Aloha from Vancouver: Celebrating a Modern Pacific Metropolis at the Vancouver Golden Jubilee of 1936

In 1936, amid the Great Depression, the City of Vancouver marked the 50th anniversary of its incorporation. Organizers initially planned a modest observance, befitting the economic circumstances. However, the Golden Jubilee expanded into a lavish festival, largely because of the influence of the city’s eccentric, populist mayor, Gerald Grattan McGeer. McGeer recast the 50th birthday as a celebration of Vancouver’s connection to the Pacific Rim. Its most ambitious element was to be a series of exotic exhibits representing various Pacific cultures. With the help of Olympic swimmer and surfer Duke P. Kahanamoku, McGeer planned to erect a Hawaiian village in Stanley Park and offer demonstrations of traditional Polynesian clam-diving in the city’s outdoor swimming pools. More impressive was the Chinese village constructed for the jubilee, which included temporary buildings and demonstrations of cultural traditions and handicrafts. This article uses the Vancouver Golden Jubilee as a lens to explore the tensions that underpinned Vancouver’s Pacific context between the wars. As an American territory, Hawai’i was a “safe” Pacific partner to celebrate, but McGeer and Kahanamoku’s presentation of Hawaiian culture ignored the complicated history of “Kanaka” settlement in the Vancouver area. Meanwhile, the Chinese village relied on outside expertise and the mayor’s deft use of exemptions to the Chinese Immigration Act but served as an opportunity for quiet resistance to racist laws from the Chinese Canadian community. Finally, the Pacific focus suited McGeer’s own ambivalence about the rest of Canada: it cast Vancouver as the natural centre of a westward-facing British Columbia only incidentally linked to the eastern provinces. However, an imitative commemoration the following year for the 125th anniversary of the founding of Fort Kamloops showed that British Columbians outside Vancouver did not necessarily accept this metropolitan and cosmopolitan vision of their region.