Stanley Ryerson

Stanley Bréhaut Ryerson (March 12, 1911 – 1998) was a Canadian historian, educator, political activist. There is very little information available concerning his parents, but Ryerson was born in 1911, into a well-off middle-class family in Toronto. Ryerson could trace his paternal lineage back to Egerton Ryerson, the "Pope of Methodism" in nineteenth century Toronto, and to William McDougall, one of the Fathers of Confederation; and, on his mother's side, he was related to Louis Antoine Bréhaut de l'Isle, French Commander at Trois-Rivières in 1638.

To fully understand his commitment to communism one must look towards his period of study at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1931. While attending classes towards a Diplomes d'Etudes Superieures with a thesis on the writings of Sicilian peasant-realist novelist Giovanni Verga, Ryerson involved himself in communist activities. While travelling through Europe, he experienced the political turmoil within Spain and Italy during the early depression years, and while in Paris he took part in the funeral procession of the last survivor of the Paris Commune of 1871 a Z. Camelinat. On this day in 1932, while marching with 200,000 others to Père Lachaise Cemetery, Ryerson felt a fierce wave of connection with the French Left. His experiences in Europe affected his vision of the capitalist world and he would write:

"the realization that the cultural values of art and literature were being turned by capitalism into what I can only describe as spiritual onanism and the discovery that communism, by solving the material problems of society, was the only path to a future creative renaissance, was the first impulse."

Europe was the scene of his birth as a communist; Canada was the scene of his growth into a renowned historian and communist intellectual.

The Communist Party of Canada, at least in the 1930s and 40s lacked a connection to the Canadian middle class as well as intellectuals; with his return to Canada, Ryerson would become a symbol of the party's appeal to this segment of society. Ryerson "was not the only traditional intellectual to join the CPC, but he was one of the first and undoubtedly was to become the most important." The Communist parties of Great Britain and the United States of America, as well as many other nations, could count numerous artists and intellectuals as members from the 1930s on; but in Canada, Ryerson was a lonely figure. His position within the CPC, including his rapid rise in the party hierarchy and his presence on the Central Committee (CC) until 1969, was assured by his unique position; a position that allowed him to play a role within the "political history of Canadian Communism unlike that of his American and British counterparts." He was a middle class school boy from a privileged background in an overwhelmingly proletarian organisation, and as such his presence within the CPC did not always meet with approval. But, his education made him an asset for the party, one that would come in handy in the years to come.

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