Joey Smallwood — the grand seduction
Now that the celebrations and commemorations for the 100th anniversary of Beaumont Hamel have run their course, maybe it’s time to turn our attention to another, though lesser once-upona-time.
Dec. 17 marks the 25th anniversary of the death of Joey Smallwood (1900-1991), Newfoundland’s first premier, who liked nothing more than to write his own history, which included the bombast of calling himself “the last Father of Confederation.”
Smallwood’s grandson Joe, a successful businessman of quiet and efficient decency, once reminded his own son that he was born with two ears and one mouth, so it behooved him “to listen twice as much as you talk.”
It’s as if family legacy had reversed itself over three generations, because the elder Joey Smallwood was all mouth. He made a place in Canadian history for himself by talking far more than he listened.
It’s often been said about Smallwood that people either loved him or hated him. Toronto journalist and author Richard Gwyn summed him up as a “deadly serious clown,” a consummate performer with big ideas, “part rustic savant, part licensed national jester.”
The time is always right for someone with a unique set of character traits to come along and make history as if it had been destiny, and Smallwood did just that. His is the story of a truculent runt who clawed his way out of poverty and went on to anoint himself as the saviour of his long-suffering people.
He was as much a visionary as he was an opportunist, as much a recognizable misfit as he was a puzzle, as much an accident as he was a force mercurial enough to stump the establishment that dismissed him at first as just another populist crackie.
And so, he slipped through the political safety net of the day and became the Pied Piper who led his people out of the hellhole of colonialism into the promised land of Confederation with Canada.
Of all his accomplishments, his mastery of seduction was the greatest; of all his failures, none played a bigger role in his unlikely climb to power than his eagerness to be seduced himself. Seduction forms the spine of Smallwood’s story — the heroic and brave-hearted action on the one hand, the countless incidents of vain, petty, peevish, even vindictive behaviour on the other — all the good, bad, and ugly of the little big man.
His first seduction still falls into the category of youthful commitment to making the world a better place: his admiration for the work of Sir William Coaker, founder and leader of the Fishermen’s Protective Union. Smallwood spent the early 1920s as a tireless union activist and socialist journalist.
His growing disillusionment with the failing politics of Coaker inevitably caught the attention of the establishment. In 1926, St. John’s lawyer George Ayre, impressed by how “young and wonderfully energetic” Smallwood was, offered him the opportunity to draw up a new manifesto for the local Liberal party. The second seduction had begun.
Smallwood accepted and quickly turned himself into a seasoned Liberal party organizer. When Liberal Prime Minister Sir Richard Squires was chased from Colonial Building by an angry crowd in 1932, Smallwood was running right behind him.
The third seduction is based on a conspiracy theory most recently rekindled by St. John’s historian John FitzGerald. According this story, Smallwood didn’t embrace Confederation with Canada as an independent thinker but as a political opportunist. FitzGerald et al. maintain Smallwood was actively recruited by British and Canadian politicians and agents to lead the confederate charge for them.
As a popular broadcaster whose trademark was to celebrate the virtues and foibles of the traditional Newfoundland way of life, he was tailor-made for the job. To get him ready, the story goes, they set him up with a pig farm near Gander, from where he embarked on many trips to Ottawa with lengthy, sometimes month-long briefings on what great benefits union with Canada had to offer.
Smallwood delivered with almost demonic skill and ruthlessness. The final 1948 vote was a squeaker. The victory, with all the division it sowed, was all the more symbolic and powerful. The old political structure of Newfoundland lay in ruins. Ottawa bureaucrats arrived promptly and rebuilt the new provincial government from the ground up. Smallwood grabbed the job at the top. He felt it was his due. He’d accomplished the exalted status of a living myth.
And now the stage was set for the final seduction — the lure of power. And here, too, Smallwood responded with all he had. Well-crafted oratory turned into long-winded pomposity. Certainty hardened into vanity, any residual insecurity into brittle conceit. Lackeys, flatterers and toadies moved in. Cronyism took over. Smallwood opened his court to every adventurer who knew how to play the game. They deceived and swindled him at every turn.
He fell for them because, underneath all his shrewdness and guile, he continued to cling to the one pure thing inside him: the gullibility of the eternal idealist.
Autocrats don’t step down, least of all when the place around them is in full revolt. They leave in defeat, as Smallwood did in 1975 after losing one election, trying to make a comeback, and losing again.
Wikipedia remarks on his “mastery of propaganda techniques, courage and ruthlessness.” According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, he demonstrated “willpower, courage and ruthlessness in the political ring.” The New York Times described him at the time of his death in 1991 as a “salty figure who both infuriated and delighted Canadians with his efforts during 22 years as Newfoundland’s premier to extend the province’s influence across the country.” About News draws the portrait of a “small man with big vision,” a “compulsive talker, reader and writer,” who admitted that his biggest mistake was “staying on too long.”
Confederation was not the personal achievement of one man but the collective effort of many. Still, even after the Confederation project was starting to run smoothly on its own, Smallwood could not take his hands off it. Any credit due had to go to him. Inevitably, any criticism ended up in his lap as well. The more his bloated ego made him blunder, the more the criticism grew, the more his skin got thinner, and the more he dug in his by now fully spurred dictatorial heels.
There was one last temptation that must have beckoned at some point during his years at the lonely top, but this one he would have nothing to do with — the temptation to walk away from it all. It could have been the one gesture that would have convinced even his harshest critics that he did have the stuff of greatness. For once this tiny man with the mouth of a lion flinched and set the stage for his political exile.
As if to prove that the fates had kept their eyes on him all along, he was dealt a stroke in 1984, which left him paralyzed on one side and unable to speak. He lived on for another seven years, a prisoner inside the cage of his own myth.
The frustration showed in his eyes. All the oratory and flair was still there, yet muted forever. You could no longer hate him, even if you wanted to. His imprisonment made you want to cry with pity.
It took the insight of a descendant two generations later to suggest that, both for the better and the worse, Smallwood had it all backwards. He had many undeniable gifts, yes, but far too much mouth and far too little ear.