Escott Reid

Who was Escott Reid?

Escott Graves Meredith Reid, CC, was a Canadian diplomat who helped shape the United Nations and NATO, author, international public servant and academic administrator.

Born in Campbellford, Ontario, he was the son of Shropshire native Rev. Alfred John Reid, by his wife Morna Irvine Meredith, the youngest daughter of Edmund Allen Meredith and a god-daughter of George Irvine. His Meredith grandfather had served as Deputy Under-Secretary of Canada, and Reid later occupied his very same offices at Parliament Hill.

He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Trinity College, in the University of Toronto in 1927. A Rhodes scholar, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1929 and a Master of Arts degree in 1935 from Christ Church, Oxford. Though academic jobs were scarce in 1930, he had won a Rockefeller Fellowship which enabled him to study the Canadian party and electoral systems in general and Saskatchewan's in particular.

Turning down a position to teach at Harvard University, from 1932 to 1938, he was the first full-time National Secretary for the Canadian Institute of International Affairs. He was active in the League for Social Reconstruction, an association of left-wing intellectuals founded in Montreal and Toronto in the winter of 1931–1932. He also joined the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the new social-democratic political party that took shape in 1932–1933. His left-wing views and his conviction that Canada should maintain neutrality in a renewed European war put him at odds with many CIIA members, and essentially made it necessary for him to find a new career path. From 1937 to 1938, he was the acting Professor of Government and Political Science at Dalhousie University.