bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1991) — Spring 1991 // Printemps 1991, pp. 41–43
The Editors of Canadian Business, A Visual
History of Modern Canadian Business —
Guts, Greed and Glory, Summerhill Press,
Toronto, 1988, 207 pp. + illus., $29.95.
In 1921, the readers of the Sunday Express in England were treated to a panegyric on the virtues of capitalism by the newspaper’s bumptious millionaire publisher, Canadian-born Lord Beaverbrook. Having cut his capitalist teeth as an itinerant bond salesman in the Maritimes and as a merger king in turn-of-the-century Montreal, Beaverbrook was well positioned to extol the benefits of a life devoted to the pursuit of business, wealth and power. “I address myself”, he wrote, “to the young men of the new age. Those who have youth also possess opportunity. There is in the British Empire today no bar to success which resolution cannot break. The young clerk has the key of success in his pocket, if he has the courage and the ability to turn the lock which leads to the Temple of Success”.
Such was the appeal of this lay sermon that Beaverbrook subsequently republished it in book form under the brash title Success. In Canada, publication rights were quickly acquired by McClelland and Stewart. A “young clerk” in Canada who took Beaver-brook’s peroration to heart would have found the prospects for a lucrative business career much reduced in the lean years of the early 1920s. The boom years of financial capitalism, when Beaverbrook had waxed rich on the proceeds of watered stock sales and bold mergers, had gone. The values heralded in Success rang hollow. If anything, Canadian business had become a prosaic matter of organization and meritocracy. The closest most Canadian businessmen came to Beaverbrook’s life of high business adventure and fulfillment might possibly have come from the page of Canadian Business magazine, founded in 1928.
Canadian Business’s sixtieth anniversary has found its editors in a sermonizing mood. Guts, Greed and Glory is a decade-by-decade accounting of the life and times of Canadian business from 1928 to 1988. In the words of the “creative team” that wrote the text and selected the hundreds of illustrations, the book is a “celebration of the entrepreneurial ethic that drives business people to dream dreams, take risks and create companies” Instead of Beaverbrook’s young clerks, the pages of this rendition of Canadian business history are peopled by “high flying successes, compulsive gamblers and romantic losers”. Like Success, Guts, Greed and Glory emerges as a misplaced and unconvincing exhortation.
The book’s structure is artificial. Sixty years of Canadian business are neatly carved into six tranches, each containing a brief (very brief) thematic introduction to the decade (the 1940s are the decade of the ’mobilized economy’), a profile of a company thought to be at the cutting edge of that decade’s development (de Havilland as a wartime bomber maker) and a newsreel of related events. This schema is augmented with impressionistic portraits of six sectors of the Canadian economy, ranging from western wheat to transportation.
The result of this approach to Canadian business history is an abundance of anecdotes and a sorry lack of structure. The book’s copious illustrations will hold most readers’ attention for half an hour. Beyond this, Guts contributes little to our understanding of the structure and complexity of modern Canadian business. The birth of MacMillan Bloedel in the 1960s is chronicled at some length but the rest of the forest industry is despatched in three paragraphs and twelve photographs. Similarly, we learn of Frank Gerstein’s innovative approach to the retailing of jewellery at People’s Credit Jewellers in the 1930s, but practically nothing of the rest of the retail industry.
Even a good “visual” history should convey some sense of the substance of the portrait sitter. This book titillates, but does not inform. It does not, for instance, address Canada’s relationship with foreign direct investment. The 1968 Watkins report on the impact of foreign ownership on the structure of Canadian industry is mentioned, but not explored. Nor does the book analyze the effects of corporate concentration. No systematic attempt is made to explain why Canada has tolerated — indeed, at times, pioneered — such a high degree of government involvement in business. What do crown corporations reveal about the guts, greed and glory of Canadian businessmen?
The book focuses almost exclusively on big business. The small entrepreneur – the creator of so much business wealth – is given short shrift. Little is said of the role of Canadian women in business. What emerges instead is a fragmented, superficial portrait of Canadian business that tends to celebrate the exception rather than the rule. We learn of the monopolizing ambitions of young K.C. Irving in the 1920s, but nothing of the otherwise declining fortunes of Maritimes business in that same decade. Those interested in a telling of the “rule” are better advised to turn to Michael Bliss’s fine Northern Enterprise: Five Centuries of Canadian Business, published in 1987.
Like all sermons, Guts, Greed and Glory tries to end on a stirring note. The gospel is free trade and the message is that ours is a “Can-do” nation. There is little to prepare the reader for this homily — no mention of the important 1935 Canada-United States trade treaty nor any of Mackenzie King’s brush with free trade in the late 1940s. We are told that in 1911 Laurier “concluded” a reciprocity agreement with Washington. This is erroneous; the agreement was tentative, to be enacted by concurrent legislation after the 1911 election. The fact that business in 1911 opposed free trade is not mentioned. Thus, while free trade may be Canada’s most persuasive economic option for the future, there is little to persuade us of the proposition in this analysis.
Weeks before he died in 1964, Lord Beaverbrook candidly reviewed his life in an interview for the Sunday Telegraph. When asked of the significance of Success, he curtly replied: “But you don’t want to take ’Success’ too seriously. It’s only newspaper stuff.” The same could today be said of Guts, Greed and Glory.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1991) — Spring 1991 // Printemps 1991, pp. 41–43. Read the rest of this issue →
