The Great Depression Read online

5

  An attempt at political murder

  1

  The dole

  Once again as the New Year dawned, everybody from the mayor of Winnipeg to the vice-president of the CNR announced that the worst was over. “Canada has survived the crisis,” the Prime Minister declared. One might have expected him to bring some new eloquence to his optimistic remarks, but no, he was content to dust off the old saw about economic conditions being “fundamentally sound.” He clearly loved that time-worn phrase, loved its solidity, loved its reassuring ring, loved it so much, indeed, that he inserted it in the Throne Speech in February. And why not? Hadn’t Roger Babson, the man who had predicted the market crash, announced that “the Depression is in retreat”?

  This time the great seer was wrong. Those who had been living on their savings and avoiding relief were coming to the end of their resources, unable to spend a nickel on new clothes and certainly not on repairs to their homes. In Halifax, to take a horrible example, 192 houses had been condemned, yet 370 families who couldn’t afford better shelter were crowded into them; and the authorities were loath to throw them out. Another 1,273 houses that should have been condemned were reprieved because the Board of Health optimistically claimed they could be brought up to standard. But who could afford to do it? As many as seven families would save money by crowding into quarters designed for far fewer, using a common sink in the hallway and climbing several flights of stairs to get water. More than 11,000 men, women, and children in that city were exposed to substandard sanitary conditions. But it was cheaper for the municipal governments to wink at health rules than it was to force people out and onto relief. Public charity was seen as a last resort. Few wanted to accept it; no level of government was anxious to pay for it.

  The haphazard means of administration of relief in Canada – a patchwork quilt of provincial, municipal, and private charities – was based on the British Poor Laws of the nineteenth century. These were designed to make public aid so unpleasant that only the desperate would resort to it. The conventional Victorian attitude was that idleness was a sin and that those who didn’t work (the leisure classes excepted) were morally weak or lazy. R.B. Bennett echoed this obsolete attitude when he declared that year that “the people are not bearing their share of the load. Half a century ago people would work their way out of their difficulties rather than look to a government to take care of them. The fibre of some of our people has grown softer and they are not willing to turn in and save themselves.”

  The puritanical ethic to which the Prime Minister subscribed decreed that people should be made to work for relief. But the municipal make-work programs were rarely successful because they were so wasteful. To stretch the job, picks and shovels replaced labour-saving machinery – as in an Ontario project where relief applicants were put to work levelling a knoll and filling in a hollow.

  Payments for relief work were parsimonious, covering only the barest necessities. An applicant was required to prove his family was close to destitution before he could get help. In many communities, he had to turn in his liquor permit. In some he was forced to sell his car. Even a telephone in the home could make him ineligible.

  Because the municipalities were still convinced that the crisis was seasonal, those men lucky enough to get this work were laid off in the summer. Nor was there enough relief work for all. In Toronto, the average relief applicant got only one week’s work in eight, hardly enough to support a single man, let alone a family. Some could afford neither boots nor work clothing; others were so undernourished they didn’t have the energy to lift a shovel. If they weren’t British, their chances of getting relief work were low. In Toronto, no unnaturalized foreigner could even apply for relief. Transients, of course, got nothing because they had no claim on any municipality. If they stayed around for more than a day they were charged with vagrancy and booted out of town. Residence requirements grew tougher; in some towns, a family had to spend a year in the area before its members were designated “residents” and allowed public aid.

  Some went to extreme lengths to overcome that problem. In Vancouver, an aging character known as “Happy” Dunning persuaded a friendly policeman to arrest him for vagrancy. In court, he pleaded with the magistrate to send him to jail for thirty days. He needed the extra month, he explained, to establish a year’s residence in the city, after which he could apply for relief. “I’ve seen tough times before,” he told the court, “but you could always make out by moving on. Now every place you go is worse than the last one, and there’s nothing else but jail and then pogey”

  In spite of these conditions, no one – and certainly not the government – really knew how many people were out of work or who they were. That failure was underscored by the publication that September of the only comprehensive study to be undertaken until the end of the decade. It was sponsored not by the government but by the private sector and confined to the province of Ontario.

  This was the survey that Dr. Harry Cassidy, one of the founding members of the League for Social Reconstruction, had begun in 1931 for the Unemployment Research Committee. Cassidy, at thirty-two, was at the top of his field, a cheerful academic, full of energy and drive. A trained economist, he was also an idealist. He had returned to Canada from a teaching position in the United States because, he said, he wanted to “play some part in the social engineering that is essential to the development … of a worthwhile culture.” Like most of his colleagues in the LSR – Underhill, Scott, and others – he was a man in search of a new political movement. During the 1930 election campaign he had been sickened by politicians clinging to past glories and ignoring current problems. “Bennett invokes shades of Sir John A. and his National Policy,” he wrote to his wife. “I think it is a disgusting performance – with Bennett being inane and silly most of the time and King being dishonest.”

  In March 1932, W.F. Nickle, the honorary chairman of the committee, sent an outline of Cassidy’s report and then the manuscript to his friend the Prime Minister, praising the research and suggesting that it could be of “great value to you by way of giving a lead in public opinion.” It’s doubtful whether Bennett ever read it. Certainly he ignored it. For Cassidy’s findings challenged some widely held myths – those to which Bennett himself subscribed.

  Unemployment, Cassidy reported, was a “virulent social disease” that was eating away at the country’s morale and undermining the confidence of the people, who were living in “hopeless despair” and had developed a bitter attitude towards established institutions. The problem wasn’t seasonal and couldn’t be solved by emergency measures. In many ways, Cassidy indicated, the dole was preferable to the wasteful and inefficient system of municipal make-work. Cassidy’s statistics on industrial unemployment were the first to be published in Canada after three years of depression, and they were shocking. From a 1929 low of 2 per cent the jobless rate in Ontario had risen to a staggering 36 per cent.

  Nor were Cassidy’s solutions designed to give Bennett any comfort, for they would cost more money. Cassidy saw the problem as a national one, with Ottawa taking the major share of the responsibility and instituting a comprehensive and generous plan to deal with unemployment. Small wonder that Bennett ignored his report.

  Yet it was already apparent, by the spring of 1932, that the government’s relief policy wasn’t working. The provinces could not afford to subsidize any more public works, and so Bennett, who had roared into power by promising never to adopt the hated dole, was now forced to reverse himself and institute a policy of direct relief. He attempted to blunt the effects of that embarrassment by making the provinces and municipalities responsible for spending the money. Ottawa retained its hands-off policy.

  Under municipal management, spending continued to be niggardly, as the Red Cross discovered in Ontario. Those on relief received scrip or vouchers that allowed them to buy groceries – but only certain prescribed items. In one city, relief recipients weren’t allowed to buy tomatoes with their scrip; in another, spice
s and seasonings were excluded. Eggs were generally taboo, and in one city in the heart of the dairy district, milk was denied except to infants and invalids. Another town, using the government scale of relief allowances, preferred to earn a cent a quart on relief milk rather than pass the savings on to the jobless. One stingy community penalized families of more than five by holding them to a weekly spending allowance of twenty-five cents per person. If anyone earned more than a dollar a week, that sum was deducted from the family’s food allowance.

  Medical aid was almost non-existent. In one Winnipeg area, as James Gray pointed out in The Winter Years, one relief doctor served sixteen thousand patients, and there was no dentist. Gray and his family got vouchers for food, fuel, and rent only – nothing for tobacco, cigarette papers, toothpaste, razor blades, lipstick, face powder, aspirin, streetcar fare, or a haircut, let alone movies or newspapers. And, of course, any recipient seen at the racetrack was cut off immediately.

  With Cassidy’s research gathering dust on his desk, Bennett turned to another, more formidable social worker in the person of Charlotte Whitton, the full-time director of the Canadian Council on Child Welfare. He considered her “the most capable woman engaged in social welfare in the Dominion.” She was short and stubby, possessed of a caustic wit, a fiery temper, and inexhaustible energy – a “young cyclone,” in the description of a friend.

  Whitton was a woman with a mission. There was a bulldog set to her features and a bulldog tenaciousness to her character. Social workers were a new presence in Canada, and she was determined to make that presence a powerful one. The best way to achieve the goal was to wrest control of the relief machinery from the bureaucrats and turn it over to professionals like herself. To that end she proposed to the Prime Minister that she take three months off from her job and study unemployment relief in the West. She was convinced that untrained political hacks were costing the government millions through waste and inefficiency and that large numbers of people – long-term indigents, for example – were getting money specifically earmarked for Depression relief that ought to come out of another pocket.

  This is what Bennett wanted to hear; it wasn’t lack of government money, as Cassidy had suggested, that was causing the problem, it was the way the money was handled. The Prime Minister gave his enthusiastic consent, whereupon Whitton immediately set off on a whirlwind tour that, in three months, covered no fewer than eighty-five separate communities with names like Pipestone, Aneroid, Yellow Grass, Blairmore, Sicamous, Comox, Alert Bay, Gimli, and Dauphin. She scarcely stopped to draw breath as she hustled from one community to the next, jaw set, brows knit, fiery red hair trimmed by the barber’s scissors, questioning, questioning, questioning in her raspy voice and scratching it all down in her notebooks. Years later, she would bring that same unsparing vigour to her several tempestuous terms as mayor of Ottawa.

  Whitton had planned a short holiday in British Columbia but cancelled it because, as she told the Prime Minister, “I found things too upsetting, and demanding too much intensive effort to lose any time.” Reading her lengthy letters, written in flowing longhand, Bennett must have had some cause to regret his optimistic New Year’s Day remarks, for she wrote: “I do not think that the East, blue as it feels, has any conception of what has happened and is happening financially in these western provinces.”

  In Winnipeg, she reported, “things are bad and getting constantly worse.” Sixty new families a day were applying for relief, bringing the total to 5,670 when she arrived on June 16. The city was also caring for 3,200 homeless men and the “homeless girl problem is growing even worse than normal.” The transient problem, she warned Bennett, was “getting out of hand.” Whitton estimated that there were more than one hundred thousand roaming about Canada, and it concerned her that “a better class is joining them daily, and giving them leadership and organization.” The federal government must take hold, she wrote, “and ‘beat’ anyone else to organization.”

  Again and again she hammered home her point – that because local relief spending was handled incompetently and carelessly, money could be saved if the federal government took over. “The more I see … of politics in the West the more I think there is danger as great in provincial relief.… What is bothering me is that all the West through there is impatience and annoyance that there is no ‘federal lead’.”

  On the boat north from Victoria to Prince Rupert, she used her spare time to butter up the Prime Minister. She had risen at 6:30 on a cold morning, she wrote, to hear him open the Imperial Economic Conference in Ottawa. “Your splendid address came through wonderfully well, your voice was vibrant, strong, and unmistakeably young.… I could almost imagine the out thrust chin and frowning intensity which accompanied that delivery.… I got great pleasure out of some of those very neat phrases … that ‘driving clear channels through the stagnant streams’ of our trade was particularly happy.” It was hard to imagine the conference failing, she told him, “with you in the chair, and all the people through the West hanging suspended to this meeting as the force that will ‘bring us round the corner’.” Whitton’s flattery would prove as unavailing as Mrs. Bleaney’s predictions to Mackenzie King.

  Obeisance paid, Whitton got down to facts. British Columbia, she reported, was in confusion. The government, knowing it was doomed in the following year’s provincial election, had ceased to function and was breaking up. The municipalities were desperate. She forecast riots in Port Alberni where “people were actually without food.” Vancouver was facing a serious financial crisis. “The provincial crew … are trying to make ‘Ottawa’ the goat,” she told him; but the public wasn’t buying that, and “every effort in this direction only enhances your prestige.” Again she belaboured her one theme: there was “no central authority, plan or leadership within the provincial group.”

  She did not tell him then – she saved it for her later report – of the graft and patronage that accompanied the setting up of relief camps for transient men in British Columbia. By shifting its responsibilities onto the shoulders of the province the federal government had invited trouble. British Columbia was fertile ground for boondoggle, corruption, and impropriety, and there was no lack of examples. The relative of one cabinet minister received an annual rent of seven thousand dollars when his property was used for a relief camp. In Mission, 104 carpenters were put on the payroll at four dollars a day each; an investigation revealed that all the work was done by four men. The government bought lumber from “friendly firms” at more than double the going rate. Tools had to be ordered by the dozen when only one or two were needed because “they did not break up the lot.” The big logging companies had offered to rent their own well-equipped camps at low rates, but the province refused. One lumber company executive of long experience told Whitton that he had never seen such “graft, extravagence [sic] and exploitation” as existed in the provincial camps. All this disturbing evidence supported her original thesis.

  Whitton’s two-hundred-page report, written on her return, was predictable. Left in the hands of the provincial and municipal authorities, the relief system was in a mess – “potentially in Western Canada there could be nearly 1100 systems of relief.…” The ablest people in public life, she wrote, were at the federal level, the least able at the municipal; yet the most serious problem facing the country had been left to be administered by inexperienced municipal personnel who “would never be considered by even a small business for any responsible position calling for vision, energy and executive ability.…”

  In one eloquent passage, she provided some insight into the psychological trauma of applying for unemployment relief. She wrote of “the overbearing ignorance, abrupt roughness, discourtesy and general lack of consideration with which the unemployed are received in only too many relief offices; the dark, dingy, ramshackle quarters in old firehalls, basements, ramshackle buildings, etc., into which men and women must crowd and wait, often in long queues, standing against walls, herded indiscriminately; the routine mass
treatment accorded the weary, unending, often ‘haggard’ lines can only darken despair already deep and desolate; can only wear down pride and self respect already endangered; can only lead to bitter, brooding resentment and determination to ‘beat the system’ that allows such things.”

  Yet Charlotte Whitton was convinced that thousands were beating the system and getting relief to which they weren’t entitled. In her determination to convince Bennett that money could be saved by social workers at the federal level, she over-reached herself. To support her claim that local officials were inept, she estimated that an astonishing 40 per cent of those getting direct unemployment relief either didn’t need it or could be helped by other, more conventional means.

  In Whitton’s remarkably callous view, no one should be given the dole unless it could be proved that his or her needs were a direct result of the Depression. Unemployed women of middle age who had never been steadily employed fitted her standard of ineligibility. “They present a problem at any time that should rest primarily upon local resources.” Deserted wives and single girls should be taught housework. Women on mothers’ allowances did not “form a justifiable charge.” The same was true of seasonal workers – trappers, farmers, and miners, especially in areas such as Cape Breton that had been depressed before the Depression. She conceded that their situation was pitiable but not “justifiably chargeable to direct relief.”

  Whitton revealed her own Calvinist outlook (or paraphrased Bennett’s) when she wrote that there was less need for relief in the small towns and rural villages, where “life is characterized generally by a thrift and resourcefulness that has been a real factor in the sturdiness of Canada generally.” Unless it could be proved that a real emergency existed “there is grave danger of undermining the self reliance of what has always been perhaps the sturdiest group in the national character.”