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As a window into contemporary debates about the concept of experience, this essay examines 1934's Vancouver Through the Eyes of a Hobo, which may have the distinction of being the only extant book about hoboing in Depression-era Canada written by a self-identified transient, Victor Wadham Forster. Forster mapped for his readers a dialectic: Nature -- an antimodern pastoral refuge where hoboes lived in freedom -- stood against the City -- a wholly modern capitalist nightmare, home to economic exploitation and its attendant moral degradations. Yet, the author also articulated his desire to destroy this way of life -- and the foundation of his claims to authority as a writer -- in order to effect his and every hobo's reintegration with society. Casting off his avowed allegiance to tramping, Forster divined for his readers a third social formation, a new kind of capitalism infused with a Christian ethos of brotherhood and cooperation, and propped up by an unbounded white supremacy and a rigidly patriarchal division of labour. Herein lies the tragedy of Vancouver Through the Eves of a Hobo: to save the hobo required the destruction of the hobo way of life.
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The article reviews the book, "Labour before the Law: The Regulation of Workers' Collective Action in Canada, 1900-1948," by Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker.
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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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The article reviews and comments on "The Tramp in America" by Tim Creswell, "Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America" by Todd DePastino, and "Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880-1930" by Frank Tobias Higbie.
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Discusses the anti-Chinese racism surrounding the No. 1 Mine disaster of 1887, when Chinese miners were unfairly blamed for the tragedy. A sign and plaque were unveiled in 1999 at the disaster's site in Nanaimo, BC, where 53 of the 150 miners killed were Chinese.
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Working-class history is the story of the changing conditions and actions of all working people. Most adult Canadians today earn their living in the form of wages and salaries and thus share the conditions of dependent employment associated with the definition of "working class." -- Introduction
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