The End of Boom Times

The good times were not to last.  The Great Depression of the 1930s hit the Niagara Frontier hard, and federal support could only able to mitigate the disaster to a limited extent.  What could a region reliant on manufacturing and trade do when factories stopped producing, goods stopped shipping, and people stopped buying?  Go on federal government relief, was one answer, and many individuals and even the city government of Buffalo proceeded to do so.  But the booster spirit was not entirely moribund.  Buffalo, for example, landed a new Chevrolet plant that began production in 1938, right after Bethlehem Steel modernized its facilities to produce steel for automobiles.  The city’s laborers, long active in the periodic waves of organizing and protest that accompanied industrialization, put together durable and powerful unions under the aegis of the New Deal’s friendly labor laws.  Meanwhile in 1932 the Canadian ship building industry reached its apex with the creation of the Port Weller Dry Docks, which is still in operation today.

Despite its troubles, therefore, the region was in good shape to welcome the enormous boom that followed the start of World War II.  The conflict jump-started both nations’ economies and flooded the industrial Niagara region with contracts and work.  A series of trade agreements between the US and Canada beginning in 1938 quickly erased four decades of high tariffs, the most recent of which had been the disastrous 1930 Hawley-Smoot levy by the US that had devastated Canadian farmers.  And, like all of the region’s other booms, the postwar expansion was accompanied by a new wave of immigration.  This last one, the third, took place primarily on the American side of the border and constituted an intensification of a decades-old migration of African Americans from the South to the industrial centers of the north. But if the war was enough to re-inflate the Niagara Frontier’s economy, it was not enough to set the region on a path of long-term stability.  Changes in technology, environment, and the economy were slowly but surely undermining the area’s hard-won position as a central nodal point for trade and communication.  Interstate trucking, begun at a small scale in the 1920s, had continued to grow but now blossomed in the frenzy of highway building that followed the war.  Unlike the railroads, these highways had no compelling reason to steer through the Niagara region.  To make matters worse, the grain belt had begun to migrate southward even as early as the late 19^th century, and the situation evolved to the point where it became economical to ship grain directly by train or truck instead of first sending it to Buffalo across the Great Lakes.  Even the Welland Canal, improved three times since its inception to keep up with the times, had its troubles:  a 1933 improvement enabled ships to pass through without stopping, effectively marooning the canal-based industries that had grown up along its banks.  Manufacturing alone could not make up for the loss of the transshipment hubs, as soon became clear.  After the war, as government contracts were canceled or not renewed, entire industries began to leave.  Spencer-Kellogg, DuPont, Anilene, and Hooker Chemical led the way.

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