E.C. Drury: Agrarian Idealist

Ron Goldsmith is a professor of Geography at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute.

This biography of one of Ontario’s least celebrated premiers represents the eleventh volume in the Ontario Historical Studies series, whose ambitious task is “to describe and analyze the historical development of Ontario as a distinct region within Canada.” The series will ultimately entail about 30 volumes including biographies of several premiers and treatises on a wide range of political, social, and economic themes. The author of this particular study is Charles Johnston, professor of history at McMaster University and well-known commentator on Ontario history. His selection as author illustrates the commitment of the series’ board of trustees to sound scholarship as well as popularization.

E.C. Drury: Agrarian Idealist, is organized largely in traditional chronological style. Six chapters describe Drury’s family and personal background and the emergence of the United Farmers of Ontario as a political force. Seven further chapters deal with the years in government, 1919-23, devoting separate attention to each of the major focal points of legislative action during the four-year period. The final four chapters follow Drury through his rather mixed and turbulent life after Queen’s Park.

Ernest C. Drury offers a complex challenge to the biographer. On one hand, his position in the province’s political history is altogether unique in that his government, based on the “farmers’ movement” of the early part of this century, represents a rare deviation from the more traditional party system of government in Canada. On the other hand, despite the overtones of radicalism and class consciousness inherent in the farmers’ movement, Drury’s tenure in office left little in the way of lasting legislative or social reform and generally failed to earn the principal actors of the time prominent places in the political mythology of the province.

Johnston’s biography is successful in two important ways: first, it is highly readable without sacrificing content for the sake of style. Secondly, it gives us an intriguing glimpse into the unparalleled political foment culminating in the formation of a government by the “Farmer MLAs,” an occurrence too little emphasized in the annals of Ontario history. At the same time, however, Johnston has given us a more laudable biography of the political environment of that time than of Drury himself. As an individual, the premier remains relatively obscure in terms of his motivations, personal qualities, and ambitions. Perhaps Johnston’s tangential reference to Drury as “a political leader whose career was reduced to the inconsequential by victorious foes and hostile newspapers” explains the author’s inability to breath life consistently into the central subject of the biography.