The Great Depression: Past and present

The Great Depression: past and present MICHIEL HORN Is something like the Depression of the 1930s about to be repeated? The question is heard with growing frequency. Predictions of economic gloom are becoming common, and the gloomiest economic event that most of us can think of is the Great Depression. That the question should be asked at all testifies not only to the pervasiveness of the current anxiety but also to the hold which an historical event can have on the minds of people, including some who know it by hearsay only. For hundreds of thousands of Canadians now in their forties and older the 1930s are still the most shattering time they have ever known. "Hard times," "the winter years," "the dirty Thirties": these are book titles, cliches perhaps. They nonetheless have the power still to disturb people as they recall the things that were. Unemployment at its worst reached 30 per cent, transient men roamed the country in box-cars looking for jobs that did not exist, drought and grasshoppers plagued the West, and most commodity prices dropped disastrously low. Many buildings and people looked ever shabbier , corporations and municipalities feared debt default, farmers and home-owners dreaded mortgage foreclosure or tax sale, and pauperization became the fate or fear of millions of Canadians, not only many who had always lived in poverty but also some who had never before felt reason to be insecure. All the same, some Canadians look back with affection on those years. They remember the Depression as a time when people learned the value of a job and of simple pleasures. Life could be good if you had a little money, for you had learned to make a little go a long way, even to do without on occasion. As I tried to show in my documentary history of the Depression in Canada, The Dirty Thirties (1972), the experiences of Canadians varied widely. The Depression was Journal of Canadian Studies far from all bad or all bleak. Certainly life was cheap. A newspaper cost two cents and a pound of sirloin steak less than a quarter. A Ford or Chevy was $600 and a good house $6,000. Even in Toronto rents were less than $15 a month for a small bungalow or apartment; a Rosedale mansion could be rented for $100. Shoes sold at Eaton's for $2; a blue serge suit cost $15 at Simpson's. A housemaid would work all day, six days a week, for room, board and $8 per month, and line up for the privilege. Materially, at least, life was good to that minority who had the incomes that allowed them to take advantage of deflated prices and the glut of sellers in the labour market. Income taxes were low, moreover , although they went up modestly during the decade while exemptions were lowered to bring in more taxpayers. On the whole, however, governments continued to rely mainly on time-tried indirect taxes which weighed more heavily on the poor than on the well-to-do or the comfortable middle class. There were far more of the poor than of the latter two groups. If we follow L. C. Marsh in identifying the well-to-do as families in receipt of $10,000 or more per annum (1931 figures), we find that between one in a hundred and one in two hundred families could be so classified. A further 20 per cent constituted the middle classes. Their family heads were small- and medium-scale business operators, professionals, technical, managerial, commercial, and other white collar workers, and "responsible and independent industrial workers." 1 In these groups family income ranged from approximately $1,500 to $10,000 per annum, with most families near the bottom end. At least half of Canadian families could be described as working class in the 1930s, while Marsh called the remaining 30 per cent the farming class. One thing can confidently be said of many farmers and the great majority of the working class: at best they lived only just above the poverty line, with 41 little left over for comforts or savings for a rainy day.2 Many of them s1'ipped into destitution...