How the ‘Dollar-A-Year Men’ transformed Canada

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Allan Levine is a historian and the author of The Dollar-A-Year Men: How the Best Business Brains in Canada Helped to Win the Second World War from which this essay has been adapted.

In the fall of 1940, American-born freelance magazine journalist Corolyn Cox, who had travelled the world with her husband, Canadian explorer John Raffles Cox, teamed up with celebrated Ottawa photographer Yousuf Karsh to profile 44 “dollar-a-year” men.

During the First World War, a small contingent of American businessmen had assisted the U.S. government with a myriad of tasks. They were known as “dollar-a-year” men because, in theory, the government paid them a dollar a year for the expertise they offered. In mid-1940, the administration of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, preparing for the possibility of America’s involvement in the Second World War, once again put out a call to select members of the managers and heads of research divisions who voluntarily left their companies to take charge of U.S. war production.

Similarly, in Canada, about 800 lawyers, business executives, accountants, financiers, administrators and professionals from every sector of the corporate community – men who put their professional and personal lives on hold to contribute to the war effort – were also known as “dollar-a-year men.” While some were assigned to departments such as National Defence, National Defence for Air, Fisheries, and Labour, the Auditor-General’s office, and the Foreign Exchange Control Board, the majority served the Wartime Prices and Trade Board and the Department of Munitions and Supply. An official federal government report in January, 1949, showed that among the 260 employed by Munitions and Supply only one person actually received a symbolic dollar. Nearly all of the dollar-a-year men continued to be paid by their companies and firms, with the federal government covering their expenses or paying them a modest per diem. A small number of men took no money at all from the government.

Ms. Cox wrote brief laudatory biographies of many of the dollar-a-year men, and Mr. Karsh took (almost all of) their pictures. The Cox and Karsh series appeared weekly as Man-of-the-Week on the editorial page of the Montreal Standard. Later, the articles and photos were published in Saturday Night magazine as Name-in-the News. In late 1946, Ms. Cox compiled some of the sketches into the book Canadian Strength: Biographical Sketches, published by Ryerson Press.

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C.D. Howe, the all-powerful minister of Munitions and Supply in the Liberal government of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, contributed a short foreword in which he extolled the “able men” and “great Canadians … who abandoned their own affairs to serve their country in time of war.” That these men “were willing to abandon their private interests and sacrifice personal gain to serve their country in a period when the future of this country was threatened as never before, indicates one of the sources of the inherent strength of Canada as a nation.”

King received the book from his cabinet on May 1, 1947. He appreciated the contributions of the dollar-a-year men to the Canadian war effort – but only to a point. Howe’s foreword deeply troubled him.

“It is rather surprising,” King wrote in his diary that day, “that any colleague should indicate that from his point of view Canadian strength was composed primarily of the heads of large corporations who … continued to draw their large salaries from corporations. Large salaries which they were accustomed to receiving. Had the book been made a record of the men in the Munitions and Supply Dept., that would have been all right, but to give to this group a monopoly symbolizing Canadian strength to the exclusion of what has been done in all other departments of government … shows a curious lack of proportion.”

Ever the politician and intellectual, King had concerns about a book effusively praising individuals who he somewhat disdainfully regarded as rich businessmen. He was suspicious of their Tory loyalties and, unlike Howe and others, did not appreciate the sacrifices they had made in service to Canada and the war effort. “King saw large salaries,” historian Robert Bothwell notes, “and the dollar-a-year men saw large productions; King fantasized about undue rewards, and they remembered full employment, overflowing order books and a quantum leap in industrial activity.”

Whether King wanted to admit it or not, Howe and his small army of dollar-a-year men had played a key role 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.”

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Howe’s only goal was to ensure that Canada’s economy was performing smoothly and efficiently. That did not always happen. Mistakes and poor decisions were made, and money was not always spent wisely. It is likely true that “much of the Howe mystique was mythical,” as historian Michael Bliss had argued. At the same time, even if propaganda and an authoritarian bent, together with the Allied victory in the war, obscured some of Howe’s missteps and faults, he truly did transform the country’s economic life. In the story of Canada’s war effort and metamorphosis from an agricultural to an industrial economy, the dollar-a-year men played a pivotal role during and after the conflict had ended.

Howe and the businessmen who served him persuaded factory owners and manufacturers that they had a responsibility to the nation to do their part. And if they did not do so, Howe reminded them of their civic duty, as only he could. Without question, he was the only minister in King’s cabinet with the experience and influence to convince and cajole the leading members of Canada’s business community to disrupt their lives and make the country’s war requirements their chief purpose.

Could the federal bureaucracy have accomplished what the dollar-a-year men did, overseeing and managing the country’s war effort to the same degree? Perhaps, yet Howe did not think so. Given the dire circumstances, there is no disputing the positive results the dollar-a-year men achieved, even if their top-down approach caused grumbling and an occasional backlash among government officials and Howe’s cabinet colleagues. The dollar-a-year men acted as significant intermediaries between the Department of Munitions and Supply and private business, calming fears about the government’s takeover of the country’s economic life and ensuring that wartime production was more or less successful.

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; the mercurial Halifax businessman Ralph Bell, who became director general of aircraft production; B.C. lumber baron, Harvey R. MacMillan, who was appointed timber controller and got into a bit of a power struggle with Howe that he not surprisingly lost; 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; and Montreal accountant Gordon Scott, who tragically died in December, 1940, after the ship he had been travelling on to Liverpool was torpedoed by a German U-boat.

When news of Scott’s death was reported, a Globe and Mail editorial declared that Scott “was a casualty of the war and gave his life in the service of the Empire as truly as if he had been slain on the field of battle” – a comment that underlines the contemporary opinion about the significance of the dollar-a-year men to the war effort.

These and the other men grew up in an era when Canadians, according to Wartime Canada, “believed that doing or giving something without being coerced spoke volumes about a person’s character: it demonstrated a strong sense of duty, patriotism, civic-mindedness, and charity.” Given the widespread mistrust of government today and the self-centred world we live in, it is difficult to imagine a similar collective response if Canada were to face the same kind of danger.

At one time there was no more honourable way of demonstrating patriotism to Canada than defending the British homeland – its people and ancient culture. “We are the trustees for the British race,” shipping magnate Frederick Barlow Cumberland stated in a 1904 speech before Toronto’s Empire Club. “We hold this land in allegiance.” More than three decades later those sentiments were still strong: To be a Canadian in English Canada meant demonstrating unquestioning loyalty to the British Empire.

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Today, it would be akin to the scions of some of Canada’s wealthiest families – Thomson, Irving, McCain, Rogers, Desmarais, Richardson, and Sobey or CEOs such as Galen Weston Jr. of George Weston Limited, Neil Rossy of Dollarama, Mike Greenley of MDA Space, Laura Dottori-Attanasio of Element Fleet Management, and Charles Brindamour of Intact Financial – stepping away from their corporate empires, entrusting operations to subordinates, and relocating to Ottawa to run wartime industries. It is difficult to imagine such a scenario unfolding today as it did more than eight decades ago, or the federal government, in today’s much more complex world successfully recruiting these men and women (a notable difference from the male-dominated 1940s) to take on such an onerous public responsibility.

Most of the dollar-a-year men were privileged, well-educated and accomplished individuals who had worked their way up the corporate ladder. They were a “who’s who” of Canadian industry, members of the country’s business elite, and heads of diverse companies who propelled the country’s economy forward. They were men who ranged in age from 30 to over 50. Many of them had served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the Great War and remembered all too well the bloodshed and horror of their experiences in the trenches. For these veterans, their sense of urgency and patriotism was more acute than that of the younger members of the group.

They hailed from cities and towns in British Columbia to Nova Scotia. Once in Ottawa or other locales, the men managed the wartime economy as advisers, troubleshooters, controllers, purchasers and chairs of new Crown corporations, which produced the required weapons, aircraft, and other goods needed by Canada and the Allies. Howe constantly praised their contributions: “Never in history has the Dominion had better business leadership than today,” he declared in early June, 1940. “The best business brains in the country are doing the country’s business and in every sphere of the work of [the Munitions and Supply] department we have those who are trusted by both business and by the public.”

Some of the dollar-a-year men stayed in Ottawa for only a few months, while others remained until the conflict ended. “For many of the dollar-a-year men,” Peter C. Newman wrote in his first volume of The Canadian Establishment, “World War II was to be the most creative season of their professional lives. Their innovative talents flourished as they learned to extend the boundaries of their self-reliance to manage the world at large without having to copy or feel inferior to the British or American.”

Despite their personal flaws and biases, 80 years later the significant contributions of the dollar-a-year men to the Canadian and Allied victory in the Second World War remain largely forgotten. These men were a part of what the American broadcaster and journalist Tom Brokaw referred to as “the greatest generation” – men who made sacrifices to save Canada and Britain from the evils of Nazism and fascism. Their unique and captivating story is a powerful reminder of what service to one’s country truly means.