The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (47 page)
Read The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 Online
Authors: Pierre Berton
Bennett brought party politics to the Territorial legislature. That was an Eastern idea, and Frederick Haultain, the Fort Macleod lawyer who was premier, denounced it. The last thing Haultain wanted was the kind of bitter party split that would break up the common front against the East. But Bennett wanted to introduce Eastern factionalism and finally succeeded. Haultain had never cared for him, even though they were fellow Conservatives.
Bennett quit his Territorial seat in 1900 to run in Calgary for the federal Conservatives. When he lost, he bounced back into Territorial politics, running in a by-election in 1901 but without Haultain’s support. The Premier backed C.A. Stuart, the secretary of the local Liberal party, used every tactic to prevent Bennett from re-entering North West politics, and at one memorable and riotous meeting in Calgary effectively muzzled his pugnacious opponent.
It is 11:30 on the evening of March 29, 1901, and we are rising to our feet with the shouting, gesticulating crowd in the cavernous Hull Opera House in Calgary, where the air is blue with cigar smoke and alive with the taunts and catcalls of embattled Liberals and Conservatives
.
Frederick Haultain stands on the thrust stage before the vast proscenium arch trying vainly to make himself heard. He has been speaking for the best part of two hours, attacking R.B. Bennett’s legislative program. Bennett keeps rising, attempting to seize the floor, but Haultain is adamant: it is his meeting and Stuart’s; they are determined to have the last word
.
But so is Bennett. He has refused to speak in the slot assigned him by Haultain – sandwiched in between his two opponents. He has insisted on speaking after the Premier so he can answer the attack. Now it begins to look as if he will not get the chance to speak at all. Haultain struggles to continue; groans, cheers, and hisses drown him out. Bennett is on his feet again; Haultain says he needs another fifteen minutes. The crowd won’t let him have it
.
The entire theatre is in a turmoil. Even the ladies in the dress circle join the pandemonium. We are all stamping our feet in unison, hissing, shouting, booing, whistling. Small boys rush up and down the aisles, contributing to the babel. One man tries to leap up on the platform and is forcibly ejected. Half the audience wants Haultain to continue; the other half wants to hear Bennett
.
Haultain announces he will hold the platform if necessary to “the grey hours of the morning.” More pandemonium! Unable to utter a word, the handsome premier takes his seat, coolly consults his notes, makes a pencilled addition here, strikes out a redundancy there, takes the occasional sip of water, refuses to relinquish the stage. The noise, echoing down from the vaulted ceiling, is cacophonie, but Haultain
still holds onto the platform, conversing with his chosen candidate, Stuart, and receiving deputations and delegations from the Dominion Land Surveyors, from chiefs of police, from ex-trustees of the irrigation districts
.
For more than an hour the bedlam continues. At one o’clock, with the crowd still in full cry, the Premier rises, puts on his overcoat, picks up his carpetbag, salutes the audience like a courtier, retires at last from the stage, and, accompanied by cheers and catcalls, vanishes into the night
.
Stuart leaps to his feet and tries to launch into a political speech. In the front row Bennett’s supporters begin to bawl, “We won’t go home until morning.” But it is clear that their champion will not be able to speak this night. Finally, Bennett himself stands up and saves the situation by calling on us all to sing “God Save the King.” At last, in the early hours of the morning, the meeting breaks up
.
Bennett won the seat in spite of Haultain’s opposition, or perhaps because of it. When the North West achieved self-government in 1905, he ran in the first Alberta election and found himself beaten by twenty-nine votes. It was clear to him why he had lost; Bob Edwards was his nemesis.
Edwards poked fun at Bennett because the firm of Lougheed and Bennett had the
CPR
’s retainer and, like most Westerners, Edwards hated the
CPR
. The
Eye Opener
campaigned strenuously for the elimination of level crossings, playing up accounts of collisions at these junctions and running photographs of the wreckage. In his most famous barb, Edwards pretended to have mixed up the captions under pictures of various
CPR
calamities, so that a pen-and-ink drawing of Bennett appeared with the caption “Another
CPR
Wreck.” But,
CPR
or no
CPR
, the mischievous Edwards must have seen in the fastidiously dressed and straight-laced Eastern lawyer an irresistible target:
“What,” thundered R.B. Bennett during the temperance address at Red Deer, “would be more terrible than to feel the wild desire for strong drink surging through every vein?” (The knowledge that you haven’t got the price.)
Bennett’s response to Edwards was heavy-handed and ineffective. He managed to have the sale of the
Eye Opener
banned on the
CPR
trains and refused Edwards the customary pass that every other newspaperman received. When that didn’t work, however, he abandoned
the frontal attack and settled on a more subtle approach from the flank.
He wanted to drag Edwards to lunch at his famous table in the Alberta Hotel, where half a dozen of Bennett’s legal and business associates regularly gathered. To this end he persuaded one of the company, Paddy Nolan, to reassure his old friend that such an invitation wouldn’t hurt him and might even help him. Bennett delivered the invitation in person, going so far as to abandon for one Sunday his own attendance at the Methodist church and insinuate himself onto Edwards’s bench at the Salvation Army citadel. In the face of this obvious effort, Edwards accepted the invitation.
Bennett, expansive, cordial, and clearly out to capture Edwards’s friendship and the
Eye Opener’s
support, asked the editor to say grace. A dreadful silence followed. At last Edwards spoke up in his quiet Scottish voice: “If you don’t mind, Mr. Chairman, I’d prefer the Good Lord didn’t know I was here.”
Bennett could turn on the charm when he wanted to, and he succeeded in slowly charming Edwards in the only effective way, by indulging in banter and telling stories, even at the expense of himself and of the
CPR
. Edwards, a maverick but also a Conservative, became a regular member of the Bennett table. In the 1911 federal election, he threw his support behind him. Bennett was elected to the House of Commons for Calgary and began his long march toward the prime ministership. Calgary remained his constituency throughout his long career.
Why, then, has Calgary rejected him? Calgary’s main street, Stephen Avenue, is named for a St. James Street Scot who rarely set foot in the city. There is a Burns block and a Bob Edwards luncheon. James Lougheed’s name is almost as well known as that of his grandson, Alberta’s premier. But there is no carefully restored Bennett home, since he had no home in Calgary and there is no Bennett building nor even a Bennett salon in the Palliser. Nor is there a Bennett Boulevard, only a tiny one-block crescent in a recent subdivision that may or may not commemorate the name of the West’s first prime minister. Why? The answer must be that in the eyes of most Calgarians, Richard Bedford Bennett, with his striped pants, his carefully nurtured paunch, and his tightfisted outlook on life did not fit the freewheeling, rough-riding image that Westerners had created for themselves. Bennett got the votes, certainly; but he never seemed to catch what the
Herald
called the Spirit of the West.
Chapter Ten
The Dark Side of Boosterism
1
The image makers
In the summer of 1913, the gifted young English poet Rupert Brooke travelled to Calgary from Edmonton in the company of two Westerners, one from each city. Hour after hour, to Brooke’s astonishment, the two men disputed the merits of their rival communities, not on the basis of culture or achievement, but on size and wealth. Land, the Calgarian boasted, had risen in value in his city from five dollars a front foot to three hundred dollars a front foot. But in Edmonton, his companion retorted, land had risen from three dollars to five hundred dollars; and Edmonton had gone from a population of thirty to forty thousand in just twenty years! To which the Calgarian responded that
his
city had gone from thirty to thirty thousand in just twelve years.
Finally, the two were prompted to ask the poet where he hailed from.
“I had to tell them,” Brooke recalled, “not without shame, that my town of Granchester, having numbered three hundred at the time of Julius Caesar’s landing, had risen rapidly to nearly four hundred by Doomsday Book but was now declined to three-fifty. They seemed perplexed and angry.”
By that time, the lusty optimism of the West had deteriorated into something more flamboyant but less admirable. Brooke found that Westerners were proud of their cities but having put down no roots didn’t have the same quiet affection for them that one found in the Old Country. Instead they loudly flaunted their love, displaying both the passion and the jealousy of adolescents.
“They boost. To boost is to commend outrageously. And each cries up his own city, both from pride, it would appear, and for profit.… It is imperative to praise Edmonton in Edmonton. But it is sudden death to praise it in Calgary.”
By 1910, with the price of land rising swiftly, prairie boosterism had become a religion to which all were required to submit. “Boosting Edson is like making love to a widow-you can’t overdo it,” was the slogan on one local weekly. Quiet pride didn’t count. Evangelism was the order of the day. The virtues of each community must be shouted from the housetops:
THE EYES OF THE WORLD ARE UPON REGINA,
THE CAPITAL AND WONDER CITY OF THIS MIGHTY PROVINCE
THE CITY OF DESTINY WHOSE GROWTH
CAN NO MORE BE STEMMED THAN THE WATERS OF THE SEA
The basic tenets of boosterism were that size meant progress and expansion brought wealth. The
Manitoba Free Press
gave expression to this philosophy as early as 1904 when it wrote that “the essential and paramount need of the West is population.” In 1904 that was “an article of faith with every man possessed of the most elementary knowledge of the conditions and needs of the west. It permits of no argument. It is an axiomatic truth.”
But whether it was an axiomatic truth by 1910, with every city ballooning in size, spilling out onto the bare plains, its municipal services straining to keep up with expansion and its immigrant population hived in slums, was a different matter.
The West was slogan mad. Every community gave itself a title, several making comparisons with larger American cities as if the very act of shouting the comparison aloud would make the dream come true. Thus, Winnipeg was always known as the Chicago of Canada. Calgary was the Banner City of the Last Great West. Tiny Prince Albert saw itself as the White Coal City of the West – the Gateway to Europe. (To the initiated, white coal meant energy, but by what magic was Prince Albert a gateway to anywhere?)
But Saskatoon outdid all others. It was the Minneapolis and St. Paul of the West, “the fastest growing city in the world,” “one of the most astounding modern miracles,” “the eight-year-old wonder of the British Empire,” “the Largest City in the World for its Age,” “the greatest example of town and city building in the world’s history.” The little community, founded by temperance zealots, had come a long way since the days of the Barr colonists but perhaps not quite as far as it boasted.
Saskatoon’s boosting techniques sprang from the fertile mind of Harold M. Weir, organizer of the Industrial League for the promotion of local enterprises. Weir was a cosmopolitan, born in Australia, reared in California, educated in England. He had studied art in France, circled the globe for English investors, and had a variety of business interests in the United States. His father, Colonel John Weir, president of the Nevada and Utah Mining and Smelting Company, went down with the
Titanic
in 1912. The following year, Harold Weir talked the citizens of Saskatoon into subscribing one million dollars for his Industrial League to promote the city and bring in new business.
Weir was magically persuasive: the sum was raised in just four and a half days, on paper at least.
To boosters like Weir, size was everything. “The more people, the more trade,” was the way the Winnipeg Board of Trade put it in 1906, and in 1906 that was certainly true. In a curious form of wishful thinking each city claimed it had a larger population than the statistics suggested.
The federal census figures were ever in dispute. As early as 1896, the city of Winnipeg insisted the official figures were wrong and demanded that the census be retaken. Calgary was never happy with the census takers. In 1907, after the census finally revealed that Edmonton and Calgary each had only about eleven thousand people, the
Herald
hinted darkly at Eastern skullduggery and suggested the count was out by at least eight thousand. “Shall a haphazard government census rob us of our own right?” the paper asked. So great was the pressure that the census was hastily revised to give Calgary fourteen thousand people and reduce Edmonton’s count by several hundred. Then, in 1909, Calgary boosters were driven to a new fury by government pamphlets that gave the city’s population as 1,700. This was clearly a misprint for 17,000, but Calgary was not mollified. The same pamphlets had given Edmonton 25,000, a statistic achieved by lumping in the people of Strathcona across the river. Calgarians insisted that
their
population was 30,000. Even in 1911 when the census showed Calgary with a population of 43,376, the civic boosters insisted that an accurate count would have given a still higher figure.