The Great Depression Read online

  Network radio was in its infancy, but Aberhart had already put into practice techniques that were becoming familiar to the public. He knew better than to confine himself to long, boring political dissertations. Instead he adapted his style to that of the hottest new programs on the air – to soap operas like “Betty and Bob” or comic skits of the kind made popular by Joe Penner and Eddie Cantor. His style was remarked on by one correspondent whose letter he read aloud to his cast during the course of a broadcast, with this mock admonition, “Now, you helpers, listen to me. You must speak more natural after this. Don’t use my tone of voice. Spruce up. Be yourselves. Here is a radio fan who declares that I’m taking all these parts myself. He says I’m like Amos and Andy.”

  He introduced characters such as Mr. Kant B. Dunn (who did animal imitations while getting across the Aberhart philosophy) and the Hon. Jerry Bluffem, leader of the Its Your Turn Next Party, attending a conference at the town of Never Get Anywhere.

  The CCF, which was making inroads in both British Columbia and Saskatchewan that year, never was able to achieve the extraordinary steamroller success that Aberhart enjoyed in Alberta. The academics, labour leaders, and farmers who made up the new party either did not catch on to the appeal of the vulgar new medium or, if they did, could not or would not use it in the way Aberhart did. One simply cannot imagine J.S. Woodsworth or M.J. Coldwell stooping to these folksy, populist techniques. Graham Spry of the LSR brains trust, who had brought network radio to Canada, certainly never envisaged this kind of broadcast buffoonery. The federation was above that sort of thing.

  Aberhart’s mastery of the medium allowed him to trumpet the idea of what he called the Just Price (taken from Douglas), which by its name suggested that current prices were unjust. The reason was that the manufacturers (the Eastern manufacturers, of course!) took too much in excess profits as opposed to “legitimate” profits. Aberhart’s idea was that the government would tax away these unjust profits and use the tax money to underwrite the twenty-five-dollar monthly dividend to which every adult citizen would be entitled. Like blood circulating through the human system, these dividends would release the stagnant credit that was smothering the system. “The Blood Stream of the State,” Aberhart called it.

  The idea that every voter was entitled to twenty-five dollars – in credit, not in cash – galvanized the province and captured the imagination of the public. Everybody could understand a monthly stipend, and nobody cared that Aberhart had pulled that particular figure out of nowhere as an example, not a hard promise. As one farmer near Edmonton told John Irving, “I supported Social Credit because I was interested in getting more money, more purchasing power. That $25 a month appealed to me more than anything else.… There wasn’t one of us farmers that wasn’t after that $25.… We had got nothing from the UFA. We talked up Social Credit constantly among ourselves. ‘By golly,’ I said to my neighbours. ‘We’re going to get $25 a month from this new system that Honest Abe’s going to introduce. Then we’ll be able to buy things.’ I counted on that $25 because I figured with our wonderful wealth there was no reason why the $25 couldn’t be paid.”

  That was the paradox. Wealth was visible. Aberhart was promising to redistribute it. So was the CCF, but Aberhart was using language that every farmer and farmer’s wife could understand. “Surely every citizen of Alberta should have enough common, ordinary horse-sense to know that there is no need to starve in a full hay paddock,” he’d say. “Even a worm will not go hungry because the apple is too large. He invariably goes to the core of the matter and there raises his standard of living. We can if we will.”

  And he was still not considering a political career, at least not publicly. “These broadcasts,” he told his listeners, “are conducted merely as an educational feature.… In no sense of the word do we wish to make it a political broadcast.” The Douglas Social Credit League, he insisted, “is against party politics and holds no political affiliation.” He added, however, that since its aim was to introduce Social Credit into the province, the league would back a candidate to support the cause in every constituency in the forthcoming election.

  Although his stated purpose remained – to shake the UFA out of its complacency and force it to adopt Social Credit – he was moving closer day by day to the political arena. If the UFA refused to support the movement, there was an alternative, and Aberhart knew it. He wrote to his niece that Christmas, “… you may hear of me being Premier of Alberta.” He was not anxious to go into politics, he said, “but the people are urging me to do so.” In the end, the people would get their way.

  3

  Harry Stevens’s moment in history

  Job – that was the magic word in the thirties. The idea of the job transcended all else. To have a job – any job – was the ultimate aspiration. The country was divided between those who had jobs and those who had none. Job was the key to respectability. Job was the Open Sesame to status. Job made you a Somebody; it allowed you to hold your head high; it separated you from the shuffling mob of unemployed who were seen as members of a lower stratum. It didn’t matter that they were the obvious victims of uncontrollable economic forces. The work ethic was still strong: there would always be a stigma attached to a man and many women who had no job.

  Yet thousands of Canadians were paid such low wages and worked such long hours that they were living in a state close to slavery. In the Quebec shoe industry, for example, wage scales ranged from bare subsistence to outright exploitation. One particularly avaricious manufacturer paid his women workers $1.50 for a seventy-five-hour week – a pitiful two cents an hour. When he was eventually exposed and prosecuted for paying less than the legal minimum wage, the penalty was shockingly low. He escaped with a fine of ten dollars.

  That was an extreme case, but there were scores of documented instances in which men and women worked more than fifty hours a week for five dollars or less. These came to light in the spring of 1934 as a result of the terrier-like dedication of Henry Herbert Stevens, the member for Kootenay East (B.C.), who was Minister of Trade and Commerce in the Bennett Cabinet. Since February, Stevens had cast himself in a new role – that of a shining knight, the people’s champion, impaling the dragons of big business on the lance of his own special project, a parliamentary committee set up to investigate price spreads and mass buying.

  From late February until the end of June the Canadian public was assaulted by a litany of horror as witness after witness appeared before the Stevens Committee, as it was called, to describe appalling working conditions and wage scales in a variety of major Canadian enterprises. Time and again the eleven M.P.s who made up the committee registered shock and anger at the testimony, which covered a wide spectrum of Canadian industrial life from groceries to garments.

  The last thing that Bennett wanted was a man like Harry Stevens poking his nose into the failings of the free-enterprise system. Certainly the committee was not his idea. It came about as the result of happenstance. In January, the Prime Minister had asked Stevens to fill in for him at the annual convention of the Retail Shoe Merchants and Shoe Manufacturers’ Association to be held in Toronto in the middle of the month.

  No doubt he expected the usual platitudes – words of encouragement to the shoe men, forecasts that the Depression would soon be over and business conditions on the mend, praise of the individual enterprise of small business. What he got from Harry Stevens was something quite different – a diatribe against big business, notably chain and department stores, for using their immense buying power as a stick to crush the small entrepreneur and bring about sweatshop conditions.

  Stevens hadn’t planned it that way. His original speech was prepared three days before the convention. But after listening to three delegations representing small business, he tore it up. At the last minute, working until three in the morning before taking the train to Toronto, Stevens wrote a new speech that brought him roars of applause and a standing ovation. With one stroke, the maverick Tory lit the fuse that touched o
ff an exhaustive investigation into wages, profits, and conditions in the Depression workplace. It led in the end to Stevens’s break with Bennett, brought about the formation of a new political party, and contributed to the downfall of the Conservatives in the election that followed.

  At fifty-five, Harry Stevens was not a typical Conservative. In a later day he would have been called a Red Tory. He was the only small businessman in a Cabinet controlled by big businessmen. He was also an outsider, a Westerner, not part of the Eastern establishment. He had been, variously, a grocer, an accountant, and a broker. Elected to five successive terms in Vancouver, he had bounced back from defeat in 1930 to win a by-election in the Kootenays. In his photographs he looks passive and plump, peering benignly through his rimless spectacles, but he was anything but passive. A grocer’s son, born in England, he was a Methodist lay preacher and reformer. He had represented a middle-class district for almost twenty years and had a distaste for the corporate world.

  “The Conservative party’s prospects for victory would be greatly enhanced if the dollar stamp were less pronounced and if a man’s personal wealth were less used as the yardstick to measure his value,” he had written in 1929. The following year, with the Tories in office, he had the temerity to suggest to Bennett that a council made up of representatives from the political, education, labour, and industrial fields be established to cope with the unemployment situation. The Prime Minister squashed that idea. “Why talk such nonsense,” he said. “Do you think I want a lot of long-haired professors telling me what to do? If I can’t run this country, I will get out.”

  Stevens had established himself as a muckraker in 1926 when, in a two-hour speech to the House of Commons, he had helped unravel the customs scandal that almost brought the Liberals down. His bêtes noires included Sir Joseph Flavelle, the business magnate who had controlled the Robert Simpson Company, and J.S. McLean, the president of Canada Packers. Both men were clearly very much in Stevens’s mind when he prepared his speech to the shoe manufacturers.

  Lurking in the background was the powerful figure of Warren K. Cook, a wealthy Toronto clothing manufacturer with a social conscience. A big, handsome, self-made man, Cook had worked his way up through the rag trade with a line of quality merchandise that he sold to a number of independent outlets. He believed in paying his employees a fair wage (he never had a strike) and in producing well-cut suits using good cloth. As a result he found himself in a cut-throat struggle with his competitors who thrived on sweatshop conditions. He had no love for the department stores that would not take his lines, preferring to sell suits of poorer quality for as low as fifteen dollars. Cook’s prices started at twenty-nine fifty.

  Cook was convinced that the large concerns were using their massive buying power to cut prices and to squeeze out small businesses that could no longer compete. The previous year, in his role as president of the Canadian Association of Garment Manufacturers, he had launched an investigation of conditions in the men’s clothing industry and had chosen two prominent radicals – Harry Cassidy of the University of Toronto and Frank Scott of McGill – to undertake it. These two men supplied Cook with the ammunition to pass on to Stevens, who admonished his audience “to face the evils that have developed like a canker. I warn them that unless they are destroyed they will destroy the system.” Stevens went on to hit the large meat-packing firms, whose mark-ups were breathtaking; the farmer was paid a cent and a half a pound for beef, for example, for which the consumer was charged nineteen cents. Stevens praised the small businessmen of Canada, of whom he was one, and declared that “it will be a sorry day for Canada when these independent citizen-businessmen are crushed out.”

  Stevens’s audience loved it; the big Toronto department stores didn’t. The speech, which was heard on the radio, elicited a howl of protest from Eaton’s and Simpson’s. “Don’t let the tremendous weight of advertising in the public press muzzle you,” Stevens had told his audience. Some newspapers, he said, “dare not publish these things or denounce them, because of the advertising office receipts that make it impossible for them to talk.” The truth of that charge was evident the following morning when the Globe gave its front page not to Stevens’s speech but to denials by both Eaton’s and Simpson’s.

  The department stores took their case to the Prime Minister, who called Stevens into his office and told him to cease and desist. Stevens immediately offered his resignation. Bennett back-pedalled. He had been snowed under by a blizzard of letters supporting his maverick colleague. With an election coming up the following year it was no time to have any minister – especially this minister – causing a minor scandal, running around the country claiming that Big Business had muzzled him.

  Bennett gave Stevens and Cook what they wanted – a special parliamentary committee with Stevens as chairman to investigate mass buying practices by chain and department stores and labour conditions in industry and the baking and meat-packing fields. The press called it “the most sweeping parliamentary probe into industrial conditions ever attempted in Canada,” and so it was.

  The final report of the committee and that of the royal commission that succeeded it together run to 9,278 pages of small type or well over three million words. They provide the most comprehensive picture we have of working conditions and wage rates in Central Canada in the early thirties. The committee was forthright in its criticisms. Of conditions in the needle trades it had this to say: “We cannot, in frankness, refrain from stating that the labour and wage conditions … are such as to merit the most emphatic condemnation. They should not be tolerated in any state that claims to call itself civilized.… The statistics … have shown us that the worker in the clothing industry can expect neither comfort nor security; in many cases he can, indeed, expect hopeless poverty.”

  The food chains also came under bitter condemnation: “Hours of labour … are longer than any worker should be asked to endure. They commonly exceed 60 hours per week and in many stores often reach as high as 80 to 84.… There is no excuse whatever for conditions such as these.”

  Day after day a regiment of horrible examples was paraded before the committee. In the tobacco industry, for example, where profits were high and wages below the subsistence level, company executives were rewarded with unbelievably fat salaries and bonuses. The president of Imperial Tobacco earned $25,000 a year plus annual bonuses ranging from $32,000 to $61,000. The company’s twenty-four executives received an average of $15,000 a year. Yet the average weekly earnings of the tobacco worker were less than $11 for a 44.7-hour week. No wonder that Imperial was able to show an annual net profit of just under six million dollars.

  The tobacco companies were obviously using the Depression as an excuse to cut wages. In one of the factories, hourly rates shrank by 24 per cent between 1931 and 1933. The president of Macdonald Tobacco, however, managed to scrape by on a mere $260,000 in salary and bonuses, still leaving the company an undivided profit of $594,432.

  The five-and-dime stores – Woolworth’s, Kresge’s, Metropolitan – kept their employees on a tight leash by staggering hours and using part-time clerks. The women were kept on call, never knowing when they would be offered work and unable to look for other jobs. In the Metropolitan chain, these women clerks averaged a miserable $4.30 a week – less, in fact, than the value of relief payments in Toronto.

  The excuse the five-and-dime executives gave for low wages was their inability to pay more, “much as they desired to.” Yet one chain in Montreal declared an 80-per-cent stock dividend, while Woolworth’s in 1932 showed a net profit of $1,800,000, every cent of which went back to head office in New York. That same year, thousands of Woolworth’s Canadian employees were hit with a 10-per-cent wage reduction.

  In those days, the minimum wage laws applied only to women. As a result, women lost out because so many employers preferred to hire men or boys at a lower rate. In Toronto, the National Picture Frame Company fired seventeen of its female employees and replaced them with men at rates as low as
ten cents an hour.

  The authorities neglected to enforce laws defining the legal work week for fear more discharged employees would be eligible for relief. The Ontario Factory Act, which dated back to 1884, called for a ten-hour working day and a sixty-hour work week. Yet even this antiquated piece of legislation, “a relic of the dark ages of industrialism,” to quote Harry Cassidy, was ignored. In Toronto, at one Red Indian service station the work week was sixty-four hours, the pay a mere $5.55. A worse example came from the restaurant trade. A restaurant on Spadina Avenue paid its kitchen workers and waitresses wages as low as $6.25 for a work week that ran as high as one hundred hours.

  In Quebec, the Minimum Wage Act was also contravened. Quebec employers were allowed occasional exemptions, and as the Depression deepened these exemptions increased dramatically – from only 94 in 1931 to 1,067 by 1933. Of the thirty-one establishments studied by Harry Cassidy for Warren K. Cook, twenty-four violated the act anyway. In all these shops more than 95 per cent of the women employees were receiving wages below standard. None dared complain for fear of being fired.

  Wages in Toronto were low enough to give the committee members pause. A messenger boy at the famous engraving firm of Rapid Grip and Batten, for instance, was paid five dollars for a fifty-five-hour week. Yet this sum seems princely compared with the miserly sums doled out in the needle trades in French Canada. Cassidy shocked the committee with a series of examples, including the story of a nineteen-year-old girl in Ste Rose who earned two dollars for a fifty-five-hour week.

  In effect, he said, bargain hunters in Toronto were living off the avails of sweated labour. “The suits we wear, many of them, have been made in sweatshops under disgraceful conditions,” Cassidy reported. Then, in a dramatic flourish he produced sixteen weekly pay envelopes received by a woman working in a Toronto shop. Printed on each envelope was a pious admonition by the bank, preaching that thrift leads to financial independence: