page_title: Harold Innis
section_title: Politics and the Great Depression
hierarchical_section_title: Harold Innis / Academic and public career / Politics and the Great Depression
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of Richard Bedford Bennett, 1st Viscount Bennett, the eleventh Prime Minister of Canada Français&#160;: Photo de Richard Bedford Bennett, 1er vicomte Bennett, le 11e premier ministre du Canada
context_page_description: Harold Adams Innis FRSC was a Canadian professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and the author of seminal works on media, communication theory, and Canadian economic history. A writer of dense and difficult prose, Innis was one of Canada's most original thinkers. He helped develop the staples thesis, which holds that Canada's culture, political history, and economy have been decisively influenced by the exploitation and export of a series of "staples" such as fur, fishing, lumber, wheat, mined metals, and coal. The staple thesis dominated economic history in Canada from the 1930s to 1960s, and continues to be a fundamental part of the Canadian political economic tradition.
  Innis's writings on communication explore the role of media in shaping the culture and development of civilizations. He argued, for example, that a balance between oral and written forms of communication contributed to the flourishing of Greek civilization in the 5th century BC.
context_section_description: The era of the "Dirty Thirties" with its mass unemployment, poverty and despair gave rise to new Canadian political movements. In Alberta, for example, the radio evangelist William "Bible Bill" Aberhart led his populist Social Credit party to victory in 1935. Three years earlier in Calgary, Alberta, social reformers had founded a new political party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). It advocated democratic socialism and a mixed economy with public ownership of key industries. Frank Underhill, one of Innis's colleagues at the University of Toronto was a founding member of the CCF. Innis and Underhill had both been members of an earlier group at the university that declared itself "dissatisfied with the policies of the two major [political] parties in Canada" and that aimed at "forming a definite body of progressive opinion." In 1931, Innis presented a paper to the group on "Economic Conditions in Canada", but he later recoiled from participating in party politics, denouncing partisans like Underhill as "hot gospellers."
  Innis maintained that scholars had no place in active politics and that they should instead devote themselves, first to research on public problems, and then to the production of knowledge based on critical thought. He saw the university, with its emphasis on dialogue, open-mindedness and skepticism, as an institution that could foster such thinking and research. "The university could provide an environment," he wrote, "as free as possible from the biases of the various institutions that form the state, so that its intellectuals could continue to seek out and explore other perspectives."
  Although sympathetic to the plight of western farmers and urban, unemployed workers, Innis did not embrace socialism. Eric Havelock, a left-leaning colleague explained many years later that Innis distrusted political "solutions" imported from elsewhere, especially those based on Marxist analysis with its emphasis on class conflict. He worried, too, that as Canada's ties with Britain weakened, the country would fall under the spell of American ideas instead of developing its own based on Canada's unique circumstances. Havelock added:
  He has been called the radical conservative of his day — not a bad designation of a complex mind, clear sighted, cautious, perhaps at bottom pessimistic in areas where thinkers we would label 'progressive' felt less difficulty in taking a stand; never content to select only one or two elements in a complicated equation in order to build a quick-order policy or program; far ranging enough in intellect to take in the whole sum of the factors, and comprehend their often contradictory effects.
caption: R. B. Bennett was the Conservative Prime Minister of Canada from 1930 to 1935, during the depths of the Great Depression. Although Innis advocated staying out of politics, he did correspond with Bennett urging him to strengthen the law against business monopolies.
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "CPARCHIVEPHOTO PUBLIC  NO ARCHIVES Candian Prime Minister Richard Bedford Bennett is shown in an undated file photo. What started as a project for a county fair now has a home-schooled New Brunswick teen talking with MP's and the family of a former prime minister to erect a statue in honour of R.B. Bennett on Parliament Hill. THE CANADIAN PRESS/National Archives of Canada"}