1930s
School Fair at Meadow Lake, 1934
- Saskatchewan Archives Board
In October of 1933 the STF was brought into being by a set of “benevolent and neutral sponsors” from the Balcarres Inspectorate, who engineered a merger of three provincial organizations to create a single federation of teachers.
At the annual fall convention of that inspectorate, the Balcarres teachers had found themselves being courted by two separate, province-wide organizations—the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Alliance (STA) and the Rural Teachers’ Association (RTA). They also had the option of joining a third, more broadly based organization—the Saskatchewan Education Association (SEA). At the Balcarres meeting the representative of the RTA, according to Alliance President E.C. McEachern’s letter to his executive, “expressed—quite openly—the desire of his organization to participate in the projected amalgamation of the other two groups.”
The executive of the Balcarres convention “very enthusiastically grasped at the opportunity of furthering the amalgamation idea,” according to McEachern’s report, and decided to organize a meeting of the three bodies before the end of the month. “The Balcarres executive, I believe,” wrote McEachern to his own executive members, “propose to act as benevolent and neutral sponsors and to preside at the meeting.”
The Balcarres initiative led directly to the meeting on October 28, 1933 at the Regina Central Collegiate which founded the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation. John H. “Jack” Sturdy, chairperson of the Balcarres convention and a principal from Fort Qu’Appelle, was the go-between for the “benevolent and neutral sponsors” in his inspectorate. The SEA sent no representatives, but both the Rural Teachers and the Alliance came prepared to deal. Under Sturdy’s leadership they “threw their preconceived plans under the table, forgot their identity as STA or RTA, and worked out, on the basis of common sense and practicability, the main outlines of a new provincial organization for which the name of The Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation was favored.”
The constitutional convention of the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation was held two months later, on December 28, in the Regina Normal School. It was “an epoch-making event,” according to the “Last Official Bulletin” of the old Saskatchewan Teachers’ Alliance. President E.C. McEachern of the Alliance had presided over the historic occasion, and reported in the Bulletin that representatives met and worked out the main outlines of the constitution of the Federation.
The significance of the event lay in its harmony, not in the formation of a new teacher organization alone. Saskatchewan teachers were (and are) good at establishing organizations. They had been doing this at the local level since the 1880s and at the provincial level since the formation of the Saskatchewan Education Association in 1907, which was itself the successor of the Territorial Teachers’ Association.
The Alliance had been in existence since 1914, originally under the name of the “Saskatchewan Union of Teachers.” The third existing organization, the Rural Teachers’ Association, was a relative newcomer to the provincial field, having been founded in the Melville district only two years before the amalgamation which created the STF.
The Great Depression was the hammer which had pounded Saskatchewan teachers and their organizations into a new unity. Those hammer strokes fell on the anvil of the terrible drought which struck at the heart of the Saskatchewan economy. John H. Archer, in Saskatchewan: A History, explains that this province really did suffer more than others:
“The 1929 depression affected all of Canada. The impact, apparent in the autumn, struck hard in the following winter as prices for farm products fell, unemployment in towns and cities rose, tight money led to declining purchasing power and an atmosphere of anxiety and gloom developed. Saskatchewan was to suffer an additional dreadful burden; the economic depression was made the more bitter by nine successive years of drought and crop failure. Impossible as it may seem, the net agricultural incomes for 1931 through 1934, and again in 1937, were reported in minus figures, a reduction in income quite unmatched in any civilized country.”
The initial impact of these blows was shattering rather than unifying. A month after the formation of the RTA, Secretary Ed Campbell circulated a letter describing the reasons for its formation. The RTA argument was that rural teachers were a special case and their problems needed special action:
“The present economic depression has accentuated the unsatisfactory conditions under which rural teachers must work. Insecurity of tenure, chaotic conditions of employment, not being paid reasonable salaries and in many cases not receiving these, overcrowding of the profession and the injustice of the Superannuation Act are but some of the things which require concerted attention and action by the rural teachers. The work of the teacher in the one-roomed schools is often very heavy with enrolment up to 50 and over and with eight to 10 grades. There is little, if any, help in dealing with school problems such as a teacher in a city may receive from specialist supervisors. When the government grant was reduced by one-third, some school districts simply reduced the teacher’s salary by the full amount of the reduction in grant. These are some of the conditions which illustrate the urgent need for an active association to deal with the specific problems of the rural schools.”
The RTA’s potential constituency was large, since at the time there were six to seven thousand teachers in the province who did not belong to any professional organization and over 90 per cent of those came from rural, village and town schools.
A. Wray Wylie, a former STF president who only recently retired after 50 years of service to education, confirms the rural disaffection of those times.
“There was discontent among the rural members of the SEA and the Alliance. I was one of the ones in the rural areas at the time, north of Moose Jaw, in the Moose Jaw Inspectorate. The rural teachers felt that nothing was being done for the rural teacher, and it was a fact. Everything was geared to the city teacher and the large towns. You might say the Alliance was made up of city teachers. The SEA was made up of departmental people as well as teachers, and many outsiders were members of the SEA too.”
“So the movement began, in the eastern part of Saskatchewan, in the vicinity of Balcarres and Melville actually, and the historic meeting was held in the village of Invermay, where as a result of the efforts of six people who met there, all men by the way, the Rural Teachers’ Association was formed.”
In spite of their disaffection, some 30 years later Ed Campbell credited these dissatisfied rural teachers with being “the catalyst which played an important part in bringing the SEA, STA and RTA together.” Writing in 1966 about these early teacher organizations he said:
“It is interesting to note that the RTA was about to fold up in September 1933 when it decided to continue its efforts. What gave it new life was its announcement of a new plank in its platform. The new plank disclosed willingness on the part of the RTA to unite with any recognized teacher organization in the province. After this the movement for a united organization with wide representation—province-wide—became increasingly evident.”
The adopted organizational structure which was designed to make the STF a “grassroots” organization rather than one dominated by a central executive was largely based on the plan devised by the RTA. The foundation of the STF was to be local teacher organizations in the inspectorates from which a representative governing council would be drawn.
Emma Stewart, hired in 1942 as the STF’s first assistant general secretary, saw the local branches as key elements in the new organization. Reflecting on the early years on the eve of her retirement, she pointed out that while many people thought of the STF as an amalgamation of the three older organizations, actually it was a federation, or coming together, of all the inspectorate organizations.
This local base made the STF an outfit of, by and for the classroom teacher. However, the old SEA contacts, including influential members of the Department of Education and the teachers’ colleges, although they were excluded from active membership, proved to be valuable allies, for in 1935 the two-year-old Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation startled the teaching world by obtaining statutory membership. The statute which required Federation membership as a condition of employment was the first of its kind in the English-speaking world.
There was no doubt in Wray Wylie’s mind that the work that the first secretary-treasurer of the STF, Lorne Titus, and Jim MacKay, the first president, did to show the minister of the day that the bulk of the teachers of the province were members anyway helped make statutory membership possible. (By the end of 1934 over three-quarters of the teachers in the province had signed up and nearly 90 per cent of the members had declared themselves in favor of statutory membership.) It also helped that the minister of education was also the premier, “Jimmy” Gardiner, a former teacher from the town of Lemburg and very well thought of in his old district as a teacher. Moreover, a good many members of the Department of Education and the corps of inspectors were former SEA or Alliance members. Federation leadership had reason to believe that they could at least get the ear of the provincial educational establishment. Nonetheless, statutory membership was unquestionably a political coup which legitimized the fledgling organization.
Credit is due to many agents. Looking back on the efforts to organize the Federation, on the occasion of becoming an honorary life member of the STF, Lorne Titus, who served four terms as president following two years as secretary, paid tribute to the superintendents of that day. “I would say that 100 per cent of the 44 superintendents we had at that time became active missionaries in trying to develop the active organization we know as the Teachers’ Federation.”
He also praised the heroic efforts of Louise Aitchison, the first of a stalwart cadre of support staff that made the work of the Federation possible. She had been office assistant for the Teachers’ Alliance, according to Titus, and the Alliance owed her several months' salary when the new Federation asked her to move to Saskatoon and continue helping:
“…I want you to remember that I taught a full timetable in Nutana Collegiate and I could only come down to the office after four at night and Miss Aitchison would stay until 6:30 - 7:00 taking dictation and doing the necessary work in that preliminary organization. The organization job was a heavy one, and then she would come up the next morning with the letters prepared—knock on my classroom door—I would do the signing.”
Teacher welfare was the overwhelming task of the tiny STF staff in those days; the emphasis was salaries. Teachers’ salaries had dropped steadily from the beginning of the Depression until 1940 when the provincial government, after years of pressure, finally enacted minimum salary legislation. Pleas, briefs and logic had failed to provoke the government to yield, but when teachers collectively demonstrated their will by agreeing to refuse all positions offering less than $750 per year, the government listened. The deterioration of salaries over the decade and the ensuing hardship suffered by teachers may have frustrated the organization but the real story is told in individual hardship.
The young organization had tried appeals and strategies of every sort to provide living wages for teachers who had become the poorest of the poor. Repeated representations to government described the teachers’ plight. Government was sympathetic. The public was sympathetic, and so were many school boards. But a great deal of hardship was experienced before the government finally legislated a minimum salary of $700 a year in 1940.
Many teachers held on at great personal cost because of their commitment to their profession and to the children they taught. But as the years wore on, satisfaction became a poor substitute for payment. Teachers of this period were not of the sentimental ilk. Frustrated with receiving praise and sympathy rather than results for his statutory minimum salary campaign, President Titus claimed…
“Despite the discouragement and the desertions from the profession, it is fair to say that the teachers have carried on through the dark years in a commendable spirit of self-sacrifice and devotion to a high calling. I have heard many tributes to teachers which may be summed up in the words of a prominent citizen of the province, himself devoting his life, in another field, to the good of others: ‘When this depression is over,’ he said, ‘the people of this province should build a monument to the teachers for their public spirit.’ Now that the sun seems to be breaking through the gloomy clouds of disaster which have shrouded the province, we bespeak for the teachers the erection of that monument. We want nothing engraved on cold stone; we do not want fervent words of admiration. We do ask recognition of the importance of our work in the form of day-by-day monetary reward, sufficient to attract and retain men and women of ability, and to reward, in spite of themselves, those many, many teachers who entered the work because of a call to service, without serious thought of the material reward, and who have served with fortitude in spite of the dire self-sacrifice of recent years.”
In justifying the rightness of a statutory minimum salary, the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation had to contend with the public which had “got by” with paying their teachers little or nothing for several years. Federation spokespersons rose to elegant rhetorical heights to defend their demand.
“The problem is not one of individual teachers but of the efficiency of the educational services. The choice lies with the people of the province to build an education system which will meet the needs of a great democracy, or to allow a condition of stagnation to creep in making our education fit to meet only the needs of a population similar to a level of serfdom.”
The young Federation did much more than merely provide rhetoric and representation to government during these desperate years. It actively solicited gifts from teacher groups across Canada, confronted particularly miserly school boards, and enlisted legal aid in an often futile attempt to have teachers paid with something more tangible than promissory notes.
During the late ‘30s, the Federation received hundreds of appeals for assistance from destitute teachers struggling to survive, let alone teach, in the appalling schools of late-depression Saskatchewan. Each sadly repetitive plea for assistance for benevolent loans fueled the Federation’s resolve to obtain for teachers a salary that would at least allow them to eat and be clothed, and to see education raised in the public priority.
From the files: Dated January 21, 1937, Miss Ada Blanche Cook, at present teacher of Reddemann S.D. No. 945: The following information was submitted on October 15, 1936:
“The secretary-treasurer at Big Butte School refuses to pay me interest on my note from there amounting to nearly $20 now. At MacGregor S.D., Macoun, I am $538 in arrears. The secretary there only paid me what he pleased. I always had to drive down and beg him for a cheque. He often told me there wasn’t any money and finally I wrote to the secretary of the municipality at Torquay, also to the deputy minister of education and learned there had been a total of $78 sent to the secretary. He gave me a small amount of that after I threatened to expose him. When the government grant and loan of $10 came last year for the teacher each month I never received a $30 cheque. It was always for $20—the balance of the grant money was used for the payment of interest on all previous notes to other teachers and myself; for coal and wood; for janitor’s salary. Many months the 12-year-old girl who was janitor and fire builder received a cheque as big as mine and also I always had to go and ask for any money which is not usually expected of a teacher. I had to pay $18 per month for 20 days as I always came home weekends. The food I ate was relief food—why should I pay cash for relief food? The people where I boarded were very insulting and unless I paid up on the exact date I was told I could get out. Besides that they asked me to pay $1 per month to have my room scrubbed and for wash water. It was the only place I could board in the district so I had to put up with it. For transportation I had to pay $3 extra and had to borrow the cash from home in order to pay it. Conditions in the schools are as follows: Dirty and dark with smoke covered walls and ceilings. Old furnaces that gradually fell apart. A 12-year-old janitor who did her best but in 50 below zero weather the schoolroom was far below zero. Libraries, desks and equipment were in bad shape and no new material was ever purchased during the three years I was there. Throughout the year there was no flag, until the end of June when the secretary took $5 of money owing to me and purchased a large new flag. At my present school the equipment is poor but we make the best of it. There are 34 pupils crowded into a small schoolroom.”
The Federation extended little sympathy to boards unwilling to act decently in circumstances such as these, and General Secretary Sturdy was not one to mince words, either with boards or with teachers nervous about his militant approach. In response to a teacher asking him to be “patient” with an impoverished board, Sturdy wrote:
“We have hundreds of cases to deal with, and the reason we are achieving some success in the matters of payment of salary arrears, teacher tenure, payment of grant, additional assistance for teachers, etc. is because the central executive of your association has adopted a long overdue aggressive and courageous attitude. Teachers throughout this province have been subjected to every indignity possible to heap on them by un-understanding, unsympathetic and careless school boards and other authorities, and it is to be regretted that some of our teachers fail to realize that their best safeguard and guarantee of the future of the profession lie in Action. As far as I am concerned our teachers are always right until proven otherwise, and I am prepared to defend their interests with whatever little courage and ability I may possess. If the axe falls it is more liable to fall on me than on those I am defending. Except in one or two cases I have not found it necessary to institute legal action against districts. Nevertheless, I am prepared to do this if school boards refuse to do the just and reasonable thing.”
One can only wonder at teachers’ courage in persisting in their profession and maintaining faith in their professional organization under these circumstances. The destitution is hard to imagine:
“I wish to state that the grant for $79.50 came through and the district paid all my board ($65) leaving me $14 for my share for the last seven months. I can’t understand how a teacher should earn the money, pay the board and have none to live on. They have left me $14 for my salary since Christmas. I have written everyone I know but am afraid nothing can be done now. I shall appreciate anything you can do for I am sick with worry, Yours faithfully.”
Many did, in fact, give up, leaving the profession so that they could at least collect the relief or welfare that was unavailable to them since they were employed. Others held on through loans or gifts received through the STF’s benevolent fund, established largely through the generosity of other Canadian teacher organizations, especially those in Ontario:
“You can imagine how rejoiced I was when I received that sum (from the benevolent fund) after having my wife and child four months in the hospital. They had contracted typhoid fever from the school well and took seriously ill and I had to stay with them all the time giving blood transfusions, while I had to go on one or two meals a day. I was and still am unable to get any assistance from the government and municipality. I have a hospital bill of $600 and a doctor bill of $300 to pay…”
“I really think it is disgraceful to be a teacher in Saskatchewan’s dried out areas, especially when we have to appear shabbily dressed, faces drawn for the want of proper food, etc…. I have had two new dresses, not exceeding $2.95 each during the past five years.”
“School teachers, especially single, did not share in the relief food supplied. I asked for a share of apples which I wished for the school entertainment but was told that there were none for the school teachers.”
By 1939, the benevolent fund committee was so active that 50 meetings were held during that year. The committee administered the fund which was divided into two parts, with one “loan” and one “gift” department. Three hundred and twelve of the nearly 500 teachers who requested assistance were aided that year with nearly $6,000. Another assistance program, called the “adopt a school” campaign, was sponsored through the United Church of Canada and served to furbish sparsely some of the most desperate schools.
Teachers were sometimes accused by the public of demanding an unfair share of the meager wartime economic pie by persisting with their demands for a statutory minimum wage. In a furious retort to such criticism a teacher responding in the Bulletin under the pseudonym of B. Battleaxe, noted that even teachers being paid $400 were being exhorted to feel responsibility for the salvation of capital D Democracy. B. Battleaxe noted this exhortation to teachers which he had recently read in the Bulletin:
“What then is the duty of education in Democracy? To teach (that) these Christian ideals are the best and most satisfactory way of life, to develop the individual to his highest power and to see that every individual has equal opportunity to make the most of his abilities and his life on earth.”
"B. Battleaxe bitterly noted that “at $400 a year, the public is lucky to get a teacher who can read that passage, let alone understand it; to say nothing of implementing it!”
“All talk of the great and vital function of education in Democracy’s crisis is a lot of pompous humbug insofar as it ignores the scandalous state of rural-teacher remuneration.”
J.H. Sturdy, in his secretary’s report for 1939, likened the teachers and schools in this province to the “Maginot Line” defending democracy, and warned that their neglect would mean irreparable defeat and ignominy at home. In demanding more money for education, Sturdy claimed that many on relief were faring better than full-time teachers, that teachers were resigning in desperation to be eligible for relief, and that over 1,000 teachers had deserted the profession in the previous two years. His claim fell largely on deaf ears, but the organization persisted in its demands for a minimum salary. Lest anyone mistake the Federation’s patience for complacency, Sturdy warned:
“In the past we have been patient to such a degree that it has been interpreted by many people and one or two organizations as fear or apathy. Let them not presume too much or make the mistake that it has been fear and not a genuine concern for education and love for our boys and girls that has made us bear these ills.”
Teachers and their organizations showed commendable creativity in justifying over and over again to an impecunious—and usually unsympathetic—public, their demands for improved salaries. The Canadian Teachers’ Federation even suggested that the genetic pool would be weakened as long as teachers were too poor to bear and support children.
“Eugenists consider that our men teachers, being in the upper brackets mentally and physically, are in the class that should, in the national interests, raise four children.” The CTF report continued to assert that under current conditions most teachers would have to choose between celibacy and abject poverty, with 65 per cent of male teachers being statistically unable to support three children let alone four.
“Notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary, every teacher shall be paid a minimum salary of $700 per year.” The STF announced with great pride that minimum salary legislation was to be introduced in the legislature in 1940. This achievement followed extensive lobbying and the securing of promises from all parties involved in the 1939 provincial election to support such legislation. The STF had, in fact, wanted a statutory minimum of $750 and $1,500 for high school teachers, but was pleased with its measure of success. It was estimated at the time that the application of the $700 minimum would add $1½ million to teachers’ salaries during that year.
Not satisfied only with promises for a brighter future, the Federation actively pursued the collecting of arrears owed to teachers, and accosted recalcitrant boards tenaciously. This did not, typically, put the Federation in the high regard of board members. This reply was written by a board secretary who had been in receipt of one of the STF’s more demanding letters:
“The tone of your letter does not in any way interest this board, particularly your threat to sue. Every member of my board is in complete sympathy with the position of teachers and will welcome the day when local conditions will permit the paying of higher salaries to teachers than they deserve, just as we did in past years.”
The unity of purpose that the teachers achieved by the end of the decade in their stand on the minimum salary was learned in a harsh school.
Travel by car was the exception rather than the rule in the ‘30s. Emma Stewart recollected that rural teachers were sometimes known to walk 20 miles into town and 20 miles back to attend an STF local meeting. But the trains were the standard mode of travel. The Saskatchewan highway system consisted largely of unfinished “road allowances” until the end of the Second World War, but even quite small towns often had two or three passenger trains a day.
Former STF president Stan Fowler, who was an STF councillor for 19 years, describes getting to his first Council meeting in Moose Jaw in 1938.
“I had to go by train because the roads in those days were either impassable or non-existent. I got on the train at Prince Albert (this was at Christmas time) with instructions that I couldn’t take a sleeper—no money. I was to pack a lunch, and they would book rooms. We bunked three and four in a room at the YMCA or in a hotel. There was a two-day Council, with a meeting that first night. I was on the superannuation committee and at three o’clock in the morning we were still working on the presentation for the next morning first thing.”
Teachers at the local level did their best to persuade the public of the rightness of their cause. Quoting newspaper ads offering “salary $1 per day; balance later,” and “salary $200 per year,” E.G. Fielding, president of the Weyburn Inspectorate Teachers’ Local, calculated that once a teacher taking up such a position deducted the $8 superannuation fee and $1 Federation membership there would be $191, or 52¢ a day left to live on. Fielding didn’t reckon that the average relief recipient in Regina or Moose Jaw would climb out of bed in the morning for that much, and offered a few painful comparisons for teachers:
“A Chevrolet sedan is worth about $1,000 or five first class teachers; a team of horses is worth $300 or 1½ trained teachers; a bacon hog on the Moose Jaw market commands 7½¢ per pound—Saskatchewan’s best brains in its rural schools command 2¢ per pound. Your value today is equal to that of a couple of good hunting hounds, a good milk cow, a radio, a dozen straw stacks, 20 loads of old iron, or 50 cases of beer.”
Not everyone was sympathetic to the teachers’ campaign for the self-imposed minimum. The Star-Phoenix quoted a letter from the October issue of the School Trustee attacking J.H. Sturdy (by then the secretary of the STF) for wanting “to double the fees to be collected by the teachers’ union” and demanding to know why the school districts should “create more funds to fight themselves” (the legislation made it a responsibility of the school districts to collect the STF fee). However, the writer reserved his real scorn for the idea of putting more money in the pockets of the profession:
“Just imagine our young lady teachers rolling in money like that! What a boom there would be in the trade in silk stockings, fur coats, and pink nail polish. And wouldn’t the normal schools be flooded? But there is another side of it. When these girls get married in a few years what a life they would lead their husband if they can’t keep them in the style they are accustomed to!’’
Put like that, it really was the trustees’ moral duty to keep the teachers in the red.