#histiography

[Since publication of this book the Encyclopedia has completely changed their analysis of Japanese incarceration operations, de-emphasizing complacency and putting in examples of resistance where none had been before.]

Unfortunately, this schoolbook narrative is overly simplistic, and quite frankly wrong. Such a telling offers a far too neat correlation between history, myth, and memory. Given the prevalence of wildcat and illegal strikes throughout Canada during the Second World War—actions often punctuated by multifaceted and legally proscribed tactics—it is hard to believe that the exceptionally violent act of throwing masses of humans into camps (many of whom had experience in unions, community organizing, and political formations) and the confiscation of property—all encompassed within lives lived inside of the deeply racist province of British Columbia and the intrinsically racist Canadian state—could have precipitated no self-activity.

A more careful analysis of the actual removal and carceral operation shows not resignation, but intense self-activity and confrontation—including strikes  protests, riots, and mass non-compliance. When examining the collection/concentration of Japanese for evacuation, we find not quietism, but riot and resistance. Later, in the work camps, there were extensive strikes of many different flavours and articulations. Indeed, in treating the Japanese Canadians as workers, rather than a disarmed racial totality, the idea of evacuation/internment shifts to a dialectic of negotiated discipline and active resistance, much the same as with other Canadian workers, albeit under exceptionally difficult and dangerous circumstances. [There was widespread] resistance to the government’s original concentration and removal operations, and the ubiquitous strikes, riots, and protests of 1942 and 1943 in the work and concentration camps. As will be made clear, these actions involved thousands of people, with women and children playing prominent roles throughout. The protestors and strikers consciously leveraged their social and labour power for significant gains both in material conditions and in regard to the recognition of fundamental dignity. Although petitions and legal arguments were extant, they exerted power and won concessions through direct action, not pleading. By articulating these workers’ activities in this fashion, [this work] will examine the self-activity of the evacuees, the internal logic of capitalist democracy and racism, and the politics of education and redress—even as it challenges some of the historiographical understandings that surround the Japanese experience during the Second World War. In particular, the idea that Japanese Canadians were a “model minority” who dealt with extreme violence and racist injustice with a quiet resilience will be shown to be false. This trope needs to be replaced with the actual story of remarkable pushback both during the removal operations and within the detention centres and labour camps. Moreover, it needs to be made clear that in this latter struggle, the Japanese had much in common with workers on the other side of the fence. As was the case for the remainder of the Canadian workers, the state only had armed men available to put down strikes and protests in the most extreme cases, true even in armed camps. Although the government had gifted itself “extraordinary powers unprecedented in Britain or the United States,” to control strikes and domestic resistance, it had little ability to actually use these broad legislative powers. In this dance of activity and marginal disciplinary powers, the Japanese were able to make impressive gains through direct action, no matter how dire, grotesque, and fundamentally unjust their situation. There has been no lack of writing on the plight of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. Indeed, before the removal operation had even finished, Forrest La Violette penned a short monograph on the Japanese wartime experience. The shameful tale is now well-known: 

“In February 1942 the federal Cabinet ordered the expulsion of 22,000 Japanese Canadians residing within one hundred miles of the Pacific coast. That order marked the beginning of a process that saw Canada’s Japanese minority uprooted from their homes, confined in detention camps, stripped of their property, and forcibly dispersed across Canada or shipped to a starving Japan.”

This core narrative has been relatively well fleshed out by historians since. Attention to strikes and resistance, however, has been a notable lacuna within the historiography of wartime Japanese displacement and incarceration. the difficult nature of activist history, in this case providing the strongest foundations for the case for redress, meant that some narratives within the story have been minimized. This is unfortunate but not uncommon... The histories of Japanese mass incarceration have not had the same opportunistic and historically questionable quality that imbues the work on other internment operations. However, the nature of pushing for redress elevated and focused some ideas and histories over others. 

The stoic “survivors’ narrative” or the spirit of resignation (“shi-kata-ga-nai”) is far more compelling, and sympathetic to a liberal audience, than those of the sit-down striker, the rioter, the protestor. There are notable exceptions, of course; namely Ann Gomer Sunahara and Pamela Sugiman, the latter who noted that “much of the publicized literature on the internment has promoted the idea that Japanese Canadians generally, and Japanese Canadian women especially, have been a passive and acquiescent lot.”

But much of the literature, if it mentions self-activity at all, speaks of “passive resistance,” or of the state “fearing sit-down strikes,” instead of actual resistance and real sit-down strikes. Moreover, much of the recent historiography focuses on the legal/liberal tropes of “citizenship” and “rights.” Apart from decentring the Japanese themselves, these attempts at analysis produce a line of argumentation that requires a tremendous amount of diagnostic and theoretical gymnastics to force a narrative onto a trajectory where it does not really fit.  A more evidentially rigorous and theoretically informed examination rooted in understandings of power relations, of the instrumentalization of institutionalized racism by the state and capital, of the intrinsic problems of the “democratic” capitalist state, would be much more illuminating. 

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The strong emphasis on targeting “Bolshevik” organizations and immigrant groups associated with the Soviet revolution was, therefore, a major obstacle to the success of these operations. Immigrants from Russia, perhaps the most vehemently decried by the anti-radical public, faced a number of logistical and diplomatic impediments to their removal. In the aftermath of the vast raids of late 1919 and early 1920, authorities increasingly faced a glut of indefinitely detained prisoners with no feasible plans for their removal. These challenges also sparked noteworthy early debates over the international human rights implications of the growing global deportation regime. As Nick Fischer explains, “Deportees’ suffering did not end with expulsion, for the government had difficulty removing them to such countries as Russia, Armenia, Turkey, the Ukraine, and Austria. Yet the Bureau of Immigration persisted in attempting to deport aliens to these countries.”

Louis Post himself expressed an early iteration of this concern in his book following what he called the “Deportations Delirium of Nineteen Twenty,” explaining that in some rare cases, such as that of Mexican-born Enrique Flores Magon, safety was a consideration. “Had I ordered him to be deported to the country from whence he came,” Post wrote, “he would have been promptly shot … . No American-minded official who cherishes one of the noblest of his country’s traditions, that it is an asylum for the oppressed of all nations, could lightly deport an alien to such a fate even in the period of delirium.”

Over a decade later, radical organizations would take up the same claim about the danger of sending Mexican radicals back to their native country. In an unpublished 1933 “Document on Deportation,” produced by the Labor Research Association of New York (research and publishing organization founded in 1927 by a number of communist activists, although the organization was not formally connected to the party), one author explained that “Scores of leaders of the beet strike are deported to Mexico, where they are known as militant working-class fighters, and where they are either immediately thrown into prison or kept under constant watch.”

Throughout the era, lawyers for the detained radicals engaged in extensive correspondence with immigration officials over the potential dangers of their clients’ removal. Attorney Jacob Margolis wrote to Post in May of 1920 expressing concern over a rumored plan to send members of the Union or Russian Workers and the Communist Party to various provinces that had been part of Russia at the time of their departure, but were now controlled by Poland or Danzig. Such a plan, he explained was troubling, as “All of these men who are classed as Poles are very much opposed to being sent to Danzig as they are unable in the first place to speak the Polish language … and they are further opposed to being sent to Danzig or Poland because of the attitude of the Polish Government to any person charged with radical tendencies or ideas.” 

This concern was echoed by attorney Isaac Shore, who wrote to Commissioner Caminetti that if deported to Poland, “they will unquestionably be treated as enemies, not only for the reason that they are Russians, but also for the charge made against them in this country.” Furthermore, he went on, with a thinly veiled warning of international reproach, “I am reliably informed that if these men are sent to Danzig … they would be either executed or put in prison for an indefinite time … . It is no doubt the policy of your Department to do nothing that would jeopardize the lives of any of these men … . It would furthermore cause unpleasant complications with the Russian Government.” A telegram from attorney Charles Recht to the commissioner general stated this anxiety even more sharply, and reiterated the international ramifications, stating, “The lives of these people would be naturally jeopardized. To send them into this danger is both against spirit and letter of international law.” While the commissioner general responded promptly, reassuring Recht that these fears were based on erroneously distributed information, the struggle to find some method by which to deport Russian subjects continued.

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The specific focus on Russian immigrants in much of Red Scare scholarship, alongside the more general limitations of the Red Scare discourse, have also tended to reify the disproportionate visibility of particular types of white, European-born immigrant activists. Instead, a broader historical trajectory allows us to see the ways in which political repression and removal of foreign-born activists have been applied to leaders of color, from the controversial, but decidedly capitalistic, Marcus Garvey to anti-imperialist activists from China and India, to Mexican communists. As Deirdre Moloney notes, scholars have primarily focused on radical deportations of European communists and anarchists, in both the First and Second Red Scare eras, therefore neglecting a variety of significant cases, such as those of Garvey, Trinidadian Communist Claudia Jones, or Australian-born labor leader Harry Bridges. Indeed, she maintains, this gap “… emanates in part from a narrow definition of political activism and ideology. But by broadening the definition of politics to include social movements that focus on racial equality and labor rights, we can understand that federal authorities were concerned about immigrants beyond communities and anarchists.””

“IT WAS NOT UNTIL the appearance of Noel's Politics in Newfoundland in 1971 that a detailed and relatively comprehensive account of the events of the early 1930s in Newfoundland was published. This book stood as the definitive account of the Commission period until the publication of Peter Neary's Newfoundland in the North Atlantic World, 1929-1949 in 1988.

Two chapters in Noel's book examine "the collapse of responsible government" and the "unconditional surrender" which led to the establishment of government by Commission in 1934. Noel traces the development of the economic and political crisis of the early 1930s. He comments on the Amulree Commission of 1933,the inquiry which found the political situation in Newfoundland beyond repair and recommended the establishment of Government by Commission. And he traces in broad terms the events of die Commission period. Noel's account is informative and insightful. In some respects, however, his discussion of the crisis of the early 1930s is incomplete.

Noel leaves the reader with the impression that Commission government was something which was essentially dreamt up and imposed on Newfoundland from outside.  And, following Noel, it has been common to assume that the Amulree Report was little more than “window dressing,'' it being a way to legitimize and justify decisions about Newfoundland's future government which had already been made in Britain. It is true that the future path for the country as eventually presented in the Amulree report had already been mapped out in Britain before the report was written in late 1933. It is also true that, in the Amulree Report, Britain made the Newfoundland government an offer it would have found difficult to refuse. 

Detailed examination of the submissions to the Amulree Commission, and of the political climate in the early 1930s, however, makes the suggestion that the Report was simply "window dressing'' untenable. The arguments presented in the Amulree report are too consistent with much contemporary political thinking in Newfoundland to be dismissed. Even if the report was "window dressing," why did so many find its message not only acceptable but so attractive?

Noel takes issue with the view expressed in the Amulree Commission's Report that Newfoundland's ills were not just economic and financial, but more fundamentally political and moral, resulting from "a prolonged period of misgovernment" which had "demoralized the people and warped their outlook.  Noel concedes that the Commission might have been "unduly influenced by the testimony of bitter, panic-stricken men who, not understanding the economic nature of their troubles, blamed everything on the 'dirty game' of politics."

In trying to explain the position taken by the Amulree Commission, Noel suggests that the "commissioners were, inevitably, men whose political values and assumptions were shaped by the forces of their own tunes.'' He notes the wide-spread loss of "faith" in democratic institutions and competitive politics in the period and argues that it is: 

Not surprising that in 1933 a royal commission composed of a British peer and two Canadian bankers should have recommended the suspension of Newfoundland's broken-down system of democracy and its replacement by an essentially dictatorial form of government. 

What for Noel was "not surprising," however, was for Harold Innis very surprising. In 1937 Innis had posed the question: "How could a Labour peer as chairman of the Commission sanction the recommendations of the report?” 

But if Noel is not surprised that representatives of the British and Canadian 'ruling classes' should advocate an end to democracy in Newfoundland, he is a little perplexed at the willingness of Newfoundlanders to accept both the Amulree Commission's analysis and its recommendations. This he puts down to the fact that "democratic politics has no strong defenders in Newfoundland. The Commission's proposals were "greeted calmly, almost apathetically," while there were "no leaders to rally opposition." And here Noel mentions Richard Squires, the former Liberal prime minister, the Liberal rump of two in the Assembly led by F. Gordon Bradley, and William Coaker, the former head of the Fishermen's Protective Union and recently a Squires' minister, as possible mobilizers of opposition. 

The lack of opposition to Amulree's proposals is also commented on by Chadwick: 

In a country less physically and morally defeated such recommendations might well have led to disorders, if not bloodshed. It is a measure of the island's anguish that a people who had stuggled for so long to gain and to maintain their separate identity, could now be judged as having no more than academic regard for the constitutional niceties, which seemed of small importance compared with the necessity of rescuing me country from its parlous state. 

What both Chadwick and Noel fail fully to appreciate is the extent to which the analysis presented in the Amulree report found widespread expression and support in Newfoundland in the early 1930s and in the years leading up to the political crisis of 1931-34. A large and varied body of opinion existed by 1933 which supported the idea that the country had proved incapable of sustaining that tender plant, parliamentary democracy. Many disillusioned people called for a rest from "politics." There had already been efforts by businessmen like W. Alderdice to "save his country from the 'politicians'." But now there emerged specific calls for an end to the party system and its replacement with a National Government or some form of non-democratic government, whether it be rule by commission or dictator. 

Nor was anti-democratic thinking and support for dictators confined to representatives of the ruling class. Some of the very people who might have been expected to defend democracy, including William Coaker, head of the fisherman’s union, had led the call for a new un-democratic state form. Disillusion with democracy was not unique to Newfoundland. Critiques of party politics and democracy were on the rise in Britain and elsewhere during this period. Admiration for dictators was widely expressed. There was support for a greater role for non-political experts in government, and corporatism was widely promoted. In Newfoundland, however, as in some other countries, the economic crisis triggered a political crisis which gave anti-democratic arguments particular force. 

Peter Neary's recent book provides a detailed account of the financial aspects of Newfoundland's collapse in the early 1930s and the high-level political maneuvering behind the scenes in the eighteen months leading to the establishment of Government by Commission early in 1934. Neary shows that Lord Amulree's task was to work out a solution to the Newfoundland problem and "strike a bargain" which would be acceptable to not only the United Kingdom, but also to Canada and to the Newfoundland government which, according to the Statute of Westminster, would have to act on any recommendation.  That this might not prove an easy task became clear to Amulree when he arrived in St John's and found Prime Minister Alderdice and his cabinet arguing for a scheme of partial default on Newfoundland's debts and firmly against Confederation, Crown Colony status, Government by Commission, further borrowing, or the sale of Labrador. 

This position might appear strange, given that Alderdice had been elected on the sole issue of looking into the possibilities of Government by Commission, unless it is viewed as a kind of initial bargaining position. In the face of opposition, Amulree began by exploring means by which Newfoundland might be incorporated directly into the United Kingdom. This suggestion was dismissed by British officials and Amulree was instructed to work out whatever temporary solution to Newfoundland's problems that he saw fit. To this end plans for the temporary control of the finances of Newfoundland as a condition of further financial assistance were prepared.

It was not until mid-1933, after Confederation and various other possibilities had been considered and after Canada had made it clear that it would take no responsibility for the Newfoundland problem, that a decision was made in London to link continued British financial assistance to Newfoundland to a "strict form of control.”  This, it was thought, could be justified by reference to the country's "prodigal past," and it would teach the country the lesson that misgovernment would not be tolerated. The United Kingdom Treasury's insistence that default had to be avoided provided the impetus for plans to get Newfoundland to give up self-government and for the country's debt to be rescheduled and honoured. 

What emerged was, in the words of Neville Chamberlain, "the nearest approach to a form of Crown Colony which we have been led to believe that Newfoundland would accept"  Amulree's job was to persuade the Newfoundland government to accept the plan without an election (it had pledged to go to the people before and to take action) in order to avoid suspense and speculation in Newfoundland bonds. The two other Commissioners agreed with Amulree's proposals and without too much wrangling, Alderdice also accepted the British plan. 

The Amulree Report was favourably received by many in St. John's, including the leading newspapers, when it was released on 21 November 1933. Alderdice's difficult job, however, was to persuade his colleagues to accept the proposal post haste. This did not prove too difficult, and a week later the House of Assembly approved the Amulree Commission recommendations. The Legislative Assembly immediately followed suit. 

Dissent was expressed by the Liberal opposition in the House of Assembly, but this was muted and half-hearted. Opposition was also expressed by Richard Squires and William Coaker, but the latter's main objection was that Alderdice had ignored his election pledge to go to the people before acting. Squires' protests carried little weight, and were more than balanced by support for Commission of Government which came from die Newfoundland Board of Trade and elsewhere. 

At this point we come back to the question of why there was little opposition to Commission of Government and the argument of this paper that existing accounts of the crisis of the early 1930s can usefully be supplemented by a detailed examination of the growth of support for a change in state form in Newfoundland in the period. In particular, it is important to consider the conditions which led liberal and "socialist" reformers and labour leaders to support an end to party politics and representative democracy. Analysis of the background to the crisis of the early 1930s, of politics and power in this period, can help us understand why there was but little opposition to suspending the constitution, and support for this measure from many quarters.”

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.”