Recovering the History of Philip H. Daniels and Justice Weekly Mary Alison Jacques Art Histor

223 Pages·2014·2.63 MB·English

by  Alison Jacques

The Newspaperman and the Tabloid:
Recovering the History of Philip H. Daniels and Justice Weekly

Mary Alison Jacques
Art History and Communication Studies
McGill University, Montreal
June 2014

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the
requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

© Mary Alison Jacques, 2014
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To others who wish to write, talk or televise us or our paper—all
we ask is that you BE TRUTHFUL ABOUT IT, make sure of your
facts and not pick on one or two solitary items in the paper but
JUDGE IT AS A WHOLE.

–Philip H. Daniels, Justice Weekly, 1969
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Table of Contents

List of Figures ......................................................................................................... 4
Abstract ................................................................................................................... 6
Résumé .................................................................................................................... 7
Acknowledgments................................................................................................... 9
Introduction ........................................................................................................... 12
1. Philip H. Daniels: Biography of a Newspaperman ........................................... 22
Before Justice Weekly: 1893–1945 ................................................................. 25
During and after Justice Weekly: 1945–1988 ................................................. 38
Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 50
2. What Was Justice Weekly?: Form, Content, and Questions of Genre .............. 53
Justice Weekly: Form and content ................................................................... 54
Classifying Justice Weekly .............................................................................. 61
Tabloid history and research ........................................................................... 68
Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 79
3. Speaking of Spanking: Discipline and Delinquency in Justice Weekly ............ 81
Letters to the editor and spanking stories ....................................................... 84
Postwar Canada and juvenile delinquency ..................................................... 99
Letters in Justice Weekly ............................................................................... 103
Intellectual/objective themes: The issue of spanking ............................. 106
Erotic/subjective themes: The practice of spanking ............................... 111
Questions of authenticity ........................................................................ 117
Conclusion .................................................................................................... 121
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4. “How Else Could I Have Found Them?”: Personal Advertising and Sexual
Subcultures in Justice Weekly ............................................................................. 123
Personal advertising: Research and history .................................................. 126
Justice Weekly’s Boy Meets Girl column ..................................................... 139
Distancing, editing, and defending Boy Meets Girl ............................... 148
Uses made of Justice Weekly’s personal ads .......................................... 157
Justice Weekly, La Plume, and the 1960s ..................................................... 159
Conclusion .................................................................................................... 162
5. “Lesbian and Convict Contribute Articles”: Justice Weekly, the Penal Press,
and the Homophile Press in the 1950s ................................................................ 164
Newspaper exchanges and scissors-and-paste journalism ............................ 167
Republications in Justice Weekly .................................................................. 175
The penal press: The K. P. Tele-Scope ................................................... 177
“Homosexual Concepts”: Justice Weekly and Jim Egan ........................ 183
The homophile press: ONE and the Mattachine Review ........................ 191
Conclusion .................................................................................................... 201
Conclusion: Starting Conversations .................................................................... 203
Bibliography ....................................................................................................... 209
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List of Figures

Figure 1. Storefront, Jewish East End, London, 1911 ...........................................26
Figure 2. Darkey Daniels, 1912 .............................................................................27
Figure 3. Map of downtown Toronto, c.1912 ........................................................29
Figure 4. Toronto newsstand, 1938........................................................................35
Figure 5. Company Sergeant-Major Phil Daniels, World War Two .....................38
Figure 6. Manning Chambers, Toronto, 1955........................................................43
Figure 7. Justice Weekly, 1946 ..............................................................................56
Figure 8. Justice Weekly, 1957 ..............................................................................56
Figure 9. Justice Weekly, 1972 ..............................................................................56
Figure 10. Flash, 1955 ...........................................................................................56
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Abstract

Justice Weekly was a tabloid newspaper published in Toronto, Canada, from 1946
to 1972. Like other postwar English-language tabloids, it contained police and
court news, horse racing information, and an oppositional orientation to the
mainstream press. However, under publisher-editor Philip H. Daniels, it also
published content that broke new ground in terms of sexuality and culture. This
dissertation is concerned with the biography of Daniels, who alone built and
shaped the tabloid, and the previously unexplored history of Justice Weekly.
Daniels borrowed from the past to create a newspaper with radical—if not
necessarily politically progressive—elements; this dissertation examines three of
those elements. First, letters to the editor in Justice Weekly were primarily stories
of corporal punishment, which resembled centuries-old erotic flagellation fiction
and correspondence. Second, the tabloid’s column of personal advertisements
came to be occupied by individuals with marginalized sexual desires, such as
sadomasochism and mate-swapping. Third, Daniels revived an early method of
newsgathering—that is, exchanges with other periodicals—to republish writing
by two groups far outside of the social mainstream: prison inmates and
homosexuals. At the same time, Daniels constructed a morally conservative
editorial stance that was at odds with his paper’s pioneering content. While the
Canadian tabloid press has received some scholarly attention, little has been paid
specifically to Justice Weekly. While Daniels’s paper has been characterized (and
dismissed) as a sleazy scandal sheet, archival research and textual analysis show it
to be significant in the history of postwar print culture and sexuality in Canada.
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Résumé

Justice Weekly est un tabloïde canadien publié à Toronto entre 1946 et 1972. Tout
comme les autres tabloïdes anglophones de la période d’après-guerre, il traitait de
l’actualité judiciaire et policière, il contenait des renseignements sur les courses
de chevaux, et il entretenait une relation d’opposition face à la presse
traditionnelle. Toutefois, sous la direction de l’éditeur et rédacteur en chef, Philip
H. Daniels, il présentait également un contenu novateur sur la sexualité et la
culture. Dans la présente thèse, nous nous penchons sur la biographie de Daniels
qui, à lui seul, a mis sur pied et façonné Justice Weekly et nous examinons
l’histoire jusqu’ici inexplorée du tabloïde. Daniels s’est inspiré du passé pour
créer un journal empreint d’éléments radicaux—mais non forcément
progressistes; la présente thèse étudie trois de ces éléments. Tout d’abord, les
lettres à l’éditeur publiées par Justice Weekly relataient principalement des
histoires de punitions corporelles s’apparentant à la correspondance et aux œuvres
de fiction séculaires sur la flagellation érotique. En second lieu, la rubrique des
petites annonces personnelles du tabloïde a vu ses lignes remplies par des
personnes aux désirs sexuels marginaux tels que le sadomasochisme et
l’échangisme. En dernier lieu, Daniels a fait renaître une des premières méthodes
de collecte de renseignements journalistiques, c’est-à-dire les échanges de textes
avec d’autres périodiques, dans le but de republier les écrits de deux catégories de
personnes très en marge de la société : les détenus et les homosexuels.
Parallèlement, Daniels a élaboré une ligne éditoriale moralement conservatrice
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qui contrastait avec le contenu avant-gardiste de son journal. Si la presse tabloïde
canadienne a attiré l’attention d’un certain nombre de chercheurs, peu d’entre eux
se sont concentrés sur Justice Weekly en particulier. Bien que le journal de
Daniels ait été étiqueté (et mis à l’écart) comme un journal à scandales sordide, le
dépouillement des archives et l’analyse textuelle démontrent qu’il représente un
volet important de l’histoire de la presse écrite et de la sexualité dans le Canada
d’après-guerre.
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Acknowledgments

It is a cliché because it is true: behind any single author is an invaluable support
network of individuals and organizations. I am grateful for all the help I received
over the course of this fascinating, rewarding, and arduous endeavour.
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the
Faculty of Arts at McGill University, the Beaverbrook Foundation, and
Media@McGill provided much-appreciated financial support in the form of
scholarships, research grants, and travel grants.
I did research for this dissertation at a number of locations, and I am
grateful to all of the librarians and archivists who helped me to find what I was
looking for—especially those who helped from a distance. I would not have been
able to produce what I did without the staff at the Archives of Ontario; the
Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives; the CBC Radio Archives; the City of
Toronto Archives; the Jewish East End Celebration Society, London; the Kinsey
Institute for Research on Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, Indiana University; the
Leather Archives and Museum, Chicago; Library and Archives Canada; the ONE
National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California; the