The Great Depression Read Free Page A

with children, making their way toward the bandstand. As Gray described them, “they looked both ordinary and harmless, not remotely dangerous to the city or the country as a whole.”
    Nothing interesting was happening or seemed about to happen. From his vantage point, about a hundred yards away, Gray couldn’t tell whether or not anyone was speaking. There was no cheering, only “a kind of irresolute shifting about in the little crowd.”
    And then suddenly, like an explosion, scores of police, some on horseback, some on motorcycles with sidecars, burst from the bushes that partially screened the Parliament Buildings and drove straight at the little group, oblivious to the crowd of spectators, who scrambled or stumbled out of the way.
    What followed shocked and sickened Gray. Near the end of his life, when he wrote his memoirs, the spectacle that he had witnessed remained seared on his mind. The little group tried at first to hold together as though to confront their attackers. That, of course, was impossible, for they had no weapons, not even a stick or a stone. They broke and fled in a dozen directions before the police onslaught, so that the park became the scene of a dozen small skirmishes.
    One man came racing across the park directly toward Gray. A motorcycle officer saw him and roared after him. He tried desperately to escape, dodging between the trees, but the motorcycle followed every move until the victim tripped and fell. In an instant the policeman in the sidecar was out, kicking his victim brutally as he tried to get up. At last he simply lay on the grass, “trying to cover his head, and crying out as his body recoiled under the heavy boot.”
    We ask, sometimes, why the German bystanders did not interfere when the Brownshirts beat up the Jews, but deep down we know the answer. As Gray wrote, “I suppose we all had some impulse to intervene, to try to stop this cruel nonsense, but we didn’t. We weren’t after all on the wretched man’s side, except that each of us could feel the boot in his guts. Instead, we turned away sickened as the broken man was stood up and led away for questioning. For a while we were moody and thoughtful, ashamed perhaps that we had not even tried to help a fellow human, shocked at the picture of a hard world beyond our experience. But presently we were playing cards and singing around the piano, and in a day or two this glimpse of
real-politik
remained only as a trace that would surface less and less often as time passed.”
    The man whom Gray saw being chased and beaten was probably Jack MacDonald, the black-browed leader of the Communist party, who had been billed in advance as the speaker of the evening. The new police chief, Denny Draper, hated all communists and was determined to snuff out the party. When they tried to hire a hall, he stopped them. When they applied for permission to hold an outdoor meeting, he refused. Thus the Queen’s Park rally was technically illegal, and MacDonald, who carefully removed his glasses and thrust them into his pocket when the police erupted onto the square, knew exactly what to expect. “I haven’t even said a word, boys,” he shouted as two officers seized him.
    In short, the illegal rally hadn’t officially begun. That didn’t matter to the police. MacDonald was struck in the face, kicked from behind, knocked down, and kicked again and again. “For God’s sake,” he cried, the tears running down his cheeks. “Don’t kick me!” He broke away twice, and it was probably at this pointthat Gray saw him zigzagging across the park before his final capture.
    From the Estevan riot of 1931 to the Vancouver post office strike of 1938, the grey years of the Depression would be marked by police overkill. The prelude to these bloodier events was the Queen’s Park “riot” of August 1929. The Toronto police made no attempt to distinguish between communists, sympathizers, and ordinary bystanders. All were treated as the enemy. One youth