bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 3 (1991) — Summer 1991 // Été 1991, pp. 48–50
Joey — The Life and Political Times of
Joey Smallwood, by Harold Horwood,
Stoddart Publishing Co. Limited, 1989,
348 pp., $29.95 hardcover.
On Christmas Eve, 1989, Joey Smallwood turned 89. He has had a long and eventful life and it is no surprise that we now have two full scale biographies of him (Richard Gwyn’s Smallwood: The Unlikely Revolutionary was published in 1968, and revised in 1972). More work on his career will undoubtedly follow as scholars begin digging into the rich policy files that he and his contemporaries have created.
The fascination of the man is not hard to understand. Born at Gambo, Bonavista Bay in 1900, Smallwood began life among the outport people who would eventually propel him into political power. The Smallwood family soon moved to St. John’s and it was in that gossipy, segmented and multifarious old town that he grew up. There is no escaping one’s childhood, and Harold Horwood writes sensitively of Smallwood’s boyhood, which was full but not without trials. The Smallwoods, Horwood writes, were “poison poor.” Young Joey was also small of stature and carried the psychological burden of his father’s drinking problem. At the same time, he possessed worthwhile gifts. One was boundless energy that remained with him for most of his adult life and which he traced to his Prince Edward Island born grandfather, David, who had established the family in Newfoundland. Joey had brains to burn, and as a strong individualist he soon left the formal school system behind. Finally, he was wonderfully fluent in speech. According to Horwood, his rhetoric was shaped by what he heard at the Bethesda Mission in St. John’s, a church to which his mother was drawn. From fundamentalist Christianity he gleaned “endless repetition of simple slogans … loudness and earnestness of voice,” and “straightforward appeal to simple, basic emotions.” In the end, his rhetoric was perfect for the “semi-literate radio listener.”
Leaving school at age fourteen, Smallwood led a knockabout life for more than thirty years. He was variously a printer, journalist, editor, author, union organizer, cooperative promoter, back-room boy, candidate, radio personality and pig farmer. In the 1920s, his intellectual roving took him to New York and then to London. In both metropoli he mixed journalism with left wing politics. In 1925 he married Clara Oates of Carbonear, Conception Bay, a remarkable woman who yet awaits her own biography.
In his journeyman years, Smallwood was an enthusiast and a big risk taker. This was most unusual in the conservative ethos of Newfoundland. He flitted from job to job, and from venture to venture, but never found the main chance. By his mid forties, he was well known to his countrymen but cast in the role of an upstart gadfly. He was a marginal man in local society. As late as 1945, few would have predicted the political ascendancy he would soon achieve. In Harold Horwood’s words, he was “a drifter” and “a tired radical who had become a pig farmer.”
Horwood’s Joey is indeed a paradoxical and quixotic figure from adolescence to middle age. Smallwood fancied himself a socialist but became a devoted follower of Richard Squires, the quintessential Newfoundland party man. For all his fascination with ideology he had a “penchant for giving more loyalty to an individual than to a cause.” He threw himself into one business venture after another but “was never really interested in money, viewing it mostly as a necessary nuisance.” Not surprisingly, the result was a series of misadventures; as an entrepreneur Smallwood was a visionary but somewhat inconsistent. “He never did learn,” Horwood writes, “that he was incapable of dealing successfully with businesspeople… Everything he touched was a financial fiasco. Yet, through it all, he was personally successful and increasingly popular.” In 1937, in a country that was barely living from hand to mouth, Smallwood published the first two volumes of the encyclopaedic Book of Newfoundland. This was a worthy but madcap venture, the enterprise of a dreamer who was the antithesis of a cost accountant.” Smallwood was, Horwood claims, “a lifelong debt accumulator, a terrible credit risk, with the glib ability to persuade people to lend him funds.”
Smallwood’s big opportunity in politics came in 1945 when the United Kingdom government called a national convention in Newfoundland to advise it on the choices to be put before the people of the country in a referendum on their constitutional future. Since 1934, Newfoundland had been governed by a British appointed Commission of Government, a constitutional experiment which the British for a variety of reasons, were now anxious to end. Prior to the calling of the National Convention, the United Kingdom and Canada had reached an understanding that they would work together to promote the cause of Confederation in Newfoundland by whatever means they could within the framework of democratic choice for the Newfoundlanders themselves.
Amazingly, it was Smallwood the outsider, who aligned himself with what the United Kingdom and Canada (and for that matter the United States) wanted in Newfoundland, while the local gentry largely fought a rearguard action in favour of the system of responsible government and dominion status that had given way under the impact of the Great Depression and had been replaced by the Commission of Government. In the National Convention, Smallwood emerged as the champion of Confederation and, based on his performance there, went on to carry the issue in two hard fought referenda and to become the first premier of the new Canadian province. Since the Liberals were riding high in Canada at the time and had engineered Confederation at Ottawa, Smallwood became a Liberal in Canadian politics. His premiership lasted until 1972 and, if there were a provincial premiers hall of fame, he would certainly qualify.
As premier, he set out to build the social and educational services of the province and to create jobs for those he called in public “the toiling masses”, and in private “the ragged-arsed artillery”. Since the 1970s, it has almost been an article of faith in the tenured academic and other comfortable middle class circles of Newfoundland to believe that the Smallwood government was corrupt, inefficient, profligate, and run by one man, to wit a Maurice Duplessis look-alike. Harold Horwood addresses all these important matters. On corruption he writes as follows: “In Joey’s book graft was graft only if the money wound up in your private bank account. Manipulating government spending so as to divert funds into party treasuries was, in his view, almost a messianic activity.” In other words, the party war chest was, to borrow a phrase, “a sacred trust” to be used to get on with the business of building what Smallwood himself once called “the new Newfoundland.”
Harold Horwood’s perspective on Smallwood’s approach to job creation is that of the 1960’s counter culture and latter day environmentalism. What Smallwood believed people needed, he argues, was “jobs at regular wages that would feed them adequately — not risk, not self-employment, not challenges and spiritual adventures — but jobs.” On the 1969 Churchill Falls deal, often said to have been Smallwood’s greatest resource giveaway, Horwood delivers a mixed verdict. He accepts that the deal has massively favoured Quebec and that its Newfoundland architects should have insisted on better safeguards for the province. On the other hand, he gives Smallwood full marks for bringing the project to fruition. “Like confederation itself,” he writes, “the development of Churchill Falls put the people of Canada permanently in his debt.” Yet the image that lingers from this book about the development of Labrador and about Newfoundland- Quebec relations in general is one of startling encounter between Smallwood and Maurice Duplessis. Harold Horwood reports on it as follows: “according to Joey, they ’pissed across the border’ to show their contempt for each other’s territory.”
Horwood agrees with those who contend that it was Smallwood and “not the government who ruled” in Newfoundland. This flowed from Smallwood’s “forcefulness and loquaciousness” and from an “aura” about him “that killed debate.” Conversely, Smallwood “was quite unable to forgive a friend who was forced by conscience to disagree with him.” Smallwood’s 1950s Latvian economic adviser, who ended up in a penitentiary, is dismissed by Horwood as “an undersized storm trooper”. On his arrival on the Newfoundland political scene, the Hon. J.W. Pickersgill is said to have had “a rather squeaky voice and the appearance of a boiled dumpling.” Horwood acknowledges, however, that Smallwood and Pickersgill became one of the most successful federal-provincial two-horse teams ever seen in Canadian politics.
Inevitably, Horwood’s biography begs comparison with Smallwood’s own 1973 memoirs, 1 Chose Canada. At the same time, Horwood’s work is itself in part autobiographical. Horwood worked closely with Smallwood to get Newfoundland into Confederation. In 1949 he was elected to the Newfoundland legislature as a Joey Liberal but, thereafter, the two men fell out, whereupon Horwood became one of Smallwood’s sternest newspaper critics. Eventually, Harold Horwood turned away from the everyday cut and thrust of partisan politics towards nature, history, fiction and philosophy. Remarkably, he has been able to take the long view in this fine account of his erstwhile leader. Horwood is a very fine phrasemaker and his biography is memorable in this regard. But it is also notable for its portrayal of the whole man. Harold Horwood finds much to fault in Joe Smallwood’s political career but he also finds achievements. Above all, he writes with compassion and understanding, qualities that are always in short supply in society. His broad humanism gives distinction to his work and will make it last.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 3 (1991) — Summer 1991 // Été 1991, pp. 48–50. Read the rest of this issue →
