The Great Depression

by Pierre Berton

  The police station, too, was jammed. Instead of the mere seven men the police were originally seeking, one hundred had been arrested. Most were swiftly released without being charged. Of the twenty-two who eventually came to trial, eight were sent to jail on charges stemming from the riot. All charges under Section 98, under which the seven arrests were to have been made, had to be dropped for lack of evidence.

  After the fusillade of pistol shots at Scarth and Eleventh, the riot had begun to wind down. Small skirmishes continued, however, and the police patrolled the streets until midnight. By then the trekkers were back at the Exhibition Grounds, surrounded by a tight police cordon that confined them without food or smokes until well into the afternoon of July 2.

  These tactics infuriated Jimmy Gardiner, who was convinced the police wanted to starve the men into submission and force them to go to the Lumsden camp. “This will end in a worse riot than last night,” he told Bennett in an angry telegram. The Premier was convinced he could have arranged to disperse the trekkers peacefully. Now he demanded that the government abandon the plans for the Lumsden camp and allow the province to take over. Bennett grudgingly agreed, and Evans had the face-saving formula he had been willing to settle for before the trouble began.

  After a hiatus of three weeks, the Saskatchewan government again found itself in control of its police force. The men at the Exhibition Grounds were fed immediately. Gardiner and Attorney General Davis worked round the clock arranging for an orderly withdrawal from Regina. Bennett had one small consolation: the responsibility was no longer on his shoulders. When frantic telegrams reached him from Victoria and Vancouver demanding that no trekkers be sent back to the coast, he fobbed them off on Jimmy Gardiner.

  On July 5, the trekkers, now reduced to fourteen hundred, marched in good order to board CPR and CNR trains to the West, to their homes, or back to the camps. Fred Griffin of the Toronto Star was reminded of similar scenes in 1914 and 1915 when other young men in khaki boarded trains to go off to war. “Nowhere in Canada is there a body of youth with such a definite will and purpose as these,” he wrote. “… They have lighted a flame that no amount of repression is going to put out.”

  There were other attempts to march on Ottawa that summer, but only one succeeded. Three hundred trekkers sponsored by the National Unemployment Council set out to walk from Toronto to the capital on July 17. It took them twenty-two days. They managed a brief meeting with Bennett, who dismissed them in fifteen minutes after telling them they wanted to embarrass the government.

  By an odd coincidence, Andrew McNaughton retired as CGS on the very day of the Regina Riot. The relief camps would no longer have him as an advocate. Their days were numbered, anyway. Mackenzie King would make their abolition a plank in his election platform (together with a pledge to drop Section 98 from the Criminal Code) and carry out his promise after he was elected. On June 30, 1936, the camps were closed forever. By then Spain was under siege, and a good number of those who had taken part in the great On-to-Ottawa trek were preparing to set off secretly to face more bullets.

  Saskatchewan appointed an official commission of three judges to look into the riot. It called 359 witnesses ranging from Premier Gardiner to Matt Shaw. It was clearly biased from the outset since it dismissed the testimony of all the trekkers and residents who swore they had witnessed or encountered police brutality and accepted that of the policemen who insisted that in every case they were acting in self-defence. The commission’s eight-thousand-page report, issued in April 1936, defies credibility. It wholly exonerated the police and blamed Evans and his followers for the riot. It admitted official responsibility only in mildly questioning Ottawa’s ill-advised attempt to exercise control from a distance.

  The lawyers who acted for the trekkers at the commission hearings disagreed with the conclusion. One of these was Emmett Hall, a future Justice of the Supreme Court and one of Canada’s most distinguished jurists. Fifty years later, Hall, recalling the events of those days, stated his continuing belief that “this was a police-provoked encounter.” Hall said, “I never had any reason to change my opinion on that. There is no doubt that the direction to what was done … had to come from Ottawa.” Without that interference, he said emphatically, “there wouldn’t have been any riot.”

  6

  Changing the guard

  There has never been anything in Canada remotely like the Alberta election campaign of 1935. Since those days Canadians have become used to more sophisticated hoopla on the hustings. But Bible Bill Aberhart’s march to victory, accompanied as it was by the kind of high-jinks usually associated with old-fashioned medicine shows, has had no counterpart.

  The big meeting that took place in the Edmonton Exhibition Grounds that summer was part picnic, part religious rally, part political kick-off, and part vaudeville show. There were singing and dancing, cakes and lemonade, and races for the children. As Aberhart came forward, to the cheers of the crowd, the band struck up one of his favourite hymns, “Tell Me the Old, Old Story.” First, however, two very agile eighteen-year-old girls, clad in what were then known as scanties, did a buck-and-wing to enormous applause, followed by a throbbing baritone who sang “Old Man River,” and then six more girls in tights who performed an energetic tap dance that brought the crowd to its feet.

  These were only curtain-raisers for the main event, which was a horse race on the oval track in front of the stadium, with Aberhart himself as the announcer. Out pranced the four steeds with their jockeys, each wearing a label for one of the four competing political parties – United Farmers, Liberals, Conservatives, and Social Credit (significantly, the CCF wasn’t represented). As the barrier was sprung, three horses bunched up in the lead, leaving the Social Credit horse a poor fourth. No one, however, had any doubt about the outcome as Aberhart, in his stentorian voice, calling the race and following the progress of the Social Credit jockey’s strategy, suggested how the faithful should mark their second choice under the province’s system of proportional representation.

  The Social Credit campaign had everything – religion, scandal, dirty tricks. Aberhart flatly refused to allow any of his people to debate the principles of Social Credit; instead, he urged his followers to take him on faith. They were told not to read or to listen to criticisms of the movement. As a result, the Calgary Herald suffered a major circulation loss while another anti-Social Credit newspaper went out of business entirely.

  It was a dirty campaign. Opposition speakers were booed off the stage or drowned out by the honking of dozens of horns outside the meeting halls. There were complaints of cars smeared with red paint, of tires slashed, of sugar and sand put into gas tanks. Although Social Credit theory was the main issue of the campaign, Aberhart’s opponents raised it at their peril. His mesmerized followers refused to listen to any arguments while his candidates declined to debate the subject with anybody, publicly or privately.

  Aberhart shamelessly used his radio broadcasts to make political hay. He got the air time at a cheap rate; after all, he controlled the mortgage on the station. The UFA was infuriated, but there was little they could do about it. By this time Bible Bill had a radio following of more than three hundred thousand – more listeners than tuned in to Jack Benny’s Sunday night half-hour. Aberhart linked his opponents to the traitorous Judas and lashed out at “fornicators, grafters, and reprobates,” a not-very-veiled dig at the discomfited ex-premier, Brownlee, and others of his Cabinet, including the Minister of Public Works, O.L. McPherson, who had been involved in a messy and well-publicized divorce case. “Are you going to let this man cross-examine me?” Aberhart cried when McPherson dared to ask a question at a political rally. The crowd shouted McPherson down.

  As recently as January Aberhart was undecided about contesting the election. If the UFA had agreed then to embrace Social Credit principles, he would have rested content. But the UFA at its January convention decisively rejected the proposal, though offering the balm of Major Douglas’s advice. The major arrived in
May as a “consultant,” but that wasn’t good enough for Aberhart. At its April convention the Social Credit League (Douglas’s name had long since been dropped) had already decided to contest the election.

  For an hour the delegates debated the method of choosing candidates. Aberhart sat silent throughout the discussion and then, in a one-minute speech, settled the question. He, as leader, would control the selection of all candidates. “If you’re not going to let me have any say in the choice of my supporters,” he said, “you will not have me as your leader.” And that was that.

  But he declined to be a candidate himself. He didn’t want his opponents to throw all their resources into one constituency in an attempt to beat him. After the election was won, he would be premier and a seat would be found for him – not much of a problem, since every candidate was under his thumb and almost every seat in the province could be assumed to be a safe seat.

  The party – no longer a “movement” – issued a new pamphlet with a blue cover and sold 60,000 at twenty-five cents apiece. A warning inside stated that the text was “not a detailed plan for the government of Alberta.” In fact, Aberhart had no explicit plan except to give everybody who supported him twenty-five dollars a month. In spite of their falling-out, he still expected Major Douglas to come up with the details. The monthly credit – it would not be in cash – would go to every adult who had lived for at least one year in the province and who, on application, acknowledged Social Credit principles.

  The newspapers were unanimously opposed and so was much of the business community. That, however, helped the party rather than hindered it. In July, a group of business leaders formed the Economic Safety League to attack Social Credit, an example of overkill that drove more Albertans into Aberhart’s camp. Neither the press nor big business was popular in Alberta in 1935.

  Aberhart stumped the province tirelessly, making as many as four speeches a day. There was no way for the UFA to combat the mass hysteria he evoked. Few bothered to heed the full-page advertisement of the Calgary Board of Trade, which prophesied that Social Credit would bring “great suffering from which the Province will not recover for many years.” The people had already endured great suffering. How could things get worse? At a meeting in Wetaskiwin at which the UFA leader spoke, a young farmer made the point graphically. “I sell a steer for hardly enough to pay the freight,” he reminded the crowd. “Now would you tell me what I have got to lose by trying Social Credit, whether I believe in it or not?” The audience cheered.

  By mid-August seers were predicting a Social Credit sweep, but no one expected the landslide that was revealed when the votes were counted on August 22. The Social Credit party took fifty-six of the legislature’s sixty-three seats, the Liberals five, the Conservatives two. The United Farmers of Alberta received a death blow; not a member of that party was elected, and several of its candidates lost their deposits. Social Credit would win the next eight elections and under Aberhart and his successor, Ernest Manning, govern the province virtually unopposed for thirty-six years.

  The dust had not yet settled in Alberta before the federal campaign got under way. It had really begun in January with Bennett’s New Deal broadcasts. But Bennett had been out of action for much of the interval. He had waited longer than any previous prime minister to hold an election, stretching his term to its legal limit. The voters would go to the polls on October 14, and to most observers the result was a foregone conclusion. The smashing victory of the Liberals in New Brunswick, followed by another in Prince Edward Island in August, brought to six the number of Conservative governments that had been successively overthrown during the Depression. The only speculation revolved around the size of the prospective Liberal sweep.

  Bennett’s government was assailed by a host of problems, not all of its own making. The drought on the southern prairies showed no signs of abating. An outbreak of stem rust, the worst since 1916, lowered prospects of a crop even further. The failure of the relief camps and the resulting explosion in Regina had dealt government support a heavy blow. Bennett’s name was being used as an epithet. To his fury, people joked not only about Bennett buggies but also about Bennett boroughs – shacktowns for the jobless in the urban centres – and Bennett barnyards, abandoned prairie farms. Worst of all, the party was badly split.

  The split came out into the open when Harry Stevens bolted the Conservatives. The move was not unexpected. A group of Tories had already been boosting Stevens as a replacement for Bennett. Another group of prominent Montreal businessmen wanted a “National Party” with Stevens at its head. But Stevens wanted nothing to do with the very business interests he’d been attacking. Warren K. Cook, the spokesman for small retail businesses, was another matter. With Cook’s backing and financial support, Stevens on July 7 announced a new reform party “to reestablish Canada’s industrial, economic and social life to the benefit of the great majority.” It was to be called the Reconstruction Party.

  Stevens’s defection embittered Bennett. “One man has crucified the party – Stevens,” he told a friend in Calgary. His own Cabinet was in disarray. One minister had died; eight others had declined to run; Bennett himself, dogged by illness, was operating at half-steam. Nonetheless, as he told a Tory banquet in June, “I’ll die in harness rather than quit now.” That delighted Mackenzie King, who thought him the best possible adversary, considering the times. “He is the man the people rightly wish to defeat,” King wrote. “He has been making enemies for himself, as I thought he would, from the day he assumed office, and if he goes through the campaign he will get one of the worst defeats any political leader ever sustained.”

  King had no use for Bennett. His diary is peppered with epithets, some of which – “blatherskite” is one – have slipped out of common usage. Bennett, King wrote, was “unctuous,” “boorish,” a man of “low cunning and hypocrisy,” “the Great I Am,” “a dog of a man – a brute in his instincts,” “a Pharisee of Pharisees,” and so on. The accommodating Mrs. Wriedt, to King’s obvious satisfaction, told him that Bennett was “like a snake in the grass in his Cabinet – he was not to be trusted.” All the same, King could not help indicating his delight on those rare occasions when Bennett deigned to notice him.

  The two were miles apart in personality and political savvy. Where Bennett was bombastic, King was bland. Where Bennett was blunt, King was devious. Where Bennett was loud and rude, King was soft and fawning. Where Bennett was outspoken, King was fuzzy. Where Bennett was direct, King was circuitous. Bennett used a cleaver against his enemies; King used a stiletto. Bennett never understood the art of the possible; King thrived on it. In short, King was a politician; Bennett was not.

  King, who always disliked making election promises, was wise enough to realize he need make none this time. The Depression, not the Liberal party, would finish off the Tories. He confined himself to some vague statements about restoring parliamentary democracy, getting rid of government bureaucracy, and saving the nation from dictatorship. He managed to suggest that other parties had something in common with Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini (who at that time was invading Ethiopia). Wasn’t it obvious that Canada was becoming “a second Italy, a second Germany, a second Russia”? he asked. His pledge to get rid of the relief camps and the hated Section 98 formed part of that attack.

  The Conservatives responded with another of those meaningless slogans that political parties seem to love: STAND BY CANADA – A CHANCE FOR YOUTH – VOTE BENNETT. The Liberals pounced on that, and with reason. The Tories, who had inaugurated the so-called slave camps and brutally stopped the protest of youth in Regina, were now talking about giving youth a chancel And how could they believe that the word “Bennett” was better than “Conservative” when it came to attracting votes? The Liberal slogan was more telling. It was KING OR CHAOS.

  When the results were tabulated on October 14, the Liberal sweep was even greater than expected. King’s party had captured 173 seats; the Conservatives were reduced to 40. Stevens’s party failed t
o get off the ground; only its leader retained his seat. The big surprises were the good showing of the Social Credit party with seventeen seats, all but two from Alberta, and the poor showing of the CCF, with only seven of its candidates elected.

  Had Stevens stayed in the party and Bennett resigned, perhaps in his favour, the results would have been dramatically different. Stevens’s defection had badly crippled the Tories. In forty-eight ridings, Ernest Watkins has pointed out, the total of Conservative and Reconstruction votes would have been enough to defeat the Liberal candidates. That would have given Mackenzie King a total of 125 seats in the House to a combined Opposition of 123 – an uneasy margin. Almost equally damaging was the impact on the CCF, which would certainly have gained more seats if independent voters had had one fewer option to the old-line parties. Stevens’s party actually got slightly more of the total vote than the CCF.

  The Liberal victory was no landslide, except in seats. The party barely increased its strength in total votes. Its gains in French Canada were matched by heavy losses in the West. As usual, the voters weren’t voting for either of the old parties; they were voting against the Conservatives, whose strength dropped to three-fifths of what it had been in 1930.