I
blogged before about the strength of the Orange Order locally in Toronto.
Canadian Orange Ordeer was surpriusingly strong, and as
this study of the distribution of Orange Order members worldwide shows, Ontario was quite prominent.
Canadian (including Newfoundland) membership exceeded that in Ireland by the turn of the century, despite having a similar Protestant population base. Canadian membership peaked in 1920, at which time Canada accounted for almost sixty percent of international membership (if we exclude the smaller jurisdictions of the United States, Australasia and Eire it is 61.6 percent). The Canadian lodges also had twice the membership of their Northern Irish counterparts at this point! Sharp membership decline in much of Canada outside Newfoundland in the 1920-38 period reduced the Canadian advantage so that by the end of the Second World War, Northern Ireland had edged ahead of Canada. The 'Ulsterization' of the Order continues to this day with over 60 percent of members now based in Northern Ireland. The Canadian organization has experienced such heavy decline that there is now little difference in size between the Scottish, English and Canadian branches of the organization!
In Canadian terms, Ontario, New Brunswick and Newfoundland have been the leading Orange provinces. Yet New Brunswick's prominence belongs more to the nineteenth than the twentieth century. Its 11 percent share of Canadian membership in 1901 had declined to six percent by 1918. In the 1918-25 period, New Brunswick's membership was again cut in half, and it never recovered. On the other hand, Ontario and Newfoundland generally comprised around three-quarters of the membership in the twentieth century, though Newfoundland became increasingly important after World War II and now makes up half the Canadian membership (5).
At the beginning of the 20th century, Ontarians constituted two-thirds of the membership of the Orange Order in Canada. Here in Toronto, the Orange Order was visible at the level of municipal government--all of Toronto's mayors were members for decades--and in the neighbourhood level, for instance in
Cabbagetown as described in one account. This Anglo-Celtic neighbourhood, substantially Irish but mixed between Roman Catholic Irish and Protestants of various British background, was riven.
Inherently linked both with the politics and the dominant sentiments of this society was the Orange Order. A recent work on the Order in Canada, by Cecil Houston and William Smyth, demonstrates that its membership was widespread across later Victorian Toronto, with lowest density in the upper class residential tracts of Jarvis Street and Rosedale, but highest density in Cabbagetown. No doubt the numerous Ulster Irish in that neighbourhood had much to do with the case. Yet Houston and Smyth confirm that the Order drew widely on English and Scottish stocks also, and it had strong followings in all three major Toronto Protestant churches-Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian, especially the first two-which were also the largest in Cabbagetown. Smaller Protestant denominations like Baptists or Lutherans were much less evident in Orangeism; as they were again in Cabbagetown. At the same time, the Order crossed class lines and kept a substantial middle-class component, even if the bulk of its members came from the lower classes.
Orange lodges pervaded the district, but a main meeting-place for their members was the eastern Orange Hall on Queen Street. Here was a forum for their views on public issues, and a headquarters for political transactions. The Orange vote in Toronto mattered municipally, provincially and federally. Orangemen were perennial among civic politicians and plentiful in city employment, whether at City Hall, the works department or in the police force, for all of which Cabbagetown residents offered a goodly quota. It is unnecessary, however, to view this as some dark conspiratorial net, a King Billy underground. Orange ties, for better or worse, operated pretty openly; and it would have been hard to impugn the respectability of the Order' s stands on British loyalty and Protestant freedom to majority Toronto then.
Cabbagetowners marched on the Orange celebration day, July 12, but almost as virtuously as in a temperance or trades union parade. Granted there long were fights and uproars in Toronto associated with the Glorious Twelfth or Hibernian St. Patrick's Day, still, violence chiefly occurred in more turbulent and crowded areas of the city. For our neighbourhood, Orangeism broadly implied order rather than disorder.
Furthermore, it has well been pointed out that Toronto's denser residential districts really contained religious admixtures, and there were no great separate, terraced confines of either Protestants or Catholics as in Belfast, mass citadels for religious warfare. In Cabbagetown, assuredly, Protestants had many Catholic street neighbours; the converse was equally true in adjacent, prevalently Catholic Cork Town south of Queen Street and on below King Street. There was not the same tight territorial basis for major sectarian combat. Sparring there might be, as when an Orange band trumpetted and coat-trailed into a largely Catholic street; yet this local version of "chicken" was a fairly minor fringe sport. The Cabbagetown community then was not an ethno-religious enclave-for all its Orange display-or a politically sequestered compound.
(The above account was written in 1984.)
And then the Orange Order began to fall apart, as Torontoist's Jamie Bradburn
wrote last September. The old British order fell apart.
For the first half of the twentieth century, one prerequisite to be a serious contender for the mayor’s chair in Toronto was membership in good standing with the Orange Order. As 1954 dawned, it didn’t appear that the situation would change much: Orangeman Allan Lamport had won a third term and the challenger most likely to run against or in place of him that December, Leslie Saunders, was a high-ranking official in the Order. Yet 1954 wound up being the beginning of the end of Orange dominance over civic affairs, thanks partly to a series of snafus by Saunders. The municipal election of 1954 not only proved a key element in breaking the Order’s hold, but showed that antagonizing the press wasn’t a good idea and that you didn’t have to be Protestant to take the mayor’s chair, even if it took you three efforts.
Our story begins at the Toronto Transit Commission, where the combination of an expanded administrative board and the death of Chairman W.C. O’Brien left several key vacancies. Sensing the prospects of steadier employment with the TTC than at the whim of voters, Mayor Lamport resigned from office in June to make himself available as a candidate for O’Brien’s job (he wound up as Vice-Chairman when William G. Russell won the top spot). On June 29, Saunders, a veteran member of the Board of Control who was serving as president of City Council, assumed the mayoralty amid general respect for his abilities as an administrator.
Saunders’s honeymoon was short-lived. Shortly after assuming office, Saunders was also named Deputy Grand Master of the Orange Lodge, just in time for the annual Orange parade in early July to celebrate William III’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Saunders decided the parade would be the perfect opportunity to issue a statement to Torontonians "reminding them of their British heritage" by stressing how important that the battle was as a victory for democratic and religious freedoms for all (even if some of faiths were deemed less worthy than others). Amid its glorification of the Orange Order, the statement requested citizens "to thank God for those whose courage against wrong hastened the dawn of freedom," and compared the triumph of Protestants over Catholics to more recent victories against "the Hun, the Nazi and the Fascist." One problem: Saunders issued the statement on official city stationery.
To Catholic councillors and other Orangemen in the city government whose views were less fervent than Saunders, the statement was received like an intolerant slap against citizens who weren’t connected to the Order. Controller David Balfour felt that the mayor should represent all faiths; in response, local Orange Order Secretary B.G. Louden challenged the Catholic Balfour to run for mayor. Saunders did not apologize for issuing the statement. "I’m proud," he said, "to be able to make a statement of this kind to the people of Toronto on this great day in Orange history." His statement did not find favour among the press, whose views were best summed by an editorial in the Telegram which noted that "the only rivers that Leslie Saunders is expected to concern himself with as Mayor of Toronto are the Don and the Humber."
Watching from the sidelines was former city councillor Nathan Phillips, who was taking a rest from elected office after a quarter of a century as an alderman and two unsuccessful mayoral runs against Lamport in 1951 and 1952. As controversy about Saunders’s statement grew, Phillips was contacted by Star reporter Bob McDonald to see if he would consider a third run for the mayor’s chair. Phillips decided he would, but only if his wife supported another run (she did) and if he could secure more newspaper support beyond the Star, which had backed his previous campaigns. He soon contacted Telegram publisher John Bassett, who indicated that Phillips could soon tell anyone he "damned well pleased" that he had Bassett’s full support. That Phillips was Jewish would make for an interesting angle in editorials in all of the city’s papers criticizing Saunders for trying to provoke religious strife. Upon hearing of Phillips’s entry, Saunders told the press on July 10 that when all the ballots were counted, he would be "be sitting right where I am now."
As it happened, the Jewish
Nathan Phillips ended up being elected mayor in 1955, notwithstanding said decidedly non-Orange Order ethnoreligious background, heralding the transition of Toronto from a city where Irish Canadians constituted a somewhat stigmatized minority to one where Irish is just another flavour of the increasingly broad and at least somewhat less relevant category of "white". Would Toronto have handled the shift as well if the Orange Order had stayed in power longer?
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