Tommy Douglas - From Pulpit To Politics

From Pulpit To Politics

Two months after Douglas graduated from Brandon College, he married Irma Dempsey and the two moved to the small town of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, where he became an ordained minister at the Calvary Baptist Church. Irma was 19, while Douglas was 25. With the onset of the Depression, Douglas became a social activist in Weyburn, and joined the new Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) political party. He was elected to the Canadian House of Commons in the 1935 federal election.

During the September 1939 special House of Commons debate on entering the war, Douglas, who had visited Nazi Germany in 1936 and was disgusted by what he saw, supported going to war against Hitler. He was not a pacifist and stated his reasons:

If you accept the completely absolutist position of the pacifist, then you are saying that you are prepared to allow someone else who has no such scruples to destroy all the values you've built up. This is what I used to argue with Mr. Woodworth . . . if you came to a choice between losing freedom of speech, religion, association, thought, and all the things that make life worth living, and resorting to force, you'd used force. What you have internationally is what you have within a nation. You must have law and order, and you must have the necessary military means to enforce that law and order.

Douglas and Coldwell's position was eventually adopted by the CCF National Council, but they also did not admonish Woodworth's pacifist stand, and allowed him to put it forward in the House. Douglas assisted Woodsworth, during his leader's speech, by holding up the pages and turning them for him, even though he disagreed with him. Woodsworth had suffered a stroke earlier in the year and he needed someone to hold his notes, and Douglas still held him in very high regard, and dutifully assisted his leader.

After the outbreak of World War II, Douglas enlisted in the wartime Canadian Army. He had volunteered for overseas service and was on a draft of men headed for the Winnipeg Grenadiers when a medical examination turned up his old leg problems. Douglas stayed in Canada and the Grenadiers headed for Hong Kong. If not for that ailment, he would likely have been with the regiment when its members were killed or captured at Hong Kong in December 1941.