The Great Depression Read online

  “The historian of the future, when he writes about Canada and the Great Depression, will comment upon the remarkable ineptitude of Canadian public men when faced with this emergency. He will write of the obstinate refusal of governments to face realities; of their pitiful and tragic tactics of ‘passing the buck’ to one another; and of their childish expectation that providence, or some power external to themselves, would come to their rescue and save them from the consequences of their refusal to look into the future, foresee events that loomed black in the sky, plain to be seen, and take such steps as were possible to mitigate the fury of the storm. The severity of the condemnation will be measured by the extent of the power which was not used and the responsibility that was denied.”

  —Winnipeg Free Press, March 18, 1933

  Copyright © 1990 by Pierre Berton Enterprises Ltd.

  Anchor Canada paperback edition 2001

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher — or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency — is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Anchor Canada and colophon are trademarks.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Berton, Pierre, 1920–

  The Great Depression 1929–1939

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37486-8

  1. Depressions – 1929 – Canada. 2. Canada – Economic conditions – 1918–1945. I. Title.

  FC577.B47 2001 330.971 C2001-930600-8

  F1034.B468 2001

  Cover photo: © Hulton Archive

  Published in Canada by

  Anchor Canada, a division of

  Random House of Canada Limited

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website:

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  Books by Pierre Berton

  The Royal Family

  The Mysterious North

  Klondike

  Just Add Water and Stir

  Adventures of a Columnist

  Fast Fast Fast Relief

  The Big Sell

  The Comfortable Pew

  The Cool, Crazy, Committed World of the Sixties

  The Smug Minority

  The National Dream

  The Last Spike

  Drifting Home

  Hollywood’s Canada

  My Country

  The Dionne Years

  The Wild Frontier

  The Invasion of Canada

  Flames Across the Border

  Why We Act Like Canadians

  The Promised Land

  Vimy

  Starting Out

  The Arctic Grail

  The Great Depression

  Niagara: A History of the Falls

  My Times: Living with History

  1967, The Last Good Year

  Picture Books

  The New City (with Henri Rossier)

  Remember Yesterday

  The Great Railway

  The Klondike Quest

  Pierre Berton’s Picture Book of Niagara

  Falls

  Winter

  The Great Lakes

  Seacoasts

  Pierre Berton’s Canada

  Anthologies

  Great Canadians

  Pierre and Janet Bertone’s Canadian Food Guide

  Historic Headlines

  Farewell to the Twentieth Century

  Worth Repeating

  Welcome to the Twenty-first Century

  Fiction

  Masquerade (pseudonym Lisa Kroniuk)

  Books for Young Readers

  The Golden Trail

  The Secret World of Og

  Adventures in Canadian History (22 volumes)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Other Books by This Author

  OVERVIEW: The worst of times

  1929

  1. The Great Repression

  2. The legacy of optimism

  3. Crash!

  4. The world of 1929

  1930

  1. “Not a five cent piece!”

  2. Mother’s boy

  3. Mrs. Bleaney’s clouded crystal ball

  4. “Bonfire Bennett”

  5. Old-fashioned nostrums

  1931

  1. Still fundamentally sound

  2. Rocking the boat

  3. The Red Menace

  4. Quail on toast

  5. Blood on the coal

  6. Nine on trial

  1932

  1. The dole

  2. Shovelling out the unwanted

  3. Boxcar cowboys

  4. Restructuring the future

  5. An attempt at political murder

  1933

  1. The shame of relief

  2. Death by Depression

  3. Childhood memories

  4. Making headlines

  5. The Regina Manifesto

  6. Bible Bill

  1934

  1. The seditious A.E. Smith

  2. Radio politics

  3. Harry Stevens’s moment in history

  4. The year of the locust

  5. Pep, ginger, and Mitch

  6. The Pang of a Wolf

  7. Slave camps

  1935

  1. Bennett’s New Deal

  2. Speed-up at Eaton’s

  3. The tin canners

  4. On to Ottawa

  5. The Regina Riot

  6. Changing the guard

  1936

  1. State of the nation

  2. The weather as enemy

  3. Le Chef, the Church, and the Reds

  4. Birth control on trial

  5. Abdication

  1937

  1. The rocky road to Spain

  2. Dead in the water

  3. Mitch Hepburn v. the CIO

  4. The Prime Minister and the dictator

  5. The black blizzard

  6. Bypassing democracy

  1938

  1. A loss of nerve

  2. Trampling on the Magna Carta

  3. Bloody Sunday

  4. The Nazi connection

  5. Keeping out the Jews

  1939

  1. A yearning for leadership

  2. Back from the dead

  3. The royal tonic

  4. War

  AFTERWORD: The first convoy

  Author’s Note

  Sources

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Overview

  The worst of times

  Nobody could tell exactly when it began and nobody could predict when it would end. At the outset, they didn’t even call it a depression. At worst it was a recession, a brief slump, a “correction” in the market, a glitch in the rising curve of prosperity. Only when the full import of those heartbreaking years sank in did it become the Great Depression – Great because there had been no other remotely like it and (please God!) there would never be anything like it again.

  In retrospect, we see it as a whole – as a neat decade tucked in between the Roaring Twenties and the Second World War, perhaps the most significant ten years in our history, a watershed era that scarred and transformed the nation. But it hasn’t been easy for later generations to comprehend its devastating impact. The Depression lies just over the hill of memory; after all, anyone who reached voting age in 1929 is over eighty today. There are not very many left who can remember what it was like to live on water for an entire day, as the Templeton family did in the Parkdale dist
rict of Toronto in 1932, or how it felt to own only a single dress – made of flour sacks – as Etha Munro did in the family farmhouse on the drought-ravaged Saskatchewan prairie in 1934.

  The statistics of those times are appalling. At the nadir of the Depression, half the wage earners in Canada were on some form of relief. One Canadian in five was a public dependant. Forty per cent of those in the workforce had no skills; the average yearly income was less than five hundred dollars at a time when the poverty line for a family of four was estimated at more than twice that amount.

  This army of the deprived was treated shabbily by a government that used words like “fiscal responsibility” and “a sound dollar” as excuses to ignore human despair. Balancing the budget was more important than feeding the hungry. The bogey of the deficit was enlisted to tighten the purse strings.

  R.B. Bennett, who presided over the five worst years of the Depression, said he was determined to preserve the nation’s credit “at whatever sacrifice.” But the burden of that sacrifice did not fall on the shoulders of Bennett or his equally parsimonious opponent, Mackenzie King. It fell on those who, in spite of the politicians’ assurances to the contrary, were starving and naked – on the little girl in Montreal who fainted one day in school because, as her teacher discovered, it wasn’t her turn for breakfast that morning; on another little girl in Alberta who could go to school only on those days when it was her turn to wear “the dress”; on the Ottawa landlord who collapsed in the street from hunger because none of his tenants had been able to pay their rent; on the New Brunswick father who awoke one cold winter night in a house without fuel to check on his three-month-old baby, only to find her frozen to death.

  The most shocking statistic of all reveals that the federal government from 1930 to 1936 spent more of the taxpayers’ money to service the debt of the Canadian National Railways than it did to provide unemployment relief. That debt was the legacy of the great Canadian boom. The builders of the Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk Pacific (not to mention the government’s own National Transcontinental), revered as audacious and far-seeing captains of industry, left a questionable legacy. The bondholders enjoyed a free ride on the backs of the people. Where was “fiscal responsibility” then? Without that burden of debt the government could have doubled its relief payments to every family in Canada.

  Had there been no railway debt, would either Mackenzie King or R.B. Bennett have taken that more generous route? One doubts it. Neither had any co-ordinated plan of relief. Like the business leaders who backed them, they were convinced the Depression couldn’t last and so made no long-range plans to deal with the crisis. Planning, after all, was a dirty word in the thirties, a subversive notion that smacked of Soviet Russia.

  Both the Liberal and the Conservative governments stumbled from crisis to crisis, adopting band-aid solutions that often became part of the problem. At every level of government the authorities attacked the symptoms and not the cause, trying vainly to hold down the lid on the bubbling kettle of protest. If single transients clog the streets of the big cities – get them out of sight. If radicals demand a better deal for the jobless – jail them. If “foreigners” ask for relief – deport them. If farmers stage hunger strikes – disperse them with police billies. At no time did those in charge consider the practical advantages of allowing the dispossessed to let off steam unmolested.

  Every level of government tried to evade its responsibilities for the unemployed. Ottawa washed its hands of the problem, as Ottawa often does, and tried to lay it on the provinces. The provinces tried to lay it on the municipalities. The municipalities tried to lay it on the local taxpayers, who couldn’t cope with it because so many were themselves out of work. Then everybody – taxpayers, municipalities, and provinces – turned on Ottawa.

  Relief was given grudgingly. The Calvinist work ethic belonged to an earlier century, but it lived on into the thirties. Conventional wisdom dictated that any healthy man could always find a job; that if he was idle, it was deliberate; that to ask for public charity was shameful; that those who got too much wouldn’t want to work. Thus, it was held, relief should provide no more than the bare necessities and should never approach the level of “real” wages.

  Bennett himself clung to this view and indicated more than once that the current generation of Canadians was “soft,” that it lacked the rugged independence and the ability to make sacrifices of its forbears. That sounded incongruous coming from one of the richest men in Canada, who owed much of his wealth to a legacy. By Bennett’s standards, anybody who applied for relief was a failure. Rather than endure this humiliation, thousands shunned the relief offices. In 1934, a United Church worker in central Manitoba discovered that many farm families were going without underwear or shoes for their children, who as a result couldn’t attend school. All were entitled to relief, but they couldn’t bring themselves to apply for it.

  Families made do as long as possible before “going on the pogey,” as the phrase had it. Houses went without repair, automobiles were allowed to wear out, clothing was patched, re-patched, and patched again before they would endure “the soul-searing shame of applying for relief.”

  That was the phrase that a Great War veteran, Victor Nelson Swanston, used in 1931 when he finally made the mortifying journey to the Regina relief office. He had no choice: he had been laid off his auto assembly job. He had worked briefly as a harvest hand. But now his resources were spent, there was no food left in the house, and his wife was in tears.

  Out came an inspector to make absolutely sure the family was destitute. He searched the empty cupboards, and he even opened the door of the oven to make sure the cunning Swanstons hadn’t squirreled away any food. In the end, the family was given enough to eat.

  To pay for his weekly groceries, Swanston was put to work digging ditches and cleaning Regina’s streets. There were no rest periods because if the men stopped to smoke there was always an angry taxpayer rushing to phone the city works department to ask why these ne’er-do-wells weren’t working. At school, the four Swanston children were jeered at. “Reliefers! Reliefers!” their schoolmates shouted. There was no hiding their shame; their daily free half-pint of milk gave their secret away.

  The catastrophe that was visited upon the Swanston family fell unevenly across the country. The big cities were the worst off, led by Montreal; by 1932, a third of its people were on relief. The big Ontario cities were almost as badly hit, the rural areas less so. Farm dwellers, except in the drought country, could at least grow their own food. Prince Edward Island, one gigantic farm, had the lowest per capita relief costs in the country. If the Maritimes appeared to suffer less it was partly because they had always been in an economic slump, and, except in Cape Breton, there were fewer industries to close and throw people out of work. But nature devastated the West; by 1937, two-thirds of Saskatchewan’s farmland had turned to desert. Outside the drought country, cities such as Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Calgary suffered the most. British Columbia, Canada’s fastest-growing province, was almost as badly off, especially in Vancouver where a flourishing building boom quickly collapsed.

  The checkerboard pattern of want in the Depression determined the political pattern in the years that followed. The Atlantic provinces remained faithful to the old-line parties while the West shoved them aside. Dissent, which had not flourished in the twenties, sparked half a dozen new political movements. People ceased to trust their traditional leaders, who had misled or even lied to them. In their search for a way out of the economic dilemma, some embraced new ideologies – communism, socialism, fascism. Others were convinced that the country ought to be run by “experts” – a denial of democracy that appealed to those who espoused Howard Scott’s Technocracy movement. The quest for a Messiah – scientific in the case of Scott, religious in the case of Frank Buchman, whose Oxford Group (and later Moral Rearmament) became another Depression fad – was a feature of the decade. Three new premiers – Aberhart of Alberta, Hepburn of Ontario, Duplessi
s of Quebec – were swept into office on populist platforms. All turned out to be authoritarians, perfectly prepared to trample on the rights of those who opposed them.

  Canadians have always been a cautious people. The Depression made them more cautious than ever. The longing for security that brought family allowances, medicare, and unemployment insurance is still deep in the subconscious of the Depression generation. The children of those years cling to their jobs as a shipwrecked sailor clings to a raft. Three decades later, the adult world raised in the thirties would be baffled by what it saw as the irresponsibility of a new generation that thought nothing of quitting work, having a good time, and then casually seeking other employment. The Depression, it might be said, helped foster the generation gap of the sixties.

  Lara Duffy, a Toronto housewife who was four years old when her father lost his job in 1932, has never been able to come to terms with her eldest daughter’s spending sprees. “Money doesn’t mean anything to her. I don’t think she’s looked at a price tag for years.” She herself can’t abide waste; she can’t even bear to discard worn-out clothing, always finding somebody who can use it. “It’s just impossible for me to waste things.” Yet in some ways she is as unrestrained about spending as her daughter, and that too is a result of the Depression: “Sometimes I have too many of some things. It’s a reaction: because you had nothing, now you have to have too much of what you were once deprived of.” As a schoolgirl she had one pair of shoes. “Now I have lots of shoes; that seems to be something I have to do for me.” To this day Mrs. Duffy cannot abide the taste of plum jam or sausages because that was the kind of cheap relief fare her family lived on during the Depression. For seven years her father was out of work, constantly and vainly seeking a job.

  A steady job – that was the supreme goal of those whose youth was scarred and shaped by the thirties. It was something to struggle for, something to cling to. Men like Verdun Clark of Toronto were never afraid of hard work all their lives because they could remember the day when there was no work and no food. Born in 1916 and named for the bloodiest battle of the Great War, Clark was one of a family of five children deserted by their father, as so many were during those hard times. As a result, he was determined that what had happened to his family would never happen to his own children.