Authors: Charlotte Gray
A keen-eyed, clean-shaven thirty-four-year-old with a penchant for checkered suits, Joe Atkinson insisted that he should have total editorial freedom. At first, Senator Cox and Minister William Mulock were apoplectic at the idea: why would any smart politician invest in
a news outlet over which they had no control? But their fellow investors, and Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier himself, persuaded the two men to accept Atkinson’s terms since they were all confident that their new employee’s loyalties lay firmly with the Liberal Party. Despite the paper’s big-business ownership, Joe Atkinson fought off political interference and insisted that the
Toronto Daily Star
was, as he repeatedly said, the champion of the “little people.” The co-owner who backed Atkinson through thick and thin, with both financial and moral support, was Walter Massey. “I know the other shareholders haven’t much interest in the paper any more,” he told his editor soon after Atkinson was appointed. “But you and I will see it through its troubles.”
Over at the
Tely
, John Ross Robertson regarded with skepticism Atkinson’s much-vaunted “editorial independence.” The
Star
’s slogan was “A Newspaper Not an Organ,” but Robertson told everybody in earshot that it should read “An Organ Not a Newspaper” because, he said, it was just a mouthpiece for plutocratic owners like the Masseys.
The only thing the two papers had in common was their determination to recruit working-class readers. Otherwise, they were poles apart. The
Tely
stuck to classified ads at the front of the paper: the
Star
followed modern practice and put news on page one. While John Ross Robertson’s
Telegram
took swipes at rail barons and the provincial government, Joe Atkinson’s
Star
portrayed the world as a place of progress, where business was enlightened, workers had rights, and government worked in everybody’s interests. While the
Tely
continued its anti-Laurier, anti-American, pro-Empire campaigns, the
Star
endorsed Laurier’s Liberal platform, which included free trade with the United States, Canadian nationalism, an aggressive immigration policy (limited, however, to Europeans), and support for labour unions. The
Star
did not share the
Tely
’s casual anti-Semitism: in 1906, the
Star
noted that in the past five years Jewish newsboys had almost totally displaced
boys of British origin. “They are a better class and easier to handle than newsboys used to be. They are also more trustworthy … The street sales of
The Star
fall off 1,500 to 2,000 on Jewish holidays.” By contrast, the
Tely
would no more have praised Jewish work habits than it would have recommended Irish home rule or endorsed the campaign to give women the vote.
From 1899 onwards, the battle lines were drawn. The
Tely
spoke with the voice of Old Canadians and for Crown, Union Jack, and British immigration. The
Star
did not question the pervasive pride of Empire, but it added to the mix a note of vigorous Canadian nationalism: its reporters rode on immigrant trains to the west and ate with railway construction crews in their camps. The clash of visions resonated far beyond Toronto’s King Street, where both papers were printed. In 1909, when Britain requested support from Canada for the expansion of the British navy, the
Telegram
led the chorus of approval for granting the request while the
Star
backed the Laurier government’s proposal to build a Canadian navy. For the next half century, as Canada struggled to define itself as a nation, there would be skirmishes between Conservative loyalty to British traditions and Liberal support for a more inclusive, autonomous country. The two Toronto newspapers embodied this tension.
The most dramatic clashes usually erupted over Toronto issues. The
Star
championed the widening of Yonge Street; the
Tely
opposed it. The
Star
lobbied the city to acquire the frontage on Lake Ontario; the
Tely
accused its rival of representing the business interests that would benefit. In 1909, the
Star
led the campaign to have Toronto’s water supply chlorinated and filtered. The
Telegram
refused to join the crusade until typhoid fever spread the following year. Behind the rhetoric, both the
Telegram
and the
Star
spoke for powerful capitalist interests. They would take opposite sides, for instance, in 1910, when two different consortia vied for control of Toronto’s streetcar
and street-lighting systems. It was no coincidence that, in each case, the newspapers’ proprietors were personal friends with the men who ran the consortia.
The early years of rivalry between the
Star
and the
Tely
were amicable: John Ross Robertson regarded Atkinson and the upstart paper with benign amusement. The proprietor of the
Tely
was a generation older than the editor of the
Star
, and although he still considered himself an outsider in Toronto social circles, he belonged to clubs to which this self-educated son of a small-town miller would never be admitted. Besides, the
Star
’s circulation in 1900 was less than 7,000, compared to the
Telegram
’s 25,144. When Robertson met Atkinson on King Street, he would ask, “Well, Joe, is it paying yet?” When the
Star
’s editor replied, “No, it is not,” the old man would guffaw and tell Atkinson to give up the struggle and join the staff of a paper with a real readership.
But one day, Atkinson answered, “Yes, it paid last month.” In 1906, the
Star
’s circulation topped 37,000 copies a day, overtaking the
Telegram
’s, and John Ross Robertson and Black Jack Robinson were no longer laughing. Only the
Globe
, with a circulation of 50,000, outsold the
Star
within the city. By 1913, the
Star
had the city’s largest readership, and Joe Atkinson, who had been steadily buying up the stock owned by the original investors, was the controlling shareholder. Walter Massey had sold his stock to Atkinson several years earlier, cementing the editor’s independence.
In the next few years, the papers indulged in a price war as competition for readers and advertisers grew vicious. Toronto’s paper wars followed the pattern established in New York, where Joseph Pulitzer’s
World
and William Randolph Hearst’s
Journal
went flat out to steal readers from each other with screaming headlines, breathless
stories, gaudy comic strips, the latest fiction, sports news, and women’s pages. Joe Atkinson was particularly good at dreaming up schemes that encouraged
Star
readers to enjoy a sense of shared goals. In 1906, the paper founded its Santa Claus Fund (still a feature today), with the goal of ensuring that no child under thirteen was overlooked at Christmas. In 1912, during another typhoid outbreak, the
Star
sponsored a “Swat the Fly” contest in an attempt to reduce the spread of disease from garbage to food. A girl called Beatrice Webb collected the prize after killing 543,360 flies.
In this fevered battle to entertain, the Carrie Davies case was irresistible to penny-press editors looking for sensational headlines. Stories of assaults on young women always increased circulation, and how many Toronto citizens could walk past a newsboy who yelled, “Massey Murder”? Only a decade earlier, Montreal newspapers had made such a meal of the murder of a young girl that one publisher remarked that the papers “were hardly fit to be picked up with a pair of tongs.” No Toronto newspaper would ignore Carrie’s case, but the
Evening Telegram
and the
Toronto Daily Star
were the papers that devoted the most column inches to the murder of a Massey by his maid.
At the
Telegram
, John Ross Robertson and Black Jack knew that Bert Massey’s death put their main rival in an uncomfortable situation—a dilemma that revealed the social and class divisions within the Anglo-Canadian population of Toronto. Even though Walter Massey no longer held shares in the
Star
, the paper owed its success in part to Massey money, and Joe Atkinson must have felt some vestigial loyalty. Could Atkinson walk away from the corpse on the sidewalk, even if the slick car salesman Bert Massey had little appeal to a working-class readership?
Black Jack Robinson had no time for the
Star
’s editor: he called Atkinson “Whispering Joe” because he considered him so devious. The
Tely
could use the Carrie Davies case to paint the
Star
as a Massey
mouthpiece. Meanwhile, the
Tely
could pursue a much more enticing storyline: the predicament of a helpless young English woman who had been assaulted by a member of one of Toronto’s leading families. Even though there was no doubt Carrie had fired the gun, or that Bert Massey had met a brutal and untimely death, Robertson and his editor decided the
Telegram
would go to bat for the shooter. Helpless little Carrie Davies, the soldier’s daughter from the Motherland, would be treated as a working-class heroine. The
Tely
’s printing presses, housed in a massive four-storey building with plate-glass windows at the corner of King and Bay Streets, would clank into action on her behalf.
One of the
Tely
editor’s first steps had been to put Archibald McIntosh Fisher, one of his sharpest and most persistent reporters, on Carrie’s case. With black eyes flickering under dark brows and a cigarette hanging from his lip, Archie was known in the
Tely
newsroom as “The Crow,” because of his hooked nose and the long black overcoat he wore winter and summer. Archie was extremely good at ferreting out information (as he had proved by finding the Fairchilds the night of the shooting), then returning to the
Tely
’s offices and whispering it into Black Jack’s ear. Once on a story, he kept it moving faster than any other reporter in the city. The interview with Mary Ethel Massey, in which she came across as snobbish and sly, was a triumph of Archie’s style.
Next, Robertson and Robinson watched how the rest of the Toronto press was handling the Walmer Road shooting. After a week, the upmarket morning papers had decided that a crime committed by an underage servant girl was not a major event. War news took up all the front pages.
The
Globe
even had a major scoop on Monday, February 15: “Several aeroplanes make a raid into the dominion of Canada,” read its big, black headline. “Entire City of Ottawa in Darkness, Fearing Bomb-droppers.” The story reflected the xenophobic paranoia that
was building in the Dominion. Although many Canadians of non-British origin had volunteered to fight for the Empire, they were branded as “alien suspects” and sent home from the Salisbury training camp. Hundreds of German and Austro-Hungarian Canadians were now being rounded up and marched into internment camps. Canadians were also growing nervous of the eight million Germans who had settled in the U.S. and were said to sympathize with the Kaiser. In January, the British consul in Los Angeles had warned that German sympathizers were planning attacks on Port Arthur, Fort William, and Winnipeg. Then, the British consul general in New York claimed that German Americans in Chicago and Buffalo were preparing cross-border offensives. Vivid imaginations fed wild rumours, and Prime Minister Borden was so unsettled that he requested a report on the invasion stories from the Canadian police commissioner.
On that mild Monday morning, Toronto’s paper boys discovered that the prospect of explosives raining down on the federal capital was almost as good for business as “Massey Murder!” The
Globe
article described “light balls” flying from the sky, the “unmistakable sounds” of a whirring motor over Brockville, and the distant outlines of at least three airplanes. Torontonians snapped up the story. Unfortunately, a couple of days later the paper had to explain that it had all been a false alarm, generated by toy balloons released by some rowdy young men in Gananoque. But the sense of panic lingered, along with anxiety that a distant threat had now become an imminent and real danger. The illuminations on Parliament’s Victoria Tower remained switched off.
The three evening papers, on the other hand, dogged the Davies story. The
Toronto Daily News
was a Conservative newspaper with a declining circulation. Its newsroom was too small to dedicate a reporter to the story, so it uncritically repeated statements from the police and the Masseys. Five days after Bert Massey’s death, a front-page item in the
News
announced, “The rumours of indiscretions on the part of the
murdered man prior to the shooting are not credited by the majority of police officials.” A “senior detective” (who had undoubtedly been treated graciously by Mary Ethel Massey) told the paper that Carrie had severe fits “every month” and that the shooting was the result of “the girl’s state of mind.”
The
Tely
’s publisher and editor paid closer attention to the
Toronto Daily Star
, which, as they had anticipated, showed more sympathy for the murdered Massey than for the woman who had held the gun. The
Star
had betrayed its bias from the start, when it described the eighteen-year-old in her first court appearance as resembling “the Slavic type more than the English” and suggested that her mouth showed a “capacity for resentment.” Two days later, the
Star
reporter who had watched the funeral cortege leave Admiral Road noted, “Many beautiful floral tributes testified to the popularity and esteem in which the late Mr. Massey was held by a host of friends and acquaintances.” The paper reported at length what Arthur Massey, Bert Massey’s brother, had said before the funeral. Carrie’s hysteria “on the Island when it took five men to pursue her, statements that she is alleged to have made to other domestics that are said to have been wild and irrational, and the apparent lack of motive for the shooting would all go to show that her condition was weak mentally.” As far as the
Star
was concerned, the insanity defence made perfect sense: a reporter collared Mr. Maw to ask bluntly, “Will there be any suggestion that the girl is unsound?”