The Underhill Review was founded to offer a forum on history, ideas, and culture consisting of essays and review essays on works of non–fiction from Canada and abroad. We provide an intellectual space mid–way between the scholarly journal and the commercial literary magazine. We publish writers willing to subordinate the footnote to the author’s voice. Like Frank Underhill, our contributors are not afraid to stick their necks out.
In this issue we are proud to offer Kenneth Dewar’s thoughtful assessment of Frank Underhill’s life–long search to understand the role of the intellectual in the modern world, and especially in Canada. Dewar’s piece implicitly calls for a series of critical essays on contemporary Canadian intellectual life. We welcome such contributions.
Underhill appears as a catalyst of debate and dispute – this time within the Canadian community of artists – in two other contributions to this issue: Lisa Panayotidis’s informative essay on the function of art and the artist during the Great Depression, and Kerry Abel’s spirited review essay on recent works on Canadian art and the North. FHU’s critical spirit runs throughout the issue, together with hints at his irreverence. That is how he will continue to make his presence felt in The Underhill Review – together with a consistently historical perspective on ideas and culture, including political culture.
The recent political firestorm in Canadian national politics, leading almost to a constitutional crisis, has demonstrated how essential knowledge of the past is when trying to understand goings on in the present. The Frank Underhill who became a radicalised resident of the Prairie West in the 1920s held a distinctly more acerbic view of the King–Byng Affair in 1925–6 than did the Underhill who moved to Ottawa in the 1950s to become Curator of Laurier House. But a thread common to the young and old Underhill alike was his disdain for sloppy thinking and wilful ignorance. This autumn’s political battle between the Stephen Harper government’s front bench and an Opposition united unexpectedly at the Prime Minister’s obsession with untrammelled power and control gave us plenty of evidence of just such laziness and ignorance.
History has certain lessons to offer citizens who cease to care to be vigilant in protecting hard–fought and hard–earned freedoms, usually embodied in constitutional practice. This fall, with rare exceptions, few Canadian commentators – whether academics, journalists, or writers of letters to the editor – seemed to wish to bother to articulate the distinction between delegatory and representative democracy, or between parliamentary government on the Westminster model and a republican presidential system. Who the hell cares? Or so seemed the sentiment. Nor has it helped that since the 1970s, Canadian university historians have all but abandoned the teaching of constitutional, even straight–forward political history. The history of political parties? Who cares? History, after all, is merely your view against mine. Shockingly few historians weighed in on the constitutional crisis–in–the–making. Duncan McDowall suggests the plight of political history over the past few decades in his review essay on recent biographies of John A. Macdonald and Thomas D’Arcy McGee.
So we flounder in a sea of lost civics lessons. Isn’t the prime minister elected by the constituencies of the nation? So much for the traditional role of the Member of Parliament. Since he’s voted in and the GG isn’t, shouldn’t the GG just do what he tells her to? This view that a Governor General should accept a prime minister’s advice in virtually any circumstance, including one in which an Opposition proclaims with rare unanimity its lack of confidence in a bullying prime minister and his flailing government, is commonly held today. But it fails to recognize that under Canada’s form of constitutional monarchy, power and authority are, in effect, and for good reason, distinct and separate. Power resides with the prime minister, while Authority rests with the crown by means of the office of the governor general.
It is easy to poke fun at the continuing Canadian monarchical connection and the travails of the House of Windsor, but in the current context it seems a pretty wise idea that our constitution requires the political leader of the day – especially one who may be obsessed with power and control – to be a supplicant to Authority where acts of law and legislation are concerned. At the very least, this chastens overheated ambition, as we have perhaps (but only perhaps) recently seen. Mr. Harper’s revealing multi–vehicle presidential cavalcade across Sussex Drive does not encourage optimism.
In the midst of an earlier election campaign, when trying to assure scrumming reporters worried about a “hidden agenda,” Mr. Harper told them not to worry: he wouldn’t have “absolute power” (his exact phrase) because, after all, several constitutional checks and balances would prevent this. But his choice of words begs a simple question: For how many politicians in any liberal democracy would the mere notion of “absolute power” – much less the actual phrase – come to mind in this way? Only, one suspects, and fears, in the heads of those few for whom the idea exists as a thwarted ideal.
Frank Underhill recognized these tendencies and nearly got himself fired from the University of Toronto in 1931 for pointing them out – as with the Toronto Police Commission’s flagrant disregard for civil rights and freedom of expression during its campaign to ferret out the Communist menace. Even Underhill’s leader at the University of Toronto, president and Canon H.J. Cody, came to admire Mussolini’s Italy in 1933, the very year the Reichstag was torched. Today, even the Canadian journalist Jeffrey Simpson, who often conveys the tone of America’s astringent conservative critic George Will, has drawn attention to the prime minister’s “totalitarian tendencies.”
The Anatomy of Fascism, a work that caps the distinguished career of Columbia University historian Robert O. Paxton, has something to say to the blasé among us. Fascism, he notes, “may be defined as a form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass–based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
Stephen Harper is no fascist, but he has begun to act like one. His redemptive violence is still, thankfully, the rhetorical one of the neoconservative Calgary School and the truly right–wing, self–styled American “Vulcans” who have inspired him, and his cleansing is thus far confined mainly to his own party, government ministries, and those non–governmental organizations or arms–length agencies that get in his way – but then he has yet to secure the majority government for which he so transparently lusts. Meanwhile, he warns of enemies within, he echoes Alberta’s call for Tar Sands lebensraum, he sows discord in the name of national unity, he acts in the interests of big oil and gas and timber interests, he demands centralized, complete control of his party and its message in the name of the Leader, he demonizes his enemies, he exhibits contempt for parliamentary government, he exhibits a cavalier attitude toward the rule of law.
All this suggests a political phenomenon, of grievance and with it revenge, well familiar to those, like Underhill and his generation, who lived through the thirties and faced its dire consequences. Meanwhile, Canadian intellectuals, as often as not, seem willing to self–censor, evade, acquiesce.
We are, or so we tell ourselves, a nice people.
The conduct in office of President George W. Bush, kindred spirit to the northern politician he calls “Steve,” reflects the ingredients of Paxton’s definition of fascism to an extent that surely must alarm. Fascism is not a historically specific creed, confined to one time or place or leader: as Paxton points out, fascism is a cast of mind. It crosses oceans and spans cultures and takes different forms. It can happen here, wherever here may be.
Stephen Harper’s reckless political acts during the fall of 2008, less spectacular than those of Bush only because they remained confined to domestic matters rather than international affairs, have taken Canadians some distance down the same dangerous path – the first unheeded steps, as Underhill warned of Europeans in the 1930s, toward “a civilization dissolving before their eyes.”
– A.B. McKillop