Hamilton: A People's History

Geoff Hayes is an associate professor of History and the Director of
International Studies Option at the University of Waterloo.

This popular account of Hamilton, Ontario, provides an attractive,
though uneven, narrative that describes the city’s evolution through
three centuries.

The first chapters that deal with the area in the late 18th and early
19th centuries are the weakest, made even more so by the dated sketches
of C.W. Jeffreys scattered throughout. Just a police village in the
1830s, Hamilton became a city in 1846. Its reputation as a manufacturing
centre developed soon after Allan MacNab developed his Great Western
railway in the 1850s. Michael Katz’s study of Hamilton at mid-century
gets little mention here as the narrative moves quickly through the
decades. By the 1870s, Hamiltonians were making cigars, sewing machines,
clothing, and stoves. With tariff protection, steel production began in
the 1890s.

The cityscape was well established by then, and Sherman details its
growth along geographic, class, and ethnic lines. (It is too bad that
the only two Italian-Canadians described here were gangsters.) As the
city’s Corktown and later its East End attracted Irish, English, and
Italian immigrants, Hamilton’s early links to trade unionism and
labour politics only strengthened. After a violent 1906 street railway
strike, Hamiltonians sent Ontario’s first Labour candidate to the
provincial parliament. Sherman provides a series of moving oral accounts
to tell of the fight for trade union recognition through the 1920s and
the Depression.

The book’s postwar chapters are the best. These provide detailed
accounts of the 1946 Stelco strike and the political struggles of the
1960s that saw developers, politicians, and citizens fight over the
downtown core. That debate was repeated throughout the country during
those years, but the controversy over Hamilton Harbour through the 1970s
was truly unique.

It is too bad that the illustrations do not always correspond with the
surrounding text, and that the captions are far too brief. Academic
historians could highlight some theoretical omissions and errors in
fact, but the narrative, though uneven, is readable. With its many
paintings, sketches, and crisp photographs, this book should be a
popular gift for many Hamiltonians.