Death on Two Fronts: National Tragedies and the Fate of Democracy in Newfoundland, 1914–34 by Sean Cadigan (review)

Why did Newfoundlanders relinquish their right to responsible government in 1934? In his recent offering, Sean Cadigan brings new insight to this persistent question in the Newfoundland historiography. Delving beyond more immediate explanations, such as political corruption and economic depression, he explores the psyche of the nation to understand why it agreed to surrender to a commission of government, even in such difficult times, rather than demand democratic alternatives. His investigation leads him to interpret local understandings of two significant fronts: the sealing front off the northeast and Labrador coasts, and the battlegrounds of the First World War.

I must admit that I approached this title with some skepticism, wondering whether it would merely draw a thinly substantiated connection between two rather disparate historical phenomena in order to tie into significant anniversary years. But what I discovered was a compelling and elegant argument about a battle between the mythologies surrounding these two fronts in capturing the Newfoundland imaginary in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Cadigan suggests that in the wake of sealing tragedies at the Labrador front, most notably the Newfoundland disaster of 1914, a growing perception of sealers as casualties of a class war created the potential for a more progressive state that would improve the lives of fishers and other working people – a vision espoused by William F. Coaker and the recently formed Fishermen’s Protective Union (FPU). But the First World War soon turned the eyes of the nation to another front and the sacrifices of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, particularly its virtual decimation at the Battle of Beaumont Hamel in 1916. Political rivals fought for symbolic ground on the home front, offering different interpretations of patriotism and wartime sacrifice. Progressives argued that soldiers and sailors were fighting for a better postwar world – free of political cronyism and mercantile exploitation – and demanded that state interventions in the economy introduced during wartime continue. Conservative discourse countered that Newfoundlanders overseas were fighting for British ideals of freedom and democracy, and that the strategies advocated by Coaker, particularly his proposed regulations for improving the fisheries, were by parts Hunnish/ Prussian (i.e., dictatorial) or socialist/Bolshevik, destined to strangle the fish trade and the free market economy. In the context of postwar depression and profound mismanagement of public funds by the Squires administration, the voices of retrenchment, paternalism, and laissez-faire won the field, making the people of Newfoundland more amenable to authoritarian governance.

As with his earlier Newfoundland and Labrador: A History (University of Toronto Press, 2009), Cadigan provides an accessible and engaging analysis in a crossover book that will be appreciated by academic and public readers alike. Although the period he covers has been well trod by other scholars, including Peter Neary, David Alexander, Ian Macdonald, James Overton, and Gene Long, he brings additional texture and significant coherence to a period marked by shifting political allegiances and social and economic upheaval. Particularly noteworthy is his nuanced representation of Coaker, who has been largely remembered in the literature as a tragic hero who struggled against, and was ultimately ground down by, the malaise and corruption of postwar Newfoundland politics. Cadigan’s Coaker is more complex: he begins his career with a clear, alternative vision for the working man, but his obsession with bringing Captain Abram Kean to justice for the Newfoundland disaster distracts him, and he wends a weary path to political disillusionment, compromising on the issue of conscription, flirting with the idea of fascism, and ultimately distancing himself from the very fishers whom he had once celebrated.

Paradoxically, this focus on Coaker is both a strength and a weakness of the book. Given Cadigan’s impressive body of work as a social and environmental historian, his top-down approach in Death on Two Fronts surprises the reader. This book focuses primarily on ideological debates among middle- and upper-middle-class elites of the period, based on...