The Great Depression Page 23

  MISSIONARY RISKS DEATH BY

  PLUNGE IN BLOOD RED LAKE

  TO CHALLENGE VOODOO MYTH

  Or his florid account of his arrival in New Guinea: “Tribal tom-toms throbbed through New Guinea’s damp hills today and hundreds of savage eyes stared from behind giant jungle ferns as our sea-going coffee grinder loaded deep with gold miners, airplanes, cows, dynamite and one lone thrill-seeker slipped inside the great coral reef which spreadeagles the island.…”

  A few days later, Canadians learned that one of Sinclair’s colleagues, Pierre Van Paassen, had run afoul of the Hitler regime and that the Star had been banned in Germany. In spite of the Depression, it was becoming harder and harder to ignore the stories from abroad – and harder to get at the truth.

  The spill-over from the new Europe also made domestic news. Canadian fascist parties were on the march, singing anti-Jewish songs in the Beaches area of Toronto, raising the swastika in that city’s Willowdale Park, and provoking wild scenes that in one case involved ten thousand people. In Montreal in September, fifteen hundred fascists tried to break up an anti-clerical rally, and in Winnipeg, two days later, the Nationalist Party of Canada announced its formation to fight communism “tooth and nail” and to abolish all provinces in favour of a central government. The party soon showed its true colours by adopting the Hitler brown-shirt uniform, complete with swastika, and the Nazi salute.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt was also making headlines, having launched his first term as U.S. president with an energy and imagination that contrasted with the retrograde policies of both R.B. Bennett and Mackenzie King. The parsimonious King was outraged at the amount of money being spent in Canada on relief – “an orgy of public expenditure,” he called it, charging that the Tories were “running wild with the taxes of the people.” King forced Bennett to limit the amount to be spent on direct relief to twenty million, except in cases of emergency. Bennett used that concession to sneak the “peace, order and good government” clause back into the relief act. It passed because nobody wanted to be seen opposing direct relief. Thus, the immigration department was again able to “shovel out” undesirables without resorting to formal legal procedure.

  Bennett’s brother-in-law William Herridge, Canada’s minister to Washington, was enthusiastic about Roosevelt’s innovations. He urged Bennett to start a public works program that might tie in with the reciprocal trade agreement the Prime Minister favoured. Bennett declined. When a Toronto sociologist urged that the government follow Roosevelt’s lead and establish a board of economic stabilization, he got a blunt rebuff. Bennett wanted no part of that; Canada, he declared, was “not going to try to keep up with the Jones’,” a phrase that hints at the Prime Minister’s contempt for major spending, even when the future of the country was at stake. It was more important to balance the budget.

  Bennett had seen a high-tariff policy as the economic salvation of the country. Mackenzie King, on the other hand, believed that Bennett’s tariff increases would strangle trade. Both were looking back to an earlier era. The new Liberal policy announced that spring included reducing the cost of government and – as always! – balancing the budget. If trade barriers were reduced, the Liberals believed, the resultant profits would make up for the federal cheese-paring. Price fixing was to end; the Combines Investigation Act was to be rigorously enforced; the Criminal Code was to be strengthened to deal with monopolies. For these worthy goals they were suggesting band-aid remedies. There were other, vaguer pledges. To “revive” industry in order to provide jobs was one. Another was to form a national non-partisan commission to administer all federal monies with the co-operation of the provinces and municipalities. The most sensible promises were enactment of a system of unemployment insurance and establishment of a central bank to control credit.

  Both political leaders were still taking their cues from Great Britain rather than from the United States. Indeed, it remained hard for Canadians to think of themselves as citizens of the Commonwealth and not the Empire, especially when Bennett reintroduced the practice of conferring titles on the famous or well-to-do. When Noel Coward’s motion picture Cavalcade came to Canada it was promoted as “The Motion Picture Industry’s Salute to the Great British Empire.” The general attitude towards Americans remained faintly snobbish, as Bennett’s “keeping up with the Jones’ ” remark suggests – a hint there of the vulgar, free-spending nouveau riche. (Bennett, a poor Maritime boy who inherited a fortune, didn’t think of himself in those terms.) Thus Franklin Roosevelt’s vigorous attempts to deal with the Depression, especially through the National Recovery Act, were viewed with suspicion and even horror by a section of the Canadian establishment.

  “I dread the thought of what may come out of the U.S. experiment,” King wrote in his diary in September. “I am beginning to think Roosevelt is a little like Bennett in his outlook, methods, etc.” Coming from someone who had that year categorized the Prime Minister as “a dog of a man … a brute in his instincts,” that was strong stuff, especially from one who would later revel in his role as a confidant of the American president. A month later King was confiding to his diary: “I am beginning thoroughly to dislike the man [Roosevelt] as a dictator whose policies are absolutely wrong – amateurish, half-baked & downright mistaken.”

  What King feared was “the mad desire to bring about state control & interference beyond bounds.” It made him shudder, he wrote; and he shuddered again that month when Raymond Moley, a member of the Roosevelt “brains trust,” outlined the NRA program to a conference on Canadian Banking and Money Policy. King noted that Moley’s speech made his “blood run cold.”

  In his years in Opposition, the former prime minister had more time on his hands to indulge in his fascination with the occult. This did not make headlines. In fact, no whisper of King’s encounters with the supernatural ever reached the public. These were gentler times. The press was discreetly incurious about the private lives of public men. The Prime Minister’s excursions into the spirit world undoubtedly served a very real need. He was a lonely bachelor whose closest friend was probably his little dog, Pat, on whom he lavished all the care and concern usually reserved for small children. When Pat was ill, King was despondent; when he rallied, King was delirious with joy. There is a charming, if somewhat saccharine, description in his diary of the two of them, man and dog, kneeling together, hand in paw, at the side of the bed, heads bowed, saying their goodnight prayers. Did the dog actually pray, paws on coverlet? King apparently believed he did.

  Joy Esberey in her psychological biography of King has written of his constant need for reassurance. He sought the security of his “loved ones,” the dear departed who spoke to him through the mouths of his mediums, who now included Mrs. Etta Wriedt of Detroit. A woman of international reputation, at least in spiritualist circles, she visited him several times during his years in Opposition. “The more I see of her the greater my admiration for her is,” he wrote, “a quite exceptional type of unselfish, high minded person, managing alone in the world with wonderful energy and independence.”

  No doubt she was. Perhaps she really believed she was talking to the shades of his relatives and friends, even when the prophecies they made were dead wrong. Indeed, most of the time the voices that issued from her lips merely served to confirm King’s own views, prejudices, and purposes.

  By the end of the year, King and his closest human friend, the ever available Joan Patteson, found they were able to talk to the spirit world without the intervention of a medium, first through the rather awkward method of the ouija board, which answered either yes or no to previously posed questions or laboriously spelled out messages from the Beyond. Later they took up the practice of “table rapping,” seated at a table with hands touching, while the table rapped out answers to questions.

  King first encountered this phenomenon at the home of Dr. Arthur Doughty, the Dominion Archivist. It was, he wrote later, “an amazing evening.” He did not know, of course, that the table-rapping craze
had been hatched as a hoax by two teenaged sisters in Rochester, New York, in 1848. The sisters’ secret was simple: they had double-jointed toes that cracked out convincing messages underneath the table. But King, who had received communications via the table from his mother, father, brother, and sisters, was totally convinced that “there can be no shadow of doubt of their genuineness.”

  Apart from his dog and the ghosts of his loved ones, King preferred the company of women. He was obviously heterosexual and made no secret, at least to his diary, that he enjoyed the sight of pretty girls in bathing costumes. After walking with friends along the beach of a lake in Manitoba one hot July afternoon, he commented approvingly on the spectacle. “Saw ladies in bathing – naked legs – am beginning to see beauty & truth in bare limbs & to overcome prejudice re covering up what Nature & God has given us.”

  He was an enthusiastic member of the audience at the Minto Follies, an ice show given each year in Ottawa. “A wonderful exhibition like the old Greek days,” he wrote. “There was no attempt to disguise bare legs. In that particular the exhibition was perfect. One wonders if we do not make a mistake in concealing natural beauty & help to create wrong ideas by so doing. I feel that it has been so in my life.… I am beginning to change my views in favour of the young people of today in some respects.…”

  The following day his diary returns to that theme. “Thinking of last night’s performance, I see more & more clearly what I have sacrificed in not having married long ago & having children growing up around me … someone helping me in my home & entertaining etc & others ‘keeping me young’ & interested in young and new ideas.”

  But then another, contrary thought crossed his mind – a typical vacillation, for King could not consider, let alone pursue, any plan, personal or political, without chewing it around the edges, like a dog worrying a bone. “Still,” he wrote, “there might have been with that cares and anxieties and expenses which would have made public life impossible.” It did not appear to occur to him that other men in public life – his great hero, Laurier, was one – had managed to cope with cares, anxieties, expenses, and even mistresses. But King, in private life, as in public, was notoriously close with a dollar.

  He could easily have married. He was highly eligible and there were plenty of suitable women who would have jumped at the chance. One of these was his old friend Julia Grant, a president’s granddaughter. Her marriage, to Prince Cautacuzene, an Italian nobleman, was breaking up, and she had leaped enthusiastically the previous year into a correspondence with the bachelor of Kingsmere. She was a stylish and articulate woman who had published two books on aristocratic life in pre-war Russia and Austria. For a time they exchanged letters or telegrams almost daily. (In one, King asked her, a little wistfully, if it were true that there were places in Paris where women danced in the nude.)

  At King’s suggestion, the princess paid a visit to his favourite medium in Detroit. The accommodating Mrs. Wriedt produced King’s mother, whereupon, so the princess told King, the voice from the void put the seal of approval on their relationship. Thus challenged, King managed to conjure up, unaided, a confused vision of his own. In it his mother appeared with a somewhat different message. “She was making clear to me,” he decided, “that carnal love was wrong, that it separated one from the divine & spiritual, and that what I have been experiencing was that.”

  The correspondence petered out and virtually ended at the close of the year when King wrote to warn the princess to expect few if any letters in the future because “it is necessary to concentrate all thought & energy & strength on public affairs from now on.” Though the two remained friends (the princess was divorced the following year) there was no hint of a closer relationship. The ghost of King’s sainted mother – or at least his interpretation of what that ghost signified – had triumphed once more. But then, the mother’s boy clearly wanted it that way.

  5

  The Regina Manifesto

  In mid-July, 131 delegates and some one hundred visitors arrived in Regina to attend the first convention of the newly formed Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, whose name indicates a certain confusion of purpose. It was a movement, certainly, but was it a political party? Not quite. It was still a loose coalition of the Left, and although its central ideology would be socialism, the men and women who marched under that banner represented a remarkable spectrum of political thought. Had the two capitalist parties – Liberals and Conservatives – decided to unite at a similar convention, the differences could have been no more pronounced.

  The farmers had a deep suspicion of the kind of state control that the socialists wanted to impose. The United Farmers of Alberta and their brother organizations in Manitoba and Ontario were no more than liberal reformers. On the far left, in British Columbia, was the Socialist Party of Canada, tinged with Marxism. On the far right, in Ontario, were the non-communist trade unions. Saskatchewan had its own socialist party, the Farmer-Labour coalition, committed to the principles of British Labour, organized around M.J. Coldwell, who would be Woodsworth’s successor. Edmonton had a “Canadian Labour Party.” The Eastern-based League for Social Reconstruction also had a Fabian counterpart on the West Coast, the Reconstruction Party of British Columbia, to balance the B.C. Marxists.

  The mucilage that held this uneasy amalgam together was the common agreement that the economic machinery was out of kilter, that the free enterprise system had failed, and that capitalism was no longer working for the people. In the interests of radical reform, these disparate groups were prepared to unite to change the existing economic, social, and political system. J.S. Woodsworth, who stood above the fray, would be the binding force. Without him, it’s hard to see how the CCF could have come into being so quickly or how the Regina Manifesto could have been accepted by everybody.

  The delegates came to Regina by passenger train and bus, some by boxcar, a few on foot, and others by Bennett buggy, the broken-down, horse-drawn automobile that more than any other artifact symbolizes the drought-ravaged years of the Great Depression. Eugene Forsey and King Gordon drove in from Montreal by way of Chicago, there being no Trans-Canada Highway in those days. Frank Scott made his way by the same route in an old Franklin touring car. With Harry Cassidy and Frank Underhill, these three were to become known as the “brains trust” of the convention, a popular title filched from the Roosevelt administration by George Ferguson of the Winnipeg Free Press and tied to the LSR.

  The title was accurate. At the very last moment, the procrastinating Underhill, scribbling away in his Muskoka cottage, had produced the historic document that came to be called the Regina Manifesto. Vetted by Cassidy, Scott, and the other members of the LSR, the four-thousand-word draft was read aloud to the assembly and then debated, clause by clause. According to Harold Laski, the guru of the British Labour Party, it was the best democratic-socialist manifesto ever produced.

  The document dealt with every aspect of change for which the new movement proposed to work. “Such an appeal to the intelligence of the people,” Frank Scott was to write, “has never before been attempted by any political party in this country. It is a venture in audacity that implies at least a profound faith in the attractiveness of the program itself.”

  To pilot such a document through the mishmash of social and political philosophies represented in Regina was an act of considerable finesse. But none could object to the ringing preamble, read out to the convention by its secretary, Norman Priestley, in a great booming voice:

  “We aim to replace the present capitalist system with its inherent injustice and inhumanity by a social order from which the domination and exploitation of one class by another will be eliminated, in which economic planning will supersede unregulated private enterprise and competition, and in which genuine self-government based upon economic equality will be possible.… The new social order at which we aim is not one in which individuality will be crushed out by a system of regimentation.… What we seek is a proper collective organization of our econ
omic resources such as will make possible a much greater degree of leisure and a much richer individual life for every citizen.…”

  The fourteen points of the manifesto proposed a system of social planning, public ownership at every level of government, the public encouragement of co-operative institutions, the nationalization of all financial institutions and health services, a steeply graded taxation system to pay for it all, security of land tenure for farmers, a labour code for industrial workers, a complete system of social insurance, the abolition of the Senate, and a strengthening of federal power to allow Ottawa “to deal effectively with urgent economic problems which are essentially national in scope.”

  The thunderous applause that followed Priestley’s reading of the first twelve points of the manifesto did not hide a determination on the part of some delegates to add to or subtract from it. Ernie Winch from British Columbia, in Eugene Forsey’s description “a dear old soul, a rip-roaring Marxist but the gentlest of men,” kept insisting with considerable force that a clause should be added to the manifesto supporting the idea of public nudism. That sent a chill down Forsey’s spine. “Can you imagine the Winnipeg Free Press headline?” he asked Winch, “J.S. WOODSWORTH GOES NUDIST!”

  “But,” Winch kept saying, “I admire the human form.” His colleagues persuaded him to curtail his enthusiasm, at least in public.

  William Irvine of the United Farmers of Alberta arrived at the convention fresh from the beginnings of his province’s honeymoon with the burgeoning Social Credit movement. He tried, vainly, to get some obeisance paid to that new if baffling philosophy in the manifesto. Other delegates stretched and pulled to put over their own points of view until, in Forsey’s words, “the whole thing seemed on the verge of breaking up over and over again.” The British Columbia contingent, “more Marxist than Marx,” despised the communists because they weren’t orthodox enough. The United Farmers of Ontario were terrified by the mildest socialist rhetoric. The word “party” was anathema to them. W.G. Good, who, with the formidable Agnes Macphail, represented the Ontario group, had already confided to Frank Scott his fear that the CCF would become a political party – which was, of course, the general plan. To the Progressives, also, again in Forsey’s words, “ ‘party’ was a dreadful, wicked, dirty word.” To the high-minded left-wingers it smacked of the kind of sleazy, backroom, ward-heeling politics they so bitterly resented. “Movement” – now there was a word! It had the ring of a crusade – people marching, trumpets blowing, banners flying high. But “Federation” would do, for that was the new CCF – a federation of farmers and working men, trade unionists, small-l liberals, Marxists, socialists, and Fabian intellectuals.