CHAPTER 2

Choosing a Party, Choosing a Wife

1919-1929

FORTY MILES NORTH OF SASKATOON THE PRAIRIE GIVES WAY TO PARKLAND, A belt of rolling fields and woodland groves of poplar, birch, spruce, and pine. This was the first area of intensive homesteading in the province, settled before the First World War by immigrants from Germany, Hungary, Ruthenia, and Galicia (later Poland, Ukraine, and western Russia). By 1919, as a result of the wartime agricultural boom, the region was moderately prosperous and thriving, served by an extensive railway network and a growing system of highways, producing wheat for export and market products for the towns and cities. Midway between Saskatoon and Prince Albert in this parkland belt lies Wakaw Lake, and one mile to the west the village of Wakaw, which was established on the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway line in 1911. In 1919 Wakaw was a busy market town of slightly less than four hundred residents, surrounded by the most densely settled rural townships in the province. The skyline was dominated by three grain elevators on the east and a scattering of still-expanding one- and two-storey buildings on the two business streets running west from the railway line: a hotel, post office, town hall, mission hospital, school, Catholic and Ukrainian churches, weekly newspaper, general stores, farm suppliers, a restaurant or two, and a few business offices. To the east, at the original townsite on the shores of Wakaw Lake, there were a few more buildings, including a Baptist church. The village was on the district court circuit, with a provincial police office and a local jail, and was easily accessible to Saskatoon, Prince Albert, and Humboldt, where the high court sat.¹

John Diefenbaker was not content to remain in Saskatoon as a junior employee of an existing law firm. He was determined to get as much courtroom experience as he could, to make his reputation, and to earn enough money to pay off his debts. That meant opening his own office in a town that needed a barrister. With the help of a lawyer friend, he reviewed the court dockets for a number of places in the province and settled on Wakaw, where, he recalled, “people were particularly litigious.” It was close enough to home, in familiar country, and had only one practising lawyer. During the month of June the newcomer made his preparations – with some difficulty. Local businessmen, he found, were loyal to the lawyer who was already on the scene and reluctant to rent office space to a competitor. Diefenbaker was offered the use of a vacant lot opposite the railway line. He negotiated credit purchases from a lumber company and, within weeks, he and a carpenter had built a primitive two-room frame shack for $480.08 plus labour. Here he opened for business on July 1. He was joined in the office by an articling student, Michael Stechishin, a classmate from the Faculty of Law. (The arrangement required special permission from the Law Society, since Diefenbaker had no more experience than his student.) Stechishin’s fluency in Ukrainian was of significant help in dealing with clients, many of them fellow immigrants from Ukraine.²

The slim young lawyer now to be seen in Wakaw had an unusual presence. As Garrett and Kevin Wilson describe him, he had “an intense and serious look.” “Above a frame that was tall and slender, almost slight, was a head that was arresting in its appearance. A finely-sculpted mouth and nose went almost unnoticed as the observer’s attention was drawn to the strange, commanding blue eyes, piercing and questioning, that made one somewhat uncomfortable. Full black hair, receding in striking waves, unfashionable for the time, accentuated the effect of the eyes beneath. Dressed severely and formally in dark suit and vest, the lawyer was an outstanding figure as he strode the streets of Wakaw.” ³ That sober presence, those intense blue eyes, were the signs of a man who did not expect to be slighted.

The new lawyer in town soon had his first client. Early in the morning of August 6 a doctor from nearby Cudworth brought a wounded youth to the Wakaw hospital and his assailant, John Chernyski, to the provincial police detachment. There Chernyski made a statement, was charged with shooting the injured boy, and was placed in the cells. Ten days later, at the request of Chernyski’s wife, John Diefenbaker took on his defence at an agreed fee of $600 – a very substantial sum in 1919.⁴

Chernyski admitted to the shooting and the defence was straightforward: the young boy had been crossing Chernyski’s land on his bicycle when he was set upon by Chernyski’s dogs. In the twilight the farmer had mistaken the grounded intruder for a fox or a coyote and had blasted him with his shotgun. The error was immediately clear. Chernyski and his family provided first aid and sought medical help in the village of Cudworth, and Chernyski turned himself in. After a preliminary hearing in Wakaw and his counsel’s successful appeal for bail to the district court in Prince Albert, Chernyski was committed for trial on a charge of wounding “in the absence of precaution and care,” or criminal negligence.

The case was heard before Chief Justice J.T. Brown of the Court of King’s Bench in Humboldt late in October 1919. After a two-day hearing in which the injured youth testified to bad blood between the two families, while the defence relied on testimony that the shooting was an error committed in the fading evening light, the jury found Chernyski not guilty. John Diefenbaker had been succinct in his examination of witnesses and his summing up, and he had his first victory.

In memory, he embellished events for the sake of a good story and ignored what may have been a key element in his success with the jury. In the 1960s Diefenbaker recalled that the jurors at first agreed to convict on a lesser charge than attempted murder because this was his first court case, and then decided to acquit after one of them had remarked: “But this is the kid’s birthday.” In fact, there had never been a charge of attempted murder, and the trial occurred more than one month after the defence lawyer’s twenty-fourth birthday. Diefenbaker’s successful appeal for bail in district court had been heard on the eve of his birthday in September, but that was not a jury hearing.⁵

The missing element of explanation was provided by Emmett Hall. In the autumn of 1919 he was articling in Humboldt and joined his university friend at the defence table to assist injury selection. Afterwards he left the courtroom, and that evening he saw the judge in the dining room of the Arlington Hotel. Chief Justice Brown asked him to sit with him and told Hall that he believed, on the whole, the defence had a good case. But he thought Diefenbaker was overplaying the extent of darkness, making the scene too obscure to see any target. Hall took this as a bit of friendly advice intended for the defence lawyer, and the next morning in court he wrote a note to Diefenbaker on the back of his copy of the indictment:

We were sitting & talking with the judge & he, in commenting on the case said that the only weakness displayed in your case so far was that you had too much stress upon the darkness. I would comment upon it, but don’t paint it too black, he is somewhat suspicious of your evidence as to the darkness – He is very favourable – He doesn’t believe that the injured man is telling the truth about his actions…

He is very suspicious of the injured man on account of the discrepancies between his testimony here & at Wakaw. Referring to the darkness the judge is quite impressed by this fact, the light was lit inside & when accused rushed out the darkness would appear greater.⁶

Once Diefenbaker read this missive, the darkness lightened to dusk, and the defence counsel emphasized the difficulty of sudden adjustment from a lighted room to the twilight outside. The argument for an unfortunate mistake became plausible and the case was won. When Emmett Hall met the chief justice again that evening, Brown joked about “the sudden ‘enlightenment’ that had struck the Chernyski trial.”⁷ If the freshman lawyer had a little unexpected assistance, it seemed to come from his friend and the judge, not from the jury.

That first piece of good luck in the courtroom gave Diefenbaker’s career as a barrister its stimulus. Local scepticism disappeared and the office was soon busy. In his next substantial case he gained acquittals for five out of ten clients in a lawsuit for fraud in grain deliveries brought against them by the Progressive Farmers’ Grain Company. The charges involved kickbacks to the grain buyer for falsifying the records of grain deliveries; Diefenbaker convinced the juries that there was insufficient evidence to convict half his clients, and he received legal fees in excess of $3000 in the case. By the summer of 1920 he was able to begin paying off his debts, move into a larger office, convert his shack into living quarters, and buy an impressive new Maxwell touring car at a price of $1764.⁸

But the bounty was temporary. The wartime wheat boom was fading by 1920 and the entire Saskatchewan economy felt the results of falling grain prices. The firm’s business suffered and Diefenbaker suspected discrimination. In June, when his local bank manager wrote to inform him that his account was overdrawn by $72.80, Diefenbaker replied in a tone of aggrieved sarcasm that a personal meeting would have been preferable to a letter, but “it would appear that such course would not result in the necessary publicity… I was under the impression,” he continued, “that in return for doing little favours for you, such as taking care of orders for payments etc., that I might at least be treated in as courteous a manner as others of whom I know, but in that I again must have been mistaken.”⁹ The firm’s financial difficulties extended through most of the following year. Like other lawyers of the time, Diefenbaker supplemented his legal work by arranging mortgage loans and selling insurance, and this business helped to see him through. His annual net income, which he had estimated at $3600 in April 1920, actually amounted to $2400 for 1921.¹⁰

Still, John Diefenbaker was gathering valuable experience – and confidence – in the courtroom and the community. In the fall of 1920 he was elected to the village council for a three-year term. He appears in a 1919 photograph as manager of the Wakaw football team, although he wrote in his memoirs that he was “the very enthusiastic manager of the local baseball team.” The young man had inherited frugal habits and his living expenses were low. He was devoted first of all to his work, and then, increasingly, to politics. The automobile seemed to be his main source of relaxation and adventure: in the summer of 1921 he drove to Vancouver and in 1923 to Los Angeles, both long trips over unpaved roads. He bought a summer cottage at Wakaw Lake, and he fished and hunted.¹¹

Diefenbaker remained on close terms with his parents and made it a habit to spend weekends in Saskatoon with them. He relied particularly on his self-assured mother for advice and emotional strength. His social life seems to have been cautious; with young women he remained shy and ill at ease, although he dated with school and university friends and attended Saturday dances at the Art Academy and Teachers’ Social Club in Saskatoon, or the village hall in Wakaw. Unlike his more relaxed brother, Elmer, John disliked dancing, had no sense of rhythm, and disdained small talk; he took part to keep up appearances and to avoid accusations of being a dull bookworm. One acquaintance told biographer Simma Holt: “We used to go to dances as a group … and we would see John there but did not pay much attention to him. He was always very properly dressed and stood board straight. He seemed just as inflexible. He was tall, slim, quiet, aloof, not aggressive, a very poor mixer.”¹² As a young professional and politician-to-be, John planned to marry, since a wife was expected in both roles and he had no wish to buck the conventions. He also seemed very dependent on women for emotional support. But he found the social round leading to courtship and marriage a painful one.

Olive Freeman, one of the performers in Diefenbaker’s tribute to Robert W. Service, was an early object of the veteran’s attentions. She was the teenage daughter of the minister at First Baptist Church in Saskatoon, Dr Charles B. Freeman. Olive made an immediate impression on the young man that he did not forget; but when she moved with her family to Brandon in 1921, the two lost touch for more than twenty years.¹³ Later John claimed that his infatuation led quickly to a proposal of marriage, either by mail or in person, and an implied rejection. Olive’s memory, as she conveyed it to her daughter, was that the returned soldier had merely asked her for a date, but had not pressed it when she told him her age.¹⁴

By the early 1920s Diefenbaker was courting another young woman in Saskatoon, Beth Newell. She was as shy as he, and they carried on their romance in private, although friends were aware of it. Beth worked as a cashier at the Massey Harris Company and lived at home with her widowed, asthmatic mother, who took in boarders for income. By late 1921 or early 1922, according to Simma Holt, the couple were engaged, and soon Beth and her mother had collected linens and cottons for her hope chest and made a wedding dress. From the distance of fifty years, friends recalled Beth as John’s adoring companion. “She was a good listener and loved to hear him talk about his cases. This quality was one he sought in women all his life: he needed someone to listen, react, and tell him what she thought of his actions or aspirations.”¹⁵

Late in the autumn of 1923 Beth, who had appeared “frail and weak” in the preceding months, was apparently diagnosed with tuberculosis. There is no direct record of what followed between the two, but Holt suggests that John never saw or talked to her again. She died in May 1924.¹⁶

The young man’s own health, which he had regarded with care since his invaliding home in 1917, suffered several lapses in these years, and his apparent break with Beth Newell may have resulted from his personal fear of tuberculosis. Pulmonary TB, like polio and scarlet fever, remained a scourge in the 1920s. Diagnosis was haphazard, treatment was inadequate, and the possibility of infection could be a source of panic. Diefenbaker was still subject to occasional internal bleeding, although the nature of his illness remained uncertain. In March 1923 he was bedridden for several days with his undiagnosed complaint, first in Wakaw and then in his parents’ home in Saskatoon, where his mother could care for him. In April he spent a week at the tuberculosis sanatorium at Fort Qu’Appelle, and in November he followed the path of other Canadian pilgrims to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for examination and treatment. There he had surgery for a gastric ulcer, which led to a radical improvement in his health. But he was still not robust and continued to suffer stomach ailments for several years more.¹⁷

JOHN DIEFENBAKER’S FIRST WIDELY PUBLICIZED COURT CASE WAS SIGNIFICANT FOR him for at least two reasons: he won a victory against his legal competitor in Wakaw, A.E. Stewart; and he acted in the case for clients from the minority French-speaking community of Saskatchewan. The Saskatchewan School Act provided that “English shall be the sole language of instruction in all schools,” but the provincial government, out of political prudence, in fact closed its eyes to infringements in some areas where there were few English-speaking settlers. In January 1922 Stewart, acting for William Mackie, an English-speaking resident of the Ethier School District, entered a complaint against two school trustees, Rémi Ethier and Léger Boutin, charging that their board had violated the School Act by permitting regular teaching in the French language. The local justice of the peace in Wakaw found Ethier and Boutin guilty, imposing a fine of $30 and costs. They asked Diefenbaker to appeal on their behalf.

The appeal was heard before district court judge A.E. Doak in May 1922. The evidence convinced the judge that the school was in fact conducting its teaching “practically entirely” in French. “I have no hesitation in coming to the conclusion,” Judge Doak wrote, “that sec. 178 was being consistently and deliberately broken in this school, and that if the trustees did not know it, it was simply because they chose to ignore the fact. Indeed I am more than a little suspicious that it was being done with their connivance.” Diefenbaker, however, argued the legal fine point that the trustees were not responsible for the school’s internal operations. On that technical ground, the judge overturned the previous conviction. Since the judgment seemed to sustain the de facto right of French language instruction, the Franco-Catholic association of the province was pleased and took up a subscription to pay the lawyer’s legal fees.

Diefenbaker had handled a politically sensitive brief with dexterity: without challenging the legal dominance of English in the schools, he had won a practical victory for French language teaching. The case made headlines in the province and launched his public reputation as a defender of minorities. He was proud both to have taken the appeal, despite advice that it would harm his political reputation in the anti-French, anti-Catholic atmosphere of Saskatchewan, and to have won it as he did. If he took the case because he objected to a constitutional wrong, he won it by subtle indirection. The larger, constitutional wrong was not corrected, but for the French community the local triumph was reason enough for gratitude.¹⁸

By Christmas 1922 John Diefenbaker had won two more criminal jury trials as a defence lawyer in Humboldt and Prince Albert, as well as handling many other criminal cases in the local police court. Although the volume of his civil work was increasing, his growing reputation was based on his talents in criminal defence. He found the role congenial and honed his skills in the courtroom with every case. On stage for the defence, he discovered his special dramatic genius. By the use of his voice, his penetrating eyes, his raised arm and accusatory finger, his sense of the ridiculous, his edge of sarcasm, his command of the fine points of law and evidence, he became a master of his juries. As defence counsel his role was not to prove a case but to raise doubts, to act on his instinctive feel for the mood of the jury. The man seemed made for the part and grew naturally into it. He could identify easily with the unfortunate, the dispossessed, the poor, with all those who lacked the birthright and assumed superiority of wealth, power, language, and education of the British Canadian mainstream; and he could argue with passion. In Saskatchewan there was fertile ground for his talent.¹⁹

During the Christmas holiday in 1922, while John Diefenbaker was at home in Saskatoon, a fire destroyed his Wakaw office along with several other buildings. In his memoirs he said of Wakaw that “for a while arson seemed the favourite local sport” and that he was twice burnt out by “fires set in buildings farther up the street. When the insurance companies finally stopped making cash settlements in fire claims and began to replace burnt-out buildings, arson somehow ceased to be an important item on the calendar of local crime.” But the setback was a minor one. For Diefenbaker, records were not vital to his practice, and within two weeks he had reopened in new offices without apparent harm.²⁰

Now John Diefenbaker dominated legal business in Wakaw. A.E. Stewart departed early in 1923, and Stewart’s successor, Thomas Paterson, could not maintain the practice. The Prince Albert firm of Halliday and Davis opened a branch office in 1923, but they too failed locally – in part because Diefenbaker challenged the right of an articling student, Clifford Sifton Davis, to run the office in defiance of the rules of the Law Society. The Davis firm was run by Clifford’s brother, T.C. Davis, the mayor of Prince Albert and chief, by inheritance, of the Liberal Party organization in northern Saskatchewan. The episode, Diefenbaker recalled, “did not augur well for our future relations.”²¹ His triumph complete, Diefenbaker now planned to move on himself. He made Alexander Ehman his Wakaw partner, and on May 1, 1924, he went north to establish his practice in Prince Albert.²²

JOHN DIEFENBAKER’S FATHER WAS A LIBERAL SUPPORTER OF SIR WILFRID LAURIER. He maintained that loyalty during the federal election of 1911, the first one to leave a marked impression on his politically ambitious son, although he doubted the wisdom of Laurier’s commitment to reciprocity with the United States. John remembered that his father was impressed by the defection of the western Liberal minister Clifford Sifton in opposition to reciprocity, but he was also suspicious that “the powerful Eastern financial interests” supporting Conservative leader Robert Borden’s campaign against reciprocity “were more concerned with selfish ends than with national welfare.”²³ His father’s ambiguity held some of the seeds of John’s own political vision.

“The election,” said Diefenbaker, “had a profound influence on me, and perhaps more than anything else made me a Conservative. I attended all the meetings in Saskatoon.”²⁴ Despite the strong desire for free trade in the west, John was impressed by Conservative warnings that reciprocity would lead to economic and political union with the United States. He was stirred by the Conservative brand of Canadian nationalism, with its still-heady mix of local and imperial sentiments. “The Tories,” he recalled, “had a marvellous campaign. They didn’t have any arguments but they raised the flag and we’d sing…‘We’re soldiers of the King.’ ‘Rule Britannia’ had its place in those programmes as we cleaved to our British heritage in defiance of American manifest destiny and Grit continentalism. The result was a tremendous revelation of Canadian determination to be Canadian. This impressed me greatly.”²⁵

Borden triumphed and reciprocity was dead. But Saskatchewan remained Liberal. The next federal election, in December 1917, split the conventional mould when Borden’s Conservatives were joined by pro-conscription English-speaking Liberals across the country campaigning as Unionists against Laurier’s Liberal rump from Quebec. For the returned soldier, support for the Unionists was automatic and did not require a decisive choice between Liberals and Conservatives. Diefenbaker campaigned in Saskatoon for the Union candidate, even though he opposed the government’s Wartime Elections Act, which had removed the vote from those naturalized Canadians who had arrived from enemy nations any time after 1902. This piece of crass demagogy was anathema in the prairies and could only deepen the young man’s sense of alienation from the leadership of the Conservative Party. As a poll worker, he was also aware of the government’s manipulation of soldiers’ votes to assure that they were applied to constituencies where they were most needed.²⁶ Diefenbaker took to the hustings during the campaign, but his timidity as a speaker kept his remarks short.²⁷

Diefenbaker’s political attitudes were being formed, it seemed, through neither his brief wartime experience of the larger world nor any deep historical reflection, but through absorption of his father’s attitudes and his own direct experience of Saskatchewan life. He left no record of his views on the Russian revolution, the peace settlement of 1919, the creation of the League of Nations, the postwar eruption of radicalism in the Progressive movement, the Winnipeg General Strike, or the conservative reaction that was labelled “the Red scare.”

By 1921 John Diefenbaker’s political affiliation was not yet entirely clear. This was the year of the Progressive Party sweep against both the old parties in the west and Ontario; in Prince Albert constituency the sitting Unionist member, Andrew Knox, had gone over to the Progressives and was re-elected easily. Diefenbaker admired him and respected his political strength. In Wakaw the young lawyer apparently kept a low profile during the campaign. He suggests, however, that the Liberal Party approached him “to enlist me for party work and as a possible candidate” for both the provincial and the federal elections of 1921. The invitations were declined, but with sufficient ambiguity to prompt his election as secretary of the Wakaw Liberal Association one weekend in his absence. “I returned on the Tuesday from Saskatoon and was amazed to find the Liberal Association minute books and paraphernalia in my office. I immediately delivered them back to the local Liberal president, Mr. J.H. Flynn.”²⁸ Four years later, in March 1925, the Wakaw Liberal Association discussed a motion to nominate him as Liberal candidate for the provincial constituency of Kinistino – a discussion that took place in the presence of his Wakaw law partner, Alexis Etienne Philion, “one of several who surely would have known if they were putting their man into the right pew but the wrong church.”²⁹ But the motion was defeated. (Diefenbaker wrote of this incident as an “approach” to be the Liberal candidate, but dates it the year before, when he was still a resident of Wakaw, and does not mention the motion’s defeat.) These repeated Liberal soundings were flattering acknowledgment of his political ambition, his growing reputation, and perhaps of the skill with which Diefenbaker withheld commitment while awaiting the right opportunity. Were they also indications of his leanings? The record is not clear. In retrospect, he believed that the reigning Saskatchewan Liberals were eager to catch him: “There were suggestions … that came to me that if I would go over to the Liberal Party there was no position that would be denied me in the province … but I was never keen.”³⁰ During the period in Wakaw, however, neither the Conservatives nor the Progressives made any overtures to the aspiring politician.

In Prince Albert, Mayor T.C. Davis was chosen as Liberal candidate for the June 1925 provincial election. Davis and others claimed that Diefenbaker was one of his supporters in that campaign.³¹ Davis won his seat in Prince Albert, as the Liberal Party again swept the province with its apparently invincible machine. Just three weeks later, on June 19, Diefenbaker finally revealed his Conservative colours by addressing a small organizing meeting for the federal Conservative campaign in Prince Albert; and on August 6, 1925, a nominating meeting declared him the party’s federal candidate by acclamation.³²

In a province dominated both federally and provincially by the Liberal Party, the decision was Diefenbaker’s Rubicon. He seemed to be committing himself to political oblivion. “For me,” Diefenbaker wrote, “the election campaign was a test involving more than votes. I passed my thirtieth birthday during the contest. I had come of age politically, and my candidacy was a public declaration of my political faith.”³³ From the start, his faith was a peculiarly personal one that did not wholly fit the party to which he now gave his permanent allegiance. He had decided to make his own way – slowly if necessary – without the patronage of the Liberal Party that had sought him, and within a party so lacking in local strength that it seemed open to his own shaping influence. Its very weakness would allow him his freedom and nurture his eccentricity.

The decision was not made alone. When John Diefenbaker moved to Prince Albert, he grew close to Sam Donaldson, the leading local Conservative. Donaldson, a wealthy former livery stable owner and land speculator, had been mayor of Prince Albert before the turn of the century, a member of the provincial legislature, and briefly (from 1915 to 1917) member of parliament for Prince Albert. He was a colourful character, wise in the political rough-and-tumble of Saskatchewan’s early days. He had engaged the Liberal Party in combat as it built its pervasive provincial machine, and he had won his first legislative election in 1905 only after a series of court cases and a decision of the legislature to overturn the official – and corrupted – result favouring the Liberal candidate. Diefenbaker saw “pluck and courage and character” in that story and in Donaldson’s political career; it was the kind of high-spirited knight errantry that struck romantic chords and recalled his own youthful heroes. As a defence counsel, Diefenbaker had already begun to shape himself in the same anti-establishment mould. In Saskatchewan politics, it was clear, to be anti-establishment was to be anti-Liberal. When Donaldson suggested that the young man should enter politics as a Conservative because Davis would always stand in his way as a Liberal, Diefenbaker saw the point. But he baulked at the suggestion that he might contest the provincial election in Prince Albert against Davis. A few weeks later, Donaldson made a more compelling offer of the federal candidacy and promised Diefenbaker that he would organize the nomination. The bait was taken.³⁴

The election was called for October 29, 1925. There was little chance of a Conservative victory in Prince Albert, where the party had lost its deposit in 1921. But this was an occasion for the budding politician to establish his reputation and his federal party credentials and to practise his platform style. Diefenbaker faced the sitting Progressive member, Andrew Knox, and the Liberal, Charles McDonald. The Progressives were fading before Mackenzie King’s blandishments, and the Liberals were his real opponents. They managed to get under his skin when Davis mocked him as “a fallen-away Liberal.” Diefenbaker replied with an admission: “T.C. Davis seems to think that the fact I was once a Liberal is an offence. Well, as I get older I see the indiscretions of my youth. I’m not here to tell falsehoods. I was a Liberal, but I could not help but see the failures of the Liberal Government in carrying out their promises. He says I sought a Liberal nomination; that’s an unqualified falsehood. It is true that certain persons wanted me to accept nomination. But that I sought it, is false.”³⁵

His Conservative faith was, from the beginning, a blend of conventional British Canadian loyalty and western recalcitrance. “I haven’t spent a lifetime with this party,” he reflected in 1969. “I chose it because of certain basic principles and those … were the empire relationship of the time, the monarchy and the preservation of an independent Canada. None of these things I thought the Liberal party could support.”³⁶ He added to that general disposition two other elements: a distrust of the Ontario-centred policies of the Conservative leader, Arthur Meighen; and a personal response to the dilemmas of cultural assimilation that were especially acute in the racially diverse prairie provinces.

The candidate disagreed publicly with his leader on two matters of western concern: the inviolability of low Crow’s Nest Pass freight rates on the movement of prairie grain and the completion of the Hudson Bay Railway as an alternative outlet to the sea for grain exports. To Diefenbaker’s horror, Meighen warned voters that a Conservative government might alter the statutory Crow rates and persisted in his opposition to the railway. Diefenbaker, in response, promised a public meeting on October 7 that, if elected, he would resign his seat in two years if the railway was not then under construction.³⁷ His opponents pointed out the disagreement with Meighen, but Diefenbaker held his ground. As he later wrote: “My position was difficult. It need not have been. But I chose to speak for myself.”³⁸

From the time of the German war, if not before, John Diefenbaker had been sensitive about his name and ancestry, eager to assert his native-born Canadian status and his British loyalties. Canada was a country still uncertain of its own character, divided by distinct social rankings and widespread prejudices in which persons of British lineage were top of the heap. That was evident in the legislatures and cabinets outside Quebec, in business, in local councils, in the grain growers’ associations. Politicians and educators on the prairies puzzled over the problems of assimilation created by the vast immigration of the previous three decades, and in the communities there were dark gusts of exclusion and discrimination. They touched Diefenbaker personally. In the 1925 campaign he heard himself described, in the old wartime pejorative, as a “Hun.” He confronted the insult in his speech at the Orpheum Theatre in Prince Albert on October 7:

They call me a Hun! Probably the opposing candidates do not, but their minions most certainly do, and one of the leading Liberals has publicly apologized for this serious allegation. The only crimes they can pin upon me are those of youth and of German ancestry. Am I a German? My great-grandfather left Germany to seek liberty. My grandfather and my father were born in Canada. It is true, however, that my grandmother and my grandfather on my mother’s side spoke no English: being Scottish, they spoke Gaelic. If there is no hope for me to be Canadian, then who is there hope for?³⁹

The claims about his grandparents stretched the truth for the sake of effect: his Diefenbaker grandfather was German-born and his Bannerman grandparents spoke English. But the candidate struck a theme that endured for his long political career. In his ideal Canada, there would be no distinctions of race or national origin, no hybrid collection of minorities, visible or invisible, but instead a “united nationality” of equals. His vision was expressed with feeling, and Diefenbaker saw no paradox in it. He simply took for granted that the emerging common nationality would absorb the dominant British heritage of values and institutions – and discard the rest. In western Canada that would become a potent dream.⁴⁰

The young Conservative campaigned vigorously. “I carried my message to village and town throughout my constituency, to Domremy and Wakaw, to Rosthern, to Blaine Lake, Marcelin, Leask, and Shellbrook, to Briarlee, Wild Rose, and Honeymoon.”⁴¹ His courtroom reputation was growing and his platform style reflected the defence counsel’s persuasive skills. A Progressive supporter warned that he should not be underestimated: “He takes himself very seriously and you will all do well to take him the same way. He has any amount of ability and has distinguished himself in his profession by his hobby of taking tough cases. He can take an out and out rascal and describe him with such wonderful oratory that one may almost see a halo around the rogue’s head.”⁴²

But in Saskatchewan the task was hopeless. The Conservative Party picked up seats elsewhere and returned the largest group to parliament, although it did not get a clear majority. In Saskatchewan, however, the party faced defeat across the board. Diefenbaker ran third behind McDonald and Knox in Prince Albert and lost his deposit. He blamed Arthur Meighen squarely for Conservative losses on the prairies; he was convinced that Meighen’s rigidity on freight rates and the Hudson Bay Railway had cost him a parliamentary majority.⁴³

The candidate’s disappointment was mollified by the encouraging editorial judgment of the Liberal Prince Albert Herald: “There are many today ready to prophesy that the last has not yet been heard of him in the political life of this country.” In early December the constituency party held a banquet in Diefenbaker’s honour attended by 250 supporters in celebration of his fighting spirit. “No community can defeat such a man as J.G. Diefenbaker,” said the Reverend R.F. Macdougall in his toast to the guest; Diefenbaker responded that the occasion marked not defeat but rededication.⁴⁴

Prime Minister King had lost not only his plurality but his own seat in North York. Yet he clung to power, delayed the opening of the House, and accepted Charles McDonald’s offer to resign his seat to allow for a by-election in Prince Albert. The local Conservatives did not nominate against him, although Diefenbaker says in his memoirs that, on the suggestion of the national party office, he privately encouraged a Conservative to contest the seat as an independent.⁴⁵ On February 2, 1926, King easily won election as the new member for Prince Albert. Almost immediately afterwards he persuaded Premier Charles Dunning of Saskatchewan to enter the federal cabinet, and Dunning was succeeded as premier by James G. Gardiner. Gardiner appointed his Prince Albert member, T.C. Davis, as minister of municipal affairs, and Davis also took charge of Prime Minister King’s constituency affairs. John Diefenbaker, having cast his lot with the Conservative Party, now found himself facing the formidable Gardiner-Davis-King organization in the riding of his choice.⁴⁶

The Conservative newcomer was beginning to attract notice beyond his own province. In 1926 he accepted an invitation to address the convention of the British Columbia Conservative Party, where another young political devotee, the reporter Bruce Hutchison, found him a compelling presence on the platform. “He was tall, lean, almost skeletal, his bodily motions jerky and spasmodic, his face pinched and white, his pallor emphasized by metallic black curls and sunken, hypnotic eyes. But from this frail, wraithlike person, so deceptive in his look of physical infirmity, a voice of vehement power and rude health blared like a trombone.”⁴⁷

Another federal election was expected soon. On February 16, 1926, a Conservative nominating meeting – much larger than that of the previous year – unanimously reaffirmed Diefenbaker as the party’s Prince Albert nominee. During the next few months the King government faced the rapidly blossoming scandal over corruption in the customs department, and at the end of June King resigned as prime minister when the governor general refused to grant him a dissolution of parliament. Arthur Meighen became prime minister, was defeated at once in the House, and was granted a dissolution for a general election on September 14.⁴⁸

Meighen and the Conservatives thus went into the campaign with what should have been the advantages of office. The previous King government, however, had gained extensive goodwill – and further undermined support for the Progressives – by adopting the old age pension proposal of two independent labour MPs, J.S. Woodsworth and A.A. Heaps. During the campaign King managed to obscure the issue of the customs scandal by charging that the governor general, Lord Byng, had improperly reduced Canada to colonial status by refusing his request for a dissolution, while Meighen had connived in the affair by accepting office. Technically the charges were absurd, but they had emotional power. Meighen bore the added electoral burden of leading a government defeated on its first vote in the House. In Quebec he was still reviled for his imposition of wartime conscription, while in English-speaking Canada he had lost some of his previous pro-British support after his nationalist speech of November 1925 in Hamilton.⁴⁹

Although Diefenbaker regarded Meighen as “a man of integrity and principle, and of powerful intellect,”⁵⁰ he found him, once again, an infuriating party leader in an election campaign. For one thing, Meighen chose to ignore King’s “constitutional issue,” while King exploited it. For another, Meighen insisted on his vehement opposition to the old age pension. Diefenbaker, among others, recalled that he argued with Meighen over the pension, which he saw as a matter of decency rather than the first stage of socialist decadence; but the leader would not be moved. Meighen maintained his unpopular views on the Crow’s Nest Pass rates and the Hudson Bay Railway as well.⁵¹

In Prince Albert there was a straight, two-way contest between Mackenzie King and John Diefenbaker. Diefenbaker did his best to “explain matters that were unexplainable” in Meighen’s platform. But as much as possible, and with fresh confidence, he fought his own local campaign against the Liberal leader. He found attack more congenial than defence. Mackenzie King, he charged, was an interloper in Prince Albert, an absentee leader who had jumped from constituency to constituency and had “never yet been elected twice in the same riding. Let him be elected and defeated in the same riding in the same year.” King, said Diefenbaker, rewarded criminals by appointment to the Senate, lied about Senate reform, and had clung stupidly to office after his party’s 1925 electoral defeat.⁵²

In the east, several Conservatives publicly ridiculed King for his flight to a Saskatchewan constituency in terms that were acutely embarrassing to the local Conservative candidate. The Saskatoon Phoenix commented that R.J. Manion, one of Meighen’s ministers, had made a base appeal to “racial” prejudice by claiming that 99 percent of the Prince Albert voters’ list consisted of “names … such that you and I couldn’t pronounce,” and adding that “I welcome them. We need them. But the fact still remains that they don’t know Canadian problems as Canadians do.”⁵³ In late August the Toronto Telegram reported the jibe of a speaker at a Conservative rally in North York: “Mackenzie King has gone to Prince Albert, has left North York. He doesn’t like the smell of native-born Canadians. He prefers the stench of garlic-stinking continentals, Eskimos, bohunks, and Indians.”⁵⁴ Liberal pamphlets appearing in the riding in the last week of the campaign made similar claims: “The Conservative candidate in North Grey, speaking on Mr. Meighen’s platform at Owen Sound, hurled insult at the electors of Prince Albert. ‘Mr. King’ he said, ‘is running in a riding among the Doukhobors, up near the North Pole where they don’t know how to mark their ballots.’ Citizens of Prince Albert: Mark your ballot for Mackenzie King and reject this insult!”⁵⁵

For John Diefenbaker such taunts were doubly painful. They reflected racial prejudices in a party that, in the west, was struggling unsuccessfully to build links with non-British voters; and they touched his personal sensitivity about both his name and his own uncertain attitudes. The confusion of Diefenbaker’s position on the social question was illustrated in a Roman Catholic parish newsletter, St. Peter’s Messenger, of Meunster, Saskatchewan, that reported on his participation in the annual Orangemen’s celebrations in MacDougall in July 1926. Diefenbaker, said the newsletter, had appeared on the platform with the Reverend Canon Strong and the Reverend R.F. MacDougall, “two veteran advocates of bigotry and fanaticism.” In his address, he had appealed for a Canada that would be “all Canadian and all British” – an imperialism, in the Messengers eyes, that was “a strictly Orange principle” – and he had taken the Orange line in opposing a distinctive Canadian flag. Both these attitudes, the Messenger suggested, were coded expressions of prejudice against Catholicism and French-speaking Canadians. Instead, it called on the electors of Prince Albert “– Catholics and Protestants, French and English – to show that they are entirely out of sympathy with those who either directly or indirectly advocate religious intolerance in our country.” Diefenbaker would discover “that to ride the stormy seas of politics to Ottawa in a rickety Orange tub is an impossible task in Saskatchewan.”⁵⁶ While Diefenbaker deplored prejudice when it took the form of insults against European names and origins, he was still prepared to seek support among Saskatchewan’s anti-Catholic and anti-French-speaking voters – without, apparently, noticing the inconsistency.

Diefenbaker was now refining a talent for turning grievance back upon his accusers. He responded to renewed rumours that he was a German by asserting that only his great-grandfather was German and adding: “Suppose I was a German, does it make for a united Canada to knock settlers?” And he threw another charge at the King campaign. On September 4 he told an election meeting: “Representatives of Mr. King are going through this constituency telling the non-English speaking people that, if the Conservative Government is returned, they will all be deported one by one without trial.”⁵⁷ That, he said, was a falsehood. Yet Diefenbaker did not respond to a challenge from Dr Robert Scott of Wakaw to prove his claim of Liberal scare-mongering.⁵⁸

Mackenzie King’s campaigns, both local and national, were triumphant. The Liberal Party won a parliamentary majority, Meighen lost his seat in Portage la Prairie, and the Conservatives returned only one candidate – the millionaire tycoon from Calgary, R.B. Bennett – from all three prairie provinces. “I still think,” Diefenbaker wrote in his memoirs, “that I might have overcome the constitutional issue, the Hudson Bay Railway, the Crow’s Nest rates controversy, and even the old age pension question, had it not been for the offensive racial comments of those Ontario Conservatives … Despite this, I put on a good fight in the city; King’s lead in the rural polls, however, was unassailable.” Even in Wakaw the local boy’s vote was overwhelmed, as it had been the previous year.⁵⁹

In October 1926 Diefenbaker attended a post-mortem meeting of elected and defeated Conservative candidates and senators held in the great Railway Committee Room of the House of Commons. There, in orotund language, he lamented the loss of votes suffered “as a result of indiscretions and unsound judgement of individuals whose verbosity had been detrimental to the interests of the Conservative party” – a reference, apparently, to the crude remarks about the race, odour, and literacy of the voters of Prince Albert constituency. But there was enough ambiguity in his words that they could also be taken as a reflection on the wisdom of Arthur Meighen. Meighen had come to the meeting carrying his resignation as leader, and after long debate it was accepted. Following departure of the defeated candidates, Conservative MPs chose Hugh Guthrie as interim leader in the House.⁶⁰ Diefenbaker returned to Prince Albert to nurse his wounds and prepare to fight another day.

The federal Conservative caucus decided that the party would choose its new leader, for the first time, in a national convention, to be held in Winnipeg in October 1927. When that meeting opened in the drafty atmosphere of the Amphitheatre Rink on October 10, John Diefenbaker was present as a Saskatchewan delegate and supporter of Guthrie’s candidacy. But Bennett’s advocates had made thorough preparations, and there was little doubt that their man would win the leadership. He did so easily, on the second ballot, against Guthrie and four other candidates.⁶¹

Bennett’s acceptance speech was an oratorical triumph. It impressed the young lawyer from Prince Albert, who noted above all Bennett’s words about destiny and service.

One night long ago I had a dream – I don’t believe in dreams because they usually indicate only a bad digestion – but I thought I was here in my dreams: that I had been called upon to say something to this vast audience, and I am going to say it to you now, what that something was, because it was very real. They were not the words of a human person; they were the words of the Man of Galilee: I looked it up the next day because it stayed with me. “And whomsoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be the servant of all.”

Men and women, you have honored me beyond my deserts, beyond any deserts I ever may have, you have made me, for the moment, the chiefest among you, and please God I shall be the servant of all.⁶²

This was an ingenious bit of mock humility, identifying himself at the same moment with Christ and Everyman. The image stuck with John Diefenbaker.

For the next two years the new leader devoted his abundant energies and wealth to the revival of the Conservative Party following its demoralizing defeat of 1926. Diefenbaker had not supported Bennett in 1927 “because of his close identification with the established economic interests,” but he soon admitted he was mistaken in that judgment. Bennett revealed himself, in Diefenbaker’s eyes, as a man of independent character and strong Methodist conscience. He quickly severed his business ties and showed that he would not accept dictation from “the self-appointed Eastern bosses of the Party.” That spirit of defiance, in a western Conservative leader, provoked the young man’s increasing admiration. Bennett’s political instincts seemed to be Diefenbaker’s own.⁶³

Meanwhile, the Conservative Party of Saskatchewan was preparing itself for renewed assault on the local Liberal government and its formidable machine. The Liberal Party had held power since 1905 by careful management of its relations with the grain growers’ associations, the federal Progressive Party, and the immigrant communities; now there were signs of decay in its alliances and popular resentment over the excesses of its patronage practices. And there were whiffs, as well, of an unpleasant fever in the prairie air, an epidemic of hatred that might also be turned to Conservative advantage.

In December 1926 three self-seeking commercial agents of the racist “Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan” arrived in Saskatchewan in search of profit and acclaim. They found a ready audience among elements of the English-speaking Protestant community who were uneasy about – or unreconciled to – life with large numbers of non-English-speaking and mostly Catholic neighbours. In recent years, substantial flows of European immigration had been renewed to the province. The Klan’s agents, flaunting the mumbo-jumbo, paraphernalia, and exotic appeal of the American Klan, adjusted its targets and methods to local circumstances. There were a few midnight parades and cross-burnings, but no lynchings. Usually, the Klan devoted itself to public meetings denouncing the influences of the Catholic Church, the French language, and continental immigration, and the organizers pocketed the substantial takings from membership fees. In October 1927 they absconded with the funds. The self-styled Canadian head office of the Klan in Toronto dispatched a replacement to Saskatchewan in the person of another itinerant American, J.H. Hawkins, who attracted fresh converts with his carnival oratory. He was soon joined by a genuine Canadian anti-Catholic bigot, the ex-seminarian John James Maloney. A raucous series of organization meetings swept the province in late 1927 and 1928, and by the end of that year there were more than one hundred local branches of the Klan boasting executives and members from all levels of society and including a sprinkling of doctors, lawyers, clergymen, village councillors, and mayors.⁶⁴

For the provincial Liberals, the school system was central to its policies of cultural balance and accommodation. For Anglo-Saxon nativists and anti-Catholics, in contrast, it was the sacred source of cultural purity. In 1928 the Klan focused its attentions on Protestant fears about the school system. As Martin Robin writes:

Klansmen, throughout 1928 and 1929, pressed the education issue with an enthusiasm – and venom – seldom witnessed before in the province. When it came to education, Klansmen – like Orangemen – had their strong likes and dislikes. Dear to their patriotic hearts was the public school, free of sinister sectarian or foreign-language influences, an institution mandated to preserve Protestant Anglo-Saxon culture and to Americanize, or Canadianize, the uninvited alien who had slipped by the immigration sentries. Among Klansmen’s favourite dislikes were separate Catholic schools, sectarian influences in public schools, and, in the case of Canada, subversive French-language provisions thrust on the public schools by a conniving Catholic minority.⁶⁵

Although there were only a handful of separate schools in the province, few nuns among schoolteachers, and less than 3 percent of schools offering French to the intermediate level, the Klan encouraged repeated protests among Protestant ratepayers in those districts.⁶⁶ In one celebrated case in the Gouverneur school district, the Klan encouraged Protestant families to withdraw their children from school over French language teaching and the presence of crucifixes in the classrooms. When truancy charges were laid, the Klan employed a leading Conservative lawyer and Orangeman, J.F. Bryant, in their defence. He argued that the school had ceased to be a public school by its practices, and the presiding justices of the peace, both members of the Klan, dismissed the charges.⁶⁷

Premier Gardiner watched the grassfire spread of the Klan with concern and in August 1927 told Mackenzie King: “It would appear … that the main object of the organization is to spread propaganda which will be of benefit to the opponents of the Government, both Provincial and Federal, at the time of the next election.”⁶⁸ King replied to him: “What you are face to face with is, I think, only the spreading to Western Canada of the influence of the Orange Order as the electioneering nucleus of the Tory Party. You cannot, I think, do a better thing than to expose as quickly and completely as possible tactics such as those which your letter describes.”⁶⁹ Gardiner set about gathering materials for his file. In January 1928, when the provincial Conservative leader told the legislature that “all the forces of the province opposed to the present government” should unite to defeat it, Gardiner erupted in a bitter condemnation of the Klan.⁷⁰ The Klan’s links to the Conservative Party had previously been the subject of gossip; now they were the leading issue of partisan debate. Gardiner made sure of that.

When the provincial Conservative Party held its leadership convention in Saskatoon in March 1928, the Klan’s activities and the premier’s denunciation promised a volatile occasion. Some delegates were members of the Klan, many were sympathetic with its intolerant aims, and most sensed that the party might ride to power in the wake of the Klan’s campaign against foreigners and Catholics. Indeed, only three among the three hundred convention delegates were Roman Catholic. As delegates entered the hall, J.H. Hawkins and his aides distributed Klan pamphlets. The convention’s policy resolutions coincided precisely with the Klan’s views on secular public schools, the promotion of patriotism, and selective immigration – with the exception of a single resolution that made a bow towards racial tolerance but seemed intended as much to throw racist accusations back at the Gardiner government.

Whereas certain unscrupulous members of the Saskatchewan Government are making use, in remote districts of the Province, of statements made by certain Eastern Conservatives and certain irresponsible individuals reflecting on our non-English electors, and are endeavouring thereby to incite racial hatred against the Conservative party: We hereby declare that these parties do not represent the Conservative policy or the Conservative attitude towards our immigrants of non-English extraction and we deplore the use of such language by such individuals and hereby repudiate it. We stand for fair and square treatment of all our citizens irrespective of race or creed.⁷¹

J.F. Bryant, the party’s vice president, told R.B. Bennett that “we have a splendid platform and … not a single word … used in the convention or in any resolution can in any way embarrass our Conservative friends in other parts of Canada.” Even the few Catholic delegates, he insisted, approved the resolutions, although he admitted that they were “very sore in that there were none of them elected to any of the Executive offices.”⁷²

These Roman Catholic delegates, along with several sympathizers, warned Bennett in a thick flurry of letters after the convention that the national party would be grievously damaged by the Saskatchewan’s party’s links to the Klan and repudiation of Catholic support.⁷³ They noted above all that two Catholic delegates, J.J. Leddy and A.G. MacKinnon, had been nominated to the executive but excluded from it by manipulation, and that the party’s leaders, J.T.M. Anderson and J.F. Bryant, were both promoters of the Klan if not actual members. Another leader, Dr W.D. Cowan, was an admitted member. Bennett quickly expressed his sadness, concern, and embarrassment at the behaviour of the Saskatchewan party. But Anderson and Bryant reassured him that all was well, while others counselled that the party could keep a discreet distance and still benefit from the Klan’s political aid. Bryant concurred in that view in a letter to Bennett at the end of May 1928: “They are … going very strong and will be of great assistance in defeating the present Government, and I do not think that we should throw any stones at them any more than we should expect that the Liberals should throw stones at the Knights of Columbus or any other similar organization that is so strongly supporting them.”⁷⁴

Despite his show of concern, Bennett eventually recognized his limited power, took the safe line of non-interference, and counselled Catholic Conservatives in Saskatchewan to shelter behind the barricades while letting the dirt fly, since it could result in a Conservative victory. The Klan would be neither formally embraced nor repudiated.⁷⁵

John Diefenbaker attended the Saskatoon convention as a delegate from Prince Albert and may have played a role in the removal of the name of one Catholic delegate, A.G. MacKinnon, from the official slate of nominees for the executive. According to Bryant, Diefenbaker typed the list of nominees from which MacKinnon’s name mysteriously disappeared, and the secretary of the nominating committee who dictated the names to Diefenbaker insisted that the change occurred – if at all – at the typing stage.⁷⁶ Diefenbaker himself left no record of the events. But clearly, as one delegate wrote to Bennett, “it was considered inexpedient that any Catholic should hold office in the organization.”⁷⁷

As the popular tide swept with them, the Conservatives hoped for a provincial election during 1928. Gardiner held off, however, and instead tested the waters with a by-election in Arm River constituency in October. It became “the most vicious in Saskatchewan’s history.”⁷⁸ The issues were already in the air, and all of them put the Liberal government on the defensive: French language teaching, an improper Catholic presence in public school classrooms, and corruption in the Liberal patronage system. Bryant added an anti-Semitic tinge to the package by charging that Harry Bronfman had paid off the Liberal Party to avoid prosecution on liquor smuggling charges. The Conservative candidate in Arm River was Stewart Adrain, a Regina lawyer and Grand Master of the Saskatchewan Orange Association.⁷⁹

Bryant dominated the Conservative campaign with his corruption charges, his accusations of a vast conspiracy to turn Saskatchewan into a French-speaking and Catholic province within ten years, and his open sympathy for the Ku Klux Klan. Party leader Anderson echoed Bryant with more restraint, while other Conservative leaders kept their distance and declined any role in the campaign. But Diefenbaker shared the stage with Bryant on several nights in late October.⁸⁰

On the last weekend of the campaign, Diefenbaker accepted Anderson’s request that he attend a Gardiner meeting in order to challenge “any statements of questionable truth.”⁸¹ When Diefenbaker repeatedly interrupted, Gardiner invited him to come to the platform to address the meeting. Diefenbaker told the audience that he wished to ask the premier “some questions in connection with education.” But he began with a disclaimer: “As it appears to be the custom for speakers in this campaign to indicate their religious beliefs, I hereby state that I am a Baptist and I am not a member of the Ku Klux Klan.” He then challenged the premier to state his position on “sectarian influences which we in the northern part of the province find pervading the entire education system.” In Wakaw, for example, he asserted that “nuns in religious garb teach in what is a public school and the crucifix is hung on the wall.” Diefenbaker spoke ominously of Gardiner’s recent travels in the east. “Do you know also where he went?” Clutching and quoting from a French language newspaper, Diefenbaker told the audience: “He went into Quebec province.” When Gardiner replied, he asked reporters to keep his remarks about the Wakaw case off the record for the sake of social harmony; for Diefenbaker, that became a cowardly evasion and a subject of ridicule.⁸² Whatever spirit of tolerance John Diefenbaker had claimed when he defended Boutin and Ethier in 1922 had disappeared later in the decade.

On polling day in Arm River there was an extraordinary turnout of 91 percent. The Liberal Party won the by-election, but with a tiny margin of fifty-nine votes.⁸³ For the Conservatives, the message was that excess would be rewarded. The 1929 campaign was under way. Bryant, Diefenbaker, and others maintained their attacks on the corruption and religious bias of the Gardiner regime, and they were joined by the fresh newspaper voice of the Conservative Party, the Regina Daily Star. Diefenbaker told an audience in North Battleford in November: “I do not believe in bigotry. I would not like to see the Conservative Party go into power on a religious question. I do not wish to hurt the religious feelings of any, but in the face of danger it is necessary to speak frankly.” It was no more fair, he suggested, for Protestant children to be forced into a school presided over by nuns and decorated with altars and crucifixes in every room than it would be to force Catholic children into a school “presided over by an Orangeman in regalia or a Klansman in a nightshirt.” Yet Protestants, he claimed, were being coerced in that way.⁸⁴

After a turbulent spring session of the legislature, the provincial election was at last called for June 6, 1929. The Liberal Party stood on its progressive record, while the Conservative and Progressive opposition emphasized the emotional issues of race, religion, language, and immigration familiar from Arm River. In a number of ridings Conservatives and Progressives made informal agreements not to nominate against each other. The Conservatives, especially, were confident that they could undermine the pluralist coalition that had sustained Liberal governments since 1905. Against this disturbing current of emotionalism the Liberal Party did little except to plead for tolerance.⁸⁵

In Prince Albert, Diefenbaker decided at the last possible moment to seek the provincial nomination. He defeated one of his mentors, Mayor Samuel Branion, in a contested meeting at the end of April. He faced the attorney general, T.C. Davis, in the campaign, and was himself promised the attorney generalship if he and the party won the election. Diefenbaker, like his leader, Anderson, denied any anti-Catholic sentiments, but his election literature called for a vote “for the Conservative candidate, J.G. Diefenbaker, if you believe in a public school free from sectarian influences.” Diefenbaker’s old legal competitor from Wakaw, C.S. Davis, his opponent’s brother, claimed that “Mr. Diefenbaker is hand in hand with the Ku Klux Klan, and if elected he would be directly answerable to it … it is only necessary to go into Mr. Diefenbaker’s committee rooms and you will find the heads among them there.” Diefenbaker did not respond to the charge.⁸⁶ In his memoirs he noted the accusation, suggested that James Gardiner had raised the Klan from obscurity by his attacks upon it and thus had made it “a recognizable centre of opposition to his government and its policies,” and concluded that “everyone who opposed Gardiner, his policies, and the viciousness of his machine was tarred with the dirty brush of Klan fanaticism.” This was not an admission of fellow-travelling with the Klan, but it was something less than a denial. The record made that difficult.⁸⁷ Whatever his private preferences might have been, Diefenbaker – like many other Saskatchewan Conservatives in 1929 – found himself tempted into an unspoken and unsavoury alliance by the prospect of victory. Diefenbaker succumbed.

On election day there was a major realignment of the vote, as the Conservatives had hoped. Areas with high Catholic and European immigrant populations overwhelmingly returned Liberals, while the Conservatives made gains in regions of Protestant and Anglo-Scandinavian settlement. The Liberal Party lost 6 percent of the popular vote, while the Conservative Party gained 13 percent. Gardiner lost half his seats in the legislature. Anderson won twenty-four seats to Gardiner’s twenty-six, but five Progressives and six Independents held the balance of power. In Prince Albert T.C. Davis held his seat by several hundred votes against John Diefenbaker.⁸⁸ Afterwards, Davis wrote privately that Diefenbaker’s “proper place would be as a third-rate vaudeville performer in a four-a-day vaudeville house.”⁸⁹ For the moment, Gardiner retained power, but that was unlikely to last beyond the first meeting of the new legislature in September.

SINCE HIS ARRIVAL IN PRINCE ALBERT IN THE SUMMER OF 1924, JOHN DIEFENBAKER had become more and more immersed in politics. Despite – perhaps partly because of – the indifferent economic state of the city in the mid-1920s, his legal practice grew steadily but slowly from its foundations in Wakaw. Much of his work involved minor civil and criminal matters, “a potpourri of disputes from a very fractious society,” in the words of Wilson and Wilson.⁹⁰ Diefenbaker never attracted major business clients in the city; bad debts, estates, minor thefts, assault, insurance claims, and slander were the firm’s mainstays. As he had learned in Wakaw, judicious publicity was useful to a criminal lawyer. In the age before television, criminal trials offered the newspapers a steady diet of sensation, and Diefenbaker was careful to encourage press coverage of his court cases.⁹¹

In Wakaw, Diefenbaker maintained his office for five years after his departure, first in the hands of Alec Ehman, then Alexis Philion, and finally R.B. Godfrey, until it was closed in 1929. In Prince Albert, Frank C. Cousins joined the partnership in 1925. He died suddenly in June 1927 of a heart attack, “the victim,” Diefenbaker wrote, “of an attack of delayed shell shock.”⁹² For the next two years Diefenbaker ran the Prince Albert practice alone, until William G. Elder joined the firm in the autumn of 1929. From early 1927 Diefenbaker shared the office with his amiable but feckless brother, Elmer, who had taught school for a few years before drifting into the insurance business. Elmer performed routine chores for John, both business and political, while John treated him indulgently as a dependent child. That relationship would continue throughout Elmer’s life.⁹³ Since his arrival in Prince Albert in 1924 John had lived an austere bachelor’s life in the Avenue Hotel; now the brothers took rooms in the Donaldson home, where they stayed for the next two years.⁹⁴

The law firm was located prominently on Central Avenue, upstairs in the red-brick Bank d’Hochelaga building. The strikingly erect young lawyer in his three-piece suits and black homburg was soon a familiar figure on the streets of the frontier town. So were his automobiles: at first the Maxwell, then a 1927 Chrysler Sedan, then a 1929 Chrysler 75. Diefenbaker maintained the various Masonic Lodge attachments he had made in Wakaw, with the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons (Scottish Rite), the Elks, the Loyal Orange Lodge, and later the Shriners. He became a director of the Prince Albert Canadian Club, the Kinsmen, the Prince Albert City Band, and a member of many other local societies. Although law and politics had made him a public figure, and his rhetorical skills were growing remarkable, Diefenbaker remained socially awkward and never penetrated the inner circles of local power. Partly, of course – but not entirely – that was a political matter. Until 1929 he was shut out of provincial rewards and frustrated by the dominance of the Davis family in public life. Not only did T.C. Davis manage legal patronage as attorney general of the province, but he owned the Prince Albert Herald and used it shamelessly for the promotion of Liberal causes. In the memoirs Diefenbaker suggested, with some exaggeration, that when he began practice in Prince Albert, the newspaper refused to use his name when reporting his cases.⁹⁵

Soon after arriving in Prince Albert, John met Emily Will, the daughter of a prominent local real estate agent, George Will. For several months they courted and friends began to assume that the couple would marry. But the courtship faded. John was still making his weekend trips to Saskatoon to stay with his parents, and there, apparently, he met Edna May Brower – perhaps through his brother, or perhaps crossing paths at the railway station. Edna’s family, like John’s, had homesteaded near Saskatoon, and after high school and normal school she had become a teacher, first in Rosetown and then at Mayfair school in Saskatoon. Edna had a long-term engagement with a Langham farmer and car dealer who was twenty years her senior, but by the summer of 1927 her interest was shifting to John Diefenbaker. Edna was slight, pretty, full of high spirits, outgoing, and had inherited a notable eye for fashion from her mother, Maren Brower. She enjoyed a busy social life in Saskatoon, and as her romance with the Prince Albert lawyer grew, acquaintances wondered what the attraction could be. “Whatever the reason, Edna’s photograph album, which is filled with pictures of herself and her many swains – a passing parade of young men with her in buggies, on horseback, beside airplanes, and in cars – suddenly begins to show pictures of only two people, herself and John, nuzzling, snuggling, swimming, laughing, picnicking. This pictorial record did not match the impression other people had of John as a cold, introverted loner.”⁹⁶

Even in the midst of courtship, Edna’s friends could not see the affectionate man that Edna saw. A teaching colleague, Molly Connell, visited John in Prince Albert with Edna in 1928 and recalled: “His eyes, they just bored right through you. They were like steel; hard eyes. There was never any tenderness or warmth about John Diefenbaker. I felt it then, but one does not say that to a good friend who may be in love with him.”⁹⁷

Edna was introduced to John’s parents, realized John’s dependence on his mother, and saw that Mary Diefenbaker was “a strong and rigid woman, single-minded in her possessiveness towards her son.” Edna was attracted to William Diefenbaker, whom she viewed as a victim of Mary’s harsh contempt. Mary could show little more than bare toleration for the young woman, “sometimes stilling the effervescence and enthusiasm that poured from John’s lady friend.” She extolled the brilliance of her son to Edna, and made clear that she expected always to retain John’s first loyalty.⁹⁸

Despite Mary’s thinly veiled hostility, Edna and John drew closer: two opposites attracting in mysterious and not-so-mysterious ways. They were young people in love, but they engaged also in the calculations of ambition. John told Edna of his political desires, of his awkwardness in personal relations, of the pain of defeat, of his wish to be prime minister. It was, he said, “more than a goal; it is my destiny.” She encouraged him, perhaps realizing this was a fate she could share.

In her heart she knew that the John Diefenbaker she knew had no hope of becoming the prime minister of Canada: She was not so blindly in love that she could not see he lacked the essential qualities for a successful public figure, except for his driving ambition and his showmanship. But she knew that she was a good teacher, and that she and her family in the West and in Toronto, and all the family’s friends would help him. She had no illusions; her brothers were popular and building a name in sports circles (particularly in curling) and her oldest brother Edward was now a prominent eastern lawyer with many highly placed political and business friends.⁹⁹

By the summer of 1928 John and Edna were close enough for John to invite Edna to join him and his family on an auto trip to California. Little record of the vacation remains, beyond a postcard from Yellowstone Park, a photograph of John, Mary, and Edna, and John’s rankling memory of a traffic violation in California. Apparently William stayed behind in Saskatoon, while Elmer and his mother chaperoned the couple.¹⁰⁰ Soon after their return, John and Edna began planning for a wedding, and Edna gave notice that she would give up her teaching job at Christmas.

A few days after the Arm River by-election, Edna’s father, Chauncey Brower, died in Victoria, where he had gone with Edna’s mother and sister-in-law for comfort in the last stages of a long illness. Maren Brower took charge of the wedding arrangements and proposed that the couple should marry in Toronto from the home of Edna’s prosperous brother, Edward. For Edna that was an appealing prospect. Edward gave her a gift of $5000 to buy her dress and trousseau, and in the spring of 1929 he, his wife, Mabel, Maren, and Edna took off for New York City to outfit the bride. There she indulged herself in a wedding dress by the fashionable French couturier Lucien Lelong, an extensive wardrobe, and linen, towels, sterling silver, and Crown Derby china for her new home.¹⁰¹ While Edna devoted herself excitedly to preparations for the wedding, John stayed behind in Prince Albert to fight the provincial election campaign – a division of labour that suited both John’s temperament and the manners of the time.

Just three weeks after his latest election defeat, John Diefenbaker and Edna Brower were married in Walmer Road Baptist Church in Toronto. A wedding announcement appeared in the Toronto papers.

The bride, who was given in marriage by her brother, Mr. E.H. Brower, was dressed in a Lelong frock of white tulle over white satin, with a tight-fitting bodice and bouffant skirt, hat of tulle to match and silver brocade shoes. She carried a shower bouquet of Ophelia roses, orchids and lilies of the valley. After the ceremony a reception was held at 34 Kilbarry Rd., the home of the bride’s brother. After a buffet lunch had been served, the bride and groom left for the west via boat, the bride wearing an ensemble of Madeline blue georgette with hat, shoes and bag to match and carrying a white fox fur. Mr. and Mrs. Diefenbaker will reside in Prince Albert, Sask., where Mr. Diefenbaker is well known in political circles.¹⁰²

Thus Diefenbaker, thrice defeated but “well known,” identified himself in the social columns as a politician rather than a criminal lawyer. For him, the Toronto wedding perhaps gave promise of an entrée into the Ontario world of power and influence in which his new brother-in-law moved – a world that had always beckoned but now seemed unexpectedly closer.¹⁰³ Thanks to Edward and Mabel’s hospitality, John and Edna had a small taste of that in the days before the wedding.

But above all John was in love, and the elixir worked wonders. Simma Holt describes the transformation as the wedding guests remembered it. “At the wedding reception they saw the stiff and stodgy John come out of his shell to laugh openly, even uproariously, at his bride’s antics and to produce brilliant, though often cutting comments. This was not the dull man they thought they had known or the family friends at the functions had heard about in gossip about Edna’s choice. He moved through the crowd, with Edna at his side, talking, joking, hugging her, praising her, seeming able to be gregarious with her. He even danced with her.”¹⁰⁴ And before the newlyweds left on the boat, they visited Edward and Mabel’s son Ted, who was bedridden in hospital and later recalled the occasion with affection.¹⁰⁵

Following their Great Lakes trip, the Diefenbakers settled temporarily into the Avenue Hotel in Prince Albert while their new house was being finished. Edna was soon friendly with their fellow residents, entertaining the women with coffee and bridge games, but John found relaxation more difficult. “John just never seemed to bend or get the starch out,” one of Edna’s close friends remembered.¹⁰⁶ But he was besotted with Edna. In her company he beamed, kissed, whispered, and ignored his surroundings. Edna’s niece, Sheila, who visited on weekends and holidays and was treated as a daughter, was embarrassed by this constant “smooching around”: “Aunt Edna used to call Uncle John ‘Donny Boy,’ and this man, who was so articulate in the public arena, reverted to baby talk in private. In the evening they relaxed and were playful; he pulled her down on his knee and she would just sit there and they would neck, and hug and kiss as though they had just discovered smooching.”¹⁰⁷

During the day, John telephoned Edna frequently to tell her about his work or to seek her advice and comfort. At a reception for the newlyweds given by the local Conservative Party, Edna captivated the guests, who saw her instantly as a political asset for the still-dour and unsuccessful candidate. Once the couple moved into their home, a stucco bungalow with two bedrooms on 20th Street West, Edna and her mother decorated and furnished it with slightly flowery taste and great enthusiasm. As the customs of professional life dictated, Edna would be the homemaker and loyal spouse, standing in the background to sustain and encourage her husband’s career with total dedication. She would be unusually close in that background, softening, reassuring, urging on, indulging his fancies and his ambitions. Edna hoped there would be children and decorated the second bedroom in yellow as a nursery. John’s natural ease and generosity with Sheila suggested that he would make a good father. But there would be no children. That absence was almost certainly a factor in the strains of discord that soon entered the Diefenbaker home.¹⁰⁸

JOHN DIEFENBAKER’S FIRST DEFENCE IN A MURDER TRIAL CAME IN 1927, WHEN HE appeared as junior counsel in R. v. Bourdon, a case involving drinking, mutual threats, and a shotgun killing. The accused offered a confused story that mixed claims of self-defence and accident during a struggle at his farmhouse. There were no witnesses and there was no solid evidence to undermine the defendant’s claims. At the preliminary hearing Diefenbaker raised doubts about the competence of the police investigation, but at trial, senior counsel chose to emphasize the defendant’s story instead. That was enough, in the end, to bring a jury decision of not guilty. But the successful defence did not quite fit Diefenbaker’s combative style, and he never again served as a junior in a criminal trial.¹⁰⁹

The Prince Albert lawyer’s second involvement in a murder trial came at the appeal stage of R. v. Olson, late in 1928. Ernest Olson, a farm labourer who had been charged with the murder of William Robson, was defended at trial by H.E. (Bert) Keown, a political friend of Diefenbaker. Olson, who had left Robson’s employment taking Robson’s wife with him two years earlier, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death on the sole evidence of Mrs Robson that he had confessed the murder to her. The trial jury had rejected medical evidence that the accused was too “feeble-minded” to stand trial. Keown had appeared without any opportunity to prepare his case, and there were questions about the trial judge’s impartiality. Keown gave notice of appeal and called in his associate John Diefenbaker.

At the appeal hearing, Diefenbaker accepted the original jury decision to allow Olson to stand trial. But he argued that the judge had improperly told the jury that Mrs Robson was a credible witness; Mrs Robson herself might have committed the murder and falsely accused her former lover. He asked that the conviction be quashed in favour of a new trial.

The Court of Appeal ruled that, on balance, there had been no miscarriage of justice. The conviction was sustained, but the court recommended that the medical evidence on Olson’s mental capacity should be brought to the attention of the minister of justice. Diefenbaker did so, and in February 1929 the federal cabinet commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment.¹¹⁰

The young lawyer’s next murder case – the first that he handled through all stages of trial himself – occurred in the late summer and early autumn of 1929. This one exemplified his courtroom style and added to his popular reputation as a defender. Nevertheless, it was anything but a model victory.

Early in August Constable L.V. Ralls of the RCMP detachment at Foam Lake, Saskatchewan, was called to investigate the death, by shooting, of a prosperous farmer, Nick Pasowesty, on his land near Sheho. Nearby Constable Ralls found one shotgun shell and one empty casing; police later found the family weapon that had fired the fatal shell. Under questioning, Nick’s two sons, his third wife, Annie, and the hired help all confessed ignorance of the shooting; they had dispersed to work in several directions that morning. Further investigation revealed some conflict with a neighbour and tension between husband and wife. But suspicion soon focused on the seventeen-year-old younger son, John, a spendthrift whom Nick had recently bailed out of a car purchase and a bad debt. When a friend of John’s told Ralls that John had boasted of shooting his father on the day of the killing, Ralls took the boy into custody.

After a night in the cells, John Pasowesty told Ralls he was ready to confess and, in the presence of a witness, he said he had killed his father in self-defence after Nick had fired first at him. When Ralls pointed out that only one shell had been used, John altered his confession, admitting that he had hidden in the brush and ambushed his father. He was charged with murder and quickly committed for trial. One week later, in Prince Albert jail, he changed his account again. The real story, he said, was that his mother had shot her husband and “told me that I should say that I have killed my old man because I might get out of it somehow because she would get some lawyers for me.” On that basis another charge of murder was laid, against Annie Pasowesty. She consulted John’s lawyer, G.T. Killam, who shifted to her defence and suggested John Diefenbaker as her son’s new defence counsel.

Diefenbaker could not be present for Annie’s preliminary hearing on September 6 in Sheho, but instructed his replacement that John Pasowesty should refuse to testify. Since John’s evidence was the sole basis for the charge, the hearing was brief. John was called to the witness stand but refused to identify himself. Annie’s lawyer asked for dismissal of the charge and, after a week’s adjournment, it was dropped. Once again there was a single defendant.

The case came to trial on November 19, 1929, before Mr Justice George E. Taylor of the Court of King’s Bench at Wynyard. He was, in the words of Garrett and Kevin Wilson, “a prosecution-minded martinet” who habitually intimidated defence lawyers in his courtroom.¹¹¹ Diefenbaker knew and disliked him.

The defence counsel’s hope was to make the case for Annie Pasowesty’s guilt and to challenge the admissibility of his client’s confession on the ground that it was coerced by the police. That meant getting John’s statement about his mother into evidence, preferably by her own admission or in police testimony in order to avoid calling the accused to the stand. But when Diefenbaker questioned Annie, the judge brusquely barred any reference to her arrest. Next Diefenbaker called Constable Ralls and led him firmly through the events leading to John’s arrest. Despite eliciting evidence that the youth had been driven “somewhere up the road” by the police for questioning, that they had told him his boots seemed to match the prints at the murder scene, that he had been arrested without any chance to speak to his family, and that he had acted strangely – perhaps out of fear – in custody, Diefenbaker could not convince the judge that the confession was inadmissible. Mr Justice Taylor cut him short and allowed it.

Now Diefenbaker could only try to get his client’s accusation into evidence and convince the jury that it might be true. Believing that the Crown would call the RCMP constable who took down the accusation, Diefenbaker had not subpoenaed him; but Crown counsel did not call him. As the prosecution’s summing up began, Diefenbaker asked that the officer be called. The judge intervened. “You know how to get them; to subpoena them and bring them here.”

“But the deputy attorney general was down here,” Diefenbaker responded.

“Do not make any more statements about that,” said the judge. “There is a legal way in which you can get witnesses, and do not start giving evidence in this case yourself.”

“With all due diffidence,” Diefenbaker replied, “I was told that all I had to do was to give them the names and they would arrange for subpoenas and everything.”

Mr Justice Taylor rebuked Diefenbaker before the jury: He had no right to “make statements by way of evidence” or to entangle the case in cross-trails, and the failure to call the witness was his own responsibility.¹¹² The rebuke may have been deserved, but it was crude, and it inevitably tipped the psychological balance against the defence. Diefenbaker was now forced to call the accused in order to get John Pasowesty’s story about his mother into evidence. But putting the accused on the stand was something Diefenbaker sought always to avoid.

Under oath, Pasowesty insisted that he had confessed to the murder to protect his mother. He identified his Prince Albert statement naming her as the murderer, and Diefenbaker was then able to read it into the record. But the fact that a charge had been laid against her could still not be mentioned. Perhaps most damaging to the Crown, Pasowesty recalled that his mother had spoken to him in Ukrainian in the presence of a police matron at the Prince Albert jail. When the matron had asked him what she said, he had replied: “My mother said, John, you say you did this, you say you did it, and I will see you get free.’ ”

When cross-examination began the next morning, the prosecutor carefully and politely revealed the weaknesses in the boy’s story. He elicited further admissions that John Pasowesty had planned to leave home for Alberta and had recently attempted to buy poison for an uncertain purpose. On reexamination, Annie Pasowesty admitted that on the day her husband’s body was discovered she had ordered ten gallons of cider and invited the neighbours to drink it. Diefenbaker wondered whether this was custom or celebration.

In his final argument to the jury, Diefenbaker insisted that the accused had no motive for murder, nothing that could weigh against “the great love of a son for his father, the respect and veneration in which we human beings hold our parents.” Instead, he suggested, “Annie Pasowesty committed this crime. A schemer, a plotter, she contrived an arrangement where she could kill her husband and throw suspicion upon her son. And worse. Then she induced this boy to confess to the crime, to take that responsibility upon himself and steer all suspicion away from her.” She had motives: her unhappiness in marriage, her husband’s estate. “The truth in this case lies in the statements the boy gave to the police in Prince Albert, the statements he made when at last he realized he was being used.”

The prosecutor, Herb Sampson, concluded instead that the son was the callous schemer who could not be believed. The judge’s summing up – although it was phrased more obliquely – left the same impression of distrust: John Pasowesty was “the kind of person that he demonstrated himself to be in the witness box.” The jury, the judge reminded them, was obliged to consider the facts “uninfluenced by any consideration of sympathy whatever.”

Four hours after they retired, the jury returned to the courtroom to request a review of evidence about the family’s movements on the morning of the killing. Since the record had not been transcribed, the judge offered to read his notes of the evidence. The jury concurred and the judge proceeded. When he was questioned about the accuracy of Diefenbaker’s suggestion that the accused had not been away from the house long enough to commit the murder, the judge made a crucial suggestion: “I am satisfied that I have taken down what was said correctly as to that, but while they put it that way, ten to fifteen minutes, still I would suggest to you that was not meant for any accurate statement at all. It is just a statement that men estimate about a thing afterwards, that they have kept no track of.” After further glossing of the record, the jury once again retired. An hour later they returned with a verdict of guilty. Mr Justice Taylor commented that the verdict was “the only reasonable conclusion that could have been arrived at upon the evidence,” and sentenced John Pasowesty to be hanged at Prince Albert jail on February 21, 1930.

Diefenbaker’s appeal, on the ground that the court should not have allowed the boy’s confession into evidence, was summarily dismissed by the Court of Appeal on January 15, 1930. Now the defence was reduced to petitioning the federal cabinet for clemency – and assuring that the press was well supplied with sensational leads. Although he had not raised the issue of mental capacity at any earlier stage of the case, Diefenbaker now gained the evidence of two “alienists” or psychiatrists who judged that Pasowesty had a mental age of nine or ten years. That was enough to convince the cabinet and, after one stay of execution, the boy’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment on March 3, 1930. At the end of a harrowing ordeal, that could almost be counted a victory.¹¹³

While awaiting the appeal hearing in the Pasowesty case, the firm of Diefenbaker and Elder took on another murder defence without fee. The case was an equally sordid affair of family violence, R. v. Wysochan.¹¹⁴ The murder victim was Antena Kropa; her husband Stanley was the only witness. The accused, Alex Wysochan, had attempted to run off with the victim a few weeks earlier, but they had been intercepted by the police and Antena had returned to her husband. On Christmas Day, 1929, Stanley Kropa arrived bleeding at a neighbour’s home claiming that Alex Wysochan had broken into his house while drunk and brandishing a revolver, threatening to shoot him. Stanley claimed to have escaped out a window, and then to have heard four shots and his wife’s anguished cry. When the police arrived, they found Antena dying with three gunshot wounds, while Wysochan lay beside her in a drunken stupor, suffering from a superficial flesh wound. As she was carried to hospital, Antena reached out to her husband and cried, “Stanley, help me out because there is a bullet in my body.”

The case seemed straightforward: Alex Wysochan was charged with murder. But the defence, too, seemed clear: if counsel could convince a jury that Wysochan was too drunk to form an intent to kill, the offence would be reduced to manslaughter and the accused man’s life would be saved. Instead, Diefenbaker chose to reject the claim of drunkenness and to assert that Stanley Kropa was the murderer. This was risky, even foolhardy. It meant that Diefenbaker would have to put his client onto the witness stand to challenge Kropa’s story with his own. Wysochan could not claim, as he had already told friends, that he had been too drunk to remember anything.

The trial was called for March 18 in Humboldt. For much of January and February Diefenbaker had been bedridden with a revival of his old gastric ulcer and, after the first day’s hearing, the Regina Morning Leader commented that “Mr. Diefenbaker is recovering from a long illness and the strain of the trial is telling severely on him.”¹¹⁵ But he had Edna in the audience for support, primed to watch the jury’s reactions as an aid to her husband.

The prosecution made a tightly woven case. Stanley Kropa told of his wife’s affair and his willingness to have her return to his home. He repeated the story of Wysochan’s drunken invasion and his own escape; other witnesses testified to Wysochan’s heavy drinking that day; the revolver was identified as Wysochan’s; police evidence showed that all four bullets had been fired at close range; and there were no identifiable fingerprints on the weapon. The prosecutor suggested that Wysochan must have fired all the shots after Kropa had dived out the window. The case rested.

Diefenbaker called Alex Wysochan, who testified through a Polish interpreter. He admitted his affair. Wysochan claimed that when he and Antena were found by the police during their attempted flight a few weeks before the murder, Stanley Kropa had taken his clothes and the revolver home with him and had kept them. Wysochan said that the affair had continued after Antena’s return home. On Christmas Day Kropa had found him drinking at the Windsor Hotel and invited him home; after his arrival, Kropa had set upon him, Antena had tried to separate them, and he had heard shots. Struggle and drink had left him confused, but he knew he had not used the gun. The story complete, Diefenbaker ended with a flourish. He asked Wysochan to bare his chest and reveal his wound to the jury.

In cross-examination the prosecutor, Frank Clayton Wilson, sought to emphasize Wysochan’s brazen act of wife-stealing. For a prairie jury in 1930, that would be strong evidence of general depravity and untrustworthiness. Under questioning, Wysochan admitted that Kropa was a good man. Which one of these two was more likely to tell the truth?

Diefenbaker’s concluding argument to the all-male, all-English-speaking jury came on the morning of the third day. Edna maintained her jury watch while he spoke, telegraphing messages to him by her expressions as he glanced now and then in her direction. Although strained and weak, Diefenbaker called forth his energies and riveted the attention of his audience. Alex Wysochan was a bad man, but the issue was not immorality; it was murder, and Wysochan had no motive for murder. He loved Antena Kropa. Stanley Kropa, on the other hand, had a motive. He had been wronged and he had killed in revenge. That was the only believable story.

The prosecutor rose to drown the defence in invective. Wysochan was a “dirty little coward,” a “little rat,” a “reptile,” a drunkard who had gone to the Kropa house to kill his mistress’s husband. If Kropa had shot the couple, would he have left the house through a broken window? Would his wife have appealed to him as she lay dying?

Mr Justice Bigelow, in his charge to the jury, commented carefully on the law, the evidence, and the arguments, but inclined towards the case for the prosecution. He disagreed with Diefenbaker on the question of motive. If the jury believed Stanley Kropa had told the truth, then a motive was unnecessary. Wysochan had come to kill Antena’s husband, and then for some reason – impossible to discover but perhaps related to the love triangle – had turned on the wife when her husband had escaped. Kropa was only likely to leave through a window if his life was threatened. If he had used the gun, wouldn’t he have done a better job on Wysochan? It seemed more likely that Wysochan had shot Antena as Stanley escaped and then attempted to kill himself. Bigelow agreed with the prosecutor that the dying woman would hardly have called for her husband’s help if he had shot her. The jury, he said, could dismiss the charge if they doubted Wysochan’s guilt; they could convict him of murder; or they could convict him of manslaughter if they judged him too drunk to form an intent to kill. At 4:30 pm the jury retired.

For five and a half hours they deliberated without conclusion, until the case was adjourned overnight. In the cells the guards heard Wysochan sing “Nearer My God to Thee” in Polish. Next morning, after a brief session, the jury returned with a verdict of guilty. Mr Justice Bigelow concurred in the verdict, offered no hope of clemency, and sentenced Wysochan to the gallows on June 20, 1930. Then, to John Diefenbaker’s distress, the judge immediately called another case for sentencing, in which Diefenbaker represented the defendant. This was a hard day.¹¹⁶

At the appeal hearing before Chief Justice Haultain on May 26, Diefenbaker challenged the admissibility of Antena Kropa’s last words as hearsay evidence and argued that the judge’s charge to the jury had been unfairly biased against the accused. On June 10 Haultain upheld the conviction. The dying woman’s words were admissible as “evidence more or less strong of a certain feeling or attitude of mind” that the jury had been free to weigh as it chose; and the judge’s charge, while it was “on certain points … not favourable to the accused,” had adequately pointed out to the jury that it was the sole judge of fact. The federal cabinet refused to grant a reprieve and, on June 20, Alex Wysochan was hanged in Prince Albert penitentiary, still protesting his innocence.¹¹⁷ Whatever the truth of the case, Diefenbaker’s gamble at long odds had failed. By denying the crime and seeking acquittal, he had lost the chance to argue for a reduced charge of manslaughter that might have saved his client’s life. The burden of that knowledge could not have eased Diefenbaker’s stomach pains. By the date of Wysochan’s execution, John was away from Prince Albert, recuperating from his illness at Edward Brower’s home in Toronto.