The Great Depression Read Free

later in an interview with
Maclean’s
. “You could take your girl to a supper dance at the hotel for $10,” he remembered, “and that included a bottle and a room for you and your friends to drink it in.”
    Ten dollars was a great deal of money in 1935 – a year in which department store seamstresses found they had to work evenings to earn the minimum weekly wage of $12.50. But for others it was a pittance.
    “I’m glad I grew up then. It was a good time for everybody. People learned what it means to work,” said John David Eaton.

1929
    1
The Great Repression
    2
The legacy of optimism
    3
Crash!
    4
The world of 1929
1
The Great Repression
    For most people, the Depression began on that manic morning of October 29, to be known forever as Black Tuesday, when the easy, buoyant era of the twenties – the roaring, turbulent, high-flying twenties – came to a dead stop. Yet those fevered October days were no more than symptoms of a deeper malady, undiagnosed and untreated.
    The germs were already there in the hot, dry summer of 1929, when the crops began to fail on the southern prairies and the boom ran wild and out of hand and the country continued to overbuild on borrowed funds. The Great Depression was beginning and nobody knew it. The Great Repression was already under way but nobody cared. One did not need to visit Munich to see dissidents beaten to the ground. It was happening here.
    In the decade that followed – the hungry, the dirty, the sad, shameful, mean-spirited thirties – the image of a policeman’s truncheon bringing a shabbily dressed man to his knees would become familiar. Human rights and civil liberties were of no more concern to the average Canadian, struggling to make ends meet, than to the average German. It is appalling to recall that under the vagrancy laws it was a crime to be poor and homeless in 1929. But scarcely anybody gave that a thought; in those heady days, anybody who wanted a job could get one. If you didn’t work you were a bum, and if the police caught you and hauled you off a freight train, you went to jail – and good riddance. But the day was coming when two million people would be bums, when the freight trains would be jammed with homeless men, when the jails would be bursting with “vagrants,” and when some who protested these conditions would be branded dangerous subversives and packed off to the penitentiary.
    That day, in fact, had already arrived. The events of August 13 in Toronto – another Black Tuesday, though nobody called it that – were as much a curtain raiser for the decade to come as the market crash that followed ten weeks later.
    We can glimpse the opening skirmish in this bloody affair through the shocked eyes of a twenty-two-year-old bystander, John Morgan Gray, who in the post-war years would become a major literary figure as president of the Macmillan Company ofCanada. On that balmy summer evening, Gray had decided to stroll over to Queen’s Park with a few friends from a nearby University of Toronto fraternity house. The park, a grass-covered, tree-shaded square behind the Parliament Buildings, provided one of the few green spaces in the downtown core and was thus a favourite with Torontonians, who liked to take short cuts across it, or listen to concerts in the bandstand, or take their ease on the park benches to observe the passing show. The passing show that night promised to be special. The communists were planning a rally, and the police had announced that they would break it up. Gray was a graduate of Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto, but in spite of his education and a recent sojourn in Europe, he knew nothing of international politics. He and his friends had walked over out of curiosity, to watch the fun and see “what wild Communists looked like.”
    The wild communists, it turned out, looked disappointingly commonplace. Gray spotted them at the south end of the park, an unimpressive group of about sixty people, some