The Great Depression (26 page)

His desk was flooded with telegrams, letters, and resolutions from organizations, business leaders, political supporters, and ordinary working people detailing specific cases of need. To all these Bennett had the same answer – the one he had given the previous year to the town clerk of Glace Bay who wrote to ask for immediate aid because municipal relief had broken down and “semi-starvation” existed. Bennett replied personally with what had become a form letter: “Unemployment relief is the primary responsibility of the municipality and secondly that of the province.…” Ottawa, in short, could not directly help.

It was an easy out for Bennett – simply dumping the problem on such already overburdened municipalities as Sydney and Glace Bay, whose limited resources could not cope with problems brought on when the mines laid off wage-earners. For example, Sydney had millions of gallons of water available but declined to give any of it away to landlords, who, in turn, couldn’t afford to pay the water rates because poor tenants could not afford to pay their rent.

John Dafoe’s editorial of January 12, 1933, lit into the government for this shrugging off of responsibility. “Its record has shown a tardiness and half heartedness even in co-operating with
the provinces, which has been frequently condemned, even by friends of the Government.” One figure – automobile production, a notable economic bellwether – made it clear that Canada had
not
rounded the corner. In 1929, new car sales had outnumbered bicycle sales by a ratio of five to one. But people could no longer afford new cars. By 1933, the ratio had sunk to less than two to one.

From coast to coast, Canada seethed with dissension. Seven jobless men went to jail in Edmonton for taking part in a hunger march. Fourteen farmers received suspended sentences for their part in a riot in Arborg, Manitoba, earlier in the winter – a riot brought on by a forced tax sale. Twenty-two men were jailed for a riot in a Saskatoon relief camp that caused the death of an RCMP inspector. Four more were arrested in Nelson, B.C., for another jobless parade. The call for a national system of non-contributory unemployment insurance reached a crescendo. One thousand men and women marched on the Manitoba legislature demanding it. Two hundred paraded in Calgary. Hundreds mobbed the city hall in Victoria. But unemployment insurance was no panacea; though it might help mitigate a future depression, it was too late for it to be of much use in this one. Besides, Bennett had already made his own position clear: “No government with which I am associated will ever establish a system of non-contributory unemployment insurance.”

By May, having used up all their savings, thousands more went on the dole, swelling the relief rolls to a million and a half. They went reluctantly because even when the voucher system was adopted by most municipalities, the stigma of being a “reliefer” was clearly advertised. As Frank Croft remembered, “merchants couldn’t see why they should wrap shoe boxes or clothing when the customer was in no condition to complain. When you saw a man with his coat over his arm it was a good bet that he was either on his way to a pawnshop or had just turned in a relief voucher for it.”

With their nest-egg gone and nothing more coming in, the newly destitute were forced to make what was to them a shameful, last-ditch decision. One such was a Toronto businessman, Arthur Lendrum, who for the past two years had watched his small company drift into bankruptcy. Borrowed money, together with an income now rapidly dwindling, had for a time helped him make ends meet. But when the holders of the second mortgage on his home foreclosed,
he and his family were forced to move to a low-rent district. The day soon came when the Lendrums’ entire funds amounted to only fifteen dollars. “It’s no use trying to keep up any longer, Arthur,” his wife told him. “We’ll have to apply for relief.”

Lendrum kept putting it off, hoping something would turn up. It never did. At last, on a gloomy Thursday afternoon at the end of January, “goaded by the spectre of want,” he asked for help.

The following afternoon an inspector called and took some notes. He asked to see Lendrum’s bank passbook, checked over the electrical equipment in the house – washing machine, floor polisher, vacuum cleaner – examined the scanty supply of coal, and departed “knowing more about our private affairs than our relatives did.” He told Mrs. Lendrum that her husband should go to the House of Industry (it had been given that name when used as a poor house) where relief supplies and vouchers were dispensed.

Lendrum couldn’t bring himself to take this final, irreversible step. That would be an admission that he, who had been a successful small businessman, earning a good independent living, had failed. He vacillated through the weekend. Finally, on Monday he realized he had no choice, for the family was faced with starvation. That afternoon he mustered his courage and walked down to Elm Street, feeling the way a dog does when it puts its tail between its legs.

When he reached the building, he felt lost and disoriented. He had no idea what the procedure was. He spotted a man standing near the doorway. “What do I do now?” he asked.

“Take a seat on the benches there,” came the reply.

Lendrum looked inside. The first row of benches was full but there was some room in the second row. He made his way between the rows, feeling horribly mortified but then a little relieved when he realized that a sort of order prevailed and that no one was staring at him.

As he took his seat he looked about him. He felt conspicuously well dressed. If only his overcoat was shabbier, his hat a little slouchier! Yet nobody took any notice. He turned to an elderly man sitting next to him.

“I never thought it would come to this,” he said in a low voice.

“Not me neither,” came the reply. It was a mild voice, modulated and pleasing, the kind of voice one might expect to hear from a clergyman of ripe experience. In it Lendrum detected a
note of gentle resignation. The man was an old-timer, he learned; he’d been coming to the House of Industry for months and knew the ropes.

“How do they run things?” Lendrum asked.

“We wait here till there’s room in that other place,” his new companion told him, jerking a thumb towards a door at the end of the room. “Your first time, ain’t it? Oh, well, there’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

He explained that they would eventually be sent to a second room “where there’s a bunch of gals sitting at tables.” You would give them your name and address, he said, “and then stand back until your address is called. Then you goes up to the girl and gets your tickets. I’ll show you how it’s done.”

Lendrum looked about him at men and women presenting tickets to others who stood in front of tall piles of parcels stacked against the walls.

“Them as has families gets the large parcels,” his friend told him. “But if there’s only two of you, like me and the missus, you gets the small parcel. I come every ten days but if you has a family you come in every week.”

Lendrum watched curiously, taking in the faces of the relief recipients. Most, he noted, brightened up when they were given their parcel. Many smiled; some joked a little lamely. Others never changed expression. They had brought shopping bags, suitcases, pieces of luggage, or sacks, which they slung over their shoulders.

The lines moved, row by row, up the stairs to a second waiting room, crowded with benches. Lendrum’s row filed in and took seats. At the far end was another door with a man standing in front who called out “next two rows” at ten-minute intervals. As the people in these rows stood up and shuffled forward, their places were taken by others from the downstairs waiting room.

A peculiar scene, Lendrum thought. It reminded him of wartime and refugee queues except that there was no evidence of grief or wounds, no bedlam of chattering tongues. The crowd was largely male, with a few women and one or two children; a good many had foreign accents. There was one black.

Over the whole assembly solid Canadian order reigned supreme. There was a strange quiet. Most of the supplicants had come alone. They knew nobody, nobody knew them; and so they
sat, silently waiting their turn. Those who did speak conversed in low tones, as in a church. All waited expectantly for the man at the door to say: “Next two rows.”

Lendrum chanced a quiet remark to a man on his right who seemed better dressed than the average.

“When’s it all going to end?” he asked. It was a question that thousands like him were asking that year, and the answer was always the same.

“Nobody seems to know,” the man replied quietly. He looked at Lendrum with puzzled eyes and then blurted out a brief confession: “I kept going as long as I could but now there’s no jobs to be had anymore. It’s getting worse. When I first came here, there wasn’t the crowd there is now. Something ought to be done about getting money in circulation again. Your first time here?”

Lendrum nodded.

“Oh, you needn’t worry about that. We’re all alike.”

All alike!
Lendrum murmured to himself. There they all were, sitting with bowed shoulders on the backless benches – business executives, labourers, mechanics, artisans, housewives, salesmen, accountants, clerks, and tramps – all social and industrial rank gone, everybody reduced to the primary level of want, equality established by need.

“The Government ought to do something,” somebody else said, breaking the silence. Lendrum had heard that line before and would hear it again. Yet he also knew that if anyone in this anonymous crowd were to stand up and denounce the system he would promptly be called a Red and ejected.

“Next two rows,” the doorman called.

Two minutes later Lendrum’s group passed through the doorway and found themselves in an inner courtyard. Lendrum noticed a rough booth labelled “Exchanges” and assumed it was for those who wished to substitute sago for salmon or rolled oats for rice. At the far end of the courtyard, in another large room, long lines of young women sat at tables and desks with thousands of cards stacked in front of them and placards marked with letters of the alphabet strung on wires above them. He went to the table marked by an L and after a few minutes managed to get the girl’s attention. He gave her his name and address and the names and ages of his wife and two daughters.

“Get a declaration that you have no liquor permit and register at Lombard Street,” the girl told him. “Do this before you come back next week. Please stand back until your name is called.”

Lendrum joined the crowd – all standing, waiting to be called. A man ahead of him left empty-handed. “The inspector says you’re not entitled to relief,” the girl told him. “You made a three-dollar purchase on your liquor permit the day before he called.”

Then, from the far end of the room, he heard not his name but his address. He was given some white squares of paper and a ticket the size of a cash register receipt.

“What about coal?” he asked.

“The inspector says you don’t need any right away.”

He made his way, coal-less, back through the labyrinth of rooms to the first waiting room.

“How do you work this?” he asked the ticket taker.

“Keep those” – indicating vouchers for milk, butter, and bread. “I’ll take this ticket; now get your parcels there. Large,” he told his assistant, and in twenty seconds, Lendrum’s arms were filled from the various piles.

He carried this armful for half a mile to the office of a friend where he’d left his club bag, wondering all the time how many passersby recognized the parcels and asked themselves how it could be that a well-dressed man should get so far down on his luck. At home, he showed his wife the vouchers.

“What will the milkman say?” she asked in dismay.

But the milkman was used to it. “Nothing to be ashamed of, going on relief,” he told her, and he showed her a sheaf of similar vouchers from her district. “I never let on,” he explained.

By the time the baker and the grocer had received their vouchers, the Lendrum family had begun to feel like old hands. Mrs. Lendrum stopped blushing and accepted her lot.

“Who gives a darn anyway,” she said to her husband.

All across the country, families like the Lendrums were facing similar crises and undergoing the difficult and often searing experience of applying for public charity. It mattered little to those on relief that the major banks were again announcing that the
worst was over and that there was “a definite increase in business activity,” to quote the Bank of Nova Scotia newsletter. That was no comfort to those who were forced to cut short a promising career, a high school or university education, or a chance to marry and raise a family.

The national marriage rate decreased annually in the early years of the Depression – from 77,000 in 1929 to 62,000 in 1932. Marrying was a hazardous business for those with no resources; the sight of a teenaged couple with a child was unusual enough to cause heads to turn, as Main Johnson discovered in the summer of 1933. Johnson, the editor of the Toronto
Star Weekly
, was hurrying down Yonge Street one hot, dusty noon hour when he was stopped in his tracks by an unaccustomed scene. Coming along the street, his hat tilted back on his head, was a telegraph messenger boy. Beside him walked a slim girl in a pink frock, brown hair blowing about her face. On the boy’s shoulders was a baby. Johnson felt tears in his eyes as he watched them pass. He saw others stop and look back at the three happy children, oblivious to the glum faces around them. He went on to his luncheon appointment but couldn’t get the picture out of his mind.

That afternoon, Johnson called in his best feature writer, Gregory Clark, and assigned him to find the couple and write about them. “Why do they look so happy?” he asked Clark. “Happiness isn’t so plentiful nowadays. Yet here are two children, already launched on the adventures of life, in a stormy time like this, and if I ever saw joy, I saw it on Yonge Street at noon today.”

Clark found the couple through the telegraph company. The
Star Weekly
, then a full-size broadsheet, devoted the entire front page of its general section to a story and pictures about Clara and Harry Watson, who had met at a soda fountain when he was unemployed and she was an eight-dollar-a-week clerk at Simpson’s. They had married on impulse after Harry was hired as a messenger boy at three cents a message. She was seventeen; he was eighteen. They had no savings. The wedding supper was an ice cream soda at a Yonge Street fountain. Their first home, which Clark described as “their home of joy,” consisted of a ten-dollar-a-month flat on Dupont Street. When the baby came, Clara had to quit her job.