The ‘Dollar-A-Year Men” and Canada during the Second World War

Opinion

A few months ago, when King Charles III became the first reigning British monarch to deliver the Throne Speech in Canadian Parliament, an Ipsos poll conducted at the time indicated that 66 per cent of Canadians believed that Canada’s historic connection to Britain was “useful.”

That was high number, given that in the past few decades, most Canadians attitude toward Britian has been indifferent, other than, perhaps, paying passing attention to the various antics of the Royal Family. Canada’s current antagonistic relationship with the U.S. likely accounted for the sudden enthusiasm for the old mother country.

If today, Britain was under attack by a dangerous enemy, how many of these same Canadians would support deploying Canadian soldiers to defend it?

What about ramping up the Canadian economy to a wartime mode in which factories and plants are taken over the federal government to produce needed munitions and supplies?

Or, would today’s CEOs, managers and corporate lawyers leave their jobs and families for possibly three or four years and offer their services to bolster Canada’s wartime economy?

These are hard questions to answer. Yet, given the fast-paced self-centered world we live in today, there might be a lot of resistance.

Canadian attitudes were far different 86 years ago. In September 1939, Canada was not immediately threatened by Nazi Germany. But Britian was, and at the time there was no more honourable way of demonstrating patriotism to Canada than defending the British homeland.

“So far as the Canadian people are concerned, there will … be unity of purpose in spite of the few preliminary murmurs against our participation,” a Maclean’s magazine editorial put it a few weeks after Canada’s official declaration of war on Germany on Sept. 10, 1939. “The history of the past few years is clear enough indication as to what would happen to the racial, language and religious rights enjoyed under the British flag were Hitlerism to triumph.”

This was a powerful sentiment shared by Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, federal and provincial politicians, as well as businessmen and professionals throughout the country — and it was a sense of duty that propelled these executives to volunteer their service.

From September 1939 to December 1941, when the U.S. entered the war following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Canada’s genuine loyalty and resolve were paramount in sustaining Britain with men, arms, and supplies, especially after Germany had occupied much of Western Europe by the summer of 1940.

Duty and loyalty to Canada and Britain certainly defined the “dollar-a-year” men, about 800 lawyers, business executives, accountants, financiers, administrators, and professionals from every sector of the corporate community; men, who from 1939 to 1945, put their professional and personal lives on hold to contribute to the war effort. Many worked for the Department of Munitions and Supply under the leadership of the indomitable C.D. Howe, the department’s all-powerful minister.

The name for the men was American in origin. During the First World War, a small group of American businessmen, called dollar-a-year men, had assisted the U.S. government with its war production.

Two decades later, in Canada, a tiny number actually were paid a dollar a year. The term, however, came to symbolize their service. In truth, the federal government covered their living expenses and most continued to be paid by their companies and firms — another patriotic act that would likely not be emulated today.

Among the notable dollar-a-year men were: Toronto corporate lawyer Henry Borden, the nephew of former prime minister Sir Robert Borden; General Motors of Canada executive Harry Carmichael, who, starting in 1941, was in charge of wartime production; Montreal accountant Gordon Scott, who tragically died in December 1940 after the ship he had been traveling to Liverpool was torpedoed by a German U-boat; the mercurial Halifax businessman Ralph Bell, who became director general of aircraft production; B.C. lumber baron, H.R. MacMillan, who was appointed timber controller and got into a bit of a power struggle with Howe that he not surprisingly lost; and Edward (“Eddie”) P. Taylor of Toronto, in 1940, the 39-year-old president of Canadian Brewers Limited, who would go on to become a prominent tycoon and one of the wealthiest people in Canada as head of Argus Corporation.

Like a “snow plow” parent, who removes all obstacles facing their children, Howe tried to clear a path for his dollar-a-year men, most of who were not used to operating under the rigorous bureaucratic rules of government. There were complaints from Opposition politicians and even from Howe’s cabinet colleagues about the power the men wielded, and the fact that some of their businesses were given huge war contracts — though there was nothing corrupt about it.

Despite this criticism, you could not argue with the results of this unique business-government collaboration. Led by Howe, the dollar-a-year men were essential in transforming Canada into the fourth-largest industrial power in the world. “When you consider that pre-war Canadian industry had never made a tank, a combat airplane or a modern, high calibre, rapid-fire gun,” a 1945 Fortune magazine article pointed out, “the speed with which industry was organized and production started ranks as an industrial miracle.”

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context. His next book, The Dollar-A-Year Men: How the Best Business Brains in Canada Helped to Win the Second World War, will be published this month.