still, as Marx had envisioned, towards the concentration of assets and the expansion of the spatial scope of operations along with a widening of the reach of the machinery of coordination. Mail-order houses epitomized the abstract terrain upon which wellcapitalized modern businesses could operate. With minimal physical embodiment, no local staff or outlets, they were capable of serving customers irrespective of place and coordinating orders and deliveries across whole continents. To achieve these spatial powers or to contain the abuses that they made possible demanded ‘combination.’ This term in the early twentieth century referred to anything from the formation of cartels to mergers to workers’ associations, so long as they involved some form of concerted action across space and time. As we have seen, the wheat industry, in part because of the durable and portable nature of the commodity, was one of the earliest in which business ‘combination’ allowed for systematic operations on a national and international scale. Growers appreciated the powerful embrace in

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which this new complex held entire agricultural regions. Their modernist response – the readiness to specialize in wheat production and to adopt the status of trans-local players alongside global giants – bewildered contemporary observers. However, farmers’ trust lay in the possibilities of trans-local combination. From the start, they recognized the scale of the undertaking. ‘We are not denizens of a hamlet but citizens of a world,’ declared E.A. Partridge to a meeting of farmers in 1902 in what was to become the province of Saskatchewan, ‘and we are facing the interlocking financial, commercial and industrial interests of a thousand million people. If we are to create a fighting force by co-operation of the workers and to meet the giants created by the commercial cooperation of the owners, we have scarcely started.’2 The hand of the state in developing the infrastructure of wheat marketing was very visible, particularly in Canada. Perhaps for this reason it was to the state that early farmers’ organizations in Canada and the United States looked to control the industry. The new spatial division of labour was a tremendous political asset for agrarian radicals intent on power at the state or provincial level. In places like Saskatchewan and North Dakota the majority of the electorate were wheat farmers, and it was relatively easy to get farmer representation in the house or legislative assembly, as well as powerful voter support for platforms of agrarian reform. Once at the controls, however, these farmer representatives typically discovered that the machinery of state was difficult to throw into gear. In North Dakota, the attempts of farmers’ administrations, most notably the Nonpartisan League, to implement state ownership of key industries in the grain trade resulted in governmental pandemonium. Procedural decorum was ignored or sabotaged, and public debate deteriorated into vitriolic and personal attacks. North Dakotans exemplified the ‘bad government’ that British statesmen feared from inexperienced colonists. In Saskatchewan, the provincial Liberal party was able to absorb a large number of farmer representatives and deflect persistent demands for state ownership. The government employed, to good effect, the deliberative ritual of the Commission of Inquiry – first in 1910 over the issue of the ownership of grain elevators, then in 1913 regarding agricultural credit. Both had representatives of the Saskatchewan Grain Growers’ Association as commissioners, and these farm leaders were persuaded that public ownership through co-operative associations would be as effective, while not as politically risky, as state ownership. They were instrumental in getting the SGGA to endorse Commission recommendations and

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in steering the farm movement onto the co-operative path. Even the most militant of Saskatchewan’s farmer radicals recognized that co-ops were an important tool in their fight to regulate monopoly interests and the anarchic capitalist market. In collaboration with the SGGA the provincial government became an active promoter of co-op organization – establishing an enabling legal framework and, in 1914, setting up a special branch of the Department of Agriculture – the Co-operation and Markets Branch – to provide financial and organizational support to the co-op sector. This sort of government patronage was neither unusual nor new, although Saskatchewan appears to have taken it further than most governmental jurisdictions in North America. The Canadian government was certainly more cautious at the time, despite a growing consensus on the value of co-operatives as a means of containing worker unrest. Committee discussions on Canada’s abortive Act Respecting Industrial and Co-operative Societies (1908) reveal in explicit detail how Canadian legislators believed that co-ops might work as a governmental strategy, as instances of what Foucault would call ‘small scale, regional, dispersed panopticisms.’3 Mutualism was understood to be a ‘disciplinary agent’ in the formation of self-governing subjects. One of the witnesses to the Canadian committee, Alphonse Desjardins, quoted a 1901 report to the governor general of India that represented ‘free and unrestricted credit to agriculturists in isolation’ as ‘a positive danger,’ while recommending ‘credit in association, guided and influenced in its use by the wiser counsels, by the increased self-respect, and self-restraint, which association with the wiser and more prudent in mutual self-development, self-managed association, produces,’ as ‘a powerful restorative, an educative, and disciplinary agent, a national necessity.’4 This disciplinary power was to depend for its effectiveness upon the personal knowledge and surveillance exercised by community leaders (the ‘wiser and more prudent’ counsels) and made possible through local face-to-face networks. Again, from the Indian report, the committee heard that no bank of any ordinary type can get down to the village, ascertain the status of the small farmer and the security he can offer; the expense of the inquiry and the risks of the loan would render the necessary cost of any loan far higher than of the local and proximate money-lender, who, probably a villager himself, certainly with a life-long connection to the village clientele, knows his men and their position better than themselves.

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In order to put this Benthamite principle of efficient surveillance into practice in Canada, the geography of the local was to be somewhat arbitrarily defined by the boundaries of the electoral district. As in the case of the design of boundaries of municipal government, the local in the North American context was to be simultaneously constructed and relied upon as an agent of ‘engineered policing.’ The experience of policing others (as well as themselves) against defaulting on credit would impress upon the associated lenders their moral obligation as agents of capital. Credit, abstract money, was, as Wakefield well understood, the structural core of distanciated ‘capitalist’ relations. At the same time it was a ‘practical illusion,’ Marx would say a ‘fetish,’ that ethically ‘responsible’ agents had to make and remake. Now the belief, that the promises to pay, which constitute the great bulk of money, will be kept, depends altogether on the preservation of political order; if there were political disturbance enough to cause a general and serious doubt of the steady execution of the laws, credit would cease: and if credit ceased in this country, what would happen?6

In addition, the routine experience with calculation and accounting, such as would be involved in any co-operative firm, would transfer valuable bourgeois skills to the worker, habituating him ‘to economize, to have order in his business, to be exact in his engagements.’ The immediate contact that the small credit association established between worker and the ‘realities’ of the capitalist nexus could effect an intimate transformation, gradually making him become a capitalist by means of the fund it obliges him to create, by the dividends he receives. Hence what better means of causing the antagonism between capital and labour to disappear than by transforming the labourer, himself, into a capitalist, than by supplying them, in the meantime, with the means of making his credit fill the void created by his lack of means.7

In creating self-governing agents of capital these associations could also autonomize the risks of absorption into the bourgeois habitus. Workers

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would learn to rely on their personal capital for long-term social security, rather than squander it through self-indulgence, idleness, or dissipation, and be thereby reduced to claimants on the public purse. Despite the rhetoric of its supporters, the promotion of co-operatives was not a confident strategy of ‘control.’ One of the objects of co-operative legislation was ‘to foster among the people the principle of association and thereby gain the strength resulting from an association.’ While association was generally accepted as a principle of modern business organization, it was also recognized to be a principle of modern class organization. Conservatives feared that the claims of class would be stronger than the discipline of capitalist self-management. One Canadian senator warned of the example of co-operative associations organized by the Grange in Ontario: ‘A good many of those that took an interest with them went around, cutely whispering in the ears of farmers that retail merchants, as a rule were a lot of thieves.’ ‘There is no need for these co-operative societies,’ argued another, since ‘they create class antipathy as the Grangers did.’8 Conferring organizational powers upon subordinate groups was, as the senators recognized, a volatile strategy. It made sense to promote co-operatives only where other forms of governance were in doubt, or the temptations of dangerous alternatives – militant unionism, socialism, and communism – were powerful. The nineteenth century had given ample cause to heed Burke’s warning that ‘reform delayed is revolution begun.’ In Saskatchewan the clamour for state ownership of monopoly interests in the grain trade was perceived to be a threat to good government and likely ‘to discourage mortgage investment in [the] province.’9 Cooperative ventures shifted the financial and political risks ‘downwards’ to the most vocal proponents of these bold ventures. The first general manager of the Saskatchewan Co-operative Elevator Company, formed on the recommendation of the 1910 Commission of Inquiry, epitomized the educative effects of this transferral of responsibility. In his 1912 address to the shareholders he urged the ‘idealists’ among his fellow farmers to take heed of the commercial aspects of co-operative enterprise and ‘the necessity of making the business succeed especially in order that the financial interests upon which the company relies for credit to conduct its business cannot be antagonised.’10 The unique conditions in Saskatchewan offered further reasons to favour the cooperative path. Governmental hold on the far-flung population was tenuous, and the proliferation of co-operative ‘locals’ promised to provide a further avenue of social governance. As the authors of the 1913 Com-

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mission report concluded, one of the virtues of agricultural credit associations would be the promotion of ‘a more cohesive [rural] social life.’11 Co-operatives did become important foci of rural ‘community’ in Saskatchewan. They enjoyed enthusiastic grass-roots support. Saskatchewan’s enabling legislation did not fix the geographic boundaries of local associations, so that, unlike other community engineering projects, they had the abstractness and flexibility required to accommodate the flux of open-country networks. They also became the most important, and perhaps the only successful, avenue for the promotion of the state’s policy on mixed farming. While the Department of Agriculture struggled against farmer resistance to its ‘better production’ campaign, the Co-operation and Markets Branch was able to appropriate populist rhetoric on reforming the marketing system. While the great grain marketing co-ops figured in its annual reports, the bulk of its budget was directed towards promotion and technical support for production and marketing co-ops for dairy, livestock, eggs, wool, potatoes, honey – in short, for product diversification. The branch was addressing the fundamental complaint farmers had about the mixed farming policy, which was the inattention of its proponents to the problem of the trans-local, to the construction of a viable marketing infrastructure. The co-operative locals were to become crucial elements in trans-local organizational strategies both in the name of the state as well as in the name of farmers as a ‘class.’ The early farmer leaders who advocated statist strategies in North Dakota and Saskatchewan failed to realize how little prairie states were actually capable of governing their dispersed territories. The problem was not just that legislators were beholden to anonymous investors; their own constituencies were beyond the reach of direct influence and were not always responsive to direction. To become effective agents of government, or of the imagined community of ‘class,’ they had to rediscover the principles of governance at a distance. It was not possible simply to ‘play monopoly’ with state resources, as leaders of the Nonpartisan League discovered to their cost. The League adopted a corporate model of command, headed by a threeman executive. ‘Are not the milling interests,’ asked League publicists in a 1915 pamphlet, ‘organized and ably led by a few men?’12 League efforts to govern in this style eventually generated crippling waves of defection from within its own constituency. One of its allies, the Farmers Educational and Cooperative Union of North Dakota, was in the process of establishing Rochdale-style consumer co-operatives. The Roch-

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dale principle fostered democratic self-government by extending management control to shareholders, and limiting each shareholder to a single vote in management decisions. Instead of promoting this autonomization of agrarian power, the League proposed a new and potentially competing system of ‘Consumers United Stores,’ run by a central bulk-buying agency. The scheme had no provision for membership control, but instead an unexplained ‘Education and Propaganda’ fund. Challenged by an understandably critical Union executive in a 1917 meeting, Townley, the League’s main spokesperson, evaded questions, and vainly appealed for loyalty, ‘personal endorsement,’ for himself and the other League leaders. Farm leaders in Saskatchewan, their energies diverted from immediate power at the level of the provincial state and toward co-operative associations and municipal government, became schooled in the techniques of governance-at-a-distance earlier and more thoroughly than their American counterparts. They deployed spatial strategies in their efforts to enlist co-operative organizations in the project of agrarian class-formation. Previous rounds of state making provided them with a model, and the incomplete results and surprising outcomes of these earlier efforts provided them with an environment that uniquely favoured their work of building radical ‘class consciousness.’ Open-country communities and SARM became, through the design of the homestead regulations and of RMs, fields of interaction relatively exclusive to farmers who shared the same economic class position. The spatial division of labour in agricultural production meant that, notwithstanding slight regional variations, almost all had a stake in the production of grain for export and most had a stake in that ‘global commodity,’ wheat.13 Economic class position is always relational. Members of a class share a position first and foremost not in relation to one another but in relation to common others with whom their economic fortunes are linked in potentially antagonistic ways. The relationship defining prairie farmers’ class position was with those who owned and controlled the grainhandling and marketing infrastructure. Like most modern class relations, this was a set of distanciated relationships. The key class ‘others’ dwelt beyond the normal circuit of face-to-face exchanges of the farmer, typically beyond the province and the prairie region. Homestead regulations established the initial petty-bourgeois structure of the farm enterprise.14 With minor variations due to the changing prevalence of wage labour (when farmers sought off-farm income or hired farm hands) and the rental of land, this structure prevailed

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throughout the first half of the twentieth century.15 More accurately, it prevailed within two ‘spatializations’ of economic class homogeneity, the open-country community and the trans-local community of SARM. Within these spheres of interaction farmers did, however, reproduce distinctions of status. The racialization that was part of the discourse of colonization and settlement offered a resource of ‘cultural capital’ to be deployed in the construction of local distinctions, albeit with some regional variations. In contrast to the imperialists’ preference for ‘British stock,’ many settlers reviled the ‘Green Englishman.’ Despite Sifton’s championing of eastern Europeans, other settlers continued to hold them in low esteem. Danysk describes settler prejudice through the eyes of a young Englishman who arrived in Saskatchewan in 1908. He soon discovered that animosity was even stronger toward immigrants from central and eastern Europe [than toward Englishmen], who he reported were in the ‘non-welcome category,’ toward ‘coloured people [who were] relegated to the damned,’ and toward ‘our original Canadian stock [who have] had little love bestowed upon them.16

Protestantism, associated with the virtues of the work ethic and propensity for ‘self-government,’ was also widely recognized as a mark of preferred status. However, by all accounts, religion and ethnicity declined in importance as marks of distinction within the open-country and agrarian organizations such as SARM.17 The liberal project of assimilation through ‘self-government’ bore the results that Moulton observed in SARM when she pictured the ‘quaint phrasings and accents’ of men from varied ethnic backgrounds merging in a ‘God-bless-you-you’re-one-of-us feeling that sent a glow over the whole convention’ in 1908. Socialist projects of class formation were no less universalistic. Organizers for the UFC, the Wheat Pool, and later the CCF all attempted, with varying degrees of success, to bridge ethnic differences in the name of class.18 All of these efforts were also very probably aided by the spatial logic of open-country communities. Low population density and slow travel systems made it difficult to support any institutions of collective life, much less the kind of duplication that would be required to maintain social exclusions. Common action that required ongoing face-to-face interaction, such as mutual aid in domestic labour and farm work, the whist drives, dances, and ‘fowl suppers’ that constituted the main social entertainments, had to cut across internal ethnic exclusions. Informal networks

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tended to cohere around formal organizations in the open country. As Willmott reports, organizations for mutual aid (the school board, rural telephone co-operative, community hall co-operative, ‘beef ring,’19 the Grain Grower’s local serving as a purchasing co-op) predominated, rather than the ‘religious, recreational, fraternal, and patriotic groups’ typical in the towns. As media of shared social or economic interests, they underscored commonalities, often in more or less political terms. It was not uncommon in open-country communities for the political to frame the social. Willmott offers and illustration from Monarch School district in the 1930s, where monthly meetings of the Monarch Lodge of the United Farmers of Canada, held in the homes of members, included much sociability and fun, as well as discussion and action on political and economic problems. The same was true of the local Co-operative Commonwealth Youth Movement branch. For the young people of the district, it served as the focal point, not only for study and discussion, but for recreation as well.20

‘Decentralization’: Bentham in Reverse The spatial strategies of organizers in the name of class were similar in form to the governance strategies involved in state making. The key difference was farmer organizers’ acceptance of the primacy of the open-country locale and ability to organize around it. A related difference was the extent of their commitment to ‘decentralization’ in the design of trans-local structures, or the genuine shift of power from governing bodies to those that they governed. Agrarian radicals’ concept of ‘class’ drew from the Marxist tradition and referred to location within abstract, and essentially exploitive, relations of capitalist production and exchange. For Marx, class location presented actors with a ‘logic of the situation’ that was ‘educative’ of the need for resistance. The concept was similar in form to Mill’s belief that the offices of local government were educative of the need to promote capital accumulation (and the belief that co-operatives could make capitalists out of workers). Both gave reason for placing confidence in local actors to behave ‘responsibly’ in the name of trans-local projects. Farmers could be relied upon to organize and struggle with unity of purpose the more aware they became of the logic of their class situation. Indeed, the raw experience of exploitation of the ‘rank and file’ was thought to make them more clear-sighted than habitual leaders (by 1920 there

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were already a number of examples to point to) appeased by the compensations of office. Participation in co-operative societies would educate them on the workings of the capitalist economic order and furnish them with the organizational skills to challenge or usurp complacent leaders. Most trusted that autonomous organization within the co-operative movement would strengthen the class character of the farmers’ movement. Far from making workers into capitalists, co-ops promised to undermine the ‘capitalist’ ethic. Local co-ops typically had no staff, and their operation depended on volunteer labour by members. They demanded an ethic of public service rather than competitive individualism in order to thrive. True, they were corporate entities in a capitalist context, but their ability to draw upon ‘community’ resources buffered them from the profit imperative that dictated the behaviour of private firms. Democratic public ownership extended the frontier of ‘the social,’ opening up a space for intentional action that could be both more humane and more ‘rational’ than what was allowed by the unfettered market. While capitalist firms squandered money in their efforts to win customers and create within them unheard of and unnecessary ‘needs,’ and duplicated each other’s efforts in a chaotic scramble to compete, co-ops could become direct expressions of social needs and satisfy them in a planned and efficient manner. Many believed that their inherent superiority would enable co-ops to edge capitalist firms out of the market.21 In this way capitalism itself would eventually be transformed, and its key features would give way to ‘co-operation, democratic control, production for use, not for profit.’22 Given the ample discursive play around the political meaning of the co-operative movement, it is not surprising that farmer radicals were just as happy as state bureaucrats to promote it. After 1914 the SGGA and the Co-operation and Markets Branch worked together in the formation and support of local associations. They collaborated in the making of self-governing agents within civil society, but competed over the discursive framing of this agency. While they were partners in the making of social governance, ‘class’ organizations and state organizations were rivals for governmental ‘authority,’ for recognition as trans-local expressions of these local wills. The unprecedented geography of dispersal that served as the setting for this struggle favoured the efforts of farmers’ organizations. As with municipal government, the difficulty that central organs of the state faced was with the scale of ‘the local.’ Face-toface networks simultaneously ensured the moral reach of any central organization and certified its democratic authenticity. The SGGA could

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coordinate tiny, dispersed locals, numbering up to 1000. These formed the basis of many of the early consumer and marketing co-ops. Maintaining contact with locals organized at this level of density proved to be beyond the capacity of government departments relying upon paid staff with fixed travel budgets. Spatial decentralization weakened the powers of all central organizations and secured the anarchist tendencies in the prairie farm movement. Farmers’ organizations had a tactical advantage in maintaining the allegiances of the local because they could draw upon volunteer labour at all levels. What makes Saskatchewan farmers’ organizations interesting and surprisingly ‘modernist’ was their promotion of ‘decentralization,’ their valorizing of the ‘rank and file,’ without making a fetish of the locale. Theirs was a modernism that embraced machine organization, but explicitly rejected its centralist, fascist forms. The movement’s most impressive organizational venture was the Wheat Pool. The ambition was no less than time-space coordination on the scale of the grain exchange, but ‘socially’ managed within the framework of a Rochdalestyle co-operative. The ‘pool’ was a time-deferral mechanism. It bought all of the members’ wheat at a fixed ‘initial price’ at harvest, then timed the sale of that wheat throughout the year so as to ‘flatten’ seasonal price fluctuations and return the average gain in sale price to members at a later date. Endorsed by SARM in 1926, it gained broad and enthusiastic support. By 1930 the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool had 83,000 subscribers or ‘contract holders,’ a substantial majority of farmers in the province.23 It was agitating for a ‘100% compulsory pool,’ which proponents hoped would give it the power, not just to average the final price to farmers, but to raise the overall market price. The idea was to dominate time and territory with a kind of state-like totality. Farmers took a certain delight in the rationalization that was required to make the Pool into ‘a smooth working machine.’ They adopted the abstract grid laid down by the state, taking the RM as the basic unit of spatial accounting. Contract signers in each RM were numbered by last name, such that each had a unique numeric designation that located them on the map – the contract of Mr Abernathy in RM 251, for example, might be numbered #251-1.24 Many farmers identified with their numbers, occasionally adding them to their signature in letters to the Western Producer, or stencilling them on their wagon boxes. Co-ordinating Pool transactions required a huge paper assembly line. Evidently thrilled by its new technologies of speed and scale, the Western Producer in 1925 described the Regina office as

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the largest single office in the Canadian west, occupying an entire floor of 18,000 square feet of space, and with a staff in the neighbourhood of 150. Here the most modern methods are employed in the interests of the grower members, and supported by the latest in office fixtures and equipment. A large battery of stenographers turn out vast quantities of Pool mail daily, addressed to every corner of the province. Adding machines and comptometers are conspicuous on over thirty desks. In the month of June, preparatory to getting out a second interim payment totalling over $10,000,000, on the basis of 20 cents a bushel, [for] No. 1 Northern Wheat, a group of a dozen Elliott-Fisher machines were installed and the bulk of the 65,000 cheques passed through that equipment.25

Their modernism was cutting edge. Indeed Le Corbusier, in the same year, celebrated the offices of the skyscraper with similar sentiment as the place where ‘[e]verything is concentrated ...: the tools that conquer time and space.’26 The Pool also made much of its architectural presence. In 1929 it claimed a space in the Winnipeg Exchange District with an office tower built in the prevailing ‘Chicago style.’27 It also built ‘terminal elevators’ at ocean ports. A photo of one in 1928 shows industrial architecture on a heroic scale – 60 mammoth cylinders along the building’s face tower, Parthenon-like, over two ocean tankers.28 Yet the figure most celebrated in Pool iconography was the country elevator. Le Corbusier saw in it the functionality and clean lines that he aspired to in his modernist office towers. Like the skyscrapers in his Plan Voisin, grain elevators reflected his ideal of the contrast between ‘density and open space.’29 Prairie people identified with them as the most visible embodiment of their presence on an otherwise unmarked expanse. Elevator buildings, along with their internal belts and pulleys, appear again and again in Pool advertisements to symbolize the organization: its permanence, its local presence, and the machinery that co-ordinated its operations across time and space. Pool elevators, serving districts somewhat larger than open-country communities, became one of the competing anchors for face-to-face ‘local’ networks. Contract-holders had to haul their wheat to them, but they also were required to elect or participate in a ten-member board or ‘Pool committee,’ whose task was to oversee its operations. There were well over 1000 Pool elevators, each housing a committee. This density of Pool ‘locals’ was similar to that of the SGGA, but no other prairie organization was to maintain such an impressive architectural presence at the local level. Still, the vast number of committees presented a problem

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for the design of organizational self-governance. Organizers experimented with parallel and more abstract spatial structures. In order to reduce the number of delegates sent to annual general meetings they created larger ‘subdistricts’ that encompassed a number of Pool committees. The subdistricts, rather than the Pool committees, elected representatives. However, the subdistricts, after two years in operation, had to be scaled back to a radius of about fourteen miles to better accommodate the restricted compass of rural exchange. ‘By reducing the size of the sub-district,’ directors explained, ‘it will be possible for the delegates to become known to the great majority of Contract Signers in their [sub]districts, and will enable the Delegates to better represent the views of the Growers and get acquainted with actual conditions.’30 A third set of spatial boundaries – sixteen ‘districts’ each comprising ten subdistricts – was established to define the territories of the field agents of the country organization division. Field agents, or fieldmen, were mobile links responsible for maintaining enduring network ties across space. The elevators served as Benthamite ‘spots’ where they could make contact with local members. They were responsible for the discursive vitality of the Pool committees, ensuring that they met regularly and had real issues brought to their attention. They also facilitated face-to-face contacts on a larger compass through regional and provincial conventions. Bentham would have recognized them as an inspectorate, and indeed many of them understood their role in Benthamite terms as promoting efficiency through the autonomization of control. In the words of one fieldman, their task was to ‘eliminate many of the problems of Management’ by instilling ‘a personal responsibility for’ the success of the co-operative venture.31 Jefferson‘s ‘wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government’32 was, like the panopticon, a place (the township). The Country Organization Division, designed by its architects to make the Pool as ‘delicately sensitive to the control of its individual members as human conceptions of democratic control can make it,’ was a trans-local mechanism.33 Through it, as through parallel organizations like SARM, farmers learned to understand the ties that united them, though not in terms of concrete ‘community’ bounded by locale. Theirs was much closer to Marx‘s vision of a ‘universal,’ translocal, and even trans-national class.34 As the director of the Alberta Wheat Pool proclaimed in 1930 ‘Only by world-wide co-operation can the farmer-producer – the largest class of all classes – ensure himself of profit for his toil.’35 Marx, in anticipating the technical conditions for

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the formation of a universal class, appears to have been limited in his imagination to the concrete, to the physical artefacts of ‘modern communications’ – railways, telegraphs, and so on. Wheat farmers had a better feel for, and a greater willingness to embrace, the abstract organizational dimension of technologies of time-space distanciation. Undoubtedly the Pool was one of the most effective governmental projects in early-twentieth-century Saskatchewan. However, from the beginning there were persistent doubts about its capacity to genuinely transfer the locus of control from the head office to the contract-signers. The ‘Open Forum’ section of the Western Producer carried a number of letters from farmers on the theme ‘Is the Pool really democratic?’ ‘It was never visualised,’ complained one critic, ‘that there should be active locals, only a shipping committee to look after details of shipments and whatever local control might be needed over the elevator.’36 Various design modifications were proposed, typically involving expanding the powers of the elevator committees to select delegates and forward resolutions to district and annual conventions. ‘In this way,’ argued one, ‘the Pool committees, who ... have the best opportunities of knowing the wants and needs of the Pool supporters in their immediate neighborhoods, would exercise a real influence on the election of delegates and directors.’37 ‘We would be doing our own education,’ contended another. ‘You can call in your fieldmen; they won’t be needed.’38 Even within farmers’ organizations, such struggles were waged over spatial form and scale. The concern on the other side of this particular dispute was with the size of the annual meeting, which with 1000 plus delegates, each mandated to bring forward several resolutions, would be difficult to structure in time. Resistance to State Governance The success of agrarian machinery of governance can best be measured by contrast to competing projects of departments of the state. While the achievements of the Co-operative Organization Branch must not be underplayed, the main thrust of state efforts to mobilize and ‘educate’ farmers was through the Department of Extension of the University of Saskatchewan, which worked closely with the Department of Agriculture. Together they promoted a by now familiar two-pronged strategy. The first part was to create self-governing local ‘bodies,’ the second to deploy agents to liaise between the centre and these locales. The ‘Agricultural Society’ was the Department of Agriculture’s contender for the sponsorship of local community on the prairies. ‘They

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should be, but are not the most influential body in the community,’ admitted the deputy minister in 1903.39 Decades later the story was still the same. Deputy ministers and, when responsibility shifted to the university in 1910, directors of extension puzzled over the societies’ unmet potential. So many resources were at their disposal – grants, free speakers from the university and the department – and the need for agricultural improvement was so great. Their failure can be attributed in part to spatial tactics. State officials insisted too heavily on a ‘rurban’ model of engineering during a period when the infrastructure of speed could not support it. The Department of Agriculture overruled farmer opposition to establish a minimum membership of 150, and minimum distance between society headquarters of 30 miles.40 Wide spacing ensured that there were never more than 170 societies for the department to oversee. This arrangement was more economical from the point of view of maintaining contact through correspondence and the visits of extension agents and department experts. Society meetings were to take place in market towns on the main railway lines, not in the open country. Officials recognized that it was easier to get farmers out to schoolhouse events, but it was infinitely more difficult to get department representatives to these obscure locales. Off the rail lines, travel was hazardous and unpredictable. Worse, coordinating and advertising an itinerary of many small stops in the open country was next to impossible. Farmers’ organizations such as the UFC insisted on touring the country schools (see figure 5.1), but at tremendous cost to their staff, who had to be motivated more by missionary zeal than any hope of fair recompense. Louise Lucas, in her diary from 1932, gives some idea of what organizing for the UFC at the ‘local’ level meant. Arrived at – No one to meet me. No station agent. Spoke to postmaster getting the mail, who said ‘Yes, there is a meeting advertised in the hall.’ Walked with him to the store. Just a small, out-of-the-way place. One grain elevator. Met a man who took me to a home for dinner. No restaurant in town. ... Next day a long cold drive to – Hall. Arrived 2:45 p.m. Hall locked. No house near. Finally a man climbed in the window ... At last someone came with a key. Five men appeared and we sat around the stove and talked until 5:30 p.m. They were very interested and I think I sowed some good seed. This meeting also wasn’t advertised, the men said they had just heard of it from the school children. No collection.41

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Figure 5.1 Parklands school district, circa 1910: This map of a school district gives an idea of the smallest compass of open-country networks, the level at which successful ‘community’ organizing had to take place on the prairies before the building of all-weather roads. The total area is 25 square miles. Within it there were 16 households. Parklands schoolhouse was (or was to be) located on the northwest quarter of section 20, township 22, range 14 west of the second meridian. The nearest railway stop is Lipton, just off the map to the east. Dwellings, travelled roads, and a proposed schoolhouse have been pencilled in on a form provided by the Department of Education. Ratepayers of the district were apparently required to submit such maps as part of their application to have a school established. (Source : School District files, Saskatchewan Archives, Saskatoon)

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Defining the spaces of assembly had important implications for class formation. The UFC chose to organize in the schoolhouse rather than the ‘city hall’ because it was attempting to build a ‘militant and class conscious’ organization,42 and the city hall and market town were dominated by representatives of classes thought to be antagonistic to the interests of farmers and other workers.43 The Department of Agriculture, and later the Extension, attempted through the agricultural society to construct the sort of cross-class ‘community’ advocated by Galpin. The Agricultural Societies Act ... provides activities in which every person in every community may be engaged, and by enlisting the interest and support of the village and town folk as well as a large percentage of city folk in one or the other of the various activities, the societies are building up people on a social plane of life where all work together for the accomplishment of a single purpose with a spirit of mutual respect.44

Common purpose was to be the basis for a common identity, an ‘imagined community’ encompassing not just the local, but the province as a whole. In place of the universal class identity promoted more or less explicitly by the UFC, the Wheat Pool, and SARM, the director of extension envisioned a regional identity embracing all classes within ‘the larger community known as Saskatchewan.’45 Particularly if agrarian political grievances could have been channelled in this direction, a classically ‘populist’ regional consciousness might have flourished here as it did elsewhere. However, ongoing ties between town and country were difficult to maintain in Saskatchewan. Farmers made the arduous trip to town as infrequently as possible. To minimize travel they combined trip purposes, which normally meant hauling a load of wheat every time they went into town. Before the roads were improved in 1950, the only sensible way to haul wheat was the slowest – a heavy wagon pulled by a team of horses. Farmers who shipped to the same railway town timed their excursions to fall on the same day of the week – ‘Train day.’ Families started out at dawn, and typically did not return to the farm until after dark. As everyone came on the same day, they could expect to meet and spend time with their farm neighbours. However, they often avoided social contact with townspeople. Their consciousness of difference had to do with class politics but also with anxieties over cultural capital and the presentation of self (having to wear ‘work clothes’ at

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meetings or bringing a bagged lunch from home rather than eating at the cafe, for example).46 The influence of small-town business people in the agricultural societies not only alienated many potential farmer members, but appears also to have compromised the department’s program. The main point of collaboration between farmers and townspeople was the ‘agricultural fair.’ For business people, this was an opportunity to promote the town and draw in the surrounding farmers to spend money. Local implement dealers, for instance, welcomed the opportunity to sponsor the farmmachinery exhibit, which invariably attracted large crowds.47 Farmers were unhappy with the ease with which societies and their resources could be captured by small-town boosters. As the members of one society complained in 1917, ‘[N]ine out of ten societies organized under the present act are organized by or through the activities of the Board of Trade, or towns people, mainly for [one object only] ... that is for the holding of a fair.’48 The department too was critical of the commercialism of these events. They featured too many midways and sideshows, and too much unimproving recreation.49 The higher moral ideal of ‘rural civilization’ extolled in a 1915 Report was rarely exhibited at these events: The pastor of the church should be asked to make an exhibit of what he thinks is his best equipment or methods for community uplift. The school teacher should be encouraged to make her exhibit of the embodiment of practice which makes for educated minds, disciplined and orderly. So with the banker, the blacksmith, the tailor, the hotelkeeper, and the homemaker, as well as the tiller of the soil and the stockman. Monetary rewards might be abolished and merit recognized by diplomas.50

Money remained the prime attraction. When government grants to fairs were scaled back in the 1930s, not enough ‘community spirit’ had coalesced to preserve them, and they were abandoned. Their numbers dropped from 138 in 1930 to 23 in 1934.51 Agricultural societies did not provide the department with representative bodies that could act as their local agents in the open country. The second prong of its strategy, the deployment of a rural inspectorate, was therefore handicapped from the beginning. Itinerant inspectors were utterly ineffective without reliable local agents – there was nowhere for them to go, no one to receive them. But a resident staff

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member, or ‘district representative’ service, stationed in local offices could potentially provide a physical presence ‘on the spot’ where the agricultural societies had failed. The idea was tried first in 1914 with a handful of district representatives. Their role was to mobilize ‘community’ as well as to meet farmers on an individual basis to promote the department doctrines of ‘mixed farming,’ ‘intensive farming,’ and improved financial management. They met with resistance from farmers who were already convinced that the source of their problems lay not in deficiencies of field production but in the corrupt organization of marketing and finance. ‘The people,’ as one representative put it, ‘think they are not in a position to fall in with the better farming methods until cheaper money [i.e., credit] is allowed to circulate.’52 Small-town business people were more enthusiastic about the promotion of better farming. The North Battleford Board of Trade in 1914 offered to contribute to the maintenance of a district representative, whose work they understood would concentrate ‘on the city or town which naturally forms the centre of each district,’ and would contribute to ‘increased prosperity throughout the district.’53 Farmer-run rural municipalities were ready to stretch their resources to the limit to hire municipal doctors, but not agricultural experts whose role, as many saw it, was to ‘teach them how to farm.’ District representatives – who were to be college graduates, and had to be supplied with an office, library, and travel expenses – were almost as expensive as physicians. Efforts in 1928 to get adjacent municipalities to co-finance the scheme in the same way that they had cooperated over municipal hospitals also ended in failure. RM assistance was essential, as the cost to the Department of Agriculture of going it alone would have been more than its entire budget. Yet as agrarian discontent deepened in the depressions of 1920 and 1930, expert advice appeared to farmers to be not just wrong-headed but downright insulting. The implication, as the retail merchants made clear in their 1930 endorsement of the district-representative idea, was that ‘the economical conditions that now exist in the Province’ were ‘the result of unsound farm practices and misdirected effort’54 on the part of farmers. Farmers were more interested in ‘political economy’ than crop science. While the radical democrats were suspicious of ‘education’ of any kind, the fare offered up by the Pool field service was more palatable than that of the boards of trade and the state, aligned in many minds with the ‘capitalist system of greed, inequality and privilege.’55 Attacks

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on ‘capitalism’ from representatives of the Pool were rare, and far more muted than the more explicitly Marxist pronouncements of the UFC. Still, local ‘study groups’ were at least offered titles like Handbook of Marxism and The Communist Answer to the World’s Needs (described as a ‘set of dialogues presenting various points of view in which the communist gets the last word’) from the Pool library. Pool field staff promoted a catholic vision of a new world order based on cooperation and mutual self-help. The very vagueness of the Pool’s political project made it more inclusive and offered a collaborative part to the rank and file. Pool members were conscious of playing an avant-garde role in its making. ‘We the co-operators’ declared the Salvador Pool committee in its 1933 annual report, ‘have at least the satisfaction of knowing that we have created an economic machine that works, and if the economists of today are not alive to its significance, they will shortly be compelled to construct their economic structure out of its accomplished results.’56 Officials with the Department of Agriculture must have found it galling that a farmer’s organization succeeded so easily in doing what they could not – financing an effective district-representative service. It was not simply a question of bringing a sweeter message to the farmers. In North Dakota, where conditions were so similar to Saskatchewan’s, counties had been able to hire district representatives, or ‘county agents,’ to promote the same message of ‘better farming’ that had become so unpopular in Saskatchewan. The Saskatchewan deputy minister complained that he was handicapped by the size and structure of RMs.57 The promise of a spatial solution to this problem lingered in many officials’ minds and new proposals were made well into the 1940s. The general idea was to replace the RM with larger units and to harmonize these, the boundaries of agricultural societies, and the jurisdictions of inspectors within a single panoptic figure. Such plans all fell afoul of SARM, intent on preserving RMs in the interests of protecting ‘local democracy’ as well as its own extraordinary power in provincial politics.58 By the 1930s, SARM, the Wheat Pool, and to a lesser extent the UFC had a firmer hold on rural governance than any agency of the provincial state. The Extension Department had to accept that if it were to deliver its programs in the ‘outlying areas,’ it had to do so through locals of farmers’ organizations. As early as 1908 the seed trials, plowing matches, ‘farmers institutes,’ and other activities within the agricultural societies’ mandate were being undertaken by locals of the SGGA. Once the Pool’s country-organization division was in place, the majority of ‘agricultural improvement’ work, including programs sponsored by the

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Extension Division, was undertaken by Pool committees.59 Pool locals could draw on personnel and resources from both the Extension Department and the Co-operation and Markets Branch with minimal accountability to these sponsoring agencies. Unlike agricultural societies, Pool locals were not required to submit annual reports to the department or send delegates to the annual convention at the University of Saskatchewan. They had greater control over the discursive framing of these activities. A Wheat Pool seed trial would not be couched in ‘mixed farming’ discourse. The formation of a co-operative community hall could proceed without reference to ‘rurban’ ideals of the meaning of ‘community.’ The experience of building a local retail co-op was more likely to be framed in terms of building class solidarity and defeating ‘capitalism’ than of making workers into capitalists.60 Modernism and the Machine Farm In their approach to their project of class formation, wheat farmers were ‘modernist’ in two senses. They embraced what Giddens has identified as the defining feature of modernity – the processes of time-space distanciation. They also exhibited the modernist faith in human invention that makes conceivable – indeed plausible and irresistible – a radical remaking of the world through the redesign of things both concrete – in the way that furniture and buildings are concrete – and abstract – in the way that a political landscape is abstract. They were not prepared to assume that tools for dominating time and territory could not be used for reinventing ‘community’ on the basis of non-‘capitalist’ nonexploitive relationships. Their experience with government – SARM and its ‘locals’ – and with the Pool had confirmed for them the liberatory potential of two principles – democratic public ownership and decentralization. The latter was not a flight from the trans-local, but a spatial-power determination that linked the local and the global. Like Marx, they recognized that class formation had to assume the same trans-local scale as new formations of capital. Marx had imagined ‘the ever-expanding union of the workers’ being ‘helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry.’ Wheat farmers used to their own purposes nineteenth-century technologies of world trade – the railway, the telegraph and telephone, and the modern press – as well as the abstract machinery for governing-at-adistance developed by modern states and trans-local markets. Saskatchewan farmers embraced the abstract machinery of moder-

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nity, but did not themselves own many physical machines. Farm households did not have running water, plumbing, or electricity, and the few appliances that eased domestic labour were hand-driven. Most farmers did not own combine harvesters, tractors, or even automobiles.61 As late as 1930, ‘horseless’ farmers were still members of a ‘charmed circle’ of adventurous souls.62 The promise of mechanization of the farm household and of field production posed a whole new set of political challenges and inspired yet another rethinking of the fundamental determinations of prairie space. New trends towards mechanized production in other parts of the world were evidently based on economies of scale. The idea of large-scale corporate control, after the model of the American ‘bonanza farm,’ received a rather cool reception in the pages of the farmer’s weekly The Western Producer. Far more interesting was the news in the early 1930s of the Soviet experiment in collective farming. Despite occasional references to cases of ‘misjudgement’ on the part of authorities, these first reports were very positive and gave a picture of collectivization as it was supposed to have worked. Readers learned of the local village councils and their input into planning and access to up-to-date equipment and expertise through local and regional machinery depots. They also learned of a rational, centralized system of ‘orderly marketing.’ Especially attractive were the accounts of social amenities – the Bolshoy Theatre on countryside tours, but more importantly the socialized health care and the promise of economies of scale in domestic labour for village women.63 Variants of state and collective ownership were discussed,64 and the ‘Open Forum’ section of the Western Producer began receiving suggestions for how these might be applied in the prairies.65 The editor and contributors to the women’s page (‘Mostly for Women’) took up the idea of village-based cooperation as a way of getting farm women access to modern amenities such as running water, plumbing, electricity, and the labour-saving devices that went with it.66 These discussions had a particular urgency during the 1930s, when continuing depression and drought reminded all concerned of the coercive logic of change built into the ownership grid of the prairie landscape. Without some firm policy intervention, waves of farm foreclosures would continue to drive the trend towards fewer owners of large landholdings. Self-consciously socialist farmers now faced the same challenge to their social ambitions that eastern European pioneers had faced in the nineteenth century. For all their discourse on ‘cooperation,’ the ground rules of play on the checkerboard were cast

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in terms of nineteenth-century ‘political economy’ and the corrosive principle of competitive individualism. If the vision of an ‘economic democracy’ based on cooperation were to be seriously entertained, there would have to be a radical rethinking of the principles of land tenure. Many leaders had become convinced that the route to democratic control lay in public ownership of the ‘machinery of production.’67 Radicals like Partridge had for years been chipping away at farmers’ attachment to what he called their ‘tiny, dilated, and insecure right of ownership.’68 It was in this context that farm leaders began in the 1930s to contemplate different proposals for the collective ownership of land.69 This was a momentous step to take conceptually, as it would mean formally relinquishing their petty-bourgeois status. The UFC stand on this issue was oddly anachronistic. Their ‘use-lease’ proposal was a statist solution in which the provincial government acquired title to foreclosed lands and leased them back to farm families, guaranteeing long-term, secure tenure. Opponents represented it as a program aimed at eventual total state ownership. Many farmers sympathetic to the principle of ‘public ownership’ feared this model would be too ‘centralized.’ Indeed, the idea was identical in form to proposals made by nineteenth-century Tories who saw the state as a modern ‘stand-in’ for a traditional, socially responsible gentry. But the implication of secure, long-term tenure was a fixing of the spatial form of smallholdings in a way that was consistent with a pastoralist vision of the landscape. Here the UFC was, perhaps unwittingly, more in line with the anti-modernist tradition still alive in the 1930s. Many experts rejected both the idea of larger farms and, in some cases, mechanization itself. The authors of a new book on wheat production asserted in 1930, ‘To our conception of rural life the idea of the “wheat factory” type of industry ... is entirely inappropriate.’ Production, they argued, is limited by natural fertility, and hand labour is more effective than machinery in ‘the extraction of plant food from the soil.’70 Many officials, such as the Alberta deputy minister of agriculture, continued to subscribe to similar views. If ‘[we] commercialize our farming activities’ and move towards larger farms, he argued, ‘we shall lose the effect of the home atmosphere, and the splendid and beneficial relationships which obtain in a closely-settled and prosperous farm district.’71 Another option, which some believed was already possible in principle under existing co-operative legislation, was the collective ownership and management of farmland through co-operative associations. Legislation clarifying the terms of co-operative ownership of land could have

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solved for modern farmers some of the problems faced by the eastern European village settlers attempting to play ‘against the grid.’ It had the potential to provide individuals with legal claim to tradable shares in the abstract ‘property’ without encumbering the land with rigid physical divisions. Like Hutterites, the co-operators could farm common land in large tracts that were easily expandable. Yet within the legal structure of the Rochdale co-op they could more readily safeguard individual option and democratic control. The co-op idea applied to farmed land could accommodate modernist dynamism while limiting competitive individualism. It was discussed in association with a more concrete spatial reform in which the co-operators would live in close proximity to one another in a central agricultural village. Here again was that seductive idea that had attracted advocates from so many different cultural and political locations. True, Saskatchewan farm leaders had categorically dismissed the idea in its ‘closer communities’ form in 1914. The difference this time was that the village was not associated with either rurban integration or intensive farming. The proposed new villages would be concentrations of population within an overall context of reduced population density. Indeed, village-centred co-operative ownership would facilitate large-scale mechanization and thereby reduce the number of hands required per acre of farmed land. What was also new was that the revised idea had come from within the agrarian movement, without, initially, any institutional sponsors. In the early 1940s the idea of ‘co-operative farms’ began to be discussed generally within the farm constituency as a concrete possibility for Saskatchewan. The Great Depression and the Second World War were understood to have been the fruits of the competitive capitalist system. By 1942 there was talk of ‘reconstruction’ and the building of a ‘new order.’ The choice for agriculture, as the editor of the Western Producer put it, was between co-operative farming and corporate farming. In one form or another, on wide or narrow lines, the new order about which there is so much writing and talking, will follow one or the other of these plans: either we will move toward greater public control and democratic organization of production and distribution processes, or toward the concentration of economic facilities in great trusts, cartels and monopolies, with the workers simply paid hands and possessing no voice whatever in the disposition of the products of their labour.72

He turned the question over to ‘the hundreds of rural study groups scat-

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tered across the Prairie Provinces.’ As the end of the war approached in 1944, news of the impending defeat of ‘fascism’ intermingled in the pages of the Western Producer with news of the impending victory of the CCF, creating a euphoric sense of the possibilities for the ‘new order.’73 Farm Women’s Week at the University of Saskatchewan began in June 1944, ‘a few hours after the invasion news had been flashed across Canada.’74 The talk throughout the convention returned repeatedly to plans for co-operative farming. The Pool issued a discussion pamphlet on the topic for its local committees that summer.75 By fall the Saskatchewan Reconstruction Council had published a report recommending that co-op farms be set up on an experimental basis.76 All of the details were up for discussion.77 The core ideas, though, included a Rochdale-style78 co-operative that would own at the very least some common machinery and buildings, and perhaps land as well. Public buildings could include barns and storage sheds, a machine shop, a community centre (or perhaps a covered rink), a school, and, some suggested, even a ‘cottage hospital.’79 Homes and public buildings would be clustered at a central location, forming an agricultural village. Their physical proximity would cut down the costs of providing basic utilities (which few farm homes at the time enjoyed). Tasks that were already done in the farm household, such as baking, canning, and laundry, could be co-operatively organized using the latest labour-saving devices. Despite the hint here of plans for domestic self-provisioning, most proponents stuck to a modernist vision that accepted the spatial division of labour. ‘We must fit this new scheme,’ one woman emphasized, ‘into a world where money is the means of exchange and where much of our food is processed or brought from other places.’80 In addition to enabling the modernization of the rural household and on-farm production, the plan solved another problem, not clearly articulated at the time. That was the impending loss of the architecture of the rural ‘local.’ The core institution sustaining open-country networks was the rural school. Mechanized transport and fewer large farms would mean first administrative consolidation, then the physical centralization of schools and increasingly of other local services that sustained open-country life. Consolidation was already underway in Alberta in 1944, and critics warned that ‘[d]ozens, if not hundreds of school buildings have been sold or moved, leaving large districts without any place to hold church, social or political meetings or voting places.’81 Without these buildings, some new embodiment of the political powers of the

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‘local’ would have to be invented to guarantee the ‘decentralization’ of power in agrarian organizations. Rural people in Saskatchewan could not anticipate the rate at which the ‘personal’ relationships that they associated with ‘community’ would soon have to be dissolved and recombined across ever-widening ‘spans of time-space.’ The ‘maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal,’ as Berman characterizes the experience of modernity, had so far not troubled this aspect of their lives.82 Perhaps it was naivety that led Saskatchewan farmers to embrace school consolidation, with barely a word of protest being registered (regrets about ‘loss of community’ would not be heard until the 1970s). But this acceptance was also consistent with their general embrace of the principles of rationalization and modernization. The co-op farm, with its economies of scale and spatial efficiencies, was a structure that appeared to link the global and the local in a way that made sense within the framework of ‘modernist’ discourse. From our late-modern vantage point, informed by discussions of disembodied intimacies in cyberspace, the idea of re-embedding communities in faceto-face relationships circumscribed within physically clustered villages does look rather anachronistic. The figure of the co-op farm was in a sense a culmination of a prairie tradition of socialist modernism. The modernist lens allowed farmers to recognize the geography of individualism for what it was, not a ‘natural’ feature of the landscape, but a design element, albeit one built into the landscape at a fundamental level. Their vision of a socialist modernism required some referent more permanent than change, and some concrete locus of collective action to mediate between the Crusoean fiction of the individual and the great trans-local identifications of the twentieth century.

Chapter 6

Conclusion: The Trans-local and Resistance

The governance of the prairie west from the mid-nineteenth to the midtwentieth century exhibits in an unusually pure form the spatial practices that Giddens and others have associated with ‘modernity.’ The most visible and tangible legacy of this history is the modernist landscape – thousands of acres of land devoted to single crops in vast monochrome squares. By the end of the twentieth century, the architectural complement, the towering grain elevators so admired by Le Corbusier, had begun to give way to the even more uncompromisingly ‘industrial’ look of the new ‘inland terminals.’ Indeed, few of the landmarks that defined the familiar countryside of 1944 are still in place. Grain elevators, rail lines, whole towns, country roads, schools, farm buildings have been disassembled, hauled away, and ploughed over. The region’s most enduring legacy is dynamism. It is as though it were a canvas of some high modernist who cannot set aside the palette knife and brush and must perpetually scrape and reapply pigment in search of ever more austere abstraction. The tangible markers on the surface of the land reflected only one dimension of prairie people’s spatial awareness and spheres of action. The important dimensions were disembedded, that is, lifted out or abstracted from the particulars of landscape and architecture. For example, the most meaningful social referent for most actors, the ‘open-country community,’ corresponded to no spatially coherent settlement or fixed set of spatial boundaries. Likewise, farmers who entered politics at the ‘local’ level discovered that, while nominally responsible to a spatially circumscribed jurisdiction, by far their most rewarding sphere of action was the trans-local invention ‘SARM,’ a spatially indefinite ‘imagined community.’

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The spatial forms of prairie action were modern in that they were dynamic and disembedded. Prairie history exhibits features characteristic of modernity but surprising when observed in a ‘rural’ setting – disengagement from ‘nature’ and tradition. These ‘progressive’ orientations were more pronounced in farmers than in the state bureaucrats sent out to administer their affairs. In this new land there were few things that could not be reinvented and remade: human nature, government, capitalism, the landscape itself. It is a mistake to take as given the environments in which historical actors made their choices. In the prairies people were conscious of the fabricated quality of their environment and often anticipated reforms that were never realized, but to which nonetheless they oriented their action. Too many commentators have explained the history of state and class formation in the west by reference to the wheat economy as though this were somehow an apolitical ‘given,’ or an economic adaptation to ‘natural’ conditions. In my own previous work I left this assumption unexplored. Following Innis, I focused upon the geographic embodiment of the wheat economy, and how it created an ‘artificial landscape’ – large fields, isolated homesteads, low population density – difficult to govern. Not until I discovered the politics of what I have called the ‘contested wheat field’ did I recognize just how reflexive the project of making prairie space was. While wheat farmers were trying, in defiance of the state, to re-engineer the ‘capitalist’ logic of what they did, state officials were doing everything in their power to re-engineer the austere landscape of wheat monoculture in order to transform the conditions of governance. Governmental projects to reform communities and counties made sense only as oriented towards a counter-factual landscape characterized by mixed, intensive agriculture and ‘closer communities.’ This was the pastoral ideal that had haunted colonists since surveyors first ‘wrote up’ the landscape in lyrical terms. The pastoral and modernist ideals were both quite unlike natural grassland, but ‘nature’ – soil and climate – did not disallow either. Indeed, each flourished at different historical moments. The communitarian agriculture of eastern European settlers was both more humane and economically rational before the construction of the railway and the local machinery of government. At one point colonization agents promoted it as the only viable model for the prairies. The competing model of the isolated farmstead on the grid specializing in cash crops prevailed, albeit shakily, as soon as sufficient infrastructure had been assembled. As a project it was never satisfactorily complete. One of its

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greatest weaknesses was the susceptibility of monoculture to pests and disease. Farmers could not manage the ‘weed problem’ locally and had to wait for the deployment of a whole new set of trans-local systems and technologies associated with the chemical revolution in agriculture. Debates about agricultural practice and its ideal landscapes returned repeatedly to the question of the survey grid. It was a paradox that something so evidently abstract, conventional, and alien to the natural shape of the land took hold with such tenacity. It was a wonderfully precise and at the same time fluid marker of land as commodity. Yet it got in the way of so many other, much more commonsensical plans for land use and social organization. The Dominion Survey was an exemplar of modern spatial practice. It was a space without particulars, a map drawn up before consulting the terrain, and making no reference to rivers, lakes, hills, or other tangible things. Instead, it was oriented to purely conventional lines of longitude and latitude that were locatable on the terrain only by referring beyond it to the ‘global’ conventions of poles and equator. The Cartesian grid and the finer grid within it mechanically represented and accounted for space. Without reference to any feature of the landscape, a single numerical description uniquely identified the location, area, and legal description of every half-mile square of land in the North-West Territories. The system facilitated the operation of power at a distance. A handful of personnel in distant offices could efficiently monitor and police land ownership and property transactions. The pastoral villages of the communal settlers represented a reembedding of the spaces of the imagination in the particularities of place. They reinscribed land-use boundaries in ways that accommodated particular features of the land and of communal relations. Yet even in established villages where ploughing and planting had erased all local traces of the grid, the grid persisted as a legal conceit with powerful local effects. I argue that this counterfactual grid with no instantiation in local space was no less ‘spatial.’ But I do not treat it as some sort of metaphysical substance, an abstract ‘space’ that hovered above the empirically observable disposition of things in the land. Rather, I treat it as a set of practices, sometimes fragile and performative practices that took place on the land, but more decisively as sets of documentary and legal practices, guaranteed by the threat of violence. Importantly, the latter took place off-scene and beyond what could be observed within the frame of the locale. Wheat farmers’ embrace of modernity was linked to their capacity to

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read its trans-local logic. Arguably they developed an elective affinity for the processes of disembedding, and with it a disengagement from the locale and from ‘nature’ as immediately given. They were not alarmed by the ‘unnatural’ shape of the new agriculture – the vast fields devoted to one crop only, the thinly scattered population, the dependence of the new machine farmers on the market for their food necessities. Urban country-life reformers could not imagine that these could be the conditions of agricultural improvement and increased productivity. To the urban eye a typical locale in modern field production looked empty. It lacked both the mass of people and the sorts of physical embodiments popularly associated with modern organizational machinery – the factory floor or the office complex – in which the ‘gears’ had to make direct contact in order for the parts to move as a coordinated whole. Wheat farmers saw the machine as a complex of distanciated relationships. They imagined themselves to be like workers feeding a vast assembly line that stretched thousands of miles to manufacturing centres in the east. They recognized the abstract and impersonal character of the market transactions that governed the movement of this conveyor. Despite the narrow circuit of their actual travels, they were capable of imagining their agency in trans-local terms: ‘We are not denizens of a hamlet but citizens of a world.’ The action of modern industrial agriculture cut across the boundary between metropolitan centre and hinterland, between urban and rural. Understanding modernity in the countryside required a new spatial imagination and a disengagement from the deceptions of the sensuous present. My main interest in writing this book has been in understanding the ‘new’ technologies for action at a distance as they were employed in governance. Bentham’s panoptic mechanisms were designed for efficient, impersonal, and centralized administration. Mill’s decentralized ‘selfgovernment’ placed greater weight on what Foucault would call the ‘autonomization’ of power in local persons. Both address the spatial problem of governing anonymous, secreted, and dispersed populations. Both hinge upon inspection, although the Benthamite principle is utterly dependent upon it. In the prairie west the thinness of population, lack of aggregate points of settlement, and uncertain transport made inspection inefficient. The same conditions made even the principle of local government difficult to implement. The ‘local’ in the ideal spatial solution would correspond to the sphere of personal influence that an elected representative could maintain through face-to-face contact. On the prairies this circle was wide, but encompassed too few to

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support any permanent administrative apparatus. Efforts to aggregate local ‘townships’ into larger ‘counties’ failed because of the primitive state of communications. Units of local government were spatial artefacts that statesmen sough to reconcile with geographic conditions that many believed were artificial and hoped were temporary. However, until prairie geography changed, interim solutions had to be devised. In place of the three spatial levels of administration implemented elsewhere – the township, county, and province – the prairie provinces created only two. The functions of the county were divided between provincial offices and local governmental units called ‘Rural Municipalities.’ The RMs were smaller, institutionally weaker, and much more numerous than counties would have been. This unique spatial solution was to have significant and unanticipated political consequences. The RMs themselves were limited in resources and somewhat ineffectual, but their provincial association (SARM) became one of the most active political bodies in the province. While it had been difficult to coordinate local government activity at the county level because of the poor quality of road transport, all of the regions were well connected to provincial centres by reliable and cheap rail services. The transport infrastructure for the global wheat economy was put to service for translocal political formations. SARM’s ‘spatial’ status as a provincial body and the claims that RM councillors made to speak through SARM for the farm public and legislate for the province were outside their legal powers as agents of the state. SARM was an invention of civil society, and while provincial legislators and bureaucrats attempted to co-opt it to their ends, it was not their invention. It became an organized voice of ‘public opinion’ and provided a window for an important segment of the public – RM councillors and their constituents – into the operation of the provincial state. The power of SARM is a reminder that the Benthamite principle of transparency worked both ways. In the exemplar of the panopticon the guard tower was designed to prevent the observer from being observed. But the transparent annular outer wall opened up the entire structure to public scrutiny in a way that was meant to inhibit corruption and temper abuses by the powerful. The architecture of governance in Saskatchewan allowed similarly for twoway ‘inspection.’ In some ways, it may have been easier for the public to see ‘in’ than for officials to see ‘out’ or gain a clear picture of goings on in their far-flung territories. Nineteenth-century projects of governance at a distance relied to varying degrees upon the constitution of collective agents separate from

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but under the guidance of formally constituted agents of the state. The modern ‘public’ and the multitude of organizations within civil society that gave it form were integral to modern governmentality. States have had tremendous but not incontestable powers to channel activity within civil society. There has always been a risk that vehicles designed to ‘autonomize’ state power would be appropriated by projects of genuine resistance. The organizational form of RMs created legal and fiscal discipline, but SARM provided a voice for unscripted aspirations based on interests of class and gender. Likewise the co-operatives, intended to instil bourgeois virtues of self-help and fiscal responsibility, became vehicles of agrarian class solidarity and in some cases forums for the critique of capitalist property relations. Farmers’ organizations and the provincial Department of Agriculture were at war over the principles of prairie farm policy. Their efforts to create local and trans-local structures of representation, and give voice to these competing visions, were parallel and often complementary. Nonetheless, farmers rather than state officials led in defining the identity and discourse of farmers as collective agents. Their hegemony was attributable in part to spatial tactics. They better understood what might be called the ‘politics of assembly’ – how and at what spatial scales to bring farmers together to performatively ‘embody’ their collective existence. The critical move was defining the scale of the local. The department insisted on large cross-class agricultural societies that failed to widen the restricted compass of local interaction or cement new face-to-face ties. Farmers’ organizations kept their locals small and numerous, closer in scale to existing open-country networks and therefore more likely to remain active and self-sustaining. Without active and representative locals the department had no Benthamite ‘spots’ upon which to build an inspectorate and forge local–trans-local links. Surprisingly, it was farmers’ organizations, representatives of agrarian dissent, that were more successful at instituting this Benthamite solution to trans-local governance. The Wheat Pool was able to realize the department’s dream of a district representative service, and during the Depression usurped the department’s influence and role as the representative of agrarian interests. A whole series of spatializations – of land use, of community, and of formal institutions within the state and civil society – must be considered simultaneously in order to understand the operation of power within the prairie west. Each spatial layer was a ‘work in progress’ whose outcome was often being fought over by contending interests. By taking a simultaneous and panoramic perspective I have attempted to resolve

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all ‘structural’ conditions into ongoing ‘constructions’ or projects. From the perspective of historical actors, however, the action at a distance of others often took on an ineluctable quality. Each project coordinated actors over space, but also took shape through time – often slowly, deliberately, at a pace measurable in decades. In the same way that the actions of anonymous others at a distance appeared in the locale as reified conditions or ‘structure,’ so too did unfinished or illtimed projects act as structural opportunities and constraints for one another. It was possible that the Department of the Interior’s project of settling the west could have been more advanced when the first counties were tried. But the lack of synchronization between the two projects crippled the second. The work of building and maintaining grid roads could have been further along in the 1920s, as it was in North Dakota and elsewhere, so that parallel projects for rurban communities, amalgamated RMs, and rural inspectorates all could have had an effective infrastructure on which to build. The hegemony of farmers’ organizations in rural Saskatchewan was a success that exploited weaknesses in state governance. It was an accomplishment aided by accidents of timing and geography that were in turn unintended consequences of purposive action. Organized farmers’ promotion of a socialist vision of a ‘co-operative commonwealth’ during the 1930s prepared the way for the electoral success of the CCF in 1944. Both their accomplishments as a popular movement for change and their role in making the democratic socialist tradition in Canada have given the history of their struggles enduring relevance. In the 1940s, Lipset saw in their ‘agrarian socialism’ a confirmation of Jeffersonian ideals of ‘small-scale democracy.’ In the 1970s intellectuals from the Canadian ‘New Left’ were drawn to the history of the ‘farm movement’ for what they could learn about the possibility of social-movement challenges to the hegemony of ‘capitalism.’ At the start of the twenty-first century this history is worth reviewing again for the insight it can give on the spatial dynamics of the formation of political identity and ‘resistance.’ Since Seattle in 1999 a new wave of protestors has claimed the sites of international conferences as spaces in which to performatively embody what they call ‘global civil society.’ They are responding to a recent phase in the globalization of capital not unlike the one that transformed prairie space in the early twentieth century. Their claims have brought to the fore the question of the legitimacy of civil society versus state representatives of the ‘people.’ While they act upon the global stage and do so using the kinds of technological and organizational

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tools that have made economic globalization possible, their need for a fulcrum of critique and resistance has reopened the search for meaningful ‘localizations’ of political action. The vanguard of young North American activists has raised the old anarchist cry of ‘smash the state.’ The problem that their position poses is not the problem of violence or the problem of the continuing relevance of the ‘imagined communities’ of nation-states, but the very possibility of the constitution of legitimate trans-local political actors. It is also a problem of spatial scale that Jefferson, an intellectual predecessor to modern anarchism, solved by embedding legitimate political action in the township. The township, that place of just the right dimensions where neighbours can come together to form a whole ‘community,’ continues to haunt our imaginings of the ‘local’ in opposition to the ‘global.’ For agrarian socialists ‘the local’ had meaning as a fulcrum of resistance. Yet from the start it was spatially amorphous, without stable outlines or physical embodiments in features of the landscape or architecture. Open-country communities were not villages. Where they overlapped village space they often excluded villagers. Farmers learned that their networks of resistance had to be, like the webs of power of the state that they frequently opposed, disembedded and knit together through modern technologies for dominating space and time. They embraced the trans-local at a scale larger than the neighbourhood as a locus of identity and collective action. They sought to democratize collective agency not by fetishizing the local. Rather they employed panoptic mechanisms, but in such a way as to shift the field of force outward from the watchful eyes in the control tower to those beyond the windows of the circular wall. Prairie politics of assembly were less about making places than ritually representing an abstract ‘social body.’ They involved converging at preappointed times on different spatial scales – the schoolhouse, the Pool elevator, the RM council, the provincial conventions at key cities around the province. They fit under the heading of the ‘utopics of resistance,’ if one reads ‘utopia’ as a kind of non-place, a ‘space’ without a permanent address. Under that heading I have also been interested to trace prairie utopias in the quite different sense of an ideal place. These are drawingboard utopias that can literally be inscribed upon a map. What is striking is how persistent the vision of a collective existence was – from the eastern European village settlements, through the town-planning movement’s closer communities, to the co-operative farms of the 1940s – in

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opposition to the private individualism of the grid. Also striking is how practical and workable these schemes seemed, particularly in contrast to the irrationalities of the Crusoean homestead, and the support they attracted from official sources. While radical farmers toyed with the idea of playing ‘against the grid’ in their plans for co-operative farms, they accepted their place in the spatial division of labour and stuck to their widely criticized specialization in single crops. In so doing they departed from the anarchist ideal of the autochthonous local in which the political autonomy of a community is based on a measure of economic self-sufficiency. While they were critical of the capitalist organization of market exchange, they accepted their economic dependence on global others. In the end, their capacity to mitigate the violent sway that global market forces had on their lives was limited. Moreover, they failed to control the ecological consequences of their reliance on monoculture and on the growing technical infrastructure that accompanied it. Just as the town planners had feared, the complement to farmers’ detachment from place was a reduced capacity for ecological stewardship. Young activists at the turn of the twenty-first century have far more sympathy for the pastoral vision articulated by Thomas Adams or Petr Kropotkin. For them opposition to economic globalization involves a search for localizations based in a renewed concern for the stewardship of ‘nature.’ The failed history of this ecological ideal should be instructive for those, like my students, who are attracted to the idea of selfsufficient organic farms, or for the Sierra Club youth who met in the summer of 2001 to discuss ‘ecotopia.’ First, the town planners’ closer communities based on intensive, mixed farming were not ‘found’ localizations. Their scale derived from a figure of political philosophy and their uses of nature were as alien to the prairies and as artificial as wheat monoculture. This remains an attractive ideal, but not one mandated by ‘nature.’ Second, the powerful logic of the spatial division of labour cannot be underestimated and must certainly be understood. The astonishing thing about the state planners who promoted the pastoral ideal was how poorly they grasped the character of modern social relations. Still, I do not mean here to invoke the global market as an inescapable structural constraint. One of the wonderful things about the spirit of modernism that took hold in the prairies in the twentieth century was its tremendous creativity and optimism – the sense that whatever we had created we could redesign and change. Throughout this history I have attempted to pre-

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serve that sense of possibility. Neither nature nor structure is reified as an absolute limit. The qualities of externality and constraint emerge, as I have said, relatively and in the arrangement of parallel projects in space and time. In addition, I have emphasized the fallibility of these projects, the inability of actors to control their outcomes. The great modernist projects of the twentieth century, experiments both in social engineering and the control of nature, are now in disrepute for their failures. The grander the scale, the worse the consequences. Humility is in order, but non-intervention is not. Indeed, one of the defining megaprojects of the twenty-first century is already underway in the extension of private-property rights to genetic inventions. This is a legal ‘grid’ in the making that will more pervasively individuate and commodify nature and pre-structure human relations than any nineteenth-century project of land survey.

Notes

Chapter 1

Introduction

1 Foucault, cited in E. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 21. 2 This is not to imply that all settlers were newcomers. On the politics of ‘settling’ the Metis and aboriginal peoples, see chapter 2. 3 Panoptism in particular, which Foucault describes as ‘a technological innovation in the order of power comparable to the steam engine in the order of production.’ (M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 71; on the question of resistance see Power/Knowledge, 164. 4 P. Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops (Montreal: Black Rose, 1994), 65. 5 A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 21. 6 W. Magnusson, The Search for Political Space (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 4. On spatial restructuring and the fundamental challenges to familiar spatial bases of collective action (‘nation-states,’ ‘communities’) see M. Dean, ‘Sociology after Society,’ in D. Owen, ed., Sociology after Postmodernism (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 205–28; N. Rose, ‘The Death of the Social? Re-figuring the Territory of Government,’ Economy and Society 25 (1996): 327–56; and B. Smart, ‘On the Disorder of Things: Sociology, Postmodernity, and “End of the Social,”’ Sociology 24 (1990): 397–416. 7 S. Dalby, ‘Against “Globalization from Above”: Critical Geopolitics and the World Order Models Project,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17 (1999): 195–6. 8 I am referring here to the ‘bundles’ of human trajectories on ‘time-space maps.’ See Giddens’s discussion of Hagerstrand’s time-space mapping

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9 10

11

12

13

14

15

Notes to pages 8–10

(A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984], 111–13). Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity. My notion of the concrete ‘performative’ construction of the social comes from Goffman (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life [Garden City: Doubleday, 1959], see in particular his discussion of ‘teams’). I use the concept to parallel, but not supplant, the potentially more distanciated processes of ‘discursive’ or ‘documentary’ construction (see Dorothy E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic [Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987]). The region that I write about in this study is defined not by nature, but by the Dominion of Canada’s project of agricultural colonization. For a discussion of various regionalizations such as ‘prairie,’ ‘great plains,’ and ‘parkland,’ see note 48 in chapter 3. I draw upon additional bodies of literature that would be impossible to discuss systematically. These include the sociological literatures on ‘community’ and ‘rural community’ and the historical literatures on prairie settlement, the development of prairie agriculture, the positions of women, aboriginal peoples, and non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants in western agriculture, rural planning and social-reform movements, and the history of agrarian movements and parties in the west. Of course I cite this literature where relevant, but as for its range, the best I can do is acknowledge it in the bibliography. The numerous points of disagreement I would have over interpretation I must mostly leave as implicit. I am thinking here of the debates in the Journal of Peasant Studies on the politics of independent commodity producers, as well as efforts on the left to rehabilitate agrarian ‘populism’ by showing that it was both class-based and offered a meaningful challenge to capitalism (see E. Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism [London: NLB, 1977]). For the Canadian context see J. Conway, ‘Populism in the United States, Russia and Canada: Explaining the Roots of Canada’s Third Parties,’ Canadian Journal of Political Science 11 (1978); and D. Laycock, Populism and Democratic Thought in the Canadian Prairies, 1910 to 1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). M. Castells, The Urban Question (London: Edward Arnold, 1977); I. Katzenelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York: Pantheon, 1981). S. Duncan and M. Goodwin, ‘The Local State and Restructuring Social Relations,’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 6 (1982); M. Boddy and C. Fudge, Local Socialism? Labour Councils and New Left Alternatives (London: Macmillan, 1984); W. Magnusson, ‘Urban Politics and the Local State,’

Notes to pages 10–11

16

17

18

19

20

21

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Studies in Political Economy 16 (1985); S. Lansley, S. Goos, and C. Wolmar, Councils in Conflict: The Rise and Fall of the Municipal Left (London: Macmillan, 1989). D. Gordon, ‘Class Struggle and the Stages of American Urban Development,’ in D.C. Perry and J. Alfred, eds, The Rise of the Sunbelt Cities (Beverley Hills, CA: Sage, 1977); J. Cumbler, ‘The City and Community: The Impact of Urban Forces on Working Class Behaviour,’ Journal of Urban History 3 (1977); D. Cannadine, ‘Residential Segregation in Nineteenth Century Towns: From Shapes on the Ground to Shapes in Society,’ in J.H. Johnson and C.G. Pooley, eds, The Structure of Nineteenth Century Cities (London: C. Helm, 1982); R. Dennis, English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century: A Social Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); R. Harris, ‘Residential Segregation and Class Formation in the Capitalist City: A Review and Directions for Research,’ Progress in Human Geography 8 (1984). C. Calhoun, ‘Class, Place and Industrial Revolution,’ in P. Williams and N. Thrift, eds, Class and Space: The Making of Urban Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988), 54. For a discussion of the use of Foucault to analyse the state or rather ‘governmentality,’ see G. Burchell and C. Gordon, eds, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Foucault, Power /Knowledge, 72; Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1979). See also Curtis for an insistence on a Foucauldian analysis of the state (B. Curtis, ‘Taking the State Back Out: Rose and Miller on Political Power,’ British Journal of Sociology 46 [1995]); but see also note 22 on the dangers of representing panopticism as state hegemony. Philo argues that, for Foucault, this specificity is primarily geographic or spatial (C. Philo, ‘Foucault’s Geography,’ Environment and Planning D 10 [1992]: 143). It is not quite the same thing as Thompson’s historical particularity, which spares ‘agency’ from the totalizing claims of theory (E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978). B. Curtis, Building the Educational State: Canada West, 1836–1871 (Philadelphia: Falmer Press, 1988); A. Moscovitch and J. Albert, eds, The ‘Benevolent State’: The Growth of Welfare in Canada (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1987). The problems arise when one represents state and non-state governance as expressions of the same ‘power.’ Those writing from within a Marxist tradition are likely to represent both as expressions of ‘bourgeois hegemony.’ Those with a more post-structuralist bent resist what they see as a Marxist revival of meta-narratives of historical agents (the bourgeoisie and its opposition rooted in class, gender, and race). While Foucault insists that we talk about ‘resistance,’ his own tendency to ‘decentre’ the subject makes the

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political identity of those doing the resisting rather ambiguous. From a Marxist perspective Foucault’s ‘powers’ are, to use his own term, ‘anonymous’ in a way that denies agency and so insidious as to undermine in advance any political opposition. Both sides see their opponents as producing homogeneous accounts of what for Foucault are supposed to be diverse powers. For debates on how to apply Foucault to understanding governance, see Curtis, ‘Taking the State Back Out’; and P. Miller and N. Rose, ‘Political Thought and the Limits of Orthodoxy: A Response to Curtis,’ British Journal of Sociology 46 (1995). P. Corrigan and O. Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). The term is Foucault’s (Discipline and Punish, 222). Power/Knowledge, 72. D. Harvey, ‘Labour, Capital and Class Structure around the Built Environment in Advanced Capitalist Societies,’ in K.R. Cox, ed., Urbanization and Conflict in Market Societies (Chicago: Maaroufa Press, 1978). L. Winner, ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’ Daedalus 109 (1977): 121–36. For a recent review see P. Macnaughten and J. Urry, Contested Natures (London: Sage, 1998). W. Cronon, Changes in the Land (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983). A. Wilson, The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992). I. Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978). On presentist assumptions in the history of ideas see R.A. Jones, ‘On Understanding a Sociological Classic,’ American Journal of Sociology 83 (1977): 279– 319. M. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (London: Verso, 1983). Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity.

Chapter 2

Goundwork: The Dominion Survey

1 E.G. Wakefield, ‘A View of the Art of Colonization’ (1849), in M.F. Lloyd Prichard, ed., The Collected Works of Edward Gibbon Wakefield (London: J.W. Parker, 1968), 868. 2 Mr Grant, Commons Debates, 28 May 1869, 494. 3 Department of the Interior, Annual Report, 1881–2, 119. 4 Dept. of Interior, Annual Report, 1877–8, 13. 5 Dept. of Interior, Annual Report, 1881–2.

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6 See D. Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (London: Duke University Press, 1993), 17–19 on the ‘visual mastery of a scene,’ as well as discursive ‘appropriation.’ 7 Dept. of Interior, Annual Report, 1884, 20. 8 Dept. of Interior, Annual Report, 1878–9, 6. 9 Dept. of Interior, Annual Report, 1879–80, 13. 10 William Butler (The Great Lone Land [Toronto: MacMillan, 1910], 231), writing in 1871 problematizes the representation of the region: ‘Like all things in this world, the Saskatchewan has its poles of opinion; there are those who paint it a paradise, and those who picture it a hell. It is unfit for habitation, it is to be the garden-spot of America – it is too cold, it is too dry – it is too beautiful; and, in reality, what is it?’ Neither he nor his contemporaries take the more interesting next step and ask, ‘How do we know?’ 11 Mr Grant, Commons Debates, 28 May 1869, 494. 12 This area became known as the ‘Palliser Triangle.’ It was crudely defined as a triangle with the 49th parallel between 100 degrees west longitude (around what is now Turtle Mountain in Manitoba) and 114 degrees west longitude (at the current border between British Columbia and Alberta) as its base and a point on the 52nd parallel (somewhere in the current Alberta, just south of Red Deer) as its apex. 13 Report of E. Deville, Chief Inspector of Surveys, Dept. of Interior, Annual Report, 1881–2, 8–9. 14 Dept. of Interior, Annual Report, 1881–2, xxi; 1884, 17. 15 Dept. of Interior Annual Report, 1881–2. 16 J. Wright, The Louise Lucas Story (Montreal: Harvest House, 1965), 68. 17 David Jones (Empire of Dust [Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1987]) makes a particularly vehement case against the promoters of dryland agriculture in what he calls the ‘dry belt.’ The ‘dry belt’ is an area considerably smaller than the Palliser Triangle (see n. 12) extending into a small corner of Saskatchewan south of the South Saskatchewan River and west of Swift Current. Like Palliser’s, this regionalization is apparently defined relative to a moving target – the possibility of growing field crops. Not surprisingly, it does not exactly correspond to other regionalizations (see, for example, Richards and Fung’s mapping of ‘moderately severe’ climatic limitations to agriculture in Saskatchewan (Atlas of Saskatchewan [Saskatoon: Modern Press, 1969], 106. Notwithstanding his withering scorn for failures like ‘clear summerfallow’ (140), Jones documents twentieth-century improvements in dryland farming techniques, many of them invented by farmers rather than ‘experts’ (222). The debate about the possibility of transforming dryland agriculture was never resolved in the twentieth century by experience of local conditions. The

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Notes to pages 19–21

engineering impulse, which was so important in the history of the prairie west, was essentially counterfactual. Not long after the drought of the 1930s, Saskatchewan officials were speculating that ‘[r]ecent developments in the field of weather forecasting and in artificial means of increasing rainfall may, in the future, make production of grain crops less uncertain’ (Saskatchewan Royal Commission on Agriculture and Rural Life, Report no. 2: Mechanization and Farm Costs [Regina: Queen’s Printer, 1955], 51). For a characterization of the pastoral aesthetic and eighteenth-century landscape design, see A. Wilson, The Culture of Nature (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 94–6. The explorer Alexander Mackenzie is reported to have written that the parkland rivalled ‘all the groves, lawns and plantations with which genius and art seek to adorn the habitations of civilized life.’ Canada, House of Commons, Sessional Papers (No. 43), North West Territory, Exploration of 1868, S.J. Dawson, May 1869, Report on the Line of Route Between Lake Superior to the Red River Settlement. Dept. of Interior, Annual Report, 1879–80, 5. Report of the Surveyor General, Lindsay Russell, Dept. of Interior, Annual Report, 1882–3 pt 2, 3–12; Dept. of Interior, Annual Report, 1884–85, xxv. Report of Surveyor General, L. Russell, Dept. of Interior, Annual Report, 1882–3 pt 2, 11. Regarding this principle see W. Pattison, Beginnings of the American Rectilinear Land Survey System, 1784–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 231. ‘Report of the Lands Board,’ Dept. of Interior, Annual Report, 1885–5, 5. Dept. of Interior, Annual Report, 1884–5, xiii–xxi. Memorandum of J.S. Dennis, Fort Garry, 11 October 1869, Correspondence and Papers Connected with the Recent Occurrences in the North-West Territories, Sessional Papers, 1870, vol. 5, no. 12. Letter from W. McDougall to the Secretary of State, Pembina, 4 November 1869, Correspondence and Papers Connected with the Recent Occurrences in the North-West Territories, Sessional Papers, 1870, vol. 5, no. 12. John A. MacDonald, Report of a Committee of the Honorable, the Privy Council, 16 December 1869, Correspondence and Papers Connected with the Recent Occurrences in the North-West Territories, Sessional Papers, 1870, vol. 5, no. 12. I rely on T. Flanagan (Riel and the Rebellion 1885 Reconsidered [Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1983], 81–5) in the following reconstruction of Riel’s legal position. Flanagan’s re-evaluation of Riel’s legal position is unduly harsh, not because of weaknesses in his scholarship concerning

Notes to pages 21–2

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Riel’s thinking or in his reconstruction of the legal context of the 1880s. Riel comes out badly in the reassessment because of the way Flanagan applies context in his evaluation. Yes, our ‘hermeneutic’ must refer to contexts of the time, but contexts do not succeed one another in linear fashion, nor do they hold absolute sway at any one moment. There are always debates that reflect temporally parallel and competing paradigms or contexts. Riel was a pioneer of a competing legal paradigm, and for this reason he cannot be judged entirely within the framework assumptions of his opponents. W. Cronon (Changes in the Land [New York: Hill & Wang, 1983]) documents the complex and changing English notions of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘ownership’ (in particular, changing notions of ‘private’ and ‘exclusive’ rights) from the period of contact in New England. He also attempts to recover aboriginal conceptions by ‘reading through’ the ideological constructions by the colonists of aboriginal thought. B. Slattery (‘Ancestral Lands, Alien Laws: Judicial Perspectives on Aboriginal Title,’ in Studies in Aboriginal Rights No. 2 [University of Saskatchewan Native Law Centre, 1983]) offers a reading of the legal texts that provide the context for the numbered treaties of the North-West Territories. Other authors have attempted to reconstruct the discursive context that framed the meaning of these treaties for the aboriginal signers. Their sources, contemporary European accounts and aboriginal oral histories, must be handled with tremendous critical reflection, particularly when one is attempting to translate them into legal concepts. A. Ray et al. argue that the signers of Treaties 1, 2, and 3 ‘obviously had a sense of tribal territorial ownership’ (Bounty and Benevolence: A History of Saskatchewan Treaties [Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000], 73). From their evidence a more adequate construction might be that the signers understood their tribal groups to have claims to sovereignty over (often contested) territories. They likely did not employ concepts approximating ‘ownership,’ that is, the possibility of exclusive individual title and the trading of land as a commodity. Rather they recognized collective usufruct rights for themselves and other groups to (often very precisely defined) places. Riel might be read as a pioneer of the concept of the ‘fourth world,’ that is, of nations that exist within and across the borders of ‘occupying’ or colonizing states. Flanagan, Riel and the Rebellion, 82. Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 54. Part of the weakness of Riel’s position, in the nineteenth-century context, was that he seems to have been seeking something more limited and ambig-

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39 40

41

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Notes to pages 23–4

uous than separate statehood, perhaps something in the direction of modern conceptions of aboriginal self-government or ‘sovereignty association.’ P. Bourdieu, ‘Social Space and Symbolic Power,’ Sociological Theory 7 (1989). Pattison, Beginnings of American Land Survey System, 92–3. For a discussion of Canadian thinking in adopting features of the American survey see C. Martin, ‘Dominion Lands’ Policy (Toronto: Macmillan, 1938). For Canadian experiments with different sizes of homestead grants, see L. Sebert, ‘The History of the Rectangular Township of the Canadian Prairies,’ Canadian Surveyor 17 (1963): 380–91 and J. Richtik, ‘The Policy Framework for Settling the Canadian West, 1870–1880,’ Agricultural History 49 (1975): 613–28. The Dominion Lands Act actually specifies a third grid dividing the section into 16 ‘quarter quarter sections’ numbered from the southeast corner of each section (Dominion Lands Act, 35 Vic., c. 23, cl. 15, s. 2, p. 60). This form of description was rarely used, but see note 49 below. Sir John A. Macdonald, Commons Debates, 27 April 1883, 863. The Canadian Pacific Railway was the main beneficiary, being offered initially odd-numbered sections in a corridor spanning 24 miles on either side of their rail line. Other railways were given lesser grants, and many of these were acquired by the Canadian Pacific through mergers and acquisitions. The railway land-grant system was complex and went through many iterations. For a detailed description see C. Martin, ‘Dominion Lands’ Policy (Toronto: Macmillan, 1938). Where ‘pre-emption,’ the right to reserve an adjacent quarter for purchase at a fixed price, did not intervene, settlers on adjacent quarters in the same section could, and sometimes did, locate their dwellings in a cluster of four at the centre of the section. This solution was rare since it removed all four families as far as possible from the road allowance (and hence the possibility of a publicly maintained road to the farm gate). Other approaches to settling ‘against the grid’ required more fundamental tinkering with both the survey and homestead regulations discussed in the remainder of this chapter. See 1869, 32 Victoria, Appendix (No. 7), ‘Second Report of the Standing Committee on Immigration and Colonization,’ George Jackson, chairman, submitted 16 June 1869, 13. See Mr Charlton’s disapproving summary of Sir John A. Macdonald’s vision of large-scale wheat farms using ‘processes of enriching the soil, expensive machinery and everything of that kind’ (Commons Debates, 1882, 817). On provision for expansion through ‘pre-emption’ see Richtik, ‘The Policy Framework for Settling the Canadian West, 619–70. The system privileged and institutionalized certain sorts of speculation.

Notes to pages 25–9

46 47

48 49

50

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52 53

54

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Great efforts were, however, expended on excluding the sort of ‘small time’ land speculators common in the United States. These were individuals who misrepresented their intent to settle and work up the land. See Martin, ‘Dominion Lands’ Policy. See the speech of Mr Charleton (Commons Debates, 1882, 810–25). When these lots were laid out by Dominion surveyors, there was an effort to regularize them to a standard 10 chains (660 feet) by 2 miles; see Flanagan, Riel and the Rebellion, 30. For a scholarly and sympathetic account of the government’s efforts see Flanagan, Riel and the Rebellion. Flanagan (ibid., 42) argues that the government again was ready to make reasonable compromise by using an even finer grid (16 ‘legal’ subdivisions within each section) to approximate the shape of river lots. These would have been very crude approximations along the curves and bends of the river. A sense of relief pervades the 1905 report of the Department of the Interior, because the number of homestead entries, as well as the proportion of English-speaking settlers is at last satisfactory (Report, 1904–5, xxii–xxix). On the desirability of Anglo-Saxons see Dept. of Interior, Annual Report, 1902–3, xxviii; and A. Hawkes, Special Report on Immigration (Ottawa, 1912), 10. On Englishness and accumulation see G. Durham, Lord Durham’s Report, ed. C.P. Lucas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 2: 289; on Englishness and self-government see J. Bourinot, Local Government in Canada (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 67. Ukrainians. The Hutterites arrived in western Canadian in 1917 (S. Evans, ‘The Hutterites in Alberta,’ in L. Rosenvall and S. Evans, eds, Essays on the Historical Geography of the Canadian West (Calgary: University of Calgary Dept. of Geography, 1987), 146. This was after the Department of the Interior had ceased to make special efforts to attract eastern European settlers. The provision is generally referred to as the ‘hamlet clause,’ although that is not what it is called in the act. See Dominion Lands Act, Statutes of Canada, 42 Vict. [1879], c. 31, p. 229. Sir John A. MacDonald, Commons Debates, 27 April 1883, 880. For details see 1872 Dominion Lands Act, Statutes of Canada, 35 Vict., c. 23, cl. 33, p. 56. According to the plans provided by R. Friesen (‘Saskatchewan Mennonite Settlements: The Modification of an Old World Settlement Pattern,’ Canadian Ethnic Studies 9 [1977], 81, 83), commons and the settlement typically comprised a section (one square mile) of land.

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Notes to pages 29–32

58 Friesen, ‘Saskatchewan Mennonite Settlements.’ 59 This sort of solution might have worked for the Metis in St Laurent in 1885. However, it was disallowed for non-immigrants (i.e., the Metis) in the 1881 Statutes of Canada, 44 Vict., c. 16, cl. 7; and disallowed altogether in the 1883 Dominion Lands Act: Statutes of Canada, 46 Vict., c. 17, pp. 288–9. Sifton, however, used his ministerial discretion in this matter as late as 1902 in concessions to Dukhobors; see Carl J. Tracie, ‘Toil and Peaceful Life’: Doukhobor Village Settlement in Saskatchewan, 1899–1918 (Regina: Canada Plains Research Centre, 1996), 100. 60 Dept. of Interior, Annual Report, 1902–3, 75. 61 Dept. of Interior, Annual Report, 1883, 13–14. 62 D. Gale and P.M. Koroscil, ‘Doukhobor Settlements: Experiments in Idealism,’ Canadian Ethnic Studies 9 (1977): 60–2. 63 Friesen, ‘Saskatchewan Mennonite Settlements,’ 74. 64 ‘Disposal of Lands,’ Report of J.S. Dennis, Surveyor General, Dept. of Interior, Annual Report, 1875–6; 1881–2, xiv. 65 In the 1940s the Alberta government went so far as to pass legislation prohibiting the sale of land to Hutterites. The expansion of Hutterite colonies continued to be regulated into the 1970s (Evans, ‘The Hutterites in Alberta,’ 154–6). 66 Friesen, ‘Saskatchewan Mennonite Settlements,’ 84; see also T Adams, Rural Planning and Development (Ottawa: Commission of Conservation of Canada, 1917), 53. 67 Friesen, ‘Saskatchewan Mennonite Settlements,’ 80. 68 Ibid., 73. 69 R. Rees, New and Naked Land: Making the Prairies Home (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1988), 77. 70 Dept. of Interior, Annual Report, 1887–8, 11. 71 J. Lehr, ‘The Government and the Immigrant: Perspectives on Ukrainian Block Settlement in the Canadian West,’ Canadian Ethnic Studies 9 (1977). 72 See, e.g., Dept. of Interior, Annual Report, 1904–5, xxvii; and Special Report on Immigration, 1912, 10; 73 Mr Royal (translation), Commons Debates, 30 April 1883, 896–7. 74 ‘Whiteness’ was an explicit marker in this debate. Their detractors represented eastern Europeans as ‘unfit to be classed as white men’ (Lehr, ‘The Government and the Immigrant,’ 44). 75 Lucas, ed., Lord Durham’s Report, 2: 288–9; 3: 142–3. 76 From 1897 to 1902 there was a vigorous campaign against the Liberals’ concessions to eastern European customs (Lehr, ‘The Government and the Immigrant,’ 44–5). The Doukhobors, who were more collectivist and more

Notes to pages 32–4

77

78 79

80

81

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83 84 85

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intransigent, were particular targets of partisan opposition (Rees, New and Naked Land, 79). See Lehr (‘The Government and the Immigrant’) on efforts to limit ethnic exclusiveness as well as a kind of ‘proxemics’ of assimilation whereby Ukrainians were settled close to Germans, who were thought to provide a better example of adaptation to Canadian conditions. D. Laird, Minister of the Interior, Dept. of Interior Annual Report, 1873–4, 6. Friesen (‘Saskatchewan Mennonite Settlements,’ 75) writes: ‘The village agreement did not have a basis in the laws of Canada and therefore recourse was limited to moral suasion and social pressure.’ This is certainly true of most agricultural land. But Mennonites across the prairies had slightly different legal and organizational arrangements. Freisen also tells us that in some cases the central quarter section devoted to dwellings and common pasture was incorporated as a village. If this were so, then some of the written agreements regarding the village may have had the status of legal bylaws. The Dominion Lands Act is very clear in allowing such re-surveying, making particular reference to river lots (adopted by the Metis) and the sorts of ‘line plans’ adopted by Mennonites and others (Statutes of Canada, 44 Vict., c. 16, cl. 16). Friesen, ‘Saskatchewan Mennonite Settlements,’ 82. Friesen, misleadingly, implies that similar solutions applied to common fields would have been disallowed under the homestead regulations of Dominion Lands Act (85). However, these regulations only applied for the ‘probationary’ period before the settler was granted full title. Whatever their actual legal situation, communitarian settlers undoubtedly felt that they had few legal options. Many Doukhobors simply refused to register their quarter section individually (Rees, New and Naked Land 78–9). Legislation facilitating the formation of Rochdale-style co-operatives was a provincial responsibility. The first of its kind in Saskatchewan, the Agricultural Co-operatives Association Act was not passed until 1913. Friesen, ‘Saskatchewan Mennonite Settlements,’ 84–5. On women and nineteenth-century utopian designs for domestic labour see D. Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981). The ‘countryside ideal’ had arisen precisely in opposition to this ‘modern’ machine aesthetic (M. Bunce, The Countryside Ideal: Anglo-American Images of Landscape [London: Routledge, 1994]). Rees’s rich survey of settler representations of the prairie (New and Naked Land) suggests that, at least among the first generation, there was more yearning for the pastoral ideal than appreciation of the modernist ‘reality’ as it emerged on the grid. He argues that for them the new aesthetic made attachment to place difficult. I would

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argue, however, that a unique modernist countryside ideal emerged in the prairies in the twentieth century. Artists too numerous to name (Kurelek, Otto Rogers, and Courtney Milne come unsystematically to mind) celebrated the austere modernism of grain elevator, grid, and horizon. This cultural milieu certainly influenced my reception of the landscape growing up in Saskatchewan. It is a landscape that one can love, but not unreservedly.

Chapter 3

Modernity in the Countryside: Contested Rural Space

1 J.S. Mill, ‘De Tocqueville on Democracy in America’ (1840), in J.M. Robson and A. Bradley, eds, Essays on Politics and Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 198. 2 E. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 11. 3 S. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 155; see also p. 156 on turn-of-the-century innovations in the control of indoor environments: air conditioning and humidity control. 4 M. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (London: Verso, 1983). 5 Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 132. 6 R. Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 191; Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 158. 7 The Evolution of the Prairie by the Plough, 1903 promotional pamphlet (no publisher), 17. 8 Fishman, Urban Utopias, 193. 9 Edwin E. Slosson, The Independent, 3 January 1920, 5–6. 10 Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 166. 11 See John MacDougall, Rural Life in Canada (1913) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 23. Canada’s ‘rural’ population had fallen to 54% in 1911 (‘rural’ population being those not living in incorporated villages, towns, and cities). In the United States in 1910 the rural population was also 54% of the total, measured using a more inclusive definition (people living outside settlements of 2500 or more inhabitants). 12 See, e.g., Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1880) (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1914), 91ff. 13 See, e.g., Dr James W. Robertson, ‘Improving Canadian Agriculture,’ in Commission of Conservation, Third Annual Report, 1912, 89. 14 Message for President Taft to the United States Congress, 1910, cited in J.W.

Notes to pages 39–41

15 16

17 18

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Robertson, ‘The Conservation of Agricultural Resources,’ in Commission of Conservation, First Annual Report, 1910, 43. MacDougall, Rural Life in Canada, 112. See for example address by Dr. James W. Roberston, ‘The Conservation of Agricultural Resources,’ in Commission of Conservation, First Annual Report, 1910, 52; Rural Planning, 175: on the Federal government’s tree-planting promotion for the prairies: ‘Trees cool the air in summer and provide shelter in winter.’ Rural Life, 68. The winter gardens in Ebenezer Howard’s garden city were housed in a glass structure that he called the ‘Crystal Palace’ (E. Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1960), first published 1899, 54. Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1994), first published 1898, 65. Rural Life, 125. Rural Life, 106. See, e.g., Roberston, ‘The Conservation of Agricultural Resources,’ 42–59. See, e.g., Commission on Conservation, Eighth Annual Report, 1917, plate xviii (land unsuitable for cultivation). Rural Life, 68–9. See also Adams, Rural Planning, 16. Fields, Factories and Workshops, 67; see also George, Progress and Poverty, 149–50: ‘Twenty men working together will, where nature is niggardly, produce more than twenty times the wealth that one man can produce where nature is most bountiful. The denser the population the more minute becomes the subdivision of labour, the greater the economies of production and distribution, and hence, the very reverse of the Malthusian is true.’ A notable exception comes from an American country-life spokesman, who recognized that ‘[t]he shift in population between town and country is an expression of many causes. In some cases it may mean a lessening in economic efficiency in the region, and in some cases an actual increase in such efficiency’ (L.H. Bailey, The Country-Life Movement in the United States [New York: MacMillan Co., 1913], 33; he gives the example of Iowa on p. 35). In most of his judgments Bailey was unusually modernist, but even he thought that high productivity with low population density was an anomaly and recommended increasing the farm population on the land through intensive farming (106). One commentator wrote in 1910 of ‘these days when the slogan “back to the land” is dinning in our ears,’ The Independent, 15 September 1910, 597.

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Notes to pages 41–3

29 See, e.g., ‘Settlement of Agricultural Areas,’ Conservation of Life 2, no. 2 (1916): 44. 30 A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 21. 31 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 202. 32 J. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 612–13. 33 The Consequences of Modernity, 19. 34 See Kropotkin, who emphasizes the influence of ‘[t]he steadily increasing speed of trans-oceanic communications and the steadily increasing facilities of shipping,’ in bringing about this trend that he himself opposed (Fields, Factories and Workshops [1898; Montreal: Black Rose, 1994], 4). He paraphrases Neumann Spallart, ‘the poet of the world trade’: ‘Why shall we grow corn, rear oxen and sheep, and cultivate orchards, go through the painful work of the labourer and the farmer, and anxiously watch the sky in fear of a bad crop, when we can get, with much less pain, mountains of corn from India, America, Hungary, or Russia, meat from New Zealand, vegetables from the Azores, apples from Canada, grapes from Malaga, and so on? ... Already now, ... our food consists, even in modest households, of produce gathered from all over the globe. Our cloth is made out of fibres grown and wool sheared in all parts of the world. The prairies of America and Australia; the mountains and steppes of Asia; the frozen wildernesses of Arctic regions; the deserts of Africa and the depths of the oceans; the tropics and the lands of the midnight sun are our tributaries’ (4–5). 35 Sir Horace Plunkett, The Rural Life Problem of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 41. 36 H. Moorhouse, Deep Furrows (Toronto: G.J. McLeod, 1918), 36, 73. 37 Wheat, more than other foods, was easy to preserve with simple technologies. It was, therefore, the ideal trans-local commodity, ‘a product which did not depreciate and was a common medium of exchange of recognized value’ (P.H. Bryce, ‘Production and Preservation of Food Supplies,’ in Commission, Eighth Report, 135). 38 Deep Furrows, 74. 39 Cited by Giddens, Consequences of Modernity, 24. 40 Deep Furrows, 36. 41 Marx emphasized the increasing spatial indifference of global industry and its destructive consequences: ‘All old-established national industries ... are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indige-

Notes to pages 43–5

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nous raw materials, but raw materials drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe’ (‘Manifesto,’ in R. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader [New York: W.W. Norton, 1978], 476). The most disturbing consequence of international competition and specialization was the loss of national agricultures. Dependency on other nations for food raised concerns for national security, although to a lesser degree if these suppliers were within a single colonial system (as were Canada and the United Kingdom) (see C. Berger, The Sense of Power [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970], 181–2). ‘Report of the Deputy Head Upon His Visit to the North-West,’ Dominion Dept. of Interior, Annual Report, 1884, 16. Evolution of the Prairie (pamphlet) 3. See, e.g., Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture, Eleventh Annual Report, 1916, 26. Commission, Seventh Report (1916), 150; Fourth Report (1913), 157. Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture, Annual Reports. Both the criteria and the boundaries used to define ‘parkland’ as opposed to ‘prairie’ regions vary. See W.A. Mackintosh, Prairie Settlement: The Geographical Setting (Toronto: Macmillan, 1934), 22–3; Saskatchewan Royal Commission on Agriculture and Rural Life, Report no. 4: Rural Roads and Local Government (Regina: Queen’s Printer, 1955), 24–6; J.H. Richards and K.I. Fung, Atlas of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon: Modern Press, 1969), 76–7, 106–7; J.W. Bennett, Northern Plainsman: Adaptive Strategy and Agrarian Life (Arlington Heights, IL: AHM Publishing, 1969), 28–31; and, more recently, Environment Canada, ‘Prairie Grassland and Parkland,’ in The Green Lane, http:// www.mb.ec.gc.ca/nature/whp/prgrass/df03s58.en.html, accessed 28 July 2003. The project of defining such regions tends to be informed by a kind of ‘naive geographic realism’ that assumes that boundaries inhere in ‘nature’ (irrespective of temporal transformation – both human and non-human) as well as a geographic determinism that expects patterns of land use (e.g., wheat growing) to conform to ‘nature.’ The widest variations are in the northern boundaries defined for the parkland region. Here the competing criteria of ‘soil type’ (itself a variable concept) and pre-agricultural vegetation create a range of possibilities. If the important transition is between primarily aspen forest and primarily fescue grassland with aspen groves, then ‘parkland’ becomes a very narrow strip of a region, particularly along the North Saskatchewan River to the east of Saskatoon. Precise correlations with agricultural land use are made difficult by the fact that most candidates for

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Notes to pages 45–6

‘parkland’ census divisions overlap some or all the region’s contested natural boundaries. The only one that is almost wholly within all of the variously defined ‘parklands’ is Division 10 (with Wynyard at its centre) and possibly 5. The line between ‘parkland’ and ‘prairie’ is fuzzy, but for prairie there is a much wider ‘consensus region’ that most consider to be the northern tip of the American ‘great plains’ (see Sask. Royal Commission, Rural Roads and Local Government, 24). As for the putative correlation between natural region and land use, note that the commitment to wheat growing in the parkland Division 10 was far greater than in any of the American ‘Great Plains’ states. For instance, in the leading wheat-growing state of the Great Plains, North Dakota, in 1930, 26% of improved acres were in wheat. In Division 10 for 1931, 56% of improved acres were in wheat – more than double the percentage. The conversion of ‘unimproved’ to ‘improved’ land, at least after the settlement period when most easily improved land was developed, provides a rough index of the clearing of bluffs and draining and/or filling in of sloughs and ‘potholes.’ In the fescue/aspen bluff parkland these would have been the main obstacles to ‘improvement.’ In the parkland Division 10 the percentage of improved land rose from 54% in 1946 to 79% in 1971, an increase that corresponds with the post-war round of mechanization. The corresponding provincial average was 60% in 1946 and only 71% in 1971. MacDougall, Rural Life, 72. Commission, Seventh Report, 1916, 131. For example, in 1931 the census for Saskatchewan records that 48% of improved acres were planted with wheat, while 65% were in ‘grains and seeds.’ In the only purely ‘parkland’ census division (#10) wheat made up 39% of the ‘improved’ area (down from 61% in 1926), while grains and seeds formed 66%. In this parkland division the next most prominent crop by area was oats, at 17%. Lipset, citing a Bank of Canada report for 1937, writes: ‘On the average, about 85 percent of the value of all net production in Saskatchewan is supplied by the agricultural industry, and about 80 per cent of the cash income of the agricultural industry is derived from wheat’ (his emphasis; S. Lipset, Agrarian Socialism [Berkeley: California Paperback Edition, 1971], 44). The operative word here is ‘cash.’ Census figures for 1936 show that wheat made up only 48% of the value of all farm produce (down from 71% in 1926). However, much of the remaining produce was not sold, but simply valued at the current market price (see Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Census of the Prairie Provinces, 1946, xviii). Nor could it have been sold at the market price. Take, for instance, oats: not only

Notes to pages 46–7

54 55

56

57

58 59 60 61 62 63

64

143

would there have been few ready to buy it, any large-scale effort to sell would rapidly have depressed the price. See Lipset, Agrarian Socialism, 46. According to one observer in 1916, there had been ‘hundreds and thousands of men leaving the farms they had occupied.’ Commission, Seventh Report, 1916, 135. He is probably referring to homestead cancellations rather than farm bankruptcies or mortgage foreclosures. Danysk has calculated ‘cancellation rates’ (cancellations as a percentage of homestead entries) for the prairies for the periods 1870–1927 (41%) and 1911–30 (60%). C. Danysk, Hired Hands: Labour and the Development of Prairie Agriculture (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995), 116–17. The problem of tax collection was particularly evident in Saskatchewan’s local government units or ‘rural municipalities.’ The bad crop year of 1919 led to reduction in the collection rate to under 75% for most municipalities. During the agricultural depression of the next two years the problem simply got worse. During the Great Depression the average collection rate fell to 21% (Saskatchewan Department of Municipal Affairs, Annual Reports). The idea of mixed farming implied that each farm produce a variety of products. ‘Diversified’ farming was a more flexible proposal for production of a variety of farm products within the region but with individual farms specializing in single crops as preferred (see ‘Agriculture and Its Problems,’ Western Producer, 22 January 1931; ‘The Business of Farming in Saskatchewan,’ Western Producer, 9 June 1932, 35). Western Producer, 15 January 1931, 25. See, e.g., MacDougall, Rural Life, 100. See, e.g., Robertson, ‘The Conservation of Agricultural Resources,’ 51. Western Producer, 29 May 1930, 8; see also 22 January 1931, 8, and ‘Does Mixed Farming Pay?’ 14 July 1932. Western Producer, 29 May 1930, 8. In 1921 87% of Saskatchewan farmers reported growing wheat. In 1931 the figure was 84%. Significantly, in the ‘parkland’ census division (#10) the figure was identical. Widespread investment in self-powered equipment did not begin in Saskatchewan until after the Second World War. When it did, farmers had a double incentive for getting rid of their horses – their work could be done my machine and hundreds of acres of land could be taken out of forage production and devoted to cash crops (i.e., wheat). The Saskatchewan Royal Commission on Agriculture and Rural Life described the infrastructure of a ‘typical’ wheat farm by 1955: ‘[It] is between 640 and 800 acres in size. It already possesses a tractor of large or nearly large size, a discer with a seed box,

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68

69 70 71

Notes to pages 47–8

a cultivator or blade tillage implement of some kind, a swather, a large pull type or medium sized self-propelled combine, a truck, a grain loader, and the other miscellaneous items associated with power farming.’ Report no. 2: Mechanization and Farm Costs (Regina: Queen’s Printer, 1955), 106–7. D.C. Jones, Empire of Dust (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1987), 144. By this time a state-of-the-art cattle farm required ‘power mowers, balers and bale pickups or forage harvesters, feed cutters and blowers,’ and could look forward to new barns with mechanized feeding, water, and manure removal systems (Royal Commission, Report no. 2, 108). In northern census divisions, where there was less specialization in wheat, the post-war wave of mechanization developed more slowly than in the south (ibid., 22). Wheat specialization meant that a greater proportion of the farm output was likely to be on a cash basis and that farms therefore were more likely to have capital to invest. Investment priorities in mechanization would also have been clearer. See a discussion in The Independent, 15 September 1910, 596–7, which notes that ‘a few years ago’ Sir William Crookes had prophesied that the world’s wheat supply would decline through exhaustion of the soil. Even the ‘Dominion Chemist’ advised against reliance on artificial fertilizers. F.T. Shutt, ‘Fertilizers and Their Use in Canada,’ in Commission, Eighth Report, 57, 62. Ibid., 57; Robertson, ‘The Conservation of Agricultural Resources.’ Commission, Fifth Report (1914), 148; see also Third Report, 116; on the lack of crop rotation in the prairies see also Fourth Report, 154. On ‘surface mining’ see Robertson, ‘The Conservation of Agricultural Resources,’ 45. Despite claims that the ‘parkland’ was a mixed farming region (see, e.g., Bennet, Northern Plainsman, 28–31), there is little evidence that farmers here practised the sort of ‘mixed farming’ that involved manuring and crop rotation. Even in purely ‘prairie’ census divisions, farmers reported value from animal products (typically dairy), livestock, and meat (likely consumed on the farm). The differences were slight and had to do with volume. Farms in the purely ‘parkland’ division (#10) reported average values for meat (2–5% of total farm products between 1921 and 1931) and slightly higher values for animal products and livestock (e.g., in 1931, 17% and 8% respectively compared to a provincial average of 13% and 7%). In Division 10 farmers harvested the aspen groves for firewood, fenceposts, and fence rails (see 1931 Census). They would have had a reduced need for cash crops to pay for coal, and a ‘free’ resource for expanding livestock infrastructure – fencing. In part they were simply responding to an opportunity to ‘mine’ resources that their prairie brethren lacked. As far as other product

Notes to pages 48–53

72 73 74

75 76 77 78

79

80

81

82 83 84 85 86 87

145

diversification in Division 10, there were no ‘fruits’ and negligible ‘vegetables’ (1–1.9% of total farm products by value as opposed to a provincial average of 0.7–1.7 over the 1921–31 period). Adams, Rural Planning, 120. MacDougall, Rural Life, 111. Commission, Fourth Report, 148: ‘[T]he farmers are more concerned about the immediate returns to be received than they are about the system which will eventually be most beneficial to their farms.’ Address by Hon. W.R. Motherwell at the Agricultural Societies convention, Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture, Annual Report, 1907, 181. Arthur Hawkes, Special Report on Immigration (Ottawa, 1912), 38. Cited in Berman, All That Is Solid, 20. On the ‘groundswell of reformist activity’ in Edwardian Britain in the 1880s and 1890s and its intellectual justification see D. Hardy, From Garden Cities to New Towns (London: E. & F.N. Spon, 1991), 37, 41. From the Report of the Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles, 1852, cited in B. Coleman, The Idea of the City in Nineteenth Century Britain (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 132. In documenting the invention of ‘the social’ during this period, followers of Foucault tend to ignore the voluntary action of non-professional ‘publics,’ which I take to include the marches and demonstrations of ‘movement’ organizations as well as the philanthropic actions of bourgeois charity organizations (see, e.g., M. Dean, ‘Sociology after Society,’ in D. Owen, ed., Sociology after Postmodernism [London: Sage, 1997], 211; and Owen, ‘Introduction’ to Sociology after Postmodernism, 9). I am thinking of his invented rituals that were meant to revivify representations of ongoing collective bonds through periodic face-to-face gatherings. See his Suicide and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life and, for the problem of abstract interdependence, The Division of Labor in Society. Plunkett, The Rural Life Problem, 41–2. Ibid., 40. Commission, First Report, 4. Conservation of Life 4 (1918): 61. See Fishman, Urban Utopias, for the aesthetics and Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, 55–6 on allotments. For a discussion of the actual number of households per acre in town planning designs see Lewis Mumford’s introduction to Howard’s Garden Cities (1960), 31–2, 34. On the general principle of spatial ‘balance’ see ‘Settlement of Agricultural Areas,’ Conservation of Life 2 (1916): ‘The more widespread the population is the more healthy it will be, and the more it will help

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90

91 92 93

94 95

96

97

Notes to pages 53–5

to solve many problems which have been created by our having thinly scattered agricultural population on one hand and overcrowded cities on the other’ (44). Western Municipal News 1 (1906): 183 (‘The City and Factory Concessions’): ‘[L]abour troubles in the larger cities have caused manufacturers to look with favour upon the idea of migrating to some smaller place, away from the temptations and dangers of the overcrowded metropolis.’ ‘The improvement in railway systems in territory surrounding large cities, the development of the hydro-radials, and the making of good roads, together with the increased pressure of taxation in congested centres, are all contributing to a new movement of industries and population to rural and semi-rural areas ... It is a natural and growing tendency and as such indicates the practicability of artificially promoting industrial village centres and rural industries’ (Adams, Rural Planning, 43). See ‘The Matter with the Farmer,’ The Independent, 30 December 1909, 1519 (on micro-hydro and electric trolleys); ‘Making Country Life Interesting,’ ibid., 6 January 1910, 59–60 (communications, farm workshops and laboratories); ‘Agriculture and Industrial Colonization, The Example of France,’ Conservation of Life 3 (1916): 4–10; and ‘Settlement of Agricultural Areas,’ ibid., 2 (1916): 44. See, e.g., John Urry, The End of Organized Capitalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 199. Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops, 152. Ibid., 152–3. See also ‘Agriculture and Industrial Colonization,’ Conservation of Life 3 (1916): ‘There are industries in which constant change of process, individuality and artistic skill count for so much that they can be successfully manipulated on a small scale’ (7). ‘Agriculture and Industrial Colonization,’ 6. From ‘Report of the GCTPA on the Report of the Departmental Committee on Land Settlement for Discharged Sailors and Soldiers,’ Garden Cities and Town Planning (NS), 6, no. 3 (April 1916): 46–53, cited in D. Hardy, From Garden Cities, 123. Marx, ‘Modern Industry and Agriculture,’ in Capital, vol. 1 (1867), in Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader, 416; Engels, pointing to the increasing spatial indifference of capitalist manufacture reiterated this theme in 1878, sounding not unlike a British town planner (Anti-Duhring, in Marx-Engels Reader, 719): ‘The abolition of the separation of town and country is therefore not utopian, also, in so far as it is conditioned on the most equal distribution possible of modern industry over the whole country.’ Marx, The German Ideology, in Marx-Engels Reader, 160.

Notes to pages 55–9

147

98 Marx actually says, by implication, that Owenist and Fourierist projects will ‘lessen the costs, and simplify the administrative work of bourgeois government’ (Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party [1848], in MarxEngels Reader, 497, 499). 99 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, in Marx-Engels Reader, 416. 100 Plunkett, Rural Life Problem, 50. 101 Hardy, From Garden Cities, 122–4. 102 ‘Town Planning in British East Africa,’ Conservation of Life 4 (1918): 81; ‘Need for Government Organization of Land Settlement,’ Conservation of Life 4, no. 1 (1918): 6. 103 ‘Town Planning in British East Africa,’ 81. 104 ‘The Governors General of Canada and Town Planning,’ Conservation of Life 3 (1916): 1–4. 105 Berger, Sense of Power, 181–2; see Adams, Rural Planning (9) on the need for ‘British blood’ in the colony. 106 Earl Grey, 1902, quoted in ‘The Governors General of Canada and Town Planning,’ 3. See also the Canadian imperialist Parkin, according to whom millions lived in ‘congested centres under conditions so bad that the vigour of the race is being sapped and its character and physique lowered, entailing enormous waste of the human material that gives strength to the body politic’ (Berger, Sense of Power, 188). For British imperialist concerns for the body politic and interest in rural planning as a corrective see Hardy, From Garden Cities, 38–9. 107 See ‘Inaugural Address’ by Clifford Sifton, chairman of Commission of Conservation and former Liberal minister of the interior, in Commission, First Report, 24; see also J.S. Woodsworth, one of Canada’s leading moderate socialists (‘Rural Citizenship,’ Canadian Municipal Journal 11, no. 2 (1915): 1 and Plunkett, Rural Life Problem, 51. 108 Berger, Sense of Power, 142; see also p. 178 on rural conservative virtues. 109 Adams, Rural Planning, 142. 110 Ibid., 46. 111 Noulan Cauchon, ‘Rural Planning and Development as an Immigration Policy,’ Journal of the Town Planning Institute 3, no. 2 (1924): 3–4. 112 Adams, Rural Planning, 157. 113 George Phelps, ‘Need for Government Organization of Land Settlement,’ Conservation of Life 4 (1918): 5; see also MacDougall, Rural Life, 75. 114 R. Rees, New and Naked Land: Making the Prairies Home (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1988), 63. 115 Adams, Rural Planning, 64. 116 Cited ibid., 53.

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Notes to pages 60–2

117 For a discussion and critique of radial plans see Adams, Rural Planning, 53ff. Dr E. Deville, a surveyor for the Department of the Interior had in 1897 recommended that the Dominion Lands Act be amended to authorize a form of radial survey (Rural Planning, 54). But by 1917, Deville, then surveyor general of Dominion Lands, in a discussion of a variety of radial plans, argued that those plans based on triangular fields imposed too many difficulties for cultivation (E. Deville, ‘Radial Hamlet Settlement Schemes,’ Conservation of Life 4 [1918]: 33–7). 118 ‘Criticisms of the Rustic City Plan,’ Journal of the Town Planning Institute 2, no. 1 (1923): 16–17. 119 Adams, for example, quotes an Australian authority on the value of closer communities for giving ‘better opportunities for visiting experts to impart advice’ (Rural Planning, 55). Adams himself felt that agricultural education, ‘even when coupled with the object lessons and propaganda of the boards of agriculture, does not reach the majority of farmers and their children, and for want of social organization in the rural districts much of the value of education is lost’ (ibid., 154). 120 ‘Closer Community Settlements,’ Canadian Municipal Journal, November 1914, 437. 121 Mitchell Dean takes Foucault to totalizing extremes on this question of ‘the social.’ Speaking of late-twentieth-century constructions of community, he writes: ‘Community, as much as the autonomous citizen, is the resultant of a detailed work of political construction. It is an attempt to normalize particular sets of relations and practices, and to establish relatively continuous regimes of authority’ (Dean, ‘Sociology after Society,’ in Owen, ed., Sociology after Postmodernism, 222). What is particularly objectionable is his attempt to collapse all possibilities for dissent into a bourgeois, indeed ‘liberal,’ hegemony. He gives less room than Foucault for the possibility of resistance to bourgeois projects. ‘The knowledges of society – from social economy, social physics and social statistics to criminology, educational psychology, sociology and beyond to feminism – become “dialogic partners” (Weir, 1996) of liberalism’s process of self-review and self-renewal. Liberalism prestructures the space of legitimate dissent’ (ibid., 211). 122 For criticisms of Adam’s plan see discussion in Commission, Seventh Report, 131; for similar sentiments from different authorities see also ‘Criticisms of the Rustic City Plan,’ 14–16. 123 The total area of the British plan was 1000 acres as opposed to the 23,040 acres of Adams’s township. 124 Mr Norris, reported in ‘Keen Interest Shown in Closer Settlement Idea,’ The Leader, 25 November 1914, 2.

Notes to pages 62–6

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125 ‘Good Results Looked for from Closer Settlement Convention,’ The Leader, 26 November 1914, 2. 126 River lots and irregular fields, tried in experimental plans in the west, were reputedly shunned by settlers (Deville, ‘Radial Hamlet Settlement Schemes,’ 37). 127 Fishman, Urban Utopias, 192. 128 According to one commentator, ‘Saskatchewan has never passed a single law that will so profoundly affect her destiny or add more to her fame as a democratic province governed by the people for the people’ (A. Buckley, ‘Town Planning in Saskatchewan,’ Conservation of Life 6 [1920]: 49). 129 Saskatchewan Department of Municipal Affairs, Report of the Director of Town Planning (part of the Department’s Annual Report), 1930, 10. 130 Saskatchewan Department of Municipal Affairs, Annual Report, 1917–18. 131 W.A. Begg, ‘A Practical Township Settlement Plan,’ Conservation of Life 3 (1917): 68–72. Begg was Saskatchewan’s town planning engineer in 1918– 19 and later the director of town planning. 132 See Department of Municipal Affairs, Annual Report, 1920–21, 15. 133 W.A. Begg, ‘Saskatchewan Town Planning and Rural Development Act,’ Journal of the Town Planning Institute 1, no. 4–5 (1921): 20. 134 The plan for a town called Lens was approved in 1921 (Saskatchewan Dept. of Municipal Affairs, Report of Director of Town Planning, 1922). For more on colonization schemes for returned soldiers in other provinces see Adams, Rural Planning, 207ff. 135 Begg, ‘Saskatchewan Town Planning,’ 20. The words ‘and Rural Development’ were finally dropped from the branch’s title in 1928 (Report of Director of Town Planning, 1930).

Chapter 4

Local Governance as Spatial Practice: State Formation

1 E. Wakefield, ‘Art of Colonization,’ in M.F. Lloyd Prichard, ed., Collected Works (London: J.W. Parker, 1968), 1968. 2 T. Jefferson, letter to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson (New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1905), 9. 3 K. Marx, conspectus on Statehood and Anarchy (1874–75), in R. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), 545. 4 J.G. Bourinot, Local Government in Canada: An Historical Study (1887; New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1973), 45. 5 B. Curtis, ‘Representation and State Formation in the Canadas, 1790–1850,’ Studies in Political Economy 28 (1989): 62.

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Notes to pages 66–71

6 See P. Corrigan and D. Sayer, The Great Arch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). 7 J.S. Mill, ‘Considerations on Representative Government,’ in Essays on Politics and Society, vol. 19 of Collected Works of John Stewart Mill, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 544. 8 For Wakefield on the impossibility of writing full accounts of local affairs see his ‘Art of Colonization,’ 883. 9 See J. Bentham, ‘Constitutional Code,’ in The Works of Jeremy Bentham (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 612–13. 10 Mill, ‘Representative Government,’ 118. 11 Thompson (Baron Sydenham after 1840) was governor of Lower and Upper Canada between 1839 and 1841, during which time he acted on many of the reforms of local government recommended by Lord Durham in his report. See J.G. Durham, Lord Durham’s Report on the Affairs of British North America, ed. C.P. Lucas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912). 12 Cited in Curtis, ‘Representation,’ 72. 13 Wakefield, ‘Art of Colonization,’ 856. 14 Ibid., 839. 15 Lord Durham’s Report, 143. 16 See, e.g., ‘Art of Colonization,’ 817. 17 J.S. Mill, ‘De Tocqueville on Democracy in America’ (1840), in Essays on Politics and Society, 169. 18 Lord Durham’s Report, 143. 19 Commons Debates, 28 May 1869, 500. 20 J. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 9 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 613. The later chapters of Bentham’s Constitutional Code, from which the quote is taken, were published posthumously in 1841, but written between 1820 and 1832. 21 Bentham, Constitutional Code, ibid., 613. 22 See, e.g., the address by C.A. Dunning, SARM Minutes (SASK Archives); also summerized in ‘Municipal Government,’ Western Municipal News (WMN) 17 (1922): 130. 23 ‘Representative Government,’ 539. 24 The debate was largely between Lenin and the Russian ‘Narodniki’ (a term often translated as ‘populists’). The Narodniki championed petit-bourgeois mutualism (typically among the progressive Russian peasantry) as a legitimate socialist strategy. See V.I. Lenin, ‘The Handicraft Census of 1894–95 in Perm Gubernia and General Problems of “Handicraft Industry” ’ (1898), in G. Hanna, ed., Collected Works, vol. 2, and ‘The Land Question and the Rural Poor’ (1913), in Collected Works, vol. 19. For an extended discussion of the class position of the agrarian petit-bourgeoisie, see R. Bantjes, ‘Improved

Notes to pages 71–6

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26 27 28

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35 36 37

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Earth: Land Settlement, Community and Class in Rural North America, 1900 to 1960,’ unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Lancaster, 1991, 8–22. These were among the recommendations of a committee, headed by William Grayson, that reported to Congress in 1785. W. Pattison, Beginnings of the American Rectilinear Land Survey System, 1784–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 92–3. Jefferson, letter to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816, in Works of Thomas Jefferson, 9. Winnipeg Free Press, 28 June 1883, cited in M. Donnelly, The Government of Manitoba (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 136. A. Reid, ‘Local Government in the North-West Territories, II. The Rural Municipalities,’ Saskatchewan History 2 (1949): 14. Statute Labour and Fire Districts were, in 1898, renamed Local Improvement Districts (LIDs). In 1903 LIDs were expanded from one to four townships (K. Crawford, Canadian Municipal Government [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1954], 44). Based on the total area within the settled census divisions in the southern half of the province, there would have been 3720 townships. While legislators did not know this, much of that area was never to be organized into municipal units. Nonetheless, based on the actual ‘rural municipalities’ that were organized (301), and assuming that they were all 9 townships in size, the number of organized townships would have been 2709. The outlines of the solution came from a Manitoba legislative committee in 1886. The way in which it was implemented varied between Manitoba and Saskatchewan. See Donnelly, Government of Manitoba, 136. Eight permanent district courts were established in 1911. These first appear in the Saskatchewan Public Accounts of 1911–12, with full-time salaries for sheriffs, clerks, and the like. Department of Public Works, Annual Reports (1905–15); Saskatchewan Public Accounts (1921–2, 1930–1). J.N. Bayne, ‘Municipal Development in Saskatchewan,’ Canadian Municipal Journal 5 (1909): 457. A debenture is a security that can be sold on the market. The funds it makes available are intended for the purchase of assets whose benefits accrue over the long term. The ability to issue debentures was a distinguishing feature of municipal autonomy and a mark of permanence. Bayne, ‘Municipal Development in Saskatchewan,’ 457. R. Roemer, History of Rural Local Government in Saskatchewan (Regina: Queen’s Printer, 1955), 17. ‘Municipal Problems in Western Canada,’ Conservation of Life 3, no. 3 (1917): 60–1.

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Notes to pages 76–80

38 T.A. Patrick and F.J. Pilkington, ‘The County System for Saskatchewan an Urgently Needed Reform,’ WMN 16 (1921): 183. 39 C. Galpin, The Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community, University of Wisconsin Agricultural Experimental Station Bulletin 34 (1915), 18. 40 C. Galpin, Rural Social Centres in Wisconsin, Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin no. 234 (1914), 7–8. 41 Ibid., 8. 42 The term ‘rurbanism’ is Galpin’s (Social Anatomy). For more on this tradition of community planning see R. Bantjes, ‘Benthamism in the Countryside,’ Journal of Historical Sociology 10 (1997): 249–69. 43 Patrick and Pilkington, ‘The County System for Saskatchewan,’ 186. 44 See, e.g., WMN 2, no. 5 (1907): 408, ‘Saskatchewan Government and Good Roads’: ‘We are in the unfortunate position that we have not in most places the material for the proper construction of permanent roads. There have been thousands and thousands of dollars spent in making mud roads that have practically disappeared next season.’ 45 See R. Bantjes, ‘Improved Earth: Travel on the Canadian Prairies, 1920– 1950,’ Journal of Transport History 13 (1993). 46 For a comparison of the capacities of local government on the prairies in the United States and Canada see R. Bantjes, ‘Governing the Great Plains,’ Studies in Political Economy 48 (1995). 47 This deficiency is best illustrated in contrast to North Dakota counties, which did become foci of local identity; see Bantjes, ‘Governing the Great Plains,’ 85–7. See also Saskatchewan, Royal Commission on Agriculture and Rural Life, Report no. 4: Rural Roads and Local Government (Regina: Queen’s Printer, 1955), 116; and D.E. Willmott, Organizations and Social Life of Farm Families in a Prairie Municipality (Saskatoon: Centre for Community Studies, 1964), 60. 48 This reconstruction of the rhythms of open-country life is based on a series of interviews conducted in 1983 with former residents of census districts 12 and 13 in Saskatchewan. The interviews were supplemented by a review of all ‘local histories’ written about this region (see ‘Improved Earth: Travel’). 49 ‘The Vice President Speaks,’ WMN 5, no. 4 (1910): 72. 50 The minister of education made the government’s position very clear to the executive of the School Trustees Association, another provincial association claiming representative status: ‘These conventions ... can give suggestions all they like but they are not going to be consulted before things are done. There is a properly elected legislative body.’ Official Report of Conference between Representatives of the School Trustees Association and the Government of Saskatchewan, 28 September 1927. 51 WMN 5, no. 4 (1910): 99; ‘Finer than Ever,’ WMN 8, no. 4 (1913): 121.

Notes to pages 81–2 52 53 54 55

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62

153

‘Citizens in the Making,’ WMN 3, no. 5 (1908): 745. Canadian Municipal Journal 11, January 1915, 21. WMN 7, no. 4 (1912): 101. These words are from the address of George Langley, minister of municipal affairs, SARM 16th annual convention, 1921, Regina, Sask. For other examples of the genre, see Saskatchewan LID Association 5th annual convention, March 1910, Saskatoon, reported in WMN, no. 4 (1910): 72; and SARM 6th annual convention, 15–16 March 1911, Moose Jaw, reported in WMN 6, no. 4 (1911): 122. ‘Address by J.R. Near, President,’ WMN 31, no. 3 (1936): 71. In Saskatchewan a consensus was emerging around the need for women’s suffrage, and for provincial reforms enabling the referendum and recall. The Saskatchewan Grain Growers’ Association (SGGA) had set a precedent in the unusual influence that its annual convention, the self-styled ‘Farmers’ Parliament,’ exerted in decisions of the Saskatchewan legislature. Saskatchewan LID Association 2nd annual convention, 7–8 April 1908, Regina, reported in WMN, no. 5 (1908): 745, resolution 11 (defeated). The Saskatchewan LID Association (1906–10) was an earlier incarnation of SARM. Proceedings of SARM 9th annual convention, 3 March 1914, Regina, reported in CAR (1914): 641: ‘5) That rural municipalities should be given authority to finance the farmers from one marketing season to another by the issue of Provincial currency or negotiable scrip on the security of grain in store’; Henry Soresen (Alberta reeve), ‘Rural Municipal Banks,’ WMN 10, no. 6 (1915): 171, proposal made at the ‘Convention of the Rural Municipalities in Calgary.’ E.g., SARM annual conventions: 1912 (taxing of CPR land grants not under cultivation); 1913 (railway liability for killed animals); 1914 (independently operated, Dominion-financed weigh scales; control of implement salesmen); 1915 (regulating mill owners); 1924 (grading and inspecting wheat). E.g., SARM annual conventions: 1917 (demand for independent weigh scales); 1919 (in favour of fixing the price of wheat); 1921 (continuation of government seed grain purchasing); 1922 (against excessive bank charges); 1922 (for the continuance of the National Grain Board); 1924 (criticism of grading and inspecting of wheat at Winnipeg Grain Exchange); 1925 (favouring branch-line construction in unserviced areas). Saskatchewan LID Association 2nd annual convention, 7–8 April 1908, Regina (government ownership of all railways); proceedings of SARM, 6th annual convention, March 1911, Moose Jaw, reported in WMN, no. 5 (1911): 157 (government ownership of the proposed Hudson’s Bay railway, whose construction was repeatedly demanded by SARM).

154

Notes to pages 83–8

63 Saskatchewan Archives, Saskatoon SAS (micro), SARM 19th annual convention, March 1924, Regina, Resolution 37a: ‘We hereby endorse the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool and urge that every member present help put the Wheat Pool over’; no. 106 (in favour of turning over $50,000 left over from the Wheat Board to the Wheat Pool organizing committee [Board of the Sask. Co-op Wheat Prod. Ltd]). 64 The idea of rural municipal hospitals was supported by the Saskatchewan Medical Association in 1908 (H.G. Nyblett, ‘Municipal Hospitals,’ WMN 3, no. 1 [1908]: 635); state medicine, or a ‘National Health Service,’ was recommended by Regina’s medical health officer in 1912 (M. Bow, ‘Public Health,’ WMN 7, no. 8 [1912]: 249). 65 V. McNaughton, ‘The Municipal Unit,’ WMN 11, no. 7 (1916): 199. 66 ‘The Cult of Cleanliness,’ WMN 7, no. 3 (1912): 69. 67 Women were present at the SARM convention for the first time in 1915 ‘Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities,’ WMN 10, no. 4 [1915]; McNaughton spoke the next year; women (including wives who were not technically property owners) were granted the vote and right to hold office in 1917 ( J.N. Bayne, ‘Address,’ WMN 12, no. 5 [1917]: 157). 68 SAS, Address of George Langley, SARM 11th annual convention, 1916, Minutes. 69 WMN 14, no. 4 (1919): 110. 70 Legislation enabling RMs to hire doctors was passed in 1919. By 1950 there were 173 municipal doctor schemes in operation. J. Feather and V. Matthews, ‘Early Medical Care in Saskatchewan,’ Saskatchewan History 37 (1984): 52. 71 Provision for the formation of municipal hospitals was added to the Rural Municipalities Act in 1916. By 1954 over half of the settled portion of the province was included within municipal hospital districts. Saskatchewan Royal Commission, Rural Roads and Local Government, 152. 72 ‘Saskatchewan Town Planning Branch,’ Journal of the Town Planning Institute 2, no. 6 (1923): 11. 73 SAS (micro), SARM 15th annual convention, 1920, Minutes, resolution 16. 74 SAS (micro), SARM 16th annual convention, 1921, Minutes. 75 SAS (micro), SARM 20th annual convention, 1925, Minutes, ‘Report of the “Trustees of the Pool.”’ 76 Saskatchewan Archives, Regina (SAR), Minutes of conference between SARM executive and the government, 13 June 1928, 2. 77 ‘New Sanatoria Act,’ WMN 24, no. 4 (1929): 96. 78 Ibid., 3. 79 See, e.g., ’Sask. Municipal Convention Deals with Many Questions,’ Western

Notes to pages 89–97

80 81 82 83 84 85

155

Producer, 12 March 1936, 5; ‘Resolutions ...,’ WMN 34, no. 3 (1939): 74; ‘Resolutions Passed ...,’ WMN 37, no. 3 (1942): 69. ‘Proposal for New Farm Body Comes from Municipal Men,’ Western Producer, 26 February 1942, 5. ‘Address of J.J. Smith, Deputy Minister of Municipal Affairs,’ WMN, 37, no. 4 (1942): 85. ‘Danger of Paternalism,’ Canadian Municipal Journal, March 1914, 113. See, e.g., ‘U.F.C Lodge Notes,’ Western Producer, 2 January 1936, 7; 23 January 1936, 8. W. Bentley, ‘Products of Environment,’ in ‘Open Forum’ of Western Producer, 3 October 1935, 9. ‘Address by J.R. Near, President,’ WMN 30, no. 3 (1935): 75.

Chapter 5

Utopics of Resistance: Agrarian Class Formation

1 Marx, 1848, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in R. Tucker, ed., The MarxEngels Reader (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), 481. 2 H. Moorhouse, Deep Furrows (Toronto: G.J. McLeod, 1918), 59. 3 Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 72. 4 Quoted in ‘Report of the Special Committee of the House of Commons to whom was referred Bill No. 2, An Act Respecting Industrial and Co-operative Societies,’ published as Appendix no. 3, Sessional Papers, 7 Edward VII, A. 1907, 133. 5 Ibid., 134. 6 Collected Works of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, 1849 (London: Collins, 1968), 794–5. 7 ‘Report of the Special Committee of the House of Commons,’ Sessional Papers, 7 Edward VII, 136. 8 Senate Debates, 24 March 1908. 9 G. Langley, ‘Danger of Paternalism,’ Canadian Municipal Journal 10 (March, 1914): 113. 10 Cited in R. Irwin, ‘Farmers and Managerial Capitalism: The Saskatchewan Cooperative Elevator Company,’ Agricultural History 70 (1996): 639. 11 Saskatchewan Royal Commission on Agricultural Credit, 1913. 12 Nonpartisan League pamphlet cited in T. Saloutos, ‘The Rise of the NonPartisan League in North Dakota, 1915–1917,’ Agricultural History 20 (1946): 50. 13 For a discussion of the variations in the commitment to wheat growing see pp. 45, 141n48, and 144n71 above.

156

Notes to page 98

14 Petit-bourgeois operations are characterized by an incomplete separation of household and enterprise. Members of the household provide the bulk of the labour. The head of the household owns the ‘firm’ (if it has legal status as such) along with capital and/or land and equipment. Prairie farmers sought to avoid the high costs of paid labour and rarely hired on a long-term or permanent basis. In Marxist terms, the household ‘self-exploits’ and is forced to give up much of the ‘surplus value’ so generated when it enters into unequal market exchanges with monopolistic buyers of its commodities. For a discussion of the literature on the agrarian petit bourgeoisie see R. Bantjes, ‘Improved Earth: Land Settlement, Community and Class in Rural North America, 1900 to 1960,’ unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Lancaster, 1991, 8–22. 15 Part-ownership, where a farmer owns land and equipment and rents additional land, is best understood as a flexible investment strategy for expansion. Faced with the need to expand both machinery and land holdings, many farmers would purchase the former and rent the latter to minimize their overall indebtedness (Saskatchewan Royal Commission on Agriculture and Rural Life, Report No. 2: Mechanization and Farm Costs [Regina: Queen’s Printer, 1955], 66–7). They were no less ‘capitalist’ than modern firms that outsource work or rent office space. Farmers who rented all of their land were rare, and their status less clear. Most would likely have owned other capital investments such as machinery, and many would have been using tenancy as a short-term strategy for expansion (on renters see also P. Voisey, Vulcan: The Making of a Prairie Community [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988], 202). As the royal commission reported in 1955: ‘[I]t seems that most farmers are more insistent that they own the machinery they use than they are that they own the land that they till’ (Report no. 2, 67). 16 C. Danysk, Hired Hands: Labour and the Development of Prairie Agriculture (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995), 66. 17 Most published accounts of status distinctions in prairie communities deal with towns and villages rather than open-country communities. Nonetheless, Voisey, in his study of the town and surrounding district of Vulcan, Alberta, argues that ‘distinctions based on ethnicity, religion, age, years of settlement in the community, place of residence, education, institutional memberships, occupations, and other criteria ... held relatively little significance for local society.’ He argues that the unifying forces were both local and trans-local (i.e., the common petit-bourgeois class position) (Vulcan, 201). In his study of another town-country complex in the Alberta foothills ( Jasper), J.W. Bennett emphasizes the homogenizing influence of the common setting, documenting how eastern Europeans became integrated into local institutions

Notes to pages 98–103

18

19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

157

and culturally assimilated over time ((Northern Plainsman: Adaptive Strategy and Agrarian Life [Arlington Heights, IL: AHM Publishing, 1969], 217–18). The important cleavages here were between grain farmers and ranchers. Willmott’s Organizations and Social Life of Farm Families in a Prairie Municipality (Saskatoon: Centre for Community Studies, 1964), one of the few ‘community studies’ in Saskatchewan, emphasizes solidarity within open-country networks and significant cleavages only between these and town networks. Metis and aboriginal peoples are notably absent from accounts of open-country community, as were those deemed ‘unsuited to agriculture’ and discouraged by immigration officials: Austrians, Poles, Italians, Spaniards, Asians, and ‘coloured’ people (Danysk, Hired Hands, 78). Most of the evidence comes from surveys of the leadership of these organizations rather than the general membership (one would expect exclusivity to be less in the latter). Lipset, looking at CCF and co-operative convention delegates, found those of eastern European and French background were under-represented relative to their populations in the province, but better represented than in the other political parties (Agrarian Socialism [Berkeley: California Paperback Edition, 1971), 225–36. Representativeness was also higher among younger delegates. On the UFC see J.N. McCrorie, In Union Is Strength (Saskatoon: Centre for Community Studies, 1964), 98. On the Pool’s efforts to organize among non-Ango-Saxons, see I. MacPherson, ‘Missionaries of Rural Development: The Fieldmen of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool 1925–1965,’ Agricultural History 60 (1986): 78. The beef ring provided mutual aid in slaughtering and butchering cattle. It was often organized as a formal co-op. Organizations and Social Life, 8. Popular theorists of the ‘evolution of co-operation’ included Kropotkin (Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution [London: Heinemann, 1902]) and Warbasse (Co-operative Democracy [New York: Macmillan, 1923]). Western Producer, 17 July 1930, 15. Ibid., 12. ‘News of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool,’ Western Producer, 22 January 1925, 6. ‘A Brief Outline of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool,’ Western Producer, 3 September 1925, 7. R. Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 192–3. Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture, Annual Report, 1929, 172. Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture, Annual Report, 1928, 167. Urban Utopias, 192. Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, Third Annual Report, 1927, 23.

158

Notes to pages 103–9

31 MacPherson, ‘Missionaries of Rural Development,’ 82. 32 T. Jefferson, letter to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson (New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1905), 9. 33 ‘News of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool,’ 6. 34 On class as trans-local, see C. Calhoun, ‘Class, Place and Industrial Revolution,’ in P. Williams and N. Thrift, eds, Class and Space: The Making of Urban Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988). 35 ‘Co-ordination of Wheat Growers Seen,’ Western Producer, 17 April 1930, 3. 36 Western Producer, 5 March 1931, 10. 37 Western Producer, 11 April 1932, 9. 38 Western Producer, 5 March 1931, 10. 39 North-West Territories Department of Agriculture, Annual Report, 1902–3, 95. 40 Report of the Superintendent of Fairs and Institutes, 1909. 41 J. Wright, The Louise Lucas Story (Montreal: Harvest House, 1965), 102. 42 ‘News and Views of the Farmers’ Union of Canada,’ Western Producer, 30 October 1924. 43 Willmott, Organizations and Social Life, 52. 44 Address of L.M. More, secretary-treasurer of the Agricultural Societies Association; ‘The Convention of Agricultural Societies,’ Public Service Monthly 11, no. 7 (February 1923): 1. 45 Report of the Director of Agricultural Extension, 1925, 332. 46 See R. Bantjes, ‘Improved Earth: Travel on the Canadian Prairies’; Willmott, Organizations and Social Life, 60. 47 Report of the Director of Agricultural Extension, 1921, 136. 48 Proposed resolution to the annual convention of the Agricultural Societies Association on the ‘Reorganization of Agricultural Societies’ (SAS). 49 North-West Territories Department of Agriculture, Annual Report, 1901, 113; ‘Convention of Agricultural, Societies,’ See D.C. Jones, Midways, Judges, and Smooth-Tongued Fakirs: The Illustrated History of Country Fairs in the Prairie West (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1983), 26 for the unsuccessful efforts of S.E. Greenway, director of extension until 1920, to improve the ‘moral uplift’ of fairs. Jones also documents efforts of Greenway’s successor, John Rayner, to defend the fairs in the 1930s with reference to their tribulations in overcoming social and class divisions in the ‘rurban’ community (125). 50 Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture, Annual Report, 1915, 16. 51 Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture, Annual Report, 1936, 23. 52 E.H. Hawthorn, Field Representative, Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture, Tenth Annual Report, 1914, 102.

Notes to pages 109–12

159

53 SAS, letter to N.G. Neil, Commissioner, from J.W. Norton, Chairman of the North Battleford Board of Trade, 19 February 1914. 54 SAS, letter from the Secretary of the Saskatchewan Retail Merchants’ Association to H.A. Atkinson, 4 April 1930. 55 Western Producer, 2 July 1942, 7. 56 Western Producer, 5 January 1933, 14. 57 Saskatchewan officials corresponded concerning the issue of funding with officials in similar states, such as North Dakota (see letter of A.F. Mantle, Deputy Minister, to Thomas P. Cooper, State Leader, Experimental Station, Fargo, North Dakota, 20 March 1915 [Saskatchewan Archives Board, Regina]), but were aware of the limitations of the design of rural municipalities (letter from Mantle to C.F. Bailey, Assistant Deputy Minister, Ontario Department of Agriculture, 6 April 1915 [SAB]). 58 R. Bantjes, ‘Governing the Great Plains,’ Studies in Political Economy 48 (1995). 59 For more detailed documentation see R. Bantjes, ‘Agricultural Extension and Resistance,’ Prairie Forum 26 (2001). The fact that many of the core programs of ‘agricultural improvement’ were undertaken by farmers’ organizations during the Depression casts serious doubt on Jones’s claim that farmers gave up on the optimistic mission of agricultural improvement in the face of unconquerable nature (Midways, Judges, and Smooth Tongued Fakirs, 139). He fails also to recognize that farmers were critical of the agricultural societies and their fairs long before the 1930s, not so much because of the influence of ‘impractical’ agricultural ‘experts’ like Motherwell and Auld, but rather owing to the influence of small-town boosters. 60 Bantjes, ‘Agricultural Extension and Resistance.’ There is a tendency among some rural historians to set up a simplistic opposition between those off the farm – planners and theoretical experts who were ‘impractical’ – and farmers – who were rooted in the land and hard local realities (as though the ‘whole truth’ were contained within the locale). This is a stubborn legacy of the rural-urban paradigm that I am trying here to dislodge. Let me then underscore the fact that while Saskatchewan farmers did reject much expert advice, even in the shadow of drought and Depression they were attempting to solve their local problems by continuing to impose a universal (wheat specialization) in local field production, building their trans-local co-operative and political machinery, and planning their ‘impractical’ overhaul of the capitalist system. 61 In 1931 only 4% of Saskatchewan farms reported owning combines, 29% reported tractors, and 45% reported automobiles (Census of Canada, 1931, table 34).

160

Notes to pages 112–15

62 ‘Canadian Horseless Farms,’ Western Producer, 25 September 1930, 22. Census figures show that 18% of Saskatchewan farms were without horses in 1931. The term ‘horseless farm’ apparently referred to farms that used ‘horseless power’ (at minimum a tractor). The 11% of farms that reported both tractors and horses may or may not have been ‘horseless’ in this sense. The percentage of Saskatchewan farms reporting horses began to drop steeply only after 1951. It dropped below half after 1956. 63 For accounts of collective farms in the Soviet Union, see Western Producer, 15 May 1930 (‘Will Russian Wheat Conquer the World?’), 29 May 1930 (‘Collective Farms’), 8; 19 June 1930 (‘Socialized Agriculture’), 13; 24 July 1930, (‘Russia’s Greatest Problem of All’), 8; 6 November 1930 (‘Russia and the Future’), 6; 13 November 1930 (‘What About Russia?’). 64 In particular, the important distinction between state and collective farms (Western Producer, 12 June 1930, 12). 65 See, e.g., Western Producer, 5 March 1931, 10; 9 January 1936, 10; and 8 January 1942, 24. 66 The editor was Violet McNaughton, who had, since the early part of the century, been an advocate of what Hayden calls ‘material feminism’ (D. Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981]). For examples of contributions from women other than McNaughton see Western Producer, 5 January 1939, 9; 19 January 1939, 11; 14 May 1942, 11; 17 February 1944, 14. 27; April 1944, 11; and 15 June 1944, 11. 67 Lipset, Agrarian Socialism, 89. 68 E.A. Partridge, ‘Farmers, Come off the Capitalist Perch,’ Western Producer, 13 August 1925, 5. 69 The best known is the United Farmers of Canada (Sask. Section) proposal for a ‘use-lease’ arrangement where the state held title but guaranteed farmers’ right of tenure (‘Report of the U.F.C. Board of Directors,’ Western Producer, 5 March 1931, 8); see also Lipset, Agrarian Socialism, 175–6; D. Laycock, Populism and Democratic Thought in the Canadian Prairies, 1910 to 1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 175–8. 70 Swanson and Armstrong, cited in a review of their book Wheat, in Western Producer, 8 May 1930, 12. 71 ‘Whither Agriculture?’ Western Producer, 25 September 1930. 72 ‘Two Farm Plans,’ Western Producer, 20 August 1942, 6. 73 The socialist CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) came to power in Saskatchewan in June 1944. Not only were the Axis powers associated with fascism, but fascism was understood by many farmers to be the political

Notes to pages 115–16

74 75 76

77

78

79 80 81 82

161

complement to monopoly capitalism (see. e.g., letter to the ‘Open Forum,’ Western Producer, 29 January 1942, 25: ‘Fascism is the last stage of capitalism. What intelligent man or woman wants fascism?’) ‘Farm Women Get Together,’ Western Producer, 22 June 1944, 12. Wheat Pool Committees’ program ‘Co-operative Farming,’ June 1944, no. 6 (Regina: Saskatchewan Wheat Pool) (Saskatchewan Archives Board). The Saskatchewan Reconstruction Council was formed by order-in-council, 20 October 1943, under a Liberal government. Its report was issued after the CCF came to power (Report of the Saskatchewan Reconstruction Council, 2 August 1944). In August 1944 the Saskatchewan Consultation Committee on Co-operative Farming met and drew up four fairly clear alternative proposals (‘Four Alternative Co-op Farm Plans,’ Western Producer, 7 September 1944, 5). The Rochdale model, developed in England in the nineteenth century, attempted to preserve democratic control by limiting the number of shares that each member of the co-operative could own and, more importantly, by limiting each member to one vote at general meetings regardless of the number of shares owned. ‘Pictures Co-op Village,’ Western Producer, 14 May 1942, 11. Margaret Dickson, ‘Co-op Farm Our Best Hope,’ Western Producer, 15 June 1944, 11. ‘Larger School Units,’ Western Producer, 27 April 1944, 23. M. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (London: Verso, 1983), 15.

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Index

Adams, Thomas, 53, 58–62, 72–3, 125 Agrarian organizations: agricultural societies – see locals, agricultural societies; Consumers United Stores (North Dakota), 97; Farmers Educational and Cooperative Union of North Dakota, 96–7; Grange (Ontario), 95; Saskatchewan Farmers Union, 89; United Farmers of Canada (Sask Section) (UFC), 47, 89, 98–9, 105–7, 110, 113. See also Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM); Saskatchewan Grain Growers Association (SGGA); Saskatchewan Local Improvement District Association; Saskatchewan Wheat Pool Agrarian parties. See Political parties Agrarian socialism. See Socialism: agrarian socialism; Co-op farms Agricultural education. See Education, agricultural Agricultural land: classification – see Regions; soil survey – see Land survey: of soil types. See also Land tenure Agricultural marketing, 46–7; co-

operative, 101–2; economies of scale in, 45; as political cause for farmers, 62, 82, 96, 109, 125; Winnipeg Grain Exchange, 43, 46. See also Saskatchewan Wheat Pool Agricultural production: artificial fertilizers, 39, 48; bonanza farms, 56, 112; crop failure, 79; dryland farming, 131n17; ecological techniques, 13, 39, 44, 47, 125; herbicides and pesticides, 44; intensive farming, 38, 40, 47, 54, 62–3, 72, 78, 90, 109, 114, 118; mixed farming, 46, 48, 54, 62, 72, 78, 96, 109, 111, 118, 125; monoculture, 44–7, 118, 125; ‘natural’ constraints upon, 38–9, 44–5, 144n71, 60; soil improvement, 6, 38–9, 48; spans ruralurban space, 6; spatial indifference of 39, 141n48; as transformation of ‘nature,’ 6, 118; weed problem, 44, 48, 79, 118. See also Climate; Mechanization in agriculture Agricultural production, wheat: as opposed to grain, 46; wheat as ‘global commodity,’ 43, 46, 91–2, 97; wheat specialization, 45–6,

196

Index

78–9; wheat specialization as contested, 12, 43–6, 118, 125 Agricultural research: Dominion Experimental Farms, 38; Agricultural research stations, 38, 45. See also Education, agricultural Agriculture, spatial division of labour in, 42, 45, 62, 88, 92, 125; as political asset, 92, 97 Anderson, Benedict, 88 Bakunin, Mikhail, 65 Bayne, J.N. ( John Norman), 63, 81 Bentham, Jeremy, 36, 42, 50, 63, 66, 70, 103, 120 Benthamism. See Governance: Benthamism Bergson, Henri, 37 Berman, Marshall, 14, 37, 116 Bourdieu, Pierre, 23 Burke, Edmund, 95 Calhoun, Craig, 10 Capital: acting in the name of, 89, 94; capital accumulation, RM councillors’ interest in promotion of, 89, 99; credit, 82, 92–4; debentures, 74, 89; dynamism of, 27, 112; as fetish, 94; as a technology of time-space distanciation, 89. See also Land tenure, Dominion Lands Act: and capital accumulation; Governance: market Class: class location as educative, 99; ‘commercial,’ 36, 48, 57–8, 60, 68; cultural capital and ‘distinction,’ 98, 106–8; economic, 97; and ethnicity, 98; residential segregation and, 50, 60, 70, 77–8, 106–7; and suitability to govern, 57, 68–9

Class, agrarian, 48; agrarian petty bourgeoisie, 70, 150n24, 97–8, 113; homogeneity, 77–8, 97–8; as imagined community, 96, 103–4, 107; proletarianization of farmers, 55, 113–14; ‘revolutionary’ potential of, 9–10, 55, 70–1; tenancy, 156n15 Class conflict, 57, 94–5 Class formation, 9, 14, 35, chap. 5 passim, 118; proletariat, 49, 53; similar in form to state formation, 99; spatial dimensions of, 3, 10, 77–8, chap. 5 passim; role of local in – see Local, the: role in class formation. See also Co-operatives: and agrarian class formation Climate, 18, 131n17; control of, 39, 44 Community, 14; and class – see Class: residential segregation and Community, open country: political activity in; closer communities, 59–64, 77, 88, 114, 118, 124–5; design of, 4, 5, 59–64, 69, 72–4, 76–7, 83, 96, 115–16, 118 – see also Land tenure, Dominion Lands Act: and community/mutual aid; neighbourhood, 65; and place, 76, 79– 80, 116–18, 124; railway towns, 59, 62–3, 70, 77, 79, 105, 108; train day, 79, 107; village settlement, 28–34, 45, 58–9, 114–15, 118–19, 124 Community, imagined, embodiments of, 52, 77, 79–80, 88, 107, 117. See also Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities: as imagined community; class, agrarian: as imagined community Community, open-country, 79, 97–9, 102, 106, 115, 117, 124; as candi-

Index date for the ‘local’ in governance projects, 97, 99, 122 – see also Local, the; co-operative associations and, 96; and ethnic exclusiveness, 98; political activity in, 99; political organizing and, 106–7, 124; schoolhouse and, 105, 115–16, 124; slow travel systems and, 98, 115 Community, ‘rurban,’ 64, 76–9, 88, 111, 114; construction of as state project, 105–9; as disembedded, 76; failure of in Saskatchewan, 79, 107–8; promotion of through Agricultural Societies, 105–8 Co-operatives, 33, 47, 92–5; and agrarian class formation, 95–6, 99– 100, 111, 122; Alberta Wheat Pool, 103; as anti-capitalist, 100, 109–11, 122; beef rings, 99; community hall associations, 99, 111; credit unions, 93–5; health care, 115; making capitalists out of workers, 94–5, 99–100, 122; and mixed farming, 96; Rochdale principle, 96–7, 101, 114, 115; role in rural planning, 54, 59; rural telephone co-operatives, 79; Saskatchewan Co-operative Elevator Company, 95; Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture, Cooperative Organization Branch – see under State, ministries; state governance projects and, 92–6; 122. See also Agrarian organizations; Domestic labour: co-operatives and; Saskatchewan Wheat Pool Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). See Political parties: CCF Co-operative farms, 112–16, 124–5

197

Corrigan, Philip, 11 County. See State, local: county Cronon, William, 12 Danysk, Cecilia, 98 Democracy, 82, 100; design for, 65, 103–4, 110–11, 114–16, 124. See also Governance: autonomization Desjardins, Alphonse, 93 Disembedding, 10, 14, 41–3, 52, 67, 116–18, 120, 124. See also Land survey, rectilinear: as disembedded space; Community, ‘rurban’: as disembedded; Space: abstract Domestic labour, 86, 98, 112; co-operatives and, 83, 112, 115; mechanization of, 112, 115; spatial solutions, 34, 83 Dominion Lands Act. See Land tenure, Dominion Lands Act Durham, John George Lambton, Earl of, 32, 67–8 Durkheim, Emile, 51–2, 88 Ecology, 12, 13, 125. See also Agricultural production: ecological techniques Education: rural schools, 25, 29, 59, 76–7, 105, 115; school boards, 99; school districts, 99, 107; and state formation, 11. See also State, local: as educative; Class: class location as educative Education, agricultural: agricultural extension, 105, 109–11; Department of Agricultural Extension, University of Saskatchewan, 63–4, 104–5, 110–11; fairs /competitions, 108–10; North Dakota, 110. See also Agricultural research; Inspec-

198

Index

torates; Locals: agricultural societies Einstein, Albert, 37 Engels, Friedrich, 36 Ethnicity. See Race/ethnicity Face-to-face governance. See Governance: natural policing Farmers. See Class, agrarian; see also Modernism: farmers as modernist Farmers as speculators. See Class: ‘commercial’ Farming communities. See Community Farm machinery. See Mechanization Farm movement. See Agrarian organizations; Class, agrarian Ford, Henry, 47 Foucault, Michel, 3, 6, 10, 11, 41, 51, 93, 120 Fourier, Charles, 11, 34, 36, 54–5 Freisen, Richard J., 31 Galpin, Charles, 64, 76–9, 88, 107 Geography. See Space; see also Land survey; Land tenure; Methodology; Place; Planning, rural; Region Giddens, Anthony, 6, 8, 41–2, 117 Goffman, Irving, 128n10 Governance: accountability, technologies of, 11, 41–2, 50–1, 66; at-adistance, 11, 14, 51, 65–9, 89, 96–7, 111, 118, 120–1; autonomization, 3, 11, 14, 30, 20, 51, 80, 89–90, 93–4, 97, 100, 103, 120, 122; Benthamism, 11, 66, 72, 94, 103, 122; Benthamism in reverse, 90, 99–104 passim, 121, 124; civil society, 10; construction of ‘publics’ and, 51–2, 62, 82–3, 121–2; decentralization,

90, 99; low population density as a problem for, 70–4, 76, 118, 120; market, 14, 33, 120, 126; natural policing, 50–1, 57, 65, 93; as opposed to ‘government,’ 10; panopticon, panopticism, 3, 11, 41–2, 50–1, 60, 63, 69, 103, 93, 110, 120, 121, 124, 127n3; resistance, 10, 14, 104–11 passim, 122–4; role of public opinion in, 69; spatial dimensions of, 3, 11–12, 50–1, 58–64 passim, 104–11 passim, 117, 122; surveillance, 50–1, 60, 93–4 – see also State, local: as surveillance; transparency, 51, 66, 90, 121. See also Co-operatives: state governance projects and; Democracy; Inspectorates; Land survey, rectilinear: as governance; Local, the: role in governance; State formation; Transportation: as impediment to governance Governance, community and. See Community, open-country: as candidate for the ‘local’ in governance projects; Local, the: role in governance Government, 10–11; difficulties of, on prairies, 96; by farmers’ parties, 92, 123. See also Governance; Sovereignty; State Grain. See Agricultural production: wheat Grain elevators, 8, 43–4, 46, 63, 76, 82, 92, 102, 117; as Benthamite spots, 103; as embodiment of place, 76, 102 Green, Fred, 62–4 Harvey, David, 12

Index Haussmann, George Eugene, 36 Health care, rural, 74, 76, 86–8, 90; municipal doctors, 86, 109; municipal hospitals, 83, 86–7; public health movement, 83; sanitation, 76, 85–7; Saskatchewan AntiTuberculosis League, 87; TB pool, 87–8. See also Co-operatives: health care Howard, Ebenezer, 53 Hudson’s Bay Company, 15, 20–1, 25 Human nature, transformation of, 49–50, 118 Immigration, 28. See also Race/ethnicity Individualism, 35, 57, 68, 70. See also Class: ‘commercial’; Land tenure, Dominion Lands Act: and individualism; Political ideologies/movements Innis, Harold, 118 Inspectorates, 60, 64, 66, 69, 70, 72, 80, 105, 123; agricultural representatives, 78–9, 86, 108–9; county agents, 78, 110; District Agricultural Representatives, 108–10, 122; municipal inspectors, 74; Wheat Pool field service, 103, 109–10. See also Governance: panopticon, panopticism; Governance: surveillance Jackson, S.J., 29, 31 Jefferson, Thomas, 65, 71, 103, 124 Kant, Emmanuel, 7 King, W.F., 16, 23 Kropotkin, Petr A., 6, 39, 40–1, 54, 125 Kuhn, Thomas, 13

199

Lakatos, Imre, 13 Landscape architecture. See Planning, rural Landscape ideals. See Planning, rural Land survey, 15, 60; debates over representation, 18; as discursive practice, 15, 19–20, 22–3, 26, 119; as inventory, 16; line plans, 60–1, 137n80; radial plans, 60; river lots, 27; of soil types, 39, 60. See also Planning, rural Land survey, rectilinear, 5, 15–16; as contentious, 19–20, 26, 27–8, 58, 60; correction line, 73; as disembedded space, 15–16, 23, 33–4, 118; Dominion Survey, 15, 17, 34, 60, 66, 71, 118; facilitates recordkeeping, 16, 23–5, 66; as governance, 5, 20, 118; internal grid, 23–5, 27, 34, 58–60; as masculine, 34; quarter section, 23–5, 26; —, legal subdivisions, 134n38, 135n49; rationalizes land description, 16, 20, 23; road allowances – see Transportation; section, 23, 26; township, 16–18, 23, 24, 61 – see also State, local: township Land tenure, 19–35 passim; aboriginal title, 21; common property, 29–31, 33, 56; co-operative ownership, 55, 113–14 – see also Cooperative farms; Metis claims, 27; squatting, 27; staked claims, 22; state ownership, 55–6; use-lease, 113; usufruct rights, 21. See also Sovereignty Land tenure, Dominion Lands Act, 23, 25, 27–8, 33, 58; block settlement, 28, 32, 57, 70; and capital accumulation, 24, 27, 58; and

200

Index

community/mutual aid, 23, 29–30; Hamlet Clause, 28, 33; homesteading regulations, 28, 33, 59, 70, 97; and individualism, 23, 112–14, 116, 125; land grants, Hudson’s Bay Company, 24–5; —, railway, 24–5; pre-emption, 24, 134nn41, 44; reserves, 32–3; speculation, 134n45, 27, 58–60 Langley, George, 63, 81–2, 89 Le Corbusier, 38, 63, 102, 117 Legislation, Canada: Act Respecting Industrial and Co-operative Societies (1908), 93; Dominion Lands Act – see Land tenure, Dominion Lands Act; Manitoba Act, 21–2 Legislation, Saskatchewan: Act Respecting Town Planning and Rural Development, 63, 87; Agricultural Co-operatives Act (1913), 93; Agricultural Societies Act, 106; municipal hail insurance, 81; Saskatchewan Rural Municipalities Act (1909), 81–2 Lenin, Vladimir Ilich, 9, 71 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 123 Local, the, 7; and the face-to-face, 41–2, 65, 67, 71, 82, 90, 120; and presence-availability, 42; role in class formation, 10, 100–3, 122; role in governance, 30, 51, 65–7, 82, 90, 100, 105, 120–2; as site of resistance, 7, 124; as site of translocal, 42, 49, 120. See also Community, open-country: as candidate for the ‘local’; Transportation: and engineering the local Locals: agricultural societies, 105– 11; of co-operatives, 94, 96; design of spatial boundaries of 94, 96,

102–3, 105, 121; electoral districts as the basis of, 94; Pool committees, 102–4, 111, 124; Pool subdistricts as, 103; of SGGA, 100–1. See also State, local: municipality, rural; State, local: spatial limits defined Local government. See State, local Lucas, Louise, 105 Macdonald, Sir John A., 17, 20, 25, 28 MacDougall, John, 39–40 MacDougall, William, 20 Macoun, John, 16–17 Magnussen, Warren, 7 Malthus, Thomas, 38 Martin, Chester, 17 Marx, Karl, 8–10, 14, 25, 36, 48–9, 56, 65, 69, 91, 94, 99, 103, 111 Marxism, Marxist. See Political ideologies/movements: Marxism McNaughton, Violet, 83, 160n66 Mechanization in agriculture, 40, 47, 112, 114; collectivization and economies of scale in, 31, 114; and land survey, 31, 60; and layout of fields, 31, 60; and wheat, 47, 113 Mechanization in domestic labour. See Domestic labour: mechanization of Methodology, 4, 7, 8; agency/structure, 4–5, 126; anti-foundationalism, 4; debate, writing about, 13, 132n29; geographic determinism, 9; naive realism, 9, 141n48; ‘presentism’ in historical writing, 13; ‘projects,’ writing about, 4, 7–9, 11, 13, 118, 122–3, 126; relativism, 4 Mill, John Stewart, 36, 48, 51, 66, 68–9, 70, 99, 120 Modernism, 3–4, 37–8, 117; applied

Index to the rural, 38–9, 45, 118; creativity, 4, 125–6; cubism, 37, 76, 78; farmers as modernist, 6, 13, 48–9, 62–3, 92, 101, 111, 115–16, 118–20; socialist, 100, 111, 116. See also Planning, rural: modernist landscape ideal Modernity, 111–12, 117; as destructive/creative, 37; as rural, 37, 41, 44; spatial aspects, 14, 36–7; as urban, 36–7. See also Space: dynamism of Modernization, 78–9, 116 Moorhouse, Hopkins, 43 Motherwell, W.R., 48 Moulton, N., 86, 98 Municipal government. See State, local Nature, 3–4; construction of, 6, 9, 12, 19, 34, 44, 118, 126; transformation of – see Agricultural production: ‘natural’ constraints upon. See also Planning, rural Nature, human. See Human nature Newcome, George, 29, 31 Palliser, 18. See also Region: Palliser’s Triangle Panopticon. See Governance: panopticon, panopticism Partridge, E.A. (Edward A.), 92, 113 Patrick, T.A., 73 Pilkington, F.J., 73 Place, attachment to, 36, 59. See also Community: and place; Grain elevators: as embodiment of place; Space Planning, rural, 52–64, 72, 88, 125; beautification, 53, 55, 78, 83;

201

Closer Settlement Movement, 62; Commission of Conservation, 52–3, 82–3, 86; Country Life Movement, 52, 120; decentralization and, 53–4 – see also Governance: decentralization and Space: spatial decentralization; and governance, 12, 49, 55, 72–3 – see also Governance, spatial dimensions; landscape architecture, 12, 49, 63, 69; modernist landscape ideal, 12, 34, 45, 118; pastoral landscape ideal, 19, 31, 34, 39, 45, 55, 62–3, 78–9, 113, 118, 125; reintegration of rural and urban, 35, 72; Saskatchewan Town Planning and Rural Development Branch – see State, ministries. See also Community: closer communities and design of; Community, ‘rurban’; Co-operatives: role in rural planning Planning, urban, 49–51, 59, 83; Civic Improvement League of Canada, 53, 63; garden cities, 53; Garden City and Town Planning Association (England), 55–6; Town Planning Institute, 53 Plunkett, Sir Horace, 42, 51–2 Political ideologies/movements: anarchism, 65, 101, 124–5; civic reform, 82–3, 86; collectivism – see Land tenure: common property; enlightenment principles, 68–9; fascism, 101, 115; imperialists, 57–8, 98; laissez-faire political economy, 53, 68, 71, 112–13; liberalism, 27, 32, 57, 68, 98; Marxism, 9–10, 89, 99, 110; New Left, 10, 123; populism, 9–10, 82, 90, 96, 106, 150n24 (Narodniki). See also Governance;

202

Index

Individualism; Political parties; Socialism Political parties: CCF, 3, 98, 115, 123; Liberals (Canada, federal), 32; Liberals (Saskatchewan, provincial), 92; Nonpartisan League (North Dakota), 92, 96–7; Tories (Britain), 65, 113; Tories (Canada, federal), 27, 32 Population density: and agricultural productivity, 40–1, 48, 58; and governability – see Governance: low population density; in planning, 53, 72–3 Race/ethnicity, 57; aboriginal peoples, 21, 32–3, 98; Anglo-Saxons, 32–3, 57–8, 98; assimilation, 32, 98; ‘coloured people,’ 98; Doukhobors, 28–31, 34, 58; Eastern Europeans, 28, 32, 34, 59, 70, 98, 112, 114, 118, 124; French Canadians, 32, 34, 57–8; Galicians, 28, 58; and governance, 30, 32, 69–70, 81; Hutterites, 28, 30–1, 114; and immigration, 28; Mennonites, 28–33, 45, 58, 60; Metis, 20–1, 27, 34; nation, 57; racialization, 28, 32–3; Ukrainians, 28; ‘whiteness’ and settlement, 32–5. See also Class: and ethnicity; Community, open-country: and ethnic exclusiveness Region, 128n11; Dry Belt, 131n17; Great Plains, 141n48; and ‘naive realism,’ 9; Palliser’s Triangle, 18, 40, 131n17; Parkland, 19, 141n48, 144n71; Prairie, 9, 141n48 Religion, 98–9 Riel, Louis, 21–2, 35 Riel Rebellion, 22, 27

Roads. See Transportation Royal, Mr, 32 Rural, concept of, 6, 36, 41, 48 Rural communities. See Community Rural doctors. See Health care, rural Rural Municipality (RM), 17, 63, 73–90, 101, 109–10, 121–2, 123–4; failure in goverance project, 79, 110, 121. See also State, local Rural planning. See Planning, rural Rural reform, 37–8, 41, 48. See also Planning, rural Rural-urban categories, 50; as misleading, 6, 48, 159n60 Rurban, rurbanism. See Communities, ‘rurban’ Russell, Alex, 16 Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM), 78–90, 101, 103, 106, 110–11, 117, 121; as class organization, 82, 88–9, 98–9, 122; as hybrid state-movement, 89, 121; as imagined community, 88, 98; as popular ‘parliament,’ 81–2, 39. See also Saskatchewan Local Improvement District Association Saskatchewan Grain Growers Association (SGGA), 62, 80, 82–3, 86, 89, 92, 100–2, 110; Women’s section, 86 Saskatchewan Local Improvement District Association, 153n58 Saskatchewan Wheat Pool (Saskatchewan Co-operative Wheat Producers Limited), 83, 98, 101–4, 106, 110–11, 122; Country Organization Division, 103, 110; field service – see Inspectorates. See also Locals, Pool committees

Index Sayer, Derek, 11 Schools. See Education Settlement. See Immigration; Community; Land tenure; Planning, rural Sifton, Sir Clifford, 98 Simmel, Georg, 43 Socialism 95, 98, 112; agrarian socialism, 10, 56, 123–4; utopian socialism, 34, 54–6, 83. See also Modernism: socialist; Political ideologies/movements Soja, Edward W., 36 Sovereignty, 20–2; aboriginal claims, 21; Dominion claims, 20; Metis claims, 21–2 Space: abstract, 3, 7–9, 23, 33–4, 41, 63, 119; built environment, 10, 12, 36; dynamism of, 14, 24, 36–7, 43, 48; electricity and, 53–4; reification of, 7; spatial decentralization, 101, 115–16 – see also Governance: decentralization; spatial indifference, 38, 140n41 – see also Agricultural production: spatial indifference of; spatial technologies, 87–9, 91–2, 101–4, 111, 120, 124; urban, 36–8. See also Agriculture, spatial division of labour in; Class formation: spatial dimensions of; Disembedding; Governance: spatial dimensions of; Locals, design of spatial boundaries of; Modernity, spatial aspects; Place; Planning, rural and urban; Region; State, local: spatial limits defined State: ownership, 47, 83, 92, 95, 113 – see also State, local: municipal ownership; provincial boundaries, 69; theories of, 10. See also Gover-

203

nance; Legislation, Canada and Saskatchewan; Political parties; Sovereignty State, commissions of inquiry: Elevator Commission of Saskatchewan (1910), 92, 95; Saskatchewan Royal Commission on Agricultural Credit (1913), 92 State, local, 10, chap. 4 passim; county, 71–3, 76, 88, 110, 118, 121, 123; county (U.S.), 78; as educative, 32, 68–9, 77–8, 80–1, 90, 99; Local Improvement District (LID), 72–4, 151n28; municipal ownership, 82–5; municipal hail insurance – see Legislation; municipal doctors – see Health care; municipal hospitals – see Health care; municipality, rural, 72 – see also Rural Municipality; municipality, urban, 77, 87; resistance to from Tories, 65–6; as soviet, 90; spatial limits defined, 67, 69–79; Statute Fire and Labour District, 71–2; as surveillance, 66–7; township, 25, 65, 71–4, 103, 121, 124. See also Rural Municipality; Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities State, ministries, departments and agencies: Bureau of Public Health, 74, 86; Dominion of Canada, Department of the Interior, 26, 29, 37, 43, 70, 123; Dominion Soldier Settlement Board, 63; Saskatchewan Attorney General’s office, 74; Sask. Bureau of Public Health, 74, 86; Sask. Department of Agriculture, 63, 74, 78, 96, 104–10, 122; Sask. Dept. of Agriculture, Co-operative and Markets Branch, 93, 96, 100,

204

Index

111; Sask. Dept. of Highways, 74; Sask. Dept. of Municipal Affairs, 74; Sask. Dept. of Municipal Affairs, Town Planning and Rural Development Branch, 63; Sask. Dept. of Public Works, 74; Sask. Reconstruction Council (1943), 115 State formation, 3, 11–12, 20–3, chap. 4 passim, 118; similar in form to class formation, 99 Stoughton, A.A., 59 Survey. See Land survey Sydenham, Lord. See Thompson, Poulett Thompson, E.P. (Edward P.), 9 Thompson, Poulett (Lord Sydenham), 67 Time, control of: grain exchange as device for, 43; internal grid as device for, 27; technologies for, 38–9, 41, 43, 76–8, 87, 89, 104, 111; technologies of memory, 41–2, 50, 66; Wheat Pool as device for, 101–2 Townley, A.C. (Arther Charles), 97 Town planning. See Planning, rural; Planning, urban Towns. See Community: railway towns

Transportation, 104, 115; automobility, 64, 76, 78; and engineering the local, 5, 71, 74, 76–8; ‘good roads,’ 5, 76, 78, 146n89; as impediment to governance, 73, 120–1; railways, 5, 78–9, 83, 105, 117, 121; road allowances, 26; road building, 5, 8, 60, 71, 78, 123; and spatial planning, 53, 64, 76; winter, 78 Tristan, Flora, 34 Urban reform. See Planning, urban Utopia, 4, 13, 125; governmental, 11, 13 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 68, 94 Weber, Max, 22 Wheat Pool. See Saskatchewan Wheat Pool Wheat. See Agricultural production, wheat Willmott, Donald, 99 Wilson, Alexander, 12 Winner, Langdon, 12 Women: agrarian feminism, 86; objections to the survey grid, 34–5; and the pastoral ideal, 34; and SARM, 83–6. See also Domestic labour