Conflicting Visions, Divergent Strategies: Watson Thomson and the Cold War Politics of Adult Education in Saskatchewan, 1944-6

Using Watson Thomson's adult educational work with Tommy Douglas' CCF from late 1944 to early 1946 as an anchor point, this paper has several goals. First, to explicate Thomson's transformative-communitarian socialist vision and thereby confront the inadequacies of the communist-social democratic framing of the history of the Canadian left; second, to illuminate the tensions on the left at an axial moment in its history; third, to examine the specific failings of the social democratic imagination and political will; finally, to insert Watson Thomson into the social history of adult education and western Canadian radicalism.