The Great Depression

by Pierre Berton

As Smith himself declared at a rally on February 3, in which three thousand thronged to Massey Hall to hear him, “I am charged with sedition because I criticize our leaders. Why is Mitch Hepburn [the Liberal leader in Ontario] not so charged? Does he not seek to create disaffection against the government? I am charged because Bennett is in an unstable position.…”

  The Toronto Star backed him up: “If a man slanders the Prime Minister he can be charged with slander. Why should he be charged with sedition which is in a wholly different category?”

  Offers of legal aid poured in. E.J. McMurray, K.C., a Winnipeg lawyer who had once been Mackenzie King’s Solicitor General, offered to come to Toronto to help with the defence. He was joined by Leo Gallagher, who had been banished from Germany after defending Marinus van der Lubbe, charged by the Nazis with causing the Reichstag fire. Gallagher’s fees were underwritten by the International Labour Defense, whose secretary stated that no expense would be spared to defend Smith.

  The trial itself bordered on the farcical. McMurray scored the first point by demanding that Tim Buck be brought from Kingston as a defence witness, a tactic that the Crown attorney, Peter White, protested vigorously but vainly. McMurray was able to make his case to the judge that Buck’s testimony would show “that there did exist an error in the administration of justice in Canada, which the defendant was trying to alter by lawful means.”

  Now Bennett’s attempts to use the big stick against his shrill opponents began to backfire. The last thing anybody wanted was to bring up the embarrassing business of the attempt to shoot Buck. An exercise in damage control was put into operation. Buck, who had been denied all news, was smuggled in irons from the penitentiary to the train at Kingston and then from the train to the Don Jail in Toronto, where he was isolated from all other prisoners. Only one guard was allowed access to him; his exercise periods were held separately from those of the others. Thus he was to be kept from learning how the trial was proceeding. But a friendly guard, angered by the implications of the Smith case, found a moment after supper to whisper to him through the bars: “You’ll have to be very careful, Tim, they are out to get Mr. Smith and they won’t let you have your say if they can help it. I’ve written down the words Smith used so you’ll know what it is all about. I’m going to pass it through your ventilator. Promise you’ll tear it up and put it down the can right away.” He threw the note and a newspaper clipping through the small square opening above the door.

  Buck, now in possession of the bare facts of the case, decided the best thing he could do was to ensure that Smith’s statement was verified. He must get across to the jury the fact that a deliberate attempt had been made to murder him. He knew the Crown would try to prevent him from speaking and so spent some time working out the shortest possible answers to the questions he might expect at the outset.

  At last he was brought into the courtroom, wearing his heavy blue prison suit and looking colourless and weak from his long confinement. His presence gave the Communist party another chance to provoke headlines. Even as he began his testimony, four thousand people were holding a demonstration in Queen’s Park.

  McMurray turned to the witness and asked if he remembered October 20, 1932.

  “I remember it very well,” Buck replied.

  “What particularly impressed it on your mind?”

  “I was shot at …” Buck began, his words almost drowned out by the Crown attorney’s objections. The objection was sustained, but the damage was done. McMurray had managed to widen the scope of the trial, to broaden its appeal, and to milk it for its propaganda value.

  The only evidence the Crown could produce against Smith was the notebooks of two of the Red Squad members. Unable to write down Smith’s words verbatim, the two policemen had expanded and transcribed them after leaving the hall. McMurray was able to show that the longhand in both notebooks was so suspiciously similar that it appeared to have been written by one hand. A parade of defence witnesses counteracted this flimsy testimony by swearing that Smith had not uttered the words attributed to him.

  The public was soon aware that the Crown had no substantial case. The jury believed Smith when he denied he’d said what the Red Squad claimed. Undoubtedly they were also influenced by the defence’s summing up: “If you punish Smith, then you are going back to the Spanish Inquisition. Certain reactionary forces will be pleased if Smith is taken away. But out over Canada today this case is attracting wide attention. This is a state trial. This is a political trial. I often wonder, gentlemen, whether jails are built for labour leaders. Smith’s fate is being watched in B.C., in the shanties among the miners of Alberta, in Brandon where he laboured as a young man, all over among the poor and working people, among people of the universities all interested in the fate of this man.”

  The verdict was a foregone conclusion. The jury found Smith not guilty. A few months later, in spite of Bennett’s threat, Tim Buck was paroled.

  2

  Radio politics

  By 1934, the radio had replaced the piano as the central piece of furniture in the living room. The Stromberg Carlson upright in its two-toned cabinet of polished walnut, the Gothic mantel Philco in its hand-rubbed casing of rare Oriental woods, or the Victor Globe Trotter with its “modernistic design” (which we now call art deco) are familiar artifacts of the Depression years. More than the railways they stitched the country together; more than the movies they brought solace to the impoverished. Radios were expensive – even a reconditioned table model cost fifteen dollars or more – so that those without radios often gathered in the home of someone more fortunate than themselves. But once you owned a radio the programs were free, except for the annual two-dollar licence fee about which everybody complained. You could tune into the CRBC and listen to the sugary tones of Mart Kenney and His Western Gentlemen or the exclamatory voice of Foster Hewitt calling the Saturday night hockey game. If you had no decent Sunday clothes you could stay home on the Lord’s Day and worship at the altar of the Stromberg Carlson.

  It is impossible to overestimate the power of the radio in the Depression years. It is not too much to say that it helped save the sanity of the dispossessed. It allowed the world to enter the parlours of the nation, and it provided a sense of community to the drought-ravaged farms and lonely coastal backwaters. Canadians heard Jimmy McLarnin wrest the welterweight boxing title from Barney Ross on the radio. They learned of Hitler’s massacre of Ernst Röhm’s Brown Shirts the same way – as well as Max Baer’s heavyweight victory over Primo Camera, the deaths of Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger, the kidnapping of the London, Ontario, brewer, John Labatt, and the charges against the boot-legging Bronfmans for evading customs duties – and all to the strains of “Blue Moon,” “June in January,” and “The Object of My Affection.”

  If Canadians got much of their news from the local stations, they got most of their entertainment from the three powerful broadcasting networks across the border, which tended to drown out their fledgling Canadian counterpart.

  The Bennett government, pushed and prodded by Graham Spry’s Canadian Radio League, had adopted the measures advocated by the Aird report on broadcasting. Canada now had its first real network, the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission, whose chairman, the bearded and bulky Hector Charlesworth, had lofty plans for the medium. Charlesworth was already talking about bringing the finest British programs to Canada, of broadcasting symphonic music from seven major centres, and of creating a “theatre of the air” in which the work of the world’s finest playwrights would be heard – Shakespeare, of course, but also Canadian works drawn from the Little Theatre Movement. As for commercials, Charlesworth was against them. “The best of American programs are those in which advertising has no voice …” he said. “Advertising has hurt radio programs.”

  In spite of this, Canadians were far more likely to turn to one of the despised American commercial programs, all of them, from “The Lone Ranger” to “The Romance of Helen Trent,” controlled by advertisers. The American
s had already seized the continental initiative, and in the end, Canada would be forced to opt for their commercial pattern rather than Charlesworth’s dream of a BBC-type network. Thus was Canada further seduced into the American orbit.

  With the exception of William Aberhart of Alberta, no Canadian politician had yet mastered the techniques of radio, as Franklin D. Roosevelt had with his famous fireside chats. Bennett’s bombast was fine for a live mass audience but quite unsuitable for the intimacy of the living room. Mackenzie King’s plodding, fusty style put people to sleep. Aberhart was the only politician in the country to adapt American broadcasting techniques to the Canadian arena.

  “Charisma” was a foreign word in the thirties; it wasn’t even in the standard college dictionaries. But there’s no doubt that Aberhart was blessed with it, as Major Douglas, the high priest of Social Credit, discovered in the spring of 1934. The UFA government of Premier J.E. Brownlee had decided to bring Douglas to the province to explain Social Credit, a move designed to discredit Aberhart, whose own ideas were at variance with the Douglas dogma.

  Douglas arrived in Edmonton on April 5 and snubbed Aberhart at the railway station. But the following day, when he appeared before the legislature (which had already heard Aberhart) and attempted to outline his theories, was not for him a success.

  Douglas was thinking in world terms. Something, he felt, was wrong with a monetary system controlled by a ruthless band of international financiers and bankers. By arbitrarily advancing or refusing credit they were preventing citizens of the world from taking advantage of modern technology that theoretically should be organized to relieve them of want. Any Alberta farmer in hock to Eastern bankers could sympathize with his indignation. Why should they control the credit system? Credit, said Douglas, was a public, not a private, resource, and the issuing or withholding of credit ought to be a state monopoly.

  When Douglas was asked to lay out a specific program to deal with the ills of the Depression, however, he was vague and evasive. He did not agree with Aberhart that Social Credit could be introduced provincially. The federal government, he was convinced, would declare it unconstitutional (which is exactly what happened later). Under questioning, he implied that Social Credit might be introduced by a revolution if the financial crisis led the world into another war; the wicked band of bankers wouldn’t give up their power unless they were forced to. Certainly there was a hint of incipient fascism in his distrust of the masses and his concept of an elitist government run by experts. Later, in Calgary, he told his listeners: “You must have control of the army, and the navy and air force.” As Aberhart’s biographers Elliott and Miller have pointed out, what he was advocating, in the long view, was a military coup against the bankers. That was all very well; no doubt many Albertans would have welcomed one. But it was scarcely a practical solution. Floating in his theoretical cloud-land, Douglas clearly had no specific cure for the province’s problems.

  As the Brownlee government hoped, Douglas’s appearance led to a breach with Aberhart. Douglas wanted the famous Yellow Pamphlet withdrawn, or at the very least his name removed from it. That caused a dejected Aberhart to lament, after a fierce encounter with his hero, “Douglas told me I am all wrong.”

  But Brownlee had not reckoned on Aberhart’s popular appeal. Douglas’s appearance in the province had the opposite effect to that intended. The major, with his military bearing and his close-cropped moustache, certainly looked the part of a leader. Aberhart, plump, Buddha-like, and double-chinned, didn’t. None of that mattered. Since few could really understand what Douglas was trying to say, his theories attracted few converts. But everybody understood Aberhart, the master of radio politics, when he broadcast about the irony of poverty in the midst of plenty. He had trained his disciples well. The UFA government in trying to discredit the new Messiah had actually strengthened his hand.

  The Premier, meanwhile, was embroiled in a spicy seduction suit brought against him by a family friend, twenty-two-year-old Vivian MacMillan, and her father, the former mayor of Edson. The court case occupied the last week of June and was covered verbatim by the Edmonton newspapers, which provided their eager readers with dozens of columns of testimony.

  And sensational testimony it was. According to Miss MacMillan, Brownlee, who had met her when she was sixteen, had talked her into coming to Edmonton and offered to be her guardian; he had got her a job in the legislature and had taken her into his home, where she became a close friend of his ailing wife and his two teenaged sons. That was substantially true. It was Vivian MacMillan’s account of Brownlee’s subsequent actions that provided the spice.

  Miss MacMillan testified that the Premier had persuaded her to have sexual intercourse (the newspaper word was “intimacy”) in his Studebaker touring car after explaining that he was dreadfully lonely and that he could not have normal relations with his wife. Sex, he had declared, would kill Mrs. Brownlee; by yielding to his advances, Vivian would be saving the life of the woman who had befriended her – or so she swore under oath. Much of her testimony came as a godsend to the headline writers. “He played with me as a cat plays with a mouse,” she explained. And again – more headlines – “he seemed to have me under some kind of spell.”

  She was on the stand for as long as eight hours at a time and sometimes was reduced to tears, but no amount of cross-examination could shake her story. Indeed, she added some lip-smacking embellishments. In those frugal times, the home of Alberta’s premier was modest and crowded. Brownlee shared a bedroom with his son Jack, a nervous sixteen-year-old. Mrs. Brownlee slept in another bedroom with the younger son, Alan, a sleepwalker. Vivian shared the maid’s room. All these bedrooms were close to each other on the upper floor. Yet Brownlee, so Vivian swore, managed to make love to her in his own room in a bed just eighteen inches from that occupied by young Jack.

  How was that possible without disturbing the family? Vivian had an answer. It was the Premier’s habit, so she testified, to walk past her room and run a tap in the bathroom next to his wife’s room, partly to cover the creaking of the hall floor and partly as a signal. The two would then negotiate the hallway back to Brownlee’s room by adopting a sort of lock step – her feet on his – so that only one set of footfalls could be heard. Once and once only young Jack mumbled in his sleep. Brownlee turned on the light for a moment, quieted the boy, and then resumed his lovemaking.

  When Vivian fell in love with a young medical student, Jack Caldwell, she tried to break off relations with the Premier, but, so she said, he would have none of it. She confessed her indiscretions to her then fiancé (the engagement had ended before the case came to court). Caldwell and Vivian’s father then talked her into filing the suit. In those strait-laced, chauvinistic days, a father could also sue if his daughter was seduced, the inference being that he owned her and she had become damaged goods.

  Brownlee flatly denied Vivian’s story and his wife backed him up. To many, Vivian’s tale of the lock-step journey down the hall and the coupling in the bedroom beside the slumbering youth had the ring of melodrama. The judge came down on Brownlee’s side, the jury on Vivian’s; it awarded her ten thousand dollars and her father an additional five thousand. “I very strongly disagree with you,” said the judge, W.C. Ives, who was at the time Acting Chief Justice for the province. He dismissed the suit on the grounds that Vivian had come to Edmonton with her parents’ approval and “that no illness had resulted from the seduction and [there was] no evidence that the ability of the daughter to render services was in any way interfered with.” In short, whether or not Vivian had been seduced, she was not “damaged” in the legal sense – for those days a remarkable pronouncement that aroused a storm of opposition.

  This result was cold comfort to Brownlee, who resigned and left the political field on July 1, the day the trial ended. (The judge’s decision to dismiss the case was later reversed by a higher court, and Vivian got her money.) The UFA, already in bad odour for its lacklustre leadership during the economic crisis, w
as now in disarray at the exact moment when a new movement and a new potential leader were on the rise.

  Irritated by the almost universal attacks upon him in the daily press (only Harry Southam’s Ottawa Citizen supported the concept of Social Credit), Aberhart that summer started his own weekly newspaper, the Alberta Social Credit Chronicle. That paper reported in August what the rest of the Alberta press was ignoring. Bible Bill had just completed another spectacular speaking tour, covering twenty-five hundred miles and delivering thirty-nine speeches to thirty thousand people.

  In his radio broadcasts Aberhart was nothing if not ingenious. Announcing that a stranger from another planet was about to visit Alberta, he launched his hugely successful “Man from Mars” radio programs. These satirical playlets were the last dramatized political broadcasts to be heard in Canada. The law was changed shortly thereafter to make them illegal.

  The Man from Mars, wandering perplexed through the province, quickly comes to the conclusion that the inmates have taken over the asylum. He meets a banker and is baffled. “I find that you are very rich in goods. In fact you have so much that you wantonly destroy your abundance. I am told that is necessary to keep up prices. But at the same time I find that many of your people are suffering from poverty and starvation. Even little children cry for food and clothing that your governments order destroyed. But their parents cannot buy the goods because they have no money. To get money they must work, but they cannot get work because you have invented wonderful machines to make your goods, so your people must starve in the midst of plenty.…”

  Aberhart’s banker was made to reply: “I am sorry that you have been influenced by the conditions of the idle loafers who are a blight to society. It’s time we had another war and got rid of them.” Those words hit home to the masses of Albertans, who had heard very similar sentiments expressed by the financiers and politicians who ran the country.