was manhandled for daring to question the assault. “Give it to them!” a policeman shouted. “They’re all yellow.” Others cried, “Get out and stay out! Get back to Russia!”
And so Joe Winkle, strolling through the park to watch a lawn-bowling tournament, was struck in the face by a detective’s fist. Edward Smith was told to get out of the park but before he could move was hammered three or four times by a policeman’s billy. Montagu Kellaway, a war veteran who, like Smith, didn’t move fast enough, suffered a cracked jaw. William Godfrey, who had dined with his sisters, was taking a short cut home when a policeman kicked him from behind. When he tried to protest, the policeman shouted, “Go back to Moscow!” and hit him across the mouth. As for Meyer Klig, who wasn’t an innocent bystander and was known to the police as a party member, he received a twenty-minute drubbing with rubber truncheons in the privacy of the Parliament Buildings.
It would be heartening to believe that this nightmarish attack was an inexplicable departure from the accepted rules of law and behaviour, an unexpected burst of pent-up emotion after a long summer’s day. It was nothing of the sort. It was planned with cold-blooded precision and carried out in the presence of the chief, Denny Draper, himself. And it was only one of a series of similar incidents that had the approval of the mayor, the police commission, and three of the city’s four dailies – the
Toronto Daily Star
being the exception, as it generally was in such atrocities. The usual establishment attitude was summed up in the
Globe’s
approving editorial the following morning: “ SEND THE BOLSHEVIKS BACK.”
The press insisted on terming the incident a “riot,” a peculiar name for an eruption of savagery that was planned and carried out by constituted authority. “Riot” would become the euphemismof the Depression, applied to any parade, demonstration, rally, or work stoppage that brought out the police and threatened the established order. There would be quite literally hundreds of these so-called riots in the turbulent decade that followed. In one year alone – 1934 – forty-three were serious enough to make the pages of the Toronto newspapers.
Labour groups, churches, and ordinary citizens were outraged by the action of the police that August. There were the usual calls for an inquiry and the usual replies that none was needed. And yet, over the months that followed, the feeling began to grow that something was wrong, that the system was out of kilter, that the social order wasn’t working. Only the communists were demanding radical change, and they made few converts. It’s one of the ironies of those times that the incidents they provoked, as the Depression deepened, did not benefit them politically. What they did do was to arouse the collective conscience of the academic elite. It was the university professors, many of them committed Christians, who would eventually take action against repression and lay the groundwork for the modern welfare state. It was the police who forced them into it.
2
The legacy of optimism
It is easy enough to look back on that buoyant and carefree summer of 1929 and ask why nobody saw trouble ahead. The signs were clear. The country was heavily overbuilt, the export market was fragile, wheat prices were falling, the stock market was impossibly high, and unemployment was rising. No one appeared to notice. The Canadians of those times seem to us to have been dancing blindfold on the lip of a precipice. They lolled in their summer cottages playing cheerful melodies – “Happy Days Are Here Again,” “Keep Your Sunny Side Up” – on scratchy gramophones. They flocked to the new talkies to see
Disraeli
, with George Arliss, or the aptly named
Gold Diggers of Broadway
. They listened to “The Goldbergs” on their Atwater-Kents and gobbled up the new murder mysteries by Dashiell Hammett and Ellery Queen. Those who had
And so Joe Winkle, strolling through the park to watch a lawn-bowling tournament, was struck in the face by a detective’s fist. Edward Smith was told to get out of the park but before he could move was hammered three or four times by a policeman’s billy. Montagu Kellaway, a war veteran who, like Smith, didn’t move fast enough, suffered a cracked jaw. William Godfrey, who had dined with his sisters, was taking a short cut home when a policeman kicked him from behind. When he tried to protest, the policeman shouted, “Go back to Moscow!” and hit him across the mouth. As for Meyer Klig, who wasn’t an innocent bystander and was known to the police as a party member, he received a twenty-minute drubbing with rubber truncheons in the privacy of the Parliament Buildings.
It would be heartening to believe that this nightmarish attack was an inexplicable departure from the accepted rules of law and behaviour, an unexpected burst of pent-up emotion after a long summer’s day. It was nothing of the sort. It was planned with cold-blooded precision and carried out in the presence of the chief, Denny Draper, himself. And it was only one of a series of similar incidents that had the approval of the mayor, the police commission, and three of the city’s four dailies – the
Toronto Daily Star
being the exception, as it generally was in such atrocities. The usual establishment attitude was summed up in the
Globe’s
approving editorial the following morning: “ SEND THE BOLSHEVIKS BACK.”
The press insisted on terming the incident a “riot,” a peculiar name for an eruption of savagery that was planned and carried out by constituted authority. “Riot” would become the euphemismof the Depression, applied to any parade, demonstration, rally, or work stoppage that brought out the police and threatened the established order. There would be quite literally hundreds of these so-called riots in the turbulent decade that followed. In one year alone – 1934 – forty-three were serious enough to make the pages of the Toronto newspapers.
Labour groups, churches, and ordinary citizens were outraged by the action of the police that August. There were the usual calls for an inquiry and the usual replies that none was needed. And yet, over the months that followed, the feeling began to grow that something was wrong, that the system was out of kilter, that the social order wasn’t working. Only the communists were demanding radical change, and they made few converts. It’s one of the ironies of those times that the incidents they provoked, as the Depression deepened, did not benefit them politically. What they did do was to arouse the collective conscience of the academic elite. It was the university professors, many of them committed Christians, who would eventually take action against repression and lay the groundwork for the modern welfare state. It was the police who forced them into it.
2
The legacy of optimism
It is easy enough to look back on that buoyant and carefree summer of 1929 and ask why nobody saw trouble ahead. The signs were clear. The country was heavily overbuilt, the export market was fragile, wheat prices were falling, the stock market was impossibly high, and unemployment was rising. No one appeared to notice. The Canadians of those times seem to us to have been dancing blindfold on the lip of a precipice. They lolled in their summer cottages playing cheerful melodies – “Happy Days Are Here Again,” “Keep Your Sunny Side Up” – on scratchy gramophones. They flocked to the new talkies to see
Disraeli
, with George Arliss, or the aptly named
Gold Diggers of Broadway
. They listened to “The Goldbergs” on their Atwater-Kents and gobbled up the new murder mysteries by Dashiell Hammett and Ellery Queen. Those who had