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Single transient homeless men are one of the archetypal figures of the chaotic decade known as the Great Depression. They are also a misunderstood group, commonly associated with a degraded and hopeless existence. This thesis focuses on homeless men, both on the road and in Vancouver, in the period from the fall of 1929, with the collapse of North American stock markets, until the spring of 1932, with the breakdown of the provincial government's relief camp scheme. It argues that those involved in the relationships of charity provision, whether homeless recipient or government bureaucrat, characterized the world of relief with the same terms they used to understand the normalized world of the capitalist economy. Homeless transients flocked to Vancouver by the thousands. Many became the rank-and-file backbone of Communist-led protest movements. Consistently, these movements demanded relief at union rates, challenged the gendered, racial and national categories that divided the unemployed, and rejected outright the oppressive relief measures accorded transients. In response, the municipal government sought to introduce Fordist methods of business management, rationalizing the processes of relief provision with an eye to efficient administration and surveillance. Relief was not a one-sided transaction-a gift from one party to another-but an exchange. When offering the poor food, shelter, fuel and clothing, public and private charities became involved in commercial relationships with the city's service industries. Businesses across Vancouver clamoured to get their share of relief money, hoping to translate some of the money spent on the unemployed into profit. With state-run relief camps, governments created one of the sharpest contradictions of the 1930s, unemployed workers who worked for a living, but for substandard rates of relief. Officials seized upon the crisis to initiate a program designed to develop British Columbia's economic infrastructure. The work of the jobless would thus pay dividends by enabling an increased rate of economic growth once the crisis had passed. In these ways, relief became an industry. The hundreds of people who wrote about tramps during the 1930s twinned the objectification and the commodification of transiency. Whether espousing a humanitarian or a hateful view of hoboes, these authors almost unanimously agreed that the tramping life had to be destroyed. Hoboes would vanish from the Canadian landscape because their lives were without value. For their part, the hoboes who put words on paper ranged across a host of subjects pertaining to life on the road and life in the city. While some cried out against what they saw as the oppressions of transient life and envisioned a future in which they would be reintegrated into society, others lauded the camaraderie and mutuality amongst tramps. For this group, the hobo life was an end in itself, valued because it enabled them to live free from the exploitation that was the lot of wage workers.
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In March 1919, more than 230 union representatives gathered in Calgary for the Western Labor Conference. There, they initiated plans for a revolutionary industrial organizatin, the One Big Union, which embodied the internationalist principles of Marxist unionism. Within its first year, the One Big Union (OBU) issued over 70,000 membership cards, and was a powerful symbol of working-class demands for the end of class exploitation. However, given its patriarchal inheritance, the OBU was always something more than just a class organization. It was an attempt by working men to organize around a specific sense of gender identity, which I have called Marxist masculinity, in order to reconstitute the social bases of male power. The first chapter outlines the events surrounding the creation of the OBU in 1919 and the wave of general strikes that swept through Canada that summer. In particular, it sketches the relationship between class politics and a masculine structure of feeling, and how this relationship influenced the OBU's ideology. The second chapter discusses three elements around which Marxist masculinity was constructed. To begin, the experiences of women in the OBU are situated in relation to the organization's policies regarding membership in individual unions and the Women's Auxilliary. As well, it examines the personal lives of OBU leaders and the naturalized assumptions about heterosexuality which governed their politics. The final chapter discusses the purge of Tom Cassidy and Catherine Rose, two dedicated activists fired because of rumours of their sexual involvement. The OBU leadership wanted to prevent a public moral panic around issues of "free love" and was thus determined to have the matter kept quiet. In taking this position, OBU leaders regulated the gender and sexual identities of union members through concepts of proper masculine and feminine socialist behaviour.
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