Newspaper City: Toronto’s Street Surfaces and the Liberal Press, 1860–1935 by Phillip Gordon Mackintosh (review)

Liberalism is a tricky term. While there is clearly a line running through from the nineteenth-century Manchester Liberals, with their hostility to the Corn Laws and emphasis on individual liberty and free trade, to more modern versions of the same political philosophy espoused by, say, Britain’s Liberal Democrats or Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party of Canada, there are marked differences of emphasis, not least on the role the state should play in regulating economic activity and the life of its citizens.

Phillip Mackintosh has very serious doubts about liberalism, and in this study of the debate surrounding the improvements to the street surfaces of Toronto and the actual improvements themselves, he takes aim at the liberal press in the city, in particular at the Globe and the Daily Star (titles still with us, if living rather precariously these days). He declares ‘Liberalism establishes property as first among liberty and equality; at the same time, property’s dalliance with capital injects liberalism with capital’s zero sum raison d’être’ (p. 13). He directs specific ire at the way in which the Globe, on the one hand, acknowledged the danger to pedestrians, particularly children, which the advent of the motor car presented, but, on the other, resorted to sponsoring a Just Kids Safety Club rather than calling for serious curbs on the freedom of car owners to dominate the streets. The dilemma which the Globe wrestled with unsuccessfully is, alas, still with us, and has yet to be resolved. Witness recent controversies in London over the hazards posed for cyclists by lorries and cars, and that posed in turn to pedestrians by cyclists.

Despite the book’s title, much of it is not concerned exclusively with the press but with the actual processes whereby Toronto changed from being a dirty, even filthy, city whose muddy streets, polluting industries, animal traffic, and inadequate sewage systems created a malodorous environment, to the much cleaner and disciplined metropolis we know today. The struggles of enlightened city engineers to improve roads and pavements (sidewalks) are well charted, as are the wiles of citizens reluctant to pay a fair share of the cost of improving the streets where they resided. The progress from roads made of cedar blocks to those built of tar macadam, then asphalt and concrete, was anything but smooth and Mackintosh uses his sources well to tell a story which has more than its fair share of hucksters and villains. He emphasises that newspapers are both evidential – ‘the first rough draft of history’ – and also agents with their own agendas to pursue, and in the cases of the two titles he focuses on, agendas he regards as deeply suspect.

The book is well illustrated and, despite excessive referencing of perfectly straightforward statements, and a tendency on occasion to a rather obscure academic style, for the most part it is lucidly written.