The Large Queens’ enduring legacy
What constitutes a nation?
This story presents the initial ramblings in a multi-part series exploring the “Large Queens,” the first stamps issued under the Dominion of Canada after Canadian Confederation.
In 1851, the colonial provinces preceding the present-day dominion issued the first postage stamps in what’s now Canada. Less than two decades later, political officials in the newly formed Dominion of Canada eagerly continued their work to develop a national identity.
One of early first steps saw the launch of a stamp series now known as the “Large Queens,” the first Canadian definitive issue, which began an era of truly Canadian philately while marking a milestone in Canadian history. Those eight stamps told our story – the first chapter, at least – and in turn manufactured the consent of the people over which they have ruled, in largely the same manner, through the present day.
What constitutes a nation, anyway?
It’s a good question—clear, purposeful, provocative. And what better time than now, when national borders seem less significant than ever, to ask such a question, what with all its transformational implications?
Philately, for example, has a lot to say about nations and borders and power; indeed, throughout its history, the hobby has transformed along with nations and the people whose stories uphold them.
We might understand history, but all we have before us is the moment. For now, it’s out with the Bidens and in, once again, with the Trumps. It’s out with the Gulf of Mexico and in with the Gulf of America, “which has a beautiful ring,” one of the Trumps – U.S. President-elect Donald – said on Jan. 7.
“That covers a lot of territory, the Gulf of America. What a beautiful name—and it’s appropriate.”
Even the editors of the great Al Jazeera rightly understand what they call “unilateral cartographic adjustments have always been part and parcel of imperialism,” a system with which we’ve all toyed from time to time.
The next day, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum responded in kind (and I’m paraphrasing): “Hey, Sanchito. How about we rename, as ‘América Mexicana,’ your fledgling United States?”
In her daily press conference at Mexico City’s National Palace, standing before a world map first published in 1607, Mexico’s first female president floated her proposed name – Mexican America – citing legislation drafted in 1814 by Mexico’s first independent congress.1
Sheinbaum, in her own sarcastic wit, added: “That sounds nice, no?”
Mexico is but one of Trump’s many play things in a global play area built by and for powerful people—most everyone else can eat shit and die. But you should avoid saying as much if you enjoy a safe, stable and overall enjoyable play area lest the plebs start burning the toys and killing the toymakers. Or worse yet, they could notice the play area isn’t in fact playful in the trucks-and-dolls sense, but instead it’s a performance—a production, and often a mockery of human potential, on the world stage.2
Even before retaking the helm on Jan. 20, Trump has suggested other cartographic changes in his country; a strategic waterway seizure in Panama, against which, along with Greenland, he has yet to rule out economic or military actions; plus an annexation, this one by economic force, of what he so lovingly calls the “Great State of Canada” (or sometimes, perhaps with less love, the “51st state”).
Our crumpled leader Justin Trudeau has also joined in on the fun.
“It actually sort of came up at one point, and then we started musing back and forth about this,” Trudeau told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki on Jan. 9, two days after stepping down as the ruling Liberal Party’s leader. “And when I started to suggest, well, maybe there could be a trade for Vermont or California for certain parts, he immediately decided that it was not that funny anymore, and we moved on to a different conversation.”
But as we’ve acknowledged, it’s a time of change: out with the Trudeaus and in with the Freelands, the Carneys and the other destined duds. Perhaps I’d like to see the Alberta-born Freeland, who flummoxed Soviet spies as a student activist in Ukraine, lead Canada through the “newest nationalism.” Or perhaps I should yield to something flawlessly fresh—and it’s in with Jesse Brown.
Of course, even the Canadaland publisher and editor has known for years our next prime minister will not be a Liberal woman or a Jewish media critic but a Conservative man, Pierre Poilievre.3
In this spirit of chaos and distraction, I should praise the Internet for its insatiable appetite for prose and opinion. Here, unlike in print, I can just keep writing, meandering here and there, teasing you with the occasional philatelic word and ultimately telling a story unbounded by paper and ink. My only concern is the story—and you certainly have no obligation to read it (although I would appreciate if you at least scrolled to the bottom to boost my numbers).
But before you go too far, you should know it’s about to get interesting, in the Chinese sense, so perhaps consider our original question and move forward with careful attention.
WHAT CONSTITUTES A NATION?
Now understanding its significance, we’re back at that question, something people much smarter than I have pondered for centuries.
A September 1942 issue of Nature, the long-running international peer-reviewed journal, asked the same question: “What constitutes a nation?”
What constitutes a nationality, according to the fine editors at Nature, “is as hard a question to answer as the allied one of what is denoted by the word race.”4
Luckily, U.S. anthropologist John Swanton had a simpler explanation.5 Writing in his book Evolution of Nations, published as part of the Smithsonian Institution War Background Studies, Swanton denied the importance of “voluntary associations of folk living under a government desired by the majority.”
“This is, of course, difficult to test in the case of past civilizations, but seems to be applicable to modern nations. But if so it cannot be too much stressed, indeed it is the keystone of the theory, that what one nation may desire, in fact what may be the cement that makes it a nation, may not be at all what appeals to other agglomerations of men and women whose nationality will be determined by a totally different outlook on life.”
In other words – the (paraphrased) words of Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, the last of the Five Good Emperors – we’re surrounded by all of these things, not just ambitions but all things to which we can devote time and energy; we must understand our own worth is measured by how, as well as to what, we devote ourselves.
Nearly 1,900 years later, in 1972, Canadians clamoured to agree with the old Roman thinker. CBC Radio broadcaster Peter Gzowski provided the backdrop by launching a competition to find a Canadian counterpart to the simile “as American as apple pie.”6
Heather Scott, a 17-year-old student from Sarnia, Ont., eventually won the day with her suggestion—“as Canadian as possible under the circumstances.”
I like to think Scott’s simile rings as true today as it did in the two centuries before it—all the way back, if we Canadians had been around, to “Verissimus.”7
But if we wanted to pen a more general definition of a nation – something the United Nations might like – we could return to Swanton. On the opening page of his Evolution of Nations, he explains even a superficial study of tribes, “whether in America or elsewhere, will quickly dispel the idea that they are simple or permanent units, and one soon discovers that they present the most bewildering combinations and contradictions.”
“In the first place we must inquire how we are to define a tribe, what factors determine that a certain body of people is a tribe.”
Swanton later refers to these defining factors through a contemporary lens as the “bases of national life,” in which he includes race, geography and language. But he concludes the “only justification of any government” centres on the benefits it offers the people it governs, “and although governments have grown up in harmony with geographical, linguistic, and to some extent cultural and racial factors, our discussion shows that none of these has been an absolute determinant.”
Citing both Switzerland and the United States, Swanton found geography, language and culture each “played a part, but common interest irrespective of these factors was far more important than either.”
“This common interest was, in the first place, a common love of liberty and of the free expression of the cultural life,” Swanton added.
“We shall be untrue to our inheritance and to what the world expects of us if we fail to maintain the ideal – and the fact – of freedom in all its aspects and if we fail to make personal worth and social service the measure of value between man and man, instead of race, language, culture or descent.”
How have we fared, eight decades later, in dealing with what Swanton called the “differences among us brought about by those factors,” limiting the ensuing friction and increasing our unity on domestic and international levels?
We’ve mostly bickered – with ourselves and our global counterparts – because the people in power generally forget, as Swanton said, “the only certain security is collective, and that freedom at the expense of another is not freedom.”
The next edition of Power & Philately and the second part of this series will come this weekend. Keep your inboxes free of other junk or check back here on Sunday morning for the most glorious of times.
P.S. Remember, subscriptions for Power & Philately are free. Subscribers receive an utterly luscious story in their inbox each week with full access to the archive of past stories plus Substack’s large reader community. While no payment is ever necessary to access Power & Philately, many righteous readers have opted to pay for donation subscriptions ($5 a month or $50 a year) or join the founding member plan ($100 a year) as “esteemed financiers.” Each of my esteemed financiers receives in the mail a special gift related to philately, propaganda or both.
At the time, in 1814, large portions of the present-day United States remained under Spanish control, whose grasp Mexican officials had just escaped to draft the Constitution of Apatzingán. In their landmark legislation, they refer to the central portion of North America currently called the United States as “América Mexicana.” But the so-called reasons for unilaterally changing the name of a land mass or a gulf matter less to us today than the mere proposal itself.
Speaking of human potential, I’m reminded of Terence McKenna. He spoke in Colorado in April 1999, seven days after the Columbine High School massacre, the first blow to America’s “age of innocence” and a precursor to the Sept. 11 attacks, the government response to which drove an apathetic spike through the hearts of since-disinterested people from Maine to California. We saw with what we had to deal, and we instead chose not to care.
But it didn’t have to be this way. Back in 1999, McKenna asked, “What in the world is going on? … What does it mean to be incarnate in a human body at the end of the 20th century in a squirrelly culture like this, trying to make sense of your heritage, your opportunities, the contents of the culture, the contents of your own mind? Is it possible to have an overarching viewpoint that is not somehow canned, or cultish, or self-limited in its approach?”
It’s as complex to determine as whatever constitutes a nation, but McKenna knew one thing: “Culture and ideology are not your friends.
“They are not your friends. This is a hard thing to come to terms with because a certain kind of alienation lies at the end of this thought process. On the other hand, you can’t live in the cradle forever; you can’t be clueless forever. So somebody might as well just lay it out for you and say culture is for the convenience of culture—not you.”
His hope, before he began rolling in his grave a year later, laid with “nature’s dynamic,” which “will carry us to the completion and the enlightenment that we seek.”
I guess things can’t all change at once.
The United Nations (UN) has its own arbitrary definition following the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights & Duties of States, which still provides the benchmarks used by the UN when deciding on new member states: Nations include a settled population, a defined territory, a governmental authority and an ability to enter into relations with other member states.
Swanton spent about 50 of his 80 years on pioneering work in ethnology and ethnohistory to answer questions like, “What constitutes a nation?” He’s particularly remembered for his work with Indigenous communities in the U.S. Southeast and Pacific Northwest.
As with much of the Western world’s beloved propaganda, the American-as-apple-pie theory predated but ultimately gained widespread popularity during the Second World War. But neither apples nor their central role as the so-called “meat and potatoes” of their namesake pie are “American” (referring not to the continent but its relatively small central portion stuck between Canada and Mexico with fewer coasts, smaller gulfs and a higher likelihood, according to the latest Vegas odds, of becoming a civil war zone, a climate-induced hellscape or a proving ground for our shared enemies’ fanciest new weapons in a crazed “bolt out of the blue,” the nightmare scenario U.S. officials have anticipated and studied for decades—not for the survival of citizens, but for the continuity of government).
But on a good note, in 2011, the U.S. Apple Association finally mustered the courage to confirm U.S. propagandists wrongfully claimed the invention of apple pie, “this quintessentially American dessert,” which historians trace to – where else? – 14th-century England. In the tasty 2009 tome Pie: A Global History, I found a reference to the 1869 novel Oldtown Folks (by abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe, who in the previous decade authored Uncle Tom’s Cabin, setting the stage for the U.S. Civil War), which explains everything you need to know.
“The pie is an English tradition, which, planted on American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of genera and species.”
As the colonizers of centuries past came to the Americas, they brought with them the necessary tools, ingredients and creative flair to make a damn good apple pie—among other things. Then a relatively thin dessert, evoking its colonial upbringing, the apple pie of today’s America offers a deep dish of doomer death. They’ve posthumously “enriched” once-vital wheat flour with the nutrients necessary for life on earth; they’ve sucked artery-clogging oils from the skin of seeds and fruit, some of which come from the trees our great-ape friends need to survive; and they’ve added diarrhea-inducing corn syrup, sugar and sugar alternatives, carcinogenic apples sprayed with pesticides banned in Europe, and artificial flavour to counteract science’s subjugation of natural flavour (all evocative, some might say, of our modern existence).
Through the 1800s and into the early 1900s, the fruit-laden dessert came to symbolize the prosperity of the “American experiment” and the third-world pilgrims who existed within it like data in a spreadsheet. A 1902 report by the New York Times, the august paper of record, declared the pie “the secret of our strength as a nation and the foundation of our industrial supremacy. Pie is the American synonym of prosperity. Pie is the food of the heroic. No pie-eating people can be permanently vanquished.”
But believe it or not, the dish’s biggest strides in the realm of public opinion came during the Second World War, when U.S. soldiers gave a deliciously indoctrinated stock response to journalists asking why they joined the war effort. They did it for – what else? – “mom and apple pie.” (This preceding phrase, “as American as motherhood and apple pie,” lost its motherly portion soon after the war).
According to the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which tracks the use of words and phrases across a corpus of books, the phrase “as American as apple pie” first turned up in English books in 1936. The largest peaks (starting from the smallest) came in 1946-47, 1970 and 2011, respectively. (I should also note an advertisement, illustrated above, in a June 1924 edition of the Gettysburg Times, promoting “new Lestz suits that are as American as apple pie.”)
Return next week for a special in-depth look at other popular fruits as propaganda.
Recognizing young Mark’s potential, Roman emperor Hadrian dubbed him “Verissimus” and later became his adoptive grandfather. Aurelius’ birth name “Verus” – the same name borne by his father and grandfather – meant true (or loyal), but Verissimus meant truest (or most loyal). Hadrian’s reason for the nickname has been lost to history. We’re left to infer he enjoyed fun wordplay when he wasn’t acting as “one in a long line of genocidal arch villains who set out to annihilate the Jewish people.” Everyone needs a day off, and Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend. (These days, you might go as far to say even Hitler had a dog.)
Since Freeland was banned from Russia, apparently to her distress at the time it happened, I don’t think she flummoxed anyone in Russia, Ukraine or anywhere else, for that matter. And then, of course, there was the much more recent episode in the Canadian Parliament where she and others applauded Jaroslav Hunka, a good old time National Socialist who fought against the Soviets in WWII, without grasping exactly what that means. A deficit in the history curriculum perhaps? Canadians need not care what outsiders think, but the goings on in Canada with people like Trudeau and Freeland in charge, globalists to be exact, have left some of us scratching our heads as to why and how generally very nice Canadians elected such, well, I will call them people to be polite.
As entertaining as ever. I will wait by my phone with bated breath for part 2.