bout de papier, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2001) — Spring 2001 // Printemps 2001, pp. 24–25
YANKEE GO HOME? CANADIANS
AND ANTI-AMERICANISM by J.L.
Granatstein, Harper Collins Publishers Ltd.,
1996, 317 pp., $28.00
Professor Granatstein tells us this is not the book he intended to write. “As a devout anti-American for as long as I can remember,” he says he anticipated producing a “justification that would be a rationale for what I believed and knew to be true: the United States was and remained a threat to Canada’s independence, and anti-Americanism is a rational defence against the takeover of Canada by American money, ideas, and culture.” He was “surprised” that the research and writing of the book “began to alter my views.” Instead, he discovered that anti- Americanism has been “a tool by Canadian political and economic elites bent on preserving or enhancing their power.” So blinding has been the light on the road to Damascus that he is now positively and at times gratuitously hostile toward some of those with whom he would have been expected to be sympathetic if not supportive.
This is a good book, which combines erudition, passion, and wit. It is packed with information, insight and new interpretation, which synthesizes a generation of scholarship, much of which is his own. Granatstein effectively reveals the excesses and skewers the fallacies of anti-American outbursts that have appeared at various times in our history. He justly concludes that “Anti- Americanism never was and never could become the basis for any rational national identity.”
In the opening chapter, Granatstein defines Canadian anti-Americanism as “distaste for and a fear of American military, political, cultural, and economic activities that, while widespread in the population, is usually benign unless and until it is exploited by business, political, or cultural groups for their own ends. Added to this is a snippet — and sometimes more — of envy at the greatness, wealth, and power of the Republic and its citizens, and a dash of discomfort at the excesses that mar American life.” This definition acknowledges that most of the time Canadian anti-American attitudes have merely reflected the desire to differentiate themselves from an otherwise all-enveloping neighbour. Isolated from Europe and sharing a continent with an energetic, self-righteous, confident giant whose values and traditions they by and large shared, having no other standard of comparison, yet taking pride in their own experience and identity, Canadians have naturally tended to emphasize those peculiar virtues, values, and ideals that differentiated them from (yes, and made them superior to) the colossus to the south.
This “benign” anti-Americanism is not systematically analysed — its evolution over time, variations by region, language, or historical antecedent, the role of myth, symbol, legend, religion, historical roots, and common but unspoken assumptions. Nor is there any assessment of the pro- American impulses that usually coexisted with anti-Americanism within the minds of most Canadians, or the balancing theme of pro-Americanism in Canadian history. Instead, the book is a series of well-crafted historical narratives of various manifestations of extreme anti-Americanism from loyalism to the present. Most of the emphasis is on the post-WWI period, including Diefenbaker, Robin Matthews, literary and cultural figures, George Grant, draft dodgers and anti-Vietnam protesters, Norman Endicott, Walter Gordon, opponents of the FTA, etc., etc. The only thread that unites these disparate people appears to be their common hostility to some aspect of American policy, it not to the United States itself. Each such manifestation, whatever its nature or cause, is treated as an example of “anti-Americanism” which implies the conclusion that “hatred, bias, and deliberately contrived fearmongering” and not the more benign form of anti- Americanism, has been for most Canadians during most of our past, the Canadian way of being different.
Only in a few instances is there explicit demonstration of the thesis that anti- Americanism was merely a tool used by political, cultural, and business elites for their own ends. It is suggested that cultural nationalism protected a Canadian industry and that anti-Americanism kept some academics in work. Undeniably, anti- Americanism has been at certain times in history a useful political weapon. Business elites at first manipulated anti-American and pro-British feeling to keep Canada a chasse-gardé, but by the 1940s “gave up the ghost of economic independence with scarcely a whimper, trading in their pounds sterling and British ideals for American dollars and acceptance on Wall Street”; this virage made the FTA possible in spite of public opposition as determined as that mounted against Reciprocity in 1911. But these specific examples, even if buttressed by stronger evidence, would not be sufficient to support such a strongly stated conclusion.
Perhaps some of his vehemence against anti-Americanism stems from Granatstein’s realization that although free trade is the right path, Canada now faces the challenge (as does much of the rest of the world) of maintaining its identity against the homogenizing forces of globalization. In his concluding chapter he states that Canadians can no longer afford the luxury of defining themselves by their Britishness, their Frenchness, their Catholicism, their anti- Americanism, or whatever, nor of regional squabbling. We must know ourselves and seek a positive definition of our identity. “Canadians are fortunate enough to live in God’s country, the best of all possible places on earth, a land graced with North America’s bounty and free of the United States’ worst problems. .. There are Canadian virtues — grit, tolerance, opportunity, civility, compassion and equality — and they should be part of any definition of national character. So should our love of the land, our shared history, our forms of governance, our common love of hockey, and those policies that bind us together like medicare and equalization. … Only when Canadians begin to understand their land and their origins, when they can assess their national history of truly great achievements without a search for politically correct victims, and when they become confident of their own worth and their limitless future, only then will the Canadian identity become truly defined without resort to glib, mindless prejudice.
This is true enough. Anti-Americanism may no longer be (if it ever really was) the “vehicle of choice” to maintain our identity. But after attacking its manifestations throughout the book, Granatstein acknowledges in his conclusion that a more mild and hopefully constructive form of anti- Americanism will be with us for some time to come. Whether the threat to national identities is globalization or Americanization, for Canada the difference will in practice be minimal. Defining Canadian qualities, virtues, advantages, and values, encountering our historical experience, and celebrating our successes, our uniqueness, our role in the world, are worthy and valid in and of themselves. But it is inevitable that they will usually be expressed in a way that differentiates Canada from its southern neighbour. One needs only examine the passage cited above to recognize this.
In short, despite the many good qualities of this provocative and informative book, the definitive study of anti-Americanism in Canadian life remains to be written.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2001) — Spring 2001 // Printemps 2001, pp. 24–25. Read the rest of this issue →
