The Great Deception Chapter 5 -The KKK Brings Down a Government: the 1929 Saskatchewan Election

A Conservative MP wrote to Prime Minister R B Bennett: the Klan was 'the most complete political organization ever known' in Western Canada

Given world events in 1929 – it is not surprising that few people have heard of a provincial election in Canada where the Ku Klux Klan helped topple a government.

It is better known as the year where the stock market meltdown triggered a global Depression leading to the greatest world conflict yet in history, World War II.

But in 1929, the Liberal Government in Saskatchewan was defeated, and Conservatives elected, because of the Saskatchewan KKK. The KKK’s leaders were present at the Conservative convention when members chose their new leader, Dr. J. M. Anderson.

“The Conservative party provincial convention was held in Saskatoon on March 15 and 16, 1928. A total of three hundred and four delegates were present, averaging five for each of the sixty-three constituencies in the province. At this convention the Conservatives and the Ku Klux Klan had managed to find each other. Dr. Rosborough, the Imperial Wizard, Mr. Ellis of Regina, the Klan Kligrapp (secretary) and Dr. Hawkins were all present at the convention. Dr. Hawkins was an observer, the other two were delegates, and Klan literature was available at the door and inside the convention hall.

The convention elected the M.L.A. for Saskatoon, Dr. J.M. Anderson, leader of the provincial party.”

The Conservatives and the Klan were not the only two parties who were teaming up. As Calderwood writes,

“Progressive-Conservative collaboration began officially at the time of the Conservative Convention at Saskatoon in March, 1928.

Before the Convention closed, it received the following cable from Dr. Tran, the Progressive leader in the legislature:

“Heartily concur in the spirit of your deliberation. Gladly accept any democratic principle re co-operation.”

Behind this cable lay secret negotiations conducted on March 4th between Dr. Anderson, J. F. Bryant, and Howard McConnell and Progressive members of the Saskatchewan Legislature and the Provincial Progressive Committee.

The negotiations were planned “with a view to arriving at some compromise” by which they could conduct the next election.

The following compromise was reached at the meeting: the Conservatives would run a Conservative candidate in certain constituencies (about fifty per cent) and have the Progressives run a candidate in each of the other constituencies where the Progressives were the strongest.

If in any constituency neither the Progressives nor Conservatives would accept any suggestions from the Central Committee, then an open convention would be called of all opposing the Government and the strongest man get the nomination.

A resolution embodying this compromise was to be brought before the Conservative Convention.

If the motion passed, then Progressive members of the Legislature were to be contacted by telegram to determine whether they would support a co-operative government if the Liberals were defeated, replies were to be read to the Convention. The Liberals were shocked that the “liberal” Progressives would even think of an alliance with the “reactionary” Conservatives.”

Calderwood goes on to suggest that the Progressives were more willing to work with “co-operative” Conservatives in government than un-cooperative Liberals – but never mentions eugenics at all.

Anthony Appleblatt writes that under the two leaders of the Saskatchewan KKK, Hawkins and Maloney,

“the Klan became violently anti-Catholic and stirred up old prejudices and hatreds… During 1928 three issues came to the fore: crucifixes on public school walls, nuns teaching in public schools, and the teaching of French in public schools. The Liberal party led by James Gardiner continued their traditional policy of defending separate school privileges and maintaining the minimum amount of French permitted by the law.”

Daniel C Grant had returned to Saskatchewan from Manitoba to campaign in 1929 to work “off and on as a bodyguard and advance man for J.J Maloney,” who headed up the Saskatchewan KKK.

Maloney was printing a KKK newspaper, the Western Freedman, with headlines accusing the Roman Catholics of forcing protestant children to kiss crucifixes as a form of punishment. Another headline accused the minority Roman Catholic population of 19% of running the government.

It’s worth considering this context - when addressing the accusations of corruption made by KKK and the Conservatives towards the Liberals – that their sense of what was “corrupt” was based partly on their own values of religious and ethnic bigotry and prohibition of alcohol. Many were, in the words of the Mother Superior above, “fanatics.”

They thought Liberals were corrupt by association – that the Liberals dealt with people who were corrupt themselves, at least by the lights of the KKK, Conservatives and pro-Eugenics Progressives and CCFers-to-be. If you weren’t British, it made you illegitimate and “less than” in their eyes – and therefore, illegitimate voters and an illegitimate government. After all, the Liberals tolerated alcohol, Jews, allowed separate French Catholic schools and immigration, as well as Catholic immigrants from Poland and Ukraine.

Conservatives, Progressives and the KKK wanted British Protestantism to be the default, and they promised to curtail French education in Saskatchewan, and immigrants would be accused of taking people’s jobs.

John Diefenbaker was a Conservative candidate for MLA in Prince Albert in the 1929 election and was accused of being a member of the Klan. Diefenbaker refused to answer directly. However, his campaign made it clear where he stood:

“The day before the election, the Conservatives ran an ad in a Prince Albert newspaper, declaring “A vote for a Gardiner candidate will ensure a continuation of indiscriminate dumping of immigrants into Saskatchewan with resulting workless days and lower wages for you.”

Prohibition & The Law

Another “shared interest” leading to accusations of corruption was alcohol and prohibition. Because of the truly shocking levels of drinking that were happening before prohibition, the issue of prohibition created common ground with “progressives” including women’s rights advocates, the Ku Klux Klan, and many Protestant churches who were concerned about drunkenness, prostitution, pregnancy, disease and violence against women.

When it came to who was being blamed, there was an element of bigotry:

“The fight to keep Canada dry was related to the fight to keep Canada British since foreigners and Catholics were portrayed as the primary culprits of the liquor traffic. It was noted that Jews, such as the Bronfmans, were prominent bootleggers, and press reports of drunkenness, and the mayhem that went with it, regularly featured persons with foreign-sounding names. St. Peter’s Messenger, a Catholic newspaper, reported: “The leaders of the prohibition league are ... filled with a virulent hatred of the Roman Catholic church and all that belongs to it.”

Pitsula writes:

“Part of the Klan’s organizing techniques was to approach Protestant ministers and enlist their support, which many were happy to give since the Klan’s concerns about crime and vice mirrored their own…

William Calderwood identified twenty-six Protestant ministers in Saskatchewan who belonged to the Klan or who were directly involved in it. They included 13 United Church ministers, 4 Baptist, 4, Anglican, 3 presbyterian, 1 Lutheran and 1 Pentecostal. They were attracted to the Klan not only became it was anti-Catholic but because of its stand on moral reform … reverend W. Titley of Imperial, maintained that the Klan existed to defend Protestant rights and truths, and he urged “every true Protestant to support it.” Baptist Ministers T.J. Hind and William Surman, both active in the Klan, were elected, respectively president and secretary of the Baptist Convention in Saskatchewan. In 1930, three members of the Klan were appointed to the Social Services Committee of the Assiniboia Presbytery of the United Church.”

He continues:

“In the United States it is estimated that as many as 40,000 fundamentalist ministers joined the Klan… Many clergymen drawn to the Klan in Saskatchewan were frustrated by the Gardiner’ government’s failure to properly enforce the prohibition laws. This was a charge echoed by the Anderson Conservatives, which forged yet another link between moral crusaders and the anti-Liberal forces in the province.”

Here there may be some confusion, when it’s suggested that clergy were being driven to the Klan because the Gardiner government didn’t enforce prohibition. That is because prohibition had already ended in Saskatchewan five years earlier, in July 1924. Gardiner wasn’t even Premier at the time.

During that time, making and selling alcohol in Saskatchewan was legal. It was even legal to export that alcohol to the U.S. Harry Bronfman’s US customers were living under prohibition – not him. It could certainly be that people were scandalized by investigations into the Bronfman’s behaviour in trying to get around U.S. prohibition laws to sell their alcohol, but prohibition in Saskatchewan had been over for five years.

Pitsula also uses the passive description “drawn to the Klan” as if clergy were moths and the Klan were a light bulb. He is looking for acceptable, reasonable explanation that will help justify why protestant clergy would support the Klan.

The explanation for their joining was not based on reason and could not be justified by the facts – that they might be drawn to the Klan, not by high-minded reasons of morality, and concern, but for uglier reasons of hate and religious bigotry, which the Klan was exploiting.

Finally, there were accusations of patronage-type scandals. Of all the accusations of corruption, these were the most justified. The Liberals had been in power a long time, and one of the issues was patronage at the Weyburn Mental Hospital. The person in charge was a Liberal without health care experience, and there were tragic stories of patients not being properly cared for.

But the major issue of the election wasn’t health care, or corruption – it was the Conservatives, Progressives and KKK’s whipping up hatred against a Catholic minority, and the primes to take away their rights to teach their children in separate schools, at all. This is euphemized as a “schools question.”

Jimmy Gardiner Vs the Ku Klux Klan

James Gray names a chapter of his book The Roar of the 20s, “Jimmy Gardiner Vs the Ku Klux Klan” Gardiner was the Premier of Saskatchewan (and later became a member of parliament). His dislike of the Klan was not just political posturing. He came by it honestly. He ran a harsh anti-Klan campaign, in government as well as during the campaign. Some thought that he was going too hard on the KKK, and that it cost the party support.

Though Gardiner supported Catholics and immigration, he, personally was Presbyterian. He was one of the founders of the United Church of Canada. Though Gardiner was accused of being lax on liquor, he personally was a teetotaler.

“Gardiner was both a Liberal and a liberal, by the standards of the day. Born into a hardscrabble family in rural southwestern Ontario, the future premier worked his way up and across the country from farm hand to teacher’s college to an elected member of the Saskatchewan Legislative Assembly in 1912. 

His teaching experience at a series of rural schools in Saskatchewan brought him into close contact with immigrants — Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, English. His most formative experience was as principal of the school at Lemberg, just east of Regina near Qu’Appelle. The community in turn supported him by sending him to the legislature as their local MLA.”

Gardiner was also a pioneer of free health care in a province where Tommy Douglas gets all the credit. As premier of Saskatchewan in 1928, Gardiner championed the Saskatchewan Sanitoria and Hospitals Act, the first legislation to provide free hospitalization and treatment for victims of tuberculosis anywhere in North America. It was passed unanimously by the provincial legislature on January 1, 1929.

Gardiner was relentless in the pursuit of the Klan, but during the campaign, Pitsula reports that Coldwell was supposedly “far from convinced” at the involvement of the Conservatives and the Klan at the time.

It is hard to know whether Coldwell’s claim is sincere or “plausible deniability” for the sake of political reputation, but Pitsula might have been more skeptical, given Calderwell’s evidence of Progressive involvement with the KKK.

When the results were in, the Liberals won the most votes and the most seats, but not enough for a majority. The seat count was:

Liberals – 28

Conservative – 24

Independent – 6

Progressive – 6

Gardiner tried to run a minority government, his opponents voted against him, and he resigned his seat. The Regina paper called Gardiner a “usurper” – all for trying to form government with the most support!

The Conservatives took power instead, supported by the Progressives and independents, who all formed government together, with the Liberals in opposition. The condition of the Progressives supporting the Conservatives was that they call an inquiry into alleged Liberal patronage at the Weyburn Mental Hospital.

It’s worth saying, briefly that despite Weyburn being a “small town” the Weyburn Mental Hospital was not just the local hospital with a ward for mental patients. When it was built and opened in 1921, the Weyburn Mental Hospital was the single largest building ever built to date in the British Empire.

Not just the largest building in Saskatchewan, or Canada, or North America. The largest building in the British Empire.

“The Progressive Party, with which Coldwell was then allied, threw its support to the Conservatives, which along with that of the independents enabled Anderson to take over the government.

The price of Progressive support was a commitment by Anderson that a royal commission would be established to investigate the relationship of the civil servants with the Liberal Party machine. Anderson also gave his assurance that none of the government’s employees would be fired while the inquiry was proceeding. Coldwell was appointed chairman of the commission.”

To repeat: the price of Progressive support was for the Conservatives to call an inquiry into the Liberals, and M. J. Coldwell was appointed chairman.

Coldwell maintained he had seen no concrete proof of connections between Conservatives and the Klan until after the election. That is despite his having witnessed events like this:

“Coldwell himself recalled being introduced to [Dr. John H.] Hawkins at the Kitchener Hotel during the 1929 election campaign. He was leaving a radio studio in the hotel when [Conservative Leader J. T. M.] Anderson and Hawkins were coming in, and after the introduction they chatted about the campaign for a while. It was only later that Coldwell learned that Hawkins was the Imperial Wizard of the Klan.”

According to Pitsula, hard proof of Conservative - Klan collusion was only confirmed later, in the form of a membership list that came to light as a side-effect of Coldwell’s inquiry.

“Two employees were fired and the wife of one appealed to Coldwell to get her husband's job back. He had, she said, joined the Ku Klux Klan on instructions from the government to provide it with inside information. She gave Coldwell a complete membership list of the Regina organization.

“I was astounded at the number of highly placed Conservatives who were on that list,” Coldwell said, adding that he had destroyed the list when he left Regina for Ottawa twenty years later.”

Consider, for a moment, that in popular Canadian political mythology, that “progressives” who established the CCF and the NDP are supposed to be opposed to conservatives more than anyone.

You would think that such a list in the hands of a political opponent would be more than political dynamite – it would be a political volcanic eruption.

You would think that if Coldwell and the Progressives or the other parties he was aligned with opposed the KKK, or wanted to expose the Conservatives, they had an opportunity – maybe even an obligation – to make the names of members known. Coldwell would certainly have found out the people in all parties who were on that list – not just Conservative. He didn’t make it a campaign issue.  

In Martin Robin's Shades of Right: Nativist and Fascist Politics in Canada 1920-1940 he cites a truly chilling passage:

“Klan membership lists were filled with the names of Tory supporters, and their meetings attended and harangued by party activists. According to Dr Walter D. Cowan, the Klan treasurer, Regina Conservative elected for Long Lake to the House of Commons in the general election of 1930, and columnist for the Regina Standard, the Klan was 'the most complete political organization ever known' in the West. 'Every organizer in it is a Tory,' he wrote R.B. Bennett. 'It cost over a thousand dollars a week to pay them. I know it for I pay them. And I never pay a Grit. Smile when you hear anything about this organization and keep silent.”

Coldwell was put in charge of an investigation into corruption at the Weyburn Mental Hospital, which made national headlines - though Coldwell, as a sitting Alderman with political ambitions, may not have been the most impartial judge.

The local MLA for Weyburn, Robert Sterritt Leslie, was a Progressive. He was Minister of Knox Presbyterian Church in Weyburn and spent most of his time as MLA as Speaker of the House. He also publicly “expressed his hope that eugenic sterilization would soon be part of a solution to the problem of a constantly growing hospital population.”

Again, the rail and the KKK played a role – there had been an influx of Americans on the rail lines and the area around Weyburn had one of the strongest concentrations of KKK associations.

This was the political environment in Saskatchewan that a young Tommy Douglas found himself moving into in 1930 from Brandon, Manitoba. Douglas was moving to Weyburn.