The Great Depression

by Pierre Berton

  The government’s failure stands out in sharp relief when compared with a similar and much more successful experiment south of the border. Why did the relief camps leave such a bad taste in the mouths of Canadians when the Civilian Conservation Corps in the United States was greeted with such enthusiasm? On the face of it, they were very similar. Yet one was a flop, the other a success. Why?

  One reason – perhaps the chief one – had to do with perception. Although the Canadian government tried to make it appear that the relief camps were part of a plan to save the youth of the country from the disease of idleness, the real reason was to save the country from its youth – to get the single jobless out of the way and prevent revolution. Fear, not sympathy, was the main catalyst, and that worked its way down to the lowest levels. The government feared the young people and the young people feared the government: they knew that if they stepped out of line to complain they would be thrown back onto the streets to starve.

  The American attitude was just the opposite. In keeping with that country’s great traditions, the American government under Franklin D. Roosevelt saw the CCC as a crusade, in much the same way that a later president would visualize the Peace Corps. The Canadians built roads and military installations. The young Americans – the cut-off age was twenty-five – were put to work in the national parks, planting trees, saving forests, building dams, protecting the environment. No one complains about drudgery when working for a cause, and Roosevelt, with his interest in conservation and his innate sense of public relations, made it one. It was, as somebody has said, “the practical fulfillment of William James’s idea of providing a moral equivalent for war.”

  In the American camps, work was seen as a means to an end. The purpose of the CCC was clearly defined in idealistic terms – saving the nation’s natural heritage. In the Canadian camps, work was seen as an end in itself. Young men must work, no matter how meaningless, poorly planned, or stupid that work might be.

  Harold Dew, a well-educated relief camp worker, described one job at his camp in central British Columbia. A portion of the road on the edge of a deep lake had fallen in. Every day, camp workers transferred loads of rock, by hand, to the outer edge of the road, attempting to fill in the gap. But every day the pile tumbled down into the lake and the road remained as before. “No one seems to worry,” Dew wrote. “The appearance of this spot is at the end of a month’s labor as at the beginning. But the number of men sent out on the grade each day has been duly recorded and all is well. It would be a joke if it were not tragic that men should spend themselves day after day to so little purpose.”

  Neither Bennett nor McNaughton or anybody else in power saw any farther than their own noses when contemplating the purpose of the Canadian camps. They were seen merely as holding units, nothing more. Roosevelt’s vision was broader. The comparative generosity of the Americans stood out in sharp contrast to the Calvinistic Canadian attitude, which held that people on public charity must never be allowed to think they were getting something for nothing. There must be no frills, no “luxuries.” The defence department, in an internal memo, actually boasted that “not one cent of public money has been spent … on reading material and recreational equipment.” The Americans in the CCC were paid a dollar a day, not twenty cents. Between twenty and twenty-five dollars a month was saved for their families so that the wage earners could feel a sense of worth and dignity. They worked a thirty-hour week and were given the weekends off besides compassionate leave with pay. The American government provided movies, entertainment, playing fields, radios, and sports equipment – and beer was available in the camp canteens. The term in the CCC was limited to six months. For many young Americans, the experience of the CCC was one of the high points of their youth. For the men north of the border, their confinement in relief camps was the nadir.

  It is perhaps unfair to call up national stereotypes to explain such differences, but the temptation is there – to contrast the open-handed and open-hearted Yankees with their stiff-necked and parsimonious northern neighbours. In this instance, as in some others in that dark decade, we do not come off very well.

  The government could have eased the situation at any time by being more generous and following the American lead. It must be remembered that the Communist party, which was blamed almost entirely for the trouble in the Canadian camps, was just as strong and as well organized in the United States as it was in Canada and had the additional advantage of being legal. But the Communists failed to get a foothold in the CCC because conditions there were not conducive to revolution or exploitation. With Ottawa stonewalling and as many as fourteen hundred crowding into Vancouver at the end of 1934, begging for food on the streets, any sensible politician would have smelled trouble. But the Prime Minister of Canada, obsessed as always with the idea of bringing peace, order, and what he considered good government to his country, paid no attention. In the election to come, that would be his undoing.

  1935

  1

  Bennett’s New Deal

  2

  Speed-up at Eaton’s

  3

  The tin canners

  4

  On to Ottawa

  5

  The Regina Riot

  6

  Changing the guard

  1

  Bennett’s New Deal

  Nineteen thirty-five was the watershed year of the Depression. It marked a political divide: Mackenzie King’s Liberals took power as R.B. Bennett’s Conservatives faded into the background. It was also an economic turning point: at last Canada got the badly needed central bank that would eventually enable the federal government to exercise stabilizing control over the economy. There were other beginnings and endings. This was the last full year of the reign of George V, whose Silver Jubilee was celebrated by a chain of bonfires blazing from Victoria to Charlottetown. It was also the last year in office for Lord Bessborough, the aristocratically stuffy governor general, soon to be replaced by a commoner, the Scottish adventure and thriller writer John Buchan. But a commoner could not yet represent the King, and so Buchan would become an instant peer before taking up his vice-regal duties as Lord Tweedsmuir.

  Some of the worst excesses of the Depression were about to end. The infamous Section 98 of the Criminal Code would be invoked for the last time. And 1935 was the last year of the relief camps, which had become a symbol of the government’s lack of concern for the unemployed. By spring, the rebellious spirit bred in the so-called slave camps would explode into a full-scale revolt that would keep the West in turmoil until July.

  With his term of office coming to its legal end – he had waited almost to the last hour before considering an election – R.B. Bennett realized he must do something spectacular if he were to remain in office. But few of his colleagues knew just how spectacular until the second day of the New Year, when he launched into a series of five half-hour broadcasts that confounded and bewildered the nation.

  His opponents (and, indeed, some of his supporters) talked of a deathbed repentance – meaning a political deathbed – and as it turned out, they weren’t far wrong. Others were reminded of the sudden conversion of Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus. Certainly, Bennett’s broadcasts were a revelation to members of his own Cabinet, none of whom had expected anything of the sort. He had not so much as whispered to anyone, except his brother-in-law William Herridge, that he intended to perform a political right about-turn (or, more properly, a left about-turn) and offer Canadians a New Deal patterned after that of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  The five broadcasts were carried by a network of thirty-eight stations between January 2 and January 11, and the air time was paid for by Bennett himself. In them, the Prime Minister hurled a series of thunderbolts that excited some, shocked others, and surprised all. One wonders why; clues to his intentions had been apparent the previous month.

  The sonorous voice that spoke to Canadians in the first broadcast was Bennett’s, but the words were largely those of Bill Herridge, who
se Washington legation served as an open house to the architects and engineers of the Roosevelt New Deal. Since 1933, the enthusiastic Herridge had been bombarding the Prime Minister with letters and memoranda urging that he strike out in a new political direction:

  “The policy of laissez-faire must, for the time being at least, be abandoned.…” [September 13, 1933]

  “The New Deal is a sort of Pandora’s Box from which … the president has pulled the N.R.A.… We need a Pandora’s Box … the national heart … will incline with profound fervour to the right sort of lead. That you alone can give.…” [April 12, 1934]

  “… old-fashioned Toryism is dead … we must keep on the move until we find the answer to the question: ‘What’s wrong with Canada!’ This is your job and no one can take your place. It is indeed a trust!” [June 22, 1934]

  The gregarious Bill Herridge occupied a special place in the Conservative party. He had been Bennett’s lawyer, adviser, and speech writer before his appointment to Washington in 1931. That year the bond with the Prime Minister was strengthened when he married Bennett’s sister Mildred, his closest friend and confidante. No others could speak to the Prime Minister as passionately or as personally as he. The previous June he had urged Bennett to stay on as leader. “Canada is broken and the people are lost,” he had told him. “Would you let a people in trouble forsake you? Would you forsake them? … You alone can save the day for Canada.…”

  Herridge’s eloquence, and his flattery, had their effect on Bennett. He was backed by Bennett’s chief secretary, Rod Finlayson, who helped write the last three broadcasts at Herridge’s cottage on Harrington Lake. But the first two were almost pure Herridge; Finlayson, apparently, wasn’t party to them, nor did he realize the scope of the opening broadcast. The script lifted ideas and even wording from Herridge’s memoranda of the previous year. Indeed, there was more than a suspicion that Bennett hadn’t studied Herridge’s text very carefully. The Montreal Gazette, which could not have been expected to applaud his words, commented that he “appeared to be imperfectly familiar” with parts of it. He became nervous toward the middle, stumbling, fumbling, and racing through the speech with uncharacteristic sloppiness.

  Typically, Bennett himself made the decision to introduce his New Deal, as it came to be called, on the radio and not in Parliament. He made all the arrangements personally and told no one. For once the usual ballyhoo wasn’t needed to entice listeners. By the time the fifth broadcast went on the air it was estimated that eight million Canadians – virtually all the country’s adults – were tuned in.

  Here is Bennett in full voice in the first broadcast:

  “The old order has gone. It will not return.… Your prosperity demands corrections in the old system.…

  “In my mind reform means government intervention. It means government control and regulation. It means the end of laissez-faire.… There can be no permanent recovery without reform. I raise the issue squarely. I nail the flag of progress to the masthead. I summon the power of the state to its support.…

  “Free competition and the open market place, as they were known in the old days, have lost their place in the system and the only substitute for them … is government regulation and control.

  “… in all times, faults in the system have been seized upon by the unscrupulous and greedy as vantage points in their battle for self-advancement. And we will be dealing with the matter in a thorough and practical way if we remove these faults, so as to put a final stop to the unfair practices which they made possible.…”

  Was this really Richard Bedford Bennett speaking? For years he had been announcing that the Depression was receding, that it was practically over, that his government had solved the country’s economic problems. As a Tory opposed to state interference, he had again and again shrugged off all federal responsibility for helping the unemployed. Now here he was broadcasting almost a mea culpa to the nation, turning his back on the free-enterprise system, embracing with open arms those very principles of state intervention that his big-business supporters decried and, by inference, taking a swipe at some of them as “unscrupulous and greedy.” No wonder that Angus MacInnis, in jest, suggested that he join the CCF immediately.

  If Herridge’s influence was predominant in that opening broadcast, there was also a whiff of Harry Stevens in Bennett’s condemnation of “unfair practices.” And there was more to come in the days that followed. Bennett was promising not only a contributory unemployment insurance plan but also a remodelling of the old-age pension scheme; health, accident, and sickness insurance; amended income tax laws to correct inequality in the distribution of wealth; minimum wage laws; laws limiting hours of work; and more legislation to help the farmers. Many of these proposals might be beyond the purview of the federal government, but Bennett glossed over that difficulty.

  Only two years earlier, Bennett had declared that “we must maintain an export business … and therefore we could not by the very nature of things reduce hours of labour and increase pay.…” Now here he was, telling the country, “I believe there should be a uniform minimum wage and a uniform maximum working week. I hold the view that if we are to have equality of social and political conditions throughout the land, we must have equality of economic conditions as well.” Harry Stevens might be out of the Cabinet, but his influence lingered on.

  It all seems mild enough today, but what Bennett was advocating came very close to what both Tim Buck and J.S. Woodsworth had been urging in the early thirties, to the sneers of the Tories. It almost seemed that Bennett had appropriated communist rhetoric when he castigated “selfish men … whose mounting bankrolls loom larger than your happiness, corporations without souls and without virtue.”

  “These … will whisper against us. They will call us radicals. They will say that this is the first step on the road to socialism,” Bennett thundered. “We fear them not.…”

  This was too much for his Secretary of State, the Hon. Charles Hazlitt Cahan, who angrily wrote out his resignation and tore it up only after a group of prominent Montreal businessmen urged him to stay in the Cabinet to fight the Bennett program (“Fight it all you can, C.H., but whatever you do don’t leave the cabinet”). For Bennett was already pledging that he would wipe out “corporate evils” by abolishing, among other things, the right to issue shares at no par value.

  Although the Gazette tried to pretend that the public was “shocked and startled” by the broadcasts, the general attitude was favourable. The Cabinet, however, was split, and the Premier of Quebec, Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, wanted no part of Bennett’s proposals, many of which infringed on provincial sovereignty. Mackenzie King, who had been advocating many of the same measures, was enraged because he was convinced that Bennett had filched his ideas from Industry and Humanity, his dense 1918 tome. “It is plagiarism of the most obvious kind,” King wrote indignantly in his diary after the first broadcast, “with the most nauseating self sufficiency & egotism … the effrontery of it all – the downright hypocrisy – when I think of his money – the money that he is paying for the broadcasts no doubt – having been made largely from the life blood of women, some in the graves, of Eddy Mffg. Co – & his talking of standards in industry – humanitarianism & the like fills me with indignation too great for utterance.”

  It is hard to picture the impatient and impulsive Bennett wading through King’s opus, but the former prime minister, who was convinced he had written an imperishable classic, was equally convinced that his opponent had purposely stolen his stuff. The more he brooded over it, the angrier he grew: “… this theft of my ideas … this effort to appropriate ideas, plans, etc – It is the most gigantic plagiarism and steal of another man’s aim, work etc & those of a political party that I believe has been made at any time anywhere, by one man. This is ‘the strange thing’ that is to try me [a reference to a prophetic vision], the theft of my life’s work & endeavour by Bennett to make his own.”

  Bennett’s broadcasts, of course, constituted his ele
ction platform. He knew that under the constitution he must go to the country no later than October. He had seized on Herridge’s advice as a means to embarrass the Liberals, and on the face of it, his strategy seemed brilliant. How could they oppose his New Deal, which embraced so many of their own stated principles? If they did find a way to oppose it – and Bennett hoped they would – he would call a snap election, make the New Deal a campaign issue, and sweep the country. He had presented the Opposition with an apparently hopeless dilemma. As R.J. Manion put it, “If King backs Bennett he is merely trailing, and if he abuses him, he’s a reactionary. I really think Bennett has scooped him rather badly.”

  But Bennett was up against the wiliest politician in Canada. Mackenzie King’s original plan had been to oppose any Conservative legislation, fight it all the way in Parliament, and hope to force an election. On January 15, however, he heard Bennett declare, during the course of an address broadcast from Montreal, that his promised reforms would be laid out in the Speech from the Throne. King immediately changed his strategy. To his delight, the details of Bennett’s New Deal could be debated in the House. Bennett, as usual, had plunged hastily – even recklessly – into his reform plan without drafting the legislation. That would come after he had won the election.

  Now King prepared to call his opponent’s bluff. Instead of opposing the New Deal, he would offer sweet co-operation and urge that specific legislation be placed before the current session so that it might be debated and passed. His attitude, King decided, would be “that not only of willingness but anxiety to join with him in getting a reform programme completed before any appeal to the electorate, [and] Bennett’s bubble will be pretty effectively pricked. He will be like a flattened tire.…”