Cookson was the investigating detective in the trial of Steve Bohun, a nineteen-year-old accused of shooting and robbing a postmaster. Diefenbaker defended Bohun, using every technique he had mastered. He wanted to prove that the Mounties had forced Bohun to confess. “Do you understand the nature of an oath?” he boomed, starting his cross-examination of Cookson. The constable was an impressive man decked out in his RCMP dress uniform of redcoat, breeches and high boots, but he soon felt flustered as Diefenbaker paced the floor or stood facing the spectators, firing questions over his shoulder for over an hour and a half. “You showed him the blood stains still upon the floor, the blood of the dead Peter Pommereul, didn’t you?” Diefenbaker accused. “And then, Constable Cookson, then you tried to force this young boy to put his hands upon those blood stains. What do you say to that?” Diefenbaker suddenly turned and thrust out a long accusatory finger. It was a move he would become famous for in the House of Commons.
“I did no such thing,” Cookson replied, rising to his feet. But a seed of doubt had been planted in the jury’s mind.
Diefenbaker was at his dramatic best but the jury found Bohun guilty, though they did ask for mercy because of his lack of intelligence. The judge sentenced him to hang.
On March 9, 1934, John walked out to his front porch. From there he had a view of the Prince Albert prison. A black flag was raised slowly up the flagpole, signalling Steve Bohun’s death. Diefenbaker wept, jaws clenched, tears staining his cheeks. “Poor devil,” he whispered, “poor, poor devil.”
In Diefenbaker’s next case, the violent murder of a farmer near Leask, the prosecution didn’t have enough evidence to continue the trial, so Diefenbaker won by default. Next came a front-page murder trial. Two trappers had gotten drunk, and in an argument over their take, one had shot the other dead. Diefenbaker was able to get the charge lowered to manslaughter because the culprit had been drinking.
John Diefenbaker had made a name for himself and had become the lawyer he wanted to be.
He had one more goal to achieve.
A shot of Edna in the 1930s,
stylish as always.
A 1933 ad urging the public
to meet Diefenbaker.
Running for Election
In 1911, when John Diefenbaker was fifteen years old, Liberal Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier called an election. Laurier had been running Canada like a well-oiled machine since 1896. He had created the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta. He had opened the floodgates to immigrants and the population of the dominion had grown from four million to seven million. He was the first and perhaps the greatest French Canadian leader, able to balance Quebec interests with the interests and the demands of the rest of Canada. He was known as the “Knight of the White Plume,” and he predicted bravely that the twentieth century belonged to Canada. Laurier wanted another term, so he called the election and ran on the platform of reciprocity – freer trade with the United States.
It was a big mistake. The Conservatives, led by Robert Borden, unfurled their Red Ensigns and waved them like mad, singing “Yankee Doodle Laurier.” They believed open trade with the U.S. would lead to stronger economic and political union with the Americans and eventually Canada’s sovereignty would be diminished. After all, Canada was only forty-four years old and still had important ties to Britain. And then “Champ” Clark, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, declared his support for reciprocity because he hoped, “to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of the British North American Colonies clear to the North Pole.” This didn’t help Laurier’s cause one iota. His campaign was dealt another blow when Clark announced, “We are preparing to annex Canada.” The flag-waving and the shouting of the Conservatives grew to near pandemonium. Laurier was voted out of office tout de suite.
Young Diefenbaker watched this firestorm of emotion and politics with wide-open eyes. “The election had a profound influence on me, and perhaps more than anything else made me a Conservative,” Diefenbaker wrote many years later. “I attended all the meetings in Saskatoon. The Tories had a marvellous campaign. They didn’t have any arguments but they raised the flag and we’d sing… ’We’re soldiers of the King.’ The result was a tremendous revelation of Canadian determination to be Canadian. This impressed me greatly.” The impression would last a lifetime.
John had done exceedingly well in the mock parliaments during his university years, but the first real test of his speaking skill came when he was elected to city council in Wakaw, by a slim margin of twelve votes.
People began to notice this brash upstart, and the Liberal party tried to enlist John in 1921. He declined. They were flabbergasted. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to join the Liberal party? So one day when John was out of town the Wakaw Liberal Association elected him secretary, sneaked into his office, and left their minute books and pamphlets on his desk. When he got back and discovered this, he immediately marched to the Liberal president and gave the books back.
On June 19, 1925, Diefenbaker let the world know he was a Conservative. Well, actually he addressed a small group of Conservatives at an organizing meeting in a tiny room in Prince Albert, but it felt like he was telling the whole world. It was his first official act as a Conservative. His feet were wet, so he dived in and two months later was declared the party’s federal candidate by acclamation.
He might as well have been invisible. The Liberals were already in power both federally and provincially, and the Conservatives were at the bottom of the political heap, with no real hope of a victory in Saskatchewan.
The election was called for October 29, 1925. Diefenbaker squared off against Charles Macdonald, the Liberal candidate. The war of words was fast and furious, and at one point John was described by his opponents as a “Hun.” This was an attempt to identify Diefenbaker with the German forces who had been the enemy in the First World War. “Matters were made little better when I was simply called a German,” John later recalled, “I was not a German, not a German-Canadian, but a Canadian.” Diefenbaker, as he would repeat throughout his lifetime, was always a Canadian first. During a speech at the Orpheum Theatre in Prince Albert he attacked his opponents by saying: “Am I German? My great-grandfather left Germany to seek liberty. My grandfather and my father were born in Canada. It is true, however, that my grandmother and my grandfather on my mother’s side spoke no English: being Scottish, they spoke Gaelic. If there is no hope for me to be Canadian, then who is there hope for?”
It was a rousing reply, though he had slightly stretched the truth: his Diefenbaker grandfather was born in Germany and his Bannerman grandparents spoke English. The point was still the same.
But just as Diefenbaker was fighting off his opponents’ claims, he was sideswiped by the leader of his own party. Arthur Meighen was a hard-minded, steely-eyed man who had briefly been prime minister (he succeeded Robert Borden in 1920 and was voted out of office in 1921). Meighen declared he would alter the Crow’s Nest Pass freight rate, which was subsidized to keep the grain flowing to the West Coast cheaply. Meighen also opposed the completion of a Hudson Bay railway, which would give farmers in Saskatchewan another outlet for their grain.
Diefenbaker publicly disagreed with his own leader, and it didn’t win him any points with his party. x201C;My position was difficult,” Diefenbaker later wrote. “It need not have been. But I chose to speak for myself.” This wouldn’t be the last time he would follow his own path instead of toeing the party line.
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