#working class town

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“The Niagara Peninsula is well suited for studying immigrants and crime because the arrival of thousands of migrant labourers between 1900 and 1930, a great many of them from southern and eastern Europe, radically altered the composition of the area’s population. Immigrants were initially drawn to the area by seasonal employment opportunities in the construction and maintenance of railways, the fourth Welland Canal, hydro-electric projects, and factories and urban infrastructure as well as in seasonal agriculture and manufacturing. Although the outbreak of the First World War and the economic and political turmoil that followed the war brought international migration in the region to a halt, thousands of foreign-born workers flocked to the area between 1914 and 1918 from other parts of Canada to supply labour for war production. From 1925 to 1930, when the government gave the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Canadian National Railway the right to recruit agricultural labourers from central and eastern Europe under the Railway Agreement, the resurgence of industrial development drew many of the new arrivals to Niagara. As they industrialized, the small service towns and some of the villages of the region became among the most ethnically diverse settlements in Ontario.

Both before and after the First World War, foreign immigrants filled the least skilled, least secure, lowest paid, most physically demanding, and dangerous jobs in all sectors. A clear indication of this danger was the high incidence of industrial accidents among workers on large construction projects. A recent community research project on the fourth Welland Canal found that 137 men, many of them immigrants, died during its construction between 1914 and 1932. Many more were wounded and maimed. Such brutal conditions helped to shape the rough culture of these early twentieth-century immigrant workers.

One reason that immigrants from the peripheries of Europe were concentrated in such jobs was that most were agriculturalists with little or no previous experience in industrial work. Most were also sojourners, temporary residents who intended to work in Canada only long enough to amass savings that would allow them to improve their lives when they returned to their native lands. Because they did not plan to stay at their Canadian jobs for long, they often put up with conditions that more established Canadian workers would have found intolerable. 

The gender imbalance among Niagara’s immigrants indicates their intentions. The ratio of men to women among different groups of eastern and southern Europeans in Niagara kept shifting as some migrants returned to their homelands while others arrived in Canada and then travelled across the country in search of work. When others decided to stay in Niagara, their wives and children came to join them. In Welland, for instance, the ratio of men to women among Italians shifted from 7.6 to 2.3 in 1911 and 2.5 to 1.4 in 1921 to a more balanced 2.8 to 2.4 in 1931. Among Ukrainians, a great imbalance of 7.9 men to 0.2 women in 1921 shifted to five men to every four women in 1931. Hungarians showed the opposite trend, ranging from an almost balanced 3.7 men to 3.4 women in 1921 to 2.4 men for every 1.5 women in 1931. 

Thanks to intense racism against the Chinese, which found formal expression, first, in the imposition of a head tax and, then in 1923, in their virtual exclusion from Canada, the greatest and most persistent gender imbalance was among these migrants. In 1911, there were thirty-two men and no women of Chinese origin in the city. In 1931, 207 Chinese men and nineteen women appeared in the census. Even if they decided to settle in Canada, however, immigrants from the peripheries of Europe and from Asia had little chance of getting better jobs. Many of their employers, fellow workers, and other Canadians believed that southern and eastern Europeans and, especially, those of Asian origin were racially inferior and thus equipped to perform only menial labour.

 A 1904 article in the Globe offers a rare glimpse both of the dominant group’s perceptions and of the anger and frustration among migrant workers because of their vulnerability. Commenting on Italian workers who left their jobs at a Toronto railway yard, where dozens of men lost their lives, for St Catharines, the newspaper wrote: “Many of the men killed were of a low order of intelligence who think once they are set to work they ought to be protected while at work.”

Residential segregation reinforced the foreign immigrants’ status as outsiders, the chief representatives of “otherness” in Niagara. The sojourners’ poverty and intention to live as inexpensively as possible undoubtedly contributed to their segregation from English Canadians. Nevertheless, employers’ practice of assigning separate quarters in company housing and construction sites to the two groups of workers, as well as restrictive covenants, also played an important part in restricting southern and eastern European and Chinese immigrants to so-called foreign quarters. These neighbourhoods, in turn, contributed to the racialization of immigrants. Reporters, health inspectors, police officers, and local boards of health described shocking conditions in the area’s foreign quarters. According to a provincial health inspector who visited the area in 1913, the worst conditions “he ever saw” prevailed in the foreign section surrounding the factory district in Crowland. “Piles of rotten material three feet high surrounded some of the houses containing many families, and the yards were in some cases quivering masses of filth and slime, many inches thick.” A local physician reported: “You could smell the place a mile off.” As late as 1931, many houses in Crowland and Welland South were not connected to sewers. Residents relied on “carelessly maintained” outdoor toilets, and slops were placed by residents in ditches. The Welland Tribune reported the outbreak of “para-typhoid fever” in the district. Rather than recognizing that these shocking conditions resulted from the foreigners’ poverty and the lack of adequate municipal services to their neighbourhoods, local physicians, health inspectors, and reporters blamed foreigners’ carelessness and lack of knowledge of sanitary conditions.”

- Carmela Patrias, “Foreigners, Felonies, and Misdemeanours on Niagara’s Industrial Frontier, 1900–30.” The Canadian Historical Review 101, 3, September 2020. pp. 432-434.

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“...the most common precisely defined charges against Welland county residents were related to alcohol: being drunk, drunk and disorderly behaviour, selling liquor without a licence, violation of the Ontario Temperance Act (1916–27), and, from 1927, violation of the Ontario Liquor Control Act . The analysis of alcohol-related crimes thus affords an especially useful way to consider both the development of Anglo-Canadian views of immigrant offenders and the ways in which the resulting stereotypes hid the complex role that the production and consumption of alcohol played in immigrant communities. Anglo-Canadian temperance advocates and local newspapers blamed foreign immigrants for making Niagara communities among the most drunken places in the country. They claimed that “the illicit sale of liquor” throughout the Niagara region was “almost entirely in the hands of foreigners.” Immigrant women involved in bootlegging attracted special censure in the press. At a time when many scholars believed that the lack of differentiation between the sexes was a mark of primitive or savage societies, some residents of Niagara saw the participation of women in such illegal activities as evidence of their lack of femininity and, hence, of primitivism and racial inferiority. The Thorold Post, for example, reported with disgust that a female immigrant boarding-house keeper hid a liquor bottle under the baby in her arms when the police raided her home. During another raid in Thorold’s foreign quarter, the newspaper noted disapprovingly, police discovered liquor bottles hidden in a cradle under a sleeping baby.

Welland County jail records belie the accuracy of such newspaper accounts. In the decades under consideration here, Niagara residents of British descent outnumbered foreigners among those charged with alcohol-related crimes. Foreigners were over-represented among those arrested for alcohol-related offences in 1920, while Niagara residents of British descent were under-represented, a situation that reflects the suspicion of foreigners that prevailed as a result of the First World War and the labour unrest that followed.

By 1930, however, despite an increase in the proportion of foreign-born residents in Welland County, their presence among those arrested for alcohol-related crimes declined significantly.  They made up only sixteen percent of those in this category. The proportion of British residents arrested for drunkenness and related crimes grew appreciably to seventy-two percent of the total. According to the chiefs of police of Crowland and Port Colborne, an important reason for this change was that the decriminalization of brewing and winemaking for home consumption made it difficult to catch those who sold home-made wine and beer without a licence, a category that included most foreign bootleggers.

There were a number of reasons in addition to racism that drew the attention of Niagara’s dominant groups to immigrant drinking and bootlegging specifically. Because their crowded quarters were not ideal for relaxation, many immigrant men spent their leisure time in public places. They loitered on public sidewalks, finding refuge in railway stations in the wintertime. In good weather on holidays and weekends, they moved from urban sidewalks to the “bush.” They were visible in these locations and, hence, vulnerable to arrest. In June 1919, for example, “a lot of foreigners” were “drinking wine and carousing” in the bush near Stamford. While most escaped when the opp came upon them, the four who were caught faced the choice of paying steep fines or serving three months in jail.

Ontario’s early twentieth-century liquor laws also helped to criminalize immigrant alcohol consumption. Both Ontario’s Temperance Act (1916–27) and the Liquor Control Act (from 1927) permitted the possession of liquor in a private residence. Boarding houses with more than three boarders, of the type that housed a great many foreign immigrants, however, did not qualify as private residences. Both boarding-house keepers and residents were thus subject to prosecution for behaviour deemed perfectly legal for people who could afford to live in single-family homes. 

While foreign immigrants were not alone in running and living in boarding houses, the attention of the press and public officials, including liquor inspectors, focused largely on immigrant boarding houses, which least resembled Anglo-Canadian households. As noted above, many foreign migrants, married or single, came to Canada on their own. The boarding houses they inhabited were frequently all-male establishments. In the eyes of English Canadian observers, therefore, they lacked the stabilizing, moral influence of women. Because of the desire of the sojourners to live as inexpensively as possible, even boarding houses run by immigrant couples were often very crowded. One reason that women joined their partners sojourning in Canada was that they hoped to increase household income by keeping boarders. To do so, however, they placed as many beds as possible in every room, at times renting the same bed to two men who worked and slept in shifts. Many boarding-house keepers – men and women – sold alcohol, just as they provided food for their boarders. Because their economic prospects were limited, boarding-house keepers, as well as other petty entrepreneurs in Niagara’s immigrant communities, such as grocers and operators of ice-cream parlours, billiard halls and even gas stations, also engaged in more than one type of enterprise, including bootlegging. Paying hefty fines on occasion was less expensive than purchasing a licence to sell liquor. Despite the involvement in bootlegging of some career criminals, such as John Trott, Police murderers, and the sensational stories about foreigners in Canada collaborating with American gangsters who drove fast cars and carried automatic weapons, immigrant bootlegging in Niagara was primarily on a modest scale. Even so, it was lucrative. In 1916, for example, when a large scale police raid netted twenty-three blind-pig operators, most were fined, but none had any difficulty paying the $300 fine on the spot.

The possibility of profiting from the sale of alcohol was especially appealing in a context where other economic prospects of immigrants were limited. Not surprisingly, therefore, the recollections of immigrants who came to Niagara before 1930 and their children offer a very different perspective on immigrant bootlegging than the views of English Canadian newspapers, temperance advocates, and officials. Foreigners recognized that offering such services was a way to increase their income with very little expense. Indeed, according to a Hungarian sojourner, they regularly had to sell liquor if they wanted to succeed during the interwar years. The trade-off was that they frequently had to put up with their boarders’ drunken behaviour.

The innocuous name given by foreigners to establishments engaged in bootlegging – social clubs – indicated the wider acceptance of this practice among immigrants than within the host society and may also have been intended to hide what was happening in these businesses. Some bootleggers bought by the gallon and sold by the glass. Others made the wine and beer that they sold. Their chief appeal for customers was that their prices were lower and their hours of operation were longer than those of hotels. In the 1920s, hotels were closed during the dinner hours, just when the day shift was ending for workers. Some social clubs enhanced their appeal by offering home-cooked food as well.

Peter Santone, a barber and Crowland township councillor, endowed immigrant bootlegging with epic proportions. No doubt exaggerating for effect, he recalled with amusement that Charlie Jary, a Hungarian immigrant, “sold more wine than the liquor store.” According to Santone, most of the Italian businesses in Welland “did a little bootlegging on the side.’ The practices of small business owners from other ethnic groups were similar, and bootleggers and their clients were not necessarily of the same ethnic origin. In the 1930s, when Adam Farioli was working at the Electro-Metallurgical plant in Welland, he and his friends from work patronized Markoff’s gas station on King Street. Markoff was also a bootlegger. “Going to Markoff’s,” he remembers fondly, “was a ritual.” After they cashed their paycheques on Thursday nights, Farioli and his friends stayed around for drinks. Rather than discrediting them, the engagement of ethnic businessmen in such lucrative illegal activities enhanced their standing in their communities. Speaking of Tony Nero, for instance, Santone recalls: “He treated the Italians good.” He carried many people through the lean times when he gave them credit. “He sold groceries in the front, used to bootleg in the back.”

The recollections of an immigrant family from Bologna provide us with the clearest illustration of bootlegging driven by a sense of mutualism among working-class immigrants. When the family of seven arrived in Welland, the father had difficulty finding work, so the family rented a house that was not much more than a shack. A mere two months later, an explosion destroyed the house and killed the father. Families from the same region of Italy came to the aid of the widow and her children. For a while, five of the children were taken in by different households of paesani, while they helped the mother find an apartment that could accommodate the entire family. The mother then took in two boarders, and her paesani helped her to set up a social club. She made wine, and, as her daughter recalled in the 1980s, “a few friends would come and drink it. That way she made a little money because she was desperate to.” This is how the family survived until the children were old enough to go out to work.

That is not to say that all foreign immigrants approved of illicit activities by their counterparts. Mary Samson (née Botari) recalled that her parents believed that the area around Tony Nero’s store was unsafe because Nero and other businesses there engaged in bootlegging. They advised their daughters not to walk through that part of Welland. Other illicit business dealings also appear less as the actions of immoral or dangerous foreigners than as small-scale business undertakings that fulfilled certain needs. Sex work involving immigrants also appears to have taken place in small, multi-purpose immigrant enterprises such as boarding houses and rooms attached to restaurants. For example, after her husband was killed in action during the First World War, Rosy Cristofono took a position as a waitress in her cousin Antonio Mosoco’s Welland boarding house and restaurant. In addition to her wages, Mosoco provided her with room and board, and Cristofono used the room to carry on “an immoral business with the customers.” She handed half of her earnings to her cousin.” - Carmela Patrias, “Foreigners, Felonies, and Misdemeanours on Niagara’s Industrial Frontier, 1900–30.” The Canadian Historical Review 101, 3, September 2020. pp. 435-439.

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“First Photos of Ohio Mine Disaster Which Killed 79,” The Border Cities Star. November 6, 1930. Page 01. ---- Seventy-nine miners, officials of the Sunday Creek Coal Company and visitors lost their lives yesterday afternoon when a gas pocket in the company’s mine at Millfield, Ohio, exploded and wrecked the interior of the mine shaft. These photos, the first of the disaster, were rushed to The Border Cities Star by airplane. The picture at the top shows a crowd of relatives and friends of the trapped men waiting at the mouth of the mine for news of the victims. The lower picture shows a rescue squad ready to enter the mine.

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“1200 Coutturiers En Greve,” La Patrie. July 2, 1919. Page 01. ---- Groupe Des Ouvriers Couturies qui ont déclaré la grève à la 10 heures ce matin dans les différents établisseuments en confection, réunis en ensemblée à leurs quartier-généraux, à la salle Auditorium, rue Ontario.

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“But the part of hegemonic groups and institutions is, of course, just one side of the complex encounter between immigrants and the Canadian justice system. This article also examines the other side of that encounter, which has received far less attention from scholars: the nature, extent, and significance of unlawful behaviour by foreign immigrants. The persistence to this day of the stereotype of racialized minority group members as prone to crime, and the resulting sensitivity regarding immigrants and crime in general, help to explain the reluctance of scholars to explore this subject. Labour and immigration historians have shied away from this topic for more specific reasons. As Peter Way explains, labour historians’ desire to demonstrate working-class agency contributed to obscuring the less salubrious aspects of working-class immigrant culture. Their works tended to emphasize the positive and constructive aspects of that culture, such as mutualism, militancy, protest, and unionization. Even influential studies of working-class leisure and recreation such as Roy Rosensweig’s Eight Hours for What We Will, and Peter DeLottinville’s study of Joe Beef’s Canteen in Montreal, stressed the working-class ethic of mutuality and reciprocity. Yet, as Way maintains, drunkenness, violence, and vice were also expressions of working-class agency. Among the migrant canal workers whom he studied, such behaviour was the product of chronic joblessness, low wages, transience, and unhealthy working and living conditions; the costs exacted from workers by the capitalist wage relationship that they could not control.

More recent studies of working-class masculinity elaborate on the nature and causes of the roughness of male culture among workers in the twentieth--century. Perhaps most pertinent for the period covered by this study is the work of Stephen Myers on twentieth-century factory workers. He shows that the harsh treatment of semi-skilled and unskilled workers – a great many of whom were recent immigrants – in mass production manufacturing took a toll. Their jobs were insecure, and increased mechanization meant that they had little control over their work. The relentless pace, driven by supervisors, machines, and various incentive schemes, noisy, dirty, and otherwise unsafe working conditions, and the mindless monotony of twentieth-century mass production, added new sources of disaffection and frustration among semi-skilled and unskilled workers. At the same time, a growing reliance on machines challenged their sense of masculinity: the brawn on which they had earlier prided themselves was no longer required or valued in many factories. As a result, like their predecessors, working-class men in the twentieth century attempted to reassert their masculinity by excessive drinking, risk taking, coarse language, and physical violence. The entry of more women and African Americans into a growing range of semi-skilled and unskilled manufacturing jobs intensified male workers’ anxiety. All too often, they directed some of their frustration and hostility against working-class women and people of colour.

Intent on conveying the agency of international migrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historians of immigration – like labour historians – generally pay little attention to crime. Yet some of their works reveal the transnational roots of unlawful and violent actions by immigrants. They suggest that the brutal exploitation of agricultural labourers that accompanied the spread of commercial agriculture to the peripheries of Europe, and their ill-treatment as seasonal workers in mining, lumbering, and construction in their native or neighbouring lands, drove these workers to excessive drinking and fighting. Within their patriarchal households, some male workers expressed their stress and frustration by violence towards their own families. In Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia, and China, some men reacted to such ill treatment by rejecting the legitimacy of the reigning economic and political system altogether. They formed gangs of bandits or outlaws, expressed their hostility towards large estate owners by incendiarism, and relied on theft, robbery, and violence for survival. This form of resistance enjoyed considerable sympathy among poor peasants and agrarian labourers, who saw the bandits as avengers.

By focusing primarily on single ethnic groups, however, histories of ethnicity and migration have inadvertently obscured the similarities in the experiences of migrant labourers from different lands. While this article builds on the findings of students of the racialization and criminalization of minority group members and the works of labour and immigration historians, it also offers several new perspectives on the encounter between immigrants and the Canadian justice system. First, the study adopts a multi-ethnic, rather than a single-group, approach. In particular, it explores the intersection of ethnicity and national origin with class and gender to explain why Niagara’s immigrants broke Canadian laws. The study reveals that foreign immigrants in Niagara in the early twentieth century engaged in the type of borderline pathological behaviour, damaging to themselves and detrimental to the building of ethnic- or class-based solidarities, found by Peter Way among canal workers in the nineteenth century and Stephen Myers among American automobile workers in the early twentieth century. My analysis suggests, however, that foreigners also broke Canadian laws for economic reasons and as a result of their belief that Canadian laws were unjust. Illicit conduct motivated by their sense of justice or economic goals could not only coexist with, but could sometimes even be driven by, a sense of mutualism and solidarity with fellow immigrants.”

- Carmela Patrias, “Foreigners, Felonies, and Misdemeanours on Niagara’s Industrial Frontier, 1900–30.” The Canadian Historical Review 101, 3, September 2020. pp. 425-428.

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“Le club ouvrier Papineau continue sa campagne pour l’embellissement,” L’Illustration Nouvelle. June 26, 1940. Page 02. ---- Le Club ouvrier Papineau continue ses activités on ne peut plus louables en tue d'embellir le quartier mais plus particulièrement ia rue Maisonneuve où le club s’occupe d'enjoliver avec le concours des citoyens cette rue tout spécialement désignée. Le club voit à fournir des boites à ses frais aux citoyens de cette rue Maisonneuve qui en font ia demande, c'cst-à-cire de la rue Dorchester à Ste-Catherine. On comprendra que le club ne peut fournir ces boites aux citoyens de tout le quartier malgré sa bonne volonté car il doit se limiter à la partie de la rue Maisonneuve plus haut désignée ses moyens ne lui permettant pas cette dépense. L'assemblée a décidé de prier M. Maillé de voir à placer de ces boites de fleurs dans les fenêtres des salles du club. Il est désirable que cet exemple soit suivi par les autres citoyens de ia rue Ste-Cathcrine. M Bourdeau a fait quelques marques sur l'importance de l’oeuvre commencée par le club et il recommande aux citoyens de faire l'éducation de leurs enfants et de leurs recommander de ne jamais faire quoi que ce soit qui détruirait les embellissements apportés dans le quartier. I! préconise la formation d une commission des parcs comme la chose existe dans toutes les grandes villes. La cité de Montréal est la seule qui n'est pas organisée. Il soutient que notre ville oerc) au moins $150,000 par année par le manque d'organisation de nos parcs et la chose est facile à prouver par des statistiques. MM. Latulippe et Pin ont aussi fait quelques remarques sur la 'situation pénible qui est faite aux citoyens et ils recommandent la patience, la modération afin que la paix régne chez nous.