The Great Depression (34 page)

As the Brownlee government hoped, Douglas’s appearance led to a breach with Aberhart. Douglas wanted the famous Yellow
Pamphlet withdrawn, or at the very least his name removed from it. That caused a dejected Aberhart to lament, after a fierce encounter with his hero, “Douglas told me I am all wrong.”

But Brownlee had not reckoned on Aberhart’s popular appeal. Douglas’s appearance in the province had the opposite effect to that intended. The major, with his military bearing and his close-cropped moustache, certainly looked the part of a leader. Aberhart, plump, Buddha-like, and double-chinned, didn’t. None of that mattered. Since few could really understand what Douglas was trying to say, his theories attracted few converts. But everybody understood Aberhart, the master of radio politics, when he broadcast about the irony of poverty in the midst of plenty. He had trained his disciples well. The UFA government in trying to discredit the new Messiah had actually strengthened his hand.

The Premier, meanwhile, was embroiled in a spicy seduction suit brought against him by a family friend, twenty-two-year-old Vivian MacMillan, and her father, the former mayor of Edson. The court case occupied the last week of June and was covered verbatim by the Edmonton newspapers, which provided their eager readers with dozens of columns of testimony.

And sensational testimony it was. According to Miss MacMillan, Brownlee, who had met her when she was sixteen, had talked her into coming to Edmonton and offered to be her guardian; he had got her a job in the legislature and had taken her into his home, where she became a close friend of his ailing wife and his two teenaged sons. That was substantially true. It was Vivian MacMillan’s account of Brownlee’s subsequent actions that provided the spice.

Miss MacMillan testified that the Premier had persuaded her to have sexual intercourse (the newspaper word was “intimacy”) in his Studebaker touring car after explaining that he was dreadfully lonely and that he could not have normal relations with his wife. Sex, he had declared, would kill Mrs. Brownlee; by yielding to his advances, Vivian would be saving the life of the woman who had befriended her – or so she swore under oath. Much of her testimony came as a godsend to the headline writers. “He played with me as a cat plays with a mouse,” she explained. And again – more headlines – “he seemed to have me under some kind of spell.”

She was on the stand for as long as eight hours at a time and sometimes was reduced to tears, but no amount of cross-examination
could shake her story. Indeed, she added some lip-smacking embellishments. In those frugal times, the home of Alberta’s premier was modest and crowded. Brownlee shared a bedroom with his son Jack, a nervous sixteen-year-old. Mrs. Brownlee slept in another bedroom with the younger son, Alan, a sleepwalker. Vivian shared the maid’s room. All these bedrooms were close to each other on the upper floor. Yet Brownlee, so Vivian swore, managed to make love to her in his own room in a bed just eighteen inches from that occupied by young Jack.

How was that possible without disturbing the family? Vivian had an answer. It was the Premier’s habit, so she testified, to walk past her room and run a tap in the bathroom next to his wife’s room, partly to cover the creaking of the hall floor and partly as a signal. The two would then negotiate the hallway back to Brownlee’s room by adopting a sort of lock step – her feet on his – so that only one set of footfalls could be heard. Once and once only young Jack mumbled in his sleep. Brownlee turned on the light for a moment, quieted the boy, and then resumed his lovemaking.

When Vivian fell in love with a young medical student, Jack Caldwell, she tried to break off relations with the Premier, but, so she said, he would have none of it. She confessed her indiscretions to her then fiancé (the engagement had ended before the case came to court). Caldwell and Vivian’s father then talked her into filing the suit. In those strait-laced, chauvinistic days, a father could also sue if his daughter was seduced, the inference being that he owned her and she had become damaged goods.

Brownlee flatly denied Vivian’s story and his wife backed him up. To many, Vivian’s tale of the lock-step journey down the hall and the coupling in the bedroom beside the slumbering youth had the ring of melodrama. The judge came down on Brownlee’s side, the jury on Vivian’s; it awarded her ten thousand dollars and her father an additional five thousand. “I very strongly disagree with you,” said the judge, W.C. Ives, who was at the time Acting Chief Justice for the province. He dismissed the suit on the grounds that Vivian had come to Edmonton with her parents’ approval and “that no illness had resulted from the seduction and [there was] no evidence that the ability of the daughter to render services was in any way interfered with.” In short, whether or not Vivian had been seduced, she was not “damaged” in the legal sense – for those days a remarkable pronouncement that aroused a storm of opposition.

This result was cold comfort to Brownlee, who resigned and left the political field on July 1, the day the trial ended. (The judge’s decision to dismiss the case was later reversed by a higher court, and Vivian got her money.) The UFA, already in bad odour for its lacklustre leadership during the economic crisis, was now in disarray at the exact moment when a new movement and a new potential leader were on the rise.

Irritated by the almost universal attacks upon him in the daily press (only Harry Southam’s
Ottawa Citizen
supported the concept of Social Credit), Aberhart that summer started his own weekly newspaper, the
Alberta Social Credit Chronicle
. That paper reported in August what the rest of the Alberta press was ignoring. Bible Bill had just completed another spectacular speaking tour, covering twenty-five hundred miles and delivering thirty-nine speeches to thirty thousand people.

In his radio broadcasts Aberhart was nothing if not ingenious. Announcing that a stranger from another planet was about to visit Alberta, he launched his hugely successful “Man from Mars” radio programs. These satirical playlets were the last dramatized political broadcasts to be heard in Canada. The law was changed shortly thereafter to make them illegal.

The Man from Mars, wandering perplexed through the province, quickly comes to the conclusion that the inmates have taken over the asylum. He meets a banker and is baffled. “I find that you are very rich in goods. In fact you have so much that you wantonly destroy your abundance. I am told that is necessary to keep up prices. But at the same time I find that many of your people are suffering from poverty and starvation. Even little children cry for food and clothing that your governments order destroyed. But their parents cannot buy the goods because they have no money. To get money they must work, but they cannot get work because you have invented wonderful machines to make your goods, so your people must starve in the midst of plenty.…”

Aberhart’s banker was made to reply: “I am sorry that you have been influenced by the conditions of the idle loafers who are a blight to society. It’s time we had another war and got rid of them.” Those words hit home to the masses of Albertans, who had heard very similar sentiments expressed by the financiers and politicians who ran the country.

Network radio was in its infancy, but Aberhart had already put into practice techniques that were becoming familiar to the public. He knew better than to confine himself to long, boring political dissertations. Instead he adapted his style to that of the hottest new programs on the air – to soap operas like “Betty and Bob” or comic skits of the kind made popular by Joe Penner and Eddie Cantor. His style was remarked on by one correspondent whose letter he read aloud to his cast during the course of a broadcast, with this mock admonition, “Now, you helpers, listen to me. You must speak more natural after this. Don’t use my tone of voice. Spruce up. Be yourselves. Here is a radio fan who declares that I’m taking all these parts myself. He says I’m like Amos and Andy.”

He introduced characters such as Mr. Kant B. Dunn (who did animal imitations while getting across the Aberhart philosophy) and the Hon. Jerry Bluffem, leader of the Its Your Turn Next Party, attending a conference at the town of Never Get Anywhere.

The CCF, which was making inroads in both British Columbia and Saskatchewan that year, never was able to achieve the extraordinary steamroller success that Aberhart enjoyed in Alberta. The academics, labour leaders, and farmers who made up the new party either did not catch on to the appeal of the vulgar new medium or, if they did, could not or would not use it in the way Aberhart did. One simply cannot imagine J.S. Woodsworth or M.J. Coldwell stooping to these folksy, populist techniques. Graham Spry of the LSR brains trust, who had brought network radio to Canada, certainly never envisaged this kind of broadcast buffoonery. The federation was above that sort of thing.

Aberhart’s mastery of the medium allowed him to trumpet the idea of what he called the Just Price (taken from Douglas), which by its name suggested that current prices were unjust. The reason was that the manufacturers (the Eastern manufacturers, of course!) took too much in excess profits as opposed to “legitimate” profits. Aberhart’s idea was that the government would tax away these unjust profits and use the tax money to underwrite the twenty-five-dollar monthly dividend to which every adult citizen would be entitled. Like blood circulating through the human system, these dividends would release the stagnant credit that was smothering the system. “The Blood Stream of the State,” Aberhart called it.

The idea that every voter was entitled to twenty-five dollars – in credit, not in cash – galvanized the province and captured the imagination of the public. Everybody could understand a monthly stipend, and nobody cared that Aberhart had pulled that particular figure out of nowhere as an example, not a hard promise. As one farmer near Edmonton told John Irving, “I supported Social Credit because I was interested in getting more money, more purchasing power. That $25 a month appealed to me more than anything else.… There wasn’t one of us farmers that wasn’t after that $25.… We had got nothing from the UFA. We talked up Social Credit constantly among ourselves. ‘By golly,’ I said to my neighbours. ‘We’re going to get $25 a month from this new system that Honest Abe’s going to introduce. Then we’ll be able to buy things.’ I counted on that $25 because I figured with our wonderful wealth there was no reason why the $25 couldn’t be paid.”

That was the paradox. Wealth was visible. Aberhart was promising to redistribute it. So was the CCF, but Aberhart was using language that every farmer and farmer’s wife could understand. “Surely every citizen of Alberta should have enough common, ordinary horse-sense to know that there is no need to starve in a full hay paddock,” he’d say. “Even a worm will not go hungry because the apple is too large. He invariably goes to the core of the matter and there raises his standard of living. We can if we will.”

And he was still not considering a political career, at least not publicly. “These broadcasts,” he told his listeners, “are conducted merely as an educational feature.… In no sense of the word do we wish to make it a political broadcast.” The Douglas Social Credit League, he insisted, “is against party politics and holds no political affiliation.” He added, however, that since its aim was to introduce Social Credit into the province, the league would back a candidate to support the cause in every constituency in the forthcoming election.

Although his stated purpose remained – to shake the UFA out of its complacency and force it to adopt Social Credit – he was moving closer day by day to the political arena. If the UFA refused to support the movement, there was an alternative, and Aberhart knew it. He wrote to his niece that Christmas, “… you may hear of me being Premier of Alberta.” He was not anxious to
go into politics, he said, “but the people are urging me to do so.” In the end, the people would get their way.

Job –
that was the magic word in the thirties. The idea of the job transcended all else. To have a job –
any
job – was the ultimate aspiration. The country was divided between those who had jobs and those who had none.
Job
was the key to respectability.
Job
was the Open Sesame to status.
Job
made you a Somebody; it allowed you to hold your head high; it separated you from the shuffling mob of unemployed who were seen as members of a lower stratum. It didn’t matter that they were the obvious victims of uncontrollable economic forces. The work ethic was still strong: there would always be a stigma attached to a man and many women who had no job.

Yet thousands of Canadians were paid such low wages and worked such long hours that they were living in a state close to slavery. In the Quebec shoe industry, for example, wage scales ranged from bare subsistence to outright exploitation. One particularly avaricious manufacturer paid his women workers $1.50 for a seventy-five-hour week – a pitiful two cents an hour. When he was eventually exposed and prosecuted for paying less than the legal minimum wage, the penalty was shockingly low. He escaped with a fine of ten dollars.

That was an extreme case, but there were scores of documented instances in which men and women worked more than fifty hours a week for five dollars or less. These came to light in the spring of 1934 as a result of the terrier-like dedication of Henry Herbert Stevens, the member for Kootenay East (B.C.), who was Minister of Trade and Commerce in the Bennett Cabinet. Since February, Stevens had cast himself in a new role – that of a shining knight, the people’s champion, impaling the dragons of big business on the lance of his own special project, a parliamentary committee set up to investigate price spreads and mass buying.

From late February until the end of June the Canadian public was assaulted by a litany of horror as witness after witness appeared before the Stevens Committee, as it was called, to describe appalling working conditions and wage scales in a variety
of major Canadian enterprises. Time and again the eleven M.P.s who made up the committee registered shock and anger at the testimony, which covered a wide spectrum of Canadian industrial life from groceries to garments.