The Big Picture: The Antigonish Movement of Eastern Nova Scotia by Santo Dodaro and Leonard Pluta (review)

Inspired by the poverty in eastern Nova Scotia in the 1920s, emboldened by the social teachings of the Catholic Church as laid down in the encyclicals Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno, and led by a cadre of activist priest-professors and sisters, the Antigonish movement sought to alleviate the plight of the region's poor - farmers, fishers, industrial workers, and their families - through mass education and co-operative enterprise. Hard work, self-reliance, and anti-communism were valued deeply by the movement's pioneers, most of whom, like the Cape Breton-born duo of Father Jimmy Tompkins and his cousin Father Moses Coady, were faculty members at St Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, the movement's institutional home by 1928. Valued deeply, indeed, for it was hoped that when these notions spurred people to identify and solve the economic problems that consigned them to society's margins, they would then chart a "middle way" between "unbridled capitalism" and "state socialism," the terminus of which was spiritual rejuvenation. The steep rise and long decline of the Antigonish movement, from the early 1920s to 2000, frames The Big Picture. Beginning with a lengthy discussion of the difference between "social" and "economic" movements, Dodaro and Pluta examine the movement's formation, paying particular attention to the emergence of its totalizing framework - the "big picture" of the book's title - in the twenties and thirties. Circulated widely within the movement, the "big picture" illustrated graphically the links between adult education, alternative forms of economic organization, and a "good and abundant life for everyone." Equipped with this model and spurred on by the desperation that accompanied the Great Depression, the movement went from strength to strength in the thirties and forties: budgets and staffing levels expanded year over year; thousands attended study clubs, mass meetings, and leadership courses; co-ops and credit unions proliferated within the region and beyond it. The call for the common people to become "masters of their own destiny," a phrase Coady loved and the authors repeat often, had fallen on very receptive ears indeed.

Yet as the heavy pressures of the Great Depression lifted and the experience of the Second World War refashioned Canadian politics, economics, and values, Dodaro and Pluta argue, the Antigonish movement went into eclipse. Of particular importance to their analysis is the emergence of interventionist government after the war. In the realm of post-secondary education, for example, the provincial government now funded St Francis Xavier University, as it did other post-secondary institutions in Nova Scotia, thereby shifting that school's gaze away from the local parishioners who had once filled that critical financial role; their problems thus became less important in the overall scheme of things, a trend only compounded by the recruitment of new faculty members from outside the ranks of the church whose research agendas were untethered to local problems. The institutional stature of the Antigonish movement, which was housed within the university's Extension Department, began to wane. Beyond the groves of academe, government also expanded into the areas of unemployment insurance, affordable housing, and regional economic development, undercutting the role that the movement had once played in these spheres and eroding the ethic of self-reliance and self-denial that had once given it some traction there. Perhaps nowhere was this reversal of fortune more obvious - the authors suggest - than among inshore fishers, who faced dire conditions in the mid-1960s. Among those workers, the Antigonish movement no longer espoused the "dream" of "self-reliance" through "socio-economic transformation," but instead facilitated government programs, which offered grants and loans to the United Maritime Fishermen, retraining for fishers and their dependents, and retirement of fishing licences. "The Extension Department . . . lacked the resources and imagination to adapt to the new circumstances," the authors conclude, "and to come up with new pioneering solutions" (236). The middle way...