Ferns and Ostry
There is a boundary between being frank and being rude, between plain speech and just plain crass. Bruce Hutchison’s candid biography of King walked the respectable side of the line, his Liberal credentials and his admiration for King as the great statesman keeping him safe. Two young radical academics, Harry Ferns and Bernard Ostry, offered their own candid biography of Mackenzie King in the mid-1950s but they did not fare as well. The publication of Ferns and Ostry’s The Age of Mackenzie King: Rise of the Leader led to a scandal in Parliament and claims and counter-claims of censorship by the government and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). If all publicity is good publicity, then this should have helped book sales. It didn’t. Partly, Ferns and Ostry suffered because their critique of King veered too far to the left. But it was also their youth and insouciant irreverence that made their perspective on King seem just a little too frank. In the mid-1950s, despite a growing appreciation for frankness and a waning support for the statesman ideal, the politics of deference retained a great deal of power. The age of Mackenzie King wasn’t quite over yet.1
Harry Ferns had a history with the Liberal establishment; indeed, if not for his outspoken nature, he might have become one of them. In the mid-1930s, like many of the brightest minds in Canada, Ferns took the civil-service entrance exams, finishing third in the country. When war broke out in 1939, he tried to enlist in the Army but was refused on medical grounds. Instead, he took up a position in External Affairs. From there, the prime minister cherry-picked the bright young man to come and work in the prime minister’s office.2
Harry Ferns did not fit in. He would never be someone to mould himself to his surroundings, to blend in. Ferns had grown up in the north end of Winnipeg, a boy from a poor Anglo-Saxon family in an immigrant neighbourhood where being Anglo-Saxon put you on the outside. From a young age, Ferns was already an odd kind of standout. He pulled himself up by hard and brilliant work. He scraped together the money to put himself through university in the midst of the Depression, an achievement of its own. After he got his BA, the next step for any ambitious colonial was to go abroad, perhaps to Oxbridge. He knew, though, that his lack of physical prowess meant he could never win a Rhodes scholarship. Instead he tried for an Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (IODE) scholarship, though here too he recognized the limits of his upbringing, travelling to Queen’s University for an MA because he considered the University of Manitoba not prestigious enough a location from which to win a scholarship. He won the IODE and went on to Cambridge where he ultimately earned a first, a rare distinction especially for Canadians.
The ship to England afforded the luxury of days spent in contemplation and conversation. It was in one such conversation that Ferns was won over to communism. Its material no-nonsense logic appealed to him. He had already been attracted to the newest trends in economic history in Canada. The works of Harold Innis and Frank Underhill took Canadian history out of the world of sentiment and morality, and explained Canada’s development as the result of trade and resources. In the mid-1930s, with the inevitable logic of capitalism so obviously frayed, Ferns made the move to a radical critique of the economic and social status quo. He later claimed that he never officially joined the Communist Party at Cambridge, but he actively organized other Commonwealth students in groups that critics would later call “fronts” for communism. They challenged the British government on international issues – calling for independence for India and for action against the fascists in the Spanish Civil war. In the early Cold War, that kind of politics would be called “premature anti-fascism.”
None of this seemed to matter to the Canadian government when Ferns returned to Canada to take up a position in External Affairs and then eventually in the prime minister’s office.3 Ferns worked, ultimately disconsolately, at the heart of Canadian power for several years. The word on him was that he didn’t have “good judgment.” This likely meant that he stuck by his principles, and spoke them loudly – not the kinds of attributes that push you up the civil-service hierarchy, certainly not in Mackenzie King’s government.
He went back to External Affairs in 1943, chewed up and spat out from King’s staff like many others. The next year, a conflict with Deputy Minister of External Affairs (and later Mackenzie King literary executor) Norman Robertson drove Ferns to resign altogether. He returned to academic life at United College Winnipeg where his contract was not renewed after two years. Moving to the University of Manitoba, he found that there, too, his academic colleagues could respect his intellect but not appreciate his political views or outspokenness. When workers at the Winnipeg Free Press went on strike in the late 1940s, he thrust himself into a venture to create a citizens’ newspaper. Ultimately, this is what pushed him out of academic life in that city. University boards of governors in the 1940s, a time when academic freedom was more a wish than a reality, did not respond well to academics on the left who publicly spoke their politics aloud.
Worse was to come for Ferns in 1949. He had applied for and won a job at the new Canadian Forces college, Royal Roads University, on Vancouver Island. Ferns had made all the arrangements to move his family and start his new job in the autumn of 1949. It was not to be. The letter arrived in August 1949. “The Department of National Defence has now indicated that your services are not acceptable.” The Civil Service Commission informed him that it had “no alternative but to delete your name from eligible list 69,891.”4
A more bureaucratic and less helpful letter would be hard to devise. It meant that Harry Ferns was not going to start work at Royal Roads the next month. One day he had a job, the next day he was unemployed. Ferns found it almost impossible to get an explanation as to why this might be the case. He wrote to the Civil Service Commission. He wrote to Brooke Claxton, the minister of national defence.5 No reply.
He had his suspicions. This was late 1949. The Cold War search for subversives within every area of life, whether in the government or in Hollywood, was well under way. If the American witch hunts drew more publicity, Canadian officials still carried out their own quieter mole hunt, and Ferns would have known that his sympathies created suspicions. Hadn’t he given a speech to the Canadian-Soviet Friendship Council as recently as 1947?
At this point, Ferns and his wife decided to move to England, to go back and finish his PhD and attempt to make his way in a country where he had once achieved so much. On their way out of the country, Ferns stopped in Ottawa to try his luck one last time – to get some redress for his poor treatment. It helped that he had connections, friends with whom he had served in the prime minister’s office and who now helped him get meetings with the relevant deputy ministers. He demanded to know why he had been fired, why the government had broken its contract, and he demanded compensation. The government gave no explanation, but it did ultimately opt to compensate Harry Ferns in the amount of $2,000, though only if he stayed silent. Needing the money, Ferns agreed, but not without a final retort. He would accept the money “as a measure of compensation for a gross breach of contract and for the anxiety and financial loss arising out of this.” As for the rest, he wrote, “I am content to leave the actions of Mr. Claxton and his associates in the Department of National Defence to history and their own consciences.”6
It’s perhaps not surprising that the sting of rejection stuck with Harry Ferns. Never quite fitting in, rarely of the right background to match those more privileged folk whose accomplishments were similar to his own, Ferns could sense, perhaps too readily, when someone did not show him the proper respect. Here was a clear situation where he suffered at the hands of those who didn’t know the true facts. The irony of Ferns’s treatment in Liberal Ottawa in these years is that he would ultimately turn out to be the exact opposite of a communist spy. In his later years, Ferns would become a right-wing ideologue, attacking the welfare state and acting as an intellectual avant-guard spokesman for Thatcherism in Britain. But in the early 1950s, when he turned to writing a biography of Mackenzie King, that transformation was in the future. Of only one thing was he then certain: he saw his book on Mackenzie King “as a blast on Joshua’s trumpet which will, I hope, bring down the walls of the Liberal Jericho.” Anticipating the response to his attack on the Liberal prime minister, he hoped that Liberal insiders like those he had battled in the prime minister’s office or those responsible for his last beating – people like Jack Pickersgill and Brooke Claxton and Norman Robertson – would live to “regret the day they kicked Henry Ferns out of his native country and branded him a red.”7
The idea for the biography came to him very soon after Mackenzie King died in July 1950. Ferns was in England completing his PhD thesis on Anglo-Argentinian relations and was about to take up a job at the University of Birmingham. He read the articles about the great statesman Mackenzie King and found them to be “sycophantic” and “drivelling guff.” Surely Canada had matured to the point where its leaders could withstand mature scrutiny. Surely there was room for a more critical and truthful account of political leadership, warts and all. Ferns’s ambitions resembled those of Bruce Hutchison. Ferns, though, was not a Liberal. Nor was he (yet) a Tory. His sense of the truth, of the real story of Mackenzie King and his power, owed more to Marx. At the time of King’s retirement in 1948, Ferns had written several articles in the left-leaning periodical Canadian Forum. He decided to embark on a more enduring book-length effort.8
How to do it, though? With young children, and a new job and a PhD to complete, how could he have the time or resources to pull it off? The answer was near at hand. His name was Bernard Ostry.
Bernie Ostry could charm a shoe. With his classic dark handsome features, his expensive suits, his sports car, and his fine art collection, he was not exactly a typical graduate student. Ostry had studied under Harry Ferns back at the University of Manitoba. In the early 1950s he had arrived in England to pursue a graduate degree at the London School of Economics. Ostry was a young, ambitious Jewish Canadian from Flin Flon, not exactly attributes that pushed one to the top of the social circle in the late 1940s. But his family had made a good deal of money, starting in the dry-goods business and later expanding into other investments. By the time that Ostry had arrived in London, he was already very well-to-do, investing in companies in his spare time, borrowing $10,000 dollars from his father for one particular venture, and occupying the post of vice-president in two holding companies that were meant to make the eventual transfer of money from father to son less subject to succession duties.9
Material prosperity, though, wasn’t what really mattered to Ostry. Above all, he wanted to “make it” socially and politically. He collected friends and connections just as he collected art, and he had excellent taste in both. He made himself well connected on the left of the Labour Party in early 1950s London. He even won himself a position as assistant to V.K. Krishna Menon when this stalwart of interwar socialist London became representative of the newly independent India at the United Nations.10
It was hard not to like Bernard Ostry. Women found him attractive. His correspondence in the early 1950s is littered with letters from admiring female acquaintances. The New York literary agent Julie Medlock (and publicist for Bertrand Russell), a friend of Ostry’s, wrote of him: “Your brief visits are like bolts of lightning. There you are – looking young, handsome, intelligent, debonair.” When the conservative journalist Patrick Nicholson interviewed Ostry for CBC radio, he introduced him thus: “All, especially the ladies, [will] be interested to know that in addition to a sharp intellect and a keen sense of humour the professor is blessed with a considerable personal charm.” Years later, on an episode of the CBC radio program “Cross Country Check-up,” the otherwise professional female host gushed and giggled as she and Ostry spoke to callers. Ostry just had that effect on people. Medlock said that, when Ostry was at the United Nations with Krishna Menon in the early 1950s, the word was that he was likely a future prime minister of Canada.11
For this to be true, Canada was going to have to change. For different reasons, Ferns and Ostry had little time for what they considered the stodgy cultural and political status quo of 1950s Canada. At the coronation of the new queen in 1953, they listened to the events on the radio, guffawing at the ludicrous costumes and pomposity on display. In Canada they saw a Liberal Party that dominated the nation and yet was led by old men with old ideas. Most of the senior cabinet ministers in St Laurent’s government hailed from the Mackenzie King era. They had only reluctantly shifted their laissez-faire liberalism to accommodate the Depression and war. Now Ostry connected himself to those on the left of the party, such as Paul Martin, or to those in the CCF, such as Tommy Douglas, Alastair Stewart, or the MP for North Winnipeg, James Bryson. He corresponded with Pierre Trudeau in Quebec, seeing in the Cité Libre editor the kind of man needed for a new Canada.
The letters friends wrote to Ferns and Ostry give some sense of the cultural malaise that they felt. Julie Medlock wrote from New York: “I am so out of sympathy with what is going on here – I literally cringe every time I hear a radio commercial, and the unconscious materialism of this society and its moral perversions are just things I can no longer live with.” Another friend wrote to Ferns saying how she was so looking forward to visiting with him in England. “We should have some long pleasant evenings of good conversation without the distraction of television. Everybody here is completely mesmerized by television. The art of conversation is completely and totally lost. Whenever one visits friends these days, the first thing one is handed is a drink, then the television set is turned on, and that’s the end of a promising evening. I’ve gotten to the point now where I can’t speak in more than two syllable words.” The historian W.L. Morton, certainly not a radical, complained of “the growing stodginess of Canadian life. The boom, the American crusade against Communism, the provincialism of a great and struggling country, the conformist disposition of our best minds … are stronger now than ever. Inevitably the demagoguery which results from the decay of intellectual and political principle is growing apace.” 12
The mix of resentment and dissatisfaction was complex, tied as it was to new technologies, the downside of prosperity, the complacency of the post-war boom, and the sense that something had to or should change in the political sphere. Ferns and Ostry determined to set one stone in motion by taking on the legacy of Mackenzie King, the man who seemed to have created Liberal Party fortunes in the twentieth century. They divided the job between them. Ferns was tied to Birmingham and his job and family. He would write the book itself. Ostry, with his money and ability to make connections, would head back to North America and do most of the research. He would scour collections to see what kinds of previously overlooked letters and documents could be found. Ostry would also befriend prominent men who might be willing to open their own private collections to him – Tories with no love for King like Arthur Meighen, and Liberals with a grievance (especially because of the conscription crisis), such as T.A. Crerar, Angus Macdonald, and Chubby Power. Even if King’s literary executors shut off access to King’s own documents, Ferns and Ostry might be able to recreate a good deal of King’s correspondence, and the key events in recent Canadian history, by other means. They kept their purpose relatively secret. Ostry was dispatched to Ottawa to see what kinds of documents were available. Together, he and Ferns hid their true intent, saying that Ostry was to be engaged upon a study of Canadian politics in the early twentieth century. That was vague enough not to raise suspicions but precise enough to get access to the right sorts of papers. For Ferns and Ostry weren’t so sure that their book would be welcomed in Canada.
It happened one day in January 1953. Bernard Ostry was going through the Wilfrid Laurier papers in the Public Archives in Ottawa, searching out references to Mackenzie King. When he left for lunch, the papers were on his desk; when he returned they weren’t there. Where did they go? The archives employees gave him a vague answer: the papers were no longer available.
Ostry went for advice to a friend of Ferns from his time in the prime minister’s office who suggested that Ostry visit Jack Pickersgill, the clerk of the Privy Council. Pickersgill was Canada’s top civil servant, the man who worked with cabinet to act as the voice between the political and administrative forms of government, and it wasn’t clear why he should have anything to say about access to the papers of a long-dead prime minister now housed in the Public Archives. Ostry suspected the worst but arranged an appointment. On meeting Pickersgill, he demanded to know why he was refused access to the papers of Wilfrid Laurier. He threatened to go to his MP and raise the issue of whether the clerk of the Privy Council was an appropriate person “to determine who should and who should not look at the Laurier Papers.” Pickersgill could give no adequate explanation. He responded with bureaucratic politeness, the kind that rarely leads to satisfaction. Ostry would not get an answer here. He left the office but when he got back to the archives, the Laurier Papers were once again, without any explanation, open for him to inspect.13
This incident reinforced in Ostry and Ferns a sense that there were forces out to get them. “I am gathering the impression very quickly that there is developing in Canada a King cult designed to prevent any effective, well documented reconsideration of his role in Canadian life,” Ferns wrote. The incident in January 1953 was the first of several. The archives lost track of certain papers they were supposed to send to Ostry in England; they didn’t accept that he had permission to view other papers; they first reported that they could copy some papers onto microfilm and then later, when Ostry had returned to England, stated that they couldn’t make copies. In each case there was a logical, if sometimes befuddled, explanation. It was especially awkward when Ostry was not sent papers because they had been removed by those working on the official biography of King. “What is the status of the Laurier House organization?” Ostry asked the chief archivist. “Can they come into the Archives and disorganize or organize material for their own purposes in a way which makes it difficult for a member of the public like myself to make use of public facilities?” 14
The chief archivist, W. Kaye Lamb, couldn’t adequately answer Ostry’s questions. How could he? The man in charge of the Public Archives, the man who made decisions about which papers were open, which ones could be consulted, was also one of Mackenzie King’s literary executors. Lamb no doubt thought he could play both roles successfully. He was an able, competent, and likely fair administrator. His own documents suggest that he saw Ostry as a too-assertive intrusion into the life of the archives, but also as a source of potential embarrassment and someone to be handled carefully. There is no direct evidence that there was any conspiracy to keep documents from Ostry.15 Nonetheless, Lamb’s dual status only reinforced the idea that official Ottawa was also Liberal Ottawa. It didn’t help that later in the year Jack Pickersgill was parachuted into a safe Newfoundland riding to join the Liberal government and the cabinet as secretary of state. He was widely rumoured to be a potential successor to Louis St Laurent and future prime minister. It was becoming a well-trod path – from the senior civil service into the Liberal cabinet – the same path that Lester Pearson and Mackenzie King had followed.
When it came to finding a publisher for their book, Ferns and Ostry thought that no Canadian firm would have the guts to take it on so they sent it to the British company Heinemann’s, which operated in Canada under the name of British Book Services. From the very beginning, Ostry and especially Ferns were fearful, almost paranoid, that Liberal interests would quash the book. One of King’s literary executors, Norman Robertson, had moved on to be Canadian high commissioner in London. Ferns interpreted this to mean that the King defenders had a man on the ground. A visit to the United Kingdom by Bruce Hutchison also had them wary. “Hutchison & the Liberals obviously have good connections over here and we don’t want them to start obstructing us.” This was only the beginning of Ferns’s worries. He found out that, when Heinemann’s sent their manuscript to assessors in the United Kingdom, at least one reader had begged off from reading the text, which Ferns interpreted as being due to political timidity: “It seems to me that these fellows are afraid to go out on a limb which they think may be sawn off.” Worse was yet to come. Alan Hill of Heinemann’s had sent a copy off to the firm’s Canadian branch. Ostry had specifically asked the publisher not to do this. “Now the manuscript has gone to Canada to be placed into the hands of god knows whom,” Ferns complained. “As things are now it looks like our book is going to be spread from one end of Canada to the other.”16
When the readers’ reports arrived, they confirmed Ferns’s and Ostry’s fears. The Canadian report, from Peggy Blackstock at British Books, found that the book “reflect[ed] an attitude of mind which seems to be a combination of the ‘pure Canada’ cult, which has been developing recent years, and the left-wing political economist who reduces society to strata, racial and pressure groups. It is anything but objective.” She was particularly offended by what she saw as derogatory comments about Canadians of Loyalist stock, the position of the governor general, and the state of parliamentary democracy. Hers was an Ontario Tory response – proud of Canada’s British traditions. In fact, Blackstock had no great love for Mackenzie King. She had supported her sister Judith Robinson in her attempt with Eugene Forsey and Jack Farthing to write a book about the British tradition in Canada and the way the Liberal Party was destroying it.17 Yet the manner in which Ferns and Ostry went about attacking King, and especially their lack of respect for British Canadian traditions, offended her.
Another report, which didn’t pick up on Blackstock’s Loyalist hurt, nonetheless took a political angle. It was this angle that would continue to appear in connection with the book. This reviewer found the book to have “much first class material and some vigorous if rather bitter passages of analysis.” But ultimately, the report said the book had two main faults. First, there was a “naïve and tiresome Marxist rhetoric … woven throughout the manuscript.” The reviewer felt that the authors’ “description of each of the many strikes in which Mackenzie King was involved reads like Daily Worker reporting.” Second, they displayed a “bitter animosity” toward Mackenzie King which “sadly mars a powerful and largely justified indictment of his shortcomings.” Some of King’s early ideas of labour relations, the reviewer suggested, were actually ahead of his time. If Ferns and Ostry did not give Mackenzie King credit for this, the reviewer warned, “the reader must feel ‘How can I trust them later on?’” Similarly, regarding a cursory account of another strike, the reviewer complained: “One gathers this incident does not fit into the picture of Mackenzie King as traitor to the working classes. We are therefore told no more about it and the authors rush on in search of other evidence with which to pillory the diabolical Mackenzie King.” 18
Their editor at Heinemann’s, Alan Hill, set to work on them and eventually managed to get them to agree to change the first four chapters of the book to make it more sympathetic to King. Ferns and Ostry thought that Hill had agreed, in turn, to get the book out by 1 July 1954. But 1 July would come and go, the first of several deadlines to pass with the book still not out. As the deadlines came and went, Ferns and Ostry became increasingly suspicious. They threatened to take the book elsewhere, at one point even raising the possibility of suing Heinemann’s. Hill somehow managed to mollify though not please them despite more delays. He insisted that the book be sent out to Canadian and English lawyers to check it for libel. Meanwhile, his Canadian office, notably in the person of Peggy Blackstock, kept being offended by the disrespectful tone of the book and called for more revisions.19
It’s unclear if anyone exerted pressure on Heinemann’s to delay the book, but the publisher was certainly being extremely cautious to cover itself before it went to print. For Ostry and especially Ferns, all of the delays and changes raised the spectre of political interference. Certainly, Ferns, having already suffered at the hands of those trying to ferret out radicals, was overly paranoid about any criticism of the book or its message. Writing in the context of Cold War anticommunism, in the stultifying atmosphere of post-war academia, he and Ostry couldn’t help but wonder if someone was trying to prevent this book from seeing the light of day.
Ferns and Ostry needed friends, important friends. This was Ostry’s job. He spent much of 1954 and 1955 visiting and corresponding with a range of political figures in what might be called the anti-Mackenzie King forces of 1950s Canada. These included prominent Tories like the journalist John Stevenson and the former prime minister and Mackenzie King nemesis Arthur Meighen. They also included senior English Canadian Liberals who had known King and who were, for various reasons of which the legacy of conscription was paramount, disaffected with Mackenzie King – Senator T.A. Crerar, Montreal Liberal A.K. Cameron, and Stuart Ralston (a judge and the son of the man King was seen to have betrayed during the conscription crisis, Colonel Ralston).
In part, of course, Ostry was digging up sources for further volumes of the biography. The current manuscript took King only up to 1919. But even more than sources, Ostry wanted credibility and connections. He was himself much more aligned with socialist thinkers and young CCFers. These weren’t the kind of friends who would get the book advertised. Prominent Tories and Liberals might do just that.
At several points in their difficult relationship with Heinmann’s, Ostry and Ferns considered trying to use these men to pressure the firm. When the book seemed to be bogged down in mid-1955 and there were suggestions of political interference, John Stevenson told Ostry: “I believe money could be found in Canada to finance [the book’s] publication.” “I talked to [a] prosperous friend, who loathed King, and he said that he would be willing to put up as much as $3000 in this good cause. Arthur Meighen would I feel sure give some money and could raise more.”20
Ostry played to the egos of men like Meighen and Crerar, who were aging, no longer quite in the thick of things, thinking as much about their place in history as about the present. Meighen especially still carried the grudges of lost battles. Ostry acted the role of keen young admirer. His money didn’t hurt either. He sent gifts – cigars for one, liquor for another – and remembered birthdays and anniversaries. He played up to their sense of history and duty, using a language of honour and chivalry that was wholly absent from his more flippant and jovial letters to closer, younger friends. Ostry visited the men on his travels in Canada in 1954 and 1955, following up with letters thanking them for their “kind hospitality” and fondly recalling the time they spent together – sitting down rye in hand and talking politics with the Liberal organizer A.K. Cameron, enjoying Meighen’s company in his home. Ostry did occasionally assert his own views. More often, though, he was a fawning admirer, noting just how unsurpassed each man’s knowledge was, and how valuable were their documents to the Canadian historical record.21
It was these men to whom Ostry turned in the summer and autumn of 1955 when it finally looked as if the book would be published. He had a grand publicity campaign planned but he need their help to pull it off. The first salvo was an article that he and Ferns wrote on Mackenzie King’s activities during the Great War that was published that summer in the Canadian Historical Review. This was an academic article in a staid academic journal. Even granting that there might have been greater public interest in Canadian history in these years, it still seems incredible that Ferns and Ostry would think to use this article as a way of generating publicity. And yet they did. And, in part, it worked. Articles appeared in the Winnipeg Tribune and the Vancouver Province.
The allegations in the article were serious. Ferns and Ostry painted King as a pro-American, anti-labour advocate, someone who stuck for too long to a position of neutrality in matters relating to the war. “He possessed neither consistency of understanding nor consistency of emotion in relation to that great political event,” they wrote. A friend reported that the article “fluttered the dovecotes in Ottawa & the copy in the Parliamentary Library was in great demand – Liberals reading it with anxiety – others with glee.” With more than a modest level of pluck, Ostry sent copies not only to friends and Tories but also to Bruce Hutchison, Paul Martin, Lester Pearson, and other Liberals.22
Ostry wanted controversy. Articles began to appear about the upcoming biography on Mackenzie King. The Conservatives’ Progress Report interviewed him and gave him top billing in its autumn 1955 issue. Ostry wasn’t entirely satisfied. He complained to Meighen that the Tory papers weren’t reporting nearly enough of the article’s revelations. “If the Conservative Party and its leading members in the profession of journalism fail to see the real political value in something like this article,” he complained, “we have reached a sorry state of affairs.” Meighen wrote back to console Ostry, saying that what he said was no doubt true. He had taken up the issue with the editor of the Globe and Mail and he told Ostry to be patient; when the book arrived, the Tory press would deliver.23
Despite the many delays and bickering between its authors, The Age of Mackenzie King did finally arrive in Canadian bookstores on 4 December 1955. Given the success of Bruce Hutchison’s book, the publishers had high hopes for this even more daring and candid biography. The Age of Mackenzie King was a different kind of book, certainly, but it, too, could find its place. A friend of Ostry’s wrote in late November to ask when the book was coming out. He may have been doing some friendly exaggerating when he said that “everybody’s been hanging around the bookstores waiting to grab the first copies,” but the book was certainly hotly anticipated. A Mackenzie King executor, and friend of Harry Ferns from his time in the prime minister’s office, Leonard Brockington, informed Ferns that “there is a great demand for [the book] in Ottawa. Grattan O’Leary [editor of the Ottawa Journal] told me a couple of days ago that [the Ottawa bookseller] Hope’s sold seventy in one afternoon.”24
The Age of Mackenzie King presented Canadians with a controversial version of Mackenzie King. Ferns and Ostry wanted to get to the truth of Mackenzie King, to give a version of King that went behind the myth the Liberals had created for him. Theirs was a work of demystification. They did this in a witty, sarcastic manner which was itself out of keeping with the stately volumes one expected from academic biography. The chapter titles conveyed their biting critique, each with its own double entendre: “Working on the Railroad Workers,” “For Hire,” “The Powerful and the Glory.” The main thrust of the book was to present King as someone who was an expert manipulator. They admitted that King had incredible skill and foresight. He had, they claimed, discovered the importance of class relations to Canadian politics before any other mainstream politician. He had recognized the changing landscape around him as he grew up and watched Canada become an industrial nation. They even provocatively compared him to Lenin, noting that both shared the same view that the class struggle was at the heart of a new version of politics in industrial capitalist societies.25
Mackenzie King, however, came to very different conclusions from Lenin as to what was to be done. Central to his position was the idea of conciliation, which he developed early in the century and then elaborated on in his book Industry and Humanity. He had trumpeted this idea successfully in his work for the new Department of Labour. When he became the minister of labour, relied on it as his touchstone during his time with the Rockefellers, and used it as a key part of his ascension to power in 1919 at the Liberal leadership convention, as a new man with fresh but safe answers for a modern age. Ferns and Ostry pointed to all of the holes in King’s application of what they saw as his muddled ideas. They showed how, in strike after strike where King was called in to conciliate, he actually worked against the real interests of working people. His attempt to find the soft compromise sapped the power of workers whose only real power came from the threat of industrial conflict. Similarly, they pointed out that, when King was called in to deal with the “Oriental problem” in British Columbia, his high-sounding language of compromise actually masked and justified racist immigration policies.
A friend wrote to Ostry in January 1956 to say that the book had “really jolted many Canadians. It is one of the most discussed books since its appearance on the bookstands. It has shocked many people who have even remotely been associated with King. Many people don’t deny the truth of its portrayal of King but the reaction seems to be disapproval that these truths are written for everyone to read.”26 In other words, it wasn’t so much what they said as the fact that they published the book at all. This is exactly the kind of book about King that Liberals had tried to suppress while King was still alive. Moreover, it was also written with a Lytton Strachey–like irreverence that was out-of-character for Canadian publishing until this point.
One common response was to say that the book wasn’t even a biography at all. It didn’t really get to the heart of its subject, as had, for example, the other great biography published that year – the historian Donald Creighton’s biography of John A. Macdonald. In an unparalleled literary style, Creighton brought Macdonald to life as few biographers have ever done for any Canadian subject. He tried to capture Macdonald the man and the politician. There were certainly gaps in his approach, and the biography had a pronounced political angle to it, but the bias wasn’t obvious on the surface. Against this, and dealing with a more recent period in which many of the protagonists were still alive and the partisan lines still clearly drawn, Ferns and Ostry didn’t stand a chance.27
The review by Charles Bruce, republished in more than a dozen papers across the country, was typical. He argued that the book “loses impact, for the reader interested in objective fact, by reason of the sarcasm with which the authors have seen fit to treat not only their central subject but nearly everyone else.” Alan Morley in the Vancouver Province complained that “in the five years since his [Mackenzie King’s] death he has been ‘debunked’ more ruthlessly than has any modern leader of comparable stature.” This, it seemed, is what Ferns and Ostry were offering – more criticism and from a radical-left perspective. “While they nowhere state the standards against which they judge Mr. King,” Morley went on, “what they do regard as an unchallengeable moral code is nothing more or less than the economic-political dogma of the Socialist intellectuals of the British Labor Party.” Canadian Business agreed, noting that the authors “are apt to do more to obscure the man’s real character and stature than anything else unless they are soon counteracted by a more objective study.” As an example of what was wrong with the book, the reviewer wrote that “there is more than a suggestion that the authors scorn Mr. King’s advocacy of conciliation in labor disputes because they believe labor disputes should be heated up rather than cooled down.” This, of course, is exactly what Ferns and Ostry argued in the book, so the review was at least honest if politically opposed. The Winnipeg Tribune found fault on more humanistic grounds, suggesting that the book couldn’t get at the man himself. The early chapters portrayed King “in an uncharitable spirit,” the reviewer claimed. Worse, “King is presented as resembling a crypto-fascist.” Ultimately, the main problem was that “one side of King’s personality is revealed in this book, but the man himself, the “poor naked fork’d thing,” is not discovered. This is not biography, but dissection.”28
The Tory press chewed only the morsels it found tasty. Grattan O’Leary of the Ottawa Journal skipped the Marxist analysis and went straight for the Liberal jugular. The most shocking revelation, from a Tory standpoint, came in the letter that Ferns and Ostry had discovered written by Mackenzie King to then American Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in 1914. In it, King seems to be urging the Americans to maintain their neutrality in the early months of the war and to deny war loans to France. In other words, it seemed to show King working against the interests of Britain and Canada in the Great War. It was one thing for King not to have served during the war, something that many Tories held against him, but for King to have advocated American neutrality was an astonishing revelation. “It is tremendous to speculate,” O’Leary declaimed, “upon what might have happened to Mr. King’s subsequent political fortunes and to the whole course of Canada’s political history had this letter become public.”29
There were other similar allegations that reverberated in mid-1950s Canada. Ferns and Ostry alleged that King had not been Laurier’s choice as Liberal leader, as was sometimes said. They also alleged that King had flirted with joining the Union government during the war, thus disproving the loyalty to Laurier which had been such a huge factor in King’s winning the Liberal leadership in 1919. Ostry himself knew that these were the features of the book that would “sell” to the mainstream in 1955 and he highlighted them when he spoke to the press. He certainly got O’Leary’s attention. “Some will say that authors Ferns and Ostrey [sic] fail in objectivity, that they are too much the able prosecutors with a criminal in the dock,” O’Leary noted. “The claim will not lack wholly validity; yet if this volume is more an essay in impeachment than an objective biography, at least it can be said for it that its selected facts, arrayed often with scorn and satire, and perhaps a touch of malice, are documented adequately; that the writers state clearly what their evidence is and where it can be found.”30
The most vitriolic attack came from the Liberal Grant Dexter at the Winnipeg Free Press. Dexter called the book a work of “unqualified denigration.” “It is doubtful,” he predicted hopefully, “if this book will have any wide audience in this country. It will be plain to every reader … that the authors are so obsessed by their antagonism to King that they cannot be objective.” Like others at the time, and echoing the accolades showered on the former prime minister after his death, Dexter linked King to the nation itself. What would it say if Ferns and Ostry’s version of King were true? What would it say about Canada and Canadians? Some might be anxious about this but Dexter was contemptuous. It simply couldn’t be true, for this very simple reason: “As everyone will agree, no small conniving, selfish man could ever be the prime minister of this country for more than 20 years.” Here it was clearly spoken. A prime minister just couldn’t have these kinds of secrets. Dexter put it this way: “No one could fool the people so long.” 31
On a mild day in early February 1956, with fresh snow on Parliament Hill and clear skies above the Peace Tower, an MP rose to clear the air inside the House – this time with respect to Mackenzie King. Hugh Bryson of the CCF had put a question on the order paper: “Why was the discussion on the book ‘The Age of Mackenzie King’ cancelled by the C.B.C.?”32 On the surface, it was an innocuous and innocent question – about the scheduling of a TV program – yet it would set off one of those mid-term mini-scandals that so often rock sitting governments.
James McCann, minister of national revenue (with oversight of the CBC), claimed that it was all a misunderstanding. The CBC had considered running a program on this book but “on consideration it was not thought to be a good basis for such a discussion.”33 The CBC, he claimed, “has full authority and sole responsibility for all program decisions,” so this really wasn’t a matter for Parliament.
The government’s answer hadn’t satisfied opposition MPs. Bryson pointed out that, in fact, the CBC had advertised such a discussion program about The Age of Mackenzie King in its promotional materials and scheduled it for the evening of 20 December 1955. The advertisement even drew viewers’ attention to the fact that “the book is said to be highly controversial.”34 The program had been scheduled. It certainly seemed to have been cancelled. And the book was controversial. There was the rub.
The Conservative broadcasting critic Donald Fleming found the Liberal explanation highly suspicious. Fleming knew that this book by “two eminent Canadian scholars” was “to say the least … not complimentary to the late Mr. Mackenzie King or to the record of the Liberal party.” Newspapers across the country had reviewed this undeniably important book. One of the authors, Bernard Ostry, had already pre-recorded an introduction to the panel discussion. Everything was, as far as he was concerned, set to go. Then, the cancellation. When Ostry asked why, he was told only that the decision came from Ottawa and from something called “the directorate.” It all sounded very Orwellian.35
In fact, this was exactly the kind of controversy Bernard Ostry wanted to stir up. He returned to Canada in January 1956 to publicize the book and to do more research on future volumes. The abrupt and mysterious cancellation of the program meant to discuss The Age of Mackenzie King fell into his lap and he decided to use it to promote the book. There were other mysteries to solve, other reasons to think that someone was trying to prevent their book from getting the right kind of attention. One of these was sales. The Age of Mackenzie King sold more than two thousand copies in the few weeks before Christmas. This was a great start, but after that, sales fell off. It is a not uncommon fate for a book and even the sale of two thousand copies was excellent. It may simply have been the usual post-Christmas lull and the usual drop-off from sales after release. It may have been the bad reviews. It might, though, have been something else.36
Friends of Ferns and Ostry wrote to say that they couldn’t get the book. A department store in Montreal claimed that it was sold out and that it would take three weeks to order a copy. The clerk seemed reluctant to put in an order. The book had been in store windows before Christmas; now it was nowhere to be seen. Ferns didn’t know what to think but he remained suspicious. His suspicions were heightened by his dealings with Saturday Night magazine. The magazine commissioned him to do an article on the book and Mackenzie King. They sent him a cheque for $75 and he sent them the article. It never appeared. Later in the spring, the editor wrote to say that there hadn’t been space for his article, and that it had by this point lost its “topicality” anyway. Ferns could, though, keep the cheque.37
Was someone attempting to suppress their book? Did the Liberal establishment have that kind of weight? Ferns thought so, and we know that the Liberal Party had done this before, though in that case the author and publisher were bought off. For Ferns, the important thing was to maintain his sense of scholarly dignity. His reading of Canadian society in these years was that controversy would kill the book. They had to present themselves as objective scholars. Ostry was a different man and his approach differed in kind. He approached friends in the CCF and that was what sparked the questions in the House of Commons.
Ostry was right to think that the book had upset official Ottawa. Former cabinet minister Brooke Claxton picked up The Age of Mackenzie King soon after it was published. He privately complained that “almost worse than its malicious distortions of everything having to do with Mr. King is the tiresome emission of communist venom on every page.” The book was “nauseating” and Claxton had to “struggle hard to keep on with the exercise” of reading it. What effect, he wondered, would this have on King’s reputation? What effect would it have on the party? At the Rideau Club during the holidays, three out of a total of six men at his table were reading the book. Among themselves, the men agreed that the book was “self-condemning.” But Claxton worried whether this would “be the view generally held by” those whom he called “the less enlightened people who have not the good fortune to live in Ottawa.” 38
Claxton considered his options. “The thought occurred to me,” he wrote to Jack Pickersgill, “that it would not be a bad thing if quite a few people across Canada sent letters … to the newspapers. That, however, would start a controversy. The best thing to do is to let the matter die. Most effective of all would be not to buy or read the book.” The latter really would be best – if it could be accomplished. “Neither the authors nor the publishers should be given the satisfaction of having the book purchased or read,” he wrote to an academic at Queen’s. But would it be possible? How could you silence a book? How best to ensure that it faded into obscurity? 39
We don’t know the full extent of what Claxton or other Liberals might have done, but it is clear that Claxton was the one behind the cancellation of the CBC program. One day Claxton had received a telephone call from the CBC that he regarded as an affront. The broadcaster was planning to run a panel-discussion program on the new book by Ferns and Ostry. The format would be simple. One of the authors had already recorded a five-minute spot in which he outlined the main themes of the book. Then a panel of four or five King experts, a mixture of academics and politicians, would review the book. The caller wanted to know if Claxton, as someone with such an intimate knowledge of Mr King and with so much political experience himself, would be kind enough to participate. Claxton loudly told them no, that he would not. He would also mention the matter to his friend “Dave.” This was Davidson Dunton, chairman of the CBC.
Claxton said that he “could not conceive of Dave passing on this.” He ran into Dunton later that day and asked him about the program. It seems that Dunton hadn’t heard of it. The CBC was a big operation and he couldn’t be aware of every little detail. Yet Dunton made it his business to find out and he decided to kill the program. Despite the pre-billing, there would be no CBC discussion program on The Age of Mackenzie King. For someone like Claxton and no doubt for Dunton, it made sense. The book just wasn’t worth it. As far as Claxton was concerned, and possibly Dunton too, that was the end of it.40 The questions in the House of Commons brought it all out into the open.
“Can the minister inform me what medium the C.B.C. will use to review the book on Mackenzie King?” asked the CCF MP Alistair Stewart. Many of the papers picked up on this jibe; nothing else needed to be said, since everyone knew of King’s interest in spiritualism. This was exactly the kind of humour usually used to poke fun of King in these years – slyly suggestive. Jack Pickersgill, now in government as a cabinet minister, managed to ensure that the opposition did not have all of the fun. When the Conservative Donald Fleming asked why the CBC had cancelled the program, he shouted out, “They probably read the book.”41
The papers that could be expected to become irate did so – notably the Toronto Telegram, whose editor Ostry met with. But so too did some papers that didn’t like the book itself but who disbelieved the government’s explanation of the cancellation – that the book “did not merit” television treatment. The Saskatoon Star Phoenix set the tone, demanding that “Canadian taxpayers should be informed and soon, exactly why the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation cancelled two carefully prepared and scheduled programs which were to deal with a supposedly controversial biography of the late Prime Minister Mackenzie King.” So far, it claimed, the government’s answers had been “exceedingly woolly and confusing” and the public could “hardly fail to suspect the worst.” The Canadian branch of Ferns and Ostry’s publisher stirred things up by writing a public letter that was published in a number of papers. The editor gave Ostry’s account of the cancellation and claimed to be concerned about this “matter which might appear to be a violation of or interference with one of the fundamental democratic freedoms.”42
Grant Dexter spoke for the Liberal press when, under the heading “No Ostry-cism,” he claimed: “It seems difficult to establish that democratic freedom involves a right to have a book discussed on a television program.” A few weeks later, when the issue refused to go away from newspaper headlines, Dexter returned to the Liberals’ defence. “Nobody has questioned the rightness of the decision not to proceed with the broadcast,” he claimed. “It is pretty well agreed that there was no case for a CBC program.”
Then Dexter set about giving the background to the story, telling how Claxton had been asked to be on the program and had angrily refused. But more importantly, Dexter claimed, “Mr. Dunton, the chairman of the Board of Governors of the CBC, had just finished reading the book and had reached the same conclusion as Mr. Claxton. After consultation with his colleagues, the review of the book was cancelled.” Dexter ended the story claiming that “the most careful inquiry [the one he had just done] indicates that there was no political interference.” Blair Fraser of Maclean’s agreed. The main point was, he claimed, that “no member of the government had anything to do with the cancellation of that program project.” This was an important technicality. It may have been true that Claxton was prominent in Liberal circles, that he was looked to for advice, and that in the next election he would take a lead role in shaping the future of the party, but he wasn’t technically part of the government.43
The CBC knew of the disapproval of an important Liberal former cabinet minister. This man was a good friend of the chairman of the CBC and had voiced his displeasure loudly. But responsible journalists in the 1950s believed that the CBC had acted on its own. One might have speculated about the friendships that crossed boundaries when these men dined at their clubs. One might have speculated about the forming of a consensus, rooted in a single political way of seeing the world, in which it became common sense to decide that The Age of Mackenzie King “did not merit” public discussion. But Fraser, Dexter, and other Liberals didn’t credit such wild accusations. They hoped that the “less enlightened people” wouldn’t either.
In the mid-1950s, this Liberal common sense still carried weight. In the particular case of The Age of Mackenzie King, it helped that Bernard Ostry and Harry Ferns couldn’t stand each other. The two men had been bickering at a steadily nastier rate month by month as the book moved toward publication and after. With so much anxiety over whether their book was being censored or not, it might only have been natural that the two came to suspect each other as well. It didn’t help that Bernard Ostry was the one in Canada who handled the publicity. When articles began appearing that claimed Bernard Ostry was the sole author and gave him the title of professor no less, Harry Ferns became irate. These were the mistakes of sloppy journalism, but they rankled.
The final straw was when Ostry was quoted in the Financial Times boasting, “My next volume will be much stronger. I have in it a lot about people who are still living. There will also be a tale of corruption the like of which never occurred in Canada since the Pacific scandal.” Ferns hadn’t even known about the CBC program, let alone its cancellation. Now Ostry was busy creating more scandal, and dragging the name of Harry Ferns through the mud in the process. On 29 February he wrote to the Financial Times to dissociate himself publicly from statements made by Ostry. On 20 April, he went further and released to the press a statement in which he dissociated himself entirely from his co-author. “There will be no further volumes of The Age of Mackenzie King,” he wrote. “I am satisfied that there is insufficient evidence available to the public at the present time to write a truthful and adequate account of Mackenzie King’s life going beyond the year 1919.” When Ostry wrote his own public letter, vowing to continue the biography on his own, Ferns responded with more than a trace of sarcasm: He claimed to be “delighted” that his former co-author would carry on to write his own book: “Such an enterprise will be a new and valuable experience for Mr Ostry.” In the short run, it was all heartwarming for Canada’s Liberals. The Winnipeg Free Press couldn’t help but comment that “Mr. Ferns thus appears to have written an advance review of Mr. Ostry’s next book.”44
There never was another volume of The Age of Mackenzie King, though the book would be reprinted in the middle of the 1970s when the whiff of scandal would be a selling feature. Not so in the middle of the 1950s. As one commentator later wrote about the book, it “landed in the complacent liberal Canada of 1955 with all the social aplomb of a dirty joke at the Governor General’s levy. It was treated by polite society like any other such faux-pas, it was coldly and pointedly ignored.”45 Partly it was the left-wing critique that irked Liberals. But it was also Ferns and Ostry’s insouciance toward King the statesman, their derisive questioning of his motivations.
For the moment, at least, it was still possible to believe that the kinds of things Ferns and Ostry had to say about Mackenzie King couldn’t be true – that no prime minister could be so fundamentally different from his public image. After all, as Grant Dexter of the Winnipeg Free Press had put it, “no one could fool the people so long.”
