Diefenbaker’s “New Frontier”: Masculinity, Modernity, and Canadian Electoral Politics, 1957–58
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The term “New Frontier” has become synonymous across historical scholarship with the thirty-fifth president of the United States of America, John F. Kennedy. The origins of the term, however, prove murkier. According to former Canadian prime minister John G. Diefenbaker, the Kennedy campaign stole the phrase from him to “great advantage” but “without attribution.” Indeed, Diefenbaker’s “New Frontier” policies were instrumental in his rise to power several years before Kennedy ran for president. This article explores the Canadian electoral campaigns of 1957 and 1958. Across these two contests, Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives narrowly defeated the longstanding Liberal government of Louis St. Laurent, before going on to win the then-largest parliamentary majority in Canadian history. The article argues that the Progressive Conservatives’ “New Frontier” policies and the branding of Diefenbaker as a self-made man were instrumental in his victory and were effective because they spoke to the historical moment. Indeed, to a certain extent they were a performative political device. The late 1950s were the era of the “other-directed man,” to quote David Riesman, where concerns about the erosion of individuality and manliness led to a newfound fascination with the frontier and wilderness. Diefenbaker and the Progressive Conservatives managed to harness this nostalgia and appealed to the growing desire for agency and self-fulfilment in the populace. His past as a Saskatchewan-raised homesteader was utilized in lending credibility to his status as a frontiersman, and he promised Canadians that under a Progressive Conservative government he would lead them toward “adventure … to the nation’s utmost bounds, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".