Frank H. Underhill was a writer and radio commentator, as well as a professor of history at the University of Toronto. He was a noted Canadian social democrat and public intellectual. Underhill was the first individual to be the Dunning Trust lecturer twice, once in 1954-55 and once in 1966-67. Underhill studied at the University of Toronto and Oxford University, after which he taught at the University of Saskatchewan during the 1920s “progressive” era. During the First World War, he served as an officer in the British Army. In 1933, Underhill helped to write the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation’s founding document, the Regina Manifesto. From 1927 he worked at Canadian Forum, publishing a column of political commentary. He taught at the University of Toronto from 1927 to 1955, where his activism pushed against the bounds of academic freedom. In 1967, Underhill was made Officer of the Order of Canada.
Underhill surveyed the place of the intellectual in Canadian politics in the last century. Before World War I, he said, the intellectual saw their role as that of the cleric, and after the war, as that of a critic of the establishment. More recently, the intellectual had become a means of legitimizing the existing institutions and beliefs of society. But, Underhill warned against the danger of the intellectual being corrupted if they allowed themselves to become a part of the elite to achieve popularity and acceptability. Surveying the Canadian landscape, he concluded that both Canada and politics needed more and better intellectuals, which would counter the failure of governments to convince Canadians of their practicality. He linked this underutilized political role of the intellectual to the prevailing placement of business and economics at the centre of Canadian society, which enabled economic growth while Canadian people become “economic sawdust.”
Read Underhill’s lecture below.