Book Review - The Great Depression

The Great Depression 1929-1939
by Pierre Burton
511 Pages, 1990

This was the only the second Canadian history book that I’ve read since finishing university, seven swift years ago. I started reading it immediately after a book called “Renegades” a history of Canadians in the Spanish Civil War. The nineteen thirties interest me as they represent a time when people were forced to take heed to the later words of Ralph Nader “People have got to turn on to politics, lest politics turn on them.” The poverty brought on by the big-d Depression forced people to re-evaluate the politics of the day.
Burton divides each year into a series of vignettes, all of which combine to give an impression of society on the whole, through a series of microcosms. No one can criticize him for a lack of context. In that endeavour, he succeeded, though the book lacks a central narrative, owing to the lack of a central protagonist. Burton’s sympathy for the Tory, JB Bennett, and antagonism to his Grit counterpart in Mackenzie King was well worth noting, in a book that places itself squarely onto the left of the political spectrum.
I’m glad that the book started with 1929. It started with the heady days of the roaring twenties. It does a good job at contextualizing the period as one of extreme wealth. It had to hit home that the wealthy at the time were rolling on the floor, being so weighted down with gold. The 1920s and 1930s were the decades of Earnest Hemmingway, Pablo Picasso, George Orwell, Graham Green and Agatha Christie. To see their world is to see a land of fantastic excess. That kind of wealth amid such poverty is something that has to be viewed with a marked fear when you see it in a history book or out of a window today.
The liberal-capitalist militancy of the Conservatives and Liberals elected to parliament stood out in my mind. The two parties were both so thoroughly dedicated to the free market, that they saw nothing wrong with exporting grain while their co-citizens were starving. When the bottom fell out of the economy, the two parties saw eye-to-eye with regards to the economic solution. Never run a deficit. Never allow government to so much as nudge the invisible hand of the market that would in its infinite wisdom guide the nation out of such despair. The Depression was created by an unregulated banking and exchange institution, and parliament was steadfastly loyal to those institutions, to the point that they abandoned any residual principles once held in order to defend the banks from an angry citizenry.
Anti-communism is a trope that of course dominates the politics of the day as it does now. Anyone who would try to promote popular democracy, or monetary reform, would be as unpalatable then as they are now. Burton doesn’t go far enough as to actually remind the reader that democracy and capitalism are inherently incompatible, but he certainly demonstrates it. The RCMP’s hostility to any whiff of socialism needed to be more directly compared to Mackenzie King’s sycophantic fawning of Hitler. The Toronto Police cracked the heads of unionists, but marched alongside the Canadian Union of Fascists. The RCMP tried to assassinate Communist Party leader Tim Buck in his gaol-cell in Kingston Pen, and the Nazi-cloned Canadian Unity Party lawfully rallied in Massey Hall.
This was a smart book, but was a difficult read because of its light structure. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who isn’t intensely interested in the time frame.