The Great Depression (38 page)

The ghost of the great Laurier
wrong
about an election? How could it be? King was hurt and baffled. He tried to puzzle it out in his diary. Clearly, Laurier “had not the knowledge evidently required and had seen only so much of the whole,” he reasoned. He was not recording any feeling of disloyalty to the spectre of his hero; he was quite convinced that it was the voice of Laurier that had spoken to him across the void. Still, it was puzzling.

At last King came to rationalize this egregious error as fervent and faithful Christians rationalize the sudden, inexplicable death of a young child. “I felt it was all for a purpose, that behind this disappointment … there was some great good which I would soon see, that God was helping me to get a clearer vision of His laws and ways and purposes, that it was all to help me in an understanding of psychic phenomena, and spiritual realities.”

Yet it continued to prey on his mind. He phoned his congratulations to Hepburn but remained “sick at heart,” fearing that Laurier’s ghostly failure might sow the seeds of doubt in his own mind. But then he rallied, feeling “that my faith was strong if not stronger than ever, that behind all this seeming shattering of our belief lay the understanding of a larger & truer belief, & a greater revelation of Reality.”

King came to the conclusion that the vagrant spirits with whom he held intercourse were “still earthbound to some degree,” that their vision might be limited and not wholly to be trusted. Perhaps, too, he told himself, Laurier’s lapse was meant to teach him that God alone could reveal truths that related to the future. With the matter off his mind, the exhausted Liberal leader went to bed.

Hepburn, of course, had no qualms about anything. Totally confident and self-assured, he plunged into a series of highly visible “reforms.” Every civil servant appointed since the previous October was fired, causing both consternation and chaos at Queen’s Park. Cabinet ministers’ salaries were cut by two thousand dollars. Work was stopped on the new Ontario Hydro building in Toronto (but only temporarily). The provincial display at
the Canadian National Exhibition was cancelled. Chorley Park was closed, as promised, but Hepburn found that constitutionally it was not possible to rid himself of its occupant. Ontario House in London was also closed and a variety of boards and commissions were either abolished or amalgamated. Every game warden in the province was dismissed, not to mention 183 beekeepers, an intriguing piece of cheese-paring that undoubtedly caught the public’s fancy. That fall Hepburn turned up on the hustings to work for the federal Liberals in five by-elections, helping his party to a net gain of two.

By this time he was close to exhaustion. The job of being premier was far more exacting than he had thought. Political leadership took more out of a man than onion farming, especially if the man had had only two years of high school and very little administrative experience. It was stimulating to be a maverick; it was quite another thing to run a province the size of Ontario in the midst of an economic crisis.

Mackenzie King’s advice to Hepburn was to conserve his energies and avoid all social engagements. He might as well have counselled him to join a Trappist monastery. Instead, the gregarious premier bought himself some light clothing and with a couple of his supporters left the chill winds of Ontario for a midwinter cruise among the sunny islands of the Caribbean. For a couple of weeks the province could run without him.

With the first sittings of the new Royal Commission on Price Spreads scheduled for October 30, its putative chairman was in deep political trouble. Harry Stevens had given his name to the earlier parliamentary committee. He was supposed to head its successor and complete his work. But he had made a political blunder, and there was no way he could shake off that stigma.

It all stemmed from a speech that the impulsive minister had made just before the session broke up in June. His audience was the Conservative Study Club, whose members were undoubtedly eager to see the man being touted as their future leader in action. It was an informal occasion; Stevens spoke without notes, but a secretary took down his words verbatim. These included an attack
on the Robert Simpson Company and Sir Joseph Flavelle, Stevens’s old enemy, who had at one time been the department store’s chief stockholder.

Stevens claimed that Flavelle and his associates, after a refinancing in 1928, had stripped the company of ten million dollars, leaving it heavily mortgaged. As a consequence of this higher overhead, he said, Simpson’s was forced to pressure its suppliers to sell for less, thus creating some of the sweatshop conditions that had been revealed by his inquiry.

That August the roof fell in on Stevens. His words, supposedly off the record and certainly off the cuff, had been printed in pamphlet form, of which three thousand copies were distributed. The Toronto
Star
and
Ottawa Citizen
(neither of them Tory organs) published excerpts. The Winnipeg
Free Press
published the pamphlet in full, frustrating R.B. Bennett’s attempts to suppress it. C.L. Burton, president of Simpson’s, threatened to sue Stevens for libel.

Stevens had broken an unwritten rule. He had revealed some of the committee’s findings before its report was published. In the five federal by-elections that took place in Ontario that September, the Stevens pamphlet became an issue. Mackenzie King lambasted the minister for not quitting the Cabinet and fighting for his principles. “But no,” said King, “Mr. Stevens is going to be chairman of the Commission.” The Tories lost four of the by-elections, prompting the Montreal
Gazette
to question Stevens’s role in the campaign.

With his twenty-three-year-old daughter, Sylvia, seriously ill in Montreal, Stevens was now the focus of a Cabinet attack led by two St. James Street spokesmen, C.H. Cahan and Sir George Perley. Cahan, the corporate lawyer, had an axe to grind in attacking Stevens, for his client was Sir Charles Gordon, head of the Dominion Textile Company, and the Stevens inquiry had certainly blackened that industry.

Now Cahan demanded that Stevens publicly apologize to Flavelle, and not without reason, for Stevens, in his attack, had some of his facts wrong. Among other things, Simpson’s mark-up on goods had not increased since 1929; in fact, it had slightly declined. Nor had Flavelle siphoned off the profits in quite the unprincipled way Stevens had implied. Apologize or resign! Cahan insisted. With his daughter close to death, Harry Stevens,
the giant-killer, resigned not only from the Cabinet but also from the chairmanship of the royal commission.

He continued, however, to dominate the inquiry, whose new chairman was a lawyer and a strong Tory, William Walker Kennedy, M.P. for Winnipeg South Centre. Stevens also carried his cause to the people in a series of speeches demanding government action on his committee’s findings. The Tory party now seemed split down the middle, with the Liberal papers gleefully supporting Stevens and the Conservative press upholding Bennett.

Cahan continued to twist the knife, sneering at “political and social propagandists, blind leaders of the blind.” Everybody knew who
that
meant. The Montreal lawyer kept insisting that the federal government was not equipped to regulate industry and went on to pooh-pooh reports of hunger, malnutrition, and starvation. In a remarkable statement in Montreal on November 27, Cahan claimed that he had seen many depressions when people were reduced to eating porridge and oatmeal scones and the boys and girls of those times had grown up just as healthy as they were doing under the higher standards of the present. “This Depression will go like the mist before the summer sun,” said Cahan.

Stevens countered, on December 3, by announcing that he intended to press in Parliament for a federal trade and industries commission with “unprecedented powers” and that he would also urge that the Combines Investigation Act be toughened up. By now he was being widely touted as the successor to Bennett, who was considering retirement. Bennett promptly changed his mind, and there is little doubt that the wave of support for Stevens spurred that decision. Two days later, the Prime Minister headed off his erstwhile opponent by announcing that he would lead the Conservative party in the next election. More, he promised that the royal commission would continue its work, that his government would shortly introduce unemployment insurance, and that it would “come more and more to regulate business.”

These were remarkable proposals for Bennett to make. They suggested a change of political direction, a move away from the right wing, dominated by men like Cahan, toward the centre or – dared one suggest it? – to the left.

What had caused this startling about-face by a man whose political philosophy had to this moment been as inflexible and
unyielding as the banded gneisses of the Precambrian shield? The new and unaccustomed mantle that the Prime Minister was preparing to don was woven from a skein of threads that had come together by the end of 1934. There was, of course, the prices inquiry with its startling testimony. There was the presence of a new party of the Left, prepared to fight the coming election in as many constituencies as it could enter. There were the Liberal sweeps in three provinces, the threat of Social Credit in a fourth, the federal by-elections, and the example of Roosevelt’s experiments in the United States, which had so excited William Herridge, Canadian minister to Washington. All these were factors.

One would like to believe, too, that Bennett himself had been softened in his outlook, that his best instincts had come forward as the result of the mountain of mail he was receiving – pleading letters, many of them agonizing, written from the depths by victims of the Depression whose awkward, ungrammatical, and often painful prose attested to the authenticity of their plight.

One cannot discount the power of these letters, which the Prime Minister had been receiving and reading for more than four years. The cumulative effect of these cries from the heart, like the constant drip-drip of a leaky tap, must have had some influence on the rigid mind-set of the man at the top. Being Bennett, he read them all personally and replied to many. Clearly, they troubled his conscience, for he often responded by enclosing a two-dollar or a five-dollar bill or, as in the case of Mrs. Thomas Hodgins of Perdue, Saskatchewan, ordering from Eaton’s a set of high-grade, heavyweight Wolsey underwear for an ailing husband. “I have patched & darned his old underware
[sic]
for the last two years, but they are completely done now,” Mrs. Hodgins wrote; “if you cant do this, I really dont know what to do.… We seem to be shut out from the world altogether we have no telephone Radio or newspaper.”

Taken together the letters to Bennett provide a unique picture of the abject conditions in Canada in the early thirties. No other account of those desperate days, either scholarly or journalistic, can compare with the words of the victims, written not through the haze of hindsight but at the very moments of their despair.

Here is W.P.P. Hamel, a painter and decorator from Sherbrooke, Quebec, signing himself a “disheartened man” (out of
work for six months, unable to pay his rent), explaining to his Prime Minister that the municipality has refused him relief: “Today I whent to get 3$ to keep us for a week and Mr. Valcourt of the City Office said I couldn’t get it because someone said we had a radio: We have never had a radio: He send Mr. Lesseau from the City Office to search our home from top to bottom bedrooms and bathroom under and over: Then he says he don’t have to give us help if he dont want to: I ask you Sir ‘who was this money given to and what for’? is it for a man to crawl on his hands and knees to get a loaf for his family? I ask you Sir how do you think we live on $3 a week and can’t get that because people make up a lie: What sort of a country have we …?”

The reeve of one Alberta community enclosed a letter from Charles O’Brien, a Great War veteran, who announced that he was withdrawing his eight-year-old boy from school because “he is not getting enough nourishment to permit of his being able to study, and furthermore we have no soap to wash him or ourselves, or any of our clothes.” O’Brien bitterly recalled an earlier promise by Bennett, who had pledged that “no man who has served his country in the war should want for food, shelter or fuel.”

“We have done all we can to be decent, honorable, and to raise our family to be a credit to the country but what’s the use,” wrote Louise Elliott, a despairing farm wife in Milton, Ontario. “… today, if it were to save my life, I could not find one cent in the place. We own a note at the Bank for $150, and one would imagine from the fuss that is made over it, that it was $150,000. The worry of all these things is driving me mad.”

Elsie Sproule of Oil Springs, Ontario, asked Bennett for money to help her father, John Thomas Sproule, Conservative member for Lambton East and the son of a former Speaker of the House. Sproule had lost so much money he couldn’t keep up the interest on his bank loan. “I fear the worry is too great for him to bear,” she wrote, “and I am afraid of him committing suicide.” She asked for fifty thousand dollars. Bennett didn’t send it, but he did send three dollars to Ruby Schultz, a little girl in Leney, Saskatchewan, who asked him to write to Santa Claus “and tell him I was a good girl all the time.… Daddy has no money to give Santa for my little brother and me and we can’t hang our stockings up.…”

More than one correspondent threw back at Bennett his careless pledge that the government would see to it that no one in Canada would starve. “You stated that there would be no one starve in Canada,” Clarence Ferguson of Winnipeg reminded him. “I presume you mean not starve overnight but slowly, our family amongst thousands of others are doing the same slowly and slowly. Possibly you have never felt the Pang of a Wolf. Well become a Father have children then have them come to you asking for a slice of bread between meals and have to tell them to wait. Wait until five of humanity’s humans sleep all in one room no larger than nine feet square with one window in it.…”