The Great Depression (2 page)

Bennett himself clung to this view and indicated more than once that the current generation of Canadians was “soft,” that it lacked the rugged independence and the ability to make sacrifices of its forbears. That sounded incongruous coming from one of the richest men in Canada, who owed much of his wealth to a legacy. By Bennett’s standards, anybody who applied for relief was a failure. Rather than endure this humiliation, thousands shunned the relief offices. In 1934, a United Church worker in central Manitoba discovered that many farm families were going without underwear or shoes for their children, who as a result couldn’t attend school. All were entitled to relief, but they couldn’t bring themselves to apply for it.

Families made do as long as possible before “going on the pogey,” as the phrase had it. Houses went without repair, automobiles were allowed to wear out, clothing was patched, re-patched, and patched again before they would endure “the soul-searing shame of applying for relief.”

That was the phrase that a Great War veteran, Victor Nelson Swanston, used in 1931 when he finally made the mortifying journey to the Regina relief office. He had no choice: he had been
laid off his auto assembly job. He had worked briefly as a harvest hand. But now his resources were spent, there was no food left in the house, and his wife was in tears.

Out came an inspector to make absolutely sure the family was destitute. He searched the empty cupboards, and he even opened the door of the oven to make sure the cunning Swanstons hadn’t squirreled away any food. In the end, the family was given enough to eat.

To pay for his weekly groceries, Swanston was put to work digging ditches and cleaning Regina’s streets. There were no rest periods because if the men stopped to smoke there was always an angry taxpayer rushing to phone the city works department to ask why these ne’er-do-wells weren’t working. At school, the four Swanston children were jeered at. “Reliefers! Reliefers!” their schoolmates shouted. There was no hiding their shame; their daily free half-pint of milk gave their secret away.

The catastrophe that was visited upon the Swanston family fell unevenly across the country. The big cities were the worst off, led by Montreal; by 1932, a third of its people were on relief. The big Ontario cities were almost as badly hit, the rural areas less so. Farm dwellers, except in the drought country, could at least grow their own food. Prince Edward Island, one gigantic farm, had the lowest per capita relief costs in the country. If the Maritimes appeared to suffer less it was partly because they had always been in an economic slump, and, except in Cape Breton, there were fewer industries to close and throw people out of work. But nature devastated the West; by 1937, two-thirds of Saskatchewan’s farmland had turned to desert. Outside the drought country, cities such as Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Calgary suffered the most. British Columbia, Canada’s fastest-growing province, was almost as badly off, especially in Vancouver where a flourishing building boom quickly collapsed.

The checkerboard pattern of want in the Depression determined the political pattern in the years that followed. The Atlantic provinces remained faithful to the old-line parties while the West shoved them aside. Dissent, which had not flourished in the twenties, sparked half a dozen new political movements. People ceased to trust their traditional leaders, who had misled or even lied to them. In their search for a way out of the economic dilemma, some embraced new ideologies – communism, socialism,
fascism. Others were convinced that the country ought to be run by “experts” – a denial of democracy that appealed to those who espoused Howard Scott’s Technocracy movement. The quest for a Messiah – scientific in the case of Scott, religious in the case of Frank Buchman, whose Oxford Group (and later Moral Rearmament) became another Depression fad – was a feature of the decade. Three new premiers – Aberhart of Alberta, Hepburn of Ontario, Duplessis of Quebec – were swept into office on populist platforms. All turned out to be authoritarians, perfectly prepared to trample on the rights of those who opposed them.

Canadians have always been a cautious people. The Depression made them more cautious than ever. The longing for security that brought family allowances, medicare, and unemployment insurance is still deep in the subconscious of the Depression generation. The children of those years cling to their jobs as a shipwrecked sailor clings to a raft. Three decades later, the adult world raised in the thirties would be baffled by what it saw as the irresponsibility of a new generation that thought nothing of quitting work, having a good time, and then casually seeking other employment. The Depression, it might be said, helped foster the generation gap of the sixties.

Lara Duffy, a Toronto housewife who was four years old when her father lost his job in 1932, has never been able to come to terms with her eldest daughter’s spending sprees. “Money doesn’t mean anything to her. I don’t think she’s looked at a price tag for years.” She herself can’t abide waste; she can’t even bear to discard worn-out clothing, always finding somebody who can use it. “It’s just impossible for me to waste things.” Yet in some ways she is as unrestrained about spending as her daughter, and that too is a result of the Depression: “Sometimes I have too many of some things. It’s a reaction: because you had nothing, now you have to have too much of what you were once deprived of.” As a schoolgirl she had one pair of shoes. “Now I have lots of shoes; that seems to be something I have to do for me.” To this day Mrs. Duffy cannot abide the taste of plum jam or sausages because that was the kind of cheap relief fare her family lived on during the Depression. For seven years her father was out of work, constantly and vainly seeking a job.

A steady job – that was the supreme goal of those whose youth was scarred and shaped by the thirties. It was something to struggle
for, something to cling to. Men like Verdun Clark of Toronto were never afraid of hard work all their lives because they could remember the day when there was no work and no food. Born in 1916 and named for the bloodiest battle of the Great War, Clark was one of a family of five children deserted by their father, as so many were during those hard times. As a result, he was determined that what had happened to his family would never happen to his own children.

Clark could never forget the times when food was so scarce that he would go down to the St. Lawrence Market to shoot pigeons off the rafters so that his mother could make a pigeon pie for dinner. He could never forget the little store at the corner of Queen and Augusta where Cooper the butcher would cock an eye at him and ask: “How’s your dog, Vern?” Both knew there was no dog, but Clark would reply with a straight face, “Not too bad.” And Cooper would respond with an equally straight face, “I’d better give you a few bones. I’ll give you some with a little meat on.” There were thousands of Verdun Clarks in the thirties, living on soup made from scraps dispensed by sympathetic tradesmen. That’s how people were in the Depression, generous in the midst of want. As Verdun Clark would often remark, years later, “They aren’t like the people today. There’s no comparison. No comparison.”

And so Verdun Clark, who was just thirteen when the Depression began, worked hard all his life and is proud of it. “I have
worked
. I don’t think I ever had a job that was only eight hours a day. I worked for fifty-six years. I never lost a day’s work in all those years. I was determined that I would never lose my family. I would work twenty hours a day if necessary to overcome it; which I did. The Depression helped me because it gave me that determination that I had to go ahead and work.”

The Depression also played havoc with
laissez-faire
. For the first time, Canadians began to realize that government
must
interfere in the private affairs of the nation. The Canadian Wheat Board, the Bank of Canada, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Trans-Canada Airlines were among the public corporations born of those hungry years. Anyone who advocated today’s social services in the pre-Depression era would have been considered a dangerous radical – and, in truth, some were. But the hard times changed people’s outlook.

Yet for a good many Canadians there were no hard times. For those who held a decent job, the thirties was a wonderful period. Because of deflation, everything got cheaper. A single man making fifty dollars a month wasn’t exactly on Easy Street, but he wasn’t poor either. He could buy a hamburger for a dime. He could take his girl to dinner and a movie for two dollars; he could buy a tailored suit with two pairs of pants for twenty.

Bruce Hutchison, then a young political reporter for the Vancouver
Province
, married, with two children, lived comfortably even when his wages were cut from fifty-five to fifty dollars a week. His standard of living actually rose as prices fell. “We always had a maid in the house, the best food in our stomachs, two second-hand cars in the garage, and in our minds the smug, bogus security of the fortunate. It never occurred to me that we were well off.…”

Thousands of Canadians lived as Hutchison did, breezing through the hard times without a care. For them the Depression was a blur; the shabby men selling shoelaces on the street corners were as foreign as Laplanders, the newspaper headlines about hunger marches and jobless riots as far removed as those from Ethiopia, China, and Spain. They gambolled their way through the decade, fox-trotting to the clarinets of Goodman and Shaw, or speeding down the quiet country lanes in their Packard Straight Eights. For them, the memories of the thirties evoked a different set of symbols – Monopoly games, miniature golf, the “candid camera,” Knock-Knock jokes.

One member of this favoured company recalled those times with nostalgia and affection thirty years later in an interview with
Maclean’s
. “You could take your girl to a supper dance at the hotel for $10,” he remembered, “and that included a bottle and a room for you and your friends to drink it in.”

Ten dollars was a great deal of money in 1935 – a year in which department store seamstresses found they had to work evenings to earn the minimum weekly wage of $12.50. But for others it was a pittance.

“I’m glad I grew up then. It was a good time for everybody. People learned what it means to work,” said John David Eaton.

For most people, the Depression began on that manic morning of October 29, to be known forever as Black Tuesday, when the easy, buoyant era of the twenties – the roaring, turbulent, high-flying twenties – came to a dead stop. Yet those fevered October days were no more than symptoms of a deeper malady, undiagnosed and untreated.

The germs were already there in the hot, dry summer of 1929, when the crops began to fail on the southern prairies and the boom ran wild and out of hand and the country continued to overbuild on borrowed funds. The Great Depression was beginning and nobody knew it. The Great Repression was already under way but nobody cared. One did not need to visit Munich to see dissidents beaten to the ground. It was happening here.

In the decade that followed – the hungry, the dirty, the sad, shameful, mean-spirited thirties – the image of a policeman’s truncheon bringing a shabbily dressed man to his knees would become familiar. Human rights and civil liberties were of no more concern to the average Canadian, struggling to make ends meet, than to the average German. It is appalling to recall that under the vagrancy laws it was a crime to be poor and homeless in 1929. But scarcely anybody gave that a thought; in those heady days, anybody who wanted a job could get one. If you didn’t work you were a bum, and if the police caught you and hauled you off a freight train, you went to jail – and good riddance. But the day was coming when two million people would be bums, when the freight trains would be jammed with homeless men, when the jails would be bursting with “vagrants,” and when some who protested these conditions would be branded dangerous subversives and packed off to the penitentiary.

That day, in fact, had already arrived. The events of August 13 in Toronto – another Black Tuesday, though nobody called it that – were as much a curtain raiser for the decade to come as the market crash that followed ten weeks later.

We can glimpse the opening skirmish in this bloody affair through the shocked eyes of a twenty-two-year-old bystander, John Morgan Gray, who in the post-war years would become a major literary figure as president of the Macmillan Company of
Canada. On that balmy summer evening, Gray had decided to stroll over to Queen’s Park with a few friends from a nearby University of Toronto fraternity house. The park, a grass-covered, tree-shaded square behind the Parliament Buildings, provided one of the few green spaces in the downtown core and was thus a favourite with Torontonians, who liked to take short cuts across it, or listen to concerts in the bandstand, or take their ease on the park benches to observe the passing show. The passing show that night promised to be special. The communists were planning a rally, and the police had announced that they would break it up. Gray was a graduate of Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto, but in spite of his education and a recent sojourn in Europe, he knew nothing of international politics. He and his friends had walked over out of curiosity, to watch the fun and see “what wild Communists looked like.”

The wild communists, it turned out, looked disappointingly commonplace. Gray spotted them at the south end of the park, an unimpressive group of about sixty people, some with children, making their way toward the bandstand. As Gray described them, “they looked both ordinary and harmless, not remotely dangerous to the city or the country as a whole.”

Nothing interesting was happening or seemed about to happen. From his vantage point, about a hundred yards away, Gray couldn’t tell whether or not anyone was speaking. There was no cheering, only “a kind of irresolute shifting about in the little crowd.”