Trudeaumania by Paul Litt, and: Trudeaumania: The Rise to Power of Pierre Elliott Trudeau by Robert Wright (review)

Since we are in Trudeau's Canada yet again, there is scarcely a fitter time to explore the meaning of Pierre Elliott Trudeau's ideas and politics and their impact(s) on Canadians and their history. Of course, Robert Wright and Paul Litt are not the first to offer dedicated studies on Trudeau. Trudeau has been the subject of dozens of academic and popular studies, and since his passing in 2000, researchers have gained access to Trudeau's official papers, which serve as perhaps the best a Canadian statesman has to offer. Wright and Litt's books are welcome additions to this new era in the Trudeau historiography, which includes works from John English, Max and Monique Nemni, and Allen Mills. Specifically, Wright and Litt both examine the making of Trudeau's political career, his rise to prime ministerial fame, and the mania that surrounded it all. The key question between them is what motivated, caused, and sustained Trudeaumania?

In short, there is a divergence in their conclusions about the nature of Trudeaumania. While Litt suggests that Trudeaumania was forged by the mass media, youth counterculture, and Canadian nationalism of the 1960s, Wright asserts that Trudeaumania arose out of Trudeau's long-running intellectual profile and the political issues that dominated contemporary Canadian politics, national unity first among them. So whereas Litt "interprets Trudeaumania in terms of the unique time and place in which it rose" (31) and emphasizes Trudeau's charisma, sexual charms, and "mod" style, Wright downplays these factors, countering with the belief that "Trudeau did not triumph in June 1968 through charisma and cunning." Instead, he "vaulted to political stardom because he provided both a cogent diagnosis of the crises facing Canada and the world and a uniquely Canadian set of solutions born of decades of study and debate" (xiv).

For the first three chapters, Litt's book is mostly a cultural history of 1960s Canada and, just as centrally, the role of intellectuals in building Trudeau's national prominence. Litt then showcases why Trudeau–defined by his sexual openness, youthful image, intellectual honesty, cosmopolitan worldview, relatively androgynous mannerisms, and irreverent authenticity–was uniquely suited and placed to become the standard bearer for a Canada that was just then emerging. In a modern, progressive, confident, and multicultural Canada, Trudeau was a man of destiny, at least in part.

But, however much Trudeau actually embodied the qualities of a new Canada, he was also a beneficiary of mass-mediated efforts to paint him as such. Litt does not really deem Trudeau's rise a media conspiracy, though at times he leans in that direction when he notes that "the rise of Trudeaumania in this period provides an instructive case study of how elites conspire in a mass-mediated modern democracy" (319). Rather, Litt suggests that the identities and world-views of Canadian intellectuals put them in a broad pro-Trudeau camp. Given that this influence was centred among a group of white, male, and highly educated scholars and journalists in Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto, they more often asserted a Canadian narrative rather than reflect the multitude of identities that existed across the country. Litt thus suggests that the media used great conscious and subconscious power to set an agenda around Trudeau: "After identifying Trudeau as a possible solution to the nation's challenges, they characterized him as a 'mod' man for the times, dashing, exciting, and fun, sporting both sexual sizzle and cosmopolitan panache. They pushed him until they had made him prime minister" (321). This clustered and empowered intelligentsia saw in Trudeau the values of a new Canadian nationalism that would manifest the modernist energies of Expo, the new flag, and the centenary into a worthy leader.

Wright's political and intellectual history of Trudeaumania, conversely, is focused on challenging the existing historiography on Trudeau's emergence. He sets out to challenge...