The Great Depression

by Pierre Berton

  He reminded the House that King himself had attacked the Bennett government for giving a “blank cheque” (King’s words) for the relief of the unemployed. “But in the speech today we are asked to give a blank cheque to the government. So far the Prime Minister has not enlightened us in any detail as to what the policy of the government is to be.”

  As Woodsworth continued, a veil of silence fell across the House, for now he was speaking personally as the Conscience of Parliament. He had no intention of departing for an instant from a lifetime’s conviction for the sake of popularity or political gain.

  “I would ask: did the last war settle anything? I venture to say that it settled nothing; and the next war into which we are asked to enter, however big and bloody it may be, is not going to settle anything either. That is not the way in which settlements are brought about.

  “While we are urged to fight for freedom and democracy, it should be remembered that war is the very negation of both. The victor may win; but if he does, it is by adopting the self-same tactics which he condemns in his enemy.… As one who has tried for a good many years to take a stand for the common people, personally I cannot give my consent to anything that will drag us into another war.”

  The common people! Coming from Woodsworth’s lips the phrase did not sound hackneyed. All of his years here in the Commons he had fought for commoners – for the Communists (whom he loathed) driven to prison by an unspeakable law; for the single jobless banished to the slave camps; for the boxcar cowboys riding the freights, beaten by the police; for the helpless victims of the Padlock Law; for the hungry children, deprived of proper nutrition by an unheeding government; for the union organizers, the maverick clergymen, the dust-bowl housewives, and all the desperate men and women who wrote him letters or met him in back-kitchens and on railway sidings in small towns and poured out their anguish and anger because they trusted him to bring their case before the bar of the House.

  Absolute silence now, as he continued.

  “I do not care whether you think me an impossible idealist or a dangerous crank. I am going to take my place beside the children … because it is only as we adopt new policies that this world will be at all a liveable place for our children who follow us. We laud the courage of those who go to the front; yes, I have boys of my own and I hope they are not cowards, but if any of those boys, not from cowardice but really through belief, is willing to take his stand on this matter and, if necessary, to face a concentration camp or a firing squad, I shall be more proud of that boy than if he enlisted for the war.”

  “Shame!” cried George Tustin, a Tory from Napanee. In the words of Woodsworth’s daughter, that was no more than “a little stone that rolled away into the cavern of stillness where men sat alone with their thoughts.” No one answered. A hush of respect still hung like a pall over the House as Woodsworth finished.

  That speech marked the end of an era – not only for the CCF, which lost its innocence, but also for the nation. It was the last crusading speech of the decade, the speech of an “impossible idealist,” and even as the speaker took his seat, the echoes of that decade reverberated through the House. Woodsworth stood as the human symbol of the best of the thirties. Now his long political career was ended. The other symbols of that bitter and violent era, in which the people were so badly served by their leaders, were also about to go. But the folk memories of the hunger marches, the bloody riots, the soup kitchens, the black blizzards, the Bennett buggies, the grasshoppers, the relief depots, the police truncheons, the sit-ins and lockouts, and all the populist Messiahs who promised so much and delivered so little – these would linger on in the subconscious of those who survived.

  On that day, September 8, Parliament declared that a state of war existed between Canada and Nazi Germany. On that day, the Great Depression can be said to have ended. For war, which would bring mutilation and death, would also bring jobs. There would be jobs in the munitions plants and the shipyards for women who had been kept out of the workforce by the Depression. There would be jobs in the services for men who had once ridden the freights and begged for handouts. There would be jobs even for teenagers and old men. Suddenly a country that had been unable to provide work for a fifth of its people found work for all. The chronicle of the Great Depression is a catalogue of ironies, but that is the bitterest irony of all.

  Afterword

  The first convoy

  December 10, 1939: a cold, raw Sunday in Halifax, the harbour a-bustle with wartime shipping. The five big luxury liners stand out in the soft mist, their former dazzle erased by the camouflage of war, their prows now as grey as the ocean itself.

  Here is the Empress of Britain, the vessel that brought Baldwin and Chamberlain to Canada in 1932, in the days when R.B. Bennett believed a new trade agreement could solve the country’s economic problems. Beside her rides the Duchess of Bedford, which had brought remnants of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion home. The Empress of Australia, which took Mackenzie King to the Coronation and brought George VI to Canada, forms part of the convoy as does the Monarch of Bermuda. And the oldest ship of all, the venerable four-stacker Aquitania, which had served as a troopship in the first war, is serving again in the second, reprieved from the scrap heap at the last moment.

  Half of the Canadian First Division – seventy-five hundred men, including their new commander, Major-General Andrew McNaughton – is already on board. The other half is to follow in a second convoy a week later. The Depression is winding down as Canada girds up for war.

  We must pause and consider before embarking

  on enterprises calling for the expenditure

  of large sums of money.

  – R.B. Bennett, in 1931

  Suddenly, the government was offering to pay a living wage to those who were willing to risk their lives for their country. What eighteen-year-old Fred LeBlanc was earning was scarcely a living wage; as a stock boy at Northern Electric in Montreal, he was paid five dollars a week. He joined up in the first week of September, but when he went home to Point St. Charles, his mother was aghast.

  “You silly ass!” she said. “You’re the only one in the family working.” So she sent Fred’s jobless twenty-two-year-old brother, Leon, to take Fred’s place and claim the army pay. (Leon told the army his middle name was Fred.)

  All during the Depression the LeBlanc family had existed mainly on relief. With Fred’s weekly five dollars and Leon’s army pay as a private in the 9th Field Ambulance ($1.30 a day, seven days a week) their total income would magically triple. Now Leon was aboard the Aquitania, leaving the Depression behind.

  McNaughton had his headquarters on the same ship. Through the accident of war, men who had once lived under quasi-military conditions in McNaughton’s relief camps found themselves again under his command. The government had once paid them twenty cents a day and treated them as bums. Now it was paying six and a half times as much and treating them as heroes.

  When Robert Humphrey from Scarborough, Ontario, another First Division volunteer, got his first army cheque, he couldn’t believe his eyes. He would, he said later, have liked to frame it, but he needed the money for his family. His father had been out of work for the whole of the Depression. His mother and one of his sisters were in hospital. He himself had worked only intermittently; as an office clerk, he was paid six dollars a week. Now he discovered that by joining the army – again as a clerk – he’d been handed a 50-per-cent raise by a government that once insisted it could pay for no more than subsistence.

  Bob Humphrey was one of fifty-eight thousand Canadians who rushed to the colours in the month of September, 1939. Some joined for reasons of patriotism or duty, others to escape the boredom and despair of those days. Large numbers had no choice: relief officials were loath to give “handouts” to able-bodied men of military age. But many were attracted by the money and the security.

  In addition to their daily $1.30, Humphrey, LeBlanc, and the others got free food and shelter, clothing, and medical and dent
al service (including free spectacles and false teeth if they needed them). The wives of their married friends received a separate sixty dollars a month and twelve dollars additional for each child. Nation-wide medicare and family allowances – the heritage of the Depression – were still in the future, but the armed services already had them.

  It is my firm conviction that any effort to

  raise from the Canadian people by taxation

  any sum in excess of $400 million is to put

  upon them a strain they cannot bear.

  – R.B. Bennett in opposition, 1936

  The country found it could bear the strain. At the peak of the war effort, more than two million men and women were being supported by public money, as many as had been publicly supported at the height of the Depression.

  But shipyard and munitions workers, and even office staff in the public service, were dealt with far more generously than those who had eked out their existence on relief. In Montreal, in 1933, a family of four received a weekly relief voucher worth just $4.58. In 1943, a single female junior in a government weather office was paid more than four times that amount.

  King and Bennett had been convinced that Canada did not have the resources to initiate either a more generous policy of relief or pump-priming through a program of public works. Bennett had specifically told Arthur Evans, during their acrimonious encounter in 1935, that a policy of “work and wages” was beyond the capacity of the country. Wartime spending underscored the hollowness of that faint-hearted attitude. The country had had the resources and the capacity to harness them. What had been lacking was the kind of commitment that wartime conditions made more attractive politically.

  The sudden infusion of public funds solved the unemployment problem. In the fall of 1939, the jobless rate had still exceeded 10 per cent. By the next fall it had dropped to the rock bottom figure of 4 per cent. The bidding for labour became so intense that the government was forced to put a ban on help-wanted ads.

  Four hundred million dollars had seemed a terrifying amount to Bennett. But in 1943, when the men of the first contingent finally went into action, the Canadian government spent four and a half billion dollars on the war; and everybody was better off.

  The mad desire to bring about state control

  and interference beyond all bounds makes

  one shudder.

  – Mackenzie King, commenting on

  Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933

  Once war had come, Ottawa could no longer maintain the hands-off policies that were part of its Depression philosophy. The new Ministry of Munitions and Supply under C.D. Howe was about to make the government itself Big Business. Of the seventy-five hundred men who climbed the gangplanks of the troopships that December day at Halifax, singing “Roll Out the Barrel,” at least half were raw recruits. Their equipment was shoddy, worn out, obsolete. The Lee-Enfield rifles had seen service in the last war; the old Lewis light machine-gun had yet to be replaced by the more efficient Bren. Some recruits were lucky enough to be issued with the new battledress. Others wore First War uniforms or their own trousers. Successive governments had been as niggardly with the armed forces as they had been with the unemployed.

  Now the penny-pinching was at an end. That very Monday, December 11, the press announced that federal revenues were soaring because of the increase in wartime business. The turnaround had occurred in just three months. In that period the government itself had spent forty-eight million dollars on war supplies.

  For the embarkees, the new attitude was symbolized by the gleaming silver and fresh linen on the tables in the cabin-class dining rooms where the ordinary soldiers ate. Here the meals and service were identical with those enjoyed by the privileged few who had been able to afford crossing the Atlantic in pre-war days. This time, however, the government was footing the bill and paying full fare. Young men who had never seen a fish knife now found themselves sitting down to seven-course meals served beneath crystal chandeliers.

  When Leon LeBlanc took his seat in the Aquitania’s dining room and saw the menu, he felt like a millionaire. Fish for breakfast! Duck for dinner! “Oh boy,” he thought, as white-jacketed waiters with napkins on their arms scurried to serve him, “this war’s all right.” Some of the men insisted on tipping their stewards, like old transatlantic hands.

  There was no crowd on hand to see them off; no reporters gushed over the leavetaking. The convoy left under a blanket of wartime secrecy. On the morning of the tenth, a small ceremony took place in the Aquitania’s lounge. McNaughton spoke briefly. A farewell telegram from the Prime Minister declared: “The hearts of the people of Canada are with you.” Prayers were murmured, McNaughton’s official flag (a white ensign with red maple leaves and gold fleurs-de-lis) was dedicated. Then, at noon, the leading liner, Duchess of Bedford, moved off from the jetty and the convoy got under way.

  In stating last night that the additional outlay

  for relief and employment will come to some

  50 millions, I find that I was 25 millions short.

  This is an appalling sum.…

  – Mackenzie King, in 1936

  The week’s voyage across the Atlantic cost the Canadian government more than two million dollars in fares alone. (The second convoy a week later would rack up a similar cost.) The big liners, steaming out of Halifax harbour at half-hour intervals into the calm Atlantic, were encircled by their escorts: four Canadian destroyers (two-thirds of the country’s pitiful fleet of six) and four British warships, the battleship Resolution, aircraft carrier Furious, battle cruiser Repulse, and cruiser Emerald.

  There was only one untoward incident. On the final night at sea, an American vessel, Samaria, blundered into the zigzagging convoy, striking Furious on her starboard side and Aquitania on her port. The only serious damage was done to McNaughton’s spanking-new Buick staff car. Lashed to the forward deck, it was pierced by a flying davit from a smashed lifeboat.

  The following morning, the troops crowding the decks could see the low, snow-covered hills of the Clydeside looming through a fine mist. The Canadian destroyer escort had long since returned to Halifax. Now a welcoming fleet of twelve British warships, including Hood and Warspite, took over.

  A crowd of thousands rushed to the shore as the convoy approached. No one was sure what the ships were carrying (wartime censorship was thorough), but the spectators sensed it was something important. It was generally believed that there were British soldiers aboard, returning from France for Christmas leave. Dimly, in the distance, the spectators began to see hundreds of khaki-clad figures cramming the decks of the leading liner, Aquitania. The sound of voices carried above the cry of the gulls, but it wasn’t until the vessel came near the quayside at Greenock that the people on shore realized what was happening.

  The first voice heard was distinctly Canadian. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” somebody called. “What the hell do we care now?”

  With secrecy blown, a reporter for the Daily Express wrote that “a burst of laughter sent the inquisitive gulls shrieking and circling high. Then more solemnly, and with no false modesty, the voices invoked their anthem: ‘O Canada! We stand on guard for thee.’ ”

  I tried … to get the Party to see … how

  impossible it was to solve the problem [of unemployment]

  through Government action.

  – Mackenzie King, in 1938

  It would be almost six years before the survivors of that first contingent returned to their home and native land. Like everybody else in the division, Leon LeBlanc didn’t see action until the summer of 1943; then, as a medical orderly, he saw too much. When his transport was torpedoed off the coast of Africa, he suffered burns to the chest and legs before taking part in the campaigns in Sicily and Italy (including the famous Christmas attack on Ortona) and later in the Netherlands during the 1944 Continental campaign.

  He returned home in the summer of 1945 to a different kind of country. In spite of Mackenzie King’s assurance, Big G
overnment and the Welfare State had arrived. Everybody was working. Unemployment insurance was in place. A massive amount of public money was being spent on the kind of projects that Bennett and King had dismissed as impracticable and extravagant. Leon LeBlanc’s eyes widened at the number of cars on the street. The people, he noted, “looked a lot more cheerful – not desperate like they were before.”

  Leon LeBlanc went to night school, learned the plumber’s trade, and got a job without any trouble. When he married in 1946, he was earning twenty-five dollars a week. By then Wilfrid Laurier’s words were again being invoked. To a new generation, this was indeed Canada’s Century. The Bennett buggy was an artifact from the past, the soup kitchen a folk memory, the hobo jungle as obsolete as the village smithy. Instead of existing on the dole, Canadians were about to enjoy family allowances, workmen’s compensation, and old age security – all legacies from that dark and dismal decade when compassion was a luxury and deliverance an impossible dream.

  It was over and done with – the Great Depression that had brought so much heartache and despair but had changed the political face of the nation. It had scarred an entire generation. Now it was history.

  Author’s Note

  A great many books have been published covering various aspects of the Great Depression in Canada. We have had scholarly studies; economic, political, social, and oral histories; statistical analyses; personal memoirs and reminiscences; biographies; reports, theses, and learned papers. In addition, most of the more dramatic moments of the decade, ranging from the On-to-Ottawa trek to the adventures of volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, have been recounted by the participants.

  Yet there has not been a narrative history of the Depression in all its manifestations, arranged chronologically from the summer of 1929 to the autumn of 1939. This I have attempted to provide, for it seems to me that the cumulative effect of a continuing narrative is devastating. In order to keep the story within the limits of a single volume, I have had to condense, or, in some cases, omit, certain incidents that some readers will miss. That was inevitable. And if I have enlarged on certain aspects of that dismal decade and neglected others, it is because this is a personal book to which I have brought my own enthusiasms and prejudices.