Barker Fairley by Frederick Varley, 1920

Further to Michael’s post on Peter Watts’s conviction for obstructing a border guard.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  Exhibit A is Frye’s editorial, which appeared in the Canadian Forum 29, no. 346 (November 1949): 169–70.

Nothing to Fear But Fear

For some months now the American immigration authorities have been busily defending our otherwise undefended border. A number of labour leaders, students, and unfrocked Communists have been held up, turned back, or refused visas, and on a principle of chance well known to duck hunters, they have even managed to bag a few authentic members of the Labor Progressive Party. The recent refusal of visas to Professor Shortliffe of Queen’s and Professor Barker Fairley of Toronto, amounting in at least the latter case to permanent exclusion, has brought the matter more into the open. As practically every Canadian has friends or relatives in the States, Canadian protest has been somewhat muffled. When made, it has usually been carefully qualified by two points: first, that it is intelligible that the U.S.A. should want to exclude people with a vocation for overthrowing its government by force; and second, that as a sovereign nation it has a perfect right to exclude whom it likes.

Well, so it has, but its officials need not be so contemptuous of the national sovereignty of Canada, which, even if smaller, is quite as highly civilized, and quite as interested in democracy. It is an insult to Canada to have American authorities in charge of Canadian immigration who do not know the elementary facts of Canadian political life, and who cannot distinguish a Communist from a social democrat. Earlier in the summer a prominent CCF leader had some difficulty in getting a visa because he had been called a Communist in a Trestrail pamphlet. But no American official should be handling Canadian immigration at all unless he knows all about the trustworthiness of Trestrail pamphlets. A similar political astigmatism must have blurred the official view of Professor Shortliffe, who, though he has associated himself with the CCF, was otherwise merely a professor of French trying to proceed to an appointment in French at Washington University.

Professor Fairley wanted a visa to fulfil an invitation to lecture on Goethe at Bryn Mawr. For any normally competent official, the only question of importance would be: is there anything in this man’s record to indicate that he is going to do anything more subversive than lecture on Goethe? And the answer to that question was obviously no. Professor Fairley is a world famous Goethe scholar, and has never made a political speech in his life. But the officials, in a frenzy of misapplied subtlety, looked up all the occasions on which he had lent his name to the support of a Soviet friendship organization, and gravely decided that he was not sufficiently at war with Russia to be admitted even for a month. After all, had not Mrs. Fairley been sent home from the Peace Conference some months before? True, that action was as high handed and foolish as the exclusion of her husband. But perhaps the authorities reasoned that if they made two foolish decisions over the same family, they would save their faces by their consistency.

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