Todd McCallum's Hobohemia and the Crucifixion Machine: Rival Images of a New World in 1930s Vancouver (Athabasca University Press, 2015) depicts the early years of the Great Depression and the thousands of unemployed homeless transients who settled into Vancouver's "hobo jungle." As the transients moved from the jungles to the city, they made innumerable demands on Vancouver's Relief Department, consuming financial resources at a rate that threatened the city with bankruptcy. McCallum discusses the response of the Vancouver municipal government and offers a new interpretation of the economic and political crises that wracked Canada in the early years of the Great Depression. In particular, McCallum examines the Fordist management methods used by the Vancouver Relief Department to control the "transients" and how these methods eventually led to a crisis that inspired the most significant protest movement of the 1930s in Canada--the On-to-Ottawa trek.

[BCBW 2015]