Catch the late-night typo! It's in there, and I'm leaving it where it was.
Morgan: Public Men and
Virtuous Women.
Stewart: The Origins
of Canadian Politics.
Cadigan: Newfoundland
and Labrador.
This week’s
three monographs are methodologically, thematically, geographically, and
temporally diverse, despite an overall link to political history. I will
address them each individually, and draw out links between specific themes that
appear in more than one text.
Gordon T.
Stewart, in The Origins of Canadian
Politics, considers the role of the pre-Confederation period in shaping long-term
post-Confederation political trends, showing the impact of a colonial political
system. Explaining the political divergence of Canada, Britain, and the United
States, Stewart illustrates how, from the 1790s to the 1840s, the Canadas
developed an extreme “court” orientation of politics, which entailed
centralization and an elite-oriented strong monarchy. While Stewart never uses
this particular language, it is evident that his conceptualization of the
pre-Confederation Canadian “court” political landscape was characterized by
hegemony, whereby reformers sought to attain power within a more or less
similar political system, rather than overthrowing state structures. Stewart’s
short study is divided into three main sections. The first examines the political
background of Canada, the United States, and Britain, outlining the “court” and
“country” systems of politics that he uses as an analytical tool through this
work. The subsequent two chapters form the crux of his work, analyzing a period
of instability from 1828 to 1864, then a period of stability from 1864 to 1914.
Stewart
emphasizes the importance of patronage in maintaining the “court” system. He
argues that patronage enabled the formation of strong political parties, a
prerequisite for overall stability.[1]
John A. Macdonald’s long period of dominance, for example, entrenched patronage
as a legitimate and apparently natural feature of party politics.[2] Under
this system, business and politics had a symbiotic relationship, resulting from
the social and economic conditions that distinguished the Canadas from Britain
or the United States.[3]
Patronage was thus a social and political phenomenon that produced a political
culture that was unable to address the complex problems that it Canada
encountered during the twentieth century.[4]
Cecilia Morgan
examines Upper Canadian religion and politics from 1791 to 1850, considering
each aspect of society through the gendered images and languages that shaped
and reflected white, middle-class urban experiences. Following from Joan
Scott’s work on gender, Morgan sees gender as “constitutive elements” and
“signifiers of power” for both religion and politics, and uses it as an
analytical tool to blur the separate spheres that historians commonly invoke to
describe gender roles through to the mid twentieth century. Considering a range
of issues, such as the language of patriotism and loyalty during the war of
1812; the formation of political institutions; Methodist discourses; the
inculcation of morals, mores, and manners; and performances of gender in
various public settings, Morgan argues that discourses of masculinity and
femininity were closely intertwined, such that public and private spheres were
constructed in relation to one another, and were thus inextricable. Gendered
images deployed throughout Upper Canadian society were often contradictory; for
example, “family” held connotations of selfishness and nepotism, or of morality
and self-sacrifice, depending on the context.[5]
The “public” is
a particularly fascinating element of Morgan’s analysis. She indicates that,
rather than signifying a sharp distinction between home and workplace, it was a
varied, shifting concept, with differing meanings that could be mobilized
according to needs.[6]
It was also discursively gendered and racialized, indicating values of
masculinity and femininity in Upper Canada. A “public man” connoted moral
strength and public influence, building responsible government independent of
corruption and patronage ties; this was a valued statement of honour. This
starkly contrasts with the connotations of a “public woman,” a promiscuous
sexual threat. Similarly, “public” was a racialized term; its emphasis on
independence excluded Native peoples, who were assumed to be dependent on the
colonial state.[7]
This concept of the “public” also appears in Jeffrey McNairn’s The Capacity to Judge. He describes “public opinion” as a collective
endeavor between diverse individuals, in a free and rational intellectual
space.[8] He
notes, however, that women’s opportunities to be “public” were ambiguous and
constrained by ideals of feminine behaviour.[9]
Thus, the “public” in Upper Canada was a non-universal social and political
space, one that depended upon and acted as a source of power. Morgan’s
attentiveness to the gendered dimensions of this sphere provides a complexity
that McNairn’s otherwise convincing work lacks.
Sean Cadigan’s
history of Newfoundland and Labrador is a fairly comprehensive survey of the
province’s history, with an emphasis on how labour relations and class
struggles related to social, economic, and political trends. Cadigan’s
chronological approach reads like a Canadian history narrative from a previous
generation, starting with an archaeologically-based analysis of “prehistoric”
peoples, then moving through European contact and colonization; a consideration
of the social and political elements of Newfoundland’s history makes up the
bulk of this work, which culminates in 2003. If being comprehensive is a strength
of Cadigan’s work for the sheer volume of facts that he presents, it is also a
weakness: in an attempt to write a broad history of Newfoundland and Labrador,
his theoretical underpinnings are vaguely implied at best, he draws very little
from primary research, and he engages with the work of other historians merely
for their empirical contributions. His overall aim of exploring how
Newfoundland and Labrador struggled to maintain human society in a cold-ocean
environment may well be novel; this is unclear, however, for anyone who is unfamiliar
with the historiography of this province.
Despite the
shortcomings of his work, Cadigan offers a potentially persuasive argument
against neo-nationalism in his conclusion, suggesting that the construction of
nationalism in the nineteenth century was a myth that ignored marine dependence
and obscured social divisions, and was ultimately merely unhelpful political
rhetoric.[10]
He is unclear as to the extent to which his criticism is applicable solely to
Newfoundland and Labrador, or to wider regions or nations. This argument is
only explicit in the final pages of this large survey; the previous
chronological chapters hint at it, however, with repeated detailings of
Newfoundland and Labrador’s social, economic, and political divisions. A
Marxist historian, Cadigan emphasizes class stratification, showing that
government policies could either produce or hinder worker solidarity, depending
on other economic and social considerations. The regionalism of Newfoundland
and Labrador is also keenly apparent through this text; Cadigan highlights the
significance of divisions between St. John’s and outpost communities, and
between Newfoundland and Labrador.
Of these three
works, Morgan’s is the only one to emphasize individual voices and experiences.
Stewart’s work is almost exclusively theoretical; he bounds his concise study
as one on high politics, absolving him of the need to include perspectives
other than those of the wielders of political power. In Cadigan’s work, the
absence of individual voices is troublesome; not only does it make his work
less engaging, but it reduces people, privileged and marginalized alike, to
general facts about their lives. Even the working class voices that Cadigan
might logically wish to expose remain unheard in this work. Morgan takes an
entirely opposite approach to revealing voices, through her intensive study of
language. Whereas Cadigan allows words—even problematic ones such as
“savage”—to remain uncontested, Morgan critiques discourses and doctrines as
they were written in Upper Canadian newspapers, reports, religious pamphlets,
and a variety of other publicly-available print sources. She is intensely
mindful not only of the language itself, but the privileging of particular
voices, showing the power of white middle-class and elite society to create
gendered discourses and spaces.
These quite
divergent works consider a couple of common issues, unsurprisingly offering similarly
divergent perspectives. With regard to patronage, Morgan portrays it as a potential
source of corruption and emasculation, an immoral usurpation of legitimate
power.[11]
For Cadigan, patronage was a challenge to Newfoundland and Labrador, linked to
class and sectarian tensions and divisions.[12]
Stewart’s analysis is entirely different, seeing patronage as the bedrock to a
stable political system. Morgan, Cadigan, and Stewart also diverge in their
perspectives on responsible government. Morgan associates it with masculine
privilege, while Stewart and Cadigan are more suspicious of it. Cadigan
characterizes responsible government as a source of “partisan deadlock rather
than stability,”[13]
while Cadigan sees it as an ideal that was incongruent with the needs of
Newfoundland and Labrador’s maritime society and resource base.[14] It
is likely that the class- and gender-conscious analyses of Cadigan and Morgan
have the potential to unravel Stewart’s elite-focused theoretical claims; I
would suggest that Stewart’s theories, useful on a certain level, are
nonetheless weakened by his positioning of political history in an entirely
separate sphere to social history. The challenge of evaluating the claims made
by Cadigan, Stewart, and Morgan is that their arguments are quite contextually
specific; Cadigan’s claim that responsible government was detrimental to
Newfoundland and Labrador does not, for instance, mitigate Stewart’s argument
that it was a force of stability for Canada preceding and shortly after
Confederation.
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