The Great Depression (36 page)

Cook’s earlier evidence that the Toronto department stores were encouraging sweatshop conditions in Quebec was confirmed by a Clarkson, Gordon study. Among its examples was that of a Quebec shoe company that paid its employees wages averaging 12.9 cents an hour. It revealed that 70 per cent of this sweated product was purchased by department stores.

By this time Stevens was the man of the hour in Canada. His committee had given the Canadian public a series of lessons in the workings of the free-enterprise system. It had dominated the news since its first sitting. Both Eaton’s and Simpson’s had scrambled to increase their employees’ wages. The tobacco firms had signed a three-year contract offering the farmers a guaranteed price. Two Montreal companies that had evaded the Quebec minimum wage laws paid four thousand dollars in compensation to their employees.

Letters of commendation poured into Stevens’s office in Ottawa, many suggesting that he become the next leader of the Conservative party. That did not seem unlikely. It was rumoured that Bennett intended to quit before the next election and accept a British peerage (over the dead body of Neville Chamberlain, one might add).

But Parliament prorogued early in July, and that meant the committee would have to be dissolved. This was, of course, unthinkable. There was more to do, more evidence to be heard. Stevens hadn’t even finished with the pesky department stores! He
persuaded Bennett to allow the work to continue by turning the committee into a royal commission, again with himself as chairman. Bennett agreed. The new sessions were planned for the following autumn, but as it turned out, Harry Stevens – impulsive Harry, intrepid Harry, rash, imprudent Harry – would not be chairing it. The defender of small business was riding for a fall, and by the time the sessions resumed, the lance that had skewered the titans of industry would be bent, if not broken, and Harry Stevens’s future clouded and obscure.

To John Diefenbaker, a budding but as yet unsuccessful Saskatchewan politician, “travelling south from the park land into the northern rim of the Palliser Triangle was like moving from the Garden of Eden to the Dead Sea.” By the summer of 1934 the drought had transformed the southern sections of the three prairie provinces into a bleak Gobi, in which forty thousand families and half a million head of livestock struggled for survival. For them there was no escape from the hot dry winds, the black blizzards of dust, or the plagues of grasshoppers that chewed up every living piece of vegetation in their path.

Because of the warm weather, the grasshoppers hatched in May, almost two weeks earlier than usual and more thickly than ever before – more thickly even than in the dreadful summer of 1933, when they had destroyed all the coarse grain in Saskatchewan. They arrived when the stalks were still short, so that they were able to gobble up the new shoots quickly, and then, with their hunger still unsatisfied, move on, executing twenty-foot jumps on their springboard legs.

There were so many grasshoppers that there was not room enough for all of them on the ground at the same time. And they ate
everything
. Their mandibles were strong enough to strip the bark from the trees. They devoured lace curtains hung out to dry on clotheslines. One man claimed they even ate the rawhide laces in his boots. They invaded cities, covering the streets so that, it was said, to walk down the sidewalk in Regina was like trampling on a million peanut shells.

They could strip an entire farm in a day, blotting out the sky in their millions, their wings flashing in the sun. The stories of their numbers are awesome. One flight, trapped by a cold wind over Lake Winnipeg, fell into the water, drowned, and was washed ashore in the millions. Their bodies covered a twenty-mile strip of beach to a depth of several feet.

The farmers, however, had learned the lessons of the previous year and were ready to do battle. They fought the grasshoppers with a witch’s brew of bran, sawdust, and sodium arsenate, and they did it on a well-organized scale, “easily the greatest thing of its kind ever seen in Canada,” in the words of James Gray.

In Alberta, 15,000 farmers picked up 15,000 tons of the poisoned bait from eighty-nine mixing stations and spread it on their fields. In Saskatchewan, 1,097 emergency committees were organized and enough bait was mixed to cover twenty-two million acres. In this way two-fifths of the grain crop in the Palliser Triangle was saved from the insects.

Alas, there wasn’t much of a grain crop to save. In some areas there was no crop at all. The drought, which had been moving north year by year from the southern United States, now struck with merciless fury. In Nebraska (where they kept statistics) the temperature soared to 110°F, breaking all records, while the humidity stood at a barely perceptible 3 per cent. In Canada (where they didn’t keep statistics), it was certainly the hottest year prairie residents had known. The Winnipeg
Free Press’s
diligent Cora Hind, travelling southwest of Regina through the drought area on the last Sunday in May, described it as “absolutely the hottest and dirtiest day I have ever been on the road in more than 30 years of crop inspection.” Hind wrote that from “Cadillac to Kincaid is a wilderness plain and simple, so far as the eye can reach on each side of the highway. Even Russian thistle seems, for a time at least, to have given up the struggle. Clouds of sharp sand strike you in the face while billows like the waves of the sea rolled on either side.”

To Konrad Istrati, who farmed south of Moose Jaw, 1934 was the year that brought “the morale of the farmers down to rock bottom.” No one had expected the drought to last this long. Surely this year the rains would return! But they didn’t. Except for a three-inch fall in June, the summer was dry. A wry parody of “Beulah Land” made the rounds:

The hot winds, travelling at speeds as high as fifty miles an hour, lashed at the soil. Filling the ditches and sloughs, covering fences, burying telephone poles for three-quarters of their height, the blowing soil, now fine as talcum, drifted across land newly abandoned by destitute farmers, covered the good loam, and smothered the newly seeded crops they had left behind. That was the year in which the prairie ritual of the summer agricultural fair had to be abandoned. How can you have an exhibition if there is nothing to exhibit?

There was no escape from the dust – the insidious, all-pervasive dust – that crept ghostlike into the tightest houses, seeping through cracks in doors or window frames or down chimneys until everything – furniture, carpets, bedspreads, window sills – was covered in a spectral mantle of grey powder. Konrad Istrati remembered an east-southeast wind that dimmed the sun for three days and covered a railway crossing and fence to within two inches of the top. When the wind changed, the great dunes shifted back to the opposite side of the crossing. In these “black blizzards,” farmers had to quit their fields because “conditions weren’t fit for man, beast or tractor.” Starving cattle ate dirt and died from mudballs in their stomachs. And still the rain did not come.

But the hail did. In mid-July a series of hailstorms lashed the three prairie provinces, causing ten million dollars’ worth of damage. Thousands of acres of wheat were shredded. Granaries were blown down, barns wrecked, horses killed. Thousands of turkeys, chickens, waterfowl, and rabbits were battered to death. Windows were shattered and telephone lines crushed as the winds whipped up to one hundred miles an hour. In one ninety-mile stretch between Stettler and Carstairs, Alberta, the hailstones lay in an eight-inch-thick solid belt before they melted.

Under such blows of nature, repeated year after year, men and women were broken. Isabel Brown was one of these. The Browns had endured a series of crop failures at their farm near Strathmore before they finally gave up in March and moved farther
north, to the vicinity of Camrose in the fertile belt. But it was too late for Mrs. Brown. By the time she made the candy for her six children she was clearly demented. The ingredients were cocoa, sugar, and a heavy dose of strychnine. Five didn’t like the taste and mercifully rejected it after a nibble or two. But the littlest, Kenneth, ate his. “I’ve just poisoned all the children,” Isabel Brown told her husband, Charles, when he came home a short time later. Then she locked herself in her bedroom. A doctor was called, and the five older children were successfully treated; but Kenneth was already in convulsions. “You’d better come out and say goodbye to Kenneth, he’s dying,” somebody called to Mrs. Brown. Silence. Then a rifle shot. A few minutes after his mother’s body was found, Kenneth Brown was also dead – twin victims of those terrible times.

It seemed as if all the furies had descended upon the pioneers of the southern prairies. Most of them had come out in the years before the war, lured by the siren call of free land – from the smoky industrial cities of England, from the American midwest, from the steppes of southeastern Europe. They had struggled through the sod hut era, broken the impossibly tough ground, doggedly worked the land, improving their lot year by year until the rolling country was transformed by substantial homes and prosperous farms. In a single generation they had changed the face of the plains and provided a legacy for their sons and daughters, only to see that legacy wiped out. Everything they had struggled for had been turned to dust. By 1934, thousands like the Browns were ready to abandon all that they had worked for. In the Depression years, a quarter of a million people simply packed up and left the sullen desert of the triangle.

Etha Munro’s family was one of these. Her father lost his farm, first to the winds, then to the creditors. They lived for a time on relief handouts – dried beans, flour, dried apples, occasionally made tolerable by gifts from Eastern Canada (Etha would always remember the thrill of delight when they received a quart jar of preserved cherries). Etha’s clothes were made from flour sacks, and she would never forget one “frock” on which the words “Quaker Flour” were faintly but indelibly stencilled. How she hated that dress! Her mother scrubbed it and dyed it, but the telltale trademark in its familiar circle never vanished.

By that time, the neighbours were all talking of a new promised land far away across the north – Peace River, Meadow Lake, Carrot River. Finally, in 1934, Etha’s parents decided that they, too, would pack up. They had lived in the same place since 1909. Now they were fleeing with no particular destination in mind – just north to some place better. They loaded what they could take onto wagons. Etha’s brother, on horseback, drove the cattle, and the dog, Towser, scampered behind.

They drove north through the desert, the road in places so badly drifted with sand and dirt they were forced to detour. Etha would always remember the sight of men working in a cemetery where the headstones had been completely covered, trying to remove the drifting soil. At last their trek ended somewhere between Biggar and North Battleford. “That country looked good to us, in fact almost like heaven after what we had left.” It was, of course, not the end of hard times. But it was a new beginning.

Like Etha Munro’s family, almost everybody in the drought country was on relief or in debt. What was there to stay for? Few could pay their taxes, which were often five years in arrears, even though municipalities were offering discounts as high as 20 per cent to those who did pay up. Schools were closing because there was no money to buy coal to heat the rooms or pay the teachers, or because the children had neither shoes nor clothing to wear to class. It was estimated that it would take thirty million dollars to bring clothing needs up to pre-Depression standards.

With the schools half empty, who was there to support education? In one district there were only seven ratepayers; the rest had fled, like the Munros. The teachers themselves were on relief, their payments in arrears even though their salaries had been cut in half. The municipality gave them IOUs, but they couldn’t get cash or credit for these, even at a 50-per-cent discount. As one rural inspector reported that year, “teachers, although they have struggled on without complaint, are beginning to show the effects of the fight in their morale, in their attitude and general outlook on life.” It was the same with the doctors: those who stayed often worked for nothing. But only those people who were seriously ill sought medical aid. It was no surprise when, after the Depression ended, Saskatchewan was the first jurisdiction on the continent to establish universal medicare.

Yet the drought was the great untold story of the early Depression years, especially in the East. The Toronto
Star
could send Gordon Sinclair to New Guinea, but it made no attempt to send a reporter through the Canadian dust bowl. In mid-September, however, two prairie newspapermen, D.B. MacRae, editor of the Regina
Leader-Post
, and R.M. Scott, assistant agricultural editor of the Winnipeg
Free Press
, following in Cora Hind’s footsteps, set out to make a thorough study of drought conditions in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. They travelled for two thousand miles, and their findings, published in a series of fourteen articles in the Sifton newspapers and reprinted in the East, left no doubt of the severity of conditions in the southern parts of both provinces.

A Chinese restaurant owner in Fillmore, Saskatchewan, summed it all up in two sentences: “No crop, no garden, no oats, no potatoes, no feed. Nothing of everything.” That was no exaggeration. Districts such as Shaunavon where farms had once produced forty bushels of wheat to the acre now produced ten. Others – Loomis was one – produced as little as two. In some districts, 95 per cent of the population was on relief; there were even areas where it was 100 per cent. Southeast of Assiniboia, in an area known as “no crop country,” the two reporters found a district where every man but one was on relief. They wanted to know the reason for the exception. “I guess he’s had no luck yet,” came the sardonic reply.