Edward Alexander Partridge wasn’t the first furious farmer from the Prairies, and he certainly wasn’t the last.
He was, however, one of the most colourful in the long history of farmer radical visionaries.
And his legacy, a golden example of the law of unintended consequences, was as great as any other. The complicated and contradictory legacy remains with farmers today, and whether it would cause him pride or is causing him to turn in his grave is impossible to know.
“With little besides a profane and biting tongue, a liberal education, a creative mind and the heart of a rebel, E.A. Partridge altered the economic organization of Western Canada and modified the political face of the nation,” concluded Ralph Hedlin, writing for the Manitoba Historical Society in 1958.
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“An unsuccessful farmer, an unsuccessful businessman and an unsuccessful editor, he created a mammoth business and a national farm magazine.”
Partridge helped create the farmer co-operative that became United Grain Growers and its magazine, the Grain Growers’ Guide, helped propel the formation of the National Progressive Party, which later merged half of its name into the Progressive Conservative party, pushed the governments of Manitoba and Saskatchewan into direct grain elevator ownership and helped form the vision and name of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, more commonly known as the CCF.
However, he died a broken man after living on a meagre pension from his grain company, which had fired him. He saw his dreams of government grain elevator ownership dashed and his hopes for a non-socialist co-operative utopia on the Prairies ignored.
“Nothing remained but a national multimillion-dollar company, a national farm magazine, men who had been pitchforked into national prominence as a product of his judgment, legislation on statute books of nation and provinces, and a generation of politicians who remembered E.A. Partridge with bitterness in their hearts,” Hedlin said.
Partridge had moved to Sintaluta, Sask., with his brothers in the 1880s and saw much of the prairie opened up around them. The early years of the first decade of the 20th century were a time of much farmer agitation, and Partridge got agitated.
Many farmers were furious at the railways, but Partridge fulminated instead against the Winnipeg Grain Exchange, which he saw as a gambler’s den that lived parasitically off farmers’ grain, leaving them little.
He rented a room on Main Street in Winnipeg for a month in 1905, watched the exchange’s pits every business day and returned to farm country railing against his perception of the exchange’s excesses.
He concluded that farmers could only receive a square deal by marketing their own grain, and in 1906 he cajoled and bullied enough other farmers to support his vision with money so that he was able to form the Grain Growers’ Grain Com-pany, operating out of rented space in Wilson’s Hardware Store in Sintaluta.
He immediately ran into problems when trying to trade grain at the Winnipeg Grain Exchange on behalf of farmers, finding his company banned from trading.
So he bullied the government into passing legislation to force the exchange to open its doors to the farmer-operated company.
“The legislation passed. Five days later the exchange suspended operations,” Hedlin wrote.
Eventually the farmers’ company would become part of the exchange, but the seeds of an alternative farmer-operated economy had been planted.
In the following years, Partridge’s boundless efforts pushed the Manitoba and Saskatchewan governments to buy grain elevators and then persuaded his own grain company to take most of them over. On the political front he helped galvanize the popular forces that produced the National Progressive party and the CCF.
Although able to inspire and encourage, he was even better able to alienate people, and he died still admired by many but cut off from all forms of influence. His utopian vision, summed up in his 1926 book A War On Poverty, ended along with his life.
“A strange mix of Ruskinian socialism, old Ontario Toryism,
western utopianism and religious fervour, the book called for an independent western state, Coalsamao,” says the Partridge entry in Historica Ð The Canadian Encyclopedia. “It was a highly individualistic vision that attracted much interest but few converts. Plagued by despondency throughout his life, Partridge died, probably by suicide, in 1931.”
