‘During the war some 40,000 agricultural workers were attracted to Canada by prospect of good wages in the wheat fields … so wages remained fairly high.’
In 1920 IWW members were rejecting employment at seven and a half dollars a day. At Aberdeen, South Dakota, in that same year 400 bindle stiffs paraded through the streets protesting against the offered sixty cents an hour and chanting the implacable IWW creed: ‘We don’t want an honest day’s wage for a day’s toil. We want the abolition of the wage system.’
Lescohier describes a typical retaliatory ploy: ‘At Colby in 1921 the IWWs were in control of the situation for about a week. Approximately 1,100 harvesters were in town, the majority of whom were farmer boys from Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Eastern Kansas.
‘The farmers were offering four dollars a day, with no takers … Into this situation came three special railroad police. Guns in hand, they went into the jungles, lined up the men and brought them up to the government employment offices, where they were told to get to work or get out - on a passenger train.
‘Then began the sorting. The Southern farmer boys, factory workers, etc. stepped up and took work; the others were marched up to the Rock Island depot and over 250 dollars’ worth of tickets were sold them - probably the first tickets that many of them had bought during extended travels. Within forty-eight hours not more than fifty men were left in Colby.’
The tactic was applied systematically throughout the wheat-belt. Wobblies, says McWilliams, were ‘separated from the stream of workers and rousted out of the communities, and the farm boys were treated as favourite sons. With industrial employment low in 1921, it became possible, moreover, to recruit city labour for the wheat harvest.’
In 1923 it was estimated that of 100,000 migratory workers in the wheat belt, one-third were farm hands from the South, one-third down-and-outs roped in from the skid rows, and one-third habitual hobos.
There were other forces at work. The mechanical mower, the reaper, the gang plough, the corn sheller, the shredder, the manure spreader, the hay loader - fewer and fewer human hands were needed for the elaborate machinery rolling fast across the plains. The black shadow of men which swooped upon the corn country steadily faded from its 1915 peak until twenty-five years later the labour needed to produce a bushel of wheat had been halved.
But it was the cooperation between railroads, government agencies and anti-union farmers which exterminated the free-ranging radical bindle stiff. To help the farmers obtain a more ‘reliable’ labour supply, in 1924 the railroads rescinded their old permissiveness when the freights were crowded like starling roosts.
Two years later sixty-five per cent of the harvesters were travelling by automobile. The old guard hobo still went by freight train but it was a more daunting ride, with closer watch at the depots, frequent raids en route, hostile train crews, and a greatly heightened likelihood of being thrown off or arrested.
This policy became possible only because of a decline already ensuing. The reduced flow could be tackled; the hobo could be subjected to ambush attack all along the line. An eloquent comparison is the railroads’ defeat a decade later when the Thirties depression pushed an even bigger and more desperate horde on to the freights. In the summer of 1932 most railroads just gave up trying to fight them off, and took to coupling on to every train one or more boxcars with wide open doors to short-circuit the readiness to break into sealed cars.
When the train-riding hobo was first encountering the new auto migrant he was not especially worried. But his belief that ‘a chisel through the radiator, a sledgehammer on the cylinder head’ would squash the competition did not prove true. The railroad bindle stiff was not only outnumbered but he was outmanoeuvred by the mobility of the car-borne who could follow the speeded-up harvest by cutting across country.
Yet as late as 1927 there was still the surprisingly huge number of 100,000 transients of all kinds involved in the wheat cutting wave starting in Texas in June and ending in Canada in October, well over half of these having followed it regularly for up to five years, and nineteen per cent for more than ten seasons.
Ironically, it was the IWW’s unionization and wage rate campaign of the war years which killed off the bindle stiff’s summer market. Scared and angered, farmers leaped into a mechanization which would liberate them from dependence upon the mercenaries. It was in 1926 that the combine roared into dominance through the wheat belt. In that first year it displaced 33,227 harvest hands. In the short space from 1926 to 1933, 150,000 harvest hands became redundant.
A journal of the time commented: The carefree knights of the boxcar rods have gone to join the buffalo hunters.’ In 1927 the Wheat Farming Company was incorporated in Kansas and six years later was handling 64,000 acres of wheat land throughout ten counties by machine. The new age of factory farming and corporate control had arrived.
The harvest hand now had become a machinist employed by long-range companies who despatched their teams on rubber tyres, vectored like air-line flights; or else he was a clock-punching shift-worker tailoring the arc-lit fields on the locally-garaged combines and tillagers. By 1940 the use of free-lance migratory harvesters had been ‘almost completely eliminated’ in most areas and ‘reduced to a trickle’ in others.
A spectacular and unique phase had unfolded and closed in the American countryside; but the rural ride was not finished for Americans. Wheat was not the only ‘money crop’.
Part Six
River’s a-risin’
Dat’s de way we’ll be soon - tore up and a-movin’… I’d be willin’ to eat dry bread de rest o’ my life if I had a place I could settle down on and nobody could tell me I had to move no more.
Negro woman, North Carolina, 1938
30 Wrap your troubles in dreams
Looks like doughnuts will be hanging too high for the social revolution before this hard winter is over.
Big Bill Haywood
On the Navajo Trail south of Mexican Hat (an Indian trading post, grocery and post office skewered by the sun into the ochre dust) is the AZ Minerals Corporation. Alone on a rock plateau the Corporation’s silver metal sheds and intestinal pipes abut country marked on the map Travel in this area not recommended without guides.’ The plant has its own warning screwed on the gate: Caution, Radioactive Material.
This part of Utah is sterile badlands on which wind-eroded buttes and escarpments, striped with mauve and carmine, jut like citadels in a Gothic nightmare. In the early Fifties prospectors scraped off the dead crust and revealed uranium. Hardrock miners migrated in to smash the deposits open with jack-hammers, blast out open-cast sections with dynamite, and hack at the thin sandwich of uranium by crawling flat on their stomachs along two-foot tunnels - Finns and Swedes from Colorado, Italians and Yugoslavs who had been quarrying lead and zinc from Montana granite.
For Dick Unger, AZ’s supervisor, these past two years have been just another spell in thirty-five years of prizing ore from the American land mass. He is a tall rangy man with springy grey hair, in an open-neck blue sports shirt. ‘My father was raised on a farm in Minnesota, I was born in Richfield, Idaho, and raised in Southern California - that was a good mobile start! I finished school in the Depression but I had some mechanical ability and I got fixed up for fifteen dollars a month running a power unit in a mine east of Sacramento.
‘From there I moved up to Colorado, screening gold, silver and copper, just for the summer season. After that I moved up to a gold mine at Weepah Camp, at Tonopah in Nevada, then back to the mother lode area on the West of the Sierra Madres in California.
‘That’s the way it’s always been. I’m in mining, so I have to go where the stuff is. When I was younger I had an auto, a bedroll and a bag of tools, and if a job didn’t suit me I just moved on and found another one. I’ve always liked travelling around through the states although it’s usually zip from here to there.
‘It didn’t make much difference when I got married. The first place I took my wife to was a mine in c
entral Nevada where there were twelve cabins, eleven men and us. We both liked a little more freedom than you can get living in a house in town. We’ve never minded how remote it was. We’ve lived in company houses or cabins, sometimes we’ve rented a house wherever we’ve found ourselves. We’ve often been seventy-five miles from a doctor or a cinema, however you define civilization.
‘When the uranium thing broke we were at Ouray, Colorado, with a lead and zinc company. There was this romantic thing about the gold-rush days: the uranium-rush was pretty similar. I hadn’t given uranium a thought until then but when the excitement started my wife and I kicked the idea around for a few months and in 1956 we decided to come down to the hot country.
‘I reckon life’s been good to me. I’m a fairly adaptable person. I’m not too gregarious. I would be much more alone in a city than I am out here. There’s a difference of course between a mine man and a mill man. I’m a mill man. The miner’s work and life are harder physically and they get to be pretty hell-roaring guys. I wouldn’t say I was quite that type.
‘Still I haven’t owned a piece of real estate in my life. Where? It would be too much of a tie. My family now are 125 miles away. I drive up at the weekend or sometimes fly up in a charter plane. That’s fine but I couldn’t stand the kind of commuting they have to do in New York.’
*
Down with the debris of the 1929 crash came the differentiation between the homeguard worker and the hobo worker. When, as the terrible years lengthened, and there were ten, then fourteen, million jobless men in the land, who was the better American down there in the bread line, the destitute bank teller or the stony-broke railroad ganger? The division closed: a democracy of burst boots. ‘Somebody had blundered,’ wrote Scott Fitzgerald, ‘and the most expensive orgy in history was over.’
Also over - or punctured and deflating fast - was the fiduciary myth of the giant tycoons, the messianic cult of the Robber Baron, half good guy, half awesome monster. Those gods and their ruthless infallibility were, if not dead, wounded as mortals can be wounded, as also was the worship of success as a chalice from which all could drink.
Of 400 unemployed questioned fewer than half gave credence to the hallowed tradition of rugged individualism - ‘Yeah, ragged individualism’, was the adjusted view. Herbert Hoover’s promise of ‘two chickens in every pot’ had turned out to be scrip for charity soup, a tar-paper tent in a Hooverville camp, and a permit to sell surplus apples, taken on credit, along the city sidewalks (and even some of New York’s 6,000 apple salesmen scabbed by undercutting: two apples for five cents).
Mike Gold wrote in The New Masses: ‘I enjoyed the recent music of the victim’s howls and tears. Too long has one had to submit to the airs of those cockroach capitalists.’
The workless man - green or seasoned at panhandling - was the new proletarian angel.
Once I built a railroad, made it run
Made it race against time
… Once I built a tower, to the sun
Bricks and mortar and lime,
sang the down-and-out in a hit song of unwonted social-realism, concluding with that familiar street cry of the Thirties, Brother, can you spare a dime?
The girls in Gold Diggers of 1933 shrilled with defiant mendacity We’re in the money; outside, lovers and married couples attempted to replace fear with wry resignation:
No more money in the bank
What’s to do about it?
Lets put out the lights and go to sleep
Wrap your troubles in dreams and dream your troubles away
or
Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?
or
Are you makin’ any money?
Or perhaps in their bewilderment they raised their eyes with Joan Blondell as she sang from the screen, gazing beseechingly upward to some sky-based court of appeal above the heads of Hoover and J. Pierpoint Morgan, both, Remember my forgotten man.
There seemed too many forgotten men to be identified. ‘Heap o’ stir an’ no biscuits’, was a phrase of the day which spilled out from the jungles and into everybody’s parlance. At a time when Macey’s department store was selling strictly for cash, when they could get it, its president, Jesse Isidor Strauss, published this article of faith (or was it a prayer?) in the New York newspapers :
I trust my government
I trust our banks
I do not expect the impossible
I shall do nothing hysterical
I know that if I try now to get all my cash
I shall certainly make matters worse
I will not stampede. I will not lose my nerve.
I will keep my head.
While Mr Strauss frantically kept on conducting the band on this larger Titanic disaster, the question everyone was asking was: ‘What do you mean, there aren’t any lifeboats?’
Stephen Vincent Benét wrote a poem:
I hate to think
Of the reapers, running wild in the Kansas fields,
And the transport planes like hawks on a chickenyard,
But the horses might help, We might make a deal with the horses.
At least, you’ve more chance, out there.
And they need us too.
But they didn’t. And the men who knew those parts and had beaten their way around them for years, were in the cities at the soup kitchens and sleeping in ice-rimmed doorways. The billboards said, fixing the grin in place, Wasn’t the Depression Terrible? A tune was commissioned for a new talking picture - Happy Days Are Here Again.
The public didn’t believe that they were, the bankers tried to believe it, the intellectuals refused to. They had, even in the boom, on those ascending uplands of seven years’ prosperity on which the hucksters and the Babbitts danced, felt a gaping alienation. ‘… the virtual enemies of society,’ said Quincy Howe. ‘No common spirit possessed the people.’ The intellectuals, in their rush to political solutions, sought for Marxist interpretations and mimesis through their fiction and poetry and journalism, trying to find their way back to the common man. James T. Farrell found The Buddies, two truck drivers for the Continental Express Company, and Maxwell Bodenheim found his Revolutionary Girl, and Albert Maltz found Man on a Road, an on-the-tramp West Virginia miner with silicosis, and Clifford Odets found his strikers’ committee Waiting for Lefty.
What they were all suddenly finding was the man who had been there all the time, and who hadn’t himself noticed all that much difference, for the seven years of plenty had apparently not been long enough for Coolidge Prosperity to spread out into his area of shifting piece work and seasonal cropping; after all, it had not reached even to the stabler areas of the mill workers and the sharecropper farmers and the miners, for in 1929 when the boom was at its meridian there had been 1,800,000 unemployed in the United States. For him the boom had come and gone and he was left untouched, curiously inviolate.
The only difference now was that there were more of his kind; the freight trains were more crowded, as were the missions and the flophouses, and you had to accost many more brothers before you got that dime.
But he was at last recognized as being more than an amusing caricature of the American loser, or as menacing in his dereliction of duty to succeed, for now there were too many of him to be treated so trivially in either sense.
Hollywood discovered him, too. He was the threadbare dreamer speaking blank verse under the wet iron bridges of Winterset. He was the rucksacked thinker who had escaped on to the road in The Petrified Forest He was, in the person of Charles Chaplin, in City Lights the dustbin-raking outcast shaming a ruined financier out of the thought of suicide, and in Modern Times the little man being crushed like a peanut between the machine age pressures, tightening bolts as he fed from the conveyor belt in a nightmare extension of the Beddoes system, until, released by a strike, stepping sideways off the industrial treadmill into the liberty of the bum’s wasteland.
He was made much of in Hallelujah, I’m a Bum, with Al Jolson and Harry Langdon, an
d treated quite seriously in White Bondage and Our Daily Bread (the struggling sharecropper) and in Millions of Us, an underground radical production from Hollywood about the workless and the fight to unionize. Amorous escapades on the overland trek were touched upon lightly in It Happened One Night In My Man Godfrey the hobo was drafted out of the rubbish tip shanty town to show the rich family how to live really richly.
The theatre discovered the hobo: not only the Federal Theater Project, where he had the part of All Unemployed, with the line: We need food … Jobs! He was also in a musical, singing in a tender duet, One Big Union For Two in the Garment Workers’ Union smash, Pins and Needles, but Paul Kelly in Hobo lasted only five performances on Broadway - perhaps it lacked glitter.
Even Vanity Fair remembered America’s forgotten man. It printed a story by Thomas Wolfe, The Bums at Sunset, in which a boy on the run, about to snag his first freight, is befriended by Bull, a hobo with ‘a curious brutal nobility; the battered and pitted face was hewn like a block of granite and on the man was legible the tremendous story of his wanderings - a legend of pounding wheel and thrumming rod, of bloody brawl and brutal shambles, of immense and lonely skies, the savage wilderness, the wild, cruel and lonely distance of America’.
Hoboing continued to have romantic connotations. In 1929 Rudy Vallee, in collaboration with Leon Zimmerman, wrote I’m Just A Vagabond Lover, which became his musical signature. This was probably the most palpable polarity of the incongruity of the fashionable idea and the actuality. Vallee, with his wispy crooning and his Connecticut Yankees’ enervated sweet dance music (his bafflement with jazz was expressed thus: ‘… the weird orchestral efforts of various coloured bands up in Harlem … pandemonium’) and who liked to emphasize his Yale background, was one of the few new showbiz millionaires since the market crash. In 1931 the vagabond lover was getting 4,500 dollars a week for his Fleischmann Yeast Variety Hour on radio. It opened with Vallee’s mild ‘Heigh-ho, everybody’, which presumably could be taken to include flesh-and-blood vagabonds if they were fortunate enough still to own radios.
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