{"id":599,"date":"2015-12-01T06:08:08","date_gmt":"2015-12-01T11:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/postconfederation2e\/chapter\/10-8-canada-noir\/"},"modified":"2020-10-06T13:04:21","modified_gmt":"2020-10-06T17:04:21","slug":"10-8-canada-noir","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/postconfederation2e\/chapter\/10-8-canada-noir\/","title":{"raw":"10.8 Canada Noir","rendered":"10.8 Canada Noir"},"content":{"raw":"[caption id=\"attachment_589\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]\"Nightscape.<\/a> Figure 10.11 Montreal's Saint Catherine Street aglow in neon lights, ca. 1937.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nModernity brought significant social, cultural, and moral changes that not everyone was pleased to see. This produced a rolling tide of uncertainty and anxieties, some of which we refer to as [pb_glossary id=\"1594\"]moral panics[\/pb_glossary]. The temperance movement was rooted in moral panic, as were elements of eugenics. There was a succession of so-called \u201cred scares\u201d in the 20th century, beginning in 1918-19 with the Russian Revolution and followed by a year of general strikes in North America, a decade of unrest during the Depression, and Cold War fears of a nuclear apocalypse (which continued until the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989-91). Building a strong, moral, and disciplined nation that deferred to authority was the goal of many Canadian leaders. Many Canadian citizens did not fall easily into line.\r\n

Sins of the City<\/h1>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_590\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]\"Mug<\/a> Figure 10.12 Anna Labelle (alias Mme. \u00c9mile Beauchamp) was a powerful Montreal brothel keeper before WWII who kept police on the payroll.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIn a recent study of crime and society in early 20th century Halifax, Michael Boudreau makes the argument that Nova Scotian critics of modernity railed against the moral softening of an increasingly secular and ethnically diverse society. This was an essentially antimodernist position that looked backwards to a time of ethnic and spiritual simplicity. Their response to these conditions? Ironically, it involved a very secular and modernist agenda of government agencies, scientific police methods, and the employment of psychologists and other experts who could treat the criminal and the deviant.[footnote]Michael Boudreau, City of Order: Crime and Society in Halifax, 1918-35<\/i> (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nWhat was happening in Halifax was playing out in different ways across the country. In Vancouver, long-time mayor L.D. Taylor (1857-1946) repeatedly rebuffed morality crusades, proud of the fact that his\u00a0city was not a \u201cSunday school town.\u201d Vancouver\u2019s middle-class voters, however, increasingly challenged his liberal view of \u201cvictimless crimes,\u201d and in 1928 defeated him under the banner of \u201cNew Town, Not Blue Town.\u201d[footnote]Daniel Francis, LD: Mayor Louis Taylor and the Rise of Vancouver<\/i> (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004), 150.[\/footnote] Taylor's relaxed attitude was replaced by an increasingly bureaucratic administrative structure that, at best, talked a good fight. Modernist responses had to be made with the human resources available and many of the people involved in administrations, police departments, and morality crusades were every bit as compromised as the people they sought to change.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_591\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]\"A Figure 10.13 Race + drugs = double jeopardy. The building beside the middle telephone pole was an opium factory in Vancouver's Chinatown, ca. 1907. Mackenzie King investigated and drew up legislation designed to end the opium trade, beginning the war on drugs even before the Great War got underway.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nModern society was urban, and urban life was a problem that needed solving. Cities, it was feared, were corrupting the morals and the very fibre of Canadians. Gambling, drinking, drugs, illegitimacy, and divorce \u2014 not to mention homosexuality \u2014 were dreaded, criticized, and policed from the 19th through most of the 20th century. Criminality was often understood\u00a0in xenophobic ways that, for example, held the Chinese community responsible for gambling and opium; connected the Italian enclaves with\u00a0violent crime, prostitution, and bootlegging; and connected Eastern Europeans, African-Canadians, and Japanese women with brothels. Indeed, the sex trade seems to have been widely regarded as a field into which Anglo-Celtics and Franco-Canadians could hardly hope to break. Eugenicists weighed into these conversations with their fears for\u00a0 the future of the race (most often meaning the British race), and alleging the corrupting moral influence of immigrants while pointing a finger at the decline of Canadian manhood (and, eventually, womanhood) through urban living.\r\n\r\nThe goal of clean, safe, go-ahead, and ethical metropolises was\u00a0elusive, however. Sometimes, it was easier to promote a different vision.\u00a0Throughout the mid-20th century, Vancouver and Montreal in particular enjoyed reputations as cities in which sins could be serviced. Vancouver was the northern-most stop on an entertainment circuit based in San Francisco, then Los Angeles, and eventually Las Vegas, and which covered the western United States.[footnote]Becki Ross, Burlesque West: Showgirls, Sex, and Sin in Postwar Vancouver<\/i> (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).[\/footnote] Vaudeville acts, musicians, and variety acts were mainstream elements in this network, but there was also a lively culture of strip-shows and burlesque. Night clubs and music hall-style theatres sprang up across the city centre; at one point, both Hastings Street (now the economically and socially depressed main artery of the Downtown East Side) and Granville Street were billed as the city\u2019s \u201cGreat White Way\u201d because of the enormous quantity of neon lights that blazed outside entertainment venues. The Cave, Palomar, Penthouse, Commodore, and Isy\u2019s Supper Club (later, Isy\u2019s Strip City) dominated what passed for the respectable trade, and between them offered thousands of seats most nights to audiences and diners. On the east side, showrooms and tiny venues jostled one another for space and offered a wide variety of entertainments. Because of restrictions on the serving of liquor, some of these clubs facilitated sales of bootlegged alcohol and provided hiding spaces under the tables for bottles brought in by customers. All had a reputation for keeping the local police happy with bribes. Some, more than others, provided a setting for the negotiation of the sale of sex. The combination of alcohol, sex, and music that had an African-American or Asian quality was viewed by critics as the triple-crown of immorality.[footnote]John Belshaw and Diane Purvey, Vancouver Noir: 1930-1960 <\/i>(Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2011).[\/footnote] Sex and booze and ethnicity combined then to create a very artificial air of exoticism: the sense that this was something not of Canada but, at the same time, available only in Canada.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_592\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]\"Seven Figure 10.14 In Vancouver's Chinatown, ca. 1936.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nMontreal\u2019s burlesque world was even more famous (or notorious) at the time, mainly because Canada\u2019s largest city had a strong connection with both New York and Boston. Business elites of these\u00a0American cities regularly travelled to Montreal, where they were treated to a nightlife that seemed genuinely foreign and risqu\u00e9.<\/i> Brothels, gin-joints, and gambling thrived through the first half of the century, mostly under the eye of Mayor Camillien Houde (1889-1958). Like Taylor, Houde was a populist, a man of the people, despite his snappy suits and glossy shoes. He supported fascists in the 1930s, opposed conscription and was branded a traitor by his English-speaking opponents, served time at Petawawa during WWII, and reemerged in 1945 more popular than ever. Under Houde, Montreal was an \u201copen\u201d city with limited restrictions on the sex trade, betting, and drinking. This was an affront to the sternly moralistic Union <\/i>Nationale<\/i> <\/i>regime of Premier Maurice Duplessis (discussed in Section 9.9<\/a>), and opposition to libertine Montreal grew through the 1950s. By 1955, a corner had been turned; brothels were being closed\u00a0and other elements of the city\u2019s entertainment industry were in peril. Houde stepped down and a new, more censorious era began.[footnote]William Weintraub, City Unique: Montreal Days and Nights in the 1940s and \u201950s<\/i> (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_593\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]\"Restaurant<\/a> Figure 10.15 The staff at Chez Paree,<\/em> a popular Montreal nightclub, in 1951. Four years later it would be the stage for a spy scandal (see Section 9.4<\/a>).[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe timing of Montreal\u2019s clean-up campaign roughly coincides with Vancouver\u2019s. The Vancouver\u00a0Police Department (VPD) had repeatedly found itself at the wrong end of corruption enquiries beginning the 1920s and continuing through the Depression into the postwar era. By the mid-1950s, it was clear that the rot extended to the Police Commissioner and included bootlegging, numbers running, and prostitution \u2014 all of which were being protected by the VPD. Effective opposition to such\u00a0practices in both Montreal and Vancouver\u00a0reflected the growing influence of a middle class committed to their small-l liberal vision of individual rights, the protection of property, the law as an instrument of morality, and professionalization of institutions like the police. They were motivated as well in the postwar era by those aspects of Cold War rhetoric that regarded anything that weakened the capitalist West as a victory for the Soviet East.\r\n\r\nTo some extent, then, the moral liberality that could be found in some Canadian cities before the 1960s was an expression of modernity and antimodernity at one and the same time. Its embrace of low-brow entertainments and rejection of law-and-order agendas, its refusal to be controlled by the state, its lust for non-rational fun, and its happy exploitation of differentness as a source of amusement \u2014 seen most graphically in the persistence of fairground freak shows but also in ethnic entertainments and [pb_glossary id=\"1595\"]slumming[\/pb_glossary]\u2014 is all directly descended from pre-modern practices. By the same token, these aspects of urban life could only be expressed in urban settings. Definitively modern cultural symbols like jazz and the blues, all-night restaurants, and cocktail lounges belong to this era.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_594\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]\"A<\/a> Figure 10.16 Even in the late 1960s, neon lights and rain-soaked streets in downtown Vancouver suggested film noir rather than suburban domesticity.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nSo, too, did the tearing down of some of the racial and ethnic barriers that had been erected, ostensibly to protect mainstream and white society from what that society\u2019s members considered as \u201cothers.\u201d Chinatowns, like Vancouver's (the largest in Canada), \u201crepresented otherness, crime, unleashed sexuality, opium dens, gambling, filth, run-down housing and mysterious back-alleys.\u201d[footnote]John Zucchi, A History of Ethnic Enclaves in Canada <\/i>(Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 2007), 9.[\/footnote] As a neighbourhood, it was experienced by outsiders as a largely inhospitable place until it was exoticized in the 1930s. Thereafter the ribbons of neon light,\u00a0and\u00a0the late-night chop-suey houses and the nightclubs, provided a legitimate urban attraction while gambling provided a less legal alternative. At that point in time, the status of Chinatowns across Canada began to shift from civic eyesore to civic asset.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_595\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]\"Portrait<\/a> Figure 10.17 In 1946, Viola Desmond, an African-Canadian Haligonian, sat down in the Whites-only section of a New Glasgow cinema. She was ejected, roughed-up, and jailed overnight. Her subsequent legal battle, though unsuccessful, was a catalyst in the fight for greater rights among African-Canadians.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe experience of African-Canadians and African-Canadian communities was less straightforward. In the mid-20th century, performers like Oscar Peterson, Joe Sealy, and Eleanor Collins challenged [pb_glossary id=\"1596\"]colour barriers[\/pb_glossary] on both sides of the border with their extraordinary talents. But long before and well after the Civil Rights movement in the United States, African-Canadian neighbourhoods were regarded by civic and provincial leaders as problematic spaces where crime and lack of hygiene were issues. African-Canadians have thus been especially vulnerable to displacement from Canadian cities. \u201cThe Bog,\u201d a Charlottetown neighbourhood near the city centre populated by an economically and socially marginalized African-Canadian community, was redeveloped out of existence around 1900. Vancouver\u2019s 20th-century African-Canadian neighbourhood, Hogan\u2019s Alley, was viewed by lawmakers and journalists as the scene of immorality, petty crime, and poverty; what locals regarded as a lively and vital community with its own African Methodist Church and businesses was bulldozed in the late 1960s to make way for a pair of highway overpasses. In both cases, the African-Canadian community never again coalesced; indeed, many of its members moved away for good.\r\n
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Exercise: Documents<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n

\r\n\r\nLes quartiers disparus<\/em><\/b>\r\n\r\nOften, historic artifacts document something other than what was intended. In the early 1960s, the City of Montreal was planning the Autoroute<\/i> Ville-Marie, <\/i>a freeway that would cut through the old downtown from one end of \u00cele de Montr\u00e9al to the other. This necessitated the removal of many buildings, homes, and businesses \u2014 along with their tenants \u2014 and the construction of large swaths of social housing. The City sent out a team to systematically photograph these spaces and residents before they all disappeared. View a selection of the photos from the collection Les quartiers disparus de Montr\u00e9al<\/a>.\r\n\r\nStart with the following three pictures. What looks familiar to you and what looks alien? If you were asked to document the material lives of 1960s Montrealers who were facing expropriation from their homes and offices, what could you glean from these photos?\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_596\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]\"A<\/a> Figure 10.E1 The expropriation of 856 rue Richmond, 17 May 1967.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_597\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]\"Women<\/a> Figure 10.E2 Workers at Dominion Button Ltd., 1850 rue Saint-Antoine, 31 May 1967.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_598\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]\"Two<\/a> Figure 10.E3 Victoriatown, Montreal, 1963.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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Key Points<\/h2>\r\n