The wretched of Canada

"These are the voices of the people who suffered most in the Great Depression of the 1930s - the prairie farmers, the unemployed workers, the old, the sick, and the very young. They lived in shacks, patched their clothes, and went to bed hungry. Their lives were bleak and still. Even the ordinary escape-hatches of the radio, the newspaper, and liquor were closed for many of them. Theirs was life at the bottom, a single-minded struggle for survival, monotonous and dreary. Yet they were a humble, proud, and God-fearing folk. perhaps Canadians at that time had too much discipline and individualism, or too little political sophistication to fight out against a whole economic and social system. The editors have carefully culled 168 of the most interesting letters of the many thousands Prime Minister Bennett received during his term of office. The collection is unique in that it allows the poor to speak for themselves, bypassing the middle-class spokesmen - union leaders, social workers, radical politicians - who too often sketched the poor in their own image. These letters strip away the tawdry glamour and stupid nostalgia that somehow clouds the 1930s in retrospect. They reveal how bad the thirties were for some people in Canada: worse perhaps than most of the history texts and even the survivors remember. In a vivid and very personal way this collection gives both those who lived through the depression and those who know only the prosperity of the last few decades an insight into the human casualties of economic upheaval."--