“IN THE AUTUMN OF 1930 , after exhausting all possible avenues of support, Harold Whyte slept outdoors in the False Creek area of Vancouver, British Columbia, fashioning his bed from abandoned wooden boards. The civic Relief Department had already refused his requests for relief on several occasions, the last time after he met in person with the Relief and Employment Committee. Recognizing that his prospects for justice were now slim, Mr. Whyte broke with the time-honoured convention of deference to those with political power, authoring a blistering missive to Alderman Atherton, the committee’s chair. “I have been trying for some time,” he began, “to be given a chance or at least a fair hearing. but so far I havent found a politician in Canada big enough to grant the request that themselfs should have attended to with out any effort on my part.” At his meeting with the committee, Mr. Whyte had found it difficult to convey his needs, since it was “the hardest task” to “plead ones own case.” Nor had he had anything to eat in the preceding 24 hours, and was thus “in no shape to stand the hot air and BS” coming from the committee, “about as dirty a bunch of politicians as ever stepped in shoe leather.” “I allways knew you were a bunch of fox,” he asserted, “but did not know you were such dam cowards.” Following this inauspicious beginning, the bulk of his letter darted from topic to topic: the “childish excuses” of department officials; the substantial sums allotted by the provincial government for unemployment relief, a share of which Mr. Whyte rightly deserved; and the fraud perpetrated by a former convict just “out of the can” who collected municipal relief in Vancouver while living in the interior of the province.
With both subject matter and tone, Mr. Whyte acknowledged the trifling value of his letter for its prospective readers. Still, he remained confident of his ability to extract a measure of justice from the committee, a “bunch of blood suckers that will stop at nothing.” He had, after all, faced down the Devil himself:
I will now close by quoting the dream I had the night of Oct 13 & 14 on the soft side of a plank in a mill on old false creek here goes I dreamt I had moraged my self to the devil and he called to foreclose. I asked him for another chance. he replyed Ill give two and if you can name one thing I can not do you are free.
A battle with the Devil, politicians as vampires: it takes little imagination to see that Mr. Whyte’s dreams weighed like a nightmare on the brain of the living. For his first attempt, he asked the Devil if he could name a “dirtyier black mail sheet” than Information, a local manifestation of the yellow press. The Devil responded by recalling how the Vancouver Sun had reversed its opposition to monopolies after the new owner of the BC Electric Railway Company, Sir Herbert Holt, purchased large amounts of advertising space in the paper to dry the “crockidile tears” it shed on the editorial page. Mr. Whyte had lost the first round, causing him to despair:
there I stood on the brink of Hell had given up hope. I turned to him and said I guess youve got me. but be for I take the leap I would like to know if there are on earth a cheaper bunch of blood sucking politicians then in vancouver BC as I looked at the devil his face turned red his eyes rolled in the top of his head. and the last words he said as he fell dead was it cant be did. it can not be did.
Harold Whyte had gloriously vanquished the Devil. Unfortunately, Vancouver’s Relief and Employment Committee proved a tougher adversary, voting to take “no action” on this letter “of an abusive character.” Mr. Whyte’s dream is a wonderful example of the profound emotional impact that unemployment and homelessness could have, and of the powerful allegories of resistance nourished in their soil. In articulating his exploitation at the hands of state officials in overtly religious terms, Mr. Whyte was not alone. As Michael Taussig and others observe, wage workers on the colonial peripheries of capitalist development often reconfigured their exploitative encounter with the emerging capitalist order through mythic tales of Devil figures and Hell. In the metropolis, the experience of North America’s jobless and homeless transients — who starved amid excess because of a series of economic calamities seemingly beyond human control — produced in some a similarly intense estrangement from the ruling order. Unemployment thus entered many 1930s narratives as an overwhelming force, irrevocably transforming lives with a power reminiscent of a vengeful, Old Testament God. The apocalyptic visions that visited Mr. Whyte during his nights on a makeshift wooden bed, propertyless but not without a Weltanschauung to call his own, explained both the present erosion and the coming restoration of value: this was a dialectic of dehumanization and transcendence.
In committing to paper these fragments of a life story, Mr. Whyte produced an account of experience that is the stuff of social history.
Unfortunately, Canada’s homeless wanderers of rails and roads never gained the minor stardom afforded hobo writers in other countries. There is no Canadian equivalent to America’s Boxcar Bertha or Jack Black; our tramps lack what the dispossessed Okie travellers had in Woody Guthrie. As for the Industrial Workers of the World, the much-celebrated social movement of and for itinerants: its most famous statement about the struggles of Canada’s transients was penned by Swedish-American boxcar tourist Joe Hill, who once visited British Columbia for the strikes. True, transients published a wealth of material in the radical press: in the 1930s, Vancouver’s Unemployed Worker and Toronto’s The Worker and The Daily Clarion, all run by the Communist Party, provided column-inches to tramps looking for a publication credit. But full-length studies of the jobless transient were the luxury of professionals — academics, administrators, and social workers, all with rooms of their own in which to perfect the product. Instead of George Orwell’s brilliant personal account, Down and Out in Paris and London, Canadians got Leonard Marsh’s dry sociological tome, Canadians In and Out of Work. In fact, the bulk of knowledge about Canadian Depression-era homeless men lies in government archives, in documents produced within the framework of relief administration."
- Todd McCallum, “Vancouver Through the Eyes of a Hobo: Experience, Identity, and Value in the Writing of Canada’s Depression-Era Tramps,” Labour/Le Travail, 59 (Spring 2007): 43-46, 49.
