The Great Depression (54 page)

On the day following the aborted meeting, Frank Scott charged, “… democracy is in a precarious position if a sane and considered statement for a lawful government is prevented from being given in a British colony by threats of violence from irresponsible elements.” Duplessis, however, saw it differently: he publicly praised the students for their attacks on communism.

By 1936, hundreds of young French Canadians had been recruited into the small but burgeoning fascist movement of Adrien Arcand, a fanatical anti-Semite, who had links with international fascism and with Hitler’s Nazis. He was also editor of the tabloid
L’Illustration nouvelle
, the semi-official organ of Duplessis’s Union Nationale.

Fascism appealed to the growing nationalism of young Quebec. At a mass meeting in Maisonneuve the previous March, speaker after speaker had attacked the Spanish Popular Front, charging that it was controlled by Russians and Jews. Arcand’s purpose was similar – to equate the Jews with the “Godless communists” as interlopers who wanted to take over the province. In his public pronouncements, he advocated stripping them of all civil and political rights and packing them off to the shores of Hudson Bay. During the 1935 election campaign he had been the Conservative party’s political director in the province; now, in his new editorial position, he was in the Duplessis camp. Because
of his political connections, Arcand played down his anti-Semitism in
L’Illustration nouvelle
. It was enough for him that he could follow the lead of Pius XI and Cardinal Villeneuve in attacking the Reds.

Two days after the demonstrations in Montreal, a mass rally of ten thousand persons celebrating the Feast of Christ the King in Quebec City heard Villeneuve condemn communism and call for all Catholics to join in a crusade for its extermination. Those who had supported the Spanish government’s cause were denounced and the Loyalists were attacked as “a group comprised of new barbarians who have covered the lands of Spain with desolation and blood.”

On that same day, Norman Bethune was on the high seas, sailing for Madrid on a one-way ticket donated by the Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. The impetus for Bethune’s trip had come, not from the communists, but from Graham Spry of the CCF, the editor of the party’s paper,
New Commonwealth
. Spry invented a “Spanish Hospital and Medical Aid Committee” in the hopes of raising money for a hospital in Spain. Bethune helped him turn the committee into a reality and then, with the assistance of a broad spectrum of organizations on the Left, to form the larger Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. Bethune had already offered his services to the Canadian Red Cross, only to be told by the national commissioner that the organization was not raising a unit for service in Spain “and has not, I think, any intention whatever of doing so.”

Typically, Bethune had made up his mind to go to Spain on short notice. A young Montreal architect, Hazen Sise, who followed him to the war, was later to describe him as “a person who had no inhibitions, no gap between thought and action.” Sise recalled that once Bethune had thought about something and thought “that something was worthwhile doing, he would just go right out and do it. And he would leave a trail of annoyed bureaucrats and hurt feelings behind him.” But, Sise added, the dedicated surgeon was also “literally the sort of person who could say ‘Rise up and follow me’ and you would follow him. He had that sort of authority about him.”

Sise was one such disciple, a member of a prominent Montreal family who was prepared to give up a career to follow his hero.
Another was Henning Sorensen, a Danish-Canadian insurance agent whom Sise described as a “very sweet, dreamy character, very emotional: [whose] heart literally bled for the sufferings of the Spanish people.” Sise wrote from Spain that both Bethune and Sorensen “are a little in love with death” but that “the essential rightne
ss
of their action seems to give them a sort of shining hallowed quality.” Sorensen, for his part, wrote that Bethune “loved the smell of danger.… He needed that adrenalin in his system that comes from a dangerous situation.…”

In late November, Bethune and Sorenson flew from Madrid to Paris to arrange for medical supplies for the unit that Bethune was planning. Bethune went on to London to consult with haematologists on transfusion techniques, for he intended to transfuse blood directly on the battlefield. For that he would need a truck loaded with equipment – everything from a gasoline-operated refrigerator and sterilizing equipment to vacuum bottles, hurricane lamps, and gas masks.

But once again he ran into the same hands-off attitude to the Spanish war that had prevented the Canadian Red Cross from offering any aid. This time it was the Canadian government. Bethune would require 1,875 separate items for his transfusion unit. He didn’t want to waste money paying duty at the border and so went to the French embassy to ask for a
laissez-passer
. The French agreed to grant permission if the Canadians would assure them that Bethune was a bona fide doctor engaged in humanitarian work. Ottawa refused to provide such assurance. Ernest Lapointe cabled to the Canadian High Commissioner, Vincent Massey, that “while Government has full sympathy of any efforts to relieve sufferers on either side of present Spanish conflict, it would not be possible in view of what appears to be the political complexion of this mission … to sponsor it by making a formal request such as indicated.” That piece of bureaucratese, translated, meant that the government had no intention of helping a known Communist, even one who was trying to save lives.

Bethune, furious at this fence-sitting, paid the duty and went on to Spain to become an authentic Canadian hero, an expatriate citizen of a country hungry for heroes but still unappreciated in his native land. More than a quarter of a century would pass before more than a handful of his countrymen would recognize his name.

On October 21, in the same week in which the Spanish delegates arrived for their confrontation in Montreal, a landmark trial opened in the little Ontario community of Eastview that variously shocked, titillated, angered, or scandalized Canadians. A young woman was haled into court on the charge of distributing birth control information and therefore breaking one of the many taboos – this one enshrined in the Criminal Code – that covered everything sexual from contraception to pregnancy, and from words like “intercourse” to jokes about pre-marital dalliance.

Under Canadian moral standards of the middle thirties, sex was held to be dirty and therefore not to be discussed in public, on the radio, or in the newspapers. William Aberhart had come up against the taboo in January when he told a joke in Calgary, in which he talked about the hard time he was being given by his critics.

“It brought to my mind,” Aberhart said, “the story of the young lady in the maternity ward who was in agony. She asked the nurse if there was a young man in a brown suit and a brown fedora outside in the corridor.

“The nurse said, ‘Yes, I saw one there when I came in.’

“ ‘Well,’ said the girl, ‘tell him that if this is anything like married life, the engagement is off.’ ”

That parable, inoffensive by almost any standards, got Aberhart into a heap of trouble. The Social Credit leader was assailed by complaints that he had told a “lewd” joke. Efforts were even made to take him off the air.

The Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission had come under a similar attack in March, when, as the result of a contest, it broadcast two prize-winning songs, the lyrics of which included the phrases “Let’s pet beneath the serviette” and “I can’t dance ’cause I’ve got ants in my pants.” They brought such a roar of disapproval that the commission bowed to the moralists, announced it would take all responsibility for the offending program, apologize to all who complained, and make sure that “the program conductor will be sternly reprimanded.”

The commission’s successor, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, even refused to allow a Toronto radio station, CFRB, to
any reference to eugenic sterilization during an address sponsored by the Eugenics Society of Canada. As a result, the broadcast was cancelled.

“Lewd” performances in theatres were forbidden. In Montreal, where all performances had to be governed “by the dictates of propriety and refinement,” the Board of Censorship explicitly defined a lewd performance as the appearance on the stage of “bare-legged females,” “the wearing of one-piece union suits by women,” or any dance that involved “suggestive or repulsive contractions of the human body.”

Toronto was equally puritan. When the distinguished British actor Maurice Colbourne appeared at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in
Reunion in Vienna
, a Robert Sherwood play, the censors were in full cry. Thanks to the vigilance of Mrs. Henry Cody, wife of the president of the University of Toronto, the police forced a number of script changes. The word “bathroom” was deleted, an eight-second kiss was reduced to five seconds, the word “damn” was cut out, and a love scene was toned down. And when the wildly successful new picture magazine,
Life
, published a photographic essay on the birth of a baby that year, the issue was denied entry into Canada.

Such moralistic taboos helped to contribute to the woeful ignorance of many Canadians regarding the clinical details of sex, birth control, and conception. How else to explain the widely held belief that Oliva Dionne, the father of the famous quintuplets, must have sexual organs of enviable proportions? There were those who were not above taking a peek in the public washrooms when Dionne went on tour.

Any public reference to birth control was taboo. The law made it clear that “everyone is guilty of an indictable offense and liable to two years’ imprisonment who knowingly, without lawful excuse or justification, offers to sell, advertises, publishes an advertisement of or has for sale or disposal any medicine, drug or article intended or represented as a means of preventing conception or causing abortion.”

Until the Depression there was no organized birth control movement in Canada. But after 1930 it began to be obvious that ignorance of birth control methods was causing hardship among the poor, who couldn’t afford large families. Deaths from illegal abortions, many self-induced, were on the rise – not only in
relation to all maternal deaths but also in absolute numbers. And to some Canadians, another statistic was equally alarming: the lowest quarter of the population in terms of income produced half the nation’s children.

One who was concerned by these figures was Alvin Ratz Kaufman, owner of the Kaufman Rubber Company in Kitchener, which made boots and rainwear (but not condoms). When Kaufman laid off a number of workers in December 1929, some of them protested that because they had the largest families they were the most in need of work. Kaufman, a harshly practical man, investigated and found that it was true: the least skilled employees had the most children. But if he kept them on and fired others, he’d quickly go broke.

“We must choose between birth control and revolution,” Kaufman declared. “We are raising too large a percentage of the dependent class.…” That was, of course, an elitist attitude, though Kaufman probably didn’t think in those terms. “If we breed from the bottom instead of the top we are courting disaster,” he said. He offered to pay for sterilization of any of his employees who asked for it or to have them fitted with diaphragms. The overwhelming response astonished him.

Birth control became a crusade for Kaufman, who spent some fifty thousand dollars a year to study the problem, to open clinics, and to offer birth control information by mail. He was not alone. A pioneer clinic in Hamilton also began operating quietly and unobtrusively in 1932.

The birth control controversy of the thirties parallels, in many ways, the abortion controversy of a later era. The Protestant Left espoused birth control. The United Church endorsed it formally in 1936; the Anglicans remained tepid. The Roman Catholic Church was totally opposed, and its influence alone was strong enough to keep the prohibitory statute on the books. No public health nurse was allowed to discuss birth control methods with her patients. Doctors avoided the subject, which was, as Dr. Gordon Bates of the Social Hygiene Council once admitted, “a very controversial one.” The council, Dr. Bates had declared, was “not at all interested in the birth control movement.” Many physicians had only the crudest knowledge of contraceptive methods. After one live birth and one stillbirth, a woman in Tecumseh, Ontario, wrote to Dr. Marie Stopes, the pioneer birth control advocate in
the United States: “… the Doctor attending advised us to avoid having more: promising to give us birth control knowledge. This he did not do, and I did not care to bring the subject up again.”

Kaufman was critical of the medical profession. After setting up clinics in Windsor and Toronto, he discovered that “about 50% of the patients cannot be fitted with a pessary for various reasons, some of which apparently are no credit to the obstetricians.” In the rural areas “doctors frequently are not available at all and more frequently do not know how to fit pessaries anyway and do not care.”

Those doctors who favoured birth control were convinced that the diaphragm or pessary was the only sure way of preventing conception. But these devices were expensive and awkward to use. Women who really needed them wouldn’t use them. Kaufman opted for “J. N. and C.” – jelly, nozzles, and condoms. They might be less effective, but in the long run they would prevent more unwanted births because people would actually make use of them.

By 1936, Kaufman had in operation a coast-to-coast distribution system with more than a thousand supporting doctors and a network of social workers and nurses paid to interview women in the poorer working-class districts. They offered to mail free contraceptive kits to any woman who signed a form asking for one. His Parents Information Bureau in Kitchener had by then mailed out more than sixty thousand birth control packages.

One of Kaufman’s part-time social workers was Dorothea Palmer, a plump twenty-seven-year-old who canvassed poor families in the predominantly French-Canadian community of Eastview, a suburb of Ottawa. The Roman Catholic Church was incensed at the idea of a Protestant woman knocking on the doors of its flock, asking mothers if they’d like birth control information. The church complained to the chief of police, and a shaken Miss Palmer one September afternoon found herself under arrest, charged with a criminal offence that could put her behind bars for two years. She was indignant. “A woman should be master of her own body,” she told the arresting officers. “She should be the one to say if she should become a mother.” Her words would be echoed in the great abortion controversy of the 1980s.