The Prophet’s Dark Side

His colleague Vince Bladen called him “a raw Ontario farm boy.” Sociologist S.D. Clark remembered him as “a shy man, awkward of manners [with] little capacity to state abstract ideas coherently.” His writing style, as even his affectionate and admiring biographer Donald Creighton conceded, was “difficult, highly condensed, extremely elliptical and, not infrequently, obscure.” And yet, when CBC Radio memorialized Harold Innis in 1972, on the 20th anniversary of his death, he was so much the hero and quintessence of Canadian scholarship that the profile was simply entitled “Innis of Canada.” Students at the University of Toronto’s Innis College may have been singing, “Who The Hell Is Harold Innis?,” the college’s irreverent, unofficial song, but Harold Innis had become the undisputed symbol of Canada’s intellectual coming of age in the years between World War One and World War Two.

Much of this fame had already been won during his lifetime, but despite his success in...