Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

  ‘I bring them into the world and bury them. I took four dollars the first year I opened this trading post. Now I do 200,000 dollars’ business a year, ninety-eight per cent with the Indians. They trade with their wool and jewellery. They make their thumb prints on their bills and maybe five years later they come in and pay them off. We trust each other.

  ‘No white Americans can figure why, after all my wanderings, I’ve stopped off here. It’s because I’ve found complete happiness.’

  *

  The search for Utopia united all who felt the lure of the great continent, but migration stamped upon the American family the characteristic of casualness toward place, kinship and stock. In the charge toward gold and land social cohesion and discipline dropped away.

  The dissolving pattern was stimulated by scriptural visions of millions of urban disinherited fanning out to fructify the prairies. ‘Make the Public Lands free in quarter-sections to Actual Settlers,’ Greeley expounded in an 1854 New York Herald Tribune editorial, ‘and deny them to all others and earth’s landless millions will no longer be orphans and mendicants; they can work for the wealthy, relieved from the degrading terror of being turned adrift to starve. When employment fails or wages are inadequate, they may pack up and strike Westward to enter upon the possession and culture of their own lands …’

  Greeley’s compulsion to bring order and decency to the semi-industrialized masses, whose sense of directon had already been atomized, should certainly not be scoffed at for the problem was bitter. In the period Thernstrom examines - just a segment, from 1850 to 1880 in Newburyport, Massachusetts - there is revealed a ferment beneath the graceful vignettes composed by the scribes who were the mouthpieces of the business aristocracy.

  Industrialization had sucked into Newburyport a swarm of floating workmen, propertyless ‘lack-alls’ in a state of bubbling turnover. The immigrant bog Irish and the farm boys from New England streamed in, found either snatches of employment or none at all, streamed out, and were replaced by other ‘permanent transients’, still cheaper labour.

  They were ‘buffeted about from city to city within the New England labour market … helpless before the vicissitudes of a rapidly changing economy*. This new influx, unable to form a stable economic connection to a community ‘which provided no soil in which to sink roots’, was relegated by the masters to an invisibility where they could not pester the middle-class sensibilities.

  This was not profoundly difficult to do for personal contact was tenuous. Contemporary observers were, even then, characterizing the new working class as ‘floating’. These hordes of impoverished, unskilled, disorientated arrivals were - like Negroes and Puerto Ricans in present-day America - the first laid off in a recession, the first forced on to relief, the first kicked out of the city. The records show that after the 1857 collapse an estimated 1,000 left Newburyport for ‘locations where work is more abundant’ - a statement unlikely to be more than a hope common to both the floaters and the burghers.

  The rhythm quickened in reverse when ‘abundance’ seemed promising in Newburyport. When the local cotton mills reopened during the economic recovery of 1879, 1,120 ‘tramps’ applied for lodgings at the local jail: 381 gave their occupation as labourer and 235 others as mill operative, both groups presumably bidding to be first in when the factories began humming again.

  The dichotomy between the classes - which gave scope for shifting a block of human beings about like ledger entries, in or out, wanted or not wanted, valid or void - ensued from a changing situation which had not yet been understood. The old order, disintegrating since the turn of the century, fell in a shambles with the sudden industrialization and urban explosion of the 1840s, and the resulting disruption of the old hierarchical relationship between the social groups. The arising of the factory caused a swerve into an ecology arrived at in Britain forty years earlier, the subject of Engels’s examination of a ‘weird inhuman society’, a nation riven into two classes, rich and poor.

  Engels looked with horror at the new shiny satanic mills and their stews into which millions were being drawn from ‘merry old England’, in which ‘no comfortable family life is possible … only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality’.

  Karl Marx decided that machinery ‘lays the worker low, abolishes humane relations, stultifies the masses and depopulates the countryside …’ Capital ‘comes into the world soiled with mire from top to toe and oozing blood from every pore’.

  Marx and Engels had been scrutinizing the results of a social eruption. In America the convulsion was still in action. Not all the bourgeoisie were callously and uncaringly oozing blood from every pore. In some quarters there was at least a nervous pessimism, even concern for the alien rabble. This concern admittedly was usually expressed in ever shriller exhortations to the ‘indolent class’ to grasp the chances for advancement dangling before them, ripe cherries.

  ‘We declare it a vice and a sin for a man to be poor, if he can help it,’ boomed a Newburyport editorial. Poverty was ‘not a want of means, but a want of will - of real manliness and self-control’. The customary method of proving that conditions were really splendid and healthily bustling was to label the Old World evil, stagnant, decaying. Industrial Britain and France were filled with ‘ignorance’, ‘imbecility’ and ‘squalid misery’, the people generally ‘poor, miserable and starving’.

  Among the beholders of the American Shangri-La, however, there were some anxious to ensure that a menacing, revolution-bent proletariat such as Europe’s should never gang up in America.

  It was out of this line of thought that the ideology of mobility was born. The theory behind the building of Lowell, Massachusetts, the first great textile centre, was an ambiguous blend of flyness and quixotism. The mills would be kept churning by a steady ‘succession of learners’, farm hands attracted in by higher wages. After a few years they would strike out West and buy a farm with their savings, to be replaced by the next ripple of eager apprentices (at reasonable prices) from the surrounding rural regions.

  Nathan Appleton and his fellow sponsors believed that Europe’s factory hands were ‘of the lowest character, for intelligence and morals’, whereas because ‘most of our operatives are born and bred in virtuous rural homes, and, after working for a few years in the mills, return to agricultural pursuits, the interests of Lowell will rest secure’.

  Thus there would continue a circulation of well-rounded and contented workers, and Jefferson’s early tenet that democracy was inextricably bound up with agrarian qualities would be substantiated.

  Much of this argument was an effort to solve a situation which had been building up for a long time, and which was now forcing itself upon the propertied classes. Many still clung to the faith that the virus of class-hatred and rebellion, carried over from the decayed carcass of Europe by the immigrants, would ‘melt before the kindly sunlight’ of American freedom, that these vile social diseases would be healed by the ‘hidden alchemy in the air of the United States’.

  The average East Coast manufacturing centre at this time had a turnover of more than half the local unskilled labour force every decade. On a much vaster canvas the economy was increasingly dependent - in industry, in agriculture, in the forests, in cattle rearing, in canal and rail construction - on disposable labour, on a brimming pool to be tapped for seasonal need, shut off when the need expired, and left to flow onward under its own power to the next vent.

  Accordingly this volatile society had to create an ideology of the Open Road as a short cut upward in the Open Society, and the go-about began his metamorphosis into lion-heart and hero. It took numbers, and the necessity to keep those numbers high-stepping, to accomplish this revision. Until then a tramp had been a tramp.

  This change of role, or rather change of guise, was not a novel enough idea to cause alarm for, as has been seen, already established as something deeply and valuably American was the hero figure of the solitary
, daring man of action. Nor was the extension of this example to the urban industrial labourer entirely an imposition from above. Man is resourcefully adept at squeezing compensation, even satisfaction, out of the most arid predicament. Minute and subtle caste marks are invented to give colour to the greyest circumstances; a pecking order is swiftly introduced in the pokiest farmyard. In April 1853 the Newburyport Daily Evening Union explained that America was a truly natural society, a collection of millions of competing atoms held together by enlightened self-interest. Those atoms were in a state of constant motion. The never-ceasing up-and-down, ‘like the waves of the sea’, could only ‘purify’ society. Few of the atoms then being purified could obtain much comfort from those words, because they were mostly illiterate. But it was not only the burghers who believed that, distressing though the condition of the working class was, it was only temporary, that fixed social layers could not exist in the United States - the floating labourer believed this, too.

  That is one reason why in the first place he undertook the gruelling journey across the Atlantic. And ever since arriving he had been ceaselessly told that it was so. He was reluctant to believe that he could have been hoodwinked, that the promised land of milk and honey was a bread and water sentence for, him. Indeed why, despite his personal misfortunes, should he believe that? For frequently the evidence was before him of someone who was breaking through, ‘pulling himself up by his bootstraps’. When, sporadically, he did try to enhance his bargaining position by collective action, he was blocked by mercenaries, company agents and Pinkerton guards bringing in the ‘black sheep’ and the ‘rats’, all armed and mobilized at trouble spots by the new machinery of railroad and telegraph. If really pushed, the factory owner got rid of his entire work force, for strike-breaking replacements could be hustled in from Canada or from the contract shiploads just arrived from Europe. If areas became too militant, industry packed up and went - as did the cotton and steel companies who transferred to Carolina and Alabama to milk the meek, cheap Negro labour.

  But the greatest impediment to collective action was not simply the craftsman’s suspicion of the unskilled labourer, nor that of the native against the immigrant prepared to work for lower wages, nor the immigrant’s ignorance and the difficulty of getting cooperation between Ukrainians and Austrians, Poles and Italians, but, as Thistlethwaite observes, ‘the lack of conviction among working men that they constituted a separate class. Whether skilled craftsman, Nebraska farm boy, or European peasant, the industrial worker believed his job to be only a temporary makeshift, a stepping stone to better things.’

  This basic faith may have wavered during bad patches but it has never really altered. Very recently a five-city survey by Wilcock and Franke among workers dismissed by the Armor meatpacking plant and a laundry-equipment firm turned up the traditional acceptance of this being the natural scheme of things. Although ‘anger, resentment, bitterness, frustration, bewilderment’ were some of the words used by the interviewers to describe the emotions of these ‘blighted men’, and although the long-term unemployed, uprooted from a productive institutional tie and a seemingly secure place in society, felt ‘isolated from the work environment and a large part of their usual human associations’, the report shows ‘surprisingly little radicalism or rejection of the social and economic system. Many accepted economic insecurity as part of the Amerian way of life, and few had very specific ideas about what could be done to help them in the labour market.’ And there was, despite attachment to the home town and apprehension about the risks of moving, ‘a substantial degree of willingness to move under the spur of economic necessity’.

  So it was from the start. The newcomer found it tougher than he had expected but he’d make out, and in the way it should be done in America - on his own. Here is the basic explanation for the slow, patchy growth of unionism in America, for the absence of a strong radical political party, for the lack of solidarity and class-consciousness among the working population - and for the floating labourer’s readiness at this time to adapt to the definitive part in which he was being cast.

  In the event the Homestead Act did not melt away the industrial poor, for few had the money to transport themselves to the happy valleys or the agricultural skill to make them bloom if they got there. And those who did set forth mostly found themselves beaten to it by land speculators and railroad corporations.

  One clue to the dearth of realistic results from Appleton’s theory is that there is only one report in the Newburyport newspapers between 1850 and 1880 of a local labourer successfully settling in the West, and this single instance would hardly have delighted Horace Greeley. On 22 June 1878, the Herald carried news of one Michael Welch, son of a Newburyport working man and who had been treasurer of a local volunteer fire company. Welch had financed his venture forth into the land by lifting the firemen’s funds and he had now written to his parents reporting that he was doing very nicely out in Nevada.

  Few aspiring pioneers could so readily get their hands on capital and few of those who did were the labouring poor for whom the theory was devised. Many were artisans, schoolteachers, farmers and businessmen who went to grab a fast fortune out of Illinois wheat or Californian gold. The ‘safety valve’ purpose of the frontier never worked.

  This indication that a century ago, despite much physical mobility, there was little social mobility sharply conflicts with all the claims for the American open economy. Nor was this merely a peculiarity of that time and place. The compilers of a recent report, The Reluctant Job Changer, find: ‘… a substantial proportion of workers in American cities never leave the general skill levels of their fathers or of their own first job … At the same time, there is evidence of considerable downward movement between generations or over a working life, perhaps even more in this country than in Europe.’

  Added to this somewhat devastating inversion of a myth is a not wholly convincing consolation: ‘Downward movement may be of little social significance to American workers, however, if other desires, especially for increased income, are satisfied in the process. Many Americans are saved from a sense of frustration by their ability to believe in an equalitarian society while drawing satisfaction from a modest position in life,’ but it is concluded: ‘The prevailing rates of vertical mobility in this country as compared with Europe do not provide much support for the belief in opportunity that is generally held to be a dominant American idea…’

  When in 1893 Turner read his paper, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, to a historians’ meeting in Chicago, and furled across the curtain on the frontier, he set circulating an anamorphosis which was believed for a long time.

  Turner declared that class war had been prevented, and democracy disseminated, by the disgruntled machine operator working off his grudges by breaking virgin ground in the West. This was simply not so. Apart from the schoolteachers and businessmen who had the little bit of capital for such an enterprise, the genuine settlers, those who became Western farmers, had been Eastern farmers. Also, a run down the years of flood migration shows that this occurred not when the unemployment pools were biggest but when they were lowest: the Westerners took off when there was prosperity in the East and capital was therefore available. The peak migrations were immediately before the panics of 1819, 1837, 1857 and 1873 and during the halcyon early 1880s.

  The factory hands without factories to work in, who were willy-nilly pushed West by distress became not land-owners but a general-purpose labour gang, errant in the country. The Homestead Act did draw them out in a subsidiary capacity; to provide the transport lines to the front-line farms, so, in a far less fair and munificent way than its exponents intended, it did break up some of the log-jams of workers from the East. But those who strapped up their belongings and moved inland were still adrift.

  The ousting of the five Southern Indian tribes and the Black Hawk War of 1832 when the starving, desperate Sauk and Foxes attempted to recover their corn plots, also gave temporary jobs to men anxious
to escape from the city purlieus and prepared to sign on with the Army auxiliary. In 1832 a special Western force was created to man the forts and patrol the 1,500 miles of Indian border. It was a rag, tag and bobtail immigrant crew with no uniforms, few arms and less English, which was later hammered into a regiment of mounted dragoons. More drifters from the industrial belt were drawn into the wilderness when in 1837 the whole region beyond the Mississippi was constituted the Western Department, and increasing numbers of rangers were needed to establish new outposts and ride as detachments guarding the overland caravans.

  In another form the casual labourer had already sashayed in many directions before the Homestead Act. He was familiar in the version of the early pack-rat miner who footslogged California with bedding and pick on his back. He was the river tramp who worked as roustabout on the Mississippi paddle steamers and hung around the landing stages at St Louis and St Joseph, much as the bossiaki, the bare-foot itinerants of Russia’s rivers, later appeared in Gorky’s stories of the ‘superfluous men’ of the Lower Depths. He was the pick-and-spade ganger who scooped out the canals, when every city euphorically saw itself as the radial point of a network of waterways on which the merchandise would flow in and out-until the panic of 1837 damped the canal fever. Dozens of plans were abandoned half finished and thousands of foreign-speaking Germans and Scandinavians, as well as the Irish (and some of those spoke only Gaelic), were left broke far from family and port-of-entry, the slipstream of a vanished machine prosperity.

  9 Strict beauty of locomotive

  They were hikin’ through the tunnels,

  Holdin’ on the funnels,