"...not caught looking ahead. Crerar spent much of the winter of 1915-16 traveling the wartime United States, including staying several days in Omaha with his idol, William Jennings Bryan, as he developed his treatise.
Published in March of 1916, On Canada and the United States was a series of essays published in pamphlet form, and later a book, that simply oozed early career Crerar. It was earnest, plain-spoken, and tended to draw broad conclusions. In the United Farmers, Crerar saw a parallel to what was happening in Canada in 1916 to what had been going on in the American Plains in 1896, and his "twenty-year theory" of Canadian politics trailing developments south of the 49th parallel by about twenty years was somewhat born from that experience. [1] Bryan's Populists, who had by the 1910s largely been absorbed into but in many ways also taken over the Democratic Party that had once been ultraconservative, had themselves been passionately reformist, largely agrarian partisans who sought to expand new rights to the people from a political establishment they considered distant both culturally and ideologically and controlled by an economic and social oligarchy, all descriptions that fit Ottawa's relationship to the Western Provinces to a T.
It was the retired Bryan working on a history of agrarian populism in the United States, however, who made the observation to Crerar in their teacher-pupil dynamic that what he really needed to focus his manifesto on was not what made populism in Canada and the USA similar, but rather what made it different, and Bryan had an idea on what the issue was that Crerar was not surprised by, even if the eventual conclusion was perhaps the kernel of his political activism for the rest of his life. Bryan noted that while superficially similar linguistically and culturally to one another, there was a reason why Canada was never interested in being part of the United States, and that was its culture of loyalty and hierarchy. It had been largely founded by Loyalists to the Crown after the American Revolution and its role as being a loyal part of the British Empire in North America was perhaps its defining trait from then on, distilled further in its hostility to (American-bred) Fenianism and, most critically, the strength of its Orange Order, an organization that had no equivalent in the United States despite the quiet background strength of the American WASP establishment. [2]
Crerar had never quite thought of it that way and while the root of this idea was present in On Canada and the United States, it was something he needed to consider more broadly and so, to the shock of many of his fellow United Farmers of Manitoba organizers, in late April of 1916 he requested to join the Lodge Number Sixty-One, in Winnipeg, and become a formal Orangeman. While some conservative-leaning historians to this day argue about whether Crerar was a spy aiming for subterfuge or was a secret Protestant-chauvinist who abandoned such views for opportunism, most scholarship on the man, even from the Right, largely are at the conclusion that Crerar was genuine in his declaration that he could not understand Canadian politics until he better understood Orangeism and what appeal it had to the Canadian people. He was not there to handicap his local Orange Lodge from within but rather learn from it and research it, and his findings offered him a level of nuance that he had not previously enjoyed that transformed his political career as much as his time with Bryan.
The realization he arrived at was that Orangeism was not merely about defending the Anglican-Presbyterian establishment of Canada and its prerogatives, or blind loyalty to the British Empire (Crerar disagreed strongly with the joke that Canadians were "more British than Britain"), even though these were nonetheless important throughlines of its raison d'etre. The Order also served an enormously important part of the social fabric of Canada, particularly in Ontario and Nova Scotia, which not coincidentally were the two provinces where the Tories tended to dominate. Crerar described the general cultural mien of Protestant Canada as "the triangle," of three basic points of social connection that reinforced a common culture but also a conservative hegemony. The overlap of Protestant churchgoers, Tory partisans and Orangemen was not by accident - participation in the one often led to participation in the others. As such, riding associations for Conservative Party elections were as much a social event and infrastructure as were attending church services on Sunday or Lodge picnics, marches or other events. Political activism, fraternal communalism, and religious worship thus came together as mutually reinforcing superstructures that were extremely hard to avoid. Many Protestant Canadians were not Tories because they hated Catholics, they were Tories because they attended the Anglican Church in Canada and everyone else in their town or neighborhood did the same, and at both church and at Lodge functions they met the same people they did otherwise who reinforced Tory ideas.
This insularity was further reinforced by the Order acting as an immediate resource for new immigrants to Canada. As discussed in the last chapter, 1910s Canada was in the midst of a huge immigration wave from Europe that saw particular concentration from poor Scotsmen, Ulstermen, and Englishmen from the less cosmopolitan Midlands or West Country. Jobs in Canada were plenty, especially in Ontario and booming Winnipeg (which by this point was arguably still the fastest-growing city on Earth, even as the Nicaragua Canal threatened its key position on the trans-continental route for British commerce), but moving to a new continent was a harrowing experience no matter where in the Americas it was done, and for these thousands of young, often male, Protestants from the British Isles the Order provided a sense of stability, help in getting on their feet, and assistance in then assimilating into a broader and greater "British Canada" that they then became just as defensive of as those who had been on North American shores for generations. Despite the decline in Order membership beginning in the late 1940s, as late as a few years before Crerar's death in 1975 one in five Protestant Canadian men met his wife through some kind of Lodge event, and sixty years prior it was more than two in five.
What Crerar came to realize over the course of 1916, then, was that the Order - and the affiliated but separate women's organizations that were beginning to grow rapidly in membership by that point - served as much a social and economic function as a religious and political one, and that was something that Laurier's Liberals and, now, the United Farmers were struggling to grasp, seeing it purely as a tool of the Conservative Party to maintain the discipline of their core voters. This did not mean that Crerar meant to fully buy in to what the Order believed or its rigid, hierarchical and supremacist politics, but rather that he began to see how it fit into the fabric of Protestant Canadian society and how many of its members had attachments to it beyond - or in some cases, despite of - its explicit agenda. This was the needle which progressive Canadian politics would need to thread, and so Crerar's next project, with On Canada and the United States published and increasingly well-received, was to plot out precisely how to do so..."
- The People's Prime Minister: Thomas Crerar's Remarkable Canadian Life
[1] Keep this figure in mind, though bear in mind this is Crerar theorizing this, not me, the TL's author
[2] I'm speaking a bit through Bryan here. IMO this is one of the biggest differences between Canadians and Americans - the former is way more amenable, culturally and politically, to following the rules and being "loyal", than the more "get off my lawn" culture of the USA, and one of the reasons I'm pursuing this thread ITTL is that it's interesting to turn that cultural instinct on its head into a more politically authoritarian worldview north of the border while the USA's overarching attitude gets threaded into progressivism rather than conservatism, a la OTL. That's me justifying my flipping of the two, at least.
