Clarke V. McNamara: When City Council Turns Violent
To his detractors he was “Council’s Criminal.” A blackmailer. A thief. A conspiracist.
To his supporters he was “Fightin’ Joe.” A man of the people. A champion of immigrants. A friend of the worker.
Joseph Andrew Clarke was a love ‘em or hate ‘em man.
His mere appearance was said to inspire admiration or contempt depending on who you asked. A greying, square-jawed Ontarian, he strutted through Edmonton with a sense of purpose — or was it an inflated sense of superiority? To critics, his perpetually cocked brow, side-eying gaze, and thin haughty smile proved he was self-righteous. To followers, it reflected a steely, sure paternalism.
Controversy and claims of conspiracy followed Joe his whole life. When he was young, he enlisted in the North-West Mounted Police; he deserted less than a year into the job. A $100.00 fine and slap on the wrist met him. The fact that Clarke’s uncle was the magistrate who presided over the case wasn’t lost on those who paid attention.
Whatever you thought, you couldn’t deny his drive. Edmonton’s political tour-de-force, not an election passed by without Clarke’s participation. Sometimes he was a Liberal, other times a Labourite, still others an independent. Until 1912 he only secured higher office once — a seat in the Yukon Territorial Council.
By the winter of 1912, Clarke neared middle age but his determination was never stronger. He turned his attention towards municipal politics, and that February ran as an aldermanic candidate in Edmonton’s local election. A long-time Eastender, Clarke lived among Edmonton’s working-class, and pledging his voice to them, was elected their Council representative. For the next eleven months he dutifully pressed “the ‘underdog’s cause, including those who were tenants, ethnic, or wage earners,” and led crusades for increased worker protections and the creation of a municipal fair-wage clause. His fiery defence of the local Industrial Workers of the World branch drew consternation from others on Council.
When Edmonton’s next round of elections came that December, Clarke resigned from Council to pursue the mayor’s chair — William Short stood in his way.
Short was a big man. Imposing in both stature and personality, he had wispy white hair and deep-set eyes. He was a devout Mason and often seen strutting around with a bejewelled cane. Between 1901 and 1904 he served as mayor, guiding Edmonton from town to city, drafted its charter, municipalized its utilities, and professionalized its bureaucracy. When his third term finally ended, he dusted his hands and walked away a hero. To many, he was Edmonton’s elder statesman.
Subsequent administrations failed to live up to the man’s legacy. Strict political and economic conservatism, beginning with the Griesbach Mayoralty of 1906-07, followed. Distrust of the City’s unelected bureaucracy grew, new Councils diverted infrastructure dollars to political strongholds, and dissatisfaction among neglected working-class voters and communities snowballed. Some councils patched over issues, others created more.
Short had kept busy in the intervening years with social and moral crusades, but emerged from a self-imposed political hibernation in 1912 to try and right Edmonton’s course. Stability and a return to form was all he promised. Edmontonians responded enthusiastically, and neither Clarke nor their other competitor, businessman William Magrath, could muster half the votes Short received. But times had changed and Edmonton had grown without him. 50,000 more people called the city home than when Short left office, and big city problems followed them.
Sex-work was an unseemly, but ignorable issue in Short’s heyday — the same couldn’t be said by the he assumed the mayor’s chair in January 1913. Somewhere between 50 and 100 brothels dotted the rough, working class streets of East Edmonton. Just what to do was an enduring source of controversy. Most Edmontonians couldn’t give a damn — “discretion and a ‘mind your own business’ attitude” pervaded locals, John Day wrote — but to Edmonton’s upper-crust prostitution represented the most pressing “social evil” of the day and everything wrong with a rotting, urbanizing, secularizing society. Bad habits and bad morals, nothing more. A set of “progressives” stood against the well-to-do, men and women who argued that an uncaring society gave the poor few options. Clarke, the ex-Yukon cop like most frontier lawmen of the day, fell into the latter camp. “Low wages for single women, and the clergy’s failure to take an active part in reforming ‘fallen women’,” he argued, was responsible for prostitution’s proliferation.
Still, debate after debate raged. The well-to-dos, like those of the Alberta Temperance & Moral Reform League (T. & M.R.L.), demanded the City shut it all down. The progressives demanded an “open” policy; monitor brothels, make sure they’re safe, licence them if need be, but don’t shut them down. Others demanded segregation; the City should keep them confined to Edmonton’s Eastend. But Mayor Short’s mind had been made up long before. The Mayor had no time for women, sex-workers or otherwise [1], and had won Edmonton’s top chair thanks to his ties to the T. & M.R.L. When the League sought to wage an all-out war against Edmonton’s “irreligious” brothels, Short happily obliged. Beginning in mid-1913, Chief Constable Silas H. Carpenter ordered a swarm of raids, and some 350 arrests were made against those working at “houses of ill fame.”
Whatever Short chose would anger someone, and the route taken angered most. Despite all the raids, few convictions stuck to Edmonton’s sex-workers, much to the T. & M.R.L.’s dismay. The progressives, meanwhile, loathed the Mayor’s moralism on the topic. Elsewhere, the Short administration dragged its feet on a street renumbering scheme. Arguments raged over whether Edmonton should municipalize natural gas lines as part of its civic utilities. Organized labour felt underrepresented and Clarke’s old fair-wage clause was essentially overturned. Troubles plagued the electric generating system. Almost all agreed that the operation of the City — which in Short’s storied tradition was obfuscated by more clerks and more committees — needed an overhaul.
By the time December 1913’s election rolled around, a swarm of enemies coalesced against the incumbent mayor. William J. McNamara, a blocky ex-school teacher turned real-estate promoter, had been hitherto unpolitical but led the charge as Short’s number one opponent. The prickly McNamara despised the overly bureaucratic and moralistic nature of Short’s administration, and hoped to implement a more efficient, technocratic approach to city management.
McNamara and Joseph Clarke couldn’t be more different — a sympathy towards organized labour was the only thing they shared in common — but the one-time alderman supported the promoter’s bid, and the two formed a politically expedient alliance. If they won, so the story goes, a newly-reelected Alderman Clarke would support McNamara’s management reform. In exchange, the would-be mayor would support Clarke’s “policy of toleration” towards sex-work. Both agreed to uplift local labour and more stringently implement a municipal fair-wage clause. Further, they would reform the police, starting with the replacement of its overzealous Chief Constable. For Clarke it was practical — Chief Carpenter couldn’t be trusted in the new administration as the man who implemented Short’s anti-prostitution policy. For McNamara, Carpenter’s planned dismissal would be a touch more personal. James Gray wrote that McNamara was the “enthusiastic owner of an automobile which he drove with considerable recklessness. He got enough traffic summonses to give him a persecution complex.”
That December, McNamara defeated Short by all but forty-odd votes. It was a surprise upset. Never before in Edmonton’s history had an incumbent mayor lost their reelection bid. Joining McNamara on City Council was Clarke, once again securing an aldermanic position on the back of a strong working-class vote.
Almost immediately, the new administration began to exert McNamara and Clarke’s vision. City Council showed Chief Constable Carpenter the door that February, and his uncooperative successor, A.C. Lancey, didn’t last much longer.
What transpired thereafter is a still confusing circle of vaguities, half-truths, and rumour, that lead to the formation of a Provincial commission in June 1914. Chief Lancey went on record to suggest that McNamara’s administration flagrantly violated the law to turn Edmonton into an “open city.” The Mayor, Clarke, and their allies, including Aldermen East, Kinney, and May strong-armed the Chief into allowing brothels to remain open so long as no citizens complained, Lancey pledged. In Gray’s words, Lancey was nevertheless expected to stage a raid every once-and-awhile “to create a splash and to let the public know he was doing his job.”
Some policemen came to the defence of their Chief by alleging similar stories — others denied them outright. Everyone contradicted everyone, and the five-week inquiry failed to come to any solid conclusion. The only thing it managed to suss out was that one detective, Ernest Seymour, was known to squeeze protection money out of Edmonton’s sex-workers. Whatever the truth, the hearings revealed the twisted set of allegiances at the heart of McNamara’s administration.
The Mayor produced a signed statement declaring his opposition to Clarke’s toleration policy. He always stood pat with the Temperance & Moral Reform League, he argued. In fact, that’s why he fired Chief Carpenter — the man was doing a rotten job bringing down the hammer. McNamara had hoped, he claimed, that Lancey could do a better job. As for his one-time ally, McNamara thought Clarke was an egomaniac whose sole intent was to control the constabulary. The Alderman was in charge of Council’s Committee of Safety & Health, to whom the Police Department reported. Clarke and Clarke alone, he claimed, set the bar for the Department’s actions.
Clarke stood his ground, arguing the whole thing was a farce. McNamara, as Mayor, was the only elected official who could dictate Lancey. The Committee of Safety & Health exclusively had jurisdiction over matters referred to it by Council. Now, had he, as Alderman, supported a tolerant approach? Yes, but because it was the least unsatisfactory option available to City administration without tackling the underlying societal problems.
By the commission’s end that July, the Mayor received a censure and calls for his resignation. Clarke, after he defended himself in a “particularly vehement denunciation of his enemies, harassment of fallen women, and low wages,” was fully exonerated.
Edmonton City Council pictured in 1914. Mayor William J. McNamara sits at the centre rear. The empty chair at the front belonged to Alderman Joseph A. Clarke, McNamara’s erstwhile ally — why he wasn’t included in this picture isn’t known.
Glenbow Archives Photo No. NC-6-65208
For the next several weeks, things simmered. Council meetings passed, and the wedge between Clarke and McNamara deepened. A jab here, a remark there. Things began to get bad at a meeting on August 4th, when McNamara supported the unilateral firing of several civic employees. Most aldermen admonished him, Clarke among them.
But then August 6th rolled around.
Despite the previous meeting’s rowdiness, the duties of government pressed on, and Edmonton’s councilmen met as they usually did. On the docket were the mundane points of civic administration; budget expenses, topics of City finance, a new baseball diamond in the East End Park.
Item through item, the aldermen moved until they reached one in particular. In light of the McNamara-Clarke Affair, it had been argued that Edmonton form a new police commission. This body, the proposal suggested, would be wholly independent of both Council and the Mayor, and would oversee the operation and management of police affairs on behalf of the City. Now it was up for a vote.
Clarke expressed his full-throated support for the motion, bluntly stating that he had “no faith in the present administration” to appropriately manage the police. Alderman East asked for clarification.
“By that I mean that I have no faith in the Mayor and his commissioners,” Clarke spelt out. “They’ve broken with me far too often.”
“When did I ever break faith with you?” McNamara defensively snorted.
“Dozens of times. I could give fifty incidents,” Clarke said with a dismissive hand wave.
“When you tried to take control of the police department, I opposed you, if that’s what you’re sore about?”
“That’s a deliberate falsehood,” Clarke jumped, thrusting his finger like a saber. “You’re a perjurer… you’re making a perjurer of yourself!”
“You’ve tried to manhandle the police department and I stood in your way,” McNamara retorted, his tone growing sharp.
“You can’t say that,” Clarke fought back. “I’ll wipe the earth with you!”
“You will, eh?” the Mayor smirked. “Well, I’ll see you get the chance. You’ve tried to control the police department, and you know it!”
“That’s a deliberate lie,” Clarke shrieked. “You can’t climb into the bandwagon with the Moral Reformers at this late date, and try to make out you’ve been with them all along — you cheapskate!”
“I’ll show you where you get off at,” McNamara grimaced.
Just as they looked ready to go for each other’s throats, Alderman East stood up and demanded order. The Mayor apologized. Clarke gave an uncommitted huff.
Council proceeded tensely for the next hour, but just as they adjourned the Mayor took up his quarrel again. With the audience filing out, he leaned over his desk, and with a coy smile told Clarke:
“I repeat now all that I said in the meeting.”
The Alderman’s jaw tightened, his cheeks flushed. The Mayor continued:
“You haven’t got the courage of a rat! You’re a liar, Joe Clarke! You’re a thief! You’re a blackmailer! You’re a coward! Now wipe the earth with me!”
Joe took it as an order. The two pushed desks aside and rushed to meet each other in the middle of Council Chambers. They stood there for a moment, hair bristling and fists clenched, until Clarke spit out:
“You vile son of a bitch.”
McNamara responded with a punch.
The newspapers described the following events like a boxing match. Each took their swing, blocked, repositioned. Every few seconds another swear was hurled, another punch hit, another desk shoved, another chair tossed. Blood began to flow.
McNamara’s chauffeur was waiting in the next room over when he heard the chaos. By the time he burst into Council Chambers he saw Clarke — the tall, well-built athlete — walloping the stout mayor. With the rest of Council stunned into inaction, the driver rushed to help. He threw himself against the Alderman, and pinned him to one of the walls, throttling Clarke by the throat. McNamara ran over and began to pound the Alderman’s face.
Joe managed a gut punch to McNamara’s lackey and escaped, but not before the Mayor grabbed hold. The two jostled and burst through to the Fire Escape Room, home to a cast-iron stairwell and eighty foot fall. Both narrowly escaped tumbling over its banister.
Alderman Sheppard managed to separate the two. Two other aldermen came to help maintain the ceasefire, and the group made their way downstairs, both boxers grimacing and eyeing each other up all the while.
By the time they reached the lobby, neither Clarke nor McNamara could hold it in anymore. One said something, one retorted, and soon both men “[exhausted] the Billingsgate lexicon in the epithets they applied to each other.” Confused passersby outside could hear the chaos within, and just as a crowd gathered, both Mayor and Alderman, grabbing each other by their starched collars, tumbled through the Civic Block’s doors onto 99th Street.
Neither wasted any time dusting themselves off, and the match continued, harder and faster. A kick here, a pummelling there. Blood pooled. Again and again their fellow aldermen and members of the public tried to split them apart, but each time were forced back by Clarke or McNamara.
After five minutes one bystander finally managed to pull the Alderman from the Mayor. When it was all said and done, Clarke was bleeding from one eye and a gash on his cheek. McNamara’s face was swollen and blue. The Mayor’s chauffeur rushed him to their car — Clarke went home on a tram.
Most agreed that Clarke and McNamara should resign, and the political future of both men looked doubtful. Clarke, it seemed, was a marked man. George Hill, a no-nonsense Scot, took over as Chief Constable shortly thereafter. Almost immediately he arrested the Alderman on four charges of aiding and abetting criminal organizations. Clarke, they claimed, conspired with the Saskatoon Police Department to have three convicts instigate a crime-wave in Edmonton. When it came time for the Department’s key witness, a Saskatoon burglar, to testify, he reneged his statement, and insisted that he was a stooge to fabricate evidence against Clarke. While the court dropped the Alderman’s case, Clarke failed to regain the public’s trust, and after his term ended failed to gain a new seat. Clarke withdrew from public life for a time, and appeared destined to become a footnote in Edmonton’s history.
McNamara fared little better. When he refused to resign, a private citizen sued on a technicality. An investigation into the matter that autumn revealed that McNamara, without disclosure, voted on matters in which he had direct financial interest. Although the Provincial Supreme Court stripped him of the mayor’s chair, McNamara shrugged off the charges and ran again in the December 1914 election. Edmontonians didn’t want him — of the 10,220 votes cast, he won all but 235.[2] Disgraced, the ex-school teacher relocated to Detroit, and later Long Beach, California. The closest he ever got to politics again was helping organize Upton Sinclair’s failed bid for Californian state governor. Unsuccessful at his attempts to farm, McNamara eventually moved to Phoenix, Arizona and managed a handful of apartment blocks. He died there in relative obscurity on New Year’s Day, 1947. Neither the Edmonton Bulletin or Journal reported his death.
While he predeceased McNamara by six years, it was ol’ Fightin’ Joe that got the last laugh. Like Short before him, Clarke reemerged from a political hibernation to secure the mayor’s chair. He took office in January 1919, and helped guide Edmonton through the turbulent post-war years. When a sympathy strike brewed in support of Winnipeg’s General Strike that year, he stood with labour and acted as an arbiter between them and the Dominion. When strike did break out among municipal workers, he vehemently prevented the use of scabs. Despite the presses’ insistence that Clarke was a Bolshevik agent, Edmontonians reelected him Chief Magistrate in December 1919 by “one of the most convincing majorities” yet seen in Edmonton’s history. He wandered in-and-out of civic office thereafter, first as alderman, and again as mayor in 1935. [3] During his second term he pushed for the construction of a new civic football ground. A personal friendship with then-Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King helped Edmonton secure a favourable lease on federal land east of downtown. Clarke’s stadium was built and named in his honour.
In total, Clarke engaged in twenty-seven local elections, five provincial elections, and four federal elections. For his efforts, he was five-times mayor, three-times alderman, and an Edmonton institution for a quarter-century. At his funeral in July 1941, 2,000 Edmontonians turned out to see his casket pass.
Cited Notes:
William Short left Alberta’s Conservative Party in 1921 to stand as an Independent on a platform of Anti-Suffrage.
The City of Edmonton maintains a list of results for each election (found here), but does not list McNamara as a candidate participating in the 1914 campaign. This is likely due to the paltry number of votes he received. Contemporary news coverage does indeed confirm he was in the running, however. While these reports do not specify the exact number of results received in his name, they do say he received the “remainder.” Adding the totals of the other two contestants, W.T. Henry and J.W. Adiar, and subtracting them from the total number of votes cast produces the above number.
In this era, mayors were elected each year, and alderman every two. Clarke won two successive elections in 1918 and 1919, and then three more in 1934, ‘35, and ‘36. As such, while Clarke was elected Mayor of Edmonton five times, it may be easier to conceptualize him as serving two distinct terms.
Sources:
“W.J. McNamara’s Platform,” Edmonton Bulletin, November 15, 1913, p.14.
“Candidates Hold Meetings All Over City,” Edmonton Bulletin, December 5, 1913, p.1.
“Shifts Responsibility For Vice Conditions To Mayor And Com’r Booth,” Edmonton Bulletin, July 4, 1914, p.1.
“Mr. Justice Scott Makes Scathing Indictment,” Edmonton Bulletin, July 22, 1914, p.7.
“McNamara is Condemned By Aldermen for Stopping Work Without Consent,” Edmonton Journal, August 5, 1914.
“Mayor M’Namara And Ald. Clarke In Fistic Encounter,” Edmonton Bulletin, August 7, 1914, p.1.
“Clarke And Mayor Engage In Fight Both Disfigured,” Edmonton Journal, August 7, 1914, p.1.
“War Of Words In Council Results In Street Fight,” Edmonton Capital, August 7, 1914, p.3.
“Mayor McNamara and Ald. East Disqualified From Holding Offices,” Edmonton Bulletin, October 27, 1914, p.8.
“Mayor McNamara Is Mayor In Name Only,” Edmonton Bulletin, October 29, 1914, p.3.
“Bulletin Is Endorsed After Long and Bitter Fight Against Tammany Forces In Edmonton,” Edmonton Bulletin, December 15, 1914, p.1.
“McNamara Heads Canadian Club; Program is Given,” Long Beach Telegram, April 13, 1924, p.16.
“Gas Company Propaganda is Two-Faced,” Long Beach Telegram, August 12, 1923, p.3.
“Candidates to Speak,” Fresno Bee, July 23, 1934, p.12.
“Debtor’s Petitions Filed,” Fresno Bee, May 31, 1938, p.10.
“Jos. A. Clarke, K.C., Five Times Chief Magistrate Of City Called By Death,” Edmonton Bulletin, July 28, 1941.
“Funeral Set For Broker,” Arizona Republic, January 3, 1947, p.2.
Jac MacDonald, “‘Fightin’ Joe’ was City’s First Mayor,” Edmonton Journal, October 15, 1989.
An inaccurate title amended thereafter.
Ross Henderson, “Pugilistic Clarke Enjoyed a Battle,” Edmonton Journal, August 16, 1992.
John Day, Fire Hall No.1/Civic Annex, Research Report for Fort Edmonton Park, Historical and Natural Services Section Edmonton Parks & Recreation Department, c.1977, p.18, 19, 126, 127, 128,
John Day, May Buchanan’s Disorderly House, 4th Copy, Research Report for Fort Edmonton Park, Historical and Natural Services Section Edmonton Parks & Recreation Department, April 1977, p.8, 14, 16, 26, 29.
A.J. Mair, E.P.S. The First 100 Years: A History of the Edmonton Police Service (Edmonton: Edmonton Police Service, 1992), p.35, 36.
James H. Gray, Red Light on the Prairies (Saskatoon: Fifth House Ltd., 1995), p.129, 134, 137, 138.
Meeting No.61, Edmonton City Council Meeting Minutes, August 6, 1914, City of Edmonton Archives, p.1-6,
