There was a Bennett Buggy painting on the invitation, a Bennett Buggy on display and a real, live Bennett Buggy outside. It’s a symbol of the newest exhibit, The Great Depression, which opened last weekend at the Western Development Museum in Saskatoon.
This piece of Canadian history is a car body, engine removed, that was pulled by horses because fuel was too expensive. It was named after prime minister Richard Bedford Bennett, who was widely if perhaps unjustly blamed for the desperate times of the 1930s, when an economy largely based on agriculture fell victim to economic meltdown and sustained drought.
Read Also
Agriculture needs to prepare for government spending cuts
As government makes necessary cuts to spending, what can be reduced or restructured in the budgets for agriculture?
The Bennett Buggy was testament to good times gone bad and bad times gone worse. That’s how Jack Newman recalls the dusty, desperate days of that decade.
“It was so bad that you thought it could never be worse,” he said. But it could and it was.
Newman was born in 1924 and grew up southwest of Saskatoon. Though his family was among the fortunate who never went hungry in the Dirty Thirties, he recalls that wheat “sold for 28 cents a bushel, if you had any,” once drought, crop disease and grasshoppers had taken their share.
As for a Bennett Buggy, “we couldn’t afford one,” said Newman. To earn money, he collected and sold crow’s eggs for 12 cents a dozen, part of a municipal attempt to rid the area of unwanted birds. His mother earned only 10 cents per dozen for her Grade A, farm fresh hen’s eggs.
Similar stories abound when members of the older generation recall those dark days. The new exhibit gives those spoken memories physical substance through photographs, displays and audio files.
“The memories of the Depression are with us still,” said WDM executive director David Klatt last week. Indeed, the Great Depression shaped prairie people just as the unrelenting winds shaped the landscape.
Its lessons were so severe, and so prolonged, that they produced a complete distrust in the idea of sustained prosperity. That has, by turns, protected and damaged the prospects of prairie farmers ever since.
Those who see this exhibit, and the rest of the Winning the Prairie Gamble initiative at the WDM, will gain an understanding of prairie history that puts today’s agricultural and economic challenges into perspective.
Through it, one can see where the work ethic of prairie farmers, and their emphasis on frugality and fairness, had its roots. In a bit of historical irony, one could say these principles reflect those of R.B. Bennett: work as hard as you can, earn all you can, save all you can and then give all you can.
