The Great Depression

by Pierre Berton

  In the Melrose Café, the waitresses were in tears as they watched men who had become their friends being pursued and beaten by the police. Some members of the crowd became actively involved in the fracas and were themselves injured. Innocent bystanders were not spared. Margaret Rickett, a visitor from Victoria, had left her suitcase in a nearby drugstore while she bought a return ticket at the CPR dock. When she tried to cross the street to get it, she suffered a stinging blow on the shoulder from a policeman’s whip.

  The intersection was packed with a struggling mass of policemen, strikers, and bystanders. The crowd followed the fleeing men down Cordova Street past Spencer’s and Woodward’s department stores. An orgy of destruction followed, as the enraged men vented their fury and frustration on the plate-glass windows. When the mob reached Cambie Street, one group swept east on Hastings, smashing windows as they went; the other moved south to attack the Imperial Bank and the B.C. Chamber of Mines. In a few minutes they did thirty thousand dollars’ worth of damage.

  The evacuation of the art gallery took place at the same time but without violence, except for the use of tear gas. Harold Winch, the CCF member of the legislature who had acted as a liaison between the city and the unemployed during the 1935 disturbances, had been effectively kidnapped by Chief Foster and driven aimlessly about town in a squad car until the zero hour. His task was to prevent the destruction of the gallery’s collection of paintings and sculpture. Winch managed to persuade the sit-ins to leave quietly. Many brought along the paintings they had worked on during their stay.

  Brodie’s reaction was one of contempt. To him, Winch, soon to be the party’s leader in British Columbia, was nothing more than an “assistant chief of police.” Brodie said that if he’d been in charge at the gallery, he’d have smashed everything in it. “That was the point … a million bucks in paintings and we were worth nothing.”

  The march from the gallery to the East End became a march of protest, with hundreds of citizens walking with the men and scores of cars following them. That afternoon, ten thousand people crowded the Powell Street Grounds for a rally to support the cause of the unemployed. The crowd cheered as speakers demanded Pattullo’s resignation. Thousands then headed for the police station but were restrained by Winch, who climbed a telephone pole overlooking the crowd to calm it down. Thousands more gathered that night to cheer a delegation of one hundred who left by the midnight boat to take their case to the legislature in Victoria.

  They got a cool reception from the Premier. “There comes a time,” Pattullo said, “when too much sympathy can be shown the men. That time has come in Vancouver.” Transients could not look to the province for any more help. If they all went home, Pattullo indicated, there would be no unemployment crisis in British Columbia.

  Once again there was an exchange of testy telegrams between Victoria and Ottawa. Pattullo and King seemed to be following an old script from 1935 and the days of R.B. Bennett. Pattullo warned the Prime Minister that revolution was imminent and that “your government must accept responsibility for this transient problem.” King had no intention of doing that. His argument was Bennett’s: that relief was a provincial responsibility. The province was to blame for the trouble because it had cut off relief for single men. Pattullo’s request for a public works program could not be met in 1938 any more than it could have been in 1934 or 1935. If a group of single men got special treatment, then what about married men, what about the heads of families, what about minors, what about war veterans?

  Thus the sit-in ended with no resolution. No one was ever arrested for taking part in it. Twenty-two men were charged with wilful damage in the destruction that followed the eviction. Of these, seven were found guilty and given short sentences. However, the King government agreed to pay the cost of relief for all non-resident transients in the province, pending their return home or until they found work. That was no solution at all, and the public knew it. Unemployment was again rising. There was no work in British Columbia and little work elsewhere.

  Bloody Sunday marked the beginning of the end of Duff Pattullo’s political career. In the 1941 election, the Liberal party lost its majority and was forced into a coalition with the Conservatives to ward off the rising threat of the CCF. That spelled finish for both the old-line parties in the province. After the 1941 débâcle Pattullo himself was rejected by his own followers.

  Ironically, Steve Brodie suffered a similar fate. He was too radical and too independent for the Communists and left the party shortly after his release from hospital with a permanent eye injury. When war came he was one of the first to try to enlist, but like Arthur Redseth he was rejected because of his eye. That was a loss to the country and to the forces. Brodie ended up in the merchant marine, but he would have made a wonderful sergeant-major.

  4

  The Nazi connection

  On July 4, a fortnight after the end of the sit-in in Vancouver, Adrien Arcand, the Quebec fascist leader, called a mass meeting at Toronto’s Massey Hall to organize a coalition of fascist groups in Canada. These included Arcand’s own National Socialist Christian Party, William Whittaker’s Winnipeg-based Canadian Nationalist Party, and Joseph C. Farr’s Toronto-based Nationalist Party. John Ross Taylor’s Canadian Union of Fascists was not included; Farr had managed to push Taylor aside.

  The new organization would bear the euphemistic title of National Unity Party. That must have been a source of frustration to Mackenzie King, who had planned to make those very words a Liberal slogan in the next election. The party retained the blue shirt by which Arcand’s followers had been identified but exchanged the swastika on the armband for a new emblem – a flaming torch. Hitler’s belligerence in Europe had made the crooked cross unfashionable in Canada.

  The scenes on Shuter Street that night were more reminiscent of Berlin than of Toronto. A double line of eighty-five blue-shirted “Legionnaires” scrutinized each ticketholder who entered the hall and ejected half a dozen people whose credentials were suspect. Arcand and his henchmen preferred to speak only to the converted, and in that effort they had the full co-operation of Chief Denny Draper’s finest.

  The communists had been harassed for more than a decade by the Toronto police and denied the use of public halls for meetings and rallies. But the fascists asked for and got police protection not only at Massey Hall but also at the Hotel Isabella on Sherbourne Street, where the Montreal contingent was staying. An RCMP undercover agent at the meeting reported to his superiors that one of Arcand’s lieutenants had met with the head of detectives in Toronto “and insured complete cooperation” between the fascists and the police.

  That co-operation did not extend to the activities of another group of several hundred anti-fascists (a code name for communists) who organized a street corner protest a block away at Yonge and Albert. As the chief speaker, William Krehm, mounted a portable stand to address the group, a covey of young women whipped off their coats to reveal white sweaters bearing anti-fascist slogans. The police arrived and surrounded the speakers, who began shouting, “Down with Fascism!” and “Down with the brutal police; they are Fascist tools!”

  More of Draper’s troops arrived on horseback, forcing their steeds into the middle of the crowd. One woman was struck on the head and knocked to the sidewalk. A newspaper reporter who went to her aid was himself knocked down by a passing horse. Part of the crowd fled into a nearby store; others ran down Yonge Street. For the rest of the evening the police patrolled Shuter Street, keeping the crowd moving and away from Massey Hall.

  Inside the hall, Joseph Farr, the stocky Toronto fascist, was haranguing the crowd and referring to Toronto as a “Jew-dominated city.” Farr was followed by C.S. Thomas, a lanky fascist from Vancouver. High in the balcony a woman heckler shouted, “Get out of here!” to the speaker. She was immediately ejected by bouncers, some of whom carried lengths of rubber hose filled with lead. The woman tripped on the stairs and was dragged the rest of the way by the hem of her dress. One or two other hecklers
were also speedily ejected.

  At last the main speaker strode onto the stage. Adrien Arcand looked the part – lean, dark, and intense, with flashing black eyes, a thin moustache, and a supple body. A forest of Nazi salutes sprouted as the crowd shouted, “Hail the King! Hail Arcand and the Party!” Arcand spoke fiercely for the best part of two hours in excellent English. His speeches rarely varied. Like those of his predecessors on the platform, this one was a diatribe against the Jews and a vicious attack on the idea of democracy.

  According to Arcand’s garbled version of history, democracy was the child of Freemasonry, which had been invented by the Jews following the French Revolution. The Jews had spread the system to all countries of the world with the aid of Napoleon Bonaparte. But democracy had become “a rotten apple,” kept alive and financed by world Jewry.

  In Arcand’s skewed vision, every major politician was either a Jew or in the control of Jews – a belief that would have baffled those Jewish refugees from Hitler who were trying vainly to convince Canadian politicians to let them into Canada. But Arcand saw Jews in power everywhere. In his speech, he reached new heights of implausibility when he claimed that Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek of China was actually a London Jew named Cohen.

  In the Duke of Wellington’s phrase, anybody who would believe that would believe anything. Many did not believe it; the audience had dwindled by several hundred before Arcand finished his marathon address. The die-hards were the products of the Depression described by R.E. Mercer, Assistant Superintendent of the RCMP in Toronto, in an earlier report to Ottawa. “This type of propaganda,” Mercer wrote, “will appeal to a certain class – disgruntled small storekeepers, business men and others who have been finding it hard to make a living in recent years.” Mercer added that it was this aspect of the fascist program that was finding a sympathetic hearing among many people “who do not agree with the aims of the party in other respects.”

  Outside Massey Hall, the Toronto police prevented any further anti-fascist outburst. Once the meeting was over, as the RCMP undercover man reported, “the various delegates left the hall in groups with the full co-operation of the police, who were very considerate and kind to see that nothing happened to anyone.… Police kept constant guard near the Isabella Hotel.”

  Such police protection was not required in Arcand’s own city, Montreal, where he already had the tacit support of the Duplessis government. It was his organization, after all, that had pressed for a provincial law to replace Section 98 of the Criminal Code and had praised the Premier when he introduced the Padlock Law a year earlier. Indeed, the notion of padlocking the premises of La Clarté had actually been discussed at a meeting of Nazi leaders two days before it took place.

  Arcand had no trouble addressing the McGill University Social Problems Club in February 1938. But Tim Buck, who was also scheduled to speak, was barred at the last minute because the Students’ Council feared the McGill Union would be padlocked if the Communist leader turned up.

  Not only was the Duplessis government too busy chasing communists to worry about fascists but also Arcand was one of their own – a toiler in the vineyards of the Union Nationale, the editor of its quasi-official newspaper. His vicious anti-Semitism found fertile ground in a province that was the home of 60,000 of Canada’s 156,000 Jews. Though many were native born, they would always be aliens to Quebeckers, who tended to think of them as “surrogate Englishmen,” in the words of Lita-Rose Betcherman, who has made a study of fascism in Canada during the Depression. The anglophone industrialists who ran the province might be too strong to attack, but the Jews, who competed at the level of the French-Canadian businessmen, could be vilified without fear of retaliation.

  Arcand distributed his hate literature without interference. No police raid seized copies of his thirty-two-page pamphlet, The Key to the Mystery, one of the most venomous anti-Jewish documents ever published. It was distributed by mail and also from door to door free of charge, although it was supposed to sell for fifty cents in Toronto and ten cents in Montreal. Copies went to prominent members of the Toronto police force as well as to civic officials, police officers, and leading citizens in the larger centres throughout Ontario.

  Arcand’s publication Le Fascist canadien was one of nineteen newspapers in Quebec that existed solely to propagate racial hatred, and that group does not include legitimate dailies such as Le Devoir, the organ of Quebec intellectuals, which, under Georges Pelletier, was intensely anti-Semitic (Pelletier advocated that all Jews be expelled from the countries of their birth and be forced to live in Palestine). That notorious anti-Semitic forgery the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion also received wide distribution. In August, a journal of the Roman Catholic Church, La Semaine religieuse, published the discredited work as literal fact. Even more disturbing, a widely read francophone daily, L’Action catholique, reprinted it.

  Most of Arcand’s hate literature came directly from Germany. In 1938 Canada was flooded with more than four hundred kinds of anti-Semitic leaflets, most published in the interests of the German Nazis.

  In addition to Arcand’s new united front and several smaller fascist groups in Toronto and western Canada, four German-speaking organizations, financed and organized by the German government, were operating in Canada. The Deutscher Bund, with branches in all the principal cities, was supervised by the German consul general in Montreal. The bund maintained schools in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg, and Kitchener. Here children were taught the German language and the glories of the Hitler regime. The bund’s weekly newspaper, Deutsche Zeitung, published in Winnipeg, was violently anti-Semitic. It existed for the sole purpose of fostering Nazi propaganda.

  The NSDAP, or Nazi party, along with the Arbeits Front constituted the inner circle of the German Nazi movement in Canada. The latter was restricted entirely to Aryans who were not Canadian citizens. Its members were pledged to propagate Nazi theories “by word and deed.”

  The German Unity League was a union of all the Nazi organizations, with branches in most provinces. It was formed for the purpose of arranging the annual German Days in order to gain control of other non-political organizations and disseminate Nazi propaganda. In 1937, the league managed to secure the Minister of Trade and Commerce and M.P. for Waterloo North, the Hon. William Daum Euler, as guest speaker at a Nazi mass meeting during Kitchener’s German Days. Euler agreed with other speakers who deprecated stories and articles critical of Germany, “which instead of healing sores [tend] to keep up hatreds.” The minister declared that he sometimes thought that the publication of such propaganda should be made a criminal offence for newspapers. In a town whose citizens had strong German ties, Euler was a good catch for the league.

  Arcand was at some pains to deny any connection with the German Nazis, but a mass of documentary evidence makes it clear that he was in constant and intimate touch with Berlin. The German diplomatic community also tried to pretend that it had nothing to do with the pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic literature pouring into the country. Erich Windels, the German consul general in Ottawa, who was a master at getting pro-German publicity into the press, explicitly denied that his country was carrying on any pro-fascist or anti-Semitic propaganda in Canada, either directly or indirectly. “Any German who takes part in anti-Semitism is not acting in the limits prescribed by German laws for emigrants,” Windels announced, suavely. That, of course, was pure rubbish.

  Windels turned his considerable charm on the gullible Mackenzie King while complaining, among other things, that the American picture magazine Peek had been allowed into Canada after carrying a caricature of Hitler. The magazine was not banned (although another magazine, Ken, was stopped at the border the following year for carrying a caricature of George VI and the Queen), but King soothed the German as best he could by inviting him and his wife to Kingsmere, along with another Nazi couple.

  “A most enjoyable evening” followed. King felt he had managed to cheer up the Germans, who “had felt lonely and depressed at times,” no
doubt because other more sensitive Canadians had shrunk from entertaining Hitler’s minions. Before the evening was over the Prime Minister of Canada and Hitler’s resident stooge and propagandist were singing songs together. King was delighted. “I could not help dwelling on the significance of the little gathering,” he wrote. “It showed what was possible if only good-will could exist between people of different nationalities rather than ill-will.” Windels and the others could not have been pleasanter, he thought.

  There’s little doubt that the Nazis’ efforts in Canada, aided and abetted by Arcand and his ilk, were having an effect. Anti-Semitism was increasing, especially in Ontario and Quebec. Some insurance companies were treating Jews as bad business risks, for no other reason than their race. Entire residential subdivisions were closed to Jews, to say nothing of the “restricted” summer resorts where the appalling expression “No Jews or dogs allowed” was making its appearance on public signs. A Jewish tennis team found it was no longer welcome in the Toronto Tennis League, while the St. Andrew’s Golf Club changed its policy and banned all Jews – citing pressure from the membership.

  During the CIO battle a year earlier, the Globe and Mail had gone so far as to identify Jews with the CIO and communism. “The indications are that a large percentage and probably a majority of Communists are Jews,” the paper said. In fact, as the Committee on Gentile-Jewish Relations revealed, only 3 per cent of the party’s membership was Jewish.

  In a remarkable display of verbal gymnastics, Arcand managed to link the Jews with both communism and capitalism. “The Jew is everywhere,” he declared. “He has seized control of our gold, our pulp, our press. He controls our government.” The Big Lie was believed by many Canadians, but the truth was different. So violent was discrimination against Jews across the country that there wasn’t a single one on the board of any Canadian bank, mortgage company, utility company, railway, or shipping firm. As for controlling the government, those members of the Jewish community who attempted to ease immigration restrictions would soon discover just how impotent they were. Jews did, however, make a convenient target for Canadians struggling blindly to find a scapegoat for their own misery. Arcand blamed them for causing the Depression. He promised, if elected, to disfranchise them all, revoke their citizenship, and expel them from Canada.