Growing to One World: The Life of J. King Gordon by Eileen R. Janzen (review)

J. King Gordon is not a household name in Canada. Some might identify him as the son of the Presbyterian minister Charles Gordon who, as the novelist Ralph Connor, was the most widely-read Canadian writer in the early 20th century. Or it might be recalled that King Gordon attended the founding convention of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf) in 1933 and possibly left some imprint on the new party. However, as Eileen Janzen makes clear in this biography, there is much more to be said about Gordon’s life.

King Gordon was born in Winnipeg in 1900. His family was comfortably middle class, partly due to the substantial income generated by the Ralph Connor novels. Both of Gordon’s parents were liberal Presbyterians, much influenced by the social gospel wing of the church. But, as he grew up, he was totally unaware of the significance of events like the Winnipeg General Strike, which occurred the year he graduated from the University of Manitoba. In 1921 Gordon went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Here his horizons were broadened. He said that he could feel the scales begin to fall from his eyes as he read R.H. Tawney’s The Acquisitive Society in which Tawney argued that property had a social function and distinguished sharply between personal and social property.

Following his return from Oxford, King Gordon served the Presbyterian Church in the logging country of central British Columbia and then in Pine Falls, Manitoba, the site of a paper mill. He won the favour of these communities with a practical, non-theological, inter-denominational approach. In 1929, as the Great Depression was beginning, Gordon enrolled in a PhD program at Union Theological Seminary in New York. There he studied under Reinhold Niebuhr and Harry Ward and developed a cordial relationship with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was a student at the seminary. He also observed the desperation of the unemployed as the Depression deepened and met various left-wing leaders including the trade unionists David Dubinski and Sidney Hillman and Norman Thomas, the leader of the Socialist Party. The two years at Union Theological turned Gordon into a full-fledged Christian social radical.

In 1931 Gordon joined the faculty of United Theological College, which was affiliated with McGill University, to teach Christian ethics. He arrived in Montréal at a propitious time. Soon he was active in social causes and urged the church to stand in judgement of the capitalist system and to carry out the principles of Jesus. He was in contact with Frank Scott, Graham Spry, Eugene Forsey, Brooke Claxton, Norman Bethune, and David Lewis. He was a part of the group that went to Toronto in 1932 and met with Frank Underhill and others to form the League for Social Reconstruction (LSR). The ccf followed. Gordon attended the founding convention of the party in Regina in 1933 and then, in one capacity or another, dedicated four years to spreading a message that emphasized the complimentary and integrated roles of politics and religion. As he travelled to every corner of the country, organizing and speaking on behalf of the LSR, the ccf, or the Fellowship for a Christian Social Order, he distinguished little between church and party and felt that the mission of both was largely the same. In the 1935 federal election, Gordon was the ccf candidate in Victoria, British Columbia, and finished a close second. It appeared that a political career within the Canadian left had begun.

In 1938, however, King Gordon left Canada and never returned permanently for nearly 25 years. Between 1938 and 1944 he was the non-fiction editor for the New York publishing company, Farrar and Rinehart, and from 1944 to 1947 the managing editor of The Nation. His circle of connections widened as he dealt with issues related to World War II and the events that followed. Freda Kirchwey, the controversial editor of The Nation...