The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (45 page)

In 1917, Bob Edwards the lifelong bachelor married Kate Penman, a twenty-four-year-old girl from Glasgow, who worked in the office of his old rival, R.B. Bennett. By all accounts it was not a successful marriage; Edwards was too set in his ways, nor would he modify his drinking. But drunk or sober he had become a Calgary fixture, a member of the establishment, a vibrant symbol of the West’s adolescent years, and, by 1921, a successful provincial politician. McGillicuddy was dead, but Edwards was unforgiving. “Is it not remarkable,” he wrote to a friend, “here I am in the Legislature and McGillicuddy is in Hell.” Shortly after that, on November 14, 1922, he died of influenza, and his paper, which more than any other had captured the Western spirit, died with him.

5
Radicalism and populism

Apart from those Canadians who arrived from the older provinces, the people who settled the West had no traditional party loyalties. To the Americans and Europeans, the titles “Liberal” and “Conservative” had no sentimental association and little meaning, especially as the Tories, unable (then as now) to come to grips with their political philosophy, insisted in defiance of all logic on calling themselves “Liberal Conservatives.” If the new arrivals voted for the Liberals, it was because the Liberal government had brought them to Canada and helped them prosper. But these ties were ephemeral. By 1905, they began to equate the government with Central Canada, and therefore with villainy. Even the Canadian-born found traditional loyalties beginning to loosen.

The Eastern Canadian was born into a political party. The sons of Grits were themselves Grits; the sons of Tories remained Tories and passed their Toryism on to
their
sons. But the newcomers were perfectly prepared to toss aside old ideas and accept fresh and even radical ones if they felt they were to their benefit. After all, they had renounced their homelands, in itself an act of radicalism. Now they were caught up in the political restlessness that affected Western attitudes in the early years of the century.

These attitudes can be defined as generally anti-establishment-the secret of Bob Edwards’s appeal. The European peasants had defected from a society in which they were literally required to bow and touch their forelocks when encountering a bureaucrat or landowner. The English had left behind a rigid class system that conspired against upward mobility. The Americans brought to Canada the ferment of agrarian dissent. The Upper Canadians, after a few years in the West, found themselves railing against the railways, the elevator monopoly, and the high price of agricultural equipment.

American periodicals spilled across the border as easily as American farmers. This was the era of the trustbusters and muckrakers. Magazines such as
McClure’s
and
Collier’s
carried sensational articles attacking the great mercantile monopolies, which were also the enemies of the American farmers. Ida M. Tarbell went after Standard Oil; Lincoln Steffens exposed political corruption in the cities; in
The Jungle
, Upton Sinclair hit hard at the meat-packing industry in Chicago.

More than one American farmer remarked that he had come to Canada to escape the establishment. An Iowa farmer was quoted in
The World’s Work
in 1905 as declaring: “I didn’t much mind leaving the States. The trusts were getting so bad there that it didn’t seem to be the same country to me anymore.” Agrarian radicals, influenced by the Farmers’ Alliance, the populist crusade, the Grange movement, and the Society of Equity were moving into Alberta – men like Henry Wise Wood, the lanky, soft-spoken Missouri farmer who took up two sections of land at Carstairs in 1905 and was to become president of the politically powerful United Farmers of Alberta.

Wood was the most important of the American immigrants who influenced Western politics in general and Alberta politics in particular. The day would come when the American-born would outnumber all other national groups, including the Canadians, on the executive of the United Farmers. Wood even
looked
like an American. With his long, loose limbs, his craggy face, and his dark, flashing eyes, he was often compared to Lincoln, in spite of an almost totally bald head. This brooding and methodical ex-cowboy, who peppered his speech with Biblical quotations and steeped himself in lyric poetry, philosophy, and nineteenth-century classics, was drawn to Canada like most of his countrymen because he wanted land for himself and his four sons and could not afford it in his native Missouri. In 1910 he became a Canadian citizen.

He would become a political force, yet he had no political ambitions. In the United States he had worked for William Jennings Bryan, the populist Democrat, but had turned down a congressional nomination from Bryan’s party as he would one day turn down a cabinet post in Robert Borden’s wartime Union government. In Alberta, he joined the Society of Equity, a Canadian offshoot of an American agrarian movement. When, in 1909, it merged with the Territorial Grain Growers’ Association to form the UFA, he became part of the new movement. He had as little interest in power as he had in money, but his integrity was such that power sought him out. He always thought of himself as a spokesman for the farmers, not a leader, for he had a sense of fundamental democracy that was rooted in his faith. He was a member of the Campbellite Church, Disciples of Christ, which eschewed hierarchy, allowing both laymen and laywomen to conduct services. He had little use for political parties, believing that officeholders should be elected by occupational groups – farmers representing farmers – yet in the end he found himself at the head of the most successful party in Alberta;
when it finally took office, he shrugged off the premiership, turning it over to his vice-president. There was nothing extreme or radical about him, and yet, in the end, this cautious, God-fearing former American would, more than any other single person, touch off a revolution in his adopted province and help to radicalize the West.

By the time Henry Wise Wood arrived in Alberta, the West was ready to be radicalized. The catalyst in that process, and also the chief villain to Westerners, was the Canadian Pacific Railway. Controlled by Eastern interests, it was seen as the enemy of the farmer. It was blamed for holding on selfishly to its free, untaxed lands, waiting for real estate prices to rise. It was blamed for not providing loading platforms and, at harvest time, for a shortage of freight cars. Western farmers were convinced this perennial car shortage was part of a deliberate conspiracy to force them to bow to the equally villainous elevator monopoly. Most would agree with the resolution passed by one angry meeting in Elva, Manitoba, in 1902, which had accused the
CPR
of plundering the farmers of $25 million through excessive freight rates and which railed against “the extortion practised by its favorite partner in spoil, the grain elevator system.”

The hatred of the railway at the turn of the century was pathological. Newspapers controlled by the
CPR
– and there were several – tried to deny any connection with it. Politicians subsidized by the
CPR
– and there were many – pretended they had nothing to do with it. As Clifford Sifton wrote to a Winnipeg supporter: “Just fancy yourself in the middle of an election campaign having the charge made on the platform that your candidate was an employee of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The probability is that he would lose his deposit.”

The antipathy toward the
CPR
monopoly brought about demands for competing lines. That, in turn, brought about the astonishing and costly railway expansion that touched off the great Western land boom of 1911–13 and led to the subsequent financial collapse. It also helped to radicalize the West. Such newspapers as the
Herald
in Calgary and the
Tribune
in Winnipeg repeatedly called for public ownership. Thomas Greenway, Premier of Manitoba, said bluntly in 1899: “…  if we cannot get the railway companies to be reasonable, we will build the railroads ourselves and the benefit will come to the people.…” His successor, Rodmond Roblin, took up the cry.

But the
CPR
was also the symbol of the West’s quasi-colonial status. The Pacific railway and the protective tariff had been the foundations of John A. Macdonald’s National Policy. Was there any real difference,
Westerners asked, between the prairie region and any other half-developed country ripe for exploitation? Imperial forces from the East had bartered away prime prairie land to get the railway built. And the railway had been built to enrich the East: to bring out settlers who would work the land cheaply, thus keeping costs down, to open up a new field for Eastern investors, and to create another domestic market for Eastern manufacturers who, propped up by the tariff, could charge what they wanted.

In this atmosphere, farmers’ organizations flourished like spring wheat. The British brought to the West the traditions of the trade unions, the co-operative movement, and the Labour party; the Americans brought the experience of agrarian populism that had launched the Progressive Movement. By 1909, the two Grain Growers’ Associations in Saskatchewan and Alberta and the recently formed United Farmers of Alberta were speaking with a single voice through the pages of the
Grain Growers’ Guide
, the most radical publication in the West and the only one the farmers trusted.

The
Guide
demanded the end of Eastern protectionism; government control of grain elevators, transportation, and meat packing; and the construction of a railway that would carry grain to a saltwater port on Hudson Bay. It could be inflammatory. Here is one of its leading contributors, J.E. Stevenson, attacking the structure of Canadian economic life: “It corrupts our political system, our political system corrupts and degrades the public administration, and the corroding influence extends to the social system and business life until the disease permeates the whole community.” In a later era such sentiments would be considered dangerously socialistic or even communistic, but on the prairies in 1910 they reflected the view of the farming class to which the
Guide
catered.

Side by side with this movement for agrarian reform – a movement that was in many of its aspects continent-wide – marched the Social Gospel of such unorthodox Protestant churchmen as J.S. Woodsworth and Dr. Salem Bland in Winnipeg. Both believed in the “applied Christianity” of the trade unions, the grain growers, and the co-operative movement. Bland looked like an Old Testament prophet, but his views were in advance of his time. It was, he declared, the Christian duty of all farmers to get behind these movements in the “real and bitter war between capital and labour.” As for Woodsworth, he wrote a regular weekly column for the
Guide
entitled “Sermons for the Unsatisfied.”

Revolution, albeit a peaceful one, so the
Guide
believed, was the key to the future stability of Canada, revolution that would “shake Canada to its very foundations.” The Laurier government – indeed all government – was seen to be riddled with graft, bribery, and corruption. Even John Dafoe, no stranger to back-room Liberal politics, was dismayed at the way votes were bought and sold in Manitoba. He told Clifford Sifton as early as 1903 that the loosening of party ties on the prairies was contributing to the corruption. Since the voters were now convinced there was no difference between the two parties and that all politicians were on the make, they thought they might as well make something too. “Therefore they sell themselves.”

Western farm leaders, like the Christian progressives, were sickened by the political opportunism of both parties, but for many years they shied away from launching a new political movement. The experience of the populists south of the border wasn’t encouraging; they hadn’t made much political headway in a two-party system. Actually, the West didn’t really want a two-party system, certainly not at the provincial level. It was like an emerging nation that has shaken off the Imperial yoke and is determined to rally under one united political force. The real enemy was Ottawa; then why should Westerners divide among themselves when their interests were identical? The West was too young to organize parties along class lines; there wasn’t a privileged class or an exploited class. The old North West Council had operated more like a municipal council without traditional parties; Frederick Haultain, the Territorial premier, had been strongly against that kind of division. And the day was coming when Alberta, the most restless and extreme of the three provinces, would, in effect, reject it too. After 1921, the province would be governed successively by three powerful political movements, each with a majority so overwhelming as to make the province a one-party state. It was no coincidence that Alberta, the prairie province farthest from Ottawa, also had the lowest proportion of Eastern Canadian settlers in its heavily British and American mix.

At the federal level, however, the two-party system could not be shaken. The
Grain Growers’ Guide
was convinced the farmers would have to become politicized. It took the Reciprocity election of 1911 to achieve that.

The farmers wanted free trade, or something close to it. For one thing, if the Eastern manufacturers were forced to compete with the Americans on an equal basis, prices of farm equipment would drop. But the Liberals, in spite of their traditional free trade philosophy, had not dared to tamper with the National Policy; too many powerful
Eastern commercial interests supported it. Now, with his party growing tired in office and racked by scandals, Laurier needed an issue. The Americans, in a startling right-about-face, were offering virtual free access to their markets for Canadian primary products in exchange for tariff reduction. In his tour across the prairies in 1910, the Prime Minister had been impressed by the grain growers’ arguments. The so-called “siege of Ottawa” followed in December, with eight hundred farmers massed on Parliament Hill. Laurier decided to go to the country on the issue of reciprocal free trade.