1913

by Charles Emmerson

  Mannix did not intend to be a quiet Archbishop, a pacifier. He intended to be an activist on behalf of what he saw as his own downtrodden and misrepresented people, Victoria’s Irish. He launched into attacks against the casual anti-Irish attitudes of the establishment newspapers of Melbourne, where the Irish, who were generally poorer than those of English or Scottish origin, were presented as habitual whiskey drinkers, uneducated and unreliable. That the iron-mask-wearing bushranger Ned Kelly – a cold-blooded murderer to the establishment, but a fighter for economic justice to others – had been an Irish-Australian was not lost on Victorians. A quarter of a century after his death in a shoot-out in 1880, the population of Melbourne was treated to a feature-length movie of his story and that of his gang, the first feature made in Australia, or anywhere else in the world. There had, of course, been Irish judges, Irish politicians and Irish premiers as well as Irish criminals. Mannix sought to remind Victorians of these contributions, and challenge anti-Irish prejudices.

  He also intended to be a stout defender of his religion, to which his nationality was so closely related. As in other parts of the British world – including Manitoba, where the Catholic population was predominantly French-speaking, adding another layer of mistrust – the debate between Catholics and Protestants covered the question of mixed marriages (recently made more difficult by the Catholic Church) and, perennially, the dispute over the proper relationship between the Church and state education.55 To that end, Mannix aimed to turn the city’s Catholic population – between a fifth and a quarter of the total – into a powerful bloc of voters he could ultimately mobilise for confessional causes. To some, this looked like gang politics. Secular-minded Australians saw an unwelcome attempt to stir up religious feeling. Mannix’s suggestion that Catholics in Victoria had not just been slighted in living memory, but actively persecuted by the police and the courts, brought a stark warning from the Argus: ‘there is danger in persons in high places making misstatements – danger to themselves’.56

  What went almost completely unmentioned in Melbourne were the people who had come before the British: Australia’s aboriginal people. Occasionally they were thought of as an ornamental addition to Australian culture, as a curiosity. More often, they were ignored. Aboriginal people were counted quite separately from the rest of the population in the Australian census statistics. The Victorian Year Book 1913–1914 noted that their number in Victoria had fallen from between 5,000 and 15,000 at the creation of the colony in 1851, to just 643 in 1913. ‘The race is gradually but surely dying out’, noted the Year Book. This, the reader was invited to conclude, was both natural and good – ignoring the role whites played in creating the conditions under which the aboriginal population in Australia had fallen in the first place, through disease and conflict. In accounts of Australian history, aboriginals appeared at the moment of Australia’s ‘discovery’ by Captain Cook, and then more or less disappeared from the historical record. There was only ‘one ending’ possible to the conflict between ‘stone and steel’ – between the backwardness of aboriginal societies and the industrial metal-working whites – noted a history book Australia Unlimited in 1910, and that conflict had ended long ago.57 As far as the law was concerned Australia had been terra nullius – an empty land – when white men arrived to colonise it. In 1913, in Melbourne, aboriginals were seldom seen, never heard.

  In Winnipeg, things were different. The native Assiniboine people were more present than aboriginals were in Victoria – in the name of the city’s main river and even in the name of the city itself, as well as in parts of the countryside around. Amongst the pictures of bank buildings, new houses, bustling streets, and harvested fields which made up the bulk of The Illustrated Souvenir of Winnipeg there was room for one picture marked ‘Indians of the North-West’.58 The Métis, a mixed-race group who had been the masters of Manitoba in the heyday of the Hudson Bay Company in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were less easily dealt with. Their role in Winnipeg’s history was more recent, and more raw.

  Canadian veterans parading on Dominion Day in July 1913 included those who had fought against Métis rebellions on two occasions, in 1869–1870 and in 1885. In the first rebellion, the Métis were protesting against the 1869 transfer of Rupert’s Land – a large area of central Canada comprising all of what would become Manitoba, and parts of what would later become Saskatchewan and Alberta – from the authority of the venerable Hudson Bay Company to the ownership of the newly created Dominion of Canada. This transfer, the Métis correctly feared, would push them off their land – to which they had historic access but not legal title – bring in more outsiders to run their lives, and challenge both their culture and habits of government. A local French-speaking Métis leader, Louis Riel, established a provisional government in the Red River colony to defend Métis interests. This was deemed illegitimate and ultimately treasonable by Ottawa. Troops were sent to suppress the colony. Riel was forced to flee. In 1870, the province of Manitoba was born, built on the ashes of a failed rebellion.

  A number of land treaties were subsequently signed by representatives of the government of Canada with native indigenous groups, under which any rights they had to large tracts of land across Manitoba and other parts of north-western Canada were given up, in return for the confirmation of rights on smaller portions of territory and some assistance with adapting to their changed circumstances. But Louis Riel and the Métis remained a thorn in the side of central government for years. Some suggested an amnesty for Riel. Others hoped he could be bribed or otherwise compelled to disappear, perhaps by moving to the United States (which, for a while, he did). But Riel was not easily shunted aside. Instead, he was elected as a Manitoban representative to the Dominion parliament in Ottawa – but prevented from taking his seat there. Later, in 1885, the increasingly unhinged Riel led another rebellion, this time in the Northwest Territories (in an area which is now part of Saskatchewan). This time he was caught, tried for treason and hanged. Many Canadians, particularly French-speaking Canadians – including some in Manitoba – criticised the way in which the trial was handled, and the harshness of the sentence. Some chose to see him as a romantic hero, even as a political martyr. English-speaking Manitobans, on the other hand, saw Riel as a treasonous brigand, a reminder of just how recently they had assumed control over their province and, because French-speakers seemed to cherish the memory of Riel, a reminder of the questionable loyalties of some of their compatriots.

  The majority of the population of Melbourne and Winnipeg in 1913 would no doubt have considered the slow extinction of the aboriginal population of Australia, the effective cantonment of the indigenous population in Canada, and the suppression of the Métis rebellions as the price to be paid for the spread of Britannic culture, civilisation and order. Was this not the lesson of history? Older peoples were superseded and pushed out by newer and more dynamic populations. Was that not what frontiers were about? Indeed was this not what progress – British progress – demanded? As they saw it, the continuing challenges posed by indigenous peoples to the Britannic fabric of Canada and Australia in 1913 would be overcome by the march of time. Soon enough, prior peoples would be assimilated, crushed, or forgotten.

  BUENOS AIRES

  Southern Star

  In the mind of the foreign investor in 1913, there was perhaps one destination with more promise for the future than Canada, Australia or even the United States: Argentina. ‘In Capel Court, the home of the London Stock Exchange’, wrote Reginald Lloyd a few years previously, ‘the names of the Argentine railways are as familiar as those of India, and the stock of its towns vies in publicity with British municipal scrip’.1 The darling of the world’s largest financial market, Argentina borrowed more money from London than Australia, and soaked up nearly as much British investment as Canada.2 Despite having been forced to renege on her national debts in the 1890s, Argentina was generally seen as a safe bet by 1913. The convertibility of the peso into gold, coupled with the surer financi
al footing of the country, provided adequate assurance of the country’s fundamental economic health to investors. Within the last forty years the population of the country as a whole had swollen from two to seven million. Buenos Aires had grown from the size of Melbourne in 1869 to more than double the Victorian capital by 1913, her exports flooding on to the world market.3

  The speed and scale of change in the country was vertiginous. In the 1870s Argentina had imported wheat. Now she was one of the world’s largest exporters, the massive grain elevators along the shore of the Rio de la Plata the first thing that a visitor arriving in Buenos Aires from abroad would see, long before they caught sight of the city itself. Shipments of frozen beef had increased five times over between the first years of the twentieth century and 1913; these were carried to European markets, principally Britain, by frigoríficos – huge refrigerated vessels. The local Baedeker – really more of a thinly disguised prospectus – recommended tourists visit the La Negra slaughterhouse in order to marvel at the efficiency of the system of slaughter and refrigeration, every bit as impressive as the manufacture of Henry Ford’s automobiles in Detroit, a wonder of the modern world.4 Georges Clemenceau – French journalist, newspaper proprietor and former Prime Minister – was one of the many prominent foreign visitors drawn to the allure of Buenos Aires’ success. He was shown around the La Negra plant by the half-French son of the owner, and found the whole process of slaughter and refrigeration performed with ‘a rapidity so disconcerting that the innocent victim of our [meat-eating] habits finds himself in the sack ready for freezing, with all his insides neatly packed into tins, before he has had time to think’.5

  Alongside the frigoríficos – and sometimes carrying cargoes of meat themselves – passenger vessels plied routes to Southampton, Liverpool, Naples, Marseilles, Genoa and Hamburg.6 The Italian lines were particularly busy, carrying the bulk of Argentina’s new immigrants and many of the 100,000 seasonal workers who came to help at harvest time and returned to Italy when their work was done in Argentina. On land, a map of the country showed a network of railway lines running into tens of thousands of miles, stretching out from the capital city to reach large inland estates – the estancias – where so much of Argentina’s wealth was generated. Nearer to the capital, 1913 saw a bumper harvest of peaches, pears, apples, grapes and figs, all of which could now, with the introduction of the automobile and motor trucks, be brought to Buenos Aires market stalls within twenty-four hours of being picked.7 ‘One wishes to conjure up this image in front of the readers’ eyes as with the cinematograph’, Baedeker noted of the change in Argentina’s countryside.8 It was an apt metaphor: any photograph of Argentinean economic prosperity would be out of date before it was developed.

  Observers concurred that this was a moving picture that, in 1913, had only just started. The same forces which were at work around Winnipeg or Melbourne had been evident in the transformation of the hinterland of Buenos Aires from colonial subsistence backwater into industrial-scale farming over the last few decades: the availability of good land, the global demand for agricultural commodities, and the integration of global transport. And those forces had ample scope to run for years to come on the pampas. There was land aplenty in the provinces of Cordoba or San Luis, noted the local Standard newspaper, cheap compared to land around Melbourne and ‘not infested with rabbits or drought’.9 What Argentina needed above all, then, was money and people, investment and immigrants – the first to build Argentina’s future, the other to populate it with Argentineans, a hundred million of them one day perhaps. ‘It is a truly wonderful prospect that lies before the country’, opined Reginald Lloyd, considering Argentina’s future development, ‘some of its features may be marred by world changes of which we at present have no conception, but if Argentines are only true to themselves no ordinary vicissitudes can arrest the steady march of their destiny’.10

  Well-heeled Argentineans, already renowned for their fierce patriotism, dared to dream that one day, not so distant, Argentina would be to southern America what the United States was to the north. When Theodore Roosevelt paid homage to the star of the south in November 1913, the man who had extended the Monroe Doctrine into a creed of American imperialism recognised that in Argentina, at least, American guardianship against European depredation, even if only theoretical, had been overtaken by events. ‘You need no protection’, he flattered an audience of upper-crust Argentineans gathered in the Teatro Colón, a newly built opera house the locals considered the equal of any in Europe, ‘you are fit to be the champion of your own Monroe doctrine’.11 Coming from a former US President, at a time when Mexico was under threat of US intervention, with the so-called ABC countries – Argentina, Brazil, Chile – demanding they be consulted on matters concerning the Americas, Roosevelt’s recognition of Argentinean greatness could not but be rapturously received. ‘Thunders of plaudits made the great theatre re-echo’, wrote a reporter from the Buenos Aires Herald, ‘ladies assembled in hundreds in the boxes showered down bouquets of posies and flowers to show their appreciation’.12

  Twins: The Manitoba Legislative building in Winnipeg, begun in 1913.

  Buenos Aires was front and centre in the Argentinean economic miracle. The city dominated the country, home to one-fifth of its population. It had no serious rival, whether as a centre of commerce – the northern port of Rosario handling one-sixth the amount of international trade passing through Buenos Aires – or as a political, cultural or administrative centre. To foreigners, the city represented Argentina as much as Paris represented France, or New York the United States. Its splendour became a matter of national honour.

  As recently as 1880 the city had consisted mostly of single-storey buildings, an overgrown Spanish village centred on a main square, the Plaza de Mayo. Since then the government had spent a small fortune gentrifying the place, commissioning new buildings – including the Italian-designed Congress, which Clemenceau compared to the US Capitol – widening the city’s streets, and transforming Buenos Aires into a European metropolis which combined ornate turn-of-the-century grandeur with the blessings of modern engineering.13 In a relatively short space of time, Buenos Aires had become:

  Twins: The Congress of the Argentine Republic, Buenos Aires, finished in 1906.

  A city of great docks and private palaces, imposing public and commercial edifices, well paved, scrupulously clean streets, and almost too many electric trams; a city of handsome railway termini, into which are daily poured the seemingly illimitable riches of Argentina; an admirably lighted city … a city of plazas and parks, stately avenues and attractive racecourses … a city of fine theatres, very modest churches, elegant shops, and surpassingly graceful women … The metropolis of the Argentine nation easily invites comparison with the Babylons of the twentieth century. The stranger, whom she absorbs in tens of thousands yearly, involuntarily salutes her with the epithet of the great, and speedily falls beneath her spell!14

  In December 1913 the city opened its first underground railway line, the first in the southern hemisphere. ‘Nothing so much as the convenience of this important modern means of urban transport … could serve to make eloquently manifest the colossal development of the city’, the local representative of the Anglo-Argentine Tramways Company said at the inauguration ceremony.15 The Mayor of Buenos Aires, Joaquín Samuel de Anchorena, continued: ‘To us has fallen the good fortune to be the first to enjoy the enormous benefits such as exist in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, New York, the model cities par excellence in urban development’.16 The builders of the line were promptly dispatched to give lectures about it in Brussels and Berlin.17

  Porteños (as inhabitants of the great port-city were known) were growing used to Buenos Aires being mentioned in the same breath as the great cities of Europe or the United States. Already their city covered more land than central Paris and its population was within striking distance of Vienna’s. The zoo had as wide a range of animals as any around the world, boasting a polar bear, lions, cheetahs, ele
phants, rhinoceroses, giraffes, and Latin American jaguars. Buenos Aires was a favoured destination for transatlantic tours of the great opera and ballet companies of Europe. A few months before President Roosevelt spoke at the Teatro Colón in September 1913, the boards of the theatre creaked to the acrobatics of ‘Russian dancers who took London by storm’, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (though Diaghilev himself, being prone to sea-sickness, did not follow his company on the Latin American leg of their tour).18 For a month, Tamara Karsavina and Vaslav Nijinsky, whose performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring had scandalised the Parisian critics earlier in the year, charmed the audiences of Buenos Aires with a repertoire stretching from popular favourites such as Swan Lake to Scheherazade and the shocking L’Après-midi d’un Faune, via ballet choreographed to the music of Weber, Tcherepnin, Borodin and Schumann. (Between performances, Nijinsky found time to get married.) A few snarls aside – Nijinsky described as ‘rather ape-like’ in Scheherazade – the performances were counted superb, every bit the equal, if not better, than presentations in London or Paris.19 ‘The vast theatre was packed from stalls to gallery’, noted the Buenos Aires Herald on one of the Ballets Russes’ last nights in Buenos Aires, ‘and from all parts the applause was spontaneous as it was sustained’.20 Twelve curtain calls ensued. No longer living in the shadow of the European metropolises but instead participating in the most sensational aspects of their common cultural life, would Buenos Aires one day be their equal?

  As in many other parts of the world, though Argentina was not formally part of the British Empire, the tentacles of British influence wrapped themselves around Buenos Aires’ commercial life. The language of business was English. In the boardrooms of most Argentine railway companies the vast majority of the board members – and always the chairman – was British (or at least Anglo-Argentine). One-third of Argentina’s imports – including the bulk of its machinery – came from Britain.21 So did three-fifths of its investment (including nearly the totality of foreign investment in the railways). Many of the British community in Buenos Aires worked as clerks in British-owned banks. All this was a reflection of a long-standing economic partnership between the two countries, established as long ago as 1825, when Britain, having given up on direct imperial control of the Argentine, recognised the independence of the new republic of Argentina in return for a free trade agreement.