Word: smallwood
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Wealthy and influential men from all over Canada and the U.S. gathered last week in the fishing village of Seven Islands, on the bleak north shore of the St. Lawrence River. U.S. Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis, and Newfoundland Premier Joseph Smallwood flew into town. A cruise ship brought 275 presidents, board chairmen or top executives of six major U.S. steel companies, U.S. and Canadian banks, insurance and trust companies and mining firms. The visitors assembled on Seven Islands' rain-drenched waterfront. A button was pushed, and rumbling machinery dumped carloads of red rock...
...Smallwood's assignment would stagger any ordinary salesman. The bleak island of Newfoundland and the mainland territory of Labrador, which has been part of Newfoundland for nearly 200 years, are among Canada's most forbidding wildernesses. Much of the land is barren and rocky, dotted with lakes and great bogs. In its 154,734 sq. mi., an area almost as big as California, only three towns have more than 5,000 people. There is still no cross-island highway, only a narrow-gauge railroad that arcs across the island but does not touch one hamlet in ten. Newfoundlanders...
...Joey Smallwood, already well known throughout the island as the operator of a St. John's radio program called The Bar-relman, began plugging immediately for confederation, attacking the old prejudice against Canada,*arguing that union was the only sensible course. "We can survive alone," he conceded, "but . . . only at the price of poverty." When the issue was decided in 1948, Newfoundlanders voted . to join Canada by a slim margin...
...Joey Smallwood's first big decision as premier was to spend the province's cash surplus developing the island's resources. Otherwise, he warned, "Newfoundland will never enjoy more than a meager, peasant economy." His opponents cried havoc, and wailed that the cash should be saved as a nest egg, but Joey retorted: "We will use it to get a goose that will lay us golden eggs...
...minority of diehard Newfoundlanders think that the development program is all wrong-that they should not attempt such a wrenching change in the economy that has kept the island since the time of Cabot. They say that Smallwood has gone "whoring after false gods" in his campaign for industries. Joey Smallwood pays scant attention to such complaints, preferring instead to restate his faith that old Newfoundland is at last beginning to catch up with the rest of North America. "For the first time in our history," he says, "our people have a chance to be healthy, well fed, well dressed...