The Great Depression (6 page)

It was a narrower, more rigid society than today’s, and those adjectives apply not only to the so-called inflexible laws of economics
but also to something as innocent as motherhood. Breastfeeding was supposed to be strictly controlled at precise four-hour intervals no matter how lustily the baby cried for food. Infants were not to be cuddled too much – that would spoil them. Mothers were admonished that “the less a baby is handled the better” and advised to slap them on the buttocks to make them cry because “it keeps the lungs well expanded.”

Those women who worked outside the home – and most married women didn’t – made about half the wages of their male counterparts. Male chauvinism, which a later generation would decry, was alive and well, even on the nation’s campuses, where a more enlightened attitude might have been expected. But the University of British Columbia segregated its classrooms. Dalhousie denied certain scholarships to co-eds. Toronto’s prestigious History Club barred women members, explaining, perhaps, the shortage of women historians. And the University of Alberta actually had a Woman Haters’ Club, whose president (in 1935) would be elected head of the student council. It was assumed that a woman went to college to find a man, not a job. After that she was supposed to stay home. Jobs were about to become very scarce indeed, prompting the demand that women stay out of the workforce entirely.

Women weren’t supposed to like sex, which was talked about (by men) in whispers and usually with sniggers, an attitude that emphasizes the prudery of those times. The subject was publicly taboo, as were all references to abortion, pregnancy, menstruation, and masturbation. Contraception was illegal under the Criminal Code, and a divorce was almost impossible to obtain. In 1929, only 816 couples were divorced in Canada; more than twice that number left the country to get an easier separation elsewhere.

A few bold souls advocated “companionate marriage” and were vilified for it. They suggested that newlyweds should practise birth control for two years to decide whether they were compatible and then, if necessary, consider no-fault divorce while still childless. But when J. Lyle Telford, a left-wing physician and future Vancouver mayor, gave a lecture on the subject at UBC, the Vancouver
Sun
went after him editorially, charging that what Telford was advocating was “a social poison that gratifies the
erotic impulse.” One angry reader wrote that Telford should be sterilized. Another declared he was “unworthy of Canada.”

That was bad enough, but if you sneered at the sovereign, or indeed “any foreign prince,” you could be clapped into jail for sedition. In 1928, in Sudbury, one man was. His name was Arvo Vaara, the editor of a Finnish-language newspaper, who went so far as to express indifference as to whether the ailing George V lived or died. For those dangerous views he served eight months of a one-year sentence.

For Canada, as the wretched Vaara learned to his cost, was still very much a British nation. School children didn’t learn any American history, but the name of every English monarch from William the Conqueror on was drilled into them. The names of those forgotten British folk heroes Hereward the Wake and Wat Tyler were as familiar to the lower grades as Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain.

No politician yet dared to suggest abandoning the good old Union Jack. Most English-speaking Canadians would have agreed with the Premier of Saskatchewan that “over sixty thousand Canadians died following this flag … and say the flag that was good enough for them is good enough for me.”

That yearning to cling to Imperial symbols sprang partially from the fear that too many non-British immigrants would alter the traditional ethnic mix. In good times, “foreigners” were welcomed as settlers, at the bottom of the social scale. In hard times they weren’t wanted at all, and the fear of the newcomer would soon become a hallmark of Depression life. As for Quebeckers, they were considered a breed apart and certainly inferior by the white Anglo-Celtic Protestants who controlled the country.

Canada in the twenties was a racist country. The vast majority of Canadians, from the Prime Minister down, were at least passively anti-Semitic. Everybody knew what the warning sign
RESTRICTED
meant at golf clubs and tourist resorts. It bothered few that banks, insurance companies, department stores, financial firms, and a variety of other institutions, from Procter and Gamble to Maclean Hunter, barred Jews from employment. Jewish doctors couldn’t get hospital affiliations. Law firms rarely hired Jews. The universities and professional schools refused to hire Jewish faculty and devised quotas for Jewish students. High offices
in the federal government from the Senate to the Supreme Court were barred to Jews. The Privy Council that year agreed that a woman could become a senator, and a woman shortly afterward did; but it was twenty-five years before a Jew was admitted to the upper house and forty before a Jew sat on the Supreme Court. The files of the RCMP hint at the general attitude. The undercover constables who were assigned to keep tabs on anybody they considered left of centre had a habit of classifying their non-WASP quarry as a “Jew” or a “foreigner” or both.

Jews, like communists, were fair game in 1929. An incident that occurred in Toronto that year underscored the racism in that citadel of WASP privilege. The police, backed by their commission, had issued an extraordinary order. No one, they decreed, could make a public speech in any language but English! Today it sounds laughable – the kind of thing a right-wing crank might suggest on an open-line show – but the police were in deadly earnest. When Philip Halpern, editor of the Jewish weekly
Kampf
, tried to address a communist rally in Yiddish, he was immediately arrested. The
Globe
, quick off the mark as usual, endorsed the action in a long editorial entitled “The Police Are Right.” And those who protested the action, it said, were indulging in “silly twaddle.”

These authoritarian measures were a foretaste of what was to come when the Depression settled in. Within a month of the stock market crash, mounted police were breaking up a demonstration of hundreds of unemployed men in Vancouver. The jobless statistics were mounting – already 10,000 in Toronto, 8,500 in nine prairie cities – but nobody in authority took action. When A.R. Mosher, president of the All-Canadian Congress of Labour, demanded an immediate federal conference to consider the situation, the government turned him down. Mackenzie King’s Minister of Labour insisted that the crash hadn’t affected Canada as it had the United States. His complacent remarks echoed those of the bankers who, as always, were seeing shafts of sunlight breaking through the dark economic clouds.

Hard as it is to swallow, the same financial seers who had predicted good times at the start of the year ignored the crash and predicted good times on the eve of the next. A heavenly choir of bank executives raised hymns of praise to undimmed prosperity, trotting out the familiar clichés – “undiminished confidence
in Canada’s continued growth …” (White of the Commerce); “constructive optimism” (Moore of the Nova Scotia); “… future as promising as any time in her history” (Bogert of the Dominion); and, of course, “fundamental conditions are sound” (Gordon of the Bank of Montreal).

The press, as usual, trailed along, indulging in the familiar boosterism. “There’s very little the matter with Canada!” exclaimed Frank Yeigh, editor of
Saturday Night
.
“CANADA STANDS UNSHAKEN AFTER MARKET COLLAPSE
,” headlined the
Ottawa Citizen
. But the prize for the murkiest crystal ball must go to the Vancouver
Sun
, which, with the unfettered conceit that was even then the hallmark of the West Coast press, went so far as to announce that “Vancouver people can create in 1930 the greatest era of activity and prosperity … that this continent has ever known.”

This selected list of prices of goods and services in 1933, the nadir of the Depression, shows how far a dollar went in the thirties compared with today. All measurements have been adapted to pre-metric figures.

As the New Year approached, the Prime Minister of Canada had confided to his diary that all was right with the world. “A good year it has been on the whole,” he told himself, “a year in which there has been I believe, some improvement in mental and moral strength, some slight growth in wisdom.…”

He continued to congratulate himself: “The session of parliament was a good one. I had to carry much of the load myself, but I came out stronger in public regard I believe than I went in.… The summer was a good one and a happy one.… The fall has been good.” For thousands the fall had been very bad, but King didn’t mention the market crash. He was still basking in the glow of Ramsay MacDonald’s visit to Canada. King, who loved to hobnob with great men, was certain that the British prime minister’s brief sojourn was “an important international event which added a little I believe to my prestige in the country.…”

He saw no dark clouds on the political horizon. “… I believe that with the party & the country I am stronger than any time since I assumed office … I thank God with all my heart for protecting me through the year now drawing to a close.…”

These smug and self-complacent scribblings seem almost demented in the light of what we now know, but King was not alone in his musings. The business and political world felt the same way.

The exception seemed to be R.B. Bennett, who was demanding a radical change in government policy to ensure prosperity. A radical change was the last thing that Bennett expected from the cautious King and the last thing that he himself contemplated when he took office, unless by radical he meant an increase in the country’s protective tariffs. But he
was
Leader of the Opposition, and so his demands were as predictable as the response of John Dafoe’s Manitoba
Free Press
. The Liberal voice of Western Canada pointed the finger of scorn at the Tory leader for his “lamentations.”

“Whom are we to believe,” the paper asked, “… the sober financial executives who say that conditions are essentially sound and full of hope for the future, or the politicians who declare that in many respects the country is in a deplorable state …?”

The sober financial executives, of course, were dead wrong. The country
was
in a deplorable state, for which the Honourable Mr. Bennett had no cure and which Mackenzie King simply ignored, in the belief that the trouble would shortly go away. Within a fortnight, with ten thousand jobless men in Winnipeg alone, Dafoe was less sure of himself and was calling for federal action. The mayors of the larger Western cities, from the Lakehead to British Columbia, poured into Winnipeg on January 29 for a conference on unemployment. They wanted the federal government to underwrite a third of all relief costs, to launch a massive program of public works, to appoint a royal commission to investigate the situation, and to stop all immigration to Canada – radical suggestions indeed, by the standards of the day.

The
Free Press
now changed its tune to declare that unemployment was “a social condition … which cannot be explained away by soft phrases or met by emergency palliatives.”

Nonetheless, when a Western delegation headed by Winnipeg’s pugnacious mayor, Ralph Webb, went to Ottawa, it got neither soft phrases nor emergency palliatives but instead tough talk. The Depression had struck the West but was only beginning to be felt in Eastern Canada. Cushioned from reality in the green womb of his Kingsmere estate, Mackenzie King shocked the delegates by refusing to believe there
was
a crisis. “If the situation is so deplorable as you try to picture, why is not eastern Canada represented?” he asked Webb. “The answer is that, generally speaking, the employment situation in Canada is not abnormal. I have a telegram from the government of the province of Quebec that conditions there are quite satisfactory.”