The Great Depression Read online

  Suddenly the concept of a new political movement gathered momentum, revolving around the spare, goateed figure of J.S. Woodsworth, the one man who had the confidence of all the disparate groups striving to form a new coalition of the Left. Critical mass was reached in less than six months – a remarkably short period in which to form a new party. In February, the League for Social Reconstruction was officially formed in Montreal and Toronto. That same month, the United Farmers of Alberta determined to organize a similar group in the West. In May, members of the Ginger Group of Farmer-Labour M.P.s met in Ottawa with some of the founders of the LSR to plan a “Commonwealth Party,” with Woodsworth as temporary president.

  On July 1, the UFA set the date and the place for its proposed meeting of left-wing organizations. It was to be August 1 in Calgary. Later that month, in Saskatchewan, provincial farmer and labour groups agreed to form a common front. Finally, the Western Labour Conference – the umbrella organization representing both labour and socialist parties in the four western provinces – switched its annual convention to Calgary to coincide with the UFA meeting.

  The West dominated the convention that followed, with the United Farmers of Alberta supplying the greatest number of delegates. The names of the organizations represented in Calgary show how fragmented was the democratic Left in Canada: the Canadian Labour Party, the Dominion Labour Party, the Socialist Party of Canada (British Columbia), the United Farmers of Canada (Saskatchewan), the Independent Labour Party of Manitoba, the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway Engineers, and the newly formed LSR. Individually, these splinter groups had little political clout. Bound together, they hoped to change the social and economic environment of the country.

  After a rousing public meeting in Calgary’s Labour Temple on Sunday, July 31, the delegates on August 1 got down to work. They represented a cross-section of the Left: fifteen farmers, twenty construction workers, two lawyers, six teachers, one miner, one professor, six housewives, three accountants, six railway workers, three journalists, two steam engineers, one hotel-keeper, one retired minister, one motion-picture operator, three nurses, two union executives, twelve working politicians, and nineteen jobless men and women.

  They chose a name and they chose a leader. The first was contentious, the latter foreordained. Of J.S. Woodsworth, an acerbic commentator in Maclean’s noted that “it can hardly be said that he is a politician, since no politician would handicap a new party with a descriptive label like Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation.” As usual, the establishment press failed to understand the significance either of the movement or of its name. As it turned out, the initials CCF fitted as easily into the headlines as “Grit” or “Tory.”

  The convention’s purpose was to form a federation to work for a socialist Canada, but not through violence or agitation in the communist style. Change would be effected through Parliament in the tradition of the British Labour Party. The details of the program would be laid out the following year in Regina in the form of a manifesto to be written with the help of the young intellectuals in the LSR. The human symbol of the movement would be the incorruptible Woodsworth, a man who cared for neither fame nor gain – perhaps the only party leader in Canadian history who was totally selfless.

  Woodsworth had been raised as a Methodist activist. His doctrine was the Social Gospel, which had swept the evangelical churches in the early years of the century. His personal credo could be summed up in his own words: “A curse still hangs over inactivity. A severe condemnation still rests upon indifference.… Christianity stands for social righteousness as well as personal righteousness.… We have tried to provide for the poor. Yet, have we tried to alter the social conditions that lead to poverty?”

  The slums of England, where Woodsworth had worked in his youth, and the All People’s Mission in the heart of Winnipeg’s immigrant district had politicized him. The Winnipeg General Strike made him a national figure. Jailed, tried, and acquitted of sedition, he emerged as the leader of the democratic Left.

  A skilled parliamentarian, he it was who had sparked the unemployment debate in the House that helped defeat Mackenzie King’s Liberals. He had waged an exhausting but eventually successful battle to establish the first divorce court in Canada – divorce having been as inflammatory a subject then as abortion in the 1980s. He had made an exhaustive study of unemployment insurance and argued vainly year after year for its establishment in Canada. He fought for civil liberties, bombarding the House with case histories of police brutality, suppression of human rights, invasion of privacy, and unwarranted deportation.

  They called him a Red, but he had no use for the shrill communists and for all of his life would keep them at arm’s length while fighting in and out of Parliament to allow them to state their views without interference. For that he got no gratitude. The communist Worker sneered at him as “the pacifist flunky of the ruling class.”

  He had visited the Soviet Union and had hobnobbed with the British Fabians, but his own brand of socialism was distinctively Canadian. “I believe that we in Canada must work out our salvation in our own way,” he was to say. “I am convinced that we may develop in Canada a distinct type of socialism. I refuse to follow slavishly the British model or the American model or the Russian model. We in Canada will solve our problems along our own lines.” He was a Canadian through and through. In those days the census takers insisted that all should list their racial origins, no matter how many centuries their forbears might have spent in Canada. Woodsworth stubbornly refused.

  He looked ascetic and frail, but he wasn’t. He was blessed with the inner toughness that is bestowed on those who refuse to veer one millimetre from the moral principles they set for themselves. “We are starting with not a dollar in the treasury,” he wrote that September, “– an immense task ahead.” He would not spare himself to meet it. In the year following the Calgary convention he would travel the country to rouse support, sleeping in nothing more luxurious than an upper berth to keep down expenses. Indeed, he sometimes sat up all night in a day coach rather than pay for a sleeping-car. He was prepared to go to any lengths to spread his political gospel, which, to Woodsworth, was the Christian gospel. He talked to brakemen and conductors on the trains and he talked to housewives in their kitchens, often helping them with their chores. As his Marxist son-in-law, the lanky West Coaster Angus MacInnis, once remarked: “If J.S. heard of three Eskimos in the Arctic Circle who wanted a meeting, he’d be off to them on the next train.”

  In the twelve-month period following the Calgary convention, Woodsworth, in spite of his heavy parliamentary schedule, managed to make two hundred speeches and give innumerable press interviews. In those despairing years, he was the conscience of Canada.

  5

  An attempt at political murder

  Having exhausted their appeals, Tim Buck and his seven Communist comrades began to serve their terms in Kingston Penitentiary on February 19, 1932. Buck would always remember that first day. Joined by six hardened criminals including the notorious bank robber Mickey McDonald, they were lined up before the acting warden, Gilbert Smith, who told them: “Having been convicted of a criminal offence you have no rights. You are not a person in the eyes of the law.” Smith then read off the penitentiary’s list of rules – twenty-two don’ts. “Repression,” Buck later wrote, “seeped out of every one of them.”

  Then Smith asked Buck to identify himself.

  “So you’re Buck. Now I want you to understand that what I’ve been saying is only part of what could be said. We have the means here by which to tame lions and you don’t look to me very much like a lion.”

  “I never pretended to be …” Buck started to say, but the warden cut him off.

  “Silence!” he shouted. A guard seized Buck by the arm and repeated, “Silence!” At length the Communist leader was allowed to speak. He asked for reading material to be sent to him but was told he must first read the prison library’s five thousand books. He asked if he could order some biographies; that
was refused. He asked if he could subscribe to Hansard, the record of the House of Commons debates; that was turned down because the superintendent of penitentiaries said there were “too many radical speeches in it.” Sometime later he was denied permission to buy books in German for language study because “German is the language of your so-called Communist International.” When Buck asked permission to study French, he was told, “You don’t live in Quebec. The answer is no.… You’re asking to study French in the hope that you’ll be able to use it for agitation and for the fomenting of unrest.”

  Conditions in Kingston Penitentiary at that time were close to medieval. That was the word William Withrow used to describe the philosophy of those who ran the institution. Withrow, a convicted abortionist, was released late in 1929 after serving three years. By the time Buck and the others were incarcerated, Withrow had embarked on a campaign to change a situation so evil as “to make the very imps in hell weep.” His tireless crusade for penal reform helped bring about the famous Archambault Royal Commission that looked into penitentiary conditions later in the decade.

  A few months after Buck was imprisoned, Withrow told a United Church men’s club, “… there are political prisoners in Kingston today, men whose only crime is opposition to those in power.… These men are no different from you and me and yet they are kept in dungeons, damp and dirty, that would not be used to hold cattle.”

  The wretched conditions that Withrow had experienced were exacerbated now by overcrowding – a direct result of the Depression. In 1929, twenty-seven hundred convicts were held in federal penitentiaries. Three years later, a wave of bank robberies, thefts, burglaries, and other acts of violence brought on by poverty and desperation had boosted the population to more than four thousand.

  By 1932, Kingston Penitentiary was in a state of tension. In addition to the major complaints – the execrable food, the lack of exercise (only fifteen minutes a day in the “bullpen” and no recreational games), the ban on verbal communication, and the barbarous corporal punishment – there was a host of minor irritants.

  It was a misdemeanour, for instance, to be found with a newspaper. Although small quantities of tobacco were issued, cigarette papers were not; the convicts were forced to use toilet paper to roll their own. During their entire prison term, inmates were allowed only one approved visitor. On these occasions a guard was interposed between the two, making private conversation impossible. Correspondence was heavily censored and so were magazines.

  If a man made a request to the warden he could be sent to the “Prison of Isolation,” which the inmates called the Hole. Here, in a cell situated halfway below ground with the windows painted over, he existed on porridge, bread, and boiled potatoes and was allowed no exercise. Electric light from a naked bulb was turned on for a brief hour or half-hour at meal times only. One convict, John O’Brien, endured these conditions for a year.

  Any inmate who stepped out of line could be sentenced to ten or twenty blows with a hideous instrument known, euphemistically, as the Paddle – so called, no doubt, to convince the general public that the punishment was no worse than a mild slap on the bottom of a recalcitrant child. The reality was that the prison authorities were using physical torture as a means of discipline and brutal revenge.

  The offender was laid face down on a table, his arms and legs stretched out tightly – as on a rack – and strapped together. Another strap, cinched around his body, made the slightest movement impossible. He was blindfolded so that, in Withrow’s words, “he must not see his castigator and besides, things are harder to bear in the darkness.”

  The Paddle itself was a thick strap, three feet long, with a wooden handle. Diamond-shaped holes were cut in the material, which was sometimes soaked overnight “the more effectively to mutilate the victim.” When the Paddle was applied to the naked buttocks, the skin was sucked through the holes. Withrow claimed that only a few of the guards were selected to do this brutal work. “We knew them. They were vicious through and through. It was said they enjoyed this cruel pastime.… Oh! The pain and the anguish! Oh! The bruising and the bleeding! Smack! Smack! Smack! Bruises and blood. Ten blows! Fifteen! Twenty! The guard uses all the force of his strong arms.”

  Withrow estimated that 10 per cent of the prison population was beaten annually in this way. He recounted stories of prisoners who were tortured every few days, carried from the table limp and unconscious, and thrown on the floor of the Hole to recover as best they might.

  His description of these conditions differed markedly from that of justice minister Hugh Guthrie. Guthrie later declared in the House, “… there is nothing brutal about it. What the prisoners resent is the indignity of it; they will tell you so.… They strap children in school. My mother used to strap me at home – yes, and in the same place they strap the prisoners … as far as the records of Canadian penitentiaries disclose there is no record of any injury, any skin broken, or any blood flowing.…” But then, one might ask, would any prison official have put it on the record?

  On October 17, matters came to a head at Kingston as a result of a series of “kites” (clandestine messages) circulated among the prisoners. What was later called a riot was really a sit-down strike. At three that afternoon, the inmates decided to walk out of the shops and engage in a peaceful demonstration to impress the officials with the need for redress of their complaints. In particular, they wanted more recreation and a regular issue of cigarette papers. Warden Smith got wind of their plans and locked them in. A group in the mailbag shop threw a hose out the window, climbed down it, and burned the locks off the doors with an acetylene torch.

  In the confused accounts of what happened next, several points stand out. Tim Buck, who had originally opposed the sit-down strike as unproductive, continually urged caution, and warned the strikers against violence. He advised them to stay out of the yard and go instead to the South Dome. When the warden refused to negotiate and brought in a detachment of soldiers, who began shooting, Buck was asked by the strikers to reason with Smith. “No agreement! No agreement!” Smith told him. “These men have committed a crime and you’re the one who’s responsible, Buck.” To which Buck replied, “Well, we can also discuss that later but in the meantime it seems to me the most important thing is to get the soldiers to stop shooting before panic sets in among these men.” To that, Smith grudgingly agreed.

  That, in effect, ended the “riot” before it became a riot. The men returned peacefully to their cells. Smith promised to recommend a public investigation, adding a pledge that no one would be punished until he received a fair hearing and that the men could return to work the following day. Smith was not allowed to keep his pledge.

  Over the next two days, the penitentiary was relatively quiet. But a spirit of revolt was simmering. It was thoughtlessly encouraged by Major-General D.M. Ormond, the superintendent of penitentiaries, who arrived from Ottawa on the morning of October 20 to conduct an inquiry into the disturbance. The Archambault Royal Commission later described Ormond as “arrogant … deceitful [and] dictatorial,” and on this occasion he certainly lived up to those adjectives. He refused to listen to any delegation of prisoners, insisting on the old army rule that complaints must be made individually. He refused to allow cigarette papers to be distributed. He banned the periods of daily exercise that Smith had promised. He called out the militia to back up the prison guards, who were issued rifles, revolvers, and shotguns. Acting Warden Gilbert Smith would be relieved of his duties two days later.

  Work became impossible. Confined to their cells without supper, the men began rattling their tin cups against the cell bars and shouting until the din in Cell Blocks C and E was overpowering. Cell Block D, where Tim Buck was held, was relatively quiet.

  Around five in the afternoon, Buck heard more shouting, apparently coming from E and C blocks and the Prison of Isolation. It was later revealed that officers or guards were firing through the peepholes into cells occupied by prisoners, even though there was no danger that these
men could escape or cause injury. In the Prison of Isolation, a convict named Price, hit in the shoulder by a bullet, was left in his cell without medical attention or food for twenty-two hours. An inquiry later reported there was no justification for this neglect.

  D Block remained quiet. About eight in the evening, Buck could hear more shots being fired. Suddenly, somebody at the north end of the block shouted that the guards were coming over to D.

  “Duck, boys, they’re going to shoot here.”

  Buck was making up his bed. Somebody else shouted, “They won’t shoot in here, we’re not trying to escape.”

  At that moment, Tim Buck felt a sharp rush of air in his hair and the crack of a bullet overhead. He looked out of the window of his cell and saw, through the drizzling rain, a group of men in penitentiary oilskins on the lawn below. He caught a gleam of light on rifle barrels and immediately ducked for cover. Someone shouted that the guards were only firing blanks, but Buck warned: “Blanks nothing. You should see the inside of my cell.”

  Even as he spoke, a bullet whizzed past his left ear. Another struck a bar of his cell with a resounding wang. A third hit the wall between his cell and the doorway of the adjoining cell. A shotgun charge spattered the back of the cell.

  Political murder, officially condoned, had up to that time been unknown in Canada. But there isn’t the shadow of a doubt that a deliberate attempt was made on the night of October 20, 1932, to kill Tim Buck and that it was tacitly approved by the prison authorities and, at the very least, condoned by higher-ups in Ottawa. There had been no disturbance in his cell block, no damage to property, no hurling of trays or other objects as had happened elsewhere in the penitentiary. The shooting was not the work of a single, deranged individual but of a group of several guards who knew exactly what they were doing. As Woodsworth was to say many months later in the House, “There are nearly nine hundred prisoners in the penitentiary. How was it that the cell selected for the shooting was the one in which there was a Communist?”