Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

  It was certainly mole-building with mudpies against the size of the torrent but there were other hands at work. The policy of the Federal Transient Service in almost every state was to return minors to their legal residence (if they still had one). If the fare money could not be raised from relatives, and the Service bureau in the ‘object’ state decided that there was reasonable hope of reinstatement in the home town, the boy was provided with train ticket and meal money.

  Ninety-nine per cent of the boys so despatched arrived back home and, it was claimed, eighty-two per cent had not become migrants again (although there is vagueness about the period over which this contentedly settled state was judged). Seventy per cent, stated a report, ‘had found the home town to be a pretty good place after all … throughout the replies on the boys that were working there runs an optimistic note of gratification at renewed independence and security in the home community. Frequently this is coupled with the expressed desire on the part of the boys to remain at home and not take to the road again.’

  Presumably that was a reliable enough conclusion to draw if the truant could be found a job, but since most of the wanderers derived from stagnant regions, this could not invariably have been the happy outcome.

  To be fair it is reported that some boys, upon landing back on a Service ticket, ‘have searched five months for something to do and the patience of some of them is nearly exhausted, and the thought of the open road is becoming more and more attractive’.

  How many children were abroad, dust in the wind, on the American continent in that period? Webb, in a 1935 Works Progress Administration monograph states with what might seem to be staggering complacency: ‘The emphasis on the number of boys on the road was a compound of sentiment and propaganda …Judging from the number of transients who received care under the transient program, the number never exceeded one half million.’

  Oh, one half million: that’s all right, then. Outland, with qualifications, supports the view that ‘all estimates made on the number of transients in the period from 1930 to 1933 were unusually high’. However let that figure, put forward apparently with sober satisfaction, be accepted: one half million.

  It may become more concrete and real if split up into smaller segments of experience. In 1932 a Chicago University research team reported for the Children’s Bureau that there were probably 200,000 juvenile hobos then in movement on America’s highways and railroads - and then apologetically adjusted their estimate to that appalling sum of half a million, all aimlessly wandering the face of the country, begging, stealing and often in thrall to adult exploiters. How strange is this quibble over precise figures, how strong the feeling received now that once packaged up in a report the problem was docketed and dealt with.

  The majority of the wanderers were not city dead-end kids but farm boys for whom there was no space in the great field tracts of the United States. Woofter and Winston point out: ‘Coming of age in the farm depression of the 1930s involved unprecedented dilemmas… Entry into agriculture has been growing more difficult, the Depression made entry into industry almost impossible, and during the period of contracting agriculture and stagnant industry there was an increase of more than 200,000 in the farm males of working age. On the threshold of productive life, at the age of readiest adaptation to work and to family and community life, youth of this generation faced an economy which, at least temporarily, did not need them.’

  Of course they had to find that out for themselves - by scouring the states for the phantom job, then just slouching on, phantoms themselves in the factory graveyard. The shocking truth about the youth of so many rootless migrants had already been catalogued in occasional departmental reports, but they stopped a long way short of general public awareness.

  In 1932 McMillen took samples in South-Eastern and Western states. He found that there were 10,000 homeless transients being given shelter in Phoenix, Arizona, and 1,529 of them were under twenty-one; in El Paso 45,150, twenty-five per cent under twenty-one; in Oklahoma City 13,047, eighteen per cent under twenty-one; in Ogden, Utah, 919, eighteen per cent under twenty-one; and in Memphis, Tennessee, 10,870, twenty-seven per cent under twenty-one. In 1932 the Central Bureau for Transient Men in Washington DC recorded that twenty per cent of the men aided were under twenty-one, and added: ‘A small proportion inevitably will join the ranks of the permanent wanderers because of low mentality, lack of education and training, and unfortunate backgrounds. The majority however were those who are ready for the world, but find the world has no place for them.’

  One example of the rush to the railroads can be taken as reasonably typical: on the Missouri Pacific the number of freight car migrants (including recidivists) leaped from 13,000 in 1929 to nearly 200,000 in 1931 - and they, needless to say, were the ones observed. Railroad detectives in general agreed with social workers that most of this new generation of nomads were neither criminals nor voluntary vagrants, and but for the Depression would have been at work or in school.

  This - not Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz age whoopee crowd - was America’s true Lost Generation. Minehan, when at the University of Minnesota, travelled in six states as a transient, collecting in boxcars, jungles and missions more than 500 case histories of homeless boys and girls. He began his study of the unemployed with the transients who had gone down with the ‘Big Bust’ of 1929. It was as he hung around with the down-and-outs of the slave market employment offices and free meal counters that he noticed the bands of youths ‘too proud to be seen lingering in the sunlight with the old bums’ who sneaked in ‘for a bowl of beans and a flop’ after dark.

  He realized - and this was only thirty-odd years ago, it should be noted - that ‘here was the possibility of a new, strange field of investigation’. In other words for certainly forty years America had managed to relegate the problem of the exiled industrial worker to invisibility.

  Minehan investigated this ‘new, strange’ sociological field and became increasingly perturbed by the numbers of young. ‘As I left the mission district to live in hobo railroad yard camps or jungles and river shanty-towns, I found more and more youths and not a few girls. In the railroad yards I waited near a block signal where freights from Chicago and the South stopped.

  ‘Mobs of men got off every train. Many were not youths, but boys, and some were girls - children, really - dressed in overalls or Army breeches and boys’ coats or sweaters - looking, except for their dirt and rags, like a Girl Scout club on an outing.

  ‘Where were their homes? Where were they going? How long had they been on the road? Why did they leave home? What did they expect to do in the future? I began to ask questions.’

  Minehan came back with his dossier. ‘They were boys and girls, flesh and blood youngsters who would be in high schools and home and were in boxcars and jungles. I had seen pictures of the Wild Children of revolution-racked Russia. I had read of the free youth of Germany after the world war. I knew that in every nation, following a plague, an invasion, or a revolution, children left without parents and homes became vagrants. Before my own experiences I had always believed that in America we managed things better. And yet in the face of economic disorganization and social change our own youth took to the highroad.’

  According to his researches, 387 out of 466 boys and girls stated that hard times had driven them away from home, flimsy and directionless as tufts of prairie tumbleweed. Even at this distance there is the unmistakable voice of the Thirties, of a people ‘hit by the economic whirlwind’ in those snatches of biography.

  ‘I lammed’, ‘I skipped’, ‘I hit the road’, ‘I beat it’ … the phrases constantly recur; they refer to ‘When the big trouble came’. Texas, a youth whose front teeth have been kicked out by a cinder dick in Sante Fe, who has half an ear frozen off, who walks with an ‘odd irregular stiffness from too much sleeping in boxcars on zero nights and too much walking and too little food’, tells Minehan that he has a broken hand from a fight with a Nashville shack wearing brass knuckles.

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sp; ‘I’ve been ducking cops and chain gangs all winter in the South,’ he says. ‘What now? Oh, anything. I can’t get a job anywhere. I can’t get in the CCC because I have no dependents. I can’t remain in any state unless I go to a slave camp, and that’s that.

  ‘What chance have I got? Less chance than a man with two wooden legs in a forest fire. I’ve seen a lot of the country in the last year, and I’m glad I’ve seen it, but if a guy travels too much he becomes a bum, and I don’t want to be a bum.’

  Jenny, a dumpy Hungarian girl from Pennsylvania, says: ‘My old man was crippled in the Lackawanna shops. I just sort of scrammed.’ Carl: ‘I don’t care how I go as long as I’m going. Any place, I think, is going to be better than the last place, but it usually turns out to be worse.’

  Another boy hobo: ‘God is guts. What makes a guy keep pushing on, doing things when he’s all in, walking when he’s so tired he can sleep standing up, going without food when he’s hungry? … If he loses his guts, he’s all washed up.’ Another: ‘The big trouble came. I went up to Fort Worth where mother used to know a man who she thought maybe he could help me get a job, but he was as hard up as anybody else… Since then I just been traveling.’

  Here are two extracts from diaries of boy tramps, scrolls from that economic dead sea, which - perhaps uniquely - convey the day-to-day life, the fly agility of leaping from one life-saver opportunity to the other which pretty totally occupied the boy on the move.

  One was kept by Blink from Pennsylvania who had lost an eye when a live cinder blew into it on a Santa Fe freight: ‘August 24, 1932. Fight with the old man. He can’t boss me. Packed clothes and left. Got a ride on truck full of furniture going to Louisville. Two men driving. Good guys. Bought me my meals. Slept in truck. We stole some melons and apples from a farmer. August 27: Truck burned out bearing near Covington. Picked ride to Cinci. August 30: Chicago. Picked ride with salesman. September 2: Momence. Slept in farmer’s barn last night. September 6: St Anne. Got pants from priest and ten cents. Slept in corn crib. September 7: Walked Paineau, hitting farmers on way. Plenty to eat. September 8: Woodland. Tough town. Marshal boots me soon as I hits the main drag. September 9: Walked part way from Cessna. Took freight Hooperton. Good town. Picked forty cents from doorsteps and swell meals. Stayed down in jungle near river with four other guys for four days. September 10: Slept in paper box. Rode freight Rossville. Small burg, but got dinner. Walked Bronson. September 11: Villa Grove, rode with truck. September 12: Shelbyville. Cop picked me up. Sent to jail. September 16: St Elmo. Good. Twenty cents and new pair of socks. September 20: City. Slept under loading platform. Rain. Got wet. Hit woman for breakfast and dry shirt. September 22: Cop caught me with pocket full of apples. One hour to scram. Took freight. Going East St Louis.’

  The other extract is from the diary of Simple Sam from New York. ‘April 6: Marshalltown, Iowa. Good. Made 85 cents hitting back doors and all I want to eat. April 7: Hit small towns today. Albion, Union, Gifford and Abbott. April 8: Slept Hampton back of station. Got hitch to Livermore. Tough bull. Hit guy for dime in front of barber shop. Three women sic dogs. April 9: Fort Dodge. Stem too tough. Ride to Algona in truck. April 12: Estherville. Hit country for chicken. April 14: Ride to St James, Minnesota. Good town. April 15: Mankato. Swell town. Hit main drag thirty cents in half hour. Lady gave me nine pancakes, four eggs and 5 cups of coffee and two pieces of pie. April 16: Sleepy Eye. NG. April 17: New Ulm. Farmers want you to work. All I want to eat. Hit stem for meals, cinch. April 20: Hit small towns, Manchester, Hartland, New Richland. All little burgs. Slept in farmers’ barns. April 25: Montgomery. NG. Women too tough. April 26: Jordan. Got breakfast 5c. April 27: Shakopee. NG. Tough cop. Can’t hit the stem. Pick up truck to Mpls. Good town.’

  Why did they, why do they still, stop for little more than food, usually not even for sleep? Minehan begins his book as he is among a load of men and boys riding into a small division point town. ‘The freight jerks wheezüy to a stop in the early autumn twilight. Southbound, the majority of the transients remain in the cars.

  ‘Fifty or sixty, transferring for Chicago and points East, drop off, skirt the station, and head for the main stem … Two autos shoot out into the middle of the street, effectively blocking the first intersection.

  ‘Five men alight, four carrying ominous looking pick-handles … The stout man without a club and with the cigar steps forward, flashes a sheriff’s badge and speaks, “You’re under arrest, boys, come along … We aren’t going to be tough on you unless you make us tough. But you can’t panhandle this town, boys … How would you like a nice supper, a good warm bed, a nice breakfast and be out of here in time to catch the morning train?”

  ‘Without great margin of choice, they troupe to jail. They get a slice of sour bread, tomatoes and one cold boiled potato, and a bare cell to sleep in. They talk: “Why do they have to have jails?” “Or sheriffs?” “Or hard times?” “Or bums?” “God, I don’t believe that anybody knows what it’s all about.” “We come and we go,” says an old man. “Where the hell we come from and why and where the hell we’re going nobody cares and nobody knows.”’

  It is later at a limestone quarry near the jerkwater town where he has disembarked that Minehan meets his first group of road kids, five boys and two girls who have dropped off a Big Four freight.

  One of the girls has black hair cut like a man’s, face tanned as an Indian’s, and is wearing overalls, an O.D. shirt open at the neck and heavy Army shoes. The other is a curly-haired blonde in riding breeches, cloth puttees, tennis shoes and a dirty sweat shirt. They are on the circuit.

  The majority, says Minehan, then remained within five hundred miles of the place they once called home. Within a circle, after many experiments, they laid their route, moving from city to city, making the rounds of different relief stations, returning to ticked off shops and houses, panhandling the same towns, streets and lunchcarts.

  They linger nowhere. ‘Relief policies force them to move … It was in truth impossible for the transient boy or girl to stay anywhere. Relief authorities gave a meal - and an invitation to move on. No matter how tired, how willing to work, how weary and disgusted with the road and its aimless wandering, he had to take it.

  ‘Police did not trouble transients so long as they kept moving. As soon as they attempted to halt, however, police acted. Jungles were raided, soup and bread lines searched for non-residents, mission lists combed.

  ‘The child tramp was out again on the road … Strange as it may seem, the boys walk as much or more than they ride … While hitting the stem and begging meals at back doors, he must walk. He must walk, too, from the yards to the relief stations - often several miles. In small towns, the freights usually stop at water towers or sidings some distance beyond the business section. To board a train, in many cities, the child tramp must walk several miles in or beyond the yards. When he drops from the freight, he must drop off some miles before it reaches town. Walk, walk, walk, the child tramp’s existence seems, at times, to be a dreary march never ending …’

  City relief stations were as a rule then much more stringent toward youthful vagrants than toward older ones. Where an adult was given six meals and two nights’ lodging, the boy tramp got one of each. (A girl tramp was sent to jail.) By forcing the youngsters out of town and onward, the relief men argued, they were forcing them back home. In reality, because few had homes, they were being forced into beggary and theft.

  In a clumsy attempt to cooperate with the government policy to reduce vagrancy by establishing vagrancy camps - actually to corral vagrancy - the police became more hard-boiled.

  In the early Depression years the child tramps hitch-hiked. As their numbers grew motorists’ sympathy shrivelled. Unable to travel in gangs by car the hitch-hiker on the highway ‘was alone among enemies’, easily picked up by the police. So they transferred to the traditional American chariot for elsewhere, the open boxcar, moving about in groups to protect themselves - but, as ever, never knowing (or rather b
eing fairly sure) how a town would receive and treat them.

  Some cities and railroad systems maintained the dualism of not permitting hobos to ride openly: if the hobo circumspectly sneaked on he could ride. In other places the railroad police insisted that no hobo should approach a train until it was in motion, so departing from their jurisdiction.

  Minehan describes such a scene, several hundred men and boys lined up along the railroad fence. ‘A train is being made up a track or two away. The intervening space is patrolled by railroad police. “Get back there, I tell you, get back,” shouts an officer, swinging a club, to a pair of boys nipping over the tracks. “Don’t let me catch one of you putting a foot on railroad property until that train gets in motion.”

  ‘The transients are silent. Boxcars buckle and bump. A brakie connects the last air hose. From a station near the caboose the conductor gives the highball. Imperceptibly the train moves as the fireman rings the bell.

  ‘Like a group of race horses springing the barrier, or foot-ball players surging forward when the ball is snapped, the boys and girls surge en masse across the tracks. They alight and swarm all over the train as a cloud of locusts alight and swarm over an orchard. Some climb ladders to the roofs. Others pile in the gondolas. The majority choose boxcar doors.’

  It is clear that wanderlust had little to do with the vagrancy of the young, that it was basically poverty or a home broken by poverty which catapulted the child out on to the road. When the mission preacher ‘tries to account for unemployment as being the will of God, they do not believe him. Nor do they believe him when he relies upon stereotype sentimental pictures of home and mother to convince his congregation of a point.