History May Be Partly Bunk: Part Four by Dave Jaffe.

  History May Be Partly Bunk: Part Four by Dave Jaffe.




    Pierre Elliott Trudeau had a great time in the 1950's, despite denouncing that period as "The Great Darkness". I didn't have a bad time either in the city of Montreal in the era of the Union Nationale premier Maurice Duplessis. Still, not all French Canadians were as fortunate as Mr. Trudeau, our future Prime Minister. "We are the white negroes of America", proclaimed  the French Canadian revolutionary Pierre Vallieres in a book with that name.that he wrote.
     Here Vallieres was exaggerating. Still, many French Canadians in the 1950's did live in poverty. So did many other Canadians living outside Quebec. Canada in the 1950's was a deeply unequal country. John Porter in his 1965 path breaking book called 'The Vertical Mosaic' exposed a Canada of vast wealth at the country's top of the social ladder and many poor people at the bottom. Canada was no utopia in the 1950's despite the growth of a middle class.
      Yet for a time I enjoyed myself back then and I think many other people did too. So despite what some historians have written about the 1950's and other periods, some of them have been too pessimistic. Henry Ford may have been partly right. I would amend his statement to say "History may be partly bunk."