Winnipeg, 1912 (review)

Occasionally, as a historian of eclectic tastes, I get a treat. Some project or other allows me to read the newspapers of a city for a whole year or more. For once, all human life – or that generous slice that editors can recognize – is on display. With real leisure, you can even pick up on the serialized novel late nineteenth-century newspapers frequently added to their readers' diet of partisan speeches, sensational trials, and myriad tidbits from far and wide.

Reading Jim Blanchard's guided tour of Winnipeg at the very apogee of its greatness had much the same feel for me. In 1912, Winnipeg was Canada's 'third city' and growing. If Canada was bread-basket to the world, the No. 1 Northern that allowed even mediocre wheat to generate wonderfully white and fluffy loaves passed through Winnipeg, leaving millions of dollars on the floor of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange. Long trains of colonist cars screamed and rattled from the East. Many of their exhausted, anxious passengers stopped and got off. Why not? A few years of hardship in Winnipeg's North End slums could lead to a prosperity virtually unthinkable in England, Scotland, or the Hapsburg Empire and, for Jews, barred by Cossacks, Black Codes, and pogroms.

Month by month through a climactic 1912, Blanchard leads us through his city, starting, like the local social reporters, with the houses and entertainments of Winnipeg's wealthy. Peering ahead a little, to the grotesque scandal of building the Manitoba Legislature, he lays bare how the politics of patronage rotted the core out of Sir Rodmond Roblin's moderately progressive Manitoba Conservative government. We join His Royal Highness the Duke of Connaught and his daughter, Princess Patricia, on a week-long visit to Winnipeg's Industrial Exhibition, a vice-regal consolation prize for Laurier's refusal to pony up federal dough to celebrate a centennial for the Selkirk settlers. Though Winnipeg's less affluent citizens generally get shorter shrift from Blanchard than they do from newspaper, the remarkable industry of the local Jewish historical society allows respectful recognition of Winnipeg's Mitzrahim, which, long before 1912, had elected Jewish aldermen and a Liberal member of the legislative assembly.

In real history, only God knows what's going to happen – and She isn't telling. Like Blanchard and most of his readers, we know that a series of disasters follows the apogee of 1912. Real estate bubbles keep on growing until credit finds somewhere better to go and, even in 1912, warning signals were out. Balkan war scares in Europe anticipated the grand catastrophe of 1914. By the time the last gasp of the great land boom had escaped, an Anglican archbishop's lawyer son had died in Headingly Jail and the once-generous endowment of both archdiocesan pensions and the University of Manitoba had vanished.

No city in Canada would enlist more of its men for the Great War; no city would lose more of them. The survivors returned to help turn the second of Winnipeg's general strikes to violence. The completion of the Panama Canal, also foreseeable in 1912, undermined Winnipeg's transcontinental significance.

The known future tramples on the pleasure of readers of old newspapers too, but only through their own general memories. The author of Winnipeg, 1912, cannot quite allow himself or us the innocence of sharing the ancestral illusions of limitless Winnipeg greatness. Wouldn't readers complain if ends were left untidy or moral lessons were left untaught? Mightn't the author be accused of sharing the illusions of these arrogant Manitoba predecessors? Or would we have had the burden, by no means onerous given the wealth of Winnipeg-centred historiography, of finding out for ourselves?

The author has had less editing help from his publisher than he needed. Perhaps the lack of an index persuaded him to repeat descriptive tags for prominent Winnipeggers who periodically reappear, but an index would have been more useful. So might a map of the city, perhaps on the endpapers. Two memorable pre-adolescent years growing up in Winnipeg in...