by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
Jungle crimes included lighting a fire at night that might attract railroad or town police, “hijacking” (robbing) other men while they slept, leaving pots dirty after using them, neglecting to rustle wood for the fire, and damaging or stealing any jungle equipment. A guilty hobo would be thrown out of camp forcibly.
The men gathered around the fire made a good audience for news and rumors about road and job conditions: police, employment “sharks,” and town officials. No attempt was made to pry into one another’s background or personal relations; a man’s past was his own affair. Usually, the men in a jungle welcomed all who arrived, regardless of race or nationality. At times, however, in permanent I.W.W. jungles, the Wobblies excluded anyone not carrying a red I.W.W. membership card.
A gallon of wine or a jug of cheap whiskey frequently led to impromptu entertainments. Often, long epic poems were composed and recited on the spot. Some became hobo “classics” which many committed to memory. Often humorous, these songs and poems highlighted the adventures and perils of hobo life. Frequently, they protested against the social order, such as these verses from “The Sheep and the Goats” by Bill Quirke, one of the most popular of hobo writers:
Say, mate, have you ever seen the mills
Where the kids at the loom spit blood?
Have you been in the mines when the fire damp blew,
Have you shipped as a hand with a freighters crew,
Or worked in a levee flood?
Have you rotted wet in a grading camp
Or scorched in a desert line?
Or done your night stint with your lamp,
Watching the timbers drip with damp
And hearing the oil rig whine?
Have you had your pay held back for tools
That you never saw or could use?
Have you gone like a fool with the other fools
To the bosses’ saloon where the strong arm rules
And cashed your time for booze?
I do no kicking at God or Fate—
I keep my shoes for the road—
The long gray road, and I love it, mate—
Hay-foot, straw-foot—that’s my gait,
And I carry no other man’s load.
I don’t mind working to earn my bread
And I’d just as soon keep straight.
But according to what the preacher said,
I’m a ram and I’ve missed the gate.
But I’m joggin along and joggin ahead,
And perhaps I’ll find it, mate.23
Although they could pick up information in the jungle or on the main stem about jobs and job conditions, for the most part, hoboes obtained work through employment agencies, which brought together the men with the jobs and the men looking for work. Usually, the agencies were in the “flop house” districts of cities which the migrants frequented between jobs. The employment agent’s “office” was more than likely an almost bare store front with a table and one or two chairs for furniture. Outside, a large blackboard announced a list of needed labor. The agent, called the “shark” or “mancatcher,” usually kept no books, except one small enough to fit into his pocket. Nels Anderson wrote about such agents in 1922: “Their records are not merely inadequate; they are a joke.”24
Working on commission, the labor agents charged either the worker, the employer—or both, and raised their fees to either party according to the demand for workers or the demand for jobs. Wobblies protested against the high costs of buying jobs, charges for jobs that sometimes did not exist, and the practice of fee-splitting between the “shark” and a foreman who would fire members of a work crew after their first pay check, and replace them with another group of “suckers” who had bought the same jobs and shipped out to the camp.
Wobblies joked that the employment sharks had discovered perpetual motion—one work crew on the job, one crew going to the job, and one crew leaving it.25
Another type of employment agency was the boarding company which would contract with employers of seasonal labor to provide crews of men throughout the needed employment period. Boarding companies made their profits from the high prices they charged workers for room and board. Scanty food, often of the poorest quality, and bad sleeping quarters with no bathing facilities, led one Wobbly to write that he was “housed worse than a beast and treated like a dog.”26
Frequently, after the migratory worker had accumulated a certain sum of money, known as a “stake,” he quit the job if it offered unpleasant conditions and drifted off to the road or to the city. Carleton Parker’s investigation in 1914 revealed that road tradition often fixed the amount of the stake, and indirectly, therefore, the period of employment. With his money, the hobo would retreat to a jungle, and, “adding his daily quarter or half dollar to the ‘mulligan fund,’ live on until the stake is gone. If he tends to live further on the charity of the new comers he is styled a ‘jungle buzzard’ and cast forth.”27
Off the job, the city life of the hobo was graphically described in these verses from “The Boe’s Lament” by an unknown writer:
O! Lord, you know I’m “down and out,”
Forever forced to roam about,
From town to town, from state to state
Not knowing what may be my fate.
And frequently I have no bed
On which to rest my weary head;
And when at times I have the price,
I find it full of bugs and lice.
You know the stem is often bad
Of course that always makes one mad,
For it means that one must carry
“The banner” in the night so airy.
Now Lord, this is no idle joke
For I am “down and out” and “broke.”
I have not got the gall to beg,
And not the nerve to be a “yegg.”
Unless one has the ready cash
For “coffee an neckbones,” or “hash,”
For “liver,” “stew,” or just “pigs feet,”
He surely has no chance to eat.
Now Lord, I’ve often times been told
That Heaven’s streets are paved with gold.
To me that does not seem quite fair,
When millions here are in despair.
Behold your creatures here below—
These multitudes who have no show,
From their cradles to their graves
Their doom is that they must be slaves.28
The stem, which this writer hinted was “so often bad,” provided very little in the way of recreation for the hobo besides the bars and the brothels. The I.W.W. hall was one of the few places that he could find companionship, a place to rest and make a meal, pick up some books and pamphlets, and exchange ideas. Carleton Parker called I.W.W. halls “a social substitute for the saloon.”29 The Wobbly headquarters usually included a kitchen, where a large pot of mulligan simmered on the stove and an enamel coffee pot was kept full. Radical literature was available for all to read. Often there was a piano, put to use by a Wobbly who picked out popular tunes and led some singing of Wobbly favorites. At Saturday night smokers, the men improvised propaganda skits in the style of current vaudeville shows.
In the jungles, on the jobs, and while lounging around the I.W.W. hall, the I.W.W. hobo frequently read avidly. Jack London was a favorite novelist and his book, The Iron Heel, was popular. Works on sociology, economics, politics, and history were also widely read. I.W.W. lists of recommended reading, printed in The Industrial Worker and Solidarity, suggested books by well-known socialists, anarchists, and other left-wing writers.
Besides reading books on the problems of labor, Wobblies learned about theories of changing the social order from the I.W.W. soapboxers. Between jobs, hoboes gathered in certain city areas, such as “Bughouse Square” in Chicago, Pershing Square in Los Angeles, and Union Square in New York City, to listen to lectures on biology, eugenics, psychology, sociology, politics, and economics.
Big Jim Thompson was among t
he most famous of many well-known Wobbly orators and certain to gather a crowd. One of his better-known, and often repeated stories, compared a young worker in the capitalist system to an automobile. “How about your children?” he would ask, and then continue:
When they get to be wonderful young men and women with their eyes brightly shining like the headlights on a new car, and with their veins and arteries like the wiring on a new car, and their hearts beating without a murmur like the smooth running of new engines, then the capitalists say to the proud parents, “We want to use your children to produce wealth for us and our children!” … The parents ask, “What are our children going to get for the use of their bodies during the precious years of their lives?”
Answer, “Gas and oil.” A mere living wage. The endless chain that starts and ends with work. Every increase in the productivity of labor, every invention, every victory of science and triumph of genius in the line of industrial progress only goes to increase the wealth of a parasite class. This is wage slavery, the foundation of capitalism.30
Other soapboxers frequently prefaced their speeches by some crowd-attracting technique. Jack Phelan, called the silver-tongued boy orator of Wobblies, would mount the box and start yelling, “I’ve been robbed! I’ve been robbed!” When enough of a sympathetic crowd gathered to help him, he would start, “I’ve been robbed by the capitalist system!”31
Industrial Worker, April 23, 1910
Another soapboxer, an outdoor lecturer in the Spokane area, had been a circuit preacher in the South. Dressed as an old Southern colonel in a longtailed black coat and a soft-brimmed black hat, he would drawl softly:
This is my text tonight, Fellow Workers. It’s about the three stars. They’re not the stars of Bethlehem. They’re better than the stars of Bethlehem. The stars of Bethlehem lead only to Heaven which nobody knows about. These are the three I.W.W. stars of education, organization, and emancipation. They lead to pork-chops which everybody wants.32
Hobo songs and poems seldom talked about love or beauty, yet curiously enough, Dick Brazier, author of so many of the verses in the little red songbook, told labor folklorist Archie Green:
… the West was a wide open country, the open spaces really existed. There was plenty of room to move around in, and there were scenes of great grandeur and beauty, and there were journeys to be made that took you to all kinds of interesting sections of the country. That’s the feeling we all had. I think that’s one of the reasons we kept on moving as much as we did. In addition to searching for the job, we were also searching for something to satisfy our emotional desire for grandeur and beauty. After all, we have a concept of beauty too, although we were only migratory workers.33
1
For over sixty years, the song, “Hallelujah I’m a Bum” has been a popular American folksong. It was sung by soldiers during the Spanish-American War, by marchers in Coxey’s Army, by Northwest loggers, construction workers, and harvest stiffs who attended the 1908 I.W.W. convention, and by the unemployed from coast to coast during the depression of the 1930’s. In 1927 Carl Sandburg included it in his collection of folksongs, The American Songbag, as a popular hobo song whose author was unknown. By the late 1920’s when over a dozen music publishers had issued sheet music of the song, Harry (“Haywire Mac”) McClintock, who recorded the song in 1926, charged that they were infringing on his copyright.
John Greenway, in his book American Folksongs of Protest (Philadelphia, 1953) has a detailed account of McClintock’s claim to the authorship of the song. Mac claimed that about 1897 he put new words to the hymn tune “Hallelujah, Thine the Glory,” sometimes called “Revive Us Again,” a song which he had learned while a boy choir singer in a church in his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. He called it originally, “Hallelujah On the Bum” and, as he was bumming around the country, added new verses to the song. Greenway quotes McClintock, “The jungle stiffs liked the song and so did the saloon audiences, most of whom had hit the road at one time or another, and the rollicking, devil-may-care lilt of the thing appealed to them.” He sang the song to soldiers at an army training camp in Tennessee during the Spanish-American War, and in their travels they helped popularize the verses around the country.
“Hallelujah On the Bum” was printed in the I.W.W. Industrial Union Bulletin (April 4, 1908). It was one of the four songs printed on colored cardboard folders which were sold for ten cents by the organization before the start of the first I.W.W. songbook about 1909. The I.W.W. One Big Union Monthly (March 1938) included an article, “Birth of a Song Hit,” on the background of “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.”
HALLELUJAH ON THE BUM
(Tune: “Revive Us Again”)
O, why don’t you work
Like other men do?
How in hell can I work
When there’s no work to do?
Chorus:
Hallelujah, I’m a bum,
Hallelujah, bum again,
Hallelujah, give us a handout—
To revive us again.
O, why don’t you save
All the money you earn?
If I did not eat
I’d have money to burn.
Chorus:
O, I like my boss—
He’s a good friend of mine;
That’s why I am starving
Out in the bread-line.
Chorus:
I cant buy a job,
For I ain’t got the dough,
So I ride in a box-car,
For I’m a hobo.
Chorus:
Whenever I get
All the money I earn,
The boss will be broke,
And to work he must turn.
Chorus:
Hallelujah, I’m a bum,
Hallelujah, bum again,
Hallelujah, give us a handout—
To revive us again.
2
This song, composed to the tune of “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louie,” was printed in the third edition of the I.W.W. songbook. Its author, English-born Richard Brazier, emigrated to Canada in 1903 at the age of twenty. He worked on farms, on railroad construction gangs, and in a blacksmith shop. He came to Spokane in 1907, joined the I.W.W., and contributed about sixteen songs to the first edition of the I.W.W. songbook. In an interview with folklorist Archie Green, Brazier told how I.W.W. organizer J. H. Walsh started the idea of the little red songbooks: “[Walsh suggested] let’s form a song committee; let the membership get together and elect their representatives to a song committee. Decide whether they want a different format, and have a real songbook out of it or go along with the cardboard song cards business.” When asked how he went about composing a song, Brazier answered: “At that time there was a lot of popular songs on the market. This was the era of the sentimental ballad, mostly, and a few humorous songs. Well, I … attended a lot of vaudeville shows … every saloon had a little vaudeville show of its own with these … sing and dance girls…. And I’d go down there and listen to a lot of singing, and if I heard a song that had a tune that I liked, I’d memorize the tune, then I would work on picking words to fit the tune…. The melody was all important.”
Brazier became secretary of the joint locals in Spokane, and in 1916, he was elected to the executive board of the I.W.W. He settled in New York City following his release from Leavenworth Penitentiary in 1923, where he had served five years of his sentence along with other I.W.W. prisoners charged with violating the espionage law. He has continued contributing poems and songs to the Industrial Worker.
MEET ME IN THE JUNGLES, LOUIE
By RICHARD BRAZIER
Louie was out of a job,
Louie was dead on the hog;
He looked all around,
But no job could be found.
So he had to go home and sit down.
A note on the table he spied,
He read it just once, and he cried.
It read: “Louie, dear, get to hell out of here
Your board bill is now
overdue.”
Chorus:
Meet me in the jungles, Louie,
Meet me over there.
Don’t tell me the slaves are eating,
Anywhere else but there;
We will each one be a booster,
To catch a big, fat rooster;
So meet me in the jungles, Louie,
Meet me over there.
Louie went out of his shack,
He swore he would never come back;
He said, “I will wait, and take the first freight,
My friends in the jungles to see;
For me there is waiting out there,
Of a mulligan stew a big share.
So away I will go and be a hobo,
For the song in the jungles I hear.”
Chorus:
Meet me in the jungles, Louie,
Meet me over there.
Don’t tell me the slaves are eating,
Anywhere else but there;
We will each one be a booster,
To catch the scissor BilFs rooster;
So meet me in the jungles, Louie,
Meet me over there.
3
These verses by Richard Brazier appeared in the third edition of the I.W.W. songbook.
THE SUCKERS SADLY GATHER
By RICHARD BRAZIER
(Tune: “Where the Silvery Colorado Wends Its Way”)
Oh! The suckers sadly gather around the Red Cross office door,
And at the job sign longingly they gaze;
They think it’s time they shipped out to a job once more,
For they haven’t bought a job for several days.
So inside they go and they put down their dough—
“We have come to buy a job from you,” they say.
The employment shark says, “Right; I will ship you out tonight,
Where the silvery Colorado wends its way.”
Chorus
Now those suckers by the score
Are hiking back once more,
For they didn’t get no job out there, they say;
So to town they’re hiking back
O’er that bum old railroad track,
Where the silvery Colorado wends its way.
The Hoboes quietly gather ‘round a distant water tank,