Watch the Bee Go Get The Hun - Patriotic Sheet Music

Sheet music is a fascinating avenue into historical culture, and the patriotic jingles of the First World War are no exception.  Songs such as "Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag", or "A Long Way Tipperary", immediately bring that conflict to mind.  The Sheridan Libraries Special Collections at Johns Hopkins University features a vast collection of digitized sheet music for research and enjoyment in  "The Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection".  Clicking the World War I subject category yields 574 items, including popular soldiers' tunes such as "Hinky Dinky Parlay Voo?", patriotic odes to President Wilson and General Pershing, and a number of titles featuring belligerent threats aimed at the German enemy.

One of these belligerent numbers is the oddly titled, "Watch the Bee Go Get the Hun" whose cover features the familiar mustachioed caricature of Kaiser Wilhelm, subject to on onslaught of American soldier-bees, guided by the lamp of lady liberty!  The song was penned by Walter Hawley, and published in New York in 1918.

http://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu/catalog/levy:097.110

The lyrics of the song are as follows:

There's a beehive in America they call the U.S.A., And is far from 'over there'.
There's a hundred million busy bees a buzzing night and day, And they will soon be over there.
Uncle Sam is spending money so the bees can get the honey.
It's up to you to see them through the thickest of the fray.

Just watch the bee go get the Hun,
And bye and bye you'll see them run,
We're sending swarms and swarms of bees,
far across the deep blue seas,
To buzz around that big long distant gun.

So help the bee to get the Hun, Stamp U.S.A. on every one.,
And the Germans will be wiser when our Bees have stung the Kaiser,

Watch the bees go get the Hun.
Just Watch the Hun.

There are busy bees at Washington as busy as can be,
Preparing plans for 'over there'
And every bee throughout the land is watching anxiously
The bees who've landed over there.

The grand old Bell is ringing,
And our bees have started singing.
Their sting will win, good-bye Berlin,
it's all off Germany.

Just watch the bee go get the Hun,
And bye and bye you'll see them run,
We're sending swarms and swarms of bees far across the deep blue seas,
To buzz around that big long distant gun.

Our busy bees will get the Hun
With Kaiser Bill we'll have some fun,
To our bee-hive we will bring him so our little bees can sting him,

Watch the bees go get the hun.
Just Watch the hun.

It seems the bees here are variously ammunition, soldiers and civil servants.  It's a very busy metaphor! Why one would want to bring the Kaiser to the American bee-hive for a stinging when millions of bees are flying overseas is also a mystery.  Fortunately, Phonofile's youtube channel features a phonograph cylinder recording of "Watch the bee go get the Hun", so you can sing along at home.  All together now!

Brutalized Landscapes: Wayne Larsen on AY Jackson and the Great War (2/2)

Continued from previous post.

Wayne Larsen's A.Y. Young (Toronto: Dundurn, 2009) is a biography of a Canadian war artist who experienced the Great War as a private in the ranks before being picked up by the Canadian War Memorials Fund.  His work for Lord Beaverbrook's organization produced some of the most iconic depictions of battlescapes on record.  After Second Ypres, Jackson accepted the war would not be over quickly, and enlisted in the 60th Battalion.

That A.Y. Jackson was on the cusp of renown when he joined the army, is reflected in the reportage of the Montreal Gazetteof June 29th, 1915.

(W.W.I - 1914 - 1918) Lieut.-Col. Gascoigne,
 O.C. 60th Battalion. May, 1917. 

Canada. Dept. of National Defence
/Library and Archives Canada/

When the first five hundred men of the 60th Battalion, under Lieut.Col. F.A. Gascoigne, entrain at the Windsor street station tomorrow night for Valcartier, the force will have on its strength Private A.Y. Jackson, artist, and associate of the Royal Canadian Academy...Mr. Jackson a few years ago traveled through Belgium, sketched its landscapes and its historic monuments, and in that time of peace and prosperity saw the cities that have since been devastated by the Germans - Bruges, Brussels, Antwerp, Liege and Namur. Now he is anxious to battle on that soil in the common cause." (Quoted in Larsen, p. 72)

Jackson arrived in Le Havre, France in February 1916, and would see four months of action before being wounded. Fifteen years after the fact, he recalled a surreal day in the trenches:

I was just thinking back to another June 3rd crawling along a trench in Sanctuary Wood, and an aeroplane circling overhead like a big hawk, signalling to the artillery who were trying to blow us up. It was a day of glorious sunshine and only man was vile, in general, individually they were magnificent. I thought a cup of cocoa in a dressing station was an undreamed of luxury. (Quoted in Larsen, p. 73) 

A little over a week later, Jackson was wounded in the Battle of Mount Sorrel. After his recovery, when training at Shoreham, England, in the summer of 1917, he received the news that Tom Thomson had drowned.  The event was shrouded in mystery, and has since been the subject of much historical speculation.

It was in the summer of 1917 that Jackson's fortunes as a common soldier changed. While digging a latrine in Shoreham, he was approached by a member of the Canadian War Memorials Fund, who told Jackson of the opportunity to work for Lord Beaverbrook as an official painter. After he proved that he had the skills for the job, he was promoted to Lieutenant, which was a source of some embarrassment. As Larsen wrote, "Whereas Private Jackson had avoided saluting officers by taking alternate routes down quiet side streets, Lieutenant Jackson now had to keep to the busy main roads to avoid being saluted." (Larsen, p. 80)

AY Jackson. Gas Attack, Lievin. 1918. Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, Canadian War Museum. 19710261-0179

Later that year, when he made his way to Flanders, he again felt embarrassed traveling around in a staff car, while the poor bloody infantry slogged on through the endless muck. Soldiers were generally cold to him until they learned that he had been wounded in combat. Larsen suggests that something in the changed nature of warfare, the estrangement of artillery, chlorine gas, night attacks, and tunnels, meant that old depictions of battle no longer sufficed. Jackson's memory supports this: 

When the War Records of World War I were organized, the artists started off thinking in terms of the kind of war art popularized by the Graphic and the Illustrated London News. It gave one the feeling of something left over from previous wars, the old stock poses, the same old debris lying around like still life, and smoke drifting whenever the composition gave trouble.

The machine gun had destroyed the old death and glory picture which depended on a mass of cavalry or infantry hurtling forward with the shot-riddled flag clutched in the striken hero's hand. There pictures were mostly painted by artists who had no first-hand information and it was not long before we realized how ineffective they were. (Cited in Larsen, p. 81)

Portrait of t Robert Shankland, 
The Victoria Cross, 1917.
 Canadian War Museum. 
Beaverbrook Collection of
 War Art Photo Credit 

While Jackson did paint a portrait of Victoria Cross recipient, most of his work, the largest of any war artist, were depictions of landscapes decimated by battle. "He knew that by painting what would have otherwise been peaceful landscapes, now battered beyond recognition by the modern war machine, he could instil in the viewer a sense of devastation that could be measured in human terms." (Larsen, p. 81).

A Copse Evening. AY Jackson, 1918.

The winter of 1917-18 was spent in his London studio, and it was on his return to the battlefields in the spring of 1918 when he painted A Copse, Evening, one of his best known works of the war. The German spring offensive pushed the artists off the continent, and curiously, Jackson did not return to capture Canadian advances during the Hundred Days campaign. Jackson was instead ordered back to Canada to prepare to join Canadian troops to Siberia.

It is here that Larsen leaves the reader wanting more.  Why did Jackson go back to Canada at this time instead of heading back to the front as the British pressed forward in 1918?  The Canadian Siberian Expeditionary force, was sent to aid the White Russians against their revolutionary foe, in hopes to allow Russia to fight the Germans in the east. The expedition sailed in October of 1918, yet Larsen notes that on the 11th of November, Jackson was on Sainte-Catherine Street, Montreal when he heard the church bells ringing to announce the end of the war. So when Larsen writes, "of course the trip to Siberia was automatically cancelled", part of the story is missing. (Larsen, p. 86)

Personnel of the Canadian Siberian Expeditionary Force

 with truck Date(s)ca. Jan. - May 1919PlaceVladivostok, Russia. 

Credit: Raymond Gibson / Library and Archives Canada / C-091749

Troops were still sent to Siberia in December 1918, in fact, some of them mutinied in Victoria before sailing. Was the action no longer considered part of the First World War and thus no longer justified commemoration under the Canadian War Memorials Fund? Was no other artist available to go with the expedition other than Jackson? London to Vladivostok is a long journey, was no one closer that could have done the job?

Larsen can't answer every question about Jackson's motivations and attitudes towards the war, especially in a full length biography of which 1914-1918 is but one small component.  He does relay an amusing anecdote about Jackson and the Siberian Intervention. He notes that in preparation for the trip, Jackson purchased twenty tubes of white paint so that he would have enough to capture all the snow. With his trip cancelled, he had more white paint than he would need for years. He joked that it was this stash of white paint that prompted him to become a painter of snowy landscapes in the following years, "as I had to find some use for it." (Larsen, p. 86)

A.Y. Jackson’s In Jasper Park, 1924. A Y Jackson's painting In Jasper Park. Thomson Collection at The Art Gallery of Ontario Photo Courtesy of the Estate of the late Dr. Naomi Jackson Groves Westbridge Fine Art

In the years following the First World War, Jackson painted troopships in Halifax before being officially discharged. He would soon become affiliated with the Group of Seven, working to promote a distinct Canadian way of art.  Some argue that the war altered his style to shift from early-modernist impressionist styles to more post-impressionist expressions of landscapes.  Some of Jackson's work is available for viewing at the Glenbow Museum's Transformations exhibit, which examines the development of Jackson's nationalism and its relation to the Great War.

Alexander Young Jackson, the Group of Seven, and the First World War

Many historians have claimed that the First World War was a transformative period, ushering in a new modern era of bureaucracy and state control. For Canadian historians, the dominant narrative surrounding the war, has been that of colony to nation. In art history, this nationalist tone rings true as well, for it was during the Great War that key nationalist artists who would later become known as the Group of Seven developed their skills and were broadly publicized through patriotic efforts linked to the conflict.

Group of Seven, 1920. From left to right: Frederick Varley, A. Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, Fairley, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, and J. E. H. MacDonald. It was taken at The Arts and Letters Club of Toronto. Photo: Arthur Goss.

Four future Group of Seven artists were officially commissioned by the Canadian War Memorials Fund to depict the war. On the homefront, Arthur Lismer and Frank Johnston depicted Canadian efforts, and overseas, AY Jackson and Frederick Varley captured the battlefields of Europe. Unofficially, a fifth member, JEH MacDonald, lent his hand to the war effort by producing illustrations for honour rolls, posters, and other patriotic impressions.

The Group of Seven are the quintessential Canadian visual artists, known for depicting a stark Canadian wilderness which some argue bears the mark of military experience. As Colleen Sharpe, (curator of a previous exhibition at Calgary's Military Museums on the emergent Group of Seven and war), wrote in 2009, "The iconic features of the Group of Seven's art - disturbed ground, prominent rocks, muddy colours and skeletal tree trunks - have not been widely acknowledged as originating in the landscape of the First World War, yet it seems no accident of chronology that these men painted many of their seminal art works directly following the war."(Colleen Sharpe, "Artists and Soldiers", in Art in the Service of War: The Emergent Group of Seven (2009), p. 3) Maria Tippett also saw a direct military connection in the formation of the Group's style, writing that "The low-keyed colours of no man's land and the trenches - muddy brown, yellow ochre, and cool grey - came to permeate the post-war canvases of Varley, Jackson, and others who had lived and painted at the front." (Maria Tippett, Art at the Service of War: Canada, Art, and the Great War (Toronto, 1984), p. 108)  She also notes that exposure to British modernists during their time in England, was a wartime connection that would bring change to Canadian art.

The Canadian War Memorials Fund was the organization which did the most to support Canadian war art during the First World War. Headed by Lord Beaverbrook, the Fund commissioned artists to create a permanent artistic record of the conflict. It prioritized the documentary aspects of art, giving artists the opportunity to explore the battlefields and sketch what they observed. The Fund supported British artists as well, but historians have argued that its major contribution was the support of artists, and the organization of critics and gallery executives, "which enabled a national school of art to fluorish." (Maria Tippett, Art at the Service of War: Canada, Art, and the Great War (Toronto, 1984), p.6.) From November 1916, the CWMF gave artists full-time officer's rank and wages to memorialize the war.

The Great War occurred at a time when artistic taste was changing. As Jackson himself wrote, the war would let Canadian art "emerge from all its tribulations. Its worst foe materialism is being walloped, and will never be quite so formidable again. And all the academic bunch are dying off, gradually very gradually ... the future will take care of us."(Tippett, p. 7) For Jackson, more traditional means of portraying battle no longer rang true. As he put it, depictions of clashes of arms, with crisp lines, and vibrant colours had, "gone underground. There was little to see. The old heroics, the death and glory stuff, were obsolete." (Tippett, p. 13)

House of Ypres
Painted by Alexander Young Jackson
Beaverbrook Collection of War Art
CWM 19710261-0189

Private A.Y. Jackson c.1915
60th Battalion, enlisted June 1915
McMichael Canadian Art Collection Archives

AY Jackon created one of the largest bodies of work of any battlefield war artist, and had served in the 60th Battalion before being committed full time as an artist. He would write that "Lawren Harris wanted me to apply for a commission and offered to defray all expenses in connection with it, but I knew nothing about soldiering and decided to start at the bottom as a private in the infantry." (Art in the Service of War, p. 4) During his time in the line, Jackson put his artistic skills to military use, by drawing diagrams and details from military maps. (Tippett, p.12) Jackson was wounded at Maple Copse near Ypres, which fortunately kept him out of the fighting in Passchendaele. The artist was no stranger to France, having spent some time studying there a decade previous to the war.

Jackson spent time convalescing in France before being sent back to England. He was taken on strength of a reserve battalion and in Shoreham Camp when he heard about the CWMF and decided to approach Lord Beaverbrook. The environment in the battalion contributed to this decision. Jackson noted there was "not enough food and too many military police" with disgruntled soldiers being "drilled and disciplined by men who had not been in France". (Tippett, p. 14) Shortly after he left the battalion a mutiny broke out in the unit.

It was the battlefield itself that inspired; the alien mudscapes, and shattered woods.  Maria Tippett wrote that, "Nothing came to symbolize the war for the artist and the combatant as much as the land upon which it was fought....Pock-marked with gaping water-filled craters, strewn with bones, metal, and all the refuse of modern warfare, the topography of the front line offered few familiar associations....The machine had superseded God's handiwork; his landscape was being reshaped by man's instruments." (Tippett, p. 58) Tippett notes that it was this violent new meaning and manifestation of the landscape that made Romantic-Realist conventions seemingly out of place. Jackson felt that his style needed to be adjusted as well: "the impressionist technique I had adopted in painting was now ineffective, visual impressions were not enough." (Tippett, p.59)

A Copse, Evening
Painted by Alexander Young Jackson
Beaverbrook Collection of War Art

These landscapes and the new techniques used to portray them were directly influential in the development of a national school of art for Canadians after the war. As Tippett writes, "After the war Jackson and his fellow artists deliberately sought to paint 'swampy, rocky, wolf-ridden, burnt and scuttled country with rivers and lakes scattered all through it.' The Group of Seven's concern to demonstrate...the 'spirit' of painting in Canada, was thus associated with a sense that this could best be done by employing methods and techniques they and their colleagues had either seen used or themselves employed to paint the war-torn landscape of the Old World." (Tippett, p. 109)

The Glenbow museum of Calgary is currently exhibiting the work of AY Jackson and Otto Dix, drawing comparisons around the idea of nation and the influence of the Great War on their art.

War is a Drag: Female Impersonators in the First World War

The phenomenon of the Great War drag show is somewhat perplexing.  Some argue that soldiers were not just laughing at the gender-bending performances but were actually aroused by the shows.  A broad array of explanations are offered for the cross-dressing phenomenon, ranging from desires for the portrayal of normalized femininity, to sublimation of homosexuality.
 

'The Dumbells' Concert Party. Formed from
 3rd Canadian Division in France.  'Marjorie'
(R.D. Hamilton), and 'Marie' (A.G. Murray),
the two girls of the Dumbells show,
 with the manager, Captain M.W. Plunkett,
 Credit: Canada. Dept. of National
Defence/Library and Archives Canada/

JG Fuller's Troop Morale (Oxford, 1990), notes the importance of music shows to the soldiers when they were at rest, and among these theatrical revues, drag shows were fairly common.  Analyzing a broad range of soldiers' journals, Fuller writes that , "curiously these female impersonators seem to have generated considerable sexual excitement.  He quotes one of the men in the ranks as claiming, "judging from the way [the men] sat and goggled at the drag on stage it was obvious that they were indulging in delightful fantasies that brought to them substantial memories of the girls they had left behind them in London, Manchester, Glasgow, wherever." (As cited in Fuller, p.105)
Apparently, many impersonators did not make a caricature of their roles, but played their parts with candour.  Fuller notes that many journals accounted for the realism of the concert party "girls".  One soldier wrote that, "it all seems to show that English beauty is essentially masculine."  Fuller is more critical of the illusion: "judging from the photographs, it shows the intensity of the desire to believe." (p. 106)

Big Beauty Chorus, Marie and the Boys.  Dumbells troupe.  Library and Archives Canada.  PA-005741

Fuller wonders why this desire to believe in the gender-bending charade was so strong with the relative ease of access to women in the rear areas.  It is true that after the spring of 1917, troops may have gone for weeks without seeing a woman in the farms, hospitals, shops and estaminets. Yet, Fuller suggests that the appeal of the entertainers was likely, "their emphasis put on glamour [not] the sheer fewness of females."  He notes that "peasant girls, working hard at practical tasks with their menfolk away, were often the reverse of 'feminine' in the restricted sense of the age."  A quote from an Australian journal lamented, "Women of shattered Picardy, Why are your boots so flat and vast?"

Of this desire for fancy femininity, Fuller writes

The trappings of elegance and luxury were the negation of war and squalor and, as such, a potent fetish of peace.  The female impersonators therefore took care over the fripperies, having lingerie sent out, or going on special leave to London or Paris to select the items themselves.  On stage they sang the sentimental songs which represented the greatest frippery of all, asserting the idealized stereotype of soft and vulnerable romantic femininity. (Fuller, p.106)

Historian David A Boxwell, in his article "The Follies of War: Cross-Dressing and Popular Theatre on the British Front Lines, 1914-1918" Modernism/Modernity 9.1 (2002) 1-20, disagrees with the thesis that drag performance was strictly a desire for  idealized heterosexual relations.  He identifies two forms of female impersonation which had already developed on British stages by 1914.  He notes that, "Mimicry was most visibly embodied in the pantomime "dame" tradition, a comedic effort to render the female form in its most hypercarnivalized manner: the grotesque, oversized, and voracious body of the raddled, "ugly" woman presented on stage out of a misogynistic animus" (Boxwell, p. 13).   The other form of impersonation was mimesis, which historians have traced back to the 1860s.  Mimesis represented "idealized femininity as closely as possible (Boxwell, p. 14).

'The Dumbells' Concert Party. 
 'Marie' (A.G. Murray)PA-005743

Boxwell argues, "the complex dynamics of men objectifying other men as women does not occur completely within a heterosexual matrix." (Boxwell, p. 16)  Boxwell's argument is formed in analysis of the HC Owen quote that, "it all seems to show that English beauty is essentially masculine."

[Owen] may well have intended to define female beauty in masculine terms, to suggest that British women were at their most beautiful when they most looked like men. The slippage that inheres in the statement effectively eradicates women's existence: male beauty not only exists, but cannot be conceived of in anything other than "masculine" terms. Thus there was an ineradicable trace of homoeroticism at the heart of drag during the Great War.[...] A man watching another man in drag must, at some level, self-reassuringly avow that the "woman" has a penis. But this act of speculation threatens to put the male spectator beyond the boundaries of the heterosexual matrix. (Boxwell, p. 16)

For Boxwell, enjoying a drag show was a cathartic way of releasing homosexual anxieties in a homophobic society.  As may be expected, other historians disagree.


Laurel Halladay, in "A Lovely War: Male to Female Cross-Dressing and Canadian Military Entertainment in World War II Journal of Homosexuality Volume 46, Issue 3-4, 2004 traces drag performances in the Canadian military, and identified in the Great War period, an attempt to reconstruct a heterosexual community.  (Hallady, p.  21)   For Hallady, drag performance was either comedic or dramatic, either mocking perceived female foibles or respecting femininity.  On the issue of sexualization, Halladay writes that, "Perhaps contrary to more modern expectations, drag performers were not the least bit threatening to the taken-for-granted heterosexual practices of their comrades and both contributed to and
enjoyed the homosociability of the battlefield." (Halladay, p.23)  For Halladay, it was only when women were recruited into the Canadian military in the Second World War, that female impersonation was broadly considered deviant.

The debate over the meanings of female impersonators in the First World War is by no means over.  How could it be when analyzing the subjective reception of gendered performances by a broad variety of men?  The work yet to be written on the complex nuances of drag performance is bound to be exciting historical work, addressing the overlap between social, sexual, and gender history.

From John to Jack, Susannah to Susie, Punch (1916).

White Feathered Zeal: Accosting Shirkers in the Great War

In 1915, problems meeting the manpower commitments of the Borden government were quickly discovered by the Canadian army.  Jack Granatstein and JM Hitsman noted in Broken Promises(Oxford: 1977), their fundamental account of conscription in Canada, that standards were quickly lowered when men failed to flock to the recruiting stations.  Medical standards were reduced, the height restriction dropped an inch down to 5'2", minimum chest measurements were decreased, and married men no longer needed permission from their wives to enlist. (p.35)

Chief Justice TG Mathers noted that the strongest motivation to serve was the social pressures put on Western men who were still strolling  civvy-street.  Mathers, a Manitoban pro-conscriptionist, noted that

It is absurd to speak of enlistment at the present day as voluntary.  In the cities of the West the man who is not in uniform is made to feel that he is a sort of social outcast.  No man who joins the ranks today does so voluntarily.  He does so because he can no longer resist the pressure of public opinion.  (Granatstein, p. 38)

 Pierre Van Paassen NYPL th-60174

Patriotic souls took it upon themselves to organize pressure against those not yet serving.  Some women would search for workers and offer to take their place on the job if they would join the army.  As Granatstein noted, "often these patriotic ladies could get carried away."  The memoirs of Pierre van Paasen, a dutchman living in Toronto, testify to the fervour with which shirkers were sought out:

One afternoon I was accosted on the rear platform of a streetcar by a woman, who was dressed in mourning.  She told me that three of her sons had been killed at the front.  She showed me their photographs.  Suddenly she began to talk very loudly.  'Why aren't you in khaki?' She demanded.  'Why do you dare to stand there laughing at my miser? Why don't you go over and fight? Fight, avenge my boys!' she screamed.  'Madam,' I tried to calm her, 'I am not a Canadian.'  That remark set her yelling at the top of her voice.  She screamed that she, the mother of three heroes who had died for their king and country, had been insulted by a foreigner, a slacker, a German spy, a Red, and I don't know what else.

City of Toronto Archives      Fonds 1231, Item 508a
    Close up of 508, T.S.R. Car No. 6
   November 22, 1916

I pulled the cord to bring the street car to a halt.  I alighted. But the woman followed me off and she kept up her screaming about spies and Germans.  A crowd gathered....Somebody stopped me just at the moment when I thought of taking to my heels as the best way out of the predicament.  I was immediately surrounded by a mob.  A group of business men, who had managed to stay five thousand miles away from where the poppies grow, and who were at that moment emerging from the hotel, gallantly rushed to the woman's aid and forced me to submit, as she pinned a white feather through my coat into my flesh: the badge of white-livered cowardice. The last I saw of her was through a pair of badly battered eyes as she laughingly picked up some of the feathers which had dropped from her bag in the scuffle.

...The following day I enlisted.  (Cited in Granatstein, p. 39)

City of Toronto Archives Fonds 1244, Item 687
Title Mother of military personnel, World War I
Date(s) of creation of record(s)        [ca. 1916]

When in 1917, the Borden government finally acknowledged that the robust commitments of Canadian troops would necessitate conscription if the war were to continue grinding on, the position of Canadian women was far from clear-cut.  The attitude of women whose sons were still in Canada would, of course, be much different from that of the mourner Paasen encountered.  In February 1917, the journal Everywoman's World had organized a "woman's parliament", which stated that a 6:1 ratio of members were against compulsory service (Granatstein, p. 80).  The national women's organizations were broadly in support of Union government and conscription, but one should not assume this meant that half the nation's population to have a unanimous opinion on the matter.  The women's groups of feminist legend may not have had the influence on public opinion that historians at times ascribe to them.  It does seem clear, however, that women whose sons were lost in the war were given a status which was leveraged to promote conscription and shame "shirkers".

Canada's Military Voters and the Lusitania sinking, 1915

The Military Voter’s Act of 1917 is one of the most notorious political manoeuvres of the Borden government in the First World War. The act would extend the vote to soldiers families, deny the franchise to certain ethnic groups, and would presumably secure further support for the government.  Prior to this monumental legislation, in 1915, the right to vote by mail was given to military members overseas.  As Desmond Morton noted that the postal ballot, “excluded women and minors in the CEF from the franchise, allowed soldiers to choose any constituency in which they had spent at least thirty days prior to enlistment or, if that failed, any other.” (Morton, p.131)  In 1917, with the Wartime Elections Act and the Military Voters Acts, the vote was given to all active or retired members of the Canadian armed forces, including women, minors, and First Nations.  Men who were not landowners, yet had a son or grandson in the forces were extended the franchise, as were women with relatives who were soldiers.

In 1915, an interesting connection between the postal ballot and the sinking of the Lusitania is noted by Morton. He writes, “On 5 May the British cabled their approval but two days later the soldiers’ vote was, quite literally, sunk. Armed with a militia commission and a large supply of ballots, Harold Daly, a former Vancouver lawyer and now a Hughes aide and all-purpose fixer, had embarked on the Lusitania."

The Globe, 8  May 1915

The Globe, 8 May 1915, p.7.

On 7 May 1915, Daly's voyage ended in the frigid waters of the Irish Sea. Unlike 1,198 of his fellow passengers, Daly survived to cable Minister of Public Works Robert Rogers from London: “I am still quite willing to die for the Conservative Party but am glad I didn’t drown for it.” Morton notes that Daly’s “vestigial rank” could have given the Germans justification for claims that the ship was full of soldiers and munitions, so the mission was kept hush-hush.  The Globe reported that Daly was on the ship, but had sent the ballots via another boat.  The discerning reader may have wondering why this was the case if he "was to look after them".

Daly was the son of a former mayor of Brandon Manitoba, and the Daly House there is now a museum.  Family lore has recorded his last moments upon the ship, as interpreted here by the Lusitania Resource:

On the day of the disaster, Daly was playing solitaire, which another passenger had taught him to play. During the last few moments, he bought a cigar from the bartender who told him to get out. No sooner did Daly exit the door of the lounge, the water washed him overboard. He said the curious thing was that he was among a different set of people than who he had seen on deck when the ship sank, to which he attributed to the ship striking bottom, before she sank.

The sinking of the Lusitania inflamed public opinion against the Germans, and served as a major propaganda coup.  Posters of women and children sinking in the waters were used for enlistment purposes which channelled the revenge instinct over outrage at the torpedoing of a civilian liner.  The attack on the ship has been cited as a cause of the American entry into the war.

Mais Quelle Flotte Formidable a pu Conduire Ici Une Parelle Armée? - Le Lusitania / But! What Tremendous Fleet Could Ever Have Brought Over Such An Army? - The Lusitainia.  Crédit: Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1983-28-3486

Robert Borden's Unknown Rank and File, 1917

An enthusiastic reception for Rt. Hon. Sir

 Robert Borden and Lady Borden. 1912

Library and Archives Canada / C-009665

John English's The Decline of Politics (1977), has little praise for Sir Robert Borden.  Borden's long neglect of the Conservative party machinery and rank and file, is shown to have decimated the party for years to come.  In 1911, Borden gathered the unlikely bedfellows of English Canadian imperialists, French-Canadian nationalistes, and provincial premiers into a group-government for the win at the ballot box.  By 1917, however, the "false pretenses" that won the French-Canadians had worn off, and the Union government allowed the Laurier Liberals to reform a solid Liberal Quebec.


The result of the unholy Union between the Conservatives and Liberals in 1917 was a party that Borden hardly recognized.  As journalist Arthur Ford noted, "after the Unionist election of 1917 Sir Robert never learned to know by name or by sight half of the supporters of the new government." (Cited in English, p. 206)  John English cites an amusing anecdote which reinforces Borden's neglect of the grass-roots of his newly formed alliance:

On one occasion, a flabbergasted new member of Parliament, undoubtedly intoxicated with the eminence of his new office, had a letter thrust into his hands by Borden with the instruction that he should deliver it to a minister.  Seldom has a member been mistaken for a Commons page boy, but then seldom was a party leader so remote from his party as was Borden after 1917. (English, p. 206)

Old Black Joe Flavelle: Condemning the Great War Profiteer

 Library and Archives Canada/C-23692

Joseph Wesley Flavelle was a self-made millionaire whose business interests extended far beyond the meat-packing industry.  It was his profits from interests in the William Davies Company during the Great War, however, that drew a broadside of condemnation from the Canadian press and public.

The accusations were especially pointed from a man who in late 1916 had told Toronto manufacturers to ignore profit during the war.  Flavelle harangued the businessmen:

"Profits! I have come straight from the seat of a nation where they are sweating blood to win this war, and I stand before you stripped of many ideas. Profits! Send profits to the hell where they belong."(Bliss, p, 295)

Nevertheless, it was due to profits that the country found their villain in Flavelle.  Michael Bliss' biography noted that a man that started his fortune in the pork industry lent himself to gluttonous metaphors.  Bliss notes, "there were bitter jokes about baconets and baconeers, hogging the profits and wallowing at the trough." (Bliss, A Canadian Millionaire, xi) 

The story was broke by Saturday Night, and a reprinted pamplet shows the vindictive vitriol poured out on the Canadian businessman.

From "Joseph Discovered by his Brethren", Gadsby, H. Franklin.

Cover of Saturday Night pamphlet

The scandal killed Flavelle's reputation.  Despite his role in organizing the munitions industry, cleaning up the mess of inefficiency and patronage from the Sam Hughes days, Flavelle was the war's most notorious profiteer.  As he stated after a commission had cleared his name, "Shall we close this chapter[?] It is all over except the unfortunate remembrance in every part of Canada that I am [...] a profiteer." (CBC)

Sam Hughes the Sure Shot : Of Ranges and Ross Rifles

Sam Hughes was the irascible Minister of Militia and Defence responsible for the mobilization of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in August of 1914.  Hughes was a fiery Orangemen, whose trenchant belief in the value of the gun-slinging, rough-riding, amateur militiaman never faltered. Ronald Haycock noted in his 1986 biography of Sam Hughes that "Nearly everyone in Ottawa had a favourite story about Hughes which was half-fiction, half-truth, but which captured the essence of the Minister's personality." (Haycock, Sam Hughes, 1986,p. 3)  One 1912 anecdote came from W.A. Griesbach, who would become the commanding officer of Edmonton's 49th Battalion:

Lieutenant General Sir Sam Hughes, K.C.B., M.P.
Painted by Harrington Mann
Beaverbrook Collection of War Art
CWM 19710261-0394

Some weeks ago I met an old man in my part of the country who told me that he had learned to shoot while serving in Sam Hughes' battalion of infantry....He said one day when the men were shooting badly Sam Hughes, who was then a Sergeant, picked up one of the rifles and lay down on the mound.  He fire and missed the target.  Turning to one of the men he said "That's the way you shoot."  Firing again, he again missed the target and turned to another man and said "That's the way you shoot." Firing for the third time, he scored a bull's eye.  Speaking to the men, he said: "That's the way I shoot" and walked on.


Hughes' bulls-eye was no lucky shot.  He was a member of several shooting societies and president of the Dominion Rifle Association (Haycock, p. 4).  During the Laurier years, Hughes reputation was welded to the manufacture of the Ross rifle, a weapon adopted by the Canadian militia at the end of the Boer war.  From 1901 on, Hughes would support the rifle against numerous complaints in the House of Commons regarding its manufacture.  The British were none too pleased about the Dominion straying from their standard Lee Enfield rifle, and disqualified many Canadian shooters at the British National Rifle Association's competitions for light triggers or heavy barrels. (Haycock, p. 123)

"Interior View of Ross Rifle Factory" 1900-1905 Credit: Library and Archives Canada / PA-107378

The unfortunate results of these British rebuttals was the altering of the Mark III Ross Rifle to insure victory at these marksmanship competitions.  As Haycock notes, "Machine tolerances were tightened; fit was made better; and the weapons won.  But close bearing surfaces, complicated and fragile target-type sights, and tight chambers capable of firing only exact dimension ammunition changed the rifle from an efficient combat weapon to an efficient target one." (p. 123)


The failure of the Ross rifle in the swampy conditions of the First World War, and Hughes' persistence that the weapon was sound, would contribute to Hughes' final dismissal as Militia minister in 1916.

Spoilt Reputations: Swine metaphors in Joseph Flavelle's profiteering scandal

The Edmonton Bulletin,

 July 13, 1917, Page 1

In 1917, Joseph Flavelle ran what was effectively the largest business in North America through his chairmanship of the Imperial Munitions Board.  Flavelle's reputation was never to fully recover from an expose of his business interests in the William Davies meat-packing industry.

On 13 July 1917, the Ottawa Journal was the first newspaper to leak news of Flavelle's profits which they headlined as "Huge Margins Shown on Bacon Trade".  Michael Bliss' biography of the capitalist takes a sympathetic approach to the scandal, noting the government report which fuelled the outrage in the press was "in a many ways...a misleading, in fact stupid, document", which showed no comprehension of the  meat-packing industry.

Bacon Export Trade examination.  Flavelle far right.  Redcliff Review, November 8, 1917, Page 3

The press couldn't resist the metaphors on a scandalous profiteering in industry whose product was synonymous with gluttony.  As Bliss writes,

Foods That Will Win The War And How To Cook
Them (1918), by C. Houston Goudiss

 and Alberta M. Goudiss Gutenburg

the bacon scandal was prime fare for editorial writers.  The Globe was glad to see that the O'Connor report had generated too much heat to be put in cold storage.  The Star  thought the order of Baronets needed to be supplemented by a class for Baconets; the Ottawa Citizen accused the packers of having hogged everything but the squeal.  The Regina Leader, on of the most bitter Liberal papers, wrote of "price hogs" and the need to treat profiteers as traitors. (Bliss, p.343-44)

 

On 6 September 1917 William Henry Taylor of the Toronto World waxed poetic in a piece he titled "The Patriotic Hog".


He swallows all the food that he can hold-
When presto! change! the meal is turned to gold;
No doubt his pride will swell when he has found
That bacon sells for fifty cents a pound.

Depression era Prairies as Great War Battlefields, 1931

The writings of EH Oliver during the Great Depression show that the landscape of the ruined First World War battlefield was a reference point for desolation long after the fighting was over.

Oliver at Benhill-on-sea 1917

Edmund Oliver, was a professor of history and principal of St. Andrew's College, Saskatoon, when he set out overseas during the Great War.  Oliver enlisted in the Canadian Forces, becoming chaplain to the 196th Battalion.   In 1917, he was instrumental in setting up the "University of Vimy Ridge" in France, a school for the soldiers of the Canadian Corps.

David Marshall's Secularizing the Faith (1992) argues that in the long period of secularization of the evangelical Protestant churches in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that the Great War was a reactionary period.  The men who experienced the misery of the trenches were not comforted by the message of the importance of moral and social deeds which came to typify the church's liberal theology.  Instead men looked to the earlier evangelical message of personal salvation, and empathized with the notion of the suffering of the innocent.


Marshall shows that EH Oliver's experiences of the Prairie West during the Great Depression were shaped by what he saw in the muddied fields of France and Flanders.  Marshall writes that, "Images of the First World War were recalled by Oliver, for the ruination of that war was the only thing within his experience that he could refer to which was similar to the wind-whipped, sun-scorched, desert-like 'Garden of Saskatchewan'" (Marshall, 234)

Saskatchewan 1930-34

Oliver attempted to portray what he observed of his 1931 tour of the arid Saskatchewan prairie.  He asked his readers to imagine,  "if it was possible,  the choicest wheat fields of our modern plains churned into yawning gravel pits, streaked with long rows of zigzag, gleaming,chalk trenches with an occasional tree trunk standing, twisted and bent and smashed." (McKinnon, The Life of Principal Otter, Toronto, 1938, 35, as quoted in Marshall)

"Dugout on the Somme" Hamilton, Mary Riter, 1873-1954.LAC Acc. No. 1988-180-3

Oliver wrote, "It left me weak and sore afraid, as though I had turned the corner of our street, eager and expectant to catch a glimpse of home and found it wrecked by a bomb or burned to the ground. 'An enemy hath done this,' was the thought that leaped into my mind, as thought the devastating hand of a malignant spirit had waved a wand over the great Prairie to spread desolation and drought and death.  If there were added to the scene a battered house here and there and an occasional trench it would be like the desolation of the western front." (National Emergency Relief Committee Papers, as quoted in Marshall)


Marshall noted that the tensions of the Great Depression caused Oliver to return to the traditional emphasis on the Bible and what God would provide, and question the power of the social gospel.  Like the Great War, the depression made some clergy abandon the liberal theology and embrace a more conservative God-oriented faith.

Medicinal Spirits: Prescribing Liquor during Prohibition, 1919

The patriotic fervour of the Great War was a great impetus to the passing of nation-wide prohibition.  Sir Robert Borden could rely on the notion that the use of grain for alcoholic purposes was a waste of precious war material when he passed the bill against the booze.  At the war's end, it was illegal to import, transport, or create liquor with more than 2.5% alcohol content.

File number: NA-4534-2
Title: Soldier in dispensary, during First World War.
Date: [ca. 1914-1918]

The consumption of liquor for medicinal purposes, however, was perfectly legal during these dry days in the Dominion.  Ramsay Cook and Robert Craig Brown note in A Nation Transformed (1972, p. 301),  the tendency to abuse the stipulation that alcohol could still be used for health purposes.  In 1919, one writer in Vancouver noted:


"Toward Christmas especially it looked as if an epidemic of colds and colics had struck the country like a plague.  In Vancouver queues a mile long could be seen waiting their turn to enter the liquor stores to get prescriptions filled. Hindus, Japanese and Chinese varied the lines of the afflicted of many races.  It was a kaleidoscopic procession waiting in the rain for a replenishment that would drive the chills away; and it was alleged that several doctors needed a little alcoholic liniment to soothe the writer's cramp caused by inditing their signature at two dollars per line."

Interior of Knowlton's Drug Store [15 Hastings Street East] - [ca. 1920] City of Vancouver Archives 99-1338

German-American Hordes, 1914

One of the sordid aspects of Canadian social reform in the early years of the twentieth-century was the nativist sentiment which resisted non-white-anglo-saxon-protestant attempts to share in the prosperity of the era.  The Chinese head-tax, and the repulsion of a boat-load of Indians from the Pacific coast are two of the more notorious instances of racism during the period.  Racism was not confined to the "non-White races", however, and Europeans were also discriminated against.  With the advent of the First World War, Germans and Austrians would receive their share of racist ire, having their shops vandalized, being socially ostracized, and in some cases being interned in "enemy alien" camps.

File number: NA-838-8

Title: Fireman attacking effigies of German soldiers, Calgary, Alberta.

Date: [ca. 1914-1918]

 Across the desk of JD Hazen,minister for Marine, Fisheries and Naval Affairs, came one particularly inventive account of the alleged conspiracies of German-Americans.  As Ramsay Cook and Robert Craig Brown noted in A Nation Transformed (1972, p.224), anti-German rhetoric could become quite fanciful:

"The Germans all over the United States are holding meetings, their intentions are to invade Canada on the lines of the Fenian Raid...Their headquarters is Milwaukee.  They are getting all the automobiles they can possibly get without causing suspicion; they intend to muster 150,000 men along the border and invade in three or four places, destroy the canals, the railroads and grain elevators; their plans are for inland invasion; they have plenty of money behind this."

British Propaganda Poster. Credit: Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1983-28-38