| Q005.com |
|
|
|
|
The Dark Years
written by: Hart Dowd
THOSE DARK YEARS
I was a child of the Depression, born in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, I was 9 when the Depression ended in 1939 with the start of the Second World War. Within three years, 400,000 men had enlisted in the armed forces and hundreds of thousands of men and women had been swept into vital war work. So the war, became, in a very real sense, Canada's End of the Depression Deal, because unemployment was basically what the Depression was all about.
The Depression has always interested me. I have tried to study what little there is to find about it, and I have talked to many old timers, those who knew of it. I have come to the conclusion that very few Canadians know anything about those years 1929-1939. For some reason a conspiracy of silence seems to have tried to hide the Depression from Canadians too young to remember it, to sweep under the rug those lost ten years that were the most traumatic in our nation's history, the most debilitating, the most devastating, the most horrendous. Those words are not used lightly. Text books used in Canadian schools tend to dismiss those ten years with half a page, three paragraphs, even one sentence. And if a student is interested enough to seek further information, there is precious little to be found in the library section.
I asked a teen-aged neighbor, "Tell me what you know about the Depression, Stephen," and he answered, "We have never been taught about it, by our teachers, but Mom has told me that it was a time when no one had any money, not even the country. She's told me a few things about it, but that's all."
Why don't they teach it? Can ten years just be chopped out of a nation's history? Should those ten years be left blank in student's knowledge of their country? Should we not pass on this information to our families. When a woman in a Quebec textile factory could work 54 to 60 hours a week for $5; when the people of Southern Ontario sent hundreds of freight car loads of fruit and vegetables and warm clothing to Saskatchewan, where millions of wheat-growing acres were burned out and blowing away as dust, and where families turned their backs on their hard earned farms and just walked away; when a firm red spring salmon at Vancouver was giving the fisherman one cent a pound; and when in New Brunswick, the net cash income of the average farm one year was just $20.
When the nation survived the war, and even emerged stronger from it, there seemed to be a general feeling that the Depression should not be talked about. A war had been won, great goals lay ahead, the Thirties were still a shameful smear on people's memories, so everyone should forget that it ever happened. And it has been kept ou
Click Here To Go To My Favorite Link
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
