Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

  ‘Five or ten years ago, the mission preacher could appeal to the wandering boy to return to his sorrowing mother and his ageing father. Today the wandering boy knows he will help his parents more by remaining away than by returning.’ The young boy tramp ‘has no background of sinful experience and dissipation to which the preacher may appeal as justification for his present need, none of his money was squandered upon harlots and riotous living. Unlike the older man, he knows little of gambling joints and houses of booze and sin. Nor of bonanza wages and foolish sprees. For him life has merely been progressively difficult as month after month, at home, he saw more worry lines on his mother’s face, less bread on the table and increasing distress in the house.’

  The boy tramp soon learned to sing with anti-religious fervour with the lumberjacks and out-of-town bindle stiffs refused mission beds:

  I dont care if it rains or freezes

  I’ll be safe in the arms of Jesus

  I can lose my shirt and britches

  He’ll still love us sons-of-bitches

  Am I Jesus’s little lamb?

  Yes, you goddam right I am.

  Then, Minehan found, there was bitter political militancy among the young. Whereas the older transients remained impervious to Communism (‘… a mental hold-over of war psychology, the anti-Red drives of Palmer, and a belief in the American success story, which will not let them accept the new doctrines’), he interpreted Communism as being seen to offer ‘school, hope and adventure’ to the youth on the road.

  ‘I’d rather be a Red than starving and dead,’ he quotes them as saying, using a phrase later subject to many an adaptation. Of patriotism ‘the boys appear to have not a shred. They do not have any more feeling of loyalty to America than they have to the South Pole’ - a disaffiliation which has certainly held firm down to the present day among the kind of rubber tyre tramp and train riders I talked to around the United States.

  ‘Practically all boys and the girls on the road, whether Communists or not, believe America is going to have a revolution soon if things do not improve. They are vague as to who is going to lead it and how it is to be brought about, but almost all agree that trouble is imminent. “We can’t stand this forever.” “Hell is going to pop some day now.” “The workers could do it, but they won’t. They’re too damn dumb. You never saw a working stiff who wouldn’t cut another working stiff’s throat for a nickel.” ‘

  The future? American cities might be ‘overrun with groups of hoodlums and depredators as London was in the eighteenth century and Paris in the seventeenth century, forcing the honest citizen to remain in his domicile after dark … Today’s child tramps will supply many recruits for the new army. Street beggars, hideous, deformed and depressing, may swarm our land and deface our cities and again many of them will be graduate child tramps.’

  Although that is a somewhat empurpled prediction, Minehan’s anger at the indifference, callousness, cruelty and stupid wastage he searchlit is understandable. ‘We prided ourselves upon the mobility of our labor,’ he says. ‘Economists told us that it was a source of natural wealth not unlike water power or mines. Labor traveled in day coaches, in flivvers, on work tickets, on its own money, but labor traveled.

  ‘And in traveling labor dissipated much of its earnings, lost home-making habits and acquired the mental outlook of vaga-bondia. Today we are paying for the mobility of labor during the last decade, and we may continue to pay for years to come.’

  From having lived with these young people whom some social workers saw as ‘learning independence’ and ‘carrying on the glorious tradition’, he concluded that there is in it ‘little that is wholesome and nothing that is permanently good … It is not encouraging to see the youth of our land spend their days in idleness and acquiring habits definitely anti-social.’

  The discrepancy in the above is of course that America, the cloudy Uncle Sam collective, did not ‘see’ what was happening to its youth. Even in that time of extremity, of breakdown and bread lines, of the Fall from innocence in almost every individual’s personal experience, the racial faith in self-help and self-sufficiency hung on blindly.

  America has always been saved by the citizen’s guilt. In no other nation in the world and in history has the ordinary taxpayer been so eager to acquit his government of criminal negligence, so unwilling to convict industrial barons of robbery with violence, of murder by evisceration. With the sacrificial alacrity of a fundamental Bolshevik, the beaten American has elected his own treason trial and confessed to the commission of failure and the omission of prosperity. He has continued to believe that he deserves all he gets, boom or slump. He has never lost the capacity for surprise at repeated revelations of corruption and perfidy in his own community or state. Essentially the Americans still sing in unison that newspaper editorial of a century ago: ‘It is a vice and a sin for a man to be poor’, and the accusatory passion with which it is carolled by the rich is echoed by the abject passion of the disowned.

  There is no other way of explaining what happened when in January 1939 (ten corrosive years after the Depression began) a group of evicted sharecropper families staged a silent protest by camping along Highway 60 in New Madrid County, Missouri, a tragic mardi gras of decrepit mattresses, bedsteads, rocking chairs and stoves. The published Farm Security Administration photograph (one of the great murals of the American disaster by such new wave photographers as Walker Evans, Dorothy Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Ben Shahn and Carl Mydans) ‘caused nation-wide discussion’.

  The eye had blinked and momentarily widened with dismay before being again nervously averted; the community heart performed its ritual diastole and systole. The photograph was, it was stated, ‘very embarrassing to local residents’ and one official cried indignantly: ‘The trouble with them is they was organized.’

  In the first flush of the Roosevelt administration, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration was permitted by law to allocate funds for the care of ‘resident, transient or homeless persons’ - a whole-hog departure in American public welfare. During 1934 FTP was operating in about three hundred towns and cities, providing transients’ shelters, known as Uncle Sam’s Hotels, where food, lodging and some medical care were available. By October 1934 all the states in the Union except Vermont were participating, and hard-up wanderers were encouraged to seek work locally or were given tickets for return to base if they were willing to go.

  It did not last. Why? Because, quite simply, says Anderson, ‘it was not popular mainly because migrants are not popular*. As a palliative a work programme was started and relief passed back to individual states, and in 1936 the Farm Security Administration began setting up its own hostels for migratory field workers to lift them out of the ditch bank and jungle camps.

  Again there is the weary jolt of amazement when one comes upon Harry L. Hopkins, administrator of FERA, writing in 1936: ‘To move into such a program meant to move into uncharted and hazardous territory. No one knew exactly how many transients there were. Little experience was available on methods of assisting them. Even advocates of their cause were confused whether transiency should be treated as an evil to be suppressed, or a necessary function of our economy to be rendered as painless as possible.’

  By now there was actually some debate, but the simon-pure tenet came up trumps: it was, when all was said and little done, an evil to be suppressed. Writes Hopkins: ‘Transient camps under WPA came to an end because of a strong conviction that their psychology was not consistent with the aims of a work program. The final victory for the transients is only won when, working side by side with the local man, he is known simply as a workman worthy of his hire.’

  This splendid, rigorous bibliolatry was undermined by a change in many state relief laws which excluded non-residents almost entirely, meaning that a workless migrant’s name on project assignments was likely to be written in minuscule. In fact, Anderson’s investigations show that ‘they cannot get on WPA unless they are first accepted for relief by the l
ocal public agencies. Cases of migrants who are assigned this are so rare as to be conspicuous.’

  To look at the statistics, these snippets from a time when concerted, businesslike and humanitarian action aborted out of misgivings or defeat, is to put one’s head down into a mist of bewildered loss. It is like reading a guess-work estimate about stray dogs. The Bureau of Agricultural Economics reporting on 1930-1934 puts baffled emphasis on this point.

  It announced that of 6,578,000 persons who migrated to farms (their italics) in that period fewer than two million were still on farms at the beginning of 1935. Of 7,176,000 persons who migrated from farms in that period, 2,593,000 had failed to return up to the beginning of 1935. There are more than seven million human beings unaccounted for in those tables, dissolving away like ghosts into America’s economic twilight. This is the common denominator of most attempts to make sense out of this ectoplasmic swirl of human population: an anxious perplexity merging into the unreality that the luckier, more stable, or even just the more unbudgeably loyalist Americans, felt towards the phenomenon. Anderson confirms that it was ‘owing to bewilderment’ about the migratory problem that the research foundations in 1934 and 1935 financed a study supervised by Professor Carter Goodrich then of Columbia University.

  What did this survey, Migration and Economic Opportunity, unearth? That ‘the study of migration led to some very profound queries about “population redistribution”, an expression which carries the implications of control. But the contemplation of control raises equally profound queries about the possibilities and difficulties that would attend a controlled or “managed” migration of people.’

  The matter was left in this quodlibetical form. Drop it, then, was the implicit outcome.

  Here and there the problem received popularized, usually sensationalized, attention in a magazine article or press report, and Hollywood gave it semi-serious treatment in the 1933 Wild Boys of the Road (distributed in Britain as Dangerous Age). Directed by William Wellman, Frankie Darro represented America’s railway children - not at all like E. Nesbit’s - as an adolescent gone wrong with the legions of homeless lads of the boxcars. All the same it may be seen that such a picture as Minehan’s of young America was not one which had much likelihood of breaking through into public consciousness, which was being supplied mostly with a somewhat cosmeticized version, the co-ed campus movies of the day or the Mickey Rooney suburban acting-out of Saturday Evening Post covers. Grim and outlandish in its truth about this invisible teenage America, nevertheless Minehan’s economic equation never captures, or even admits as a factor, the accretion of ritual in the roving life of the young.

  Even in the spreading climate of radical dissent of the early Thirties, Minehan does retain some of the older whimsy of the tramping syndrome. He notes the camp fire myth of ‘the child tramp who is a cross between Huckleberry Finn, the English Puck and the German Eulenspiegel. A mischievous lad, he is always playing tricks.’ But while in broad terms he accurately saw the wandering youth of that decade as scrapped people, destroyed by the ‘economic whirlwind’, and warned that ‘hunger and cold and death ride the green light of every train the child tramp flips’, his litmus paper seemed not to soak up the yearning which has always pulsed in the younger American - which may most often have been ignited into action by economic compulsion but which was none the less there, a hot spot in the imagination, a dare in the air.

  17 The abyss, the charnel-house

  I inhale great draughts of space;

  The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.

  Walt Whitman: Song of The Open Road

  Breakfast is being served in the long narrow room in the Loop side street. This is Chicago’s ‘slave market’ district where small agencies display hand-printed cards and notices chalked on blackboards, and sign up shipments of homeless men and casual labourers for out-of-town construction jobs. Johnson Scott, like the rest of the men sitting on high stools along the bar, isn’t planning to go anywhere at the moment.

  These are the ones with a few cents to start the day with a shot of liquor or some beer. Some shout quarrelsomely, some slump broodingly, but all are detached in the windowless twilight from the city’s business life roaring by where the sun blazes in the open doorway.

  Johnson Scott is conspicuous among the ragged clothes, greasy mechanic’s caps, whiskery chins and wrecked bodies, either gaunt or shambling. He is a lithe Negro of thirty-three from Birmingham, Alabama, clean shaven and quite spruce in a red button-down shirt. He is drinking a glass of straw-coloured brew named Golden Port, the cheapest kick-administering drink in the house.

  ‘I got out of the South in 1951,’ he says. ‘In a hurry you might say. There was this white girl in the store where I was working. One morning I hadn’t felt in the mood to be nice to her and she put it around that I’d tried something with her, which I hadn’t.

  ‘It seemed healthy to get out of town. Another fellow told me about riding the trains, about how to get aboard and avoid the railroad dicks, how to check the marker on the side to see which state it was going to. Well, all I knew was that it was going North, a long way from out of Alabama, and in fact it landed me up in California.

  ‘Since then I’ve been generally speaking on the move. I do jobs here and there. Picked cucumbers and oranges in California, worked in the shipyards at San Pedro until they started laying off, washed cars and things in Berkeley. As a matter of fact I flew up to Seattle, and I flew from Denver here to Chicago - a few women helped out on this. But on average I ride the trains.

  ‘You get to know the score. I always carry bread and a plastic jug of water, and a blanket because you can get aboard in ninety degrees and during the night go over the hump into mountain zero, and brown paper to pack my shoes. In winter you get a bucket half filled with sand and some kerosene oil and you can have some heat in the boxcar.

  ‘I carry a knife, an open knife, too. It’s important on those trains to travel with a buddy, not alone, because you can get killed by some of those guys. On a slow-travelling train at night if I’ve been alone I’ve kicked a guy off who was trying to jump on. But you daren’t close the door behind you. No, you have to spike that door open. If it slides shut it may be ten days before they open it in the yards, and you can be dead.

  ‘It’s nice down in the jungles where the hobos camp near the freight yards; it’s like one big happy family. Five or six guys go out different ways and put all they bring back into the pot. You eat, and you smoke, and you drink, and you talk: real companionable.

  ‘I’d rather be in the jungle than these missions. They’re nerve-racking. Monotonous. You hear the same old stuff every day. Blackmail. It really bores me.

  ‘I don’t head nowhere in particular. I just decide to get off a train at a stop to see what’s doing in that town. You just bum along. I go down to the vegetable market - always something to pick up. And often other guys who’ve got a stake will help you. If I’m really busted and there’s no work I stop someone in the street and tell him. They can always tell if you’re telling the truth. When I feel a place getting under my skin I know it’s time to be moving on.

  ‘I don’t see this ending. It’s habit-forming. It’s like trying to give up smoking. It takes a lot of will power to stop moving. But I’m thinking seriously of going back to Birmingham. A Negro really can live better there now than up here in the North. You can walk down the street like a man. Chicago’s the most prejudiced city I’ve known. It destroys your willpower and self-confidence.

  ‘I’ve started drinking since I’ve been here. Most days I raise enough to buy a bottle of whisky or wine, and I take it into the park… You happen to have fifty cents ?’

  *

  In The Road Jack London, the first American writer of stature to write about hobo life from the inside, describes how he was first drawn into it. His words have ever since skirled like the pied piper’s whistle to thousands of American boys.

  It was in the 1890s that he became h
ooked: ‘On the sandbar above the railroad bridge we fell in with a bunch of boys likewise in swimming. They talked differently from the fellows I had been used to herding with. It was a new vernacular. They were the road kids, and with every word they uttered the lure of The Road laid hold of me more imperiously.

  ‘ “When I was down in Alabam,” one kid would begin; or, another, “Coming up in the C & A from KC”; whereat, a third kid, “On the C & A there ain’t no steps to the ‘blinds.’” And I would lie silently in the sand and listen.

  ‘ “It was at a little town in Ohio on the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern,” a kid would start; and another, “Ever ride the Cannonboll on the Wabash?” and yet another, “Nope, but I’ve been on the White Mail out of Chicago.” “Talk about railroadin’

  - wait till you hit the Pennsylvania, four tracks, no water tanks, take water on the fly, that’s goin’ some.”

  ‘A new world was calling to me in every word that was spoken - a world of rods and gunnels, blind baggages and “side-door Pullmans”, “bulls” and “shacks”, “floppin’s” and “chewin’s”, “pinches” and “get-aways”, “strong arms” and “bindle-stiffs”. “punks” and “profesh”.

  ‘And it all spelled Adventure. Very well; I would tackle this new world … I was first a road-kid and then a profesh … the profesh are the aristocracy of The Road. They are the lords and masters, the aggressive men, the primordial noblemen, the blond-beasts so beloved of Nietzsche.’

  Later in ‘What Life Means To Me’ in The Comrade, a Socialist Party publication, in 1905, London stresses the hardship and horror of tramp life: ‘A became a tramp, begging my way from door to door, wandering over the United States and sweating bloody sweats in slums and prisons … I was down in the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery about which it is neither nice nor proper to speak. I was in the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool, the shambles, and charnel-house of our civilization. This is the part of the edifice of society that society chooses to ignore.’