The government in St. John’s was a facade. The dominion’s nominal democracy was effectively dysfunctional. The details of the breakdown would have been vague to anyone who wasn’t closely following the complicated political contortions at the time. And to make matters worse, the people of the Burin were more attuned to events in Canada and America and St. Pierre. That was where most of their news came from. Those places mattered more than St. John’s and its crazy politicians.
It would soon become clear that those places, too, were irrelevant. If the people of the Burin were to survive, they’d have to build a future for themselves. And in the long run, they would have to learn to fight for basic rights—dignity and health and life itself.
16.
ST. JOHN’S, NEWFOUNDLAND
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1932
LATE AFTERNOON
THE fist came out of nowhere. Sir Richard Squires was sure it was a fist. He hoped it was a fist and not something potentially more lethal. And now the prime minister of Newfoundland was being helped to his seat, no longer sure where he was or where he was going. This much he now had in common with the common people.4
The impact of a fist on one’s face—the unique sensation of soft tissue mashed between the moving bone of knuckles and the rigid bone of jaw or teeth or skull—can be, for someone who is introspective, a moment of enlightenment.
It isn’t painful, not right away, but it is disorienting. And in the uncertainty between initial confusion and the eventual, inevitable pain and outrage, there is a flash of objectivity about what could have led to this surprise—perhaps a moment of educational self-doubt.
It must be said, however, that introspection and self-doubt are not necessarily assets in a successful political career. And in the long, miraculous political career of Sir Richard Anderson Squires, either quality would have been a handicap.
It is tempting to speculate that on that late Thursday afternoon, Sir Richard might have entertained a brief reflection on the corruption of his own behaviour, his dubious leadership over the past four years of this, his second term as prime minister of the Dominion of Newfoundland.
It is more likely that his resolute self-righteousness remained unshaken. And he might legitimately have harked back to his finer moments during the months of November and December 1929. For surely those were the days when he, like many other Newfoundlanders, had revealed a capacity for decisive, precise, unselfish and effective action in the face of a crisis—a crisis not of his design. An earthquake. A tsunami. A natural disaster.
It would be too much to expect that this reflection would have led him, or anybody else in the Liberal caucus there in that sanctuary of democracy, the executive council chamber in the courthouse on Duckworth Street, to ask a relevant question: Where had the qualities of leadership, so ably demonstrated in those tragic days, been hiding in the years since then? Years of disaster of a different kind. No less a humanitarian crisis. Man-made, this time. Politically driven. No less catastrophic.
Sir Richard’s hand was bleeding and now his head was sore, and he was, to be quite truthful, uncertain and afraid.
THERE was no real mystery about the fist. The man attached to it—never specifically identified but possibly named McGrath, Furlong or Kelly5—had been trying to get the attention of someone in the government for days. He’d been patient, right up until he, or someone with him, finally ripped a piece of banister from the stairway outside the chamber, where they’d been waiting all afternoon, and smashed it through the window in the entranceway. After which, he and his fellows barged into the room, where the Liberal Party was holding a private caucus behind locked doors.
The sight of this group of relatively wealthy politicians, their shocked surprise and the disdain in their expressions, would have challenged the limits of his patience. He was without work. He was living on $1.80 a month. Dole was often provided in the form of a voucher with which he could acquire food from a list prepared by government. Flour. Fatback pork. Beans. Cornmeal. Split peas. Cocoa. Twelve ounces of cocoa for a month. These cockroaches. How long would one of these last on $1.80 a month? Two pounds of beans?
Peter Cashin, until ten days earlier, was a member of this odious assembly of crooks, their finance minister, until the burden of their infamy became too much even for him—and he quit. And then he blew the whistle on their corruption.
Sir Richard had seemed undaunted by the defection of his finance minister and the political crisis that followed, and he seemed undaunted now in the presence of this motley gang of agitators. But as he raised a hand to wag a finger, opened his gob to remonstrate . . . well, it all became too much. And suddenly Sir Richard was staggering, grabbing on to something, and now there was blood on his hand and he was being supported by his accomplices.
There could be no backing down now. Now was the time to escalate the level of the threat and to reinforce the principal demand: the dole must be increased at once. Or else.
Sir Richard, hand swaddled, face bruised, huddled briefly with his mates. The conversation was intense, but with surprising speed, it seemed to reach a resolution. We can safely presume that much because of what happened shortly after his consciousness returned, and with it his renowned instinct for political survival.
He capitulated.
Sir Richard rose to his feet, stepped forward, faced his adversaries. And he quietly agreed to bring forward a motion that would increase the dole—mind you, to nowhere near what a body needed to survive. But every little bit was a penny further away from the ugly, constant presence of starvation.
A CRISIS can be a godsend, especially a crisis caused by a natural disaster, one in which human responses are uncompromised by feelings of responsibility and blame—humanity united against nature in a struggle to survive. In man-made catastrophes, it’s man against man. A lot of energy and talent and material wasted in conflict, finger pointing, guilt and recrimination.
That was the political beauty of the crisis of November 1929, when cruel nature broke the communities of the south coast, tried to break the people but failed because the people came together, and not just the people of the Burin—all of Newfoundland; all of Canada; all of the mother country, England; and all of the adopted country for so many Newfoundlanders, the United States. People everywhere united by this reminder of their vulnerability, the common peril. Nature.
Faced with an assault by nature, humanity has no alternative but to mobilize a unified response. This is when the better aspects of humanity prevail, when we must find within ourselves the qualities that God withheld from heartless Mother Nature—generosity and mercy. And we survive if we succeed. We survive as individuals, as communities, as a species.
The immediate political response in November 1929 had been impressive. The resilience of the communities affected had been inspirational. Ordinary people in Point au Gaul, Taylor’s Bay, Lord’s Cove, St. Lawrence, Kelly’s Cove, Port au Bras—picking up the pieces of their lives, literally, helping one another through grief and hunger and exposure to the sudden onset of relentless winter weather. Ordinary people throughout Newfoundland and Canada and England and America, digging into depleted pockets and coming up with more than $250,000 in contributions to the relief effort.6 Inspirational generosity. And above it all, inspirational leadership.
But that was yesterday. Nobody in government in 1929 could have anticipated yet another natural calamity—the total failure of the fishery. And by 1930, there was an overarching preoccupation with new challenges, an awareness of the possibility of a new catastrophe, a man-made calamity. The Dominion of Newfoundland was, for all practical purposes, nearly bankrupt—a looming prospect that was exacerbated by political paralysis and would quickly overwhelm whatever humanitarian concern remained for the particular challenges of small places in the hinterlands and bays.
The political and commercial elites of Newfoundland, almost all concentrated in St. John’s, should have seen that violent confrontation in the executive council chamber coming. They s
urely would have understood the origins of this man-made fiscal crisis. They would have known where it was coming from and where it would terminate if it weren’t stopped.
And they might have stopped it because they understood it, and they understood it because, in so many ways, they had caused it. But unlike the response to a natural calamity, the reaction to a man-made disaster is rarely unified because there is blame, recrimination, defensiveness. It is war. Maybe minor, metaphorical and bloodless. But as war is the supreme man-made calamity, all lesser calamities of human failure are a form of war.
17.
IN Newfoundland by early 1931, there were two new disasters looming. One was caused by nature, perhaps a consequence of the tsunami.7 Nobody seems to be entirely sure. But for years after the tsunami, the fishery went flat all around the island country. There was hardly an outport that was unaffected. Nowhere were the effects more vicious than on the Burin Peninsula, however, where people had been deprived by the tsunami of the basic necessities of survival.
They would have still been struggling even if the times were prosperous. No boats, no fishing gear. In many cases, they were still striving to establish homes, grieving for lost and ailing kin. Spirits, if not broken, badly crippled.
All along the coast, people like Patrick Rennie, Thomas Fudge, David Hepditch, standing on the shore of what had been a workplace, the senseless ocean now lapping at their feet like a large domestic animal that had misbehaved, gone berserk and wrecked the house, killed the children and the parents and the grandparents, and was now remorseful. But not so remorseful that it could offer compensation. No. The fish were gone, and the way they saw it, the collateral catastrophe was because of that brief rampage.
There would be financial compensation to help buy new boats and gear and houses. But there was no way to bring the fish back. Only the sea and God could accomplish that. The omnipotence that took it all away.
And now, two years later, the people of the south coast were just part of a larger systemic emergency, and the collapse of the fishery in the 1930–31 season was just part of the existential challenge facing government and the country’s future. Undeniably, the fishery was an issue, but it was clear the greater problem was that Newfoundland had nothing to fall back on but borrowed money.
And so, you really had to sympathize with the confused and now almost useless politicians. They were, for all their posturing and speeches, at the mercy of the banks. The solutions to the challenges of the years 1930, 1931, 1932 were in the hands of bankers who were located in Canada. The larger issue facing Newfoundlanders was that Canadians and bankers, like people everywhere, had problems of their own.
And it has to be recognized that one of the problems bankers had in common with ordinary people, the idle fisher folk in the outports and the angry urban poor, was a lack of confidence in the political leadership of Newfoundland.
The country, from the perspective of the bankers, was a mess. Fish had drawn people to the forbidding island centuries before. The island was essentially a fishing platform. A global appetite for fish had motivated people to try to live there—and they had succeeded, after a fashion. The majority always poor, always vulnerable to the double jeopardy of hunger and the weather. And—truth must be told—vulnerable to the interests of the minority of settlers who were not poor; people who were well-to-do and educated, who had power and knighthoods. People like Sir Richard Squires, self-improved through study, determination, work and luck—but now more at home in London, New York or Montreal, where accents were refined and the conveniences reliable, where physical assault on public figures was mostly unheard of.
The Canadian and American and British bankers and the politicians in Newfoundland were all in basic agreement on one important point: there had been, for far too long, too great a dependency on fish as an economic staple. But efforts to diversify the national economy—while costly and ambitious, if not grandiose—had been mostly unsuccessful, and had led to hubris and corruption. And now that too was a factor that was affecting the confidence of bankers.
And finally, on the afternoon of February 11, 1932, they had the spectacle of a fist connecting with the jaw of the first minister in the government of Newfoundland, in the centre of decision-making power, the executive council chamber in the courthouse.
THAT day, February 11, had started ominously, darkened by the wearying frustrations that everybody was accustomed to. Crowds of dole recipients gathered on the waterfront to discuss their difficulties, the impossibility of their hopeless situation. They decided to speak directly to the prime minister himself and marched together up to Duckworth Street, where they knew the most important politicians were assembled.
They asked for Squires. They were told that Squires was unavailable. They went away. The frustrations didn’t go away, but instead metastasized to anger, which was, by afternoon, boiled off to rage. Now another crowd, numbering about twelve hundred, marched towards the courthouse once again. This time the place was locked.
The protestors stood around all afternoon, waiting for someone of importance to emerge, to talk, perhaps to listen. Nobody did. The meeting under way inside, in the executive council chamber, went on and on, it seemed. It began to look as though the people waiting outside were being stonewalled by their representatives.
This time, they were disinclined to go away.
Even the thickest idiot among them, even the man who swung the fist—even the shocked bankers and the bureaucrats in Montreal and England who would soon hear all about it—would have understood the outrage and the symbolism, would have seen the future in that moment.
18.
IT wasn’t just the dole. If Sir Richard and the members of his cabinet had been sharing the hardship—if they had been leading by example, with resolve, participating in the sacrifices—maybe Newfoundlanders would have been forgiving, more inclusive in their allocation of responsibility and blame. Maybe they would have pulled themselves together, as they had shown themselves so capable of doing in 1929, and improved the prospects of their survival as a country. But things were different now, and nobody was in a better position to appreciate the differences than Peter Cashin, the minister of finance.
He was a tall man and had a history of decisiveness and valour. He was a veteran of the First World War, had risen to the rank of major in the revered Newfoundland Regiment and was seconded to the British army as a machine gun corps commander. He had a physical demeanour that was, for many, intimidating. For those who admired him, he was eloquent. For others, a volcanic blabbermouth.8
He was born and raised in a political cauldron—his father, Sir Michael Cashin, was finance minister prior to the First World War and, briefly, prime minister of the dominion. Peter Cashin seems to have inherited his father’s mercurial temperament—Sir Michael’s political affiliations shifted frequently, and invariably with great drama.
Major Peter Cashin had what ordinary people might have called a bad streak—he was talented but unpredictable and, he later would acknowledge, a heavy drinker. A bad combination in a politician inclined to speak and act out of principles and personal interests, rather than from an overarching team commitment. The army and the war should have knocked some of that vanity out of him, but they clearly didn’t, and the years in which he served as finance minister, 1928 to 1932, must have been uncomfortable for Sir Richard Squires.
But Squires depended on Cashin, on his gifts. He had a mind that was just as sharp as his tongue, and woe betide the man (for they were all men in the assembly, with one exception—Lady Helena Squires) who rose to take him on. And he was a Catholic. Squires was not, and this mattered in a place where Catholics were numerous and unpredictable.
How often Peter Cashin must have bit his tongue in 1930, when it was still possible to pretend that the country had the resources and the character to avoid what, for many, was an inevitable reckoning after years of political mismanagement and wasted opportunities. It was still possible, in 1930, to look on the bright side, tout
the resilience so well demonstrated in the war, in the aftermath of the tsunami.
And Peter Cashin would have remembered his own cheerful voice in the chorus of optimism as the island’s politicians persuaded bankers to keep the money flowing in 1930. Like all governments, Newfoundland lived on credit, and the confidence of bankers was a matter of survival.
And then it was 1931 and the optimistic eloquence of the political elites was fooling nobody, least of all themselves. The little country had a debt of $90 million and it was growing. In 1931, the assembly passed a bill authorizing another trip to the money markets to raise another $8 million, part of which was earmarked to pay a $2.2 million interest bill that was coming due on July 1 that year.
The notices went out—the big investors were invited to bid on another issue of Newfoundland government bonds. It was routine. It was how governments everywhere paid the bills that came due daily. But this time would be different. The invitation to grab a piece of what should have been considered a perfectly safe investment was met by—silence.
The deadline for submitting bids was May 22. The deadline passed without a nibble. On May 23, there was confusion. This never happened, but it just had. The message was clear: Newfoundland didn’t just have a bad credit rating. It had no credit rating.9
ST. JOHN’S is a garrulous place, and over the course of that long holiday weekend, the rumours were flying. The Evening Telegram had the scoop but wouldn’t run it. The potential consequences were too dire. In any case, the word was on the street, and on Tuesday morning, May 26, there was a lineup of worried clients outside the government-owned Newfoundland Savings Bank.
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