Hitler’s personality charmed King as it charmed so many other visitors. “His face is much more prepossessing than his pictures would give the impression of. It is not that of a fiery over-strained nature, but of a calm, passive man, deeply and thoughtfully in earnest …; his eyes impressed me most of all. There was a liquid quality about them which indicates keen perception and profound sympathy.… One could see particularly how humble folk would come to have a profound love for the man.”
Ribbentrop’s liaison man, Walter Hewel, an intimate of the Führer, filled King’s head with a lot of twaddle about his master, duly reported in the diary. Hitler didn’t want to be treated as a deity, Hewel said. “He dislikes any of them thinking of him as anything but a humble citizen who is trying to serve his country.…” He was deeply religious, Hewel insisted, believed strongly in God, and during his tenure more Christian congregations had been established in Germany than in many years preceding. The outside world had misrepresented his religious views; all he wanted to do was keep the blood of the people pure. “He is particularly strong on beauty, loves flowers,” Hewel told King, “and will spend more of the money of the State on gardens and flowers than on most other things.”
King accepted all this without comment and went on that afternoon to learn something about the “Strength Through Joy” youth movement. “I found all these young men very frank, very alert, clean looking, active minded, enthusiastic,” he wrote. “There was a splendid order and efficiency about everything I saw.” At the opera that night – Verdi’s A Masked Ball – he was impressed by the fact that the people came from love of music rather than shallow social reasons. “Dress was conspicuous by its absence.” Between acts he talked to a member of Hermann Göring’s staff, who “spoke about secret forces at work to bring about better conditions after this period of stress and strain.” The opera over, King returned to his hotel feeling that this, perhaps, had been the most significant day of his life.
He saw Nevile Henderson the next day and found that the British ambassador shared his impression of Hitler. Henderson complained that the English kept finding fault with him for stressing anything good about Nazism, and reiterated his belief that Germany should be allowed to expand by degrees without interference from England. “It seems to me particularly fortunate that Henderson is Ambassador at the present time,” King commented.
King followed this with a call on the German foreign minister, Baron Konstantin von Neurath, who declared solemnly that “as long as I am at the Foreign Office, there will never be war on Germany’s account.” Neurath spoke of how the country had been “going to pieces” when Hitler took over. For much of that he blamed the Jews. “He said to me,” King wrote, “that I would have loathed living in Berlin with the Jews, and the way in which they had increased their numbers in the City, and were taking possession of its more important part. He said there was no pleasure in going to a theatre which was filled with them. Many of them were very coarse and vulgar and assertive. They were getting control of all the business, the finance, and had really taken advantage of the necessity of the people. It was necessary to get them out, to have the German people really control their own City and affairs. He told me that I would have been surprised at the extent to which life and morals had become demoralized; that Hitler had set his face against all that kind of thing, and had tried to inspire desire for a good life in the minds of young people.”
If King took exception to this racist diatribe there is no evidence of it in his diary. Indeed, the context suggests that he agreed with much of it. What Neurath was saying about Berlin wasn’t very different from what King himself had written about the Jews taking over an Ottawa suburb. This, after all, was the man who didn’t want Jews as neighbours and who was always disgusted by what he considered to be vulgarity and coarseness – epithets that anti-Semites all over the world, including Canada, were using to support their version of the Jewish stereotype.
The Nürnberg laws had been in existence for almost two years when King visited Berlin. Jews could no longer be German citizens, couldn’t marry Aryans, and couldn’t employ Aryan servants. By this time they had been so rigorously excluded from public or private employment that half of them had no means of livelihood. They were forced to wear an identifying Star of David that barred them from entering a grocery store, drugstore, bakery, or dairy. Nor could they get a night’s lodging in a hotel. Taunting signs forbidding them entry were everywhere. King must have seen these or known of them.
Nonetheless he quoted his host’s remarks without comment and proclaimed himself delighted by his charm and hospitality. After Neurath insisted that they be photographed together, King was pleased to receive a copy of the picture in a silver frame. This discussion was followed by a luncheon party that King judged “one of the pleasantest I have ever enjoyed. The whole environment was most attractive; no one could have been kinder than the host. I felt in von Neurath’s attitude something of the same kind of paternal attitude that I have experienced with Sir William Mulock and some older men.”
The entire German visit overawed King, who misread all the signs and portents in that doomed country. “I can honestly say it was as enjoyable, informative and ever inspiring as any visit I have had anywhere,” he exclaimed. Everything about Germany seems to have entranced him, including the appearance, manners, and outlook of the people, who appeared to him to be more like Canadians than were either the British or the French. What others feared in Germany, King was persuaded, was that German ideas of liberty and equality for the masses might spread out into their own lands! As for regimentation, though one didn’t like it, “it is apparently the one way to make views prevail.”
He could not believe that the German people would ever revert to a purely materialistic way of life; the country was undergoing a revolution, fuelled by idealism. “I have come away from Germany tremendously relieved. I believe there will not be war.… The one danger to all countries is the Press; through its misrepresentations and persistent propaganda, some incidents will arise which will occasion conflict.”
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.
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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.
5
The black blizzard
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 Great Depression Page 48