Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

  Toward the players in the Homeric ring - indeed men driven before the winds of Aeolus - there had developed the mixture of fear and envy, distrust and admiration which marks off America’s necessary outcast.

  Garland remembers the men who came to his father’s Iowa harvests in the mid-Seventies, ex-soldiers and city bums from St Louis and Chicago, ‘the errant sons of poor farmers and rough mechanics of the older States, migrating for the adventure of it’. He saw them as ‘rough, hardy wanderers from the South, nomads who had followed the line of ripening wheat from Missouri northward … They reached our neighbourhood in July, arriving like a flight of alien unclean birds, and vanished into the North in September as mysteriously as they had appeared.’

  Unclean they inevitably were. One of the few migrants who put his case into public print wrote an article for The Country Gentleman in 1900: ‘In the West no washing is done for farm help as a rule, and in Dakota, at least, the transient “hobo”, who is depended on for the harvest and the threshing rush, is not provided with a bed, but catches a lousy blanket and a straw-stack or a granary, and does not see a laundry or a bath during a whole season’s campaign. He pays for his meals on rainy days and between jobs, and is looked upon and treated as a necessary evil.’

  Twenty-one years earlier King had described, with an amused raised eyebrow, the migrants’ accommodation: ‘Those singular huts made of rough pine boards, with canvas awnings, which you notice now and then, were set up yesterday, perhaps, and will be taken down tomorrow. They are the quarters of the men engaged in the harvesting and very odd places they are, with their rude beds of straw, their long, narrow dining-tables, their clatter of dishes, their ludicrous mimicry of towels, combs and looking-glasses.’

  Perhaps the economic percentage in the new labour system was totted up most baldly and honestly by an agricultural specialist from Scotland who noted in the 1870s that most of the harvest help was recruited from the Minnesota lumber regions.

  ‘There is no difficulty in obtaining extra hands, amongst whom are many Norwegians, Scandinavians and Germans,’ he wrote. ‘During harvest and threshing, which is done in the field, as many as five hundred men are frequently employed.’ He commented on the mass dismissal as the harvest finished: ‘Hard as such wholesale dismissal would be in Great Britain, it is no hardship here, for these men readily find lumberwork in the forests. It is obviously an enormous boon thus to get rid of men whom the farmer cannot profitably employ during the five winter months. Many an English wheat grower would gladly practise this retrenchment and send off most of his staff to other vocations during the short days and bad weather of midwinter.’

  ‘Wheat farms and hoboes go together’ became a byword. But the evolving system did not go altogether uncriticized. A professor at the North Dakota State Experiment Station attacked wheat specialization, arguing for a return to diversification which ‘distributes the farm work throughout the year more uniformly … Any plan which will dispense with careless “hobo” labour upon the farms of this state and substitute competent, thinking men instead, will do much to advance farming interests.’

  Before that, Stephen Powers in his 1872 Afoot and Alone had deplored the upsurge of the same heartless and rootless system in the far West. In California he saw that if wheat was there also to be grown exclusively ‘then these immense ranches and the consequent hireling system, so baleful to California hitherto will be perpetuated’.

  His inventory of harvest hands was: ‘Runaway sailors; reformed street thieves; bankrupt German scene-painters, who carry sixty pounds of blankets; old soldiers, who drink their employer’s whisky in his absence, and then fall into the ditch which they dug for a fence-row; all looking for “jobs”, or “little jobs”, but never steady work’ but he attached the fundamental blame not to the men but to the monster wheat culture. ‘If the land remains in vast ranches these men will always continue hirelings and tramps.’

  John Hayes in Overland Monthly drew a picture unusually vivid and sympathetic for its period, the early 1870s, for he said there should be no surprise at the labourer’s discontent:

  ‘To see him toiling along the dusty highway, penniless, weary, and foot-sore, begging a ride from the teamsters, begging a meal of victuals from the farmers, none would suppose him a denizen of a State advertised over the world for the extent and fertility of a soil to be obtained there for nothing! Having no permanent residence, making no enduring friends, coming daily into contact with strangers whose only object is to make the most out of him and then turn him adrift, it is not a matter of much surprise that his vices attain the highest development; that his virtues become dimmed, and finally extinguished.’

  In 1872 the Pacific Rural Press also condemned this ‘growing evil in our State … again the men are discharged to wander about looking for more work or idly “killing time”.’ But the same journal printed a scalding attack on labourers who after starting to harvest sought an advance of wages: ‘If the farmer refused to yield to the exorbitant demand and for non-compliance with contract on the part of the labourer he refuses to pay, or retains a part as a guarantee of continued work, the civilized man utterly refuses to do another day’s work; leaves, and more than likely within a week, by a remarkable dispensation of divine providence (?) the farmer’s stacks or grain fields are found in a blaze.’ The advice extended to farmers was not to engage white labour, but Chinese.

  Not all the big California wheat growers favoured cheap coolie labour but there were plenty who worked hard to block restrictions on its entry and even to step up the flow - just as was later to happen with the Mexican braceros.

  One of the state’s largest agricultural employers told the Congressional Committee on Chinese Immigration in 1876 that importations of Chinese were necessary because ‘the character of the labour generally in California is very bad other than that of the Chinaman. What has contributed to make the American labourer so good for nothing … I do not know. Perhaps labour-leagues have had something to do with it. Perhaps the general disinclination to work which has grown out of the war … At any rate, the fact is patent that the American today has made up his mind to live off his wits and not work … I say that the rule for American labourers today is to be drunkards. They are bummers.’

  That is an ageless wistfulness, bedewed with nostalgic longing for days when labour was cheap and cheerful. One underdog barked back in the Pacific Rural Press during correspondence on labourers’ conditions. Headed ‘A Farm Hand’s Complaint’, the letter ran: ‘If we work for a poor farmer we get a bed in the house, and sit at the same table with the family, and sit at his fire and read his papers, and enjoy the comforts of his house generally. But with the large farmers we have to furnish our own bed, if we have any; if not, maybe he will be kind enough to give us an old piece of blanket or quilt, or a few old sacks to cover ourselves with. He will tell us to go out to a barn or in the granary, or to the hay stack to sleep … We find a place to wash ourselves out of an old barrel or a milk pan; then we wipe on the towel or piece of barley sack, that hangs there for us only…

  ‘If the farmer gets good steady hands, as he calls them, he will keep them just as long as he has plenty of work for them, and just the minute the work is done they must go, rain or shine. He doesn’t say, “Boys, stop until the storm is over” … they have to take their blankets and clothes on their back and march - to town or through the country - to look for another place to work; and thus they are treated by the rich farmers.’

  The growing enmity between the big employers and migratory labourers ‘marked the extremes among those whom one-crop wheat culture was separating’. Many smaller working farmers, alarmed at the destruction of the cherished American principle of the independent, self-sufficient farming family, found themselves with the migrant on this issue.

  A speaker at an Agricultural Society meeting at Ukiah, California in 1887, compared the intimacy and security of the Eastern farm worker with his counterpart from the West: ‘Make the employment of men brutal, an
d you must depend upon a brutalized class to fill the positions it offers, a class that will become more embruted by the character of its treatment.’

  The protests continued, here and there, now and then. ‘Debasing’, ‘demoralizing’, ‘shameful and deplorable’ - these were words used by officials and investigators between the 1870s and the turn of the century against the exploitations of the ‘flights of alien birds’, but the protest was never sufficiently fierce or unified to deflect the trend.

  ‘If the land remains vast ranches,’ Powers had written, ‘these men will always continue hirelings and tramps.’ Of course it did remain so, and became more so, and the men did so continue - until it became possible to dispense with them almost entirely in the wheat belt and forget them as they smoked away into other branch lines of American life.

  One of the first attempts to find out who the migrant worker was, from whence he came and whither he vanished, was made in 1923 by Don D. Lescohier. He discovered that many of the blackbirds had small farms in the South and had been ‘making the wheat harvest’ for ten, fifteen and even twenty years, each autumn taking home with them a little cushion of dollars for the winter months on their own one-crop semi-subsistence holdings.

  These were, in McWilliams’s words, the Joads of yesterday. Then they travelled as single men, and indeed not all were heads of far-away households for the wheat plains army recruited too from the city hostels and the permanent hobo force.

  The arrival of the harvest hands was a yearly event yet it always seemed to cause new consternation. ‘Drowsy little villages in the midst of the yellowing wheat fields woke to the need of providing temporary shelter for the harvest hands who landed from boxcars or came walking,’ reported the Review of Reviews in 1927. Hospitality was tempered exactly to the exigency of the moment.

  A headline in the Daily American, in Aberdeen, South Dakota, on 18 July 1921 was Move On Is Order Of Police As Trains Bring Hobo Throngs To City and, no buts about it, when an area was furnished with enough hands, all later arrivals were rounded up and pushed aboard the next train out.

  The labour was never, in relation to the local price structure, cheap. The migrants of those times in the breadbasket zone were Caucasian Americans; they were capably strong men and of mettlesome pride and independence, unshackled by women and children around them, or at least immediate responsibility for a family’s welfare; they bargained hard and, if they were not actual members of the IWW, they leaned towards radical unionism.

  The farmers were unorganized, scattered and frantically concerned to get their crops cut. The bindle stiffs strolled across the tracks out of the yards and into Main Street, squatted with their backs to the store fronts, and the farmers drove up in the buggies or T-models to conduct kerbstone deals for their labour.

  McWilliams comments: ‘It will be noted that this migration pattern was almost the reverse in many respects of the typical present day agricultural migration. The wheat migrant was not despised: his services were eagerly sought after, and his working conditions were tolerable.

  ‘A lord of the rods, he had no travelling expenses and never worried about a broken-down jalopy. Nor did he have a hungry family following him. He was actually received into the farm family … Mid West farm wives prided themselves in preparing good meals for harvest hands. Workers could net, for the season, around two hundred dollars, which, for many of them, was a tidy sum.’

  Well, they earned it. Ashleigh’s description of his time as a bindle stiff in 1915, although somewhat inflamed with drama, carries authenticity. Joe, his hero, is aboard the blind baggage of a passenger heading for the North Dakota harvest.

  ‘Some frozen stars appeared. On through the sleeping land rushed the long express. Inside the passengers sat, warm and soft on the upholstered seats, or lay sleeping in their berths. And on the prow of the giant land-ship stood three muffled figures, shivering but dauntless, carried on - through bitter cold and smoke and turmoil, danger of arrest or of beating - towards the harvest jobs that would earn them sustenance for a short space, and help provide the world with bread.’

  Taken on, Joe follows the big machine as it scoops up the ripe wheat, lashes it into bundles and drops them behind, to be gathered and stacked. ‘Joe worked at shocking. Together with other slaves of the machine he worked … Hour after hour went by. His arms and back ached with the toil. But he must not relax : the machine went relentlessly on, and he must keep up with the machine. Under the late sun, or in the chill of the Northern wind, he must go on with his fellow-workers of the shocking crew.

  ‘From early dawn until no light was left in the sky, by which they could work, gathering bundles and placing them in shocks - until his mind was deadened in a species of coma, and his arms performed their task with the same mechanical regularity as did the apparatus ahead of him.

  ‘Night came and the crew ate supper, swallowing voraciously the food before going to their exhausted sleep. They slept in the barn on straw, wrapped in the threadbare unwashed blankets provided by the wheat farmer. For weeks Joe had not taken a bath nor changed his clothes. He slept in his clothes for warmth. Like the rest of the crew he had become lousy, at first to his great horror. Later he learned to joke about the lice, as did his hardened fellows.’

  It was in this year, 1915, that the IWW formed its Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union and began a headlong drive in the grain belt, seizing the opportunity offered by the war in Europe. Wheat prices rocketed. Great areas of new land were riven open by the plough and, as rural labour gravitated to the highly paid jobs in arms plants and factories canning export floods, harvest hands acquired a scarcity value which they had never before enjoyed.

  By 1918 the IWW had enrolled 50,000 in its agricultural branch, and made ever tougher deals with the farmers. Ashleigh writes: ‘… the IWW swept the wheat fields like a prairie fire, making thousands of new members, and raising the daily wage from three or three and a half dollars to four dollars. They also secured better food and other conditions wherever they were sufficiently powerful.’

  Joe finds himself in a Wobbly crew - ceiling rates. He learns the Wobs’ technique: to infiltrate each crew in ones and twos, begin proselytizing, clinching an agreement to organize a job, then presenting their demands to the farmer. Concessions were not always instant and amicable. The wheat plains in those years were battle grounds of sporadic fights, strikes and raids by gun-packing citizen-territorials.

  For several years before the IWW launched its campaign, the wheat belt had shaken with labour unrest. In September 1914 George Creel wrote in Harper’s Weekly: ‘Since June the whole wide sweep of the Western grain belt has been the scene of ugly disorder and even actual riot.

  ‘Thousands of men, marching in great bands, have broken down the rules of railroads, ravaged fields and gardens, robbed provision stores and acted as aggressive units in making wage demands. Towns in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas have been compelled to treble their police forces, the railroads have largely increased their constabulary, pitched battles are not unknown, and jails have been filled to overflowing.’

  Creel’s rather undetailed drama is at least frank about how the farmers and chambers of commerce cast recruiting nets widely to keep down wage rates: ‘Wheat belt towns grew black and blacker with work hunters … the pressure of these thousands of idle, hungry, shelterless men bore heavily on every community. Towns people were deputized and armed with clubs, trains were met by these posses.’

  The wheat rush had been unleashed by stories, deliberately bruited by paid agents as distant as Chicago and St Louis, and in newspaper advertisements throughout the Mississippi Valley, that 150,000 additional workers were needed in the wheat belt.

  The anti-union plotters over-reached themselves and landed upon many a small town the graver problem of hordes of surplus men, most of whom, after hard riding across half the country, were put in a tetchy mood by learning that the announced jobs were illusory.

  In some areas the scab tactics worked
and wages were held or even cut. There was a song sung around the railroad network then:

  It was on a sunny morning in the middle of July

  I left in a side-door Pullman that dear old town called Chi

  I got the harvest fever, I was going to make a stake

  But when I worked hard for a week I found out my mistake…

  For sixteen hours daily, oh say, oh say,

  John Farmer worked me very hard, so I’m going away

  When I left that old farmer he cussed me black and blue

  He says, ‘You goldurned hoboes, there’s nothing will suit you.’

  So back to town I’m going, and there I’m going to stay.

  Even going back to town took on additional dangers once the United States had entered the war in April 1917, for soldiers on guard at bridges and tunnels were quick to relieve their boredom by taking potshots at human targets on a boxcar roof.

  Not everywhere was the bindle stiff cheated or clubbed or shot out of the county. As already mentioned, in the Northern Plains area there were many farmers whose sympathies favoured the Wobblies and the labourers, the agrarian Populists who felt their enemy to be not the unionized worker but the ‘money baron’, the ‘lords of industry’ of the vested interests who threshed the real profits out of America’s crops.

  Within this variable climate of attitude, the IWW succeeded in winching up wage rates despite the Government’s purge of the ‘One Big Union’ in 1917. Lescohier reports: ‘From Oklahoma to Canada the hand of the IWW has been felt in the harvest. Although the Federal Government was doing everything in its power to flood the wheat belt with surplus workers as part of its efforts to crush the Wobblies, the expanding wheat acreage and other factors continued to create a relative labour shortage.