Mark Bourrie’s new book ‘Big Men Fear Me’ gives shape to an era and man almost erased by history

Mark Bourrie, winner of the 2020 Charles Taylor Prize for “Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre Radisson,” now turns his considerable investigative powers to the “fast life and quick death” of George McCullagh. This handsome, ambitious, charismatic newspaper man — founder of the Globe and Mail — has, until now, been almost erased from Toronto history. The facts are these: a “bright kid from London (Ontario) with no education” grew up to mingle with the rich and powerful, attract thousands of listeners to his radio speeches and grace the pages of the world’s press.

His story begins in the dusty rural roads of Ontario, where young George first made his mark selling the Globe newspaper — so successfully that the paper hired, then fired him. (He smoked, drank, loved horses and racing: all habits disdained by his puritanical bosses.) At age 31, wealthy from mining investments — Bourrie’s chapters on Ontario’s gold mining boom are worth the price of the book — and with backing from friend and mining magnate William Wright, George purchased the Globe, then the Mail and Empire: the Globe and Mail was born.

Like a northern Horatio Alger or Jay Gatsby, McCullagh shone in Toronto’s financial, newspaper and sporting circles. He was on the board of Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens, part-owner of the Argonauts football team, owned one of the best racehorse stables in the country and was frequently touted as a future prime minister. Then he was found dead at his estate north of the city, aged 47.

There are many threads to untangle here and Bourrie — journalist, academic, and lawyer — unpicks them all. Spanning the first half of 20th-century Ontario, McCullagh’s life and times become an engrossing tale of ambition, politics and bipolar illness — it’s like little else we’re likely to read this year.

“George McCullagh’s Canada has passed into history — a land where great veins of gold were waiting to be discovered by people willing to trudge through -45 degree weather, where a man without an education could become the most powerful publisher in Canada,” Bourrie writes.

The book features a cast of historical characters that Bourrie often calls “weird”; they include politicians, prospectors and, of course, newspapermen — they were mostly, but not all, men. (One Ontario gold millionaire, Harry Oakes, was mysteriously murdered in the Bahamas.) These near-Shakespearean characters sometimes include George’s friends, sometimes the opposite — especially those who were social progressives.

His interest in newspapers began in his Bay Street days, after he became friendly with Percy Parker, a successful lawyer and fellow gold and oil mining speculator. Parker’s death left an empty seat on the University of Toronto board that Premier Mitch Hepburn awarded George, since Hepburn’s political success had benefited hugely from Parker and McCullagh backing his recent campaign. Not bad for a dropout. George McCullagh, young media darling, seemed destined to achieve the heights of power. But that unfortunate boast in an early interview, “big men fear me,” showed naiveté and hubris, his essential character flaws.

It was a tumultuous life, and Bourrie tells it with wit and humour — “If McCullagh hadn’t had bad luck in politics, he would have had no luck at all.” Under McCullagh’s leadership, his newspapers waged a long and sometimes vicious war of words with the Toronto Star and its owner, “Holy Joe” Atkinson, a strict Protestant who abhorred drinking but championed the rights of women and the poor.

Whereas Atkinson and then prime minister Mackenzie King were fast friends, the gregarious, racecourse-loving McCullagh was an outsider whose politics swerved hard right when American unions inspired Ontario’s underpaid Oshawa autoworkers to strike in 1937. Both he and his backer, Bill Wright, to whom he was much indebted, fiercely opposed unionization.

The word “communism” was flung about. “And the strike fuelled the already tough competition between McCullagh and Atkinson into a hate-fuelled brawl,” destroying “the idea that McCullagh was a man of the people.” When McCullagh next formed the Leadership League, a coalition scheme aimed at eliminating provincial political parties entirely, his grand scheme fizzled.

It was a rambunctious age. In early days, Hemingway was filing stories for the Star, soon to become “Canada’s most successful metropolitan newspaper.” During the Depression, Hepburn, an onion farmer whose Trumpian-style populism kept him in power for years, carried on secret boozing and womanizing in his suite at the King Edward Hotel on King Street, activities unreported by the press.

Capturing the energy and pathos of these decades — two world wars, the Depression, the early postwar years — Bourrie recreates a whole world for readers who don’t remember which daily newspaper landed on their front steps, or which political party was supported in its editorial pages.

So lively is his style that McCullagh’s sudden death in 1951 comes as almost as sad a shock as it did to his friends and contemporaries, who assiduously covered up rumours about mental illness and suicide. A “two-fisted Canadian” (when that was high praise) the epitome of the age’s ideal, a handsome self-made man, who greeted “newsies” (the old men who sold papers on city streets) by their first names, but whose portrait no longer hangs at the paper he created, is brought to nostalgic, vivid life, his portrait restored, flaws and all.

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