The Great Depression Read online

  He pointed a finger at Buck.

  “You born in Russia?”

  “No, sir, I was born in England.”

  “I didn’t ask you if you were born in England. Whether you were born in Russia or not is beyond my power to prove at this moment. But I know you’re lying and I want to tell you that you’ve told your last lie to me. I’ve been watching you fellows and I know you’re in the pay of Russia, and I’m going to tread on you so hard that you’ll never be able to raise your heads again in this city. I’m going to clean this city up.”

  Smith tried to point out that he was a candidate in the forthcoming federal election.

  “Don’t you lie to me about being candidates,” shouted Draper.

  “Well, sir,” said Buck, “I’m a candidate also.”

  “I’ve had enough of this insolence from you fellows,” said Draper. He rang a bell. “Take these fellows out. And let me tell you two before you leave, I’m going to have you behind bars, just as sure as my name is Dennis Draper.”

  Thus it came about that in the election of 1930, a legal political party with nine candidates in the field found it impossible to conduct a campaign. When a gang of toughs disrupted one meeting at Spadina and Dundas streets, three mounted policemen and four uniformed constables stood by smiling. The majority of Torontonians condoned this harassment because the party was unpopular.

  The Communists couldn’t afford the radio and wouldn’t have been given access to the air waves if they had had the money. But on the last night of the campaign, Saturday, July 26, Canadians were treated to a marathon of campaign speeches broadcast by the Liberals and Conservatives. There were now 435,000 radio sets in Canada, an increase of 35 per cent over the previous year. Probably one million people heard all or part of the political addresses that droned on to midnight. Those were the days when a politician could get away with the most long-winded of broadcasts. King and Bennett had very little competition. They carefully avoided clashing with each other, just as they steered away from competing with the “Amos ‘n’ Andy” show. But apart from that wildly successful fifteen-minute program, radio listeners had a limited choice.

  Bennett, in a fighting mood, chose to speak to ten thousand people at a rally in Ottawa. King followed, characteristically alone, hunched before a microphone set up in a dining room of the Chateau Laurier. Beside him in twin gold frames were portraits of his mother and his father. From the far end of the table, two of his heroes, Laurier and Mackenzie, gazed down at him. In the presence of his “loved ones” he took more comfort, drew more security than was possible in an open-air rally where untoward mishaps sometimes conspired to throw him off his stride.

  He attacked his opponent with an age-old weapon, as hoary as democracy itself. Bennett, he indicated, was a doomsayer, shedding crocodile tears over the supposed unemployment crisis and crying “blue ruin” around the country. As usual he was pleased with himself, though a little concerned about a certain harshness in his throat – nothing to worry about, though, when contrasted with Bennett’s “ranting.” The contrast, he was sure, would be to his opponent’s disadvantage.

  He was convinced he would win. “There may be a real Liberal sweep,” he wrote on election day. “… I look to the Govt. coming back stronger than it was.” After all, hadn’t the estimable Mrs. Bleaney predicted that Bennett would never last as leader?

  But Mrs. Bleaney was wrong again, overwhelmed, perhaps, by the need to tell her client what he wanted to hear. The Conservatives swept the country, gaining a clear majority with 137 seats to the Liberals’ 91. Six splinter parties, mainly on the progressive side, garnered 17.

  R.B. Bennett was now Prime Minister-elect and, in spite of Mrs. Bleaney’s crystal ball, would remain in power for five full years. There were some who claimed that the entire election was an example of Mackenzie King’s much-vaunted canniness – that he had foreseen what was coming and actually wanted to relinquish power and leave his opponent the impossible task of trying to take the country through hard times before being swept aside by a Liberal tidal wave. But King was the very opposite of prescient. The magnitude of the Depression utterly escaped him. He wasn’t canny, only lucky: he would not take the blame for the worst five years in Canadian history. Had he remained prime minister in 1930, he could never have survived politically after 1935.

  4

  “Bonfire Bennett”

  Richard Bedford Bennett was not the sort of man to keep a diary or, if he had been, to leave it around for posterity. One simply cannot imagine him scribbling away of a night, confiding his most intimate thoughts, passions, and terrors to a daily journal. He tore up his personal correspondence and his private documents. His letters to his mother, whom he venerated as King did his, were burned after his death. Thus we cannot examine Bennett from the inside as we can his opponent. We view him from afar, no doubt unfairly – an austere, forbidding, pugnacious figure with precious little humanity to him, a “bumptious” leader, in his opponent’s words, who was “apt to be very unpleasant, and give a nasty tone to public affairs.”

  To this day no scholarly biography has been published of the man who presided over Canada during its five hungriest years. It is understandable: apart from the daunting absence of primary evidence, few writers really want to deal with failure. When Bennett took office, the hopes of the country were with him. By the time he was ousted, those hopes had turned to ashes.

  In retrospect he cuts a slightly comic figure, in his silk hat, his wing collar, his grey double-breasted waistcoat, and his striped pants, a pre-war costume that most of his colleagues had already discarded. Even in the country, it is said, Bennett stuck to that old-fashioned uniform. Arch Dale, the wickedly effective cartoonist of the Manitoba (later Winnipeg) Free Press, did not have to caricature him. He simply pictured Bennett as he was, complete with rimless glasses, double chin, and frown.

  Bennett not only looked like a bloated capitalist, he was a bloated capitalist. When he arrived in Calgary in January of 1897, a gangling twenty-six-year-old from the Bay of Fundy, he was determined to make himself look substantial and so devoured gargantuan breakfasts in the Palliser Hotel until he attained the fashionable girth that was then the hallmark of the successful captain of industry. He had been raised in straitened circumstances after his father’s shipbuilding business failed, but by 1930 he was one of the richest men in Canada, having inherited the controlling interest in the Eddy Match Company in the twenties from his friend Jennie Shirreff Eddy, the widow of the match king, and her brother, Joseph T. Shirreff.

  The picture of Bennett that emerges from the memories of those who knew him and from his own actions in Parliament and as prime minister is of a human bulldozer, battering his way through the problems that beset him. He had a memorable voice, firm and resonant, and a “blustering, two-fisted way of smashing out words” – words that poured from him in such a torrent that Hansard reporters laid out extra pencils when he rose to speak. He was once clocked at the incredible speed of 220 words a minute – a sharp contrast to King’s ponderous delivery. In his younger days, he’d been called “Bonfire Bennett.” After listening to him on the radio, one contemporary remarked that “one cannot help but think he looked on the microphone as a public meeting or a mob.”

  Nonetheless, his oratory had a powerful effect on his listeners, as the 1930 election proved. Tommy Douglas of the CCF, who entered the House in 1935 and observed Bennett when he was Leader of the Opposition, thought he was “probably one of the greatest orators and best parliamentarians the country ever had.”

  The new prime minister worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day, dictated at top speed to two stenographers, toiling in shifts, and exhausted both. His secretary, Andrew MacLean, described his working through the night before leaving for the Imperial Conference in London. Bennett had to catch the 5:30 a.m. train from Ottawa to Quebec, but at three that morning he was still furiously dictating. One stenographer was trying to keep up with him while MacLean, completely fagged out, snored o
n a sofa. Two more weary stenographers, their notebooks crammed from cover to cover with shorthand, had fallen asleep in an anteroom, heads on each other’s shoulders. At four, Mildred Herridge appeared to urge her brother to pack and perhaps take an hour’s rest before boarding the train. Bennett replied that it would take no more than a minute to get his things together; he would need the extra hour to complete his work.

  He needed every waking moment because he simply could not delegate. A poor administrator with a minimum of Cabinet experience, he dominated every department of government, invading areas that should have been left to his ministers. He insisted that he himself take care of every detail, no matter how small. A story making the rounds of Ottawa at the time contained more than a little truth. A stranger, seeing the Prime Minister striding down the hill, asked a friend why he kept muttering to himself. Came the reply: “He’s holding a Cabinet meeting.”

  This inability to shuck off the minor burdens of office was carried to extremes. Bennett believed that he should personally answer every letter he received. As a result his desk was piled with documents. He made himself available to everyone who wanted an appointment, so that his office resembled a railway waiting room. He had never had a home of his own. In Calgary, he had occupied a suite in the Palliser Hotel, in Ottawa, in the Chateau Laurier. He lived on the job within a narrow geographical circle – Chateau, Rideau Club, East Block.

  He read a great deal – heavy tomes, biographies and histories, nothing frivolous. He had committed a good many hymns and poems to his prodigious memory, but otherwise he had no hobbies – no interest in sport (he wouldn’t even enter a bowling alley), very little in art or culture. Musically, he was tone deaf, although Elgar’s jingoistic anthem “Land of Hope and Glory” stirred his imperial emotions when it was rendered on the organ. By contrast, Mackenzie King detested the song, especially the phrase “make thee mightier yet.”

  In private, Bennett was a shy, lonely man with a strong sense of purpose. Like Isabel King, his mother was the dominant figure in the family, firm minded, ambitious for her son, and determined that he would succeed where her husband, an easygoing shipbuilder, had failed. In a household that was not without its tensions, she shaped her boy, and he worshipped her. His strict Methodism came from her (he deplored tobacco, alcohol, cards, and gambling, and read six verses of the Bible every day of his life). So, too, his ambition. In his early twenties he had announced his twin goals: to become prime minister and a millionaire. He achieved both.

  He had few social graces, didn’t give a hoot about other people’s opinions, and was often indifferent to their feelings. Robert Manion, who succeeded him as Tory leader, wrote that “too often his temperamental explosiveness … cost him loyal friendships that he should have cherished.… At times his apparent contempt for the opinions of others whom he deems less able than himself stirs up antagonisms against him.”

  Bennett was not popular with the press – he had once sneered at editorial writers who made only a few dollars a day. Like so many self-centred and self-sufficient men, he had little sense of humour. Grattan O’Leary of the Ottawa Journal, a strong Tory newspaper, remarked that “when he laughs it is as though he were making a good-natured concession to the weakness of others.”

  He did not trust the electorate, finding it “almost incomprehensible that the vital issues of death to nations, peace or war, bankruptcy or solvency, should be determined by the counting of heads and knowing as we do that the majority … are untrained and unskilled in dealing with that which they have to determine.”

  His brusqueness masked his inner shyness. Manion wrote that “personally he can be one of the most lovable and attractive leaders when in the mood – which is about half the time.” Tommy Douglas, who had thought of Bennett as a blustering bully, grew to admire him after he entered the House in 1935. Douglas wrote that Bennett “had a human side which he kept from the public.” He was kind to Douglas and his CCF colleague M.J. Coldwell, congratulated both on their maiden speeches, got Douglas books on parliamentary procedure, and often called him over for a chat. But that was after Bennett was no longer prime minister and had had a change of heart. “I think he was a man who hadn’t had close contact with people,” Douglas wrote. “Consequently he didn’t know people and was shy of them.”

  Certainly he had difficulty communicating. It rarely occurred to him to praise his colleagues in his public addresses. As the former Tory leader Arthur Meighen put it, drily: “Platitudes of affection do not pertain to him.” Meighen went on to say that “on the rough, ruthless battlefields of life, he has triumphed, and he depends, and does not fear to depend upon his achievements for his following and his fame.”

  Both Manion and Meighen in their memoirs seem to be struggling to say something good about their colleague – something that will mask their own ambivalence. For he was a difficult man to love and an even more difficult man to know – pugnacious, impulsive, sometimes bullying, and subject to outbursts of anger. Unlike Mackenzie King, who wallowed in the praise even of those he knew to be sycophants, Bennett did not seek affection, public or private. His many philanthropies were unpublicized. Few knew that he was putting a good many young men through college, or that in answer to a stream of pleading letters, he was sending out two- and five-dollar bills to people in need.

  He remained a bachelor to the end, though he knew many women and enjoyed their company. His boyhood friend Lord Beaverbrook described his attitude to marriage as “quaint.” A wife, Bennett had told him, “must while being domestic in her tastes have such large sympathies and mental qualities as to be able to enter into the ambitions and hopes of her husband, whatever they may be.…” As Beaverbrook remarked, that was a big order. “Bennett was, it seems, one of those men who liked women but feared that he might be dominated by a wife or, perhaps, brought to unhappiness through some clash in temperament.”

  Domination, of course, he could not abide. The headstrong prime minister under a woman’s thumb? Unthinkable! That was Bennett’s tragedy, and the country’s. The softening influence of a consort might have made R.B. Bennett more tractable. A domestic mise en scène could have had a liberating influence on a man who, for all of his career, had nobody to come home to. It is ironic that, in the end, this perplexing and often misunderstood politician should have been thwarted and made over, not by a wife or a mistress or a political opponent, but by the times themselves.

  5

  Old-fashioned nostrums

  The Communists came off very badly in the federal election, especially for a party that was considered strong enough to launch a successful revolution against the entrenched forces of capitalism. In the nine ridings the party contested, it gained a mere 7,601 votes out of a total of 168,540.

  In spite of this, the authorities, especially in Ontario, continued to treat the party as a threat to established order. A month after the election, Charlie Sims, a hard-line communist, was sent to Sudbury to try to organize the employees of the International Nickel Company. At a public meeting on a Sunday night, Sims, who had survived previous beatings at the hands of the Toronto police, was hauled off his soapbox, arrested, and charged with unlawful public assembly, even though a permit wasn’t required to hold a public meeting in Sudbury. The city council had got around that difficulty by rushing through a new by-law empowering the police to break up any meeting of three or more persons. This transparent device could never have survived in court, and Sims and three colleagues were quickly released, but not before the judge had delivered a tongue-lashing in which he declared, “You foreigners should go back to the land you came from.…”

  From Port Arthur, where the police raided the party’s headquarters, seizing files, smashing typewriters and furniture, to Niagara Falls, where a large mob led by Red Hill, the Niagara daredevil, broke up a communist-sponsored meeting, the attacks continued. The charges were often trumped up. In Toronto, two party members were arrested for conducting a raffle in aid of the unemployed. Police tried to plant a bottle
of cheap wine in the Toronto headquarters in a vain attempt to arrest some of the comrades on liquor charges. The plant was discovered; but later that month authorities padlocked the Bay Street offices on the grounds they constituted a firetrap. The offices were on the top floor. Tenants on the lower floors, who continued in business unmolested, were apparently considered fireproof.

  One of the uglier incidents that autumn took place during a street corner meeting in support of Tim Buck, who was running in the civic election for Board of Control. The city police under Inspector Douglas Marshall broke it up and seized two of Buck’s supporters, Oscar Ryan and the veteran Tom Ewen (also known as McEwen), and threw them into the back of a police car.

  “We’ll fix you sons of bitches,” Marshall told them. “We’ll drive you off the streets.”

  When Ryan expostulated that they had every right to hold a street meeting, Marshall cried, “Shut that bastard’s mouth!” whereupon a hefty sergeant known as the Terror of No. 2 Station pushed his elbow into Ryan’s face.

  At the station, according to evidence later sworn to by the pair, Marshall seized Ryan, threw him to the floor, and kicked him so hard that he lost several of his front teeth. In the yard outside, Ewen was felled by a blow to the face, then punched, kicked, and dragged into the station by one leg. There he was “attacked with savage blows on his face and sharp kicks on the body by the Police.”

  Ewen was so badly injured that he vomited blood and had to be rushed to the hospital. The two comrades who bailed him out the next morning described his face as “a mass of wounds, his left nostril still swollen and clotted with blood and stuffed with gauze and his eye black.” He spent a week in bed recovering.

  That same fall, the Nazi party in Germany made staggering gains in the federal election. As Hitler rose to power, Canadians became aware of the bullying tactics of his storm troops, who broke up anti-Nazi street corner meetings and beat up the speakers. Later, when Hitler took office and the policy of police suppression became official, it was fashionable in Canada to decry these brutal attacks on freedom of speech or assembly. It occurred to only a few – a small coterie of university professors in Montreal and Toronto and the corporal’s guard of progressive politicians under J.S. Woodsworth – that the same thing had been going on in parts of Canada for some time before the Nazi party began to make headlines in Europe.