In 1929, Canada had an election where bigots made education and children's identities the main issue. The bigots won - with the help of the KKK. (Part 1)
The only thing more shameful than this period of Canadian history is the fact that it's been whitewashed. This history wasn't just forgotten. It was buried.
The article, by historian James Pistula, is fascinating - but as with so many accounts of history, the reality is even worse.
The 1929 election in Saskatchewan has been talked about as a “schools question” - about education. it was being driven by bigotry - deep religious bigotry, especially by British and American Protestants with extreme views and hatred against Catholics as well as anti-immigrant and antisemitic sentiment, as well as towards Indigenous people.
Canada’s religious divisions were incredibly deep, and very bitter - much more so than people generally realize, in part because in Canada, propaganda and puffery has often taken the place of the recounting of real history.
There is no question this hatred shaped Manitoba and Canada.
When Louis Riel, who was French, and Catholic and was Métis took over control of the fort at Red River, he and his provisional government were saying they wanted to join Canada - which was about to take them over without asking - but on their own, democratic terms, not Canada’s.
The gang of “Canadians” from Ontario who tried to overthrow Riel’s government by violence was led by Thomas Scott, a protestant Orangeman, from Northern Ireland, who grew up in a culture that despised Catholics, partly because of centuries-old grudges from brutal civil religious wars and medieval brutality.
In prison, Scott’s never-ending stream of racial and religious bigotry towards his Métis guards had them wanting to a lay a beating on him. Riel said no. Riel ended up sentencing Scott to death, and Scott’s execution created a firestorm in Ontario, where the government put a bounty on Riel’s head. The execution of Scott is routinely portrayed as a “political blunder” on Riel’s part, by historians who leave out that Scott had also promised that if released, he would kill Riel.
The idea that it was to “put down a rebellion” makes no sense. Riel’s government had negotiated legislation granting it validity, and the federal government had passed legislation making it official. Part of the deal was supposed to be amnesty for the people who had founded Manitoba. Instead, there was a reign of terror:
This is the local military doing this. When Riel and the people of Red River took a stand to say they wanted to be part of Canada, but on their own terms, there were about 13,000 people in the community. Most Métis, some French, some Catholic, some Scottish and Protestant. Not English - from Scotland, either as fur trade workers or as settlers fleeing the Highland Clearances.
Western Canada was seen as a colony for the Orangemen of Ontario. The fight in Manitoba was about what kind of Canada Western Canada would be - whether it would be British Canadian - as from Ontario - or French Canadian - as from Quebec - because it was already a mixed community.
Red River already was a community that was a mix of people from different countries and religions, meeting and marrying with people who lived here. They wanted that actual reality to also be a legal reality in Manitoba’s constitution, so that their rights couldn’t be denied.
Canada’s plan all along had been to flood the Canadian prairies with British immigrants, so the rights of the French Catholics were suppressed.
People often try to provide reasons about why entire religions or entire nations resent to despise each other. It’s important to remember that hatred can also be irrational - that hatred is self-justifying.
There are certainly people who have reasons and justification for hating the Catholic Church.
It is also important to note that, as with all irrational hatreds, there are also people who hate the Catholic Church because they believe irrational and false conspiracy theories about it, or simply, as many protestant sects were, at the time, they were taught to hate Catholics and the Catholic Church.
I am not Catholic, but I did have some Catholic ancestors. A several times-great-grandmother was Catholic and her husband-to-be was Quaker. On their way to the church to get married they saw a crowd gathered, and they asked what was up, They replied, “There’s a Catholic going to marry a Quaker, we’re going to stone them when they come out.” They went to a different church, got married, and immediately moved to Canada.
Once Manitoba had been brought into Confederation the Canadian Government sent a British military force accompanied by Ontario and Quebec militia to establish sovereignty and to visit vengeance upon the Métis. British Army Colonel Garnet Wolseley led this Red River Expeditionary Force (RREF) of 1,200 men. On August 24, 1870, he and his forces entered Fort Garry unopposed as the Métis had left the vicinity. The militia was then stationed at Upper and Lower Fort Garry. Later a group was stationed at Pembina. The Quebec contingent was kept out of Winnipeg being stationed at the lower fort.
Historian Fred Shore notes that:
Since the militia was stationed in Fort Garry along with the Dominion Lands Office, the first Provincial Legislature and other government offices, Métis attempts at being part of the new power system were fraught with danger. Assaults, rapes, murder, arson and assorted acts of mayhem were practiced on the Métis anytime they came near Fort Garry, while the situation in the rest of the Settlement Belt was not much better.
The troops were seemingly beyond the control of their officers whom they often either ignored or assaulted. The newspapers in Red River, Montreal, Toronto, New York and St. Paul labeled their behaviour a “reign of terror.’ In the face of this abuse, many Métis began to migrate further west to Willow Bunch, Batoche, Lac Ste. Anne and St. Albert, in what is now Saskatchewan and Alberta.
I don’t think it’s possible to accurately understand this history unless we recognize the intensity of the feelings of religious resentment, hatred, spite, revenge and fear that existed in Canada. It defined and drove these conflicts.
August 1870, Charles Mair and friends organize the North-West Emigration Aid Society and starts moving Ontario settlers onto Métis lands, specifically at Rivière aux Islets de Bois, which in 1871 they renamed Boyne (after the Orange victory in the Battle of the Boyne in the 1690).
December 8, 1871, when a party of armed men, led by William Buchanan, raided Riel’s house in St. Vital, claiming to hold warrants for his arrest. Riel was away, and the raiders could only threaten the women of the household to vow bitterly that the Métis leader would be killed before the night had ended. Some of these men were arrested but were then broken out of jail by Frank Cornish (later mayor of Winnipeg) and some other friends.
To understand the history of the founding of Manitoba and the political dynamics of Riel and the people of Red River against Canada and the British Empire, unless you also understand the religious differences were that readily moved from hatred to violence and terrorism.
Protestant Extremism in Canada, the US and the KKK: Conservative and Progressive Alike
In the U.S., one of the defining features of the protestant Christianity associated with the KKK was hatred and mistrust of the Catholic Church, because of their own belief that they could be the only true Christians.
These churches were sometimes explicitly engaged in racist pseudoscience, and were preaching eugenics based on people being “subnormal,” which then also split human beings into races, then ranked them, which meant there was a built in assumption that some groups of people are “lower performing” rather than that “this group of people is enjoying a temporary advantage due to technological innovations that have improved food production or manufacturing or energy efficiency, like steel or the steam engine, or military supremacy.
As we’ll see, that message resonated in Western Canada in the 1920s and 30s.
It’s also worth remembering this. It’s after the First World War, and people are coming back to Western Canada as veterans with no understanding of PTSD and the horrors and losses of that war were unimaginable. Tens of thousands of dead in a day, and Western Canada sent a lot of young men who never came back.
There’s also been a devastating pandemic that killed millions of people around the world, and after the war everyone is trying to figure out how to rebuild broken economies and pay for the war they just had.
And the economy is a lot like our economy has been for a few years as well.
The “Roaring 20s” were only roaring for the folks at the top
People talk about the 1920s as “the roaring 20s” and think of it as a time when a lot of money was being splashed around - but the economy sure wasn’t roaring for everyone.
If you read the Great Gatsby, you need to remember that that was about the people at the top of the heap. There was lot of frenzied speculation in stocks and real estate was driving up those prices, and making people millionaires.
This was driven by the “classical” economic policies of United States Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon from March 4, 1921 to February 12, 1932. In 1924, the U.S. Congress passed “The Mellon Plan” - “economic legislation passed by Congress in 1924 reducing taxes on the wealthy and businesses, advocating high tariffs and cuts in government spending and corporate taxes.”
Mellon himself had astonishing personal wealth, and used his office to extend it. He was on the board or an officer of 60 companies - coal and oil, finance and industry. The rather optimistic idea was that since Mellon was already incredibly wealthy, he was incorruptible because no one could buy him, overlooking the fact that he might (and did) use his position to further enrich himself.
“inequality [was] driven by low wages among workers and farmers. Crop prices were low throughout the decade… The American Federation of Labor fell from 5 million to 3.6 million members from 1920 to 1923 and continued falling through the decade. Productivity jumped by 30 percent, but wages were up by just 8 percent in the decade.”
The other thing that happened during this period was that interest rates went to record lows.
“the “Roaring ’20s” included an insidious and unsustainable boost from monetary policies at the Federal Reserve. From 1924 to 1929, the Federal Reserve expanded the nation’s money and credit supply by two-thirds, driving interest rates to historic lows”
I have to emphasize that again
the Federal Reserve expanded the nation’s money and credit supply by two-thirds
People think that this means that the Federal Reserve was literally printing money - sheets of dollar bills. Instead, banks extend more credit when interest rates are low. They are allowed by regulation to lend out more than their reserves, because the people are paying back with interest, which should make up for some losses and failures.
Not, however, for really big losses and failures, which is when the whole system breaks down, because some banks have extended too much credit, because it turns out there’s not enough real money in the system to cover all these debts. That is what recessions and business cycles are, and when banks start failing, it’s a “financial crisis.” It’s the creation of money in the economy by private banks through the extension of credit. It’s why crashes can be explosively destructive. The whole rest of a an unpaid loan is not there anymore.
Now, if governments were printing actual sheets of dollar bills - or government-backed currency, this wouldn’t happen. Because if you were just printing money and giving it away - actual coins and bills - it wouldn’t just “disappear”. That happens with money that is extended by private credit. That is why government finances can always keep functioning for a national government that can print money.
The vast majority of money in the economy is not government money. It is money that is privately extended credit by banks.
So they have to increase productivity with no new capital. All of the growth is in the price of the asset - not in the underlying value - driven by debt, not what people would call “fundamentals”.
The same thing happens with housing. House prices are not doubling because demand has doubled, or because people have poured all that money they have borrowed into making the properties better. It’s because banks are willing to extend credit, on assets whose prices are going up, even though the reason the prices are going up is that lower interest rates mean banks are extending more credit.
In Canada, similar policies were playing out. Canada also had to lower interest rates when the U.S. did, but Canada did not have a central bank at all until the Bank of Canada was officially created in 1935. This paper argues that Canada and the U.S. alike “lacked the financial policies to control excess credit growth and both suffered as a consequence… The subsequent busts owe much to inadequate financial stability policies that failed to control the rapid increase in credit that fuelled the housing and stock market booms."
This economic context matters. If history seems to be repeating itself politically, it’s because we are in the same spot we were in a roughly a century ago. Countries with veterans with untreated trauma, a crazy housing market and tons of debt, even while good jobs are drying up. And there was just a devastating pandemic as well.
The reason people are acting like this is because they are desperate. They need solutions, but all they are offered is more debt to buy things they can’t afford to pay back.
The world was emerging from the First World War, and a global pandemic. Europe was still in chaos, and economic growth was uneven. There were growing social tensions and insecurity for everyone else, resulting in extremism, hate groups and nativism.
Across Canada in the 1920s, there were firebombings, death threats and cross burnings. There were attacks on Catholic Churches in Quebec City. A stick of dynamite blew a hole in a Catholic church in Barrie, Ontario. In 1922, St. Boniface College in Manitoba burned, killing ten students. Marjorie Treichel’s 1974 Master’s Thesis sets at the University of Manitoba
“The anti-Catholic stance of the Ku Klux Klan, only one of its many themes in the U.S.A. where Catholics were a definite minority, was to take on outsized proportions in Canada where French Roman Catholic - English Protestant relations were a particularly sensitive issue. In hopes of gaining the favour of ultra-Protestant extremists, this is where the Klan first struck.
In late 1922 fire destroyed an estimated $ 7,000,000 or more worth of Roman Catholic Church property. Fires at such places as St. Anne de Beaupre, the University of Montreal, St. Boniface College,. and the Quebec Basilica were blamed on the Klan. Evidence was wanting, but not indications. Notices such as that received by St. Michael's Roman Catholic Church and the headquarters of the Knights of Columbus at St. Lambert, Quebec, threatening their destruction by the "K.K.K." did nothing to alleviate suspicion.
And then one morning, in June, 1926, the citizens of Barrie, Ontario awoke to the startling news that Klansmen had tried to dynamite their local St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church at the midnight hour. The Klansmen were no more successful in that than in removing all incriminating evidence. Three Klan culprits were speedily brought to trial and all the interesting details of their misadventures given a thorough airing in court and news headlines. It was the first case of irrefutable evidence of Klan designs to destroy Catholic property. The church was repaired, the dynamiter sent to Kingston penitentiary for five years after which he was to be deported to Ireland, and the Barrie Klan Cyclops and Secretary given four and three year terms respectively at Kingston.”
From 1927 to 1929, membership in the KKK in Saskatchewan soared to 25,000 members, with chapters in every major city. They were campaigning against liquor and crime, Saskatchewan’s First Nations, and Catholics - including Ukrainian and Polish Immigrants, but especially French Catholics.
In 1928, the Klan expanded into Manitoba. Winnipeg at the time was the third largest city in Canada, and had significant Jewish as well as French, Ukrainian and Polish Catholic Communities.
The major organizer for Manitoba was “Daniel Carlyle Grant, the Moose Jaw-based Klan Kleagle, now calling himself the “Organizer for the Western Division of the Ku Klux Klan of Canada.” Grant, a shrewd and capable organizer with ““the instincts of a shark,” knew how to attract attention.”
Grant was based out of Brandon, and like other KKK organizers was getting from place to place by rail. On May 25, 1928, the Brandon Sun reported that a giant cross had been burned on the north hill of the city.
“The cross was 18 feet above the ground and had a span of 12 feet. No less than 110 tires were used in building it, and it was soaked in 80 gallons of crank case oil for some time previous, and later another 60 gallons of oil and 10 gallons of coal oil. It weighed about 2700 pounds and burned for about five hours.”
It was one of more than 150 KKK cross burnings that took place across the prairies in the late 1920s, especially on the “Empire Day” long weekend in May, now renamed Victoria Day.
“On Empire Day (24 May 1928) a cross was burned just outside the Kerrobert town limits.” That same night, crosses were burned in communities all across Saskatchewan. One of the largest gatherings was near Melfort, where the crowd was estimated at between seven and eight thousand people. Over twelve hundred automobiles were parked around the platform.
Klan organizer R.C. Snelgrove gave an address, which garnered much applause. He said that Klan demonstrations were being held that day at 161 different locations in Saskatchewan, including Regina, where, he said, a crowd of between thirty and forty thousand people was expected to attend the cross burning. (According to press reports, the number was only fifteen hundred. The cross was twenty-four metres high, and a steam tractor was required to elevate it.)”
Snelgrove had defected from the Saskatchewan Liberals, whose Leader, Jimmy Gardiner, bitterly opposed the Klan.
As a KKK organizer, Grant had had some success in Manitoba – about 2,000 members, which was nothing like the 25,000 Klan members in Saskatchewan. At meetings, he used racist epithets for Blacks, Asians, Jews, and Catholics.
The Manitoba Historical Society’s website has an entire page dedicated to Grant’s efforts to organize the Klan in Manitoba. Grant had his first meeting in Winnipeg just a few days after the long weekend cross-burning in Brandon, on June 1, 1928, at the Royal Templars’ Hall at 360 Young Street.
“In this meeting, his attack on Roman Catholics and Jews set the pattern for his future Winnipeg campaign. In his speech, Grant informed his audience that the Roman Catholic Church controlled the Dominion and that the Jews had crucified the Son of God. Shortly after this meeting, Grant returned to Saskatchewan believing that the Klan could take hold in Winnipeg.
By autumn 1928, Grant was back in Manitoba once again, basing himself in Brandon. Grant, now calling himself the Manitoba Organizer of the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, plotted the Klan invasion of Winnipeg. In October, Grant shifted his activities to Winnipeg and set himself up at the Marlborough Hotel on Smith Street just north of Portage Avenue. He was joined by Charles H. Puckering and Andrew Wright, a local Klansman. The trio soon made their plans of action for their Winnipeg campaign.”
On October 16, 1928, at the Norman Dance Hall on Sherbrook in Winnipeg, Grant told an audience of 150 that:
“The Klan strove for “racial purity. We fight against intermarrying of Negroes and whites, Japs and White, Chinese and Whites. This intermarriage is a menace to the world. If I am walking down the street and a Negro doesn’t give me half the sidewalk, I know what to do.” He then lashed out at the Jews and said that “The Jews are too powerful ... they are the slave masters who are throttling the throats of white persons to enrich themselves.” Grant claimed that the federal Liberal government was allowing the “scum of Papist Europe to flood the country and refuse to allow immigrants into the country who are not Roman Catholic ...”
Grant said he was going to go to St. Boniface, the city’s largely Catholic French quarter next.
“Reaction to Grant’s statements came immediately. The Priest in charge of St. Boniface Cathedral, Monseigneur Wilfred Jubinville, accused Grant of being a coward, and warned him to stay out of St. Boniface. The priest stated that the Roman Catholic Church would fight the Klan to the full extent of its power. Monseigneur Jubinville summed up the Klan’s activities in Winnipeg as a “scheme to raise a little ‘easy money’.”
St. Boniface police chief Thomas Gagnon stated that, “There is nothing in St. Boniface to attract the Klan,” and furthermore, he denied that the city “was held in a grip of vice.” Police chief Gagnon went on to say that if the Klan “raided” St. Boniface, drastic police action would be taken.”
Winnipeg mayor Daniel McLean, a businessman and distinguished soldier who was Colonel-in-command of the Canadian 101st Battalion in France, 1916–1918, dismissed all the Klan’s charges and noted that “when outsiders come into Winnipeg and criticize as these people have done, we simply pay no attention to their remarks.”
After a rough go of it in Winnipeg, Grant ended up returning to Saskatchewan, where he was an organizer and sometime driver and bodyguard for J. J. Maloney, a Catholic-turned-Klansman who spread hate with all the enthusiasm of a convert.
“Grant withdrew from Manitoba and returned to Saskatchewan where he campaigned for the Klan against Premier James Gardiner and the Liberal Party in the 1929 provincial election.
After the Anderson Conservative Party victory, Grant was given a job in charge of the Weyburn Employment Bureau. Soon after the Liberal Party’s return to power in 1934, Grant was sacked from his job.”
Coming Soon - Part 2 : The 1929 election.
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