"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." I have
forgotten whether it was Paul or Solomon who said that. But Sir Joseph
Flavelle, Bart., will be sure to remember. From the time he was big
enough to carry in wood for his devout Christian mother near
Peterborough, Ont., he was living out that text.
The Flavelle family afterwards moved to Lindsay, where the future
baronet went into business. Queer little town--to be the home of three
such men as Flavelle, Hughes, and Mackenzie.
A man who has had years of business intimacy with Sir Joseph said to me
once--under suggestion--"Yes, you never miss a word he says to you,
because he puts everything so clearly, and you admire the big things he
does, because he has such a genius for action after he thinks--but
somehow you are so exasperated when you leave him that you feel like
giving him a big swift kick."
Another man who was under him in an organizing position for years
during the war said: "Well, the higher critics can say all they like
against his methods and his personal peculiarities, but I tell you--I
like the old boy."
One of Britain's foremost financial experts in the war said to an
interviewer: "Ah, you know Flavelle? Clev-er man! Clev-er!" That was
nearly twenty years ago.
In 1918 Sir Joseph Flavelle had in his Munitions Office at Ottawa a
staff of 360 accounting clerks working upon thirteen ledgers, each
representing a separate department of the Board, which up till that
time had placed orders in this country for war material aggregating
$1,60,000,000 [Transcriber's note: $160,000,000? $1,600,000,000?] in
value.
At that time an editor wrote Sir Joseph asking for a statement of what
his Board had done. Within a few hours of receiving the letter Sir
Joseph forwarded an itemized statement a column long, of which one
paragraph read:
"Upwards of 56,000,000 shells have been produced; 60,000,000 copper
bands; 45,000,000 cartridge cases; 28,000,000 fuses; 70,000,000 lbs. of
powder; 50,000,000 lbs. of high explosives; 90 ships built, or under
construction aggregating 375,000 tons; 2,700 aeroplanes have been
produced."
He stated also that 900 manufacturers had taken contracts in all the
Provinces except Prince Edward Island. The great ex-Minister of
Munitions himself, reading that report, might have said: "Flavelle?
Yes--he is mighty clever." And Flavelle had been for one year then a
baronet. That also was clever; and just in time. The man who happened
to be in England when war was declared and sold war bacon in August,
1914, was not to be caught napping in 1917; neither after he had got
his title was he to be found slacking in his marvellous work in 1918.
Flavelle earned a title--even after he had taken it.
"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do!" Yea, verily. I have been fairly
well acquainted with Sir Joseph for a good many years. I do not know
him. Yet his altogether uncommon personality has almost frozen itself
into my memory. Whenever I see that thick-shouldered,
whitening-whiskered man of sixty-three hastening afoot up the street,
or driving his little runabout, or wiping his glasses every minute in
some office, or coming becaped and crush-hatted to a concert, I can
hear that high-keyed, slow voice, the calm dispassionate utterance with
never a syllable misplaced, and feel the energy of a nature that of all
men I ever met is the oddest compend of clear thinking, cool judgment,
strength of grip and juvenility of impulse.
The story of his struggle to affluence is not much different in basic
outlines from that of any average, self-made man; differing vastly in
the character of the man. A year after he was forced out of Lindsay by
boycott because of his Scott Act campaign, the freezing of a car of
potatoes on a Toronto siding almost wiped out his business. Frankly
and modestly, yet with a sort of fatalistic assurance, he discusses the
kind of man he thinks himself to have become since he lost those
potatoes. He denies that he has ever been interesting; rather
bewildered that at one time or another people have taken such a
peculiar interest in him. He talks of his early struggles, the economy
of bacon, and the bigotries of Old Testamentarians in the same concise
language set to the same unvaried monotony of voice. If you should
fail to follow him, he would almost chide you for not paying attention.
Nearly twenty years ago I met a preacher keenly interested in Flavelle.
He told me a story repeated to him in a sort of admiring deprecation
that very day by a Methodist preacher from Toronto who had a gift for
elevated gossip. This story was probably out of the Apocrypha, as it
concerned a very worldly episode in the joint experiences of Mr.
Flavelle and another Canadian financier on a visit to Chicago, when the
latter got a wire stating that a certain conditional donation of his to
a small church in Ontario had been unexpectedly covered by the
congregation with the stipulated equal amount, and that it was time to
send the money. It was said that he showed the wire to Flavelle; that
the two financiers took joint action on the Stock Exchange; and that
the money was wired immediately. The little details about the
transaction I omit, partly out of deference to the preacher who bandied
the yarn--wherever he got it. He probably only half believed it
himself. Even ministers will gossip.
Much has been said about Sir Joseph's religious affairs. He has had
many. He has been in publicity over a few, such as the controversy
between the late Dr. Carman, his old adversary, and Rev. George
Jackson, his then pastor, whom he defended. Flavelle has never
concealed his enthusiasm for the church. He has entertained many a
celebrated minister. He has been prominently identified with Missions,
with the Methodist Book Room--that sadly unecclesiastical
corporation--with debates in Conference on amusements and other things,
with Methodist education. In all these he has practised the text,
"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do." The church needed Flavelle's
organizing hand. He generously lent it. He could not do otherwise
without being untrue to his own prodigious and inherited passion for a
certain kind of organized religion.
The personal faith of a public man is no business for the critic,
except where that faith becomes public works. Sir Joseph has been
conspicuously aligned with the militant work of the Church. It has
been the belief of those who know him, casually or intimately, that his
philanthropic works were inspired by his faith. But many men have had
as much faith with less works, because of too much dissipating emotion.
Sir Joseph with all his juvenility of impulse had a way of hitching his
emotions up to a job. The church needed organization. Other
wealth-getting Methodists were prominent in pews, public donations and
conferences. Flavelle believed in the seven days' work. He had a
programme of action for the Sabbath. Church, social work, business,
were to him very much one thing; all in need of organization to get
results. He had no use for the idle church and less for what he called
"the dead hand"--referring to the influence of his old adversary, Dr.
Carman, who thought it presumption in a wealthy pork-packer to regard
himself as a critic of clerical authority.
It is tolerably certain that had Flavelle made less of a business of
religion, the public would have had less business condemning him on the
bacon inquiry evidence. Here was a man who all his life had been a
tremendous organizer of the church and a professor of a peculiarly
active faith, president of a company which in one year had made an
alleged profit of $5,000,000 on a capital investment of less than
$14,000,000. Bacon at that time--1917--cost the consumer 50 cents a
pound. The price was considered outrageous. Bacon afterwards went to
80 cents at a time when nobody blamed Sir Joseph; and when he had
disposed of his interest in bacon altogether. But the alleged
extortion of this powerful and baroneted Christian stuck in the public
mind. Bacon was the pioneer in exposed "profiteering." O'Connor's
report was made public at a time when it was yet the private property
of the Cabinet. There was politics here. And the Premier was away.
Other men afterwards made much more amazing profits that never were
mentioned in the press; men who never went to church; who had never in
public said such words as "let war profits go to the hell where they
belong."
It was not the actual profit, but the alleged hypocrisy of Flavelle
that roused the detestation of a large section of the public. And to
the end of his life this man will never erase from the minds of many
people the notion that he was of all profiteers the worst, because the
most hypocritical.
Then there was the baronetcy. For a man who had preached Christ so
much this seemed a thin business. A man's Christianity, if he works
hard at it, becomes advertised without posters. The world that
mistrusts the church on principle, that only waits the chance itself to
profiteer and to get social preferment, is quick to anathematize the
man who in a big way seems to corelate church, profits and society.
The public are no longer concerned, neither did they understand at the
time, whether the Davies Co. made 5.05 cents a pound on bacon or 5.05
minus overhead charges, 4.1. Here was the first "sinner" caught;
sentimentally lynch him. It made no difference then what had been the
man's serious work in philanthropic organization and in public service;
or that for war production he had offered the Wm. Davies plant to the
Government to operate at so much percentage to the company; or that
Flavelle himself had no connection with the management and at the time
concerned knew very little about it. The public appetite did not want
extenuating facts. It wanted a victim. Certain other interests,
curbed by Sir Joseph in the matter of prices for munition contracts,
wanted revenge. Under the old system of contracts these men had made a
fairly good start at plundering the nation in its extremity. Between
the long-suffering public, who thought they had a reason for hating
Flavelle, and the profiteers who really had such a reason, Sir Joseph
had an experience that would have tested any man's Christianity.
However, he made no protest; did not resign his post or leave the
country, but worked on. The time came when he could have said, "Et tu,
Brute!" to men who with no record for helping the church or organizing
to help humanity had profited far more prodigally than the Wm. Davies
Co. But he kept silence. He believed in his conscience that the
company buying hogs at competitive prices, and selling in a protected
market was ethically A1 at Lloyds. He still believes so. His
enthusiasm for the company has not waned. He admires it even to a
point of emotion. The company was not his, but he had made it. From
the day that William Davies drove to Flavelle's house in an old open
buggy and asked him to sell out his provision business to manage the
company, till the day it produced about 100 million pounds of bacon
alone, in a year, he had been its energizing head. The Wm. Davies Co.
was but the main thing from which he made his money. Its stock was not
sold on the markets. There was never any need of capital except what
came from the business conducted by Flavelle. There was no wit and
philosophy in "The Letters of a Pork Packer to His Son" that could have
instructed him in the shrewd business of making a great commercial
concern out of a little business. His success in Canada was relatively
equal to that of any Swift in Chicago. Multiply it by the ratio of
population and see. In one year during the war the Wm. Davies Co. had
a bacon output of forty million dollars.
But Flavelle never can be judged by bacon. He could have done as well
at railways or banking or law. He did even better at munitions when
there were no profits, not even a salary. He did as well at any other
form of public service. No man can justly judge him by commercial
success. He invested--himself--in everything to which he set his hand,
with the one exception of the now defunct _Toronto News_, which he left
to the management of other people. He invested the same self capital
in the commercial concern and in public service.
Any patient who has been in the Toronto General Hospital will tell you
what a wonderful institution it is. He may not know who made it
possible, or whose genius for order and perfection of mechanism it
expresses. Without Flavelle, Toronto, instead of one of the greatest
hospitals in the world, would have had just a good hospital. Almost a
village was pulled down to make room for it, on a site that would suit
the medical needs of the University. It needed a strong will to put it
there, against the opinions of other people; a great hospital on the
end of a slum! The same will put the great "Methodist Book Room" where
it is--against the wish of a majority.
Flavelle was Chairman of the Commission that reorganized the University
of Toronto. He had no desire for the work. The late Goldwin Smith was
already chairman, much disliking Flavelle for some editorial about him
in the _Toronto News_. The old professor was feeble. The Commission
asked Flavelle to replace him. He consented. If they thought he was
the man, he was willing to do the work. And it was thoroughly done, so
far as a business brain could direct the reconstruction of a concern in
which business system is the anatomy, not the life.
No man could sit at a conference with Flavelle and not think hard; or
accept a duty from his committee and not discharge it. He demanded on
behalf of the public--service. No man ever sat on a committee with him
who had time for badinage. That man with the slow, high voice and the
steady look was judging other men by results. Men came to believe that
when there was a public task to perform, Flavelle was the man to take
it. He was almost forced into service, often by the public indolence
of other men. Canada has always played the professional grandstand
method of getting things done for the public. Before the advent of
Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs our two chief cities systematically advised
the humble philanthropist without pull to go to such men as Flavelle,
Edmund Walker, one of the Masseys, E. R. Wood, J. C. Eaton, Thomas
Shaughnessy, Herbert Ames and P. S. Meighen--because these men were in
the habit of doing or giving or organizing for the public interest,
which is supposed to be a game for experts, not amateurs.
Flavelle's investment in things that made him no money was one of great
ability, hard work and conscience. His returns on such capital were in
the efficiency and usefulness of things which he had helped to create;
the need for which he had observed as clearly and calmly as ever he had
foreseen the scope of a great business.
Yet for much of his life he has been a creature of impulse, powerfully
attracted by things not in business. He left his seat once in a great
Buffalo hall to stand at the door that he might judge the effect of a
certain decrescendo from a choir. To a group of musical enthusiasts in
Chicago he suddenly suggested a trip to the Cincinnati May Festival.
Speaking to the boys of Upper Canada College, he drew from his pocket a
piece of putty to illustrate the plasticity of character. Standing
amid heaps of luggage at the docks in St. John, he looked at the
immigrant sheds and said, "What a very human picture!" Pocketing the
proof of an hospital article, which as proprietor of the _Toronto News_
and Chairman of the Hospital Board he had withdrawn from publication,
he said to the reporter, "Old man, a place of suffering should not be
described in the language of the racetrack." When Pastor Wagner,
author of "The Simple Life", was in Toronto, he was the guest of Mr.
Flavelle, who for a time was as much absorbed in the peasant
philosopher as he often was in the "Meditations" of Thomas à Kempis.
Considering these impulses to express himself, it is not hard to
understand how Sir Joseph came to say to the Toronto Board of Trade
that war profits should go to the hell to which they belonged. He was
speaking under a sense of emotion. All through his enormously
successful career he had been energized by a sudden enthusiasm to take
hold of something, and afterwards to make it go. "Whatsoever thy hand
findeth."
Flavelle's hand found many things. Among them was the _Toronto News_,
his one recorded failure. This also was an impulse; precisely the same
as had led him years before to subscribe $5,000 to a fund for the
better education of the Tory party. The _News_ cost him one hundred
times as much, for much the same reason on a larger scale; and he lost
it. But he has never regretted the loss, because he gained the
experience. The _News_ did a valuable work. But its rather Utopian
resurrection had a sad sequel in Toryism such as Flavelle never could
have endorsed, and its ultimate extinction seemed to prove that
newspapers cannot be operated by ideals.
Again, reconstructing enthusiasm followed him to Ottawa. He went there
at the instigation of the Imperial Government. Whether he himself made
the original suggestion of the need, I do not know. But he obeyed the
need when he saw it. Impulse drove him to meet it in the greatest work
of public organization ever done in so short a time in this country,
except the sending of the First Contingent.
Flavelle had never liked Ottawa. Ordinarily he had a sort of contempt
for its waste of time and its dissipation of morality. It is not
conceivable that he would have taken Munitions under any Canadian
department. Nor was it necessary. Canada was to produce munitions for
much more than the Canadian Army.
The work was vast and varied; the man at the head of it capable,
exacting and impartial. His sole aim was to produce and to export
munitions at a price high enough to attract industry and low enough to
prevent profiteering. For three years he was the superman of Canada's
industrial fabric. The C.M.A. and the Department of Trade became mere
annexes to munitions, at a time when Davies' bacon clamoured for
ship-room needed by Flavelle munitions.
Official Ottawa had never known a man like this. He was not popular.
The Government had no control of him. Ottawa had never cared for
super-men. Flavelle was there without politics. He had a department
greater than any in the Administration. He was never responsible to
Parliament. Ministers to him were not necessary. He had no favours to
ask of members. He never even looked in at the Commons which he would
like to have reformed. People sometimes ask why such a man does not go
into Parliament. Impossible. He regards government as sheer business,
when it is often a passing show. Foster's Business Conference that
never met would have caused him to discharge the department for
incompetency. Sir Thomas White had no desire to lift his eyes unto the
hill Flavelle, the super-Minister who for years had been a critic of
his own party, and now believed it more inept than ever in spite of the
great work of the Finance Minister. Sir Sam Hughes had never wanted
Flavelle. There was a good reason. Sir Sam had started the munition
industry in Canada as a branch of war, not as a department of mere
business. Flavelle was all business. War was business. There was the
rub. The nearer the war came to a climax, the more men like Flavelle
at home became part of the machinery. Foster never could have salaamed
to this super-man of trade and commerce. Did even Sir Robert Borden
ever feel comfortable with him? Back from Europe in a fit of impulse
more powerful than he had ever known, impressed by the success of
Coalition in England, Sir Joseph wanted to see it established in
Canada. The nation was united for munitions; why not for national
business? The Premier was away in the West. Sir Joseph wired him
asking permission to urge coalition at a certain public dinner. There
was no response. Evidently the Government wanted no advice from a man
who had nothing whatever to do with it and represented merely big
business.
Something must have caused the Premier to treat Sir Joseph coolly.
Afterwards at the bacon investigation there was cause for a change in
temperature. The Premier had been negligent about some documentary
evidence extenuating to the Flavelle presentation of the case. The two
had warm words. Sir Joseph told the Premier one thing which, as it was
repeated to me without reference to use in publication, had better be
omitted here. But it was scathing. Sir Joseph is no mean master of
the kind of language that hurts. But he has the Christian
spirit--which in this case he laid aside. I should like to know what
the Premier said to Sir Joseph; and precisely what were the Premier's
opinions, before and after, concerning the baronetcy.
In his quiet moments Sir Joseph does not rebuke himself more than he
regrets the moral myopia of other people. I think he is somewhat
disillusioned as to what it is worth to gain a good deal of the world
at the risk of a lot of people thinking he has lost his soul. He does
not believe that his soul was ever in danger of being lost. Often he
goes to rugby games. In this he sees again the virtue of struggle,
probably wishing he himself had played rugby in youth.
"When a man gets old," he said lately, "he loves to sit at home."
But Sir Joseph, for all his whitening whiskers and his impatience with
the shortcomings and animosities of the world, is not yet old. He has
the strength of two men, and a power of administration possessed by few
men in public office in any country. He has lost some of his bubbling
enthusiasm for the humanities. The last thing he will lose must be his
faith in himself: and that is very far off.
"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do . . . ."
Sir Joseph Flavelle has yet a strong hand. What remains that he will
do with all his might? If he so desires, more of service on behalf of
the public good in the ten years he has left than many men accomplish
in a strenuous lifetime.
It is time we learned the difference between a public pirate and an
organizing servant of the public. Take away from this man his public
church business, his power to make money, his human vanity over an
hereditary title, and we still have left the story of a big life, much
of it spent in doing good for the sake of other people. You cannot
efface that strange personality; that desire after all the admiration
of his wonderful ability to administer him mentally "one good swift
kick." But you will never mentally kick a man of such powerful good to
his country.