It was in the floodtime of immigration - migrations from the Old World, migrations from farm to town - which created the volatile society which, in Thernstrom’s words, ‘made a hero of the man on the road, heading for the Great West or the Great City’. Increasingly at the centre of the folklore current was the equation of movement with clicking big. ‘The hero was on the make as well as on the move.’
America could not have been made without these squads ready to sign up for shipping out to any quarter. The hobo may have been the ‘rather pathetic figure … wracked by strange diseases and tortured by unrealized dreams that haunt his soul’ (one retrospective view) but he had as well as the muscle a certain spirit crucial to those preparatory stages of capitalism through the Middle West to the Pacific Coast.
In a society so censorious of failure, which in editorial, on political platform and from pulpit nagged pitilessly - and defensively - about the shiftless who squandered their opportunities, the failure had to hold on to a remnant of self-esteem. Accordingly he conjured for himself a substitute role. This was partially an acceptance of the merry wayfarer image imposed upon him, derived from imported literary ideas about the greenwood and the Nut Brown Maid, and naturalized in Walt Whitman’s Song of the Open Road. This was not entirely untrue. At a stiff price the Jiobo was, as the industrial revolution roared forward, prolonging the frontier dynamic. As the actual frontiers closed and the fences went up, on the narrow steel trail of the railroad the hobo was Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo with a second lease of life, the Leatherstocking of the freight cars, beholden to no one.
The other element in the synthesis of the hobo was his pride and self-respect as a worker. He may have been stripped of environment, of an outlet for his limited skills, but he doggedly clung to his membership of ‘the productive classes’. The hobo might not seem, when begging at a back door or dozing on a sunny ditch bank, to qualify; nor could status in the jungle shanties over the tracks and outside the community structure appear, from above, anything but a fairly chimerical conceit; but the hobo always insisted on the distinction. Among many who, out of despair or drink, had sunk too low to fret, the hobo tenaciously regarded himself as a working joe temporarily out of a job and out of luck. Also, he could often argue his case in political and philosophical terms - in broad, slapdash outlines, at any rate -and did. Whether he was later a Wobbly - a member of the Industrial Workers of the World - hoboism was his union; he wore the badge with a swagger.
There began with the American roving worker what Pittard, in his study of gipsies, has called ‘ceremonial nomadization’. This class consciousness, or ‘underclass’ consciousness, developed in the United States one of the few instances of political solidarity as well as a sense of social entity, and produced such movements as the Hobo Colleges and the songs and doggerel of alienation which inevitably call to mind the Corporations de Gueuserie of medieval Europe, the beggars’ guilds which adopted their own cant lingo, jurisprudence, territorial rights and - as the hobo Wobblies of the IWW centred themselves upon Chicago and Seattle and Spokane - set up their ‘States General’, or legislative bodies, in La Vendee and Languedoc.
Although it was the railroad system which, by uniquely providing a rootless working stiff with 254,000 miles of ready-made promenade, gave the hobo his particular flavour and a structure to his ‘ceremonial nomadization’, the raw material from which he was fashioned had been there for a long time. The raw and hasty makeshift conditions which were his blueprint have changed, or anyway modified, yet the hobo’s perpetuation is the natural outcome of a hyperglandular belief, still intrinsic to the American writ, that the race must be to the swiftest - never summarized more pungently than by the public war whoop of one nineteenth-century industrial concern: ‘Let buffalo gore buffalo and the pasture go to the strongest,’ whereupon the company was, with consummate aptness, gored into the dust by its competitors.
America was the ‘open door’ to forty millions from 1800 to 1950, eighty-five per cent of them from Europe. From the earliest beginnings the chancers from Europe were not only shut inside habit and kinship but confronted by formidable physical confines, the walls of forest and mountain and wilderness. They had to hack their way into the heartland, probing and clearing every mile of the immeasurable adventure. A mist then hid the New World. America was the last territory to which European settlers went in droves before the geographers and surveyors.
The transfer of populations began in the seventeenth century; it was far into the nineteenth before the mist was dispersed from the continent, and it loitered in pockets for longer. There was little scope for the drifting scrimshanker in the early colonial days. Every muscle had to function.
The modern tramp who has either opted out from choice, or fallen out because of lack of grip, still needs the infrastructure of society. His crumbs must fall from somewhere. The men who pushed inland from the thin rind of settlement on the Atlantic seaboard were on their own. They had to grapple their way forward with axe and hoe and gun.
It was a working passage all the way, for the first trails were stitched together by fur traders and hunters and scouts, and the smudges in the dust were beaten broader by the creaking carts of homesteaders, the prospectors and missionaries and woodsmen and tyro ranchers, and whole communities which were mobile, pausing for rest and replenishment, then, like a circus, folding and moving on.
This was a total break with the pattern of nomadic people in the Old World, whose joumeyings were scratchings across starved soil, never more than a few steps ahead of depletion. Here, the mist was rolled back upon tumultuous wealth. The decision to be taken was what and where to seize. In the mind of every man who struck out into ‘the golden America’ was a certainty of sovereignty. They were working princes, their accession was merely temporarily held in escrow.
Concurrently within the established townships of Massachusetts and Virginia and Pennsylvania and Maryland, a different kind of movement was interweaving, limited in diagram and purpose. The first colonists were Englishmen, prosperous bourgeois merchants and aristocrats. Their instinct was to reproduce on this empty page the formal typography of the feudal class gradations at home. Not many of them stayed personally in the God-forsaken treasure chest. Nor, incidentally, did many of their retainers and free immigrants.
The heavy backlash migration, the two-way traffic, mounted. Huge numbers of European poor - probably one in three - stayed in the New World just long enough, much as Italians go to Germany and Britain now, to accumulate enough capital to buy a farm or cut a dash back in the old country.
Most of these later immigrants who were deliberately flooded into the steel labour market as scabs were single men, willing to work for nine dollars weekly, pig it in communal boarding houses, then return permanently to their homelands with a few hundred dollars saved.
These nineteenth-century short-term lodgers in America were a crucial factor in crippling young unionism and protracting the working man’s insecurity for they were eagerly recruited as strike breakers.
Not all went back; many stayed and learned the bleak truth about being a new American and remained alienated men -’alienated from the culture they had left and from the one that had not yet wholly welcomed them and that they did not understand, and alienated finally from themselves’, says Lerner. Despite the excitement and ferment, ‘the immigrant experience was thus sombre and tragic’.
None the less the intaglio introduced by the early return trippers marked their successors and their indentured servants borne over in cattle boat consignments. Fifty per cent of the white population came to the colonies as wageless servants - but usually voluntarily, the progenitors of the present seemly white slave traffic in upper-class English girls who flock to Manhattan as secretaries or smart home helps.
Of the thirty-five million people who shifted from Europe to America between 1800 and 1914 only five million were English, but the mould of their influence lasted like a fossilized footprint. The old life persisted despite the aspira
tions of most who had crossed the ocean to slip the collar of restrictions. Even by 1728 the back country ‘had already developed the free and easy ways of the squatter world, shiftless, lubberly, independent, but animated by hostility towards the aristocratic Old Dominion’.
There was a lively scurry of men on the move - but on circuit, separate from the outward bound who were beginning to penetrate the frontier curtain of the Appalachians, to bore into the Kentucky forests, and slog on pack-horses and Conestoga wagons through the Cumberland Gap and across the Pennsylvania peaks.
On the Atlantic coastal plain the servants freed from indenture left to grab parcels of land where they could set themselves up as yeoman farmers in the Connecticut River valley and in the hills of New Hampshire and Vermont. In the German settlements along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers, the Quaker colonies in South-East Philadelphia, the Scotch-Irish caravans halted in Central Pennsylvania, and the trial plantations in the back country of Georgia and the Carolinas, there was an increasing urgent call for skills and goods.
Specialization changed to jack-of-all-trades ingenuity. The carpenter mended shoes and cut wheels. The printer wrote as well as set up type, sold books and ink, made paper. The doctor and the lawyer went in the saddle to find customers. Such itinerant preachers as the Wesley brothers, the Quaker Thomas Chalkley and the Anglican Charles Woodmason, set the prescription fulfilled still by the migrant ministry infiltrating the migrant fruit pickers’ camps, by the hell-busting revivalists whose marquees and scarey promises of damnation can be seen erected on spare lots beside the motels and lunch counters in the Bible Belt. The first Swedes toured the fringe hamlets building houses from squared-off timbers, which became the hallmark of the American frontierscape, and of modern mountain resort motels and pancake drive-ins: the log cabin.
In these conditions of scattered centres of an agrarian economy the floating labourer was born. He was then the wandering ‘mechanick’. He arrived at a farmstead with his kit of tools, was furnished with board and wages, built the lean-to or bedsteads, repaired a wagon or plough, cured hides and made dresses, all with materials supplied by the farmer, then strode on when the job was done.
There was a wide open barter area for the handyman with skills to hawk. The floating labourer was for a long time in relatively piping times. Wage rates were high for the ‘beste sorte of labourers’, thirty to one hundred per cent above the British workers’.
There was an acute shortage of artisans, bespoke and nomadic. If disagreement or boredom entered, not far down the turnpike another job awaited. The relationship between hirer and hired was, until the eighteenth century, harmonious. They worked on intimate terms, temporarily under the same roof.
It was a free life which the craftsman lived, unhampered by union protocol or unemployment, and work proceeded at a leisurely pace and in attractive variety.
To meet the shortage of labour the colonies ignored the embargo clamped by the British government on the emigration of skilled artisans and imported boatloads. They also imported glass-workers from France and Italy, flax workers from the North of Ireland, miners, masons and carpenters from Germany, potters, brick makers, tanners and lime burners from Sweden, cowmen from Poland, silk workers from Italy, sawyers from Holland, and also peasant biceps from all of Europe for the strong-arm toil done in the South by African slaves.
Although the British apprenticeship system had been borrowed, this did not feed through enough trained labour, even combined with that lured from Europe. Consequently there was rapacious hijacking between the colonies. Advertisements jostled in the news sheets. Agents offered such fringe benefits as a no-tax honeymoon period, exemption from militia service and immunity from compulsory labour service on public roads and building projects.
Unionism began piecemeal, hugger-mugger, usually as extemporaneous alliances to tackle a local wrangle or organize a turnout, and which dissolved when a particular matter was disposed of.
Although the shoemakers of Philadelphia and the New York printers made groping attempts to form permanent ‘associations’ in the 1790s, it was not until the second decade of the nineteenth century that there was a serious attempt to organize a drive, met head-on by employers’ resistance to wage demands and by prosecutions under an old English common law against ‘conspiracies in restraining of trade’.
The craft guild, the one combination legal in Britain, never took hold - and this was as much due to employee as to employer. In 1648 Massachusetts chartered a shoemakers’ guild and a coopers’ guild, but neither charter was renewed after the three-year term, largely because of the clamour from rural artisans at this move to ‘hinder a free trade’. A weavers’ guild in New York, and chartered cordwainers’ and tailors’ guilds in Philadelphia were similarly strangled in infancy.
Elsewhere there were efforts to enforce guild regulations, such as the leather industry’s rule that butchers, tanners, shoemakers and carriers should not trespass on allied crafts. Boston prohibited the opening of a workshop by a non-qualified journeyman. And many cities tried to limit tradesmen to one craft and to prevent farmers poaching on other trades in slack seasons.
Thus from the start of the American experiment the prototype of the free labourer, the casual all-rounder, was embodied in the economic blueprint - and endorsed by the man himself.
The important difference between the American craftsman and his nearest counterpart in Britain was that the American had no union life-line to guide him in his ventures. In Britain the tramping system lasted for two hundred years, becoming the way of life of many unions.
It existed in Germany and France too but there the Wander-pflicht and the tour de France of the compagnons were developed to burnish a craftsman’s education with ecumenical experience.
In Britain by the mid-Victorian period there were networks of ‘stations’: houses of call still marked in familiar pub signs, the Bricklayers’ Arms, the Masons’ Arms, and so on, where the lodges were set up. Walking was the approved ‘provident’ means of circulation, and it was a single man’s business.
Calico printers report trips of 1,400 miles; the compositors’ itinerary covered 2,800 miles in the 1850s, and there is one case of a compositor who left London in March 1848 and returned a year later having tramped to Brighton, round the South coast to Bristol, up to Birmingham, Liverpool and Carlisle, into Scotland, across to Belfast, Dublin and nineteen Irish towns, and back to London via Liverpool, Yorkshire and Cambridge, having received relief in seventy towns and worked in three. All this by foot: no rods for them to ride.
An original purpose was to slacken off the screws in zones and times of unemployment and to lighten the load on strike funds, so strengthening the union’s endurance and bargaining power. But the crucial point here is that the ‘sacrificed’ man (the printer’s phrase) was not a castaway.
The emblem of the ironfounders depicted a tramping moulder, pack on back and ash staff in hand, saying ‘Brother craft, can you give me a job?’ and receiving the answer: ‘If we cannot, we will assist you.’ He carried with him a card of identity, his credential and introduction, and a book of relief checks cashable at each branch. Monthly circulars listing men on the road paved his way so that a niche could be held ready or advice given on prospects ahead. If there was no job he could depend upon lodging, food and probably beer.
The navvies - the millions of heavy labourers from Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, Scotland and Ireland, who in the eighty years from 1822 onward built 20,000 miles of railways in Britain - were a distinct tribe, an ‘anarchic élite of labourers’ who moved from cantonment to cantonment along the new embankments, who dressed in moleskin trousers, velveteen square-tailed coats and gaudy neckerchiefs, and who drank and fought ferociously.
There is an 1855 sketch showing a navvy on the tramp, his shoulders loaded not only with personal kit but also with wheelbarrow, pick and shovel, lamp, ale-flask and sword. Coleman writes: This was the age of lives spent in factories and sweat shops, but the navvy, with all his hardsh
ips, worked mostly in the open and between contracts he was on the tramp. His life was a strange one, isolated and free … They were nomads. At one time there were 200,000 of them, yet to ordinary people they were practically unknown, and this increased the fear and the legend.’
That is a strikingly similar social situation to that which was happening to the navvy’s counterpart across the Atlantic, where the hobo ganger was both romanticized and outlawed. On the other hand the British navvy seems never to have freeloaded on the trains he made way for, as did his American opposite number. Instead of riding the rods or snagging a boxcar he either walked it or bought a third-class ticket ‘because they loved to see what they called the course of the country’. An American migrant worker would never, on principle, have parted with money to the railroad companies.
British craftsmen of all kinds were constantly semi-nomadic, often spending a lifetime pack-on-back. But the system, with its traces of medieval wayfaring, eventually crumpled under the massive stresses of modern capitalism. Indeed unions grew steadily less keen on subsidizing those whom they came to view as their giddy fly-by-night membership. There was also a profound change of mind toward crisis and slump, as it was slowly borne upon them that these were no longer parochial eddies which could be walked out of, but national and even wider.
Further, as Hobsbawm puts it, ‘the tram replaced the tramp: from the 1880s urban transport made it possible for a worker to renounce long-range wandering, for, without changing residence or lodgings, he had within reach a larger labour market to explore.
Even so the tramping artisan did benefit from the security that the system contained, as well as contribute to it. The British migrant spread trade unionism, not only by disseminating news of wages and conditions elsewhere but by stirring colleagues to found branches and by leaving conversions in his wake. The brotherhood sustained him and he nurtured the brotherhood, with a staunchness which was to become a class solidarity, absent from the American experience.
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