The Great Depression

by Pierre Berton

  They were by no means a cohesive group. They clung to their separate ideologies, suspicious of any attempt either to water down their radicalism or, conversely, to seduce them to extremes. The traditional East-West rivalry, which has plagued every political party since Confederation, was very much in evidence, as Scott and Forsey learned. They did their best to try to find out what the agricultural policy of the Saskatchewan Farmer-Labour party was, but that party’s representative, George Williams, refused to tell them anything. “We were reminded that we were from the East,” Forsey recalled. In Montreal, the Fabians had been regarded as something close to the Kremlin’s right-hand men, but here “we were regarded as the personal representatives of the CPR, the Royal Bank of Canada and the Bank of Montreal.” Williams simply kept repeating over and over again, defensively, that “nobody is going to take our socialism away from us.”

  There were also personal divisions. Agnes Macphail, Canada’s only woman Member of Parliament, couldn’t abide the gangling B.C. Marxist Angus MacInnis but admitted that there must be some good in him, otherwise Grace Woodsworth, daughter of the founder, wouldn’t have married him. For the feminists who were also out in force Macphail had nothing but contempt. When the women delegates to the convention held a luncheon in her honour, she swept in, swathed in an opera cloak, and declared, “All the time I’ve been in the House, I’ve never asked for anything on the grounds that I was a woman. If I didn’t deserve something on my own merits, I didn’t want it. This woman stuff makes me sick!” Off she stormed, leaving behind, as Forsey put it, “an infuriated mass of seething feminists.”

  The two most contentious debates revolved around the question of compensation for industries nationalized by the state and the argument over whether the movement’s objectives could be achieved entirely through parliamentary democracy. The Marxists wanted to strike out all reference to constitutional practice. Ernest Winch sponsored a motion to delete the phrase “we do not believe in change by violence.” The Marxists lost that one, but on the other argument they had more success. When the die-hard British Columbians tried to insist that the original owners should get nothing when society took back “what rightfully belonged to it,” a committee was struck to try to effect a compromise during the lunch hour. The result, scribbled on the back of a cigarette package in a Regina restaurant, was a paragraph that declared: “We do not propose any policy of outright confiscation” but added that “the welfare of the community must take supremacy over the claims of private wealth … a C.C.F. government will not play the role of rescuing bankrupt private concerns for the benefit of promoters and of stock and bond holders.”

  The convention, pushed hard by the radicals, added one sentence to Underhill’s original draft. “No CCF Government will rest content,” it read, “until it has eradicated capitalism and put into operation the full programme of socialized planning which will lead to the establishment in Canada of the Co-operative Commonwealth.”

  It was that final piece of rhetoric that M.J. Coldwell described as “a millstone” around the party’s neck. It suggested that the new federation was revolutionary rather than reformist in its goals – determined to abolish the capitalistic system, though not by the violence that the communists were said to advocate.

  The title of the Regina Star’s editorial that week, “Destroying Democracy,” suggests the virulence of the anti-CCF campaign that followed. R.B. Bennett had already set the tone for the establishment following the movement’s formation in 1932, when he attacked it in public. “What do they offer you for dumping you in the mud?” he asked. “Socialism! Communism! Dictatorship!” It was at this point that Bennett made his ill-considered request to “every man and woman to put the iron heel of ruthlessness against a thing of that kind.” The left wing, especially the communists, always took a delight in referring to him as “Iron Heel Bennett.”

  The CCF’s strongest opponent was the Roman Catholic Church, which held that socialism and communism were, in the words of the Archbishop of Montreal, “subversive political theories,” an attitude that effectively throttled the CCF in the province of Quebec. The church’s hostility spilled over into the Protestant world when King Gordon lost his job as professor of Christian ethics at the United Theological College in Montreal. There is no doubt that the primary reason was his identification with the new party. On the Ontario hustings, the gentle Woodsworth was attacked as “a Russian red” and “a dangerous citizen.”

  In spite of this opposition, the CCF would within a year establish itself as an influential political movement. In 1933 it would become the official opposition in British Columbia and the following year in Saskatchewan, where it briefly clung to the old “Farmer-Labour” name. It would have a profound influence on the policies of the old-line parties, and it would, by its presence and its rhetoric, act as the conscience of the country and prepare the way for the Canadian welfare state in the post-war era.

  It was a child of the times. It is hard to believe that there would ever have been an effective socialist party in Canada if there had been no Depression. And when the Depression began to fade from people’s memories and the welfare state was a fait accompli, the CCF’s star faded too. The socialist movement took power in Saskatchewan, British Columbia, and Manitoba, where memories of the Depression were longer and more bitter. But it could not capture the hidebound Atlantic provinces, the Tory strongholds of rural Ontario, or the Alberta hinterland where the people had opted for their own Messiah. Nor could it make headway in Quebec.

  In the end, the party changed its name and moved closer to the mainstream of Canadian political life. To the dismay of a dwindling band of die-hards, it shook off the millstone of socialized planning that its founders had believed would eradicate capitalism in those brave, sad years when young men and women of high ideals and selfless purpose struggled to transform the society that had betrayed them.

  6

  Bible Bill

  Alberta marched to a different beat. With Saskatchewan, it was the youngest of the provinces. Its settlers had been in the last of the immigrant waves to arrive during the pre-war boom. The percentage of Americans among them was far higher than that in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The province was also farther away from the manufacturing centres of Central Canada, so that goods from the East were more expensive. In the prosperous days of the twenties, Albertans had bought farm equipment, radios, and furniture on the instalment plan. Now, as prices fell and crops failed, they were forced to return them.

  Farm foreclosures and crop seizures had bred a deep suspicion – indeed, a hatred – of Eastern financial institutions, and with good reason. When the UFA government tried to adjust farm debts, it received no co-operation from the East. One trust company raised hackles when its representative told the Alberta legislature that “farmers must pay their debts at the interest contracted for.” This callousness was not lost on those local officials who were forced to carry out instructions from the East. H.H. Drecinson, a bailiff in Northern Alberta, would never forget the shame and pity he felt when he had to evict one family from their shack. The farmer, his fragile wife, four children, and a bedridden grandmother were allowed no period of grace. The orders were to oust them immediately.

  These scenes became commonplace in the grim winter of 1932–33, when the price of eggs dropped to a nickel a dozen, when the sale of a hog would return only two dollars, and beef went so cheap (six cents a pound) that farmers lost money paying the freight to ship cattle to market.

  John F. Milner, who farmed near Lloydminster, found his situation becoming desperate. Ninety-five per cent of the farmers in his district were burdened with crushing debts to the banks, the mortgage and machinery companies, and even the local grocery store. Every week when he went to the post office he emerged with a fistful of bills, unopened. He drove the six miles home in his wagon and handed them to his wife “because she had more pluck than I had.” Yet Milner felt lucky, compared to a neighbour, a sick and illiterate farmer whose only income ca
me from selling eggs at four cents a dozen. His wife was forced to trudge six miles to town carrying twenty-four dozen eggs, for which she received ninety-six cents. That was all the family had to pay for the week’s provisions.

  Devices once considered essential vanished. In the Camrose district, where farm families were living on potatoes and skim milk, Patrick Ashby discovered that he had the only telephone left in the area. The phone company had removed all the others for non-payment of bills.

  What bothered the farmers everywhere in Alberta was that they were living in poverty in the midst of plenty. There was, after all, a surfeit of groceries. A representative of Gault Brothers, the big Edmonton wholesaler, begged H.G. Hammell, a general merchant in Carstairs, to take eight thousand dollars’ worth of stock off the company’s hands. He promised Hammell that he could pay for it when he wished. But Hammell couldn’t sell the twenty thousand dollars’ worth of stock that he had optimistically piled up in his store. That started him thinking that something was wrong with the economic system. All over the province, thousands had come to the same conclusion.

  A verse from a popular radical song of the thirties said it all:

  Our domestic situation is certainly hard to beat:

  We have to go round hungry ’cause we raise too much to eat;

  We cannot ride our railroads ’cause we haven’t got the fare

  And we pile up stacks of clothing till we haven’t much to wear …

  Something was clearly very wrong when children had to go to the rural school barefoot and wear potato sacks for clothing. Breakfast became a luxury for those who could have a meal only on alternate mornings. Yet the magazines were full of advertisements for breakfast foods, ranging from Dr. Jackson’s Roman Meal to Red River Cereal.

  The times were ripe for a Messiah, and Alberta found one in the person of a schoolteacher named William Aberhart, without doubt the most electrifying political figure the country has ever produced. He did not look like a politician and he didn’t act like one. In fact, he had no intention of being a politician or even, at that time, of starting a new party. He was a big bulky man with a decided paunch, a beak-like nose, thick lips, jowls, and drooping eyes, shielded by a pince-nez – like Bennett, a cartoonist’s delight. He was a high school principal and, more important, he was a lay preacher whose religious fundamentalism was both bizarre and spooky.

  He believed, of course, every single word in the King James Version of the Bible. “The Bible, the whole Bible and nothing but the Bible” was the way he put it. He also believed in Old Testament prophecy based on an understanding of secret codes that he and his followers thought lay behind the words. These prophecies, which seem so outlandish, were accepted by thousands in the drought-ridden farms of Southern Alberta, the Bible Belt of Canada. Bill Aberhart would adhere to them long after he became premier of the province – indeed, until the moment of his death.

  He was a “Dispensationalist” who preached that world history was divided into seven periods of unequal length known as “dispensations.” The world, he said, had reached the sixth dispensation and must prepare for the seventh, which was known as the Rapture. During the Rapture, so the Dispensationalists preached, every Christian would be spirited away from the earth, which would then be caught in the grip of a truly frightful anarchy known as the Tribulation. Without the presence of Christians, they believed, the world would, literally, go to Hell: train passengers would die in dreadful accidents when the Christian engineers vanished from the locomotives; patients would succumb in hospitals as Christian doctors and nurses were removed. With the Holy Spirit having made off with all the Raptured Christians, the globe would be plunged into chaos. Japan and China would be locked in a mortal battle with the West. Finally a super-figure would emerge – the “anti-Christ,” in the jargon of the sect. Armageddon would follow until Christ established his millennium. More was promised – much more – including a return engagement with Satan and a titanic battle that would see Satan thrust into a lake of fire, the world destroyed, and a new heaven and earth created.

  Anyone who would believe all that would have no trouble with the kooky ideas of Major Clifford Hugh Douglas, a British war veteran and a vicious anti-Semite. His economic theories, which he called Social Credit, were being taken seriously by thousands who, drowning in a failed system, were eager to grasp at the lifeline of an alternative.

  Aberhart was just the man to spread the Douglas philosophy among the wretched of Alberta. A farm boy from Ontario, the fourth of eight children, a successful educator and one-time athlete (football, basketball) with a Bachelor’s degree by correspondence from Queen’s, he had reached the age of fifty-five. It was not only that the time was ripe for any man who could promise to set the country free from debt and the moneyed interests; the new factor in politics – radio – had now come into its own.

  Franklin Roosevelt had inaugurated a series of fireside radio chats that would help him sweep the country again in 1936. To an even greater degree than Roosevelt, Aberhart captured the new medium and made it his own. It was said that in any town, village, hamlet, or city you could catch an Aberhart broadcast without missing a word simply by walking along the street and hearing his vibrant voice leaking from every radio set on the block.

  He had adopted radio when it was still in its infancy. In the early twenties he had decided to bring his interpretation of Bible prophecy to a wider audience among Alberta’s scattered communities by opening a Bible school in Calgary. His ten-week courses led to the Calgary Prophetic Bible Institute, which, in November 1925, went on the air for the first time, broadcasting on CFCN, the “Voice of the Prairies.” Standing on the rostrum of the Palace Theatre with microphones suspended above him, Aberhart launched into his topic: “Is the Bible Story of Creation Scientific?” (the answer, of course, was Yes!). From that moment, radio was his medium, and his voice – rich, sonorous, and confident – became the best known in Alberta. Three hundred and fifty thousand listeners habitually tuned in to his broadcasts.

  The Depression did not hit home to Aberhart until the winter of 1931–32, when he began to receive letters from desperate farmers asking him to pray for them. Former students came seeking advice on how to deal with hard times. Some, he noted, were suffering from malnutrition. And then, to his horror, one of his Grade 12 graduates, reduced to wandering through the hobo jungles, killed himself. That one event politicized him.

  He was ripe for any unorthodox political or economic theory, just as he had been ripe for religious prophecy. He found it in the eccentric ideas of Major Douglas, a reserve officer in the RAF. Aberhart became an instant convert, thanks to a little book, Unemployment and War, written by the actor Maurice Colbourne, who had tried to simplify the Douglas theory. A teacher handed Aberhart the Colbourne book during an exam-marking session in Edmonton. Aberhart devoured it overnight and told one of his teaching staff the following day, “I read the most fascinating book last night on Social Credit. It seems to me it has got a solution which could be applied.”

  Put simply (and it is not easy to put it simply), Douglas’s theory was that the capitalistic system couldn’t provide people with enough purchasing power to allow them to enjoy the fruits of their countrymen’s labour. The total sum of the wages they received would always be less than the total costs of production because of additional expenses: profit margins, overhead, distribution, and credit charges. Thus, Douglas argued, there wasn’t enough money in the community to buy all the goods and services being produced. In short, to quote the Social Credit slogan, there was “Poverty in the Midst of Plenty.” To redress the balance, Douglas argued, the government must provide the additional funds – “social credit” – so that people could buy the goods and services the system was producing. Douglas did not explain where the public money would come from or how his system would cope with inflation.

  The debt-ridden farmers of Alberta might not be able to understand Douglas’s theory – it is doubtful if Aberhart himself understood it – but they
could understand the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty, for they saw it all around them. And when Aberhart took up the Social Credit crusade with all the evangelistic fervour he had lavished on his prophetic sermons, they were hooked.

  He published anonymously a booklet with a yellow cover, properly titled The Douglas System of Economics, that quickly became known as the Yellow Pamphlet. In it he suggested that every adult citizen be given a monthly credit in the form of non-negotiable certificates worth twenty dollars (later boosted to twenty-five). This credit would act as an economic safety net, allowing everybody the bare necessities of life: food, shelter, clothing. It was the concept of twenty-five dollars a month for everyone that caught the imagination of the people. Without Aberhart’s promotion, Social Credit would have remained an obscure economic theory. Aberhart was to turn it into a movement that would, in name at least, dominate the political arena in the two most westerly provinces for decades to come.

  In 1933 his only purpose was to influence the established government. As he wrote to his niece in July, “Some people tell me I should run for Premier of Alberta – ha! ha! I have no ambition along that line but the Radio Broadcast has made me well-known all over the Province.”