Jazz, Hockey and the Group of Seven: Arts and Popular Culture

A new mood

After the horror of the war, many young Canadians wanted something new: faster music, new dances, shorter hair, movies and sports. At the same time, artists and writers tried to define what was distinctly Canadian. Expectation B3.2 asks you to describe changes in the arts and popular culture and the people behind them.

Painting Canada: the Group of Seven and Emily Carr

In May 1920, seven Toronto painters held their first exhibition as the Group of Seven at the Art Gallery of Toronto: Lawren Harris, J. E. H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley, Frank Johnston, Franklin Carmichael and A. Y. Jackson. Their friend Tom Thomson, who had died in 1917, had strongly influenced them. They painted the rocks, lakes and forests of Algonquin Park, Algoma, Georgian Bay and later the Rockies and the Arctic, in bold colours and strong shapes. Some critics at first called the paintings crude; over time they became symbols of a Canadian national art.

In British Columbia, Emily Carr painted the forests and the villages and carved poles of Northwest Coast First Nations. A 1927 National Gallery exhibition brought her work to national attention.

A historian's question: many of these paintings show the land as an empty wilderness. But these were (and are) the homelands of First Nations, such as the Anishinaabe in Algonquin and Algoma. What does an "empty" landscape suggest about who was seen as belonging?

Writing Canada

• Stephen Leacock, a professor at McGill, was one of the best-known humorists in the English-speaking world; his Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) gently mocked small-town Ontario.
• Mazo de la Roche of Toronto wrote Jalna (1927), the first of a popular series about an Ontario family; it won a large American literary prize.
• L. M. Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables (1908), continued to publish, including Emily of New Moon (1923).
• John McCrae's In Flanders Fields (1915) remained one of the most famous poems of the war.

Sport becomes a national passion

• The National Hockey League was founded in Montreal in 1917. Stars such as Howie Morenz of the Montreal Canadiens drew huge crowds, and radio broadcasts brought hockey into homes.
• Women's sports grew: the Ladies Ontario Hockey Association was formed in 1922, and the Edmonton Grads women's basketball team won game after game against teams from around the world.
• The Nova Scotia fishing schooner Bluenose was launched in Lunenburg in 1921 and won the international fishing schooner races against American challengers through the 1920s and 1930s. It has been on the Canadian dime since 1937.
• Tom Longboat, Onondaga from Six Nations of the Grand River, had been one of the world's best distance runners before the war (winning the Boston Marathon in 1907) and served as a dispatch runner in France.
• At the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, sprinter Percy Williams of Vancouver won gold in both the 100 m and 200 m, and Canada's women's track team, the "Matchless Six", won medals in the first Olympics that included women's track and field.

Changing social mores

Fashions changed fast: flappers wore their hair short (bobbed) and their skirts to the knee, danced the Charleston, and went out without chaperones. Jazz, born in African American communities in the United States, spread through dance halls and records. Older Canadians and many churches worried about the new freedoms. Movies, radio, magazines and cars gave young people more independence than their parents had had. (You will look at what this meant for women in the next lesson.)

Prohibition, temperance and rum running

The temperance movement, led by groups such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), believed alcohol caused poverty, violence against women and children, and crime. During the war, almost every province banned the sale of alcohol, and in 1918 the federal government banned its manufacture and import for the rest of the war. After the war, provinces moved away from prohibition one by one: Quebec in 1919, British Columbia in 1921, and Ontario in 1927 (replacing the Ontario Temperance Act with government-run liquor stores). Prince Edward Island kept prohibition until 1948.

In the United States, prohibition lasted from 1920 to 1933. Canadian distilleries could often still make liquor legally for export, and much of it was smuggled across the border: by boat across the Detroit River from Windsor, from Nova Scotia and the French islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, and across the Prairie border. Rum runners made fortunes; so did some distilling businesses, including the Bronfman family's company, which became one of the largest in the world. Prohibition showed the limits of banning something many people wanted, and it fed organized crime.

Canadian identity or American culture?

By the late 1920s, most movies Canadians watched, many magazines they read and many radio stations they heard came from the United States. Even Mary Pickford, born in Toronto, became a Hollywood star known as "America's Sweetheart". Some Canadians welcomed American culture as modern and fun; others worried Canada would lose its own identity. These worries led to the Aird Commission (1928–1929) on radio, and to support for Canadian artists and writers.