The Depression, not the war, left the deepest scars on an entire generation of Canadians. Survivors carried indelible memories of the collapse of capitalism. My mother, raised on a Manitoba farmstead, years afterward could not bear to throw out tin foil pie plates: “That’s wasteful,” she warned. My father-in-law cursed TV episodes of The Waltons that depicted poor but cheerful townsfolk who had love, if not money: “It wasn’t anything like that,” he muttered. “I was there and it wasn’t like that.”
The broad strokes of the Depression years are part of the nation’s memory, preserved in schoolbook texts and grainy newsreels: hobos on freight cars, police on horseback, dust storms and factory closures. Yet it’s the fine details that paint the most vivid picture of whole communities brought to their knees by an economic calamity unmatched in its cruelty.
Historian Todd McCallum of Dalhousie University has written a startling book. Hobohemia documents the Dustbowl Years in British Columbia, a “homeland for beggars,” he calls it, where thousands of jobless settled in shantytowns at the railways’ last stop. “Everywhere I turned, archives offered me dusty examples of a multitude of ways of seeing the hobo jungle as an island unto itself, something simultaneously connected to and separate from ‘society,’ whatever one took that to mean.”
