The Great Depression (70 page)

In English-speaking Canada, the most formidable public opposition to Jewish immigration came from the Canadian Corps Association, the powerful veterans’ group, which sent a resolution to the Prime Minister opposing any weakening of immigration regulations that might “tend to make Canada a dumping ground for Europe.” The CCA wanted all new Canadians to be predominantly British or at least capable of rapid assimilation. “Now is no time to bring in people who have nothing in common with us, who do not want to work in the open and who have no desire to come here other than to find a new home.” This was a not-too-veiled attack on the Jews, who were stereotyped as people who didn’t want to “work in the open,” i.e., on the farms or in the forests and mines.

On the other hand, when the Canadian Jewish Congress held a national day of mourning on November 20, it attracted a broad spectrum of Gentile sympathizers in an attempt to convince the
government to allow Jewish refugees to immigrate. Meetings were held from Glace Bay to Victoria, with prominent speakers representing labour, the United Church, and local civic councils. Letters, telegrams, and petitions flooded the Prime Minister’s office in what the
Globe and Mail
called an example of “the brotherhood of man asserting itself.”

It did no good. Three days after the day of mourning, a powerful Jewish delegation from Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, led by Heaps and Sam Factor, the Liberal member for Spadina, met with King and Crerar. They announced that the Jewish community was prepared to care for any Jews admitted to Canada and asked that at least ten thousand be admitted. King shilly-shallied. He pointed out that unemployment was still high and that Canada must first take care of its own. He also had to consider “the avoidance of strife within our own country,” not to mention the constituencies (meaning Quebec) “and the views of those who are supporting the government.” Votes, in short, were more important than human lives.

King then shocked the delegation with the suggestion that
Kristallnacht
might be a blessing in disguise; international opinion, he said, was so outraged the Nazis would be afraid to molest the Jews further.

International opinion did not sway the Cabinet, though King, whose conscience was clearly bothered by his colleagues’ intransigence, tried to bring the members around. On November 24 he asked his ministers “to try and view the refugee problem from the way in which this nation will be judged in years to come, if we do not play our part along with other democracies, in helping to meet one of humanity’s direct needs.” He pointed out that “we could not afford to lose the Liberal attitude … and that the time had come when, as a Government, we would have to perform acts that were expressive of what we believed to be the conscience of the nation, and not what might be, at the moment, politically most expedient.” He got little response, “most of those present fearing the political consequences of any help to the Jews.” Cabinet was prepared to find a home for the Jews somewhere else – in Africa, perhaps – but not in Canada.

By this time it was almost impossible for any Jewish refugee to leap the barrier that the Immigration Branch had erected against the Jews. At the beginning of the year, Jewish refugees were
required to have capital of at least five thousand dollars on entering the country. By December the department was rejecting those who had twenty thousand or more. Just before Hitler seized Czechoslovakia, a group of Jewish farm families with a total capital of one million dollars begged for entry visas. They were bluntly denied entry. Blair and other officials of the department were convinced, without any evidence, that many refugees were faking their assets in order to gain admission.

In Europe, where time was of the essence for anybody fleeing the Nazis, the very word “Jew” on an application form was enough to cause immediate rejection by Canadian officials. Abella and Troper quote the case of Zita Plaut, who had managed to escape from Vienna to the Netherlands with her husband. In 1938 she applied for a visa to bring the couple and the rest of her family still in Germany to Canada. She told the Canadian official that the family had fifty thousand dollars in foreign currency. “Wonderful,” he said, and handed her a form. She filled it out and signed it. “Oh,” he said, “their name is Rappaport? They are Jewish? I’m sorry, we have no visas.” And he tore up the document as she watched.

King had not since November pressed the matter of Jewish immigration on his colleagues, but Crerar did. On December 1, he told the Cabinet that he was prepared to admit ten thousand Jewish refugees. King was nettled. Crerar had made the recommendation, he felt, “really without consideration of the matter.” With the rest of the Cabinet totally opposed, the Prime Minister fell back on that old bulwark, the BNA Act. He would announce publicly that the matter couldn’t be dealt with until the provinces were consulted. “As legislation respecting immigration is concurrent,” the government would leave it up to each province as to whether they would accept Jewish immigrants. The general feeling in Cabinet was that they would all be unwilling.

To further appease Crerar, King suggested tossing a small bone to Canadian Jews who were still pressuring the government for bolder action, especially in the light of Australia’s commitment to admit fifteen thousand Jewish refugees. Jews who had come to Canada as tourists, it was announced, would be allowed to stay, but no more would be admitted “lest it might foment anti-Semitic problems.”

That was the bizarre argument used by Canada’s High Commissioner to Britain, the patrician Vincent Massey, who danced on the periphery of Lord and Lady Astor’s anti-Semitic, pro-German Cliveden set. Massey told King privately that a further influx of Jewish refugees would “naturally swell the already substantial Jewish population of larger cities” and help create “anti-Semitic feeling.”

The High Commissioner had another, more devious solution. Why not appease those Canadians who wanted to help alleviate the refugee problem by taking in another type of refugee – Germans from the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia who had incurred Hitler’s wrath by not supporting him at the time of the Munich crisis? Massey made his prejudices clear when he told King that “these refugees are of a superior type to certain other categories of refugees who are engaging our attention.” For one thing, they were Aryans.

And that is exactly what happened. A few days before Christmas the Cabinet agreed that more than three thousand Sudeten Germans could emigrate to western Canada “provided they came with the amount of capital now required for settlement purposes.”

King’s conscience was salved. Canada would humanely admit these Germans, who “had been sacrificed for the benefit of the world’s peace of which we were the beneficiaries.” As Massey explained, they were among “the numerous non-Jewish people who [found] life quite intolerable under the Nazi regime,” while Norman Robertson, of External Affairs, stated that “men of their type and history should be a really valuable asset and acquisition to this country.”

Of all the disparate groups of refugees in Europe, the victims from Sudetenland were the newest. The Jews, of course, were the oldest. But Canada had made it clear that, as a Canadian official would later say of Jewish immigrants, none was too many. With a scratch of the pen, Canada’s most distinguished and powerful mandarins and statesmen pushed the Jews aside and put the Germans at the head of the queue.

The country was tired.

In this, the last year of the Great Depression – but who could know that? – the people were weary and dispirited and their leaders worn out in mind and sometimes in body. (Mackenzie King, on New Year’s afternoon, took to his bed for two and a half hours.)

One million Canadians were still on relief. Jobs remained hard to get, even though many who had them were overworked. Social workers had too many desperate cases, doctors too many indigent patients, teachers too many ragged students crammed into rundown classrooms.

Since 1930, the country had been living from hand to mouth. The government had shovelled nine hundred million dollars into direct-aid works and projects for unemployment relief and agricultural distress and had precious little to show for it. The number of people dependent on public funds was still rising, yet the nation’s leaders seemed incapable of effective planning.

The Canadian Welfare Council described the prevailing mood in its annual report that January: “A weary country and a disillusioned people have been in a mood of drift.” Under such conditions, charismatic leaders often emerge to short-cut democracy. It had happened elsewhere. Could it happen in Canada?

There were hints that it could, especially in the three provinces whose leaders had, with the enthusiastic approval of the voters, tried to subvert the democratic process.

In Alberta, William Aberhart showed his contempt by a long silence in the legislature, which he explained in one brutally frank sentence. “I can reach the public by radio,” he said, “so why take up the time of the House?”

In Quebec, the administration of the Padlock Law reached new heights of imbecility when two Protestant missionaries were thrown out of a lumber camp near Dolbeau. The police invoked the Act (supposedly designed to suppress only Communist literature) to confiscate 570 Protestant publications – Bibles, dictionaries, tracts, hymnals, and gospels. Then they ordered the offenders out of town on the next train. No amount of official protest brought so much as a peep of acknowledgement from Premier
Duplessis, lending further credence to the
Canadian Forum’s
suggestion that the real fear in Quebec was not communism but anti-clericalism.

In Ontario, the hunger for direction in an apparently pilotless nation erupted briefly with the creation of that curious, if short-lived, movement known as the Leadership League. Canadians in moments of crisis have tended to demand “strong leadership.” Now, tens of thousands made it clear that they were prepared to accept one-party rule in the interests of peace, order, and imaginative government.

The league was George McCullagh’s personal baby. Its sudden success provides an insight into the psyche of the country that spring. In a series of five broadcasts over a loose network of radio stations, the publisher of the
Globe and Mail
managed to strike a chord. Though his simplistic approach to the nation’s problems might seem half-baked to some, there were multitudes who hung on his every word. McCullagh had the advantages of a rich and charismatic voice and the enthusiastic backing of his own newspaper. But he was clearly unprepared for the response to his call for stronger leadership. Before he knew it he found himself at the head of a national movement that had all the earmarks of an incipient political party.

McCullagh was one of those self-made men who believe that governments can be run on the same business principles that work so well in the private sector. The so-called Boy Millionaire was just thirty-three years old, a cabinet-maker’s son who had become a king-maker, a phenomenon in the business, publishing, and political world. Mitch Hepburn had been his creature. McCullagh, it was said, was not above prompting the Premier,
sotto voce
, from his listening-post in an adjoining washroom. “I make and unmake governments,” McCullagh once boasted.

Tall and ruggedly handsome, the Boy Millionaire bristled and brimmed with an overweening confidence undiluted by false modesty. Some of his business rivals were still tittering over his declaration, during a 1936 testimonial dinner, that his merging of the
Globe
and the
Mail and Empire
was a “masterpiece.”

Much was made of the fact (by McCullagh himself, among others) that he had started his publishing career at twenty-one as a subscription salesman for the
Globe
and that when he had quit, he told the current owner, William Gladstone Jaffray, “when I
next walk into this office, I’ll be buying the paper out from under you.” He had made good that boast in the depths of the Depression. No wonder, then, that he was convinced he could solve the Depression’s ills.

Everybody agreed that he was a supersalesman. As a broker, he had flourished even after the 1929 crash. But his biggest act of salesmanship was to convince William Henry Wright, an unpretentious prospector, to let him handle his business affairs.

Wright was McCullagh’s real ticket to success. He had struck it rich in northern Ontario not once but twice. His income from two of the richest gold mines in Canada – Wright Hargreaves and Lake Shore – was estimated at two million dollars a year. McCullagh, the business evangelist, soon found the key to his client’s pocketbook. “Link arms with me in a crusade,” he told the former house-painter in 1936. Wright bought him two newspapers for his crusade, and added a fancy art-deco headquarters on King Street.

The McCullagh charm that had seduced Wright was invoked in the 1937 Ontario election campaign in the Liberal cause. The publisher’s radio personality was so powerful that a single broadcast brought in two thousand letters and fourteen thousand phone calls. But within a year his relationship with the Premier soured, partly because of Hepburn’s new association with Duplessis and his public feud with Mackenzie King. Hepburn, McCullagh had once said, wasn’t “fit to be premier of a pub.”

McCullagh’s musings on leadership began to obsess him after the Munich crisis in 1938. Both King and Robert Manion, Bennett’s successor, seemed to him to be lukewarm in their attitude toward Britain. Nor, he thought, did either have any fresh ideas about how to cope with Canada’s domestic problems. (The best King could do was to take some of the burden of relief off the shoulders of the municipalities.)

In the
Globe
that fall, McCullagh had called for “fresh leadership.” By late December, after talking it over with his Bay Street friends, he had decided on a series of five intimate, “man-to-man” broadcasts, designed to arouse public consciousness. The publisher had two goals in mind, one vaguely high-minded – “to reject the clap-trap the politicians have preached for years” – the other coldly practical, “to extend the influence of the
Globe and Mail
.”