Professors or Propagandists? McGill’s Socialist Professors and their Students in the 1930s

This is the final post in a three-part series about socialism at McGill in the 1930s.

Raffaella Cerenzia

1930s McGill was a small, tight-knit place. Only 3,000 or so students roamed the university’s campus. They were taught by a short roster of professors; the Department of Economics and Political Science numbered just six in the early thirties. In this intimate setting, “One got to know one’s classmates and teachers fairly easily.”^[1] The McGill You Knew, a collection of McGill memories, is replete with stories of casual and friendly student-professor interactions, many of which took place outside of the classroom or even off campus.^[2] In such an environment, professors were likely to know their more vocal students’ political leanings. Economics professor Stephen Leacock, a known Conservative, once told one of his socialist students not to write an assigned essay “because, he said with a Leacockian grin, his ulcers acted up at the thought of having to read it.”^[3]

In this context, it’s easy to imagine that individual professors had the ability to influence or shape their students’ political philosophies. It’s also quite hard to imagine that when socialism cropped up among students and staff, the two cohorts operated independently. Certainly, McGill’s top administrators found it entirely plausible, or even definite, that McGill’s handful of socialist professors were propagating their beliefs among the student population. Professors Eugene Forsey and Frank Scott were considered the ringleaders, poisoning lectures and students with their socialist propagandizing.^[4] Throughout the 1930s, McGill’s administrators returned repeatedly to the question of whether radical professors were converting students to their ideology. While evidence suggests that these professors did influence at least a handful of their students, it also indicates that administrative fears were rather overblown. In fact, it seems that the professors’ greatest impact was made outside the classroom, among students who were already involved with socialism to some extent.

It was fine for McGill’s professors to be socialist on their own time, McGill’s chancellor, Sir Edward Beatty, wrote. They just had to leave those beliefs at the lecture hall door, and not let them “taint the quality of their lectures.” This was a conundrum for Beatty because to him, “every socialist professor” was “at all times a definite propagandist for his faith.” Scott, for example, was “definitely a socialist propagandist and not a mere dispassionate examiner of political and economic principles.” Principal Sir Arthur Currie felt similarly about Forsey, whom he called a “very dogmatic” instructor.^[5]

When it came to professors expressing their political opinions, the line between propriety and propaganda was a rather arbitrary one. Forsey and the others may have let their political philosophies influence their lectures, but so did Conservative professors like Leacock. One socialist student recalled of his old professor that “a Socialist could not take [Leacock’s] ideas seriously,” and that the only value of his lectures lay in their “literate” and “engagingly irrelevant” style.^[6] Still, the administration does not seem to have complained about him. Leacock’s conservatism was educational; Forsey and Scott’s socialism was propaganda.

This contradiction was informed by one common line of thought on the role of universities and their professors. Historian Michiel Horn has observed that some Canadians, particularly the wealthy elites, viewed universities as sites of production for “well-trained managerial and professional workers.” McGill and its professors were meant to “uphold the law and the social and economic order, and not in any way challenge them.” If socialism, as Beatty viewed it, was an “[attempt] to break down the existing structure of society,” then socialist professors undermined the raison d’être of the university. Beatty warned that Scott, Forsey, and their ilk, in promoting such disorder, could “exercise a most disturbing effect on the minds of their students.”^[7]

Other onlookers took comfort in the fact that even if the professors were proselytizing in class, the students would surely ignore them. Currie and his assistant, for instance, didn’t consider Forsey a threat to the university or its pupils: the professor had “no knowledge of the world, and could have no possible influence over anyone who knew him, least of all over the students,” who supposedly viewed him “as a young idiot.” It’s worth noting that this view of Forsey was far from universal: one of Currie’s associates, for example, applauded Forsey’s “enthusiasm and also his powers as a lecturer.”^[8]

It’s difficult to determine the extent to which these anxieties and self-assurances were grounded in reality. However, a careful examination of the professors’ activities inside and outside of the classroom, and their relationships with their students, can begin to paint a picture. Debates around dismissing Forsey in the early 1930s might hint at what professors were actually saying in their classes. Currie felt that Forsey was a “failure as a teaching professor,” and wanted to get rid of him. Still, he knew that dismissing Forsey could become a cause célèbre and lead to charges that McGill stifled academic freedom. Leacock, weighing in on the matter, told Currie that firing Forsey might be worth the public criticism if he devoted his lectures to “propaganda instead of… instruction,” but the respected Conservative professor didn’t believe that to be the case. Perhaps the closest Forsey got was (allegedly) “mark[ing] down students who disagreed with him.”^[9] But even if the professors were openly socialist in their lectures, other avenues seem to have offered them more influence over students.

Professors often chatted with students in their offices, where they didn’t shy away from politics. Professor J.C. Hemmeon in the economics department, a self-described communist, “befriended and encouraged” one student, David Lewis, “as he did others.” Lewis admitted to having “learned more about economics in his office than I did in his classes.”^[10] Frank Scott similarly influenced his students during private conversations. He recalled one student in particular, an RCMP corporal named Tom Scrogg. Scott “came to know him quite well” from repeated office conversations, and the two “were on first-name terms.” Their relationship had started when Scrogg walked into Scott’s office and asked the law professor about his involvement in civil liberties groups. Scrogg was already “sympathetic” to Scott’s activities, and his support grew as his education progressed. He later defended Scott’s character to his RCMP coworkers, who derided Scott as a Communist.^[11] Scott was not the only influence on Scrogg at McGill, but based on the professor’s recollection, he played an important guiding role in the student’s political development.

Professors and students also mixed at university clubs. David Lewis remembered “crossing paths” with Forsey and Scott at the McGill Labour Club. Some of the Labour Club’s members also fought for social progress as part of the Student Christian Movement (SCM), another group whose activities Professor Forsey often joined. Scott and Forsey each contributed articles to The Alarm Clock, the leftist publication of the Labour Club. It was largely in these social and political spaces that Lewis described becoming “personal friends as well as political colleagues” with his professors.^[12]

The professors did more than just intellectually influence their students. They also pushed them to pursue opportunities. It was Scott and Hemmeon who convinced Lewis to apply for the Rhodes Scholarship. The young socialist hadn’t planned to try for it, having assumed that his well-known political views would preclude the “stuffed-shirt [selection] committee” from ever choosing him. But he unexpectedly won the scholarship, which opened doors for his “career intellectually, politically, and even financially.”^[13] The prestigious boost to Lewis’s resume was facilitated by Scott and Hemmeon’s personal relationship with Lewis, which had developed at clubs and during office hours.

The professors also demonstrated a willingness to offer qualified students concrete opportunities for socialist political involvement. David Lewis’s case again emerges as an example. Forsey and/or Scott invited him “to join a small study group of concerned young professors,” which later evolved into the League for Social Reconstruction. It was here that Lewis had “discussions which gave me an insight into the workings of Canada’s economic and political system, insight that was not to be had from university lectures.” Professor Scott continued to help his young protégé even after graduation; it was he who was largely responsible for getting Lewis a job in 1938 as the full-time national secretary of the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation, a national political party.^[14]

While it’s hard to determine how much socialist professors influenced their students during lectures, it’s clear that they influenced their students elsewhere. In their offices, at student clubs, and after graduation, they shaped some of their students’ political philosophies and influenced their future paths. Tom Scrogg and David Lewis are fine examples of this. Scrogg’s political enlightenment at McGill, which appears to have been significantly influenced by Scott, led him to clash with his superiors at the RCMP, and he left the organization as soon as he was able to.^[15] Lewis testified directly to the political influence of his professors: “Until McGill days… My brand of socialism was… concentrated more on strategies to smash the capitalist system than on programs to build a more humane one. The emphasis which my professor friends gave to the need for positive programs was therefore an invaluable addition to my philosophical kitbag.” In terms of career connections, “political commitment,… [and] intellectual growth,” Lewis reflected, Forsey and Scott were “the most fruitful contacts I made” during his university years. Currie’s perception of Forsey as a poor or “failed” professor seems to falter in light of the student’s testimony; Lewis, at least, found him to be an important teacher and mentor.^[16]

Ultimately, the administrators’ fears of classroom propagandizing seem to have been exaggerated. If the socialist professors’ lectures skewed left, it was probably no more than their conservative colleagues’ skewed right. The administrators’ worries were also misdirected. The professors did actively promote socialism among students, but our clearest evidence of this comes from their interactions outside of the classroom, rather than inside. Additionally, the student circles where their presence was most felt were those in which socialism had already taken root. The professors were not embarking on a crusade of socialist conversion, or forcing their opinions on those who didn’t wish to listen. When they attended Labour Club or SCM meetings, they were joining students who already agreed with them—and who were already actively developing and acting on their own socialist inclinations. All they did was help those students shape their personal versions of socialism. In fact, in Lewis’s case, they appear to have actually moderated his approach. Overall, the administration wasn’t totally imagining the professors’ influence on their students; but if they were looking to the classroom for definitive proof of socialist influence, then the available evidence suggests they were looking in the wrong place.

Raffaella Cerenzia is a fourth-year undergraduate history student at McGill University.

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^[1] Eugene Forsey, A Life on the Fringe: The Memoirs of Eugene Forsey (Oxford University Press, 1990), 20; Edgar Andrew Collard, ed., The McGill You Knew: An Anthology of Memories, 1920-1960 (Longman Canada Limited, 1975), 47; David Lewis, The Good Fight: Political Memoirs, 1909-1958 (Macmillan of Canada, 1981), 23.

^[2] One such anecdote involves Professor Stephen Leacock. Walking his dog on campus one day, he apprehended a student whom he knew by name. Leacock told the young man to please take care of his dog while he, Leacock, gave his afternoon lecture. The student apparently acquiesced. Collard, The McGill You Knew, 48. It’s a quaint little anecdote, but it shows well the familiarity that students felt with the more popular professors.

^[3] Lewis, The Good Fight, 24.

^[4] Stanley Brice Frost, The Man in the Ivory Tower: F. Cyril James of McGill (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 53-54.

^[5] Michiel Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada: A History (University of Toronto Press, 1999), 130, 134-136.

^[6] Lewis, The Good Fight, 24.

^[7] Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada, 133-134.

^[8] Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada, 129-130. One modern scholar has similarly argued that Currie “underestimated” or otherwise misjudged the quality of Forsey’s teaching. Sandra Djwa, The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott (Douglas and McIntyre, 1989), 133.

^[9] Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada, 129-130.

^[10] Lewis, The Good Fight, 24-25. Hemmeon was an interesting figure who would merit his own discussion, if space permitted. He seems to have described himself as more radical than others would have said, and likely escaped the administration’s ire because he was reserved, unobtrusive, and a great follower/admirer of Leacock’s. It’s quite possible that Currie’s statements that students would never listen to socialist professors applied more accurately to Hemmeon than to the others—not because his ideas were too radical, but because his lectures were too “dull.” Lewis, The Good Fight, 24; Collard, The McGill You Knew, 71.

^[11] Collard, The McGill You Knew, 192.

^[12] Lewis, The Good Fight, 27, 29; The Alarm Clock, January 1933, 3, 7, 8; The Alarm Clock, January 1934, 10; Michiel Horn and Frank R. Scott, A New Endeavour: Selected Political Essays, Letters, and Addresses (University of Toronto Press, 1986), 10.

^[13] The description of the committee, which was headed by McGill’s chancellor, was Hemmeon’s. Lewis, The Good Fight, 32–33; Alan Whitehorn, Canadian Socialism: Essays on the CCF-NDP (Oxford University Press, 1992), 155.

^[14] Lewis, The Good Fight, 27-28; Whitehorn, Canadian Socialism, 157.

^[15] Collard, The McGill You Knew, 192.

^[16] Lewis, The Good Fight, 27; Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada, 129.