The Great Depression (40 page)

Under these conditions, nobody worked very hard unless driven to it. Scores found ways of avoiding anything but the minimum of effort. One of these was “Steve” Brodie, whose life had been saved when he almost slipped off a boxcar on a cold Saskatchewan night in 1932. Brodie, a natural rebel, “refused to take part in any of this silly digging of holes.” He not only avoided work himself – hiding in the latrines for hours – but he also found ways to get others out of work. On one occasion when the foreman wasn’t looking, Brodie started a bridge game on the job. The army caught on to him and put him to work as a waiter in the mess hall. Brodie then buckled down because “you were working for the men and not for some ridiculous engineer at five dollars a month.”

The fact that the camps were operated by the army was another sore point with a public that had been conditioned by the excesses of the Great War to distrust the military. Certainly, the army operated the camps with Scrooge-like parsimony. Strict economy was the order of the day. The budget for rations was set at between nineteen and twenty-two cents per man per day, providing a monotonous diet that was only barely adequate for men supposedly doing hard labour. The men ate their meals from chipped enamel ware, a breeding place for bacteria. They received no special rations at Christmas. Clothing was mostly army issue; some shirts purchased during the Great War were now threadbare. All the men were dressed alike, as convicts were, and thus could be easily spotted if they deserted. No towels were provided. Laundry facilities were primitive. There was little medical aid and no provision was made for recreation – no radios, no musical instruments, no sports equipment, no books, magazines, or newspapers. If the men wanted to play baseball, they had to provide their own bats and balls. Those who wanted to play chess or checkers were obliged to carve their own pieces.

Yet these were not the main causes of complaint. The very reason for the camps – getting the jobless as far away from the cities as possible – militated against their success. The relief camp workers felt isolated – far from their families and, perhaps even more important, far from the company of women. These were mostly virile young men in their twenties who had reached a period in their lives when, under favourable conditions, they would have been fashioning their places in the world and preparing for marriage. Now that was denied them. They could not even vote in the coming federal election. The law now said that they could vote only in their home constituencies; Bennett had effectively disfranchised them.

It is true that they would also have been isolated if they had worked in the lumber camps and mining camps of the northwest. But there was a difference. The lumber workers were well paid, the end of their period of employment fixed. They could save money or send it home. At season’s end they could go back to the cities. But for the relief camp workers there were no such incentives; there was no future, not even the chance to look for a job because the real jobs were far off in the cities and farmland. The “slave camps” were just that – camps of hopelessness and futility.

The men at the top didn’t understand this, but one newspaperman did. Bob Bouchette, the immensely popular columnist for the Vancouver
Sun
, was an iconoclast who, when covering heavyweight boxing matches, made it his business to interview the loser while his colleagues were crowding round the champion. His publisher, Robert Cromie, used to slip him five dollars from time to time to attack his own editorials. In February 1934, the
Sun
dispatched Bouchette to investigate the camps. His six-part series, a refreshing contrast to the usual newspaper puffery, helped form public opinion in British Columbia and confounded the authorities, who scrambled to find some way of counteracting the effect.

“There is no future to which these men are looking forward,” Bouchette wrote. “That is why their faces are so wooden. That is why, as you drive by them on the road, they stare at you with an expression half sullen, half detached.

“They consider themselves outcasts from society with no part in the normal activities of men.… The expression on [their] … faces is, to me, a little terrible to behold. I can see no conceivable justification for a system which creates the feeling manifesting itself in that expression.”

Then Bouchette touched on a topic that, in those puritanical days, no other journalist had discussed – the absence of sex. He quoted a doctor who regularly visited the camps: “You will notice that most of the trouble in the camps is from the young men. Much of it is due to the neurotic conditions arising from their manner of life. They are on edge and ready for any sort of action.… It is not the actual sex deprivation that produces this neurosis. It is the fact that the men feel that they are cut off from any association with women.… If they knew they would return to ordinary activity and the enjoyment of ordinary rights and privileges in six months to a year, it would not be so harmful. But they can see no end ahead.”

Although the camps seethed with discontent, it was a brave man who dared to protest, for under army rules all complaints had to be made individually and through channels. King’s Regulations made that clear: “Appeals for redress by means of any documentation bearing the signature of more than one complainant, or by organized committees combining to make a complaint are strictly forbidden”; and again: “the Department will not countenance any
steps to bring accusations before any tribunal of public opinion, either by speeches, or letters or letters inserted in the newspapers.… Such a proceeding is a glaring violation of the rules and shows a contempt for properly constituted authority.”

The actual result of these rules was to
provoke
contempt for authority by bottling up grievances that might easily have evaporated if the men had been able to blow off steam. They were, after all, civilians – not military recruits who had signed up voluntarily, knowing what the rules were. Yet though still civilians they were no longer free to form their own associations or to air their grievances publicly.

Bill Gilbey found that out after he entered a relief camp at Winterburn, Alberta, north of Edmonton. He was chilled to the bone in a tent and angered to discover that he and his friends were allowed only forty minutes to enjoy a cup of tea in the warmth of the dining hall. He made the mistake of remarking to some of the men in his tent that something ought to be done about it. Word got back to the major in charge, who the following morning told Gilbey to pack his belongings. He put him in a truck, drove him to Edmonton, and dumped him at the corner of Jasper Avenue and 97th Street. You’re not supposed to complain, he told Gilbey.

The authorities persisted in the fiction that the camps were totally voluntary. Bennett kept reassuring his growing army of critics that “anyone can leave without notice.” He could not get it into his head that anyone who did leave would be jailed for vagrancy if caught. Worse, he would be blacklisted, so that if he tried to return to any camp the authorities would immediately expel him. It is a measure of the discontent in the camps that by the end of 1934 the blacklist ran to thousands.

The miracle is that in spite of these restrictive conditions the Relief Camp Workers’ Union managed to organize all the British Columbia camps by the autumn of 1934. The organizers, who were blacklisted, simply changed their names and addresses and, thus disguised, moved from camp to camp. On arrival they were careful never to address an old acquaintance by name. Instead, they’d sidle up to him and whisper, “What name are you using here?” Some men had fifty or more names.

Steve Brodie simply picked names out of the Vancouver telephone book. Gerry Tellier called himself Gerry Winters; his
brother, Lucien, took the name of Lou Summers. They lived in hope that they might be arrested together, at which time they planned to announce: “We’re Summers and Winters and we’re brothers.”

The glue that held this underground together was the union paper, the
Relief Camp Worker
, published in Vancouver and smuggled into the camps. The authorities made a practice of rifling through the incoming mail looking for the paper. If it was found it meant instant dismissal and blacklisting for the subscriber. But the
Worker
still got through. Sometimes it arrived in an innocent-looking envelope bearing the name of a prominent Vancouver businessman. Sometimes it was sneaked in by new arrivals.

In 1934, largely due to the efforts of the union, there were one hundred disturbances, strikes, and riots in the British Columbia camps. Twenty-seven of these occurred in December as the union prepared for a general walkout, which was to have its climax in a major demonstration in Vancouver.

To combat the rising power of the union, the police resorted to extra-legal methods. It was their practice to raid the camps late at night to pick up “agitators.” At Moran’s Camp, halfway between Spence’s Bridge and Kamloops, fifteen policemen arrived, bundled all five members of the union executive into a truck, and dropped them on a lonely road in the middle of the wilderness. As one of the men, John Cawston, later pointed out, they were neither arrested nor charged: “If we were guilty of no crime or misdemeanour, it was a pure case of intimidation by kidnapping.”

The rising chorus of complaints, many from prominent citizens in British Columbia, had little effect on Bennett. If Vancouver was crowded with vagrants who had left the camps, that was a problem for the provincial and city authorities. At the end of October the union had made its plans for a general strike in all the British Columbia camps. A delegation led by Matt Shaw of Saskatchewan – a major figure in the disturbances that followed – travelled to Victoria to see the Premier, T. Dufferin Pattullo, who had been swept into power on the slogan “Work and Wages.” The union wanted work and wages but at trade union rates. It also demanded an end to the blacklist and the right to vote. And it wanted the army out. Pattullo passed the buck right back to Ottawa but did offer enough scrip to allow the members of the delegation to eat at Salvation Army hostels.

By mid-December hundreds of men from the camps were walking the streets of Vancouver, depending on handouts from sympathetic citizens. “This kind of thing cannot continue here without grave results,” Pattullo wired to Bennett. He asked for “a tribunal to deal with alleged grievances” and a “generous program of public works.” By this time the Prime Minister was inundated with telegrams and resolutions from British Columbians of every walk of life demanding an investigation into conditions in the camps and urging that the blacklist be abandoned. The Prime Minister heard from several federal M.P.s, from the Vancouver Council of Social Agencies, from the Vancouver City Council, and, indirectly, from General Victor Odlum, a Vancouver newspaper proprietor, who added to the chorus with a long “Dear Andy” letter to his old comrade-in-arms McNaughton. A “prompt committee of investigation would steady public opinion,” Odlum wrote. The mayor, Louis D. Taylor, followed with another telegram on Christmas Eve, again urging a commission of inquiry, adding that “personally I feel the men have grounds for complaint.”

To this unprecedented storm of protest the Prime Minister remained singularly obdurate. He wasn’t going to let a bunch of Reds push him around! His telegrams to Pattullo read like the patient admonitions of a college professor trying to explain for the umpteenth time a perfectly sensible course of action to a remarkably dull student.

“No investigation is necessary,” he wired on December 28, “for press and citizens have been invited to visit these camps ever since they have been established.… The so-called black list included the names of those who have been told to leave the camps because their further presence involved the destruction of the very camps which have been established for the benefit of those who are the victims of propaganda.”

And again: “No powers of compulsion are exercised and discipline is maintained only for the purpose of preserving the orderly conduct of the camps.”

At one point Bennett made the irritating suggestion that Pattullo visit the camps himself and return to reassure the public that everything was fine and thus “correct the effect of subversive propaganda.” That invitation, which seemed to be extended to all
citizens, was not as wide open as it looked. McNaughton made it clear that citizens
might
be given permission to visit one or two camps “provided that they went in the capacity of individuals and not as a corporate or collective body and it should be made clear that no permission was being given for them to visit the camps as a committee of investigation.” They could look, but they could not listen to anybody except the camp authorities because the relief camp workers weren’t allowed to complain to anybody but their immediate superior.

In short, the government had no intention of launching any investigation into the camps. The official line was that nothing was wrong, that, in Bennett’s words, repeated over and over again, “a proper system has been arranged for hearing and correcting any grievances which individuals may feel they have and that this is being done sympathetically by officers in charge” and “except for disturbances directly traceable [to] activities [of] subversive organizations there have been no troubles or serious complaints.”

Few British Columbians swallowed that hokum. Bennett may have believed it; he was sometimes a prisoner of his own self-deception. What he failed to recognize was that the young men in the camps, in spite of their isolation, were part of a larger circle. They had parents, relatives, and friends, and most of them could write letters. The voters of Canada didn’t need Bennett’s public statements or even the press to form their opinion of the relief camps. They listened to their own sons.

The government’s failure stands out in sharp relief when compared with a similar and much more successful experiment south of the border. Why did the relief camps leave such a bad taste in the mouths of Canadians when the Civilian Conservation Corps in the United States was greeted with such enthusiasm? On the face of it, they were very similar. Yet one was a flop, the other a success. Why?