Little fists for social justice: anti-semitism, community, and Montreal's Aberdeen School Strike, 1913.
MacLeod, Roderick ; Poutanen, Mary Anne
Little fists for social justice: anti-semitism, community, and Montreal's Aberdeen School Strike, 1913.
IN FEBRUARY 1913, WHEN A TEACHER at Montreal's Aberdeen School
made disparaging remarks about her Jewish pupils, five boys called a
strike. Hundreds of Jewish children congregated in the park across from
the school where they appointed strike leaders, established a
negotiating committee, and resolved not to return to class until the
teacher apologized. Some of them marched to the Baron de Hirsch
Institute and the newspaper office of the Keneder Adler to demand that
action be taken. The Aberdeen students showed maturity in their
understanding of "the strike" as a strategic response to
perceived injustice, their politicization with respect to relations
between the Jewish and Anglo-Protestant communities, and class
consciousness. The years 1912 and 1913 had been arduous for
working-class Jews living along the St-Laurent Street corridor who
experienced a lengthy tailors' strike followed by an economic
depression. The youthful strikers were acutely aware of the difficulties
of being both working class and Jewish. We argue that the collective
actions of the Aberdeen School strikers reveal a close connection to the
labour activism of their parents and to the downtown Jewish community.
Their response to the teacher's anti-Semitic comments is an example
of the historical agency of children.
EN FEVRIER 1913, A LA SUITE D'INSULTES antisemites provenant
de leur enseignante, cinq garcons de l'ecole Aberdeen de Montreal
ont decide de faire la greve. Peu de temps apres, des centaines
d'eleves juifs montrealais se sont reunis au parc en face de
l'ecole. La, ils ont designe des leaders, ils ont etabli un comite
de negociation, et ils ont convenu de ne pas retourner a l'ecole
sans obtenir au prealable des excuses de l'enseignante. Certains
grevistes ont egalement manifeste devant les bureaux de l'institut
Baron de Hirsch et devant ceux du journal yiddish Keneder Adler pour
afin d'obtenir appui a leur cause. Enfin, dans la foulee de ces
evenements, les eleves de l'ecole Aberdeen ont demontre une
comprehension profonde de << la greve >> comme reponse
strategique a l'injustice, et aussi de la politique entre les
communautes juive et protestante. Les annees 1912-13 furent tres
difficiles pour les familles juives de la classe ouvriere a Montreal,
mentionnons notamment, la greve des tailleurs suivie par la depression
economique. Les jeunes grevistes ont compris parfaitement ce que voulait
dire etre a la fois juif et de la classe ouvriere. Selon nous, la greve
a l'ecole Aberdeen est une expression du syndicalisme des parents
des grevistes et de l'injustice senti par toute la communaute
immigrante juive. Les actions de ces eleves confrontes par
l'antisemitisme representent un exemple manifeste de la capacite
d'agir des enfants.
Introduction
DURING THE LAST WEEK OF FEBRUARY 1913, Miss McKinley called her
Jewish pupils "dirty" and declared that they should be banned
from the school. Her outburst triggered a political storm at
Montreal's Protestant Aberdeen School, where Jews constituted the
vast majority of the population. [Figure 1] News of Miss McKinley's
anti-Semitic tirade spread quickly from her grade six classroom to other
senior students who subsequently called a strike. Hundreds of Jewish
pupils congregated in the park across the street from the school and
organized pickets. Some of the strikers marched to the Baron de Hirsch
Institute and to the newspaper office of the Keneder Adler to demand
that action be taken against the teacher unless she apologized.
Prominent Jewish community leaders negotiated with the principal and
with the Protestant school board. Under pressure, Miss McKinley
"expressed her regret for having made inappropriate comments which
were misunderstood by the children." (1) While this did not
constitute an apology, the students agreed to return to class the
following Monday, leaving it to their elders to resolve the crisis with
the school commissioners.
It is tempting to see this event as an example of youthful
exuberance, not to be taken seriously as a genuine strike. Certainly
most contemporaries appear to have paid it little heed. The school board
minutes are silent. Although it did receive coverage by the press, both
locally and in Toronto, the treatment of the strike is often dismissive.
However, silence can speak volumes about adult fears engendered by
student militancy. Deconstruction of public discourse and a closer
analysis of the behaviour of the actors involved reveal a much greater
level of complexity in the reactions of adults, which ranged from pride
to outrage, embarrassment, and anxiety. The strike had long-lasting
consequences for the Jewish community, for Protestant school board
policy, and for the character of Quebec's education system.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
The Aberdeen students' actions were remarkable. They showed
maturity in their understanding of "the strike" as a strategic
response to perceived injustice, in their degree of self-confidence, and
in their resolve, even when faced with mounted police, who had been
called in to control the situation, and with possible reprisais from
teachers and parents. We argue that the Aberdeen student walkout reveals
a close connection between the strikers, the labour activism of their
parents, and the working-class Jewish community along the St-Laurent
Street corridor (otherwise known as "the Main"). The
collective action of the Aberdeen pupils speaks to the historical agency
of children and what the actions of youth can tell us about their
community and its nurturing environment. While the strike touches on a
range of themes such as migration, family, race, and social mobility, we
intend this article to contribute to labour history, demonstrating that
children learned about the politics of work at home and in the
community. The Aberdeen school strike, like consumer strikes and funeral
processions, gave voice to grievances associated with the complex and
layered realities of working-class life. (2) We also see it as part of
the history of ethnicity, reflecting the development of a sense of
identity in the face of anti-Semitism and in the indifference of school
authorities. Finally, the paper builds on the history of children and
youth, by examining children's agency as it was exercised in the
school strike.
To an extent, the Aberdeen strike is part of the local lore:
references to it appear in anthologies and popular histories of the
Montreal Jewish community.(3) Our brief treatment of the strike in our
monograph, A Meeting of the People, was based on a short piece in Israel
Medres' Montreal of Yesterday. We mentioned the strike to
illustrate a low point in the relations between the Jewish community and
the Protestant school board, but we felt that more could be gleaned from
it with respect to resistance and human agency. We realized that in the
newspaper accounts and the anecdotal treatment details were often
confusing and even contradictory when it came to the sequence of events
and the names of people involved. Our first task, therefore, was to get
the story straight. Second, to distil the strike's long-term
significance, it was important to situate the students' action
within the larger context of anti-Semitism in Quebec, the evolving
nature of the Protestant school board, and the political discourse
surrounding education in the early part of the century. Third, to deepen
our understanding of the motivations of the various players and their
social and economic background, we needed to draw on primary sources
generated by the school board and the Jewish community.
The literature pertaining to school strikes in general is scant and
therefore it is difficult to make generalizations. (4) Even so, the
level of organization and the rhetoric used by students at the Aberdeen
School is not often seen in those children's strikes treated by
historians in Canada and the United States. The Chinese students in
Victoria studied by Timothy Stanley had evident grievances but their
tactics were considerably different and lacked the political discourse
of Eastern European socialism. (5) Two strikes dealing in whole or in
part with Jewish students are not examined primarily in the light of the
strikers' political agenda. Donald Raichle's study of the 1912
Newark school strike outlines a larger story of social panic and class
tension in which Jewish students were merely one ethnic group among
many. (6) Shmuel Shamai's treatment of the 1918 "Flag
Fight" in Toronto describes a protest by Zionist Jewish students
against a school system whose integration policy was inadequate and
outdated, but was largely about symbols. (7) The strike at the Aberdeen
School resulted from deep-seeded grievances and demonstrated a
precocious understanding of the basic tenets of labour politics.
The complicated relationship within Montreal's Jewish
community, with its class, language and geographic schisms, and between
Jews and non-Jews, has been the subject of much research by Gerald
Tulchinsky, Sylvie Taschereau, Pierre Anctil, Ira Robinson, David Rome,
Ariette Corcos, and Gerard Bouchard. All of these authors have explored
anti-Semitism in its particular manifestations in Quebec, including a
public school system that was divided along Catholic and Protestant
lines in which the nebulous place of Jews required constant negotiation.
Even within the Jewish community, Yiddish-speaking immigrants faced
prejudice from well-established English-speaking elites. These newcomers
once again found themselves near the bottom of a hierarchy of whiteness
in their new country. They were considered the "Others" deemed
unfit for democracy, uncivilized, of a lower social class, and dangerous
owing to their reputation as advocates of socialism. (18)
The concept of children's agency is central to our approach to
the strike, to the motivations of the youthful players, and to their use
of labour strategies learned at home and in the community. While such a
theoretical position has not informed much writing by Quebec historians,
Tamara Myers' groundbreaking studies of juvenile justice have been
influential in our understanding of how children respond to
discrimination. (9) As Robert McIntosh reminds us, historical accounts
of children usually have centred on actions undertaken by others, adults
in particular, which have rendered children as victims of society. (10)
Until recently, childhood has been understood as a process of
socialization into the adult world. The new sociology of childhood,
which informs our study, recognizes children as social actors and
capable of reflexivity; thus, it gives children their voices rather than
silencing them. Proponents of this approach argue that children must be
"seen as active in the construction and determination of their own
social lives, and the lives of those around them," and that
"children are not just the passive subjects of social structures
and processes." (11) Today, scholars of children and youth
emphasize a plurality of childhoods across societies as well as over
time, and a methodology that recognizes the significance of social
context in kids' lives. (12) Children, they argue, must be
considered from their own shared perspectives and their experiences with
others in their social networks. Instead of perceiving adults,
especially parents and teachers, exercising power over children in a
variety of circumstances and places, sociologist Madeleine Leonard has
suggested that we ought to see adults and children as negotiating the
expectations they had of each other within families. Nonetheless, we
must be aware that the notion of agency, which is essentially
individualistic, should not imply an absolute lack of influence from
family, community, or institutions. We argue that the response of the
Aberdeen strikers to Miss McKinley's anti-Semitic comments is
evidence of autonomous action, albeit within the limitations imposed by
parental and institutional authorities.
Since we know so little about the Aberdeen students themselves, we
needed to reconstitute aspects of their lives through their relations
with kin, peers, school authorities, and community leaders. We chose to
consult a wide range of historical documents in order to provide as
thorough a picture as possible of the circumstances surrounding the
strike and the motivations of the various players. These sources include
English, French, and Yiddish-language newspapers; school board
documents, such as minutes of the Protestant Board of School
Commissioners and the Aberdeen School admission and attendance
registers; McGill Normal School registers; 1911 census returns;
Lovell's directories; and the databases of Montreal Avenir du Passe
or MAP. These sources present challenges with respect to identifying the
children who attended the school and their families, to evaluating
contradictory interpretations of the events as reported in newspaper
articles, and to figuring out what became of the strike leaders. In
order to understand the social-class origins of these students, we
sought to reconstitute as many families as possible and determine
fathers' occupations. To create a manageable cohort for analysis,
we examined a list of students who registered for the 1912-13 school
year and matched these names against the databases Of MAP, the 1911
census, Lovell's Directory, and parish records. Through a careful
reading of these historical documents, we have come to understand
aspects of the children's motivations and to distinguish diverse
and sometimes contested discourses by English, French, and
Yiddish-speaking elites about the meaning of the strike. There are,
however, no written accounts by the actors themselves and we have round
only one photograph of the youthful strikers, in the Montreal Herald.
The paper has been organized as follows. We begin with an overview
of the Jewish community of Montreal, including the 1912 tailors'
strike, the economic recession, and the climate of anti-Semitism in
Quebec. Next, we explore the complex relationship between the Protestant
Board of School Commissioners (PBSC) and the Jewish community. Both
these sections provide crucial background to the Aberdeen strike by
exploring the class, language, and cultural tensions within the Jewish
community and the experience of Jews within the Protestant school
system. We then examine the strike itself in some detail in the light of
children's agency and the reaction to it by adults. Finally, we
consider the strike's impact on the Protestant school system, on
the Jewish community, and on the students themselves.
The Jewish Community in Early Twentieth-Century Montreal
WHEN THE ABERDEEN STUDENTS walked out of school in late February
1913, the Jewish community had grown substantially since the turn of the
century owing to waves of immigration from Eastern-European shtetlekh
(villages) in Russia, Poland, Romania, and Lithuania. In 1911, 30,000
Jews called Montreal home; ten years later, the population had grown to
over 45,000. (13) Most were poor, Yiddish-speaking, and Ashkenazi,
having left Europe to escape poverty, political repression, compulsory
military service in the Russian army, discrimination, and pogroms. (14)
These newcomers contrasted sharply with the small number of
long-established, English-speaking, and largely well-to-do Jewish
Montrealers who had set down roots in Quebec following the Conquest.
While the "uptowners" lived principally in middle-class
enclaves such as Westmount and Outremont, new arrivals or
"downtowners" clustered along the corridor of St-Laurent
Street where they recreated shtetl life. (15)
The uptowners were ambivalent about the newcomers. Given that the
two groups differed sharply in terms of social class, political
orientation, and culture, many in the original community were concerned
that these Jewish immigrants would sully their hard-earned reputation
with regard to the mainstream community, especially respectable
Anglophones. Both Tamara Myers and Sylvie Taschereau have argued that
well-off Jews worried that any negative attention resulting from the new
arrivals could jeopardize their tentative hold on social citizenship in
Quebec. (16) Moreover, the overwhelming needs of impoverished immigrants
strained the existing resources of Jewish charitable institutions as
well as relations between the established members and newcomers.
Anti-Semitism was a constant feature of Montreal Jewish life, even
if it was sometimes obscured and in the background. Nonetheless, Jewish
Montrealers faced chronic prejudice as a matter of course, be it at the
level of snubs and taunts, which could at times erupt into street
fights, or at a more official level, where political discourse
maintained that Jews were inassimilable and as a result represented a
threat to the Christian character of Canadian society. Ancient libels
regarding Jews continued to raise their heads even in respectable
circles, nowhere more so than in the declarations of Toronto's
Goldwin Smith, distinguished scholar and "Canada's best-known
Jew-hater," whose ideas influenced several generations of
politicians. (17) For the Christian population at large, long accustomed
even as it was in many places to denominational antipathy, Jews were
outsiders. While the more established members of the Jewish community
had striven to integrate with mainstream society, the newcomers
inevitably stood out by their language and poverty. Geographical
isolation and the maintenance of traditions--defensive mechanisms
typical of the immigrant experience in general--translated in gentile
eyes as a refusal to integrate and therefore evidence of threat. That
most newcomers were poor reinforced the popular association of outsiders
with wretchedness, crime and disease--an association shared by much of
the established Jewish elite. Class divisions within the urban Jewish
community also took on a political character as working-class Jews came
to protest their economic condition, increasingly rejecting cultural
tradition in favour of secular militancy. To the wider society, such
militancy simply added to fears that the Jewish community as a whole was
a potential danger.
The years leading up to the Aberdeen strike saw a sharp increase in
anti-Semitic incidents and the acidity of anti-Jewish discourse in
Quebec. Passage of the Lord's Day Act in 1906, a federal law
prohibiting commercial activities on Sunday, had been promoted by
Protestant evangelicals who often lashed out virulently against Jews for
complaining of the rigours of Sunday observance. The Act did contain a
clause exempting Jews, which had the effect of rallying anti-Semitic
fervour from Protestants and Catholics alike; MP Henri Bourassa declared
that Jews were unworthy of such an exemption, being unproductive
"vampires" on Quebec society. (18) In 1901, La Presse began to
criticize Louis-Gaspard Robillard, president of the Union
franco-canadienne, for improper business practices; Robillard defended
himself by impugning the character of the newspaper's left-wing and
Jewish editor, Jules Helbronner, with overtly anti-Semitic language.
(19) Newspapers printed anti-Jewish letters and editorials with growing
frequency, and desecration and vandalism seemed on the rise. (20)
This malicious tide crested in March 1910, when notary
Jacques-Edouard Plamondon addressed a gathering of the Association
Catholique de la Jeunesse Canadienne-Francaise in Quebec City and
denounced Jews and Judaism, evoking no less than the ancient blood libel
as evidence of inherent murderousness on the part of Jews everywhere.
This speech, and its subsequent publication as a pamphlet, provoked
several instances of street fighting and vandalism between Jews and
Catholics. These incidents in turn spurred the provincial Jewish
leadership to sue Plamondon for libel, claiming that such language
incited violence against Jews which potentially threatened lives and at
the very least livelihoods. (21) The case ultimately would be lost on
the grounds that the courts did not recognize group libel, but solely a
specific attack on an identifiable individual. Plamondon's
denigrations had not been of this nature. Even before the trial,
however, which opened in May 1913, the case would have been an eagerly
discussed topic throughout the Jewish community, by children as well as
adults, both because of what was at stake and because the action of
filing a suit on the grounds of defamation was itself unprecedented.
Despite such prejudices, immigrants set down roots and initiated
strategies to manage on little income by taking in boarders or doubling
up, whilst helping each other in the transition from the old world to
the new. Families provided household space for newly-arrived relatives
as well as landsleit (those from their home towns in Eastern Europe).
The stores, political and cultural institutions, synagogues, and
neighbourhood parks and green spaces that they frequented served many
functions, including places in which to exchange information and assist
in the process of integration. (22) Immigrants purchased kosher food,
clothing, and shoes, along with Yiddish-language newspapers and books,
at Jewish businesses which lined the Main. Jewish women frequented the
mikva or ritual baths. Female networks were critical in this process, as
were the games and activities that neighbourhood children had organized
into which young newcomers were invited. Immigrants utilized the
services offered by existing community institutions and the numerous
organizations that they themselves had created. These included Yiddish
theatre, small Yiddish-language lending libraries (soon to be
amalgamated as the Jewish Public Library), and the Arbeiter Ring or
Workmen's Circle. In addition, mutual aid societies (or
landsmanschaft) catered to widows, children, and the ill, among their
services being free loans to those who wanted to establish small
businesses. While this clustering in the St-Laurent Street corridor
promoted mutual aid and niche economies, it also eventually resulted in
economic independence and social mobility. As studies elsewhere have
shown, the community's geographical proximity to Montreal's
central business district encouraged outside links with respect to
customers and jobs; the presence of other ethnic groups within the
neighbourhood also brought similar opportunities. (23)
Life was not easy for young people but they round endless
distractions in the neighbourhoods where they lived that softened the
harshness of poverty, heavy responsibilities, and uncertainty. Esther
Goldstein Kershman writes fondly about her childhood in her "Echoes
from Colonial Avenue," describing favourite activities and sites of
play. Her own backyard attracted siblings, cousins, and friends who
played in the space encompassing her parents and her uncle's
triplexes. Children frequented green spaces such as Fletcher's
Field, where boys played baseball and girls organized picnics (as well
as "bread and butter" parties), and Dufferin Park. At the
Young Men's Hebrew Association, they attended nature study
excursions, summer camp, swimming, and science lessons. Free swimming
lessons were also offered at the Public Bath on the Main near Duluth
Street. Goldstein Kershman watched silent films at The Midway, a theatre
located at the corner of Ste-Catherine and St-Laurent streets, and saw
vaudeville acts from the United States at the nearby Orpheum Theatre.
Both parents and elites were uneasy about a youth culture that had
developed around vaudeville, movies, and dance halls, worrying about the
negative influences of a growing leisure industry in Montreal on
children and adolescents. They were especially concerned that girls
might be attracted to "prevailing Hollywood messages of romance,
scandal, and new aesthetic standards, such as rouged lips and sex
appeal." (24) The Main itself was a constant source of
entertainment, a cornucopia of sounds, sights, and smells, where
children (some of whom attended Aberdeen School) prowled in search of
opportunities for urban amusement and for adventure:
Nothing can ever taste as delicious as a sour apple you stole from
one of the fruit stalls; so tart that it left you with a lingering
velvety feeling in your mouth. Shops with shining fruits and vegetables,
cheeses and delicacies from "back home" in Poland and Roumania
or other sources--it was like the "shtetl" transplanted to
Montreal. The crowds were busy, multilingual, buying, haggling,
good-humoured people like in a trance. They filled the sidewalks,
chatting, laughing, chewing on something, walking four-abreast,
arm-in-arm, blocking the way for others. (25)
The children were also acutely aware that their parents were
struggling in a new country to make ends meet. Securing waged employment
was an obvious priority for all new arrivals. They sought work at the
port, with the Canadian Pacific Railway, and in factories. Many turned
to the garment industry or schmata trade which had expanded northward
from its earlier location around Notre Dame and St-Paul Streets;
sweatshops spread along the Main as far as Mile End, allowing for a
short trek to work for much of the industry's labour force. (26) By
1911, Jewish workers were fully ensconced in the needle trades, as noted
in the Canadian Century and Canadian Life and Resources: "The great
majority of the Russian Jews are in the clothing trade as cutters,
tailors, finishers and so forth. A good many work at home or in sweat
shops under wretched conditions. As long as the consumer insists on
having an all-wool, ready-made, fit-you-as-a-glove suit of clothes for
$9.99, someone will have to turn it out." (27) That it was Jewish
owners of garment factories who provided employment to newcomers, and
Jewish socialist organizers who strove diligently to unionize the mainly
Jewish needle trade workers, created further conflicts, tensions, and
divisions within the community. The conditions under which workers
laboured were appalling. Factory inspector Joseph Lessard's 1898
report of needle trade shops painted a disquieting picture of these work
sites which, according to the Jewish Times, tarnished the public image
of the entire Jewish community. (28) Labour conditions were
characterized by low wages, seasonal employment, child labour, the use
of illegal workers, strike-breakers, and the threat of runaway shops.
Jewish newcomers provided a cheap and abundant pool of workers for an
expanding labour-intensive industry. As David Rome has so aptly
concluded, "The conflict between the immigrants and the
establishment, between employers and employees, had a class dimension
when bitter strikes tore at the existing flimsy Jewish fraternal
fabric." (29) All the same, as Laura Vaughan and Alan Penn remind
us, employment in a company owned by co-religionists allowed Jewish
workers to fulfill their religious obligations associated with Shabbes
(Sabbath) and high holidays. (30)
Unions not only promoted solidarity amongst workers but sought
better working conditions and wages, the closed shop, and the end to
outsourcing and piece work. Both Gerald Tulchinsky and Bernard Dansereau
have detailed a series of key strikes in a lengthy and bitter history of
labour confrontations in Montreal's clothing industry from the turn
of the century: one at the Star Mantle Manufacturing Company in 1904,
four in 1907, one at Freedman Company in 1908, and one at Abraham
Sommer's dress and cloak factories in 1910. (31) The growing
hostility between employers and workers erupted again in June 1912, when
4000 tailors laid down the tools of their trade in firms of the Montreal
Clothing Manufacturers' Association. The companies were owned by
some of the community's most prominent Jewish leaders, including
Lyon Cohen, Noah and David Friedman, Harris Vineberg, and Samuel Hart:
"Members of the venerable Spanish and Portuguese synagogue,
Sha'ar Hashomayim, or the Temple Emanu-el, they lived in
fashionable West End suburbs, supported local Jewish charities, and took
a keen interest in Jewish public affairs." (32) When the powerful
Association refused to meet with the strikers and closed its shops, the
union raised money through a tag day to assist the families of striking
workers; members of the Poale Zion movement, or Labour Zionists, were
taxed a day's pay to establish a strike fund. (33) The labour
confrontation became very public when the Association hired thugs
(private detectives and off-duty city policemen who had been employed by
factory owners) to physically attack picketing workers. The union
organized large rallies and parades in the heart of the schmata trade in
protest. This strike was surely the substance of lively discussions
around family kitchen tables, as well as on the streets, parks, and
synagogues frequented by needle trade workers and their families. The
acrimonious and bloody strike ended two months later in partial victory:
manufacturers maintained their open shops; workers won a small reduction
in hours of work and an increase in the rate of piece work. Even so,
this labour dispute was critical to workers' growing class
consciousness and solidarity, and it "marked the importance of Jews
as major participants in the Montreal men's clothing industry, both
as manufacturers and as workers." (34)
Poor families depended on the wages of their children who they sent
to work by age thirteen or fourteen. In a difficult job market, parents
knew that their sons could find work as newsboys for the city's
major dailies earning enough money to make ends meet: "Many young
boys could be seen running up and down St. Catherine Street, St. James,
Notre Dame, and other thoroughfares selling newspapers. These were
Jewish boys, sons of tailors, cloakmakers, and un-skilled workers."
(35) The earning power of newsboys was especially critical during
strikes when their pay often constituted the family's sole income.
Young boys were also part of an important strategy used against
shopkeepers who raised prices on staple products such as bread or meat.
Housewives typically initiated these disputes, their husbands organized
the protests, and their sons distributed pamphlets in front of the
offending stores detailing the conflict and calling for collective
action. (36)
The tough economic situation was not to improve. After more than a
decade of unprecedented growth, Canada plunged into an economic
recession in the fall of 1912. Jewish residents of the St-Laurent Street
corridor now had to contend with the uncertainty of employment and
higher prices owing to inflation. Yet, despite the difficulties of
everyday life associated with such economic uncertainty, immigrant
Jewish families continued to send their children to elementary school,
unlike the usual practice whereby working-class families temporarily
withdrew their children from school during hard times. Jewish families
placed great importance on educating their children, both to facilitate
integration into the larger community and to encourage social mobility.
Ideally, education would extend beyond the elementary grades but this
was impossible for many. If families could afford to send only one child
to high school, they would have to select the young student considered
the most promising, devoting resources and encouragement to this
favoured offspring.
Montreal's Jewish families had been sending their children to
Protestant schools since the 1870s, a trend continued by the eastern
European immigrants, although at the beginning of the twentieth century
many opted for the school attached to the Baron de Hirsch Institute,
which also received subsidies from the Protestant school board until
1907. Jewish students at these schools received Hebrew instruction
alongside English, but the emphasis was not particularly religious.
Members of the older established congregations could send their children
to day schools attached to the synagogues, but most immigrants followed
different religious traditions and sought alternatives. In 1896, a
recently established congregation, B'nai Jacob, opened its own day
school, the first of a number of schools known as Talmud Torah. (37)
Within three years, the school had attracted a population of 150
students, and in 1903 it acquired a permanent home on St-Urbain Street.
By that time, it was listed officially as the Montreal Hebrew Free
School, even though it functioned primarily in Yiddish. Despite growing
concern among some Eastern European families that their children were at
risk of losing their cultural identity within a Protestant system, by
the time of the Aberdeen strike most still enrolled their children in
Protestant public schools.
Aberdeen: A Protestant School
ABERDEEN SCHOOL WAS BUILT by the Protestant Board of School
Commissioners (PBSC) to replace a temporary school that could not meet
the needs of the rising inner-city Protestant population. Searching for
nearby land to purchase, the commissioners had noted a largely open,
undeveloped area straddling St-Denis Street, featuring only a few
isolated houses, the Sisters of Providence asylum, and a large
rectangular reservoir. The area seemed on the verge of being developed
as a residential quarter; several landowners were looking to subdivide
their estates, and the city was in the process of creating an urban park
around the reservoir to serve as a nucleus for the new neighbourhood. In
the autumn of 1894, the commissioners reached an agreement with two
sisters, Philomene and Marie-Josephte Cherrier, the owners of a
good-sized estate on the east side of St-Denis Street. (38) It seemed
like a very good deal: the Cherrier lot was nearly 56,000 square feet in
size and contained "two magnificent houses," semi-detached
mansions which could be adapted for school purposes. (39) These houses
overlooked one corner of what was then known as St-Denis Park but which
soon acquired the name of St-Louis Square. This beautifully landscaped
green space soon attracted speculative builders, and by the end of the
century it was lined with elegant terraced houses and formed one of
Montreal's most desirable residential neighbourhoods. From the
beginning, the commissioners anticipated that the school would serve a
socially diverse population, drawing on a broad geographical area
containing mostly working-class families. The effort they expended to
create a handsome school building in aesthetic surroundings was
consistent with the Protestant board's policy on school
accommodation since the 1870s; as with other aspects of the curriculum,
the school environment was intended to have a morally uplifting impact
on working-class (and increasingly non-British) youngsters. (40) [Figure
2]
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]
The commissioners hired the distinguished architect Alexander
Cowper Hutchison to refurbish the two houses for use as a school capable
of accommodating 800 pupils in several classrooms, and to build an
extension to the rear that would contain an additional eight large
teaching rooms and an assembly hall--all at a cost of $40,000. (41) This
was to be the first public school in the city to have a caretaker's
living quarters incorporated into the design. Seeking a name for the new
school that would reflect favourably on its distinguished appearance and
prestigious location, the commissioners wrote the current governor
general, the Earl of Aberdeen, to see if he would agree to have it named
after him. Like his predecessors Dufferin, Lorne and Lansdowne, the earl
was willing, and also accepted their invitation to be present at the
school's opening--which, after repeated delays, eventually took
place in October 1895, one month after the doors opened to students.
(42)
Aberdeen School personified the notion of a modern Protestant
school that had evolved over the previous two decades. From the start,
it contained a kindergarten class, an institution the commissioners had
launched just four years earlier. They also selected Aberdeen School to
be the home of an experimental new cooking component in the Protestant
curriculum, with full kitchen facilities. This arrangement came out of
an offer by the YMCA School of Cookery to subsidize what would later be
called Domestic Science; girls aged ten and up from Mount Royal,
Lansdowne, Berthelet Street and Dufferin schools would join those from
Aberdeen for weekly cooking classes. (43) A few years later, in
September 1901, a similar offer came from the Commissioner of
Agriculture, this time to equip a school with facilities for manual
training and to provide an instructor for two years as part of a program
sponsored by tobacco magnate William Macdonald to improve Protestant
education in the province. Again, the commissioners chose Aberdeen
School to house what became known as "Sloyd," which drew boys
from five neighbouring Protestant schools for regular classes. (44)
The school quickly became the largest in the system, along with
Lansdowne to the east and Mount Royal to the north. All three schools
took in students from extensive stretches of the city, their district
boundaries encompassing the area north and east of the commercial old
town. The Aberdeen school district included part of St-Laurent Street, a
longer segment of St-Denis Street, and territory reaching as far east as
Papineau Street, its southern boundary being just north of Ste-Catherine
Street and its northern extent was the old city limits. (45) What had
been large swaths of open land in 1895 soon filled, as expected, with
houses and families, adding to the pressure on its district school. By
the turn of the century Aberdeen's population had exceeded
capacity, and the commissioners were obliged to install moveable
partitions in the assembly hall to create additional teaching space.
(46) A year later they hired architect Hutchison to build a second
extension, providing twelve additional classrooms. (47) By 1908 ongoing
congestion obliged them to resort once again to subdividing the assembly
room, this time creating four classrooms, bringing the total to 33
classes aside from the kindergarten, cookery and Sloyd rooms. (48)
For some time, the commissioners had been pondering the nature as
well as the extent of this rapid growth in school population. In 1901,
they noted that the situation was at least as critical in nearby Mount
Royal and Lansdowne school districts, although in the Berthelet Street,
Ann Street and Dufferin districts--all older, commercial areas--the
student numbers were actually dropping. They were growing in the
suburbs, suggesting that the Protestant population was moving away from
the centre. The area immediately around St-Louis Square and along
St-Denis Street had become heavily Francophone and Catholic, a
population that did not contribute to the overcrowding at Aberdeen, of
course. What did add to the school's numbers was the increasingly
dense neighbourhood along the Main and nearby streets east and west of
it, composed overwhelmingly of recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. To
a large extent, the commissioners noted, inner-city schools like
Aberdeen were being sustained by a "very considerable increase in
the number of resident Jews." (49)
This situation troubled the commissioners on various levels.
Non-Christian children presented a social and cultural challenge: how
would the students respond to the use of the New Testament within the
curriculum? Was it possible to accommodate both Christian and Jewish
religious holidays? How well would immigrants adapt to the ideals of
British citizenship promoted in Protestant schools? On a more
fundamental level, most immigrant families were not property owners and
did not pay school taxes; overcrowded schools full of children whose
parents did not contribute directly to the institution's upkeep
were a recipe for financial woes.
On a deeper level, Protestant authorities were troubled by a
working-class element that was potentially dangerous because of its
so-called foreign habits and socialist tendencies. The introduction of
Domestic Science and Sloyd into the curriculum highlights their
anxieties. While these programs taught useful skills, they were also a
vehicle to reinforce contemporary Anglo-Protestant and bourgeois values
that were gendered and class-based. Such values were applied to the
board's working-class constituency in order to inculcate the tenets
of citizenship that emphasized a loyalty to empire and served as an
antidote to socialist discourse. In Match 1909, the school board was
investigating ways "to develop among the pupils of the schools a
stronger sense of civic duty," particularly "the duty of the
individual to the state." Commissioners hoped to promote the
formation of civic clubs and advocated the use of pledge cards
"binding the signatories to the performance of such duties."
(50) One can imagine the Aberdeen pupils feeling that such a plan had no
relevance to their daily lives and objecting strongly to the implication
of being graded according to their level of commitment.
Moreover, the growing number of Jewish children swelling the ranks
of Protestant schools and the consequent demands for educational rights
challenged, and potentially undermined, Protestant identity. Such claims
touched a much cruder nerve within authorities than fears of social
unrest: anti-Semitism was rarely expressed explicitly in the
commissioners' discourse, but was never very far below the surface.
Tension between the school board and the Jewish community was elevated
at the beginning of the century following a drawn-out dispute over
taxation. Since only the wealthy minority of Jews owned property and
therefore paid school taxes, Protestants came to feel they were
accommodating increasing numbers of Jewish pupils whose parents made no
contribution to their education. According to David Rome, this situation
led to bad feelings, manifested in growing hostility by Protestant
teachers to "their Jewish charges." (51) School commissioners
did little to smooth over such hostility, and returned with some
frequency to the idea that Jews were implicitly taking advantage of
Protestant generosity; they were, by definition, "outsiders"
in both a legal and cultural sense. (52) This sense was compounded by
the growing numbers of immigrants who lacked sufficient command of the
English language to function in class without considerable extra work on
the part of teachers.53 One commissioner, the Reverend Shaw, even
reflected openly on the problem of overcrowded classrooms in a letter to
The Montreal Star. One option, he wrote, would be to expel them
outright, even though "putting about 600 Jewish children on the
streets" would be "excessively severe." Another option
was segregation. (54) The latter would have appealed to those Protestant
parents who "refused to send their children to Dufferin School
because of the number of Jewish children." (55) Such refusal may
have stemmed from a conviction that large numbers of Jews in the
classroom diminished the curriculum's "Christian
character" or it may have been simply that these parents did not
want their children to associate with Jews.
That Jewish children were still considered "outsiders" in
Protestant schools was underscored in 1902 when the winner of a
scholarship to the High School of Montreal, Jacob Pinsler, was informed
by the board that he was ineligible, given that his parents did not pay
school taxes. The Pinsler case brought out in the open all the ill
feelings of the past few decades. The Jewish community was outraged by
the assumption that Jewish students were considered
"outsiders," of a lesser status simply because their parents
rented, and that on a fundamental level were simply not wanted in
Protestant schools. A legal case was brought against the PBSC by Jacob
Pinsler's father, Paul, who owned an upholstering and decorating
business on Ste-Catherine Street. A Russian-born cap maker in 1891 whose
upward mobility would result in the move of Pinsler & Company
westward in 1919 and a Westmount home address the following year, Paul
Pinsler declared in the Jewish Times that he had lived in Quebec for
many years and that all of his children had been born in Canada. (56)
The case was argued by lawyer Samuel Jacobs, who would go on to
prosecute Edouard Plamandon in 1913 and become an Me in 1917. The
commissioners' response to Pinsler's legal action was petty,
even vindictive. They would discontinue an annual subsidy they had been
making to the Baron de Hirsch Institute since 1894 and would stop
teaching Hebrew in the board's schools. (57) In the end, the case
was settled in the commissioners' favour, much to the alarm of the
Jewish community. To a large extent this discontent was also reflected
in the wider community. The court found that, according to the law, Jews
in effect had no educational rights. Although there were voices claiming
that Jews had no place in Quebec society, large numbers acknowledged
that the situation identified by the courts left much to be desired.
Consequently, legislation was passed in 1903 stating that "persons
professing the Jewish religion shall, for school purposes, be treated in
the same manner as Protestants ... and shall enjoy the same rights and
privileges." (58) This legislation was regarded by the Jewish elite
as the "magna carta" of Jewish education, marking the full
acceptance of Jews within Quebec's public education system. (59)
The Protestant school commissioners accepted the implications of
this legislation even as they continued to grumble about having to
accommodate these technical Protestants who made no financial
contribution to schooling. Furthermore, Protestant ire was clearly
raised when it was suggested that equality for school purposes meant
that Jews had a right to sit as commissioners. (60) The Protestant board
defiantly resisted any changes to its administrative structure, refusing
to interpret the 1903 legislation as granting Jews any further rights
beyond accommodation in school rooms. They steadfastly pointed to the
constitutional guarantees which specifically defined Montreal's
Protestant school board as an institution to be run by and for
Protestants. Commissioners even opposed moves to bring democracy to the
city school boards, arguing that an unelected board was the best way to
uphold these guarantees. Since Confederation, the PBSC consisted of
three Protestant clergymen appointed by the provincial government and
three Protestant city councillors selected by the council. Reformist
politicians made several attempts to introduce legislation ending this
practice, but the Protestant commissioners (like their Catholic
counterparts, who would have been similarly affected) protested, fearing
that unsuitable candidates might be allowed to take office; many felt
that among such unsuitable candidates there might well be Jews. (61)
Addressing this ongoing debate in 1909, one commissioner, the Reverend
James Barclay, implied that Jews were thieves for attempting to take
something that did not belong to them. (62)
Another source of aggravation was the treatment of Jewish children
in Protestant classrooms. A key element in the nineteenth-century
discussions over taxation and Jewish accommodation within the PBSC was
the availability of Hebrew instruction in Protestant schools, which took
place first at the British and Canadian School and then at Dufferin, but
which many thought should also be made available at Ann Street, Mount
Royal, and Aberdeen schools where there were large Jewish populations by
1902. (63) Over the following decade, Hebrew instruction tended to take
place, if at all, as an extracurricular activity--which was fine for a
large percentage of the Jewish community (to say nothing of the
Protestants) who did not particularly appreciate public money going to
support it. According to The Jewish Times, 90 per cent of Jewish
families did not support Hebrew instruction in public schools; such a
statistic would suggest that the priorities of the elites held little
significance for many if not most non-observant Jewish immigrants. (64)
At the same time, the school board promised as part of its
negotiations with the Jewish community not to impose Christian teaching.
This was part of the so-called "conscience clause," which also
guaranteed Jewish children the right to absent themselves from school on
Jewish holidays without reprisal. Absenting themselves from the
pervasive influence of Christianity was another matter, however.
Education in Protestant schools generally did not involve a specific
period within the school day devoted to religious instruction the way
the Catholic curriculum did, but rather incorporated elements of Bible
study into various subjects. Although the lack of defined religious
instruction was traditionally seen as an attractive aspect of the
Protestant school system to non-Christians, its more nebulous promotion
of Christian values actually made it harder for Jews to find exemption
from influence. Furthermore, it was easier for Protestants to claire
that schools had a "Christian character" that was somehow
vulnerable when exposed to Jews. At any rate, the 1900s saw frequent
complaints from Jewish families that the board often disregarded its
promise not to impose Christian teaching on their children. (65)
To make matters worse, in the days leading up to the strike, Jewish
students had borne the brunt of anger from their Protestant counterparts
over the school board's decision to replace the Easter Monday
holiday with another day in April which coincided with Passover. (66)
Commissioners wanted to create a holiday later in the spring to spread
the school breaks more evenly. Because the date they chose fell during
Passover, many Protestants felt this was catering to the Jewish
community. Several religious leaders, including the Anglican Archbishop,
openly protested against the decision. "Sir," one disgruntled
"parent" wrote to the Daily Witness, "Is the Montreal
High School a Hebrew or a Christian school? Are our children to be
taught to observe Christian or Jewish holidays?" The editor of the
newspaper responded by reminding readers: "We may ask ourselves how
we would like it if we were a minority [sic] bound in conscience to keep
certain days and suffered unnecessary difficulties on that account. Out
schools are distinctly Christian in point of form. To be Christian in
spirit we should consider out neighbours as well as ourselves."
(67) This was a nice sentiment but, given the School commissioners'
long history of resisting accommodation of Jews, it can hardly be
supposed that they were moving the holiday out of consideration to
Jewish families. According to the chairman of the school board, Herbert
Symonds, it had been made with "no thoughts of race or creed."
(68) Whatever their reason for the decision to shift the date of the
holiday, the school board cannot have been pleased by the controversy.
The commissioners typically reacted to such disgruntlement by moving
quickly to avert any public discussion that threatened to expose fault
lines within the system. (69)
It did not help relations within the classroom that virtually all
teachers in the system were Protestant--even at schools like Aberdeen
where the population was in the majority Jewish. Only a handful of Jews
attended the McGill Normal School; by the time teacher training moved to
Macdonald College in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue in 1907, less than a dozen had
received teaching certificates. (70) There is no evidence that any of
them were hired by the PBSC, other than those appointed to the Baron de
Hirsch Institute School. This lack of Jewish teachers was noted and
decried in editorials and in letters to the editors of the Keneder Adler
and the Jewish Times. (71) In 1909, lawyer Maxwell Goldstein wrote the
commissioners on behalf of "a number of Jewish citizens" who
advocated "the admission of Jewish teachers to the schools, and of
Jewish representatives to the membership of the Board," but the
letter was merely acknowledged and filed away. (72) The commissioners
understood the 1903 legislation to mean that "the Protestant school
system should remain unchanged in respect to its distinctive religious
character," and that such change "would have the ultimate
effect of destroying the Christian character of the administration [and]
would be opposed to the conscience and judgement of the Protestant
community of Montreal." (73) Clearly, the hiring of Jewish teachers
would constitute a change in the system's "distinctive
religious character." Furthermore, had any teachers been employed,
they would have been unable to take Jewish holidays, a deterrent in and
of itself. (74)
For Jewish children, having only Protestant teachers would not have
been surprising given that every aspect of the school system--teaching
personnel, administrators, and the curriculum--was Protestant. Although
there was no formal class in religious instruction, the Protestant
curriculum was suffused with Christian elements, from reading exercises
drawn from the New Testament to singing daily hymns such as "Jesus
Loves Me." Protestantism was so integral to the culture of going to
school that the students might well have absorbed these elements
uncritically. School children routinely took at face value what teachers
conveyed and Aberdeen students were presumably no different. And yet, it
is not so difficult to imagine, given the timing and substance of Miss
McKinley's anti-Semitic remarks that her students might have looked
around their classroom and noted that they were all Jews, and thus the
target of her malice. Equally, it might have suddenly struck them that
this Protestant teacher was the anomaly in the classroom and that her
outburst was offensive. Quite possibly, from their perspective, the
ground had shifted.
For their part, teachers in schools with large Jewish populations
may have consistently felt a greater affinity with their Protestant
employers, however fearful they might have been of the power they
exercised over their lives, than with their young Jewish charges. For
many teachers, facing a classroom of children from different ethnic,
facial, or religious backgrounds would have been a daunting prospect.
Furthermore, the teaching profession was as vulnerable as any other to
prejudice and racism. Alton Goldbloom, future professor of medicine at
McGill University, insisted that most of his Protestant teachers had no
issue with their Jewish pupils, but recalled one who was
"particularly venomous," constantly insulting him in public
and wondering aloud what it was that made Jews "smell so bad."
(75) Even well-meaning teachers would not have been immune from such
prejudice. Most were young and distinctly ill-equipped to deal with
urban diversity; certainly cultural sensitivity training was not a
feature of the Normal School curriculum. Lack of experience, combined
with a public discourse that was often overtly anti-Semitic, made the
kind of incident that sparked outrage at Aberdeen School in 1913 all but
inevitable.
The Strike
WHEN HARRY SINGER, FRANK SHERMAN, Joe Orenstein, Moses Skibelsky,
and Moses Margolis heard Miss McKinley's remarks on that winter day
in February 1913, they went to the principal to demand that the teacher
apologize. Miss McKinley had allegedly said "that when she first
came to the school it had been very clean, but since the Jewish children
arrived the school had become dirty ... and that Jewish children should
be shut out of Aberdeen school." (76) As British historian Ellen
Ross has suggested, the word "dirty" frequently served as code
for lice which drew attention to fears of contagion. (77) Miss
McKinley's tirade had touched a nerve. Aberdeen's Jewish
students were often singled out and humiliated for being dirty. One
child commented: "Should a Christian boy come to school in an
unclean condition he was quietly sent home, but if a Hebrew lad turned
up dirty he was sure to be told of it before the whole class and held up
to ridicule." The mother of a small child reported that he had come
home crying for being told he was dirty, even though all pupils had
soiled hands after playing. (78) Rabbi Simon Glazer, the feisty champion
of social justice, asked the school board for the names of Jewish pupils
who had been reported for being dirty, believing that they were being
targeted unfairly. (79) Accustomed as they were to such regular
discrimination, the pupils were nevertheless struck by the blanket
application of this accusation. Individually, students may have
overlooked such countless petty putdowns, but by denigrating all
Aberdeen's Jews, Miss McKinley had simply gone too far.
Principal Henry Cockfield was experienced with working-class youth.
He himself had grown up in Pointe-St-Charles, son of machinist Moses
Cockfield and Elizabeth Digby McKay, and married Helen Smith Reid whose
father was also a machinist. Despite his humble origins, Cockfield
graduated from McGill with a BA and an Academy teaching diploma in 1882.
By the time he became principal of Aberdeen School in 1899, he had
fathered five sons, two of whom went to Aberdeen: one, Henry (Harry),
attended for seven years "without having been once late or absent
and stood first in his class each year but one," and was awarded a
special prize of $10; the other, William, who had "received perfect
marks for conduct and punctuality during each year of his school
career," won a Commissioners' Scholarship, the Bronze Medal,
and a $10 gold piece. (80) These were evidently the ideals to which
Principal Cockfield held boyhood. His only daughter, Helen, who was in
the senior class at Aberdeen at the time of the strike, did not
disappoint him either: in June 1913 she would win one of the
Commissioners' Scholarships. (81)
[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]
As the veteran head of several schools in working-class areas,
including Aberdeen for fourteen years, Cockfield expected trouble from
adolescent boys. Some years earlier, he reported the "wilful
breakage of glass in the rear windows" of the school which was a
frequent occurrence and necessitated calling in the police. (82) A
number of unusual thefts of money and clothing at Aberdeen School might
also have raised his suspicions about the moral integrity of immigrant
pupils. And only a few weeks before the strike, one local resident, the
Honorable Mr. Justice Martineau, had complained to the board of Aberdeen
pupils' "disorderly behaviour." (83) Confronted by these
five teenage boys bringing an accusation against a teacher, Cockfield
was inclined to take a jaundiced view of their sincerity and dismissed
them as troublemakers.
[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]
Frustrated, Harry Singer, Frank Sherman, Joe Orenstein, Moses
Skibelsky, and Moses Margolis met after school on Thursday, 27 February,
and agreed to take action by calling a strike. In keeping with the
logistics of labour protest that they had learned at home and in the
community, the boys set out to mobilize the student body. By Friday
morning the word had spread and growing numbers of students stood
"about the school gates eagerly discussing the chance of success of
their cause" and encouraging others to join their protest. Not
knowing how long the strike would last, the five protest organizers
suggested that classmates pick up their textbooks and scribblers; when
they got to their class, however, they discovered that Miss McKinley had
locked the door on them. (84) In response, the leaders sent a group of
younger children throughout the school alerting anyone who might join
their cause to what was taking place outside. The students then
congregated in St-Louis Square across from the school. [Figure 3] The
strikers appointed the five boys who initiated the action as strike
leaders, and resolved to uphold solidarity by not returning to class
until authorized by the leaders to do so. (85) Some students were
appointed to picket "as is the custom in all strikes." (86)
They vowed as well to consider any strike-breaker a scab: "In those
days, when the majority of the children were from working-class
families, even the small children in the first grade felt contempt for
scabs." (87)
At least 200 Aberdeen pupils joined the strike; some journalists
have reported higher numbers, and Reuben Brainin of the Keneder Adler
referred to "600 small soldiers." (88) That so many acted
speaks to the close-knit community whence they came. The students knew
each other very well. In 1913, the school had more than 1500 students,
with an average class size of 37. While such conditions may not have
made for an ideal learning environment, they did permit students to
network and conspire, and in this way build a sense of solidarity not
unlike that of the factory floor. Moreover, these students all came from
the same set of streets, often living next door to each other or even on
separate floors of the same houses. The sense of solidarity was further
expressed along the streets, green spaces, laneways, and even over
backyard fences. The density is captured in Figure 4, representing a
sample of three streets close to the school--St-Dominique, Coloniale,
and Cadieux--in which families sending one or more students to Aberdeen
School (each represented by a dot) in 1912-1913 are clearly numerous.
Such networks assured effective mobilization once the call to strike was
sounded.
Who were these children? Of the 825 students who registered at
Aberdeen for the 1912-1913 school year, we were able to link 121
students to the 1911 census and to city directories, thus allowing us to
determine parents' occupations and therefore their social and
economic status. These occupations indicate a preponderance of
working-class families although some represent white collar jobs,
management, and professionals. Notwithstanding the wide range of
occupations, as shown in Figure 5, almost a third of the families had
breadwinners who laboured as tailors. Likely all or most of these
families would still be feeling the effects of the vicious tailor strike
that had taken place only months before. No doubt this experience and
others like it account for the readiness with which the Aberdeen
students resorted to a call for militant action. It explains the ease
with which they turned to the language of the strike: "uphold
solidarity," "close ranks," "pickets," and
"scabs." At the same time, the children were not simply
mimicking their elders but rather were using these terms appropriately
and effectively, revealing an understanding of the process of labour
politics.
The strike leaders were all in grade six and aged twelve to
thirteen. Their families originated in Eastern Europe, and two of the
boys (Margolis and Singer) were born there prior to emigrating. Of the
three born after the move, only Orenstein was born in Canada;
Skibelsky's family was living in England at the time of his birth,
while Sherman's was in the United States. Three of the strike
leaders immigrated with their mothers as young children, the fathers
having arrived earlier as was customary for those from Eastern European
shtetlekh. Margolis and Skiblesky had fathers who were teachers,
Orenstein's was a shopkeeper, and Singer's and Sherman's
fathers were tailors. In the 1911 census, only one of the strike
leaders' mothers was identified as a wage earner: Rebecca Margolis
was an operator in a fur factory. Given that two of the fathers were
teachers and two were tailors it is hOt surprising that these students
would have been familiar with the politics of labour discourse. Joseph
Orenstein's father self-identified as a shopkeeper in the 1911
census, but Lovell's Directory shows that in the years leading up
to the strike he laboured in a variety of occupations that included
grocer, pedlar, and presser. His work history would have given him a
unique insight as small-business owner and wage labourer in the schmata
trade. Joseph's oldest brother Henry had a similar labour
experience; he worked for companies manufacturing clothing and shoes
before managing the tony Cotter Boot Shop located on St. James Street in
the city's business district.
For journalist Reuben Brainin, Montreal's young strikers were
inspired by "the literary evenings in Jewish institutions, of
Jewish presentations which young people hear and absorb." (89) The
Baron de Hirsch Institute on Bleury Street was at the heart of the
community's cultural life and straddled geographically the divide
between uptowners and downtowners. It was the principal social and
educational centre and a venue for the kinds of events to which Brainin
refers. The Institute offered day and night classes to young immigrants,
housed a library of Yiddish as well as English books, and provided space
for a variety of Jewish community organizations; it was part of the
vibrant intellectual life, expressed in Yiddish, associated with labour
unions, theatre, and bookstores along the Main. The Keneder Adler,
Montreal's only Yiddish-language newspaper at the time, reflected
this culture, at least to a certain extent. Although politically it was
more liberal than socialist in outlook, and typically refrained from
taking the lead in condemning factory owners during key strikes, it was
widely read by working families along the Main. (90) Identifying with
these institutions reinforced a sense of the strike leaders'
identity as Yiddish-speaking members of the working class. The local
synagogues would also have provided social space to debate such
political and social issues even while the strike leaders prepared for
their bar mitzvahs. That these boys had either recently turned thirteen,
or were about to, would have been a factor in taking a leadership role
in the school as "men." This status, especially in 1913, would
have earned them respect among the younger children in Aberdeen School,
surely an important factor in rallying the rank-and-file.
As effective strike leaders, these young men inspired a sense of
labour discipline on the picket line. By the afternoon of the strike,
the crowds of children attracted reporters from most of the city's
dailies as well as police: "Striking children lined the sidewalks
and cheered lustily. A solitary foot policeman and one mounted officer
paraded up and down the road trying to disperse the crowd, but as soon
as the youthful strikers were moved from one part of the square, they
gathered at another." Such tactics, typical of children trying to
avoid trouble and escape adult authority, proved very useful in the
context of the strike. Journalists reported that "the scholars
behaved with almost perfect conduct; there was no booing or hissing, and
not even one snowball was thrown." (91) Their apparent lack of fear
was noteworthy, given that these children had witnessed the police
brutality used against members of their families and neighbours during
the recent tailors' strike and would have seen a police presence as
intimidating.
Seeking solidarity with the larger Jewish community, some of the
Aberdeen strikers marched to the offices of the Keneder Adler, where
they found a sympathetic audience in its editor, Reuben Brainin. A
Russian-born Hebrew essayist and scholar with a long career in Poland,
Germany and the United States, Brainin had arrived from New York a year
before to take up the position of editor-in-chief at the behest of the
Adler's owner and publisher, Hirsch Wolofsky. Brainin's
editorials reflected not only the newspaper's support for the
Jewish working class but also his own commitment to Jewish ethnic
identity. (92) The Aberdeen strikers knew of him, expected a good
reception, and were not disappointed. Although Brainin's sympathy
for Jewish workers during the tailors' strike had been muted, given
his opposition to creating divisions among the
Jewish community, the Aberdeen school strike was clearly different.
(93) It struck a chord with Brainin, who was already impressed by the
cultural resilience of Jewish diaspora communities in North America, but
had never seen this level of resistance to discrimination on the part of
such youngsters. The students left convinced that their strike would
receive positive coverage by Brainin in the community's newspaper.
Any chance that the Adler might have presented the other side of the
story was dashed when a reporter contacted the school later that day and
Principal Cockfield refused to issue a statement.
Another group of Aberdeen students marched to the Baron de Hirsch
Institute, located over a kilometre from the school. By one account,
they were corralled and escorted there by uptowner Hyman Lightstone, who
feared "mischief from the children." A veteran of both the
Spanish-American and Boer wars, Lightstone was also a McGill-trained
physician at the Baron de Hirsch Institute. Wanting to assert the
authority of community leaders, Lightstone instructed the strikers
"not to do anything unlawful." Despite this apparent pressure
to be coopted by an elite member of the community, the strikers
continued to assert their autonomy. At the Institute, they presented
their case to representatives who agreed to call a meeting of the Baron
de Hirsch's legislative committee to decide on a course of action.
Knowing that the school authorities would never negotiate directly with
children, the strikers were prepared to place their trust in this
committee and to return to the strike. For all of their militancy, the
strikers were also pragmatic, once again displaying wisdom beyond their
years.
The legislative committee met at the Craig Street office of Samuel
W. Jacobs, the prominent lawyer who would shortly prosecute the
Plamondon case, and debated the children's actions. Jewish
community leaders had mixed feelings about the strikers. On the one
hand, because the strike was in reaction to anti-Semitism, they could
hardly oppose its intentions; on the other hand, picketing children
reminded them of the threat of labour militancy recently displayed in
the bitter tailors' strike. In the end, the committee realized that
they could not ignore the situation and so decided to appoint
negotiators to intervene on the part of the students provided that they
would return to school on Monday morning. (94)
Wishing to influence the outcome of this delicate situation, Herman
Abramovitz, rabbi of the prestigious Sha'ar Hashomayim Synagogue
located in Montreal's Square Mile, agreed to be one of the
negotiators along with Jacobs. (95) Abramovitz had a cautious response
to the strike: "Whether there is any truth in what the boys say
remains to be seen. [It would be] vastly unfair to make any move in this
matter until I feel assured that the allegations made by the boys have
some foundation of truth." Furthermore, Miss McKinley was a
"young lady who has had close connection with the Hebrew community
in the city for many years and was for some time a teacher in the Baron
de Hirsch School. She has always been held in high esteem by those of
the Hebrew race with whom she has come in contact." (96) Rabbi
Abramovitz doubted that the teacher meant "the construction that
the boys put upon the remark." Moreover, he placed the blame on the
shoulders of the leaders, claiming that the strike could have been
avoided if the students had taken their complaint to the proper
authorities. (97) On the last point, the rabbi was wrong; the leaders
had in fact gone to the principal, and it was only after he had rebuked
them that they resorted to calling a strike. The rabbi's glowing
description of the teacher is also inconsistent with Miss
McKinley's behaviour in the Aberdeen classroom. Such a glaring
contradiction suggests either that he was confusing her with someone
else or that he was exaggerating her qualities out of a wish to downplay
the validity of the boys' actions. These comments are reminiscent
of the rhetoric associated with employers who typically characterize
strikers' demands as unreasonable.
When these two prominent uptown residents arrived at the school by
sleigh, the picketers cheered. To them, the presence of such
high-powered figures indicated that the strike was being taken
seriously. They likely expected that their cause would unite the
community and did not sec that their actions might have appeared as
threatening to the Jewish establishment. While children generally do not
welcome the prospect of adults meeting with a school principal, the
Aberdeen strikers appear to have felt confident that Abramovitz and
Jacobs would represent their position fairly on this matter. Before
going into the school, the two men met with the strike committee in
St-Louis Square. It may have been only a symbolic gesture, but to the
young strikers it helped validate the legitimacy of their cause.
Whatever Abramovitz and Jacobs' motivations, it is clear that they
understood the need to recognize the chain of command in this dispute.
In the principal's office, Abramovitz and Jacobs were
confronted by Cockfield's outrage over what he saw as the
students' insolence. Called in to defend herself, Miss McKinley
admitted that her comments had been inappropriate but maintained that
they were misinterpreted by the students. The intransigence of principal
and teacher appears to have convinced Abramovitz and Jacobs that the
matter was more serious than they originally thought. Despite their
ongoing concern for the social implications of children being on strike,
they came to accept that on some level the students' action was
justified given that the teacher's remarks at the very least
bordered on anti-Semitism. Jacobs and Abramovitz presented Cockfield
with two demands for the resolution of the strike: that Miss McKinley be
transferred to another school and that the children be accepted back
with no recriminations and without exception. (98) The irascible
principal refused to make these concessions, claiming that it was a
matter for the school commissioners. Learning that the school board
would meet the following week, Abramovitz and Jacobs agreed to place the
matter in the hands of the commissioners and left the school. The
student strikers were apparently satisfied with this arrangement enough
to agree to go back to school on Monday; once again, they cheered the
community leaders as their sleigh disappeared down the street. (99)
Monday morning, however, when the children lined up in the school
yard, Principal Cockfield called the strike leaders "out" and
threatened to have them expelled. When journalists asked Cockfield what
would happen to the leaders, he replied, "It is no business of the
press what we do here in Aberdeen School." (100) Here again,
Cockfield seems to have acted impulsively, displaying willfulness, and a
lack of tact by snubbing Rabbi Abramovitz, Samuel Jacobs, and the press
for no apparent reason other than to assert his rapidly diminishing
authority over the situation. Likely, from the school board's
perspective, both Cockfield and Miss McKinley had become liabilities.
The school commissioners found themselves faced with an embarrassing
situation that threatened to present the Protestant school system in the
worst possible light. However hostile some Protestant leaders were to
the presence of large numbers of Jews within their schools, such overt
anti-Semitism on a teacher's part or such incompetence and
histrionics by a principal were unpardonable. That the school
commissioners were prepared to concede to some of the strikers'
demands in return for peace in the school yard, leads us to conclude
that Cockfield was effectively silenced.
Jewish leaders at the Baron de Hirsch Institute felt
"confident that the Commissioners will probe the alleged insult and
give a sound judgement according to the facts of the case." (101)
Curiously, however, the Aberdeen strike was not minuted at the March 6th
board meeting. Whether the deliberations were held in camera or simply
stricken from the record, the commissioners must have dealt with this
delicate issue. Their silence suggests that they did not want the matter
to be discussed further in the public domain. There was no more
newspaper coverage of the Aberdeen School strike. The local dailies do
touch on the matter of Easter Monday, which was recorded in the minutes:
the commissioners decided, under pressure, that this day would revert to
being a school holiday along with the new date in April. (102) The
two-holiday solution constituted the board's official response to
what was potentially an explosive crisis. Faced with irate parents and
church leaders, on the one hand, and the embarrassment of a tactless
teacher's offensive remarks on the other, the commissioners sought
a compromise that would appease both sides.
Rabbi Abramovitz and Maitre Jacobs likely understood that the
additional holiday was part of a larger concession to resolve the
Aberdeen strike, along with the tacit agreement that the strikers would
not be disciplined. After Cockfield's initial attempt to call the
leaders out on the Monday morning, the matter appears to have been
dropped. While we have no way of knowing this for certain, it is
reasonable to assume that any punishment visited upon the students would
have been publicized. Although the English-language newspapers might
have agreed hOt to report on any recriminations against the students,
one cannot image that Reuben Brainin of the Keneder Adler would rail to
decry any mistreatment of the strikers.
This, however, was as far as the board would go for the time being.
There is no indication that changes were made to the complement of
teachers at the Aberdeen School. Miss McKinley does not figure in any of
the transfers or retirements listed in the school board minutes in the
weeks following the strike. In fact, there is no mention of any higher
level teachers from Aberdeen School, which is significant given that
there is a larger problem regarding Miss McKinley. While Reuben Brainin
identified the teacher who made the anti-Semitic remark as "Miss
McKinley," the name does not appear in any other English-language
newspaper coverage; furthermore, we could not find the name anywhere in
the school board minutes or in the list of McGill Normal School
graduates. It is possible that English-language newspapers withheld her
name in order to protect her reputation; if so, it must have been common
practice when reporting on middle-class individuals. At any rate,
whoever Miss McKinley was, she seems to have remained for the time being
at Aberdeen School. (103) Although the students had set the
teacher's removal as a condition for ending the strike, Rabbi
Abramovitz and other Jewish leaders must have felt that the issue was
not worth pursuing given the board's other concessions. Order was
restored.
The strike provoked a variety of responses within the media,
clearly demonstrating that the student conflict had alerted the adult
world to the danger (or, in some cases, the advantages) of children who
were willing to challenge authority. The Montreal Gazette was adamantly
opposed to the students' strike call: "A big foot should be
put down on any strike movement among scholars in public schools.
Children are sent to school to be taught by teachers and hot to dictate
to them, as some of the learned youngsters think in these days of the
idle strap and ruler. Let the juveniles wait till they grow up to be big
men of 18 and 20 before they begin agitating and worrying old people of
30 and 40." (104) The language used in this article is deliberately
demeaning, asserting the authority of responsible adults, and
sanctioning the punishment of these children with strap, ruler, and the
evocative "big foot." The Montreal Herald provided the most
extensive coverage of any newspaper, featuring the strike on
Saturday's front page, no less. It too used belittling language.
One headline ran: "Wee Kiddies on Picket Duty at Aberdeen School
Strike," accompanied by a photograph showing seven very young
children standing in the snow. (105) [Figure 6] Neither the image nor
the headline conveys the seriousness of the strike with regard to the
age of the leaders, the numbers involved, or the manner in which the
strike was organized. This dismissive tone may well have masked
anxieties about the potential radicalism of a new generation of workers
brought up with strikes and militant labour rhetoric. The story was
taken up in Toronto where The Globe provided background material on the
confessional structure of education in Quebec, commenting that the
Protestant board was not to be envied its task of having to accommodate
pupils of widely varying origins. (106) The French-language newspapers
were neutral in their coverage of the strike, providing very short
descriptions of the incident without commentary. This position was
typical when it came to issues between Protestants and Jews with respect
to schooling. Editors did not want to insert a Catholic opinion into
this conflict which had no relevance for the Francophone readership.
[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]
Although members of the Jewish elite were wary, many in the
community supported the Aberdeen students. The Canadian Jewish Times
depicted the strike as "novel in the annals of public
instruction" and a "healthy symptom of Jewish
nationalism." At the same time the editors drew a distinction
between a teacher's off-hand remark and the views of the school
board: "The teacher's oration we believe to be merely a slip
of the unguided tongue ... [and] are not prompted or sanctioned by her
board." (107) The Yiddish press, less worried about upsetting the
Protestant community or the English-speaking Jewish elite, was
supportive of the strike. Nonetheless, Reuben Brainin played down the
element of labour militancy and emphasized that the self-confident
strikers were marching for Jewish dignity. Brainin was keen to see signs
that the community was taking pride in a growing sense of identity. The
Aberdeen students did not disappoint; the strike was "a major
contribution to Jewish renaissance." (108) To Brainin, an
understanding of this renaissance lay "hidden in the
children's strike and more. The tender soul of the Jewish child
would not dare revolt for so minor a matter if the threads of national
rebirth were not weaving in their hearts." (109) There would have
been no strike had these children not developed a sense of injustice and
decided to stop making concessions to a system in which their identity
was systemically suppressed: "Since schools were opened to Jews ...
every skulking teacher or professor had the right to stifle and insult
the soul of a Jewish child ... [while] his exilic parents always
suppressed all that is Jewish in the child to the point of denial of his
self." Brainin referred to this transformation as an assertion of
honour: "The act of these children is an honour unto us. Many
Christians will learn the new Jewish sense of honour." (110)
Evidently, Brainin was projecting his own aspirations for the North
American diaspora. Indeed, Aberdeen parents seem to have approved of
their children's action, no doubt seeing in it a reflection of
their own values; according to the Globe, they "encouraged the
children to remain on the street." (111) The strike signalled to
these working-class parents that their children had absorbed lessons in
labour learned at home. To the elites, the strike signalled that the
upcoming generation was prepared to challenge the authority of their
elders in their quest for justice. To counter this challenge, Jewish
elites were obliged to close ranks, assert their own authority, and
downplay the significance of the children's actions.
Conclusion
ABERDEEN'S STRIKERS MADE THEIR OWN HISTORY. At a critical
moment in the development of Montreal's Jewish community, when
labour militancy, solidarity, and organization had reached unprecedented
levels, when growing numbers of Jewish children began to present serious
accommodation problems to the Protestant school system, and when the
first concerted effort to mount a legal challenge to anti-Semitism had
united Jews of all social classes, Aberdeen students marched. What might
appear as a localized, momentary act of rebelliousness was in fact a
course of action with landmark consequences for the world around it.
Although adults appeared to demean or ignore its importance, they were
conscious of the strike's serious potential challenge to authority,
and worked to resolve the strike quickly. Both the Protestant school
system and the Jewish community experienced significant changes in the
months following the strike that were directly or indirectly related to
the actions of the Aberdeen students. In looking back at the strike,
they may well have been pleased with the social and legal changes that
ensued.
The Aberdeen School strike marked a turning point in the history of
the Montreal Protestant school system. Although the issue appears to
have been whitewashed by the school authorities, they soon took clear
steps to improve relations in the classroom. A crucial modification was
the hiring of Jewish teachers. It was no coincidence that within weeks
of the strike, the commissioners asked legal counsel to inquire whether
it would contravene the provisions in the Education Act pertaining to
the need for teachers to be vetted by Protestant clergymen. In June
1913, lawyers determined that the board had "the power to appoint
Jewish teachers to its staff," and thus the commissioners agreed to
"consider applications for employment from Jewish women teachers
who are otherwise duly qualified." (112) Members of the school
board had managed to close their eyes to the issue despite frequent
calls since 1903 by the public for change. They were also willing to
tolerate anti-Semitic attitudes by teachers. But when the Aberdeen
students responded publicly and militantly to Miss McKinley's
outburst, the inappropriateness of having Protestant teachers
instructing large classes of Jewish pupils could not be ignored. The
following winter, Misses F. Novick, L. Chaskelson and Rebecca Smilovitz,
all clearly identified as "Jewesses," were appointed to
Montreal schools. (113) Within a decade of the strike, the board was
employing over seventy Jewish teachers, hardly enough to go around all
the schools on the Main, but a definite improvement over the situation
at the beginning of the century. Despite continued pressure by the
Jewish community, it would be a long time before the school board made
further concessions such as recognizing the right of Jewish teachers to
attend their high holidays without recrimination and moving high school
dances from Friday to Saturday evenings.
The student strike also had an impact on the outlook of the Jewish
community towards schooling. Since 1903, the elite had taken the
position that attending Protestant schools was crucial to Jewish
children's integration in North American society--or, more
precisely, into the Anglo-Saxon world of the British Empire, which they
respected for its values of "fair play." (114) Recent
immigrants were more likely to value the preservation of Eastern
European culture, including the Yiddish language, and to mistrust
non-Jewish authority over their lives. (115) The more religious among
such families had opted to send their children to the Talmud Torah
School opened in 1896, and would help establish similar schools in the
years following the Aberdeen strike; by 1917 there were five such
schools, which joined to form the United Talmud Torahs of Montreal. More
significant, in terms of its relation to the Aberdeen strike, was the
growth in the support shown by non-observant Jews for independent
schools. Members of the Poale Zion (Jewish socialist) movement,
embracing ideas brought from Eastern Europe, had been critical for some
time of the Jewish establishment's apparent willingness to continue
negotiating with an unaccommodating Protestant school board. The opening
in 1913 of the National Radical (later Peretz) Shul dedicated to the
preservation of Jewish cultural heritage, and the creation the following
year of the Jewish People's School, were clearly influenced by a
rising sense of militancy that the Aberdeen School strike reflected.
(116) For many years, these schools functioned only on Sundays and in
the later afternoons on weekdays, as a supplement to regular classes in
the Protestant system, but as of 1928 the Jewish People's School
operated as a day school and the Peretz School would do so as of 1941.
By the late 1920s, the supporters of these private schools would
champion the formation of a separate Jewish school board, in fierce
opposition to Maxwell Goldstein and others who continued to favour
integration. (117) Even so, as the Protestant school board fought to
reverse the 1903 legislation (successfully by 1928) and actively
promoted separate schools, even a separate school system, the faith of
the more liberal Jewish element in a comprehensive public school system
was shaken.
The issue of Jewish representation on the Protestant school board
also returned in the wake of the Aberdeen strike. Thanks to the efforts
of the newly-created Independent Citizens' League, clothing
manufacturer Abraham Blumenthal had been elected to the Montreal city
council in 1912, representing the St Louis Ward. (118) Two years later,
at the end of a school commissioner's term of office, Blumenthal
presented himself as a candidate for one of the three school board seats
that the council appointed. He was not chosen, his candidature opposed
by other members of the council. In 1916, when a second Jew, the popular
world-champion skater Louis Rubinstein, was elected an alderman,
Blumenthal attempted to have him appointed to the school board, again
without success. (119)
The strikers themselves emerged as winners despite the odds; they
were never publicly disciplined and they received an apology of sorts,
even if they regarded it as insufficient. They did not succeed in having
the objectionable teacher removed from the classroom, but they did set
in motion a process that would result in much better Jewish
representation among the public school teaching profession. They
initiated the strike action without first securing permission from their
parents, who nonetheless proved supportive. Likely, the strikers were
aware of what they had achieved: by refusing to tolerate anti-Semitism,
they drew the attention of their community to a systemic problem in the
school system that had links to prejudice within the wider society. In
so doing, they learned the value of taking action against injustice. The
Aberdeen strike was also no doubt a transformative moment in their
lives, the kind of incident that one often looks back on and recognizes
as profoundly significant.
We have no way of knowing the long-term impact of being a student
strike leader, but we have managed to glean something of their adult
lives. In 1916, Moses Skibelsky emigrated with his family to the United
States when his father accepted a position as principal of a Hebrew
school in Chicago. Moses became a dentist and practised in Chicago for
decades. Although he anglicized his name to Martin Bell, he married
within his faith to Russian-born Esther and raised a daughter, Cyral.
(120) Moses Margolis worked as a cloak operator and auto mechanic before
enlisting (as Mack Margolese) in the Royal Canadian Dragoons in 1917
when he turned 18. (121) That for several years after the war Margolis
was listed in Lovell's Directory only as "returned
soldier" suggests that he had been injured or was unable to work.
In 1921, Joseph Orenstein (he shortened his name to Oren) married Evelyn
Yaphe, who was also a grade six student at Aberdeen School during the
strike. The couple moved to Miami where Joseph operated a shoe store.
According to his granddaughter, Joseph was the "least bigoted
person" she had ever known. He employed an African-American worker
as a "stock boy" with whom he sat and ate in the
"Blacks-only" section of a segregated restaurant across the
street from his store. (122)
These young men eventually anglicized their Jewish names--which may
have been a nod to modernity, a means of pre-empting prejudice, or a
practical business strategy rather than a rejection of their roots--but
their actions in 1913 reflected a growing sense of Jewish identity. In
this they were instrumental in rousing the community. Reuben Brainin put
it eloquently in the Adler:
Christian society let it pass as a minor event; the Jewish public
took it as child's play. Some Jews considered it unfortunate. Why
arouse the geese? But the inquiring eye will see that there is much to
learn in the case.
This without entering into the justice of the case or whether
children should resort to strikes. The first to protest should be the
parents, and it is the parents who should demand rights and justice for
them. But what interests me is that the children did not seek justice
for themselves; it was their national sensibility that was offended and
that provoked their little fists against their highest government (for
to children their teachers and schools are the highest government).
We need to think much about this first sprouting of a generation
which is new in out exile history, a free generation which is discarding
the chains of diaspora, which no longer bends its head, no longer begs
for justice but takes what is not accorded it freely. (123)
To an extent, Brainin read his own cultural interpretations into
the children's actions whilst underplaying their political
radicalism. In practice, the Aberdeen strike, like the tailors'
strike the previous year, highlighted the deep class divisions within
Montreal's Jewish community as well as, to a lesser extent, the
differences between observant and non-observant Jews. It also
highlighted the philosophical differences that would lead to long and
bitter battles within the community over the values that constituted
Jewish education, and over how and by whom such values should be
imparted. Yet, in the end the Aberdeen strike proved an issue around
which the entire community could rally, albeit cautiously in some cases.
It may not have led directly to the creation of Jewish independent
schools or the assertion of Jewish political rights, but it provoked
critical deliberation. The student action served to remind Jews that
they did not have to put up with the kind of discrimination, both veiled
and explicit, that they swallowed every day, proving to be one of the
occasional cases where ethnic and religious solidarity prevailed. The
conditions for mobilizing Yiddish-speaking members of the community were
ripe, but it took the action of children to reinvigorate a growing
movement to champion Jewish citizenship. The children were not only
applying the values with which they were brought up but also affirming
their importance as a means to effect change.
Going on strike confirmed the children's status in their own
minds as members of the working class and connected them to their
labour-activist parents. At the same time, resisting anti-Semitism
bolstered their cultural identity, both in their neighbourhood and with
the Jewish community at large. To an extent, they had grown up with this
sense of identity, absorbing it at home, in the streets, and in the
social life of the St-Laurent corridor, but it stood at odds with the
broader notions of citizenship promoted in Protestant schools. The
Aberdeen strike gave them the confidence to explore and express their
own notions of citizenship predicated on Jewish identity, working-class
solidarity, and a sense of social justice.
We would like to express our gratitude to Ben Ellis for conducting
crucial research in newspapers and school documents and for early
comments on his insightful findings. We would also like to thank
archivists Janice Rosen at the Canadian Jewish Congress, Shannon Hodge
at the Jewish Public Library, and Joanna Wrench at the English Montreal
School Board. We are grateful for the helpful suggestions from Tamara
Myers, Stephan Gervais, Steven Lapidus, Magda Farhni, Joan Sangster, and
Bryan Palmer. We appreciate the commentaries by the three anonymous
readers which have enriched our paper. This article builds on our
continued research on community and schooling in Quebec and is part of a
SSHRC-funded project, "Social Mobility in Two Canadian Cities,
1880-1914," led by Jason Gilliland at the University of Western
Ontario.
(1.) "Strike of Yiddish School children in Aberdeen
School," Keneder Adler, 2 March 1913 (Translation: David Rome).
(2.) Since the 1960s, Herbert G. Gutman and E.P. Thompson have
established that working-class protest, outside the physical settings of
waged work, falls within the realm of labour history. See Gutman,
"Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America"
American Historical Review, 78 (June 1973), 531-588 and Thompson,
"The Moral Economy of the English Crowd," Past & Present,
50 (February 1971), 76-136. Family and women's historians have also
located crucial links between the family, the household economy, and
workplace struggles which demonstrate the vast array of strategies that
the working class implemented in confronting and resisting capitalist
society. Consider for example, Bettina Bradbury, Working Familles: Age,
Gender, and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal (Toronto 1993);
Peter Gossage, Families in Transition: Industry and Population in
Nineteenth-Century Saint-Hyacinthe (Montreal 1999); Denyse Baillargeon,
Making Do: Women, Family and Home in Montreal during the Great
Depression (Waterloo 1999); Cynthia R. Comacchio, The Infinite Bonds of
Family, 1850-1940 (Toronto 1999); Nancy Forestell, "'All That
Glitters Is Not Gold': The Gendered Dimensions of Work, Family and
Community Life in the Northern Ontario Goldmining Town of Timmins,
1909-1950," PhD thesis, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,
1993; and Franca Iacovetta, Such Hardworking People: Italian Immigrants
in Postwar Toronto (Montreal 1992).
(3.) David Rome, The Drama of Out Early Education (Montreal 1991),
133-4; Israel Medres, Montreal of Yesterday: Jewish Life in Montreal,
1900-1920 (Montreal 2000), 135-6; Judy Gordon, 400 Brothers and Sisters:
Their Stories Continue ... (Toronto 2004), 15-18.
(4.) US scholars have focussed on youth activism in the 1960s with
respect to the civil rights movement and social reform. See for example,
Rebecca de Schweinitz, If we could change the world: Young People and
America's Long Struggle for Racial Equality (Chapel Hill, North
Carolina 2009) and Gael Graham, Young Activists: American High School
Students in the Age of Protest (DeKalb, Illinois 2006). Tamara Myers has
been studying the participation of Canadian children and youth in Miles
for Millions, a walkathon to relieve worldwide poverty and hunger. See
her publication, "Blistered and Bleeding, Tired and Determined:
Visual Representations of Children and Youth in the Miles for Millions
Walkathon," Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 22
(2011), 245-275. There is an unstudied but fascinating history of strike
action by Montreal students, including those attending the Baron Byng
High School in 1934, who protested the school board's increase in
school fees. More recently Montreal high school students supported CEGEP
and university students during their latest strike over tuition fees by
day-long boycotts of classes.
(5.) Timothy Stanley, "White Supremacy, Chinese Schooling, and
School Segregation in Victoria: The Case of the Chinese Students'
Strike, 1922-1923," Historical Studies in Education 2 (Fall 1990),
287-305 and Stanley; "Bringing Anti-racism into Historical
Explanation: The Victoria Chinese Students' Strike of 1922-3
Revisted," Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 13
(2002), 141-165.
(6.) Donald R Raichle, "The Great Newark School Strike of
1912," New Jersey History, 106 (Spring-Summer 1988), 1-17.
(7.) Shmuel Shamai, "The Jews and the Public Education System:
The Students' Strike over the 'Flag Fight' in Toronto
after the First World War," Canadian Jewish Historical Society
Journal, 10 (Fall 1988), 46-53.
(8.) See for example, Michael de Nie, "A Medley Mob of
Irish-American Plotters and Irish Dupes: The British Press and
Transatlantic Fenianism," Journal of British Studies, 40 (April
2001), 214; and Steve Garner, "Atlantic Crossing: Whiteness as a
Transatlantic Experience," Atlantic Studies, 4 (April 2007), 129.
Other publications for consideration are David A. Gerber,
"Caucasians are Made and Not Born: How European Immigrants Became
White People," Reviews in American History, 27 (September 1999),
437-443; Donald M. MacRaild, "Crossing Migrant Frontiers:
Comparative Reflections on Irish Migrants in Britain and the United
States during the Nineteenth Century," Immigrants and Minorities,
18 (July 1999), 40-70; Alastair Bonnett, "Geography,
'Race' and Whiteness: Invisible Traditions and Current
Challenges," Area, 29 (September 1997), 193-199; and Noel Ignatiev,
How the Irish Became White (New York 1995). On laying claire to
inclusion as white, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different
Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.
1998) and Daniel A. Rochmes and G.A. Elmer Griffin, "The Cactus
that Must Not Be Mistaken for a Pillow: White Racial Formation Among
Latinos," Souls 8, (Number 2 2006), 77-91. For a discussion on
Italian immigrants and race in the United States, see Jennifer
Guglielmo, "The Racialization of Southern Italian Women" in
her book, Living the Revolution: Italian Women's Resistance and
Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina
2010), 79-109.
(9.) Consider Tamara Myers' numerous article publications and
her book, Caught: Montreal's Modern Girls and the Law, 1869-1945
(Toronto 2006). Note as well Valerie Minnett and Mary Anne Poutanen,
"Swatting Flies for Health: Children and Tuberculosis in Early
Twentieth-Century Montreal," Urban History Review/Revue
d'histoire urbaine, 36 (Fall 2007), 32-44. Outside of Quebec, both
Neil Sutherland and Mona Gleason seek out children's voices in
interviews with adults about their childhood recollections and in
textual sources such as diaries. See Neil Sutherland, "Listening to
the Winds of Childhood," in his book, Growing Up: Childhood in
English Canada from the Great War to the Age of Television (Toronto
1997), 3-23; Mona Gleeson, "Embodied Negotiations: Children's
Bodies and Historical Change in Canada, 1930-1960," Journal of
Canadian Studies, 34 (Spring 1999), 112-138. See also Elizabeth Gagen,
"'Too Good to Be True': Representing Children's
Agency in the Archives of Playground Reform," Historical Geography,
29 (2001), 53-64.
(10.) Robert G. McIntosh, Boys in the Pits: Child Labour in Coal
Mining (Montreal 2000), 10.
(11.) Alan Prout and Allison James, "A New Paradigm for the
Sociology of Childhood? Provenance, Promise and Problems," in Prout
and lames, eds., Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary
Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood (London 1997), 8. A
growing body of literature since their path-breaking study includes Nick
Lee, "Towards an Immature Sociology," The Sociological Review,
46 (August 1998), 458-482; Berry Mayall, "Toward a Sociology of
Child Health" Sociology of Health & Illness, 20 (May 1998),
269-288; Gill Valentine, "Boundary Crossings: Transitions from
Childhood to Adulthood," Children's Geographies, 1 (Number 1
2003), 37-52; Madeleine Leonard, "Children, Childhood and Social
Capital: Exploring the Links," Sociology, 39 (October 2005),
605-622; Michel Vandenbroeck and Maria Bouverne-De Bie,
"Children's Agency and Educational Norms: A Tensed
Negotiation," Childhood, 13 (February 2006), 127-143; and H.
Matthews, "A Window on the 'New' Sociology of
Childhood," Sociology Compass, 1 (September 2007), 322-334.
(12.) Matthews, "A Window on the 'New' Sociology of
Childhood", 325-326.
(13.) Gerald Tulchinsky, Taking Root: The Origins of the Canadian
Jewish Community (Toronto 1992), 130, 158, 172.
(14.) Pierre Anctil, Tur Malka: Flaneries sur les cimes de
l'histoire juive montrealaise (Sillery 1997), 59.
(15.) Anctil, Tur Malka, 55-74.
(16.) Sylvie Taschereau, "Echapper a Shylock: la Hebrew Free
Loan Association of Montreal entre anti-semitisme et integration,
1911-1913," Revue d'histoire de l'Amerique francaise, 59
(printemps 2006), 460; Tamara Myers, "On Probation: The Rise and
Fall of Jewish Women's Antidelinquency Work in Interwar
Montreal," in Bettina Bradbury and Tamara Myers, eds., Negotiating
Identities in 19th- and 20th-Century Montreal (Vancouver 2005), 176-7.
(17.) Tulchinsky, Taking Root, 231; Alan Mendelson, Exiles from
Nowhere: The Jews and the Canadian Elite (Altona, Manitoba 2008), 20-2.
(18.) Tulchinsky, Taking Root, 239, 242.
(19.) David Rome, On Jules Helbronner (Montreal 1978), 51.
(20.) Tulchinsky, Taking Root, 248-50.
(21.) Tulchinsky, Taking Root, 250-53. Joe King, From the Ghetto to
the Main: The Story of the Jews of Montreal (Montreal 2000), 98-9.
(22.) Sara Ferdman Tobin, Traces of the Past: Montreal's Early
Synagogues (Montreal 2011), 45.
(23.) Laura Vaughan and Man Penn, "Jewish Immigrant Settlement
Patterns in Manchester and Leeds 1881," Urban Studies, 43 (March
2006), 654. See also Laura Vaughan, "The Spatial Form of Poverty in
Charles Booth's London," Progress in Planning, 67 (April
2007), 231-250; Laura Vaughan, "The Unplanned 'Ghetto':
Immigrant Work Patterns in 19th Century Manchester," Paper given at
Cities of Tomorrow: The 10th Conference of the International Planning
History Society, University of Westminster, July 2002; Jason Gilliland,
Sherry Olson, and Danielle Gauvreau, "Did Segregation Increase as
the City Expanded? The Case of Montreal, 1881-1901," Paper given at
the Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting, University of
Ottawa, 2009.
(24.) Myers, Caught, 159-162.
(25.) Canadian Jewish Congress Charities Committee, Esther
Goldstein Kershman, "Echoes from Colonial Avenue," Unpublished
manuscript, 2, 14, 17, 19, 24-5, 54.
(26.) Robert Lewis, Manufacturing Montreal: The Making of An
Industrial Landscape, 1850 to 1930 (Baltimore 2000), 177-182.
(27.) Quoted in King, From the Ghetto to the Main, 120.
(28.) "Sweat Shops of Montreal," Jewish Times, 17
February 1899, 88-89.
(29.) David Rome, The immigration Story II: Jacobs' Opponents
(Montreal 1986), 69.
(30.) Vaughan and Penn, "Jewish Immigrant Settlement
Patterns," 668.
(31.) Tulchinsky, Taking Root, 208; and Bernard Dansereau, "La
place des travailleurs juifs dans le movement ouvrier quebecois au debut
du xxe siecle," in Pierre Anctil, Ira Robinson et Gerard Bouchard,
eds., Juifs et Canadiens francais dans la societe quebecoise (Sillery,
Quebec 2000), 127-154.
(32.) Tulchinsky, Taking Root, 208.
(33.) Tulchinsky, Taking Root, 210.
(34.) Tulchinsky, Taking Root, 212.
(35.) Medres, Montreal of Yesterday, 49.
(36.) Medres, Montreal of Yesterday, 70.
(37.) Ariette Corcos, Montreal, les Juifs et l'ecole (Sillery,
Quebec 1997), 156-7.
(38.) English Montreal School Board Archives [hereafter EMSB],
Minutes of the Protestant Board of School Commissioners [hereafter
PBSC], 13 December 1894.
(39.) Report of the PBSC for the City of Montreal, January 1894-30
June 1895, 6-7.
(40.) MacLeod and Poutanen, Meeting of the People, 129-31.
(41.) EMSB Archives, Minutes of the PBSC, 14 February 1895.
(42.) EMSB Archives, Minutes of the PBSC, 14 March 1895, 1 October
1895. Report of the PBSC for the City of Montreal, January 1894-30 June
1895, 6-7.
(43.) EMSB Archives, Minutes of the PBSC, 7 May 1895. Report of the
PBSC for the City of Montreal, January 1894-30 June, 1895, 10.
(44.) Report of the PBSC for the City of Montreal, September
1899-September 1901, 6.
(45.) Regulations for City Schools under control of the PBSC for
Montreal, September 1895.
(46.) EMSB Archives, Minutes of the PBSC, 21 September 1903.
(47.) EMSB Archives, Minutes of the PBSC, 10 November and 8
December 1904.
(48.) Report of the PBSC for the City of Montreal, 1925-6, 47.
(49.) Report of the PBSC for the City of Montreal, 1899-1901, 4.
(50.) EMSB Archives, Minutes of the PBSC, 11 March 1909.
(51.) Rome, The Drama of Our Early Education, 61.
(52.) Tulchinsky, Taking Root, 139-140.
(53.) Rome, The Drama of Our Early Education, 94.
(54.) Quoted in Rome, The Drama of Our Early Education, 97.
(55.) King, From the Ghetto to the Main, 135-6.
(56.) Canadian Jewish Times, 24 October 1902.
(57.) Report of the PBSC for the City of Montreal, 1901-02, 6.
(58.) Quoted in King, From the Ghetto to the Main, 136.
(59.) David Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal
(Montreal 1986), 1.
(60.) Rome, The Drama of Our Early Education, 118.
(61.) Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 17.
(62.) Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 15.
(63.) Rome, The Drama of Our Early Education, 100.
(64.) Rome, The Drama of Our Early Education, 97.
(65.) Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 39-40.
(66.) "School Strikers Go Back to Desk," Montreal Herald,
1 March 1913.
(67.) "Jews in the schools," Montreal Daily Witness, 1
March 1913.
(68.) Montreal Herald, 7 March 1913; Montreal Daily Witness, 1
March 1913.
(69.) See for example, Mary Anne Poutanen, "Containing and
Preventing Contagious Disease: Montreal's Protestant School Board
and Tuberculosis, 1900-1947," Canadian Bulletin of Medical History,
23 (Number 2 2006), 401-428.
(70.) McGill University Archives, McGill Normal School Registers,
RG.30, c.55, 2044B.
(71.) Rome, The Drama of Our Early Education, 130-131.
(72.) EMSB Archives, Minutes of the PBSC, 28 April 1909.
(73.) EMSB Archives, Minutes of the PBSC, 13 June 1913.
(74.) Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 33.
(75.) Quoted in Rome, The Drama of Our Early Education, 98.
(76.) Brainin, "Strike of Yiddish School Children in Aberdeen
School," Keneder Adler, 2 March 1913 (Translation: David Rome).
(77.) Ellen Ross, Love & Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London,
1870-1918 (New York 1993), 214.
(78.) "School Strikers Go Back to Desk," Montreal Herald,
1 March 1913.
(79.) EMSB Archives, Minutes of the PBSC, 28 April 1909. For more
on Simon Glazer, see Ira Robinson, "Rabbi Simon Glazer: A Rival for
the Chief Rabbinate," in his book, Rabbis and Their Community:
Studies in the Eastern European Orthodox Rabbinate in Montreal,
1896-1930 (Calgary 2007), 35-56.
(80.) EMSB Archives, Minutes of the PBSC, 12 November 1903 and 9
June 1904.
(81.) Report of the PBSC for the City of Montreal, 1913, 18.
(82.) EMSB Archives, Minutes ofthe PBSC, 11 October 1906.
(83.) EMSB Archives, Minutes of the PBSC, 19 December 1912.
(84.) Reuben Brainin, "Strike of Yiddish School Children in
Aberdeen School," Keneder Adler, 2 March 1913 (Translation: David
Rome).
(85.) Israel Medres,"The Children's Strike against
Anti-Semitism," Montreal of Yesterday, 135.
(86.) Reuben Brainin, "Strike of Yiddish School Children in
Aberdeen School," Keneder Adler, 2
March 1913 (Translation: David Rome).
(87.) Medres, "The Children's Strike against
Anti-Semitism," 135.
(88.) Reuben Brainin, Keneder Adler, 4 March 1913. (Translation:
David Rome).
(89.) Reuben Brainin, "Strike of Yiddish School Children in
Aberdeen School," Keneder Adler, 2 March 1913. (Translation: David
Rome).
(90.) Tulchinsky, Taking Root, 211, 224-5. In 1913,
Yiddish-speaking Montrealers would also have read Der Canader Yid
(Canadian Israelite), published in Winnipeg, and which has been
described by Lewis Levendel as ranging from liberal to socialist. Lewis
Levendel, A Century of
the Canadian Jewish Press: 1880s-1980s (Nepean, Ontario 1989), 23.
(91.) "School Strikers Go Back to Desks," Montreal
Herald, 1 March 1913.
(92.) Tulchinsky, Taking Root, 211; Rebecca Margolis, "The
Yiddish Press in Montreal, 1900 to 1945," Canadian Jewish Studies/
Etudes juives canadiennes, 16-17 (2008-2009), 12.
(93.) Medres, "On the Eve of the Storm," Montreal of
Yesterday, 144-5.
(94.) "School Strikers Go Back to Desks," Montreal
Herald, 1 March 1913. According to Ruben Brainin, there was only one
delegation that visited the Keneder Adler offices and the Baron de
Hirsch Institute in turn. Such an interpretation does not allow for the
role of Hyman Lightstone. It is possible that two groups of strikers
converged on the Baron de Hirsch Institute, one from the Adler and
another directly from the school.
(95.) According to Israel Medres it was Hirsch Wolofsky and not
Samuel Jacobs who formed the
negotiating committee with Rabbi Abramovitz and visited the
Aberdeen principal. The majority of the newspapers, however, have
identified Jacobs and not Wolofsky. ("The Children's Strike
against Anti-Semitism," 135.)
(96.) "School Children Call Strike but only Six Respond,"
Montreal Herald, 28 February 1913.
(97.) "Scholars Strike at End," Montreal Gazette, 1 Match
1913.
(98.) Reuben Brainin, "Strike of Yiddish School Children in
Aberdeen School," Keneder Adler, 2 Match 1913. (Translation: David
Rome).
(99.) "School Strikers Go Back to Desks," Montreal
Herald, 1 March 1913.
(100.) "Young Strikers Were Called Out from School
Ranks," Montreal Herald, 3 March 1913.
(101.) "Young Strikers Were Called Out from School
Ranks," Montreal Herald, 3 March 1913.
(102.) EMSB Archives, Minutes of the PBSC, 6 March 1913.
(103.) According to his son Stanley, Harry Diamond, one of the
strikers, ran into the teacher at a movie theatre in the 1930s. Harry
described the meeting as tense and her reaction frosty. (Interview
conducted with Stanley Diamond, 31 May 2012.)
(104.) "Scholars Strike at End," Montreal Gazette, 1
Match 1913.
(105.) "School Strikers Go Back to Desks," Montreal
Herald, 1 Match 1913.
(106.) "Jewish Scholars Have Been On Strike," The Globe,
3 March 1913.
(107.) "The Juvenile Strike," Canadian Jewish Times, 7
March 1913.
(108.) Keneder Adler, 9 Match 1913 (Translation: David Rome).
(109.) Keneder Adler, 4 March 1913 (Translation: David Rome).
(110.) Keneder Adler, 4 March 1913 (Translation: David Rome).
(111.) "Jewish Scholars Have Been on Strike," The Globe,
3 March 1913.
(112.) EMSB Archives, Minutes of the PBSC, 13 June 1913.
(113.) EMSB Archives, Minutes of the PBSC, 23 April 1914.
(114.) Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 1.
(115.) Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 20.
(116.) Hershl Novak, La premiere ecole Yiddish de Montreal,
1911-1914 (Quebec 2009), 69. Novak refers to Simon Belkin, who dated the
city's first Yiddish school from 1911, but admits there is much
uncertainty as to when the school actually opened. Accounts of the
Jewish People's Schools give 1913 or 1914 as the dates when these
schools began.
(117.) Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 61.
(118.) Medres, Montreal of Yesterday, 118-120.
(119.) Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 22.
(120.) National Archives and Records Administration, Washington,
D.C., "Manifests of Passengers Arriving at St. Albans, Vermont,
District through Canadian Pacific and Atlantic Ports, 1895-1954,"
M1464, in Library and Archives Canada, Records of the Immigration and
Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; 1920 United States Federal
Census, Cook County, Illinois, Chicago Ward 12, T625-320, 1A,
Enumeration District 675, Image 575; and 1930 United States Federal
Census, Cook County, Illinois, Chicago, 461, 18B, Enumeration District
1004, Image 38.0.
(121.) Library and Archives Canada, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166,
Box 5921-16, Soldiers of
the First World War--Canadian Expeditionary Force, Mack Margolese.
(122.) Bibliotheque et Archives nationales du Quebec a Montreal,
Quebec, Vital and Church Records (Drouin collection), 1621-1967,
Sha'ar Hashomayim, Folio 18, No. 32, Marriage of Joseph Orenstein
and Evelyn Yaphe, 22 June 1921. We also draw on an email from Stanley
Diamond describing a telephone conversation he had with Linda Slote
Quick, 4 June 2012.
(123.) Reuben Brainin, Keneder Adler, 4 Match 1913 (Translation:
David Rome).
Roderick MacLeod and Mary Anne Poutanen, "Little Fists for
Social Justice: Anti-Semitism, Community, and Montreal's Aberdeen
School Strike, 1913," Labour/Le Travail, 70 (Fall 2012), 61-99.
Figure 5. Occupations of the Aberdeen School families, 1912-13.
Occupation--Trades # % of sample
Painter 3 2.5
Carpenter 5 4.1
Butcher 2 1.6
Electrician 2 1.6
Tailor 38 31.4
(includes 3 pressers and 1 operator)
Furrier 1 0.8
Total 51 42.1%
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