bout de papier, Vol. 14, No. 3 (1997) — Fall 1997 // Automne 1997, pp. 40–41
RARE AMBITION: THE CROSBIES OF
NEWFOUNDLAND by Michael Harris,
Viking, 1992, 407 pp., $29.99
Reviewed by Peter Neary
Michael Harris’s purpose in writing this book was to produce “a history of the entire Crosbie family,” a work “that would not only tell readers where John Crosbie had come from, but make a permanent contribution to the history of the country as well.” His approach “was neither assassination nor glorification, but faithfulness to the facts.” What he sought was “a composite that would transform the stark pronouncements of the record into the story of a father’s smile or a mother’s tears, a son’s resolve or a daughter’s dreams.” He describes his work as history with “a human face.” There is much to be said for this genre and Harris certainly has a flair for it, but in other respects his book is only a qualified success.
Rare Ambition opens with a detailed account of the funeral of Joey Smallwood in 1991. This serves to introduce some of the dramatis personae of recent Newfoundland political history but offers only scraps of information about the Crosbies. A strange start. The book then moves on to a very general and somewhat anecdotal account of the history of Newfoundland. This is followed by a description (overly long for this reader) of the Scottish origins and heroics of the Crosbie family. George Crosbie, the progenitor of the Newfoundland clan, who came to the island from New Brunswick in 1858, does not appear until page 30. With his arrival, however, the book becomes more tightly focussed
The narrative of the family history is built around six principal characters: Sir John
Crosbie (1876-1922), son of the founding
40 bout de papier Vol. father; his wife Mitchie Anne (Manuel) Crosbie (1876-1953); their son Chesley A. Crosbie (1905-62); and his children, Joan (1927-81), John (1932-), and Andrew (1933-91). Sir John was a buccaneering businessman and politician who moved the family to the top rungs of local society. Mitchie Anne Crosbie was a Newfoundland Mother Courage with a good head for business and public affairs. Chesley Crosbie was a highly successful entrepreneur known for his public service and with a good reputation for fairness to his workers. He brought the family’s fortune to new heights but fought a losing political battle in the late 1940s when he led a party in favour of economic union with the United States. This party defied what the United Kingdom and Canada wanted for Newfoundland: the absorption of the small country into the Canadian confederation. The constitutional issue was decided in the 22 July 1948 referendum, when Confederation with Canada was approved by the Newfoundland electorate in a very close vote.
Joey Smallwood, the Confederate leader, and Ches Crosbie were both members of the delegation that subsequently negotiated the final terms of union between Newfoundland and Canada, but Crosbie refused to sign the document. Wisely, however, he made political peace with Smallwood, who was premier of Newfoundland from 1949 to 1972. The Crosbie business empire flourished in the first decades of union, fed by heady provincial and federal government spending.
Following Ches Crosbie’s death, his son Andrew (aided by his shrewd Uncle Percy Crosbie (1913-75), about whom we do not learn enough) carried on the family tradition of business leadership. Andrew went from success to success until, like the Province of Newfoundland itself, he encountered gale-force winds in the early 1980s. He then lost one business after another and died while embroiled in a legal tangle over a failed offshore venture. His sister Joan had died in tragic circumstances a decade before. Her life was one of great adversity and misfortune, all of which is recounted by Michael Harris in hard detail.
Inevitably, the general Canadian reading public will be mainly interested in what the author has to say about the John Crosbie who was Minister of Finance in the short-lived government of Joe Clark and then held several big portfolios under Brian Mulroney including Minister of International Trade. A lawyer by profession, he entered politics in 1965 at the municipal level. Having served as deputy mayor of St. John’s, he joined the Smallwood government in 1966. In 1968 he broke with Smallwood and in 1969 challenged him for the leadership of the provincial Liberal Party. Crosbie lost out at a tumultuous and divisive convention. He then moved over to the Progressive Conservative party and served in the government of Frank Moores. After winning a federal by-election in 1976, he was the member of parliament for St. John’s West until 1993.
In 1983 John Crosbie contested the leadership of the national Progressive Conservative party. He was the first Newfoundlander to seek to lead a major national party, and Michael Harris gives a vivid and original account of his campaign. His account is especially revealing about
GREENTREE y l & COMPANY de: of documents ections competitive fees ere… we care!
390 Rideau Street E.P.O. P.O. BOx 20118 Ottawa, Ontario KIN 9N5 how the Crosbie campaign was funded. Harris also give details (p. 356) of a choice exchange between Premier Brian Peckford of Newfoundland and Maureen McTeer, which came at the height of the televised leadership convention proceedings.
The book is less satisfactory on John Crosbie’s subsequent career in the Mulroney government. The author has access to John Crosbie’s papers, which are at the Centre for Newfoundland Studies Archives, Memorial University, St. John’s, but he devotes only part of one chapter and part of the epilogue to Crosbie’s ministerial career and his account does not break much new ground. The full exploration of the life-giving role of the Newfoundland minister in Ottawa still awaits its historian.
In sum, Harris is at his best in his exploration of the intergenerational patterns to be found in the history of the Crosbies. When he ventures into Newfoundland history more generally, he tends to fall back on convention and stereotypes. Resettlement, for example, a complex historical phenomenon with roots in the 1930, is harshly criticized. Comme d’habitude, Joey Smallwood takes all the blame for it. The resettlement program, Harris writes, persuaded “rural Newfoundlanders to ’burn their boats’ and abandon a way of life they had known for centuries.” No source is given for what has become a stock quotation. Yet there is much to learn in this book, which surveys a broad field and is attractively produced. There is a bibliography and an index, and the dust jacket features a fine photograph (c. 1928) of Sir John and Lady Crosbie and their sons and daughters. The photograph was apparently taken by Rolloway Studios in St. John’s but this fact is not noted in the credits.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 14, No. 3 (1997) — Fall 1997 // Automne 1997, pp. 40–41. Read the rest of this issue →
