Here’s Howe

Many readers know about Gifford Pinchot, the forestry official who served under Theodore Roosevelt, and about the labour leader Sidney Hillman and the businessman Bernard Baruch, who were part of America’s wartime efforts and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. These were “dollar-a-year men,” celebrated for their selfless and indispensable service to government, each with an annual salary of a single greenback note. As with so much, the Canadian equivalents — the group of lawyers, engineers, and executives who rushed to Ottawa’s aid in a time of crisis and need, just as selfless as their Yankee counterparts, just as indispensable, maybe more so — have received far less attention.

With The Dollar a Year Men, Allan Levine casts new light on the forty-plus Canadians (including two women) who, operating under the stern guidance of the formidable and indefatigable Clarence Decatur Howe, helped Canada mobilize for the Second World War, reorient its manufacturing base, and streamline its production lines — all vital elements of bringing the Axis powers to heel.

These heroes of history have not entirely been forgotten, of course. Yousuf Karsh photographed many of them, creating portraits that appeared in the Montreal Standard and later Saturday Night. But Canada, like the world beyond, needs a refresher course in generosity and humanitarian kindness, and this book provides yet another reminder of how and why the world needs more Canada.

So hurrah for Levine, who sets out the work and woes of these “volunteers.” The quotation marks are required because these targets of opportunity were more likely to be hit by a meteorite outside the Château Laurier than to say no when summoned by the redoubtable minister of munitions and supply. C. D. Howe saw little value in William Lyon Mackenzie King’s famous nebulous sidestep (“Not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary”). Indeed, he trafficked less in recruitment than in near-instant enlistment for one man’s personal home front.

A year after the war, Howe praised those “great Canadians” who “were willing to abandon their private interests and sacrifice personal gain to serve their country in a period when the future of this country was threatened as never before.” But between 1939 and 1945, he demonstrated that though this was a team effort, there was never a question about who was at the helm. “Does anyone suggest that a senior executive can quarrel with me and still continue to work with the department?“ he asked while addressing the House of Commons in February 1941. “I set the policy of the department, and if any executive does not follow it, he has no option but to resign.” Some did.

In retrospect, and in some of the pages of this otherwise estimable volume, a patina of inalterable altruism has settled on the executives who stayed, like dust in an untended archive. But at least some questioned their motives back then. Mackenzie King, for one, was deeply skeptical of the entire enterprise; he worried that many of the recruited Visigoths for victory had Tory sensibilities and thus were unworthy of the positions of influence into which they were injected. Like the Liberal prime minister, Howe was a political animal — not in a representative way but rather in an insider way, like FDR’s Harry Hopkins. He moved through the halls of Parliament and the corridors of the federal bureaucracy like a prowling lion.

Howe’s minions were by and large from the C‑suites of big companies, accustomed to having their say and unfamiliar with the structural impediments and senseless timeworn policies of long-established government institutions. Think of them as first-year students at McGill or the University of Toronto: overachievers habitually at the top of their class, thrown in with others with nearly identical records. As a result, the unavoidable occurred: Tempers flared. Power struggles ensued. Egos clashed. Angry threats flowed. In short, grown adults behaved like men, which is to say like jerks.

Overall, though, this is a success story, and Levine doesn’t overstate the case when he argues, “Dollar-a-year men helped make the victory possible and continued to shape Canada’s economic development in the post-war era.” It was during what he aptly calls “the most transformative time in Canadian history” that they had the most impact, building up a country that, even after its First World War mobilization, had not yet become an industrial powerhouse and surely had not yet achieved its status as the world’s fourth-greatest industrial nation.

Sometimes physically big, always temperamentally big, these were big shots with big ideas: among many others, William Woodward, the president of Vancouver’s Woodward Stores; Gordon Scott, a prominent Montreal chartered accountant; E. P. Taylor, the president of Canadian Breweries Limited, who later would be regarded as one of the country’s great tycoons; Henry Borden, a nephew of a prime minister and an eminent Toronto lawyer himself; and Richard C. Berkinshaw, the general manager of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. (The presence of Phyllis Turner Ross, the economist whose son John later became prime minister, and Byrne Hope Sanders, the editor of Chatelaine, somewhat complicates the “dollar-a-year men” label.) Together, they were, as Howe put it less than a year into the war, “the best business brains in the country.” One of Levine’s chapters is titled “Men of Experience and Absolute Integrity,” and that provides a crisp summary of those who were mobilized for the effort.

Howe turned a “drab wooden building” on Ottawa’s Wellington Street — where Library and Archives Canada currently sits — into perhaps the most important office complex in the country’s history. There the ambitious and the accomplished, all possessed of a dash of conscience, toiled. Many of them had served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the First World War. Most were between the ages of thirty and sixty. Many were anti-union. They marched to Howe’s drum, acquired his style of efficiency in action. He once reproved the Halifax lawyer Frank Covert for giving him a seven-line memorandum. “In future,” he said, “see if you can keep it to four lines.”

Still, Howe didn’t squash his recruits’ personalities. Take Jack Bickell, an owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs and, with Conn Smythe, one of the builders of Maple Leaf Gardens. A rambunctious risk taker with a taste for gambling and drinking, Bickell worked in London on Lord Beaverbrook’s frantic manufacturing offensive; became adept in the art of slicing red tape and encouraging the repair of damaged aircraft; led the operation to ferry planes from Canada to Britain; and sped up the manufacture of the new Lancaster, eventually producing 422 bombers (and seventy-eight Anson trainers). A parallel operation was headed by William Drysdale, who accomplished much the same with explosives and who at one point presided over the production of more than a dozen different kinds of shells in separate factories. In both cases — indeed in almost all these efforts, start‑ups decades before the term became popular — the results came with the sort of power struggles that such undertakings produce and maybe require.

One of the most successful of these dollar-a-year hires was Henry Carmichael, a top figure with General Motors of Canada. He became the country’s wartime production czar and troubleshooter-in-chief. Having adopted and adapted GM’s practice of using subcontractors, he was largely responsible for what Fortune magazine, in 1945, called an “industrial miracle.”

Along the way, these executives established many Crown companies, including Polymer Corporation Limited, Victory Aircraft, Eldorado Mining and Refining, and Research Enterprises Limited, which produced optical, communications, and radar equipment. Working tirelessly and with a sense of military discipline, they created, almost from scratch, Canada’s shipbuilding and aircraft manufacturing industries. The country that hadn’t produced a steel-hulled ship capable of transatlantic travel since 1921 had, by May 1943, manufactured 350 naval vessels. Not all their work was industrial. Borden, for example, recruited eight lawyers through his firm to draft contracts that could be adapted for the purchase and sale of all manner of matériel.

Yes, as Mackenzie King said, these figures of great wealth could afford what was essentially a furlough from their positions. Yes, there were heroes aplenty in the holds of ships, on the beaches of Normandy, in the air over Europe and the Pacific, and especially in the doomed 1942 Dieppe raid that left 916 Canadians dead. But the country no doubt benefited from the work of these executives, who drew few personal benefits from it.

“Given the widespread mistrust of government today and the self-centred world we live in,” Levine writes, “it is difficult to imagine a similar collective response if Canada were to face the same kind of danger.” Here a glance south of the border is instructive. It is nearly impossible to calculate how much the unelected tech bros, to say nothing of the president’s sons, have profited in a year and a half of the current Washington administration, a marked contrast with the “Country First” motto of the one-time Vietnam prisoner of war and 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

“Notwithstanding any missteps, poor judgments, and personality conflicts, they deserve to be remembered,” Levine concludes. “Because without them, surviving the ordeals of the Second World War in Canada would have been a lot more difficult.” Indeed, without them, surviving the ordeals of the Second World War in Canada might not have happened at all.