The Great Depression

by Pierre Berton

  Clark could never forget the times when food was so scarce that he would go down to the St. Lawrence Market to shoot pigeons off the rafters so that his mother could make a pigeon pie for dinner. He could never forget the little store at the corner of Queen and Augusta where Cooper the butcher would cock an eye at him and ask: “How’s your dog, Vern?” Both knew there was no dog, but Clark would reply with a straight face, “Not too bad.” And Cooper would respond with an equally straight face, “I’d better give you a few bones. I’ll give you some with a little meat on.” There were thousands of Verdun Clarks in the thirties, living on soup made from scraps dispensed by sympathetic tradesmen. That’s how people were in the Depression, generous in the midst of want. As Verdun Clark would often remark, years later, “They aren’t like the people today. There’s no comparison. No comparison.”

  And so Verdun Clark, who was just thirteen when the Depression began, worked hard all his life and is proud of it. “I have worked. I don’t think I ever had a job that was only eight hours a day. I worked for fifty-six years. I never lost a day’s work in all those years. I was determined that I would never lose my family. I would work twenty hours a day if necessary to overcome it; which I did. The Depression helped me because it gave me that determination that I had to go ahead and work.”

  The Depression also played havoc with laissez-faire. For the first time, Canadians began to realize that government must interfere in the private affairs of the nation. The Canadian Wheat Board, the Bank of Canada, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Trans-Canada Airlines were among the public corporations born of those hungry years. Anyone who advocated today’s social services in the pre-Depression era would have been considered a dangerous radical – and, in truth, some were. But the hard times changed people’s outlook.

  Yet for a good many Canadians there were no hard times. For those who held a decent job, the thirties was a wonderful period. Because of deflation, everything got cheaper. A single man making fifty dollars a month wasn’t exactly on Easy Street, but he wasn’t poor either. He could buy a hamburger for a dime. He could take his girl to dinner and a movie for two dollars; he could buy a tailored suit with two pairs of pants for twenty.

  Bruce Hutchison, then a young political reporter for the Vancouver Province, married, with two children, lived comfortably even when his wages were cut from fifty-five to fifty dollars a week. His standard of living actually rose as prices fell. “We always had a maid in the house, the best food in our stomachs, two second-hand cars in the garage, and in our minds the smug, bogus security of the fortunate. It never occurred to me that we were well off.…”

  Thousands of Canadians lived as Hutchison did, breezing through the hard times without a care. For them the Depression was a blur; the shabby men selling shoelaces on the street corners were as foreign as Laplanders, the newspaper headlines about hunger marches and jobless riots as far removed as those from Ethiopia, China, and Spain. They gambolled their way through the decade, fox-trotting to the clarinets of Goodman and Shaw, or speeding down the quiet country lanes in their Packard Straight Eights. For them, the memories of the thirties evoked a different set of symbols – Monopoly games, miniature golf, the “candid camera,” Knock-Knock jokes.

  One member of this favoured company recalled those times with nostalgia and affection thirty years later in an interview with Maclean’s. “You could take your girl to a supper dance at the hotel for $10,” he remembered, “and that included a bottle and a room for you and your friends to drink it in.”

  Ten dollars was a great deal of money in 1935 – a year in which department store seamstresses found they had to work evenings to earn the minimum weekly wage of $12.50. But for others it was a pittance.

  “I’m glad I grew up then. It was a good time for everybody. People learned what it means to work,” said John David Eaton.

  1929

  1

  The Great Repression

  2

  The legacy of optimism

  3

  Crash!

  4

  The world of 1929

  1

  The Great Repression

  For most people, the Depression began on that manic morning of October 29, to be known forever as Black Tuesday, when the easy, buoyant era of the twenties – the roaring, turbulent, high-flying twenties – came to a dead stop. Yet those fevered October days were no more than symptoms of a deeper malady, undiagnosed and untreated.

  The germs were already there in the hot, dry summer of 1929, when the crops began to fail on the southern prairies and the boom ran wild and out of hand and the country continued to overbuild on borrowed funds. The Great Depression was beginning and nobody knew it. The Great Repression was already under way but nobody cared. One did not need to visit Munich to see dissidents beaten to the ground. It was happening here.

  In the decade that followed – the hungry, the dirty, the sad, shameful, mean-spirited thirties – the image of a policeman’s truncheon bringing a shabbily dressed man to his knees would become familiar. Human rights and civil liberties were of no more concern to the average Canadian, struggling to make ends meet, than to the average German. It is appalling to recall that under the vagrancy laws it was a crime to be poor and homeless in 1929. But scarcely anybody gave that a thought; in those heady days, anybody who wanted a job could get one. If you didn’t work you were a bum, and if the police caught you and hauled you off a freight train, you went to jail – and good riddance. But the day was coming when two million people would be bums, when the freight trains would be jammed with homeless men, when the jails would be bursting with “vagrants,” and when some who protested these conditions would be branded dangerous subversives and packed off to the penitentiary.

  That day, in fact, had already arrived. The events of August 13 in Toronto – another Black Tuesday, though nobody called it that – were as much a curtain raiser for the decade to come as the market crash that followed ten weeks later.

  We can glimpse the opening skirmish in this bloody affair through the shocked eyes of a twenty-two-year-old bystander, John Morgan Gray, who in the post-war years would become a major literary figure as president of the Macmillan Company of Canada. On that balmy summer evening, Gray had decided to stroll over to Queen’s Park with a few friends from a nearby University of Toronto fraternity house. The park, a grass-covered, tree-shaded square behind the Parliament Buildings, provided one of the few green spaces in the downtown core and was thus a favourite with Torontonians, who liked to take short cuts across it, or listen to concerts in the bandstand, or take their ease on the park benches to observe the passing show. The passing show that night promised to be special. The communists were planning a rally, and the police had announced that they would break it up. Gray was a graduate of Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto, but in spite of his education and a recent sojourn in Europe, he knew nothing of international politics. He and his friends had walked over out of curiosity, to watch the fun and see “what wild Communists looked like.”

  The wild communists, it turned out, looked disappointingly commonplace. Gray spotted them at the south end of the park, an unimpressive group of about sixty people, some with children, making their way toward the bandstand. As Gray described them, “they looked both ordinary and harmless, not remotely dangerous to the city or the country as a whole.”

  Nothing interesting was happening or seemed about to happen. From his vantage point, about a hundred yards away, Gray couldn’t tell whether or not anyone was speaking. There was no cheering, only “a kind of irresolute shifting about in the little crowd.”

  And then suddenly, like an explosion, scores of police, some on horseback, some on motorcycles with sidecars, burst from the bushes that partially screened the Parliament Buildings and drove straight at the little group, oblivious to the crowd of spectators, who scrambled or stumbled out of the way.

  What followed shocked and sickened Gray. Near the end of his life, when he wrote his memo
irs, the spectacle that he had witnessed remained seared on his mind. The little group tried at first to hold together as though to confront their attackers. That, of course, was impossible, for they had no weapons, not even a stick or a stone. They broke and fled in a dozen directions before the police onslaught, so that the park became the scene of a dozen small skirmishes.

  One man came racing across the park directly toward Gray. A motorcycle officer saw him and roared after him. He tried desperately to escape, dodging between the trees, but the motorcycle followed every move until the victim tripped and fell. In an instant the policeman in the sidecar was out, kicking his victim brutally as he tried to get up. At last he simply lay on the grass, “trying to cover his head, and crying out as his body recoiled under the heavy boot.”

  We ask, sometimes, why the German bystanders did not interfere when the Brownshirts beat up the Jews, but deep down we know the answer. As Gray wrote, “I suppose we all had some impulse to intervene, to try to stop this cruel nonsense, but we didn’t. We weren’t after all on the wretched man’s side, except that each of us could feel the boot in his guts. Instead, we turned away sickened as the broken man was stood up and led away for questioning. For a while we were moody and thoughtful, ashamed perhaps that we had not even tried to help a fellow human, shocked at the picture of a hard world beyond our experience. But presently we were playing cards and singing around the piano, and in a day or two this glimpse of real-politik remained only as a trace that would surface less and less often as time passed.”

  The man whom Gray saw being chased and beaten was probably Jack MacDonald, the black-browed leader of the Communist party, who had been billed in advance as the speaker of the evening. The new police chief, Denny Draper, hated all communists and was determined to snuff out the party. When they tried to hire a hall, he stopped them. When they applied for permission to hold an outdoor meeting, he refused. Thus the Queen’s Park rally was technically illegal, and MacDonald, who carefully removed his glasses and thrust them into his pocket when the police erupted onto the square, knew exactly what to expect. “I haven’t even said a word, boys,” he shouted as two officers seized him.

  In short, the illegal rally hadn’t officially begun. That didn’t matter to the police. MacDonald was struck in the face, kicked from behind, knocked down, and kicked again and again. “For God’s sake,” he cried, the tears running down his cheeks. “Don’t kick me!” He broke away twice, and it was probably at this point that Gray saw him zigzagging across the park before his final capture.

  From the Estevan riot of 1931 to the Vancouver post office strike of 1938, the grey years of the Depression would be marked by police overkill. The prelude to these bloodier events was the Queen’s Park “riot” of August 1929. The Toronto police made no attempt to distinguish between communists, sympathizers, and ordinary bystanders. All were treated as the enemy. One youth was manhandled for daring to question the assault. “Give it to them!” a policeman shouted. “They’re all yellow.” Others cried, “Get out and stay out! Get back to Russia!”

  And so Joe Winkle, strolling through the park to watch a lawn-bowling tournament, was struck in the face by a detective’s fist. Edward Smith was told to get out of the park but before he could move was hammered three or four times by a policeman’s billy. Montagu Kellaway, a war veteran who, like Smith, didn’t move fast enough, suffered a cracked jaw. William Godfrey, who had dined with his sisters, was taking a short cut home when a policeman kicked him from behind. When he tried to protest, the policeman shouted, “Go back to Moscow!” and hit him across the mouth. As for Meyer Klig, who wasn’t an innocent bystander and was known to the police as a party member, he received a twenty-minute drubbing with rubber truncheons in the privacy of the Parliament Buildings.

  It would be heartening to believe that this nightmarish attack was an inexplicable departure from the accepted rules of law and behaviour, an unexpected burst of pent-up emotion after a long summer’s day. It was nothing of the sort. It was planned with cold-blooded precision and carried out in the presence of the chief, Denny Draper, himself. And it was only one of a series of similar incidents that had the approval of the mayor, the police commission, and three of the city’s four dailies – the Toronto Daily Star being the exception, as it generally was in such atrocities. The usual establishment attitude was summed up in the Globe’s approving editorial the following morning: “SEND THE BOLSHEVIKS BACK.”

  The press insisted on terming the incident a “riot,” a peculiar name for an eruption of savagery that was planned and carried out by constituted authority. “Riot” would become the euphemism of the Depression, applied to any parade, demonstration, rally, or work stoppage that brought out the police and threatened the established order. There would be quite literally hundreds of these so-called riots in the turbulent decade that followed. In one year alone – 1934 – forty-three were serious enough to make the pages of the Toronto newspapers.

  Labour groups, churches, and ordinary citizens were outraged by the action of the police that August. There were the usual calls for an inquiry and the usual replies that none was needed. And yet, over the months that followed, the feeling began to grow that something was wrong, that the system was out of kilter, that the social order wasn’t working. Only the communists were demanding radical change, and they made few converts. It’s one of the ironies of those times that the incidents they provoked, as the Depression deepened, did not benefit them politically. What they did do was to arouse the collective conscience of the academic elite. It was the university professors, many of them committed Christians, who would eventually take action against repression and lay the groundwork for the modern welfare state. It was the police who forced them into it.

  2

  The legacy of optimism

  It is easy enough to look back on that buoyant and carefree summer of 1929 and ask why nobody saw trouble ahead. The signs were clear. The country was heavily overbuilt, the export market was fragile, wheat prices were falling, the stock market was impossibly high, and unemployment was rising. No one appeared to notice. The Canadians of those times seem to us to have been dancing blindfold on the lip of a precipice. They lolled in their summer cottages playing cheerful melodies – “Happy Days Are Here Again,” “Keep Your Sunny Side Up” – on scratchy gramophones. They flocked to the new talkies to see Disraeli, with George Arliss, or the aptly named Gold Diggers of Broadway. They listened to “The Goldbergs” on their Atwater-Kents and gobbled up the new murder mysteries by Dashiell Hammett and Ellery Queen. Those who had money – and some who didn’t – took a flyer on the stock market and exulted over their paper profits. Some – Lottie Nugent, a thirty-year-old Toronto office worker, was one – invested every cent they had and fully expected to grow rich.

  Lottie Nugent, the head bookkeeper at Monarch Brass in Toronto, bought on margin, as most people did. She took her life savings of three thousand dollars and used that to make small down payments on six stocks, expecting to be able to repay the balance out of profits when the stocks rose. Why should she worry? After all, her broker was her boyfriend.

  Why should anyone worry? The politicians, the leading businessmen, the journalists, and every reputable banker had been forecasting that the boom would go on. On New Year’s Day, the nation was assaulted by an avalanche of predictably optimistic messages from sober business leaders of the stamp of Edward Beatty, president of the CPR, who said he’d never seen the country looking better, or S.J. Moore, president of the Bank of Nova Scotia, who predicted that “an unprecedented period of prosperity” lay ahead. The bankers confined a growing sense of unease to no more than a whisper in the fine print of their annual reports because, as one put it, “the counsels of caution have little honour with the speculative public.”

  The politicians and the journalists had no qualms, and this was especially true in Western Canada, which would suffer the greatest blows from the Depression. John Brownlee, Premier of Alberta, declared that “at no time since the f
ormation of the provinces have conditions, both in Alberta and Canada, been more auspicious.” But Brownlee’s party, the United Farmers of Alberta, would be wiped out by the economic disaster that followed. Perhaps the most jubilant editorial appeared in the New Year’s edition of the Regina Leader. “We believe that there is also a … greater measure of brotherhood, also a greater charitableness, than existed in the world a twelvemonth back. The finer things of life are steadily winning new appreciation and new devotion.” Charity and brotherhood would soon be in short supply when Regina teetered on the edge of bankruptcy and police bullets wounded jobless protesters in the streets.

  To those of us who look back across the twentieth century at 1929 and who have seen later recessions come and go and cycles of drought appear and vanish, this mindless optimism seems incredible. But Canada had just come through some thirty-five years of unparalleled prosperity, interrupted only by the Great War and a mild slump in the early twenties. Laurier’s famous remark about Canada’s Century was on everybody’s lips, and with good reason. From 1896 to 1912 the boom had roared on, fuelled by an unprecedented immigration explosion. During that first heady decade, as one million immigrants poured off the colonist cars to populate the empty prairies, enthusiastic magazine articles and newspaper features had underscored Laurier’s prediction.

  Canadians were a cocky lot in the twenties. Certainly the Great War had exacted a sobering toll, but the country could not help being intoxicated by the successes of the Canadian Corps, symbolized by the remarkable victory at Vimy Ridge. Now a full-fledged member of the League of Nations, Canada was emerging from colonial status as a result of the Balfour Declaration of 1924, which promised eventual autonomy. We were a nation. We had come of age. The Twentieth Century belonged to us.