September 16, 1935-Our Reporter Hunts, and Fails to Find the Canadian Hoover
The Washington Daily News — Monday, September 16, 1935
Our Reporter Hunts, and Fails to Find the Canadian Hoover
By ERNIE PYLE
OTTAWA — We were sitting in the press room of Canada’s beautiful Parliament building in Ottawa. There was a fireplace in front of us, and deep chairs all around, and moose heads on the walls, and bottles on the tables, and half a dozen Canadian and British newspapermen sitting around.
“They tell me Premier Bennett is the Canadian Hoover in personality,” I said.
Two of them turned white. Two others jumped up and grabbed me by the arm. “In Heaven’s name who told you that? Come on. The only way to settle that is for you to see Bennett.”
So out we went, and saw the Premier of Canada. Just like that. We went out of the building, over to what they call the East Block, which you would swear was a cathedral but which really contains the offices of the Premier and several government departments.
We got there just as Premier Bennett was leaving for lunch. He stopped in the corridor and chatted awhile, then we walked on together.
The Canadian Hoover? Who in Heaven’s name did tell me that? As far as I could learn, there really is no Canadian Hoover.
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Premier Bennett has Roosevelt’s charm. He doesn’t have one of those “one of the boys” personalities. You never could walk up and slap him on the back and say, “How’s tricks today, R. B.?” But I guess you couldn’t do that with Roosevelt either.
His first words to me were, with a smile: “You haven’t got a new wheat treaty in your pocket, have you?”
It was our tariff rise of 1930 that stopped the flow of Canadian products into the U.S., and helped give the knockout punch to Canada. Any Premier who can get the U.S. to lower that tariff will have a bright feather in his hat.
I told the Premier I didn’t have, but (since he was smiling) that if he would wait, I’d run back to Washington and get one. He said he couldn’t wait.
When he shook hands with me, he didn’t let go. We kept walking down the corridor, talking, and he kept holding on, and it finally struck me as being awfully funny that I should be walking along all this way holding hands with the Prime Minister of Canada and he wouldn’t let go. At first it was funny, and then I got stage fright. I thought if anybody saw us they would laugh. I guess it must have been three-quarters of a minute before he relaxed his grip.
We walked down the stairs together to his waiting car, and we stopped again there on the sidewalk, in the warming sun, and chatted for 10 or 15 minutes.
The Premier noticed my shoes — a pair of tan moccasins that hadn’t been shined for a month. “Scotch moccasins,” he said. “I haven’t seen those for a long time. They’re fine shoes. And ah, that reminds me that I seem to detect the faint but to some people delightful odor of something else Scotch — good Scotch whisky.”
The Canadian newspapermen grinned, and a couple hung their heads in mock shame. Premier Bennett is a churchman, he has never taken a drink or smoked, but he doesn’t mind others doing it.
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The Premier told me little anecdotes about each of the four or five newspapermen with us. And some of them were pretty barbed. He said one of the boys present — and he pointed to him, a reporter for an enemy paper — would write anything his editor told him to. He was smiling, but he meant it. The reporter smiled too. And the next instant the Premier was questioning him about an infected eye, and insisting that he go to the hospital. From the stories I have heard about Bennett, he would probably have the reporter in the hospital by night, and be paying the bills out of his own pocket.
I would not attempt to quote further from Premier Bennett’s conversation. Any quotation not taken literally from shorthand notes would misrepresent him completely. His choice and flow of words, even in ordinary conversation, were those of an orator, without seeming in the least bit “speech making.” His mind in repose is fanciful, there is nothing unusual about it. He does not say the ordinary thing. He leaves such a commonplace conversationalist as myself befuddled and groping for a reply in kind.
No, Bennett is not the Canadian Hoover. His photographs picture him too much as the same type of man, but when you see him you see how the camera can so innocently lie.
They say Bennett is colorless as a politician. But even his enemies say that is because simply he can’t force himself to go in for “baloney” postures. He certainly has intellectual color, if he wants to display it.
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