HOBOHEMIA AND THE CRUCIFIXION MACHINE fabriks: studies in the working class Capital is dead labor. — Karl Marx Fabriks: Studies in the Working Class provides a broad-based forum for labour studies research. Of particular interest are works that challenge familiar national and institu- tional narratives, focusing instead on gender-based, occupational, racial, and regional divisions among workers and on strategies for fostering working-class solidarity. The series also seeks to resurrect both social class analysis and the view of labour movements as a potentially liberating social force. It invites contributions not only from labour histor- ians but from industrial relations scholars, political scientists, economists, sociologists and social movement theorists, and anyone else whose concerns lie with the history and organization of labour, its philosophical underpinnings, and the struggle for economic and social justice. The Political Economy of Workplace Injury in Canada Bob Barnetson Our Union: UAW/CAW Local 27 from 1950 to 1990 Jason Russell Hobohemia and the Crucifixion Machine: Rival Images of a New World in 1930s Vancouver Todd McCallum rival images of a new world in 1930s vancouver Todd McCallum Copyright © 2014 Todd McCallum Published by AU Press, Athabasca University 1200, 10011 – 109 Street, Edmonton, ab t5j 3s8 doi: 10.15215/aupress/9781926836287.01 isbn 978-1-926836-28-7 (print) 978-1-926836-29-4 (pdf) 978-1-926836-63-8 (epub) Cover and interior design by Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design. Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printers. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication McCallum, Todd, 1969– Hobohemia and the crucifixion machine : rival images of a new world in 1930s Vancouver / Todd McCallum. (Fabriks : studies in the working class, 1925-6477 ; 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. 1. Unemployed — British Columbia — Vancouver — Social conditions — 20th century. 2. Unemployed — Services for — British Columbia — Vancouver — History — 20th century. 3. Transients, Relief of — British Columbia — Vancouver — History — 20th century. 4. Public welfare — British Columbia — Vancouver — History — 20th century. 5. British Columbia — Social conditions — 1918–1945. 6. British Columbia — Economic conditions — 1918–1945. 7. Depressions — 1929 — British Columbia. i. Title. ii. Series: Fabriks : studies in the working class ; 3 hd5708.2.c32v35 2014 305.9 '0694097113309043 c2012-905774-6 c2012-905775-4 This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Human- ities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (cbf) for our publishing activities. Assistance provided by the Government of Alberta, Alberta Multimedia Development Fund. This publication is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence, Attribution–Non- commercial–No Derivative Works 4.0 International: see www.creativecommons.org. The text may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original author. To obtain permission for uses beyond those outlined in the Creative Commons licence, please contact AU Press, Athabasca University, at [email protected]. CONTENTS List of Tables vii Preface ix INTRODUCTION: From Fordlandia to Hobohemia Homeless Men and the Relief Industry 3 1 A Strike, a Conference, and a Riot December 1929 to January 1930 27 2 “Useless Knowledge” About Jungle Life The Utopian Practices of Hobohemia, 1930–32 69 3 The Crucifixion Machine and the Quest for Efficiency The Relief Industry, Administration 115 4 The Racket in Tickets and the Traffic in Lives The Relief Industry, Consumption 155 5 “Work Without Wages,” or, Paving the Way for Economic Development The Relief Industry, Production 195 CONCLUSION: Vancouver, “The Mecca of the Surplus” 243 Notes 251 Bibliography 289 Index 301 doi:10.15215/aupress/9781926836287.01 T AB L ES 1 Length of Residence in Canada, First Survey 2 Length of Residence in Canada, Second Survey 3 Age of Registrants, First Survey 4 Age of Registrants, Second Survey 5 Nationality of Registrants, First Survey 6 Nationality of Registrants, Second Survey 7 Occupation of Registrants, First Survey 8 Cost of Unemployment and Indigent Relief in Vancouver, 1927–38 doi:10.15215/aupress/9781926836287.01 PREFACE “Sleep in gentle ease / little eyes shut please, / hear the raindrops in the dark, / hear the neighbour’s doggy bark. / Doggy bit the beggar- man, / tore his coat, away he ran, / to the gate the beggar flees, / sleep in gentle ease.” The first strophe of Taubert’s lullaby is frightening. And yet its two last lines bless sleep with a promise of peace. But this is not entirely due to bourgeois callousness, the comforting know- ledge that the intruder has been warded off. The sleepy child has already half forgotten the expulsion of the stranger, who in Schott’s song-book looks like a Jew, and in the line “to the gate the beggar flees” he glimpses peace without the wretchedness of others. So long as there is still a single beggar, Benjamin writes in a fragment, there is still myth; only with the last beggar’s disappearance would myth be appeased. But would not violence then be forgotten as in the child’s drowsiness? Would not, in the end, the disappearance of the beggar make good everything that was ever done to him and can never be made good? Is there not concealed in all persecution by human beings, who, with the little dog, set the whole of nature on the weak, the hope to see effaced the last trace of persecution, which is itself the portion of nature? Would not the beggar, driven out of the gate of civilization, find refuge in his homeland, freed from exile on earth? “Have now peaceful mind, beggar home shall find.” Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: 1 Reflections from a Damaged Life doi:10.15215/aupress/9781926836287.01 In this short excerpt, written sometime between 1944 and 1947, Theodor Adorno registers the tragic effects of fifteen years of global depression and war with a horrifying revision of Walter Benjamin’s pre-war dream about the possibility of revolutionary change. The beggar, whose disappearance Benjamin had imagined as a sign of the disappearance of all classes, becomes in Adorno’s wilful misreading a much more complicated figure. In Adorno’s rendering, because the beggar is the target of the violence that must first be done so that myth can achieve the desired result, sleep comes to the child only by first remembering and then forgetting the hurts inflicted upon the homeless man in the shadows. This process is made all the easier by articulat- ing the man’s poverty with the appearances of racial inferiority.2 Effectively effaced and made an abstract figure, yet still all too human in his ability to experience pain, Adorno’s beggar is necessary to the functioning of the whole, not because he can work but because he can suffer, allowing the rest of us to remember, and then forget, and then sleep. Adorno manages to find a kernel of utopian content in this nursery rhyme by proposing that the bourgeois dream of physically expelling each and every beggar from the whole would, in reality, “make good everything that was ever done to him and can never be made good.” 3 In his mind, justice for each individual historical act of persecution is an impossible goal since the very act of calculating an equivalent punishment would make one “the mouthpiece, against a bad world, of one even worse.” 4 Nonetheless, Adorno still imagines that the beggar could inflict severe damage by accepting his removal from “civilization,” thereby allowing its citizens to stamp out within themselves the only remaining “portion of nature” yet to succumb to rationalization. In this logic, it is only outside of this society — now left alone with its dialectic of enlightenment, where Hitler or Hollywood represented the only choice that remained — that the abject beggar finally “glimpses peace without the wretchedness of others” : “Have now peaceful mind, beggar home shall find.” Regrettably, in our present context, Adorno’s final question — “Would not the beggar, driven out of the gate of civilization, find refuge in his home- land, freed from exile on earth?” — originates in a kind of curiosity about the possibilities of a utopia that most Canadian historians have learned to leave behind, an occasional object of, but not a guide to, critical historical practice. I offer in this book’s opening chapters an excursus into the beggar’s “homeland,” doing so as something of an antidote to this contemporary his- toriographic departure away from utopia’s long-standing attractions. This is not to say that my account will be entirely unfamiliar to Can- adian historians. Beginning with chapter 3, my interpretive journey follows paths of inquiry that should be easily understood within the framework of conventional Canadian writing on the period. If my account of the changing character of relief governance and provision pertaining to single homeless x Preface doi:10.15215/aupress/9781926836287.01 men in Vancouver and British Columbia in the early years of the Great Depres- sion sits comfortably within established appreciations of the inadequacies of the state response to the collapsing social formation of the 1930s, I none- theless destabilize the usual narrative somewhat by introducing two key concepts: Michel Foucault’s “governmentality” and Theodor Adorno’s “ration- alization.” This theoretical intervention allows us to grasp more fully how mass need and the market collapse quickly overwhelmed Vancouver’s Relief Department. The result was a crisis recognizable throughout the municipality and, to a lesser extent, in the governing chambers of Victoria and Ottawa. It is my contention that the increasing number of people who distanced themselves from business methods in the face of the obvious contradictions manifesting themselves in the streets can best be situated historically and understood in our own times through an excavation of that long-buried uto- pian challenge posed by “Hobohemia” against capitalist Fordism.