Defiant Spirits by Ross King

of location was almost certainly Harris’s. The subject matter was probably inspired by Skarbina’s twilight masterpiece Railway Tracks in North Berlin, an industrial landscape featuring a gasometer flanked by chimney stacks in a haze of smoke and steam. Harris was no doubt also aware of cries of modernists such as the English poet and art critic Laurence Binyon, who wanted artists to turn away from “subjects from the past” and instead paint images of modern life. “We are to celebrate the sublime geometry of gasworks,” Binyon wrote in 1910, “the hubbub of arsenals, the intoxicating swiftness of aeroplanes.” 36 What better way for Harris and MacDonald to proclaim themselves modernists than by depicting icons of the contemporary industrial city such as smokestacks, locomotives and gasometers?
    There might have also been another motive for choosing this location. Toronto industrialized around the time of Confederation, after which its steam-powered factories and foundries became sources of local pride. The first few decades after Confederation were the heroic age of factories and machines—of locomotives puffing through Crowsnest Pass and Massey-Harris reapers fanning out across the Prairies. Indeed, one of the first films ever shot in Canada, by the Edison Company in 1898, starred a new Massey-Harris binder. The pages of the Canadian Illustrated News were filled with inspiring engravings of Toronto’s busy factories, and a nineteenth-century catalogue for Hart Massey’s farm implements proudly featured an illustration of a factory blackening the sky with smoke. 37 Steam and smoke meant jobs and signalled prosperity. As late as 1912 a new Toronto subdivision called the Silverthorn Park Addition hoped to lure homebuyers with a newspaper advertisement that showed smoke-belching factories. It proudly declared Silverthorn to be “right in the heart of the factory district.” 38
    Canadian industry was prominent in the news in the months before MacDonald and Harris took themselves down to the waterfront. Toronto’s industries had vigorously expanded over the previous decade, 39 and a good deal of MacDonald’s professional career had been spent producing images of Canadian commercial prosperity (including, in 1911, a poster for Canadian Northern Steamships showing black smoke billowing from a steamer’s funnels). 40 But in 1911 all of that prosperity had been threatened. The country had just fought an election on the issue of free trade with the United States. The reciprocity proposals called for free exchange in both natural resources and a wide variety of manufactured goods: everything from pocket knives and surgical gauze, to musical instruments, motor vehicles and urinals. Reciprocity was popular in the resource-rich West but bitterly opposed by Ontario’s captains of industry. Arguments about the national interest were rolled out to defend the owners of private fortunes. “Canadian nationality is now threatened with a more serious blow than any it has heretofore met with,” declared the manifesto of a group of protectionist magnates known as the Toronto Eighteen. The Conservative leader, Robert Borden, wrote a letter in a Toronto newspaper claiming the treaty would cause “the disintegration of Canada.” 41 Anti-American sentiment was unleashed in pamphlets and cartoons; the Stars and Stripes was even censored in Ontario cinemas. On September 21, 1911, Borden’s Conservatives won the election by 132 seats to Laurier’s 85.
    It seems too much of a coincidence that Harris should have been drawn to Toronto’s industrial zone at such a time. Already stirred by nationalist sentiments, he must have noticed how the treaty had provided for the importing of American harvesters, reapers and threshing machines. He would also have known that Sir Lyman Melvin-Jones, president and general manager of Massey-Harris, though personally loyal to the