Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

  ‘The tramp is not often interested in small town or country associations, because they generally tend to terminate seriously and he does not want to be taken seriously. The tramp is not a marrying man, though he does enter into transient free unions with women when the occasion offers.

  ‘A certain class of detached men makes a practice of getting into the good graces of some prostitute for the winter. The panderer is not a characteristic tramp type, but certain homeless men are not averse to becoming pimps for a season …

  ‘Most hoboes and tramps because of drink, unpresentable appearance, or unattractive personality, do not succeed in establishing permanent, or even quasi-permanent, relationships with women. For them the only accessible women are prostitutes and the prostitutes who solicit the patronage of the homeless man are usually forlorn and bedraggled creatures.’

  These live adjacent to the main stem, a poxy lot. Most committed hobos have been venereally diseased from time to time. One Twenties check by the Chicago Health Department calculated that one-third of the homeless men in the city were constantly spreading infection.

  Obviously when heterosexual outlet is available, most hobos, however ambidextrously adjustable, will take it. The show girls who sing and dance in the cheap burlesque theatres on South State and West Madison Streets in Chicago have always been famously ready to help a returned lumberjack or harvest hand burn through a fat bill roll.

  The bump-and-grind round-the-clock theatres, the blue-ish cinemas and the strip tease slot-machine arcades which cluster round any American city skid row or rail junction would not be in business if girls did not interest the hobo. Nor would the cat wagon - the horse-drawn and later motorized vehicle containing a procurer and two or three whores (or a dingfob, a blow-up life-size rubber woman, Japanese-made, an emergency substitute if the real flesh and blood failed to come through) which for a century has traditionally followed the travelling wheat harvester through the Middle West corn belt - have become such an established and prosperous enterprise.

  But not amazingly in an existence which is womanless apart from the fleeting scuffle in a brothel, and with long monastic periods in forest bunk houses and construction camps, homosexuality has always been popular.

  Dean Stiff makes partial admission of this but chiefly to make light of it. ‘It is so generally assumed to be true among hoboes,’ he says, ‘that whenever a man travels around with a lad he is apt to be labeled a jocker or a wolf … It has become so that it is very difficult for a good hobo to enjoy the services of an apprentice. It may be that he has the boy along only to wash his clothes or bum his lumps. It is hard for people with morbid minds to understand this. In some states they will even arrest a hobo merely for traveling with a lad. Such diseased minds have the Christian law-makers and man-catchers!’

  The fact remains that the man-catchers never neared in numbers and skill the boy-catchers among the hobos. Anderson’s opinion is that a boy ‘does not need to remain long in hobo society to learn of homosexual practices. The average boy on the road is invariably approached by men who get into his good graces. Some “homos” claim that every boy is a potential homosexual.’

  But he does not agree that the relationship often amounts to ‘a sort of slavery’ in the sense that a boy is often held in bondage and compelled to steal and join in sex. ‘This condition may exist in isolated instances but is not general,’ he says. ‘It is even suggested by some authorities that there exists some sort of organization among tramps through which boys have been “caught” and kept in servitude.’ He thinks this has never been the case for ‘perverted sex practices are frowned upon by the tramps themselves’.

  Yet he admits that ‘court records show that not infrequently boys are held in rooms, or taken to lonely buildings or out on the lake front, or in parks … If there is a slavery in these latter cases it is slavery to their passions, or to a state of mind growing out of their habits and their isolation.

  ‘The duration of an intimacy of this kind in the city is seldom more than a few days. On the road however the “partnership” may last for weeks. Whereas out of town the pair can travel as companions aiding each other, in the city they can get along better alone.

  ‘Tramp perverts argue that homosexual intercourse is “clean” and that homosexuals are less liable to become infected with venereal disease … It is also urged by perverts that in the homosexual relation there is the absence of the eternal complications in which one becomes involved with women. They want to avoid intimacies that complicate the free life to which they are by temperament and habit committed.’

  And he summarizes: ‘In his sex life, as in his whole existence, the homeless man moves in a vicious circle. Industrially inadequate, his migratory habits render him the more economically inefficient. A social outcast, he still wants the companionship which his mode of life denies him. Debarred from family life, he hungers for intimate associations and affection. The women that he knows, with few exceptions, are repulsive to him. Attractive women live in social worlds infinitely remote from his. With him the fundamental wishes of the person for response and status have been denied expression.’

  From sociological reports and the hints of vague sinful dangers in the soft-cover hobo publications, the almost standardized homosexuality of a large group of industrial labourers has reached the larger public in a curiously ambiguous form. The misty, imperfectly understood relationship as transmuted and transmitted by The Kid is interestingly present in the case of Britt, Iowa.

  In 1899 two Britt businessmen, Thomas A. Way and T. A. Potter, read of the third annual convention of the Tourists’ Union No. 63 held in Illinois, at which the newly elected President and Vice-President were Onion Cotton and Grand Head Pipe Charles F. Noe.

  In the developing rootin’-tootin’ spirit of middle-town America (later to be made definitive by Sinclair Lewis in George Babbitt and Zenith, with its Rotary Club puffers and stunted skyscrapers), Messrs Way and Potter espied a novel - cute, they probably chortled - way of putting Britt on the convention and vacation map. They wrote to Noe, offering hospitality and 22 August 1900, was set for the first Britt Hobo Convention.

  Britt’s action reflects again the dualism in the American view of the tramp - now as a joke oddity, a kind of national clown to be exploited. Feature-writers and wire service reporters were pulled in from as far afield as Chicago, Minneapolis, St Louis, Des Moines, St Paul and Philadelphia. A delegation from Chicago and ‘men of dignity and influence’ from many other cities were taken on a horse-and-carriage tour of ‘the round elevator at the Missouri and St Louis, the arch over the cemetery gate, the town pump, the race track, the Salvation Army barracks, and Ed Bailey’s spittoons’.

  Britt had even greater riches to unveil. Main Street had been arrayed with banners. The Way-Healey building was placarded HOBO HEADQUARTERS; The News-Tribune decorated its office opposite HOBO HINDQUARTERS. A fife and drum corps ‘all dolled up like hoboes and playing the latest rag time tunes’ preceded the speech making, after which there was a barbecued ox feast and sports. Fred Corey, of Algona, rode a horse in a five-mile race with two hobos on a tandem: the horse won. That evening at the hobo camp fire assembly ‘Admiral’ Dewey was elected the new president and ‘Philippine Red’ vice-president. After the ‘slumgullion’ supper, the King was crowned - and provided with a local young man for his queen.

  In later years there were some genuinely female queens such as Polly Ellen Pep, Boxcar Myrtle French, Hitch-Hiker Sylvia Davis and Boxcar Betty Link; but the King’s partner was usually ‘a local lad, chosen for his youthful beauty to wear the queenly garments’. So Britt and its Rotarians and Kiwanis and summer visitors innocently supplied the facilities for a drag ball and a queasy charade of jungle homosexuality.

  Naturally the press milked it. It was a Beggar’s Opera, a circus of grotesques and buffoons, good for a giggle, and the tone of those contemporary reports was a there-you-are, see what hedonistic ragamuffins the unemployed are.

  The type of ho
bo prepared to hire himself out for an advertising gag in return for free beer and stew can never have been markedly representative of the body of men riding the trains around the wilder states, assuredly not of the bindle stiffs and the Wobblies, engrossed in guerrilla warfare with capitalism and who would rather have had their fingernails pulled out with pincers than be found putting on a fund-raising cabaret turn for the system.

  But there were not a few who found hamming up themselves as vagabond ‘cards’ an agreeable and even a moderately paying proposition.

  19 Hobo-trekkers that forever search

  A tightening net

  traps all creatures

  even the wildest

  Too late

  the young cry out,

  and the innocent

  who were not wild enough.

  Peter Levi: The Gravel Ponds

  The virtuoso booster hobo was perhaps Ben Benson, ‘Official King of the Hoboes’ (twice elected at the Britt ceremony) and President of the Hobo Fellowship Union of America. A printer by trade, he travelled with squares of cardboard in his knapsack, poised to dash off a portrait or a cartoon for a dime; he was also ‘road editor’ for the Hobo News and he described himself without visible justification as a poet. Benson is revealed in the few extant photographs as a tiny goblin with white curly locks and a doorknocker face. There seems no reason to doubt that he had hoboed hard.

  He jumped his first freight when he ran away from home in New York City at fifteen in 1898, and remained in perpetual motion for the next forty-five years around the rail merry-go-round of the Union. He wore this experience like a heraldic coat-of-arms: encased by tattoo needle on his left forearm was a map of the United States, COAST KID underneath, and the initials SP, standing for Southern Pacific, a railroad which enjoyed his especial affection and, presumably, patronage.

  A lifetime of riding the trains, either just above or in between the wheels, had by his sixties virtually destroyed his hearing, but his volubility remained unblunted and was oftener than not directed against other hobo lions whom he regarded as unentitled to attention from public and press. During his career on the road Benson had good coverage - that is, a prolific one, for he obviously always had a keen instinct for selling himself as ‘entertaining’ copy and listed ‘a few who have reported me favourably,’ Time Magazine, the Columbia Broadcasting System and the Los Angeles Times being mentioned together with fifteen other newspapers and radio stations.

  His zeal for self-projection did not temper an incandescent contempt for others with a similar aim. ‘Fakirs [sic] of all kinds besiege Newspaper Offices and Magazine Editors,’ he writes in the preface to one of his autobiographical miscellanies, ‘claiming to be an authority on Hoboes and the road … cushion armchair and thumb-lifting would-be hoboes … hobo exploiters, cheap publicity hounds and conventional home-guards or town bums … Hoboing, like every other profession requires experience, and a “correspondence course” of a few months or a year or even years does not entitle one to a diploma, or right to be called King of the Hoboes.’

  This particular booklet carries a full-page photograph of him in baggy white pants (there is another of him, regal in cardboard crown) with the announcement: ‘Hobo Benson is at liberty for talks, radio and movies.’ He also addressed this Open Letter to the public: ‘A few hoboes and would-be-hoboes are roaming the country posing as duly elected King of the Hoboes. Press, radio and the public are warned against the imposters, Hoboically yours, Ben (Hobo) Benson.’

  When I first got my hands on some of this tramp broadsheet literature I could not at first nail down the recollection it stirred. Its determined cockiness overlaying a forlorn sadness has of course a lot in common with pavement poetry and street ballads of England’s early urban proletariat, strong liquor brewed from violent misfortune, but also saucy with a battered vigour and gift for survival. ‘The brains trusts have discovered how to solve the unemployment problem,’ wrote a correspondent in a 1922 issue of Hobo News with sarcasm typical of the genre. ‘The best thing to keep the unemployed busy is to have the cops chase them around the block. They are experimenting already.’ Alexander E. Freeman, the white-bearded author of a 1945 booklet, Hobo Jungle Talk, draws a bitter little scene. The Hobo, hitting his last door - described as the Gate to the HEAVENLY PARADISE - is asked by St Peter how much money he’s got. None ? Okay, says St Peter, and kicks him swiftly down to Hell, leaping with flames and demons.

  Then I remembered. Hobo literature has exactly the general complexion of pre-war schoolboy comics, with their galumphing jokes, secret society clubs, advertisements for recondite badges and stink bombs, and gory gothic adventures of penny-dreadful immortals.

  Benson’s odds-and-bobs autobiography for instance offers a Membership Card with this oath: ‘I solemnly swear never to be unjust to “others” or take advantage of my fellowmen, and to do all in my power for the betterment of myself, my organization and America. So help me God.’

  Throughout there are cartoons involving the knockabout hobo Tired Tim cipher, forever facing hatchet-faced housewives and brutal judges with indestructible, sly, squiffy amiability. There are instructive sections on ‘What is a Hobo?’ and ‘How Hoboes Travel’, and glossaries of Hobo Terms and Hobo Monikers. There are ‘True Stories’ and a list of ‘Railroads I Have Rode’, and a chapter headed ‘Hobo Adventures and Thrills’, which goes from Thrill Number One to Thrill Number Five. There are little items entitled Important Things to Know When On The Road (‘Be c reful whom you mix with on trains or in jungles’) and numerous poems and mottoes.

  Benson staunchly wags the hobo flag. He perceives at the time he was recording the lore, in the 1940s, that ‘after years of persistent propaganda, through the efforts of myself and others, the word “Hobo” is becoming to be rather respected throughout the country. Especially is this true in Press reports, in spite of a few Reporters who still regard the Hobo as a tramp, bum, or parasite.’

  He puts forward the homo bonus theory of the origin of the word and adds: ‘A real hobo is a migratory worker - most of the Pioneers in the country were hoboes. Many leaders in all the professions and crafts, and in commercial activities, were men who left their homes, when young, years ago. They “hoboed” to some part of the country they liked. Opportunities, twenty, thirty and forty years ago, were more plentiful than they are today.

  ‘Many of these pioneering hoboes made good. Many of them are not ashamed of their hobo days … hoboes - being single men -are the REAL backbone of the Nation: the first to be called upon in time of war - and the last to be helped, as they should be, in times of depression! … The hoboes ARE a respectable and necessary part of our population. THEY helped to MAKE this country I They helped to make it GREAT !’

  The tramp had the occasional outside philanthropic sympathizer, perhaps the most consistent and the most generous having been James Eads How, known as the millionaire hobo. For many years - very actively from the early 1900s up through the Twenties - How used his family fortune, derived from a St Louis railroad company, to shore up the ‘hobo colleges’ of Chicago and other cities, to organize hobo conventions and to sponsor his own lecture tours on economic theories, based (declared The Bugle during How’s Oklahoma City teach-in in 1923) on the proposition that ‘life is a flower of which love is the honey’.

  How’s International Brotherhood Welfare Association was but one of many bodies which sought to band together the unemployed and the migrant for both political and educational purposes. The IBWA had as a later offshoot the Migratory Workers’ Union, in serious competition with the IWW. But most of the hobo fraternities - like Michael Walsh’s Society of Vagabonds and John X. Kelly’s Benevolent and Protective Order of Ramblers, with its anthem ‘Hail! Hail! You Ought To Be A Rambler’ -have the strong redolence of those schoolboy secret societies, and were the inventions of individuals with a weakness for self-invested grand titles and emperor’s robes. The difficulty all, businesslike and nonsensical, faced was an unreliable and non-residential membersh
ip. Even the successful Hobo College of Chicago, open to all ‘migrant and casual workers’ on South Green Street, could operate only in winter when the hobos were back from their summer trips; and the iww, whose membership reached impressive heights, had a high lapse rate and turnover.

  Benson’s patchy and none too logical memoirs are of interest because they span roughly the trajectory of the hobo’s development from vermin through his high romance period to his present-day oblivion except as minor folk hero. Benson’s primitive publicity sense gave him a megaphone mouth but he was definitely not peculiar or even rare in his narcissistic view of what a hobo was or should be.

  There are difficulties here of distinguishing the image from the search, in the sense that recognition of an entity or meaning is often retrospective. Dorothy Parker observed upon reading the tag the Lost Generation applied to her circle of the Twenties: ‘Whew, we’re lost!’ Tom Wolfe has pointed out to me that whereas motor cycle gangs already existed in California it wasn’t until Marlon Brando appeared in The Wild One as the leather-swashed, neo-Nazi road-rider on a plura-headlight phosphorescent two-wheel juggernaut, that the teenage tearaways on whom the picture was based identified themselves and crystallized into the Hell’s Angels cult.

  Similarly it is now impossible to reconstruct how much of the hobo was self-made and how much was absorbed from popularized and mythological versions of him. There are, however, certain guides.

  Unquestionably Charles Chaplin importantly furthered the process already in action of de-fusing the tramp as an explosively dangerous element by either scorning or sentimentalizing him.

  Enrolled in 1914 by Keystone Studio, Chaplin wandered around the sets where three companies were at work on the unscripted comedies (perhaps the first real ‘happenings’). Mack Sennett, chewing a cigar, said: ‘We need some gags here. Put on a comedy make-up. Anything will do.’

  Chaplin continues: ‘I had no idea what make-up to put on… However, on the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat… I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was.’