The Great Depression

by Pierre Berton

  Stevens had broken an unwritten rule. He had revealed some of the committee’s findings before its report was published. In the five federal by-elections that took place in Ontario that September, the Stevens pamphlet became an issue. Mackenzie King lambasted the minister for not quitting the Cabinet and fighting for his principles. “But no,” said King, “Mr. Stevens is going to be chairman of the Commission.” The Tories lost four of the by-elections, prompting the Montreal Gazette to question Stevens’s role in the campaign.

  With his twenty-three-year-old daughter, Sylvia, seriously ill in Montreal, Stevens was now the focus of a Cabinet attack led by two St. James Street spokesmen, C.H. Cahan and Sir George Perley. Cahan, the corporate lawyer, had an axe to grind in attacking Stevens, for his client was Sir Charles Gordon, head of the Dominion Textile Company, and the Stevens inquiry had certainly blackened that industry.

  Now Cahan demanded that Stevens publicly apologize to Flavelle, and not without reason, for Stevens, in his attack, had some of his facts wrong. Among other things, Simpson’s mark-up on goods had not increased since 1929; in fact, it had slightly declined. Nor had Flavelle siphoned off the profits in quite the unprincipled way Stevens had implied. Apologize or resign! Cahan insisted. With his daughter close to death, Harry Stevens, the giant-killer, resigned not only from the Cabinet but also from the chairmanship of the royal commission.

  He continued, however, to dominate the inquiry, whose new chairman was a lawyer and a strong Tory, William Walker Kennedy, M.P. for Winnipeg South Centre. Stevens also carried his cause to the people in a series of speeches demanding government action on his committee’s findings. The Tory party now seemed split down the middle, with the Liberal papers gleefully supporting Stevens and the Conservative press upholding Bennett.

  Cahan continued to twist the knife, sneering at “political and social propagandists, blind leaders of the blind.” Everybody knew who that meant. The Montreal lawyer kept insisting that the federal government was not equipped to regulate industry and went on to pooh-pooh reports of hunger, malnutrition, and starvation. In a remarkable statement in Montreal on November 27, Cahan claimed that he had seen many depressions when people were reduced to eating porridge and oatmeal scones and the boys and girls of those times had grown up just as healthy as they were doing under the higher standards of the present. “This Depression will go like the mist before the summer sun,” said Cahan.

  Stevens countered, on December 3, by announcing that he intended to press in Parliament for a federal trade and industries commission with “unprecedented powers” and that he would also urge that the Combines Investigation Act be toughened up. By now he was being widely touted as the successor to Bennett, who was considering retirement. Bennett promptly changed his mind, and there is little doubt that the wave of support for Stevens spurred that decision. Two days later, the Prime Minister headed off his erstwhile opponent by announcing that he would lead the Conservative party in the next election. More, he promised that the royal commission would continue its work, that his government would shortly introduce unemployment insurance, and that it would “come more and more to regulate business.”

  These were remarkable proposals for Bennett to make. They suggested a change of political direction, a move away from the right wing, dominated by men like Cahan, toward the centre or – dared one suggest it? – to the left.

  What had caused this startling about-face by a man whose political philosophy had to this moment been as inflexible and unyielding as the banded gneisses of the Precambrian shield? The new and unaccustomed mantle that the Prime Minister was preparing to don was woven from a skein of threads that had come together by the end of 1934. There was, of course, the prices inquiry with its startling testimony. There was the presence of a new party of the Left, prepared to fight the coming election in as many constituencies as it could enter. There were the Liberal sweeps in three provinces, the threat of Social Credit in a fourth, the federal by-elections, and the example of Roosevelt’s experiments in the United States, which had so excited William Herridge, Canadian minister to Washington. All these were factors.

  One would like to believe, too, that Bennett himself had been softened in his outlook, that his best instincts had come forward as the result of the mountain of mail he was receiving – pleading letters, many of them agonizing, written from the depths by victims of the Depression whose awkward, ungrammatical, and often painful prose attested to the authenticity of their plight.

  One cannot discount the power of these letters, which the Prime Minister had been receiving and reading for more than four years. The cumulative effect of these cries from the heart, like the constant drip-drip of a leaky tap, must have had some influence on the rigid mind-set of the man at the top. Being Bennett, he read them all personally and replied to many. Clearly, they troubled his conscience, for he often responded by enclosing a two-dollar or a five-dollar bill or, as in the case of Mrs. Thomas Hodgins of Perdue, Saskatchewan, ordering from Eaton’s a set of high-grade, heavyweight Wolsey underwear for an ailing husband. “I have patched & darned his old underware [sic] for the last two years, but they are completely done now,” Mrs. Hodgins wrote; “if you cant do this, I really dont know what to do.… We seem to be shut out from the world altogether we have no telephone Radio or newspaper.”

  Taken together the letters to Bennett provide a unique picture of the abject conditions in Canada in the early thirties. No other account of those desperate days, either scholarly or journalistic, can compare with the words of the victims, written not through the haze of hindsight but at the very moments of their despair.

  Here is W.P.P. Hamel, a painter and decorator from Sherbrooke, Quebec, signing himself a “disheartened man” (out of work for six months, unable to pay his rent), explaining to his Prime Minister that the municipality has refused him relief: “Today I whent to get 3$ to keep us for a week and Mr. Valcourt of the City Office said I couldn’t get it because someone said we had a radio: We have never had a radio: He send Mr. Lesseau from the City Office to search our home from top to bottom bedrooms and bathroom under and over: Then he says he don’t have to give us help if he dont want to: I ask you Sir ‘who was this money given to and what for’? is it for a man to crawl on his hands and knees to get a loaf for his family? I ask you Sir how do you think we live on $3 a week and can’t get that because people make up a lie: What sort of a country have we …?”

  The reeve of one Alberta community enclosed a letter from Charles O’Brien, a Great War veteran, who announced that he was withdrawing his eight-year-old boy from school because “he is not getting enough nourishment to permit of his being able to study, and furthermore we have no soap to wash him or ourselves, or any of our clothes.” O’Brien bitterly recalled an earlier promise by Bennett, who had pledged that “no man who has served his country in the war should want for food, shelter or fuel.”

  “We have done all we can to be decent, honorable, and to raise our family to be a credit to the country but what’s the use,” wrote Louise Elliott, a despairing farm wife in Milton, Ontario. “… today, if it were to save my life, I could not find one cent in the place. We own a note at the Bank for $150, and one would imagine from the fuss that is made over it, that it was $150,000. The worry of all these things is driving me mad.”

  Elsie Sproule of Oil Springs, Ontario, asked Bennett for money to help her father, John Thomas Sproule, Conservative member for Lambton East and the son of a former Speaker of the House. Sproule had lost so much money he couldn’t keep up the interest on his bank loan. “I fear the worry is too great for him to bear,” she wrote, “and I am afraid of him committing suicide.” She asked for fifty thousand dollars. Bennett didn’t send it, but he did send three dollars to Ruby Schultz, a little girl in Leney, Saskatchewan, who asked him to write to Santa Claus “and tell him I was a good girl all the time.… Daddy has no money to give Santa for my little brother and me and we can’t hang our stockings up.…”

  More than one corr
espondent threw back at Bennett his careless pledge that the government would see to it that no one in Canada would starve. “You stated that there would be no one starve in Canada,” Clarence Ferguson of Winnipeg reminded him. “I presume you mean not starve overnight but slowly, our family amongst thousands of others are doing the same slowly and slowly. Possibly you have never felt the Pang of a Wolf. Well become a Father have children then have them come to you asking for a slice of bread between meals and have to tell them to wait. Wait until five of humanity’s humans sleep all in one room no larger than nine feet square with one window in it.…”

  Adam Armeny, who had been farming in Alberta for thirty years, wrote that he was “frantic with despair.” He had been forced to come to Calgary to get hospital treatment for his wife, who was suffering from cancer, but because the couple didn’t have a year’s residence, he was turned down for relief. It took “courage of the bravest kind to ask for relief,” he told Bennett. “I have been humiliated and sent from pillar to post, just as if I were a criminal or something.”

  Mrs. J.C. Bishop described how her family existed in a two-room shack in Tisdale, Saskatchewan. “Just enough room for two beds & the house is cold theres two inches of Ice freezes on the water in the house cold nights we are shivering in bed at night we have no mattresses on our beds only gunny Sacks & not enough blankets on our beds. Mr. Bishop has no underwear no top shirt no Socks only rags on his feet no trousers only overauls & they are done for, boots are near don my Self I have no house dresses & no wash tub.… there are times we live on potatoes for days at a time … I don’t see how much longer it can last … there are a good meny people the same in this town I am five months pregnant & haven’t even felt life yet to my baby & its I feel quite sure from lack of food, there has been many babys died in this town from neglect.…”

  “I hear you are going to destroy some thousands of tons of wheat to get rid of it; while my family & stock are starving to death,” J.L. Sullivan wrote from Leoville, Saskatchewan, on March 31, 1934. “There is lots of wheat and other things here but I have no money to buy them with.… We have kept off relief as long as we had a cent to buy food or a rag of clothes that would hang together. To date we have had $45.35 for food to feed ten of us from Dec. 1st on until now and I did relief bridge work to about that amount.… But when I asked for a greater food allowance I was told that many were doing with much less as well as one insult upon another added thereto by the local relief officer.… We have to live ten of us in a cold one roomed shack.… We haven’t even a mattress or even a tick just simply have to sleep on a bit of straw and nearly every night we have to almost freeze because we haven’t bed clothes … the whole family have some kind of rash and running sores & I cannot take them to a Dr. as I have not the price to pay the Dr. or to buy the things that he would order. Also my wife has become badly ruptured and I cannot have anything done about it.…”

  Of all the letters that Bennett received, perhaps the most touching came from a young woman named Jean McLean, for it illustrates how the cycle of unemployment was compounded for many young people by poor nourishment or lack of clothing. It became more and more difficult for any job seeker to be thought of as employable when her dress was shabby and her constitution weak from lack of food.

  Jean McLean worked as a stenographer-bookkeeper for a firm in Essex County, Ontario. When it folded in 1934, she went to Hamilton looking for work and found none. As she told Bennett, “… my clothing became very shabby.… Many prospective employers just glanced at my attire and shook their heads and more times than I care to mention I was turned away without a trial. I began to cut down on my food and I obtained a poor, but respectable room at $1 per week. First I ate three very light meals a day; then two and then one. During the past two weeks I have eaten only toast and drunk a cup of tea every other day. In the past fortnight I have lost 20 pounds and the result of this deprivation is that I am so very nervous that I could never stand a test with one, two or three hundred girls. Through this very nervousness I was ruled out of a class yesterday. Today I went to an office for an examination and the examiner just looked me over and said: ‘I am afraid Miss, you are so awfully shabby I could never have you in my office.’

  “I was so worried and frightened that I replied somewhat angrily: ‘Do you think clothes can be picked up in the streets?’

  “ ‘Well,’ he replied, with aggravating insolence, ‘lots of girls find them there these days.’

  “Mr. Bennett, that almost broke my heart. Above everything else I have been very particular about my friends and since moving here I have never gone out in the evening, I know no one here personally and the loneliness is hard to bear, but, oh, sir, the thought of starvation is driving me mad! …

  “Day after day I pass a delicatessen and the food in the window looks oh, so good! So tempting and I’m so hungry!

  “Yes, I am very hungry and the stamp that carries this letter to you will represent the last three cents I have in the world yet before I will stoop to dishonour my family, my character or my God, I will drown myself in the Lake.…”

  There is no evidence that Bennett replied; and yet the hardest heart could not remain unaffected by these anguished pleas. Nor could Bennett escape the rueful reminders from some of his correspondents that they had voted for him in the belief that he could solve the country’s economic problems. “Mr. Bennett, it was my vote that helped to put you where you are now,” G.J. Steeves of Campbellton, New Brunswick, reminded him. “Is there anything you can do for me?” A crippled sixty-year-old, Steeves was the sole support of a family of five, unable to get help from a Maritime municipality as destitute as himself. How could the Prime Minister not have felt a sense of helplessness? What could he really do for this man with a crippled leg and a missing hand? What could he do for the Sherriff family of Montreal, who were being thrown out of their lodgings because the landlord refused to rent to the unemployed? Fred Sherriff’s two daughters had been under a doctor’s care for a year and a half. The doctor told him they needed better food. But how could they afford better food with the miserable dole offered by the city of Montreal?

  Bennett had ridden into power believing he could solve the country’s problems by adopting new trade and tariff policies. It hadn’t worked, and in spite of his stubbornness, he was being forced to admit it. For more than four years he had tried to massage the body politic with his own brand of unction. Yet however optimistic his forecasts, he had been driven to retreat, step by step, from his personal and political philosophy. He had said he would never countenance the dole, but the dole had long since arrived. He had said that no one would starve, but here before him in the wobbly handwriting of ordinary Canadians was all the evidence needed that people were starving. He had sworn that his government would never establish a system of unemployment insurance, yet here he was in the dying days of 1934 promising that very thing.

  The Prime Minister could not entirely escape the importunings of his brother-in-law Bill Herridge, who was also conspiring to soften the Bennett line. Herridge, a son of the parsonage, outlined his own philosophy in the presence of both Bennett and Mackenzie King when he told the Ottawa Canadian Club on December 16: “… if we looked more to spiritual leadership and less to capitalistic leadership; if we made business less our religion and religion more our business; if we proclaimed by deeds the eternal truths of the Christian faith, we might find that this system did not work so badly after all.”

  Like Stevens, Herridge was what would today be called a Red Tory, though no Tory in the thirties would have wanted the dreadful adjective “Red” applied to his political philosophy. Stevens himself was not in Ottawa to listen to Herridge’s message. He was at his daughter’s side in Montreal. When she died on December 21, friends and foes of every political stripe extended their sympathy – with one exception. Harry Stevens did not hear from Richard Bedford Bennett. The Prime Minister was done with Stevens. Determined at last to make an about-turn in his political program, he was far
too busy to concern himself with the personal agony of an old and increasingly bitter rival. Within a few days, without any prior consultation, he would drop the first of several bombshells on his unsuspecting Cabinet colleagues.

  7

  Slave camps

  By the end of the year, it ought to have been clear to those in power that General McNaughton’s much-vaunted relief camp program had become a political liability. McNaughton knew it but wouldn’t admit it, though his own statistics suggested that the plan was in a shambles. For one ten-month period, between June 1933 and March 1934, the Department of National Defence reported no fewer than fifty-seven disturbances in the 120-odd camps across the country.

  In the months that followed the situation became more tense. Complaints and mutinies grew to the point where, in defiance of every democratic principle, the government actually considered confining the troublemakers to barbed-wire enclosures in isolated regions. Anybody who refused to take a job or refused to work at a relief camp could be sentenced to as much as sixty days’ hard labour at these “Camps of Discipline.”

  Although the plan was never carried out, an order-in-council designed to establish such camps had actually been drawn up the previous year under the “peace, order and good government” clause in the Relief Act. As was so often the case in that turbulent decade, ordinary British justice was dispensed with. The only evidence needed to imprison an “agitator” would be a certificate from the relief camp commander. Inmates were to be locked in separate cells and forbidden to speak a word for at least fourteen days – in short, solitary confinement without trial. The camps would be expressly designed to cow malcontents by harsh discipline. In McNaughton’s words, “no man who serves a term in such a camp will want to enter it again.”

  Fortunately for the reputation of the country, the idea was abandoned as politically dangerous. Had it been carried out, Canada would have had the dubious distinction of being the only nation in the democratic world to initiate a penal system that differed only in degree from that being employed in Nazi Germany.