Fashioning Farmers: Ideology, Agricultural Knowledge and the Manitoba Farm Movement, 1890-1925

W.J.C. Cherwinski is a history professor at the Memorial University of
Newfoundland and the co-author of Lectures in Canadian Labour and
Working-Class History.

Prairie farmers have always posed a puzzle for some scholars because,
while they appeared to share a logical bond with urban labor against the
exploitation of industrial monopoly capitalism, they seldom pursued
radical organization to overcome the oppression and rarely made
alliances with labor to alleviate their mutual grievances. This book
provides one explanation drawn from the experience of the region’s
oldest farm movement during a crucial 35-year period.

The central argument, based on meticulous research and the most recent
social science theory, is that in the first instance Manitoba farmers’
organizations did pursue closer ties with labor to attack the tariff and
the railways, and pursued co-operative purchasing and marketing for
their joint benefit. However, their organizations were hijacked by
conservatives espousing an ideology that portrayed farmers as
independent producers of commodities for profit and therefore in league
with the aims and aspirations of capitalist Central Canada. The
educational institutions created early in this century (most notably the
Manitoba Agricultural College) assisted in the creation, promotion, and
perpetuation of this ideology. This was accomplished through the
creation of a farm-directed curriculum based on the study of
agricultural economics and home economics.

Taylor must be commended for bringing some order to a field of study
that, until recently, was examined primarily in political terms at the
federal level. This work is a challenge to others to apply his model to
the farm movements in Saskatchewan and Alberta.

Unfortunately, the book is heavy going because of the overuse of social
science jargon; consequently, few outside of academe will read it purely
for information and inspiration. One hopes that the synthesis that will
emerge someday will place greater stress on clarity and readability.