The Great Depression
By Pierre Berton
McClelland & Stewart
Pierre Berton has done it again. Unfortunately.
With his new book, The Great Depression, the champion churner of Canadian chronicles has constructed, though a combination of historical research and personal interviews, yet another narrative of Canadian history that is at its best only recreational reading.
The general theme of The Great Depression is continually repeated in Berton’s ten-year span of the Dirty Thirties. The country was tired. Prime Ministers Bennett and Mackenzie King were tired. The boxcar hoboes, the unemployed, the families who scraped and scrimped to get through these lean years were tired. And long before she finally reaches 1939—somewhere on page 477—the reader is thoroughly exhausted.
Berton describes the Depression chronologically, starting with the stock market crash in 1929 and ending with the war fever that his the nation in the autumn of 1939. He writes at the end of his book that a narrative history “in all its manifestations” of the Depression has not been written before, thus providing justification for his task. He also notes, somewhat overconfidently, that “it seems to me that the cumulative effect of a continuing narrative is devastating.” What’s really “devastating,” however, is the style that Berton writes in, which is singularly irritating to the extreme.
He sets out the goal of contrasting the hardships, poverty and intense discrimination and racism that were the key features of the depression years, against the Canadian government’s coldness, stinginess and lack of policies to deal with the situation.
But despite the valiant intent, Berton destroys the credibility of his book by making assumptions and using descriptive language that only detracts from what is trying to demonstrate. For example, in his depiction of Mackenzie King as a rather insecure yet stubborn prime minister, he focuses more on King’s personal idiosyncrasies and mysticisms rather than the policies he enacted (or did not as the case may be).
Berton used the King Diaries intensively as a source, and no doubt they are very entertaining and filled with the stuff that bestsellers are made of. As the major tool for the political analysis of King’s policies, however, they are not enough to adequately present King’s influence on the governmental scene. I don’t want to know about his little dog or his conversations with his dead mother but rather, for example, why his party continued to follow his uncaring and parsimonious policies. Berton is very good at telling a bedtime story but falters in drawing credible historical conclusions.
For example, he spends an entire chapter on Edward VIII’s abdication and King’s dilemma over how to phrase the telegram of congratulations to George VI, forcing the reader to endure such agonizing detail over such a trivial matter.
He [King] tossed in his bed, unable to
sleep. He called for his little dog
Pat to comfort him … It was now 4:30
a.m. The Prime Minister of Canada had
spent more than eight hours trying to
write a one-paragraph message of
congratulation … And thus, having made
obeisance to his new sovereign without
appearing to grovel, the Prime
Minister of his majesty’s loyal but
autonomous dominion toddled off to bed
and tried his best to get some sleep.
Devastating. There’s a reason this book is over 500 pages long.
With his story ode in fine tune, Berton does do a good job of demonstrating how widespread the fear and discrimination were in this decade. These were the years when immigrants, people of colour and above all anyone who showed even the slightest leftist leanings were blacklisted or arrested so they would never be able to find work, and then were made ineligible for the dole. These were the years when freedom of speech was only accorded to rich WASPs, when police were told to break up peaceful protests with guns and tear gas and to throw “communists” in jail without fair trials.
This was the decade when the University of Alberta had a Woman Haters’ Club whose president became student council president in 1935. U of T’s History Club was closed to women students. Birth control was illegal, unions were a communist plot, the Padlock law was enacted in Quebec and Jews escaping Nazi Germany were refused entry into Canada.
Berton also tries to show the courage (or alternatively the desperation of) the common farmers and working class Canadians who underwent tremendous hardships, poverty and starvation as drought and grasshoppers destroyed thousands of hectares of farmland and one fifth of Canada was unemployed. And he hasn’t forgotten anything. It’s easy to see where his sympathies lie with a line such as
The worst victims of hunger were the
million and a half cattle … A surplus
of at least three hundred thousand
would now have to be sold at
bankruptcy prices to meat-packing
plants.
This book is for people who love to watch the “historical” mini-series of the type Jane Seymour loves to star in; for people who read Victoria Holt, John James, Little Orphan Annie comic strips. The last paragraph seems to say it all.
It was over and done with—the Great
Depression that had brought so much
heartache and despair but had changed
the political face of the nation. It
had scarred an entire generation. Now
it was history.
The Depression of the thirties might be history. The Great Depression of the nineties most definitely isn’t.
