The DCB on Herbert Molson

The new Dictionary of Canadian Biography entry on Herbert Molson (1875-1938) is a blockbuster, worth reading even if you have no interest in the scions of old Montreal families  -- Herbert being the fourth descendent of the original Molson brewer of Montreal. It's by Robert C.H Sweeny, the Montreal historian and Memorial University emeritus professor.

I'm ambivalent about the little potted summaries that the DCB has started placing at the top of its biographies. At first glance, I thought this one editorialized a little too much about how it felt about the subject of the biography.

Then I got into the meat of this biography, and boy, it delivers. For his account of Herbert Molson's life and career, Robert Sweeny seems to have tracked every penny that ever went in or out from the Molson's business and in or out from Herbert Molson's personal wallet. It's not a pretty picture. The market rigging! The price-fixing! The tax-dodging! The profiteering! The honours for his philanthropy set against the microscopic share of his income it represented.

In 1909 Molson’s entered into a cartel with its much larger rival. From April of that year through to September 1925, the two firms shared monthly returns on how much ale, porter, and lager each had sold in both Canada and Newfoundland. All sales in excess of a set market share were to benefit both firms, at a fixed profit per gallon. 

... 

It is not clear how Herbert managed to avoid incurring a heavy tax bill on these appropriations. His private ledgers show that in 1928 he paid 25 per cent in taxes on a net income of $311,812, but in 1929 he paid only 2.8 per cent on a revenue of $5,187,519, and in 1930 a mere 1.8 per cent on $4,877,352.

...

Throughout the 1930s he donated only 1.56 per cent of his $17.1 million income to charitable causes.  

Lately the DCB has been engaged in an ambitious fundraising project seeking to build its endowment to the size it needs. One cannot help speculating about how potential major donors might react if they saw this work sample. 

Which is why it's important that the DCB has published it. 

 

History of Marie Dressler at the DCB

No one is old enough to remember Marie Dressler in her movie days.  She's famous in Canada as an early Canadian star, and familiar to olde Hollywood buffs, no doubt  But the DCB today publishes a biography of her that really brings out her full and complicated life. It's a hell of a story and an excellent biography by Cari Beauchamp. Not that long, and well worth a few minutes.

History of Railroads

Most of the new biographies the Dictionary of Canadian Biography is publishing these days are of people who died in the 1930s and 1940s. Today's entry on William Burnie, who died in 1902, is an outlier, or maybe a catch-up.

It is a good one and an original contribution to historical knowledge, I should say. William Burnie's claim to be included in the DCB arises from the fact that he was the engineer who drove the Grand Trunk Railway train that ran through an open swing bridge and crashed into the Richelieu River in June 1864, killing 97 people.

The story gives a detailed account of how and why the accident occurred. It focusses mostly on how the extraordinarily careless management of the GTR caused the crash, and how the railway escaped all consequences beyond some inadequate financial compensation payments, while trying to scapegoat Mr Burnie.  

I looked into 1860s railroading a little when I was going deep into the events surrounding the Quebec Conference of 1864 while writing Three Weeks in Quebec City. It was striking how much railroads, though only fifteen years old in Canada then, had already transformed the lives of politicians, businessmen, and other travellers -- and also how crash-prone and delay-plagued railroads were in 1864. 

The whole subject of early railroading and its social and economic impact on British North American society seemed seriously under-researched, so this DCB article stands out. It is signed "John Derek Booth, railway historian, Lennoxville, Quebec." 

Good thing somebody is doing the work.

He haunts us still? New Macdonald bio at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography

This week, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography's weekly online publication of a new biography has been supplemented by the release of a revised biography: that of John A Macdonald, previously issued in 1990 and now extensively reworked. It deserves attention from students of historiography as well as of history. 

The basic Macdonald biography remains largely the work as published in 1990 and credited to Peter Waite and J. Keith Johnson (both now deceased), but it now has significant additions signed by J.R. Miller on Macdonald's Indigenous policies and by Patricia Roy on his policies and attitudes regarding Chinese people in Canada, plus a concluding assessment credited to DBC staff -- with new bibliographic notes for all of these. In the "Publication History" sidebar provided in the online DCB, the original 1990 text of Waite and Johnson remains available for comparison.

This practice -- is it new? -- of identifying and assigning authorship of revisions in DCB entries seems to me better than the silent rewrites that seem to have prevailed previously. (Again, the originals of those entries can still be found). Many older biographies have urgently needed revision, but how much rewriting of the work of now-deceased scholars can be made before it becomes necessary to wonder if the original authors would wish to have their names removed from the new texts attributed to them? In the Macdonald process, we can see the quality of Waite's and Johnson's scholarship as well as of that in which they had no part.

No doubt the new material will be closely scrutinized (perhaps even reviewed), given the controversies over Macdonald's actions and reputation that have roiled Canadian history in recent years. My own view on a first reading is that the DCB's revised Macdonald entry signals the impossibility of the project now being attempted by the Canadian Institute for Historical Education and its partisans: to restore all the Macdonald statues and honours and denounce all who bring forth new assessments of him, particularly with regard to indigenous matters. The standard view here has shifted, and the revised biography reflects and confirms that.

I might have a quibble or two still. 

The repeated invocation here of Macdonald's centrality in the making of confederation makes one think Donald Creighton managed to be a ghost author here.  

Also In particular, the respect given to the claim that Macdonald drafted fifty of the seventy-two clauses of the Quebec Resolutions of 1864 grates on at least one reader. Yes, D'Arcy McGee said it, but the setting matters: it was at a partisan tribute dinner in a Kingston tavern where hyperbolic praise was surely de rigueur and the sobriety of all involved was very much in question. There has always been abundant evidence of lively debate and multiple authorship of most of the Seventy Two Resolutions -- and of Macdonald's resistance or grudging assent to many of them.       

New DCB website

The Dictionary of Canadian Biography used to be a big new book every ten years or so with a heap of short biographies in each  one.

Not anymore. The DCB is becoming an empire. Now that the biographies are published online, will there ever be decade-by-decade hardcopy books like there used to be? It would be hard to do because the boundless space of the intertubes is allowing the DBC to include more people and to produce longer articles on them too. The last printed volumes of the DCB covered notable Canadians who died in a particular decade. Now the biographies in development for the decades remaining to be covered are probably too extensive to go into a single book. 

These days, the DCB publishes a new biography online every week. The 1920s seem to be complete, the 1930s are providing a lot of the new ones, and the odd one from the 1940s can be seen. (Special cases can bend the rules: Pierre Trudeau is among the eminent dead already included in the DCB.) I'm currently drafting a DCBiography about someone who died in 1973, and I have no great expectations of living to see that one in digital "print."

Meanwhile, today the DBC announces a new expansion of its website.

Today we are proud to announce the launch of our updated website, which has a refreshed look and important new features.

We have added more than 300 summaries about topics and events relevant to Canadian history. When reading a biography, refer to “Related Topics” in the left-hand sidebar; click to read the topic summary and discover links to other resources for more information. Readers can also browse by topic: click on Browse (at the top of the site under the Search bar) and then Browse by Topic. As well as improving discoverability of our biographies on the Web, these related topics offer an overview of the many historical themes addressed in our entries. For example, the summary “Enslaved Black people in the Maritimes” provides context for more than 40 related biographies, including a group that we started publishing in Black History Month, among them Name Unrecorded and Lydia Jackson.

You will also begin to see biographical summaries at the head of new entries and, in the case of long biographies, subheadings; consult, for example, Ward Chipman. The addition of summaries and subheadings will be ongoing in the coming weeks.

As well, the site’s display is now responsive, adapting to all screen sizes, whether desktop, tablet, or mobile phone.

I think this is good. I can see the additional material and the links back and forth add context for readers. It must also makes the DCB seem more classroom-friendly and teacher-friendly. 

But I will confess to some mixed feelings about the unsigned interpretive essays that have been gradually added to the website and that are now becoming even more integrated with the biographies. It's more fun, sometimes, just to follow links from one biography to another, gradually putting together a sense of their shared time and place from their combined experience.

Which reminds me. Has anyone ever tried to put together a course in Canadian history or some field or period of it, using only the DCB as the course text? Could one? Would anyone?  You could get quite a long way -- and the course materials would be right at hand.

(Update, July 11:  I have a little case of covid at the moment, and covid-brain may have scrambled some of what I tried to write above yesterday.  I've done some rewriting for coherence.  Also: I should have noted the some of the new elements of the DBC will be added gradually and are not entirely in place at the moment.

  

 

History of me and the DCB and Edith Sheppard, part II

My biography of Edith Sheppard is up on the Dictionary of Canadian Biography website as promised.

I confirmed recently that the first contribution I made to the DCB was published in 1979 (though written some years earlier). Since I currently have two forthcoming biographies in the pipeline, neither of which is close to publication, I must be on track to attain the status of a fifty-year contributor.  Not sure what the record might be, but Robert Fraser was already on staff there when it was published, so he at least is ahead of me.

The DCB site seems to be loading slowly and there is an ominous message posted about "technical difficulties." The Toronto Public Library system has been undergoing a ransomware attack recently. Would anyone try to take thousands of dead Canadians hostage at the DCB?  (Update:  false alarm re the DCB site.)

DCB and me ... and Edith Sheppard

I am told that if you subscribe to the weekly email from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography -- the one that links you every Wednesday to the DCB's newest biography -- then bright  and early tomorrow morning you will find in your inbox my biography of Edith Sheppard, and find out who she was. It has only been about twenty years getting to publication. In case you don't get the weekly notice, I'll link to it tomorrow once it's up. 

New at the DCB: old-timey parliamentary life

The most recent new biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography features Charles Joseph Doherty (1855-1931), Montreal lawyer, judge and politician, who gets a nice wide-ranging treatment from Larry Glassford.  

Doherty came from that nineteenth-century world of intermarriage between well-to-do Irish Catholic Quebeckers and francophone Quebeckers that produced surprisingly extensive bilingual/bicultural networks within elite Quebec circles. It still exists to some degree. Indeed I once interviewed the Supreme Court of Canada Justice Charles Gonthier, who turned out to be Charles-Doherty Gonthier, who had had a very bilingual, bicultural upbringing in Montreal and Ottawa and was a grandson of Charles Doherty.

Charles Doherty was a Conservative MP from a Montreal constituency from 1908 to 1921, and Robert Borden's Minister of Justice. Glassford brings out his role in the War Measures Act of 1914, the conscription crisis of 1917, the Winnipeg General Strike prosecutions of 1919,  and the Paris Peace talks, and his (perhaps surprising?) support for Canadian (and for Irish) autonomy from Britain.

Reading the biography, I'm also struck by how, uh, interesting, an MP's parliamentary career could actually be in the early twentieth century. As an opposition backbencher in 1910, Doherty helped save Robert Borden when the party caucus voted on whether or not to remove him from the party leadership. Several times he worked to defend party policy from restive backbenchers and hostile public opinion in Quebec, while trying to defend Quebec interests and minority rights, often enough without much support from the Borden government. Glassford writes, "Behind cabinet doors, Doherty did not hesitate to speak his mind..."  

Cabinet ministers with views? A backbencher who had to defend the leader against his restive colleagues? Nobody is likely to write that kind of stuff when some distant volume of the DCB starts to cover the current crop of  MPs and cabinet ministers. Pity. 

Update, October 13:  The Beaver of 2002 has a lively story about conscription, Catholicism, and the Doherty family that is cited in the DCB bio: "The Guelph Raid" by Mark Reynolds.

Also, can't resist reposting this from the American blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money, about the travails of another legislature:

Suppose you were to combine a parliamentary system, in which a majority of the legislature could bring down the government at any time, with a presidential system, in which no government would then be in place until the next fixed election seated a new legislature, even if that event was, say, 16 months away?

What would happen? Let’s tune in to America: 2023 and find out!

The DCB redoes a big one

As the Dictionary of Canadian Biography moves gradually through the 1930s and into the 1940s in its decade-by-decade progress in the publishing of authoritative biographies of Canadian historical personages, it is also looking backwards. From time to time, it adds new biographies of previously neglected figures -- or reworked version old biographies that have become, ah, dated, as new information and new attitudes need to be accommodated.

Today:  a new Samuel de Champlain, no less. The first DCB biography of Champlain, by Marcel Trudel, was published in 1966, in the DCB's first published volume. The "Document History" included with every online DBC biography, offers access to a revised version by Trudel from 1979 and to a "minor revision" in 2014, also credited to Trudel (who had died in 2011), but not to the 1966 text.  

The new biography is signed by Ramonde Litalien, former longtime director of Library and Archives Canada's program of research in French archives and noted scholar of early explorations. It is much longer (DCB biographies tend to be longer now that print space no longer rules), with coverage of and reflection on much recent research.  It's not a "politically correct" revision -- Champlain's relations with indigenous people, for instance, get more coverage, but it's not statue-demolishing coverage.  But I haven't scrutized or compared it in detail -- it would be interesting to see a study of the various versions by a Champlain scholar.

To my surprise, a baptism certificate found in  2021 2012 and dated 1574 that seems to establish Champlain's birthdate for the first time, is treated with a good deal of reserve by Litalien in the new biography. I had taken it as authoritative and was quite impressed to see it on display at Library and Archives Canada in 2013.  Litalien presents her view in detail in the new biography; I'm inclined to defer to her expertise!  

New at the DCB: Aegidius

This week's new entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography is Aegidius Fauteux, historian, librarian, lawyer, homme de lettres.  In my days as a student of New France, I came across many of his edited documents.  Longtime blog-followers might just recall the anonymous supply clerk's journal, a Fauteux publication I used copiously when I "liveblogged" the siege of Quebec in 1759/2009. 

But mostly the biography makes me want to celebrate the wonderful proliferation of given names in Quebec in the late 19th and early 20th century. Maybe it was the large families in need of new names, but ones like Jean-Baptiste and Francois that prevailed in New France gave way to many more colourful successors.

Aegidius, son of Hercule and Exilda, was raised in Sainte-Cunegonde, and among the uniquely named friends and colleagues named in the biography are Edouard-Zotique, Gonzague, Napoleon, Nazaire, and others. The habit has faded in modern Quebec -- Yannick is about as bold as it gets now.  The trend may have survived longer in Acadia, notably in the gloriously named poet, scholar, and former lieutenant governor of the province Herménégilde Chiasson (b.1946).

History of librarians

Who knew librarians get honoured for their civic service?  At Charles Street near Church, the City of Toronto has a plaque in honour of James Bain, who "established and directed" the world's busiest library system.

Bain has a biography in the DCB, written by the magnificent Edith Firth. A few notes from it:

"The library board had to sue the city council for operating funds in 1900."

"Goldwin Smith and others had opposed the establishment of the library because taxes would be used to circulate novels."

"When the reference library’s catalogue was published in 1889, its Canadian section was much admired, especially the rare books. Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau thought the number of current French Canadian titles was “wonderful” and offered to help Bain find Quebec publications."

"His voracious reading and retentive memory gave him a knowledge of history, literature, and bibliography that was both extensive and precise; he also possessed “perfect patience with illiteracy,” so that he could give courteous, kindly, expert help to everyone. He was especially helpful to authors."

Photo "credit": me.  (Didn't expect so much sun shadow.) 

History of troublesome priests

Fallon: Obey!

The weekly new-biography mailing from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography has featured in the last two weeks two really horrifying clerical lives, at least for any reader from a background of secularism, moderation, tolerance, and the separation of church and state: Michel-Thomas Labreque (d.1940, biography by Gaston Gagnon) and  Michael Fallon (d.1931, by Pasquale Fiorino).

"Throughout his life Labrecque suffered from an immense and obsessive fear of freemasonry and liberalism, which promoted secular public schools and the separation of church and state." As bishop of Chicoutimi, he called the possible arrival of some non-francophone labourers “a national and religious danger” for his diocese. He forebade his parishioners from even attending Liberal party rallies, since Laurier "was a traitor to his religion and his nationality." Of him Gagnon writes, with nice understatement: "Certain personality traits – such as irascibility, impulsiveness, and authoritarianism – revealed themselves to be quite the opposite of those of St François de Sales, whom Labrecque looked to as his guide."

Michael Fallon was an Irish Catholic from Ottawa who managed to be both a British imperialist and an Irish nationalist. Also, "he felt strongly that French Canadians ought to place loyalty to the Church above loyalty to their language and culture." He was at once a supporter of separate schools for Ontario Catholics and a fierce opponent of French-language instruction for Franco-Ontarian Catholics. In 1912 he helped bring about Ontario's anti-French Regulation 17, in the process earning "the lasting enmity of French Canadians across the country." Upon his death a colleague acknowledged, “Bishop Fallon failed at times in patience and meekness."  

I mean, one knew people like this existed and prospered, but reading these two lengthy biographies in sequence really rubs your nose in it.

Update, June 12:  I thought of my title above as a clever allusion to the complaint by Henry II that led his knights to go murder Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.  But apparently the original version of the phrase was "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" (sometimes revised as "meddlesome" or "troublesome," according to Wikipedia).  "Turbulent" would work for these guys, too. And this update allows me to add that the DCB entry does mention that some of Fallon's francophone parisioners actually discussed assassinating him.

Piloting tips from the DCB

The job of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography is to provide detailed, sourced, authoritative biographical information on a vast array of Canadians. From time to time, it can also provide startlingly fresh and dramatic anecdotes. Like this example, from the closing paragraphs of its just-published essay on pioneer Quebec aviator Joseph-Hervé Saint-Martin (d.1939) by Pierre Thiffault:

Saint-Martin, whose prowess was acknowledged by his peers, had only one phobia: boarding a plane in which he would not be at the controls. He had built his career on the principle never to do so. Shortly before his death, however, Saint-Martin had taken up filming as a new hobby and was in the habit of bringing along his 8 mm camera wherever he went. The investigators found the broken apparatus in the remains of the aircraft and examined its contents, which enabled them to clarify the circumstances surrounding the accident. They discovered that the three men had come upon a herd of stampeding caribou and filmed them at such a close range that the bristling hairs on their backs were distinctly visible. Excited by the idea of capturing extraordinary footage, Saint-Martin had handed over the controls to Therrien. As they approached, Therrien tipped the plane sideways so that the cameraman would have a better view. Saint-Martin was too preoccupied to realize that his apprentice pilot, through lack of experience, was trying to hold the plane in an impossible position. The last frame showed the plane diving suddenly towards the ground.

New at the DCB: Fernand Rinfret's habits

 The latest DBC biography -- of Fernand Rinfret, journalist and politician, brother to a chief justice of Canada, and Mackenzie King's Secretary of State in the 1920s and 1930s -- is a tease. We learn King appointed him to the cabinet despite deploring Rinfret's "bad habits" which would destroy him -- but the biography will not even speculate as to what the habits were.

A reader may notice that Rinfret is reported to have literary tastes and abilities, loved the opera, holidayed in sunny California (where he died at 56), and had a brief and childless marriage in his youth.  Are we supposed to take a hint here?  I know nothing of Rinfret, but I've wondered in the past about the DCB's seemingly nudge nudge wink wink approach to possibly gay subjects. Is this another?

Random notes

• The latest from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography features one of those people who weren't even well known in their own time but still deserve to be in the DCB, in this case Vénérande Robichaud, an Acadian woman who died in 1936 at the age of one hundred, in the home she had lived in all her life, leaving behind among her possessions letters from her grandmother of the same name, a survivor of the deportation of 1755. (The DCB includes her too.)

• I notice that some time recently the little counter in the right-hand column ticked over 1.6 million views since 2010. I have never taken these counts too seriously but I do appreciate all of you who really do view and read.

• April 27th was the two hundred and eighth anniversary of the American attack on what is now Toronto.  No, I had not noticed either, but Andrew Stewart had. He sent this photo of "The Approach," a new painting [only partly shown here] by marine artist Peter Rindlisbacher, depicting the approach of the American forces aboard the fleet of Commodore Isaac Chauncey. 

The New Dictionary of Canadian Biography

The Dictionary of National [i.e., British] Biography was first published in 1885, and was completed in 63 volumes in just fifteen years. They published quite a few updates and supplements during the twentieth century, and then went whole hog on the New DNB, starting in 1992. The intention of the new DNB was to completely replace the Victorian original and its updates with a whole new work. By the time the New DNB was complete in 2004 (60 volumes in print and online), it had changed its name to the Oxford DNB. 

At the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, going since 1966 and fifteen volumes in so far, the intention seems to be different. The aim there seems to be just one DCB in perpetuity, with a sort of continual rewriting of individual entries as historical knowledge changes.  

So recently the DCB published a new Pierre Radisson biography, with Radisson scholar Martin Fournier replacing American historical novelist Grace Lee Nute as the author. And last week the DCB released a new version of its entry on the Mi'kmaq leader Membertou:

Today we are pleased to announce a completely new entry for Membertou (d. 1611), Micmac (Mi’kmaq) chief, mainly known as the first chief of a First Nations community to be converted by Roman Catholic missionaries. After re-examining what is known about his life, however, one realizes that it cannot be limited to that single spiritual dimension.

You can still read earlier versions of the entry on Memberbou in the "Document History" section of the online DCB (though the earliest provided is a 1979 revision of the original). There one can still find original biographer Lucien Campeau's declaration, 

The fact that this Micmac sagamo was the first Indian to receive solemn baptism in New France remains his principal claim to distinction. 

For 2020 Stephanie Bereau revises that to: 

He is mainly regarded as the first chief of a First Nations community to be converted by Catholic missionaries. After examining what is known about his life, however, one realizes that it cannot be reduced to that single spiritual dimension. Membertou was indeed a sagamo whose personal and diplomatic qualities visibly impressed the French to the point that, on his death, he was accorded the honours reserved for men of high rank.

This still seems a Membertou as seen by the French rather more than a Membertou as his own community would have understood him. But it presumably means that rather than let the DCB gradually become entirely an artifact of the late twentieth century, its editors and contributors will be at work forever producing an eternally revising DCB for endless new generations of readers. 

Image: from the DCB.

 

 

History of plus ca change...

From the DCB's newly posted biography of Phillips Thompson, labour journalist and socialist intellectual of the late 19th century:

When he testified in November 1887 before the royal commission on the relations of labor and capital, chaired by James Sherrard Armstrong, Thompson maintained that rapid increases in the cost of rental properties in Toronto had brought “considerable hardship upon a good many of those who have only fixed incomes or salaries.”

And:

He reasoned that before a millionaire “could have any chance to utilize his business talents, he must first have a society with all the highly complex agencies and instrumentalities of commercial life, in which these qualities can find free scope.” Because he owed his success to society, his wealth was therefore a resource that belonged to society, and its people had “the right to step in and put a limit upon accumulation..."

The DCB is currently inviting readers to nominate their five favourite DCB biographies:

We invite you to send us the names of your favourite personalities – no more than five – and briefly tell us your reasons. From time to time, we will post your answers on our website and share them on social media.

Nominations can be sent to dbc@dbc.ulaval.ca.

History of Northrop Frye

Looking up someone else in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography online, I noticed that today's featured biography is of Northrop Frye, who died on this day in 1991. (The biography itself is not new; it was posted to the DCB site in 2009.)

It turns out to be an elegant and readable biography, and provides probably the best short explanation of just what made Frye a god among literary critics. At the end I discovered it is by Eleanor Cook, widow of historian and former DCB editor Ramsay Cook, and professor emerita of English literature in her own right 

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.

Update, September 25:  And here's the companion biography: Ishbel Marjoribanks, Lady Aberdeen.

Outing History

Among the recent new entries in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography is one for Robert Home Smith, d.1935, the Toronto lawyer, financier, real estate entrepreneur.

Smith has a park named for him not far from where I live, because he was the developer of the large, rather exclusive residential tract along Toronto's Humber River known as The Kingsway. He also established the Old Mill tea room (now conference centre) on the river, partly to draw traffic to his then rather remote neighbourhood.

The entry has a word-sketch of the man:

A tall figure, Home Smith was a “veritable Adonis,” one contemporary said, deliciously funny and charismatic, and, whatever his hearing disability, intensely sociable....

Though outgoing, Smith could be an extremely private man, one who left tantalizing anecdotal trails. Business and recreational trips to Britain, Mexico, Washington, New York, the Caribbean, and resorts in Tennessee and the Carolinas were undertaken quietly; his friendships, mainly with building and engineering types, were never ostentatious; invariably he explained his bachelorhood with dismissive good humour....  He left his entire estate to an associate, lifelong bachelor Godfrey Stanley Pettit.

I had come across Home Smith in some legal history research years ago. Having seen essentially the same info covered in the DCB excerpts above, I informally put him in my (imaginary) file: Historic Canadians Who were Probably Gay.

I think that is what the DCB is hinting, too, with the "lifelong bachelor" and "tantalizing anecdotal trails."

Which raises a nice question of historical practice: how discreet or forthcoming should historians be about the possible sexual orientation of historical figures who were not forthcoming on the subject in their lifetimes? To put it another way, consider how hard it would be for a historian of sexuality to go through the DCB and find the gay or possibly gay Canadians, even when there are hints and suggestions.