4. Stephen Leacock: The Not-So-Funny Story of His Evolutionary Ethnology and Canada's First Peoples

Stephen Leacock the Popular Intellectual

Daniel Francis has drawn attention to something which many of us might have preferred were otherwise. Canada's preeminent humorist, Stephen Leacock, whose very name identifies Canada's major award in this genre, wrote extensively on Canada's First Peoples using a tone described by Francis as "dismissive, even vicious" (1992:55). Francis also drew attention to Leacock's reliance on the evolutionary stage perspective in his depiction of Leacock's view that "Canadian history . . . was the struggle of civilization against savagery. There was never any question on which side Indians stood" (1992:223).

The aim of this paper is to examine in greater depth Leacock's writings on Canada's First Peoples and then to examine the proposition that Leacock was disposed to this portrayal by the ethnography of America's aboriginal peoples by the Scottish historian and proto-anthropologist, and proponent of evolutionary stage theory, William Robertson.

Of some interest also is Leacock's status as a "public intellectual," a term that has come to denote in more recent usage a generally positive connotation with regret over the lack of public intellectuals in today's world. The term was popularized by Russell Jacoby in his The Last Intellectuals (1987). He meant this by it: "the old fashioned generalist intellectual who wrote clearly about social, political, and cultural issues" as opposed to today's "specialized scholars who write about narrow academic debates in often tortured or highly technical prose" (McLaughlin n.d.:2). In addition, the public intellectual reaches out to the wider public by utilizing generally accessible media rather than low-circulation "scholarly" journal articles and monographs.

Arguably, the "improving" Victorian and Edwardian eras were well-stocked with public intellectuals but Leacock's example may lead us to a reexamination of the recent and favorable portrayal of them. Rather than speaking "truth to power," Leacock's writings demand some other epithet such as the reinforcement of conventional stereotypes still widely held by the Canadian public at that time. However that may be, Leacock's "dismissive, even vicious" portrayal of aboriginal peoples did have an academic lineage, one that is linked to evolutionary stage theory. On the other hand, it is arguable that even if Leacock's views were in accord with widely held academic and popular views, there did exist more favorable portrayals of aboriginal cultures which Leacock could have drawn from, most notably the American-Canadian scholar, Horatio Hale, F.R.S.C., (1817–96). One is reminded here of the three axioms of sociology's symbolic interactionist perspective: that we act toward things (including social categories and concepts) on the basis of the meanings that such things have to us as individuals, that such meanings arise out of the social interaction we have with others (social interaction here must be defined broadly as including social and cultural influences in general), and that these meanings, so derived, are modified in an interpretive process by the person dealing with the social concepts he or she encounters (Blumer 1969:2).

Leacock, of course, was not an anthropologist or ethnologist by profession. His profession was that of political scientist and economist. He had earned his PhD in 1903 in these subjects at the University of Chicago and then joined McGill's faculty, where he stayed until retirement in 1936. In 1906 he had published Elements of Political Science which "became a best-selling book in his lifetime." Leacock's avocation was his long string of "funny books" which are still widely read and about which Canadians generally think of when the name Leacock comes to mind. These included his "masterpieces," Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) and Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914). Gerald Lynch (2000:1312) writes that Leacock held the rank of "the English speaking world's best-known humorist" during the years from 1915 to 1925.

Leacock's willingness to venture beyond the fields of political economy and humor can be inferred from his comment, "I can write up anything now at a hundred yards" (Lynch 2000...