The Great Depression Page 10

  In mid-September, the federal government announced a comprehensive program to deal with unemployment by undertaking “the construction of useful public works.” Ottawa had no intention of initiating any of these; again, that would be up to the provinces and municipalities. But because the government would deal only with the provinces, a good deal of red tape would have to be cut before the municipalities could get at the money. They must prove that the works were actually contributing to unemployment relief; no other capital expenditure was eligible for federal grants. That meant that no province, city, or town could put a spade into the ground or turn a wheel and expect Ottawa’s help until the project was approved. By the time the programs got under way in November, the hardest-hit provinces were in the grip of winter and little outdoor work could be done until the following spring.

  2

  Rocking the boat

  Hard times were becoming harsh times. Crime and violence, starvation and despair, repression and brutality were the visible signs of the government’s reluctance to cope with unemployment. When, in June, Dr. T.F. Donnelly, a Saskatchewan M.P., produced a telegram in the House with the shocking news that fifteen farm families in his drought-ridden constituency were literally starving to death, the Prime Minister replied, as usual, that this was not a federal responsibility. R.C. Vooght, the despondent manager of a Camrose, Alberta, lumberyard, didn’t wait to starve. When his business failed, Vooght shot and killed his wife and two daughters, then drowned himself in a nearby lake.

  An unprecedented wave of bank holdups swept the country – five in Winnipeg alone in less than a year – and brought brutal penalties. In February, a sixteen-year-old boy who held up a bank at Fort Frances was strapped to an iron rack, lashed twenty times on his back with a cat-o’-nine-tails, and given five years in prison for stealing $540. The sentence provoked no editorial comment but did inspire a protest from J.S. Woodsworth, one of the few politicians who regularly denounced such practices. “Canadians will not stand for this kind of thing,” Woodsworth declared, but of course Canadians did. The Great Repression was well under way.

  The country that had once invited Eastern Europeans to hew wood and haul water on the Western plains now wanted to send them all home. Elizabeth Penner, who came to Canada in 1925 and later went to the United States to take nurse’s training, was one who was held at the border. It took three months and hard lobbying before the immigration department relented and let her back in. A Polish settler who had worked hard to earn a good living was told he couldn’t bring his sweetheart to Canada because the government had tightened the law to prevent people from arriving for purposes of marriage.

  In Toronto, members of the Communist party – or indeed any organization thought to be communist – were still being denied basic civil liberties by the police. In January, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a new group of Christian pacifists, decided to sponsor a Sunday debate in a local theatre on the resolution “that the Toronto Police Commission is justified in its present attitude in regard to free speech.” The head of the commission and the chief, Denny Draper, were invited to take the affirmative. The response to this even-handed invitation was extraordinary. The police not only refused to attend but also labelled the event “a communistic meeting under thin disguise” and threatened the theatre owner with a five-thousand-dollar fine under Section 98 of the Criminal Code if he didn’t cancel the fellowship’s lease.

  Out of such arbitrary actions are great movements born. This was one of several similar acts of repression that led indirectly to the formation of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, Canada’s first national socialist party. The spark, in Toronto, was Frank Underhill, then a peppery professor of history at the university. Underhill was so enraged by the police commission’s action that he immediately composed a letter to the press declaring that “the right of free speech and assembly is in danger of suppression in this city” and deploring the police policy as “short sighted, inexpedient and intolerable.” Sixty-eight people, most of them fellow faculty members, signed it.

  As a result, the debate the police had tried to smother raged in the press for more than a month. It tells something about the state of the public mind, and also about the state of journalism in Toronto, that three of the four newspapers attacked the letter’s signatories as communist sympathizers and insisted that free speech wasn’t an issue. The Globe demanded that the professors who signed the “ridiculous document” be fired if they didn’t recant. The Evening Telegram agreed with Sir John Aird, president of the Canadian Bank of Commerce, that the academics should “stick to their knitting.” Only the Star supported the cause of free speech. The university kept quiet, its president concerned that this hint at radicalism might affect public and corporate support. One member of his board, the millionaire philanthropist Sir Joseph Flavelle, was privately vexed that the professors had “put themselves at variance with other representative bodies.…” In short, they had rocked the boat.

  That same January in Montreal, the police turned out in force to break up a series of communist meetings demanding relief for the unemployed. In a striking example of overkill, the authorities dispatched 125 constables and 26 detectives to a single meeting in the Prince Albert Hall. As a result of this spate of raids, thirty-eight people were arrested and faced with one of a series of convenient charges: making seditious utterances, unlawful assembly, or simply failing to move on when ordered to do so. One luckless passerby, Izzy Houck, who stopped out of curiosity to watch a phalanx of police hustle eighteen men and one woman into custody, was himself arrested, fined three dollars, and jailed for three days.

  When the communists tried to hold a meeting to protest these methods, the police pounced again, broke up the gathering, and arrested the speaker. That was too much for a young McGill law professor, Frank Scott, who wrote indignantly to the Montreal Gazette that the action was “clearly high handed and apparently illegal.” As Scott pointed out, the only disorder occurred after the police made their arrests and started to disperse the audience. Their methods “amounted to a prejudging of the case before any evidence of crime existed.”

  Scott’s voice was a lonely one. As in Toronto, the press and a good section of the general public were on the side of the police. The Gazette declared that the action was quite proper. “There is nothing to be gained,” the editor wrote, “by a microscopic examination of abstract principles.” That was a remarkable statement from a member of the Fourth Estate, an institution always ready to take up the cudgels for the equally abstract principle of press freedom, especially when the authorities tried to apply the child labour laws to newsboys. The police chief was unrepentant. “I cannot allow this sort of thing to take place in Montreal,” he said. The principal of McGill, Sir Arthur Currie, told Scott to stop identifying himself as a law professor when writing to the press, even though Scott hadn’t mentioned McGill. Currie didn’t forbid Scott to protest but made it clear he’d be happier if he desisted.

  The leading universities, presided over by boards of solid businessmen, had always been bastions of conservative thought, but now a few embers of resentment, sparked by the Depression, were smouldering. It had been a slow process; after all, eighteen months had elapsed since the shocking battle in Queen’s Park. Yet there was movement.

  The Depression had nudged both Underhill and Scott farther to the left. Each was at the centre of an informal discussion group whose members were drawn together by a growing concern over what was happening to the country. Each was groping toward some fairer way of organizing society. Though they had not met, both were gripped by a similar sense of mission that had religious overtones, by a hatred of establishment hypocrisy, and by a strong commitment to liberal-democratic values. They both came from strong Christian backgrounds. Scott was the son of Canon F.G. Scott, the most famous padre in the Canadian armed forces during the Great War. Underhill had been raised as a strict Presbyterian. Both had been exposed to Fabian thought at Oxford, Scott as a Rhodes Scholar, Underhil
l on a Flavelle Travelling Scholarship.

  The determined Anglican and the stubborn Calvinist were drawn together by their political and social views although their personalities were markedly different. The lanky Scott, with his long, monklike features, was very much a social animal – personable, witty, outgoing. He belonged to a large and prominent Quebec family and was already recognized for both his poetry and his mastery of constitutional law. The circle of like-minded people whom he gathered around him was known simply as “The Group.” Most had also studied at Oxford.

  Underhill, by contrast, was a stubby, compact figure with a shy, sometimes waspish personality. He was a small-town cobbler’s son – a precocious and often lonely bookworm to whom plays, movies, and all dances were forbidden as ungodly. But his was a questioning nature. By his fourth university year he had become a confirmed agnostic, yet was still unable and probably unwilling to rid himself of the Calvinist streak. As he said, “I was born with this naïve feeling that if you don’t keep a tight hold on yourself, you’ll never accomplish anything.… To waste your energy on what seems to be a dissolute life never attracted me.”

  He was already a public supporter of the Western Progressives who were, he believed, “the only hope for a civilization in this country in which we won’t all be abject slaves to a few vulgar, ignorant money barons from Toronto and Montreal.” That was vintage Underhill. He had little use for big business for he said he had discovered through his researches that the country had been built by “grasping, unscrupulous businessmen.” Now he saw those views confirmed. His hero, understandably, was J.S. Woodsworth.

  Underhill was constantly in hot water with the university authorities. As a contributor to the then radical Canadian Forum, he knew he could never achieve “that austere impersonal objectivity which was exemplified by most of [his] academic colleagues who lived blameless lives, cultivated the golden mean and never stuck their necks out.”

  Clearly, he and Scott were destined to meet. The encounter, which has taken on mythological trappings in left-wing circles, took place in August. Underhill had persuaded John Dafoe to let him cover a world economic planning conference in Williamstown, Massachusetts. There he met Scott, who was attending as secretary to McGill’s dean of law, Percy Corbett. The trio decided to take advantage of a free day to drive to the foot of Mount Greylock in the Berkshires and picnic on the slopes.

  In that seminal discussion, Scott enthusiastically expounded to Underhill his theory that the Depression would force the establishment of a new political party. But unless the party knew where it was going, Scott went on to say, it would be swallowed by Mackenzie King’s Liberals, who had already digested most of the Progressives. He argued that a research group was needed to set goals and provide a socialist underpinning. His model was the British Fabian Society. By the end of the day the two men had agreed to launch just such a group in their separate cities.

  It is pleasant to contemplate these men, stretched out on a mountain slope, munching their sandwiches in the August sunshine and planning the future of their country. Did they know that they were making history – that this encounter would lead, within a year, to the launching of a new political movement that would change Canadian society? Probably not, though Underhill the historian may have sensed its significance. Did he ever appreciate the irony that this meeting, which helped to launch the socialist movement in Canada, should have taken place in the United States?

  The League for Social Reconstruction, as the new group came to be called, had no American antecedents. Its parentage was entirely British; the men and women who planned it were mostly graduates of Oxford. Canada in those days took its political cues from the old country. Indeed, it’s probable that without the Oxford experience of its founders, the League for Social Reconstruction would never have come into being.

  In Montreal, Scott’s two chief lieutenants were Eugene Forsey and King Gordon, both sons of the manse, both Rhodes Scholars. Like Scott they had been strongly influenced by the Christian socialism of R.H. Tawney of Balliol College, a strong critic of the capitalist system and perhaps the most influential reformer of his day.

  The craggy-faced Forsey, aged twenty-seven, a man of dry wit who rarely suffered fools and was a wicked mimic of his contemporaries, was teaching political economy at McGill. Gordon was the son of the Reverend Charles Gordon, whose books (The Sky Pilot, Glengarry School Days, and others), written under the pen name of Ralph Connor, were international best-sellers. A friend and colleague of J.S. Woodsworth, the elder Gordon was a convert to the Social Gospel, the activist doctrine that swept the non-conformist Protestant churches before the Great War. King Gordon, aged thirty-one, heavily influenced by his father, and an active layman in the United Church, had just arrived in Montreal as a professor of Christian ethics at the United Theological College. More patient than the excitable Forsey, King Gordon had, in the words of a friend, “a great sense of humour which kept fanaticism in check.”

  They were joined by twenty-two-year-old David Lewis, who had studied under both Scott and Forsey and, like them, would soon go to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Born in Polish Russia, he had already adopted his father’s socialism and would one day become leader of the New Democratic Party. His familiarity with organized labour, especially in the Montreal needle trades, lent a practical tone to the academics’ planning.

  The idea of a Canadian Fabian society was one whose time had come. Such a group would have been formed even if Scott and Underhill had never met. When Underhill returned to Toronto from Williamstown he found that, quite spontaneously, events were already on the move along the lines he and Scott had discussed. Several professors who had signed his January protest letter had joined the movement, including Harry Cassidy, in whose house Underhill’s informal group had been meeting. A tall, slender, tennis-playing social economist, Cassidy was also secretary and research director for the Unemployment Research Committee of Ontario. To that point, no one had made a study of unemployment or unemployment relief. No one, in fact, even knew the extent of the problem. The government apparently didn’t care; it had made no effort to compile statistics. But Cassidy, with private funds, was already at work on the subject and would shortly provide the first extensive review in his influential book Unemployment and Relief in Ontario, 1929–1932.

  This was a yeasty period in Canadian academic and artistic life. The earnest young theorists – Scott, Forsey, Gordon, Cassidy, Lewis, and others – who struggled that autumn to jolt their country out of its economic and social rut were destined to become the elder statesmen of the Left. Prominent all of their lives, they remained activists until their deaths. Their gospel was to be found in the pages of the Canadian Forum, a periodical of small circulation but immense influence, to which many of them contributed. Marching out of step on the flanks of this leftward movement were some unlikely characters who seemed to have joined the wrong parade. One was J.S. McLean, the wealthy meat packer, whose political ideas were far to the right but whose bankroll kept the Forum alive. Another was William Folger Nickle, a prominent Tory businessman and close friend of R.B. Bennett, who was honorary chairman of the Unemployment Research Committee, the mixed bag of academics and businessmen who had hired Cassidy to produce his monumental study.

  Meanwhile, another Rhodes Scholar, Graham Spry, had climbed aboard. Spry was then the head of the Canadian Radio League, lobbying vigorously for a public radio system. Today he is venerated as the father of Canadian radio broadcasting; in 1931 he was concerned about his own future and also about the effects of the Depression on the country.

  A former journalist, he wanted to do something to help “the poor bozos” of Canada. He was convinced that if the Liberal party didn’t move to the left there would soon be a third party in Canada. He was planning to buy the Farmer’s Sun, the weekly organ of the United Farmers of Ontario, and put it at the disposal of the new group. The funds came from his wealthy friend Alan Plaunt, who had helped him found the Radio League. Spry himself was so poor he w
as reluctant to take off his overcoat at meetings because the clothes he wore underneath were so shabby. But the League for Social Reconstruction changed his life in more ways than one. There he encountered a pretty if penniless economist, Irene Biss, the daughter of a British Labourite. Seven years later, when they could at last afford it, the two were married.

  All that autumn, the two groups in Toronto and Montreal produced draft after draft – five in all – of a manifesto for the new league. They were grappling with a dilemma that has continued to plague the moderate Left: how radical should their rhetoric be? If it was too tame it would have little effect. If it was too strident it might sound like a communist document and scare off supporters. Montreal had the final draft and opted for caution in the hope (the eternal hope!) of attracting French-Canadian supporters. Finally, as the New Year dawned, the two groups arrived at a meeting of minds. A month later the LSR came into being and the politics of Canada entered a new era.

  3

  The Red Menace

  The Fabians believed in “the inevitability of gradualism,” the Marxists in sudden, dramatic, and often violent action. Long before the LSR was even thought of, the Communist Party of Canada had seized the initiative and was exploiting the Depression for its own purposes. Controlled by dedicated and experienced leaders, it represented the only hope for tens of thousands of hopeless men and women. While the old-line parties clung to the status quo, the Communists promised a better world through radical change.