Prejudice and Pride: Canadian Intellectuals Confront the United States, 1891–1941 by Damien Claude-Bélanger (review)

Canadian philosopher George Grant once wrote that “to think of the US is to think of ourselves—almost” (2). In this book, Damien Claude-Bélanger explores the views of French and English Canadian intellectuals about the United States between the election of 1891 and the American entry into World War Two. By 1891, he argues, the United States had emerged as the modernist nation par excellence, and Canadian intellectuals began to debate the implications for Canadian society and culture. Conservative and anti-American, the “imperialists” believed that Canada’s future was as part of the British Empire, and they feared the corrosive effects of urbanization, industrialisation, mass culture and secularism, which they identified as the hallmarks of American civilization. Most French Canadian nationalists harbored a deep distrust of modernity, fearing its threats to Roman Catholicism and the largely agrarian society of Québec. “Continentalists,” however, more liberal in orientation, thought of themselves as North Americans, and they emphasised both the commercial and cultural benefits to Canada of close ties with the United States while rejecting annexation. Bélanger ends his account in 1941, when, he suggests, the United States lost its reputation as the leading modernist nation.

Based on over five hundred articles from contemporary periodical literature, the book follows a thematic approach sketching out the intellectual origins and history of the contending groups in the first chapter and then analyzing their positions on a range of issues, including philosophy, politics, religion, culture, race, gender, Canadian identity, and Americanization. A final chapter explores debates over trade, international unionism and migration. Bélanger convincingly demonstrates that the positions of the continentalists and imperialists were rooted in their views of history. In English Canada imperialists such as Colonel George T. Denison, and George Munro Grant, shared a disdain for the American Revolution, for example, seeing it as a disruption of Empire that forever sundered the unity of English-speaking peoples. French Canadian nationalists like Jules Paul Tardivel and Father Louis Chaussegros de Léry decried the radicalism of the American Revolution, seeing its origins in deism, freemasonry and Voltaire’s critique of the Roman Catholic church and religion. Continentalists like Goldwin Smith and Frank Underhill, however, argued for the inevitability of the Revolution and emphasised the continuities of language and legal traditions.

Bélanger offers a refreshingly different lens to the history of Canadian nationalism, avoiding the binary opposites of nationalism and antinationalism in favor of a more nuanced framework that appreciates the nationalism of the continentalists while also showing the lines of continuity between French Canadian nationalists and imperialists. Building on this study, scholars will want to examine similar themes in the popular press and look beyond the rhetoric to the movement of American capital into Canada after World War One and the penetration of American ownership and control that so vexed the economic nationalists of the 1960s and 1970s. He skillfully examines one of the most critical components of Canadian social and political thought, and his book will undoubtedly will be indispensable, both for the study of Canadian-American relations and Canadian intellectual history.