Pride and prejudice : Canadian intellectuals confront the United States, 1891-1945

This study compares how English and French Canadian intellectuals viewed American society from 1891 to 1945. During the period under study, the Dominion experienced accelerated industrialization and urbanization, massive immigration, technological change, and the rise of mass culture. To the nation's intellectuals, many of these changes found their source and their very embodiment in the United States. America, it was argued, was the quintessence of modernity, having embraced, among other things, secularism, democracy, mass culture, and industrial capitalism. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Canadian hostility to the United States and continental integration was expressed in two conservative discourses: that of English Canadian imperialism and French Canadian nationalism. Despite their fundamental divergence on the national question; both imperialists and nationalistes shared an essentially antimodern outlook, and anti-Americanism was their logical point of convergence. By contrast, the most passionate Canadian defenders of American society could be found among liberal and socialist intellectuals like F. R. Scott and Jean-Charles Harvey. They saw continental integration and Canadian-American convergence as both inevitable and desirable. Intellectual continentalism reached its summit of influence during the 1930s and 1940s. The present study is based on the analysis of some 520 texts found essentially in the era's periodical literature. Each, at least in part, explores some aspect of American life or of the relationship between Canada and the United States. Unlike most previous scholarship, which has tended to view anti-American sentiment merely as an expression of Canadian nationalism, this study is more concerned with Canadian intellectuals as thinkers on the left, the right, and the centre. The comparative, pan-Canadian nature of this study reveals that English and French Canadian intellectuals shared common preoccupations with respect to the United States. However, the tone and emphasis of their commentary often differed. In English Canada, where political institutions and the imperial bond were viewed as the mainstays of Canadian distinctiveness, writing on the United States tended to deal primarily with political and diplomatic issues, in Quebec, where political institutions were not generally viewed as vital elements of national distinctiveness, social and cultural affairs dominated writing on the United States.

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