The first time I met Crerar—at lunch in a small eastern club—he impressed me as a man enormously capable in business, tersely direct in his judgments, somewhat satirical and inordinately sensitive. He seemed wary, almost cryptic in his remarks. Recently sworn in as Unionist Minister of Agriculture, he had turned his back on Winnipeg, where he was a sort of agrarian king, and taken his first dip into the cynical waters of Ottawa, where he was but one of a Ministerial group some of whom were abler and more interesting than himself. He had not yet appeared in Parliament. He dreaded the ordeal. He had no knowledge of just to what programme he would be expected to adhere, except the general one of winning the war. He had little enthusiasm for the Premier, probably less for most of his colleagues. So far as he had been able to survey Ottawa, he considered it an administrative mess. His direct ways of doing business were menaced by a sense of muddle and officialdom. He missed the breezy, open ways of "the Peg" and the sensation of being general manager of the biggest commercial concern west of the lakes, the Grain Growers' Grain Co. Crerar could not business-manage Ottawa. When he opened his Agriculture door he saw no box cars trailing in from the elevator pyramids on the skyline; he smelled no wheat; he saw no "horny-handed" farmers writing checks to cover their speculative investments in grain which they had not yet sown. No wheat-mining comrade motoring in from the plains came to thrust his boots up on the general manager's desk and say, "Believe me, Tom, I paid thirteen-ninety for those protected articles. What a shame!"
Crerar complained of indigestion. I think his nerves were on edge. I asked him if he expected to co-relate Agriculture with Food Control and Trade and Commerce. "Oh, I suppose so," he said wearily. "Nobody in Union Government knows what he will do yet. I don't like Ottawa. Its whole atmosphere is foreign to me."
He seemed almost contemptuous. He had made the patriotic plunge in order to put his particular brand of radical Liberalism at the service of a Tory-Unionist Government. He did not like it. Of all the Liberals who entered the Union Cabinet he was the sworn Radical. Both Calder and Sifton were machine men from governments that still had Liberal labels on their luggage. Crerar represented the great inter-prairie group of no compromise and of economic enmity to the Tories. He was rather looking for trouble; thinking rather hard of how he could get through with such an uncomfortable job, do it well and get back uncontaminated to his own dear land of the wheat and his fine office in the most handsome suite of offices in the Grain Exchange at Winnipeg. The Ottawa that he hated was the Capital that old line politicians had created. He was looking forward to some Ottawa of the future which like Canberra, the new dream Capital of Australia, might be vacuum-cleaned and disinfected of all the old partisan microbes.
Crerar made his success in a country where the visible signs of getting on in the world are a bigger factor than anywhere else in Canada. The prairies are mysterious and sublime. The West is plain big business. Crerar represents the West rather than the prairies. He is temperamentally a man of Ontario, where he was born; solidly businesslike and persistent. He glorifies hard work. And he went West at a time when the law of hard work was just coming to replace the old-timer's creed of hanging on and waiting for something—usually a railway—to turn up. He came up with the farmer of 60-cent wheat in a part of the country where everything that the farmer had to buy in order to produce that kind of wheat was high in cost. Cheap wheat and dear wherewithals have been to T. A. Crerar and his kind Number One Hard experience. His axioms began with the plough made under a high tariff. His code of ethics was evolved from the self-binder, railroaded the long haul by systems that thrive on the tariff. His community religion—not his personal, which one believes has been pretty devoutly established—is embodied in the emotions of the skyline elevator following the trail of the steel and the twist of the box car.
One cannot mention these rudimentary western things without a species of enthusiasm for the Westerner, and a consequent precarious sympathy with the views of Mr. Crerar. Transplant yourself even for a year, as the writer did twenty years ago, to the far northwest, and you begin in spite of all your previously inrooted sentiments, to share the beliefs and talk the language that lie at the basis of even so arrogant an organization as the Grain Growers' Association and so inordinate an oligarchy as the Canadian Council of Agriculture. A man cannot fight the paralyzing combination of drouth, wet, early frost, rust, weevil, grasshoppers, eastern manufacturers, high tariffs, centralized banks and bankrupt octopean railways in the production of under-dollar wheat, without losing much of his faith in the smug laws of economy laid down by men who buy and sell close to the centres of production.
Now begins the work of the novelist, making precis notes for his Crerar masterpiece; investigating the prairie farm of 1900, anywhere between the main line and the skyline. For the sake of space we copy his notes, hastily sketched:
Low hill—General aspect, poplar bluffs, billowy landscape—Log and mudchink shack; pole and sod roof—stable and shed ditto—Three or four cattle and lashions of grass—Broncho team and new high-painted wagon—No family—Dash churn—Lucky to have a wife—Some hens—Sod-breaking plough, long snout, breaks odd fields twixt bluffs—Coal-black loam, strong—Wheat and oats, wonderful early growth—Drouth first year—Second year, pole fences, more fields, and wet season—More crops but half spoiled by wet—Sacks on trail to cars, toiling across prairie to elevator—Smudge of train, bit of a town and a tank—No cars to load grain—Must sell to elevator—Monopoly—Low price—Grading wheat to No. 2 Northern—55 cents, used to be 40—Lien note to pay on wagon and binder—Goes to indignation meeting—Lots of that—Farmer revolutionaries—Want Gov't. to pass acts compelling Rys. to supply farmers cars to break low-price monopoly of elevators—Act passed, but roads in league with elevators—Same old trouble—Rise of radical leaders—Organization of farmers into group to fight interests—Helots on prairies—Helpless unless organized—Only partial relief from Gov't.—Two new provinces in 1905—Grits make great splash, promising Utopia along with newer trunk lines and big towns, etc.—Farmer grins, goes on organizing, in each province association of grain growers (G.G.)—Every few towns some fiery evangel—Great on conventions, regular convenanters, old style—Schools of debate and Utopian legislation—Gov'ts. wear goggles and organize elections—Farmer organizes group ideas, to oppose old line politics—Say Eastern old parties effete in West—Townsmen league with farmers, common interest; low price wheat means lean purchases and laggard towns—By this time young man Crerar in Wpg., taken from managing small elevator company to be general manager G.G. Grain Co.—Co-op. movement develops in all associations, for buying and selling—G.G.G. Co. give farmer equal rights with city man in speculation on what farmer grows—Horn into Grain Exchange, little office—Under Crerar Co. grows to much the biggest corporation in Exchange; whole ground floor offices of G.G.G. Co. which as commercial organization focuses the buying and selling end of whole agrarian movement—Head of this, naturally chief of movement—All remedial and legislative programmes merged in economics of G.G.G. Co.—Crerar wiry, quiet executive, now fuse plug to a real agrarian party with a programme which through Canadian Council of Agriculture, members from all over Canada, constitutes itself a parliament of farmers telling old parties to go to the devil—Liberal gov'ts in prairie province mere annexes of new radical group which is now bigger nationalist force than Quebec ever was, ready to march upon Ottawa——
On this basis the novelist builds his political fabric of Crerar, who began life as a Laurier Liberal, became a Free Trader of the Michael Clark school, and ten years ago gave symptoms of pushing the economic side of the agrarian movement to a point where it aimed to become the new Liberalism of the prairies. He was the business head of a revolutionary movement of which other men became the ardent, flaming crusaders, both in and out of Ottawa. Crerar calmly evolved his practical evangelism out of the ledger of exports and imports. Nothing excited him so deeply as comparative statistics. He never trusted to the moral or emotional side of the case. His crusade was in the national ledger. His church was the elevator; his economic Bible the Grain Growers' Guide.
Since 1914 or thereabouts this man has kept his balance at the head of a movement that split again and again into local factions only to come together again in the head offices of the Grain Growers' Grain Co. and the Canadian Council of Agriculture. He represented multi-millions of investment in land, agriculture, co-operative commercial enterprises and speculation. On the ground floor of the Grain Exchange he was at the head of the greatest organization in the world speculating in visible supply wheat. The grain that Crerar's cohorts bought and sold was either just sown, or heading out, or being threshed, or it was crawling to Winnipeg in miles of box cars on its way to Fort William. In wheat he put his trust; in railways and steamships never; in centralized banks and eastern manufacturers not at all; in old parties at Ottawa still less—if possible.
Crerarism was becoming power to act. Behind Crerar was a sullen but optimistic reformation of such varied emotional character that none but a quiet, steady man could have controlled it in Winnipeg. The novelist's prairie farm was now a power in the land. It was Agrarianism; that had bolted like an ostrich both old parties in the West, and now offered a new one supposed to contain as a new National Policy a general and itemized contradiction of the old N.P. of 1878—The National Progressive Party.