True Patriot: The Life of Brooke Claxton, 1898-1960

D.M.L. Farr is professor emeritus of history at Carleton University in
Ottawa and the co-author of Life and Letters of Sir Wilfrid Laurier.

Brooke Claxton was a late member of the formidable cabinet that
Mackenzie King assembled to carry Canada through World War II and into
peace time. He held two portfolios: National Health and Welfare, of
which he was the first minister (1944–46), and National Defence, in
which he served for eight tumultuous years (1946–54). But there was
more to Claxton’s career than ministerial appointments, as this
biography makes abundantly evident.

David Bercuson, in this first full-length study of Claxton, brings out
the added dimensions. In the first place, Claxton was an early activist
for a strong Canadian nationalism, knit together through a public
broadcasting system and enlightened through the serious discussion of
such major issues as cultural identity and social reform. As a Montreal
lawyer in the 1920s and 1930s, before he entered Parliament, Claxton
directed personal fervor and considerable organizing skills to such
causes as the establishment of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and
Canada’s support for the League of Nations. These and other purposes
sprang directly from his experience as a 20-year-old artillery sergeant
on the battlefields of France.

Secondly, Claxton was ahead of his time in seeing the value of the mass
media as a means of forming a national consensus on policy questions. He
also saw it as an aid to a governing party, applying his beliefs to the
successful electoral advertising carried out for the Liberal Party
toward the end of the war. Claxton is an outstanding example of an
“opinion leader” with a practical bent in politics.

Finally Bercuson shows us Claxton the social reformer, presiding over
the most extensive social-welfare program ever adopted in Canada: the
family allowance plan of 1944. Claxton had long been interested in
social reform and labor union rights, and he pushed for changes in these
fields as Prime Minister King’s parliamentary secretary and later in
the cabinet. J.W. Pickersgill, continually at King’s side during the
war, shared Claxton’s views and made sure they were placed before the
prime minister. It was a fruitful partnership, both for the Liberal
Party and for Canada.

This is a biography solidly researched from public and private sources.
It is well balanced, devoting about one-third of its length to
Claxton’s challenging years in the Department of National Defence. It
is especially helpful in locating Claxton in the context of his times.
The author wisely does not attempt to write “psychohistory” but
offers plausible explanations for the moods of black depression that
plagued Claxton throughout his life. All things considered, Claxton was
always more than a partisan politician. This biography sympathetically
yet critically commemorates his place in Canadian history.