The Great Depression (10 page)

At police headquarters, Buck encountered an old comrade, the Reverend A.E. Smith, late of Winnipeg and now chairman of the Canadian Labor Defense League organized by the party to provide free legal aid for those of its members who were haled into court.

“A.E.!” exclaimed Buck, “have you been called, too?”

“I wasn’t called,” Smith replied. “I was ordered.”

After a wait of fifteen minutes they were summoned to the chief’s office. Dennis Colburn Draper was even smaller than Buck, but his no-nonsense approach to police work had cowed more than one constable on the Toronto force. A tiny martinet with hard eyes, a bristling black Prussian-style moustache, a firm jaw, and a tense, crouching stride, he was unquestionably brave.
In the Great War he had managed the rare feat of twice winning the Distinguished Service Order, the most coveted decoration after the Victoria Cross. The first was awarded for hauling his mortally wounded commander to safety while he himself was wounded, the second for courage at Passchendaele. By the end of the war he had risen to brigadier-general.

He took a post-war job as timber cruiser and purchasing agent for a paper company, but he’d had no police experience when he was made chief in 1928. There were those who thought the job should have gone to a member of the force, but Draper proved himself quickly. When one of his men was shot, he took command of the hot pursuit that followed. In bowler hat and gaiters, he drove every available officer across the fields of three neighbouring municipalities until his quarry was hunted down.

Denny Draper had all the qualities, good and bad, of a Great War officer. A strict disciplinarian, he believed in direct action and in bending the rules when he considered it necessary. He didn’t hold with civil rights where malcontents – or those he considered malcontents – were concerned. Over the objections of the mayor, he authorized the use of the police baton as a means of persuasion. He believed that bookmakers should be given the lash, and he was all for longer penitentiary terms for lawbreakers. His hobbies were predictable: he was a good horseman, a crack shot, and an avid gun collector.

Now the chief pointed a finger at Smith and rapped out a question: “You born in Russia?”

“No, sir. I was born in Canada.”

“I didn’t ask you if you were born in Canada.”

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.

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 on 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.”