The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (7 page)

This was far from the truth. As the British magazine
Nineteenth Century
reported late in the nineties, “the mass of the people do not pay enough attention to politics to care much what individual gets in.” Everybody, save for a small coterie of heelers and hacks, was far more concerned with clearing the land, ploughing the new fields, working a homestead, and making a living. The Machine got out the vote, but it was a five-dollar bill, a bottle of whiskey, or the promise of a job that brought an apathetic public to the polls.

But to the politicians and their hangers-on, each campaign was a life-and-death contest. To Sifton, the Conservatives were more than the Opposition; they were “the enemy.” At election time he talked of putting on his war paint, and he entered the lists as a battler who genuinely enjoyed a scrap. He asked for no quarter and gave none. He was subjected to the most vicious calumny, especially by Richardson, but he never complained and never sued. The
Tribune
called him “unsavory,” – “a grafter,” “a crook,” “a coward,” and “a thief.” Richardson charged that the
Free Press
was controlled by “financial grafters” and that the Department of the Interior was “a paradise for partisan hangers on … a bribery agency.” “
MR. SIFTON’S CROOKED CAREER LAID BARE
,” one of its headlines declared in 1902. During the federal election campaign of 1904, Richardson wrote that “no man in Canada now in public life has done more to smash ideals of public righteousness and promote public wrong doing and political corruption, to bedevil the public interests, to enslave the people and to debauch the politics of the country.…”

The
Free Press
was under Sifton’s orders not to attack Richardson personally except in its reports of political meetings. Instead, its job was to boost the Liberal party in general and the Minister of the Interior in particular.

MR. SIFTON DISPOSES
OF AIRY OPPONENT

Richardson Gets Severely Worsted at the Joint Meeting at Brandon-His Braggadocio and Abuse Fails – The Minister’s Clean-Cut, Facty Reply Scored Hard – Political Record of Opposition Candidate Exposed

This
Free Press
report of November 1, 1904, which described Richardson’s remarks as “tawdry and commonplace in comparison with the weighty, earnest utterances of the minister” was no more shameless than the report of the same meeting the same day in the
Tribune
:

GREAT TRIUMPH FOR
PUBLIC OWNERSHIP

Mr. Richardson, Candidate of the Great Cause, Carried the Mammoth Mass Meeting at Brandon – Mr. Sifton, Apologist for Private Corporations, Clearly Worsted in the Joint Debate

The accompanying story described Richardson’s speech as “a nail in the coffin of the Young Napoleon,” claimed that Brandon “failed to give the minister one spontaneous cheer,” and reported that “it was apparent at once that the sympathies of the great majority of the audience” were with Richardson.

With commendable optimism Richardson was forever announcing the complete disarray of the dark Siftonian forces aligned against him, only to be forced into an apologetic editorial the day after each election – as in the 1904 federal election, in which Richardson decided to take on Sifton in Brandon.

Tribune
news story,
November 2, 1904:
“The forces of the Sifton party are shattered.… The total rout of Sifton and his boodle gang is only a matter of hours.… Sifton is a gonner [
sic
].… That Richardson will be elected by the will of the people tomorrow is an indisputable fact.… Opinion in the Conservative and Independent ranks is … that Richardson will have a clear majority of 500.…”

But Sifton beat Richardson handily, and in an editorial on November 4, Richardson blandly pretended he had expected a Sifton win all along: “In view of all that Mr. Sifton had at stake in the election, The Tribune hardly expected that Mr. Richardson would defeat him. We hoped, however, a much closer run would have been made.…”

Richardson continued gamely to run for office and continued to be defeated. Thirteen years passed before he regained a seat in Parliament.

6
Master and servant

Sifton, the cynical pragmatist, realized that slanted news stories were far more effective than opinionated editorials. In 1901 he told his business manager, E.H. Macklin, that the government wasn’t hurt by opposition editorials nor much helped by friendly ones. “What actually injures the Government is some carefully concocted piece of alleged news.… The simple-minded farmer swallows it and a great many people who are not farmers and ought to know better. I am quite convinced however that the damage is done by the news columns and not by the editorial columns.…”

But he needed a strong voice, and the following year he hired a new editor in the person of John Wesley Dafoe, the big, dishevelled genius who would rise to become the most respected journalist in Canada. Like so many other Manitobans of that time, Dafoe had his roots in pioneer Ontario. There was always something of the backwoods boy about him. He was tall and thickset, with a shock of red hair, a shaggy moustache, and a long, flabby face with a nose to match. In his photographs he always seems to be peering downwards through his pince-nez at some obscure and mysterious document. As a youth he was something of a prodigy and something of a rebel. Although he had no more than a high school education, he was a schoolteacher at the age of fifteen. His parents were Conservative farmers and doctrinaire Methodists. But a single speech by the great Liberal orator Edward Blake turned Dafoe into a Grit; and as for fundamentalism, he shucked that off in his early years – it was, to him, “a damnable doctrine.”

As a token Anglican, a passionate Liberal, and a sometimes cynical journalist, Dafoe seemed to be at war with his upbringing, yet his philosophy was deeply influenced by his agrarian background. In the one instance in which he broke with his employer he took the Western farmers’ side against the Eastern industrialists.

He was never comfortable in what he called a “plug hat.” Even in his later years when he had achieved an awesome prestige he looked like a farmer – a “rube,” to use the expression of the day. That stood him in good stead when with no experience he got his first job on the
Montreal Star
. The teenaged tyro looked enough like a hick to be disguised as one in the newspaper’s exposé of a clothing store that was cheating country bumpkins by substituting cheap suits for expensive ones. In one year he rose to be the paper’s Ottawa correspondent. At
the age of nineteen the new Ottawa
Journal
hired him as editor, surely the youngest in history. It was too much for him. Three weeks later he bounced west to the
Free Press
, and there he learned his craft. In 1892, the Montreal
Herald
offered him its editorship and he grabbed it, flinging himself into the task, working fourteen hours a day, tripling the circulation in his first year, then moving to the companion
Weekly Star
, which he edited for six years, doubling
its
circulation from fifty thousand to one hundred thousand.

It did not seem to bother Dafoe, the Liberal convert, that he was working for a Tory organ. But Sifton knew he was a Liberal. “I do not think we can afford to let you work for the Tories any longer,” he told Dafoe, who seized the offer, moved back to Winnipeg, and proceeded to put Sifton’s stamp, and his own, on the one-time
CPR
organ. Richardson attacked his editorial style almost immediately as “a sort of cheap imitation, Macaulayese, stilted, tawdry and ranting.” But it was Dafoe’s style, not Richardson’s, that would influence a future generation of editorial writers. To Dafoe, Richardson was “a blatherskite.”

For decades, the name of Dafoe has had a godlike ring to young journalists. The myth, still believed in some quarters, was that the young editor was granted, almost from the outset, the ideal arrangement that every journalist seeks from the publisher but few attain-absolute independence and freedom to express opinion.
^*
The myth stems entirely from Dafoe’s celebrated break with his employer over the issue of reciprocity during the 1911 election. But for the first decade of his career, and indeed with that one exception for some time after, Dafoe was Sifton’s willing and compliant servant. He wrote what he was told.

In those early years, he was as much a party hack as an editor. He addressed political meetings, attended Liberal conventions, advised on patronage, wrote party pamphlets, and published propaganda for the Liberal government in general and Sifton’s department in particular. His job was to drive the Conservatives in Manitoba out of office, a task that took fifteen years. In 1903, for instance, Dafoe thought nothing of devoting more than half the paper to attacks on Rodmond Roblin, the Premier. Dafoe was as much a Liberal back-room boy as
some of Sifton’s Immigration Department employees – and with more power. The
Free Press
operated as a kind of clearing house for party patronage. And when Sifton gave an order, Dafoe jumped.

When, for example, R.S. Mullins, a prominent Manitoba Conservative, bolted the Tory ranks, Sifton seized the opportunity to exploit the defection in the
Free Press
. He did not leave the task to his editors; instead, he had a former Brandon crony prepare an interview, which he sent to Dafoe with specific instructions. The story was to be vetted, not by the newspaper, but by another old Sifton hand, J.D. Cameron, and then turned over to the paper. Dafoe was ordered to give it a great deal of prominence and to accompany the news story with an editorial. There was never any question but that Dafoe would go along with what many journalists would today consider front office meddling.

The same year – 1904 – Dafoe was ordered to write or have written a “first class” introduction to a special election edition that was to appear as a
Free Press
supplement. The introduction was to occupy half of the front page. The supplement itself was not written in the
Free Press
offices but in those of the Toronto
Globe
. Some seventy thousand were to be sent out. “My organizer tells me that the people, strange to say, read these sheets better than they do carefully prepared and well printed pamphlets,” Sifton told Dafoe, “so we will give them both.”

Sifton, who was not one to overestimate the intelligence of the electorate, saw his paper as a political tool. Dafoe, the loyal Grit, did not demur in this assessment. During election campaigns, Sifton’s people would prepare lists of doubtful voters who were to receive the
Free Press
free until voting day. The paper was also used as a cover for partisan political activity. In 1901, for instance, Sifton suggested that one of his organizers travel about the province, ostensibly as a
Free Press
reporter but actually to devote his time to visiting Orange lodges and proselytizing Protestant voters.

If Dafoe didn’t know Sifton’s views on a subject, he asked for them before committing an editorial to print. What, for instance, should be the
Free Press
policy on the Crow’s Nest Pass rail extension? What line should the paper take on the coming visit to Winnipeg of Israel Tarte, Minister of Public Works, who had little love for Sifton? When Dafoe prepared an editorial critical of the Governor General he sent a copy to his employer before printing it. Sifton “suggested” more than he ordered, but to Dafoe these suggestions were law. “I was glad to get your letter giving me your views on some of the subjects now attracting
public attention,” he wrote to Sifton in December 1902, adding, “I had already taken much the same ground on most of the points; and have since worked them over again.…”

Dafoe, of course, was more than a passive political servant dancing to Sifton’s tune. He had always been an activist, even under a Conservative publisher. When, at the outset of his editorship, a public outcry washed over the West because of the absence of enough freight cars to handle grain shipments, he saw in it a prime opportunity to erase the pro-
CPR
bias that had stained Sifton’s new organ. His articles on the subject, he told his employer, “were written very carefully to … serve notice on the railway officials that the Free Press was quite prepared to criticize them [and] to satisfy the farmers that the Free Press is quite free from railway control.”

At times Dafoe seems to have spent as much or more time working as a politician than as a journalist. When he discovered a new German language paper was about to be launched at Rosthern in the District of Saskatchewan, he managed to bring its editor at least part way into the Liberal camp and “to say a good word for the Liberal government in its record of settling the west.” To sweeten the deal, Dafoe urged Sifton to throw the paper some government business.

On another occasion, he prepared a blatantly pro-Liberal pamphlet to be distributed among Galician settlers containing photographs of all the Liberal candidates who had Galicians in their constituencies. “Under every cut,” he told Sifton, proudly, “we will put the name and then some legend as this –‘This is the Government Candidate for such and such a constituency, all Galetians
[sic]
should vote for him.’ We are also arranging to include a small map of western Canada showing the projected G.T.P. [Grand Trunk Pacific] line and branches in bold relief. Under it we will put some such words as these,–‘This is a railway the Liberal government intends to build. If you want this railway vote for the Liberal Candidates.’”

It is true that Sifton – after considerable argument (the two men wrangled for a week) – allowed Dafoe to go his own way during the 1911 election campaign. It was an odd reversal of roles. Sifton, the leading Westerner, was now an Eastern capitalist. Dafoe, whose family roots in Ontario went back for several generations, had become a fervent Westerner. Sifton moved in the same social and financial circles as the industrial power brokers of Ontario and Quebec who wanted to maintain the protective tariff on Eastern manufactured goods. Dafoe saw himself as the spokesman for the Western farmer,
who was tired of paying a premium on agricultural implements and other goods, which would be cheaper if the tariff were reduced or dropped.