by Denis Smith
Copyright © 1995 by Denis Smith
Hardcover edition published 1995
Paperback edition published 1997
This electronic edition published 2013
Originally published by Macfarlane Walter & Ross
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication available upon request.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-636-3
Information on excerpts from published sources appears in the Acknowledgments
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council
McClelland & Stewart,
a division of Random House of Canada Limited,
a Penguin Random House Company
One Toronto Street
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v3.1
To the memory of my parents,
Doris and Bruce Smith,
who raised me as a westerner;
to my wife, Dawn;
and to Alastair, Stephen, and Andrea,
Canadians of another generation
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
1 A Prairie Youth and a Curious War, 1895–1919
2 Choosing a Party, Choosing a Wife, 1919–1929
3 A Provincial Life, 1929–1938
4 Seats of the Mighty, 1940–1945
Photo Insert One
5 New Name, Old Party, 1945–1951
6 The Big Fish, 1951–1956
7 On the New Frontier, 1957
8 Rt Hon. John George Diefenbaker, 1957–1958
9 Visions, Dreams, and Fallen Arrows, 1958–1959
10 “History Is a Hanging Judge,” 1959–1961
11 “Hazard… Our Constant Companion,” 1960–1961
12 A Government Disintegrates, 1962–1963
13 A Leader at Bay, 1963–1966
14 “An Old Man Dreaming Dreams,” 1967–1979
Photo Insert Two
15 A Burial on the Prairie
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Prologue
IN CANADA THE WINTERS ARE HARD. POLITICIANS PREFER TO CAMPAIGN IN THE temperate months of spring or autumn when travel is reliable and the public mood is not depressed by storm and winter darkness. But 1958 was an exceptional year. Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker, who had come to power with a minority of parliamentary seats in the general election of June 1957, dissolved the House of Commons in early February and entered a winter contest in defiance of nature. On March 31, after a campaign that dazzled the electorate and dismayed his foes, Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives won the largest majority in the country’s history: 208 of 265 seats, spread evenly across every region of the nation. The invincible Liberal Party was shattered, its front bench decimated, its treasury exhausted, its new leader humiliated by an electorate that had chosen to “Follow John.” The Social Credit Party disappeared entirely from parliament, and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) was reduced to eight seats.
John Diefenbaker was sixty-two, yet he did not seem it. The prime minister campaigned at a frenetic pace, and with his famous victory he opened a Conservative era that might outlast the Liberal reign of twenty-two years. As expectations rose in the aftermath of victory, the prospect did not appear unreasonable. Instead, the Conservative prime minister gave the country a decade of continuous convulsion, marked by his government’s defeat in April 1963 and his own forced departure from the leadership in September 1967. For a decade and more after that, the old warrior remained hovering in parliament, the scourge of Liberal governments and his own successors. But it was the tumultuous decade of leadership from 1957 to 1967 that made him a subject for the history books.
When Diefenbaker died in August 1979, he was given an extended state funeral modelled – at his own direction – on the funerals of Winston Churchill, John Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy. It culminated in a transcontinental train journey and burial on the grassy bluffs of the South Saskatchewan River overlooking the city of Saskatoon, beside the centre that had been built to house his personal and public papers and the relics of a lifetime.
What was remembered, and buried, on those bluffs was as much a legend as a man. The man lived a long public life, but it was a life of turmoil, rebuff, failure, disappointment, and bitterness more than of triumph and satisfaction. Yet out of it Diefenbaker built the legend of a morally triumphant underdog, the representative Canadian common man. The country took to the legend even as it rejected John Diefenbaker the politician.
When he became prime minister in 1957, the country did not know him. When it came to know him and to experience his leadership, the country preferred the legend to the man. To understand him - and perhaps to understand his country as well in the twentieth century - it is necessary to know both legend and man, both myth and reality.
John Diefenbaker was born into colonial Ontario before the end of the nineteenth century. He was of German-Scots ancestry, and his name cast him and his family as outsiders in a society that was, in the twilight of the Victorian era, proudly British in its politics and imperial in its view of the world. His father - despite his German name - was an admirer of the British parliamentary model and of imperial ideals. His mother was an independent Highland Scot with scant respect for the institutions her husband revered. Young John somehow absorbed the influences of both his parents - his father’s romantic imperialism and his mother’s iconoclasm and driving determination - without entirely reconciling them. From both mother and father, and from the conditions of his youth, he learned about life on the margins of society in a country where most others lived on the margins too. From there, he developed a youthful ambition to move to the centre. While his ambitions were forming and deepening, he could not know the costs of achieving them.
At sixty-one, he came to power late - perhaps too late, both for his administrative capacities and for the suppleness and timeliness of his political ideals. The office of prime minister he had coveted for years seemed in some essential ways beyond his ability to master. That may have been because the country he was chosen to govern was not the country that had formed him. It was already casting off its ties of empire, just as the imperial centre had cast it off. It had achieved international maturity in a world of technology and weapons he scarcely understood. And it was subject to the dominating influence of a friendly neighbour at the very moment when Canadians had come to accept their independence in the world. At home, the western Canadian vision of the nation as a single community absorbing all its subcommunities into a greater whole – a vision Diefenbaker had embraced – came into conflict with a revived French Canadian (or Québécois) nationalism. The conflict was one that Diefenbaker could never really comprehend. As a westerner, an outsider, a romantic parliamentarian of the Edwardian era, he was a man out of time and place in late twentieth-century Ottawa.
Yet in two senses he was a perfect representative of Canadians in the postwar era. He entered parliament from a bankrupt province at the end of ten years of depression, and his belief in a compassionate social policy was shared by progressives of all parties. In 1957 he spoke for a new independence among Canadians of every region, expressing a confident sense of themselves that meant rebellion against th
e patronizing smugness of Liberal governments of the 1940s and 1950s. His victories of 1957 and 1958 brought to the country a brief sense of liberation and of new horizons to conquer, but the expectations could not be fulfilled.
Privately and publicly, he was never fully in control of his emotions. By 1957 – perhaps much earlier – he was scarred by his failures. He was suspicious of colleagues, unfamiliar with the play of political compromise, inexperienced in sharing tasks and authority. Probably he was too old to learn new tricks. But he was also a man of high theatrical talent, stubbornness, and pluck, who found great pleasure in the political battle. That mixture of character and circumstance produced a life of complexity both for John Diefenbaker and for his country.
CHAPTER 1
A Prairie Youth and a Curious War
1895-1919
JOHN GEORGE DIEFENBAKER WAS THE FIRST SON OF MARY AND WILLIAM Diefenbaker, born in Neustadt, Ontario, on September 18, 1895. A second son, Elmer, was born in 1897. William Diefenbaker was a public school teacher, and the family lived an itinerant life. In John’s first fifteen years they occupied at least nine homes in Ontario and Saskatchewan.1 In 1897 there was a move to Greenwood, east of Toronto; in 1900 there was another to Todmorden, slightly to the north; and in the summer of 1903 there was a trip across the continent by rail to Regina and north to Rosthern, and by box wagon to a schoolhouse home in the district of Tiefengrund (Deep Ground) near Fort Carlton. In 1905, again, there was a relocation thirty miles south to the Hague school district; in 1906, another shift to homestead land near Hoffnungsfeld; and finally in February 1910, after four hard winters on the homestead, a move to Saskatoon, where John and Elmer could complete their schooling. After a few months in a rented house, the family settled into its own home at 411 – 9th Street. Here they remained for almost four decades, until the widowed Mary Diefenbaker entered hospital as an invalid in 1957.
Not surprisingly, John Diefenbaker’s memories of his early life in Ontario are sparse: a dog poisoned by unfriendly neighbours; daily prayers and Bible readings, weekly church and Sunday school; music on the family’s Thomas organ; springtime lilacs around the house in Greenwood; a sledding accident involving a near-fatal collision with a milk cart; and first encounters with the automobile in Todmorden. As he recalled those events seven decades later, some revealing signs of the man were evident: a memory of childish impudence towards the privileged and a delight in the marvels of the automobile.
Our home then was on the highway taken by the aristocrats of Toronto in their newfangled electric carriages when out for a spin on a Sunday. I saw practically the beginnings of this new traffic: how they travelled, looking neither to right nor left, the cynosure of all eyes, the women in big hats, with a kind of handkerchief around their chins, and the men wearing dusters. Sometimes these cars ran and sometimes not. When they broke down they afforded me a great deal of enjoyment. I would ask the drivers such helpful questions as, “Do you think it will ever start again?” This, I found, having done it once, practically assured sharp ejaculations of annoyance, so I invariably raised the question at every opportunity, just to test the reaction. Needless to say, none of these people offered me a ride, however much I might secretly have wished for one. Not until 1907, when on the homestead, did we get our first ride in an automobile, in the back of a Brush one-seater, owned by a real estate man in Radisson, Saskatchewan.2
In his memoirs Diefenbaker also recalled his first attendance at a “great national event” – the victory parade past Toronto City Hall of Canadian units returning from the Boer War in November 1900. Dressed by his mother in his best blue velvet sailor suit and Balmoral cap, young John set off by horse and wagon with the local garbageman, Mr Skelhorn, for the trip to city hall. As the wagon turned onto Danforth Avenue from Don Mills Road, it hit a bump and John was tossed into the greasy bottom of the slops tank, emerging “unhurt but … the filthiest mess that anyone could imagine.” Skelhorn soon dropped him off, Diefenbaker claims, and John set out alone to watch the marchpast. “There was Mayor Urquhart of Toronto along with all the other political and military celebrities on the steps of the City Hall, and four or five feet away that urchin covered with grease. I was such a fright that nobody dared touch me. There I watched with wonder the returning soldiers and joined in the cheers for the Highlanders. When my mother heard what I had done, she was shocked.”3
In 1902 the family made a tenting trip to Stoney Lake, north of Peterborough. Here John’s father gave him his introduction to fishing, which became a lifelong passion and one of his few diversions.4
John began school in his father’s classroom in Greenwood at the age of four – the result, he suggested, of precocity and an assertion of will. “I objected to staying home; I knew how to read, having learned in order to understand the thermometer on page one of the Globe, which gave the weather forecast each day.”5 His experience of school over the next few years was “sometimes unpleasant.” As the teacher’s son, John was shown no favours: “When there was some mischief in the class and I was blamed whether rightly or wrongly by the other students, their word was accepted.” John recalled that he was forbidden to fight, which meant he was the loser whenever he was attacked or challenged. His German name was one subject of challenge. “I used to get quite upset when my schoolmates teased me about my name. I felt that my forbears’ having been in Canada for so long a time made me a Canadian. I was just seven years old, but my ideas on that subject have not changed with the passage of time. One must remember, however, that in those days Toronto was ninety-eight per cent British.”6
Diefenbaker’s ancestors were unprivileged immigrants to North America. He describes them as “dispossessed Scottish Highlanders and discontented Palatine Germans” who arrived in Upper Canada early in the nineteenth century. On the first page of his memoirs, Diefenbaker offers an inaccurate account of the family’s history on his father’s side, claiming that his grandfather “was born in Upper Canada” to parents who had emigrated from the Grand Duchy of Baden early in the nineteenth century. In fact, his grandfather, George M. Diefenbacker (sometimes spelled Diefenbach or Diefenbacher), was born in Baden and emigrated to Upper Canada in the 1850s, where he married and bought land in 1858. He was a wagon-maker. After his son’s move to the Saskatchewan homestead, grandson John recalled the arrival from Ontario of “a magnificent wagon of oak and maple” that was unsuitable for use on rutted prairie trails. Grandmother Diefenbacker, seen through a grandson’s eyes, was “a dutiful rather than an affectionate person.” Once the family left Ontario in 1903, the children had no further contact with these grandparents. At some point John’s father, William, simplified the spelling and changed the pronunciation of his name to Diefenbaker.7
William Thomas Diefenbaker was born in April 1868, one of seven children, and educated in Hawkesville and Kitchener, then named Berlin. After high school graduation, he began a teaching career on a temporary certificate, and in 1890-91 gained his professional (or normal school) qualification at the Model School in Ottawa. In that year, his son believed, William haunted the gallery of the House of Commons, absorbing the political atmosphere in the last year of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald’s life. He disliked John A. “because of his legendary capacity for drinking and because of his reputation for wiliness, although he had a considerable regard for Macdonald’s capacity as a leader in Parliament.”8 William’s hero was Wilfrid Laurier, and parliament was his object of veneration. “Father had … so strong an appreciation for British traditions – having no British blood in his veins – for what the British had done for freedom, that he left that with me … He knew more about Parliament than I know today as far as the formalities are concerned.”9 This was the romantic age of parliamentary government, and William passed on that romance to his son. “The House of Commons lived for him, and it lived for me when I heard him recount the events he had witnessed and stories of the parliamentary personalities he had seen.”10 From his father the boy absorbed a thoroughly whiggish sense of hist
ory as the progressive expansion of freedom, developing benevolently and inevitably under British law.
John Diefenbaker always expressed filial affection and admiration for his father, but as he grew up he came to sense in William a certain diffidence and lack of ambition. In the memoirs he notes that William “was not a driver in any sense of the word, but a dreamer who loved books … an excellent teacher … content to serve the public weal through his church, his schools, and his lodge, the Independent Order of Foresters.”11 The memoir description is brief and unreflective, but it suggests a kindly, withdrawn, perhaps shy man with a wide smattering of general knowledge in British history, languages, astronomy, and elementary mathematics, almost entirely self-taught.12 The dreamer had a distant and resigned gaze and a slightly receding chin, which he bequeathed to his elder son. In later life he was white haired and comfortably portly.
Mary Diefenbaker was sturdy, straight-backed, and firm in expression. She was the force in the family, “the much more determined personality,” in her son’s understated words. To these he adds a few conventional phrases: “When I look back over my life, Mother gave me drive, Father gave me the vision to see what could be done.” Mary, John tells us, was a devout Baptist, frugal, and, curiously, “a wee bit fey.”13 He leaves this ambiguous Scottish expression undefined, although it points to a certain strangeness or imbalance of character. Later evidence suggests that his mother was a dour, intimidating, prejudiced, ignorant, and wilful woman whose influence over her two sons was powerful and lifelong.14 But in these early years the sparse documentary record permits only the occasional glimpse into the Diefenbakers’ domestic history. It appears that she already regarded her husband as ineffective after a few years of marriage.15
As an adult – and especially after he had become prime minister – Diefenbaker demonstrated an unusual interest in the collection of family history and relics, almost exclusively from his mother’s side of the family. She was a Scot, of Highland descent, a Campbell of Argyll on her mother’s side, a Bannerman of Kildonan on her father’s side. She had none of her husband’s reverence for things English; the Bannermans had nursed resentments through the generations since 1745, and Mary passed on their defiant spirit to her son.16 The Bannermans lost their tenancies in the great Sutherland clearances of 1811–12, and in 1813 John Diefenbaker’s great-grandparents were chosen as members of the third party of Red River settlers sponsored by Lord Selkirk. They crossed the North Atlantic in the late summer of 1813 and, typhoid-ridden, were dropped at Fort Churchill, where they wintered in desolation. The depleted party reached the Red River Settlement in June 1814.
