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﻿<title﻿>﻿New Socialist Magazine, Stanley Bréhault Ryerson, 1911-1998- Obituary﻿</title>﻿

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﻿<b﻿>﻿Stanley Bréhault Ryerson, 

﻿<br﻿>﻿1911-1998

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by Jim Naylor﻿<br﻿>﻿

﻿<i﻿>﻿New Socialist Magazine, June - July 1998﻿</i>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿

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"It is an exhilarating sign of our times of change, not only that work is being done on hitherto untouched or largely neglected areas of our social past and present, but that there is a growing recognition of the significance of class and nation in Canadian development." Stanley Ryerson wrote this in 1968 in the preface to his important history of 19th-century Canada, Unequal Union, just as the study of Canadian history was about to be turned on its head by a new generation of historians interested in rediscovering a history of exploitation and struggle that had not been taught to us. They had little to build on except the work of Ryerson himself. In books such as 1837: The Birth of Canadian Democracy (1937), French Canada: A Study in Canadian Democracy (1943), The Founding of Canada (1960), and Unequal Union, Ryerson set out, for the first time, to write an explicitly Marxist history of Canada.

﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿

A great-grandson of Egerton Ryerson, Stanley was born into one of Toronto's premier professional households and naturally attended Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto. Studying at the Sorbonne in 1931-32 he encountered the heady political culture of depression-era Europe and was drawn to the Communist Party. As befitting his background, his radicalization was very much an intellectual process as Ryerson decried the cultural sterility of capitalist society and saw in communism "the only path to a future creative renaissance."

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Ryerson not only came to play a central role in the Communist Party's cultural institutions such as the Workers' Theatre and the Progressive Arts Club but, for the next four decades he was a fixture in the central leadership bodies of the Party. Only in 1969 did he leave the Central Committee of the CP, and in 1971 quit the Party itself.

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For a new generation of radical historians in the 1970s, the Communist Party held few attractions, yet Ryerson's historical work attracted attention far beyond the bounds of the Party itself. He had successfully rescued the rebellions of 1837 as an important radical democratic uprising and he explored the emergence of industrial capitalism in Canada in the nineteenth century. His most significant contribution, I would argue, is rooted in his close engagement with political and intellectual life in both Quebec and the rest of Canada. He took serioulsy the problem of nationhood, of the denial of the right of self-determination for Quebec, and recognized Canada as an "unequal union."

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It ie easy to criticize Ryerson for his dogged adherence to the Stalinist Communist Party, but it is also worth noting that it was this same desire for political engagement that compelled him to write politicized, readable, popular history. Read today, decades later, his works still speak to unresolved historical questions. Whatever weakenesses they have stem much less from his political connections, than from the simple fact that Ryerson was attempting to synthesize a history that was as yet inadequately researched. In this regard, Ryerson's contribution was to spur other socialists to study the roots of inequality in Canada.

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As well, Stanley Ryerson's role in the Communist Party did not dull his desire to engage broader intellectual worlds. As editor of the Communist Party's Marxist Quarterly and Horizons in the 1960s, he struck up debates with a wide array of radical thinkers. He regularly attended meetings of the Canadian Historical Association and, upon leaving the CP, helped establish the Society for Socialist Studies. The national movement in Quebec, of course, was of continued importance and interest to him. In several spheres, he continued to play a key role in bridging political traditions on the left through the 1980s and 1990s. The product of a lifetime of political and intellectual commitment, Stanley Ryerson's struggle to understand and explain the importance of class and nation in Canada's past has borne considerable fruit in the past two or three decades.

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﻿<font﻿ ﻿size="1"﻿>﻿Jim Naylor teaches history at Brandon University in Manitoba and is president of the Canadian Committee on Labour History.﻿</font>﻿</font>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿


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