Community Life and Intergroup Relations

An early forum for Irish Protestant community life were the Irish Protestant benevolent societies founded in the latter half of the nineteenth century in such Ontario cities as Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa, and Brantford. The object of these societies was to provide financial assistance to Irish Protestant immigrants and their descendants. In Ottawa, the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society (IPBS) transformed itself early on into a more inclusive Protestant organization, reflecting the status of Irish Protestants as mainstream Canadians. The Toronto IPBS, organized in 1870, existed for nearly a century. That it survived as long as it did was a result of that city’s former reputation as the “Belfast of Canada,” the destination of a significant proportion of the much-reduced immigrant stream following the mid-nineteenth-century peak.

In the 1870s the Toronto IPBS rendered assistance mostly to poor widows and the families of men suffering illness; Irish Protestant immigrants newly arrived in the city were found to be comparatively prosperous and seldom in need of aid. An 1875 motion to expand the society’s efforts to Irish Catholics, portrayed as innocents susceptible to bad influences, was rejected amid derisory anecdotes of priestly miserliness and alleged Catholic reluctance to contribute to city charities. Applications for relief increased during the depression of the 1890s, especially among the “gentler working people”: clerks, agents, and families formerly in comfortable circumstances but reduced to destitution by the downturn in business. Concerts, picnics, and lectures held in support of the society had evolved by 1885 into an annual St Patrick’s Day banquet, and the IPBS also participated with another association, the Sons of Ireland Protestant Association, and its affiliate for women, in an annual church parade. Its highest-profile charitable activity became the annual distribution of Christmas baskets.

The IPBS adopted inclusive green rather than exclusionary Orange imagery, leading the press occasionally to report the Protestant organizations’ parades in terms more usually associated with Catholics: “brawny Irish boys tramp[ing] by” in silk hats and green ties, with “accents that spoke of the Blarney stone and Killarney.” In the 1870s the IPBS membership heard lectures on St Patrick, eighteenth-century statesman John Philpot Curran, and Irish music, and in 1899 it cooperated with Catholic organizations to give a dinner for a visiting Irish rugby team. Well into the twentieth century the association issued banquet invitations bearing a crest of shamrocks and harp over the slogan “Erin Go Bragh” (Ireland Forever), and graced its tables with centrepieces of sherbet shaped as a “Paddy’s” hat with clay pipe.

Nonetheless, the organization became more politicized after 1900 as Irish identity in the homeland was appropriated by Catholic nationalist interests. The annual sermons about St Patrick began to advance ingenious justifications for commemorating a figure who was increasingly associated in the popular mind with Catholic Ireland. Patrick at first had been viewed neutrally as a “good man . . . [whose] Day has a special claim upon all,” but by 1901 it was being claimed that he would feel more at home with present-day Protestants because the Catholic Church had changed markedly since his time. Transubstantiation, papal infallibility, and the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception were denounced as “19th century inventions.” In 1917 it was asserted that the Irish Celtic church that had led England and Scotland to Christianity had been “Protestant before the name was invented” but was crushed by the Roman Church, a tragedy that put the “clock of civilization back for centuries.” Other lectures addressed imperial federation and Canada’s failure to contribute to the British navy, jingoistic topics similar to those being addressed at contemporary meetings of the Sons of England. That fact in itself underlines the increasing convergence of the values and preoccupations of Irish Protestants with those of Protestant anglophone Canadians in general.

By far the most important and long-lasting Irish Protestant community organization was the Orange Order. A secret society that had originated in County Armagh in 1795, the Orange Order merged a peasant tradition of defensive violence with the organization and symbolism of middle-class freemasonry. Its name came from William of Orange (King William III), who had defeated the Catholic King James II in the 1690s. At first the order, active in a border area where Church of Ireland (Anglican) and Catholic Irish were almost equal numerically, concentrated on protecting the holdings of small Protestant tenants from Catholics intent upon outbidding them for leases. Later it expanded across the country and began defending the Protestant ascendancy in a broader, more political sense.

Canadian Orangeism has been interpreted as a manifestation of immigrant democracy that was largely social in nature. The lodge, it is asserted, was “merely fraternal in character” and “primarily a social club.” The evolving network of local lodges brought Irish Protestants together and helped recent arrivals adjust to life in the new land. The lodge helped organize social life and acted as a guardian of morality in the absence of a local church. Another interpretation does not go this far in stressing the order’s importance as a moral force, but it does emphasize the role of lodges in helping immigrants obtain land and cushion them from economic blows. In fact, however, it is much easier to document the role of family in assisting new arrivals than to find evidence of Orange involvement in the economic sphere.

As for the view of Orangeism as a community organization, a case can be made that the social functions of the order were clearly subordinate to the association’s role in political bonding in defence of Protestant interests. In turn-of-the-century lodges in Kingston, Ontario, for example, more written requests were received for donations towards lodge-building funds than to help Orangemen in need and members were not required to assist their brethren until they reached the upper degrees in the order; even then they were excused from making such contributions if doing so would hurt their own finances.

Across Canada, the society was strict about the payment of dues and so membership in the order tended to decline during times of economic hardship when assistance for poorer members was most needed. There was a long tradition, dating back to the 1860s, of supporting Protestant orphans’ homes, but local lodges spent as much on a single testimonial dinner or on putting up monuments as they gave to charity in a year. Appeals for donations to the Loyal True Blue and Orange Home in Richmond Hill, Ontario, which housed 450 children, emphasized the necessity of keeping orphans from being put in institutions operated by the Roman Catholic Church. Similarly, the Orange Mutual Benefit Fund was established in 1881 to provide death and accident benefits to subscribing members, but this program was very much a response to a challenge to membership numbers posed by the benefit schemes of the Oddfellows and Foresters. By 1900 only 2,029 had enrolled in the Orange plan out of more than 60,000 lodge members, in contrast to 35,000 people who held policies with the Foresters. Enrolment in the Orange plan peaked in 1913 with 6,436 policyholders.

Throughout British North America it appears that the strength of the Orange order and the rise of sectarian violence were not the result of imported quarrels so much as responses to evolving power balances within specific Canadian localities. Before the 1840s Protestant/ Catholic relations in the North American colonies were for the most part peaceful if not entirely congenial. Irish immigration to the Canadas and New Brunswick remained heavily Protestant, and the majority therefore entertained little fear of Irish Catholics mounting a challenge to the established order. The initial goal of Irish Protestant and Irish Catholic immigrants alike was to win for themselves, by fair means or foul, a secure position within colonial power structures that in some communities were already monopolized by earlier settlers. The Protestants and less numerous Irish Catholics found that they had much more in common with one another than they did with the earlier settlers, and they looked upon political radicals of American, French, and Lowland Scots background as alien to the British system in which they had both grown up. The few Orange lodges then in existence were locally based and were associated in no provincial organization, and the Orange Order, as an exclusively Protestant body, seemed an unlikely vehicle for cooperation.

In New Brunswick, as the more prosperous of the Irish established themselves economically and politically and began to look out for the interests of their ethnic constituency, Protestant and Catholic Irish at first worked together to oppose the old-stock settlers, who had secured for themselves the best land and the most prestigious government positions. Early Irish organizations in Saint John had both Protestant and Catholic members and differed in class and political stripe rather than in religion. The St Patrick’s Society attracted mostly rising merchants of conservative politics whereas the Sons of Erin drew artisans and grocers who adhered to the brand of moderate reformism associated in Ireland with Daniel O’Connell. But as the proportion of Catholic arrivals in the province increased in the 1830s and 1840s, coinciding in the latter decade with efforts by the Catholic hierarchy to establish authority over the Catholic population and expand the network of Catholic institutions, membership in Irish organizations divided on religious lines.

The Orange Order rose from minor significance to dominance in this context, acquiring substantial strength in the 1840s as a Protestant nativist organization. The order had come comparatively late to New Brunswick. The first lodge outside transient military units dated only from 1831, but by 1838, when a provincial grand lodge was established, there were fifteen primary lodges. In 1844 there were twenty-six, ten of them less than a year old, and by 1850 there were 123 lodges claiming a membership of 10,000. Members were drawn from all walks of life, half of them born in New Brunswick and most under forty years of age.

The Orange Order was at first moderate and nonviolent, but more militant forces had gained control of the organization by the late 1840s. The annual 12 July parades commemorating the 1690 victory of Protestant King William III over Catholic King James were increasingly marred by riots, beatings, and murders. One of the worst incidents occurred in New Brunswick on 12 July 1849, when Orangemen intruded upon the home ground of the Catholics in Portland near Saint John. Hundreds of shots were fired and a number of people were killed. The perpetrators were not convicted and the Orange Order emerged as the only force that seemed capable of regulating alleged Catholic lawlessness in impoverished working-class areas. Nativism was defused by the decline of Catholic immigration after 1848 and the outflow of Catholic migrants to employment opportunities in New England, by the improving economic situation in the province, and by Orange determination to appear respectable while seeking legal incorporation. No more marches were held until corporate status was secured in 1875.

An Orange Order lodge appeared in Nova Scotia only in 1847 and took root mostly in mining areas. It also attracted support among the descendants of German settlers in Lunenburg County. There were few Irish Protestants in Prince Edward Island and so the lodge drew little following there, most of it among Protestant Scots. The order arrived in Newfoundland even later, the first lodge commencing only in 1863. Because there were scarcely any Irish Protestants in Newfoundland, the lodges tended to be found in communities exclusively English. Its values proved congenial to the English residents’ political and religious sensibilities, and it served social functions in isolated outport communities.

In urban London, Ontario, early-twentieth-century Orange lodge members were largely immigrants from English industrial cities, a fact that reflected the tendency of sectarianism to appeal most to the working class, as indeed it does in Northern Ireland today. It reflected, too, the appeal of the order’s pro-British and pro-monarchist stance to recent English arrivals. Across central Canada as a whole in the nineteenth century, membership in the lodge was widely distributed. Making inroads far beyond its initial immigrant Protestant Irish constituency, the order appealed to the Loyalist and Anglican traditions of the Mohawks of Deseronto, in eastern Ontario, while in the Ottawa valley community of Ladysmith, Quebec, a lodge operated among German settlers for many years. Orangeism had ceased to be an exclusively immigrant organization.

Characteristically, Orangeism spread to the Canadian west with the westward migration of Ontario Orangemen. The first western lodge was established at Fort Garry (Winnipeg) in 1870 under a warrant brought out by a militiaman, sent west to help quell the uprising led by Louis Riel. By 1900 there were 150 lodges in Manitoba, but the order failed to make any inroads beyond the population of British-origin Ontarians. Farther west, lodges were founded in railway towns as early as the 1800s, but lodges began to proliferate only after 1905 as large numbers of settlers from central Canada arrived in Saskatchewan and Alberta. Even so, the large size of western farms and the prevalence of eastern European block settlement militated against a dense distribution of Orange lodges there as in rural Ontario. The order had an earlier presence in British Columbia, where a lodge was founded in New Westminster in 1863 in the wake of the Cariboo gold rush. It stood alone, however, until the expansion of mining into the Kootenays in the late 1800s. Because settlement in British Columbia was primarily industrial rather than agricultural, the strength of the lodge was attenuated by the impermanence of the mining communities, and at its height there were no more lodges there than in Prince Edward Island.

Orangeism adapted in each area for different local reasons, and evolving local circumstances proved more important than imported concerns. The order achieved widespread support because its traditional values were increasingly in accord with rising concerns in the new land. In the case of Upper Canada, it has been argued that Orangeism, or Irish Protestant values, established hegemony over the idea of Loyalism, but in fact the emphasis of the movement changed over time in that province.

Before the granting of responsible government in 1848, the major political issues revolved around the defence of British hierarchical institutions against republicanism, whether among American immigrants, liberals and radicals of British origin, or French-Canadians patriotes and rouges. During this era the Irish Protestants offered an alternative definition of Loyalism to that advanced by the “Family Compact” elite and its local hangers-on. In older parts of the province, an elite of old Loyalists was ensconced in power when the Irish began arriving in force after the War of 1812, much the same kind of situation as prevailed in New Brunswick. The provincial capital York (Toronto) was mostly a non-Loyalist area of settlement, and the provincial elite was composed largely of official appointees and pre-1812 British immigrants. The Irish of the outlying regions were angry at being excluded and argued that they were more loyal to the crown than the Loyalists and pseudo-Loyalists, both of whom they perceived as Americans.

Brockville Orange journalist Ogle Gowan in 1830 organized scattered lodges into a provincial Grand Lodge. Owing largely to his efforts, Protestants and Catholics united against the “Yankee” interest, both Reform and Tory. This part of the story is similar to the situation in New Brunswick, where Irish organizations also formed the germ of an immigrant interest. In Upper Canada, however, the Orange association rose to prominence early and assumed a leading political role because of Gowan.

The conciliatory strand in Upper Canadian Orange ideology engendered a continual tension over the recurring need to choose between two key principles that in Ireland had always gone together: loyalty to the crown (which in Upper Canada was usually interpreted by the Tories to mean the governor and his ministers) and loyalty to the Protestant cause. Irishmen and Orangemen had divided over the Reform movement as a vehicle for winning a role in the provincial power structure until William Lyon Mackenzie’s radical Reformers posed a threat to the British connection. During the 1836 election, the Mackenzie threat led to the uniting of Gowan’s Orangemen with Irish Catholics in support of the established order.

In the late 1840s, Reform demands were met by a Reform administration and the privileges of the old government party were eliminated. Under responsible government, ministries were no longer appointed but rather chosen from among elected members who could control a majority in the assembly. Political alliances and compromises were therefore necessary to assemble and hold majorities. The old high Tories were relegated to the dust-heap of history, and the old republican radicals were replaced by moderate Reformers under the leadership of Robert Baldwin. New extremist groups emerged from the realignments, such as the Clear Grits under Toronto Globe editor George Brown, who were anti-Catholic but also had republican leanings. John A. Macdonald’s Liberal-Conservative party emerged in the 1850s as a coalition of moderate Tories and moderate Reformers, drawn from both the francophone and anglophone halves of the newly united Province of Canada. The old high Tories had been contemptuous of Orangeism, as of all popular movements, but because it appealed to the common voters Macdonald’s Conservatives were compelled to accommodate it. By mid-century many members of the old Family Compact elite were joining the lodge in an effort to retain political credibility. Macdonald himself had joined in 1841.

Protestant/Catholic divisions had always been uppermost in some areas of strong Irish settlement, such as the Ottawa valley and Cavan Township near Peterborough. Ottawa valley Orangemen were therefore less accepting of Gowan’s efforts to work with Macdonald in courting the French vote and of the need to compromise. The result was a schism in Orange ranks between 1853 and 1856 when many of the more conservative lodges withdrew under the leadership of George Benjamin of Belleville; fifty-one of the fifty-three secessionist lodges were in eastern Ontario. Ironically, Gowan, driven by personal ambition, proved politically to be a master of compromise and moderation, while Benjamin, a closet Jew who had nominally converted to Anglicanism, was politically more Protestant than the Protestants and was supported by the most bigoted anti-Catholics. As it turned out, Gowan’s career ended ignominiously in the 1860s with his trial for criminal assault on a twelve-year-old girl.

The Orange Order became popular in each area of Canada for different local reasons. One may generalize, however, by noting that it achieved widespread support because its imported values were increasingly found to accord with the concerns of Canadian Protestants, whether of Irish origin or not. In the last half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the most emotional political issues involved Protestant trepidation over Catholic resurgence. The major political debates no longer hinged on the privileges of the Anglican Church, as had been the case before mid-century, but on the perceived privileges of Catholicism. What Catholics saw as their just rights, Protestants perceived as special privileges, even as the rewarding of the disloyal, for there remained a persistent Protestant fear that a Catholic could not be loyal to both queen and pope. The separate school questions of the 1850s onward in Ontario and later in New Brunswick, the Riel issue, the Jesuit Estates question in 1889, Manitoba schools, the Orange incorporation bill, the South African War and imperialism, and the controversy over the place of French in Ontario schools during World War I – all of these issues were bound up with Protestant suspicions of the growing assertiveness of the Catholic hierarchy.

Though Orangeism continues to be a presence in Newfoundland and the Saint John valley, nationally it has declined to virtual non-existence from its peak at the beginning of the twentieth century. Because it had ceased to be a purely Irish Protestant immigrant organization, its decline owed little to the falling off in Irish immigration; indeed, the order was at its height in the two generations after Irish immigration ceased to be significant. The principal reason for its decline stems from Canadians’ de-emphasis of the British connection, the element that constituted the main pillar defining Orangemen’s concept of political allegiance. Moreover, the order’s defence of the Protestant cause and anti-Catholic tendencies seem irrelevant in an age of secularization and ecumenism.

Over the last thirty years the lodge has made efforts to become a vehicle of anglophone opposition to “special privileges” for francophones, but newer right-wing organizations have proved better able to articulate that fringe vision of a Canada that is fast disappearing than Orangeism with its archaic imperialist and religious baggage. The monarchy, too, now finds its institutional defenders in organizations that emphasize what they are for rather than what they are against, though inevitably there is some crossover of personnel. At the social level, the Orange Order has been unable to compete with commercial and domestic-entertainment alternatives and with service clubs that are less stridently sectarian.