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NINE The Vote In private as well as in public one topic must have dominated the thoughts of Berliners during the last week of the campaign. In drawing rooms and on street corners, in offices and shops, on sidewalks, in parks and schools, and barrooms, pool halls, and clubs, "The Vote" must surely have been debated with the usual mixture of passion and reason. So far as anyone could tell, the contestants appeared to be neck and neck as they approached the wire, though in terms of public pronouncements the British Leaguers held the initiative by a wide margin. Scare tactics were now clearly the focus of their campaign, as citizens were warned that if the name was not changed businesses would relocate, property prices would fall, jobs would be lost, taxes would rise, and weeds would soon be growing in the streets. The many published reports of meetings and advertisements and open letters of CEOs to their workers all carried dire predictions of this nature. "If you own property and have to pay increased taxes which is inevitable," said the Retail Merchants, "you are not likely to take a chance on retaining the name which may cause property values and wages to go down," while a letter "From Employer To Employee" warned that loss of sales due to the name means loss to everybody, you and me and our families. It means loss to the city as a whole, and loss to every activity within its gates. The only thing which will flourish is taxes, and fewer people will have to raise them. We will invite disaster by refusing to change the name. Even the public school children were roped into the act when they were reported, two days before the vote, to have come out overwhelmingly in favour of changing the name (at Suddaby Public School it was 453 to 0), though the fact that the 131 132 The Battlefor Berlin motion put to them was "Are you in favour of changing the city's name for patriotic reasons?" and the vote was a standing one may account for this result. This dubious lesson in the democratic process did not, however, prevent the Telegraph from sermonizing on the text, "and a little child shall lead them." The day before the vote, this paper's headline cried "KING GEORGE IS WAITING FOR BERLIN'S ANSWER." Beneath it a picture of the waiting monarch stares out at the reader—though his expression appears to be not so much nervous expectation as royal catatonic. There were, of course, one or two visible signs of opposition to this bulk of propaganda. For example, there was J.F. McKay, the former chairman of the Board of Health, a fierce sage whose voluminous white moustaches gave him the appearance of a dragon breathing smoke from its nostrils. He was also an indomitable opponent of the name change and an obsessive writer of long, tortured letters to the press, in one of which he argued that the word "berlin" was totally inoffensive for it was of Slavic origin and meant "flaxseed," and that as the Russianswere Slavs and our allies there was no need to change it. One doubts that he gained many converts. There were also two full-page advertisements in the News-Record urging people to vote "No" in the referendum, dismissing the doomsday scenarios of the namechangers , and decrying their insulting and violent tactics. It was signed "The Committee" —another example of anonymity that, of course, drew further insults from their opponents. W.H. Breithaupt, however, who was undoubtedly one of "The Committee ," was not afraid of going public. For example, he went personally to the barracks to protest to Lochead about the behaviour of the soldiers in the last two weeks of the campaign, behaviour of which he was provably one of the victims. The day before the vote he wrote a signed letter to the Toronto Daily Star in which he reaffirmed the earlier stories of intimidation and expressed the essence of what he was fighting for. "I know directly that many prominent Canadians throughout the country approve the attitude of those who have some feeling of reverence for long established things of good repute, some background of history, and who want to retain an honest name." Election day, Friday, May 19, was a mixture of sunshine and cloud, and a chilly wind was blowing. As the day wore on, reports came in from the 23 polling stations of steady...

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