AMERICANIZATION
I
"The Americanizing of Canada" is a phrase which has been much in vogue
with a section of the British press ever since the attempt to establish
reciprocity between the United States and the Dominion. It is a
question if the glib users of the phrase have the faintest idea what
they mean by it. It is a catchword. It sounds ominously deep as the
owl's wise but meaningless "too-whoo." English publicists who have
never been nearer Canada than a Dominion postage stamp wisely warn
Canada against the siren seductions of Columbia's republicanism.
If the phrase means that reciprocity might lead to annexation, Canada's
repudiation of reciprocity is sufficient disproof of the imputation.
If it means increased and increasing trade weaving a warp and woof of
international commerce--then--yes--there is an "Americanizing of
Canada" as there is a Canadianizing of the United States through
international traffic; but the users of the phrase should remember that
the country doing the largest trade of all countries with the United
States is Great Britain; and does one speak of the "Americanizing" of
Great Britain? If it means that in ten years two-fifths as many
Americans have settled in Western Canada as there are native-born
Canadians in the West--then--yes--Canada pleads guilty. She has spent
money like water and is spending it yet to attract these American
settlers; and they, on their part, have brought with them an average of
fifteen hundred dollars a settler, not counting money invested by
capitalists. If in the era between 1900 and 1911, 650,719 American
settlers came to Western Canada, and from 1911 to 1914, six hundred
thousand more--or say, with natural increase, a million and a quarter
in fifteen years; to counterpoise that consideration remember that in
the era from 1885 to 1895 one-fifth of Canada's native population moved
to the United States.
There is not the slightest doubt that within ten years the balance of
political power in Canada has shifted from the solidarity of French
Quebec to the progressive West; but that can hardly be considered as of
political import when two out of four western provinces rejected
reciprocity.
What, then, is meant by the phrase "Americanizing of Canada"?
Consider for a moment what is happening!
Twenty years ago the number of American and Canadian railroads meeting
at the boundary and crossing the boundary numbered some six. Ten years
ago in the West alone there were sixteen branch lines feeding traffic
into one another's territory across the border. To-day, if you count
all the American railroads reaching up from trunk lines north to
Canada, and all the Canadian spurs reaching south from trunk lines into
the United States, and all the great trunk lines having subsidiaries
like the South Shore and "Soo" crossing the border, and all the lines
having international running rights over one another's roadbed, there
are more than sixty railroads feeding Canadian traffic into the United
States and American traffic into Canada. This explains why of all the
export grain traffic from the Northwest forty-four per cent. only goes
from Canada by all-Canadian routing, while fifty-six per cent. comes to
seaboard over American lines; and all this is independent of the
enormous American traffic through the Canadian "Soo" by the Great
Lakes, in some years, reaching a total five times as large as the
traffic expected through Panama. One can not contemplate this constant
interchange of traffic without recalling the metaphor of the warp and
the woof, of the shuttle weaving a fabric of international commerce
that ignores dead reciprocity pacts and an invisible boundary. Yet
England does three-fourths of the carrying trade for the United States
across the Atlantic. Spite of high tariff on one side of the ocean and
no tariff on the other side, spite of eagle and lion rampant, British
ships weave like busy shuttles across the silver lanes of the sea an
invisible warp and woof that are stronger than cables of steel, or
political treaty.
So much for lines of traffic between Canada and the United States!
What of the traffic carried?
American imports to Canada have doubled in three years; or increased
from two hundred sixteen million dollars' worth in 1910 to four hundred
fifteen million dollars' worth in 1913; and instead of the war causing
a falling off, it is likely to cause an increase; for Canada's
purchases from Europe have been cut off and must be supplied by the
United States. Of the imports to Canada, two-thirds are manufactured
articles--motors, locomotives, cars, coffee, cotton, iron, steel,
implements, coal. At time of writing exports from the United States
now rank the United Kingdom first, Canada second, Germany third. When
you consider that Canada's purchasing power is that of seven million
people, where the United Kingdom's is forty-five and Germany's
sixty-five million, the significance of these comparative ranks is
apparent.
From Canada to the United States, exports increased from $95,000,000 in
1910 to $120,000,000 in 1913, not because Canada's producing power is
so much smaller than her buying power, but because she is growing so
fast that she consumes much of what she produces. To put it another
way, of all Canada exports, the United States takes four-fifths of the
coal, nine-tenths of the copper, four-fifths of the nickel,
ten-elevenths of the gold, two-fifths of the silver, four-fifths of
other minerals, one-third of the fish, one-third of the lumber,
one-fourth of the animals and meat, one-tenth of the grain. It need
not be told here that the other portions of Canada's farm, mine and
lumber exports go almost entirely to Great Britain.
II
It has been estimated that half a billion of American capital is
invested in Canada. A moment's thought reveals how ridiculously below
the mark are these figures. Between 1900 and 1911 by actual count
there entered Canada 650,719 American settlers. Averaging up one year
with another by actual estimate of settlers' possessions at point of
entry, these settlers were possessed of fifteen hundred dollars each in
cash. This represents almost a billion, and almost as many more
American settlers have entered Canada since 1911. This represents not
the investments of the capital class but of small savings. It takes no
account of the nickel mines, the copper mines, the smelters, the silver
mines, the coal lands, the timber limits, the fisheries, the vast
holdings of agricultural lands in the West held for speculative
purposes--for all of which spot cash was paid down in large proportion.
The largest steel plant in the East, the largest coal areas in the
West, the only nickel mines in America, three-quarters of all the
copper and gold reduction works of the West are financed by American
capital. To be more explicit, when the MacKenzie-Mann interests bought
one large coal area in British Columbia, the Hill interests of St. Paul
bought the other large coal area. This does not mean there are not
large coal areas owned by Canadian capital. There are--colossal areas;
but for every big area being worked by Canadian capital there are two
such being worked by American.
Before a single Canadian railroad had wakened up to the fact there were
any mines in East and West Kootenay and the Slocan, American lines had
pushed up little narrow-gauge lines to feed the copper and gold ores
into Butte and Helena smelters. By the time Canadian and British
capital came on the scene in Kootenay the cream had been skimmed from
the profits, and the mines had reached the wildcat stage of beautifully
gilded and engraved stock certificates taking the place of real
profits--of almost worth-nothing shares in worthless holes in the
ground selling on a face value of a next-door profit-yielding neighbor.
The American is without a peer as pioneer on land, in mine, in forest;
but the boomster, who invariably follows on the heels of that pioneer,
is also the most expert "houn' dawg" to rouse the wildcatter.
Canadians have too often wakened up only at the wildcat stage, and
British capital has come in to reorganize inflated and collapsed
properties on a purely investment basis. The American pioneer does
nothing on an investment basis. He goes in on a wild and rampant
dare-devil gamble. If he loses--as lose he often does--he takes his
medicine and never whines. If he wins, the welkin rings.
What happened in Kootenay was largely repeated ten years later in
Klondike and ten years yet later in Cobalt, and it must not be
forgotten that when Canadian capital refused to bond the nickel mines
of Sudbury, it was American capital that dared the risk.
What happened in the mining booms was only a faint foreshadowing of the
furore that broke to a madness in real estate when American settlers
began crossing the boundary in tens and hundreds of thousands a year.
Canadians knew they had wonderfully fertile farming land. Hadn't they
been telling themselves so since confederation, when they pledged the
credit of Canada to build a transcontinental? They knew they had the
most fertile wheat lands on earth, but what was the use of knowing that
when you could not sell those lands for fifty cents an acre? What was
the use of raising forty bushels of wheat to the acre, when you burned
it in the stack or fed it to cattle worth only ten dollars a head,
because you could get neither wheat nor cattle to market? You really
believed you had the best land on earth, but what good did the belief
do you? Sons and daughters forsook the Canadian farmstead for the
United States. Between the early eighties and the early nineties, of
Canada's population of five millions, over a million--some estimates
place it at a million and a half--Canadians left the Dominion for the
United States. You find the place names of Ontario all through
Michigan and Wisconsin and Minnesota and the two Dakotas; and you find
Jean Ba'tiste drifting from the lumber woods of Quebec to the Upper
Peninsula of Michigan and to the redwoods of California and to the
yellow pine uplands of the Southwestern Desert. I have met men who
worked for my brothers in the lumber woods of Wisconsin down among the
yellow pines of the Arizona Desert. All that was back in the decrepit
and languid and hopesick nineties. It was then you could see the skies
of Southern Manitoba luridly aflame at night with wheat stacks it
didn't pay to thresh.
Came a turn of the wheel! Was it Destiny or Providence? We talk
mistily of Cause and Effect, but who drops the Cause that turns the
Wheel? Who of us that witnessed the crazy gold stampede to Kootenay
and the crazier stampede to Klondike could guess that the backwash of
those foolish tidal waves of gold-mad humanity would people the
Northwest? Why, we were mad with alarm over the gold stampede! Men
pitched their homesteads to the winds and trekked penniless for the
mines. Women bought mining shares for a dollar that were not worth ten
cents. Clerks, railroad hands, seamstresses, waitresses--all were
infected by the mania. In vain the wheat provinces pointed out that
one single year's wheat crop would exceed in value all the gold mined
in the North in fifty years. Nothing could stem the madness. You
could pave Kootenay with the fortunes lost there or go to Klondike by
the bones of the dead bleaching the trail.
But behold the unexpected Effect! Adventurers from all the earth
rushing to the gold mines passed over unpeopled plains of seeming
boundlessness. Land in the western states was selling at this time at
from seventeen dollars in the remote sections to seventy-five dollars
an acre near markets. Here was land in these Canadian plains to be had
for nothing but the preemption fee of ten dollars and three years'
residence.
"I didn't take up a homestead meaning to farm it," said a disappointed
fortune seeker to me on the banks of the Saskatchewan. "I did it
because I was dead broke, and it seemed to me the easiest way to make
three thousand dollars. I could earn three dollars a day well-driving,
and then at the end of my homestead term sell this one hundred and
sixty acres for three thousand dollars."
Do you appreciate the amazing optimistic confidence of this bankrupt
argonaut? We could not sell that land for fifty cents an acre. To use
the words of a former Minister of the Interior, "We could not bring
settlers in by the scruff of the neck and dump them on the land."
(There had been fewer than two thousand immigrants the year that
minister made that apology for hard times to an audience in Winnipeg.)
But this penniless settler had seen it happen in his own home state of
Iowa. He had seen land increase in value from nothing an acre to ten
dollars and twenty dollars and seventy-five dollars and one hundred
dollars, and he sat him down on the bare prairie in a tar-papered
shanty to help the same process along in Canada. He never had the
faintest shadow of a doubt of his hopes materializing. He had gambled
on the gold and he had lost; and behold him casting another throw of
the dice in the face of Fate, and gambling on the land; and please
note--he won out. He was one of the multitude who won out of the land
what they had lost on gold--who plowed out of the prairie what they had
sunk in a hole in the ground in a mine!
Another twist of the capricious Wheel of Fate! We didn't send Clifford
Sifton down from the West to boom Canada. We didn't know a boom was
coming. Nobody saw it. Clifford Sifton was one of the youngest
Cabinet Ministers ever appointed in Canada. There was a fight on
between the Province of Manitoba and the Dominion government as to the
right of the province to abolish separate schools. Had the province
exceeded its rights? The dispute was non-religious at first, but
finally developed into a bitter Catholic versus Protestant controversy.
Not all Protestants wanted non-religious schools; but when Catholic
Quebec said that Protestant Manitoba should not have non-religious
schools, a furious little tempest waxed in a furious little teapot.
The entrenched government of Sir John Macdonald, who had died some few
years previously, went down in defeat before Laurier, the Liberal, the
champion of Quebec and at the same time the defender of Manitoba
rights. Cardinal Merry del Val came from Rome, and the dispute was
literally squelched. It was never settled and comes up again to this
day; but the point was the champion of Manitoba, Clifford Sifton,
entered the Dominion Cabinet just as the Klondike boom broke.
He saw the backwash of disappointed gold seekers. He realized the
enormous possibilities of free advertising for Canada, and he launched
such a campaign of colonization for Canada as the most daring optimist
hardly dreamed. Agents were appointed in every hamlet and city and
town in the western states--especially those states like Iowa and
Illinois and Minnesota and Wisconsin, where land was becoming high
priced. The personal testimony of successful farmers was bill-posted
from station platform to remotest barb-wire fence. The country was
literally combed by Sifton agents. Big land companies which had
already exploited colonization schemes in the western states pricked up
their ears and sent agents to spy out the land. Those agents may have
deluded themselves that they went to Canada secretly; it is a safe
wager that Sifton's agents prodded them to activity at one end and
Sifton's agents caught and piloted and plied them with facts at the
other end. I know of land that English colonization companies had
failed to sell at fifty cents an acre that was sold at this time to
these American companies at five dollars and resold by them at fourteen
dollars to thirty dollars.
Such profits are the best advertisement for a propaganda. There
followed a land boom compared to which the gold boom had been mild.
American settlers came in special cars, in special trains, in relays of
special trains. Before Canada had wakened up to it fifty thousand
American settlers had trekked across the border. You met them in Peace
River. You met them at Athabasca. You met them on far reaches of the
Saskatchewan. And land jumped in value from five dollars to fifteen
dollars, from fifteen dollars to thirty dollars an acre. When Canada's
yearly immigration reached the proportions of four hundred
thousand--half Americans--it is not exaggerating to say the prairie
took fire. Villages grew into cities overnight. Edmonton and Calgary
and Moose Jaw and Regina--formerly jumping-off places into a
no-man's-land--became metropolitan cities of twenty-five to fifty
thousand people. If every American settler averaged fifteen hundred
dollars on his person at this period--as customs entries prove--it may
be confidently set down that his value as a producer and worker was
another fifteen hundred dollars. Wheat exports jumped to over one
hundred million dollars a year. Flour mills and elevators financed by
western American capital strung across the prairie like beads on a
string.
If this was an "Americanizing of Canada," it was not a bad thing.
Every part of Canada felt the quickened pulse. Two more
transcontinental railroads had to be built. All-red routes of
round-the-globe steam ships were established; all-red round-the-world
cables were laid. The quickened pulse was Canada's passing from
hobble-de-hoy adolescence with a chip on the shoulder and a tremor in
the throat to big strong, silent, self-confident manhood.
John Bull is a curious and dour foster father in some of his moods. He
never really wakened up to Canada as a desirable place for his numerous
family to settle till he saw Jonathan's coat tails going over the fence
of the border--till somebody began to howl about "the Americanizing of
Canada." Then, in the words of the illustrious Governor-General, "what
was good enough for Americans was good enough" for him. Clifford
Sifton's agents had been combing the United Kingdom as they had combed
the western states. British immigration jumped from almost nothing to
a total of 687,067 in ten years--with accelerating totals every year
since.
If this was "the Americanizing of Canada," it was a good thing for the
Dominion.
III
There was another feature to the tidal wave of four hundred thousand
immigrants a year. The American is a born pioneer, a born gambler, a
born adventurer. The Englishman is a steady-going, dogged-as-does-it
plodder. The American will risk two dollars on the chance of making
ten dollars; he often loses the two dollars, and he often makes the ten
dollars; from his general prosperity, I should say the latter results
oftener than the former; but the American never in the least minds
blazing the trail and stumping his toe and coming a hard fall. John
Bull does. He takes himself horribly seriously. He will never risk
two dollars to gain ten dollars. He will not, in fact, spend the two
dollars till he is sure of four per cent. on it. Four per cent. on two
dollars and ten dollars on two dollars do not belong to the same
category of investment. Jonathan makes the ideal pioneer; John Bull,
the ideal permanent settler who comes in and buys from the pioneer.
If this, too, be "the Americanizing of Canada," it has been a good
thing for the country.
To be sure, there have been hideous horrible abuses. The real estate
boom reached the proportions of a fevered madness before it collapsed.
Americans bought r_an_ches for five dollars an acre and resold them as
r_awn_ches for fifty dollars to young Englishmen who will never make a
cent on their investment; chiefly because fruit trees take from five to
ten years to come to maturity, and because fruit must be near a market,
and because only an expert can succeed at fruit.
If ever wildcat flourished in a gold camp or gambling joint, and that
wildcat did not hie to Canada when the real estate boom broke loose,
the wildcat species not in evidence was too rare to be classified.
Property in small cities sold at New York and Chicago values. Suburban
lots were staked out round small towns in areas for a London or a
Paris, and the lots were sold on instalment plan to small investors,
many of whom bought in hope of resale before payments could accrue.
City taxes for these suburban improvements increased to a great burden.
Fortunes were made and lost overnight. Railroad bonds were guaranteed
plentifully enough to pave the prairie. All this applies chiefly to
city real estate. Inflation beyond investment basis never touched farm
lands; but as a prominent editor remarked, "No fool thing that ever
failed was half as improbable as the fool things that have succeeded.
Men have literally been kicked into fortunes; and the carefulest man
has often been the biggest fool by not biting till the last."
The boom, of course, burst of its own inflation; but it is worthy of
note that the year the boom collapsed immigration reached its highest
figure--four hundred thousand. Whether the boom was good or bad for
Canada is hard to determine. It left a great many fortunes in its wake
and a great many wrecks; but naturally it did for the country what
years of hope, years of dogged silent work, years of self-confidence
could not do--it jolted Canada and the world into a consciousness of
the Dominion's possibilities. It is like the true story of the finding
of coal on Vancouver Island--a miner stubbed his toe and lo, a clod of
earth split into a seam of shining worth!
Practically the very same story of the advent of American energy and
daring and optimism into the lumber industry of Canada could be told;
but it is the same story as of the mines and the land, except that the
Canadians on the ground first reaped larger profits. A few years ago
scarcely an acre in British Columbia was owned by interests outside the
province. To-day as far north as Prince Rupert the great lumbermen of
the United States own the timber limits. Canadians bought these lands
round four dollars and five dollars an acre. They sold at from one
hundred dollars to one thousand dollars. One understands why American
lumbermen to-day demand low tariff on Canadian lumber. East of the
Rockies from Edmonton to Port Arthur the fringe of timber along the
great rivers and lakes is owned by operators of Wisconsin and
Louisiana. In Quebec the most valuable pulp wood limits--the last of
the great pulp wood limits on the continent--are owned by New York
interests. Undoubtedly all this means "the Americanizing of Canada"
industrially. Will it result in the entrance of Big Business into
politics? That is hard to answer. The door is not wide open to Big
Business in politics for reasons that will appear in an account of how
Canada is governed. If Americans have entered so powerfully into
Canadian industrial life, why was reciprocity rejected? That, too, is
an interesting story by itself.
There is one subject on which Canada's inconsistency regarding
"Americanizing influences" is almost laughable. It is the subject of
the influence of periodical literature. Canadians are great
lip-loyalists, but in all the history of Canada they have never
accorded support to a national magazine that enabled that magazine to
become worthy of the name. Facts are very damning testimony here.
Very well--then--let us have the facts! There is one American weekly
which has a larger circulation in every city in Canada than any daily
in any city in Canada. Of the American monthlies of first rank, there
is hardly one that has not a larger circulation in Canada than any
Canadian magazine has ever enjoyed. Even Canadian newspapers are
served by American syndicates and press associations. The influence of
this flood of American thought in the currents of Canadian thought can
not be exaggerated. It is subtle. It is intangible. It is
irresistible. What Americans are thinking about, Canadians
unconsciously are thinking, too. The influence makes for a community
of sentiment that political differences can never disrupt, and it is a
good thing for the race that this is so. It helps to explain why there
is no fort between the two nations for three thousand miles.
It may also be added that no Canadian writer can get access to the
public in book form except through an American publisher. Unless the
author assumes the cost or risk of publication, the Canadian publisher
will rarely issue a book on his own responsibility. He sends the book
to New York or to London, and from New York or London buys plates or
sheets. This compels the Canadian book to have an Imperial or an
American appeal. In literature, the modus operandi works; for the
appeal is universal; but one might conceive of conditions demanding a
purely national Canadian treatment, which New York or London publishers
would not issue, when Canada would literally be damming the springs of
her national literature. Canada considers her population too small to
support a purely national literature. Not so reasons Belgium of
smaller population; nor Ireland; nor Scotland. The fault here is
primarily in the copyright law. A book published first in the United
States gains international copyright. A book published first in Canada
may be pirated in the United States or England; and on such printed
editions no payment can be collected by the author. The profits in
England and the United States were lost to authors on two of the most
popular books ever published by Canadians. [1]
[1] Charles Gordon's _Black Rock_, pirated from his own publisher, sale
half a million; Kirby's _Chien d'Or_, sale one million.