Bloody Sunday, Sunday 19 June 1938 A cordon of police was drawn up in front of the smashed-in store fronts keeping the crowds back. Here and there a moronic souvenir hunter dived for a scrap of broken glass or any relic that had been missed by the early morning clean-up job. The people milled solid for five blocks. There was a line of seven street cars where the service had got dislocated. They snailed along striking their gongs. The shrill of the gongs, the honking of horns and the jamming-in of gears kept up all the time as the traffic crawled along in first. It was one of those freak turn-outs. A woman leant from a car yelling and waving a red flag. No one paid any attention to her. That was the kind of thing that was in the air all over town. Hysteria. Mob hysteria. All on account of a few hundred jobless evicted from a three-weeks-old sit-down.  I’m reading Waste Heritage, a 1939 novel by Irene Baird that begins in the aftermath of the eviction of unemployed sit-downers from the post office & art gallery in 1938. Apparently it’s Canada’s Grapes of Wrath, the best depression-era novel to come out of this country. I’m not too far into it, but so far so good.  Source: Photo: Vancouver Daily Province via Vancouver Public Library #1289
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Bloody Sunday, Sunday 19 June 1938

A cordon of police was drawn up in front of the smashed-in store fronts keeping the crowds back. Here and there a moronic souvenir hunter dived for a scrap of broken glass or any relic that had been missed by the early morning clean-up job. The people milled solid for five blocks. There was a line of seven street cars where the service had got dislocated. They snailed along striking their gongs. The shrill of the gongs, the honking of horns and the jamming-in of gears kept up all the time as the traffic crawled along in first. It was one of those freak turn-outs. A woman leant from a car yelling and waving a red flag. No one paid any attention to her. That was the kind of thing that was in the air all over town. Hysteria. Mob hysteria. All on account of a few hundred jobless evicted from a three-weeks-old sit-down. 

I’m reading Waste Heritage, a 1939 novel by Irene Baird that begins in the aftermath of the eviction of unemployed sit-downers from the post office & art gallery in 1938. Apparently it’s Canada’s Grapes of Wrath, the best depression-era novel to come out of this country. I’m not too far into it, but so far so good. 

Source: Photo: Vancouver Daily Province via Vancouver Public Library #1289

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