Trudeaumania by Paul Litt (review)

The public interest in Pierre Trudeau, given his son's ascendancy to the office of prime minister, is again on an upswing. But Trudeau is anything but under-studied. Indeed, since Trudeau's rise in 1968, dozens of manuscripts have been written about his ideology, his government, and his legacy, though few had access to Trudeau's private papers. Following his passing in 2000, pioneering projects by scholars like John English and Max and Monique Nemni have used Trudeau's papers to delve not only into his formal politics but also into his coming of age experiences as a student and activist in Quebec and abroad.

In this light, Paul Litt's study of Pierre Trudeau's whirlwind rise from being relatively unknown in English Canada to prime minister is a worthy addition to the modern Trudeau historiography. Interestingly, Trudeaumania comes at the same time as another project on the phenomenon by Robert Wright. Both Litt and Wright hone in on the mania and what it meant for Canada's political and social culture. But whereas Wright undertakes a more-or-less traditional political history and seeks to demonstrate that Trudeaumania was driven above all by Trudeau's distinguished intellectual profile as it pertained to issues like civil liberty and nationalism, Litt makes the cast that Trudeau was at least in part a creation of the media as well as a leader built for a unique late 1960s context.

In constructing this argument, Litt does a commendable job at setting the stage. Indeed, the first 100 pages are mostly a cultural history of the 1960s. Here, Litt demonstrates that on everything from the sexual revolution, to the excitement around the Centennial and Expo 67, to the increasing prominence of baby boomer youth culture, Trudeau was a man for the times. He was not particularly young in 1968, but he had an undeniably youthful air, and while he had wealth and an elite education, Trudeau was seen as hip and irreverent toward both status quo politics and social convention, be it via his bachelorhood or wearing sandals in Parliament. If Canada was feeling young, cosmopolitan, and progressive, Litt suggests that Trudeau personified the electorate's desire.

But Litt also perceptively notes the importance that influential intellectuals had in priming the pump for Trudeaumania. Specifically, Litt makes a strong case that much of Canada's intellectual leadership in the late 1960s was homogenous: the majority of top journalists, public commentators, and influential scholars were white, male, relatively wealthy, and lived disproportionately in Ottawa, Montreal, or Toronto. In addition, many of them were educated at only a few exclusive schools, such as the University of Toronto, McGill University, or Queen's University. Litt's argument, then, is less that Trudeau's rise was an out-and-out conspiracy perpetuated by central Canada's intellectual class and more that this class saw themselves in Trudeau and shared his general philosophy and ideology. Therefore, in late 1967 and early 1968, when even Trudeau himself was reluctant about running to be Lester Pearson's successor, both faculty lounge meetings and major media sources were touting him as the next big thing.

This touches on a key aspect, which Litt certainly acknowledges but perhaps not to a fully sufficient extent: Trudeaumania was not necessarily a conspiracy, but it was an example of the persuasive power of Canada's elite, who saw in Trudeau not only something new and exciting but also someone who would rarely if ever strike at the core aspects of capitalist modes of production and distribution. While a not insignificant number of Canadians feared Trudeau was a communist, the reality was that he offered a progressive veneer to an otherwise individualistic ethos that drove an unequal society. Again, Litt acknowledges how Trudeau's elite upbringing made him at least tolerable in many boardrooms, but less is said about how Trudeaumania – either as a set of policies or as a cultural phenomenon – compared to the democratic socialist alternative of Tommy Douglas's New Democratic Party and how the convergence of media elites played a role...