The Problem of Stuffed Shirtism

LT. COL. MONTAGUE: Today's guest speaker is Mr. Scott Young, well-known to us as a Globe and Mail columnist who is frequently seen on television.

It is usually interesting enough to meet and hear, in person, a writer whose columns are currently receiving favourable attention, but I am sure that today it will become doubly interesting after a brief review of Mr. Young's colourful and varied background.

Born in Manitoba 39 years ago Mr. Young entered the fourth estate as an 18 year old copy boy with The Winnipeg Free Press, but in a matter of weeks was posted to the Sports Department as a reporter. After four years of sports writing he became a Canadian Press Correspondent in London, England, during 1942. In 1943 he joined the Royal Canadian Navy as an ordinary seaman.

Full use of his talents as a writer was made by our Navy and, as a public relations officer, he served in the Channel, the Mediterranean, the Adriatic and the Aegean seas and in the invasion of the south of France.

Following World War II he joined the staff of Maclean's magazine, in 1945, and shortly thereafter tried his hand at short story writing as a spare time activity. Three years later, having established that there was gold for

him in the short story field, he decided to devote all his time to free-lance writing.

This resulted in his short stories appearing in virtually every major magazine in Canada and the United States and their reprinting, in some cases, in "Best Post Stories of 1949" and "A Treasure of Sport Stories". He received an honour roll mention in the "Martha Foley Best American Short Stories". His production exceeded 60 short stories and many of them were printed in the U.K., Italy, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia.

Mr. Scott Young is the author of three books--"Scrubs on Skates" and "Boy on Defense" in the juvenile field, and an adult novel based on the Winnipeg flood entitled "The Flood".

In early 1956, he tried his hand in industry as Assistant to the General Manager of Orenda Engines Ltd. His activities in that capacity were chiefly in the public relations and advertising field.

Since February, 1957, he has been a Columnist with The Globe and Mail and has appeared, with increasing frequency, on such television programmes as "Front Page Challenge" and special sports telecasts.

He has chosen as his subject for today--"The Problem of Stuffed Shirtism".

Gentlemen, I have the great pleasure of introducing Mr. Scott Young.

MR. YOUNG: Some of you must feel that you have been brought here under false pretence today, since the speaker was to have been Philip Deane--the Globe and Mail's Washington correspondent. He was going to tell you all about satellites, and why the Russians have two and the Americans have none. However, when President Eisenhower became ill, Mr. Deane's work obliged him to remain in Washington--and here I am.

I must say that sometimes in the last day or two--while I was preparing to speak to you today--I thought that it would have been very sporting of Mr. Deane if he had sent me a copy of what he'd been going to say to you.

I then could have given you Mr. Deane's speech on satellites, so that you could have astounded your friends and confounded your enemies with your inside understanding of this matter.

Even in the absence of any word from Mr. Deane, I did consider briefly the possibility of bluffing it out--you know, go up to the CBC and study up on how to look important, then come back here and give you my own best speech on satellites. However, if you've read Pogo lately--he's the Globe and Mail correspondent from a little farther south than Washington--you know all that I know about satellites, anyway. So, instead, let us be the only people in the world to spend a whole lunchtime today, without even mentioning the words satellite, sputnik, or even Russia.

Of course, I'm sure you realize that underneath this kidding, I feel very honored to be speaking to the Empire club. I am particularly pleased, since what I have to say I would like influential people to hear.

I know that there is at least one good public relations man here--my friend Royd Beamish of Maclean-Hunter. What I am going to say about stuffed shirtism in high places, however, is not directed primarily at public relations men, because usually they are the instruments of public relations policy rather than the originators. They tidy up the techniques, and give advice, but generally speaking if a man has enough on the ball to become president of his company, he considers that his company's relations with the public are very much a part of his responsibility. He realizes--or he should--the reason why public relations departments have become such a vital part of large companies.

This reason is that every company which operates in this country, is dependent for its continued existence on public goodwill. That is, the laws of the land allow business to operate as it does, but the laws of the land can be changed by the public, the voter, if he ever decides that there have been too many abuses of his goodwill.

This isn't as remote a possibility as many people believe. We have had political parties which in their beginnings aimed openly at changing the system under which this nation lives; and still do, to a less outspoken extent. The Social Crediters of 1935 were one. Their stand is less clear, now. The CCF is another. Even the creation of such parties showed that in our population there are people who would like to make drastic changes, politically and economically.

Each time in the past that such changes have been put forth as a general political platform, however, the goodwill the majority of the voters felt toward the traditional economic system prevailed.

In essence, the major aim of industrial public relations in this country today is to preserve that goodwill. Of course, in the narrow sense, the good will is solicited for this industry or that, this company president or that one. But in the broad sense all are soliciting goodwill for the way we live, the system. And I don't think that the job is being done well enough to ensure that the system would stand solidly in really bad times.

It is obvious, I hope, that I didn't come to this opinion through the pure vacuum type of thinking--the ivory tower, or removed-from-life, school of reaching decisions.

As every suburban gardener among you knows, no grass roots grow in ivory towers.

In my job at the Globe and Mail I am fortunate enough to be treated by readers, and by people I meet, as a person without an axe to grind.

In one job I held for a year before coming to the Globe and Mail, I was, however, committed by my job to the management side of industry.

I was assistant to the general manager of Orenda Engines Limited, and among my responsibilities was the public relations department.

However, since I am by nature a person who likes who he likes, I had a number of good friends among hourly-paid workers and other unionists. So I was frequently in the position to hear honest men on both sides as they frankly discussed one another. And I believe--from this and from much other evidence, both earlier and later--that workers trust management generally much less than management really deserves.

This even in a company with relatively excellent labour-management relations.

In some companies, as you all know, there is very little trust at all on either side. The other day I heard of a wife of a worker for one of the large auto companies who wanted to buy something, but couldn't, her husband told her, because of the necessity of laying up something for the strike in the fall.

The person who told me this said, "How do they know they're going to have a strike in the fall? That's nearly a year away." I said, "That's when their contract runs out. I guess a unionist in that plant always has to be laying up money against the possibility that the next contract negotiations will end in a strike."

Now, 'I'm not going to discuss the right to strike. It is part of our industrial system. But when a worker, not long after one strike has ended, is saving up for another one, he isn't--as some people contend--just plain crazy. He is a man who simply doesn't trust his management. And if you get enough such people in the country, and economic disaster hits us sometime, the votes might very well pile up in favor of some party pledged to change this system that nurtures men whom the workers do not trust.

There are a lot of faults on the other side, too, of course. An industrial relations man told me one time that labour strife always is uneven, because the public always expects management to be responsible but does not require the same responsibility from a union. This double standard by which the public judges a strike is hard on management, and makes bitter men of some industrialists. But when they get bitter and strike out, the unions opposing them become even more bitter and intractable.

And bitterness certainly is not the road to trust between labour and management. And yet such trust is the only real guarantee of the continuity of our present economic system in any future time of stress.

Now, for what it is worth, and I think it is worth a good deal or I wouldn't be spending this time talking about it, I know one reason why workers do not even give the best managements the trust they deserve.

That reason is this: Our big men all too seldom are presented with real candour and honesty to the public view. I don't claim to know any great number of industrialists personally. But I do know enough of them--and have compared my private view with the watered--down version that usually is presented to the public--to be quite sure that often their public relations policy hurts the very cause that it functions to help.

I know men who speak with wit and charm in private, but who in their public appearances allow themselves to be cast as just one more stuffed shirt, speaking an industrial philosophy that is the triple-distilled essence of all the platitudes that other generations of seemingly stuffed shirts have said before them.

It is very strange indeed that so few will trust themselves to exhibit naturally in public the qualities that earned them their high positions in the first place.

For instance, if they have accepted a speaking engagement, usually they have a public relations man draft the speech. This immediately becomes a speech that is inferior to the man who is to deliver it. All that wit and anecdote and fun and adventure that the great men of business find in their jobs is lost. The result is laboured platitudes, not surprising, really, from a speech-writer who is trying to second-guess what the boss would like to say.

The speech-writer usually doesn't know a great deal in depth about the subject, anyway. If he did, he might be the boss.

Our big men of business do things this way either because they think it is the safe way, or because they don't want to spend the time creating friends in public that they would spend preparing for a tricky bit of persuasion in a director's meeting.

How many of you have sat through dull speeches by men who you just know aren't dull, or they never would have reached the positions they hold?

I know I have, many times.

Such audiences--as you--usually are polite. You will sit stolidly through the dullest speech, bored almost to insensibility, and at the end you will come up and shake hands with the speaker and tell him he has made a great speech. Then, going out of his hearing, your hand still warm from congratulating the speaker, you will be grousing to your companions--and hearing their grouses in return--about what a dull speech it was.

But the public, reading the speeches later, or hearing them on the radio, isn't polite. One thing the average man treasures, when judging another, is conviction that the other man means what he says--and not only that, is saying all that there is to be said. I've heard some very rude comments made, by workers, about speeches their company executives had made--and in all honesty, I often had to agree with the workers, even while sometimes knowing and liking greatly the man who had made the speech.

I had a great argument not long ago with a public relations man on this very point. It started when I heard that a certain industrialist was being considered by the editorial board of a large and influential magazine as being a possible profile subject for that magazine. The industrialist was going to New York to have lunch with the magazine's editors. Two public relations men were going along. Now, if there is one thing that maddens me more than another, it is hearing some public relations man tell modestly about how skilfully he guides some industrialist through the shoals and rapids of life, ever onward and upward. So when I heard this I said to the public relations man concerned that I supposed that when the magazine's editors asked this industrialist a question, and he answered (if, indeed, allowed to do so) the public relations man immediately would say, "What Mr. So and So means to say is this . . ." and then give the public relations or watered down, version; designed with eyes in all directions, all corners rubbed off, so that no one could possibly be hurt--or, although the P.R. man wouldn't realize this, interested.

This reminds me of a story. It is a little too salty to repeat here in full, but a little will do. It concerns a pilot who returned from Korea after many heroic exploits and was met on the west coast by a great throng of newspapermen, for a press conference.

He was flanked, of course, by public relations men for the air force.

One of the first questions was, "And what do you plan to do first, now that you are home, Major?"

The major, eyes lighting up, replied: "Do? I'm going to get me a case of whisky and I'm going to set out across the country and I'm going to chase every damn pretty girl I see until I catch her, and then I'll . . ."

At this point the public relations chief interrupted smoothly: "What the major means is that he can hardly wait to get back to his childhood sweetheart."

Well, you get the idea.

And in the case of the industrialist who was going to take PR men with him to speak to the editors of the large magazine, the core of my argument was that I knew the industrialist in question, and liked him, and was convinced that if he met this magazine's editors himself, they'd like him, admire him, and have a story done on him.

But I was much less sure of what they'd think of him when he appeared in the veritable cloud of public relations ideas, advice, coaching, and general fog of concealment of his real personality. Of course, I might as well have saved my breath.

I said I thought this was important. Not only I recognize the impression a big man usually makes when his own personality is allowed to be felt and seen. Unions traditionally need their strongest efforts for a company run by a strong and personable leader. The unions often call the policies of such a man paternalism. What they really don't like is when the personality of a company head is stronger than the collective union personality--where trust of a company president is as great among his workers as is their trust of the union.

It may take years to break down the legacy of stuffed shirtism of the past. And I am not naive enough to think that this one point is the only problem. But it is one of the major problems, because it seems obvious that if the gap between management on one side, and labour and the public on the other, is allowed to widen any further, it cannot mean anything but trouble for us in the future. Also, I think that in any field, anything that can be done to substitute trust for strife is worth working for. Even if, as a start, every boss in the land has to take the pledge that never again will he allow himself to appear in public as a stuffed shirt.

THANKS OF THE MEETING were expressed by Mr. Royd D. Beamish.