There's been a lot of that kind of attitude going around in recent months, even if the people backing out of the market have never heard of the Pudd'nhead Doctrine. The same sort of retreat took place throughout the 1930s in reaction to the market's implosion in October 1929 — just as it did when writer Mark Twain was implanting the doctrine in the mind of his Pudd'nhead character in a story published shortly after the crash of 1893. And, for that matter, the same thing happened way back in the wake of the collapse of 1857.

Pudd'nhead — actually a smart New Yorker pinned with the nickname by the crackers in his adopted Mississippi home who didn't get his sense of humor — would have known through Twain about the deflationary aftermaths of both 19th-century meltdowns. Of interest to the soothsayer school of analysts is the fact that October — the calamitous month of 1929 — gets first mention in the Twain-Pudd'nhead warning. (The market collapses that cued previous economic downers occurred in August of 1857 and June of 1893.)

If flagging October could truly be taken as an early warning of hazards ahead, it would fit with the notions of some watchers that markets, for example, get roiled every 36 years. So would the truer tradition that advance alerts get drowned out by dreamers.

There were warnings before Wall Street plunged on October 24, 1929, and all markets crashed in unison on October 29. As early as January 1928, analyst Roger Ward Babson, author of the reputed Babson Reports, urged investors to beware: "People are in debt today to an extent never before. Sooner or later the dam will break, to be followed by unemployment, failures and hard times."

The similarities reverberate across seven decades. Take for instance investor attitudes—one week upbeat, the next a downer. Just like nowadays, upticks in the market in the 1930s nourished spasms of hope that "the slump" would be short-lived:






Nine months before the optimistic editorial appeared, a published study showed that the valuation of all listed and unlisted Canadian securities had plunged by more than $5 billion from their 1929 peak of $9.5 billion. And by the middle of 1930, the prices and the earnings of products from the farms, forests and mines—then the mainstays of the economy—were slithering into freefall. The price of wheat was on its way from a 1929 average of $1.34 a bushel to a record low of 50¢ in 1931. Copper also skidded to a low of 6¢ a pound.

In the four years from the peak of prosperity in 1929 to the Depression's deepest trough in 1933, the ravages of the afflicted economy took corporate Canada from total profits of almost $400 million down to a loss of nearly $100 million. The down-spin chopped the value of exports in half, eroded the gross national product by 43% and pushed up unemployment—the rate was never less than 12% throughout the decade—to a massive 27% of the workforce in 1933. Almost two million of the roughly 10.5 million Canadians then had no earned income at all. As the ruination gathered momentum, the magazine maintained a brave face. "The present is no time for gloomy forebodings," an editorial stubbornly proclaimed in September 1931. "The dark days are over and we do well to look ahead."

As if the losses of money and jobs alone weren't enough to turn off the people's trust in business, the early days of the Dirty Thirties exposed cases of bent corporate practices akin to the Enrons and WorldComs of our time. Courts sentenced a dozen top brokerage executives, convicted of defrauding clients and corporations, either to pay large fines and serve short jail terms, or vice versa:






At the same time, with capitalism itself in disrepute in many quarters, the publication devoted generous space to the system's challengers, including the Soviet Union. Other reform-minded movements received attention, among them the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, born in Calgary in 1932 and forebear of the NDP. Consistently negative appraisal was lavished on Alberta's Social Credit, forerunner of the Reform and Canadian Alliance parties, and a winner provincially in 1935, its first election. The magazine's editors also maintained a circumspect watch on neighbor Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program, launched in 1933.

The good news about the Great Depression is about the country's accomplishments in those otherwise dire days—notably in communication by radio and airplane and even in pioneering versions of television. Both the CBC and Air Canada, offspring of the 1930s, established key linkages in cross-country business operations and social unity.

Another unifying factor figures in the Great Depression's legacy. It is the lesson that co-operation in hard times—between public and private enterprise, among regions and language groups—evolved into a central element of Canadian life. That spirit produced national unemployment insurance and, in elaboration of that idea, such social assets as national health care and the many forms of mutual support between business and government.

Canadian Business makes the same point a number of times. One occasion was in December 1936, as Depression pressures eased somewhat, although about a million Canadians were still receiving relief assistance: