“Idle All Along the Line”: Mass Need and the Hunger March The six thousand demonstrators congregating in Vancouver during the last week in February 1932 were represented by Wilberforce Cooper, rector of the parish of St. James, who was asked to “interpret the Hunger March to the City Council” in his own words. This group, he gravely noted, “represent[ed] a far larger number of workless and hungry and ill-clad up and down the Province.” The question, ultimately, was one of entitlement. “I believe that their demands are fundamentally right,” intoned Wilberforce Cooper. “Hungry, they look daily (as I do) at vast stores of food. They are conscious (as I am) that, seemingly, large sums have been employed to relieve this situation: yet, so largely, results do not arrive.” The marchers offered proposals for economic reform coupled with demands for political freedom: their banners cried out for the rights of freedom of speech and assembly, a program of emergency works over the winter to provide them with a “stake” to seek employment in spring, and, most of all, unemployment insurance. As the rector explained, “these ‘Marchers’ demand such a revision of the Governmental handling of economic conditions as shall ensure for them and their families the work and the means of living to which, as citizens, they have a right.” Nor did he see a need for police repression of their demonstrations. “I admired the steadiness, orderliness and quiet determination of Monday’s parade,” he noted. The crisis called for the nation’s rulers to abandon the old ways and recognize the revolutionary import of the times:
I believe that radical re-construction of the social order is utterly essential: moreover, where I live in the East end of this city, I am always aware of the gathering momentum of human opinion that is determined upon and making for radical change. They are not out for blood. Most of them are sick of it. They want justice and decent living conditions.
The Hunger March represented the first concrete and workable attempt at a united front by Vancouver’s Communist organizers during the 1930s. In most respects, this front was purely discursive, in that it existed in various textual appeals but not beyond them; few political groups considered the Communist-led movement as anything but suspect, even if transients themselves were worthy of a substantive measure of sympathy. The party’s sectarianism, too, earned it little trust from other leftists. At the same time, united fronts were few, in large part because Communist groups were almost alone in the field: they exerted a singular domination of the leadership of unemployed transient organizations in the two and a half years following the market crash because the competition was next to nil. Unity was possible only if diversity already existed, and this would not happen until after the Hunger March, when organizations of poor residents sprang up in large numbers. Another obstacle to unity lay in the parliamentary focus of the city’s socialist organizations, which offered few immediate gains for the unemployed and fewer for transients: Vancouver’s non-Communist left could not claim to have consistently defended the right of transients to receive the same treatment as residents. Yet Communists held out hope that collective action could win the bulk of workers to their agenda: this was, in the practice of the day, a united front from below, although one of necessity. To this effect, they organized camp residents and transient homeless men en masse, as well as a sizeable number of residents, around a single overarching demand: the dismantling of the relief industry as it currently existed. Their immediate program, as constructed frequently over the course of these three years, would have remade Vancouver into the type of utopia of total employment: steady work at union rates and the rights of assembly, speech, and organization fully enshrined; bed and meal tickets abolished and the missions and refuges emptied; and gatherings held and parades launched without interference, while police constables walked the streets with orders to protect the rights of tenants against those with property. Any radical would likely have welcomed the realization of just one of these demands.
Since early September 1931, Communists had appealed to the public directly on the issue of camps. “This is an attempt to drive us into prison camps, and we appeal for your help,” pled one radical. On occasion, Communists attempted to provide an ideological framework for the unity of distinct groups in opposition to the economics of the camp system. Like other groups, Nation Unemployed Workers’ Association organizers hit on the cost argument. One inmate noticed that some of the cabin doors used in the camps were manufactured in Washington. “The patriotic providers of prison camps,” he suggested, “appear to be unable even to provide them from ‘our’ national resources.” “The money has been spent on costly but jerry-built camps, with neither sufficient accommodation for the number of men placed in them, nor the most elementary facilities,” argued another radical. “The grafting contractors have been rewarded by their friends, and got away with the swag, and the camps are exposed more clearly than ever as Prison Camps.” In fact, Communists offered up an argument for the unity of most socio-economic groups against the camps. This was perhaps best expressed in “‘Higher Mathematics for the Unemployed,” an article in the 5 March 1932 edition of the Unemployed Worker.” The mathematical paradigm was suitable given the centrality of value calculations to every problem. The first problem outlined in “Higher Mathematics” relied on skills of subtraction. The author explained that according to a recent provincial report (the source for these figures remains unknown), the government spent $3.5 million on seven thousand transients in October and November, or approximately $500 per transient. Yet provincial officials also boasted of limiting the amount spent to maintain transients to twenty-six cents per day, or $15.60 per month. “Where did the other $484.40 go?” asked the writer. “Who got it?” Although the numbers were wrong, the deductive rationale was sound: to provide relief, governments contracted with the business community, meaning that a portion of the funds designated for the jobless became profits in the pockets of patronage beneficiaries and others. A similar logic could be found in other problems.
The second question noted that the provincial government purchased wood from the Abernethy Lougheed Logging Company at a rate of $7.50 per cord, wood that “the Allco slaves had to cut gratis. Better wood could have been bought from the small farmers around Allco at less price, and all ready cut,” leading to the question at hand: “Why did they buy from Lougheed, and how much did the government save by doing so? Try and work this out by Algebra.” The third question related to the government’s purchase of meat and fruit, much of it rotten, “from the millionaire wholesalers at a fancy price,” while “small farmers” were forced to sell their produce cheaply in order to pay their taxes: “How will the farmers in that locality pay their taxes and continue to exist[?] To work out this problem, use common sense.”
In each of these examples, the value that accrued to large companies came at the expense of the jobless and other economic sections of the community. Communists were not alone in offering this type of interpretation of the relief industry; similar equations appeared in the ideas of owners and managers of Vancouver establishments that catered to the transient unemployed. “Higher Mathematics” included a problem rooted in the observation that camps had been established around logging and mining towns, “in localities where hotel keepers and boarding house keepers are fast going broke for lack of customers.” We have already seen the lobbying efforts of some of Vancouver’s restaurant owners and rooming-house operators to increase the scale of relief and to change its form from tickets to cash. For instance, E. A. Gillingwater, owner of the Whittier Park Café, asked to be put on the approved list of relief restaurants, arguing that he faced bankruptcy “owing to all single men being sent to camps.” Despite the Third Period scorn for all forms of class collaboration, Vancouver’s Communists suggested that the camps undermined the economic stability of petty entrepreneurs. “Can anyone tell us why some people are paid as high as $5,000 per year for helping the small business men to go on the bum faster than they need to?” the mathematician asked. “To work out this problem use the support of the small business men.” The final problem focused on the spending statistics on matters of discipline: “For killing the workers of other countries the soldiers are paid $1.10 a day, with board and good clothes thrown in. For building roads and highways the workers are paid 27 c per day, rotten food, and compelled to furnish their own clothes out of the 27 c per. Guess who the employer is?” Communists and other radicals had long argued that despite their reluctance to spend money on the jobless, governments rarely balked at spending more on police forces during moments of crisis attributed to crowds of jobless men. As they put it in another context, “they pay the policeman 150 dollars per month to club and arrest the unemployed workers for refusing to work 20 months for the same amount of money.” The author of “Higher Mathematics” used the pedagogical format playfully in order to make a serious argument for a united front, bringing together a wide range of immediate class interests in a single complex equation that both revealed and disproved the value of the economics of the relief camps. That the unity it imagined existed primarily on the page does not diminish its power.
On 22 February, the NUWA organized a parade of several thousand people, after which a delegation led by Arthur “Slim” Evans met with the Relief and Employment Committee. While the challenge posed by the movement of necessity involved grand concepts, Slim Evans went into the meeting with a mandate to discuss a detailed list of concrete demands. The first demand extended beyond the reach of municipal and provincial officials: a program of non-contributory unemployment insurance, valued at twenty-five dollars per week and to be given “without discrimination against race, creed or color.” In the interim, the City was to hire married men to work four days per week at four dollars for every seven-hour day, with “single unemployed workers, male and female, with dependents to receive the same benefits.” The single jobless without dependants would receive three days of work per week at the same rate, or the equivalent in cash relief. The NUWA thus proposed an immediate program that required single transients without dependants to work 84 hours per month for wages of $48.00, while the provincial government offered $7.50 and board for 120 hours of labour: the disparity between these two visions of the value of the labour of transients was stark.
Like most political groups in Vancouver, the Hunger Marchers called for public works to relieve unemployment. Yet here, too, Hunger Marchers articulated a singular vision, placing emphasis on the construction of hospitals, nurseries, playgrounds, and parks “to be built in working-class districts.” The delegation also wanted the municipality to legislate a ban on evictions for non-payment of rent or taxes, on bank foreclosures, and on the termination of water, gas, or light services by utility companies. Moreover, interest payments on municipal bonds were to be stopped “until the needs of the unemployed are met.” Many of the demands made by the Hunger Marchers would have cost little to nothing. The repeal of vagrancy laws and section 98 of the Criminal Code, a ban on deportations for becoming a public charge and for political activities, and the release of “class-war prisoners”: each of these would, in fact, have shrunk the state, saving money in the process. By a vote of three to two, the Relief and Employment Committee agreed to recommend to City Council that an emergency meeting be called in order to consider the Hunger Marchers’ platform. They also promised fifteen hundred bed and meal tickets to the demonstrators as a “special concession and not to be repeated after today.” What followed is all too familiar. The City Council meeting began with a report of the Relief and Employment Committee. Then, Aldermen Dean and Miller proposed that “demands 2-12 inclusive, of the Hunger Marchers’ Association be not entertained.” The motion was carried, after an amendment to consider each demand separately failed. Hundreds of Marchers then left for Victoria and a meeting with members of the provincial cabinet. Once again, the components of their multi-dimensional program were declared obviated by financial exigencies and an uncooperative federal government, if they were considered at all.
Returning to Vancouver, the jobless protesters found a municipal government determined to follow the January 1932 provincial declaration that those who refused the order for camp would be denied relief in the cities. On 1 March, organizers asked to send a delegation to the City Council meeting on 3 March, a day for which they had received permits for a meeting at Victory Square and a parade. They did not receive an answer until the day of the meeting and were turned down, but NUWA organizers chose to continue with the planned parade and meeting. As the crowd began to disperse, a delegation attempted to enter the building to again request a hearing. “This was the excuse for the police, who were held in readiness, to attack the workers with unprecedented brutality,” read the account in the Unemployed Worker. The result was “the most savage and unprovoked attack upon the workers in the experience of unemployed demonstrations in Vancouver.” One radical counted twenty-two mounted constables from the city and fourteen from the RCMP, in addition to regular city constables:
The mounties galloped along the sidewalks, heedless of many women and children. ONE WOMAN WITH A BABY IN HER ARMS WAS RIDDEN DOWN. It is not to be expected that the workers would allow themselves to be beaten up without resistance. While many workers were injured, the police did not escape entirely. Three workers and two policemen were removed to hospital. . . . There was no riot, there was no disturbance, until the police charged into the crowd, and by their open brutality carried out the policy of the City Council in forcing starvation upon the unemployed. The City Council must accept responsibility for the slaughter of Thursday. The sadist methods of Edgett, the ex-mountie, and Murdock, the ex-flatfoot, are the methods approved and endorsed by the Council in dealing with the demands of the thousands of unemployed in the City.
Arthur Evans argued that violence could have been avoided: had the council “agreed to meet the committee from the unemployed none of the workers, men, women or children would have been slugged or battered up by the Police.” He added, “Had the communication come from some Prince of Siam or other exalted carrion, the City Council would have fallen over themselves and would have met with them within an hour’s notice and wined and feted puppets of that ilk.” Nor would parades cease: “Workers are not going to peaceably starve to death amidst plenty.”
To complete the pattern begun in the winter of 1929, the police riot of 3 March 1932 was officially legitimated. A delegation of Hunger Marchers attempted to be heard at the 5 March meeting of the Board of Police Commissioners. Arthur Evans’s letter was read aloud, as was a letter from a prominent merchant. Then the appointed commissioners, led by W.C. Atherton, former alderman and chair of the Relief and Employment Committee, used procedural methods to frustrate the will of the mayor. According to the minutes, “At this juncture a delegation from the ‘Unemployed Workers’ made application to address the Board, and, upon motion, it was decided unanimously that they be not heard.” Mayor L.D. Taylor, who was chairing the meeting, then “produced a copy of a Communist Party periodical” — the 5 March issue of the Unemployed Worker, which contained an the account of the riot as well as “‘Higher Mathematics’ Problems for the Unemployed” — and “was prepared to read from it.”
Objection was taken to this, and it was moved by Coms. Atherton, seconded by Coms. Reid, “that this publication be not read.” The Chairman refused to put the motion before the meeting, and Coms. Delbridge was appointed Chairman for the purpose of putting the motion. Upon the motion be put by Coms. Delbridge it was declared carried. Further discussion arose on the business for which the meeting was called, upon which Coms. Delbridge moved, “That the discussion being carried on at this meeting is not in the best interests of law enforcement, and that no more of this discussion be heard.”
This resolution was seconded by Coms. De Wolfe, and upon the Chairman refusing to put the motion before the meeting, Coms. Atherton was appointed Chairman. Upon Coms. Atherton putting the motion, it was declared carried. In connection with the Unemployed situation in the City at the present time, Coms. Atherton stated, although we have to cope with the situation, it is really a Government matter as they have pledged themselves to look after the single men. He therefore moved “That we take the matter up with the Provincial and Federal Governments, asking them to look after these men who are raising disturbances in the City of Vancouver.”
Mayor Taylor “voiced his protest against the manner in which the members had received his views, and declared they were antagonistic to him.” He then turned on Chief Constable C.E. Edgett, accusing him of corruption by “showing partiality in raiding Chinese gambling houses.” There would be no forum for the jobless here.
With the Hunger March riot, Communists, and the single unemployed transients generally, lost the battle for the city. One writer attempted to capture the looming importance of coercion faced by the movement upon returning to the camps:
They have the blood of the workers on their hands. Concessions will be made, as they have been made in the past, piecemeal and by degrees, increasing with the militancy of the workers and the strength of their organisation. At the same time, they will use force, not only to avoid making concessions, but to conceal the fact that they are compelled to make them. They will try to intimidate and divide the workers, along with the provincial and federal governments, and the brute force they command. They cannot succeed.
Yet the march did not mark an end to organizing. More than thirty delegates from various camps arranged to meet in Ashcroft in March and forged a “campaign for extending organization and struggle,” while also managing to have food and shelter provided gratis by the municipality. Near the end of March, workers left the camps near Ashcroft and secured five days’ worth of relief from local authorities. Their solidarity held strong, and in a unanimous vote, the group took out membership in the NUWA. Seven workers in Ashcroft were eventually arrested, although a collective protest managed to get the charges dropped. Other activists were moved from Ashcroft to Camp No. 38, near Lytton, and promptly began their strike again, winning a regular tobacco ration and an additional meal every day as concessions, although they continued the fight against the monthly rate of $7.50.
More than a single cause of discontent, “$7.50” was a symbol with which many grievances were conveyed. Throughout the period from the introduction of the allowance in February 1932 until the province relinquished control of the camps to federal officials in August 1933, many strikes were fought with demands for a higher rate of relief at the forefront. Workers at Camp 43 in Spuzzum, for instance, mobilized against the rate reduction in the spring of 1932, as did inmates at outposts near Beaumont Creek, Cedarvale, Prince Rupert, Stewart, and Usk that summer.
The largest protest concerning $7.50 involved approximately seven hundred men who left the camps in May 1932 and made their way to Vancouver, less than three months after the Hunger March. Mayor Johnston of Kamloops took a hard-line approach to the bands of travelling strikers, “urg[ing] citizens not to give meals or money to men who won’t get into work camps. They have proved themselves undesirables.” Demanding work at the rate of fifty cents per hour, hundreds of camp residents were joined by hundreds more local supporters while a committee met with Vancouver’s Mayor Taylor. Taylor claimed that the responsibility for feeding and housing the protesters now lay with the Province.
Faced with mass pressure, and wanting to avoid the escalation of collective action, Public Works Minister Bruhn guaranteed the protesters bed and meal tickets for two days on the condition that they then leave the city, prior to the “mass demonstration before the American Consulate in protest against the impending execution of seven negroes convicted of killing a white woman.” With aid running out, small groups began the journey back to the camps, hoping that they would not be turned away by foremen holding grudges against radicals. Many still refused to return to the camps; their places were taken by other unemployed men cut off the relief rolls.
The immediate failure of the Hunger March marked, in one sense, both the end of the movement begun on the streets in December 1929 and the beginning of a new movement, one with a greater diversity of constituencies and an even sharper conception of the exploitation at the heart of the relief industry. In the years that followed, activists who dedicated themselves to organizing the relief industry would lead many successful campaigns. The Block Committees and Neighbourhood Councils would assert their organizational strength in ongoing battles with the Relief Department.
Even the camps saw a measure of self-determination on the part of the unemployed. In the end, the Tolmie government proved incapable of withstanding either the Liberal onslaught at the legislature or the organizing work of Communists within relief camps. Because some camp foremen had received their jobs through patronage networks, many lacked experienced with the requirements of enforcing discipline. Sydney Hutcheson saw these men as ineffectual, suggesting that new foremen were routinely “broken in” by workers who controlled the pace of their work on roads through repeated slowdowns. In other instances, workers and camp bosses co-operated to some extent; while the relationship was sometimes strained, grievances could be expressed and remedied within the framework established on the ground. On occasion, a strike would result in smaller changes, such as with food. Some officials in the Department of National Defence believed that the new regime of discipline in DND-run camps was much needed because it would stamp out workers’ control:
In many cases a committee of the men has taken over the management of the camps, and the camp superintendent has not been able to function. This situation has been allowed to exist by the Provincial authorities and by the Fordham Commission but cannot be condoned when camps are taken over by the Department of National Defence.
Within one year of the Hunger March, unemployed committees had asserted de facto control over a sizeable number of provincial relief camps. Along with successes for the Communists, the period after the march witnessed the founding of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, which in Vancouver had its strong roots in the ideological soil of the Socialist Party of Canada. This had a profound effect, reinvigorating both labourist and social-democratic tendencies and realigning the political sphere. - Todd McCallum, Hobohemia and the Crucifixion Machine: Rival images of a new world in 1930s Vancouver. Edmonton: Athabaska Univesity Press, 2014. pp. 232-241. Images are TOP: Demonstration organized by the Vancouver Unemployed Workers' Association outside City Hall in 1932. Photo: Vancouver Police Museum #P00886 and BOTTOM: Police triggered a riot after attempting to clear the street at this 1932 demonstration organized by the Vancouver Unemployed Workers' Association. Photo: Vancouver Police Museum #P06048