The Great Depression (3 page)

And then suddenly, like an explosion, scores of police, some on horseback, some on motorcycles with sidecars, burst from the bushes that partially screened the Parliament Buildings and drove straight at the little group, oblivious to the crowd of spectators, who scrambled or stumbled out of the way.

What followed shocked and sickened Gray. Near the end of his life, when he wrote his memoirs, the spectacle that he had witnessed remained seared on his mind. The little group tried at first to hold together as though to confront their attackers. That, of course, was impossible, for they had no weapons, not even a stick or a stone. They broke and fled in a dozen directions before the police onslaught, so that the park became the scene of a dozen small skirmishes.

One man came racing across the park directly toward Gray. A motorcycle officer saw him and roared after him. He tried desperately to escape, dodging between the trees, but the motorcycle followed every move until the victim tripped and fell. In an instant the policeman in the sidecar was out, kicking his victim brutally as he tried to get up. At last he simply lay on the grass, “trying to cover his head, and crying out as his body recoiled under the heavy boot.”

We ask, sometimes, why the German bystanders did not interfere when the Brownshirts beat up the Jews, but deep down we know the answer. As Gray wrote, “I suppose we all had some impulse to intervene, to try to stop this cruel nonsense, but we didn’t. We weren’t after all on the wretched man’s side, except that each of us could feel the boot in his guts. Instead, we turned away sickened as the broken man was stood up and led away for questioning. For a while we were moody and thoughtful, ashamed perhaps that we had not even tried to help a fellow human, shocked at the picture of a hard world beyond our experience. But presently we were playing cards and singing around the piano, and in a day or two this glimpse of
real-politik
remained only as a trace that would surface less and less often as time passed.”

The man whom Gray saw being chased and beaten was probably Jack MacDonald, the black-browed leader of the Communist party, who had been billed in advance as the speaker of the evening. The new police chief, Denny Draper, hated all communists and was determined to snuff out the party. When they tried to hire a hall, he stopped them. When they applied for permission to hold an outdoor meeting, he refused. Thus the Queen’s Park rally was technically illegal, and MacDonald, who carefully removed his glasses and thrust them into his pocket when the police erupted onto the square, knew exactly what to expect. “I haven’t even said a word, boys,” he shouted as two officers seized him.

In short, the illegal rally hadn’t officially begun. That didn’t matter to the police. MacDonald was struck in the face, kicked from behind, knocked down, and kicked again and again. “For God’s sake,” he cried, the tears running down his cheeks. “Don’t kick me!” He broke away twice, and it was probably at this point
that Gray saw him zigzagging across the park before his final capture.

From the Estevan riot of 1931 to the Vancouver post office strike of 1938, the grey years of the Depression would be marked by police overkill. The prelude to these bloodier events was the Queen’s Park “riot” of August 1929. The Toronto police made no attempt to distinguish between communists, sympathizers, and ordinary bystanders. All were treated as the enemy. One youth was manhandled for daring to question the assault. “Give it to them!” a policeman shouted. “They’re all yellow.” Others cried, “Get out and stay out! Get back to Russia!”

And so Joe Winkle, strolling through the park to watch a lawn-bowling tournament, was struck in the face by a detective’s fist. Edward Smith was told to get out of the park but before he could move was hammered three or four times by a policeman’s billy. Montagu Kellaway, a war veteran who, like Smith, didn’t move fast enough, suffered a cracked jaw. William Godfrey, who had dined with his sisters, was taking a short cut home when a policeman kicked him from behind. When he tried to protest, the policeman shouted, “Go back to Moscow!” and hit him across the mouth. As for Meyer Klig, who wasn’t an innocent bystander and was known to the police as a party member, he received a twenty-minute drubbing with rubber truncheons in the privacy of the Parliament Buildings.

It would be heartening to believe that this nightmarish attack was an inexplicable departure from the accepted rules of law and behaviour, an unexpected burst of pent-up emotion after a long summer’s day. It was nothing of the sort. It was planned with cold-blooded precision and carried out in the presence of the chief, Denny Draper, himself. And it was only one of a series of similar incidents that had the approval of the mayor, the police commission, and three of the city’s four dailies – the
Toronto Daily Star
being the exception, as it generally was in such atrocities. The usual establishment attitude was summed up in the
Globe’s
approving editorial the following morning: “
SEND THE BOLSHEVIKS BACK.”

The press insisted on terming the incident a “riot,” a peculiar name for an eruption of savagery that was planned and carried out by constituted authority. “Riot” would become the euphemism
of the Depression, applied to any parade, demonstration, rally, or work stoppage that brought out the police and threatened the established order. There would be quite literally hundreds of these so-called riots in the turbulent decade that followed. In one year alone – 1934 – forty-three were serious enough to make the pages of the Toronto newspapers.

Labour groups, churches, and ordinary citizens were outraged by the action of the police that August. There were the usual calls for an inquiry and the usual replies that none was needed. And yet, over the months that followed, the feeling began to grow that something was wrong, that the system was out of kilter, that the social order wasn’t working. Only the communists were demanding radical change, and they made few converts. It’s one of the ironies of those times that the incidents they provoked, as the Depression deepened, did not benefit them politically. What they did do was to arouse the collective conscience of the academic elite. It was the university professors, many of them committed Christians, who would eventually take action against repression and lay the groundwork for the modern welfare state. It was the police who forced them into it.

It is easy enough to look back on that buoyant and carefree summer of 1929 and ask why nobody saw trouble ahead. The signs were clear. The country was heavily overbuilt, the export market was fragile, wheat prices were falling, the stock market was impossibly high, and unemployment was rising. No one appeared to notice. The Canadians of those times seem to us to have been dancing blindfold on the lip of a precipice. They lolled in their summer cottages playing cheerful melodies – “Happy Days Are Here Again,” “Keep Your Sunny Side Up” – on scratchy gramophones. They flocked to the new talkies to see
Disraeli
, with George Arliss, or the aptly named
Gold Diggers of Broadway
. They listened to “The Goldbergs” on their Atwater-Kents and gobbled up the new murder mysteries by Dashiell Hammett and Ellery Queen. Those who had money – and some who didn’t – took a flyer on the stock market and exulted over their paper
profits. Some – Lottie Nugent, a thirty-year-old Toronto office worker, was one – invested every cent they had and fully expected to grow rich.

Lottie Nugent, the head bookkeeper at Monarch Brass in Toronto, bought on margin, as most people did. She took her life savings of three thousand dollars and used that to make small down payments on six stocks, expecting to be able to repay the balance out of profits when the stocks rose. Why should she worry? After all, her broker was her boyfriend.

Why should anyone worry? The politicians, the leading businessmen, the journalists, and every reputable banker had been forecasting that the boom would go on. On New Year’s Day, the nation was assaulted by an avalanche of predictably optimistic messages from sober business leaders of the stamp of Edward Beatty, president of the CPR, who said he’d never seen the country looking better, or S.J. Moore, president of the Bank of Nova Scotia, who predicted that “an unprecedented period of prosperity” lay ahead. The bankers confined a growing sense of unease to no more than a whisper in the fine print of their annual reports because, as one put it, “the counsels of caution have little honour with the speculative public.”

The politicians and the journalists had no qualms, and this was especially true in Western Canada, which would suffer the greatest blows from the Depression. John Brownlee, Premier of Alberta, declared that “at no time since the formation of the provinces have conditions, both in Alberta and Canada, been more auspicious.” But Brownlee’s party, the United Farmers of Alberta, would be wiped out by the economic disaster that followed. Perhaps the most jubilant editorial appeared in the New Year’s edition of the Regina
Leader
. “We believe that there is also a … greater measure of brotherhood, also a greater charitableness, than existed in the world a twelvemonth back. The finer things of life are steadily winning new appreciation and new devotion.” Charity and brotherhood would soon be in short supply when Regina teetered on the edge of bankruptcy and police bullets wounded jobless protesters in the streets.

To those of us who look back across the twentieth century at 1929 and who have seen later recessions come and go and cycles of drought appear and vanish, this mindless optimism seems incredible. But Canada had just come through some thirty-five
years of unparalleled prosperity, interrupted only by the Great War and a mild slump in the early twenties. Laurier’s famous remark about Canada’s Century was on everybody’s lips, and with good reason. From 1896 to 1912 the boom had roared on, fuelled by an unprecedented immigration explosion. During that first heady decade, as one million immigrants poured off the colonist cars to populate the empty prairies, enthusiastic magazine articles and newspaper features had underscored Laurier’s prediction.

Canadians were a cocky lot in the twenties. Certainly the Great War had exacted a sobering toll, but the country could not help being intoxicated by the successes of the Canadian Corps, symbolized by the remarkable victory at Vimy Ridge. Now a full-fledged member of the League of Nations, Canada was emerging from colonial status as a result of the Balfour Declaration of 1924, which promised eventual autonomy. We were a
nation
. We had come of age. The Twentieth Century belonged to us.

Oddly, and ironically, the proud process of nation building contributed to the economic disaster that followed. Greed and over-optimism cost Canada dear. The country was a victim of its own ambitions. We were so ecstatic over the triumph and success of the first Pacific railway that we went railway mad. One railway wasn’t enough; we had to build
three
– an extravagant and wasteful venture. The new lines often ran parallel to one another even in long stretches of unproductive land. When the railway craze ended and the new railways went broke, the government was forced to take them over. But it was the taxpayers and not the bondholders who were saddled with the crushing debt of the hybrid CNR.

Canada was in hock to strangers. Almost half the public debt and four-fifths of the private debt were in foreign hands. The West was built on borrowed money. Everything from new towns to family farms was mortgaged at interest rates that would remain fixed when wages and prices tumbled. Yet the day was coming when deflation would bump up the real rate of interest from 6 per cent to 10 per cent.

Nobody worried about that. The railway binge was followed by another building binge – railway stations and hotels, skyscrapers and factories. In 1927, to the hosannas of the people of Toronto, the golden-haired heir to the throne had, at last, opened the
Union Station, that granite and marble temple to the age of steel and steam. Now, in 1929, Torontonians were boasting that they had the largest hotel and also the tallest building in the British Empire, which really meant the tallest building in Canada, since the rest of the empire had yet to be seduced by the North American craze for skyscrapers. The changing skylines of Canadian cities hinted at prosperity and progress. A new Hotel Vancouver was rising on the West Coast, while the fashionable Empress in Victoria and the equally fashionable Chateau Laurier in Ottawa had expanded with luxurious new wings. The Royal Bank opened its splendid new head office in Montreal. The Toronto
Star
got itself a skyscraper; Eaton’s built a new art-deco store on College Street, just a block from the future site of the new temple to hockey that Conn Smythe was planning.

The building boom went too far. After the stagnant war years manufacturers scrambled to put up new plants to boost productivity through new devices and to build fat inventories. By the summer of 1929 the country was stuck with a surfeit of goods nobody wanted. The boom had distorted the employment situation. When construction stopped, jobs vanished. Even before the crash, Canadian unemployment figures were rising. Investment in an overdeveloped, overstocked country made little sense, and speculative money started to dry up. But spending increased. The automobile had touched off another orgy of expansion. New roads had to be built on borrowed money, new suburban homes financed with mortgage loans. Dazzled by prosperity, people were spending more and saving less, living beyond their means on the instalment plan.

John A. Macdonald’s National Policy, which had worked so well in the nineteenth century, was outdated. Build a railway to the Pacific, Macdonald had decided; use it to populate the West, to haul wheat to the seaports, to carry Eastern manufactured goods, protected by high tariffs, to the settlers. But the railways were overbuilt, the good land was gone, the immigration flow was down to a trickle, the Eastern goods cost too much because of the tariff, and the foreign markets were drying up. Every nation was taking the high tariff route, halting the international flow of goods and resources.

Canada lived – thrived – on its exports, chiefly wheat and newsprint and to a lesser extent hydroelectric power and base metals.
If foreigners didn’t want to buy these natural resources, the country was in jeopardy because there weren’t enough Canadians to consume them. The West provided the world with 40 per cent of its wheat, but by 1929 the wheat economy was in trouble, partly because of the drought but also because the wheat pools, which collected and marketed the farmers’ grain, refused to believe the signs and portents from abroad. The Europeans had recovered from the war and were growing their own wheat. The price dropped, but the pools held back, hoping for bigger profits, even though the elevators were bursting with unsold grain. Once again greed and optimism were Canada’s undoing. Her former customers turned to Australia and Argentina, and Canada, in spite of the poor crop in 1929, was stuck with a glut of grain.