“And we still get the train through Steinbach as an encore” wrote Arnold Dyck in an editorial in his Steinbach Die Post in 1931.¹ But Dyck was quick to point out that he was just being ironic. No rails had been laid, no trains had steamed through the town and they never would. Instead he was reporting on the visit of the judges of the Canadian National Railway’s (C.N.R.) Community Progress Competitions, then in its second year. Steinbach and the surrounding Mennonite area, designated as “Hanover,” had been selected for the competition in 1930, as had Rhineland. Surprisingly little has been said about Mennonite participation in these competitions. For instance, E. K. Francis’ book does not mention the competitions and assess their influence.²

The Origin and Forms of the Competitions

The Community Progress Competition was the idea of Dr. W. J. Black³ of the C.N.R.’s Department of Colonization and Agriculture (D.C.A.) “to determine the relative degree of progress being attained by communities of immigrants” from Europe settled in Western Canada. It was not intended to “measure” their wealth “but those things that make for better living and attractive homes.”⁴ The competitions were part of a much larger strategy, in part built upon the need to counter the effects of the Depression, anti-immigration sentiments among “Anglo-Saxon” Canadians, and to help develop communities who, it was hoped, would later improve the revenue of the company.⁵ Robert England, who was in charge of the competition, would later write that this initiative was intended to act as a “lever” to promote agricultural progress through raising the “group consciousness” of ethnic communities in Western Canada.⁶ The C.N.R. was not the first rail company to promote such competitions and festivals among Canada’s immigrant groups, especially in the prairie provinces. The Canadian Pacific Railway had sponsored “Folk Festivals” although Mennonites, lacking “folk” costumes, dance, and other colourful markers of “ethnic” difference had been involved only through a choral performance presented in Winnipeg in 1929.⁷

In 1930, 40 entries were received from communities wishing to participate in the competition but only a few were selected.⁸ The prizes offered were highly attractive at that time: $1,000 as first prize, $500 for second, and $250 for third.⁹ To be eligible a community had to constitute a majority in a municipality or a grouping of six or more school districts “with a population of at least 75 percent of immigrants of the first or second generation from Continental Europe.”¹⁰ In reality the regulations “Governing the Competitions” were complex with nine detailed points. The first brochure provided a complicated “Score Card” indicating how the judges would assess the communities: A: Education (250 points); B. Agriculture (250), C: Citizenship – Co-operation – Social Welfare (300 – subdivided into Adults and Boys and Girls); D: Arts and Handicrafts (150); E: General, a category consisting of “constructive” activities not included in earlier categories (50).¹¹ Each of these sections, however, was subdivided and then subdivided again. For instance, Education was subdivided into eight categories (Community, Teachers, Pupils, School Grounds, School Buildings, Equipment, Library, Records, and Reports). The Teacher category had the most subdivisions with 15 additional points. Scoring was an equally complex business but at least provided the judges with an easy method of assessment and for communities entering later competitions some indication of what was required to impress the team of judges.¹²

Miss Haig’s Reports of 1930

During the first competition a journalist for the Manitoba Free Press, K. M. Haig, accompanied the judges on their inspections of the groups.¹³ Eventually she would write nine reports on the areas and peoples she encountered devoting four to the two Mennonite communities entered in the competition. Her articles provide a fascinating insight of an outsider’s view of the communities living through the dark days of the Depression.

Born on a farm near Brandon, Kennethe Macmohan Haig (1887–1977) had graduated from the University of Manitoba with a B.A. in Philosophy. She became an editorial and feature writer for the Manitoba Free Press where she worked alongside another pioneering, journalist, and colleague, E. Cora Hind whose biography Haig would later write.¹⁴ Both women supported progressive causes and were important in the development of female journalism in Manitoba and Canada.¹⁵

Haig titled her articles “Meeting Manitoba.” They were obviously written to inform her mainly English-speaking readers that beyond the predominantly urban, middle-class world mostly consisting of “Anglo-Saxons” as she referred to them, was a province inhabited by a large number of non-British immigrants. These people, she wrote, had long been visible on Portage Avenue when they visited Winnipeg from rural areas: “the Mennonite, the Ukrainian, the Polander, and so on … but there they receive only a glance.” The competition proposed by the C.N.R. was about to change all this, “and as a result Portage Avenue will never be the same again.” Haig hoped that the competition would reveal “the pattern of Manitoba” which she compared to a loom in which “the cross thread” varied “even among colonists of the same blood and faith.”

Rhineland, Hanover, and Women

To illustrate this point Haig compared the two Mennonite communities entered in the competition: the Rural Municipalities of Rhineland and Hanover. As she wrote, “Both have their origins some fifty years back; both are situated in country well adapted to farming; both have made considerable development in agriculture; both have stultified themselves by the same methods of withdrawal within themselves; both have sought to use such educational tools as they had to hand; both are now the centre of conflict, the age-old one between one generation and the next, a conflict intensified by the fact that in this case all the elements of a new country with its new loves are thrown in one scale.”

In Hanover, Haig continued, “these elements seemed to stand out in clearer juxtaposition than in Rhineland. There are pleasant homes there, as in Rhineland, well up to if not beyond the average of farm homes in any part of the province. And there are sweet, gracious women presiding over them. Big rooms to keep sweet and garnished, piles of feather quilts, and in the basements rows and rows of preserved fruits and pickles and bins of vegetables. There is an air of plenty over a Hanover farm home. So there is over those in Rhineland. An old fashioned air of plenty of the kind that goes with shining pewter and smoked hams hanging from oaken beams.¹⁶ There were chest drawers also filled with cunningly wrought linen.”

According to Haig, Rhineland gave the impression of conservatism more than Hanover. “It is ill to see a woman, old before her time, with a grey, drawn face. Gardens some way lose their winsomeness when one thinks of those long rows tended by women who have borne and reared large families, who tend the dairy and the poultry yard, who feed the farm hand, who polish these shining floors. That wistful snatch at beauty, too – those windows of house-plants and the glowing flower-gardens. The point is not the success of women’s work. There is no question of that. The fact that left its stain on the memory is that, especially in Rhineland, there seemed little evidence of appreciation of the burden being carried, so small an effort put forward to secure labor-savers for the women. Are they so cheap?”

But Haig also saw hope: “Yet dancing along the way are bonny girls, fair of hair and bright of eye, challenging the day with the gay laugh that gives to her young womanhood. The woman with the grave, deeply-lined face, lifts a worn hand to push back her shawled head-dress. ‘My daughters,’ she murmurs, and watches intently this meeting of Canadians. Is the deepening shadow of her eyes anxiety as she senses this kinship of country? I do not know.”

The idea of a shift in the opinion of generations, essential for “progress” and assimilation, essential in her view in the making of good citizens, was again referred to in the case of men where: “… there is no difficulty reading the glance of the youth who catches the motors manoeuvring their way out of the yard. His father considers automobiles an evil probably prays for his Mennonite neighbour who has one – he looks like a man whose prayers should prevail. But [the] son looks as though he knew what a carburettor was or at least intended to know presently.”¹⁷

New Immigrants and New Generations

Haig started her second article with an account of the C.N.R. judges’ journey to “‘Mennonite country’” stressing that there is no “need to go to Europe, to see an old world village.” As she wrote: “Begun as a community settlement some still remain so, the farms extending out in long ribbons. Others are assuming a separate entity of towns with the churches, high school centres, garages, hotels, printing plant and so forth. And then in case the old world flavor should be thought lost, over the meadowland comes the village cowherd bringing home his charges.”

Haig suggested Mennonites are somewhat isolated from their non-Mennonite neighbours; they “do not attend agricultural fairs or share breeding stock or knowledge with outsiders.” To the “Anglo-Saxon way of reasoning” she argued, this seems “wilfully self-limited” but at the same time Mennonites appear to be doing well.

One “of the faith” explained to her that a Mennonite “considers it sinful to make a display.” She commented that “if one is doing a thing [that way], one might as well do it as well as possible” adding ironically that there “is scripture for that, too.” Haig recognised that a “conservative factor [was] still strong,” and that any attempt at progress would have to take this into account. The answer lay, she suggested, in “two new factors, one is the recent immigration and the other is the new generation.” To an outsider as herself, these two factors appeared in “sympathy” and as well as to “have much in common.” She then reported a story related by an “English Canadian”: “‘I happened to be on the platform five years ago when a train load of these new Mennonites came in … The residents who met them immediately held with them a service of thanksgiving. I slipped candies to two children and at once their father instructed them to say ‘Thank you.’ I asked him if he knew English and he explained that he knew a little and was trying to learn it as fast as he could. ‘As soon as we got on the boat coming out of Russia we began to learn English’ he said ‘We wish to be Canadian.’”

The “recent immigrants” to whom she had referred were obviously Russländer from the Soviet Union who were to influence life on both the West and East Reserves. The most important influence of the newcomers was in the area of schooling, something confirmed in the reports from the Department of Education supplied to the judges. The combined influence of the immigrants and a new generation of the older immigrants meant, “there is beginning among the Mennonites themselves a body of opinion demanding good Canadian schools.”

Schools and Educational Progress

Before 1916 Haig noted that Mennonites ran their own schools, insisting on Mennonite teachers and teaching in “their own language.” The teachers were not always qualified and thus the poor level of education might explain “why a section of the community, so obviously well-endowed intellectually should through fifty years of history contributed to so comparatively few leaders in any of the professions.” But the one case she referred to as an “anomaly” to this situation was the Mennonite Collegiate Institute in Gretna under H. H. Ewert’s leadership.¹⁸ She added, however, that the attempt to establish a similar institution in Altona failed when its premises burned down and it was never rebuilt.

In many ways progress in education was crucial in the judging of communities by the C.N.R. teams. The judges could assess progress with information supplied not by the communities but independently by the Department of Education. This showed a steady progress in enrolments and attendance since 1925/26; attendance had increased from sixty percent to approximately seventy percent of the school-age population, “well above average for rural schools in the province and within measurable distance of the consolidated [i.e. urban schools].” High school enrolments in grades nine, ten, and eleven had more than doubled in Hanover in years from 1925/26 to 1929/30.¹⁹

In Mennonite municipalities 90 percent of the teachers were mostly married men with a long period of service who were provided with a “teacherage.” All possessed suitable “academic requirements” and their average salary ($1,200) was 25 percent higher than in other rural districts. This higher pay was “tempered by the knowledge that the teacher is required to teach the German language [for] an extra half hour and to give the children religious instruction.” As all the children were of the Mennonite faith, this was not a problem and explained the “prevalence” of teachers of “like origin.” The children’s knowledge of English did not lead the judges to think that German was being “over-emphasized.”

In her fourth and final report devoted specifically to Mennonite competitors Haig noted that, in spite of their material progress an “extraordinary small number” of Mennonites had “taken part in the public life of the province in which they have made their homes for half a century.”²⁰ But she added that “notably” they also do not appear in the records of “the police court and jail.” In paying taxes, however, Mennonites prove conscientious citizens. She provided figures for both Rhineland and Hanover showing the equalized assessments for 1927/28/29 mainly the amounts levied and actually collected. In spite of the Depression, Mennonites’ record of paying taxes she declared “measures up quite well with other communities, an attribute of citizenship that has much to commend it.” In terms of involvement in the political life of the province, the information the judges were given was that the “‘more conservative elements do not even vote’” evidently because Mennonites thought “we-are-but-strangers-here, heaven-is-our-home,” a view which Haig cynically suggested “is some distance removed from the usual run of politics.”

Religious Conservatism, Health, and Farming

Returning to her earlier point about “the pattern” of community life, Haig had to admit that it was difficult to see among Mennonites entered in the competition a single community that “had no less than four shades of the faith accommodated in as many edifices.” And these edifices themselves were far from attractive to an outsider’s eye: “bare, save for the rows of backless benches, the pulpit and choir stalls, painted light blue and white, where women sit on one side and men on the other.” This she found was in stark contrast to the churches in Ukrainian communities entered in the competition. For example in the Ukrainian settlement of Rossburn, visited by the judges, the Greek Catholic church was “set in the bush … set upon a hill with distant prospect of scattered homesteads.” Unlike a Mennonite meeting house here they saw a “blazing altar, its seatless nave, its walls and ceiling aflame with bright pigmented representations of the Madonna.” What a contrast indeed.

For Haig the “blackest mark against the ‘Mennonite country’ is beyond doubt its public health record.” Although she was unsure whether or not its poor record reflected “the sect’s teaching and the idea that the “’Lord’s will [will] be done’ which seems to the Anglo-Saxon mind … a confusion of thought which identifies Providence with a promiscuous towel,” the reality was that until 1930 the community had refused the “claims of the rest of the province to be protected against the contagion of trachoma.” It was, she wrote “extremely painful” to visit schools and witness its effect on children. She then provided statistics on the incidence of eye diseases in the Mennonite communities in the summer of 1930: in Hanover of the 1,966 persons examined, 214 had sore eyes and 152 were suspected of having trachoma; in Rhineland a survey of 4,469 showed 676 cases of sore eyes and 697 of suspected trachoma. A clinic, she noted, was due to be established in the next few weeks but she suspected it would “mean a long, hard fight” before its work was accepted.

Haig’s five remaining articles turn to her visit to the three Ukrainian and one Polish community who also entered the 1930 competition. She mentioned Mennonites only once in her discussions, interestingly on a subject not mentioned earlier in her reports: “The weakest point [for the non-Mennonite communities] remains the agricultural. Take, for instance, the record of livestock in two of the Ukrainian municipalities: In the one, horses, 1.6 head per farm; cattle, 6.1; sheep, 2.1; swine, 1.4; poultry, 30. In the other municipality are: horses, 3 head; cattle, 6; swine, 2, sheep, 500, among 50 farmers. Contrast this with that of the Mennonite municipalities. Horses, 3 head; cattle, 30; swine, 15; poultry, 100, and sheep, 300 head among 10 farmers. The last is about average for the type of farm.” She suggested it might be argued that Ukrainians and Polish farmers had settled on inferior land in comparison to Mennonites but points out that the authorities – Provincial and Dominion – had provided agents to improve agriculture but “their efforts have by no means always been met with enthusiasm, sometimes not even with acceptance.”²¹ It would seem not only Mennonites were conservative communities.

The 1931 and 1932 Competitions

The judges chose the Ukrainian community of Rossburn as the first winner of the Progress Competition, with Hanover coming second and Rhineland third.²² What attracted the judges to Rossburn was that it presented itself as an integrated community centred on its single church, reasonable elementary schools, and cultural groups who entertained the judges with folk songs, dancing, and exhibitions of colourful crafts. Mennonites, of course, did not dance, sang only hymns in public and their craftwork, being mainly restricted to women’s practical needlework, was not as colourful or wide-ranging as that found in Ukrainian communities. If Mennonite communities were to do better in 1931, they needed to organize themselves across all the categories to be successful.

In Rhineland teachers took the lead starting in 1930 and continued to play a major role, along with members of the municipal council, in reorganizing the community’s entry for the 1931 competition in spite of earlier opposition from some farmers. A detailed report from one of the teachers involved illustrates how great efforts were being made ahead of the second competition. These included innovations in agriculture, creating a Co-operative Buying Association and establishing a United Farmers of Manitoba Local, forming a sewing club, a literary society, a Junior Red Cross, and a baseball league for the younger people, organizing displays of arts and handicrafts, and finally spending their 1930 winnings on improvements to schools in the district.²³ As a result, in 1931 Rhineland won the competition.²⁴ The money they won in 1930 was spent, with the approval of the C.N.R., mainly on improving school grounds; however, in 1931 the prize money was used to purchase pure-bred bulls, create boys’ and girls’ clubs, establish sewing groups, improve school grounds and finally, a donation to MCI.²⁵

While great efforts were also made in Hanover in the 1931 competition the community slipped from second to third place. In 1930 and 1931 support for participation in the competition in Hanover also appears to have come mainly from teachers and progressive sections of the Kanadier community largely settled in or around Steinbach. In his newspaper editorial on the 1931 competition Arnold Dyck reported that an exhibition of Mennonite artefacts and crops had been displayed in the schoolhouse.²⁶ While Dyck suggested this came as a “surprise” to non-Mennonite visitors and even some Mennonites, he “regretted that so few have seen it” a comment that suggests that some Mennonites thought it too “worldly” and a sign of pride. Dyck wrote that: “… all irony aside, the exhibition was really successful. It is to be wished that such exhibitions might become a permanent fixture and not only have the purpose of showing what man can and is, but can provide a stimulus for new creations, to new aspirations and thus prove itself to be a culture-fostering factor of merit.”²⁷

The teacher, amateur historian, and regular contributor to Dyck’s newspaper, G. G. Kornelsen, gave further details as to the “visitors” involved and other aspects of the programme the community presented.²⁸ Besides the same judging team as in 1930, the local Member of Parliament, Albert Prefontaine, was present along with the Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Immigration for Manitoba, James Howell Evans. Herr Weitinger of the “Deutsch-kanadischen Bund (von Manitoba)” gave a speech in German and Mennonite children replied in the same language. A choir under the direction of a Rempel²⁹ presented religious pieces but the choir also sang “Way Back on Memories Wall”³⁰ and “Carry me back to Old Virginia.” Finally, one of the judges, Mrs. Watts, was presented with “a beautifully crafted foot rug by the local women’s association” and in turn young girls were presented with prizes for their needlework.³¹

Although there appear to be no contemporary Mennonite accounts of the 1932 competition, it seems that the community increased its efforts in the categories to be judged even if these involved activities not usually to be found in Mennonite circles at the time. Some idea of these efforts can be seen in Robert England’s summary of the community’s achievements in 1932. These included not just improvements in agriculture, horticulture, and schooling but also the organizing of community clubs for children and adults as well as long-term community assets when work began on the construction of a new hospital.³²

After winning in 1932, the money in Hanover was spent on a diverse set of projects. A pure-bred Percheron stallion (“Monarch’s Commander”), “bred to 72 mares” in order to improve Mennonite draft horses and 6,900 day-old chicks which helped establish a “Better Poultry” campaign. When the cockerels were sold in the fall, the money was placed in a “revolving fund” used to improve livestock, principally hogs. The competitions also encouraged farmers to take advantage of the support offered by the Dominion government to improve dairy stock and establish a “Dairy Calf Club.” Some money was used to improve the school library.³³ Part of the money, however, was placed in another revolving fund from which the girls’ and boys’ clubs could borrow, especially for developing agricultural skills.³⁴

The Impact of the Competitions

The winners of these competitions were unable to enter again. Although the C.N.R. had hoped to continue the competitions after 1932, it decided not to hold any more as the Depression restricted the funds available. But had the competitions achieved their purpose in furthering economic, social, and cultural progress in communities? Had they encouraged their inhabitants towards achieving good Canadian citizenship? On reading the reports of the C.N.R. judges, one promoter of “British” community settlements in Canada certainly thought the success of the competitions “offered a challenge to the United Kingdom to put forth greater efforts to send over more and still more British families” to balance the progress made by Central European settlers.³⁵

In the early 1930s researchers from McGill University carried out what were probably the first sociological studies of ethnic communities in Western Canada, including Mennonites. The research indicated that the competitions had indeed made an impact on Mennonite communities that would “continue long after the competition itself is forgotten.”³⁶ In Rhineland teachers such as Jacob G. Neufeld, Jacob D. Siemens, and Peter D. Reimer formed an agricultural society ahead of the 1931 competition. This eventually would become the Rhineland Agricultural Society (R.A.S.) that organized its own community competition at the Fall Fair held in Altona.³⁷ Siemens, at the time a teacher in Edenthal (1927–1933), would later promote the co-operative movement in Manitoba more widely, aided at first by “Jack” Crawford, a graduate of the Manitoba Agricultural College.³⁸ Other projects stemming from the competitions involved clubs and crafts that persisted long afterwards. As the teacher from Rhineland reported in 1931, the competitions were a “great medium to lift us out of the rut and set us on a modern highway, looking towards a new and better goal.”³⁹

In Hanover, although not as well documented as Rhineland, similar influences can be seen. A strong cooperative movement never developed in Hanover, but local teachers still took the lead in the competition assisted by the long-time secretary-treasurer of the Hanover Municipality (1922–1944), John D. Goossen. Goossen had been the first person approached by the C.N.R. authorities to help organize the local work but had at first declined. However, encouraged by local schoolteachers he eventually agreed.⁴⁰ Julius Toews, one of the teachers involved, would later recall that the beginning of so many new community initiatives in 1930, in the heart of the Depression, was not just by chance, but was instead a “result” of these competitions.⁴¹ It is surprising (or “puzzling” as Toews suggests), that none of the accounts of the local history of Hanover published since the 1970s has mentioned the competitions or their impact on community life.

Conclusion

Although the competitions may have been intended to measure and encourage “progress,” Robert England had his doubts about some kinds of “industrial” progress. Discussing Mennonites he wrote: “What can defeat a people when the table is backed by well-stored cellars with sauerkraut, canned eggs and small fruits, the products of the smoke-houses, pretzels, cheeses, sausage of every variety, ‘pflaumenmuss’ (pluememoos) and a good larder with chickens, eggs and butter produced on practically every farm? Such household economy is a challenge to the industrial meat-packer, fruit canner and groceteria – proof positive that if our industrial civilization cracked, our rails rusted, and our towns crumbled there are rural people in Western Canada who could emulate the examples of early Canadian settlers…”

Mennonite meeting houses he noted might be “bare edifices” and as a people Mennonites might: “distrust the world, the flesh, and the devil of our modern world … But the most progressive mind must also feel so doubtful of much of the glitter and tinsel of our world… To substitute novelty for progress, mechanization for efficiency, and standardization for style means commercialized sport, newspaper sensationalism, radio jazz, sex films, cosmetics, drug stores, and the emotionalism of the morticians’ trade. The evils of which a Mennonite is warned are sins of the flesh, the error of force, the stupidities of blasphemy and pride, but the evils against which advertisement pages of any magazine warn are halitosis, the offence of being out of style in dress or automobiles, and the risks of social or business failure.”⁴²

Whatever their personal opinions, the representatives of this railway company came to Rhineland, Steinbach, and surrounding areas only briefly in the early 1930s. They soon departed, taking their opinions and score-sheets with them. Presumably they arrived and left in motor vehicles instead of rail carriages pulled by a steam engine and mounted on rails, a form of transport that may have brought the “world” to Mennonite communities. When the dust settled from the unsealed roads, the impact of these visitors from afar may have lived on in the progressive practices and institutions the competitions had encouraged, but most Mennonites appear to have forgotten this brief encounter with the judges of the C.N.R. competitions.

1. Arnold Dyck, ed., “Community Progress Wettbewerb 1931,” Die Post 18, no. 34 (22 August 1931): 5. ↩︎
2. Robert England, The Colonization of Western Canada: a Study of Contemporary Land Settlement (1896–1934) (London: P. S. King, 1936); see E. K. Francis, In Search of Utopia: the Mennonites in Manitoba (Altona: D. W. Friesen, 1955), 279. ↩︎
3. William John Black (1872–1941), former President of the Manitoba Agricultural College and Professor of Animal Husbandry. ↩︎
4. Walter Murray, “Continental Europeans in Western Canada,” Queen’s Quarterly 38 (1931): 63; Murray (1866 –1945) was the first President of the University of Saskatchewan where he promoted links between agriculture and other academic fields of study. ↩︎
5. On the larger context see Susan E. Wurtele, “‘Apostles of Progress’: Robert England, the C.N.R. and Prairie Settlement,” in H. John Selwood and John C. Lehr, eds., Reflections from the Prairies: Geographical Essays (Department of Geography, University of Manitoba, 1992), 14–25; Brian S. Osborne and Susan E. Wurtele, “The Other Railway: Canadian National’s Department of Colonization and Agriculture,” Prairie Forum 20, no. 2 (1995): 231–254; reprinted in Gregory P. Marchildon, ed., Immigration and Settlement, 1870–1939 (University of Regina: CPRC Press, 2009), 103–128. ↩︎
6. Robert England. “A Project in the use of Group Consciousness as a Lever in Agricultural Progress,” Scientific Agriculture 13, no. 4 (1932): 260–272. ↩︎
7. Stuart Henderson, “’While there is still time …’: J. Murray Gibbon and the Spectacle of Difference in Three CPR Folk Festivals, 1928–1931,” Journal of Canadian Studies/ Revue de’etudes candiennes 39 (Winter 2005): 158, 169, n. 37. ↩︎
8. “Introduction” to the brochure for the Competitions in Community Progress: Provinces of Manitoba Saskatchewan and Alberta (Montreal: Department of Colonization and Agriculture, C.N.R., 1931); copy is in the W. C. Murray Fonds, University of Saskatchewan, University Archives & Special Collections at http://sain.scaa.sk.ca/collections/w-c-murray-fonds. Some documents of these fonds have been digitalized by the University of Manitoba Library at:http://manitobia.net/islandora/search/competitions?type=edismax&cp=uofm%3Apie&islandora_solr_search_navigation=0 ↩︎
9. Allowing for inflation this means in 2019 terms the prizes would be worth around $14,600/$7,300/$3,500; figures from the calculator of the Consumer Price Index of the Bank of Canada although their purchasing power would have been higher than perhaps indicated by these calculations ↩︎
10. Murray, “Continental Europeans,” 63. ↩︎
11. Competitions in Community Progress (1930) and for 1931, 1932 in copies in W. C. Murray Fonds, University of Saskatchewan and also digitalized by the University of Manitoba. ↩︎
12. Examples these score cards and the calculations can be found in the Murray Papers at the University of Saskatchewan again digitalized in the University of Manitoba Library collection. ↩︎
13. Newspaper reports of the competition appeared in a number of local Canadian newspapers all across Canada and even one from the Ottawa correspondent of The Times of London, “A Citizenship Contest. Foreign Stocks in Canada,” The Times 45877 (July 17, 1931): 13. ↩︎
14. Brave Harvest: The Life Story of E. Cora Hind, LL.D (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1945); Hind (1861–1942) contributed articles on agricultural issues and also wrote a lengthy entry “The Mennonites of Manitoba” in Canada, an Encyclopaedia of the Country: The Canadian Dominion Considered in its Historic Relations, its Natural Resources, its Material Progress and its National Development, 4 (1898), 140–144. ↩︎
15. Shirley Muir, and Penni Mitchell, “Winnipeg Women Journalists have always Led the Way,” Manitoba History, 70 (Fall 2012): 47– 48; Marjory Lang, Women Who made the News: Female Journalists in Canada, 1880–1945 (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1999), 257–259. ↩︎
16. It has been pointed out to me that Mennonites possessed few items made of pewter and even those items they did possess did not exactly shine. ↩︎
17. All the quotations above come from K.M.H., “Meeting Manitoba Article 1,” Manitoba Free Press (hereafter MFP) (October 28, 1930): 1. ↩︎
18. Haig notes that Ewert’s own children were highly successful in education and employment but that this is uncommon in the community; this ended the second of Haig’s reports, K.M.H., “Meeting Manitoba Article 2” MFP (October 29, 1930), 1; Ewert himself mentioned the competitions in his 1932 address to the Historical and Scientific Society of Manitoba published as The Mennonites. (Rosthern: D. H. Epp, c. 1932), 11. ↩︎
19. K.M.H., “Meeting Manitoba Article 3,” MFP (October 30, 1930): 1; her article provides more detailed statistics supplied by the Department. ↩︎
20. K.M.H., “Meeting Manitoba Article 4” MFP (October 31, 1930): 1. ↩︎
21. K.M.H., “Meeting Manitoba Article 6” MFP (November 3,1930), 1. ↩︎
22. Paul Yuzyk, The Ukrainians in Manitoba: a Social History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1953), 214 claims Ethelbert won second prize and this is repeated in a number of other later sources, but the Ukrainian Municipality of Stuartburn was second in 1931 and 1932 and the Ukrainian-Polish Municipality of Sifton third in 1932. ↩︎
23. Details in England, The Colonization of Western Canada, 186–192. ↩︎
24. C. A. Dawson, (Group Settlement: Ethnic Communities in Western Canada [Toronto: Macmillan, 1936], 145) incorrectly claimed that Edenthal won the competition in 1931 when it was just a school district in Rhineland. ↩︎
25. England, Colonization of Western Canada, 179. ↩︎
26. For an example of a similar display see the photographs of one created for the competition by the Mennonite community of Laird, Saskatchewan in the W. C. Murray Fonds, University of Saskatchewan scanned in the University of Manitoba digitalized collection at http://hdl.handle.net/10719/1899413 ↩︎
27. “Community Progress Wettbewerb 1931,” 5. ↩︎
28. On Kornelsen (1878–1958) see numerous references in Ralph Friesen, Between Earth and Sky: Steinbach, the First 50 Years (Steinbach: Derksen, 2009) ↩︎
29. Most likely Jacob S. Rempel (1890–1947), see Friesen, Between Earth and Sky, 512. ↩︎
30. Probably the hymn by Charles J. Butler, the opening lines of which are: “On memory’s wall engraven stands and continues/ My mother’s precious face/ Time’s rude and ever busy hands/ Naught from it can erase [c. 1897]. ↩︎
31. G. G. Kornelsen “Ostreserve-Nachrichten,” Die Post (18, 34, 22 August 1931): 8. ↩︎
32. England, The Colonization of Western Canada, 242–243; the hospital would not be finished and operational until 1937. ↩︎
33. Details in England, The Colonization of Western Canada, 180; 195. ↩︎
34. Julius G. Toews, “Among Other Canadians: Acculturating Mennonites,” in Lawrence Klippenstein and Julius G. Toews, eds., Mennonite Memories: Settling in Western Canada (Winnipeg: Centennial Publications, 1977), 263. ↩︎
35. Brigadier-General M. L. Hornby, A Plan for British Community Settlements in Canada (Lethbridge: Lethbridge Herald Print, 1931), 8. ↩︎
36. Dawson, Group Settlement, 146. ↩︎
37. H. H. Hamm, Sixty Years of Progress, The Rural Municipality of Rhineland Diamond Jubilee 1884–1944 (Altona: D. W. Friesen & Sons, 1944), 21, 23 and Robert Meyers, Spirit of the Post Road: A Story of Self-Help Communities (Altona: D. W. Friesen & Sons for the Federation of Southern Manitoba Co-operatives, 1955), 16–17 who also referred to the competitions as unavoidably “paternalistic and nationalistic.” On the influence of the Competitions on the Society’s formation see also David Schroeder, “The Rhineland Agricultural Society: Its Cultural and Educational Contribution,” Newsletter of the Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society 20 (December 1997): 4, 6, footnote 9. ↩︎
38. On Siemens and his struggles with the Mennonite establishment, see Hans Werner, “Sacred, Secular and Material: The Thought of J. J. Siemens,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 17 (1999): 194–210. ↩︎
39. Quoted in England: The Colonization of Western Canada, 192. ↩︎
40. Toews, “Among Other Canadians,” 262–263; on Goossen (1884–1951) see Friesen, Between Earth and Sky. ↩︎
41. Toews, “Among Other Canadians,” 260. ↩︎
42. England, The Colonization of Western Canada, 246, 247. ↩︎