Mysticism and Broadcast Censorship in Canada

Len Kuffert. "Tempest in the Tea Leaves: Broadcasting the Esoteric Arts and Mystic Sciences, 1937-53." Canadian Historical Review 91 (2010): 1-25.

After it was created during the Great Depression, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) initially held (at least in theory) relatively broad powers to control what was aired not only on its own network, but over private radio stations as well. Kuffert reveals the fascinating tale of one of its adventures in broadcast censorship, in which the CBC tried (and continued to try, throughout the Second World War) to restrict broadcasting programs by mystics, fortune-tellers, astrologists, and various other esoteric artists (the kind that people like James Randi call scam artists, and in general I'm forced to agree).

This was not without consequences. Kuffert implies that CBC's effectiveness in enforcing this regulation was only partial at best. What it did tend to achieve, he says, is to drive a number of esotericists into claiming that what they were doing was based in science (when it wasn't) or traditional religion (ditto), both of which were considered quite acceptable in broadcasting. (The latter leads us back to the cynical definition of a cult, which is any religion that's younger than the rule-maker's.) Nowadays skeptics complain very loudly, of course, when modern-day quacks link their dubious professions to "science."

It's a good article, made all the more readable by the fact that I find this subject intrinsically fascinating. Kuffert may stretch a little bit when he tries to connect his work to prevailing fads in historical/cultural theory (e.g. that the CBC must have viewed its audiences as passive and feminized, or that this is an incidence of control over the production of knowledge), but not in any way that a hundred other scholars aren't doing even as I write this.

Fisheries and Trade Wars, Depression-Style

Liza Piper. "Parasites from 'Alien Shores': The Decline of Canada's Freshwater Fishing Industry." Canadian Historical Review 91 (2010): 87-114.

Ah, the sweet smell of a manufactured trade-related public health controversy. Such things are very familiar to us today, of course. In this article, however, Liza Piper examines a similar dispute which occurred during the 1930s, when American freshwater fishing corporations successfully lobbied their government to ban Canadian exports of tullibee and whitefish on the grounds that they contained a (harmless to humans) parasite, Triaenophorus.

The parasite had actually been around for some time, Piper observes -- and, while humans ate infected fish, it didn't actually cause diseases in humans. It was, however, largely confined to Canadian lakes -- and it was easier to find in border inspections than in the supermarket. This meant it was a convenient method for barring Canadian exporters from competing with American companies.

So much for the trade embargo side. What Piper does best -- even if at times the paper seems to wander a bit -- is observe the implications and complications of this. Government policy bodies and scientific research projects sprang up targeting Triaenophorus, for no particular reason other than the trade dispute. Triaenophorus, meanwhile, prospered indeed, now that fishers were no longer targeting some of its most important host species.

It's easy to take from this that the growth of Triaenophorus was a negative unintended consequence of the attempt to suppress it. I'm not sure whether Piper is trying to make this argument in her conclusion or not. I hope not. That's because if the Americans never really genuinely cared about Triaenophorus to begin with, except as a useful lever on trade policy, then the growth of Triaenophorus would have helped them even more.

The Doctrine of Usefulness: Development in Canadian National Parks

Robert Craig Brown. "The Doctrine of Usefulness: Natural Resource and National Park Policy in Canada, 1887-1914." In The Canadian National Parks: Today and Tomorrow, edited by J.G. Nelson and R.C. Scace. Calgary: University of Calgary Duplicating Services, 1968.

Canada's national parks are safe havens -- vestiges of wilderness carefully protected from the rush and bustle of civilization outside. This myth has been propagated in various forms by the Parks Branch (now Parks Canada) and its supporters in civil society for nearly a century now. And, of course, it is not the whole truth, as William Cronon argued in "The Trouble with Wilderness."

In Canada, the critical history of national parks began with Robert Craig Brown in the 1960s:

In essence, then, the origins of the Canadian parks boil down to what Brown, borrowing a word from Macdonald, calls a doctrine of "usefulness": the intention, according to the Minister of the Interior in 1887, was to "frame such regulations as will make the springs a respectable resort" (p. 98), but largely because they were what Brown calls "the most easily exploitable asset in the reservation."

Although Brown does acknowledge (98-99) that the process of "parkmaking," as understood in the 19th century, would certainly have involved "the construction of roads and bridges, the establishment of a townsite and the provision of tourist facilities from baths to elaborate hotels," the principal caveat of "usefulness," to him, is that usefulness could take a variety of forms -- only one of which was tourist resorts. He uses this insight to explain the Canadian government's willingness to permit various forms of industrial activity in the park in the early 20th century, including the coal mining operations at Bankhead and Anthracite.

Read the rest of this review on Bukisa.

Canada's Depression-Era Deportation of Communists

Dennis G. Molinaro. "A Species of Treason? Deportation and Nation-Building in the Case of Tomo Cacic, 1931-1934." Canadian Historical Review 91 (2010): 61-85.

National identity (and its related institution, citizenship), morality, and political ideology are interconnected. This point would not be seriously challenged by many cultural historians of the 20th century, and in fact Canada already has a growing literature on this subject relating to the early Cold War, populated by well-known figures like Reg Whitaker.

Molinaro goes earlier, however, to the suppression of communism during the 1930s. He focuses in particular on the deportation of Tomo Cacic, the lone "foreigner" (a Yugoslavian immigrant) among the eight defendants in the government's infamous prosecution of the Communist Party of Canada in 1931. Cacic, like the rest, was convicted. He was then deported to Yugoslavia, where the fascist government was expected to kill him. Fortunately this never happened -- sympathetic Brits arranged for a Soviet passport while he was in Liverpool, and he ended up in Moscow instead.

So much for Cacic, but Molinaro is more concerned with the consequences for Canada, and he illustrates this quite well. When Cacic was prosecuted, he notes, the court stressed that being communist was not only evil -- it was foreign, an alien ideology invading liberal British Canada. It wasn't just that immigrants (who were subject to deportation) made easy targets, he argues: it was part of the process by which communism was defined as un-Canadian. (This phrase may jar some readers -- we just don't use it as often as our neighbors to the south use the phrase un-American.)

I was still left wanting a bit more context. After all, the other seven defendants in 1931 represented a range of other ethnic backgrounds, but plenty of them were properly British. Tim Buck was even born in England. If Molinaro's assessment of the court's position on communism is accurate, then the court was fudging on this -- but Molinaro fails to look much deeper, either.

One further bit of quibbling -- Molinaro says he's drawn, in part, on "Canadian Security and Intelligence (CSIS) files" in producing this essay. Of course, CSIS did not exist until 1984. The files in question do reside in the CSIS record groups now, but technically they would have originated with the RCMP (and its Security Service). That organization got caught burning down barns in Quebec in the 1970s, and as a result got spun off into a separate agency.

National Parks and Worthless Lands

Alfred Runte. National Parks: The American Experience. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971, 1987, 2010.


Runte's thesis has stood the test of time -- plenty of historians would say it's obsolete, but the University of Nebraska just published a fourth edition of his groundbreaking work. Runte is responsible for two major ideas in American parks history, the worthless lands thesis and the monumentalism thesis:

The natural landscape, Runte argues, filled the place in the American psyche which was in Europe reserved only for man-made construction. What the country lacked in historical architecture, it could easily make up for in the great range of natural sights and scenes, especially in the Rocky Mountains far to the west. This thesis has since been referred to as "monumentalism"... 

But where to put these monuments (or rather, where to commemorate them, since the natural monuments were already present)? Cultural pride was an important objective to many people in the republic, but not, according to Runte, a predominant one, especially not when compared with such important objectives as settlement and economic development. As a result, early proponents of national parks, especially Yosemite and, took paints to point out that the small pockets of mountainous land which they hoped to reserve for national parks were actually not useful for alternative development by miners, railway companies, agriculturists, etc.

Obviously similar ideas would seem to have relevance in other countries, like Canada.

Read the rest of this review on Bukisa.

Allied War Crimes in World War II

James Bacques. Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II. Bolton: Little, Brown, 1999.

Searching for Allied war crimes in World War II is a popular activity among those who, while not wanting to cross over into actual Holocaust denial, still want to point out that the Allies fell somewhat short of white knights of justice. There's plenty of material to work with on that front -- although it's also perilously easy to go a little bit too far:

In Other Losses, Canadian novelist and writer James Bacque makes the disturbing accusation that the Allied prisoner-of-war camps after World War II deliberately killed over a million German prisoners-of-war (POWs), mostly through intentional starvation. It's a frightening claim: after all, if it's true, it would mean that our side engaged in some of the great cruelties that the Axis powers themselves did. We would, in short, be guilty of war crimes. And those war crimes were never investigated and prosecuted. But the claim is more startling than it is supported. There just isn't enough evidence to make me fully persuaded of what Bacque says in this book.

Read the rest of this review on Bukisa.

Trouble with Wilderness?

William Cronon. "The Trouble With Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature." Environmental History 1 (1996), 7-55.

Cronon overturned a lot of apple carts with this article, even if the idea wasn't wholly new. In fact, even though it wasn't wholly new, you can tell the influence of the article by the fact that virtually no serious environmental historian today would quibble with at least one component of the article:

Wilderness is "quite profoundly a human creation -- indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures" (7). Rather than a "pristine sanctuary," then, wilderness is in fact a "product of... civilization." The argument is at least in part a valid and important one, albeit unsettling to many readers.

One can approach this challenge to the wilderness ideal -- examining the concrete ways in which humans have managed and altered seemingly "untouched" wilderness areas, especially in our national parks; or, alternatively, examining the ways in which the idea of wilderness has developed and changed over time. In this groundbreaking article, Cronon attempts to do both, but is clearly interested more in the second.

Read the rest of this review on Bukisa.