Swearing Allegiance to No Crown: Thoughts on the Lost Histories of Municipal Rdical Politics

The arrival of the 150^th anniversary of Confederation presents scholars of Canada with an opportunity. This opportunity comes in the form of a temporal 'trail marker', affording us an arbitrary point, imbued with state- and culturally-created meaning, at which we may look back, look around, and look forward.

From my position, at the intersections of political science, geography, and history, I choose to critically examine the past so as to optimistically consider the future. In doing so, I am brought back to an issue that has followed me through my nascent academic career: that of lost or obscured histories. It is truly difficult to critically examine the past when one is examining selective fragments. Those fragments may only exist because they aligned with previously accepted dominant cultural narratives or may simply be arranged in a way that neatly fits the aims of those who organized them as such. Possessing only historical fragments is similar to holding a book with selected paragraphs redacted.

My interest in lost histories originated during my undergraduate final research project on the role of women in Hamilton, Ontario's municipal government. In subsequent conversations on the subject, I always begin with an anecdote about Agnes Sharpe, the first woman elected to public office in Hamilton. To conduct my research, I relied heavily on reports in the Hamilton Spectator, the city's daily newspaper that remains in print. Official records from the City of Hamilton are limited, and one municipal official informed me that provincial legislation does not require any municipal elections information to be retained. As such, when space at Hamilton City Hall becomes more scarce, older materials are simply destroyed to make way for new materials. Mills Memorial Library at McMaster University retains physical copies of the minutes of city council proceedings, but these are short summaries and provide little information outside which motions were brought to council on which days and whether they were approved or not. Regardless, I was able to uncover a considerable amount of information on Sharpe's political career and Hamilton's political history with the resources available.

At the time of Sharpe's initial foray into municipal politics, Hamilton was a deeply industrial city, built around the steel manufacturing industry, governed by a traditionalist, Conservative Party-affiliated city council. The local city council, which dealt with the day-today planning and maintenance of the growing city, was selected yearly by electors in the city, who regularly returned strong Conservative majorities to council. According to one article in the Hamilton Spectator, after the 1935 municipal election, "Hamilton is still Tory Hamilton if the political affiliations of the new City Council may be taken as a criterion."¹ While representatives of labor and the political left used overt labels, most notably that of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) prior to 1933, right-leaning councillors and candidates would obscure their affiliations, campaigning as independents dedicated to sound civic administration. As Hamilton's first labor-affiliated mayor, Sam Lawrence, noted in a 1946 mayoral debate, the members of the right-wing faction on council, when campaigning as independents, were merely "disguising themselves, but when elected to office they react to their own political ideologies."²

Sharpe was elected as a labor-affiliated independent public school board trustee for Ward 8 in the city's working class north-east in the early 1930.³ Her initial election occurred a year before the founding of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), which, for a year, cooperated with the local branch of the ILP, before a rift occurred that would severely damage labor's electoral prospects for decades.⁴ Sharpe was able to avoid becoming embroiled in the internal schism and, after a year absent from public office, Sharpe was elected to city council as a CCF alderman for Ward 8 in 1934.⁵

A dedicated partisan and pacifist, Sharpe's legislative focus was on challenging militarism and nationalism, passions that did not earn her considerable support from her fellow trustees or her decidedly right-leaning council colleagues.⁶ In an act of open rebellion against the traditions of British colonial rule, Sharpe even refused to swear allegiance to the crown when taking the oath of office required of newly-elected aldermen.⁷ Despite her radical politics and lack of support on council, Sharpe's personal popularity remained high and she was soundly re-elected as the CCF alderman until 1939.

After the outbreak of World War II, Sharpe was omitted from the Hamilton Spectator's election coverage. She was replaced as the CCF candidate in Ward 8 and, prior to the election in December of that year, her name was left off the official council roll available in the published minutes. That, coupled with vague language in the autobiography of Ellen Fairclough, the first female cabinet minister in Canada who got her political start on Hamilton City Council, led me to believe that Sharpe had been killed while on the passenger ship, the S.S. Athenia, which was torpedoed by a German U-Boat on September 3, 1939.⁸

As there existed no other information on Sharpe, I reiterated this assumption in the final research project I completed during my graduate work at McMaster, and moved on. Only later, after revisiting the records I had on Sharpe and Hamilton's local politics, did I realize Sharpe had not died. Rather, she had been traumatized by the events and, unwilling to make the journey back to Canada during the war, remained in the United Kingdom, sending Hamilton's clerk a letter announcing her resignation from city council.⁹

Sharpe's tenure on Hamilton City Council faded into history unceremoniously. Her radical politics, partisan affiliations, and great strides made to advance the role of women in politics were forgotten just months later, as her name and legacy were not mentioned in the entirety of the Hamilton Spectator's municipal election coverage throughout December of 1939.¹⁰ This is not accidental; through the entirety of her time in local politics, Sharpe's radical politics earned the ire of the city's dominant newspaper. At the time, the Hamilton Spectator was a deeply conservative newspaper that often advised electors to avoid candidates affiliated with the CCF.¹¹

Sharpe's contributions to local government in Hamilton did not fit into the dominant narrative's preferred role for women who held political office. For all of Sharpe's tenure on Hamilton City Council, she was joined by Nora Frances Henderson, a right-leaning member of the city's executive Board of Control. Henderson was lauded by local media for her good work maintaining the established order. In 1940, Henderson joined an attempt by council members to remove Labour-Progressive Party-affiliated alderman Harry Hunter from council for his political affiliation.¹² In November of that year, Henderson was asked by the Spectator about her political ambitions. She replied, rather simply, that "a woman mayor would, for many reasons, be unsuitable for an industrial city like Hamilton."¹³

Sharpe's contributions, and the contributions of so many queer people, racialized communities, women, and indigenous Canadians who have struggled for change at the local level are lost in historical purgatory. Radical, pacifist, critical, and left politics have been key elements of local elections and government in Canada. As Stefan Epp-Koop notes, "…we should try to understand municipal politics as we study the history of the political left in Canada, because it was at the municipal level that the left experienced political success…"¹⁴ Forces on the left recognized the power in the city and the productive forces inherent in urbanization, an early acknowledgement of theories articulated by David Harvey decades later.¹⁵ Noting this, movements on the left organized to contest local elections to implement change and progressive policies at the local level.

The urbanist Jane Jacobs observed that, "Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success in city building and city design."¹⁶ Progressives of the early and mid-20^th century knew that it was the working people engaged in city building, experiencing the design of cities, and producing the value of the city who had a right to, if not the city itself, then, at the very least, to shape the production of places to better suit all. They aimed to become involved in the laboratory of the city and shape the results of the grand urban trials to benefit working people.

I have used the temporal trail marker of Canada's sesquicentennial to look back at the important contributions of radical political actors at the local level and re-assemble the scattered fragments of their legacies. It is on their foundations that we will build a critical politics for the future.