Lessons in Resistance: The Swastika Riot

The only photo of the riot at Christie Pits; courtesy Toronto Archives; fonds 1266

So it was 1933. A lot of people liked Hitler. He was a cool dude back then. Racial profiling was mainstream. Sterilizing people considered degenerate because they were mentally ill or developmentally delayed or an “inferior” race or just too much trouble was also popular…everywhere. Back then the Hitler salute wasn’t unusual anywhere in the English speaking world.

Here in Toronto the Good, white people (ie of British descent) were worried about the darkening of the city, by which they meant the influx of Jews and Italians. Residents of the nice (well-heeled, British) beaches area didn’t appreciate the working class immigrants who, escaping their hot tenements, came down to Lake Ontario to cool off. Near tennis courts and lawn bowling. (Good Heavens! The smell of garlic. The babies changing into dry clothes. Is there anything worse than a tiny naked foreigner?)

Signs on the beach and swimming pools indicated restrictions, No Jews or Italians, who were as good as. And though the local Swastika Club started off small, it was gaining members who wore their emblem, a white badge with a red swastika, as they strutted up and down the boardwalk. They weren’t expecting scrawny immigrants to fight back. There were clashes. Order and good government was shaken.

Toronto’s mayor, William Stewart, pleaded for restraint. His chief of police, Brigadier-General Draper, was unimpressed. They were both members of the Orange Order, an international Protestant brotherhood that marched through the city every year to let Catholics and others know who was boss.

(In the meantime, Pierre Van Paassen, a reporter for The Toronto Star, was writing daily about the atrocities against Jews in Germany; the day after the 1933 Orange Parade, 15,000 people marched in sympathy. Per capita, that’s as many as in the Women’s March in New York or LA.)

The summer of ’33 was hot, temperature as well as tempers.

Chief Draper and his militarized officers spent every weekend suppressing free speech in parks around the city. Wherever people were calling for work, decent wages, food for the hungry, his horses and men were there to pound them with batons and haul them off. He wasn’t interested in a softball game and a bunch of Jews.

So we come to Christie Pits, a park far from the beach. Around it was a British, working class enclave. Young men, out of work, joined gangs, who resented immigrants on the move, pushing into their territory from the east and south. One of the gangs, the Pit Boys, hooked up with the Swastika Club in the beaches, happy to exploit their resentment.

It was the height of the depression. Unemployment was high, and the softball games held at Christie Pits provided free entertainment attended by large crowds. The final series that year was between the Harbord Playground team, a group of Jewish boys, and St Peter’s.

There were rumblings. In the penultimate game, someone from the Pit Gang waved a sweater painted with a swastika. But they wanted to make a bigger statement, so during the night, they painted a giant swastika and “Hail Hitler” on the roof of the park’s club house. At the last game, tension mounted. The Pit Boys were sitting on the hill behind third base, the supporters of the Harbord team watching them from the opposite hill.

St. Peter’s won the game, but that wasn’t the point for the Pit Gang. They raised a large white blanket, the swastika painted large and black on it, called out Hail Hitler, and violence erupted. The Jewish boys, who’d snuck onto the hill above them, ran down, fists flying. The riot lasted six hours.

People poured from their houses and swarmed the streets. Jewish and Italian boys met up at the Golem restaurant and pool halls, grabbing cues and lead pipes. The riot spilled out of the park and into surrounding streets. The police were occupied elsewhere, busy arresting speakers in other parks. By the time they quelled the riot, it had run its course, involving up to ten thousand people. The blanket was trampled.

The mayor of Toronto, slight and unimposing and an Orange man who had no love for Catholics or Jews, could have done any number of things. His police chief would have loved a mass arrest. Instead the mayor banned the swastika.

It took a riot and a conservative mayor to make a statement about this city. A statement of action that changed the future of Toronto, which ultimately made my neighbourhood the haven that it is.

In 2017, from my house it’s a fifteen minute walk to Christie Pits or to Harbord Street, where my friends’ kids go to high school. The neighbourhood was gentrified decades ago. It’s peaceful and multicultural. The riot, its violence and the reasons for it, have become unimaginable…until recently.

But now Big Brother is in the Whitehouse, a pathological liar aiming to brainwash his people with repeated lies and propaganda.

Seen that one before, never wanted to see it again. But that is the reality we face, no alternative fact, and wherever we reside, we have to grapple with it.

As yet, Americans have avenues of communication and assembly open to them.

As yet, Canada is free and liberal, but the sickness is creeping up. We just saw a young, White Canadian Trump supporter shoot up Muslim families at prayer in Quebec. There ought to be horror and condemnation from both sides of the political aisle. We need to make common cause with everyone who reveres democracy and tolerance.

And be willing to fight.

In 1933, my grandparents were in Poland. Against all odds, I’m here.

Signs at the women’s march on Jan 21st: Community is the only cure for catastrophe. Action is the only antidote to anger.

It’s also the antidote to hopelessness.

The sequel to 1933’s riot a few blocks from my house? I just found it in the newspaper archives.