The Great Depression Page 25

  It certainly had. As one railway employee put it, “he had a voice that made the pilot lights on your radio jump.” To Maude McLean, a Calgary housewife, it seemed “as if God had picked Mr. Aberhart and then prepared an audience for him in Alberta first as a religious leader and [later] as leader of the Social Credit movement.” Mrs. McLean was quite convinced that Aberhart’s arrival in Alberta and his subsequent career in the province were “the fulfillment of a Divine Plan.”

  Professor John Irving, a University of Toronto psychologist who interviewed scores of Aberhart’s supporters from those years, later wrote that “it is, perhaps, not surprising that the attributing to Aberhart the ‘special grace’ of ‘a man of destiny’ recurs in the interviews with the most ardent of his religious followers. For nearly a quarter of a century he had been widely known and enthusiastically accepted in certain quarters as ‘the greatest student of Bible prophecy in the world.’ Under these circumstances, some of his followers naturally found it easy, by a certain shift in the apocalyptic emphasis, to endow their leader with Messianic qualities.”

  Irving noted that many of his respondents referred to Aberhart as “Our Great Prophet,” “Our Beloved Leader,” “That Man of God,” “The Last Hope of Mankind,” or “That Heaven Sent Saviour” and that these were the most vocal proponents of the Social Credit movement. But Aberhart’s appeal went far beyond religion. He was literally loved – the word is not too strong – by thousands, many of whom had no ties with the evangelical movement. As his right-hand man and eventual successor, the quiet-spoken Ernest Manning, remarked, “You either believed he was right and followed him wherever he led, or you had nothing to do with him.” Among Aberhart’s followers were two prominent Christian Scientists, Wilson and Harry Southam, members of the colourful newspaper family and publishers of the Ottawa Citizen.

  As a platform speaker Aberhart had no rival. He would enter the hall to thunderous applause and walk slowly down the aisle, his progress impeded by well-wishers, talking to everybody who wanted to speak with him. Then, a mischievous grin on his face, he would mount the platform. As one farmer put it: “We felt he was the law – he was the only man who could give us a decent hope in the future – who could free us from the money barons of Eastern Canada. Who wouldn’t gather around a man like that? Who wouldn’t love him?” The fact that he was obviously sincere – disinterested as to personal gain or public office – enhanced his appeal.

  His platform technique, honed in his years as a lay preacher, ranged through all the emotions. Tears ran down his cheeks when he discussed the plight of the poor. But he could also get his audience laughing. He’d pull a letter from his pocket, wave it at the crowd, and say, “Listen folks, the Bible Institute just got this letter from one of our opposition – a big banker who lives in Eastern Canada. This banker expresses deep sympathy for me in this letter.… He writes ‘I understand Mr. Aberhart has lost his equilibrium completely, that he’s left Mrs. Aberhart and is living in a shack up in the mountains.’ ” The audience would roar with laughter at that and Aberhart would have them captive.

  As one farmer northeast of Calgary told Irving, “He appealed to us because he attacked the banks and mortgage companies really fierce. You should have heard the crowd applaud this part.”

  “Let’s knock on the door of an imaginary home,” Aberhart would say. “A dispossessed farmer’s wife comes to the door. Let’s ask her some questions. ‘How long have you lived here?’ ‘Twenty-five years.’ ‘Have you a car?’ ‘Oh, my, no. We ride in a wagon.’ ‘You have an electric refrigerator?’ ‘Oh, no, not even an ice box.’ ‘Would you like a car and a refrigerator?’ ‘I certainly would.’ ‘Have you been to Calgary lately?’ ‘Not for a year.’ ‘Would you like to go?’ ‘I certainly would and so would my children.’ ‘Would you be interested in a plan that would give you a car, a refrigerator and trips to the big city? Social Credit, without any cost to you individually, will give you all these.’ ”

  As soon as he adopted Social Credit, Aberhart began to add economic theory to his Sunday broadcasts. He knew he would have to tone down his biblical prophecies if he was to enlarge his audience. One trick to prevent non-believers from turning off the radio was to weave the Social Credit philosophy into his religious demagoguery. If you were interested in one, you also got the other, but you had to hear the whole broadcast to get the full message.

  His target was the United Farmers of Alberta, who had held power since 1921. A pale shadow of the grassroots movement that had once galvanized the province (and established an Alberta tradition of unorthodox political behaviour that would help to legitimize the Social Credit movement), the UFA began to feel the heat of Aberhart’s attack. When people wrote to Aberhart asking what they could do, he urged them to “tell your legislature.” One petition, signed by twelve thousand Social Credit adherents, urged the UFA government to implement Social Credit principles.

  In spite of the fact that Douglas had denounced Aberhart’s Yellow Pamphlet as “fallacious from start to finish” (or perhaps because of it), the government was contemplating bringing the major to Alberta to discuss his theories. Meanwhile, using techniques perfected in his Bible study days, Aberhart had formed the Douglas Social Credit League, whose central committee was directly responsible to the Calgary Prophetic Bible Institute, which Aberhart headed and dominated. The league immediately set about establishing study groups across the province, as the Bible Institute had once done.

  Aberhart’s technique in conscripting members of his flock was described in detail to John Irving by Mary McCulloch, a Calgary housewife and rooming-house keeper who had been attending the Bible Institute for a year. In the fall of 1932, Aberhart asked those of his flock who were interested in Social Credit to raise their hands. These were asked to stay after the service. At that meeting, Aberhart asked one of his deacons to take names; Mrs. McCulloch’s headed the list.

  The following week, Aberhart called a meeting of the thirty followers whose names he had. They met weekly for several months at the institute while Aberhart explained Douglas’s economic philosophy, or at least his version of it. As Mrs. McCulloch put it, “I was sure hit with the Social Credit bug. Aberhart boiled the books on it down so anybody could understand it.… He was a wonderful teacher.… I’ve never seen people study the way he made us.”

  One night Aberhart told them, “We’d better organize and get out and tell everybody in Calgary about Social Credit. Who will help?” Each person was assigned to a district, and again Mrs. McCulloch took the lead. She organized twelve study groups in the Victoria school district where she lived, bustling around to all her friends and neighbours and keeping in constant touch with them by telephone. Soon the crowds became so large that the houses in which they’d started could not hold them, and they were all forced to move as a single unit to the Labour Temple.

  Mrs. McCulloch neglected her rooming house for Social Credit work. Her front room became an office, piled high with the movement’s literature, which she sold all over her district. She ran such a formidable organization that she had no trouble garnering eight thousand signatures on a petition to the government. At the Calgary Stampede in July, each of Mrs. McCulloch’s twelve groups rode in the parade in cars with their names on the side – to the applause of the onlookers. Ironically, R.B. Bennett led the procession and, she insisted, “could hardly believe his eyes when all our Social Credit cars rolled by.”

  There were dozens like Mary McCulloch, driven to proselytize through Aberhart’s study groups. As she said, “We really took over the city.… I don’t think we missed any street or block.… We were everywhere. Everybody wanted to get into a group and find out what it was all about.”

  In Calgary alone, there were eventually sixty-three Social Credit study groups. In the province as a whole there were sixteen hundred. Aberhart’s trained speakers were everywhere, organizing and lecturing. Some devoted all their working hours to spreading the word – men such as A.B. Hickox, a chicken rancher east of Del
burne, who quit his ranch to work without pay for the movement. Hickox made thirty-five speeches and organized the entire district between Red Deer and Rocky Mountain House, then plunged into a speaking tour of the Peace River area, making as many as five speeches a day over a five-month period. As a result he had “that whole country talking Social Credit.” So eager were the crowds to hear him that one audience waited patiently until he arrived very late, long after midnight. As he put it, “people were simply mad for Social Credit.”

  And yet, as the year wound down, Social Credit was not a political party and didn’t act like one. Aberhart was not a politician – at least not in the old-fashioned sense. His task as he saw it was to force the Social Credit philosophy on the established order. But control of the events that he had set in motion were now out of his hands. Bible Bill was about to have greatness thrust upon him.

  1934

  1

  The seditious A.E. Smith

  2

  Radio politics

  3

  Harry Stevens’s moment in history

  4

  The year of the locust

  5

  Pep, ginger, and Mitch

  6

  The Pang of a Wolf

  7

  Slave camps

  1

  The seditious A.E. Smith

  The usual New Year’s fanfare heralding the end of hard times (“LOW POINT OF DEPRESSION REACHED IN FEBRUARY LAST YEAR, SAYS OTTAWA EXPERT”) was scarcely off the front pages before the Prime Minister found himself in hot water in Vancouver.

  With eight thousand families on relief in that city and more than forty thousand on the verge of financial collapse, Bennett, queried by a reporter on the question of the Dominion’s public debt, was so incautious as to reply: “If you want to know who is responsible for all this debt, look at yourself in the mirror when you are shaving tomorrow. There are people who say let’s spend more money, well and good, but where is the money coming from? Where is the spirit of our pioneers who tilled our soil and worked in your forests? Did they go to the government whenever they wanted anything? They did not ask governments to be a wet nurse to every derelict.”

  In vain, the Prime Minister tried to backtrack and insist that he had meant to say “every derelict industry.” The Vancouver Sun, in full voice, flayed Bennett for using “a cruel and contemptible description to flaunt in the faces of men and women who are looking for some plan or economy that will enable them to do something and to whom the dole is a heart-breaking shame and disgrace.” The Sun, a populist newspaper owned by the brilliant if erratic Robert Cromie, then put its finger on what was generating the growing criticism of the Bennett regime. The so-called derelicts, it said, “have been betrayed by an economic system so vehemently defended by Mr. Bennett, which has always sacrificed the human structure to the money structure.”

  The following month the Prime Minister was further embarrassed by a court case in Toronto that was the direct result of another of his incomprehensible encounters with the radical wing of the dissident Left. The Reverend A.E. Smith, the founder of the Canadian Labor Defense League, a communist organization, was charged with sedition. The evidence suggested – and a good many people believed – that the charges were trumped up and the court case was another attempt to silence Smith and his organization, which had been campaigning for the release of Tim Buck from Kingston and for a royal commission to look into penitentiary conditions in Canada.

  Smith had been able to gather an impressive 459,000 signatures on a petition demanding both an investigation into the attempted shooting of Buck and the repeal of Section 98 of the Criminal Code under which the eight Communists had been charged. In November 1933 he had brought a delegation to Ottawa to present the petition to Bennett. The Prime Minister was in his usual belligerent mood.

  “There will be no investigation into the shooting,” he told Smith. “There will be no repeal of Section 98. It is needed on the statute books. And finally” – in Smith’s account he began to pound his desk – “there will be no release for these men. They will serve every last five minutes of their sentences. That’s all there is to be said! Now get out!”

  Smith was undoubtedly nonplussed the following year to learn that Bennett himself had gone to Kingston for a half-hour visit with Norman “Red” Ryan, the notorious bank robber known as the Canadian Jesse James, then being touted as a model prisoner. Ryan, who was allowed extra privileges at Kingston, conned almost everybody from the prison padre to the Toronto Star into believing that he had reformed. “I was greatly impressed by what he said to me,” Bennett wrote to the Ryan family. “I can only say that his demeanour … and surroundings were calculated to stimulate him to renewed efforts of usefulness.” Ryan was paroled after serving one of the shortest life terms on record (eleven and a half years). He immediately returned to his old ways, staging hold-ups by night while making speeches and giving sanctimonious press interviews by day on his “reform,” until he was killed during an armed robbery of a liquor store.

  In spite of Bennett’s curt dismissal of Smith, the CLDL was a voice to be reckoned with. With the usual communist efficiency it had managed to sign up seventeen thousand paid members. Few were dyed-in-the-wool Marxists, but all wanted to contribute to the defence of those who they believed were being hounded for their opinions. The league had three hundred and fifty branches throughout Canada and, to this point, had distributed five million pieces of literature. It had organized demonstrations across the country protesting the imprisonment of the Communists and attacking Section 98.

  The CCF remained officially lukewarm. Woodsworth and his followers wanted nothing to do with the Communists or any form of united front; therein, they were convinced, lay political suicide. But they found it difficult to prevent members of the rank and file, and even some of the CCF clubs, from joining forces with the socialists’ traditional enemies.

  To Bennett, the CLDL’s campaign was a maddening development. He thought he had destroyed the Red monster by striking hard at the leadership. But the Communist party was hydra-headed. It was bitterly ironic that the very court case that he had used as a weapon against the dissidents was now being employed as a weapon against him. The imprisonment of Buck and his comrades under Section 98 had given the radical Left a cause for which to do battle and had won over thousands who had previously been neutral. As justice minister Hugh Guthrie admitted, even the churches were committed.

  After his Ottawa encounter with Bennett, Smith immediately launched a new attack – a play entitled Eight Men Speak, performed in the Standard Theatre in Toronto in conjunction with the Progressive Arts Club. Home-grown drama was an oddity in Canada. Even the fledgling Little Theatre Movement generally performed British or American plays. But this play dealt with events close to home – the Communist trials, conditions at Kingston, the attempt to murder Tim Buck, and the bloody climax of the Estevan strike. It played to a full house and was so successful that a second performance was planned. Before the actors could reassemble, however, the Toronto Police Commission banned the play as “distasteful.”

  Bennett asked for a copy of the script. On January 2 his secretary, Alice Miller, wrote to the Minister of Internal Revenue that the Prime Minister “thinks … appropriate action should be taken through the Attorney-General of the province to protect society against these attacks.…” Bennett was convinced once again that dissidents must be muzzled, that “the time has come when we must no longer allow Smith and his followers to spread propaganda of gross misrepresentation, deluding the people who they exploit.” He dragged out the familiar excuse that censors always use to justify their actions: “we should not permit liberty to degenerate into license [sic].”

  Prodded by Ottawa, the attorney general was not long in acting. The Strand Theatre on Spadina Avenue, which was planning to stage a second performance of the play, was told that if it did so it would lose its licence. The CLDL immediately sponsored a protest rally at Hygea Hall on January 17. Smith took to t
he platform to tell of the attempt to shoot Tim Buck and to describe his reception by Bennett. Then he charged the government with the attempted assassination of the Communist leader.

  “Was this an accident?” Smith asked. “Was not the government of the day to be held responsible?”

  In the audience that evening were three members of Police Chief Denny Draper’s Red Squad trying to write down everything that was said. None of them knew shorthand; the best they could do was to scribble certain abbreviated words and phrases in their notebooks. Nonetheless they produced a verbatim account of Smith’s speech, including these words: “I say deliberately that Bennett gave the order to shoot Buck in his cell in cold blood with intent to murder him.” The order, Smith was said to have declared, had come from Bennett through Hugh Guthrie to the penitentiary warden.

  Two weeks later, A.E. Smith opened his Toronto Star to find a front-page headline announcing that he had been charged with sedition “with the intention of spreading discontent, hatred and distrust of the government.”

  The charge was not popular. More and more, the Prime Minister of Canada – “Iron Heel Bennett” – was seen as a bully trampling on the rights of ordinary citizens. Smith, a one-time Methodist minister who had helped in early negotiations to form the United Church of Canada, had quit the ministry following the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 to work for the cause of labour. A former member of the Manitoba legislature, he was respected for his obvious sincerity if not for his politics. To many Canadians Smith’s opinions didn’t sound seditious. Opposition politicians were always fomenting distrust of the government; what was wrong with “spreading discontent”?