by Denis Smith
Another federal election was expected soon. On February 16, 1926, a Conservative nominating meeting – much larger than that of the previous year – unanimously reaffirmed Diefenbaker as the party’s Prince Albert nominee. During the next few months the King government faced the rapidly blossoming scandal over corruption in the customs department, and at the end of June King resigned as prime minister when the governor general refused to grant him a dissolution of parliament. Arthur Meighen became prime minister, was defeated at once in the House, and was granted a dissolution for a general election on September 14.48
Meighen and the Conservatives thus went into the campaign with what should have been the advantages of office. The previous King government, however, had gained extensive goodwill – and further undermined support for the Progressives – by adopting the old age pension proposal of two independent labour MPs, J.S. Woodsworth and A.A. Heaps. During the campaign King managed to obscure the issue of the customs scandal by charging that the governor general, Lord Byng, had improperly reduced Canada to colonial status by refusing his request for a dissolution, while Meighen had connived in the affair by accepting office. Technically the charges were absurd, but they had emotional power. Meighen bore the added electoral burden of leading a government defeated on its first vote in the House. In Quebec he was still reviled for his imposition of wartime conscription, while in English-speaking Canada he had lost some of his previous pro-British support after his nationalist speech of November 1925 in Hamilton.49
Although Diefenbaker regarded Meighen as “a man of integrity and principle, and of powerful intellect,”50 he found him, once again, an infuriating party leader in an election campaign. For one thing, Meighen chose to ignore King’s “constitutional issue,” while King exploited it. For another, Meighen insisted on his vehement opposition to the old age pension. Diefenbaker, among others, recalled that he argued with Meighen over the pension, which he saw as a matter of decency rather than the first stage of socialist decadence; but the leader would not be moved. Meighen maintained his unpopular views on the Crow’s Nest Pass rates and the Hudson Bay Railway as well.51
In Prince Albert there was a straight, two-way contest between Mackenzie King and John Diefenbaker. Diefenbaker did his best to “explain matters that were unexplainable” in Meighen’s platform. But as much as possible, and with fresh confidence, he fought his own local campaign against the Liberal leader. He found attack more congenial than defence. Mackenzie King, he charged, was an interloper in Prince Albert, an absentee leader who had jumped from constituency to constituency and had “never yet been elected twice in the same riding. Let him be elected and defeated in the same riding in the same year.” King, said Diefenbaker, rewarded criminals by appointment to the Senate, lied about Senate reform, and had clung stupidly to office after his party’s 1925 electoral defeat.52
In the east, several Conservatives publicly ridiculed King for his flight to a Saskatchewan constituency in terms that were acutely embarrassing to the local Conservative candidate. The Saskatoon Phoenix commented that R.J. Manion, one of Meighen’s ministers, had made a base appeal to “racial” prejudice by claiming that 99 percent of the Prince Albert voters’ list consisted of “names … such that you and I couldn’t pronounce,” and adding that “I welcome them. We need them. But the fact still remains that they don’t know Canadian problems as Canadians do.”53 In late August the Toronto Telegram reported the jibe of a speaker at a Conservative rally in North York: “Mackenzie King has gone to Prince Albert, has left North York. He doesn’t like the smell of native-born Canadians. He prefers the stench of garlic-stinking continentals, Eskimos, bohunks, and Indians.”54 Liberal pamphlets appearing in the riding in the last week of the campaign made similar claims: “The Conservative candidate in North Grey, speaking on Mr. Meighen’s platform at Owen Sound, hurled insult at the electors of Prince Albert. ‘Mr. King’ he said, ‘is running in a riding among the Doukhobors, up near the North Pole where they don’t know how to mark their ballots.’ Citizens of Prince Albert: Mark your ballot for Mackenzie King and reject this insult!”55
For John Diefenbaker such taunts were doubly painful. They reflected racial prejudices in a party that, in the west, was struggling unsuccessfully to build links with non-British voters; and they touched his personal sensitivity about both his name and his own uncertain attitudes. The confusion of Diefenbaker’s position on the social question was illustrated in a Roman Catholic parish newsletter, St. Peter’s Messenger, of Meunster, Saskatchewan, that reported on his participation in the annual Orangemen’s celebrations in MacDougall in July 1926. Diefenbaker, said the newsletter, had appeared on the platform with the Reverend Canon Strong and the Reverend R.F. MacDougall, “two veteran advocates of bigotry and fanaticism.” In his address, he had appealed for a Canada that would be “all Canadian and all British” – an imperialism, in the Messengers eyes, that was “a strictly Orange principle” – and he had taken the Orange line in opposing a distinctive Canadian flag. Both these attitudes, the Messenger suggested, were coded expressions of prejudice against Catholicism and French-speaking Canadians. Instead, it called on the electors of Prince Albert “– Catholics and Protestants, French and English – to show that they are entirely out of sympathy with those who either directly or indirectly advocate religious intolerance in our country.” Diefenbaker would discover “that to ride the stormy seas of politics to Ottawa in a rickety Orange tub is an impossible task in Saskatchewan.”56 While Diefenbaker deplored prejudice when it took the form of insults against European names and origins, he was still prepared to seek support among Saskatchewan’s anti-Catholic and anti-French-speaking voters – without, apparently, noticing the inconsistency.
Diefenbaker was now refining a talent for turning grievance back upon his accusers. He responded to renewed rumours that he was a German by asserting that only his great-grandfather was German and adding: “Suppose I was a German, does it make for a united Canada to knock settlers?” And he threw another charge at the King campaign. On September 4 he told an election meeting: “Representatives of Mr. King are going through this constituency telling the non-English speaking people that, if the Conservative Government is returned, they will all be deported one by one without trial.”57 That, he said, was a falsehood. Yet Diefenbaker did not respond to a challenge from Dr Robert Scott of Wakaw to prove his claim of Liberal scare-mongering.58
Mackenzie King’s campaigns, both local and national, were triumphant. The Liberal Party won a parliamentary majority, Meighen lost his seat in Portage la Prairie, and the Conservatives returned only one candidate – the millionaire tycoon from Calgary, R.B. Bennett – from all three prairie provinces. “I still think,” Diefenbaker wrote in his memoirs, “that I might have overcome the constitutional issue, the Hudson Bay Railway, the Crow’s Nest rates controversy, and even the old age pension question, had it not been for the offensive racial comments of those Ontario Conservatives … Despite this, I put on a good fight in the city; King’s lead in the rural polls, however, was unassailable.” Even in Wakaw the local boy’s vote was overwhelmed, as it had been the previous year.59
In October 1926 Diefenbaker attended a post-mortem meeting of elected and defeated Conservative candidates and senators held in the great Railway Committee Room of the House of Commons. There, in orotund language, he lamented the loss of votes suffered “as a result of indiscretions and unsound judgement of individuals whose verbosity had been detrimental to the interests of the Conservative party” – a reference, apparently, to the crude remarks about the race, odour, and literacy of the voters of Prince Albert constituency. But there was enough ambiguity in his words that they could also be taken as a reflection on the wisdom of Arthur Meighen. Meighen had come to the meeting carrying his resignation as leader, and after long debate it was accepted. Following departure of the defeated candidates, Conservative MPs chose Hugh Guthrie as interim leader in the House.60 Diefenbaker returned to Prince Albert to nurse his wounds and prepare
to fight another day.
The federal Conservative caucus decided that the party would choose its new leader, for the first time, in a national convention, to be held in Winnipeg in October 1927. When that meeting opened in the drafty atmosphere of the Amphitheatre Rink on October 10, John Diefenbaker was present as a Saskatchewan delegate and supporter of Guthrie’s candidacy. But Bennett’s advocates had made thorough preparations, and there was little doubt that their man would win the leadership. He did so easily, on the second ballot, against Guthrie and four other candidates.61
Bennett’s acceptance speech was an oratorical triumph. It impressed the young lawyer from Prince Albert, who noted above all Bennett’s words about destiny and service.
One night long ago I had a dream – I don’t believe in dreams because they usually indicate only a bad digestion – but I thought I was here in my dreams: that I had been called upon to say something to this vast audience, and I am going to say it to you now, what that something was, because it was very real. They were not the words of a human person; they were the words of the Man of Galilee: I looked it up the next day because it stayed with me. “And whomsoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be the servant of all.”
Men and women, you have honored me beyond my deserts, beyond any deserts I ever may have, you have made me, for the moment, the chiefest among you, and please God I shall be the servant of all.62
This was an ingenious bit of mock humility, identifying himself at the same moment with Christ and Everyman. The image stuck with John Diefenbaker.
For the next two years the new leader devoted his abundant energies and wealth to the revival of the Conservative Party following its demoralizing defeat of 1926. Diefenbaker had not supported Bennett in 1927 “because of his close identification with the established economic interests,” but he soon admitted he was mistaken in that judgment. Bennett revealed himself, in Diefenbaker’s eyes, as a man of independent character and strong Methodist conscience. He quickly severed his business ties and showed that he would not accept dictation from “the self-appointed Eastern bosses of the Party.” That spirit of defiance, in a western Conservative leader, provoked the young man’s increasing admiration. Bennett’s political instincts seemed to be Diefenbaker’s own.63
Meanwhile, the Conservative Party of Saskatchewan was preparing itself for renewed assault on the local Liberal government and its formidable machine. The Liberal Party had held power since 1905 by careful management of its relations with the grain growers’ associations, the federal Progressive Party, and the immigrant communities; now there were signs of decay in its alliances and popular resentment over the excesses of its patronage practices. And there were whiffs, as well, of an unpleasant fever in the prairie air, an epidemic of hatred that might also be turned to Conservative advantage.
In December 1926 three self-seeking commercial agents of the racist “Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan” arrived in Saskatchewan in search of profit and acclaim. They found a ready audience among elements of the English-speaking Protestant community who were uneasy about – or unreconciled to – life with large numbers of non-English-speaking and mostly Catholic neighbours. In recent years, substantial flows of European immigration had been renewed to the province. The Klan’s agents, flaunting the mumbo-jumbo, paraphernalia, and exotic appeal of the American Klan, adjusted its targets and methods to local circumstances. There were a few midnight parades and cross-burnings, but no lynchings. Usually, the Klan devoted itself to public meetings denouncing the influences of the Catholic Church, the French language, and continental immigration, and the organizers pocketed the substantial takings from membership fees. In October 1927 they absconded with the funds. The self-styled Canadian head office of the Klan in Toronto dispatched a replacement to Saskatchewan in the person of another itinerant American, J.H. Hawkins, who attracted fresh converts with his carnival oratory. He was soon joined by a genuine Canadian anti-Catholic bigot, the ex-seminarian John James Maloney. A raucous series of organization meetings swept the province in late 1927 and 1928, and by the end of that year there were more than one hundred local branches of the Klan boasting executives and members from all levels of society and including a sprinkling of doctors, lawyers, clergymen, village councillors, and mayors.64
For the provincial Liberals, the school system was central to its policies of cultural balance and accommodation. For Anglo-Saxon nativists and anti-Catholics, in contrast, it was the sacred source of cultural purity. In 1928 the Klan focused its attentions on Protestant fears about the school system. As Martin Robin writes:
Klansmen, throughout 1928 and 1929, pressed the education issue with an enthusiasm – and venom – seldom witnessed before in the province. When it came to education, Klansmen – like Orangemen – had their strong likes and dislikes. Dear to their patriotic hearts was the public school, free of sinister sectarian or foreign-language influences, an institution mandated to preserve Protestant Anglo-Saxon culture and to Americanize, or Canadianize, the uninvited alien who had slipped by the immigration sentries. Among Klansmen’s favourite dislikes were separate Catholic schools, sectarian influences in public schools, and, in the case of Canada, subversive French-language provisions thrust on the public schools by a conniving Catholic minority.65
Although there were only a handful of separate schools in the province, few nuns among schoolteachers, and less than 3 percent of schools offering French to the intermediate level, the Klan encouraged repeated protests among Protestant ratepayers in those districts.66 In one celebrated case in the Gouverneur school district, the Klan encouraged Protestant families to withdraw their children from school over French language teaching and the presence of crucifixes in the classrooms. When truancy charges were laid, the Klan employed a leading Conservative lawyer and Orangeman, J.F. Bryant, in their defence. He argued that the school had ceased to be a public school by its practices, and the presiding justices of the peace, both members of the Klan, dismissed the charges.67
Premier Gardiner watched the grassfire spread of the Klan with concern and in August 1927 told Mackenzie King: “It would appear … that the main object of the organization is to spread propaganda which will be of benefit to the opponents of the Government, both Provincial and Federal, at the time of the next election.”68 King replied to him: “What you are face to face with is, I think, only the spreading to Western Canada of the influence of the Orange Order as the electioneering nucleus of the Tory Party. You cannot, I think, do a better thing than to expose as quickly and completely as possible tactics such as those which your letter describes.”69 Gardiner set about gathering materials for his file. In January 1928, when the provincial Conservative leader told the legislature that “all the forces of the province opposed to the present government” should unite to defeat it, Gardiner erupted in a bitter condemnation of the Klan.70 The Klan’s links to the Conservative Party had previously been the subject of gossip; now they were the leading issue of partisan debate. Gardiner made sure of that.
When the provincial Conservative Party held its leadership convention in Saskatoon in March 1928, the Klan’s activities and the premier’s denunciation promised a volatile occasion. Some delegates were members of the Klan, many were sympathetic with its intolerant aims, and most sensed that the party might ride to power in the wake of the Klan’s campaign against foreigners and Catholics. Indeed, only three among the three hundred convention delegates were Roman Catholic. As delegates entered the hall, J.H. Hawkins and his aides distributed Klan pamphlets. The convention’s policy resolutions coincided precisely with the Klan’s views on secular public schools, the promotion of patriotism, and selective immigration – with the exception of a single resolution that made a bow towards racial tolerance but seemed intended as much to throw racist accusations back at the Gardiner government.
Whereas certain unscrupulous members of the Saskatchewan Government are making use, in remote districts of the Province, of statements made by certain Eastern Conservat
ives and certain irresponsible individuals reflecting on our non-English electors, and are endeavouring thereby to incite racial hatred against the Conservative party: We hereby declare that these parties do not represent the Conservative policy or the Conservative attitude towards our immigrants of non-English extraction and we deplore the use of such language by such individuals and hereby repudiate it. We stand for fair and square treatment of all our citizens irrespective of race or creed.71
J.F. Bryant, the party’s vice president, told R.B. Bennett that “we have a splendid platform and … not a single word … used in the convention or in any resolution can in any way embarrass our Conservative friends in other parts of Canada.” Even the few Catholic delegates, he insisted, approved the resolutions, although he admitted that they were “very sore in that there were none of them elected to any of the Executive offices.”72
These Roman Catholic delegates, along with several sympathizers, warned Bennett in a thick flurry of letters after the convention that the national party would be grievously damaged by the Saskatchewan’s party’s links to the Klan and repudiation of Catholic support.73 They noted above all that two Catholic delegates, J.J. Leddy and A.G. MacKinnon, had been nominated to the executive but excluded from it by manipulation, and that the party’s leaders, J.T.M. Anderson and J.F. Bryant, were both promoters of the Klan if not actual members. Another leader, Dr W.D. Cowan, was an admitted member. Bennett quickly expressed his sadness, concern, and embarrassment at the behaviour of the Saskatchewan party. But Anderson and Bryant reassured him that all was well, while others counselled that the party could keep a discreet distance and still benefit from the Klan’s political aid. Bryant concurred in that view in a letter to Bennett at the end of May 1928: “They are … going very strong and will be of great assistance in defeating the present Government, and I do not think that we should throw any stones at them any more than we should expect that the Liberals should throw stones at the Knights of Columbus or any other similar organization that is so strongly supporting them.”74
