Richard Bedford Bennett

• Born: July 3, 1870
• Birthplace: Hopewell Hill, New Brunswick, Canada
• Died: June 26, 1947
• Place of death: Mickleham, Surrey, England

Bennett became prime minister of Canada just as the Great Depression entered its most severe phase. His various responses to the disaster failed to please voters, and he lost the following election.

Richard Bedford Bennett overcame the disadvantages of a poverty-stricken childhood to become a successful lawyer and a millionaire industrialist and reach the highest elective office of his country. The main influence on his childhood was his mother, a stern Wesleyan Methodist, who inculcated in him the values of hard work, diligence, self-denial, and charity.

At the age of sixteen, after attending Fredericton Normal School in New Brunswick, Bennett began teaching. In four years, he saved enough money to attend Dalhousie University Law School, Halifax. He then became junior partner in a law firm in Chatham. In 1897, seeing greater opportunity in the West, Bennett accepted an offer to join a Calgary law firm. He soon had a busy and profitable practice and joined his clients in successful business enterprises that made him the wealthiest of Canadian prime ministers.

Active in the Alberta Conservative Party, Bennett was elected to the territorial legislature in 1898, the Alberta provincial legislature in 1909, and the House of Commons in 1911. In 1916, he became head of the Canadian National Service Board. In 1920, he became minister of justice, only to be defeated in 1921 when the Conservatives lost the general election. By 1925, Bennett was back in the Commons, serving as minister of finance during the Conservatives’ three months in power in 1926.

Party Leader

When the leader of the Conservative Party resigned, the party’s national convention chose Bennett in October, 1927. In 1928, he divested himself of corporate directorships and blocks of stock that might raise conflict of interest questions.

As party leader Bennett headed the 1930 Conservative campaign, running against William Lyon Mackenzie King’s Liberals. He proved a most effective campaigner. His dynamic speaking style suited the newly useful medium of radio. Neither he nor King realized the significance of the economic downturn and expected prosperity to return shortly. However, where King proposed to continue his cautious fiscal policies, Bennett promised action. He insisted that raising tariffs would encourage Canadian manufacturing and create new jobs and that public works programs would reduce unemployment. Conservatives swept the July 28 election, winning 137 seats against 91 for the Liberals and 17 for all other parties.

Prime Minister of Canada

Bennett had promised action, and he acted immediately, calling a special session of the Canadian parliament for September, which in two weeks enacted record tariffs and appropriated $20 million for public works. In October, he was in London trying unsuccessfully to convince the British to grant Canada preferential treatment in the British market in return for preferences in Canada. At the 1932 Ottawa Conference, Bennett’s hard bargaining produced greater concessions for Canada than it gave Great Britain.

However, other countries also raised tariffs, and international trade declined sharply. Demand for Canada’s vital wheat and minerals exports fell. Wheat prices began declining during the late 1920’s and reached catastrophic levels just as drought afflicted the Prairie Provinces. Mines closed or laid off workers. Textile manufacturers profited under the Ottawa Agreements, but not workers—some mills paid as low as nine cents per hour. Unemployment, which stood at 300,000 when Bennett took office, reached 675,000 in 1932.

Bennett increased appropriations for public works. He began direct federal relief of individuals, establishing work camps in 1932 for unemployed single men, who received board and lodging and twenty cents per day for their labor. Fearing radical unrest, Bennett placed camps far from urban centers and put them under the control of the Department of National Defence. Aware that economic conditions encouraged agitation, Bennett increased undercover activities by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. His Department of Justice convicted nine top leaders of the Canadian Communist Party in 1931 for violating the law against unlawful assembly.

To encourage trade with the United States, Bennett began negotiating a reciprocity treaty in 1932 that was signed one month after he lost the 1935 election. A treaty to jointly build a St. Lawrence Seaway failed to be ratified in the U.S. Senate. Bennett also created the predecessor of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1932, preparing the way for an outstanding public radio and television network.

Bennett’s most productive year as prime minister was 1934. To aid farmers, parliament passed an agricultural marketing bill giving the government power to set prices and quotas. A farm credit bill provided bankruptcy protection, permitting farmers to avoid foreclosure and remain on their farms. A companies act aimed at preventing future price bubbles on the stock exchange was initiated. A central Bank of Canada was created to manage the currency, despite vigorous opposition by major banks.

Historians praise Bennett’s efforts in 1934, but the electorate seemed less impressed. Facing the expiration of the Canadian parliament’s five-year-term in 1935, Bennett decided on a major policy shift. In a January, 1935, radio broadcast, he proposed his New Deal, clearly modeled on that of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States. He called for a minimum wage, an eight-hour day, a forty-eight-hour work week, unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, and debtor relief. Bennett’s biographers believe that although his rhetoric had become increasingly radical, the program was consistent with his paternalistic personal and political attitudes. Others termed it hypocrisy, a deathbed conversion as he faced electoral defeat.

Bennett’s plan divided Conservatives, while King kept Liberals together by not taking any stand. He expected the Depression to defeat Bennett, and it did. The Liberals took 173 seats, the largest majority on record; Conservatives won 40 seats. However, Liberals received only 45 percent of the popular vote, about the same as 1930; the drop in support for Conservatives and the shift of 20 percent of the electorate to new radical parties created a rout of the Conservatives.

Bennett remained the Conservative leader until 1938 before retiring to Mickleham, Surrey, England. Lord Beaverbrook’s lobbying of Winston Churchill garnered Bennett the title Viscount Bennett of Mickleham and a seat in the House of Lords in 1941. Bennett died of a heart attack and was buried in Mickleham churchyard.

Impact

Rejected by the electorate in 1935, Bennett was widely considered a failure. He woefully underestimated the impact of the Depression and promised too much during the 1930 campaign. His claim that an increased tariff would end unemployment had no chance of succeeding. Bennett provided work and direct relief for the unemployed, but he did so grudgingly, failing to convince the public that he actually wanted to help. His work camps for unemployed single men closely resembled Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). The CCC paid thirty dollars a month, twenty-five dollars of which was sent home, giving the men the feeling they were doing something worthwhile for their families. Bennett’s derisory twenty cents a day had the opposite effect on morale. In June, 1935, inmates of the government camps on the West Coast began a protest march on Ottawa. Bennett ordered police to stop it; on July 1, a pitched battle broke out in Regina, Saskatchewan, that left a policeman and a marcher dead and dozens wounded.

Bennett’s biographers call him a partial success, arguing things could have been much worse. No democratic leader anywhere in the world was able to reduce unemployment substantially by 1935. He left a permanent mark on Canadian life with his effective agricultural relief program in 1934, starting the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and inaugurating the Bank of Canada, which proved invaluable during World War II. Bennett’s paternalistic belief in private charity belies his public image as a cold, arrogant corporation lawyer insulated from economic reality by his wealth and insensitive to the plight of the unemployed.

Bibliography

Allen, Ralph. Ordeal by Fire: Canada, 1910-1945. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1961. Readable narrative focusing on people and events; weak on policy issues.

Beaverbrook, Lord William Maxwell Aitken. Friends: Fifty Years of Intimate Personal Relations with Richard Bedford Bennett. London: Heinemann, 1959. Favorable description of Bennett’s personality and politics.

Bothwell, Robert. The Penguin History of Canada. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2006. Valuable for the general background of Bennett’s public life.

O’Brien, Anthony Patrick, and Judith A. McDonald. “Retreat from Protectionism: R. B. Bennett and the Movement to Freer Trade in Canada, 1930-1935.” Journal of Policy History 21, no. 4 (2009): 331-365. Critique of Bennett’s economic policy.

Watkins, Ernest. R. B. Bennett: A Biography. London: Secker and Warburg, 1963. Full-scale examination of Bennett’s life and career.

Wilbur, Richard. The Bennett Administration, 1930-1935. Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association. 1969. Brief and careful evaluation of Bennett’s policies.