Rogue Tory

by Denis Smith

  Despite his show of concern, Bennett eventually recognized his limited power, took the safe line of non-interference, and counselled Catholic Conservatives in Saskatchewan to shelter behind the barricades while letting the dirt fly, since it could result in a Conservative victory. The Klan would be neither formally embraced nor repudiated.75

  John Diefenbaker attended the Saskatoon convention as a delegate from Prince Albert and may have played a role in the removal of the name of one Catholic delegate, A.G. MacKinnon, from the official slate of nominees for the executive. According to Bryant, Diefenbaker typed the list of nominees from which MacKinnon’s name mysteriously disappeared, and the secretary of the nominating committee who dictated the names to Diefenbaker insisted that the change occurred – if at all – at the typing stage.76 Diefenbaker himself left no record of the events. But clearly, as one delegate wrote to Bennett, “it was considered inexpedient that any Catholic should hold office in the organization.”77

  As the popular tide swept with them, the Conservatives hoped for a provincial election during 1928. Gardiner held off, however, and instead tested the waters with a by-election in Arm River constituency in October. It became “the most vicious in Saskatchewan’s history.”78 The issues were already in the air, and all of them put the Liberal government on the defensive: French language teaching, an improper Catholic presence in public school classrooms, and corruption in the Liberal patronage system. Bryant added an anti-Semitic tinge to the package by charging that Harry Bronfman had paid off the Liberal Party to avoid prosecution on liquor smuggling charges. The Conservative candidate in Arm River was Stewart Adrain, a Regina lawyer and Grand Master of the Saskatchewan Orange Association.79

  Bryant dominated the Conservative campaign with his corruption charges, his accusations of a vast conspiracy to turn Saskatchewan into a French-speaking and Catholic province within ten years, and his open sympathy for the Ku Klux Klan. Party leader Anderson echoed Bryant with more restraint, while other Conservative leaders kept their distance and declined any role in the campaign. But Diefenbaker shared the stage with Bryant on several nights in late October.80

  On the last weekend of the campaign, Diefenbaker accepted Anderson’s request that he attend a Gardiner meeting in order to challenge “any statements of questionable truth.”81 When Diefenbaker repeatedly interrupted, Gardiner invited him to come to the platform to address the meeting. Diefenbaker told the audience that he wished to ask the premier “some questions in connection with education.” But he began with a disclaimer: “As it appears to be the custom for speakers in this campaign to indicate their religious beliefs, I hereby state that I am a Baptist and I am not a member of the Ku Klux Klan.” He then challenged the premier to state his position on “sectarian influences which we in the northern part of the province find pervading the entire education system.” In Wakaw, for example, he asserted that “nuns in religious garb teach in what is a public school and the crucifix is hung on the wall.” Diefenbaker spoke ominously of Gardiner’s recent travels in the east. “Do you know also where he went?” Clutching and quoting from a French language newspaper, Diefenbaker told the audience: “He went into Quebec province.” When Gardiner replied, he asked reporters to keep his remarks about the Wakaw case off the record for the sake of social harmony; for Diefenbaker, that became a cowardly evasion and a subject of ridicule.82 Whatever spirit of tolerance John Diefenbaker had claimed when he defended Boutin and Ethier in 1922 had disappeared later in the decade.

  On polling day in Arm River there was an extraordinary turnout of 91 percent. The Liberal Party won the by-election, but with a tiny margin of fifty-nine votes.83 For the Conservatives, the message was that excess would be rewarded. The 1929 campaign was under way. Bryant, Diefenbaker, and others maintained their attacks on the corruption and religious bias of the Gardiner regime, and they were joined by the fresh newspaper voice of the Conservative Party, the Regina Daily Star. Diefenbaker told an audience in North Battleford in November: “I do not believe in bigotry. I would not like to see the Conservative Party go into power on a religious question. I do not wish to hurt the religious feelings of any, but in the face of danger it is necessary to speak frankly.” It was no more fair, he suggested, for Protestant children to be forced into a school presided over by nuns and decorated with altars and crucifixes in every room than it would be to force Catholic children into a school “presided over by an Orangeman in regalia or a Klansman in a nightshirt.” Yet Protestants, he claimed, were being coerced in that way.84

  After a turbulent spring session of the legislature, the provincial election was at last called for June 6, 1929. The Liberal Party stood on its progressive record, while the Conservative and Progressive opposition emphasized the emotional issues of race, religion, language, and immigration familiar from Arm River. In a number of ridings Conservatives and Progressives made informal agreements not to nominate against each other. The Conservatives, especially, were confident that they could undermine the pluralist coalition that had sustained Liberal governments since 1905. Against this disturbing current of emotionalism the Liberal Party did little except to plead for tolerance.85

  In Prince Albert, Diefenbaker decided at the last possible moment to seek the provincial nomination. He defeated one of his mentors, Mayor Samuel Branion, in a contested meeting at the end of April. He faced the attorney general, T.C. Davis, in the campaign, and was himself promised the attorney generalship if he and the party won the election. Diefenbaker, like his leader, Anderson, denied any anti-Catholic sentiments, but his election literature called for a vote “for the Conservative candidate, J.G. Diefenbaker, if you believe in a public school free from sectarian influences.” Diefenbaker’s old legal competitor from Wakaw, C.S. Davis, his opponent’s brother, claimed that “Mr. Diefenbaker is hand in hand with the Ku Klux Klan, and if elected he would be directly answerable to it … it is only necessary to go into Mr. Diefenbaker’s committee rooms and you will find the heads among them there.” Diefenbaker did not respond to the charge.86 In his memoirs he noted the accusation, suggested that James Gardiner had raised the Klan from obscurity by his attacks upon it and thus had made it “a recognizable centre of opposition to his government and its policies,” and concluded that “everyone who opposed Gardiner, his policies, and the viciousness of his machine was tarred with the dirty brush of Klan fanaticism.” This was not an admission of fellow-travelling with the Klan, but it was something less than a denial. The record made that difficult.87 Whatever his private preferences might have been, Diefenbaker – like many other Saskatchewan Conservatives in 1929 – found himself tempted into an unspoken and unsavoury alliance by the prospect of victory. Diefenbaker succumbed.

  On election day there was a major realignment of the vote, as the Conservatives had hoped. Areas with high Catholic and European immigrant populations overwhelmingly returned Liberals, while the Conservatives made gains in regions of Protestant and Anglo-Scandinavian settlement. The Liberal Party lost 6 percent of the popular vote, while the Conservative Party gained 13 percent. Gardiner lost half his seats in the legislature. Anderson won twenty-four seats to Gardiner’s twenty-six, but five Progressives and six Independents held the balance of power. In Prince Albert T.C. Davis held his seat by several hundred votes against John Diefenbaker.88 Afterwards, Davis wrote privately that Diefenbaker’s “proper place would be as a third-rate vaudeville performer in a four-a-day vaudeville house.”89 For the moment, Gardiner retained power, but that was unlikely to last beyond the first meeting of the new legislature in September.

  SINCE HIS ARRIVAL IN PRINCE ALBERT IN THE SUMMER OF 1924, JOHN DIEFENBAKER had become more and more immersed in politics. Despite – perhaps partly because of – the indifferent economic state of the city in the mid-1920s, his legal practice grew steadily but slowly from its foundations in Wakaw. Much of his work involved minor civil and criminal matters, “a potpourri of disputes from a very fractious society,” in the words of Wilson and Wilson.90 Diefenbaker never a
ttracted major business clients in the city; bad debts, estates, minor thefts, assault, insurance claims, and slander were the firm’s mainstays. As he had learned in Wakaw, judicious publicity was useful to a criminal lawyer. In the age before television, criminal trials offered the newspapers a steady diet of sensation, and Diefenbaker was careful to encourage press coverage of his court cases.91

  In Wakaw, Diefenbaker maintained his office for five years after his departure, first in the hands of Alec Ehman, then Alexis Philion, and finally R.B. Godfrey, until it was closed in 1929. In Prince Albert, Frank C. Cousins joined the partnership in 1925. He died suddenly in June 1927 of a heart attack, “the victim,” Diefenbaker wrote, “of an attack of delayed shell shock.”92 For the next two years Diefenbaker ran the Prince Albert practice alone, until William G. Elder joined the firm in the autumn of 1929. From early 1927 Diefenbaker shared the office with his amiable but feckless brother, Elmer, who had taught school for a few years before drifting into the insurance business. Elmer performed routine chores for John, both business and political, while John treated him indulgently as a dependent child. That relationship would continue throughout Elmer’s life.93 Since his arrival in Prince Albert in 1924 John had lived an austere bachelor’s life in the Avenue Hotel; now the brothers took rooms in the Donaldson home, where they stayed for the next two years.94

  The law firm was located prominently on Central Avenue, upstairs in the red-brick Bank d’Hochelaga building. The strikingly erect young lawyer in his three-piece suits and black homburg was soon a familiar figure on the streets of the frontier town. So were his automobiles: at first the Maxwell, then a 1927 Chrysler Sedan, then a 1929 Chrysler 75. Diefenbaker maintained the various Masonic Lodge attachments he had made in Wakaw, with the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons (Scottish Rite), the Elks, the Loyal Orange Lodge, and later the Shriners. He became a director of the Prince Albert Canadian Club, the Kinsmen, the Prince Albert City Band, and a member of many other local societies. Although law and politics had made him a public figure, and his rhetorical skills were growing remarkable, Diefenbaker remained socially awkward and never penetrated the inner circles of local power. Partly, of course – but not entirely – that was a political matter. Until 1929 he was shut out of provincial rewards and frustrated by the dominance of the Davis family in public life. Not only did T.C. Davis manage legal patronage as attorney general of the province, but he owned the Prince Albert Herald and used it shamelessly for the promotion of Liberal causes. In the memoirs Diefenbaker suggested, with some exaggeration, that when he began practice in Prince Albert, the newspaper refused to use his name when reporting his cases.95

  Soon after arriving in Prince Albert, John met Emily Will, the daughter of a prominent local real estate agent, George Will. For several months they courted and friends began to assume that the couple would marry. But the courtship faded. John was still making his weekend trips to Saskatoon to stay with his parents, and there, apparently, he met Edna May Brower – perhaps through his brother, or perhaps crossing paths at the railway station. Edna’s family, like John’s, had homesteaded near Saskatoon, and after high school and normal school she had become a teacher, first in Rosetown and then at Mayfair school in Saskatoon. Edna had a long-term engagement with a Langham farmer and car dealer who was twenty years her senior, but by the summer of 1927 her interest was shifting to John Diefenbaker. Edna was slight, pretty, full of high spirits, outgoing, and had inherited a notable eye for fashion from her mother, Maren Brower. She enjoyed a busy social life in Saskatoon, and as her romance with the Prince Albert lawyer grew, acquaintances wondered what the attraction could be. “Whatever the reason, Edna’s photograph album, which is filled with pictures of herself and her many swains – a passing parade of young men with her in buggies, on horseback, beside airplanes, and in cars – suddenly begins to show pictures of only two people, herself and John, nuzzling, snuggling, swimming, laughing, picnicking. This pictorial record did not match the impression other people had of John as a cold, introverted loner.”96

  Even in the midst of courtship, Edna’s friends could not see the affectionate man that Edna saw. A teaching colleague, Molly Connell, visited John in Prince Albert with Edna in 1928 and recalled: “His eyes, they just bored right through you. They were like steel; hard eyes. There was never any tenderness or warmth about John Diefenbaker. I felt it then, but one does not say that to a good friend who may be in love with him.”97

  Edna was introduced to John’s parents, realized John’s dependence on his mother, and saw that Mary Diefenbaker was “a strong and rigid woman, single-minded in her possessiveness towards her son.” Edna was attracted to William Diefenbaker, whom she viewed as a victim of Mary’s harsh contempt. Mary could show little more than bare toleration for the young woman, “sometimes stilling the effervescence and enthusiasm that poured from John’s lady friend.” She extolled the brilliance of her son to Edna, and made clear that she expected always to retain John’s first loyalty.98

  Despite Mary’s thinly veiled hostility, Edna and John drew closer: two opposites attracting in mysterious and not-so-mysterious ways. They were young people in love, but they engaged also in the calculations of ambition. John told Edna of his political desires, of his awkwardness in personal relations, of the pain of defeat, of his wish to be prime minister. It was, he said, “more than a goal; it is my destiny.” She encouraged him, perhaps realizing this was a fate she could share.

  In her heart she knew that the John Diefenbaker she knew had no hope of becoming the prime minister of Canada: She was not so blindly in love that she could not see he lacked the essential qualities for a successful public figure, except for his driving ambition and his showmanship. But she knew that she was a good teacher, and that she and her family in the West and in Toronto, and all the family’s friends would help him. She had no illusions; her brothers were popular and building a name in sports circles (particularly in curling) and her oldest brother Edward was now a prominent eastern lawyer with many highly placed political and business friends.99

  By the summer of 1928 John and Edna were close enough for John to invite Edna to join him and his family on an auto trip to California. Little record of the vacation remains, beyond a postcard from Yellowstone Park, a photograph of John, Mary, and Edna, and John’s rankling memory of a traffic violation in California. Apparently William stayed behind in Saskatoon, while Elmer and his mother chaperoned the couple.100 Soon after their return, John and Edna began planning for a wedding, and Edna gave notice that she would give up her teaching job at Christmas.

  A few days after the Arm River by-election, Edna’s father, Chauncey Brower, died in Victoria, where he had gone with Edna’s mother and sister-in-law for comfort in the last stages of a long illness. Maren Brower took charge of the wedding arrangements and proposed that the couple should marry in Toronto from the home of Edna’s prosperous brother, Edward. For Edna that was an appealing prospect. Edward gave her a gift of $5000 to buy her dress and trousseau, and in the spring of 1929 he, his wife, Mabel, Maren, and Edna took off for New York City to outfit the bride. There she indulged herself in a wedding dress by the fashionable French couturier Lucien Lelong, an extensive wardrobe, and linen, towels, sterling silver, and Crown Derby china for her new home.101 While Edna devoted herself excitedly to preparations for the wedding, John stayed behind in Prince Albert to fight the provincial election campaign – a division of labour that suited both John’s temperament and the manners of the time.

  Just three weeks after his latest election defeat, John Diefenbaker and Edna Brower were married in Walmer Road Baptist Church in Toronto. A wedding announcement appeared in the Toronto papers.

  The bride, who was given in marriage by her brother, Mr. E.H. Brower, was dressed in a Lelong frock of white tulle over white satin, with a tight-fitting bodice and bouffant skirt, hat of tulle to match and silver brocade shoes. She carried a shower bouquet of Ophelia roses, orchids and lilies of the valley. After the ceremony a reception was h
eld at 34 Kilbarry Rd., the home of the bride’s brother. After a buffet lunch had been served, the bride and groom left for the west via boat, the bride wearing an ensemble of Madeline blue georgette with hat, shoes and bag to match and carrying a white fox fur. Mr. and Mrs. Diefenbaker will reside in Prince Albert, Sask., where Mr. Diefenbaker is well known in political circles.102

  Thus Diefenbaker, thrice defeated but “well known,” identified himself in the social columns as a politician rather than a criminal lawyer. For him, the Toronto wedding perhaps gave promise of an entrée into the Ontario world of power and influence in which his new brother-in-law moved – a world that had always beckoned but now seemed unexpectedly closer.103 Thanks to Edward and Mabel’s hospitality, John and Edna had a small taste of that in the days before the wedding.

  But above all John was in love, and the elixir worked wonders. Simma Holt describes the transformation as the wedding guests remembered it. “At the wedding reception they saw the stiff and stodgy John come out of his shell to laugh openly, even uproariously, at his bride’s antics and to produce brilliant, though often cutting comments. This was not the dull man they thought they had known or the family friends at the functions had heard about in gossip about Edna’s choice. He moved through the crowd, with Edna at his side, talking, joking, hugging her, praising her, seeming able to be gregarious with her. He even danced with her.”104 And before the newlyweds left on the boat, they visited Edward and Mabel’s son Ted, who was bedridden in hospital and later recalled the occasion with affection.105