Commentary
When young American men crossed the northern border to avoid military service during the Vietnam War, they received a cordial welcome from Canada’s progressive intelligentsia.
Estimates of the Vietnam era migration range from 40,000 to 60,000 draft-age men who entered a population of some 20 million Canadians. Above average education levels permitted many of the American arrivals to seek positions in Canadian cultural institutions. Around half remained in Canada even after the USA offered them amnesty.
These Americans were disproportionately well-educated, progressive, and eager to support the generational shift to the left that was gathering momentum under then-Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau. Records indicate that many found jobs in colleges and universities, and significant numbers went into teaching, writing, publishing, media, the arts, social-justice activism, environmental movements, and local politics.
The Hubbard’s Colony
Yet, military service evaders weren’t the first American progressives to establish a foothold in Canada. Almost half a century earlier, one of the USA’s most influential progressive philosophers put down roots in the province of Nova Scotia. His name was John Dewey.
John Dewey circa 1915. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Dewey first came to Hubbards, Nova Scotia, in 1927. He returned for stays ranging from several weeks to two months for some 16 summers between 1927 and 1949. He passed up Canada in 1928 for a goodwill tour to the USSR, but soon after he purchased a lakeside residence on Nova Scotia’s pristine South Shore. Dewey referred to the collection of friends and fellow travellers who visited him at Sawler Lake as the “Hubbards colony.”
John Dewey’s choice of the word “colony” is intriguing. He didn’t establish a formal settlement in Nova Scotia. Nor could he have been described as a Yankee patriot attempting to carry the American dream northward. But if one defines colonization in a broad cultural sense—the establishment of a community that brings with it intellectual assumptions, social values, and political networks—then Dewey’s attraction to Nova Scotia raises an interesting question. Did the Hubbards colony represent a purposeful progressive mission to establish an intellectual beachhead in Canada?
More Than a Collection of Tourists
This little-known part of Dewey’s life was thoroughly documented by Purdue University professors Douglas J. Simpson and Kathleen C. Foley. Their 1973 study, “John Dewey and Hubbards, Nova Scotia,” was considerably more intriguing than a breezy account of summer vacations.
Simpson and Foley revealed that the Hubbards colony was more than an accidental collection of tourists who happened to enjoy Nova Scotia. In fact, it appears to have been an international cultural set that perfectly represented the kind of people who gathered around Dewey almost everywhere he went.
Many of Dewey’s visitors were connected to literary circles in Philadelphia and New York. Their relationships were sufficiently close that, when they wintered in the USA, they continued to meet at what they called “Hubbards parties.”
Dewey established his summer sanctuary shortly after the death of his first wife. In this small corner of rural Canada, the summer routine was cordial and anything but austere. The colonists enjoyed cocktail and sailboat parties, poker, rummy, croquet, swimming, canoeing, and picnics. Dewey spent quality time with his second wife, children, and grandchildren. He read extensively and continued writing.
Dewey’s years in Hubbards were not unproductive. During his visits he was producing some of the most influential work of his career. The Purdue University academics who studied Dewey’s visits to Canada noted that some of his most important writing was done at the colony. He worked on his 1938 book “Logic: The Theory of Inquiry” at Sawler Lake for almost a decade. His wife, Roberta, recalled that he would swim in the lake each morning and return to work on the book. While in Hubbards he also worked extensively on “How We Think” and “Art as Experience.”
Anti-war demonstrators burn their draft cards on the steps of the Pentagon during the Vietnam War, in Washington in May 1972. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Like-Minded Companions
Among the most prominent, and perhaps like-minded, Canadian companions to join Dewey’s colony was Robert Winkworth Norwood.
The Dewey’s and the Norwood’s cottages were only yards apart. The two couples became magnets for regular Hubbards visitors who interacted regularly both in Nova Scotia and back in New York.
Norwood was born at New Ross, Nova Scotia, in 1874, and raised in Hubbards, where his father was an Anglican clergyman. He attended nearby King’s College, Windsor, where he was encouraged to write poetry by the prominent Canadian literary figure, Charles G. D. Roberts. After being ordained an Anglican priest, he served in several local parishes. In 1906–07 he studied philosophy at Columbia University where Dewey enjoyed rock star status among American progressives.
John Dewey at the University of Chicago in 1902. Public Domain
There is little doubt that Robert Norwood’s thinking and writing became remarkably radical for an Anglican priest of his generation. In a 1918 poem titled “Voice of the Twentieth Century,” he attacked tyranny, political power, accumulation of wealth, militarism, and the exploitation of workers. In “A Song of Battles,” he spoke of capitalism’s alleged relationship to war and the suffering it inflicted on ordinary people.
Norwood’s early 20th-century progressive lexicon was remarkably similar to the vocabulary of the present-day woke left. Then, as now, radical progressives asserted that the true form of divine will is human evolution. They worship and preach “the coming of the God whose name is Man!” This may not seem like conventional Marxism, but it is entirely consistent with the progressive idealism that has influenced the North American left for well over a century.
Hubbard’s Historical Significance
It’s fair to assume that Dewey did not merely vacation in Canada. He was a devoted political activist who would have thoroughly enjoyed influencing the thought of impressionable locals. What he spoke and wrote about included the nature of knowledge, progressive education, and democratic socialism. His progressive philosophy was especially significant because it became enormously influential in Canadian education and culture.
Progressives usually contend that colonization is something that involves empires, armies, settlers and the seizure of territory. But history has demonstrated that culture can cross borders without armies.
Ideas, fashions, intellectual movements, and social networks can achieve remarkable victories without a shot being fired. Enormous influence has been transmitted through Hollywood films, television, music, journalism, literature, school curricula, academic research, and advertising, and—in the case of both John Dewey and the Vietnam-era American immigrants—personal engagement.
John Dewey’s “Hubbards colony” never amounted to a seizure of territory, but it may have been something potentially more sinister: a small but influential outpost of radical American progressivism on Canadian soil.
This raises the compelling notion that sovereign nations need to pay closer attention to the global networks through which hostile intellectual movements and adversarial cultures cross borders. Toxic ideas don’t only arrive in print. They arrive in people, and eventually bore their way into vulnerable national institutions.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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