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Reviews Social Democrats on Social Democracy ''BUILDING THE CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH": ESSAYS ON THE DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST TRADITION IN CANADA. J. William Brennan, ed. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1985. LIFE OF THE PARTY. Gerard Fortin and Boyce Richardson. Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1984. THE REBEL IN THE HOUSE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A.A. HEAPS, M.P. Leo Heaps. Markham, Ont.: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1984. 'MY DEAR LEGS... ': LETTERS TO A YOUNG SOCIAL DEMOCRAT. Alex Macdonald. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1984. THE GOVERNMENT OF EDWARD SCHREYER: DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM IN MANITOBA. James A. McAllister. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1984. SECULAR SOCIALISTS: THE CCFI NDP IN ONTARIO, A BIOGRAPHY. J. T. Morley. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1984. LET US- RISE! AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE MANITOBA LABOUR MOVEMENT. Doug Smith. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1985. Through the 1950s and 1960s the book most often cited with reference to the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation was Seymour Martin Lipset's classic sociological study, Agrarian Socialism (1950). Even after the publication of Gad Horowitz's Canadian Labour in Politics (1968) and Walter Young's The Anatomy of a Party: The National CCF (1969), Lipset's study commanded a status at home and abroad that few ac144 counts of any aspect of Canadian politics had attained. It was reprinted, for example , in Doubleday's prestigious Anchor Books series in 1968 and excerpts from it were reproduced in successive editions - right through the fourth edition in the late 1970s - of Hugh Thorburn's longestablished text book reader, Party Politics in Canada (1979). It is instructive to draw attention to the impact of Agrarian Socialism; the picture it painted of the CCF influenced many who read it and taught from it. Because the CCF was an electoral success in the 1940s and 1950s in the largely rural province of Saskatchewan, and apparently a failure elsewhere in the country , many came to see the party as Lipset did: a social movement of protesting farmers whose vision of the "new society " had American parallels and precedents. Thus, Lipset's point of departure, and the title of his first chapter, was "The Background of Agrarian Radicalism" rather than something like "The Background of Canadian Socialism." Before undertaking his trek to Saskatchewan, Lipset, by his own admission , "had literally not been more than a few miles west of the Hudson" River and his footnotes in that chapter reflected something of his training at Columbia University and the American agrarian experience: Frederick Turner, J.D. Hicks, Thorstein Veblen, and assorted articles from the Mississippi Valley Historical Review and other American journals on Iowa, North Dakota, Kansas, and Wisconsin. He also cited various books on third-party politics in the United States. Nothing in these sources referred to Canada or Britain although Lipset was certainly not oblivious to the British Labour and socialist influence, as other parts of his book revealed. It is important to draw attention to the CCF's British heritage because the background to agrarian socialism in Canada was certainly more British and Fabian than American: M.J. Coldwell, Tommy Douglas, and the socialist founding father of the Farmers Union of Revue detudes canadiennes Vol. 21, No. I (Printemps 1986 Spring) Canada, L.B. McNamee, were all British-born. Henry Wise Wood was an important American agrarian populist leader, but he moved to Alberta and was no fan or proponent of socialist parties. Lipset's own data and other studies showed that the CCF garnered a higher percentage of votes in Saskatchewan's cities than on Saskatchewan's farms. But, because Saskatchewan was rural relative to other provinces, the CCF's triumphs appeared to be a case of agrarian socialism rather than a case of British-style, urban-based, labourist social democracy in an unlikely agrarian setting. The image of the national CCF as a western-based farmers' party was reinforced by the vagaries and distortions of the electoral system. In the 1945 federal election, for example, the CCF returned eighteen MPs from Saskatchewan and none from Ontario. If one just peeked below the surface, however, one could see that while 21 percent of all CCF voters in Canada came from Saskatchewan , a much more...

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