United We Stand: Prairie Farmers 1901-1975

Joe Cherwinski is a history professor at the Memorial University of
Newfoundland.

For some reason, retired politicians in their twilight years feel moved
to commit their recollections to paper, to “set the record straight”
from the personal perspective of an insider who was there. The promise
is appealing to historians and interested observers alike, since
references to strongly held views, personality differences, and personal
quirks, while hinted at in various places, would do a great deal to
flesh out the historical record and make well-known developments better
understood. Too often, however, the product falls short and the reader
learns little that is new about the narrators or their times.

United We Stand is one such work. Gleave, long associated with
left-wing farmers’ politics in Saskatchewan, intends to demonstrate
the real role of the Saskatchewan Farmers’ Union in that province’s
economic and political life. What we get, however, is a rather muddled
amateur survey of Saskatchewan history during the twentieth century,
interspersed with copious references to Gleave’s more mundane
activities in a variety of farmers’ co-operative and political
organizations. The documentation consists of lengthy lists of people
present on various occasions, and convention resolutions (too often
quoted verbatim)—safe stuff that is available to anyone. Nowhere is
there reference to the deep ideological divisions that have always
existed in the country’s most politically polarized province. Even
bitter enemies like Ross Thatcher, who brought down the “socialist
experiment” in 1964, have been sanitized, perhaps in an attempt to
show outsiders that the people of the Wheat Province are nice people who
hold this book’s title as an unofficial credo.

Gleave’s political memoir is well-intentioned and thus does provide
some useful insights, especially into the problems associated with
organizing political action before Saskatchewan’s road system was
upgraded. Unfortunately its bland contents make it of only marginal use
to those seriously studying the history of Prairie Canada. However,
those seeking mention of their names within likely will not agree.