| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 54

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Mark Kristmanson, Plateaus of Freedom: Nationality, Culture, and State Security in Canada, 1940–1960 (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press 2003).

"GREAT IS TRUTH, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth," wrote Aldous Huxley in 1946. The sentiment resonates with William Lyon Mackenzie King's diary entry of 6 August 1945 when he learned that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. After expressing relief that the bomb had been used on the Japanese rather than on the "White races of Europe," King noted: "The whole business has been referred to as the greatest achievement in science. I think it was an equally great achievement in secrecy.... It shows what control by government of publicity can effect." King's insight was sharper than his syntax, as control of publicity, alongside secrecy and silence, were characteristic achievements of the Brave New World of the Cold War state. In Plateaus of Freedom Mark Kristmanson confronts the contemporary legacies of the silent and secret architects of Cold War Canada: the selective speech of censored security records and the selective memory of a cultural nationalist historiography. Kristmanson responds by using the analytical tools of cultural studies to interrogate the erasures of the censor and the platitudes of the liberal-progressive narrative of the making of the modern, multi-cultural, tolerant, democratic Canadian state.

The histories of Canadian cultural institutions and security agencies are typically segregated fields of research, but Kristmanson traces a latticework of connections between culture and security during and following World War II that make it difficult to sustain the division. Kristmanson's case studies point to a coordinated network of censorship, intelligence, and propaganda shaping an assertive Canadian national culture. His studies range from a "conspiratorial" rereading of the famous Gouzenko defection to analyses of forgotten cultural/security figures like Tracy Phillipps and Peter Dwyer. In each, Kristmanson blends an analysis of a relevant cultural text — a spy novel, a play, a film, a painting, a concert — with his examination of archival and security sources.

Kristmanson begins with the eccentric character of Tracy Phillipps, the British soldier-adventurer who arrived in war-time Canada to offer his services as a self-described "electrical engineer of culture."(2) Through remarkable self-promotion, Phillipps became simultaneously employed by the Canadian government in the Nationalities Branch and by the RCMP as a civilian agent. In the latter role, Phillipps' reactionary imperialism and strident anti-communism were hardly an obstacle, but, within the Ottawa bureaucracy, Phillipps became an ever-increasing source of embarrassment. As a part of the residual culture of Canada's colonial past, Phillipps was out of step with an emergent nationalist cultural project. Kristmanson shows, however, that Phillipps' interaction with Canada's minority nationalities was but a "Britishthinking" variation on a Canadian theme. Though personal and political controversy swirled around him during his brief Canadian career, this should not obscure his rather typical position alongside other special constables, translators, and cultural bureaucrats who acted as intermediaries between ethnocultural minorities and state security agencies. "If these cultural intermediaries are exposed to public scrutiny and discussion," Kristmanson argues, "it would be understood directly how multicultural states are, intrinsically, security states."(48) Cultural difference, if ostensibly tolerated, attracts the attention and mistrust of the state's security agencies. For example, Kristmanson notes that the National Library of Canada owes its extensive collection of early minority-language periodicals to the assiduous surveillance and censorship work of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

Kristmanson then turns his attention to the strained Cold-War relationship between the National Film Board (NFB) and the RCMP. Much of this section is a reproduction of RCMP files pertaining to the NFB garnered through Access to Information requests — or what remained of these files after they had been expurgated by the CSIS censor. The absent portions of these "shattered" documents reveal a shadowy portrait of the censor in action — in his omissions we may read "the contemporary signature of the state" authorizing a limited and sanitized history of its past security activities. Yet what remains here still provides revelations: Kristmanson has demonstrated the extent, persistence, and duration of the Mounties' surveillance and penetration of the NFB. More painful perhaps is the overt and covert complicity of those within the Film Board in a "clean-out" that far exceeded the three politically-motivated firings that were publicly acknowledged. These particular revelations could easily fit into a general narrative that is well-known in Canadian historiography — the Red scare dismantled the progressive/subversive NFB that had made such great and hopeful strides during the war under the leadership of John Grierson. Kristmanson, however, challenges a paradise-lost reading of the post-war NFB. Rather, he suggests, Grierson's dream of "audio-visual citizenship," in which film would "direct men's vision and determine their loyalties," was completely compatible with aims of the cultural nationalist project of the Canadian state.

Griersonian documentary was designed to evoke an emulative desire amongst viewers — the masses should imagine that they saw themselves on the screen and identify with the moral and political choices of their on-screen personae. The elaborate distribution network established by the NFB to deliver these civic-educational messages to millions of Canadians put a very powerful propaganda tool in the hands of the state. To illustrate this point, Kristmanson draws our attention to the transgression of Norman McLaren's Academy Award-winning short film Neighbours (1952). This film depicts an ultra-violent and surreal conflict between two suburban home owners over the unexpected blossoming of a marigold between their properties. Contemporaries read the film as an allegory for the Cold War. Certainly, too, it could be read allegorically in reference to the RCMP and the NFB. Kristmanson urges us to notice that this film is a transgression through medium. McLaren's pixillation technique causes the movements of his actors to appear unnatural and distorted; the soundtrack, drawn on the film itself, is otherworldly — the combined effect distances the audience from the on-screen action and the result is a viewing experience that breaks decisively with Grierson's aesthetic.

In the hands of less ambitious historians, Kristmanson's first two chapters might have been expanded into stand-alone monographs — but in this book they serve as an extended introduction: acclimatizing the reader to the shadowy theatre of the "state-within-the-state" that Kristmanson views as the hub of the censorship-intelligence-propaganda network. The key players in its cast were not the blinkered, Communist-fixated, watchers of the RCMP Red Squad, but rather those gathered weekly around a table at Sammy's restaurant in Ottawa, where an informal club occupied a liminal zone between culture and security. Foremost amongst these hybrid figures was Peter Dwyer, the British intelligence agent turned Canadian security specialist and then turned Canadian arts administrator. Improbable as it sounds, Dwyer both redesigned the Canadian government's post-Gouzenko security measures and drafted the legislation that gave birth to the Canada Council. He went on to serve as director of the Council's arts-funding program between 1958 and 1971.

Dwyer destroyed most of his personal records, but Kristmanson uses released documents to shed new light on remaining published works. Dwyer's move from internal security agent to arts administrator was hardly a new beginning but rather a shift in focus, from the background to the foreground, in Canada's Cold-War national project. A major revelation in the chapter is that Dwyer, while working for British intelligence, was the "Canadian" source of a tip to the FBI about the unreliability of American treasury board official Harry Dexter White. Dwyer's role in the White affair provides for a change of focus within Kristmanson's narrative to a different but related set of questions regarding the activities of British Intelligence in Canada. Most importantly, what role did British Intelligence play in the defection of Igor Gouzenko?

"I cannot speak about that," Yvanna Petrowska told Kristmanson regarding the Russian cipher clerk who was her Ottawa neighbour in 1945 and whose "choice of freedom" instigated a dramatic escalation of the Cold War. Petrowska's husband was a Ukrainian-Canadian writer who made his living working as an intelligence officer for the RCMP. Knowing the full extent of the couple's involvement in Gouzenko's defection would be of great historical interest, but Mrs. Petrowska has decided to keep the promise of silence she made to RCMP agents 60 years ago. Kristmanson, like many historians before him, runs into a similar wall of silence when he attempts to investigate the case through historical documents that seem to have systematically disappeared. Some traces remain, however, that Kristmanson puts under his analytical microscope. Gouzenko's own writings and remaining primary documentation (some of which was released to him accidentally) allow him to draw attention to several inconsistencies, improbable accounts, and absolute fabrications in the "official" version of Gouzenko's story. What accounts for these? Unable to find a "smoking gun," Kristmanson proposes a hypothesis that would go some way towards explaining the smoke: Gouzenko had been working covertly for British intelligence and his defection was engineered for the purposes of propaganda. Only the discretion of the Canadian press and the idiosyncratic behaviour of William Lyon Mackenzie King (who astonished British and American counterparts with his hope that the Soviet Union might take the opportunity of "turning over a new leaf" if the defection was covered up) delayed the sensational impact of Gouzenko's revelations. If Kristmanson is correct, former British P.M. Winston Churchill was complicit in this plan and his famous "Iron Curtain" speech was timed to coincide with the media leak that publicized the defection.

Kristmanson would likely admit that his Gouzenko hypothesis is far from empirically proven (a vanishing guest book from the Seigniory Club in Montebello and an allegedly symbolic reference to Lord Beaverbrook's chickens in a letter from Churchill to his wife seem to be the flimsiest points), but such speculation has polemical value. Kristmanson's provocation breaks the dictated silence that surrounds the officially-sanctioned Gouzenko myth. Let records be produced that conclusively disprove his allegations and his work will have succeeded.

Even if Kristmanson is wrong about Gouzenko's motivations, the use to which Gouzenko's story and his revelations have been put further reinforces the more general thesis of the book: that the Canadian state engineered a Cold-War cultural nationalism that foreclosed on the progressive culture that had begun to emerge during the 1930s and 1940s. But if this is so, what were the characteristics of this "progressive culture"? What was its reach? What alternate futures did it foretell that were so threatening to the Canadian state? In his final case study, Kristmanson begins to answer these questions through his examination of the Canadian reception of African-American singer and activist Paul Robeson. Robeson shared with Tracy Phillipps the difficulties of being unable to change his character to fit changing cultural times — Robeson continued to speak out against racism and for socialism when such sentiments became unspeakable during the Cold War. As a result, his career was tragically cut short. It is far too easy to point retrospectively to the horrors of Stalinism to discount figures like Robeson. Kristmanson uses linguist Gilles Fauconnier's conception of the "analogical counterfactual" to help explain Robeson's public claims for the USSR — the purported tolerance of the Soviet Union encouraged Robeson's audiences in Canada and the USA to imagine alternative realities. Robeson was not simply duped by Soviet propaganda: performing in front of Stalin in Moscow, for instance, he protested Soviet anti-Semitism by singing a song of the Warsaw Ghetto in Yiddish. (202)

Robeson's Canadian career, and his border concerts at the Peace Arch in British Columbia, have been recently discussed in these pages by Laurel Sefton MacDowell ("Paul Robeson in Canada: A Border Story" Labour/Le Travail, 51 (Spring 2003) 177–221) but Kristmanson goes further. He not only shows the extent to which the Canadian government supported the US decision to deny Robeson's right to travel, but also uses Robeson's experience as an example of the ways in which the concepts of nationalism and nationality became inseparable during the geopolitical and ideological polarization of the Cold War. For the interrogators of the Kellock-Taschereau Royal Commission, just as for those of the HUAC, left-wing political sympathies amounted to treasonous allegiance to a competing and hostile nation state. Those interrogated were presented with a forced choice between Canada and the USSR — a choice that did not make space for progressive internationalists like Paul Robeson.

Kristmanson's use of Robeson as a representative of progressive culture indicates his perception of the international character of this movement. This approach, however, risks leaving the impression that this choice was made because of a lack of suitable Canadian examples. Indeed, if Kristmanson had engaged with the Canadian progressive culture, he would have had a wonderful opportunity to distinguish between the nationalism of, for example, Margaret Fairley's collection, The Spirit of Canadian Democracy (1946), and the Cold-War cultural nationalism that supplanted it. In this era, as Caren Irr explains in The Suburb of Dissent (1998), the nation was a site of "residual political vocabularies" and served as a "sine qua non for leftists — even writers who concerned themselves primarily with narratives of class struggle."(92) But perhaps the use of Robeson as a representative of an internationalist movement in the early stages of the creation of a truly popular culture is Kristmanson's own "analogical counterfactual."

There are other silences in Kristmanson's account. We learn, for example, about the NFB's rural distribution service as an arm of Grierson's audiovisual citizenship training, in which projectionists were to lead discussions with the uneducated masses with the aid of a highly didactic "question and answer" guide. But did these discussions really produce the "correct" answers that the NFB provided? Evidence I have seen indicates that communities were more likely to commandeer these forums for discussions of issues of immediate local concern. Moreover, the film showings often provided an excuse for less controlled forms of community interaction like sporting events and dances. Kristmanson's story of social control neglects the agency of Canadians to resist such control, with the notable exception of the Mine-Mill union members who flooded to the border to hear and support Paul Robeson. But perhaps such historical agency might be better assessed after the elements of control have been dragged out of the shadowy inner regions of secret state memory into the light of public knowledge.

For historians of security and intelligence, Kristmanson's work is timely — the Arar case is only the most recent illustration of the need for public discourse about the relationship between multiculturalism, nationality, and security/intelligence agencies. For those studying Canada's cultural history, the influence of state security on cultural institutions documented here will be difficult to continue to ignore. Kristmanson's work demands a critical reinterpretation of the nationalist framework shaping much of the current historiography.

By bridging the gap between histories of security and culture, and breaking sharply with the conventions of Canadian historical writing, Kristmanson has demonstrated the potential of interdisciplinary scholarship. Plateaus of Freedom, both in content and form, is provocative and controversial: it merits a lively discussion and critique that has not yet surfaced. Given the book's central themes, it will be unhappily ironic if this silence continues.


Kirk Niergarth University of New Brunswick

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