Editing Harold Innis (section)

==Academic and public career==

===Influence in the 1930s===
Aside from his work on ''The Cod Fisheries'', Innis wrote extensively in the 1930s about other staple products such as minerals and wheat as well as Canada's immense economic problems in the [[Great Depression]]. During the summers of 1932 and 1933, he travelled to the West to see the effects of the Depression for himself.<ref>Creighton, p. 84.</ref> The next year, in an essay entitled, ''The Canadian Economy and the Depression'', Innis outlined the plight of "a country susceptible to the slightest ground-swell of international disturbance" but beset by regional differences that made it difficult to devise effective solutions. He described a prairie economy dependent on the export of wheat but afflicted by severe drought, on the one hand, and the increased political power of Canada's growing cities, sheltered from direct reliance on the staples trade, on the other. The result was political conflict and a breakdown in federal–provincial relations. "We lack vital information on which to base prospective policies to meet this situation," Innis warned, because of "the weak position of the social sciences in Canada."<ref>Innis, Harold. (1956) ''Essays in Canadian Economic History'', edited by Mary Q. Innis. Toronto: [[University of Toronto Press]]. pp. 123–40.</ref>

[[File:old radio.jpg|left|thumb|Radio, a new medium, drew a scathing rebuke from Harold Innis for promoting "small talk" and "bores." Innis believed that both radio and mass circulation newspapers encouraged stereotypical thinking.]]

Innis's reputation as a [[public intellectual]] was growing steadily and, in 1934, Premier [[Angus Lewis Macdonald]] invited him to serve on a Royal Commission to examine [[Nova Scotia]]'s economic problems. The next year, he helped establish ''The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science''. In 1936, he was appointed a full [[University of Toronto]] professor and a year later, became the head of the university's Department of Political Economy.<ref>Creighton, pp. 85–95.</ref>

Innis was appointed president of the [[Canadian Political Science Association]] in 1938. His inaugural address, ''The Penetrative Powers of the Price System'', must have baffled his listeners as he ranged over centuries of economic history jumping abruptly from one topic to the next linking monetary developments to patterns of trade and settlement.<ref>Heyer, p. 20.</ref> The address was an ambitious attempt to show the disruptive effects of new technologies culminating in the modern shift from an industrial system based on coal and iron to the newest sources of industrial power, electricity, oil, and steel. Innis also tried to show the commercial effects of mass circulation newspapers, made possible by expanded newsprint production, and of the new medium of radio, which "threatens to circumvent the walls imposed by tariffs and to reach across boundaries frequently denied to other media of communication." Both media, Innis argued, stimulated the demand for consumer goods and both promoted nationalism.<ref>Innis, ''Essays'', pp. 252–72.</ref>

Innis was also a central participant in an international project that produced 25 scholarly volumes between 1936 and 1945. It was a series called ''The Relations of Canada and the United States'' overseen by [[James T. Shotwell]], director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Innis edited and wrote prefaces for the volumes contributed by Canadian scholars. His own study of the cod fisheries also appeared as part of the series. His work with Shotwell enabled Innis to gain access to Carnegie money to further Canadian academic research. As John Watson points out, "the project offered one of the few sources of research funds in rather lean times."<ref>Watson, p. 201.</ref>

===Politics and the Great Depression===
[[File:Richard Bedford Bennett.jpg|thumb|right|[[R.&nbsp;B. Bennett]] was the [[Conservative Party of Canada|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.]]

The era of the [[Dust Bowl|"Dirty Thirties"]] with its mass unemployment, poverty and despair gave rise to new Canadian political movements. In Alberta, for example, the radio evangelist [[William Aberhart|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."<ref>Havelock, Eric. (1982) ''Harold Innis: A Memoir''. Toronto: Harold Innis Foundation, pp. 14–15. The reference to "hot gospellers" can be found in the Creighton biography, p. 93.</ref>

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."<ref>Quoted in "The Public Role of the Intellectual," by Liora Salter and Cheryl Dahl. In ''Harold Innis in the New Century.'' (1999) Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, p. 119.</ref>

Although sympathetic to the plight of western farmers and urban, unemployed workers, Innis did not embrace socialism. [[Eric A. Havelock|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:
{{blockquote|
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.<ref>Havelock, pp. 22–23.</ref>
}}

===Late career and death===
In the 1940s, Harold Innis reached the height of his influence in both academic circles and Canadian society. In 1941, he helped establish the American-based [[Economic History Association]] and its ''[[Journal of Economic History]]''. He later became the association's second president. Innis played a central role in founding two important sources for the funding of academic research: the Canadian Social Science Research Council (1940) and the Humanities Research Council of Canada (1944).<ref>Watson, p. 223.</ref>

In 1944, the [[University of New Brunswick]] awarded Innis an honorary degree, as did his alma mater, [[McMaster University]]. [[Université Laval]], the [[University of Manitoba]] and the [[University of Glasgow]] would also confer honorary degrees in 1947–48.<ref>Watson, pp. 223–24.</ref> He received the [[Royal Society of Canada]]'s [[J. B. Tyrrell Historical Medal]] in 1944.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Past Award Winners |date=21 October 2018 |url=https://rsc-src.ca/en/awards-excellence/past-award-winners#TyrrellMedal |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240629010729/https://rsc-src.ca/en/awards-excellence/past-award-winners#TyrrellMedal |archive-date=June 29, 2024 |publisher=The Royal Society of Canada}}</ref>

In 1945, Innis spent nearly a month in the [[Soviet Union]] where he had been invited to attend the 220th anniversary celebrations marking the founding of the country's [[Russian Academy of Sciences|Academy of Sciences]].<ref>Watson, pp. 223–224.</ref> Later, in his essay ''Reflections on Russia'', he mused about the differences between the Soviet "producer" economy and the West's "consumer" ethos:
{{blockquote|
[A]n economy which emphasizes consumer's goods is characterized by communication industries largely dependent on advertising and by constant efforts to reach the largest number of readers or listeners; an economy emphasizing producer's goods is characterized by communications industries largely dependent on government support. As a result of this contrast, a common public opinion in Russia and the West is hard to achieve.<ref>Quoted in Heyer, p. 33.</ref>
}}

Innis's trip to Moscow and Leningrad came shortly before US–Soviet rivalry led to the hostility of the [[Cold War]]. Innis lamented the rise in international tensions.<ref>Creighton, p. 122.</ref> He saw the Soviet Union as a stabilizing counterbalance to the American emphasis on commercialism, the individual and constant change. For Innis, Russia was a society within the Western tradition, not an alien civilization. He abhorred the [[nuclear arms race]] and saw it as the triumph of force over knowledge, a modern form of the medieval [[Inquisition]]. "The Middle Ages burned its heretics," he wrote, "and the modern age threatens them with atom bombs."<ref>Innis, (Bias) p. 139.</ref>

In 1946, Innis was elected president of the [[Royal Society of Canada]], the country's senior body of scientists and scholars. The same year, he served on the Manitoba Royal Commission on Adult Education and published ''Political Economy in the Modern State'', a collection of his speeches and essays that reflected both his staples research and his new work in communications. In 1947, Innis was appointed the University of Toronto's dean of graduate studies. In 1948, he delivered lectures at the [[University of London]] and [[University of Nottingham|Nottingham University]]. He was elected an International Member of the [[American Philosophical Society]] that same year.<ref>{{Cite web |title=APS Member History |url=https://search.amphilsoc.org/memhist/search?creator=Harold+Innis&title=&subject=&subdiv=&mem=&year=&year-max=&dead=&keyword=&smode=advanced |access-date=2023-03-07 |website=search.amphilsoc.org}}</ref> He also gave the prestigious Beit lectures at [[University of Oxford|Oxford]], later published in his book ''[[Empire and Communications]]''. In 1949, Innis was appointed as a commissioner on the federal government's [[List of Canadian Royal Commissions|Royal Commission]] on Transportation, a position that involved extensive travel at a time when his health was starting to fail.<ref>Watson, pp. 224–25. See also Creighton, pp. 136–40.</ref> The last decade of his career, during which he worked on his communications studies, was an unhappy time for Innis. He was academically isolated because his colleagues in economics could not fathom how the new work related to his pioneering research in staples theory. Biographer John Watson writes that "the almost complete lack of positive response to the communications works, contributed to his sense of overwork and depression."<ref>Watson, pp. 250–55.</ref>

Innis died of [[prostate cancer]] on November 8, 1952, a few days after his 58th birthday. In commemoration, [[Innis College]] at the University of Toronto and Innis Library at [[McMaster University]] were named in his honour.

Following his premature death, Innis' significance increasingly deepened as scholars in several academic disciplines continued to build upon his writings. [[Marshall Poe]]'s general media theory that proposes two sub-theories were inspired by Innis. [[Douglas C. North]] expanded on Innis' "[[vent for surplus]]" theory of economic development by applying it to regional development in the United States and underdeveloped countries.<ref>{{cite encyclopedia|url=http://eh.net/encyclopedia/harold-adams-innis/|title=Harold Adams Innis|encyclopedia=EH.Net Encyclopedia|access-date=23 April 2014}}</ref> In addition, [[James W. Carey]] adopted Innis as a "reference point in his conception of two models of communication."