The Great Depression (59 page)

As Liversedge floundered through the floating debris, he came upon a diminutive New Yorker, Syd Shostick, who was trying to hold up a two-hundred-pound Finn named Sankari. Liversedge took one side of the big man, gathered some planking together, and then with some canvas fashioned a makeshift raft and hauled Sankari aboard.

The torpedo had struck the vessel amidships and blown the engines right through the decks. Corpses, mutilated by the force of the explosion, floated around Liversedge as he swam about. Some men were drowning and he could hear them singing the “Internationale,” the Communist anthem, as they sank beneath the water. In the distance he spotted some fishing boats, but these were separated from the survivors by a vast tangle of floating wreckage.

He came upon a man clinging to the edge of a wooden bunk. “How are you making out?” he shouted.

“Not so good,” came the answer. Then the man turned around, saw Liversedge, and cried out, “Good Lord, are you here too?” It
was a friend from Vancouver, Ellis Fromberg. Liversedge had had no idea he was on the ship. Fromberg was in a bad way from cramps in his arms, but Liversedge gathered enough floating lumber together to keep the two of them from sinking. It was two hours before the first of the fishing boats reached them, took them aboard, and deposited them on the beach in front of the little town of Malgrat. Liversedge was relieved to see that Shostick and Sankari had also been saved.

He and Fromberg were taken to a fisherman’s cottage whose owner cut the clothes from their bodies and rubbed them down to restore circulation. A young girl arrived with a bottle of cognac, and that stopped Liversedge from shaking. The family provided both men with clothes and the girl took them to the town square, where the other survivors had gathered. There, Liversedge learned that three of the Canadians had been lost.

The bodies were laid out in the local church. That evening the townspeople came down, set up tables, and served an outdoor supper. The president of Catalonia, Luis Companys, made a speech of welcome. (In the Second World War, Companys would be executed by the Gestapo.)

Later that night, the survivors were put on the train to Barcelona, ready to be drilled for the battles that would follow. It would be almost two years before those Canadians who survived would return to their native land, and it would not be to a hero’s welcome.

While the volunteers were making their way across the ocean and over the mountains to support the troubled Spanish government, trouble of another kind was brewing in Ontario. Mitch Hepburn was about to take on the dragon of the labour movement – John L. Lewis’s Congress of Industrial Organizations.

The struggle that took place in April was perhaps the most significant in Canadian labour history. At the time it seemed that the decision went to Hepburn: he fired two of his Cabinet stalwarts and won a landslide victory in the election that followed. But in the long term it was a defeat. The strike at the General Motors plant in Oshawa that spring saw the tacit acceptance in
Canada of the United Automobile Workers of America, and that heralded the entrenchment of industrial unionism, the very thing that Hepburn had fought to quell.

The peak of the Depression had passed in Central Canada – or so it seemed. In his “sunshine budget” in March, Hepburn lowered taxes and announced an unprecedented surplus of seven million dollars. Large corporations were beginning to post handsome gains. General Motors workers had taken five wage cuts over the Depression years. At the beginning of 1937, the company had announced a two-hundred-million-dollar profit, the greatest in its history. Yet it refused to raise wages. Instead, GM’s Oshawa plant hired an American efficiency expert, who persuaded the company to speed up the assembly line.

Unions had not flourished in the Depression years; there were too many people eager to take jobs at any price. GM had no trouble keeping its plants free of labour organizers. Canadian workers could look with envy across the border where their counterparts had left the old American Federation of Labor to form the UAW under the CIO’s banner. A series of sit-down strikes – a new weapon in the industrial struggle – had forced the American parent to recognize and negotiate with the union.

In Canada, however, wages were still going down and hours were longer. Some of the Oshawa workers formed a clandestine “Unity Group.” On February 19, four days after the speed-up was introduced, three hundred assembly-line workers struck and asked the Detroit office of the UAW for support.

The new American union had little interest in organizing Canadian workers. It was too busy with its own problems. The only man available to help was a slight, dark-haired UAW organizer named Hugh Thompson. He agreed to come to Canada to look over the situation and report back. Thus the American union and its parent, the CIO, were dragged into the Canadian struggle in spite of themselves.

In the weeks that followed, Hepburn and his friend George McCullagh, publisher of the
Globe and Mail
, would portray Thompson as a dangerous, wild-eyed radical, a “foreign agitator” acting as the spearhead for the CIO’s campaign to infiltrate and disrupt Canadian industry. He was nothing of the sort. A British subject born in Ireland, he had lived ten years in Canada before marrying an American. Hepburn did everything he could
to have him deported. Neither the federal government nor Hepburn’s own Department of Labour could uncover a shred of evidence to eject him, yet Hepburn could never get it into his head that, as a British subject without a criminal record, Thompson had every right to cross the border.

To J.B. Highfield, GM’s personnel manager in Oshawa, the mild-mannered Thompson was “a swine of an outsider,” a convenient epithet, perhaps, but a strange one coming from a man whose American bosses were themselves outsiders. The American Federation of Labor, which organized craft unions, had operated for years in Canada without being castigated as “foreign.” But the CIO was different. Its ultimate weapon, the sit-down strike – an attack on the age-old principle of private property – scandalized the business world. John L. Lewis, with his quivering jowls and Satanic brows, was depicted in the U.S. and Canadian newspapers as an ogre, tearing at the foundations of the American way of life. Although Thompson did not advocate use of the sit-down strike in Oshawa, Hepburn and his mentor, McCullagh, used the threat of it to terrify the public.

Thompson arrived in Oshawa on February 19 and persuaded the workers on the line to return to their jobs until a proper union could be formed. So deep was the feeling at GM that within a month, four thousand employees had joined the UAW, making the new Local 222 the largest in Canada. This in itself was a major victory. As Felix Lazarus wrote in the
Canadian Forum
, “the foremen and straw bosses … began treating the men like human beings. That was something new, and without precedent.”

The union, however, couldn’t find a meeting place. The owners of the hockey arena “didn’t want their kind of an organization.” The Department of National Defence stalled on renting the armouries. The board of education denied them the collegiate auditorium. That was too much for Thompson. When he threatened to hold an outdoor meeting at Oshawa’s busiest intersection at high noon on a Saturday, the board gave in.

In March, Hepburn got the ammunition he needed when workers at the Holmes Foundry in Sarnia staged a bloody sit-down strike, the first in Canada. The factory was a sweatshop, where sanitary conditions were appalling, short circuits on the production line threatened men’s lives, wages were low, speed-ups were common, and men were fired on whim. On March 2, seventy
workers, many of them immigrants, sat down at their machines. A mob of infuriated Sarnia citizens, only a few of whom were plant workers, descended upon the foundry wielding crowbars, baseball bats, and steel pipes against the “foreigners.” The police refused to interfere while heads and limbs were broken. No member of the mob was charged, but the strikers were arrested and convicted of trespassing. In the legislature, Hepburn declared, “… my sympathies are with those who fought the strikers.” He went on to say that “those who participate in sit down strikes are trespassers.… There will be no sit down strikes in Ontario. The Government is going to maintain law and order at all costs.”

A few days later, the Premier, with the Oshawa situation in mind, attacked “professional agitators from the United States – [who] agitate and foment unrest in our industrial areas …” and declared that he would “put down these sit down strikes with the full strength of the Provincial Police if necessary.…”

Five years before, during a provincial by-election in West York, Hepburn had wooed the labour vote with his declaration, “I swing far to the left where even some Liberals will not follow me.” In fact, he was a closet conservative, a typical product of the southern Ontario farming community that had always held the key to political success in the province. The new premier’s closest cronies, confidants, and advisers were industrialists and mining men, such as J.P. Bickell of McIntyre-Porcupine, Jules Timmins of Hollinger, and Sir James Dunn of Algoma Steel. The most influential was George McCullagh, the young Toronto broker who had talked the wealthy prospector William H. Wright into bankrolling the
Globe and Mail
. These men were terrified that the CIO would organize the mines in Ontario and cut into their phenomenal profits. The previous year the province’s gold mines, with production valued at eighty-three million dollars, had distributed twenty-nine million in dividends. Hepburn himself was slowly and unobtrusively becoming rich, thanks to McCullagh’s advice and help. Earlier that year, as Hepburn’s biographer, Neil McKenty, has recorded, when the Premier was away on holiday, McCullagh secretly bought him a block of stock in Hyslop Gold Mines that had doubled in value by the time he returned. In the fight with the CIO, McCullagh’s newspaper was flagrantly partisan.

In Oshawa, General Motors was flatly refusing to deal with any “outside agitator” – Thompson – or to have anything to do
with the CIO. Thompson, whose object was to prevent a strike and get an agreement, quietly withdrew, leaving the negotiations to a Canadian auto worker named Charles Millard.

A series of talks in the first week of April suggested that a settlement was in the air. The men, who worked a forty-eight-hour week without extra pay for overtime, wanted a forty-hour week with time-and-a-half. The company was prepared to meet them halfway. On April 6, it agreed to negotiate the various union demands with Millard. It was apparent that a compromise was about to be reached.

But not if Mitch Hepburn had his way. The Premier had been following these events from Florida. Suddenly he cut short his vacation and on April 7 returned to Ontario, which, he told a fellow Liberal, was “just seething with labour troubles.” The seething was all in the Premier’s mind.

He was so determined to break the union that he even made an unprecedented phone call to the company’s vice-president, George Chappell. He told Chappell that the government was backing GM and urged him to stand firm and refuse to recognize the CIO. As a result, General Motors reversed its stand and said it wouldn’t negotiate with Millard while he represented an American union. For five days both Millard and Thompson, acting as an adviser behind the scenes, had desperately tried to avert a strike, urging a restive rank and file to postpone any action as long as negotiations continued. Now on April 8, with the talks at a standstill, Hepburn got the strike he wanted.

Late that evening, he called in a
Globe
reporter and, in a voice shaking with anger, indicated his real reason for opposing the union. “We know what these CIO agitators are up to,” he said. “We are advised only a few hours ago that they are working their way into the lumber camps and pulp mills and our mines. Well, that has got to stop and we are going to stop it!”

For the duration of the strike, both Hepburn and the
Globe and Mail
did their best to suggest that the city of Oshawa faced anarchy and bloodshed. The union was determined not to provide any excuse for police repression. “It will be peaceful picketing and violence will not be tolerated,” Hugh Thompson announced. Millard declared that no sit-down strike had ever been contemplated and that the strikers would leave the buildings. That was the last thing Hepburn wanted. He had been primed for a violent
confrontation and, in spite of Thompson’s announcement, tried to suggest that one was in the offing.

He wired to the federal justice minister, Ernest Lapointe, demanding that one hundred Mounted Police be dispatched to Oshawa at once because a “report just submitted to me indicates the situation becoming very acute and violence anticipated any minute also impairment of heating plants and fire protection services.” That was sheer fantasy; Oshawa was remarkably quiet. “A city more peaceful … cannot be imagined,” the Toronto
Star
reported. “It is neither grim nor gay but placidly ordinary, showing signs neither of industrial strife nor of holidaying workers.” But Lapointe did as he was asked.

Hepburn put his provincial police on alert and announced that the men on strike would get no government relief, thus reneging on a promise made by David Croll, his own Minister of Labour. “The time for a showdown has come,” the Premier announced. The strike was “the first open attempt on the part of Lewis and his CIO to assume the position of dominating and dictating to Canadian industry.”

The mayor of Oshawa, Alex Hall, condemned Hepburn for his “irrational and impulsive action,” but the majority of newspapers supported him, the important exceptions being the Toronto
Star
and the
Ottawa Citizen
. Hepburn’s intemperate remarks bore such a resemblance to the editorials in the
Globe and Mail
that both of them might have been written by George McCullagh himself, and probably were.

On April 10, Homer Martin, the bespectacled president of the UAW, arrived in Oshawa. A Yale graduate and a former Baptist minister, Martin scarcely fitted the stereotype of the wild-eyed union agitator. Thousands of people lined the streets to cheer as his flag-draped convertible passed down the main street; Oshawa was clearly on the union side. In a fiery two-hour speech that evening that belied his meek manner, Martin castigated Hepburn as “a puppet of General Motors.” But it was really Hepburn who, with McCullagh’s help, was pulling the strings behind the scenes.