Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada

In the first half of the twentieth century, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation helped to create and maintain a cultural and intellectual infrastructure in Canada that benefited key institutions such as University of Toronto, McGill University, the National Gallery, the Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Canadian Social Science Research Council. Jeffrey Brison documents how American philanthropy facilitated the transformation from a private, localized system of cultural, intellectual, and academic patronage to a complex, nation-based system of incorporated patronage - a system in which the major patron was the federal state. His study calls into question our essentialistic notions of contrasting national identities and the now-mythologized juxtaposition of an American culture fueled by the free market with a Canadian one sustained by state support.