Stanley Bréhaut Egerton Ryerson (March 12, 1911 – 25 April 1998) was a Canadian historian, educator, political activist. His parents were Edward Stanley Ryerson and Tessie De Vigne, a well-off middle-class family in Toronto. Ryerson's paternal grandfather was Egerton Ryerson, a leading Methodist and educator in nineteenth century Toronto. His grandmother, Emily Eliza Beatty, was a sister-in-law to William McDougall, one of the Fathers of Confederation; and, on his mother's side, he was related to Louis Antoine Bréhaut de l'Isle, French Commander at Trois-Rivières in 1638.
Ideological origins Ryerson began his communist activism while attending classes towards a Diplomes d'Etudes Superieures with a thesis on the writings of Sicilian peasant-realist novelist Giovanni Verga, which he started at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1931. While travelling through Europe, he experienced the political turmoil in Spain and Italy during the early depression years, and while in Paris he took part in the funeral procession of the last survivor of the Paris Commune of 1871, a Z. Camelinat. On this day in 1932, while marching with 200,000 others to Père Lachaise Cemetery, Ryerson felt a fierce wave of connection with the French Left. His experiences in Europe affected his vision of the capitalist world and he would write: "the realization that the cultural values of art and literature were being turned by capitalism into what I can only describe as spiritual onanism and the discovery that communism, by solving the material problems of society, was the only path to a future creative renaissance, was the first impulse."
Europe was the scene of his birth as a communist; Canada was the scene of his growth into a historian and communist intellectual.
In the Communist Party
In the 1930s and 1940s, the Communist Party of Canada lacked a connection to the Canadian middle class as well as intellectuals; with his return to Canada, Ryerson would become a symbol of the party's appeal to this segment of society. Ryerson "was not the only traditional intellectual to join the CPC, but he was one of the first and undoubtedly was to become the most important." The Communist parties of Great Britain and the United States of America, as well as many other nations, could count numerous artists and intellectuals as members from the 1930s on; but in Canada, Ryerson was a lonely figure. His position within the CPC, including his rapid rise in the party hierarchy and his presence on the Central Committee (CC) until 1969, was assured by his unique position; a position that allowed him to play a role within the "political history of Canadian Communism unlike that of his American and British counterparts." He was a middle class school boy from a privileged background in an overwhelmingly proletarian organisation, and as such his presence within the CPC did not always meet with approval. His education, however, made him an asset for the party that would become more valuable in the years to come.
Marxist historian Ryerson's major contribution was as a Marxist historian and it was here that Ryerson was to find his voice. The Canadian bourgeoisie's dismissal of Communism generally states that it is an alien importation and as such has no basis within Canadian society. By stressing the progressive nature of the Canadian past, the CPC hoped to prove the validity of its existence within Canadian society. During this period, the CPC published numerous articles and pamphlets, but Stanley Ryerson's 1837: The Birth of Canadian Democracy, published in 1937, was the first full Marxist analysis on the 1837 Rebellions. 1837 should be viewed as a work of Marxist historiography written for a working-class audience and not for academia; since Ryerson wrote this book so it could be used as a weapon in the struggle of working people to build a qualitatively different and better world. Ryerson's rationale for writing this book, as was the rationale for all his works, can be best summarised as an exploration of Canadian history with the hopes of educating the working class; in a sense it was an exercise in the raising of class consciousness.
The choice of the title for this book is in itself an interesting by-product of the 1930s Popular Front activities of the CPC. Dedicated to the soldiers of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion fighting in the Spanish Civil War in defence of Republican Spain, this book was written in the hope of redefining the context of revolution. Ryerson referred to the cause of 1837 as the cause of democracy; his decision to place the word in the title of his book, was done with the hope of suggesting that this referred "to both bourgeois liberalism that will supplant the remnants of feudal oligarchy and the ultimate vision of equality in the classless society brought about by the proletarian revolution." Doyle contended it was Ryerson's aim to redefine "democracy," and the way in which we refer to the events of 1837 and the idea of revolution in general.
In leadership Following the outlawing of the CPC in 1940, General Secretary Tim Buck along with Sam Carr and Charles Sims fled Canada for the safety of New York where they would reside under the protection of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). The leadership of the now underground party was placed in the hands of an Operations Centre, which was headed by Stewart Smith, Leslie Morris, and Stanley Ryerson. This new leadership decided upon a slogan for the CPC's anti-war protests: "Withdraw from the British Empire". Signalling a more radical approach to their anti-imperialist protests, the Operations Centre authorised Ryerson to write and publish two pamphlets in Quebec, French-Canada, A Nation in Bondage and French-Canada and the War. The pamphlets described French Canada as a subjugated people held in "slavery" by English Canada. This new approach to the issue of French Canada enabled Ryerson to develop close contacts among Canadian nationalists who opposed the war. With the German invasion of the Soviet Union in July, 1941 the CPC's stance on the war changed quickly. Now that they supported the war, Tim Buck called Ryerson, Smith, and Morris before a CC meeting held on January 22 and 23, 1943. During this meeting, Buck assailed the position of Ryerson, which had become the position of the CPC during their anti-war period. According to Buck, "English-Canada as a nation does not oppress French-Canada, nor impose inequality upon it. The national inequality from which the workers and farmers of Quebec suffer, is a heritage of the past."
Attitude towards French Canada Later that year, the Communist Party, re-constituted as the Labor-Progressive Party, published Ryerson's French Canada: A Study in Canadian Democracy. Within the pages of French Canada, Ryerson set out his vision of their vision for the future of Canada. He also emphasised the common aims of French and English Canadians in their anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist goals. Although researched and mostly written while Ryerson was occupied with the direction of the underground party, French Canada was a careful and provocative analysis of Quebec's social and political history.
French Canada aimed to encourage the development of a sense of national pride and unity among Canadians during the Second World War era. Ryerson put forth a socio-economic analysis of Quebec and in turn educated most English-speaking Canadians about a region they knew very little about. As a sequel to 1837, Ryerson's French Canada revealed "the militant spirit of democracy among French Canadians" in the hopes of uniting "them with their Anglophone compatriots." Ryerson did follow a certain "great man" approach to history when, in the early chapters, he emphasized the heroes "who struggled for self-determination and/or Canadian unity"; this approach was complemented by an emphasis on "the Quebec masses and their rise out of feudal subjugation toward political power." Following historical materialism too, Ryerson viewed the previous administrations of Quebec as working with representatives of English Canada and international capitalism to keep Quebec in economic subservience. Ryerson believed, "The Toronto Tory and the Quebec corporatist meet on common ground: hostility to the democratic peoples' movement, [and] denial of our democratic heritage." Following on his contentions laid out in 1837, Ryerson viewed the failure of English Canada to recognise their connection to French Canada and to fight hand in hand for the fullest democratic rights of the minority nation only served to deepen the power of reactionary influences and limit Canadian democracy and unity in general.
French Canada was a by-product of World War II and should be viewed as such. It was full of optimism about the prospects of an Allied victory in the war against international fascism and a transformed world capable of bringing about the complete elimination of the conditions that gave rise to fascism and to the prospect of war. Although this book is full of optimism about a possible future world, Ryerson did not envision a Communist future for Canada and instead placed the LPP as an important part of post-war Canada, but not a defining movement or a dominant party. Ryerson's vision did not come to pass, but his analysis of the political perspicacity of working-class Quebec was groundbreaking as it came during a time when most writers tended to view "Quebec as either a quaint or lamentable anachronism." French Canada gave its readers a more modern and hopeful image of French-Canadian society.
Intellectual evolution For Ryerson, an understanding of social relations was paramount if one was to garner an understanding of history; his encounter with Harold Innis's materialism led Ryerson to the charge that equated Marxism and economic determinism. He wrote "Marxism holds that it is the people who make history-their labor and their struggles and their dreams; and that these are understandable and have meaning when seen in their real setting…" He added, "Labor, production, the real relationships of living society: this is the point of departure for historical materialism…Thought and feelings, ideas and passion and imagination have their being in a material world, are conditioned by it, work upon it." Ryerson's approach to history is that of a man who sees the struggles and ideas of people as the driving force behind history. He did not believe they operate within a vacuum but within a given social system. Ryerson recognised the interplay of freedom and necessity within the development of history "as it is in the best Marxist historical writing."
Following on the tradition of viewing his writings as a mode of class consciousness, The Founding of Canada was written very much as a popular Marxist introduction to Canadian history. This book offered very little new material and was instead more of a shifting in emphasis for Ryerson. This shift in emphasis stemmed primarily from Ryerson's interest in prehistory and Soviet anthropology; this shift in emphasis is best illustrated by the six chapters on pre-European-contact Canada. This work was not a complete shift of emphasis; Ryerson still dealt with the issue of exploitation and freedom. He believed "[t]he weight of 'official' historiography has hitherto been heavily on the side of efforts to smother the facts of exploitation," and because of this "[t]he idyllic patriarchal picture of these times that has become traditional, is a piece of flagrant deception."