Saskatchewan was still the hardest hit of the prairie provinces; it had no choice but to cancel $75 million in debts and taxes owed by the citizens in 1936. The unprecedented dry spell forced the federal government to abandon all hope of balancing the budget. Conditions were now so appalling that Ottawa had to promise 100 per cent federal aid to the drought-stricken regions of the southern prairies.
The winter had been terrible, the coldest on record. From early January until the end of February there was no break in the constant cold. Temperatures dropped below minus forty degrees Fahrenheit and stayed there. City streets were deserted; traffic came to a halt. Blizzards buried railways and disrupted train schedules. Farm families lived in their stove-heated kitchens. Every sideroad between Winnipeg and the Rockies was blocked by snowdrifts. In Saskatchewan, the average temperature was a startling twenty-five below, Fahrenheit. Brandon went nine days with the thermometer registering more than forty degrees below zero. In the ranch country of Alberta thousands of head of cattle perished in the cold as farmers were immobilized. In the schools, where heating systems had long ago broken down from neglect, makeshift stoves were fashioned out of oil drums. Teachers struggled through the drifts before dawn each morning hoping to kindle fires that might make their schoolhouses habitable by noon; on the coldest days some students missed their class work while trying to keep them fuelled.
Fred Williams, in his book The Fifth Horseman, described the scene in one Saskatchewan schoolhouse that winter: “When nine o’clock came, the half-frozen pupils would stand around the contraption, stamping their feet on the board floor until circulation was restored. Frozen mitts and snowshoes were placed in a circle around the heater and left there until it was time to go home; no attempt was made to throw snowballs or play outside games at recess. Life was a grim reality for the children of the ‘thirties’ – mitts, overshoes and warm clothing could only be obtained on relief orders once a year.”
Ontario was affected almost as badly as the West. On a frigid morning at the end of January, in a two-storey house in Lindsay warmed only by a small oil heater, an old-age pensioner named Ella MacMurchy came downstairs to find her eighty-two-year-old sister, May, lying on the cold kitchen floor. “I think May is not so well this morning,” she remarked to the milkman. He quickly discovered that May was dead.
On the prairies, there was no relief from the weather. The winter, which had been the coldest in history, was followed by a summer that was the hottest. Two-thirds of the western grain lands were withered by drought, producing the smallest harvest since 1919. Each day was hotter than the last. Right across the southern plains temperatures rose to ninety degrees, and then kept climbing.
Saskatchewan suffered for six straight weeks; in all that period there were only three days in which the thermometer dropped below 90°F. In many areas it was worse. Willow Creek endured thirteen days of 100-degree weather in July. On July 11, the temperature reached 108° in Winnipeg, 110° in Brandon. It was almost as bad in Toronto, where the temperature reached 105° for three consecutive days.
James Gray, in The Winter Years, described the stifling Winnipeg heat. It felt, he wrote, “as if someone had left all the furnace doors open and the blowers on.” In July, Gray, at that time a reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press, travelled with Robert M. Scott, the paper’s agricultural writer, from Winnipeg to Regina and back again. The pair headed down the Souris River valley – now bone dry from the drought – and watched the dust clouds forming ahead. Soon “the sun vanished in an amber haze [and] the sharp dust particles ricocheted off the windshield.” The visibility dropped to a few feet. They crawled blindly along the extreme right shoulder of the gravel road and then, suddenly, they were out of it. The blowing soil stopped “as if on command.” A few miles farther on, they encountered it again; that was the pattern – alternate stretches of dark and light.
In this bleak wasteland, money was almost unknown – large bills, certainly. When Scott gave a Saskatchewan garageman a ten-dollar bill to pay for gas and oil and for cleaning out a radiator choked with dust, he was asked if he had something smaller, explaining that “it’s awfully hard to spend anything out of a ten-dollar bill around here these days.”
They stopped at a farmhouse west of Forget (a harshly significant name) – clothes sticking to their bodies, blisters on their feet from the heat of the floorboards – hoping to get a glass of cool buttermilk. It was a typical Saskatchewan spread – small, unpainted house, combination horse- and cattle-barn, chicken-house, huddle of sheds, blown-over privy. And it was all empty. Though the door was unlocked, the house was still completely furnished, a Canada’s Pride range and a Hoosier cabinet in the kitchen, a Quebec heater in one bedroom, and two large beds with their mattresses. Although every crevice had been stuffed with newspaper, floors and furniture within were covered with dust; a long drift, two inches deep, had crept in from a crack under the kitchen door. A cast-iron pump stood halfway between house and barn, but its mechanism was rusted and immovable.
They drove off, passing two or three more abandoned farms. Had the entire country been abandoned? Gray wondered. At last they came upon a working farm and accepted a glass of water from the farm wife, Ellen Simpson. Why, they wanted to know, would a family walk away from a farmhouse and leave the doors open?
“Well, why not, for goodness sake?” Ellen Simpson replied. “Who’d steal anything around here? And, anyway, what is there that anybody has left now that’s worth stealing?” Besides, she added, another family, fleeing from the dust bowl, might need shelter for the night on their way to better land.
By midsummer in southern Saskatchewan, most streams and rivers were dry, the cows had stopped giving milk, wild life vanished, the grain elevators stood empty, and even the potato crop failed. There was so little business that the railways reduced their daily schedules to once or twice a week.
The best farmers could not cope with the elements. Robert Miller, one of the few in the area not dependent on government relief, had a towering reputation. Years before he had picked a piece of high tableland near the Cypress Hills, where the soil was good and he knew he could catch every vagrant rainstorm. He used the most modern machinery and was known as one of the best farmers in the province – painstaking, thrifty, scientific. But now no rain came. In 1936 Miller planted two thousand acres with seed grain in a carefully prepared seed bed – and didn’t reap a single bushel.
That summer, the Canadian Red Cross sent its Regina representative on a tour of the worst of the Saskatchewan drought area. He was shaken by what he found. On a farm near Consul he came upon a family – typical of many others – who hadn’t been able to repair any household buildings since 1928. They couldn’t afford laths or tar-paper to fix the roof or cribbing for the well, which had buckled and given out. As a result they had no decent drinking water. When the crops withered in the early summer, the farmer and his pregnant wife tended an acre and a half of potatoes, planted in a low place to capture any rain that fell. But no rain fell. The very weeds died. For all their work that summer, the family harvested a single sack of potatoes.
Near Shaunavon, the same man came upon a family with nine children, all dressed in gunny sacks. One child had died, and such was the despair among the siblings that one had to be watched carefully to prevent him from taking his own life. “Imagine a child of twelve years contemplating or attempting suicide,” the Red Cross man wrote in his report.
In another desolate region, he encountered a widow, surrounded by seven black-eyed children, trying to break ground for a chicken coop, “attacking the stubborn prairie soil with a crowbar so heavy it would have daunted many a man.” Her fourteen-year-old daughter, wearing a dress with the label of the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, was helping with an axe; the younger children plied rakes and hoes. The family lived in a three-room house, the holes in its broken windows stuffed with Russian thistle. The kitchen utensils were all gone; the only remaining pail was full of holes. They had tried to raise turkeys, but t
hese had become thin and scrawny because the grass had withered. The only feed left was Russian thistle. “I can save some of them for Thanksgiving,” she explained, “and the poor kids will be able to have a good dinner on that day but it is going to take all my time to have any left for Christmas.” She hoped that the new hen house might protect the birds from the marauding coyotes, who were carrying them off one at a time.
“The spirit of this family was unbeatable,” her visitor reported, “and it was affected neither by hardship, famine nor depression. It is such people that build a country.”
At Bone Creek, a family of eleven was crammed into a one-room shack. The children used newspapers as mattresses and sheets and slept in the gunny-sack clothing they wore during the day. The parents were sick and the children suffered from “the apathy of despair.” In the winter, even with a big fire in the stove, drinking water froze in the pail.
Another shack housed a father, mother, and eighteen children, ranging in age from two to eighteen. There wasn’t a mattress in the house, daylight could be seen through the cracks in the roof, and the broken window panes hadn’t been replaced. “It is almost incredible to think,” the Red Cross worker reported, “that, in the Dominion of Canada, the father of a family finds it impossible to obtain work or earn sufficient money to replace a broken window pane. Nevertheless, it is a condition that actually exists.”
Under such conditions, professional entertainment was out of the question. Mart Kenney, who was just starting out leading the dance band that would become famous as the Western Gentlemen, delightedly accepted an engagement at a small-town hall south of Calgary. Admission was fifty cents. The band arrived, wearing new uniforms, and waited and waited and waited, but not a soul turned up. At ten, four people finally arrived – the only ones who could afford the price.
Political entertainment, however, was free and people made the most of it. Tommy Douglas remembered that for the politician “it was an ideal time because you could have a political meeting in every schoolhouse. People came! It was the cheapest entertainment in town.” Douglas found that they would argue politics until one or two o’clock in the morning.
He sent out copies of Hansard, the verbatim record of the House of Commons debates, and was astonished to find that his constituents gobbled it up. “Who would read Hansard if they could get anything else to read?” he asked himself. “It was wonderful because when opposition speakers would come in, some farmer who looked as though he didn’t even know one political party from another would get up in the question period and say, ‘You said so and so, didn’t you?’ The fellow would say, ‘Yes.’ He’d get it out of his overalls pocket and say, ‘Now on page 3347 of Hansard for February the 9th, this is what Mr. So and So said.…’ ” After a while, Douglas recalled, political speakers stayed out of the drought constituencies because so many farmers, with nothing else to read, had been devouring the Commons debates.
Douglas also paid tribute to the spirit of a deprived people who still managed to see some humour in their situation. One day, driving out to Weyburn, he saw ahead a patch of clouds hanging over the community. He thought, “They’re getting a rain. That’s marvellous.” When he reached town, he came upon a group of men playing horseshoes. Stepping over to one, Andy Prentiss, he asked, “Hello, Andy, did you get any rain out of those clouds?”
“Well,” Prentiss replied, “five drops.” Then he added, “You know Bill Sykes south of town? Well, one of those drops hit him on the head, knocked him unconscious. We had to throw three pails of dust on him to bring him to.”
“You can’t beat courage like that,” said Tommy Douglas.
3
Le Chef, the Church, and the Reds
The Depression changed the political face of Canada. By 1936 the Church, eight out of nine provincial governments had fallen, to be replaced, except for those of Alberta and Quebec, by new-broom Liberal administrations. Only John Bracken’s United Farmers, in Manitoba, survived.
Quebec’s turn came on August 17. In June, after sixteen years in office at the head of the entrenched Liberal party, Premier Louis-Alexandre Taschereau had resigned in a cloud of scandal and had been succeeded by the relatively colourless Joseph-Adélard Godbout. But the moribund Liberals, who had coasted along in power for nearly forty years, could not withstand the onslaught of the new Union Nationale under Maurice Duplessis. Godbout suffered personal defeat as the UN piled up seventy-six seats to its opponents’ fourteen.
Duplessis ran and won on a reform ticket, but then, every politician in Canada who aspired to office claimed to be a reformer. Like Hepburn in Ontario, Duplessis only talked reform. As his background suggested, and as events were to prove, he was a Conservative bleu marching under a different banner. He had entered politics as a Conservative; that was the family tradition. His father had been a Tory member of the Quebec legislature from 1886 to 1900, and his birthplace, Trois-Rivières, was a bulwark of conservatism, both political and religious. Duplessis had represented it since 1927, one of a corporal’s guard of Tories swamped in a vast army of Liberals.
By 1934, with reform everywhere in the air, a group of dissident Liberals under Paul Gouin, son of a former premier, had decided to form a new party called Action Libérale Nationale. It drew its support from farmers’ groups and credit and labour unions. Too weak to fight the entrenched Liberals on its own, it formed an alliance with Duplessis’s Conservatives, each group agreeing to take a share of the constituencies and to refrain from poaching on the other’s territory. This uneasy alliance bore the unwieldy name of Union Nationale Duplessis-Gouin.
But not for long. The “morganatic marriage,” as Taschereau dubbed it, lasted through the provincial election of November 1935, which saw the new party rocket to within six seats of the ruling Liberals. But it soon became Duplessis’s party. Leading an invigorated opposition, he forced a series of hearings by the Public Accounts Committee, which had not met in eight years. As the chief inquisitor he laid bare a history of Liberal patronage, graft, and rascality that outraged the province. Taschereau, who, it was revealed, had forty-six relatives on the provincial payroll, was forced out. Gouin declined to run in the election that followed and faded into the background. The Union Nationale no longer needed to bear Duplessis’s name. He was Le Chef – a stocky, conservatively dressed politician whose chief distinguishing feature was a prominent nose that, like Aberhart’s double chin and Bennett’s wing collar, proved a cartoonist’s delight.
He had promised a series of reforms, but he made good on very few. The UN was simply the Conservative party under a new name. Duplessis’s main attack was not on the trusts, which he had promised to smite, but on all those he considered to be communists. These included anybody who appeared to be left of centre, including, of course, the CCF. In this crusade against the supposed forces of evil, he had the backing and the encouragement of the ultramontane Roman Catholic Church.
The Spanish Civil War broke out in July. The Quebec clergy and the Quebec press were almost unanimously on the side of General Francisco Franco, leader of the insurgents who were attempting to overthrow the communist-supported Popular Front government.
This attitude was thrown into sharp focus when, on October 23, three delegates from the Spanish government arrived in Montreal under the auspices of the Committee for Medical Aid to Spain. These were Marcelino Domingo, a former education minister, Isabella de Polencia, who had been Spain’s delegate to the League of Nations, and Father Luis Sarasola, a Franciscan priest. None was a Communist. Their purpose was to raise money and to present the Loyalist cause to Canadians. They had spoken without incident in Toronto, Hamilton, and Ottawa. But in Montreal they ran up against the hostility of the church.
Father Sarasola was already under papal indictment for taking sides in a political struggle. Translated, that meant taking the Loyalist side, since many priests were working for Franco without being censured. On the morning of his arrival, the church denounced the Franciscan in the press. A small force of students
from the University of Montreal paraded to the city hall and squatted in the Hall of Honour until the acting mayor appeared to announce that the meeting the Spanish committee had planned to hold in the Mount Royal Arena that evening would not take place. “We will not allow Communism to take root here,” he declared as the students cheered.
The student protest had been carefully organized by the church, as Eugene Forsey discovered. “Former students of mine have in their possession one of the notes sent round ordering youths to meet at the headquarters of the Jeunesse Ouvrière Catholique and ‘bring their canes,’ ” he told C.H. Cahan.
The controversy was racial as well as religious. When the delegates turned up at McGill at the invitation of the university’s Social Problems Club, several hundred French-speaking students from the University of Montreal invaded the campus to protest. They were dispersed by English-speaking McGill students.
With the police preventing anyone from entering the Mount Royal Arena, Frank Scott, one of the sponsors of that meeting, tried to secure Victoria Hall, which, being in Westmount, didn’t come under the jurisdiction of the Montreal force. He was told that all the space in the hall had been rented for that night. Later he learned that the main auditorium was dark all evening.
That left the Mount Royal Hotel in downtown Montreal. A group of about a hundred people crammed into a small salon in an informal meeting with the delegates. Dr. Norman Bethune, who was about to leave for Spain, pointed out that the cancelled meeting at the arena was to have raised money for vaccines and serums for use against preventable disease. As a result of its cancellation, he said, thousands of children would die. “I would never have believed that a meeting of this sort could have been stopped in Montreal,” he said.
The Great Depression Page 41
