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Review: [Untitled]
Reviewed Work(s):Canada and International Civil Aviation,
1932-1948 by David Mackenzie
John R. M. Wilson
The American Historical Review, Vol. 96, No. 2. (Apr., 1991),
pp. 641-642.
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Canada
writing was obviously bad by modern standards. As Taylor makes
clear, there was wholesale plagiarism by authors of earlier works.
Even that was preferable to those who seemed to write from no
sources at all. There were also good histories, however, at least
given the limitations of the times. Many authors diligently
rummaged through government documents and old newspapers. Others
interviewed sources at great length. Several volumes were well
written. At their best the so-called amateurs were as capable as
the profes- sionals who succeeded them. Taylor has a sure feel for
textual analysis and an excellent turn of phrase that allows him to
bring these qualities out. The gentleman scholars whom he is
analyzing would have been im- pressed by his literary ability and
probably disturbed by his ability to dissect their underlying
purpose.
Although this is a solid book throughout, some parts are more
convincing than others. Most impressive is Taylor's recounting of
the way in which partisan polit- ical viewpoints captured
historical writing and created that "national school" of history in
central Canada. Somewhat less convincing is the author's account of
the convenient collapse of amateur historical writing on the eve of
the new professionalism of the late nineteenth century. I am not
sure from my own readings in the era that the crisis was quite as
deep as he would have it. It is also unfortunate that the author
decided to exclude writers from the West. Although the West was
settled relatively late, it had a strong tradition of amateur
historical writing by the later nineteenth century. Those points
aside, this is an informative and useful addition to our
understanding both of Canadian his- torical writing and of the
nineteenth-century sensibil- .A..
DOUG OWRAM
University of Alberta
DAVID MACKENZIE.Canada and International Civil Auia- tion,
1932-1948. Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. 1989. Pp. x, 314.
$40.00.
David MacKenzie specializes in Canadian diplomatic and political
history in the 1930s and 1940s. His previous book dealt with
Newfoundland joining the Canadian Confederation in 1949. In this
volume MacKenzie focuses on the period from 1932, when Quebec's
challenge to the national government's au-thority over civil
aviation was rejected, to 1948, by which time the basic ground
rules of international civil aviation had been determined. The book
details "the efforts made to establish an international system for
the regulation and operation of international air services an; the
role play'ed by Canadians in its development" (D. 5). MacKenzie
treats international civil aviation as \1 ' an element of
government policy and weaves a com- plex tapestry of the relations
between the bureaucratic and political levels of government (with
modest suc- cess) and Canada's relations with the United States and
the United Kingdom (more effectively).
The story culminates at the Chicago International Civil Aviation
Conference in November 1944. After a long build-up focusing on
Canada's role as an honest broker between the British and Americans
(including a lengthy chapter from the perspectives and archives of
those powers), the issue was joined at the conference. Britain,
with perhaps 12 percent of commercial air traffic in 1945,
confronted the United States, with over 70 percent. T o try to
ensure British competitiveness after the war, the U.K. delegation,
led by the rude, arrogant Lord Swinton, sought to establish a
multilat- eral organization that would not only provide technical
uniformity but also allocate routes, rates, and fre-quency of
service. The Americans successfully resisted and argued for
bilateral negotiation of routes and services. By stalemating the
conference, they rendered that outcome inevitable and, dealing from
a position of strength, subsequently gained a lion's share of
traffic for the United States. The British essentially joined the
Americans at their two-nation Bermuda Conference in January 1946,
made the best of their not inconsider- able strengths, abandoned
their pleas for empire soli- darity, and left the Canadians and
other Common- wealth countries to fend for themselves.
Much of the book is devoted to discussing battles over the "five
freedoms" of aviation, an important but somewhat esoteric dispute
that often leaves the reader bumping into trees but lacking a sense
of the forest. Fortunately, appendixes have the texts of various
agreements and lists of the freedoms, and the reader is directed
there at appropriate points in the narrative. For someone with only
casual interest in the subject, however, perusing the last four
pages of the book would reveal the essence of MacKenzie's story and
save considerable time.
American readers may be struck by similarities be- tween the
Canadian and American experience that are common knowledge north of
the border. Both coun- tries used airport construction as a relief
measure in the 1930s, and both pursued a policy of cooperation but
not commitment in international affairs. Likewise, Canada found
aviation challenging its aloofness from the world even as the
United States did; MacKenzie suggests that air flight, possibly as
much as the war itself, ended American isolation forever.
The author has done a good job of research in Canada, the United
States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, drawing on the appropriate
archives and conducting a number of interviews. His writing is
competent, although he fails to bring to life most of his
characters, even C. D. Howe, Canada's first Minister of Transport
and the most omnipresent and admirable figure in the book. The book
thoroughly covers its relatively narrow topic. The University of
Toronto Press, unfortunately, detracts somewhat from the pre-
sentation with a number of typographical errors, an annoying,
unorthodox use of dashes, and the use of half-size capital letters
for abbreviations, which makes "US" or "UK" fade into the text
instead of standing out. Still, such caveats aside, the book is
generally
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Reviews of B o o b
attractively done and will be a basic source for scholars
interested in Canada's impressive role in the emer-gence of the
international civil aviation scene we know today.
JOHN R. M. WILSON
Southern Calijornia College
LATIN AMERICA
ROBERT M. LEVINE. Images of History: Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth-Century Latin American Photographs as Docu-ments. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press. 1989. Pp. xi, 216. $72.50.
Historians have traditionally used photographs pri- marily as
illustrations, and frequently their content has contradicted the
thesis of a publication that was derived from literary sources. In
recent decades there has been an increasing consciousness of
photographs as docu- ments with potentials distinct from written
records, yet little formal training is available to historians to
aid them in understanding the peculiarities of the me-dium. Robert
M. Levine attempts to provide such systematic instruction for
scholars of Latin America. The first half of his book is a survey
of the history of Latin American photography with special emphasis
on the distinct cultural values that adapted the new me- dium to
the peculiarities of neocolonial societies. This distillation is
perhaps the best yet published for the entire region and represents
the work of photographic historians who have emerged in the various
republics in the past fifteen years. The book is well documented
and can serve as a guide to the current literature in the field.
There are several inaccurate or misleading state- ments in the text
that betray the author's dependence on specialists in the history
of photography and some outdated publications, but none of these
errors dis- tracts from the basic soundness of the text as an
introduction for nonspecialists. Lacking is a sense of urgency with
regard to building a research base for biographies of the
photographers; biographies could provide insights into intentions
and political attitudes. Without such information we can easily be
misled in interpreting images.
The second half of the book is devoted to an exten- sive and
systematic reading of images, giving specific visual examples to
illustrate each point. The ideas here reflect the thinking of
various critics of photography, and the examples make the concepts
easy to grasp and extendible to other cases. Each stylistic and
historical point is further explored with consideration for class,
gender, and ethnicity. A good example is the portrait of nineteen
"Pernambucan representatives of the first sugar conference" in
Brazil in 1902, which contrary to all known written documents and
commentaries in- cludes a black among the elite delegation (p.
76).
The poor quality of reproduction in the book is equally
instructive. The author repeatedly points to the need to work with
the richness of detail in original photographic prints, but the
illustrations in this publi-
cation fail to convey that richness, which is precisely one of
the most important qualities of photographs. Economic struggles
with publishers are no less the responsibility of the historian
than the accurate reading of the visual documentation, and no
historian should attempt to study photographs from poor reproduc-
tions.
In this second section, the author becomes an exam- ple of
precisely the errors that he seeks to help others avoid, which only
strengthens the need for such pub- lications as this one. In his
zeal to find relevance to slavery in a studio portrait of a black,
he mistakenly takes for "iron fetters" the base of a metal posing
support, which was standard in photographic studios (p. 149).In
explaining a view of a Brazilian church, he confuses the standard
symbols of the passion scene on an outdoor cross with ex-voto
offerings. Such misread- i n g ~ by an astute critic of
photographs-as-documents should suggest caution to all of us using
visual docu- mentation and make this book a must for all area
specialists.
KEITH MCELROY
University of Arizona, Tucson
TIMOTHY E. ANNA. The Mexican Empire of Iturbide. Lin-coln:
University of Nebraska Press. 1990. Pp. xii, 286. $39.50.
Timothy E. Anna, author of works on Mexico City during the war
of independence and the demise of Spain's empire in Peru and
elsewhere in America, now turns his attention to the ephemeral
empire of Agustin de Iturbide, Mexico's liberator in 1821.
Throughout this contentious and tendentious work, Anna insists that
Iturbide's contemporary enemies and, with few exceptions,
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexi- can historians have
demonized Iturbide. According to Anna, they have dismissed him as a
traitor, a usurper, a tyrant, and a fraud, reducing him to the
status of ~ex ico ' s"most significant non-person" (p. x). There is
nothing novel about Anna's charges. Almost forty years ago, William
Spence Robertson, in the epilogue of his exhaustively researched
and objective biography of Iturbide, commented on the intense
prejudice against Iturbide in Mexico. Robertson lamented that,
while the liberators Simdn Bolivar and Jose de San Martin were
universally praised, some Mexican historians utterly failed to
appreciate Iturbide. Others, Robertson ob- served, took sides
either as bitter critics or as impas- sioned champions of Mexico's
liberator.
Anna joins the list as an impassioned champion of Iturbide, and
the emperor's contemporary critics and historians critical of him
are treated by Anna as ten- pins, to be knocked down at every
opportunity. Anna's main thesis appears to be that Iturbide really
wanted to be a constitutional monarch but was thwarted in his
effort by his enemies in and out of Congress. Yet Anna admits that,
within weeks of his coronation, Iturbide
