Left History (E-Journal - York University)

McDonald, Tracy

182 Reviews 
changed, with the passing decades. But more explicitly, the editor's introduc- 
tion also offers a concise history of the Canadian Historical Review (CHR), the 
premiere historical journal in Canada. Here, although Professor Shore has pre- 
viously written on similar subjects, the introduction falls a bit short. 
My complaint is that the introduction is a simple narrative, revealing few 
glimpses of discussions behind the scenes. Perhaps the CHR's double-blind 
assessment process prevents revealing too much, but surely this could be 
accommodated. Simply put, the introduction glosses over contentious issues 
and is largely uncritical. As one example, although Shore repeatedly informs 
the reader that the editors tried to bridge the divide between French and English 
Canadians, it is difficult to perceive just how this was tried prior to the Quiet 
Revolution. The CHR remained firmly English in its conception, only awak- 
ening to the other solitude in the 1950s under John Saywell. Its first French- 
language article, appearing in 1962, was a curiously political choice - Femand 
Ouellet's analysis of the historical roots of QuCbecois separatism - that reflect- 
ed Anglophone apprehensions about Quebec and Canada more than French- 
language scholarship of the day. All of this receives little comment from Shore. 
There are other examples that reflect, not so much a contested past, but an 
exercise in consensus building. This is not the fault of Marlene Shore. It would 
have been irresponsible to portray, for instance, a tradition of bilingualism 
where none really existed. But silences can be deafening, and informative. 
Where were the rebels and outsiders in this story? Were there no dissatisfied 
contributors? The CHR may be open to new methods today, but it is unfortu- 
nate that Shore does not explore the politics behind editorial decisions of the 
past. Editors and editorial boards sometimes have agendas (as might reviewers) 
and the rejected might reveal more than the published. An analysis of the rea- 
sons given for rejecting submissions, or perhaps some figures on the kinds of 
papers and authors most often turned down, might have revealed a greater but 
hidden contest to frame our collective memories. This is not investigated in the 
book Marlene Shore has given us. Instead we are shown a past contested, but 
only within the general consensus of mainstream academic historians. 
Alan Gordon 
University of Guelph 
David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the 
Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Cambridge and 
London: Harvard University Press, 2002). 
David Brandenberger's National Bolshevism focuses on history and historical 
narrative as key to understanding how a particular national identity was creat- 
Left History 10.1 183 
ed in Russia under Joseph Stalin. 
The work is divided into three chronological periods. Part one looks at the 
development of a "national Bolshevism" up to the eve of World War 11. Part 
two focuses on ideology during the war years. Part three analyses the post-war 
period up to the death of Stalin. Brandenberger argues that, constantly con- 
cerned with insuring the legitimacy of the Soviet state and of the inability of a 
"marginally educated citizenry" to understand Marxist-Leninism, "Stalin and 
his colleagues gradually refashioned themselves as etatists and began to selec- 
tively rehabilitate famous personalities and familiar symbols from the Russian 
national past" (8). According to Brandenberger, because "the population large- 
ly failed to grasp" the more philosophical elements of the party narrative which 
was really designed to promote patriotic loyalty to party and state, the approach 
taken toward "popular mobilization ultimately contributed to no less than the 
formation of a mass sense of Russian national identity in Soviet society7' (9). 
Brandenberger provides a well-written, coherent background chapter on 
the weak sense of national identity that existed in the Tsarist and early Soviet 
period. He argues that most Russians lacked a sense of common heritage and 
history. For Brandenberger, the 1927 war scare was the warning for the Soviet 
regime that it needed a coherent sense of identity around which to mobilize 
popular support. In order to achieve such mobilization, he argues, the party ide- 
ologues had to turn to "more conventional styles of agitation oriented around 
the promotion of individual heroes, patriotism, and history itself' (27). 
Brandenberger argues that the "Great Terror" destabilized the "pantheon" 
of Soviet heroes who had been credited with the establishment of the Soviet 
Union and precipitated a shift to Russian and pre-Revolutionary heroes and to 
the idea of the Russian people as the vanguard of the Soviet nation. He 
describes this shift as an "about face," from "proletarian internationalism to 
national Bolshevism" (44-45). Brandenberger's choice of "national 
Bolshevism" is obviously a carefully considered one. It would have enriched 
the work to see a more detailed discussion of the various evocations the term 
obviously conjures. Brandenberger does discuss M. N. Riutin's use of the term 
(6-7), but there is no mention of the concept as it appeared in other places and 
contexts or of the wink to "national Socialism." 
Brandenberger traces the development and presentation of history through 
the war years, noting that there were "both quantitative and qualitative differ- 
ences about Russian and non-Russian themes that placed the former in a priv- 
ileged position vis-a-vis the latter7'(157). He discusses the increasing conflation 
of notions of "Russian" and "Soviet" over time. More reflection on the matter 
would have been welcome. In some cases, even after the war, some writers do 
seem to be making a deliberate choice of one word over the other in a particu- 
lar context. There are many moments in which Brandenberger's work hints at 
a spectrum of nuance and variation but then shies away from delving too 
184 Reviews 
deeply into such contradictions. 
Contradictions, however, are at the center of his discussion of post-war 
ideology. Brandenberger wrestles with the question of whether or not the 
emphasis on the Russian national past is "eclipsed by the myth of the war" 
(1 87). He concludes that "starting in the mid- 1940s, two epics informed Soviet 
state legitimacy until the USSR's collapse in 1991: a thousand years of prerev- 
olutionary Russian history and its complement, the 'Soviet' experience of the 
war" (192). He views the period of the zhdanovshchina as "the culmination of 
a nativist drive that had been steadily russifying the Soviet ideological experi- 
ence since 1937" (196). 
In each section of his book, Brandenberger takes on the laudable and 
extremely challenging question of the popular reception of state ideology. He 
provides a rare look into the understanding of history on the part of Russian pri- 
mary school children. Although extremely difficult to explore in the confines 
of a single project, a comparison between Russian speaking children's inter- 
pretation and those of similar-aged children in Ukraine or Kazakhstan, for 
example, would have been fascinating. Throughout the work, the reader catch- 
es glimpses of the wider exigencies of life in the Soviet Union. In a chapter on 
public and party education (or lack thereof) in the post-war period, for exam- 
ple, the chair of an urban party committee explained to visiting officials that his 
knowledge and understanding of party ideology were weak because they real- 
ly were not relevant to his day-to-day work. Brandenberger also includes some 
of the shortcomings in the understanding of history and ideology among staff 
members in the Ministry of State Security. 
Brandenberger makes impressive use of a vast array of sources from the 
historical works produced in Stalin's Soviet Union and rich and varied archival 
collections, to lectures, broadcasts, diaries, newspapers, films, opera, school- 
children's essays, museum guest books, exhibits, and exhibitions. He has a 
broad and impressive knowledge of an extensive secondary literature in a vari- 
ety of languages. The work is careful, detailed, and exhaustively referenced. 
Brandenberger's study raises many questions and issues for fixther debate 
and research. In a multi-ethnic, gendered, and classed society one wonders how 
these matters played out in the pages of history textbooks. There are intriguing 
moments in which Brandenberger compares the portrayal of various groups 
within the Soviet fraternity. How were workers and peasants portrayed in the 
pages of history under Stalin? How were intellectuals cast? Did the recasting 
of history contain within its pages an agenda for the creation of a certain kind 
of Soviet boy or girl, man or woman? There is a notable absence of Catherine 
the Great from the pantheon: speculation as to why this was the case may have 
proved rewarding. Using the interviews of the Harvard University Refugee 
Interview Project, Brandenberger illustrates that interviewees noticed that rev- 
olutionary heroes became enemies overnight. Was the regime able to overcome 
this distrust? 
Finally, perhaps Brandenberger pushes his arguments about russocentrism 
too far. He acknowledges tensions, contradictions, and dualities among notions 
of internationalism and of russocentrism. Perhaps these contradictions and 
dualities would have made an interesting and revealing focus. 
Still, the book is an ambitious and extensive study which provides a major 
contribution to the surprisingly understudied and insufficiently understood, yet 
crucial theme of ideology under Stalin, especially through the war years and 
beyond. His presentation of the controversy and scandal surrounding the 
History of the Kazakh SSR and of the Short Course on the History of the USSR 
are fascinating. Brandenberger is to be highly comrnended for wrestling 
through an enormous amount of extremely varied material and shaping it into 
a coherent and accessible argument and study. 
Tracy McDonald 
McMaster University 
Peter Ives, Gramsci S Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and 
the Frankjiurt School (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 
The last 30 years have seen an explosion of writings on Antonio Gramsci in 
almost all social science and humanities disciplines - so much so that short of 
fresh applications of a 'Gramscian' method to the study of specific contexts, 
one might conclude there is little new to say about Gramsci's thought itself. Yet 
a newly adapted theoretical reading of Gramsci's ideas is exactly what Peter 
Ives strives to present in Gramsci k Politics of Language. What results is not 
just another book on Gramsci, but rather a unique reading of Gramsci's work 
through a wide-ranging interdisciplinary engagement with history, linguistics, 
and Marxist philosophies of language, culture, and social and political thought. 
Ives investigates the connection between Gramsci's linguistic and political 
concepts by simultaneously explaining the way they relate internally through- 
out Gramsci's thought, historically contextualizing the linguistic debates 
Gramsci had with his contemporaries, and bringing his particular reading of 
Gramscian political and linguistic philosophy into a theoretical dialogue with 
the works of other influential (but unknown to Gramsci) Marxist theorists of 
the era. 
The book's overarching argument focuses on proving that the ideas 
Gramsci developed in his early training in linguistics and his engagements with 
Italian language politics, are complementary to (and influenced) the cultivation 
of his better known contributions - hegemony, organic intellectuals, the war of 
manoeuvrelwar of position, the philosophy of praxis - more commonly asso- 


David Brandenberger — National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956

Zachernuk, Philip S.

198 Reviews 
James H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and 
Africa, 1935-1961 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina 
Press, 2002). 
The search for Pan-African solidarity within the African diaspora, as a means 
to resist the established order, remains important. Until recently, however, the 
story of Pan-Africanism has not been well served by scholarship. Much of the 
earlier literature wanted above all to celebrate its evolution toward expected (if 
still incomplete) triumph. Too little of the literature sought to understand the 
rather peculiar ways in which Pan-African ideas and organizations have 
endured moments of triumph and of deflation while never really completing 
their mission. The story that needs telling is about how Pan-African appeals 
can at certain times command such remarkable power while at others appear 
largely irrelevant. This is a quest to which, among other things, James 
Meriwether's fine new study contributes. 
His focus is on how black Americans' ideas about and attitudes toward 
Africa changed over the middle third of the twentieth century, and how this 
mattered in their search for civil rights and a sense of place in America and the 
world. The accepted account explains changes in African-American views 
through domestic conditions, tying, for example, the occasional rise of back to 
Africa movements to moments of acute racial persecution. Meriwether con- 
vinces us that more was at work, particularly political actions by Africans at 
home. Here lies his contribution to Pan-African history, beyond his contribu- 
tion to black American historiography: the links between African Americans 
and Africans in Africa were forged from both sides of the Atlantic, in con- 
stantly shifting, complex contexts that cannot easily be prefigured but which 
also cannot be ignored. 
Meriwether picks up the story in the aftermath of World War One when 
twentieth-century patterns still held. Africa, for black Americans as for white, 
was a place of primitives. Ancient African glories provided some African 
Americans with a valued heritage, but contemporary Africa was either ignored 
or deemed relevant only as a mission field where new world Afncans could 
potentially prove the capacity of their race by uplifting their downtrodden 
brethren. Starting from this well-known relation, Meriwether concentrates on 
how events in Africa sometimes push and other times allow black Americans 
to see Africa differently. Fascist Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, for instance, 
awakened some black Americans to contemporary Africans' struggles. The 
chapter on World War Two and the early Cold War traces a more complex 
moment. African nationalists and black American activists both recognized the 
promise inherent in the Allied declaration that the war was about democracy 
and self-determination. African demands for self-government and black 
American claims to civil rights were natural corollaries of these war aims, and 
Left History 10.1 199 
African nationalists and black Americans forged a vibrant alliance based on 
both their racial and political subjugation to reinforce this point. This Pan- 
African front, however, was widely forsworn on the American side under the 
changed logic of the Cold War. Mainstream African American leaders now 
aligned themselves as patriotic anti-communist Americans, arguing that Cold 
War victory required an immediate end to the racial injustices besmirching 
America's image as the leader of the free world. Only a dwindling left wing 
continued to identify with African nationalists, unconcerned with the problem 
of allying with increasingly radical foreign organizations. The rest of the book 
relates the gradual recovery from this retreat, starting with the South African 
Defiance Campaign in 1952. Organized by a wide array of non-white groups 
against the unfolding apartheid regime, it employed mass resistance and civil 
disobedience to demand basic rights. Although initially only a small group of 
black American leaders found inspiration in these tactics and aims, the identi- 
fication with South African blacks would spread and endure as awareness of 
the parallels between the two struggles developed. The engagement with "Mau 
Mau" in Kenya at about the same time was rather more troubled. Overwhelmed 
by the colonial and imperial propaganda which so effectively portrayed the 
Kenyan resistance movement as atavistic, black Americans had to frame their 
sense of solidarity carefully. Even so, Meriwether argues that a radical strand 
within the civil rights movement used events in Kenya to make a case for more 
radical action at home against the resistance of moderate civil rights leaders. 
The climax of the story comes in the chapters on Ghanaian independence in 
1957 and "the year of Africa" in 1960. The American connections and charis- 
matic popularity of Kwame Nkrumah (whose 1960 march through Harlem 
graces the cover of the book) were transformative. The much-celebrated arrival 
of seventeen new independent, ambitiously modernizing states in Africa in 
1960 effectively buried the old black American image of Africa. Now, across a 
wide spectrum of political tendencies, black American leaders proclaimed that 
"proudly we can be Africans." Martin Luther King Jr. profoundly inspired by 
the contemporary, democratic accomplishments of black Africa, marched all 
the more powerfully into the civil rights battles of the 1960s. Further, 
Meriwether argues, these leaders moved ahead more effectively having used 
debates over African affairs to shape and sharpen their own strategies. 
The book concludes by foreshadowing the next phase of the story, which 
began soon enough with the Congo crisis in 1960. In keeping with the new 
sense of solidarity with African nationalism, the black American press sus- 
tained the heroic image of popular Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba despite 
the trend in US government circles to shun him as a communist. But as seces- 
sion, civil war, and sectional politics continued following Lumumba's murder, 
black Americans were not inclined to sort it all out. Here first, and in Africa 
more generally by the later 1960s, black Americans could not find obvious 
200 Reviews 
inspiration in the swirl of African news about domestic political scrambles, cor- 
ruption, and coups. Instead, they increasingly limited their attention to the 
remaining liberation struggles with conspicuous parallels to their own ongoing 
battles against white American domination. 
Meriwether builds his story on an impressive research base, providing suc- 
cinct but effective contexts for each episode from relevant secondary literature 
on African history, American high politics, and the civil rights movement. The 
breadth of primary material, culled from autobiographical writing, personal 
and organizational archives, and a wise selection of black American newspa- 
pers, uses letters from individual black Americans to the press and leadership 
figures insightfully. Throughout Meriwether pays careful attention to the play 
of debate and dissent, developing his thesis that Africa's significance to black 
America is not to be reduced to a single simple narrative. 
Some episodes of black Atlantic politics become clearer as a result of this 
work. Historians of West African Pan-Africanists, for example, can now better 
explain why West Africans' keen desire for connections with black America 
shifted so abruptly at the end of the 1940s to favour wider contacts with 
America in general. The dynamic was mutual: as black Americans forswore 
black Atlantic racial solidarity to exploit the logic of Cold War domestic poli- 
tics, West Africans were obliged to seek other allies. But at the same time, it is 
disappointing that Meriwether does not advance our assessment of West 
Africans in the United States who in the 1940s and 1950s were preoccupied 
with raising American awareness of contemporary Africa. The very archives he 
uses reveal the extended interactions of, for example, the African Academy of 
Arts and Research and numerous student unions with black American leaders 
and public opinion. The African sojourners' apparently significant impact 
needs to be assessed within the framework of black American history. 
While making his case for how African affairs shaped black American 
ideas, and thus shaped the American career of Pan-African dreams, Meriwether 
falls into one unfortunate trap. Although aware of the limited nature of black 
Americans' new understanding of Africa - for example highlighting how they 
attended especially to episodes which could be understood in light of their own 
situation while overlooking less legible events - his grand narrative is of a 
move from ignorance to knowledge, from misunderstanding to understanding. 
A better reading would be to see this instead as a move from one interested and 
partial image to another. This would have obliged Meriwether to treat more 
carefully what, exactly, black Americans were proud of concerning Africa by 
the 1960s. He mentions, for example, how black Americans had to wrestle with 
denigratory propaganda about Kenyan freedom fighters, but does not pick up 
the hints in his own evidence about how the colonists' "savage" became the 
black Americans' "fanatic." How else did the old African imagery get trans- 
formed in this new phase? Similarly, while tracing Nkrumah's positive impact, 
Left History 10.1 201 
Meriwether avoids mention of how news about Nkrumah's growing domestic 
opposition in the later 1950s was absorbed in America. When local complexi- 
ties could not be ignored, how were they rendered irrelevant in the newly imag- 
ined Africa? Meriwether's own epilogue highlights the value of such questions. 
The end of the last classic anti-colonial liberation struggle in South Africa in 
1994 finally dissolved the context in which black Americans could identify 
with Afiicans as noble nationalists. As conditions call for a new image of 
Afiica it would be useful to understand more about the image that reigned in 
the late twentieth century, as well as how the previous image dissipated. 
Philip S. Zachernuk 
Dalhousie University 
David Cunningham, There b Something Happening Here: The New Left, the 
Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (Los Angeles: University of California 
Press, 2004). 
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of VENONA, the emphasis in his- 
torical writing about intelligence has been on what "they" (foreign intelligence 
services and Communists) were doing to "us" (the state) not what "we" (the 
state) did to "ourselves" (ordinary citizens). The response of the state, be it in 
the United States, Canada, or the United Kingdom to the attacks of September 
11, however, has reiterated the importance of the domestic security environ- 
ment, particularly with respect to civil liberties. David Cunningham's book, 
There b Something Happening Here, is a timely reminder of why. 
In examining domestic security operations by the Federal Bureau of 
Investigation in the 1960s, There b Something Happening Here represents a 
new stage in the historical writing on the topic. Previous work consisted of a 
mixture of memoirs, histories written by activists, and more complex studies 
by historians writing with greater detachment, yet who had still lived through 
at least part of J. Edgar Hoover's redolent reign. 
Cunningham's study, on the other hand, is part of a welcomed stage where- 
by academics without any connection to the events they are writing about bring 
a more thorough and less emotional perspective to the subject matter. Equally 
significant is his sociological/historical approach to the topic which allows him 
to avoid simply telling us what the FBI did, as others before him have already 
done. Instead in a comparative fashion he focuses on what the FBI was, how it 
went about its work, what that work was, and the impact that it had. 
In this case that work was the Counter Intelligence Program, or COIN- 
TELPRO for short, which served as a weapon of destruction for a police force 


James H. Meriwether — Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961

Irvine, William D.

Left History 10.1 167 
Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel 
That Ended It (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004). 
In the autumn of 1952 all anyone in literary circles in Paris wanted to talk about 
was the public feud between Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. It had been 
occasioned by Camus's publication the previous autumn of The Rebel 
(L 'Homme revolt&), a philosophic anti-Communist manifesto and by Sartre's 
savage reply in the pages of Les Temps modernes and his unequivocally pro- 
Communist manifesto, The Communists and the Peace. Most of the arcane lit- 
erary quarrels of the Rue St. Germain have a shelf life of weeks or months but 
this one had legs and 50 years on is still commanding attention. Of course the 
protagonists were arguably the two most prominent Parisian left-wing intellec- 
tuals of the period, both destined for Nobel laureates. But on Aronson's account 
what explains the durability of the dispute is the debilitating impact on the 
Western left of the Cold War. As he notes, "[alfter their split a dispiriting 
'eitherlor' would prevail on the left: supporting revolutionary movements and 
governments meant agreeing to ride roughshod over freedom; defending free- 
dom meant opposing the only significant project challenging capitalism. In a 
deep sense, we are talking about the left's defeat in the twentieth century, its 
splintering of hope" (5). 
In fact, though, as this book makes clear, there is rather more to the con- 
text of this particular quarrel than the Cold War; equally important were the 
hopes and disappointments of the French "resistance generation" and the cor- 
rosive divisions provoked by the Algerian war. Both Sartre and Camus walked 
the stage of liberated France as representatives of the much-adored Resistance. 
In truth the contribution of Camus to the Resistance, while real, was modest, 
and that of Sartre more modest still (a fact that neither man disputed). Indeed 
both men had a "good occupation", one in which their literary careers, unlike 
those of many of their Resistance contemporaries, took off. Nonetheless, by 
1945 Camus edited the most important left-wing newspaper that emerged from 
the Resistance, Combat, and Sartre the most prominent journal, Les Temps 
modernes. The two of them, friends since 1943, took as their project the cre- 
ation of a newer, more progressive post-war France, free to be sure of all 
residues of Vichy, but shorn as well of the conservative and sclerotic features 
of the previous republic. The project failed - or at least it failed in any terms 
either man would have understood - and that failure owed something (but not 
everything) to the fissures on the left and the concomitant failure to create an 
effective, non-Communist but genuinely socialist left-wing movement. 
It is an open question whether such a movement was in the cards in 1945 
or whether Camus and Sartre would have had the requisite political credentials 
to direct it. But it is hard to deny that the simultaneous onset of the Cold War 
168 Reviews 
had a dampening effect on the project. And already the issue of communism 
was beginning to divide the left and, albeit still to a limited degree, Sartre and 
Camus. The issue that could not go away on the French left in the late 1940s 
was the vexed question of the Soviet "camps." "Labor" camps to French 
Communists and their leftist allies; "concentration" camps for Camus, some 
small fraction of the left and all of the right. (Although Aronson cannot be 
expected to know this, that particular distinction had a long history. In the 
1930s pacifist left-wing intellectuals opted for "labor"; overtly anti-fascist left- 
wing intellectuals opted for "concentration," to describe Nazi camps.) 
Common in all cases was the fact that whatever adjective was selected, the 
reality on the ground were hell-holes. 
Others had raised the issue before Camus did. But The Rebel (and Aronson 
correctly argues that the translation should be Man in Revolt) is a systematic 
and philosophically rigorous attack on the camps of Stalinist Russia and, more 
precisely on those in the West who apologized for the system, and more pre- 
cisely still, those on the non-Communist left who did so, by which he clearly 
meant Sartre. The message of Camus was that a left-wing intellectual must 
choose, and he must choose freedom and therefore must reject communist 
totalitarianism. Sartre's reply was equally blunt. Yes, one must choose, and he 
chose the side of History (i.e. the Soviet Union) and the side of the proletariat 
(i.e. the French Communist Party [PCF], warts and all). To do otherwise would 
be to side with the bourgeoisie and as he would note "in the name of liberty, 
equality, fraternity, 1 swore to the bourgeoisie a hatred which would only die 
with me"(128). There were more than a few ironies here. The Camus excoriat- 
ed by Sartre as a running dog of the bourgeoisie was actually the son of a wash- 
erwoman from a working-class district of Algiers. The man who had discov- 
ered his identity with the French working class was (much like his partner 
Simone de Beauvoir) a product of the Parisian upper-middle class. Perhaps this 
explains why when Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, 
he refused to accept it or the handsome sum that went with it; Camus, by con- 
trast, cashed the cheque and bought a house. Sartre, for all his much-publicized 
affinity for the French Communist Party, never quite managed to join it, unlike 
Camus who, in his youth and in the Popular Front era, had. 
Initially Sartre would appear to have gotten the better of the dispute. For 
the next twenty years most, although not all, non-Communist intellectuals 
appear to have sided with him. Camus scored well on the anti-Communist right 
but these were allies that he, a genuine leftist (Sartre notwithstanding) did not 
really want. But this was almost certainly the case because within a year of the 
outbreak of this feud Stalin died, the Cold War thawed, and the issues raised 
by Camus lost some of their immediacy. More important still, within two years 
the Algerian war broke out and gradually displaced the Cold War as the central 
reference point for the French left. And this would not be the finest moment for 
Left History 10.1 169 
Camus. In December of 1957 after receiving the Nobel prize for literature 
(seven years before his rival) he addressed a group of students at Stockholm 
University, one of whom was from Algeria and given to posing pointed ques- 
tions about the savage repression then being applied by the French government. 
The notoriously hot tempered Camus lost his composure and informed his 
antagonist that he condemned the lund of terror currently being carried out by 
Algerian nationalists which might some day strike his mother, still living in 
Algiers. In a phrase destined for some notoriety he declared, "I believe in jus- 
tice but I will defend my mother before justice" (21 1). Not a bad line and one 
that many would subscribe to, but a certain loser given the conduct and out- 
come of the war. 
The Algerian war, however, has now passed into memory, its passing made 
easier by the sordid quality of the post-independence Algerian regimes. Camus' 
blindness no longer looms quite so large. The Cold War is also over but in light 
of post-Cold War triumphalism, it is not surprising that Camus gets higher rat- 
ings in certain circles (and Sartre lower ones) than ever before, especially 
among ex-members of the European left - one thinks immediately of Franqois 
Furet and Tony Judt, anticipated by more than a decade by Bernard-Henry 
Levy. 
The great merit of Aronson's account is that he makes a major - and large- 
ly successful - effort to provide a balanced analysis of this debate. He notes, 
for example, that despite its prominence in the anti-Communist cannon, Man 
in Revolt is an imperfect book. Although the book was intended as a denunci- 
ation of totalitarianism and political murder, the Nazis, pretty good at both, 
drop out of sight after the early chapters. To be sure, Camus' targets were the 
"rational murderers", by which he meant the Communists rather than the "irra- 
tional" Nazi variety. But he is also strangely silent about the violence of 
Western imperialism. His analysis moves almost entirely at the level of ideas, 
the style is a-typically diffuse and imprecise and Man in Revolt may qualify, 
Aronson asserts, as one of Camus' worst books. He is no gentler, however, with 
Sartre's contemporary polemics, suggesting that the utterly turgid Communists 
and the Peace qualifies, in turn, as one of Sartre's worst outpourings. Sartre's 
indignation over the execution of the Rosenbergs in the United States and his 
discrete silence over the execution of Rudolph Slansky and his colleagues in 
Czechoslovakia, the author observes, made rather a mockery of Sartre's more 
or less contemporary assertion that the "intellectual's duty [was] to denounce 
injustice wherever it occurs" (170). 
But Sartre's abject deference to the PCF did not last very long. By 1956 he 
was outspoken in his opposition to the Algerian war, at a time when French 
Communists were still supporting the increasingly repressive measures of the 
Guy Mollet government. For Camus, Sartre's protests were the rantings of a 
privileged and isolated Parisian intellectual who could not grasp, as he, apied 
170 Reviews 
noir, could, that most French settlers in Algeria were not the owners of large 
agricultural estates but modest members of the working class. In truth, Camus 
had long been a more articulate critic of French colonial rule than Sartre or 
most of the Parisian left. Indeed he quit the Communist Party after two years 
in the late 1930s in protest against its general indifference to colonial issues. 
But Camus could not get past the violence of the National Liberation Front 
(FLN). The man who had courageously denounced the savage French repres- 
sion at Setif in 1945 could not, a decade later, appreciate that FLN violence had 
almost always been proceeded and exceeded by that of the French. Camus had 
been ahead of his times in protesting the abuses of colonial rule; what ulti- 
mately escaped him was that the problem lay in the colonial system itself. 
Sartre, for all his periodic blindness, understood this perfectly. 
Aronson's insistence that the rupture between Sartre and Camus was a 
tragic product of the Cold War is well argued. Yet it is entirely possible that 
some parting of the ways would have happened anyway. Camus was notori- 
ously thin skinned. Sartre and his companion Simone de Beauvoir had always 
been slightly miffed that, despite the genuine fhendship that existed between 
the three in the 1940s, Camus was never prepared, as so many of their acolytes 
were, to be part of the couple's adoring "famille" on the Rue St. Germain. It 
cannot have been easy for Sartre, the senior by eight years and the most pres- 
tigious normalien of his generation to be considered the equal of a man with 
the hnctional equivalent of an MA from a provincial university and to have 
received his Nobel prize seven years after his younger colleague. And, as both 
men were avid womanizers, it cannot have escaped Sartre that the infinitely 
more handsome Camus enjoyed a substantial advantage in that department. 
Nonetheless this is an important book. Aronson is at ease with the philo- 
sophic nuances of both men's writing; he is also comfortable with the histori- 
cal context. His writing is lucid and delightfully free of jargon. Although a 
great deal has been written about the post-1945 intellectual history of France, 
this book is high on the list of "must reads." 
William D. Irvine 
York University 
Herman Lebovics, Bringing the Empire Back Home. France in the Global Age 
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004). 
Those who are interested in the cultural identity of twentieth-century France, 
and more precisely in the struggle for the legitimate cultural identity of France, 
cannot avoid Herman Lebovics' scholarship. After, among other works, True 


Ronald Aronson — Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It

Carstairs, Catherine

178 Reviews 
empowerment with feminism and the term begins to lose its meaning and 
power. 
Camille Soucie 
Seneca College 
Craig Heron, Booze: A Distilled History (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2003). 
In his introduction to this well-written, soundly researched, and beautifully 
illustrated book Craig Heron claims that he never intended to write a book on 
"Booze." We are lucky that he did. Heron's book is a terrific contribution to the 
histories of working-class culture, masculinity, and alcohol. This masterful sur- 
vey covers early taverns, social occasions involving drinking, campaigns for 
moderation, temperance and prohibition, the business of alcohol production, 
the role of labour and unions, the regulatory regimes that developed in Canada 
after prohibition, the rise of the "disease" model of alcoholism, the emergence 
of beer parlours and cocktail lounges, the increase in women's drinking, the 
extra regulations and discrimination faced by aboriginal drinkers, and the 
impact of immigration on drinking patterns. Heron's carehlly organized 
research accounts for the morass of regional differences without confusion, and 
he also draws extensive comparisons between Canada, the United States, and 
European countries. 
In pre-industrial Canada, Heron shows, drinking was extremely common. 
Taverns were ubiquitous and customers helped themselves from a pail of 
whiskey at the door of their local shopkeepers. Many people made their own 
alcohol from spruce, dandelions, and hops. Neighbors drank at work bees and 
canal workers, loggers and fur traders all demanded whiskey in return for their 
labour. Heron contends that heavy drinking was a way of solidifying bonds 
between men. He argues that rugged masculinity was enacted through drunken 
brawls, but that alcohol consumption gave license to these performances, rather 
than initiating them. 
In the first half of the nineteenth century, temperance movements attract- 
ed a fairly broad range of "common" people, including farmers, shopkeepers, 
and journalists as well as members of the "respectable" working class. The 
movement sometimes critiqued upper-class drinkers, but temperance cam- 
paigns were dominated by the image of the "working-class drunkard who 
drank up his wages, left his children starving and beat his wife" (64). Heron 
argues that temperance distracted people from the larger economic forces of 
industrialization that were uprooting many lives by proposing an easy solution 
to poverty and criminality. Nonetheless, the effects were dramatic - drinking 
Left History 10.1 179 
on the job largely disappeared, alcohol was often barred from "bees" and other 
community events, and the tavern became increasingly disreputable. 
Even so, drinking continued and urban populations dramatically increased 
their consumption of beer in the second half of the nineteenth century. Because 
of the difficulties in preserving, brewing continued to be small-scale, with own- 
ers working alongside skilled craftsmen, while distilling became larger and 
relied more on mechanization. By World War I, nearly all bartenders and brew- 
ery workers in the major cities outside of Quebec were unionized and both the 
beer and the barrooms sported union labels. Taverns grew more glamorous 
with brass foot rails, mahogany bars, and pictures of manly pursuits such as 
hunting trips and sporting events. A man could find accommodation or a job 
and cash a cheque. Taverns were also important sites for political organizing 
and occasionally offered musical entertainment or boxing matches. 
The taverns were dominated by young men. In the late nineteenth century, 
men entered the workforce young and often did not marry until their late 20s, 
leaving 10-15 years with few domestic responsibilities. Many worked away 
from home, and the saloon became their community. These tavern-goers were 
sometimes boisterous, but in Heron's view, they were rarely the violent drunk- 
ards of the temperance imagination, and generally they kept their drinking 
under control. Most married men drank less, using their money to support their 
families. 
In the second half of the nineteenth century, people concerned about alco- 
hol turned to the state to impose a solution. Heron argues that prohibitionists, 
who were increasingly drawn from the upper and middle classes, were conser- 
vative progressives. Heron has little sympathy for the Woman's Christian 
Temperance Union (WCTU), who emerged as a major force in the fight for 
prohibition, complaining that "there was a relentlessly anti-male tone to much 
of the propaganda: men were weak, women were morally superior" (154). 
Prohibitionists worked at all levels - trying to reduce the number of licenses, 
restrict store hours, forbidding entertainment in addition to fighting for local- 
options and all-out prohibition. Heron insightfully points out that there were 
differences between urban and rural prohibitionists - urban prohibitionists 
thought that banning booze would encourage industrial efficiency, modernity, 
and rationality while the rural supporters had a more trenchant critique of 
industrial capitalism, which "brought a democratizing current into temperance 
campaigns" (167). In French Canada, temperance supporters believed that 
alcohol was hindering the survival of the French-Canadian race. Prohibition 
met with mixed success until the war, when Canada was swept up in a cam- 
paign for self-sacrifice, efficiency, and nationalism. One by one, every 
province except Quebec implemented prohibition, closing saloons, clubs, and 
retail stores. People were still allowed to consume alcohol at home and "near 
beer" was available at hotels. Brewers, distilleries, and wineries still continued 
180 Reviews 
to produce for export. 
Prohibition would be a short experiment. Quebec voted against it in 19 19, 
and British Columbia followed in 1920. In other provinces, Moderation 
Leagues appealed to individual liberty in defending their right to booze. Heron 
traces the shift in public opinion to a change in the social organization of gen- 
der. In the early part of the twentieth century, many middle and upper class men 
sought a more masculine and vigorous culture, less hindered by bourgeois self- 
restraint. "New women," and especially flappers, were less interested in the 
maternal feminism of the WCTU, and keenly partook in the alcoholic pleasures 
of their male peers. Organized labour, which had previously been sympathetic 
to temperance, turned increasingly wet. And returned soldiers, who had accus- 
tomed themselves to drinking overseas, demanded their beer. 
Moreover, prohibition was easily flaunted. Doctors prescribed alcohol for 
a wide range of supposed ills, with prescriptions peaking in December. 
Drugstores occasionally became makeshift bars while blind pigs and other 
bootlegging establishments flourished. Enforcement was a challenge - many 
police were reluctant to investigate, some judges were loathe to convict, and 
bootleggers regarded fines and bribes as part of the cost of doing business. 
In most provinces, prohibition was replaced by sparsely decorated and 
government-run liquor stores and later by carefully controlled public drinking 
establishments. Beer parlours had no entertainment, even checkers or music, no 
stand-up bar, and a limit on how many glasses could be on the table at a given 
time. Cocktail lounges, which were less common, served a greater variety of 
drinks to a better-dressed clientele. Three large conglomerates - Molson, 
Labatt, and Canadian Breweries came to control most of the market. 
Prohibition had hurt the unions, but they regrouped. By 1960, brewery work- 
ers were the highest paid industrial workers in the country. "Union-made" 
appeared again on beer bottles. Bartenders were also unionized under the Hotel 
and Restaurant Employees. As province after province repealed prohibition, a 
greater proportion of Canadians began to drink and they drank more. 
Beginning in the late 1970s, "neo-temperance" movements emerged. 
Alcohol use fell substantially from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Alcohol 
researchers moved away from focusing solely on the "alcoholic" and paid more 
attention to the dangers of increased consumption, and to the problem of binge- 
drinking. Campaigns against drunk driving increased penalties and enforce- 
ment across the country. 
Throughout, Heron's emphasis is on the male drinking experience and 
male sociability. In providing a corrective to earlier literature on temperance 
and prohibition in Canada, which he sees as being too sympathetic to the crit- 
ics of "demon rum," Heron perhaps leans too far to the other side. Drunken 
brawls injured and even killed workers. For women who watched men "smash- 
ing crockery and furniture" and feared they might be next, this was not a per- 
Left History 10.1 181 
formance of "symbolic aggression," it was real (125). It would have been use- 
ful to hear more from the women who took their drunken husbands to court for 
non-support, from children who suffered abuse, or even to have taken the nar- 
ratives of members of Alcoholics Anonymous more seriously. Problem 
drinkers are a minority, but there are more of them than Heron wants to admit, 
and there are valid reasons to be concerned about the harm they do to them- 
selves and to others. Compared to his terrific work on drinking cultures and 
policy, Heron pays less attention to the history of alcohol research and treat- 
ment, although he makes a compelling case for how badly many treatment pro- 
fessionals dealt with working-class drinkers. More than once, Heron mentions 
that moderate alcohol consumption has health benefits, but he pays relatively 
little attention to contemporary research on the costs of alcohol consumption 
including disease, family disruption, violence, and accidents. He dismisses the 
"total consumption model," used by the Addiction Research Foundation of 
Ontario, but I would argue that the evidence that harm increases as total con- 
sumption increases is actually quite compelling, at least in certain drinking cul- 
tures. The World Health Organization recently determined that four percent of 
the global burden of disease is caused by alcohol - about the same percentage 
as tobacco. 
These minor concerns aside, Heron has created a lively world of drinkers, 
temperance supporters, and workers. Heron should be applauded for taking on 
such an ambitious project, and adding so much to our knowledge of drinking, 
masculinity, and worlung-class culture. Cheers! 
Catherine Carstairs 
University of British Columbia 
Marlene Shore, ed., The Contested Past: Reading Canada 5 History (Toronto: 
University of Toronto Press, 2002). 
The Contested Past performs a service to the Canadian historical community. 
Aside from providing excellent notes for doctoral students approaching their 
comprehensive exams, it assembles the essential points of nearly 80 years of 
Canada's leading historical journal. The book comprises 69 article excerpts 
accompanied by commentary by Marlene Shore. These excerpts are divided 
into four mainly chronological sections and then subdivided by theme within 
those periods. No explanation of the selection criteria is given, but presumably 
the choice was based on informed personal impressions. This book could 
anchor an undergraduate historiography class, as it reveals how some of the 
main trends and issues in the study of Canada's past have changed, or not 


Craig Heron — Booze: A Distilled History

Hewitt, Steve

Left History 10.1 201 
Meriwether avoids mention of how news about Nkrumah's growing domestic 
opposition in the later 1950s was absorbed in America. When local complexi- 
ties could not be ignored, how were they rendered irrelevant in the newly imag- 
ined Africa? Meriwether's own epilogue highlights the value of such questions. 
The end of the last classic anti-colonial liberation struggle in South Africa in 
1994 finally dissolved the context in which black Americans could identify 
with Afiicans as noble nationalists. As conditions call for a new image of 
Afiica it would be useful to understand more about the image that reigned in 
the late twentieth century, as well as how the previous image dissipated. 
Philip S. Zachernuk 
Dalhousie University 
David Cunningham, There b Something Happening Here: The New Left, the 
Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (Los Angeles: University of California 
Press, 2004). 
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of VENONA, the emphasis in his- 
torical writing about intelligence has been on what "they" (foreign intelligence 
services and Communists) were doing to "us" (the state) not what "we" (the 
state) did to "ourselves" (ordinary citizens). The response of the state, be it in 
the United States, Canada, or the United Kingdom to the attacks of September 
11, however, has reiterated the importance of the domestic security environ- 
ment, particularly with respect to civil liberties. David Cunningham's book, 
There b Something Happening Here, is a timely reminder of why. 
In examining domestic security operations by the Federal Bureau of 
Investigation in the 1960s, There b Something Happening Here represents a 
new stage in the historical writing on the topic. Previous work consisted of a 
mixture of memoirs, histories written by activists, and more complex studies 
by historians writing with greater detachment, yet who had still lived through 
at least part of J. Edgar Hoover's redolent reign. 
Cunningham's study, on the other hand, is part of a welcomed stage where- 
by academics without any connection to the events they are writing about bring 
a more thorough and less emotional perspective to the subject matter. Equally 
significant is his sociological/historical approach to the topic which allows him 
to avoid simply telling us what the FBI did, as others before him have already 
done. Instead in a comparative fashion he focuses on what the FBI was, how it 
went about its work, what that work was, and the impact that it had. 
In this case that work was the Counter Intelligence Program, or COIN- 
TELPRO for short, which served as a weapon of destruction for a police force 
202 Reviews 
not content to watch passively but rather desiring to take the war to its enemies. 
Although the types of tactics associated with it predate its creation, COIN- 
TELPRO oEcially began in 1956 when the FBI targeted the Communist Party 
of the United States for obliteration. Later, in the 1960s, the Bureau's list of tar- 
gets for COINTELPRO grew dramatically, encompassing a wide range of 
groups on the left and even some on the right. It is here that Cunningham offers 
a unique approach by comparing the nature of the COINTELPRO operations 
directed against the amorphous New Left with those employed against right- 
wing "white hate groups." 
In taking this comparative approach Cunningham finds a surprising level 
of consistency as the Bureau employed many similar methods against both tar- 
gets. Where it differed, primarily due to the FBI's own institutional perspec- 
tive, was in COINTELPRO's goals in dealing with them. For the New Left the 
end objective was its complete annihilation. Driving this was the Bureau's hos- 
tility toward activists not because of their actions but because of their beliefs. 
The FBI from Hoover on down perceived these as being anathema to every- 
thing the Bureau represented. On the other hand, the desired result against 
racist organizations was not elimination but containment. Indeed, the FBI tar- 
geted racist groups in the first place not because of their abhorrent views but 
because they advocated and used violence. From the Bureau's patriotic per- 
spective, Klan members did not "hate" America the way the New Left did, but 
instead were misguided or poorly educated patriots who would otherwise be 
harmless. This speaks to the ideological bias inherent in the FBI in its dnve to 
ensure the maintenance of the status quo. In places the police and racists even 
shared a worldview: Klan depictions of Martin Luther King Jr. reflected some 
of the same characterizations applied to him by Hoover. 
If this important book has a flaw it is in Cunningham's failure to delve 
even further into the FBI's mindset. More biographical information on the 
agents involved would have strengthened the work's presentation of how the 
FBI as an institution viewed its respective targets on the racist right and the rad- 
ical left. 
Although somewhat problematic in attempting to address post-September 
1 1, 200 1 domestic security developments (the Total Information Awareness 
program discussed as if still active was, in fact, cancelled, in part because of 
negative publicity), Cunningham raises questions of relevance not just to the 
finctioning of the FBI or any domestic security agency but to society as a 
whole. The lack of a clear and narrow definition of what terrorism is, coupled 
with, and here Cunningham does not make his point strongly enough in the 
conclusion, an institutional emphasis on pursuing terrorists with career rewards 
for those taking the most aggressively ambitious paths, will inevitably lead to 
significant abuses of civil liberties. Cunningham calls for vigilance against the 
activities of security agencies, not an easy task given the veil of secrecy that 
Left Histoly 10.1 203 
cloaks their work. Still, his book represents an invaluable contribution through 
surveillance of the past to promoting alertness for the present and future. 
Steve Hewitt 
University of Birmingham, UK 
Paul Rutherford, Weapons of Mass Persuasion: Marketing the War Against 
Iraq (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 
Although it is now commonplace to observe the way in which politics is 
increasingly reliant on marketing strategies to deliver its message, rarely is 
such an observation so rigorously and compellingly pursued as it is in Paul 
Rutherford's Weapons of Mass Persuasion. Rutherford provides a bracing 
account of the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq and details how the Bush 
administration packaged and sold the war with great success to the American 
public. Bush's address to the nation in March 2003, just days before the actual 
invasion began, was less a report to the citizenry on matters crucial to the 
nation than the culmination of the elaborate promotional campaign designed 
specifically to transform the idea of war against Iraq into a desirable product. 
By the time the bombs starting falling on Baghdad, enthusiasm for the war 
had reached a fevered pitch among certain sectors of the American public, and 
all that was left for the Bush administration to do was to deliver this product to 
eager consumers. The news media served as the ideal distribution mechanism 
for this. Whatever the opportunities the Intemet provided to assemble a dis- 
senting or dissonant account of the events in Iraq, television retained its privi- 
leged place as the primary source for information about the war. Rutherford is 
at his most incisive and illuminating in detailing the experience of "real-time 
war" as broadcast on the trinity of twenty-four-hour news channels that control 
the American market: CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. But such a "real-time 
war" could not have occurred without the Pentagon serving as its CO-producer, 
not simply in terms of actually waging the war that served as the raw material 
for television reports, but by investing in all manner of media technology to 
ensure that it would be the primary content provider for the media's coverage. 
The quirks of advanced technology came to define a Pentagon house-style. 
Ranging from the greenish hue of the footage gleaned from night cams 
attached to soldiers' helmets to the perpetually disintegrating pixellated images 
bounced from desert to satellite to newsroom, these stylistic tics served to 
authenticate the reports filtered, processed, and often completely assembled by 
the Pentagon that the news channels fi-equently conveyed without question or 
commentary. 


David Cunningham — There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence

Beemyn, Brett

The Geography of Same-Sex Desire: Cruising Men in Washington, DC in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Wall, Sharon

226 Reviews 
Robin Jarvis Brownlie, A Fatherly Eye: Indian Agents, Government Powev, and 
Aboriginal Resistance in Ontario, 1918-1939 (Don Mills: Oxford University 
Press, 2003). 
For anyone who would like to know more about Canadian First Nations histo- 
ry after the banning of the potlatch and before the rise of Red Power, I suggest 
picking up a copy of Robin Jarvis Brownlie's new book, A Fatherly Eye: Indian 
Agents, Government Power, andAborigina1 Resistance in Ontario, 1918-1939. 
As the title suggests, Brownlie's approach is three-pronged: first, to document 
"the destructive legacy of the Indian Affairs system" (X), second, to reveal the 
agency of First Nations people as they contested DIA (Department of Indian 
Affairs) control and, third, to explore the history of the Indian agent, that "lit- 
tle scrutinized," yet "pivotal figure" who served as "middle man" between 
these two forces. The end result is a nuanced portrayal of the workings of state 
power as well as a detailed picture of reserve life in inter-war Ontario. 
Brownlie's entry into the subject is via a comparison of two case studies: 
the Ontario Indian agencies of Pany Sound and Manitowaning in the Georgian 
Bay area. As in the case of other intensely regulated groups, the tragic fact of 
state surveillance and power vis-a-vis Native peoples led to the creation of 
voluminous records upon which to reconstruct their history (though in some 
cases, these have been destroyed). In this case, Brownlie is able to draw on the 
extensive correspondence, reports and memoranda that traveled between the 
DIA and the agents who witnessed reserve life first hand. Insisting on the 
importance of reading these Eurocentric documents "against the grain," 
Brownlie also concedes with refreshing candor that these provide "at best, par- 
tial, fragmented depictions of Aboriginal points of view; at worst, they might 
be egregious distortions" (xx). In efforts to balance this picture, Brownlie also 
draws on letters written by band members to their agents and the DIA and, to 
a lesser extent, on a very small number of oral interviews, both of which help 
flesh out the story. 
That story is not a happy one, it quickly becomes clear. These decades rep- 
resent, in Brownlie's estimation, "a bleak period" in First Nations history as 
bands faced devastating economic hardship, agent-control of their band coun- 
cils, disregard for their treaty rights, and increasingly coercive measures aimed 
at their assimilation. Before delving into these particulars, Brownlie provides a 
broad overview of the structure of the DIA in the interwar period, usefully inte- 
grating much of the secondary literature on the subject. The Indian agent was 
an essential part of this story, the "man on the spot" and the living symbol of 
DIA power in First Nations' communities. Ironically, though occupying the 
lowest rung of the DINS administrative ladder, on a daily basis, he had enor- 
mous impact on reserve life. Thus, we watch the agent as he invades, controls, 
Left History 9.2 227 
and occasionally ameliorates the lives of his Aboriginal clients in matters eco- 
nomic, political, and moral. Throughout the study, Brownlie does especially 
well at exposing the huge cultural divide across which such acts were carried 
out. The fact that agents and Aboriginals had fundamentally different under- 
standing~ of such concepts as leadership, generosity, gratitude, and the nature 
of a promise (or treaty) ensured, according to Brownlie, that relations would be 
fraught with animosity. 
There are (at least) two other parts to the story as well. Stemming from a 
Foucauldian commitment to exploring "the 'micro-physics' of power rela- 
tions" (xxiii), Brownlie recognizes that state power was not monolithic. In 
effect, Brownlie argues, though an integral part of the DIA system, agents also 
represented a "third party in the power struggle" (32), sometimes challenging 
or reinterpreting DIA policy according to their own interpretations of 
Aboriginal welfare. In this vein, Brownlie illustrates that the "fatherly eye" 
occasionally had its benevolent side. Thus the same agents who arrogantly 
vetoed band council decisions, punished their political opponents by withhold- 
ing relief, and policed the sexuality of Aboriginal women could also be known 
to champion hunting and fishing rights, to challenge the imposition of guiding 
licenses, and to caution individuals against taking up DIA offers of enfran- 
chisement. In coming to these positions, their own personalities - their atti- 
tudes to Native peoples, their political ideologies, even simply their own tem- 
peraments - Brownlie notes, played important roles. Here this study takes us 
beyond the eitherlor debates of the Great Men v. the Little People of history, 
and succeeds in blending the structural insights of social history - including 
those of gender and class - with an appreciation for the role of personality and 
the individual. This is true not only in the case of the Indian agents, but also in 
the Native case, where Brownlie provides mini-biographies of several 
Aboriginal "dissenters." 
More broadly, the importance of the local and the particular is a theme 
which runs throughout this study. Thus, while confirming that reserve life was 
undoubtedly shaped by an Indian Act that was national in scope, Brownlie is 
also careful to show that DIA influence could be felt differently in different 
locales. A commitment to this view underlies the first chapter which outlines in 
detail the economic, geographic, political, even religious particularities of the 
two agencies under study. Indeed, Brownlie demonstrates the varying impor- 
tance of agriculture, hunting, trapping and the particularities (or absence) of 
treaty rights in the two agencies and how these differences shaped agent actions 
and, ultimately, the nature of reserve life. 
To further complicate the story, Brownlie also demonstrates that, whatev- 
er the power of the DIA agent (and it was great), it was met with repeated and 
determined resistance on the part of Native peoples. Returned veterans, we 
learn, were frequently key agitators for change (as indeed they were in the 
228 Reviews 
dominant society). On the other hand, we also hear stories of parents interven- 
ing to control teachers at reserve day schools, band members protesting the 
imposition of compulsory enfranchisement legislation, and, during the devas- 
tating poverty of the Depression, band councils working (if unsuccessfully) to 
standardize the nature of relief. Indeed, Native agency is another of this book's 
prominent themes. Interestingly, however, some of the ambivalence Brownlie 
has exhibited on this issue in the past (and, perhaps, rightly so) also comes 
through here.' Apparently not wishing to romanticize or exaggerate Native 
control, the narrative oscillates somewhat between an emphasis on "the sur- 
viving tradition ofAborigina1 self-determination" (153) and the extent to which 
First Nations resistance "faced serious obstacles" (15 1) due to the oppressive 
nature of DIA power. 
Brownlie's handling of the question of assimilation reveals a similarly 
nuanced approach. First, it is wisely posited that all cultural change cannot sim- 
ply be read as Native capitulation. On the other hand, following the trend of 
recent scholarship, it is argued that the assimilationist project was generally 
unsuccessful. In trying to account for this, Brownlie makes some interesting 
and rarely noted points. On the question of education, it is suggested that the 
impact of residential schooling has been overestimated, given that the vast 
majority of children attended reserve day schools close to home. Most provoca- 
tively, Brownlie argues that the state itself was ambivalent as to the possibility 
of truly assimilating its Aboriginal wards. In effect, this suggestion provides a 
nice counterpoint to literature that has stressed the DINS assimilative drive. 
Again, this is owing to a view of state power as multi-dimensional. Ultimately, 
Brownlie contends, by the interwar period, statements of policy issuing from 
the Ottawa office of Duncan Campbell Scott were only half-heartedly pursued 
in the field, where agents frequently wondered if "the Indian" was actually 
capable of change. In the end, Brownlie concludes, "oflicials appear to have 
resigned themselves to a more or less permanent state of tutelage" (40) vis-a- 
vis Native peoples. Added to the fact of state ambivalence was the geographic 
reality of segregation on reserves and hostile Euro-settler attitudes, both of 
which served as fk-ther barriers to assimilation. We are left with the nagging 
question: who really supported the assimilationist project? First Nations resis- 
ted it, white settlers did not welcome it, and state officials more or less accept- 
ed the impossibility of achieving it. 
In sum, this is First Nations history as one hopes it will more often be writ- 
ten. Brownlie effectively combines social, institutional, biographical history to 
provide a well-rounded picture of Aboriginal-government relations in this peri- 
od. No doubt, the balancing of the macro-level of state policy and the micro- 
level of individual agencies will serve as a useful model for future study. On a 
more prosaic level, the review of the administrative context that this book pro- 
vides will serve as indispensable background reading for new scholars in the 
Left History 9.2 229 
field. 
If one had to point to any weaknesses in this study, I would say that I 
sometimes wanted to hear the sources speak more clearly for themselves. I 
wanted to read, for instance, the words of band members as they appealed to 
Indian Affairs, or those of self-satisfied Indian agents as they rejected their 
appeals. More substantively, some might suggest that Brownlie is over ambi- 
tious with this project; that one is hard-pressed to cover the history of treaty 
rights, band politics, the organization of First Nations relief, health care, edu- 
cation, and even Native participation in fairs in some 150 pages. 
On the other hand, what might be seen as a limitation might also be this 
book's unique appeal. What it offers is the "big picture" of a small picture. 
When I finished it, I felt I could imagine the day-to-day life of an interwar 
reserve in greater totality than was previously possible. Given most scholars' 
on-going preference for narrowly defined projects of historical research, this 
"slice-of-life" study comes as a welcome addition to the historiography. More 
than this, this is the kind of book you could give to an undergraduate class and 
have them walk away with a solid understanding of the grievances which 
underlie modem Aboriginal rights movements. And, in light of Brownlie's own 
commitment to "dismantl[ing] colonialism in Canada" (1 54), I would think that 
broadly educating the next generation would be seen as a most worthy goal. 
Sharon Wall 
University of British Columbia 
l For instance, in a 1994 CO-authored article, Brownlie took issue with those historians 
who "go beyond the argument for the recognition of Native agency to one that uses evi- 
dence of Native resilience and strength to soften, and at times to deny, the impact of 
colonialism, and thus, implicitly, to absolve its perpetrators." Clearly Brownlie does not 
wish to do this here. Robin Brownlie and Mary-Ellen Kelm, "Desperately Seeking 
Absolution: Native Agency as Colonialist Alibi?'Canadian Historical Review 75.4 
(Dec 1994): 543-556. 
James Holstun, EhudS Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution 
(London: Verso, 2000). 
EhudS Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution is an engaging and 
sometimes enraging book. Holstun sets out to prove that the popular praxis of 
labouring people played a crucial role in shaping the English Civil War. He 
also attempts to demonstrate that the Civil War constituted the first capitalist 
and anti-capitalist revolution of the modem period. Finally, Holstun argues 
that the experiences of radical, lower-class men and women in the 1640s and 
1650s can help activists in the twenty-first century better understand their own 


Robin Jarvis Brownlie — A Fatherly Eye: Indian Agents, Government Power, and Aboriginal Resistance in Ontario, 1918-1939

Lincove, David A.

Radical Publishing to "Reach the Million Masses": Alexander L. Trachtenberg and International Publishers, 1906-1966

Perry, Adele

Left Histoly 10.1 19 1 
Antoinette Burton, ed., Gendel; Sexuality, and Colonial Modernities (London 
and New York: Routledge, 1999). 
It has become axiomatic and even trite to remark on the inseparability of some 
or all of gender, sexuality, race, empire, nations, and nationalism. Gendec 
Sexuality, and Colonial Modernities takes this as its bedrock and pushes well 
and appropriately beyond. Editor Antoinette Burton's introductory piece 
locates the collection within the shifting terrain of feminist and post-colonial 
scholarship. In the process, Burton sets an intellectual agenda for critical analy- 
ses of what she calls the "unfinished business" of colonial modernities, for a 
scholarship that is alive to the centrality of gender and sexuality to nations and 
empires, the inseparability of metropoles and colonies, and committed to 
"reimagining the content and context of colonial modernity in the wake of 
global capital and post-colonial criticism" (2). 
The relatively short essays are organized thematically. Part I deals with the 
connections between colonial modernity, sexuality, and space. Nayan Shah 
relates the construction of San Francisco's Chinatown as immoral with the 
shifting politics of American domesticity, a point he has since expanded in his 
deft Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco k Chinatown 
(2001). Phillipa Levine sees British attempts to control venereal disease in 
Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements as an example of the tension between 
the alleged modernity of the colonial state and the coercion that so often 
enforced it. This is an important point that is too often lost in discussions that 
privilege the formal articulations of empire over their messier and more reveal- 
ing applications. Angela Woollacott's "White Colonialism and Sexual 
Modernity: Australian Women in the Early Twentieth Century Metropolis," 
probes these connections in a different way. She argues that white Australian 
women living and working in London highlight the ties that bind metropole, 
colony, and racialized modernities. 
Part I1 moves on to representation and cultural production. Karen 
Dubinsky's treatment of the "spectacle" of race at Niagara Falls brings togeth- 
er race, gender, nation, and class and reminds us how unhelpfil the too-often 
presumed separation between cultural and social history is. Yael Simpson 
Fletcher's analysis of interwar Marseilles makes a point recently driven home 
by Catherine Hall's majestic Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the 
English Imagination (2002), namely that empire was always coming "home," 
in this case camed by Afncans settled in France. Saloni Mathur offers a com- 
plex reading of postcard images of Indian women, arguing that they "stage sal- 
vation, benevolence, 'cooperation,' and contempt, and are stamped with 
women's desire, fascination, racism, and revulsion" (1 33). 
Domesticities and nations are the topic of Part 111. Enakshi Dua's analysis 
of the "Hindu Woman's Question" in the early twentieth century demonstrates 
192 Reviews 
the salience of race and nation to Canadian history and suggests how women's 
reproduction could be variously mobilized by different constituencies. This 
point is reconfirmed by Fiona Paisley's examination of inter-war white femi- 
nists' critique of Aboriginal child removal policies in Australia. Mary Hancock 
examines the relationship between "home science," imperialism, international 
feminism, and nationalism in twentieth-century India. Frances Gouda's essay 
moves into the new terrain of the Dutch empire, showing how Indonesian 
nationalists relied on masculinity and modernity to fashion a post-colonial 
identity. 
The essays in Part IV look at how colonialism produced new, syncretic 
cultural forms. Malathi de Alwis offers a suggestive analysis of how local and 
imperial practices of shaming and respectability coalesced to monitor the bod- 
ies of Sinhala women. Imperial meldings are also Joy Dixon's topic, although 
in a very different way. She analyses how theosophists developed an unstable 
combination of the 'modern' and the 'ancient' and the 'Eastern' with the 
'Western.' Mrinalini Sinha argues that the passage of the Child Marriage 
Restraint Act of 1929 symbolized the transition from "colonialism as the 
agency of modernity and the advent of a new nationalist 'Indian' modernity," 
and reminds us of the centrality of women's activism to the latter. 
The topical variety in this collection is in some senses striking. Burton 
makes a bold and wise choice in rejecting the hackneyed and historically inap- 
propriate divisions between "old" and "new" worlds, "first" and "third" 
worlds, and colonies and metropoles. The inclusion of three essays on North 
America (a remarkable two of them dealing with Canada) is an especially 
important contribution toward a more thorough reconsideration of the place of 
empire in North American history and vice-versa. 
The common themes that bind these essays together confirm that dislodg- 
ing the nation from its choice spot at the historiographical table is both politi- 
cally significant and intellectually fruitful. Issues and topics crisscross the thir- 
teen essays just as they did the imperial world. Each author exposes the gen- 
dered and sexualized character of colonial modernity in its various and shifting 
incarnations. The centrality of home, hygiene, marriage, and morality to the 
political order comes up again and again. This telling convergence suggests 
that there is a specificity here that the rubric of "colonial modernities" - bor- 
rowed as a "speculative frame" (4) from Tani Barlow - is not entirely able to 
convey. 
This is a tension, but it is a productive one. In keeping with recent trends 
in imperial historiography, this collection never takes the proverbial easy way 
out and instead presents colonialism in all its trickiness. It is no surprise that so 
many of the contributors to this volume - including Shah, Levine, Wollacott, 
Burton, Dubinsky, Paisley, Hancock - have produced provocative book-length 
studies since the publication of Gendel; Sexuality, and Colonial Modernities in 
Left History 10.1 193 
1999. All of this is evidence, if more was needed, of how the wedding of fem- 
inist and post-colonial scholarship can produce work that is critical, engaging, 
and sharp. 
Adele Perry 
University of Manitoba 
Ternrna Kaplan, Taking Back the Streets: Women, Youth, and Direct Democracy 
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 
As the current attempts to bring former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to 
trial for the atrocities committed during the 1970s make clear, too often justice 
is a lengthy process and an elusive right. When Pinochet is finally brought to 
justice, our attention will undoubtedly be focused on the brutality of state ter- 
ror. In giving such regimes a history, it is incumbent upon us to also remember 
the thousands who stood in opposition to them. In her latest book, Temma 
Kaplan, Rutgers University historian and author of several books on social and 
political movements in Spain, insists that we remember the Pinochet regime 
from this angle. Through female and youth movements that fought injustice 
and forgetfulness in Chile, Argentina, and Spain, Kaplan explores the recent 
histories of three countries that witnessed some of the worst civil rights abus- 
es in the latter half of the twentieth century. This book recounts the ways that 
women and young people came to confront such regimes and demand account- 
ability, and is a forceful exploration of the rituals of resistance. 
Taking Back the Streets is a survey of the political action taken by women 
and youth in the context of the repressive regimes in Chile, Argentina, and 
Spain in the years known as the transition to democracy. The book's opening 
chapters relay the centrality of gender to both repression and resistance. 
Descriptions of the physical torture of Chilean women considered a threat to 
Pinochet in the mid 1970s are reminiscent of the atrocities visited upon women 
in war-tom parts of the world today. Kaplan identifies women who survived 
physical torture and sexual abuse to bring their stories first to each other, and 
then to the attention of the world. Despite their vulnerability and humiliation, 
women organized, spoke out, and eventually took to the streets. Collectively - 
and as women - they organized, for example, as Women for Life. Throughout 
the 1980s, in the difficult years of "protected democracy" in Chile, women 
used their gender identity - and a popular organizing date, International 
Women's Day - to mobilize for human rights, equality, and democracy. The 
demonstrations around this March celebration, according to Kaplan, helped 
transform "ordinary Chilean women from fearful housewives to militant com- 
batants" (100). 


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