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<title>Herbert Greenfield</title>
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<publisher>wikipedia.org</publisher>
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<publishedyear>2010</publishedyear>
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<section id="18000" fatherid="0" title="" lv="" priority="-1" level="1">
Herbert W. Greenfield (November 25, 1869 - August 23, 1949) was a Canadian politician who served as the fourth  Premier of Alberta from 1921 until 1925.  Born in Winchester, England, he emigrated to Canada in his late twenties, settling first in Ontario and then in Alberta, where he farmed.  He soon became involved in the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA), a farmers' lobby organization that was in the process of becoming a political party, eventually becoming the organization's vice president.  Though he did not run in the 1921 provincial election, the first in which the UFA fielded candidates, Greenfield was the party's eventual choice to serve as Premier when the UFA won a majority of the seats that year.
Like most of the UFA caucus, Greenfield had no experience in government and he struggled in the position.  He relied extensively on his Attorney General, John E. Brownlee, for counsel on policy and strategy.  He was unable to control his caucus, which did not generally believe in party discipline, and his government lost several votes in the legislature despite its nominal majority.  He was unable to effectively address the problems facing farmers (including drought and low grain prices), bitter labour disputes in the coal industry, or the pronounced divisions in public opinion that had sprung up around prohibition (which his government ended).  Despite this, his time as Premier saw the eventual elimination of the provincial deficit, substantial progress in negotiating the transfer of natural resource s from the federal government, and the creation of the Alberta Wheat Pool.  He also named Irene Parlby as the province's first female cabinet minister.
By 1924, many UFA Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) wanted to see Greenfield leave office, both because they were frustrated with his failings and because they thought it likely that a Greenfield-led government would be defeated in the next election.  Their first attempt to replace him failed when Brownlee, their intended replacement, refused to have anything to do with the plan, but a second attempt in 1925 was successful when Brownlee agreed to take office if Greenfield personally requested that he do so.  Greenfield had not wanted the job in the first place, and agreed to resign in Brownlee's favour.
After his retirement from politics, Greenfield represented Alberta in London, England for several years before returning to Canada to work in the oil and gas industry.  He died in 1949 at the age of 79.

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<section id="18001" fatherid="0" title="Early life" lv="" priority="-2" level="1">
Herbert W. Greenfield was born November 25, 1869, in Winchester, England.Jones 60  The son of John Greenfield and Mary Leake, he attended Wesleyan School in Dalston, but dropped out as a result of his father's bankruptcy.  He worked aboard a cattle boat in 1892 before emigrating to Canada in 1896.
In Canada, he worked in the oil fields near Sarnia, Ontario, and as a farmer in Weston.  He married Elizabeth Harris on February 28, 1900.  The couple had two sons, Franklin Harris Greenfield and Arnold Leake Greenfield.  In 1904, the family went west for economic reasons and homesteaded near Edmonton.  He found work in a lumber mill and later turned to farming.  During his first year in Alberta, a fire destroyed his home, and he and his wife spent the winter in an abandoned sod hut.  In 1906, they resettled to a large home four kilometers south of Westlock.
In 1922, while Greenfield was Premier, Elizabeth died suddenly as a result of routine surgery.Jones 71–72  He remarried in 1926, to Marjorie Greenwood Cormack who brought two children of her own into the marriage.

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<section id="18002" fatherid="0" title="Early political career" lv="" priority="-3" level="1">
Herbert Greenfield entered public life on a local level soon after moving to his new farm.  He was elected to the local school board, where he spent twelve years, including stints as chair, secretary, and treasurer.  He also served as Vice President of the Alberta Educational Association.  He served as President of the Westlock Agricultural Society and as co-founder and President of the Alberta Association of Municipal Districts.Rennie, Agrarian Democracy, 178  Greenfield also served as an officer of the province-wide Association of Local Improvement Districts, which advocated for reforms such as a change from a ten-hour to an eight-hour work-day, on the grounds that many Local Improvement Districts (LIDs) were having trouble competing with railways for labour.Rennie, Agrarian Democracy, 72  John E. Brownlee later said of Greenfield's involvement in the ALID that it was there "that he was first initiated into the discussion of public subjects, and it became the training ground for his subsequent success."Masson 43
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<section id="18003" fatherid="0" title="Premier" lv="" priority="4" level="1">
<section id="18004" fatherid="18003" title="" lv="" priority="-1" level="2">
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<section id="18005" fatherid="18003" title="Legislature and cabinet" lv="" priority="2" level="2">
Once in the legislature, however, Greenfield faltered in his leadership of his caucus.  The UFA MLAs came from a determinedly independent and non-partisan background and proved nearly impossible to whip.Jones 69    When Greenfield selected his cabinet and was about to announce it to his caucus for their vetting, he was interrupted by Lorne Proudfoot who asked whether, in addition to the rumoured inclusion of Labour members, the cabinet would include any of the fourteen Liberal MLAs.  Proudfoot argued that to exclude them would be to "start out much after the matter of the old parties".Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 59  Greenfield had not intended this, and suggested that no Liberals would likely be amenable to it.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 60  Irene Parlby, the caucus's only woman (who Greenfield would shortly name as Alberta's first female cabinet minister) agreed, and suggested that the UFA's ideal of securing representation for all economic groups in society did not apply to the Liberals, who were not an economic group and were not democratically organized in any event.  Proudfoot's proposal was defeated sixteen votes to fourteen.Byrne 4  Greenfield went on to name the seven member cabinet he had intended, including Labour MLA Alex Ross as Minister of Public Works, Parlby as Minister Without Portfolio, and Greenfield himself as Provincial Treasurer.Byrne 5
Once the legislature convened in 1922, the inexperience of the Premier and his caucus was further laid bare.  Greenfield, devastated by the sudden death of his wife, turned in a poor performance.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 74. "The impact of the loss seemed to carry on into the opening session of the Assembly where Greenfield's preoccupied manner and lucklustre performance were attributed to his continuing grief." Faced with an aggressive attack by new Liberal leader John R. Boyle, Greenfield relied heavily on Attorney General John Brownlee, who sat next to him in the legislature, to provide the defense.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 75  The session got off to an inauspicious start: Greenfield nominated the government's preferred candidate for speaker, Oran McPherson, only to have one of his backbenchers, Alex Moore, nominate Independent Conservative John Smith Stewart; Stewart spared the government embarrassment by declining the nomination.
Moore, along with fellow UFA backbencher John Russell Love, caused the government further trouble with a resolution aiming to limit the circumstances under which the government would have to resign.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 77  By convention of the Westminster system, a government was required to resign on the defeat of any piece of its legislation that was critical to its program.  Moore and Love objected to the manner in which this provision could be expected to pressure UFA MLAs to back government legislation that they might otherwise be inclined to oppose, and introduced a resolution in the legislature that called for a policy by which the government would resign only upon passage of an explicit motion of no confidence.  The resolution caught the attention of politicians across Canada, including future Prime Minister R. B. Bennett, who warned that it was unconstitutional.  Brownlee moved an amendment that reduced the resolution to a vague statement of principle, which passed and was not heard of again.
UFA members also objected to the concept of a caucus, in which MLAs from one party debate policy behind closed doors.  They believed that the role of an MLA was to represent the views of his or her constituents directly on the floor of the legislature.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 76  This belief too proved problematic to the government.  The Dairyman's Act had been adopted by the Liberal government to provide low-interest loans to dairy farmers.  It was unpopular among farmers, and Greenfield's government aimed to amend it.  Many UFA backbenchers, however, wanted to see it repealed all together, but because of their objection to caucus discussions Greenfield was not aware of this by the time his amendments came to the floor of the legislature.  They passed through the house with little debate, until just after third reading, when one of the backbenchers rose to ask if the time had come to speak against the bill.  Brownlee suggested that, in view of the legislators' inexperience with parliamentary procedure, the legislature consider the motion to adopt the bill on third reading as not yet having passed, that debate might ensue.  This suggestion adopted, several UFA members attacked the Act.  They were joined in this by the Liberals, despite the fact that it was a Liberal act that had been co-authored by Boyle.  In the end, the bill passed only by virtue of the support of the four Labour members.
More trouble with the legislature struck Greenfield in August 1922, during a special session called for the purpose of passing enabling legislation for a provincial wheat board.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 82  The session lasted only a week, and on August 31 the only item of business that remained was the members' pay for the session.  The government was proposing $100 per member, but some MLAs complained that this was insufficient in light of the long travel times between Edmonton and their constituencies.  Greenfield, lacking the counsel of the vacationing Brownlee and wanting to avoid trouble, proposed upping the amount to $200.  Independent MLA Robert Pearson proposed increasing it once again, to $250, to match what their counterparts in Saskatchewan had received.  This suggestion was carried.  While Greenfield had hardly been the driving force behind the increases, he had facilitated them and had been blind to the appearance of paying MLAs more for six afternoons of work than some farmers were able to earn in a year.  The grassroots of his own party condemned the move, all the more so when the wheat board that had been the purpose of the special session failed to come to fruition.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 82–83

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<section id="18006" fatherid="18003" title="Agriculture" lv="" priority="-3" level="2">
Greenfield became Premier at a time of agricultural depression, especially in the province's south.Jones 61  The region, which was responsible for approximately 75% of Alberta's wheat production, was in the midst of its fifth consecutive year of drought, and the farmers who had been responsible for putting the UFA into office were now demanding action.  Initially, the government offered direct financial assistance, with $5 million provided in seed and grain relief by the end of 1922.Jones 63  However, this effort was driving the province close to bankruptcy, and in 1923 Greenfield announced an end to the handouts (the bill authorizing the last of these was a source of chagrin for MLAs from all parties, both because it marked the end of direct assistance for farmers and because the last of the assistance was itself so expensive).  Farmers and political representatives from the affected areas criticized the government bitterly, referencing Greenfield's earlier pledge that "if the south country should fall, then we are prepared to fall with it".Jones 62
Another preoccupation of the UFA and the Greenfield government was the marketing of wheat.  From 1919 to 1920 there had been a federally established wheat pool to stabilize wheat prices.  When it was disbanded, wheat prices tumbled by two-thirds, prompting many farmers to call for its re-introduction.  At the call of the UFA and farmers' organizations in other provinces, the federal government (whose razor-thin majority in the House of Commons was often widened by the support of farmer-friendly Progressive members) created a new, mandatory agency, pending the appointment by the provincial governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan of a board of directors for the agency.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 96  This they proved unable to do.  Greenfield's government ultimately admitted defeat and gave up on re-establishing the pool, opting instead to guarantee loans to farmer-run cooperative pools.  With government assistance, the Alberta Wheat Pool came into existence in time for the 1923 harvest.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 90

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<section id="18007" fatherid="18003" title="Labour unrest" lv="" priority="4" level="2">
During Greenfield's premiership, Alberta's major non-agricultural industry was coal mining, and the industry was not prospering.  Production was more than 50% greater than demand, and fewer than half of the province's mines were profitable.  The industry as a whole was earning a profit of less than one cent per ton of coal.  While miners' wages had more than doubled (in nominal terms) between 1909 and 1920, in the 1920s mine owners began to roll them back.Jones 65–66  Besides wages, miners were unsatisfied with working conditions in an industry that saw more than 3,300 workplace accidents per year.  The results were labour militancy and violence.  A general strike in 1920 saw strikers assault strikebreakers, throw them off their bicycles, and launch rocks through the windows of buses.Jones 66  When police escorts were called in to aid the strikebreakers, they were sometimes attacked as well; one constable was partially paralyzed from the beating he received.  Provincial police commissioner W.C. Bryan was warned against inspecting one strike site in a note reading "You spoilt the strike, and if you go...you will be killed."Jones 67  He went anyway, and was greeted by an ambush in which three bullets were fired into his car, missing him.Jones 66–67
Greenfield was at a loss as to how to respond to this crisis, complaining that both employees and employers were the most difficult people in the province to deal with and that they showed "very little spirit of compromise".  He was not aided by his own Minister of Public Works, Labour MLA Alex Ross, who took the side of the miners and objected to the government's provision of police escorts for strikebreakers.  Though the problems originated before Greenfield took office, many Albertans felt that a stronger leader might have been more successful than Greenfield in appealing for peace.

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<section id="18008" fatherid="18003" title="Prohibition" lv="" priority="5" level="2">
Prohibition had been introduced in Alberta following a 1916 referendum, during which the UFA had advocated for the prohibitionist side.Jaques 49  The Liberal version of prohibition was weak, and Greenfield came into office intending to strengthen the legislation.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 64  By 1920, however, it was becoming apparent that the policy was not working (or, as the Medicine Hat News noted, "Prohibition is now working smoothly.  The only thing  is to stop the sale of liquor!").  Greenfield's own MLAs began to grumble about the policy-Archibald Matheson expressed in 1923 the view that "This government has acted as philosopher, guide, and God to the people long enough."Jones 68  Public opinion, too, began to shift against the policy, more rapidly after 1922 when three police officers were killed in the line of duty by bootleggers.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 85  The last and most dramatic of these was the murder of Steve Lawson in front of the barracks where he and his family lived, by Emil "Pic" Picariello and his daughter, Florence Lassandra.  Public opinion ran high both for and against the pair, and their 1923 hangings only served to unite both factions against prohibition.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 95
An autumn 1923 referendum saw Albertans vote decisively for the repeal of prohibition, despite the UFA's continuing support for the policy.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 100 In response, the government resolved to repeal the Prohibition Act and replaced it with government-controlled liquor sales.  Greenfield attempted to make the move more palatable to prohibitionists by proposing that liquor profits be shared with impoverished municipalities.  However, the scheme proved unworkable, and the re-legalization went ahead without any such profit-sharing.  In 1924, the government introduced legislation to replace prohibition with the regulation of liquor sales by the government, and subjected it to a free vote.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 107  While the legislation passed, the new measures were divisive, pitting community leaders who wanted their towns to remain "dry" against those who wanted to apply for liquor licenses, and different would-be saloon-keepers against one another in competing for the government-issued licenses.

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<section id="18009" fatherid="18003" title="Provincial finances" lv="" priority="6" level="2">
At the outset of his premiership, Herbert Greenfield served as Provincial Treasurer as well as Premier.  In both of these capacities, he was faced with a provincial deficit, which reached an accumulated total of $4 million between his taking office and the end of the 1922 fiscal year.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 92  One reason for this was the government's involvement in railways: it had found itself the owner of four uncompleted money-losing railway lines after the private syndicates set up to run them collapsed due to construction cost overruns.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 81  By 1922, the government had lost a total of $6.7 million on the endeavor, with an additional $5 million expected to follow that year-37% of the estimated 1922 provincial budget.  Greenfield wanted to sell the lines to the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), a course of action that was endorsed by Brownlee, but many farmers despised the CPR and most UFA MLAs preferred to keep the lines government-operated.Jones 69  Moreover, Greenfield's own Minister of Railways, Vernor Smith, was among this faction.  This problem plagued Greenfield for his entire term as Premier, and it was not until Brownlee succeeded him that a resolution came in the form of a $25 million sale to the major lines.
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<section id="18010" fatherid="18003" title="Natural resources" lv="" priority="7" level="2">
At the time that Alberta was made a province in 1905, the federal government retained control of its natural resources (though it provided financial compensation to the new provincial government for this), a fact that set it apart from the older provinces.Thomas 10  By 1925, negotiations to alter this state of affairs had been ongoing for more than a decade, and the two levels of government had an agreement in principle.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 114  Despite this, Alberta Liberal leader John R. Boyle sent a letter to his fellow Liberal, Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King, pleading with him to delay any agreement until after the expected 1925 election so that the UFA could not claim success.  Greenfield and Brownlee attended a series of meetings with federal representatives beginning May 19 in Ottawa; these continued until June 7, whereupon Brownlee returned home.  Greenfield offered to stay, but on June 11 King told him that the cabinet would need the summer to consider the question and that no agreement would be immediately forthcoming.  This decision did not help the Alberta Liberals, who went on to lose the next election soundly, and did not prevent the transfer of resource s, which took place in 1929,Foster, Alberta Premiers of the Twentieth Century, 90 but was enough to rob Greenfield of his glory; he  office the next year.
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<section id="18011" fatherid="18003" title="Provincial banking" lv="" priority="8" level="2">
It was the longstanding view of a segment of the UFA that the Alberta government should enter the banking business directly by obtaining a bank charter from the federal government (which has responsibility for banking under the Canadian constitution).  At the UFA convention in 1923, a leader of this group, George Bevington, made a passionate speech in favour of this idea, bringing most of the membership around to his side.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 90  The convention passed a resolution in favour of the idea (along with one calling on the provincial treasury to establish a loan department, an idea that came to fruition fifteen years later with the creation of Alberta Treasury Branches),Finkel 46 against the stiff opposition of Attorney-General Brownlee.  Brownlee's opposition stemmed in part from investigations that Greenfield's government had already undertaken into the subject: information was gathered from similar experiments in New Zealand and New South Wales, leading to the conclusion that, while there would be some benefit to a provincially owned bank, Alberta "had neither the economic nor constitutional base to consider such a scheme".Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 93  This conclusion was affirmed by University of Alberta professor D. A. MacGibbon in a government-commissioned study.
The issue would not go away so easily.  At the 1924 UFA convention, Bevington and his followers moved a resolution calling for immediate action on the previous year's banking resolution.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 105  Against them stood Greenfield's government, UFA president Henry Wise Wood (whom Bevington was challenging for re-election), and radical Labour Member of Parliament William Irvine.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 106  Thanks to Irvine's surprising intervention on the side of the conservatives, the resolution was soundly defeated.

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<section id="18012" fatherid="0" title="Departure from politics" lv="" priority="5" level="1">
Herbert Greenfield's political stock had fallen over the course of his time as Premier.  His arrival was heralded with great expectations of economic and political reform.  After the 1921 federal election, Progressive Party of Canada leader Thomas Crerar was contemplating a merger of his party with the Liberal Party of Canada and asked Greenfield to join him as Alberta's representative in the federal cabinet upon completion of this merger.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 70  This initially lofty stature was reduced by incident after incident: his reliance on Brownlee in the legislature and elsewhere, his failure to deliver on the promised economic relief, and his alienation of the radical wing of his own party.Jones 70  By 1924, many of Greenfield's own backbenchers had had enough and hatched a plan to force Greenfield's resignation and replace him with Brownlee, who was perceived as more likely to lead the UFA to victory in the impending election.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 110–111  This group-which included George Johnston, George MacLachlan, William Shields, Donald Cameron, Oran McPherson, and Austin Claypool-contacted Brownlee to alert him to their intentions and were taken aback when the Attorney-General told them that if Greenfield resigned, so would he.
The following year, the group approached Greenfield directly to ask for his resignation.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 116  He initially agreed, but then vacillated long enough for Brownlee to once again pledge his loyalty to the Premier.  This time, Henry Wise Wood intervened to ask Brownlee to reconsider, which he agreed to do only if Greenfield himself made the request.  The Premier immediately did so, saying that he had never wanted the job in the first place.  On November 23, Herbert Greenfield resigned as Premier of Alberta, tearfully telling the media that he was "through with politics".Jones 71
The media judged the rebellion harshly.  The Calgary Herald mocked the rebels as a "group of farmer politicians who have always claimed to be purer than those of other parties" and yet "threw their leader to the wolves in the hope that they may save their own skins".  It concluded: "Greenfield was not a good political captain, but he had a poor set of officers and a mutinous crew."

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<section id="18013" fatherid="0" title="Later life" lv="" priority="6" level="1">
In 1927, Greenfield was appointed Alberta's Agent General in London, England.  The appointment was controversial and was perceived as a patronage reward even by some UFA backbenchers.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 133  Liberals also accused the government of benefiting the Hudson's Bay Company, which owned the London office that the government leased, more than Alberta.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 147  Even so, Greenfield's performance in the position was well-regarded: his personality was better-suited for his duties there, which included the promotion of Alberta's burgeoning oil and gas industry,Jones 73 attracting English immigration to Alberta, and acting as a guide for Albertans visiting London.  It was in this last capacity that he welcomed Brownlee to London, where the two met together with British immigration and financial officials.Foster, John E. Brownlee: A Biography, 138
In 1931, the Agent General's office closed, and Greenfield returned to Alberta, settling in Calgary.  There he entered the oil and gas business, serving as a director (and later vice president) of Calmont Oils, president of the Oil and Gas Association, president of the Alberta Petroleum Association, and director of Home Oil.  He also served as managing director of the British Dominion Land Settlement Corporation and as president of the Calgary Board of Trade.  He spent the rest of his life in the city, maintaining an office in the General Trusts Building.
Herbert Greenfield died at 8:25 in the morning of August 23, 1949.  His funeral took place at Grace Presbyterian Church and he is buried in Union Cemetery, both of which are in Calgary.  In 1968, Greenfield School, an elementary school in Edmonton, was named in his honour.

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<section id="18014" fatherid="0" title="Notes" lv="" priority="-7" level="1">
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<section id="18015" fatherid="0" title="References" lv="" priority="-8" level="1">
Category:Premiers of Alberta
Category:People from Winchester
Category:English immigrants to Canada
Category:People from Westlock County, Alberta
Category:United Farmers of Alberta MLAs
Category:People from Calgary
Category:Canadian farmers
Category:Canadian businesspeople
Category:Alberta political party leaders
Category:1869 births
Category:1949 deaths

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