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The League for Social Reconstruction (1932–42) was an organization of socialist intellectuals that advocated for political education and economic and social reform. The LSR was formed in response to the Great Depression. Its members were influential in the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation.
The League for Social Reconstruction (LSR) was an organization of left-wing intellectuals, founded in 1931–32 in Montreal and Toronto, largely in response to the Great Depression. Although it soon had almost 20 branches elsewhere in Ontario and the West, the founding branches proved the longest lived and most active in political education. Led by historian Frank Underhill and law professor F.R. Scott, founding members included John King Gordon, Eugene Forsey, David Lewis, Graham Spry and Irene Spry (née Bliss).
The LSR was critical of monopoly capitalism and demanded economic change by parliamentary means. Although it was never formally linked with a political party, it made its sympathies clear with the annual re-election of J.S. Woodsworth as its honorary president.
The Regina Manifesto (1933) of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation was largely written by LSR members. The league's ideas found fullest expression in the books Social Planning for Canada (1935) and Democracy Needs Socialism (1938), and in the Canadian Forum, acquired in 1936.
Disillusionment with socialism in the late 1930s weakened the LSR. The Second World War and the increased organizational demands of the CCF led to the LSR's quiet demise in 1942. Its influence on the CCF was great; its influence on Canada is still a matter for speculation.
