The Great Depression (15 page)

A covey of Mounties escorted the delegation to the street as the Prime Minister delivered a parting shot, “… and don’t misrepresent me in what
I
have said to
YOU!” TO
which Ewen replied, “Have no fear, Mr. Prime Minister, I’ll give it to the people straight.”

Tom Ewen and his group of squeaky-clean British subjects realized that their demands – modest as they seem today – would be turned down. Nonetheless it was gestures like theirs that attracted thousands of sympathizers. The age of hype had scarcely begun, but the Communists were already masters at grabbing headlines. Although that probably didn’t help the party’s public image as a group of shrill, self-serving, and dangerous wild men, it did focus the spotlight on the social ills of the time.

The Communists hadn’t caused the problem, but they certainly exploited it; most of the mounting turmoil of the early Depression years – the hunger marches, the demonstrations, the confrontations with the police, the mass meetings, the street corner rough and tumble – was the result of their organizing. And the authorities, from the lowliest RCMP constable to the Prime Minister himself, played directly into their hands. It was a battle that Bennett could not win. In the end the much maligned Party would help drive him from office.

In the summer of 1931, however, Red baiting was popular – with the public, with the press, with the mayors of the major cities, with the police, and with most politicians. Undoubtedly there were many who agreed with Commissioner MacBrien that if only the party could be muzzled, the protests would stop and the Depression would go away. At the very least, its members would be prevented from embarrassing the authorities.

By August, Colonel Price’s case was prepared and the government was ready to pounce. At six o’clock on the evening of the eleventh, eighteen members of the RCMP, Ontario Provincial Police, and Toronto city police were called into the Queen’s Park office of Major-General V.A.S. Williams, the provincial police commissioner. No one had any idea of what was up until Williams spoke.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “we are going to strike a death blow at the Communist Party – we hope. We are going to arrest the leaders, we are going to search their headquarters, as well as the
homes of the men, and we are going to seize every paper and every document which will link the members with the party and the party in Russia.”

The raids that followed were carried out with military precision. Six police cars sped off to the homes of the six party leaders. Simultaneous raids took place at the party’s headquarters and the offices of the
Worker
and the Workers’ Unity League. Other raids, all carefully timed, were staged by the RCMP in Timmins, Ontario, and Vancouver.

Tim Buck’s shabby, red brick semi-detached house at 54 Delaney Crescent was empty when the police forced open the door to be greeted by a scene of lower-middle-class respectability: pet rabbits in cages chewing on grass, a piano in the living room with sheet music for several popular songs, and a Roll of Honour with a daily star against the name of each child who’d eaten his morning porridge – in addition, of course, to the inevitable portraits of Marx and Lenin.

The police tore into the house, ripping pictures from their frames, strewing clothing and bed linen, books, and even the contents of kitchen cupboards on the floor. When they left, with a mountain of documents, they didn’t bother to replace the lock torn from the door. The other homes received a similar treatment.

Nine leading Communists were charged on three counts under Section 98: with being members of an unlawful association, with being officers of that association, and also with seditious conspiracy. The Ontario attorney general told the press that the raids had come about as the result of an interview with Hugh Guthrie. Guthrie blandly denied this, claiming the federal government had nothing to do with the raids and maintaining the fiction that the matter was purely provincial. But in the trial that followed, it was the federal police who supplied the bulk of the evidence.

The Toronto press, again with the exception of the
Star
, applauded the raids and proceeded to convict the accused before any evidence was heard. The
Financial Post
declared that “the files of the Mounted Police contain all the evidence needed for the jailing or deportation of many of the chief Soviet agents.” The
Evening Telegram
tried to discredit its long-time rival, the
Star
, by describing it as “the Little Brother of the Reds.” But in Winnipeg, the
Free Press
took a saner view. “The situation the Government has to meet would still remain though every Communist now in
Canada had been deported,” the paper wrote. Jailing nine men was not going to solve the problem of a stagnant economy.

Two of the deepest pockets of destitution in Canada lay more than two thousand miles apart – in the lignite fields of Southern Saskatchewan and the coal and steel villages of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. By the summer of 1931, conditions in both these regions were explosive, waiting only for the fuse to be lit. In Saskatchewan, the explosion occurred and bloodshed resulted. In Sydney, it was snuffed out.

With the Sydney steel mill closed and scores of families close to starvation, jobless men were ready to take desperate measures. One night at a meeting of the Unemployed Workers’ Association feeling ran so high that an ex-steel worker rose to move that everyone go home, get a gun, and march on city hall to demand an increase in relief. The motion was seconded and passed before the chairman, Dan MacKay, realized what was happening. “Good God!” said MacKay. “Did they know what they were voting for?” A debate followed; parliamentary procedure was invoked, and the motion was finally rescinded.

It would not have been astonishing if it
had
passed, for relief that year did not provide bare subsistence, as George MacEachern, a twenty-six-year-old unemployed steelworker, discovered. MacEachern had been married in 1929. In 1930 he managed to get some pick-and-shovel work out of town, but by May 1931, when his first child was born, his savings were gone. To this moment he had not considered applying for relief – he’d always thought that was something for paupers. But now he swallowed his pride and went on the dole – the direct relief that R.B. Bennett opposed but that more and more communities like Sydney were dispensing in the absence of anything resembling public works. The family of three was given vouchers for just three dollars’ worth of groceries a week – nothing for rent, light, telephone, or fuel and, shockingly, nothing for milk. It would take a third of the family’s “income” just to provide milk for the new baby.

MacEachern joined the Unemployed Workers’ Association and became an active executive, first as recording secretary and
eventually as chairman. One of his first tasks was to sit on a committee to try to get milk for the children of the unemployed. One family of ten – the mother had tuberculosis – could afford only a pint of milk a day. They could get no more: the town council refused to help them and the Red Cross was out of funds. Yet because the farmers couldn’t afford to bring milk into the town, they were feeding it to the pigs.

MacEachern found some people literally starving. One man who lived in a shack was so sick his friends asked the city health officer to investigate. They were told there was nothing wrong with the invalid that warm clothes and good food wouldn’t cure. True enough; on a dollar a week, his main fare was turnips. He died insane in the Dartmouth Mental Hospital.

The death of an old man named Small at the local mission was put down by the superintendent to “malnutrition.” MacEachern’s friend Harry Morgan put it more bluntly. “He died of starvation and Christian sympathy,” he said. “That’s what killed him.” Others died of what MacEachern called “a wearing away process.” With their resistance lowered by malnutrition, they succumbed to the first disease that came along.

When MacEachern became chairman of the union, he decided to canvass the local aldermen privately to try to get an increase in the relief payments. The man who represented MacEachern’s ward, Seymour Hines, agreed to sponsor such a motion at the next council meeting. But when Hines arrived and looked down at the front row filled with officials from the steel company, he knew the motion wouldn’t pass. “They didn’t speak,” MacEachern recalled later; “they didn’t have to.” In the discussion that followed, one alderman, Dan MacDonald, charged that the unemployed wanted “quail on toast.” Another declared that if a vote of the taxpayers was taken,
all
relief would dry up. Hines’s motion was defeated; only the mover and seconder voted for it.

The union called a mass meeting in the Unemployed Workers’ Hall. Only a few council members attended. Alderman Hines again spoke in favour of an increase in relief. The next speaker, an alderman who had voted against the motion, broke down and cried. He admitted that although he was in favour of more relief and had promised to vote for it, his courage had failed when the vote was taken.

This confession threw the meeting into such an uproar that MacEachern found he couldn’t keep order. MacDonald, the man who’d made the “quail on toast” remark, managed to slip out by a side door, but another councilman, who also tried to flee, had the sleeve of his jacket torn off. The next morning the police picked up some of those who had addressed the meeting and charged them with failure to pay their poll tax. The charges were not pressed; at the station they were simply warned against “stirring up trouble” – a wishful admonition, typical of those dark years, that suggests the gap of understanding between those in authority and those in want.

In Sydney, as elsewhere, the upper classes, such as they were, seemed totally divorced from the conditions of the destitute. MacEachern discovered that in court one day when a member of the union was charged with stealing coal and fined ten dollars. At that, the defence lawyer, George Morrison, cried out in horror. “In Heaven’s name,” he asked the judge, “where do you think the man is going to get the $10? I should think if he had $10 he wouldn’t bother stealing coal. He stole it because he didn’t have any money.” After some discussion, the magistrate dropped the sum to five dollars. Morrison explained that it would be just about as difficult for the accused to get five dollars as ten. The fine was dropped to three dollars and eventually to a simple payment of costs.

In nearby Glace Bay, conditions were just as grim. Coal mining in the thirties was a form of serfdom. The miners could never move away because they were always in debt to the company store, “a jolly little system of perversion invented to overcome the inconvenience of anti-slavery laws,” in the words of Bill McNeil, who grew up there. Half a century after the Depression, McNeil, in a bitter indictment, wrote that the town was built on the cheap by companies that came in to savage the region’s natural resources.

The local stores, churches, schools, and town council were all in thrall to “the Company” – Dominion Coal – which built the roads and the cheap houses, kept the miners in debt, and blacklisted those who tried to complain. “The Company’s immense influence extended not only to the local governing councils but also to the provincial and federal governments.…” McNeil,
who was to become a CBC producer, wrote that “many children died during the Depression in Glace Bay. Nobody said they starved to death, but that was actually the reason.”

The miners were a proud bunch, unwilling to accept a handout except as a last resort. In desperation some would sneak out to the local relief station, fearful that they would be seen, following a long and circuitous route of back alleys, sometimes hiding in the shadows for hours until they could claim their bit of lard, some sugar, flour, or bread. No one wanted to be seen “carrying the sack,” as the local phrase had it – a telltale bag containing relief supplies.

Although there was coal everywhere in Glace Bay – in huge storage bins, in railway cars, and in seams that cropped out on the surface of the ground – people were invariably cold because the company police prevented them from taking it. By the end of the thirties, there wasn’t an available stick of wood left in town. Driftwood, picket fences, shingles, and clapboard, even telephone poles disappeared in the dead of night to prevent people from freezing to death. The company houses had no basements and no insulation. The walls were full of cracks. The floors were uncarpeted. The only furniture, other than a kitchen table, consisted of a few chairs and a couple of mattresses upstairs. Newspapers took the place of curtains.

Appalling as conditions were in Cape Breton, those in the Souris coalfields of Southern Saskatchewan were worse. This was lignite country. The soft, dirty coal, mined in the vicinity of Bienfait, nine miles east of Estevan on the U.S. border, was sold domestically. Mining therefore was seasonal. Until the Depression, the miners earned a year-round living by working six months in summer as farm help. But now there was no work on the farms. The big coal companies were themselves teetering on the edge of insolvency, largely because they could not compete with the cheaper strip-mining techniques introduced to the area by the Truax-Traer firm. In the face of this threat, they cut the meagre wages even lower.

The five largest companies, known as the Group, conspired to fix prices, control production limits, and handle labour problems. These were Bienfait Mines Limited, Crescent Collieries Limited, Eastern Collieries of Bienfait Limited, Western Dominion Collieries Limited, and Manitoba and Saskatchewan Coal Limited,
better known as M&S. Together with a sixth company, National Mines, where working conditions were better, they were called the Big Six.

Before the Depression the average earnings in the Souris fields were only half those paid elsewhere in Saskatchewan and Alberta. By 1931 they had fallen by an additional 21 per cent. Some miners made as little as nine dollars a week; twenty-five was considered exceptional. Those working on a tonnage basis (twenty-five cents a ton, reduced from fifty-six cents) did better than those on straight hourly wages. But to scrape together a living these men had to work fourteen to sixteen hours a day, cooped up like moles from sunrise to sunset. They rarely saw daylight.