Sean T. Cadigan - Newfoundland and Labrador: A History

Sean T. Cadigan,

Newfoundland and Labrador: A History

Toronto; University of Toronto Press, 2009

xiv + 363 pp. ISBN 0802044654 (hardback); 0802082475 (paperback); £45 / £20

An overview history of Newfoundland (not forgetting Labrador) is much needed. Sean T. Cadigan's volume has many strengths. Cadigan is a social historian of the fishery, with a firm grasp of the role of the island's bleak environment. The book is well illustrated, with useful maps. It is splendidly written: Cadigan's calm account of the disastrous 1914 seal hunt is deeply moving, almost more so than the familiar story of the carnage at Beaumont Hamel two years later. The narrative proceeds seamlessly, drawing the reader persuasively along as it goes. Given my strong criticisms, it is only right to praise Cadigan's achievement, for some of the problems stem from the limitations of the conventional historical textbook. There are four areas of weakness: loose utilisation of the explosive concept of nationalism, failure to take account of historical demography, underplaying of Newfoundland's distinctive political culture and reluctance to highlight the turning-point of Newfoundland's absorption into Canada in 1949.
One third larger but markedly less fertile than Ireland, Newfoundland rises like a slab of rock from the continental shelf of the Grand Banks, where the collision of Arctic waters and the warm Gulf Stream stimulated one of the world's largest fish reserves. Year-round settlement developed slowly but, in 1832, a legislature was established, and local self-government was conceded in 1855. However, Newfoundland did not conform to the standard colony-to-Commonwealth pattern. Although formally included in the 1931 Statute of Westminster, it collapsed into bankruptcy two years later, and a Whitehall-appointed commission of government took control. In 1948, Newfoundlanders agreed to join Canada, but their 52 percent Yes vote fell short of full-hearted consent.
Newfoundland's history spans the entire British imperial experience, from Humphrey Gilbert's symbolic planting the English flag at St John's in 1583 to Churchill's cap-in-hand meeting with Roosevelt at Argentia in 1941. Two themes of centrality run throughout, and Cadigan handles both well, the economic and social centrality of fishing and the centrality of the island itself in the North Atlantic world. Newfoundland's linking role between two continents was underlined when Gander became the half-way refuelling point between New York and London in the early years of air travel. Newfoundlanders' strong 'British' identity was accompanied by suspicion of their larger Dominion neighbour, although they used Canadian money and affiliated with Canadian churches long before they joined its federal system. In 1927, Newfoundlanders successfully upheld their claims to the mainland enclave of Labrador. Although the full mouthful was not officially adopted until 2001, the province determinedly rebutted the expansionist dreams of Quebec by calling itself Newfoundland and Labrador, and Cadigan punctiliously calls its people Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.
Rather than simply restore self-government in 1945, the Attlee government summoned a 'National Convention'. But the ringing declaration by the chief proponent of joining Canada, J.R. Smallwood, 'We are not a nation', forms the opening words of Cadigan's text as well as the theme of his closing reflections. Yet for an author who disavows the idea of a Newfoundland nation, he seems loose in his employment of the formidable related term, 'nationalism'. It appears in the title of his Introduction, and briefly hovers over the opening pages of Chapter Seven. But nowhere is there any analysis of the word, no suggestion of the extensive academic debates on the concept, no hint that its application to Newfoundland has ever been debated.
The closest that we come to elucidating the term in Chapter Seven is the revelation that 'nationalists' were people who embraced a foundation myth around fifteenth-century explorer John Cabot and favoured 'landward economic expansion' (p. 154) which Cadigan seems to regard as a Bad Thing. Newfoundlanders were over-optimistic about the potential wealth of the interior of their island, as the ruinously expensive construction of a 547-mile trans-island railway showed. But how historians would grumble if they had made no attempts to exploit Newfoundland's forest and mineral resources! Nor does Cadigan explain his asserted antithesis. Why were politicians incapable of simultaneously developing the interior and improving the fishery? The real problem lay in the intractability of the fishery itself. William F. Coaker, the only politician who seriously contemplated radical reforms, ended as a disillusioned admirer of Mussolini. However, compared with Mussolini, nobody in Newfoundland remotely qualified as a nationalist. There was no pressure to break with the imperial power, and the so-called economic nationalists proved terrifying keen to hand over their resources, such as they were, to external exploiters. Cadigan uses the terms 'nationalism' and (post-1949) 'neo-nationalism' Emperor's-Clothes fashion to hint at profundity while papering over muddle.
Maybe I have an obsession with demography, but I believe that a general history should supply population figures. True, absolute numbers do not tell us why, for instance, China escaped imperial rule but India did not, nor do statistics about language and religion explain why spacious Canada evolved bicultural partnership while tiny Ireland was partitioned. But surely the fact that Newfoundland contained fewer people than a London Borough conveys some meaning? Cadigan relentlessly spares his readers from the demands of numeracy. Occasional statistics intrude, for wartime enlistments and job losses in the fishery. But to tell us, for instance, that a women's organisation had 7,000 members conveys nothing if we do not know whether Newfoundland was home to 70,000 people or 70 million. The sole exception ─ the information on page 288 that the population in 1986 was 576,495 ─ comes too late to provide any demographic context, especially as numbers had almost doubled since union with Canada. The population was roughly 120,000 when responsible government was introduced, around 200,000 as Newfoundland struggled to build its railway and just over a quarter of a million when it was engulfed by bankruptcy. These small numbers would not preclude the creation of a 'nation', especially as by the late nineteenth century almost all Newfoundlanders were native-born, but surely they qualify claims for 'nationalism'. Cadigan dismisses manufacturing projects because markets were so small, but he does not supply illustrative figures. He talks of 'the growth of an urban working class' in late-nineteenth century St John's, although acknowledging that the capital had a 'very small population' (p. 199). Indeed: the metropolitan area counted at most 40,000 people in 1900, one in five of the Newfoundland total. It is surely worth noting that almost half the population lived on the Avalon peninsula and that, vast though it is, Labrador has never accounted for more than two percent of the provincial total. And then there is religion. The three main denominations, Anglicans, Catholics and Methodists, made up over ninety percent of the population, not only eerily equal in numbers, but tending to cluster: in 1921, of 4,790 people in the Avalon district of St Mary's, only five were not Catholics. Very little of this, and none of it statistical, features in Cadigan, although he does devote a page to a Pentecostal revival movement which had signed up 3,757 people island-wide by 1935 ─ one third the size of the Salvation Army ─ apparently because it was 'an industrial, working-class phenomenon' (p. 218).
Cadigan devotes two sentences to a notable feature of Newfoundland political culture, the denominational compromise of 1865, but does not explore its subsequent political importance. A response to sectarian rioting in 1861, the denominational principle required governments to allocate patronage proportionately, i.e. roughly equally, among the three main groups. Usually there were twelve cabinet posts, four each for the Anglicans, Catholics and Methodists, and government jobs went by turns. Remarkably, this gave Newfoundland the combined features of two-party Liberal-versus-Conservative politics and cross-community power-sharing. The downside was it made large demands on leadership talent in a colony with less than a quarter of the population of modern-day Northern Ireland. Critics alleged that sectarian harmony was achieved at the cost of efficient government.
There are other aspects of Newfoundland political culture which merit more discussion than perhaps can be possible in a narrative textbook. Newfoundlanders are not unique in their tendency to believe that the next megaproject will make them rich, but they have been doggedly uncritical in their pursuit of economic mirages. The railway, the pulp and paper mills, industrialisation, oil, Labrador ─ the continuity is as impressive as the gullibility that has lapped them up. Thus in 1987 hydroponic cucumbers were going to make Newfoundland a power in the gherkin world: Cadigan mildly calls the project 'foolhardy' (p. 275). Another element in island politics is the enduring strain of the Newfoundland politician as the little guy who fights for ordinary people even if he sometimes cuts corners. It is difficult in a general textbook to bring every personality to life, but somehow we miss the stream that links the scoundrel Squires, whose arrest for corruption merits a passing allusion, to the ineffable Smallwood and subsequent figures such as Premier Brian Peckford who acted out a clownish heritage of battling populism, and funded the cucumber scheme. Smallwood unites the two themes. During the War, he planned to exploit the Gander air base, which was both voracious and wasteful of food, by running not just a pig farm, but a perpetual piggery. Pigs would be fattened on discarded military swill, sold as pork to the military and so on in an endless cycle. This was precisely the barmy ingenuity of an earlier generation that had fantasised of the snow-covered hills white with sheep ─ and helps explain how Smallwood ran Newfoundland as a Canadian province for two decades after 1949.
But why should outsiders grapple with the comic-cuts history of this tiny community? One episode in modern Newfoundland history, the colony's decision to join Canada, was more than a small-earthquake-in-decolonisation story. What would have happened if that narrow 52 percent vote had flipped the other way? This is no counter-factual fantasy, for if Confederation had been defeated, Britain would have been honour-bound to restore 'responsible government as it existed in 1933', as the ballot-paper alternative described it. The phrase was technically accurate, for Newfoundland had not embraced the implied independence conferred by the Statute of Westminster, but it was politically inept to remind the 1948 voters of 1933 conditions: imagine David Cameron campaigning for 'the Conservative party as led by John Major in 1997'. With smarter presentation, the anti-Confederates might indeed have won, and 320,000 Newfoundlanders (including a few Labradorians) would have re-launched themselves as a virtually independent country. What then? A stand-alone Newfoundland could hardly have provided the welfare services and economic prosperity demanded by the rising expectations of the 1950s. Even with its overlooked post-Confederation population increase, Newfoundland today is characterised by cyclical emigration which takes many of its workers off to Ontario and Alberta. In the 'fifties and 'sixties, there would have been an outflow of people, with Newfoundlanders perhaps running the London Underground, and probably targeted by Australia as a supply of people who were white, British and desperate. Newfoundland's political culture might have thrown up a leader in the Squires tradition and Smallwood mould, perhaps even Smallwood himself, who claimed a socialist pedigree. A little-guy government would probably have been anti-American, for Newfoundlanders envied the prosperity flaunted by the military bases but resented American superiority, especially their alleged coinage of the insulting nickname, goofy Newfies. It would have been tempting to insist that Churchill had handed over the bases without consulting the people, and that Newfoundland sovereignty required a hefty increase in rent ─ not a comfortable scenario to imagine on a crossroads island at the height of the Cold War. An independent Newfoundland might not have become a North Atlantic Cuba, but it could well have been a weak link in Western geopolitics.
Your genuine stick-to-the-facts historian will riposte that this never happened because, at one second to midnight on 31 March 1949, Newfoundland (and Labrador) became the tenth province of Canada ─ the timing was designed to avoid April Fools' Day. But that is precisely why Newfoundland's decision to join Confederation should be underlined as something more than a passing event in a linear history. Cadigan does indeed devote half a dozen pages to the Confederation issue, more space than is allocated to many earlier historical episodes, but his discussion of the issue conforms to the continuous narrative requirements of the conventional textbook. The constitutional future of Newfoundland emerges logically from the end of the War, and the decision to join Canada flows naturally into discussion of Newfoundland's practical adjustment to Ottawa control and Ottawa largesse. But the impression is given of a slight change of historical gear, for nothing is said to drive home to the reader that a major turning point has occurred.
Sean T. Cadigan has written narrative that evokes the Newfoundland past although it does not manage to tell us how many people were involved, how far their community could be measured against the elusive concept of nationality, how its politics were shaped by a peculiar local culture and how its context was altered forever by its union with Canada . But these deficiencies may be inherent in the standard format of the historical textbook.