Academics and Canadian Social and Economic Policy in the Depression and War Years

Academics and Canadian Social andEconomic Policy in the Depression and War Years MICHIEL HORN In different ways the Depression and the Second World War profoundly affected Canada.• The disastrous slump of the early 1930s, and the slow, uneven and interrupted recovery which followed it, touched many Canadians painfully and led some of their leaders to think of their country in new ways. War brought a prosperity which made it possible to initiate a measure of economic and social change, thus at least in part satisfying a popular demand which was becoming increasingly insistent. During this decade-and-ahalf , too, some Canadian academics played an important role either in proposing changes or in helping to implement them. For professors to express themselves on social and economic concerns was, in 1930, nothing new. The academic intellectual of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was likely to regard himself as a moral tutor to society, with · a duty to state views on the large topics of the age. That he was often not much noticed when he . did so resulted from a self-imposed exclusion from political life. Academics "preferred to confine themselves to critical observations in academic journals or membership in quasi-clandestine · organizations...."' A few joined the public service or interested themselves in non-controversial reform causes; most remained safely within the ivory tower. A new type emerged early in this century. He was the social scientist, an empiricist rather than idealist in outlook - the broad categories are S.E.D. Shortt's - who was often ready to act as an advisor to government and in the process might receive considerable public notice. The mood of both idealist and empiricist Journal ofCanadian Studies Vo/. 13, No. 4 (Hiver 1978·79 Winter) could be one of criticism. The former, whether English- or French-Canadian, tended to treasure the older, more pastoral Canada or Quebec, to distrust industrialization and deplore the rise of a business-like spirit which set little store by the fruits of a classical education. Empiricists, on the other hand, were sometimes very critical of the persistence of old ideas and practices. Their criticism of religion was far more muted. Neither group was a serious disturbance to the powerful of the land, however, whether businessmen, churchmen or politicians. Canadian academics were scarcely touched by socialism before the Depression. In FrenchCanadian institutions it was equated with atheism; in English Canada it was simply very bad form. A political scientist at Queen's University, O.D. Skelton, did in 1911 publish a measured refutation of socialism; it won first prize in a competition . in the United States. Even milder proposals for change found few devotees. Norman Penner notes that "an attempt by Professor R.M. Maciver of the University of Toronto to launch a movement of social reconstruction in 1917 misfired . "2 In that year Rev. Salem Bland was dismissed from the faculty of Wesley College, Winnipeg . He was a Christian socialist of sorts who was well-disposed to the labour movement. Although his dismissal was ostensibly on budgetary grounds, there was a· strong suspicion that his advanced opinions, which were known to be offensive to·some members of the Board of Directors of the College, constituted the real reason. In the 1920s overt political participation was still generally discouraged. A Stephen Leacock might be clearly identifiable as a Conservative, but most academics did not discuss their political preferences, if they had any, in public or with newspaper reporters. Academic comment on matters of social and economic policy was restrained in tone, and when it was not, as in James Mavor's attacks on the public ownership of telephones in Manitoba (1916) and of hydro-electric power in Ontario (1925), t!le extenuating circumstances were clear. Besides, by the latter year he had retired from the University of Toronto. Academic freedom was generally understood to mean the freedom to pursue one's research 3 and teach, without interference, provided one observed the laws governing defamation and sedition , and avoided partisanship. This interpretation was provided by Sir Robert Falconer, president of the University of Toronto, in his pamphlet Academic Freedom (1922). He reiterated it for the benefit of a fractious Frank Underhill...