Fiery Joe: The Maverick Who Lit Up the West by Kathleen Carlisle (review)

Joe Phelps arrived in Saskatchewan from Ontario in 1908, when he was nine years old. The Phelps family homesteaded near Wilkie, west of Saskatoon. George Phelps, his father, like thousands of settlers from Ontario and elsewhere, came to the West filled with determination and confident of success in this land of opportunity. Reality, however, soon set in. Those pioneers who survived on the land, and many did not, faced a hostile natural environment and sold the wheat they produced into a complex international market dominated by what one farm leader referred to as commercial pirates. It was not a life for the faint hearted.

Joe Phelps, the subject of this biography, was a part of the next generation of Saskatchewan farmers which faced this situation and attempted, with some success, to construct a social and economic system that would alleviate problems and provide a degree of security for farm families. From the 1920s to the 1960s, Phelps dedicated his life to this task. It led him in the 1920s to the Saskatchewan Grain Growers' Association, the Farmers' Union of Canada, the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, and the United Farmers of Canada (ufc). In the 1930s, he was involved in the creation of the Farmer-Labour Party and the Saskatchewan Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (ccf). By then Phelps clearly was a part of the left wing of the broader farm movement and had become what Seymour Martin Lipset in his study of the ccf would call an agrarian socialist.

Phelps was elected a ccf member of the provincial legislature in 1938 and was re-elected in 1944 as a part of the sweep that brought Tommy Douglas and the ccf to power. He served as Minister of Natural Resources in the Douglas government from 1944 to 1948 and was at the centre of several controversial measures involving ventures in public ownership and resource development in northern Saskatchewan, gaining the reputation of a fiery left-wing maverick. At least partly as a consequence, he was defeated in the 1948 provincial election. Phelps then turned back to the farm movement and built the Saskatchewan Farmers' Union (sfu) into a formidable force in the 1950s. In the years that followed, he played a leading role in the creation of the Western Development Museums in the province. To the end of his life, he remained devoted to collecting and preserving the farm machinery which had been so essential to the agricultural era in the West of which he had been a part.

Kathleen Carlisle's book is an interesting and well-written account of Joe Phelps' remarkable career. It is largely based on Phelps' papers, government records, interviews, and other unpublished material. The research in regard to Phelps' contentious years as Minister of Natural Resources is particularly impressive. The book adds to our knowledge of the Saskatchewan farm movement, the Saskatchewan ccf, and the early years of the Douglas government. What is especially clear is that Phelps' ideas and the policies he advocated were rooted in Saskatchewan's rural economy. Thus he saw the Wheat Pool, the ufc and sfu, socialism, the ccf, Crown Corporations, and the possibility of a publicly-owned oil industry as ways of providing farmers with a measure of security or of making what was still an overwhelmingly rural province less dependent on the vagaries of a wheat economy.

As the title of the book suggests, Carlisle places considerable emphasis on Phelps' colourful personality in her story. One cannot understand or appreciate Joe Phelps without doing so. Various words can be used to describe him, which help explain both his successes and failures: hard working, dedicated, relentless, fearless, impatient, impulsive and difficult. Two of my favorite anecdotes from the book, which tell much about Joe Phelps, are the following. While president of the Saskatchewan Farmers' Union in the 1950s, Phelps wrote and presented a number of briefs to the board of the Canadian Grain Commission. They were lengthy, detailed, and filled with criticism, as he...