Making a Middle Class: Student Life in English Canada during the Thirties by Paul AxelrodReview by: Burton J. BledsteinThe American Historical Review, Vol. 97, No. 3 (Jun., 1992), pp. 964-965Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2164977 .

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964 Reviews of Books

ports; and curiously, the text does not reflect the fact that coal and petroleum/natural gas have come to be far more valuable in the British Columbian economy than all other forms of mining. Related to this is a second concern: the lack of information on British Columbia in the context of the Pacific Northwest states, transborder commerce, and American invest- ment, on the one hand, and about growing Japanese and other Asian trade and investment on the other. The dependence of British Columbia's resource- based economy on foreign trade is noted, but there is little substantive discussion.

Nonetheless, Barman's work is a pleasure to read and easily supersedes earlier works by Margaret Ormsby and Martin Robin; it is now the introduction of choice to the history of British Columbia.

DAVID J. HALL University of Alberta

ALLEN MILLS. Foolfor Christ: The Political Thought ofJ. S. Woodsworth. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press. 1991. Pp. xiv, 301. Cloth $50.00, paper $18.95.

No Canadian politician, living or dead, has a reputa- tion to match that of James Shaver Woodsworth (1874-1942). He is often described as a "saint" or a "prophet," and not only by members of the Co- operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), whose first leader Woodsworth was, or its successor, the New Democratic Party (NDP). To many Canadians of all political stripes Woodsworth still appears as a man of unsullied principle and uncompromising socialist and democratic convictions.

Although Allen Mills is an admirer of Woodsworth, he is far from uncritical, and in this book he presents a balanced view. Believing that Kenneth McNaught's fine biography, A Prophet in Politics (1959), still has much to offer, Mills focuses on Woodsworth's ideas rather than on the events of his life. Having ran- sacked Woodsworth's correspondence, speeches, and writings, he depicts a man much more complex in his views than received opinion holds him to be.

The book consists of five long chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter takes Woodsworth into young adulthood and the Methodist ministry. The second traces the changes in his thought as he moved into social work and journalism, and then, in 1921, into the House of Commons. Three chapters deal with Woodsworth's ideas in the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in his decision to oppose Canada's entry into the war in September 1939, a step that effectively ended his leadership of the CCF.

Mills offers a thoughtful and carefully nuanced account of the twists and turns of Woodsworth's mind. He certainly did not suffer from the "foolish consistency" that Ralph Waldo Emerson held to be "the hobgoblin of little minds." Yet there were con- stants in his thought. He was Anglo-Canadian and suspicious of foreigners. He lost his faith but main-

tained his Christian identity: "The social gospel was the stimulus to Woodsworth's socialism" (p. 253). He was statist, gradualist, and anticommunist. He thereby cleared a path for others to follow: "His gradualism blends agreeably with the NDP's later penchant for revisionist liberalism and social democ- racy" (p. 259).

Mills makes a major contribution to our under- standing of Woodsworth. Still, some topics get unde- served short shrift. Mills virtually ignores Wood- sworth's response to the 1935 "New Deal" of the Conservative Prime Minister, R. B. Bennett. Arch Dale, cartoonist of the Winnipeg Free Press, showed Bennett getting into bed with Woodsworth while saying "Move over!!" What did Woodsworth think about this? Mills offers no more than the passing comment that Woodsworth supported the New Deal measures. And Mills fails to mention Social Planning for Canada (1935), prepared by the League for Social Reconstruction. Woodsworth, the League's honorary president, wrote in his foreword to the book that "it should be of great service in the formulation of the future policies of the CCF." Mills might have said something about the influence that the book had on Woodsworth's own thought.

Scholars interested in Canadian politics or the Canadian Left will find this book indispensable. Gen- eral readers are advised to read the biography by McNaught instead.

MICHIEL HORN York University

PAUL AXELROD. Making a Middle Class: Student Life in English Canada during the Thirties. Buffalo, N.Y.: McGill-Queen's University Press. 1990. Pp. 269. $34.95.

The relationship between American higher education and the making of a new middle class is well estab- lished in the literature. I have argued for a "culture of professionalism" in the later nineteenth century (The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America [ 1976]), and David 0. Levine for a "culture of aspiration" between the world wars (The American College and the Culture of Aspiration: 1915-1940 [1986]). In the context of Ca- nadian universities during the 1930s, Paul Axelrod now develops the subject further with an informed understanding of the complexities of class behavior, cultural values, generational change, institutional re- strictions, and socioeconomic insecurities. Only in emphasis does Axelrod's account differ from the American one. The more conservative social struc- ture in Canada restrained students in contrast to their more, freewheeling U.S. counterparts, and Canadian industrial developments occurred later than in the United States.

On the surface the scenario is a familiar one. "Middle-class" families whose primary earners were

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 1992

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Canada 965

in service, white-collar, or modest professional occu- pations were neither rich nor poor, neither privileged nor outsiders, and were deeply worried about the future of the economy. They turned to higher edu- cation to secure for their children the status and respectability of careers that promised both long- term security and mobility. A job market for these graduates (banks, insurance companies) began open- ing up where it had not previously existed.

Appropriately, the students themselves are the leading performers in Axelrod's account. He holds that a common student experience during these years of the Depression outweighed significant institutional differences. Neither defeated prisoners in a social system nor heroic individualists, the students were fashioning a generational "middle-class" voice of their own, rebellious in terms of aspiration, respectful in terms of the culture of professionalism. Axelrod is at his best describing the ambiguity and incongruity experienced by the students. In the academic culture, for instance, students pursuing a professional course fell short of satisfying the paternalistic college presi- dent's mission to cultivate character and launch good citizens. In the professional culture, the rhetorical ideals of progress, objectivity, and altruism bumped up against teaching methods that depreciated critical thinking and a curriculum devoid of public policy issues. The political realities of good-old-boy self- interest and professional jealousy dominated the guilds, barring women, racial minorities, and Jews. Indeed, anti-Semitism and exclusionary practices prevailed as Jews enrolled in professional courses in significant percentages. In the student culture and extracurriculum, the popular styles of the day accen- tuated appearance over substance, conformity over commitment. These characteristics stood in contrast to the increasing independence and sophistication of students who worked to make expenses, were capable of satirizing the higher education enterprise, and were disillusioned with world leadership as the war approached.

My only reservation about this solid work concerns a matter of historical judgment. Axelrod's repeated invocation of the social categories of mainstream conformity on the one hand and personal indepen- dence on the other begins to seem shallow. Only infrequently do the students materialize as subjects with special histories of their own, passing through higher education and making friends as a privileged (in the best sense) rite of passage. The social histori- an's demographic data is inadequate to convey the meaning of where lower-middle-class students thought they were coming from and what they thought they were up against, especially in hard times. Looking back from the post-1960s generation, Axelrod is disappointed that the 1930s generation students were not more politicized, more intolerant of discrimination and inequality, more cultural plu- ralists and civil libertarians, in short more radical. He

would make the student's life harder and more inse- cure than it was.

BURTON J. BLEDSTEIN

University of Illinois, Chicago

GRAEME PATTERSON. History and Communications: Har- old Innis, Marshall McLuhan, the Interpretation of History. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press. 1990. Pp. 251. Cloth $40.00, paper $16.95.

In an engaging afterword, Graeme Patterson admits his initial distaste for the works of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. He changed his attitude after he participated in a group-taught course coordinated by Natalie Zemon Davis on "Man in Society," which led via McLuhan to Innis and to what Patterson describes as "a second liberal education" (p. 220). Eventually, Patterson saw how the approaches of Innis and McLuhan could be applied to the work that he had already completed in his Ph.D. dissertation, "Studies in Elections and Political Opinion in Upper Canada" (University of Toronto, 1969). The afterword is a disarming account of an extended exercise in matur- ing insights.

Also disarming is Patterson's refusal to succumb to a McLuhanesque style that, he allows, has "done much to exasperate and alienate many intelligent people" (p. 21 1). (But has he always resisted the temptation? Surely the reference to the "Superces- sion of one medium ... by another" [p. 33] is not a typo.) Instead, Patterson endeavors to proceed "as logically, linearly, and sequentially" as possible (p. 211). Above all, that the author feels obliged to provide an afterword is attractive. It acknowledges the paradoxical quality of the material and the pro- visional nature of the accomplishment. At the same time, however, it betrays an uncertainty of purpose.

In keeping with his frankness, Patterson confronts the question of readership. He notes that, while "the historiographical arguments ... are ... primarily addressed to the professional historians of Canada," he would "also like to reach a wider public" (p. 224). One has to wonder about the first aim. Those profes- sional historians open to an Innis/McLuhan perspec- tive will already be familiar with much that is offered here.

Chapters 2 through 4 describe elements of their approaches. Singled out for discursive treatment are the non-linear, non-sequential style that can serve so effectively as a teaching device; the figure/ground contrast; the importance of context; and the cliche/ archetype distinction. These insights are then applied in chapter 5 to the Upper Canadian myths of "family compact" and "responsible government." The final chapter covers much the same ground, this time seeking "to explain the rebellion [of 1837] in terms of communications" (p. 184). These chapters, which hint rather than argue, will preach to the converted.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 1992

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