bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1987) — Summer 1987 // Été 1987, pp. 54–57
Frank H. Underhill: Intellectual Provo-
cateur by R. Douglas Francis, University of
Toronto Press, 1986.
Professor Francis has written a straightforward, scholarly and readable biography of one of our most articulate Canadian academics.
Frank Underhill was the highly gifted and rather sheltered child of well-to-do-parents; an English immigrant father and a mother born in Canada of a father from the north of England and a staunch Presbyterian mother from Aberdeen, Scotland. Late in life Under-hill described himself as being born a “North York Presbyterian Grit” ’. He was from his student days repelled by the Toronto establishment and Toryism generally.
A brilliant student at the University of Toronto and Balliot College, Oxford, his lifelong interest in history and politics developed in his years in England. He was associated with the Fabian Society which was the intellectual inspiration of the Labour Party in England. He came to regard Socialism of the English type as the natural way for Liberalism to evolve in Canada as in England. Looking back at his whole career, the biographer shows that he was primarily liberal rather than socialist in outlook Though he found Oxford and England congenial, he soon realized he could never become an Englishman and that being a Canadian was really different.
In 1914, right out of Oxford, Underhill became a full Professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan. The raw academic climate of Saskatoon and the Prairies he found a rude shock. For Underhill, the intellectual desert was relieved by the Manitoba Free Press and the editorials by J.W. Dafoe, and by a meeting with J.S. Woodsworth who was to become both a friend and a hero.
During that first year in Saskatoon he was troubled that he was not taking an active part in the war which he came to regard as a moral struggle. He enlisted in 1915 and soon found the life of a private soldier irksome. Once in England, through friendly influence, he secured a transfer to the British army leading shortly to a commission. He found the life of an officer much more congenial and the comradeship agreeable, though as a Canadian, he felt, in some ways, an outsider. His combat service began at Passchendaele in 1917; wounded on the Somme in early 1918, he was back in action in September until the final offensive. He acquitted himself well as a soldier, but he had had enough of war.
Underhill did not get back to Canada until the late summer of 1919. Oddly enough he was never in England again. He returned to his Professorship at Saskatoon where he remained until 1927, when he finally realized his ambition to achieve an academic post in the University of Toronto. In 1921, he had married a fellow academic, Ruth Mary Carr, Western born of an English immigrant family. It was a very happy marriage. His wife shared his academic and other interests and was a stalwart support in turbulent times.
At the University of Saskatchewan, as elsewhere in Canada where the only university was a strictly provincial institution, the prevailing attitude was that the academic staff should be politically neutral and inarticulate in public on controversial questions. The argument was that partisanship might jeopardize the financial support in the legislature for the University. Underhill reacted. In 1925 he spoke in public in support of the Progressive party. He confided to his father that he would vote Progressive if the candidate had any chance of winning, otherwise he would vote Liberal. It was clear he had no strong partisan views though he was no Tory. His open support of a party opposed to the Liberal government of Saskatchewan did not seem to get him into any trouble trouble with the university authorities in Saskatoon, though no doubt eyebrows were raised. In Toronto the attitude to academics taking part in partisan activity or expressing strong positions on external policy was far more irksome and intolerant. He submitted a paper to the conference of the Canadian Historical Society in 1927 on Confederation after sixty years. It stressed the emphasis on business interests in the movement for Confederation in the 1860s in which he claimed the men who ran the Grand Trunk, the Bank of Montreal, the Catholic Church, the Methodist Church and the Toronto Globe were more influential than the political leaders of the Conservative or Reform parties.
When he was offered the position in Toronto, his old mentor, Professor George Wrong, though supporting the appointment expressed concern that Underhill might be too quiet and retiring to make his influence felt. He need not have been concerned on that score! Always mild and rather shy in manner, Underhill in the classroom, on paper and on the platform became steadily sharper and more picturesque in expression. How he expressed an opinion rather than the opinion itself frequently aroused interest and often antagonism.
Once in Toronto, Underhill quickly became associated with the Canadian Forum which he helped to make the main organ of Canadian intellectual socialism. Underhill’s political activity and distortions of his views soon resulted in censorius criticism. The story of attacks by politicians and university authorities from Premiers Howard Ferguson to Mitchell Hepburn is well recounted. Underhill and his friends won the battle for academic freedom in Canada in 1940 and 1941. I am proud to recall that I had a part, which the biographer believes was decisive, in the final stage of the struggle.
In 1931, Underhill and Frank Scott of McGill decided there should be a Canadian Fabian Society. The League for Social Reconstruction was the result. Originally conceived as a means of reforming the Liberal Party, that aim was transformed after the foundation of the C.C.F. in Calgary in 1932. Underhill wrote the first draft of the Regina Manifesto in 1933. The League was called by its critics the brain trust of the new political party and the label suited Underhill well. His connection with the early years of the C.C.F. is interestingly recounted. His three fundamental principles of socialism were liberal — democracy, anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. Once the blood began to rush to Toronto British heads as war approached, his opposition to British imperialism aroused even more antagonism than his attack on capitalism. To many of his critics, the suppression of opinions objectionable to a reactionary establishment was preferable to the clash of differences in an atmosphere of freedom.
Underhill’s critics, who rarely read what he had said or written, but relied usually on sensational and often distorted newspaper headlines, failed to observe that he was also critical of colleagues and associates in the League and the C.C.F. A difference in outlook led to a personal as well as ideological estrangement with a fellow professor, Harold Innis, who nonetheless gallantly came to his defence when the University was on the verge of dismissing Underhill
Some of his phrases earned him the biographer’s description of Underhill as “Intellectual Provocateur”. Early in 1939, George Drew, then leader of the Opposition in the Ontario Legislature, dredged up a phrase Underhill had written four years earlier which had been published without his knowledge. Underhill had said that the poppies which grow in Flanders fields no longer had any interest for the people of Canada. Premier Hepburn cried “Shame, Shame.” Underhill was saved that time only because of his war record and an explanation and apology. The phrase that caused the final crisis was used in a panel discussing the Ogdensburg Agreement between Roosevelt and Mackenzie King in which Underhill welcomed the American initiative and said “we can no longer put all our eggs in the British basket” — a phrase taken entirely out of context in press reports.
For Underhill as for me and for many other Canadians who felt it was not in the real interest of Canada to participate in another war in Europe, the fall of France and the threat to the very existence of Britain was a profound shock. Underhill soon concluded that the battle between socialism and capitalism was insignificant compared to the fundamental and irreconcilable struggle between democracy and totalitarianism.
It was not long before Underhill’s support for the C.C.F. and for socialism began to wave. He began to worry about the defence of freedom in a state which would become the nearly universal employer, and he began to suspect a political party whose members seemed to believe they had a right to govern on the basis of their virtue alone. In a way Underhill’s was a quest for an ideal political party of which freedom would be the corner stone. In the end he apparently felt the pragmatic Liberal party of Mackenzie King, St. Laurent and Pearson, despite imperfections he was always ready to point out, came closest to that ideal.
When the time came for his retirement from Toronto, I was pleased, as the Minister responsible for the Public Archives, to be able to convince my colleagues that Underhill should be appointed curator of Laurier House, a sinecure which would enable him to continue his work on the life of Edward Blake, the only leader of the federal Liberal party who did not become Prime Minister. The book was never finished but the post gave him an opportunity to continue his work on history and politics and, through Carleton University, to carry on the greatest work of his life which was teaching. In 1960, Underhill, in a speech, disclaimed all knowledge of political issues and described his speciality as “general invective”. But Ottawa in 1960 was more tolerant of criticism than Toronto had been in the 1930s and Underhill had become almost a prophet.
He was widely recognized in academic circles as one of three students of history who had most profoundly contributed to the understanding by Canadians of their country, both through their writings and, perhaps even more, through their influence on their students. The others were Harold Innis and Arthur Lower. Underhill and Lower were born in 1889 and Innis in 1894. The most profound influence on all three was the first world war. They had all served in combat and all emerged not merely with a horror of war, but of its appalling cost to Canada in the loss of 60,000 lives in a struggle which had never physically come close to our country. For Innis, who served throughout as an army private, the feeling of comradeship with his fellow veterans was closest. His sharp reaction to subservience and discipline no doubt nourished his abiding suspicion of bureaucracy and centralized political authority.
Neither Underhill, as an officer in the British army, nor Lower, as an officer in the British navy, experienced the same degree of the hardship of military life or the same solidarity with the Canadian corps, but all three believed that the experience of half a million young Canadians in war in Europe had created a Canadian spirit and a sense of Canadian unity.
Their attitudes to the character and development of Canada varied significantly. Those attitudes were influenced by family background and religious affiliation. The Innis family had been in Canada for at least three generations and their background was basically Scottish. They were farmers and Innis never lost his feeling for the soil and the seasonal variations in farm life. Though he lived in an urban community all his adult life, he never became urbane. His academic life began as an undergraduate at McMaster University then still in Toronto, but not of it. McMaster was a Baptist institution insistent on complete separation of church and state. Innis was brought up a devout Baptist and a traditional Ontario Grit. He once told Lower that their differences probably went back to religion and pointed out that the Methodists were always anxious to control things and the Baptists were always suspicious of control.
Lower’s upbringing was both Methodist and Conservative and his book on his first seventy-five years clearly shows that his view that government was a positive force in shaping a nation owed much to that background. I knew all of them well but only Lower was an intimate friend. I joined Wesley College in the University of Manitoba in 1929 as Lower also did. He and I were the History Department. That was only five years after Church union and the separate Methodist and Presbyterian strains were still strong. I once told Lower and another colleague that the great difference I could see between Methodists and Presbyterians was that Methodists did not care what you believed as long as you did the right things, while the Presbyterians did not care what you did as long as you believed the right things.
That specious generalization is one measure of the difference in attitude between Lower and Underhill. Both were strong nationalists and both shared the view before 1940 that no Canadian interest was at stake in a war in Europe. But the expression of their nationalism differed. Lower sought to work with others of different views to get his to prevail, while Underhill tended to ridicule positions which differed from his own philosophical position at the time. Both faced disillusionment in 1940, but their reactions were different. Lower felt the call of the blood and a deeper emotional response to the peril to Britain; Underhill welcomed Ogdensburg as insurance for Canada as a North American nation.
The Oxford trained Underhill showed less attachment to the traditional ties than the Harvard trained Arthur Lower who was impatient that the United States was so slow to perceive the menace until at Pearl Harbor the menace became a reality. Pearl Harbor looms large in Lower’s autobiography; Ogdensburg is not even in the index: Pearl Harbor is not in the index of the Underhill biography.
Innis resisted the demand that academics participate in political life and even in commissions of inquiry, though he did yield on a few occasions. To him, the prime duty was to preserve scholarship. The outbreak of war in 1939 strengthened his hatred of war, but did not, even after June 1940, stimulate him to become directly involved. His first concern remained the preservation of freedom for research in universities and he continued to distrust government and dislike bureaucracy. No doubt this attitude was strengthened by his post-graduate studies at the University of Chicago. Though he was classed as an economist rather than a historian, he was basically an economic historian. From his studies at Chicago, Innis concluded that geographical and economic factors determined the future of a nation more than politics or government.
Both Lower and Innis differed from Underhill in another way. They had both worked as students in the summers and even full-time before completing their undergraduate studies. They had a taste of the work-a-day world and a wide geographical knowledge of Canada. Underhill’s sheltered life as a student and a lifetime in the academic world, where even his political involvement was largely academic, resulted in a more theoretical and philosophical approach to history. He was critical and provocative rather than constructive. Of the three, Lower alone was seriously preoccupied with the composition of the Canadian population and especially with the basic need of accommodation between English- and French-speaking Canadians.
All three were superb teachers. In a way they might be compared to the blind Indians attempting, after direct contact, to describe an elephant. These Canadian scholars were not blind, but their vision was limited by both background and education. The vision of each was not total, but each of them contributed substantially to understanding what Canada really is. Professor Francis in his biography has vividly revealed Underhill’s part in painting that national picture.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1987) — Summer 1987 // Été 1987, pp. 54–57. Read the rest of this issue →
