Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

  The phrase ‘slave trade’ was no melodramatic exaggeration. Four years before the governor’s proclamation, this report appeared in the Chicago Tribune, datelined Moberly, Missouri: ‘Four vagrants, Samuel Rankin, John Smith, Frank Joes and Thomas Clark, were offered at public sale here today under an old Missouri law that is virtually a reinstatement of slavery. All the offerings were able-bodied men. The sale had been duly advertised according to law, and the men were auctioned off in front of the court-house to the highest bidder for a terms of six months each. Two of the men brought two dollars apiece and were at once released by their purchasers. The third was bought for seventy-five cents by a farmer who meant business, and he took his man out to put him to work. There was no bidder for the fourth and he was taken back to the county jail.’

  It is worth side-stepping for a moment to look at the stance from which Governor Lewelling spoke. He was a crusader and a Populist, and in a curious way the Mid-West farmer felt more on terms and more in a shared economic position with the shunned, ragged floater beating his way through his county than he did with his socially opposite number in the East.

  The Populist movement called for reform and a new standard of social justice, but based on agrarian radicalism and not on city criteria. Essentially it was the last stage of a struggle to save agricultural America from the manacles of industrial America. Later it became seen as a hotbed of reactionary Luddites fighting to put back the clock, and of proto-fascist groups, McCarthyism, anti-Semitism, anti-Intellectualism and xenophobia in general: a theory recently revised since Norman Pollack’s first-hand researches into Populist journals of the late 1800s.

  Pollack, refuting the charge that Populism was ‘a Ruskinesque lament for an outmoded handicraft existence’, shows the Granger movement, founded in 1867 to regenerate farming, did not want to abolish the railroads, as often alleged, but to subject them to public control. What the Populists did, at a period when most eyes could descry only glory and glut ahead, was to sense that ‘man was becoming dehumanized in psychological as well as economic terms’; they recognized ‘the trend toward what we today call alienation’.

  It follows that the alienated men all around them, the sad offloading of the new industrialism, should become an emblem of their protest. Industrial America, they accused, was creating not only poverty, but a new man in whom an awful personality injury was being wrought.

  Unexpected though these attitudes might appear in this rural and not deeply educated quarter, they are better understood when it is remembered to what they were responding. This was the time when a man could hold the credo, and expect it to be received with the solemn ardour in which it was smelted, that: ‘Upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends - the right of the laborer to his hundred dollars in the savings bank and equally the legal right of the millionaire to his millions.’ That was Andrew Carnegie’s cracker motto in The North AmericanReview in 1889. It was the period in which a father - John D. Rockefeller’s - encapsuled the skin-and-win spirit thus: ‘I cheat my boys every time I get a chance … I trade with the boys and skin ‘em and just beat ‘em every time I can. I want to make ‘em smart‘. It was the period when Rockefeller, himself the perfect horticultural bloom of the economy, could preach: ‘The American Beauty rose is only brought to flower by sacrificing the early buds.’

  Men like these both created the high-octane atmosphere of ambitious drive and themselves used it as fuel. They saw nought but good in the rapacious energy on all sides. Carnegie wrote to a Scottish friend: ‘Our dense forests are falling under the ax of the hardy woodsman. The Wolf and the Buffalo are startled by the shrill scream of the Iron Horse where a few years ago they roamed undisturbed. Towns and cities spring up as if by magic … This country is completely cut up with Railroad Tracks, Telegraphs and Canals … Pauperism is unknown … Everything around us is in motion.’

  What Carnegie probably meant by that penultimate phrase is that pauperism, as subtly distinct from poverty, was too contemptible to be acknowledged, for this was high noon of the self-made man cult. Everyone had a whetted appetite, and, as the Puritan clergy had from the outset assured their congregation, secular success was blessed in God’s eyes.

  The essays of Cotton Mather teaching that wealth was God’s gift, were invaluable to the success ethic. Franklin, himself a disciple of Mather, published The Way to Wealth, and became the idol of the rags-to-riches movement. When his statue was unveiled in Boston, Robert C. Winthrop delivered an address designed to spur the poor to greater efforts.

  ‘Behold him, Mechanics and Mechanics’ Apprentices,’ he said, ‘holding out to you an example of diligence, economy and virtue … Behold him, ye that are humblest and poorest in present condition or in future prospect, lift up your heads and look at the image of a man who rose from nothing.’

  Poverty was a disgrace if it was allowed to continue; it was, on the other hand, glorified as of inestimable value in purifying and strengthening the character, especially if it was rural poverty, for there its corollaries were fresh air and no temptations of city sin.

  Carnegie venerated poverty for, as he never wearied of reiterating, he and the great men of the time had all been disciplined by this rigorous experience. ‘They appear on the stage, ’ he said, ‘athletes trained for the contest, with sinews braced, indomitable wills, resolved to do or die … Abolish luxury if you please, but leave us the soil, upon which alone the virtues and all that is precious in human character grow; poverty - honest poverty.’

  Although the bare-foot newsboy was appointed the hallowed exemplar of self-help, Lewis E. Lawe, the Warden of Sing Sing, has mentioned that seven out of ten of his inmates sold papers in their youth. Indifferent to such practical tests, the self-help handbook literature - while short on practical information - slogged away relentlessly at character-building leading to the building of a bank balance, and religious approval chanted piously in the background.

  ‘Adam was created and placed in the Garden of Eden for business purposes,’ asserted Matthew H. Smith in Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine in 1854; ‘it would have been better for the race if he had attended closely to the occupation for which he was made.’ In 1836 the Reverend Thomas P. Hunt had published The Book of Wealth,’in which it is Proved from the Bible that it is the Duty of Every Man to Become Rich’. In Acres of Diamonds Russell Conway pronounced it to he man’s ‘Christian and Godly duty’ to make money. In Young Man’s Counsellor,Daniel Wise, a Methodist minister, said, partly in capitals: ‘Religion will teach you that industry is a SOLEMNDUTY you owe to God, whose command is “BE DILIGENT IN BUSINESS”.’

  The Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts, William Lawrence, explained that although sometimes the wicked prospered it was only occasionally for ‘in the long run it is only to the man of morality that wealth comes … Godliness is in league with riches.’

  The poor young man who could read was, around the turn of the century, strafed from every point on high with these golden bullets, aimed at driving him from his squalor and lethargy. For a continuing theme through these pep sermons was the necessity for the lad to sever the apron strings and stride off in pursuit of fortune. ‘A boy at home seldom has a chance,’ declared one manual. ‘Nobody believes in him - least of all his relations.’

  Out then into the commercial jungle of social Darwinism to prove himself the stronger in tooth and claw. So it may be seen that the opposing view, that unbridled big business was wreaking appalling hurt upon its servant - ‘Degradation was destroying his sense of being human’ - did not make itself widely heard against those thunderous homilies.

  (Not that this vein of inspirational literature is out of business. In 1926 Elbert Hubbard in that work beloved of Babbitts, A Message to Garcia, wrote: ‘We have recently been hearing much maudlin sympathy expressed for “the downtrodden denizens of the sweatshop” and the “homeless wanderer searching for honest employment,” and with it all too often go many hard words for the men in power. Nothing is said about the employer wh
o grows old before his time in a vain attempt to get frowsy ne’er do wells to do intelligent work … When all the world has gone a-slum-ming I wish to speak a word of sympathy for the man who succeeds.’ And best-sellers continue to spread the old but welcome news that ‘God always pays off.’.)

  The tramp, then, needed friends in the 1890s. Yet it is startling to find in rural newspapers, in a traditionally insular region, and in a period when socialism was still spores in the wind, such as this in the Lincoln, Nebraska, Farmers’ Alliance in 1892s: ‘It is in the interest of the capitalist class to have as many men as possible out of work and seeking it in order to keep and force wages down by making competition fierce between those seeking work and those employed,’ or this from the Topeka Advocate in 1894: ‘Has society, as a whole, derived the benefits from the use of labor-saving machinery that it might have done under a different system? We think not. Under the prevailing system the capitalist has been the chief beneficiary. Instead of using the machine to displace men, it should have been used to reduce the hours of labor.’

  The same journal wrote directly of the tramp: ‘… they are entirely unnecessary, given the country’s unlimited resources … the result of our vicious social and economic system … Are the poor of America poor from choice any more than were those in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, or in France under a “dissolute monarch”? Is a dissolute monarchy any worse than a dissolute republic?’ In a later issue the Topeka Advocate declared: ‘Remember that tramps are men, and that they are a natural product of our social system.’

  For Populism the tramp was the drummer boy of the approaching crisis. Industrial America had reached a juncture in social development: it could continue on disaster course or make the decision to return to democratic ideals. So the farmer felt at one with the worker, in or out of a job: because the Populist recognized that solidarity was the only basis for a radical policy.

  On 25 March 1894, a throng of unemployed gathered at Mas-sillon, Ohio, and, enlisting under the banner of the ‘Commonweal of Christ’, were led by Jacob S. Coxey, a contractor, on a march to Washington to demand that the President and Congress should launch a programme of public works. As Coxey’s Army marched East they were joined by increasing battalions of work-less, and from California came two more armies of ‘industrials’ led by ‘General’ Charles T. Kelly and ‘General’ Lewis C. Fry, all the time supplemented by migrant workers riding on freight trains to catch up. Townships watched them approach with alarm. Had the marauders come for them? Some states tried to drop the bar at the frontier. In Utah the railroads called for police and military help when bands of hundreds swarmed like boarding parties on to possession of freight trains.

  But the ‘petition in boots’, the muster of men from pits and timber camps and railroad sites on a mass job hunt, moved massively onward to Washington, and among the thousands were many Populists.

  The public press was antagonistic - the Pittsburgh Press printed under a cartoon:

  Hark, hark! Hear the dogs bark!

  Coxey is coming to town

  In his ranks are scamps

  And growler-fed tramps

  On all of whom workingmen frown.

  But the Populist papers and spokesmen loudly supported the hunger march.

  Five months after issuing his ‘Tramps’ Circular’. Governor Lewelling said: ‘The Coxey movement is a spontaneous uprising of the people. It is more than a petition, it is an earnest and vigorous protest against the injustice and tyranny of the age’. The Topeka Advocate was in there rooting for them. Stressing that all ‘reference to the causes which have produced the Coxey-ites is studiously avoided’, it continued: ‘When forced into idleness and compelled to take to the road in the fruitless effort to find employment it requires but a short time to make a vagabond of the man who under other and more favorable circumstances would be numbered among our best citizens.’

  During the 1890s the rural press of the Mid-West - the Lincoln, Nebraska, Farmers’ Alliance, the fiery Advocate in Topeka, the Custer County Beacon of Broken Bow, the Flatte County Argus at Colums, the Saunders CountyNew Era from Wahoo, the Representative from St Paul, Minnesota - seethed with anger and protest at the damaged men being thrown out on to the road, and it may appear that the hobo was in sympathetic territory, passed along by a cordon of helping hands.

  For all that, potent force though the Granger movement was on paper, the average hobo was probably lucky if he ever came into physical contact with a Populist brakie, farmer or hick town sheriff. The boot was always likelier for him than the helping hand.

  The Populist faith certainly hadn’t percolated into Clinton, Iowa, only a state away, to judge by Tully’s reminiscences. He describes meeting outside Clinton a hobo who had just been pulped by the whole township.

  ‘I comes a whistlin’ in there like a cattle train,’ says this hobo, nursing his bruises. ‘Well, sir, they ketches four of us and makes us run the ga’ntlet … The natives stands on each side for a quarter of a mile or more. They hit us wit’ stones and whips … Some guy caught me wit’ a rock here where you see this bump … I’ll bet there was 200 men there, an’ a dozen women.’

  Elsewhere Tully is told by a railroad detective who has arrested him: ‘Ye guys are the ruin of the country, a bummin’ honest people, an’ a stealin’ money, an’ a breakin’ into cars, an’ a burn-in’ barns’, and Chaplin, recalling his first experience as a migratory harvest hand in the early 1900s, says: To all good citizens we were “pesky go-abouts”. We were indeed as sad a lot of unskilled, unorganized, overworked, and underpaid undesirables as could be imagined … everlastingly out of luck.’

  Justice was a joke: ‘If a stiff had as little as twelve dollars on him when arrested, the judge would fine him ten of that. Rather than go to jail for thirty, sixty, or ninety days on a trumped-up charge of vagrancy or disorderly conduct, the helpless culprit would cough up. If he refused to pay the fine, he was jailed.

  ‘The real punishment consisted of being released in the middle of winter without warm clothing to keep the frost from his bones as he “rode the rods” back to his native “skid road”. We were expected to “keep moving”, yet we couldn’t move at all without breaking the law … Our farmer bosses, rich and poor alike, were inclined to treat us as human outcasts beyond the law.’

  Occasionally there are to be found flickers of self-knowledge, a half angry, half repentant realization that the tramp was not merely either offscourings of city industry cr a workshy on the fiddle, but a curse brought upon country people themselves. For industry could not be blamed solely. The commitment of almost all the Middle West to wheat during the second half of the nineteenth century killed the American tradition of the small, compact, diversified family farm, and set in motion the process toward the huge agribusiness prairie tract. It also created the short-term harvest hand, the man for whom the need was urgent but brief, a beautiful person in the sight of God when the wheat ears hung heavy but whose absence was required, in short order, as soon as the single stupendous crop was in.

  One big South-Western land owner encouraged hobos to cross his territory (about 11,000 square miles) so that they could be pulled in for harvest work. His instruction to his ranch foremen was: ‘Never refuse a tramp a meal, but never give him more than one meal. A tramp should be a tramp and keep on tramping. Never let the tramps eat with the other men. Make them wait until the men are through, and then make them eat off the same plates.’ That neck of the country was known to hobos as the Dirty Plate Route.

  Thus the hobo’s constitution and function were completed, as if all those wheat and timber and oil and mining regions were each, individually, supplying a characteristic feature for the identikit creation of the new labourer. They had to have him, and they lamented the truth of it. He was a harvest hand when the fields were golden and a tramp as soon as they were stubble. He was profit and loss, guilt and redemption. One of the most direct expressions of this muddle of feeling, which reflects Tully’s experience on the receivin
g end and the sense of blame on the other, came from a Mrs E. T. Curtiss, a farmer’s wife, who in 1902 addressed the North Dakota Farmers’ Institute on ‘Our Farm Life, How to Decrease its Evils and Increase its Blessings.’

  Mrs Curtiss castigated the abandonment of the principle by which her own settler ancestors had abided, that which allotted to each man ‘so much land as he could well and faithfully till.’ ‘Not a thousand-acre farm,’ she repeated, ‘but “only so much land as he could well and faithfully till”.’

  She told her audience that of all evils, ‘the one most destructive of happy family life is the attempted farming of too much land for the capital wherewith to do it well, resulting in exclusive wheat raising with its long periods of comparative idleness alternating with weeks of spasmodic labor when all the family work to exhaustion,’ and she added, ‘taking into their midst as help travelling transients or “Hobos”, four-fifths of whom are moral lepers.’

  She saw the hobo as a maleficent germ-carrier infecting the purity of the farming family. ‘What makes possible,’ she demanded, ‘the many slum saloons and houses of ill fame that cluster so thickly in the Minnesota border towns, their long fingers reaching greedily over into Fargo and other parts of North Dakota that they may gather into their slimy clutches your boys as well as ours? Hobos. Who make up four-fifths of the inmates of our jails and alms-houses for honest taxpayers to support them? Hobos. What brings the hobo here? Wheat farms. So there you are.’

  Leaving out compassion, such standards of self-criticism did not then and have not since ameliorated the four-square Plainville detestation of the tramp, and when a later depression swept yet another cataract of discarded men across the continent the relaxation of penalties which had come with the good, or better, times stiffened once more in relation to the fear and genuine shortage on every doorstep.

  California reacted to the Dust Bowl refugees of the Thirties with the ‘bum blockade’ and the ‘hobo express’, in the spirit in which the Los Angeles Times columnist demanded that the door be slammed on the ‘vicious’ and ‘criminal’ invaders. Because some of the towns hit by the removers in their coughing old cars, on their way from Oklahoma and Arkansas, often had to bear the cost of food, clothing, medical care and sometimes petrol to hump them on, local communities ‘felt impelled to discourage the coming of the migrants’. They were given temporary care and told to move on: the ‘passing on’ principle of relief.