Fire of Politics
In 1945, the war over and his army discharge papers in hand, Dalton signed up for the program giving veterans the university education most of them, himself included, never finished before enlisting. He and Linda moved to Fredericton, where he enrolled at the University of New Brunswick.
At university, he continued reading the works of great writers, and, in tandem, exercised his talent for written expression. Dalton was an instinctive writer, making intelligent sense of a chaotic world through ideas and imagery. Putting views about public issues into print proved to be the shy and rebellious man’s preferred method of outreach. By autumn 1946, as editor of UNB’s student newspaper, The Brunswickan, Dalton was in full flight. Using this weekly platform, he offered forthright commentaries on subjects of the day, opining on current events with profundity, wit, and clarity. Camp’s talent for engaging readers lay far beyond the ken of most student journalists.
One day, a sharp knock on the Camp’s apartment door startled him. Dalton was even more surprised, opening it, to find a gentleman introducing himself as Robert Tweedie, private secretary to New Brunswick’s premier. Tweedie had come, he explained, to invite the student editor to Ottawa. He was extending the invitation, he added, at the joint request of Premier John B. McNair and New Brunswick MP Frank Bridges, minister of fisheries in Prime Minister King’s Liberal Cabinet. Both men were impressed by Camp’s editorials.
Up to this point, Dalton’s interest in public affairs had not extended to politics’ earthy realities. He’d been content to observe from a higher plateau, where he could agonize over the human condition, sense history’s sweeping currents, and consider leadership as displayed in the actions of men like his father Harold, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill. It was time, the Liberal sages believed, for him to descend onto the plains of truer battle and experience the real work of politics.
As these things go, Dalton’s coming-of-age induction into Canadian public life was like a poor country kid getting his first automobile ride through big city streets in the front seat of a new Cadillac. Not only did he experience unaccustomed luxury travelling by train to the nation’s capital, but Camp was met at the station by “the first in an endless line of ubiquitous men described as executive assistants to the ministers,” shown his room in the Château Laurier with two beds, large overstuffed chairs, gleaming white-tiled bathroom, and a bottle of Scotch on the dresser. “It was clear that I had arrived,” he said, “both in Ottawa and somewhere — on some upper rung — of the Liberal ladder.”
Touching down at the epicentre of Canada’s political universe, the student, already on a veteran’s accelerated program of study, was now immersed in an additional crash course of special adult education. Up to now, Camp acknowledged, politics had been “a foreign country” to him, and politicians “distant, alien figures.” During his intensive visit with Liberal officialdom, Dalton encountered for the first time the human side of politicians.
From the House of Commons public gallery, looking down “on the gently lit, softly coloured chamber below,” Camp studied the orchestrated performances of elected representatives. At “burnished desks sat identical men, in charcoal greys and blacks and navy blues, drumming on their desks in unison, laughter rising in throats like a chorus.”
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Back in Fredericton, the Liberal Party’s newest recruit responded by doing what he enjoyed most — writing.
The New Brunswick party published a journal called Liberal Review, and in it Dalton K. Camp began a column under the title, “A Young Liberal Looks at Politics.” Apart from giving his ego a solid boost, the Liberal Review column confirmed for Dalton that the writing he most relished was not reporting news, but instead reflecting on events and commenting on what they forewarned — now as the writer of columns, someday as author, he envisaged, of books.
A close observer of detail, Dalton could paint with words the exquisite poetry of life’s touching moments and hard truths, free of cant, true to reality. Being sensitive and still feeling like an outsider, Camp observed with clarity and dispassion.
Dalton’s articles also expressed his rebellious edge. This gave his columns a seriousness that might have grated, had it not been for his talent in rendering criticism more palatable by the touching irony in his humour and the counterweight of his abiding humanism. He addressed public affairs with a trademark disdain for the banal. He taunted readers with portents about what lay ahead, as a consequence of failing to grapple with some current conundrum.
All the while in Ottawa, Cabinet minister Chubby Power, himself a resident critic of the Liberal government of which he was part, began reading, clipping, and underlining many of Camp’s Liberal Review columns.
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In August 1947, Prime Minister King appointed Milton Gregg, a highly decorated soldier of the Great War who’d become president of UNB, to his Cabinet as fisheries minister, to replace Frank Bridges who’d died suddenly in Ottawa from heart failure. King then called a by-election in York-Sunbury for October so the political novice, already in Cabinet, could get into the Commons.
At the UNB president’s invitation, Dalton and Linda joined Gregg for tea at his campus residence to discuss his campaign. Linda, impressed by this emerging dimension in her husband’s life, felt proud.
With his interest in politics now “broadened and deepened,” as he put it, Camp was eager to accept, a couple of days later, a Liberal organizer’s request to campaign all around York-Sunbury riding with Gregg before leaving for New York and journalism studies at Columbia University that fall. What Dalton was to bring to the old war hero’s campaign was the voice of a younger soldier looking to his future.
There was already deep support for Milton Gregg, out of respect for his courageous determination. During combat in France in 1917 he earned the Military Cross. The next year, his further “valiant leadership under fire” added a bar to the Cross. Then in the final weeks of the war, his conspicuous bravery in battle at Canal du Nord earned Gregg the highest military honour, the Victoria Cross. His outstanding valour prevented many casualties and enabled the Canadians’ war-ending advance to continue. Though Dalton held him in respectful admiration, even as a political novice he could see the distinguished soldier needed tips about campaigning.
In their initial outings, the candidate in no way resembled a powerful minister in the Government of Canada. Camp persuaded Gregg to change from his tramp-like dungarees to a suit, instinctively grasping the importance of image for someone seeking election. Dalton, to his own delight and that of others, displayed real skill in campaigning, too, not at shaking hands but at speaking from a platform. At their meetings, he’d follow Gregg’s folksy ramblings by speaking as a young veteran, hitting harder on the issues, scoring partisan points against the Tories.
The campaign had not yet ended, although another Liberal win seemed fairly certain, when Dalton and Linda departed for New York. In Manhattan that October he received a cordial telegram from Gregg, announcing his substantial win at the polls.
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So far, Camp’s introduction to ground-level politics had been on the federal level, though provincial politics held greater appeal because he found it “more interesting and vital.”
When completing his year at Columbia, which left him aspiring more than ever to a writer’s career, Dalton got an invitation from his Liberal pals to return to New Brunswick for the 1948 provincial election. Writing and politics were not, he reasoned, mutually exclusive. They might even be self-reinforcing.
In the campaign’s opening days, Dalton, who had been recruited because of his impressive 1947 performance with Milton Gregg, was asked to tour the province with the premier himself. John McNair was bright, articulate, and solidly entrenched in power. The more the young Liberal campaigner witnessed from this unique vantage point at the premier’s side, the more he could see how the Grits’ province-wide political operation ran with machine-like precision.
The premier, Dalton observed, had no separate headquarters for the election but conducted the entire campaign from his office at the legislature. Dalton was even more fascinated to discover that McNair had quietly imported two men from Toronto’s Walsh Advertising, a Grit agency, to handle all campaign publicity.
Although Camp’s early duties entailed touring with McNair as an organizer and helper, once the premier discovered the high calibre of some speech material Dalton drafted for him, the premier envisaged a more crucial role for his aide. He reassigned the talented wordsmith to help the Toronto admen, secreted in a suite at Fredericton’s Lord Beaverbrook Hotel, to ensure they got the true “Maritime understanding” of things.
Their Liberal campaign consisted entirely of newspaper advertisements. Camp studied how the Walsh men designed the ads, booked space in the dailies and weeklies, and arranged to get the best visibility for the most economic rates. He followed, for the rest of the campaign, how they wrote and re-wrote copy for the series of VOTE LIBERAL notices. He took a hand in it himself, discovering how to hover in a rarefied creative space until finding the perfect phrase to connect with voters who were aware of political realities yet aspired to something better.
On election night, of the fifty-two seats in New Brunswick’s assembly, the Liberals claimed all but five.
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A couple of months later, Dalton took another step up the Liberal ladder.
As one of New Brunswick’s most active and increasingly prominent Young Liberals, he’d become a voting delegate to the Ottawa convention selecting a successor to retiring Prime Minister King. Happily back in the capital again, Dalton and other Maritimers, including the Liberal premiers, were busy drafting policy resolutions when suddenly he was summoned out of the committee room to address the plenary session of delegates.
For the party strategists calling on him, Camp’s mission “as a Young Liberal” was to put an end, in public, to rumblings of impatient discontent from some of the party’s younger members. Dalton, with two others similarly summoned, heard the chairman saying, “I do not know what they wish to talk about, but when three or four men say they have something important to say to a convention of this kind, we should hear them.”
Finding those words “embarrassingly gratuitous, and almost completely false,” Dalton felt he was “on the end of a string looped around someone’s fingers, helplessly manipulated, obliged to respond without thought or calculation to the urgencies of unknown or unseen forces.” He looked over the vast audience, searching in vain for the revolt of the young he was called upon to quell. Yet speak he did, offering the most natural thing on his mind — a tribute to the brand of Liberalism practised in New Brunswick by the recently re-elected premier, John B. McNair.
After he finished, Prime Minister King, sitting on the stage behind him, shook Dalton’s hand and congratulated him on his message. The next day, the Montreal Star’s report would quote him as saying, “If you will not listen to the younger members of this party, then they will leave and join another party.” It was a speech in which Camp, speaking without any specific grievance against the Liberal Party and almost on automatic pilot, had given abstract voice to the natural rebelliousness that dwelt within him: Listen to me, okay? Take my views into account, or I’ll leave for another party.
The following days would give him more genuine cause for grievance. The Maritime delegations had come prepared to push for a better deal for their region, a part of Canada which routinely gave Liberals majority representation but which just as routinely was ignored by Liberal Ottawa on substantive issues that mattered. Camp had joined other true believers, working hard on resolutions which, if adopted as official Liberal policy, could change that. Delegates from Nova Scotia and PEI agreed with New Brunswick’s delegates on the strategy. Premier McNair would nominate Nova Scotia’s powerhouse premier, Angus L. Macdonald, as a candidate for the Liberal leadership. Premier McNair had a well-crafted speech ready to deliver, and so did Macdonald, who would make the Maritime case with force and eloquence before withdrawing from the race, his point made to the full convention of Canadian Liberals. That, they’d all reasoned, would prepare the way for approval of the Maritime resolutions.
Faced with opposition to Macdonald’s candidacy and pressure behind the scenes against their agenda, however, the Maritime delegation’s earlier unity disintegrated. Macdonald was not nominated. The two premiers folded and put away their carefully honed speeches. The resolutions never reached the floor for Liberal delegates to debate and approve.
“The fragile wall of resolve many of us had so laboriously improvised,” Dalton saw, “was easily breached by a numberless horde whose interests and ambitions lay with the new order. The deeper realities of politics left us exposed, armed with only good intentions.”
The business-like efficiency of the convention was not to be marred. The Liberal Party was now “a corporate dynasty,” he realized, “and its board of directors was not lacking in zeal for good corporate relations. No delegate felt himself pushed or driven, but gently directed by some benevolent guidance system, deflected in the mists of his confusion from the possibility of harmful collision with more powerful purpose and authority.”
The only challenger not derailed was Cabinet minister Charles G. Power, a leadership candidate wedded more to liberalism than to the party’s corporatism. He urged delegates, in a nomination speech Dalton eagerly absorbed, that “almost nothing can be accomplished unless we proceed vigorously along the lines of reforming, first, our electoral system; secondly, our parliamentary system; and thirdly, our administrative ministerial system; to make these more readily responsive to the will of the people.” He gave more details, with which Dalton heartily concurred: “There must be a complete and final disappearance from our electoral manners, customs and morals of wasteful, unnecessary, and often scandalously corrupt political expenditure.”
Dalton cast his ballot for “Chubby” Power, one of the fifty-six votes the western Canadian received as Louis St. Laurent coasted into the prime minister’s office with an 848-vote win in the first round of voting, as planned. Camp was unaware that, the year before, Power had avidly read, marked, and kept his article from the New Brunswick Liberal Review that included his own similar critique of the Liberal Party.
As the 1948 convention concluded, Camp marvelled at the efficiency of the Canadian Liberal Party, “its splendid imperturbability, the infallibility of both its fortune and its genius. The convention had been summoned to decide everything — to ratify the decision of the directors as to its management for the next decade — and to decide nothing (or as little as possible) and to demonstrate that there are ways to maintain fealty other than through commitment to a cause. It was a new politics of pragmatism made more compelling for its graceful power.”
Camp returned to New Brunswick with a changing view of politics.
“Somehow,” he reflected, he’d previously “had the notion that power was compassionate and sympathetic.” It had not been until encountering the machinations of power in the “dark, noisy, confused convention hall, and in the corridors and stuffy little rooms where groups of men gathered,” that he sensed power as being “a blind and omnipresent force” that was “indiscriminate and amoral.” He now understood that “men who wield it are also prisoners of it.”
He had yet to discover how his insight applied not only in Ottawa, on the upper rungs of power, but equally at all levels of political operations throughout the country.
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For the rest of the summer, Dalton floated in loose engagement with a small squad of Young Liberals recruited by the party’s provincial organizer.
Lacking instructions, they spent their time playing cards in the Liberal Party’s dusty, sloped-floor back office. The interlude, like a soldier’s rest time behind the front lines, gave Dalton space and time to wrestle “with a growing uneasiness about politics and with the New Brunswick Liberal organization.”
He’d come to know “Smiler” McFadgen, “who did for the political chiefs what they did not want to do themselves — the numberless, small, but cumulatively vital tasks of dispensing what is collected, for appropriate purposes and for maximum effect, among the party’s forces and elsewhere.” Dalton already had learned that while electoral victories are claimed by those whose names are on the ballots, their votes are accumulated at the polling stations “under the shrewd and watchful management of men like McFadgen, who adopt whatever means seem most likely to achieve the best results.”
Dalton accompanied Smiler along Fredericton’s main street, learning how he dispensed $2 bills to men “clustered on the corners, in their frayed Mackinaw or denim jackets, wool shirts open at the throat, the bottoms of their trousers tucked loosely into the tops of pink-soled, gum-rubber boots.” Smiler had “an honest, direct relationship with them all that was neither cunning nor cynical but, in a Calvinistic way, compassionate. He was the unofficial almsman of the Liberal Party.”
Between infrequent forays into the field and intense card games in the backroom, Dalton delved into the yellowing copies of old Synoptic Reports he found in the office, reading accounts from earlier sessions of the provincial assembly. He “marvelled at the elaborate, mysterious irrelevance of the New Brunswick legislature, the interminable hours of meaningless debate, and the dramatic, highly stylized interventions of McNair … his caustic wit and bitter irony, all directed at make-believe adversaries in a world of illusion.”
It was clear to Dalton that he was only putting in time, that nothing he did during the languid summer months of 1948 would affect the course of New Brunswick Liberalism before he took off for England where he’d been admitted to the London School of Economics on a Beaverbrook Overseas Scholarship. But already he’d seen too much of the Liberal machine to depart with quiescent equanimity. He’d concluded after this time in the Grits’ backshop that politics “was not for me.”
Politics was, he’d concluded, “much too dark and mysterious a business to fathom.” He’d come to think that being even a part of politics “deprived you of your balance … so that you walked in anxious fear of falling and developed hesitancy in speech, as though frankness would have your tongue.” All in all, Camp judged politicians to be “afflicted by some rare, obscure passion which they could neither understand nor consummate, doomed to lonely lives devoted to failing in the effort.” Lonely lives, devoted to failing.
He went to see John McNair at the legislature and, facing him across his large desk, told the New Brunswick premier that he had come to dislike politics. He was unable to list the reasons, but was bold enough to tell the Liberal leader that he’d even come to dislike his party, because “much of my experience in it had been, to my dismay, distasteful.”
After a long silence, the puzzled man told Dalton to enjoy the rest of the summer, profit from his year overseas, and that when he returned to New Brunswick, he might feel differently.
By the time Camp got back to the Liberal Party office to say farewell to his Young Liberal colleagues, he encountered the chief organizer, Don Cochrane, who was also a member of the legislature and vice-chairman of the province’s Power Commission, handing out their weekly paycheques. When he got to Dalton, there was none.
“It meant that I had been summarily and retroactively removed from the payroll of the Liberal Party.”
Dalton, already disenchanted with the Liberals, had now been humiliated before his pals by the Liberal’s chief organizer. He hitchhiked from Fredericton back to the Atkins’ family cottage. By the time he reached Robertson’s Point, the sun was low, its late August rays slanting across Grand Lake’s placid surface. He broke its mirror with a running dive, swam far underwater, and finally surfaced with a joyous splash, his baptism of purification complete.
His career in politics, he believed, was over. He was liberated, a free man.