The Great Depression (52 page)

An Imperial era was ending. In late January the life of George V drew “peacefully to its close,” in the words of the Royal Physician, who was not above giving his dying sovereign a little nudge toward the grave. Now the new king reigned. “His subjects in every country in the British Commonwealth know that he will acquit himself with great distinction,” John Dafoe wrote in the
Free Press
– brave words that he, in common with other editors, would have preferred to forget before the year was out. Rudyard Kipling, who wasn’t poet laureate but acted as if he were, preceded George V to his tomb by a few days. King made no public
comment; Kipling, in his view, was “a Tory imperialist [who] has never shown particular friendship towards myself or meant much to Canada.… It does not seem to me … [that] Canada has any particular tribute to pay.”

King’s aversion to Kipling was in keeping with his own nationalism. In the midst of the worst economic crisis in its history the country was slowly becoming disjoined from the British connection, with its colonial overtones. King’s suspicion of titled governors general, who, he felt, were always trying to upstage him, also applied to the newest occupant of Rideau Hall. One might have expected John Buchan, a popular novelist, to be more accommodating than the blue bloods who had preceded him, but as First Baron Tweedsmuir he was, in the Prime Minister’s view at least, decidedly stand-offish.

At the end of March, King tackled Tweedsmuir about his attitude and an embarrassing conversation took place. King asked if somebody had been telling the Governor General to beware of him. Why, at a recent Canadian Club dinner, with Bennett, of all people, present, had His Excellency made no reference to King as prime minister? And why had he delivered a eulogy of Lord Byng – whose treatment of King’s position in the constitutional wrangle was still a sensitive topic after ten years? Surely, Tweedsmuir must have known that he was reviving an old controversy and striking at King personally! Or so King thought.

The Prime Minister complained that he didn’t feel at home with Tweedsmuir as he had with the others; and that was odd, he felt, because the two had known each other for twenty years. Why, just that evening, at a reception, the Governor General had snubbed him, giving him nothing more than a formal shake of the hand before passing him on to Lady Tweedsmuir “and leaving me to straggle in as a schoolboy.” King wondered why on informal occasions the Governor General and he could not be on first-name terms; yet even in private Buchan addressed him formally as “Prime Minister.” This hypersensitivity was typical of King. He might be irked by the colonial connection; he might be distressed by ostentation; but he loved to bask in the friendship of the great and near-great – a Franklin Roosevelt, a John D. Rockefeller, Jr., a Ramsay MacDonald, or a member of the British nobility.

Buchan tried to make amends, but it didn’t work. At a vice-regal dinner during Roosevelt’s visit to Quebec at the end of July, King found himself seated at His Excellency’s right but with a vacant chair at
his
right. That meant he had nobody to talk to half the time. The vice-regal staff apparently hadn’t thought to bring someone else in. “It is this treating of one as a secondary consideration – when P.M. of the country that I do not like,” he wrote.

He found it almost impossible either to talk to Tweedsmuir on a man-to-man basis or to write to him “as fully as I would have liked to be able to. I don’t feel free enough to be natural; or that he is enough of a stranger to be formal.” King at last decided to stop using “J.B.” as a salutation and go back to “Governor General,” but he did sign one last letter, wistfully, with “Rex,” the name that only his oldest and most intimate friends used.

As the prime minister of an independent nation in the Commonwealth, in no way subordinate to Great Britain, King was, of course, feeling his position. It was not the first time he had been nettled by what he considered a patronizing attitude on the part of British nobility, and he was in the process of drawing Canada gracefully out from under the long imperial shadow. But Buchan was newly minted as a noble and still a commoner at heart. Why didn’t he bend a little? Was it because, as a new peer, he was too conscious of his position? There is a simpler and more obvious explanation: the sophisticated novelist-viceroy had little in common with his fusty prime minister. He simply couldn’t warm to him.

King was faced with more serious problems than imagined vice-regal snubs. The province of Alberta was technically bankrupt. Aberhart had asked for a two-million-dollar loan the previous December; King cut it to one million. He and the Minister of Finance, Charles Dunning, wanted to establish a loan council that would allow the poorer provinces to borrow money more cheaply because the loans would be guaranteed by the federal government. But there was a string attached: each province must prove that it really needed the money. That was too much for William Aberhart, who balked at this attempt to extend Ottawa’s control over provincial finances. King felt he had no choice but to let the province default on its maturing debentures, as it did on April 1 and again later in the year.

As the new premier of a depressed province, Aberhart was having a bumpy ride. There was as yet no sign that the voters would get their promised twenty-five dollars a month. Indeed, he had at one point referred to that election promise as “a figure of speech.” And he had broken with Major Douglas, who said, quite correctly, that Aberhart’s version of Social Credit was not
his
version. Douglas, for one thing, had never mentioned twenty-five dollars a month. But what
was
Aberhart’s version? He had relied on Douglas to come to Alberta to put his Social Credit theory into effect. Now it appeared that neither Douglas, who thought in global terms, nor Aberhart, who thought in provincial terms, had
any
specific plan.

The new premier was sure the press was out to get him. The
Calgary Herald
hired its first staff cartoonist, Stewart Cameron (late of the Walt Disney studios), whose job was to caricature Aberhart and his program. The Premier hinted more than once that he would have to control the press. Meanwhile the Alberta Social Credit League bought the other Calgary daily, the
Albertan
, getting its radio station, CJCJ, into the bargain. Station CFCN, over which Aberhart had broadcast and on which he still held a mortgage, was told to stop reporting news adverse to the government. To its credit, it refused to be muzzled.

About the same time, Aberhart reassured his followers that the Rapture, in which the world would be deserted by Christians, was still a long way off. The second coming of Christ would not occur until after 1943, he told an audience in Edmonton.

On April 23, Aberhart moved to introduce a form of what he considered Social Credit. The government, he said, would issue scrip known as Prosperity Certificates in place of money. To keep the scrip valid, the holder would have to place a one-cent stamp on the back of each certificate every week. Aberhart hoped that this tax would keep the notes circulating.

It didn’t work. People found they couldn’t use “funny money” to pay fines or taxes or make purchases in government liquor stores. The banks wouldn’t cash scrip. Some Cabinet ministers even balked at being paid with it. The Prosperity Certificates failed to bring prosperity.

To still the clamour for the monthly twenty-five-dollar dividend, Aberhart in August introduced a registration program for Albertans who, he promised, would start receiving the bonus
some time in 1937. The regulations laid bare the authoritarian nature of the Social Credit government. To receive Alberta Credit, a citizen would have to register, pledge allegiance to the government, and make a declaration of all assets and liabilities and a statement of other personal information. Nor could anyone be absent from the province for more than a month without permission of the local manager of one of the new State Credit Houses that the government was creating. These houses were designed to process all financial transactions within Alberta; they were, in effect, state banks. People rushed to sign up, either through fear of government retaliation or because they expected to get their twenty-five dollars at once. One man brought his wife all the way back from Detroit to sign. But an Edmonton bookstore owner named Surry refused, even though his MLA told him he’d lose his business. Instead he launched a “League of Freedom” to attack the whole idea.

The reforms that Aberhart introduced in Alberta in 1936 had little to do with Social Credit philosophy. They were forced on him by the deepening drought. He increased the minimum wage, bolstered crop insurance and unemployment relief, created a moratorium on debt collection and land seizures, and reorganized the school system, including a much-needed consolidation of school districts. But he could not make it rain.

Saskatchewan was still the hardest hit of the prairie provinces; it had no choice but to cancel $75 million in debts and taxes owed by the citizens in 1936. The unprecedented dry spell forced the federal government to abandon all hope of balancing the budget. Conditions were now so appalling that Ottawa had to promise 100 per cent federal aid to the drought-stricken regions of the southern prairies.

The winter had been terrible, the coldest on record. From early January until the end of February there was no break in the constant cold. Temperatures dropped below minus forty degrees Fahrenheit and stayed there. City streets were deserted; traffic came to a halt. Blizzards buried railways and disrupted train schedules. Farm families lived in their stove-heated kitchens.
Every sideroad between Winnipeg and the Rockies was blocked by snowdrifts. In Saskatchewan, the average temperature was a startling twenty-five below, Fahrenheit. Brandon went nine days with the thermometer registering more than forty degrees below zero. In the ranch country of Alberta thousands of head of cattle perished in the cold as farmers were immobilized. In the schools, where heating systems had long ago broken down from neglect, makeshift stoves were fashioned out of oil drums. Teachers struggled through the drifts before dawn each morning hoping to kindle fires that might make their schoolhouses habitable by noon; on the coldest days some students missed their class work while trying to keep them fuelled.

Fred Williams, in his book
The Fifth Horseman
, described the scene in one Saskatchewan schoolhouse that winter: “When nine o’clock came, the half-frozen pupils would stand around the contraption, stamping their feet on the board floor until circulation was restored. Frozen mitts and snowshoes were placed in a circle around the heater and left there until it was time to go home; no attempt was made to throw snowballs or play outside games at recess. Life was a grim reality for the children of the ‘thirties’ – mitts, overshoes and warm clothing could only be obtained on relief orders once a year.”

Ontario was affected almost as badly as the West. On a frigid morning at the end of January, in a two-storey house in Lindsay warmed only by a small oil heater, an old-age pensioner named Ella MacMurchy came downstairs to find her eighty-two-year-old sister, May, lying on the cold kitchen floor. “I think May is not so well this morning,” she remarked to the milkman. He quickly discovered that May was dead.

On the prairies, there was no relief from the weather. The winter, which had been the coldest in history, was followed by a summer that was the hottest. Two-thirds of the western grain lands were withered by drought, producing the smallest harvest since 1919. Each day was hotter than the last. Right across the southern plains temperatures rose to ninety degrees, and then kept climbing.

Saskatchewan suffered for six straight weeks; in all that period there were only three days in which the thermometer dropped below 90°F. In many areas it was worse. Willow Creek endured thirteen days of 100-degree weather in July. On July 11, the temperature
reached 108° in Winnipeg, 110° in Brandon. It was almost as bad in Toronto, where the temperature reached 105° for three consecutive days.

James Gray, in
The Winter Years
, described the stifling Winnipeg heat. It felt, he wrote, “as if someone had left all the furnace doors open and the blowers on.” In July, Gray, at that time a reporter for the Winnipeg
Free Press
, travelled with Robert M. Scott, the paper’s agricultural writer, from Winnipeg to Regina and back again. The pair headed down the Souris River valley – now bone dry from the drought – and watched the dust clouds forming ahead. Soon “the sun vanished in an amber haze [and] the sharp dust particles ricocheted off the windshield.” The visibility dropped to a few feet. They crawled blindly along the extreme right shoulder of the gravel road and then, suddenly, they were out of it. The blowing soil stopped “as if on command.” A few miles farther on, they encountered it again; that was the pattern – alternate stretches of dark and light.

In this bleak wasteland, money was almost unknown – large bills, certainly. When Scott gave a Saskatchewan garageman a ten-dollar bill to pay for gas and oil and for cleaning out a radiator choked with dust, he was asked if he had something smaller, explaining that “it’s awfully hard to spend anything out of a ten-dollar bill around here these days.”

They stopped at a farmhouse west of Forget (a harshly significant name) – clothes sticking to their bodies, blisters on their feet from the heat of the floorboards – hoping to get a glass of cool buttermilk. It was a typical Saskatchewan spread – small, unpainted house, combination horse- and cattle-barn, chicken-house, huddle of sheds, blown-over privy. And it was all empty. Though the door was unlocked, the house was still completely furnished, a Canada’s Pride range and a Hoosier cabinet in the kitchen, a Quebec heater in one bedroom, and two large beds with their mattresses. Although every crevice had been stuffed with newspaper, floors and furniture within were covered with dust; a long drift, two inches deep, had crept in from a crack under the kitchen door. A cast-iron pump stood halfway between house and barn, but its mechanism was rusted and immovable.