RAMSAY COOK
During the great debate in the 1970s, over the supposed ‘Americanization of Canadian universities,’ I occasionally thought about my good friend and colleague, Robert Craig Brown. Had I wanted an example, a prime, personal example of the academic imperialism of the United States, Brown could have been it. Back in 1957 when Brown, having just graduated from the University of Rochester, arrived at the University of Toronto as the recipient of a Canada Council fellowship, his presence immediately caused me more than a little inconvenience. A good Methodist, he had demonstrated his theological confusion by applying to live in Knox College, a bastion of continuing Presbyterianism. For two years I, a lapsed member of the United Church, had occupied a room on the first floor of West House in that same residence. I enjoyed life there, even though the room was somewhat grubby and the meals were unappetizing. The West House inhabitants were argumentative and irreverent; some were even known to lubricate their intellectual and religious life with cheap scotch or even cheaper sherry.
Without warning, in the late summer of 1957 I was informed that I had been banished from West House to lonely exile in Centre House. Two things made this news very hard to take. For one thing, West House, including my room, had been cleaned and painted over the summer for the first time in years. The cleansing of Centre House had to wait another year or so. And then the unkindest cut of all: an American, entering the masters program in history, had been assigned the space that I, a PhD student in history, had come to call home. The arrival of Brown, impeccably attired in quasi–Ivy League style, was a dark day for me. Surely this was a classic example of colonialism. The Canada Council had invited this newcomer in, paying his way, and the college authorities uprooted a native so that this foreign agent could live, if not in luxury, then at least in a freshly painted room. In my overcharged imagination I visualized him being served specially prepared shepherd’s pie in the dining room! Though I didn’t see it clearly at the time, the American academic invasion of Canada was obviously off to a quick start.
Brown, in his courteous and amiable fashion, soon made it plain that he was not the advance guard of the U.S. Kulturkampf. He quietly demonstrated that he had come to the University of Toronto with considerable previous knowledge of Canada, learned under the guidance of Mason Wade, who in those days was renowned for having written a book that no English Canadian historian had even attempted, namely, The French Canadians, 1760–1945 (1955). Moreover, Brown was a Democrat, something not that usual in Livonia, his home town in upstate New York. His attitude towards the Eisenhower administration and the continuing influence of McCarthyism in U.S. public life, an influence that had contributed directly to Herbert Norman’s suicide in Cairo in April 1957, proved to be remarkably Canadian. Still, those first years must have been not too easy for Craig, since in Diefenbaker’s Canada, partly because of the Norman tragedy, there was more than a little edginess in attitudes towards the United States and Americans. Perhaps that atmosphere – the debate over membership in NORAD, Walter Gordon’s dire predictions about the impact of U.S. direct investment, the cancellation of the Avro Arrow, the Cuban missile crisis, and the controversy over nuclear warheads for our Bomarcs – helped to convince Brown that the study of Canada–United States relations could be exciting.1 For that was his chosen field.
Before selecting a thesis topic, Craig looked over the Department of History with considerable care. He worked with Maurice Careless on Upper Canada, R.M. Saunders on the Enlightenment, Gerald Craig on the United States, and D.J. McDougall on the British Commonwealth. Not every graduate student found Donald McDougall’s rigorous seminars a pleasure. This truly amazing, sightless professor (blinded in battle during the Great War, McDougall entered university in 1919 as a severely disadvantaged veteran) insisted that his students use their eyes – and their time – effectively. He could cite reams of documents and passages from books in sometimes unnerving ways in his unending effort to teach students to read with care. But his demand for exactitude and intellectual clarity, when met, was rewarded by generous grades and invitations to his house to listen to Mozart. Brown met the demands, often heard Mozart, and became one of Mr McDougall’s regular, paid readers, a privilege this sardonic professor granted to only his best students.
Craig quickly proved that he was up to the demands that the University of Toronto presented in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Donald Creighton, of course, presented the main challenge to all students in modern Canadian history. Following the completion of the central work of his career, the two-volume biography of John A. Macdonald, Creighton’s reputation as a scholar and a teacher was at its peak. Graduate students flocked to his seminar, where they discovered his passion for his subject, his close attention to his students’ work, and his unpredictable moods. The faint at heart often shrank before this much larger-than-life performer, who sat with his long pale face in his hands or paced nervously around his Flavelle House office interjecting corrections and comments, while a hopeful apprentice historian stammered through a presentation on the ‘double shuffle’ or the ‘Pacific scandal.’ Only the truly courageous – or foolhardy – took up the case for Louis Riel. In 1957 Creighton had been especially buoyed up by the recent Diefenbaker victory, the cleansing of the Liberal stables. The hated Liberals, after over two decades of continentalist drift, were gone. The Tories, at last restored, would surely lead Canada and the Commonwealth into a second Elizabethan age. Creighton, too, had come to power. In his presidential address to the Canadian Historical Association in Ottawa in June 1957 he had excoriated the ‘Authorized Version’ (read ‘Liberal’) of Canada’s history and declared that the true past was yet to be discovered. After a struggle that led to F.H. Underhill’s flight from the Toronto department to Laurier House in Ottawa, Creighton obtained the chairmanship. Neither Creighton himself nor his colleagues enjoyed the abbreviated years of his reign.
An American graduate student entered that particular lion’s den at his own risk. Or so it might have seemed. Craig Brown took the risk in his stride and found in Creighton what many other serious students discovered: a demanding, opinionated, tolerant, mercurial, generous, encouraging teacher – even a mentor. That Craig was an American apparently made little difference, for he quickly demonstrated that he was a talented, well-trained student with a professional interest in the history of Canada. Moreover, here was a student who understood that presentation, literary style, was essential to the historian’s craft. Creighton didn’t have to advise Brown (as he often did with his students) to read novels; he already did, including works by American authors whom Creighton, paradoxically, often admired, though none as much as Arnold Bennett. Like every other Creighton student, Craig had his difficult moments with his master. More than most, doubtless he found Creighton’s often colourful diatribes against the United States outrageous. Irritated as he must have been, he kept his peace, as a well brought-up young Yankee was expected to do. He chose to learn the remarkable things Donald Creighton had to teach and to demonstrate that even an American could help to discover a new Canadian past.
What Creighton certainly taught him – or perhaps he only reinforced an already formulated conviction – was that Canada was a nation with its own institutions, public values, cultural traditions, and, perhaps above all, national interests. (Since Creighton had little sympathy for or understanding of the concerns of Canada’s French-speaking population, Brown’s later, more liberal views on that subject likely originated earlier in Mason Wade’s Rochester classroom.) Had he not learned, or shared, Creighton’s strongly held beliefs about Canada’s national interests, he would certainly have chosen some other supervisor for his doctoral research. His topic, ‘Canadian American Relations in the Latter Part of the Nineteenth Century,’ fell right into the period and touched on many of the diplomatic incidents about which Donald Creighton had a thorough knowledge.
The originality of Brown’s work, published as Canada’s National Policy, 1883–1900: A Study in Canadian-American Relations, rested on his argument that the diplomacy of these years could best be understood as a logical extension of Macdonald’s well-known National Policy measures: the protective tariff, the transcontinental railway, the acquisition of western Canada and the beginning of its settlement. ‘The spirit of the National Policy,’ he wrote in the introduction to his study, ‘went much deeper than railways, immigrants, and tariffs. Beneath these external manifestations was the will to build and maintain a separate Canadian nation on the North American continent.’ After more than 400 pages documenting in detail tariff debates and negotiations, fisheries disputes, sealing quarrels, and boundary conflicts involving Canada and the United States, Brown entitled his conclusion, ‘An Expression of Canadian National Sentiment.’ He summed up his interpretation this way: ‘Surprisingly, for a nation so inexperienced and immature in foreign relations, for a nation which remained a ‘colonial nation’ both in fact and in law, for a nation torn by domestic quarrels between English-and French-speaking Canadians, this policy appeared to be carefully thought out and rooted in the principle of national survival in the future as well as in the present.’2 Donald Creighton would certainly have been pleased by this conclusion, and his pleasure must have been heightened by the realization that it had been reached by a student from the United States, now a landed immigrant in Canada.
The development of Craig’s views about Canada’s national interest did not come as a surprise to me. Since those dark days when he had occupied my room at Knox College, a close friendship had grown up between us. As I was nearing the end of my graduate studies, he sometimes asked my advice about courses, professors, research sources, and other necessities of graduate student life. In the autumn of 1958 Donald Creighton was appointed to the Monckton Commission on the Central African Federation, and I received an exceedingly temporary appointment in the Department of History as a replacement. I moved out of Knox and Craig joined me in a basement apartment let to us, probably illegally, by a wonderfully eccentric, hard-drinking, elderly woman, who lived on an affluent street in North Toronto. (She often trapped the squirrels in her garden and drove them to a nearby park where she released them. She regularly expressed astonishment, on her return, that her garden was still filled with squirrels – doubtless the same ones she had transported!) During the subsequent year and a half we both worked very hard preparing for comprehensive exams, writing theses and lectures, and grading papers. Craig cooked, I washed the dishes. We drank beer, listened to music – Craig’s classical records – played atrocious tennis, took in an occasional baseball game, manned the mops when the sewers backed up, fought off the odd bat in the middle of the night, and occasionally allowed our unorthodox landlady to ply us with generous amounts of rye whisky. These were good times. My admiration for Craig’s discipline, common sense, scholarly devotion, and sense of humour – not to mention his skill in disguising hamburger – convinced me that he would be a talented professional historian and, I hoped, a life-long friend. The rental partnership broke up in the spring of 1960 when Craig and Gail were married. I followed suit a week later. We ushered for each other. The circle of friendship now doubled in size and became permanent. The scholarly partnership would soon develop new dimensions.
Craig never suggested to me that he intended to return to the United States once his graduate work was completed. Probably, like all the rest of us, he was ready to take whatever post came up – and in those years very few did on either side of the border. As things turned out, he was ready for a job at just about the time when Canadian university expansion – both numbers of universities and numbers of students at all levels – got under way. In 1961, his thesis still to be examined, Brown took a position in the Department of History at the recently established University of Calgary. He quickly became a central member of that department, soon taking a weekly trip to the University of Alberta in Edmonton to help out with the graduate program there. Though an easterner, he nevertheless found the informality of western society attractive. The magnificence of Alberta’s landscape appealed to both Browns in a very fundamental fashion. The west seemed to suit Craig and not merely because it allowed him to take up trout fishing – an art that included tying his own lures. Its history interested him. Had he resisted the fleshpots of Toronto, to which he returned first temporarily and then permanently beginning in 1964, his historical work might very well have taken a somewhat different direction.
Living in Calgary meant ready access to Banff National Park, and Craig naturally developed an interest in its history. One of his earliest and most original essays was presented at a conference on the national parks system in Canada held in Calgary in October 1968. He entitled the essay ‘The Doctrine of Usefulness: Natural Resource and National Park Policy in Canada, 1887–1914.’ While the subject was a new one for Craig, and indeed in Canadian historiography, his interpretation was an extension of an argument he had already made. He sketched out and analysed with care the debates surrounding the establishment of Banff, our first national park. His argument was that early parks policy had to be understood in a wider context of natural resource and national development. Parks, though areas for conservation, were similar to mines and timber because they were ‘useful’ even if only for recreation and revenue generation. Parks policy, like the foreign policy he had studied in his first book, was best understood as an extension of ‘the expansionist, exploitative economic programs of the National Policy of the Macdonald Government after 1878 … the term “wilderness” was scarcely used in discussion of parks policy and then only to suggest a primitive condition demanding “improvement” in order to make a park.’3 Embedded in this persuasive essay was the potential for a larger study, one that could have encompassed the virtually unexamined work of the Canadian Commission of Conservation, established in 1909, which Brown commented on tentatively in his parks study. But that potential project slid into the background once Brown moved to the University of Toronto in 1964, and he soon found himself being offered other research opportunities.
Craig easily made a place for himself in the Toronto department, where he began as a temporary replacement for Donald Creighton and then stayed. He taught Canadian-American relations, and his interests moved from the late Victorian age into the twentieth century. He was quickly recognized as a conscientious teacher and a demanding scholar and editor. We renewed our old partnership almost at once; he joined me as associate editor of the Canadian Historical Review in 1964 and succeeded to the editorship four years later. He applied his admirable editorial talents to a centennial project with J.M.S. Careless, an excellent collection of essays, each covering a decade, entitled The Canadians, 1867–1967 (1967). His willingness to work with and for others brought all sorts of tasks Craig’s way over the years. Together with Sid Wise he published Canada Views the United States (1966), a valuable study of Canadian public opinion about the United States. He later wrote a first-class chapter on the second decade of the twentieth century for an innovative textbook, Twentieth Century Canada (1983) with J.L. Granatstein and others.
In the mid-1980s he accepted an invitation from Louise Dennys and Malcolm Lester to bring together a group of historians to produce a lavishly illustrated, scholarly history of Canada. The task was a major one, since Craig’s goal was not merely to produce a textbook with a great many illustrations and photographs. He understood and told his unruly herd of authors that an ‘illustrated history’ was one where the text and the illustrations had to be thoroughly integrated, that one without the other could not tell the complete story. The Illustrated History of Canada (1987) is easily equal to similar books published elsewhere. (Since I was one of Craig’s contributors, my view of the quality of the final product is obviously unbiased.) Most notably, it was the first survey of Canadian history to pay serious attention to the history of Native Peoples before the Europeans arrived. A French edition, in both cloth and paper, found a large francophone audience, while a Spanish version was published in Mexico on the recommendation of Pierre Trudeau. With such a range of editorial experience, it is hardly surprising that Craig was approached by the Champlain Society when a new editor for its prestigious series was needed in 1987.
The extent to which Brown had become a committed and indispensable member of the Canadian historical profession by the end of the 1960s is perhaps best illustrated by a fundamental decision that he made in 1967. After several summers labouring in the collections of the Public Archives of Canada, Craig decided to build a cottage in the Gatineau. Like many other Canadian historians, to say nothing of Ottawa’s politicians and public servants, the Browns realized that there is no place for human life in the heat, humidity, and rumour-mongering that descends on the Nation’s Capital during most of July and August, the research months. But the beauty of the Gatineau, mosquitoes and all, the prospect of a swim after a day in the Borden Papers, and some fishing and sailing on weekends offered a compelling alternative to a young historian who had grown up within easy reach of the Finger Lakes in New York State. Another ten years would pass before Craig officially became a Canadian citizen, but the real decision about his future home came with the purchase of a lot sitting high over the shore at Grand Lake. Having reassured Craig that Quebec would almost certainly never separate from Canada, I felt it my duty to act on my beliefs and soon acquired a summer place at a somewhat less grand lake a half hour closer to Ottawa. Our continued friendship and collaboration was ensured. Our kids could play ‘Dungeons and Dragons,’ learn to sail, and read Tintin, while we got on with the serious business of doing Canadian history. Often, though not often enough, Craig would pick me up at the end of my cottage road so that together we could battle our way through menacing gravel trucks, slow-moving tractors, and haying machines on our way to that Canadian scholars’ shrine, the Public Archives of Canada.
It may have been on one of those early morning joy rides, with an uncovered gravel truck in front spewing stones at Craig’s Volvo and the one in the rear-view mirror creeping closer and closer, that I confessed that I might never finish my volume in the Centennial Series, the one devoted to the 1896–1921 period. My research on the Laurier years approached completion and I had done a great deal on Quebec, French language rights, and the conscription crisis. But that left large holes probably amounting to more than half of the planned book. I had been at it for about five years, my deadline was past, and Professors Morton and Creighton were beginning to ask pointed questions. Would Craig be interested in bailing me out?
Naturally Craig took a little time to think about my proposition. He was already launched on a very important new project – a biography of Sir Robert Borden. It was that work, of course, that made him such an obvious scholar to become my partner. I knew we could work together, not only because of our long friendship, but also because we had often discussed many of the historical issues that my projected book would be expected to cover. He asked some questions about my approach to organizing the book. I told him that my intention was to deviate somewhat from the pattern set in the already published volumes of the series. Where those volumes had generally adopted a chronological, narrative approach, I wanted to write a more thematic study, examining some topics that would illustrate the general characteristics of the period. Those were developments that the two of us had often discussed, namely, the gradual emergence of an urban-industrial society in the quarter-century that I had been assigned. There would, of course, be several chronological chapters interspersed among the topical ones, especially those that would carry the political and diplomatic history forward. I was not surprised that Craig readily approved this general approach and immediately offered some suggestions about subjects that might be treated analytically.
Before agreeing to join me, Craig had to convince Henry Borden that this digression would be a valuable stepping-stone towards writing the Borden biography. For my part, Professors Morton and Creighton would have to agree to this new partnership. The latter was easy – anything that might kick-start their delinquent author evoked unrestrained enthusiasm. Craig’s detour also won approval. Then, before he threw me the lifeline, he set one perfectly reasonable condition: the entire final product would be presented as the joint work of the two authors, neither being identified as having written one part or the other. That meant we were entering a genuine partnership, just what I wanted. To seal the deal I proposed listing the authors alphabetically. We then set about finishing the research and writing the book, reviewing each draft chapter together and, with Eleanor Cook’s help, bringing an agreed approach and common style to the revised versions. Disagreements were rare and never fundamental; there were a few errors that neither of us caught. The happy memory of writing the final two paragraphs together is still clearly etched in my mind. I can’t recall which author came up with the book’s subtitle, A Nation Transformed, but I do remember the word play it evoked (would it be mistaken for a history of electricity? How about ‘A Nation Transpired?’ And so on.) The book turned out exactly as intended: a single book by two authors. Craig proposed that we dedicate it to D.J. McDougall, the First World War veteran and teacher we loved and admired and for whom, one day, we would serve as pallbearers. That dedication put a perfect seal on our successful partnership.
Brown had been strategically placed to do me this great favour because, as I mentioned, he had agreed to write a life of Sir Robert Borden. That, too, was part of his Canadian baptism. Not surprisingly, Henry Borden had first asked Donald Creighton to write the biography of his uncle. Creighton at first had agreed, but for his own reasons he never really got down to work on his new subject, preferring instead to focus his polemical pessimism on the supposed decline and fall of his beloved country. My guess is that Creighton was not attracted to Borden, whose sombre, matter-of-fact temperament contrasted so sharply with the high-spirited, hard-drinking John A.; Borden was simply not Wagnerian enough. So Creighton decided to find someone else to take over his job. His former student and now his colleague, Craig Brown, was his choice. Though neither Craig nor Donald Creighton thought of it this way, Creighton’s imprimatur struck me as the equivalent of Canadian citizenship. Creighton’s public utterances were increasingly anti-American, yet he willingly recognized that Craig, whatever the land of his birth, was the historian of Canada most likely to present a thoroughly researched, well-written, balanced portrait of the only successful Conservative prime minister since Macdonald. Creighton might also have thought that Brown and Borden had many temperamental similarities: quiet competence, patience, and perseverance. And, underneath their deceptively calm exteriors, the prime minister and the professor were energetic and decisive, capable of both occasional anger and loud laughter. ‘Self-control, and patience and courage in the face of adversity, [Borden] had repeatedly observed, were the first steps toward achievement and the fulfilment of duty,’4 Brown would later write, lines that could have been applied to the biographer himself without any significant alteration.
Robert Laird Borden: A Biography, completed in 1980, remains Brown’s major scholarly achievement. It was everything that could be expected of a biographer: exhaustively researched, effectively organized, tightly written, and, above all, very perceptive about the character of a prime minister who had tried his best to reveal as little of himself as possible. Readers of Borden’s diaries knew that he entertained strong opinions about the public men of his time. They also knew that in times of stress Borden often suffered from boils and that he loved to play golf. But Brown teased much more out of the documents than the obvious: Borden emerges from this study as a person of ambition as well as conscience, of decisiveness and self-doubt, and of a judicial temperament that might have suited him better for the bench than for politics. ‘From his perspective,’ Brown concluded in a typically detached way, ‘putting the interests of “country above party” had been a consistent principle of his political career.’5 Hardly the road to long-term political success.
Borden, both in opposition before 1911 and as prime minister for the next decade, led a fractious party that constantly threatened to split apart. He faced caucus revolts and harsh criticism from more successful provincial Conservative party leaders before he finally drove Laurier from office. No problem was more persistent and ultimately more corrosive of Conservative unity than the place of the Quebec members in the party. Given Laurier’s domination of Quebec, it is not surprising that Borden had to make do with the threads and patches of Quebec political life. Both the unpredictable Conservative, F.D. Monk, and the predictable nationalist, Henri Bourassa, made life almost unbearable for Borden. Brown’s treatment of this subject is truly masterful in its detail and in its detachment: he sympathizes with Borden, whose frustrations were unending, but he also understands the problems faced by Borden’s Quebec supporters. The Conservative leader had made a dubious bargain with the Nationalists in 1911, and Brown does his best to follow Borden’s efforts, ultimately failed efforts, to make the alliance work.6 His account of the Regulation XVII/Conscription/Union Government crisis carefully details the reasoning that led Borden to value Canada’s war effort above Canada’s domestic unity. Borden’s limitations are frankly revealed, his strengths underlined. There will almost certainly never be a better, more tempered, critical account of Borden’s war leadership than that found in Brown’s biography and in a brief, compelling essay entitled ‘“Whither are we being shoved?” Political Leadership in Canada during World War I.’ Who has better summed up Borden’s Union Government than Brown did in 1971? ‘Union government was the vehicle of both the assets and liabilities of Borden’s political leadership. It was a creature of the politics of war. It violated all the canons of traditional political leadership. At its base was no party nor any recognizable traditional constituency support. It substituted a wartime national purpose for a celebration of peacetime national unity. Its foundation was an artificially created ‘National’ constituency and a singleness of purpose. Most important, its authority was temporary.’7
Though Brown recognized that Borden had made wartime decisions that ruptured national unity and led to a collapse of the Union Government, his final judgment on Borden was, characteristically, a balanced one. The rupture of national unity had to be weighed, as Borden himself claimed, against another principle that had guided Brown’s assessment of politicians and policies from the time of his earliest writings: the national interest. That theme ran like a red thread through the Borden biography, becoming especially evident in the war years. Borden’s assessment of the ‘national interest’ explained his decision to place military victory ahead of national unity in 1917, a Hobson’s choice.
Soldiers leave by rail: troops off to war, ca. 1914 (City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 814)
Borden’s conduct of wartime relations with London provided Brown with the most convincing evidence of Borden’s commitment to the national interest. In an essay that he wrote for a book honouring his mentor, Donald Creighton, he offered a subtle revision of the accepted view that Borden’s imperial policy had evolved from an ‘imperial’ to a ‘national’ focus by the end of the Great War. From the outset, Brown believed, ‘Canada’s war aims were nationally defined, general, moral and unselfish.’8 That position underlay both Resolution IX of the Imperial Conference in 1917, with its call for ‘continuous consultation’ among the members of the empire, and Borden’s opposition to the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Treaty in 1921. He contended that though Borden believed that the interests of Canada and the imperial interests should coincide, the Canadian leader nevertheless insisted that Canada had a right and duty to define its own interests, even if doing so resulted in conflict with Great Britain. The source of potential conflict, Brown explained, was that ‘Borden deliberately brought the point of view of North America to the councils of the empire, a point of view that reflected the growing identity of Canadian and American interests.’9 If there was ambiguity in this formulation – and there was – that ambiguity faithfully reflected the state of the imperial game at the end of the Great War. Brown’s achievement was not to erase the ambiguity but rather to make it understandable. With the Borden biography Craig established himself as the leading historian of Canada’s role in the First World War.
Craig dedicated the second volume of Borden to Donald Creighton, but his detached approach to the life of Sir Robert meant that his study differed markedly from his mentor’s unabashedly committed account of Sir John A.’s career. Yet the two scholars shared a common belief in the validity of biography as an approach to understanding the past. ‘I think that an Historian’s chief interest is in character and circumstance,’ Creighton famously remarked. Brown knew that he was writing the Borden biography not only in Creighton’s long shadow but also at a time when Canadian historians had begun to argue that the ‘life and times’ approach had serious limitations. Craig decided to dispute that claim in his presidential address to the Canadian Historical Association in Montreal in the spring of 1980. His presentation deftly surveyed the field of Canadian biography, examining novel approaches and new and old criticisms. As usual, he was both judicious and firm. Biographers too often gave in to the temptation of biased advocacy; social history and social sciences such as psychology could add new insights to historical biography. But in the end, he maintained, biography remained a discrete and essential approach to the past. The biographer’s ‘obligation remains what it has always been: to disclose with sympathy and candour, and with such literary grace as he can command, as much as he can discover of his subject’s private and public life. Without historical biography, there can be no historical “dialectique constant entre l’individu et la société.” And that dialectic, after all, is an essential element not just of social history but of all historical inquiry.’10 Labouring in the presence of Sir Wilfrid and Sir Robert for more than a decade could hardly have suggested any other conclusion. Robert Laird Borden illustrated the point and won his colleagues’ admiration.
The completion of the Borden biography lifted a heavy responsibility from Craig’s shoulders. It had been a long haul, interrupted by his work on A Nation Transformed. Observing Craig through those summers in the Gatineau was a lesson in discipline for all of his friends. Long hours at the Public Archives, when the warm sun and the brisk sailing winds beckoned at Grand Lake, demonstrated his devotion to research and to exploring the undiscovered places in the Canadian past. Few, if any, Canadian scholars could challenge his record of attendance in the Archives reading room overlooking the mighty Ottawa River. Knox College had doubtless prepared him for the Archives cafeteria, where only poutine added variety to a recognizably Presbyterian menu. The copy of the final volume of Borden that Craig gave me as a reward for reading his draft manuscript included this amusing but self-revelatory message. ‘Now all you will have to read at Tenpenny Lake are thesis drafts,’ he wrote in his characteristically neat hand. My translation: ‘Borden is finished at last!’
The two-volume biography completed, Craig, despite his stalwart defence of the genre, didn’t look for another major biographical project. He did, however, continue to demonstrate his skills in a series of succinct gems he wrote for the Dictionary of Canadian Biography / Dictionnaire biographique du Canada. The Great War continued to fascinate him, especially its impact on Canadian domestic developments. Scientific research – and Craig, perhaps spurred on by his science-educated wife Gail, had a long-held interest in science – had become a ‘national interest’ during the First World War. Brown’s essay on the physicist Sir John McLennan demonstrated once again his capacity to bring together biography, politics, imperial relations and intellectual life. As always, the footnotes demonstrated that Craig wore his scholarship lightly: his research, as always, was resourceful and exhaustive.11
While Brown’s scholarly work continued in these years, its pace was inevitably slowed by his increasing involvement in the administrative responsibilities that he willingly assumed. His patience, capacity for detailed work, and genuine fascination with university politics and intrigue, made him a natural leader in a variety of jobs. At the University of Toronto he served as associate dean of the graduate school and briefly as acting dean between 1981 and 1984, followed by five years as vice-dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, 1987–92. The real challenge came in 1992: after having served his department in almost every other capacity he became chair for a five-year period. In his various responsibilities he offered friendly encouragement to his colleagues, who, in turn, recognized his ability and willingness to take the tough decisions that made his superiors look good. This was a part of my friend’s life that I admired, because it so clearly demonstrated his strong sense of duty and loyalty to the institution that had given him a home when he came to Canada. It also made me appreciate my own good fortune – and that of others – in having avoided any such responsibilities. Craig was the kind of academic citizen who made the lives of the irresponsible possible.
Craig’s administrative talents and his scholarly reputation were widely recognized beyond the University of Toronto. Having served on the Council of the Canadian Historical Association he became president in 1980. In 1984 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Four years later he became the vice-president of Academy II (Humanities and Social Sciences). The presidency of Academy II followed for a three-year term. Occasionally, the Royal Society does something adventuresome. Craig, along with Professor John Meisel, serving a term as president of the society, took charge of one of those rare initiatives: the Royal Society of Canada – Beijing Academy of Social Sciences study of Canadian democracy. The Canadian team, on which I was an occasional substitute player, hosted their Chinese counterparts in Canada for lectures and discussions and travelled to the Peoples’ Republic to continue these exchanges. Other Canadian specialists were recruited to explain to the Chinese researchers the mysteries of bilingualism, elections, federalism, income tax, bankruptcy and labour law, civil society, women’s equality rights, and much more. At the final session in Niagara-on-the-Lake (where the capitalist who owned all of the hotels was a Chinese woman from Hong Kong), the Beijing scholars presented papers on Canadian democracy. They seemed to have taken in much of what had been taught. Events proved, however, that even modest hopes that the sterling example of Canadian democracy might change the Peoples’ Republic of China were excessively optimistic.
Craig’s role in the China project was an essential one. He was its major-domo, planning the session, arranging travel, finding Canadian scholars to participate, engaging in the discussions, eating, even cooking, Chinese food. His superb organizational skills surprised no one. But in one respect a new, if temporary, Craig emerged. Like Cecilia Bartolli, Craig long held to the sensible belief that no place is worth visiting unless it can be reached by land, preferably by train or, in a pinch, by Volvo. Nothing daunted, he and Gail twice flew to Beijing, and twice returned by air. (Later, trips to Israel and even to Vancouver were safely ventured.) The Chinese scholars quickly recognized Craig as a person they liked and trusted, one who enjoyed bok choy and Beijing duck. The Browns formed friendships that have continued long after the relegation of the China project to the academic filing cabinet. On the Chinese side, the firmness of that friendship has been repeatedly demonstrated during visits to Canada, regular electronic correspondence, and once, when Craig was ailing, by the gift of a dozen capsules of ‘“Longevity” Ursine Seal Penis Special-Effects tonics.’ In generous recognition both of our more than forty years of friendship and of my greater need, I suppose, Craig passed the elixir on to me!
The longevity of our friendship, of course, is not the outcome of any medication, traditional or scientific. As is probably in the nature of friendships among academic people, common scholarly interests are at the centre of it. That is an essential bond. But beyond my admiration for Craig’s scholarly performance, his editorial skills, and his outstanding contributions to the Canadian historical and academic community, there is something else, something more personal. He is the example that springs to mind when I quote, as I often do, Mavis Gallant’s self-evident truth: ‘a Canadian is someone who has a logical reason to think he is one.’12 That logic, I am now convinced, began to take shape long ago in that unfairly acquired, freshly painted room in Knox College.
1 J.L. Granatstein, Yankee Go Home? (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1996), chaps 4–8.
2 Robert Craig Brown, Canada’s National Policy 1883–1900: A Study in Canadian-American Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), 12, 402; see also Robert Craig Brown, ‘The Nationalism of the National Policy,’ in Peter Russell, ed., Nationalism in Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 155–63.
3 Robert Craig Brown, ‘The Doctrine of Usefulness: National Resource and National Park Policy in Canada 1887–1914,’ in J.G. Nelson, ed., Canadian Parks in Perspective (Montreal: Harvest House, 1969), 58.
4 Robert Craig Brown, Robert Laird Borden: A Biography, Vol. II (Toronto: Macmillan, 1980), 208.
5 Ibid., 197.
6 Robert Craig Brown, Robert Laird Borden: A Biography, Vol. I (Toronto: Macmillan, 1975), 245–53.
7 Robert Craig Brown, ‘“Whither are we being pushed?” Political Leadership in Canada during World War I,’ in J.L. Granatstein and R.D. Cuff, eds, War and Society in North America (Toronto: Thomas Nelson, 1971), 119.
8 Robert Craig Brown, ‘Sir Robert Borden, the Great War and Anglo-Canadian Relations,’ in John S. Moir, ed., Character and Circumstance (Toronto: Macmillan, 1970), 206.
9 Robert Craig Brown, ‘Canada in North America,’ in John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and David Brody, eds, Twentieth-Century American Foreign Policy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971), 359.
10 Robert Craig Brown, ‘Biography in Canadian History,’ Historical Papers / Communications Historiques (1980), 8.
11 Robert Craig Brown, ‘The Life of Sir John Cunningham McLennan Ph.D, O.B.E., K.B.E., 1867–1935,’ Physics in Canada / La physique au Canada, 56, 2 (March/April 2000), 91–102.
12 Mavis Gallant, Home Truths (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981), xiii.