The Great Depression (30 page)

He was an enthusiastic member of the audience at the Minto Follies, an ice show given each year in Ottawa. “A wonderful exhibition like the old Greek days,” he wrote. “There was no attempt to disguise bare legs. In that particular the exhibition was perfect. One wonders if we do not make a mistake in concealing natural beauty & help to create wrong ideas by so doing. I feel that it has been so in my life.… I am beginning to change my views in favour of the young people of today in some respects.…”

The following day his diary returns to that theme. “Thinking of last night’s performance, I see more & more clearly what I have sacrificed in not having married long ago & having children growing up around me … someone helping me in my home & entertaining etc & others ‘keeping me young’ & interested in young and new ideas.”

But then another, contrary thought crossed his mind – a typical vacillation, for King could not consider, let alone pursue, any plan, personal or political, without chewing it around the edges, like a dog worrying a bone. “Still,” he wrote, “there might have been with that cares and anxieties and expenses which would have made public life impossible.” It did not appear to occur to him that other men in public life – his great hero, Laurier, was one – had managed to cope with cares, anxieties, expenses, and even mistresses. But King, in private life, as in public, was notoriously close with a dollar.

He could easily have married. He was highly eligible and there were plenty of suitable women who would have jumped at the chance. One of these was his old friend Julia Grant, a president’s granddaughter. Her marriage, to Prince Cautacuzene, an Italian nobleman, was breaking up, and she had leaped enthusiastically the previous year into a correspondence with the bachelor of Kingsmere. She was a stylish and articulate woman who had published two books on aristocratic life in pre-war Russia and Austria. For a time they exchanged letters or telegrams almost daily. (In one, King asked her, a little wistfully, if it were true that there were places in Paris where women danced in the nude.)

At King’s suggestion, the princess paid a visit to his favourite medium in Detroit. The accommodating Mrs. Wriedt produced King’s mother, whereupon, so the princess told King, the voice
from the void put the seal of approval on their relationship. Thus challenged, King managed to conjure up, unaided, a confused vision of his own. In it his mother appeared with a somewhat different message. “She was making clear to me,” he decided, “that carnal love was wrong, that it separated one from the divine & spiritual, and that what I have been experiencing was that.”

The correspondence petered out and virtually ended at the close of the year when King wrote to warn the princess to expect few if any letters in the future because “it is necessary to concentrate all thought & energy & strength on public affairs from now on.” Though the two remained friends (the princess was divorced the following year) there was no hint of a closer relationship. The ghost of King’s sainted mother – or at least his interpretation of what that ghost signified – had triumphed once more. But then, the mother’s boy clearly wanted it that way.

In mid-July, 131 delegates and some one hundred visitors arrived in Regina to attend the first convention of the newly formed Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, whose name indicates a certain confusion of purpose. It was a movement, certainly, but was it a political party? Not quite. It was still a loose coalition of the Left, and although its central ideology would be socialism, the men and women who marched under that banner represented a remarkable spectrum of political thought. Had the two capitalist parties – Liberals and Conservatives – decided to unite at a similar convention, the differences could have been no more pronounced.

The farmers had a deep suspicion of the kind of state control that the socialists wanted to impose. The United Farmers of Alberta and their brother organizations in Manitoba and Ontario were no more than liberal reformers. On the far left, in British Columbia, was the Socialist Party of Canada, tinged with Marxism. On the far right, in Ontario, were the non-communist trade unions. Saskatchewan had its own socialist party, the Farmer-Labour coalition, committed to the principles of British Labour, organized around M.J. Coldwell, who would be Woodsworth’s successor. Edmonton had a “Canadian Labour Party.” The Eastern-based League for Social Reconstruction also had a Fabian
counterpart on the West Coast, the Reconstruction Party of British Columbia, to balance the B.C. Marxists.

The mucilage that held this uneasy amalgam together was the common agreement that the economic machinery was out of kilter, that the free enterprise system had failed, and that capitalism was no longer working for the people. In the interests of radical reform, these disparate groups were prepared to unite to change the existing economic, social, and political system. J.S. Woodsworth, who stood above the fray, would be the binding force. Without him, it’s hard to see how the CCF could have come into being so quickly or how the Regina Manifesto could have been accepted by everybody.

The delegates came to Regina by passenger train and bus, some by boxcar, a few on foot, and others by Bennett buggy, the broken-down, horse-drawn automobile that more than any other artifact symbolizes the drought-ravaged years of the Great Depression. Eugene Forsey and King Gordon drove in from Montreal by way of Chicago, there being no Trans-Canada Highway in those days. Frank Scott made his way by the same route in an old Franklin touring car. With Harry Cassidy and Frank Underhill, these three were to become known as the “brains trust” of the convention, a popular title filched from the Roosevelt administration by George Ferguson of the Winnipeg
Free Press
and tied to the LSR.

The title was accurate. At the very last moment, the procrastinating Underhill, scribbling away in his Muskoka cottage, had produced the historic document that came to be called the Regina Manifesto. Vetted by Cassidy, Scott, and the other members of the LSR, the four-thousand-word draft was read aloud to the assembly and then debated, clause by clause. According to Harold Laski, the guru of the British Labour Party, it was the best democratic-socialist manifesto ever produced.

The document dealt with every aspect of change for which the new movement proposed to work. “Such an appeal to the intelligence of the people,” Frank Scott was to write, “has never before been attempted by any political party in this country. It is a venture in audacity that implies at least a profound faith in the attractiveness of the program itself.”

To pilot such a document through the mishmash of social and political philosophies represented in Regina was an act of considerable
finesse. But none could object to the ringing preamble, read out to the convention by its secretary, Norman Priestley, in a great booming voice:

“We aim to replace the present capitalist system with its inherent injustice and inhumanity by a social order from which the domination and exploitation of one class by another will be eliminated, in which economic planning will supersede unregulated private enterprise and competition, and in which genuine self-government based upon economic equality will be possible.… The new social order at which we aim is not one in which individuality will be crushed out by a system of regimentation.… What we seek is a proper collective organization of our economic resources such as will make possible a much greater degree of leisure and a much richer individual life for every citizen.…”

The fourteen points of the manifesto proposed a system of social planning, public ownership at every level of government, the public encouragement of co-operative institutions, the nationalization of all financial institutions and health services, a steeply graded taxation system to pay for it all, security of land tenure for farmers, a labour code for industrial workers, a complete system of social insurance, the abolition of the Senate, and a strengthening of federal power to allow Ottawa “to deal effectively with urgent economic problems which are essentially national in scope.”

The thunderous applause that followed Priestley’s reading of the first twelve points of the manifesto did not hide a determination on the part of some delegates to add to or subtract from it. Ernie Winch from British Columbia, in Eugene Forsey’s description “a dear old soul, a rip-roaring Marxist but the gentlest of men,” kept insisting with considerable force that a clause should be added to the manifesto supporting the idea of public nudism. That sent a chill down Forsey’s spine. “Can you imagine the Winnipeg
Free Press
headline?” he asked Winch, “
J.S. WOODSWORTH GOES NUDIST
!”

“But,” Winch kept saying, “I
admire
the human form.” His colleagues persuaded him to curtail his enthusiasm, at least in public.

William Irvine of the United Farmers of Alberta arrived at the convention fresh from the beginnings of his province’s honeymoon
with the burgeoning Social Credit movement. He tried, vainly, to get some obeisance paid to that new if baffling philosophy in the manifesto. Other delegates stretched and pulled to put over their own points of view until, in Forsey’s words, “the whole thing seemed on the verge of breaking up over and over again.” The British Columbia contingent, “more Marxist than Marx,” despised the communists because they weren’t orthodox enough. The United Farmers of Ontario were terrified by the mildest socialist rhetoric. The word “party” was anathema to them. W.G. Good, who, with the formidable Agnes Macphail, represented the Ontario group, had already confided to Frank Scott his fear that the CCF would become a political party – which was, of course, the general plan. To the Progressives, also, again in Forsey’s words, “ ‘party’ was a dreadful, wicked, dirty word.” To the high-minded left-wingers it smacked of the kind of sleazy, backroom, ward-heeling politics they so bitterly resented. “Movement” – now
there
was a word! It had the ring of a crusade – people marching, trumpets blowing, banners flying high. But “Federation” would do, for that was the new CCF – a federation of farmers and working men, trade unionists, small-l liberals, Marxists, socialists, and Fabian intellectuals.

They were by no means a cohesive group. They clung to their separate ideologies, suspicious of any attempt either to water down their radicalism or, conversely, to seduce them to extremes. The traditional East-West rivalry, which has plagued every political party since Confederation, was very much in evidence, as Scott and Forsey learned. They did their best to try to find out what the agricultural policy of the Saskatchewan Farmer-Labour party was, but that party’s representative, George Williams, refused to tell them anything. “We were reminded that we were from the East,” Forsey recalled. In Montreal, the Fabians had been regarded as something close to the Kremlin’s right-hand men, but here “we were regarded as the personal representatives of the CPR, the Royal Bank of Canada and the Bank of Montreal.” Williams simply kept repeating over and over again, defensively, that “nobody is going to take our socialism away from us.”

There were also personal divisions. Agnes Macphail, Canada’s only woman Member of Parliament, couldn’t abide the gangling B.C. Marxist Angus MacInnis but admitted that there must be
some good in him, otherwise Grace Woodsworth, daughter of the founder, wouldn’t have married him. For the feminists who were also out in force Macphail had nothing but contempt. When the women delegates to the convention held a luncheon in her honour, she swept in, swathed in an opera cloak, and declared, “All the time I’ve been in the House, I’ve never asked for anything on the grounds that I was a woman. If I didn’t deserve something on my own merits, I didn’t want it. This woman stuff makes me sick!” Off she stormed, leaving behind, as Forsey put it, “an infuriated mass of seething feminists.”

The two most contentious debates revolved around the question of compensation for industries nationalized by the state and the argument over whether the movement’s objectives could be achieved entirely through parliamentary democracy. The Marxists wanted to strike out all reference to constitutional practice. Ernest Winch sponsored a motion to delete the phrase “we do not believe in change by violence.” The Marxists lost that one, but on the other argument they had more success. When the die-hard British Columbians tried to insist that the original owners should get nothing when society took back “what rightfully belonged to it,” a committee was struck to try to effect a compromise during the lunch hour. The result, scribbled on the back of a cigarette package in a Regina restaurant, was a paragraph that declared: “We do not propose any policy of outright confiscation” but added that “the welfare of the community must take supremacy over the claims of private wealth … a C.C.F. government will not play the role of rescuing bankrupt private concerns for the benefit of promoters and of stock and bond holders.”

The convention, pushed hard by the radicals, added one sentence to Underhill’s original draft. “No CCF Government will rest content,” it read, “until it has eradicated capitalism and put into operation the full programme of socialized planning which will lead to the establishment in Canada of the Co-operative Commonwealth.”

It was that final piece of rhetoric that M.J. Coldwell described as “a millstone” around the party’s neck. It suggested that the new federation was revolutionary rather than reformist in its goals – determined to abolish the capitalistic system, though not by the violence that the communists were said to advocate.

The title of the Regina
Star’s
editorial that week, “Destroying Democracy,” suggests the virulence of the anti-CCF campaign that followed. R.B. Bennett had already set the tone for the establishment following the movement’s formation in 1932, when he attacked it in public. “What do they offer you for dumping you in the mud?” he asked. “Socialism! Communism! Dictatorship!” It was at this point that Bennett made his ill-considered request to “every man and woman to put the iron heel of ruthlessness against a thing of that kind.” The left wing, especially the communists, always took a delight in referring to him as “Iron Heel Bennett.”