The Great Depression (62 page)

When King blamed “the interests behind the press,” he wasn’t thinking of Goebbels’s propaganda machine in Germany but the democratic press, including McCullagh’s
Globe and Mail
, which, he believed, was behind Hepburn’s public attacks on him. He had read of Hepburn’s vitriolic outbursts only after arriving in England and was convinced that “the
Globe
has got him in its pocket.” King thought the Liberal party might have to fight the
Globe
“and its capitalistic backers.” He relished that idea: “To me it would be both an easy and an enjoyable battle to continue till the end of my life the fight for the rights of labour.”

The matter came up again on the voyage back to Canada in July. King had a conversation with Sir James Dunn, a fellow passenger and a strong Hepburn supporter. Dunn remarked that McCullagh was “far too immature and inexperienced to handle a paper like the Globe” and added that he had been in touch with Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian-born proprietor of the London
Daily Express
, presumably as a possible successor. “It is quite clear,” King confided to his diary, “that all these financial pilots are getting together to wheel [
sic
] what influence they can, through the Press.” The talk with Dunn was amiable enough, but, King added, “I put no trust, however, in these men.”

The following night, as the liner made its way up the St. Lawrence, the Prime Minister had another of his visions. In it, a magnificent star appeared, so real and strong that it woke him. In his sleep he had heard a chorus of angels in the background singing music from the concluding act of
Faust
. “It was all rapturously
beautiful. I have heard no music like it, & beheld no greater beauty.… It was a magnificent vision, a marvellous ending to this great journey, with its mission of peace from beginning to close.…”

King rose from his bed, picked up the picture of his mother that was never far from his side, and pressed it to his lips. Then, convinced that he had experienced a divine revelation, he kissed one of the roses in his bedside vase.

In Europe that summer, Hitler was busy cementing the Rome-Berlin Axis with Mussolini and preparing for war, if necessary, with both Austria and Czechoslovakia. That same year he opened at Buchenwald the first of the Nazi death camps.

On the morning of June 22, while Mackenzie King was planning his itinerary for Berlin, Annie Bailey, on a small prairie farm near Bengough, Saskatchewan, was pouring one last cup of coffee before starting to do her chores. It was not the kind of fresh, dewy morning she had been used to as a child. She found herself panting for air as the hot, amber light of the sun filtered down through the dust. In the pasture beyond the barn she could see one of the horses pawing through the drifting sand, trying vainly to uncover a blade of grass. But the only vegetation was the ubiquitous Russian thistle, the prickly, red-stemmed weed that thrived on arid conditions and branched profusely into a dome-shaped plant. It was piled ten feet high at the fence corners, held there by the weight of the sand that had blown across it and even crushed part of the wire fence itself.

The Baileys had come to the end of their resources. Their only hope was to find another home, a place to settle far from the clinging dust that had turned their world into a monochrome, like a grainy black-and-white movie. The dust lay everywhere in the fields, on the roads, and inside the unpainted buildings. There was no escape from it. It clogged your throat and nostrils, got into your hair, ground itself into your very skin. It turned lace curtains grey and settled in a thick blanket on the rusty farm machinery. The greens and golds of spring and fall, which had once delighted the prairie people, had long since been replaced by a
common drabness – mile upon mile of dun-coloured land in which no living thing, save for the everlasting thistle, moved or flourished. The animals and birds and the wild flowers that had been the prairies’ glory had retreated to richer pastures. Now the Bailey family was fleeing with them.

Mrs. Bailey had just seen her husband, George, off on a three-day journey of exploration in northern Saskatchewan to seek a farm far away from the dry belt where they hoped to make a new beginning. Now she wished she had gone with him. She could see the wind blowing swirls of dust high above fields already cracked by the intense heat. In the distance, a whirlwind of alkali from a dry lake rose hundreds of feet in the air.

With the help of Bob, the fourteen-year-old hired hand, she fed the pigs, cleaned the stalls, and did the cream separating. Then she made breakfast, dressed her small baby, Elaine, and sent her young son, Reginald, off to the same one-room school she herself had attended years before. Then she returned to the ritual of cleaning the dust from the window sills and floors, knowing that it would be back again almost as soon as she’d finished. As she went about her work, she thought ahead to the evening and the radio programs she enjoyed so much. This was a special night – the night of the heavyweight boxing match between Joe Louis, the contender, and James J. Braddock, the champion. Her husband would want all the details.

The wind blew all that day – hot and dry. By five that afternoon it had reached gale proportions. Now, as she and the others sat down to supper, a strange silence fell across the farm.

The wind suddenly died. It was, she thought, as if somebody had thrown a switch and turned it off. An hour later, as she did the dishes, young Reginald ran into the house, crying, “Come quick, Mom, there’s a big black cloud coming!”

She ran out behind him. There, on the horizon, loomed “the blackest, most terrifying cloud I had ever seen.” It was racing toward them at top speed – a shapeless monster blotting out the sky. Panic rose within her. Here she was, a woman alone on the prairie – the nearest neighbour a mile away – with a small baby and two young boys. What could she do? Where could she go? At the rate the cloud was moving, and she could see its edges literally rolling along, it would engulf them before they reached the neighbours.

“Where’s Bob?” she asked.

“Over there, fixing the pigpen.”

“Go, tell him to come quick.”

She shut the door, picked up the baby, shouted to the others to follow, and ran for the barn, which was dug into the side of the hill. The shadow of the great cloud followed close behind.

The cow stood by, waiting to be milked. She pushed the animal into the barn and shouted at the children, “Go back as far as you can! Get up on those sacks of feed and sit there!” She fastened the door shut and, still carrying Elaine, joined the others. “We’re safe here,” she told them, marvelling at the calm of her voice – a calmness she did not feel. The boys, oddly, asked no questions but sat silent and still on the sacks of grain.

By this time it was pitch dark in the barn, and she sensed that the cloud was directly overhead. She expected to be lifted up at any second and carried into the air, or to have the barn blown away around them.

She had no way of telling time, but when she thought it was safe, she groped her way to the door, opened it a crack, and peered out. It was like a vacuum outside, quiet and dark, but she could hear the milk pails and stools being hurled about. She went back to the others and told them it would soon be all over.

At last it grew light enough so that she could distinguish forms. Now she felt it safe enough to open the door onto what she would remember as “the strangest phenomenon I had ever witnessed.” A cloaking silence enveloped her. The dust hung so thick in the air it was clearly visible. And everything – land, air, and sky – was a dull grey colour. The black cloud had been saturated with dust sucked up many miles away and carried along in a sort of vacuum, to be dropped along the route. The wind had been blowing at a high altitude and the sand in the cloud had cut out the sound. That was what caused the eerie silence.

She scooped up the baby, and she and the two boys headed for the house, sinking almost to their ankles into drifts of sand. Inside, the dust was too thick to sweep up with a broom. She had to use a shovel.

When she turned on the radio to listen to the fight – the one in which Joe Louis became heavyweight champion of the world – she got only static. It was still dark, even though the evening was young. She was afraid to go to bed in case another storm struck
and so sat by the kitchen window and then lay on the couch, fully clothed and awake.

What happened that day convinced the Baileys that they had to move out of the dry belt. When George Bailey got home, he reported that conditions were far better two hundred miles to the north. And so, in the third week of July, they pulled out.

It was not an easy leave-taking. Annie Bailey had lived all her life in the same area; the home she was born in stood only a mile away. When the neighbours came down to the station to see them off, somebody said, wistfully, “Maybe it will change now and rain.” Annie looked at her husband with a question in her eyes, but he replied, bluntly, “If it does, we won’t be here to see it.” Nor were they.

The Baileys had stood it for longer than many of their fellow farmers. This was the eighth year of the drought and by far the worst. In 1937, the prairies suffered the greatest crop failure in their history. Saskatchewan was the hardest hit. It had produced 321,000 bushels of wheat in 1928; in 1937 its farmers were hard put to harvest 37,000 bushels. By fall, crop failures forced two-thirds of the province’s rural population onto the relief rolls; 290 of its 302 municipalities were forced to seek government assistance.

The effects of the drought had been cumulative. Debt built up; farmers who borrowed money in 1930 found that, with unpaid interest, they owed 50 per cent more by 1937 – and had nothing to show for it. The dust piled up as the blowing top soil grew finer and looser. The grasshopper plagues grew worse as each hot, dry spring provided the ideal climate for the egg pods laid the previous fall to open and release a swarm. An average of one pod of thirty eggs per square foot meant that each acre could hatch more than a million grasshoppers. At one point on the road between Regina and Saskatoon automobile traffic came to a standstill because the radiators were plugged with thousands of dead insects.

But even the hoppers were hard put to find sustenance. In June and July, scarcely a drop of rain fell in the drought country. In the last week of June, Mackenzie King’s barrel-chested agriculture minister, Jimmy Gardiner, the former premier of Saskatchewan, made a twenty-five-hundred-mile swing through the Palliser Triangle, accompanied by the Minister of Labour, Norman Rogers. In all that vast area they saw scarcely a blade of grass, a
haystack, or a flash of green – only a bare patchwork of grey and brown.

The wells, cisterns, ponds, and even the medium-sized lakes were dry. Johnstone Lake, a twenty-mile stretch of water southwest of Moose Jaw, was a weedy slough. Wildfowl perished for lack of water. People were forced to buy water to drink at a nickel a pail. Max Braithwaite, who taught school there during the Depression, remembered that even in Vonda, Saskatchewan, outside the Triangle, his family was rationed to eight pails a week.

The wind that year was devastating, as Mrs. Bailey discovered. John Boak, farming near Meacham, Saskatchewan, found that so much of his neighbour’s summer fallow had blown onto his fields that his crop was smothered. In many cases seeds failed to germinate. Traditionally, the province’s average yield had been fifteen bushels to the acre. In 1937 it dropped to 2.6.

By 1937 the prairie farm debt had reached half a billion dollars. Half the telephones had been taken out and more than half the automobiles were abandoned or converted to Bennett buggies. Education was hard hit because municipal tax revenues had dropped from six million a year to a million and a half. The average annual salary for a male teacher dropped from $1,186 to $536; women were paid as little as $350 and weren’t always able to collect the full amount. Some teachers virtually worked for nothing. So did the doctors. Many had long since stopped sending bills and were taking payment in kind. As Dr. John Scratch of Maymont, Saskatchewan, put it, “I pull their teeth and lance their boils and deliver their babies. They pay me what they can – a chicken here, a ham there.” That year, some medical men on the prairie reported that they were beginning to see signs of scurvy. Relief vouchers could not be used to buy fruit or fresh vegetables.

The worst victims of hunger were the million and a half cattle. With the farmers forced to switch from growing wheat to raising livestock, the cattle population had exploded. A surplus of at least three hundred thousand would now have to be sold at bankruptcy prices to the meat-packing plants. Families on relief were allowed to keep no more than four or five head.

When it finally began to rain in late July, it was too late for any crop save Russian thistle, which suddenly blanketed the drab prairie with a mantle of green. The farmers managed to harvest
well over one hundred thousand bushels of the plant to serve as subsistence fodder for the livestock.

The rain helped to settle some of the dust and to bring down temperatures that in some places had exceeded 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The downpour came as a blessed relief to everybody – or, to quote some wags, to
almost
everybody. There were those who claimed, with a straight face, that small babies who had never seen a rainstorm cried out in fright when the unaccustomed water dropped from the sky. It could even have been true.

In times of economic crisis, strong or demagogic leaders tend to emerge and to entrench themselves through extra-legal means. It happened not only in Europe during the Depression but also in other parts of the world – in the sovereign state of Louisiana in 1935, and in Brazil in 1937. It also happened in Canada.

In Alberta, William Aberhart tried to control the banks, the financial institutions, the police, and the press. In Quebec, Maurice Duplessis passed a law that gave him the power to suppress any opinion he might happen to dislike. Aberhart’s legislation was quickly and properly squelched by Ottawa. The scandal is that the federal government allowed Duplessis a free hand.