Maurice Duplessis, 'Le Chef' of Quebec, Pt. 2

While Duplessis had ingratiated himself to voters as a man of the people, he was not exactly viewed as a saint. He's often described as a man who wanted to be both loved and feared, and numerous controversies are associated with him.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly from and I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and today
we are doing part two of our episode on Maurice
Dupas and we left off in the last episode with

(00:24):
du Plassy, who was the Premier of Quebec, having lost
his seat his premiere after his first terman office. His
conservative views and aggressive politicking had really moved him quite
quickly through the ranks of the Conservative Party in Quebec,
but some poor decisions uh during his first term caused
his his new party that he had formed, called the

(00:45):
Union Nationale, to lose their power base in the Legislative Assembly.
During his first term, he also drank heavily and that
really took a toll on his health as well as
his reputation. Yeah, he was also hospitalized for a strangulated
hernia in Night Team forty two, and he had already
had surgery for this same condition more than a decade earlier.
But he ended up in a hospital again, and this

(01:07):
time for four months, due to complications brought on by pneumonia.
After he had had the procedure. He had also been
diagnosed with diabetes, and so his health problems and the
damage to his image that had come from alcohol led
him to decide to just quit drinking altogether. Yeah, there's
a very funny interview that I saw in like an
old documentary where someone said that to the Liberal Party,

(01:29):
the worst thing that ever happened was the day du
Plessy stopped drinking because he just became much better at
his job and a much better politician. Was simultaneously extremely
offensive and also funny. It was said in JESU. They
weren't like, yeah, he should have stayed an alcoholic, but
they were saying, you know, he improved himself and it
hurt our party. Uh. But throw throughout the health issues

(01:50):
that he was working on. During his time away from office,
du Plessy it wasn't exactly absent from politics. He was
still very vocally involved. He spoke out against the idea
that the of the provinces losing more control to the
federal government, particularly over a constitutional amendment that gave unemployment
insurance UH to the federal jurisdiction and took it away

(02:11):
from the provinces. So, with renewed vigor, Duplessi went back
to fighting political battles. He was really vocal in the
conscription vote that had begun discussions while he was still convalescing.
He continued to stand for French Canadian nationalism and spoke
out against federal government control and against labor unions and

(02:32):
religious minorities exert exerting influence over the people of Quebec.
And when election time came up again in nineteen forty four,
with Quebec emerging from the financial depression that had been
going on early even in his political career, Duplessi regained
his seat as premier. Though it was a tight race,
it wasn't like a landslide. However, once he was there,

(02:55):
he stayed in power for the next fifteen years, so
he really held that seat for a long time. This
was kind of a controversial span. Yeah, not all of
it was controversial while he was the hare, but we're
going to talk about some of the bigger controversies that happened.
Some of it became controversial later. While he had ingratiated
himself to voters as a man of the people in

(03:18):
a time when economic crisis had left many quebec quad
jobless and uneducated, he was not exactly viewed as a
saint a lot of times. Now he's described as a
man who wanted to be both loved and feared, and
his campaigns were always alleged to be sort of swirled
with corruption. There were claims of fraud. Uh. There were

(03:40):
assertions that paid thugs had beaten Liberals sometimes even in
like the Liberal party headquarters. Uh. There were assertions that
there were voting boxes that had been stolen, there was
stuffing of voting boxes. Basically all of like the kind
of textbook when you think of like nineteen thirties and

(04:02):
forties political corruption checklist. It was all kind of in
his uh, his campaigns as well. On top of all that,
he was alleged to have kept secret files on all
members of the Assembly. And even though by the time
he took the position of premier a second time, Quebec
was moving into an industrial industrialized era. Uh, but do plus,

(04:26):
he was still pretty insistent that agriculture was going to
be the most important thing to focus on. And while
this did keep him very popular uh with you know,
the people in his province that were, you know, still
involved in agriculture and making their living as farmers to
a lot of people, that also made him appear sort
of out of touch and shortsighted, and his detractors would

(04:48):
point out, like, he is not moving with the times do. Plus,
he was also a devout Catholic for his whole life,
and this did cause some criticism and his political career.
His detractors hid said that he and the Roman Catholic
Church were just too tightly intertwined, with too much influence
flowing both ways. And indeed he was quoted numerous times

(05:10):
as saying, quote, the bishops eat out of my hand. Yeah,
that's another one of those Wow, you are really brazen. Uh.
And there were certainly more controversial issues than that, but
they play out in much the same way. Uh. You know,
he really had a pretty insistent view of the world.
He felt like he had a handle on how things worked,

(05:33):
and that was really what was going to guide him
in leading Quebec before we get to the three big
scandals that sort of define his political career. Now, when
you look back, do you want to take a moment
here and work from our sponsor. Yes, let's do. Let's
get on that. And now let's get back to Maurice Duplessy.
So as we did before the ad break, there were

(05:54):
three really damning scandals in duplessis time as Premier, although
one did not come to light until after the fact.
One involved a man who fought back against him, Another
involved a possibly preventable tragedy that costs lives and closed
a major roadway, and the third is a really truly
tragic legacy that is actually still playing out today. The

(06:15):
first in dupless He made a move that would really
cost him pretty dearly, the premier ordered the arrest of
a group of Jehovah's witnesses who had been distributing religious leaflets.
These leaflets criticized the Catholic Church, but dupless He claimed
that their rhetoric was just a threat to public order,

(06:35):
and a Montreal restaurateur by the name of Frank Roncarelli
posted bail for the men who had been arrested in
this leaflet scandal, and as a Jehovah's witness himself, he
often used his profits and his success from his business
to bail out members of his religious group. Not long
after that, Roncarelli received notice that his businesses liquor license
had been revoked, and without a liquor license, his restaurant

(06:59):
was unsa stainable. During an interview many years later, Roncarelli said,
interestingly enough, that he harbored no ill will towards Duplessi,
even though this whole thing really shut down his business. Uh.
He said that he knew Duplessy socially, and that quote
he was very charming in company. I just wanted to

(07:19):
include that because it's so fascinating that this continues to recur,
where it's like, man, he was horrible to deal with,
he was so hard to work with. He was really
quite delightful socially. Though it's such an interesting slash difficult
to accept juxtaposition for me. Yeah. At the time, though,
Roncarelli sued the Premiere and what would become an important

(07:40):
civil rights case which dragged on for more than a decade,
and during testimony in that case, Duplessi admitted that the
revocation of the liquor license was in fact not due
to any impropriety or violation of liquor regulation on Roncarelli's part,
and that it was just Roncarelli's bailout of the arrested
men that precipitated the revocation. So he kind of did say, yeah,

(08:01):
it was just because I was mad at him. He
had he admitted basically he was using his political power
to get vengeance on someone else. Eventually, an early nineteen
fifty nine Supreme Court made its ruling in favor of
Frank Roncarelli. Duplessi was ordered to pay forty six thousand
two dollars personally. They ruled that he had overstepped his

(08:23):
bounds and had arbitrarily damaged Roncarelli's livelihood. After the case closed,
Roncarelli actually left candidate. He moved to the United States
to work with a highway construction company, and he became
sort of a David and Goliath to symbol to a
lot of people, and he was often touted in a
sensationalized manner as the one man who took on Duplessi
in one So, in nineteen forty a new bridge, which

(08:47):
was the Duplessi Bridge, was opened between trou Riviere and
Capita la Madelene. However, this bridge had been built with
what uh some people refer to his quote political cements,
in other words, inexpensive materials. It was assembled by private
contractors who were friends of Dupasy, not really to the
highest bidder and not really focused on quality. A lot

(09:09):
of corner cutting. Yeah, in the United States, we call
that good enough for government work, which used to mean
something completely different than it generally does today. So in
the early hours of January thirty one one, this three
million dollar bridge collapsed and that halted travel on the
busiest highway in Quebec and killed four people. And Duplessy's

(09:33):
reaction was that he's quoted as saying, I think it's
simply sabotage. He uh was completely convinced that the collapse
was the work of subversives, at least publicly. Whether he
truly believed this to be the case or whether he
was trying to cover up some poor decisions in the
building process and some poor political connections that he had

(09:53):
used to get it built is still unclear. Of course,
the actual problem was mediocre construction, and the book Failed
Bridges Case Studies, Causes and Consequences describes the conditions that
caused the tragedy this way. Four of the eight spans
of the welded composite plate girder bridge over the Maurice

(10:13):
River collapsed in a night at a temperature of minus
thirty four degrees celsius. The steel contained zero point four
percent carbon and zero point one two sulfur two fissures
in the bridge had been repaired two years earlier, using
riveted plates to strengthen the welding seems under tension in
the flanges. The bridge had undergone a thorough inspection on

(10:36):
the only two weeks before the failure. When it came,
the collapse was sudden and completely unforeseen. So it was
basically substandard materials in extremely cold weather that just failed. Uh.
And the force of the bridge falling was so great
when it happened that nearby residents actually thought an earthquake

(10:57):
had occurred. As the investigation into the Apps went on,
the substandard construction was revealed in reports and the inquiry
into the bridge, testimony was given by two Canadian Army
engineers and they believe that two wires that were found
wrapped around a girder were part of an explosive trigger
which was part of a sabotage plot. But to Bell

(11:18):
telephone employees later testified that the wires were actually part
of an emergency line. Yeah, that whole uh support for
duplessis sabotage theory kind of fell apart. UH. The bridge
was eventually rebuilt, and again it was built with a
private contract against the wishes that a union contractor be
given the project. So even though this had all happened,

(11:41):
Duplessy kind of did the exact same thing he did
on the first build and handed it to friends. Yeah.
All in all, he spent more money on highway infrastructure
than any previous premier did. Yeah. I mean he did
expand a lot of Quebex roadways. So whether or not
others had similar problems that were never exposed by you know,

(12:06):
an incident or cold weather precipitating an incident, he did
add more roadways to the province than any anybody had
done previously. Uh. The darkest legacy of Duplessy's time in
office didn't come to light until after Duplessy had actually
died uh in nWo, So this is quite some time
after he had passed. A group calling themselves the Duplessy

(12:28):
Orphans Committee, headed by writer Bruno Ray, went public with
some extremely horrifying allegations. Basically, during the time that Duplessy
was premier in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties, thousands
of orphans were swiftly declared to be either mentally ill
or mentally retarded. And these were actually healthy children who

(12:49):
had been under the care of the Quebec government, and
they were living in homes that were run by the
Roman Catholic Church, and the reason for these sudden literally
overnight diet nses uh. Between nine and nineteen sixty the
Canadian federal government would pay seventy cents per day per
orphan to orphanages for their care. However, it paid a

(13:12):
subsidy of two dollars and twenty five cents per day
per patient to psychiatric hospitals, and it was more fiscally
lucrative to care for psychiatric patients than for orphans. So
Duplessy on paper was like, hey, we could get more
money for this if we just said they were all insane.
That is such an ugly thought. In nineteen sixty one

(13:35):
commissioned on Quebec psychiatric hospitals determined that more than a
third of the twenty two thousand patients foused in psychiatric
hospitals at the time had been incorrectly diagnosed. Most of
these people were orphans from the dupless E era who
had been in the system since a very early age. Yes,
so they had been declared mentally ill and then we're

(13:55):
still decades later living in that system when they should
have never ever been there in the first place. The
exact number of children that were affected by this rampant
diagnosis misdiagnosis is unclear. Uh. It ranges anywhere from two
thousand children too close to twenty depending on your source.
And uh, you know, it's one of those things that

(14:18):
is difficult to track. Some of the children that were
in the orphanages were born out of wedlock. Uh. Some
had lost their parents and had no family. Others had
been turned over to the system by parents that were
too poor to feed them. And we're thinking that would
at least be a better option for their care, but
instead they were all subjected to this sort of horrific
bit of paperwork that basically ruined their lives. Stories of

(14:42):
abuse are really rampant. There was electroshock therapy, which was
a deeply different thing in the forties and fifties than
it is today. Purposefully high drug dosages, forced lobotomies, physical
and sexual abuse. All of these things have been claimed
by survivors, and this list of horrors is lengthy. It
resulted in a government payout to all the surviving orphans

(15:06):
in the two thousands, an effort was made to get
the bodies of the orphans who had died in the
care of the corrupt homes exhumed to prove that they
had been used in medical experimentation. But this effort was
met with a lot of resistance. And I do think
it's important to note that, uh, while du Plessy authorized
this paperwork, he has never been determined to be personally

(15:29):
involved in the abuse. It's kind of like he made
a very poor fiscal decision that resulted in it, but
he's never implicated as having known that these children were
potentially being used in medical experiments, that they were being abused.
I think he just thought it was literally going to
be a paperwork, transaction and easy money. He actually suffered

(15:50):
a series of strokes and died on September seven, ninety nine,
and that was shortly after the verdict in the first
scandal that we talked about, the Ranca Relli case. It's interesting,
though perhaps unsurprising, is that depending on what biographical source
you're reading from, you'll see him described in completely contradictory ways.
One will speak of how staunchly he opposed the federal

(16:13):
government in the work of provincial government. Another will comment
on how he recognized that the only right path for
Canada was to not to unite the provinces under the
federal government. Yeah, he almost as like a ghost like
people make up their version of him sometimes. Uh. He
definitely had anti elitist views and that made him very

(16:33):
popular with some voters. He was sometimes even called a ruralist,
and his insistence that agriculture remained uh an integral part
of Quebec earned him the loyalty of a lot of people.
As we mentioned earlier, for a lot of people, his
death is a milestone that marks a significant and pivotal
moment in Quebec's history and the time that he governed,

(16:53):
Quebec experienced economic stability, but xenophobia and anti union sentiments
were also part of that package. And after Duplessy, during
the so called Quiet Revolution, Quebec became more secularized. The
Roman Catholic Church lost a lot of its political power,
and then the ministries of education and health were established,

(17:15):
but the economic growth slowed. Duplessy never married, and when
he was asked in interviews about his perpetual bachelorhood, he
would always tell people that he was married to Quebec.
And what's interesting is that, uh, I have you know
friends in Canada, and I asked them about Maurice Duplessy

(17:35):
and what they're taught in school and how much they
knew about him, and as he characterized as more of
a hero or a villain nowadays, because there have been
movements to try to kind of repaint him and put
him in context of like, yes, if you just look
at the facts on paper, he can look very bad,
but if you look at him in context of the
bigger political machine at the time, it really wasn't out

(17:57):
of the ordinary. It wasn't like he was a monster.
But every person I asked, none of whom were from
Quebec I should mention, said who they had never heard
of him, or they had heard of him in like
that distant bell ringing. Isn't there like a Duplessi road
Like they couldn't conjure who he had ever been, which
was very interesting to me. Yeah. Well, and considering how

(18:21):
the orphan scandal was ongoing into the two thousands, I
think that's what makes it that was off. At my
follow up, like do you know about du Plessy or
the dupless Orphans, they would go not really, uh, And
that led to some discussion of sort of the division
that there's ongoing sort of strife and discussion and disagreement

(18:41):
about Quebec's place in the bigger Canadian structure and French nationalism,
and uh that sort of desire to be separate and
different kind of being a problem sometimes socially. Uh So
some of them were like, that could just be the
problem is that it's a piece of Quebec history and
we don't always get taught very much about that outside

(19:02):
of that province. So I just thought it was interesting
that none of my Canadian friends knew who he was, um,
and they spread from sort of Vancouver all the way
over to ah Ottawa. But yeah, Maury Stupissy still kind
of up in the air in terms of whether he
was a good guy or a bad guy for many people. Yeah,

(19:23):
but I also have listener mail. I was just about
to ask, this is gonna dovetail on a previous little
listener mail experiment that we did, which is that we
had had a listener who was going to go to
New Orleans and wanted ideas for what to do, and
we had so many great ideas we put together a
blog post on them, and now we kind of have
like the stuff you missed the history class guide of
interesting things to do in New Orleans that might not

(19:46):
be in guide books. So we're gonna do a similar
thing and this one involves Canada. Uh. This actually comes
from a uh Facebook note we got from our listener Robin.
She says, Hey, ladies, my beloved husband introduced me to
the podcast recent ly and I've been hooked ever since.
We've both become pretty avid listeners and really enjoyed discussing
the cool stuff we learn. Anyway, my husband and I

(20:07):
are going to celebrate our tenure wedding anniversary. Congratulations, I
say to you, Uh, this May, and we're hoping to
visit Victoria, British Columbia. It would be awesome if you
could do a podcast on the city or something related.
It would also be so great to visit and have
some historical insights to help us in deciding where we
visit and what to see. Uh. So I once again
putting a call out to our various listeners who might

(20:29):
have knowledge of Victoria, British Columbia on what is really
cool to do there. I will admit I don't know
much there. I usually I visit Vancouver periodically, which I love.
I love that city. So much. Uh, but I don't
know a lot about Victoria and it's specific magic. So
if you know things, you can um share those with

(20:49):
us and I will once again put those all into
one big blog posts and we will have a fabulous
guide to yet another city. Yay, I know, and then
we'll have to go on the history class tour of
the world once we have several put together. Uh So,
if you would like to write to us with questions
or to answer Robin's query about what's good to do

(21:10):
in Victoria, British Columbia, you can do so at History
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missed in history. If he would like to uh learn
more about a topic related to what we've discussed today,

(21:32):
you can go to our website and type in the
words scandal and one of the articles that will come
up is ten political scandals. And while do pssy is
not mentioned, again, it helps put it in context that
there have been a lot of weird and awful and
sometimes fascinating things that have gone on in the political realm,
the political missteps. So if you want to learn about

(21:53):
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