July 03, 2010 <Back to Index>
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Richard Bedford Bennett, 1st Viscount Bennett, PC, KC (July 3, 1870 – June 26, 1947) was a Canadian lawyer, businessman, politician, and philanthropist. He served as the 11th Prime Minister of Canada from August 7, 1930, to October 23, 1935, during the worst of the Great Depression years. Following his defeat as prime minister, Bennett moved to England, and was elevated to the House of Lords. R.B. Bennett was born on July 3, 1870, when his mother, Henrietta Stiles, was visiting at her parents' home in Hopewell Hill, New Brunswick, Canada. He grew up nearby at the home of his father, Henry John Bennett, at Hopewell Cape, the shire town of Albert County, then a town of 1,800 people. His father was descended from English ancestors who had emigrated to Connecticut in the 18th century. His great, great grandfather Bennett migrated from Connecticut to Nova Scotia c. 1765, before the American Revolution, taking advantage of lands vacated by the Acadians during the Great Upheaval. R.B. Bennett's family was poor, subsisting mainly on the produce of a
small farm. His early days inculcated a lifelong habit of thrift. The
driving force in his family was his mother. She was a Wesleyan Methodist and passed this faith and the Protestant ethic on
to her son. His principle ever after was: work as hard as you can, earn
all you can, save all you can, and then give all you can. Bennett's
father does not appear to have been a good provider for his family,
though the reason is unclear. He operated a general store for a while
and tried to develop some gypsum deposits. The
Bennetts had previously been a relatively prosperous family, operating
a shipyard in Hopewell Cape, but the change to steam-powered vessels in
the mid-1800s meant the gradual winding down of their business.
However, the household was a literate one, subscribing to three
newspapers. They were strong Conservatives; indeed one of the largest and last ships launched by the Bennett shipyard (in 1869) was the Sir John A. Macdonald. Educated in the local school, Bennett was a good student, but something of a loner. In addition to his Protestant faith, Bennett grew up with an abiding love of the British Empire, then at its apogee. By
the age of 15, Bennett had learned all that the local school could
teach him, and he enrolled in the New Brunswick Department of
Education's teacher training school in Fredericton,
getting his second class teaching certificate. He then taught the
elementary grades at a small village called Irishtown, just north of Moncton,
New Brunswick. He campaigned vigorously in the Conservative interest in
the 1887 federal election, at 17 years of age taking the floor at
public meetings in rural areas, well able to handle hecklers. He earned
the gratitude of the local candidate, Dr. R.C. Weldon, a co-founder of the Dalhousie Law School. In 1888 Bennett obtained his first-class teaching certificate, and received an appointment as principal of the 159-student Douglastown school.
Though only 18 years old, Bennett was a success. He was 6' tall and his
serious demeanour enabled him to control his pupils. Sundays were spent
across the Miramichi River in the larger community of Chatham, New Brunswick, where he attended the Methodist Church twice and taught Sunday School. He also joined the Chatham branch of the Conservative Party,
and spoke whenever he could. He became a polished speaker. During this
time he formed several female friendships, but none blossomed into
marriage. One
day, while Bennett was crossing the Miramichi on the ferry boat, a
well-dressed lad about nine years younger came over to him and struck
up a conversation. This was the beginning of an improbable but
important friendship with Max Aitken, later the industrialist and British press baron, Lord Beaverbrook.
The agnostic Aitken liked to tease the Methodist Bennett, whose fiery
temper contrasted with Aitken's ability to turn away wrath with a joke.
This friendship would become important to his success later in life, as
would his friendship with the Chatham lawyer, Lemuel J. Tweedie, a prominent Conservative politician. He began to study law with
Tweedie on weekends and during summer holidays. Another important
friendship was with the prominent Shirreff family of Chatham, the
father being High Sheriff of Northumberland County for 25 years. The son, Harry, joined the E.B. Eddy Company, a large pulp and paper industrial concern, and was transferred to Halifax. His sister moved there to study nursing, and soon Bennett joined them to study law at Dalhousie University.
Their friendship was renewed there, and became crucial to his later
life when Jennie Shirreff married the head of the Eddy Company. She
later made Bennett the lawyer for her extensive interests. Bennett started at Dalhousie University in
1890, graduating in 1893 with a law degree. He worked his way through
with a job as assistant in the library, being recommended by Dr. R.C.
Weldon. He was then a partner in the Chatham law firm of Tweedie and Bennett. Max Aitken (later known as Lord Beaverbrook) was his office boy, while articling as a lawyer, acting as a stringer for the Montreal Gazette, and selling life insurance. Aitken persuaded him to run for alderman in
the first Town Council of Chatham, and managed his campaign. Bennett
was elected by one vote, and was later furious with Aitken when he
heard all the promises he had made on Bennett's behalf. Despite
his election to the Chatham town council, Bennett's days in the town
were numbered. He was ambitious and saw that the small community was
too narrow a field for him. He was already negotiating with Sir James Lougheed to move to Calgary and become his law partner. Lougheed was Calgary's richest man and most successful lawyer. Bennett moved to Alberta in 1897. A lifelong bachelor and teetotaler (although Bennett was known by select associates to occasionally drink alcohol when the press was not around to observe this),
he led a rather lonely life in a hotel and later, in a boarding house.
For a while a younger brother roomed with him. He ate his noon meal on
workdays at the Alberta Hotel. Social life, such as it was, centered on
church. There was, however, no scandal attached to his personal life.
Bennett worked hard and gradually built up his legal practice. He was elected to the Legislative Assembly of the Northwest Territories in the 1898 general election,
representing the riding of West Calgary. He was re-elected to a second
term in office in 1902 as an Independent from the parties in the
Northwest Territories legislature. In 1905, when Alberta was carved out of the territories and made a province, Bennett became the first leader of the Alberta Conservative Party. In 1909, he won a seat in the provincial legislature, before switching to federal politics. Elected to the Canadian House of Commons in 1911, Bennett returned to the provincial scene to again lead the Alberta Tories in the 1913 provincial election, but kept his federal seat in Ottawa when his Tories failed to take power in the province; such practice was later forbidden. At age 44, he tried to enlist in the Canadian military once World War I broke out, but was turned down as being medically unfit. In 1916, Bennett was appointed director general of the National Service Board, which was in charge of identifying the number of potential recruits in the country. While Bennett supported the Conservatives, he opposed Prime Minister Robert Borden's proposal for a Union Government that
would include both Conservatives and Liberals, fearing that this would
ultimately hurt the Conservative Party. While he campaigned for
Conservative candidates in the 1917 federal election he did not stand for re-election himself. Nevertheless, Borden's successor, Arthur Meighen appointed Bennett Minister of Justice in his government, as it headed into the 1921 federal election in which both the government and Bennett were defeated. Bennett won the seat of Calgary West in the 1925 federal election and was returned to government as Minister of Finance in Meighen's short-lived government in 1926. The government was defeated in the 1926 federal election. Meighen stepped down as Tory leader, and Bennett became the party's leader in 1927 at the first Conservative leadership convention. As Opposition leader, Bennett faced off against the more experienced Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King in
Commons debates, and took some time to acquire enough experience to
hold his own with King. In 1930, King blundered badly when he made
overly partisan statements in response to criticism over King's
handling of the economic downturn, which was hitting Canada very hard.
King's worst error was in stating that he "would not give Tory
provincial governments a five-cent piece!" This serious mistake, which
drew wide press coverage, gave Bennett his needed opening to attack
King, which he did successfully in the election campaign which followed. By defeating William Lyon Mackenzie King in the 1930 federal election, he had the misfortune of taking office during the Great Depression. Bennett tried to combat the depression by increasing trade within the British Empire and imposing tariffs for imports from outside the Empire, promising that his measures would blast Canadian
exports into world markets. His success was limited however, and his
own wealth (often openly displayed) and impersonal style alienated many
struggling Canadians. When his Imperial Preference policy
failed to generate the desired result, Bennett's government had no real
contingency plan. The party's pro-business and pro-banking inclinations
provided little relief to the millions of increasingly desperate and
agitated unemployed. Despite the economic crisis, Laissez-faire persisted
as the guiding economic principle of Conservative Party ideology.
Government relief to the unemployed was considered a disincentive to
individual initiative, and was therefore only granted in the most
minimal amounts and attached to work programs. An additional concern of
the federal government was that large numbers of disaffected unemployed
men concentrating in urban centres created a volatile situation. As an
"alternative to bloodshed on the streets," the stop-gap solution for
unemployment chosen by the Bennett government was to establish
military-run and -styled relief camps in remote areas throughout the
country, where single unemployed men toiled for twenty cents a day. Any
relief beyond this was left to provincial and municipal governments,
many of which were either insolvent or on the brink of bankruptcy, and
which railed against the inaction of other levels of government.
Partisan differences began to sharpen on the question of government
intervention in the economy, since lower levels of government were
largely in Liberal hands, and protest movements were beginning to send
their own parties into the political mainstream, notably the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and William Aberhart's Social Credit Party in Alberta.
Bennett hosted the 1932 Imperial Economic Conference in Ottawa;
this was the first time Canada had hosted the meetings. It was attended
by the leaders of the independent dominions of the British Empire
(which later became the Commonwealth of Nations).
Bennett dominated the meetings, which were ultimately unproductive, due
to the inability of leaders to agree on policies, mainly to combat the
economic woes dominating the world at the time. A
nickname that would stick with Bennett for the remainder of his
political career, "Iron Heel Bennett," came from a 1932 speech he gave
in Toronto that ironically, if unintentionally, alluded to Jack London's socialist novel: What
do they offer you in exchange for the present order? Socialism,
Communism, dictatorship. They are sowing the seeds of unrest
everywhere. Right in this city such propaganda is being carried on and
in the little out of the way places as well. And we know that
throughout Canada this propaganda is being put forward by organizations
from foreign lands that seek to destroy our institutions. And we ask
that every man and woman put the iron heel of ruthlessness against a
thing of that kind. A 2001 book by Quebec nationalist writer Normand Lester, Le Livre noir du Canada anglais (later translated as The Black Book of English Canada) accused Bennett of having a political affiliation with, and of having provided financial support to, fascist Quebec writer Adrien Arcand.
This is based on a series of letters sent to Bennett following his
election as Prime Minister by Arcand, his colleague Ménard and
two Conservative caucus members asking for financial support for
Arcand's antsemitic newspaper Le Goglu. The
book also claims that in a 1936 letter to Bennett, A.W. Reid, a
Conservative organizer, estimated that Conservative Party members gave
Arcand a total of $27,000 (the modern equivalent $359,284). Having
survived Section 98, and benefiting from the public sympathy wrought by
persecution, Communist Party members set out to organize workers in the
relief camps. Camp workers laboured on a variety of infrastructure
projects, including such things as municipal airports, roads, and park
facilities, along with a number of make-work schemes. Conditions in the
camps were abhorrent, not only because of the low pay, but the lack of
recreational facilities, isolation from family and friends, poor
quality food, and the use of military discipline, which made the camps feel like penal colonies. Communists thus had ample grounds on which to organize camp inmates. The Relief Camp Workers' Union was formed and affiliated with the Workers' Unity League,
the trade union umbrella of the Communist Party. Camp workers in BC
struck on April 4, 1935, and, after two months of protesting in
Vancouver, began the On-to-Ottawa Trek to bring their grievances to Bennett's doorstep. The Prime Minister and his Minister of Justice, Hugh Guthrie, treated the trek as an attempted insurrection, and ordered it to be stopped. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) halted the Trek in Regina on
July 1, 1935, by attacking a crowd of 3,000 strikers and their
supporters, resulting in two deaths and dozens of injured. All told,
Bennett's anti-Communist policy would not bode well for his political
career. Following the lead of President Roosevelt's New Deal in the United States, Bennett, under the advice of William Duncan Herridge, who was both Canada's ambassador to the United States and
Bennett's brother-in-law, the government eventually began to follow the
Americans' lead. In a series of five speeches to the nation in January
1935, Bennett introduced a Canadian version of the "New Deal,"
involving unprecedented public spending and federal intervention in the
economy. Progressive income taxation, a minimum wage, a maximum number of working hours per week, unemployment insurance, health insurance, an expanded pension programme, and grants to farmers were all included in the plan. In one of his addresses to the nation, Bennett said: Bennett's
conversion, however, was seen as too little too late, and he faced
criticism that his reforms either went too far, or did not go far
enough, including from one of his cabinet ministers H.H. Stevens, who bolted the government to form the Reconstruction Party of Canada. Some of the measures were alleged to have encroached on provincial jurisdictions laid out in Section 92 of the British North America Act. The courts, including the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, agreed and eventually struck down virtually all of Bennett's reforms. However, some of Bennett's initiatives, such as the Bank of Canada and the Canadian Wheat Board, remain in place to this day. Although
there was no unity among the motley political groups that constituted
Bennett's opposition, a consensus emerged that his handling of the
economic crisis was insufficient and inappropriate, even from
Conservative quarters. Bennett personally became a symbol of the
political failings underscoring the depression. Car owners, for
example, who could no longer afford gasoline, had horses pull their
vehicles, named them Bennett Buggies. Unity in his own administration suffered, notably by the defection of his Minister of Trade, Henry Herbert Stevens. Stevens left the Conservatives and formed the Reconstruction Party of Canada, after Bennett refused to implement Stevens' plan for drastic economic reform to deal with the economic crisis. The beneficiary of the overwhelming opposition during Bennett's tenure was the Liberal Party. The Tories were decimated in the October 1935 general election,
winning only 40 seats to 173 for Mackenzie King's Liberals. King's
government implemented its own moderate reforms, including the
replacement of relief camps with a scaled down provincial relief
project scheme, and the repeal of Section 98. Many of King's other
reforms continue today, including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the nationalized Bank of Canada,
versions of minimum wage, maximum hours of work, pension, and
unemployment insurance legislation. But ultimately, Canada mostly
pulled out of the depression not as a result of government programs,
but because of jobs created by the industrialization and onset of the Second World War. While
Bennett was, and is still, often criticized for lack of compassion for
the impoverished masses, he stayed up through many nights reading and
responding to personal letters from ordinary citizens asking for his
help, and often dipped into his personal fortune to send a five-dollar
bill to a starving family. The total amount he gave personally is
uncertain, although he personally estimated that between the years of
1927-37 he spent well over 2.3 million dollars. Bennett was a controlling owner of the E.B. Eddy match company, which was the largest safety match manufacturer in Canada, and he was
one of the richest Canadians at that time. Bennett helped put many
poor, struggling young men through university. Relative to the times he lived in, he was likely the wealthiest Canadian to become prime minister. Bennett
worked an exhausting schedule throughout his years as prime minister,
often more than 14 hours per day, and dominated his government, usually
holding several cabinet posts. He lived in a suite in the Chateau Laurier hotel, a short walk from Parliament Hill. The respected author Bruce Hutchison wrote
that had the economic times been more normal, Bennett would likely have
been regarded as a good, perhaps great, Canadian prime minister. Bennett was also a noted talent spotter. He took note of and encouraged the young Lester Pearson in
the early 1930s, and appointed Pearson to significant roles on two
major government inquiries: the 1931 Royal Commission on Grain Futures,
and the 1934 Royal Commission on Price Spreads. Bennett saw that
Pearson was recognized with an O.B.E. after he shone in that work, arranged a bonus of $1,800, and invited him to a London conference. Former Prime Minister John Turner, who as a child knew Bennett while he was prime minister, praised Bennett's promotion of Turner's economist mother to the highest civil service post held by a Canadian woman to that time. Richard Bennett retired to Britain in 1938, and, on June 12, 1941, became the first and only former Canadian Prime Minister to be elevated to the British House of Lords, as Viscount Bennett of Mickleham in the County of Surrey and of Calgary and Hopewell in the Dominion of Canada. He died after suffering a heart attack while taking a bath on June 26, 1947, at Mickleham. He was exactly one week shy of his 77th birthday. He is buried there in St. Michael's Churchyard, Mickleham.
He is the only former Prime Minister not buried in Canada. Unmarried,
Bennett was survived by nephews William Herridge, Jr., and Robert Coats
and by brother Ronald V. Bennett. Bennett was ranked #12 by a survey of Canadian historians out of the then 20 Prime Ministers of Canada through Jean Chrétien. The results of the survey were included in the book Prime Ministers: Ranking Canada's Leaders by J.L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer. |