The Great Depression (33 page)

After his Ottawa encounter with Bennett, Smith immediately launched a new attack – a play entitled
Eight Men Speak
, performed in the Standard Theatre in Toronto in conjunction with the Progressive Arts Club. Home-grown drama was an oddity in Canada. Even the fledgling Little Theatre Movement generally performed British or American plays. But this play dealt with events close to home – the Communist trials, conditions at Kingston, the attempt to murder Tim Buck, and the bloody climax of the Estevan strike. It played to a full house and was so successful that a second performance was planned. Before the actors could reassemble, however, the Toronto Police Commission banned the play as “distasteful.”

Bennett asked for a copy of the script. On January 2 his secretary, Alice Miller, wrote to the Minister of Internal Revenue that the Prime Minister “thinks … appropriate action should be taken through the Attorney-General of the province to protect society against these attacks.…” Bennett was convinced once again that dissidents must be muzzled, that “the time has come when we must no longer allow Smith and his followers to spread propaganda of gross misrepresentation, deluding the people who they exploit.” He dragged out the familiar excuse that censors always use to justify their actions: “we should not permit liberty to degenerate into license [
sic
].”

Prodded by Ottawa, the attorney general was not long in acting.
The Strand Theatre on Spadina Avenue, which was planning to stage a second performance of the play, was told that if it did so it would lose its licence. The CLDL immediately sponsored a protest rally at Hygea Hall on January 17. Smith took to the platform to tell of the attempt to shoot Tim Buck and to describe his reception by Bennett. Then he charged the government with the attempted assassination of the Communist leader.

“Was this an accident?” Smith asked. “Was not the government of the day to be held responsible?”

In the audience that evening were three members of Police Chief Denny Draper’s Red Squad trying to write down everything that was said. None of them knew shorthand; the best they could do was to scribble certain abbreviated words and phrases in their notebooks. Nonetheless they produced a verbatim account of Smith’s speech, including these words: “I say deliberately that Bennett gave the order to shoot Buck in his cell in cold blood with intent to murder him.” The order, Smith was said to have declared, had come from Bennett through Hugh Guthrie to the penitentiary warden.

Two weeks later, A.E. Smith opened his Toronto
Star
to find a front-page headline announcing that he had been charged with sedition “with the intention of spreading discontent, hatred and distrust of the government.”

The charge was not popular. More and more, the Prime Minister of Canada – “Iron Heel Bennett” – was seen as a bully trampling on the rights of ordinary citizens. Smith, a one-time Methodist minister who had helped in early negotiations to form the United Church of Canada, had quit the ministry following the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 to work for the cause of labour. A former member of the Manitoba legislature, he was respected for his obvious sincerity if not for his politics. To many Canadians Smith’s opinions didn’t sound seditious. Opposition politicians were always fomenting distrust of the government; what was wrong with “spreading discontent”?

As Smith himself declared at a rally on February 3, in which three thousand thronged to Massey Hall to hear him, “I am charged with sedition because I criticize our leaders. Why is Mitch Hepburn [the Liberal leader in Ontario] not so charged? Does he not seek to create disaffection against the government? I am charged because Bennett is in an unstable position.…”

The Toronto
Star
backed him up: “If a man slanders the Prime Minister he can be charged with slander. Why should he be charged with sedition which is in a wholly different category?”

Offers of legal aid poured in. E.J. McMurray, K.C., a Winnipeg lawyer who had once been Mackenzie King’s Solicitor General, offered to come to Toronto to help with the defence. He was joined by Leo Gallagher, who had been banished from Germany after defending Marinus van der Lubbe, charged by the Nazis with causing the Reichstag fire. Gallagher’s fees were underwritten by the International Labour Defense, whose secretary stated that no expense would be spared to defend Smith.

The trial itself bordered on the farcical. McMurray scored the first point by demanding that Tim Buck be brought from Kingston as a defence witness, a tactic that the Crown attorney, Peter White, protested vigorously but vainly. McMurray was able to make his case to the judge that Buck’s testimony would show “that there did exist an error in the administration of justice in Canada, which the defendant was trying to alter by lawful means.”

Now Bennett’s attempts to use the big stick against his shrill opponents began to backfire. The last thing anybody wanted was to bring up the embarrassing business of the attempt to shoot Buck. An exercise in damage control was put into operation. Buck, who had been denied all news, was smuggled in irons from the penitentiary to the train at Kingston and then from the train to the Don Jail in Toronto, where he was isolated from all other prisoners. Only one guard was allowed access to him; his exercise periods were held separately from those of the others. Thus he was to be kept from learning how the trial was proceeding. But a friendly guard, angered by the implications of the Smith case, found a moment after supper to whisper to him through the bars: “You’ll have to be very careful, Tim, they are out to get Mr. Smith and they won’t let you have your say if they can help it. I’ve written down the words Smith used so you’ll know what it is all about. I’m going to pass it through your ventilator. Promise you’ll tear it up and put it down the can right away.” He threw the note and a newspaper clipping through the small square opening above the door.

Buck, now in possession of the bare facts of the case, decided the best thing he could do was to ensure that Smith’s statement
was verified. He must get across to the jury the fact that a deliberate attempt had been made to murder him. He knew the Crown would try to prevent him from speaking and so spent some time working out the shortest possible answers to the questions he might expect at the outset.

At last he was brought into the courtroom, wearing his heavy blue prison suit and looking colourless and weak from his long confinement. His presence gave the Communist party another chance to provoke headlines. Even as he began his testimony, four thousand people were holding a demonstration in Queen’s Park.

McMurray turned to the witness and asked if he remembered October 20, 1932.

“I remember it very well,” Buck replied.

“What particularly impressed it on your mind?”

“I was shot at …” Buck began, his words almost drowned out by the Crown attorney’s objections. The objection was sustained, but the damage was done. McMurray had managed to widen the scope of the trial, to broaden its appeal, and to milk it for its propaganda value.

The only evidence the Crown could produce against Smith was the notebooks of two of the Red Squad members. Unable to write down Smith’s words verbatim, the two policemen had expanded and transcribed them after leaving the hall. McMurray was able to show that the longhand in both notebooks was so suspiciously similar that it appeared to have been written by one hand. A parade of defence witnesses counteracted this flimsy testimony by swearing that Smith had not uttered the words attributed to him.

The public was soon aware that the Crown had no substantial case. The jury believed Smith when he denied he’d said what the Red Squad claimed. Undoubtedly they were also influenced by the defence’s summing up: “If you punish Smith, then you are going back to the Spanish Inquisition. Certain reactionary forces will be pleased if Smith is taken away. But out over Canada today this case is attracting wide attention. This is a state trial. This is a political trial. I often wonder, gentlemen, whether jails are built for labour leaders. Smith’s fate is being watched in B.C., in the shanties among the miners of Alberta, in Brandon where he laboured
as a young man, all over among the poor and working people, among people of the universities all interested in the fate of this man.”

The verdict was a foregone conclusion. The jury found Smith not guilty. A few months later, in spite of Bennett’s threat, Tim Buck was paroled.

By 1934, the radio had replaced the piano as the central piece of furniture in the living room. The Stromberg Carlson upright in its two-toned cabinet of polished walnut, the Gothic mantel Philco in its hand-rubbed casing of rare Oriental woods, or the Victor Globe Trotter with its “modernistic design” (which we now call art deco) are familiar artifacts of the Depression years. More than the railways they stitched the country together; more than the movies they brought solace to the impoverished. Radios were expensive – even a reconditioned table model cost fifteen dollars or more – so that those without radios often gathered in the home of someone more fortunate than themselves. But once you owned a radio the programs were free, except for the annual two-dollar licence fee about which everybody complained. You could tune into the CRBC and listen to the sugary tones of Mart Kenney and His Western Gentlemen or the exclamatory voice of Foster Hewitt calling the Saturday night hockey game. If you had no decent Sunday clothes you could stay home on the Lord’s Day and worship at the altar of the Stromberg Carlson.

It is impossible to overestimate the power of the radio in the Depression years. It is not too much to say that it helped save the sanity of the dispossessed. It allowed the world to enter the parlours of the nation, and it provided a sense of community to the drought-ravaged farms and lonely coastal backwaters. Canadians heard Jimmy McLarnin wrest the welterweight boxing title from Barney Ross on the radio. They learned of Hitler’s massacre of Ernst Röhm’s Brown Shirts the same way – as well as Max Baer’s heavyweight victory over Primo Camera, the deaths of Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger, the kidnapping of the London, Ontario, brewer, John Labatt, and the charges against the boot-legging
Bronfmans for evading customs duties – and all to the strains of “Blue Moon,” “June in January,” and “The Object of My Affection.”

If Canadians got much of their news from the local stations, they got most of their entertainment from the three powerful broadcasting networks across the border, which tended to drown out their fledgling Canadian counterpart.

The Bennett government, pushed and prodded by Graham Spry’s Canadian Radio League, had adopted the measures advocated by the Aird report on broadcasting. Canada now had its first real network, the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission, whose chairman, the bearded and bulky Hector Charlesworth, had lofty plans for the medium. Charlesworth was already talking about bringing the finest British programs to Canada, of broadcasting symphonic music from seven major centres, and of creating a “theatre of the air” in which the work of the world’s finest playwrights would be heard – Shakespeare, of course, but also Canadian works drawn from the Little Theatre Movement. As for commercials, Charlesworth was against them. “The best of American programs are those in which advertising has no voice …” he said. “Advertising has hurt radio programs.”

In spite of this, Canadians were far more likely to turn to one of the despised American commercial programs, all of them, from “The Lone Ranger” to “The Romance of Helen Trent,” controlled by advertisers. The Americans had already seized the continental initiative, and in the end, Canada would be forced to opt for their commercial pattern rather than Charlesworth’s dream of a BBC-type network. Thus was Canada further seduced into the American orbit.

With the exception of William Aberhart of Alberta, no Canadian politician had yet mastered the techniques of radio, as Franklin D. Roosevelt had with his famous fireside chats. Bennett’s bombast was fine for a live mass audience but quite unsuitable for the intimacy of the living room. Mackenzie King’s plodding, fusty style put people to sleep. Aberhart was the only politician in the country to adapt American broadcasting techniques to the Canadian arena.

“Charisma” was a foreign word in the thirties; it wasn’t even in the standard college dictionaries. But there’s no doubt that Aberhart was blessed with it, as Major Douglas, the high priest of
Social Credit, discovered in the spring of 1934. The UFA government of Premier J.E. Brownlee had decided to bring Douglas to the province to explain Social Credit, a move designed to discredit Aberhart, whose own ideas were at variance with the Douglas dogma.

Douglas arrived in Edmonton on April 5 and snubbed Aberhart at the railway station. But the following day, when he appeared before the legislature (which had already heard Aberhart) and attempted to outline his theories, was not for him a success.

Douglas was thinking in world terms. Something, he felt, was wrong with a monetary system controlled by a ruthless band of international financiers and bankers. By arbitrarily advancing or refusing credit they were preventing citizens of the world from taking advantage of modern technology that theoretically should be organized to relieve them of want. Any Alberta farmer in hock to Eastern bankers could sympathize with his indignation. Why should they control the credit system? Credit, said Douglas, was a public, not a private, resource, and the issuing or withholding of credit ought to be a state monopoly.

When Douglas was asked to lay out a specific program to deal with the ills of the Depression, however, he was vague and evasive. He did not agree with Aberhart that Social Credit could be introduced provincially. The federal government, he was convinced, would declare it unconstitutional (which is exactly what happened later). Under questioning, he implied that Social Credit might be introduced by a revolution if the financial crisis led the world into another war; the wicked band of bankers wouldn’t give up their power unless they were forced to. Certainly there was a hint of incipient fascism in his distrust of the masses and his concept of an elitist government run by experts. Later, in Calgary, he told his listeners: “You must have control of the army, and the navy and air force.” As Aberhart’s biographers Elliott and Miller have pointed out, what he was advocating, in the long view, was a military coup against the bankers. That was all very well; no doubt many Albertans would have welcomed one. But it was scarcely a practical solution. Floating in his theoretical cloud-land, Douglas clearly had no specific cure for the province’s problems.