The Great Depression (39 page)

Adam Armeny, who had been farming in Alberta for thirty years, wrote that he was “frantic with despair.” He had been forced to come to Calgary to get hospital treatment for his wife, who was suffering from cancer, but because the couple didn’t have a year’s residence, he was turned down for relief. It took “courage of the bravest kind to ask for relief,” he told Bennett. “I have been humiliated and sent from pillar to post, just as if I were a criminal or something.”

Mrs. J.C. Bishop described how her family existed in a two-room shack in Tisdale, Saskatchewan. “Just enough room for two beds & the house is cold theres two inches of Ice freezes on the water in the house cold nights we are shivering in bed at night we have no mattresses on our beds only gunny Sacks & not enough blankets on our beds. Mr. Bishop has no underwear no top shirt no Socks only rags on his feet no trousers only overauls & they are done for, boots are near don my Self I have no house dresses & no wash tub.… there are times we live on potatoes for days at a time … I don’t see how much longer it can last … there are a good meny people the same in this town I am five months pregnant & haven’t even felt life yet to my baby & its I feel quite sure from lack of food, there has been many babys died in this town from neglect.…”

“I hear you are going to destroy some thousands of tons of wheat to get rid of it; while my family & stock are starving to death,” J.L. Sullivan wrote from Leoville, Saskatchewan, on March 31, 1934. “There is lots of wheat and other things here but I have no money to buy them with.… We have kept off relief as long as we had a cent to buy food or a rag of clothes that would hang together. To date we have had $45.35 for food to feed ten of
us from Dec. 1st on until now and I did relief bridge work to about that amount.… But when I asked for a greater food allowance I was told that many were doing with much less as well as one insult upon another added thereto by the local relief officer.… We have to live ten of us in a cold one roomed shack.… We haven’t even a mattress or even a tick just simply have to sleep on a bit of straw and nearly every night we have to almost freeze because we haven’t bed clothes … the whole family have some kind of rash and running sores & I cannot take them to a Dr. as I have not the price to pay the Dr. or to buy the things that he would order. Also my wife has become badly ruptured and I cannot have anything done about it.…”

Of all the letters that Bennett received, perhaps the most touching came from a young woman named Jean McLean, for it illustrates how the cycle of unemployment was compounded for many young people by poor nourishment or lack of clothing. It became more and more difficult for any job seeker to be thought of as employable when her dress was shabby and her constitution weak from lack of food.

Jean McLean worked as a stenographer-bookkeeper for a firm in Essex County, Ontario. When it folded in 1934, she went to Hamilton looking for work and found none. As she told Bennett, “… my clothing became very shabby.… Many prospective employers just glanced at my attire and shook their heads and more times than I care to mention I was turned away without a trial. I began to cut down on my food and I obtained a poor, but respectable room at $1 per week. First I ate three very light meals a day; then two and then one. During the past two weeks I have eaten only toast and drunk a cup of tea every other day. In the past fortnight I have lost 20 pounds and the result of this deprivation is that I am so very nervous that I could never stand a test with one, two or three hundred girls. Through this very nervousness I was ruled out of a class yesterday. Today I went to an office for an examination and the examiner just looked me over and said: ‘I am afraid Miss, you are so awfully shabby I could never have you in my office.’

“I was so worried and frightened that I replied somewhat angrily: ‘Do you think clothes can be picked up in the streets?’

“ ‘Well,’ he replied, with aggravating insolence, ‘lots of girls find them there these days.’

“Mr. Bennett, that almost broke my heart. Above everything else I have been very particular about my friends and since moving here I have never gone out in the evening, I know no one here personally and the loneliness is hard to bear, but, oh, sir, the thought of starvation is driving me mad! …

“Day after day I pass a delicatessen and the food in the window looks oh, so good! So tempting and I’m so hungry!

“Yes, I am very hungry and the stamp that carries this letter to you will represent the last three cents I have in the world yet before I will stoop to dishonour my family, my character or my God, I will drown myself in the Lake.…”

There is no evidence that Bennett replied; and yet the hardest heart could not remain unaffected by these anguished pleas. Nor could Bennett escape the rueful reminders from some of his correspondents that they had voted for him in the belief that he could solve the country’s economic problems. “Mr. Bennett, it was my vote that helped to put you where you are now,” G.J. Steeves of Campbellton, New Brunswick, reminded him. “Is there anything you can do for me?” A crippled sixty-year-old, Steeves was the sole support of a family of five, unable to get help from a Maritime municipality as destitute as himself. How could the Prime Minister not have felt a sense of helplessness? What could he really do for this man with a crippled leg and a missing hand? What could he do for the Sherriff family of Montreal, who were being thrown out of their lodgings because the landlord refused to rent to the unemployed? Fred Sherriff’s two daughters had been under a doctor’s care for a year and a half. The doctor told him they needed better food. But how could they afford better food with the miserable dole offered by the city of Montreal?

Bennett had ridden into power believing he could solve the country’s problems by adopting new trade and tariff policies. It hadn’t worked, and in spite of his stubbornness, he was being forced to admit it. For more than four years he had tried to massage the body politic with his own brand of unction. Yet however optimistic his forecasts, he had been driven to retreat, step by step, from his personal and political philosophy. He had said he would never countenance the dole, but the dole had long since arrived. He had said that no one would starve, but here before him in the wobbly handwriting of ordinary Canadians was
all the evidence needed that people
were
starving. He had sworn that his government would never establish a system of unemployment insurance, yet here he was in the dying days of 1934 promising that very thing.

The Prime Minister could not entirely escape the importunings of his brother-in-law Bill Herridge, who was also conspiring to soften the Bennett line. Herridge, a son of the parsonage, outlined his own philosophy in the presence of both Bennett and Mackenzie King when he told the Ottawa Canadian Club on December 16: “… if we looked more to spiritual leadership and less to capitalistic leadership; if we made business less our religion and religion more our business; if we proclaimed by deeds the eternal truths of the Christian faith, we might find that this system did not work so badly after all.”

Like Stevens, Herridge was what would today be called a Red Tory, though no Tory in the thirties would have wanted the dreadful adjective “Red” applied to his political philosophy. Stevens himself was not in Ottawa to listen to Herridge’s message. He was at his daughter’s side in Montreal. When she died on December 21, friends and foes of every political stripe extended their sympathy – with one exception. Harry Stevens did not hear from Richard Bedford Bennett. The Prime Minister was done with Stevens. Determined at last to make an about-turn in his political program, he was far too busy to concern himself with the personal agony of an old and increasingly bitter rival. Within a few days, without any prior consultation, he would drop the first of several bombshells on his unsuspecting Cabinet colleagues.

By the end of the year, it ought to have been clear to those in power that General McNaughton’s much-vaunted relief camp program had become a political liability. McNaughton knew it but wouldn’t admit it, though his own statistics suggested that the plan was in a shambles. For one ten-month period, between June 1933 and March 1934, the Department of National Defence reported no fewer than fifty-seven disturbances in the 120-odd camps across the country.

In the months that followed the situation became more tense. Complaints and mutinies grew to the point where, in defiance of every democratic principle, the government actually considered confining the troublemakers to barbed-wire enclosures in isolated regions. Anybody who refused to take a job or refused to work at a relief camp could be sentenced to as much as sixty days’ hard labour at these “Camps of Discipline.”

Although the plan was never carried out, an order-in-council designed to establish such camps had actually been drawn up the previous year under the “peace, order and good government” clause in the Relief Act. As was so often the case in that turbulent decade, ordinary British justice was dispensed with. The only evidence needed to imprison an “agitator” would be a certificate from the relief camp commander. Inmates were to be locked in separate cells and forbidden to speak a word for at least fourteen days – in short, solitary confinement without trial. The camps would be expressly designed to cow malcontents by harsh discipline. In McNaughton’s words, “no man who serves a term in such a camp will want to enter it again.”

Fortunately for the reputation of the country, the idea was abandoned as politically dangerous. Had it been carried out, Canada would have had the dubious distinction of being the only nation in the democratic world to initiate a penal system that differed only in degree from that being employed in Nazi Germany.

The reality was that the camps were prisons. Any man who left could never again get relief. Thus, unless he could find a job (and who could find a job in those lonely wilderness outposts?) he had no real choice. Either he stayed in camp or he starved.

The Prime Minister had seriously considered closing down the relief camps in the spring for political reasons; in many constituencies they represented an electoral bloc that could upset the political balance. More than one politician had warned him that there were enough anti-government votes in some camps to defeat a Conservative candidate in a federal or provincial by-election. Either close the camps and scatter the inmates or increase the daily allowance; otherwise, the Tories faced defeat.

Peter Heenan, Minister of Labour in King’s government, appeared at the Petawawa camp during the Ontario by-elections and talked about “slave labour” – a reference to the daily allowance
of twenty cents. The local M.P., Ira Cotnam, warned Bennett that the potential voters in the camp represented political defeat. In the words of the editor of the Pembroke
Standard-Observer
, Heenan’s remarks were “just the same as putting a match to a keg of gunpowder.” The term “slave camps” was already being used to telling effect by the Relief Camp Workers’ Union, a communist-front organization. This reference by a mainstream politician gave it greater respectability.

Somehow Bennett was never able to sense the political implications of his twenty-cent-a-day policy. He and General McNaughton believed that the government was being munificent, feeding, clothing, and sheltering thousands of men and, in addition, giving them pocket money to buy “luxuries.”

“You apparently do not understand the purpose of the camps,” he wrote to Cotnam. “They are just what their name indicates – relief camps; and any man can leave without notice should he desire to take up other employment.… It is too bad there are those who talk about the paying of wages. It is merely a little pocket money for those who are on relief.…”

Cotnam, of course, understood very well that the general public, not to mention the camp inmates, would never grasp the fine distinction that Bennett insisted on making. It didn’t matter whether the twenty-cent allowance was called pocket money or wages: it was an insult.

Andy McNaughton, however, could not bear to see his pet scheme abandoned. The Chief of the General Staff made no bones about the real reason for the camps – or at least the reason he gave to Bennett, knowing, perhaps, that it would clinch his argument to retain them. The program was designed to forestall the revolution that the Prime Minister feared by getting thousands of restless young men out of the cities and isolating them in remote areas. “If these had not been dispersed,” the General told Bennett, “it is hardly conceivable that we would have escaped without having recourse to the military forces to suppress disorder.” In reality, McNaughton had only shifted the potential disorder from the cities to the camps, and the day was rapidly coming when military force, or at least quasi-military force, would be called in to quell it. But Bennett, whose fear of revolution was palpable, was convinced. He backed up his chief of staff.

The Ontario electoral problem was still unsolved. The authorities
did their best, disfranchising as many relief camp workers as possible by shifting them from one constituency to another so that they could not meet the residence requirements for voting. But the by-elections were lost anyway.

Meanwhile, in British Columbia, where the majority of the relief camps had been located, trouble was brewing. The Relief Camp Workers’ Union was well organized. Scores of men were already quitting the camps and pouring into Vancouver, negating McNaughton’s purpose of keeping them out of the cities. Both the mayor and the premier wired their alarm to Ottawa. McNaughton’s solution was to use the vagrancy laws to hit the malcontents with longer and tougher prison terms, but that wasn’t feasible. There weren’t enough jails, let alone enough money, to accommodate the burgeoning army of homeless men. Bennett, as usual, refused to take responsibility for the growing crisis – that was the province’s problem, he kept saying.

It was clear that the general public, especially in the West, was sympathetic to the cause of the relief camp workers. Organized labour was up in arms because the men were put to work for far less than union wages. The business community was appalled because of the inefficiency of the system. Since the tasks given the men were largely make-work, designed only to keep them as busy as possible – building a road from nowhere to nowhere in one instance – productivity dropped below 50 per cent. Labour-saving machinery was discarded to produce more hours of labour. The men toiled with picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows while, in some places, earth-moving devices stood idly by.