His grandmother, Emily Eliza Beatty, was a sister-in-law to William McDougall, one of the Fathers of Confederation; and, on his mother's side, he was related to Louis Antoine Bréhaut de l'Isle, French Commander at Trois-Rivières in 1638.

While attending classes towards a Diplomes d'Etudes Superieures with a thesis on the writings of Sicilian peasant-realist novelist Giovanni Verga, Ryerson involved himself in communist activities.

His experiences in Europe affected his vision of the capitalist world and he would write: "the realization that the cultural values of art and literature were being turned by capitalism into what I can only describe as spiritual onanism and the discovery that communism, by solving the material problems of society, was the only path to a future creative renaissance, was the first impulse.

"[2] The Communist parties of Great Britain and the United States of America, as well as many other nations, could count numerous artists and intellectuals as members from the 1930s on; but in Canada, Ryerson was a lonely figure.

During this period, numerous articles and pamphlets were published by the CPC, but it was not until the 1937 publication of Stanley Ryerson's 1837: The Birth of Canadian Democracy, that the full Marxist analysis of the on the 1837 Rebellions would appear.

Dedicated to the soldiers of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion fighting in the Spanish Civil War in defence of Republican Spain, this book was written in the hope of redefining the context of revolution.

[4] Following the outlawing of the CPC in 1940, General Secretary Tim Buck along with Sam Carr and Charles Sims fled Canada for the safety of New York where they would reside under the protection of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).

[5] The leadership of the now underground party was placed in the hands of an Operations Centre, which was headed by Stewart Smith, Leslie Morris, and Stanley Ryerson.

[6] This new approach to the issue of French Canada enabled Ryerson to develop close contacts among Canadian nationalists who opposed the war.

Although researched and mostly written while Ryerson was occupied with the direction of the underground party, French Canada was a careful and provocative analysis of Quebec's social and political history.

"[12] He added, "Labor, production, the real relationships of living society: this is the point of departure for historical materialism….Thought and feelings, ideas and passion and imagination have their being in a material world, are conditioned by it, work upon it.

"[13] Following on the tradition of viewing his writings as a mode of class consciousness, The Founding of Canada was written very much as a popular Marxist introduction to Canadian History.

He believed "[t]he weight of 'official' historiography has hitherto been heavily on the side of efforts to smother the facts of exploitation," and because of this "[t]he idyllic patriarchal picture of these times that has become traditional, is a piece of flagrant deception.

Gregory Kealey felt Ryerson overextended himself in his argument that the land-monopoly represented a "sort of commercialised feudalism" which "loomed as the dominating problem before the Canadas.

"[16] But Ryerson's analysis of the 1837 Rebellions held true for Kealey, as he agrees with the classical Marxist formulation, that "potential production forces were stifled by dominant property relations; and as long as the latter couldn't be broken down progress remained illusory."

"[17] For Ryerson, the complexities and contradictions of Canadian history can be best analysed through the lens of class conflict rather than idealistic theses of most bourgeois historians.

This two volume work, Ryerson explained modestly, was intended as "a preliminary breaking of ground, suggesting a line of approach to a re-interpretation of this country's history".

According to Ryerson, and many other Marxist thinkers, the ability to breakthrough to a more open society will come about from the "dispelling of the fog of false consciousness, [the] gaining for ourselves a true recognition of the real nature of the existing social structure.

He held his position at the College for three years until his secret was discovered; all the while working and writing under the pseudonym of E. Roger to protect his job, his politics would lead to his eventual non-renewal in 1937.

During his 35-year tenure in the CPC, Ryerson was routinely asked to augment his historical writings in order to meet the prevailing philosophy at the time.

Blaming this on "liberalism," he essentially turned his back on his earlier beliefs concerning 1837 and sought to align himself with the new revisionist tendencies within the CPC that came about during the post-Stalin debate.