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  • In Search of R.B. Bennett by P.B. Waite
  • David Frank (bio)
P.B. Waite. In Search of R.B. Bennett. McGill-Queen’s University Press. xxii, 370. $34.95

Assessments of prime ministers often run to extremes, and the case of Richard Bedford Bennett is one of them. In his own time he was ridiculed for his bombastic self-regard and his image as a cartoon capitalist. Views [End Page 414] have moderated since then, and Bennett has received credit for establishing institutions such as the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Corporation (the forerunner of the CBC) and the Bank of Canada, as well as for proposing cautious (but inadequate) initiatives in supporting relief, pensions, and public works. The distinguished historian P.B. Waite began the much more ambitious task of humanizing Bennett in a short book of lectures, The Loner (1992). Insofar as the sources allow, he has now given us a fulsome picture of a prime minister who had more sympathetic qualities and human frailties than most of his enemies or friends suspected.

In deference to James H. Gray’s R.B. Bennett: The Calgary Years (1991), Waite covers Bennett’s first fifty-seven years in a single chapter. By the time he took over the Conservative Party leadership in 1927, Bennett was a very rich man with more experience in the minutiae of business and law than in politics (but enough of the latter to have petitioned in 1918 for a Senate seat that he believed Robert Borden had promised him), but he was also, writes Waite, “more progressive than many in his party” and had “a Maritime penchant for reasonable, responsible social legislation.” A stri-dent sentimentalist, Bennett (b. 1870) came from straitened family circumstances in rural New Brunswick and loved to quote heroic verses from Tennyson or Kipling; he thought of himself as a muscular Methodist businessman with a responsibility for public service; he considered his size and weight to be signs of substance rather than symptoms of obesity and diabetes; most touching of all is the revelation that Bennett came late in life to love, a delay possibly caused by a physiological defect, and he suffered badly from the failed affair. The Great Depression put Bennett’s conflicting impulses to the test during his term as prime minister (1930–35). Always an anglophile with little understanding of French Canada and a nostalgic sense of the Maritimes as a good place to come from, Bennett was also an assertive Canadian nationalist in dealing with Great Britain on issues of imperial trade, so much so that Neville Chamberlain described him as “threatening and bullying in his manner, shifty and cunning in his methods.” Meanwhile, Bennett routinely warned unemployed workers to respect law and order or “pay the price for it”; most notoriously, in 1932 he threatened those who would undermine the stability of the state (and he included J.S. Woodsworth in that category) with “the iron heel of ruthlessness” – a term most likely drawn (my aside here) from the Duke of Wellington’s scraps with reformers in the 1830s. Although Bennett was apt to tell Canadians that they were too soft for the times and unaccustomed to hardship, he was also prepared to take emergency action to support corporations that were, in modern parlance, “too big to fail,” such as the Royal Bank and Canadian Pacific, and to endorse other forms of state intervention in the economy. Bennett’s term of office ended in division and confusion, especially after he took to radio to denounce the excesses of capitalism and call for reform, regulation, and higher taxes. After the rout [End Page 415] of 1935, Bennett held on until 1938 and then retired to Britain, establishing himself on a country estate next to his boyhood friend Lord Beaverbrook. Elevated to the peerage in 1941, he died in 1947 as Viscount Bennett of Hopewell, Calgary, and Mickleham, achieving a minor distinction as the only prime minister of this country not buried in Canada.

In this wonderfully readable biography by one of our finest stylists, the narrative of political management is enriched with delicious anecdotes and observations on the high politics, society, and culture of...

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