Comedian Chris Rock once said, “Every racial and ethnic group gets treated (badly) when they get here – by the racial and ethnic group that got treated (badly) when they came in on the earlier flight. Nobody says, ‘Hey, here are the new guys. Let’s welcome them. Let’s bake a cake for the Irish.’”
Research on social conditions in Guelph or any other Canadian town proves his point. Newspapers and other documentation from bygone years show there is nothing new about the kind of bigotry that has most recently oozed to the surface like miasma from a septic tank in the midst of the American presidential election. Anti-immigrant demonization, for example, has been around for a long time. The slurs and falsehoods going back over generations are identical to the ones used today; only the targeted ethnic groups are different.
The Haitian immigrants legally living in Ohio aren’t the first to be falsely accused of abducting and eating pets. Asian immigrants used to get that treatment. However, until recently there was no internet with which to spread nonsense.
When we hear a presidential candidate’s disturbing talk of deportation camps, we might immediately be reminded of the Nazis’ vicious antisemitic rhetoric. But we don’t have to go there to find parallels. During the First World War, Eastern European immigrants right here in Guelph were the targets of discrimination fuelled by fear and bigotry.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire, which occupied much of central and eastern Europe, was an ally of Imperial Germany. There had been a lot of immigration to Canada from that region. Canada had, in fact, encouraged the people to come here and many of the newcomers had settled in Guelph. Even though they included Poles, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Ukrainians and Slovakians, among others, they were all lumped together under the name “Austrians.” It was used with derogatory intent.
With the outbreak of war in 1914, Eastern Europeans, along with German immigrants, were regarded with suspicion. In addition to the resentment of some people who just didn’t like “foreigners,” there was the added fear that there were enemy spies among them. When Guelph’s water was found to be contaminated, authorities immediately thought German agents might be responsible. It turned out that waste from cattle was seeping into a cracked pipe shallowly buried under pasture.
An individual named Shute wrote to the Mercury to complain about “the wrong and continued insult and annoyance I am subjected to in this city on account of my surname … At first I was annoyed by the local police shadowing me around … I have been very unjustly treated on account of the same thing … I am accused of being a German … I am not German, there is no German in my blood.”
Eastern Europeans found themselves in a very difficult position. Many of them were fired from their jobs. Employers didn’t trust them and men they’d been working with for years suddenly didn’t want to work alongside “the enemy.” Eastern Europeans were rejected if they tried to join the army.
The result was a large number of unemployed men who turned to Guelph’s municipal offices for assistance. They had to report regularly to the “enemy alien” office. If they didn’t, they faced disqualification and perhaps even arrest. When the city tried to find employment for them, it was criticized for hiring enemy aliens. With no relief work available, some men sought jobs in other communities, risking being cut off from assistance if they were unsuccessful. Transient men suddenly found themselves homeless on unfamiliar and unfriendly streets.
In Guelph, Eastern European men sometimes went to the police station asking for a meal and a place to sleep for a night. Chief of police Frederick Randall would question them, through an interpreter if necessary. If he was satisfied they had done nothing wrong and posed no threat to the community, he’d give them a meal and a bed and then let them go on their way. He was subsequently criticized for not being tougher with enemy aliens.
The federal government’s answer to the problem was to set up internment camps for German and Eastern European immigrants.
In Guelph, Randall was instructed to round up every “Austrian” in the city. They received court orders to report to the police station on the morning of May 15, 1915. Married men with families were allowed to stay in Guelph, but single men were escorted by armed guards to the train station. They were provided with a meal from the kitchen of the Winter Fair building. Then they were put on a train to Toronto. From there they would be sent to a detention camp at Kapuskasing where, according to Commissioner of Dominion Police Arthur P. Sherwood, they would be “taken care of.”
The camps were prisons. The men were kept behind barbed wire in substandard conditions. They were ravaged by pneumonia and tuberculosis, and made to labour 14 hours a day for a pay rate of 25 cents a day – if they received any pay at all.
Meanwhile, factories with big government war contracts faced a manpower shortage and had to hire the very immigrants people had been reviling. When the war ended and soldiers came home, there was a huge outcry against foreigners who had “stolen” good jobs while Canadian men were fighting overseas. An editorial in the Mercury pondered, “WHAT TO DO WITH THE ALIEN.”
At a packed meeting held at the Guelph Opera House on Feb. 9, 1919, war veterans, local politicians and the city’s business leaders gave their answer. They wanted the foreigners deported as soon as ships were available. Moreover, they demanded a 50-year halt to all immigration.
Some detainees in the camps were sent back to their countries of origin, and in Guelph some “Austrians” did lose their jobs to returned soldiers. But there was no mass deportation, and no dramatic freeze on immigration. If there had been, quite a few people living in Guelph today might not be here.
Fortunately, over the century since that time, Guelph has earned a much more desirable reputation as a community that welcomes newcomers.
