Diefenbaker’s “New Frontier”: Masculinity, Modernity, and Canadian Electoral Politics, 1957–58

Abstract

The term “New Frontier” has become synonymous across historical scholarship with the thirty-fifth president of the United States of America, John F. Kennedy. The origins of the term, however, prove murkier. According to former Canadian prime minister John G. Diefenbaker, the Kennedy campaign stole the phrase from him to “great advantage” but “without attribution.” Indeed, Diefenbaker’s “New Frontier” policies were instrumental in his rise to power several years before Kennedy ran for president. This article explores the Canadian electoral campaigns of 1957 and 1958. Across these two contests, Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives narrowly defeated the longstanding Liberal government of Louis St. Laurent, before going on to win the then-largest parliamentary majority in Canadian history. The article argues that the Progressive Conservatives’ “New Frontier” policies and the branding of Diefenbaker as a self-made man were instrumental in his victory and were effective because they spoke to the historical moment. Indeed, to a certain extent they were a performative political device. The late 1950s were the era of the “other-directed man,” to quote David Riesman, where concerns about the erosion of individuality and manliness led to a newfound fascination with the frontier and wilderness. Diefenbaker and the Progressive Conservatives managed to harness this nostalgia and appealed to the growing desire for agency and self-fulfilment in the populace. His past as a Saskatchewan-raised homesteader was utilized in lending credibility to his status as a frontiersman, and he promised Canadians that under a Progressive Conservative government he would lead them toward “adventure … to the nation’s utmost bounds, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”