The Great Depression

by Pierre Berton

  He had already laid the groundwork by staging random marches about the city so that people would become used to long lines of men moving through the streets. The men, starting from four different halls in the East End, were not privy to Brodie’s plan. They thought they were marching to Stanley Park. Only when his division reached the corner of Granville and Hastings did they realize that their objective was the newly redecorated federal post office with its granite façade, its copper dormer roof, and its English tower.

  By two o’clock on the afternoon of May 20, seven hundred men were inside the post office. The police sergeant on the corner immediately called for help from the Granville and Georgia intersection, three blocks away. That left Georgia Street wide open for the two other divisions to march on the hotel and art gallery. At 2:15, three hundred men were crowded into the cramped lobby of the Hotel Georgia. Five minutes later, two hundred more poured into the art gallery, four blocks farther along Georgia. A fourth division acted as a decoy, marching aimlessly about town, confusing the authorities and allowing Brodie time to consolidate his position.

  The post office closed for five minutes while Brodie polled his followers. Were they willing to stay until arrested? They gave him a unanimous yes. Nobody realized that the siege would last thirty days. For all that period the post office would keep regular hours, customers would come and go, and clerks would transact business while the jobless men hugged the edges of the L-shaped lobby. Brazenly, Brodie had tweaked the noses of the federal police force, whose headquarters were, in effect, part of the same building.

  At eight that evening, Vancouver’s police chief, Col. W.W. Foster, arrived to confer with the strikers. He had done so three years before when the museum was occupied, and now he showed the same reasonable attitude that had distinguished his actions then. He congratulated the men, praised their discipline, applauded their behaviour, and declared that the incident would certainly have its effect on the authorities. Then he asked them to go home.

  Brodie had the answer to that. “If we had homes,” he said, “we would not be here.”

  Then he issued a challenge that he would continue to use for the month that followed. If his comrades were breaking the law, he said, the police must arrest them. Brodie knew, of course, that the authorities had no intention of maintaining some twelve hundred men in jail; that would cost even more than relief. Foster left after arranging for toilet facilities at the CPR depot a block away. The men slept that night on the marble floors of the post office and art gallery and the more comfortable carpets of the hotel.

  The next day, as Brodie had foreseen, there was a chorus of protests to Ottawa from a variety of civic and political leaders. But there was no action. The government expected that the strikers would soon tire of the sit-in and leave the buildings of their own accord. That didn’t happen at the post office and art gallery. At the Georgia, the men were well behaved, keeping the passageways clear for guests. The manager refused to call the police; nobody wanted a forcible eviction that might cost thousands in damage. On May 21, city aldermen distributed five hundred dollars from their own salaries to the hotel strikers. To Brodie’s disgust, the strikers quickly evacuated the hotel. Most of the others held fast; the number at the post office dwindled by no more than a hundred over the month.

  The men in the post office kept the doors and wickets clear. So did the occupants of the art gallery, which, however, was forced to close, thus denying the citizens the spectacle of poorly dressed men, with toes protruding from their socks, snoring in the shadow of marble busts and beneath the gilded frames of painted landscapes.

  The public and the press were solidly on the side of the strikers. On the first night, five thousand people gathered outside the besieged buildings bringing sandwiches, tins of food, and cash. Employees of the Melrose Café near the post office sent over a constant supply of coffee. As the days dragged on, the odour of unwashed socks and feet began to permeate the lobby. Two nearby clubs soon offered free shower facilities for the post office occupants.

  Brodie was hard put to prevent the sit-in collapsing from boredom. On May 24, he held a sports rally to celebrate Victoria Day, organizing events such as peanut races that could be held in a small space. Gifts continued to pour in: bedrolls and blankets, free towels from a linen company, bread from a bakery, five hundred pairs of socks from a department store, tobacco from ordinary citizens.

  Brodie let his men leave the building in small groups to take free meals offered by nearby restaurants or to attend services in churches that invited them. Musicians turned up to swell the impromptu banjo and mouth-organ concerts that helped keep up the men’s spirits. In the art gallery, some of the men took up painting. Brodie, who habitually wore a bright orange sweater for instant identification, held regular press conferences and launched a weekly newspaper, the Sitdowners’ Gazette, that sold for as much as five dollars a copy.

  In the public’s view, Ottawa was the villain that had disinherited the transients, but the city and province were blamed, too. Mayor George Miller, a plumpish and easy-going man, was roundly booed and hissed at a church hall when he tried to justify the city’s refusal to come to the aid of the men. Pattullo’s old pledge of “work and wages” returned to haunt him, but he held his ground and insisted there would be no relief for out-of-province transients. “We are not going to yield,” he said. “If we give in it will not be a matter of a thousand or fifteen hundred men but five to ten thousand men.” Pattullo was again trying to use the demonstration to force Ottawa to launch a program of public works in British Columbia. It hadn’t worked with Bennett in 1935; it would not work with King.

  The city of Vancouver was caught in a dilemma. Sooner or later the men would have to be evicted, but how? Brodie, who had never expected the sit-in to last so long, kept asking that everyone be arrested. Although the city refused to take that course, the situation was becoming more and more maddening. How could two public buildings be emptied without any arrests and without causing a political backlash and, perhaps, considerable damage?

  A solution was finally provided by the chief sanitary officer, who said he feared an outbreak of meningitis and warned also that the appearance of even a single case of smallpox, diphtheria, or scarlet fever would be cause to quarantine both buildings. That provided the excuse the authorities were seeking. As Mackenzie King put it, the government had acted with patience and forbearance, but now something had to be done if the sit-downers were becoming a menace to public health. They were also, in King’s private view, “a bad lot. They do not want work. They want trouble.” Trouble, of course, was what William Lyon Mackenzie had sought a hundred years earlier, but not his grandson.

  The eviction was planned for five o’clock on Sunday morning, June 19, a time when, it was hoped, there would be few witnesses on the streets. At three that morning some fifty members of the RCMP – the entire force in Vancouver – assembled at their Point Grey barracks to be addressed by Col. Cecil Henry Hill. A big man with a bristling moustache, the colonel had once trained the famous Musical Ride. Now he told his men that he had instructions to clear the post office. The city police would handle the art gallery.

  At almost the same moment, Brodie was shaken awake from his mattress on the post office floor and told he was wanted on the telephone at the Melrose Café. “Is that you, Steve?” said the voice at the other end. Brodie grunted an affirmative. “Any hour now,” said the voice, and the line went dead.

  Brodie returned to the post office and told the pickets to wake him at the first sign of anything unusual. Ninety minutes ticked by. Then he was awakened again. “It’s getting pretty busy,” he was told. “There are cops on every corner.”

  These were city police. Brodie always insisted they were drunk. “Those who had not been called in from a Saturday night booze party were passing around mickeys at a great rate, evidently trying to catch up to those already drunk. Laughing and poking each other’s ribs with their billies, they seemed to be anticipating their job wi
th great relish.” Brodie told the others that the police reminded him of children trying to set fire to the family cat.

  Then Brodie heard something else: the measured clip-clop, clip-clop of horses approaching from the west. The Mounted Police were coming on very slowly, and Brodie realized they meant business.

  He herded the pickets inside. They woke the section leaders, who woke the sections. Brodie, fanatically meticulous as always about the trappings of democracy, called a meeting and asked for and got the usual vote of confidence. His tactics, he said, would remain unchanged. When ordered to leave the building, he would ask the police to put him and his followers under arrest.

  Somebody asked what they should do if the police used tear gas. Brodie, seated on a window sill, pointed to a small cloud in the morning sky, touched by the pink of dawn. “Between the outside of that window and that little cloud,” he reminded them, “there is an estimated four hundred miles of fresh air. The best antidote for tear gas is fresh air.”

  Out of the corner of his eye he could see Colonel Hill and two others entering quietly by the side door on Hastings Street. “There is no necessity for violence,” he told the men in a loud voice, so Hill could hear. “I hope it will not come to that.”

  Walking beside Hill was Detective Sergeant Robert S.S. Wilson, the only Mounted Policeman in Vancouver trained in the use of tear gas. In his white haversack he had three small regulation gas bombs and five larger ones, new to the force. These were the Lake Erie Jumpers, the type offered to Mitch Hepburn during the CIO trouble in Ontario the previous year. They could not be picked up and tossed back at the police because the perforations in the tops made them too hot to handle. Timers could be set to make them go off consecutively, when they would explode and jump ten feet into the air half a dozen times before the gas supply was exhausted.

  Outside the post office, the Mounted Police took up positions, twenty at the Granville Street door, twenty at the door off Hastings. Hill ordered both doors opened, barred the press from entry, climbed up on a counter, and addressed the men: “We are a federal police force and we have our instructions from Ottawa. After a month of vacillating, the federal government has instructed us to put you out.…” Pattullo would later claim credit for breaking up the sit-in, but Hill’s remarks made it clear where the orders came from.

  Almost at this very moment, by a peculiar irony, the Prime Minister was breakfasting at the General Brock Hotel in Niagara Falls, having spent the previous day nearby visiting the newly restored home of his rebel grandfather. King was irked that Mackenzie was being represented to school children “as a rebel, traitor, etc.” The true presentation of his character, he thought, “would be in the form of martyrdom, etc.”

  Now Hill was telling a group of modern rebels, and perhaps martyrs, “We would not put you out if we were not ordered to do so. But we have no alternative.” They could go peacefully, but if they resisted somebody would get hurt.

  To which Brodie replied, “… we will submit to arrest if we have broken any law. If we are an unlawful assembly, we are now your prisoners. We await your orders.”

  At this point, the police could have arrested all the men, booked them at the station, released them on their own recognizance, and later dropped all charges. But Hill told Brodie, “I have no orders about arrest.”

  Brodie insisted on convening another meeting. He told his followers that anyone who wanted to leave was free to do so. Nobody budged. “You have six hundred prisoners,” he shouted at Hill. “What are your instructions?”

  “You men are being stupid and ill-advised,” Hill responded. “I think you should over-ride the decision of your leader because in a further five minutes force will be used.”

  These words were greeted with catcalls. Brodie walked over to a city police inspector named Grundy and asked, “Do I have your word that if the men step out orderly on the sidewalk that you’ll arrest them and march them wherever they will be held until they can see a magistrate or a judge?”

  “I have no instructions about arrest,” Grundy replied. “I’m here to see that you keep moving when you hit the street.”

  Sergeant Wilson, standing on a counter, held up a Lake Erie Jumper for the crowd to see. He noted that many of the men were already reaching for various articles either to use as weapons or, more likely, to smash the windows to let in fresh air.

  The RCMP were all inside the building now. A hush fell over the crowd. Nobody moved. Wilson couldn’t help thinking that the scene resembled a still picture taken from a movie. The only sound came from the drip-drip of men urinating into their handkerchiefs to cover their faces when the gas attack came. To Wilson, the five-minute interval seemed like hours.

  At last he leaned over to Hill. “Shall I throw it, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  Wilson had never thrown a gas bomb at human beings before, but he’d had plenty of training in Regina following the riot. He pulled the pin, counted to three, then flung the bomb at the feet of the crowd.

  In an instant, to quote Wilson, “all hell broke loose.” He heard a single reverberating crash as every window in the building was shattered. The strikers had torn bars from the clerks’ wickets to use as clubs and even heaved two old iron bedsteads through the windows. Objects of every kind were flying about – glass shards, iron bolts, rocks. It was exactly 5 a.m.

  As the glass cascaded down, the RCMP formed a double row, ten abreast, across the lobby to drive the men from the building. A second gauntlet of city police waited outside. The police denied, as the police always do, that excessive force was used, but the press photographs that day made it clear that riot whips “designed to smash heads and break them open” (Brodie’s phrase) were used to deadly effect. Of forty-two men hospitalized after the fracas, only five were policemen – all city constables.

  Scores more were treated at the Ukrainian Labour Temple, where Dr. Zoltan Wirshafter rendered first aid. Maurice Rush, secretary of the B.C. Young Communist League, wrote that “the scene at the Ukrainian Hall was one that I will never forget. The grass outside and every available bit of space inside were covered with injured and gassed men. Blankets and bandages, collected earlier for medical aid for China, were rushed to the hall. Members of the YCL and other organizations tended the wounded and set up a kitchen to feed the men.”

  One of the strikers hospitalized was a former militia sergeant, Arthur Redseth, who slipped on the floor during the mêlée. As police and strikers battled over him, friends tried to help him to his feet and were whipped with police batons for their trouble. At last Redseth’s friend, known as Little Mike to distinguish him from Big Mike, another Serbian, came to his rescue. Little Mike dragged Arthur Redseth through a gauntlet of club-swinging policemen. By then Redseth was in terrible shape, with one eye out of its socket. When Little Mike called to a policeman in the middle of Hastings and asked for an ambulance, he got a billy across his face. He half dragged, half carried his friend nine blocks to Main Street, where a passerby picked them up and drove them to hospital.

  Little Mike needed five stitches in his jaw. Redseth lost his eye – and for him that was tragic. All his life he had wanted to be a soldier. Now that ambition was shattered. When war came he tried to join the army and later the merchant marine and was refused by both because of his injury. He never recovered from what would always be known as Bloody Sunday. He became despondent, and in 1942 he shot himself. Little Mike was killed that same year at Dieppe. He was twenty-three years old.

  The post office was evacuated in just ten minutes. Brodie was one of the last to be driven from the building. Easily identified by his orange sweater, he was the main target of the police attack. He kept his head protected from a rain of blows by the RCMP until he became numb. Unable to see because his head was down, he stumbled to the door, where the city police were waiting for him. They seized him by the heels and dragged him away bodily, his head banging on the stone steps.

  Brodie went down three times before the onslaughts and would alw
ays remember those terrifying moments. “They got me out in the gutter and it got to the point that there were so many doing it they couldn’t all hit my head so they hit me where they could. There comes a time when you don’t feel it anymore. It seemed to me that I was watching somebody else. I was almost casually waiting for them to finish it. I was out, and then back, and then passed out again and then back. The same feeling you get when you smoke grass except that’s not painful. I was simply numb.…”

  It’s probable that Brodie was saved from critical injury and possibly death by the presence of a photographer from the Vancouver Daily Province. He himself was certain that the police intended to murder him. Photographs taken that morning support that suspicion. There he stands, arms protecting his head, while a plainclothesman flails away with a rubber hose.

  Some of Brodie’s followers, seeing him lying insensible on the pavement, ran the gauntlet of police clubs, picked up their leader, and carried him across the street to one of their own first-aid men.

  “Get an ambulance for Brodie!” one of them called.

  “Get your own ambulance,” the police retorted.

  A private car pulled up and offered to take Brodie to the hospital.

  “Don’t take a chance, fellow,” Brodie moaned.

  But G.F. Johnson, who was heading off on a fishing trip when he reached the scene, took a chance. He helped hoist Brodie into his car as a sergeant and a constable advanced upon him. “Get out of here before I cut your heads off,” the sergeant shouted.

  In spite of the strategy to clear the post office at a time when few citizens would be present as witnesses, hundreds of onlookers had already turned up before the police entered the building. The crowd was enraged at the spectacle of hundreds of men, blinded by gas, frantic and screaming as they erupted into a hail of swinging clubs and whips.