Chapter Nine

1
The Canadian connection

2
The people’s power

3
The Second Battle of Niagara

4
The red-headed hero

5
The soaring ambitions of Adam Beck

 

1
The Canadian connection

In the fall of 1901, when Annie Taylor plunged over the Horseshoe Falls, the exploitation of Niagara’s power was entirely in the hands of Americans. With considerable daring – some might call it recklessness – they had thrust their country into the electrical age and seen that gamble pay off. The power that they drew from the great cataract was, of course, reserved for American industries. Canada, with its small population, was not a lucrative market, nor had the cautious Canadians shown any interest in developing power on their own.

Indeed, for all of the previous decade Canada seemed to have been mired in the past. In 1891, when an American syndicate was already boring its tunnel under Niagara Falls, New York, and exploring the possibilities of hydro power in Europe, the Canadian Electrical News was pooh-poohing the idea of long-distance transmission as commercially unsound. In 1892, the year the Americans hired Stanford White to design their generating station, the manager of the Toronto Electric Light Company, J. J. Wright, insisted that alternating current was far too dangerous to be practical.

The majority of Canadian businessmen clung to the idea that steam would always be the main source of power for industry. It was not until April 1900 that the Toronto Board of Trade set up a special committee to get the facts about electricity. Its chairman was Walter Massey, of the famous farm implements firm, himself a progressive entrepreneur. But even at that late date the committee concluded that electricity would remain “a secondary force, a handmaid or servant of steam or some other primary power.” This, in spite of the fact that eleven major industries, all using hydroelectric power, were already operating on the American bank of the Niagara River.

The Americans themselves helped to hold back power development in Canada. For most of the nineties, exclusive rights to develop electricity from the Canadian falls were held by the Canadian Niagara Power Company, wholly owned by Americans. The company made no move to harness the Horseshoe; why go to any expense in Canada until its American parent, the Niagara Falls Power Company, had used up all the available power on the other side? It did not put a spade into the ground until 1901, and when its hydroelectric plant finally went into operation in 1904, all the power was transmitted across the river to American industry.

A second American company, known as the Ontario Power Company, had been incorporated in 1887. It took several years to secure a franchise and did not get around to building a powerplant in Canada until 1903. Another two years went by before it was able to generate electricity. Again, most of the power was transmitted to U.S. customers across the river.

Canadians were shaken out of their torpor in 1902 when the great coal famine struck Ontario industry. Suddenly, the country’s dependence on the United States was brought home graphically. A series of bitter strikes in the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania sent the price of hard coal in Toronto – used extensively for heating – soaring from three dollars a ton to a peak of more than nine dollars. Indeed, there came a time when Canada ran out of hard coal, and even the soft coal used in manufacturing was in short supply. Wood, peat, and coke all proved ineffective. Factories closed, hundreds were thrown out of work, and, as winter approached, ordinary people began to shiver. Even when the famine ended in the fall, coal was scarce because Americans controlled the transportation systems, and American customers got preferential treatment.

The coal famine turned the eyes of Central Canada toward Niagara. As the Berlin (later Kitchener) News Record argued, “Niagara Falls is worth serious consideration.” If it were harnessed for Canadians, the Falls would make western Ontario independent of the soft coal fields and provide cheaper power than steam. Berlin, a rising industrial town, became the centre of a growing campaign for public power in Ontario.

The shortage had another result. It stimulated a trio of Canadian businessmen to resolve, at long last, that a Canadian company should also exploit the waters of the great cataract.

The three men who in 1902 formed the syndicate that became the Electrical Development Company were among the most powerful industrialists in Canada. All were in the prime of life; all were experienced financiers and builders. Frederic Nicholls, general manager of Canadian General Electric, would be the technical expert. Henry Pellatt, who ran the Toronto Electric Light Company, and William Mackenzie, who controlled the Toronto Street Railway Company, would be their own best customers.

The eloquent Nicholls had been identified with electrical development in Canada for more than a decade. In 1896 he was elected president of the National Electric Light Association of America – the first and only Canadian to hold that post. A fervent supporter of John A. Macdonald’s National Policy of high tariffs, he was a leading spokesman for the manufacturing interests. Nicholls had published and edited the Canadian Manufacturer and also served as secretary of the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association. He and his group had been able to seize control of Canadian General Electric when its American parent ran into financial difficulties. As vice-president and general manager of CGE, the forty-six-year-old Nicholls had the motivation to exploit the power of the Canadian Falls and the drive to get what he wanted. In the assessment of the Toronto News, “he was a man of skill, courage and enterprise.”

With his round, pink face, his slightly popped eyes, and his military moustache, Henry Pellatt looked more like a Colonel Blimp than a hard-nosed financier. Actually, he was both. He had started in his father’s brokerage business and took over running it. By 1902 he was up to his armpits in utilities, power, and mining, “the Cecil Rhodes of Canada” as one financier called him. Perhaps the most enthusiastic amateur soldier in Canada, he was lieutenant-colonel of the 2nd Regiment of the Queen’s Own Rifles. And he was such a romantic royalist that he would within the decade erect, on one of Toronto’s most prominent ridges, the fairytale castle Casa Loma, for which he is best remembered.

Powerplants on the Niagara River

The third member of the triumvirate, and, as it developed, the most important, was William Mackenzie. He had begun his career in Kirkfield, Ontario, as a schoolteacher. He failed in the lumber business, took a job cutting railway ties, and gravitated from that into major contracting. His fortune rested on a five-thousand-dollar loan coaxed from the Mother Superior of a Montreal convent where his wife, a Roman Catholic, had been a student. For the rest of his career, Mackenzie, a Conservative and a Calvinist, would build his growing empire on borrowed funds.

A major contractor during the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, Mackenzie, with his strapping partner, Donald Mann, had also amalgamated and electrified the Toronto tramway system. Since 1896 Mackenzie had been busy cobbling together Canada’s third transcontinental railway, the Canadian Northern, out of a “series of disconnected and apparently unconnectable projections of steel hanging in suspense.” (Those were the words of a colleague, D.B. Hanna.) The dapper Mackenzie, with his sharp features, his neat imperial beard, and his agile mind, knew his way around the financial world. Blunt-spoken, tough-minded, and secretive, he had, in the words of the Canadian Courier, “a sphinx-like attitude towards the public.”

When the Montreal Standard produced a list of twenty-three men who formed the basis of Canadian finance, Nicholls, Pellatt, and Mackenzie were among those named. Indeed, their joint activities dovetailed neatly, to the benefit of all three. Nicholls, until 1902, was president of Mackenzie’s transcontinental railway. Mackenzie was one of ten major shareholders in Nicholls’s Canadian General Electric. Nicholls also sat on the board of Pellatt’s Toronto Electric Light Company, while Pellatt was a director of and broker for Mackenzie’s Toronto Street Railway Company. Conservatives all, fellow members of the exclusive Toronto Club, they were also among the most prominent of Toronto’s social élite.

On January 29, 1903, the syndicate was granted the right to take water from the Niagara River at Tempest Point above the Falls and to generate 125,000 electrical horsepower. The Niagara Falls Queen Victoria Park Commission was strapped for funds and set the price at a mere $30,000. The prospect was – to use a word then new in the language – electrifying.

In 1905, in an address to the Empire Club in Toronto, Nicholls rhapsodized over the “invisible and mystic power which men call electricity.” In a single poetic sentence, he delineated the magical qualities of the new energy, which was only then beginning to captivate the public. It would, he explained, “be transmitted along slender copper wires to great distances, and having silently entered our mills, factories and power houses, over still more slender wires, will, like the genie out of the bottle, expand into a force that is terrifying when uncontrolled.”

Nicholls did not dramatize, of course, the enormous profits to be made by those who controlled the genie. That year he and his partners created the Electrical Development Company as a publicly traded stock company. They then sold their $30,000 franchise to the new corporation for a staggering $6,100,000. Each took only $10,000 in cash, the rest in shares.

It was a breath-taking financial coup. They had got all their money out, made a profit, and created a six-million-dollar company with very little risk. Next they raised $5 million for construction through the sale of public bonds. But then, who could blame them for seeing an electrical future that the members of the park commission, in their myopia, had failed to grasp when they sold for $30,000 a franchise the worth of which would increase a thousandfold within twenty years?

Now these late arrivals proposed to outstrip the other two power companies operating on the Canadian side. Theirs would be the biggest and the best. The power station would be installed on a twelve-acre stretch of reclaimed riverbed, raised, in Nicholls’s colourful phrase, “from the most turbulent part of the upper rapids at Tempest Point.” That was no exaggeration. When workmen sent down sounding rods to gauge the river bottom, the flow was so fierce that it bent the metal at right angles. Nothing could be accomplished until a great wall of rocks and earth was thrown up to hold back the raging waters.

The problems the new company faced were unique, for nothing of this sort had ever before been attempted. The waters of the river, diverted down into a deep well 150 feet below the powerhouse, would rotate the big turbines at the bottom. Shafts would carry the power up to rows of generators on the ground floor of the building. The waste water would be drained away through a 2,000-foot tunnel, 150 feet below the river level. It would run to a point directly behind the Falls and discharge its effluent into the cataract itself. The tunnel would be thirty-three feet wide, the largest of its kind in the world according to the company’s boast.

Construction began at the lower end of the tunnel in 1903. A shaft 150 feet deep was sunk in the bank at the edge of the Horseshoe Falls, and a second construction tunnel driven at right angles out to the very brink, 700 feet of it under the water, to the point where the excavation for the main tunnel would commence. To save both money and time, the contractor, Anthony C. Douglass, an American from Niagara Falls, New York, decided that the debris from both tunnels would not be hauled back to shore and up the connecting shaft. Instead, it would be dumped into the chamber that the river had gnawed out between the falling sheet of water and the limestone face of the cliff over which that water tumbled.

But to accomplish this, he needed to rip a hole in the wall of the escarpment. A small opening was made near the ceiling of the construction tunnel, but thick clouds of spray from the cataract burst in. Obviously a larger opening was needed through which the tailings could be removed and the water allowed to drain out, leaving a clear passageway.

Douglass then had eighteen holes drilled into the rock face and loaded with ten cases of dynamite. The blast that resulted tore a jagged hole in the cliff, but it still wasn’t large enough. Meanwhile the tunnel, open to the spray, was filling up with water.

Douglass had a flat-bottomed boat lowered down the shaft in the river bank. The tunnel was now so full of water that the boat couldn’t clear the roof and had to be weighted down. Three miners with several boxes of dynamite and coils of copper wire then boarded the boat and started off down the tunnel, lying on their backs and propelling the craft with their hands and feet.

When they reached the opening, they placed the dynamite around it, attached the copper wire, and headed back to the shaft. Just as they reached it, their boat sank under them. They climbed to safety, and a moment later a tremendous explosion rocked the gorge. But the hole in the cliff face still wasn’t big enough.

The only solution was to apply the dynamite to the face of the cliff behind the fall of water, a dangerous enterprise. The company’s chief engineer, Hugh L. Cooper, and its resident engineer, Beverly R. Value, donned rubber suits and roped themselves together like mountain climbers. Starting from the Scenic Tunnel, long a tourist attraction, the pair headed for the opening that had previously been blasted. They scrambled precariously along the cliff face, blinded by the intensity of the spray and buffeted by the force of the wind created by the intense pressure of the falling water. Soaking wet in spite of their precautions, chilled to the bone, and thoroughly miserable, they finally reached the opening in the tunnel wall.

Here they were battered by two forces of water – the backlash churning up from the base of the Falls and the powerful jets of spray coming at them from every side. Again and again they made this journey, risking their lives each time, until they had secured four tons of dynamite around the opening, chaining the boxes into position to prevent them from being torn away by the incessant blasts of water.

This effort worked. The obstructions were at last removed, and the water ran out of the tunnel, which, as Nicholls later told an Empire Club dinner in Toronto, “is as dry and pleasant as this room.”

Meanwhile, a trickle of protests against a private Canadian company harnessing the Falls was growing to the dimensions of a tidal wave. Neither Mackenzie’s city transit company nor Pellatt’s electrical utility was popular. Both were known for gouging the public and giving inferior service. Moreover, the proponents of public power were bringing their case before the public, and it was a popular one.

The Electrical Development Company knew that it had to put up a good front, and this was undoubtedly one reason why Pellatt hired his friend E. J. Lennox, one of the country’s best-known architects, to design the powerhouse. As a result, what might have been a plain brick box became instead a neo-classical palace that in its every line seemed to suggest both power and grace. Lennox set it on the bank half a mile above the brink of the cataract, the point where the river is at its most turbulent. It was ninety-one feet wide and forty feet high, clad in pale Indiana limestone. A colonnade of massive stone pillars extended along the entire 462 feet of its front. From there visitors could goggle at the line of eleven great generators, each weighing close to two hundred tons, filling a hall so vast it was large enough to accommodate five regulation hockey rinks.

The Canadians had finally outdone all their rivals, including the Americans. But would this impressive architectural gem, perched on the very lip of the thundering river, be symbol enough to withstand the popular appeal of the public power movement?

2
The people’s power

The probability that Toronto – Hogtown, as its rivals called it – would gobble up all the Falls power did not sit well with the smaller communities of southwestern Ontario. Solid industrial towns such as Berlin and Waterloo, 70 percent of whose populations were of Germanic origin, knew that they would have to fight for their share. The only way to provide a large enough market to justify transmission of power from the Falls was to work together. No single community could go it alone.

Such was the concept that a Waterloo manufacturer, Elias Snider, brought to the local board of trade meeting in February 1902. Two days later, his friend Daniel B. Detweiler, vice-president of the neighbouring Berlin Board of Trade, preached the same gospel. The twin communities must set up a joint committee, “the sooner the better,” to look into the possibility.

From that day on, the campaign for cheap public power – “the people’s power,” as it came to be called – gathered momentum, led by Snider and Detweiler. For their communities, public power made sense. All inland towns suffered in competition with those on the lakes, which did not have to pay high freight rates to bring in coal by rail. Hydroelectric power was cheaper, but why let private industry gouge the manufacturers with exorbitant prices and poor service when a publicly owned company could provide cheaper electricity more efficiently? That was the message that the two businessmen carried to other neighbouring communities.

Popular sentiment was on their side. Suspicion of Big Business, imported from the growing antitrust movement south of the border, helped give the campaign a much-needed shove. Besides, the people of Waterloo had first-hand knowledge of the advantages of public ownership. It was one of the few municipalities that had opted for a publicly owned street railway and gas distribution system. Toronto, on the other hand, was in thrall to Mackenzie’s inadequate and inefficient privately owned transit service, which was notoriously indifferent to both public and political criticism. As Detweiler wrote to Snider, “If the new Toronto Co’y should get started they no doubt would look mainly to their own interests first and then sweat the Public all they could stand same as other Co’s.” After all, the same business cronies were involved. “The Ontario legislature must choose,” the Toronto News declared. “The time for decision has arrived. The people, or the Corporations?”

“The rising clamour of the multitude,” as Saturday Night called it, was amplified in February 1903, when seventeen municipalities, mostly from southwestern Ontario, met in Berlin to issue “the first, faint blast” in the campaign for public power. It was important enough for the mayors themselves to attend with their aldermen to hear the report of the joint committee set up the year before. It was a tentative document that merely asked for provincial legislation enabling municipalities to buy, sell, and distribute electric power.

Up rose the mayor of Toronto to toughen the resolution. He proposed that the government build and operate the transmission lines itself. The seconder, who helped push the resolution through, was the mayor of London, Adam Beck.

Almost immediately Beck took up the campaign for public power. Within a year he was its leader. His name would be linked forever with the principle of publicly owned hydroelectric power in Ontario. His larger-than-life statue would dominate Toronto’s University Avenue, opposite the Ontario Hydro building. The great generating stations flanking the Niagara gorge would all bear his name. Hated, feared, despised, and admired – even venerated – in his lifetime, he would eventually attain the status of provincial idol.

Since Beck’s childhood, his life had centred around water-power. He came from a family of Lutheran millers who had been using water to turn their mill wheels in the old days in Baden, Germany. As a boy in Baden, Ontario – Waterloo County – Adam Beck built miniature dikes in the little brooks that ran into his father’s millpond. From his earliest days, he was challenged by the potential of water and the question of how it could be further channelled to serve mankind.

The German immigrants were devotees of the work ethic At the age of ten, Adam found his summer holidays interrupted when his father took him to the family foundry that ran in conjunction with the mill. “Slap him if he doesn’t work, or I’ll slap you,” he told an employee. The younger Beck, who never went to university, learned to work a ten-hour day. For the remainder of his restless life he found it difficult to take a prolonged holiday.

Beck soon learned the value of community co-operation, for those were the days of barn raisings and quilting bees, when people banded together to help each other out. That concept would fire Beck’s later obsession to attain a publicly owned hydroelectric system.

When Beck was twenty-two, his father’s business failed, and the family moved to the United States. But Adam stayed in Canada, determined to make it on his own. He took various jobs – one in a brass factory and another, later, in a cigar factory. Then, discerning an unfilled need, he started a cigar-box company in the heart of the Southern Ontario tobacco fields. There the young workaholic did everything from sharpening his own saw to delivering the product in a two-wheeled handcart.

By 1898, Adam Beck was well enough off to enter politics. In 1902 he was elected mayor of London and soon revealed his social philosophy when he refused to extend the lease of a privately owned local railway. Beck was determined that the city itself should run the line. Although in politics he was nominally a Conservative, the term, in those days, did not have the connotations it later acquired. The Ontario Liberal party, rusty in office under George W. Ross, contained the die-hards. The Conservatives, led by James Pliny Whitney, were more progressive. In the provincial election of 1902, narrowly won by the Liberals, Beck ran as a Conservative and was elected to the legislature. That, of course, was the year of the great coal famine and also of the gift of the franchise to develop Niagara power to a private concern, the Electrical Development Company.

With the municipalities demanding that a commission be set up to look into the whole thorny question of public power and most of the press on their side, Ross could not refuse. In August he bowed to the pressure, put Elias Snider in charge, and made Beck one of the commissioners. From that moment the cigar-box manufacturer began to dominate the movement. As his biographer and colleague, W.R. Plewman, has said, he went at it “as naturally as Queen Victoria of England went to the centre of any stage upon which she had occasion to stand.”

He was forty-six years old, an assertive and dynamic personality – eloquent, impetuous, aggressive, and often unbending in his pursuit of “power for the people.” A handsome man with steel-grey eyes, he had the profile of a romantic stage actor to fit his own theatrical nature – aquiline nose, aggressive jaw, high forehead. In repose, it was said, he seemed “to be carved in granite.” A self-made man, he dressed like an aristocrat in clothes of British cut, and he acted like one, too, for he was an avid horseman and breeder who, when he found the time, rode pink-coated to hounds.

In 1905, an aroused electorate, disenchanted with the creaky thirty-four-year-old Liberal regime, threw Ross’s government out of office. James Whitney became premier, and Beck was named minister without portfolio. He might more aptly have been called “Minister of Public Power.” One of Whitney’s first moves was to refuse to ratify the agreement his predecessor had made with the Electrical Development Company to allow it to generate an additional 125,000 horsepower from Niagara Falls. Whitney also pledged that no more franchises would be granted until a thorough examination into Niagara power had been conducted. “The water power of Niagara,” he declared, “should be as free as the air.”

Beck, meanwhile, had found the villain he needed in his own campaign. He attacked the EDC from the public platform and in the legislature and declared that the agreement with the private company was worthless. It was supposed to protect the public, but, he said, “the promoters get the capital stock for nothing, the total cost of acquiring and developing the property being borne by the proceeds of the bond issue.” Thus began a long and bitter wrangle between Beck and the private power interests.

In July, Premier Whitney appointed his own three-man commission of inquiry to examine the subject of electrical power. Beck, who was already a member of the Snider commission appointed by the previous government, would be chairman of this new body. That position did not prevent him from stumping the province, attacking the private companies for charging too much and pointing to the benefits for industry in cheap power generated by a publicly owned company. For, although Beck also emphasized the advantages of power in the home, “Power for the People” really meant power for industry. Niagara Falls was seen, correctly, as the source that would create an industrial heartland in Southern Ontario. The manufacturers who demanded public power did so, not out of any political philosophy, but simply because they knew it would be cheaper.

The two commissions – Snider’s and Beck’s – submitted their reports within days of each other in the spring of 1906. To Snider’s fury, much of the data gathered by his own commission when it appeared in the press was credited to Beck. Snider never forgave Beck for that. Beck, in his turn, had no faith in the Snider commission, which had, in effect, been superseded by his own. Snider’s report recommended a municipal co-operative that would own both the generating plants and the transmission lines. Beck was not proposing public ownership of the generating plants, but he did want the province to build the transmission lines. In addition – and more significantly – he urged the creation of a provincial hydroelectric power commission mandated to regulate the private companies.

Beck had no intention of letting his report gather dust on the legislative shelves. The night it was tabled he organized a massive demonstration. Fifteen hundred people wearing cardboard badges bearing the words “Cheap Power Convention” marched on Toronto’s Romanesque city hall (a Lennox building) and then paraded to the legislative buildings in Queen’s Park, where they received Whitney’s promise – appropriately guarded – that the government would either supply power itself or regulate that business in the public interest.

Beck’s cause was further advanced by the revelation that the Electrical Development Company intended to charge Canadians a much higher price than its American customers, even though the transmission costs in Canada were lower. He was nervous about Whitney’s intentions, worried about the possibility of weak legislation. A seasoned political friend gave him some advice. “Why do you wait? Why take a chance? Why not draft your own bill and tell the cabinet what you want passed?” Beck did just that, with the help of the province’s chief justice. Then he campaigned for press support, inviting reporters into his office, eloquently outlining his dream, and giving the newspapermen the kind of black-and-white story they liked – the People versus the Vested Interests.

Beck got exactly what he wanted. In May 1906, the government created the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario, known to succeeding generations simply as “the Hydro” or, later, “Hydro.” Beck would be its chairman. Its power was astonishingly broad, but such was the strength of the public power movement that scarcely a voice was raised against it. The new commission would distribute power to the municipalities and it would also regulate the private companies. Hydro would not generate power itself but was given wide powers of expropriation.

The Electrical Development Company fought back on two fronts, in the Canadian newspapers and in British financial circles. In those days, much of the daily press was literally for sale. The EDC was able, through an advertising agency, to buy space in both the letters-to-the-editor columns and the editorials of some newspapers. At the same time the company tried to frighten the British from investing in the province. The strategy backfired by angering the premier, who told Nicholls that it had only injured the EDC’s cause.

Beck now faced a second battle. On January 1, 1907, the ratepayers of the various municipalities would have to give their councils permission to enter into contracts with Hydro. An intense public relations battle took place, with Beck and his engineers campaigning across Ontario like evangelists, spreading the gospel of Hydro and depicting the private interests as greedy scoundrels.

Beck cleared the 1907 hurdle. At the municipal elections, twenty communities voted for the proposition. But they still had to approve a $2,750,000 bond issue to pay for the municipal network that would deliver the power. The fight was on again, reduced once more to a good-versus-evil struggle by Beck’s propaganda. The villain was “the Electric Ring … the Most Dangerous Ring in Canada.” That meant the EDC.

The newspapers plunged into the battle. The Toronto World, which supported Beck, attacked both the Electrical Development Company and the rival Globe. “Both are public enemies,” it cried. In fact, the Globe favoured public ownership but believed in fair play for the private interests. Yet the private interests themselves were hardly playing fair. The Globe, the Mail, the News, and the Star were all being paid advertising rates for letters, articles, and editorials supporting private enterprise. “A perfect deluge of letters” (Whitney’s phrase) – some anonymous, others with fictitious names or such noms-de-plume as Veritas or Citizen – was appearing in newspapers in major centres in the province. All, apparently, were the work of a Toronto advertising agency with money to burn. The World was offered and turned down $350,000 to change its shrill policy. It was, in fact, losing so much advertising that it found itself in financial trouble and asked the government, vainly, for advertising help.

On January 1, 1908, the municipal electors again gave Beck what he wanted – a solid vote in favour of the bond issue. Now Whitney found himself in a dilemma. Three of the country’s most powerful capitalists controlled the EDC. If that company failed – and it too was in financial straits – Canada’s credit abroad would be badly compromised. Yet the premier, facing a provincial election that year, could scarcely halt the growing pressure for public power. The best he could hope for was that one of his appointments, John S. Hendrie, minister without portfolio and a former mayor of Hamilton, might serve as a brake on Adam Beck’s ambitions. Hendrie, a member of the three-man Hydro-Electric Power Commission, was sympathetic to the private power lobby.

But Beck’s ambitions had already damaged the EDC; talk of expropriation had hurt its credit badly. Mackenzie stepped in with a dazzling series of mergers and realignments that placed it under the umbrella of his newly organized Toronto Power Company. Now the EDC, its transmission lines, and its contracts with Mackenzie’s Street Railway Company and Pellatt’s Electric Light Company were all part of the same package. Mackenzie assumed direct control, with his partners in subordinate positions.

Whitney easily won the summer election in 1908, and Beck was returned with a huge majority. But he remained obdurate in his near fanatical opposition to Mackenzie. When, in August, Canadian General Electric submitted the lowest tender to build the Hydro line, Beck tried to block the contract because Mackenzie’s colleague, Nicholls, controlled the company. Whitney stepped in and persuaded the vengeful Hydro chairman to allow CGE to have two-thirds of the project.

The first sod for the transmission line was turned on November 18 at Exhibition Park in Toronto. Whitney was on hand to make a conciliatory speech. “We have undertaken to safeguard the interests of the people,” he said, “but only with the assurance that it will not be at the expense of private rights.”

In actual fact, the premier was growing more and more disenchanted with the private power lobby. Mackenzie brought suit to try to prevent Toronto and London from taking power from Hydro. The Whitney government immediately introduced an act placing these contracts beyond the jurisdiction of the courts. That touched off a vicious press campaign in Montreal, London, and New York, designed to convince the financial world that the “socialist legislation” would damage Canada’s credit in the money markets. The British press was especially vitriolic. The Financial Times of London wrote of “an outrageous parody of lawmaking,” and the Monetary Times referred to “bullying legislation which takes away the first right of the British subject.”

All such comments were published in a widely distributed pamphlet whose purpose was to force the federal government to disallow the act. A petition for disallowance was heard in October, but Hydro went forward with construction anyway, convinced, correctly, that Ottawa would throw out the case. Whitney had never had any doubts about that. The London manager of the Bank of Montreal had already told him privately that Canada’s credit was in no way harmed. The press campaign had not only nettled the premier but, by its intemperance, had also turned many London investors against the private power interests. The battle between Beck and Mackenzie, two strong and stubborn personalities, was over, at least for the moment.

When the power was switched on in Berlin on the night of October 11, 1910, the premier referred to the long and bitter struggle. “We have been attacked, vilified, and slandered,” he said. “Large sums of money have been expended in creating and fomenting prejudice and ill feeling against us. And still larger sums have been expended in conducting a campaign against us outside of Ontario. Our opponents left nothing undone that could be done, and men of influences, from the humblest man in the land up to the Prime Minister of Great Britain, were approached in the endeavour to destroy our power legislation and render it impossible for the wonderful new force to be used and enjoyed by the people.… We, Adam Beck’s colleagues, can never forget his steady confidence in the result and the bravery and pluck with which he stood up against all attacks.”

This was Adam Beck’s triumphal moment. The movement for public power had been launched in Waterloo and Berlin by Snider and Detweiler. But Snider, who had broken with Beck because of his leak of information to the press, was no longer in the picture. It had been Beck’s day, and his alone. The streets, garlanded with foliage, bunting, and strings of coloured lights, were lined with people standing three deep as the representatives of thirty-four participating municipalities were driven through town. Some ten thousand crowded into the community’s largest skating rink, festooned with banners proclaiming “Power at Cost” and “We Are Proud of Our Boy, Adam Beck.” At the end of the proceedings, after everyone had had his say and before the festive banquet – cooked for the first time with electricity – the premier took centre stage. There stood a little girl, Hulda Rumple, dressed in red, white, and blue and wearing a crown of bulbs, which in a moment would glow with electric light.

Whitney had already called for three cheers for Beck. Now, with his voice breaking slightly, he said, “I have been asked to press the button which will turn on the people’s power. I am proud and happy to do it in the name of the province. But with your approval I propose to use a true and tried influence, one in which we all have learned to have unbounded confidence.”

In the semi-darkness he turned and beckoned to the Hydro chairman, standing in the background. “Give me your hand,” he said. As the crowd cheered he grasped Beck’s hand and used it to press the button. The darkened rink was instantly enveloped in a blaze of light, while Hulda Rumple’s crown sparkled. “Congratulations,” the premier said to Beck, “and thanks from Ontario.”

Beck had already spoken. “The work is not finished,” he told the crowd. “It has only begun. Let us gird our loins and earnestly, honestly, and indomitably go on, and on, and on until this great public service serves all our people and serves them well. That is our ambition, that is our aim, that is our ideal.”

3
The Second Battle of Niagara

Our dreams exceeding by thy bounteous spray;
With power unrivalled thy proud flood shall speed
The New World’s progress towards Time’s perfect day.

Thus did Benjamin Copeland in his 1904 poem, Niagara, capture the euphoria that greeted the growing use of Niagara’s power. Two years later, H.G. Wells visited Niagara and wrote enthusiastically about the “noble masses of machinery,” so clean, so noiseless, so irresistible, heralding, in Wells’s view, a world in which the greatness of life was not to be found “in such accidents as mountains or the sea” but in a world that human beings would create, as they had created electric power. To Wells it did not matter if the Falls ceased to flow, provided its waters “should rise again in light and power … in cities and in palaces and the emancipated souls and hearts of men.”

Wells was captivated by the wave of optimism engendered by the great age of heroic invention at the turn of the century. But with the Canadians also preparing to tap the cataract for hydro power, a few voices began to express their opposition to the kind of future that the novelist was envisaging. The very future of the Falls as one of nature’s great showplaces was in doubt. What if unlimited water should be diverted from the two cascades by power-hungry industrialists and power-hungry governments? Lord Kelvin himself had said he hoped the Falls would have vanished by his grandchildren’s time.

These ominous forebodings touched off the Second Battle of Niagara, as it was called, to save the Falls. A series of articles in newspapers and leading periodicals began to harp on the uncertain future of the great cataract. Niagara, “saved from the hand of the catch-penny sharper … has fallen into the hands of the catch-million capitalist,” a writer in Outlook declared. Worlds Work identified the catch-million capitalists as those early twentieth-century whipping boys, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, and the Astors, fair game in those trust-busting days for any muckraking journalist. These were the men behind the Niagara Falls Power Company, the New York Central Railroad, and General Electric.

The key figure in the new preservation campaign was J. Horace McFarland, president of the American Civic Association and editor of the “Beautiful America” column in the influential Ladies’ Home Journal. “Every American – nay, every world citizen – should see Niagara many times, for the welfare of his soul and the perpetual memory of a great work of God,” McFarland wrote. And yet, he warned, the Falls was about to be “sacrificed unnecessarily for the gain of a few.”

“Shall we make a coal pile of Niagara?” he asked his readers in 1905. He urged them to write letters to the White House and to Rideau Hall, the governor general’s residence in Ottawa. Thousands responded. Clubs and newspapers took up the cry. Under McFarland’s prodding, Theodore Roosevelt mentioned the subject in his annual message to Congress. When McFarland asked the president for suggestions to prevent the destruction of Niagara, Roosevelt gave him a forthright reply: “Get as many intelligent citizens as you possibly can to write urgently upon this subject to their representatives and Senators in Congress. That will help mightily.”

Tens of thousands of letters swamped Congress and had their effect. In March 1906, the International Waterways Commission, which had been studying the problem, advised that no more than thirty-six thousand cubic feet of water a second be diverted from the Canadian falls and half that amount from the American side. Any greater diversion, the report declared, would be dangerous. “It would be a sacrilege to destroy the scenic effect of the Falls.”

Roosevelt sent the report to Congress, whereupon the private power companies besieged Washington with attorneys, engineers, promoters, and lobbyists issuing contradictory statements designed to kill its impact. But the House Committee on Rivers and Harbors, chaired by Theodore Burton of Ohio, resisted the pressure and put the recommendations into a law “for the preservation of Niagara Falls.”

In 1909, a new international treaty established the amount of water that could be diverted from the Falls. The United States would be allowed a total diversion of twenty thousand cubic feet a second, slightly more than the Waterways Commission had recommended three years before. The Canadian diversion would be held at thirty-six thousand. For the time being, at least, the Falls was safe.

A commission appointed by the United States war department had recommended that the entire gorge area for three hundred feet back from the cliff be purchased as a national park and that the buildings along the crest be removed, together with the Schoellkopf power station at the foot as soon as it became obsolete. Few of these recommendations were followed. The proposed park was considered too expensive; the factories kept working and were not removed until 1945, and the power station operated until 1961 and was not torn down until 1965.

The preservation movement had concentrated on the beauty of the cataract and its surroundings, successfully preventing the bulk of the water from being looted for private gain. But the humanists behind the Second Battle of Niagara could do nothing to suppress the carnival atmosphere that had been a part of the Niagara environment for the best part of a century; nor is there any evidence that they wished to do so. It was neither feasible nor necessary to deny tourists who were lured to the Falls the attractions they expected. Indeed, both communities had every intention of using the Falls as a backdrop for fun and frolic.

In 1910, the Twin Power Cities of the World, as the press dubbed them, mounted a successful carnival built around the magic of electricity. But electricity was already losing its novelty, and electrical exhibits had less and less drawing power. After all, every town had become a “White City.” When the two communities tried to repeat the spectacle the following year it was a near flop. The program promised a gigantic automobile parade, with five hundred illuminated cars – “three miles of electrical enchantment.” But the auto, too, was becoming commonplace. Henry Ford had just introduced his Model T. The parade fizzled out. “Prince Nelson the Great” was supposed to walk a tightrope across the gorge, his costume emblazoned with 180 miniature lights. But the prince got cold feet and failed to turn up.

A feeling of déjà vu hung over the affair like a pall. The crowds were large – as many as one hundred thousand persons – but they didn’t spend much money. The hotels and restaurants failed to prosper. The organizing committee had made the colossal error of hiring a non-union press to print the official program. Labour was beginning to feel its strength, and this gaffe kept many away.

Strapped for funds, the organizers had gambled a good chunk of their budget on one event. It cost at least one thousand dollars in gold (some reported five thousand), but when it was over no one begrudged that. For this was the only spectacle that looked to the future and not to the past. Without the presence of Lincoln Beachey, the carnival would have been more than a disappointment. He helped save it from disaster.

The automobile may have lost its excitement, but the airplane had not, and Beachey was a pilot who knew no fear. The Niagara Falls Gazette called him “one of the nerviest aviators in the country.” “He will fly anywhere and over any obstacle and is known as the man who will take more chances than any aviator in the world,” the Cataract Journal told its readers.

Variously depicted as “fearless,” “intrepid,” “dauntless,” and “daring,” the twenty-four-year-old Beachey, clean-shaven and debonair, had in less than a year become the best-known stunt flyer in North America, if not the world. Wearing an ordinary business suit with white shirt and tie rather than a pilot’s leather jacket and helmet, he barnstormed about the country in his specially reinforced Curtiss pusher biplane. Beachey was already developing his vertical “death dive,” which saw him plummet straight down from the clouds, pulling out only at the last possible moment. He came so close to the ground on these dives that he was once able to scoop up a handkerchief with the tip of one wing. On another occasion at Dallas, Texas, he made a vertical dive onto a race track, flew straight under the starting wire, and pulled out without touching either the wire or the ground.

Beachey would collect his gold only if he piloted his flimsy craft immediately above the Horseshoe Falls and then flew downriver directly under the Upper Steel Arch Bridge. The closest bridge to the Falls, its arch supported a roadway of 840 feet, only 150 feet above the river. To meet the conditions, Beachey would have to zoom down from the crest of the Horseshoe almost to the water’s surface, fly under the bridge between its two massive pillars, and then climb again to a safe height. He agreed at once.

Beachey flew in from Buffalo on the afternoon of June 26, making the fourteen-mile trip in sixteen minutes. Thousands cheered as the plane landed on the American side, and the following day hundreds paid a fee to examine it. A little after five that afternoon, as bells rang and whistles blew, Beachey took his plane into the air in the teeth of a high wind and rose several thousand feet above the Falls while crowds on both shores cheered.

He swept down the gorge, circled round, and made a second pass at the Falls to lose altitude. He soared up the river above the Falls, circled back toward the crest, his speedometer clocking eighty miles an hour, then suddenly dove at a forty-five-degree angle directly into the wall of mist rising high above the river.

Blinded by the spray, he had to shut his eyes for a moment. The drop was so swift that the engine stalled briefly, then coughed into action. As he pulled out of the dive, he spotted an open space between the two bridge supports and swept through, just twenty feet above the furious water, on what he later called “one big, beautiful joyride.”

A second bridge, the cantilever structure built by the Michigan Central Railroad in 1883, now barred his way. But Beachey easily lifted his craft over it, circled about, and raced back over the Falls again before landing to the cheers of the crowd. He was, that day at least, “the most talked of aviator in the world.” In banner headlines, the Cataract Journal announced that he had saved the carnival.

Beachey moved on to greater triumphs. In 1913 he added to his reputation by looping the loop over San Diego Bay. He challenged Barney Oldfield, the great automobile racer, to a contest, and won. In the Palace of Machinery at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, he made the first indoor flight in history. In that city on March 14, 1915, fifty thousand people watched him take off from the polo grounds in a light monoplane built especially for him. Down he came in a terrifying vertical plunge from 3,500 feet. But he had misjudged the speed of his descent. As he tried to pull out of the dive at 500 feet, both wings broke off the plane and it crashed into San Francisco Bay. “The Silent Reaper of Souls and I shook hands,” he had written of an earlier flight. “Today the old fellow and I are pals.” But the friendship ended on that sunny afternoon. Before his body could be hauled from the wreckage of his plane, Lincoln Beachey had drowned.

4
The red-headed hero

By February of 1912, when he won his second life-saving medal, William “Red” Hill had established himself as a local hero and also as something of an eccentric. He was obsessed by the Niagara River – drawn to it as if by an irresistible force. It haunted his dreams, controlled his waking hours, held him captive. To Hill, the Niagara was an old friend; he knew its every current, eddy, and whirlpool; he knew it in every season – knew it and loved it.

It had been that way since his father, Layfield Hill, impatient with anyone who feared the river, had swum out into the current with five-year-old Red on his back to give him a taste of Niagara, the temptress. The following day he pushed his son, fully clothed, into fifteen feet of water. “Sink or swim!” Layfield cried. Young Red swam.

He was born with a caul – a membrane covering the fetus – and so, following a mystic tradition, was believed to have second sight. His wife, Beatrice, claimed that he often awoke suddenly in the dark to announce that he would find a body in the morning. More often than not he was right, as he was right about the weather, which he could predict with uncanny accuracy, simply, he said, by listening to the roar of the Falls.

It was once believed that a child born with a caul bore a charmed life. Certainly Red Hill’s life seemed charmed. He took chances and survived. The river had no terrors for him, but then, it is also said that a person born with a caul is in no danger of drowning. Neither flood nor fire fazed him. At the age of nine, when his parents’ home burst into flames, he rushed back barefoot into the inferno to rescue his two-year-old sister, Cora, who had been trapped inside. For that he was awarded his first life-saving medal.

He often skipped school to study the river. Once, after he had been absent a fortnight, the principal tackled his parents. What, he asked, has happened to young Red? Young Red, as it turned out, had spent each day from 8:30 in the morning until four in the afternoon tossing sticks and bits of driftwood over the Falls and into the rapids. All his life, Hill continued the practice, throwing in logs, tin cans, lifebelts – anything that would float – until he could guess the exact spot at which an object would end its journey. As with logs, so with a corpse. Over his long life, Hill would pull 177 bodies from the waters of the Niagara. He got a fee for every one.

No day went by that did not see Red Hill patrolling the river. Beatrice soon gave up trying to keep his evening meal warm for him. He was off at 8:30 a.m., gulping down a cup of coffee before heading for the waterfront. Sometimes he would be away for two or three days, spending his nights in a sheltered nook known as the Cave. No more than ten feet square, it had been worn out of the cliff six hundred yards below the Falls. “There’s nothing to worry about,” he’d tell his wife when he returned. “The river can’t do me any harm.”

He had no steady work. He ran a taxi service for a time and also a souvenir store. He did odd jobs. He bootlegged whiskey from his back door. His real vocation was the river.

He achieved celebrity in 1910 after Bobby Leach, in a new barrel, again successfully tackled the Whirlpool Rapids. Hill swam out to haul Leach to shore and retrieve the barrel. When he returned, somebody bet him two dollars that he didn’t have the courage to take the barrel through the lower rapids, “I’m your man,” cried Red Hill, and, to Leach’s fury, leaped into the barrel and rode all the way to Queenston unscathed.

Now, two years later, on a freezing February day in 1912, he was about to exchange local celebrity for wider fame. Two weeks earlier another great ice bridge had formed on the Niagara, stretching for a thousand yards below the Falls. Red Hill, as usual, had erected his shack not far from two other shanties some distance out from the Canadian shore. From there he peddled coffee, sandwiches, and, of course, hard liquor.

It was bitterly cold. The thermometer stood at zero Fahrenheit, and the mist that usually pillared skyward had turned to sleet. No more than twenty-five people had braved the weather to remain on the ice when, at noon, Hill heard an ominous rumble beneath him. He knew at once that the ice bridge was breaking up.

Calling for everyone to follow, he raced for the Maid of the Mist landing on the Canadian shore. Most followed his example, leaping the widening gap of water and slush between the slow-moving mass and the bank. But four people failed to recognize the danger.

Hill called for men and ropes to help these stragglers – two teenagers from Cleveland, Burrel Hecock and his friend Ignatius Roth, and a young Toronto couple, Mr. and Mrs. Eldridge Stanton. The two boys, childhood friends, had arrived that morning and were frolicking on the ice when they encountered the Toronto couple. The Stantons lived in Rosedale, then a new subdivision on the northern edge of Toronto. Eldridge Stanton was well known in musical circles. He sang in the Schubert choir and had taken a leading role in a light opera, Three Little Maids, on the stage of the city’s Royal Alexandra theatre. His attractive dark-haired wife, ten years his junior, was a camera enthusiast. The pair had often come to Niagara for sightseeing and to visit friends, and now, as Mrs. Stanton produced her camera, she offered to photograph the two Cleveland boys. The quartet quickly became friends and decided to stay together exploring the hills and valleys of the great frozen mass as they threaded their way back toward the concession shacks.

Suddenly, with a loud cracking sound, the ice bridge, anchored to both shores, shook itself free and began to move down the river. The four found themselves standing on a vast moving floe from which smaller chunks were breaking off. The two youths immediately rushed toward the Canadian shore while the Stantons headed in the opposite direction, only to find a dark channel twenty feet wide barring their way.

Hill dashed across the moving ice, leaping over fissures and rounding great hummocks, calling to the couple to make for the Canadian shore. Stanton grasped his young wife’s hand and followed the riverman. But when they encountered another channel of slush lying off the Canadian shore, the Stantons panicked. Hill urged them on; the slush, he said, was thick enough to take their weight. But they turned back, and the two youths followed them.

The great floe on which all four were marooned was already passing beneath the Upper Steel Arch Bridge. They stood helplessly on the American side of their frozen platform, escape still cut off by the open channel. Firemen from American towns stood ready with rescue lines but could not reach them. Canadian firemen dropped ropes from the bridge, to no avail. Hill and others raced along the Canadian shore, clambering over hillocks and boulders, to keep pace with the moving ice.

As the floe passed the outflow of the Niagara Falls Power Company’s tunnel, its back section broke off and ground to a halt on the American shore. Had the marooned quartet been standing at that end they could have been saved. Now their only hope was to try to return to the Canadian side.

The two youths rushed on ahead, with the Stantons stumbling along behind. Mrs. Stanton fell. “Oh, let me alone!” she said, “let me die now.” Her husband tried to drag her to her feet, and Hecock, hearing his call for help, turned back. In doing so he sacrificed his life.

Roth kept going. The great floe was now some seven hundred yards downstream from the Upper Steel Arch Bridge. Hill threw the youth a rope. Roth seized it and, calling back to his companions to follow, plunged into the slush. Hill leaped from the bank into the water, grasped the youth, and dragged him, half unconscious, his clothes frozen solid, to safety. But the other boy and the man, with a hysterical woman on their hands, remained on the crumbling, drifting floe.

By this time the banks were lined with spectators. The Whirlpool Rapids were only half a mile downstream. The trio would have to escape before the ice plunged into that maelstrom. The block on which all three were standing broke into two pieces, leaving Hecock on one and the Toronto couple on the other.

On the Michigan Central Railroad bridge, members of a repair crew lowered a rope weighted with iron, while another workman fashioned a makeshift line from three coils of insulated telephone wire. Hecock grasped the dangling rope as he passed below it and plunged waist-deep into the water, battered by the ice as the men above tried to yank him free. When at last the lifeline tightened, they began to haul up the numbed Hecock, who, in turn, tried to climb upward, hand over hand. He was dangling forty feet above the water when his strength left him. His frozen hands slipped, and he tried to grip the rope with his teeth. But he could not hold on, and suddenly he was gone, swallowed by the ice-choked river as the crowd above groaned.

Stanton saw it all. His wife, on her knees, weeping uncontrollably, closed her eyes. Then, as the current moved the floe out into midstream, Stanton was able to seize the knotted telephone line dangling from the bridge. He was trying to tie it around his wife when, to his horror, it broke. A second lifeline was dropped, and Stanton tried again to save his wife; but the twenty-mile-an-hour current was too swift. The floe swept beyond the bridge before he could reach the line.

The spectacle of the two, clasped in each other’s arms, then dropping to their knees as if in prayer, would remain with Red Hill all his life. An instant later the rapids overturned their icepan. Their bodies were never found.

Hill received a second life-saving medal from the Royal Canadian Humane Association for his efforts. And for the rest of time, the Niagara ice bridge was declared off limits to everyone, residents and visitors alike.

5
The soaring ambitions of Adam Beck

The chairman of the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario was a man obsessed with power – not only the power that the Falls could provide but also the power that he himself could wield. Adam Beck was an autocrat. He wanted no interference from politicians peering over his shoulder. Hydro was his child, and he wanted to run it in his own way, at arm’s length from the Ontario government.

In one sense that was admirable. There would be no political patronage under Beck – no incompetent friends of the government bungling matters, as had happened in the federal government’s Intercolonial Railway in the Maritime provinces. But there was another, darker side to Beck’s personality. He was quite prepared to dissemble, and even to lie, in order to keep the government unaware of his ambitions for Hydro. He was miffed in 1915 when the new premier, William Howard Hearst, appointed an auditor to examine Hydro’s books. The government had received no accurate financial information from Beck since 1909 and wanted some answers. Beck was even more miffed when the auditor came down hard on Hydro for spending four million dollars more than the new legislature had authorized. The auditor declared that there wasn’t even a semblance of legislative control over Beck’s commission and referred to his “seemingly defiant disobedience of the Act.”

In this harsh condemnation shrewder politicians might have seen some hints of what was to come, but Adam Beck, MPP, was riding high with both press and public. His Hydro Circus, a horse-drawn caravan, was travelling to rural communities trumpeting the advantages of electrical appliances and equipment. Beck himself often arrived in his Pierce Arrow automobile to address the crowds. A witty popular song, “Oh! What a Difference Since the Hydro Came,” emphasized the enthusiasm with which the public greeted Beck’s achievement. His white-knight stance as the saviour of the people from the greedy private interests had made him a folk hero to go with the real knighthood he was awarded in 1914.

With his haughty aristocratic features, he did not look like a man of the people. If he was obsessive about public power, it was the single-minded obsession of a fanatic. Beck was like a collector whose energies are channelled into an insatiable desire for rare porcelain or eighteenth-century watches. He couldn’t let go. He wanted more, no matter what the cost, and more was never enough.

His empire was expanding at a furious rate. When Hydro began operation in 1910 it was delivering 2,500 horsepower to ten municipalities. At the outset of the Great War it had already expanded into a network of ninety-five municipalities, requiring 77,000 horsepower. By the end of 1916, with wartime demands increasing, Hydro was delivering 167,000 horsepower to 191 municipalities. The following year, with hundreds of newly constructed munitions factories all demanding power, Hydro was providing 330,000 horsepower.

Hydro had been designed as a middleman that would build and operate the transmission lines while buying its power from private concerns. That original concept had been sold to the municipalities, to the provincial government, and to the public. But Beck wanted more. He did not want to be dependent on others; he wanted to generate his own power.

The idea had been percolating since 1914, when he had approached the ailing premier, Whitney, to gain his support for a mammoth generating plant at Queenston. A year later he asked Whitney’s successor, Hearst, to back the idea. It would cost $10 million, he said, to produce 100,000 horsepower, and take three and a half years to build. Beck apparently pulled the figure out of a hat – the estimates occupied a single sheet of paper. Later, they were revised. In January 1917 the cost was estimated at a little more than $24 million to produce 300,000 horsepower. That was the only estimate the government ever received. The enabling legislation placed before the ratepayers on the January 1916 municipal ballot carefully made no mention of costs or horsepower. It simply asked authorization “to develop, or acquire, through Hydro, whatever works may be required for the supply of electrical energy or power.”

What Beck was planning was a huge project that would take its water from the mouth of the Weiland River at its confluence with the Niagara at Chippawa, above the Falls, and convey it by a long canal to Queenston. The net fall would be 294 feet. With the efficiency of newly designed generators, Hydro at Queenston could develop two to three times as much power as the stations nearer the Falls were producing.

Beck, in the meantime, was casting covetous eyes at the Buffalo-owned Ontario Power Company, which took its power from the foot of the Falls, using no more than the original 170-foot drop. This company had been awarded the major share of the Canadian horsepower allotted under the treaty of 1909. Beck knew that Ontario Power was not using all the water that the international agreement allowed: four thousand cubic feet a second were going to waste. And so Beck “acquired” this potential power source in 1917 for $22 million. At about the same time he accused the Electrical Development Company of “stealing water” – exceeding its legal maximum – a charge that enraged Sir William Mackenzie, who, like Beck, had received a knighthood. Mackenzie wrote to the premier protesting Beck’s “despicable calumny.”

Beck’s ambitions were stimulated by the wartime power crisis. As the demands of the munitions plants increased, he wrapped himself in the flag. He wanted the government to stop the sale of private power to the United States on the grounds that it was needed for the Canadian war effort. His intention was not entirely patriotic. Industry south of the border now paid more for Canadian power than Canadian industries did. By persuading the government to cut off that lucrative source of profit, Beck would weaken his rivals. But Hydro had just become an exporter itself, through its recent purchase of the Ontario Power Company, and Beck had no intention of revoking the contracts with U.S. industries it had inherited. This time, however, Beck didn’t get his way. The United States was also at war and threatening to cut off exports of coal to Canada. Ottawa refused to place an embargo on power exports.

By 1917 Ontario was faced with a shortage of 70,000 horsepower, much of it brought on by Beck’s own sales efforts, which had prompted householders to buy such things as electric irons and heaters. The Canadian government ordered all power interests to develop electricity to the maximum, regardless of their legal restrictions. With power blackouts now a regular inconvenience, Beck had no trouble getting legislative approval for his pet Queenston-Chippawa project. Nobody knew how long the war in Europe would drag on, but it was obvious that more electric power would be needed.

Now Beck’s implacable rival, the dapper Sir William Mackenzie, struck back. He argued that Beck’s plan to divert water from the Niagara River for the Queenston plant contravened an earlier agreement the EDC had made with the commissioners of Queen Victoria Park. Mackenzie’s firm applied for an injunction to stop the project. It failed. Mackenzie tried to get the federal government to disallow the Ontario legislation. That failed, too. The defeated Mackenzie, strapped for cash, was finally prepared to sell out to Hydro.

A long and acrimonious series of negotiations followed, with Beck intransigent as always, refusing even to stay in the same room with Mackenzie’s nominee, R.J. Fleming. W.R. Plewman reported that the premier thought both men were acting childishly “and would have taken pleasure in banging their heads together.” The long-drawn-out arguments cost the taxpayers dearly and did not end until December 5, 1921, when Hydro bought out all of Mackenzie’s interests for $32,734,000 – more than five million dollars above the price that Mackenzie had been prepared to accept in 1918.

During this time, Beck was determined to press on with his new project at any price, but he did not tell his political masters that costs were escalating. Nor, apparently, did they ask. As far as the premier was concerned, the job would be done for about $25 million, a figure that Beck continued to cling to in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

Eight thousand labourers were toiling night and day, blasting an eight-mile tunnel out of solid rock to carry the water from Chippawa to the cliff side at Queenston. Fourteen gigantic shovels were at work, five of them larger than any others in the world. Seventeen million cubic yards of earth and rock had to be moved – an amount five times greater than the volume of the great pyramid of Cheops. Four hundred and fifty thousand cubic yards of concrete had to be poured. Beck, it turned out, was building on a hitherto unprecedented scale, dwarfing the American plants across the river. This would be by far the largest hydroelectric plant in the world, and Ontario Hydro would be the world’s largest power company.

For all of this turbulent period, Beck misled not only the government but also the other members of the commission. Expenditures were running wildly ahead of estimates, but Beck withheld that information. The big shovels were not operating under ideal conditions and could do no more than half the work advertised by their manufacturers. Wartime pressures had escalated wage rates. And the original estimates had been distorted by Beck and his staff, who were eager for official approval and didn’t want to see the project aborted.

Time and again Beck had submitted estimates to the municipalities that he knew were unsound. Sometimes he had persuaded the provincial legislature to approve money for one purpose, then used it for another. He had issued cheques without the sanction or knowledge of the Treasury Board or even of his fellow commissioners, knowing that otherwise they would not be authorized. Beck had had no compunction about misleading the government in which he was a Cabinet minister. He had got approval of his huge project on the basis of a single sheet of paper estimating the cost at about $10 million, later raised to $24 million. The government had no inkling of the real bill until three years after the start of construction.

In 1919, a new political movement, the United Farmers of Ontario, swept into power under its leader, E.C. Drury. Beck himself was out of political office, swamped by the tidal wave. He had had considerable clout with Hearst; he had none with Drury, who after an investigation of Hydro accounts found that construction costs were far out of line. An audit revealed that the cost of the Niagara project would be at least $40 million. Within six months that was revised to $50 million and then to $65 million. Even this figure was low. When all the bills were in, the price had soared to $84 million.

Beck had exceeded his estimates in another way. Instead of producing the original 100,000 horsepower that he had forecast to Whitney in 1914, or the 300,000 horsepower agreed to in 1917, the new plant would produce 550,000 horsepower.

Beck tried to stall Drury off as he had successfully obstructed his predecessors. In October 1921, the premier and his cabinet met with the Hydro chairman to get some explanation of the soaring expenses. Beck promised he’d have it in a week. But two months went by with Beck pleading pressure of business. He finally replied with feeble excuses, blaming “conditions which could not have been foreseen” and “results which could not have been anticipated.”

It was time for that old Canadian standby – a royal commission that would head off a politically embarrassing confrontation between the tough-minded Drury and the resolute Beck. Thus, when the big project finally opened with much fanfare on December 29, 1921, “a pall seemed to hang overhead,” in the words of W.R. Plewman, who was there.

The royal commission, under the chairmanship of W.R. Gregory, produced its report in March 1924, and it was devastating. It came down very hard on the Hydro chairman, who, it said bluntly, “has shown an absolute lack of frankness.” He had recognized no obligation to keep the government informed about costs or expenditures. His estimates had been “inadequate or unsound” and it was clear that he knew it. He had often “been arbitrary and inconsiderate in his dealings with his colleagues and with the government.”

“It seems inconceivable that the Commission should have regarded cost so lightly and that the financing of this great work could have been carried on by it in such a loose way,” the report said. No government, it declared, “should accept with confidence estimates prepared by a promoter of a scheme.” Beck had hoodwinked a successions of premiers, but the premiers themselves were also to blame. They had let Hydro become a law unto itself. The Ontario government, dazzled by Beck’s charisma, had never kept in touch with the work through an independent representative. Beck got money “almost for the asking” not only from the government “but by diverting millions which it [Hydro] held in trust for other purposes.”

The Gregory Commission could not, however, ignore the “inestimable” value to the province of the Queenston-Chippawa plant, no matter what the cost. Some other figures turned out to be wrong – but on the right side. The canal, designed to carry 15,000 cubic feet of water a second, was capable of 18,000, and perhaps more. Beck had planned to develop 500,000 horsepower, but the plant, which had an efficiency of 90 percent, was capable of developing 550,000. That indicated “a fineness of design seldom, if ever, attained in a work of this character. It is, in short, a magnificent piece of engineering.”

That would serve as Beck’s epitaph. By finagling and dissembling, by vague promises and outright lies, the bull headed Hydro chairman had got his way. Would his dream have come true if the government had known early in the game what the final cost would be? Sir Adam Beck clearly didn’t think so. He died in 1925, his name linked forever with the campaign for public power in Canada. When the Tennessee Valley Authority was brought into being in 1933, Ontario Hydro served as a model. Franklin Roosevelt, when he was governor of New York, had been a close student of Beck’s project.

There were other monuments in addition to the one on University Avenue, Toronto. In 1950, Beck’s enormous power-plant was renamed Sir Adam Beck Generating Station No. 1. Two more stations would follow, also carrying Beck’s name. History may not have forgotten the autocrat’s financial legerdemain, but the public has long since forgiven him his flaws. He got the job done, and that, in the long run, is all that seems to matter.