The Great Depression Read online

  Some of the argot of the road – wino, junkie, punk, canned heat artist – has since entered the language. Sometimes the meaning has changed: a “dingbat” among the stiffs of the thirties was a man who was always dinging people on the street for a nickel for a cup of coffee. Generally he was arrested for vagrancy.

  Every town had its jungle, where, as Sherwin learned, the stiffs gathered to cook mulligan and exchange information. James Ealey, a teenager from Toronto’s Cabbagetown, had warm memories of the Montreal jungle on a hill near the St. Lawrence where some three hundred men regularly slept. Nuns from a nearby convent arrived each evening with stew, tea, and bread and returned each morning with muffins and porridge. The Toronto jungle was just north of the Prince Edward viaduct on the Dan-forth – a well-run camp in the charge of a committee of twelve, with whitewashed stones to mark the pathways between the shacks. Strict discipline was enforced, and the youngsters who swam in the Don River not far away were kept out of the area by the transients to protect them from molesters.

  The best hobo jungles were remarkably clean, with pails and cans for brewing tea or for washing clothes hanging neatly on the fence. Every jungle had a fireplace made of stones with boxcar brake irons on which to stand pots or perhaps a heavy stick, split from a barn door, with a wire attached to the end for the cooking pail. Canned heat (Sterno) was the universal stimulant, especially for the older hoboes. The pink jelly was strained through a sock and mixed with soda pop and water. Charles Sherwin would never forget the mountain of empty Sterno tins which greeted him when he first entered the Sudbury jungle, right in the heart of town.

  It was spectacles like these – homeless men living in shacks in the jungles, swarming aboard rattling freights, begging on the streets of the Western cities – that shocked the Chief of the General Staff, A.G.L. “Andy” McNaughton, when he crossed the country on a tour of military establishments late that summer. McNaughton was a man of considerable imagination and drive. An unconventional gunnery officer in the Great War, he had brought his scientific imagination to the problems of counter-battery work; as a result, his artillery had knocked out 70 per cent of the German guns just before the battle of Vimy Ridge. Now this lean and shaggy general, the best-known military man in the country, proceeded to devote his orderly mind to the problem of the single, unemployed transients.

  The waste of manpower galled him. The health and morale of tens of thousands of men – the very men who would have to fight the next war, if it came – were deteriorating to the point where he thought it doubtful if they could or would work again. Worse, they were increasingly susceptible to communist propaganda, and, in the General’s view, subversion. If they didn’t fight for their country they might easily be the storm troopers in a revolution McNaughton’s army would have to suppress. In 1932, the possibility of revolution didn’t seem so unreal. Here, the General concluded, was a situation that had all the makings of serious trouble for the future – and probably the near future at that.

  On the face of it, his solution was ingenious and sensible. It certainly appealed to R.B. Bennett, who seemed convinced that revolution was a real and present danger. At the opening of Parliament on October 6, Bennett leaned over to whisper to McNaughton that Cabinet was very much interested in his scheme. He asked for a detailed proposal and wanted it on his desk by half-past nine the following morning. To the enthusiastic General, who had planned more than one skirmish in less time, this was an acceptable deadline. He worked all night and produced the document as requested.

  McNaughton’s solution had two aims. It would get the men off the streets, out of the cities and out of sight, and, at the same time, it would improve their bodies and their minds by providing honest, useful work in a group of camps run by the military but not subject to army discipline. The scheme would be entirely voluntary. Men could enter the camps and leave when they pleased. They would be fed, clothed, and housed and would work on projects of national importance – building airfields and highways that had been postponed because of the Depression. In addition, they would be given twenty cents a day with which to buy cigarettes, toiletries, and other sundries.

  The camps, in effect, would be holding units to keep younger men in reasonable physical condition until they could find work. What could be more sensible, more generous, more exciting than a program “to build up morale through work, to proceed by persuasion and not by compulsion, and to do everything possible to facilitate the flow back of men to industry as soon as they should be mentally and physically fit and positions available”?

  Press, politicians, and general public exulted. The newspapers went overboard in praising the idea. The Winnipeg Tribune burbled that “the camps provide just such an outing as a young man’s heart should long for – an outdoor life, as a man among men, plenty of time for sport, and plenty of sport at hand.… They are enjoying life to the full; and work more eagerly than wellpaid workmen … there has been no evidence of any desire to depart. On the contrary, the boys are writing their unemployed friends to ‘come on in.’ ”

  This paean of praise was nation-wide. The British United Press declared that the plan “may be numbered among the most successful social experiments of the fight against depression.” The Halifax Mail described the program as “a veritable miracle of common sense expediency.” Reporters toured the camps and returned to portray them as a paradise on earth compared to the shiftless life previously endured by the occupants. “Life is made as congenial and pleasant as possible,” the Kingston Whig-Standard reported. “Good companionship is enjoyed … everything to provide ordinary comfort for the men is done.” The press did not report that their information came from camp officials only, that the men themselves were forbidden to talk to newspaper reporters.

  The newspaper emphasis was on the lack of army discipline and the voluntary nature of the scheme. As the Ottawa Journal put it, “men at these camps are free to come and go, do not wear a uniform, are fed well and comfortably housed, live under splendid conditions. There are few rules, no rigorous restrictions on their freedom of action, nothing approaching a military atmosphere. There is no punishment for violation of rules. If a man will not do his share of the work he is dismissed from the camp, and a report on his conduct goes to the relief authorities of his home community, but that is all.”

  What the newspapers left unsaid was that those who left camp for any reason were denied all further relief. Men either stayed or starved. Nor did the press understand that while the camps rejected military discipline, they held to military law, which made it difficult and dangerous to complain.

  But one group of men, living in a camp in Riding Mountain park, managed to smuggle out a letter that reached J.S. Woodsworth. He read portions of it to the House: “Picture to yourself a tarpaper shack 79 feet x 24 with no windows, along each side there is a row of double decker bunks, these are spaced off with 8 × 1 board so that there is room for two men in each bunk. The bunks are filled with straw and you crawl into them from the foot end. Along the front of the lower bunk a narrow board is placed upon which the men may sit. The place is very meagrely lighted and ventilation by three skylights.… So narrow is the passageway between the bunks that when the men are sitting on the bench there is scarcely room to pass between them. This shack … houses 88 men. There is a marked resemblance to a hog pen or a dog pound. At times the place reeks of the foul smell and at night the air is simply fetid. The floor is dirty and the end of the shack where the men wash … is caked with black mud. The toilet is thoroughly filthy, unsanitary, and far too small.”

  Woodsworth asked rhetorically why men would suffer such indignities and then supplied the answer. The camp was isolated – fourteen miles from the nearest railway. Stool-pigeons reported the slightest attempt at organization. There was intermittent surveillance by the RCMP and a general breaking down of morale.

  The press, which had been so enthusiastic about the camp scheme, played down or ignored Woodsworth’s remarks and the Canadian public continued to b
e lulled into believing that the problem of the homeless single men was on its way to solution. But Bennett, McNaughton, and those who planned the relief camps were not living in the real world. The “gift” of twenty cents a day was “slave wages” to those who had laboured for eight hours. That phrase would soon enter general parlance to bewilder and madden the Prime Minister, who never comprehended its meaning.

  The irony was that McNaughton’s scheme for staving off revolution had the seeds of revolution inherent in it. Within two years the camps that had been greeted with such applause would be known throughout the country as slave camps. In the end the program would prove another of the Bennett government’s disasters.

  4

  Restructuring the future

  In the hot, dry summer of 1932, when the main crop in the Palliser Triangle seemed to be Russian thistle, two significant gatherings caught the attention of the nation. The first, the Imperial Economic Conference held in July, got more coverage but accomplished very little. The second, the founding convention of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in Calgary, made fewer headlines but was of greater significance. The Ottawa conference looked back; the Calgary convention tried to chart the future.

  On July 18, every steamer in Quebec harbour sounded a welcome and the crowd that blackened the shores cheered hoarsely as the pride of the CPR, the Empress of Britain, fastest passenger liner in the world, nosed its white prow into the dockside. A formidable delegation was on board. It included half the members of the British Cabinet, two of whom – Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain – would be prime ministers later in the decade, and representatives of five of the nine British nations that would be at the conference.

  At that moment, Canada was at the centre of the British world – the old Empire and the new Commonwealth – and R.B. Bennett was the centre of the conference that followed. He was convinced that he was about to make good on his election promise to blast his way into the markets of the world. He wanted, if not free trade, at least a freer trade within the British sphere. That, in Bennett’s view, was the real path to prosperity.

  Press and public seized on the conference with all the yearning and fervour of a castaway who sees a wisp of smoke on the horizon. An American professor told R.J. Manion that he hoped “the conference might break the vicious cycle of the depression.” If the Empire led, he said, the rest of the world would follow. That pretty well summed up Bennett’s position. Stanley Baldwin, who looked the very image of the cartoonist’s John Bull, said the same thing as the ship arrived. “We believe,” he announced, “we can set an example to the whole world in breaking down obstacles to commerce … and so bring peoples safely through the tragic depression of recent times.”

  This was wishful thinking. Bennett’s own policies underlined the growing concern about American encroachment in the Canadian economy. By strengthening her ties with Great Britain and the Commonwealth, Canada might be able to ward off the American threat. The mercurial Canadian-born press baron Lord Beaverbrook, who would ride the hobby horse of Empire free trade all his life, saw in the conference the fulfilment of a dream, even though he could not attend because of an unfortunate breach with his long-time friend Bennett. (“How I longed to be there,” he sighed, in a later memoir.) It was Beaverbrook’s conviction that “the day of Empire unity had dawned” – the first step, he was convinced, towards an economic union in the British world.

  But the influential John Dafoe, the rumpled sage of Winnipeg, who had been to more than one imperial conference himself, was not going to settle for a narrow British zollverein on the Beaverbrook model. He intimated as much in the Free Press. Dafoe saw the British position as “a means of extending free trade within the Empire and as a stepping stone to enlarged free trade with the whole world.” Failure in Ottawa, he warned, would mean a political crisis in those nations responsible for that failure.

  In the crowded lobby of the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa that week, two hundred newspapermen from the British and world press joined the jostling, cosmopolitan throng – turbaned Hindus carrying briefcases; hard-eyed businessmen in eighty-dollar suits; stylish women on the arms of florid politicians; statesmen or would-be statesmen in striped pants and pearl grey vests to match their pearl grey hair. The air crackled with talk about Danish ham, Australian wool, Canadian wheat. As one observer noted, “more economics, statistics and monetary theory are being talked about in Ottawa at this moment than in all the other capitals of the world combined.”

  At the same time, in the same city, 576 shabbily dressed men and women were congregating in a newly whitewashed garage for the Workers’ Economic Conference, clearly sponsored (though clandestinely) by the outlawed Communist party. Most of the delegates, from every corner of Canada, reached the capital by riding boxcars or by hitchhiking, though one group of forty-five actually walked from Montreal. They slept for three days in the conference hall on tarpaulins padded with wood chips, and presented to the Prime Minister a familiar program that included a thirty-five-hour week with no reduction in pay, non-contributory unemployment insurance, the repeal of Section 98, and the release of Tim Buck and his colleagues from prison, all of which, in the briefest of confrontations, the Prime Minister rejected.

  The Imperial Conference accomplished very little more. Nobody wanted to make major sacrifices where protective tariffs were concerned. Each country, including Canada, wanted more than it was prepared to give. Twenty leading Canadian manufacturers were holed up in the Chateau, reportedly in a panic because they feared Bennett might give away too much. They needn’t have worried. In simple terms, the Canadian government wanted the mother country to continue the preference it was extending to Canadian imports and increase it by taxing all natural and processed foreign products that competed with imports from Canada. Britain was being asked to boost taxes on butter from Denmark and beef from Argentina in favour of Canadian products. Such a “stomach tax,” as it was called, was politically impossible.

  Canada offered considerably less. Bennett had promised to extend the free list and the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association provided a lengthy catalogue of goods that it announced it would be happy to admit from Great Britain without any protective tariff. On the face of it, this was a magnificent gesture of goodwill. But the British had not come unprepared; accompanying that delegation was a formidable group of trade and tariff experts who combed through the CMA’s list after Bennett presented it and began to hoot with laughter at such items as “hog de-hair-ers,” “Queen bees,” “herring de-boners,” and – most hilarious of all – an item described as “Mickey Mouse machines, for making noises of.”

  The list was a sham. Many of the items were unobtainable in either Canada or Great Britain; others were under patent in the United States and weren’t applicable. When the experts translated the impressive-looking array of free goods into dollars and cents, they discovered that the advantage to British exporters would not reach even one hundred thousand dollars.

  Another stumbling block to achievement was Bennett’s own abrasive personality. By turns intransigent and bombastic, he tried to impose his will on the men who ran the empire. According to Stanley Baldwin, Bennett “had a brainstorm every day which wiped out what he had agreed to the day before.” Baldwin then maliciously quoted a former Liberal minister’s characterization of Bennett: “He has the manners of a Chicago policeman and the temperament of a Hollywood film star.”

  The negotiations grew so ugly that, at one point, Bennett asked the Canadian Pacific to have a liner standing by to take the British home. That ultimate breach didn’t occur, but there’s no doubt that Bennett made a lifelong enemy of Neville Chamberlain, who complained at the outset of “Bennett’s very aggressive tone.” Chamberlain later declared that “most of our difficulties centred around the personality of Bennett. Full of high Imperial sentiments, he has done little to put them into practice. Instead of guiding the conference in his capacity as Chairman, he has acted merely as the leader of the Canadian delegation. In t
hat capacity he has strained our patience to the limit.” The breach between the two men was never healed. Chamberlain’s revenge came a few years later after Bennett had retired and was living in England. The name of the former prime minister was advanced as a candidate for a peerage. Chamberlain blocked it, and Bennett had to wait until Churchill was prime minister.

  As the bargaining and haggling in Ottawa “tolled the bell for the funeral of Empire solidarity,” to quote a disconsolate Beaverbrook, the moderate left wing of the Canadian political spectrum was preparing for a more modest gathering in Calgary. The launching of the new movement, in the words of its leader, J.S. Woodsworth, was “of far greater consequence to the future of Canada than the Imperial Economic Conference now in session in Ottawa; for while the Ottawa Conference is seeking to restore prosperity by adding a few patches to the disintegrating system of capitalism, the object of the Federation is fundamental social reconstruction.”

  The federation was, of course, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, which its founders insisted on calling a “movement” rather than a political party.

  The time was ripe. Since the days of the National Policy, few Canadians had seriously questioned the basis of the social and economic order that had seemed to work so well. Now it was apparent, especially in the West, that the government was not prepared to deal with the new crisis in any imaginative way. The country was in a ferment. The illegal Communist party, using a series of front organizations, had seized the initiative on the left, promoting hunger marches, farmers’ revolts, and industrial strikes. But the government was still talking as if old panaceas such as the protective tariff would solve the economic crisis. To the old-line parties, the horrors of a deficit were greater than the demoralization of unemployment.