by Denis Smith
Early in the new year, the Conservative Party in Prince Albert nominated Samuel Branion as its candidate for the forthcoming provincial election. Branion then resigned as the local crown prosecutor and was succeeded in the position by John Diefenbaker. That was a curious role for “Prince Albert’s pre-eminent defence counsel” to accept; perhaps, as the Wilsons conclude, “Diefenbaker had … obviously decided that the modest fee tariff of the attorney general’s department was more attractive than the generally unpaid glamour of the defence.”21
The prospects of his Conservative patrons did not, in any case, show much promise for the long term. The government had lost a by-election decisively to the Liberals in Kinistino in 1933, and the Conservative Party was now openly divided between moderate supporters of the Anderson government and a “true blue” right wing. The depression doomed governments everywhere. Jimmy Gardiner’s Liberals were well prepared for a contest, but they patiently prolonged the agonies by avoiding votes in the legislature that might defeat the coalition. The government held on grimly to the end of its five-year term and went to the polls on June 19, 1934.
As vice president of the provincial party, Diefenbaker campaigned loyally in what was clearly a desperate cause. The party lacked money, spirit, organization, and program. It fought a three-way campaign against the Liberals and the new Farmer-Labour Party (soon to become the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation), and was undermined from both right and left. The former party president and true blue Tory, Dr D.S. Johnstone, campaigned for the Liberals, and former coalition allies defected wholesale to Farmer-Labour. On election day the government found itself without a single seat. Gardiner took fifty seats and Farmer-Labour, five. Six days later Diefenbaker resigned as crown prosecutor in Prince Albert, and a month later James Gardiner resumed office as premier of the province. T.C. Davis of Prince Albert was once again attorney general. The Conservatives returned to the provincial wilderness, with a federal election still to come.22
Diefenbaker’s regard for R.B. Bennett was sustained by Bennett’s record in office after 1930. It was not just that Bennett was a winning Conservative leader: so, too, was J.T.M. Anderson, but Diefenbaker never showed great admiration for him. For one thing, Diefenbaker’s focus was on Ottawa rather than Regina. For another, Diefenbaker saw Bennett as a politician on the grand scale and an object of emulation: independent, dignified, dominant, brusque, defiant, harsh, and unsociable, yet, behind the mask, loyal, generous, and sentimental. More than any other politician, the prime minister in the wing collar became his model.
In his willingness to finance the Conservative Party after 1927, Bennett showed that he would not be managed, in Diefenbaker’s words, by “the self-appointed Eastern bosses of the Party.”23 Once the Conservative Party had come to power, Diefenbaker admired Bennett’s dramatic – if unsystematic – lunges against the forces of the depression and his willingness, eventually, to use the power of the state without the restraints of dogma. Bennett’s ministry, Diefenbaker later wrote, “was not a government that sat on its hands.”24 Diefenbaker praised the Farmers’ Creditors Arrangement Act of 1934 for saving “tens of thousands of farmers from bankruptcy and ruin,” and took satisfaction in the thought that “this was not a measure to which the banking and mortgage institutions were particularly favourable.”25 Yet he also recalled approvingly that the Bennett cabinet had come quietly to the aid of the Royal Bank and Sun Life, thus saving “a wholesale crash of corporations.”26 Diefenbaker had no coherent economic framework of his own against which to judge Bennett’s erratic policies. It was their political – or perhaps even their theatrical – impact that interested him. Bennett was certainly theatrical.
Diefenbaker’s memory of R.B. Bennett went back to the turn of the century at Tiefengrund: “I first saw Bennett as a boy when he came to my father’s school. The living quarters were attached to part of the school building. In the election of 1904 he was Richard Bonfire Bennett. He had a reputation for speaking two hundred and twenty words a minute. I think the audience did not exceed sixteen, but he spoke for hours.”27 After Bennett had become prime minister, he showed unfailing courtesy towards the young acolyte from Prince Albert. When Diefenbaker visited Ottawa he was welcomed in the prime minister’s office; and more than thirty years later Diefenbaker had vivid recollections of those visits. What stuck notably in his memory were the moments of partisan point-scoring. For example:
I was here in Ottawa the morning in 1933 when the revelations came out concerning King having had his expenses paid – $4,500 – by Beauharnois Company in the Caribbean, or in the Bahamas. I came to see him about 8.30 in the morning. Bennett was in his office. He said, “Frightful! Frightful exhibition here this morning! Young man, frightful!”
“What happened?”
He said, “That weasely King came in crying. He said, ‘Please, Mr. Bennett, call off your dogs. They’re destroying me. Don’t press this.’ And I said, ‘King, go and weep no more.’ ”28
Bennett, in his generosity, called off the assault. “And then a year and a half later when Chubby Power and the others brought out the fact that Bennett wore shoes that cost $25 and had a suite in the Chateau that cost so much, they smeared him all up. King rubbed his hands in unholy glee.”29
In 1934 Bennett’s minister of trade and commerce, H.H. Stevens, became chairman of the muckraking Royal Commission on Price Spreads. Stevens’s purpose was to apply his Methodist conscience to the exposure of price gouging and harsh labour practices in the retail trade of the big department stores. The commission’s public hearings through late summer and autumn were a righteous sideshow that proved highly embarrassing for Eaton’s and Simpsons, and brought Stevens into conflict with Bennett and other members of the cabinet, especially C.H. Cahan. In October, Stevens resigned from cabinet and commission – not so much, it soon became clear, because he disagreed with Bennett over policy, but because Bennett saw in him a challenge to his own dominance. Diefenbaker watched the inquiry in admiration and urged Bennett to make peace with his outspoken minister. Bennett would not do so.30
Diefenbaker could not claim presence at the birth of Bennett’s New Deal, but he wrote that Bennett told him, during a visit to Ottawa in the summer of 1934, that “something has to be done. These conditions cannot be permitted. I have tried, but no one seems to have an overall plan.” Six months later, said Diefenbaker, “when every traditional method of government had been exhausted to meet the depression, and time had provided no respite, he shocked the great interests in Eastern Canada with legislation that could never have been expected from one of their own.”31
Bennett proclaimed his New Deal in a series of six radio broadcasts in January 1935. The speeches were a dramatic last effort to save the failing administration, prepared by Bennett’s brother-in-law and minister in Washington, W.D. Herridge. Bennett proposed a program of economic reform modelled on the American National Industrial Recovery Act and the preliminary recommendations of the price spreads inquiry, designed, like Roosevelt’s New Deal, to remedy abuses in the capitalist system rather than to destroy it. There would be a national trade and industry commission to suppress unfair business practices; a national employment and social insurance commission; regulation of wages and hours of work; an advisory economic council; heavier capital gains taxes; and extended low-cost farm credits. Bennett’s rhetoric echoed the populism of his discarded minister, Stevens, in its attacks on the avarice of big business.32
Although the need for radical responses to the economic disaster was more and more widely admitted, Bennett’s own cabinet received the proposals with as much surprise as the public. Mackenzie King greeted Bennett’s initiative coolly and made no effort to outbid him. Although there was widespread popular scepticism about the prime minister’s death-bed conversion to economic reform, Diefenbaker professed new hope in a letter to his friend Robert Weir, the minister of agriculture.
You will be pleased to know that Mr. Bennett’s speeches are being enthusiastically received in this
Province. I have spoken with large numbers of farmers during the past few days and their attitude (almost without exception) has been one of unstinting praise.
A Liberal today paid our leader a real compliment – “Mr. Bennett has not been a timeserver” he said. The Party has been broken and discouraged since the June debacle in Saskatchewan and needed a tonic – the radio speeches have provided just that, and have given our rank and file something to enthuse over – a new hope and a new spirit.
I have often spoken to you about the fact that in my opinion the Conservative Party appeared to live in the past. If there was any substance in that view it now no longer holds true.33
In Saskatchewan, the province most devastated by drought and depression, Bennett’s measures may have received widespread approval. But that did not necessarily translate into votes for a discredited government. Although the party had perhaps received “a tonic,” Diefenbaker concluded realistically that “the reaction of the electorate is evident, but in my opinion the election should be held off to the very latest possible date.”34
It was already too late for the Bennett government to recover lost ground; instead, it displayed signs of terminal confusion. For three months after his new deal speeches, Bennett was ill and did not appear in the House of Commons, while talk swirled on the back benches about a change of leadership. One faction favoured Stevens, but Bennett and others opposed him for his ambition. Bennett was said to prefer the return of Arthur Meighen if illness forced his own retirement. The conflict seemed irreconcilable, and by June 1935 party leaders were pleading with Bennett to remain as leader whatever his health.35 Stevens drifted closer to a definitive break with the party.
Throughout the Western world, 1935 was a time of political as well as economic desperation. In Britain the breadlines were long; in Germany the Nazi party was consolidating its domestic power by brutal use of the mailed fist; in Spain the Second Republic was lurching towards disaster. The times gave birth to wild dreams and demagogues. Next door in Alberta, William Aberhart had launched Social Credit from the radio microphones of the Prophetic Bible Institute; and across the border in the United States Father Coughlan preached a similar, confused message of hatred, revenge, and hope. In Washington, Senator Huey Long of Louisiana was beginning to mount a populist challenge to President Roosevelt. Diefenbaker was fascinated, and in January, soon after Bennett’s radio speeches, he wrote to the senator.
As a Canadian admirer of yours and of the great fight you are putting up for the under dog, I take the advantage of every opportunity offered to hear you over the air.
I recall a very striking speech made by you in one of the Western States in the Fall of 1932 during the fight waged by you against the then President in his campaign for re-election – your attitude with regard to wealth inheritance and distribution impressed me greatly, and was far in advance of political thought at the time.
Today public opinion is demanding the carrying out of your ideas regarding wealth, and this applies not only in the United States but also in Canada.
The other evening I listened to your broad-cast over the Columbia network. Your subject-matter was striking in its breadth of vision and persuasiveness, and I am writing you to ask that you favor me with a copy of that speech if you have any available for distribution.
With every good wish for your success in your campaign to make the lot of the unprivileged a better and a happier one, I am,
Yours respectfully,
John G. Diefenbaker36
There is no record of a reply. Diefenbaker continued to ruminate on such populist-radical ideas, and in March he was gathering materials for a speech to be entitled “Capitalism Controlled.”37
The face of Canada was transformed by the depression. Thousands of the unemployed, young men and old, traversed the country on freight trains in search of jobs. The Bennett government established a system of relief camps for single men, offering bed, board, and manual labour without wages. These spartan conditions stimulated a relief camp union, organized with communist influence, which sought minimal pay for the inmates of the camps. At the end of May 1935, in the face of Ottawa’s indifference, the Vancouver branch of the union announced an “On-to-Ottawa” journey, and on June 3-4 about one thousand men took to the freight cars for the journey east. Initially the CPR cooperated, and the demonstration gathered public support as it moved eastwards. Crowds gathered in sympathy at railway stations, and in Calgary, Swift Current, and Moose Jaw local governments welcomed and fed the destitute travellers, now numbering two to three thousand. The policy of the Gardiner government was to assist the trekkers on their way, but when the trains arrived in Regina the railway company stopped further trespassing and the RCMP, under federal orders, halted the cavalcade. At that point, in Gardiner’s view, Ottawa had assumed responsibility for public order, and thus was also responsible for feeding the men. Tense days passed while federal and provincial ministers met the protest leaders, and a delegation travelled to Ottawa to meet Prime Minister Bennett. But Bennett rejected their demands, and Ottawa gave directions for dispersal of the men through a temporary internment camp in Lumsden, Saskatchewan. The strike leaders agreed to disperse, but on their own terms. On July 1, in the course of urgent negotiation, police and trekkers clashed violently in Regina’s market square, resulting in one police death and many injuries. Following the violence, the province reasserted its supervision over public order, and Gardiner and Davis arranged for special trains to take the men out of the province. Gardiner was convinced that Bennett, with support from the CPR, intended to picture the march on Ottawa as a communist-inspired insurrection, and then to put it down in a Liberal province for political gain. If that was the federal government’s intention, it turned out to be misguided. The events deepened political division in the country and did nothing for the reputation of the Conservative regime.38
Bennett finally dissolved parliament on August 15 and called a general election for October 14, 1935. Diefenbaker was directly affected in two ways by the dying government’s last dispersal of patronage. In August the provincial party president, J.A.M. Patrick, was appointed to a district court judgeship, leaving Diefenbaker as acting president of the party; and in September he was appointed Prince Albert lawyer for the Canadian Farm Labour Board.39 Two months earlier, on July 22, Diefenbaker had declined federal nomination for the party in Prince Albert. The prospects were hopeless, and this was obviously no time for another futile battle. Diefenbaker told the nominating meeting: “I think this is a time for us to have a farmer as a candidate. A farmer might unite us and then we could get some place.” He was half right: the meeting nominated a farmer.40
As party president, Diefenbaker was obliged to show the flag in the campaign, no matter how bleak the prospects. He did so for Bennett’s appearances in the province during the campaign in September.
It was in this capacity that I chaired a public meeting for Bennett shortly after the 1 July 1935 riots in Regina when the Communist-led Ottawa trek was broken up. It was as big a meeting as any hall in Regina could accommodate. To the left of the platform was a large group of those who had taken part in the riots: noisy, vociferous, offensive, and profane. There had been threats that the Prime Minister would be shot. The Regina Conservative Association took those threats seriously; the rostrum had been turned into a bullet-proof shield which came up to my shoulders. Mr. Bennett was sitting directly behind me in the cover of the rostrum. During my opening remarks I turned to him and he wasn’t there; he had taken his big chair out in front. His courage calmed the audience. The speakers preceding him had a fairly rough time. Mr. Bennett just sat there. When he got up to speak, he was cheered. Courage, Barrie said, is the greatest attribute of all. That is, next to integrity. Bennett had both.41
Across the prairie border in Alberta, Aberhart and his Social Credit evangelists swept into provincial power on August 22 with fifty-six of sixty-three seats, wiping out the United Farmers government as Gardiner had decimated the Saskatchewan C
onservatives in 1934. In the enthusiasm of victory, the new party’s agents were soon nominating for the federal election throughout the prairies, or proposing alliances with the CCF against the parties of finance capital. Eventually all four parties in Saskatchewan refused alliances, but the public was left in unusual confusion. The disorder was compounded when Stevens proclaimed his own Reconstruction Party at the end of August, campaigning on a reform platform that hit many chords of prairie protest. In Saskatchewan Stevens managed to make only three nominations, but the break with Bennett further undermined Conservative morale. Gardiner devoted his usual close attentions to the Liberal cause as the campaign progressed. The only real uncertainty concerned the extent of Conservative devastation and the division of the spoils among so many contenders.42
On October 14 Mackenzie King’s Liberals won a landslide victory, with 173 seats to the Tories’ forty. Social Credit elected seventeen members, the CCF seven, and Reconstruction only one. In Saskatchewan the Liberals took sixteen seats, Social Credit and the CCF two each, and the Conservatives one. Mackenzie King once again won Prince Albert with ease, while the Conservative candidate ran third behind Social Credit. The Conservative popular vote in Saskatchewan slid by almost half to 19 percent, just behind the CCF and just ahead of Social Credit. Diefenbaker’s chosen vehicle to Ottawa had again been shunted to the sidelines.43
