Niagara

by Pierre Berton

  But to accomplish this, he needed to rip a hole in the wall of the escarpment. A small opening was made near the ceiling of the construction tunnel, but thick clouds of spray from the cataract burst in. Obviously a larger opening was needed through which the tailings could be removed and the water allowed to drain out, leaving a clear passageway.

  Douglass then had eighteen holes drilled into the rock face and loaded with ten cases of dynamite. The blast that resulted tore a jagged hole in the cliff, but it still wasn’t large enough. Meanwhile the tunnel, open to the spray, was filling up with water.

  Douglass had a flat-bottomed boat lowered down the shaft in the river bank. The tunnel was now so full of water that the boat couldn’t clear the roof and had to be weighted down. Three miners with several boxes of dynamite and coils of copper wire then boarded the boat and started off down the tunnel, lying on their backs and propelling the craft with their hands and feet.

  When they reached the opening, they placed the dynamite around it, attached the copper wire, and headed back to the shaft. Just as they reached it, their boat sank under them. They climbed to safety, and a moment later a tremendous explosion rocked the gorge. But the hole in the cliff face still wasn’t big enough.

  The only solution was to apply the dynamite to the face of the cliff behind the fall of water, a dangerous enterprise. The company’s chief engineer, Hugh L. Cooper, and its resident engineer, Beverly R. Value, donned rubber suits and roped themselves together like mountain climbers. Starting from the Scenic Tunnel, long a tourist attraction, the pair headed for the opening that had previously been blasted. They scrambled precariously along the cliff face, blinded by the intensity of the spray and buffeted by the force of the wind created by the intense pressure of the falling water. Soaking wet in spite of their precautions, chilled to the bone, and thoroughly miserable, they finally reached the opening in the tunnel wall.

  Here they were battered by two forces of water – the backlash churning up from the base of the Falls and the powerful jets of spray coming at them from every side. Again and again they made this journey, risking their lives each time, until they had secured four tons of dynamite around the opening, chaining the boxes into position to prevent them from being torn away by the incessant blasts of water.

  This effort worked. The obstructions were at last removed, and the water ran out of the tunnel, which, as Nicholls later told an Empire Club dinner in Toronto, “is as dry and pleasant as this room.”

  Meanwhile, a trickle of protests against a private Canadian company harnessing the Falls was growing to the dimensions of a tidal wave. Neither Mackenzie’s city transit company nor Pellatt’s electrical utility was popular. Both were known for gouging the public and giving inferior service. Moreover, the proponents of public power were bringing their case before the public, and it was a popular one.

  The Electrical Development Company knew that it had to put up a good front, and this was undoubtedly one reason why Pellatt hired his friend E. J. Lennox, one of the country’s best-known architects, to design the powerhouse. As a result, what might have been a plain brick box became instead a neo-classical palace that in its every line seemed to suggest both power and grace. Lennox set it on the bank half a mile above the brink of the cataract, the point where the river is at its most turbulent. It was ninety-one feet wide and forty feet high, clad in pale Indiana limestone. A colonnade of massive stone pillars extended along the entire 462 feet of its front. From there visitors could goggle at the line of eleven great generators, each weighing close to two hundred tons, filling a hall so vast it was large enough to accommodate five regulation hockey rinks.

  The Canadians had finally outdone all their rivals, including the Americans. But would this impressive architectural gem, perched on the very lip of the thundering river, be symbol enough to withstand the popular appeal of the public power movement?

  2

  The people’s power

  The probability that Toronto – Hogtown, as its rivals called it – would gobble up all the Falls power did not sit well with the smaller communities of southwestern Ontario. Solid industrial towns such as Berlin and Waterloo, 70 percent of whose populations were of Germanic origin, knew that they would have to fight for their share. The only way to provide a large enough market to justify transmission of power from the Falls was to work together. No single community could go it alone.

  Such was the concept that a Waterloo manufacturer, Elias Snider, brought to the local board of trade meeting in February 1902. Two days later, his friend Daniel B. Detweiler, vice-president of the neighbouring Berlin Board of Trade, preached the same gospel. The twin communities must set up a joint committee, “the sooner the better,” to look into the possibility.

  From that day on, the campaign for cheap public power – “the people’s power,” as it came to be called – gathered momentum, led by Snider and Detweiler. For their communities, public power made sense. All inland towns suffered in competition with those on the lakes, which did not have to pay high freight rates to bring in coal by rail. Hydroelectric power was cheaper, but why let private industry gouge the manufacturers with exorbitant prices and poor service when a publicly owned company could provide cheaper electricity more efficiently? That was the message that the two businessmen carried to other neighbouring communities.

  Popular sentiment was on their side. Suspicion of Big Business, imported from the growing antitrust movement south of the border, helped give the campaign a much-needed shove. Besides, the people of Waterloo had first-hand knowledge of the advantages of public ownership. It was one of the few municipalities that had opted for a publicly owned street railway and gas distribution system. Toronto, on the other hand, was in thrall to Mackenzie’s inadequate and inefficient privately owned transit service, which was notoriously indifferent to both public and political criticism. As Detweiler wrote to Snider, “If the new Toronto Co’y should get started they no doubt would look mainly to their own interests first and then sweat the Public all they could stand same as other Co’s.” After all, the same business cronies were involved. “The Ontario legislature must choose,” the Toronto News declared. “The time for decision has arrived. The people, or the Corporations?”

  “The rising clamour of the multitude,” as Saturday Night called it, was amplified in February 1903, when seventeen municipalities, mostly from southwestern Ontario, met in Berlin to issue “the first, faint blast” in the campaign for public power. It was important enough for the mayors themselves to attend with their aldermen to hear the report of the joint committee set up the year before. It was a tentative document that merely asked for provincial legislation enabling municipalities to buy, sell, and distribute electric power.

  Up rose the mayor of Toronto to toughen the resolution. He proposed that the government build and operate the transmission lines itself. The seconder, who helped push the resolution through, was the mayor of London, Adam Beck.

  Almost immediately Beck took up the campaign for public power. Within a year he was its leader. His name would be linked forever with the principle of publicly owned hydroelectric power in Ontario. His larger-than-life statue would dominate Toronto’s University Avenue, opposite the Ontario Hydro building. The great generating stations flanking the Niagara gorge would all bear his name. Hated, feared, despised, and admired – even venerated – in his lifetime, he would eventually attain the status of provincial idol.

  Since Beck’s childhood, his life had centred around water-power. He came from a family of Lutheran millers who had been using water to turn their mill wheels in the old days in Baden, Germany. As a boy in Baden, Ontario – Waterloo County – Adam Beck built miniature dikes in the little brooks that ran into his father’s millpond. From his earliest days, he was challenged by the potential of water and the question of how it could be further channelled to serve mankind.

  The German immigrants were devotees of the work ethic At the age of ten, Adam found his summer holidays interrupted when his fath
er took him to the family foundry that ran in conjunction with the mill. “Slap him if he doesn’t work, or I’ll slap you,” he told an employee. The younger Beck, who never went to university, learned to work a ten-hour day. For the remainder of his restless life he found it difficult to take a prolonged holiday.

  Beck soon learned the value of community co-operation, for those were the days of barn raisings and quilting bees, when people banded together to help each other out. That concept would fire Beck’s later obsession to attain a publicly owned hydroelectric system.

  When Beck was twenty-two, his father’s business failed, and the family moved to the United States. But Adam stayed in Canada, determined to make it on his own. He took various jobs – one in a brass factory and another, later, in a cigar factory. Then, discerning an unfilled need, he started a cigar-box company in the heart of the Southern Ontario tobacco fields. There the young workaholic did everything from sharpening his own saw to delivering the product in a two-wheeled handcart.

  By 1898, Adam Beck was well enough off to enter politics. In 1902 he was elected mayor of London and soon revealed his social philosophy when he refused to extend the lease of a privately owned local railway. Beck was determined that the city itself should run the line. Although in politics he was nominally a Conservative, the term, in those days, did not have the connotations it later acquired. The Ontario Liberal party, rusty in office under George W. Ross, contained the die-hards. The Conservatives, led by James Pliny Whitney, were more progressive. In the provincial election of 1902, narrowly won by the Liberals, Beck ran as a Conservative and was elected to the legislature. That, of course, was the year of the great coal famine and also of the gift of the franchise to develop Niagara power to a private concern, the Electrical Development Company.

  With the municipalities demanding that a commission be set up to look into the whole thorny question of public power and most of the press on their side, Ross could not refuse. In August he bowed to the pressure, put Elias Snider in charge, and made Beck one of the commissioners. From that moment the cigar-box manufacturer began to dominate the movement. As his biographer and colleague, W.R. Plewman, has said, he went at it “as naturally as Queen Victoria of England went to the centre of any stage upon which she had occasion to stand.”

  He was forty-six years old, an assertive and dynamic personality – eloquent, impetuous, aggressive, and often unbending in his pursuit of “power for the people.” A handsome man with steel-grey eyes, he had the profile of a romantic stage actor to fit his own theatrical nature – aquiline nose, aggressive jaw, high forehead. In repose, it was said, he seemed “to be carved in granite.” A self-made man, he dressed like an aristocrat in clothes of British cut, and he acted like one, too, for he was an avid horseman and breeder who, when he found the time, rode pink-coated to hounds.

  In 1905, an aroused electorate, disenchanted with the creaky thirty-four-year-old Liberal regime, threw Ross’s government out of office. James Whitney became premier, and Beck was named minister without portfolio. He might more aptly have been called “Minister of Public Power.” One of Whitney’s first moves was to refuse to ratify the agreement his predecessor had made with the Electrical Development Company to allow it to generate an additional 125,000 horsepower from Niagara Falls. Whitney also pledged that no more franchises would be granted until a thorough examination into Niagara power had been conducted. “The water power of Niagara,” he declared, “should be as free as the air.”

  Beck, meanwhile, had found the villain he needed in his own campaign. He attacked the EDC from the public platform and in the legislature and declared that the agreement with the private company was worthless. It was supposed to protect the public, but, he said, “the promoters get the capital stock for nothing, the total cost of acquiring and developing the property being borne by the proceeds of the bond issue.” Thus began a long and bitter wrangle between Beck and the private power interests.

  In July, Premier Whitney appointed his own three-man commission of inquiry to examine the subject of electrical power. Beck, who was already a member of the Snider commission appointed by the previous government, would be chairman of this new body. That position did not prevent him from stumping the province, attacking the private companies for charging too much and pointing to the benefits for industry in cheap power generated by a publicly owned company. For, although Beck also emphasized the advantages of power in the home, “Power for the People” really meant power for industry. Niagara Falls was seen, correctly, as the source that would create an industrial heartland in Southern Ontario. The manufacturers who demanded public power did so, not out of any political philosophy, but simply because they knew it would be cheaper.

  The two commissions – Snider’s and Beck’s – submitted their reports within days of each other in the spring of 1906. To Snider’s fury, much of the data gathered by his own commission when it appeared in the press was credited to Beck. Snider never forgave Beck for that. Beck, in his turn, had no faith in the Snider commission, which had, in effect, been superseded by his own. Snider’s report recommended a municipal co-operative that would own both the generating plants and the transmission lines. Beck was not proposing public ownership of the generating plants, but he did want the province to build the transmission lines. In addition – and more significantly – he urged the creation of a provincial hydroelectric power commission mandated to regulate the private companies.

  Beck had no intention of letting his report gather dust on the legislative shelves. The night it was tabled he organized a massive demonstration. Fifteen hundred people wearing cardboard badges bearing the words “Cheap Power Convention” marched on Toronto’s Romanesque city hall (a Lennox building) and then paraded to the legislative buildings in Queen’s Park, where they received Whitney’s promise – appropriately guarded – that the government would either supply power itself or regulate that business in the public interest.

  Beck’s cause was further advanced by the revelation that the Electrical Development Company intended to charge Canadians a much higher price than its American customers, even though the transmission costs in Canada were lower. He was nervous about Whitney’s intentions, worried about the possibility of weak legislation. A seasoned political friend gave him some advice. “Why do you wait? Why take a chance? Why not draft your own bill and tell the cabinet what you want passed?” Beck did just that, with the help of the province’s chief justice. Then he campaigned for press support, inviting reporters into his office, eloquently outlining his dream, and giving the newspapermen the kind of black-and-white story they liked – the People versus the Vested Interests.

  Beck got exactly what he wanted. In May 1906, the government created the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario, known to succeeding generations simply as “the Hydro” or, later, “Hydro.” Beck would be its chairman. Its power was astonishingly broad, but such was the strength of the public power movement that scarcely a voice was raised against it. The new commission would distribute power to the municipalities and it would also regulate the private companies. Hydro would not generate power itself but was given wide powers of expropriation.

  The Electrical Development Company fought back on two fronts, in the Canadian newspapers and in British financial circles. In those days, much of the daily press was literally for sale. The EDC was able, through an advertising agency, to buy space in both the letters-to-the-editor columns and the editorials of some newspapers. At the same time the company tried to frighten the British from investing in the province. The strategy backfired by angering the premier, who told Nicholls that it had only injured the EDC’s cause.

  Beck now faced a second battle. On January 1, 1907, the ratepayers of the various municipalities would have to give their councils permission to enter into contracts with Hydro. An intense public relations battle took place, with Beck and his engineers campaigning across Ontario like evangelists, spreading the gospel of Hydro and depicting the private interests as greedy scoundrel
s.

  Beck cleared the 1907 hurdle. At the municipal elections, twenty communities voted for the proposition. But they still had to approve a $2,750,000 bond issue to pay for the municipal network that would deliver the power. The fight was on again, reduced once more to a good-versus-evil struggle by Beck’s propaganda. The villain was “the Electric Ring … the Most Dangerous Ring in Canada.” That meant the EDC.

  The newspapers plunged into the battle. The Toronto World, which supported Beck, attacked both the Electrical Development Company and the rival Globe. “Both are public enemies,” it cried. In fact, the Globe favoured public ownership but believed in fair play for the private interests. Yet the private interests themselves were hardly playing fair. The Globe, the Mail, the News, and the Star were all being paid advertising rates for letters, articles, and editorials supporting private enterprise. “A perfect deluge of letters” (Whitney’s phrase) – some anonymous, others with fictitious names or such noms-de-plume as Veritas or Citizen – was appearing in newspapers in major centres in the province. All, apparently, were the work of a Toronto advertising agency with money to burn. The World was offered and turned down $350,000 to change its shrill policy. It was, in fact, losing so much advertising that it found itself in financial trouble and asked the government, vainly, for advertising help.

  On January 1, 1908, the municipal electors again gave Beck what he wanted – a solid vote in favour of the bond issue. Now Whitney found himself in a dilemma. Three of the country’s most powerful capitalists controlled the EDC. If that company failed – and it too was in financial straits – Canada’s credit abroad would be badly compromised. Yet the premier, facing a provincial election that year, could scarcely halt the growing pressure for public power. The best he could hope for was that one of his appointments, John S. Hendrie, minister without portfolio and a former mayor of Hamilton, might serve as a brake on Adam Beck’s ambitions. Hendrie, a member of the three-man Hydro-Electric Power Commission, was sympathetic to the private power lobby.