Chapter 3

Cauldron of War

Around the world, all the while, the grim threat that Nazi Germany’s propaganda minister Josef Goebbels glorified as “total war” had been searing people for three years.

Yet in rural New Brunswick, six-year-old “Kemp” Atkins, an American kid on summer holidays, faced a more immediate battle, struggling to pull his wagon over rough terrain around the family’s cottage at Robertson’s Point. The boy brightened with surprise to see reinforcements arrive, in the form of a Canadian soldier on a motorcycle.

The soldier was soon pulling the lad in his wooden Flyer and, when ready for something else, the pair played catch with a baseball.

“I immediately liked Dalton, because he gave me the attention a little boy likes to have,” Atkins later said about the bond forged that first summer morning. “He was fun!”

Camp’s biographer Geoffrey Stevens would describe that spark as the beginning of “a severe case of hero worship.” As the relationship between them strengthened over the years, Camp would help Atkins grow from “a snotty-nosed kid” into a political godfather for the Conservative Party.

“He encouraged me to reach beyond what I could do,” was how Atkins put it.

Dianne Axmith, who would come to work closely with both men through hard-fought election campaigns and in their Toronto advertising agency, confirmed the enduring strength of this 1942 summer’s link. Atkins, she confided, “had a loyalty to Dalton that almost went beyond the reasonable.”

Camp himself would one day quip, “If I’d become a socialist, Norman would have followed me into socialism.”

Dalton had not come all the way down to Grand Lake to play with a boy, however. He’d materialized at Robertson’s Point because he was yearning for the kid’s twenty-two-year-old sister. Camp’s campaign was for Linda Atkins, whom he’d fallen in love with at Acadia University before enlisting.

They were similar opposites. Camp was an Americanized Canadian who’d lived his formative years in the United States before returning to New Brunswick. The Atkins were American Canadians. Linda and Norman’s parents had been born in the Maritimes. They’d met at Acadia, too, then married. After the First World War, the father relocated with his family to New Jersey, but they retained their Canadian connections, and in 1937 built this Robertson’s Point cottage and returned each summer.

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The experience of living in the United States had profoundly shaped Dalton’s views on public affairs, sports, and life.

When he was a young boy, his father, Harold, landed work as projectionist for a theatre in Woodstock, New Brunswick, where the son began watching new release movies with riveted fascination. “The inevitable victory of good over evil,” Dalton remembered, “unfailingly stirred the heart and confirmed a world of heroic dimension.”

When Harold Camp caught religion, the newly ordained Baptist minister moved his family to the United States. After living awhile in New England, the Camps relocated to California. Mixing into American school life, Dalton was exposed to a far broader education than he’d received in New Brunswick. He began emulating his fellow students, who displayed confidence on the sports fields and charm in the dance halls. Virtues of the American way of life, formerly absorbed in a distant Canadian movie theatre, were now drummed into teenage Dalton at school and soaked up from his friends.

Harold Camp emerged as a powerful, popular, and well-paid preacher at major centres on the lucrative speaker’s circuit around the United States. People flocked to hear the charismatic clergyman’s inspiring sermons and his compelling oratory on transcending public issues.

As the elder Camp’s status rose, the family’s living standards soared. Dalton’s well-born mother enjoyed plenty of money and pursued its rewards. Aurilla Camp orchestrated the family’s relocations to successively bigger homes, until they finally landed in one of Oakland’s most exclusive neighbourhoods. In these formative years, Dalton became charmed by the good life, enjoying smart clothes and the latest phonograph records.

Harold Camp was also enthusiastic about sports, particularly boxing, and next thing Dalton knew, his dad had been appointed by the state Democrats to the California Boxing Commission. The clergyman’s interest in boxing went fist in glove with his fascination for another fighting sport, Democratic election campaigns. Harold befriended leading party members, like rising star Earl Warren, later California governor and, later still, U.S. Supreme Court chief justice.

Outspoken on world conditions, Harold went to Nazi Germany to see for himself how bad things were becoming for Jews. After returning stateside, his sense of urgency led him to become active in the World Peace Federation. Top Americans, including President Franklin Roosevelt, now asked Camp’s advice.

Like his father, Dalton, too, was sensitive to oppression and social injustice, particularly the raw injustice that he saw existing in America. “Growing up,” Dalton would later write, “I developed an instant sympathy for the underdog, for the put-upon, the unemployed, the disadvantaged, and the luckless.” He learned what “every white American child inevitably learned, which was to look without seeing, to hear without listening.” America was “not one nation, but two,” he observed, “one ‘indivisible,’ the other, invisible.” It was accepted as natural “that Negroes were porters or maids (where they were not entertainers), Japanese were gardeners, Chinese were cooks and laundrymen, Filipinos were houseboys, and Mexicans worked the fields.”

Dalton’s thinking about society based on such observations was given even sharper focus by his intensive, constant reading. Laid up for almost a year because of a foot infection, he initially listened to popular songs on his radio until his father sternly admonished his bed-ridden son to read books by important thinkers instead. His edict led Dalton to Walter Lippmann’s A Preface to Morals, next a biography of Abraham Lincoln, then more biographies of famous and heroic men, until he was fully launched into a private universe of serious reading — a portable space in which he would remain transported, engaged, and inspired the rest of his days.

These beliefs, values, attitudes, and memories — all contending within young Camp and becoming self-arranged as a distinct world view — would have held no significance for Canadians had Dalton not carried them back to Canada intact and applied them, for decades, at high levels in election campaigns, political party affairs, newspaper columns, broadcasting commentaries, and public policy development.

What triggered Dalton’s return, and transformed his life more than anything, was the blow fate delivered one August morning in 1937. His father fell dead in the prime of life at age forty-three. Dalton was devastated, first by the loss of his larger-than-life father, then by the changes that followed in rapid succession.

The steady flow of money underwriting the family’s high-rolling life dried up overnight. His mother, a widow with few prospects, decided to retreat “home” by train, with her boys Dalton and Red, to the quiet safety of the Maritimes. Her oldest son, Sandy, resolved to stay behind and make his own way.

A sensitive youth, just shy of seventeen, Dalton was overwhelmed by melancholy. “Everything I loved and held dear had been wrenched away,” he wrote. “Not only had I lost my father, friends, school, the family home, my room and the pleasures and comforts which had surrounded me, but, as well, I was leaving America for an unknown country where I would be a stranger.”

Camp did retain, and carried north with him, an instinctive passion for social justice, a deep distrust of surface appearances, and his on-going love affair with books about serious subjects. Back in Canada, he soon noticed, and lamented, how “there just weren’t any heroes. In America we had one a week, people like Lindberg.” Dalton craved someone to believe in.

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Living in New Brunswick meant adjusting to a society secured by familiar customs and unchallenged traditions. Staid Maritime provincialism presented a big hurdle for Dalton, still intoxicated by the dynamic nature of the United States.

He’d felt in synch with the hard-hitting rhythms of American public affairs. He’d enjoyed the direct, earthy humour of America’s people. While repelled by the cruelty and excesses of racism within American society, Dalton remained enthralled by America’s demanding arenas of baseball, football, journalism, and politics. At least he was still Canadian enough to be charmed by paradox: Dalton liked how Americans appeared to treat life as just a game, but played for keeps.

Realizing they were back in New Brunswick for good, restless Dalton and his cultured mother suffocated in Woodstock’s narrow society. They felt stymied by the limited scope of small-town intellectual curiosity. The place, Dalton observed in dismay, had few Jews but plenty of anti-Semites.

Dalton’s mother made the best plans she could for him, arranging enrolment in a private academy in the fall of 1937. It would offer better education than her well-read but rebellious son could get at Woodstock High. And sending him to a private school, just across the border in Maine, could help Aurilla maintain some semblance of a cherished station in society’s higher ranks.

Dalton lasted only two days. Then he progressed to another private school, Horton Academy in Wolfville, operated in affiliation with Nova Scotia’s Acadia University, a Baptist institution. But wherever he found himself, he did not fit in. An active state of rebellion had become Dalton Camp’s personal norm.

Despite his campaign of insurgency against all school rules, he managed to graduate in May 1939, just as world war appeared imminent. Before departing to New Brunswick for another Woodstock summer, he headed over to the registrar’s office at adjacent Acadia to sign up. Dalton had decided to return to Wolfville in the fall for university education. Acadia seemed the best option for someone lacking money. No tuition fee was charged to the son of a Baptist minister who declared interest in becoming one himself.

Back in Woodstock, strolling down a street that summer “on a still, airless afternoon,” Dalton heard German leader Adolf Hitler’s voice over the radio, “coming out from behind a screen door.” He paused in his tracks, listening to the announcer explain Hitler’s speech “and why people were cheering.” In Ottawa that fall, the House of Commons voted to declare war on Germany.

By September Dalton returned to Wolfville, his always awkward relationship with the world now troubled even more by uneasy feelings about the war. As campus life at Acadia picked up, Dalton’s moody thoughts were eclipsed by Linda Atkins. The attractive cheerleader, gymnastics star, and high-marks economics student dazzled him. While it was Linda’s innate qualities that made Dalton fall in love, her essential nature as an American woman further enhanced his rapture. Still aching for America’s pulse, he felt it flow through him every time he held her tight.

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Barely noticed by Dalton, whose thoughts divided up pretty much between Linda and a world at war, was a provincial election taking place over in New Brunswick.

The two-way battle between Liberals and Conservatives, with voting set for November 20, 1939, grew hotter when a Liberal Cabinet minister’s allegations about Conservatives engaging in corrupt fundraising caused a sensation. He’d accused the Tories of promising companies that a new Conservative government, if elected, would fix things for them, ranging from liquor sales to lower taxes. But these allegations about prospective future Tory corruption, launched just a week before voting, grew so intense and personal they began to backfire. Many New Brunswickers shrugged in commonsense disbelief. Where, after all, did Liberals get their campaign funds, if not from the same sources, using similar means?

When votes began to be counted on election night, the Conservatives took heart. As the night progressed, they watched their popular vote rising to 45 percent of all ballots cast. Riding-by-riding results were declared through the evening, with the Tories climbing back to nineteen seats from the mere five held after the 1935 election. Still, the party remained in Opposition in the forty-eight-member legislature, ten seats behind the Liberals.

Dalton, unmoved by parochial provincial politics and generally apolitical in the context of Canadian affairs, had not bothered to travel from Wolfville to Woodstock for an election that in no way interested him. Had he taken time from Acadia to vote, it would have been for the Liberals.

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What did pull at him, though, was the world darkened by a war whose outcome remained in gravest doubt.

Haunted by moral qualms about sitting safe while his friends offered up their lives as soldiers, he left Acadia in November 1941 and enlisted in the Canadian army. An equally persuasive factor was that Linda was no longer around. After graduating, she’d become a financial worker in the dark canyons of New York’s Wall Street, commuting daily from her parents’ home in New Jersey. With Linda gone, Dalton had no remaining pull to campus life.

Private Dalton Camp visited Robertson’s Point in 1942 to court Linda Atkins and, in the bargain, became a hero to her kid brother Norman.

From “Camp Utopia,” Dalton exchanged electrifying love letters with Linda. By the summer of 1942, this romantic relationship crackled more than ever. At Robertson’s Point, after Linda’s kid brother had gone to bed, they swam together and sat by a beach fire. They wanted to be together for life. It took another year, but in August 1943, Dalton snagged a four-day pass from the army and married Linda in Fredericton. They travelled by train to Saint John for a short honeymoon, staying in the city’s Admiral Beatty Hotel. Two days later, the groom returned to Camp Utopia, the bride to New Jersey.

Included in Linda’s dowry was the kid brother. Dalton Camp and Kempton Atkins, who’d bonded so well the summer before, were now “brothers,” in law. It was clear who would wield the influence in this relationship. Soldier Dalton was twenty-three, admiring schoolboy Kemp, only nine. Yet that very difference in age contributed to the caring interest each had in the other.

They were not rivals but good buddies.