New Approaches to the Halifax Explosion

Abstract

New Approaches to the Halifax Explosion Leslie Baker (bio) IN APRIL 2018, ACTOR ROB LOWE appeared on the American talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live to promote his most recent movie. In the segment he adlibbed about the Halifax Explosion and explained that he had convinced the movie's producers to change his character's nickname from "The Explosion" to "The Halifax Explosion." Lowe went on to (mis)educate the host of the show, Jimmy Kimmel, about the details of the Halifax Explosion, and between the two men it was implied that the explosion was a forgotten historical event. Only four months earlier, on 6 December 2017, following months of preparation and public events leading up to the anniversary, the centenary of the Halifax Explosion was commemorated. The response from Canadians to the segment on Jimmy Kimmel Live was swift and largely condemnatory of both Lowe's inaccurate recounting of the details of the disaster and the conclusion reached by the men that it was acceptable to laugh about the disaster now because it was 100 years ago and the victims have been "forgotten."1 In the days that followed the story was picked up by provincial and national news outlets, first as a quirky interest piece but soon the focus shifted to popular outrage that the two men had joked about a tragedy that, despite being a century in the past, is still seen by many as integral to the identity of Haligonians. The short-lived scandal seemed to culminate in a letter being sent from Nova Scotian provincial labour minister Labi Kousoulis requesting an official apology from the comedian.2 Aside from the attention garnered by the irreverent treatment of the disaster detailed above, the assortment of new scholarship on the disaster and the contemporary responses to it published in 2017 (both locally and internationally) make it clear that the explosion, its victims, and its lasting effects are far from forgotten. The six texts reviewed here highlight the diversity of approaches to, and interpretations of, the records of this historic disaster: John Bacon's The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy and Extraordinary Heroism; Keith Cuthbertson's The Halifax Explosion: Canada's Worst Disaster; David Sutherland's "We Harbor No Evil Design": Rehabilitation Efforts After the Halifax Explosion of 1917; Michael Dupuis's Bearing Witness: Journalists, Record Keepers and the 1917 Halifax Explosion; Dan Soucoup's Explosion in Halifax Harbour, 1917; and Susan Dodd's The Halifax Explosion: The Apocalypse of Samuel H. Prince.3 These texts are academic or popular works that have been authored by three historians, two journalists, and a political theorist. Uncommon though it may be [End Page 151] to review popular works alongside academic, the assortment represented here is reflective of the wide interest in the disaster, its causes, and aftereffects. The two monographs by journalists, Bacon's The Great Halifax Explosion and Cuthbertson's The Halifax Explosion, have both been published by the trade press Harper Collins and, as such, seek to engage a popular audience. Bacon and Cuthbertson each promise to answer enduring questions about the disaster and to humanize the story by exploring the lives and fates of individuals affected by the blast. This, however, is where the two part ways; while Bacon describes the explosion as a "forgotten disaster,"4 Cuthbertson more rightly considers the disaster to be "an integral element of the city's self-identity and of Canada's national mythology" that is far from forgotten.5 These two quotations, each part of the respective author's introduction, are representative of how each has approached the topic. John U. Bacon, an American professor of journalism, takes a more sensationalist approach as he endeavours to reconstruct the worlds and experiences of victims and survivors while relying on his audience to have very little knowledge of the disaster or of Nova Scotian history. Bacon's The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy and Extraordinary Heroism draws primarily on familiar secondary sources, including the works of Kitz, Bird, Beed, Dupuis (also reviewed here), and Ruffman and Howell.6 The narrative that Bacon constructs takes a new approach to the history of...