bout de papier, Vol. 25, No. 3 (2010) — Fall 2010 // Automne 2010, pp. 31–32
BENNETT: THE REBEL WHO
CHALLENGED AND CHANGED A
NATION, by John Boyko, Toronto: Key
Porter Books, 2010, 504 pp, index and
bibliography, $34.95, cloth.
Richard Bedford Bennett, who served as Canada’s 11th prime minister from 1930 to 1935, was savaged by the unemployed and destitute during the grimmest years of the Great Depression. They denounced him as uncaring, unthinking and undemocratic, and the labels stuck. For most Canadian historians, busy charting Canada’s happy transformation from colony to modern North American nation, Bennett’s attachment to imperial Britain and raw capitalism were old-fashioned and dangerous follies. They dismissed his last-minute efforts in 1935 to « fashion a strong government response to the dislocation of the Depression, his “New Deal,” as cynical and opportunistic. Historian John Boyko thinks it’s time we tried harder to understand Bennett a little better.
Boyko’s new biography celebrates Bennett. He relies heavily on early histories and Bennett’s own papers to recount the future prime minister’s litany of youthful accomplishments. Bennett was clearly a man of prodigious intelligence and indefatigable energy, who made his own way in the world. As a teenager, he marched steadily up the ranks of the teaching profession in rural New Brunswick, where he was born in 1870. Part-time law school at Dalhousie and weekend articling followed, before Bennett headed to Calgary in 1896 to join James Lougheed’s legal firm as junior partner.
Bennett thrived in Western Canada. The individualistic ethos of the harsh frontier capitalism that he encountered there suited him. A shrewd and skillful lawyer, he enjoyed steady work as legal counsel for the Canadian Pacific Railway, the region’s most important economic force. In a tough and competitive environment, he added a host of corporate clients to his firm’s roster, using his connections to profit from land speculation as immigrants poured into Western Canada and the region boomed. Bennett was soon a wealthy man.
Politics in turn-of-the-century Alberta was also a free-wheeling affair, and Bennett embraced them with enthusiasm. He was active in the struggle to attain provincial status for Alberta, enjoyed some initial success as a provincial politician, and was elected to the House of Commons in 1911. Bennett ran as a Conservative. As Boyko argues, and this is central to his reassessment of Bennett, the Calgary lawyer was deeply attached to the British Empire and drew large elements of his Conservative political philosophy from British Toryism, with its long tradition of active and benevolent state intervention in the economy for the community’s overall benefit. For Bennett, there was apparently little contradiction between supporting a vibrant /aissez-faire, free-enterprise economy and backing firm government measures to protect the welfare of the worker, the farmer, and the poor.
Boyko leaves this fundamental contradiction at the core of his portrait of Bennett largely unexplored. Instead, as he traces Bennett’s career through the First World War and his tempestuous relationships with prime ministers Robert Borden and Arthur Meighen, Boyko documents his subject’s steadfast support for government intervention in the Canadian economy. Demands for tariffs, an early call for a central bank and government control of monetary policy, and support for unemployment relief and old age pensions are cited as evidence of Bennett’s modern, even advanced, view of the role of government in an industrial society. Incredibly, Boyko describes the mishmash of platitudes and generalities cobbled together into the Conservative Party’s platform during the 1927 convention that elected Bennett leader as “marvellously visionary.” (p. 165)
Headstrong and impatient, Bennett drove his party forward to victory in the 1930 federal election, wresting power from Mackenzie King’s Liberal government, just months before the onset of the Great Depression. The new Conservative prime minister, Boyko argues in the final parts of this biography, marshalled his “Red Tory” beliefs for an assault on the ills of the Great Depression, “channelling the ideas of [liberal economist] John Maynard Keynes.” (p. 366) Like the great American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Canadian leader employed public works and relief for the unemployed to help Canadians. Why then, Boyko asks plaintively, is Roosevelt praised, and Bennett reviled?
Bennett’s tenure, Boyko goes on, resulted in even more public goods. At the Ottawa Conference in 1932, the prime minister embraced a new set of British Empire tariff preferences, turning his back on his North American neighbour and crafting a real response to slumping trade. His government created the CBC, imagined the St. Lawrence Seaway, and established the Bank of Canada, all icons of modern Canada. Steadily, inexorably, consistently, Boyko insists, Bennett marched throughout his life towards the high point in his political career. In early 1935, the Tory prime minister unveiled his “New Deal” for Canadians. It promised unemployment insurance, minimum wage laws, better pensions, workplace and corporate reform, and measures to improve farm marketing.
Canadian voters were unimpressed. They doubted the prime minister’s reform credentials and they sent him packing.
Boyko’s Bennett is a wasted opportunity. Bennett, whom we sometimes glimpse as a sympathetic figure in the biographies of his contemporaries, undoubtedly merits reassessment. There may even be much in Boyko’s insights about the Tory origins of Bennett’s ideas that is worth retaining, but the case advanced here is wholly unconvincing. Boyko’s explorations of Bennett’s ideas are too often rooted in preoccupations about the present, and lack sufficient historical context and detail.
Boyko’s favourite form of argumentation, that Bennett was a modern and forward-looking thinker because his ideas were sometimes consistent with the ideas of Progressives, or were echoed in legislation passed 30 or 100 years later, is profoundly ahistorical and misleading. Support for old age pensions, unemployment insurance, and a central bank was widespread across the political spectrum in early 20th century Canada. The differences were in the details — vitally important details. Bennett’s Bank of Canada, in which private banks held shares and influenced policy, was fundamentally different from the entirely state-owned Bank established by the Liberal government after 1935. In the same way, Roosevelt’s use of public works was more strategic, liberating, and visionary than Bennett’s.
This book has other shortcomings. Its purple prose is over-burdened with adjectives and clichés. Virtually all Boyko’s heroes are “ruggedly handsome” or in “bracingly good health,’ while his villains are inevitably “mashed-potato soft.’ And can any writer still claim with a straight face that “A star had been born” or that “Wall Street laid an egg”? The research is sloppy and fatally limited. Lester Pearson was not a “small” man and Dean Acheson was never Roosevelt’s secretary of state. And surely Bennett’s foreign policy role in British Empire affairs and Canada-US relations demanded research in the rich archives of London and Washington.
Canada’s forgotten prime minister deserved better.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 25, No. 3 (2010) — Fall 2010 // Automne 2010, pp. 31–32. Read the rest of this issue →
