Writing About Canadian Workers: a Historiographic Overview*

chapter 3 Writing about Canadian Workers: A Historiographic Overview*

The writing of Canadian labour history has always unfolded at the intersec- tion of national specificity and international currents of influence, be they in the realm of analysis or activism. Yet an assessment of Canadian working- class history’s rise and reconfiguration also highlights some ‘peculiarities of the Canadians’. First, Canada is a big country, but its academic culture is decidedly small. This means that debates within Canadian labour history can be, and have easily become, quite sharp and even personalised. Second, with a weak communist tradition but a strong social-democratic presence, a scholarly field such as labour history tends to concentrate attention on contentious differences within the left, especially as these were evident, initially, in social history’s rise and, subsequently, in cultural history’s later challenges. Third, for these and other reasons, working-class history in Canada has arguably had a much greater influence on more general historiographic debates and trends than in other countries, where study of workers’ past may well be more insulated from the hegemonic mainstream. Fourth, and finally, labour historians have played an important role in the upper reaches of the academic profession in Canada, per- haps more so than in any other country. All things considered, labour history in Canada has led a charmed life. And yet it is both relatively young and not without something of a tumultuous past.

The Past as Prologue

Until the modern labour historiography of Canada emerged out of the ferment of the 1960s, professional historians played second fiddle to a band of econom- ists, political scientists and even specialists in English literature in writing on the country’s workers and their labour movement.1 Paralleling these academic developments were radical and Communist commentaries, but such writing

* ‘Canada’, in Histories of Labour: National and International Perspectives, edited by Joan Allen, Alan Campbell and John McIlroy (Pontypool, Wales: Merlin Press, 2010), 196–230. Published here under the title ‘Writing about Canadian Workers: A Historiographic Overview’. 1 For detailed accounts of this early writing, see G. Kealey 1995, pp. 3–47; 1981b, pp. 213–22.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi: 10.1163/9789004301849_006 70 chapter 3 was hardly influential, especially in comparison with other English-speaking settings.2 By the 1960s, Communist publications that addressed the history of class formation in Canada and the development of the trade-union movement included Charles Lipton’s Trade Union Movement of Canada, 1827–1959 (1966) and Stanley Ryerson’s Unequal Union: Confederation and the Roots of Conflict in the Canadas, 1815–1873 (1968). An autodidactic dissident communist, Jack Scott, expelled from the Communist Party of Canada (cpc) in 1962, also produced a series of labour history studies in the 1960s and early 1970s. He opened one study with the declaration that: ‘Historians – with a few honourable excep- tions – take virtually no note of the existence of workers in society’.3 Lipton, Ryerson and Scott resonated with an emerging contingent of New Left-influenced students in the 1960s, to be sure.4 As a mid-1960s historiographic article in the Canadian Historical Review by Stanley Mealing indicated, however, mainstream historians were by no means convinced that ‘the concept of social class’ was highly relevant to understanding national identity and the country’s history.5 Canada lacked anything comparable to the influence of the Hammonds, the Webbs and G.D.H. Cole in England, where the Fabian and moderate socialist analytic stream ran historically deep, with specific currents hav- ing a pronounced impact on disciplines and fields such as economics, history and political thought. Nothing comparable to the American Wisconsin School, associated with the substantial researches of John R. Commons, Richard T. Ely and Selig Perlman existed north of the 49th parallel. Liberal individualism, on the one hand, and patrician sensibilities, on the other, incarcerated most Cana- dian historians in an academic aesthetics that shunned approaching the nation and its past in class ways as troublingly base. ‘[T]he study of the common, or common-place man’, wrote Arthur R.M. Lower in 1929, ‘if overdone, would no doubt make for common-place history’.6 Kenneth McNaught presented a similar barrier to new approaches to labour within the small ‘left’ of academic historiography. McNaught, a committed social democrat associated with the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf), had been schooled in the late-1940s variants of the contemporary ‘culture wars’. This education was a battleground that pitted moderate socialists

2 Note, for comparative purposes, Irving and Seager 1996, pp. 239–77; Hobsbawm 1978a, pp. 21– 48; J. Barrett 2004, pp. 23–54. 3 For discussion of Communist labour history, see G. Kealey 1982a and 1982b. Jack Scott’s writings are discussed in B. Palmer 1988a; and Scott is quoted from Jack Scott 1974, p. 1. 4 See, for instance, Teeple 1972. 5 Mealing 1965, pp. 217–18. 6 Lower 1929, p. 66.