The Great Depression (44 page)

It was this sentence that enabled his opponents, from the Prime Minister down, to label Evans as a thief and an embezzler. These were unfair epithets. Evans had long since rejected the opportunity for an easy life in favour of the Cause. Theft for his own purposes was not in his character. He was, in fact, so popular and the sentence was considered so unfair that eighty-seven hundred miners signed a petition successfully demanding his release. Nine months after entering prison he was out again.

Having joined the Communist Party of Canada in 1926, Evans became district organizer for British Columbia of the National Unemployed Workers’ Association, whose hunger marches and demonstrations were a feature of the Depression years on the West Coast. He shortly moved to the same post with the parent body, the Workers’ Unity League, and also helped to organize the breakaway Mine Workers’ Union of Canada in Princeton, B.C. He played a prominent part in the strike that followed – a strike so bitter that Princeton businessmen organized a branch of the Ku Klux Klan to burn a fiery cross of warning to the strikers on a nearby hillside. Evans was arrested under Section 98 of the Criminal Code. In September 1933, he was sentenced to a year in prison and held without bail pending his appeal, which he lost on March 4, 1934. In a vicious ruling, the B.C. appeal court refused to subtract the extra time from his original sentence. Evans, with time off for good behaviour, was released on December 4, 1934, having spent sixteen months behind bars.

While Evans was in jail, his home in Vancouver was seized in a mortgage foreclosure and his family forced onto relief. That in no way dampened his revolutionary ardour. When he was released, he plunged back into organizing. Now three months later, he was in Kamloops, quietly planning tactics for the Relief Camp Workers’ Union.

Evans outlined his plans. The union would call a walk-out for April 4, three days after payday so the men would have a little money in their pockets. It was not technically a strike. The workers would simply leave camp and go straight to Vancouver. That would require considerable organization. Food would have to be
squirreled away. Clothing must be repaired or replaced. Exit routes and transportation would have to be planned and billets provided in Vancouver – in churches, ethnic halls, and union headquarters. And recalcitrants – or at least some of them – would have to be dragooned into joining the walk-out.

The meeting made its objectives clear. Briefly, the men wanted “work and wages” – Pattullo’s election slogan – fifty cents an hour for unskilled labour, union rates for the rest. They demanded a thirty-hour week, better first-aid equipment in the camps, the end of blacklisting and military control, democratically elected camp committees, the federal franchise, non-contributory unemployment insurance, and the repeal of Section 98 and the vagrancy laws. In the turbulent months that followed, these demands were heard again and again.

There was as yet no hint of any tribunal to look into the camps. McNaughton was still toying with the idea of camps of discipline, and even went so far as to ask whether a Doukhobor detention camp might be available. The General was so far removed from reality that he thought public opinion might be favourable to these draconian measures if the situation worsened. In fact, the public was solidly behind the camp workers, as were Vancouver’s two afternoon papers. Had the leaders been placed in isolation behind barbed wire without benefit of a trial, a most unholy row would have ensued.

Duff Pattullo was frustrated to the point of fury. For almost four months he had been vainly warning Ottawa that the men would riot if their needs were not met. Pattullo was, of course, a lifelong Liberal nagging a Tory government, but he was more than that – a disciple of Roosevelt attempting to give his province what came to be called a “little New Deal.” One of the several populist leaders who emerged during the Depression, he believed that “no person in British Columbia should be allowed to want for food, clothing and shelter through inability to obtain employment.”

Pattullo was an Ontario Grit turned B.C. booster by way of the northern frontier. In his youth he had been an editor of the Galt
Reformer
. He had gone to the Yukon in 1898 during the gold rush as part of a government delegation. He stayed on as gold commissioner and then moved to British Columbia, where he served as mayor of Prince Rupert before entering provincial politics. At
sixty-two he was big and beefy, with pink jowls, blue eyes, and silver hair. The frontier had given him a boldness, even a recklessness, that the voters of British Columbia found refreshing after the caution of the Tolmie regime. “Work and wages” had touched a chord, and that was what he was now demanding from Ottawa.

“I have tried in all my correspondence to use temperate language,” he told Sir George Perley, the acting prime minister, on March 25, “but the situation is getting so serious that I must convey to you in the strongest possible terms that some form of permanent solution must be found.…” To Pattullo, the government’s failure to come to grips with the situation was “incomprehensible.” If there was a riot and bloodshed, he said two days later, Ottawa would be to blame.

McNaughton was unmoved. Why was he being so stubborn? For it was the General who was calling the shots. Not only was he drafting Perley’s responses but he had also persuaded Bennett the previous year, against the Prime Minister’s political instincts, to keep the camps going. Now even General Ernest Ashton, the District Officer Commanding in British Columbia, having reported that a general walk-out was planned for April 4, went so far as to say that he, personally, would not object to a public inquiry. But McNaughton continued to insist that nothing of the sort was necessary, that nothing was wrong, and that the men would be happy and contented if it were not for a handful of professional agitators.

In this attitude, McNaughton was a product of his class and of his time. For most of the Depression, politicians, businessmen, army leaders, and police had tried to pretend that “agitators” (the RCMP word) were at the root of the nation’s troubles. Get rid of them, Commissioner MacBrien had said, and the problem will go away. Jail them as vagrants, McNaughton had advised, or put them in cells behind barbed wire; that was how the army handled malcontents. But Bennett had jailed the Communist leadership without noticeable effect. At that very moment, Tim Buck, newly released from Kingston, was on his way to address a mass meeting of the unemployed in Vancouver.

McNaughton was acting like a typical Colonel Blimp, and that was odd because in the Great War he had been anything but Blimpish. His meteoric rise was due to his flexible mind, his
imagination, his eagerness to test new ideas that the Blimps in the British army had rejected. His unorthodox approach to gunnery had helped win the Battle of Vimy Ridge.

But now, at forty-eight, the shaggy general seemed incapable of seeing past his nose. Why? The simplest answer is probably closest to the truth. The relief camps were his baby. He had planned them, organized them, and, as at Vimy, basked in the warm enthusiasm they had originally inspired. He could not allow them to fail. Failure, after all, was not an admired word in the military lexicon.

Having risen to the peak of his profession, the General was not used to having his plans or his orders questioned. He had been a good soldier but was, as future events would demonstrate, a poor politician. On March 28, just one day after the last stonewalling letter had gone off to Pattullo, the Cabinet did a sudden about-face, caved in to British Columbia’s demands, and at last ordered a royal commission of investigation into the relief camps.

The commission, headed by a retired provincial Supreme Court justice, W.A. MacDonald, was seen as little more than a last-ditch attempt to defuse a dangerous situation. Ernest “Smoky” Cumber, secretary of the Relief Camp Workers’ Union, who appeared before the commission on April 4, categorized it as “only a stop-gap.” Its terms of reference were narrow; it was empowered only to investigate conditions in the camps based on individual complaints. It had no power to deal with the union’s demands.

By the time the commission held its first hearing, the walk-out that it was supposed to prevent had begun. Very little had been left to chance by the organizers. To keep the men from being apprehended before they could stage the walk-out, work crews were organized to cut telephone lines and fell trees across key roads. Others smuggled tents from the camp stores, dragged them into the bush, and cut them up to make knapsacks. Some piled logs and ties near the rail lines, ready to stop freights so that the waiting men could climb aboard.

Some walked, some hitchhiked, some rode the boxcars, some even arrived in Vancouver by water. James “Red” Walsh, who had chaired the organization meeting in Kamloops the month before, trudged and thumbed his way from camp to camp, inspiring the men to follow him. By the time he reached Princeton,
hundreds were tramping along behind him, four abreast, military style. Walsh set up pickets around the taverns and brothels to keep his followers in check and arranged for food for 450 men until the first freight train arrived.

Similar scenes were enacted across the province as the union leaders routed out their members. At Half Moon Bay on April 3, the men walked out a day early in order to board the only boat for Vancouver. So did the group at Squamish – sixty strong – who were warned that the police were ready to pounce. Sixty-four men from a camp near Nelson weren’t so fortunate. They were hauled off a westbound freight, charged with trespassing, and thrown into jail, to become the last contingent to reach Vancouver.

By mid-April, a human torrent was pouring into Vancouver, crowding the trains so thickly that, in the words of Robert “Doc” Savage, who brought a contingent from Spence’s Bridge, “the freight was like a hill with ants on it – you couldn’t have stuck another man on it.”

Arthur Evans met each group as it arrived. He and the other leaders of the walk-out faced a superhuman task: they had fifteen hundred men on their hands, all broke, all requiring food and shelter. They had to maintain morale, prevent violence, and weld a ragged mob into a disciplined force capable of undertaking a series of carefully planned demonstrations.

What followed was a miracle of organization. It was also a wrenching example of the waste of human talent during the Depression years. A group of young men with minimal education was about to demonstrate a capacity for the kind of leadership and organizational ability that any industrial corporation – not to mention army or government – would prize. To have kept that many young, restless, hungry, and embittered men in a seaport one week without untoward incident would have been remarkable. To have kept them under strict discipline for the best part of two months and
then
to have moved this miniature army all the way to Regina was a feat that passes comprehension. Yet it was done without violence or bloodshed and with only one minor clash until the government moved in and, with unbelievable ineptness, precipitated a historic riot.

The basic building block of Arthur Evans’s awesome organization was a “bunkhouse” group of a dozen men. Willis Shaparla
was one of those who were asked to form such a unit. He was told to choose men whom he knew personally and who knew each other. That tight commitment made it difficult for police informers to infiltrate the organization.

The bunkhouse groups were organized into four divisions of about four hundred men each, all originally from the same geographical area. Each division had its own headquarters in Vancouver’s East End. A chairman handled administration, a captain or marshal discipline, a secretary-treasurer finance. A finance committee distributed two fifteen-cent tickets a day good for meals in one of the Chinese restaurants in the area, and also bed tickets, good for a flop in one of the labour temples, boarding houses, or cheap hotels commandeered for the purpose. Men with relatives or friends in the city were urged to bunk in private homes.

There were also a food committee, a publicity committee, a “bumming” committee to organize the “tin canners” who solicited funds on street corners, and a card committee that made sure each man carried a strike card with his individual number, his unit number, and his divisional number. The divisions met daily, receiving reports from the various committees and assessing the success or failure of that day’s demonstration. The chairmanship rotated among those who had shown promise during camp days.

This key leadership was almost entirely Communist. An exception was Steve Brodie, who was regularly elected chairman of No. 3 Division. Brodie was too independent to join the party, at least at that juncture. Indeed, he tended to scoff at the orthodox members, who he felt spent far too much time talking and too little acting. His hero was Evans, a man, Brodie said, “who didn’t want to save the world. He just wanted to do something about the unemployed in Canada.”

Above the four divisions in the pyramid were an eight-man strike committee that made the major tactical decisions, a publicity committee headed by Matt Shaw, a brilliant twenty-one-year-old orator from Saskatchewan whose real name was John Surdia, and an action committee. The last was an amalgam of camp workers and delegates from forty-two local organizations, many of them non-communist, and ranging all the way from the streetcar workers’ union and the CCF to the remarkable Mothers’ Council, which included women of every political stripe. It was
the mothers who began to use the tellingly effective phrase “our boys,” which established the strikers as something far removed from vagrants or bums.

At the pinnacle of the organization stood the Strategy Committee of half a dozen men, headed by Slim Evans. This was the ultimate governing body, the one that decided policy in the events that followed. Its task was daunting. It had to raise enough money to feed and house the strikers. It had to maintain the pressure on Ottawa. It had to devise a series of ingenious but peaceful demonstrations that would keep the strike on the front pages. Above all, it had to maintain good relations with the general public, which was at that time overwhelmingly on the side of the strikers.