Ranking a politician's place in history is subject to variables such as when the assessment is made (e.g. during their life or decades after their death) as well as by who (a popularity poll of citizens versus scholars). As new facts come to surface, and ideas and prejudices change, the politician's ranking among their peers may rise or fall.
Circumstances have an overriding effect. R. B. Bennett was elected in 1930 at the beginning of the Great Depression and served until 1935. The American President Herbert Hoover also served during those years (1929-1933). As a worldwide event of catastrophic magnitude, no one could quickly reverse the suffering of the population. Predictably, human nature resulted in the citizens of all countries to seek blame and retribution on the present government (despite the government's best intentions and partial successes).
As the natural cycle of the Great Depression slowly lead to recovery, the next Prime Minister (Wm Mackenzie King), and President (Franklin D. Roosevelt), received the credit for policies instituted before their terms, and savior status for pulling the country out of the depression.
During the boom years of the 1920s, many Canadians (and Americans) had bought cheap vehicles for the first time, but during the depression, many found they did not have enough money to operate them. This was especially true in the hard-hit Prairie Provinces. The increased poverty played an important role, as farmers could not buy gasoline.
A Bennett buggy was a term used in Canada during the Great Depression to describe a car which had its engine, windows and sometimes frame work taken out and was pulled by a horse. The Canadian term was named after Richard Bennett, who was blamed for the nation's poverty. In Saskatchewan, badly hit by the depression, similar vehicles with an additional seat over the front axle were dubbed "Anderson carts" after Premier James T. M. Anderson. In the United States, such vehicles were known as Hoover carts or Hoover wagons, named after President Herbert Hoover.
Homeless people pulled newspapers over themselves to ward off the night's chill and called them Bennett blankets. A bitter, ersatz brew of wheat or barley was dubbed Bennett coffee. Shantytowns housing the transient unemployed were called Bennett boroughs.
Hoover allowed his opponents in the Democratic Party to define him as cold, incompetent, reactionary, and out-of-touch. Hoover's opponents developed defamatory epithets to discredit him, such as "Hooverville" (the shanty towns and homeless encampments), "Hoover leather" (cardboard used to cover holes in the soles of shoes), and "Hoover blanket" (old newspaper used to cover oneself from the cold).
By 1932, almost a quarter of Canadian workers were jobless. Bennett was forced to adopt less traditional economic measures and the federal government gave the provinces $20 million for relief programs. Bennett also created labour camps to provide unemployed single men with a subsistence living. Men lived in bunkhouses and were paid 20 cents a day in return for a 44-hour week of hard labour.
In January 1935, Bennett began a series of live radio speeches outlining a "New Deal" for Canada. He promised a more progressive taxation system; a maximum work week; a minimum wage; closer regulation of working conditions; unemployment insurance; health and accident insurance; a revised old-age pension; and agricultural support programs.
After his election in 1935, Wm Mackenzie King referred Bennett’s New Deal legislation to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (Canada’s highest court of appeal at the time). In 1937, it declared many of the reforms unconstitutional and outside of federal jurisdiction. In an amazing parallel, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1936 struck down many key programs of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, and continued to reverse more over the next years.
Source: Waite P.B. (2012) In Search of R.B. Bennett.When history is written he [Bennett] will come out in large letters. So said many academics and colleagues, not least Harold Innis, the great University of Toronto economist, whose appreciation sums up the outpouring of recognition:
Your leadership of the party especially during the years when you were Prime Minister was marked by a distinction which has not been surpassed and will not be surpassed in our time. No one has ever been asked to carry the burdens of an unprecedented depression such as you assumed and no one could have shouldered them with such ability. I am confident that we shall look to those years as landmarks in Canadian history because of your energy and direction. I hope you will long live to enjoy the growing appreciation which is bound to come with the future.
Yours sincerely,
Harold Innis
Unfortunately, nearly a century later, such recognition is not widely given.
Scholarly ranking of 13 long-serving Canadian PMs
In aggregate of all 23 PMs, Bennett ranked 14th |
Scholarly ranking of U.S. Presidents
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This ranking was based on 26 academic historians and political scientists (up to 1997, thus it does not include these Prime Ministers: Paul Edgar Philippe Martin; Stephen Harper; Justin Trudeau).
It was published in
Prime ministers: ranking Canada’s leaders by J. L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer (Toronto, 1999)
I would note, that from my reading of Canadian PMs, I would not rank them this way.
Great
1 William Lyon Mackenzie King
2 Sir John A. Macdonald
3 Sir Wilfrid Laurier
Near Great
4 Louis St. Laurent
High Average
5 Pierre Elliott Trudeau
6 Lester B. Pearson
7 Sir Robert Borden
Average
8 Brian Mulroney
9 Jean Chrétien
10 Sir John S. Thompson
11 Sir Alexander Mackenzie
12 R.B. Bennett
13 John Diefenbaker
Low Average
14 Arthur Meighen
15 Joe Clark
Failure
16 Sir Charles Tupper
17 Sir John J.C. Abbott
18 John Turner
19 Sir Mackenzie Bowell
20 Kim Campbell