The Great Depression

by Pierre Berton

  The financial and political establishments were terrified of the Communists. They were, as R.B. Bennett rightly declared, “a threat to the system.” At a time of crisis, while the leaders of the major parties babbled on about the need for fiscal responsibility and a balanced budget, the Communists were the only people who seemed to care about the impoverished. They were also superbly organized through a network of grassroots organizations – the Young Communist League, the Young Pioneers, the Canadian Labor Defense League, the Workers’ Unity League, the Farmers’ Unity League, and the Unemployed Workers’ Association.

  Most Canadians, however, especially those who weren’t on relief, would have tended to agree with Sir William Mulock, the white-bearded Chief Justice of Ontario, who, at a banquet of stock breeders in February, blamed every social malady except measles on the Communists. Communism, he said, was a diabolical force that would suppress religion, destroy marriage, nationalize women [sic!], abolish home life, and turn children into criminals. Communists should be barred from Canadian shores in the interests of British freedom, the Chief Justice declared.

  British freedom was continually being invoked in the matter of the Red Menace. As Sam McBride, the mayor of Toronto, put it, “our stopping of Communist meetings shows that we are truly British.” Being truly British, in those days, was a step above being truly Canadian. McBride’s successor insisted that free discussion must be confined to what was considered compatible with “British institutions, British traditions and British principles” – this from the chief magistrate of a city where the British principles and traditions of free speech and assembly were assaulted and trampled almost daily.

  But then, “British” in those days was a euphemism for “not foreign.” Although the leaders of the Communist party were almost all British, the rank and file were largely immigrants, mainly Finns and Ukrainians. To the average Canadian, these foreigners were bent on destroying the British way of life in Canada. It was the same attitude that prompted some cities to require that all meetings be addressed in English and that the Union Jack should be the only flag carried in a street parade. The latter ordinance, which neatly outlawed the Red Flag, was just as conveniently overlooked when the Stars and Stripes appeared on July 4 or the Orange banner on July 12.

  Mayor Ralph Webb of Winnipeg said that all the Reds should be dumped into the Red River. The old soldier’s feeble jest was popular, especially with those members of the Canadian Legion who acted as Webb’s storm troopers when the Reds took to the streets to demonstrate on behalf of the unemployed. The inference was that the communists were to blame for unemployment. The chief constable of Vancouver agreed. The unemployment situation, he said, was inspired by communists. Major-General James MacBrien, another old soldier newly appointed Commissioner of the RCMP, felt the same way. “If we were rid of them,” said MacBrien, neatly if illogically summing up the entire economic dilemma, “there would be no unemployment.”

  MacBrien, a spit-and-polish officer, was brought in by Bennett to replace Cortlandt Starnes, the rugged veteran of the Klondike gold rush, who did not take the Red Menace as seriously as the Prime Minister thought he should. Compared to the easy-going Starnes, who had seen enough of the country to know that there were other menaces as grave as communism, MacBrien was close to being as fanatical on the subject as he was about many other things. He was fanatical about his appearance. Maclean’s called him “one of the three best looking men in Canada … no debutante who has seen him in his major general’s uniform has ever been quite the same.” He was fanatical about his health: he swam daily in the Chateau Laurier pool and pointedly eschewed tobacco. He was equally fanatical about security. Security without peace, he once announced, was better than peace without security. After a term as chief of the general staff, with a chestful of medals for bravery, he had retired from the army to become a civilian air pilot when the government appointed him. Back in uniform, he was just the type of tough, unbending martinet to carry out R.B. Bennett’s war on communism.

  For MacBrien saw communists everywhere, preaching sedition, plotting revolution, undermining the status quo, boring from within like maggots in a wheel of cheese. That suspicion was shared by many if not most of the constabulary. To the typical Mounted Policeman, anyone slightly to the left of the established political parties was a dangerous agitator – words used by the undercover policemen who trailed the saintly J.S. Woodsworth, reporting on his speeches and his actions until finally ordered in 1925 to desist on the grounds that it was unseemly of the force to be shadowing a man who’d been an elected Member of Parliament for four years.

  “This man continues to speak along the most radical lines,” wrote the spy assigned to Woodsworth, “probably knowing he has already placed himself in a bad position, and, feeling that he cannot very well be in a worse thinks he is at liberty to say just what he thinks” (emphasis added).

  MacBrien’s men even invaded the sanctity of the first-class mail. Letters addressed to communist organizers were opened and read by the RCMP. Peter Hunter, an organizer for the Young Communist League, was one who was called to the Hamilton post office to have his mail from the World Youth Committee examined. He was required to open it for inspection before it was given to him and was told that if it wasn’t in English it would have to be held for translation. Thus were the morals of the nation protected from wicked alien influences.

  Early in his term, Bennett was prepared to crush the Communist party under what he would later refer to as “the iron heel of ruthlessness,” another remark that would come back to haunt him. In February, a private conference of police chiefs assembled in the office of his Minister of Justice, Hugh Guthrie, painted an alarming picture of dissent and riot in their cities. Egged on by the Communists, the unemployed were staging demonstrations. The police wanted the power to suppress the party, as if by that action alone they could solve the problems the party was exploiting.

  The federal government didn’t have the machinery to act. It was true that under Section 98 of the Criminal Code, any association that advocated or believed in political or economic change by violence could be declared unlawful. The court case, however, had to be initiated by a province, not by Ottawa. Guthrie would have to put the pressure on Attorney General Colonel William Price, of Ontario, where the party had its national headquarters.

  In March, Guthrie sent Colonel Price a sheaf of secret RCMP documents and assured him of the federal government’s full cooperation “should [he] conclude that some definite action should be taken.…” He promised that more documents would be available and that an undercover Mountie was prepared to testify. In short, an elaborate fiction was being constructed to make a federal prosecution look as if it were provincial.

  “I’m under pressure,” Price told his staff. He knew a squeeze when he saw one. He wasn’t a Red hunter, at least not then. Section 98 had rarely been invoked successfully and had lain dormant through the previous decade. But Ottawa was not easily denied. Price knuckled under and set about preparing a case against the Communist leadership. It would be another four months before he was ready to proceed.

  The terror inspired by the Communists was far out of proportion to their real numbers. In late June, Harry Meighen, deputy reeve of York County, caused a one-day sensation by announcing that a thousand men were drilling with rifles and Mills bombs, preparing for an armed invasion to commandeer food from the Eaton and Simpson department stores. This was a total fabrication. At the time there were no more than thirteen hundred dues-paying members in the Communist Party of Canada. To bolster its image the party claimed four thousand. To bolster its image, the RCMP estimated five thousand.

  The idea that thirteen hundred men and women – or even five thousand – could take over a country of ten million stretching from Victoria to Halifax seems ludicrous today and, indeed, seemed ludicrous then to many party members. Peter Hunter in Hamilton was amused by his local party leader, who had devised plans for a complete takeover of the city, noting the home of e
very police officer, fire station, hydro substation, and telephone exchange. “We considered him a bit off the beam,” Hunter recalled. The dedicated leaders of the party had been to Moscow and were well aware of the revolutionary goals of the Communist International, but their own goals were more modest.

  It is true that the Communists were using the unemployed for their own political ends. So, indeed, were the major parties. After his defeat, Mackenzie King viewed the unemployment crisis as a bonus for his own Liberals and a chance to get in a lick at Bennett. Although “sorry for the country’s sake,” he recorded on March 31 his satisfaction when told by Woodsworth and other Labour M.P.s that things were far worse than they had been the previous year under a Liberal administration.

  That the Communists were sincere is beside the point; after all, so was Hitler. The gospel according to Karl Marx made them just as blindly orthodox as their capitalistic opponents, who clung to the dogma of the balanced budget no matter what the cost in human suffering. Yet in the ranks of the Reds and, indeed, among the leadership there was also a sense of genuine outrage not unmixed with human compassion for those who had been felled by economic disaster.

  Unlike the members of the business establishment, the Communists rubbed shoulders daily with the underprivileged and knew at first hand what conditions were really like. They were poor themselves. Some, like A.E. Smith, were committed Christians who actually believed in the brotherhood of man and thought that communism was the most practical way to achieve it. Others were attracted by working for a cause, as people have been from time immemorial. Some were bitter, some naïve, some ruthless, all dedicated and dreadfully poor.

  Tom Ewen’s daughter, Jean, recalled in her memoirs that “there was more RCMP shekels circulating within the party than Moscow gold” – a reference to the undercover Mounties who lived on government salaries. When Ewen quit his job as a blacksmith at the Riddle Carriage Works in Saskatoon to become leader of the Workers’ Unity League, his family suffered. “Being a full time functionary of the Communist party sounds like a bloody good job,” his daughter wrote, drily. “Actually we became poorer than we had ever dreamed possible.” They moved from their handsome brick home with its white columns, front porch, and cosy fireplace to a miserable shack on Flora Avenue in North Winnipeg.

  Peter Hunter wrote that the full-time organizers were prepared to spend every waking minute promoting the party. Ewen’s family saw little of him; he’d be away weeks at a time, and they never knew when he would go or when he would return. These zealots, in Hunter’s words, “worked for … nothing more than the same relief voucher upon which so many depended. But they had a cause which needed them, a cause which held out hope for the future.” For that they were prepared to suffer eviction, beatings, long jail terms, and, when the Spanish Civil War erupted, even death.

  While Attorney General Price, under Ottawa’s prodding, worked with his staff to prepare indictments against the leaders of the party, the Communists were making every day count. By April, Tom Ewen had managed to get one hundred thousand signatures on a petition demanding the government initiate non-contributory unemployment insurance, a thirty-five-hour week, and a minimum wage of twenty-five dollars a week for both sexes. These were standard communist demands throughout the thirties, and it is doubtful that Ewen or anybody else in the party expected them to be met. It was the gesture that counted, not the results, and so he and thirty-five others headed for Ottawa to present their demands to the Prime Minister.

  Ewen knew the publicity value of confrontation, especially against a man with Bennett’s short fuse. His lively account of their meeting in the Railway Committee Room shows that he got the results he wanted.

  Bennett did not greet the delegation. He strode into the room, laid down his walking stick, peeled off his gloves, shrugged out of his topcoat, and placed them with his bowler hat on a nearby chair. Then, with his labour minister, Gideon Robertson, he strode to the platform and uttered his first words: “I want some paper!” Several aides scrambled to obey the order and produced a bundle of some five hundred sheets.

  “Now,” shouted Bennett, “I want the names and addresses of all of you.” He sat down and proceeded to write down all thirty-six names in his own hand. The Reverend A.E. Smith of the Canadian Labor Defense League, who was present (and has also left a lively account), was convinced he was searching for foreigners who, if they were not naturalized, could be deported. But the delegation had been hand picked; almost all were Canadian or British born.

  Bennett turned to Smith, who had arranged the meeting. “What have you got to say?” he asked him. Smith indicated Ewen, who put forward the gist of the league’s demands in his thick Scots burr.

  Bennett rose and, in Ewen’s words, “literally exploded.” The destitution being felt in Canada, he declared, came from “wasteful living” and “unwise investments.” Unemployment insurance would undermine the free institutions of Canada.

  “Never,” cried Bennett, “will I or any government of which I am a part, put a premium on idleness or put our people on the dole.” He pointed a finger at Ewen, “… and I have a place where they will take care of you.”

  A covey of Mounties escorted the delegation to the street as the Prime Minister delivered a parting shot, “… and don’t misrepresent me in what I have said to YOU!” TO which Ewen replied, “Have no fear, Mr. Prime Minister, I’ll give it to the people straight.”

  Tom Ewen and his group of squeaky-clean British subjects realized that their demands – modest as they seem today – would be turned down. Nonetheless it was gestures like theirs that attracted thousands of sympathizers. The age of hype had scarcely begun, but the Communists were already masters at grabbing headlines. Although that probably didn’t help the party’s public image as a group of shrill, self-serving, and dangerous wild men, it did focus the spotlight on the social ills of the time.

  The Communists hadn’t caused the problem, but they certainly exploited it; most of the mounting turmoil of the early Depression years – the hunger marches, the demonstrations, the confrontations with the police, the mass meetings, the street corner rough and tumble – was the result of their organizing. And the authorities, from the lowliest RCMP constable to the Prime Minister himself, played directly into their hands. It was a battle that Bennett could not win. In the end the much maligned Party would help drive him from office.

  In the summer of 1931, however, Red baiting was popular – with the public, with the press, with the mayors of the major cities, with the police, and with most politicians. Undoubtedly there were many who agreed with Commissioner MacBrien that if only the party could be muzzled, the protests would stop and the Depression would go away. At the very least, its members would be prevented from embarrassing the authorities.

  By August, Colonel Price’s case was prepared and the government was ready to pounce. At six o’clock on the evening of the eleventh, eighteen members of the RCMP, Ontario Provincial Police, and Toronto city police were called into the Queen’s Park office of Major-General V.A.S. Williams, the provincial police commissioner. No one had any idea of what was up until Williams spoke.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “we are going to strike a death blow at the Communist Party – we hope. We are going to arrest the leaders, we are going to search their headquarters, as well as the homes of the men, and we are going to seize every paper and every document which will link the members with the party and the party in Russia.”

  The raids that followed were carried out with military precision. Six police cars sped off to the homes of the six party leaders. Simultaneous raids took place at the party’s headquarters and the offices of the Worker and the Workers’ Unity League. Other raids, all carefully timed, were staged by the RCMP in Timmins, Ontario, and Vancouver.

  Tim Buck’s shabby, red brick semi-detached house at 54 Delaney Crescent was empty when the police forced open the door to be greeted by a scene of lower-middle-class respectability: pet rabbits in cages chewing on grass, a pian
o in the living room with sheet music for several popular songs, and a Roll of Honour with a daily star against the name of each child who’d eaten his morning porridge – in addition, of course, to the inevitable portraits of Marx and Lenin.

  The police tore into the house, ripping pictures from their frames, strewing clothing and bed linen, books, and even the contents of kitchen cupboards on the floor. When they left, with a mountain of documents, they didn’t bother to replace the lock torn from the door. The other homes received a similar treatment.

  Nine leading Communists were charged on three counts under Section 98: with being members of an unlawful association, with being officers of that association, and also with seditious conspiracy. The Ontario attorney general told the press that the raids had come about as the result of an interview with Hugh Guthrie. Guthrie blandly denied this, claiming the federal government had nothing to do with the raids and maintaining the fiction that the matter was purely provincial. But in the trial that followed, it was the federal police who supplied the bulk of the evidence.

  The Toronto press, again with the exception of the Star, applauded the raids and proceeded to convict the accused before any evidence was heard. The Financial Post declared that “the files of the Mounted Police contain all the evidence needed for the jailing or deportation of many of the chief Soviet agents.” The Evening Telegram tried to discredit its long-time rival, the Star, by describing it as “the Little Brother of the Reds.” But in Winnipeg, the Free Press took a saner view. “The situation the Government has to meet would still remain though every Communist now in Canada had been deported,” the paper wrote. Jailing nine men was not going to solve the problem of a stagnant economy.

  4

  Quail on toast

  Two of the deepest pockets of destitution in Canada lay more than two thousand miles apart – in the lignite fields of Southern Saskatchewan and the coal and steel villages of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. By the summer of 1931, conditions in both these regions were explosive, waiting only for the fuse to be lit. In Saskatchewan, the explosion occurred and bloodshed resulted. In Sydney, it was snuffed out.