Ringing in the Common Love of Good: The United Farmers of Ontario, 1914-1926

Terry A. Crowley is a professor of history at the University of Guelph,
and the former editor of the journal Ontario History. He is the author
of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality and Canadian History to
1967, and the co-author of The College on

UFO stands for something entirely different today than it did a century
ago when the United Farmers of Ontario were a force to be reckoned with.
Beginning in the 1890s and lasting a half-century, farmers were kings
and queens who determined the fate of governments and drove much of
Canada’s economy, but they did not feel they were. Agriculture was a
difficult occupation that generally brought small incomes and long
hours, even though it demanded a multiplicity of skills. Farmers
organized in the Patrons of Industry, but it was the United Farmers that
became the first group to challenge two-party dominance through forming
a government in concert with the Independent Labour Party in Ontario in
1919.

The United Farmers of Ontario were begun in 1914 as a means to achieve
social and economic betterment among agriculturalists. The profound
tensions generated by World War I catapulted them into the political
arena, but since they survived in office for four dissension-wracked
years, historians have mistakenly dismissed them as unimportant. Kerry
Badgley, who works at the National Archives of Canada, sets out to
overturn this judgment and unite agrarian experience in the east with
that in Western Canada. He establishes that the United Farmers had
potential for radicalism in their criticisms of existing political and
economic structures as well as in their promotion of cooperatives. They
spawned both women’s and youth wings that similarly tried to enhance
rural life prior to their folding into the Ontario Federation of
Agriculture in 1943.

Badgley’s book bears few traces of the doctoral dissertation on which
it is based except in prodigious research that concentrates on men,
women, and young people in the counties of Lambton, Simcoe, and Lanark.
In asking excellent questions and answering them directly, he has
produced a major contribution to the literature on agrarian movements.
It is a pity he stopped at 1926 because it would have been worthwhile to
see how Ontario becalmed this movement before it did the same to the
Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. A similar fate may soon befall the
NDP.