Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

  A few months later an Ohio farmer wrote to the Cincinnati Commercial favouring rounding up all these vexing undesirables and sending them to the South as cotton pickers, concluding: ‘Some helpful hint, no doubt could be taken from Russia’s Siberia business. The only remedy for the “tramp” is occupation.’

  In the 9 December issue appeared a long account of a statewide ‘Anti-tramp Convention’ held in Columbus, Ohio. Delegates from small towns and large cities all resolved ‘not to be gentle or generous to “tramps”’, and urged that workhouses should speedily be constructed throughout the state.

  The same month the Cleveland Leader was invoking its readers’ moral responsibility: ‘The people of the city at large have a duty to perform. Whenever a vagrant knocks at the side of the door for a breakfast or dinner, the answer should be that the applicant must report to the Police Station… The thing to be done is to stop feeding the army of loafers who have taken advantage of the hard times to inflict themselves upon people not too lazy to work.’

  The Iron Age, the leading steel industry journal took an even harder-boiled line in its issue of 27 July 1876. ‘We must compel the vagrant to become an industrious, useful, self-sustaining citizen,’ it intoned, ‘by making vagrancy disagreeable to him, and this can only be done by treating him as a criminal and making him earn by labor the bread he eats and the clothes he wears.’

  The ground tremors of America’s unemployed troubles, channelled as they were into enmity and indignation toward those hit hardest by them, were registered in Britain. On 5 October 1876, the London Times said in its editorial: ‘The West, once the paradise of the working man, echoes back the lament of the East, of a superabundance of labour … The worst feature of the hard times is, however, the appearance of a distinct class of vagabonds, called tramps, who are not in search of work… They usually go in gangs… The tramp is not a picturesque character like the gipsy of the English lanes, and does not awaken sympathy like the “strapped” journeyman in search of a job. He is a low-browed, blear-eyed, dirty fellow, who has rascal stamped on every feature of his face in nature’s plainest handwriting.’

  Here is the familiar chemistry employed to prepare the ground for persecution: establish that your victim is debased and barely human, thereby justifying inhuman, draconic measures.

  As well as the salt mine and arsenic curatives, there was a waxing enthusiasm (which must have activated that 1892 consular circular seeking tips on vagrancy control abroad) for importing European methods. In the same year, 1877, that The Unitarian Review writer was clamouring for a revival of England’s medieval hounding of ‘sturdy beggars’, the Victorian English workhouse was being looked to as a meritorious model.

  The extent of the tramp scare and its infection of even liberal opinion may be judged by the recommendation of Elihu Burritt, philanthropist, reformer and U.S. Consul in Birmingham, who supported anti-slavery, and organized the 1848 Brussels Congress of ‘Friends of Peace’: ‘We have with us already all the classes that vice, poverty and ignorance have made “dangerous” in the Old World, and we must have the Old World institutions to protect society against them… We must have the English workhouse, with whatever improvements we may add to it… With such an institution, every town and village could make a clean sweep of tramps… We must supplement our jails, poorhouses and asylums with this English institution.’

  Never, among these moral uplifters, was there remorse for acquiescing in a system which wore men out and junked them; never analysis of what made the difference between a diligent, honest workman and a low-browed rascal who must be punished and persecuted for being out of a job.

  The leap in logic was repeatedly accomplished with dextrous syntax. Yet, to see this with balance, it should be remembered that the climate in which such proposals were made was one of general distress. Communities were in a state of fiscal crisis, worsened by the burden, in both cost and perhaps secret guilt, of local unemployed. Banks had closed; ranks must be closed.

  The passing of years has not momentously altered this vernal concept of guilt and punishment. Still in the Twenties, as Wecter shows: ‘The most acute problem was relief. Traditional American ideas about relief sprang not from modern Britain, with its “soul-destroying dole”, but from English poor laws dating back at least to Queen Elizabeth. It was commonly believed that charity corrupts those who receive it, that public relief and politics are inseparable and above all that such disbursements are “Something for nothing”. Aid to the indigent thus tended to become a local responsibility, given as grudgingly and humiliatingly as possible in order to discourage spongers and point up the disgrace of poverty. The bleak horror of the poorhouse was thought to be salutary.’

  Later still Harry Carr, a Los Angeles Times columnist, in January 1935 articulated the attitude of many Californians toward the ingress of the violated people from the Dust Bowl.

  ‘The desert roads are streaming with hoboes,’ wrote Carr. ‘All those with any desire to work have gone to the government camps. Most of those on the road are vicious and dangerous … Florida and Washington are both stopping indigents at their border. California should do likewise. The government relief boards could stop these wandering nomadic bands of tramps if they would… From the days of Rome in its decline to Paris just before the revolution, the problem of civilization has been to compel the unemployed and unemployables to stay in one place. California is willing and able to take care of its own jobless, but the doors should be shut against the indigents of other states.’

  There was understandable groaning against this unbidden strain on local budgets, just as there had been half a century earlier in New England townships, and, as there, it was an easy emotional step to believe that the invaders were ‘vicious’ and ‘criminal’.

  In the economic earthquakes of the late 1800s the tramp, the foreigner in town, was a convenient scapegoat upon whom hysteria and anxiety could be sweated off. It helped also to be able to blacken him with political menace. The title of Pinker-ton’s book - Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives - is a ripely pejorative portmanteau. In January 1878 the New Orleans Picayune was declaring: ‘The extreme poor are all that Louisiana can feed on account of charity. We have no surplus bread for the communists and vagabonds of other states.’

  Invariably as the tramp scare flamed across America, the workless man’s immoral laziness and his diseased subversive thinking were indicted: not only for the community’s good but for his own, he had to be reformed. What more fitting means of forcing him to overcome his sloth than to make it a matter of his own life or death ?

  In the Newburyport Herald of 14 June 1878, James D. Parton, the biographer of Andrew Jackson and a popular writer of the day, proposed as the answer to the escalation of vagrancy that paupers should be placed in cisterns, into which water was to be pumped at a rate equal to that at which a vigorous man could pump it out. ‘If he worked he was saved,’ Parton coolly observed, ‘and if he refused he was drowned.’

  This neat plan seeded, for eight years later this report, ‘adopted by an overwhelming vote’, was published by the Supervisors of Westchester County, New York: ‘Hundreds of this class flock to this county from the city of New York and the adjoining State of Connecticut… These tramps are a source of great danger and great nuisance to our citizens… The expense, directly and indirectly, to the taxpayers of this city, caused by this tramp raid, has reached the enormous sum of 75,000 dollars per year …’ The Superintendents of the poor and asylums were instructed ‘to erect a building in a suitable place on the county farm, which shall be so situated and constructed that it can be flooded with water to the depth of at least six feet, and so arranged with apartments and platforms that all persons committed as tramps and vagrants can be placed therein and thereon, and when the water is turned on to be compelled to bail or be submerged thereby.’

  Poisoning. Drowning. And there were those who swore by guns. A writer in the New York Herald in 1878 said: ‘It is very well to relieve real distress w
herever it exists, whether in city or country, but the best meal that can be given to the regular tramp is a leaden one, and it should be supplied in sufficient quantity to satisfy the most voracious appetite.’

  The faith in summary butchery for dealing with scroungers remained spring green in many an American breast. When in 1915 the IWW was campaigning for better conditions for itinerant mowers and shockers, vigilante committees, known as pick-handle brigades, were formed everywhere to break up the ‘Wobbly menace’. In 1917 the South Dakota Morning Republican counselled ‘every member of the vigilante committee over twenty-one to supply himself with a reliable firearm and have it where he can secure it at a moment’s notice’. And when in 1920 Attorney-General A. Mitchell Palmer directed the round-up of Communist leaders for deportation to Russia on a ship tagged drolly ‘the Soviet Ark’, Guy Empey reminded the public that the best instruments for Communism-control could be ‘found in any hardware store’, and declared: ‘My motto for the Reds is sos - ship or shoot. I believe we should place them all on a ship of stone, with sails of lead, and that their first stopping-place should be hell.’

  Nor is poisoning a solution which has entirely faded from the more paranoiac imagination. In March 1966 a Californian was charged with solicitation to commit murder. Obviously a white supremacist planner of national executive stature, he had, said the police, arranged four distribution points, one in each zone of the country. From there free poisoned food samples, such as powdered gelatine desserts, would be sent to almost every Negro in the United States. Another like-minded American, exposed during 1964’s House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, was the organizer of a Ku Klux Klan firing squad and of classes on how to exterminate Negroes with poisonous snakes.

  Whether any individual householders really did rid their neighbourhood of visiting vermin by means of strychnine and bullet cannot now be ascertained, but at least on an official level the wilder penalties were not enforced. That drowning trap was never built in Westchester County. Instead the officials urged only the removal of the tramps ‘from a condition of demoralizing idleness and degrading associations to a situation where they can be permitted and compelled to work at some laborious occupation’.

  The change of mind was made under heat of protest for all the foregoing venom and vengeance was not without opposition. Also making themselves heard were the defenders of the tramp. In that same period when deportation, imprisonment without trial, forced labour and execution were being commended, the progressive press was insisting upon deeper investigation of the tramp problem.

  The National Labor Tribune on 14 August 1875: ‘Who are the tramps and who made them? A tramp is a man, an unfortunate man, because he can find no work. He starts out and travels because he wants to work, and on, on he goes… They are products of recent times … Society itself has created every tramp who is compelled to beg … Beware ye money bags; beware ye political Leches; beware ye cormorants of society. The tramps you now despise will some day become tigers, and wise, rise like an army and suddenly wrest your ill-gotten gains from your grasp, appropriate them to their rightful owners.’

  A more considered piece appeared in The Weekly Worker on the same date: ‘It is said “the devil is not so black as he is painted.” May this not be true of the tramp ? No doubt there are naturally bad men who assume this character … But does it follow that every tired, ragged, foot-sore, dirty and hungry wretch who comes to the door to ask for something to eat is a vicious fellow ? By no means.

  ‘There are thousands, even hundreds of thousands of working men in the country who have no work, can get none and “know not where to lay their heads” … How easy for the wicked to lay chicken-stealing and worse crimes to the tramp. He thus becomes the natural scapegoat of the whole criminal tribe, and on him, as he wanders forth in a world that is a wilderness to him, are heaped the sins of society. About the only consolation left the truly unfortunate tramp is the thought that Christ was a tramping vaga-bon’ whom the world crucified to get rid of, and all honest men suffer for the sins of the world …’

  Most revealing of less well organized, or at least less ventilated,

  humanitarian opinion of the day was the Executive Proclamation by Governor of Kansas, Lorenzo D. Lewelling, which became known as the ‘Tramps’ Circular’. Ever since the business slump following the Civil War, the cry had been heard that the sparse city relief services, the charity soup kitchens and mission shelters, were being preyed upon by greedy, cunning ‘vagrants, bummers and revolvers.’ But it was in this year Of the ‘Tramps’ Circular’ that the pattern of future depression oscillation formed, for this was the first severe coast-to-coast slump, the first economic drought to settle upon the whole nation. Now there began the transcontinental movement. Now there began the shutting of doors and the eviction of any roamer from towns, counties and states. It was this intensified, increasingly official policy against which Lewelling’s proclamation protested. It appeared in the Topeka Daily Capital on 5 December 1893.

  ‘The monopoly of labor saving machinery and its devotion to selfish instead of social use,’ it ran in part, ‘have rendered more and more human beings superfluous, until we have a standing army of the unemployed numbering even in the most prosperous times not less than one million able-bodied men; yet, until recently it was the prevailing notion, as it is yet the notion of all, but the work-people themselves and those of other classes given over to thinking, that whosoever, being able-bodied and willing to work can always find work to do, and Section 571 of the General Statutes of 1889 is a disgraceful reminder of how savage even in Kansas has been our treatment of the most unhappy of our human brothers.

  ‘The man out of work and penniless is, by this legislation classed with “confidence men”. Under this statute and city ordinances of similar import, thousands of men, guilty of no crime but poverty, intent upon no crime but that of seeking employment, have languished in the city prisons of Kansas or performed unrequited toil on “rock piles” as municipal slaves, because ignorance of economic conditions had made us cruel.

  ‘The victims have been the poor and humble for whom police courts are courts of last resort - they cannot give bond and appeal … They have been too poor to litigate with their oppressors, and thus no voices from this underworld of human woe has ever reached the ear of the Appellate Court, because it was nobody’s business to be his brother’s keeper…

  ‘And who needs to be told that equal protection of the law does not prevail when this inhuman vagrancy law is enforced? It separates men into two distinct classes, differentiated as those who are penniless and those who are not, and declares the former criminals … To be found in a city without some visible means of support or “some legitimate business” is the involuntary condition of some millions at this moment, and we proceed to punish them for being victims of conditions which we, as a people, have forced upon them.

  ‘I have noticed in police court reports that “sleeping in a box car” is among the varieties of this heinous crime of being poor. Some police judges have usurped a sovereign power not permitted the highest functionaries of the states of the nation, and victims of the industrial conditions have been peremptorily “ordered to leave town”. The right to go freely from place to place in search cf employment, or even in obedience of a mere whim, is part of the personal liberty guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States to every human being on American soil. If voluntary idleness is not forbidden; if a Diogenes prefer poverty; if a Columbus choose hunger and the discovery of a new race, rather than seek personal comfort by engaging in “some legitimate business”, I am aware of no power in the legislature or in city councils to deny him the right to seek happiness in his own way, so long as he harms no other, rich or poor; but let simple poverty cease to be a crime.’

  It was a brave, and original, statement - to remind Americans that Americans had the right of way over American soil. There was a great rush of response to the ‘Tramps’ Circular’, from a body of opinion hitherto unhear
d.

  A Denver police magistrate wrote: ‘I know of no laws which have been so universally abused and used as engine of oppression against the unfortunate poor.’ One newly-made tramp, a regularly employed cook before the depression, related his own experiences after requesting permission to sleep the night in Kewanee jail, ‘treatment as that would soon make a criminal of me, and I really believe that many criminals are made in this manner*. A North Wichita man wrote: ‘The tendency of the times is to force the masses into a propertyless condition, then persecute them for vagabondage.’ Another correspondent saw the tramp as a natural outcome of a society in which ‘the dollar, instead of humanity, is the object of the supremest regard and protection … Who does not bear constantly with him the dark spectre that by another year perhaps he and his may be vagrants; and does not each succeeding year give to the word a deeper and more damning dye.’

  The Tramps’ Circular’ was also praised by Eugene Debs, then editor of The Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine: ‘Governor Lewel-ling is the first and only man in authority to brand the cruel, savage, heartless wrongs in fitting terms … his letter ought to arouse everywhere the inquiry in this country: why are there so many tramps?’ A Texas lawyer, named Andrew Jackson, wrote condemning the system under which local officials ‘are paid fees in criminal cases only in case of conviction.’ This, he said, ‘has fostered a slave trade’ through ‘the selling of honest and innocent men for the fees of office.’