HIstory of Graeme Gibson

Graeme Gibson, a beautiful, inspirational man, died in London recently. There is a nice appreciation of him in The Guardian, as well as many Canadian sources.

In June 2013 I interviewed Graeme Gibson and Margaret Atwood (both of whom I knew -- professionally, you might say, and mostly through the Writers' Union of Canada) as part of an oral history project on the founding of the Union. The following is an excerpt from that interview, previously published in a 2015 Writers' Union publication, Founding the Writers' Union: An Oral History.[1]

What we really were concerned about in the one fundamental area was -- how best to say? -- managing the professionalism. Managing how writers were being treated by publishers, by government, and establishing a sense of authority for the profession.

 Gibson: On some level the Union started with the sale of Ryerson Press.^[2] It was perhaps inevitable once that had happened, because Ryerson Press was another one of the traditional publishers that was sold to another country. At that time I had been told by an American-owned publisher that they could not publish Five Legs because New York would not let them and that branch plants do not do research.   That was one part of it.

Jim Lorimer, who was with the Canadian Publishers’ Association — as compared to the branch plants bunch -- got onto this very quickly. He started this rebellion, and a bunch of us decided we had to have a protest. [Jim made a poster that] depicts the Egerton Ryerson statue outside of Ryerson University, at that time called Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. I was teaching there at that point, and Jim and I and others decided it would be a good idea if we had a mournful celebration of what had happened to Ryerson Press around that statue. So I got permission from the principal or the director of Ryerson — he didn’t know what he was getting into. And what we did there is we had a big American flag and a ladder, and we called the press in, and to our astonishment they all turned up – cameras, all kinds of things. I climbed up the ladder and draped the American flag around the statue of Egerton Ryerson, and we all sang ‘I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.’ The press covered it extensively.  And we all rushed home and watched ourselves on television.

Update: service at Library and Archives Canada

Regarding the recent post about service at Library and Archives Canada, I had a response on Friday from Media Relations at the LAC, suggesting that I forward their email to my informant with an invitation to get in touch with them to arrange a prompt solution. They are now in touch.

"Your blog has power," my friend writes.  Well....

History of GG's

Gordon

Browsing through Veronica Strong-Boag's recently released DCB biography of (deep breath) John Campbell Hamilton-Gordon (Gordon), 7th Earl of Aberdeen and 1st Marquess of Aberdeen and Temair, one-time governor general of Canada, I realized, well, not that I knew him (those British GGs mostly blur together in my mind) but that at least I knew something about his uncle Arthur Gordon, one-time lieutenant governor of New Brunswick, who figures in confederation history, most often as comic relief. 

It's another lesson in how inbred and interconnected were those British dukes, generals, and civil servants who served as Canadian governors general until 1952. Writing Three Weeks in Quebec City, I alluded to a connection of Governor General Lord Monck named Ponsonby as belonging to an Anglo-Irish political family, without realizing another in the Ponsonby line was the Earl of Bessborough, great Irish landlord and Canadian GG in the 1930s.

Strong-Boag's detailed and rather vivid account of Aberdeen makes clear that he did actually stand out somewhat among his fellows, not least by his liberalism. He tilted toward Laurier and the Liberals as much as predecessors like Dufferin had leaned to Macdonald and the Conservatives. Aberdeen was like Dufferin in still presuming upon a governor-general's independent authority in Canadian politics. Strong-Boag notes how Aberdeen made Mackenzie Bowell prime minister when no one else would have dreamed of doing so, partly because the GG and his wife, the proto-feminist Ishbel Marjoribanks, disapproved of the "carnal masculinity" of the leading candidate, Charles Tupper.

(Strong-Boag may here be quietly taking issue with the DCB biography of Tupper, which robustly declares that Tupper's relations with women other than his wife were never "anything more than mildly flirtatious.")

The biography also reinforces David Cannadine's argument in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy that in the post-confederation era, many of the GGs took the job because they needed the money. The vice-regal salary was substantial, and the Aberdeen fortune was in serious decline. 

Service at Library and Archives Canada

A historian and friend sends me a Dear Abby letter: What about the slowness of service at Library and Archives Canada?

I’ve been dealing with the archives in Ottawa since the 1980s and have never encountered this problem before. Perhaps it is due to cuts in staff or something else. But it takes weeks and weeks and weeks to obtain a reply from them. As an example, I submitted a request in early May [ ...]. After I had not heard anything from them by early July, I wrote again but did not receive a reply. At the end of August, I left a frustrated voice mail message and at long last someone responded with an apology that they have been “very busy”. They told me that I had to obtain permission [ ...] , which I did immediately. After that, they said they would get back to me. That was two weeks ago. So from the time I first inquired to now, it has been four months!

For the book project I’m currently working on, I have also been obtaining documents and photographs from several US archives in New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and elsewhere. Every one of them has responded within in four days at most. Why is the LAC so terribly slow? Are they really inundated with requests? You should investigate further.   [Square brackets above indicate my removal of identifying detail. The item requested is not highly sensitive or confidential, shall we say.]   

I would be proud to unleash the blog's crack investigative team on this.  But since it does not exist, I'll put it to recent LAC users who may see this post. If you let me know of your recent experiences with service at the LAC (via the email address in "Comments" on the right hand side of this page), we can at least share. I have invited comment from LAC as well.

Meanwhile, I note that the LAC's Code of Conduct: Values and Ethics page states, under the title "Excellence":

Excellence in the design and delivery of public sector policy, programs and services is beneficial to every aspect of Canadian public life. Engagement, collaboration, effective teamwork and professional development are all essential to an organization's excellence.

At LAC:

• we provide fair, timely, efficient and effective services that respect Canada's official languages; and
• we continually strive to improve the quality of our policies, programs and services in accordance with our mandate.

Moore speaks: on Statues and Citizenships

In July I participated in a discussion of controversial statues and what to do with them, held at McMaster University in Hamilton and moderated by Toronto journalist Steve Paikin, under the sponsorship of the Wilson Institute and the Socrates Institute there.

If I had been keeping up with the Wilson Institute blog like I oughta, I would have known that they have put the film of the whole event up right here.  You can watch James Dashuk, Vanessa Watts and me go into it with Steve and a lively audience of several hundred.  Props to historical philanthropist Lynton "Red" Wilson, McMaster's ex-chancellor and major donor, for making it possible.

Meanwhile, I'm discussing this topic again soon.

On September 17, at McArthur Hall at Queen's University west campus [UPDATE: now moved to] the Grand Theatre on Princess Street in Kingston, I will be participating in another discussion on this issue, a public meeting organized by the Heritage office of the City of Kingston.

It is laudable that the city is engaging its citizens in discussion of this matter. Kingston has Macdonald memorabilia like no other place in Canada. It has the John A. Parkway (and the Macdonald Cartier freeway close by), the Macdonald gravesite, Macdonald walking tours, and many Macdonald homes, sites, statues, and associations. Decisions by the City of Kingston about its honours to John A. would obviously have an impact on the state of this debate nationwide. For details and ticket info for this event, featuring Bob Watts, Charlotte Gray and Lee Maracle as well as me, look here.

Desmond Morton (1938-2019) RIP

I have never meant this to be an obituary blog, but in recent years I seem to have been documenting a growing list of my elders and mentors.  Olive Dickason, Michael Bliss, Craig Brown, Ramsay Cook, John Thompson.... Now Desmond Morton, who has been ill for a while, has died in Montreal at 81,

He came from a military family, descended from ur-Canadian general William Otter and son of another general, and he followed that tradition at Royal Military College.  He used to tell new professors of a military course called Instructional Techniques where the teacher said, "When you write on the blackboard, how do you write on the blackboard?" and all the cadets had to roar out in unison: "F-ing big, sir!" Useful information, he thought.  Soon however, he took a U-turn and became a history professor, activist, and NDP campaigner -- though he never lost his interest in military history.

Des was an early advocate for my first book, Louisbourg Portraits, and not long after it appeared he, as a Dean at U of T Mississauga, tried to get me hired for the history department there. I was not sure I wanted the job, but naively thought Dean Morton could make it happen. Why he was equally naive, I don't really understand -- there were already scads of underemployed Ph.Ds knocking around and big walls against idiosyncratic outside-the-box hirings. Maybe in recompense for that fiasco, he recommended me to Grolier Canada, then an educational publisher, and I did quite a bit of work for them,

Des once said he thought he published too much -- as an old journalist, he couldn't resist the call when someone asked him to write something, and he had a nicely jaundiced attitude to book promos, marketing, and prizes. But his military- and journalism-based habits sustained a formidable work ethic, and he published over forty books, and a slew of commentary.  And not filler either: a lot of major military and social histories in there, a much republished history of Canada, and a chapter in the Illustrated History of Canada too.

Book Notes: upcoming from UTP

You know nothing, John Historian

A quick look at the "new books in Canadian history" page at the University of Toronto Press website suggests a lot of pretty specialized works, and a few of wider interest.  A trio caught my interest (but see here for the full list: much on women, multiculturalism, military history, other topics)

Margaret Conrad tackles just the pre-confederation history of Nova Scotia in a 400 page book, At the Ocean's Edge, promised for October -- though the webpage doesn't have cover art yet, so maybe last-minute work continues there.

In Questions of Order: Confederation and the Making of Modern Canada, Peter Price (or his publicists) declare

Confederation was not just a political deal struck by politicians in 1867, but was a process of reconfiguring political concepts and the basis of political association. Breaking new ground, Questions of Order argues that Confederation was an imperial event that generated new questions, concerns, and ideas about the future of political order in the British Empire and the world.

Then, and this might be interesting, there is Sharing the Past: The Reinvention of History in  Canadian Poetry since 1860 by J.A. Weingarten. The poets, it seems to argue, have been better social historians than the social historians, because

the academy’s continued emphasis on professional distance and objectivity made it difficult for historians to connect with the experiences of those about whom they wrote, and those same emphases made it all but impossible for non-academic experts to be institutionally recognized as historians....

Sharing the Past argues that the project of social history has achieved its fullest expression in lyric poetry, a genre in which personal experiences anchor history. Developing this genre since 1960, Canadian poets have provided an inclusive model for a truly social history that indiscriminately shares the right to speak authoritatively of the past.

North American prehistory -- keeps getting older

Know how these differ from Clovis points?  Well, they do.

Recent data from an archaeological site in Idaho sets out new evidence for a "pre-Clovis"  (ie, more than 12,000-13,000 years before the present) presence in western North America.

"Clovis" is largely a style of tool-making, with examples found quite widely in North American excavations back to 13,000 BP. It was long considered the oldest evidence of human presence in the Americas. There are now also some genetic data from Clovis-associated remains, which confirm Clovis people shared DNA links with other early North Americans and also with Asian/Siberian forebears.

A "Clovis" presence was compatible (just barely, maybe) with an "ice-free" deglaciated corridor east of the Rocky Mountains that could have given the first Clovisans access from Beringia and Asia into North America as the ice sheets began to recede. But human evidence south of the ice 16,000 years ago is too early for any "ice-free" corridor. So finds that date earlier strengthen the likelihood of a coastal or sea-borne migration into the Americas coming first, followed by dispersal inland from points south of the ice-sheet barrier. The archaeologist at Cooper's Ferry, Idaho, notes that the site might have been accessed by a route opening inland from the Pacific Coast more or less where the lower Columbia River now flows.

I made a documentary, 'Peopling the Americas,' for CBC Radio Ideas as long ago as 1989, and even then the best glaciological opinions I could find were dubious about an ice-free corridor as early as the archaeologists needed, and intrigued by the likelihood of a coastal migration, along a Pacific coast that might have resembled 20th century Greenland -- cold, but habitable and traversable.  Nice to see the evidence grow.

Image: from Nature.com.

HMS Terror: new video from inside

John Franklin and all his men are still dead. The how (entrapment by ice, followed eventually by starvation) and the why (bad luck, failure to understand the risks, overconfidence, etc.) remain well known.  The "Franklin mystery" mostly comes down to small details.

Still, it is impressive to see how much of the small detail seems likely to be teased out in the coming years, with the expedition's sunken ships now located in pretty good condition, and with new reports coming in from Parks Canada on just how much material awaits investigation aboard the Terror:  possibly even notebooks, lettters, charts, and papers preserved in their cabinets in the cold water.

Here is Parks Canada's report on the 2019 exploration season, blessed with good weather this time, and here is an appreciation by Franklinist Russell Potter.

Image: Parks Canada.

History of build that wall: Francophones in New England

19th century New Englanders torch a Catholic church in Bath, Maine

Franco-American historian David Vermette has a notable piece on the Smithsonian History website about the time when the invasion of French-Canadians from Quebec was seen as a dangerous threat to New England.

In 1892, the New York Times suggested that emigration from Québec was “part of a priestly scheme now fervently fostered in Canada for the purpose of bringing New-England under the control of the Roman Catholic faith. … This is the avowed purpose of the secret society to which every adult French Canadian belongs.”

The New York Times reported in 1881 that French-Canadian immigrants were “ignorant and unenterprising, subservient to the most bigoted class of Catholic priests in the world. … They care nothing for our free institutions, have no desire for civil or religious liberty or the benefits of education.”

In Canadian and Quebec historiography, the movement of some million francophones out of Quebec and into New England to rebuild the textile industry workforce after its Civil War collapse has mostly been recorded as a crisis for Quebec -- with the Catholic clergy being prime movers in colonization projects in the Saguenay, the Laurentians and other areas intended to prevent the draining away of francophones from Quebec.  Perspective is everything, I guess.

Vermette is the author of A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans. published by the Quebec (English-language) publisher Baraka Books.

Image: US National Gallery of Art, via Smithsonian History

Book Notes: Wynn and Coates (and friends) on The Nature of Canada

The Ormsby Review draws my attention to a new collection of environmental history essays.   The Nature of Canada is curated by historical geographer Graeme Wynn and historian Colin Coates, and published by the OnPoint imprint of UBC Press. Reviewer Jenny Clayton writes:

I was impressed by how much each author was able to cover and how they brought together case studies from various regions of the country. Most chapters whet my appetite to know more about particular topics, and they provide the means to do so with detailed “References and Further Reading” sections. Seeking to create a collection of “lively, wide-ranging, thought-provoking, and informative reflections on topics of broad significance to Canadians in the twenty-first century,” the editors and contributors have certainly accomplished these goals.

And the publishers claim:

Intended to delight and provoke, these short, beautifully crafted essays, enlivened with photos and illustrations, explore how humans have engaged with Canadian nature and what those interactions say about the nature of Canada.\

Tracing a path from the Ice Age to the Anthropocene, some of the foremost stars in the field of environmental history reflect on how we, as a nation, have idolized and found inspiration in nature even as fishers, fur traders, farmers, foresters, miners, and city planners have commodified it and tried to tame it.

Science proves history FALSE!

The Memorious blog has recently run Ted McCormick's analysis of "Why Most Narrative History is Wrong" by Alex Rosenberg, published in the online magazine Salon.  McCormick ain't convinced, shall we say:

[According to Rosenberg,] Science doesn’t just cast doubt on the explanations of “even the best histories”. Cognitive science, evolutionary anthropology, and neuroscience are now showing that all the explanations history has ever offered are wrong. Get ready, historians, your minds are about to be blown!

Spoiler alert: I’m still here, mind unblown.  The article, excerpted from Rosenberg’s new book, is so horrendous a muddle that I had to start tackling it paragraph by paragraph — at times sentence by sentence  ... just to keep Rosenberg’s shifting claims and multiplying promissory notes straight.

McCormick is persuasive .I haven't gone back to the Rosenberg post or the book it draws on. 

History of constitutional evolutions

The Anne McLennan report -- on whether the office of Minister of Justice and the office of Attorney General can or should be held by a single cabinet minister -- has not much history in it.  It breezily declares that at Confederation it was decided the jobs would be fused, and so they were.

The model of having the same person hold the Minister of Justice and Attorney General roles was deliberately chosen at Confederation, and for good reason. Our system benefits from giving one person responsibility for key elements of the justice system. Joinder of the roles creates important synergies. That person gains a perspective over the entire Review of the Roles of the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada 2 system which could not be achieved if the roles were divided; so too do the lawyers and policy experts who work together in the Department of Justice.

For McLennan's purposes, the simple statement is probably enough. She outlines the different systems that exist around the world -- and demonstrates fairly conclusively that splitting the job would have no obvious benefits to Canada. All that is needed, in fact, is for prime ministers to respect the system that does exist. Paul Wells sums it up all nicely here (and also provides a link to the report text, though the link frequently fails to load, in my experience.  This one may be better)  

Even McLennan's mostly ahistorical study, however, demonstrates how governing practices that seem quite fundamental comfortably operate quite differently in various parliamentary systems, even among countries whose constitutions are said to be "similar in principle to that of the United Kingdom." And there is usually an elaborate historical process behind each local variant, about which the lawyers and political scientists who opine of these matters are generally uninformed and not very interested.  Pity. 

  

The statue controversy... in 1893

The controversy over statues of John A. Macdonald goes back farther than I realized.  This is Peter Mitchell, a long serving New Brunswick politician and confederation-maker. Mitchell had served in Macdonald's first Canadian cabinet but later ceased to trust him and sat as an independent in Parliament. He was writing in 1893 to a businessman who had profited mightily under Macdonald's National Policy.

Now, in conclusion, my dear Mr. Gault, I would like to ask you whether you think the memory of such a character is of such a nature as justifies you and your friends for erecting statues to his memory? Of course it is your right and your friends' to do with your money as you like; but do you believe that you are doing justice to the rising generations of Canada, when fathers and mothers are leading their children past these statues which are to be erected in the cities and parks of Canada, they will, probably in ignorance of the true character of the man, point out to those children that Sir John Macdonald is a man whose conduct should be emulated and whose reputation and character is one to admire? If you do, I certainly do not.

History of Childhood

Life in the pen, 1066

Think nothing ever changes?  This is a sweet human-interest story about Wayne Malley, now 58, who remembers the day he got lost at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto when he was five.

Except the story goes on to say that he was one of 356 kids who became lost at the CNE that day, and that one day in 1958 1624 kids went missing. Today: maybe 5 or ten.

In 1966 there was a kind of holding pen where the lost kids were held, weeping and waiting.  Wayne was inside the wire about half an hour before his parents (and five siblings) turned up. “I don’t think we’ve ever had any cases where the parents didn’t eventually show up,” said the woman in charge of comforting the kids in the pen.

Okay, joke about helicopter parents and feral children, and all that.  But there have been some huge societal changes about parenting since the 1960s, no?  Things do not remain the same.

Ged Martin at H-Can

H-Canada, which in the primordial internet once facilitated lively historical discussion, is now mostly just notifications of conferences and publications. But I was grateful recently to be reminded by it of "Martinalia," a section of the website of the (somewhat) retired Professor Ged Martin, noted historian of most of the British empire and particularly Canada. Martinalia is where Martin posts a very diverse range of his writing that never quite got published elsewhere

H-Can's reference is to his historiographical essay on A.R.M. Lower's and Northrop Frye's blinkered (or blinded) visions of a Canada in which French Canada barely registers at all.  This "marginalia" would be a major article for many scholars.  But there is a good deal else in Martinalia, all of which testifies to Martin's careful scholarship and to the global reach of his interests. I might have thought I was the only student of confederation to have dug out a recent edition of Lord Carnarvon's diaries for its confederation material. Martin, however, has read it all where I only dipped, and amassed a truly terrifying list of its errors and shortcomings.
  

History of ethics in politics

This tries to be a history blog, not a current events commentary. With regard to the Ethics Commissioner report of yesterday, I just want to say:

The unusual thing about this whole SNC-Lavalin contretemps is not that the prime minister and PMO attempted to apply inappropriate pressure upon a minister attempting to do her job.  It's that the minister resisted and pushed back -- the rarest event in Canadian politics, and one not at all encouraged by our political culture. One imagines all the cabinet ministers (of all parties, in all provinces as well as Ottawa) who, when inappropriately pressured by the boss, have said, "Yes, sir, how high?"  And thereby averted a scandal -- or rather prevented us from being scandalized by hearing of it.

The remarkable part of last winter's committee hearings on this matter was seeing the prime minister, the staff advisor, and the head of the civil service all saying (not in so many words, but quite clearly) the same thing: that when the prime minister's office applies presssure, it is never inappropriate. The elected politician, the hired gun, and the apolitical public servant are all steeped in the conventional wisdom of Canadian politics:  a prime ministers and party leaders are a leader, not accountable to those who follow them.

Smith on whiny MPs

Gotta say I kinda love this blast of contempt from Ottawa journalist Dale Smith at self-pitying MPs whining about being bullied by the PMO.  Sure they are, but as he says, it's only because they lie down for it -- until they retire and start working on their self-justifying memoirs.

They don’t have to take the orders from the PMO if they think it’s humiliating or degrading. They don’t have to ask the questions prepared for them by PMO for QP – they can ask their own. The key is that they need their fellow backbenchers to back them up, and behave similarly. If you think the prime minister is going to throw a tantrum and threaten to not sign the nominations of his whole backbench, well, you’d be mistaken. They have this power.

That last italicized sentence is the key. In a parliamentary democracy, prime ministerial (and party-leader) autocracy is an entirely fixable problem, one that can be remedied anytime MPs throw off their learned helplessness. 

I do wish Smith would extent his rant to all the political scientists who share and shore up the political journalists in supporting and enabling leadership autocracy.  What is in it for all of them?

Milligan on digital history reviewed

This month's Literary Review of Canada has a long review (only available to subscribers) by librarian Lisa Betel of Ian Milligan's History in the Age of Abundance: How the Web is Transforming Historical Research. I profiled Milligan and his work on digital history in Canada's History magazine in April and June of 2018, and it's good to see the full book now in print. 

Betel notes the sheer immensity of data that digital media make available for historical study, and the problems of managing such abundance:

Few if any schools are currently equipping future historians with teh technical skills to run database queries and understand the metadata, and Milligan advocates for a curriculum that includes such instruction.

She notes the ethical (notably privacy) issues -- though I'm not convinced they differ fundamentally from those faced any anyone who writes contemporary history. She also notes that the need for sampling and quantifying in coping with masses of data, noting Milligan's observation that "people are obscured... but still read into the historical record"  -- again, not an unknown problem in quantitative social history, but now perhaps reaching a new scale.  She, and maybe Milligan, comes out rather optimistic:

Milligan believes ... emerging technology will allow us to deal with large data sets, preserve the anonymity of individuals, and still incorporate their perspectives into the record."   

 Also in the current LRC, former Harper cabinet minister Chris Alexander reviews Roy McLaren's Mackenzie King in the Age of Dictators, taking some pleasure in the feet of clay of a Liberal prime minister blind to the perils of fascism. David Breault, reviewing Helaina Gaspard's Canada's Official Languages, notes how in the post-Confederation era, patronage allowed powerful francophone cabinet ministers to stock the senior civil service with fellow francophones, whereas the establishment of the non-partisan Civil Service Commission based its practice on English-Canadian norms, so francophone representation in the public service dropped dramatically.  And more, as they say.

History in the summer in the city

Toronto had a beautiful August long weekend:  warm but breezy, with none of the all-too-familiar heat/humidity nexus we see too often.  Turned out to be more historical than I expected it to be, lazy as my expectations were.

Saturday we went strolling along the deep green valley of the Humber River, as part of the Walking the 6 West program organized by a consortium of local historical societies.  We just walked along the river for a few kilometres total, and here and there along the way we encountered arts companies performing some brief original presentation -- music, theatre, recitation, singing -- inspired by some or other aspect of the local history: from a dance in honour of long-gone Chinese market gardeners to a playlet about the integration of Syrian refugees nearby.  Hundreds turned out.

Monday we happened to be at Fort York, rather aimless except for a wish to be out in the city, where we encountered a pretty large crowd being entertained by military marching, cannon fire, and Lt-Gov John Graves Simcoe proclaiming.  (In Toronto the holiday is Simcoe Day.)  Fort York is both a pleasant oasis in the city and a reminder to me whenever I'm nearby of how brilliantly it has integrated itself into a densely populated urban neighbourhood.

I know we go on about how Canadians don't know their history.  Actually we are immersed in it way more than we can see.

Update, August 7:  Helen Webberley comments:

There is no need to insist that history is only valid if it is written in text and placed in a gloomy library.