Book Notes: Passfield on Upper Canada's Tories

That dissertation you abandoned in order to pursue another path --can you ever go back to it?  Here is a hopeful tale.

Robert Passfield started as a student of engineering, switched to history, and started a doctorate in the intellectual history of early Upper Canada/Ontario. In 1974, however, with his dissertation incomplete, he joined Parks Canada's historic site service and began applying both his historical skills and his earlier knowledge of engineering to historical studies of Parks Canada's heritage canals. He became part of the "Parks Canada School" of what is sometimes called industrial archaeology, working in research teams with restoration architects, engineers, draftsmen, and others in generating full cultural/historical/architectural studies of canals and other 19th century Canadian sites.

Passfield had a highly productive and successful thirty-year historical career with Parks Canada. His publications ranged from the Rideau Canal to the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Red River Floodway and the historical contexts associated with engineering, construction and technology in early Upper Canada. (My own time at Parks Canada overlapped briefly with Passfield's, but as far as I know we have never met.)

Sometime after he retired (at the highest level a historian can reach in the Canadian public service), he went back to his dissertation project on the ideas of Tory Anglicans in Upper Canada.

Et voilà: in 2018, he published The Upper Canadian Anglican Tory Mind: A Cultural Fragment. on "the constitutional, religious and educational ideas and worldview of the Upper Canadian Anglican Tories who governed the Province of Upper Canada (Ontario) for two decades following the War of 1812."

It is the contention of this study that the Upper Canadian Anglican Tories were true philosophical conservatives who evolved a unique variant of English Anglican Toryism, and who were committed to defending and strengthening the traditional political order, loyalty to the Crown, and the unity of the British Empire, in the Loyalist asylum of Upper Canada.

Perhaps there are some other historical studies with an equally long gap between conception and delivery, but this seems a remarkable achievement in both scholarship and perseverance.  (Note: I have not read the book.) It's hard not to think that Passfield may have had at least as useful, productive, and satisfying a career as a public service historian than as a specialist academic scholar in Upper Canadian thought.

Passfield maintains a website. It includes blog posts on current political and social issues that suggest Passfield retains something of the Tory mind, as well as most of the biographical material I have summarized here.

Historians at the Order of Canada

Good to see Arthur J. Ray, Skip to his friends, on the list of new appointments to the Order of Canada. He has been honoured for his long list of groundbreaking works on fur trade history and indigenous-settler relations, and also for his long record of providing expert witness in land claims and aboriginal title court cases (about which he also wrote a book, Telling It To The Judge. He's also my co-author on the Illustrated History of Canada.  Skip joins the order at the "officer" level.
Also appointed: Marie Battiste, Mik'maw scholar and education prof at the University of Saskatchewan for her scholarship and activism on indigenous education and her many publications in the field.

History of Suffrage

The Champlain Society continues to pour out episodes in what most be the most productive and most substantial Canadian history podcast, Witness to Yesterday.*  I've just been listening to Patrice Dutil's lively and interesting conversation with Tarah Brookfield about the suffrage movement in Ontario, drawing on her recent book Our Voices Must be Heard, part of the seven-volume UBC Press series "Women's Suffrage and the Struggle for Democracy" on suffrage across Canada edited by Veronica Strong-Boag.

The episode elides one odd and neglected twist in the campaign for the vote. Who could vote in federal elections was made a provincial responsibility in the British North America Act, 1867: whatever electoral rules prevailed in a province applied automatically to federal elections too. The federal government had the authority to secure control over the terms of the federal franchise and did so in by the Franchise Act of 1885. But in 1898 the Laurier government returned that control to the provinces. 

As a result, adult women acquired the federal vote, along with the provincial vote, in provinces that legislated female suffrage in 1916 and 1917. These women -- estimates ran as high as a million --  had their right to vote removed when the federal government regained control of the federal franchise by its gerrymandering legislation of 1917, which permitted only women in the forces or with relatives serving in the forces to vote. This point was extensively discussed in parliamentary debate on the 1917 federal Elections Act. 

*Okay, I've been on the podcast (and Patrice is always after me to promote the Champlain Society, of which I'm a member) but it's true and I'd say it anyway. Witness to Yesterday is also supported by the Hudson's Bay History Foundation and the Wilson Institute of McMaster University.

Peer review

I was recently surprised and gratified to receive a lifetime membership in the Writers' Union of Canada "in recognition of extraordinary contributions to the Union and the lives of Canadian writers."

I reflect that an important part of those contributions has been in resistance to the piratical copyright policies of Canada's universities and the support given them by docile faculty and organizations like the Canadian Association of University Teachers, which has always been loyal to the boss rather than to the interests of scholars on this issue.  The work goes on.

Talking Statues at the Wilson Institute

Thursday, July 4, at 7 pm, at McMaster University in Hamilton, I'll be participating in the panel discussion "Statue Wars" with James Dashuk of Clearing the Plains fame and Vanessa Watts of the Indigenous Studies Program at McMaster. Deets are here -- it's a ticketed event.

It's part of a collaboration between the university's Wilson Institute and OHASSTA, the Ontario History and Social Science Teachers Association -- both of whose innovative programs I've been part of in the past.  Looking forward to learning a lot.

History of gay entrepreneurship

I've been meaning to note -- Pride Week finally gets me around to it -- a lively review in the May Literary Review of Canada by Elspeth Brown of Andrea Benoit's history of the Toronto-founded cosmetics company MAC: Viva M.A.C: AIDS, Fashion, and the Philanthropic Practices of M.A.C Cosmetics. Brown, and Benoit, consider the place of "gay capitalism" in a community generally seen as oriented to social justice and against capitalist exploitation

Now a ubiquitous fixture in high-end shopping malls and consumer-­friendly airport terminals around the world, M.A.C Cosmetics emerged from Toronto’s queer entrepreneurial past. In the 1970s, young gay people created a parallel ­lavender economy where they could both be out and pay the bills. By founding bookstores, restaurants, and bathhouses, business owners did their best to make money while making good and supporting the “community.” These newly out entrepreneurs joined an older queer tradition of gay men, in particular, working in the velvet underground of the aesthetic industries — fashion, hair salons, interior decorating — where being gay was tolerated, so long as no one spoke about it publicly.

Nice cover design, UTP.

In the BC Archives

Spend a very contented day yesterday here, in the Reference Room of the British Columbia Archives in Victoria.  Online registration waiting for me, two trucks of document boxes at hand, friendly staff, and terrific documents, mostly handwrittens and carbon copies, that hardly anyone has looked at in fifty years. Wish I could have stayed a month.

Reading B.C. Bookworld on the ferry, amazed as ever at the sheer volume of books the province produces, I found both an article by and a review of a new book by the always productive British Columbia historian Patricia Roy -- the book actually being a history of the BC Museum and Archives. This led me to her recollections of her early years at the University of Victoria in the mid-1960s. Read 'em and weep, academic job-seekers:

Those of us from the relatively small cohort born during or just before the war were expected to report to classrooms and complete our dissertations while teaching full-time. Academic jobs were rarely advertised. In some cases, department heads seeking new faculty contacted their equivalents in departments that offered graduate degrees; in others, graduate students wrote to those departments where they thought they might like to teach with an outline of their qualifications and their interest in a position if one were available.

This is just a quick and busy trip west, so I trust my left-coast friends will forgive being neglected.  Blogging should get more active next week.

HIstory of whiny historians

Like medicine, law or engineering, history is a profession.

Actually, history is not like medicine, law, or engineering.  Medicine, law, and engineering are licensed professions with governing agencies empowered to withhold or remove the right to practise from those who fail to meet precisely defined professional standards. Generally, you cannot hold yourself out to be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer without the permission of the certifying body, and if you screw up seriously enough, that permission can be withdrawn.

Historians? No. Academic teaching is a profession of sorts, though without the same sanctions (I can't think of a professor who has been disbarred by their fellows just for bad teaching or writing.)  Nobody grants or removes an exclusive right to practise history. And nobody should, for the most basic free speech reasons.  

Erik Loomis, a terrific historian at the terrific blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money, has fallen into this error.

One of the most annoying things about being a historian [is] that every random person on the street thinks they know more than you do about it. It really does drive me nuts.  ... This is how you have idiots like Bill O’Reilly out there writing “history” and it’s why you have people such as Naomi Wolf and Cokie Roberts being called out for basic errors. They shouldn’t be claiming they can do history to begin with because it’s an actual profession with actual training that develops actual skills.

This is, well, nonsense -- one might say, almost a disqualifying error by the standard Professor Loomis is proclaiming here. It would not take long, shall we say, to compile a list of distinguished historians who in their time have promoted slavery, racism, colonialism, misogyny, unjust wars, toxic nationalism, and other errors, without suffering consequences to their employment or professional standing.  

Historians do make errors. Need we be reminded of Hugh Trevor-Roper, perhaps the most distinguished British historian of his generation, Regius Professor of History at Oxford, no less, who endorsed the fake Hitler diaries as genuine? His whopping error in this case does not mean he is "not a historian;" he was a fine and skilled one. Historians with "actual training that develops actual skills" are not immune to error, any more than are the American writers Loomis is calling out here.

So here is the rule, everyone. There are good histories and bad histories. There are competent historians and incompetent historians.  There is no "I am a historian, but this person -- whose historical work I dislike -- is not." Good thing too.  There is a strong free speech bar against preventing someone from writing history just because you don't like the things they may write. In history, what matters is quality, not qualifications.

Call out bad history and bad historians to your heart's content. If you must, try to revive the lovely Victorian definition "historiaster, a petty or contemptible historian."  Do not imagine you hold a monopoly on historical practice and can deny it to others.

History of D-Day in perspective: lest we forget

The D-Day commemorations were moving and personal and very widely broadcast again this year.  As they should be.

But to counter the inclination of some commentators and maybe even some historians to speak of "the turning of the tide" or "the beginning of the end," it's worthwhile to read this essay from the American History News Network, confirming that the turning of the tide occurred at Moscow, or Stalingrad, or Kursk, and not in Normandy. 

John A. Macdonald and Reconciliation

On Thursday I went to Kingston at the invitation of the Kingston Historical Society to give the Address at the annual graveside commemoration of the death of John A. Macdonald -- an event that has gone on on June 6 since 1892! I chose the topic "John A. Macdonald and Reconciliation."

It was a beautiful day. It was a moving ceremony. Thoughtful and enlightening conversations followed. The text will be published in good time by the Kingston Historical Society, of whose good works I am most appreciative. I am posting it here as well. 

Canada's first prime minister, John Alexander Macdonald of Kingston died on the 6th of June in 1891 and is buried here. Every year this gathering marks his death and commemorates his life. Today I propose that we consider as the theme for this commemoration: Reconciliation.

A graveside is a particularly appropriate place to discuss such matters. In Christian theology, Reconciliation means the end of the estrangement between God and Humanity. John A Macdonald, dead now these 128 years, would have trusted that in going to this grave he would settle his life account, make his reconciliation with his maker, and end all life's estrangements. So here, at the grave of John Macdonald, on the traditional territories of Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples, let us among the living consider reconciling our own accounts, not so much with God as with each other.

For in recent years, the Reconciliation concept has moved from religion to politics. Archbishop Desmond Tutu helped inspire one of the first Truth and Reconciliation processes to help South Africa face the legacies of apartheid. Inspired by that example, Indigenous survivors of Canadian residential schools used some of their class-action settlement fund to create a Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Commissioners said in their final report that the intent was to establish "a mutually respectful relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples." I want to consider today what the life and career of John A. Macdonald can say to us about building that more nearly respectful relationship.

Prize Watch, CHA prize to Tillotson, Give and Take

We hear that Shirley Tillotson has won the CHA Prize for the best book in scholarly Canadian history for her taxation history Give and Take.

It's notable that last year's winner was Elsbeth Heaman's Tax, Order, and Good Government, which covers the world of tax policy and public policy in theperiod 1867-1917, as Give and Take does for 1917 to 1967. Pretty good run for taxation history!

History of protest

Still one of the most amazing acts -- and photos  -- of recent world history

Wikipedia:

Tank Man (also known as the Unknown Protester or Unknown Rebel) is the nickname of an unidentified Chinese man who stood in front of a column of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989, the morning after the Chinese military had suppressed the Tiananmen Square protests by force. As the lead tank maneuvered to pass by the man, he repeatedly shifted his position in order to obstruct the tank's attempted path around him. The incident was filmed and smuggled out to a worldwide audience. Internationally, it is considered one of the most iconic images of all time. Inside China, the image and the events leading up are subject to heavy state censorship, and as a result they are being forgotten. 

There is no reliable information about the identity or fate of the man,

Talking John A and Reconciliation in Kingston

Every June 6, the Kingston Historical Society marks the death on this date in 1891 of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald with a commemorative ceremony at his grave in Cataraqui Cemetery, Kingston, on the traditional territory of the Anishnaabe and Houdenosaunee peoples, with the participation of the Fort Henry Guard, the RCMP, Bellevue House staff, and civic dignitaries. Each year a historian or public figure gives a short address on some aspect of the life and significance of John A. Macdonald.

This year the speaker is me, speaking on the topic of "John A. Macdonald and Reconciliation." 1.30 pm, Cataraqui Cemetery, Kingston Ontario.

June 6 nowadays draws more attention as the anniversary of D-Day in 1944. Coverage is abundant, but I was struck by this historiographical essay reviewing the role of the Canadian Army in Normandy published at, of all places, CTV News. 

History of taxation

An essay on austerity politics from the blog of Alex Himelfarb, sociologist, former top federal civil servant:

In one way or another, Canadians have been living with austerity for several decades. Admittedly, we have experienced nothing like what the Greeks or Spanish have gone through. Ours has been an austerity in slow motion, but austerity nonetheless and austerity largely self-imposed.

In Canada, for example, taxes as a percentage of the economy are lower than they have been since the days before medicare and universal pensions. Total government spending as a portion of the economy is below the OECD average. And when it comes to social spending, we are near the bottom. Here in Ontario, following a round of unaffordable tax cuts, cuts to vital services accelerate, even though Ontario’s per capita spending is the lowest of all the provinces.

And while Canadians not so long ago voted for governments that vowed to end the austerity, the previous decades of tax cuts constrained their options and none were willing to reverse those cuts in significant ways. Any tax increase for some was typically joined by an even more costly tax cut for others. And, now, for many, austerity at full throttle seems to be making a comeback.

Is there a counter-argument to this? I mean, there are conservatives who promise "We'll cut taxes." But there a case being made that, contra Himelfarb, today's taxes are higher than they used to be? Or that in a complicated society like today's, we have less need for public services like health and education?

Giro wraps up, bring on the Tour

So this guy, Guillaume Boivin, the only Canadian in the Giro d'Italia this year, successfully completed the race today in Verona, having survived crashes and accidents, 125th out of 141 who finished the race. So not yet in Ryder Hesjedal territory, but he's out there.

The Tour looms: Grand Départ is July 5 in Brussels