The Great Depression (11 page)

His brusqueness masked his inner shyness. Manion wrote that “personally he can be one of the most lovable and attractive leaders when in the mood – which is about half the time.” Tommy Douglas, who had thought of Bennett as a blustering
bully, grew to admire him after he entered the House in 1935. Douglas wrote that Bennett “had a human side which he kept from the public.” He was kind to Douglas and his CCF colleague M.J. Coldwell, congratulated both on their maiden speeches, got Douglas books on parliamentary procedure, and often called him over for a chat. But that was after Bennett was no longer prime minister and had had a change of heart. “I think he was a man who hadn’t had close contact with people,” Douglas wrote. “Consequently he didn’t know people and was shy of them.”

Certainly he had difficulty communicating. It rarely occurred to him to praise his colleagues in his public addresses. As the former Tory leader Arthur Meighen put it, drily: “Platitudes of affection do not pertain to him.” Meighen went on to say that “on the rough, ruthless battlefields of life, he has triumphed, and he depends, and does not fear to depend upon his achievements for his following and his fame.”

Both Manion and Meighen in their memoirs seem to be struggling to say something good about their colleague – something that will mask their own ambivalence. For he was a difficult man to love and an even more difficult man to know – pugnacious, impulsive, sometimes bullying, and subject to outbursts of anger. Unlike Mackenzie King, who wallowed in the praise even of those he knew to be sycophants, Bennett did not seek affection, public or private. His many philanthropies were unpublicized. Few knew that he was putting a good many young men through college, or that in answer to a stream of pleading letters, he was sending out two- and five-dollar bills to people in need.

He remained a bachelor to the end, though he knew many women and enjoyed their company. His boyhood friend Lord Beaverbrook described his attitude to marriage as “quaint.” A wife, Bennett had told him, “must while being domestic in her tastes have such large sympathies and mental qualities as to be able to enter into the ambitions and hopes of her husband, whatever they may be.…” As Beaverbrook remarked, that was a big order. “Bennett was, it seems, one of those men who liked women but feared that he might be dominated by a wife or, perhaps, brought to unhappiness through some clash in temperament.”

Domination, of course, he could not abide. The headstrong prime minister under a woman’s thumb?
Unthinkable!
That was Bennett’s tragedy, and the country’s. The softening influence of a
consort might have made R.B. Bennett more tractable. A domestic
mise en scène
could have had a liberating influence on a man who, for all of his career, had nobody to come home to. It is ironic that, in the end, this perplexing and often misunderstood politician should have been thwarted and made over, not by a wife or a mistress or a political opponent, but by the times themselves.

The Communists came off very badly in the federal election, especially for a party that was considered strong enough to launch a successful revolution against the entrenched forces of capitalism. In the nine ridings the party contested, it gained a mere 7,601 votes out of a total of 168,540.

In spite of this, the authorities, especially in Ontario, continued to treat the party as a threat to established order. A month after the election, Charlie Sims, a hard-line communist, was sent to Sudbury to try to organize the employees of the International Nickel Company. At a public meeting on a Sunday night, Sims, who had survived previous beatings at the hands of the Toronto police, was hauled off his soapbox, arrested, and charged with unlawful public assembly, even though a permit wasn’t required to hold a public meeting in Sudbury. The city council had got around that difficulty by rushing through a new by-law empowering the police to break up
any
meeting of three or more persons. This transparent device could never have survived in court, and Sims and three colleagues were quickly released, but not before the judge had delivered a tongue-lashing in which he declared, “You foreigners should go back to the land you came from.…”

From Port Arthur, where the police raided the party’s headquarters, seizing files, smashing typewriters and furniture, to Niagara Falls, where a large mob led by Red Hill, the Niagara daredevil, broke up a communist-sponsored meeting, the attacks continued. The charges were often trumped up. In Toronto, two party members were arrested for conducting a raffle in aid of the unemployed. Police tried to plant a bottle of cheap wine in the Toronto headquarters in a vain attempt to arrest some of the comrades on liquor charges. The plant was discovered; but later that month authorities padlocked the Bay Street offices on the
grounds they constituted a firetrap. The offices were on the top floor. Tenants on the lower floors, who continued in business unmolested, were apparently considered fireproof.

One of the uglier incidents that autumn took place during a street corner meeting in support of Tim Buck, who was running in the civic election for Board of Control. The city police under Inspector Douglas Marshall broke it up and seized two of Buck’s supporters, Oscar Ryan and the veteran Tom Ewen (also known as McEwen), and threw them into the back of a police car.

“We’ll fix you sons of bitches,” Marshall told them. “We’ll drive you off the streets.”

When Ryan expostulated that they had every right to hold a street meeting, Marshall cried, “Shut that bastard’s mouth!” whereupon a hefty sergeant known as the Terror of No. 2 Station pushed his elbow into Ryan’s face.

At the station, according to evidence later sworn to by the pair, Marshall seized Ryan, threw him to the floor, and kicked him so hard that he lost several of his front teeth. In the yard outside, Ewen was felled by a blow to the face, then punched, kicked, and dragged into the station by one leg. There he was “attacked with savage blows on his face and sharp kicks on the body by the Police.”

Ewen was so badly injured that he vomited blood and had to be rushed to the hospital. The two comrades who bailed him out the next morning described his face as “a mass of wounds, his left nostril still swollen and clotted with blood and stuffed with gauze and his eye black.” He spent a week in bed recovering.

That same fall, the Nazi party in Germany made staggering gains in the federal election. As Hitler rose to power, Canadians became aware of the bullying tactics of his storm troops, who broke up anti-Nazi street corner meetings and beat up the speakers. Later, when Hitler took office and the policy of police suppression became official, it was fashionable in Canada to decry these brutal attacks on freedom of speech or assembly. It occurred to only a few – a small coterie of university professors in Montreal and Toronto and the corporal’s guard of progressive politicians under J.S. Woodsworth – that the same thing had been going on in parts of Canada for some time before the Nazi party began to make headlines in Europe.

R.B. Bennett, meanwhile, was contemplating more orthodox methods of dealing with the growing Depression. Shortly after the election he assembled his Cabinet, whose senior members with only two exceptions were closely allied with the Eastern financial establishment. These included his predecessor, Arthur Meighen; his deputy, Sir George Perley, a bank director and railway executive; his Minister of National Revenue, E.B. Ryckman, who was forced to shuck off a portfolio of directorships before joining the Cabinet; and his Secretary of State, C.H. Cahan, a wealthy St. James Street lawyer with wide business interests, supposedly backed by Lord Atholstan, publisher of the
Montreal Star
. The two exceptions were his Minister of Railways, R.J. Manion of Port Arthur, and his Minister of Trade and Commerce, H.H. “Harry” Stevens, an accountant and broker from Vancouver.

In the words of one political commentator, “the new government group was dominated by eastern, urban, creditor and capitalist interests to a greater degree than any previous government.” This was the Cabinet that Bennett picked to deal with restless Westerners, drought-stricken farmers, and the growing army of jobless men drifting back and forth across the country on freight cars.

True to his promise, Bennett called a fall session of Parliament six weeks after the election to face the burgeoning crisis. He had already, by order-in-council, brought foreign immigration to a virtual halt. Now he introduced two measures designed to soften the economic blows under which the country was reeling and also, no doubt, to maintain the image of the Prime Minister as a man of action.

Both measures were rushed through Parliament without much forethought, study, or planning. The first, the Unemployment Relief Act of 1930, provided twenty million dollars for assistance to the unemployed, a sum then considered enormous because it was ten times the amount spent for the entire decade of the twenties. (The full federal budget for that year was less than five hundred million.) Mackenzie King was predictably appalled at this extravagance. “It is a big price to pay for a Tory victory,” he wrote. “It is a sort of wholesale purchase.… It makes one cynical to see the little regard for the public money.” As events were to prove, however, this was no more than a fraction of the amount required
to alleviate the country’s misery. Bennett couldn’t stomach the idea of handouts to the dispossessed, however. Four-fifths of the money was to be for “work not charity … to provide employment for wages, not doles.”

Yet Bennett had no idea how the money was to be spent and, apparently, didn’t want to know. It was shovelled out to any municipality that could prove it had a project that would create jobs. Ottawa paid a miserly quarter of the cost, the province paid half, and the municipality paid the rest. But when the municipalities controlled the purse strings it was an open invitation to inefficiency, patronage, and graft.

Bennett ignored this because, like King, he didn’t believe the Depression would last. Unemployment had always been seasonal; the government thought it would end by spring. The relief act was a mere stopgap, due to expire on March 31, 1931. At that point there were still two million dollars left in the kitty because some towns and cities couldn’t afford to spend a nickel on public works, even with provincial and federal help.

Ottawa had reluctantly set aside a fifth of the relief money, four million dollars, for direct relief – the hated dole – in those regions where public works were impracticable. But again the government had no idea how the money was to be spent. Much of it would be handled by private charities, although relief committees were being organized haphazardly across the country. There were then only a few score of trained social workers in Canada, all struggling with immense case loads. In September, one described their dilemma: “One meets some Workers of whom one thinks – ‘How old she looks! I never before thought of her as being old’ … many of us have grown a bit brittle and require ‘handling’ as to our tempers. Can you see your cherished standards, one by one, go by the board; can your sympathies be torn day after day by tragedies of which most of the rest of the city remain unheeding; can you stand day after day in the position of being the only person to whom these families have to turn and yet be absolutely unable to relieve their anxiety and suffering?”

On September 16, a week after he introduced the relief bill, Bennett made good on his election promise to raise the protective tariff. He went even further than his most protectionist supporters could have hoped for, clamping duties as high as 50 per cent on 180 items ranging from butter, eggs, wheat, and oats to textiles,
paper products, and kitchen ware. It was a monumental revision, the most drastic and sweeping since the first customs duties were enacted in 1859. Bennett claimed that the industries thus protected would take on an additional twenty-five thousand employees. But again, nobody had done any homework. There was apparently no time to hold public hearings or to investigate the industries that would be affected. How the government had decided which tariffs to raise, and why, remained a mystery.

As before, these measures were seen as temporary solutions to a short-term problem. What the Prime Minister and his Eastern capitalist supporters failed to realize was that while the new tariffs might help the manufacturers of Central Canada, they did nothing for those Canadians who depended on the export market – the producers of those traditional Canadian staples, wheat, fish, and pulpwood, the farmers and the fishermen who were the hardest hit by the slump. In fact, it could be argued that the tough tariff policy inhibited trade because it made some of Canada’s best customers less eager to buy her raw materials.

It was clear by December that it was no longer possible to grow grain for profit on the prairies. In a single year, the price of No. 1 Northern wheat had dropped from $1.43 to 60 cents a bushel. It cost more than that to produce.

By this time some of the nation’s leaders had replaced the word “recession” with the stronger “depression.” Sir Henry Thornton, president of the CNR, who at the start of the New Year had dismissed the downturn as a “passing phase,” used the dreaded word in a conversation with Mackenzie King in August, thus managing to execute a 180-degree turn in six months. “He fears a difficult winter ahead & a world depression lasting some time,” King noted.

King took some personal comfort from those words. The CNR president’s gloomy forecast, he confided to his diary, “reveals wisdom of not having waited till next year.” The former prime minister was already weaving a tissue of myth that he had shrewdly foreseen the accelerating disaster and got out while the going was good. Like so many of his fellow Canadians that fall, the parsimonious King took a careful look at his own finances. Unlike most, he saw that he had “nothing to fear.”

Others less fortunate were making their voices heard. In Vancouver, where a crowd of fifteen hundred protesters had been
dispersed by police batons, the mayor was forced to declare a state of emergency when he discovered that all the money earmarked for relief had been exhausted. “The situation in Vancouver is beyond our control,” the city clerk wired to the Prime Minister on New Year’s Eve. The city, he reported, could no longer handle its 25-per-cent share of jobless relief. “There are thousands of people in this city who are hungry and are in need of clothing and shelter.” To this cry for help he added a note of genuine bafflement that citizens could be so hard up when “there is in this Dominion enough of all these things that the unemployed need.” It was a sentiment that would be voiced again and again: the stores and the factories were full to overflowing; why then were people starving and in rags?