Abstract
Reviewed by: Donald B. Smith (smithd@ucalgary.ca ), Professor Emeritus of History, University of Calgary
Donald Wright, associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of New Brunswick, has written an impressive biography of Donald Creighton, known in the mid-twentieth century as English Canada’s greatest historian (9, 198, 329). The author’s writing style is commendable, the book is well organized, and the extensive research supporting the text is exceptional. Well-chosen illustrations and a complete index add greatly to this well-constructed biography. The author’s introduction eloquently sets the stage for the 13 chapters that follow. Wright’s Donald Creighton: A Life in History makes a significant and important contribution to our understanding of English Canadian historical writing in the twentieth century. It explains well Creighton’s British-Canadian nationalism and, in his later years, his strident anti-Americanism.
The biography owes much of its success to the author’s fine research in both primary and secondary sources, and his interviews. The author has taken a multitude of “facts” and transformed them into a vivid and informative narrative. Donald Creighton (1902–1979) advanced quickly in his career as a history professor at the University of Toronto, where he taught from 1927 to his retirement in 1971. With the publication of The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence in 1937, he gained the reputation as his generation’s leading Canadian historian. His emphasis on the importance of the St. Lawrence River in opening up the interior of the continent provided the narrative thread for the book. His two-volume study of John A. Macdonald, The Young Politician (1952) and The Old Chieftain (1955), which both won the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction in their respective years of publication, solidified his reputation. He had a genius for narrative history (321).
Don Wright hides nothing in his biography. The eminent professor was a difficult person to get along with. In the author’s words: “His fuse was famously short and he could explode without warning, meaning his friends, and colleagues learned to walk on eggshells in his presence” (9). His work drive consumed him, weakening him both physically and emotionally. Fortunately for him, Luella, his devoted wife, never wavered in her support. He did have several close male friends, three among them being John Gray, his editor at Macmillan; Robert Finch, a University of Toronto French professor and poet; and Harold Innis, the celebrated University of Toronto political economist, whose biography, Harold Adams Innis: Portrait of a Scholar Creighton wrote in 1957. To others, however, Creighton often appeared arrogant. He had limited interpersonal skills, and as Chair of the History Department at the University of Toronto from 1955 to 1959, he was a disaster (chapter 9). He had no close friends in the History Department (220).
Donald Creighton was a British-Canadian historian, one who showed little interest in French Canada. He lived for several months in France in the late 1920s. We learn that although he loved reading French novels (9), he apparently read little on Canadian history in “French-language sources” (192). No evidence is provided that Donald Creighton ever spoke French in Canada. Like most other Canadian historians of the day, Creighton was also “blind to Aboriginal history” (159). Louis Riel was, in the historian’s own words, a “half-breed megalomaniac” (197, 199). In 1967, he consciously went out of his way in a speech in Winnipeg to pronounce his name “Lewis Riel” (284). Creighton was a man of his times, as the opening of his one-volume general history of Canada, Dominion of the North—written for the general reader in 1944—reveals. His first chapter, Wright reports, covers, “from discovery and exploration to tenuous beginnings and eventual settlement” (154). The reference to “discovery” and “settlement” overlooks at least 10,000 years of human occupation in what is now the “Dominion of the North.”
The celebrated Canadian historian had many contradictions. He disliked the United States, yet, early in his career, obtained research funds from the Rockefeller Foundation and financial support from the Carnegie Endowment. He also obtained a Guggenheim Fellowship. Dominion of the North was written for Houghton Mifflin in Boston (154). As a young man, he clung to the conventional wisdom of the Toronto of his day, and he held to—until his final years—this stubborn belief in the importance of Great Britain. In Don Wright’s words, Donald Creighton believed the imperial connection was “essential to Canada’s survival on a continent dominated by the United States” (7). He argued that the Liberals during their long rule from 1935 to 1957 had eroded Canadian independence. As Wright summarizes, Creighton believed the Liberals were “bent on destroying Canada by wrecking whatever connections it had to Great Britain and the Commonwealth” (237).
When the old British Canada of his early and mid-career lost its predominance in the late 1960s and early 1970s, marked by the emergence a new flag, bilingualism, and then multiculturalism, Creighton’s mental equilibrium apparently crashed. In 1964, he published one additional well-crafted volume, his richly documented and dramatic account, The Road to Confederation: The Emergence of Canada, 1863–1867. His argument that in the 1860s John A. Macdonald intended to create a strong central government is developed calmly and coherently. After this, Donald Creighton turned ever more to writing contemporary history. In 1976, his last major book, The Forked Road: Canada 1939–1957, appeared. It proved disappointing, more a polemic than a history, with his negative opinions of Quebec and the United States freely offered. Don Wright describes it as “an awful book,” one in which the author “drew on a reservoir of anger and disappointment, making it little more than a barely researched series of bitter laments for a nation that might have been” (324–325).
Donald Creighton firmly believed that popular historical writing must be accessible. In his words, he believed history “is essentially a story” (12). Whatever his personal flaws and imperfections, his lasting gift remains his two-volume biography of Canada’s first prime minister. The historian’s great contribution was his work on the nineteenth century. Congratulations to Donald Wright for his biography of Donald Creighton: a job well done, one which covers so honestly the strengths and the weaknesses of his subject.