Canada's Holy Grail, Lord Stanley's Political Motivation to Donate the Stanley Cup

To every Canadian today, the Stanley Cup is synonymous with the NHL. But few know the manner in which the cup was given before the NHL was founded. By 1926, the NHL became the only league to compete for the cup. However, what is the history behind the donation of the cup by Lord Stanley, the governor general of Canada, from 1888 to 1892? Jordan B. Goldstein tries to answer this question by looking at the context in which Lord Stanley came up with the idea to donate a trophy for the best hockey team in Canada.Goldstein went through the archives of Lord Frederick Arthur Stanley, both in Ottawa and his hometown of Liverpool, England. He also looks at how his family, mainly his father, Edward Geoffrey Stanley, a British prime minister, influenced his political thought and how Frederick Arthur Stanley could contribute to Canada during his stay as governor general. Goldstein also discusses the different theories that emerged during the first decades of the Canadian Confederation concerning how the new country should act toward Great Britain and the United States. The book is then more a history of politics of the late Victorian era while discussing how sports, mainly ice hockey, were treated as a way to differentiate Canada from the mother country and the neighbor to the south.The book is divided into three parts, each having two chapters. The first part discusses Canada as a new country and its efforts to create a national identity. The second part is more about Lord Stanley, his father, his political views, his stay in Canada as governor general, and how he contributed to the new nation. The final part is about how a national sport was thought to help to cement national unity throughout Canada and how Lord Stanley viewed his donation to the new national winter sport of hockey.Goldstein introduced the idea of “nationalized” sport instead of national sport. He takes the examples of cricket in Britain and baseball in the United States to elaborate on the idea that the state, not simply the people, make a sport national. Lord Stanley (whose children played the sport) fell in love with hockey, and it became the center of his attention. Interestingly, there is almost no mention of lacrosse, an Indigenous game transformed by the English Canadian elite by 1856 so that the white people could beat the Indigenous peoples at (and assimilate them through) their game. Lacrosse was a more popular game than hockey at the time Lord Stanley lived in Canada. Perhaps it was because lacrosse was an Indigenous game, not created by the Protestant Anglo-Saxons, that Lord Stanley preferred hockey.In fact, Goldstein focuses mostly on Protestant Anglo-Saxons when he talks about politics and sports. Francophones, who were at the time a quarter of the Canadian population (1.4 million French Canadians out of a 4.8 million Canadian population, according to the 1891 Canadian Census), are almost never mentioned in the book. Goldstein writes: “One group not discussed in this book is French Canadians—in particular, their conception of Canadian nationalism and their participation in sport” (13). By looking at his exhaustive bibliography, one may note there are no French references (all those by a French author are taken from English translations). He is right that Francophones came late into hockey (the first French teams were created by 1895) and were not very present in this sport when Lord Stanley was in Canada, but they were practicing many other sports activities, such as snowshoeing, skating, baseball, and others, as Donald Guay demonstrated in his book Introduction à l'histoire des sports au Québec (1987). Also, the Catholic Irish are not mentioned in Goldstein's book, yet their team, the Montreal Shamrocks, was part of the Amateur Hockey Association of Canada while Lord Stanley was at Rideau Hall.For Goldstein, all the political focus and sporting focus are on the Protestant Anglo-Saxons, be they Canadian, American, or British. They were the people who dominated sports and the political scene, and he thus focused only on them, leaving all other secondary groups aside to elaborate his rhetoric on Canadian nationalism.Despite such omissions, Goldstein wrote a book that is accurate in elucidating Lord Stanley's point of view about the political era (late Victorian's new liberalism and new conservatism), and the author explains well why Lord Stanley gave a cup to a newly organized sport some years after the Confederation—so that he could help to construct a Canadian nationalism while he was Governor General of the country.

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