End of an Era
Perhaps there is no better representation of the shifting mood in the late 1950s than the changed fortunes of poet and lawyer F.R. Scott.1 A son of the Anglican bishop of Quebec, Scott was born into the anglo establishment and yet he became a radical critic of politics and society in Quebec and Canada in the middle years of the twentieth century. He won a Rhodes scholarship that took him to Oxford University in 1920, coming back eventually to teach law at McGill University. Like his friend Eugene Forsey, he became a leading socialist thinker in inter-war Canada, helping to found the CCF. Unlike Forsey, he was able to stay on at McGill even though his viewpoints were often a source of contention with the university’s authorities and with the members of the Montreal elite who sat on its Board of Governors. Long overlooked for promotion to the deanship of the Law School despite his seniority, Scott nonetheless made his own reputation as a political thinker, legal expert, and poet. By the later years of the 1950s, he had been fighting to reform the politics and culture of his country for decades.
In 1957 he published a poem about the legacy of Mackenzie King – a cri de cœur of exasperation and a call for change. Scott’s poem “WLMK” would go on to become one of the most widely cited and remembered of Canadian poems, showing up again and again whenever attention turned to Mackenzie King. “WLMK” was published in Time magazine and then again in two different books in 1957 (a collection of Scott’s poems and an anthology of satirical verse). “How shall we speak of Canada, Mackenzie King dead?” Scott asks. It was the essential question for those who cared about politics and the nation after more than two decades of uninterrupted Liberal rule. Scott was not optimistic. Mackenzie King, said Scott, “blunted us”:
Because he never took sides,
And no sides
Because he never allowed them to take shape.
…
The height of his ambition
Was to pile a Parliamentary Committee on a Royal Commission,
To have “conscription if necessary
But not necessarily conscription,”
To let Parliament decide –
Later.
King had left Canada an unfinished country, a jelly of a nation, with no shape, barely any substance. This might, as some then and since have argued, be a recipe for success. But Scott skewered the idea that the Mackenzie King style of leadership could be anything other than self-serving, allowing the status quo to endure for a little while longer. If this was what political success meant in Canada, thought Scott, pity the nation.
The poem is a candid assessment of King but also of the Canada of the 1950s – a nation that still had many who honoured King and his successors. The final lines speak to the Canada of this era as much as they do to King himself:
Truly he will be remembered
Wherever men honour ingenuity,
Ambiguity, inactivity, and political longevity.
Let us raise up a temple
To the cult of mediocrity,
Do nothing by halves
Which can be done by quarters.
A friend wrote to Scott that, in reading the satirical poems that Scott published that year, she “breathed a most welcome, astringent air: a fresh breeze in the somewhat debilitating atmosphere which tends to smother the day-to-day existence of the average individual.”2 In this case, the poet really did lead the people. Scott would eventually become dean of the McGill Law School and would live to see many of his previously radical ideas become a new common sense.
In the mid-1950s, Canadian politics exuded a misleading feeling of calm. The Liberal Party had governed uninterrupted for twenty years. When Mackenzie King retired in 1948, he handed power over to Louis St Laurent, who won majority governments in 1949 and again in 1953. The Liberal Party had become the governing party, its values seeming to seep across the landscape, filling in the cracks of opposition and keeping down the dust of controversy and discontent. The onset of the Cold War had dampened criticism from the socialist CCF, opening it up to attacks of communist subversion and leading those on the left to purge communists from their ranks. It helped that the Liberals presided over an era of unprecedented economic growth with unemployment at record low levels. Although inequality was in no way eradicated (and would re-emerge as a political issue in the 1960s), economic depression did not return after the war. The bounties of modern life, long promised but often reserved for the better off, came within reach for many. Shiny new things like refrigerators and televisions filled up Canadians’ houses and the latest models of automobiles covered the roadways in a country where car ownership was becoming the norm. Progress could be gauged by the small fundamentals that we now overlook, things like indoor plumbing, which finally became a reality for almost all Canadians, and the spread of electricity to even remote rural areas. The expansion of unions across the blue-collar work world led to the standardization of the forty-hour week for many. This meant that, increasingly, Canadians could look forward to the time of leisure called the weekend.3 When critics took on the legacy of Mackenzie King, St Laurent, and the Liberals, then, they were taking on those who had shaped what had come to be the bountiful harvest of modern Canada.
Yet decades in power can lead to arrogance. Certainly, arrogant is how the Liberals seemed. A series of scandals in the mid-1950s showed their weaknesses. The debate over the construction of a national gas pipeline in 1955 pitted the Liberals against both opposition parties and a large chunk of the media in a David and Goliath confrontation that made the Liberals appear both arrogant and undemocratic. The Liberals also came to seem too pro-American in their support of American capital and in their lack of deference for Canada’s British connections. In these battles, the media gave space to the Liberal and Mackenzie King critic Eugene Forsey. His letters to the editor were read into Hansard and published in papers across the country. Forsey decried Liberal anti-democratic arrogance. If the Liberals were so willing to shut down parliamentary debate, “Why not dispense with Parliament altogether?” he asked. “Why not assure now, to us and our posterity, the full blessings of arbitrary power and untrammelled despotism?’4
The Liberals’ response to Forsey and their critics revealed the problem. Brooke Claxton, the man who had been so critical of the Ferns and Ostry biography, was amazed at how the pipeline debate had been turned into “the greatest sensation since Confederation.” He couldn’t believe how “irresponsible” the media was behaving in giving Forsey and this line of argument any credence. Yet, while Claxton “felt that the conduct of the Opposition was so outrageous that there would be a heavy swing of public opinion in favour of the government,” he had to admit that it hadn’t happened yet, except in what he regarded as “more informed quarters.”5
The Liberals survived the pipeline controversy but not its wider implications. The post-war era may indeed have been exceedingly prosperous but Bruce Hutchison was wrong to say that “no government can easily defeat itself, however it tries, under these conditions.”6 By the time Canadians could buy Volume One of the Mackenzie King biography and could read the newspaper debates about a public man’s right to privacy, the political world in the country had been turned upside down. John Diefenbaker, the small-town lawyer from the Prairies, upset the St Laurent Liberals in the 1957 election, winning a minority government. The next spring, when the too-confident Liberals forced an election, Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives won a decisive majority government, taking 204 of the 265 seats in the House of Commons and 53.7 per cent of the popular vote, the largest majority ever recorded. The Mackenzie King era finally came to an end.
Yet the changes afoot in the late 1950s went beyond political parties. Politics is only ever partly about the subjects covered in parliamentary and journalistic debate. There were also other, subtler social and cultural changes that coincided with the downfall of the Liberals in the late 1950s. The moral landscape of Canada was changing. Attitudes toward practices previously unrespectable – or at least the subject of debate as to their respectability – softened. More tolerant views of the pleasurable aspects of life and self-expression became increasingly common. These changes in the culture of the self showed up usually only obliquely in speeches in the House of Commons or in the editorials of prominent newspapers. Yet they were political in a wider and cultural sense. In retrospect, it is easier to see how the shift to a more psychological- and rights-based model of the self was beginning to undermine the kinds of assumptions politicians could make about citizens and vice versa.
None of the political parties completely understood what was happening because the changes weren’t directly partisan. They were tied to the affluence of the period and represented the spread of a culture of the self and individual rights that was slowly unravelling the tight grip of Victorianism on Canadian morals. By the end of the 1950s, as these cultural changes bubbled underneath the surface, the Liberal Party that was the inheritor of Mackenzie King’s mantle would learn that the seemingly solid foundation of common sense was cracking everywhere around it.
The 1950s might be the most misunderstood decade of the twentieth century. In hindsight, the era has appeared conservative and quaint, something either to be derided as old-fashioned, sexist, and racist or longed for nostalgically as an era of family togetherness and political quiescence. Next to the radical social revolutions of the 1960s – with the youth revolt, Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) terrorism, and feminism – the earlier decade can’t help but seem black and white. This view is only further reinforced by the fact that so much of the decade later came to be seen through the prism of the Baby Boom generation which grew up at that time. This was, to them, a period of youthful innocence to be succeeded by something more radical, tumultuous, and (depending on your viewpoint) exciting and progressive. None of this does us any favours in our attempts to figure out the dynamics of social change that were busily at work transforming everyday life and values throughout the decade.
Ironically, one man who understood what was happening at the end of the 1950s was seventy years old and a relic of many Liberal governments under both Mackenzie King and Louis St Laurent. Charles Gavan Power, or “Chubby” as he was known to most, was a politician entirely unlike Mackenzie King. From a family that took hockey as seriously as it did politics, Power represented the riding of Quebec South from 1917 until he went to the Senate in 1955. As he admitted himself, he didn’t give much truck to the place of ideals in politics. An old-school politician of tactics and handshakes, of deals and pragmatism, he had survived in politics longer than most. King had hesitated in putting Power into the cabinet because of his fondness for drink – an issue that many in Liberal circles were loath to make public.
But in the aftermath of the Liberals’ humiliating 1958 defeat, Power sought to explain to his fellow Liberals what was happening in the country. To his friends in the Liberal Party who wanted to push the party back to laissez-faire liberalism, with its emphasis on individualistic restraint and probity, he urged caution. Writing to his friend and fellow Senator Thomas Crerar, he told him that those (like Crerar) who wanted the party to take that path were out of touch with the realities of Canada in the 1950s. The welfare state was here to stay, he wrote. Those who argue against it, he feared, placed “too much reliance on the people’s attachment to what we were taught to believe were fundamental virtues – self-discipline, hard work, individual saving … in other words the practice of those stern Presbyterian principles to which you are so much attached.” Like it or not, Canada had changed. “This is a more materialistic age and the people are not so much interested in the homely virtues as in security and reasonably comfortable living, at someone else’s expense if possible.”7
Power was right. In area after area, Canadians in the 1950s were slowly and tentatively stepping away from the Victorian Christian moralism that had so long dominated middle-class culture. The Baby Boomers might not often think of their parents as hedonists (and many certainly were not), but throughout Canadian culture we can see many ways in which Canada was becoming a nation much more open to pleasures previously considered sinful. Part of the turn inward, to wanting a franker and more open look at what individuals really did (pace Freud), was based on the fact that increasingly Canadians were loosening up about a series of habits that had previously been viewed as the kinds of activities that one would want to hide.8
Drinking had long divided Canadian families and communities. In the midst of the call for sacrifice in the Great War, temperance campaigners had even convinced all governments across the country to impose prohibition. This fell apart after the war, quite soon in Quebec and much later in the Maritimes. But in its place, provincial governments instituted a series of restrictive drinking laws whose main purpose was to make drinking as difficult and unpleasurable as possible. These restrictions decisively lost their popular support throughout most of Canada in the 1950s. Canadians began to consume a great deal more alcohol of all types – beer, wine, and spirits. Governments loosened up regulations, allowing things like jukeboxes and snack foods into what had been staid beer parlours. Soon, they were allowing the public sale not just of beer but also of wine and spirits. The most egregious restriction, the ban on selling alcohol to Aboriginal peoples, had ended by the mid-1950s. And the breweries and distilleries, swelling in size from sales and corporate consolidation, and presenting themselves as supporters of moderation and good citizenship, supported community and sports events with their advertising dollars.9
What happened in drink spread to other areas. Gambling, too, had long been considered a vice by many moralists. The views on this had perhaps been more divided than on alcohol. There had always been exceptions to government bans on gambling – betting at racetracks, for instance. But the laws against gambling arose out of a Christian moral sensibility. Gamblers irresponsibly risked their money. And even if they won the profits were seen as sinful because they weren’t earned. In the 1950s, there were still Christian ministers who could be called upon to make the old moral arguments, but they increasingly found themselves with less support. As with drinking, the public came to see the problems of gambling as relating to specific individuals. This might be gamblers who couldn’t control themselves, or it might also be the criminal syndicates who controlled and profited from the illegal gambling that happened in every Canadian community. For every small town in Canada had its local bookie who arranged bets, or the house or houses where you could find a game of chance on a certain night of the week. The laws wouldn’t change until 1969 when the Trudeau government’s Omnibus Bill opened the door to government-controlled lotteries, but even in the 1950s the moral consensus against gambling was crumbling.10
The same could be said for attitudes toward money and debt. In retrospect, Canadians of the 1950s seem like pillars of financial rectitude. Consumer debt was barely a concern at all. And yet the tide was already turning, washing out old ideas about the evils and sinfulness of owing money. The consumer culture of the 1950s brought many new expensive luxuries that soon came to be seen as necessities – refrigerators, electric stoves, and automobiles. Many Canadian families remained cautious about purchases, paying with cash or with only very short-term loans. Yet the federal government had committed to expanding home ownership across the country. It established programs to insure mortgages, making it more lucrative and safe for banks and other lenders to extend mortgages to potential homebuyers. The government was encouraging Canadians to go into debt, if only to fuel the economy and expand middle-class economic well-being and security. Many middle-class families in the era of Mackenzie King – indeed even King’s own family – rented their homes. In post-war Canada this would increasingly come to be seen as a hallmark of the past. Home ownership, even if it meant large debt, had become the ideal.
Other kinds of credit began to appear as well. The first credit card appeared in 1950, although this kind of credit would begin to expand only by the end of the decade and in the 1960s. Purchasing items by instalments had a long history in Canada, and so did store credit. But these practices had typically been small scale, at the local level between those who knew one another, and often credit had been extended reluctantly by the lender. The post-war years, however, saw the expansion of instalment purchases for many new consumer items. None of this changed attitudes overnight, and in retrospect the views of most Canadians in the 1950s toward credit and debt remained cautious if not condemning. As Margaret Atwood said in her book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, she grew up in a society where “there were three things you were never supposed to ask questions about”: sex, religion, and money. Yet, on each of these fronts, Canadians were becoming less silent.11
A common joke about 1950s television and films is that you never got to see people’s bedrooms. Or, if you did, they showed parents sleeping in two separate beds. Yet, in fact, this kind of artistic representation was already crumbling. Hollywood had been under a system of self-imposed censorship since the 1930 Production Code. Under the code, films were to avoid portraying everything from profanity to miscegenation. They were to be careful when showing violence and crime and especially sex and anything to do with bodily functions. Yet, by the late 1950s, the code was falling apart under the influence of foreign films, the competition from television, and liberalizing social norms. The 1959 film Some Like It Hot didn’t receive approval from the censors and yet went on to become a money-making success. A film like Psycho in 1960 ran into difficulty with the censors not just because of the violent shower scene but because one of the characters was shown flushing paper down a toilet – all in full view of the camera.12
All of these developments showed the ways in which basic features of human existence – human desire, alcohol, gambling, money, or bodily functions – were coming out into the open in the public culture of the late 1950s. In 1976 the historian Donald Creighton wrote about this shift in the immediate post-war years. Creighton was a Tory and unsympathetic to the changes around him. Yet his dismay is useful in signalling the direction of change. The hardship of the Depression and the Second World War had been similar to the conditions of Victorian and Edwardian Canada. “Colonial and rural origins” had bequeathed to Canadians an “acceptance of hard work, the belief in personal responsibility, the habits of thrift, simplicity and order” yet “their children and grandchildren were to be creatures of affluence and uneasy peace.”13 Creighton paints the 1940s and early 1950s as years of ordered simplicity and tempered pleasure, yet still there were signs of change. While tame by later standards, they represented a kind of “coming out” every bit as significant as, and similar to, the way some wanted to expose Mackenzie King’s own secrets.
If one accepted the Boomers’ view of the ’50s, it would be impossible to understand one of the greatest Canadian novels of that decade, Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch That Ends the Night from 1959. MacLennan is now better remembered for his book Two Solitudes, which gave a poetic title to the tension between French and English in Canada. Yet The Watch That Ends the Night beautifully showed the moral loosening already at work in 1950s Canada. “Morality? Duty?” says one character. “It was easy to talk of these things once, but surely it is no accident that in our time the best of men hesitate inwardly before they utter these words?” In the novel, MacLennan is not entirely comfortable with the changes he sees around him. But he is an even better witness because of his discomfort.
The novel makes clear that the great quest in contemporary Canada was to look unflinchingly within the self. “We’re like the man who tore down all the walls of his house in November and then had to face the winter naked,” another character says. “Now I suppose we’ve got to make up the rules as we go along and one gets so tired doing that. It would have been so much simpler and safer to have kept the old rules.” And what had replaced the old moral language, the old certainties? It was psychology. “Was neurosis the new word for sin?” MacLennan has a character say. That is exactly what it was. As the book ends, the narrator comes to the conclusion: “Here, I found at last, is the nature of the final human struggle. Within, not without.” 14
MacLennan’s friend and fellow writer F.R. Scott agreed. Scott, whose poem “WLMK” so exemplified the desire for change at the end of the 1950s, also strove to create a less shameful, more open Canada in his other job, as law professor and lawyer. Scott acted as legal counsel in the court case that best illuminated the ways in which older standards of decorum were being cast aside at the end of the 1950s – the censorship trial over Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The case resulted from the attempt to censor an unexpurgated version of D.H. Lawrence’s famous novel. The British and American trials are better known but in fact the Canadian case went to the courts first. Moreover, the British defence attorney was an old Oxford friend of Scott’s and he looked to the Canadian trial for guidance on how to proceed.
Lawrence’s novel about an affair between an English woman and her gamekeeper offended sensibilities in myriad ways – in its portrayal of adultery, in its frank use of language including “fuck” and “cunt,” and in its blunt eroticism, especially the scene where the lovers braid each other’s pubic hair. The case was made for someone like Scott, with his unique background as a poet and lawyer. He brought in expert literary witnesses, including the novelists Hugh MacLennan and Morley Callaghan, to speak to the literary merit of the novel. Scott had to make the case that the sexual passages of the novel were only parts of it and he tried to push the court to consider the effect of the book not on a young person (as had previously been the test in censorship cases) but on the community at large. Both the lower court in Quebec and the Quebec Court of Appeal found against the publisher. Scott had expected this given the conservative judicial culture in Quebec. But he had taken on the case only on the assurance that the publisher would see it through to the Supreme Court of Canada.
By the time the case reached this stage, the famous British trial had already reached its conclusion, vindicating the publisher. The British trial became a sensation and the crown prosecutor was turned into a symbol of old-style morality to be mocked, with much of the commentary focusing on the moment when he naively asked the jury of mostly working-class men whether this was the “kind of book you would wish your wife or servants to read.” The publisher, Penguin, quickly published a verbatim transcript of the trial which itself became a bestseller.15 The trial came to encapsulate the sea change in values that led to the sexual revolution. As the British poet Philip Larkin put it, “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (which was rather late for me) – / Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.”16
In Canada, Scott appeared before the Supreme Court, which decided in his favour in a split decision, with the Catholic judges dissenting from the majority opinion. Scott turned the whole experience into a poem. He felt that the desire to censor matters of human sexuality went against humanity itself. Sexuality, he wrote in his poem about the trial and in private letters, was simply part of the human experience. “It’s all part of our universe,” he wrote, “and I don’t think we should hide a fraction of it.” 17
Here, Scott and MacLennan reflected their times. Like others at the end of the 1950s, they wrote of a Canadian culture that was tearing down older traditions in the name of being more honest and open about what was truly human – the kinds of desires and truths that an earlier morality had hidden or repressed. In the next decade, younger people who urged a more radical openness and authenticity and who were willing to tear down more of what had been traditional would take these ideas further. But on the edge of the 1960s, the direction of change was already clear.
