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Article Evaluation: Anthony Musgrave

-Minor typo: listed as "Governor of Newfoundland 1864-1869" twice

-Section mentioning his work in the colonial governments of the Leeward Islands is greatly lacking (latter section of "Life" subheading, first sentence of "British North America" subheading)

-Section under subheading "British North America", in the latter section discussing his efforts to make British Columbia a Canadian Province, there is no mention of the key part the trans-continental railway played in getting B.C. to agree to confederation

-Section under the subheading "South Australia" says, "This proved to be a substantially less taxing appointment". However, I have found the following two sources: http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/musgrave-sir-anthony-4283 and http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1303951h.html#ch-03 (Chapter XIV, The Administration of Sir Anthony Musgrave"), which say that, while Musgrave may not have been directly involved in turbulence, the time was a turbulent one nonetheless for South Australia. It is not a lie, but I believe it is misleading.

Article on the Toronto Police Service's "Morality Department", Including Sources

--Section to be included in Wikipedia's "Toronto Police Service" page, under the Heading "Special Operations"--

The Morality Department

Founding and Purpose

The Morality Department was formed in 1886, when then Toronto Mayor William Holmes Howland appointed ex-Royal Irish Constabulary officer David Archibald to head this special unit of the Toronto Police Service to deal specifically with vice, sin, and crimes which heavily impacted women and children. Howland had just won Toronto's Mayoral race that year by promising to make Toronto a beacon of morality for the world, even going so far as to give Toronto the moniker, "Toronto the Good". The department ran from then through the 1930's, and was seen as a forerunner to many social assistance programs, such as the Children's Aid Society. It was set up under a social purist pretext of policing people's everyday behaviours so that Toronto might live up to Howland's moniker. Among the offences, though not necessarily crimes, that Morality Officers policed were gambling, "Blue Laws" or "Sabbath Laws", being an absentee father, drug dealing, interracial relationships, homosexuality, bootlegging and alcoholism, vagrancy, family abuse and prostitution. The people in power who wrote these laws, such as Howland, and created the Morality Department would say that it was there to protect moral and good people from the evils of the city. However, when examining the direct implementation/enforcement of these laws, and the effects they had on civilian life, it would seem that the larger purpose of the Morality Department was to prevent working class people from socializing or coming together, and thereby to keep them in a generally less powerful position.

Context

The roots of this social purity doctrine can be traced back to the belief in the good of British colonialism, ideas still holding strong in the late 19th century in Canada, as Canada's national identity was still strongly linked to British ideals. The assumption is that bad people behave objectively badly, and that these people need to made good by a sovereign government. This government does so by limiting the civilian population's freedoms and regulating their social interactions to ensure that people remain "moral and good", and thereby can make a new generation of "moral and good" people. Of course everyone would fall under these practices who was not seen to be morally, or socially, good, but women and people of colour were seen by the government as inherently lesser or more susceptible to temptation or sin, and so they were policed far more heavily than their white and/or male counterparts. The resulting system of social governing, though perhaps well intentioned, was easily abused to keep a divide between classes wide, through methods like disproportionately enforcing the laws when the accused were of lower classes, making special exemptions for people who lived or served those who lived in the higher classes. And, once again, since women and people of colour were seen as inherently more susceptible to temptation, they were automatically made targets of the system's efforts to socially reform people.

Methods and Effectiveness

The Officers' methods often, though not always, called for them to threaten fines or jail time rather than arrest all offenders, which made them popular among people as a social service. People knew that they probably would not be arrested or get the unwanted publicity that goes along with being arrested and going through the public courts. In this way, these officers became regulators of the community. Ordinary people would interact with them, and thereby come to trust them. As a result, these officers had many people willing to give them information on who might be a suspected drug dealer, prostitute, gambler or absentee father.

Prostitution

The primary focus of the anti-prostitution laws was to make prostitution unprofitable so that women would instead pursue legitimate ways to make money. In essence, the people who put these laws in place were attempting to save women from a life of prostitution. While that is noble, the legitimate forms of employment were few and far between; maid, secretary and factory worker were the only plentiful options, and each of those put women in a position where they were constantly subordinate to another. It is also important to note that prostitution had a much wider definition to the social purists of the time than it does now. For example, if a man bought a woman, dinner, and the woman then went home with him, that was considered prostitution. Thus, any women, and especially working-class women without social standing, who sought out men were persecuted, though not prosecuted. Seemingly innocuous behaviours, such as walking alone at night, might also get a woman arrested for prostitution. It would seem that these laws which were meant to protect women only made them more vulnerable to being told where they could go, what they could do, and when they could do it.

Sabbath laws

The Sabbath Laws (alternatively known as "Blue Laws") were a series of laws designed to prevent people from working on the Sabbath, commonly known as Sunday, to respect the Abrahamic God's day of rest. They, like most laws enforced by the Morality Department, disproportionately affected working class people and/or favoured the upper class. One of the best examples of this was the fact that taxis used by the public to get around were not allowed to work on Sunday, but private chauffeurs of the wealthy were allowed to work. Beyond preventing many forms of work, they also prevented people from doing certain leisure activities that could be interpreted as work. Similar to the taxi driver–chauffeur contradiction, ball games for children in public on Sundays but still allowing for games of golf at private clubs. Because of this, and other contradictions, lead people to believe that these laws were put in place to prevent working class people from consorting with each other, to keep them separate and easy to manage.

Absentee Fathers

For most of their operating time, the majority of their work was finding absentee fathers from Canada, the U.S. and Great Britain, and then coercing them into paying maintenance payments. These maintenance payments would go towards supporting their wives and children. As much as this was a good service to the family the father left behind, it also re-enforced a family structure where the father was a provider and the mother was unable to support herself or her family. As attitudes towards policing among the upper ranks moved away from social management and into crime and punishment in the 1920's, it came to be that the police and social activist groups alike agreed that this work was no longer a job for the police. In 1929, the newly established Family Court system takes over the management of these payments.

First Women on the Force

Morality Officer was one of the first roles within the police force, not including secretary, that women were allowed to fulfill. In the early 1910's, they were brought in under the idea that they would be better suited to deal with young women who had been acting immorally, and that they would themselves be a moralizing influence in the Police Service. Also, the existence of policewomen was an encouragement for women to come forward with assault charges against their abusive husbands. Women would trust that if they went to a police officer who was also female, then something would be more likely to get done. Yet, the majority of their duties included arresting and searching female suspects, and interviewing female suspects and victims. As well, rather than being on the beat in dangerous parts of town, they would be searching for people, though mostly women, acting immorally, particularly in places where men and women came together. They were never tasked the same duties as their male counterparts, and so were seen more as social workers within the police force than actual members of the force. Through the 1920's, feminists argued that these policewomen were taken on by police for show more than to be actual policewomen, and interest from the upper ranks in policewomen faded along with their interest in social management, since the upper ranks saw the two as being deeply connected. Few more women were taken on until after World War II, and those that were there gained precious little ground for women in the police force.

References

6. Policing native pleasures: a colonial history

"The deployment of sexuality in Europe, in contrast, as a scientia sexualis by and for an ascendant bourgeoisie, no matter how unevenly, helped establish other forms of normalization by which western society became recognizable as such. A familiar gradation of control emerged,one which by implication never evolved in those alien social orders:‘It was essential that the state knew what was happening with its citizens’ sex, and the use they made of it, but also that each individual be capable of controlling the use he made of it’(Foucault 1990: 26)." (7)

"By identifying individuals,social classes or even different races as more culpable in the exercise of power we are in danger of misunderstanding the essentially cellular nature of power and how it actually functions. In modern society, the life of power is determined not by the whim of individuals, no matter how great; it is systematic, mechanistic. " (7)

"The medicalization of perverse pleasures, it turns out, touches more than the errant British soldier. In carrying out this task, I want to briefly detail instances of human fulfillment (and they are merely glimpses) without endorsing the same return to ‘sexual integrity’ Hyam implicitly pointed to in his historiography of sexuality in the colonial past, where ‘In truth’, we are told, ‘there is no way back to sexual integrity which does not involve the care of institutions,and the attempt to restore to the actual social order the concrete marks of a public morality’ (Scruton 2006: 350)." (9)

"...can we really confidently assert that sexual subordination is a model of resistance?The world is probably full of lovelorn souls. Is this perverse inversion of roles a fact of life for most women who choose not to exploit this potential also or do factors independent of sex play an equally important part?" (10)

“‘The absence of natural differences’, we are told, ‘creates uncertainties, risks, hazards, and therefore, the will to fight on both sides’ and the dialectical process created out of this unpromising stuff of Nature, ‘the primal relationship of force that creates the state of war’ is ‘the aleatory element’ of colonial power (Foucault 2004: 91).” (12)

“The policing of women was not merely symptomatic of a prevailing fear of infection amongst colonial elites; the colonial state apparatus used the law in order to enforce its policy of regulating sexuality: the 1868 Contagious Diseases Act stipulated a one-month prison term, a hundred rupee fine, both and ‘failing to notify a change in residence to the local administration earned a registered woman a fourteen-day stay in jail and/or a fifty rupee fine’ (Levine 2003: 50). The quartermaster’s instruction reflects the provisions of the 1864 Cantonment Act; whilst it stated that the ‘onus of demanding to be registered’ remained with the women themselves, the regulations distinguished between ‘the public prostitutes in every military cantonment . . . into two classes, viz., first, public prostitutes frequented by Europeans; second, public prostitutes not so frequented . . .the rules shall be held to be applicable to public prostitutes of the first only of the two classes’ (Levine 2003: 54). A network of spies concentrated in the figure of the dai herself maintained the arbitrary flow of traffic through the nodal point of the military brothel. Medical hygiene, despite being a public good in itself, was also a good pretext for the ‘military-fiscal state’ to subject its population to the norms of security.” (14)

“There is no way of recuperating the agentive voice of subaltern groups in the colonial era without going through the manifestation of the authoritative discourse of counterinsurgency in its primary, secondary or tertiary versions, the first kind ‘[originating] not only with bureaucrats, soldiers, sleuths, and others directly employed by the government, but also with those in the non-official sector who were symbiotically related to the Raj, such as planters,missionaries, traders, technicians and so on among the whites and landlords, moneylenders, etc. among the natives’ (Guha in Guha and Spivak 1988:47).” (14 – 15)

“in this Miltonic cosmos, where the Supreme Government of the British presides over affairs, ‘the youngest Civilian’ can have the confidence of arresting Gabriel if he failed to produce for inspection a licence issued by the Deputy Commissioner to ‘make music or other noises’. This mild good humour belies the actual machinery of the Leviathan-state that is needed to police a population of millions.” (15)

“The gallant narrator of Kipling’s story by equating native protest with degeneration, ingratitude, misogyny, an innate tendency to sporadic and violent irrationality, if occasionally, bravery and poetry too is hiding the actual mechanisms of colonial power…The imperatives of colonial rule meant that even the illusory freedom of movement for bodies Kipling celebrated had to be sacrificed when the deep sex of these bodies necessitated regulation by science.” (16 – 17)

“…the idea that these native women, who performed their housewifely duties for their white sahib, did so as part of their ‘tenure’ neatly typifies the way the lives of ordinary people were controlled by the bureaucratic apparatus of the fiscalist state.” (18)

"Lalun’s salon could never flourish in a place of primitive ‘lawlessness’ like Sind. According to phenotypic signs, Burton describes the tribesman as a ‘specimen’ who fairs rather middling in the racial spectrum of Indian peoples, only his skin colour,‘the dark complexion of the Sindhi points him out as an instance of arrested development’ (Burton 1851a: 283)." (19)

"The dai, as we see, is present; she opens negotiations with the client interested in a female and the use of her house for the price of a few annas, what Burton calls her ‘Lawazimo’: 'She afterwards, if properly paid, allows the parties to meet at her house, and manages their different interviews.The employment is a lucrative but not a safe one: the Kutni being perpetually exposed to the resentment of injured husbands,who sometimes use the stick without remorse.These old hags are accused of many actions of gross villainy, such as administering narcotics, preventives and abortives, and practising unholy rites,in order to subjugate the wills of their victims.' " (21)

"He duly notes how fine these women’s features are in youth but due to their ‘depravity’ and ‘debauched’ living, they soon age." (21)

“The desire of the colonial authorities in regulating the bodies that inhabited the hinterlands of commercial sex wherever the army barracks were pitched or those that actually came from brothels were shaped by forces and realities beyond the immediate concerns of the pastor and the censorious middle-class public that found its way amongst alien pleasures and moralities.” (24)

“Sexuality was exotic because it did not obey the normative genealogy western science defined for it. Both family life and the social or national group, Frantz Fanon asserts, turn on the same axes: ‘The white family is the workshop in which one is shaped and trained for life in society’ (Fanon 1986:149).” (24)

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**Below are the notes I used to construct this article, and will not be included in the final product**

***The number order of the sources in the above bibliography is the one which would be used in the final product. The below number scheme was/is only for the below notes***

-1886, then Toronto Mayor William Holmes Howland appoints ex-Royal Irish Constabulary officer David Archibald to head a special unit of the Toronto Police Service to deal specifically with vice, sin, and crimes which heavily impacted women and children, later called the "Morality Branch" (2)

-in most cases worked outside of the court system, and instead used their authority to coerce people into behaving more appropriately (2)

-working without imprisoning allowed them to gain trust within the communities they worked in, which meant people would tell them when they heard about an abusive husband/father or of a prostitute (2)

-comparable to a social protection agency (2)

-praised for its ability to instill morality in the general public, criticized for overly targeting foreign populations for behaviour that was not wrong as much as unfamiliar (2)

-a lot of effort was focused on making absent husbands/fathers pay "maintenance payments" to their families, within Canada and for men who had abandoned their families in the U.S. and Britain (2)

-reinforced a traditional view of the man being a provider for the family (2)

-social service workers complain that police often blamed the individual for acting irresponsibly, rather than taking environmental factors into account, and acted to punish instead of rehabilitate; and the police are willing to give up dealing with family conflict, which had become the large majority of their workload (2)

-1929, the Morality Branch gives up the job of collecting Maintenance Payments to the newly established Family Court system (2)

-as a result, the Morality Branch becomes focused entirely on gambling, bootleggers, drug dealers and prostitutes,as well as enforcing "Blue Laws" (2, 4)

-the Morality Branch had a wide definition of "prostitute", which included any single woman who had their (dinner, movie, etc.) paid for by a man, and then went home with them (1)

-"Blue Laws", known in Toronto as "Sabbath Laws", were laws prohibiting certain jobs and activities on Sundays, and often overly affected the poor and working classes

-Morality Officer was one of the first roles within the police force, not including secretary, that women were allowed to fulfill; (2)

-often they were tasked with like arresting, searching and interviewing female victims and suspects (2)

-when not on desk duty, rather than being on the beat in dangerous parts of town, they would be searching for people (particularly women) acting immorally (drunkenness, possible prostitutes, etc.), particularly in places where the sexes fraternized (2)

-their methods were more geared towards rehabilitation of social deviants rather than outright punishment (2)

-because of their different/lesser duties and methods, policewomen in the early years, especially because they were only Morality Officers, were not full members of the police force, and were more like social workers than their male counterparts in other units, and therefore were treated as such (2)

-in the late 1920's, the rehabilitation approach fell out of favour with police brass, and with it fell the opinion that women/Morality Officers could be an effective part of police work (2)

1. https://www.blogto.com/city/2011/01/nostalgia_tripping_torontos_morality_police/
2. https://hssh.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/hssh/article/viewFile/16474/15333
3. http://torontopubliclibrary.typepad.com/trl/2017/04/vice-virtue-policing-morality.html
4. http://www.russianbooks.org/crime/cph6.htm
5. http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/howland_william_holmes_12E.html

Chemical Testing on Canadian Soldiers in WWII

Though I got some of the details wrong, the basic gist of the story is true.

According to the below sources, Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Suffield in Alberta was the site where, during WWII, Canada used mustard gas against thousands of their own soldiers so that Canada and Britain could test the effectiveness of their gas-masks (2). The soldiers were all volunteers who were enticed by an extra dollar a day and extra leave, on the condition that they didn't tell anyone what happened to them (1). There was a similar operation going on simultaneously at Porton Down, a weapons testing facility in Britain which has been operational since the Germans first used chemical weapons in WWI (2, 3).

(1) http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canadian-war-vets-exposed-to-mustard-gas-receive-compensation-1.515527

(2) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/may/06/freedomofinformation.politics

(3) http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36606510

RCR Museum Photo + 160 words

This scroll (left) and card (right) for a Memorial Plaque was issued to Mrs. Amanda Carroll of Halifax, NS. Her husband, an experienced soldier who joined the RCR with the so-called "Manchester draft" in 1907, was Sgt. John Carroll. He died in France, of a gunshot wound on the 28th of November 1915; it is said that Sgt. Carroll was the first victim of the First World War. (Description taken from the description of this artifact within the RCR museum)

(Scroll, left) In the Monarch of the United Kingdom’s crest the words “Dieu et mon Droit” (French for “God and my Right”), reminds of the ancestral cross-over between the French and British people which takes on special meaning on the scroll of a dead Canadian soldier, Canada being the child of these two ancient monarchies. In The first lines of the scroll, all is linked to a greater sense of authority under which it should be a privilege to serve: “King and Country". The scroll then undertakes a poetic and romanticizing tone after “King and Country”, which consoles the family of the fallen soldier, and lets them know that their fallen friend was valued highly by his “King and Country”. The fallen is named at the bottom in conspicuous red: “Serjt. John Carroll/Royal Canadian Regt.”, which both allows the name to stand on its own in honour and suggests that the above may have been printed en masse and the names added later.