the injuries of class: destructive and divisive behaviour
“...the relatively benign nature of immigrant bootlegging and drinking, of the positive social and economic role that such illicit activities could have, and of the mediated tolerance of unlawful behaviour by foreigners in Niagara should not overshadow the costs of heavy drinking and bootlegging for working-class immigrant communities and for the individuals within them. Excessive alcohol consumption was frequently a key factor behind violent crimes among foreigners. Reporting that Welland had earned a reputation as “the place where they have all the murders,” the Welland Daily News left no doubt that “foreigners” were responsible for this reputation. An editorial claimed that the
grand total of murders and attempted murders and attempted slayings has been swelled by foreigners who have been working on the two large engineering projects in the country, the Chippawa Power Canal and the Welland Ship Canal, and by the foreigners in Crowland who have been employed in industrial plants.
Fights among immigrant men, many of them under the influence of alcohol, broke out on such social occasions as weddings and christenings, as well as in boarding houses, outdoors, and at all-male establishments and gatherings such as pool rooms and restaurants. Participants often suffered serious injuries and even death. Men from the peripheries of Europe were charged with thirty-six percent of the assaults in 1910, seventy-six percent in 1920, and forty-seven percent in 1930. British men, however, also engaged in such violent behaviour. They were charged with half of the assaults in 1910, twenty percent in 1920, and forty-seven percent in 1930.
Local newspapers paid scant attention to their behaviour. Instead, the newspapers capitalized on recounting foreign immigrants’ extreme reactions to seemingly insignificant affronts, publicizing such behaviour among their English Canadian readers. For example, taking the opportunity to emphasize the foreigners’ ungodliness, Welland’s People’s Press quipped: “[It] is understood that Sunday among the foreigners is a day of brawling.” Alluding to the primitivism of immigrants, the Thorold Post described a brawl between Austrians and Italians at a christening as a “tribal war” and claimed that they were “going at each other with shovels and axes.”
As these examples suggest, most violence involving immigrants took place in Niagara’s foreign quarters, and the victims of such violence were generally other immigrants. Despite this, English Canadians were greatly alarmed by the behaviour of “hot-tempered aliens.” Some anti-immigrant voices ascribed such behaviour to the lack of self-control among foreign immigrants, the “warm blood of sunny Italy,” or the “hot blood of the South.” Others believed that such intemperance resulted from the foreigners’ ignorance of civilization and their unfamiliarity with the advantages of liberty, law and order. The difference between savagery and civilization, employed most often by English Canadians to measure the contrast between Indigenous people and the British, was also used to mark the gap between backward people from the peripheries of Europe and the British. Generally ignoring the harshness of the immigrant workers’ lives, members of the dominant culture blamed the offenders for abusing the privilege of living in Canada.
In the rare cases when immigrant women were charged with violent offences, they came in for special censure. Many English Canadians saw such “unfeminine” behaviour as indicative of the depravity of racially inferior foreigners. Among court audiences and reporters, the conduct of such female offenders aroused prurient interest, contempt, and ridicule in equal measure. Reporting on a 1909 dispute between two Romanian immigrant women in Crowland, the People’s Press found it necessary to describe the odour of garlic and the women’s obscene language in court. A decade and a half later, a Welland Tribune reporter writing about the altercation between Terenka Sokolowska and Hannah Drosda alluded to the trial’s entertainment value by referring to the curtain rising over Crowland’s police court.
The scene he described could have been set in an eastern European village. Sokolowska was carrying two pails of water on a wooden yoke when she encountered Drosda, her neighbour. The two women got into a heated argument. Despite the presence of an interpreter in the court, the reporter did not disclose the reason for the altercation. Seeking to underline the women’s coarseness, however, he did note that “compliments (?) of a filthy nature passed between the parties, the most vile statements being made.” The argument ended when Sokolowska beat her neighbour unconscious with the wooden yoke. The reporter mocked the “tough” Sokolowska, who declared amidst wails that she would not go to jail. Finally, she agreed to pay a fine and costs. Threatened with a hefty fine in case of non-compliance, both women also agreed to keep the peace for a year.
The case of Joseph Lapuszinsky, a Polish immigrant in Thorold, illustrates the type of senseless violence that could erupt among drunken immigrant men. In October 1929, Joseph and his brother March attended a drinking party at an unoccupied house in Thorold’s factory section. A fight broke out. Someone pulled a gun. Joseph was killed by two shots to the heart. His brother was slightly wounded. An Italian individual, allegedly responsible for the shootings, fled the scene in a taxi. Joseph was found lying in a field the next morning by a woman on her way to work. According to the Globe, “the quarter in which the murder was committed has been the scene of much crime. There was a lot of drinking and many quarrels among the residents.” The article also disclosed that Lapuszinsky had a wife and children back in Poland.
Although John Trott was unusual even among career criminals in murdering a policeman, immigrant bootleggers and moonshiners did not shy away from using violence to advance their economic interests. Domenico Prodote and Patsy Villella, described as two leaders of the Welland Italian community, quarrelled at a christening at the house of Frank Longo. Villella accused Prodote of informing the police about Villella’s still. Their quarrel did not lead to violence until later the same day, when the two men shot each other to death.
The trial records of such serious crimes offer a window into the most frightening aspects of the rough culture of migrant labourers. A seemingly minor disagreement between John Magro and Nick Delucco, two immigrants employed in the construction of the Grand Trunk Railroad, for example, escalated into a violent confrontation. During the course of an argument about cooking supper, Delucco cut Magro’s face with a razor. Claiming self-defence, Magro shot Delucco, accidentally inflicting a minor wound on a third worker with whom they were sharing a drink. One of the workers who was not involved in the altercation called the workers’ foreman to the scene. Thinking that Delucco, who was given to periodic drinking sprees, had overdone it again, the foreman turned him over and placed him on his bunk bed with the help of another man. Ten minutes later, Delucco was dead. A jury convicted Magro of manslaughter. He was sentenced to ten years in Kingston Penitentiary. Then as now, the line separating crimes against property from crimes against persons was not always firmly drawn. Although foreigners committed far fewer crimes of this type than the British did, the silence of the press concerning the latter’s involvement means that we do not know how often such crimes also involved violence.
By contrast, newspapers offer many examples of foreigners committing crimes against property that involved violence. As the robbery of one Macedonian labourer by another suggests, for instance, familiarity with the habits and needs of fellow immigrants facilitated such crimes. Nicholas and Jodan became chummy while they worked for the Michigan Central Railroad, before Jodan left for a job at Union Carbide in Welland. When Nicholas lost his job on the railroad, Jodan enticed him to a meeting in an abandoned shanty by promising to get him a job at the Carbide plant. There, Jodan threw pepper in his eyes, knocked him down, and then ran off with the $350 that Nicholas had with him. Immigrant labourers’ habit of carrying their savings hidden on their bodies was responsible for many other attacks by foreign workers on their fellow sojourners.
In Niagara, the supposed predisposition of foreigners to violence and their propensity of using weapons intensified as large numbers of itinerant foreigners arrived in the region with the construction of large public projects and war production. As R. Blake Brown has argued, the coincidence between a great increase in immigration to Canada and the growing availability of cheap revolvers at the turn of the twentieth century led to intense campaigning for gun control. The federal government amended the Criminal Code to require permits to carry concealed weapons. “Aliens,” however, were required to obtain permits to carry any kind of weapon.
According to Minister of Justice Charles Doherty, the law was not intended as a reflection upon all aliens. Singling them out as a group was necessary because the records of criminal courts reflected that “crimes of violence are disproportionately frequent among newly-arrived aliens.” A 1910 Ontario law targeted labourers on public works projects, who were the twentieth-century counterparts of the labourers studied by Peter Way. It required that all persons employed on public works obtain a permit to carry such weapons as a “bowie-knife, dirk, dagger, stiletto, metal knuckles, skull cracker or sling shot, revolver and pistol air gun.” When convicted of possession of such weapons without a permit, persons not born in Canada could be deported
- Carmela Patrias, “Foreigners, Felonies, and Misdemeanours on Niagara’s Industrial Frontier, 1900–30.” The Canadian Historical Review 101, 3, September 2020. pp. 444-447.
