The Great Depression Page 9

  R.B. Bennett, meanwhile, was contemplating more orthodox methods of dealing with the growing Depression. Shortly after the election he assembled his Cabinet, whose senior members with only two exceptions were closely allied with the Eastern financial establishment. These included his predecessor, Arthur Meighen; his deputy, Sir George Perley, a bank director and railway executive; his Minister of National Revenue, E.B. Ryckman, who was forced to shuck off a portfolio of directorships before joining the Cabinet; and his Secretary of State, C.H. Cahan, a wealthy St. James Street lawyer with wide business interests, supposedly backed by Lord Atholstan, publisher of the Montreal Star. The two exceptions were his Minister of Railways, R.J. Manion of Port Arthur, and his Minister of Trade and Commerce, H.H. “Harry” Stevens, an accountant and broker from Vancouver.

  In the words of one political commentator, “the new government group was dominated by eastern, urban, creditor and capitalist interests to a greater degree than any previous government.” This was the Cabinet that Bennett picked to deal with restless Westerners, drought-stricken farmers, and the growing army of jobless men drifting back and forth across the country on freight cars.

  True to his promise, Bennett called a fall session of Parliament six weeks after the election to face the burgeoning crisis. He had already, by order-in-council, brought foreign immigration to a virtual halt. Now he introduced two measures designed to soften the economic blows under which the country was reeling and also, no doubt, to maintain the image of the Prime Minister as a man of action.

  Both measures were rushed through Parliament without much forethought, study, or planning. The first, the Unemployment Relief Act of 1930, provided twenty million dollars for assistance to the unemployed, a sum then considered enormous because it was ten times the amount spent for the entire decade of the twenties. (The full federal budget for that year was less than five hundred million.) Mackenzie King was predictably appalled at this extravagance. “It is a big price to pay for a Tory victory,” he wrote. “It is a sort of wholesale purchase.… It makes one cynical to see the little regard for the public money.” As events were to prove, however, this was no more than a fraction of the amount required to alleviate the country’s misery. Bennett couldn’t stomach the idea of handouts to the dispossessed, however. Four-fifths of the money was to be for “work not charity … to provide employment for wages, not doles.”

  Yet Bennett had no idea how the money was to be spent and, apparently, didn’t want to know. It was shovelled out to any municipality that could prove it had a project that would create jobs. Ottawa paid a miserly quarter of the cost, the province paid half, and the municipality paid the rest. But when the municipalities controlled the purse strings it was an open invitation to inefficiency, patronage, and graft.

  Bennett ignored this because, like King, he didn’t believe the Depression would last. Unemployment had always been seasonal; the government thought it would end by spring. The relief act was a mere stopgap, due to expire on March 31, 1931. At that point there were still two million dollars left in the kitty because some towns and cities couldn’t afford to spend a nickel on public works, even with provincial and federal help.

  Ottawa had reluctantly set aside a fifth of the relief money, four million dollars, for direct relief – the hated dole – in those regions where public works were impracticable. But again the government had no idea how the money was to be spent. Much of it would be handled by private charities, although relief committees were being organized haphazardly across the country. There were then only a few score of trained social workers in Canada, all struggling with immense case loads. In September, one described their dilemma: “One meets some Workers of whom one thinks – ‘How old she looks! I never before thought of her as being old’ … many of us have grown a bit brittle and require ‘handling’ as to our tempers. Can you see your cherished standards, one by one, go by the board; can your sympathies be torn day after day by tragedies of which most of the rest of the city remain unheeding; can you stand day after day in the position of being the only person to whom these families have to turn and yet be absolutely unable to relieve their anxiety and suffering?”

  On September 16, a week after he introduced the relief bill, Bennett made good on his election promise to raise the protective tariff. He went even further than his most protectionist supporters could have hoped for, clamping duties as high as 50 per cent on 180 items ranging from butter, eggs, wheat, and oats to textiles, paper products, and kitchen ware. It was a monumental revision, the most drastic and sweeping since the first customs duties were enacted in 1859. Bennett claimed that the industries thus protected would take on an additional twenty-five thousand employees. But again, nobody had done any homework. There was apparently no time to hold public hearings or to investigate the industries that would be affected. How the government had decided which tariffs to raise, and why, remained a mystery.

  As before, these measures were seen as temporary solutions to a short-term problem. What the Prime Minister and his Eastern capitalist supporters failed to realize was that while the new tariffs might help the manufacturers of Central Canada, they did nothing for those Canadians who depended on the export market – the producers of those traditional Canadian staples, wheat, fish, and pulpwood, the farmers and the fishermen who were the hardest hit by the slump. In fact, it could be argued that the tough tariff policy inhibited trade because it made some of Canada’s best customers less eager to buy her raw materials.

  It was clear by December that it was no longer possible to grow grain for profit on the prairies. In a single year, the price of No. 1 Northern wheat had dropped from $1.43 to 60 cents a bushel. It cost more than that to produce.

  By this time some of the nation’s leaders had replaced the word “recession” with the stronger “depression.” Sir Henry Thornton, president of the CNR, who at the start of the New Year had dismissed the downturn as a “passing phase,” used the dreaded word in a conversation with Mackenzie King in August, thus managing to execute a 180-degree turn in six months. “He fears a difficult winter ahead & a world depression lasting some time,” King noted.

  King took some personal comfort from those words. The CNR president’s gloomy forecast, he confided to his diary, “reveals wisdom of not having waited till next year.” The former prime minister was already weaving a tissue of myth that he had shrewdly foreseen the accelerating disaster and got out while the going was good. Like so many of his fellow Canadians that fall, the parsimonious King took a careful look at his own finances. Unlike most, he saw that he had “nothing to fear.”

  Others less fortunate were making their voices heard. In Vancouver, where a crowd of fifteen hundred protesters had been dispersed by police batons, the mayor was forced to declare a state of emergency when he discovered that all the money earmarked for relief had been exhausted. “The situation in Vancouver is beyond our control,” the city clerk wired to the Prime Minister on New Year’s Eve. The city, he reported, could no longer handle its 25-per-cent share of jobless relief. “There are thousands of people in this city who are hungry and are in need of clothing and shelter.” To this cry for help he added a note of genuine bafflement that citizens could be so hard up when “there is in this Dominion enough of all these things that the unemployed need.” It was a sentiment that would be voiced again and again: the stores and the factories were full to overflowing; why then were people starving and in rags?

  But Bennett remained convinced that the country could not afford to feed and clothe more thousands, that the Depression would melt away with the snows in spring. No amount of evidence appeared to change his view. A few months later, Harry Stevens sent him some revealing photographs showing groups of jobless men crouched against the rain in makeshift shelters on vacant waterfront property in Vancouver.

  Bennett shot back an answer by return mail. His smug reply reveals the antiquity of his social philosophy. The Depression by then was almost two years old, and still the Prime Minister of Canada
remained unconvinced of its seriousness. On the contrary, he appears to have persuaded himself that his government’s hasty measures had solved the crisis and that any man who really wanted work could find it. How else to explain his words to Stevens? “I thank you for the photographs you were good enough to send me showing how the unemployed housed themselves on the waterfront in Vancouver. Surely our unemployment relief measures will rectify conditions for those who are anxious to obtain work” (emphasis added).

  Harry Stevens’s reaction to this extraordinary response can only be guessed at. He didn’t bother to reply.

  1931

  1

  Still fundamentally sound

  2

  Rocking the boat

  3

  The Red Menace

  4

  Quail on toast

  5

  Blood on the coal

  6

  Nine on trial

  1

  Still fundamentally sound

  For all of 1931, R.B. Bennett tried to pretend that the Depression didn’t exist. That summer he dispatched his lean, aging Minister of Labour, Senator Gideon Robertson, on a fact-finding tour across the West. But in spite of what Robertson saw and what he was told, he remained remarkably obtuse, bolstering the Prime Minister’s own view that Western M.P.s were “blackening Canada’s character” by talking about hard times.

  At fifty-seven, Robertson was not the ideal choice for the labour portfolio. A former trade union leader, he was pilloried as a turncoat by the Left because of his ruthless intervention in the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. The radicals called him “that skunk Robertson.” In the upper house he had thwarted almost single-handed Mackenzie King’s attempts to have the infamous Section 98 withdrawn from the Criminal Code. Imposed as a result of the Winnipeg General Strike, the measure gave the authorities the power to jail anybody who attended a meeting of any organization that advocated change by violence of the system of government. It would shortly be used to imprison Canadians for their beliefs.

  Robertson began his tour in Vancouver. There he encountered the remarkable Andrew Roddan, minister of First United Church in the heart of the city’s rundown East End. Roddan was doing his best to feed the jobless, the numbers in the daily bread lines at his Church of the Open Door running to more than twelve hundred. That year he ministered to the needs of some fifty thousand homeless men.

  Roddan told the labour minister that conditions in the East End “jungles” were worse than they had been in Russia. He had been reading about the Soviet Union and “had not seen any picture or read any story that equalled [Vancouver’s] conditions as a breeding place for bolshevism.” Roddan painted a hideous picture of life that month at the corner of Prior and Campbell. A hundred men were sleeping in shacks made of bits of tin and wood, auto hoods, old car bodies, signs, and scraps of cloth found on a nearby dump. He found men sleeping in the rain among rats “as big as kittens,” and foraging alongside them for scraps of discarded food. Water for washing and drinking came from a stagnant pool. But Robertson, in Roddan’s view, didn’t “seem able to grasp the seriousness of the situation.” In fact, the senator announced that conditions weren’t as bad as he’d feared – this in spite of his own statistics that twenty thousand jobless men were now congregated in the city, many of them transients.

  When he reached Alberta, where the unemployed figure had already hit ten thousand, the senator remained determinedly cheerful. Conditions were improving, he told the Edmonton Canadian Club; Canada, he predicted, would be the first country to recover from the slump.

  There was only one problem: the transients. The government was pretending that unemployment relief was a municipal, not a national, responsibility. But the tens of thousands of young Canadians criss-crossing the country on freight trains exploded that fiction: the municipalities couldn’t afford to feed the hordes passing through and didn’t feel responsible for them. Robertson saw this mass movement as a serious menace to public safety. In spite of the solid middle-class credentials of the occasional transient he encountered – one turned out to be the son of an old friend, another a high school gold medallist – he was convinced that the boxcars were crammed with communists and foreigners. His solution was threefold: get the railways to clamp down on those riding the freights; get the transients out of sight in semi-military work camps; and deport those “aliens who are spreading dissension.” If that were done, the municipalities could look after their own – or so the senator believed.

  He was brought up short when he travelled south to Regina and Southern Saskatchewan and saw the effects of the two-year-old drought. For the first time he seemed to grasp the magnitude of the country’s plight. Robertson, who had lived twenty-five years in Western Canada, could scarcely believe what he saw. A third of all the municipalities in the south of the province had suffered crop failures. Seventy-five were hopelessly in debt. The whole region, stretching for one hundred miles, a shocked Robertson told the Prime Minister, “is a barren drifting desert, with no vegetation in sight and water supply is almost wholly exhausted.… This scene of desolation beggars description, and in areas populated by roughly 150,000 persons, it is inevitable that there can be no crops whatever this year, and that feed and fuel will have to be supplied if the people are to be preserved.…”

  The water shortage was devastating. Farmers had to travel as far as twenty miles to haul brackish and muddy water from the expiring sloughs for drinking and washing. Few could afford gas or oil for their trucks, and the underfed horses were often too weak to make many journeys. Thus water had to be hoarded like gold; families were forced to endure the blazing heat of summer without taking a bath, and even the water they used to clean their hands had to be strained and saved, first to wash clothes and finally to scrub floors.

  The farm people lived on a monotonous diet of stewed jack rabbit and boiled Russian thistle. They had no potatoes because the crop had failed, no milk because the cows had been sold for lack of feed, no green vegetables because the garden seeds refused to germinate.

  And the wind! As a survivor of the drought later told Barry Broadfoot, “The wind blew all the time, from the four corners of the world.… I could go about 10 feet beyond the house fence and pick up a clod of dirt, as big as this fist. I’d lay it on my hand and you could see the wind picking at it. Pick, pick, pick. Something awful about it. The dry dust would just float away, like smoke.… I used to say the wind would polish your hand shiny if you left it out long enough. You’ve got to understand, this was no roaring wind. It was just a wind, blowing all the time, steady as a rock.

  “That dirt which blew off my hand, that wasn’t dirt, mister. That was my land, and it was going south into Montana or north up towards Regina or east or west and it was never coming back. The land just blew away.”

  Even before Robertson returned to Ottawa, the Canadian Red Cross had organized a national appeal to aid the 125,000 destitute farm people in Southern Saskatchewan. The response, especially from Ontario, was heartwarming and helped bring about a rapprochement between East and West. The farm families would long remember the hundreds of tons of clothing, collected by the churches, that arrived washed, pressed, and packed in 247 freight cars. The children would never forget the first tinned fruit and fresh apples they’d seen in two years. Only the salt cod from the Maritimes baffled the prairie people; much of it was wasted because no one had explained it must be soaked and desalted.

  In Winnipeg, Robertson received an eloquent presentation from D.J. Allan, reeve of Kildonan, who insisted that fifteen million dollars would have to be spent on public works in Greater Winnipeg to provide for the jobless. “It is true,” the reeve declared, “that it would mean mortgaging our future, but better that than to starve the present generation.” He then put into words what a lot of Canadians were thinking – a sentiment that Vancouver’s council had voiced on New Year’s Eve: “In a country with full elevators and granaries, with its factories and industries suffering from overproduction of
goods, with wealth in goods and wealth in money, it is unthinkable that we can let our people go hungry without the comfort of a fire or stay out of school for lack of shoes and clothing, and this is happening and will happen in greater degree unless some immediate relief is given.”

  Winnipeg’s hard-nosed mayor, Ralph Webb, had blunter proposals, which coincided with the senator’s own views: put the transients to work building the Trans-Canada Highway, kick out “all foreign agitators and undesirables,” and ban the communist newspaper, the Worker.

  Back in Ottawa in July, Robertson told the Prime Minister that the Depression was only temporary and that “perhaps next year with any kind of luck we may be out of it.” More than luck would be needed. Bennett knew he would have to do something about the victims of the drought and also about the transients. Since he had pledged that he would never allow the dole, he would have to find work for the jobless. But, like King before him, he shrank from making any form of public welfare a federal responsibility.

  His election rhetoric returned to haunt him. He was conscious that in Calgary he had declared in a ringing voice that relief was no longer a local problem but had become “national in importance.” He had chided King for pretending otherwise. Now he was forced into a position where he would have to advance a hefty share of federal money because scores of Canadian municipalities and one entire province – Saskatchewan – were too poor to shoulder the burden. He dodged part of the responsibility by insisting that the provinces should distribute the money through independent relief commissions. Relief camps for single men would also be run by the provinces, again with some federal help. British Columbia jumped at his offer and set up twenty-seven camps to provide for 18,340 men – a scheme marked by ineptitude, blatant patronage, and even fraud.