Fluent Essays

Q1: Read the following two short articles: · From Stories from Canada’s Economic History[footnoteRef:1]: “A Subtle Ingenuity in Advertising” (1914), p. 440. [1: ] · Oyeniran, C. (2019). Sleeping Car Porters in Canada [Web Page]. The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sleeping-car-porters-in-canada a. According to “A Subtle Ingenuity in Advertising”, the C.P.R. “tried the American cooks and waiters” but found them “unreliable, leaving after two or three months’ employment.” Meanwhile, “the men found in London remained the whole season”. Based on the readings and other material from ECON 321, why do you think that American cooks and waiters were more likely to quit than cooks and waiters brought in from Europe? Briefly explain your reasoning. b. According to “A Subtle Ingenuity in Advertising”, the C.P.R. wanted to “harmonize” the skin tone and hair color of waiters and cooks to “the setting of the particular car to which the shade of color should be confined”. In 1914, the company went to a lot of trouble and expense to find employees of just the right appearances in London. Based on the readings and other material from ECON 321, why would the C.P.R., in 1914, have found it desirable (and presumably, profitable) to employ cooks and waiters with appearances that matched the customers in the cars in which they would serve? c. The C.P.R. made an effort to match the skin and hair tones of its cooks and waiters to the passengers in their cars, but even in 1914 most of its porters, who also had face-to-face contact with passengers, were black. Why would the C.P.R. in 1914 prefer black porters, but cooks and waiters of mixed appearances that matched the passengers? Q2: Sources you will need for this question: · Ogilvie Flour Mills Company. (1905). Ogilvie’s Book for a Cook. Montreal: Ogilvie. https://archive.org/details/McGillLibrary-rbsc-cookbook-coll-TX7156O431905-copy2-18650/mode/2up · Everitt, J. (1993). The early development of the flour milling industry on the Prairies. Journal of Historical Geography, 19(3), 278 – 298. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/10.1006/jhge.1993.1018 · Varty, J. F. (2004). On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread. The Canadian Historical Review, 85(4), 721-753. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/10.3138/CHR.85.4.721 a. (5 marks) Use information from the Everitt (1993) paper (and, optionally, ECON 321 lecture material) to answer the following question: Why would the Ogilvie Company have first published the book in 1905, as opposed to earlier or later? (Note: New editions of the cookbook continued to be published at least until the 1930s.) For full marks, you must show that you are using information from Everitt (1993). b. (5 marks) The cookbook was an effective way for the Ogilvie company to send messages to consumers of flour. Of all the messages the company could have chosen to send, it chose to focus on uniformity. There were at least two ty“A Subtle Ingenuity in Advertising” The C.P.R. has disclosed a subtle ingenuity in advertising; nor did this suffer impairment in a comparatively recent instance. The company wanted, to be exact, 670 cooks and waiters for its dining–car service last spring. It has tried the American cooks and waiters by the painful hundred and found them unreliable. It determined to advertise in the “Big Smoke.” London is unthinkably cosmopolite. Every race under heaven has its representatives in the world’s metropolis. In a delicate way the company announced that it wanted a certain number of fair–haired people and an equal number of dark “complexioned” individuals. The papers began to write about the “red–haired dining car,” and “black–haired dining car” to such an extent as to cause nothing short of a “thrill” in the general breast. And the requisite number responded – to be exact, indeed, there were at least 2,000 persons, at one time or another, who applied. There was a severe weeding process, with the result that the requisite number were employed and shipped out – fair and dark–complexioned men – to harmonize with the setting of the particular car to which the shade of color should be confined. And it is the fact that the C.P.R. desires, in its aesthetic way, to produce in each dining car what might be called a synthesis as to the color and height and general appearance of the men – the idea being in decorations and general ensemble to present a harmonious whole for the delectation of the passengers. The point of interest is this – that whereas the American cooks and waiters who had aforetime been employed by the company were for the most part unreliable, leaving after two or three months’ employment, the men found in London remained the whole season; and at this moment of the entire number 500 are still in the employment of the company. Some left to better themselves; a few went back but the greater bulk are at work quite contented, as the commissioner sent out recently “Answers” and who talked with the men, avouches. These men are Swiss, Scandinavians, Germans to some slight degree, and British. The Swiss speak at least three languages, and are most adaptive. This matter of help on the dining cars is one of the serious problems to be faced by W. A. Cooper, the manager of the sleeping and dining car service – the difficulty of getting and then retaining the right men; but the experiment of going to London and advertising for them has proved an unqualified success. It seems unthinkably remote to consider the big posters of the early days which announced, rather riotously, the advantage of the C.P.R. in the matter of gastronic enjoyment. The delicate aestheticism which the company now provides marks the apogee of advance and elaboration.Sleeping Car Porters in Canada Sleeping car porters were railway employees who attended to passengers aboard sleeping cars. Porters were responsible for passengers’ needs throughout a train trip, including carrying luggage, setting up beds, pressing clothes and shining shoes, and serving food and beverages, among other services. The vast majority of sleeping car porters were Black men and the position was one of only a few job opportunities available to Black men in Canada. While the position carried respect and prestige for Black men in their communities, the work demanded long hours for little pay. Porters could be fired suddenly and were often subjected to racist treatment. Black Canadian porters formed the first Black railway union in North America (1917) and became members of the larger Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1939. Both unions combatted racism and the many challenges that porters experienced on the job. Pullman Sleeper Cars George M. Pullman invented the Pullman sleeper car in partnership with Benjamin Field. Designed for overnight travel, Pullman sleeper cars were first used in the United States in 1865 and introduced in Canada by the 1870s. Pullman cars were more comfortable and luxurious than regular passenger cars, with chandeliers, privacy curtains and silk shades, vibrant colours, dark walnut panelling and richly upholstered seating. At night, seats were unfolded as beds and bunks were pulled down from the wall. After initial success in the United States, the use of sleeping cars grew rapidly in Canada. William Van Horne, general manager and president of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), tripled the CPR’s investment in sleeping cars between 1885 and 1895. Other Canadian railways, such as the Canada Atlantic Railway and the Intercolonial Railway, also increased the number of sleeping cars in their fleets. Black Railway Porters in Canada One reason why sleeper cars were so successful was the high level of service provided by porters. In both the United States and Canada, Black men were preferred hires because of their history in domestic service. The American Civil War, which ended in 1865, freed thousands of enslaved Black people, many of whom needed jobs. George Pullman modelled his train service on enslavement-era servitude and hired Black men to work as porters for his company. (By the 1920s, Pullman was the largest employer of Black men in the Unites States.) When sleeper cars were imported to Canada, Pullman’s service model came along with it. In Canada, porters were hired from cities with established Black communities, including Africville in Halifax, Little Burgundy in Montreal and Toronto’s Bathurst and Bloor area. According to historian Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu, “Many African Canadians migrated westward for promotions or better opportunities with the Pullman Palace Car Company, the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the Grand Trunk Railways.” As a result, 76 men were working as porters out of Winnipeg by 1909. AOn Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread: Rationalizing Technologies and the Canadian State, 1912B1935 JOHN F. VARTY When, in the 1850s, luminaries at the Chicago Board of Trade devised a system of rationalized categories B >grades= B for expressing grain qual- ity, they created a technology that was, while abstract, as transformative as any other in turning North America=s Great Plains into the world=s >bread basket.=1 Then, as now, grades engendered the tacit assumption that nature could and should be rationalized to suit human needs. In this respect, of course, wheat grades were hardly unique at the time of their advent. Indeed, such rationalized schemes have been integral to the broader project of Western modernity, which, among other things, entails the reification of categories of >things which stay together.=2 The formation of putatively objective bodies of knowledge about >things which stay together= helps inscribe meaning in the ever-changing social, political, and cultural-epistemological experience of modernity.3 The debates and discussions described in this paper may be 1 William Cronon, Nature=s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 97B147. 2 This is Alain Desrosières= phrasing, cited in Bruce Curtis, The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840B1875 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 18. 3 While the concept of modernity is not developed at length in this paper, the broader research project of which it is a part has been influenced substantially by modernity theorists, in particular Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991), and Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989), and Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996); and Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). These individuals hardly present a unified theoretical front; however, I have tried to integrate their useful insights on, respectively, modernity=s totalizing >quest for order,= shifting conceptions of time and space under capitalist production, and the >re-embedding= of meaning across ever-greater distances. understood as constituting a >moment= in the Canadian struggle to inscribe meaning vis à vis these specific dimensions of modern experience. The economic implications of wheat grading were hardly more discreet, however. By altering the time horizon of the wheat=s movement from the Great Plains to eastern US and European markets, grades helped establish and stabilize institutionalized commodity hedging, known commonly as futures trading. Moreover, by ensuring a sufficient degree of uniformity in terms of quality, grades permitted movement of wheat, via pricing and market mechanisms, in grea