When the box shattered the window, the men inside Louis Long’s barbershop thought the world was ending. A raucous mob was running through the November night, targeting storefronts with Chinese characters.
They ran up the stairs of Hop War Low’s café on Elizabeth St., stole $300, and smashed a mirror. The newspapers said it was revenge: one night before, a dozen soldiers were eating at that café when a “Chinese gambling dive” across the street was raided by police. The soldiers went outside to watch the arrests, and when they returned to their meals, they were told to scram, allegedly called “white dogs.” One of the soldiers, it was said, was “roughly handled” on his way out.
The story made the rounds, indignation grew, and an angry crowd returned the evening of Nov. 17, hurling stones and breaking things as staff closed the doors and drew the blinds. Police came running, girding themselves for another run-in with soldiers, who, in addition to their reputation for sacrifice and bravery on the Western Front, had also gained a reputation for unruly acts of retribution.
In the spring of 1917, a veteran who had been wounded at the Somme applied for a job at a Toronto munitions plant, and said he was rebuffed by a “Hun” (a derogatory term for Germans) who told him to “Get the Hell out of here.” A few days later, dozens of soldiers returned to raid the plant, “rounding up the alien enemies” to make a point about their employment. They then moved on to Parkdale, where they raided and interrogated German shopkeepers, forcing them to produce immigration papers. In August 1918, the city had descended into days of chaos after a returned soldier was kicked out of a Greek-owned café after a skirmish with a waiter. A group of soldiers destroyed that restaurant, smashing windows and throwing plates, and thousands of soldiers and civilian sympathizers tore through other Greek restaurants and shops, causing thousands of dollars of damage. When the police made arrests, the battle shifted to a clash between the police and the returned men.
By 1919, the war was over, but peace was hard to find. In newspaper headlines across Canada, issues of class, race and patriotism percolated with economic unease, resentment and fear. Returned soldiers were some of the most “reactionary and violent anti-immigrant activists during a time of heightened nativism,” historian Nathan Smith writes in his chapter of “Other Combatants, Other Fronts: Competing Histories of the First World War.”
Most Torontonians traced their lineage to the British Isles, but there was growing diversity in the city, and in the Canadian Expeditionary Force.
During the anti-Greek riots of 1918, a man named “Mastrogan” had the window of his Yonge Street café smashed in. When he told the soldiers that he was one of them — that he had been wounded in France — they were silent at first. Then they cheered, apologized and offered to pay for the damage as they moved on to destroy the next shop. The voices of returned soldiers in Toronto with a “non-British immigrant background” don’t often appear in historical sources, and Smith explains that “anti-foreigner attitudes discouraged them from speaking out or from identifying themselves ethnically.”
“You have to erase any notion of Canada’s identity as multicultural,” says Smith, a history professor at Seneca College who wrote his PhD thesis on veterans in Toronto between 1915 and 1919. “The debate is really about what church you’re in. Beyond that, there’s not a lot of tolerance for cultural difference, or if there is, as long as that cultural difference doesn’t make any difference in my life or neighbourhood.”
There were around 50,000 returned soldiers in Toronto in 1919, and they stood out in a city of 500,000. For some, Toronto was home, but others came for health care, recovery or an artificial limb. These were men who had survived horrific conditions, and many were visibly injured, while others dealt with unspoken trauma. Antibiotics hadn’t been invented yet and there was no public drinking with Prohibition in full force. There was plenty of time to talk, and returned men weren’t shy about expressing their opinions about people they perceived to be slackers and war profiteers.
Most students of Canadian history know about the battles on the Western Front, but fewer know about the battles of the home front. Partly, it’s because social history is underresearched, but it’s also because some of these stories challenge the ideal of the heroic soldier, and there is a reticence to complicate history, Smith says. Most people, including the soldiers themselves, were opposed to rioting and open conflict. The soldiers who engaged in the violence represented a minority of veterans, but they made a big impact.
There was a lot of turnover in the Ward, but two of these three Elizabeth Street businesses, located at 6 and 8 Elizabeth Street, were operated by Chinese merchants in 1919 and had their windows smashed in the November raid. This Toronto Archives photo is from 1912.
In Chinatown in 1919, the mob and the police squared off with firecrackers, stones and batons. The crowd dispersed eventually, and there were no reported injuries or arrests, and nobody was held accountable for the violence.
“What is the use of talking of a broad cosmopolitan spirit, interested in the welfare of the world, if intolerance is shown to strangers from far-off lands,” the Star asked its readers in the aftermath.
Most letters to the editor expressed dismay with the lawlessness, and not the way the Chinese community had been treated. Mayor Tommy Church, a pro-soldier politician — who had tried to shift the blame for the 1918 anti-Greek riots on to “foreigners, Socialists and idlers” — was exasperated.
“This thing has got to stop,” Church said to a room full of soldiers after the Chinatown riot at the Red Triangle Club. The club was run by the YMCA and advertised as a “hiding place from the wind.” A few blocks east of the Ward, it was a place where you could get your wooden leg tightened with a screwdriver, find a clean bed, play billiards, eat a meal after smashing windows of unsuspecting business owners. Mayor Church had been there on opening day in 1917, and now he was threatening to shut it down.
“It is not fair to the city or the citizens to carry on this way,” he said. “You are in danger of losing public sympathy.”
The soldiers asked Church “when the foreign element was to be cleared out of the city.” They told the mayor that they couldn’t find jobs “while foreigners were doing well and growing rich,” the Globe reported.
So much of the anti-immigrant outlook was wrapped up in diminished economic prospects. In 1914, a soldier’s daily pay rate was better than the average industrial worker, Smith says. But as wartime industries cranked to life, wages crept up back home, while soldiers’ earnings remained relatively stagnant.
Some business owners were accused of war profiteering, and non-British immigrants — “aliens” in the parlance of the times, “enemy aliens” if they were from Germany or the Austro-Hungarian empire — were often the target of frustration, especially if they had good jobs. In 1916, the Toronto branch of the Great War Veterans’ Association complained that 40 Chinese people were hired by a manufacturing firm “at a very low rate of pay,” Smith writes. The implication was that soldiers who had already returned from the war should have those jobs.
The association’s leadership didn’t agree with the violent tactics of some of its members, but it lobbied for immigration restrictions.
“The GWVA is in favor of any Governmental action which will tend to make Canada a white man’s country,” the provincial secretary W.E. Turley told the Star in 1919. In his thesis, Nathan Smith wrote that for Turley, and many veterans, “aliens were naturally unpatriotic and undeserving of citizenship until they adopted British, and therefore Canadian, views.”
It wasn’t as if members of Toronto’s Chinese community could easily prove their patriotism. At the outset of the war, Canada’s militia headquarters noted that it was “inadvisable” to “enlist persons of foreign birth or nationality,” Richard Holt writes in “Filling the Ranks.”
By 1915, there was a formal requirement that recruits were British subjects. To become a naturalized British subject required a person to live in Canada for five years, be of good moral character, and understand French or English. You had to go to court to prove those things, and the final decision was shrouded in secrecy and not subject to appeal.
It was a “legislative tool to prevent undesirable immigrants” from obtaining status and rights, according to the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21.
Enlistment criteria loosened as the war dragged on, but there were obvious signs that Chinese Canadians were “not welcome” in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, Holt writes. As Holt researched how Canada sustained its manpower, he found a “general mistrust of immigrants,” including mentions of regulations that excluded Chinese-Canadian men in the Central Ontario district. That district, headquartered in Toronto, also ordered the discharge of Chinese-Canadian draftees in August 1918.
Arlene Chan, a retired librarian who has written several books about Toronto’s Chinese community, said many people wanted to prove their patriotism and earn the right to vote, but were turned away. Despite the challenges and hostility, there were some Chinese Canadians who served with the expeditionary force, including Wee Tan Louie, who famously bought a horse to ride across the Rockies to enlist in Calgary after he was turned away in B.C.
There was also the Chinese Labour Corps, a battalion of tens of thousands recruited by Allied forces for construction and support work in France. Some of the battalion travelled through Canada by rail, before boarding ships to Europe. After the war more than 40,000 made the reverse journey on heavily secured trains. Rather than commend their service, a Toronto newspaper noted that great care was taken “that none should go astray, for there is a head tax of $500 and all are in bond.”
At the time of the riot, around 2,000 Chinese people lived in Toronto. There was a “staggering gender imbalance” of 18 men to every woman since the head tax made it too expensive for families to come to Canada together, says Arlene Chan. Many of the men worked at laundries, restaurants and grocery stores across the city, but Chinese businesses were concentrated in the Ward, a neighbourhood packed tight with barbers, restaurants, laundries, tea merchants, butchers, shoemakers,and homes.
The Ward was a landing pad for newcomers, and Elizabeth Street soon became known as Toronto’s Chinatown. When they weren’t working, young men attended Cantonese opera shows, studied English at churches, debated politics at community or family associations, attended Sunday school, met with their student association, and visited the clan and community groups for loans and housing help. Many gambled to pass the time:
“Gambling was one of the only ways to turn bad luck into good, to grab a chance at a life beyond anyone’s dream,” Chan writes in “The Chinese in Toronto from 1878.”
Chan says biased media coverage focused on gambling raids and opium use, which was banned in 1908 — Canada’s first narcotic law. “The public generally looks upon the Chinese inhabitants of the city as a poppy-poisoned lot, living upon a steady diet of opium smoking,” the Globe reported in 1919. “But the Chinese are by no means the chief offenders, although they are more often caught.”
In 1915, Toronto alderman Sam McBride called for a ban on Chinese laundries: “We should wipe the yellow peril out of Toronto,” he said. The term was common fodder for citizens and politicians who saw Chinese people as a “threat to the British race,” Chan writes. In the West, the “Asiatic Exclusion League” railed against Asian immigration and employment.
The federal government had a Chinese head tax, the Ontario government outlawed the employment of white women by Chinese men, and Toronto’s municipal government created a licensing fee for laundries that hit smaller Chinese-run operations the hardest. Around the turn of the century, Toronto’s first Black alderman, William Peyton Hubbard, argued that the fee should take into account the size of the operation. “He was an exception in terms of politicians who were supporting the Chinese community,” Chan says.
Considering the climate, she didn’t find the 1919 Chinatown riot surprising when she first came across newspaper stories.
“It’s how things were,” she says. “It’s lucky there weren’t a lot more riots like that.”
Chinese consul general Yang Shu Wen came to Toronto to demand “adequate protection” from the police. The police chief assured him Toronto’s Chinese community would receive the same protection as everybody else, and that every effort would be made “to discourage attacks.”
Wen had also protested in 1914 when Ontario banned the employment of white girls in “Oriental restaurants,” and in 1918, he travelled to St. Catharines after locals harassed the “Chinese colony” there.
In 1920, the consul general was the guest of honour at a banquet for the Toronto Chinese Christian Union. “I would like to say that the Chinese are the best people in the world,” he said to the glittering ballroom of the King Edward hotel. “But instead I will content myself with claiming that they are not so bad as they are painted in a certain newspaper.”
Arlene Chan holds the marker in the alleyway, named after her mother. Jean Lumb Lane south of Dundas Street West, east of Huron, in Toronto's Chinatown was dedicated Nov. 2. to the woman known for her activism on immigration rules that separated Chinese families, and for advocating for Chinatown.
In the 1950s, the buildings that returned soldiers raided on Elizabeth Street were bulldozed, along with a good chunk of old Chinatown, to make way for the new city hall. A century later, the riot is forgotten, but something else happened that year that would leave a lasting impression on Toronto.
In the summer of 1919, Jean Lumb was born in Nanaimo, B.C. Her parents had both paid the head tax when they came to Canada. She attended segregated schools, which she left to support her family. She moved to Toronto as a teenager and opened a grocery shop, lost her Canadian citizenship through marriage, raised six children, owned a restaurant and regained her citizenship. She became a community advocate, promoting Chinese food, dance, and culture to break down barriers.
She was an unstoppable force, and on a recent November day, as politicians sat in folding chairs in the newly minted Jean Lumb Lane off Dundas St., they heard about her fight to save Toronto’s original Chinatown from further expropriation, and her work to end discriminatory immigration laws.
“Her fight to change immigration law probably resulted in my family being what it is today,” said Coun. Mike Layton, explaining that his stepmother, Olivia Chow, and his grandmother “may or may not have been able to come to this country or city and meet my dad and become part of our loving family.”
After the 1919 riot, all of that resentment toward the community didn’t go away. In 1923, when Lumb was four, the Canadian government passed the Chinese Immigration Act, which banned Chinese immigration for 24 years, with several exceptions.
When Lumb moved to Toronto, her impressions of the bachelor society that had been forged by decades of restrictions stayed with her, informing decades of activism. As a young woman, she lost her Canadian citizenship when she married Doyle Lumb. Her husband had arrived in Canada as a child and was considered an “alien.” The Lumbs had six children, ran a grocery store in the Junction, and later owned the Kwong Chow Chop Suey House at 126 Elizabeth St., a few blocks north of the 1919 riot site.
The federal government repealed the immigration ban in 1947, but stipulations remained that made reunification next to impossible. In 1957, local MP Roland Michener suggested that Lumb, then president of the women’s association in Chinatown, join the delegation of Chinese Canadians lobbying the government. She was reluctantly accepted by the men in the group, and told to sit in the back and not speak up, her daughter Arlene Chan recalls.
But Prime Minister John Diefenbaker insisted that Lumb sit beside him, and his one good ear. She repeated everything so he could hear. (“Things always seemed to work in her advantage,” says Chan.) Not long after, the rules were changed so that legal residents, and not just naturalized citizens, could sponsor family members. By 1967 restrictions based on race and national origin were gone as Canada introduced a point system for immigration.
Lumb was also a lifelong advocate for Toronto’s Chinatown. After the official opening of new city hall in 1965, the city planned to expropriate more land and Lumb formed the Save Chinatown Committee. The Toronto Star called the remains of Chinatown dreary, and Lumb said any “ugliness” was caused by the area’s uncertain future.
“We want to build a Chinatown that will not only attract tourists, but the Chinese as well,” she said. “The only way Chinatown can be kept alive is with Chinese people.”
Her daughter said the timing was good. Reform politicians were starting to be elected, and people began to rethink the wisdom of tearing everything down. Former mayor David Crombie, elected to city council in 1970, was very helpful to the committee, and remained a close friend.
What remained of the old Chinatown survived, expanding westward, and moving into Toronto’s east end. Lumb died in 2002, and there is a school (under construction), a parkette and a lane all dedicated to her memory.
“I say the more the merrier, let’s keep going,” Coun. Joe Cressy said at the dedication of the lane on a recent November day as friends, family and politicians gathered in the narrow space between a Chinese barbecue and a Chinese bakery, a short walk from the old Lumb family home.
Dignitaries and relatives of Jean Lumb view a dragon dance at the ceremony to name a Chinatown lane after the late activist on Nov. 2.
During a traditional lion dance, Crombie offered a head of lettuce to the dancing beast, dangling the gift from a bamboo stick. The lion — animated by two young men — grabbed the lettuce in its teeth, danced, and tossed green bits back at the crowd to spread good luck. Chris Glover, the MPP for Spadina—Fort York, spoke in Mandarin, to the delight of the crowd. “I hope that was intelligible,” he said to soft laughter.
Before the ceremony’s end, Tonny Louie, chair of the Chinatown BIA, reminded the politicians to continue working hard for the community. After a group of antifur protesters passed noisily by, friends and family crossed the street for tea and pastries.
A few days later, Arlene Chan reflected on the century that passed since 1919, the year of her mother’s birth, the year of the riots. Her mother lost her citizenship as a young woman, but later in life, became a citizenship judge, and was inducted into the Order of Canada. “Despite all the things that happened to my mother, and what she experienced, she didn’t have a chip on her shoulder,” she says. When Chan was a teenager, she would look for books about Chinese people at the library, to no avail. It was only later that she came to a realization.
“All that time, my mother was the role model that I was looking for, to read about in books.”
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