The Great Depression (29 page)

By 1933, the newspapers were presenting their readers with a daily load of gloom. In addition to the regular diet of suicides, kidnappings, bank robberies, and murders that has always been grist to the presses, there were tales that hit closer to home: pay cuts, labour disputes, and hunger marches. Stories of global unrest
also dominated the front pages: bank failures in the United States, the rise of fascism in Europe, and the Japanese atrocities in China.

No wonder, then, that editors yearned for lighter fare. It explains why, in those days, the comic strip was king. The major dailies hid their front pages on the weekend by wrapping their entire editions in the comic section. Rival broadsheets vied in proclaiming that they had more strips than the opposition. “72
COMICS
!
” the Toronto
Telegram
trumpeted on its cover – a happier line than the ones that predicted a national railway strike or reported on Adolf Hitler’s accession to power.

Newspaper readers were ripe for tales of adventure – anything to take their minds off their troubles – and in May they got just that. Once again, like a rocket piercing the murk, a new kind of journalistic presence burst from the front pages, wafting Canadians to faraway places with strange-sounding names, where bizarre rituals and unspeakable practices transported them, if only briefly, from the realities of the times.

The Toronto
Star’s
Gordon Sinclair was off once more, this time on a voyage to the south seas – to New Guinea, which he described, with lip-smacking relish, as the “home of the fiercest and most treacherous people living today. An unknown, unexplored, and unmapped jungle hell where bone-crushing savages live as they lived in the stone age with neither clothes nor tools nor laws nor fear. Where wives come by conquest and seizure; where men are slaves and cannibals. Where tribal warfare, black magic and sacrificial rites reap a grim harvest of human skulls.…”

What newspaper could resist the lure of Sinclair’s heated prose? He had already made his name during a tour of India in 1932, with tales of tom-toms, nautch girls, black scorpions, and vipers. Rival publications in most cities now scrambled to buy syndication rights to the newest Sinclair adventures. The stories, which arrived in Canada two months after he wrote them (there were as yet no Pan American Clippers to speed them across the Pacific), were made to order for the times.

The Depression made Sinclair a national figure. His gaudy copy was read by millions. The books that he produced from his adventures were phenomenal best-sellers. He peered cockily from the front pages in his jaunty pith helmet and breeches, his broken nose giving his features a slightly battered and therefore
exciting look. He arrived at the right time, in the right place, and on the right paper. The Toronto
Star
, with its legendary expense accounts and its aggressive coverage, had no intention of losing its position as the country’s largest English-speaking daily. Sinclair was given his head.

Travel to foreign lands was slow, difficult, and expensive. The occasional student was able to work his way to Europe on a cattle boat – Hugh MacLennan, the future novelist, was one – but most people, sunk in the abyss of the Depression, could scarcely scrape up streetcar fare. Movies like
Flying Down to Rio
and
King Kong
and popular songs such as “The Isle of Capri” had provided a touch of the exotic in a drab world. But Sinclair provided Escape from the humdrum, day after day.

“I’ll tell you nothing of trade, commerce or the profound yammerings which go to make up a modern business world,” he wrote, undoubtedly to the relief of his readers. “But I’m going to learn how they stuff those skulls. I’m going to hunt the cuscuss. I’m going to sleep among the vampire bats where you have to wear your shoes to save your blood. I’ll give you the low down on slavery and the weird rites of the longhouse. I hope to get where few whites have been before.…”

That must have been a welcome contrast to a typically gloomy news story that appeared that same day from Quebec City: “Evicted from his home because he was unable to pay rent, Arthur Drouin, 80, was obliged to live in a dilapidated shed with his sick wife until last night because he could not get near district relief officers to plead his case. It took physical injury to have his case brought to the attention of civic officials, the injuries coming as a result of being trampled on by a crowd of younger men when he tried to get near the relief office in city hall.”

When front-page headlines reported on the destitution and near starvation of settlers sent to Northern Ontario, Sinclair enthralled his readers with a tale of “two million gaudy butterflies … drowned in the Pacific … as a monsoon boomed seaward from Papua and swept them helplessly into an enraged ocean.”

On May 9, the
Star’s
readers could wallow in a whole series of disturbing headlines: “
DREAD OF BEING DEPORTED DRIVES LAD ACROSS CANADA”; “GANDHI GROWS WEAK IN
2nd
DAY OF FAST”; “TWO EXECUTED BY AXE IN PRUSSIA”; “KIDNAP THREATS BRING YOUTH
, 19,
FOUR YEAR TERM”; “COMPROMISE FAILED UPON DISARMAMENT
.”
But no Depression headline could compete with the ones that Sinclair was making:

Or his florid account of his arrival in New Guinea: “Tribal tom-toms throbbed through New Guinea’s damp hills today and hundreds of savage eyes stared from behind giant jungle ferns as our sea-going coffee grinder loaded deep with gold miners, airplanes, cows, dynamite and one lone thrill-seeker slipped inside the great coral reef which spreadeagles the island.…”

A few days later, Canadians learned that one of Sinclair’s colleagues, Pierre Van Paassen, had run afoul of the Hitler regime and that the
Star
had been banned in Germany. In spite of the Depression, it was becoming harder and harder to ignore the stories from abroad – and harder to get at the truth.

The spill-over from the new Europe also made domestic news. Canadian fascist parties were on the march, singing anti-Jewish songs in the Beaches area of Toronto, raising the swastika in that city’s Willowdale Park, and provoking wild scenes that in one case involved ten thousand people. In Montreal in September, fifteen hundred fascists tried to break up an anti-clerical rally, and in Winnipeg, two days later, the Nationalist Party of Canada announced its formation to fight communism “tooth and nail” and to abolish all provinces in favour of a central government. The party soon showed its true colours by adopting the Hitler brown-shirt uniform, complete with swastika, and the Nazi salute.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was also making headlines, having launched his first term as U.S. president with an energy and imagination that contrasted with the retrograde policies of both R.B. Bennett and Mackenzie King. The parsimonious King was outraged at the amount of money being spent in Canada on relief – “an orgy of public expenditure,” he called it, charging that the Tories were “running wild with the taxes of the people.” King forced Bennett to limit the amount to be spent on direct relief to twenty million, except in cases of emergency. Bennett used that concession to sneak the “peace, order and good government” clause back into the relief act. It passed because nobody wanted to be seen opposing direct relief. Thus, the immigration department
was again able to “shovel out” undesirables without resorting to formal legal procedure.

Bennett’s brother-in-law William Herridge, Canada’s minister to Washington, was enthusiastic about Roosevelt’s innovations. He urged Bennett to start a public works program that might tie in with the reciprocal trade agreement the Prime Minister favoured. Bennett declined. When a Toronto sociologist urged that the government follow Roosevelt’s lead and establish a board of economic stabilization, he got a blunt rebuff. Bennett wanted no part of that; Canada, he declared, was “not going to try to keep up with the Jones’,” a phrase that hints at the Prime Minister’s contempt for major spending, even when the future of the country was at stake. It was more important to balance the budget.

Bennett had seen a high-tariff policy as the economic salvation of the country. Mackenzie King, on the other hand, believed that Bennett’s tariff increases would strangle trade. Both were looking back to an earlier era. The new Liberal policy announced that spring included reducing the cost of government and – as always! – balancing the budget. If trade barriers were reduced, the Liberals believed, the resultant profits would make up for the federal cheese-paring. Price fixing was to end; the Combines Investigation Act was to be rigorously enforced; the Criminal Code was to be strengthened to deal with monopolies. For these worthy goals they were suggesting band-aid remedies. There were other, vaguer pledges. To “revive” industry in order to provide jobs was one. Another was to form a national non-partisan commission to administer all federal monies with the co-operation of the provinces and municipalities. The most sensible promises were enactment of a system of unemployment insurance and establishment of a central bank to control credit.

Both political leaders were still taking their cues from Great Britain rather than from the United States. Indeed, it remained hard for Canadians to think of themselves as citizens of the Commonwealth and not the Empire, especially when Bennett reintroduced the practice of conferring titles on the famous or well-to-do. When Noel Coward’s motion picture
Cavalcade
came to Canada it was promoted as “The Motion Picture Industry’s Salute to the Great British Empire.” The general attitude towards Americans remained faintly snobbish, as Bennett’s “keeping up
with the Jones’ ” remark suggests – a hint there of the vulgar, free-spending
nouveau riche
. (Bennett, a poor Maritime boy who inherited a fortune, didn’t think of himself in those terms.) Thus Franklin Roosevelt’s vigorous attempts to deal with the Depression, especially through the National Recovery Act, were viewed with suspicion and even horror by a section of the Canadian establishment.

“I dread the thought of what may come out of the U.S. experiment,” King wrote in his diary in September. “I am beginning to think Roosevelt is a little like Bennett in his outlook, methods, etc.” Coming from someone who had that year categorized the Prime Minister as “a dog of a man … a brute in his instincts,” that was strong stuff, especially from one who would later revel in his role as a confidant of the American president. A month later King was confiding to his diary: “I am beginning thoroughly to dislike the man [Roosevelt] as a dictator whose policies are absolutely wrong – amateurish, half-baked & downright mistaken.”

What King feared was “the mad desire to bring about state control & interference beyond bounds.” It made him shudder, he wrote; and he shuddered again that month when Raymond Moley, a member of the Roosevelt “brains trust,” outlined the NRA program to a conference on Canadian Banking and Money Policy. King noted that Moley’s speech made his “blood run cold.”

In his years in Opposition, the former prime minister had more time on his hands to indulge in his fascination with the occult. This did
not
make headlines. In fact, no whisper of King’s encounters with the supernatural ever reached the public. These were gentler times. The press was discreetly incurious about the private lives of public men. The Prime Minister’s excursions into the spirit world undoubtedly served a very real need. He was a lonely bachelor whose closest friend was probably his little dog, Pat, on whom he lavished all the care and concern usually reserved for small children. When Pat was ill, King was despondent; when he rallied, King was delirious with joy. There is a charming, if somewhat saccharine, description in his diary of the two of them, man and dog, kneeling together, hand in paw, at the side of the bed, heads bowed, saying their goodnight prayers. Did the dog actually pray, paws on coverlet? King apparently believed he did.

Joy Esberey in her psychological biography of King has written of his constant need for reassurance. He sought the security of his “loved ones,” the dear departed who spoke to him through the mouths of his mediums, who now included Mrs. Etta Wriedt of Detroit. A woman of international reputation, at least in spiritualist circles, she visited him several times during his years in Opposition. “The more I see of her the greater my admiration for her is,” he wrote, “a quite exceptional type of unselfish, high minded person, managing alone in the world with wonderful energy and independence.”

No doubt she was. Perhaps she really believed she was talking to the shades of his relatives and friends, even when the prophecies they made were dead wrong. Indeed, most of the time the voices that issued from her lips merely served to confirm King’s own views, prejudices, and purposes.

By the end of the year, King and his closest human friend, the ever available Joan Patteson, found they were able to talk to the spirit world without the intervention of a medium, first through the rather awkward method of the ouija board, which answered either yes or no to previously posed questions or laboriously spelled out messages from the Beyond. Later they took up the practice of “table rapping,” seated at a table with hands touching, while the table rapped out answers to questions.

King first encountered this phenomenon at the home of Dr. Arthur Doughty, the Dominion Archivist. It was, he wrote later, “an amazing evening.” He did not know, of course, that the table-rapping craze had been hatched as a hoax by two teenaged sisters in Rochester, New York, in 1848. The sisters’ secret was simple: they had double-jointed toes that cracked out convincing messages underneath the table. But King, who had received communications via the table from his mother, father, brother, and sisters, was totally convinced that “there can be no shadow of doubt of their genuineness.”

Apart from his dog and the ghosts of his loved ones, King preferred the company of women. He was obviously heterosexual and made no secret, at least to his diary, that he enjoyed the sight of pretty girls in bathing costumes. After walking with friends along the beach of a lake in Manitoba one hot July afternoon, he commented approvingly on the spectacle. “Saw ladies in bathing – naked legs – am beginning to see beauty & truth in bare limbs
& to overcome prejudice re covering up what Nature & God has given us.”