by Doug Munro
74 Mitchell, Who, 11.
121
CLIo'S LIvES
up in miniscule Eastend, Saskatchewan, a place he called a ‘kid’s paradise’.
Using the metaphor of imprinting – that phase ‘in the development of
birds, when an impression lasting only a few seconds may be imprinted on
the young bird for life’ – Stegner believed to his last days that he too had
been imprinted, or ‘marked by the space and geography of the plains’.75
The prairies marked Cook in the same way, imprinting an abiding
love and need for nature, the outdoors, wildlife and especially birds.
As a 10-year-old boy in Wynyard, he learned to identify the prairies’ many
birds – the meadow lark, the northern goshawk and the western tanager
– using a simple guide book; he spent the money he earned as a paper
boy on bird pictures from the Audubon society; and he ‘collected birds’
eggs, blew the yolks out and, with his hands scratched and dirty from a
day spent free, ‘carefully stored the shells in a sawdust-filled box’, his own
cabinet of curiosities. ‘I always claimed that I collected only one egg per
species, but I often found what I decided was a better example in some
gopher-skin-strewn hawk’s nest high in a tree.’76
For these reasons and more, Cook reacted quickly and viscerally to a 1974
book that he felt looked down on small prairie towns like the ones that
had made him, and he let the author have it in a review written with
what he called, quoting Stegner, the ‘angry defensiveness of the native
son’. At this point a full professor at York University, Cook turned Grass
Roots upside down. The Winklers, Biggars and Miamis were not stuck
in the past; they were stuck in the present. It was the car, television and
chain stores that were turning their main streets dusty and tired. And
while he acknowledged that these towns and villages could be ‘pinched
and prejudiced’, they could be ‘attractive’ and ‘humane’ too. ‘The devoted
school teacher can still be found,’ he said, ‘and the doctor who’ll make
a house call when asked’ and ‘lawyers and merchants who know when
a bill shouldn’t be collected’. As well, there are clergymen like his father
‘who have never heard of [Marshall] McLuhan but who help people
who are lonely or alcoholic or just mixed up’.77 Forty years later, it is
still one of his favourite reviews, precisely because it was defensive and
75 Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow (New York: Viking, 1962), 21. For Stegner’s reference to Eastend as a ‘kid’s paradise’, see Page Stegner, ed., The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker Hoard, 2007), 118. For Stegner’s reference to having been ‘marked by the space and
geography of the plains’, see Jackson J. Benson, Wallace Stegner: His Life and Works (New York: Penguin, 1996), 31.
76 Ramsay Cook, email to author, 23 May 2015.
77 Ramsay Cook, review of Grass Roots by Heather Robertson, in Canadian Forum (March 1974), 43.
122
6 . CECI N’EST PAS RAMSAY CooK
therefore honest. In the end, Cook’s experience was Margaret Laurence’s
experience. When thinking about her hometown of Neepawa, Manitoba,
she admitted that it could be an ‘isolated hell’. But it could be ‘a place of
incredible happenings, splendours, and revelations’, and for the longest
time that ‘settlement and that land’ were ‘my only real knowledge of the
planet’; it was, she said, ‘where my world began’.78
The prairies were not a hinterland to the commercial empire of the
St Lawrence River. They were Ramsay Cook’s only real knowledge of the
planet and the place where his world began. But that was about to change.
IV
It never crossed my mind, when young, that I might
become a professional historian.
— A.J.P. Taylor
Winnipeg was still the largest city on the prairies when Cook began
his studies at United College in 1950. It was also the most tolerant as
the ‘old barriers between ethnic groups’ fell and ‘the once impregnable
fortress of British-Canadian culture was undermined’ by ‘an evolving,
plural approach to questions of identity’. Of course, Winnipeg had been
a diverse city since its beginnings, but in the postwar period its civic
leaders displayed an ‘increasing openness to newcomers’. Forty years
earlier, Woodsworth had asked how a ‘heterogeneous mass’ might be
welded ‘into one people’. The answer, most of Winnipeg’s citizens now
believed, lay in pluralism and ‘a determined effort’ to build bridges across
ethnicity, religion and language.79 Cook remembers United College, then
a couple of buildings on Portage Avenue at Good Street, as a place where
kids with Jewish, Ukrainian, Polish, German, Scandinavian and West
Indian backgrounds went to classes and shared a dormitory with kids from
English, Scottish and Irish backgrounds. Although Winnipeg was New
York City compared to Raymore, Wynyard and Morden, and although
United College, with 1,500 students, was enormous compared to Maple
78 Margaret Laurence, ‘Where the World Began’, in Laurence, Heart of a Stranger (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1976), 213, 219.
79 Royden Loewen and Gerald Friesen, Immigrants in Prairie Cities: Ethnic Diversity in Twentieth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 92, 78. ‘Winnipeg’, Allison Marshall writes, ‘was a more tolerant place to live than many other cities in Western Canada’. Marshall, Cultivating Connections, 11.
123
CLIo'S LIvES
Leaf Collegiate, a four-room, four-grade high school, they all shared one
defining characteristic: cultural diversity. Thinking about his childhood
and adolescence, Cook is not sure that he ever lived in a town that had
a majority British population. Actually, every town did, but that is not the
point. Rather, his memory is. Ethnic, religious and linguistic difference,
or multiculturalism, although that word had not been invented yet, was
‘the normal state of things’ on the prairies.80
Initially, Cook did not want to study history, thinking instead that first-
year chemistry would be more interesting. After the ‘insufferably boring’
history that he had been compelled to sit through at Maple Leaf Collegiate,
he would have watched paint dry if he could get credit for it. But when
the assistant registrar explained that taking chemistry necessitated ‘thrice
weekly bus trips to the Fort Garry campus of the University of Manitoba’,
he said thanks but no thanks. She then suggested the American history
survey, adding that the department had ‘an excellent reputation’. Maybe
it did, but Cook did not care about things like that. He cared about
the classroom – a five-minute walk across campus. ‘On such weighty
considerations my career choice was made, though I did not suspect it at
the time.’81
United College’s Department of History was small, just three full-time
professors, but it was the centre of the Arts Faculty and, in a way, of
the university because its members were tough-minded men with strong
opinions who were not afraid to stick their necks out.82 And they were
wonderful teachers who pushed their students t
o think for themselves
and make connections between the past and the present. Where George
Brown had killed the past, Harry Crowe, Ken McNaught and Stewart
Reid brought it back to life. Cook loved it and although he ‘had no
conception of what historians did for a living’, he quickly shelved his plans
for law school.83 The next four years saw him grow intellectually, push his
mind and discover its reaches, broaden his horizons and debate the world.
80 The 1931 and 1941 censuses confirm that Alameda, Raymore, Wynyard and Morden had
more ‘British Races’ than other ‘Races’, although the 1941 census identified 427 Britons and 408
Scandinavians in Wynyard. Cook, ‘Introduction’, Watching Quebec, viii.
81 Cook, ‘Introduction’, Watching Quebec, ix.
82 Kenneth McNaught, Conscience and History: A Memoir (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 89. For example, in 1953, Kenneth McNaught, Harry Crowe and Stewart Reid formed the
United College Association, a faculty association, with the goal of securing faculty representation on the Board of Regents and improving salaries. See also Michiel Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), doi.org/10.3138/9781442670570.
83 Cook, ‘Who Broadened Canadian History?’
124
6 . CECI N’EST PAS RAMSAY CooK
The Morden Times had made a handful of references to famine in China
and polio in India, but it was more interested in Princess Elizabeth’s
engagement to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, the royal wedding and
the birth of Prince Charles. At United College, Cook discovered that the
world was bigger than the royal family and that history was the key to
unlocking it. The Cold War and the Korean War; Israel and the Arab
states; McCarthy and the Rosenbergs: it was an exciting time to be
a student of history.
Crowe, McNaught and Reid took an interest in young people, hosting
meetings of the History Club in their homes and inviting students to
Tony’s, the campus cafeteria and coffee shop in the basement of Wesley
Hall next to the ancient boiler room. With ‘a semi-permanent cigarette
drooping from his mouth’, Crowe would hold forth on politics, especially
American politics, while students sat transfixed.84 The senior senator from
Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, was a favourite target. Often McNaught
would join Crowe, and together they would solve the world’s problems.
When the conversation turned to history, they would refer to the Winnipeg
General Strike as class warfare and not, as George Brown had, simply
the result of postwar unemployment. Every now and then, Reid would
show up, turning the conversation to British politics, decolonisation, the
National Health Service and especially the Labour Party, the subject of his
doctoral thesis. A crusty Scot, Reid was ‘argumentative’ and ‘disagreed’ with
everyone but, like Crowe and McNaught, ‘he was a really good teacher’.85
Captivated, Cook began to see himself in his professors, thinking that
they led interesting lives. The coffee, cigarettes and conversations also
confirmed and strengthened his growing interest in civil liberties. So when
a law student wrote a column in the college newspaper criticising those
‘propagandists’ and ‘fellow travellers’ who would rail at witch hunts and
threats to academic freedom but disdain America’s leadership in the ‘crucial
struggle of our time’, he responded. If only one professor is intimidated
– or worse, hounded – it is one too many, Cook said. McCarthyism, he
added, is a ‘manifestation of a certain type of thought’ in American politics
– which Richard Hofstadter would identify later as the paranoid style –
but there is another type of thought in American politics, Cook noted,
84 Ramsay Cook, The Teeth of Time: Remembering Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 98.
85 Emphasis not mine. Author’s interview with Ramsay Cook, 14 July 2014. Fifteen or so years later, Cook dedicated a collection of essays ‘To the Memory of J.H.S. Reid’. See Ramsay Cook, Canada and the French-Canadian Question (Toronto: Macmillan, 1966).
125
CLIo'S LIvES
stretching from Jefferson to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and it is in this
tradition ‘that the hope of western democracy lies’. Not to be outdone,
the law student responded in kind, thanking Cook for confirming his
thesis that every ‘self-righteous pseudo-intellectual’ believes that he is heir
to Jefferson yet this same ‘left-wing thinker’ has nothing to say about
the ‘millions’ of victims and ‘proposed victims’ of communism. Still
the competitive kid who never backed down from a fight against some
hayseed from Winkler, Cook hit back: congressional committees are one
thing, but ‘kangaroo courts’ are another, and academic freedom is too
important to be left in the hands of ‘cowards’ and ‘character assassins’.86
The exchange ended in a draw, but Cook had discovered the letter-to-the-
editor, which became a favourite medium for usually quick, occasionally
sustained, often ironic, but always forthright commentary.
In addition to its informal sessions at Tony’s, the Department of History
organised an annual exchange on some aspect of international relations
with Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota: United College faculty
and students would go down one year, Macalester faculty and students
would come up the next. To Cook, it was heady stuff and in the spring
of 1953 he was selected to give a presentation, which meant that summer
he had to prepare a paper on ‘the problem of peace in the Middle East’,
as well as fertilise sunflowers and corn at the Morden Experimental Farm.
In his self-deprecating way, he now likes to remind people that, in case
they are wondering, he failed to find a solution, but the paper contains the
first expression of what became two of the animating themes of his career:
a distrust of nationalism and a commitment to liberalism. Drawing on
articles in The Nation and The New Statesman, two left journals, he asserted that the record of the West in the Middle East is the record of generals,
oil executives and Coca-Cola salesmen, making it ‘a record of conquest,
broken promises, expediency, and exploitation’. Meanwhile, local elites
draw on the language of nationalism and national self-determination
to advance their own narrow class interests, transforming ‘the foreigner’
into ‘the whipping boy’ and deflecting attention from persistent social
and economic inequality. But it is the intractable ‘misery of the people’,
86 The 1953 exchange took place in the Manitoban, the student newspaper of the University of Manitoba, but was reprinted in The Brown and Gold, the Manitoba yearbook. See The Brown and Gold, 1954, University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections.
126
6 . CECI N’EST PAS RAMSAY CooK
Cook concluded, that must be addressed by policies rooted in the ‘liberal
principles’ of ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity’ if the place that ‘gave birth
to Western civilization’ is not also to become its ‘graveyard’.87
In his fourth year, Cook had the opportunity to study with a visiting
professor, William Rose, wh
ose courses in Eastern European history and
Eastern European nationalism were unlike anything he had taken before.
Rose himself was a fascinating man whose life read like something out of
a novel: a poor farm boy from Minnedosa, Manitoba, he went to Oxford
on a Rhodes Scholarship and then Leipzig to do a PhD, but the First
World War interrupted his studies and he found himself interned in
Poland as an enemy alien of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He quickly
learned the language, fell in love with the culture and, when the war
ended, did a PhD in Poland on Polish history, becoming a key interpreter
of Eastern and Central Europe to Great Britain when he was named
director of the School of Slavonic Studies at the University of London.88
Now retired and nearly 70 years old, Rose returned to his alma mater and
took his Winnipeg students beyond Britain and France to that part of
Europe where Clifford Sifton’s ‘stalwart peasant in a sheepskin coat’ and
his ‘stout wife’ had come from – where, for some of them, their parents
and grandparents had come from.89
As he did in all of his courses, Cook jumped in with both feet, ‘struggling
to pronounce Eastern European names and to distinguish between Pan
Slavs and Slavophils’.90 But Rose was a patient teacher – ‘very fatherly’ and
‘very kind’ – and when he delivered a public lecture – in a subfusc in the
tradition of Oxford and Cambridge – Cook sold copies of his books at the
back of the hall.91 As both a historian and commentator on current events,
Rose saw nationalism as a positive force, leading to national independence
and the end of empire. Polish nationalism, he believed, could be a force
even for moral regeneration. Cook was not convinced. After all, he had
studied with Crowe, McNaught and Reid, all socialists who distrusted
the nation as a bourgeois deceit and instead pinned their hopes on
87 Ramsay Cook, ‘Nationalism in the Middle East’, Vox Wesleyana, 1954, University of Winnipeg Archives, AC-9-27.
88 See Daniel Stone, ‘William Rose, Manitoba Historian’, Manitoba Historical Society Transactions, Series 3, 31 (1974–75) and Daniel Stone, ed., The Polish Memoirs of William John Rose (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975).
89 Quotation in Brown and Cook, A Nation Transformed, 63.