Stronger than steel: class and commemoration in postindustrial Nova Scotia

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Editor’s note: This is the fifth in a series of posts on deindustrialization and industrial heritage commissioned by The Public Historian, expanding the conversation begun with the November 2017 special issue on the topic.

Cape Breton, by NASA NASA Landsat, via Wikimedia Commons

Cape Breton. Image credit: NASA Landsat via Wikimedia Commons

In the late nineteenth century, Cape Breton, the island on Canada’s east coast at the northern tip of the province of Nova Scotia, was rich in coal and ripe for resource extraction. When Boston industrialist H. M. Whitney organized the Dominion Coal Company in 1893, followed soon after by the Dominion Iron and Steel Company in 1899, he put into action a set of processes that would impact dozens of communities across the island well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With the establishment of the integrated steel mill in Sydney—the island’s largest town—immigration rapidly increased as workers from Newfoundland, the British Isles, eastern Europe, the American South, and the West Indies arrived looking for employment. These workers brought with them a host of cultures, religious beliefs, and ideas—all of which coexisted in the multiethnic, working-class neighborhood adjacent to the Sydney Steel Works, Whitney Pier. In 2015, the neighborhood received official designation as a heritage site from the Canadian government as a “symbol of Canada’s rich diversity.”

By this time, however, the mills and mines had closed, and Cape Breton Island was wrestling with issues of historical representation, identity, and economic development. In the immediate aftermath of the closures, a close-knit group of steelworkers sought to develop a brick-and-mortar steel museum on the site of the plant. These efforts stalled at every turn, largely the result of a dominant political belief that to move forward the city had to turn away from its history as a “dirty steeltown” and toward a future characterized by the then-nascent tech and knowledge industries.

On the other hand, state-driven methods of memorialization have been more successful. The Open Hearth Park, a community green space established on the site of the former plant by the federal government, includes signage describing the area’s steelmaking history, imagery of the site’s former life as a steel mill, and the recollections of some former workers.

There are a great many successes of the park that sits atop the site of the former Sydney Steel. Pollution from a century of steelmaking has been capped, sports fields and play areas abound, and walking tracks and exercise equipment are readily available for free to members of the public. From a public history perspective, however, things become more complicated. In public memory, the city’s history of work, pollution, and state intervention have produced competing, sometimes conflicting narratives about the importance of remembering and commemorating the island’s industrial heritage.

Cape Breton’s industrial history shares much with other postindustrial regions. Desperate working conditions and low wages in the Cape Breton collieries and at the Sydney Steel Works prompted lengthy, sometime vicious battles for unionism between workers and “the Company.” The Canadian army was called into Sydney to help put down a recognition strike by steelworkers in 1923, and coal company police officers shot coal miner and union activist William Davis dead during the infamous 1925 strike in the Cape Breton coalfields.

Quality of life for Cape Breton’s industrial workers improved during the 1940s and ʼ50s, with the achievement of unionism and the development of a national framework for collective bargaining and workers’ rights. On the other hand, it was also during these decades that the coal and steel industries began to face structural problems. Distance from central Canadian markets, decisions by private owners to reinvest profits elsewhere, and supply chain issues prompted a significant downturn that was evident by the 1960s. Taking unprecedented action, the federal and provincial governments took over control of the Cape Breton coal and steel industries after 1967.

Dominion Coal Company mine, Reserve Mines, Cape Breton, 1900. Wikimedia Commons.

Dominion Coal Company mine, Cape Breton, ca. 1900. Image credit: “Cape Breton at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century” via Wikimedia Commons

In Sydney, the provincial government organized the Sydney Steel Corporation to keep the mill afloat while a private buyer could be found. Such a buyer never materialized, and a series of organizational missteps—involving failures to diversify product lines and hesitancy to invest in modernization—meant that within just a few short years the mill began operating continuously at a loss. Despite efforts at modernization in 1988, successive governments were unable to find a private buyer and the newly elected Progressive Conservative Party announced plans to shutter the mill for good after 1999. The federal government, operating the island’s collieries under the Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO), announced the closure of the remaining coal mines as of 2001.

The loss of Cape Breton’s industries has hurt a great many people. Since the early 2000s, the island has struggled with an unemployment rate that hovers between 15 and 20 percent. A suicide epidemic periodically robs us of our young men and women, as do alcohol and prescription drug abuse.

Any form of industrial heritage that does not recognize these costs is at least partially incomplete. The turn away from industry was not wholly a turn toward a green, successful future—at least, not for everybody. In Cape Breton, unlike in postindustrial cities like Pittsburgh, nothing has emerged to fill the gap left by our vacated industries.

That said, we—as public historians—cannot and should not engage in ruin-gazing, smokestack nostalgia, or any of the other terms that we use to describe uncritical or romantic readings of the industrial past. Just as the loss of industry has a cost, so, too, did its continuance. As the result of steel production in Sydney and the resulting pollutants, for example, the city continues to have some of the highest cancer rates in the country. Perhaps our role is to be participant-observers. We should involve ourselves in industrial heritage initiatives to ensure that tough questions are not shirked, or that varying class-based perspectives are not occluded in favor or more saccharine forms of representation.

In Sydney, the Open Hearth Park was created as part of a larger state-driven remediation effort that sought to position the present city within a longer historical timeline. With access to a portion of the $400 million allocated by the federal government to the clean up of on-site pollutants, it was designed as a community space for exercise, recreation, and cultural events. The historical markers on-site describe the local history of the Mi’kmaq First Nation, industrialization, and the remediation process. They do not mention of the struggle for workers’ rights, social resistance to closure, or the fraught environmental politics that shaped the end of the city’s steel industry. Moving forward, public historians should keep such complications at the foreground of our interventions. In this way, we can contribute to a critical vision of industrial heritage that extends beyond the justification of the present order or the repurposing of the industrial past for city boosterism, tourism, or gentrification.

~ Lachlan MacKinnon is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow of the Gorsebrook Research Institute for Atlantic Canada Studies at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is a co-editor of The Deindustrialized World: Confronting Ruination in Postindustrial Places, which was released through UBC Press in 2017.

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