Ryerson, Stanley Bréhaut Egerton

  • From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: See full biography at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Br%C3%A9haut_Ryerson
  • Wiki Biography:
    • Stanley Bréhaut Egerton Ryerson (March 12, 1911 – 25 April 1998) was a Canadian historian, educator, political activist. His parents were Edward Stanley Ryerson and Tessie De Vigne, a well-off middle-class family in Toronto. Ryerson’s paternal grandfather was Egerton Ryerson, a leading Methodist and educator in nineteenth century Toronto. His grandmother, Emily Eliza Beatty, was a sister-in-law 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.
    • Ryerson began his communist activism while attending classes towards a Diplomes d’Etudes Superieures with a thesis on the writings of Sicilian peasant-realist novelist Giovanni Verga, which he started at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1931. While travelling through Europe, he experienced the political turmoil in 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.
    • Common criticism of Ryerson accuses his work of continual failure to transcend the CPC’s ideological passivity when it came to their relationship with Moscow. Kealey sees these arguments as being based upon a belief that Ryerson’s understanding of Marxism was severely limited by the many Stalinist distortions people generally see in Soviet philosophy disseminated during Ryerson’s time in the CPC. It is true that party work affected his intellectual work; his choice of material was in many respects dictated by the political atmosphere of the day. But this does not mean he substituted party beliefs for his own in every respect. Ryerson was a dedicated Communist, who saw within the CPC the best vehicle for advancing the cause of Communism and the betterment of the working class. His decision to follow the general line, and in some instances deny his true beliefs, is unfortunate but should not be viewed from outside of their historical realities. During the era of the Popular Front, Ryerson wrote in a manner befitting that era and during the time of the Democratic Front he stridently put forth arguments seeking the destruction of Fascism as it was, in his eyes, the best way forward for the working-class. The removal of Ryerson from his intellectual and historical “context denies him recognition as the major pioneer of Marxist historical writing in Canada;” and it also denies the very nature of Ryerson and his role in Canadian society.[
    • Second Great Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=7251
  • Find A Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/108193878/stanley_brehaut_egerton-ryerson