Toward the end of Frank Underhill and the Politics of Ideas, his engaging and perceptive book about the historian, Kenneth Dewar, professor emeritus of history at Mount Saint Vincent University, describes Underhill’s 80th birthday dinner, held in Ottawa’s Rideau Club in November 1969.
Although it is now hard for me to believe, I was there that night and can still clearly remember the speech Underhill gave. With a tongue-in-cheek nod to Cardinal Newman, he entitled it “Apologia pro Vita Sua,” and that was apt, for his aim was to give us a taste of the education of Frank Underhill. That meant describing the shifts in his philosophical outlook from late 19th-century liberalism through democratic socialism to post-1960 liberalism, while at the same time his political stance meandered from liberal imperialism through neutralism and isolationism to Cold War internationalism.
Michiel Horn is professor emeritus of history at York University. He translated David Koker’s At the Edge of the Abyss: A Concentration Camp Diary, 1943–1944 (Northwestern University Press, 2012); he is also the author of Becoming Canadian: Memoirs of an Invisible Immigrant (University of Toronto Press, 1997).
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