Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Grandio Moraguez, Oscar

166 Reviews 
gy and use of violence, and, more importantly, the deeper sense of historical self 
that drove Weatherman, understanding this contradiction would be a good place 
to start. Unfortunately, Bringing the War Home does not make that effort. 
David Barber 
University of Tennessee at Martin 
Julia E. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard 
University Press, 2002). 
Inside the Cuban Revolution by Julia E. Sweig, senior fellow and deputy direc- 
tor of the Latin American program at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), 
is without a doubt a landmark in the historiography of the Cuban Revolution. 
The book is the first rigorous investigation of the immediate period before the 
revolution. As a staff member of the CFR, Sweig was granted unprecedented 
access to the classified records in the Cuban Council of State's Office of 
Historic Affairs - the only scholar inside or outside of Cuba allowed access to 
the complete collection of Fidel Castro's 26th of July movement's underground 
operatives. 
To have access to first-hand sources - letters, documents written by the 
different actors involved, etc - allowed Sweig to undertake a fearless analysis 
of a crucial stage in Cuban history: the period preceding the taking of power by 
Fidel Castro, which covers the 15 months of the Cuban insurrection (early 1957 
to mid-1958), when the urban underground leadership was the dominant force 
within the 26th of July Movement and Castro did not yet have the political and 
military initiative. 
Using these documents, Sweig argues that in its early days the revolution 
was influenced more by the Cuban middle class and less by Fidel Castro or 
Ernesto 'Che ' Guevara than historians have suggested. She explores the com- 
plex and often contradictory relations between urban members of the 26th of 
July Movement (Llano), and its mountain-based guerrilla in the Sierra Maestra 
(Sierra), effectively shattering one of the enduring myths about the Cuban 
Revolution, forged, in large part, by the official Cuban historiography. Its main 
author was no one less a figure than Guevara, whose account practically sug- 
gests that the Sierra guerrillas single-handedly defeated the Batista regime. 
Sweig, conversely, demonstrates the preponderant function played by the secret 
urban organization of the 26th of July in the triumph of the revolution. Sweig's 
thesis has considerable implications, because it dismantles the myth on which 
Castrist ideology is founded: that the Sierra Maestra fighters, after conducting 
a guerrilla war supported by a rural base, achieved a fm military victory 
Left History 10.2 167 
against a regular army, putting an end to the dictatorship of general Fulgencio 
Batista. 
Guevara's role as official historian had its origins in the Sierra Maestra's 
mountains, thanks to his habit of keeping diaries on daily events that later 
served as documentation to establish his historical narrative. In these diaries, 
published as a book entitled Pasajes de la Guerra Revolucionaria, Guevara 
grants all the credit for the overthrow of Batista to the guerrilla fighters of the 
Sierra. His authorship gave this thesis enough genuineness to transform it into 
an unquestionable truth, in Cuba as much of the world. 
Sweig, when demonstrating that this version of history is slanted, also 
questions the utility of Guevara's model, based on his erroneous historical 
account, for world revolution. Although it is undeniable that the Sierra Maestra 
had enormous symbolic importance, attracting the attention of the world and 
establishing the bases for the mythology of the Cuban Revolution, Sweig 
demonstrates that the Llano, in fact, contributed much more to the collapse of 
the Batista regime. 
The book exquisitely exposes the essential role of the urban underground, 
which skilhlly controlled critical tactical and strategic decisions, the allocation 
of resources, and relations with opposition forces - including political parties, 
Cuban exiles, and even the United States - thus contradicting the standard 
view that portrays Castro as the primary decision-maker during the revolution. 
This is in fact the second myth demolished by Sweig's book: that of the 
omnipresent figure of Castro during the period of insurgency. Given the 
absolute authority achieved by Castro after the collapse of Batista's govern- 
ment, it is perhaps understandable that many have assumed that his power was 
equally formidable during the period preceding his seizure of power; however, 
the important decisions were not always his to make, The leadership of the 
urban insurrectionists such as Frank Pais, RenC Ramos Latour, or Armando 
Hart and the organizational authority and ability they exercised during the fight 
against Batista's regime, were as important, if not more so, than Castro's activ- 
ities and position. 
Inside the Cuban Revolution also demonstrates that the 26th of July 
Movement, while participating in the fight against Batista, was also involved in 
an internal struggle for the control of the insurgency with other opposition 
groups, in order to establish its monopoly on power. Sweig's sources demon- 
strate that, until six or eight months prior to the insurrection, the tactical deci- 
sions of the revolution were in some not very well-known individuals' hands, 
working in the underground, and not in those of Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, 
or 'Che' Guevara. Here the author affirms that, without the work accomplished 
by urban members of the 26th of July movement during the first seventeen 
months of insurgency, victory would not have been achieved in January 1959. 
However there are some flaws in the book. Very little detail is given about 
168 Reviews 
the periods between February and April 1957, August 1958 to January 1959, 
even though these were crucial periods in the Revolution and the insurrection 
against Batista. In fact, two of the most important events of the entire 
Revolution are almost completely neglected by the author: the contribution of 
the 13th of March Movement and the Revolutionary Directorate to the insur- 
gency against Batista and their attack on the Presidential Palace in Havana. But 
undoubtedly, Julia's E. Sweig's work has the great merit of inaugurating a line 
of analysis that substantially modifies the way to approach the history of the 
Cuban Revolution. The book constitutes a major contribution to the under- 
standing of one of the most complex chapters of the contemporary History of 
Latin America. 
Oscar Grandio Moraguez 
York University 


Julia E. Sweig — Inside the Cuban Revolution

Leighton, J. Douglas

Left History 10.2 159 
David M. Quiring, C.C.F. Colonialism in Northern Saskatchewan: Battling 
Parish Priests, Bootleggers and Fur Sharks (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004). 
Clio is a demanding mistress. While she inspires historians, she also demands 
much. The best products of the historian's craft demonstrate original and 
painstaking research, careful argument, and lucid, concise writing. David M. 
Quiring's book demonstrates many of these technical strengths, but also con- 
tains surprising weaknesses. A doctoral thesis revised for publication, its schol- 
arly apparatus is impressive, but it demonstrates a lack of breadth and an ideo- 
logical narrowness which lessen its impact. 
Quiring's study focuses on the policies of the CCF/NDP government of 
Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1964, as it attempted to develop the northern part 
of the province. Making extensive use of provincial archival and administra- 
tive sources, the author analyzes the CCF's "planned economy" approach and 
pronounces it a failure. In his view, this two-decade-long experiment in north- 
ern economic policy was nothing more than a doomed experiment in neo-colo- 
nialism. "Southerners" who did not understand the north imposed their values 
and procedures upon it, ultimately retarding its economic growth and disrupt- 
ing its traditional ways of life. "From their point of view," the book concludes, 
"northerners endured twenty years of CCF intervention in their lives. These 
two decades brought the destruction of much of the traditional northern power 
structure, economy and society" (259). 
Colonial exploitation is hardly a new theme in historiography. The great 
early European empires behaved this way; indeed mercantile doctrine endorsed 
it. Former colonies similarly developed and exploited their own hinterlands. 
Quiring's central thesis contains no surprises, but his assertion that the CCF 
practiced such policies in more callous and doctrinaire ways than other govern- 
mental jurisdictions may catch readers off guard. In this account, 
Saskatchewan bureaucrats are little more than mindless villains, though Tommy 
Douglas, himself, seems to stand apart from the provincial administration. 
Quiring's chief complaint appears to be that the CCF government was 
socialist. He uses the word throughout the book in an accusatory, rather than a 
descriptive, manner. He includes a brief discussion of such terminology, for 
example, by claiming that CCF references to social democracy "may downplay 
its origins in socialist ideology and seem less threatening to some who oppose 
more radical socialism" (note 6, 268). So, northern policy failed in post-war 
Saskatchewan because it was "socialist." 
This is really questionable. Does Quiring think, for example, that the cen- 
tral planning of large resource-based corporations - corporate socialism if you 
will - was less intrusive, more environmentally sound, and humane than 
Saskatchewan's policies? Were Saskatchewan's post-war policies worse than 
those of Maurice Duplessis' Quebec? Aboriginal peoples in the province were, 
160 Reviews 
of course, a federal responsibility, while crown lands, after 1930 were under the 
province's control. The author demonstrates little understanding of the com- 
plexities of federal-provincial relationships when dealing with the situation of 
aboriginal communities in Saskatchewan's north. 
The narrowness of this book's intellectual and ideological framework is 
partly a product of its intensive, but tightly focused research. Twenty-one inter- 
views with northern residents were all, with one exception, conducted in July 
and August 1999. There is some material on First Nations peoples, but it is not 
extensive: Olive Dickason's work, to cite one example, is not mentioned, nor 
are Thomas Berger's studies of northern development. In short, this is PhD 
research, which should have been given a wider context before being published. 
Doctoral studies - usually highly specialized projects - need to marinate a 
while before being turned into books. This work is no exception. 
Readers of David Quiring's book will get a close-up view of 
Saskatchewan's northern policies after 1964. They will not get contextual or 
ideological breadth. 
J. Douglas Leighton 
Huron University College, University of Western Ontario 
Emilie Stoltzfus, Citizen, Mother, Worker: Debating Public Responsibility for 
Child Care After the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North 
Carolina Press, 2003). 
During World War 11, parents across America relied on publicly hnded child- 
care; it was a service many, especially mothers, did not want to relinquish. 
Accordingly, when the Federal Works Administration announced the termina- 
tion of federally funded daycare at war's end, mothers across the US formally 
organized to oppose the closures. They confronted both fiscal concerns and a 
conservative gender ideology that supported the breadwinner ideal and envi- 
sioned women as specially suited to mothering. Using case studies of 
Cleveland, Ohio, the District of Columbia, and the state of California, Emilie 
Stoltzfus documents each campaign to retain the wartime program in the post- 
war era. Her juxtaposition of the failures in the first two places with the even- 
tual success in California, offers a glimpse into barriers confronting women 
across the country. Moreover, she demonstrates through their struggles that 
women's responses to the impending loss of public childcare were much more 
complex than sometimes believed; many women did not go gently back to their 
kitchens. Rather, they practiced what she calls "dissident citizenship," engag- 
ing in protests such as a day-long sit-in at Cleveland's city hall. As suggested 


David M. Quiring — C.C.F. Colonialism in Northern Saskatchewan: Battling Parish Priests, Bootleggers and Fur Sharks

Berry, David S.

"Workers of the World, Embrace!": Daniel Guérin, the Labour Movement and Homosexuality

Pilcher, Jeffrey M.

Left History 9.2 213 
Julio Moreno, Yankee Don't Go Home! Mexican Nationalism, American 
Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920-1950 (Chapel Hill: 
University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 
For nearly a century, historians of the Mexican Revolution of 19 10 have con- 
centrated their attention on the peasant insurgency led by Emiliano Zapata and 
Francisco "Pancho" Villa. Romanticized notions of the Mexican peasantry con- 
tributed to the fascination for North American scholars, and the complexity of 
factional struggles and the convoluted periodization of reform gave ample 
material for academic debate. Mexican politicians have likewise fixated on 
agrarian revolution, either crafting policies to control peasant movements or 
protesting the failure of the resulting land distributions. Yet the Zapatista move- 
ment in Chiapas notwithstanding, the defeat of the leftist Party of the 
Democratic Revolution candidate, Cuauhtemoc CLdenas, in the 1994 presi- 
dential campaign owed more to his rural focus, in a country that is now over 
70 percent urban, than to vote fraud by the ruling Party of the Institutional 
Revolution - although the same cannot be said of the 1988 race. Scholars have 
finally taken notice of this changing social reality, and in the last decade a 
flourishing historiography of urban revolution has thrown new light on the 
development of modem Mexico. Yankee Don't Go Home!, by Julio Moreno, 
offers an important contribution to this literature by examining how urban 
Mexicans sought to reconcile the ideals of social revolution with North 
American business practices and consumerism. 
The Mexican Constitution of 19 17 enshrined the promise of a revolution- 
ary society, but reformers battled for another two decades to implement land 
distribution, workplace benefits, universal schooling, and moral improvement 
- never mind the original calls for democracy. As historians have recently 
shown, many of the conflicts that raged through the countryside in the 1930s 
actually began with urban revolutionary experiments in the 1920s. Ariel 
Rodriguez Kuri pioneered this field of study with La experiencia olvidada: El 
Ayuntamiento de Mixico: politica y gobierno, 1876-1912 (1996). This timely 
and important book, published on the eve of Mexico City's first local election 
in over 70 years, examines the downfall of the city council under the dictator 
Porfirio Diaz and its brief revival in the early days of the revolution. 
Meanwhile, a complementary pair of urban and labor histories, John Lear's 
Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico City (2001) and 
Andrew Grant Wood's Revolution in the Street: Women, Workers, and Urban 
Protest in Veracruz, 1870-1927 (2001), insighthlly analyze popular mobiliza- 
tion through food riots and rent strikes in the absence of democratic institu- 
tions. 
This new revolutionary history has pursued a diverse range of topics, all 
sharing a common emphasis on the shifting boundaries of citizenship as politi- 
214 Reviews 
cians claiming to represent the "revolution" confronted a population that had 
grown militant through the experience of armed conflict. Katherine Elaine 
Bliss's Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender 
Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City (2001), which looks at moral reform 
campaigns directed against a vice associated with Porfirian decadence, is valu- 
able both for its gendered analysis of revolutionary politics and for the agency 
it allows to some of the most disadvantaged women in Mexican society. 
Another important book, Patience A. Schell's Church and State Education in 
Revolutionary Mexico City (2003), examines the complex negotiations 
between anticlerical revolutionaries and the Catholic Church in their collabo- 
rative efforts to moralize the Mexican working classes. Finally, Enrique C. 
Ochoa's Feeding Mexico: The Politics ofFood since 191 0 (2000) describes how 
the threat of worker unrest stimulated the creation of a welfare bureaucracy to 
subsidize urban food supplies. This program became one of the leading bul- 
warks of the ruling party, but it served primarily the needs of industrialization 
rather than improving popular nutrition. Thus, even agrarian policies were usu- 
ally influenced by the revolutionary party's primary goal of creating a modem, 
industrial nation. 
Julio Moreno argues that by the 1940s Mexicans had come to welcome 
North American business, but only so long as it respected their revolutionary 
and nationalist traditions. According to Moreno, the corporation that adapted 
best to Mexican conditions was Sears Roebuck. In contrast to Porfirian-era 
department stores, El Palacio de Hierro and El Puerto de Liverpool, which sold 
exclusive European goods to an upper-class clientele, Sears sought to democ- 
ratize consumption by pitching its merchandise to the middle classes and by 
offering credit, a novel practice in Mexico. The US retailer also implemented 
a profit-sharing plan and promoted Mexican workers to management positions, 
while carefully ascribing these progressive labor practices to Mexican revolu- 
tionary traditions. On the eve of its grand opening, local managers even invit- 
ed the Archbishop of Mexico City to perform a highly publicized religious pro- 
cession through the store. When the doors finally opened, in February 1947, 
more than 100 000 customers flooded the store over three riotous days. 
"Employees panicked 'as a sea of hands thrust pesos toward them, into their 
pockets, into their blouses, anywhere -just to complete a purchase. Shopping 
crazed crowds anxiously screamed, 'Let us in! Let us in!' " (1). The euphoria 
soon passed, particularly after Mexico adopted prohibitive tariffs on 80 percent 
of the company's goods, both to bolster the declining peso and to stimulate 
domestic manufacturing. Sears established a network of local suppliers, but it 
never completely adjusted to the lower purchasing power of the Mexican mid- 
dle classes compared to their North American counterparts. 
The success of Sears contrasted with the disastrous early attempts by the 
prestigious J. Walter Thompson advertising agency to export North American 
Left History 9.2 215 
promotional methods to Mexico. The company confronted stiff competition 
from Mexican advertisers, most notably, Juanita Guerra Rangel, who had start- 
ed as a secretary in the Nest16 corporation's sales division in 193 1 and went on 
to become president of the national advertising association. Indeed, when the 
Thompson agency opened its Mexico City office, it hired two of the top local 
executives to ensure the success of the venture. Nevertheless, the multination- 
al firm made little use of its employees' local knowledge and instead empha- 
sized a scientific approach based on opinion surveys. As a result, the company 
made embarrassing mistakes in its early campaigns; a radio spot for Carnation 
milk featured the words "a satisfied cow" followed by a bull's "moo7', which 
Mexicans interpreted as a hilarious sexual innuendo. Thompson recovered 
from such early disasters only by reorganizing the office to make better use of 
local talent. 
Moreno concludes that Mexican advertising 
promoted American industrial capitalism and lifestyle while 
celebrating anti-American nationalism. It championed pre- 
revolutionary liberal ideals while proudly celebrating 
Mexico's socialist and revolutionary traditions. Advertising 
glorified Mexico's indigenous past as well as current folk 
traditions at the same time that it encouraged Mexicans to 
move away from rural areas. It reinforced traditional views 
by showing women how to be obedient daughters and wives 
while teaching them how to be popular, how to attain beau- 
ty, and how to conquer men (1 12-1 3). 
In short, Mexican and North American advertisers alike promised that all prob- 
lems could be solved with enough consumer goods, although consumerism dic- 
tated that one could never buy enough. 
Even this fantasy world of consumption was closed to most Mexicans. 
Moreno offers tantalizing glimpses of how little advertisers actually under- 
stood working-class life. Rather than risk entering crowded Mexico City tene- 
ments, Thompson employees conducted their surveys of radio listening habits 
by copying down whatever they heard from the streets. They did not even try 
to gauge the attitudes of rural workers, and simply concluded that advertise- 
ments would be transmitted to poor campesinos from wealthy landowners who 
did have access to mass media. 
Although the middle class forms the subject of this work, any study of 
Mexican consumer culture in the 1940s must acknowledge that this was the 
decade when the government renounced President Lazaro Cardenas's 
Keynesian approach of stimulating development by increasing the purchasing 
power of all citizens. In its place, technocrats designed trickle-down industri- 
216 Reviews 
alization policies to concentrate capital in the hands of the wealthy. Cormpt 
union bosses and agrarian bureaucrats conspired with industrialists and 
agribusiness to produce stagnant wages for at least two generations of Mexican 
workers. Needless to say, foregoing domestic consumption led not to the 
growth of an efficient manufacturing sector but rather to a sclerotic economy 
incapable of competing for export markets, thus setting the stage for another 
encounter with North American business culture under NAFTA. 
In light of this experience, Moreno's use of the term "social democracy" 
to describe the corporatist Mexican state seems inappropriate. The Institutional 
Revolutionary Party did not "buy" social peace through Nordic wages and wel- 
fare, as Enrique Ochoa's study of food policy clearly shows. Whatever carrot 
the government offered through subsidized maize was backed up repeatedly by 
the stick of repression - the 1952 election campaign of Miguel Henriquez 
Guzman, the railroad workers' strike of 1959, the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, 
and the "dirty war" of the 1970s, the full brutality of which is only now com- 
ing to light. 
These reservations notwithstanding, Julio Moreno has provided a thought- 
ful and nuanced account of middle-class business and consumer culture in 
Mexico during the first half of the century. Yankee Don't Go Home! will 
become an essential starting point for future studies of Mexico's encounter 
with globalization. 
Jefiey M. Pilcher 
The Citadel 
Alfred Yee, Shopping at Giant Foods: Chinese American Supermarkets in 
Northern California (Seattie: University of Washington Press, 2003). 
From the 1930s through the 1970s, supermarkets owned by Chinese Americans 
outside of Chinatowns catering to non-Chinese clienteles featuring mainstream 
products and services, dominated the grocery business in North California. 
Especially during the first three decades when these businesses required little 
technical knowledge and initial capital, Chinese-American owners edged out 
other competitors with cheaper prices by employing family members, relatives, 
and sponsoring recent immigrants from their own villages in China who, as a 
result of personal ties and lack of better employment alternatives, worked long 
hours for low wages. The secret to success was the system of "paternalism" 
from the "old world," "combined with ethnic solidarity and good timing" (132- 
3). Ironically, beginning in the mid-1950s, these supermarkets' success con- 
tained seeds of their undoing. The pool of cheap labour gradually disappeared 
as labour unions monitored the stores' practices and demanded that employees 


Julio Moreno — Yankee Don't Go Home! Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920-1950

Hesketh, Ian

Forum: Writing History 
Editorial Introduction: The Burden of Writing 
Ian Hesketh 
History became an autonomous discipline of study in the nineteenth century, at 
least partly, by challenging the perception that it was merely a literary genre. 
Professionalizing historians argued that their practice of history was under- 
pinned by an inductive scientific method, one that promoted the study of the 
past for its own sake. The new task of the historian would be to tell what actu- 
ally happened. This was a critique of Romantic history of the eighteenth and 
early nineteenth centuries that not only drew moral lessons from the past, but 
also narrated a history that was based primarily on the self-education of the his- 
torical author. Lord Acton, an important figure in the professionalization of 
history in England, believed that the Romantic historians, such as Macaulay 
and Thiers, "project[ed] their own broad shadows upon their pages"; their 
work, in other words, was overly burdened by the presence of the author him- 
self. For Acton, the historian was at his best when he disappeared into his own 
narrative as if it was history itself that spoke: 
[Tlhere is virtue in saying that a historian is seen at his best 
when he does not appear. Better for us is the example of the 
Bishop of Oxford [William Stubbs], who never lets us know 
what he thinks of anything but the matter before him; and of 
his illustrious French rival, Fustel de Coulages, who said to 
an excited audience: "Do not imagine you are listening to 
me; it is history itself that speaks."' 
Objectivity was key for this to be possible, but it was a particular type of 
objectivity created out of the demands of the practical scientist looking to not 
only apply knowledge to industry but also to communicate that knowledge to 
others in the field. Lorraine Daston refers to this as "aperspectival objectivi- 
ty," the ideal in nineteenth-century science that individual or group idiosyn- 
crasies had to be eliminated in order to create scientific knowledge. It was 
believed that individual viewpoints woilld have to be transcended in order to 
create a coherent scientific community. "The existence of such a community, 
stretching over time and space," argues Daston, "in turn seemed a precondition 
for - or even an eventual guarantee of - reaching scientific truth."* 
Professionalizing historians were quick to pursue this scientific method for a 
discipline that could not adhere to the strict law-making demands of a natural 
science. 
8 
O Left History 
10.1 (Fall/Winter 2004) 
Editorial Introduction 9 
It was this precise attempt to make the referent (i.e. history) speak, rather 
than the historian, that gave history its most powerful argument in favor of sci- 
entific status. "[Wlhere the utterer means to 'absent himself' from his dis- 
course," while substituting an "'objective' persona", argues Roland Barthes, a 
"realistic effect" is produced. This is because the referent is external to the his- 
torical discourse, creating a "referential illusion" that disguises the historian as 
History itself. Not only are the individual and emotional personas of the his- 
torian suppressed in this situation, the historian no longer speaks: the only 
voice heard is that of the past. History becomes what actually happened rather 
than the story of what actually happened, a subtle distinction that has immense 
~onse~uences .~  It was precisely the erasure of the presence of the historian 
that provided the basis for a professional community, and, further, a profes- 
sional discipline of history. This translated into a conservative writing style, 
one where the historian was masked behind an omniscient narrative. Add to 
that the inherent authority of such a narrative style and we can begin to under- 
stand why historians have been reluctant to experiment with literary techniques 
in their writing. 
David Leeson's article, "Cutting Through History," which provides the 
focus of our forum on the practice of writing in historical analysis, takes up 
Hayden White's challenge to historians to benefit from the work of modernist 
literature and write "surrealistic, expressionistic, or existentialist" history. 
White condemned historians for their conservative writing style: "It is almost 
as if the historians believed that the sole possible form of historical narration 
was that used in the English novel as it had developed by the late nineteenth 
century. And the result of this", White believed, "has been the progressive 
antiquation of the 'art' of historiography i t~elf ."~ This is problematic, Robert 
Stein tells us in "Fictional Plots and Historical Representation," because "plots 
and the protocols of representation that produce them are neither cognitively 
indifferent nor value neutral.. .. When historians continue to use the protocols 
of nineteenth-century fiction.. ., they bring with them the same presuppositions 
and assumptions about historical agency, about social action, and about human 
psychology that make the great nineteenth-century novels possible as plausi- 
ble representations of reality." Nancy Partner in "Reading, Writing, Getting It 
Right," puts White's work in a similar political context: "History, White 
charges, is thus complicit with anti-liberatory forces of every kind because its 
very 'way of looking at the world' validates the continuity of the past, and it 
does this with redoubled effect in thoughtlessly adopting deeply traditional and 
conventional literary forms as its mode of expression." Partner has to admit 
that "[wlhat White wants is something very difficult, probably impossible to 
ask of an institutionalized practice.. .: that historians use their historical aware- 
ness to dismantle the deep complacencies of their discipline and try to recon- 
stitute it at 'a higher kind of intellectual inquiry,' closer both to art and to sci- 
10 Hesketh 
ence, and yet without giving up entirely on its special cultural work of produc- 
ing knowledge of the past to a high standard of evidentiary rigor." Being aware 
of the way in which the past is represented through the act of writing is an 
important step in challenging the conservative epistemology that has under- 
pinned professional historical writing since the nineteenth century. 
Experimenting with different writing styles, then, can be a revolutionary 
activity for the historian looking to undermine the outmoded forms of repre- 
sentation and the corresponding conservative values of the historical disci- 
pline. Despite the general reluctance of professional historians to experiment 
in this regard there have been some recent steps in the right direction. For 
instance, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, since its 
inception in 1997, has openly called for work that pushes the boundaries of his- 
torical writing beyond the confines of the nineteenth century and the editors 
have since published a volume that includes the best of these experimental nar- 
rative hi~tories.~ As well, a recent issue of Histo y and Theo y was devoted to 
exploring the theme of "unconventional history" in "order to reveal new con- 
ceptual resources and novel forms of representation that might be useful in 
deepening the possibilities of history as a discipline, and for shedding light on 
what understanding the past  involve^."^ Leeson's article is a part of this 
renewed interest in the way we, as historians, represent the past through the act 
of writing. 
Leeson experiments with a form of surrealistic writing (the cut-up tech- 
nique invented by Brion Gysin and used by William S. Burroughs) and 
attempts to apply it to a battle he initially wrote about for his MA thesis in 
hopes to "capture the manifest confusion and meaninglessness of trench fight- 
ing in the First World War, and achieve something sublime by doing so." 
While Leeson is forced to conclude that his experiment fails in achieving this 
goal, and that, more boldly, modernist literary techniques are not well-suited to 
describe modern events, there is no question his article itself is a success in a 
different, and perhaps, unintended way. Leeson's article is not really about a 
battle but it is not entirely about the application of a surrealistic literary tech- 
nique either. Centrally, I think, Leeson's article is about trying to write a his- 
tory paper. It is not only the experiment or Leeson's argument or even the bat- 
tle itself that makes the article interesting, though all of those elements cer- 
tainly help. Instead, it is the fact that Leeson structures the article in such a 
way that the reader follows him from the conception of the article through the 
experiment and to the conclusion as if taking a seat in a chair beside him and 
watching him "cut-up'' his coherent thesis while also trying to make sense of 
the confused mess that results. We become virtual witnesses, not to the battle 
that Leeson wanted to adequately represent, but to the writing of history and to 
the work of the historian. Leeson's self-reflexive writing style not only makes 
the article interesting and engaging; the historian's intentions and activity in 
Editorial Introduction 11 
the creation of historical knowledge are also made apparent to the reader. 
Indeed, Leeson's self-reflexive, self-conscious historian is the antithesis of the 
absent one created in the nineteenth century in order to make history real. 
Leeson gives the historian hisher voice back. 
Notes 
Lord Acton, "Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History," Lectures on Modern 
History, ed. John Figgis and Reginald Laurence (London and Glasgow: Collins Press, 
1960), 27. 
Lorraine Daston, "Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective," Social Studies of 
Science 22,4 (November 1992), 607. 
Roland Barthes, "The Discourse of History," trans. Stephen Bann, in Comparative 
criticism: A yearbook, vol. 3, ed. E. S. Shaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 1981), 11, 17. 
Hayden White, "The Burden of History," in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural 
Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 43-4. 
Originally published in History and Theory 5,2  (1 966). 
Alun Munslow and Robert A. Rosenstone, eds., Experiments in Rethinking History 
(New York and London: Routledge, 2004). 
Brian Fay, "Unconventional History," History and Theory 41,4 (December 2002), 1. 


Editorial Introduction: The Burden of Writing

Jackson, Paul

The Enemy Within the Enemy Within: The Canadian Army and Internment Operations during the Second World War

Huang, Belinda

216 Reviews 
alization policies to concentrate capital in the hands of the wealthy. Cormpt 
union bosses and agrarian bureaucrats conspired with industrialists and 
agribusiness to produce stagnant wages for at least two generations of Mexican 
workers. Needless to say, foregoing domestic consumption led not to the 
growth of an efficient manufacturing sector but rather to a sclerotic economy 
incapable of competing for export markets, thus setting the stage for another 
encounter with North American business culture under NAFTA. 
In light of this experience, Moreno's use of the term "social democracy" 
to describe the corporatist Mexican state seems inappropriate. The Institutional 
Revolutionary Party did not "buy" social peace through Nordic wages and wel- 
fare, as Enrique Ochoa's study of food policy clearly shows. Whatever carrot 
the government offered through subsidized maize was backed up repeatedly by 
the stick of repression - the 1952 election campaign of Miguel Henriquez 
Guzman, the railroad workers' strike of 1959, the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, 
and the "dirty war" of the 1970s, the full brutality of which is only now com- 
ing to light. 
These reservations notwithstanding, Julio Moreno has provided a thought- 
ful and nuanced account of middle-class business and consumer culture in 
Mexico during the first half of the century. Yankee Don't Go Home! will 
become an essential starting point for future studies of Mexico's encounter 
with globalization. 
Jefiey M. Pilcher 
The Citadel 
Alfred Yee, Shopping at Giant Foods: Chinese American Supermarkets in 
Northern California (Seattie: University of Washington Press, 2003). 
From the 1930s through the 1970s, supermarkets owned by Chinese Americans 
outside of Chinatowns catering to non-Chinese clienteles featuring mainstream 
products and services, dominated the grocery business in North California. 
Especially during the first three decades when these businesses required little 
technical knowledge and initial capital, Chinese-American owners edged out 
other competitors with cheaper prices by employing family members, relatives, 
and sponsoring recent immigrants from their own villages in China who, as a 
result of personal ties and lack of better employment alternatives, worked long 
hours for low wages. The secret to success was the system of "paternalism" 
from the "old world," "combined with ethnic solidarity and good timing" (132- 
3). Ironically, beginning in the mid-1950s, these supermarkets' success con- 
tained seeds of their undoing. The pool of cheap labour gradually disappeared 
as labour unions monitored the stores' practices and demanded that employees 
Left Histoly 9.2 21 7 
be paid for all worked hours and as increasingly affluent employees moved out 
of employee dormitories into their own homes and sought better opportunities. 
Furthermore, the consensus-based partnership structures led by hardworking 
but often untrained shareholders that had worked so well during lucrative times 
steadily collapsed under the demands of increased capitalization and operation 
cost, and competition from national chains. By the 1970s, most stores closed 
as they could no longer compete against increasingly large and efficient nation- 
al chains and as the aging owners retired while their children, armed with the 
advantages of their affluent upbringing, moved into other professions in main- 
stream America. Today, only a couple stores are in operation. 
Yee's accessible study provides rare insights into the business practices 
and relationships of Chinese-American enterprises, and their historical legacy. 
As someone who spent fifteen years in the industry, his passion about the sub- 
ject, first-hand knowledge, and personal contacts made him uniquely qualified 
to write this study. He points out that these largely suburban supermarkets, by 
promoting regular interactions between Chinese owners and non-Chinese 
clients and suppliers, gradually encouraged the social and economic integration 
of Chinese Americans into the United States. At the same time, he readily 
points out systemic barriers confronted by past owners. By using extensive 
oral interviews, he is able to reconstruct the lost histories of these enterprises. 
The last three analytical chapters in particular made good use of these inter- 
views through their well-placed direct quotes, which intimately captured the 
past. 
Yee's study, however, has certain limitations. As he admits, due to the 
absence or lack of access to store and employee records, he relies heavily on 
interviews with employers, and some employees, and published US census 
records, trade periodicals, and scholarly studies published prior to 1997. While 
he uses his sources well, he does not examine labour union and government 
records, interviews with past customers, or local Chinese-language newspa- 
pers. The last could have shown whether and how these supermarkets recruit- 
ed other Chinese Americans and marketed themselves to the Chinese-speaking 
population. While the voices of men, as owners, employees, and suppliers, 
come through clearly, the experiences of women, as wives, sisters, daughters, 
and employees who undoubtedly participated in these family enterprises are 
absent. Furthermore, the concepts of "old world business practices" and 
"paternalism" remain vague, undefined, and rooted in the perception of China 
as timeless, homogeneous, and stagnant, a view which ignores its rapid trans- 
formation during the twentieth century, rich diversity, and regional complexi- 
ty. 
The two concluding chapters tantalizingly hint that the business practices 
common to these supermarkets were both uniquely "Chinese" and frequently 
used by other immigrant groups in the United States by comparing them, 
respectively, to those owned by "Chinese" in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the 
218 Reviews 
Philippines, and the "Stop-N-Shop," a successful chain operated by "an imrni- 
grant from the Middle East" in Sacramento. Although Yee's approach raises 
questions such as what makes an English-speaking, third-generation, North 
American-born person and someone who grew up in Japan-occupied Taiwan 
both "Chinese," and how to categorize and compare different cultural groups, 
he nonetheless invites future scholars to draw much needed parallels and con- 
trasts across ethnic and national boundaries. 
Yee has written an original and accessible study on Chinese-American 
supermarkets, their business practices, and the intricate economic and social 
conditions that accompanied their rise and fall. It is worthwhile reading for 
anyone interested in ethnic history, Asian-American studies, and business prac- 
tices and labour union organizations in the trans-Mississippi West. 
Belinda Huang 
Princeton University 
Steven High, Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America's Rust Belt, 
1969-1984 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). 
Comparative history is fairly common, but it is not always done very well. 
Sometimes one part of the comparison is underdeveloped, the analysis of the 
similarities and differences between cases is weak, or the comparison does lit- 
tle to explain other larger questions of historical change. Industrial Sunset, 
however, suffers from none of these deficiencies. Steven High skillhlly uses 
a comparative approach for an enlightening look at economic decline in the 
Great Lakes region, on both sides of the national border, between 1969 and 
1984. His book also blends various fields of history to good effect, exploring 
the linked economic, political, social, and even environmental aspects of dein- 
dustrialization. 
High's writing style and chapter organization make for generally easy and 
rewarding reading. The writing is never impenetrably technical and the con- 
cise chapters, part of a painstaking approach to peeling away the multiple lay- 
ers of deindustrialization, make precise points. The interpretation is also well- 
supported by a variety of sources, including government records, union 
archival material, trade journals, and 137 oral history interviews. As often hap- 
pens, High was denied access to the records of companies playing key roles in 
the story he tells, but he did find some that had made their way into public- 
access collections. 
High's main argument wrestles with why Canadian workers in Southern 
Ontario fared so much better than their American "Rust Belt" counterparts 
when industrial decline led to numerous plant closings. He contends that 


Alfred Yee — Shopping at Giant Foods: Chinese American Supermarkets in Northern California

Stein, Robert M.

Fictional Plots and Historical Explanation: 
A Response to David Leeson's "Cutting Through History" 
Robert M. Stein 
By choosing the technique of the cut-up (as Leeson notes, the cut-up was 
already a surrealist exercise long before William Burroughs introduced it to the 
mainstream American avant-guard) to explore the possibilities of using non- 
traditional narrative procedures for a historical account, David Leeson provides 
his readers with a fine confirmation of perhaps the single most important 
argument of Hayden White's work, namely that the fundamental mode of his- 
toriographical explanation consists in the historian's construction of a plot. 
Since the cut-up is a surrealistic technique precisely intended to defeat mean- 
ing and to free the resulting narrative from the author's own interpretative con- 
trol, Leeson's essay functions as a rather elegant reductio ad absurdurn that 
demonstrates the absolute identity of meaning and plot structure in history. 
As Paul Veyne has convincingly argued, historical explanation is not at all 
analogous to classical scientific theory, for historical inquiry has nothing to do 
with the search for the articulation of a general law (along the lines of "for 
every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" or c2=a2+b2) that would 
subsume a group of superficially unrelated individual phenomena such that 
each individual phenomenon could be construed as an illustration of the law. 
Rather, historical explanation aims to understand a singularity - not all battles 
but the attack by the fourth Guards Brigade on the afternoon of 18 May, for 
example, or the Battle of Festubert, or even World War 1. Each are singulari- 
ties; each is capable of being taken as a whole object of historical knowledge. 
And to do this, a historian offers a narrative account, one that proceeds as 
thickly as the evidence will allow, to show the interplay of chance, delibera- 
tion, material conditions and their intended and unintended consequences. The 
historian, that is, creates within a given medium - typically prose - a narrative 
representation of some segment of the past, and what we call the meaning is 
the result of very deliberate intellectual activity addressed to each of the key 
terms in the preceding clause. How to deal with the constraints of the medium, 
the decisions about where and how to segment time, the sort of questions that 
the historian addresses to the documentation, indeed what the historian takes to 
be adequate documentation in the first place, all play a role in determining the 
properties of the representation that the historian creates. 
In "The Burden of History," Hayden White observed that in offering such 
narrative accounts, historians have overwhelmingly relied on the protocols of 
nineteenth-century realistic fiction even as writers of fiction in the twentieth 
47 
0 Left History 
10.1 (FallIWinter 2004) 
48 Stein 
century were submitting these very protocols to intense challenges. The point 
is that plots and the protocols of representation that produce them are neither 
cognitively indifferent nor value neutral. The fragmentation, discontinuity, and 
complex temporality that characterize the "avant-guard" techniques of repre- 
sentation of a Woolf or a Joyce or a Musil were not merely the products of 
artistic experimentation for its own sake. They were challenges to the ideolog- 
ical presuppositions and unacknowledged assumptions that underlay the con- 
ventional sense of reality as such, and they were meant to question those pre- 
suppositions and force those assumptions to be consciously addressed. When 
historians continue to use the protocols of nineteenth-century fiction as if they 
went without saying, they bring with them the same presuppositions and 
assumptions about historical agency, about social action, and about human psy- 
chology that make the great nineteenth-century novels possible as plausible 
representations of reality. 
In brief, if White's essay can be read as a call for the historian to consider 
new kinds of narrative procedures it is only insofar as it is primarily a call for 
the historian to reconsider the unconscious and unexamined assumptions about 
the nature of human action in time that come with conventional procedures of 
historical explanation. It is no accident, in this light, that since 1966, the year 
of the first appearance of "The Burden of History," much of the most signifi- 
cant work in women's history, in anthropologically based work in medieval 
and early modern religious history, as well as in theoretically sophisticated 
work in postcolonial history has, in fact, not only stimulated far-reaching dis- 
cussion about the nature of historical documentation, but has also raised some 
of the same questions, from the side of practice, about historical narrative - 
including most significantly questions of change over time, of social disconti- 
nuity, and not least questions of small and large scale periodization - that 
White's essay raised theoretically. 
When we turn to what Leeson disarmingly calls "history's tobacco indus- 
try," military history, "the war and society school" is not the best example to 
consider, for even though Keegan's Weberian typology in The Face of Battle is 
obviously intellectually far more compelling than the old-fashioned genre 
painting narratives that Keegan criticized, it is still wedded not only to the rep- 
resentational techniques of nineteenth-century realism but more significantly 
to the sense of the battle field, seen from the perspective of military command, 
as the place of significant historical action. More to the point, as illustrations 
of the dependence of protocols of narrative representation on assumptions 
about historical agency, it seems to me, are those ground-breaking narratives, 
whether reportage or quasi-fictional, that emerged from the Vietnam war. I am 
thinking of Michael Herr's Despatches and the astonishing North Vietnamese 
autobiographical novel The Sorrows of War by Bao Ninh. And Stendhal, of 
course, had already in the nineteenth century brilliantly depicted the Battle of 
Fictional Plots and Historical Explanation 49 
Waterloo from the point of view of a marginal soldier who did not quite know 
where he was or what he was doing, and in the process Stendhal rather com- 
pletely overturned the conventions of novelistic representation. It is not by try- 
ing out cut-ups or surrealistic exercises but rather by developing a radical and 
critical sense of historical action and its relation to violence, by reformulating 
the temporal and spatial delimitations of "battle," and by developing a truly 
dialectical exploration of the multiform relations of war and society that the 
historian will be thrust willy-nilly into the narrative possibilities of the twenty- 
first century. 


Fictional Plots and Historical Explanation: A Response to David Leeson's "Cutting Through History"

Attias, Bernardo Alexander

"Police Free Gay Slaves": Consent, Sexuality, and the Law

Palmer, Bryan D.

Reviews 
James Laxer, Red Diaper Baby: A Boyhood in the Age of McCarthyism 
(Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 2004). 
How does one remember a childhood? Not easily, is the simple answer. The 
matter is all the more complicated when this personal history is cut to the core 
with ambivalence and 'secrets', when it is refracted through subsequent expe- 
rience, and reflected on with the guiding hand of principles, politics, and prag- 
matic judgments nurtured by a later adult intellect. This remembering is not 
only difficult, then, but interpretively layered. All human beings, to one degree 
or another, are caught on the horns of the past's varied dilemmas. 
James Laxer's memoir of growing up a red diaper baby in the age of 
McCarthyism is at once an engaging account and a somewhat truncated polit- 
ical statement. Elegant in its presentation, refreshing in its candor, and at times 
brave and admirably restrained in its subjective revelation, it is an evocative 
narrative that will appeal to sensitive readers on a number of levels. But it is a 
political statement that at times needs to be challenged with pushes and prods 
as well, precisely because while it recognizes and names the ugliness of 
Stalinism, it ultimately sidesteps coming to grips with this most pernicious 
degeneration of a critically important wing of the revolutionary left. 
Laxer tells a tale of a childhood in the 1940s and 1950s that was lived in 
a series of conventional boxes, but they were surrounded by 'secrets'. In many 
ways the Laxer household was quite ordinary, and in outward appearance the 
family was respectable and traditional. Gender relations, for instance, seem 
lifted out of Betty Friedan's 'feminine mystique' or 1950s 'sit com' represen- 
tations such as Leave It To Beaver: family life was ordered by a nurturing 
mother obsessed with the details of domesticity and an authoritative, patriar- 
chal father who provided the orthodox breadwinner sustenance as well as deci- 
sive guidance. Children were christened in the United Church; paper routes 
provided money; and neighborhood pranks confirmed that boys would be boys. 
Hockey was played in the streets and on a series of outdoor rinks, occupying a 
place of prominence in most male lives. Summers were sometimes spent at a 
Muskoka Lake. A part of Laxer's presentation of his childhood is noteworthy 
because it is totally unexceptionable in its 'middle-class' routine, albeit one that 
existed within quite pinched material circumstances. 
Beneath the surface of 'being normal', however, lay the conflicted actual- 
ities of 'underground' identities. Of prime importance, understandably, was 
the Laxers' communism. Robert and 'Queenie' (Edna May) Laxer were 
staunch members of the Communist Party of Canada, with Bob a leading 
Toronto functionary, a professional revolutionary who taught study groups, 
organized political campaigns (including his own electoral efforts to secure 
160 
0 Left History 
10.1 (Fall~Winter 2004) 
Left History 10.1 161 
minor municipal office), and orchestrated communist work in the trade unions 
and the peace movement. James recalls being affectionately hauled up onto 
Tim Buck's lap in the family living room. And he grew up handing out leaflets, 
trudging alongside Mom at demonstration marches, and fearing that his parents 
would end up like the Rosenbergs. 
As public as was the family's commitment to communism, it was also hid- 
den, like so much in 1950s households, especially in the neighborhood where 
Jim and his siblings made friends, went to school, and walked local streets and 
back alleys. Teachers, police, schoolyard chums, and those who lived next 
door or ran the corner store where groceries were purchased were never to 
know the political 'truth' about the Laxers. It was not prudent in Cold War 
Canada to proclaim too loudly and visibly one's allegiance to workers' revolu- 
tion and its international leaders, Lenin and Stalin. 
Terror struck the young Laxer boys at school when asked what their father 
did for a living: they were tongue-tied, their predicament reaching beyond the 
seeming embarrassment of not knowing Dad's occupation to indeed being all 
too cognizant that to blurt out his 'job' was to risk ostracism in the classroom, 
the wrath of parents, and possibly the reprisals of capitalist authority. Jim's sis- 
ter dressed her dolls in preparation for family flights from threats she could not 
comprehend. Laxer notes that to this day his sister has nightmares relating to 
this 1950s fear that the family would be 'found out', and pay the awful price of 
exile or worse. This book thus takes us into the conscious and unconscious toll 
that the Cold War exacted on young children in communist families, whose 
fears and tortured training in negotiating the politicization of truth proved a ter- 
rible burden. 
The keeping of this communist 'secret' was paralleled in the Laxer house- 
hold in hiding the Jewishness of Robert Laxer and his children. Jim's mother 
was the daughter of anglophile Protestants of a missionary bent, their gentility 
matched by the security of 'old money'. But his father, born Menachem Laxer, 
came from a rabbinical Hasidic background where neither dollars nor compla- 
cent adaptation to a Canadian homeland were much in evidence. Blond and 
blue-eyed, however, Robert Laxer could 'pass' for what he was not. The dis- 
tance between identities born into and consciously chosen widened when 
Menachem Laxer gravitated to secularism and then communism rather than 
religious orthodoxy, his road to 'enlightenment' illuminated by an initial read- 
ing of Darwin rather than Marx. The grandfather was broken by his son's repu- 
diation of the rabbinical path, his shame only deepening as the now self-iden- 
tified Robert married a 'shiksa' who soon gave birth to a son. In the small 
occupationally-defined Montreal sector of Hasidic Jews (the grandfather was a 
butcher) who looked to Jim Laxer's paternal grandfather as their spiritual head, 
tolerance was not a trait highly valued: hearing of the religious teacher's dis- 
grace, they offered him no empathy, but rather a public humiliation, pelting 
162 Reviews 
him with tomatoes on the street. The old rabbi died shortly thereafter, before he 
ever saw his grandson. 
Out of this family and socio-cultural setting, Robert Laxer decided to raise 
his children as though they were WASPS, a project of deception not all that dif- 
ficult in Anglo Toronto, where his wife's family was deeply embedded in the 
Britishness of the mainstream. As James Laxer reports, "this fitted in with my 
father's migration from the Jewish ghetto and his adoption of an anti-religious 
ideology. Being Jewish was an unnecessary complication, and he wanted no 
part of it" (54). 
Perhaps not, but the charade added to his children's unease. Denying his 
Jewishness, James Laxer grew up a lie, at times feeling "tight inside, ... violat- 
ed and miserable." More colloquially, it "bugged [James] that being Jewish 
meant that your nose and your dick looked different" (53-54). If communism 
presented the Laxer children with a difficult tightrope to walk, taut in its neces- 
sities of hiding practices and thoughts vilified as evil, Jewishness was often a 
more physical marker that demanded denials of a different, and likely more 
routinely agonizing, kind. 
These secrets, obfuscations, and discomforts disordered a part of James 
Laxer's childhood, but as this recollection indicates, there was much happiness 
and love in all of this as well. Young Jim grew up at the borderlands of a bois- 
terous, sensual Jewish Montreal and the restrained comforts of British 
Methodist Toronto. When these familial cultures came together there was an 
inevitable dissonance, but the distinct halves provided comforts and warmths 
that were separate but equal in their appeals to a child. The grandfather Jim 
Laxer knew was a cultured, caring man who introduced his grandson to the 
beauties and bounties of the Muskoka cottage country, renting summer resi- 
dences for the extended family, and taking the time to fish and catch bullfrogs 
with the children, enjoying them as much as they did him. A storyteller and a 
man tolerant of dissent, he gave his son-in-law and his grandchildren the ben- 
efits of what must have been many doubts. The Montreal side of the family 
had a different allure entirely. Aunts, uncles, and cousins were a raucous, 
newly urbanized coterie of scotch-drinking, cigar smoking, hockey-loving, lip- 
stick wearing 'kibbutzers'. If young Jim Laxer was not quite of either half of 
this divided Toronto-Montreal world, he nevertheless enjoyed what both had to 
offer. 
Laxer's 'secrets' were, in some senses, the extreme and politically charged 
end of a spectrum, for domestic facades often fronted growing up normal in 
1950s Canada. Many families had skeletons in their closets of some kind. 
There were parents who avoided divorce, but were mired in endurance tests 
governed by the maintenance of the appearance of propriety. What love had to 
do with it, was anybody's guess. Alcoholism was often a 'secret' many in fam- 
ilies and neighborhoods knew but refused to acknowledge. Child, sexual, and 
Left History 10.1 163 
wife abuse were perhaps more common than some were prepared to admit. 
Certainly fathers with vile tempers and mothers who made strained accommo- 
dations were hardly rarities, and they produced in more than a few children 
shame and reticence that left them scarred into adulthood. 
Jim Laxer's trials were of a different kind than those of the mainstream, 
and on balance they were of considerably greater magnitude. But they were in 
some sense the tip of an iceberg of difficulty in the making of childhood in a 
particular period that demands more scrutiny, and that opens out into critically 
important suggestion. Indeed, Laxer's account, which will rightly be read as 
the memoir of a communist childhood, is intriguing because of its exploration 
of a left upbringing, of course, but also because so much of Laxer's youth 
crossed over into the territory of the ostensibly depoliticized norm. When 
Laxer recounts, for instance, almost in passing, that he was sexually abused in 
his neighborhood by a man he did not know, but never told his parents about 
this, the understatement of the event is a window into something yet to be ade- 
quately explored in the modern history of Canada. 
Where the book falters lightly, ironically, is at the interface of memoir and 
political accounting. A boy of fifteen, to be sure, could not be expected to grap- 
ple with Stalinism. But we are engaged, in this book, not with a child's or ado- 
lescent's understanding of historical process and the politics of the left. Rather, 
James Laxer, now a figure of some stature in both Canadian academic circles 
and in the country's oppositional political culture, is filtering his past through 
his current conceptions. He does his best to convey to us that he always, even 
as a mere child and early teen, questioned Stalinism's lack of democratic prac- 
tice and Bolshevism's supposedly hair-splitting sectarianism; he is repulsed by 
Stalin's monstrosity, evident in his liquidation of Communist leader-rivals and 
in his murderous regime of totalitarian repression. Laxer apologizes, in some 
ways, for his father's accommodations to this, which ended with his parents' 
break from the Communist Party of Canada in 1956-1957. James nevertheless 
remains resentful of his dad's failure to ever confront the crimes of Stalinism 
adequately. "I believe the tellers of false tales are almost as damaged by them 
as the hearers are," Laxer concludes, "and I wonder if by peddling the story [of 
Stalin saving the Soviet Union in buying time during World War I1 with the 
Hitler-Stalin Pact] to me, my father managed to keep the distortions alive in his 
own mind" (279-280). 
In focusing on the post-1935 meaning of Stalinism, however, Laxer him- 
self avoids, like so many New Leftists, the programmatic reversal of the 
Communist International in the mid-1920s. It was then that Zinoviev's bureau- 
cratization and unduly centralizing authority within the Comintern CO-joined 
with Stalin's concentrated power over the Soviet Party apparatus, adrninistra- 
tive deformations that culminated in the political defeat of Bolshevism's proj- 
ect of world revolution. The ideology of "socialism in one country" paved the 
164 Reviews 
way for a parade of disillusioning policies and practical, usually opportunistic, 
'turns', all of which meant that Bob and Queenie Laxer's heartfelt commitment 
to revolutionary social transformation was destined to be stillborn. What their 
children lived through as a consequence is at times quite sad. There is no doubt 
that it colours the depiction of communism and individual communists in this 
book, where what remains most poignant in recollection is place and family, 
and where what seems distant and distorted are the politics that had promised 
a wider authenticity, encircling all of humanity. Would that it could have been 
different. 
Bryan D. Palmer 
Trent University 
Irwin Silber, Press Box Red: The Story of Lester Rodney, The Communist Who 
Helped Break the Color Line in American Sports (Philadelphia: Temple 
University Press, 2003). 
Professional baseball has a long-documented history of racial bigotry. This his- 
tory runs contrary to two of the great myths on which the game has always 
relied. First, that in sport, every effort consistent with sportsmanship must be 
spent to achieve victory - to run faster and leap higher. Second, that in busi- 
ness, for the pursuit of profits one must be indifferent to emotive inclination 
that can potentially distract one from achieving the bottom line. The ultimate 
objective therefore is to win championships and market share. However, the 
Jim Crow laws against black athletes that began to fall in 1947 and the preju- 
dices that have since persisted belie these conventions. Major League Baseball 
sells the colourful eccentricity of its athletes, both on and off the field, who 
supposedly adhere or adhered to these sporting and economic principles. 
Individuals such as Babe Ruth, Pete Rose, Bill Veeck, and George 
Steinbrenner, some of American baseball's most beloved characters and icons, 
have personified the ideals of competition and success. The myths that these 
characters embody are so powerful that the meaning of baseball's colour barri- 
er is difficult to grasp, as participants and observers alike evince a preference 
for the comfort of shared prejudice over the basic rigours of unfettered compe- 
tition. 
The story of the Negro Leagues and the black players who could have 
gone on to be remembered as some of the best baseballers in history if they had 
only been given the chance by their white major league counterparts, is a well- 
documented one, both in academe and in popular media. Thus, one might 
imagine that Press Box Red, a collection of interviews with the largely 


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