The Great Depression Page 29

  By autumn the drought country was faced with the overwhelming problem of keeping the livestock over the winter. In autumn, thousands of animals would have to be sold at rock-bottom prices, but there was no help for that. Yet some cattle would be needed over the winter for milk and some horses for farm labour. One municipality with 320 farm families figured it would have to retain two thousand milk cows and twenty-seven hundred horses; three thousand head of cattle would have to be sold. The federal government and the railways, belatedly aware of the dimensions of the problem, offered to split the cost with the municipalities of shipping livestock out of the drought area.

  Fodder would have to be imported – a superhuman task, since each municipality would require something close to ten thousand tons to tide it over until spring. Some districts, such as Alameda and Oxbow, sent crews grubstaked by the province north to seek out fodder. Since each man could bale little more than one hundred tons a week, a winter’s hard work was needed to find, bale, and ship south enough straw to feed the stock left behind. By mixing the straw with crushed Russian thistle and a little crushed wheat, the farmers hoped to stretch out their meagre supply of grain.

  By the time they arrived, Scott and MacRae found few farmers planning to “skip out,” to use the common phrase, simply because there was no place left for them to go. The earlier emigrants from the dust bowl had taken all the good land available as far north as the Peace River. Indeed, notices were posted warning people to stay out of Manitoba and Alberta. No relief would be made available to migrants.

  Those who stayed still retained that quality of optimism that is the hallmark of the pioneer. Without it, the West would never have been settled. The two reporters ran across it again and again in their travels. Good times, the people said (echoing the politicians), were just around the corner. As one farmer put it, “We’re bent but not broken.” The land was good; the soil was rich; it had produced excellent crops in the past; it would do it again. All that was needed was rain – and that would come. Surely, people said, they had reached the nadir of the drought cycle. This was the worst year yet; things could only improve.

  But 1934 was not the worst year. The men in their tattered overalls, the women and children in their flour-sack dresses, surviving on potatoes and dried grains, their throats as parched as the grey land around them – these last holdouts could not know that there was a worse year to come, and it was still three years away.

  5

  Pep, ginger, and Mitch

  There are certain manic spectacles that at their moment in history attract the enthusiasm and even the applause of the public and yet, in later years, take on the trappings of high comedy. In retrospect, the pageantry that briefly excited the city of Toronto on August 27, 1934, falls into that category. On that morning, a jostling crowd of eight thousand jammed Varsity Stadium to witness an unlikely event.

  Varsity Stadium had been transformed into a used-car lot! There they were for all to see, lined up at the end of the gridiron – eighty-seven fancy automobiles, all polished to a high gloss, ready to be knocked down to the highest bidder. Here was the very cream of the auto makers’ art: Packard limousines, Chevrolet coupés, Buick touring cars, Dodge sedans, Cadillacs, Fords, and Studebakers, some almost brand-new, others with as many as 200,000 miles on their odometers, most equipped with one or other – or all – of the mechanical gimmicks of the times: “turret tops,” “free wheeling,” “knee action.”

  These were, of course, not ordinary second-hand cars. The users had been Cabinet ministers and senior civil servants in the now discredited provincial Conservative government. The new Liberal premier, Mitchell Hepburn, was keeping an election promise and selling them all off by auction.

  Hepburn had promised the taxpayers that they would no longer have to pay through the nose to watch Conservative lackeys riding around in upholstered limousines. “If we are elected,” he had told a cheering crowd in Midland in May, “we are going to line up all the limousines at Queen’s Park and sell them to the highest bidder.” It was a seductive pledge and an easy one to fulfil (though some of Hepburn’s opponents wondered aloud if the Premier and his Cabinet colleagues intended to ride around Queen’s Park on bicycles).

  Now, on an unseasonably cool August morning, the crowd was shoving its way into the stadium to see Mitch Hepburn make good on his promise – some to seek bargains in used cars but most to take part in what the irrepressible Gordon Sinclair called “a combination three-ring circus, medicine show and deputation of protest.”

  That last phrase told the story. Hepburn, the young onion farmer from Elgin County, had chosen the cheapest and most flamboyant way of telling his Depression-ridden flock that he would countenance no lavish spending at a time when thousands were on the dole. He would not only sell the cars, he would fire the lieutenant-governor and close his official residence at Chorley Park. That might offend the blue bloods, but to the man on the street, the idea of a minor functionary living lavishly on the taxpayers’ money in a miniature castle while laying cornerstones or attending garden parties had a whiff of the British class system about it. “There will be no more Lieutenant-Governors in this Province until we get out of the present period of Depression,” Hepburn had shouted on the hustings, and again the crowd cheered.

  The crowd at Varsity Stadium was impatient. Long before the announced start of the auction, thousands began clamouring for it to begin. Hundreds, fearful of missing a bargain, crowded the runways, overflowed onto the playing field, and swarmed around the auctioneers’ truck, where the veteran Tommy Ryan stood, immaculate in white kid gloves and tan topcoat.

  “You’re all going to be put off the field, boys,” Ryan warned. “You might as well get seats in the grandstand now while you’ve got the chance.”

  “Who are you?” demanded an elderly Torontonian, hanging on to his spot.

  “Oh, I’m nobody,” said Ryan, laughing.

  The retort that followed suggested the strength of Hepburn’s populism and the disenchantment with George Henry’s Depression government. “That’s just it. You don’t run this province. The people of Ontario run this province now.”

  At last, Ryan’s superior arrived in the person of the leather-lunged T. Merritt Moore of Aylmer, a personal friend of the new premier. Moore took off his hat and waved to the crowd as Ryan introduced him.

  “Gentlemen,” said Moore, ignoring the distaff side, “I am speaking on behalf of the people of the province of Ontario. I want you people to co-operate in making this the most unique [sic] auction sale that has ever been held.” By now the crowd was cheering itself hoarse, drowning out Moore’s further words.

  “Sell the cars!” the people screamed, as Moore tried to launch into a political speech.

  Moore continued to try to speak. Again the crowd drowned him out, and Moore finally gave in and signalled for the first automobile. It rolled slowly up the field, nosing its shiny way through the mob and onto a specially built ramp in front of the stands: George Henry’s seven-thousand-dollar Packard, glittering with chrome.

  The crowd went wild as Moore shouted: “This is the outstanding car in the province of Ontario. You will be proud to tell your grandchildren you bought the first government car sold at public auction – the car of Premier Henry.”

  “Ex-Premier!” shouted several members of the crowd, as the bidding got under way.

  Schwartz the Wrecker was outbid by J.E. Montgomery of Mount Dennis, who paid fifteen hundred dollars for the Henry car. The terms were strictly cash – 25 per cent down, the rest in ten days (a finance company had already set up shop in the stadium). Some people tried to proffer cheques as the auction progressed and were turned away, angry. When Tommy Ryan tried to explain that this was an auction and not a fire sale he was roundly booed.

  Car after car went quickly under the hammer, the limousines of the eleven Cabinet ministers first – some at bargain prices (a Buick listed at $1,400 went for $1,000) and some at inflated rates (a Studebaker valued at $100 sold for $2
55). In the end the government realized about $34,000 from the sale, but the publicity was worth far more than that to the cherubic, blue-eyed young man who had galvanized the province with his oratory during the election campaign and was now firmly in charge in Ontario.

  Hepburn’s election that summer completed the Conservative rout at the provincial level and in Ottawa must have been seen as a portent of things to come in the federal arena. The Depression had doomed the hidebound Tory governments. In British Columbia the year before, a newly energized Liberal party had swept into power under another florid populist, T. Dufferin Pattullo. In Saskatchewan, James Gardiner, the tough little farmer whom everybody called Jimmy, had vaulted back into the premiership he had lost in 1929. That victory, coming on the same night as Hepburn’s, meant that there wasn’t a Tory government in any Canadian province west of the Maritimes.

  Hepburn was just thirty-seven when he roared into office with the greatest Liberal majority in history, defeating a government that had previously boasted the greatest Conservative majority in history. That spectacular switch in political loyalties underlined the obvious truth that the voters wanted someone to do something about the Depression. Hepburn had promised just that, but he would have to do more than conduct a frivolous used-car sale in a football stadium. He had been rocketed into office by a desperate populace seeking a saviour and a spokesman. Now he would have to deliver.

  He was a farmer turned politician who had followed in the footsteps of his father, another farmer turned politician. Hepburn Senior had been forced to withdraw from a 1906 by-election over some murky charges of personal scandal that drove him first to St. Paul, Minnesota, and then to Winnipeg before the family returned to Ontario. Young Mitch was only ten at the time. At sixteen he quit school to become a bank clerk and at nineteen he went to work on the farm of his grandfather, the bulk of whose $150,000 estate he inherited in 1922 – a legacy equal to more than one million dollars today.

  By 1925, the wealthy young man was up to his elbows in politics, known as the best stump speaker in Elgin West riding, which elected him its federal Liberal member the following year. It is a tribute to his platform abilities that he managed to become the first Liberal to win that seat in thirty years. In the 1930 election he increased his majority eightfold and was judged a comer.

  Mackenzie King did not care much for him, and when the brash newcomer took a shot at the provincial leadership in the fall of 1930, the strait-laced federal leader was very much opposed. Hepburn ran with a fast, hard-drinking crowd, and that was certainly not King’s kind of crowd. But Hepburn won, and in his acceptance speech he set the tone of his regime: “I go forward as Ontario leader filled with optimism. I know I am going to succeed.… I’ll supply the pep and ginger and you people hold the brakes. And we will never stop until we get to Queen’s Park.”

  By the time the election was called in 1934, Hepburn was ready with the pep and ginger. “It’s good politics,” he had said, somewhat cynically, “to give a hand to the majority.” The majority at that point was composed of those who had been felled by the Depression. “Get this fact,” Hepburn told the voters. “We are in this thing because of the little fellow, the workman who isn’t working anymore, the farmer who is struggling against unbelievable odds. I’ve seen these people, talked to them, you can’t credit their situation. We’re in this thing because of them and for them.” And then, borrowing the Rooseveltian phrase that had caught the imagination of the continent: “There is going to be a new deal in this province.”

  It is doubtful that without the Depression as a spur Hepburn would have swept the province as he did. The good, grey voters of Ontario were not in the habit of falling for flashy leaders. But the times favoured Hepburn, and George Henry – as good and grey a politician as ever held office in Queen’s Park – was no match for the dynamic young man with a face like a polished apple who inflamed the voters and managed by verbal gymnastics to make the Henry regime seem responsible for the hard times. It’s probable that without the Hepburn glitter, without the pep and ginger, the Liberal party might not even have won a majority. All across the Far West, it was plain that the public had become fed up with stiff, hidebound, do-nothing politicians. Like Pattullo, Aberhart, Gardiner, and eventually Maurice Duplessis in Quebec, Hepburn was the antithesis of that image.

  In Ottawa, as the returns poured in, a private farce was being enacted. Mackenzie King should have been overjoyed at the Liberal sweep in Ontario. Instead he felt “an anguish of mind and heart” – not over Hepburn, whom he had come to accept, and not because of the Liberal victory, which every Grit in the country was hailing as a forecast of great things to come. No; King’s anguish of heart came because he felt he had been betrayed by the ghost of Wilfrid Laurier. That fickle shade had predicted, quite wrongly as it now turned out, that Hepburn would not gain a majority and would, indeed, lose his seat.

  The ghost of the great Laurier wrong about an election? How could it be? King was hurt and baffled. He tried to puzzle it out in his diary. Clearly, Laurier “had not the knowledge evidently required and had seen only so much of the whole,” he reasoned. He was not recording any feeling of disloyalty to the spectre of his hero; he was quite convinced that it was the voice of Laurier that had spoken to him across the void. Still, it was puzzling.

  At last King came to rationalize this egregious error as fervent and faithful Christians rationalize the sudden, inexplicable death of a young child. “I felt it was all for a purpose, that behind this disappointment … there was some great good which I would soon see, that God was helping me to get a clearer vision of His laws and ways and purposes, that it was all to help me in an understanding of psychic phenomena, and spiritual realities.”

  Yet it continued to prey on his mind. He phoned his congratulations to Hepburn but remained “sick at heart,” fearing that Laurier’s ghostly failure might sow the seeds of doubt in his own mind. But then he rallied, feeling “that my faith was strong if not stronger than ever, that behind all this seeming shattering of our belief lay the understanding of a larger & truer belief, & a greater revelation of Reality.”

  King came to the conclusion that the vagrant spirits with whom he held intercourse were “still earthbound to some degree,” that their vision might be limited and not wholly to be trusted. Perhaps, too, he told himself, Laurier’s lapse was meant to teach him that God alone could reveal truths that related to the future. With the matter off his mind, the exhausted Liberal leader went to bed.

  Hepburn, of course, had no qualms about anything. Totally confident and self-assured, he plunged into a series of highly visible “reforms.” Every civil servant appointed since the previous October was fired, causing both consternation and chaos at Queen’s Park. Cabinet ministers’ salaries were cut by two thousand dollars. Work was stopped on the new Ontario Hydro building in Toronto (but only temporarily). The provincial display at the Canadian National Exhibition was cancelled. Chorley Park was closed, as promised, but Hepburn found that constitutionally it was not possible to rid himself of its occupant. Ontario House in London was also closed and a variety of boards and commissions were either abolished or amalgamated. Every game warden in the province was dismissed, not to mention 183 beekeepers, an intriguing piece of cheese-paring that undoubtedly caught the public’s fancy. That fall Hepburn turned up on the hustings to work for the federal Liberals in five by-elections, helping his party to a net gain of two.

  By this time he was close to exhaustion. The job of being premier was far more exacting than he had thought. Political leadership took more out of a man than onion farming, especially if the man had had only two years of high school and very little administrative experience. It was stimulating to be a maverick; it was quite another thing to run a province the size of Ontario in the midst of an economic crisis.

  Mackenzie King’s advice to Hepburn was to conserve his energies and avoid all social engagements. He might as well have counselled him to join a Trappist monastery. Instead, the gregarious
premier bought himself some light clothing and with a couple of his supporters left the chill winds of Ontario for a midwinter cruise among the sunny islands of the Caribbean. For a couple of weeks the province could run without him.

  6

  The Pang of a Wolf

  With the first sittings of the new Royal Commission on Price Spreads scheduled for October 30, its putative chairman was in deep political trouble. Harry Stevens had given his name to the earlier parliamentary committee. He was supposed to head its successor and complete his work. But he had made a political blunder, and there was no way he could shake off that stigma.

  It all stemmed from a speech that the impulsive minister had made just before the session broke up in June. His audience was the Conservative Study Club, whose members were undoubtedly eager to see the man being touted as their future leader in action. It was an informal occasion; Stevens spoke without notes, but a secretary took down his words verbatim. These included an attack on the Robert Simpson Company and Sir Joseph Flavelle, Stevens’s old enemy, who had at one time been the department store’s chief stockholder.

  Stevens claimed that Flavelle and his associates, after a refinancing in 1928, had stripped the company of ten million dollars, leaving it heavily mortgaged. As a consequence of this higher overhead, he said, Simpson’s was forced to pressure its suppliers to sell for less, thus creating some of the sweatshop conditions that had been revealed by his inquiry.

  That August the roof fell in on Stevens. His words, supposedly off the record and certainly off the cuff, had been printed in pamphlet form, of which three thousand copies were distributed. The Toronto Star and Ottawa Citizen (neither of them Tory organs) published excerpts. The Winnipeg Free Press published the pamphlet in full, frustrating R.B. Bennett’s attempts to suppress it. C.L. Burton, president of Simpson’s, threatened to sue Stevens for libel.