The Great Depression

by Pierre Berton

  In Alberta, William Aberhart showed his contempt by a long silence in the legislature, which he explained in one brutally frank sentence. “I can reach the public by radio,” he said, “so why take up the time of the House?”

  In Quebec, the administration of the Padlock Law reached new heights of imbecility when two Protestant missionaries were thrown out of a lumber camp near Dolbeau. The police invoked the Act (supposedly designed to suppress only Communist literature) to confiscate 570 Protestant publications – Bibles, dictionaries, tracts, hymnals, and gospels. Then they ordered the offenders out of town on the next train. No amount of official protest brought so much as a peep of acknowledgement from Premier Duplessis, lending further credence to the Canadian Forum’s suggestion that the real fear in Quebec was not communism but anti-clericalism.

  In Ontario, the hunger for direction in an apparently pilotless nation erupted briefly with the creation of that curious, if short-lived, movement known as the Leadership League. Canadians in moments of crisis have tended to demand “strong leadership.” Now, tens of thousands made it clear that they were prepared to accept one-party rule in the interests of peace, order, and imaginative government.

  The league was George McCullagh’s personal baby. Its sudden success provides an insight into the psyche of the country that spring. In a series of five broadcasts over a loose network of radio stations, the publisher of the Globe and Mail managed to strike a chord. Though his simplistic approach to the nation’s problems might seem half-baked to some, there were multitudes who hung on his every word. McCullagh had the advantages of a rich and charismatic voice and the enthusiastic backing of his own newspaper. But he was clearly unprepared for the response to his call for stronger leadership. Before he knew it he found himself at the head of a national movement that had all the earmarks of an incipient political party.

  McCullagh was one of those self-made men who believe that governments can be run on the same business principles that work so well in the private sector. The so-called Boy Millionaire was just thirty-three years old, a cabinet-maker’s son who had become a king-maker, a phenomenon in the business, publishing, and political world. Mitch Hepburn had been his creature. McCullagh, it was said, was not above prompting the Premier, sotto voce, from his listening-post in an adjoining washroom. “I make and unmake governments,” McCullagh once boasted.

  Tall and ruggedly handsome, the Boy Millionaire bristled and brimmed with an overweening confidence undiluted by false modesty. Some of his business rivals were still tittering over his declaration, during a 1936 testimonial dinner, that his merging of the Globe and the Mail and Empire was a “masterpiece.”

  Much was made of the fact (by McCullagh himself, among others) that he had started his publishing career at twenty-one as a subscription salesman for the Globe and that when he had quit, he told the current owner, William Gladstone Jaffray, “when I next walk into this office, I’ll be buying the paper out from under you.” He had made good that boast in the depths of the Depression. No wonder, then, that he was convinced he could solve the Depression’s ills.

  Everybody agreed that he was a supersalesman. As a broker, he had flourished even after the 1929 crash. But his biggest act of salesmanship was to convince William Henry Wright, an unpretentious prospector, to let him handle his business affairs.

  Wright was McCullagh’s real ticket to success. He had struck it rich in northern Ontario not once but twice. His income from two of the richest gold mines in Canada – Wright Hargreaves and Lake Shore – was estimated at two million dollars a year. McCullagh, the business evangelist, soon found the key to his client’s pocketbook. “Link arms with me in a crusade,” he told the former house-painter in 1936. Wright bought him two newspapers for his crusade, and added a fancy art-deco headquarters on King Street.

  The McCullagh charm that had seduced Wright was invoked in the 1937 Ontario election campaign in the Liberal cause. The publisher’s radio personality was so powerful that a single broadcast brought in two thousand letters and fourteen thousand phone calls. But within a year his relationship with the Premier soured, partly because of Hepburn’s new association with Duplessis and his public feud with Mackenzie King. Hepburn, McCullagh had once said, wasn’t “fit to be premier of a pub.”

  McCullagh’s musings on leadership began to obsess him after the Munich crisis in 1938. Both King and Robert Manion, Bennett’s successor, seemed to him to be lukewarm in their attitude toward Britain. Nor, he thought, did either have any fresh ideas about how to cope with Canada’s domestic problems. (The best King could do was to take some of the burden of relief off the shoulders of the municipalities.)

  In the Globe that fall, McCullagh had called for “fresh leadership.” By late December, after talking it over with his Bay Street friends, he had decided on a series of five intimate, “man-to-man” broadcasts, designed to arouse public consciousness. The publisher had two goals in mind, one vaguely high-minded – “to reject the clap-trap the politicians have preached for years” – the other coldly practical, “to extend the influence of the Globe and Mail.”

  The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation turned him down, touching off an unholy row in the Globe about free speech. But the CBC, stung perhaps by the virulence of the paper’s attack, discreetly allowed McCullagh to establish his own network by shipping recordings of his broadcasts to thirty Canadian radio stations.

  The broadcasts, heard on successive Sunday nights in January and February, had all the fervour of an evangelistic revival. Like so many would-be leaders before and since, the Boy Millionaire catered to the age-old yearning for a return to traditional values. In the words of his own paper, which awkwardly attempted an objective report, he “challenged the Canadian people to awaken fully to the national crisis with which he believes them to be confronted, and to turn back – before it is too late – from the borderline of defeatism, disillusionment and disaster toward which irresponsible government, inadequate leadership and individual apathy, he believes, are slowly but surely heading them.”

  McCullagh embellished his talk with a call for “rugged honesty, clear purpose, tireless energy and unswerving loyalty” to long-established principles. But, stripped of the platitudes, his first broadcast had only one proposal to advance, the time-tested appeal for a reduction in taxes and a curb on “wild government spending.”

  These were hardly novel suggestions, but in later broadcasts McCullagh demonstrated his disdain for the traditional political process, which he, like so many other businessmen, found ponderous and tiresome. He called for a “National Government” in which the Liberals and Conservatives would bury their differences and form a single party to deal with the problems of the Depression. “In all humility,” he cried, “I beseech them not to paralyze the government by a bitter election contest when these problems are facing us.”

  That was reminiscent of Hepburn’s earlier attempt, inspired by McCullagh, to form a one-party government in Ontario. But McCullagh now went farther. He called for the abolition of all provincial governments – “political misfits” in his words. These were “luxuries we cannot afford.”

  McCullagh had no other specific proposals. The rest was a mishmash of old bromides – a plea for a return to honesty and thrift, a denunciation of government patronage, a call for a “strong national purpose,” an invocation to make Canada “a virile nation.” And yet – such was the temper of the times – these vague and possibly dangerous proposals produced a flood of letters that must have surprised McCullagh himself.

  He hadn’t contemplated any kind of national organization when he began. Now it was thrust upon him. In his final broadcast on February 12, he announced the formation of the Leadership League “through which a persevering people, by co-operative effort, may guard the country against further incompetency in public affairs … and may, if ever the urgency arises – smash the present political setup with the launching of a potential new party of power and propriety, independent thought and action.”

/>   The Globe and Mail each day published two forms, one a membership request, the other to be mailed to a Member of Parliament asking him or her “to forget party advantage and co-operate for the common good.” The response was overwhelming. In the first week following McCullagh’s final broadcast, forty-two thousand form letters swamped federal M.P.s, though one, J.A. Glen, claimed that a number were addressed and filled in by the same hand. By mid-March, the league had taken on a staff of twenty-six and moved out of the newspaper’s office to larger quarters on Richmond Street.

  If McCullagh had taken the time and trouble to work out a specific program, if his attention span had been longer and his health better (he was, apparently, a manic depressive and would one day commit suicide), the Leadership League might have prospered, as Social Credit had, as a political movement and perhaps a new party. Certainly the public was ready for some new ideas. The trouble was that McCullagh didn’t have any, unless one counts his appeal for a single-party state.

  At the same time, the Leadership League was costing money and provoking a backlash. The federal government responded through the Minister of National Revenue, J.L. Ilsley, who told a Toronto business lunch that McCullagh (whom he didn’t name) “showed a contempt for our political institutions.” The yearning for leadership, Ilsley pointed out, was part of the trend of events in Europe, where “lead me, Führer” and “lead me, Duce,” had become the highest expressions of civic virtue.

  Most major national dailies, especially McCullagh’s Toronto rivals, either attacked the league or ignored it, many seeing it, in the words of Saturday Night, as “a newspaper stunt.” Only the smaller Ontario dailies were supportive.

  But the Globe and Mail went all out, devoting its front page and all of its page 7 to the league’s activities. It also provided speakers to spread the gospel for the forty or more local league clubs that met in churches, schools, legion halls, and theatres. The new movement seemed to be accelerating – certainly anybody reading the Globe would have thought so – its membership expanding and its network increasing. And then suddenly, no more than a month after he’d announced its formation, McCullagh bowed out.

  In mid-March his paper announced that the league would no longer be his personal vehicle. It would be taken over by a body of public-spirited citizens led by Dr. Herbert Bruce, the former lieutenant-governor, and Sir Frederick Banting, the Nobel laureate who helped discover insulin. Under this impeccable stewardship, the league seemed destined for greater triumphs. Its membership had reached 125,000 (or so it was claimed), and a mass rally was planned for Maple Leaf Gardens. The Globe forecast that at least twenty thousand would jam the hockey arena.

  Only ten thousand turned up. McCullagh, who was suffering from nervous exhaustion as a result of all this activity, made a spirited appeal for funds, but for once his oratory fell flat. The public, which had seemed to support the league by filling out newspaper ballots, failed to respond. The total contributions amounted to a piddling $300. McCullagh himself had spent $105,000 on the venture.

  Suddenly it was over. The Globe and Mail announced on April 26 that it could no longer afford to acknowledge membership applications. McCullagh resigned from his own organization the following day. His brainchild had flared like a rocket and fizzled out in just four months. On June 26, when its offices closed forever, the Leadership League died from lack of leadership.

  2

  Back from the dead

  They returned that winter and spring, the men who had fought in Spain, wearing dead men’s clothes – garments and uniforms stripped from the corpses that lay thickly on the battlefields. They came in groups of steadily diminishing size, the halt, the lame, the ill, and the disillusioned. Others would never return. A third of those who had enlisted would lie forever on that foreign field, their clothing gathered up to cover the living in that most frugal of wars.

  The first contingent of 272 reached Halifax on February 3 aboard the CPR’s Duchess of Richmond. Most were veterans of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, which had been named with unconscious irony for the Prime Minister’s rebel grandfather. Their crusade was over. The previous fall the Loyalist government, in a futile attempt to influence international public opinion, had withdrawn all foreign soldiers from the line. It had taken more than four months to get them out of the embattled peninsula.

  They had travelled by barge, rail, and foot to the French border. They had been whisked across France to the channel ports in a sealed train, guarded by French detectives. They had crossed to England and finally sailed from Liverpool, homesick and fagged out. Hundreds of others were waiting in England and France, some in concentration camps, to return home.

  The RCMP didn’t want them and urged the government to deny them immigration status because they had been “engaged contrary to the policy of the Government in the Spanish War.” The government was embarrassed by them but didn’t care to encounter a worse embarrassment by barring them; after all, England and France had resisted taking such a drastic step. Nonetheless, Ottawa was taking no chances. An RCMP inspector was dispatched to France to make sure all were bona fide Canadians. After two years of battle, some of the foreign-born could no longer remember the details of their original entry into Canada. These the French herded unceremoniously into concentration camps until their admissibility could be confirmed.

  There were no brass bands on the dock at Halifax, no triumphant parades, no politicians mouthing speeches of congratulation – only a small corps of newspapermen and a crowd of anonymous well-wishers. Led by their commander, Major Ed Cecil-Smith, a former Toronto newspaperman, the veterans shambled down the gangway in their cast-offs. One man was carried off on a stretcher. Fifty-five required medical attention. Thirty-three needed surgery. Lionel Edwards – Captain Edwards now – who had been badly wounded by shellfire on the Ebro was heading for Edmonton. He’d been one of the passengers on that earlier trip who had so terrified the Irish couple aboard the SS President Roosevelt. Tom Ewen’s two boys, Bruce and Jim, had no idea where they were going. They had enlisted in Vancouver but had lost touch with their family.

  Some veterans didn’t want to talk to the press because they feared the publicity would make it hard for them to get jobs in Canada. Others were defiant. Fred Baxter put it bluntly: “I went to Spain to kill as many Fascists as possible; that’s all the less to kill when they get here.”

  That was the underlying theme of those who spoke up on their return to Canada. Bill Beeching, who had served with the Lincoln Battalion, was determined to travel the country warning Canadians that the Spanish conflict was no more than a curtain raiser for a new world war. “It was shocking to us when we first came back,” he would remember. “We were elated to be alive. We were ashamed we had lost the war. We felt we had let the Spanish people down. We felt sort of cowardly that we had been repatriated, although we were not responsible for it.… Everything felt strange. It seemed to me that the Canadian people weren’t aware of what was taking place in the world.…”

  The sense of disillusionment and defeat hung like a pall among the survivors. It was, as Samuel Abramson of Montreal recalled, “a bitter end to the dreams we had cherished. We were leaving Spain shattered and in chains.” Barcelona had already fallen. Madrid would do so soon. Gregory Clark, the Toronto Star’s diminutive reporter, wrote that day that “their war stories have a gentle madness that reminds you of Don Quixote.”

  The veterans were rushed from the ship to a special nine-car train that would take them to Montreal. Their passage had been paid partly by the Spanish government and partly by the Friends of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion. In England, the Friends had approached Matthew Halton of the Toronto Star to help raise ten thousand dollars to underwrite some of the costs. Halton knew two wealthy Canadian residents he thought might contribute – R.B. Bennett and Garfield Weston, the biscuit king. He phoned both. Bennett turned him down. Weston offered five thousand dollars before Halton finished his pitch. (Tim Buck wrote in his memoirs that A.A. MacLeod, editor o
f the Communist paper the Tribune, went to London on the same mission and “was so persuasive that Bennett gave him $500” – a remarkable piece of persuasion indeed.)

  It wasn’t enough. The former soldiers agreed to sleep in un-heated colonist cars to save money. There was no dining car; they subsisted on 1,650 sandwiches donated by Halifax women. Just before the train pulled out, William Foley of Toronto, wounded in the shoulder and hip, said a final goodbye to his friend Gerald Shea, who was heading for Cape Breton. Foley would never forget the day when Shea had carried him to safety under intense machine-gun fire. “It’s like the closing of a book,” he said sadly.

  There would be no civic welcomes for the men who now crossed the country to their homes, although there were crowds at the train stations. The Montreal City Council refused to let the veterans hold a banquet in the Atwater Market because they were “Communists,” and the CPR police tried to stop the ongoing passengers from parading in Windsor Station. They relented briefly at the last moment to permit a short passage down the concourse – but not into the street – before herding the men back on the train. At Toronto, there was a brass band to welcome them. Here somebody told the Ewen brothers that one of their sisters was in Toronto, living on Bedford Road. That was the end of the journey for them. In proletarian Winnipeg, four thousand cheered the returning men. There was bitter criticism for the mayor and the Premier, who had declined to join the welcoming party.

  With war looming in Europe, the press was less hostile to the crumbling Loyalist cause. Saturday Night found it extraordinary that Canadian public opinion “should have passionately sympathized with Czechoslovakia and under the same situation be so generally cold to a Spanish government, which received the same aid against the same enemies and now seems likely to receive the same treatment from France and Britain.”