Fool for Christ: The Political Thought of JS Woodsworth

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and author of
War and Peacekeeping and For Better or For Worse.

More than thirty years ago, Kenneth McNaught published A Prophet in
Politics, the first scholarly biography of CCF founder J.S. Woodsworth.
That good book has sat unchallenged ever since, its interpretation—and
its splendid title—setting the tone for subsequent study. Now Mills,
of the University of Winnipeg, has tilted his lance at McNaught after a
fashion. He pays due homage, and claims to be writing a history of
Woodsworth’s ideas rather than a biography, but in fact he covers much
the same ground as his predecessor. What is different, however, is the
way he brings out some of the less-attractive sides of his subject’s
career, including his nativist sentiments, his coolness to immigrants
(which lasted almost to the end of his long political career), and his
occasional wobbling on the League of Nations. Woodsworth was, no doubt,
a man of principle, although perhaps he was not quite the saint that
McNaught and others have painted him. Mills’s book is careful,
judicious, uncommonly well written, and based on good research.