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perhaps apocryphal, a Toronto investor reached home on the evening of Black Tuesday to tell his wife he’d resigned from six clubs, sold their second car, put his garage up for rent, and cancelled all the family’s charge accounts. After that he fired the maid and went to bed.
    The stories of brokers leaping from tall buildings is one of the myths of the great crash. But there were suicides. There was, for instance, the case of poor Lottie Nugent, the Toronto bookkeeper, who, it will be recalled, had invested all she had – $3,000 – as down payment on six stocks. Her broker friend, with all the optimism of his breed, urged her to hang on, certain that they would go up again. But when the brokerage firm went bankrupt, she was faced with a demand to close out her account and pay $4,421.27 owing on the stocks. She was given six days to pay; it might as well have been six years, for all the hope the creditors had of realizing a debt that was certainly equal to five years of her salary. Unlike Tom Gallagher, she did not have a father who could cover her losses. She went back to her room in a Huron Street boarding house and turned on the gas. When the police found her body, it was still warm.
    Others far more prominent than Lottie Nugent were wiped out in the débâcle. These included a future prime minister, Louis St. Laurent, who would still be paying off his debts during the Second World War. R.B. Bennett, the Leader of His Majesty’s Opposition, also took a beating, but he could afford it. The cannier Mackenzie King, who ignored the crash in his voluminous diary, lost nothing; his fortune was secure in gilt-edged bonds. King, indeed, seemed oblivious to the implications of the market disaster. On October 30, in a remarkably smug statement, the PrimeMinister declared that “while no doubt a number of people have suffered owing to the sharp decline in stocks, the soundness of Canadian securities generally is not affected.”
    “Business was never better, nor faith in Canada’s future more justified,” said Mackenzie King.
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The world of 1929
    Canadians were not prepared for the Depression that followed. The businessmen weren’t prepared, the politicians weren’t prepared, and the people weren’t prepared. The coming disaster would call for bold, imaginative action, but Canada, in the twenties, was not a bold or imaginative country. Unlike the United States, it had yet to find its feet as an independent, united nation. Its semi-colonial status and its narrow regionalism had inhibited original thought and common endeavour.
    The country’s ten million people were cooped up in scattered population islands that seem, in retrospect, to have been hermetically sealed. The modern communications network we take for granted was almost non-existent. There was no national broadcasting system, no national airline, no Trans-Canada Highway to provide a sense of community – and no unique flag or official national anthem to rally round. The long-distance telephone was expensive and awkward – beyond the reach of most people. And there was little sense of history. Other nations revelled in theirs; Canadians thought theirs dull. Outside Quebec, the majority thought of themselves as British first, Canadian second; to them, Quebec was an unknown country.
    The chief unifying force was the railway system, but travel was expensive and denied to all but a select few. Ironically, the Depression changed all that, allowing thousands of young men to burst out of their isolation and, for the first time, gain a sense of country as they scrambled aboard the passing freights and criss-crossed the land.
    By western standards, Canada was an old-fashioned country. Almost half the people lived on farms or in small towns, far from the centres of sophistication – such as they were. Except for the Group of Seven or the National Hockey League, there was little indigenous culture. The tiny minority who cared about theatre,ballet, or opera made do with