Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

  There’s A Mother Waiting For you at Home Sweet Home

  My Dad’s The Engineer

  You’re Going Far Away, Lad

  On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away

  Way Down in Old Indiana

  In Dear Old Illinois

  Put Me Of At Buffalo

  My Old New Hampshire Home

  Mid The Green Fields of Virginia

  I’m the Ghost of the Troupe That Was Stranded in Peoría

  - all these, and scores more, comic and tragic, but all about some-

  where distant or a sad parting, came out between the mid 1800s and the early 1900s.

  It was Where Is My Wand’ring Boy Tonight? which jabbed the nerve most tellingly: which, as pop songs often do, stated a commonplace truth at precisely the emotional pitch at which it is felt by us all.

  Mothers really did put lights in windows. Chaplin recalls his mother at the organ - ‘I don’t know any fine songs,’ she apologizes, ‘only the kind sung by farmers’ wives,’ and renders Where Is My Wand’ring Boy Tonight? to the hushed family circle. One day when Chaplin and a young friend returned late from the wild country, where they had caught sunfish and roasted in wet clay a guinea hen, killed Indian-fashion with a slingshot, there is a light in the window. ‘I lit the lamp and left it for welcome,’ his mother says. ‘’il keep a light in the window for you always. You’ll remember that, won’t you?’

  Tully, once knocking at a door for food, is told grievingly by the housewife, ‘I don’t understand why boys knock about so’: her own son went off in a freight train.

  The motto of the period, worked in coloured wools and printed in gold, and which hung framed in saloons, and also in brothels where sentiment did not impinge upon trade, was ‘There’s No Place Like Home’ - if only as the last resort, Robert Frost’s definition : ‘the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in’.

  Where Is My Wand’ring Boy Tonight? was a song which became specifically identified with the hobo, and who himself identified with it, and which was sung, with varying degrees of seriousness and sobriety, at jungle soirées:

  Oh, where is my wand’ring boy tonight,

  The joy of his mother’s pride ?

  He’s treading the ties with his bed on his back,

  Or else he’s bumming a ride …

  He’s on the head-end of an overland train,

  That’s where your boy is tonight.

  The authentic sorrow the song reflected may be gauged, but only roughly, by the dubious statistics given by ‘A No. 1’ in his luridly moral The Curse of Tramp Life that ‘annually 350,000 boys run away from home, 35,000 become confirmed tramps, 7,000 are crippled by accidents, and 3,000 killed by the cars and through exposure’.

  Although it is unwise to trust those figures, at the peaks of the big railroad movements this was a murky social problem which little was done to tackle. The floater was hard to trace and there was next to no liaison between one police force and another, and there is no evidence that local records were kept of boys who upped and went down the track, away from their homes probably for ever.

  Yet that there was this social spur, a kind of initiation into manhood ceremony, exerting itself upon the young rural American of the late 1800s and onward - those steel blades cutting through the skyline beyond the Mid-West corn strip or Southern cotton field - is clear from a body of literature either of that time or reminiscence written later.

  It can also be glimpsed in pulp magazines of the hobo flood tides. The Detective Story Magazine and The Western Story Magazine, to be found in the racks of skid row news stands and in radical book stores along with Jack London, The Industrial Standard, The Hobo News and The Masses, carried ‘Missing’ columns, trysting places for those who had disappeared without trace.

  Messages of the Twenties from these columns read: ‘Zookie, Agnes. Still love you, Roaming around the country, making no headway without you. Write to A. G., Klavicord, Denborough, New Mexico’; ‘Reese, Harry S. Your mother is very sick. Please communicate with her at once. I will not interfere with your plans. Daddy’; ‘S. L. No word from you since June 1914. I am heartbroken. Please write to Mother.’

  In December 1922 The Hobo News printed a letter which somehow is more eloquent than it intends to be about the deserted woman in these shifting sands of migrant industry. The letter was from Mrs Nellie Miles, of 1412 First Avenue, Dallas, appealing for news of Walter, her former husband. ‘He was a knight of the open road,’ wrote Mrs Miles, ‘and I am sure he has cooked “mulligan” for some of you in some of the camps of the West. Won’t you help me find him? His little daughter, Katie Lorene, asks me every few days, “Mother, where is Daddy and why don’t he come back?” and she prays at night, “God, please send my daddy back to Mother and me - we love him and we need him so”.’ The Editor’s note was: ‘We gladly print this appeal and hope the boys will do their best to trace the missing brother.’

  This theme has not lost its meaning, both sombre and comic, in present-day America. In 1966 Time Magazine reported a double teenage murder in Tucson, Arizona, and commented that missing girls did not exactly galvanize the city police because in this ‘boom town with an unusually high proportion of transient residents, more than fifty runaway minors are reported each month’. Most, it was stated, vanished from the drive-ins and juke joints along the East Speedway Boulevard: ‘Propelled by the same aimless itch, unrestrained by permissive parents, hundreds of teenagers haunt the Speedway.’ At about the same time in The Saturday Review there appeared a cartoon depicting a mink-clad mother, executive father in background, imploring a Beatle-haired guitar-playing youth, who is serenading a girl in dark glasses outside a Greenwich Village espresso: ‘Son, dear son, come back to Scarsdale with us!’

  The implicit facts which make that funny are horrifying. As recently as the Thirties packs of feral youth roamed America’s roads and rights-of-way. They attracted much worried discussion in educational and sociological journals, but little action out there in the no-man’s-land they had entered.

  There were publications such as Sullenger’s, which lists as one of the five reasons for boys leaving home ‘the desire to escape school difficulties’, and Armstrong’s which estimated that school conflicts accounted for about sixteen per cent of the runaway cases before the New York Juvenile Court. Such were the surface euphemisms, for, as Minehan pointed up in an article in The Clearing House in November 1936, the ‘difficulties’ and ‘conflicts’ which were being escaped were simply that many were ‘economic ally unable to attend school’. It was the Depression which had ‘brought out in stark relief the plight of many of these youngsters who often lacked shoes or clothing to attend school, to say nothing of the money to purchase textbooks’.

  There seems no cause to believe that most of the juvenile hobos, caught up in ‘the wave of youth-wandering which swept the country’ - as Outland describes it - were sub-standard unteachables. In an article in School and Society in October 1934 Outland published some conclusions drawn from interviews with 5,000 transient boys between fifteen and twenty who had registered with the Federal Transient Service in Los Angeles between December 1933 and July 1934. There he wrote: ‘The statement has frequently been made that all transient boys included are “bums” and “hobos”, and the Federal Government has been often condemned for attempting to care for them … Whereas there are a few transients who might properly fall in one of the above listed undesirable categories, the great majority of them are individuals who have lost their jobs on account of economic difficulties over which they had no control, and who are extremely anxious to rehabilitate themselves.

  ‘Especially is this true of the army of minor transients … How eager they are to find work and to help the folks back home … The general average of 4,970 boys was found to be 9.09, or slightly better than a ninth grade education. This figure might be quoted to those individuals who insist on calling our transient youths “young bums” and “wild boys of the road”. It might prove
to be that the average education of these “bums” would be better than that of the persons making such statements!’

  Three years later in another article discussing school dropouts Outland gives examples of ‘boys, evidently average or above in scholastic attainment, dropping out of high school, and eventually drifting on to the freight train’. But he found ‘most of the boys did not go on to the road until being out of school for several months, and, in most cases, a year or more’ - that is, when the icy truth was undeniable: that there was no work for him around there.

  In a May 1933 article in Scribner’s Magazine Lowell Ames Norris, in ‘America’s Homeless Army’, wrote: ‘The traditional hobo is not to be found in these ranks of starving youth. The majority come from substantial American homes. A goodly number are college trained, an even higher percentage are high school graduates, and most of the others have had an eighth-grade schooling.’

  The ordinary, uncomplicated fact was that the young boy shuttling about, as if before gusts, on the trains of this time was either in flight from actual starvation or had taken a Captain Oates decision to relieve the pressure on a family in extremity by removing one stomach.

  Los Angeles alone in 1932 gave asylum to more than 200,000 adolescents in its free flophouses and midnight missions. Two thirds said they had left home for economic reasons - ‘one less mouth to feed’ - and only one-seventh admitted to a predicative wanderlust. More detailed examination reveals that over thirty-five per cent of the families represented were on relief at the time the boy left home; over fifty-five per cent came from homes broken by death, divorce or separation - and, of course, it can be only speculation as to how frequently those two last categories themselves were due to economic stress.

  It is significant that in the late Thirties there could still be debate about whether a young man became a runaway because of ‘wanderlust’, and ‘inner urge’. Anderson was then reporting ‘a trend’ toward explaining transiency in terms of social or economic duress upon the individual. There should not be overlooked the diagnosis of Dr Robert C. Van Riggle, a psychiatrist working with the Florida Transient Service, who in 1935 explained the myriads on the road as the result of ‘a deep inner need to escape from a known condition into an unknown condition, to remove the old and discover the new, to break restraining bonds and find freedom, to renounce the too obvious “real” for the more glitteringly “unreal”. Stability in life has always meant sacrifice.’ Doubtless all Dr Van Riggle’s elaborate deductions could be found occurring as rationalizations, means of making the best case out to oneself, but the ‘real’ was mass unemployment and hunger, and the flight - the futile flight - was from these. ‘Wanderlust’ - the medical mysteries of dromomania and drapetomania - offered a more comfortable vagueness to the burgher than the realities of starvation and despair.

  Out of the 466 youngsters Minehan talked to, twenty-eight of them said just that they ‘liked to trave’; 387 gave their reasons as ‘hard times’. At least in these young people the reasons were still raw. In the older man the stages become intricately layered. Sutherland and Locke worked out from their talks with homeless transients in Chicago’s public shelters during 1934 and 1935 that they had hit that depth in the course of ‘roads to dependency’, a series of related experiences, sexual and marital problems, illness, alcoholism and economic transitions. Many chronically wavered back and forth across the ‘line of dependency’.

  The point was did Americans have to start out on those roads at quite such an early age ?

  ‘America’s wandering youths are back home again,’ ran an Associated Press despatch in May 1937 with excessive cheeriness. To be sure Outland did in that year find ‘indications … that the great wave of youth transiency which swept over America during the years 1931-1936 is abating somewhat, but signs also point to a continuation of the high degree of mobility among the American people as a whole.’

  Although there had during that decade been sporadic flutters of disquiet about the horde of young Americans snapped loose from their moorings, that Associated Press story, filing away the bothersome business as tidied up and done with, is symptomatic. The handful of social workers and bodies attempting first aid treatment were up against encrusted dogma. When, in 1936, a recreational programme was launched in the Boys’ Welfare Department camps and lodges in South California, the leaders were astonished and not a little piqued that the young hobos responded with ‘listlessness and indifference’ to group games. ‘They don’t know how to play,’ was the way this resentment at such un-American non-activity was expressed.1 Outland remarks: ‘When an adolescent has been kicked from one town to another, and has been jailed and beaten for no reason other than trying to get a job, or to obtain something to eat, baseball and scouting must of necessity take a back seat.’

  Even then, when the Wall Street volcano of 1929 was still spraying human slag across the landscape, there were those who saw boon in the desperate wanderings of young America. ‘Wishing to apologize for the present mess and justify the ways of mammon to man,’ writes Minehan, ‘they assert that the boys are learning independence, self-reliance and the whole gamut of ancient virtues which made this country what it is today. One social worker executive has asserted that they are carrying on the glorious tradition of American life and extending the frontier. Another relief official has asserted that road life may be good for a lad. It toughens him.’

  (In a similar spirit of hearty pragmatism did Wilbert L. Hindman, Los Angeles Welfare Planning Council chairman, a quarter of a century later speak up for skid row. ‘Skid Row is a very healthy institution,’ declared Mr Hindman. ‘It has sprung up spontaneously to meet the demands of the homeless ones - the men who have resigned from society. It is not something that was dreamed up by a group of arm-chair planners without any real notions of the needs. It has resisted change for more than a century. It is meeting certain needs and meeting them well.’)

  Throughout the Thirties at scattered points there were a few anxious, determined people trying to mitigate the affliction, but it is notable that as late as summer 1935, when Outland published some of his findings in Sociology and Social Research, there was still a fumbling around to chart the origins and motives of the juvenile vagrants.

  Outland had found in his examination of 100,000 cases in Los Angeles during 1934 that every state in the union was logged, Texas top with the ‘astounding total’ of 1,051 boys, or more than ten per cent, and with Delaware and Vermont - nine and ten boys respectively - bottom. Territories and overseas countries also contributed to California’s intake of young hobos - there were boys from Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Brazil, Canada, China, England, Ireland, Italy and, of course, Mexico. Most of these boys could yet be rehabilitated, Outland insisted, for many making their first road trip had not ‘acquired that cynical outlook which frequently characterizes the experienced old transient. The immature young wanderer still believes in his home and his country, and his religion, and he is trying desperately hard to maintain this faith.’

  (Those Minehan talked to had stopped trying: ‘Casual association with the child tramps indicates that they have no more religious life than a healthy young colt… But if religion is a search for values the boys are religious. There is in their lives a vague quest for something beyond the present, a hope of union with the beautiful and the good, with the purpose and cause of life.’

  Outland warned: ‘Mix him for a prolonged period with the old “regular” and this faith commences to wane… The next step will be the acquiring of one of two viewpoints of life; either one of bitterness and cynicism, or one of dullness and apathy. Either is bad for the boy, and a danger to our social order.

  ‘Neither philosophy is so apt to be acquired if the young transient is maintained apart from the older man… The warped social outlook which frequently results when transient boys and men are mingled over a long period is often accompanied by definite physical dangers. Sex perversion is the worst of these, with cases frequently found wh
ere a boy has been bought, or forced, or led into degeneracy.’

  16 Roosevelt roosts

  What chance have I got? Less chance than a man with

  two wooden legs in a forest fire.

  American teenager of the Thirties

  In April 1933 the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal began operating. Its purpose was to round up the discarded children into work camps. Promptly nicknamed ‘Roosevelt Roosts’, their occupants wore a green uniform and each youth received a monthly wage of thirty dollars, part as family allotment. Peak enrolment was in autumn 1935 when the CCC had half a million members, including 50,000 Negroes.

  Of the 2,750,000 recruits who passed through CCC camps up to 1942 the great majority were in their teens. Wecter, while conceding that the ‘Depression’s full toll upon susceptible youth was hard to assess because in large measure it resembled a payment deferred’, believes that its sum would have been greater but for the creation of the CCC, ‘to keep idle youngsters from riding the rods, living off soup kitchens and sleeping in hobo jungles’.

  Yet although the figures are impressive, and it cannot be doubted that the CCC did check many from slithering irrevocably down into destitution, its catchment area was midget. First, the age of eligibility was eighteen, and the entrant had to have dependants, a residence and a reference. This was a case of two index fingers missing connection in the dark for, according to Minehan, fully half of the boys and girls on the road in the Thirties were under eighteen, many lacked traceable relatives, the only reference they could offer was a police record, and they had been drifting so long that they could claim no place of residence - so the opinion was that the CCC did little effectively to check the child exodus.

  There was, too, collective unease about the militaristic tinge of the camps. Perhaps some saw disagreeable similarities to the uniformed, drilled, trainee Nazis of the German youth movement; perhaps it was erosion of patriotism by the privations undergone, the loss of faith Outland predicted. Minehan’s findings among the more battered, ingrained road kids were that ‘of service to state, duty to nation, the boys knew nothing and are willing to render less’. Objections to the CCC by the boy tramps he encountered were that ‘in the event of trouble the Corps would have to fight’. In March 1933, he says, all rootless boys would have enlisted with enthusiasm but when the first fine glow subsided the Corps’ lists began increasingly to be marked ‘deserter’; within three months the camps were being called ‘prison’ by the renegades, within five months ‘Army chain gangs’.