The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (46 page)

Clifford Sifton bolted the party on the issue, taking eighteen other Liberals with him. Some said he had been seeking a chance for revenge against those who had helped oust him in 1905. J.A. Macdonald, the former editor of the
Globe
, using a common phrase of the day, said it was an “infinite relief” when Sifton joined the enemy, “knowing for years, as we did, that he had carried a knife in his boot for members of the government.” However that may be, the former minister became the chief tactician behind the Tory campaign, speaking forcefully and without let up from Windsor to Halifax against reciprocity. In this he certainly had the support of his friends in the Eastern financial establishment, but not of his editor, Dafoe, who for the first time broke with his chief. Dafoe really had little choice. His editorials had always been pro-free trade; the phrase, in fact, was emblazoned on the masthead of the
Free Press;
to have switched sides at that moment would have been journalistic suicide. He could scarcely afford to be seen to be in the same bed with such Eastern financiers as Sir Edmund Walker, president of the Canadian Bank of Commerce, who felt that the attitude of Western agricultural leaders regarding free trade and freight rates was “both selfish and ignorant.”

The emotional campaign that followed was enlivened and muddied by American expansionists such as J.B. “Champ” Clark, the Speaker-designate of the House of Representatives, who welcomed the day “when the American flag will float over every square foot of the British – North American possessions to the North Pole,” and by Ontario patriots who wrapped themselves in the Union Jack and warned that reciprocity would water down British preference and loosen Imperial ties.

The West didn’t care. A good many of the most prominent farmers were Americans – men, as we have seen, such as Henry Wise Wood and Daniel Webster Warner. These people did not fear American expansion. Even the British in the West, with their traditional belief in free trade, could not be convinced of the evils of tariff reduction.

Laurier was trounced in 1911, reciprocity was dead, and the traditional split between East and West was widened. In the rueful view of the
Grain Growers’ Guide
“the rest of Canada must bow to Ontario, the most powerful province, politically, in Canada.” And the farmers began to consider direct political action. “What is needed in Canada is a radical party with the courage of its convictions,” George Chipman, the
Guide’s
editor, wrote shortly after the election.

It took the best part of a decade to achieve that, but by 1921 the traditional two-party system on the prairies was dead. The Conservatives, having rejected free trade, were a spent force; the provincial Liberal parties were badly shattered. Faced with a minority government in Manitoba, they were forced by the farmers into a Liberal-Progressive coalition that in various forms would govern the province for more than three decades. In Saskatchewan they just managed to survive by chameleon-like tactics, becoming in effect a farmers’ government at arm’s length from Ottawa. In Alberta, in 1921, Henry Wise Wood’s United Farmers finished them off, sweeping into power to remain until 1935, when another populist movement calling itself Social Credit took over.

In 1921 the psychological and economic split between East and West was confirmed politically in a federal election. The Progressive party, sparked by farmers’ movements in every province, took sixty-five federal seats, leaving Laurier’s successor, Mackenzie King, to head a minority government. The continental West turned to the Progressives. On the prairies the Liberals managed to elect three members, no more. The Conservatives elected ten, but eight of these came from Manitoba. The settlers’ discontent had changed the political face of Canada. That discontent too was part of the Western spirit.

6
The un-Western Westerner

In the first decade of the century, Western Canadians developed a strong image of themselves. It didn’t fit everyone; in fact, it might be argued that it really didn’t fit
most
Westerners, but it persisted. Rituals such as the Calgary Stampede, lauched in 1912 and emulated in various forms throughout the West, helped to intensify the stereotype and plant it in the minds of all Canadians. Westerners
were
different, like Texans. There was a swagger here, a looseness, a gambling spirit, the kind of devil-may-care style that was the attraction of the chuck wagon races.

Nowhere was the Western spirit more in evidence than in Calgary, that most American of all prairie cities. This was ranching country, and ranchers tended to take chances; they had to, because they knew a bad winter could wipe them out. Since mixed farming provided a hedge against acts of nature, northern Albertans didn’t need that same recklessness; if the crops failed, one could fall back on the hogs.

It is passing strange, then, that the West’s most illustrious citizen should have been nurtured in the high, wide, and handsome atmosphere of the foothills, for Richard Bedford Bennett simply didn’t fit the image. There was little of the West about him – except for naked ambition – even though he served it for the best part of four decades. And his ambition was not of the Western kind: it was dogged and unswerving; there was no fun in it.

See him now in January of 1897, a gangling, freckled-faced, twenty-six-year-old from the Bay of Fundy, arriving in Calgary in his dark suit and bowler hat having already announced that he intended to become
(a)
a millionaire and
(b)
Prime Minister of Canada. R.B. Bennett – nobody ever called him Richard or Dick – would achieve both goals. In the first half of the century he was the only Westerner to lead the country.

It’s hard to think of him as a Westerner, much less a Calgarian, even though Calgary was his constituency, in and out of office, for forty years. Bennett the politician was from the West but not
of
the West. He didn’t even own a home in Calgary, preferring to occupy a suite in the Alberta Hotel and later in the Palliser. One thinks of him as an Ottawa man, and that is the way the cartoonists portrayed him, in silk topper and morning coat. He was, in fact, the first and perhaps the only man to stroll down Stephen Avenue in that attire, an incongruous spectacle among the crowd in Stetsons, checked vests, and buckskin jackets. His clothes, at least in the early days, weren’t even made in the West but fashioned to his specific instructions by a Maritime tailor.

But R.B. Bennett didn’t need a silk hat to stand out like a nun in a brothel in that liveliest of cities. A dedicated Methodist and Sunday School teacher, he took his religion as he took his life, with deadly seriousness. He did not drink. He did not smoke. He deplored dancing, hated cards, eschewed all games of chance, wouldn’t even enter a bowling alley. In his early days he carried a Bible with him – a tall, austere, forbidding figure, “conscious of coming greatness,” who devoured vast breakfasts in the accurate belief that it would eventually give him the commanding figure, the ample girth that was in those days the hallmark of the successful man.

“Fun” is not a word one associates with R.B. Bennett. He clearly believed he was brought into the world not to have fun but to make his mark. “R.B. Bennett’s idea of happiness,” Bob Edwards wrote, “is a seat in heaven with the privilege of addressing angels from the throne.”

What brought this shy, introspective law graduate and one-time high school principal to the West? Partly the determination to make his fortune, something he couldn’t achieve on those harsh Atlantic shores, but also, one suspects, the need to escape. In this, at least, Bennett was a typical Westerner. Thousands had arrived on the prairies for the same reason. The difference was that Bennett did not choose the West; he could have gone anywhere. The West chose him.

Money was always important to him; he had little enough as a boy in New Brunswick or as a law student at Dalhousie. His mother had to watch every penny, for the Bennetts were victims of the Maritime ship-building depression, and of the elder Bennett’s lack of foresight. When Richard’s parents were married, the Bennett shipyard was a thriving operation, but it fell into decay in the age of steam, and Henry Bennett made little attempt to adapt to changed circumstances. He was a genial, easy-going man who enjoyed a drink, didn’t take religion seriously, and was perfectly willing to let his wife take charge. She was everything her husband was not – a dedicated teetotaller, a fervent Methodist, a fiercely ambitious and firm-minded woman determined that everything her husband had failed to be her eldest son would become.

Young Richard was shaped by his mother. All his furious energy, his resentment of competition, his shyness and introspection, his moods of despair, his outbursts of temper, his apparent arrogance and insensitivity, his courage and tenacity – all this mixed bag of strengths and flaws were surely the product of his mother’s strength of character and implacable will, and of the tensions that must have existed in the household of that strangely assorted pair. All his life R.B. Bennett worshipped his mother. It was a rare Christmas that he did not spend with her. Yet he left her when he was twenty-six, and in all his long, spectacular, but lonely career he never sent for her; she remained in Hopewell Cape, N.B., he in Calgary and Ottawa.

He might as easily have gone off to Montreal or Toronto. But the West sought him out in the person of one of its favourite sons, Senator James Alexander Lougheed. Lougheed was Calgary’s first citizen in more ways than one. He had followed the
CPR
to the end of steel and put up his lawyer’s shingle when Calgary was still a tent town. He had
married into one of the pioneer fur-trading families of Alberta; his wife was a Hardisty, the niece of Lord Strathcona. Lougheed was wealthy, with more work on his hands than he cared to do. He needed an assistant, and the dean of Dalhousie, trying to come up with somebody who would meet Lougheed’s exacting standards, finally remembered a young student who had been so wrapped up in his studies that he had no life apart from law school – a poor mixer but totally dedicated. Bennett, who was already establishing a reputation as a lawyer in Chatham, got the job.

He was everything that Lougheed was not. The elder lawyer was one of the few members of the Western establishment who could also be called a member of the leisure class. For him the hard grind was no longer necessary; a natural gambler, he preferred the adventure of the unpredictable. But Bennett could never be inveigled into Lougheed’s various speculations. A financial as well as a political conservative, he preferred the solidity of corporate bonds. Even after he grew wealthy he persisted in salvaging unused stamps from unposted envelopes and retrieving spare pieces of writing paper from letters he had received.

It is instructive to compare the Bennett style and temperament with that of another Calgary lawyer, the famous Paddy Nolan. Nolan was, and in legend remains, a Calgary institution; Bennett never was. Nolan was a big, handsome Limerick Irishman with such a gift for blarney that it was said he could talk about a barber’s pole and make an absorbing tale of it. A man of electric personality and flashing wit, he could charm a jury, confuse a witness, and bemuse a judge. Bob Edwards, his closest friend, wrote: “…  every man in these parts who gets found out and is conscious of being in the wrong, instinctively turns for aid to P.J. Nolan.” Nolan, who never took himself seriously, would certainly have agreed.

Nolan stories abound in the West. There is, for example, his famous cross-examination of a Moose Jaw girl who had charged his client with indecent assault and told a convincing tale of how she had been sent to fetch a pail of milk when, en route home, the accused had attacked her. Nolan winkled out the admission that the gallon pail had no lid on it and was filled to the brim. “Gentlemen,” he told the jury, “this young woman says she lost her virtue, but saved her milk. What do you think about it?” He won the case.

Nolan once prevailed upon a Calgary judge to purchase, out of sympathy, two tickets on the gold watch of a dead man that the poverty-stricken widow was forced to raffle off. What the judge didn’t
know was that he was shortly to preside over the trial of the same woman charged with conducting a lottery. She was guilty, of course, but Nolan got her off with a suspended sentence by directing his argument to the judge: “Your honour knows full well the danger of these lotteries and how even the best intentioned people in the community fall victim to them and out of sheer sympathy for their object commit offenses by buying tickets in them, as no doubt Your Honour has done on occasion himself.”

There are a score of such stories about Nolan, few about Bennett. “It is almost impossible to get any human interest stories about you,” a reporter once complained to him. “There are none,” Bennett replied shortly.

Nolan had no enemies; Bennett had many. In court, every opponent was to him an enemy, and his vituperative form of attack, his compulsion to win got him into trouble. One lawyer called him “a God damned liar” in court; another rushed at him and slapped his face. On the other hand, Bennett himself had an ungovernable temper.

He plunged into politics almost from the moment of his arrival in Calgary, turning up at one of Frank Oliver’s meetings and heckling him so unmercifully that the audience, intrigued by the brash newcomer, insisted he speak. Bennett made his reputation as a loyal Tory and an effective platform orator that night. Less than two years later he was elected to the Territorial assembly.

Bennett treated the Liberals as he did his legal adversaries: as enemies. One day when he was visiting J.J. Young at the
Herald
, the publisher remarked that his brother, David, who was lounging in the rear of the main office, was a Liberal. Bennett stormed over to David Young. “Is it true you’re a Grit?” he asked. Young allowed that he was. Bennett turned on his heel, left the office, and didn’t speak to David Young again for years.

He was a traditional Conservative by upbringing, an emotional Conservative by temperament. Disraeli, Rhodes, and Kipling were his heroes, the Empire the object of his veneration. The ripple of nationalism that grew out of pride in Western expansion did not, in the end, tie him to his native land. The Imperial bond was stronger; and when, in 1938, he finally quit politics, he did not return to Calgary but opted instead for the life of an English peer in the Mother of Parliaments.