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  • Hobohemia and the Crucifixion Machine: Rival Images of a New World in 1930s Vancouver by Todd McCallum
  • Nathan Tye
Todd McCallum, Hobohemia and the Crucifixion Machine: Rival Images of a New World in 1930s Vancouver (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press 2014)

Thousands op unemployed wanderers flocked to Vancouver during the Depression. They built hobo jungles on the city’s margins and constructed numerous infrastructure projects under the auspices of relief. Todd McCallum captures the indispensability of and tensions embodied by itinerant labourers in Vancouver during the early 1930s. His detailed portrait of transient life and space, relief work, labour camps, and the government and business machinations surrounding the itinerant poor is a worthwhile addition to Canadian labour history, Depression history, and hobo history more broadly.

McCallum argues hobos and other itinerant labourers crafted “islands of non-capitalist, non-statist social practice,” within hobo jungles or camps in the city and the communal practices of sharing, foraging, and begging kept them going. (6) He refers to these spaces as “homelands” which functioned as anti-capitalist, and particularly anti-Fordist utopias where itinerant and unemployed labourers established strong communal bonds and organized resistance against city, provincial, and national relief efforts. Epitomizing the implementation of Fordism within Vancouver’s relief efforts was the creation of the “transient” as a site of knowledge, commodification, and control by the Relief Department. Relief workers wiped away any of the hobos’ recognizable humanity in an effort to standardize and rationalize relief efforts. This is the “Crucifixion Machine” of the title. Undergirding relief work was a growing interaction between the Relief Department and local business interests during the opening years of the Depression, an interweaving of government and business McCallum terms the “relief industry.” (9) Thus economic factors, like efficiency, production, distribution, and consumption shaped the policies and day-to-day practices of the Relief Department. Part of the Relief Department’s response to the thousands of homeless men flocking to Vancouver was the creation of work camps where transients earned their keep building roads or cutting timber. McCallum argues that work relief should be understood as another iteration of unfree labour. This made work relief camps a space of resistance fostered by Communist organizers.

Overarching his historical arguments are a firm defense of social history and forceful theoretical claims. McCallum attempts to place the lives of Vancouver’s homeless men as the central focus of his study and situate the relief industry as its “shadow.” (7) To support these claims he relies heavily on social historical and Marxist methodological practices. He argues social history is the most fruitful approach to exploring the lives of transients because the archive makes no mention of sexuality, gender, race, or class. Although, deeper readings of archival silences [End Page 263] like this rarely leaves the silence intact. Underscoring this, he argues his work is, at its core, a “mode of production” history charting the ways commodification and rationalization underscored the relief industry’s work and relationship with the homeless men they served. (11) Yet, McCallum is not content with the traditional and what he sees as largely stagnant social historical and Marxist methodologies employed by Canadian historians. To this end he brings the Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor Adorno, as well as Michel Foucault to augment and expand the theoretical reach of social history. This supports his call for an “indivisible analytic totality” between theory and historical sources. (25) To further this aim McCallum purposefully sidesteps much of the historiography in order to focus on his theoretical arguments.

The book is divided into five chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 provide chronological narratives about itinerant lives and spaces within Vancouver between 1929 and 1932. The final three chapters focus on the formation and execution of the relief industry during that same period. Each focuses on a particular aspect of the relief industry and includes significant space devoted to these trends in conversation with McCallum’s theoretical arguments. The tension between the first two and last three chapters is purposeful and captures, in part, the historical conflict between homeless men and Vancouver’s Relief Department.

Chapter 1 follows the rise of Vancouver’s hobo jungles between December 1929 and January 1930. It...

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