Thinkers and Dreamers: Historical Essays in Honour of Carl Berger 9781442690165

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THINKERS AND DREAMERS Historical Essays in Honour of Carl Berger

Carl Berger (Newsome Photography)

Thinkers and Dreamers Historical Essays in Honour of Carl Berger

Edited by Gerald Friesen and Doug Owram

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2011 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4195-2

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Thinkers and dreamers : historical essays in honour of Carl Berger / edited by Gerald Friesen and Doug Owram. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4195-2 1. Canada – History. 2. Canada – Historiography. 3. Associations, institutions, etc. – Canada – History. I. Berger, Carl, 1939– II. Friesen, Gerald, 1943– III. Owram, Douglas, 1947– FC164.T55 2011

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C2010-907039-9

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Contents

Introduction 3 Doug Owram and Gerald Friesen 1 Carl Berger: Ironic Man as Historian Ramsay Cook

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Historiography 2 Engaging History: Historians, Storytelling, and Self A.B. McKillop

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3 Beyond the Search for Intellectuals: On the Paucity of Paradigms in the Writing of Canadian Intellectual History 53 Michael Gauvreau History 4 ‘Nebulous Penumbra’: James Mark Baldwin and the Borderlands of Psychology 93 Marlene Shore 5 Sir Andrew Macphail and the Pen and Pencil Club of Montreal Ian Ross Robertson 6 Toronto’s Arts and Letters Club: A Public History Perspective Danielle Hamelin

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Contents

7 Before the Citizenship Act: Confronting Canadian Citizenship in the House of Commons, 1900–1947 163 Barry Ferguson 8 Modernist Blues: Performing Race in the Harlem Renaissance David Monod

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History and Historiography 9 Progress, Science, and Religion: Exploring Victorian Thought in Canada 225 Doug Owram 10 Cultural Diversity in Prairie Canada and the Writing of National History 245 Gerald Friesen, in collaboration with Masako Kawata Millennial Reflections 11 A New Era of History Alan Bowker

contributors index

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THINKERS AND DREAMERS Historical Essays in Honour of Carl Berger

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Introduction Doug Owram and Gerald Friesen

The impact of Carl Berger on the development of Canadian intellectual history has been profound. For some, including the editors and many of the contributors to this volume, the influence began in graduate school. For others, it came through his writings and the way in which they affected both teaching and research in subsequent decades. Nor was his influence restricted to specialists within intellectual history. Works like The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism 1867–1914 (1970) and The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English Canadian Historical Writing 1900 to 1970 (1976, 1986) became standards for all students of Canadian history. The former fundamentally transformed the interpretation of what imperialism meant in the Canadian context, a transformation summed up in one clear sentence so typical of Carl Berger: ‘Imperialism was a form of Canadian nationalism.’ The latter investigated a subject of fascination to Canadian historians – themselves – at a time when the profession was moving in new directions. These and other works by Berger are, of course, the foremost reason for his impact on the profession. He is a superb historian with an eye for the nuances of the past. He deals with the past on its own terms while, as Ramsay Cook notes in this volume, maintaining a sense of irony for the foibles and contradictions of the people and movements he is analysing. He is also a fine teacher and supervisor. Some of us came to study with Berger by accident. As Gerald Friesen writes, Berger inherited him when another great intellectual historian, Ramsay Cook, departed the University of Toronto for York. In other cases it was a matter of choice. Doug Owram read The Sense of Power while still at Queen’s and that led him to apply to work with Berger for his doctorate. Whatever the route, though, Berger’s students were treated to three things:

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a superb historical mind; a supervisor who both made it clear this was to be our work not his but who was always perceptive and helpful in his comments; and some of the smallest and most indecipherable handwriting ever inflicted on graduate students. Good historical writing alone does not guarantee influence. Berger would have been an important historian under any conditions but there were contextual forces that increased his influence. The first of these was his appointment in 1966 at the University of Toronto. Both the timing and the location are significant. Historically, the University of Toronto had been the dominant Canadian graduate school in history. While other Canadian institutions had Master’s programs, few had much of a tradition of doctoral study in history. This was changing in the 1960s but the doctoral programs that would become influential in coming years were still fledgling when Berger took up his appointment. Of course there had always been the option of leaving the country. Many of the previous generation of historians in Canada had headed to Oxford or to an elite American institution. However, for English-speaking Canadian historians in particular – at least after the Second World War – the University of Toronto was the most obvious and favoured choice. Berger’s appointment coincided with the rapid expansion of advanced Canadian historical studies. Canadian universities were expanding rapidly in the 1960s to meet the demands of the baby boom. Tens of thousands of new students were added to the Canadian system during that decade. Initially the demand for instructors that accompanied such expansion led to considerable recruitment of foreign (especially American) faculty members. However, Canadian universities increased the size and scope of their graduate programs very quickly. Besides, in no field were they less likely to use foreign professors than in the study of Canadian history. Canadian history was a growth field in its own right during the 1960s, a decade of increased national awareness. The same waves of nationalism that led to complaints about American influence in academia and that resulted in endless political debates attracted many scholars to the study of their own country’s past. It was even possible to presume that such study would lead to a lucrative career. History departments across the country were scrambling along with other departments to expand their offerings to meet student demand. Canadian history was under more pressure than most areas, and thus a little nationalist enthusiasm in the choice of graduate specialty might actually be rewarded. That

Introduction 5

the market would start to close as rapidly as it rose was something that historians did not foresee. As Canadian history expanded it moved into new areas. Political history, so dominant in recent years, suddenly appeared old-fashioned. Academic publications and graduate theses moved in new directions, notably into the all-encompassing sphere of social history. Drawing on the strong traditions south of the border and benefiting from the earlier work of such scholars as Frank Underhill, S.F. Wise, and Ramsay Cook, intellectual history also emerged as a new and promising sub-field. The sharp ideological edges and nationalist rhetoric of the 1960s reinforced the notion that ideas were important and that intellectual history was a field of study with real promise. Carl Berger’s work, an early product of these new directions, reinforced the growth of intellectual history by providing an example of what was possible when one examined the role of ideas in Canadian history. Berger’s writings, his location at the University of Toronto, and the expansion of Canadian history thus all contributed to his place in Canadian scholarly history. Graduate students soon began to gather and then to carry the significance of ideas in history to other universities. This festschrift is edited by two of those students and has as it contributors others – students, scholars influenced by Berger’s writings, and colleagues who shared Berger’s passion for Canadian history – who wish to pay tribute to his quiet leadership and generous support. Carl Berger did much to build the field of intellectual history in Canada. However, the contributions in this volume also demonstrate that within this broad category, he focused on certain key themes and eras. The first in terms of his own writings was his interest in the VictorianEdwardian era. The Sense of Power was primarily a book about Victorian ideas in Canada. Other publications early in his career, such as ‘The True North Strong and Free,’ and an edited collection on imperialism were both related to his work on The Sense of Power and further reinforced his reputation as an historian specializing in the half-century after Confederation.1 This focus reflected postwar work done both in Britain and the United States which had had significant impact and, in turn, affected future Canadian historical writing.2 Many factors drew Canadian historians to this period in the 1970s and 1980s but among them was the framework Berger had built in his early writings. Certainly over the next twenty-five years the period from roughly 1850 to 1914 became the most studied era in Canadian intellectual history. Berger’s chrono-

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logical emphasis is reflected in several of the articles in this volume. In different ways Doug Owram, Ian Robertson, Danielle Hamelin, and Marlene Shore have all written pieces that touch on this era, though their tendency in many instances is to move forward from the Victorian roots of such subjects to their implications for interwar experience. Carl Berger had a tremendous ability to use the study of very specific, often quite elite intellectual organizations to paint a larger picture. This is not an easy task. Much intellectual history has floundered because the chosen groups or organizations did not illuminate broader forces. However, when clubs, societies, or ideas capture larger enthusiasms or link to influential societal directions, such studies bring historical analysis to human scale and augment the sense that these were not abstractions. The articles by Ian Ross Robertson and Danielle Hamelin are both good examples of this sort of work. If the Victorian era was central to Berger’s work chronologically, issues of identity and nationalism predominated thematically. Both The Sense of Power and The Writing of Canadian History wrestled with the way in which groups of individuals tried to understand Canada. In following this line of argument Berger was very much a product of his era. The 1960s and 1970s saw endless debates about Canadian identity, visà-vis the United States and Quebec. Berger looked back to an era when Britain – rapidly fading as an anchor of identity for Canada – dominated the discussion, first for imperialists and then for Canadian historical writing. In this volume many of the pieces touch on this issue of identity and on the responses of artists and scholars to cultural change. The chapters by Monod, Friesen, and Ferguson focus most clearly on this theme. From era to method to theme and thence to audience: Carl Berger was the most successful Canadian historian in discovering the patterns that had developed in the professional community in which he worked. In The Writing of Canadian History, Berger was looking at the discipline of history and its interpretation, something that fascinates historians. However, his work there, as with that of others, helped create a much broader discussion of the ways in which academic fields of study have evolved, both organizationally and intellectually. Berger’s own book on the Royal Society of Canada looked at a central academic organization and did so in a way that uncovered both the intellectual and the selfinterested. This is a volume that celebrates the life and work of Carl Berger. Ramsay Cook is ideally situated to talk about Carl Berger from a personal

Introduction 7

perspective. Not only is Cook one of the founders of Canadian intellectual history and a perceptive historiographer, he is a close friend, fellow Manitoban, and bird-watcher (something far beyond the understanding of the editors). Cook’s ‘appreciation’ is insightful in that it brings to the personal an intellectual historian’s understanding of Carl Berger. In one of his recent essays, Berger suggested that professional historians were increasingly writing for each other rather than for a wider public. He added that, in any case, ‘history seemed to matter less and less’ to citizens than it had in previous generations.3 These two issues, professional historians’ decisions about their audience and the wider world’s apparent lack of interest in history, are the subject of Brian McKillop’s witty, persuasive chapter. This essay follows on the heels of numerous entries in Canada’s version of the so-called history wars, arguments that have preoccupied historians in a number of countries during the past two decades. McKillop is well-known as a defender of progressive social historians in their debates with national political historians. The author of a scholarly history, The Spinster and the Prophet, that won popular acclaim and a ‘true crime’ prize, and of Pierre Berton: A Biography, McKillop agrees with the popular criticism of professional historical writing and insists that all historians, political or social, could write more engagingly and for a much wider audience. In his view, historical narratives that pay attention to the craft of dramatic storytelling – to plot and pace, mystery, and revelation – could win readers who have little interest in social scientific analyses and character-less ‘forces of history.’ McKillop offers some advice to the aspiring storyteller. He advocates writing for emotional as well as intellectual connection with the reader, an ideal that his chapter – originally delivered as a public lecture at Carleton University – lives up to. Michael Gauvreau raises a controversial but important question in his assessment of the place of intellectual history within the broader Canadian field of historical writing. For all the contributions made by intellectual historians, he argues, there were certain methodological flaws that made it vulnerable to the inroads of social history. Where some have argued that the great limitation of recent Canadian history is the failure to build an overarching framework, Gauvreau takes the opposite position. An excessive ‘allegiance of intellectual historians to the postwar nationalist paradigm’ isolated them, both within Canadian historical writing and in international terms. The success of intellectual history in the twenty-first century will be more open, he concludes, to historical trends outside Canada and outside the field of intellectual history.

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Marlene Shore’s discussion of James Mark Baldwin presents a different approach. Shore starts from Baldwin’s innovative observations of his children during his stay at the University of Toronto between 1889 and 1894. Baldwin’s remarkable observations of his infant daughters’ mental and physical development during this brief period gave rise to social psychology, specifically, and influenced the eventual emergence of cognitive developmental psychology. More generally, Baldwin’s approach to psychology impinged on debates over subjective vs. objective or introspective vs. experimental methods in the study of behaviour. Even Baldwin’s appointment to the University of Toronto in 1889 offers valuable insights into Canadian academe, given the wishes of one university faction to select a more junior, but home-grown candidate. Hypnosis, spiritualism, and the occult all figure in this formative era of psychology as an autonomous discipline but Baldwin’s emphasis on ‘imitation,’ an extension of ideas that grew in part out of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, eventually won widespread support. Shore pays close attention to the international dimensions of the conversation in psychology. In the process, she identifies a French co-founder, with Baldwin, of this scientific approach. She also outlines the German and American contributions to the field, thereby illustrating that the Canadian chapter in this story of Modernist social science, while real, was a relatively tiny part of the larger story. Shore has written a convincing analysis of a scientist, an idea, and an approach to understanding the world that became increasingly influential during the twentieth century. Ian Ross Robertson takes as his subject the Montreal Pen and Pencil Club, an institution founded in 1897, and one of its leaders, Andrew MacPhail. A Prince Edward Islander, medical historian, and editor, MacPhail contributed to the Montreal club between 1897 and 1914, and again from1919 to 1921. Robertson celebrates him as a distinguished man of science and letters while hinting at the fragility of the Montreal institution. Read next to Danielle Hamelin’s study of Toronto’s Arts and Letters Club, Robertson’s chapter offers an interesting perspective on Canadian cultural leaders and their ambitions. As Robertson demonstrates, the Montreal group was smaller and possessed less revenue than its Toronto contemporary. Moreover, it had no physical home and its supporters were never asked (as the recruits in the Toronto arts community were) to donate their talents to fundraising in order to develop such a meeting place. The club itself was an occasional salon and movable feast, full of conversation, smoke and drink, but did not aspire to

Introduction 9

national cultural leadership. It sounds very much like the kind of place inhabited by the spokesmen of imperialism discussed by Carl Berger in The Sense of Power. Danielle Hamelin’s essay on the Toronto Arts and Letters Club depicts a quite different cultural milieu. A public historian, Hamelin implies that the Toronto club’s physical presence illustrated the development of a new generation’s cultural aspirations. Founded before the First World War, the club’s impressive facilities and lively celebrations conveyed its members’ confidence that they would play a central role in the life of the local and, by extension, national arts community. Like the Montreal group, their gatherings were dedicated to argument, contradiction, and jokes as well as to good food and conversation. But what stands out in Hamelin’s account is the members’ dedication to critical thought and to communicating such analyses, welcome or not, invited or not, both to each other and to a wider world. Her essay is a model of public history, presenting the essential facts of the club’s existence, the appearance of its interior spaces, the colour of its displays, and the rhythm and rumble of lunch-time conversation. Barry Ferguson addresses questions related to empire, nation, and race through House of Commons debates on Canadian citizenship. The questions first arose in the late nineteenth century and were addressed by Laurier’s government, though without a concrete result. Members of Parliament renewed these discussions during the governments of Borden, King, Bennett, and, after the Second World War, King again. In the beginning they debated whether British imperial status or a madein-Canada standard should be established. Later, they disagreed about whether the national government or local judges should administer the process by which applicants became citizens. They also questioned whether economic contributions or race should be crucial criteria in the decision. In 1946, after a half-century of these debates, the federal government finally introduced a Citizenship Act. Rather than ending questions about the meaning of citizenship, ironically, the legislation opened a new round of discussion. David Monod turns to the United States to consider the advent of modernism. His subject is the impact of this distinctive way of living, seeing, and thinking upon the notion of ‘race’ in American cultural circles. Race had been an accepted classificatory concept in Victorian times but came under devastating criticism from modernist artists whose ‘fractured viewpoints’ challenged the essentialism of the previous generation. By concluding that merely visual evidence was con-

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tingent, and probably suspect, that cause and effect were never easy to establish, that racism was a blight, the modernists opened the way for new approaches to thinking about relations among the world’s peoples. In the United States, African-American modernists who tried to come to terms with notions of race might have concluded with their most radical representative, Zora Neale Hurston, that race did not exist in any meaningful way. But they did not. Most of their number, from Duke Ellington and Aaron Douglas to Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and Alain Locke – leaders of the Harlem Renaissance – would not relinquish the blackness of their black history. Though they had been challenged by modernism to ‘authenticate bi-racialist concepts in ways appropriate to modernist times,’ they settled for a black-white dichotomy as the truth about ‘race’ in their civilization. The essence of their blackness, they implied, rested on the plasticity of personality, on the one hand, and the authenticity of their performances as artists, on the other. Their success, and their greatest failure perhaps, was to reinforce the category of race itself. Doug Owram’s chapter takes a broad overview of intellectual historians’ perception of the era of Victoria’s reign, asking two closely related questions. The first asks, what themes have linked the writings of Canadian intellectual historians in looking at these years? Second, does the cumulative impact of the past forty years of writing justify the often implicit assumption that there was something distinctive about the ‘Victorian mind’ in Canada? Gerald Friesen, like Monod, discusses questions of race, though in Prairie Canada. He places the oral history of a Japanese-Canadian family in the context of historical writing on the Prairies during the twentieth century. The two generations of this family approached questions of race and identity from very different vantage points. Generations of historians, too, differed in their understanding of race and identity. When placed side by side, the family story and the history of historical writing illustrate a crucial difference between the Canada of earlier decades and today: shifting meanings of race, gender, and communication now challenge Canadians’ understanding of themselves; and changing approaches to history contest the very relevance of the nation-state as a container within which they contemplate the past. Friesen suggests that Carl Berger offered valuable advice on this ‘national history’ question. Another strategy in the quest for wider relevance is to redefine the contours of human history in order to encompass the remarkable scientific and technological changes of recent years. Alan Bowker offers a

Introduction 11

synthesis that possesses all the hallmarks of a longer-lasting schema. The ‘Modern Era’ in many of the grand narratives of world history is depicted as beginning in the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and enduring to the twentieth century when, as David Monod and Doug Owram suggest, a crisis shattered the intellectual and spiritual foundations of that civilization. Bowker follows this path. He also accepts the increasingly persuasive thesis that a ‘New Era’ has been taking shape during the past fifty years. But he parts company with these generalizations over the issue of the ‘postmodern.’ In Western societies, advocates of a postmodern cultural moment have provoked speculation about our inability to know the world and to deal with the instability of knowledge, language, and even the human as subject. Bowker, who spent his career in Canada’s foreign service, takes an empirical approach to the contemporary world. Having had to articulate Canada’s national position on world affairs to representatives of other nations, he grew accustomed to thinking in terms of economic trends, military power, and scientific breakthroughs. Perhaps as a consequence, Bowker’s essay considers the political and strategic implications of such recent developments as the Internet, the satellite, genetics, and nanotechnology. How do such phenomena affect a world system that had been relatively unchanging for five hundred years? Bowker’s thesis is that technological advances have pushed humankind into a ‘new era,’ one that will require a new intellectual synthesis equal in power to that of the Renaissance. His article is an exhilarating journey, both in its breadth of vision and in the depth of its experience of contemporary events, Canadian as well as international. To restore the whole from the parts, two features stand out in this collection. The first is that nearly half a century after Berger, Cook and others brought intellectual history to life in Canada, it remains a lively and distinct field within Canadian history. The second is the influence Carl Berger has had and continues to have on the way it is practised. This volume has been created in order to permit Carl’s students and friends to thank him for his contributions to our understanding of Canada’s past.

NOTES 1 Carl Berger, ‘The True North Strong and Free,’ in Peter Russell, ed., Nationalism in Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1966), and Carl Berger, ed., Imperialism and Nationalism: A Conflict in Canadian Thought (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1969).

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2 Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Vintage, 1957); Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830– 1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957); J.H. Buckley, The Victorian Temper (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951). 3 Carl Berger, ‘History and Historians,’ in Gerald Hallowell, ed., The Oxford Companion to Canadian History (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2004), 289.

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Carl Berger: Ironic Man as Historian Ramsay Cook

Irony: a condition of affairs or events of a character opposite to what was, or might be, expected; contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things. Oxford English Dictionary

… the jests of the ironical man are at his own expense; the buffoon excites laughter at others. Aristotle, Rhetoric III

I Modern Canadian intellectual history, in English, takes most of its inspiration and approach from Carl Berger whose work, since the 1970s, has defined the field and set its standards. Earlier work, for the most part, confined itself to exploring the ideas of politicians, the opinions of journalists, and sometimes historiography. Berger moved beyond the ideas of individuals to an examination of themes and ideologies formulated by groups of thinkers and popularizers: imperialists, historians, naturalists, scientists, and other prominent academic figures. Although ideas were central to his studies, he always insisted that both individual biographical details and general sociocultural context were necessary to a full understanding of the ideology under his microscope. He approved and, by implication at least, recommended Harold Innis’s ‘concern for limitations’ and ‘feel for the tentativeness of his subject.’ Finally, he insisted most emphatically that the past had to be understood in its own terms, not those which dominated the present. While

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others often applied these guidelines, Berger also brought something to his subject that gave his scholarship its distinctive character: an ‘ironical man,’ he was both self-deprecating and quick to identify the ‘contradictory outcome of events.’ Remarkably, all of these qualities were present even in his earliest work.1 II Few first books, or for that matter few books, have made as marked an impact on the interpretation of a major theme in Canadian history as Carl Berger’s The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism 1867–1914. That book, published in 1970, has become one of the master works of Canadian historical writing: a lucidly argued, carefully documented, and stylishly written revisionist interpretation of ‘imperialist’ attitudes in Canada. The dust-jacket of The Sense of Power revealed all, perhaps even the source of Berger’s insight: a 2-cent Canadian postage stamp dated ‘Xmas 1898’ depicting the Empire in red with Canada the largest coloured blob smack in the centre. For Berger, a serious stamp collector, the symbolism was self-evident: the nation Canada would become a dominant partner in a reorganized Empire. No colonial obeisance here, but rather assertive evidence that Canadian imperial thought aimed at a new understanding of Empire. ‘Canadian imperialism rested upon an intense awareness of Canadian nationality combined with an equally decided desire to unify and transform the British Empire so that this nationality could attain a position of equality within it.’2 His book, as he noted at the outset, ‘is a study in Canadian nationalist thought’3 not ‘imperialist thought.’ Berger’s well-known and now almost unanimously accepted4 argument can be simply stated. Imperialism in Canada had long been viewed and condemned – especially but not only by liberal historians and French Canadian nationalists – as a slavish, colonial attachment to the so-called Mother Country and its expanding appendages. Berger demonstrated the reverse. As he put it in his introductory chapter, at the same time making clear his understanding of nationalism: ‘Canadian imperialism was one variety of Canadian nationalism – a type of awareness of nationality which rested upon a certain understanding of history, the national character and the national mission.’5 This is as revisionist a sentence as any Canadian historian has ever written. Revisionist first in its reinterpretation of imperialism but equally important in its insistence that there was, or could

Carl Berger: Ironic Man as Historian

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be, more than ‘one variety’ of nationalist ideology in Canada, even in English-speaking Canada. More than arcane philatelic knowledge led Berger to advance his subtle revisionist argument. His conclusions followed logically from his already mature convictions about the proper approach to the study of history. He defined the ground on which he stood, and on which he believed other historians should stand, unambiguously. Since nationalism flowered in many varieties in Canada, the historian’s task could never be to select the finest or superior nationalist bouquet, ‘unless, of course, he possesses some absolute standard against which they can be measured. Since history itself provides no such standard, the only way in which an account of Canadian nationalist thought can be written is by inquiring into the ideas and ideals which men in the past read into their interpretation of Canada and by exploring the relationship between those conceptions and the environment in which they circulated. Those who require more than this ask more of history than it can ever give.’6 For Berger, teleology, the belief that historical events led to a pre-ordained conclusion and that the present reveals winners and losers, unfailingly distorted the past. The reason: ‘our knowledge of the outcome makes it difficult to enter the minds of the men who lived in another age and who did not know that they worked in vain for a cause that would never be realized.’7 Rarely has a historian of Canada been more certain that the past should not be confused with or judged by the present. When even Harold Innis, the historian most admired and praised for his detachment from the issues of the day, occasionally mounted a nationalist pulpit to explain history’s nationalist lessons, Berger became noticeably uneasy.8 In the heady days of the long decade called the ‘sixties,’ when Berger began his academic career, students were sometimes puzzled by his seemingly detached, often amused attitude to the Canadian past. If they came for the lessons of Canadian history, they went away hungry; if they came for a thorough explanation of that past in its own terms they departed intellectually replete. The 1968 course evaluation by the University of Toronto History Students’ Union reported that some students ‘would have preferred a more subjective approach, felt his lectures tended to be too factual and detailed … [others] noted that he did display a good wit on occasion and often aroused considerable interest with diversions into Canadian cultural and intellectual history … His superlative organization received rave reviews.’9 The much appreciated ‘wit’ probably referred to Berger’s love of irony, a quality not

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always plain to undergraduates or found in large supply in the academic world. (Those same undergraduates doubtless never guessed that their witty lecturer had a remarkably well-trained eye for the ironies – or foibles – of the passing parade. On a summer visit to his home province he collected a small red card, distributed by the provincial government that carried the warning: ‘VD gets around’ – ‘an interesting artifact of social democracy in Manitoba,’ the amateur archeologist observed dryly.10) Berger’s ironic temperament doubtless would have made him appreciate the assessment of a shrewd reader outside the academy, my iconoclastic friend George Ferguson. Thinking he would enjoy The Sense of Power, I sent him a copy. I guessed accurately; the former editor of the Winnipeg Free Press and the Montreal Star replied: ‘What a swell job Carl Berger did in his book on imperialism … As you know I am a product of a Canada whose forbearers were still practicing the imperialist art when I was a kid … The first money that I ever earned was for an IODE essay on the subject of Canada’s debt to the British Empire, and I laid it on good and thick, as I recall it. The Great War knocked it out of me … When I was going to Oxford in 1921, old George Parkin looked me up on the boat and we had a long talk which convinced me that the Empire was not for me nor for Canada … Berger writes with great perception about those years and with an objectivity I could never attain to.’11‘Here was the essence of Berger’s book in a personal nutshell, and the irony of George Parkin’s messianic failure could not be missed. Berger’s ‘objectivity,’ his amused detachment, even his approach to historical writing was founded on a deep sense of irony. Again unlike most first books – and certainly unlike most Ph.D. dissertations – The Sense of Power was infused with the spirit of irony. It appeared in virtually every chapter, and if the careless reader missed it, there it was in easily imagined bold-face in the final sentences of this remarkable book: ‘The imperialists,’ he remarked, ‘are excellent examples, not of men who quested for the Canadian identity, but of those who had already found it and who tried to bring reality into alignment with their vision. They are a salutary reminder that our own mental outlook, which seems so coherent and final, so free from extravagance, is unlikely to appear that way to posterity.’12 Is this admonition also something of an unexpected irony? Had the advocate of lesson-free history surreptitiously slipped in a lesson?

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The Sense of Power reveals another characteristic of Berger’s work that would be present in each of his later books. Let me call it ‘minimalism,’ the ability and the desire to describe and analyse an historical subject in as few well-chosen words as necessary to explain even the most subtle ideas.13 In an historian, an academic historian, this is an unusual and highly meritorious virtue. Each chapter of this compelling book would, in some hands, seem to require almost book-length treatment: the Canada First movement, the Canadian character, attitudes to the United States, the imperialists’ sense of mission for Canada. But in Berger’s writing style brevity plus respect for the exact meaning of words equals clarity. An example is the conclusion of his discussion of the apparent conflict between French- and English-Canadian nationalisms: ‘Yet for both the French-Canadian nationalists and the EnglishCanadian imperialists, history had ordained a special avocation, and nationalism was consecrated by the hand of God.’14 Readers struck by the perceptiveness of this loaded observation might wish for more but more could hardly be clearer. Berger’s spare prose occasionally evokes the minimalist aesthetic of the artist Ronald Bloore and the finely chiselled white on white of some of his most original works. A prime example of Berger’s laudable conciseness, where his minimalism might even be thought of as ‘white on white,’ is his brilliant essay, ‘The True North Strong and Free,’ published in 1966. There in a mere twenty-odd pages he skilfully dissected the persistent Canadian nationalist idea that the north, whose whereabouts is unspecific but whose inhabitants are northmen from Europe, has been central to the shaping of the Canadian identity. He lovingly traces the chorus of northerness from Canada First through the Group of Seven and beyond. He could have included Glenn Gould in his choir of songsters, or at least hummers, of the repetitive northern tune. The study of EnglishCanadian nationalism should never have been the same after Berger’s tour de force. And he set categories for that study when he concluded: ‘If Canadian nationalism is to be understood, its meaning must be sought and apprehended not simply in the sphere of political decisions, but also in myths, legends and symbols like these. For by its very nature nationalism must seize upon dissimilarities and tendencies and invest them in the language of religion, mission and destiny.’15 Alas, Berger’s scholarly exposure of the fragility of these ‘utopian’ dreams has often been ignored by urban romantics who continue to expound northern myths.

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III In August of 1975 I received a terse note from Carl – even in his correspondence he practised minimalism, especially in the minuscule handwriting that apparently gradually shrank over the years. He asked, ‘Would you read the damn thing?’ In his self-deprecating fashion he went on to assert that George Ferguson’s now well-known witticism about the need for cheap bullshit filters was ‘the only line in the ms. with any punch.’ Yet, despite these signs of post-partum depression, his taste for the ironic – or, perhaps the ridiculous – and for brevity, remained unimpaired. ‘In the library the other day,’ he ended his letter, ‘I found your Maple Leaf Forever filed between two copies of Arthur Deacon’s My Vision of Canada.16‘ No exegesis seemed necessary. Putting the worst interpretation on the remark – for it was certainly not a criticism of the shelvers at the Robarts Library – I concluded that it was verbal retribution for his recent humiliation in our ongoing struggle for snooker superiority. Still, I agreed to read ‘the damn thing,’ knowing that it was his study of the work of English-Canadian historians in the twentieth century, tentatively entitled History and Canadian Culture – its published title became The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English Canadian Historical Writing 1900 to 1970. Reading the manuscript that autumn, three things immediately struck me. First, no ‘damn thing’ this, but rather another major contribution to Canadian intellectual history. Second, it contained many striking sentences, lines with ‘punch.’(Of Frank Underhill, perhaps his least favourite Canadian historian, he wrote acerbically that ‘it should be obvious by now that he had the habit of generalizing personal deficiencies and projecting his own failures on to Canada.’17). Third, and most significantly, the new book could well have been titled ‘The History of Nationalism in English Canada,’ volume II. Although the connection between the two volumes is not organic – the range and variety of the players who appear in The Sense of Power exceeds the narrow cast of historians in The Writing of Canadian History – the relationship is a natural one. Each book is unified by a similar preoccupation: the identity of Canada as revealed by its history. The ideology identified by Berger in his first book is a Canadian nationalism that was British North American; the second book recounts the gradual diminution of that ideology and its replacement by a vision or interpretation of Canada that is essentially North American. The closing chapters on Donald Creighton and W.L. Morton might be read as uneasy

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expressions of nostalgia for the lost identity elucidated by the ‘imperial nationalists.’ Berger’s conclusion about the Canadian historians he so skilfully explained confirms their relationship with the dramatis personae of the earlier study: ‘Canadian historians have all been nationalists of various hues, and sometimes their judgments about what was central to the past and what was peripheral arose as much from divergent conceptions of nationality as from disagreements about interpretations of the same evidence.’18 The two books, then, may be read as another striking example of Berger’s affection for irony. Though The Sense of Power contained hardly a quotation from a professional historian, The Writing of Canadian History is peopled almost exclusively by academic practitioners (and a few amateurs, mostly journalists). Yet there is a remarkable similarity between their concerns and often their conclusions, though the professionals’ devotion to archival research allowed them to claim quasi-scientific status. As Berger observed, in a slightly different context, ‘There are few areas of historical study where one encounters more surprises, paradoxes, and ironies than in the history of history itself.’19 Berger explicitly rejected too simplistic a parallel between his two studies of a century of Canadian intellectual history. His account of Canadian historiography deals with so much more than the famous ‘national question.’ The professional historians spent much of their energy on such matters as constitutional evolution, economic development, political conflict, foreign affairs, religion, regional inequalities, and biography. What he discovered about nearly three-quarters of a century of hard scholarly labour in the country’s repositories of documents and statistics was that ‘historical scholarship evolved through a complex dialectic in which approaches were advanced, elaborated, documented – and then criticized, reformulated or abandoned.’20This dialectic explains why, though the past may be a foreign country, its written history reveals ‘a good deal about the intellectual climate in which it was composed.’21 That relativist understanding leads naturally to Berger’s final arresting admonition, one that echoes the final sentence in The Sense of Power: ‘Clio may be an inspiring muse, but she has the alarming habit of devouring those who respond to her charms.’22 IV With these two superlative assessments of the intellectual history of nationalist ideas and historical writing in English-speaking Canada

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Berger’s research interests took a new direction in the late 1970s. His own long-time natural history activities – butterfly collecting, bird watching, flower photography, and gardening, even the ownership of an undomesticated Bassett hound called Humphrey, and George, a high-climbing ginger cat (clear evidence of an interest in wild animals?) – may have led him to the study of the history of natural history in Canada.23 Certainly there was something almost autobiographical about the preface he wrote for the published version of the 1982 Joanne Goodman Lectures that he delivered at the University of Western Ontario. There he urged his readers to erase from their minds certain anachronisms about science and especially natural history. In the nineteenth century, he pointed out, science had not developed into the abstruse, mathematized pursuit that it would later become. Therefore, it was possible in the Victorian age for the amateur to make significant contributions to scientific knowledge. That being so, there was no reason to identify the pursuit of natural history then – or now, he seemed to imply – as ‘quaint, frivolous and eccentric.’24 At any rate there was something in birding’s ‘Victorian’ flavour, perhaps the ‘quaint, frivolous and eccentric’ character of this relaxed natural history pursuit that attracted Berger, at least before it became a mass recreation for the retired boomers and for aggressive twitchers circling the globe, life lists in one hand, mega-telescopes in the other, both elbows at the ready. Like S.T. (‘Single Tax’) Wood, the Toronto author of Rambles of a Canadian Naturalist, about whom he wrote sympathetically, Berger’s patience, attention to detail, and ready capacity for bemusement ensured successful birding.25 Indeed those qualities almost guaranteed that one day, without even trying, he would view such nearly extinct species as California Condors in their native habitat and, with a little more effort, Whooping Cranes in a Texas nature preserve. He never tired of reminding me of my insistent misidentification of a Louisiana Heron, normally found only on salt water shores in the southern United States, feeding on the Leslie Street Spit in Toronto. At the same location on a later trip he was aggressively chased by an angry nesting Canada Goose – perhaps as retribution. Once we rambled through a mosquito-infested swamp in the neighbourhood of my Gatineau cottage, where I claimed to be a reliable guide. Soon we were lost without finding the heronry I had visited more than once with a geographically unchallenged neighbour! All we could report to the scientific authorities who anxiously waited our return was infinite numbers of mosquito bites. Berger patiently waited for his moment. In the summer of 1983,

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in response to some complaint of mine he responded with gentle irony: ‘You seem to be verging on hypochondria – what you obviously need is a long ramble without maps through the swamps!’26 In taking up the history of natural history, Berger decided to apply his well-developed intellectual history skills to an exciting field that was just beginning to open up: the history of the environment. Once he began his research he discovered a rich body of largely unexploited documentation. He also found that, since natural history was an international activity, he would need to master an array of secondary sources in both Europe and the United States. ‘My work has been going very slowly,’ he wrote in 1978, ‘mostly in arcane secondary sources written by obscure Germans in the late 19th century, and obscure Americans in the thirties and forties.’ Then he added that he been having ‘a great deal of fun reading a book about spiritualism in American literature.’ The letter ended typically: ‘You can see how indirectly I am approaching my subject.’27 What may have seemed indirect to some scholars was normal for Berger, whose breadth of reading rarely left even the most obscure publication unexamined. Alhough his footnotes were usually spare, careful reading of his text makes it obvious that his references rested on additional layers of reading that he felt should simply be assumed. (Whatever else Berger’s historical method may have owed to Harold Innis, it did not include Innis’s penchant for footnotes that sometimes filled nearly half a printed page.) Alhough he never wrote an exhaustive full-length study of the history of natural history in Canada, the main published outcome of his research was a little gem entitled Science, God and Nature in Victorian Canada. In three incisive chapters he surveyed the three capacious topics mentioned in his title. In his first lecture, and elsewhere, he argued that ‘natural history was born of wonder and nurtured by greed, and it combined an intellectual fascination with the strange forms of life in northern America with an intense interest in exploiting new resources.’28 Then he presented a highly original description of early natural science in Canada, an activity very often dominated by such amateurs as Charles Fothergill, Catharine Parr Traill, and John Macoun. The gradual institutionalization and professionalization of scientific activity followed, organized by men like the accomplished geologist, Sir William Dawson, principal of McGill University, and Sir Daniel Wilson, literary scholar and amateur anthropologist at the University of Toronto. Here he illustrated the close connection between natural history and natural theology which, he maintained, not only united

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the sacred and the secular but legitimized science ‘in a profoundly religious culture.’29 The reception of the Darwinian hypothesis that natural selection rather than acts of God explained the observed changes in nature over vast, unbiblical periods of time was the subject of Berger’s penetrating concluding lecture. He advanced the important argument that, while the great debate about Darwinism and the Book of Genesis so familiar elsewhere in the late nineteenth century also took place in Canada, here it was characterized by at least three significant features. First was the prominent, even seemingly dominant, role played by Principal Dawson, the anti-Darwinian. While Dawson’s conservative stance was well enough known, Berger argued that equally important was the ‘restrained and muted’ acceptance of Darwin’s hypothesis by working scientists in their specific investigations and its ‘subtle penetration into the practice and writing of natural history.’30 Yet in assessing the controversy over Darwinism Berger adopted a surprisingly literal, even problematical argument in an attempt to demonstrate that the conflict was not between religion and science or between theologians and naturalists, since there were clergymen and naturalists, theologians and scientists on both sides. That is accurate enough although hardly conclusive. Moreover, his own argument that the conflict was really between ‘those who wanted to retain theology within scientific explanation’ and those who believed that scientific explanation eschewed all reference to ‘notions of creation and providence’ – over the place of religion in scientific explanation – amounts to saying that the conflict was between natural theology and scientific naturalism, between religion and science.31 In Quebec both the conservative Presbyterian geologist, Sir William Dawson, and l’abbé Léon Provancher, the Roman Catholic botanist, entomologist, and editor of Le naturaliste canadien, recognized in Darwinism an attempt to undermine the union of the secular and sacred, a fundamental feature of natural theology and of their social philosophies. Here Berger once again discovered those ironies that so often caught his attention. The first irony was Provancher’s use of ‘the essential tenets of the natural theology’ similar to those articulated by Dawson in order to give science a legitimacy in French Canadian Catholic culture. The second irony of this unofficial alliance, Berger observed, lay in Dawson’s belief that ultramontane Catholicism was as dangerous a threat to the triumph of ‘the gospel and the light of Modern civilization’ in Canada as Darwinism.32 For Dawson, and probably for Provancher, the enemy of my enemy was not my friend.

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In fewer than one hundred pages Berger lucidly delineated the three central themes of nineteenth-century science in Canada in an impressively original manner. Intellectual history in this book followed a pattern already established in his earlier works: scientific thought was not presented as isolated abstractions but rather in relation to the biographies and occupations of the individuals involved and the society in which they lived. Berger also paid close attention to the implications of scientific claims for underlying societal arrangements. ‘Whether expressly employed … or simply held as an unstated assumption, the natural history of an ordered, ranked, supervised and beneficent creation,’ Berger noted, ‘supported the fabric of Victorian society.’ Dawson’s uncompromising opposition to Darwinism could thus be understood, at least partly, as a defence of the existing social order including the place of the English-language minority in Quebec.33 This approach allowed him to draw a convincing, original sociocultural conclusion. Victorian natural history, he wrote, ‘was an instrument for the appropriation and control of nature and a vehicle through which divine purpose stood revealed; it was at once an acceptable form of leisure and a path to recognition; it provided an outlet for intellectual activity in a colonial environment that seemed to have no past and no traditions to stimulate the literary imagination.’34 Science, God and Nature in Victorian Canada once again illustrated Berger’s talent for saying a great deal in a short space. He provided his own bemused, plain-spoken measuring device for his minimalism. ‘The enclosed will probably involve less violent intellectual exercise than brushing your dog,’ his note accompanying a minimally autographed copy said, ‘and it has the other advantage in that it can be read while drinking one glass of beer.’35 There were times when we shared one glass or more (most memorably: a flag-waving automobile ramble after celebrating 1 July 1967; a surprise party given by Premier Richard Hatfield in Fredericton; a botched puffin expedition in St John’s; our wake following Donald Creighton’s death), but Berger, even then, never made any large claims for the importance or value of his scholarship. Modesty, he evidently believed, is the best policy, especially for an historian who knew that Clio is capable of surprising, humiliating tricks. Judgment of his work could be safely left to others. V Berger’s work is perhaps not as widely known as it deserved to be be-

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yond the scholarly world but it was regularly read and praised by his peers. The Writing of Canadian History received the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction for 1976, and the members of the Royal Society of Canada elected him a Fellow that same year. The Society, eight years later, presented him with the Tyrrell Medal, its principal historical prize. In 2000 the University of Toronto, on the advice of the Department of History, appointed him the first holder of the May Gluskin Chair in Canadian History. While doubtless Berger was pleased by these honours, nothing changed his attitude to his scholarly responsibilities or his lifestyle, although he may have worried that chair holding might reduce the time available to satisfy his enormous appetite for reading or his opportunities to tend his garden and take long nature rambles in Haliburton. Like Harold Innis he valued his freedom and independence much more than status, honours, or influence. Writing the history of the Royal Society of Canada might well have tested the limits of that valued freedom and independence, since he was, after all, an honoured Fellow. To erase any hint that this might be an official history, he enlisted irony to announce his intention to remain independent in his opening pages: ‘That it [the Royal Society] survived its first half century,’ he remarked laconically, ‘is a puzzle that alerts us to the unappreciated role of inertia and vanity in the persistence of an institution.’36 For anyone who missed that point, on the following page he quoted a nineteenth-century satirical poem entitled ‘Preparing for the Royal Society’ that ended, ‘At the Royal Society everything goes.’ The finished book, whose title Honour and the Search for Influence neatly summed up its argument, met Berger’s stringent standards of research and writing style and again revealed his capacity for dry humour. It looked carefully and critically at the Victorian origins of this scholarly organization, at its several disciplinary and two linguistic divisions, and discussed its repeated financial and intellectual crises. On almost every page Berger demonstrated a remarkable ability to explain disparate fields of research, to separate the significant from the marginal and the devoted scholars from the academic politicians. Harold Innis, who once resigned on principle, again won high marks as did the private scholar, Frank G. Roe, whose specialty was the life and extinction of the plains buffalo.37 Yet, ironically, the subject does not seem to challenge Berger’s ability as an intellectual historian. The Society’s search for influence often appeared unfocused; many of its most accomplished members preferred honour to participation and the same issues were debated by successive generations: purpose, attendance, fund-

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ing, relevance, and relations among various sections, composition of the French academy and the status of the French language, integration of new disciplines, relations to government. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose. Berger, with thinly disguised approval, quotes the historian J.B. Brebner’s 1945 observation that the title FRSC evoked ‘an honorific, autumnal glow which is comfortable rather than stimulating.’38 Although elegantly written and mercifully minimalist, Honour and the Search for Influence almost certainly failed to warm the hearts or swell the heads of the FRSCs, even if some might have found some small consolation in the book’s last, wry line: ‘The Royal Society has always been considerably less than the sum of its parts.’39 VI Although he wrote very little about the Canadian West, Berger mastered the secondary sources and more in preparation for his regular teaching and thesis supervision in this field. As an undergraduate he had been influenced by W.L. Morton, whom he would later describe as ‘one of the first major historians of Canada who brought to his field of study a perspective moulded by the cultural milieu of the prairie west.’40 Berger admired this perspective, one eloquently articulated in a 1946 essay entitled ‘Clio in Canada.’41 There Morton, in a gentlemanly regional cri de coeur, protested the Innis-Creighton ‘Laurentian thesis’ that, he argued, treated the west as a colony rather than an equal partner in Confederation. The later Morton, whose work struck a ‘delicate balance between region and nation,’ the title of the chapter on Morton in The Writing of Canadian History, informed Berger’s understanding that ‘unlike any other major region, the prairie west was the creation of old Canada. The best prairie history has always highlighted the interplay of the nation and the region.’42 Although he was interested enough in the new regionalism that flourished in the Trudeau years in the West and in the Atlantic Provinces to participate in Western Canadian Studies Conferences and to recognize the exciting new work that was often presented there, Berger’s sceptical mind made him critical of the concepts of ‘region’ and ‘regional identity’ as historical explanations. ‘Region was in some ways as much an abstraction as nation,’ he wrote perceptively, ‘for … there were always limited identities within limited identities. The concept was also ambiguous in that historians equated some regions with individual provinces; provinces were in fact far more precise units of analysis,

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because their boundaries, constitutional powers, and activist governments were easily identified.’43 This was perhaps the sane, reasoned voice of Manitoba – speaking from Toronto. As with W.L. Morton, to whom he paid homage by initiating and editing a festschrift in his honour,44 Berger’s own Manitoba origins implicitly and pervasively influenced his approach to Canadian ‘national’ history and nationalist ideology. This intellectually curious son of parents whose origins lay beyond the pale of the imperial Englishspeaking world (his father arrived in Canada just as international capitalism crashed), grew up in the northern Manitoba environment of Le Pas. There he was educated in the public schools, in the school library, and by reading second-hand or borrowed books; then he entered the University of Manitoba. The baggage which he brought to the University of Toronto in 1961 as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow ensured that he would not accept at face value the ‘northern’ imaginings of the ‘Canada First’ movement, the nativist nostrums of the George Denisons and the Arthur Lowers, Principal Dawson’s creative translations of Old Testament Hebrew, or the self-interested pursuit of influence by the FRSCs. Each required serious and dispassionate analysis, mixed with a touch of irony, if they were to be understood as part of a Canadian past that for Berger was decidedly a ‘remote, foreign and uncontemporary country.’45 But he also recognized the tension between the ideal and the possible, the central paradox of historical writing: every historian, however detached, brings background, temperament, and perspective to his work. His own choice of subjects, and his interpretation of them, was surely on Carl Berger’s mind when he wrote that: ‘All written history is, in a sense, a form of autobiography and an essay in self-knowledge.’46

NOTES 1 For some of the work that reveals Berger’s influence, see Ramsay Cook, ‘Canadian Intellectual History: What Has Been Done?’ in Damien-Claude Bélanger, Sophie Coupal, and Michel Ducharme, eds., Les idées en mouvement: perspectives en histoire intellectuelle et culturelle du Canada (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2004), 15–27; for Berger’s description of Innis, see his The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English Canadian Historical Writing 1900 to 1970 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1976), 107. 2 Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism 1967–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 49.

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3 Sense of Power, 3. 4 For some reason, which would be worth exploring another time, the Berger thesis about ‘imperialism’ has not been fully absorbed into Quebec historiography even though Michel Brunet advanced a somewhat similar interpretation. Yet in the domain of Henri Bourassa the idea that ‘imperialism’ among English Canadians was a version of ‘nationalism’ remains difficult to understand and accept. See, for example, Sylvie Lacombe’s otherwise perceptive study, La rencontre de deux peoples élus: comparaison des ambitions nationale et impériale au Canada entre 1896 et 1920 (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2002). 5 Sense of Power, 9. 6 Ibid., 9–10. 7 Ibid., 6. 8 Writing of Canadian History, ch. 4 and pp. 190–1; Berger had similar reservations about Stephen Leacock. See his ‘The Other Mr Leacock,’ Canadian Literature, 55 (Winter 1973), 23–40. 9 History Students’ Union, Course Evaluation 1968 (n.d.), 5. 10 York University Archives, Cook Fonds, Carl to Ramsay, 19 Oct. 1973. 11 Cook Fonds, GVF to Ramsay, 18 Sept. 1977. 12 Sense of Power, 265. 13 While I have long been aware of this feature of Berger’s work, Laurel McDowell reminded me of his ‘minimalist way,’ in a note accompanying a copy of his barebones c.v. Another example is his uninflated eleven-line entry in the Canadian Who’s Who 2006 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 106. 14 Sense of Power, 232; Sylvie Lacombe’s comparative study of ‘imperialists’ and ‘nationalists’ (La rencontre de deux peuples élus) is an example of a booklength study that explores Berger’s single-sentence observation. 15 Carl Berger, ‘The True North Strong and Free,’ in Peter Russell, ed., Nationalism in Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 24. See also Janice Cavell, ‘The Second Frontier: The North in English-Canadian Historical Writing,’ Canadian Historical Review, 83/3 (2002): 364–89, demonstrates the geographical vagueness of the northern notion. 16 Cook Fonds, Carl to Ramsay, 7 Aug. 1978. Ferguson wrote to Innis: ‘What this country needs is a good 5-cent bullshit filter’ (cited in Berger, Writing of Canadian History, 193). 17 Writing of Canadian History, 201. 18 Ibid., 259 (emphasis added). 19 Ibid,, 261. 20 Ibid., 262.

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21 Ibid., x. 22 Ibid., 264. 23 In his youth in Le Pas, Berger included among his friends Sam Waller, who collected natural history specimens and local historical artefacts, and Walter Krivda, an ardent amateur naturalist who apparently advised Vladimir Nabokov about butterfly collecting in Riding Mountain National Park. Michael Pyle, ‘Between Climb and Cloud,’ in Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, Nabokov’s Butterflies (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 68; Krivda was also known occasionally to fill the washbasins in the United College Men’s Residence with wriggling earthworms after a rain. 24 Carl Berger, Science, God and Nature in Victorian Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), i. 25 Carl Berger, ‘Wood, Samuel Thomas,’ in Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), vol. XIV.1080–1. 26 Cook Fonds, Carl to Ramsay, 23 July 1983. 27 Cook Fonds, Carl to Ramsay, 25 Sept. 1976. 28 Science, 3. 29 Ibid., 50. 30 Ibid., 70,71. 31 Ibid., 54–5; Berger’s interpretation is a simplified version of James R. Moore’s complex argument in Post-Darwinian Controversies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), which Berger footnotes. 32 Ibid., 63–5. 33 Ibid., 50, 64. 34 Ibid., 77. 35 Cook Fonds, Carl to Ramsay, 23 July 1983. ‘To Ramsay with best wishes Carl.’ He could vary this expression without increasing the number of words or adding punctuation: ‘To Ramsay with many thanks Carl.’ 36 Carl Berger, Honour and the Search for Influence: A History of the Royal Society of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), x. 37 Ibid., 78, 30. 38 Ibid., 101. 39 Ibid., 137. 40 Writing of Canadian History, 238. 41 W.L. Morton, ‘Clio in Canada: The Interpretation of Canadian History,’ University of Toronto Quarterly, xv (April 1946), 232. 42 ‘Writings in Canadian History,’ in W.H. New, ed., Literary History of Canada, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), vol. 4, 306. 43 Ibid., 310.

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44 Carl Berger and Ramsay Cook, The West and the Nation: Essays in Honour of William L. Morton (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1976). 45 Carl Berger, ‘Ramsay Cook: The Historian, Nationalism and Religion,’ unpublished ms., 5. 46 Writing of Canadian History, 113.

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HISTORIOGRAPHY

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2

Engaging History: Historians, Storytelling, and Self A.B. McKillop

Carl Berger’s major works, The Sense of Power (1970) and The Writing of Canadian History (1976), resemble Hegel’s Owl of Minerva, for they took flight at the apogee of their subjects’ influence. We come to understand only after the fact. The Sense of Power told the story of competing visions of English-Canadian nationalism – ‘visions of grandeur,’ as Berger had called his doctoral dissertation. But before the last reviews of the book were in, the meta-narratives on which such notions of nationalism in Canada were based had come into disarray; ‘limited identities’ became the mantra of Canadian historians in the 1970s, refracted through lenses – especially of class, race, and gender – that looked in other directions for meaning. In The Writing of Canadian History, imperial-nationalists and liberal autonomists struggled for attention and influence once again, this time within the historical profession in the form of Canadian historians such as Donald Creighton and Frank Underhill, W.L. Morton, and Arthur Lower – men whose views gained the attention of the national press and whose books were read by thousands of Canadians. Within a decade, the Canadian historian’s reading public, like the story of Canada, had disappeared into the dark winter night. The new chapter Berger added to the second edition of The Writing of Canadian History reflected the irony of the Canadian historian’s own story in the years between 1976 and 1986. As much bibliographical essay as analytical narrative, ‘Tradition and the “New” History’ charted the expansion of the discipline, its practitioners, and their works, and told of new theories, new methods, and new directions, while also noting what Berger might well have called the historian’s abandonment of public duty. ‘The expectation of the reading public regarding a work of history and the practice of most academic historians,’ Berger wrote

34 A.B. McKillop

with characteristic restraint, ‘were closer a generation ago than in the last decade.’ Individual human beings had been displaced from the centre of the historian’s attention, their place taken by ‘anonymous social patterns … groups and classes.’ The abandonment of storytelling for question answering, Berger warned, ‘tended to make access to the past difficult for the general reader; it was almost as though the historian had interposed himself or herself between the reader and history.’ The work of even the best young historians had become incomprehensible to all but a few readers.1 Berger’s final words on Canadian historical writing warned that this new history, its own path an ever-narrowing gyre, would eventually ‘experience the same fate as the old history,’ for in time its limitations, too, would become abundantly evident.2 That time has surely come. Carl Berger’s own body of work reflects story and understanding in equal measure. This contribution in his honour is offered in the hope that such a balance, so essential to the historian’s craft, may once again find a place at the centre of the discipline in Canada. In 1893, when G.M. Trevelyan was in his first year at Cambridge, Sir John Seeley, Regius Professor of History, infuriated the young man by declaring that Carlyle and Macaulay had been charlatans; infuriated him in part because it called into question his family’s disposition towards narrative history. After all, Thomas Babington Macaulay, the most popular English historian of the nineteenth century, had been Trevelyan’s great-uncle. His father, George Otto Trevelyan, was the distinguished author of a history of the American Revolution and biographer of Charles James Fox. Later, G.M. would himself become one of the great narrative historians of the twentieth century.3 In this encounter more than a century ago, a young historian faced the accusation that if he followed his instincts he would become a mere storyteller, even if he did frequent the archives. Not many years later, Trevelyan would have a similar experience, this time in the figure of J.B. Bury, another Regius Professor of History. In his Inaugural Address, Bury declared, baldly, that although history ‘may supply material for literary art or philosophical speculation, she is herself simply a science, no less and no more.’4 Readers of Bury’s well-known manifesto or of Trevelyan’s impassioned response to it, invoking Clio as muse rather than as scientist, soon discover that however deeply divided they appeared to be over whether history was a ‘science’ or an ‘art,’ the two historians shared

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certain basic assumptions about the historian’s craft. The first was that history was a craft. Bury, champion of history as ‘science,’ insisted that it must be written well, and clearly; Trevelyan, defender of history as art, insisted that history should be systematic and embedded in research.5 Both emphasized that the best history should encompass a broad understanding of the many pathways to the past, and of the regions ripe for historical investigation. The Bury-Trevelyan debate remains relevant to students of history because its angles of vision symbolize different directions taken in the study and writing of history during the twentieth century. Trevelyan drew attention to the importance of maintaining a sense of story – a recognition of the interplay of character and circumstance, and of the significance of the unique event. Bury pointed towards the study of historical experience as structure, system, and process – social, intellectual, or material. The great question these two historians raised – history, art or science? – continues to serve well as a heuristic device, for this Edwardian debate captured tensions that would reverberate within the profession throughout the twentieth century. Its ideological equivalent was the conflict between liberalism and Marxism. And both are linked as aspects of the age-old dialectic of the spiritual and the material, of inquiry and affirmation, and of value and fact, in history and in life. Recent years have witnessed a revival and re-emergence of historical narrative. The historian as storyteller is once again in the archives, due in part to the movement of ‘culture’ to the centre of academic attention. But the whole point of invoking Bury and Trevelyan has been to point out that the uneasy relationship between the analytical and narrative functions of history is scarcely a new one. It is as old, if not older, than the advent of professional history itself; and it, too, has a history. Tides are pulled by unseen forces. Western social theory, as it applies to the discipline of history, came during the twentieth century in three overlapping waves. The first was the nineteenth-century tsunami of political, constitutional, and diplomatic history that swept into the twentieth, dominating historical practice for several generations. The second was a movement of protest against the dominance of the political, towards the social, especially in France, Britain, and the United States. Then, late in the twentieth century, came the third wave: a general redirection of scholarship towards the realm of culture.6 The political approach to history was clearly in decline by the 1960s. Commitment to the social was in the ascendant, propelled in the acad-

36 A.B. McKillop

emy by the expansion of scholarly historical attention beyond the boundaries of empire and nation, towards the authority of the social sciences. Breaking the bonds of parochialism, historians in effect rediscovered the earlier mission of J.B. Bury in England, James Harvey Robinson and Charles A. Beard in the United States, and Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in France – advocates of the ‘New History’ of the interwar years, ideologically progressive and pluralistic in method.7 The trajectory of the left-leaning ‘New History’ of the 1960s and 1970s, dedicated initially to matters of class, social structure, and equality, but increasingly to feminist and gender issues, dominated mainstream historiography for the better part of a quarter century. This rich and illuminating social history is with us still. But on its own mission to expand the dimensions of history beyond those of the political and the social, the third wave of historiography took shape, inspired by cultural critics such as Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and others in the 1950s and 1960s.8 The turn to culture gained substantial force in the 1980s, largely out of frustration over the limitations of social forms of historical explanation and recognition that meaning in history takes place in the arena of cultural experience. All of this had a salutary effect on the profession by broadening it. In hindsight, however, we can perhaps now also say that social history at times brought with it more than a whiff of arrogance. The approach privileged human beings in the aggregate. Only human beings conceived and marshalled as part of a larger collectivity, it was often said, could generate historical meaning, and only through statistical inference. In contrast, work that focused on a single individual, even an influential individual, was seen to lack historical significance. For quantitative social historians during the heyday of ‘Cliometrics,’ the life of an individual spoke only to discrete action and to tangential influence.9 Studying the life of a mere individual lacked the power of prediction, for it pointed towards the idiosyncrasy of the contingent. It was seen to privilege the heroic in history; and to substitute mere narration for analysis, and description for understanding. This, went the inference of such hubris, was not really history – certainly not good history. Individuals precluded generalization. Narration precluded analysis. And who needed any more of that? A third of a century later, the tide again turned, this time redirecting currents of change not from the political to the social but from the social to the cultural. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the reconstitution of Central and Eastern Europe; the effort by E.P. Thompson, Raymond

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Williams, and others to develop and articulate a theory of culture within a materialist framework; the resistance of ordinary people to the hegemonic influence of corporate powerbrokers bent on global influence and the obliteration of any lingering remnant of indigenous custom; the postmodern rejection of universal ‘truth’ and meta-narrative of any sort – all of this resulted in the burgeoning of cultural studies with all the transdisciplinary orientations and influences the movement carried with it.10 ‘Think globally. Act locally,’ goes a catchphrase of the environmental movement. ‘The personal is the political,’ says one generated by the women’s movement. Each phrase tells us in its own way that agency, the capacity of people to think and act for themselves, is not divorced from the local environment or from the discrete individual. The capacity for change, they say, is not the preserve of global forces or the public order alone; individuals count in the struggle to act as citizens in a consumer society.11 The scholarly movement during the 1980s towards the ‘new cultural history’ reflected something similar, but with respect to historical understanding and explanation. Historians increasingly preoccupied with only the most recent scholarship (equating it with the best scholarship) rediscovered what Trevelyan knew, as had Huizinga, Burkhardt, Carlyle, Macaulay, Gibbon, and other now neglected historians before them: that history as process involves structures that are social, political, and intellectual; but that history as lived and (literally) ‘embodied’ involves individual beings – people of flesh and blood, ideas, and excrement. History on the ground exudes The Foul and the Fragrant, to recall the title of Alain Corbin’s marvellous book, subtitled Odor and the French Social Imagination.12 Historical biography, all but abandoned by academic historians during the 1960s as a career-damaging enterprise of the sort experienced when English professors dare to write literature as well as comment upon it,13 is now in strong public demand. As often as not, however, this demand has come to be met by literary scholars and journalists rather than by historians. No longer content with human subjects, the journalist-as-biographer has turned to the life story of the material object. In an over-determined world, the idea that at least the non-human subject forges its own history and creates meaning is something the public wants to believe, and journalists, who know the market, write for it. So biographies have appeared of the compass, the screwdriver, the pencil, the mirror, coffee, sugar, chocolate, and the colour mauve.

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The stripe has found its flag bearer. The penis has found its Boswell. The author of a book on this latter subject gave his magnum opus the title A Mind of Its Own.14 What else could it be? The subject is of interest, but this author regrets to say that he has not been up to reading it. Biographers of objects of material culture such as these argue that the life story of an object helps us understand the past, just like the study of people or institutions. Martin Andrews of the Center for Ephemera Studies at the University of Reading, declares: ‘If you want to get something of the atmosphere and the mood of the time, it’s through the everyday trivia rather than the pompous reflections of historians looking back on government edicts.’15 One need not go as far as this, denigrating the capacity of mere human lives to illuminate the past, in order to recognize that biographers of objects share with biographers of people a commitment to the concrete and the particular, and to narrating the ‘story’ of their subjects’ ‘lives.’ Yet the popularity and concern for the life history of the object speaks to more than the object and its story. It speaks also to a popular desire to count for something and to a generalized fear that in a global culture we do not. So writers, including historians, hedge their bets. Because we have difficulty authenticating a sense of meaning and agency in ourselves, we seek to locate it in the things we create, and tell ourselves we control – objects, and the group as object, embedded in specific, concrete, and local circumstance. Viewed in this context, the life history of the object, one strand of the ‘return to narrative,’ speaks to something greater than the question of whether or not historians are doing their work properly. It speaks also to a renewed hunger for human significance. And the contemporary reader wants to locate that significance not in the nature of ‘society,’ or the timelessness of the ‘longue durée,’ but in the life of the individual in community, because that is what the reader is, and where she lives. It speaks volumes for our age that we historians find it necessary to experience agency vicariously, by attaching it less to the inner resources we possess than to the material commodities we create. You will, of course, already have noticed a tension, if not an outright contradiction, between my language and my argument. A moment ago I pointed to the location of cultural meaning in the individual and the local – in ‘specific, concrete, and local circumstance.’ But my language remained abstract and detached. I did not intend to write in a way that ran counter to my argument. It just happened in the act of writing. It

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happened because, over what is now almost a full academic career, I have become expert in deploying the objective case and therefore in suppressing the personal pronoun. In the socialization that comes with becoming a professional academic, I learned to privilege the universal and to disregard the parochial, and with this to prefer the abstract to the concrete – in words as well as in ideas. And so, over the years, I acquired and learned to deploy a language of detachment; one that is intended to demonstrate my ‘objectivity.’ This has been, and remains, the loyalty oath of the scholar. Detachment in itself is a virtue. Most scholars attempt to view evidence from several perspectives, including those not their own. The problem with intellectual detachment is that it too easily leads to emotional – more accurately, affective – disengagement. In the case of academic writing, this sometimes leads to a more general disengagement from the very subjects we study, at least in the arts. It is to this problem I wish now to turn by way of personal illustration. I stumbled into writing popular history quite by accident a few years ago. I had come across a curious footnote to Canadian legal history and decided to write a tight little monograph on the subject – one that would be objective and judicious. But during the process of marshalling the material and writing, something completely unexpected happened. More by instinct than by discovery, I became aware that my intellect had constructed only the shell within which the story resonated. The shell gave shape and structure to the plot, but it proved to be the emotional dynamics of the story that made possible a meaningful connection between story and reader. In the act of writing The Spinster and the Prophet, I found myself especially sensitive to the human drama that lay behind the issue of whether or not H.G. Wells plagiarized an unknown Toronto woman well advanced in age. For some reason, and in an almost impalpable way, I found myself emotionally connected to the loss, the betrayal, and the fear Florence Deeks must have experienced in her solitary struggle with the legal system. Only after the book was published did I come to recognize that while training as a historian had helped me organize the plot of my story, it was having a mother who died a lingering death from lung cancer as I drafted the book that had allowed me to abandon the habit I had worked so hard to acquire – that of standing apart from, and above, my subject. I wrote my book, I now understand, less as a practised historian or as a neophyte biographer, than as a grieving son. Only when readers began to describe to me how it had affected

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them, did I fully understand that a well-constructed assessment of the question of literary theft might convince a reader, but that a well-crafted evocation of the emotional elements of the story, would touch a reader. Something similar occurred a few years later when tackling a biography of celebrity journalist and popular historian Pierre Berton. The figure of Berton’s father, Frank – usually viewed as an influence on Pierre secondary to his mother, Laura – rather unexpectedly became the second most important character in the book. Frank had triumphed over adverse childhood circumstances in New Brunswick and reached the Klondike in ’98; but he failed to strike gold and spent the remainder of his life a government clerk, devoted to his family but carrying with him the whiff of personal failure. To an extent this conclusion, not shared by Pierre’s younger sister, came about through my discovery that after the death of her husband in the 1870s, a poverty-stricken Lucy Fox Berton had placed her six-year-old son Frank in a Saint John orphanage. He lived there until he left the Wiggins Male Orphan Institution at sixteen, and kept the experience a dark secret for the rest of his life.16 Only when the manuscript was finished did it occur to me that the emergence of Frank Berton as the enigmatic object of a son’s quest to understand his father had gained resonance for me because my own father’s inner life had in some ways paralleled that of Frank – child of a Depression, an orphan as a boy, ambition stilled by circumstance, dedicated to family, imbued for life with a sense of failure and of life’s injustices. I wrote Pierre Berton: A Biography in a scarcely registered state of worry at the declining health of a father as enigmatic in his own way as Frank Berton, a man whose favourite words were ‘god damn,’ living alone in his late eighties and half a continent away. While drafting and redrafting a scene in which Frank Berton bids farewell to his distraught fifteen-year-old son Pierre in mid-Depression Victoria in order to return to the Klondike (and a job) for the last time, I had wondered why, with each revision, the moment moved me to tears; wondered, that is, until I recalled those wretched Winnipeg winters of memory in the 1950s when my father, then a construction worker, would leave home to find work in Saskatchewan or Alberta. The biography done and submitted, the letter I sent to my eighty-six-year-old father letting him know that I had dedicated the book to him, arrived in Winnipeg on the morning he died. Too late, yet once again personal loss, like the chemical mix of a synaptic gap, had linked itself to story in a way that no amount of academic training could have brought about. It is not the sense of loss that is important here; rather, it is the discovery of ways of tapping into

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inner resources, thereby enriching the cognitive through the affective, in the act of re-creation. One of the abiding characteristics of entrance into the historical profession is that so much that is necessary for the acquisition of skill is left to the student’s own devices. This includes being schooled in the craft of writing. We professors correct the grammar and the dangling participles of undergraduate essays, and we often find ourselves informing students in our comments that they must improve their ‘style,’ by which we often mean their syntax and sentence construction. But how many of us pay serious attention as teachers to style in the larger sense, as the rhetoric or poetics of history? Love them or lament them, those before us did this. Jack Hexter, Jacques Barzun, Peter Gay, Barbara Tuchman, John Clive, and the sociologist C. Wright Mills – each took pains to draw attention to the rhetorical skills required to sustain a narrative, and therefore to gain and keep the reader’s attention.17 So, in Canada, did Donald Creighton and W.L. Morton. In his essay ‘The Art of Narrative,’ Morton wrote a half-century ago that History is ‘inquiry, a research, methodically carried out; it is an account of the findings of the inquiry, narrated in such manner as to give pleasure by informing.’ History as science, as method, said Morton, had progressed; history as art, as style, had not. ‘We will all agree,’ he said, ‘that it is this almost rude insistence on the primacy of method, this consequent indifference to style, which is to say to any potential audience, that has lost for historical writers, even good ones, the audience [and] the market history had a century ago.’18 This in 1959, a time many of us would view as the golden age of historical narrative in Canada. Morton’s reminder that history should ‘give pleasure by informing,’ and that indifference to style risks losing one’s audience, was not far from mind as I prepared to write The Spinster and the Prophet. It continued to be, when I wrote about Pierre Berton’s life. My research, in archives and in books ranging from the history of patriarchy and Edwardian literary circles to the history of the Klondike gold rush and Canadian publishing, proved relatively easy. I was trained to do this. The really difficult work came in building on what Morton and others had to say about the art of narrative. How can a university-trained writer become freed of the constraints imposed by the academic monograph, once the thesis is done? Neither the Deeks’ nor the Berton story lends itself to monographic form, and I know first-hand that Mr Berton had previously rejected offers from

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others to write his biography precisely because he was fearful someone would publish a turgid thesis about him. To help break from the monographic straitjacket, I have found certain ‘how to’ books helpful. David Lodge’s The Practice of Writing, Richard Rhodes’s How to Write, and Jon Franklin’s Writing for Story proved especially valuable for their shift of focus from the meaning of content to the manner of conveyance.19 That bible of the Hollywood film industry, Syd Field’s book, Screenplay, understandably draws attention to the importance of the visual in carrying a story; but it also draws attention to the need to be aware of ‘plot points’ in the overall dramatic arc of a story, for it is they that propel and convey dramatic tension, engagement, conflict, and resolution. The book I’ve found most useful book for understanding the different expectations of academic and trade editors is Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Serious Nonfiction – and Get It Published, by Alfred Fortunato and Susan Rabiner.20 Academic readers of this insightful work will discover the differences between the dissertation proposal and the book pitch, and much more. How many of our history teachers ever pointed to the dramatic ‘arc’ of a story about the past? For that matter, how many dared to consider ‘history’ as ‘story,’ even though the latter is literally embedded in the former? Certainly none of mine, not after Grade 8, although I wish they had. How many of us spend as much time struggling over matters of narrative pace as we do over footnote place? How much thought do we give to the precise point of climax, or the element of dénouement, in the books we write? How well do we develop the ‘characters’ in our historical accounts? (I wonder sometimes how a Canadian Arthur Miller would make alive – even to the stage – some of the poignant human stories in Joy Parr’s The Gender of Breadwinners, a prize-winning book about men and women living and working in two southern Ontario textile towns.21) Why, for that matter, did I feel obliged to use the wooden phrase ‘historical accounts’ instead of the simple word ‘stories’ in what I just wrote? Academic historians tend to view the past as a series of ‘problems’ to be ‘solved,’ and solved as quickly and efficiently as possible. But the general reader who turns to a work of history may well see the past as mystery, as stories that are strange and different. Most readers of mystery stories want the mystery to be ‘solved,’ but not on the first page by an anxious author. Many of the people who read history do so, I suspect, to encounter a different world, but welcome the shock of recognition when these strange lands or peoples ape or illuminate their own.

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How seldom we think to say of our ideal reader what Mrs Willy Loman says of her dead husband, in Death of a Salesman: ‘Attention must be paid.’22 We must respect the reader as we respect the departed. To my mind, we too often do our readers a disservice, patronizing them and underestimating their intelligence, if we think of them at all. I am myself a champion of the dissertation abstract, for it is a scholarly apparatus of particular value, especially to harried examiners. But why do we so often structure the chapters of our later books, by – by what? By stating our conclusions at the outset. And then, fearing perhaps that the reader’s memory is as faulty as our own, why do we further blunt the reader’s imagination by summarizing our findings at the conclusion of each chapter, often in the least imaginative way possible? Only the university-trained scholar oblivious to the book’s readers would do this. Which one of our teachers, in some distant English or History course, taught us that telegraphed conclusions and ‘seamless continuity’ were virtues, making for a better book or a more satisfied reader? Was it Miss Thistlebottom – she who taught us to, above all, never split an infinitive? And never, no never, to deploy a sentence fragment?23 I am with Harvard historian John Clive, who writes, in his book Not by Fact Alone, this: ‘Nothing can induce tedium and indifference on the reader’s part more rapidly than a historian’s advance summary of his conclusions. One’s natural reaction to such summaries may well be: “Why, then, should I bother to read this book, or thesis, or essay, when, after all, I know what the author is going to tell me?”’ ‘Is it merely poetic licence,’ Clive asks, ‘to claim that history stories are mystery stories? I think not. In one of his roles, the historian is, after all, the skilled detective who asks questions, locates and follows clues, and must not reveal the solution until the tale is told.’ 24 John Clive reminds us that even the most unlikely or staid historical topic or theme can maintain an aura of mystery until ultimately resolving it. Arthur Koestler does so in an imaginative and powerful way in his instructive book about fraud and scandal in the early-twentieth-century biological sciences, The Case of the Midwife Toad. So does Josephine Tey, in The Daughter of Time, a novel about the legend surrounding Richard III that every history student should read.25 Conventional history can often be treated in a similar way. Elie Halévy, for one, did so in his lengthy masterpiece England in 1815. In it, he poses the mystery – Why did England have no Revolution like the French? – as a question, and at the outset of a very long book. But only after all other explanations, including political and economic ones, have been set for-

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ward and discarded does Halévy ‘solve’ the puzzle. It turns out that the ‘butler’ named Methodism did it, in the name of Religion and Culture. And as in all good mysteries, the reader is the last to know.26 Was it Miss Thistlebottom, too, who insisted that we must deploy prophylactic segues, linking paragraph to paragraph, and section to section, in the cause of seamless continuity? Why have we so often accepted, as an article of faith, the assertion that smooth transition is always superior to radical disjunction – chronological, spatial, or thematic? The ‘seamless web’ of narrative prevents an abrupt shift in historical venue or theme in the reader’s mind; it is, we are told, a mark of superior style. I beg to differ. No one wants to confuse the reader, but incessant continuity for continuity’s sake is, to my mind, the WD-40 of literary technique. Seamless narrative serves a good purpose, of course: as connective tissue. But as a primary guide to good prose style it also serves to blunt the reader’s attention by giving her a false sense of historical continuity. As historians, we are usually aware of the discontinuities of the past; but when time comes to write, we fear that the reader might not follow the story unless we construct convenient prose bridges at every thematic or chronological turn in the river. This serves to flatten dramatic tension. It also distorts the past. There is power in disjunction. An absence of continuity forces the reader to think for herself, to create in the mind’s eye missing transitions, to discern difference, in this way forcing her to think about causation. Or, in the absence of causal links, to interrogate the forces leading to disjuncture and to create and deploy categories of difference. The lives of Miss Deeks and Mr Wells could not have been more unlike: fidelity to family and social isolation, on the one hand, serial adultery and social connection, on the other. When, in The Spinster and the Prophet, I alternated within each chapter the telling of her story and his, I worried a great deal that this disjunction would disturb or confuse the reader. These fears proved unwarranted. The very difference of circumstance and lack of connection of one protagonist with the other, the reasons for my worry, were what in fact drove the story forward. Its force and its dramatic tension came about precisely through the disjunction and discordance that had so concerned me. In this way, historical narrative can take on interpretive power even as it pushes the reader’s interest forward in time. For lessons in the ways disjunction and radical discontinuity can reinvigorate the im-

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agination and reawaken readers’ interest, by all means read historians who have mastered narrative, like Simon Schama and Barbara Tuchman; but we should not neglect or feel guilty about reading adventure writers like Wilbur Smith or thriller writers like Gerald Seymour. I would scarcely recommend Mr Smith as a model for the academic monograph, but he is a past master of narrative pace – and how many of our monographs possess that? Just how is it that Wilbur Smith can write a compelling page-turner of five or six hundred pages without once employing a chapter break?27 A major problem in the way we write that diminishes our readability, and hence our readership, is what I will call the Tyranny of the Academic Other. I am confident that most scholars have some notion of their desired reader in mind when they write, but I suspect that this figure too often resembles the embodiment of their dissertation examining committee. A ghostlike apparition hovers over the shoulder of most of us long after our thesis has been defended. Even The Spinster and the Prophet, seven books removed from the dissertation stage, required an exorcism, and I recommend one at the post-dissertation-partum stage of life. It occurred to me, as I began to write about Miss Deeks and Mr Wells, that thirty years into an academic career, almost every piece of sustained writing I had undertaken had been done for the Academic Other in one form or another: for a high school short story committee, for an M.A. committee, for a Ph.D. committee; for several Carleton Library Series editorial committees; for the Ontario Historical Series editorial committee; and for two committees of one, in the persons of W.L. Morton and S.F. Wise, whose essays I collected, edited, and introduced. We secure good advice in writing for such committees, but we also pick up the same bad habits that came after Miss Thistlebottom’s elder sister told us in art class, way back when, that the sky had to be blue, and Sky Blue at that. Certainly not green. A green sky, after all, brings with it the threat of a creative imagination. By such means, in this and in a thousand other ways right through grad school, we learned not to take chances or be adventurous; instead, we discovered clever ways to conform, to play it safe, to strive to impress, and thereby to curry favour. Did I mention the thesis examining committee? Through lessons such as these we become scholars. But in the process we risk losing – and too often, I fear, we do lose – our sense of ourselves as authors. We become victims of latter-day Mr Gradgrinds, cousins to the Thistlebottoms, concerned solely with ‘the facts’ and distrustful of

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the unfettered imagination – and we thereby diminish the capacity to connect and the range of affect that together connect us to others, and to ourselves. Whatever else lay behind my decision to spend a half-dozen years on one woman’s encounter with the arbiters of history, and then turn to popular biography, the most compelling personal reason has been the simple determination to be true, for once, to myself. I have long wanted to write at least one book for no one’s purpose but my own – to satisfy my curiosity, to convey to others a sense of the chase of history and the exhilaration it involves. And to purge myself of the lurking presence of the Academic Other. I wanted to be free to invoke what now has almost been lost but what was once as common as it was essential in the writing of history: a vivid sense of place. Good history, as Barbara Tuchman has reminded us, is written by the ounce, through fidelity to the ‘telling detail.’ In the case of the Deeks book, I wanted my readers to feel the close atmosphere of interwar Toronto. I wanted to give the homes in which Miss Deeks and Mr Wells lived the same careful attention readers pay to their own homes, and to knit in words the lace curtains that masked genteel poverty; make visible the array of goods on the main floor of Eaton’s College Street store on a blustery November day in 1920; to give meaning to the hearts carved in the front doors of Easton Glebe, Wells’s country estate – hearts inverted to become spades, as if to serve as a permanent reminder to his wife Catherine (he called her Jane) that there would be no unnecessary romance in this home. Why should we not devote to such details the same meticulous attention we afford to complicated strands of cultural theory? Above all, I wanted to write a book with characters from whose lives the book’s dominant themes issued, strands of human experience played out inside their homes: strands of commitment and betrayal, accomplishment and frustration, community and isolation, love and indifference. And to do so in a way that engaged the reader at an emotional as well as an intellectual level, writing for the heartbeat. Is there room in academic history for books that draw upon the sanctuary of affect as well as the kingdom of intellect? I hope so, and believe that attention to the craft of historical narrative can help bring this about. One view of ‘style,’ after all, is that it is the expression of one’s authentic self. It is this, says Peter Gay, that makes style ‘the art of the historian’s science.’28 We cultivate an enthusiasm of sorts in our students, but how well do we nurture in them a genuine and impassioned

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engagement with the subjects they choose to study? My sense is that when we fail to foster this engagement in others, it is because we have often not yet engaged our selves.29 An intellectual education, when not balanced by resources of affect, can become a sustained exercise that alienates the self instead of liberating it. John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography demonstrates this.30 Our ‘noble dream’ of objectivity31 requires subordination of the passionate to the reasonable; in this way, we learn to strive to meet the expectations of others. How often it is that, intellects running at full bore, we find ourselves – or, more often, notice others – simply filling space within existing circles of interpretive concern, effectively tying ourselves to familiar thought patterns and conceptual frameworks, content with ‘filling a gap’ in one area or another. As knowledge workers, too often we do not create, we replicate; we do not increase, we extend. We enlarge the scholarly comfort zone and venture far too seldom into genuinely uncharted territory, including our own interiorities. In such ways we diminish our profession, and ourselves. Someone once asked André Maurois why he had chosen to write a life of Shelley. He answered that the poet mirrored his early emotions; ‘and it seemed to me indeed,’ he added, ‘that to tell the story of this life would be a way of liberating me from myself.’32 Liberated, yes, but also enlarged and enriched and emboldened. All true art, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Robert Olen Butler once said, is rooted in yearning.33 I believe this. I believe further that is not only possible but also desirable within the arts to engage in the act of writing in ways that are intellectually rigorous yet that draw upon the emotive force of what Martha Nussbaum calls ‘the uneven intermittence of attention and desire that inhabits our own imaginations.’34 We need more often to reach within ourselves and liberate this force in the act of authorial creation. It will become embedded in the nonfiction works we write no less than it does in a great novel. This would not turn history into some cheap form of therapy. Instead, by drawing upon the power of our emotional and moral resources in ways we too seldom do (after all, we are historians), it would tap the wellsprings of our authentic self, unimpeded by the arrogances and defence mechanisms of intellect. In doing this, we would not debase our craft; rather, we would elevate it by forming a more authentic link between our sense of self and the subjects we study. This may seem against the grain of what we think makes us professional. It seems to suggest that we must first feel what we study and

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write about, and only then think about it, and that this works against the cultivation of a disciplined intelligence. Yet nothing I have said involves suspending either critical judgment or the ideals or apparatus of scholarship. The past quarter-century of scholarship in disciplines from philosophy and literature to anthropology and neuroscience has taught that not only do emotions and subjectivities count, and count for much, but that, when associated with cultural experience, they are instrumental in the formation of rationality itself. This is the message I take from Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought, Ronald de Sousa’s The Rationality of Emotions, and Antonio Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza (subtitled, Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain).35 ‘Over time,’ the neurologist Damasio writes, ‘we do far more than merely respond automatically to components of a social situation with the repertoire of innate social emotions. Under the influence of social emotions (from sympathy and shame, to pride and indignation) and of those emotions that are induced by punishment and reward (variants of sorrow and joy), we gradually categorize the situation, we experience – the structure of the scenarios, their components, their significance in terms of our personal narrative.’36 To a degree, then, we do indeed think what we feel. Whatever the balance between the affective and the cognitive in our lives and in our work, whatever the relationship between narrative and analysis, art and science, to be truly engaged requires us to look within, and then to muster the courage and the desire to be true to ourselves and not to subordinate our desire to the expectations of others. Books written from such depths carry with them a clear sense of the authenticity of the author’s moral vision. This will be clear to the reader, for example, when reading Václav Havel.37 So, too, with E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, a great work of moral compassion in the form of a narrative history that not only tells an important story but also addresses matters of great consequence to historical theory and radical dissent. As with Havel, Edward Thompson did these things by himself, to satisfy himself, writing, as he put it, by candlelight.38 A historian seeking the arc of a story that needs to be told must do research using external resources, but she should write from inner necessity, open to possibility and to connecting self and subject. Great works of history, narrative or not, invariably convey the authenticity of publicly expressed yearning. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre says, in his book After Virtue: ‘I can only answer the question, “What am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question, “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”’39 In short, before we can get others en-

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gaged with the past, we must first gain a sense of who we ourselves are. Then we can use the motive power of inner resource to connect to our readers through the stories we create about the world around us, past and present – stories shaped from within, where our humanity resides.

NOTES 1 Carl Berger, The Writing of Canadian History; Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing since 1900, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 268. This essay had its origins in my contribution to the round table ‘Storytellers in the Archives: The Return of the Historian as Narrator,’ at the annual conference of the Canadian Historical Association at Laval University in 2001. Earlier versions of the text served as the 2005 Davidson Dunton Research Lecture at Carleton University and the keynote address at the 2009 McGill-Queen’s Graduate Student Conference at Queen’s University. 2 Berger, Writing of Canadian History, 320. 3 See John Clive, ‘Trevelyan: The Muse or the Museum?’ in Clive, Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 279–80. 4 An edited version of Bury’s Inaugural Address, ‘The Science of History’ (1902), is reproduced in Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1973 [1956]), 209–23; quotation at 223. 5 See George Macaulay Trevelyan, ‘Clio a Muse,’ in Trevelyan, Clio, a Muse; and Other Essays, new ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1930); reproduced in Stern, ed., Varieties of History, 227–45. 6 Gerard Delanty, Social Theory in a Changing World: Conceptions of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). 7 See, for example, Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–89 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); Georg Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to Postmodern Challenge (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1997); Ernst A. Breisach, American Progressive History: An Experiment in Modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 8 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy; Aspects of a Working-Class Life (London: Chatto, 1957); Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958). 9 Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-history, Quanto-History, & History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Gertrude Himmelfarb, The

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11 12 13

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15

16 17

Old History and the New (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). Writings on the ‘Cultural Studies’ movement are voluminous. See, for example, Patrick Brantlinger, Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (New York: Routledge, 1990); Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Toronto: Vintage, 2000). Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986). An example: Stephen Marche, completing doctoral work in English at the University of Toronto in 2005, wrote a novel, Raymond and Hanna, accepted for publication by a major publisher. According to one account, ‘His professors never knew and are not particularly impressed by his multitasking. Some have advised him not to put his novel on his résumé when applying for teaching jobs.’ Judy Stoffman, ‘Looking for love in the 21st century – First-time author writes sexy, multicultural tale,’ Toronto Star, 12 Feb. 2005. See David H. Friedman, A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis (New York: Penguin, 2003); Michel Pastoureau, The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Simon Garfield, Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World (New York: Norton, 2002); Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000); Peter Macinnis, Bittersweet: The Story of Sugar (London: Allen and Unwin, 2003); Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Ground: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Mark Pendergrast, Mirror Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair with Reflection (New York: Basic Books, 2003); Henry Petroski, The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (New York: Knopf, 1992); Witold Rybczynski, One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw (New York: Scribner’s, 2001); Amir D. Aczel, The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention that Changed the World (New York: Harvest Books, 2001). Quoted in Emily Eakin, ‘Screwdriver Scholars and Pencil Punditry: Society’s Material Culture Garners Academic Scrutiny,’ New York Times, 24 Feb. 2001. A.B. McKillop, Pierre Berton: A Biography (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2008). C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959); Clive, Not by Fact Alone; Barbara Tuchman, Practicing History:

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18

19

20

21 22 23

24

25

26 27

28 29

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Selected Essays (New York: Knopf, 1981); Peter Gay, Style in History: Gibbon, Ranke, Macaulay, Burckhardt (New York: Norton, 1974); Jacques Barzun, On Writing, Editing, and Publishing: Essays Explicative and Hortative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971); J.H. Hexter, Doing History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971). W.L. Morton, ‘The Art of Narrative,’ Culture, 20 (1959): 391, 395. See also Donald Creighton, ‘History and Literature,’ in Creighton, Towards the Discovery of Canada (Toronto: Macmillan, 1972). John Franklin, Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction by a Two-Time Pulitzer Prize Winner (New York: Penguin, 1986); Richard Rhodes, How to Write: Advice and Reflections (New York: William Morrow, 1995); David Lodge, The Practice of Writing: Essays, Lectures, Reviews and a Diary (New York: Penguin, 1996). Alfred Fortunato and Susan Rabiner, Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction – and Get It Published (New York: Norton, 2002); Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, expanded [3rd] ed. (New York: Dell, 1994). Joy Parr, The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem (New York: Penguin, 1976), 56. Miss Thistlebottom is not my invention. See Theodore M. Bernstein, Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins: The Careful Writer’s Guide to the Taboos, Bugbears and Out-Moded Rules of English Usage (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973). John Clive, ‘Why Read the Great Nineteenth-Century Historians?’ in Clive, Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 21–2. Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time (London: P. Davies, 1951); Arthur Koestler, The Case of the Midwife Toad (London: Hutchinson, 1971). Tey’s novel takes the form of a conventional mystery; Koestler’s non-fiction tale is a kind of ‘whydunit,’ and with a conclusion worthy of O. Henry. Both are masterpieces of suspense. Elie Halévy, England in 1815 (London: Ernest Benn, 1961 [1913]). Two representative examples are Wilbur Smith, River God (London: Macmillan, 1993); Gerald Seymour, Traitor’s Kiss (London: Corki, 2003). See also Simon Schama, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (New York: Knopf, 1991); Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: Macmillan, 1962). Gay, Style in History, 219. The origins and nature of ‘selfhood’ are subject to extensive scholarly

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30 31 32 33

34 35

36 37

38 39

investigation and debate. Is ‘self’ inherent to the human condition or a matter of experiential construction? Recent scholarship suggests the latter, which is why, in my title, the word ‘self’ is not preceded by the definite article. See Cultural Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, Richard A. Shweder and R.A. LeVine, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). John Stuart Mill, Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1924). Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Maurois quoted in Leon Edel, Literary Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), 8. Butler said this at the conclusion of an experimental electronic workshop, ‘Inside Creative Writing,’ in which he taught creative writing by drafting a short story in ‘real time’ over the Internet. The seventeen sessions, conducted over a three-week period in October and November, 2001, were broadcast from his office at Florida State University, Tallahassee. Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 713. See Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Harcourt, 2003); Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987); Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought. See also Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotion, R.C. Solomon, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Ronald de Sousa and Adam Morton, ‘Emotional Truth,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplemental Volume, 86 (2002): 247–75. See also Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), 363–424, esp. 372–4; R.H. Frank, Passions within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions (New York: Norton, 1988). Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, 146. See Václav Havel, ‘Paradise Lost,’ New York Review of Books, 39/7 (9 April 1992); Václav Havel, Summer Meditations (New York: Knopf, 1992); both translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson. E.P. Thompson, Writing by Candlelight (London: Merlin, 1980); Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963). MacIntyre quoted in Robert Fulford, The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture (Toronto: Anansi, 1999), 33.

3

Beyond the Search for Intellectuals: On the Paucity of Paradigms in the Writing of Canadian Intellectual History Michael Gauvreau Assessing the state of the sub-discipline of Canadian intellectual history at the end of the 1980s, Doug Owram observed that after two decades of development, the leading works in the field ‘assumed that it was possible to talk of a coherent body of national Canadian intellectual history.’ However, he noted in the same breath the growing disjuncture between intellectual history and the wider field of social history in both English-speaking Canada and Quebec which had, ‘to a degree which may be unique, turned its back upon the concept of a single unifying national history.’1 Although intellectual history stood well within the mainstream of the Canadian historical enterprise until the early 1980s, it was pushed to the margins with the explosion of work in labour, working-class, women’s, and regional history. In all of these, the historical treatment of ideas as causal factors in explaining social experience was placed at a definite discount in favour of materialist explanations. What placed intellectual history at a disadvantage in a constructive engagement with social history was the result of a methodological deficiency identified by Brian McKillop in 1981: the overemphasis on the search for coherence, the assumption that order existed within disorder, and that priority should be placed on social character rather than social conflict, which irrevocably cast practitioners in the field as preoccupied with ‘the consensual values that comprise aspects of national consciousness.’2 Two major premises characterized the first wave of intellectual history’s close connection between nationalism and the search for consensual values. The first was hardly unique to Canadian historiography, for it had defined the practice of intellectual history in both Europe and the United States in the 1930s and the immediate postwar years. As a

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sub-discipline, intellectual history developed along two principal trajectories: an internalist ‘history of ideas’ approach that insisted upon the autonomy and agency of individual thinkers in the face of the impersonal collective forces of history that characterized the emerging social sciences and an external approach that treated the broader ‘climate of opinion’ or ‘the spirit of the age.’ The intent was to disaggregate social and intellectual history so that practitioners of the latter could assert the autonomy of their sub-discipline and concentrate on the ‘life of the mind.’3 However, in the postwar years, this ‘history of ideas’ was harnessed to a postwar preoccupation with the role of educated elites in a new mass civilization, and took as one of its key canons that the writings of articulate individuals and elites – the ‘significant thinkers’ in any society – spoke for the values of the culture, and that by studying the writings of elites, the elements of a ‘national mind’ would emerge. While there was no necessary overemphasis on nationalism in the agenda of this approach to intellectual history, the particular Canadian context of the 1960s, as we shall see, made nationalism the dominant element both in the wider historical profession and within the ranks of intellectual historians. Elitism and nationalism were, in turn, amplified by an implicit Central Canadian bias that continued one of the major currents of Canadian historical writing since the 1930s.4 One of the unintended consequences of the early developments of intellectual history in Canada was to make the sub-discipline a casualty of the increasingly shrill polemics of the 1990s, linked in the mind of many social historians with a beleaguered defence of a single narrative structure for Canadian history oriented around the theme of political nationhood – in contrast to the more exciting advocacy of the elaboration of alternative masternarratives based on class, gender, region, or ethnicity.5 The growing difficulties facing the prospects of Canadian intellectual historians at the end of the 1980s stood in marked contrast with the position of their British and European counterparts who, by linking their discipline with new ‘culturalist’ and linguistic methodological insights, were able to overcome the fear of being colonized by the perspective and methods of social historians and, through attention to ‘meaning,’ were able to place ideas in a new dynamic framework with social relations and experience.6 In particular, what Canadian intellectual historians lacked was access to a conceptual apparatus and set of methodologies that could deal with the agenda of social history: questions of hierarchy, sources of authority, disparities of power, and lines of social tension and conflict in their own society. This chapter argues that these

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deficiencies, evident in the work of first-wave intellectual historians in the 1960s and 1970s, still lurk at the core of the sub-discipline because their etiology has never been traced. Specifically, intellectual history in Canada owed its beginnings to a particular set of cultural hierarchies and dichotomies that informed the construction of Canadian nationalism in the postwar period, which irrevocably placed the sub-discipline in the camp of an elitism contemptuous of, and anxious to demarcate itself from a ‘mass’ culture defined as ‘non-Canadian.’ Of equal significance, intellectual history tied itself to a view of the past, fashionable in the postwar period, that placed an overweening priority on the building of national consensus and the downplaying of ideological or social conflict. By the 1980s, this elitist, consensualist posture severely weakened intellectual history’s purchase in the face of a social history whose primary agenda was to recover the ‘masses’ from historical oblivion. However, this chapter also contends that the best Canadian intellectual histories written since the 1980s have been those that stepped outside the poverty of these paradigms and have either engaged with international debates or have anchored intellectuals or their ideas not in the elaboration of national consciousness or social consensus, but in their institutional contexts: churches, universities, the state, or associations. Although these works have, by and large, avoided the ‘linguistic turn’ symptomatic of European intellectual history in the 1990s, they have decidedly taken a ‘culturalist’ turn that has opened the prospect of a re-engagement and enriching conversation with social history. English Canadian intellectual history traces its origins to the emergence of a view among postwar British academics and cultural commentators that their society differed from its continental European counterparts because intellectuals as a group or class were ‘absent’ from national life.7 Where once this had been a cause for celebrating a solidly grounded Anglo-Saxon empiricism’s resistance to the totalizing and potentially totalitarian abstractions of European intellectuals, in the years following the Second World War this ‘absence’ was something to be both feared and deplored. In an era when both politics and cultural life seemed to be increasingly subservient to ‘the masses,’ with their apparent anti-intellectualism, irrational behaviour, proclivities for authoritarian leadership, and sheer bad taste, an ‘absence’ of intellectuals signified a rudderless democracy adrift on the capricious seas of a public opinion ruled by momentary appetites, with the ever-present temptation towards totalitarianism. In English-speaking Canada such views

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were given increased cultural purchase because well-placed cultural elites and elements of the political classes married them to a protectionist cultural nationalism that identified ‘mass culture’ as American and threatening to an emerging Canadian national consciousness. Thus was elaborated both a rhetorical strategy and a set of cultural institutions and policies dedicated to manufacturing national consciousness as a rational, liberal-humanistic process to be firmly guided by educated elites,8 and identified a set of elements that epitomized the Canadian national character. The latter’s attributes, upon which the nation’s cultural survival rested, were defined as the mirror-image of an omnipresent North American ‘mass’ society: deferential to the intelligent guidance of elites, desirous to see the overarching consensual, rather than conflicting elements in Canadian society, and an anxiety to affirm ties with the parent societies of Britain and Europe as a counterweight to the irresistible pull of American mass democracy. Thus began a ‘search’ for Canadian intellectuals and intellectual ‘traditions’ whose mere presence would be the central body of evidence for a viable distinctly Canadian national life. This tight synthesis between a consensual English Canadian nationalism and the cultured intellect was the subset of a wider transatlantic debate on the problem of ‘mass’ society9 and initially reflected the ambitions of a particular group of Canadian cultural producers. However, it was eagerly seized upon and given greater authority by postwar nationalist historians, who read the Canadian past as an evolving convergence towards rational accommodation and the submergence of political and social conflict which permitted the successful expression of a unified political nationality in Confederation. Building upon the work of sociologist S.D. Clark, who saw the dynamic of Canadian religious life as a perpetual tension between the enthusiastic ‘sectarian’ impulse of the frontier and the rational, consolidating bureaucratic imperatives of urban, middle-class religious elites, J.M.S. Careless articulated one of the most enduring and influential historical paradigms in English-speaking Canada. Like Clark, who traced the marginalizing of sectarian religion in Canadian Protestantism after the mid-Victorian period, Careless consigned political conflict – the expression of Old World ethnic, religious, and social tensions – to the remote past. The story of Canada after the Rebellions of 1837–38 and the successful achievement of Canadian nationhood was, according to Careless, a classic ‘whig’ history. The secret to the emergence of the Canadian nation in 1867 lay in the elaboration of a ‘moderate’ mid-Victorian

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North American liberalism which, as a kind of Hegelian synthesis, resolved the persistent conflict between elements of conservatism and radicalism, creating both a political and cultural coalition that both marginalized and excised the extremes from the political spectrum in an ideology that expressed continued allegiance to a British tie, which was no longer a symbol of colonialism, a commitment to a version of ‘North American’ values of individualism and economic progress, which in contrast to their American counterparts were more tempered and more willing to accept the restraint and regulation of government, and a cautious reformism that sought to depoliticize irritants from the ‘colonial’ past such as the Clergy Reserves. Thus, Careless’s Victorian ‘liberalism’ closely resembled the ‘conservatism’ of Donald Creighton, as both evinced the same consensual ideological characteristics that formed the basis of a desirable set of Canadian national values. Both these paradigms, the search for intellectuals as essential to the elaboration of a national consciousness and the idea that conflict must ultimately be resolved into consensus in order to produce a viable Canadian nation, were the unchallenged assumptions that greatly marked the founding generation of Canadian intellectual historians. However, two distinct tendencies or phases existed within this group. The first comprised a number of scholars associated with the University of Toronto who were strongly marked by the ‘moderate’ liberal climate of the immediate postwar years, and took as their mentors Frank Underhill, whose personal journey from democratic socialism in the 1930s to King Liberalism in the 1950s demonstrated the power of liberal values to neutralize ideological conflict,10 and J.M.S. Careless, whose vision was that Canadian society ultimately rested upon the dominance of accommodationist liberal values. Both of these scholars, to greater or lesser degrees, celebrated Canada’s moderate liberalism as a ‘North American’ achievement. At the beginning of the 1960s, Ramsay Cook’s study of the liberal ideology of the newspaperman J.W. Dafoe carried forward the emphases of both Underhill and Careless by tightly fusing Canadian liberalism with the insistence upon achieving political autonomy from Britain, which alone could resolve social and cultural tensions, especially between Quebec and English-speaking Canada.11 Cook’s study stood more within a well-established postwar trajectory of political biography, and represented the classic expression of exploring the roots of Canadian national consciousness through the search for significant intellectuals who formulated the democratic political values that would guide the masses.

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A second group of intellectual historians was, however, like the Canadian historical profession, strongly influenced in the 1960s by Louis Hartz’s celebrated study of American ideology as a ‘liberal’ consensus and by persistent anxieties about the erosion of Canadian nationalism in the face of a conformist American empire, represented by thinkers like George Grant.12 It was not surprising that, given the association of liberalism with American cultural hegemony, the major interpretations of Canadian intellectual history of the late 1960s, by Syd Wise and Carl Berger, attempted to reassert a conservative-nationalist presence in the Canadian past through the exploration of currents of thought and the rediscovery of conservative thinkers. Both practised a variant of the ‘externalist’ form of intellectual history, an examination of ideas functioning below the level of formal or systematic thought. ‘Canadian intellectual history,’ stated Syd Wise in 1965, ‘must be concerned, almost of necessity, with the kinds of ideas that lie between the formal thought of the philosopher or the political theorist and the world of action, and probably closer to the latter.’13 While implicit in this was a tone of disappointment that English-speaking Canada had produced neither structures of formal thought nor ‘intellectuals’ worthy of the title, Wise’s work on Upper Canadian political ideologies also strongly contributed to the refurbishment of the ‘consensual’ elements in the Canadian past. Although his treatment of the Tory frame of mind in pre-Rebellion Upper Canada refuted the notion that Hartz’s liberaldemocratic consensus could be applied to the ‘founding moment’ of English-speaking Canada, by positing ‘the continued workings of a liberal-conservative dialectic,’ Wise ultimately pointed to a synthesis of these political values. This occurred, in his estimation, at some point in the twenty years before Confederation, and this lay at the core of the Canadian national character, and his understanding of the process was precisely similar to the formulation presented earlier by Creighton and Careless, ‘in terms of muted conservatism and ambivalent liberalism.’14 It would be difficult to see how this constituted a significant methodological advance over the Clark-Careless model of the late 1940s, beyond the injection of a persistent conservative ethos into the early history of Upper Canada, which assuaged the anxieties of Englishspeaking Canadian historians by distinguishing their society from that of the United States and, from the perspective of left-wing academics, gave historical and cultural legitimacy to the socialist presence in Canadian politics.15 However, in writing histories that were expressions of nationalism, English-speaking Canadian intellectual histori-

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ans were neither unique nor especially backward-looking. Nationalist attempts to distinguish Canada from a less desirable set of American ideals and values also underpinned major works in the new sub-discipline of labour history, where the analyses of Robert Babcock and Irving Abella traced Canadian labour struggles to attempts to resist the inroads of ‘imperialistic’ American labour unions.16 Political historians like Kenneth McNaught continued the postwar engagement with the writing of biography, but attempted to elucidate ideologies such as democratic socialism, which they regarded as explicitly and uniquely ‘Canadian.’17 The Centennial of 1967 inspired a spate of political histories that celebrated Confederation as the triumph of nationalist aspirations among Victorian politicians from various regions of British North America.18 Others, especially challenged by the pessimism of George Grant, sought historical confirmation for the existence of a distinctive Canadian nationalism that could inspire the generation of the 1960s to assert measures of cultural protectionism and a set of social policies that would further distinguish Canada from its apparently predatory neighbour.19 What is particularly intriguing about intellectual history in English-speaking Canada is why it remained so preoccupied with asserting overarching nationalist and consensual values, when those sub-disciplines that arose contemporaneously with it turned in different directions after the mid-1970s. Part of the explanation lies in the paradox posed by Carl Berger’s The Sense of Power20 which was justly celebrated as one of the most seminal studies of Canada published in the two decades between 1960 and 1980. Berger’s was the first full-length monograph to analyse the conservative strand in English Canadian nationalism. It was, at one level, a methodological breakthrough because it was not ostensibly cast within the conventions of the ‘history of ideas’ approach either as an anxious ‘search for intellectuals’ or ‘an English-Canadian mind.’ Rather, the work sought to disaggregate and examine thematically a mind-set that was in Berger’s own generation regarded, especially by the immediate postwar group of intellectual historians, as being at odds with the Canadian national character. The work’s central achievement was to take what had once been dismissed by liberal academics and historians such as Frank Underhill and restated by Ramsay Cook in the early 1960s – an imperialism imposed from outside and ‘alien’ to the Canadian character. Berger recast it as a coherent strand of Canadian nationalism, articulated and produced by English-speaking Canadians to address the cultural and social changes that they saw occurring in

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the late nineteenth century, and deployed to assert a moral superiority and distinction for Canada over both Britain and the United States. However, on another level, Berger’s work was less innovative in that it did not break with postwar assumptions regarding the nature of Canadian history. In a manner similar to Wise, for whom ‘Toryism’ stood for a set of monolithic’British’ values that preserved Upper Canada from American culture, Berger evoked the attachment to Britain implicit in ‘imperialism’ as affirming the emerging Canadian nation’s autonomy from the United States, and in so doing, both conferred historical legitimacy upon the project of postwar cultural elites in which Britain’s role was simply to act as a dialectical foil to America. However, neither Wise nor Berger problematized the social and cultural dynamics of Britain’s presence in Canada’s colonial or national past.21 Although attentive to nuances within the conservative nationalist mind-set, The Sense of Power was marked by the same dialectical assumptions characteristic of postwar historians and refurbished by Wise. English-speaking Canada’s intellectual life until the First World War had, in Berger’s estimation, been the scene of a contest between liberals and conservatives over the meaning of nationhood and national responsibility, a struggle eventually decided in favour of the liberal version of nationality by the discrediting and loss of the conservative nationalist paradigm in the aftermath of the events of 1914–18. The Sense of Power reasserted, for the late-Victorian era, the Careless master-narrative that Canadian history was structured by the oscillation of periods of ideological conflict succeeded by a unifying synthesis characterized by a consensus about the Canadian national character. Although The Sense of Power did treat a period of intense conflict in Canadian history, the lesson was that ultimately, a nation’s identity could only be founded upon a single unifying cultural paradigm. Berger’s The Writing of Canadian History, originally published in 1976, constituted the first substantial study of the intellectual history of the historical discipline in English-speaking Canada. He cast the study around ‘the central teachings of the leading figures,’ historians who represented ‘the creative edge of historical writing’22 – Adam Shortt, George Wrong, Frank Underhill, Harold Innis, Arthur Lower, Donald Creighton, and W.L. Morton. While attentive to ‘climates of opinion’ in which his subjects undertook the writing of history, these were not explored in the context of examining the institutions in which historiographical strategies and practices in the field were both produced and altered over time.23 Rather, Berger’s intent was to use historical

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writing as a lens through which to assess the evolution of Canadian nationalism in the twentieth century. The Writing of Canadian History’s audience could take comfort in the fact that, by and large, historical practice in English-speaking Canada was ultimately an enterprise that led to consensus for, in his estimation, all his subjects had been ‘nationalists of various hues, and sometimes their judgements about what was central to the past and what was peripheral arose as much from divergent conceptions of nationality as from disagreements about interpretations of the same evidence.’24 By defining the purpose of the volume in this way, Berger conferred, to some extent unintentionally, new purpose upon the two central postwar imperatives of Canadian intellectual history: the ‘search for intellectuals’ as the core content of the sub-discipline, which in this case also happily reasserted the seamless bond that existed between Canadian intellectual history and the ongoing production of a unified national consciousness. Even the first edition of The Writing of Canadian History was attuned to the intimation of trouble when it evinced an acute awareness of the critiques posed by the emerging sub-disciplines of social history: the narratives of the past, according to Berger, may have placed too much emphasis upon the excessive preoccupation with national history and national unity, and the failure of earlier generations of historians to address questions of class structure, class conflict, and working-class history.25 This reflected a movement that was already occurring among labour history and the emerging sub-discipline of women’s history in the early 1970s which emphatically sought international paradigms, such as postStalinist variants of British Marxist historiography, and the desire by the first generation of women’s historians who sought to recover the historical experience of women who, they claimed, had been silenced and marginalized by a professional discipline dominated by men. Generally speaking, this ‘history from below’26 aimed to break the partition still maintained by intellectual and political historians between history and the social sciences. During the 1970s, Berger was aware of, and certainly sympathetic to the need for intellectual history to broaden its scope and agenda. As a doctoral student at the University of Toronto in 1978, I had the opportunity to take Berger’s graduate course in Canadian intellectual history, many of whose themes and questions invited students to move in a more ‘culturalist’ direction in their reading and research. Interestingly, Berger took an unexpected turn, and did not include political ideologies in his syllabus, indicating his own quiet taking of distance

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from the close linkage between intellectual history and Canadian nationalism. The influence of the American ‘myth and symbol’ school, which provided a counterpoint to the ‘history of ideas’ approach, was evident in the examination of less formalistic and nationalistic writings on nature, evolution, and painting, produced by poets, artists, and journalists who functioned below the level of formal thought.27 And there were innovative spirits like Mary Vipond and Doug Owram among the younger generation of intellectual historians whose work sought to build upon The Sense of Power’s rigorous contextualization of ideas. Vipond’s project, in one of the most exciting doctoral theses in the intellectual history genre produced in the climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s, sought to engage with the question of how nationalist ideas interacted with ‘mass’ culture by treating ‘intellectuals’ as cultural producers, and examined them through an attentive study of institutions.28 It was unfortunate that Vipond, as a woman not writing feminist history, stood outside the professional power structures which, as late as the 1970s still functioned to exclude women scholars,29 and the thesis did not secure the recognition to which it was entitled. Owram understood intellectuals as propagandists and promoters, and his work was well attuned to the mythical and representational character of a number of mid- and late-Victorian nationalist assumptions. His work deconstructed the way in which nationalist ‘myths’ provided the stuff of propaganda and promotional literature that secured a public constituency for Canada’s internal empire-building in the West.30 With the benefit of hindsight, however, it is possible to see The Writing of Canadian History’s principal shortcoming as intellectual history in the fact that it was difficult to dissociate it from the postwar moral project of elucidating an overarching Canadian identity. This was in large part the result of Berger’s own ambiguous relativism31 which, on the one hand, posited Canadian historiography’s dynamic as the succession of paradigms (although all within the way in which nationalism was interpreted) which clearly distanced Berger from the view that there was either a single body of nationalist or historical orthodoxy, and on the other, an insistence that a single version of the nation and of history might ultimately prevail if the ‘hidden and unsuspected factors’ that lay behind national traditions of historical writing could be ‘raised as far as possible to the level of consciousness so that they can be neutralized and brought under control.’32 In this respect, Berger closely resembled Charles Beard and Carl Becker, two of the leading American relativist historians of the 1920s and 1930s. While the rela-

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tivism of this period certainly critiqued the analogy between history and the natural sciences that had dominated historical writing in the years immediately before the First World War, it did not dissent from the ‘objectivist’ paradigm that characterized the historical profession saying that ‘true’ knowledge of the past was possible.33 It was exactly at this moment that the sub-disciplines of labour history, women’s history, and social history began to turn away from the nationalist project, and introduced a series of new questions to the wider historical profession, questions generated by their contact with international scholarly currents and revolving around issues of conflicting ideologies, disparities of wealth and power, and the repressive nature of elites. By the early 1970s, intellectual history in English-speaking Canada was nearly synonymous with the search for an overarching national identity and, as a result, had closed itself off from a number of trajectories that would have built bridges to the emerging sub-disciplines of social history. At the same time, Quebec historians embarked on what at first sight appeared to be a radically different course in relating ideas and culture to the development of their society in North America. According to Doug Owram, prior to the 1950s, the practice of history in Quebec was by and large dominated by the history of ideas,34 largely because older nationalist narratives had, in contrast to the economically driven explanations proffered by English-speaking Canadian historians, heavily privileged Roman Catholic religion in explaining both the content of nationalist ideas and the social evolution of Quebec. However, in this context, ‘history of ideas’ was something of a misnomer, because an earlier generation of francophone Quebec historians assumed as a given that Catholicism was simply a monolithic source of values that produced and maintained social cohesion, and as a consequence, there was little systematic attention to the content of Catholic religion or any systematic contextualization of its relationship to nationalist ideologies. The work of historians trained in the immediate postwar period diverged sharply from the overly ‘idealist’ bias of earlier treatments. While still intent on explaining the origins and survival of a national community, both the ‘Montreal’ school and the ‘Laval’ school, which succeeded Abbé Groulx as the main currents of professional history, were far more interested in positing the economic bases of nationality.35 Implicit here was a predisposition to embed ideas in the socioeconomic realm and to move intellectual history more emphatically in the direction of the social history of ideas. Fernand Ouellet’s celebrated Histoire économique et sociale du Québec, 1760–1850: structures et con-

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jonctures was the first work to systematically deploy the third wave of the French Annales school which developed in the late 1960s. Here, instead of the older ‘history of ideas,’ which erected barriers between intellectual history and social science methods, French historians like Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, and Pierre Goubert eagerly ‘borrowed’ from the disciplines of anthropology and ethnology to elucidate ‘mentalités’ or collective mentalities, ideological systems which, they believed, reflected material reality.36 Leading practitioners of the ‘social history of ideas,’ like Robert Darnton, appropriated the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz to examine book production, censorship, and literacy in eighteenth-century France, a project aimed at radically reassessing conventional views of the ‘Enlightenment’ and its links to the late eighteenth-century political revolutions, as caused by the ideas of great individual minds. The key consequence was a pronounced shift from the ‘internalist’ treatment of the ideas of individuals and elites to a grounding of ideas in the material conditions of ordinary people, an opening to the social sciences that, for all its potential for broadening the agenda of intellectual history, carried with it the danger of economic reductionism.37 In Ouellet’s hands, this analysis sought to marry the study of ideas to the broader social transformations of Lower Canadian society, and he aimed to study the collective ideologies of peasants and social elites in a period of rapid economic and social change.38 Unlike his Englishspeaking Canadian contemporaries, Ouellet displayed little interest in the ideas or agency of individuals; rather, nationalism was treated as a body of collective beliefs that originated in the particular response of a set of social structures and classes to the transition from an ancien régime to a market capitalist society. However, the impact of Ouellet’s work, and his much-debated characterization of early-nineteenth-century francophone nationalism, was less a function of his method than of the ability of his work to contribute to an older historiographical preoccupation with the events of 1837–38. This fascination stemmed from the sense, which was given greater cultural purchase by the events of the 1960s in which currents of secular nationalism re-emerged in Quebec politics, that the nationalist movement prior to the Rebellions was a precursor of modern nationalism, because it contained the potential for the emergence of a secular, liberal, and independent Quebec. At one level, it might have been expected that coupling the study of mentalités to the extreme rejection of institutional Catholicism among many educated segments of francophone Quebec society during the

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1960s would have markedly distinguished Quebec historiography from that of English-speaking Canada. The critique of clericalism might have led to a historiography far less preoccupied with the maintenance of social cohesion which, by problematizing the historical place of Catholicism, would identify ideas – defined as the mentalités of rival social groups – as the central dynamic of social conflict. However, even the existence of a culturalist method that emphasized the collective nature of intellectual life did not make the study of ideas mainstream in Quebec historiography during the 1970s and 1980s. There are two major reasons for the marginality of intellectual history within the Quebec historical profession. First, the assault on the institutional church was undertaken by both laypeople and clergy, with the result that Catholicism found few defenders within academic circles in the 1960s and 1970s, meaning that it was not theorized as a key element in Quebec’s past. The result was that following the 1960s there emerged a nearly hegemonic reading of Quebec history that, in the first instance, irrevocably linked much of the post-1837 world of ideas with a socially and culturally repressive conservatism and clerical control.39 Apart from an interest in the fate of the radical liberal option in the 1840s and 1850s,40 most studies simply equated Catholicism with an ossified clericalism, and followed the pre–Second World War trajectory of treating religion as an ideological monolith. Now, however, Catholicism was cast in entirely negative terms, as coterminous with a reactionary ultramontanism that sought to subjugate the political realm,41 underwriting the colonization of Quebec society by anglophone political and business elites, and contributing to the oppression of working-class people by legitimating capitalist social relations and by blocking social thought and educational experimentation that would have given francophone Quebec the cultural equipment to deal with the social problems of the industrial age.42 Second, the ‘revisionist’ school that rose to prominence in professional historical circles in the 1970s successfully advanced a view of the past in which ideas did not form either the basis of social cohesion or conflict. Indeed, revisionism sought to reaffirm modern Quebec’s self-image by portraying the past as a ‘normal society’ whose development was not a function of culture, religion, intellect, or ideology, but of the by-and-large successful workings of a market capitalist society that closely resembled anglophone North America, and established a commonality between francophone, anglophone, and ethnic Quebecers.43 More tellingly, the ‘normal society’ paradigm not only did not

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seriously challenge the rejection of Catholicism by the Quiet Revolution generation, but it even ingested its main outlines into its own portrait of the national past.44 Here was a national consensus writ large, but in contrast to the reading of the past that prevailed among the pioneers of English-speaking Canadian intellectual historians, it was a history in which all that pertained to ideas was either rigorously consigned to a compartment labelled ‘tradition’ or treated as a superstructure of little relevance to the ‘real’ economic and social forces that had shaped the nation.45 During the 1980s, intellectual history in English-speaking Canada slipped outside the mainstream of the profession, whose central questions were now driven by a number of social history sub-disciplines. In the second edition of The Writing of Canadian History, Berger added a concluding chapter that sought to outline the transformations that had occurred in the two decades since the mid-1960s. A fundamental contradiction characterized Berger’s assessment of these changes, indicating both his own uncertainty over the direction of the Canadian historical profession and the loss of the consensual nationalist perspective provided by the intellectual history of the 1960s. On the one hand, he asserted that the diversification of historical writing and the spirit of experimentation that characterized many sub-disciplines displayed fundamental continuities with the past, and he took comfort from the fact that these were ‘stronger than those making for an abrupt break with previous historical writing.’46 However, more negatively, he observed that the rise of social history ‘expressed a distrust if not disdain for the activities and achievements of elites and a preference for attempting to understand the mentalities and popular beliefs of large groups of people. As a result historians of Canada seemed to possess a limited view of cultural history.’47 Significantly, the term ‘intellectual history’ did not appear in Berger’s new analysis, and he lumped works in the field of ideas under a more anodyne rubric of ‘cultural history,’ a designation that he left undefined in an attempt to refurbish the lost consensus of the 1960s by deflecting social history’s principal arraignment of intellectual history as elitist and detached from questions of material circumstances and social power. Nor did Berger evince any awareness of new developments among European and American historians who, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, sought to overcome the very problems of overemphasis on continuity and consensus by embarking on a serious engagement with questions posed by the post-structuralist philosophies of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and the insights

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of the linguistic turn. These effectively recast and reinvigorated the agenda of intellectual history by bringing it into new contact with the disciplines of literary theory and philosophy. These developments asserted the distinction of intellectual history from both social history and cultural history, in that the former ought to be concerned with texts, but opened a considerable terrain of stimulating transdisciplinary conversation around new questions of the production of discourses, hierarchy, repression, and power.48 Given this silence, it was difficult for Berger’s readers to escape the conclusion that he had largely given up on intellectual history as a sub-discipline. Even presented as a nebulous ‘cultural history,’ it was a marginal enterprise destined to suffer the fate that he ascribed to the history of religion between the 1960s and the 1980s: ‘Even when religion was not explicitly relegated to the status of epiphenomenon, however, those who wrote of submerged groups and classes were apt to identify religion and its upholders with social control, middle-class values, or European imperialism.’49 What Berger had not anticipated was the degree to which the continued allegiance of intellectual historians to the postwar nationalist paradigm would deprive them of the opportunity to communicate, not only with social historians, but also with the international developments that revitalized the sub-discipline of intellectual history in the 1980s. It was unfortunate that at exactly the moment when Canadian intellectual historians urgently required a method and set of questions by which to engage with the issues raised by social historians, a number of younger intellectual historians still saw their chief task in moral terms, that history should first and foremost serve nationalist identity, and read the work of Berger, Wise, and Cook in ‘presentist’ terms as key contributions to an ongoing search for a comprehensive and consensual expression of Canadian national identity.50 The work of Brian McKillop on nineteenth-century Anglo-Canadian philosophy and of William Westfall on the formation of the Protestant culture of nineteenth-century Ontario remained tethered to the identification of leading intellectuals and the search for an essentialist, overarching ‘national character’ founded upon a consensual reconciliation of dualisms. McKillop’s A Disciplined Intelligence was a close study of the ideas of a group of ‘public moralists,’ dubbed ‘the Anglo-Canadian mind’ – always singular, who sought to balance ‘critical inquiry’ and ‘moral affirmation.’51 There was considerable promise to McKillop’s volume in that his ‘Atlantic’ framework, the intricate tracing of the engagement of Canadian university figures with international paradigms

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of Common Sense Realism, natural theology, Darwinism, and idealism, and their grappling with social and cultural problems of secularization, appeared to shift the concerns of intellectual history beyond the nationalist agenda of the 1960s generation. Equally exciting, his serious attempt to treat the systems of formal thought articulated by Canadian philosophers appeared to be an opening to issues of language and structure. However, the purpose of McKillop’s analysis was to distil some essential quality of a purported monolithic Anglo-Canadian intellect, which lay in the continuity of ‘its moral dimension.’52 From the perspective of the study of ideas, A Disciplined Intelligence tilted too far in the direction of coherence, often eliding under an all-encompassing ‘moralism’ the divergent intellectual approaches of the different Protestant denominations that dominated Anglo-Canadian academic life, not all of whom adhered in equal measure to Scottish Common Sense philosophy or to the structures of natural theology.53 Perhaps unintentionally, this volume’s insistence that the thought of a small elite of ‘public moralists’ defined a unified and unitary ‘mind’ adhered to the very methodology that had been so roundly critiqued by social historians – an overemphasis on an order constructed entirely by elite thought that marginalized ordinary people. The impression left by this volume by McKillop was that intellectual history was irrevocably associated with esoteric thought and with a conservative view of the past, thus projecting the sub-discipline as the antithesis of social history. Similar difficulties plagued Westfall’s Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario. Billed as a ‘cultural history,’ which sought to analyse the changing religious identities of Protestant Ontarians, the book raised expectations of a new method which would bring ideas into closer relation with the social. However, by casting these identities under the rubric of a conflict between ‘order’ and ‘experience’ (and in this respect Westfall’s dialectic closely mirrored McKillop’s ‘moral affirmation’ and ‘critical inquiry’), irrevocably identified with the Anglican and Methodist churches, the study overlooked the central fact that, historically, this tension expressed not only lines of conflict between religious groups, but within these groups as well. Indeed, by privileging two archetypal intellectuals, John Strachan and Egerton Ryerson, whose ideas stood for the two rival cultural paradigms, the volume actually stood closer to a very traditional form of the history of ideas. In its overt evocation of ‘consensus,’ which had emerged by the 1850s among Protestant denominations,54 it could be argued that Westfall simply followed the chronological outlines of the political history

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supplied by Careless and Wise, lending credence to the suspicion that the Anglican/Methodist religious dichotomy was simply a convenient shorthand for those other monolithic identities of British/American or conservative/liberal.55 At another level, Westfall’s work appeared less innovative because it stood well within the conventional structure of work done in the 1980s on Upper Canadian political ideologies by Jane Errington and David Mills, the first scholarly monographs to take up Syd Wise’s influential hypothesis of the liberal-conservative dialectic. Both these scholars, however, did not depart from the now-ubiquitous dynamic of monolithic and conflictual ‘British’ and ‘American’ identities, and the emergence of an eventual moderate political consensus that defined the Canadian ‘character.’ Each, however, brought certain refinements to the picture of Upper Canadian political conflict supplied by Wise and Careless. In Errington’s case, the ‘British’ values of the Loyalists enabled them to carry on a continued conversation with conservative American republicans, the Federalists;56 while for Mills, the clue to the softening of conflict between Reformer and Tory in the 1840s was the emergence of a definition of ‘Britishness’ and loyalty among Reform ideologists, and a more ‘inclusive’ model of loyalty articulated by moderate political figures such as Egerton Ryerson.57 Beginning in the mid-1980s, a second group of English-speaking Canadian intellectual historians, comprising both younger and established scholars, actually broke the identification of their sub-discipline with the nationalist project. Their contribution lay less at the level of methodological innovation such as the adoption of forms of postmodernism such as the ‘linguistic turn’ or the merging of intellectual history into a culturalist ‘history of meaning,’ approaches that characterized the work of a number of American and European scholars during this decade,58 as in the location of a set of alternative questions generated outside the now-threadbare nationalist narrative and anchored in international scholarly debates. The intent of most of these works was not to set out either to locate significant ‘intellectuals’ or to define the national character, but worked out of a more ‘functional’ definition of ideas. Thus, many of them explored the institutional contexts in which ideas were produced, and the way in which ‘transatlantic’ intellectual currents were refracted and mediated by their Canadian receptors and institutional networks. Carl Berger himself was closely connected to this development through two of his shorter monographic works, which analysed the reception, application, and persistent influence of natural theology in local ‘amateur’ scientific societies, and the less-

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than-successful attempt to organize Canadian academic life around the elitist Royal Society of Canada.59 Two of the more prominent examples of this genre were provided by the work of Greg Kealey and Bryan Palmer, Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880–1900, and by that of Doug Owram The Government Generation: Canadian Intellectuals and the State, 1900– 1945. Kealey and Palmer are not usually included among the fraternity of intellectual historians, being two of the leading new social historians critical of the elitist and nationalist bias of many previous studies of ideas. However, the significance of their work lay, first, in challenging the ‘consensus’ bias of the previous generation of intellectual historians by uncovering the existence of a coherent body of radical thought critical of emerging capitalist social relations. This significantly altered the dominant portrait of late-nineteenth-century English-speaking Canada as a conservative society. That these critiques of capitalism were, in the 1880s, widely shared by many ordinary Canadians, both inside and outside the working class, introduced cultural Marxist theoretical constructs such as ‘hegemony’ to the intellectual history lexicon. Second, the work broke with the conventional search for ‘Canadian ideas.’ The Knights, after all, originated in the United States, and much of the work was directed to examining a cross-border ‘North American’ context in which working-class cultural life was lived. Finally, although many intellectual historians may not have shared the Marxist ideology of the authors, many would have applauded Kealey and Palmer’s insistence that ideas, values, and cultural practices did have a causal role to play in history, as Dreaming of What Might Be, through its attention to the lines of hegemony and counter-hegemony, affirmed the validity of the continued attempt to connect ideas with the lived social experience of people.60 Similarly, although from a ‘liberal’ perspective, Owram located his subjects and their ideas in a cultural climate defined not by nationalism, but by idealism, progressivism, and secularization, and by the transformations that occurred after the 1880s in Canadian universities, occasioned by the rise of the social sciences.61 Significantly, Owram’s evidence brought a Canadian perspective to bear on American historiographical debates that sought to situate the origin of the social sciences and, by remaining attentive to the institutional contexts – in this case, universities and their developing interface with government brought about through social science knowledge – Owram was able to establish a clear linkage between the ideas of academic social scientists and

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social philosophers and policy making and political practice that shaped the growth of the Canadian state.62 The result was an enrichment of our understanding of twentieth-century liberalism in Canada, an achievement all the more telling because of the lack of a synthetic history of Canadian political thought. Others, like Ramsay Cook,63 Michael Gauvreau,64 Marguerite Van Die,65 David Marshall,66 Phyllis Airhart,67 and Nancy Christie,68 turned to the churches as the central social and cultural context for the production of ideas in Canada. Here, the initial inspiration was provided by the implications of Richard Allen’s importation of the American ‘social gospel’ paradigm in the 1960s. Allen’s work was, like Berger’s, a product of the 1960s Canadian revision of Hartz’s liberal consensus, but his originality lay in explaining the existence of a home-grown Canadian socialism through a different causal set of ideas. He thus offered an alternative explanation to the ‘Tory’ strain, which emphasized the early twentiethcentury intellectual transformation of Canada’s Protestant churches,69 as providing an explanation for the distinctive Canadian political climate of the 1960s and 1970s. Although Allen’s work on religion and social reform was well situated within the older nationalist paradigm, what historians of religion in the 1980s took from him was the idea that the churches were key sites for the understanding of intellectual and cultural change, thus finding a way to counter Berger’s assertion of the marginality of religious history announced in 1986. The presence of a critical mass of scholars in this field rapidly expanded the range of Allen’s questions, as the discussion quickly turned away from left-wing politics towards understanding the far larger issue of secularization. What was most significant regarding the professional practice of these scholars was that they did not believe that a historical consensus should exist on the chronology, nature of, or implications of secularization, with the result that a debate ensued that was both lively and productive for the status of intellectual history in English-speaking Canada. In the first instance, the uncovering of a variety of divergent intellectual positions within the Canadian churches on the far-reaching turn-of-the-century social and cultural transformations firmly shifted the practice of intellectual history away from the search for consensus. Second, secularization, like Marxism, most emphatically involved a set of issues and theoretical frameworks generated outside of Canada, which challenged the equation between intellectual history and the search for a self-sufficient national identity.70 That this involved some discomfort for those who persisted in linking intellectual history with

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a search for an essentialist Canadian identity was brought home to me when I sought a publisher for my own work in the late 1980s: The Evangelical Century was deemed ‘not Canadian enough’ by the Canadian history editor at University of Toronto Press, a comment which echoed Carl Berger’s assessment that there were far too many Scottish references. But most tellingly, religion provided a terrain through which the world of ideas could be reconnected with the questions and methods of social history, and this occurred in English-speaking Canada under the engagement with the intellectual and cultural ramifications of secularization. Secularization was in the first instance a social history masternarrative that sought to explain religious decline through an advancing process of modernization that encompassed urbanization, industrialization, class segmentation, and the displacement of theological explanations of social processes and relationships by ones generated by the social sciences.71 The implications were broad and invited intellectual historians to uncouple their discipline from the nationalist priorities of the pioneer generation. In Quebec the study of ideas during the two decades after 1970 displayed two paradoxical qualities. Through a set of methodological approaches that sought to anchor intellectual life more fully in the social realm, the sub-discipline was largely reintegrated into the ‘normal society’ master-narrative. However, at the same time, just as their Englishspeaking Canadian counterparts were expressing doubts about their imbrication with nationalism, the preoccupations of francophone Quebec intellectual historians became more closely tied to the production of a neo-nationalist reading of their society’s past. Writing at the end of the 1980s, Yvan Lamonde set forth a set of new methodological and conceptual imperatives, calling for an emphatically social direction to the history of ideas. However, the welding together of intellectual and sociocultural history was not to be methodologically driven by the history of mentalités, an overly socioeconomic approach now coming under serious challenge from a rising generation of French cultural historians, led in particular by Roger Chartier.72 Rather, Lamonde’s interest lay in defining the new cultural history’s terrain as ‘histoire de l’expression sociale,’ and he called for the production of a large synthetic treatment that would give intellectual coherence to ‘l’expression publique des citoyens du Québec.’73 The linking of ‘public expression’ with ‘citizenship’ provided a clue to the direction of Lamonde’s thinking, which was, first, to break the negative image of intellectual history in Quebec, which was a consequence of the near-automatic equation that had been

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made between the study of ideas and the conservative-clericalist ideology of the Church. The intellectual realm was now seen as traversed by ‘liberalizing’ currents, a view that challenged the notion, established during the Quiet Revolution, that Quebec’s intellectual life had been characterized by a hegemonic conservatism. The importance of liberal values in Quebec’s past was accorded further interpretive weight by Fernande Roy’s Progrès, harmonie, liberté, which discerned the existence of a strong and coherent liberal outlook in the late-nineteenth-century francophone business community. Rather than accepting the primacy of communitarian and collective values or of nationalism – the Catholic clergy’s position on social issues – these businessmen were opposed to clericalism in that they were devoted to an ‘individualisme propriétaire,’the primary element of their liberal creed. However, the clergy and the francophone business elite, both committed to the primacy of private property, were in fundamental agreement concerning the threat of the working class and socialist ideologies.74 Roy’s work was significant for two major reasons: first, she was able to demonstrate a considerable degree of ideological pluralism in Quebec during the supposed period of absolute clerical dominance in the realm of ideas; second, she was able to nuance the ‘liberal’ discourse itself in showing that the meaning of the term was far wider than the anticlerical, republican ‘rougisme’ that had formed the classic foil to ultramontane Catholicism, in order to argue that some of the ‘conservative’ values once identified with the Catholic clergy were actually varieties of ‘liberalism.’ Roy’s treatment raised, by implication, two central questions. First, could it be argued that Roman Catholicism, hitherto identified with an anti-liberal traditionalism, was itself thoroughly enmeshed in articulating and promoting ‘liberal’ ideologies?75 And did the harmony of both clerical and lay elites around the question of private property indicate that Quebec’s intellectual development should be understood as a ‘liberal’ hegemony rather than a ‘conservative’ one? The outlines of a new ‘liberal’ synthesis were clear in Lamonde’s pioneering synthesis, Histoire sociale des idées au Québec, the only overarching work of this type ever to have been attempted by a Canadian historian. He built upon Roy’s theoretical insights regarding liberalism in francophone Quebec, and upon his own substantial spadework on the nineteenth-century climate of intellectual life in Montreal, to produce a study that sought to rigorously place ideas in their social contexts through a treatment of the ‘circuit complet des idées, de leur production, de leur diffusion, de leur réception.’ Further, Lamonde was

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interested in anchoring individual producers of ideas – note the term ‘intellectual’ was not used – in particular social strata and in the diffusion of ideas through print and networks of associational life and sociability.76 Of equal signficance, Lamonde claimed to broaden the meaning of ‘intellectual history,’ extending this social history of ideas into the realm of ‘idées civiques’ – the ‘isms’ which, like other Western societies, had framed debates in Quebec since the eighteenth century. Hitherto, Quebec historians had concentrated their attention on ‘political’ ideas such as nationalism or relations between church and state. The realm of ideas, according to Lamonde, was an emphatically participatory one, engaging a broad social spectrum beyond the clergy and the nationalist politicians, encompassing the elites, people of ‘milieux bourgeois,’and the emerging middle classes.77 Lamonde’s great achievement was to integrate the sub-discipline of intellectual history in Quebec into the reigning ‘normal society’ paradigm by demonstrating the existence, through all historical periods, of an openness in Quebec society to a diversity of international currents of thought emanating from Britain, France, and the United States. Unlike the preceding generation of intellectual historians who viewed the terrain of ideas as solely occupied by conservative strands of French thinking, Lamonde was particularly insistent upon Quebec’s cultural debt to Britain in the realm of political thinking and concepts of liberalism.78 Even the period of ultramontane ‘hegemony’ after 1840, which had been accorded such dismissive treatment by the previous generation of historians, was now viewed in positive terms as a period of ‘takeoff’ for the institutional consolidation of networks and associations directed to the cultural diffusion of ideas.79 In one significant respect, however, Lamonde’s work did not break with the ‘nationalist’ bias of intellectual history. For all its novel attention to the contexts of articulation and social diffusion of ideas, the spine of the book remained organized around elucidating the ideologies, and the tensions these produced among various social groups, of the ‘nationalist’ project, be it expressed in terms of political nationhood in the 1820s and 1830s or in the yearning for a Catholic social order in the face of early twentieth-century urban industrial challenges. The cast of characters – Papineau, the Patriotes, the ultramontanes, Laurier, Bourassa, Abbé Groulx – remained the familiar names. The temptations of the elitist bias of intellectual history proved hard to resist, and in the second volume, Lamonde moved back towards a more traditional ‘history of ideas’ approach, quietly dropping the social context in favour of an analysis of the discourses of intellectuals about ‘the social question.’

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Indeed, taken together, the views of Roy and Lamonde could be read as reinforcing the ‘consensual’ quality of intellectual history, except that they emphatically shifted the bias of historical attention from ‘conservative’ to ‘liberal,’ a direction that accorded well with the ‘normal society’ portrayal of Quebec’s historical trajectory as similar to that of other Western capitalist societies. What prospects lie before Canadian intellectual history at the turn of the twenty-first century? According to the French historian Pascal Ory, the culturalist frame of reference is now one of the dominant currents within the discipline of history, especially given the decline, in most Western countries, of political religions, with their monolithic and rationalistic definitions of individual and society.80 Social historians, once confident in the power of a master-narrative anchored on the belief that ‘class’ could be objectively anchored in economic data,81 have themselves imbibed much of the culturalist turn which, according to Ory, is suspicious of unified and deterministic interpretations.82 However, Ory is emphatic that intellectual history is not synonymous with cultural history. The latter, in his definition, is a far broader term because it is more heavily imbricated in social history. As conceptualized by Ory, cultural history encompasses the ‘histoire sociale des représentations’ and can be distinguished from social, political, intellectual, or religious history in the weight that it gives to representations. Intellectual history, according to Ory, lacks homogeneity and is overly concerned with the structures of formal, original thought produced by elite thinkers. It can, however, participate in the culturalist enterprise by concerning itself with ‘l’analyse de la production, de la diffusion et de la réception des objets verbaux d’interprétation,’ and especially by broadening its outlook to include the popularizing element involved in all diffusion of ideas.83 Here, Ory emphatically annexes intellectual history to cultural history by cutting away the traditional dichotomy upon which the sub-discipline was founded, the postwar distinction between elite and mass, and by urging intellectual historians to take on more of a social history approach to the study of ideas. In both English-speaking Canada and Quebec, the examples of intellectual history during the past few years that have been most successful in more closely linking ideas with modern cultural theory are those adopting more emphatically culturalist directions. Inspired by the vogue of studies of ‘memory’ current in a number of Western historiographies, and coinciding with the turn of the millennium, a cluster of

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works written by Jonathan Vance,84 H.V. Nelles,85 Keith Walden,86 and Ronald Rudin87 emerged treating commemoration, spectacle, and celebration. At their best, works on recurring spectacles such as Walden’s study of the Canadian National Exhibition and Rudin’s exploration of francophone Quebec’s celebration of its ‘founding fathers’ attained the plane of ‘sociocultural’ history advocated by Ory, by using these events to more closely connect ideas and society. By critically analysing those moments whose discourse ostensibly proclaimed an overarching unity, these works penetrated the often-conflictual tissue of social relations, exploring the webs of cultural hegemony and authority and the degree to which these were contested. But, as noted by one international critic, such studies, especially those of wartime commemoration, at times verged on an uncritical nostalgia,88 adopted intellectual history’s besetting fault – an overemphasis on coherence – and tended to adopt the rhetoric of consensus and unity inherent in memory and celebration. Not only could this be taken as a conservative justification of war, but they largely ignored the unequal relations of power that produced these supposedly unifying commemorations, refurbishing the old nationalist narrative so roundly critiqued by social historians. In other words, these studies had the potential to become vehicles, through an overlay of a culturalist perspective, for the promotion of a sublimated nationalism that was as uncritical of the Canadian past as its predecessor. Despite the brilliant achievements of J.G.A. Pocock in exploring the conceptual languages of politics, Canadian intellectual historians evinced little interest in political ideas beyond Syd Wise’s initial forays into the field in the 1960s. However, two stimulating new cultural approaches to politics were published in 2000. The first was Jeffrey McNairn’s The Capacity to Judge, which explored the emergence of the idea of ‘deliberative democracy’ in Upper Canada as it related to the ways in which the concept of ‘public opinion’ forged during the Enlightenment transformed older, imported models of the British constitution in the colonial setting. This book moved ideas onto the terrain of society and culture, by insisting that ‘the form and distribution of arguments and information, the institutions that fostered the skills and norms to evaluate them, and the nature and number of sites where they could be read and discussed are vital to understanding their meaning and consequences.’89 McNairn’s was the first work to attempt to alter the conceptual categories framed nearly forty years before by Careless and Wise; it argued that the terms of political conflict could be explained less by reference to a conservative-liberal dialectic than to the incompat-

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ibility between widely shared British theories of ‘mixed monarchy’ and a robust culture of public opinion which, by the 1830s, had developed in the colonial setting.90 In a manner similar to Lamonde’s analysis of civic ideas in Quebec, McNairn fully integrated Upper Canada into a rational world of Enlightenment liberalism characteristic of other Western societies. However, in a number of ways, McNairn’s work did not alter the older consensualist bias of Upper Canadian historiography, beyond shifting attention away from Responsible Government and the 1854 Great Coalition, and providing a negative reading of the system of parliamentary government that emerged in the 1850s, which he judged as greatly inferior to the earlier ‘deliberative democracy’ that had emerged prior to the Rebellions of 1837–38. It might be argued that McNairn’s reliance upon a theoretical framework provided by Jürgen Habermas’s writings on the Enlightenment public sphere predisposed him, like many other intellectual historians, to overidealize those ‘rational’ and consensual components of the political system. Habermas, according to Martin Jay, was among those mid-twentieth-century European intellectuals ‘anxious to retain Hegel’s emphasis on rationality and his belief that history as a whole is potentially coherent,’ and this agenda frequently induced him to ignore social contexts in which unequal, hierarchical relationships of power prevailed.91 More troubling, by confining himself to constitutional discourses in the colony’s newspapers, and comfortably reassuring his readers that an increasing number of Upper Canadians accepted the parameters of ‘public opinion,’ McNairn ignored Pocock’s insistence upon the historicity of language and the need to ground such studies in experience.92 To put the matter bluntly, The Capacity to Judge failed to consider the paradox that the rational culture of ‘deliberative democracy’ was part of a world of sociopolitical violence and extremist language deployed by rival groups of Tories and Radicals who, in McNairn’s estimation, fully participated in Habermas’s rational world. The fact that shared ‘rational’ understandings of the British constitution could provoke such violence, which created a situation of incipient civil war in Upper Canada in 1837–38,93 was a phenomenon well-understood by Pocock in the context of the British seventeenth century94 and can only be explained by the fact that many Upper Canadians realized that the colonial public sphere was not the scene of a discussion among equals, but of inequalities of power occasioned by oppressive relations not only in the colonial administration itself, but in the wider tissue of social relations. Viewed in this light, it is possible to argue that the decline of ‘deliberative democracy’ and the

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rise of the maligned ‘parliamentary government’ of the 1850s marked a distinct improvement in Upper Canada’s political culture! A second major work of this genre, Nancy Christie’s Engendering the State, shifted the focus to the origins of the welfare state in Canada. Refining Owram’s functional approach to ideas, which had explored the institutional contexts in which intellectuals had operated, Christie took as her terrain the debates around the subject of citizenship occasioned by the social and political pressures to expand the scope of state intervention in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Relying upon new insights provided by women’s and gender historians regarding the notion of agency, her analysis of how welfare policy was formulated at both federal and provincial levels enormously expanded the scope of the sub-discipline of the history of public policy by including women, labour groups, and the recipients of state welfare, the poor themselves. In the process, her book, like Owram’s earlier treatment, greatly expanded our understanding of the framing of political ideologies: liberalism was, emphatically, less a set of political practices or high-political manipulations than a widely diffused culture whose implications and prescriptions regarding citizenship were frequently contested by a constellation of social groups. More tellingly, the major transformation in twentieth-century liberalism was not the change of governments or the long persistence of Mackenzie King, the ubiquitous agenda of what passes for twentieth-century political history, but the dramatic shift in the 1930s from a welfare state constructed on maternalist lines of female citizenship towards an emphatically masculinist one based upon the enshrining of the male breadwinner norm in a host of state policies.95 A third major culturalist trajectory represents a deepening of the engagement between intellectual history and religious history launched during the 1980s. Here there have been two major recent developments, one in Quebec and the other in English-speaking Canada, both of which have led to a practice of ‘sociocultural’ history in the years since 1995. In Quebec, the work of a number of religious historians paralleled the reconstruction of Quebec’s intellectual life on ‘liberal’ lines by seriously re-examining the ‘ultramontane’ character of Roman Catholicism. Major studies by Louis Rousseau, René Hardy, and Christine Hudon, while less about the content of religious ideas than religious practices, have shown that the identification of ultramontanism and Catholicism was a process that was both contingent and contested, both by ordinary believers and by groups of clergy, and it did not achieve success

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until the 1880s or 1890s.96 Ollivier Hubert’s stimulating analysis of preultramontane Catholic ritual, published in 2000, contended that the social and cultural power of the Catholic Church in the late nineteenth century could in fact be explained by the acquisition by the clergy of a monolithic control over the elaboration and administration of ritual, a process that had begun in the seventeenth century. Theoretically, Hubert’s analysis owed a great deal to the insights of cultural anthropology and to the theories of power advanced by Foucault, and it marked a significant methodological advance in studies of Quebec Catholicism, reinforcing the insistence that ultramontanism was not a given, Catholicism was not an immobile set of social and cultural relations, but had to be considered as a socially constructed process.97 It was Hubert, in fact, who took studies of Quebec Catholicism in a more overtly ‘culturalist’ direction, moving beyond earlier quantitative analyses of religious practice to discern the ways in which Catholicism, through both ritual and discourse, constructed notions of ‘otherness’ and marginality that sought to constrain early-modern practices of religious and cultural hybridity, and articulated modern ‘liberal’ categories of masculinity and family relations that framed the ideologies and cultural practices of the emerging francophone middle classes.98 Cultural historians of religion in English-speaking Canada engaged with and contributed to new international developments within the discipline, particularly in articulating a revisionist approach to secularization along more ‘culturalist’ lines. Where in the 1970s secularization had once been viewed as a socioeconomic process coextensive with ‘modernization,’ its content was now increasingly analysed on the terrain of personal identities and public ideologies of family, gender, and youth.99 And in this respect, historians of religion stood at the cutting edge of new developments within social history that challenged the ‘master-narrative’ based on class as an objective given and gave more weight to languages and identities founded upon gender. More tellingly, its chronology, in a number of suggestive recent works, has shifted from the period 1870–1914, framed by the focus on the more ‘intellectualist’ questions of the Darwinian debate and the ‘social gospel,’ to the period after the Second World War, to the more culturalist direction provided by the revolt of youth and the rise of new female identities.100 The contribution of English-speaking Canadian scholars to this debate has been to maintain a strong focus upon the dynamic agency of the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches as producers and diffusers of public ideologies, and they have insisted upon the need to consider a

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more ‘internalist’ perspective on the institutional and intellectual logics of the churches themselves, a point of contrast with their British and European counterparts who have tended to see secularization as a oneway process in which the churches are acted upon by the agencies of the surrounding culture. Religious history, with its well-established location in non-nationalist paradigms of secularization and methods that now range from cultural anthropology to literary analysis, has led the way in the recent culturalist turn promoted by the French historian Roger Chartier which has more solidly grounded discourses, texts, and representations in social experience or ‘practices.’101 Religious history’s advantage in this respect lies in possessing an institutional context in which it is possible to examine the negotiation that occurs between discourses of authority produced by the clergy and the ways in which these are appropriated, reproduced, or contested by a variety of social groups who participate in the institution.102 In continuing this conversation, however, it is imperative that intellectual historians avoid at all costs the temptations of the search for intellectuals, the uncritical linking of their sub-discipline with nation building. That these seductions are still present is evident from the proceedings of a recent symposium on the state of intellectual history in Canada. Although many of the participants called for a broadening of the agenda, emphasized the need for wider comparisons to break down the ‘two solitudes’ between Quebec and English-speaking Canada, and urged a greater attentiveness to the social contexts and networks in which ideas were produced,103 others seemed more intent on a traditionalist agenda, positioning intellectual historians as moralists, who might counter the Canadian discontent with a totalizing ‘Americanization’ or ‘américanité’ – in other words, as public intellectuals who possessed insight into an essential set of Canadian values and who could thus offer prescriptions as to how their contemporaries should live.104 It is plain that such an agenda reflects a hankering for the persistent equation of intellectual history with nationalism, and replicates the founding moment of the discipline in the lament for an ‘absent’ intellectual class destined to lead the masses out of their addiction to a universal American culture. Perhaps the way forward lies in a culturalist contextualization of these lofty claims, to an understanding of their intellectual provenance in a postwar social commentary whose response to secularization was the elaboration of the role and mission of the intellectual.

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NOTES I would particularly like to thank Nancy Christie, Ollivier Hubert, and Doug Owram for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 1 Doug Owram, ‘Intellectual History in the Land of Limited Identities,’ Journal of Canadian Studies, 24/3 (1989): 114. 2 A.B. McKillop, ‘So Little on the Mind,’ in A.B. McKillop, Contours of Canadian Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 28. 3 For this definition of the aims of the ‘history of ideas’ approach, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 380–1; and for the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ dimensions of intellectual history, Dominick LaCapra, ‘Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts,’ in Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 47–8. 4 For the rise and persistence of the ‘Laurentian School,’ represented by Donald Creighton, and the centralist implications of the ‘metropolitan’ thesis of J.M.S. Careless, see Carl Berger, The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing 1900 to 1970 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1976), 160–86, 208–37. 5 See, for example, J.L. Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History? (Toronto: Harper Collins, 1998); Michael Bliss, ‘Privatizing the Mind: The Sundering of Canadian History, the Sundering of Canada,’ Journal of Canadian Studies, 26/4 (1991–92): 5–17; Gregory S. Kealey, ‘Replies to Privatizing the Mind: Class in English-Canadian Historiography, Neither Privatizing, nor Sundering,’ Journal of Canadian Studies, 27/2 (1992): 123–9; A.B. McKillop, ‘Who Killed Canadian History: A View from the Trenches,’ Canadian Historical Review, 80/2 (1999): 269–99; Bryan D. Palmer, ‘Of Silences and Trenches: A Dissident View of Granatstein’s Meaning,’ Canadian Historical Review, 80/4 (1999): 676–86. 6 John E. Toews, ‘Review Article: Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience,’ American Historical Review, 92/4 (1987), 879–907. 7 Michael Saler, ‘Presence of Minds: Is There Such a Thing as a British Intellectual?’ review of Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), Times Literary Supplement, 26 April 2006. 8 For the production of cultural policy in this period, see Paul Litt, The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission (Toronto: University of

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Michael Gauvreau Toronto Press, 1992); Leonard B. Kuffert, A Great Duty (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004). For a recent treatment which disaggregates and deconstructs the notion of consensus as a cultural production, rather than accepting it as a description of postwar society, see Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, ‘Introduction: Recasting Canada’s Postwar Decade,’ in Christie and Gauvreau, eds., Cultures of Citizenship in Post-War Canada, 1940–1955 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 17. On the international dimensions, see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1973); Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997). For Underhill’s career and writings, see Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, and R.D. Francis, Frank H. Underhill: Intellectual Provocateur (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). Ramsay Cook, The Politics of John W. Dafoe and the Free Press (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963). Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955); Hartz, The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, Canada, South Africa, and Australia (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964). For the Canadian Tory critique of America’s liberal empire, see George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965). Syd Wise, ‘Sermon Literature and Canadian Intellectual History,’ reprinted in S.F. Wise, God’s Peculiar Peoples: Essays on Political Culture in NineteenthCentury Canada (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1993; edited and introduced by A.B. McKillop and Paul Romney), 3. Syd Wise, ‘Liberal Consensus or Ideological Battleground: Some Reflections on the Hartz Thesis,’ in Wise, God’s Peculiar Peoples, 211. Gad Horowitz, Canadian Labour in Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968). Robert H. Babcock, Gompers in Canada: A Study in American Continentalism before the First World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974); Irving Abella, Nationalism, Communism, and Canadian Labour: The CIO, the Communist Party, and the Canadian Congress of Labour, 1935–1956 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973). Kenneth McNaught, A Prophet in Politics: A Biography of J.S. Woodsworth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960).

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18 See, for example, P.B. Waite, The Life and Times of Confederation: Politics, Newspapers, and the Union of British North America, 1864–1867 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). 19 Peter H. Russell, ed., Nationalism in Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1966). 20 Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970). 21 For the problem of Britain in Canadian historiography, see the analysis by Nancy Christie in ‘Introduction: Theorizing a Colonial Past,’ in Nancy Christie, ed., Transatlantic Subjects: Ideas, Institutions and Social Experience in Post-Revolutionary British North America, 1760–1850 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 3–44. 22 Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, ix. 23 It is of some note that it was another three decades before the practice of Canadian history as a professional project received its first scholarly treatment. See Donald Wright, The Professionalization of History in English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). 24 Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 259. 25 Ibid., 262–3. 26 For the links between post-Stalinist variants of British Marxism, ‘history from below,’ and early developments in women’s history, see Matt Perry, Marxism and History (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002), 88–109; and for the theoretical implications of women’s history, see Gisela Bock, ‘Women’s History and Gender History: Aspects of an International Debate,’ Gender and History, 1/1 (1980), 7–30. 27 Canadian historians were given a tantalizing hint of the methodological direction in which Berger’s thinking was moving in his 1982 Joanne Goodman Lectures to the University of Western Ontario, subsequently published as Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada: The 1982 Joanne Goodman Lectures (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983). 28 Mary Vipond, ‘National Consciousness in English-speaking Canada in the 1920s: Seven Studies,’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1974. 29 On the exclusion of women as a key element of the project of ‘professionalization’ of Canadian history, see Wright, The Professionalization of History, 97–120. 30 Doug Owram, Promise of Eden: The Canadian Expansionist Movement and the Idea of the West, 1856–1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). 31 For this critique of Berger’s anti-relativism, which was more stridently articulated in the second edition of The Writing of Canadian History, see Ronald Rudin, Making History in Twentieth-Century Quebec: Historians and

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Michael Gauvreau Their Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 4, in which Rudin characterizes Berger as seeing twentieth-century historians in English Canada as united in a search for truth, in which succeeding generations are able to build upon the achievements of past generations of scholars. More recently, Nancy Christie has advanced the view that the anti-relativism of Berger’s generation was a deeply embedded inheritance from late-Victorian nationalist narratives. See Christie, ‘Between Nature and Nation: History Textbooks in Canada and Australia, 1880–1950,’ paper delivered to Congrès sur le livre scolaire, Bibliothèque nationale, Montreal, April 2006. Ibid., ix. In this respect, Berger’s allegiance to Innis’s views of bias and objectivity, and his own limited relativism can be likened to using 1930s paradigms to engage with the varieties of postmodernism and post-structuralism that emerged from the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and began to influence the Canadian historical profession in the 1970s. For Innis’s formulation, see Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 105–7; and on the new intellectual paradigms spawned by the 1960s, see Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, the United States, and Italy, 1958–1974 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). I am indebted to a number of conversations with my colleague Nancy Christie about the extent to which Berger himself accepted historical relativism. Novick, That Noble Dream, 263. Owram, ‘Intellectual History in the Land of Limited Identities,’ 122. For the emphases of the ‘Montreal’ and ‘Laval’ schools, see Ronald Rudin, Making History in Twentieth-Century Quebec. For this categorization of the history of ‘mentalités’ as a third wave of the Annales school, see Lynn Hunt, ‘French History in the Last Twenty Years: The Rise and Fall of the Annales Paradigm,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 21 (1986), 216–17. The persistent ‘borrowing’ by Annales scholars has been noted by François Furet, ‘Beyond the Annales,’ Journal of Modern History, 55 (1983), 392. Robert Darnton, ‘Review: In Search of the Enlightenment – Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas,’ Journal of Modern History, 43/1 (1971): 113–32; Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984). Alan Megill, ‘Intellectual History and History,’ Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 3/4 (2004), 552–3, directs attention to the economic reductionism of some of Darnton’s work. Fernand Ouellet, Histoire économique et sociale du Québec, 1760–1850: structures et conjonctures (Montreal: Fides, 1966; preface by Robert Mandrou).

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For the influence of the concept of ‘mentalité’ on Ouellet, see Rudin, Making History in Twentieth-Century Quebec, 161. For the rejection of institutional Catholicism among the university generation of the 1960s, see Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution 1931–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), chapter 6. See in this genre Jean-Paul Bernard, Les Rouges: libéralisme, nationalisme et anticléricalisme au milieu du 19e siècle (Ottawa: Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1971); Yvan Lamonde, Louis-Antoine Dessaules 1818–1895: un seigneur libéral et anticlérical (Montreal: Fides, 1994). See Nadia Fahmy-Eid, Le clergé et le pouvoir politique au Québec: une analyse de l’idéologie ultramontaine au milieu du XIXe siècle (Montreal: Hurtubise, 1978). See, for example, the four-volume study of Quebec ideologies post-1850 edited by Fernand Ouellet, Jean Hamelin, and Jean-Paul Montminy, Histoire des idéologies au Canada français, vol. 1, 1850–1900; vol. 2, 1900–1929; vol. 3, 1929–1940; vol. 4, 1940–1976 (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1971– ). For the magisterial synthesis encapsulating the revisionist vision of the ‘normal’ society, see Paul-André Linteau, René Durocher, and JeanClaude Robert, Histoire du Québec contemporain: de la Confédération à la crise (Montreal: Boréal, 1979), and Histoire du Québec contemporain: depuis 1930 (Montreal: Boréal, 1986). It is significant that these chief protagonists of ‘revisionism’ began their study only in 1867, significantly after the intense social and national conflicts of the early nineteenth century, and in this respect, they resembled the English-speaking Canadian advocates of consensus. However, for the ‘normal’ society paradigm applied to the whole of Quebec history, see John Dickinson and Brian Young, A Short History of Quebec: A Socio-Economic Perspective (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1988). Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of the Quiet Revolution, 6–7. For a critique of the ‘normal society’ paradigm, see Ronald Rudin, ‘Revisionism and the Search for a Normal Society: A Critique of Recent Quebec Historical Writing,’ Canadian Historical Review, 73/1 (1992), 30–61. Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 319. Ibid., 287. LaCapra, ‘Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts,’ 47–85; Mark Poster, ‘The Future According to Foucault: The Archaeology of Knowledge and Intellectual History,’ in LaCapra and Kaplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual History, 137–52; David Harlan, ‘Intellectual History and the

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Michael Gauvreau Return of Literature,’ American Historical Review, 94/3 (1989): 581–609; Toews, ‘Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn’; Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). For a more recent account of a personal journey through these issues, see Dominick LaCapra, ‘Tropisms of Intellectual History,’ Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 8/4 (2004): 499–529. Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 2nd ed., 293. A.B. McKillop, ‘Nationalism, Identity, and Canadian Intellectual History,’ in McKillop, Contours of Canadian Thought, 14. A.B. McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979), ix–x. Ibid., ix, 230–2. For a work that places more emphasis on the different religious responses to these international systems of thought, but which, like McKillop, placed too much emphasis upon the coherence of formal structures of thought produced by academic clergy, see Michael Gauvreau, The Evangelical Century: College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991). William Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989). This problem was also noted by Brian McKillop in 1989, when he observed of Two Worlds that ‘in spite of its metahistorical plane, its relentless dialecticism, its socio-cultural theorizing, and its structuralist preoccupation, the book, however brilliant, alters the fundamental interpretive thrust of older accounts less than it does their vocabulary.’ See A.B. McKillop, ‘Culture, Intellect and Context,’ Journal of Canadian Studies, 24/3 (1989), 21. Jane Errington, The Lion, the Eagle, and Upper Canada: A Developing Colonial Ideology (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987). David Mills, The Idea of Loyalty in Upper Canada, 1784–1850 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988). William J. Bouwsma, ‘Intellectual History in the 1980s: From the History of Ideas to the History of Meaning,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 12/2 (1981): 279–91. The one notable exception to this generalization remains Nancy Christie’s unpublished doctoral dissertation, ‘Prophecy and “the Principles of Social Life”: Historical Writing and the Making of New Societies in Canada and Australia, 1880–1920,’ University of Sydney, 1986. For reasons similar to the reception of Vipond’s work, this thoroughly culturalist treatment of nationalist historical writing has remained unpublished.

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59 Carl Berger, Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada; and Honour and the Search for Influence: A History of the Royal Society of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). 60 Gregory S. Kealey and Bryan D. Palmer, Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880–1900 (Toronto: New Hogtown Press, 1987; originally published, Cambridge University Press, 1982). 61 Owram’s suggestive treatment of the rise of social science disciplines in the Canadian context was built upon by two works published later, one discussing the origins of sociology, the other, the institutional setting of political economy. See Marlene Shore, The Science of Social Redemption: McGill, the Chicago School, and the Origins of Social Research in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987); Barry Ferguson, Remaking Liberalism: The Intellectual Legacy of Adam Shortt, O.D. Skelton, W.C. Clark and W.A. Mackintosh, 1890–1925 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993). 62 Doug Owram, The Government Generation: Canadian Intellectuals and the State, 1900–1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). 63 Ramsay Cook, The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late Victorian English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985). 64 Michael Gauvreau, The Evangelical Century: College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991). 65 Marguerite Van Die, An Evangelical Mind: Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989). 66 David B. Marshall, Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Protestant Clergy and the Crisis of Belief, 1850–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). 67 Phyllis Airhart, Serving the Present Age: Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992). 68 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, A Full-Orbed Christianity: The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996). 69 Richard Allen, The Social Passion: The Social Gospel and the Reform Tradition in Canada, 1914–1928 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971). 70 For a critique of the nationalist approach, which emphasized the unique and self-determining, see Allan Smith, ‘Organizing Ideas and How They Work: The National-International Binary, the Rise of Transnationalism, and the Imagining of the Canadian Community,’ in Damien-Claude Bélanger, Sophie Coupal, and Michel Ducharme, eds., Les idées en mouve-

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Michael Gauvreau ment: perspectives en histoire intellectuelle et culturelle du Canada (Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2004), 30–2. For a similar experience recounted by the eminent New Zealand scholar J.G.A. Pocock in the 1950s, see Pocock, The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. ‘The Antipodean Perception,’ 3–23. For a critical analysis of the classic secularization theory, see Roy Wallis and Steve Bruce, ‘Secularization: The Orthodox Model,’ in Steve Bruce, ed., Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Yvan Lamonde, ‘L’histoire culturelle et intellectuelle du Québec: tendances et aspects méthodologiques,’ Journal of Canadian Studies, 24/3 (1989): 80. For Chartier’s influential critique of the ‘histoire des mentalités,’ see Roger Chartier, ‘Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories,’ in LaCapra and Kaplan, Modern European Intellectual History, 13–46. Lamonde, ‘L’histoire culturelle et intellectuelle,’ 86–8. Fernande Roy, Progrès, harmonie, liberté: Le libéralisme des milieux d’affaires francophones à Montréal au tournant du siècle (Montreal: Boréal, 1988), 282–3. The implications of this new direction were explored further over the next fifteen years by Gilles Bourque, Jules Duchastel, and Jacques Beauchemin, in La société libérale duplessiste, 1944–1960 (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1994); Jean-Marie Fecteau, La liberté du pauvre: sur la régulation du crime et de la pauvreté au XIXe siècle québécois (Montreal: VLB, 2004). Yvan Lamonde, Histoire sociale des idées au Québec, vol. 1, 1760–1896 (Montreal: Fides, 2000), 9. Yvan Lamonde, Histoire sociale des idées au Québec, vol. 2, 1896–1929 (Montreal: Fides, 2004), 10. Yvan Lamonde, ‘Le lion, le coq et la fleur de lys: l’Angleterre et la France dans la culture politique du Québec (1760–1920),’ in Gérard Bouchard and Yvan Lamonde, eds., La nation dans tous ses états: le Québec en comparaison (Montreal: Harmattan, 1997), 161–82. Lamonde, Histoire sociale des idées au Québec, vol. 1, 401–32. Pascal Ory, L’histoire culturelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 118. See the discussion in the mid-to-late 1990s involving Patrick Joyce, ‘The End of Social History?, Social History, 20/1 (1995): 73–91; Geoff Eley, ‘Starting Over: The Present, the Post-Modern, and the Moment of Social History,’ Social History, 20/3 (1995), 355–64. Ory, L’histoire culturelle, 28.

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83 Ibid., 13, 24. 84 Jonathan Vance, Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997). 85 H.V. Nelles, The Art of Nation-Building: Pageant and Spectacle at Quebec’s Tercentenerary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 86 Keith Walden, Becoming Modern in Toronto: The Industrial Exhibition and the Shaping of a Late Victorian Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 87 Ronald Rudin, Founding Fathers: The Celebration of Champlain and Laval in the Streets of Quebec, 1878–1908 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). 88 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Asking the Big Why Questions: History – A New Age of Reason,’ Monde diplomatique, 15 Dec. 2004. 89 Jeffrey L. McNairn, The Capacity to Judge: Public Opinion and Deliberative Democracy in Upper Canada, 1791–1854 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 14. 90 Ibid., 16. 91 Martin Jay, ‘Should Intellectual History Take a Linguistic Turn? Reflections on the Habermas-Gadamer Debate,’ in LaCapra and Kaplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual History, 98, 100. 92 Toews, ‘Review Article: Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn,’ 892. 93 Carol Wilton, Popular Politics and Political Culture in Upper Canada, 1800– 1850 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000); Bryan Palmer, ‘Popular Radicalism and the Theatrics of Rebellion: The Hybrid Discourse of Dissent in Upper Canada in the 1830s,’ in Christie, ed., Transatlantic Subjects, 403–9. 94 Pocock, ‘The Atlantic Archipelago and the War of the Three Kingdoms,’ in Pocock, The Discovery of Islands, 77–93. 95 Nancy Christie, Engendering the State: Family, Work, and Welfare in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). 96 Louis Rousseau and Frank Remiggi, eds., Atlas des pratiques religieuses: le sud-ouest du Québec au XIXe siècle (Ottawa: Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1998); René Hardy, Contrôle social et mutation de la culture religieuse au Québec, 1830–1930 (Montreal: Boréal, 1999); Christine Hudon, Prêtres et fidèles dans le diocèse de Saint-Hyacinthe, 1820–1875 (Sillery: Septentrion, 1996). 97 Ollivier Hubert, Sur la terre comme au ciel: la gestion des rites par l’Église catholique du Québec (mi-XVIIe siècle-mi-XIXe siècle) (Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2000). 98 Two stimulating articles can be cited as typical of the ways in which Hubert employs the ‘culturalist’ turn to articulate a new agenda and

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Michael Gauvreau body of evidence for studies of Quebec Catholicism, which hitherto have overprivileged sources generated by the clergy. See Hubert, ‘La religion populaire est-elle une légende du XIXe siècle?’ in Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, eds., special journal issue, Histoire sociale / Social History, 36/71 (2003): 85–98; ‘The Invention of the Margin as an Invention of the Family: The Case of Rural Quebec in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,’ in Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, eds., Mapping the Margins: The Family and Social Discipline in Canada, 1700–1975 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 183–208. See Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). For English Canada, see Nancy Christie, ‘Sacred Sex: The United Church and the Privatization of the Family in Postwar Canada,’ in Nancy Christie, ed., Households of Faith: Family, Gender and Community in Canada, 1760– 1969 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 348–76; Christie, ‘“Look out for Leviathan”: The Search for a Conservative Modernist Consensus,’ in Christie and Gauvreau, eds., Cultures of Citizenship in Postwar Canada, 63–94. See Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices (translated by Lydia G. Cochrane) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). For further discussion, see Jonathan Dewald, ‘Roger Chartier and the Fate of Cultural History,’ French Historical Studies, 21/2 (1998): 221–40; Roger Chartier, ‘Writing the Practices,’ French Historical Studies, 21/2 (1998): 255–64. For a longer discussion of this method, see Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, ‘Modalities of Social Authority: Suggesting an Interface for Religious and Social History,’ in Christie and Gauvreau, eds., special issue, Histoire sociale / Social History, 1–30. See esp. the essays by Smith, ‘Organizing Ideas and How They Work,’ and Yvan Lamonde, ‘Canadian Print and the Emergence of a Public Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,’ in Bélanger, Coupal, and Ducharme, eds., Les idées en mouvement, 175–90. For the enunciation of this position, see A.B. McKillop, ‘Public Intellectuals and Canadian Intellectual History: Communities of Concern,’ in Bélanger, Coupal, and Ducharme, eds., Les idées en mouvement, 121–39. For parallel views by Quebec historians, see Pierre Trépanier, ‘L’historien et la tradition,’ 77–105, and Joseph Yvon Thériault, ‘Peut-on encore penser des traditions politiques nationales,’ 107–19, in ibid.

HISTORY

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‘Nebulous Penumbra’: James Mark Baldwin and the Borderlands of Psychology Marlene Shore In his autobiography, written during his exile in France, James Mark Baldwin, who had been Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Toronto from 1889 to 1893, reminisced about his boyhood days. They were set, he said, ‘in a sort of nebulous penumbra, a misty circle, in which appears the old home at Columbia [South Carolina].’ He was born there in 1861 to parents of Connecticut Yankee stock. He remembered, in particular, the mockingbird in the garden where he played amid exotic plants with his two brothers: its voice haunted his boyhood images and stimulated moods within him that called up all his experiences. ‘When gay, he imitated everything, the clipping of the gardener’s shears, the notes of all the birds of the country; and when sad he piped mournfully a few minor notes, repeated and again repeated.’ What affected Baldwin most, however, was the mockingbird’s ‘triumphal burst of melody, when, carried away by his song, fairly breaking with music, he was thrown above his perch to flutter and tumble in the air, until coming to himself again he serenely gained the tree-top and began his song anew.’1 In myriad ways, these images evoke the pathbreaking psychological theories concerning imitation and its role in the creation of the self that Baldwin developed over a significant part of his scholarly career. Although a scandal would serve for a few decades to diminish his contributions and accomplishments, Baldwin was considered one of psychology’s most sophisticated thinkers. Author, editor, and organizer, he wrote twenty-two books and 150 articles, established experimental psychology laboratories at the University of Toronto (in 1890, the first experimental psychology lab in the British Empire), Princeton University (1893), and at Johns Hopkins (1904) where he re-

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vived Stanley Hall’s laboratory. He also co-founded with University of Pennsylvania psychologist James McKeen Cattell the Psychological Review and Psychological Monographs, and after breaking with Cattell, co-founded the Psychological Bulletin. One of his most significant contributions to psychology, also influential in sociology, was the idea of the social personality: Baldwin explored the effects upon the individual of contacts with other individuals; not only did he recognize that people influenced one another through the processes of imitation and suggestion, but that one’s very conception of oneself arose through interaction with others.2 In this context, he developed the concept of ‘circular reaction’ and the foundation it set for the development of the social personality. Circular reaction was a sort of feedback mechanism, facilitating the individual’s adaptation to his or her environment; at its centre was imitation. Essentially, the idea was that through imitation – repetitions of one’s past behaviour – an individual would ‘select’ those behaviours best suited to his or her environment. Through conscious imitation, Baldwin once explained, ‘vistas open up along the great highways of individual and social progress; it is through intercourse with others thus established that the individual self-thought or ego is attained.’ Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904) had claimed that ‘society is imitation,’ but Baldwin presented a formulation of imitation theory based on laboratory investigation and distinguished between the matter and process of social organization. 3 Baldwin was one of the major figures involved in the late nineteenthcentury transformation of American psychology from faculty-oriented intuitionalism (the idea that truth was intuitive or direct and could be perceived through the cognitive faculties) to a new scientific experimentalism.4 Although he was deeply rooted in the mental philosophy tradition that had dominated American higher education during the nineteenth century, he was committed to fostering laboratory experimentation as a means to achieve a synthesis of philosophy with science in the study of the human mind. This effort led him to embrace numerous disciplines and approaches, a flexibility made possible by the fact that he wrote at a time when boundaries between disciplines had not yet hardened. Until 1889, he was primarily interested in mental philosophy; from 1889 to 1903, he turned to evolutionary psychology; and from 1903 to 1915, to evolutionary epistemology.5 This essay focuses on one particular aspect of Baldwin’s work – his study of imitation and the integral role it plays in the creation of the self. In the context of the culture of the 1890s, not only did imitation suggest to him an explanation of the development of the self but it would lead him into what he once

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called ‘the border reaches’ of psychology – investigations of hypnosis, encounters with psychical research, telepathy, and the occult. In some ways, these call up the image of the ‘nebulous penumbra’ mentioned in his reminiscences. Baldwin disparaged psychical research, telepathy, and the occult as unscientific, but considered their relationship to imitation and suggestion important. These phenomena attracted the attention of the wider psychological and lay community at the time and illustrate psychology’s complex and many-layered relationship to the emerging culture of modernism. Introduced as a term in the eighteenth century, psychology was the branch of philosophy that dealt with mental life and consciousness. Until the late nineteenth century, the study of consciousness was undertaken largely by means of introspection but gradually gave way to efforts to establish psychology as an objective science of subjective experience. By the 1890s, psychology was moving towards methods of laboratory experimentation borrowed from physiology. The new impulse came from Germany, where the first psychological laboratory was instituted in 1879 by Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig and then spread to other European and North American cities. Before 1890, psychology in North America was amorphous and had no independent status within the university departmental structure. Among numerous signal events, publication of William James’s Principles of Psychology in 1890 inaugurated a new era acknowledging the growing research and theoretical interests related to the study of consciousness and the human mind. The new approach was, for the most part, introduced into the academy by American students who had gone to Germany to take their doctoral degrees. If psychology was accepted into the curriculum, it was because of its apparent practical utility (although practical application of laboratory experimentation had never been Wundt’s intention), and because it seemed free of the sort of excessive metaphysical speculation that authorities feared would lead students to question established institutions and social structures. In Canada, although psychology was as old as its universities, until well into the twentieth century it was taught as philosophy.6 Because he devoted a great part of his time to fostering experimental psychology, James Mark Baldwin is often referred to as the first ‘modern’ psychologist appointed to a faculty in Canada. That appointment, however, was laden with controversy. The death in 1889 of the Reverend George Paxton Young, who had spent eighteen influential years as Professor of Metaphysics and Logic at the University of Toronto, opened the way

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for Baldwin’s hiring. Trained at Edinburgh, under Sir William Hamilton, Young was nevertheless critical of the ‘Common Sense’ empiricism of the Scottish realists and instead espoused German idealism.7 His death prompted discussion about importing the ‘new psychology’ that had been flourishing in Germany, a discussion that turned into a vitriolic public debate about the worth of empirical research and laboratory work, the relation of philosophy to psychology, and whether the latter should be taught by mental philosophers or experts in experimental science. Because major decisions at the University of Toronto were dominated by the provincial government, with faculty appointments made by the Ontario cabinet and announced by the province’s minister of education, the issue of who had the right to appoint professors was raised.8 For Young’s chair, Sir Daniel Wilson, president of the university, and the heads of the two Toronto-affiliated theological colleges, William Caven of Knox and James Sheraton of Wycliffe, supported Baldwin, who had studied under James McCosh, North America’s last exponent of Scottish Realism or ‘Common Sense’; James Loudon and Vice-Chancellor Mulock, the ‘home party’ (as Baldwin called them in his autobiography), supported Ontarian James Gibson Hume, a recent Toronto graduate who had been a student of Young’s and had also studied under G. Stanley Hall, Josiah Royce, and William James in the United States. Since Hume had not yet completed his training, Wilson considered him ‘a raw, inexperienced youth,’ not fit to head an important department. Wilson was also suspicious of Loudon, who led the home party, referring to him privately as ‘the Mole.’9 Within the Ontario cabinet, powerful ministers, including the Hon. Col. Gibson, provincial secretary, and the Hon. G.W. Ross, minister of education, supported the home party. After an intense battle, which included threats that they would feel the ‘whole weight of graduate opposition’ in the next provincial election unless Hume were appointed, Oliver Mowat’s government decided to split Young’s chair. Baldwin was appointed immediately in October 1889, although long after the academic session had begun, with the understanding that he would specialize in psychological research; Hume was required to spend two more years of preparation abroad before returning as professor of ethics and the history of philosophy. Hume, who ultimately became a good friend of Baldwin’s, resumed his studies at Harvard and then went to the University of Freiburg before taking up his position at Toronto.10 Bringing Baldwin to Canada was a significant achievement for Wilson, who had been aiming for excellence in university appointments

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but confronted Canadian nationalism and the parochial view that only Toronto graduates should be considered for appointments.11 Given his own Edinburgh training, he was more sympathetic to Scottish realism than either Young or the home party, which made his support of Baldwin understandable. But there was also a shared intellectual interest between Wilson, who was an archaeologist and ethnologist, and Baldwin in the issue of an individual’s hand preference. Wilson had been left-handed, was now ambidextrous, and would author a scholarly book on the subject, The Right Hand: Left Handedness (1891); Baldwin made hand preference the object of his first direct observation of his infant daughter.12 Once at Toronto, with a grant secured from university authorities, Baldwin set up the psychological laboratory and initiated a program of experimental research. He also persuaded the university to approve a new curriculum for students wishing to specialize in experimental psychology. Throughout, he had Wilson’s strong support; later, he fondly remembered him as ‘large-minded and sympathetic,’ ‘a Scot of enormous erudition and of great personal force.’13 In reality, Baldwin was not just an experimental psychologist; he was trained in mental philosophy and spent a good part of his early career attempting to bridge the old and new psychology.14 In fact, his choice of a career in psychology came relatively late in his academic training. On completing his primary education at a boys’ school in Columbia, South Carolina, once attended by Woodrow Wilson while Wilson’s father occupied the pulpit in the city’s First Presbyterian Church, Baldwin entered the Columbia Military Academy. In 1878, at the age of eighteen, he enrolled in Salem Collegiate Institute at Salem, New Jersey, and completed a course of study there; after a further year of graduate study, he entered the sophomore class at Princeton College (then called the College of New Jersey) in 1881. Intending to enter the Christian ministry,15 he chose the academic course based on classical studies and encountered Princeton’s most interesting personalities – James McCosh, who was president, and Charles A. Young, an eminent astronomer. (It is interesting to contemplate how Baldwin’s use of the term ‘nebulous penumbra’ to describe his misty childhood memories might have grown from his fascination with the astronomer’s work.) McCosh taught many of the courses that Baldwin took and ultimately directed his doctoral dissertation. Baldwin found McCosh a formidable presence; he recounted how McCosh taught natural realism, ‘brought direct from Scotland, which he maintained until his death was best suited to be the true “American philosophy.”’ In his courses, McCosh

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‘poured out his invectives against the two systems, equally false to him, of idealism and materialism. Spinoza and Kant were his bêtes noires on the idealistic side. The pantheism of Spinoza was as taboo as the formalism of Kant; for Spinoza denied the arguments for the existence of a personal God, while Kant abolished the external world by clothing it in the subjective forms of the mind.’16 McCosh had no qualms about studying biology and psychology; he integrated Darwin’s and Spencer’s views into his theistic cosmology and rejected the notion that evolutionary ideas led to irreligion. Believing that ‘development by causation is the plan by which God carries on his works,’17 he thought that natural selection operated to prune species, thereby supporting Spencer’s theory of progress (that is, that the tendency of animal life is generally upwards, from all fours to the upright position). However, McCosh rejected mechanistic interpretations of evolution and insisted that internal, vital forces with a divine origin were the true causes of development.18 Baldwin recognized that McCosh had insights that were for that time prophetic and these would become significant motives in Baldwin’s own work: one was McCosh’s acceptance of the theory of biological evolution. The other was the great interest McCosh took in the project of scientific psychology announced in Wundt’s Psychologische Psychologie, then just published. Baldwin was introduced to this psychology through a course of readings in Wundt arranged by McCosh, with lab demonstrations given by young Princeton faculty members W.B. Scott and H.F. Osborn.19 Although his sophomore year was to stimulate Baldwin’s lifelong respect for scientific method and for the place of scientific work in the university, by his senior year he was more interested in philosophy, in the form of McCosh’s ‘institutional realism’ and his mentor’s insistence on a firm balance between idealism and materialism. From McCosh, Baldwin gained his commitment to reason, belief in the existence of a separate and primary order of mental facts in consciousness, his realistic metaphysics, and a concern with the psychological justification of morality.20 Even with his interest in Wundt, though, McCosh was never able to integrate the ideas of the new psychology into his natural realism. He continued to regard introspection as the only method appropriate to the discovery of intuition in self-consciousness. From early on, Baldwin was determined to achieve what McCosh had not – to accommodate experimental science and strike a balance, in the best tradition of McCosh, between internal and external method, between philosophy and science, to integrate evolutionary science in

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order to attain the more difficult balance between reason and material things.21 After graduating, Baldwin studied in Germany for a year on a fellowship in mental science, spending one semester each at the universities of Leipzig, Berlin, and Freiburg. At Leipzig, where Wundt’s psychological laboratory was drawing students from many countries, he was primarily interested in experimental psychology. He had time only to familiarize himself with laboratory methods and principal researches, acting as a subject for some experiments undertaken by graduate students. The experience made him enthusiastic about the new psychology and he took back to the United States the full panoply of ideas, including Fechner’s and Weber’s laws dealing with the measurement of differential sensitivity, the technique of reaction-time experiments, and theories of mind and body. At Berlin, he took Friedrich Paulsen’s seminar, studying what he called the system of the ‘God-drunk’ philosopher Spinoza. There, Baldwin, who had become interested in Spinoza after hearing McCosh, concluded that Spinoza’s metaphysics accorded with his own desire to reconcile scientific knowledge with apparently ‘obdurate nature.’ 22 Baldwin’s brief sojourn in Germany gave him, as it did so many American graduates during the 1880s and 1890s, a distinct advantage on the academic job market: a German doctorate, even residence in Germany for study, was then ‘almost indispensable to a young American teacher, wishing a post of college grade.’23 Before coming up for the doctoral degree in Berlin, Baldwin was hired in 1885 as undergraduate instructor of French and German at Princeton. He decided to use the material prepared in Berlin on Spinoza for a Princeton dissertation. McCosh, fearing that Baldwin had been contaminated while abroad, objected, saying, ‘No, Spinoza will not do, you must refute materialism.’24 Baldwin, deciding that ‘there was nothing for it but to refute materialism,’ set to work and in two months completed his dissertation to McCosh’s satisfaction.25 In an article written somewhat later, ‘The Idealism of Spinoza,’ Baldwin attempted to demonstrate that correctly interpreted, the Spinozistic system was a precursor to Scots philosophy because it led to realism and intuitionism.26 Apart from his fascination with Spinoza, the primary result of Baldwin’s German visit was ‘a sort of apostolic call to the new psychology.’ Finding a summary of the movement in Théodule Ribot’s Psychologie allemande contemporaine, he acquired the rights to do an English translation, published in 1886 as German Psychology of Today, with a preface by McCosh. Even though

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he took a special course in the Theological Seminary at Princeton, the experience in Germany had piqued Baldwin’s interest in experimental psychology, rendering it no longer ‘subordinate,’ as he put it, to philosophy and theology.27 Furthermore, publication of German Psychology of Today put him in touch with Ribot himself, whom he grew to know and revere later in Paris.28 More than Wundt, it was Ribot who influenced Baldwin’s understanding of the new psychology; Ribot’s ideas about memory were echoed in some of Baldwin’s work. Although Baldwin was a graduate of the seminary’s 1887 class, his course had been irregular and he never qualified for the Christian ministry. Instead, his translation of Ribot and his refutation of materialism led to a call to take up an appointment to the chair of philosophy at Lake Forest University, Illinois, in 1887, which set his career path in psychology and philosophy. He did not regret this step, he later said, because of the ‘rigid and intolerant theology held in favour in Princeton Seminary’ at that time.29 A small, typical Midwestern college, Lake Forest was devoted to educating candidates for the Presbyterian ministry and specializing in missionaries to China. Finding the atmosphere there too ‘narrow and mercantile’ for a ‘progressive educator,’ and in the hopes of getting a job elsewhere, he decided to publish quickly.30 His several essays and publication of the first volume of his Handbook of Psychology: Senses and Intellect resulted in the desired advancement – the Toronto appointment. Receiving significant accolades, the book was regarded as on a par with William James’s widely acknowledged brilliant study, Principles of Psychology.31 Baldwin intended it as an exposition of general psychology for the classroom.32 The second volume, Feeling and Will, published in 1891 while Baldwin was at Toronto, was less conventional. Involving more of his own personal research, it laid the foundation for his later work.33 In 1887, Baldwin had married Helen Hayes Green, daughter of Princeton Theological Seminary President Dr W.H. Green; their first daughter, Helen, was born in Princeton in 1889, followed by Elizabeth, who was born in Toronto in 1891. Observation of his infant daughters in his ‘home laboratory’ became the basis for his famous work on imitation; the research, published over the period 1891 to 1893 in the prestigious journal, Science, constituted psychology’s first controlled experimental studies of infant behaviour. These achievements elevated Baldwin’s stature in the scientific community during the early 1890s. The second volume of his Handbook was also published to great praise. Like William James, he was encouraged to write a onevolume abridgement of the Handbook for use in colleges, published in

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1893 as Elements of Psychology.34 His growing international reputation led to his election in 1892, at the age of thirty-one, as vice-president of the International Congress of Psychology in London.35 Baldwin enjoyed his years at Toronto. Although he found Sundays in the Victorian city ‘stagnating,’ he remembered the period as happy and productive. His friends included Daniel Wilson, William Osler and his two brothers, and Goldwin Smith, to whose home, ‘The Grange,’ he was frequently invited. ‘The host never relinquished the floor,’ Baldwin recalled of Smith’s dinner parties, ‘or the table – regaling his guests with racy souvenirs of British politics and fashion, and puncturing with his darts the reputations of many men prominent in his generation in the Old Country, but no one else ever got in a word.’36 Baldwin also witnessed the fire on 14 February 1890 that gutted University College, ‘among the finest examples of Norman architecture in North America,’ during the evening when ‘the annual university reception and dance took place, and the halls and court were decorated with inflammable materials.’ ‘We all, in evening dress, driven out pell-mell, watched the magnificent spectacle – the great square tower outlined against a background of glowing smoke and flame.’ Although the building was restored substantially to its original form because its massive walls withstood the fire, the library was completely destroyed.37 Baldwin’s theories on the social nature of the self came to prominence with the publication of his book, Mental Development in the Child and the Race (1895) but the seeds of his ideas were already evident during his years at Toronto, in his articles published in Science.38 Observation of his children from infancy through early childhood served as the focus through which he considered all the problems of general biology and psychology: these were the issues of genesis, including origins, development, and evolution. For such purposes, studying children was advantageous, he believed, because their consciousness lacked the entanglements of an adult’s: the child was innocent of the theoretically contaminating influence of self-reflection.39 The child’s consciousness was simple instead of reflective; it was the child’s presentation of memories, not his own inner observations of them. ‘There is around every one of us,’ he wrote, ‘a web of social convention and prejudice of our own making. Not only do we reflect the social formalities of our environment, and thus lose the distinguishing spontaneities of childhood, becoming insofar all coins of the same mint, but each one of us builds up his own little world of seclusion and formality within himself … The

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child, on the contrary has not learned his own importance, his pedigree, his beauty, his social place, his religion, his partial disgrace, and has not viewed himself through all these and countless other lenses of time, place, and circumstance. He has not yet turned himself into an idol nor the world into a temple; and we can study him apart from the complex accretions which are the later deposits of his self-consciousness.’ It seemed only natural for Baldwin to conclude that patient observation of the movements of the child during his or her first year produced ‘the safest generalizations of the science of the mind.’40 Baldwin was nevertheless conscious of the drawbacks involved in using children as subjects of genetic analysis. He believed that their minds were not blank slates but deeply grooved by specific and individually varying heredity, rendering it difficult to distinguish between the acquired and the innate, between the peculiarities of one child and the traits possessed by all children; he also recognized the dangers of generalizing from just a few cases.41 But he held that careful observation and tests should enable an experimenter to chart the gradual appearance of different mental powers and their sequences. Baldwin believed that every idea had a dynamogenetic force – a tendency to realize itself in an appropriate muscular movement.42 So, too, would a child’s ideas work themselves out in actions that the psychologist could observe and interpret.43 This law – the law of dynamogenesis – would come to the fore in the second volume of Baldwin’s Handbook of Psychology, where he began to treat the mind as fully integrated into the psychophysical system, elaborating on ideas about the self and identity treated only lightly in the first volume. The law of dynamogenesis was Baldwin’s version of the ideomotor hypothesis, also advanced by William Carpenter, Herbert Spencer, and William James. In Baldwin’s conceptualization, it implied that all states of consciousness involved feelings of muscular movement. This meant that a particular pattern of sensations, or even the conclusion reached in rational judgment, could be interpreted in motor terms. Such a construction of consciousness was also evident in William James’s proposal that thought originally evolved to produce action in the natural world; these ideas also profoundly influenced the theories of functionalism and pragmatism developed by members of the Chicago School.44 Baldwin’s Handbook, however, was the first to emphasize the fundamental importance of motor functions in the cognitive process. Baldwin remembered, with amusement, how another pioneering psychologist and Wundt student, Hugo Münsterberg, had

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remarked to him in the summer of 1900 that the two of them were the ‘motor men’ in the ‘psychological car.’45 Among those who took a keen interest in Baldwin’s work on children was Daniel Wilson. Indeed, when Baldwin began his systematic study of his first-born daughter, Helen, it was in order to test certain hypotheses about handedness that had been suggested by Wilson in his book, The Right Hand: Left-handedness. Baldwin tested hand preference in Helen from her fourth to tenth months under a variety of circumstances; in her ninth month, he also began exploring some hypotheses about colour perception and undertook various experiments pertaining to the development of other specific behaviours in children. William James, too, paid close attention to Baldwin’s studies of infants. ‘I was much interested in your last baby article,’ he wrote to him in March 1891, ‘My wife has often put the babies to sleep by flaring up the gas upon them, but equally well by suddenly turning it down. She thinks the hypnotic effect comes from any sudden change. I admire your energy over the creatures; I don’t think anything could hire me to put my baby to sleep more than one day at a time.’46 An article of Baldwin’s published in Science in 1891, ‘Suggestion in Infancy,’ is considered the theoretically most important of his papers dealing with the dynamogenetic property of consciousness.47 Here he explained that the phenomenon of hypnotic suggestion demonstrated that ideas could serve as a fundamental kind of motor stimulus; this prompted him to employ the theory of suggestion discriminatingly as a way to determine the developing behaviour patterns of his daughter, Helen. But Baldwin defined suggestion very sparely in relation to consciousness, stipulating that suggestion was the tendency of a sensory or ideal state to be followed by a motor state; in effect, this was a reiteration of the law of dynamogenesis. The ideas which Baldwin developed on imitation and suggestion while at Toronto, and utilized later in Mental Development in the Child and the Race, were reinforced, he wrote in his autobiography, ‘by the sensational discovery about that time of the principal facts of hypnotism and suggestion.’48 Indeed, the theoretical implications of hypnotic suggestion struck Baldwin as so significant that in 1892 he travelled to France, first to Paris and then to Nancy, in order to study the phenomenon first hand.49 Two main schools of thought on hypnotism – that of Paris, led by Jean-Martin Charcot, and that of Nancy, led by Hippolyte Bernheim, had been struggling for supremacy in what Baldwin recalled as a bitter

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fight. Théodule Ribot, professor in the Collège de France, warned Baldwin, however, that he was arriving in Paris at a moment when hypnotism was largely abandoned: six months earlier, the majority of serious researchers interested in it had concluded that it was being misused, and decided to give it a rest for a time. On the other hand, hypnotism was still flourishing in Nancy, where it had not been discredited.50 In Nancy, Bernheim, involved in hypnotizing hundreds of subjects, found through comparisons of strong and weak responders to hypnosis, that people from the lower classes were more likely to be hypnotized than those from the upper classes. From this, he speculated that lower-class subjects might have been more conditioned to obey commands. This led him to conclude that there was a general trait of suggestibility in human beings that varied considerably within a population. He also believed that people could be cured by persuasion just as well as by hypnotism. In these ways, Bernheim took issue with Charcot. Among the Charcot school’s subjects were patients diagnosed as hysterics in Paris hospitals, especially those in the charity hospital of Salpetrière, where the young Pierre Janet (later to become a close friend of Baldwin’s) was just beginning his career. Observing similarities between hypnosis and hysteria, Charcot declared that susceptibility to hypnosis and hysteria were aspects of the same underlying abnormal neurological condition. Bernheim attacked Charcot’s theory as an artefact of the specific Salpetrière setting. Reflecting on the controversy, Baldwin took note of the Charcot school’s theory of ‘three stages’ – three distinct phases in the hypnotic trance, each of which could be induced at the will of the operator – and the school’s creation of technical rules and procedures for bringing on the trance and for restoring the patient to normal consciousness. The Nancy school also found these flawed, Baldwin explained; they concluded that it was all a matter of suggestion – suggestions given to the patient by the operator accounted both for the ‘three stages’ and for the effectiveness of the procedure. Baldwin had the opportunity of seeing Bernheim at work in Nancy’s charity hospital where he witnessed numerous cures, some of which struck him as remarkable. Bernheim’s clinic, essentially the hospital’s public hall, was full of hypnotized people – men, women, and children. ‘There were patients of all ages and conditions, afflicted with rheumatism, headaches, lameness, pains of every kind who sat around the long room while the doctor passed down the line putting them all asleep with a word and a pass, and suggesting their cure,’ Baldwin recalled. ‘“Dors, tu ne souffres plus.” All seemed to yield docilely to their com-

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mand,’ Baldwin commented; at least, he never saw anyone resist. He concluded it was all the result of ‘the contagion of the crowd and the reputation of the operator.’51 Through his visit to Salpetrière, seeing Charcot at work, and attending the clinics of Janet and others, Baldwin became convinced at least of the reality and importance of the hypnotic state, whatever theory of it one adopted. What seemed to confirm the theory of the Nancy school, in his opinion, was that the number of so-called hysterical women in the Paris hospitals had increased enormously during the years of the discussion. It was a fact, Baldwin believed, that seemed to show the prevalence of effective suggestion. This was confirmed by the contrary fact, brought to Baldwin’s attention by Janet himself, that ‘as hypnotism became a bit stale and less subject to public discussion, the number of hysterical patients has become steadily less all over France, until now it is difficult to find one in all of the country.’52 Visits to the clinics of Charcot and Bernheim were not Baldwin’s only forays, during his Toronto period, into what he called the border reaches of psychology. He also served on an international committee appointed by the British Society for Psychical Research (established in 1882) that was headed up by Professor Henry Sidgwick, ‘to investigate pretended cases of veridical hallucination – that is to say, cases of the vision of phantoms or ghosts, premonitions of death, etc., which seem to have been fulfilled or to represent actual occurrences.’ He concluded that the cases he examined, with evidence gathered in summer hotels, heard in casual conversations, or through correspondence, amounted to nothing. The few cases that resisted explanation were, he said, ‘due to coincidence or aberration of memory,’ or ‘pointed to telepathy; while a still smaller number remained finally unexplained.’53 The experience made Baldwin sceptical about matters pertaining to the occult and the extravagant interpretations printed in the newspapers of the time. Somewhat later, William James, one of a number of respectable thinkers of the time who took an interest in psychical research, invited Baldwin to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to sit for a medium James was then investigating. ‘The incoherent writing she produced while holding my hand during her trance – being under the “control” of a supposed personality called Phinuit – served only to strengthen my belief in the vacuity and banality of the messages received from the realm of spirits,’ Baldwin scathingly wrote.54 On witnessing Baldwin’s lack of sympathy, James advised him that it was necessary to encourage the medium, lead her on. For Baldwin, the remark revealed ‘the secret of all traffic with

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spirits’: ‘Encourage them, expect them, and you will see them! – they will give you what you expect and deserve. They hate unbelief and retire before it, and we should not hurt their feelings!’ Baldwin conceded that telepathy might be real, but like muscle reading, which often takes its place, it had to be divorced from all implications of the occult. Natural laws explained it, he insisted, and to conclude otherwise meant going back to the days of ‘sorcery, demonism, and all the other superstitions of the pseudo-sciences.’55 He was not a ‘scoffer’ nor a ‘philistine’ when it came to properly controlled observation and experiment in this field, just as in any other; he admired the spirit of candour shown by James and the Sidgwicks. James’s sense of fairness and desire to aid the ‘under-dog’ – to give everyone his chance – sometimes resulted in his being deceived, Baldwin noted, but he thought that James deserved credit for ‘“taking the risk,” as he would himself say and, as his friends well know, of taking the trouble.’ On the other hand, Baldwin disparaged the credulity and lack of scientific judgment in the work of the ‘lesser lights’ of the new ‘spiritism’ – James Hyslop, Charles Richet, and Oliver Lodge.56 As a reflection of the attention it had garnered in psychological circles in the late nineteenth century, hypnotism was the chief focus of the First International Congress of Psychology held in Paris in 1889 under the presidency of Théodule Ribot. The subject did not meet with universal approval, especially in Germany, where Wundt had been particularly critical. German psychologists were concerned about psychical researchers’ use of the term ‘experimental psychology’ to describe their study of the paranormal because it challenged the credibility of the new psychology.57 Wundt was also concerned that under Sidgwick’s presidency, the second Congress planned for London in 1892, the Congress of Experimental Psychology, would adopt the same focus – ‘clairvoyance, under the innocent mask of a statistic of hallucinations.’ Sidgwick countered that he hoped German psychologists would appreciate that the hypnotic state provided novel opportunities for psychological experimentation: important light had already been thrown by the study of hypnotic and cognate phenomena on the question of the relation of mental action to organic life, on the relation of conscious to unconscious intelligence, on the nature of human memory, and on the import of common notions of will and personality. This light, Sidgwick explained, was quite different from that which laboratory experiments on the sensations of human beings under normal conditions had re-

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vealed. In the end, however, because so many psychologists expressed their opposition to the focus, a special section on hypnotism was created to run parallel to sessions on neurology and psychophysics, and the general meetings were devoted to other departments of experimental psychology.58 One of the leading American proponents of experimental psychology, Joseph Jastrow, noted that in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, psychical research was so prominent that in many circles a psychologist meant a ‘spook hunter.’59 Given their desire to distance themselves from lay popularizers and pseudo-scientists and to establish the scientific legitimacy of psychology, it is worth considering why fin de siècle psychologists gave so much heed to psychical research, hypnotism, mesmerism, spiritism, telepathy, clairvoyance, and related phenomena. Writing about the ‘new psychology’ in 1894, Frederick Tracy, a Canadian graduate student of Baldwin’s who became an eminent child psychologist, attempted to account for the trend. With so much unexplored and shrouded in mystery, he could hazard only a few general statements: that mind had mastery over matter; that states of body could be induced by states of mind; that one mind could affect another by means other than through ordinary channels of communication, and that this influence as a therapeutic agent was being fully tested by careful and reliable scientists. The results already achieved were sufficient to compel belief and silence hostile criticism, Tracy said, though he couldn’t predict what the end of it would be: it seemed to him beyond question that some valuable addition to human knowledge, and consequently to human power, would result.60 The ‘new’ psychology was a multiplicity of enterprises and not one movement; it continued as a plurality well into the 1920s and 1930s. It might have displaced the old psychology in the 1890s, but it also appropriated much from it, particularly the public’s interest in psychical research.61 A certain sensitivity to what held popular attention was especially important for the first generation of experimental psychologists in North America, particularly at a time when they were trying to win acceptance for their discipline in institutions of higher learning and were determined to displace the amateurs – among them, spiritualists and phrenologists – who had captured public attention with their supposed insights into the functioning of the human mind.62 In this way, late nineteenth-century psychologists got caught up in the era’s widespread fascination with mystical phenomena and psychic experi-

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ences. After the middle of the nineteenth century, spiritualism, ranging from spirit rapping and ghost detecting to mental telepathy attracted popular attention. Like mesmerism earlier, spiritualism suggested that the mind had special powers. The creation of spiritualist societies both in North America and in Europe, enormously popular mediumistic events such as those described in Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886), Madame Blavatsky’s success, the interest taken in her by writers like W.B. Yeats, and the transformation of literary salons and society afternoon teas into séances seemed to suggest the emergence of a new movement.63 ‘Spirits’ began appearing in séances around 1860 when photographs of them were also purportedly taken. Scientific study of these manifestations was attempted – sometimes uncritically as in the work undertaken by well-known physicist William Crookes or more systematically by Charles Richet. As a result, the new science of parapsychology dedicated to the study of occult belief, including spiritualism, theosophy, astrology, and faith healing, emerged.64 At Toronto and in the international psychological community to which he belonged, Baldwin could not have been immune to these currents. In late nineteenth-century Canada, there was a great deal of discussion about spiritualism and spiritualist activities in religious and secular circles even before William Lyon Mackenzie King got interested in table-rapping.65 In 1898, B.F. Austin’s Glimpses of the Unseen, prefaced and approved by Reverend E.E. Badgley, professor of philosophy at Victoria University, was published. Set forward as a study of ‘psychology’ and ‘that mysterious region where mind and matter seem to meet, known in modern occult literature as “borderland,”’ the book treated dreams, telepathy, prayer, prophecy, Christian Science, apparitions, human prodigies, spiritualism, genius, and insanity. Austin, a Protestant clergyman, dabbled in psychic matters; in a year free from clerical responsibilities, he undertook an extensive investigation of psychic phenomena, becoming a psychical researcher, and drawing much of his evidence from the British Society for Psychical Research.66 The fascination with spiritual encounters and occult experimentation in this quintessentially ‘modern’ late Victorian and Edwardian period is not hard to fathom. British historian Alex Oxen posits a link between occultism and the era’s newly conceptualized subjectivity or innovative sense of self, thereby placing occultism at the heart of what H. Stuart Hughes referred to as ‘the problem of consciousness’ at the fin de siècle. 67 Occultism strove to rehabilitate the irrational by rework-

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ing the idea of reason in the ‘mystical’ domain through a rationalizing endeavour dedicated to ‘piercing the veil of the unknown’ rather than a spiritualized celebration of ‘a terrifying unreason.’ It sought to access and understand the great secrets of the universe through ‘intellectualist rationalization’ and all-encompassing knowledge of the occluded real. The occult recognized not one self but a series of selves, meaning that consciousness in all its dimensions could be known and that the self could penetrate the heart of the mysteries of ‘Being.’68 The individual rational subject, however, remained at the heart of its enterprise. ‘Like the new practitioners of the science of the mind,’ Owen suggests, ‘advanced occultists would have derided any suggestion that the theory or practice of occultism was predicated on an optimistic, overweening (even irrational) assumption. They were confident that they were pursuing a rational if unconventional experiential route to absolute clarity of mind.’69 To a degree, then, the occult’s interest in consciousness was similar to that of late nineteenth-century psychologists’. Efforts to identify the self with the conscious thinking ‘I’ and to distinguish it from notions of the soul reached back though all of post-Enlightenment culture. In the nineteenth century, attention turned to the self, conceived as mind and consciousness.70 Preoccupation with consciousness and the newly imagined self was also the hallmark of the fin-de-siècle modern and was manifested in a great deal of the literary and artistic production and cultural thought of the time.71 Ultimately, this impulse came to be known as modernism. Medical psychology and occultism were, in effect, different expressions of fin-de-siècle inquiry into the construction of consciousness. Although practitioners of the new sciences of mind attempted to erase any trace of occult philosophy from their work, they recognized that scientific scrutiny of occult phenomena might provide clues into the workings of the mind.72 Baldwin, for his part, was interested in hypnotism as a more obscure form of imitation. In hypnotic somnambulism, he wrote, all ‘copy elements’ come from the outside: ‘the inner fountains are blocked; action follows upon idea … Even the idea of no action is acted out by the lethargic, and the idea of fixed action by the cataleptic.’ In certain cases of madness, he noted, such as folie à deux, ‘the afflicted patient acts out responses to a certain personal copy which has become fixed in the progress of the disease, and perhaps has aided in its production.’ He regarded these as illustrations of ‘plastic’ imitation. On the pathological side, it was possible to find in aphasic patients who

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could not write or speak spontaneously, but who could still copy handwriting and speak after another, cases that illustrated the same kind of defect, yet could be explained by the existence of lesions in the brain.73 At the University of Toronto, Baldwin’s efforts to build experimental psychology did not escape attention. In 1890, a publication on psychological laboratories in American colleges and universities contained detailed descriptions of ten of the leading ones: Wisconsin, Nebraska, New York Teachers College, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Clark, and Toronto. The University College fire impeded efforts to equip the University of Toronto laboratory but plans for the college’s restoration provided for even more ample accommodation – a suite of four rooms with an area of about two thousand square feet.74 The University of Toronto’s international standing was further enhanced when, in 1892, Baldwin became one of the founding members of the American Psychological Association, and was made a member of the association’s first council, on which he served for the next five years until he was elected as president in 1897.75 His stature in the discipline – and that of Toronto’s – was also reflected in his participation in the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893, where he was selected as a judge of awards. Under his aegis, Toronto sent a fine display of brass laboratory instruments for the psychology exhibit – the first official exhibit in psychology ever mounted at a World’s Fair. It was regarded as the best exhibit in that part of the fair. In conjunction with the Chicago fair and its academic sessions, Baldwin also wrote the special report for the United States Congress on the history and educational state of psychology.76 That same year, however, Baldwin left for Princeton to occupy the new Stuart Chair in Experimental Psychology. Princeton’s offer was said to be ‘very liberal’ and Baldwin must have found appealing the prospect of returning to his alma mater to establish there another ‘first’ psychological laboratory.77 At Toronto, Wilson had died in 1892 and was succeeded in the presidency by James Loudon. And Baldwin had been trying unsuccessfully for two years to get someone to help him supervise the increasing number of students wishing to work in his psychological laboratory. At his urging, Toronto ultimately imported another student of Wundt’s, August Kirschmann, to assist in supervising the experimental work of the graduate students who had grown enthused about laboratory research by Baldwin and would continue, after his departure, to use the psychological laboratories.78 Baldwin remained at Princeton for ten years, working out his theory

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of organic selection (the idea that mental growth was a function of the adaptations achieved by imitation), the first part of which he incorporated into his book, Mental Development in the Child and the Race. Published in 1895, but prepared in his seminar of the previous year, the book was pivotal in moving American psychology towards evolutionary and biological analyses of consciousness. It was followed two years later by the second volume in Baldwin’s series on development, Social and Ethical Interpretations, the first book to describe itself as ‘a study in social psychology’ (the study of psychology from the standpoint of individual responses as conditioned by social stimuli79). At the end of the decade, Oxford University recognized Baldwin’s eminence by awarding him one of its first two new honorary science degrees. The scientific community’s perception of Baldwin as a powerful and original intellect in the 1890s might have prompted him to reconstruct the lineage of an important concept emerging in his evolutionary psychology – the idea of suggestion, according to historian of science, Robert J. Richards. Richards concedes that Baldwin might not have been acting deceitfully, but, feeling pressured to make an original contribution to science, felt compelled to claim that his intellectual child was ‘a virgin birth.’ Baldwin’s adoption of ‘imitation’ rather than ‘suggestion’ as the central principle of his evolutionary psychology, Richards observes, represented this relatively minor reconstruction.80 However, a reviewer of Social and Ethical Interpretations, a book extending Baldwin’s analysis of imitation to social institutions, suggested that Baldwin had failed to acknowledge a debt to Gabriel Tarde’s Les Lois de l’imitation, published in 1890. In his preface to the second edition of Social and Ethical Interpretations, published in 1899, Baldwin explained that while the theory of imitation had formed the conceptual foundation for Mental Development, the manuscript for the book was finished before he was made aware of Tarde’s Lois de l’imitation. 81 One of Tarde’s supporters, Gustavo Tosti, the Italian consul-general of New York and a frequent contributor to Baldwin’s Psychological Review, politely suggested that the French sociologist had made a real discovery about the influence of imitation in social life that Baldwin’s Mental Development generalized and completed.82 After reading Baldwin’s ‘defence’ in the second edition of Social and Ethical Interpretations, a less polite Tosti argued that Baldwin had never brought to light any fact regarding social evolution not mentioned by Tarde.83 In fact, Baldwin had discussed Tarde’s Les lois de l’imitation in an essay in Mind in January 1894, ‘Imitation: A Chapter in the Natural History of Consciousness,’

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remarking that the theory of imitation he was advancing accorded with that first announced (obscurely, he thought) by Tarde.84 The crux of the issue, Richards suggests, is that in order to use the concept of imitation in his theory, Baldwin pared down its usual meaning, as he did earlier with ‘suggestion’: in Mental Development, he proposed that ‘“an imitative reaction is one which tends normally to maintain or repeat its own stimulating process.”’85 The infant reaching for or holding on to a cookie, Baldwin explained, is imitating, since it attempts to maintain a stimulus (perception of the cookie) that reinforces the original behaviour (of reaching and holding). Where this definition of imitation had previously served for ‘imitative suggestion,’ Baldwin now intended the conception to take over the role of suggestion in his stage analysis of the child’s mental growth. The stages of mental development to be explained by imitation were precisely the same as the previously discriminated stages of suggestion.86 In the preface to Mental Development, Baldwin claimed that the concept of imitation had ‘eruptive significance’ for his burgeoning genetic psychology: he said the importance of imitation struck him in 1892, while he was working on his paper, ‘The Origin of Volition in Childhood.’87 He also said that further study of the subject led him to such a revelation concerning genetic function that he decided, inspired by a small group of writers then treating the subject, to work out a theory of mental development in the child which incorporated this new insight. Tarde was one of these writers, Richards suggests: in Baldwin’s Mind paper of 1894 and in Mental Development, he used the concept of imitation to argue, as Tarde previously had done, that the habits of the individual, his accommodations to novel situations, and the ideas he acquired – all resulted from social models. According to Richards, Tarde’s work seems to have moved Baldwin to perceive the contribution that the social environment made to individual mental development, and provided the hints on how to extend the theory of development to the mental growth of societies. Although Baldwin did not directly acknowledge Tarde, Richards concedes that Baldwin’s genius was secure enough, and was manifested in his finer analysis of the mechanism of imitation that was quite different from Tarde’s.88 Baldwin’s theory of organic selection stemmed from his thinking through the implications of the role of imitation.89 A theory of individual development through imitation was open to criticism that repetitions of past behaviour would not necessarily be able to accommodate new situations. Despite this problem, Baldwin saw that his daughters

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learned new skills. Accordingly, he designed his theory of organic selection to explain their ability to learn accommodating behaviours, not only at the level of repetitive imitation but also from the initial stages of biological and cortical stimulation through to the higher reaches of apperception and intelligence. As he conceptualized it, each stage was represented by a series of habits imitatively achieved after passing through a prior stage. From this, he concluded that the progress of an individual through the various levels of mental development was achieved through his or her accommodation to new environments by means of organic selection. In other words, observing his children’s persistent efforts at imitation of behaviours they had witnessed, he analysed persistent imitation as a process comparable to natural selection: in attempts to learn a new behaviour, two regions in the child’s brain became coordinated. One region was excited by the original suggestive perception or image (for example, the mother’s tying her child’s shoe), the other by the child’s observations of its own imitative behaviour. According to Baldwin’s theory, these excitations coalesced into a greater mass, which, in accordance with dynamogenic law, produced a more diffuse reaction. With continued efforts, the exciting mass enlarged, and more elements of the original copy were reproduced in behaviour. Final success was accidentally achieved (when, for example, the child would tie its shoe). After initial success, selection worked to eliminate those elements that did not fit the criterion.90 Baldwin’s social theory echoed other evolutionary and social conceptions of the time, not only Tarde’s, but Wundt’s ideas about the development of self-consciousness, James’s depiction of several selves with which an individual identified, and Spencer’s psychology. Baldwin’s investigation of his own children reinforced the assumptions of these theorists – that the self was social, and that life in the family and in the broader society shaped personality.91 He concluded that most of the social elements forming the self did not stem from physical heredity but from cultural rules, social norms and expectations, and habits of conduct specific to certain families that endured for generations.92 For the discipline of psychology, as Baldwin explained, evolutionary theory spelled the end of the idea that ‘the soul was of a fixed substance, with fixed attributes.’ ‘Instead of a fixed substance,’ he said, we have the conception of a growing, developing activity.’93 Confronted with such ideas, psychology had to rethink its program. ‘Like the better-known functionalists, James and Dewey, Baldwin shifted the focus of analysis from entities or faculties to actions and processes. Mind was no longer a

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mysterious entity which governed the organism; consciousness became the structure of the interrelationship between organism and environment.’94 A major feature of Baldwin’s work, then, was his repeated emphasis upon the necessity of understanding the individual through the interdependent relationship that exists between the individual and the group.95 He was critical of those views which attempted to explain behaviour solely on the basis of biological heredity when, in his view, what was equally important was a ‘social heredity’ – influences from society. These were path-breaking ideas that were incorporated into sociology by members of the Chicago School, particularly by George Herbert Mead and W.I. Thomas.96 All that said, there were ways in which Baldwin’s idea of the self hearkened back to Common Sense philosophy. Indeed, this explains why Baldwin’s brand of experimental psychology did not run into conflict with Scottish realism or the old moral philosophy tradition. The Scottish Common Sense School regarded society as antecedent to the individual, held that self and mind developed through interaction with others, that self-control stemmed from social control, and that people were actors as well as reactors. Most of the Scottish moralists shared the view that people were not born human but derived their humanness from society, the matrix from which the mind acquired intelligence and moral sentiments.97 Memory was another investigative concern of Baldwin’s that began during his Toronto years. Alongside his studies of infancy during the period 1890 to 1897, Baldwin published articles reporting results of his laboratory investigations of memory, size contrast, and reaction types.98 Memory played a crucial role in his theories about imitation, conceptualization of the process of organic selection, and the creation of the self. In Mental Development in the Child and the Race, he postulated a ‘simple organic system set up to accept certain stimulations; it constantly reaches out after them and in the process tends to achieve a level of biological efficiency, through successive approximations, and this we call adaptation.’99 Conscious control of response, however, depended on the growth of memory so that past and present movements could be compared. Baldwin believed that the circular reaction – the tendency of the organism to repeat its movements – was the physical basis of memory. He offered no neurophysiological explanation of the circular reaction, but suggested that repetitions led to the development of the nervous centres so that they could reinstate movements in the absence

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of direct stimulation.100 ‘At this point,’ he proclaimed, ‘the human mind comes to achieve a measure of freedom from the dictates of biological necessity.’ ‘Man then becomes an agent. He reflects upon both the old and the new and his choice represents the best adjustment into which all the elements and tendencies within him may fall for future reaction or conduct.’101 In other words, the circular reactions – which retain vital stimulations, as Baldwin saw it – gave rise to the memory function; this function served to keep before the organism what it was after and it allowed each approximation or attempt to be compared with a copy; if discrepancies proved to be ‘psychologically distasteful,’ the organism was inherently motivated to try again.102 For Baldwin, memory, too, was functional, evolving, part of an organic conception rather than static. This view contrasted with the older conception of ‘faculties,’ which held that different phases of mental process were distinct from one another: memory was a ‘faculty,’ a ‘power’ of the mind; thought was another; imagination a third. The functional conception instead asked how the mind as a whole acted, and how this one form of mental activity adapted itself to the different elements of material which it found available.103 Memory was another subject that drew the attention of scientists of the mind in the late nineteenth century.104 By the early 1890s, leading practitioners of experimental psychology in North America were only too aware of its popular appeal. Systems of memory training – mnemonics – continued to hold the public’s fascination and popular publications dealing with it flourished, as did those in many other areas of self-help. North American psychologists soon made memory tests part of their practice, employing them for the first time in the psychology exhibit at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. This was part of a more general fascination with memory in the late nineteenth century which became the focus of other forms of cultural production during that time – the centre of Henri Bergson’s philosophical thought, the heart of the literary autobiography of Marcel Proust. The accessibility of the past through memory was central to studies in the emerging social and behavioural sciences, and their investigations of how memory operated as an ability to remember and thus a product of the brain’s functioning or in reaction to a person, feeling, or event remembered. In the late nineteenth century, then, memory was used almost metaphorically. It provided a way for scholars in many fields to explore controversial problems such as the relationship between the individual and society, or the roles which heredity and environment played in shaping indi-

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viduals. It had no single clear definition but rather multiple meanings and connotations. In popular realms, it constituted what the Frankfurt School labelled ‘the consciousness industry’ which encompassed political ceremonials, monuments, museums, and art galleries.105 Baldwin’s conceptualization of memory, not only as a function that evolved but the notion that it had physical manifestations in muscular action, points towards the era’s emerging modernist ideas. Psychology’s turn towards experimental methods in the late nineteenth century arose from more than the growing ascendancy – and authority – of science in the West. It is also attributable to the pre-eminence of the visual sense in Western culture, where one of the strongest tendencies has been to reify thought – to externalize and objectify interior states.106 Psychology was not only shaped by this trend but by the increasing speculation about sight itself – particularly about the trust that could be placed in vision and in what the eye actually saw – in a period of rapid, economic, technological, and social change when most of the familiar past seemed to be disappearing. Psychologists began to take an interest in investigating memory in an era when others were expressing concern about the past’s erasure. The discipline shared in the late nineteenth-century fascination with the visual, seeking to display the results of investigations into the mind and consciousness in material terms. Psychological theories such as Baldwin’s conceptualization of consciousness and mental states as sensorimotor conceptions all reflected the importance that Western culture attached to the visual and the modernist desire to penetrate and understand two worlds – the visible and the invisible; or, to use another phrase, the nebulous penumbra.107 Discussion of the rest of Baldwin’s career and work is beyond the scope of this essay. Although he now enjoys something of a renaissance, especially in the field of cognitive developmental psychology, Baldwin was for many decades a forgotten figure. This is partly because with his exile to France he lost his institutional base as a leader in the field of psychology. For varied reasons, he was scorned in the United States. In 1908, Baldwin was arrested by police in a raid on a bordello in Baltimore that compelled his resignation from his position at Johns Hopkins University and subsequent decision to move first to Mexico and then to France with his family, where he resided until his death in 1934. It is thought he made the scandal surrounding his arrest worse by claiming that he was at the house of prostitution as an observer of social behaviour.108 In addition, in the badly divided field of American psychology

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from the late nineteenth century through to the beginning of the First World War, Baldwin was in the camp of the theorizers, which included William James, John Dewey, and Hugo Münsterberg, as opposed to the ‘fact gatherers,’ which included Stanley Hall, E.C. Stanford, James McKeen Cattell, and E.W. Scripture. The theorizers were losing out. By the time Baldwin resigned from Johns Hopkins in 1909, American psychology was moving towards an experimental empiricism that culminated in behaviourism during the 1920s.109 Even before he left for France, though, Baldwin had grown disaffected with experimental psychology, finding truth in what William James was already proclaiming as the barrenness of the tables and curves coming from many laboratories.110 Baldwin’s work in psychology spanned a period of thirty years. He then became absorbed in the Great War and national and political issues, publishing a series of political writings between 1914 and 1926.111 Already well connected in Paris before he settled there, his circle of friends included Pierre Janet, who had succeeded Ribot in the chair in experimental psychology in the Collège de France, Ribot himself, Alfred Binet, Henri Bergson (with whom he corresponded on the relation of Bergson’s book, Evolution Créatrice, with his own Evolution and Development), and Henri Poincaré, the mathematician then preparing his work on Scientific Hypotheses, which he explained to Baldwin in conversations. His relationship with leaders of contemporary thought in France grew closer when he was elected in 1910 to succeed William James as the Correspondent of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences at the Institute of France.112 Although Baldwin had very few graduate students or followers, he influenced Jean Piaget and the Russian genetic psychologist, Lev Semonovich Vygotsky. In the case of Piaget, whose mentor was Pierre Janet (according to Piaget, Janet constantly cited Baldwin in his lectures), Baldwin’s influence came primarily through his reading of Mental Development, from which Piaget took the sensorimotor principle and concepts such as circular reaction and assimilation/accommodation. Vygotsky was influenced by Social and Ethical Interpretations mediated by Pierre Janet, especially Baldwin’s arguments about the sociality of mind, the importance of enculturation, and the role of tradition, custom, usage, and social habit in the ways of acting and thinking of a given social group. In the late 1960s, American developmental psychologists, enthusiastic about the new ‘cognitive revolution,’ were surprised to discover that two European psychologists – Piaget and

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Vygotsky – had been pursuing questions of cognitive development as early as the 1920s and that Piaget was still doing so. (Vygotsky died in 1934.) The international recognition attained by Piaget in the early 1980s helped to rehabilitate Baldwin.113

NOTES 1 James Mark Baldwin, Between Two Wars, 1861–1921 (being Memories, Opinions and Letters Received), vol. 1 (Boston: Stratford Co., 1926), 1–2. 2 Ronald H. Mueller, ‘A Chapter in the Relationship between Psychology and Sociology in America: James M. Baldwin,’ Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences [JHBS], 12 (1976): 242; Robert E. Park, ‘Sociology and the Social Sciences: The Social Organism and the Collective Mind,’ American Journal of Sociology, 26 (1920–21): 19. 3 Obituary of James Mark Baldwin (Columbia, South Carolina, 1861– Paris, France, 1934), by J.R. Kantor, Psychological Bulletin, 32 (Jan. 1935): 2–3; James Mark Baldwin [on himself] in Carl Murchison, ed., A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 1 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), 5; Robert H. Wozniak, ‘Lost Classics and Forgotten Contributors: James Mark Baldwin as a Case Study in the Disappearance and Rediscovery of Ideas,’ in Thomas C. Dalton and Rand B. Evans, eds., The Life Cycle of Psychological Ideas: Understanding Prominence and the Dynamics of Intellectual Change (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2004), 47; Mueller, ‘Relationship between Psychology and Sociology,’ 243. 4 See Christopher Green, Marlene Shore, and Thomas Teo, eds., The Transformation of Psychology: Influences of 19th-Century Philosophy, Technology, and Natural Science (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2001). 5 Wozniak, ‘Lost Classics,’47; Robert Wozniak, ‘Metaphysics and Science, Reason and Reality: The Intellectual Origins of Genetic Epistemology,’ in John M. Broughton and D. John Freeman-Moir, eds., The Cognitive-Developmental Psychology of James Mark Baldwin (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1982), 12–14. Baldwin’s effort to create this synthesis are evident in his book, Handbook of Psychology: Senses and Intellect (New York: Holt, 1889), iiv–v. 6 Mary J. Wright and C. Roger Myers, eds., ‘Introduction,’ History of Academic Psychology in Canada (Toronto: Hogrefe, 1982), 12. 7 C. Roger Myers, Chapter 3, ‘Psychology at Toronto,’ in Wright and Myers, Academic Psychology in Canada, 68–70. 8 Ibid., 71.

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9 Baldwin, Between Two Wars, vol. 1, 41–2. Baldwin explained that when the Canadian ‘home party’ saw the chance of putting a Canadian in the position and presented to the government the name of one of the most promising graduates and pupils of Young, Sir Daniel Wilson and his supporters were upset. Wilson insisted on the usual procedure of advertising the chair, and selecting the professor on the basis of the formal printed testimonial as was the custom in British universities. Baldwin was approached by Professor F.E. McCurdy of Toronto, himself a Canadian, and allowed his name to be used. McCurdy collected the testimonials and presented Baldwin’s name as a candidate; See also A.B. McKillop, ‘The University of Toronto and the Research Ideal,’ in A.B. McKillop, Contours of Canadian Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 89. 10 Ibid., 91; Myers, ‘Psychology at Toronto,’ 71–2. Baldwin grew quite close to Hume who later joined the American Psychological Association, in which Baldwin had been prominent. William James, who knew Hume quite well, later corresponded with Baldwin about the controversy surrounding the appointment. James explained that Hume, during his two years at Harvard, had endeared himself to everyone by his genial and manly character. James said, ‘He is very expert in the Green-Caird-Young way of thought. I only hope it won’t stand in the way of his attending to particulars. His fight with you for the professionship [sic] seemed to me rather amusing at the time, and made me glad that appointments were not in the hands of politicians. However, if the politicians could make places for all academic contestants as they did in this instance, perhaps the quality of the contests might be condoned.’ William James to J. Mark Baldwin, 7 March 1891, in Baldwin, Between Two Wars, vol. 2, 205. 11 Myers, ‘Psychology at Toronto,’ 71. 12 Ibid., 72. 13 Baldwin, Between Two Wars, vol. 1, 42. 14 Robert Wozniak, ‘Metaphysics and Science,’ 13; J. M. Baldwin, Handbook of Psychology, vol. 1, Senses and Intellect (New York: Holt, 1889), iiv–v. 15 Baldwin, Between Two Wars, vol. 1, 14–15. 16 Ibid., 19–20. 17 Chapter 10, ‘James Mark Baldwin: Evolutionary Biopsychology and the Politics of Scientific Ideas,’ in Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behaviour (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 453–4, 454n10; cited from James McCosh, ‘Development: What It Can Do and What It Cannot Do’ (1883), reprinted in Realistic Philosophy (New York: Scribner’s, 1887), vol. 1, 157 and 163. 18 Richards, Darwin, 454.

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19 Baldwin, in Murchison, History of Psychology, 1–2; Baldwin, Between Two Wars, vol. 1, 20. 20 Baldwin, Between Two Wars, vol. 1, 35; Wozniak, ‘Metaphysics and Science,’ 18. 21 Wozniak, ‘Metaphysics and Science,’ 19–20. See also Chapter I, ‘The “Tangled Bank” of Evolution and Religion,’ in George Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture 1880–1890 (New York: Twayne, 1992). 22 Richards, Darwin, 455; Baldwin Between Two Wars, vol. 1, 32; E.H. Weber’s exploration of the dermal senses in 1834 and 1846 made the skin a recognized psychological organ. These investigations developed into the measurement of sensibility that Fechner called Weber’s law and led in 1860 to Fechner’s elaboration of a system of psychophysics. Fechner experimented with lifted weights to determine the ‘just perceptible difference’ in proportion to the initial weight and announced a general psychophysical law that ‘proportional amounts of stimulus are needed to produce equal units of sensation.’ Joseph Jastrow, ‘Psychology,’ Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1934) 12: 591. 23 Baldwin, Between Two Wars, vol. 1, 35. 24 Ibid., 20; Baldwin, in Murchison, History of Psychology, 2. 25 Baldwin, Between Two Wars, vol. 1, 20n1. 26 Richards, Darwin, 455. 27 Baldwin, in Murchison, History of Psychology, 2. 28 Baldwin, Between Two Wars, vol. 1, 38–9. 29 Ibid., 39. During his public graduating speech at Princeton in June 1884, Baldwin experienced a bout of faintness, the result of a physical defect that became more pronounced later; it was a factor, he later said, in his subsequent decision to take up teaching rather than the ministry. Baldwin, Between Two Wars, vol. 1, 31. 30 Ibid., 40. 31 Kantor, ‘Obituary,’ 2. 32 Myers, ‘Psychology at Toronto,’ 73; Baldwin, in Murchison, History of Psychology, 3. 33 Baldwin, in Murchison, History of Psychology, 3. 34 Daniel Wilson to James Mark Baldwin, 8 June 1892, in Baldwin, Between Two Wars, vol. 2, 223–4. 35 Baldwin, in Murchison, History of Psychology, 3–4. 36 Baldwin, Between Two Wars, vol. 1, 52. 37 Ibid., 44–5. The distinguished philosopher Croom Robertson, learning of the fire and the international movement to provide books for a new library,

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38

39 40 41 42

43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

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wrote to tell Baldwin that he was donating a complete set of the journal Mind (of which Robertson was editor). Other than his own spare set, Croom thought that no other complete sets were available. G. Croom Robertson to J. Mark Baldwin, 4 Dec 1890, in Baldwin, Between Two Wars, vol. 2, 224–5. Baldwin, in Murchison, History of Psychology, 3. Baldwin’s Science articles included: ‘Origin of Right or Left Handedness,’ Science, 16 (1890): 247–8; ‘Right-handedness and Effort,’ Science, 16 (1890): 302–3; ‘Infant Psychology,’ Science, 16 (1890): 351–3; ‘Suggestion in Infancy,’ Science, 17 (1891): 113–17; ‘Infants’ Movements,’ Science, 19 (1892): 15–16; ‘Origin of Volition in Childhood,’ Science, 20 (1892): 286–7; ‘A New Method of Child Study,’ Science, 21 (1893): 213–14; ‘Distance and Color Perception by Infants,’ Science, 21 (1893): 231–2. Richards, Darwin, 462. J.M. Baldwin, ‘Infant Psychology,’ Science, 16 (1890): 352–3. Richards, Darwin, 463. Baldwin outlines these issues in his 1890 Science article, ‘Infant Psychology.’ J.M. Baldwin, Handbook of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Holt, 1889–91; reprinted by A.M.S. Press, New York, 1976), vol. 2, Feeling and Will (1891), 14n34. Richards, Darwin, 458–9; Baldwin, Feeling and Will, iii. Richards, Darwin, 460. See Marlene Shore, The Science of Social Redemption: McGill, the Chicago School and the Origins of Social Research in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987). Baldwin, in Murchison, History of Psychology, 3n4; Wozniak, ‘Lost Classics,’ 45. William James to J. Mark Baldwin, 7 March 1891, in Baldwin, Between Two Wars, vol. 2, 205. Richards, Darwin, 463. The reference is to James Mark Baldwin, ‘Suggestion in Infancy,’ Science, 17 (1891): 113–17. Baldwin, in Murchison, History of Psychology, 3. Richards, Darwin, 463; J. M. Baldwin, ‘With Bernheim at Nancy,’ Nation, 55 (1892): 101–3. Théodule Ribot to J. Mark Baldwin, 21 April 1892, in Baldwin, Between Two Wars, vol. 2, 228; the English translation is by Baldwin. Baldwin, Between Two Wars,vol. 1, 47–9; Raymond Fancher, Pioneers of Psychology, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1996), 347–8, 354–5. Baldwin, Between Two Wars, vol. 1, 48. See also Daphne de Marneff, ‘Looking and Listening: The Construction of Clinical Knowledge in Charcot and Freud,’ in Barbara Laslett et al., eds., Gender and Scientific Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 243–4.

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53 Baldwin, Between Two Wars, vol. 1, 45–6. 54 Ibid., 46. James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902): in his Gifford Lectures on natural religion given at the University of Edinburgh, he attempted to account for mystical experience in psychological terms. 55 Baldwin, Between Two Wars, vol. 1, 37n3. 56 Ibid., 47. 57 Heather Wolffram, ‘Parapsychology on the Couch: The Psychology of Occult Belief in Germany, c. 1870–1939,’ JHBS, 42 (Summer 2006): 240–1. 58 Reports of the Proceedings of the 2nd International Congress of Psychology (International Congress of Experimental Psychology), 2nd Session, London, 1892, iii–iv; Henry Sidgwick, ‘President’s Address,’ in Proceedings of the International Congress of Psychology, 1892, vol. 1,7–8. 59 Joseph Jastrow, in Murchison, ed., History of Psychology, 158. 60 F. Tracy, ‘The New Psychology,’ The Methodist Magazine: Devoted to Religion, Literature, and Social Progress, 40 (July–Dec. 1894): 453–4. 61 David Leary, ‘Telling Likely Stories: The Rhetoric of the New Psychology, 1880–1920,’ JHBS, 23 (Oct. 1987): 320–2; Judith Ryan, The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 13. 62 See, for instance, Michael M. Sokal, ‘Practical Phrenology as Psychological Counseling in 19th-Century United States,’ 21–44; Marlene Shore, ‘Psychology and Memory in the Midst of Change: The Social Concerns of Late19th-Century North American Psychologists,’ 63–86, in Green et al., The Transformation of Psychology. 63 Ryan, Vanishing Subject, 15; Stan McMullin, Anatomy of a Séance: A History of Spirit Communication in Central Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 12. 64 Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 84–5; Wolffram, ‘Parapsychology on the Couch,’ 239n7. 65 Ramsay Cook, The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late Victorian English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985); see esp. Chapter 5, ‘Spiritualism, Science of the Earthly Paradise,’ 65–6. 66 Ibid., 71–2, 74. 67 Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 7; H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought (New York: Knopf, 1958), 15. 68 Owen, Place of Enchantment, 8. 69 Ibid., 144–5.

James Mark Baldwin and the Borderlands of Psychology 70 71 72 73

74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82

83 84 85

86 87

88

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Ibid., 114–15. Ibid., 118. Ibid., 142. J. Mark Baldwin, Chapter IX, ‘Imitation: A Chapter in the Natural History of Consciousness,’ in Fragments in Philosophy and Science reprinted from Mind, Jan. 1894, 204–6. Myers, ‘Psychology at Toronto,’ 74. The reference is to an article in American Journal of Psychology, 1890, 285–6. Myers, ‘Psychology at Toronto,’ 74–5. J. M. Baldwin, ‘Historical and Educational Report on Psychology,’ in Report of the Committee on Awards of the World’s Columbian Commission: Special Reports upon Special Subjects and Groups (vol.1, House Report No. 4374, pp. 357–404), Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Baldwin’s participation is discussed more extensively in Shore, ‘Psychology and Memory in the Midst of Change,’ 71–83. Myers, ‘Psychology at Toronto, 75. Wright and Myers, ‘Introduction,’ 12. L.L. Bernard, ‘Social Psychology,’ Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1937) 14: 151. Richards, Darwin, 465–6. James Mark Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development: A Study in Social Psychology (New York: Macmillan, 1897), xiii. Richards refers to Gustavo Tosti, ‘The Sociological Theories of Gabriel Tarde,’ Political Science Quarterly, 12 (1897): 507. See also, Ian Lubeck, ‘Histoire de psychologies sociales perdues: le cas de Gabriel Tarde,’ in Revue française de sociologie, 22 (1981): 382, for further details on the relationship between Baldwin and Tarde. Richards, Darwin, 467. James Mark Baldwin, ‘Imitation: A Chapter in the Natural History of Consciousness,’ Mind, 19 (1894): 30. James Mark Baldwin, Mental Development in the Child and the Race: Methods and Processes (New York: Macmillan, 1895); 3rd ed. (New York: MacMillan, 1906), 350. Richards, Darwin, 467–8. Baldwin, Mental Development in the Child and the Race, vii; Baldwin, ‘Origin of Volition in Childhood,’ 286. In the paper, he described Helen’s repeated attempts to imitate skilful behaviours she had observed, as well as the ‘mother-child’ charades of his daughters; he thought the child’s first exhibition of will lay in these persistent imitative performances. Richards, Darwin, 468–9.

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89 See, for example, Baldwin’s discussion in ‘Imitation: A Chapter in the Natural History of Consciousness.’ 90 Richards, Darwin, 470. Baldwin also traced this development in his book, Elements of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1893), 56–61, alluding to his articles in Science – ‘Infants’ Movements,’ ‘Origins of Volition,’ 27 Feb. 1891, 8 Jan. 1892 and 18 Nov. 1892, as well as to experiments he made on a sixmonth girl (his daughter) reported in Science, 2 May 1890. 91 Richards, Darwin, 473–4. 92 Ibid., 474. Richards refers to Baldwin’s, Social and Ethical Interpretations, 60. 93 Baldwin, ‘Infant Psychology,’ 351; Baldwin, Mental Development, 2. 94 D.J. Freeman-Moir, ‘The Origin of Intelligence,’ in Broughton and Freeman-Moir, The Cognitive Developmental Psychology of James Mark Baldwin, 128. 95 ‘Foreword,’ Broughton and Freeman-Moir, Cognitive Developmental Psychology, xvi. 96 John W. Petras, ‘Psychological Antecedents of Sociological Theory in America: William James and James Mark Baldwin,’ JHBS, 4 (1968): 142, 144. 97 Susan Shott, ‘Society, Self and Mind in Moral Philosophy: The Scottish Moralists as Precursors of Symbolic Interactionism,’ JHBS, 12 (1976): 39, 40, 42. 98 These articles included: with W.J. Shaw, who followed Baldwin from a B.A. in Toronto to Princeton where he received an M.A., ‘Types of Reaction,’ Psychological Review, 2 (1895): 259–73; also with Shaw, ‘Memory for Square Size,’ Psychological Review, 2 (1895): 236–9; and by Baldwin only, ‘The Effect of Size – Contrast upon Judgements of Position in the Retinal Field,’ Psychological Review, 2 (1895), 244–59. 99 Freeman-Moir, ‘Origin of Intelligence,’ 129. 100 Ibid., 140. 101 Baldwin, ‘Imitation,’ 301. 102 Freeman-Moir, ‘Origin of Intelligence,’ 140. 103 J. Mark Baldwin, ‘Psychology Past and Present,’ in James Mark Baldwin, Fragments in Philosophy and Science: Being Collected Essays and Addresses by James Mark Baldwin (New York: Scribner’s, 1902), 83; the article, in part from the Psychological Review (July 1894), was material prepared by Baldwin, along with others, in his capacity as ‘Judge of Award’ for psychology at the World’s Columbian Exposition, which appeared in the ‘Historical and Educational Report.’

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104 See Kurt Danziger, ‘Sealing Off the Discipline: Wilhelm Wundt and the Psychology of Memory,’ 45–62, in Green et al., The Transformation of Psychology. 105 Shore, ‘Psychology and Memory,’ 68–71, 76–82. See also, Patricia Fara and Karalyn Patterson, ‘Introduction,’ in Fara and Patterson, Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 3; Matt K. Matsuda; The Memory of the Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 12; Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 106 Shore, ‘Psychology and Memory,’ 64; Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4, 5, 13–22, 179. 107 Shore, ‘Psychology and Memory,’ 76. In Modern and Modernism, for example, Frederick Karl argues that by 1900, all arts and sciences had moved towards invisible things. This was partly out of the realization that things were not fixed – in history, psychology, or human aspirations. Frederick Karl, Modern and Modernism: The Sovereignty of the Artist, 1885–1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1985), 74–5. 108 Wozniak, ‘Lost Classics,’ 50; Richards, Origins, 496ff. 109 Wozniak, ‘Lost Classics,’ 50–1. 110 Baldwin, in Murchison, History of Psychology, 4. 111 Kantor, ‘Obituary,’ 3. 112 Baldwin, Between Two Wars, vol. 1, 162–4. 113 Wozniak, ‘Lost Classics,’ 51; Jacques Vonèche, ‘Reflections on Baldwin,’ in Broughton and Freeman-Moir, Cognitive Developmental Psychology, 80–6.

5

Sir Andrew Macphail and the Pen and Pencil Club of Montreal Ian Ross Robertson

The present author’s interest in Sir Andrew Macphail began in the most embryonic way as a small child during the early 1950s with glimpses from a moving car of stately granite pillars, approximately four metres in height, at the end of a lane on a scenic clay road in southeastern Prince Edward Island. Those pillars had come from the ruins of the Macdonald Engineering Building at McGill University, and the lane led to Macphail’s then-deserted family home. Only fourteen years old, the Engineering Building had been the victim of a devastating fire in 1907, and the pillars were transported by railway flatcar to the Island. It was an age of great philanthropists and the donor of the building had been Sir William Macdonald, a Montreal tobacco manufacturer and native of rural Prince Edward Island; possibly the latter fact had eased the way for Macphail to take the pillars to the Island.1 In 1967–68, my first year as a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, Carl Berger encouraged me to make Macphail the subject of my thesis even if his personal papers could not be found for, Berger believed, he was ‘so open’ in his writings. His guess was that Macphail’s relatives would want him ‘to be done.’2 Using Island connections, Macphail’s papers were soon located in Montreal, in the custody of his daughter, who gave the fullest cooperation, and I completed the thesis, ‘Sir Andrew Macphail as a Social Critic.’ At that time I still knew little about the Pen and Pencil Club. Consisting of artists and writers, it was an almost-forgotten institution that had served as an important centre for cultural production in the quarter-century before the First World War. The Club survived until the 1960s but it lost its creative edge long before that time, and, as demonstrated below, this decline can be seen as early as the 1920s.

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It remains a fact that little of substance has been written about the Pen and Pencil Club, although in its period of greatest activity it encompassed some of the leading cultural figures in Canada. Leo Cox, a member, published a ten-page pamphlet on its history in 1939, and concluded with a list of members elected, 1890–1937, in the sequence of their election.3 He was inspired by a particularly evocative obituary article Stephen Leacock, a member, had contributed to the Queen’s Quarterly marking the death of Macphail in the previous year. Leacock had recalled the atmosphere of the Club – a small circle of close friends, many of them remarkably productive and several exceptionally versatile.4 Macphail himself had in 1919 included a brief passage about the Club in a lengthy article on the deceased poet and physician John McCrae, another member.5 Several subsequent writers mentioned the Pen and Pencil Club briefly in passing, and conveyed some of its flavour without attempting to deal with it in a sustained fashion.6 In the absence of a general study, the present piece will examine the Club through the experiences of Macphail, one of its most energetic members in the early twentieth century, and will seek particularly to explain the part he played as a member of the Club; to understand its role in his development after his election to membership; and more generally, to convey a sense of the Club and its members.7 As such, this chapter offers insight into Canadian cultural life from the 1890s to the 1920s, notably the role of English-speaking Montreal artists and writers, and it should be placed in contrast with the development of the Toronto Arts and Letters Club in the same era. Macphail, born 24 November 1864 in rural Prince Edward Island, graduated in arts and medicine from McGill University, practised medicine in Montreal, and in 1907 became the first professor of the history of medicine at McGill. Within the medical profession he was known primarily as a maverick and challenger of conventional wisdom, and as a periodical editor. His course description in the McGill calendar stated that ‘the intention [is] to examine the causes which produced the varying conceptions of medicine in times past, rather than burden the student with a narration of facts and a recital of biographies.’8 In other words, Macphail’s aim was to produce an intellectual or social history of medicine. The lectures were not restricted to students in any particular medical year, and attendance was voluntary.9 In an obituary article, C.F. Martin, a McGill colleague who had also been appointed in 1907 and who had served as dean of medicine for more than a decade, would state that Macphail ‘was a fervent advo-

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cate of a curriculum which exposed the student as early as possible to the patient, believing that too much laboratory training in the primary years obscured the main human issues involved in the practice of medicine.’10 When Macphail was teaching at McGill, the overwhelming emphasis during the early stages of medical education was on science, with the first two years being spent in laboratories. Such views meant, according to Paul Potter, a medical historian, commenting in 2003, that Macphail was ‘very much against the trend [in his own era], even revolutionary.’11 In the 1920s his willingness to question practices in the Faculty of Medicine had even led Martin, a close friend, to report to the principal, Sir Arthur Currie, on his activities. The issue in that instance had been Macphail’s vigorous criticism of the influence of American examples, which in turn was closely linked to American funding, eagerly sought by Martin as dean.12 Beyond McGill, Macphail edited a medical monthly, the Montreal Medical Journal, commencing in 1903. At the annual meeting of the Canadian Medical Association in Montreal four years later, he advocated the establishment of a national periodical, offering to submerge the local publication in it. When this happened, following the efforts of a CMA committee which he appears to have chaired, he became founding editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, also a monthly, serving from 1911 to the First World War. In the initial number he devoted an article to ‘Style in Medical Writing.’ This also marked him as unusual within his profession. He had already been meeting at the McGill medical building one night a week with a small group of students to discuss medical writing style, using case reports as illustrative material. One of those students, H.E. MacDermot, who would also become a medical historian, interviewed in 1971, remembered that Macphail was the only one of his lecturers to take any interest at all in writing.13 Although well known within the Canadian medical profession, Macphail became best known within Canada as a whole as a man of letters, especially as an essayist and commentator on contemporary public affairs. An outspoken imperialist of the sort discussed by Berger in The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism 1867–1914,14 he articulated a conservative, anti-industrial ideology and criticized forcefully such modern social movements and trends as feminism, the social gospel, and utilitarian education, which he associated with Americanization. He also edited and financed the University Magazine, a highly successful quarterly, from 1907 to 1920, except

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for the war years. He published several collections of essays, a novel, short stories, a play, and the official history of the Canadian medical services during the First World War. His most enduring work is The Master’s Wife, a semi-autobiographical memoir of his youth in rural Prince Edward Island, published posthumously.15 A beautifully crafted book, presented from the perspective of a child, it has made him an iconic figure for many Islanders because of both the quality of the writing and his evocation of a vanished era. For some, the authenticity of the book also represents an antidote to the somewhat contrived and too-nice representation of Island rural life associated with the commercial exploitation of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, which has been a phenomenal driver of mass tourism in the province. An important part of Macphail’s life for several decades was the Pen and Pencil Club of Montreal. From 1890 until the 1960s the Club regularly brought together artists and writers, drawn primarily from the English-speaking population of the city. Founded on 5 March 1890 at the home of William Hope, an artist, its purpose was ‘Social enjoyment and Promotion of the Arts and Letters.’ Six were present at the initial meeting; later that month, another thirteen joined. The group was all male, and indeed the Club’s exclusion of women was one reason given in 1894 for the creation of the Women’s Art Association of Canada, Montreal Branch.16 The members met on alternate Saturday evenings, and each was expected to unveil or read an original piece of work for criticism once every month or six weeks. Some of the most active members in the early years were artists William Brymner, Maurice Cullen, Edmond Dyonnet, and Robert Harris, poet J.E. Logan, and McGill literature professor Paul T. Lafleur. Other well-known members who attended only infrequently included the poet, physician, and medical professor William Henry Drummond, the writer Louis Fréchette, McGill’s Dean of Arts Charles E. Moyse, and the railway builder and artist William C. Van Horne. The Club was noteworthy for the diversity of the Montrealers it brought together. Among the writers were such men as the classicist John Macnaughton, McGill’s Dean of Law F.P. Walton, and the medical and scientific writer T.J.W. Burgess. The artists included the sculptor Henri Hébert and architects Ernest Cormier, W.S. Maxwell, and Percy E. Nobbs, as well as those who focused their creative energies on portraiture and other types of painting. There were both English-speakers and French-speakers, although the proceedings appear always to have been conducted in English. Dyonnet and Lafleur are the best examples

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of francophones who were prominent in the life of the Club, and indeed Dyonnet was probably the member present at the largest number of meetings over the years, as the Club frequently met in his studio.17 But the two were not representative of the French-speaking population of Quebec. Dyonnet was a native of France whose particular friends, according to the author of the preface to his posthumously published memoirs, tended to be English-speaking; and there was a complete lack of religious paintings in his life’s work although during his time in Montreal, from 1875 to 1954, the Roman Catholic Church had an immensely powerful presence among French-speakers.18 Lafleur was a Protestant, in fact part of a distinguished Protestant family and the son of a Protestant clergyman, therefore by definition outside the FrenchCanadian mainstream.19 Macphail had moved from Prince Edward Island to Montreal as a student in 1885, gaining his B.A. three years later and his M.D. in 1891. He spent several months of the following year in London and became a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians (London) and a member of the Royal College of Surgeons (England). He was elected a professor in the University of Bishop’s College Faculty of Medicine, located in Montreal, separate from the main campus at Lennoxville, in 1893; there he was a colleague of Drummond. Twelve years later he played a crucial leadership role in the amalgamation of the medical schools of Bishop’s and McGill. A man with an enormous capacity for work, and a wide range of talents with respect to writing, Macphail had established a name for himself as an essayist prior to his second graduation from McGill. He had won an essay contest sponsored by the American Humane Education Society, open to the English-speaking world and juried by Harvard University medical professors, on the topic: ‘In the interests of humanity should vivisection be permitted, and if so, under what restrictions and limitations?’ It had resulted in bitter criticism, as well as a prize of 250 dollars.20 In 1897 Macphail was nominated for membership in the Pen and Pencil Club, and, following the usual custom, a specimen of his work – ‘An article on Japan (Outing)’ – was inspected.21 This had resulted from a project he had undertaken six years earlier, shortly after graduating with his medical degree. Having worked full-time as a journalist while still a student at McGill, he had signed a contract with a syndicate of news organizations including the New York Times, the Montreal Gazette, the Detroit Free Press, the Chicago Times, and Associated Press, to sail around the world. His fare was paid in exchange for rights to a series of

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articles on the places he visited.22 He had published at least two regarding Japan, on athletics and bicycling there, in the American magazine Outing, and this was probably one of them. The standard format for a meeting of the Club at the time Macphail joined was that members would select the ‘subject’ one session in advance. Those contributing were to produce something related to the chosen theme, a method which provided a stimulus and a challenge. Within a year Macphail became one of the most active members. Although it was unusual to make presentations at consecutive meetings, commencing on 22 January 1898 he did so at an impressive eight successive gatherings, carrying on through 28 April. On six of those occasions he contributed poetry, twice sonnets.23 One of his first presentations, in the autumn of 1897, had been a short story entitled ‘Cromwell,’24 probably related to a novel set in the Restoration period which he would eventually publish.25 The Pen and Pencil was essentially a cold-weather club, for it closed down in the spring and resumed in the autumn. Each season featured a ‘Festival,’ or elaborate dinner party, the final event of the year, at which, in Macphail‘s words, ‘one dressed the salad, one made the coffee, and Harris sang a song.’26 The objectives of the society were the fostering of camaraderie and the provision of intelligent although not necessarily expert feedback in response to creative work. In those terms the Club was undoubtedly a success. It provided a sort of workshop for writers and artists to present works-in-progress. Leacock, for example, delivered a series of ‘Sunlight Sketches in Mariposa,’ clearly foreshadowing his Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.27 It was at the Pen and Pencil Club that Macphail made the acquaintance of Leacock, who joined in 1901. So close did the men become that, in the words of Leacock’s biographers, Albert and Theresa Moritz, writing in 2002, ‘Until Macphail’s death in 1938 he remained Leacock’s chief literary mentor and confidante [sic].’28 According to Macphail, ‘“The Pen and Pencil Club” ... was a peculiar club. It contained no member who should not be in it; and no one was left out who should be in. The number was about a dozen ... the place was a home for the spirit wearied by the week’s work.’29 He was to join several other clubs, but the Pen and Pencil remained his favourite for many years, and certainly it was the most important for his intellectual development. The meetings were convivial affairs, in part because, as Macphail put it, ‘Brymner and the other artists would discourse upon writings, and Burgess and the other writers would discourse upon pictures.’30 Some

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even crossed over, as when the artist Harris read his account of an incident he had experienced during the conflict over the Prince Edward Island ‘land question’ in the 1860s.31 Such a procedure almost guaranteed that the atmosphere would not be too severely competitive. There was also a degree of cross-disciplinary collaboration: when Captain John Try-Davies, a charter member, produced a book of stories, Harris, another charter member, illustrated the volume and the two men dedicated the book to members of the club ‘in memory of many pleasant evenings.’32 Some unusual topics emerge from the Minutes, such as censorship and the police, a discussion provoked by the case of a Montreal policeman arresting a shopkeeper for displaying in his window statuettes like that of Venus de Medici (a modest Venus, with both hands before her body).33 The Minutes reveal other unpredictable aspects of the proceedings. In December 1908 Nobbs, a well-known Montreal architect and McGill professor of design, in collaboration with a guest, ‘gave a fencing exhibition.’34 This was apparently a result of the fact that earlier in the year Nobbs had won an Olympic silver medal in foils. An exceptionally able and active man of many talents, interests, and passions, he deplored specialization as a curse of modernity, a perspective which he shared with Macphail and which epitomized the spirit of the Club. Nobbs would eventually, in addition to writing prolifically in his own professional field, publish books on salmon-fishing tactics and fencing tactics. Each of them, Macphail would write, was a serious piece of work, in effect, a book for experts.35 Yet whimsy was often a part of Club meetings. One of Leacock’s early presentations was on ‘Things that I do not want to read any more,’36 and his first, delivered in front of only six members, had been ‘opening a bank account.’37 This was probably based on ‘My Financial Career,’ originally published in Life in 1895 and destined to be the lead-off sketch in his first book-length collection of humorous pieces, Literary Lapses, published in 1910.38 Once, when the assigned subject was ‘Horror,’ Dyonnet unveiled a portrait of himself.39 Following ‘a poetical study of a mermaid’ by Nobbs, Macphail related having attended a mermaid in his capacity as a physician.40 On another occasion he delivered a paper on ‘Superstition in P.E.I.’41 The tone of some of the Minutes suggests a lack of orderliness, possibly even a lack of sobriety, especially towards the end of a session. At the first meeting Macphail attended, the Minutes indicate that several motions regarding the constitution were moved and lost, ‘and

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it was decided that there was no necessity for recounting [?] them in the minutes.’42 The members drank freely, with Macphail a prime instigator, moving on one occasion ‘that the glasses be filled,’ an unusual motion even by the standards of the Club; there was no resistance, though, for it was ‘seconded by all the members present.’43 During the Prohibition period in the rest of Canada and in the United States members would make much of their freedom to drink, particularly when they had guests from Toronto the ‘dry.’ On one occasion, after entertaining the artists A.Y. Jackson and Homer Watson, the minute book entry read: ‘At the close of the meeting, it was noted with admiration ... that the distinguished guests from Toronto needed very little assistance in navigating the stairs to the street.’44 In 1920 the Minutes recorded a discussion of the ‘wet’ versus ‘dry’ issue in relation to Ontario, Quebec, and the United States. With Macphail in the chair as president, ‘Quebec was voted to be “the last refuge of civilization.”’45 In the 1940s Leacock would recall that ‘this organization, meeting ... in the half-light of a studio, falling asleep over essays read to it, and waking up to look at pictures or drink scotch and soda, developed a life and character all its own.’46 Over the years Macphail became a central figure in the intellectual life of Montreal and indeed of English Canada as a whole. At the beginning of 1907 he had founded a quarterly, the University Magazine, edited by himself, based out of his home on Peel Street in Montreal, and, ultimately, financially underwritten by himself. The declared purpose was ‘to express an educated opinion upon questions immediately concerning Canada; and to treat freely in a literary way all matters which have to do with politics, industry, philosophy, science, and art.’47 It succeeded the semi-annual McGill University Magazine, but Macphail was able also to obtain the nominal sponsorship of the University of Toronto and Dalhousie College. He established an editorial committee of six drawn from the three universities. Yet, unmistakably, Macphail was in control. He drew upon a wide range of contacts, including members of the Pen and Pencil Club, and handled difficult personalities with consummate skill. His objective was to reach beyond a university readership and, insisting upon clear, non-technical writing, he was remarkably successful. The Canadian academic community numbered in the hundreds, and his quarterly had a circulation which at one point, probably in 1912, almost reached six thousand.48 With forty-three pieces, Macphail was the most frequent contributor to the University Magazine. There he dealt with such contemporary public issues as the protective

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tariff, modern education, and female suffrage, in the process outlining a comprehensive philosophy of social and political conservatism which found its initial expression in imperialism. During the First World War Macphail disappeared from Montreal and the Pen and Pencil Club. In his writings he had frequently pressed the case for mixing theory and practice, decrying mere ‘theorists.’ Since he supported Canadian participation in the war, he insisted upon serving despite being in his fiftieth year and almost blind in one eye as the result of an accident suffered three years earlier. On 9 January 1915, when he made his one appearance at the Club between its seasonopening meeting of 3 October 1914 and his departure for Europe in the following April, he was in uniform.49 Overseas, at the front, he felt farremoved from his usual milieu. He reported to Sir William Peterson, principal of McGill, in October 1915 that ‘all reading and writing have gone from me. I gave away my last book, “The Tempest.”’50 In a subsequent letter to a member of the Pen and Pencil Club, he added the following curious observation about the donation. He had given his copy of The Tempest to the daughter of the man in whose house he was billeted, he said, and ‘I apologised to her for not having offered to her the greatest compliment a man could offer to a woman and endeavoured to console her by explaining that this was a life of temperance, poverty and obedience, but when the war was over it would be different.’51 Macphail had commenced his wartime experience with a romantic view of military service. Prior to the war he had advocated military preparedness and a military spirit to counteract the enfeebling effects of modern society. For fourteen months he saw war firsthand as a medical officer with a field ambulance; and he served as a staff officer close to the front for an additional six months. He kept diaries during these years, and it is evident that his views changed: he became thoroughly sick of the war. In October 1916 he wrote: ‘In the afternoon I slept for two hours, and wished I were dead on the Somme ... I see no end to the war.’52 With respect to military service: ‘The inhumanity ... is appalling to me. It is only under the most exceptional circumstances that one can do the slightest favour for a man without breaking some regulation.’53 At the end of May 1917 he accepted a transfer to headquarters in London with some relief. In 1918 he received a knighthood; his example, as a middle-aged, prominent Canadian who had voluntarily endured great hardship and risked his life for the war effort was probably decisive in determining that he be so honoured. When Macphail returned to Canada in the spring of 1919, he was

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suffering from glaucoma and, as a consequence, he was unable to use his eyes for reading until the autumn. Although he never resumed the editorship of the Canadian Medical Association Journal after the war, and he terminated the University Magazine in 1920, he continued to enjoy exceptional prestige, as a person with recognized leadership qualities. This was well-illustrated by two highly unusual incidents at the Pencil and Pencil Club. The Club had its ups and downs. The best-attended meetings were in periods when, among active members, there was an approximate numerical balance between artists and writers. If there was an imbalance, artists usually predominated, and sometimes in that situation the rivalries or quarrels among different groups or schools of Montreal artists would undermine the Club’s vitality. On such occasions, comments, as recorded in the Minutes, could become unnecessarily pointed and dismissive regarding entire artistic tendencies, reflecting, for example, the particular views of Dyonnet. Rebecca Sisler, in her history of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, of which Dyonnet was secretary for decades, introduces him thus: ‘he was warmly regarded by his contemporaries as a totally dedicated painter and teacher and a delightful if slightly irascible man. He was also ... an obdurate traditionalist.’54 The Arts Club, founded in 1912, and the much older Art Association of Montreal appear to have been seen as representing ‘the other,’ and resentment was evident in the Minutes more than once.55 The Group of Seven was also a target.56 The tendency to indulge in vituperation was not healthy, and at various times the writers left the Pen and Pencil Club to artists. On those occasions, deep and even bitter divisions within the artistic community of Montreal, both French and English, surfaced. Several times, the Club came close to atrophy. Attendance dropped off, and there were meetings at which almost no one showed up. In November 1919, at a time when artists predominated over writers within the Club, Macphail was elected its president. During his second meeting in the chair, he called upon members to contribute with their former vigour. The Minutes record that he reminded them of ‘the many contributions that had been put to the critical test by members of the Pen and Pencil Club in former years, ... [and] called on members in the order in which they were seated, for contributions in their several lines. Those failing to respond met with Presidential rebuke.’57 Judging from the decades of Minutes stretching from the 1890s to the 1960s, this seems to have been an unparalleled attempt to energize members. Furthermore, it is likely that only someone of Macphail’s

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eminence – for he had been a national leader in both literary and medical spheres, and had a record of significant wartime military service, capped by a knighthood – could have made such an appeal without facing a revolt. There followed a surge of activity. Macphail personally made a practical contribution to the cause by delivering unusually provocative papers on the history of education and the Peace of Versailles.58 But the revival of energy did not last indefinitely; by the spring of 1921 and certainly by 1922 attendance had declined and artists were again predominant. In the spring of 1921 Macphail ceased attending frequently, frustrated by the lack of ‘critical’ commentary by members. This was a major concern of his over many years, and the Minutes record that he brought up the issue twice in February 1927, when he blamed the lack of bite in the Club’s discussions for the reduction in the flow of contributions. Almost a decade later he would be writing to a struggling young author on the Prairies, later to become famous, Sinclair Ross, telling him that ‘what we lack most in Canada is criticism.’59 In the Minutes for the 1930s he was listed as present only once. Despite his frequent absences, he was certainly not forgotten: at a meeting on 5 March 1927, the sculptor Hébert exhibited a bust of Macphail that he had made. Macphail, who had reported to a close friend that the bust had been Hébert’s idea, did attend on that occasion.60 Another incident which appears to have been unique in the Club’s history brought Macphail out. It had been a custom that at the ‘Annual Festival’ in the spring the artists would produce illustrated menu cards. Some of these survive in repositories in Montreal, Ottawa, Charlottetown, and probably other places as well. They often featured caricatures of members sitting around a table with wine bottles, whiskey glasses, and cigars. On 3 May 1924 there was a special meeting of the Club one week after the Annual Festival because two menu cards had caused offence. Nobbs, who was an outspoken man known to have a short temper and to be subject to outbreaks of ‘explosive profanity,’ had raised the issue.61 Apparently as a consequence, an artist, Randolph S. Hewton, would eventually resign formally from the Club, and a writer, René du Roure, a professor of French at McGill, would resign because he believed that the artist had been censured. Such a meeting – shortly after the Annual Festival – was extremely rare, if not unheard of, since that event was, by definition, the last meeting of the season, after which the Club closed for five or six months. Moreover, such issues as the taking of offence and the matter of whether Hewton had been censured

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went to the very heart of a central component of the Club’s declared raison d’être: social enjoyment.62 At that special meeting Macphail was present, although he had not attended the Annual Festival a week earlier and indeed had not been attending regularly for years. Given the circumstances, it is highly probable that he had been called in because of the difficult situation, as part of an effort to limit the damage to the venerable Club. Macphail’s standing within the organization was clear, and his proved ability, from his years as editor of the University Magazine and two medical journals, in dealing diplomatically with talented people who had a sense of their own importance, was probably key. No one else emerges from the records of the Pen and Pencil Club in quite the way that Macphail does: prominent contributor, admonisher of the inactive, and even, it seems, peacemaker. The Minutes reveal a great deal about him and his development; without them, for example, the researcher would not know how many serious efforts he made at writing poetry, for, apparently, over the years, only two of his poems, both Petrarchan sonnets, were actually published.63 But above all else the Club Minutes underline his stature – a person who made a powerful impression on his peers and exercised a strong influence on them. The Pen and Pencil Club was a society in which Macphail thrived, and which included some of Montreal’s leading artistic and literary people during an era when the city was the cultural and intellectual capital of English Canada as well as of French Canada. The members, mostly anglophones, found that it was not easy to establish connections with their counterparts within the French-Canadian milieu of the city. But members did make an effort to reach the French-Canadian mainstream. In 1906, with Macphail present and supporting the initiative, they decided to offer membership to Henri Bourassa, the FrenchCanadian nationalist tribune and fervently ultramontane Roman Catholic.64 They could have been under no illusion concerning the man whom they were inviting into their midst, for by this time he had established his reputation through opposing the Boer War and supporting minority language rights for French-speakers in the West. Unfortunately, the Minutes do not reveal Bourassa’s response, and all that is clear is that he did not join or even attend as a guest. The presence and prominence of such members as Dyonnet and Lafleur, and the absence of a Bourassa, must have underscored for members the gap between the minority English-speaking and the majority French-speaking popu-

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lations of the city. Nonetheless, the attempt does indicate an effort to build bridges. This effort to involve Bourassa was consistent with Macphail’s personal record with respect to French-English relations over the years, indeed over the decades. At Bishop’s in 1894, the year after his initial appointment, he moved a resolution to hire additional staff so as to offer courses taught in French in order to provide French-speaking students with ‘complete facilities.’65 In the 1930s he was a vigorous champion of the Montreal Repertory Theatre, which made a conscious effort to produce plays, including original Canadian works, in both languages.66 As well, he was a strong supporter of French-English equality within the country as a whole. To be successful in Canada, he had argued in 1908, a political party must ‘recognize frankly and absolutely that the rights of the French are exactly the same as the rights of the English ... There must be no air of condescension or superiority, because politically all are equal.’67 But he was swimming against the stream. Macphail clearly valued the companionship and the contacts he found in the Pen and Pencil Club. Yet it was equally evident that he strove for high standards and a critical edge which would lead to better work in future. This was the same passion which animated his work with the University Magazine, and it was his faith in the value of criticism and commitment to quality which led to his eventual loss of interest in the Club during the 1920s. As it became less rigorous – and less stimulating – Macphail drifted away. Nonetheless, it had been important for his own emergence as a man of letters, for the friendships with people like Leacock that it nourished, and for the contacts it provided to assist in the work of the University Magazine. He personally retained a critical outlook, whether in publishing a stinging critique of Sir Arthur Currie’s principalship of McGill shortly after his death in office,68 or in skewering the performance of Sir Samuel Hughes as a wartime leader in his Official History of the Canadian Forces in the Great War, 1914–19: The Medical Services.69 This critical bent also extended to the practice of medicine, a prime example being his address, ‘American Methods in Medical Education,’ delivered in 1926 to the Congress of the American College of Surgeons, in which he criticized ‘this inhuman system.’70 Whether working within the medical profession, or speaking at the Pen and Pencil Club, or establishing and editing the University Magazine, Macphail had emphasized the ideals of quality and criticism. The evidence from the Pen and Pencil Club illustrates well the role he played in the early twentieth century intellectual and educational life of

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English-speaking Canada: he was a demanding yet constructive force, concerned with encouraging artistic and literary work by Canadians, and attempting to reach out to French-speakers. He had been one of the most active and productive members on a personal level, and the Club had provided him with a forum for presentation of works-in-progress, had helped to establish his position in literary circles in Montreal, and had been crucial in extending his range of contacts. All this had happened in a notably informal atmosphere. Within Canada at the turn of the twentieth century only Montreal could have provided such talented and diverse fellowship, and only the Pen and Pencil Club did so. Yet it was also clear by the 1920s that the Club was in decline, and this was a trend Macphail was unable to arrest.

NOTES 1 On Macdonald and the building, see William Fong, Sir William C. Macdonald: A Biography (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 165–71. 2 Author’s notes on interview with Carl Berger, 10 Jan. 1968. 3 See Leo Cox, Fifty Years of Brush and Pen: A Historical Sketch of the Pen and Pencil Club of Montreal (Montreal: Pen and Pencil Club, 1959), 8–10. 4 See Stephen Leacock, ‘Andrew Macphail,’ Queen’s Quarterly, 45 (Winter 1938): 446–8. 5 See Sir Andrew Macphail, ‘John McCrae: An Essay in Character,’ in John McCrae, In Flanders Fields and Other Poems (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1920), 127–8. 6 Examples include Moncrieff Williamson, Robert Harris, 1849–1919: An Unconventional Biography (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970), 144, 149, 150; John F. Prescott, In Flanders Fields: The Story of John McCrae (Erin, Ont.: Boston Mills Press, 1985), 55, 59, 63; Albert and Theresa Moritz, Leacock: A Biography (Toronto: Stoddart, 1985), 108–9; Carl Spadoni, Introduction to Stephen Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2002), xxvi–xxvii. 7 The Minutes and other documentation associated with the Club have survived at the McCord Museum of Canadian History (MMCH) in Montreal. The quality and detail of the Minutes vary greatly: sometimes the descriptions are rich, and sometimes perfunctory. Overall, they are invaluable – indeed, essential – for any attempt to characterize the Club and to portray its activities.

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8 McGill University Calendar for 1908–09, 295, McGill University Archives (MUA). 9 Class 38/3/6, Faculty of Medicine Minute Book, 216, minutes of meeting held 13 June 1907, Archives of the Faculty Medicine, MUA. Macphail had put himself on record several years earlier as opposing compulsory attendance of lectures; see ‘The Attainment of Consideration,’ British Medical Journal (15 Nov. 1902): 1612–14. 10 C.F. Martin in Canadian Medical Association Journal, 39 (1938): 509. 11 Paul Potter, Hannah Professor of the History of Medicine, University of Western Ontario, personal communication, 19 Sept. 2003. Potter speculated that Macphail may have developed his point of view because the era in which he entered and practised medicine meant that he had seen both approaches: the humanistic and the scientific. For a brief summary of the contrasting approaches to medical education in Canada, see Douglas Waugh, ‘Medical Education,’ The Canadian Encyclopedia, 3rd ed. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999), 1456. 12 See Ian Ross Robertson, Sir Andrew Macphail: The Life and Legacy of a Canadian Man of Letters (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 237–40; and D. Sclater Lewis, ‘McGill’s First Full-Time Dean of Medicine: Dr “Charlie” Martin,’ in Edgar Andrew Collard, ed., The McGill You Knew: An Anthology of Memories 1920–1960 (Don Mills: Longman Canada, 1975), 136–7. 13 Author’s interview with H.E. MacDermot, 22 June 1971; also see MacDermot, ‘Sir Andrew Macphail,’ McGill News, 20 (Winter 1938): 16. 14 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970). 15 (1st ed., Montreal: J. Macphail and D. Lindsay, 1939; 2nd ed., Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977; 3rd ed., Charlottetown: Institute of Island Studies, 1994 [facsimile reprint of 1st ed.].) 16 See Ellen Easton McLeod, In Good Hands: The Women of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), 91. 17 This was located first at 359 Dorchester West, at the northeast corner with University Street, and later at 255 Bleury Street, a few minutes walk to the east and north. See the map of ‘Macphail’s Montreal’ in Robertson, Sir Andrew Macphail, xx. 18 See Jean Ménard, Préface to Edmond Dyonnet, Mémoires d’un Artiste Canadien (Ottawa: Éditions de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1968), 10–11. In his memoirs Dyonnet makes only passing mention of the Pen and Pencil Club (at 51). 19 See David Ricardo Williams, ‘Eugene Lafleur,’ Dictionary of Canadian Biog-

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20

21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35

raphy, V. XV (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 551–3; Eugene A. Forsey, A Life on the Fringe: The Memoirs of Eugene Forsey (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990), 24. See Andrew Macphail, ‘The Vivisection Controversy,’ n.d. [1896] (a draft essay/address); Macphail, ‘On Vivisection,’ Montreal Medical Journal (June 1891); Mrs Caroline Earle White to Macphail, 8 Jan. 1893, Sir Andrew Macphail Papers, in private possession when used. See entry for 20 Feb. 1897, Pen and Pencil Club Minutes, I, 103, MMCH, Montreal (hereafter PPCM). See Macphail, untitled draft manuscript, n.d. [1891 or 1892] (89 loose and un-numbered pages), Macphail Papers. See entries for 22 Jan. – 28 April 1898, PPCM, I, 115–19. See entry for 30 Oct. 1897, ibid., 110. See Andrew Macphail, The Vine of Sibmah: A Relation of the Puritans (New York: Macmillan, 1906). A completed typescript draft, dated 2 April 1901 and entitled ‘Nicholas Dexter: A Puritan Soldier in the Old World and the New,’ survived in the Macphail Papers. Macphail, ‘John McCrae: An Essay in Character,’ in McCrae, In Flanders Fields and Other Poems, 127. See entry for 6 April 1912, PPCM, II [un-numbered pages]; also entry for 27 Jan. 1912, ibid. Albert and Theresa Moritz, Stephen Leacock: His Remarkable Life (Markham, Ont.: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2002), 114. Macphail, ‘John McCrae: An Essay in Character,’ in McCrae, In Flanders Fields and Other Poems, 127–8. Ibid., 128. See entry for 29 Feb. 1908, PPCM, II [un-numbered pages]. Harris’s text is reproduced in Williamson, Robert Harris, 1849–1919, Appendix I, 202–7. John Try-Davies, A Semi-Detached House and Other Stories (Montreal: John Lovell and Son, 1900), dedication; the cover states ‘by J. Try-Davies illustrated by Robert Harris.’ Also see entry for 27 Oct. 1900, PPCM, I, 145. In 2007 the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown had a miniexhibition on the collaboration of Harris and Try-Davies. There is a copy of the book, which is rare, in the Harris Collection at the Gallery. See entry for 18 April 1914, PPCM, III, 12–15. Entry for 5 Dec. 1908, ibid., II [un-numbered pages]. See Susan Wagg, Percy Erskine Nobbs: Architecte, Artiste, Artisan / Architect, Artist, Craftsman (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1982), 67–74; Sir Andrew Macphail, ‘Design,’ Queen’s Quarterly, 44 (Spring 1937): 29. Some of Nobbs’s bold proposals for buildings on the

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36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60

Ian Ross Robertson McGill campus (never built) continued to provoke hostile commentary in the early years of the twenty-first century; see Mark Reynolds, ‘The Campus that Never Was,’ McGill News, 84 (Winter 2004–05): 29. Entry for 15 March 1902, PPCM, I [un-numbered page between 154 and 155]. Entry for 1 Feb. 1902, ibid., 154. For more on Leacock’s contributions to the Club, see Moritz and Moritz, Stephen Leacock, (2002), 115. See entry for 30 March 1901, PPCM, I, 150. For a self-portrait by Dyonnet, dated 1940, see Rebecca Sisler, Passionate Spirits: A History of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, 1880–1980 (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1980), 195. Entry for 29 Nov. 1919, PPCM, III, 169. Entry for 19 Jan. 1901, ibid., I, 148. Entry for 3 April 1897, ibid., 105. Entry for 23 March 1907, ibid., II [un-numbered pages]; also see entries for 21 Dec. 1907, ibid., 1 May 1920, ibid., III, 189. Entry for 11 Nov. 1922, ibid., 225. Entry for 24 Jan. 1920, ibid., 173. Stephen Leacock, Montreal: Seaport and City (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran, 1942), 312. University Magazine, 6 (Feb. 1907): inside cover. See Macphail to James Mavor, 17 Sept. 1913, Macphail Papers. See entries for 3 Oct. 1914, 9 Jan. 1915, PPCM, III, 17–19, 38–9. Macphail to Peterson, 23 Oct. 1915, Sir William Peterson Papers, MUA. Macphail to [J.B.] Fitzmaurice, 23 Nov. 1915, PPCM. Entry for 14 Oct. 1916, War Diaries, II, Macphail Papers. Entry for 14 Feb. 1916, ibid. Sisler, Passionate Spirits, 87; also see 163. For a portrait of Dyonnet, ca. 1922, by G. Horne Russell, also a member of the Pen and Pencil Club and an ally of Dyonnet, which conveys well his personality as described by Sisler, see Charles C. Hill, The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation (Toronto: National Gallery of Canada [with McClelland and Stewart as co-publisher], 1995), 131; also see 307. See entries for 8 Jan. 1921, 9 Dec. 1922, PPCM, III, 197, 227. Regarding the Arts Club, see Leo Cox, Portrait of a Club (Montreal: Arts Club, 1962). See entry for 13 Oct. 1928, PPCM, III, 290. Entry for 13 Dec. 1919, ibid., 170. See entries for 27 Dec. 1919, 20 March 1920, ibid., 172, 182–3. Macphail to Sinclair Ross, 27 Jan. 1936, Sinclair Ross Papers, National Archives of Canada. See entry for 5 March 1927, PPCM, III, 279; Macphail to R. Tait McKenzie,

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61

62 63

64 65

66

67 68

69 70

1 Feb. 1927, R. Tait McKenzie Papers, University of Pennsylvania Archives. The bust is now part of the collection of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum, Charlottetown. For a photograph of it, see Janet M. Brooke, Henri Hébert 1884–1950: Un Sculpteur Moderne (Quebec: Musée du Québec, 2000), 164 (the catalogue resulting from an exhibition of Hébert’s works at the Musée du Québec, Quebec City, 5 Oct. 2000 – 7 Jan. 2001), or Robertson, Sir Andrew Macphail, 282. John Bland, ‘Percy Nobbs: Superb but So Explosive,’ in Collard, ed., The McGill You Knew, 213. Regarding Nobbs’s temperament, also see 214; J. Kenneth Nesbitt, ‘Percy Nobbs: A Genius but Irascible,’ in Collard, ed., The McGill You Knew, 213; Wagg, Percy Erskine Nobbs, 23–4. See entries for 3 May, 1 Nov., 20 Dec. 1924, PPCM, III, 250, 251, 253–4. Hewton had been a member only since 1922. See the anthology of verse that he published: Andrew Macphail, ed., The Book of Sorrow (London: Humphrey Milford, 1916). His own poems were no. 157, ‘Illusion’ (pp. 138–9), and no. 316, ‘The Marriage Feast’ (p. 276). He also translated three poems from French: nos. 98 (pp. 88–90), 228 (pp. 192–3), 235 (pp. 201–2). See entries for 17 Nov., 1 Dec. 1906, PPCM, II [un-numbered pages]. See entry for 3 Aug. 1894, Minutes of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Bishop’s College, II, 192–3, Bishop’s University Archives, Lennoxville, PQ. See Herbert Whittaker, ‘Montreal Repertory Theatre,’ in Eugene Benson and L.W. Conolly, eds., The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989), 346; and Herbert Whittaker, Setting the Stage: Montreal Theatre 1920–49 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), 74. Macphail, ‘Why the Conservatives Failed,’ University Magazine, 7 (Dec. 1908): 545. See Macphail, ‘Sir Arthur Currie: The Value of a Degree,’ Queen’s Quarterly, 41 (Spring 1934): 1–19. Fifty years later, McGill’s official historian, Stanley B. Frost, referred to Macphail as Currie’s ‘foremost critic.’ Frost, McGill University: For the Advancement of Learning, vol. 2, 1895–1971 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984), 119. (Ottawa, 1925). Macphail, ‘American Methods in Medical Education,’ offprint from British Medical Journal (3 Sept. 1927): 11.

6

Toronto’s Arts and Letters Club: A Public History Perspective Danielle Hamelin

St George’s Hall, a historic building located in downtown Toronto, is significant in a national context as the home, since 1920, of the Arts and Letters Club. Founded in 1908 by a group of men working in or interested in the arts, the Club brought together individuals from a variety of disciplines – painters, writers, musicians, architects and actors, among others – as well as patrons of the arts. St George’s Hall was designated a national historic site of Canada in 2007, because of its role as a gathering place for artists and patrons of the arts, as an important venue for artistic activity, and as a catalyst for the organization of artistic communities. In its layout and decor, the building attests to the ideals and functions of the Club as well as its significance in Canada’s cultural history. This essay presents the Club from the perspective of public history. I first encountered the Arts and Letters Club while researching my doctoral dissertation on the development of a literary culture and publishing world in Toronto between 1890 and 1920. After leaving graduate school and Carl Berger’s supervision, I entered Canada’s public service as a historian at Parks Canada. One of my projects there was the preparation of a research paper on St George’s Hall for the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. The purpose of the report was to assist Board members in their deliberations on whether the building should be added to Canada’s list of national historic sites, a designation held by some 950 buildings, cultural landscapes, archaeological sites, or historic districts that have been determined to be of national significance.1 My second look at the Arts and Letters Club was thus through the lens of the built environment, and required me to consider how the physical fabric of the building reflected the historical significance of the institu-

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tion; questions of physical integrity and community value also needed to be considered. The essay that follows is presented as an example of public history – a field that ideally bridges academic history and a public audience – and of the work on Canada’s built environment that is currently being undertaken by Parks Canada historians. The Arts and Letters Club: Establishment and Early Years Toronto at the beginning of the twentieth century was, by all accounts, a booming city just reaching metropolitan status in Canada. An expanding population, the development of new markets, and the extension of Toronto finance all helped to give turn-of-the-century Torontonians ambitious views of their city’s future.2 To those interested in the arts, Toronto could seem brash and business-oriented, ‘consumingly commercial,’ as Rudyard Kipling described it. Nonetheless, cultural activities were a part of city life. Amateur and professional groups, as well as visiting performers, presented a wide variety of concerts and theatrical productions, and lecture series and private salons provided other opportunities for cultural exchanges. By the early twentieth century, the city was established as Canada’s publishing centre, and a number of cultural organizations and societies had been founded. It was an era that saw earnest efforts to encourage Canadian culture: contemporary concepts of nationalism, inspired by Romanticism, included the idea that to be a true nation, a country must have a vibrant culture. In various fields, ranging from the visual arts to music to literature, young practitioners were eager to help develop a home-grown culture. Toronto’s metropolitan stature encouraged its artists and cultural figures to see their efforts in national terms.3 It was in this context of a somewhat embryonic – yet ambitious – Toronto cultural world that the Arts and Letters Club came to be. It originated in a tour of the Mendelssohn Choir to the United States in 1907, during which newspaperman and choir member Augustus Bridle suggested the idea of ‘organizing a society or club which would serve as a rallying point for musicians, painters, writers and others engaged in the pursuit of the fine arts.’ Bridle believed that the various artistic disciplines, divided into cliques by ‘minor jealousies and major misunderstandings,’ needed to find common ground ‘if the city were to attain any standing as an art centre.’4 The idea was discussed at a few dinner meetings in 1908, and met with enthusiasm. From the start, a bohemian character was encouraged: ‘Langton, our first president, elected

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at McConkey’s old Palm Room on King St, in the fall of 1908, said that to conform to the tradition of arts in poverty, the Club should live in a garret. Which for ten months we did.’5 By 1910, the Club had well over a hundred members, and was renting quarters on the second floor of the County Court House on Adelaide Street. Reacting against what they perceived as the commercial orientation of their city, founding members drew on the traditions of British men’s clubs, which they reinterpreted with creativity and humour. Primarily a luncheon club that valued informal, controversial, and wide-ranging conversation, the Club also organized pageants, plays, musical evenings, and art exhibits. Club traditions and rituals were quickly established, many of them harking to medieval times, a period that Club members associated with brotherhood, craftsmanship, and a certain simplicity and honesty of spirit. During the 1910s, the Arts and Letters Club became firmly consolidated, providing its members, just as Augustus Bridle had imagined, with a refuge from the demands of the outside world, a stimulating intellectual environment, and an atmosphere of congenial companionship. New Quarters: St George’s Hall In 1920 the Club learned that its lease of the Court House would not be renewed, and began a search for a new home. After considering various downtown locations, the Club decided on St George’s Hall, constructed in 1891 by the St George’s Society, an organization established to aid British immigrants. For some thirty years, St George’s Hall had served as a place where newly arrived immigrants could come for financial help as well as other types of support. By the 1920s, however, British immigration to Toronto was dwindling, and the Society no longer needed its large quarters.6 Negotiations between the two organizations were facilitated by the fact that a number of Club members, including architects Henry Sproatt and Ernest Rolph, were also members of the St George’s Society. Because St George’s Hall had been purpose-built as the home of a social organization, its layout, including a neo-Gothic ‘Great Hall,’ met many of the requirements of the Arts and Letters Club. Existing references to St George, such as the heraldic emblem and the name carved in stone on the entranceway, as well as the St George carved in the firstfloor staircase, were maintained, and would even be incorporated into

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Club lore. Nonetheless, the Club decided to embark on extensive renovations as a way to put its own stamp on the building. Sproatt and Rolph were asked to undertake the renovations. They had established an architectural firm in 1899, and were well known in the city for their work on a number of significant buildings, especially in the commercial and educational fields. They had worked particularly in the ‘Collegiate Gothic’ style, in buildings such as Bishop Strachan School, Burwash Hall and Library, and Hart House. Later, they would be responsible for Modern Classicist style commercial buildings such as the Canada Life Assurance Building and the Manufacturers’ Life Building. For St George’s Hall, Sproatt and Rolph were asked for alterations ‘in the main hall and elsewhere, with decorations throughout and the installation of a new heating plant.’7 In his Club history, Augustus Bridle recalled that ‘Sproatt, mandated by the Club, set to work that summer and reconstructed the entire building … We gave [him] carte blanche, and he set in motion a glorious job.’8 In the Great Hall, the windows were rebuilt and enlarged, with the stone tracery designed by the firm of Robert McCausland. The existing stage was removed, and the panel work extended and decorated. For the walls of the Great Hall, J.E.H. MacDonald designed a series of coats of arms, full of visual puns and iconographic references, for seventeen prominent Club members. A baronial stone fireplace was added to the west wall, decorated with the Club’s crest. As well, the kitchen was reconstructed, the upstairs library was redecorated, and dressing rooms and a new floor were added in the basement. The final cost of reconstruction was $22,866.77.9 Three committees were established to raise funds: the Music Committee would organize and sell tickets for concerts; the Pictures Committee was responsible for a members’ exhibition and auction sale; and the Subscriptions Committee would canvass members unable to contribute to the first two committees. Additional revenue was provided by room rentals: the third floor space was sublet to the Canadian Society of Graphic Art, and smaller rooms were rented occasionally to groups such as the Ontario Society of Artists. The renovated Club premises were inaugurated with elaborate ritual on 27 November 1920. An invitation prepared in illuminated medieval script and mock-medieval language summoned Club members to a ‘Dinner on Occasion of the New Club House: A Pageant of the Gild of Arts and Letters wherein the Brotherhood will dedicate its NEW

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HOUSE which was built under the protection of Saint George of England in the Street of the Elms in the Citie of Toronto.’ According to Club member M.O. Hammond, the evening was ‘one of the great nights of our history.’ Club members, with members of the Executive garbed in colourful robes, entered the Great Hall in a solemn procession: We looked quite ascetic and made quite a wonderful procession … [F]irst of all Sir Frederick Stupart as Pres. of the St George’s Society turned over the keys with appropriate ritual. Then followed a lot of narrative by Middleton, & attention paid to architects, painters & writers … and H[enr]y Sproatt, architect, for the alterations, was chaired & cheered. The fire was lit and crackled enthusiastically & then we sat down to supper … There was some singing as we ate, and the color of the scene was quaint and inspiring. After a while, the electric lights were put out and we depended on scores of candles on the tables. [After dinner,] we had music and other diversions after [Club President Vincent] Massey & [Club Secretary Augustus] Bridle had spoken admirably. A chorus of 20 or more sang the Pilgrims’ chorus, Boris Hambourg celloed & Campbell McInnes spoke beautifully on music & then sang. So we went on till after 11 and the whole thing was high in quality & tone and worthy of the great event.10

For Augustus Bridle, the change of venue was a ‘mere passage into new phases of living:’ from a ‘somewhat monastic brotherhood,’ the Club had become more ‘property-conscious,’ perhaps less bohemian. Nonetheless, Bridle continued, ‘the Club has always belonged vitally to its own age, [and its] vitality was never higher than when we had the first Annual Meeting in the new premises.’11 The Arts and Letters Club at St George’s Hall With the new quarters renovated and inaugurated, the Arts and Letters Club embarked upon a dynamic period in which existing Club traditions were transplanted and continued, and new activities, many of them important on a national scale, were launched. Although over the decades it has undoubtedly had many different meanings for various members of the Club, St George’s Hall can be considered as a gathering place for artists, as an important venue for artistic activity, and as a catalyst for the organization of artistic communities.

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A Gathering Place Conversation was (and continues to be) at the heart of the activities of the Arts and Letters Club. Club member John Watson recalled that it was ‘a great club for talk and work. Over the long oak tables in the Hall and in the leathered luxury of the library, they argued, fought and fulminated, mind setting fire to mind.’12 Vincent Massey noted that ‘lunch is the important meal of the day ... The president of the Club, as I remember well, might unexpectedly produce G.K. Chesterton to speak, or a visiting company playing The Beggar’s Opera to sing, or perhaps one of the members of the Club would be moved to play one of Chopin’s nocturnes during lunch just because he wanted to, or exhibits of artist members would be hanging on the walls.’13 Lunch at St George’s Hall provided an opportunity for people in the cultural world to meet informally. The long oak tables of the Great Hall encouraged members to mingle with people from other artistic disciplines, or who held different opinions or perspectives. (Nonetheless, certain tables ‘belonged’ informally to certain groups; for example, one was known as the ‘Artists’ Table,’ and was frequented by members of the Group of Seven and their supporters. Across from them was the ‘Knockers’ Table,’ where the critics sat.) Friendly debate on a wide variety of subjects was the goal; as one Club member noted, ‘it is the better part of wisdom in the Arts and Letters Club never, during the lunch hour, to agree to anything.’14 Visitors to the Club, from other parts of Canada or from overseas, brought new views and perspectives. In Massey’s words, ‘the Club gave us windows on a fascinating world.’15 One of the best-known friendships and collaborations that developed at the Arts and Letters Club, beginning at the Court House location and continuing at St George’s Hall, was that of the Group of Seven. Lawren Harris was a Club member from the beginning, while J.E.H. MacDonald, a commercial artist at Grip Ltd., joined in 1911. At the Club, Harris and MacDonald quickly became close friends, and they were soon sketching together. Arthur Lismer, Franz Johnston, and F.H. Varley, also commercial artists at Grip, joined soon after. In 1913 Harris invited A.Y. Jackson, then living in Montreal, to the Club where, Jackson remembered, ‘I was received by MacDonald and the others as a kindred spirit.’ According to A.J. Casson, who liked to call himself ‘number eight of the Group of Seven,’ they all would meet ‘just about every day, for company and a good meal.’ The Club was extremely im-

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portant in their lives, providing ‘the common ground where [they] met and talked and generated ideas. It was, in varying degrees, their second home – truly a part of their lives – both before and after the Group name was formally adopted.’16 The Club also allowed the emerging artists to meet people who would be important patrons, such as Vincent Massey, Toronto ophthalmologist Dr J.E. MacCallum, and bank president Sir Byron Walker. The Club also saw its share of artistic rivalries and disagreements. It was home not only to the Group of Seven, but also to a number of the traditionalists who opposed the Group. Painter Wyly Grier, for example, was critical of the aims and methods of the Group of Seven; he and A.Y. Jackson engaged in an ongoing (and sometimes acrimonious) debate about modern art. Art critic H.F. Gadsby, who wrote the famous critique of the Group that dubbed them the ‘Hot Mush School,’ was a Club member, as was Hector Charlesworth, who wrote a number of critical reviews of the Group in Saturday Night magazine. Another traditionalist was George Reid, an ‘academician’ who was principal of the Ontario College of Art in the early 1920s when Lismer was viceprincipal. According to Jackson, Lismer was ‘always at loggerheads’ with Reid, who was ‘firmly set in his ways’ and unsympathetic to the style of the Group of Seven.17 Apart from the regular luncheons, the Club also enjoyed a number of more formal events. One was the monthly dinner. These events were sometimes organized by one of the artistic disciplines, for example, the artists or the architects, and the after-dinner entertainment typically consisted of musical performances or humorous skits. In his diary, M.O. Hammond described a monthly dinner held in 1925: ‘About 80 present and architects were featured. I sat with Jefferys and Middleton at head table. Langton gave a good talk on architecture with about 40 slides, including one of my Simcoe Hall door. Sir William Mulock gave some recollections of early Toronto … F.H. Johnston talked on Dynamic symmetry and J.E.H. Macdonald gave a very clever take-off on it.’18 Other dinners were organized in honour of Club members or visitors. In 1922, for example, the Club held a dinner to mark sculptor Walter Allward’s departure for Europe to work on the Vimy war memorial. Allward’s maquette of the monument was exhibited, ‘so that members might have an opportunity of seeing and fully appreciating his work.’ Dinner was followed by a short play by Merrill Denison, then a lantern slide show of Allward’s monuments. Finally, with the Vimy model

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still on the screen, a Brahms Trio was performed by Ernest MacMillan, Frank Blatchford, and Boris Hambourg, ‘expressing in the architecture of music an appreciation of the art which the guest of the evening will create in France.’19 Debate on current topics in the arts was also encouraged through monthly ‘Fireside Talks,’ in which a subject was introduced by a speaker, and then opened to discussion. Fireside Talks held in 1921 included, in January, Walter Allward on ‘The Neglect of Sculpture;’ in February, C.T. Currelly (first director of the Royal Ontario Museum) and Arthur Lismer on ‘The Relation of the Ontario Museum to Art, Education and “Industry”’; and in March, Wyly Grier and C.W. Jefferys on ‘The Canadian Painters.’20 One can imagine that the last topic made for vigorous discussion. A sense of belonging and club identity was further established through two of the Club’s regular, formal events: the annual general meeting and the Christmas dinner. A dinner and various special presentations always followed the annual general meeting, which saw the election of the president, secretary, treasurer, and executive. The 1922 meeting, for example, included a choral performance of the Club Constitution, which had been set to plain song by Healey Willan, the presentation of a series of portraits of past Club presidents, drawn by J.E.H. MacDonald, and a reading of a poem by Vincent Massey on the history of the Club.21 These contributions were to become entrenched as Club traditions. To this day, Willan’s rendition of the constitution is sung at every annual general meeting, and the tradition of presidential portraits, which are displayed in the Lounge, continues. The first Christmas dinner, or Boar’s Head Feast, was held in 1910, in the Court House quarters. A relatively simple affair at the beginning, ‘it evolved into all the grandeur of medieval pageantry that creative minds could bring to it, limited only by the size of the hall.’22 Elements of the Christmas dinner, now enshrined as ritual, include the Boar’s Head procession, led by a fool in cap and bells and with the members of the executive in colourful robes, elaborate decorations, and the performance of Christmas carols and original dramatic presentations.23 Whether during informal luncheons, or at organized events, St George’s Hall was a gathering place for members of an emerging Canadian arts community. In the words of one member, who described the Club in the early 1920s as ‘the most intellectual and at the same time the most frolicsome social institution of Toronto,’ the Arts and Letters Club had ‘made all artists in the city a band of brothers.’24

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A Venue for Artistic Activities Members of the Arts and Letters Club did not limit themselves to abstract discussions and debates about the arts. Most of them were also practitioners, and the Club gave them opportunities to perform or exhibit, in a supportive yet critical environment. Especially in the Club’s early decades, when venues for artistic activities were relatively limited in Toronto, St George’s Hall, with its ample performance and exhibit space, played a significant role in various areas of the arts. The Club has always acted as a place where visual artists could exhibit their work. When the Club first opened, artist members were asked to bring one work each to decorate the walls. Since then, frequently changing art exhibits have been a regular feature of Club activities. A number of the Club’s exhibits have been significant in the history of Canadian art. Pre-dating the Club’s move to St George’s Hall, in December 1915, Tom Thomson had his first (and only) one-man show at the Arts and Letters Club; the Club also organized a memorial exhibit after his death in 1917. Once ensconced in St George’s Hall, the Club continued to exhibit works at the forefront of Canadian art. An exhibition of Bertram Brooker’s work in 1927, for example, was a milestone in Canadian art history as the first showing of Canadian abstract paintings. Artist members have also contributed their talents to various Club events and traditions. J.E.H. MacDonald, for example, designed the Club crest and began a tradition of creating illuminated lists containing the names, for each year, of members of the Club’s executive. Along with the portraits of Club presidents, they are displayed in the Lounge, and together provide an informal history of the graphic arts in Canada. Christmas dinners, plays, and other performances have also provided outlets for artist members, who contributed decorations and set designs. The performance of music is an important aspect of Club activities. Its centrality was established at the Club’s first meeting, with a performance by the Toronto String Quartette. After-dinner entertainments have generally had a music component, organized and often performed by Club members. The Club has been a venue for informal performances by amateur and professional musicians, as well as concerts by the Hambourg Trio, the Academy String Quartet, the Adanac Quartet, and the New World Chamber Orchestra (all of these groups being comprised of Club members), and many guest artists. Some concerts showcased the compositions of Club members. In December 1920, for

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example, the Club presented a ‘Firelight Chamber Musicale’; the program included Schumann’s Trio No. 2 in F by the Hambourg Trio, Club member Healey Willan’s Sonata for the Violin, and Gabriel Fauré’s Piano Quartette in C Minor, performed by Canadian Academy Players, with Ernest MacMillan at the piano. As well, original music was sometimes composed for specific Club events, such as the Spring Revue or the Boar’s Head Feast, for which Healey Willan composed carols and a choral march in the 1920s. Piano, choral, and organ recitals continue to be regular events at the Arts and Letters Club.25 Theatre has also been a cornerstone of Club activities, whether humorous skits written by Club members or full-scale dramatic productions. At one level, acting provided amusing after-dinner entertainment, allowing members to spoof one another or poke fun at current ideas or tendencies. Unlike with music or the visual arts, Club members who participated in Club theatricals were not necessarily individuals who actually worked in the theatre: Vincent Massey and Arthur Lismer were only two of the many Club members from other disciplines who mounted the stage boards. At a more serious level, the Club introduced new playwrights to Toronto and provided important opportunities for actors and stage directors. Raymond Massey, Vincent’s younger brother and later a distinguished stage and screen actor, had one of his first acting experiences at the Club: ‘At Toronto’s Arts and Letters Club, whose members were writers, painters, journalists and various eccentrics, I played Smitty in In the Zone, one of Eugene O’Neill’s short plays. It was my first taste of the new realistic theatre. For the first time … I worked with a cast who had vitality and enthusiasm, with that team feeling which I believed must be part of the professional theatre.’26 The Club had its own theatre troupe, the Arts and Letters Players, who staged regular productions. A close relationship existed with Hart House Theatre, created by the Massey Foundation in 1919. Especially in its first decade, the Hart House company was made up primarily of members of the Arts and Letters Club, with some University of Toronto students, and its theatre director was Roy Mitchell, also a Club member. Hart House Theatre introduced Toronto to theatrical works by avant-garde playwrights such as W.B. Yeats and Maurice Maeterlinck, and was at the forefront of Canadian amateur theatre.27 For this period, the lines between Hart House Theatre and the Arts and Letters Club are quite blurred. Club members such as Lawren Harris, Arthur Lismer, and J.E.H. MacDonald designed sets and costumes for Hart House Theatre, playwright and Club member Merrill Denison worked on

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scripts, and some productions were staged at both venues. The 1930s saw the inauguration of the Spring Revue, an annual Club event that continues to this day as a ‘showcase of member talent in light entertainment and fun for themselves, other members and guests.’28 Over the years, the casts have grown and the shows have become increasingly sophisticated, but the material is always completely original – scripts and music, acting, and set and costume design are all provided by Club members. The Club has always encouraged new dramatic writing, staging first productions of plays by Merrill Denison and Mazo de la Roche, among others. Herman Voaden and Bertram Brooker, as well as John Coulter and Healey Willan, are only a few of the Club members whose collaborations have resulted in important contributions to Canadian theatre history.29 Writing is a much more solitary activity than some of the other artistic disciplines but the Arts and Letters Club has nonetheless at times provided not only social context for its author members but also some opportunities for literary activity. Starting in 1910, the Club put out a newsletter called The Lamps, which appeared irregularly until 1939. A slim newsletter at the beginning, it grew to include criticism and longer opinion pieces. In 1913, the Club compiled The Year Book of Canadian Art 1913, published by J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd. In 1945, the Club published a history written by Augustus Bridle entitled The Story of the Club. Over the years, Club members have produced a number of newsletters: The Bulletin, The Monthly Letter, and, currently, The Newsletter. A Catalyst for the Organization of the Arts Although its primary function has been social, the Arts and Letters Club has also made a contribution to the organization of the arts in Canada. Over the years, St George’s Hall has provided office and meeting space for a variety of arts organizations. A Club newsletter from June 1921, for example, noted an upcoming meeting of the Council of the Royal Canadian Academy, several meetings of the Toronto Branch of the Canadian Authors Association, a request from the Ontario Association of Architects to rent office premises, a monthly luncheon meeting held by the Council of the Canadian College of Organists, and a meeting of the newly organized Toronto Chamber Music Society. Members of these organizations tended also to be members of the Arts and Letters Club, so it was logical and convenient to hold meetings at St George’s Hall. The June 1921 newsletter concluded with satisfaction that ‘nearing the end of our regular season in the new premises we have made consider-

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able progress in making the Club the centre of general art movements in Toronto as designed by the founders in 1908.’30 The Club has at times taken an active role in organizing events held outside of its walls. In 1921, for example, Club members decided to organize a ‘Canadian Arts Week’ to coincide with the Canadian Book Week of the Canadian Authors Association. The idea was to broaden the literary event to include music, painting, theatre, and architecture; events included plays at Hart House, a music evening at Massey Hall, and a literary evening at Convocation Hall. Held in November, the week was launched ‘with great success’ at an Authors’ Dinner held at St George’s Hall and attended by writers including Nellie McClung, L.M. Montgomery, and Marshall Saunders.31 The Arts and Letters Club has been linked to the origins of various important cultural organizations, including the Canadian Academy of Music, the Toronto Chamber Music Society, the Guild of Civic Art, the Toronto Symphony, the Canadian Music Council, and the Canadian Arts Council.32 This sort of causal link is extremely difficult to establish. Certainly, many of the key figures in a number of the arts organizations being created in the first half of the twentieth century in Toronto were members of the Club. We can be fairly confident that the Arts and Letters Club created a ‘critical mass’ of like-minded individuals, and a place where ideas could originate and germinate. In some cases, one can point to specific links between the Club and developments in the cultural world. In 1944, for example, a Club advisory committee, led by Marcus Adeney, John Coulter, and Herman Voaden, presented a brief to the Turgeon Committee on Post-war Reconstruction and Re-establishment. Making a strong case for government support of the arts, the report was one step towards the establishment of the Canadian Arts Council and eventually the Massey Commission (headed by former Club member Vincent Massey) and the creation of the Canada Council.33 In other cases, the connections are more a matter of overlapping memberships, as acknowledged by Augustus Bridle: ‘The Club does not pretend to be the creator of the Toronto Symphony or of Hart House Theatre or of the music and pageantry of the Centennial of Toronto in 1934. It only happens that the leading spirits in all these have been, and are, members of the Club.’34 The Club Reflected in the Building St George’s Hall speaks directly to the history and significance of the important cultural institution it has housed since 1920. It is a three-sto-

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rey brick and stone building, with a cathedral-ceilinged Great Hall at the rear. Its symmetrical front facade is dominated by a Romanesque Revival entranceway, with a stone arch flanked by heraldic crests. Above the arch, a stone panel bears the name ‘St George’s Hall.’ The recessed doorway consists of two glazed wood-panelled doors and a side panel, topped by an arched window with moulded tracery. The name ‘St George’s Hall’ is painted on the brick arch above the doorway. The more delicate brick and metal work of the upper levels offset the solidity of the first-floor stonework. The upper centre section of the front facade is finished with vertical brick bands, and a pedimented double dormer with decorative metal trim and a finial. Two turreted dormer windows project from the grey slate roof. At the top of the first and second storeys, metal stringcourses, with decorative detailing, parallel the horizontal lines of the second-storey windows and the patterned brickwork above the windows. Additional decorative details include the stepped gables on either side of the roof. Stylistically, the building is an eclectic blend of architectural styles popular at the end of the nineteenth century, combining elements of Romanesque, Flemish, and medieval architecture. Inside, the Club’s atmosphere is immediately established in the ornately wood-panelled vestibule. To the right of the wide first-floor landing is the ‘Lamps Room,’35 used for small luncheons and gatherings and filled with artwork and memorabilia relating to Club members, and a modern kitchen. To the left of the landing is the Lounge, which includes a bar and sitting area. The centre hallway leads to the Club’s main gathering place, the Great Hall. Its open, timbered ceiling is of a hammer-beam construction,36 and is finished in dark wood, with four triangular dormer windows. The east and west walls include six neo-Gothic windows, with pointed arches and decorative tracery; the medieval theme is continued with the heraldic emblems decorating the walls, the large stone fireplace and the carved figures decorating the ends of the hammer beams. The north wall consists of a raised stage, above which is a mural depicting a Viking ship, the Club’s symbol. A minstrel’s gallery projects from the south wall, providing three rows of seating overlooking the hall. Other levels of the building provide additional space for various Club uses and activities. On the second floor is the Board Room, decorated with works of art by Club members, and the Library, filled with books by and about Club members. This floor also includes the Club Archives as well as administrative offices. The third floor consists pri-

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marily of a large studio, an airy, well-lit space with high ceilings. The basement is divided into a number of small rooms, including a display area and several dressing rooms. In its layout and use of space, the building reflects the Club’s various functions. The importance of the Club as a venue for artistic activity is seen in the Great Hall, with its well-equipped stage and lighting and its exhibit space, in the lower-level dressing rooms, and in the thirdfloor studio. Its role as a gathering place is reflected again in the Great Hall, with its long tables, as well as in smaller rooms conducive to conversation. More importantly, the ideals and history of the Club are expressed through the building’s decor: the strain of medievalism and ritual in the dark, timbered ceiling, the members’ coats of arms, and wooden carvings; the ideal of artistic openness and exploration, symbolized by the Viking ship of the Club’s crest, depicted on the fireplace and in the mural above the stage; the importance of tradition and history, as seen in the portraits and lists of Club executives displayed in the Lounge. The building is filled with artefacts connected to the Club’s rich history. The walls of the Lamps Room are covered with photographs, paintings, and artefacts relating to the Club and its members, including the score of the Club Constitution and the well-known photograph of the Group of Seven at lunch at the Club. The Board Room displays paintings by Club members, and sketches by Lismer and Charles Comfort line the second-floor hallway. Still more artefacts are displayed in the basement, including framed dinner programs, photographs of Club performances, and some stairboards from a previous stage.37 As well as housing a significant number of books written by or about Club members, the Library contains a narwhal tusk brought back from Ellesmere Island by Frederick Banting, sculptures of Hector Charlesworth and A.J. Casson, and a portrait of Augustus Bridle by Wyly Grier. These objects act as physical touchstones to the rich legacy of the Arts and Letters Club. The integrity of St George’s Hall is very strong.38 The building has changed little since the Arts and Letters Club became tenants in 1920. With its neo-Gothic decoration and massive fireplace, the Great Hall is virtually unchanged. The room’s long oak tables date back to the Court House location, and the members’ coats of arms are still in place, although they are reproductions of the originals (in the early 1960s, the originals had deteriorated to the point of disintegration, and they were recreated on permanent boards). A strong sense of history pervades the

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building, enhanced by the historic photographs and works of art by Club members that cover the walls. The building also enjoys a strong integrity of function. The Great Hall continues to be used for Club lunches, dinners, exhibits, concerts, and other performances. The third-floor studio is used by artist members, who currently paint from models three days a week. The Club values its traditions, and events such as the Christmas Dinner and Spring Revue are conducted much as in their early days. On many levels, the Arts and Letters Club has been a player in Canada’s cultural life. Most of its members would undoubtedly concur with J.E.H. MacDonald’s eloquent summary of its significance: ‘If I may speak personally, I would say that the Club has been a church, a home and a studio for me. It has called on me for service, it has developed my powers to serve. It has often given me inspiration and ideals. It has enlarged our Canada for me. It has made a blessed centre for me in this grey town.’39

NOTES 1 Established in 1919, the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada provides advice to the Government of Canada on the designation of places, persons, and events of national historic significance. The report on which this chapter is based was presented to the Board in December, 2005. 2 For J.M.S. Careless, Toronto at the turn of the century had become a ‘nearly national metropolis, with a hinterland that “ranged Canada-wide.”’ As well as economic influence, Toronto had reached what Careless referred to as ‘attitudinal metropolitanism,’ whereby a city is ‘accepted as a chief place of regard by a broad hinterland community.’ Careless, Toronto to 1918: An Illustrated History (Toronto: Lorimer, 1984), 149–52, and ‘Metropolis and Region: The Interplay of City and Region in Canadian History before 1914,’ Urban History Review, 7 (1978): 110. 3 Toronto’s desire for national leadership was remarked by Rupert Brooke when he visited Canada during the war: ‘Toronto is the centre and heart of the Province of Ontario; and Ontario, with a third of the whole population of Canada, directs the country for the present … And in this land, that is as yet hardly at all conscious of itself as a nation, Toronto and Ontario do their best in leading and realising national sentiment.’ Brooke, Letters from America (Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild and Stewart, 1916), 81–2. For the

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Kipling quote, see Augustus Bridle, The Story of the Club (Toronto: Arts and Letters Club, 1945), 1. J.E. Middleton, The Municipality of Toronto: A History, vol. 2 (Toronto: Dominion Publishing Co., 1923), 783–4. Bridle, Story of the Club, 1. Charter members included painters J.W. Beatty, F.S. Challener, Wyly Grier, George Reid, Lawren Harris, and C.W. Jefferys; sculptors Walter Allward and Emmanuel Hahn; journalists and art critics Augustus Bridle, Hector Charlesworth, and M.O. Hammond; publisher Henry Button; musician A.S. Vogt; architects W. A. Langton, Eden Smith, and Henry Sproatt; stage director Roy Mitchell. They were joined in the next few years by musicians such as Ernest MacMillan, Healey Willan, and Boris Hambourg, painters such as Arthur Lismer, Fred Varley, J.E.H. MacDonald, and A.Y. Jackson, and patrons of the arts such as J.E. MacCallum, Sir Byron Walker, and Vincent Massey. Members from later periods include Lovat Dickson, E.J. Pratt, William Arthur Deacon, Peter John Stokes, Floyd Chalmers, Eric Arthur, and Hugh Hood. The St George’s Society is still in existence, and continues to rent office space in the basement of the Arts and Letters Club building. Arts and Letters Club Scrapbook, Secretary’s newsletter, 15 June 1920. Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, University of Toronto, Ms Coll 315. The Club scrapbooks, large plywood-bound volumes that include notices of meetings, newspaper clippings, photographs, treasurers’ reports, programs, musical scores, poetry, and sketches, are also available on microfilm at the Ontario Archives (OA), Fonds F 1135. Bridle, Story of the Club, 24. Arts and Letters Club scrapbook, 4 May 1921. M.O. Hammond, Diary, 27 Nov. 1920. OA, M.O. Hammond Fonds, F 1075. The invitation is in the Arts and Letters Club scrapbook. Bridle, Story of the Club, 27. John Watson, Fiftieth Anniversary Program, March 1958. Quoted in ‘Whispers from Seven Decades,’ a commemorative booklet put together on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Club. Vincent Massey, What’s Past Is Prologue: The Memoirs of the Right Honourable Vincent Massey (Toronto: Macmillan, 1963), 45. Ettore Mazzoleni, Monthly Letter, Feb 1948; quoted in ‘Whispers from Seven Decades.’ Massey, Memoirs, 45. Visitors to the Club have included, among many others, Benjamin Britten, John Buchan, Pablo Casals, Aaron Copland, M.-A. Suzor Coté, Noel Coward, Clarence Gagnon, Gratien Gélinas, Sir

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Danielle Hamelin John Gielgud, Sinclair Lewis, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Maurice Ravel, Arthur Rubinstein, Hugh Walpole, and W.B. Yeats. Fergus Cronin, Jack A. Carr, Franklin Arbuckle, The Group of Seven: Why Not Eight or Nine or Ten? (Toronto: Arts and Letters Club, 1995), 1–23. The quote from Jackson is from A.Y. Jackson, A Painter’s Country: The Autobiography of A.Y. Jackson (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1958), 23. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, 76–7. Hammond, Diary, 7 Feb. 1920. Arts and Letters Club scrapbook. Ibid. Ibid. ‘The Arts and Letter Club 1908–1983,’ a commemorative booklet put together on the occasion of the Club’s 75th anniversary. Hammond described the Christmas dinner of 1922: ‘The Christmas dinner at A&LC was quite a novel and complete success. About 225 were there, crowding the place fearfully, and leaving a lot for second serving. Many old members, now seldom seen, like Dr Vogt, were there. The processional music, composed by Dr Willan, with verses by Fred Jacob, was very fine. There were also splendid choruses during dinner and later. The last event was a play and skit on Canadian Authors Association. Written by Fred Jacob, very clever, a bit severe, but funny. Jacob, Ralph Smith, Hugh Eayrs, Basil Morgan, Button, and Dick Wagner and another took part.’ Hammond, Diary, 27 Dec. 1922. Middleton, Municipality of Toronto, 785. Middleton’s gendered language is a reminder that a significant portion of Toronto’s arts community was effectively excluded from the Arts and Letters Club, which did not admit women as members until 1985. The Club’s exclusion of women may have been a factor in the decision of Mary Hewitt Smart, a voice teacher at the Toronto Conservatory of Music, to found the Heliconian Club in 1909 as an organization for women in the arts. The program for the ‘Firelight Chamber Musicale’ is in the Arts and Letters Club scrapbook. Other details in this paragraph are derived from Mary Willan Mason and Patricia Wardrop, ‘Arts and Letters Club of Toronto,’ in Encyclopedia of Music in Canada (http://www .thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params= U1ARTU0000126). Healey Willan (1880–1968), one of the Club’s most prominent musician members, taught at the Toronto Conservatory and later the University of Toronto, was music director of Hart House Theatre in the 1920s, acted as organist-choirmaster at St Mary Magdalene Anglican Church, and composed more than 800 works.

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26 Raymond Massey, A Hundred Different Lives: An Autobiography (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979), 20. 27 For a brief history, see the Hart House website: http://www.harthouse .utoronto.ca/English/page-3-1227-1.html. 28 ‘The Arts and Letters Club, 1908–1983.’ There was a show every year through the 1930s, and then four during the 1940s, all under the direction of Napier Moore. Revues were resumed in 1954. 29 Considered to be one of the most significant playwrights in Canada and inspired by the Group of Seven, Herman Voaden developed a multimedia form of theatre that he called ‘Symphonic Expressionism.’ In the 1930s, Voaden directed a number of experimental plays written by Bertram Brooker. Playwright John Coulter worked with Healey Willan in the 1940s to produce two operas. 30 Arts and Letters Club scrapbook. 31 Ibid. Hammond, Diary, 16 March, 11 May, 20 May, and 18 Nov. 1921. 32 See, for example, ‘Arts and Letters Club of Toronto,’ Encyclopedia of Music in Canada. 33 Bridle described the report as ‘one of the ablest documents ever written on that subject.’ Bridle, Story of the Club, 39. For an account that includes a broader context, see Paul Litt, The Muses, the Masses and the Massey Commission (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 23–4. 34 Augustus Bridle, The Lamps, Dec. 1932; quoted in ‘Whispers from Seven Decades.’ Another cultural institution whose origins are strongly linked to the Arts and Letters Club is the Art Gallery of Ontario. Bridle notes that ‘Sir Edmund Walker and George A. Reid – both Club members – … worked hardest to plan the Gallery, and the architects who designed it – John Pearson, Barry Cleveland and Jules Wegman – were all Club members.’ Bridle, Story of the Club, 22. 35 ‘Lamps’ stands for the disciplines practised by the Club’s professional members: Literature, Architecture, Music, Painting, and Stage. 36 A style developed in fifteenth-century England, and in which the tie beams are cut through, and the portions remaining (the hammer beams) are supported by curved braces from the wall. 37 The stairboard fragments are framed and displayed with the following inscription: ‘These treads once formed part of the stairway from the dressing rooms to stage right. On them trod many of the performers pictured on these walls. They now serve as a memento of Arts and Letters Club stage production from 1920 to 1999.’ 38 ‘Integrity’ is a concept that has been developed in the heritage conservation field to mean the ability of a place to convey its significance. It meas-

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ures the intactness of the various elements (both tangible and intangible) that embody a site’s historical significance. Integrity can be considered in terms of design, materials, workmanship, function, and/or setting, insofar as any of these elements are essential to understand the significance of the place in question. See the HSMBC’s General Guidelines on the Parks Canada website: http://www.pc.gc.ca/clmhc-hsmbc/crit/crit2_E.asp. 39 J.E.H. MacDonald, Annual Meeting, Oct. 1929; quoted in ‘Whispers from Seven Decades.’

7

Before the Citizenship Act: Confronting Canadian Citizenship in the House of Commons, 1900–1947 Barry Ferguson Among Carl Berger’s major contributions to Canadian historical writing was that he enlivened and recast the subject of nationalism. The Sense of Power showed not only how extensive and extravagant Canadian thinking about imperialism and nationalism were but also how much popular political concern there was over nationhood and nationality. His book stimulated a long-running and probably inexhaustible examination by historians about the meaning of Canada’s imperial ties and nationalist movements.1 The imperialist-nationalists that Berger studied were eager to project major roles for Canada both within the British Empire and among nations. They also explored the legal and political status and identity that Canada had acquired or should acquire in order to fulfil its role. This exploration was a crucial task, since it is among the most important subjects that political thinkers have to consider. The question of membership in the political community, usually focused on discussions of citizenship and its acquisition, had no easy answer for residents of Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. French-speaking and English-speaking, rural and urban, Liberal and Conservative, Canadians disagreed about the future of Canada’s constitutional status and national identity, and pursued these disagreements while the population of the country grew rapidly and became increasingly diverse as a result of settlement of the Prairies and central Canadian resource and industrial development after 1900. Whether examined in terms of basic legal requirements, general political rights, or broader social characteristics, citizenship was the subject of long-running and contentious political debate throughout the first half of the twentieth century in Canada. While Berger’s imperial-

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ists assumed that they were British subjects and imperial citizens, all Canadians had to contend with the unsettled and uncertain legal and political basis of citizenship and nationhood. Their international status was unclear, their rights abroad uncertain, and their identity decidedly unstable. The examination of these questions proved to be a staple of Colonial and Imperial Conferences from 1887 to 1937 and of Canadian Parliamentary debates alike from the turn of the twentieth century until after the Second World War.2 The academic understanding of citizenship has become a subject of great contestation since the 1990s, encompassing such traditional themes as the legal and political basis of membership in a state and such diverse ones as educational practices, immigration policies and the treatment of racial and ethnic as well as socioeconomic groups by the state.3 Most studies still rely upon the canonical writings of the British sociologist, T.H. Marshall, who formulated the classic division of citizenship into legal, political, and social forms. Writing shortly after the Second World War and as an enthusiastic advocate of welfare-state social policies, Marshall distinguished between legal and political citizenship, on one hand, referring to public rights and duties, and social citizenship, on the other, referring to economic and social entitlements and expectations.4 Marshall, and almost all who have followed him, distinguish in their writings between the fairly limited forms of membership, often amounting to mere subjecthood or subordination involving the exclusion of vast proportions of the people, in a political community, and the more complex sets of rights and responsibilities, including active engagement and the goal of including virtually all people, that characterize the relationship between individuals and governments in the modern (and postmodern) state. These sorts of questions have, of course, been apparent in Canada, and they became a subject of considerable public discussion and policy debates by the end of the nineteenth century, just when Canada felt the full impact of the imperial movement. The subject of this chapter is the unfolding exploration of citizenship in the House of Commons during the first half of the twentieth century. Parliamentary debates, as Jerome Ouellet and Frederic RousselBeaulieu have argued recently, are often fascinating indicators of public concerns, conflicting attitudes, and the entrenchment of policy stances.5 If parliamentary debates are usually structured as sets of argument for and against a particular proposal, many lead to extensive, substantive, and cumulative examinations of the subject. These factors emerge from

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Canadian parliamentary debates over citizenship. They took place over years at a time when neither legislative decisions nor public understanding of citizenship were clear. They were not only about the procedures and regulation of citizenship and about the legal status of Canadian nationals – the emphasis of historical work on the emergence of Canadian citizenship6 – but on the relations between the individual and the state. They addressed the criteria by which individuals would qualify for membership in the state. This chapter will show that both procedural and jurisdictional means and the more substantial criteria for gaining standing in Canada were examined by MPs and argue that Canadian politicians from the time of the South African War to the end of the Second World War developed distinctive, increasingly polarized conceptions of Canadian citizenship before it was defined by the citizenship legislation of 1947. Two factors goaded Parliamentarians into their early consideration of citizenship. The first was the realization after about 1900 that high levels of immigration raised issues concerning the legal rights and political status of these new peoples. The second was pressure from Great Britain at Colonial and Imperial Conferences to clarify the meaning of imperial political membership, including the status of residents of the Dominions in the Empire. Together these pressures led to the first articulation of party positions on the meaning of citizenship. The Colonial and Imperial Conferences starting in 1887 raised the matter of citizenship through the examination of naturalization legislation, the process by which non-British immigrants acquired legal and political rights. Naturalization was a regular and even heated subject raised at conferences held during the 1890s and 1900s.7 Discussion at the Conferences indicated that the problem had many aspects. These included such legalistic matters as the validity and currency of passports (Canada had issued passports starting in 1893 as that document became more frequently demanded for crossing borders) and the legal status of British subjects in Canada and Canadians abroad, particularly married women. Discussions also considered the constitutional relations of Canada with Great Britain, which of course remained unclear and indeed disputed. The differing qualifications for and standards of nationality in the Dominions constituted a problem identified for serious resolution as early as 1902.8 It took the conferences of 1907 and 1911 to reach agreement on the goal of ‘uniformity’ in naturalization legislation and therefore of a common status among the peoples of the Empire, although this status was only open to the self-governing

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Dominions and the United Kingdom, and never fully implemented by any of them.9 The impact on Canada of this imperial pressure was considerable. Pressure from the Imperial Conferences forced Canada into regular debates about the criteria for citizenship and the means of legislation. Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, who was unusually adept at supporting both imperial cohesion and dominion distinctiveness, interpreted the conferences’ goals as being simultaneously to create uniform legislation and to recognize the legislative authority of each state. He argued at the 1911 Colonial Conference that Canada’s compliance would occur because ‘naturalization is one of the incidental powers of sovereignty’ and Britain had ‘parted with this power of sovereignty and delegated it to the Dominions.’ He further stated that ‘uniformity’ would be based on standards decided upon by the individual Dominions. This was a position Liberal Senator Louis Brodeur had taken on Canada’s behalf in 1907 and it was apparently a view shared by the Australian sponsors of the move to uniformity, or so Laurier claimed in 1911.10 Laurier was careful to explain that Canada’s naturalization law must reflect jurisdiction divided between the Dominion and the provinces over aspects of citizenship rights and therefore that Canadian legislation must be somewhat vague as to procedures and tests for naturalization. Laurier referred specifically to provincial government jurisdiction over the franchise rather than provincial government authority over naturalization as such. He would have known, however, that naturalization as it was then constituted was a matter for provincial magistrates’ courts. He concluded that Canada’s internal variability was an exact parallel to constitutional relations in the Empire, based as Canada was on broad uniformity of purpose but a division of authority and variation in practice.11 In 1910 and 1911, Laurier’s Minister of the Interior Frank Oliver, publisher of the Edmonton Bulletin and MP for a district built on a great deal of non-British immigration, explained that the status of immigrants who wished to become naturalized should lead to a more specific classification of ‘citizenship’ under Canadian legislation. Oliver’s use of the term, citizenship, suggested that he had accepted Laurier’s claim that Canada possessed the sovereign power of naturalization. The particular amendment that Oliver spoke of was to define all naturalized immigrants including Britons as Canadian ‘citizens.’ But he went further and emphasized that this new status was one that all individuals could acquire in Canada. The legislation that Oliver proposed simply

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affirmed that the acquisition of property constituted an apt procedural test of citizenship. He drew attention to changes in the draft legislation which stated that wives did not acquire citizenship simply because their husbands did and that British immigrants had no more right to Canadian citizenship than any other ‘aliens.’12 Oliver’s argument that Canadian citizenship should not subsume wives and families under a husband’s legal status drew sharp complaints and some support. Both Liberals like Cape Bretoner D.D. Mackenzie and Conservatives like Montrealer Charles Doherty spoke in favour of this innovation. Mackenzie was supported in his emphasis on the individual by other Liberals, including Quebec Liberal Jacques Bureau. Oliver particularly emphasized that the ‘individual merits’ of the applicant for citizenship was crucial and that this focus on the individual was a principle agreed upon by Canadians and immigrants alike. He asserted that this emphasis on individual merit, and a tacit admission of female rights, was particularly strong in the Prairies. While he admitted that the host society had a preference for ‘people of our own race,’ that is British immigrants, he had warned that Canada must deal ‘fairly and equitably by all men’ and claimed that the focus on individual qualifications would ensure that immigrants would ‘add to our citizenship as well as to our labour.’13 More importantly for the Parliamentary understanding of citizenship, Oliver focused debate for the first time on citizenship itself and identified criteria for its acquisition as characteristics to be determined in the applicant’s specific community. Individual female rights may not have been terribly important to Oliver but individual rights were and, therefore, separate male and female standing were crucial to his defence of the new legislation. In these ways Oliver was expressing both a social and a legal view of citizenship that would be embellished by others over the next three decades. In all of this, Oliver emphasized the importance of procedural clarity in determining the legal tests that should be met in Canada. If the Laurier Liberals interpreted citizenship in local and individual terms, the new government led by Robert Borden, elected in 1911, most certainly did not. Its broad goals of seeking greater Imperial recognition for Canada as well as introducing strong centralizing and interventionist policies are well known to historians.14 The administration of naturalization and citizenship were subject to similar treatment. The Borden government moved to follow Colonial and Imperial Conference resolutions on naturalization. In 1914, the Minister of Justice, Montreal

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corporation lawyer Charles Doherty, sponsored the ‘British Nationality, Naturalization and Aliens Act.’ This legislation would ‘bring about an empire-wide naturalization.’ Doherty specifically wished to establish a common imperial nationality by bringing Canadian criteria for naturalization into line with practices being undertaken in other Dominions and Great Britain. Conformity to a common Imperial standard, claimed Doherty, would at last remedy the lack of internal authority and international recognition that Canadian naturalization and nationality law had suffered from for so many years. Doherty noted, too, that the legislation would end the practice of accepting ‘double nationality’ for so many ‘aliens’ which Canada still tolerated. Finally, but in ways he did not specify, it would allow for more effective judgments of the ‘character’ as well as the legal qualifications of applicants.15 In explaining the new imperial naturalization procedures, Doherty criticized the Laurier government’s approach and articulated a distinctive alternative policy. Claiming that the new measures were compelled by Canadian participation in and acceptance of the decisions of the Imperial Conferences, Doherty set out a new approach to naturalization and citizenship. He rejected local decisions about naturalization in favour of standard criteria. He proposed to end judicial assessment by magistrates by substituting departmental decisions and increasing ministerial discretion. He wanted to shift from the individual application towards family acquisition of citizenship based upon a husband and father’s citizenship. He sought special status for British immigrants and rejected dual nationality for non-British Canadians.16 Doherty went so far as to claim that the reform of ‘naturalization’ law did not actually affect the meanings of Canadian ‘citizenship.’ But he admitted that this distinction was fairly unimportant because, in Canada at least, citizenship was merely a status under the Canadian Immigration Act that conferred few legal or political rights, whereas naturalization was the crucial status for Canadians among the nations of the world. This tendency to treat citizenship as a minor matter involving legal rights within the country and concentrate on naturalization as the key to political identity was followed by many parliamentary debaters in the years to come, including such normally sharp legal debaters as R.B. Bennett. It suggests that the actual terms were less significant in themselves than as key words for the broader concepts. In this case, what most academic authorities would call citizenship, Canadian politicians spoke of as naturalization.17 But how were the Conservative government’s turn towards cen-

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tralization, and a newer understanding of the legal and social basis of citizenship, perceived by its own supporters outside Cabinet? Two Conservative MPs well known for their strong reservations about immigrants and immigration policy tried to express the party view. Wealthy Calgary businessman and CPR solicitor R.B. Bennett, for one, noted that in the past Canadian law had meant that ‘citizenship was entirely too cheap’ and claimed that the new approach meant Canada would meet the challenge of ‘assimilating’ immigrants in the way the United States had done so well. He observed that he was ‘not so much concerned about imperial citizenship as in having a proper domestic citizenship.’18 H.H. Stevens, a Vancouver accountant and crusading nativist foe of Asians in British Columbia, agreed with Bennett that ‘for many years we have treated the privileges of citizenship altogether too lightly.’ He confined himself to arguing that Canada should not grant naturalization to people who did not ‘understand the value of the franchise in a democratic country.’19 Both Bennett and Stevens were westerners and therefore familiar with the importance and impact of immigration. Both were also skilled in the rhetoric of anti- immigrant politics combined with pro-immigration practices. They were also urban businessmen, like Doherty and Borden, and entirely sympathetic to the centralizing, imperialist, and interventionist approaches of the Conservative party and government. These efforts to redefine citizenship provoked a strong Liberal reaction. Wilfrid Laurier put the basic objection most clearly. The new legislation included the relatively minor but well-entrenched shift from the Canadian three-year qualification period to the five-year British practice and the more important change of centralizing authority at the discretion of a cabinet minister rather than enabling local administration supervised by a judge. Practically, Laurier noted, the shift in criteria wrecked the Dominion Lands Act provisions of three years permanent residency and homestead land patenting as the basis for naturalization. These differences, Laurier explained, were symptoms of highly divergent British and Canadian attitudes towards dealing with immigrants and indeed the grant of citizenship rights. Whereas Great Britain was ‘chary of giving naturalization,’ as Laurier said and Doherty conceded, (and indeed British naturalization was more limited in its grant of rights to naturalized subjects), Canada and the other Dominions built up by immigration had been ‘free with their legislation with regard to naturalization.’ In Canada’s case, the country had ‘invited’ persons from the rest of the world to settle under the promise of granting every

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right that the existing ‘citizens’ of the country had. Laurier concluded his argument by shifting to the contractual position that Frank Oliver had previously used. Not only did Canada ‘want to open up our country to the world,’ but this invitation ‘implies the promise that everything we have we will share with those who come to help us to develop the country.’ Laurier here alluded to the major theme that Liberal critics of the common imperial naturalization project would refine in years to come.20 W.M. Martin, who later headed a Farmer-Libera1 provincial government in Saskatchewan, criticized the Doherty bill as unfairly and foolishly impeding ‘citizenship’ for immigrants. His fellow Saskatchewan Liberal, Dr D.B.Neely, was even blunter: ‘A man coming to this country comes here solely for the purpose of bettering his condition, to spend his life here, to raise his family here,’ Neely stated. He explained that an immigrant ‘can have but one object in mind’ and that was that he ‘must become a permanent resident, and must adopt the flag and the ideals of citizenship of the country to which he comes.’ Neely had no worries about the education of citizens or assessment of their qualifications for naturalization, since individuals were motivated by these goals themselves. In his view, the goal of material advancement was sufficient to induce whatever transformation of legal and political identity occurred. Neely did add that naturalized Canadians should strive to acquire the ‘ideals of citizenship.’21 Like most of his fellow Liberals, Neely preferred not to describe these principles, since he was confident that they would be acquired as a result of citizenship and were not a condition for it. The Liberal foes of the British Nationalities bill rejected any test for knowledge of either English or French as a condition for granting naturalization. Saskatchewan farmer Levi Thomson, also a trained lawyer, derided the language qualifications of the proposed law by pointing out that many of the Scots in his Ontario home county would not have met the English language test. Quebecker Rodolphe Lemieux claimed that German language rights would be as worth pursuing as English or French rights since the quality of German immigrants’ contributions to Canada was so considerable. The spectre of language tests suggested to Wilfrid Laurier that Canada would be moving towards practices similar to those in the former Boer Republics and, as a result, raised the prospect of creating an outlander population in the Prairies. To the Liberals, in sum, language tests were not seen as legitimate in 1914 or indeed later.22

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Another provision in the Tory legislation drew criticism based on its reversal of the Liberal approach to women’s status. New Brunswick Liberal William Pugsley claimed that the provision for a wife to acquire naturalization solely on the status of her husband was an ‘antediluvian’ approach. He urged the government to press Great Britain and the other Dominions to rethink the position. In his response, Charles Doherty dismissed the argument about female equality. Breezily, he asserted that Canada’s high social standards ensured that there was very little agitation for women’s rights and he invoked the biblical injunction that a wife must accept the ‘people and God’ of her husband to confute Pugsley’s concerns.23 Some Liberal MPs noted that the bill had a number of implications about the ethnic and religious screening of immigrants, but they did not pursue these arguments. While there was some debate about the aptness for citizenship of all peoples identified as racially Caucasian, there was little debate about the fitness of non-Whites, whose status seldom received any consideration or defence. Several critics observed that the shift towards a common imperial standard could lead to more international migration and subsequent naturalization claims by British subject peoples from Asia and elsewhere as well from Asians already resident in Canada. But Doherty was quick to deny that British status alone or Canadian law would provide for such equal treatment24 In the end, the law was passed and the 1914 measures marked a turning point in the way naturalization and citizenship in Canada were determined. Two principles had been established. Canadian nationality was subordinated to the ‘common standard’ of the empire, a condition that endured for the next thirty years. And, later debates about the determination of nationality and citizenship were based upon the pre-war themes that had been stimulated by the Laurier and Borden governments. Wartime between 1914 and 1918 created new divisions among citizens. The War Time Elections Act of 1917 extended the differential treatment of native-born and naturalized Canadians to new lengths. Previously, Canada had merely excluded status Indians, Asians, and females from the suffrage. The wartime legislation removed the right to vote for naturalized Canadians who had been born in Austria-Hungary and Germany and extended the vote to females who were close relatives of members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Curiously enough given the atmosphere of hyper-concern about support for the

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war effort, naturalization and citizenship did not much occupy Parliament until the war ended. After 1918, the consequences of extending critical and cultural tests of naturalization and of adopting a British model naturalization law began to conflict with Canadian practice and Canadian social and political characteristics. Ironically, the first example of the contradiction between British and Canadian ways concerned legal uniformity. Borden himself had spoken against punitive anti-German provisions for future nationality legislation at the Imperial Conferences in 1918 even as the government he led acted against Austro-Hungarian and German-born naturalized Canadians. Borden proclaimed that ‘thousands and ten of thousands’ of Canadians born in enemy nations were staunchly loyal to the allied cause, including Slavs and Germans. Borden went on to explain, in language Laurier might have used, that the distinct society of Canada meant that Canada alone should have the right to determine qualifications for naturalization. Perhaps he had been stung to defend Canada’s differing standard because of criticism from another Dominion. The New Zealand Prime Minister, Sir Joseph Ward, had dismissed Canada the year before as a sieve for utterly undesirable elements from the United States and therefore a potential source for ‘contamination’ if there were indeed a common status of nationality throughout the empire. Ward’s New Zealand kept one of the most determined local variations with its unique educational qualifications for naturalization that were decidedly unsympathetic to non-British peoples and even more hostile than Canada to Asians.25 The Canadian government did move to conform to Imperial practices but, as Doherty claimed in 1920, Canada was only moving to bar ‘former enemy aliens’ from naturalization for a period of ten years because of the requirement for Imperial uniformity. Canada was not adopting the harsher British law that would have prevented existing naturalized residents from regaining political rights.26 The British line drew harsh condemnation for its arbitrary treatment of pre-1914 German Canadians, especially from the Kitchener-Waterloo Liberal W.D. Euler. Euler also reiterated that the lack of ‘personal naturalization’ for women was another mistake, an issue Doherty finally admitted was a result of imperial uniformity.27 Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Canadian parliamentarians had to deal with imperial legislation that fitted poorly with the nation’s position on constitutional autonomy and that led to many clashes over the basis of citizenship. Doherty introduced legislation in 1921, during

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the last days of the Union government, to establish a common legal position for naturalized and native-born British subjects in Canada. The ‘Canadian Nationals Act’ was demanded of Canada, he somewhat ruefully admitted, by the country’s claim to separate membership in the League of Nations. He admitted that the common status as British subjects that Canada had adopted in 1914 had to be revised to support the nation’s international standing. The result of membership in the League of Nations was that ‘in addition to having all the rights and all the obligations of British subjects, [Canadians] have particular rights because of the fact that they are Canadians.’ Doherty’s acceptance of dual obligations to Empire and League and his vague allusions to the responsibilities and rights of citizenship offered a clear admission that the meaning and nature of Canadian nationality remained uncertain to say the least.28 The administration of and standards for naturalization and nationality remained unsettled after Doherty’s 1921 legislation expired with the Union government. In the next decade, Liberal Secretaries of State, Arthur Bliss Copp in 1923 and Fernand Rinfret in 1928, proposed revisions to Canadian legislation with the excuse that Canada must align its administration of naturalization with British norms. Copp, a lawyer from New Brunswick, explained that changes were necessary because of Canada’s continuing failure to realize the 1914 imperial project of a common citizenship status. He proposed to bypass the county courts, which continued to grant naturalization despite Doherty’s earlier intention, in favour of federal determination of naturalization. He suggested that investigation through the Immigration department and the RCMP should be part of the new procedures he was proposing. This plan was not implemented because of criticism from all sides. For his part, Rinfret, a Montreal journalist and teacher, attempted to resurrect the measure by throwing some imperialistic and anti-American mud at the opposition. He noted that the government was simply trying to abandon American practices of easy naturalization and replace it with British ones of greater rigour. Rinfret’s proposals were only somewhat more successful than Copp’s but he succeeded in getting legislation that tightened administrative practices.29 Copp and Rinfret claimed that their reforms aimed merely at conforming to imperial norms and providing greater efficiency in processing claims for naturalization. What they admitted was that Canadian thinking and practice continued to be driven by Imperial Conference decisions and its subsequent administrative refinements. What they

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did not admit was that this conformity meant trying to define the sorts of exclusionary cultural tests and imperial-centred status that were certainly implied by the legal situation after 1914. Copp’s exploration of Canadian citizenship and naturalization goals led him to appreciate that there was an implicit contract between Canada and its immigrants as well as a crucial economic basis to citizenship. ‘We open our doors to people from other lands,’ he declaimed, and ‘give them to understand that our country is ready to receive them and that after residing in Canada a certain length of time they will be entitled to become naturalized Canadian citizens.’30 This position, that Canadian nationality was a mutual obligation between the host government and its new peoples, reflected a long-standing tendency among Liberals in Parliamentary debates. What was somewhat new was his argument that the exchange between government and immigrant would properly recompense both parties. Whereas Laurier in the pre-war era emphasized the need for this promise in order to attract immigrants to Canada, Copp could assert in the buoyant postwar 1920s that there were clear benefits to both parties in the exchange of work for citizenship. In a remarkable alignment with postwar social scientific thinking about the ease of assimilation, Copp pleaded for the quick granting of citizenship rights because cultural adaptation – assimilation – was so rapid.31 This was a position that the social democrat J.S. Woodsworth agreed with, at least up to a point. While Woodsworth has sometimes been portrayed as a full-blown nativist critic of immigration, he had in fact written sympathetically before the Great War about the need to enable immigrants to participate in both the economy and the politics of Canada. It was prudent, he had argued in his pre-war tracts, for Canada to support this integration. By the 1920s he had moved to emphasize, at times, the rights of immigrants. He warned that ‘we are not keeping faith with those whom we are inviting to come to this country unless we make it possible for them to qualify [for naturalization] in order that they may receive free homesteads and in order that they may enter into the full rights of Canadian citizenship.’ Like Copp, Woodsworth argued for clear procedures for naturalization because the prior contract between host and newcomer had promised it and because new Canadians so readily adapted to Canadian norms.32 It must be added that Woodsworth also asserted during his Parliamentary career that some immigrants – Asians in particular – who could not become citizens due to local community objections should not be admitted unless and until

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they could be admitted to full citizenship. Undoubtedly Woodsworth did not stand up to anti-Asian racial policy and sentiments, but the nuance of his position was fairly clear. Rinfret introduced his reforms in the late 1920s’ atmosphere of growing unease about high levels of immigration. But he began with a positive account of the reasons why Canada should reward immigration. ‘If we want to build up this country and if we want to make Canada prosperous and progressive,’ he said, ‘it will not suffice to invite immigrants from all parts of the world to settle in this country; it will not be sufficient to open our doors to these immigrants ... we should bind them to this country by making it possible for every one of them to receive the priceless gift of British citizenship.’ Rinfret, who did not appear to speak with any trace of irony about the British ‘gift’ bestowed by Canada, accepted the goal of centralized administration. Alhough he was willing to propose tests of English or French language proficiency, he continued to argue that naturalization should be almost automatic for anyone who met the minimal criteria. And, he conflated the legal status of naturalization with the broader political rights of citizenship, as did virtually every parliamentary debater.33 Copp’s and Rinfret’s arguments contained implications about the way citizenship was earned and about the British principles of ministerial discretion to be employed in the grant of naturalization. Opponents preferred that local communities ensure the selection of qualified applications. Most Progressives, some Liberals, and a few Conservatives argued that community standards comprised the basis for the assessment of naturalization and that this basis must be respected and accommodated. The boundaries of such communities could not be clearly defined, however, because in the case of naturalization, unlike the suffrage or even immigration, the provinces themselves had no authority.34 Some influential MPs believed that the territorial units of the provinces, but not provincial governments, constituted the appropriate community. Warning that the whim of cabinet should not be allowed to block the virtual promise of citizenship that immigrants received, J.S. Woodsworth stated that ‘we in Manitoba ought to decide who are the right and proper persons to be taken into the citizenship of Manitoba.’ Referring to Manitobans rather than the province of Manitoba, he illustrated his point with reference to the standards of British Columbians on the subject of local sensitivities to immigration.35 This was a point taken up with enthusiasm by West Coast MPs of all parties. Vancouver Conservative Leon J. Ladner, for one, was eager to exclude

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Asians from equal participation in society. Ladner and his xenophobic B.C. colleagues, like Alberni independent Liberal A.W. Neill and New Westminster Conservative W.G. McQuarrie, asserted that provincial community standards must prevail. Their goal was to limit naturalization applications by all Asians and the tendency, understandable given international law at the time, to retain their nationality in the case of Japanese.36 In contrast, Woodsworth had echoed the Liberals in emphasizing the benefits of including people as quickly as possible after their arrival in order to create primary Canadian ties that would lead to the most complete form of assimilation, acquiring ‘the full rights of Canadian citizenship.’37 To be sure, some MPs, notably Progressives like Arthur Beaubien of Manitoba and Milton Campbell of Saskatchewan, tended to support the Liberal government move to centralize naturalization under the authority of the secretary of state. They saw centralization as the best way to ensure cheap and less whimsical access to citizenship than county court judges sometimes provided. Both were sensitive to Woodsworth’s support for the political integration of immigrants and the need to avoid their isolation or alienation.38 The veteran agrarian reformer, W.R. Motherwell, put it more clearly still in 1928: ‘If we are going to build up a contented country and give to our new settlers the privilege of citizenship that we promised them,’ he said, ‘we should not put obstructions in their way.’ Motherwell also commented that the post-1914 imperial-centred approach had introduced needless complications and led to unfair restrictions on candidates for naturalization and on naturalized Canadians. Seconding this point, Montreal Liberal Sam Jacobs derided the importance of county court appearances that W.G. McQuarrie had emphasized as a valuable screen on ‘oriental’ applicants. Jacobs wondered whether B.C. judges had taken ‘special courses’ in distinguishing Asians one from another so as to prevent the bogus naturalization applicants that McQuarrie and other B.C. politicians fretted over. McQuarrie, unmoved by humour, responded with a proposal to photograph and fingerprint applicants.39 Although the Liberal approach to citizenship made some headway during the 1920s, Conservatives had not given up on the imperial approach to nationality. By the late 1920s, R.B. Bennett, who had complained in 1914 that Canadian ‘citizenship was entirely too cheap,’ and that naturalization was being treated as a ‘joke,’ asserted that Canada’s version of what he termed ‘British citizenship’ still did not possess appropriate standards. Bennett and the Borden-cabinet veteran Sir George

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Perley informed the House of Commons that some judges apparently had tried to gauge the moral and political ‘character’ and language skills of applicants. This was exactly the sort of community-based tests that Bennett and Perley feared would no longer be followed if naturalization became a ministerial or departmental prerogative.40 The Conservative position, as expressed by R.B. Bennett, acknowledged that Canadian administration had been lax but insisted, too, that Canada had not developed a rigorous standard of citizenship. The country offered only a slack indigenous tradition or a fuzzy British imperial one. Canada was not like Australia, Great Britain, or New Zealand, which comprised populations that were over 90 per cent ‘British,’ he pointed out. On the contrary, Canada was like the United States and South Africa in its ethnic composition. Those were states whose naturalization legislation was most relevant to Canada. Their legislative examples taught that rigid statutory standards and close review of the backgrounds of applicants were essential to maintaining effective citizenship. Bennett did not in 1928 proceed to read South African or United States citizenship law into Hansard, as he had done in 1914. This was perhaps a sign of his increasing discretion about the practicality of following those models, although Laurier’s earlier caution about the South African lesson may not have fazed him. Unsurprisingly, not imperial uniformity but cultural and racial exclusivity constituted the concern of Conservative spokesmen like Bennett, Ladner, and T.L. Church, the last of whom lamented that only Australia was still working to remain a ‘white man’s country.’ Significantly enough, all three were lawyers in cities favoured by immigration as well as ardent gatekeepers of citizenship.41 The move towards a legal definition of nationality based upon race was pursued by E.D.R. Bissett, a physician from rural Manitoba and a Liberal Progressive. Using the example of ‘English’ nationality, which was composed of a large number of ethnic groups, Bissett presented a resolution in 1929 proclaiming that ‘white’ Canadians of three generations’ residency should be allowed to declare themselves as ‘Canadians’ in all governmental declarations of ethnic and national classifications. Advocating one of the more extreme forms of assimilation, Bissett proclaimed that Canada ‘requires racial unity; it is one of the big factors necessary for the development of the true Canadian spirit’ that was his overriding goal.42 This aim of defining a common Canadian nationality was sympathized with by several speakers, notably Immigration Minister Robert

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Forke and opposition MP J.S. Woodsworth, both of course Manitobans like Bisset. But neither supported his proposal for a race-based definition. Forke contrasted the English example with the Scottish case, noting that there was a Scottish nationality but not a Scottish race. Woodsworth offered the example of American nationality and argued that the inclusion of all people regardless of their ethnic or national origin into a new, common citizenship would be the preferred way ‘to build the Canadian nation’ along American lines.43 While the MPs who were exercised about the standards of citizenship may have agreed with Bissett about the appropriateness of race, they preferred R.B. Bennett’s alternative view that a separate Canadian nationality could not exist apart from Imperial subjecthood. Canada’s lack of ‘independence,’ according to Bennett and others, therefore, prevented the very definition of a means of exclusion that Bennett himself in other contexts demanded.44 The problems imposed by imperia1 subjecthood and legal uniformity, however, became more difficult during the early 1930s. Imperial Conference decisions made during the late 1920s and formalized by the Statute of Westminster in 1931 transformed the imperial link into a bond between autonomous states. In the meantime the Imperial Conferences, most notably in 1926, but also in later years, also affected understanding of citizenship. In 1930, the Conference adopted provisions advised by previous expert meetings, and it determined that there was no effective limitation on the right of individual Commonwealth states to define their own citizenship, through a resolution which stated bluntly that it was ‘for each Member of the commonwealth to define for itself its own nationals.’ This conclusion would have momentous results for the status of citizens within each Dominion when it chose to deal with the matter. When the Statute of Westminster was proclaimed, R.B. Bennett, by then Prime Minister, acknowledged the transformation of national status when he declared that the political empire was dead, although he went on to predict that an economic empire would rise in its place. Nonetheless, both internal disagreements about the practice and meaning of citizenship and gaping holes in the actual status of Canadian citizens remained to be faced. By the end of the 1920s, the Department of External Affairs had reflected on continuing Imperial Conference deliberations as well as its own experience with the common citizenship status. The department warned the government that the status of Canadians abroad was a muddle and worse because of the absence of a single standard for nationality or citizenship. Department officials would continue to worry

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about this question throughout the 1930s, goaded by Imperial Conference decisions and statements.45 The 1930 Conference had warned that the status of married women under the various laws of the Dominions very poorly protected women’s autonomy or nationality status in the event of marital breakdown except in a woman’s nation of birth. A 1937 Imperial Conference committee on nationality had had to remind Canada in effect that the implications of the 1931–32 constitutional transformation had yet to be faced.46 Highly practical matters of law as well as more abstract factors of national identity were drawing attention to the anomalies and the limitations of Canadian thinking about nationality and citizenship. But it is a sign of a continuing refusal to face these limitations that Canadian debate remained stuck in the disagreement about procedural and basic standards. The Bennett government made one more effort to deal with Canadian nationality in anticipation of the Statute of Westminster. In 1931, Secretary of State C.H. Cahan, yet another corporate lawyer in cabinet, moved to address both the practical problem of protecting Canadians abroad and the constitutional challenge of constitutional autonomy. His new Canadian Nationals Act aimed to preserve Canadian ‘self-respect’ and ‘dignity’ and ‘lay the foundations’ for a future nationality. The bill proposed to unify the status of all Canadians, whether Canadian born or naturalized, and to protect all Canadians regardless of country of birth or marital status under international law. In a challenge to several forms of existing differential status, he specifically charged that his bill would make it a right for persons of any race or gender born in Canada to acquire nationality.47 While opposition MPs like Charles Stewart and Fernand Rinfret doubted the constitutional authority for Cahan’s bill, they applauded the effort. It was a welcome move to distinguish, as Rinfret said, a ‘citizen of Canada from a citizen of Australia or New Zealand.’48 In the event the bill was withdrawn with no explanation. Canadian citizenship remained through the 1930s what the legal officer in the Department of External Affairs warned was an internally fragmented and internationally tenuous status.49 Not only was international acceptance of the status of Canadians abroad uncertain throughout the 1930s and 1940s, but so too was the equal treatment of all Canadian-born Canadians. The blatant case of parliamentary removal of legal and political rights from Canadian-born or naturalized citizens of Japanese ancestry (quite apart from Japanese Canadians unable or unwilling to acquire naturalized status) during internment operations in the Second World

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War, starkly illustrated the problem. Another example was the case of status Indians, who had been denied continually full or equal citizenship rights. The fragmentation of subjecthood and differential citizenship rights remained legally intact, and they were deemed to be fully acceptable politically and legally until the end of the Second World War. Canada continued to ignore both Imperial Conference committee reports and decisions, and Candian officials’ reports that urged successive governments to act on its new constitutional status by deciding on the matter of ‘nationality.’ Only after the Second World War did the Canadian government act. Historians have strongly emphasized the importance of the war, ‘Canada’s war,’ and the emergence of a new sense of nationality in creating momentum for the post-1945 restructuring of national political institutions.50 The colossal gap in citizenship law and practice made it an obvious priority, and so it became. In March 1946, Secretary of State Paul Martin proposed a new ‘Canadian Citizenship Act.’ The aim of the bill, proclaimed Martin, who had done graduate work in international law, was ‘to achieve a clear and simple definition of Canadian citizenship’ and ‘to provide an underlying community of status for all people in this country that will help bind them together.’ In effect, the two broad concerns about citizenship, the legal and administrative status of Canadian legislation, on the one hand, and the political and social standards for Canadian nationality, on the other, were going to be bound together at last, or so Martin hoped.51 Rhetorically at least, Martin tried to resolve the broad concerns and the two approaches to citizenship that politicians had worried over for the previous forty years. Martin’s interpretation of citizenship led him to claim that the new Citizenship Bill simultaneously reflected ‘the development of Canada as a nation’ and the attendant ‘common pride in the achievements of our country.’ He also explicitly wanted to avoid the encouragement of any new form of ‘nationalism,’ which he identified as ‘a regression to that selfish introversion that has brought war and chaos to the world.’ But what Martin stressed, finally, was the importance of resolving the administrative problems of divided status and unclear jurisdiction of Canadian nationality. These problems had for some time been identified by legal experts reporting to various government departments as well as by the Imperial Conferences and, in their way, the MPs in their debates.52 Martin’s own legal mentor, W.P.M. Kennedy, a law professor at the University of Toronto, had been contracted in 1943 to prepare a study of Canadian nationality. Kennedy warned yet again about the

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dangers of the incoherent Canadian legal situation and its manifestations in highly unequal citizenship status for Canadians depending upon their ancestry and place of birth as well as an exceedingly weak national capacity to protect Canadians abroad.53 Martin recognized that nationality required a unifying and substantive meaning beyond legal and social characteristics such as British subjecthood or cultural identity. In this way, Martin’s legislative proposal broke with British governmental wishes in the postwar era.54 Martin claimed that ‘citizenship means more than the right to vote; more than the right to hold and transfer property; more than the right to move freely under the protection of the state.’ By enumerating these political rights and presumably endorsing them as aspects of citizenship, Martin sought to delineate a new social dimension to citizenship. The new citizenship meant ‘the right to full partnership in the fortunes and the future of this nation ... a common stake in the welfare of the country.’ He wished to inculcate this partnership by devising citizenship ceremonies, enhancing the symbols of nationhood, and nurturing a ‘fervent and urgent unity’ similar to that of voluntary and service clubs. Comparing new citizenship ceremonies to the rituals of service clubs may have indicated the banality of Martin’s vision, but the hope to build ties of national community also reflected his yearning for the remaking of character that one position on citizenship – and not the one his own political party had been identified with – had long held to.55 The continuities and the differences between this new identity and the traditional model were shown by the sullen hostility about a separate nationality expressed by diehard advocates of Canada’s British identity like the old-line Ontario Tories T.L. Church of Toronto and J.R. MacNicoll of Kingston. The break-through of the proposal was suggested by the enthusiastic prediction from liberal nationalists like Liberal MP David Croll from Windsor, a strong defender of liberal immigration policies and social citizenship rights, that new Canadians would prove more fervent than established residents in celebrating an emerging Canadian way of life.56 As his own condemnation of nationalism suggested, Martin was wary of the goals he himself proposed. He had pointed out that the new bill did not seek to impose rigid language tests for citizenship, substituting instead a rather stiff twenty-year residency requirement in place of demonstrated knowledge of French or English. Moreover, Canadian practice continued to admit duality not only by preserving the British subjecthood of Canadians but by the explicit recognition of dual citizenship, a rarity in citizenship legislation

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at that time. Recognizing that citizenship could and did mean more than a set of rules for membership in the political order, Martin and other parliamentarians in 1946 set out to establish tests as well as rules of acquiring citizenship. The issue was for the first time taken up with considerable interest and enthusiasm by French-speaking Quebecers of all parties. Most tried to embrace the new concept of citizenship and yet preserve the multiple identities of the old. They openly welcomed the moves to end the British relationship, however incomplete it appeared. Liberal Edouard Rinfret, independent Liberal Liguori Lacombe, and Bloc Populaire nationalist Maxime Raymond, lawyers all, spoke most extensively. Each sought to emphasize the break with Great Britain. Each hoped that the declaration of Canadian citizens as British subjects could be dropped. Each compared the future Canadian unity with that of multiracial nations like Brazil or multiethnic states like Switzerland, which were also unquestionably sovereign states. To Rinfret, the models of these other states showed that it was not religious or linguistic unity but common historical experiences and political purposes that Canada must cultivate.57 The reservations expressed by French-speaking Quebecers as well as by British Ontarians revealed that long-standing disagreements about the content of citizenship remained strong. Positive support for the measures, however, came chiefly from leading Prairie politicians. From the Progressive Conservative John Diefenbaker to the CCFer Alistair Stewart and the Liberal Walter Tucker there was strong support because it was clear to them that the bill achieved its goal of establishing a clear nationality based on individual rights.58 If Paul Martin only alluded to the importance of defining a standard for citizenship, he emphasized the obligations of citizens. He also left the way for others to outline the necessary means for defining citizenship rights. Martin himself had suggested developing a sense of mutual welfare as the means to bring about unity.59 Others leaped on this point and stated that the only way to clearly develop this sense of citizenship rights was by a bill of rights. Liberals like Roche Pinard, a Quebec lawyer and later secretary of state, wanted to codify ‘the principles of Canadian citizenship.’60 In his remarks, Diefenbaker, as always a defence lawyer, chiefly focused on the ways in which the state (or the Liberal government) had abused individual rights particularly during the war. He posited a bill of rights as a defence against those forms of encroachment.61 Like Diefenbaker, David Croll, and Donald Fleming referred to the

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relevance of the United States model of entrenched citizens’ rights rather than just its citizenship laws. Manitoba CCF member Alistair Stewart, an avid defender of civil rights, wanted to include economic as well as political rights. Both Diefenbaker and Stewart quite rightly insisted on credit for their own long-standing support for a codified bill of rights.62 Only one debater, F. E. Jaenecke, a small-town Conservative lawyer from Saskatchewan, actually argued that citizenship was a mutual contract between citizen and state. Saskatchewan Liberal Walter Tucker’s interpretation that citizenship reflected the ‘will of the sovereign people of Canada,’ also suggested how much the opinion of MPs had substantial origins in or acknowledgment of a democratic rather than a monarchical concept of politics. Neither the Quebecers nor the Conservative advocates of a bill of rights like Diefenbaker and Davie Fulton, later responsible for the federal Bill of Rights of 1960, followed that particular line, at least at that time.63 Canadian citizenship debates consistently led to considerations that were much broader than the treatments found in the received categories of Canadian history and social science. These received categories have emphasized ‘imperial’ versus ‘liberal’ concepts of nationality and the progressive shift from narrowly legal to broader political and social citizenship in the course of the twentieth century.64 In the course of House of Commons debates, two quite distinctive positions on the acquisition and characteristics of citizenship emerged in the first half of the twentieth century. One emphasized centralization of administration and testing of individual fitness for nationality. That position is an aspect of the powerful centralizing tendencies that have characterized Canadian politics throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The other position stressed community input into administration, mutual agreement between individual and society about acquiring nationality, and an inclusionary basis for membership in the society, viz., the market economy. The two Canadian positions on citizenship parallel the debate about criteria for citizenship that late twentieth century commentators like John Barbalet and J.G.A. Pocock have identified. By articulating two different concepts of the relationship between people and the state, parliamentarians held to positions that Pocock saw as central to concepts of legal and political citizenship in the long tradition of Western political thought. One, ‘Aristotelian’ or Athenian, holds to an idealistic, exclusionary, and unequal concept of rights; the other Gaian and Roman, holds to a materialistic, potentially inclusionary, and potentially equal

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concept. Both were subsumed by the modern ‘liberal’ views of citizenship. Barbalet argues that by the mid-twentieth century, citizenship debates necessarily meant thinking about social as well as legal and political rights and therefore broadening membership accordingly.65 Over the past two decades, the consensus about the meanings and categories of citizenship has frayed both in practice and theory. As a result some political scientists have moved to argue that the liberal view encompassing legal, political, and social citizenship encourages only ‘passive’ citizenship of voluntary participation in public and political life. Instead, these critics have argued that contemporary citizenship rights must be ‘active’ based upon an insistence upon engagement in a full range of social as well as political activities and are prepared to make this activity the standard for both acquiring and retaining citizenship rights. Thus, in the analysis of political philosopher, Will Kymlicka, there has been a shift from rights to responsibilities as the basis for understanding citizenship, a position (from both neoconservative and communitarian writers) that seems to be in the forefront of much recent scholarship.66 As a result of their differences over precisely these matters, Canada’s MPs were forced to think about the sorts of rights, legal and political and, at least by the 1940s, social, that citizenship involved. It is notable that some MPs did emphasize the primary contract of labour rather than law as the basis for acquiring citizenship. The American political theorist Judith Shklar argued that the right to work and the right to vote (both deeply proscribed by race and gender historically in the United States) constituted the keys to membership and the basis for all the debates about political and social citizenship that characterized twentieth-century American public discourse.67 Shklar’s argument underlines why the Canadian MPs of the 1940s were wise to recognize that they had only begun to explore the meaning of citizenship. Those MPs who preferred cultural tests and national administration relied on social criteria and a high, if vague, standard of civic engagement to define Canadian nationality. Those who preferred economic criteria and local administration appear to have been quite comfortable with a legal, contractual, and rather minimalist framework in which to include individuals in the country. Nonetheless, the debate about citizenship represented a crucial means for thinking seriously about inclusion in Canada. The arguments of a Conservative and self-styled imperialist like R.B. Bennett showed that he was preoccupied with the shaping of institutions and laws to deal with Canada’s peculiar situation rather than with arriving at effective uniformity with the Empire.

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Bennett and others like him, mostly political Conservatives, wanted to create a social environment that would include only certain kinds of men and women. Imperialists like Bennett can certainly be seen as having a social concept of citizenship. In comparison, the position of a Liberal like A.B. Copp, a cabinet minister in a government yearning for greater constitutional autonomy, shows a fixation on the relationship between individual and state in Canada rather than the Empire. Like so many other Liberals and social democrats who shared this position, Copp emphasized the market relationship, the contributions of people to the economy, as the means of determining political membership. All moves towards greater uniformity of naturalization in the period from 1914 to 1947 floundered in the intellectual and practical complexity of defining specific Canadian standards and goals. The polarization of the debate remained. Ironically, the two sides agreed that Canada needed its own citizenship standards and legislation. This realization, prompted by legal advice, Imperial Conference decisions, and a new national mood alike, led to the 1946 move to legislate on Canadian citizenship. The MPs who spoke in that debate recognized that they were clearing away legal and administrative anomalies and defining political citizenship, but also that this was only the beginning of a serious examination of the rights of citizens in Canada. This position was expressed most clearly by the advocates of a bill of rights, who argued that the next step was to work towards a codified definition of citizenship. This position was shared by the Liberal Walter Tucker, the Progressive Conservative John Diefenbaker, and the social democrat Alistair Stewart, all of whom were solid Prairie democrats. It is notable enough that their position found common ground with the mélange of Quebec Liberals and nationalists. The Quebecers who posited the model of a multinational consociational nation were just as keen as the Prairie devotees of an American-style bill of rights to work towards substantive meaning of citizenship, but only as a new legislative project. They both recognized that the 1947 Citizenship Act was but a partial resolution of the citizenship debate and only a step toward the inclusion of all peoples into the Canadian state.

NOTES 1 Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970). Several essays published in the Canadian Journal of African Studies, 15/1 (1981), offered strong

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Barry Ferguson critical views of Berger’s thesis about Canada and imperialism, mostly to show that sometimes imperialism meant imperialism: Anthony KirkGreene, ‘Taking Canada into Partnership in “The White Man’s Burden,”’ 33–46; Suzann Buckley, ‘Reflections on Canadian Imperialism,’ 46–51; John E. Flint, ‘Reflexions on British Imperial and Canadian History,’ 51–4; and Arthur I. Silver, ‘Quelques considerations sur les rapports du Canada français avec l’imperialism britannique au XIXe siècle,’ 55–75. Terry Cook offered a strong critique of the Berger thesis in his doctoral dissertation but published only two articles in the Journal of Canadian Studies: ‘George R. Parkin and the Concept of Britannic Idealism,’ 10/3 (1975): 15–31, and ‘The Canadian Conservative Tradition: An Historical Perspective,’ 8/4 (1973): 31–9. Most recently Philip Buckner has coordinated a major series of conferences that reconsidered Canada and Empire. Three collections of essays have been published in 2005 and 2006 by UBC Press and are reviewed by Lisa Chilton, ‘Canada and the British Empire: A Review Essay,’ Canadian Historical Review, 89/1 (2008): 89–95. The books are entitled Rediscovering the British World, Canada and the British World, and Canada and the End of Empire. John E. Kendle, The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975). This was an important and revisionist account but did not gain a lot of traction in Canada. Elizabeth Gidengel, Citizens (Canadian Democratic Audit Series, vol. 3) (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004); Abigail Bakan and Daiva Stasiulis, Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the Global System (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). In the international world of historians, an online discussion group has been formed, ‘H-Citizenship’: http://www .h-net.org/~citizen/. T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950). Marshall’s work and the broad aspects of modern if not postmodern analysis of citizenship is found in J.M. Barbalet, Citizenship: Rights, Struggle, and Class Inequality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Jérôme Ouellet and Frédéric Roussel-Beaulieu, ‘Les débats parlementaires au service de l’histoire politique,’ Bulletin d’Histoire Politique, 11/3 (2003): 23–40. Kenneth Carty and Peter Ward, ‘The Making of a Canadian Political Citizenship,’ in Carty and Ward, eds., National Politics and Community in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1986) 65–79; Robert Bothwell, ‘Something of Value? Subjects and Citizens in Canadian History,’ in William Kaplan, ed., Belonging: The Meaning and Future of Canadian Citizenship (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993) 25–35.

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7 The Colonial and Imperial Conferences, vols. I–III, edited by Maurice Ollivier (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1954). Hereafter, these volumes are cited as CIC, followed by the volume number. 8 On passports, see J.F. Hilliker, Canada’s Department of External Affairs, vol. I, 1909–1946 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), 4–5, 9, 63. CIC, I, 1902 Conference, 190–1. 9 CIC, I, 1907 Conference, 223, 256–2, 320–1; II, 1911 Conference, 85–8, 153–6. 10 CIC, II, 1911 Conference, 86–7, 153; I, 1907 Conference, 320. 11 CIC, II, 1911 Conference. 12 Debates, 22 March 1910, 5349–50, 19 Jan. 1911, 2012, 2014, 2018. Oliver alluded to the Dominion Lands Act and its requirement that individuals undertake three years of residency and improvements to the property, plus appearance before a county court judge. 13 Debates, 22 March 1910, 5850 and 5860. 14 John English, The Decline of Politics: The Conservatives and the Party System, 1901–1929 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), and Robert Craig Brown, Robert Laird Borden, vol. II (Toronto: Macmillan, 1980). 15 Debates, 5 May 1914, 3250–1, 22 May 1914, 4119–20. 16 Ibid., 22 May 1914, 4119–26, 4146. 17 Ibid., 4143–4, 4133. 18 Ibid., 4133–7. 19 Ibid., 23 May 1914, 4180. 20 Ibid., 22 May 1914, 4127–8, 4146–7. 21 Ibid., 4129–30 (Martin), 23 May 1914, 4175 (Neely). 22 Ibid., 22 May 1914, 4141–3 (Thomson), 23 May 1914, 4177 (Lemieux). 23 Ibid., 4 June 1914, 4823–4 (Pugsley), 4825 (Doherty). 24 Ibid., 22 May 1914, 4144. 25 CIC, II, 1918 Conference, 351–3, 1917 Conference, 220–2. 26 Debates, 17 June 1920, 3682–3. 27 Ibid., 21 June 1920, 3920–2, 3915–19, 17 June 1920, 3683. 28 Ibid., 1 March 1921, 397, 8 March 1921, 645. 29 Ibid., 23 April 1923, 2107–9, 2182–3 (Copp), 30 April 1928, 2531–8 (Rinfret). 30 Ibid., 23 April 1923, 2182–3. 31 The social scientific consensus about the ease of assimilation is discussed in histories of social science that examine the ‘Canadian Frontiers of Settlement’ series of the 1920s and 1930s: see Marlene Shore, The Science of Social Redemption (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988) on sociologists, and Barry Ferguson, Remaking Liberalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993) on political economists. See also Susan Bellay’s alasunpublished University of Manitoba Ph.D. dissertation of 2001, ‘Pluralism and Race/Ethnic Relations in Canadian Social Science, 1880–1939.’

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32 J.S. Woodsworth, Strangers within Our Gates (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972 [1909]). See also, Allen Mills, Fool for Christ: the Political Thought of J.S. Woodsworth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). See Debates, 25 April 1923, 2184–5. 33 Debates, 9 May 1928, 3843, 30 April 1928, 2531–8. 34 Ibid., 25 April 1923, 2184–5 (W.M. German of Welland), 2183–4 (W.G. McQuarrie of New Westminster), 2187–8 (R.B. Hanson of York-Sunbury), 2195–6 (J.S. Woodsworth of Winnipeg North), 1 May 1928, 2592–3 (W.R. Motherwell of Regina), 15 June 1923, 3984, and 1 May 1928, 2567–8 (Milton Campbell of Mackenzie). 35 Ibid., 3 May 1923, 2456, 2 May 1928, 2617. Allen Mills properly emphasizes Woodsworth’s broad sympathy with immigrant peoples despite his nod to community standards. See Fool for Christ, 224–37. 36 Debates, 13 May 1925, 3165–6, 1 May 1928, 2580 (Ladner), 3 May 1923, 4224–5 (Neill), 1 May 1928, 2558–9 (McQuarrie). 37 See sources cited in n36. 38 Debates, 13 May 1925, 3161–3. 39 Ibid., 1 May 1928, 2592–3 (Motherwell), 1 May 1928, 2592–3 (Jacobs). 40 Ibid., 30 April 1928, 2541, 2551, 2555, 9 May 1928, 2841–2 (R.B. Bennett), 30 April 1928, 2539–40 (Perley). 41 Ibid., 30 April 1928, 2548–55, 22 May 14, 4134–6 (Bennett), 1 May 1928, 2569–70 (Ladner), 2563–4 (Church). 42 Ibid., 15 Feb. 1929, 176–9. 43 Ibid., 180–1, 182–3. 44 Ibid., 185-6. 45 H.H. Wrong, ‘Some Observations on the Operation of the Canadian Immigration Act,’ 20 Nov. 1929, 55–65, Documents on Canadian External Relations, vol. 4, 1926–30; H.H. Wrong, ‘Memo on Canadian Nationality,’ 24 April 1937, and J.E. Read, ‘Nationality and Imperial Relations,’ 19 May 1937, Documents on Canadian External Relations, vol. 6, 1936–9, 146–7, 150–2. 46 CIC, III, 1926 Conference, 222–4, 1930 Conference, 245, 1937 Conference, 442–5. 47 Debates, 14 April 1931, 575–6, 27 May 1931, 2021–3. 48 Ibid., 27 May 1931, 2025. 49 Read, ‘Nationality and Imperial Relations.’ Other authorities were even more disturbed by these flaws. See also, N.A.M. Mackenzie, ed., The Legal Status of Aliens in Pacific Countries (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), esp. N.A.M. Mackenzie, ‘Introduction,’ 1–15; H.F. Angus, ‘Canadian Immigration: The Law and Its Administration,’ 58–74, and ‘The Legal Status in British Columbia of Residents of Oriental Race,’ 77–87; Moffat Hancock, ‘Naturalization in Canada,’ 103–9.

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50 Two expressions of this argument are J.L. Granatstein, Canada’s War: The, Politics of the Mackenzie King Government 1939–45 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), and Jose Igartua, The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in English Canada, 1945–71 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006). 51 Rare for his time among Ontario lawyers, Martin had an undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto and did graduate work in law at the University of Geneva. Debates, 20 March 1946, 131, 22 Oct. 1945, 1336–7. 52 Ibid., 2 April 1946, 502, 509. 53 W.P.M. Kennedy, Report … on Some Problems of the Law of Nationality (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1943). 54 See, for example, N.A. Robertson to W.L.M. King, 19 April 1946, Documents on Canadian External Relations, vol. 12, 1946, 1356–60. 55 Debates, 2 April 1946, 510. 56 Ibid., 5 April 1946, 598–9 (Church), 29 April 1946, 996–7 (MacNicoll), 9 April 1946, 692–5 (Croll). 57 Ibid., 5 April 1946, 623–5 (Rinfret), 607–9 (Lacombe), 622–3 (Raymond), 594–7 (Rinfret). 58 Ibid., 2 April 1946, 510–1 (Diefenbaker), 9 April 1946, 697–701 (Stewart), 706–9 (Tucker). 59 Ibid., 7 May 1956, 1310ff. 60 Ibid., 5 April 1946, 506. 61 Ibid., 2 April 1946, 511-3. 62 Ibid., 9 April 1946, 685 (Fleming), 9 April 1946, 694–5 (Croll), 9 April 1946, 697–701 (Stewart). 63 Ibid., 5 April 1946, 586–7 (Jaenecke), 9 April 1946, 708–9 (Tucker). 64 See the essays cited in n6 above. 65 Barbalet, Citizenship; J.G.A. Pocock, ‘The Ideal of Citizenship since Classical Times,’ Queen’s Quarterly, 99/1 (1992): 33–55. In an invited response to Pocock, Susan Moller Okin wrote that modern liberal citizenship models had failed to address the inherent gender, racial, and class barriers to equal membership in society: ‘Women, Equality and Citizenship,’ Queen’s Quarterly, 99/1 (1992): 56–71. 66 Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Chapters 7 and 8, esp. 287–93. 67 Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).

8

Modernist Blues: Performing Race in the Harlem Renaissance David Monod

According to the nineteenth-century essayist John Foster all successful people had a duty to maintain a record of their achievements. This record should not ‘be composed by small daily or weekly accumulations ... but [should be made] at certain considerable intervals, as at the end of each year, or any other measure of time that is ample enough for some definable alteration to have taken place in the [individual’s] character or attainment.’1 To Foster, the memoir was a way of ordering the messiness of human life and harmonizing it with the classificatory systems of the Linnean society, the scientific exposition and the bibelots that cluttered people’s mantles and cabinets. Observable differences served for Foster, as for other Victorian thinkers, as the basis of objective classification. The symmetry and order that he presumed could be seen in the record of individual attainment was, like the distinct types of plants and animals, evidence of the divine plan, a visible bridge between the finite world he lived in and the infinite mind of God. In Foster’s view, science yielded truths not hypotheses, God’s majesty was discernible and the landscapes of nature seemed to make sense from whatever angle they were perceived. His vision of a coherently ordered universe would survive increasing challenges in America over the course of the nineteenth century and it would really only lose credibility, at least among the educated elite, in the early twentieth. Victorian certitude’s critics, who saw themselves as modernists, conceived of life as fractured, somewhat incoherent, often random and in need of continual reinterpretation. This essay will explore American modernism’s challenge to the idea of a well-ordered world in the early twentieth century and will focus on its implications for the construction of race among artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

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Race to Victorian Americans was a widely accepted classificatory concept. Although its practical measurement was hotly debated, it was commonly used as an instrument for measuring Foster’s definable alteration. To late nineteenth-century Americans, there was a plurality of races: Poles, Irish, Germans, Jews, and Italians were all considered races with observable and defining characteristics. In fact, at the turn of the century, the U.S. Immigration Commission enumerated forty-five distinct races of people. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, this classification system was largely supplanted by a binary concept of race which leached out from the American South. This binary concept – under which people were classified as either white or black – grew to be accepted across the nation as increasing numbers of African Americans fled from segregation, as America conquered islands in the Caribbean and Pacific, and as racism gained scientific respectability. Although Jews, Hispanic Americans, and Asians continued to occupy liminal places in the Americans’ Southernized racial consciousness, by 1930 the idea that there were two essential races in America had become generally accepted.2 Why did a more categorical approach to the idea of race gain in popularity at a time when modernists were challenging the very primacy of nineteenth-century classificatory systems? Modernists tested the notion of race which they saw developing around them, as they did other essentialist constructions, but they were more concerned with revealing the fragmenting influence of perspectives and contexts and reproducing those fractured viewpoints than they were in deconstructing the component parts. Their concern lay in showing how one identity might be substituted for another in an endless process of emergent meaning. Although they felt truth could only be glimpsed in pieces, as manifested in situations and contexts, they generally accepted the notion that truth, the essence of things, or the souls of people, was latent in the subjects they addressed. Consequently, they were able to manipulate and reimagine racial identities without questioning essentialist ideas about race and in so doing they helped legitimize those ideas among urban intellectuals. The Harlem Renaissance is a term used to describe the confluence of African-American modernist artists and thinkers in and around New York in the years between the two world wars. This chapter argues that Black modernists were almost as validating in their approach to the biracialization of identity as their white contemporaries. Although they knew the pain of race stereotyping, they were deeply conscious of their

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role as the first generation of African-American artists to gain the recognition of intellectuals and art patrons. Most of them wanted not simply to define themselves as American artists, they wanted to celebrate their racial identity and free it from the shackles of nineteenth-century minstrelsy. In asserting the existence of an authentic blackness, a tradition into which they could place themselves, they also tended to make use of popular racial stereotypes and images. Even though they manipulated the stereotypes, few among this generation of artists were able to or interested in working out the ramification of modernism’s uncertainty, relativism, and multipositioning on the idea of race. Many of those who viewed the Igorots and Negritos from the Philippines, the star attractions at the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair, could hardly believe they were human. ‘They approach,’ declared the New York Sun, ‘as nearly to the conception of primitive man as any people thus far discovered.’ The Igorots’ nakedness, their preference for dog meat, and their reputation as ‘head hunters’ were so particularly shocking that it seemed completely justifiable assigning them to the category of ‘anthropological freaks.’ For many of the everyday Americans who saw the Philippine Aboriginals, optical certitude, and a belief in nature’s hierarchy continued to influence their reactions. The natives looked and behaved so strangely, they seemed so far ‘below’ Americans, that they appeared almost animals. As one Kentucky reporter explained, ‘all efforts to civilize them have failed,’ and he was particularly drawn to one ‘Negrito specimen’ who was commonly referred to as ‘the missing link’: the man, he noted, had ‘round shoulders, long gorilla-like arms, a horizontal profile. The palms of his hands are curiously unhuman.’3 Other spectators of the Philippines Exhibit in St Louis, however, perceived the Aboriginals of Luzon differently. To one commentator, they revealed ‘the frank savagery of unaccommodated manhood’ which he thought more palatable than ‘the symbols of shamefaced civilization’ which ogled them at the Fair. The sixteen-year-old T.S. Eliot, who visited the exposition, went off and wrote a story about the Igorots in which he portrayed them as much more rational and decent than the degraded whites he placed among them. And a certain Mrs Wilkins found sufficient kinship with the head-hunting savages to have herself photographed holding the hand of a young native while teaching him to cakewalk.4 For more hide-bound late Victorians, visiting the ‘dog eaters’ served to affirm their faith in white racial superiority, the divine order, and American empire. That this view was prevalent in St Louis

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is not surprising, given America’s overseas expansion and the growing ulcer of segregation. What is more surprising is that many spectators saw in the Igorots a distorted vision of themselves. For in their reaction one can detect the challenge the modernist approach was posing to conventional thinking. The contrasting response of Euro-Americans to the ‘dog eaters of the Philippines’ reveals the survival of Foster’s ‘definable alteration,’ its transformation into biracialism, and the critique that modernism presented to it. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Darwin’s evolutionary taxonomy – the idea of variable descent from a common stock and the infinite range of possible environmental adaptations – had revolutionized the early Victorian catalogue. As Herbert Spencer quipped, ‘evolution is definable as change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity.’5 Darwinism had placed the firm sides of the classificatory boxes in doubt by threatening the idea that things have immanent meanings. If plants and animals were not fixed in nature, if divine intent could not necessarily be extrapolated from the perfection (or lack thereof) of their form, then the differences between things could no longer be taken as absolute and essential. The Igorots might simply be Euro-Americans who had adapted themselves to a different environment. That which was commonly seen as biological could, in fact, be cultural. The great debate that arose in late nineteenth-century America over which took precedence – similarity or manifest diversity, the common root or polygenesis, the perfection of God’s original work or the infinite variety of environmental adaptation – ended for most people in the triumph of imperialism, eugenics, biracialism, Social Darwinism, white supremacy, and segregation.6 This is why so many visitors to the St Louis World’s Fair could use the idea of evolution to celebrate their own advancement and calculate their distance from the sub-human ‘black’ savages. But at least some of those observing the Igorots had absorbed Darwin’s message differently. For them, the certitude of seeing was being supplanted by the hypothetical relationship; although people might appear different, that was merely evidence of the cultural and social adaptations they made and not the measure of their biological essence, innate humanity, fundamental intelligence, or ability. Differences that remained absolute for some had become contingent for others. Among these modernist thinkers, perfect order was dissolving into an imagined web of diversities. The question was: would the promise of modernism – its questioning of categories and its attraction

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to the unfamiliar – find realization in a challenge to prevailing ideas about race? Modernism is a controversial, even murky, cultural movement. Some critics read the modernists’ tendency to juxtapose unrelated objects and their insistence on the autonomy of their art as evidence of their failure to engage with reality. Others see modernism as relativistic and deconstructive; a manifestation of the modern condition and not a reaction to it. But modernism was not really a retreat from uncertainty or a surrender to it; it was an effort to extrapolate a new authenticity from an environment and a sensory system that modernists considered conditional. To the American photographer Roland Rood, modern art involved ‘the almost impossible feat of combining your thought with railroad-yards, locomotives and skyscrapers’; the world around him needed the artist’s point of view to animate it.7 Modernists rejected the Victorian ideal that the essence of things was discrete and determinate and constant. To these products of the Darwinian revolution, the true nature of things could never be fully known, as it was always contingent, only partially observable, ever-evolving, and fragmentary. Relationships between cause and effect could be posited, hypothesized, and implied, but there was randomness to nature and our perception of it that made it impossible to link them definitively, as John Foster had done. Modernism arose out of the realization that systems of classification based on discrete categories were collapsing and that they could no longer base understanding simply on the evidence of sight. Nineteenthcentury Americans liked to believe that appearance guided one to truth; by observing nature, one could understand its symmetry; by studying people, one could learn their characters. The face was a particular signifier of moral character, which is why the Victorians were so suspicious of cosmetics and disguises, and popularly imagined cranial shape to be an indicator of intellectual and emotional proclivity.8 But by the 1880s, vision, so prized at mid-century, was losing its privileged place among the senses. This was not just Darwin’s doing. The visual experience of urban and industrial life in the late nineteenth century was proving so overwhelming as to be unintelligible. As William Crary Brownell, a celebrated journalist and critic lamented of his own city in 1884, ‘there is no palpable New York in the sense in which there is a Paris, a Vienna, a Milan. You can touch it at no point. It is not even ocular. There is instead a Fifth Avenue, a Broadway, a Central Park; a Chatham Square ... the whole is destitute of definiteness, of distinction.’9 In the United States, street planners had battled the urban ambiguity with straight lines and

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90-degree angles, but the confusion of pedlars and carriages, shoppers and prostitutes, wet laundry and stinking garbage overflowed their numbered streets and avenues. Incandescent lighting turned night into day; mass-produced clothing reduced the visual indicators of class; even the technological improvements which seemed to validate sight, such as the photograph and the moving picture, became objects of manipulation, retouching, and special effects. By the early years of the twentieth century, Americans had grown understandably fascinated with the idea that sight might be fallible and enamoured of the trompe l’oeil, the magic show, and the impression. Popular entertainers like the escape-artist Harry Houdini built their careers on their ability to defy visual knowledge. Audiences who could not see how Houdini could escape and who could not see the process of his escape, still had to accept the fact that he had escaped. Similarly, cross-dressers like Karyl Norman, ‘the Creole Fashion Plate,’ became leading vaudeville performers in the early twentieth century. Norman, who would first appear on stage as a ‘good looking Creole girl’ singing blues songs to a piano accompaniment, would then ‘discard her wig and show how easy it is to fool an audience.’ The transformed ‘Fashion Plate,’ whitefaced now and in evening dress, would then proceed to sing ‘double voice,’ rendering his ‘soprano notes as well as he does his baritone.’ Like Houdini, Norman gave the lie to the nineteenth-century idea that seeing meant knowing. He made a mockery of visual and aural knowledge and helped broaden doubts about sight being able to reveal truth. In this way, these eminent vaudevillians stood alongside Mrs Wilkins and T.S. Eliot in the vanguard of the modern age. But could their challenge to visible certitude be extrapolated to test the notion that race was an essential and predetermined indicator of character?10 The difficulty is that for all that they questioned the evidence of sight, modernists still accepted the notion that objects in nature had an actuality that transcended their immediate contexts. Modernists knew that their art could not reveal a complete truth; that it could represent only pieces of their subject’s nature. But they were still drawn to the idea that the bits might be added up to constitute a greater and more authentic whole. As Gertrude Stein put it, although perception had been fragmented, modernism’s goal remained one of creating ‘a whole history of each one of [us]’ by assembling a perspective from which to present ‘every way there can be of seeing [the various] kinds of [us].’ The goal of modernist art became a dual one: on the one hand, it aimed to reveal the incompleteness of our perception and the fragmented na-

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ture of identity, and on the other, to demonstrate that the limited truths made perceptible in different contexts and times were nonetheless authentic and true.11 Artists could suggest multiple, limited, and authentic meanings by placing objects in different contexts. They could reproduce the partial nature of perception through literary devices such as multiple or unreliable narrators and visual ones like overlapping perspectives or collage. But art could only decipher the inner meaning of things and explore their diverse manifestations if the confusion of voices and images and values present in the lived world was controlled. Subjects had to be isolated from the contaminating clutter of daily life and its entanglements in order for the individual strands of their diverse natures to be revealed. This is why the modernist painter Marsden Hartley could insist that ‘the thing must be brought clearly to the surface in terms of itself, without cast or shade or the application of extraneous ideas.’ The goal, agreed the poet William Carlos Williams was to reveal something of the essence, not just to represent the surface image; it was ‘not realism but reality itself’ that modernists were after.12 Collage, involving the positioning or layering of supposedly incompatible objects, was one of the primary media through which artists attempted to expose the limitations of human understanding and the authentic truth, beauty, and harmony beneath the surface images. In Man Ray’s Noire et blanche (1926), for example, a landmark modernist work, one can see discordances: the incompatibility of the modern Kiki (the female model with her slick hair and twenties make-up) and the African folk art; the asymmetrical horizontal head of Kiki and the vertical mask; the white and the black; the disembodied light that generalizes and flattens the model’s flesh and the one which seems to emanate from within the mask. Man Ray, however, did not imagine his photograph in this disjointed fashion. His method revolved around the manipulation of apparent incompatibles, the employment of ‘factors that are not related in any way’ in order to achieve ‘the creative act … [of] coupling these … different factors to produce a plastic poem.’ As the art historian Sidra Stich has observed, there is a ‘relationship of correspondence’ in Noire et blanche that can be found in the shape of the two heads, the simplicity of shading in the two faces, the identity of expression, the balancing of the shadows cast on the horizontal plane by the model and the mask. Noire et blanche finds completeness and oneness through the counterpoint of white and black, of life and art, of antique and modern. It also finds wholeness in the parallel meanings Man Ray

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assigned to Kiki and the mask for she was, in her poise, aloofness, and sexual freedom (what the fictitious showgirl Dixie Dugan described in 1928 as ‘being cool and looking hot’) his image of the modern primitive. The point, William Carlos Williams explained, was that ‘things of nearly totally divergent natures but possessing one-thousandth part of a quality in common’ can be shown to exist ‘in an imagined category and not in a gross natural array.’13 Man Ray postulated harmony in Noire et blanche by juxtaposing ostensibly antipodean objects. In so doing he sought to illuminate the organic relationship between white and black, mask and model, artefact and individual. He wanted to reveal something of Kiki’s (or women’s) essence: her own form of ‘primitive blackness.’ Most of the first generation of American modernists shared Man Ray’s attitudes. They too wished to depict the complexity and the diversity of viewpoints and the contingent character of the truths our senses perceive and our minds process. In this way they could show that truth was not knowable in its totality and that subjects might reveal different truths about themselves in changing contexts. In the interests of demonstrating the fallibility of accepted assumptions and images modernists were fond of mixing up artefacts and ideas drawn from different cultures. They declared their freedom from categorical thinking, their spiritual autonomy, and their ability to represent the human essence through such incongruities as wearing Ibo bracelets, writing music for Balinese gamelan, and slumming it in Harlem. What were considered ‘primitive’ ideas and artefacts were particularly popular with modernists because of their potent associations. Counterpointing apparently incompatible objects not only revealed the bankruptcy of a classificatory system derived from surface appearance, it also manifested the belief that a richer truth could be found through hypothesized associations. Exotic art that was considered ‘tribal’ or ‘folk’ was especially useful in this regard because it served to expose by negation Victorian value structures and assumptions. Because exotic works were thought to be closer to ‘nature’ and untainted by ‘artifice,’ they could arouse a sense of freedom from the constraints of modern civilization, they could suggest base instincts, and they could create impressions of mystery, magic, and superstition. West African art was especially alluring aesthetically because its unfamiliar perspectives and proportions, pure colours, and polished lines seemed the antithesis of both nineteenth-century decoration and turn-of-the-century naturalism. That African art had been produced by people popularly regarded

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as racially inferior made it only the more alluring and evocative. Alberto Giacometti’s towering metal sculpture, Spoon Woman (1926–27), for instance, presents female fertility and sexuality as mythic, powerful, and forbidding by employing the forms and playing with the stereotypes associated with traditional West Africa cutlery. Because the object does not appear to be a woman at all and the logic of linking women and spoons is not immediately apparent, the sculpture embodies Williams’s notion of imagined categories. Artists could use the idea of the primitive to force audiences to perceive new linkages and unexpected meanings and to recognize the shifting and unstable nature of reality. For white American modernists this kind of primitivism was creatively liberating. They conceived blackness and the primitive form as means of escaping from the confines of Victorian civilization. In defiance of the racial assumptions of the white supremacists, ‘primitive’ ideas and objects also placed them in contact with what collector Albert Barnes called ‘the essential oneness of all human beings.’ Like certain visitors to the Igorots of the World’s Fair, modernists believed that the potential to display diverse elements of character existed in all people. To the composer George Gershwin, modernity was a matter of recognizing that the spirit of America was ‘all colors and all souls unified.’ As Gershwin explained, ‘we are living in an age of staccato, not legato. This we must accept.’ To his ‘machine age’ sensibility, jazz music, the music of black people, could alone capture the unstable and ‘nervous energy of modern American life.’ Only by taking the rhythms of jazz ‘into his blood’ could Gershwin create a truly American and modern music. ‘I do not assert that the American soul is Negroid,’ the composer cautioned in 1927, ‘but it is a combination that includes the wail, the whine, and the exultant note of the old “mammy” songs of the South. It is black and white.’ Gershwin and Barnes were making positive, even remarkable, statements for their time, not least because attitudes like theirs encouraged white people to seek out the friendship and cultural inspiration of black people. They genuinely cherished the humanity of all peoples, but that did not mean that they saw everyone as alike.14 The modernists’ embrace of heterogeneity had not carried them over the barricades of racialist thought. The allure of the black primitive was always more than aesthetic; modernists wanted to reveal their own identity with what they assumed to be its opposite. Although composer George Antheil echoed Gershwin in proclaiming all modernists to be ‘mulattoes’ and recent recipients of a ‘gigantic blood infusion’ from Africa, in actuality he was

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careful to segregate the plasma. Antheil’s negritude, like Gershwin’s, was a matter of speculative proximity rather than oneness. ‘The black man,’ he chortled, was ‘the exact opposite color of ourselves!’ He was ‘like a photograph of ourselves ... the sole negative from which our positive can be drawn! Holding this negative up to the sun we see the essence that so many eyes and ears have been trying to demonstrate on canvas, paper, and stone.’ To Antheil’s mind, the white self could better experience its own sensuality by exposing itself to the separate and distinct black self. It could use blackness in order to reveal the primitive instinct within itself, through collage rather than blending. A true union, Zora Neale Hurston joked, would have been too much. It would have been ‘like seeing your sister turn into a ’gator. A familiar strangeness. You keep seeing your sister in the ’gator and the ’gator in your sister, and you’d rather not.’15 This was why white modernists felt representing the universal savage had to be distinguished from actually being black. Whiteness needed blackness to reveal the different elements within itself; it was not interested in miscegenation. The wearing of African ornaments, the composing of music employing African-American rhythms, and the cross-cultural practices modernists adopted only had meaning because of the values that had come to be associated with non-European, non-white, cultures. As a character in Carl Van Vechten’s novel, Nigger Heaven (1926), announces when reflecting on the modernists’ fondness for cultural transgressions, they revealed that ‘we are all savages.’16 The expressive power of the black and the primitive ultimately derived from their anticipated associations: passion, fertility, simplicity, superstition, and the threat of violence. Although white modernists justifiably boasted of their liberality in adopting figurations popularly considered barbarous, although they insisted on the autonomy of their art from fixed meanings, appreciating them depended on the spectator’s acceptance of pre-existing stereotypes that were fundamentally biracial in nature. White modernism’s engagement with uncertainty and autonomy led them to a dependence on prevailing images because collage worked only if the objects that were juxtaposed carried latent meanings. T.S. Eliot, who as a teenager might defend the Igorots’ dignity, could still go on to employ crude racial stereotypes in his later poems. 17 Blackness could bring white sensuality into relief and exoticism could achieve its disruptive value only if the meanings commonly ascribed to both were assumed. And this is why the exercise was so insulting to African Americans. Or so Helga Crane, the interracial heroine in Nella Larsen’s novel,

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Quicksand (1928), discovers when she sees a portrait of herself painted by the fictitious Danish modernist, Axel Olsen. The portrait, from which Helga recoils, was merely ‘some disgusting sensual creature with her features.’ Larsen accepts Axel’s need for Helga, but she understands it to be self-gratifying and even delusional. When Axel proposes marriage to Helga, he intones: ‘for me it will be an experience. It may be that with you Helga, for wife, I will become great. Immortal. Who knows. I didn’t want to love you, but I had to.’ Helga, who not surprisingly rejects his unlovely offer, explains that she could not marry a white man, to which the painter replies uncomprehendingly: ‘I have offered you marriage, Helga Crane, and you answer me with some strange talk of race and shame. What nonsense is this?’18 White modernists who placed themselves alongside a black muse could not understand the pernicious nature of the ideals they cherished. As Larsen recognizes, their freedom came through an objectification and homogenization of race identity presented in such a way as to make prejudice seem old fashioned. In so doing, modernists were bowdlerizing for their own purposes something that was for African Americans an oppressive social reality. Few scholars have been more troubled by modernism’s relationship with the primitive than students of early twentieth-century AfricanAmerican culture. Primitivism, they argue, was a caricature, a blackface for the modern age, a fantasy that could only damage the authentic expression of black creativity. The African-American modernists of the interwar years, the ‘New Negro’ writers, musicians, and thinkers who formed the Harlem Renaissance, saw themselves at the base of ‘a racial mountain.’ ‘No matter how committed to giving expression to the black experience the Renaissance was,’ writes Cary Wintz, ‘in the final analysis, [it was] dependant on white audiences, white magazines, white publishers, and white money.’ Consequently, black artists had to operate within and around white modernists’ projections of them as possessors of an ‘exotic’ sensibility. For the historian Nathan Huggins, writing in 1971, white primitivism was a pernicious influence which impeded the New Negroes’ creativity and minimized their impact. The goal of the black modernist, Huggins declared, should have been to ‘delineate the Negro character and personality in the American context. Did the Negro belong? Was he distinctive? How? Was he merely a white man with black skin?’ But, Huggins argues, Renaissance artists failed to fulfil this obligation. Primitivism was the counterfeit article that lured them (as it had white modernists) away from their duty: ‘the Negro, who had long fought a white imposed stereotype, found that

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those very traits which he had denied were now in vogue. One need merely rework the old minstrel model and one had a new Negro image that both conformed to contemporary values and laid claim to a distinctive Negro self.’ Because it was hard to resist a projection that came with substantial white patronage, black artists accepted atavism and primitivism, Huggins charges, falsely believing that they had liberated their consciousness, ignoring the fact that they were simply applying another layer of burnt cork. ‘For the purposes of ethnic identity, primitivism is peculiarly limited. It is especially a male fantasy,’ Huggins announced, and it led artists, ‘in their quest for Africa, [and] in their fancy of Timbuctoo and Alexandria’ to ‘forsake their actual past.’19 Huggins’s interpretation still rests imposingly at the centre of the debate over black modernism, but over time its foundations have begun to decay. Although many scholars still accept his overall position, it is widely felt that Huggins either exaggerated the importance of primitivism or mistook its function. According to historians with more integrationist beliefs, white and black moderns generally worked amicably and profitably together. Primitivism was merely one element in the larger cultural engagement that in the early twentieth century produced America’s mongrel culture. To Ann Douglas, all modernists ‘wore masks’ and primitivism was only one among the many they adopted. ‘This is hardly to say that black and white collaboration ... was conflict free. Racism was everywhere in white ranks, and blacks were fully aware of it.’ But the ‘collaborations’ of black and white modernists remained ‘an affair of equals, and equals are opponents as often as they are friends.’ Pace Huggins: ‘only one right fully engaged the attention of black and white moderns’ and that was ‘the right to appropriate anything that caught their fancy to their own needs.’ But if scholars like Douglas have questioned Huggins’s insistence on primitivism’s centrality to modernism, others have accused him of succumbing to the same fetishism for the exotic he attributed to the New Negro artists. Houston Baker’s influential study, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987), for example, asserts that Huggins simply failed to grasp the subversive nature of black primitivism. Baker dismisses white modernists as ‘boorishly racist, indisputably sexist, and unbelievably wealthy Anglo-Saxon males ... shoring [themselves] up ... under perceived threat of “democratization” and a “rising tide” of color.’ However, because white moderns controlled access to and defined success in the cultural field, they forced black artists to develop their own vision in the ‘tight spaces’ of their omnipresent primitivist

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discourse. What emerged was a ‘uniquely black’ Afro-American form which improvised on the same folk culture which attracted white modernists, but which subverted their racist stereotypes. Historian Paul Anderson has documented Baker’s thesis in a nuanced intellectual history of some of the people contributing to the Harlem Renaissance (2001). He shows how the rejection of primitivism led W.E.B. DuBois to defend nineteenth-century artistic representations of black spirituals for their uplifting qualities and Alain Locke to celebrate the contemporary and cosmopolitan elements in black cultural expression. The fullest realization of the Baker thesis, Anderson argues, can be found in the work of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, writers who, through their ‘mastery of vernacular form,’ avoided the pitfalls of white modernism altogether. In Anderson’s view, Hughes and Hurston not only ‘overcame’ primitivism and other ‘residual Eurocentric assumptions’ but they also successfully distanced themselves from the romanticism of DuBois and Locke. In the blues, he argues, these Renaissance authors discovered a folk ‘vernacular’ which accurately conjured their people’s spirit. White modernists could only caricature blues voices, Baker and Anderson suggest, whereas by mastering the forms, Hughes and Hurston could reproduce their reality.20 Certainly, as many recent scholars have argued, black artists did subvert racial stereotypes by occupying white traditions and turning them inside out. This was a common form of resistance to racism, for as George Walker, the blackfaced African-American vaudevillian reflected in 1906, ‘nothing seemed more absurd than to see a colored man making himself ridiculous in order to portray himself.’ In fact, part of primitivism’s appeal for New Negro artists was that it allowed them to ridicule the pretensions of their white contemporaries by mimicking their fixations. Consider the way Langston Hughes, in his 1928 essay ‘Luani of the Jungle,’ gently mocks the modernist myth of blackness. The story’s unnamed white protagonist falls in love in Paris with a visiting African woman from ‘a village in the jungle.’ He speaks of her as ‘the ebony goddess of my heart, the dark princess who saved me from the corrupt tangle of white civilization, who took me away from my books into life, who discovered for me the soul of your dark countries.’ However, when the couple moves to her village, he finds himself an outsider who does not understand the language and who cannot accept local customs. The lovers are soon estranged but the white man is incapable of saving himself from an African fantasy that has now become his nightmare. Hughes’s black American narrator, who meets the

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‘strange, weak looking little white man’ on a freighter delivering ‘Fords from Detroit and some electric motors’ to Africa, is ‘dazed’ by his story. To the narrator, Africa is ‘monotonous,’ ‘colorless and forbidding’ and its people and wildlife are tawdry, mercenary, and vicious. He parallels the white lover’s perception of the exotic African in Paris with his own ‘fascination’ for a monkey that a vendor is selling on the wharf. Although he finds the monkey intriguing, he describes it with cold realism, noting the ‘very wildness of the poor captured beast with the wire cord around his hairy neck.’ The monkey, he concludes, is untrainable and ‘vicious’ as it ‘snarled shrilly whenever I tried to touch him.’21 Hughes gently prodded the white modernists, positioning the narrator in ‘Luani’ as a pragmatic industrial age black American mystified by the decadence and delusion of primitivism. Baker is right in arguing that Harlem Renaissance artists subverted white fantasies about blackness from within, but it is hard to describe the space Hughes works as especially ‘tight.’ In fact, when they wanted to, New Negro artists had no trouble simply dismissing white attitudes and doing so with emphatic force. To the writer Countee Cullen, primitive modernism simply led to ‘abortions and aberrations which other people are all too prone to accept as truly legitimate.’ Commenting for the Crisis in 1926, Cullen wrote that he considered the idea of the ‘ignorant, burly, bestial’ black male and the ‘sensual habitué of dives and loose living’ offensive and a ‘racial defamation.’ Unlike Hughes, he expressed no sympathy for the white primitive who, ‘as far as I am concerned ... is totally out of the picture. He will write as he pleases, though it offend.’22 While it was true that black modernists like Hughes engaged with primitivism and sometimes – as Baker maintains – blacked up to ridicule the white minstrel, it would be wrong to narrow their modernism to this one element. Harlem Renaissance artists, George Hutchinson, the literary historian reminds us, ‘considered themselves participants in, and the potential vanguard of, an American modernist movement.’ This is something that Baker and other advocates for a distinctly black modernism have tended to discount. But the fact remains that black and white modernists did share the same cultural space. Modernism’s fundamental belief, that Victorian certainty was illusory, crossed racial boundaries. Indeed, the collapse of categories, the rise of scientific methods, and the degrading of sight were ideas in many ways more emancipating for black intellectuals than for white. Creating contiguity between ostensibly unrelated objects and themes proved a means of highlighting African-American difference while at the same time

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describing trans-racial similarities. Moreover, such incongruities as a black writer exploring ‘the ways of white folks’ or a black painter representing white subjects, or a nightclub entertainment in which AfricanAmerican actors played white characters, was proof that New Negro artists could themselves master whiteness.23 In the work of some black modernists, pastiche becomes a means of expressing this liberation and critique. In Duke Ellington’s Black and Tan Fantasy (Okeh 40955) of 1927, the composer uses collage to narrate a story of migration, racial interaction, and cultural miscegenation. In the early twentieth century, ‘black and tan’ described any racially mixed entertainment, but Ellington was depicting one of the Harlem clubs where blacks performed and served and whites comprised the clientele. The piece opens with a blues chorus in B-flat minor, loosely based on the spiritual The Holy City, which ends with a fleeting reference to the melody from the third movement of Chopin’s Second Piano Sonata, a work in the same key. This first theme is then contrasted with a second unrelated one, a ‘white tune,’ which the eminent jazz critic Gunther Schuller derided as ‘slick trying-to-be-modern show music.’ The ‘white’ theme is then submerged by a series of blues choruses performed by Bubber Miley and Sam Nanton. These choruses, in B-flat major, are characterized by comic growls and chokes, a whinny and ya-ya vocal imitations evoking the primitive sensuality on display in the Harlem black and tans. Between them, Ellington interpolates a brief raggy solo, rhythmically recalling the second ‘white jazz’ theme, only to have it driven off by Nanton’s snarls and whines. The piece then closes with four unexpected and lugubriously played measures of the Chopin B-flat minor Sonata which return the listener to the close of the first theme. Over all, the sequence of snippets is mournful, ironic, strangely agonizing, and deeply troubling. It is also episodic, almost fractured, and clearly narrative. Ellington was explicit about this, for when recalling his compositions of the 1920s, he wrote that ‘painting a picture or having a story to go with what you were going to play, was of vital importance.’24 The Fantasy’s sound picture moves us from the rural South of the spirituals to the white city and down into the sexually charged environment of the black and tan. Here the image is dominated by the white fantasy of the primitive which Ellington presents with deep irony and humour. In the first sequence of themes, the black spiritual migrates to the white city and is transformed in the process. In the second sequence, the white clientele comes to the black and tan and is absorbed

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in the display. The effect of the players’ snorts and whines is immediately comic, but the quote from Chopin’s funeral march supplies a jolt. Does the city represent death to the spiritual and even to the AfricanAmerican blues tradition? Or is it the death of white cultural purity and superiority that Ellington is announcing? The proximate unity created by the key signatures provides added value to the Black and Tan Fantasy. Because of Ellington’s skin colour, his musical pastiche not only sounds out black history but also empowers the African-American artist. The very act of finding a table for Chopin and for white ‘show music’ in this black and tan is a celebration of the transfer of musical power. Ellington asserts his mastery over Tin Pan Alley and European art music and subordinates them to his blues vision. Here, in a remarkable 3’19, was embodied Man Ray’s ‘coupling of different factors,’ white primitive imaginings, the chronicle of migration and the musical authority of an African American composer. Beneath Ellington’s Fantasy is an exploration of what had been to the Victorians discrete categories: white and black, serious and popular music, religion and sexuality, city and country. Ellington was declaring that the categories no longer applied and that he could, by making collage into poetry, up-end conventional thinking. The questions which the juxtaposition of discordant sounds and images raised, and the transference of responsibility for the answers to the audience members’ imagination (whose death is being announced?), was an invigorating artistic formulation. Black modernists could expose the absence of boundaries indirectly, revealing the fallacy of abusive racial constructions by forcing audiences to think their way out of their inherited intellectual box. The reality of the black experience, as Ellington depicted it, shifted musically as the movement across space and time he portrayed in the music altered the listeners’ perspective. This idea, which lay at the very heart of modernism, was a powerful weapon in the hands of Harlem Renaissance artists. The dethroning of sight was another engaging concept for artists whose skin colour was commonly thought to define them. ‘Harlem is not to be seen,’ Wallace Thurman declared, echoing William Crary Brownell’s turn-of-the-century observation, ‘or heard. It must be felt.’ For New Negro modernists, vision was considered a fallible signifier. ‘Unless you see de fur,’ Janie, the heroine in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), observes, ‘a mink skin ain’t no different from a coon hide.’ It is a complex, thickly layered, remark which, while ostensibly affirming the certitude of sight (‘We don’t know nothin’ but

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what we see’), implies that nothing but the colour of their skin separates whites from blacks. Until she was six, Janie associated with whites and did not even know she was black. Tellingly, she learns to identify her skin colour from a photograph.[ ‘Where is me?’ Janie asks, looking at a group photo, ‘Ah don’t see me.’ ‘Dat’s you,’ a white women tells her: ‘don’t you know yo’ ownself?’ ... ‘Ah looked at de picture a long time and seen it was mah dress and mah hair so Ah said: “Aw, aw! Ah’m colored.” Den dey all laughed real hard. But before Ah seen de picture Ah thought Ah wuz just like de rest.’ But the real lesson we learn from Their Eyes is that sight is a misleading and antiquated guide to reality. For Hurston, colour was a social construction rather than a biological determinant of character; culture, class, gender, place, and history made people what they were, not their skin pigment. The brilliant pianist in James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an ExColored Man (1912), communicates the same message even though he presents race as more of a biological impulse than a cultural creation. Fair skinned enough to pass as white, the novel’s protagonist marries a white woman and grows to be a famous musician who specializes in ragging the European classics. His wealthy white patron asserts that his pale skin has also granted him a ‘white heart,’ but his eyes deceive. In the end, Johnson’s hero reflects sadly that by becoming white and rich he sacrificed his secret dream of creating authentic black American art music. Having suppressed the demands of his soul, he mourns, ‘I have chosen the lesser part ... I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage.’25 What, however, constituted the greater part? If colour deceived, what, to the New Negro, set African Americans apart from the primitivist images invented for them by whites? Why did this question trouble Johnson and the other modernists? After all, modernism denied that there was a single fully knowable, unified, and defining essence waiting to be discovered. But even more than their Euro-American contemporaries, Renaissance authors could not help searching for the authentic racial self. The New Negro artists were products of a culture where whiteness was normative, where white people reduced all African Americans to a set of objective characteristics, where whites asserted that they understood and knew how to perform blackness. Conscious always of their difference and understanding their symbolic role as African American artists, Renaissance writers struggled to find ways of representing who they were and what they experienced. Perhaps a more productive challenge to racism might have lain in the celebration

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of the individuality, complexity and human diversity of black people or in the recognition that race itself was a cultural and historical construction. But Renaissance authors, although reluctant to essentialize blackness, still dreamed of revealing Johnson’s ‘greater part.’ And it was this which led them to sometimes employ colors pilfered from the Euro-Americans’ descriptive pallet. It was difficult to treat race as innate without employing familiar stereotypes. This is why Langston Hughes, who knew better, occasionally wrote as though he imagined black people to be blessed with a sort of minstrel jollity. Of ‘the low down folks, the so-called common element [who] ... do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else,’ he wrote, ‘their joy runs, bang! Into ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout. Work a little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. O let’s dance.’ The voice of Jim Crow is disturbingly close in this invocation of the pastoral, happy-go-lucky folk, but Hughes was not alone. Even one of his most formidable critics, George Schuyler, who dismissed the search for a distinctively ‘Negro art’ as ‘hokum,’ sometimes romanticized the African American. In his satiric novel, Black No More (1931), Schuyler described black neighbourhoods as filled with ‘music, laughter, gaiety, jesting and abandon,’ although he added, just to complicate his caricature, that they were ‘almost European’ in these features. Still other artists traced the essence of black America to its distant African past. In his works of the 1920s and early 1930s, the painter, Aaron Douglas, joined folk references with angular, geometrical shapes and flat masses of colour, and presented racial authenticity as a mixture of the mysterious and regal Egyptian and the emotional, violent, and spiritual West African.26 But the modernism of Harlem Renaissance artists, which inspired them to see authenticity as contextual rather than unified and absolute, grated against the idea that the two races had fixed biologically defined characters. The solution they discovered was the same one that white modernists developed to conceptualize and justify their own involvement with the exotic: truth was to be found in performance and representation itself. Masks, like bracelets and dance steps, were not simply disguises; they provided insights into qualities that had only become real through the act of wearing them. Antheil’s negative was needed for the positive to appear; Gershwin required the blues to unleash his own creativity; and Mary Cunard depended on her African American lover to express her own sensuality. In similar ways, Renaissance modernists sought the racial spirit through the performance of African-American

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vernacular art. It was through their creativity that they connected themselves to a racial essence while denying that specifically racial characteristics were simple and unvarying. For the Renaissance moderns, form – the structures, methods, and contexts of vernacular performance – provided access to the authentic self they found otherwise difficult to remove from white fantasies. Alain Locke, the self-styled ‘spokesperson’ for the Renaissance, believed that a goal of black modernism might be just this, ‘to take the common clay of life and fashion it to living beauty.’ Claude McKay, the Jamaican-born Renaissance writer, echoed Locke’s point: ‘it is the task of Negro artists to give back to the Negro race its heritage, by revealing to it the beauty and wonder and glory, the warmth and color and passion, rhythm and music inherent in itself.’ And Langston Hughes wrote to Vachel Lindsay: ‘the mission of the artist is to interpret beauty to the people, – the beauty within themselves.’ Hughes first presented what he conceived as authentic blackness in the series of ‘blues’ poems he wrote in the 1920s. The blues, Locke explained, became a ‘device’ or ‘mold into which the life of the plain people [could be] descriptively poured. This gives not only an authentic background and the impression that it is the people themselves speaking, but the sordidness of common life is caught up in the lilt of its own poetry and without any sentimental propping attains something of the necessary elevation of art.’27 For all of these artists, music and dance were the quintessential expressions of African-American difference. Even Countee Cullen, who cultivated a flâneur’s detachment regarding race, could still declare an ‘unconcealed and absolutely depraved delight in jazz. It got into my blood and coursed through every vein making me feel giddy.’ In the dance, Cullen swooned, he ‘lived more poetry ... than I ever wrote.’ References which linked music to the racial self permeated the art of the Harlem Renaissance. As Zora Neale Hurston observed in an article describing her own race feelings as contingent and impermanent, when she heard hot jazz ‘the great blobs of purple and red emotion’ made her feel ‘so colored.’ Musical references are everywhere in Aaron Douglas’s most famous work, his 1934 W.P.A. murals, Aspects of Negro Life. In the panel The Negro in an African Setting, two dancers entangle while drums beat and encircling warriors stomp; in Slavery through Reconstruction, the drums have become baskets of cotton, but singers praise freedom with arms outstretched and a bugler sounds; in the final mural, Song of the Towers, migrants scramble over a bridge made of gears towards Lady Liberty, barely escaping the coiling grip of Southern racism, while

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the skyscrapers bend aside and a towering figure fills the central space holding aloft his saxophone.28 In visualizing music, Douglas wanted to depict the actions that create blackness rather than to narrow and solidify the folk essence. History was important to Douglas because connecting the saxophone to the tribal drum established the authenticity of the vernacular tradition he portrayed and celebrated. James Weldon Johnson agreed with this effort, for he argued that one could only discover the distinctiveness of the African-America identity by studying its performance. The ‘birthright’ of his hero in the Autobiography, the ‘greater part’ of his black character, was something produced by and revealed in the creativity of the folk. ‘The day will come,’ he predicted, ‘when ... slave music will be the most treasured heritage of the American Negro.’ In the performance of these works, the world would know them and African Americans would understand themselves. As Johnson explained, ‘I now began to grope toward a realization of the importance of the American Negro and his creative folk-art, and to speculate on the superstructure of conscious art that might be reared upon them.’29 It was here that black artists tried to reconcile their scepticism, as modernists, about the idea that a single, unified, and essential soul was latent in each person, with their desire, as members of a racially constructed minority, to represent their difference from whites and their primitivist projections. This did not always mean returning to Africa for inspiration. Significantly, Hughes did not see himself reaching back, in the way Aaron Douglas did, to the pre-enslavement or even rural past in his blues poetry. Hughes certainly took the blues to be a vernacular song type, but he also understood it to be a modern, urban, poetic, and musical form. ‘I first heard them sung as a child by a blind orchestra that used to wander about the streets of the slums and the red-light district in Kansas City singing for nickles or pennies, a fish sandwich, or anything one chose to give,’ he wrote Carl Van Vechten. And he placed ‘the ribald verses, the music that seemed to cry when the words laughed,’ in the entirely urban context of ‘the painted girls from the houses of ill-fame in their gingham dresses.’ Although Hughes would, in the mid-1920s, begin to collect folk blues records, unlike Zora Neale Hurston he was never particularly interested in the country variety. When he imagined the blues, he associated it with its urban commercial practitioners, especially Bessie and Clara Smith and Ethel Waters. In fact, when listing the chronology of African-American music for a show he was writing, he explicitly placed the blues at the end, after the ‘slave songs, [the

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turn-of-the century vaudeville music of] the Williams and Walker days and ragtime.’30 In other words, like Gershwin and other modernists, Hughes understood the blues to be the music of the Harlem he inhabited and not a relic of the pre-migration South. But Hughes’s blues poetry was more narrowly focused on the racial essence than he imagined. Although the poet hoped to convey the rich multitudinous ‘soul’ of African Americans through blues performance, he was constrained by his own limiting sense of the meaning which that form would reveal. Hughes, who sometimes characterized the African-American spirit as lighthearted, in his blues poetry imagined it to be tragic. The blues, he explained, ‘always impressed me as being very sad, sadder even than the spirituals because their sadness is not softened with tears but hardened with laughter, the absurd, incongruous laughter of a sadness without even a god to appeal to.’ It was here that his vernacular poetry suffered its limitation. Hughes’s blues spirit was so monochrome that it seemed to caricature the African-American essence he wanted to depict rather than to texture, contextualize, and complicate it. This was Walter White’s feeling after reading the second volume of Hughes’s blues poetry: ‘inevitably the repetition of a single emotion in time grows monotonous and often triteness cannot be avoided because there are few changes to be rung on the blues theme. The human voice of a Bessie Smith is needed to transmute and vary the subtle overtones and in that manner give the needed variety.’ Perhaps Hughes did not fully trust his folk sources and was unwilling to sufficiently nuance his blues voice. He confessed he had too many preferences in the music (‘the mood of the Blues,’ he wrote, ‘is almost always despondency’). Perhaps, as Alain Locke declared, black modernists could not assume a vernacular voice without feeling the need to refine it. Indeed, in Locke’s view, there was, in ‘the rambling improvised stanzas of folk-song’ too much ‘that is inconsistent with the dominant mood; and seldom any dramatic coherence.’ But in supplying both of these things, something authentic was lost. To Harry Potamkin, who reviewed Hughes’s blues poetry in the Nation, ‘duplicate spirituals or blues have only duplicate values.’31 And here one can again feel the tension at the heart of early modernism, the difficulty artists experienced manipulating forms to embody real things whose meanings were not absolute and clear but were circumstantial, complex, and shifting. If anyone in the Harlem Renaissance understood the tension within the modernist construction of the self, it was Zora Neale Hurston. A student of the anthropologist Franz Boas, Hurston brought to her work

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both a keen attention to the diverse voices of her folk subjects and the conviction that environment was the crucial ingredient in shaping people’s experiences and customs. Like other modernists, Hurston dismissed sight as a false guide to an absolute truth: ‘there is no single face in nature,’ she wrote, ‘because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man’s spice box seasons his own food.’ More consciously even than Hughes and her Harlem Renaissance contemporaries, Hurston privileged sound over sight. Only through speech and action could the essence be revealed and the evidence of sight affirmed or denied. As one of the characters in Their Eyes Were Watching God explains, ‘you heard her, you ain’t blind.’ Since sight was an insufficient guide to reality, Hurston concluded, the observable signifiers of race were equally flawed. Visible indicators did not denote interior differences; one had to look to people’s customs for evidence of African-American distinctiveness. As she explained, ‘colored’ was something ‘one became,’ it was completely experiential and not biological. Culture, however, was also transient, not an immutable inheritance, as Aaron Douglas or James Weldon Johnson believed, but something which constantly adapted to new circumstances. Like Hughes, Hurston saw folk forms as alive and developing and she discovered through her field research in the South that ‘Negro folk-lore is still in the making[,] a new kind is crowding out the old.’ But unlike Hughes, Johnson and the white primitives, all of whom resisted the implications of modernism for the articulation of race, Hurston made the leap and concluded that blackness was no more intrinsic or permanent than its cultural underpinning. In the 1950s, she would even go so far as to denounce school integration in the South on the grounds that ‘Negroness’ would be ‘rubbed off by close contact with white culture.’32 The fragility of blackness lay in the fact that it was tangible only as a product of culture. It existed in the pattern of American speech and song, in such devises, Hurston found, as ‘angularity’ and ‘abruptness,’ ‘redundance,’ ‘repetition,’ and ‘imitation,’ and in ‘a restrained ferocity in everything.’ But these things were easily lost, for they were as vulnerable to corruption and decline as any other dialect or folk art. Where she differed from the other modernists was in the intensity of her commitment to the new way of thinking, for unlike them, she never looked for a racial essence to replace the one she believed the failure of sight had discredited. In her writings, cultural critic Henry Louis Gates admits, Hurston ‘is far more interested in human motivations and the idiosyncracies of characters as manifested in language-use’ than in es-

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sentializing the African-American experience. ‘Identity, in Hurston’s modernist conception,’ agrees the literary scholar Priscilla Wald, ‘is mainly a function of perspective.’ Her dialect fiction was empowering to the extent that it gave a literary voice to rural black, generally female, Floridians, but she refused to portray her central characters as more or less than the creations of circumstance, community, and individual aspiration. Significantly, at the core of her most important novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is the need for individuals to break through the images, expectations, constraints, and meanings other people have placed on them and to ‘find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.’ Janie struggles to gain her own voice (to ‘tell big stories herself’), in a community at once as oppressive, conflicted, and hierarchically structured as the flock of buzzards that feast in the novel on a dead mule.33 Although Hurston shared the concerns of other modernists, the solutions she reached placed her in the position of denying the innateness of race while celebrating what seemed like quaint and decorative local customs. To many of her contemporaries, it appeared as though she was trivializing the African-American experience. As the writer Richard Wright complained, Hurston simply used ‘minstrel techniques that makes the white folks laugh ... the sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought.’ Wright, like Aaron Douglas, considered folk culture a ‘channel through which racial wisdom flowed,’ an instrument for raising race consciousness, and he was antagonized by Hurston’s apolitical insistence on its impermanence (‘she exploits that phase of Negro life which is “quaint”’). But modernism, in Hurston’s view, was antithetical to the idea that races had fixed ‘characters,’ and this is why few among her generation of black artists, men and women conscious of their place in a racist nation, could swallow it undistilled.34 Harlem Renaissance artists remained children of the dramatic intellectual changes of the nineteenth century, and their work was, like that of all modernists, a reaction to the collapse of a world order based on perfect design. They were drawn to such techniques as collage, irony, shifting perspectives, and the idea that sight no longer revealed absolute truth. But the intellectual currents that emancipated their art also raised fundamental problems: if colour was not a predictor variable, what did it mean to be black or white or olive? Were whiteness or blackness meaningful classificatory concepts? Science had theoretically pointed the way out, the modernist literary critic Ivor A. Richards explained, because it did not presume to ‘answer any question of the form: what is so and so. It can only tell us how such and such behaves.’35 American

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modernists applied this dictum to their own work and used performance as a way of critiquing assumptions about form. Blackness was not defined by the colour of people’s skin, but by the culture which being black produced. In this way, modernists attacked nineteenth-century racial conventions while accepting race as a concept. For white modernists, authenticity could be found in those characteristics which blackness revealed; by performing the primitive, they felt white people could release their own ‘primitive’ spirit. Blackness carried with it a set of essential characteristics, whether a tendency to jollity or empathy or passion or some ambivalent ‘blues spirit.’ But each definition of the racial essence rested upon the location of innate characteristics that were identifiably and authentically black. In the primitivist construction, black people were environmentally closer to a natural state, and white people had to reconnect with their own childlike qualities, their own freedom from restraint, their own passion, and their own jungle rhythm. Although black artists were flattered by these attentions, they also understood that the modern/primitive fantasy said more about the hang-ups of white people than it did about them. They often explored primitive themes as a way of critiquing their white contemporaries, but they did not dismiss the whole idea behind them because their primary goal remained one of conceptualizing race in an age where appearance no longer supplied a reliable guide to character. The solution black modernists found was the modernist concept of performance or plasticity: the artistic creation that could be manipulated so that meanings might be suggested in the mind of the spectator. Vernacular musical and speech forms could be relied upon to reproduce blackness and signify authenticity without the artist having to enumerate the qualities comprising African-American distinctiveness. What was ‘racial’ could be posited from the performance itself. Indeed, when they did try to describe the essential qualities of black people, they too often produced the kind of ‘hokum’ George Schuyler derided. Few, however, were willing to go with Schuyler or Hurston all the way down the modernist road; the prospect was simply too unnerving. Most were reluctant to consider races as cultural constructions without inherent qualities or characteristics, or folk practices as regional and economic variations and not manifestations of organic differences. Like white modernists of their generation, Renaissance artists turned to performance as a compromise between relativism and certainty, but it still remained for them a means of revealing racial authenticity. It would be wrong to suggest, as Nathan Huggins has done, that

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New Negro artists ignored the challenge of defining the African-American experience: everything they created, of necessity, dealt with the actuality of being black in a society where all that was normative was white. But one can fairly say that black modernists found it difficult to itemize what it meant to be black in large measure because the stereotypes white people ascribed to them were so oppressive, flexible, and pervasive. Modernism provided them with a certain release from the dilemma by validating their efforts to suggest meaning through association and pastiche. ‘African-Americanness’ was to be found not in the ‘definable alteration’ of skin colour itself, but in its contexts and relationships and in the distinctive character of its self-expression. Although not entirely true to the ideal of ‘release from the fixities,’ this concept still showed the distance modernists had moved from the tidy categories and presumed causes underpinning John Foster’s ‘record of achievement.’ In writing his memoirs, Carl Van Vechten urged Langston Hughes to ‘be as formless as you please ... disregard chronology if you desire, [weave] your story backwards and forwards,’ but ‘however you do it’ what will inevitably emerge is ‘the soul of a young Negro with a nostalgia for beauty and color and warmth.’ That soul would manifest itself, ‘because hundreds of young people of whatever color, nay thousands, have this same nostalgia but they do not know how to express it, but they react to it emotionally when it is expressed.’36 Here, once again, was the modernist sense of the art work as ‘a thing alive’ with a nature that could be revealed in action and association. Foster’s conception of an ordered life, divisible into closed categories, had lost its relevance. For white modernists like Van Vechten, the fragmentary array of images and experiences, juxtaposed in apparent disregard for conventional chronology, revealed the ‘soul’ impressionistically because readers would be able to posit the transference of their own identity to it. Few Renaissance artists would disagree with Van Vechten’s modernism; where they took issue with him was over his conviction that primitive blackness was in everyone, ‘whatever color.’ If the conclusion Renaissance modernists reached was that race was a matter of performance, they still maintained that it had to be an authentic performance within a vernacular tradition. Maybe this was a slippery slope; maybe it embroiled African-American modernists in the search for origins and ultimately inclined them to root every black cultural expression in an authentic and non-white, inheritance that was dangerously close to being biological. But they felt it was important for them to make African-American culture organic and inherited, because

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by accepting the notion that race was no longer a visual certainty, they were calling into question African-American distinctiveness. It was in such contradictory impulses, in these half-realized experiments and radical assertions that artists like Hughes and Van Vechten gave shape to American modernism. They may have been looking through different lenses, but both agreed that they were living in a land that had been made blind by science. And this is why the successes and failures of American artists both white and black need to be accepted for what they were: dynamic and tension-filled efforts to authenticate racial concepts in ways appropriate to modernist times.

NOTES Thanks to Daniel Signal and Darren Mulloy for their comments and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for supporting the research. 1 John Foster, ‘On a Man’s Writing Memoirs of Himself,’ in Essays in a Series of Letters (Andover, 1826), 58. 2 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America, 1900–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Ariela Gross, ‘Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth Century,’ Yale Law Journal, 108/1 (1998): 109–88. 3 The Sun (New York), 3 June 1904; The Citizen (Berea, Kentucky), 15 Sept. 1904. 4 Christopher Vaughan, ‘Ogling Igorots: The Politics and Commerce of Exhibiting Cultural Otherness, 1893–1913,’ in Rosemarie Garland Thomas, ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 219–20, the quote about manhood can be found on 225. For T.S. Eliot see Tatsushi Narita, ‘The Young T.S. Eliot and Alien Cultures: His Philippine Interaction,’ Review of English Studies, 45 (Nov. 1994), 523–5. The photograph of Mrs Wilkins and the Igorot can be found at http://ascc.artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/courses/306/ Fair-cakewalk.jpg. One could argue that Mrs Wilkins was creating a correspondence between Philippine primitives and black Americans in order to more easily conceptualize both and assert her dominance over each. But given the taboo involved in white women dancing with black men and the evident ease and pleasure of both dancers, such a reading seems unlikely

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David Monod and needlessly complicated. For more on the Fair itself, see Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1987). Spencer quoted in J.D.Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 137. Carl Berger provided a sensitive treatment of Victorian classificatory and scientific impulses in Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983). On the impact of Darwin in the United States see: Jon H. Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859–1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Robert Abzub, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Robert Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Roland Rood, ‘The Origin of the Poetical Feeling in Landscape,’ Camera Work, 11 (July 1905): 25 (emphasis added). Mary Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist: The Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). On the visibility of character see: Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians (New York: New York University Press, 1969); on appearance: Helone Roberts, ‘The Exquisite Slave: The Role of Clothes in the Making of Victorian Women,’ Signs, 2/3 (1977): 554–69. William Crary Brownell, ‘New York after Paris,’ in Brander Matthews, ed., The Oxford Book of American Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1914), 438–9. James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); on Houdini, John Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); on Norman, New York Star, 22 (July 3 1919). Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans, in A Stein Reader: Gertrude Stein, edited by Ulla Dydo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993 [1934]), 57. Marsden Hartley’s ‘Dissertation on Modern Painting’and Williams’s comment on reality are cited in Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 247 and 240. J. Livingstone, ‘Man Ray and Surrealist Photography,’ in L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York: Abbeville, 1985), 133–52; the decon-

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structionist citation is from John Fuller, ‘Atget and Man Ray in the Context of Surrealism,’ Art Journal, 36/2 (1976): 132; Man Ray is cited in R. Janus, Man Ray: The Photographic Image (Woodbury: Barron’s, 1980), 9; Sidra Stich, Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 58. On the sexual dimension of the photograph, see Whitney Cadwick ‘Fetishizing Fashion / Fetishizing Culture: Man Ray’s Noire et blanche,’ Oxford Art Journal, 18/2 (1995): 3–17; Dixie Dugan quoted in Kenneth Tynan, Show People: Profiles in Entertainment (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), 276; Carlos Williams, ‘Prologue to Kora in Hell,’ in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1954), 11. Albert Barnes, ‘Negro Art and America,’ in Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997 [1925]), 23; George Gershwin, ‘Does Jazz Belong to Art’ and ‘Jazz Is the Voice of the American Soul,’ in Gregory Suriano, ed., Gershwin in His Time (New York: Gramercy Books, 1999), 38 and 48. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995), and Robert M. Crunden, Body and Soul: The Making of American Modernism (New York: Basic Books, 2000) maintain that modernism represented a fusing together of racial, geographical, and class dialects. George Antheil, ‘The Negro on the Spiral,’ in Mary Cunard, ed., Negro: An Anthology (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969 [1934]), 3, 46, 48, and 351; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: HarperCollins, 2006 [1937]), 48. Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven (New York: Harper and Row, 1971 [1926]), 90. Eliot’s anti-Semitism has been controversially scrutinized by Anthony Julius in T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Authors such as Robert Fleissner have defended Eliot’s intentions, but it remains true that, like other modernists, he employed racial stereotypes even when his goal was to express understanding and empathy; see T.S. Eliot and the Heritage of Africa: The Magus and the Moor as Metaphor (New York: Peter Lang, 1992). Nella Larsen, Quicksand (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1969 [1928]), 199 and 193–5. Cary Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance (Houston: Rice University Press, 1988), 189; Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 139, 307, 156–7, 189. Robert E. Washington calls primitivism ‘a retrograde racial ideology,’ in The Ideologies of African American Literature: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Nationalist Revolt (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2001), 24. Historian Kevin Gaines

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David Monod is less forgiving of the New Negro intellectuals than Huggins. He traces their failures to their class prejudices and links their racist values to their integrationist ambitions; see Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 299; Houston A. Baker, Jr, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 4; Paul Anderson, Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 10. In line with this, Steven Tracy has argued that Langston Hughes did not just use a blues form, he composed authentic blues: ‘To the Tune of Those Weary Blues: The Influence of the Blues Tradition in Langston Hughes’s Poetry,’ Melus, 8/3 (1981): 73–98. As Ronald Radano has suggested, Anderson’s and Baker’s interpretation rests on romantic myths concerning the ‘enduring continuity’ of the folk form. In their work, the blues is ancient and authentic, a form of expression whose employment linked artists to Africa, slavery, sharecropping, and the rural South. Ronald Radano, ‘Soul Texts and the Blackness of the Folk,’ Modernism/Modernity, 2/1 (1995): 73; see also, J. Martin Favor, Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 4–5. George Walker quoted in Louis Chude-Sokei, The Last ‘Darky’: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy and the African Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 33; Langston Hughes, ‘Luani of the Jungle,’ Harlem, 1/1 (1928): 7–11, reprinted in Cary Wintz, ed., The Harlem Renaissance, 1920–1940: Black Writers Interpret the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Garland, 1996), 51–5. Countee Cullen, ‘The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed,’ Crisis, 32 (Aug., 1926): 194, reprinted in Wintz, ed., Harlem Renaissance: Black Writers, 356. George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 30. Some of the points of convergence were less positive than Hutchinson suggests. As Daylanne English has shown, many New Negro modernists shared an interest in eugenics with their white counterparts; see Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Renaissance artist Palmer Hayden depicted handsome white people alongside savage caricatures of black subjects; in the Cotton Club black dancers sometimes portrayed white characters. On Hayden see George C. Wright, ‘Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America,’ Journal of American History, 77/1 (1990): 256–58; on the Cotton Club,

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25

26

27

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Marshall Stearns, The Story of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 183–5. David Metzer, ‘Shadow Play: The Spiritual in Duke Ellington’s “Black and Tan Fantasy,”’ Black Music Research Journal, 17/2 (1997): 137–43; Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 330; Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976), 47. Wallace Thurman, ‘Harlem: A Vivid Word Picture of the World’s Greatest Negro City,’ in The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman, edited by Amrijit Singh and Daniel Scott III (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 33; Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 7, 14, and 9; James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, in The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson, vol. 2, edited by Sandra Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 333 and 362. To Hurston, ‘There is no The Negro here. Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different that there is no possible classification so catholic that will cover us all,’ Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on the Road (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1942), 172. George Schuyler concurred: ‘aside from his color ... your American Negro is just plain American. Negroes and whites from the same location in this country talk, think, and act about the same.’ George Schuyler, ‘The Negro-Art Hokum,’ Nation, 121 (16 June 1926), reprinted in Cary Wintz, ed., The Harlem Renaissance, 1920–1940: The Politics and Aesthetics of ‘New Negro’ Literature (New York: Garland, 1996), 164–5; Langston Hughes, ‘The Negro and the Racial Mountain,’ Nation, 122 (23 June 1926), reprinted in Wintz, Harlem Renaissance: The Politics and Aesthetics, 166; George Schuyler, Black No More (College Park: McGrath, 1969 [1931]), 85. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Langston Hughes Papers, Box 564, clipping: Alain Locke, ‘Review of Fine Clothes to the Jew,’ Saturday Review (9 April 1927); Claude McKay Papers, Box 4, Claude McKay to Harold Jackman, 9 May 1928; Langston Hughes Papers, Box 104, Langston Hughes to Vachel Lindsay, n.d. 1925. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Countee Cullen Papers, Countee Cullen to Harold Jackman, 25 Aug. 1923; Zora Neale Hurston, ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me,’ in Cheryl Wall, ed., Folklore Memoirs and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 828; on Aaron Douglas, see Amy Kirschke, Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995).

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29 Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 349; James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (New York: Viking, 1933), 152. 30 Langston Hughes to Carl Van Vechten, 17 May 1925, Remember Me to Harlem: Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925–1964, edited by Emily Bernard (New York: Knopf, 2001), 12–13, and Langston Hughes to Carl Van Vechten, 4 June 1925, 19; Langston Hughes Papers, Box 74, Langston Hughes to W.C. Handy, 1 June 1940. 31 Langston Hughes to Carl Van Vechten, 17 May 1925, Remember Me to Harlem, 12–13; the ‘despondency’ comment is from the preface to Fine Clothes to the Jew (New York: Knopf, 1927); Langston Hughes Papers, Box 564, clipping: Walter White, ‘Review of Fine Clothes to the Jew,’ New York World (n.d. 1927); clipping: Locke, ‘Review’; clipping: Henry Potamkin, ‘Review of Fine Clothes to the Jew,’ Nation (n.d. 1927). It was something Hughes shared with other New Negro artists. Although many of them delighted in jazz and blues, although they celebrated black street culture, words like ‘sordid’ and ‘depraved’ often crept into their descriptions. 32 Langston Hughes Papers, Box 82, Zora Neale Hurston to Langston Hughes, 12 April 1928; Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 79; Hurston, ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me,’ 826; Andrew Delbanco, ‘The Political Incorrectness of Zora Neale Hurston,’ Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 18 (1997): 105; for ‘Negroness,’ Zora Neale Hurston to Franz Boas, 29 March 1927, in Carla Kaplan, ed., Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 97. For the fallibility of sight in Their Eyes Were Watching God, see Stuart Burrows, ‘“You Heard Her, You Ain’t Blind”: Seeing What’s Said in Their Eyes Were Watching God,’ NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 34/3 (2001): 434–52; for an alternate reading, Deborah Clarke, ‘“The Porch Couldn’t Talk for Looking”: Voice and Vision in Their Eyes Were Watching God,’ African American Review, 35/4 (2001): 599–613. Shelly Eversley, The Real Negro: The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth Century African American Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), chapter 2 argues that Hurston was a racial essentialist. 33 Langston Hughes Papers, Box 82, Zora Neale Hurston to Langston Hughes, 12 April 1928; Zora Neale Hurston, ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’; Henry Louis Gates Jr, ‘Introduction,’ in The Complete Stories of Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), xii; Priscilla Wald, ‘Becoming “Colored”: The Self-Authorized Language of Difference in Zora Neale Hurston,’ American Literary History, 2 (Spring 1990): 86; Deborah Plant makes the same point in Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston (Urbana: University of Illinois

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Press, 1995), chapter 6; Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 109 and 192; for Wright’s criticism, ‘Between Laughter and Tears,’ in Gloria Cronin, ed., Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Hall, 1998), 76. 34 Richard Wright, ‘Blueprint for Negro Writing,’ in Angelyn Mitchell, ed., Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 99. 35 I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Oxford University Press, 1924), 84. 36 William Carlos Williams, Spring and All That (New York: Frontier Press, 1970 [1923]), 93; Carl Van Vechten to Langston Hughes, 4 June 1925, in Remember Me to Harlem, 17–18.

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HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

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9

Progress, Science, and Religion: Exploring Victorian Thought in Canada Doug Owram No equal period in the history of the world has witnessed such advances in science, such rapid development in the useful arts, such an increase of comfort, liberty and enlightenment. – Conyngham C. Taylor on the occasion of the Queen’s Jubilee, 18871

Carl Berger probably did more than any Canadian historian before his time to get behind the clichés and assess the ideas, culture, and enthusiasms of what Walter Houghton once termed ‘the Victorian mind.’ Berger’s first book, The Sense of Power, was not just a study of imperialism but a study of ‘the intellectual background out of which it grew.’2 This led him to dissect the arguments, values, and rationalizations of one group of Victorians about everything from the nation, to destiny, to notions of freedom and social order. His subsequent works continued to uncover patterns of Victorian intellectuals, popular culture, and social myths.3 It was not long before historians began to take up the intellectual challenges Berger had thrown out. Over the quarter-century after The Sense of Power the Victorian era took pride of place at the centre of Canadian intellectual history. Important though Berger’s work was as an inspiration, it is also true that there was something in Victorian-Canadian society that called for attention. For one thing the time was right. An earlier generation of historians had too often seen Victorian morals, values, and religion as the antiquated and fussy world of their parents. It was something to put behind them. The tidy morality and ordered world-view seemed ridiculously confident from the perspective of two world wars, communist revolution, and holocaust. For a later generation, however, Victorian

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society raised certain questions about the evolution of Canada itself. In the tumult of Victorian thought, there seemed to be something that defined both the founding years of Canada as a nation and contained the roots of the modern. The purpose of this chapter is to ask a question of the Canadian understanding of Victorian thought. After a generation of research and writing has a synthesis emerged that allows us to sift through the myriad of assumptions, ideas, and themes that made up Victorian culture and ideas? Are there certain themes or fundamental ideas that both shaped Victorian thought and which, in their passing, help define the end of the Victorian intellectual world? Are these ideas sufficiently important and fundamental that they can help define the Victorian world? The answer, this chapter will argue, is yes to these questions. Three inter-related themes have emerged as central to the Victorian mind in Canada.4 First, whatever the underlying anxieties, Victorians held a deep assumption that their age was, of all the annals of history, exceptionally progressive. Second, religion in Victorian Canada was pervasive but had a particular trajectory that increasingly served to support progress and the underlying social order that Victorians believed was essential to continued progress. Third, both these themes rested on a deep-seated assumption about the very nature of truth. The three were symbiotic and depended on each other. When the symbiotic relationship came apart, so too ultimately, did the Victorian intellectual world. Historians are always tempted to define eras as a means of organizing the past. It is thus a happy coincidence when it is possible to find that an era actually did begin on cue. In 1837 the young Queen Victoria ascended the throne. The same year brought rebellion to the Canadas that drove a change in the issues that dominated Canadian concerns and, with that shift, allowed new ideas – Victorian ideas – to come to the fore. In the decades between the end of the American Revolution and 1837, British North Americans had been defensive and divided about the basic direction they should take. They seem to have been obsessed with two unresolved political issues. First, there was the relationship with the United States. This, it could be argued, is a constant in Canadian history. However, it is also true that the pre-Victorian era had a trajectory and a debate that was quite different from what would emerge during the Victorian years. Two groups in society vied for their vision

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of a British North America against the American backdrop. Both sides saw their opponents not only as wrong but as disloyal and dangerous. An object of fear and admiration, the United States polarized Canadian politics to a degree that could not be managed within existing political and social structures.5 Conservative imperialists sought, as Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe put it, to create British North America into ‘an image and transcript’ of the British constitution. Members of the Upper Canadian Family Compact and Lower Canadian Chateau Clique extended Simcoe’s goal and tried to create a British North America that would rest on social order, established religion, and conservative politics. Such restrictive views caused a reaction in the unformed society and dissent increasingly led to polarization. The alternate vision was the antithesis of such conservatism and looked to a North American ideal – republican, egalitarian, and pro-American. American institutions possessed, from this perspective, ‘a guarantee for the progressive advance of their political institutions towards perfection.’6 The other political and related obsession had to do with defining the place of French Canada in British North America. From the time of the conquest the British colonial system had struggled to incorporate successfully a Catholic and French minority within its Empire. Policy alternated between reconciliation and suppression on the part of the British but any consensus on French-English relations was elusive. By the 1830s growing nationalism in Lower Canada vied with an English merchant class that saw itself as entitled to a privileged position in the Empire resulting from religion, loyalty, and birth. Flaws in the governmental structures and the evolution of the popular legislature all destabilized the system. Fiscal tensions between Upper and Lower Canada added to the difficulties of the era. Given how long these issues had remained unresolved it is striking that both exploded the same year that the young queen took the throne. The 1837 rebellions set the stage for the transition from the old issues to a new Victorian political order that, while not always harmonious, was certainly much less violent and rested on more common principles than had its predecessor. Indeed, there is a remarkable agreement among historians that the first part of Victoria’s reign marked the development of a new consensus about certain basic British North American values.7 Within a decade British North America was neither to be ‘an image and transcript’ of Britain nor was it to follow the path of the United States towards a North American republicanism that Mackenzie and

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Papineau favoured.8 Likewise, the failure of the Durham Report and the brilliant utilization of representative politics by a new generation of French-Catholic politicians suppressed notions of both assimilation and rebellion in French-English relations. New ideas began to dominate the Canadian intellectual landscape. One of the most central and important concepts and slipperiest of these was the notion of progress. Though present in earlier decades there is no doubt that the Victorians saw their era as exceptional. Indeed, at times Victoria’s reign was seen as a proxy for the greatest era of progress that the British Empire had ever seen. On the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee, the London Illustrated News contrasted the emaciated and lamentable children of ‘mill and mine’ from 1837 with the same group sixty years later. ‘They became well-fed, healthy children: their rags became decent clothing: the light of youthful joy was in their eyes: the glow of health was in their cheeks: they laughed and leaped. “There came the Queen,” said [a child’s voice], “and all is changed. Mill and Mine can no longer take the children all day long: there is school for them: they are human children. This is thy doing, O Queen! At thy feet we lay the old Barbarity and the old Cruelty.”’9 Although an extreme piece of rhetoric, the comment by the Illustrated News nicely demonstrates the pervasive belief among Victorians that they lived in an era of moral and technological improvement. In Canada this outlook was summed up by the sub-title of a 776-page compendium published in 1864, Eighty Years Progress of British North America. These years showed ‘the vast improvements made in agriculture, commerce and trade, modes of travel, and transportation, and educational interests etc. etc.’ In case people missed the point, the first page of the preface restated the premise that the modern era was exceptional. From Herodotus until the late eighteenth century ‘the world made little progress.’ That long record of stagnation meant that it ‘remained for the present age to witness a rapid succession of important inventions and improvements, by means of which the power of man over nature has been incalculably increased, and resulting in an unparalleled progress of the human race.’10 These Victorian assertions of progress have been central to the work of Canadian historians and have bracketed both the writing on the era and the Victorian years themselves. Carl Berger deserves considerable credit for turning the attention of historians away from the politics of Confederation to the world of ideas, where progress was so embedded. The Sense of Power was a breakthrough work on the general attitude of

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Canadian Victorians to progress. Berger stated unequivocally that the ‘idea of progress was a major certitude of Victorian culture.’11 Progress, he argued, began with the confidence in the material improvements in life wrought by technology but quickly extended beyond such mundane matters to visions of political liberty as a particular trait of the Victorian era. ‘The apostrophes to progress and the praise of the personal qualities of the Queen were always coupled because these spokesmen found the root cause of progress to be the institutional system which she symbolized.’12 Progress had not begun with the Victorian age but few doubted the nineteenth century marked a new threshold. Both the methodology and focus of Berger’s Sense of Power inspired further research into Canadian Victorian enthusiasms. Several doctoral dissertations appeared through the 1970s and 1980s that looked to further define the reasons for the Victorian sense of progress. Part of this was rooted in specific events in the intellectual life of the colonies. Berger was one of the first of several Canadian historians to note that the growth of what might be termed the ‘infrastructure of ideas’ in these years was significant.13 The first universities (McGill, Dalhousie, Toronto, and Queen’s) were all established, if precariously, in the early years of Victoria’s reign. With them came an influx of British-educated intellectuals. People like Daniel Wilson, appointed at the University of Toronto in 1853, William Dawson, principal of McGill in 1855 and new journals such as the Canadian Journal: A Repertory of Industry, Science, and Art, brought a new intellectual sophistication to British North America / Canada in these years. Other works assessed the belief in progress against the more abstract but very powerful realm of popular assumptions. Allan Smith’s important article ‘The Myth of the Self-Made Man in English Canada’(1978) noted the Victorian emphasis on the myth that individual progress was a matter of will and hard work. In this version of society, Victorian culture allowed merit to prosper and sloth to fail.14 My own 1980 work, Promise of Eden, written initially as a dissertation under Carl Berger’s supervision, emphasized the notions of material and moral progress that the expansionists brought to the vision of the west. There was, they felt, ‘an intellectual dawn which heralds the period when states and empires of the great northwest are to claim their place in the world’s commonwealth of nations.’15 In his 1982 study of the Victorian press, Paul Rutherford noted that ‘the idea of progress was the most hallowed maxim of the age’ and dismissed any doubts as ‘the intellectual equivalent of indigestion.’16

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Rutherford’s comment is important. Canadian Victorians seemed unmovable in their faith in progress but why this was the case is not immediately obvious. Nineteenth-century Canada was hardly without problems. Indeed, it is almost as if every sign of improvement was countered by some contradiction. It was the great era of railroad construction but that construction left behind political scandal and many a ruined investor. Canada confederated and expanded across the continent, thus laying the foundation of the modern nation. Yet subsequent years brought persistent out-migration and growing western discontent. The new Dominion resisted absorption by the United States but as the Victorian era moved towards an end Goldwin Smith’s 1891 dismissal of Canada in Canada and the Canadian Question (1891) could still predict Canada’s imminent annexation.17 The contradiction between the events of the age and the persistent and pervasive belief in progress underlines the mythic nature of the notion of progress to Victorian Canada. As with other myths, this one remained remarkably unshaken by any particular event. Indeed, it may have been that the disappointments of the age made the belief in progress all the more essential. Canada sought in these years to take its place as something more than an outpost in the world’s greatest empire. It also sought to distinguish itself morally from its flawed but much more prosperous and powerful southern neighbour. In sum, the mythology of progress of the Victorian years was essential to the construction of a Canadian intellectual identity. Some elemental change would have to occur before people abandoned something so essential to their view of the world. Still, the initial development and then the remarkable persistence of the myth called for further explanation. To do so it is necessary to turn to two of the most powerful intellectual currents in society – science and religion. For what makes Victorian thought so distinctive is the complex inter-relationship that existed between science, religion, and progress. Each was important in its own right but each also buttressed the others to create an incredibly powerful set of beliefs. Historians have long recognized that for a couple of reasons Victorians saw science as tremendously important, both in its own right and as a broader symbol of the age. The construction of the nineteenth-century canals and railways were major events in their own right and essential to the already mentioned theme of nation-building. More importantly, the material transformation of the world was inseparable from the overall sense of progress. As Suzanne Zeller concluded, ‘the author-

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ity of science as the spearhead of the age of progress grew dramatically throughout Victoria’s domains.’ And ‘Victorian Canadians, like Victorians elsewhere, marveled at the technological signs of material progress and economic development.’18 Victorian science, as Zeller and others have noted, was a curious amalgam. On the one side, it tended to the applied – engineers like Sir Sandford Fleming, were idolized precisely because they were seen as integral to economic progress.19 The major government institutions of the day – from the Geological Survey through the mining departments of the various provinces, were focused on economic development. So too were major government financial commitments. The welfare state was non-existent for individuals but government commitments to development, from geological surveys through canals and railways accounted for the vast majority of government expenditures (and debt) in the Victorian era.20 Yet Canadian historians have also recognized that Victorian science – however it celebrated the applied – was more than a vehicle to economic progress. This was because to the Victorians both science and progress were more than economic phenomena. Once again, Berger focused on this duality. ‘Of the practical utility of science naturalists wrote much, for they were seeking support from a colonial society that was suspicious of the theoretical and ornamental.’ However, he concluded, the other side of the Victorian fascination with science cannot be ignored. It was nothing less than a manifestation of the ‘work of God.’21 This statement leads us to the third crucial underpinning of the Victorian intellectual milieu, religion. To date the most extensive examination of the relationship between science and religion has been A.B. McKillop’s superb 1979 work, A Disciplined Intelligence. In his discussion on the influence of Paleyite philosophy among Canadian writers, he demonstrated that science in mid-Victorian Canada was inseparable from religion. ‘In British North America … convictions as to the nature of scientific endeavour were marked not so much by any overt antagonism between science on the one hand and religion on the other, as by the continuing presence of religious assumptions within the domain of science itself.’22 As one speaker put it in an 1860 address, ‘the intellectual mind answers the purposes, and subserves the convenience of the rational and reasonable immortal soul.’ 23 The key to this was an empirical approach to scientific enquiry that more or less resolved a potential tension between religion and science dating back to the scientific revolution, if not the Reformation. One could observe phenomena but one could not extrap-

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olate that observation to primary causes. Thus knowledge could not be limited arbitrarily by edict or doctrines of faith. Yet, because knowledge was approached in such a narrowly empirical manner there was little likelihood that anyone would extend new discovery in such a way as to challenge basic religious doctrine. Science and religion not only coexisted but seemed to demonstrate the same phenomenon – the reality of progress. Central to this conclusion was the belief that science not only added to material comfort but had a direct effect on the individual’s moral sensibility. This concept operated at the societal level, as scientific discovery uplifted the people as a whole and in the realm of the personal where the individual could undertake self-improvement.24 Viv Nelles recognized the former concept in 1979 when he reprinted one of the great paeans to scientific discovery in early Victorian Canada, Thomas Keefer’s 1846 pamphlet, The Philosophy of Railroads. Here, concluded Nelles, Keefer sought to ‘establish a direct linkage between the railroad and the noblest ideals of the age, and to illuminate the process through which steam technology would necessarily advance the material improvement and moral perfection of man.’25 If anything Nelles’s comments are an understatement given the florid rhetoric of Keefer’s work: ‘Poverty, indifference, the bigotry or jealousy of religious denominations, local dissensions or political demagogueism may stifle or neutralize the influence of the best intended efforts of an educational system; but the invisible power which has waged successful war with the material elements will surely overcome the prejudices of mental weakness or the designs of mental tyrants.’26 Earlier ages had sought either to subordinate science to religion or to proclaim its superiority. What differentiated the Victorian era in Canada was the inseparability of the two. The very way in which the Victorians assessed what was true meant that science and religion had to operate in balance, reflecting the balance that had to be maintained within the human mind between intellect, morality, and faith. These forces working together were key to the whole concept of progress. None of this was a matter of coincidence or accident but, as Keefer implied, a matter of human will and intelligence. People had a responsibility to turn their efforts in the right direction. When individuals worked toward their own improvement, in tune with the forces of progress, both social and personal improvement were the result. As Allan Smith put it, ‘individual effort was historically important, productive of great satisfaction, and likely to bring dramatic rewards.’27

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This view was basic to the mind-set of the age. Michael Bliss’s biography of Joseph Flavelle, for example, showed the close relationship in Flavelle’s mind between his religion, his own efforts, and his success.28 Berger developed this theme with his discussion of ‘useful leisure’ as one of the inspirations between all those amateur biologists, botanists, and others who spent their time scrambling around the countryside looking for new species. ‘To open the faded and dusty transactions and bulletins … is to glimpse something of the astonishingly eclectic character of natural history, the unlimited thirst for facts about nature, and the earnestness and touching innocence of the Victorian enthusiasm for science.’29 More recently, Heather Murray’s study Literary Societies in Nineteenth-Century Ontario demonstrated the Victorian ‘quest for self and mutual improvement, through literature, in early Ontario.’30 In sum, Victorians believed that progress was attained and attainable through purposive and disciplined acts of will. The enthusiasm for amateur science, as with that for amateur exploration, is thus not some quirky fad of Victorians but a manifestation of their very sense of themselves. The linkage between science as practical means to economic improvement and a manifestation of God’s presence would, as we will see, frame one of the great challenges in the later stages of Victorian society. However, in the earlier period, the relationship between science as instrumental to material improvement, to moral uplift, and to religion was key to the notion of progress. With each scientific discovery there was the possibility of improvement at all levels. With each scientific enquiry, even if it only meant the classification of new forms of moss, there was both a sense that the individual engaged in it was improved and that a broader comprehension of God was possible. Discussion of progress, whether in science, personal morality, or social organization is thus impossible without a discussion of Victorian religion. Indeed, historians, who have so often focused on the later impact of Darwin and the challenge to religious belief, may not have paid enough attention to the centrality of religion in earlier Victorian Canada. The assertive power of religion defined Victorian society and much of the social and moral outlook that underlay it. This was perhaps even truer for Canada than for the more complicated and fragmented society of nineteenth-century Britain. Religion was the central institution in the lives of Victorian Canadians just as progress was a pervasive notion. John Webster Grant commented about religion in Ontario, that the churches had sought to tame a frontier society and to

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incorporate ‘the indifferent, the careless, the uncommitted. By the time of Confederation this initial mission could be regarded as substantially accomplished.’31 It is almost as if religion, having tamed the frontier, now served as a confirmation of Victorian achievement rather than as a witness to sin and salvation. This change came relatively rapidly and transformed both the society and the churches. In the decades leading up to Victoria’s reign a series of religious movements challenged the rationalism and spiritual indifference that characterized much of the English-speaking world of the eighteenth century. The transformation varied by region, denomination, and social class but was generally marked by an upsurge of evangelism and emotional spiritualism that favoured inspiration and emotional connection over theological education and restraint. The new movements were often seen as dangerous, theologically and politically, by members of more established religious views. In the words of that definitely pre-Victorian figure, John Strachan, the first Anglican Bishop of Toronto, they were led by ‘uneducated itinerant preachers, who leaving their steady employment, betake themselves to preaching the Gospel from idleness or a zeal without knowledge.’32 His Lower Canadian counterpart, J.G. Mountain complained of the ‘impetuous flood of fanaticism, rushing at intervals through newer parts of the country.’33 Through the first half of the nineteenth century the theological battle lines formed and re-formed. On the one side, emotional campfire revival meetings created social cohesion among individuals in a frontier society. On the other, seemingly small differences in religious doctrine led to angry rifts within congregations and schisms within denominations.34 Yet amid the theological and social chaos created by this religious debate, three trends were emerging that pointed the way to the emerging Victorian triumphalism to which Webster referred. First, the traditional established churches of England and Scotland – Anglican and Presbyterian – had to yield ground to the upstarts, especially the Methodists. Second, the correlation between social class and religious denomination shifted. In the socially mobile world of nineteenth-century Canada the crude upstart family of one generation became the establishment figure in the next. Along the way these upstarts began to boast a membership that was as connected to Canadian wealth and power as any Anglican. By the end of Victoria’s reign the Methodists, to give one important example, could boast of the presence of Timothy Eaton, the department store magnate, and Joseph Flavelle, future

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knight and millionaire pork-packer. The funding and construction of several ‘cathedrals of Methodism’ from Confederation onwards testified in physical form to the dramatic changes in the social structure of nineteenth-century religion.35 The most important change may have been the third. As denominations such as Methodism became respectable they also transformed theologically. These denominations were, in pre-Victorian years, based on sin, faith, and redemption. ‘Humankind was sunk in original sin and … the soul stood in peril of eternal death and damnation.’36 It was an emotion-based religion because it rested on the personal relationship between the sinner and God. ‘Sinners struggled under the weight of sin; God struck them directly in the heart, overwhelming them with a powerful wave of uncontrolled feelings, while shouts of joy and rapture greeted the release from bondage.’37 That world disappeared with amazing rapidity during the first decade or so of Victoria’s reign. Much of the formal theology might remain but, concluded David Marshall, ‘a harsh and judgmental God was being replaced in the imagination of many by a God of love.’38 William Westfall noted that ‘the dream of revivalism was tempered by the more deliberate pace of organization and development.’39 By the second half of the nineteenth century Canadian evangelical religion was a considerably tamer version of its early years. Methodism was becoming the religion of the Victorian middle class, every bit as respectable as Presbyterianism and Anglicanism.40 The very nature of religion was changing. Beneath an increasingly thin veneer of discussion about sin, previously rebellious denominations became the voice of middle-class respectability. ‘The new Methodism emphasized moderation, gradualism, and the central place of the institutions.’41 As theology faded in importance the relations between churches began to change. Though the Catholic-Protestant divide remained powerful, Protestant denominations came closer together. Leading theologians of the later Victorian era, such as George M. Grant, preached a conciliatory, even ecumenical attitude towards other Protestants. In the early nineteenth century the western frontier of Upper Canada had been the birthplace of new, fiery religions. The frontier of the 1880s and 1890s, across the Canadian Prairies, was the birthplace of new forms of cooperation that would, in time, evolve into the United Church of Canada.42 The growing religious harmony – at least among Protestants – reinforced the Victorian-Canadian faith in the linked nature of scientific knowledge, religion, and progress. The ecumenicalism of the age

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seemed to be one more beacon of progress. It was also seen as inherent to the particular decades of Victoria’s reign. Old prejudices were being set aside as at least Protestants discovered new theological similarities under the broad unifying umbrella of Victorian certitude. A combination of Protestant religion and middle-class values seemed to have asserted a new social order while leaving behind previous petty prejudices. Of course there were demons to be overcome and these too have formed a good part of the writing of Canadian historians, especially those focused on the latter part of Victoria’s reign. One of the inconsistencies of Victorian society was that it could argue in favour of the laissez-faire state and extol the values of individual effort, on the one side, while insisting on legal regulation and moral control, on the other. Temperance movements fought demon rum, gathering political strength through the latter part of the century.43 Sabbatarian movements asserted a distinctly Protestant and middle-class notion of social order on society.44 Reform notions of seemingly endless variety were everywhere.45 Particularly striking when compared with a later era is the way in which these reform movements were religiously inspired and religiously led. Sometimes the connection is obvious by the title, as is the case of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (founded 1874) or the Young Man’s Christian Association (Canadian branch founded 1851). At other times the cause itself is a mixture of religion and moral uplift, as in the many Sabbatarian movements that sought to strengthen Lord’s Day Acts across the country. Even where the links are less obvious practically any social reform movement in these years had executive boards sprinkled with clergymen or clergymen’s wives and were often dependent on the local church basement for a meeting hall. Many historians have interpreted these movements as a defensive reaction against urbanization, the rise of unions, and a new immigrant ‘threat.’ There is a degree of truth in this but the other part of the equation must not be forgotten. The beliefs of these reformers were quintessentially linked to notions of progress. They were certain that they knew what was needed to fix the problem. They believed that it was possible to organize, campaign, and make a difference. The same sense of progress and moral improvement that pervaded imperialism also pervaded the church basements and meeting halls of earnest Victorian reformers.

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Yet this apparent certainty of progress contains contradictions. The problem might be set out as follows. Faith in progress, such a basic part of Victorian attitudes, was not rewarded over the longer term. Within a few decades the great underpinnings of Victorian society – moral and material improvements and the pervasive nature of religion – seem to have eroded. The religious leadership of society would, within a generation, be displaced by more secular voices. The legacy of a society that believed so much in progress would be to march blithely into the catastrophe of the Great War. Science would remain powerful but would be associated as much with the terrors of gas warfare as with the benefits of railways. Churches fragmented, and faith itself fell into question among an increasing number of citizens. At the very time that Victorian society seemed to reach its apex it began to unravel. The last part of the Victorian era, historians have argued, are years that undermined the certainties of Victorian life and prepared the way for a more modern, more pessimistic, and more secular world – one that would shrug off the Victorian era as an outmoded relic that had pursued a myth of progress with delusional optimism. British historians have noted this side of the era for some time. Walter Houghton’s 1957 classic, The Victorian Frame of Mind, for example, talked explicitly about the tensions and anxieties that ran through Victorian religious and moral faith.46 Carl Berger turned to this theme in the final part of Sense of Power. His last chapter, ‘Militarism,’ has a somewhat different tone than the rest of the book. It is a foreshadowing of the First World War, of course, but it is also a look into the other side of Victorian attitudes towards progress – fear that it was under threat. Moral progress was being undermined by the greed and apathy of modern society. Military discipline and power stood as an alternative to a ‘generation pampered by peace and plenty.’47 Of all the anxieties and crises in the later Victorian era, none comes close in terms of importance in the minds of historians, whether in Canada or other parts of the Empire, than the great theological challenge imposed by Darwinism.48 The argument has been, with many variations, that the publication of Origin of the Species in 1859 opened a debate on the nature of humanity that challenged the literal truth of the Bible and, along the way, raised serious questions about the nature of progress, religion, and the very nature of humanity. The outlines of the basic narrative in Canadian history are well known and have been the focus of works of Canadian history by leading intellectual historians like Ramsay Cook, A.B. McKillop, and Carl Berger.

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In essence, they have demonstrated that Darwin’s writing did two things. First, by developing evolutionary theory Darwin destabilized assumptions about the literal truth of the Bible. This opened theological interpretation to new and difficult questions. Second, the ruthless competitiveness of that evolutionary process, at least in the hands of subsequent interpreters of Darwin, created a new and somewhat darker view of change than would be implied by Victorian assumptions about progress.49 Over time, historians have argued, the mutual reinforcement between science, religion, and progress began to come apart as Darwin’s influence spread in the decades after 1859. Towards the end of the century the Social Gospel, or other versions of Christian sociology arose in an attempt to adapt. Ultimately, however, as Ramsay Cook put it, the failure of theology in the post-Darwin era was a ‘fatal weakness’ in the strategy to preserve the place of religion in society.50 The triumvirate was ruptured. Over time religion moved from pervasive and triumphant centre to the margins of a more secular society. The ability of science to improve material conditions did not automatically translate into moral or social progress. Reform movements found religion an increasingly unsatisfactory basis upon which to build and turned to new sources of authority, the social sciences.51 The exact progress of this shift has preoccupied Canadian historians of the Victorian era more than any other issue. How quickly did religion decline? Did Darwinian challenges make religion irrelevant to notions of reform or, alternately, bring a new vitality through movements like the Social Gospel?52 How did the individual quest for answers adjust to the uncertainties wrought by Darwin?53 What were the relationships between this religious challenge and underlying schools of philosophy? Was, for example, idealism a product of Darwin or doomed by him? Most of all, did the triumph of Darwin signal the end of the Victorian era? In all of these questions there have been some interesting and revealing conclusions. Ramsay Cook’s influential study, The Regenerators, focuses on the often eccentric responses of a society seeking to come to grips with the new era. Strange blends of secular utopianism and religion, of religion and science come into being in movements like Theosophy and table rapping.54 All of these offshoots of the Victorian triumvirate could also be seen as signals of its demise. Religion, science, and progress no longer seemed mutually reinforcing ideas. As Canada moved into the twentieth century the choice often seemed to be between religious doctrine and social progress. In different ways,

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Ramsay Cook argues, for example, that J.S. Woodsworth, Salem Bland, and William Lyon Mackenzie King represent a fundamental shift from Victorian thinking. Theirs was the ‘stage on the road to a secular view of man and society.’55 There have been dissenters, or at least variations. In particular, Michael Gauvreau concluded that the religious impulse of the nineteenth century had a longer life than many have argued. Churches did not abandon theological conviction or Baconian concepts of knowledge as quickly as has often been assumed.56 Yet Gauvreau, though dissenting from the rapid secularization thesis espoused by many historians, ultimately accepts the argument that the Victorian era depended on a particular linkage of religion, science, and progress. By the 1930s it was impossible to ‘convey the old assurance that the march of events was providentially guided, and thus both comprehensible and predictable to the Christian believer … The discarding of Baconian thought and the prophetic history broke the cultural unity that had once marked the relationship between the evangelical churches and English Canadian life.’57 Yet, for all this, the impact of Darwin requires further explanation. The whole point of writings on Victorian religion referred to above has been to demonstrate that, once the great evangelical fervour of the early Victorian years faded, religion was pervasive but malleable; a matter of belief but also of social propriety. Given this, the tremendous impact of Darwinism can be understood only if it is viewed not just as a challenge to religion but to something even more fundamental. The Darwinian view of the world ultimately undermined the unique way in which the triumvirate of science, religion, and belief in progress had been buttressed by the very way in which Victorians understood the ‘truth.’ Darwin challenged that most fundamental part of that thought and in so doing shook the Victorian mind to its core. This is a complex issue and, my own teaching would indicate, one that is often difficult to grasp fully from a modern perspective. In essence, Victorian beliefs depended on a balance between non-evidentiary issues of faith, morality, and values – usually rooted in religion – and an empirical bent that looked to the accumulation of fact and method to resolve scientific issues. In other words, Victorian science was rigidly empirical in method but when it came to using gathered facts to make a broad generalization about cause and effect it entered God’s realm. ‘The conclusions of natural reason must therefore always be subject to possible correction by the providential truths of revelation.’58 This was

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why science and religion could coexist so readily in the mid-Victorian era. Science was important but also limited in what it could claim to explain. One could classify, order, and amass information, one could apply scientific technique to problems of industry or engineering, but the assessment of causation or purpose was something that lay beyond the scientific realm. Darwin undermined this, although it is important to realize that he was but one stream of a broader scientific challenge. Darwin developed a hypothesis on causation and compared it to empirical evidence. The evidence had to fit but the actual causal link did not need to be observed. To put it simply, one did not have to watch an evolutionary change to believe in evolution. Other scientists had also employed such approaches but that Darwin applied it to such a central matter as life itself and that his work became so well known actually shifted the nature of ‘fact’ as it was understood. Darwin’s methodology of hypothesis and conclusion came to dominate scientific debate. Once causation and even purpose was linked to empirical evidence science began to encroach upon the realm of faith. ‘It was precisely here,’ notes Berger, ‘that Darwin’s long revolution in science won out most decisively.’59 This is why, as Cook noted, such strange hybrids emerged during the transition, from Theosophy to table rapping. They were symbolic of the ever-greater intrusion of science into the religious sphere. By the end of the Victorian era the direction was clear. Science had asserted its realm to be universal. Religion was forced into a position of denial, either of the literal truth of its central document or denial of the dominant consensus of the intellectual elite. Victorian society’s particular and distinct understanding of science, enquiry, and religion had fragmented. This conclusion, although not without debate, has been central to historians’ understanding of the world of Victorian thought. Berger’s Science, God, and Nature, Cook’s Regenerators, and McKillop’s A Disciplined Intelligence all explore this disruption in order to understand the transition from the Victorian world to that of the twentieth century. Of course, none of these historians sees this as a monocausal event. The Great War, which so altered social structures, the economy, and government also had a direct impact on the triumvirate in that it sundered the notion that science and progress were linked. Urbanization undid the social-governmental assumptions of the world of Cobden, Mill, and Adam Smith.60 Many things, in other words, intruded on the end of the Victorian era. Nonetheless, what Berger termed ‘the fragmentation of

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that Victorian amalgam of science and religion, of fact and feeling, and of that sense of intellectual progress’ allows us to mark a clear distinction between the Victorian world and that which followed it.61

NOTES 1 Cited in Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Idea of Canadian Imperialism 1867–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 117. 2 Ibid., 10. 3 Carl Berger, Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto press, 1983). 4 There was an Empire-wide exchange of ideas and many of these themes originated in the United Kingdom. However, this chapter is restricted to comments on the Canadian Victorians. 5 See Jane Errington, The Lion, the Eagle and Upper Canada: A Developing Colonial Ideology (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987); David Mills, The Idea of Loyalty in Upper Canada 1784–1850 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988); S.F Wise and R.C. Brown, Canada Views the United States: Nineteenth-Century Political Attitudes (Toronto: Macmillan, 1967). 6 ‘Ninety-Two Resolutions of the Lower-Canadian Assembly,’ Resolution 41 Statutes, Treaties and Documents of the Canadian Constitution, 1713–1929, Constitutional Documents of Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1930, 2nd ed., rev. and enl., 278). Available at http://www.canadiana.org/ECO/ PageView/9_03428/0307?id=f919048e25d8d602. 7 Mills, Idea of Loyalty, 134–6; Wise and Brown, Canada Views the United States, 44. 8 J.M.S. Careless, The Union of the Canadas: The Growth of Canadian Institutions, 1841–1857 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967), remains the best overview of political and constitutional evolution in this crucial period. 9 London Illustrated News (26 June 1897): 872–3. 10 H.Y. Hind, T.C. Keefer, J.G. Hodgins, Charles Robb, M.H. Perley, Rev. Wm. Murray, Eighty Years Progress of British North America (Toronto: L. Nichols, 1864), 3. 11 Berger, Sense of Power, 109. 12 Ibid. 117. 13 Berger, Science, God, and Nature, 7. 14 Allan Smith, ‘The Myth of the Self-Made Man in English Canada 1850– 1914,’ Canadian Historical Review, 59/2 (1978): 189–219. See also Michael

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18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Doug Owram Bliss, A Living Profit: Studies in the Social History of Canadian Business 1883– 1911 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979). Doug Owram, Promise of Eden: Canadian Expansionists and the Idea of the West 1856–1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 75. Paul Rutherford, A Victorian Authority: The Daily Press in Late NineteenthCentury Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 157. Though it can be argued that Goldwin Smith also believed in Victorian progress; he just didn’t see Canada as a part of that progressive destiny. See Goldwin Smith, Canada and the Canadian Question (London: Macmillan, 1891), 30: ‘Roughnesses of this [American democratic] kind, with the servant difficulty and the boy anarchy, are the joltings in the car of human progress on its road to the glorious era of perfect order and civilisation, combined with perfect equality, which the generation after next will see.’ Suzanne Zeller, Inventing Canada: Early Victorian Science and the Idea of the Transcontinental Nation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 3–4. See J. Rodney Millard, The Master Spirit of the Age: Canadian Engineers and the Politics of Professionalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988). Kenneth Norrie, Douglas Owram, and Herbert Emery, A History of the Canadian Economy, 4th ed. (Toronto: Thomson Nelson, 2008), 159–63. Berger, Science God and Nature, 31. A.B. McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979), 61. Cited in McKillop, ed., A Critical Spirit: The Thought of William Dawson LeSueur (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977), 9. Once again, Berger was one of the first to discuss this; see Berger, Sense of Power, Chapter 4. H.V. Nelles, Philosophy of Railroads and Other Essays by T.C. Keefer, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979) ,Introduction, xxv. Ibid., 10. Smith, ‘Myth of the Self-Made Man,’ 190. Michael Bliss, A Canadian Millionaire: The Life and Business Times of Sir Joseph Flavelle bart, 1858–1939 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1978). Berger, Science, God, and Nature, 13. Heather Murray, Come, Bright Improvement: The Literary Societies of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), xi. John Webster Grant, A Profusion of Spires: Religion in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 152. Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 24.

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33 J.I. Little, Borderland Religion: The Emergence of an English-Canadian Identity 1792–1852 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 254. 34 Grant, Profusion of Spires, 57–9. 35 Joy Santink, Timothy Eaton and the Rise of His Department Store (Toronto: University of Toronto press, 1990); Bliss, Canadian Millionaire. 36 David Marshall, Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Protestant Clergy and the Crisis of Belief 1850–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 27. 37 Westfall, Protestant Culture, 55. 38 Marshall, Secularizing the Faith, 37. 39 Westfall, Protestant Culture, 195. 40 Neil Semple, ‘The Impact of Urbanization on the Methodist Church of Central Canada, 1854–1884,’ doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1979. 41 Westfall, Protestant Culture, 78. For a somewhat post-Victorian satire on the remnants of sin and redemption among the respectable, see Stephen Leacock, Arcadian Adventures of the Idle Rich (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1959 [1914]). 42 Grant saw the establishment of Christianity as more important than the particular Christian denomination or doctrine. See George Munro Grant, Ocean to Ocean: Sandford Fleming’s Expedition through Canada in 1872 (Toronto: Belford, 1877). In later writings he even extended some of this liberal view to other religions. See George Grant, Religions of the World in Relation to Christianity (Toronto: F.H. Revell, 1894). 43 R.C. Brown and G.R. Cook, Canada 1896–1921: A Nation Transformed (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974). 44 Christopher Armstrong and H.V. Nelles, The Revenge of the Methodist Bicycle Company: Sunday Streetcars and Moral Reform in Toronto 1888–1897 (Toronto: Martin, 1977). 45 Mariana Valverde, The Age of Soap, Light and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada 1885–1925 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991), 17–19. 46 Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 216–17. 47 Berger, Sense of Power, 255. Note that this theme has been present in British writings for some time. Houghton, Victorian Mind, Chapter 9. See a similar theme in G.R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). 48 The literature on the Darwin controversy is vast. For one example see James Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America 1870– 1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

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49 The best-known of these is the British writer Herbert Spencer. See David Wiltshire, The Social and Political Thought of Herbert Spencer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). 50 Ramsay Cook, The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late Victorian English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 230. 51 See for my argument on the next phase, Doug Owram, The Government Generation: Canadian Intellectuals and the State 1900–1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), Chapters 1–4. See also Barry Ferguson, Remaking Liberalism: The Intellectual Legacy of Adam Shortt, W.C. Clark and W.A. Mackintosh 1890–1925 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993). 52 One of the earliest attempts to come to grips with the Victorian religious legacy came in Richard Allen, The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada 1914–1928 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971). 53 See, for one example of a study of an individual, McKillop, ed., A Critical Spirit. 54 Cook, Regenerators. 55 Ibid., 228. 56 Michael Gauvreau, The Evangelical Century: College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991). 57 Ibid., 283. 58 McKillop, Disciplined Intelligence, 73. 59 Berger, Science, God, and Nature, 76. 60 Owram, Government Generation, 17–21. 61 Ibid., 77.

10

Cultural Diversity in Prairie Canada and the Writing of National History Gerald Friesen, in collaboration with Masako Kawata

Developments in historical writing are related to changes in society, as Carl Berger demonstrated in The Writing of Canadian History. This essay takes Berger’s work, and his special interest in the history of the Canadian Prairies, as a spur to consider the relations between Prairie social change and the writing of national history. The essay begins with a family story, that of a Japanese-Canadian family expelled from coastal British Columbia during the Second World War. It then situates this family history in historical writing and archival practice on the Prairies during the twentieth century, outlining the changing intellectual approaches to the region’s distinctive multicultural pattern. The final section considers how the juxtaposition of these regional narratives, one dealing with family and the other with historiography, illuminates contemporary pressures in society and culture, particularly challenges to the writing of national history. The essay’s purpose is to place Carl Berger’s writing in the context of recent approaches to cultural history and to suggest that Berger raises important questions about historians’ values. The historian Quentin Skinner provides an ambitious explanation of the field of which Professor Berger has been a leading representative in Canada: ‘The intellectual historian can help us to appreciate how far the values embodied in our present way of life, and our present ways of thinking about those values, reflect a series of choices made at different times between different possible worlds. This awareness can help to liberate us from the grip of any one hegemonal account of those values and how they should be interpreted and understood. Equipped with a broader sense of possibility, we can stand back from the intellectual commitments we have inherited and ask ourselves in a new spirit of enquiry what we should think of them.’1 Three aspects

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of this agenda for intellectual history are worthy of note. First, Skinner highlights the merits of historical analysis of a community’s values and of the choices the community has made. Second, he suggests that certain ‘hegemonal’ accounts articulate the values we live by. Third – and this is a serious shortcoming – he does not specify the boundaries of the community and, thus, does not address the crucial political question of where responsibility for the conduct of the debate resides, whether in the nation-state or global marketplace or some other location. This omission, which leaves open the question of relations between nationstates and globalizing culture, shapes the essay that follows. Following Carl Berger’s lead, let us accept that hegemonal accounts include historical works. Let us agree that the Prairie Provinces of Canada possessed sufficient coherence and underwent sufficiently similar changes during the twentieth century to be discussed as a ‘community.’ And let us regard the mixing of peoples of different national origins, religions, and ethnicities as a limited theme that, because of its centrality in Prairie experience, can serve as an index to cultural values and cultural change.2 Commencing from these assumptions, the following pages will consider the impact of social and cultural trends upon the Kawata family, the nature of ethnic identity as it appeared in professional historical writing and, finally, how the changes in one family’s history and in one region’s historiography illuminate discussions about today’s historical priorities, especially the writing of national history in Canada.3 A Family History Masako Kawata was four years old in 1942 when government authorities ordered her Japanese-Canadian family to leave their farm south of Vancouver. In June of that year, they travelled by train to a Manitoba sugar beet farm where they were housed in a granary. Eventually – five years and three homes later – they settled in Winnipeg. Masako excelled in her studies, received a bursary to attend university, graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Home Economics degree, taught for a few years, and then switched fields and accepted an administrative position where she flourished for three decades. After her retirement, I asked her if she would be willing to undertake a series of interviews about her family’s past. I wanted to understand the process of identity formation, ethnic and otherwise, among immigrants and their children and to depict more accurately the history of Prairie social diversity during the

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twentieth century. My suggestion happened to coincide with her own plans. She knew little of her family’s past and, given that her parents were in their nineties, she had been hoping to recover some of that story before it was lost forever. We worked together on the development of a text in a handful of meetings during the following three years. A narrative of about fifteen to twenty pages was constructed on a series of questions that I drafted, her record of her conversations with her parents, my interviews with her, and a number of subsequent discussions about the text that was emerging. The narrative begins: My mother’s story is amazing. She was born in 1915 in Vancouver. She was the eldest of nine surviving children. At the age of six or seven, she travelled on her own from Canada to Japan and lived there for six years. She complained a lot, she says. After all, she had been born in Canada and the village in which she lived in Japan with her grandparents was very poor. She returned when she was twelve, received a few years of schooling, and then worked as a domestic. She married when she was nineteen. My father’s story is also amazing. He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1905, the youngest of four children, and his family soon moved back to Japan. When he was very young, his father died. Father received some schooling in Japan and, at the age of twenty-four, in 1930, he came to Canada as an immigrant farm labourer sponsored by a Japanese family in Delta [British Columbia]. He had to work for them for three years. In 1934, he married my mother and they bought land near her parents. They cleared the land and raised chickens and sold eggs and strawberries. Four children followed in the next few years.

The Japanese were removed from coastal areas of British Columbia to inland camps in the early months of 1942 and the Kawatas, in order to stay together, accepted work on a sugar beet farm in southern Manitoba. They moved to Winnipeg five years later and adapted readily to life in the city’s polyethnic North End. The children then embarked on successful careers. One of the highlights of these later decades was the Canadian government’s official apology in 1988 for the wartime evacuation. Masako Kawata concluded: I was never Japanese. I’m a Canadian in every way in my outlook. I had very little from my heritage. You asked me a few years after Redress what I did with the Redress money. I told you then that I was buying back my

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heritage. I thought it was a good idea to buy some Japanese cultural works – I thought it was better than just spending the money. We never had original prints or pottery in our family – so I bought some – in Vancouver, in Hawaii, in Winnipeg – some beautiful prints and some pottery and this little lacquered tray that I got in a garage sale for a dollar – a beautiful work, an heirloom, and it was in this sale that I found by accident.

When Masako heard the details of her parents’ early years for the first time, she was surprised by the drama and expressed amazement that it had not become part of family lore. She also came to understand better how the journey from British Columbia to Manitoba reshaped their lives. Her parents, she learned, viewed the government’s sale of their land, house, and possessions – property the Kawata family was still paying for – as outright betrayal. Meanwhile, they had struggled to adapt to granaries, sugar beet labour, father’s long absences from the family after he accepted work in a packinghouse, and bureaucratic restrictions on where they might live in Winnipeg. They survived these challenges and eventually achieved, if not prosperity, at least sufficiency. The federal government’s offer of apology and compensation in the 1988 Redress Statement, as Ms. Kawata explains, was the last step in this journey, a crucial means of reconciling past and present. The elder Kawatas’ view of their past weighed the obvious losses against significant gains. This balance shifted constantly: loss of homeland culture in the emigration to Canada, gain in the family’s settling in a new world where material comfort seemed more accessible; loss in the family’s expulsion from the B.C. coast, gain in eventually discovering an accepting neighbourhood in north Winnipeg; loss in the British Columbia Commission’s selling of family possessions at bargain basement prices; loss in father’s acceptance of unpleasant work that contrasted sharply with his tasks on the farm they left; gain in the material possessions acquired during the prosperous 1950s and in the protections offered by an increasingly supportive Winnipeg community and Canada-wide social safety net. Their view, as expressed when they were in their nineties, was that the gains and losses were more or less in balance. They took pride especially in their children’s achievements. Masako Kawata, who was very young when they embarked on the train journey from British Columbia to Manitoba, judged the story by very different standards. It is true that, until late in life, she had almost no sense of historical or family continuity. Though she and her siblings spoke Japanese at home in their early years (her parents continued to

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speak it for the rest of their lives), they lost the language soon after their arrival in Manitoba. Their parents did not hand down the traditional domestic arts and crafts; Ms. Kawata mastered some of them at the local cultural centre later in life. Despite her volunteer work within Japanese-Canadian community institutions, she believed hers was ‘basically a Canadian way of life.’ One might think that Masako Kawata had experienced a significant degree of cultural loss. Certainly, she spoke in these terms when she described her childhood. She qualified this judgment, however, by saying that she did not think of such losses when she was young. Her view today, as she reaches her seventieth birthday, is a useful reminder about the complexity of such experiences. She says that she would not want to have been as constrained as was the norm for young women in Japan. She preferred Winnipeg’s conscious diversity to the ethnic relations of mid-century Vancouver. Though she started out in school facing considerable economic handicaps, her calm steady competence led to success in educational, career, and volunteer activities: The re-settlement of 1942 opened more doors for me. I know that because I’m here [in this comfortable apartment, at the end of a successful career] – for me it was an advantage. For my parents and people of their generation, it was just hardship. And I benefited from the timing – it was the right time – the government gave us our rights in 1949 – I went to university in 1953.

In the terms employed by political philosopher Charles Taylor, the Kawata family story offers valuable illustrations of individuals’ perceptions of their ‘identity.’ Taylor defines identity as ‘a person’s understanding of who they are, of their fundamental defining characteristics as a human being.’ In modern societies, he writes, discussions of identity are accompanied by analyses of ‘recognition and misrecognition,’ that is, estimates of how one’s identity is shaped by the perceptions of others, ‘so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves ... imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.’ Taylor suggests that democratic societies such as modern Canada embrace ‘a politics of equal recognition, which has taken various forms over the years, and has now returned in the form of demands for the equal status of cultures and of genders.’4

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The Kawata family narrative offers two illustrations of that demand for the equal status of cultures. The senior Kawatas sustained significant reverses in the course of their lives, especially because of the decisions taken by government in wartime. They wanted the label of ‘alien’ removed. Masako Kawata believed her own claim to citizenship had been accepted with little or no dissent in her community. She looked at Redress from the perspective of a thoroughly integrated Canadian whose history contained one stain and whose commitment to the community required that the historic error be acknowledged by other Canadians. Thus, both supported the Redress Campaign, though for different reasons. The elder Kawatas were not bitter. They chose to ‘look forward rather than back.’ They did not ‘impose their Japanese views’ on their children, says Masako, because they believed such inheritances ‘had to be suppressed in order to get along in society.’ But they did believe that an official government apology was necessary. Masako, in contrast, retained only a few of the conventional markers of ethnicity in her daily life, including food (‘my mother always cooked half-Japanese and half-Canadian’), and a few – though strong – links to the local Japanese-Canadian community. She had fewer connections to such other markers of ethnicity as language, faith, and national memory. But she accepted both the history of the Japanese-Canadian group’s forced resettlement and a family history that concentrated on integration rather than consciousness of ethnic cultural differences. The ‘Japanese’ aspect of her identity had two meanings, one that was based on her social attachments and another that had civic and political dimensions. She joined her parents and the local ethnic community in the Redress Campaign partly from a desire for vindication of her community and partly from a desire to educate Canadians about respect for the rights of all citizens. Thus, the two generations of the Kawata family joined the Redress Campaign with different motivations. The elders wanted an apology and then to forget and move on; the younger wanted to remember, to commemorate, and to teach. Both emphasized Japanese Canadians’ equal place in Canadian society, as Charles Taylor emphasized. To understand encounters between newcomers and host society, encounters that took place in physical places but also occurred in metaphorical and imagined spheres, scholars have invented the concept of ‘boundaries.’ The notion originates in Fredrik Barth’s discussions of ethnicity. Barth, a Norwegian anthropologist, emphasized in the 1960s

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that ethnicity was a fluid thing, shaped by the group’s present struggles to define and maintain its boundaries rather than by primordial qualities inherited in bloodstream or culture. The boundaries could be ‘real or symbolic, visible or invisible. The markers that divide could include territory, history, language, economic considerations, or symbolic identifications of one kind or another.’ The boundaries could be strong or weak, and the distinguishing marks could be obvious or nearly invisible ways of separating ‘us’ from ‘them.’ More recently, a number of postcolonial scholars concerned about hybridity, imagined communities, and cultural contingency have focused on the permeability of such boundaries and the mixing and uncertainty where cultures meet. In thinking about Prairie cities and their histories, and utilizing the concepts introduced by Barth, one might imagine a boundary zone between recently arrived ethnic groups and host society that changes in character over time.5 The nature of Winnipeg’s boundary zones, as well as of individual identity, is illuminated by the Kawata family’s experience of ‘race.’ Ms. Kawata’s story illustrates: Dad found work with the help of a friend but the authorities would not approve. They said that workers were needed in the public abattoir so he took a job there, though he didn’t like the job ... He also found a house and paid two months rent but, again, the authorities would not approve because there were too many Japanese families already living in the East Kildonan area.

In short, local government and military officials determined the Kawatas’ place of work and choice of home, in each case basing their decisions on ‘racial’ factors.6 Informal racist interaction is more difficult to pin down. Masako Kawata commented: Racism existed but it was not a big issue ... I think that life in ... Winnipeg was marked by a subtle racism. Some people treat you differently. You sense it, feel their body language, so you walk away. You don’t confront it. It’s often not verbal because people don’t want to voice such opinions. Children will say such things out loud, especially younger kids. We would chase them all the way home to their parents. They would think we were Chinese. The kids must have learned these views from someone in order to have voiced them. Most clerks in stores would serve you last, even Eaton’s and the Bay. We would try to avoid the small stores that treated us

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Gerald Friesen with Masako Kawata

in this way. We did hear racist remarks but we would always try to avoid confrontation.

As this brief history suggests, the Winnipeg encountered by the two Kawata generations differed. The elder Kawatas experienced the effects of racism in Winnipeg during the 1940s and recognized that public attitudes to ‘race’ shaped their lives in Canada; Masako Kawata’s opinions about her community were much more positive because her fulfilling career began in the 1960s and 1970s. Masako found spheres in which to make voluntary contributions, including the Japanese-Canadian cultural centre and a pavilion in Winnipeg’s summer festival, Folklorama. In these institutions she was able to address racism and explore her ethnicity in practical, everyday ways. She felt a greater degree of individual authority – greater control over her own life and greater responsibility for the wider community – than her parents had known. She established a sense of belonging within civil society, a sense of ‘ownership’ of the whole that was greater than had been possible in previous generations. In Charles Taylor’s terms, her identity was more complete, less distorted by the views of those around her, than was possible for her parents. Winnipeg’s history, too, illustrates how newcomers and long-standing residents worked out compromises during these midcentury decades. In the terms originally set out by Fredrik Barth, the boundary zone in which Masako Kawata encountered the host society had become more benign, more genuinely plural in its acknowledgment of Japanese Canadians. Prairie Historiography How does the Kawata family history, as it is recorded here, fit within the professionals’ approach to Prairie history? Such an exercise is anticipated by Carl Berger in his landmark book on the development of Canada’s English-language historical literature. Berger selects for special study those authors who broke ‘the traditional patterns of interpretation.’ These leading scholars, he says, developed the ‘original conceptions that bore on the larger and central themes in Canadian history.’ What is striking about his volume is that it sketches the course of a century-long English-Canadian historical conversation beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the 1980s. It was conducted by a small group of scholars, most of them university faculty members. The main subjects they discussed, the key themes that distinguished

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their writings, focused on Canada as nation, though the concepts underlying the national narrative changed in character over time. Indeed, Berger suggests that each generation of scholars developed ‘language appropriate to ... [that] generation.’7 Berger’s great innovation was to weave so many works from so many different authors and written over so many years into a single tapestry. The place occupied by Prairie Canada in this national conversation reflected the region’s limited influence in Confederation for much of its history. When the country’s professional historians did refer to the Prairies, they saw reflections of the grand themes they had elaborated in their histories of the eastern sections of the continent. Because the discipline’s version of the national narrative in the early twentieth century focused on the winning of responsible government in northern North America, that became the story told by some Prairie histories. Chester Martin of the University of Manitoba, for example, discussed the Prairie struggle for equality with other provinces, a campaign that began with the grant of responsible government to Manitoba in 1870 and later erupted in the three provinces’ battles with Ottawa for control over public lands and natural resources.8 Another thread in early Prairie writing simply established a regional chronicle. Thus, the work of Arthur Silver Morton of the University of Saskatchewan, as Berger recognized, ‘advanced no generalized interpretations of Canadian history. But his concentration on the activities of an imperial trading monopoly underlined the independent origins of western Canadian history.’9 If a Kawata family narrative had been available in an archive in the 1920s, it would have offered little of interest to these Prairie historians. Given their preoccupations – that is, responsible government, the country’s dominant social groups, a chronicle of European activity in the region – the leaders of western Canadian historical writing and archival collecting would have viewed the Kawatas as a very minor aspect of the regional story. When this first generation of critical histories was succeeded by economic interpretations of Canadian history in the 1930s, both Frank Underhill’s interest in protest movements and Harold Innis’s in the export of staples treated the Prairie region as a hinterland. S.D. Clark added a sociological angle to this story, particularly the notion that ‘new forms of economic enterprise’ imposed social and political stresses upon frontier regions. By linking the perspectives of Underhill (political protest) and Innis (new staple economies), Clark demonstrated that the Prairie Progressive movement and Alberta’s Social Credit Party were typical

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Gerald Friesen with Masako Kawata

protest movements of the North American frontier – ‘intensely localist, separatist, ... [seeking] autonomy and withdrawal from the infringements of outside authority.’10 These disparate approaches, which were published during the interwar years, had a common characteristic: in their treatment of the Prairie west, they treated the region as a receiving vessel, economically, politically, and culturally, rather than a patternmaker, the latter role being reserved for metropolitan centres, whether in eastern Canada or Europe. Leading national historians of the 1930s were aware of immigration to the West and might have been expected to pay close attention to the historical implications of the Kawata migration and settlement. Arthur Lower, for example, spent eighteen years (1929–1947) teaching in Winnipeg, then one of Canada’s most polyglot cities. Yet he concentrated his scholarly attention on economic themes and, from time to time, on French-English and Roman Catholic-Protestant tensions while expressing mainly disdain for the waves of southern and eastern European arrivals on the Prairies. He thought these low-wage newcomers were driving better-adapted Canadians south to the United States and would make his ideal – a socially stable and ethnically homogeneous Canada – unattainable. The sociologist Carl Dawson, a more sympathetic student of immigrant communities, nonetheless constructed his Group Settlement: Ethnic Communities in Western Canada (1936) upon the assumption that ethnic bloc settlements such as the Mennonite and Doukhobor would crumble when the truly powerful institutions in society – schools, courts, political organizations, wage labour, railways, and newspapers – consolidated a Prairie Canadian way of life.11 If historians developed narratives and archivists collected documents of the sort represented by the Kawata case, they situated such materials in the context of descriptive and often celebratory approaches to the ethnic group’s past. Prepared by insiders, designed to record the founders’ virtues and the hardships overcome, such books and collections did not figure in Berger’s analysis of history’s leaders in Canada for the good reason that they had little or no impact outside their own communities. Like the local chronicles of earlier decades, they simply registered the presence of certain distinctive minority groups within a dominant culture.12 Regional history changed significantly between the 1940s and the 1960s when W.L. Morton of the University of Manitoba and several of his colleagues at western and Maritime universities introduced their distinctive histories into the national conversation. Carl Berger, in his

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study of English-Canadian historiography, used Morton as the main illustration of the regionalists’ response to centralizing national narratives. Morton’s ‘major intellectual achievement,’ Berger writes, ‘was ... the successful effort to construct a framework and find a vocabulary to convey his attachments to both Canada and the West.’13 What would Morton, a scholar attuned to the conditions of his native province, have made of the Kawata document, had it been available to him? One might expect that pluralism, including the Japanese-Canadian story, would figure as prominently in Morton’s writings as it did in his daily life in Winnipeg, his home for more than thirty years. Indeed, Berger emphasizes Morton’s concern for this theme and suggests that Morton’s ‘most enduring preoccupation was with the acceptance of pluralism as the guarantee of freedom, civil liberties, and justice.’14 Berger’s judgment about Morton’s deepest commitment is largely correct but it underestimates the influence of that era’s cultural context upon Morton’s writings and outlook. Viewed from today’s vantage point, Morton placed remarkably little emphasis in his publications upon the ethnic and Aboriginal place in the Prairie and national narrative. True, Morton appreciated ‘the variegated and the plural’ (Berger’s phrase), but, as a writer of history, he still expressed a distinctly British version of the community story. This Britishness in his prose sat uneasily beside his daily commitments because Morton was a leader in the development of a plural atmosphere in Winnipeg during the 1940s and 1950s. He was a committee member when the Indian and Métis Friendship Centre was founded, he defended Japanese Canadians in their time of crisis, and he led the historical society’s sponsorship of research and publication on ethnic group history.15 The apparent inconsistency of an historian neglecting social pluralism in his writings while working vigorously to sustain it in his community offers an important lesson. It is very rare for a scholar, no matter how perceptive, to transcend the conventional wisdom in fashioning an historical narrative out of the intellectual materials present in the community. In Morton’s case, the theme of pluralism could not be the centre of attention in his Manitoba: A History because the national culture of that era did not treat the subject of diversity as sympathetically as it does today. Morton himself did not then appreciate how important diversity had been in the shaping of his own life and in the reshaping of Manitoba. As a result, his discussion of pluralism was reduced to a hopeful statement in the preface to his provincial history.16 The next influential generation of professional historical practice on

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Gerald Friesen with Masako Kawata

the Prairies commenced in the 1960s and reached the peak of its influence between the 1970s and 1990s. During these years, Berger explains, there occurred a ‘vast expansion’ in the numbers of Canadian academic historians, an ‘explosion of research and publications,’ and ‘new fashions’ such as the history of ‘the experiences of ordinary people and explorations of gender, class, ethnicity, and region.’17 Writing about and archiving the records of the Prairies reflected the broader trends. Contributions to Prairie immigration and ethnic history were part of the historiographical renaissance, though they adhered more closely to themes developed in the previous generation. Thus, the documents created by ethnic communities – church records, newspapers, minutes of club meetings – provided some scholars with plenty of material for their path-breaking ethnic histories. The records of the Prairies’ broader institutions, including schools, courts, and legislatures, enabled other scholars to reinforce Carl Dawson’s thesis that the ethnic groups’ inevitable trajectory led to a relatively uniform culture and society. In both approaches, the notions of definable, palpable ethnic group ‘identities’ and of an increasingly pervasive dominant culture or ‘host society’ provided the axes of analysis. These Prairie ethnic historians and archivists would have welcomed the Kawata family document and seen it as evidence about ethnic identity and integration, issues central to their work. But, as will become clear, there were some fundamental differences between their ‘social history’ thinking and the approach taken in the Kawata discussion above. Historical debate moved on in the 1980s and 1990s and new approaches undermined Canada’s social history. A product of global changes in culture and communication, of such intellectual phenomena as postmodernism and poststructuralism, and of doubts about the country’s stability as nation-state, the new histories challenged the conceptual limits implicit in previous generations, including the assumptions of both the national political and the progressive social schools. The new concerns were at once more intensely individual and more sweepingly international. They reflected the opinion expressed in Christopher Bayly’s path-breaking history of the modern world that ‘all local, national, or regional histories must ... be global histories. It is no longer really possible to write “European” or “American” history in a narrow sense.’ They also reflected Charles Tilly’s formulation of identity as an unstable cultural phenomenon. These recent histories framed the world within a new set of assumptions, leaving behind the preoccupations of social historians as they did so.18

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No one would suggest today that immigrants and social diversity were irrelevant in the history of twentieth-century Prairie Canada. But it is striking to see what a limited place such themes occupied in the histories written before the 1960s.19 The publications that led the national historical conversation during the first half of the twentieth century were establishing the print account of the country’s institutional and material foundations. Pluralism might have been a social ideal or personal commitment for some leading historians but it was not a central subject of their narratives. W.L. Morton and his predecessors would have regarded the Kawata family history presented in these pages as unconventional because it failed to address the concerns that were most relevant to the Canada of their day. In contrast, social historians and archivists working between the 1960s and 1990s would have given the Kawata history a congenial home. These scholars remedied the national narrative’s favouring of the privileged and its omission of people who possessed far less control over their lives. Their revisionist approaches introduced new problems, however, including the reification of the ethnic group and the splintering of the national story. Both the Morton regional school and the social history school faded in the 1990s. In this period, the hard lines distinguishing ethnic groups dissolved. The works published around the turn of the millennium, some of them quite critical of the old grand narratives, placed a new emphasis upon global perspectives and challenged essentialist views of culture. Such a brief history of professional historical practice, no more than five phases in a regional conversation, illustrates the steady pace of change in the professionals’ consensus about the Prairie past. It also illustrates changes in the Kawatas’ place in the hegemonal narrative. Cultural Diversity and the Nation-State The foregoing surveys of the Kawata family story and of Prairie historical writing, read as two parts of a single cultural history, illuminate some important community choices, as Quentin Skinner suggested. One crucial choice, a collective attempt to ease the integration of migrants into Prairie Canadian cities that commenced in the 1950s and has continued to the present, became a subject of international interest, given the urgency of events related to the global movement and mixing of peoples. What is more, the development of new historical approaches in these same decades has underlined the increasingly close relations between local and global trends in the analysis of society.

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Gerald Friesen with Masako Kawata

Some themes cropped up in both stories. Three of these themes – race, gender, and communication – had significant implications for a fourth, a hitherto-unshakable unit of modern human experience, the nationstate. In this final section, I would like to consider these themes in relation to Canada’s national history. Masako Kawata’s text differed from earlier histories in one crucial aspect, the matter of ‘race.’ Though she was conscious of skin colour and other physical identifiers as factors shaping her family’s experience, and though race had once occupied a central place in Canadian conversations, in all the time the family history was being prepared she raised the concept of race only obliquely. This was not simply an oversight but reflected her deeply held view of the world. When asked directly about her race as we reviewed these pages for a last time, Ms. Kawata said: I never think of myself as Japanese alone. I say Japanese-Canadian because I haven’t retained a lot of Japanese ways and, basically, as I said, I lived a Canadian life. My ‘race’ is Japanese-Canadian. My features and everything – I can’t say I’m a Canadian, I look different. People to this day ask me where I’m from. They don’t really mean to say that, they’re asking if I’m Chinese, Vietnamese. What they mean is ‘what is your ancestry?’ There are a few who think you’re from another country. They ask how you learned to speak English so well. There are so many new immigrants ... Is it race? Something is shaping you differently. I don’t know if it’s biological, but it’s ingrained from when you were born. Maybe the attitudes that you learn at an early age. You’re taught certain things ... I’m not competent to talk about race at a genetic level but there aren’t inner differences.

And that was her conclusion. She may have looked different from someone of European ancestry, may have had responses to the world that were learned from her parents and inherited from earlier generations, but ‘there aren’t inner differences.’ Race, in her view, simply does not define crucial distinctions within humankind. Ms. Kawata’s comments reflected changes in the wider community and in the scholarly world. Race mattered less in 2008 than in earlier generations. Racism existed, and so did race-based judgments, but race as a category distinguishing meaningfully between and among humans was now contested. Such a debate was new. Chester Martin would have recognized race as an important category in human societies. William Morton accepted the existence of race while arguing for

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a tolerant pluralism that ensured equal rights for all. The progressive social historians followed Morton’s lead, condemning racism and defending those without power, especially those who did not qualify for ‘whiteness’ in the community’s collective definition of race, but accepting the relatively stable status of race itself. In contrast, some recent scholars, such as Paul Gilroy, have argued that race must be rejected as an organizing category in discussions of humankind.20 Though she did not follow the academic literature, Ms. Kawata travelled this latter path. For her, racism was an historical issue but physical differences – skin colour, hair, facial and body characteristics – were not matters of relevance. And, in her view, the intellectual or social or cultural differences often associated with such characteristics, had other explanations than the biological. Another obvious silence in the above pages is the matter of gender. When I asked Masako Kawata about the place of sex difference in her story, she talked about career choices. She had decided at an early age that she wanted to go to university. Her highest school marks were in Home Economics and she knew little else about the academic disciplines, so she entered that faculty: I thought about Pharmacy but, in those days, girls didn’t go into Pharmacy. And I thought if my grades were good enough, I’d do a Master’s degree in Clothing and Textiles. But I wasn’t quite good enough in the Arts classes.

Those were the facts of life as she saw them. The greater fact was that I was able to go to University – though I wasn’t male ... not that many women went on [to university]. That’s why I say my parents were more liberal-minded and allowed me to do things I wanted to do. Males in the family had more opportunity. They were expected to do certain things. The attitude of the time ... that was the foundation that shaped you. You can’t change what you are. I made a small step because I did get to go to university. If you were from a poor family, the girl didn’t go, especially if there were sons in the family.

Her parents’ decision that she might compete for a bursary, Ms. Kawata believed, had shaped her life. Gender may have been a factor in determining the range of her life choices but an even more important factor was that her parents had respected her abilities and aspirations.

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Gerald Friesen with Masako Kawata

Ms. Kawata’s comments about pharmacy – in Canada a man’s profession in the 1950s – applied to many other professions as well. Almost all the professional historians of the Prairies before the 1960s were men. Not only did graduate school recruiting and university hiring reflect this masculine bias but so, too, did the very questions scholars asked of historical sources. Public policy, the economy, and the military were fair game for historical investigation; domestic affairs, the legal status of women, and gender itself were not. Even in the 1960s and 1970s, when women made noteworthy breakthroughs in university history departments, the subject of women’s history was often marginalized, at best one among many social history sub-fields. Historians at the turn of the millennium were determined to change this outlook. Masako Kawata may have seen her life as one of considerable freedom; nonetheless, the new scholars wanted to transcend the limits implicit in her statement that ‘you can’t change what you are.’ They wanted to establish that women’s roles in society and relations with men were contingent rather than eternal and, as such, were important subjects of historical inquiry. Feminist scholarship and women scholars transformed studies of gender. Women’s status, social roles, and identities were increasingly considered on the same plane as the questions about politics and the economy that once constituted the main objects of scholarly inquiry.21 Another difference between the pre-1960s histories and their successors derived from the new modes of communication such as television, the Internet, and the Web. Masako Kawata’s willingness to be interviewed and her concern for the recording of her family’s past represented aspects of a new cultural moment. She saw in our oral history project the possibility of discovering her family’s story, of reflecting on it, of preserving it, and of communicating it to others. Though she had not articulated such an aspiration to herself, in developing a family story she was altering the inherited relations between archivist and source and between historian and audience. Ms. Kawata became the co-creator of a document, co-supervisor of its use, and co-agent of its distribution. As a professional historian working with her, I became the collaborator in each of these roles. This phenomenon, in which both the historian and the historical subject acted as cultural producers, has become more widespread just in the last few years because of the World Wide Web. It has become possible to insert one’s own family story into the world’s historical record. And the story itself can be shaped as much by the actors as by historian-collaborators. Some scholars believe that these developments in communication technology and historical

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practice make possible history writings different from any that existed in previous generations. Citizens, they say, are no longer sidelined by the professional scholar’s nearly exclusive control over the historical narrative nor are they as constrained by some of the other gatekeepers – publishers, archivists, museum curators – who contributed to the shaping of the narrative. Rather, laypeople (as opposed to professionals) have acquired the capacity to challenge hegemonal accounts, thereby injecting a fluidity and flexibility into community conversation that is possible only in the age of screen, Web, and postmodernity.22 Such changes in the perception of race and gender, and in the practices underlying cultural production, challenged what had been for more than a century the organizing principles of history as discipline. One such principle was the nation-state. Where did Canada fit in this new world of shifting boundaries and contingent identities? And what about the so-called regions within the nation-state? For the early historians of western Canada, there was no question but that the British Empire and the nation constituted fixed spaces in the universe. And the Prairie West was a distinguishable region within them. Social historians introduced new ways of thinking about ordinary people but they, too, accepted Canada’s boundaries and the relevance of region and nation-state. By focusing on the ‘limited identities’ of ordinary citizens, however, they opened themselves to charges that they addressed minor subjects (‘housemaid’s knee in Belleville,’ as one critic lamented), and neglected themes crucial to the maintenance of national unity. This debate between the social historians and the national historians lasted for a decade and left wounds on both sides before the conversation moved on. Historians of the new millennium are trying to define new vantage points. In one widely cited Canadian alternative, Ian McKay acknowledges the importance of the nation while defining Canada not as an essence to be defended or an empty space to be possessed but as a liberal project, ‘the implantation and expansion over a heterogeneous terrain of a certain politico-economic logic – to wit, liberalism.’23 Adele Perry’s alternative rejects the centrality of the nation, including what she described as national historians’ quest for ‘one narrative line in Canadian history’ and their acceptance of ‘the nation’s claims to totality and coherence.’24 In these departures from previous conceptualizations McKay and Perry are not alone. For several decades, similar concerns had been reshaping the thinking of many historians, including American specialists weary of that country’s alleged national ‘exceptional-

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Gerald Friesen with Masako Kawata

ism,’ British specialists eager to bring overseas experience into the story of their island, Atlantic historians, environmental historians, ‘world’ historians, and others.25 Like generations of scholars before them, they recognize that the most effective histories are those best able to depict both the forces shaping previous worlds and the forces shaping the present day and to mould them into a single narrative. Their contemporary circumstances, they believe, require a drastic reconsideration of the place of nation-states in their histories. Carl Berger has offered a brief comment on this question. Twenty years ago, in an earlier historiographical moment, when social history was challenging political history as the most effective means of constructing a dialogue between past and present, Berger noted what some saw as the new social historians’ refusal to shoulder ‘the burden of constantly performing as some kind of national sage.’ He added that some scholars viewed the revisionists’ rejection of such a role as inappropriate because the revisionists were shunning a useful tradition of service. The tradition, one that ‘stretched back from [Donald] Creighton to George M. Wrong,’ was to provide ‘positive perspectives on the major currents of national life.’26 Berger’s perception, that a contest was being waged between two approaches to the writing of history and to the nation-state itself, was an accurate one. The spectre of ‘positive perspectives on national life’ was indeed the preoccupation of social history’s critics at the time and after. But, as Berger’s carefully phrased comment implied, the revisionist historians were not attempting to evade their civic responsibilities nor were they conveying unrelieved, negative social criticism. Rather, they were trying to see clearly into the future while sketching as carefully as possible a meaningful image of the past – the Sisyphean task of historians in every age. This is where the Kawata family history comes in. To a small degree, it illustrates the strengths of the new historical writing because it enables readers to perceive as social constructions what once seemed timeless aspects of life such as race and gender and even historical narrative itself. But it also accepts the necessity of paying careful attention to the national frame in which the family’s experience takes place. Many aspects of the Kawata story, including the parents’ original decision to migrate to Canada, the 1942 expulsion, the 1949 grant of citizenship, and the 1988 achievement of Redress involve Canada as national entity. To review such a narrative and find an unbroken series of positive images of the nation-state would be a travesty. To deny the relevance of the nation-state’s history would also be folly. The Kawata story re-

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flects Quentin Skinner’s agenda for intellectual history: that it should examine the values embodied in our present way of life and the choices that led to this condition. But it also introduces the need to recognize national borders in many – not all, but many – studies of the past, and especially those considering events between the late eighteenth and the late twentieth centuries. The scholar’s challenge today is to reconcile the nuances of the new history with the relevance of previous generations’ concern for the nation-state.

NOTES I would like to thank the readers of this manuscript, Margaret Conrad, Jean Friesen, Len Kuffert, Morris Mott, Tom Nesmith, Doug Owram, and Bill Waiser, for their very helpful advice. 1 Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 116–17. In The Writing of Canadian History, Carl Berger wrote that he hoped ‘to explain the attitudes historians brought to the study of the past and to relate historical literature more closely to its context, suggesting allusively the affinities between history and other contemporaneous expressions in Canadian intellectual life.’ The reason for such a ‘history of history,’ he explained, was that there are ‘hidden and unsuspected factors behind any national tradition of historical writing, and these need to be raised as far as possible to the level of consciousness so that they can be neutralized and brought under control.’ Berger, The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing 1900 to 1970 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1976; 2nd ed.: University of Toronto Press, 1986), ix. 2 This may seem a larger jump but it is defended in Royden Loewen and Gerald Friesen, Immigrants in Prairie Cities: Ethnic Diversity in Twentieth Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). 3 Berger The Writing of Canadian History, ix, 177–8; the notion of a ‘hegemonal account’ is similar to Raymond Williams’s use of ‘selective tradition’ in his famous essay ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’; it appears in Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 1980), 31–49. 4 Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25, 27; Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996).

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Gerald Friesen with Masako Kawata

5 Robin Cohen, ‘Britain and Nation,’ in Jan and Leo Lucassen, eds., Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997), 352–3; an illustration of views on hybridity is Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge 1994). 6 Peter Nunoda mentions a discriminatory city by-law on minimum wages in ‘Harold Hirose on Integration and Citizenship for Japanese Manitobans, 1942–52,’ Prairie Forum, 27/2 (2002): 209–20; Saul Cherniack, ‘Canada and the Japanese Canadians,’ unpublished lecture presented to the Jewish Historical Society of Western Canada, Dec. 1998; Loewen and Friesen, Immigrants in Prairie Cities. 7 Berger The Writing of Canadian History, ix. 8 Chester Martin, ‘The Natural Resources Question’: The Historical Basis of Provincial Claims (Winnipeg: King’s Printer, 1920); L.H. Thomas, The Struggle for Responsible Government in the North-West Territories (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978 [1956]). 9 A.S. Morton’s concern was the fur trade and he did not insist on the Aboriginal origins of Prairie history; Arthur S. Morton, A History of the Canadian West to 1870–71 (London: Nelson, 1939). As Berger recognized, W.L. Morton ‘was an inheritor of this tradition.’ Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 241. The nineteenth-century origins of Prairie historical writing are discussed in Doug Owram, Promise of Eden: The Canadian Expansionist Movement and the Idea of the West 1856–1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980); Lyle Dick, ‘The Seven Oaks Incident and the Construction of an Historical Tradition, 1816 to 1970,’ in Catherine Cavanaugh and Jeremy Mouat, eds., Making Western Canada: Essays on European Colonization and Settlement (Toronto: Garamond, 1996), 1–30; L.G. Thomas, ‘Historiography of the Fur Trade Era,’ and T.D. Regehr, ‘Historiography of the Canadian Plains after 1870,’ in Richard Allen, ed., A Region of the Mind: Interpreting the Western Canadian Plains (Regina: Canadian Plains Studies Centre, 1973), 73–85 and 87–101. 10 Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 167. 11 Even some of the most scholarly works dedicated to the history of particular groups, such as those sponsored by the Manitoba Historical Society, had the assimilationist purpose of establishing ‘the degree of participation [of ethnic groups] in the life of the province.’ W.L. Morton, ‘Foreword’ to Arthur A. Chiel, The Jews in Manitoba: A Social History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961), iv; Lower’s and Dawson’s views are discussed in Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 128–31 and 161–3. 12 J. Murray Gibbon, Canadian Mosaic: The Making of a Northern Nation (New

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13

14 15

16

17

18

York: Dodd, Mead, 1939), and Watson Kirkconnell, The European Heritage (London: Dent, 1930). Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 242, 256; W.L. Morton, ‘Clio in Canada: The Interpretation of Canadian History,’ in A.B. McKillop, ed., Contexts of Canada’s Past: Selected Essays of W.L. Morton (Toronto: Macmillan, 1980) 105, which was first published in University of Toronto Quarterly, 25 (April, 1946): 227–34. Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 248. Leslie Hall, ‘The Creation of the Winnipeg Indian and Metis Friendship Centre 1954–1964,’ M.A. thesis, University of Manitoba / University of Winnipeg, 2004; Mary Kinnear, ‘“An Aboriginal Past and a Multicultural Future”: Margaret McWilliams and Manitoba History,’ Manitoba History, 24 (Fall 1992) http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/mb_history/24/mcwilliams_m .shtml. Berger suggests that Morton should be seen as a transitional figure between national historians and the new social historians of the 1960s–1990s. Morton’s ‘feeling for the local was stronger than the so-called nationbuilding approach to the Canadian past allowed, and this brought him perhaps closer to a younger generation of historians who would accept as common wisdom Northrop Frye’s statement that the tension between a political sense of unity and the imaginative sense of locality was central to whatever the word Canada meant.’ Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 256; the reference is to Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), iii. Carl Berger ‘History and Historians,’ in Gerald Hallowell, ed., The Oxford Companion to Canadian History (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2004), 286–9. The most frequently cited statement of the new age was by J.M.S. Careless, ‘“Limited Identities” in Canada,’ Canadian Historical Review, 50 (1969): 1–10. An introduction to this approach is the chapter on ‘Postmodernism and the Crisis of Modernity,’ in Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York: Norton, 1994), 198–237; on world history, C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 2; on identity, Charles Tilly, ‘Citizenship, Identity and Social History,’ in Charles Tilly, ed., Citizenship, Identity and Social History, Supplement 3, International Review of Social History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–17; on the millennial ethnic history approach, Fredrik Barth, Balinese Worlds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

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Gerald Friesen with Masako Kawata

19 T.D. Regehr, ‘Historiography of the Canadian Plains after 1870,’ in Richard Allen, ed., A Region of the Mind: Interpreting the Western Canadian Plains (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1973), 87–102. 20 Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures, and the Allure of Race (London: Allen Lane Penguin Press, 2001). 21 Beverly Boutilier and Alison Prentice, eds., Creating Historical Memory: English-Canadian Women and the Work of History (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997); Donald Wright, The Professionalization of History in English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); Mary Kinnear, Margaret McWilliams: An Interwar Feminist (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991). 22 Roy Rosenzweig, ‘Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,’ Journal of American History, 93/1 (2006): 117–46; Peter Seixas, ed., Theorizing Historical Consciousness (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Margaret Conrad, ‘Public History and Its Discontents or History in the Age of Wikipedia,’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 18/1 (2007): 1–26. When the alternative viewpoints of those without power did surface, the records were likely to have been generated by institutions representing a narrow range of experience; Manoly Lupul, ed., A Heritage in Transition: Essays in the History of Ukrainians in Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982), 5. 23 Ian McKay, ‘The Liberal Order Framework,’ Canadian Historical Review, 81/4 (2000): 620. 24 Adele Perry has suggested that, even for the social historians, ‘the nation remained as the central frame of reference.’ She writes: ‘What people saw as constituting Canadian history changed, but the framing of it within the confines of nation, for the most part, did not.’ Perry ‘Nation, Empire, and the Writing of English Canadian History,’ unpublished paper presented to a conference on ‘Rethinking Canadian History,’ University of London Institute of Commonwealth Studies and Institute for the Study of the Americas, May 2007. 25 David Thelen ‘Making History and Making the United States,’ Journal of American Studies, 32 (1998): 373–97; Antoinette Burton, ‘Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating “British” History,’ Journal of Historical Sociology, 10/3 (1997): 227–48; Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World. 26 Berger regretted particularly the focus on ‘guilt and grievance’ in the recent social histories. Moreover, he suggested that these scholars had become ‘more isolated from the society in which they lived and in general [had] failed to respond to the enormous popular interest in the past – either in satisfying it, or educating it.’ Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 269, 319, 320. He said

Cultural Diversity in Prairie Canada 267 in his 2004 entry on ‘History and Historians,’ for the Oxford Campanion of Canadian History, that professional historians increasingly wrote for each other rather than for a wider public, for whom ‘history seemed to matter less and less’ than in earlier generations (at 289).

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MILLENNIAL REFLECTIONS

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11

A New Era of History Alan Bowker

Some time around the year 2000 humanity entered a new historical era. This was the result of a combination of important developments in the late twentieth century: advances in information and communications; political changes including the end of the Cold War; global economic integration; social change including the gender revolution; pressure on the global ecology; and spectacular advances in computer science, physics, biology, and a range of related sciences and technologies. Together, these and other changes fundamentally altered our perception of human nature, our world, God, and the role of the individual in society. We are approaching a new plateau in human mental and cultural evolution. We cannot predict in detail how the New Era will unfold. As with previous transitions it will be a synthesis of new and old, and it will not transform all parts of the world at once; but its impact will ultimately be universal and irreversible. We can say with confidence that the Modern Era, which began five hundred years ago with the Renaissance, is over.1 We may illustrate the significance of present changes by comparison with the last transition. About 1500 CE economic, social, political, and technological trends that had been developing for over a century interacted in an accelerating process of change. These included the decline of feudalism and the rise of powerful monarchs, state bureaucracies, standing armies, and national treasuries; the Westphalian state system; firearms; revolutions in agriculture, manufacturing, banking, and money; and the rise of capitalism and world trade, which led to a rapid growth of wealth and population. But the Modern Era was primarily defined by the cultural, scientific, and intellectual revolutions of the Renaissance, which altered humanity’s world view, our physical and

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mental capabilities, and human nature itself. Printing accelerated the dissemination of ideas, changed concepts of time vs. space, and altered human thought and the way we perceive and utilize information.2 Humanism encouraged individualism, reason, and secular learning, celebrated the human body, and brought fundamental changes in artistic perception such as perspective in painting, proportion in ‘classical’ architecture, and polyphony in music. The Reformation proclaimed a more direct relationship between man and God, with salvation dependent on faith, works, or predestination with no need of sacraments, saints, or ecclesiastical authority. The Counter-reformation emphasized obedience and conformity, producing on the one hand, modern concepts of ideology, totalitarianism, and propaganda, and on the other, an enduring body of great art and literature. Religious wars and excessive missionary zeal gave way over time to more pragmatic compromises, increasing toleration, and a greater separation of church and state. The discovery that the earth revolves around the sun destroyed the concept of the universe as a closed system with God as primum mobile. The scientific method pioneered by Bacon and Descartes, based on the conviction that nature is governed by laws which individuals have sufficient reason to discover, laid the groundwork for the astonishing scientific, medical, and technological advances of the Modern Era. And finally, maritime and navigation technology allowed explorers to discover new continents and circumnavigate the globe. Thus began a fundamental alteration of the European mind and consciousness, a relentless process of expansion, enslavement, and subjugation of indigenous people, and a determination to make the whole planet ‘the known world.’ For all its drama and variety, the history of the Modern Era has been, essentially, the working out of these revolutions. Any historical transition has a catalytic event. For the New Era, it was the appearance in the 1990s of the Internet, whose sudden emergence followed a generation of breakthroughs in micro-electronics, computing, telecommunications, and opto-electronics, and fuelled an explosion of technologies and applications as well as profound economic and social changes. In cultural terms its significance rivals alphabetization and printing. Electronic communications had already replaced two millennia of visual literary culture with an oral/aural culture that made the world a ‘global village.’ Telephones had allowed ordinary people to talk to each other over long distances in real time. Now all forms and media of communication came together – television, fax, Internet, wireless, cellular telephones, text messaging, datalinks, and a host of devices

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that integrate and enhance them, to connect exponentially increasing numbers of people in interactive networks, then networks of networks, in real time, and at almost any place.3 If, as McLuhan pointed out, technology extended man’s body and media his senses, the Internet has extended his neural net across the planet, making each connected human being part of a global brain, in constant learning mode.4 As computing power expands exponentially, enhancing our intellects and memories, and as virtual reality links experiences as well as thoughts, the ability of information technology to shape the consciousness and reshape the reality of each individual will continue at an accelerating pace.5 These changes were facilitated by the global triumph of capitalism, free trade, political liberalism, the fall of communism and state-controlled economies, and an explosion in innovation.6 They also coincided with the gender revolution – itself an epoch-making event in human history. Labour-saving devices, a post-industrial economy, mass education, and control over reproduction, combined during the last three decades of the twentieth century to totally change gender relationships, patriarchal control, sexuality, the family, social interaction, and politics in the developed world. It is not simply that women were ‘liberated.’ The physical and social barriers that had kept half of humanity from participating in the political, economic, and cultural mainstream of most societies are being progressively removed, along with other barriers and prejudices pertaining to class, race, gender, and physical handicap. To many outside the portion of the world that has fully entered the New Era, gender equality is a particularly threatening development, and the role of women is one of the major fault-lines marking the separation between the New Era and its predecessors.7 The Internet is now creating a limitless network of economic nodes which allow for local production, specialization and innovation, cater to local needs and wants, encourage decentralization, and ensure financial flows, while absorbing new ideas, discoveries, and techniques. The network society fundamentally alters the nature of work and of the worker, of companies, of bureaucracies, of power. It is relentlessly innovative and constantly creates and destroys. Above all, because it bases economic activity on information and knowledge, it blurs the lines between economics and politics, culture and the world of the mind.8 It is in a sense an example of classical anarchy, with spontaneous networks springing up across national, gender, class, cultural, and traditional barriers. There are political networks, entertainment systems, and billions of ordinary people chatting, arguing, spreading rumours, ex-

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changing images and information. Crime and terrorism have also gone global, using all the tools of networking to operate outside controls and across borders. Globalized culture is best symbolized by popular music including rock, jazz, reggae, samba, and others which blend influences from many parts of the world, represent a fundamental break with the ‘classical’ and popular music of the Modern Era, and combine with local traditions to form new syntheses which then become part of the global mix. The network does not homogenize the world; indeed, local cultures and nationalisms are being strengthened and engaged in a global ‘multilogue.’ We are seeing the paradox of ‘“one civilization – many civilizations” with technology as its theoretical base, information its mode of production, and pluralism its operational feature.’9 But what can connect and empower can also fragment and alienate. The network can strip its participants of identity and autonomy, stifle creativity, exalt the inconsequential, and encourage and condone ideas and behaviour that would never be tolerated in the real world. Many people use the network not as a window but a mirror, isolating themselves with like-minded people in intellectual gated communities or virtual tribes.10 What can encourage dialogue can also exacerbate conflict, especially along the fault-lines between the New Era and those resisting it or excluded from it.11 In the world of the network, political, social, and economic institutions, values, structures, and concepts once thought as solid as Gibraltar are suddenly built on shifting sand. The sovereign state and the Westphalian system are under challenge. Borders are becoming increasingly porous to ideas, financial flows, crime, disease, terrorist networks, and population movement. Power is gravitating downward to citizens, outward to networks, ethnic communities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and corporations, and upward to international institutions and supranational agencies. On the one hand, ‘the individual has won and foreign policy is the continuation of domestic concerns beyond national boundaries and vice-versa.’12 On the other hand, the sovereign state remains the fundamental unit of international activity and the expectations on it, acting alone or with other states – to guard its citizens, keep the peace, provide jobs and economic security, protect the environment, and guarantee public health, human rights, and personal safety – are actually heightened.13 Corporations are combining, dissolving, competing, acquiring, divesting, and becoming networks engaging a myriad of niche operators. Individuals face the same constant unsettlement and threats to their identity. They can no longer define themselves by their physical

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being or root themselves in space, time, and culture. They can no longer rely on the certitudes of the Modern Era such as reason, logic, order, hierarchy, expertise, and the meta-narratives of history and culture. They are becoming increasingly schizophrenic members of both real and virtual societies and cannot always tell the difference between the two. The satellite technology which made this revolution possible was a by-product of another revolution of the late twentieth century. The image of Planet Earth, viewed for the first time from the moon in 1969, etched into the human consciousness the beauty, loneliness, and vulnerability of the world we all share. This event did not make 1969 the epoch-making year that 1492 was, since humanity has realized that in the near future large-scale colonization of other planets is likely beyond its reach.14 Its real significance has been to focus our attention on the ecosystem of our own world, where the almost unimaginable eruption of human population from four billion in 1976 to six billion in 2000 before ‘levelling off’ at about nine billion by 205015 is pressing fragile ecosystems and finite resources, threatening starvation, disease, and war, and thus fundamentally altering the relation of humanity to the planet. A huge proportion of the arable land is covered with monocultures of plants and animals vulnerable to disease, pests, and climate change. But most people are now clustered in giant conurbations, a sociocultural transition as profound as that from hunting and gathering to agriculture.16 From space we can see our ‘pale blue dot’17 as the product of life and its evolution over four billion years. With modern communications we can know each other, our sufferings, our inequalities, our diversity, and our common humanity. With science we can begin to understand the incredibly complex, dynamic, interlocking systems that govern climate, ocean currents, and the thin, intricate, resilient web of life on ‘spaceship earth.’18 Globalization has made us one world and given us awesome responsibilities. This sense of the smallness of our terrestrial home was accentuated by a new awareness of the vastness of the universe and the mystery of the forces that created it and hold it together. From the Renaissance to about 1900, the universe was seen as majestic clockwork. To Newton it demonstrated the existence of God. Then in the early twentieth century, this static model was smashed by general relativity and quantum mechanics. However, these two theories contradict each other in important ways. For decades physicists have struggled to find a reconciling ‘theory of everything’ to explain both the nature of matter and the origins of the universe. We may soon know more about the history and

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properties of the universe than we do about our own planet.19 But the more we learn, the more we must rely on mathematical abstractions and probabilities to describe what we cannot envisage or precisely define, and the more we realize that we have to regard the universe in terms of the chance evolution of complex, self-organizing systems.20 Many scientists now envisage a universe built on seventeen elementary particles characterized by uncertainty and ‘spin.’ Matter and force are actually vibrating loops of ‘string.’ The matter and energy we can perceive is only 4 per cent of what exists (the rest being ‘dark’ matter and energy whose precise composition we do not yet know). The universe operates in perhaps eleven tightly folded dimensions. But most of these theories are unproven and open to challenge. We know with much more certainty that the universe exploded in a ‘Big Bang’ in an incomprehensibly short time from an incomprehensibly small space. We can detect the evidence remaining from the creation. We can define the moment (Planck time, 10–43 seconds) when what we now know as universal natural laws ‘switched on.’ We can understand why matter coalesced into stars and galaxies, how the heavier elements were formed, that the universe is expanding steadily, and that the physical laws we know exist in every part of the universe.21 Will we ever know the ‘mind of God’?22 Or are we approaching the limits of what we can know, what we can test, and what we can do?23 Is it pure accident that the laws of physics in our universe are precisely those that make stars, planets, and life possible?24 It may be that we are on the threshold of a major breakthrough in our understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe. Or, our world view may shift decisively in the opposite direction, with a final acceptance that our 500-year quest for scientific mastery has ended in uncertainty, mystery, and the unknowable. These discoveries have paralleled a revolution in the perception of life. The Origin of Species in 1859, Mendelian genetics, and the discovery of DNA in 1953, had by the late twentieth century given rise to breathtaking advances in genetic science and produced a new Darwinian synthesis which spawned new sciences of evolutionary psychology, biology, anthropology, and even philosophy.25 Neo-Darwinism asserts that the beauty and harmony of life are the product of a trillion trillion chance occurrences, in each of which one out of an immense number of potential designs survived and replicated itself – because it worked. This mechanistic view has been modified by a renewed recognition of the importance of sexual selection and a better understanding of how organisms could evolve more quickly than previously believed, in or-

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der to adapt to rapid environmental changes.26 The key issue is why, between 2.5 million and 50,000 years ago, the human brain tripled in size, apparently in a series of leaps,27 so as to mark humans off entirely from other species, not only in terms of intelligence but of physical development (bipedalism, lengthy childhoods), sexual evolution, social evolution (operating in families, clans, and tribes), having culture (not only technology but art and philosophy), and above all, language (the innate ability to form thoughts and to learn language from birth).28 There is also increasing recognition that human physical and cultural evolution have gone hand in hand – that human social interaction, technology, and communication have been drivers as well as products of both.29 Through abstract thought, language, and then mathematics and writing, science and technology, and ever more complex social organizations, humanity has climbed with accelerating speed to successive new plateaux of evolution. Driven by curiosity, humanity will explore outer space, plumb the depths of the oceans, delve into the human mind and soul, and begin to transcend the violence and selfishness necessary for its early survival.30 Rapid technological evolution and the ability to adapt to new environments and challenges are now largely kicking away the Darwinist ladder. But what is consciousness, and what is human nature? Is there a ‘me’ apart from my body? Is the human brain – with its capacity for love, guilt, morality, selfishness, altruism, spirituality, social relations, war, and its ability to adapt, plan, remember, predict, integrate, imagine, speculate, appreciate beauty and mystery, and formulate and express ideas in language, symbols, and mathematics – merely a mechanical, chance product of evolution?31 God and the soul have vanished from this equation. But Man – part angel, part beast – is once again the measure of all things. The idea of progress has gained renewed currency – not as a march towards perfectibility and the Kingdom of God but as the inexorable evolutionary drive of complex self-organizing systems towards greater complexity and ever-higher levels of consciousness.32 The twentieth century advances in physics and biology and the emerging computer science revolution led to a proliferation of interacting technologies in genetics, artificial intelligence (AI), pharmaceuticals, and nanotechnology. In medicine, work at the cellular, gene, and molecular levels promises to eradicate most common diseases, delay aging, reverse spinal cord or brain damage, and eliminate hereditary or degenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Powerful drugs, implants, and therapies could enhance our physical perform-

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ance, sharpen our mental acuity, and alter our moods and personalities. Biotechnology will increase the food supply through enhanced plants and animals, and could produce new medicines, fight pollution, reduce reliance on fossil fuels, and eliminate waste. Synthetic biology could grow living products including organs and food. Genetic engineering could overcome handicaps and enhance human capabilities.33 AI has literally surrounded us with intelligence, from iPods to smart cards to wired cities, leading to an ever-closer interface between people and machines and, perhaps one day, the development of a ‘cybersphere’ where people are directly linked to machines and each other.34 AI and robotics will solve complex problems, wage war, combat crime and terrorism, explore space and our world, and drive new technologies.35 Nanotechnology, now in its infancy, opens vast possibilities of building machines by self-assembling molecules, producing super-materials, increasing computing through superconduction and miniaturization, and building nanobots – robots at the molecular level that can destroy pollutants, diagnose and fight disease, and even self-replicate.36 Many see these technological advances as the road to ‘world peace, universal prosperity, and evolution to a higher level of compassion and accomplishment.’37 Some believe that humans enhanced by robotics and AI will live in virtual reality, extend their capabilities through technology, and upload their consciousness into super-intelligent, selfreplicating, conscious (even spiritual) machines which will surpass humans.38 Some believe that genetic engineering and technology will produce a ‘meta-man’; that ‘homo sapiens would spawn its own successors by fast-forward.’39 Some preach the imminence of what they call the Singularity – a point when history ends, humanity transforms, and the universe itself acquires life and consciousness.40 But many others regard all this as a vision not of a Golden Age but of a Dark Age. Will these technologies be used for human benefit or for designer babies, warfare, or terrorism? Will their creators be idealistic geeks, or are we on the cusp of ‘a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals?’41 Would ‘trans-humans’ be happier, better, or zombies without purpose, living in the shadow of machines? How would the vast majority of humanity react to super-intelligent humans or machines, and how would they be treated by them?42 An ever-present possibility is the law of unintended consequences. Or human cussedness, carelessness, or depravity. Or warfare, environmental degradation, or a system so complex it collapses of its own weight. Or even uncontrolled selfreplication by machines, nanobots, or engineered viruses. A laboratory

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accident wipes out the planet – Oops!43 Lord Martin Rees gives humanity less than a 50 per cent chance of surviving the next three decades.44 The nightmare scenarios are not inevitable, if only because the real world of complex systems, finite communications, and unforeseen outcomes is more intricate and diverse than the world of scientific dreamers; and because human beings, society, and nature are more unpredictable, resilient, and slower to adapt than machines or theorists.45 Nonetheless, the ability to understand, alter, and manipulate nature confronts humanity with the most profound moral dilemma in our history. Our oldest myths, from the Tower of Babel to Dr Frankenstein, warn us against trying to be gods, much less creating God in our own image. A more accurate analogy, says Bill McKibben, would be the legend of King Midas, for we now have the ability to turn to gold everything that makes us human, only to find it dross.46 But in the New Era will these religious and philosophical traditions still be adequate to define our humanity? Technologies to overcome physical infirmities are as old as wooden legs, eyeglasses, wheelchairs, and hearing aids. What is the point at which external physical aids, implants, substitutes, and alterations transform a human being into Darth Vader?47 Whether change comes in a rush or by creeping incrementalism, there are too many forces pushing it forward – capitalism, the military, the competition of universities for research grants and prestige, the pride of discovery, the desires and needs of ordinary people – to suggest that we can ever effectively restrict or contain scientific advance.48 Science has removed our old sense of limits and fear of divine punishment, and it has obliterated the duality between man and nature. ‘We are breaking out of our roles as passive observers of life and the order of things to become manipulators of life and the order of things,’ says one AI scientist. ‘We will need to observe and moderate our own hubris very carefully.’49 Indeed. If all we wanted was to live longer and better, or even to save our loved ones from terrible suffering, there might well be an argument that we should not tempt nature or God. But we are now driven not by hubris but by necessity. We must expand our capability to safely and responsibly manipulate the environment, increase the food supply, conquer disease, and alter nature to produce livable environments and deal with toxic waste, because of the relentless pressure of population growth and resource depletion, climate change, and the accelerating complexity of our world. We must also accommodate diversity, deal with transitions, and address the instability that will arise because

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some parts of the world are connected and others are not, because some have their feet on the ladder of development while others cannot even reach the bottom rung, because some have entered the New Era while others have not.50 Humanity is now responsible for the planet, not as its lords, possessors, or stewards, but in the far more fundamental sense that we are nature and nature is us. We, and not chance or God, are now in charge of the future evolution of our species and our world. What we do matters not only to us but to the universe.51 If we do not progress, the fate that awaits us is not the stagnation that beset China when it turned from progress, but a Malthusian cataclysm, a global version of ‘failed states,’ or the end of human history. Science and technology will only address these problems effectively if they are understood and applied by people and governments who combine the humanity and morality which are the product of our long evolution on the planet; the objective rationality which is at the heart of science; and the consciousness of evolving complex systems, global ecology, human diversity, economic balances, and communications that are the hallmark of the emerging New Era. Yet here we falter. Neo-liberals argue that only the unfettered individual and the market can allocate the resources, encourage the innovation, and develop the techniques to resolve problems. But can we continue to allow bureaucrats, scientists, and private enterprises in the developed world to research, test, and market products in genetic engineering, bio-weapons, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology with the same narrow outlook and lack of control that has often marked their past efforts?52 On the other hand, the late twentieth century has left an intellectual legacy of fragmentation, uncertainty, and doubt. The individual is an intersection of influences and context. The line between virtual and real, art and experience, is blurred. The certitudes of science, objectivity, reason, and religion dissolve in ambiguity, presentism, and relativism. Extreme ‘postmodernism’ is a universal solvent that renders any form of common understanding, reasoned dialogue, or concerted action impossible.53 It is not the culmination of modernism but a sign of its exhaustion, at best a way station to the New Era. Imprisoned in the twilight of modernity, the best lack all conviction (or any possibility of conviction), while the ideologues, the techno-geeks, the fanatics, the extremists, and the many opponents of the New Era are full of passionate intensity. A new synthesis is needed and there are signs it is emerging. The new sense of common humanity and responsibility for the planet, the need for action, and the energy set loose by globalization and the power of

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the network, may gradually give rise to a new cosmopolitanism, beginning at the level of individuals but transforming communities, states, and global institutions. Cosmopolitanism, as I envisage it,54 is a state of awareness and a habit of mind resulting from a multilogue among the ideas, values, cultures, and histories of the diverse peoples of the world connected by global networks, a blending of global and local. It implies a balance between the rationality, science, and objective logic of modernism and postmodernism’s comfort with diverse viewpoints and values, multiple identities, uncertainty, and complexity. It means a willingness and confidence to act according to our best instincts and knowledge, tempered with the humility, tolerance, scepticism, memory, and sense of limits that chasten and humanize but do not de-energize. Cosmopolitanism, expressed in a new sense of responsibility and citizenship within and between countries,55 will moderate the excesses of neo-liberalism, renew democracy within nations, and provide the impetus for a new global system. Ordering, regulating, and securing an increasingly interdependent world will be one of the major challenges of the New Era. As nationstates adjust to porous borders and empowered citizens, so the international system is becoming dynamic and multilayered, with flows and connections and more complex webs of interdependency. There is as yet no viable way of addressing the many issues and problems that beset, and link, all the peoples of the world except through cooperation among sovereign states and through the international laws, agreements, organizations, and institutions created by and built upon them – however asymmetric and increasingly dysfunctional these may be. But states and institutions will be increasingly supplemented by the growing role of individuals, networks, and partnerships between and among scientists, academics, citizen activists, governments, and the private sector which will increasingly form the basis both for the legitimacy of the state and for international action.56 In the final analysis it is people, not institutions or states, who will be the foundation for the democratic national and international order of the future – people expressing their citizenship as voters, as members of NGOs, as participants in networks, or as creators of cultural expression. People connected in cyberspace can only perform these roles if they remain human beings who know who they are and what it means to be human. If we in the West are to play a meaningful role as cosmopolitan citizens engaged in a multilogue with the world, we need to rediscover our past, not through an ‘agreed version,’ still less through

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a fragmenting and futile debate about ‘meta-narratives,’ but through a sustained, eclectic, empirical enquiry to connect deracinated people to all the roots of their multiple identities and to situate us together in ‘the long now,’ as humans whose past, present, and future are connected and meaningful.57 Education, in all its forms and facets, needs to prepare young people for the new information society as well as provide the understanding of other cultures and values needed for cosmopolitanism, while at the same time grounding them in the best of the literature, thought, history, and achievements of their own pasts.58 But education itself will change radically. Classroom walls will disappear, the lines between formal education and media, Internet, museums, visual reality, popular writers, amateur researchers, will blur, and all will have a role to play in bringing the past and our culture alive with immediacy and relevance.59 To an increasing extent educated and empowered citizens will educate themselves, through dialogue and engagement with each other. Universities will continue to play their more specialized role of research and advanced study, but to remain relevant in this new environment academics, especially in the humanities and social sciences, will have to rediscover their primary vocation to be the conscience, thinkers, and teachers not only of students but of society as a whole. Cosmopolitanism also demands a renewed sense of the spiritual, a revitalization of humanity’s relation with the divine, with nature, and with each other. The Modern Era has progressively marginalized religion and secularized society.60 The contradiction between science and the theology, eschatology, and teleology of the major religious beliefs is now acute. Physicists and biologists see the universe and life on earth not as Creation but as evolving, complex, self-organizing systems. Human qualities such as morality, altruism, self-sacrifice, mercy, once seen as flowing from divine commandments, ancient prophecy, and religious practice, are now being analysed as the products of physical and cultural evolution or as the by-products of a complex brain with pattern recognition, information processing, and inference systems suitable to survival.61 Our world has become ‘disenchanted.’ We no longer understand the concept of sacred time or of nature as a chain of being. We no longer ‘need God’ to explain the universe any more than our ancestors after a certain point needed gods to explain the sunrise or guarantee the harvest.62 The global network society challenges the claim of any religion to being the full and final truth. Perhaps, some argue, it is time for religion to go. We no longer need it to do good, help our fellow

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humans, or feel the wonder of the universe, and it is time we got rid of its violence, superstition, dogmatism, and bigotry.63 ‘Get over your fear of being a machine,’ barks one otherwise thoughtful scientist, ‘We are not the centre of the universe, and God does not exist.’64 For the majority of the peoples of the world such conclusions, thus baldly stated, would make the New Era intolerable. Many of those already entering the New Era have profound misgivings that the beliefs built up over millennia, with their divine plan and purpose, their belief in a world beyond the senses and a power beyond the mundane, their faith in a fuller, richer, even eternal life, may be swept aside in favour of the bleak doctrine that man is ‘alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance.’65 If we are determined solely by evolution, have we free will? What is the basis of law, ethics, justice, and human dignity? Do we succumb to despair or simply regress to the savagery of our hunter-gatherer ancestors?66 The coming ‘clash of civilizations’ will not be between ‘Islam’ or ‘China’ and ‘the West’ but between those within each who are coming to grips with the New Era, and those who will struggle at all costs to defeat what they see as its godless materialism.67 Instability, repression, conflict, and terrorism will be seen by developed societies as a security issue and a political divide; but the real cultural tension will be subtler and more pervasive – for religion will be another fault-line dividing the New Era from the old. But such arid atheism is not the basis on which the New Era will be built. Religion expresses a part of human nature that cannot be encompassed within the world of reason and science. In the language of mythology, metaphor, art, and mystery, and through devotion and ritual, it links humanity to a divine power existing outside normal time, space, and experience. Spirituality is as prevalent now as it has been in the past, even if adherence to religious institutions and rituals has declined.68 Indeed, as humanity comes to grips with our new understanding of the universe, of our oneness with nature, and of our new role and responsibility, the dualities between spirit and body, man and nature, and the immanence or transcendence of God, which have been at the heart of our major religions, fall away. The New Era may also be a new Axial Age – the name given by Karl Jaspers to a period in the ancient world when great prophets and thinkers in all cultures questioned established beliefs and developed new syntheses which had in common their emphasis on humanity, tolerance, compassion, justice, a God of mercy, and the need for people to emulate the divine.69

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Religions are not invented simply to fill a need (though they are only successful if they do); they are the result of deep insight and prophecy, translated into the myth and poetry that can alone convey our awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe and our place in it, define our humanity, answer our deepest questions, and provide meaning and comfort to ordinary people. Because we still speak the language of the Modern Era, which finds such concepts difficult to conceive let alone express or believe, we can only see the religious evolution of the New Era through a glass, darkly. An age of information and scepticism will scrutinize all those who claim to be prophets and challenge all assertions of divine revelation. But as the network society evolves into an ongoing multilogue, an oral culture where myth and metaphor can be used without shame, where all cultures and beliefs can share their insights and values, qualitatively new religious ideas and beliefs could emerge. The evolution of religious beliefs, and the relationships among them, will shape the New Era as it unfolds. Such new beliefs must not be merely a ‘God-of-the-gaps,’ providing religious explanations for what science has not (yet) discovered. Nor can they be blind obscurantism based on a denial of objective reality. Some scientists argue there is meaning, though not design, in the inexorable trend of the emergent universe towards increasing diversity and of life towards ever higher levels of consciousness. The emergence of consciousness in a tiny speck of the universe (no more illogical than the emergence from an infinitude of random replications of the complex life forms that inhabit our world) is a defining moment in the history of the universe and the key to its future evolution.70 Seen thus, the universe is not a ‘cosmic joke’ but ‘a meaningful entity’ which has given birth to ‘thinking beings able to discern truth, apprehend beauty, feel love, yearn after goodness, define evil, experience mystery.’71 After five centuries of Copernican dethronement, humanity, as the consciousness which alone gives the universe meaning, is once more at the centre of an evolving cosmos. A new spirituality, based on but moving far beyond this awareness, drawing on but different from the received religions of today, is the only way by which humanity can fully realize its potential, overcome the doubts and blind alleys of postmodernism, express an affirmative vision of our common humanity, life, and our interdependent world, and continue as autonomous but interconnected and interdependent human beings a global multilogue about the basic questions that define the human condition.72 What does all this mean for Canadians? Canada is quintessentially

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a product of the Modern Era, but unlike the Americans we retained organic ties to the older world and have been for most of our existence on the margins of empire. The great challenges we have faced in our history – finding an uneasy, inconsistent, sometimes costly balance between North America and the British Empire; engaging in the international system and the global economy but preserving our independence; defining and nurturing a sense of identity and values while espousing modernity; building a nation while reconciling regions, identities, values, rights – can be seen as emblematic of the challenges now facing all countries. We are in a familiar position as a leader in making the transition to the New Era, but slightly off to one side where we can take a somewhat more detached approach, neither resisting change nor embracing it unthinkingly.73 Canada has been called the ‘first post-modern state’;74 it is, rather, a harbinger of the New Era. It is a complex, cosmopolitan country, a political space in which limited and multiple identities and two ‘societal nationalisms’ could find freedom as long as they adhered to certain basic rules necessary for social cohesion.75 We have had our share of bigotry, strife, injustice, and conflict, but these have been more than balanced by a history of openness, tolerance, compromise, pragmatism, and social justice.76 Immigration has made Canada a ‘multiculture,’ a node point and meeting place for peoples of the world.77 Our Constitution, often derided as an impossible mishmash of contradictions, looks more and more like, if not a model for others (God forbid!), at least a signpost to the New Era.78 Among the most connected people on the planet, Canadians can engage in a multilogue among themselves as well as with the world, and we will see our multiple identities, strengths, and common interests through our own eyes and those of others, situated in global civilization. Canada, says John Ralston Saul, is an idea or it is nothing.79 In the world of information, all states are ideas and the Canadian idea is one of the best because it is open, fluid, conditional, and inclusive, well fitted to survive in a world that values diversity and encounters change, and to advance the interests of all its peoples in a way that none could do alone. But the New Era will challenge Canada as well. Canadians and their governments, like all the societies of the New Era, will have to address the social, political, economic, intellectual, and spiritual issues this chapter has outlined, to define their humanity as well as their identity, and to reassess their values and their place in the world. The postmodern forces of fragmentation and the politics of division have been

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especially acute in Canada. Individuals and groups are empowered; racial, ethnic, and gender issues are at the forefront; and the state at all levels must deal with reduced authority and heightened expectations.80 It is by no means clear how the Canadian federation will develop, or whether it will survive in its present form, in the evolving global order of the New Era. And, like the world as a whole, all Canadians will not enter the New Era at the same time or in the same way.81 Our governments will be challenged by the need to encourage the education and innovation needed to maintain our leading position, while dealing with the fault-lines that will emerge within and between regions, within minority groups, within cities, and with the resultant strain on our social cohesion and our values. Canadians will therefore need, more than most people, to embrace the cosmopolitanism of the New Era both at home and in our view of the world. There is no longer an ‘in here’ and an ‘out there.’ Canadians are ‘in the world’ whether we like it or not, and the Canadian state in the New Era can only play a full role, at home or in the world system, with the continuing democratic consent and the active partnership and engagement of its citizens. In the Modern Era Canada survived and prospered immensely but somehow never quite fulfilled the modernist idea that a nation-state should be the embodiment of some common project, identity, or ideology.82 In the New Era, our very lack of these qualities, our ability to accept reality, favour empiricism over ideology, assume complexity, live with ambiguity and contradiction, tolerate diversity, cherish multiple identities, as well as our adherence to liberal democracy and human rights, now make us leaders in an evolving world order and an example keenly studied by others. But all this is the product of our experience, individual and collective, and we cannot assume it will continue automatically. If we want to understand the role we must now play, we must know who we are as people, as peoples. We must know what we stand for in the world. We must understand what has shaped us, including our shortcomings and failures. We must see these projects not as a national pageant but as a way of situating ourselves in time as well as in space with a past and a future as well as a present.83 To extend the brilliant metaphor of Viv Nelles,84 Canadians are about to put on yet another Transformation Mask, this time one that will be a two-way mirror both transmitting and reflecting an image, blending what we have become with the world of which we are now an inseparable part. The world will need all the resources of the past and present, all the guidance and faith we can draw from without, all the ethical, moral,

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and spiritual resources we can gather from within, if it is to balance its scientific mastery, offset the forces that have been set loose, and survive the transition to the New Era. Even under the best scenarios the world will be a very dangerous place in the short term. As ever-larger numbers fight for the limited resources of the planet, the developed will act in their self-interest and the despair of the excluded will deepen. The threat of nuclear destruction and war between great powers will be replaced in an interdependent world by local conflict, terrorism, pandemics, ecological catastrophes, systems breakdowns, and the far more pervasive intellectual and cultural threats which inhere in the global information society. The New Era both allows and requires humans to become wiser and better than we have been so far. It is sobering indeed to remember the transition of the Renaissance, where Europe nearly destroyed itself in religious wars, did destroy the indigenous cultures of the New World, and slaughtered or condemned to slavery those Africans it could reach. The Modern Era began for most of the inhabitants of the world on the day when they were conquered, colonized, or dominated by a European power; and their subsequent history was marked by their efforts to destroy colonial empires and emerge as full citizens in developed countries. The ancient world collapsed from within, its technologies limited, its philosophies and will to act exhausted. Our challenge is far more complex, difficult, and fundamental than earlier transitions since there is no alternative to success if humanity is to survive. If we fail, for whichever of the many reasons we could fail, our history on this planet could end. If we succeed, we will usher in not only a New Era of history but possibly even a new phase of human evolution, different from all that has gone before.85

NOTES 1 I use the term ‘era’ to denote a long historical period such as the Middle Ages, the Modern Era, or Ancient history. These eras contain shorter periods, one of which is the modern period (basically the short twentieth century); but the Modern Era discussed in this chapter is the five centuries that began with the Renaissance. The concept of historical eras is open to challenge from many directions, as are the criteria used to define them. Some separate the Early Modern Era (1400–1750) from the Late Modern (1750–). My definition is the traditional one, which keeps the emphasis on the broad and varied intellectual and cultural transitions that mark the

288 Alan Bowker Modern Era, rather than on economic, social, and technological changes. The year 2000 is an arbitrary date that marks the fruition of the Internet, just as 1500 is an arbitrary date. Martin Albrow, in The Global Age: State and Society beyond Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1–30, sees the Modern Era as flowing from the Renaissance, as does Charles Taylor, in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); though they see the Modern Era in very different ways. See also J.C.D. Clark, Our Shadowed Present: Modernism, Postmodernism and History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 16–17. It may also be argued that the Modern Era is a concept peculiar to Western history; but historians of other civilizations also see it as their latest era because their societies have been transformed by Western conquest, ideas, science, and culture and the New Era will be Global. See Felipe FernandezArnesto, Civilizations (Toronto: Key Porter, 2000), 536–66; and Farhang Rajee, Globalization on Trial: The Human Condition and the Information Civilization (Ottawa: IDRC, 2000), chapter 1. The remaining question is whether what we are now experiencing is the dawn of a New Era or simply a new phase of the Modern Era. Anthony Giddens, in Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping Our Lives (New York: Routledge, 2000), and in earlier works on modernity, recognizes that an important transition is taking place but sees it as a continuation and extension of modernity. Martin Albrow notes that as prisoners of the language of modernity, we find it difficult to see the New Era as a departure from modernism – or, we may regard fundamental change as marking ‘the end of history’ (Global Age,1–6). Farhang Rajee argues that we are entering a ‘new phase of human history based on the information mode of production’ (Globalization on Trial, 9). James Martin, in The Meaning of the 21st Century: A Vital Blueprint for Securing Our Future (London: Eden Project Books, 2007), sees the twenty-first century not as the beginning of a new historical era but as a period of transition towards a new evolutionary plateau, if humanity survives. Finally, many scientists see us entering not just a new historical Era but a new geological/ecological Period, the Anthropocene, since humanity is now transforming the planet itself. 2 See Harold Innis, The Bias of Communications (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), and Empire and Communications (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), as well as Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). 3 See Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. (Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell 2000).

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4 Insightful though he has proven to be, McLuhan did not live to see the diversity and convergence of all the media in the network society. Many of his acolytes tend to apply his ‘laws’ rather than building on his insights. Most useful for our purposes are Derrick De Kerckhove, Connected Intelligence: The Arrival of the Web Society (Toronto: Somerville House, 1997), and The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality (Toronto: Somerville House, 1995); and Ronald Diebert, Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), which updates Innis’s ideas as well. 5 Joel Garreau, in Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Expanding Our Minds, Our Bodies – And What It Means to Be Human (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 6, describes a curve of exponential change, based on Moore’s Law (computing power doubles every 18 months at reducing cost) which can be applied to all change. In 2000 we were at the ‘knee of the curve,’ that is, the point when the line of change went virtually straight up. Ray Kurzweil, in The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005), 7–33, applies the curve to all history; each stage of evolution, he argues, has been exponentially shorter than the last. Undoubtedly, accelerating change is altering the way we perceive the world, our history, and ourselves. 6 Jeffrey A Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: Norton, 2006), 363–434. 7 Giddens, Runaway World, 69–84; and Manual Castells, The Power of Identity (Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997), 134–242. Of course the process is not uniform worldwide, and I am conscious of the increasing denial of basic rights to, oppression of, and violence against women and girls in many parts of the world. But the growing body of international law relating to the rights of women and girl children, the widening range of opportunities and roles for women in newly developing countries, and the prominence of gender issues among, for example, the Millennium Development Goals, indicate that the gender revolution has been clearly established as the direction in which the world will move in the New Era, albeit with resistance and setbacks. 8 There are shelves of works on the network society, globalization, and the new economy, but the debate is as ‘siloed’ as the international organizations and government departments that respond to it. This chapter cannot deal with the complexities of globalization, nor does it argue that globalization will solve all problems and not produce inequalities and anomalies, conflicts, and crises – quite the opposite. What it does argue is that globalization in its broadest sense will shape the world of the New Era.

290 Alan Bowker I cite here only works that bring together many threads including the impacts on the developing world and the layers of engagement of various peoples and societies, and relate them to human society, culture, and mind. I have been deeply influenced by Manuel Castells’s magisterial three-volume work The Information Society which combines sophisticated technological knowledge with exhaustive political, economic, and social analysis and deep cultural insight, all with an international perspective. See vol. 1, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed., 2000; vol. 2, The Power of Identity, 1997; and vol. 3, End of Millennium, 2nd ed., 2000 (all Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell). Albrow, Global Age, is also important as are Rajee, Globalization on Trial; David Held, Anthony McGraw, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Parraton, Global Transformation: Politics, Economics and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalization and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World (New York: Ballantine, 1996). Other useful works include John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1–31; Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens, eds., Global Capitalism (New York: New Press, 2000); Giddens, Runaway World; Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access: The New Role of Hyper-capitalism, Where All Life Is a Paid-for Experience (New York: Tarcher/ Putnam, 2000); Frances Cairncross, The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997); Don Tapscott, The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996); John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000); David Held and Anthony McGrew, Globalization/Anti-Globalization (Cambridge: Polity, 2002). 9 Rajee, Globalization on Trial, ix; see also Chapter 3. To Rajee, globalization is a ‘process not a project’ (8) in which no society has control or a monopoly and each human is unique; it is a ‘global village but not a global identity’ (95). See Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture, 26–7; Diebert, Parchment, Printing, and Hypermiedia, 178–91; Giddens, Runaway World, 31; Albrow, Global Age, 146–8. By ‘multilogue’ I mean here an ongoing interaction among individuals who may not even know each other, through increasingly sophisticated media of communication and agencies of connectedness. It is not yet a ‘global brain’ or even a ‘global mind’ but it is much more intimate than a ‘network’ and more comprehensive than a ‘dialogue’ or ‘conversation’; and it is exponentially evolving in complexity and scope. 10 Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A.

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Knopf, 2010); Cass Sunstein, republic.com (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Castells, Power of Identity, chapters 5 and 6; Brown and Duguid, Social Life of Information; Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, 20th anniversary ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 209; Francis Fukuyama, The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of the Social Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999); Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap: How Can We Solve the Problems of the Future? (Toronto: Knopf, 2000), 333–6. See Pippa Norris, Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). The digital divide occurs not only between countries but also within societies (Castells, End of Millennium, Chapter 2). Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), 53. Held and McGrew, in Globalization/Anti-Globalization, summarize the wide range of views about globalization and the evolution of the state. See also: Gordon Smith and Moisßs Naím, Altered States: Globalization, Sovereignty and Governance (Ottawa: IDRC, 2000); articles by Koenig-Archibugi, Stiglitz, and Goodin, in David Held and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, eds., Taming Globalization: Frontiers of Governance (London: Polity, 2003); Cooper, Breaking of Nations, 26–54; Richard Rosencrance, The Rise of the Virtual State: Wealth and Power in the Coming Century (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation-State (New York: Free Press, 1995); Walter Wriston, The Twilight of Sovereignty: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our World (New York: Scribner’s, 1992); Thomas Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Berkley Books, 2004); Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (New York: Anchor, 2003). Some see the cosmos not as a new frontier but as a lifeboat. See Freeman Dyson, The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 75–105; Martin, Meaning of the 21st Century, 421–5; Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York: Random House, 1994), 283–5. Estimates range from a low-fertility assumption of over 8 billion to a constant fertility assumption of over 10.5 billion. The present population is about 6.8 billion. See http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/ wpp2008/wpp2008_highlights.pdf.The fact that growth will then slow down, and that some countries will instead have a problem of aging, does not reduce the stress this growth, coupled with rising expectations among the young population in poor countries, will cause.

292 Alan Bowker 16 Roy Woodbridge, The Next World War: Tribes, Cities, Nations, and Ecological Decline (Toronto University of Toronto Press, 2004); Thomas Homer-Dixon, Environmental Scarcity and Global Security (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1993), Ingenuity Gap, and The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization (Toronto: Knopf, 2006); J.F. Rischard, High Noon: 20 Global Problems 20 Years to Solve Them (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Held et al., Global Transformations, 376–413; and Bjørn Lomborg, ed., Global Crises, Global Solutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 17 Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 8. 18 The phrase was Buckminster Fuller’s. The Gaia hypothesis of J.P. Lovelock described Gaia as ‘a complex entity involving the Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet. The maintenance of relatively constant conditions by active control may be conveniently described by the term “homeostasis.”’ Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), and The Ages of Gaia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 11. There is increasing acceptance that the planetary ecology is a set of complex, self-organizing systems that are, in a sense, alive, and whose study requires a different scientific approach. See Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (London: Penguin, 2007); Homer-Dixon, Ingenuity Gap, 108–20; Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1999, 10th anniversary ed.), 156–66; Brian Goodwin, ‘In the Shadow of Culture,’ in John Brockman, ed., The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century (New York: Vintage, 2002), 41–51; Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (New York: Wiley, 2000). 19 Lee Smolin, ‘The Future of the Nature of the Universe,’ in Brockman, Next Fifty Years, 3–17. One reason for this is that although vast, the universe is relatively simple in its information content, compared, say, with complex, self-organizing systems that govern the ecology of the earth, or with the DNA of an ant. 20 Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); John D. Barron, The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless, and Endless (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 93–109, 115–54; Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

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21 I do not pretend to understand a fraction of the physics involved or to have read more than a Planck length of the literature. Excellent overviews are found in Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams, The View from the Centre of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos (New York: Riverhead, 2006); ‘A Survey of the Universe,’ Economist, (5 Jan. 2002): 47–58, http://www.economist.com/surveys; and Martin Rees, Our Cosmic Habitat (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), and Before the Beginning: Our Universe and Others (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Helix Books, 1997). Roger Penrose, in The Emperor’s New Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), has a more technical but still readable summary of quantum mechanics, cosmology, and other aspects of modern physics. See also Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam, 1988). An excellent source on string theory is www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/, which features writing by Brian Greene and interviews with leading scientists. Lee Smolin, in The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of Science and What Comes Next (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006, esp. chapters 1–15, gives a readable history of string theory (which he attacks as unprovable and a blind alley) and has a good exposition of the emerging rival theory of quantum loop gravity. 22 Stephen Hawking, The Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe (Beverley Hills CA: Mew Millennium Press, 2002), 166–7. 23 Gödel’s theorem is one example of limitations on what we can understand through mathematics. We are running into other examples including complexity theory, quantum uncertainty, relativity, and untestable hypotheses. Smolin, ‘Future,’ and the Economist article ‘Survey of the Universe’ provide a list of questions we may or may not be able to answer in the first half of the twenty-first century, and the factors which limit discovery. 24 Various theories of ‘biophilic’ universes, including the idea that they result from a cosmic natural selection from an infinitude of possibilities, are found in: Rees, Our Cosmic Habitat, and ‘Cosmological Challenges: Are We Alone and Where,’ in Brockman, Next Fifty Years, 18–28; Smolin, Life of the Cosmos; Primack and Abrams, View from the Centre, Chapter 7; John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Kaufmann, Reinventing the Sacred. 25 Genome mapping has provided a powerful new tool for tracing evolution and its progress, beyond having to rely on fossil remains. A good discussion of the new biological sciences is in Robert Wright, Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are – The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

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(New York: Vintage, 1994). On anthropology, see Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Leading philosophers include Daniel Dennett, Patricia Churchland, and Michael Ruse. On psychology, see David J. Buller, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005). Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), 103–36, describes the difficulties early evolutionary social scientists faced. The key figure in the neo-Darwinist synthesis was Richard Dawkins, who argued in 1976 that ‘we, and all other animals are machines created by our genes.’ The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989 [1976]), 2. See Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley, eds., Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think – Reflections by Scientists, Writers, and Philosophers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). See Michael Ruse, Darwinism and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 342–69, and his many other writings on consciousness and evolution; Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (New York: HarperCollins, 1999); and Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (New York: Harper, 2006 [1993]). Excellent summaries of evolution and recent research are the survey article ‘Human Evolution,’ Economist, (24 Dec. 2005): 3–12, and Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (New York: Free Press, 2009). There is disagreement on why and how this brain evolution took place and whether it continues. See William H Calvin, A Brief History of the Mind from Apes to Internet and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Ruse, Darwinism, 166–93; Diamond, Third Chimpanzee, Chapter 2; Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Anchor, 2001); Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), and Nature vs. Nurture: Genes, Experience and What Makes Us Human (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 201–30; Gary Lynch and Richard Grainger, Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). There is great controversy about what the balance is between physical and cultural evolution, how they interact, and how each works. At one time, pure Darwinists led by Dawkins and Dennett, insisted that evolution took place over too long a period for cultural changes to express themselves in

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physical changes. They therefore developed pseudo-Darwinist concepts such as ‘memes’ – cultural bits that could replicate in human brains just as genes could in the body, and be winnowed and developed by the same process of natural selection; an excellent summary of a broad literature is Robert Aunger, ed., Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). This idea has some usefulness in explaining why some ideas catch on and spread and others do not – see, for example, Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (New York: Little, Brown, 2001) – but it has been largely discarded as a means of explaining cultural evolution. The emerging consensus, called ‘epigenetics,’ driven by research into brain science and genetics, is that behaviours and possibly even cultural characteristics can be inherited, and that evolution is thus ongoing. Of course, the impact of accelerating technology on future evolution will be profound. Wright, Moral Animal, 5. See Pinker, Blank Slate. Roger Penrose, in The Emperor’s New Mind, and Shadows of Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), argues that consciousness exists at the quantum level. See also Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, chapters 12 and 13. The issue that most divides scientists is whether creativity is a function of computing power or of the complexity and interconnections of the human brain. See Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997); Margaret Boden, The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (London: Routledge, 2004); and Jeremy Campbell, The Improbable Machine: What Artificial Intelligence Research Reveals about How the Mind Really Works (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989); Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: HarperCollins, 1996); Calvin, Brief History of the Mind; Norman Doidge, The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (New York: Penguin, 2007). See Michael Ruse, ‘Richard Dawkins and the Problem of Progress,’ in Grafen and Ridley, Dawkins, 145–63. Much of biotechnology is controversial but genetic engineering is especially so because of the philosophical issues it raises. Its unapologetic apostles include Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), and Lee Silver, Remaking Eden: Cloning and beyond in a Brave New World (New York: Avon, 1997). A more comprehensive and balanced view is Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World (New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1998).

296 Alan Bowker 34 David Gelertner, ‘Tapping into the Beam,’ in Brockman, Next Fifty Years, 242. 35 See Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Pantheon, 2002); Andy Clark, Natural-born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Gregory Benford and Elizabeth Malartre, Beyond Human: Living with Robots and Cyborgs (New York: Tom Doherty, 2007). 36 Nanotechnology is technology at the level of the atom. See ‘A Survey of Nanotechnology,’ Economist, (1 Jan. 2005), http://www.economist.com/ surveys. The leading apostle of ‘strong’ nanotechnology is Eric Drexler whose seminal work was Engines of Creation (New York: Anchor, 1986); his ideas can be accessed at http://e-drexler.com/ and http://www.foresight .org/nano (accessed 08/04/09). 37 Michael Roco and William Sims Bainbridge, Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, quoted in Garreau, Radical Evolution, 112–14. Garreau is an invaluable source on the various technologies and the issues they raise, as is Martin, Meaning of the 21st Century, chapters 10, 11, and 12; Benford and Malartre is a popular survey of much of this work. See also Dyson, The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet; Douglas Mulhall, Our Molecular Future: How Nanotechnology, Robotics, Genetics, and Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Our World (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2002). What strikes me about the many books I read is how optimistic their authors remain that humanity will overcome its many challenges – without offering much concrete, detailed, or realistic evidence of how this will happen, and in spite of much evidence to the contrary. 38 The most prominent voice of this group is Ray Kurzweil. See his Singularity, and his earlier The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Penguin, 1999), and The Age of Intelligent Machines (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). See also Hans Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Garreau, Radical Evolution, 85–129. 39 Stock, quoted in Garreau, Radical Evolution, 115; and see interviews with Stock, in Benford and Malartre, 220–32. Drexler believes nanobots will make us immortal and powerful (Garreau, 120). 40 Kurzweil believes that technologies will reach the point that there will be no distinction between human and machine nor between physical and virtual reality. We will upload our brains into computers and nanotechnology will render biological genetic processes obsolete. Quantum computing will use all matter as a giant computer and the universe will thus ‘turn on.’ See also Vernor Vinge, ‘Address to NASA Vision-21 Symposium,’ 30–1

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March1993, http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity .html (verified 08/04/09). Moraveca, Robot, is perhaps the ‘farthest out,’ seeing his robots, having surpassed humans, colonizing space but disappearing in a wake of increasingly pure thinking stuff – a ‘Mind Fire’ burns across the Universe and physical laws lose their primacy. It is easy to dismiss these people as cranks, but most are brilliant, serious people who have been pioneers in information science and its applications, and their views are far more sophisticated and nuanced than can be expressed in a summary. They believe we should embrace this outcome – the machines will after all be our children. See Garreau, Radical Evolution, 85–129; and George Gilder and Jay W. Richards, eds., Are We Thinking Machines? Ray Kurzweil vs. The Critics of Strong AI (New York: Discovery Institute, 2004). Bill Joy, ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,’ www.wired.com/wired/ archive/8.04/joy_pr.html. Joy accepts most of Kurzweil’s assumptions but draws different conclusions. Garreau, Radical Evolution, 128, points out that Mostly Original Substrate Humans would be to enhanced humans and intelligent machines as Neanderthals were to Cro-Magnons. They might expect better treatment, perhaps to be kindly cared for as domestic animals or pets. Joy, in ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,’ states flatly that ‘biological species almost never survive encounters with superior competitors.’ Stock, ever the cheerleader, says we will extend our diversity and value each other’s qualities (Redesigning Humans, 176–201). Joy, ‘Why the Future.’ Drexler has postulated a so-called grey goo scenario where out-of-control self-replicating nanobots consume all the resources of the biosphere. Martin Rees, Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning – How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in This Century – on Earth and Beyond (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 7–8. Joy, quoted in Garreau, Radical Evolution, 139, talks of the extermination of the human race within a generation. Jaron Lanier, in ‘One Half a Manifesto,’ Edge, (Sept. 2000), sees the Terror in brittle software and complex problems that multiply faster than computing power can solve them. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ lanier/lanier_index.html (verified 08/04/09). He has expanded (and darkened) his analysis in his recent book, You Are Not a Gadget. See also Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (New York: Holt, 2003), 200–27; Rees, Our Final Hour, 19; Homer-Dixon, Ingenuity Gap, 28–9, 46–8, 102–20; Brown and Duguid, ‘A Response to Bill Joy and the Doom

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and Gloom Futurists,’ http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/ch4.pdf (verified 08/04/09); Jaron Lanier, ‘The Complexity Ceiling,’ in Brockman, Next Fifty Years, 216–29; Rees, Our Final Hour, 151–3; Henry Warwick in Reality Club (a discussion forum on Lanier’s ‘One Half a Manifesto,’ which is available at the same coordinates online), 25 Sept. 2000; Kim J. Vicente, The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way People Live (Toronto: Routledge, 2004); and Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (New York: Knopf, 1996). To illustrate the point one needs only to compare the predictions made by reputable scientists in the 1950s about what life would be like in the year 2000 with what has really happened; most predictions never came to pass or change happened much more slowly, but many other things happened that were then undreamed of. Enough, 105. Francis Fukuyama, in Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002), is the most eloquent advocate for this older sense of humanity, seconded by Leon Kass of the President’s Council on Bioethics, in Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Human Improvement. http://www.bioethics.gov/ background/kasspaper.html; Margaret Somerville, The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit (Toronto, Anansi, 2006); and Garreau, Radical Evolution, 116. Michael S. Gazziaga, a member of the President’s Council, in The Ethical Brain: The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), attempts to find scientific and pragmatic solutions to ethical questions raised by biotechnology, while Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature is an elegy for an older concept of humanity and duality with nature. Rodney Brooks, in ‘The Merger of Flesh and Machines,’ in Brockman, Next Fifty Years, 183–93, asks the key questions: What is it to be alive, to be human, to make something human? What makes something subhuman or superhuman? Whose version of life and of humanity? What responsibility does the scientist have for life he/she creates? Many writers call for some form of control but their proposals – ‘relinquishment’ (Joy, ‘Why the Future’), the ‘precautionary principle’ (Rees, Our Final Hour), a ‘moral covenant’ (Martin, Meaning of the 21st Century), legal restrictions (Fukuyama, President’s Council), renunciation, as was done by the Amish or the Hongxi emperors of China (McKibben, Enough) – appear quixotic given the powerful forces driving change. Brooks, ‘Merger of Flesh and Machines,’ 192. Some may question my assumption that sooner or later all parts of the

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world must enter the New Era. Some will argue that it might be better to stay outside or look for an alternative. Others will resent what can be portrayed as an arrogant Western-centred view. But although the epicentre of the New Era is currently the developed world, and those outside the New Era will be increasingly affected by it (just as those parts of Europe which had not fully entered the culture of the Renaissance were nonetheless shaped by it), the civilization of the New Era will no longer be Western but Global. There will be resistance, give and take, and many turns in the road but in the long term I do not see an alternative. In the words of Thomas P.M. Barnett: ‘To be disconnected in this world is to be kept isolated, deprived, repressed, and uneducated; it means for women to be barefoot, pregnant and ignorant, for young men ignorant and bored and malleable; it means lack of choice and access to ideas, capital, travel, entertainment, and loved ones overseas; for the elite it means the ability to control and hoard wealth, especially generated by export of raw material’ (Pentagon’s New Map, 49). 51 Rees: ‘What happens, here on Earth, in this century, could conceivably make the difference between a near eternity filled with ever more complex and subtle forms of life and one filled with nothing but base matter’ (Our Final Hour, 8). 52 It is chilling to consider, inter alia, the history of experimentation with bio-agents or nuclear weapons by governments in different parts of the world; to read the bland certainty with which Kurzweil and others assume that AI, genetic engineering, biotechnology, and nanotechnology will be developed and distributed by private companies in response to market demands; or to learn that much of this new research is being conducted and funded by the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) which originally developed the Internet as a means of keeping communications functioning in the event of a nuclear attack. Many of the most creative minds in that anarchical world of Silicon Valley in the 1980s are disturbed about, if not critical of, the directions their work has taken. See Garreau, Radical Evolution, 17–44, 269–73, 312–13. The nearcollapse of the global economy, from which we are only slowly recovering, that resulted from the reckless speculation in risky derivatives based on an American housing bubble by financial institutions around the world, casts strong doubt on the faith of the Chicago School economists that deregulated markets would automatically deliver prosperity and promote the greater social good. The ignorant hubris of some cyberspace enthusiasts is well expressed in a popular ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ by John Perry

300 Alan Bowker Barlow, which begins: ‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome. You have no sovereignty where we gather,’ www.eff.org/ ~barlow/Declaration-Final.html (verified 08/04/09). 53 Postmodernism can exist only with reference to the ‘modern’ which it caricatures as merely Enlightenment rationalism. It provides great insight, particularly in bringing formerly marginal people and ideas into the centre and showing how structures, symbols, and governing ideas can reflect subjectivity and power, not eternal truth. But in the end, deconstructing all master narratives, historical objectivity, linear thought, culture, rationality, even science, invalidates all beliefs, robs us of all power of action, and ends in pessimistic nihilism or dangerous irrationalism. To the extent that it reflects scientific ideas of relativity and uncertainty, it misinterprets these by asserting that there is no objective truth. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, 495–521, and The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: Anansi, 1991), 55–69. See also Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Clark, Our Shadowed Present; Pauline Marie Rosenau, PostModernism in the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 167–84; Mats Alvesson, Postmodernism and Social Research (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2002), 1–45; Rifkin, Age of Access, 186–217; Diebert, Parchment, Printing, 179–201; Ranjee, Globalization on Trial, 26–62; Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture; Albrow, Global Age; D.S.L. Jarvis, International Relations and the Challenge of Post-modernism: Defending the Discipline (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2000). 54 A number of writers use the term in different ways and my use of the word incorporates some but not all of their ideas. Held and McGrew see ‘Cosmopolitan Social Democracy’ as the world order of the future, based on cosmopolitan citizens, a new pattern of states and institutions, and a reconciliation of the differences between neo-liberals, liberal internationalists, and realists (Globalization/Anti-Globalization, 118–36). Held, in ‘From Executive to Cosmopolitan Multilateralism,’ in Held and Koenig-Archibugi, Taming Globalization, 160–86, places more emphasis on structures and systems. Jeremy Waldron, in ‘Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,’ in Will Kymlicka, ed., The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 93–122, uses the term to describe the evolution of states to reflect diversity in individuals and cultures, with multiple identities and loyalties. See Rajee, Globalization on Trial, 95–126; Tomlinson,

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Globalization and Culture, 181–207; Albrow, Global Age, 78–106 and 168 ff. As I perceive the concept and use the term, ‘cosmopolitanism’ is first and foremost a state of mind and a way of looking at the world. 55 The debate about ‘citizenship’ parallels that about the evolution of the sovereign state. Will Kymlicka, in ‘New Forms Of Citizenship,’ in Thomas Courchene, and Donald Savoie, eds., The Art of the State: Canada in a World without Frontiers (Ottawa: IRPP, 2003), 265–310, and Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Citizenship (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 293–346, and many other writings on nationalism and citizenship, argues that citizenship is only the reciprocal rights and obligations between citizens and the state or community to which they belong, which is sovereign within its boundaries. I believe, with Jeremy Waldron (‘Minority Cultures’), that the concept of citizenship is evolving, like that of the state, and that it will become more multiple and multilayered as people consider themselves citizens of any community to which they feel they belong and for which they undertake responsibilities. See Held et al., Global Transformations, 449; Alain-G. Gagnon, Montserrat Guibernau, and François Rocher, The Conditions of Diversity in Multicultural Democracies (Ottawa: IRPP, 2003). 56 As of course it did in 1648 when the Treaty of Westphalia, after almost two centuries of turmoil, replaced the medieval international order with the new system of sovereign states and international law. See Held and McGrew, Globalization/Anti-Globalization, esp. chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8; Held et al., Global Transformations, 444–52; Held and Koenig-Archibugi, Taming Globalization; Bobbitt, Shield of Achilles; Cooper, Breaking of Nations, 83–151. I think some elements of the new international system are emerging, including, inter alia, a growing body of commonly held assumptions about democratization, human rights, economic freedoms, and norms of conduct, and evolving international law including the International Criminal Court; the increasing influence of private networks and the willingness of governments and international institutions to work with them (for example, the Copenhagen Consensus, Amnesty International, or Transparency International); the emergence of a web of transnational bodies, processes, and projects such as the G-20, and of supranational bodies such as the European Union; the growing practice of governments (both domestically and internationally) and international institutions of setting objectives and standards, such as the Millennium Development Goals, which can only succeed with cooperative and concerted action from a wide range of players; and the acceptance of international norms which erode sovereignty such as the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) in which states undertake to

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protect their citizens from civil war, lawlessness, crime, abuse of rights – in short to govern well. See Smith and Naím, Altered States; Wolfgang H. Reinecke, Critical Choice: The United Nations, Networks, and the Future of Global Governance (Ottawa: IDRC, 2000); John Keane, Global Civil Society? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Jessica T. Matthews, ‘Power Shift,’ Foreign Affairs, (Jan.–Feb. 1997): 50–66; Joseph Nye, ‘Soft Power,’ Foreign Policy, no. 80 (Fall 1990): 153-171; and websites of the United Nations and the World Bank Group. Stewart Brand, in The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (New York: Basic Books, 1999), makes the point that different elements of culture and civilization work at different speeds, from ecology to fashion, and by failing to situate the present in these long cycles we distort past, present, and future. Frederic Jameson defines postmodernism as ‘an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place’ (Post-modernism, ix). Clark adds: ‘By claiming to emancipate the present from the past, presentism promises to abolish the future also’ (Our Shadowed Present, 28). See also Rosenau, Post-modernism in the Social Sciences, 62–76. Cosmology, ecology, and evolution seem more comfortable than some postmodernists with the idea that the past is constantly shaping the present and both shape the future (see, for example, Primack and Abrams, View from the Centre, 138–41). This implies that formal education must reassert the role it has played in all societies of inculcating ideas of patriotism, identity, the past, and the link to the future. Accepting that there are many versions of the past, or debated interpretations, need not mean that we negate all values or produce pablum in the name of fairness. Seeing things as evolutionary, multifaceted, dynamic, and at times provisional rather than fixed and final, is more difficult, but it will still yield truths which can be acted upon. There are many interesting reports on the website of the OECD, including ‘Schooling for Tomorrow: What Schools for the Future?’ (2001) and ‘Schooling for Tomorrow: Networks of Innovation – Towards New Models for Managing Schools and Systems’ (2003). Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). Pinker, Blank Slate; Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee; Dean Hamer, The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes (New York; Anchor, 2004);

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Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Michael Shermer, How We Believe: Science, Skepticism and the Search for God (New York: Owl Books, 2003). See Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 185–94; Primack and Abrams, View from the Centre, 15–86. Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003); Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006); and their more recent anti-religious books, are village-atheist rants. More thoughtful are Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: Norton, 2004); and Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Alister McGrath, Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life (London: Blackwell, 2005), attempts rebuttal; and Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine, 1999), seeks a deist compromise. Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997; translated by Oscar Burge), sees atheism, with vestiges of spirituality and religious observance, as the logical end product of the religions of the Axial Age as they have evolved through the Modern Era. Charles Taylor, whose historical analysis is far deeper, disagrees with this conclusion (Secular Age, 768–9). Rodney Brooks in Reality Club, 1 Oct. 2000, found on http://www.edge .org/discourse/jaron_manifesto.html (verified 08/04/09). Jacques Monod, quoted in Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 272. See Patricia Churchland’s testimony before the U.S. President’s Committee on Bioethics, 2 Feb. 2006: http://bioethicsprint.bioethics.gov/transcripts/ feb06/session1.html (verified 08/04/09). An extreme view is Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995). Samuel P. Huntingdon, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), popularized this concept but a much better book is Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld. Western civilization does not have all the answers and the global civilization of the New Era will draw from many sources, undoubtedly after much conflict and sharp debate. What is far more threatening, however, is a struggle between civilization and its opposite. This is most apparent today in the rise of religious fundamentalism, flowing from a literal reading

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of the holy books and manifested not only as opposition to materialism, democracy, and what it considers sinful behaviour, but as intolerance of dissent, inflexible moral codes, and denigration of women. It is on the rise not only in Islam but in Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and other major religions, in all parts of the world. See Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism (New York: Random House, 2001), vii–xviii, 317–371. See Northrop Frye, The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), and his many other books, as well as the works of Eliade, Jung, and Campbell. Primack and Abrams, in View from the Centre, combine sophisticated scientific exposition with a profound awareness of the origins, necessity, and relevance of myth in its deepest sense. Information about the prevalence of spirituality is in Stark and Finke, Acts of Faith, 59–78. See Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (New York: Knopf, 2006), xii, 390–9, and A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (New York: Ballantine, 1993, 391–9. See Primack and Abrams, View from the Centre; Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions: Gifford Lectures Given at Aberdeen, Scotland, April-November, 1985 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 119; Morowitz, Emergence of Everything, 192–6; Paul Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 232; John D. Barron, The Constants of Nature: From Alpha to Omega – the Numbers that Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe (New York: Vintage, 2002), 141–76; Barrow and Tipler, Anthropic Cosmological Principle; Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred. De Duve, quoted in Davies, Fifth Miracle, 263. See Armstrong, History, 395–9, Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief (San Francisco: Harper, 2001); Jim Garrison, Civilization and the Transformation of Power (New York: ParaView Press, 2000); David Ray Griffin, Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom and the Mind-Body Problem (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Gauchet, Disenchantment, 200–7. John Watson’s biography of Innis, Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), has some interesting comments on Innis’s theories of Canada’s position on the margins of empire and their relevance to the modern world; see esp. the Epilogue, 417– 29. See George Grant, Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (Toronto: Anansi, 1969); Taylor, Malaise of Modernity.

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74 Richard Gwyn, Nationalism without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1995; quote at 243). 75 Michael Ignatieff, in Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (Toronto: Penguin, 1993), compares unhealthy ethnic nationalism of the variety he chronicles with Canadian ‘civic nationalism’ which is membership in a community defined only by rules and norms. Will Kymlicka somewhat challenges this view in States, Nations and Culture (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1997), 47–72, where he argues for the idea of societal culture, which includes assimilation to a dominant language, but he agrees with the distinction between ethnic nationalism and Western liberal nationalism which is ‘thinner,’ more inclusive, and more tolerant; ‘societal nationalisms’ is his phrase. See also Charles Taylor, ‘Shared and Divergent Values,’ in Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 155–86. 76 On many occasions Canada has fallen short of its ideals; but I agree with John Ralston Saul that what is remarkable is, for example, the relatively small number of Canadians killed in any political strife, and the long-term instinct of Canadians for compromise. See his ‘The Inclusive Shape of Complexity,’ in Chad Gaffield and Karen Gould, eds., The Canadian Distinctiveness into the XXIst Century (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2000), 13–27; ‘His Excellency John Ralston Saul, Speech on the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the DFAIT Canadian Studies Program,’ Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Ottawa, 15 Oct. 2001, http:// www.gg.ca/media/doc.asp?lang=e&DocID=1368 (accessed 7/14/2006 and no longer available on this site), and Memoirs of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century (Toronto: Viking, 1997). 77 Pico Iyer, in Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home (New York: Vintage, 2001), 117–71, discusses Canada (Toronto/Vancouver) as a cosmopolitan meeting place for internationalists like himself. This has drawn the gibe that Canada has become multicultural at the expense of suppressing its own history and making no requirements on newcomers – a high-class maitre d’ to the world – a claim that Kymlicka would challenge, as would I. Our present turmoil is the result of an ongoing redefinition of the role and powers of government at all levels, a rebalancing between loyalties, demands, and expectations and the concept of citizenship, and a response to global change, which will in time produce a new synthesis. 78 Kymlicka argues that the ‘Canadian model’ is a product of time, space, and luck, and while it is working here it is not necessarily exportable. See

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his ‘Marketing Canadian Pluralism in the International Arena,’ International Journal, (Fall 2004): 829–52. But many scholars in other countries are interested in our experience: see, for example, the myriad of publications by foreign Canadianists in national journals of Canadian studies and the International Journal of Canadian Studies, which focus overwhelmingly on the literature and scholarship of multiculturalism, identity, transculturalism, and the like. For further information see the website of the ICCS, www.iccs-ciec.ca. See esp. Charles Doran, Why Canada Matters and Why Americans Care: Democratic Pluralism at Risk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). Siamese Twin, 121. An especially interesting discussion is Raymond Breton, Norbert J Hartmann, Joseph L. Lennards, and Paul Reed, A Fragile Social Fabric: Fairness, Trust, and Commitment in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004). The interaction between the frontier and the metropolis (as opposed to the Turner Frontier Thesis) has been a central theme in Canadian history and recent work has focused on the interrelations between people at various stages of development. See Gerald Friesen, Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communication, and Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); see also Saul, ‘Complexity,’ in which he argues that one of the unique elements of Canadian history has been the interaction between different levels of civilization and life styles. Lamentations that Canada has somehow ‘failed’ in fulfilling a great national dream are legion in Canadian history and literature. Underhill in his earlier years complained that Canada did not have a revolutionary tradition, Creighton lamented the abandonment of Macdonald’s dream of a united Canada in permanent alliance with the British Empire, George Grant lamented the end of the putative Canadian vision of conservatism. The latest in this genre is Michael Bliss, ‘Has Canada Failed?’ Literary Review of Canada, (March 2006): 3–5. This theme of failure (as opposed to criticism of the direction of the country, calls for reform or renewal, attacks on ideology) appears to be more a feature of English-speaking Canadian historians than the historians of French Canada (whose focus has more often been on the lost paradise of New France or the struggle of French Canadians for cultural survival). Canadian history has been affected by the trend in the English-speaking world towards specialization and fragmentation but it has not succumbed to the extremes of postmodernism. A synthesis of the wide-ranging research of the last generation – not necessarily into a new meta-narrative

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but into a more comprehensive account of our collective past – is therefore possible. See Carl Berger, The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing since 1900, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), chapter 11; and Ronald Rudin, Making History in Twentieth-Century Quebec (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 84 H.V. Nelles, A Little History of Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2004), v–xi. 85 James Martin borrows the title of an Arthur C. Clarke science fiction novel to describe the new evolutionary plateau he foresees as our ‘childhood’s end’ (Meaning of the 21st Century, 280).

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Contributors

Alan Bowker is a retired diplomat who has served abroad in Tanzania and Zimbabwe and as High Commissioner to Guyana and Ambassador to Suriname. At headquarters his assignments have included United States environment, energy, and transport issues; the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe; Cabinet and Parliamentary Liaison; Access to Information and Privacy Protection, and International Academic Relations. He is the editor of two books of essays by Stephen Leacock, and from 2005 to 2008 he taught history at Royal Military College. Ramsay Cook is Professor of History (emeritus) at York University in Toronto and former General Editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography/Dictionnaire biographique du Canada. His shared interests with Carl Berger include Canadian intellectual history, natural history, and snooker. Barry Ferguson is a Professor of History at the University of Manitoba. His research interests include Canadian political ideas and practices and Canadian social trends. His publications include Remaking Liberalism: The Intellectual Legacy of Adam Shortt, O.D. Skelton, W.C. Clark, and W.A. Mackintosh, 1890–1925. His current work includes an edited book, Manitoba’s Premiers. Gerald Friesen has taught in the History Department at the University of Manitoba since 1970. He is a past president of the Canadian Historical Association and the author of several books including Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communication and Canada, and, with Royden Loewen, Immigrants in Prairie Cities: Ethnic Diversity in Twentieth Century Canada. Michael Gauvreau is Professor of History at McMaster University, specializ-

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Contributors

ing in Canadian religious, cultural, and intellectual history. He is the author of a number of scholarly monographs, notably The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970, which was awarded the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize of the Canadian Historical Association. He is currently working on a biography of Claude Ryan, Catholic activist, public intellectual, and politician, which explores the connections between federalism, nationalism, liberalism, and dechristianization. Danielle Hamelin has worked as a public historian at Parks Canada since 1999. Until 2009, she wrote research reports on a range of topics for the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, many of them leading to designations of national historic significance. She is currently working as a Program Policy Advisor for Parks Canada’s National Historic Sites Directorate. A.B. McKillop is Chancellor’s Professor at Carleton University, and specializes in intellectual and cultural history. His most recent book is Pierre Berton: A Biography (2008), which won the Donald Grant Creighton Award of the Ontario Historical Society. David Monod completed his PhD under Carl Berger’s supervision in 1988. Since that time, he has been teaching in the history department at Wilfrid Laurier University. His most recent book is Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification and the Americans, 1945–1953. He is currently writing a book on vaudeville in the early twentieth century. Doug Owram is Professor of History, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Principal UBC – Okanagan campus and Professor Emeritus, University of Alberta. He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada, former President of the Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the author of several books including Promise of Eden and The Government Generation. Ian Ross Robertson is Professor Emeritus of History, University of Toronto at Scarborough and is the author of The Tenant League of Prince Edward Island, 1864–1867: Leasehold Tenure in the New World (1996) and Sir Andrew Macphail: The Life and Legacy of a Canadian Man of Letters (2008). Marlene Shore is a member of the Department of History at York University. Her research specialization is intellectual and cultural history of the social and behavioural sciences in North America. Her major publications include The

Contributors 311 Science of Social Redemption: McGill, the Chicago School, and the Origins of Social Research in Canada; The Contested Past: Reading Canada’s History; and The Transformation of Psychology: Influences of 19th-Century Philosophy, Technology, and Natural Science (co-edited with Christopher Green and Thomas Teo).

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Index

Africa, images of, 202–3 African-American artistic movement. See Harlem Renaissance Airhart, Phyllis, 71 Alberta, 253 Allen, Richard, 71 Allward, Walter, 150 American Psychological Association, 110 Andrews, Martin, 38 Anglican church in Canada, 234 Annales school, 64 Antheil, George, 198–9 Arts and Letters Club (see Toronto Arts and Letters Club) Arts Club (Montreal), 135 Bacon, Sir Francis, 239, 272 Baker, Huston, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, 201–2 Baldwin, James Mark, 8; career, 93–5, 96, 110, 116–7; childhood and education, 93, 98–9; hypnotism, 103–4, 106; psychological theories, 101–103, 112–3, 114–6; influence of, 116–8; influences on, 96–100, 104, 106, 109, 111–2

Barbalet, John, 183–4 Barth, Fredrick, 250 Barzun, Jacques, 41 Bayly, Christopher, 256 Beard, Charles A., 36 Bennett, R.B., 169, 176–7, 179, 184–5 Berger, Carl, 11, 62, 229, 231, 237, 245, 252; as bird watcher, 7, 20–1; career, 3–4, 24, 26; handwriting (small), 4, 18; historiography and approach of, 14–15, 16, 18–19, 23, 26, 33–4, 58–62, 163, 225, 262; Honour and the Search for Influence, 24–5; honours, 24; influence of, 5–6, 11, 13–15, 23–4, 126, 144, 228– 9; Manitoba, 26; and myth of the north, 5, 17; Science, God and Nature in Victorian Canada, 21–3, 70, 240–1; Sense of Power, 5, 9, 14–15, 33, 59, 60, 128, 225, 229, 237; as teacher, 15–16, 62; and Victorian Canada, 5–6; on W.L. Morton, 255; Writing of Canadian History, 6, 18–19, 24, 25, 33, 60–1, 62, 66, 245, 252–3. See also under individual book titles Bergson, Henri, 117 Bernheim, Hippolyte, 103–4

314

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Berton, Pierre, 40, 41–2 Bill of Rights (1960), 183 biography, 37–8, 39, 46 Bishop’s University, 130 Bissett, E.D.R., 177 Bland, Salem, 239 Bloch, Marc, 36 Boas, Franz, 210 Boer War, 137 Borden, Sir Robert, 167, 172 Bourassa, Henri, 137 Bowker, Alan, 10–11 Brebner, J.B., 25 Bridle, Augustus, 147, 148, 155 British Empire, 16, 285 British Nationality, Naturalization and Aliens Act, 168 British Society for Psychical research, 105 British North America, 226–7 Brodeur, Louis, 166 Brownell, William Crary, 194 Cahan, C.H., 179 Canada, 285–6; nationalism, 6, 14–15, 18, 56, 59–60, 180, 230; imperialism, 5, 6, 14, 16, 164. See also Citizenship Canada and the Canadian Question, 230 Canada Council, 155 Canada First, 17 Canadian Academy of Music, 155 Canadian Book week, 155 Canadian Citizenship Act, 180–1 Canadian historiography (see historiography) Canadian Medical Association, 128 Canadian Nationals Act, 179 Canadian Society of Graphic Art, 147 Careless, J.M.S. , 56–7, 58, 69, 76

Casson, A.J., 149 Charlesworth, Hector, 150 Chateau Clique, 227 Christie, Nancy, 71, 78 Church, T.L., 177, 181 churches, (see under individual denominations) citizenship and naturalization, 9, 163 et passim; anti-Asian feelings, 175–6, 179; anti-German provisions, 171–2; Canadian Citizenship Act (1947), 180–5; and diversity, 257–9; debates, early 20th century, 166–71; Bennett on, 169, 176–7, 179, 184; Borden on, 172, 176–7; Laurier on, 166, 170; Oliver on, 166–7; and Statute of Westminster, 178, 179 Clark, S.D., 56, 253 Clive, John, 41, 43 Common Sense school. See philosophy conservatism, 58, 60 Cook, Ramsay, 5, 6–7, 57, 59, 71, 237, 240; The Regenerators, 238–9 Copp, Arthur Bliss, 173–4, 185 Corbain, Alain, 37 Cox, Leo, 127 Creighton, Donald, 18, 33, 57, 60 Croll, David, 181 Currie, Sir Arthur, 128 Cyberspace, 281–2 Dafoe, J.W., 57 Dalhousie University, 229 Damasio, Antonio, 48 Darwin and Darwinian thought, 22, 79, 113, 193, 237–8, 240, 276–7 Dawson, Carl, 254, 256 Dawson, Sir William, 21, 22, 229 Denison, Merrill, 153

Index Derrida, Jacques, 66 Dewey, John, 117 Diefenbaker, John, 182, 185 Doherty, Charles, 167, 168, 171, 172–3 Dominion Lands Act, 169 Douglas, Aaron, 207, 209 DuBois, W.E.B., 202 Dyonnet, Edmond, 129–30, 135 Eaton, Timothy, 234 Edmonton Bulletin, 166 Eighty Years Progress of British North America, 228 Ellington, Duke, 10, 204 Elliott, T.S., 192 Errington, Jane, 69 External Affairs, Department of, 178–9 Family Compact, 227 Ferguson, Barry, 9 Ferguson, George, 16 Flavelle, Joseph, 233, 234–5 Fleming Donald, 182 Fleming, Sir Sandford, 231 Foster, John, 190 Foucault, Michel, 66, 79 Franklin, Jon, 42 Friesen, Gerald, 3, 10 Gadsby, H.F., 150 Gates, Henry Louis, 211 Gauvreau, Michael, 7, 71, 239; Evangelical Century, 72 Gay, Peter, 41 Giacometti, Alberto, 198 globalization, 274–5, 280 Goodman lectures, 20 Grant, George M., 235 Grant, George P, 59

315

Grant, John Webster, 233 Great Britain, 165–6, 169 Great War. See World War, First Grier, Wyly, 151 Group of Seven, 135, 149–50. See also individual artists Habermas, Jurgen, 77 Halévy, Elie, 43 Hamelin, Danielle, 6, 8 Hammond, M.O., 150 Hardy, René, 78 Harlem Renaissance; music in, 204–5, 208–10; ‘New Negro’ movement, 200, 201–3, 205, 214; primitivism and modernism, 200–1, 203, 204, 207–9, 210–11, 213–15 Harris, Robert, 129 Harris, Lawren, 149 Hart House Theatre, 153, 155 Hartz, Louis, 58, 71 Harvard University, 130 Hatfield, Richard, 23 Havel, Våclav, 48 Hewton, Randolph S., 136 historical writing and historiography, 34–7, 41–3, 46–8; biography, 37–40; cultural, 36–7, 70; Canadian, 4- 5, 11, 13–15, 18–19 , 25–26, 75–6, 254–6; general 35–7, 54; intellectual, 3, 6–7, 10, 11, 13,-14, 53–6, 66–7, 71, 225; prairie 252–6; religious, 78, 80, 232, 234–6; and nationalism, 17, 19, 58–9, 63, 66, 77–8; and Victorian Canada, 225–6, 228–9. See also Berger, biography Houdini, Harry, 195 Houghton, Walter, 237 House of Commons, 164 Hubert, Olliver, 79

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Hudon, Christine, 78 Huggins, Nathan, 200–1 Hughes, Langston, 10, 202–3, 207, 208–10, 214 Hurston, Zora Neale , 10, 202, 205–6, 209, 211–12 Igorots and Negritos, 192–3, 199 Imperial Conferences, 165–166, 167, 172, 173, 178–9, 185 imperialism, 3, 14–15, 59, 60 Innis, Harold, 13, 15, 24, 60, 253 intellectual history. See Berger, history internet , 273–4 Jackson, A.Y., 133, 149, 150 James, William, 95, 113, 117 Japanese Canadians; ethnicity and identity, 249–50; redress campaign, 250; and Second World War, 179–80, 247 Jaspers, Karl, 283 Johnston, Franz, 149 Kawata Masako, 246–7, 252; and gender, 259, 258–60; and race, 258 Kawata family, 247–52, 256, 257, 260, 262; settling in Winnipeg, 247–8, 250–2 Kealey, Greg, 70 Keefer, Thomas, 232 Kennedy, W.P.M., 180–1 Kiki, 196–7 King, William Lyon Mackenzie, 108, 239 Kipling, Rudyard, 145 Koestler, Arthur, 43 Kymlicka, William, 184

Lacombe, Ligouri, 182 Lamonde, Yvan, 72–4 Laurentian thesis, 25–6 Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 166, 170 Leacock, Stephen, 127, 131–2 Lemieux, Rodolphe, 170 liberalism, 56–7, 58 limited identities in Canada, 261 Lismer, Arthur, 149, 151, 153 Locke, Alain, 210 Lodge, David, 42 Lower, Arthur, 33, 60, 254 Lower Canada, 227–8 MacDonald, J.E.H., 147, 149, 158 Mackenzie, D.D., 167 Mackenzie, William Lyon, 227 Macnaughton, John, 129 MacNicholl, J.R., 181 Manitoba, 175 Marshall, David, 71, 235 Marshall, T.H., 164 Martin, C.F., 127 Martin, Paul, 180–181 Martin, W.M., 170 Massey, Raymond, 153 Massey, Vincent, 150, 151, 153 Massey Commission, 155 McCosh, James, 97–8 McCrae, John, 127 McGill University, 127–128, 229; Faculty of Medicine and Andrew McPhail, 128, 130 McKay, Ian, 261 McKillop, A.B., 7, 53, 67–8, 237; A Disciplined Intelligence, 67–8, 231; Pierre Berton: A Biography, 40–1; Spinster and the Prophet, 7, 39, 41, 44, 45–6 McLuhan, Marshall, 273

Index

317

McNairn, Jeffrey, 76 McNaught, Kenneth, 59 McPhail, Andrew, 8, 126, 135–7, 129; childhood and education, 127–8, 130; French-English relations and, 138; publications, 128–9, 131; service in First World War, 134; and University Magazine, 133–4. See also Pen and Pencil Club McQuarrie, W.G., 176 Methodism, 234–5 Mills, David, 69 Mills, John Stuart, 47 Mitchell, Roy, 153 modernism, 11, 22, 190, 194, 201–4, 207–8, 287; and art, 195–8, 203, 206–7 Monod, David, 9 Montreal Medical Journal, 128 Montreal Pen and Pencil Club, 8, 139 Morton, A.S., 253 Morton, W.L., 18, 25–6, 33, 41, 45, 60, 254–5, 259 Motherwell, W.R., 176 Mountain, J.G., 234 Murray, Heather, 233 music, and Harlem Renaissance, 204–5; St George’s Hall, 152–3, 154

Ory, Pascal, 75 Ouellet, Fernand, 63–4 Owram, Doug, 3, 6, 10, 53, 62, 78; Government Generation, 70–1; Promise of Eden, 229 Oxford, 16

Nelles, H.V., 76, 286 Nobbs, Percy, 129, 136 Norman, Karyl, 195 Nussbaum, Martha, 47, 48

Quebec, 6, 74, 78; historical writing in , 63–7, 72–4, 75–6; position on citizenship 182, 185. See also ultramontanism Queen’s University, 229

Ollivier, Hubert, 79 Oliver, Frank, 166 Ontario, religion in, 233–4 Ontario Historical Series, 45

Palmer, Bryan, 70 Papineau, Louis Joseph, 228 Parkin, George, 16 Pen and Pencil Club; activities and character of, 131–2; controversy within, 136–7, 139; founding of, 129; membership, 129–30, 137–8 Perley, Sir George, 176–7 Philosophy; Baconian thought, 239; commons Sense school, 96, 97, 114; idealism, 97–8 post-modern society, 11, 285 Piaget, Jean, 117 Pinard, Roche, 182 Pocock, J.G.A., 76, 183–4 Potamkin, Harry, 210 prairie provinces, 246 ethnicity and, 253–4 Presbyterian church, 234, 235 Progressive movement, 253 psychology, origins of, 95–6 Psychic research, 105–106, 107–109 Pugsley, William, 171

Ray, Man, 196–7, 205 Raymond, Maxime, 182 rebellions of 1837, 227

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Rees, Martin, 279 religious thought in Canada, 21–3, 71–2, 74, 230–3; in the modern era, 280–4 responsible government, 77 Ribot, Théodut, 99–100, 104, 117 Richards, Robert J., 111 Rinfret, Eduoard, 182 Rinfret, Fernand, 173, 175 Robertson, Ian, 6, 8 Rolph, Ernest, 146 Roman Catholicism, and Quebec thought, 73, 74, 78–9, 130 Ross, Sinclair, 136 Roy, Fernande, 73 Royal Society of Canada, 6, 24 Rudin, Ronald, 76 Rutherford, Paul, 229–30 Ryerson, Egerton, 68 Schama, Simon, 45 Schklar, Judith, 184 Schulyer, George, 207, 213 Secularization in Canada, 71 Seeley, Sir John, 34 scientific thought, 23, 230–1, 240; and the future, 277, 278–80 Shore, Marlene, 6, 8 Shortt, Adam, 60 Sidgwick, Henry, 105 Simcoe, John Graves, 227 Skinner, Quentin, 245–6, 257, 263 Smith, Allan, 229, 232 Smith, Bessie, 209 Smith, Clara, 209 Smith, Goldwin, 101, 230 social gospel, 71, 238 social sciences; evolution of, 70; psychology, Nancy School , 103–105 Spencer, Herbert, 98, 102

Sproat, Henry, 146–147, 148 St George’s Hall (Toronto), 144, 146–8, 151–3; Architectural design, 155–8 St Louis World’s Fair, 192–3 Statute of Westminster, 178 Stevens, H.H., 169 Stewart, Alistair, 183, 185 Strachan, John, 68, 234 Tarde, Gabriel, 111, 112 Taylor, Charles, 249 Temperance movement, 236 Tey, Josephine, 43 Theatre, at St George’s Hall, 153 theosophy, 238 Thompson, E.P., 48 Thomson, Levi, 170 Thomson, Tom, 152 Toronto, at turn of 20th century, 145 Toronto Arts and Letters Club, 8–9, 127, 144 et passim; activities of, 150–1; as artistic venue, 152–3; founding of, 145–6; Group of Seven and, 148–9; The Lamp, 154; patronage of, 150 Trevelyan, G.M., debate with J. Bury 34–5 Tuchman, Barbara, 45 Tucker, Walter, 182 Tyrell medal, 24 ultramontanism, 78 Underhill, Frank, 18, 33, 57, 59, 253 United Church, 235 United Kingdom. See Great Britain United States, 172, 182–3, 227; Canadian reaction to, 227; Race in, 191 and passim; Urban planning in, 194–5

Index University Magazine, 128, 133, 135 University of Manitoba, 253 University of Toronto, 4, 8, 15, 95, 101, 110, 229; and Carl Berger, 4, 15–16; and James Mark Baldwin, 93, 110 University of Toronto Press, 72 Upper Canada; family Compact in, 227; historiography in, 58–9, 77; political thought in, 58, 76–78, 227; rebellions in, 77 Van Vechten, Carl, 214 Vance, Jonathon, 76 Victoria, Queen, 226 Victorian Canada, 5–6, 8, 20, 23, 56–7, 225; Berger on, 225; and nationalism, 14–15, 56–7, 59, 226; psychic phenomenon and, 108–9; religion in, 226, 231–2, 233–6; reform movements in, 236–7; and science 237– 40; scientific thought in, 230–2; social sciences and, 95–6; views of nature, 190 Victorian society, rejection of, 198 Vimy war memorial, 150 Vipond, Mary, 62 Walden, Keith, 76 Walker, George, 202

319

Wartime Elections Act (1917), 171–2 Waters, Ethel, 209 Watson, Homer, 133 Watson, John, 149 Wells, H.G., 39, 44, 46 Westfall, William, 68–9, 235 White, Walter, 210 Williams, Carlos William, 196 Williams, Raymond, 37 Wilson, Daniel, 96, 103, 229; and James Baldwin, 103 Winnipeg, 246 Wintz, Cary, 200 Wise, S.F., 5, 45, 58, 60, 76 Women’s Art Association of Canada, 129 Women’s Christian Temperance Union, 236 women’s history, 63 Wood, S.T., 20 Woodsworth, J.S., 174–5, 178, 239 World War, First, 134, 174, 237 Wrong, George, 60 Wundt, Wilhelm, 99, 106, 113 Young, George Paxton, 95–6 Young Man’s Christian Association, 236 Zeller, Suzanne, 230–1