The Irish & Crime in 19th Century North America
May 4, 2010 § 7 Comments
WordPress lets me see what search terms lead people to this site. Usually, they’re predictable, people searching my name, or Griffintown, or things along those lines. But today, there is this term: “explain the strong association between the 19th century irish diaspora and crime?” So, explain I shall.
Yes, this is a stereotype. But behind this stereotype is some kind of truth. Yes, the Irish, especially Catholics in inner cities, tended to find themselves in trouble with the law in disproportionate fashion in the 19th century. This was particularly true in port cities: Montréal, Saint John (NB), Halifax, Boston, New York, Philly. 19th century sailors were hard-living men. And the consequence of that was an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of police stations in those cities. And, yes, a lot of those sailors were Irish Catholics.
There was also the matter of labour violence. The Irish tended to do the kinds of jobs that no one else would, but they also tended to guard their employment jealously, in that if someone else wanted to do their work (free blacks in the States, French Canadians in Québec), they would protect their right to work. Oftentimes with violence when others threatened to undercut their wages (and the Irish tended to do work on very thin margins to start with).
Connected to this was ethnic/racial violence. For example, the Bowery B’hoys Riot of 1857 in the Five Points of Manhattan, where the Irish Catholics who had recently settled there were attacked by the nativist gang, the Bowery B’hoys. Or in York Point, Saint John, in 1849, when the ultra-Protestant Orange Order insisted on marching through an Irish Catholic neighbourhood on the Glorious 12th. Or more internecine battles in places like Philadelphia between black and Irish workers.
As an aside, this has led to one of the most simplistic arguments I’ve ever come across. Noel Ignatiev, in his overly dramatic How the Irish Became White (in order to “become white,” you have to first be considered something other than “white,” and I’m not convinced that the Irish were ever seen this way), argues that slavery essentially lasted another generation in the United States because the Irish Catholic immigrants to New York and Philadelphia, poor working-class immigrants, I might add, refused to throw their lot in with the free black populations of those 2 cities prior to the US Civil War. Had they, he argues, slavery would’ve ended. So, in essence, Ignatiev argues that the Irish “became white” by siding with the Anglo-Protestant hegemons in the United Sates against the blacks. Of course, to have expected anything different is just, well, simple. Why would the Irish side with the blacks? The blacks were the only other group of people down near the bottom of the socio-econo-cultural totem pole with the Irish. So, obviously, they’re going to try to distance themselves.
Anyway, I digress. Political violence. Well, politics were corrupt in the 19th century, pure and simple, whether it was Tammany Hall in New York, or battles against Anglo-Protestant hegemony in Montréal, corruption was everywhere, and violence was a common tactic by all sides. The Irish got their shots in just like everyone else.
But the most common reason why the Irish found themselves in trouble with the law in North America wasn’t any of this. It was the drink. The Irish were a disproportionate number of public drunks in North American cities, at least in the northeast of the US and Eastern Canada, for much of the 19th century. But, before we get into stereotypes of the Irish and the drink, let us remind ourselves of something else: they were the working-classes, they lived hard lives of unsteady and dodgy employment in the factories, ports, and canals of these cities. Their lives were defined by insecurity, in terms of employment, finances, housing. Inner-cities of Boston, Montréal, New York, Baltimore, in the 19th century were, in many ways, worse than they are today. Housing was worse, social conditions were worse, welfare states were worse. And so, not surprisingly, people tended to distract themselves from their problems with alcohol. And not surprisingly, this means that they ran afoul of the law and ended up getting arrested. And the Irish, well, they were a significant chunk of the urban working-classes in these cities. So, no surprise that they appear so frequently in the crime statistics.
Years ago, I was reading a book by my MA supervisor, Jack Little, about state formation in the Eastern Townships of Québec in the mid-19th century. As the Grand Trunk Railway was being built between Montréal and Portland, ME, in the 1850s, Irish navvies flooded the Townships. A rash of crime broke out along the rail line, and Stipendiary Magistrate Ralph Johnston was dispatched out to Sherbrooke to investigate. The results of his investigation surprised him, and in his report to his bosses in Québec City, he stated that the crime was actually committed by non-Irish Catholic, non-navvies. In short, by locals. And the Irish-Catholics got the blame. “In the eyes of too many,” Johnston wrote, “their crimes are to be Irish and Catholic.”
Yup, racial profiling existed in the 19th century too.
Recent Readings on the Irish Diaspora
April 26, 2010 § Leave a comment
As I continue to read, deepening my knowledge of the Irish diaspora in the United States and Canada, I find I’m struck by the changing trends in the historiography, in particular the fact that this literature IS diasporic and transnational in nature. Ever since Kerby Miller published his landmark Emigrants and Exiles in 1985, historians of the Irish in North America have been encouraged to keep an eye on the Irish context. But, for a long time, this was no more than a cursory glance across the Atlantic Ocean, briefly acknowledging what it was that lead the Irish to leave Ireland in the first place.
But, in the past decade or so, a much deeper understanding of the Irish context has taken root in the literature. Diasporic Irish historians have been caught up in the debates in Irish historiography, the revisionists v. the post-revisionists, but even the older discussion between revisionists and nationalists. And what I’m finding interesting is the influence of these Irish historiographical debates on scholars studying the diaspora. It also seems that it is social scientists, rather than historians, who seem to be caught up in these debates. I suppose for historians, historiographical debates are so internalised in our work, to openly comment on them seems redundant, at least for some of us.
Take, for example, Reginald Byron’s 1999 study, Irish America, an overly ambitious title for a case study approach to the diasporic Irish of Albany, NY. Indeed, part of the chip on Byron’s shoulder is that studies of the Irish in the US have focused on the ethnic enclaves of major cities: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, to the detriment of smaller centres, such as Albany. But then the problem is that Albany itself isn’t all that representative of the larger American context, in that it was a predominately Catholic city, and it, too, is a northeastern city. Anyway. Byron is a cynic of the Irish, which is fine, he argues, ultimately, that symbols of Irishness, most notably St. Patrick’s Day, are no longer Irish in nature, they are American, as the Irish have been fully assimilated into the mainstream of American life. To an extent, I agree. He bases his conclusion on 500 oral interviews with “Albanians,” most of whom were people who are of Irish descent, amongst others (German, English, French Canadian, Italian, so on). What he found is that most of the informants had no special knowledge of Ireland and Irish affairs, and did not live their quotidian lives in the Irish fashion, whatever that is. Fair enough, but when you read into the Irish context he covers, in discussing the historical background as to how Albany became so Irish in the first place, one begins to see the connections.
Byron spends a lot of time attempting to portray Ireland as un nation comme les autres, to borrow from the revisionists of Québec historiography. Indeed, this is the very goal of the Irish revisionists, who seek to downplay many of the more traumatic events in Irish history as a means to normalise its history within the mainstream of Western Europe. The problem with this is that there are things that make Ireland exceptional: it was colonised by its neighbour, its Catholic population was oppressed and disenfranchised by the colonising power. Byron scoffs at the common misconception that the Irish were in permanent rebellion in the 19th century. Again, to some extent, I do agree. However, this ignores the fact that the Irish did rebel in 1798, 1847, 1867, and that there were revolutionary, physical force nationalists operated on Irish soil for most of the 19th century leading up to Irish independence and Partition in 1921. Indeed, the response to the 1798 and 1916 rebellions were particularly draconian on the part of the British colonisers.
Indeed, it was this on-going pattern of rebellion that galvanised the Irish diaspora, especially in Canada and the United States, as nationalist circles were strong in both countries. Indeed, it was the Irish in North America who raised funds for the independence struggle “back home,” even if Ireland was a country many diasporic Irish never saw, and only knew through stories and memories of their ancestors and more recent immigrants.
But this also leads to problems, as evidenced in Paul Darby’s Gaelic Games, Nationalism, and the Irish Diaspora in the United States. Darby, who plays Irish football, occasionally comes off more as a fanboy than a scholar in discussing the trials and tribulations of the Gaelic Athletic Association’s American branches, praising their dedication, hard work, and so on, and not acknowledging the American GAA’s biggest problem: an inability to make itself relevant to the diasporic Irish. The GAA, according to Darby, was incredibly successful within circles of Irish immigrants in the cities he studies: New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. But the American GAA faded when immigration from Ireland dried up.
At any rate, the larger issue I have with Darby’s work is that he seems to equate the Irish in North America with Irish nationalism, in that the Irish here were all nationalists. No doubt this stems from studying a particularly nationalist organisation as the GAA. But the GAA didn’t speak for all the Irish in North America, even within the contexts of Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.
Thus, Darby leaves us with a problem that is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Byron. Whereas Byron wishes to downplay the ruptures of Irish history and identity in Albany, NY, Darby seeks to keep those ruptures in his readers’ minds, in order to explain this strong Irish identity amongst his case studies in New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. Surely there is a common ground between Byron and Darby.
Indeed, my own work, as well as that of many others (Rosalyn Trigger and David Wilson, for example) explore the ambivalences and ambiguities of the Irish in North America. It is too simplistic to say, as Byron does, that they became assimilated into the mainstream of North American culture and politics (if they did, JFK wouldn’t have been identified as an Irish-Catholic American), or to say that the Irish in North America = Irish nationalists, as Darby does.
Urban Archaeology & Material Culture
April 21, 2010 § 1 Comment
Recently, I’ve been thinking about urban archaeology and material culture. Given my research interests, I suppose it’s only natural that I would also think about the actual physical landscape of the city and how it shifts and changes with time, populations, and construction.
Years ago, I visited Montréal’s Pointe-à-Callière Museum, in the Vieux-Port. Point-à-Callière is the site of the first settlement of Ville-Marie, where Paul de Chomedy, Sieur de Maisonneuve decided to plant his new settlement in 1642. The museum itself is based around 3 archaeological digs (Pointe-à-Callière iteslf, as well as Place Royale and Place D’Youville), and artefacts from these archaeological digs are on display. But it’s not just that. In the underground of the museum, down where the digs took place, one can physically see the layers of city and settlement on Pointe-à-Callière, from the initial aboriginal inhabitants through the founding of Ville-Marie, to the governor’s mansion that was once located there, through urbanisation, industrialisation, and so on. The physical remnants of the buildings, and artefacts are there for the viewer to see.
My favourite part is the William sewer, which canalised, and placed underground, the Rivière Petite Saint-Pierre, which itself had become a stinking cesspool as it flowed above ground through what was once the Nazareth Fief (and later Griffintown), into the St. Lawrence, hence creating Pointe-à-Callière. Apparently (at least according to its entry on Wikipedia), the museum has plans to open up and expose the Petite Saint-Pierre, as well as the old location of St. Ann’s Market in Place D’Youville, as well as the remains of the Parliament House of the United Province of Canada, which was burned down in the Rebellion Losses Bill Riot in 1849 (just imagine a riot today in a democracy burning down the house of parliament!).
Anyway, this is where I first thought about urban archaeology, but I never really gave it much more thought in terms of my academic interests until a couple of summers ago, whilst walking along the Canal Lachine, where, at the St. Gabriel locks, Parks Canada has dug up the foundations and remnants of a factory on the northeastern side of the locks.
Andy Riga, over at The Gazette, has an interesting blog, “Metropolitan News;” his latest post is about the public toilets, disused and buried under Place D’Armes. During the reign of Mayor Camillien Houde in the 1930s, partly as a public works project, Vespesiennes were built in Carré Saint-Louis, Square Cabot, amongst other places, and public washrooms were constructed in places including Place D’Armes. The washrooms there were shuttered in 1980, victim of many things, including Montréal’s notoriously crumbling infrastructure. Since then, there have been a few plans or attempts at plans to revive the public toilets, but they are in serious decay and would cost too much money to renovate them, due to years of neglect, water damage, and humidity. So they remain buried under Place D’Armes which, like Dorchester Square downtown, is undergoing a massive renovation.
So notions of what’s underfoot have long interested me as I’ve wandered about the city, but especially in the sud-ouest, Griffintown and Pointe-Saint-Charles, as well as Saint-Henri, where I’ve lived for most of the past decade.
Also, too, there is the influence of Prof. Rhona Richman Kenneally of Concordia University, who encouraged me to give some thought to material culture in approaching my dissertation and my work on Griffintown. Ultimately, as interesting and exciting as I found approaches to material culture in my studies, there was no way to fit it into the dissertation (the same can be said of proper mapping of the Griff). But I remained intrigued by these ideas.
So, with all of this in mind, I finally got my hands on Stephen A. Brighton’s Historical Archaeology of the Irish Diaspora, based around digs in the Five Points of Manhattan and in Newark, New Jersey. Using the archaeological evidence, Brighton constructs an argument centred on the material culture of 19th century Irish-American life in these two urban centres. Using this methodology, Brighton is able to answer a lot of questions we cannot answer using more traditional historical methodologies. Brighton has the remnants of the material culture of the Irish immigrants and Irish-Americans. Finding glasswares with symbols of Irish nationalism on them suggests that the movement had some traction amongst the tenement dwellers of the Five Points.
My favourite part of his analysis, though, comes in relation to medicine. The artefacts from the Five Points come from the 1850s and 60s, whereas those in the New Jersey digs are from the 1880s. In other words, the Five Points Irish were more recent arrivals and lived in greater poverty than those in New Jersey. Thus, their access to the nascent public health system was different than that of their compatriots in Jersey. Brighton found that the Five Points Irish relied more on cure-alls and pseudo-medical tonics to cure what ailed them. Throughout the dig site are bottles that once contained tonics and cures, whereas in New Jersey, the digs uncovered evidence of reputable medicines. This, concludes Brighton, is symptomatic of that poverty but also, too, perhaps of the alienation of mid-19th century Irish immigrants from the mainstream of American culture and society (remember, the 1850s also saw the Know-Nothing movement in the USA and the Bowery B’hoys Riot of 1857).
So what Brighton offers up here is a piece of evidence to support what historians already know from more traditional sources. And this brings me to my problem with Brighton’s book: it doesn’t add much in the way of new information to our historical knowledge. Rather than challenge historians’ traditional takes on the Irish in the Five Points (especially), Brighton confirms what we already knew with the archaeological evidence.
Montreal Mosaic
March 31, 2010 § Leave a comment
I have an article published on the Montreal Mosaic website on the Montréal Shamrocks Hockey Club, based on the article I published. You can read it here.
Positive Feedback
March 27, 2010 § Leave a comment
A few months ago, I published an article in a book edited by John Chi-Kit Wong of the University of Western Washington in Bellingham. The book was entitled, Coast to Coast: Hockey in Canada to the Second World War (University of Toronto Press, 2009), and my article was entitled “‘Scientific Aggression’: Class, Manliness, Class, and Commercialisation in the Shamrock Hockey Club, Montreal.”
Today, John forwarded the authors a review of the book from the H-Arete listserv, which deals with sport history, written by Jason Blake, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Blake had this to say about my article:
A few chapters show a keen interest in narrative, examining individual newspaper reports and trends in sports reporting. In “‘Scientific Aggression’: Irishness, Manliness, Class, and Commercialization in the Shamrock Hockey Club of Montreal, 1894-1901,” John Matthew Barlow argues that reporters in Montreal “became less concerned with the idea of fair play” and “more interested with winning and losing” (37) long before the amateur debate died. In a special subsection, Barlow provides cogent Ð almost literary Ð readings of individual press accounts. Important, too, is his highlighting of how self-consciously the journalists created stories of games. Consider this 1900 pronouncement: “Narrative in the superlative can only convey an imperfect sense of the paragon of perfection and sensation detail of this, the last and premier exhibition of a week’s great hockey” (64). It’s a shame Aethlon was not around then.
Very nice to get such good feedback on my first publication.
An Episode in the Life of a Diasporic City
February 5, 2010 § Leave a comment
Montréal is a city of literature. It has been the home of many great novelists, both of Canadian and international reknown. It is also a city that has been the setting of many novels, bestsellers at home and abroad. For years, I lived in the neighbourhood that was the setting of Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion, Saint-Henri. Prior to that, I called Duddy Kravitz’s Mile End home. Presently, I call the setting of Balconville home. The Plateau-Mont-Royal has been immortalised by the likes of Michel Tremblay, Mordecai Richler, and Rawi Hage. One of the best academic reads of recent years was Sherry Simon’s Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City. Simon explores the cultural and social history of her Montréal through the literature, in both official languages, that depict the city’s multicultural landscape and lived experience.
Montréal’s literary authors, to say nothing of Simon herself, have projected and reflected the experience of immigrant groups and their diasporas through their works. It was from Richler’s works that I learned so much of the Jewish experience of Montréal, that I came to understand the city as a Jewish one. Indeed, Richler was instrumental in re-casting Montréal as something more than just a bifurcated locale, a city caught between French and English, in that he inserted the city’s Jews into the dialogue, his writing maturing with the city throughout the 2nd half of the 20th century.
Today, however, in trying to find a bowl of matzoh ball soup, I was kind of stunned by just how much Richler’s Montréal has changed. As I wandered through the city’s downtown core, both searching for the soup and running a handful of other errands, I got to thinking about not just how diasporas inform and reflect off each other, but also how diasporas evolve, shift, and replace one another. This was especially true, I thought, in a 5-block section of downtown just west of Concordia’s downtown campus. In this stretch, there are, amongst other things, a German restaurant that has been there for most of my life, as well as newer Russian, Indian, Iranian, Lebanese, Irish, Armenian, Mexican, Central American, Chinese, and Thai restaurants. And not a single place that served matzoh ball soup. During Richler’s years studying at Sir George Williams University, one of the founding institutions of Con U, I’m sure matzoh ball soup could be found in the vicinity of the campus. Of course, one would not have found the plethora of “ethnic” food (the term is in quotations because it is such an unsatisfactory one to use in this instance).
This is neither a lament nor a complaint, I eventually found the matzoh ball soup at Dunn’s, an old Jewish deli, on Metcalfe. It just is what it is, an episode in the life of multicultural, diasporic city.
Web Resource: Transnational Urbanism in the Americas
January 27, 2010 § Leave a comment
This just came through on the H-Urban listserv. Cambridge University Press has launched a multimedia companion, Transnational Urbanism in the Americas, a companion to a special issue of the journal, Urban History. This is from CUP:
In this special issue, a project of the journal’s North American Editorial Board, six authors from Canada, France, and the United States explore a sweeping range of historical issues that linked cities of the Americas to the rest of the globe. They write: “The emerging transnational paradigm suggests intriguing new possibilities for the historical study of cities. Transnationalism challenges us to map out the patterns of human life in neways as they cross and construct cities, nations, and other crucial formations. Even as this new paradigm stimulates a fundamental rethinking of urban historical scholarship, the Internet and the World Wide Web are also challenging our received modes of scholarly communication.
This multimedia companion meets these challenges through a hybrid of cartographic, narrative, and photographic presentation, featuring the publishing debut of HyperCities, an online, open-source research and educational platform for studying and interacting with layered hypermedia histories of city and global spaces.
Access to the on-line companion is free. Subscribers get access to the journal itself.
Diaspora and the Haitian Earthquake
January 25, 2010 § Leave a comment
I spent a chunk of my weekend reading theory on diaspora and transnationalism, as I begin the process of writing the Introduction to the book, so these topics were fresh in my mind when I read The Gazette today. Today, here in Montréal, a group of global bigwigs, including US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, as well as foreign ministers from Canada, Japan, Brazil, and a hanful of other nations, plus the UN, are meeting with Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive to discuss rebuilding plans for Haiti.
Upon arriving in Montréal yesterday and meeting with Québec Premier Jean Charest, Bellerive told reports that the Haitian diaspora is fundamental to the re-building of his nation:
We need a direct, firm and continuous support from them. This cataclysm has amplified the movement (of people) out of Haiti, unfortunately. We will have to work hard to encourage them to come back to Haiti…I’m very happy that the help has now arrived and is being distributed, because we had a lot of logistical problems in my country.
In other words, the Haitian diaspora is a transnational one, as it stretches across several nations in addition to Haiti (including Canada and the US), and a dynamic relationship exists between Haiti and its diaspora, diasporic Haitians have not just settled in places like Montréal and New York City, they also continue to send money back to Haiti, establish charities and trusts, and so on. In the days since the earthquake there, and its aftershocks, I’ve been struck by the actions of prominent diasporic Haitians, such as Indianapolis Colts’ receiver Pierre Garçon, former Montréal Canadiens’ tough-guy Georges Laraques, Philadelphia 76ers’ Samuel Dalembert, and musicians such as Wyclef Jean and the Arcade Fire’s Régine Chassagne, amongst others. They, along with less-well-known Haitians, have been working feverishly raising funds, visiting Haiti, helping in rescue efforts and so on. Indeed, the Haitian diaspora has been instrumental in not just raising consciousness, but in keeping Haiti in the global consciousness beyond the initial burst of news of the earthquake, to work towards a rebuilding plan for a devastated nation.
Bellerive’s recognition of that is impressive, as national leaders tend not to recognise the importance of their nations’ diasporas, even in times of trouble. And yet, transnational diasporas are central to the homeland nation, as the Haitian example makes clear.
The Irish Are Not, and Were Not, British
January 23, 2010 § 3 Comments
There are very few things in academia that get my goat quite like statements such as the following: “In all, there were 2,544,101 British born living in foreign counties [in 1861]. Most of these were accounted for by emigrants to the United States [,] 2,476,132 (of whom 65% were Irish and 4.5% were Scots).” (my italics)
The Irish don’t belong in this categorisation. Ireland isn’t part of Britain. Nor was it ever. The island itself, of course, is part of the British Isles, but that is not what people refer to when referring to “Britain.” Britain is the other major island, on which the nations of England, Scotland, and Wales can be found. In 1801, an Act of Union was forced upon the Irish following the failed United Irishmen uprising of 1798. But the kingdom created out of this union was known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Today, the UK is comprised of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
This annoys me for two reasons: 1) I am an historian of the Irish diaspora and, I also include myself in that diaspora, and 2) it is just historically, definitionally, and factually wrong. Prior to Irish independence in 1922, it is true that people born in Ireland received UK (more colloquially referred to as British) citizenship. But so did Canadians, prior to the creation of Canadian citizenship on 1 January 1947. It is also true that one can claim UK citizenship based upon ancestral UK citizenship of someone (i.e.: a grandparent) born in pre-independence Ireland. But that doesn’t make the Irish British, either historically or today. It made the Irish citizens of the UK, just as someone who is from Northern Ireland is today a UK citizen (although, due to the Repbublic of Ireland’s citizenship laws, some Northern Irish/UK citizens can also claim Irish citizenship).
The point is that the relationship between Ireland and Britain (or perhaps more properly termed, England) is complicated. But it’s just laziness that causes academics to lump the Irish in with the British in discussing emigration.
When writing my dissertation, my supervisor and I had an argument about some random fact of the Irish past (I was right, it turned out), but he made a good point: as an academic and a scholar, you don’t want to make little stupid errors, because they sap your credibility. He was bang on. I see stupid errors, even typos, and I find myself questioning the credibility of the source. I read historically, definitionally, technically, and factually incorrect statements in peer-reviewed scholarship, and I find myself dismissing the larger argument being made. Call me fickle, call me a stickler. Factual correctness matters.
Radicalism and Diaspora in Canada
January 15, 2010 § 2 Comments
Yesterday, the ring-leader of the Toronto 18, Zakaria Amara, apologised to Canadians for his role in plotting to blow up U-Haul trucks outside of the Toronto Stock Exchange, the Toronto CSIS HQ, and a military base just outside the city. It is worth noting that the Toronto 18’s goal was specific, to convince the Canadian government to pull out of Afghanistan. Amara said that he “deserves nothing less than [Canadians’] complete contempt.” At least according to The Globe & Mail, he went onto to explain how it was he was radicalised in suburban Mississauga.
Starting off by quoting the Quran, in hindsight, [Amara] said his interpretation of Islam was “naïve and gullible,” and that his belief system made worse by the fact he had “isolated himself from the real world.”
Today he told the court he has been rehabilitated by his time awaiting trial in jail – mostly through his interactions with fellow prisoners who challenged his hate-filled ideology. He promised he would change from a “man of destruction” to a “man of construction.
He also apologised to Canada’s Muslim community, noting that he had brought unwelcome attention and scrutiny.
The Globe also reports on Amara’s accounting of his radicalisation in suburban Mississauga, a multicultural locale with a population larger than all but a handful of Canadian cities (Toronto, Montréal, Vancouver, and Ottawa-Gatineau), one that sounds not all that dissimilar than what Marisa Urgo describes in Northern Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC. As she notes, Northern Virginia has produced a fair number of radicalised young men. Mississauga, on the other hand, has not, other than the Toronto 18. In Mississauga, Amara isolated himself from all but a small handful of radicals, and they fed off each other.
In prison, Amara claims to have seen the light, befriending a former stock broker who worked at the very exchange Amara had planned to blow up. He, a Sunni Muslim, also befriended both a Jew and a Shi’a Muslim. In his radical era, Amara had nothing but contempt for Jews and Shi’a. But now, he says, he’s seen how wrong he was.
Amara’s psychiatric examination in prison suggests that he became radicalised as a means of escapism, the drudgery of life, of having had to drop out of university to help support and raise a daughter, as well as the pain from his parents’ divorce.
One thing that strikes me the most, though, about the discourse surrounding the Toronto 18, is this horror that Canada might have produced radicalised terrorists from a diasporic community. Canadians seem genuinely befuddled that this could happen in his multicultural nation where immigrants and their progeny are generally welcomed (not that there isn’t racism in Canada, there is. A lot).
But, this is where being an historian is kind of fascinating. As I have argued over at the CTlab, historians get to take the long-view, we see context, and depth. We don’t, or at least we shouldn’t, engage in knee-jerk reactions. And so, I would like to point out that this isn’t the first and only time that diasporic radicals have trod on Canadian soil.
Indeed, the neighbourhood I study, Griffintown, here in Montréal was once one of the hottest of hotbeds of radicalism, in the 1860s, 150 years ago. Then, it was the Fenians, a group of Irish nationalists who were always more successful in the diaspora than in Ireland itself. Indeed, their plan wasn’t all that different than that of the Toronto 18. The Fenians in the United States and Canada dreamed of seizing and conquering Canada and holding it as ransom against the British in return for Irish independence. And Griffintown was the centre of Fenianism in Canada.
The Fenians met secretly around Griffintown and Pointe-Saint-Charles, plotting how to act as a 5th column when their American brethren invaded, and how they would then take over the country. The Griffintown Fenians were also the ones responsible for the first political assassination in Canadian history (there have been only 2 in total), that of Father of Confederation and Member of Parliament for Montréal West, Thomas D’Arcy McGee on 7 April 1868 on Sparks St. in Ottawa. McGee had been a radical in his youth in Ireland, a member of the Young Ireland movement there in the 1840s, but, after relocating to Montréal, he had become convinced of the Canadian cause, and during the particular contentious 1867 federal elections (the first Canadian election), McGee had outed the Fenians in the pages of The Gazette. Not surprisingly, this didn’t go over well, and the Fenians, acting, it seems, independently of their American counterparts, and Patrick Whelan shot him.
Then, as now, there was all sorts of anguish over the thought of terrorists (though this word wasn’t used for the Fenians) on Canadian soil. Anglo-Canadians couldn’t understand why the Irish would wish to carry their old world battles into the new Dominion, and they tended to see Irish-Catholics as a singular whole. Not unlike how Canadians in the early 21st century have responded to the Toronto 18, in fact. Not that this exonerates either the Fenians or the Toronto 18 as radicalised diasporic terrorists, but the long view is always interesting in and of itself.
Matthew Barlow 