by Denis Smith
What could be questioned was continued life on the land. At the end of 1909 William would acquire title after the necessary three years’ occupation, but only a few acres were under cultivation, and the prospects looked bleak. During the summer, after three years in Uncle Ed’s classroom at Halcyonia, John went to Saskatoon to write the provincial examinations for grades nine and ten – and failed them. In the memoirs he explains that the disappointment arose not from Uncle Edward’s teaching or his own incapacity, but from overindulgence in the pleasures of a Saskatoon ice-cream parlour.
I had a little money given me for the week, ice cream was not expensive, and here was the opportunity to have as much as I could swallow – heaven indeed. This was the end of June, and very hot. The departmental regulations required that if a student failed on one examination he lost all of them, no matter how well or poorly he did on the rest. On Friday, the last day of the examinations, I had about a quart of ice cream for breakfast. I felt squeamish during the morning examination, but everything seemed to go well enough. At lunch I walked over to the Maple Leaf for more ice cream. I felt still less well. To make a long story short, back in the examination room, I took sick and had to leave at the end of half an hour. I lost my year.49
John’s mother had already made known her desire to move to Saskatoon. When he returned home, his parents made the decision to leave the farm to “permit Elmer and me to get the best education within our parents’ means.”50 Given their hardships, the choice was understandable: it was a common one. It was also an admission of defeat – for William’s efforts as a farmer and rural schoolteacher, for Uncle Ed’s tutoring of John. Henceforth the family would devote itself to the children’s advancement rather than the father’s.
William announced his wish to give up teaching. He went off to Saskatoon – then at the height of the urban land boom, with a growing population of more than 10,000 – to look for other work. He found it as a clerk in the provincial Land Titles Office, at a salary of $720 a year. Mary showed her disapproval – whether of the salary, or the lowly status, or both, we do not know. But the job was taken, and in February 1910, once title to the homestead had been acquired, the Diefenbakers moved to town. Despite their departure, Uncle Ed remained a rural schoolteacher until his retirement. In 1911 William took work as an inspector in the Saskatoon Customs Office, where he stayed for twenty-six years until his retirement in 1937.51
The family continued to live frugally in the city. They kept a cow, and for a few months the boys sold milk. Household vegetables were supplied from their own garden plots. John and Elmer sold newspapers, and John soon became a distributor, selling the Saskatoon Phoenix, the Winnipeg Tribune, and, intermittently, the Calgary Eye-Opener to a network of newsboys, for a weekly net income of about $20. For two summers John also worked as a janitor for $20 a month.52
John enrolled on arrival at the Saskatoon Collegiate Institute, and in June 1910 passed his grade nine and ten examinations on the second try, without ice-cream. During John’s senior matriculation year of 1911-12, William arranged a job offer for him at the Northern Crown Bank, but “Mother, despite the fact that Father’s salary was small, took a strong stand, and Father, on reflection, agreed with her that I should be given an opportunity to complete my education.”53 Once again mother’s will prevailed.
That seemed to include enrolment after high school at the University of Saskatchewan, which occupied temporary space on the top floor of the Collegiate Institute and would move to its new campus in the autumn of 1912. Both mother and son already had a sense of John’s mission – although its gradual emergence, and its initial substance, are difficult to trace. It certainly came early. At first Mary favoured a career for John in the Baptist Church. But John, stimulated by his father’s romantic stories and his own browsing in the family library, had his eye on politics from an early age. His interest – or perhaps his identification – centred on inspiring anecdotes about two legendary radicals, one English, the other American. John Lilburne, the seventeenth-century English Leveller, had demanded equality and freedom of speech at the risk of exile and imprisonment. Abraham Lincoln, “a small-town lawyer,” Diefenbaker wrote in his memoirs, “was to become the symbol of American democracy, tribune of his people, a man whose origins were those of a pioneer on the United States frontier.”54 These two, joined with the Canadians John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier, were his heroes – and they were heroes meant to serve a practical purpose.
In a long paragraph in the memoirs John Diefenbaker reflected, circumspectly but revealingly, on his life and ambition, tracing his sense of destiny back to his early years:
Every little boy or girl has some ultimate ambition, to be a farmer or a train engineer, a nurse, a schoolteacher, or a doctor, and no doubt in every case the best possible. Some pursue their ambition with a single-minded devotion and attain it. Others, caught in the byways of life, find more attractive or more realistic goals. As one looks back over life from the vantage of many years, it is difficult not to be fascinated by the “ifs” of his experience. Perhaps it would be simpler if one’s theology embraced the concept of predestination. Mine does not. It would seem to me that we are given opportunities, not guarantees, and that all we can do is to strive forward, contributing as we can to the common good, trying to make certain that our decisions and actions are not inconsistent with our highest ambitions. Our ultimate future depends so much on character and circumstance. I was eight or nine years old when I said to my mother, “Some day I am going to be Prime Minister.” She did not laugh. Always a practical woman, she pointed out the near-impossibility of anyone’s realizing that ambition, and in particular one living far out on the Prairies. I was deeply concerned. Uncle Ed provided me a more sympathetic audience. As we walked or rode to and from school each day, I told him of my thoughts and ambitions, and discussed the things I had read. He was a wonderful person, with a lively, inquiring mind and all the time in the world to listen to the dreams and plans which Elmer and I might unfold. From my earliest boyhood I was given to a romanticization of the future in which I would be able to do something for my country.55
Was this just the old politician giving retrospective shape to his life as he fashioned a myth for the history books? Partly, no doubt. But the story of John’s ambition had earlier origins and was a familiar one in the Diefenbaker family, in several variations. On June 17, 1957, for example, when Diefenbaker was about to become prime minister, Elmer cabled congratulations “on the occasion of a dream at the tender age of six at last coming true.”56 His mother told the journalist Patrick Nicholson that “when John was only six years old … he once looked up from reading about Laurier, and confided to her in all seriousness that he proposed to become prime minister of Canada too. Just as seriously she replied: ‘If you work hard enough, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t.’ ”57 At the end of his life Diefenbaker believed that he had been one of those who “pursue their ambition with a single-minded devotion and attain it,” and that he had guided his life “to make certain that our decisions and actions are not inconsistent with our highest ambitions.” Yet in his view the career was not simply a product of his own acts, an expression of his own character; there was a larger destiny at work, the “circumstance” within which character could play out its role. If not predestined, his goal seemed somehow to beckon him, to be available specially to him – and thus to be a source both of confidence and of justification. Diefenbaker never spoke of any ultimate ambition except to be prime minister of Canada.
That emerging sense of purpose could only have been aided by the fifteen-year-old’s encounter with the prime minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, on July 29, 1910, when Laurier came to Saskatoon to lay the first cornerstone for the university.
His private railway car was at the station one morning when I went over to pick up our newspapers. There he was, standing on the platform, taking the morning air. This memory of him will stay with me always, his dignity, his plume of snow white hair. I sold him a new
spaper. He gave me a quarter – no better way to establish an instant rapport with a newsboy. We chatted about Canada. I had the awed feeling that I was in the presence of greatness. That afternoon, when he laid the cornerstone, he included in his remarks a reference to his conversation with a Saskatoon newsboy which, he observed, had ended with my saying, “Sorry, Prime Minister, I can’t waste any more time on you, I’ve got work to do.” I took some pride in July 1957, after I became Prime Minister, in the fact that my railway car was stationed in exactly the spot where Sir Wilfrid’s had stood.58
Whatever words may have passed between them, Diefenbaker remembered that “Sir Wilfrid inspired me with the idea that each of us, no matter who he is or what his upbringing, or however humble his parentage and home, can rise to any position in this country, provided we dedicate ourselves.”59
For the aspiring teenager, there were two immediate goals: a mastery of public speaking and the law. Public speaking was the more difficult of the two, because “my diffidence and nervousness were hard to overcome.” At Saskatoon Collegiate he took part in a special class in oratory, speaking about the great English jurists and politicians and the landmarks of English history. When it came to the annual school oratorical contest, John reached the finals but then froze and forgot his peroration.60 There was much more agonizing practice before his fears on the platform were overcome.
What John noticed about his political heroes was that “many of them had started their careers in public life as lawyers … I was impressed by the lives of those who, in the practice of law, stood for the liberties of the individual and for the assurance that no one, however poor, should be denied justice. I decided that was the kind of lawyer I wanted to be.”61 From the beginning, he would be an advocate with a cause. The pursuit of oratory, the law, and politics were all to be explained out of duty to the voiceless, the poor, and the meek. John Diefenbaker’s childhood experience – of family hardship and humiliation, a mother’s will, a father’s romance with whig history, a pioneer community of many origins and languages – was combining to shape his life. In June 1912 the shy and aloof sixteen-year-old graduated from high school in Saskatoon, an ambitious romantic who quietly nurtured his dreams.
IN SEPTEMBER 1912 JOHN DIEFENBAKER REGISTERED AS AN ARTS STUDENT AT THE University of Saskatchewan. Classes were held for the first time that year in the new College Building, the first of five buildings under construction on the new campus on Caswell Hill. The architects, David Brown and Hugh Vallance, had designed generously in the collegiate gothic style of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, and the buildings taking form on the treeless prairie symbolized the province’s confidence in its boundless future.62 Since he entered university with senior matriculation standing, Diefenbaker qualified as a second-year student and managed to avoid most of the undignified hazing of freshmen. But he did recall that he was “unceremoniously heaved into the decorative pool” in front of the College Building after arriving for registration in his short pants.63
The first president of the university, Walter C. Murray, had recruited an able young group of faculty members, and the university’s small enrolment meant that students came to know their teachers well. John Diefenbaker did not shine as a student – partly, he later believed, because “I was reluctant to accept unchallenged what I was told, and always wanted to follow propositions through to their logical conclusion,” an attitude that was ahead of its time in the era of certitude before 1914 and perhaps gave hint of his later combative style.64 He took courses in history, political science, and economics in preparation for his legal studies, but otherwise took little part in university life. “I was too shy and I had little spare time. I still had newspapers to sell, morning and afternoon.” But he persisted in his struggle to master public speaking, taking part in the university’s mock parliament and the first provincial Boys’ Parliament in Regina in the fall of 1912.65
At the end of his university year, the young man gave up his newspaper business and took work for the summer as a farm labourer south of Blaine Lake. His wages of $20 a month doubled to $40 during harvest in August and September, but his savings were exhausted by medical bills to treat a carbuncle on his neck, which he blamed on the steady diet of salt ham and potatoes inflicted on him by his bachelor employer.66
In his second university year, 1913-14, he studied economic history and began work in law with courses in contracts and jurisprudence. For economic history – broadly defined – he wrote an essay on “The Rise of the Regal Power” in medieval Europe.67 Beyond classes, Diefenbaker recalled that he was “a little more outgoing” as a member of the mock parliament, where he became leader of the Conservative Party and leader of the opposition, and in the Boys’ Parliament, where he barely missed election as premier.68
Early in 1914 the Wheat Heart School District, close to the Diefenbaker land, advertised for a schoolteacher at $65 to $70 per month, to commence work on May 1. John Diefenbaker, lacking both experience and a teaching certificate, responded with an offer to serve at $63 a month. The local school board procured a provisional certificate in his name from the provincial Department of Education and signed a contract appointing him for a term of seven months at that rate, to terminate at the closing of school for the winter on December 1, 1914. (The long holiday occurred in winter to avoid heating expenses for the school building.) There is no record, beyond the contract, of whether the new teacher intended to complete the term or not; if he had done so, he would have been unable to enrol for his third year of university in early October. Diefenbaker taught school for the summer, but on September 9 he gave four weeks’ notice of resignation, proposing that his uncle, Edward Diefenbaker, should finish the term in his place. The trustees agreed, provided that Edward signed a new contract.
The would-be lawyer added a further claim, citing a section of the School Act which stipulated that a contract of more than four months should be compensated on an annual basis. At the rate of $756 per year, this would amount to a salary of $75.60 per month rather than the agreed $63.00.
On October 2 Diefenbaker notified the school board that his uncle would replace him in the school that very day and would sign a new contract in the coming week. Edward did not sign a contract, but instead asked the board to continue paying the salary of $63 each month to John Diefenbaker. The board agreed, and Edward completed his nephew’s term.
With his original claim unsettled, Diefenbaker increased the pressure in January 1915 with a request that he be paid a further sixty cents a day for the entire period of the contract, or a total of $84.60 per month. The Wheat Heart School Board protested to the deputy minister of education that Edward Diefenbaker’s failure to sign a contract “was a trick to render the board liable to have to pay the additional salary due to the first teacher … for practically two months after his resignation had expired.” Diefenbaker responded that “the Board had me for these two months and I had my substitute.” The board replied that it would never have hired the teacher if his demands had been known in advance; in any case, there were insufficient funds to meet his claim. The provincial department washed its hands of the affair and told the young man to seek legal advice if he wished to pursue it. For a few months Diefenbaker threatened he would, then he dropped the matter in May.69
Diefenbaker’s own account of his short teaching experience is different from this one, though not necessarily inconsistent. He does not mention the salary dispute but emphasizes that his own enthusiasm for the classroom was shared by his students: “They would come to school however early I was prepared to come, and stay as late as I could stay with them. Sometimes we were there from seven in the morning until six in the evening.” Diefenbaker writes that he intended to carry on teaching in 1915; to do so he would require a favourable report on his work from the school inspector in order to renew his temporary certificate. On the day the inspector arrived, however, “the children were busy with their work but I was nowhere in sight. He found me at the back of the yard with a .22 s
hooting gophers, which were so numerous as to be almost a plague. I did not get my certificate.”70
If this account is true, it is obviously incomplete. It suggests that when John Diefenbaker took the job in May 1914, he intended to honour the contract; otherwise he could not expect to maintain the option of teaching again in 1915. This would mean an interruption of two years or more in his university education – a possibility his financial needs might have dictated. When the inspector reported unfavourably and deprived him of a renewal, he perhaps decided to break the contract (with the aid of Uncle Ed) and return to university for his degree. The consequent loss of income might then explain his desperate appeal to the fine print of the School Act for added salary. What the memoir does not explain is the whiff of sharp practice, the “trick” complained of by the school trustees of Wheat Heart, Saskatchewan. From John’s perspective it may have been simply a first, experimental use of the law that did not succeed.
There was another, infinitely greater event that summer, which altered Diefenbaker’s circumstances. European mobilizations had occurred in July, and on August 4, 1914, after the German invasion of Belgium, Britain declared war. Canada automatically became a belligerent beside the imperial parent. In Saskatchewan, as elsewhere in the dominion, war against Germany was greeted with patriotic fervour, “almost with jubilation.” Nightly demonstrations of enthusiasm lasted seven days in Saskatoon, and within weeks thousands of volunteers from the prairies were on their way east to the camps and overseas ports. Editorials and sermons denounced the kaiser and German militarism, and pronounced the cause a righteous one.71 At first there was general belief that the war would be brief and victorious, but before the end of the year that faith had been drowned in the mud of Flanders.
