Eugene Forsey: Reluctant Intellectual

“I am not an intellectual,” my father would say with a twinkle, “and sometimes when I contemplate some of those so described, I am rather thankful that I don’t feel I deserve the title” (Forsey 1990b). Sadly, Frank Milligan’s “intellectual biography” of Eugene Forsey is itself an example of the kind of work that gave rise to that comment.

I am, of course, hardly an unbiased observer. As Eugene Forsey’s daughter, I share his wariness, not of the intellect itself, but of the institutional forms it sometimes takes. Too often, those who wear the trappings of expert or academic authority provide a novel twist on an old allegory: the fine clothes are there, certainly, but there is no emperor inside.

It gives me no satisfaction to have to pass such harsh judgment on a book written in good faith by someone my father referred to as a friend (Forsey 1990a, vii). Between 1984 and 1987, in preparation for the PhD dissertation that became this book, Frank Milligan interviewed his eminent subject more than a dozen times (2004, 294), and even welcomed him as a guest at his home in Edmonton. In 1996, I too spent a pleasant afternoon with Dr. Milligan exchanging memories and anecdotes, and when he kindly loaned me a bound copy of his thesis, I looked forward eagerly to reading it.

Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Although the author had obviously done a great deal of work, the resulting manuscript was rife with errors of fact, missed points, and misinterpretations, which sometimes, however unwittingly, misrepresented key positions my father held throughout his career. These failings of the thesis, reproduced in their entirety in the book, are central to any assessment of the work.

Before going on to that assessment, let me touch on why an “intellectual biography” of Eugene Forsey would seem to promise something of an intellectual treat. From the beginning, the circumstances that shaped my father’s life favoured the development of a keen critical mind, a sense of history, strong ethical convictions, and a deep concern for social justice. When his librarian-artist mother lost her husband to a heart attack six months after their son’s birth in Newfoundland (not, as Milligan would have it, while she was still pregnant [2004, 2]), she returned to Canada and raised the baby in the home of her father, William Cochrane Bowles, who was chief clerk of votes and proceedings for the House of Commons in Ottawa.

Like the Forsey home in Grand Bank, the Bowles household was highly literate, quite religious, and very political. With one grandfather the resident magistrate and port warden of a major Newfoundland outport and the other responsible for the daily business of Canada’s Parliament, it is not surprising that an only child would absorb a fascination with public affairs. The young Eugene nourished that fascination with supper table discussions, book learning, and frequent visits to his “Goppa’s” workplace on Parliament Hill. In the 1920s at McGill and Oxford, he excelled academically, further deepened his religious and political understandings, and gradually—one might say quite logically—underwent an “intellectual conversion” (Forsey 1970) to democratic socialism.

This background laid the foundation for a life of thoughtful and principled politics. In the long career that followed, my father expanded his learning both in the academic sphere and through practical experience with trade unions and political activism. Forever embroiled in controversy, he used his intellect as a tool to move through mazes of complexity, break barriers of bafflegab, and foil, where he could, the machinations and hypocrisy of vested interests. An “intellectual biography” of such a man should be rich indeed.

Certainly there is some interesting material in Frank Milligan’s book. He correctly highlights the importance of progressive Christianity in my father’s world view, and gives well-deserved credit to my mother’s role and influence, which might too easily have remained invisible. He points to valuable source documents and provides information on...