Pierre Berton The Great Depression Then and Now By Melanie Fogel Volume 18 Number 6 1990 November Get to know the man behind the bow tie as he reflects on the legacy of the decade that changed Canada forever. Pierre Berton's Great Depression may be the most comprehensive look at a Canadian decade ever attempted. But it is not complete, nor could it be within reason. It tells us much about ourselves; and, from what it says and how it says it, may tell us something about the man Pierre Berton as well. CM: How did you decide what to put in and what to leave out? Berton: Well, generally, being a journalist, I put in what I find interesting, what interests me, or what is significant, of course. But in a book like this you can't put in everything--and you shouldn't. That would be really, hideously boring. CM: Is there anything you regretted leaving out? Berton: No. If I was going to be sorry to leave it out, I put it in. CM: You point out some interesting parallels between then and now, like the birth control debate and abortion, but it seems to me a lot else hasn't changed either. Berton: You still have politicians who, like generals, try to fight the next war using the tactics of the last war. Most of the panaceas they thought would work were old and tired, such as balancing the budget. We still hear that. Now, what's more important, balancing the budget or feeding the hungry? I would say feeding the hungry, and, OK, the next generation has to pay for it. But the next generation always pays for the last, and they should. They're the children of their fathers and mothers, and the fathers and mothers should expect to lay some of the burden on their offspring. They should pay. So I've never been worried, as some people are, about these guys who say we have to have high interest rates now to stop inflation. We're always going to have inflation; it's been going on steadily forever, and high interest rates are not going to help. You've got the same attitude towards a thing like the GST, which is not a very fair tax. It hits the poor very badly, and the rich can afford it. The tax that nobody's advocating is the fair tax, which is the gradual income tax. But even in the Depression that was anathema to the establishment. It wasn't until the war came along that we got a really tough income tax in which people paid according to their ability. CM: Another parallel is King's not taking action against Quebec's Padlock Law. Berton: Because it was Quebec! That's right, we still get that. King was very sensitive about Quebec. He was trying to establish a Canadian nationalism and he didn't want anybody rocking the boat, so he winked at Quebec. But the wicked thing was that he didn't wink at Alberta. And this is what made the [Social Credit] west so mad. He was disallowing a lot of Alberta laws, but he wasn't doing anything about these laws that were really worse in the province of Quebec, where Duplessis could walk in on anybody's house and lock the door for a year. And if you tried to go back in your house, as some poor guy did, you went to jail for two years! Imagine going to jail for two years for trying to get into your own house! But that's what happened. And the press wasn't very good. It was mainly on the side of the establishment. There were only three papers I would call independent--left of centre or at least in the centre--the Toronto Star, the Ottawa Citizen and the Winnipeg Free Press. They were the papers that seemed to be saner than the others. Some of them, the Montréal Gazette, for instance, were awful. The Globe and Mail was not much better. CM: I don't get any sense of this terrible, national crisis of the Depression having done anything to unite the country against it. Berton: No, quite the opposite. It was the war that united the country. If it hadn't been for the war the country might easily have fallen apart more than it did. People were too busy worrying about their own personal problems, and those of their neighbours, to worry about the state of the nation. There wasn't much nationhood. For instance, we didn't have television. Radio was in its infancy; the CBC was just being born. We had no Tin Pan Alley, no Woody Guthrie, no film industry to produce movies like The Grapes of Wrath. We didn't have writers. If you look at the list of books that were published, and there weren't many, they're mainly about the north and the outdoors. CM: Canada in 1929 doesn't seem like a very nice place. Berton: Boring. That's the worst thing you can say about it. I remember Toronto in 1943 and it was boring! There was nothing to do, no place to go. But in '29, of course, it was a repressive country. It was a country of white Anglo-Saxon Celts. The Scots ran the country. They ran the politics, they ran the universities, and they ran the financial institutions. No Jew could get any kind of job except as a junior clerk. Sex was not discussed. I was raised in the Yukon, where things were a little easier, a little wider open. But, boy, to have lived in Toronto in those days, with our attitude, wouldn't have been much fun. But people didn't have our attitude then; they thought it was OK. CM: Have we become more charitable, or have we merely institutionalized charity so that we don't have to bear the burden personally any more? Berton: Well, one thing I will say about the Depression is that it may not have brought the country together but it did bring the people together. People did help each other and they made sacrifices for their neighbours and family, but not on the basis of the larger entity. Now we think in terms of the larger entity. No, what's happening now is that the government is trying to get out of the charity business and put it back on the people, and it's not working very well. The large corporations are not giving very much to charity, nor is the average guy; that's the Me generation. CM: While you were writing this did any personal memories crop up? Berton: A lot, most of which I kept out of the book. CM: Oh, tell us one, please. Berton: Well, the personal memories have to do with my own interest in popular culture as a boy growing up: in movies, in pulp magazines, in the radio. I didn't want to make the book an exercise in nostalgia, which people tend to do about hard times fifty years later. They only remember the good times. Everybody says, "Oh, I had a good time in the Depression," but they didn't. CM: Is the research more interesting that the writing? Berton: No, the writing's more interesting. When I do research, I have to read everything. I don't take abstracts from my assistant. She gets the documents and I read them. And you have to read everything and mark it up and organize it, and then you have to read it all again and make a plan, make a card index. And then you have to plan it. Planning takes longer than the writing. I'm slowing down these days. I spent a year just writing this book. I wrote the first draft of The National Dream and The Last Spike each in three weeks, when I was young. Can't do that now. The second draft took six months, of course. I dictated the first draft of Klondike, which was a mistake. It just didn't save a minute of time. I had to rewrite it, it was so bad. Rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it, but the rewriting is the most fun. CM: The Thirties were a time of anticommunism and anti-Semitism and a lot of other "antis." Can people ever by happy if there's nobody to hate? Berton: There'll always be somebody to hate. There'll always be the stranger: "hate the stranger; be afraid of the stranger." There'll always be people in revolt, more than ever. We're going to have lots of revolutions come up. Look at what the Indians [in Quebec] are doing. You put the lid on people and it pops off. That's what's happening here; it's the same story. Ignore these people for long enough and suddenly there's an explosion. What'd they expect? Books by Pierre Berton The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the North West Passage and the North Pole, 1818 -1909. McClelland & Stewart, 1988. The Big Sell: An Introduction to the Black Arts of Door-to-Door Salesmanship s Other Techniques. McClelland & Stewart, 1963. Canada from Sea to Sea. Kings Printer, 1958. A Canadian Story [kit]. Ganymede Music, 1987. The Comfortable Pew: A Critical Look at Christianity and the Religious Establishment in the New Age. McClelland & Stewart, 1965. The Dionne Years: A Thirties Melodrama. McClelland & Stewart, 1977. Drifting Home. McClelland & Stewart, 1973. Fast,fast,fast relief. McClelland & Stewart, 1962. Flames across the Border, 1813-1814. McClelland & Stewart, 1981. The Golden Trail: The Story of the Klondike Rush. MacMillan, 1954. The Great Depression 1929-1939. McClelland & Stewart, 1990. Hollywood's Canada: The Americanization of Our National Image. McClelland & Stewart, 1975. The Invasion of Canada, 1812-1813. McClelland & Stewart, 1980. Just Add Water and Stir. McClelland & Stewart, 1959. The Klondike Fever: The Life and Death of the Last Great Gold Rush. McClelland & Stewart, 1958. The Klondike Quest: A Photographic Essay, 1879-1899. McClelland & Stewart, 1983. Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899. (Rev.) McClelland & Stewart, 1972. The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885. McClelland & Stewart, 1971. My Country: The Remarkable Past. McClelland & Stewart, 1976. The Mysterious North. McClelland & Stewart, 1956. The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881. McClelland & Stewart, 1970. The New City: A Prejudiced View of Toronto. MacMillan, 1961. The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914. McClelland & Stewart, 1984. The Royal Family: The Story of the British Monarchy from Victoria to Elizabeth. McClelland & Stewart, 1954. The Secret World of Og. McClelland & Stewart, 1961. The Smug Minority. McClelland & Stewart, 1968. Starting Out. McClelland & Stewart, 1987. Vimy. McClelland & Stewart, 1986. Why We Act Like Canadians: A Personal Exploration of Our National Character. McClelland & Stewart, 1982. The Wild Frontier: More Tales from the Remarkable Past. McClelland & Stewart, 1978. Melanie Fogel is an Ottawa-based freelance writer.