Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Sheinin, David

Left History 10.1 195 
were made aware of their identity. 
In the final chapter of the book, Kaplan turns to Spain. In 'Demonstrating 
to Remember in Spain' she examines the politics of the last years of Franco's 
government and women's efforts to shape the country's democratic future and 
address the profound gender inequality in the fascist era. Here, too, women and 
youth grapple with a collective desire to bury the past. 
The repressive and violent regimes of Latin America in the 1970s and 
1980s and the interminable reign of Franco in Spain left a death toll that is 
barely comprehensible. These regimes, though, produced resistance move- 
ments, sometimes consisting of unlikely participants like women and youth 
who lacked basic civil rights and who were firmly excluded from the public 
arena. That Pinochet may yet face justice has depended on the courageous 
opposition movements fomented in dangerous times. This book is a testament 
to the importance of feminist and left-wing organizing from the 1970s to the 
1990s. Kaplan demonstrates the critical role of physical ritual in protesting 
locally and globally, across languages and cultures. While this book lacks the 
visual images she purports to be so central to direct action, she may be forgiv- 
en. Here she has given us the stories of individual women and young people 
who lost so much but who risked their own lives by using their bodies to tell 
stories their oppressors and history denied. 
Tamara Myers 
University of Winnipeg 
John D. French, Drowning in Laws: Labor Law and Brazilian Political Culture 
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 
Drowning in Laws starts by rejecting the substitution of purported class inter- 
ests and behaviours for the words that express them (discourse). From that 
point French launches two premises. First, social conflict finds expression 
through speech. Second, the law is a crucial focal point for that expression. 
Combining methods in labour, cultural, and legal history the book starts 
chronologically with the 1943 Consolidation of Labour Laws (CLT) under cor- 
poratist and ostensibly pro-worker president Getulio Vargas. French maintains 
that as an amalgam of worker protections and advances the CLT was illusory. 
During the six decades that followed, workers became concerned with trans- 
forming the ideals behind the CLT into reality; they quickly came to see their 
country as "drowning in laws but starving for justice" (152). Drawing on a 
broad array of strong primary and secondary sources, French shows how work- 
ers used the CLT as a weapon to achieve social justice. He breaks down, refor- 
196 Reviews 
mulates, and then solves many associated problems in Brazilian history. It is 
reductionist, for example, to simply affirm or deny Varguista foundational 
myths as many scholars have done. In considering Vargas' complex legacy as 
both author of the CLT and defender of elite interests, French brings to bear a 
study of legal instruments and institutions in their relation to working people. 
Focusing primarily on Sao Paulo, the hub of urban working-class activity 
in the latter half of the twentieth century, Drowning assesses how scholars have 
approached the CLT in the past. French is especially concerned with discours- 
es and actions of the authors of labour law, government ministry staffs, and 
members of labour courts. But the book's principal strength lies in its attention 
to the discourses of workers and labour activists in their response to and use of 
the CLT to advance worker interests. The intersection of worker politics and 
the activist interpretation of labour law led to distinct forms of social critique, 
protest, mobilization, and politics among Brazilian workers that in turn shaped 
the labour movement and how it functioned. If there is a chronological climax 
to this conjuncture of legal, social, and political strategies it would be the emer- 
gence of Luis Inacio "Lula" da Silva. Lula's political rise began in radical 
labour protest in 1970s Sao Paulo. In the 1980s and 1990s he transformed his 
regional workers' base into a national political movement that led in the end to 
his election as President of the Republic. 
Is Drowning labour history? French is at pains to point out that this is more 
than "a straightforward social history of labour" (xi). But by effectively inte- 
grating alternate methodologies - modern and postmodern - French has chart- 
ed new directions for labour history. The result is a fascinating book, exciting 
for how it draws on (and in French's words engages with) the discursive turn 
and postmodern theory as well as newer methodologies in the histories of the 
law, work, and working peoples. But Drowning is also profoundly challenging 
for the manner in which the author grounds his thinking in the trajectory of 
Latin American labour history. It has been a long time since I have read as the- 
oretically innovative a study so meticulously researched in Latin American pri- 
mary and secondary sources that also draws so richly and thoughtfully on the 
works of Charles Bergquist, Hobart Spalding, and (the early) Alain Tourraine, 
among other "older" labour historians. 
Drowning invites comparison with Dofia Mariak Stoiy: Life History, 
Memory, and Political Identity, Daniel James' outstanding study of working 
people in Peronist Argentina. French and James are among a small handful of 
the preeminent historians of Latin American labourlwork writing in English 
today. Each book represents a different sort of pinnacle in the field. In his 
respective analysis, each author explains methodological conception and proj- 
ect execution. Each struggled with how to write his respective project for over 
a decade, considering and rejecting alternative models. But where James set 
labour history aside in a jump from modern to poststructural analytical frame- 
Left History 10.1 197 
works, French has not made the leap. Drowning signals the evolution of labour 
history, not its end. 
This divergence marks two larger points about labour history, the history 
of work and scholarship since the late 1980s. First, researchers on the left in 
Canada and the United States studying Latin American workers have moved 
increasingly in James' direction. But French's work is far more in keeping with 
the ongoing importance of labour history in the historiography of Latin 
American countries - innovatively conceived but within the realm of the mod- 
em. That French's work bears this imprint is a tribute to the manner in which 
he draws on the current Brazilian scholarship. The French-James dichotomy 
also underlines the contributions of Duke University and, secondarily, the 
University of North Carolina in shaping historiographical continuity and 
change. Through the late 1980s, Charles Bergquist trained students at Duke, a 
top Latin American history program in the United States. When Bergquist left 
for the University of Washington (in part to reconnect with his labour activist 
roots in the Pacific Northwest), Duke hired another prominent labour historian, 
Daniel James. Dorla Maria shows that as Duke scholars in many departments 
spearheaded change toward postmodernism in the 1990s, James was clearly 
influenced by those shifts and away fiom labour history methodologies that 
had defined his earlier work. 
Duke University Press (where Doiia Maria appeared) emerged as what 
many considered the leading publisher of monographs in Latin American his- 
tory, both for the exceptional quality of its list and an editorial emphasis on 
path-breaking postmodern methodologies. In the meantime, in both Latin 
American and American history, the University of North Carolina Press chart- 
ed an alternative course, publishing extremely well-edited monographs that 
were not postmodern. If Doiia Maria marks the high water mark of the shift 
toward the postmodern at Duke University Press, Drowning represents the 
same for North Carolina's emphasis on scholarship that remains in the realm of 
the modern (despite, as in French's case, interest in and the application of post- 
modern methodologies). Ironically perhaps, when James left Duke for Indiana 
University five years ago, Duke hired John French as his replacement. 
David Sheinin 
Trent University 


John D. French — Drowning in Laws: Labor Law and Brazilian Political Culture

Editors' Note 
Historians on the left would be wise to follow Daniel Guerin in understanding 
that the "revolution cannot be simply political. It must be, at the same time, 
both cultural and sexual and thus transform every aspect of life and of socie- 
ty." For Left History this has meant publishing articles and reviews that 
explore the history of resistance to capitalist, patriarchal, and imperial oppres- 
sions through alternative means of organizing, not only political selves, but 
also social and private selves. Understanding these histories demands search- 
ing for limited source materials; it requires a close attention to the details of 
language and actions and their hidden or multiple meanings; and it places the 
historian under the constant tension of trying to reconstruct the worlds of peo- 
ple who often actively sought to keep their lives apart from the dominant cul- 
ture, and away from the eyes of a searching state - traditionally the pre-emi- 
nent repositories of historical knowledge and evidence. It is in these explo- 
rations that left historical analysis and research has found itself overlapping 
with the newer, burgeoning scholarship in LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, 
transgendered, queer) studies - an overlap evident in previous issues of Left 
History featuring David Churchill's "Personal Ad Politics: Race, Sexuality and 
Power at The Body Politic" (8.2), as well as in the publications of other jour- 
nals with common mandates such as Radical History Review's 1995 queer 
issue focused on American history (no. 62). The editorial collective at Left 
History decided to examine this overlap in a special issue devoted to LGBTQ 
studies drawn from several national contexts. We hoped this issue would reveal 
the territory historically shared by the left and the LGBTQ communities (and 
their multiple constituent parts), while also raising new questions about how, 
why, and where the politics and cultures of each historically diverged. 
The articles that make up this issue build on well-established themes in 
LGBTQ and left historical studies. Brett Beemyn and Elise Chenier each 
emphasise the significance of place, and the urban geography of Washington 
DC and Toronto respectively, in shaping the histories of these cities' gay and 
lesbian communities, as well as further delineating class and racial divides. 
Paul Jackson similarly evokes the segregated geography of Canadian-run POW 
camps to describe the experiences of gay men interned in World War Two.This 
collection of articles reminds us that the multiple forms of oppression at work 
in capitalist societies cannot be separated from the multiple sites of resistance: 
Chris West describes how science fiction fans and writers in domesticated post- 
World War Two America, escaped the repressive atmosphere of their lived real- 
ities through their utopian visions. Jackson argues that in POW camps with 
largely Nazified, and therefore intensely homophobic, inmate populations, 
homosexual men turned to the otherwise repressive Canadian state for protec- 
7 
0 Left History 
9.2 (SpringiSummer 2004) 
8 Editors' Note 
tion against violence. And Marc Stein in his autobiographical essay on navi- 
gating the considerably less overt sexual politics of the academic job market, 
reiterates the subtle ways in which prejudice can function: one need not be 
openly homophobic to participate in the reproduction of hegemonic forms of 
oppression. 
These articles also raise important new questions about the state of the 
queer left. Most striking is the persistence with which historically, individual 
struggles and sense of self, collided against collective endeavours and associa- 
tions. David Berry examines how this collision preoccupied Daniel Guerin, a 
prominent French Marxist anarchist, and gay rights activist, personally and the- 
oretically. It was, for GuCrin, paramount that individual rights and freedoms be 
retained in the midst of the collective struggle for class liberation. We can see 
from Berry's analysis and Jackson's work how the policing of sexual identity 
was socially and culturally defined and therefore struck at the heart of individ- 
ual identity, yet served broader political agendas. Class and sexual politics do 
not automatically converge although their mutual sympathies are the subject of 
much previous historical research. As Chenier reveals, the lines that were 
drawn within the post-war Toronto lesbian community are not those of class, 
or even race; but were rooted instead in survival strategies based in necessity, 
and located in the street and underground economy. Jeb Alexander, in 
Beemyn's analysis, was simultaneously a victimizer and victimized, punished 
for his sexual orientation by police, co-workers, and strangers, while looking 
down upon and mistreating blacks and the poor. West accordingly insists that 
we must not confuse cooperation, shared interests, and shared oppression with 
the automatic creation of a "community". Historically, as in the present, 
LGBTQ communities are made up of many people, with manifold allegiances. 
LGBTQ historical analysis foregrounds the challenge of identity politics 
to the Marxist left. Marxists' insistence on the primacy of class has been pro- 
foundly shaken by the voices of feminists, LGBTQ, and civil-rights scholars, 
among others, who have demonstrated that for many, the primary determinant 
of one's experience can be gender, sexual orientation, or race, and by implica- 
tion, not class. Leftist anxiety at this finding has found its way onto Left 
History's pages with Bryan Palmer's "Leon Trotsky: Planet Without a Visa," 
(9.1) where Palmer argues that while we must appreciate the centrality of alter- 
nate forms of discrimination to the experience of many, it is through recogniz- 
ing, as did Trotsky, the universality of our class-based exploitation that the peo- 
ple will empower themselves and throw off their oppressors. Trotsky, like 
GuCrin, recognized that while exploitation is a universal experience, it takes 
many forms and functions in the social and cultural as well as the political 
spheres. Thus, Left History seeks here to further the integration of LGBTQ 
issues into leftist historiography, in order to deepen our understanding of the 
vicissitudes of power relations that structure all aspects of life. 
Editors' Note 9 
We would like to take this opportunity to thank Paul Leatherdale, Harold 
Averill, Alan Miller, and Don McLeod at the Canadian Gay and Lesbian 
Archives in Toronto who were very generous with their time and resources as 
we searched for a cover image and to Ben Lander for his excellent photographs 
of possible cover images that were far too large to scan. This is also the final 
issue on which Steve Penfold will serve as book review editor, and we would 
like to thank Steve for his exemplary service to the journal. 
The Editors 
August 2004 


Editors' Note

Chenier, Elise

Rethinking Class in Lesbian Bar Culture: Living 'The Gay Life' in Toronto, 1955-1965

Dummitt, Christopher

Peter Boag — Same-Sex Afairs: Constructing Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest

Montrie, Chad

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 
Left History 9.2 219 
Canadians' use of nationalism allowed them to soften the blow of wholesale 
job loss, sustaining direct union action and winning government legislation that 
provided advance notice of layoff, severance pay, pension reinsurance, job 
placement assistance, and preferential hiring rights. In the United States, how- 
ever, both the AFL-CIO's "Buy American" campaign and New Left veterans' 
''community strategy" failed to galvanize widespread opposition and won only 
limited, poorly enforced state and federal legislation to assist displaced work- 
ers. 
To lingering materialists, a thesis that centers around the "empowering 
myths" (10) of community and nation might raise suspicions that Industrial 
Sunset is "post-structuralist". But the book is nothing of the sort. High firmly 
roots his interpretation of deindustrialization in the political and economic real- 
ities of the late twentieth century. Although he is interested in rhetoric, there is 
no mention of texts or workers' bodies as signifiers. In a straightforward way, 
High investigates the role played by differing cultural values during a major 
transformation in workers' lives. He is clearly working within the tradition of 
E.P. Thompson, recognizing how worker consciousness varies, changes, and 
matters for class struggle. 
High begins his book with a chapter on the cultural evolution of the Great 
Lakes region from industrial "heartland" to "Rust Belt," providing an interest- 
ing history of the latter term. This compares to the resiliency of "Golden 
Horseshoe" to describe Southern Ontario, which he explains was due to the 
health of the region's economy (which was more diversified) and the faltering 
rise of Canada's frontier sunbelt (which provided less of a foil). On the other 
side of the border, the decline of concentrated industries in places like 
Youngstown, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan, along with relatively better oppor- 
tunities developing in the Southern states, combined with memories of the 
"Dust Bowl" to transform the Upper Midwest both in image and reality. 
Chapter two chronicles the impact of job loss on workers who went from 
thinking of the factory as their home and co-workers as their family to shock 
and displacement after receiving notice. High draws on oral history interviews 
here and finds that Americans felt much more insecure and uncertain, identify- 
ing themselves as '1-75 gypsies' or 'transplants' when they were called back 
from layoff for a job somewhere other than their hometown. As their unions 
failed them, they also felt helpless and disillusioned, with a few turning bitter- 
ly antiunion when they found entirely different jobs. None of the Canadian 
workers, on the other hand, felt compelled to question their identities as work- 
ers or union members, because they were still bound to people and places that 
made those identities meaningful. Their unions did not stop plant closings, but 
they did not simply abandon the membership and, in fact, mustered a strong 
fight for compensation and assistance. 
The next chapter delves into another aspect of capital mobility in the post- 
220 Reviews 
industrial era, when increased criticism by environmentalists combined with 
the appeal of cheaper land, lower taxes, and freedom from unions to lure fac- 
tories to suburban industrial parks or rural sites. Between 1945 and 1984, High 
argues, planners and the companies they served gave more attention to incor- 
porating environmental values into factory exteriors, marking a return to indus- 
trialism's earlier attempt to blend pastoral ideals with mill design. This new 
aesthetic of industry, however, was simply one part of a larger effort to cam- 
ouflage and legitimate corporate efforts to lower production costs and pursue 
the ideology of growth - whatever the costs to local communities and nations. 
As a social environmental history of a neglected aspect of postwar industrial- 
ization this section, although a bit out of place in the book, is not only engag- 
ing but also astute. 
High goes on to compare the differences between plant closings in 
Southern Ontario and the Upper Midwest. He notes that American companies 
made conscious decisions against modernizing their facilities and instead chose 
to invest somewhere else, shifting the blame for job loss to aging equipment 
and unproductive workers. In Canada, shutdowns hit the electrical, textile, and 
other industries but planned obsolescence did not claim a single major auto 
assembly plant or integrated steel mill. Consequently, these industries 
remained vital parts of the region's economy and unionized auto and steel 
workers remained active members of the country's organized labor movement. 
Chapter five takes up the responses workers and union leaders made in the 
United States and Canada when faced with plant shutdowns. High suggests 
that the Vietnam War drove the militant New Left from the American labor 
movement, tarnished nationalism for them, and encouraged participants to 
embrace decentralization and localism. Later, when the factory closings began, 
they organized around defending local communities. One problem with this 
argument, however, is that the New Left was never so completely alienated and 
disengaged from American unions (which were never so fully supportive of the 
war). Many activists were also sympathetic to an internationalist, often social- 
ist, vision and that certainly must have shaped how they saw capital's role in 
deindustrialization. But High is right that organized labor's emphasis on "Buy 
American" protectionism, tainted by racism and deflecting attention away from 
corporate culpability, clashed with the veteran New Left's response. He 
demonstrates this in two Ohio case studies, Fridgidaire in Dayton and 
Youngstown Sheet and Tube. 
The approaches American workers and their supporters took to protecting 
their interests against plant closings produced few results, High explains, 
besides some state legislation that was rarely enforced. In Canada, however, 
workers and their unions rallied around anti-American nationalism and won 
many important legislative victories. An earlier version of economic national- 
ism had warned against too much foreign investment and this was modified in 
Left History 9.2 22 1 
the 1970s and 1980s to focus attention on the motives and likely impact of 
American disinvestment. High points out that this was a somewhat erroneous 
explanation of the forces behind deindustrialization, but the particular myth of 
nation served workers and their unions well. Their movement against plant 
shutdowns culminated in a wave of plant occupations during the 1980s, the 
spread of national anxiety among the general population and political leaders, 
and significant assistance from the federal government. 
High explains, however, that Canadian workers failed to stop the plant 
closings. They were no more successful in this respect than Americans and this 
makes his comparison of national unionization rates somewhat puzzling. He 
suggests that the divergence between the two countries, starting in the 1950s 
and now reflected in Canada's 41 percent rate of unionization, nearly double 
the level in the United States, is due to a greater capacity to resist plant clos- 
ings and concessions. Perhaps this is true in part - following from the contin- 
ued vibrancy of organized labor, the greater respect it shares among workers 
and the general public, and more hesitance among employers to attack unions. 
But there are many other reasons for the pitiful performance of organized labor 
in the US and much stronger showing in Canada. 
High also suggests that Americans would have fared better if they rose "in 
defence of community based on nation" (166). It is not clear, however, how 
American workers would have used the same strategy as Canadians to suc- 
cessfully protect their interests, considering that Canadian nationalism seemed 
to work because it was anti-American. In the end, it seems, neither set of work- 
ers had a viable strategy for resisting plant shutdowns which, put in their prop- 
er context, are actually part of a new global mobility of capital. But High's 
book goes a long way in helping us to understand some of the more recent 
struggles in North America against that phenomenon. 
Chad Montrie 
University of Massachusetts Lowell 
John Saville, Memoirs from the Left (London: The Merlin Press, 2003). 
John Saville's accomplishments are many. He was the founder (with E.P. 
Thompson) of the Reasoner and the New Reasoner, editor of the Dictionary of 
Labour Biography and the British volumes of the Dictionnaire biographique du 
movement ouvrier international, long-time editor (with Ralph Miliband) of the 
Socialist Register, and one of the founders of the Society for the Study of 
Labour History. As Chair of Economic History at the University of Hull, 
Saville was instrumental in establishing an impressive labour history archive 
and he published over 100 books and articles in a prolific career spanning the 


Steven High — Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America's Rust Belt, 1969-1984

Leeson, David

Who Shall Decide, When Doctors Disagree? 
David Leeson Responds in Turn 
David Leeson 
I don't have much to say to Robert M. Stein's response, except maybe this: I'm 
not entirely convinced that historians "have overwhelmingly relied on the pro- 
tocols of nineteenth-century realistic fiction," as White and others have 
claimed. Over the last year, while teaching at Laurentian University, I con- 
ducted a seminar on topics in the history of nineteenth-century Europe, which 
included a four-week unit on the Franco-Prussian War and its impact on 
France. The structure of this unit was both chronological and historiographi- 
cal. The first week was devoted to the war itself, and to the traditional military 
history thereof. The second week was devoted to the Paris Commune, and the 
social history of warfare. The third week was devoted to the popular memory 
of these conflicts during the period of the Third Republic, and the cultural his- 
tory of warfare. The fourth week was devoted to Emile Zola's novel La 
DBbLicle (1892), which I thought would help illuminate the previous three 
weeks' topics. 
This was a fortunate choice: my students were quite enthusiastic about 
Zola's work. La DBbbcle not only helped reinforce various points made by 
their historical readings: it made the conflict come alive. All of them agreed 
that the characters and events in the novel seemed real in ways that their his- 
toriographical counterparts did not. So if contemporary historians are indeed 
using the protocols of nineteenth-century realistic fiction, they're not using 
them very well. Having compared the two just recently, I have to say that I 
don't see much resemblance between them. 
Let me now turn to Nancy Partner, who says I just don't understand 
Hayden White. White wasn't serious when he criticized historians for eschew- 
ing the literary techniques of Joyce, Yeats, and Ibsen, she says. He was just 
teasing. He was just making mischief. "One would think," she says, "that aRer 
some thirty years of the linguistic turn, historians might by now have learned 
to recognize rhetorical strategies for what they, rhetoiically, are and not read 
earnest literal messages when mild shock tactics were intended." 
Would one indeed? Partner does not support her claims with any proof: 
she just appeals to her own authority. So let's turn away from Hayden White's 
early essays, and examine what he says in his most recent collection, Figural 
Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (1999). "Literary modernism did not 
repudiate narrative discourse but discovered in it a content, linguistic and 
tropological, adequate to the representations of dimensions of historical life 
only implicitly perceived in nineteenth-century realism," he says. "The ade- 
50 
0 Left History 
10.1 (Fallminter 2004) 
Who Shall Decide When Doctors Disagree? 51 
quacy of the 'content of the form7 of literary modernism to the representation 
of both the form and the content of the kind of historical life we call modern 
argues for the relevance of literary modernism to a modem historical dis- 
cour~e."~ 
He sounds fairly serious to me. Later, White argues that historians must 
write about "modernist events" like the Final Solution in modernist ways: "its 
representation, whether in history or in fiction, requires the kind of style, the 
modernist style, that was developed in order to represent the kind of experi- 
ences which social modernism made possible, the kind of style met with in a 
number of modernist writers. . . 
Not much "teasing assertiveness" there. Still later, White even alludes to 
his 1966 manifesto when he writes: 
What I am suggesting is that the stylistic innovations of 
modernism, born as they were of an effort to come to terms 
with the anticipated loss of the peculiar sense of history 
which modernism is ritually criticized for not possessing, 
may provide better instruments for representing modernist 
events (and premodernist events in which we have a typical- 
ly modernist interest) than the storytelling techniques tradi- 
tionally utilized by historians for the representation of the 
events of the past that are supposed to be crucial to the devel- 
opment of their communities' identity. Modernist techniques 
of representation provide the possibility of defetishizing both 
events and the fantasy accounts of them which deny the 
threat they pose in the very process of pretending to repre- 
sent them realistically and clear the way for that process of 
mourning which alone can relieve the burden of history and 
make a more if not totally realistic perception of current 
problems pos~ible.~ 
Unless Partner wants to say that White is just making mischief when he 
suggests that modernism can help console the bereaved, I would say that's case 
closed. But a skeptical reader may want more to convince them that White was 
in earnest. They may want the judgment of an expert: an expert like - Nancy 
Partner. 
One of the works collected in The Content ofthe Form is a discussion of 
the work of Paul Ricoeur. In the course of this discussion, White remarks that 
"the very notion of a modernist historiography, modeled on the modernist, anti- 
narrativist novel, would be in Ricoeur's estimation a contradiction in  term^."^ 
According to her own account, when she first read this, Partner didn't realize 
it was intended as a criticism. As a result, she was surprised to discover that 
White had been "rather scathing and dismissive of Paul Ricouer" in a published 
interview. "White apparently thinks that Ricoeur is too content with the tradi- 
52 Leeson 
tional literary instruments," she says, "too willing to celebrate narrative for its 
accomplishments, and in the end too committed to the western tradition of 
attempts to perfect the illusion of a true mimesis of time. Since Ricoeur virtu- 
ally defines history as the human attempt to endow life with meaning and 
accepts that meaning, though not life, tends to come in story form, White 
seems to regard him as retrograde in both literary-historical and political 
ways."5 
But he shouldn't - at least he shouldn't, according to Nancy Partner. 
"White's own work does its work too well to encourage the attentive reader to 
look for anti-narrative, anti-formalist routes in some uncertain onward direc- 
tion for history, toward an aesthetic epistemology more open to radical 
visions," she says. 
The author's determination to strike out in that direction 
seems a committed but still a personal mission. His work 
doesn't lead there. As I read it, whether he approves or not, 
Hayden White's work stands in close affinity with that of 
Ricoeur, and reaches back to Aristotle of the Poetics, for pri- 
mary questions about the confrontation of mind with world. 
This seems to me an interesting case of dissonance between 
authorial and textual intentiom6 
I agree. What's more, I said as much myself. "It's not easy to squire 
White's continuing enthusiasm for 'the kinds of antinarrative nonstories pro- 
duced by literary modernism' with his own structuralist analysis of Western 
historiography" I said. "It's not easy to reconcile Hayden White's prescriptions 
for a meaningless history with his descriptions of history-writing," I said. 
So, thank you, Doctor Partner: you've been very helpful. The witness is 
excused. The defence rests. 
Notes 
Hayden White, "Literary Theory and Historical Writing," in Figural Realism: Studies 
in the Mimesis Eflect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 26. 
Hayden White, "Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth in Historical 
Representation," in Figural Realism, 42. 
Hayden White, "The Modernist Event," in Figural Realism, 82. On the previous page, 
White says: "it seems to me that the kinds of antinarrative nonstories produced by lit- 
erary modernism offer the only prospect for adequate representations of the kind of 
'unnatural' events - including the Holocaust - that mark our era and distinguish it 
absolutely from all the history that has come before it" [emphasis added]. 
Who Shall Decide When Doctors Disagree? 53 
Hayden White, "The Metaphysics of Narrativity: Time and Symbol in Ricoeur's 
Philosophy of History," in The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 
University Press, 1987), 173. 
Nancy Partner, "Hayden White: The Form of the Content," History and Theory 37,2 
(May 1998), 169. 
Ibid. 


Who Shall Decide, When Doctors Disagree? David Leeson Responds in Turn

Rudy, Jarrett

188 Reviews 
she contributes to, the translation. What does this work say of Ives himself? 
Acting as translator, Ives' own thoughts and opinions inevitably influence the 
material with which he has worked. The clarity of his arguments, the insight 
with which they are accompanied, and the connections he makes between the- 
ories indicate he has the potential to produce promising theoretical works. In 
the fbture, it will be particularly interesting to see if Ives attempts to 'translate' 
or operationalise his theories for the site-specific contexts of contemporary 
social movements. 
JanaLee Cherneski 
Wolfson College, Oxford University 
Carl Freedman, The Incomplete Projects: Marxism, Modernity, and the Politics 
of Culture (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002). 
Today, cultural domains are at the forefront of political debate. In the United 
States, right-wing commentators claim great liberal conspiracies in Hollywood 
and in the media while on the left, critics have felt it necessary to launch a radio 
station to counter right-wing talk radio. In Canada we see these issues play out 
over opinions about the CBC and regarding funding to university programmes 
in the arts. In The Incomplete Projects, the Marxist literary critic Carl 
Freedman argues that in light of the current unprecedented economic and polit- 
ical dominance of capitalism, culture is a domain that offers an opportunity for 
Marxists to think politically again. It is here, drawing on Marx, that Freedman 
offers the study of culture as a strategy to destabilize right-wing dominance. 
The book is separated into two parts. The first is more theoretical, serving 
to situate the rest of the essays as part of three "Incomplete Projects." The first 
of Freedman's incomplete projects is capitalism. Capitalism is incomplete 
because it has not "hit the wall" of environmental destruction or revolution 
which Marxists have long predicted. Because capitalism continues to exist, 
Marxism continues to be essential for understanding the world today and thus 
represents the second incomplete and ongoing project. The final incomplete 
project is modernity. Freedman asserts that while modernity can most easily be 
defined as the era dominated by the capitalist mode of production, capitalism 
is an economic category, and as such, Marxism can, at best, problematize the 
economic dimension of modernity. Thus Freedman legitimizes using Jiirgen 
Habermas and other theorists outside of the Marxist canon to explore questions 
of culture. 
The second part of the book is an empirical demonstration of the theoreti- 
cal directions of the first. Collected here are seven previously published essays 
Left History 10.1 189 
on cultural topics that Freedman says inhabit the "middle realm" of modern 
culture, thus blurring the problematic borders between high and mass culture. 
Topics here include M*A*S*H, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 
notion of England in the television show Upstairs Downstairs and in the film 
A Room with a Mew, sexuality and race in All the Kingk Men, "work" in 
Dashiell Hamrnett's Red Harvest, paranoia in the science fiction of Philp K. 
Dick, and contradictions in Nineteen Eighty-Four. These are all fascinating 
essays that problematize culture in interesting ways. Because of the diversity 
of these essays, I want to concentrate on two as a way to demonstrate briefly 
both the strengths and weaknesses of Freedman's approach. 
The first point to be made about all these essays is their innovative use of 
genre to make important points that would otherwise be overlooked. This is 
done in an impressive fashion in the essay on Kubrick's 2001(1968). Freedman 
argues that Kubrick films remake and redefine the genre to which they belong; 
hence, he looks at the way in which Kubrick exposes the ideological and his- 
torical frameworks of science fiction and science fiction cinema and then ques- 
tions whether true science fiction cinema is possible at all. Freedman begins by 
noting that 2001 was not released in a conservative period in American histo- 
ry unlike other important science fiction movies which were popular in the 
1950s and 1970s. The catch-22 of the genre of sci-fi film is its defining char- 
acteristic: the special effect, or effects that are self-consciously "filmic." 
Freedman argues that subsequent sci-fi films either allow special effects to 
dominate (the Star Wars films and Close Encounters of the Third Kind) while 
dialogue and story are found wanting, or, in the case of Ridley Scott's Alien and 
Bladerunner, there is a closer alliance with science fiction literature, somewhat 
atypical of sci-fi cinema, which prevents a critique of the genre. In 2001, on the 
other hand, Kubrick self-consciously allows special effects to dominate dia- 
logue and story, problematizing human banality itself. Furthermore, Freedman 
argues, this approach self-consciously puts into question the possibility of sci- 
ence fiction film because Kubrick's solution only leaves space for lame imita- 
tions. Freedman's analysis, by comparing and contrasting these films with oth- 
ers from within and without their genre, as well as with works from other lit- 
erary forms, brings out interesting conclusions. Explaining why a film is clear- 
ly better than another is something less frequently done these days in studies 
that relate to popular culture where texts are too often seen as equal in value. 
The essay on W A * S * H ,  while interesting, is not as strong. Freedman fol- 
lows M*A*S*H as it moved from the form of a novel to becoming a movie and 
finally a television series. Once again, comparing and contrasting genres and 
probing the historical context helps to pose interesting questions. First, 
Freedman looks to explain why W A * S * H  the movie came to be seen as an 
anti-Vietnam War movie when it never clearly took an anti-Korean War stand. 
His answer comes from the conservative nature of Hollywood at the time and 
190 Reviews 
the support of a vague "anti-anti-Communist" feeling in the late 60s. The ques- 
tion he poses of the television series is equally interesting. Freedman asks how 
it was that during the taping of its monumental final episode, the cast received 
telegrams of congratulations from Cold War warriors like Ronald Reagan and 
Henry Kissinger even though at the time WA*S*H was the most politically 
liberal show on television? 
Drawing on Roland Barthes' theory of inoculation, Freedman argues that 
M*A*S*H's protests against the war and American politics were largely dif- 
fused through Hawkeye's continued individualism. This individualism was 
solidly rooted in the status quo of middle-class America and particularly the 
medical discipline. This contention is less convincing. First of all, to claim 
Hawkeye as an individualist clearly forgets that he was drafted and that if he 
had had a choice in the matter, he would have been back home in Maine. His 
individualist antics were window-dressing for his captivity in the army. 
Freedman seems to let down his rigorous comparative analysis here when 
labelling Hawkeye as an individualist incapable of collective action. Hawkeye 
simply does not rate as a profound individualist when compared to other screen 
legends of the 1960s like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, to give just one 
example. 
An alternative source of the sitcom's "inoculation" is found in its faith in 
American collectivism. Frequently the characters in the sitcom were called to 
come together in collective action (including Hawkeye) to save particular indi- 
viduals. An example mentioned by Freedman, but never noted as collective 
action, was the episode when there was an attempt to tar Margaret Hoolihan as 
a communist. All the characters, even Major Winchester, are involved in an 
elaborate plan to prevent this injustice from taking place. The message seems 
to be, even in difficult situations like being forced to go to war, that on h d a -  
mental questions most Americans are ready to come together. This seems to be 
the Barthesian myth. Historically, looking at the McCarthy trials, Americans 
did not come together collectively to prevent attacks on innocent people until 
late in the game. In the end, however, this critique suggests that WA*S*H the 
television series had much in common with the movie in its vague "anti-anti- 
communism" position (as Freedman would put it) and thus is a small caveat to 
what is a book that poses exciting questions and offers rigorous answers in the 
important area of culture. 
Jarrett Rudy 
McGill University 


Carl Freedman — The Incomplete Projects: Marxism, Modernity, and the Politics of Culture

Langford, Tom

232 Reviews 
epithet "Russian Mohawks," thus mobilizing the Enlightenment's full arsenal 
of vituperative metaphors of race, geography, and incivility in one simple con- 
struction. 
A curious and possibly important undercurrent in British popular imagery, 
both positive and negative, was the ongoing interest in Peter's troubled rela- 
tionship with his son Alexis, a relationship that ultimately led to Alexis' execu- 
tion for treason. Somehow this sad episode held special meaning for British 
publicists, as if it encapsulated some essential truth about Peter and Russia. But 
what? What does this ongoing fascination with the execution of the regent tell 
us about British political sensibilities or their assumptions about civilized king- 
ship? Herc, as elsewhere, the reader must draw hisiher own inferences. 
Cross eschews simple political conclusions from his material. Neither does 
he impose any specific interpretive model on it. He describes the book telling- 
ly as "a wide-ranging survey that embraces all forms of written evidence as 
well as visual images." Here, as in much of his previous scholarship on Russia 
and Britain, he delights in offering rich descriptions of little-known material, 
and then allow the readers to make of it what they will. This approach to nar- 
ration is both pleasing and slightly frustrating. Pleasing because it places the 
primary material at center stage and it avoids forcing cultural ambiguities and 
cross currents into a single rigid model. Frustrating because it deprives the 
reader of the author's own readings of his materials, his sense of their signifi- 
cance in grasping the geo-politics of culture. Living as we do in a time when 
the cultural symbols and material interests of states and peoples are intertwined 
with powerful and often violent consequences, it would be instructive to apply 
these heightened sensibilities to past time, especially if it were done by some- 
one with the expertise and erudition of Anthony Cross. From that single per- 
spective this book, otherwise so engaging and consistently attentive to detail, is 
something of a missed opportunity. 
Gary Marker 
State University of New York at Stony Brook 
Gary Kinsman, Dieter K. Buse and Mercedes Steedman, eds., Whose National 
Security? Canadian State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies (Toronto: 
Between The Lines, 2000). 
This collection originated in a 1996 conference at Laurentian University which 
brought together critical researchers and Left activists concerned with under- 
standing and critiquing dominant notions of Canada's "national security." 
Reviews 233 
Including the editors' introduction, there are 23 chapters in the book, 15 of 
which are revised versions of papers presented at the conference. The editors 
have done a nice job of thematically introducing and organizing the papers, and 
securing additional contributions to round out the collection. Nevertheless, 
with its short, highly empirical or anecdotal papers, Whose National Security? 
reads very much like a conference proceedings. 
The editors argue that "national security" is an ideological concept which 
represents thc partial interests of privileged groups as the general interest of the 
"nation" (280). Furthermore, the concept is both elastic, thus offering powerful 
groups the ability to readily change the focus of national-security campaigns 
(280); and hegemonic, in the Gramscian sense of being uncntically taken-for- 
granted by most citizens (283). 
The concept of national security is used to undermine the democratic 
rights of those groups who dissent from the patriarchal, capitalist, heteronor- 
mative, and racist relations of ruling in Canadian society (281). The editors call 
for critical investigations of national security "from the standpoints of those 
defined as being on the margins, of those defined as being subversive" (279). 
They also argue that critical scholarship on national security can play an impor- 
tant role in social-justice politics: "defending the democratic rights of the mar- 
ginalized and excluded requires that we challenge and deconstruct the rhetoric 
and practices of 'national security"' (284). 
The analytical framework of Whose National Securit?/P has three other 
noteworthy features. Firstly, national security is presented as "a broader form 
of social and moral regulation" that "attempts to define 'proper Canadian' sub- 
jects" (3). Secondly, the scope of concern of national security is defined much 
more widely than in traditional studies, and includes gender, sexuality, ethnie- 
ity and immigrant status. Thirdly, non-state agencies like Churches are seen as 
having important roles in national-security campaigns. 
The strongest papers in the collection are those that exemplify aspects of 
the editors' theoretical perspective. In "Constructing Gay Men and Lesbians as 
National Security Risks, 1950-70," Gary Kinsman studies the social organiza- 
tion of the national-security campaigns against gay men and lesbians from the 
standpoints of the targets of the campaigns. The paper critically juxtaposes 
empirical materials from three sources: interviews with twenty gay men and 
four lesbians who were personally targeted by this security campaign; inter- 
views with state security operatives; and textual analysis of official security 
documents. Kinsman's paper highlights how resistance by gay men and les- 
bians forced the security police to change its practices. 
Paula Maurutto's "Private Policing and Surveillance of Catholics: Anti- 
Communism in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto, 1920-60" is a 
shortened version of a paper first published in Labotlr/Le Travail. She analyzes 
234 Reviews 
the Catholic Church's anti-communist practices in Toronto as being primarily 
concerned with moral regulation. Indeed, the Church's role is crucial to 
Maurutto's understanding of the Cold War which "operated as a mixed social 
economy in which government interests merged with the goals of private vol- 
untary institutions" (46). 
While the two aforementioned papers are the strongest in the collection, 
many of the other papers will be of interest to readers with particular interests. 
For instance, I first flipped to those papers that discuss researchers' experiences 
with trying to gain access to state surveillance records. The book includes three 
papers in the section "Finding Security in the Archives." In addition, in the sec- 
tion "Old Methods and Recent Trends" there is a paper by Evert Hoogers which 
describes the attempts by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) to 
gain access to documents created on CUPW by the RCMP Security Service 
between 1965 to 1984. This is fascinating, practical information for anyone 
who has been frustrated by the limited information that the Canadian Security 
Intelligence Service (CSIS) is willing to release about past surveillance activi- 
ties. 
The acts of mass destruction and murder that occurred on 11 September, 
2001 have pushed issues of "national security" to the front of the political 
agenda. Canada joined George W. Bush's "war on terrorism" by sending com- 
bat troops to Afghanistan. This has increased the possibility that Canadian ter- 
ritory will be targeted in any future al-Qaeda attacks. The government also 
enacted an anti-terrorism law, Bill C-36, that creates new police powers and 
limits civil and political rights. Furthermore, CSIS has been promised a 30% 
increase in its budget over the next five years so that it can hire 280 new intel- 
ligence officers and expand overseas covert-spy operations (Globe and Mail, 
13 June 2002: Al). Security concerns are also paramount in the Canadian 
state's response to the movement against corporate globalization, as witnessed 
by the policing of the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec City and the 
2002 G-8 Meeting in Alberta. Is Whose National Security? relevant in this new 
political moment, or is the book passe? 
Most of the papers in Whose National Security? deal with Cold War 
themes, surveillance and social control. For the period between 1945 and the 
1970s, we learn important details of the monitoring and targeting of gays and 
lesbians, of groups regarded as "fronts" for the Communist Party, of new left 
and aboriginal groups, and of immigrants and Catholics. This was a period 
when political and cultural dissenters were defined as enemies and subject to 
intense surveillance. Does the contemporary secret police establishment con- 
flate criminality and dissent in the same way? In his chapter on police spying 
at the University of Saskatchewan, 1920-71, Steve Hewitt, guardedly com- 
ments that police spying at the university "supposedly ended with the death of 
Reviews 235 
the RCMP Security Service in the 1980s" (100). He is guarded because it is 
impossible to know for sure. On the same theme Larry Hannant comments, 
"[wle know so little about the contemporary Canadian security intelligence 
system that we cannot possibly offer any informed view on whether or not it 
merits the slightest iota of support from citizens" (220). In this vacuum of hard 
information it seems reasonable to assume that political dissenters are still 
being labelled as "enemies" by CSIS, especially when that dissent is highly 
critical of U.S. foreign policy and the corporate capitalist system. Indeed, com- 
bine such political dissent with Islamic faith and brown skin, and one can 
almost be guaranteed to draw special attention from CSIS in the wake of 1 1  
September 2001. The Cold War may be over, but dissenting groups are still 
being identified as threats to the nation, so the contributions to Whose National 
Security? provide an historical window on this new conjuncture in national- 
security politics. 
That said, Whose National Security? does not discuss how the McDonald 
and Keable Royal Commissions changed the terrain of national-security work 
in Canada, and how CSIS has been doing things differently from or similar to 
the old RCMP Security Service. The book does include two papers with a focus 
on recent events: an excerpt from Zuhair Kashmeri's book on CSIS's harass- 
ment of Canadian Arabs during the 1991 Gulf War; and Karen Pearlston's 
account of the suppression of protesters at the 1997 APEC meeting in 
Vancouver. What the book lacks is an analytical treatment of changes in the 
surveillance state over time, particularly as old "enemies" faded in importance 
in the 1980s and new "enemies" were created. For instance, research on the 
bombing of Air-India flight 182 on 23 June 1985 suggests that CSIS had 
already reoriented its security priorities prior to the bombing.' 
We are living at a time when the attacks of l l September 2001 have 
infused the concept of national security with overriding concerns for the safe- 
ty of North American civilians. The theoretical framework posited in Whose 
National Security? will need to be expanded to handle this new reality since 
state surveillance can no longer be presented as a straightforward instrument of 
the interests of Canadian elites. At the same time, threats to democratic rights 
are grave, and critical scholarship on issues of national security is needed as 
never before. 
Tom Langford 
University of Caigary 
'. Zuhair Kashmeri and Brian McAndrew, So$ Target: How the Indian Intelligence Service 
Penefrated Canada (Toronto 1989), v. 


Gary Kinsman, Dieter K. Buse and Mercedes Steedman, eds. — Whose National Security? Canadian State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies

Crysler, Julie

Reviews 185 
experienced by audiences within that half world, a universe of light and dark" 
(1 73). Through his examination of many films dealing with constitutional, crim- 
inal, civil, and international law, Chase concludes that while they provide a legal 
narrative to the audience, it is "a different kind of narrative, a different impres- 
sion of the legal system than conventional legal narrative, the language of lawyers 
and courts." The "visualization of legality" can be more or less true, but it is 
impossible to "argue that movies are simply a mirror held up to a system of blind 
justice, providing one more authorized account . . ." (1 80). 
Whether or not a realistic image of the American legal system is a reason- 
able goal for filmmakers, the fact remains that their productions provide some of 
the most powerful, if not the most powerful images that inform the audience's 
view of the system. This begs an important question that Chase chooses not to 
address in much detail: Should commercial filmmakers be expected to portray the 
American legal system in its pure form, or when it comes to the law is there still 
room for fiction? Aside from the minor criticisms above, however, Chase's exten- 
sive and well-written analysis offers much of interest to serious scholars and 
movie-buffs alike. In particular, Movies on Trial presents a well-argued case for 
the study of the legal genre of film as an essential means of gauging how people 
understand the rules, regulations and procedures of the American legal system. 
Mark A. Eaton 
University of Western Ontario 
Marc Edge, PaciJic Press: The Unauthorized Story of Vancouver5 Media 
Monopoly (Vancouver, New Star, 2002). 
The relationship between academia and the popular press has never been an easy 
one. Academics complain that journalists lack rigor. Editors complain that aca- 
demics cannot write. Pity the poor PhD who tries to write a scholarly book in a 
journalistic style. The result is usually an unhappy marriage: not rigorous enough 
for scholars, not engaging enough for the general public. 
Marc Edge's advisors likely warned him about this when he set himself the 
task of writing the history of Vancouver's two dominant newspapers, but unfor- 
tunately, PaciJic Press: The Unauthorized Story of Vancouver5 Media Monopoly 
succeeds in being both dull and sensationalist. Not only is it filled with clichCs, it 
lacks the narrative structure to draw a reader along. 
It is too bad, because Edge chose a great subject. Vancouver is infamous for 
its lack of media diversity. Today, both the Vancouver Sun and the Vancouver 
Province are owned by CanWest Global. This means that the Aspers, according 
to a recent Department of Canadian Heritage report, control more than ninety- 
five percent of the city's newspapers. They also own Vancouver's two biggest tel- 
186 Reviews 
evision stations and most of the suburban weeklies. 
Edge's book, in its way, does help explain how it got so bad. Vancouver's two 
dailies have been held by one company since the formation of Pacific Press in 
1957. Under this odd arrangement, the Cromie family's Sun and Southam's 
Province consolidated production in one printing plant and shared profits equal- 
ly. This effectively killed the competition that once enlivened Vancouver's dailies. 
And as the Province continued to bleed money, this arrangement soon proved 
unworkable for management. In the 1970s, in an attempt to rationalize operations 
- and in defiance of earlier federal rulings - Southam bought up the Sun, but still 
struggled to make both papers profitable. 
Despite its virtual monopoly, between 1957 and 1991 Pacific Press went 
from being a profitable enterprise to a money-loser. Given its unbridled access to 
a major market, the company's travails can only be explained by spectacularly 
bad management. That might also explain the repeated strikes. Pacific Press 
employees walked off the job in 1967, 1970, 1972, 1976, 1978, and 1984. This 
summer, Sun and Province employees are on the picket line once again. 
Edge makes a valiant attempt to explore all of these complex issues in 
Pacijic Press, which is adapted from his PhD thesis in Mass Communications 
from the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. He also tries to give readers a sense 
of the characters who made the newspapers, as well as the flavour of the editori- 
al content. He even goes into detail about various failed attempts to start rival 
dailies. His account draws on archival material, including the memoirs and per- 
sonal papers of former Sun publisher Stuart Keate, the records of Pacific Press's 
now-defunct typesetters local, various government reports, as well as interviews 
and email correspondence with some of the players. 
Unfortunately, Edge's ability to gather information is far greater than his 
ability to synthesize it. He lingers over irrelevant details, and forces the reader to 
suffer through lengthy digressions and flashbacks that make it difficult to keep 
track of the many characters or even the chronology. 
First of all, Edge begins at the end, with the Sun's weird 1991 marketing 
campaign to promote its switch to morning publication. Admittedly, this is a 
time-honoured device-start at the climax of the story, and then start at the begin- 
ning and show readers how the events unfolded. But choosing a marketing cam- 
paign as the hook for a tale of monopolistic practices and subsequent labour strife 
seems rather strange. 
Edge's approach becomes increasingly bizarre as the book proceeds. In the 
second chapter, Edge leads with Vancouver Sun publisher Don Cromie waiting 
for the elevator (exciting!) one fine day in 1956. Edge then expects the reader to 
accept that a lengthy flashback-which consumes the rest of the chapter save the 
final paragraph-is really Cromie reflecting on the events of that summer. That is 
one slow elevator. 
These types of conceits appear throughout. Again and again, chapters on one 
Reviews 187 
topic quickly switch to another unrelated one. It's as though someone took the 
manuscript and shuffled it. One chapter, "The Reluctant Prince," begins with a 
portrait of young Harvey Southam being groomed to take over the family busi- 
ness. Several pages in, Edge returns to a discussion of shock-columnist Doug 
Collins-the subject of the previous chapter. A chapter about the 1967 Pacific 
Press strike is interrupted by Edge's comments on the Davey Commission, a 1968 
senate inquiry into media concentration. 
Edge's attention to non-revealing detail is remarkable. In a chapter on the 
1970 strike, he spends about a page and a half on the early career of manage- 
ment's lead negotiator-including a couple of paragraphs on his penchant for 
mountain-climbing. This allows Edge to refer to Paddy Sherman as a "diminu- 
itive mountaineer" later on, but what the man's choice of weekend activities is 
supposed to say about labour relations at Pacific Press is never made clear. 
Edge is fascinated by the personalities at the newspapers, and spends a great 
deal of time on hackneyed profiles of the Cromies, Max Bell of FP Publications, 
Sun editor Bruce Hutchison, Sun columnist Allan Fotheringham, and many oth- 
ers. He even gives them lame little nicknames. Hutchison is "The Legend," 
Fotheringham is "The Perpetrator," Doug Collins is "The Bulldog." Edge's 
reliance on cheap clichis is astonishing. There are more "fiery Scots," "old buga- 
boos" and "writing on the wall" than I have ever encountered outside the "Stale 
Bread" section of my style gulde. It makes you want to take up a collection and 
buy Edge (and his editors) a copy of Strunk & White. 
Although he promises to focus on the economic aspects of Pacific Press, 
Edge seems most attracted to its reporters and editors, especially "renegades" like 
Fotheringham and hard-bitten types like Bruce Larsen, the seventies-era Sun 
managing editor who began his newspaper career at the age of seventeen. 
Edge also marvels at Bruce Hutchison's ability to edit the Sun through the 
sixties and seventies from his retreat on Vancouver Island. An enviable post, sure, 
but could appointments like this have contributed to the lousy morale at Pacific 
Press? Edge does not even pose the question. Sure, Hutchison was a smart man, 
and the Sun's circulation soared under his leadership, but there was also a ridicu- 
lous turf war between the managing editor and senior editors that (though Edge 
does not speculate) might have been avoided if an actual Editor were on site. 
Oh yeah, and there were six strikes during this period too. The strike of 1967 
got so heated that the craft unions and management started suing each other. One 
labour negotiator was even threatened with jail-time for his role in a work-slow- 
down campaign. The 1978-79 strike was even longer, dragging on for eight 
months and losing the company buckets of money. 
Despite the woeful lack of analysis, reading through Edge's book, the pro- 
found disconnect between press operators, journalists and upper management is 
obvious. Edge reveals just how little Sun and Province writers identified with the 
people who made the actual paper. He cites one particularly grotesque comment 
188 Reviews 
by Allan Fotheringham describing the labour situation as "people who write 
being jerked around by people who can't form sentences ... People who can write 
subsidizing people in overalls." 
The picture that emerges is one of a toxic work environment where manage- 
ment, newspaper staff, and press operators all hate each other. Six strikes in sev- 
enteen years. This despite the fact that Pacific Press employees have long been 
among the best paid in the business-with jobs for life no less. It suggests a level 
of distrust rarely seen outside Mike Harris's Ontario. 
From Edge's account, it is difficult to determine why. The two longest strikes 
were protracted because both sides had outside income-Pacific Press from strike 
insurance, and the unions from their strike newspaper. But Edge fails to show 
which appointments, policies, and decisions created the acrimony in the first 
place. He cites a 1980 Royal Commission on newspapers that found upper man- 
agement failed to plan for the inevitable technological upgrades, but he does not 
go into detail. 
While many media outlets endured strikes over automation during the 1970s, 
few were so bitter, lengthy, and frequent as those at Pacific Press. The only 
Canadian examples that really compare were strikes at the Montreal Star and the 
Ottawa Journal (both owned by FP Publications, Pacific Press's parent compa- 
ny at the time). So maybe the corporate owners were doing something wrong. But 
what, precisely? Edge blames the trouble on absentee management, but plenty of 
companies are run by central command and nevertheless avoid repeated shut- 
downs. 
As the book progresses into a series of chapters on media concentration, the 
quality of writing and analysis does improve somewhat. Edge's account of Black 
Wednesday (when both the Winnipeg Tribune and the Ottawa Journal shut down, 
leaving Thomson with a monopoly in Winnipeg and Southam with a monopoly 
in the nation's capital) is competent. So is his description of the ensuing criminal 
investigation and the 1980 Kent Commission on newspaper concentration. These 
events, however, are already well-documented in other works, and Edge's account 
adds little to the field. 
For the bulk of the book, you are left to plod though, trying to figure out why 
you should care about all these grumpy old men and their crummy newspapers 
and what all these arcane details Edge has fished out of the archives are supposed 
to illustrate. It's disappointing, because Edge was in a position to make a valuable 
contribution to the history of Canada's media, and maybe even help Pacific 
Press's current owners learn something from the company's turbulent past. Sadly, 
the determined reader who makes it to the end of Edge's book will be left with 
more questions than answers. 
Julie Crysler 
This Magazine 


Marc Edge — Pacfic Press: The Unauthorized Story of Vancouver's Media Monopoly

Editors' Note 
In the silence of abjection, when the only sounds to be heard 
are the chains of the slave and the voice of the informer; 
when everything trembles before the tyrant and it is danger- 
ous to incur his favor as to deserve his disfavor, this is when 
the historian appears, charged with avenging the people. 
Chateaubriand's above statement, from an article that appeared in the Mercure 
of July 4, 1807, remains an unsettling one for the historical profession. Only a 
generation after the article's publication, the academic discipline of history 
began to be institutionalised, largely on the basis of an imagined Rankean 
methodology that promoted scientific detachment, objectivity, and a narrative 
style that spoke only of the facts. Avenging the people would be the task of rev- 
olutionaries or altruistic social reformers, not professional historians. In a way, 
the profession has remained tied to its initial disciplinary foundation, letting 
facts speak for themselves while ignoring the epistemological problems engen- 
dered by such fantasized, cold detachment. As every good historian knows, 
however, examining the minutia of any metanarrative reveals counter-discours- 
es and resistances that throw the absolute hegemonic value of such accounts 
into doubt. We would like to think of Left History as a medium for resistance 
that undermines any story of the professional discipline as a sterile, fact-based, 
nation-builder. 
Since its inception in 1993, under the editorship of, for the most part, 
Adam Givertz, Marcus Klee, and Bryan Palmer, and published out of Queen's 
University until 1997, the journal printed articles from a distinctly leftist out- 
look and became an important medium for a variety of theoretical perspectives. 
In particular, Left History became a site for debate between theoretical posi- 
tions, particularly between histor+cal materialism and post-structuralism. The 
journal moved to York University in 1997 and Patrick Connor, Jeet Heer, and 
Nicholas Rogers assumed the editorship. Under their inspired direction the 
content of the journal continued to diversify and its scope broadened. They 
recently turned Left History over to the present editors, and 8.2 is the product 
of the combined efforts of the outgoing and incoming editors. We would like to 
thank Patrick, Jeet, and Nick for all of their hard work and continued guidance; 
we can only hope that we will live up to the high standard of scholarship and 
editorial acumen set by our predecessors. 
Our respect for the political and intellectual commitments of the journal 
means that the content and direction of Left History will continue along its 
present path. Readers will be glad to know that there is no movement within the 
editorial collective to change the name to Right History. Our current priorities 
include maintaining the standard of publication that Left History has held in the 
past while also broadening the scope of the journal by expanding and diversi- 
fying our website to allow for more online content. We have also made changes 
to the editorial board in the hope of better engaging the diverse interests and 
knowledge that comprise the larger editorial collective of Left History. And the 
present issue, in itself, is a microcosm of the diverse perspectives and topics 
that readers have come to expect from Left History over the years. 
Over the past decade, cultural history has moved from the fringes to the 
centre of history, mediating much needed dialogue between philosophy, popu- 
lar culture, and the traditional concerns of the historian. In her article on 
Thelma and Louise, Aspasia Kotsopoulos does just that, persuasively arguing 
that the film needs to be understood as a historical and cultural event empha- 
sising the multiple interpretations engendered by the film's polysemic nature. 
By analysing Thelma and Louise as an event Kotsopoulos is able to contextu- 
alise the diverse interpretations the film elicited from reviewers, providing 
much needed insight into the gender wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. 
Kotsopoulos's reading of Thelma and Louise brings up important issues 
concerning gender and sexuality, themes that have become familiar terrain for 
readers of Leji Histoy. Similarly, David S. Churchill's article on the Toronto 
gayllesbian publication, The Body Politic, analyses a personal advertising con- 
troversy that occurred in 1985. Churchill not only singles out an important 
moment in gayllesbian politics in Toronto, he also opens a window into the sex- 
ual politics of the time, exploring the framing of vital issues from sexuality and 
race to power and the politics of radical publishing. 
Fortunately historians of more traditional fields have taken notice of the 
exciting new avenues of historical analysis opened by the likes of cultural his- 
tory and the history of sexuality. Peter Cole's article on Philadelphia's long- 
shoremen and the Industrial Workers of the World is a case in point. Cole focus- 
es on the "Philadelphia Controversy" as a turning point in the relationship 
between developing American communism and the decline of the IWW after 
the First World War. By utilizing the work of David Roediger, Cole is able to 
contextualise the internal and external controversies that surrounded the IWW 
in the 1920s around issues of race. 
Intellectual history, as well, has benefited from, in particular, post-struc- 
turalism, and Daniel Rosenberg's article on the all too familiar story of a uni- 
versity being transformed from an inclusive, equitable institution, to an entre- 
preneurial institution dominated by the market economy, draws out many links 
between power and knowledge. Rosenberg meticulously reconstructs this shift 
at Adelphi University from 1985- 1997, arguing that a neo-conservative ideolo- 
gy provided a common discourse linking trustees, administrators, and 
researchers, directing a common set of policies and procedures. The adminis- 
tration and the Board of Trustees managed to establish administrative sover- 
eignty and even institute their ultra-conservative ideology as the core curricu- 
lum, with the expressed purpose of rectifying the intellectual and moral vacu- 
ity that supposedly had taken over the campus. 
The diverse fields of history that this issue contains - from cultural histo- 
ry to history of sexuality, and from labour history to intellectual history - have 
become commonplace in the pages of this journal. Radical changes are clearly 
not necessary; we would simply like to regularise practices that have already 
occurred in the journal at certain points such as review essays and theme issues. 
We look forward to continue to produce the high-quality articles people have 
come to expect from Lefi Hjstory. It is an extremely exciting time to be engaged 
in historical analysis and perhaps it is only now that Chateaubriand's concep- 
tion of the historian can be realised. We can only hope that Leji Hjstory helps 
provide a medium for that historian to appear and avenge the people. 
The Editors 
March 2003 


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John D. French — Drowning in Laws: Labor Law and Brazilian Political Culture

Editors' Note

Rethinking Class in Lesbian Bar Culture: Living 'The Gay Life' in Toronto, 1955-1965

Peter Boag — Same-Sex Afairs: Constructing Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest

Steven High — Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America's Rust Belt, 1969-1984

Who Shall Decide, When Doctors Disagree? David Leeson Responds in Turn

Carl Freedman — The Incomplete Projects: Marxism, Modernity, and the Politics of Culture

Gary Kinsman, Dieter K. Buse and Mercedes Steedman, eds. — Whose National Security? Canadian State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies

Marc Edge — Pacfic Press: The Unauthorized Story of Vancouver's Media Monopoly

Editors' Note

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