The brothers have barely reached California when Tex, a grizzled hobo, exhorts them to turn back. Tears streaking his cheeks, he tells them that six months after he likewise had hightailed from home he had returned but ‘my mother wasn’t there to greet me. She had died several months before. Don’t ever ride a train again. Go home and stay there. When the old fever grips ya, fight and just remember what happened to me.’
Clarence and Carl look at each other: they board an East-bound train. Carl concludes: ‘At twelve-thirty on December 20, 1931 we entered the portals of our “Home, Sweet Home”… I’ll never, never ride another freight. I still shudder to think of what might have happened to us, and I sincerely believe there was Someone above who protected us… Thus I’ll end my story my saying simply: “Home, Sweet Home, Be it Ever so Humble, There’s No Place Like Home.”’
Then in 1941 Minehan produced a book for children, Lonesome Road. Its hero is Joe, a fifteen-year-old orphan living with an aunt in Tulsa. In the traditional form Joe encounters a fully-fledged road kid of eighteen, named Bill Greene, who spins the travel dream stuff, and says: ‘Shucks, there ain’t nothing to it. All you need is a tongue and a thumb.’
Joe and Bill sleep rough in jungles and equally rough in jail, but they get to California and gradually push North. Bindle on shoulder, they drift onward to the apple farms of Washington, and then East to Colorado where they pack peaches one summer and herd sheep during the winter. They arrive in Seattle where they try to ship out to the salmon canneries of Alaska, but find that they are but two among hundreds trying without a hope to get beyond the lash of the depression.
There is a muzzy socialistic flavour to Lonesome Road. Joe learns a poem which goes:
The bum on the rods is a social flea, who gets an occasional bite
The bum on the plush is a social leech, bloodsucking day and night
The bum on the rods is a load so light
That his weight we scarcely feel
But it takes the labor of a dozen men
To furnish the other a meal.
As long as you sanction the bum on the plush the other will always be there
But rid yourself of the bum on the plush and the other will disappear Then make an intelligent organized kick, get rid of the weights that crush
Don’t worry about the bum on the rods - get rid of the bum on the plush.
After strongly underscoring the attractions of being free agent in the United States, Minehan at the end corrects these blandishments with a swift change of tack, for eventually Joe and Bill weary of the Salvation Army homes and government Transients’ Camps - ‘living on Sally and Sam’.
They meet an old whiskery bum who says: ‘I’ve ruined my stomach with poor food and worse whisky. I’ve ruined my body with neglect and abuse. It’s hard for me to feel at home any place except in a boxcar. It’s hard for me to look people in the face because I’m always expecting a kick… Get off the road while the getting’s good.’
After the traditional opening of the hobo morality play, the traditional close with the warning of the ancient mariner. And indeed Joe and Bill decide to quit the road.
Joe returns from the wide, wandering way to the straight and narrow, and gets a job as a truck driver, and ‘never again did he tramp the country … for he knew that nobody could remain on the road too long without becoming a bum, and Joe had seen too many bums to want to be one himself.
For all that the poignant tug is there on the last page: ‘At night he sometimes awoke to imagine the bed under him was a swaying boxcar, or the rumble of a distant bus the sound of a freight engine pulling a load uphill.’
Almost always when the repentance has been formally supplicated the syrup seeps through again. There is a splendid purple heroic passage in Ashleigh’s autobiographical novel where Joe Crane, his Wobbly hero is once more on the road.
‘Thunder, thunder on smoothly, you long sinuous steel thing of speed,’ Joe exulted, standing in the blind baggage on the last lap of the ride. He had caught the Shasta Limited, the fast devil from Portland… ‘Shriek, you devil,’ thought Joe, clinging with gloved hand to the steel hand-grip. The train swayed and heaved, sensitive, swift and beautiful, merciless.
‘The wind roared past him. He loved the train as a horseman loves his horse… This was one of the things that kept men hobos for life: the ecstasy of the end of the journey. Meeting the others, and boasting; the relaxation of nerves which one never realized were so tensed.’
Rambling Kid, culminating, as did many up-lift Marxist novels of its time, on rapturous wing to the new socialist heaven of Comrade Lenin, is yet one of the more valuable sources of information about the amorphous American proletariat of the First World War. The romantic pang is strong throughout. ‘Die Sache der Arme, In Gottes und Teufels Name’ (‘The cause of the poor, in spite of God and the Devil!’), murmurs an intellectual jungle stiff. Joe, still in his teens, forks off to the city, and to the slave market section of saloons and employment agents. There was an atmosphere of recklessness and daring about these fellows who strolled along the streets in their blue overalls, or khaki trousers, with grey or blue shirts, open at the throat, and their black slouch hats. They knew the Western states from British Columbia to the Mexican border, from Chicago to Portland, Oregon.
‘In all the vast territory where great railroads are still being built, or giant reservoirs; where wheat and other harvests are gathered where forests are felled, they roamed from job to job…’
In a saloon called Black Davis’s, where Joe is temporarily helping at the lunch counter, ‘by evening the air would be thick with tobacco, the odors of drink and the exudations of human bodies. They stood at the long bar thickly clustered - for men were pouring into Minneapolis to ship out to the harvests which were just commencing. Here was a bunch of “gandy-dancers”. With fingers dipped in beer they traced upon the bar the diagrams of new railway branches …
‘Near them were other men from construction camps … a superior breed which looked contemptuously upon those who sweated with pick and shovel. They were “teamios”, these reckless rascals, with their great broad-brimmed black hats - the men who drove the mule carts which carried the dirt away from the excavation to the dump.
‘And even among the teamsters, or “skinners” as they were called, there was an aristocracy consisting of the men who drove the carts which were drawn by six to a dozen mules - these were the kings of the craft, the “long-line skinners”. Nobody bothered the “teamios” much, for these men were feared. They carried razors with them, and would use them as weapons, if necessary. They were great fighters, and an insult to one of them would be the signal for a gang attack, such was their clannish-ness.
‘Near them would be perhaps a group of lumberjacks, men from the forests of spruce and pine along the Puget Sound, or from Eastern Washington, Montana or Michigan. These were usually big fellows with many Scandinavians and Finns among them, as well as old Saxon-American stock. Joe could pick them out by their heavy, knee-high boots about which hung their overall trousers, raggedly cut short. They wore heavy flannel shirts or blouses which hung outside their belts; and some wore the short Mackinaw coat of brightly-patterned blanket material.’
The evening streets are thronged. ‘Rough greetings were shouted as wanderers met whose paths had not crossed for a year or more. Genial groups poured out of saloons to enter other ones. On the corner the portable rostrum of the Industrial Workers of the World was being set up, and in a moment the voice of the “Wobblies”, singing their revolutionary songs, added yet another note to the strong symphony of the Slave Market.’
Joe falls in with a particular group of Wobs, Gold-Tooth Carey, a teamster, The Terrible Swede, Boston White and Cincinnati Red, and he is permitted to join their drinking party. They begin singing Wobbly songs. The Terrible Swede ‘led them in a melancholy chant: “Oh, where is my wandering boy tonight?” The lumberjack looked at them with a tender wistfulness while he sang, droning the notes with drawn-out path
os. The tears came to their eyes as they considered the sorrows of a hobo’s life. And as they joined in the chorus, they looked gratefully at the red-hot stove, thinking of the bitter night-rides when the poor hobo, frozen and cramped, must cling to the unfriendly metal of the engine-tender or car.’
Next day Joe buys overalls and a pair of working gauntlets and then takes out a Red Card.
‘Joe began to feel that here was a new baptism. Last night he had been received into the wide fraternity of the floaters, the migratory workers. And now he was initiated into the interior fellowship of the rebels… Joe walked down the street, a slight swagger in his gait. His hat was cocked to one side of his head. His hands were deep in the pockets of his new overalls. He eyed impudently the respectable citizens passing by.
‘He was a hobo and a Wobbly, one of the reckless rambling boys who despised the soft security and comfort of a dull-spaced city existence.’
One hears the same garish pride, and contempt for the home-guard and spittoon philosophers, coming from the loud mouth of Spud Murphy, an IWW migrant described by Chaplin. At a meeting addressed by a University of Chicago economics professor, Murphy tells the gathering: ‘No kiddin’, I pity you poor scissorbill kids sittin’ down there with your little pencils and notebooks. No wonder you never know nuthin’ when you go out into the big world… I’ll tell ya, why don’t you go out and grab a rattler and find out things for yourself… Three months in the harvest fields anfl a thirty-day stretch in the hoosegow -that’s the way to get smarted up.’
Braggart cock-sureness, wistful hedonism, secret misery and the canonization of the outcast bravo - all these sound a constant theme through the underclass literature of this period. Among the bleakest pictures of a hobo’s trials is Dahlberg’s Bottom Dogs, a gloomy piece of Thirties proletarian naturalism. Young Lorry’s story is unremittingly dejected. He hauls himself into a boxcar: ‘He huddled up in a corner. There was no straw around, and the bottom boards were splintered, with a stiff, desolate-feeling air coming up through the cracks. He kept fidgeting about, not seeming able to get fitted in right against some corner; there was a smell of human excreta coming from somewhere. He went off for an hour or so, and jarred up by some bump or other, it was hard to doze off again. The cold kept getting into him, tightening up his joints. Some time early in the morning he stood up, stiff as a nail, kicking one foot out after the other to get the ache out of his knees, which felt as hollow to him as a bone chewed raw by an alley dog.’
And yet when some other hobos are planning to get themselves pinched near Ogden, Utah, to feed up in prison Lorry rejects the idea. ‘He didn’t care if he never saw any grub, he wanted his freedom, he wanted to knock about, hit the road whenever he felt like it, bum around the country. He would get through somehow.’
Later he has a moment when he almost longs to be ‘domesticated, cooped up in straw like poultry for the winter’, for being on the bum ‘did appear to be a purple-fingered, desolate affair, leaving one out in the cold’, but when he sees another locomotive, ‘its headlights drawn out like batwings’ as it looms nearer, ‘he became all nerves and couldn’t wait to hop her; he was going on, beatin’ the bulls…’
At length: ‘Perhaps he would go east, get out of it all, he could run away; but he couldn’t go side-door Pullman again, that was finished. Boing, sleeping in coal cars, riding those railroad broncos, going to strange hotel rooms, the ghastly plaster inside those empty clothes closets, walking the streets - all that was done, but then, how did he know?’
A social-realism novel which preceded both Bottom Dogs and Rambling Kid was Edge’s The Main Stem published in 1927 whose hero Blondey, is found in 1918 working in a Cleveland stove factory with a labour force of first generation Pollacks.
In the boarding house he meets Slim whom he immediately perceives to be different: ‘There was something big and fresh about him … he always brought in with him a little of the clean outdoors.’
This ‘novel’ is a college boy’s dalliance with Marxist ideas, with a pre-Orwellian desire to sink into the warmth of an imagined proletariat, and Slim is the introducer - but vaporously inept, it turns out, for all his smiling, tanned sophistication.
He takes Blondey hoboing and initiates him into the craft, as they board a freight, in this language: ‘We are now on a gondola. This is an open car, and, when empty, can comfortably accommodate ever so many bums, provided the shacks are friendly, and the yard dicks not too hostile. Nailing a rattler, where you choose a gondola or the side-door Pullman, calls for a concatenation of skills not acquired in a day,’ and so, relentlessly, on.
Slim in fact is slumming. He is actually educated and played full back ‘for one of the greatest Pacific coast teams three years ago’. Rather feebly the first ride they take together is ‘on the cushions’: they pay for their tickets to Pittsburg. There Slim explains as is his pedagogic wont: ‘We are now on the “stem” or “main stem” or “main drag”, as you have just heard that worthy say.’
On a building project Blondey begins to get the measure of the labourer’s life in America. ‘The personnel of our gang changed daily… Few men lasted on one job longer than three weeks. Intermittent employment breeds the habit of wandering around for other jobs… Also workers left because poor food or lousy beds drove them away. Employers refused to improve living conditions, because, after all the men were restless, footloose, floaters. And so it went; and nothing was done about it; and it took perhaps twenty men to fill one job annually.’
Journeying on, Slim reads to him from Ghosts and A Doll’s House, and after a night in a field rouses Blondey thus: ‘Wake up, my dusky beauty, for jocund morn stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops, and your face is as black as a shine’s.’ While not displaying much inclination to turn words into acts Slim characteristically declaims: ‘Migratoriness is, perhaps, satisfactory to cnly a few temperaments. Some people love the formalities and insincerity of bourgeois life; others tolerate it. I don’t. I have on important occasions made my escape from the hollowness and chicaneries of bourgeois environment. I doubt that I shall ever return to it.’ Blondey, like a girl hovering agonizedly on the brink of surrendering her virginity, fluctuates between the attraction and the dangers of the travelling adventure. On their way into Chicago they pass through sidings of cars studded with the names which he had ‘come to associate with romance… “The Pennsy”, “The Big Four”, “The B & O”, “The Santey Fay”, one hears these names over and over again in doss-houses, at meals, just as one hears the words Chevrolet, Buick, Studebaker at dinner receptions and the theatre… I was a little afraid, too, of those words. On these trains with epic names, I was to plunge into lands unknown to me.’
Also in Chicago he detects a difference in the men. In the Eastern cities the hobo had been ‘an adventitious migratory. He went dumbly from job to job, impelled by the relentless forces of modern capitalism. He was simply a man beaten by the economic system’. But here in Chicago ‘the hobo seemed to be a hobo by choice’.
‘The men were large, strong, conscious of their disinheritance. They seemed not to be the victims of circumstances; they had definite standards. They did not allow themselves to be kicked about from job to job.’
He looks at this different breed of American and is frightened for so far he had been ‘only flirting with the forces that drag men down for good. But this was in earnest…’
It was a serious matter, this hobo business. Elsewhere he ponders anxiously: ‘Will I ever again be able to take my place as a citizen in the world of the middle class? Will I be a lawyer, or doctor, or a teacher, or a realtor, or a mortician? … Where am I going? Will I always be a stiff?’
The answer was No. Because after less than a year of labouring and a little zig-zagging around the author caught ’flu, was admitted into hospital, and then shipped home, and presumably was severed from that nympholepsy which might have prevented him from becoming a realtor or mortician. Slim, one takes it, continued his pantomime of rogue intellectual and m
ocker of the middle classes, dazzling apprentices with Ibsen, the scourge of the passenger coach bourgeoisie.
Similarly Glen H. Mullin, whose Adventures of a Scholar Tramp appeared in 1925, was a middle-class amateur - a university graduate who hit the road for a few months with a golden-hearted ragamuffin (‘Wherever you are, old-timer, I salute you - hobo rex, tramp royal!’) and who got the infection: ‘To the genuine hobo a train is a thing compounded of magic and beauty, just as a bravely trimmed vessel is to the mariner. It arouses within him a latent mysticism. The rattle and swank of a long freight pulling out of the yards, the locomotive black and eager, shoving hard a snorting muzzle along the rails … an enchanted caravan moving into the mysterious beyond, hailing with poems and song blue distance … As the hobo sits on a tie-pile, perhaps, and watches her go by, there is a lure in the cars themselves individually. He moves his lips unconsciously repeating the sonorous names that lilt past’
But at the end of his truncated ‘smoky trail’ Mullin states candidly: ‘In truth I was sick of the Road, and ready to admit it. The freedom of the Road is certainly specious: it is too uncomfortable, compromised everywhere by laws … One wearies after a while of the sordid outlawry of the Road.’
At least Edge and Mullin tried it, or dipped their toes in. But there was another category of hobo literature emerging which, in the period when the refugee with family became more typical than the individual rambler, sought to glamourize what was then believed to be a dying if not already extinct species.
Anderson deserted his earlier objective sociological work on the homeless to produce in 1931, under the assumed personality of ‘Dean Stiff’, The Milk and Honey Route: A Handbook for Hoboes. The paradigm Dean Stiff is met in a municipal lodging house queue in Chicago and he addresses Anderson: There’s too much hocum on the hobo subject. What with professors like you doing researches and the novelists wih their human interest stuff, the rest of the world is getting to think of the hobo game as a lot of cheap comedy. I say it’s a grand art and it’s about time somebody stepped in and saved it from the hitch-hiker,’ whereupon he, the onlie begetter, hands over the manuscript of the text which follows.
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