Lunch-Bucket Lives: Remaking the Workers’ City by Craig Heron (review)

By the time I finished reading Chapter 10 of Craig Heron’s Lunch-Bucket Lives, “The Whip Hand,” the spell had been cast: I had been transported to Hamilton, Ontario, in the late 19th and early 20th century, a place and time marked by immense and far-reaching changes.

After the implementation of the National Policy in 1879, the “ambitious city” at the western head of Lake Ontario became the “Pittsburgh of Canada” as capital investment from local, national, and transnational sources grew, employment opportunities ballooned, and the value of goods produced skyrocketed – jumping nearly tenfold between 1871 and 1911. Never a company town, nor solely reliant on a single commodity in these years, Hamilton would later lean heavily on a manufacturing sector anchored by the Steel Company of Canada, International Harvester, and Canadian Westinghouse. As the economic basis of the city changed, so too did its population – surpassing 150,000 people by the Great Depression. Most of the newcomers were Canadian-born and drawn to the city by the possibility of work. Immigrants from the British Isles and to a lesser extent Southern and Eastern Europe arrived too, filling out the city’s emerging vertical mosaic. By the turn of the century, new homes, neighbourhoods, communities, and relationships had come into being. Their distinctive forms, textures, and trajectories were shaped by many things; not least of these were the vicissitudes of industrial production and state initiatives which shaped what it meant to be a family, a worker, and a Canadian.

By the mid-way point of the book when Chapter 10 begins, all of this – the city’s evolving economic, political, and cultural geography – has been carefully and lovingly revealed. In the pages that follow, Heron refines and extends many of these core themes as he moves his narrative forward to the eve of World War II. The end result is a momentous scholarly achievement by a historian who has been engaged by the city of Hamilton and the field of labour and working-class history for his entire career.

Lunch-Bucket Lives is structured like a set of Russian nesting dolls, an approach that dissolves the inherent tension between chronology and theme. At the book’s core – the smallest of the figures – is what Heron calls “working-class realism.” (7) Neither a coherent political program, nor an easy substitute for conservatism, this notion points to the consistent attempt by wage-earning families to secure a degree of financial stability, familial integrity, and personal fulfillment within a set of circumstances so rarely – if ever – of their own choosing or making. The lunch-bucket in the book’s title – and featured so prominently on its cover – is meant to embody this broad set of pragmatic desires and choices, for it evokes in material form what Hamilton’s working class understood intimately and practiced daily: “the hard-metal reality of surviving on wage labour and the many practices that workers engaged in to make life worth living.” (3)

Heron’s perspective brings to mind Bryan Palmer’s path breaking study of the same city, A Culture in Conflict: Skilled Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Hamilton, Ontario, 1860–1914 (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979). A quick and compressed comparison is instructive. Published when the field of labour and working-class history was still in its infancy, Palmer’s account accentuated the swelling of working-class culture, consciousness, and conflict that accompanied the industrial revolution in Hamilton between 1860 and 1914. Organized around the notion of “working-class realism,” Lunch-Bucket Lives is angled in a slightly different way. Heron spends far more time with family and neighbourhood than work process and union politics; quotidian choices about homes, shopping, education, and entertainment edge moments of expanded political opportunities and overt workplace confrontation – 1886, 1919, and 1946 – to the margins. The two books, in other words, focus on the same subject, but move in contrasting directions: toward conflict and possibility in the case of Palmer; toward acceptance and pragmatism...