Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos: The Literature and Culture of U.S. Transiency 1890–1940 (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture) 9781009348034, 9781009348065

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VAGABONDS, TRAMPS, AND HOBOS

The most enduring version of the hobo that has come down from the so-called ‘Golden Age of Tramping’ (1890s to 1940s) is an American ­ cultural icon, signifying freedom from restraint and rebellion to the established order while reinforcing conservative ­ messages about American exceptionalism, individualism, race, and ­gender. Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos shows that this ‘pioneer hobo’ image is a ­misrepresentation by looking at works created by transient ­artists and thinkers, including travel literature, fiction, memoir, early ­feminist writing, poetry, ­sociology, political journalism, satire, and music. This book explores the diversity of meanings that accrue around ‘the hobo’ and ‘the tramp’. It is the first analysis to frame transiency within a nineteenth-century literary tradition of the vagabond, a figure who attempts to travel ­without money. This book provides new ways for scholars to think about the activity and representation of US transiency. Ow en Cl ay ton  is a senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Lincoln. He has written and edited several books, including Representing Homelessness (2021). He has been awarded Newberry Library and William P. Heidrich Fellowships, as well as the British Association of American Studies (BAAS) Ambassador’s Award.

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C a mbr idge Studies in A mer ic a n Liter atur e a nd Cultur e Editor Leonard Cassuto, Fordham University Founding Editor Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Advisory Board Robert Levine, University of Maryland Ross Posnock, Columbia University Branka Arsić, Columbia University Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway, University of London Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois, Chicago Kenneth Warren, University of Chicago Recent books in this series 191. OWEN CLAYTON Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos: The Literature and Culture of U.S. Transiency 1890–1940 190. JOLENE HUBBS Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature 189. RYAN M. BROOKS Liberalism and American Literature in the Clinton Era 188. JULIANA CHOW Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History 187. JESSICA E. TEAGUE Sound Recording Technology and American Literature 186. BRYAN M. SANTIN Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism: A Literary History, 1945–2008 185. ALEXANDER MENRISKY Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology 184. HEIKE SCHAEFER American Literature and Immediacy: Literary Innovation and the Emergence of Photography, Film, and Television 183. DALE M. BAUER Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Serial Novels (Continued after Index)

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VAG A B ON D S , T R A M P S , A N D HOB O S The Literature and Culture of U.S. Transiency 1890–1940 OW EN CL AY TON University of Lincoln

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009348034 DOI: 10.1017/9781009348065 © Owen Clayton 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Clayton, Owen, author. Title: Vagabonds, tramps, and hobos : the literature and culture of U.S. transiency 1890–1940 / Owen Clayton, University of Lincoln Description: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Series: Cambridge studies in American literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023004285 | ISBN 9781009348034 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009348065 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Tramps in literature. | Migration, Internal, in literature. | Marginality, Social, in literature. | American literature – 19th century – History and criticism. | American literature – 20th century – History and criticism. Classification: LCC PS217.T67 C57 2023 | DDC 810.9/3526942–dc23/eng/20230414 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004285 ISBN 978-1-009-34803-4 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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For Kate and Utah, who didn’t go anywhere.

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Contents

List of Figures page ix Acknowledgements xii Pa r t I   C on t e x t Introduction: Hobohemia and the Literary Imperative 1 From Tramp to Hobo: The Representation of Postbellum US Transiency

3 24

Pa r t I I   T h e Vag a b on d a n d t h e T r a m p 2 In Search of Experience: Vagabond Travel Narratives

47

3 Vulnerable Youth and Hobosexuality in the Works of Jack London and A-No.1

79

4 ‘That’s Why the Lady Is a Tramp’: The Hidden Story of Female Transiency

107

Pa r t I I I   T h e Hob o T r a ns f or m e d  5 Between Hobohemia and Academia: Nels Anderson’s Double Voice

139

6 ‘The Laureate of the Logging Camps’: Language, Food and Revolution in the Work of T-Bone Slim

167

7 ‘I’m a Hobo Myself Sometimes’: African-American Transiency in Black Vernacular Music

200

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Contents

Conclusion: The End of the Road? Transiency beyond the Hobo

230

Notes 243 Bibliography 315 Index 339

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Figures

I.1 Illustration from the “Hobo” News 2:2, May 1916, p. 14. From St Louis Public Library, scan taken by author. page 15 1.1 Frederick Burr Opper, ‘Happy Hooligan’ in New York Journal (11 March 1900). Public domain image taken from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Happy_Hooligan_ (March_11,_1900).gif [accessed 21 June 2022] 27 2.1 Photographs from Harry Franck, A Vagabond Journey Around the World (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1910), p. 298. 55 2.2 Photograph of Mount Kazbek from Stephen Graham, A Vagabond in the Caucasus: with some notes of his experiences among the Russians by Stephen Graham (London; New York: The Bodley Head and John Lane Company, 1911), p. 156. 60 2.3 Press photograph of Vachel Lindsay with Stephen Graham. Public domain image taken from https://upload.wikimedia .org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Vachel_Lindsay_with_ Stephen_Gwynne.jpg [accessed 23 March 2021]. NB: Stephen Graham is incorrectly named as ‘Stephen Gwynne’ in this file. 72 2.4 Illustration from Stephen Graham, Tramping with a Poet 72 in the Rockies (London: Macmillan and Co, 1922), p. 47. 2.5 From Graham, Tramping with a Poet, p. 21. 73 2.6 From Graham, Tramping with a Poet, pp. 150–151. 73 2.7 From Graham, Tramping with a Poet, p. 108. 75 2.8 Illustration from Vachel Lindsay, Going-to-the-Sun (New York; London: D. Appleton and Company, 1923), p. 1. 76 2.9 From Lindsay, Going-to-the-Sun, pp. 12–13. 76 2.10 From Lindsay, Going-to-the-Sun, pp. 30–31. 77 3.1 Photograph of Jack London and Leon Ray Livingston (‘A-No1’). Image taken at London’s home in 1909, later colourised by Martin Johnson and put onto a glass lantern slide. The inscription reads: ‘Poteau, Oklahoma. December ix

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3.2

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1

5.2 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

List of Figures 9th 1909. To Mr Martin Johnson. This is a souvenir of Jack London and A.No1. Yours truly, A.No1, The Rambler.’ Courtesy of California State Parks, 2022. 87 Letter written by London claiming that he had hoboed with A-No.1. The text reads: ‘To my old pal, A.No.1: – In memory of old days on the Road together, & in hopes that your same old good luck will always be with you – Jack London. Glen Ellen, Calif., Sept 11. 1909.’ Jack London to Leon Ray Livingston, 11 Sept 1909, reproduced in Livingston, From Coast to Coast with Jack London (Erie, Pennsylvania: The A-No.1 Publishing Company, 1917). 88 Photograph of Dolly Kennedy Yancy on inside cover of The Tramp Woman: A Book of Experiences (St Louis, MO: Britt Publishing Company, 1909). 116 Photograph of Agnes Thecla Fair, published in The Oregon Sunday Journal, 17 December 1916, p. 46. 121 Illustration from the “Hobo” News 1:7, October 1915, p. 7. From St Louis Public Library, scan taken by author. 125 Photograph of Helen Card. Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. 130 Map of hobohemia from Nels Anderson, The Hobo: the sociology of the homeless man. A study prepared for the Chicago Council of Social Agencies under the direction of the Committee on Homeless Men (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1961, text originally published 1923), p. 15. 146 Photograph from Anderson, The Hobo, p. 34. 147 T-Bone Slim cartoon that was printed at the head of many of his Industrial Worker columns. This example comes from Industrial Worker, 13 February 1926. 181 A one-off cartoon that utilised Slim’s trademark image. From Industrial Worker, 28 April 1923. By ‘Retlaw’. 182 Photograph of Slim in his early twenties. Newberry Library, Rosemont Collection. 183 Photograph of Slim with his then-wife, Rosa Huhta, circa 1906. Newberry Library, Rosemont Collection. 184 Photograph of T-Bone Slim, Westmoreland Collection, circa 1930s. Used, with thanks, by permission of Cherie and John Westmoreland.185

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List of Figures 6.6 Photograph of T-Bone Slim, Westmoreland Collection, circa 1930s. Used by permission of Cherie and John Westmoreland. 6.7 Photograph of T-Bone Slim, Westmoreland Collection, circa 1930s. Used by permission of Cherie and John Westmoreland. 7.1 ‘Sunshine Special’ advert, Chicago Defender, 3 March 1928. 7.2 Advert for Trixie Smith’s ‘Freight Train Blues’, Chicago Defender, 19 July 1924.

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xi 186 187 214 217

Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks go to staff at the various research libraries and collections that I consulted for this book, including at the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, Ruther Library at Wayne State University, Henry E. Huntington Library, Merrill-Cazier Library at Utah State, Lilly Library at Indiana University, Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University, St Louis Public Library, Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago Special Collections, Newberry Library, New York Public Library, New York Municipal Archives, Beinecke Library, Yale Library, University of Reading Special Collections, and the British Library. My thanks must also go to the following individuals who have been particularly helpful with their feedback, suggestions and other assistance: John and Cherie Westmoreland, Iain McIntyre, Michele Fazio, Kirsti Salmi-Niklander, Saku Pinta, John Lennon, Paul Bagget, Michael Martin, Ruth Hawthorn, Alice Crossley, Scott Brewster, Dominic Symonds, Jeanne Cambell Reesman, Bruce dePyssler, Bill Pettit, Katie Dorr, Susan Phillips, May Colling, Vanessa Lynn, Penelope Rosemont, ‘Beni’, Steve Garabedian, Hannah Murray, Keith Newlin, Bucky Halker, Melinda Hunt and Peter Cole. Apologies to anyone I may have missed. I am additionally grateful for funding that I received from the British Association of American Studies Travel Grant, Newberry Library ShortTerm Fellowship, University of Michigan William P. Heidrich Fellowship, and University of Lincoln Research Resources Allocation Fund. Elements of Chapters 2 and 6 were published, in earlier and less complete form, as ‘Punks, ‘Prushuns and Gay-Cats: vulnerable youth in the work of Jack London and “A-No.1”’ in Studies in American Naturalism, Volume 14, Issue 1 (Summer 2019), pp. 76–103 & ‘Puns, Politics, and Pork Chops: The “insignificant magnitude” of T-Bone Slim’ in The Journal of Working-Class Studies, Volume 4, Issue 1 (June 2019), pp. 6–23. xii

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Part I

Context

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Introduction

Hobohemia and the Literary Imperative

The shock-trooper of the American expansion, the man with bed-roll on back who free-lanced beyond the community redoubts, building the canals and roads and rights-of-way, spiking rails, felling timber, drilling oil, digging mines, fencing prairie, harvesting wheat, was the hobo. Kenneth Allsop1

the idea of the hobo is still compelling. The dreamer, the iconoclast, pioneer, he pricks the yearning to break new ground, to be at the cutting edge of a frontier, to explore. Roger Bruns2

In his 1965 hit song ‘King of the Road’, Roger Miller sings about living the carefree life of a hobo who has to work just ‘two hours of pushing broom’ to pay for his ‘eight by twelve four-bit room’ (Tree Publishing, T-071.000.635-1, 1965).3 One joy of this easy life is that although he wears ‘Worn out suit and shoes’ he does not have to pay any ‘union dues’, Miller being apparently unable to see the connection between these two facts. The song celebrates the freedom of the individualist hobo, whose unwillingness to be tied down to a particular job – and a union – makes him a paradigmatic American hero. While he may be a ‘man of means by no means’, his freedom to move around styles him as the titular ‘King of the Road’. This representation parallels the idealised hobo figure celebrated by the two epigraphs above: the ‘dreamer, the iconoclast, pioneer’ who, in the macho language of Roger Bruns, ‘pricks the yearning to break new ground, to be at the cutting edge of a frontier’. This conflation of the hobo with the ideology of the frontier indicates that this version of the hobo is, like the pioneers celebrated in Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous ‘frontier thesis’, both white and male.4 The hobo’s extreme freedom is a celebration of the rugged individualist qualities of white US American men, and the hobo becomes an example of America’s exceptional nature. The ‘pioneer hobo’, as I term this imagined transient figure, is the most enduring version of the 3

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hobo that has come down from the so-called ‘Golden Age of Tramping’: roughly the early 1890s to the early 1940s, which is the period under analysis in this book. This hobo became an American cultural icon, signifying freedom from restraint and rebellion to the established order, while paradoxically reinforcing conservative messages about American exceptionalism, individualism, race and gender.5 The pioneer hobo’s legacy can be felt in works of canonical American literature, such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy (1930–1936), and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). It reaches into popular culture through the idealisation of ‘the road’ in movies such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Easy Rider (1969), and Thelma and Louise (1991), as well as in songs by Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard, and many others. Yet as Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos sets out to demonstrate, the pioneer hobo image is a simplification of the era of the hobo, particularly regarding the complexity and diversity of cultural artifacts created by transient authors, poets and musicians in the early twentieth-century US. Transients created what was arguably the first counterculture in the modern United States. Known as ‘hobohemia’, this working class subculture existed in the ‘Main Stem’ areas of cities such as Chicago, which were also called ‘hobohemia’, and which served as hubs for workers to pick up jobs and to hunker down over the winter.6 The subculture thrived in union halls run by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and in ‘Hobo Colleges’ run by the International Brotherhood Welfare Association (IBWA), both of which sought to educate and radicalize the transient worker through their respective street newspapers the Industrial Worker, Industrial Solidarity and the “Hobo” News. Hobohemian culture spread along what John Stilgoe has called the ‘metropolitan corridor’ that ‘evolved along railroad rights-of-way in the years between 1880 and 1935’.7 It grew in the thousands of temporary and permanent camps, known as ‘jungles’, that hobos established across the USA, in which they would trade tall tales and sing communal songs. It refreshed itself by watertanks, where train-hoppers would wait for a steam-powered freight to stop for water so that they could hitch a free ride to their next job, locations at which people often left marks stating their ‘road names’, the date and their direction of travel.8 It moved in boxcars, where hobos could exchange ideas in a manner that John Lennon has called ‘boxcar politics’.9 But it also dwelt in the home, since most transients were not, as the pioneer hobo image suggested that they were, individualistic loners: in fact, most remained connected to their families and communities, who they left for periods to seek work but to whom they would regularly return.

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Introduction: Hobohemia and the Literary Imperative

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The fruits of hobohemia were fiction, poetry, autobiography, sociology, journalism, and popular music, including works produced by women and African-Americans. The material examined by this book, much of which has been forgotten or neglected, demonstrates that hobos were not the all-American, white, straight, male hyper-individualists that they have been seen as by much twentieth-century popular history.10 Like Heather Tapley, I question ‘the assumption of the hobo as white and the suspicious absence of the African-American male in hobo history’.11 In addition to being white men, hobos were also foreign, black, gay, female, and, in many instances, both socially-minded and politically communistic. They included blues singers such as Sleepy John Estes and Memphis Minnie, whose songs provide an alternate perspective to that of the pioneer hobo. Despite or perhaps because of the idealisation of the pioneer hobo, some people have claimed that transient writers and artists created little of cultural worth. In 1956, for example, Frank Beck wrote that ‘With abundance of leisure he [the hobo] produces little literature, practically no philosophy and little else that has much social or scholarly value’.12 One purpose of Vagabonds, Tramps and Hobos is to demonstrate that this is not true. I do so by looking at works created by transient artists and thinkers, including travel literature, fiction, memoir, early feminist writing, poetry, sociology, political journalism, satire, and music. I explore the diversity of meanings that accrue around ‘the hobo’ and ‘the tramp’, providing new insights into the meaning of these terms. This book is also the first analysis to frame transiency within a nineteenth-century literary tradition of the vagabond, which is, I argue, a figure who attempts to travel without money. I examine the vagabond, tramp and hobo as cultural figures, each of which was part of the discourse of US transient subculture from the late nineteenth- to the early twentieth century.13 In doing so, I provide new ways for American Studies scholars to think about the activity and representation of transiency. Vagabonds, Tramps and Hobos is primarily a work of literary studies, a field in which the upper and middle class flaneur has had a great deal of attention.14 In contrast, and somewhat surprisingly given the abundant scholarship that also exists on picaresque literature of the Early Modern Period, later US tramp narratives have been almost entirely overlooked.15 This seems an example of class bias within US literary studies specifically.16 Most of the writers in this book are non-canonical for the simple reason that many of them, though not all, came from the US working class, whose cultural productions have been generally considered to be of little worth. In addition, while literary studies tends to privilege certain

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Introduction: Hobohemia and the Literary Imperative

forms (novels over memoirs, poems over songs), my understanding of literariness treats different forms equally. Memoir and song, for example, feature heavily in the chapters that follow, not primarily because they provide access to experience but because of their craft. This book provides insight into a US working-class literary tradition and, especially in the case of T-Bone Slim, new conceptual frameworks for the analysis of working-class writing. A key term in this book is ‘transient’, which I sometimes use as an adjective before ‘worker’ but more often as a noun to describe people whom I group under the overlapping headings of vagabond, tramp and hobo: the first term being one that I apply to travel literature and the latter terms being common period archetypes. Since it relates to capitalist modernity, my use of ‘transient’ is not intended to account for the experiences of first nations peoples, gypsy travellers or slaves: the disparate movements of each of these groups warrants its own conceptual framework and so falls outside the scope of this book.17 Nor does the term cover the experience of immigration although, as I discuss towards the end of this Introduction and in the book’s Conclusion, there are overlaps between the circular experience of transiency and the more linear experience of migration.18 As an alternative I considered using the legal term ‘vagrant’. I decided against this, however, because historically ‘vagrant’ has been so broadly applied as to mean almost anyone of whom the authorities disapproved, although I will use the term when discussing the effects of vagrancy laws. Another possibility was ‘nomad’, which has acquired academic popularity following the publication of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s influential concept of ‘nomadology’ in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987, first published in English 1988), having been further developed by feminist scholar Rosi Braidotti and applied to women’s road narratives by Deborah Paes de Barros.19 However, I found the term ‘nomad’ to be inadequate to describe the experience of historic US transiency and also, especially as used by Deleuze and Guattari, to be an idealised representation at best and a form of neo-colonialism at worst. In her excellent work on women’s road narratives, Alexandra Ganser has modified the term to ‘para-nomadism’ to indicate that many journeys are undertaken not always as acts of rebellion, as Deleuze and Guattari insist, but out of economic necessary.20 I agree with this critique but have nevertheless chosen ‘transient’, partly to avoid any connotations with historic or contemporary nomadic peoples, partly because, as I discuss in the book’s Conclusion, the term ‘nomad’ has become a choice term for relatively privileged workers in the twenty-first century, and most

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importantly because the term ‘transient’ speaks to both movement and time. Many transients lived as vagabonds, tramps or hobos only for a period, or would alternate between phases of movement and relative stability.21 As its name would suggest, then, transiency was rarely permanent. In this book, ‘transient’ is not a sociological category but a strategic one; that is, I do not use it to imply a fixed essence or inherent identity but rather as a description of a way of being that may be temporary, semipermanent or for an entire life. Recent scholarship on US tramps and hobos has been dominated by poststructuralist approaches that have emphasised the power relations to which transients were subject, especially the tramp and vagrancy laws which made it illegal to be out in the open or to cross state lines ‘without visible means of support’.22 Michel Foucault’s famous statement that ‘Visibility is a trap’ has been particularly influential.23 For example, in his early work on the US tramp the human geographer Tim Cresswell, who would later become a leading-albeit-sceptical figure in a turn to ‘mobilities’ within the social sciences, focused on the nineteenth-century laws that constructed the categories of tramp and vagrant.24 The concept ‘tramp’, he argues, was brought into being by various ways of knowing, including eugenics, sociology, and documentary photography, which acted as means of control over a potentially mobile class of transient workers.25 For Cresswell, ‘Vagrancy, vagrants, tramps, etc. are what some people, in positions that enable them to define others, say they are’.26 This may be true of the term ‘tramp’, which was an externally-imposed category, but it is not true of ‘hobo’, which came from within transient subculture, seemingly in response to the legal implications of the terms tramp and vagrant. Indeed, for John Lennon, who is influenced by the work of Michele de Certeau and Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson), when they stole rides on freight trains hobos were performing acts of resistance by hiding their presence from a modernity that sought to categorise and pathologize them.27 Like Cresswell, however, Lennon also positions visibility as a trap and invisibility as agency: hobos, he asserts, ‘have the most subcultural power because they are invisible … hobos, unseen, have agency because they are invisible’.28 But sometimes visibility, as Ariella Azoulay outlines in relation to photography, can bring welcome benefits, particularly for those who seek recognition.29 For example, the fact that the ‘means of support’ mentioned in vagrancy laws needed to be visible indicates that visibility of capital could represent freedom from police persecution. In addition, invisibility could also be a trap. Some tramps laws explicitly categorised the tramp as male, which meant that women could not be arrested as ‘tramps’.30 This

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invisibility of female tramps protected them from jail but it also led to their exclusion from the literary marketplace, which is why of the almost 80 transient memoirs published between 1890 and 1945, fewer than a handful are by women. The increased visibility of women on the road that took place during the Great Depression led to a more sympathetic portrayal, at least in some representations.31 Visibility can be a trap but sometimes, and simultaneously, it can demand the recognition of personhood.

I.1  Book Structure Vagabonds, Tramps and Hobos is divided into three parts. Parts I, which includes this Introduction and Chapter 1, provides background about hobohemia and gives an outline history of representations of US transiency. As well as laying out the argument and structure of the book, this Introduction will shortly argue that hobohemia was a subculture that privileged storytelling, and that the popular genre of hobo memoir emphasises drift as a key aspect of the transient experience. Chapter 1, which is more of a cultural history than later chapters, examines how tramps were represented in mainstream constructions and how the concept ‘hobo’ developed within transient subculture to provide a cultural and legal alternative. Part II, which contains Chapters 2–4, explores the figures of the vagabond and tramp. These figures pre-date the popularisation of the hobo and so most of the texts in Part II date from either the late nineteenth century or from the first two decades of the twentieth. Part  III, which consists of Chapters 5–7, focuses on the hobo and on ‘hoboing’. Since the hobo figure developed after the vagabond and tramp, the material in this section dates from the 1920s to the early 1940s. Finally, the book ends with a Conclusion that sums up the argument and briefly examines representations of US transiency from the end of World War 2 to the present day. In Chapter 1, I outline a brief history of the representation of US transiency from the postbellum period into the early twentieth century. I explore how the term ‘tramp’ developed as a term of moral and legal exclusion to describe the mobile poor, who were felt to be opting out of the capitalist work ethos. I show that while the tramp had been a figure of mockery in popular culture, during the late nineteenth century the problem began to be treated more seriously by a range of proto-sociological figures. In the early twentieth century, investigators increasingly accepted a connection between vagrancy and unemployment, and representations became less hyperbolic as a result, although no less tainted by class bias.

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I.1  Book Structure

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Finally, the chapter shows how the term ‘hobo’, constructed to mean a transient wage-worker, was developed by the IBWA, the IWW and others to fight back against the cultural meaning and legal implications of the term tramp, creating what I call the ‘frontier defence’ of transiency. However, this defence had problematic connotations and exclusions based on gender and race. Focussing on writing by Ralph Keeler, Lee Meriwether, Harry Franck, Stephen Graham and Vachel Lindsay, Chapter 2 charts the development of a subgenre of writing that combines the slumming narrative with the travelogue, which I call the ‘vagabond travel narrative’. In this subset of travel literature, a narrator attempts to sightsee without money. These narratives make a spectacle of the supposed ingenuity of the narrator in acquiring, in the absence of financial capital, what I call ‘experiential capital’. Yet these texts also reveal, against the intentions of their authors, that it is their privilege as white men that enables these journeys and experiences. Vagabond writers set themselves apart from hobos and tourists, seeing both groups as too closely associated with modernity. Unlike the hobo, the vagabond travels to escape modernity – to go ‘off road’, rather than ‘on the road’, we might say. Yet Vachel Lindsay in particular shows an uneasy solidarity with the transient workers whom he inevitably encounters. Chapter 3 compares the representation of vulnerable transient youth in the work of Leon Ray Livingston, whose road name was ‘A-No.1’, and the author Jack London, neither of whom made a clear distinction between the hobo and the tramp. The chapter argues that both writers engage, in hesitant ways, with the frequent abuse and exploitation of young boys, known as ‘punks’ or ‘gay-cats’, on the road. A-No.1’s semi-autobiographical writings are more explicit, obsessively reproducing the same narrative in which the author (or his fictional stand-in) saves a punk from the clutches of an older hobo, or ‘jocker’. Livingston also wrote a fictional account of going on a hobo trip with Jack London, having gained the famous author’s permission to pretend that they had been road partners. For London, who was at the very least what today would be called bi-curious, questions of transient sexuality and abuse were particularly fraught. He acknowledges the existence of sexually vulnerable youths in early stories, written before he became a successful author. However, in his well-known work The Road (1907) he goes to great lengths to persuade his audience that he was never a gay-cat. The text positions London as a young man well ahead of his time, a claim that many critics have taken at face value. Yet paradoxically the text’s narrator seeks out the approval and protection of older men, including one who seems to expect sexual favours in return.

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Chapter 4 challenges the homosocial representation that is present in most hobo narratives, including those of Livingston and London, by examining accounts of female transiency from the early twentieth century. These accounts are obscure and have been either overlooked or dismissed by previous scholarship. Analysing writings by and about Dolly Kennedy Yancy, Agnes Thecla Fair, Kittie Solomon and Barbara Starke (whose real name was Helen Card), the chapter argues that female transient writing provides a different focus to representations of transient women written by men. When they do write about women, male writers, including A-No.1 and Ben Reitman, obsess about sex: presenting the road as a place of moral danger or, for Reitman, a space of fantastical sexual liberation. Female authors, on the other hand, treat sex as merely one aspect, and often an annoying one, of the transient experience. Yancy, Fair, Solomon and Starke focus on the liberatory aspects of moving beyond domestic confinement that transiency can offer to women in the early twentieth century. Yancy and Solomon discuss sex rarely, although Yancy does concern herself with notions of propriety and the challenges of maintaining a respectable appearance. Fair and Starke both discuss incidents of sexual assault or harassment. For Fair, the sexual threat she faced came not from being on the road but rather during her arrest for political activism. Stake, meanwhile, represents male sexual harassment as a constant background noise to the female transient experience. This harassment is so frequent, in fact, that she underplays it, troublingly laughing it off and presenting it as simply one of the inevitable dangers of travelling while female. Chapter 5 turns to the figure of the hobo as constructed by Nels Anderson, a former hobo who became a member of the influential ‘Chicago School’ of sociology. It argues that Anderson’s early writing, in particular The Hobo (1923) and The Milk and Honey Route (1931), projects the hobo as a distinctively American figure, separate from the supposedly European tramp because of his (and the figure is constructed as male) commitment to hard work. While The Hobo has been much commented upon by scholars, The Milk and Honey Route has been remarkably neglected. Rather than being merely a minor contribution as other scholars have implied or explicitly stated, I argue that The Milk and Honey Route is crucial to understanding Anderson’s The Hobo. Both books contain a distinctive double voice that not only speaks to their author’s position as a hobo-turned sociologist, but also expresses scepticism towards the project of sociology itself. In making this latter argument, the chapter pays attention to Anderson’s tone and language. Making use of literary close reading, I argue that his early style is distinguished by a voice that mixes different modes, including

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the sociological and autobiographical, in conflicting and paradoxical ways. While earlier scholars have noted Anderson’s ambiguous representation of hobos, this chapter demonstrates that he was, at least during the 8 years between The Hobo and The Milk and Honey Route, equally ambiguous about the sociologists who studied them. Chapter 6 focuses on T-Bone Slim (real name Matti Valentinepoika Huhta), a second-generation Finnish–American hobo who became the IWW’s most popular and influential writer. In his regular newspaper columns and in his songs, Slim represented the hobo not only as a worker, as Anderson had, but also as the revolutionary vanguard of a post-capitalist society. His writing parodies mainstream and conservative ideas about work, hobos, and the working class more generally. He challenges the common stereotype of hobos and tramps as being unintelligent through wit and verbal dexterity that assumes intelligence in his transient audience. He uses puns, neologisms and dynamic wordplay to involve his readers in the process of making meaning. In doing so, he creates a mode of literary genius that is communal rather than individualistic, and which in turn allows him to challenge mainstream understandings of literary success. The chapter shows how Slim brings his body and the bodies of his working-class readers into his writing by representing hunger as a defining class experience. He portrays lack of food as a problem for workers not only in terms of quantity but also quality, arguing that adulteration of foodstuffs weakens both the individual body and the hobo proletariat’s revolutionary potential. Chapter 7 focuses on African-American representations of being a hobo and of ‘hoboing’ as a verb meaning to hop a freight train. Black transients suffered from the same problems of poverty and hunger as whites but they had to contend with the added problems of racial discrimination and statesanctioned violence. They were also, to varying degrees, barred from hobohemian subculture. Black transients were entirely excluded, for example, from the publishing market for book-length hobo memoirs, even more so than the female transients discussed in Chapter 4. In contrast to scholarship that has largely accepted this lack of black written accounts from the early twentieth century, Chapter 7 seeks out representations of transiency in another medium: black vernacular music, particularly, though not exclusively, the blues. While train-hopping is a well-known theme in blues songs, it has been surprisingly overlooked by Hobo Studies. I argue that examining the lyrical content of black vernacular music changes the cultural representation of the hobo because blues is more sexually explicit, contains more examples of female empowerment, and places a stronger

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emphasis on the road as a place of violence than do white written accounts. The romanticisation of the road that is common in white hobo memoirs is largely absent from black vernacular music, in which concerns about needing to leave town, often to escape an awkward romantic situation but sometimes to escape from the violence of the railroad police, loom large. This chapter seeks to redress the historical writing out of the African-American transient. It does so by showing how black vernacular music challenges the idealistic image of the hobo as perpetuated in white US culture. The Conclusion begins by showing that the hobo was a picturesque archetype that from its very inception was portrayed as being on the verge of extinction. When the ‘Golden Age of Tramping’ actually came to an end following the conclusion of World War 2, however, the popular image of transiency shifted to the automobile, which had been providing its own road narratives for several decades but which found its popular spokesperson in the figure of Jack Kerouac, whose writing combined the spiritual literary vagabond tradition of Vachel Lindsay with an idealisation of the picturesque hobo. The Conclusion briefly traces the representation of transiency in the wake of On the Road, including the development of the ‘road movie’ and the way in which numerous singer-songwriters of the 1960s and 1970s adopted the mantle of the countercultural drifter. I outline the growth of homelessness, voluntary ‘lifestyle’ transiency and the development of the relatively privileged ‘digital nomad’ in the neoliberal era, before concluding with a discussion of the use of train-hopping by people fleeing to Europe and the US to escape poverty, violence and climate change. Subcultures, as the influential work of Dick Hebdige makes clear, require identity markers based on inclusion and exclusion.32 In the following section of this introduction, I describe hobohemian subculture as one that privileged storytelling, music and literacy, a milieu in which many US writers, singers and artists found inspiration. Since the subculture emphasised literacy, it is unsurprising that it produced many novels, memoirs, poems, and songs.

I.2  Domesticity, Self-creation, and the Literary Imperative According to Todd DePastino, hobohemian culture was born out of the remaking of the West in the image of corporate capitalism during the 1890s and the first two decades of the twentieth century. This remaking necessitated the work of thousands of young labourers who, as they ‘flocked to the mines, forests, lakes, harvest fields, construction sites, and countless other places where hoboes found casual and seasonal labour’, created a new subculture.33

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‘Hobohemia’ was also used as a slang term for the Main Stem district of large cities, most notably Chicago, where travelling labourers looked for work in employment agencies, for accommodation in cheap lodging houses and hotels, and where they spent their money in saloons, brothels, gambling houses, vaudeville theatres, cigar shops, and more. These locations had a vibrancy that could be attractive when compared to the moralistic culture of the US mainstream. Hobohemia also operated with a code of ethics that involved what Frank Tobias Higbie calls ‘transient mutuality’: a willingness to share and to assist fellow hobos.34 This mutuality was, however, limited by ethnicity: African-Americans and others were often unwelcome in Chicago’s hobohemian district, for example. These racial exclusions led to the creation of alternative, non-white equivalents to hobohemia, most famously Chinatown in San Francisco and Harlem in New York City. Hobohemia was also exclusionary according to gender, becoming ‘an important domain of masculinity’, according to DePastino, who adds that ‘Gay culture thrived’ in hobohemian areas that were largely male-only.35 Following the logic of frontier mythology, hobos have been portrayed, and often portrayed themselves, as freewheeling hypermasculine loners who were disconnected from society, particularly from the supposedly feminine domestic sphere. The nineteenth-century author Lee Harris, for example, linked tramps’ alleged status as single men to dangerous political radicalism, claiming that the strikes that had swept the USA in 1877 were the work of ‘the irresponsible floating population, who have no home ties to bind them to society’.36 DePastino says that ‘the tramp’s “homelessness” denoted a broader-based moral crisis of domesticity … the rise of a homeless army signalled a breakdown in domestic relations that endangered the nation as a whole’.37 The cultural concern was that men were wandering away from the responsibilities of family life and the softening effects of feminine influence. Later, the IWW adopted the image of the disconnected and disaffected transient and turned it into an ideal. For example, arguing that conditions in the West ‘render it impossible for the worker to marry’, Wobbly writer Charles Ashleigh claimed that Western hobos had acquired a ‘rough self-reliance’, ‘health and … physical courage’ that was ‘superior’ to that of stationary workers in the East.38 Frank Beck, who had been involved in Chicago’s hobohemia, wrote that ‘The hobohemian life begins by breaking ties. First with the family and then the community’.39 Many within the subculture were committed to this fiction, as when former dockworker Art Nurse, an acquaintance of T-Bone Slim, upon being asked by Franklin Rosemont whether Slim had a family, replied: ‘I don’t think he ever had a family. I don’t think he was ever even born – he just

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growed’.40 Hyperbole aside, later scholars have echoed the spirit of these claims, as in Frederick Feied’s statement that the hobo ‘is removed from the arena of domestic crises’ or DePastino’s argument that ‘young hoboes in the thrall of hobohemia saw domesticity as a threat to their “manly” independence’.41 However, as Tobias Higbie has shown, ‘migratory workers without homes amounted to no more than a fifth of the total harvest labor force … 80 percent of the harvest workers surveyed had homes to return to after the harvest’.42 Most hobos remained connected to their family home, travelling during the warmer months and returning home for Winter, or sometimes after several years.43 The hobo was, then, disconnected from neither the home nor ‘domestic’ influence. Feminist road scholarship tends to examine texts by women that represent those women challenging gendered spatial binaries by going on the road.44 Indeed, I will do so myself in Chapter 4. Less examined, however, has been the ways in which hobos represented the road itself as domestic, especially in their representations of the hobo ‘jungle’. These camps were a focal point of transient communities. Strict rules governed their regulation, including an ethical code that required all food to be cooked and shared communally in a central pot, the meal becoming known as ‘Mulligan Stew’ no matter what ingredients went into it. The larger jungles had permanent sets of cooking utensils, which hobos left behind when they departed, to be used by whoever arrived next. There were rules against violence and violators were typically expelled. Probably the most important rule, which is emphasized in many accounts, was that the camps be kept clean. AfricanAmerican political activist and former hobo Nelson Peery, for example, claims that during his tramp days ‘I had seldom seen a dirty jungle’.45 Blues singer Dave ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards recounted that in hobo jungles ‘You had to stay clean. If you’re too dirty, people won’t talk to you’.46 Similarly, and with an awareness of the stereotype of the dirty hobo, T-Bone Slim joked that the ‘No hobos’ signs in railway depots were there because the depots were ‘too dirty for self-respecting hobos to visit except with mop, soap and water’.47 Former hobo Godfrey Irwin’s 1931 dictionary of tramp slang tells its readers that ‘The true “hobo” is a cleanly individual, and welcomes any opportunity to keep his person clean and neat’, and that ‘slack indeed is the hobo or tramp who fails to clean up after he has cooked or in other ways made use of the jungle’.48 The IBWA did its part to promote hygiene and a tidy appearance among hobos. An illustration in its paper the “Hobo” News shows a man shaving by using a piece of glass hung from a tree branch for a mirror, with an explanation that ‘The Hobo in his effort to keep clean while on the road is often put to many strange methods’ [Figure I.1].49

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Figure I.1  Illustration from the “Hobo” News 2:2, May 1916, p. 14. From St Louis Public Library, scan taken by author.

Using gendered language, Nels Anderson commented that ‘The hobo who lives in the jungles has proved that he can become domesticated without the aid of women’. Noting that hobos must learn skills of sewing, bleaching clothes and washing up, Anderson concludes ‘The man who cannot, or will not, learn these few elementary principles of housekeeping is likely to fare ill in the jungle’.50 Cooperative housekeeping is a far cry from the heroic pioneer image of the hobo promoted by the IBWA and, ironically enough, Anderson himself. Yet it was vital for the creation and maintenance of jungle communities in which tramps and hobos could feel ‘at home’. In his 1890s letters to Professor John James McCook, transient and former soldier William ‘Roving Bill’ Aspinwall spent more time discussing cooking, washing dishes and cleaning clothes than train-hopping.51 This was a matter of concern to McCook, who wanted Roving Bill to talk more about riding freights.52 Later writers like Jack London would focus on trainhopping, presumably in the knowledge that this was a romantic topic by which his non-transient audience was fascinated. This change of focus also

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had the effect of making hobo narratives appear more ‘masculine’ according to stereotypical gendered notions of space. Another key rule of hobohemia, one which enhanced the enigmatic quality of the hypermasculine loner stereotype, was not asking too many questions about each other’s personal lives or inquiring about a fellow tramp’s real name. Most transients adopted hobo monikers or ‘road names’.53 This included several of the people under discussion in the following chapters, such as Jack London (who called himself ‘Sailor Jack’ and ‘Frisco Kid’), Leon Ray Livingston (‘A-No-1’), Matti Huhta (‘T-Bone Slim’) and arguably also the blues singers Dave ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards, ‘Sleepy’ John Estes and Lizzie Douglas (‘Memphis Minnie’), whose careers as musicians led them to take to the road regularly. Tramp and hobo monikers represented a chance to forget the difficulties of one’s past: one hobo asked researcher Nels Anderson not to write down his real name, poignantly stating ‘My name is too good for me now’.54 Nineteenth-century transient writer Ralph Keeler claimed that after he took to the road, ‘I was really afraid of my own name’.55 In his version of W.C. Handy’s ‘Yellow Dog Blues’ (Black Patti 8026, 1927), Sam Collins sings from the perspective of a hobo who claims: ‘I don’t remember my name’. This trope of amnesia is repeated by Neal Cassidy in a writing fragment that was eventually published in his incomplete autobiography The First Third (1971), while in his account of twentyfirst century train-hopping the journalist William T Vollman repeatedly asks himself ‘Who am I?’ [italics in original].56 Some monikers were taken up by hobos following the death of their initial possessor or were used simultaneously by several people, both practices highlighting a more communal sense of road identity than the hobo pioneer architype.57 Like other aspects of transient subculture, road names could be romanticised as a form of freedom. In his ‘Queen of the Rails’ (Philo Records, Philo-1004, 1973), for example, the twentieth century musician and oral storyteller Utah Phillips sings that ‘A hobo doesn’t need a name/cos’ he never gets no mail’. Here mail, in particular bills, is metonymic of the responsibilities of bourgeois modernity from which male hobos have allegedly escaped. The supposed freedom of road monikers was also idealised as a peculiarly American form of self-(re)creation, one which allowed transients to engage in a fictionalising of self, creating a new identity even while they often maintained connections to their old home. This fictionalising of self was concomitant with a larger fictionalising impulse within hobohemia: specifically, the telling of tall tales. Jungles were central locations for oral storytelling. Anderson says that ‘The art of telling a story is diligently cultivated by the “bos” in the assemblies about

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the fire … Many of them develop into fascinating raconteurs in the literal as well as the literary sense of the term’.58 George Dawson, an AfricanAmerican transient worker, stated: ‘At those hobo camps, they would sit around and lie their heads off all day. I liked to listen.’59 Dawson’s comment that he enjoyed listening to what he knew were lies indicates a fictionalising, or what I am calling a literary imperative, within hobohemia. Like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dawson was willing to suspend his disbelief for the pleasure of being an audience member. Such experiences were common. Nelson Peery says that camps were full of ‘warm laughter and tall tales … that made hoboes love their jungle’, Roving Bill tells James McCook ‘You would laugh your Sides to Acheing to hear them tell their stories and make Remmarks, they are verry witty’, while Godfrey Irwin claims ‘it is a matter of pride with every real tramp to have a good string of stories at his command’ to be told at the door of a prospective alms-giver.60 In ‘A Story of the Jungles’ (n.d.), an anonymous comic poem collected by Anderson, a cook spins a tall tale about his past life, forgetting to keep an eye on the mulligan stew, which then burns. Willing to put up with the lies but not with the ruined stew, the hungry hobos kill the man as punishment: ‘He’s sleeping at peace in the valley,/O’er his head grow the laurel and fern;/He will ride no more rattler or ponies--/For he let that damn mulligan burn!’61 As long as it did not spoil dinner, however, tall tales were an integral part of hobohemian culture. Indeed, it was their embellishment of truth that made the stories enjoyable. In A Tramp Camp (1906), Bart Kennedy luxuriates in the fictions spun over the jungle fire: ‘In my opinion Van Slyck was a finest and richest and most fluent liar in the camp. It was a pleasure and a delight to listen to him’. Describing Van Slyck’s storytelling technique, Kennedy claims that he ‘always began, so to speak, from a microscopic pedestal of fact. Upon the pedestal he would build an edifice at once magnificent and curious and wonderful’.62 Kennedy calls the fictional aspect of the tales ‘romance’, utilising language that had been used during the nineteenth century for non-realist literature. Similarly, according to an article in the “Hobo” News, being a hobo meant having ‘personality’ and being ‘able to tell a convincing story – not always a true story, but convincing’.63 In these idealised accounts, storytelling becomes a key motivation for transiency, and transients wander out of a compulsion for narrative. Given this oral storytelling tradition, it is unsurprising that a large number of tramp and hobo memoirs were published, along with works of poetry and fiction, between the 1890s and 1940s.64 As I discuss in Chapter 5, so many transients had literary ambitions that Nels Anderson

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found the situation comic, since in his opinion few of them had the talent or intelligence to match their ambition.65 A small number of transients were successful, most famously Jack London, who claimed that the ability to lie convincingly, which he had learned on the road, laid the foundation for his future success.66 Transient narratives were popular, fuelling a large number of publications, especially memoirs. However, most of these publications are little-known today, having been ignored or disparaged by subsequent academic scholarship. Cresswell, for example, dismisses tramp autobiography as a ‘minor genre’ and claims that these ‘so-called tramp autobiographies … tend to be written by middleclass drop-outs’.67 In fact most of the tramp memoirs, like immigrant memoirs with which they share some qualities, were written by workingclass people who took to transiency because of a lack of economic opportunity. But whatever their class origins, the geographer Cresswell’s dismissal of these writings as inauthentic (‘so-called tramp autobiographies’) is unhelpful for the literary scholar, for whom determining the factual basis of literary representations is relatively unimportant.68 As just discussed, hobohemian culture had a strong literary imperative, and the fictions spun in many tramp or hobo memoirs are just as interesting as any that might be based on fact. In Chapter 3, for instance, I discuss the exaggerations of Leon Ray Livingston, whose writings laid embellishment atop fantasy, and who invented a story of his travels with Jack London, but whose representations of boys on the road say a lot about the fears, anxieties and even desires that surrounded the sexual exploitation of transient youth.69

I.3  Hobo Memoirs, Drifting and Migration According to the frameworks established by recent scholarship in life writing, hobo narratives are memoirs rather than autobiographies.70 In the autobiography, or at least its Post-Enlightenment Euro-American form, the narrator-author ranges across the span of their life in search of an overall meaning or coherence.71 Autobiography narrates a story of self-creation and, ultimately, of the concept of the individual, through its narrator’s triumph over external circumstances.72 In this tradition, autobiography is a form of fictive, teleological self-invention.73 By contrast, memoirs focus on more limited timeframes and tend to be fragmented, non-teleological and less triumphalist.74 While autobiography was largely the domain of the white bourgeoisie, memoirs have been written mostly by marginalised groups, including women, slaves, immigrants and, indeed, transients.75

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Tramp and hobo memoirs are examples of what Alfred Hornung terms ‘out-of-life narratives’, whose authors ‘have to cope with the loss of their status as human subjects’. Such narratives ‘never amount to a continuous story, but consist of the random arrangement of exclusively short episodes’.76 Most hobo memoirs, including some that I discuss in this book, like Vachel Lindsay’s A Handy Guide for Beggars (1916) and Jack London’s The Road (1907), as well as some that for reasons of space I do not, including Windy Bill’s An American Hobo in Europe (1907), Harry Kemp’s Tramping on Life (1922), and Dan Hennessey’s On the Bum: Sketches of Tramp Life (1926), present an episodic, paratactical chain of incidents without an overarching narrative.77 In these texts there is little sense of an Enlightenment selfhood under construction: nothing is resolved or created in them except, perhaps, for London, whose pre-existing fame enables him to refer to his life outside the book. Hobo memoirs are, generally speaking, radically incoherent texts. This may be because, as analytic philosopher Galen Strawson puts it, ‘Some of us are not just not naturally Narrative. We’re naturally – deeply – non-Narrative … we have at best bits and pieces, rather than a story’.78 Or it may be that the incoherence of these texts best fits the experience of transiency, which is a series of moments spent drifting from place-to-place. Transient memoirs are about drift, which, according to Jeff Ferrell, ‘constitutes the consequence, the collateral damage, of historical crisis’, including economic and political crises, as well as ‘the lived experience of such crisis’.79 Drift involves a movement to random or even unknown locations, or a series of definite plans that are subject to change at short notice. By hopping freight trains, hobos and tramps often hoped to arrive at particular locations, but just as often were unsure of the final destination and had to adapt to where they were taken. They became, for a time, aligned with the machinery of the train and the railroad, a metaphorical cog in a very real socio-economic system, as well as part of a national imaginary that framed mobility as peculiarly ‘American’ while denying that mobility to many people. A good example of the experience of drift is black vernacular musician Henry Thomas’s recording ‘Railroadin’ Some’ (Vocalion 1443, 1929): I leave Fort Worth, Texas and go to Texarkana, And double back to Fort Worth. Come on down to Dallas. Change cars on the Katy. Coming through the Territory to Kansas City. And from Kansas City in Missouri.

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Introduction: Hobohemia and the Literary Imperative And Missouri to Chicago. I’m on my way but I don’t know where. Change cars on the TP. Leaving Fort Worth, Texas. Going through Dallas. Hello Terrell. Grand Saline. Silver Lake. Mineola. Tyler. On to Longview. Jefferson. Marshall. Little Sandy. Big Sandy. Texarkana. And double back to Fort Worth. Change cars on the Katy. Leaving Dallas, Texas. Comin’ through Rockwell. Hello Greenville. Celeste. Denison. South McAlester. Territory. Muskogee. Hello, Wagner. Parsons, Kansas. Kansas City. Sedalia. Then I change cars and jump into St Louis. Hello Springfield. I’m on my way, Chicago. Bloomington. Joliet. Can the Highballer pass on through? Highballer on through, sir. Grand Crossing. Thirty-first Street depot. Polk Street depot. Chicago.

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Thomas puts the circularity of drifting to the forefront as he repeatedly doubles back to Fort Worth, with the only comment on his movement being ‘I’m on my way but I don’t know where’.80 Spoken breathlessly rather than sung, the lyrics emerge as a stream of consciousness that is, like the towns and cities through which he passes, disconnected and incoherent, either presented without discussion or with a simple ‘Hello’. It is as if the singer’s consciousness has joined with the train and distributed itself along the railroad network to each of the cities he visits, his decentred subject becoming, like Alfred Tennyson’s Ulysses, a part of all that he has met.81 In a similar way, an anonymous poem called ‘No Matter Where You Go’ (1918), published in a volume by the IBWA, captures the experience of movement forced upon the hobo speaker through a search for work: ‘Not much doing in St Louis – /It’s the same in Baltimore – /Coin don’t rattle in Seattle/As it did in days of yore’. Lack of work and harsh vagrancy laws ensure that each new location provides an unwelcome reception and ensures swift movement elsewhere, continuing the cycle: ‘In the face of all such rumors/It seems not amiss to say/That no matter where you’re going/ You had better stay away’.82 The belonging on which a rooted, sedentarist human subjectivity depends is nowhere to be found, with the speaker being told to ‘stay away’ from places at which they are yet to arrive.83 This encapsulates the paradox of drift as discussed by David Harvey, who notes that while capitalism requires a degree of labour mobility in order to open new markets, too much drift thins the ranks of the industrial reserve army whose presence helps capitalists to depress wages.84 US vagrancy laws were also paradoxical in that they attempted to control drift but in fact created further mobility, since they continually forced transients and people experiencing homelessness to move on. Circuitous drifting distinguishes transient from immigrant life writing, though the two genres have overlapping characteristics and writers often occupied both identities simultaneously or alternately. Most early Twentieth Century US immigrant autobiographies, including those by Mary Antin and Jacob Riis, draw a straight narrative line that focuses on how the author achieved or resisted integration within the United States.85 This is true even when, as in the case of Philippine writer Carlos Bulosan, the text also contains a transient drift narrative section. In his fictionalised autobiography America is in the Heart (1943), Bulosan’s narrator faces racial discrimination and violence upon his arrival to the US. He takes to the road in an attempt to escape: ‘it seemed’, Bulosan writes, ‘impossible for me to stay in one place without feeling persecuted and hunted’.86 For many writers of colour, explaining transiency by way of wanderlust, as did

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many tramp memoirists, seems preposterous because it is a fear of violence that motivates movement. Yet at times the road is a heteroglossic space of freedom. For instance, after encountering the brutal aggression of a group of white policemen, he states ‘I sat on top of an empty boxcar and watched the beautiful land passing by. I saw places where I thought I would someday like to build a home’ (p. 157). This scene combines transient and immigrant narratives, since it is the drifting movement on a freight train that engenders a desire to integrate into America’s ‘beautiful land’. The narrator encounters white hobos, but his race and inability to speak English keep him separate: ‘I could not converse with them, and this barrier made me a stranger. I wanted to know them and to be a part with their life. I wondered what I had in common with them beside the fact that we were all on the road rolling to unknown destinations’ (p. 119).87 This denial of a cross-racial phatic connection is paralleled, as I discuss in Chapter 7, in representations by African-American transients. Other immigrant and non-white workers left an important legacy within US transient subculture.88 For example, Latinx workers who laboured in Southern plantations, sometimes alone but often in family groups, constituted what Mae M. Ngai calls ‘an agricultural proletariat’ and an example of ‘imported colonialism’. The group included ‘Mexican Americans, legal immigrants, undocumented migrants, and imported contract workers (braceros)’, each of whom ‘remained external to conventional definitions of the American working class and national body’.89 They were also outside of the definition of the white hobo worker that was, as I will discuss in the next chapter, perpetuated by the IBWA and others. Latinx workers ‘suffered from a system of [racial] segregation’ throughout the American Southwest ‘that mimicked the Jim Crow practices of the South’.90 Mexican and Mexican-American laborers produced ballads, known as corridos, which portrayed a variety of transient situations.91 For example, ‘El Corrido de Texas’ (‘Ballad of Texas’) and ‘Corrido Pensilvanio’ (‘Pennsylvanian Ballad’), two of the most famous and influential corridos, deal with contract work given by Northern industrial employers, who hired work gangs known as enganches, while others portray the dangers of cotton picking. In ‘Corrido de Robstown’ (‘Ballad of Robstown’) [circa mid 1920s], Eusebio González complains ‘Ya me duelen las manos/de tanto estirar capullo’ (‘My hands are already hurting/From picking so much’).92 In ‘Corrido de pizcar algodón’ (‘Ballad of Cotton Picking’) [1926], Justiniano Soto and Andrés O. García describe travelling to Abeline as part of a work crew. They enter a restaurant, ‘no nos quisieron vender/porque éramos mexicanos’ (‘But they refused to serve us/Because we were Mexicans’).

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This experience of segregation, along with the cold weather that prevents them working, leads them to fantasise about leaving their job: ‘Quisiera ser Pajarito/para cruzar Abelín,/y volar por estos aires/y llegar pronto a Seguin’ (I wish I were a little bird/To be able to cross Abeline/And fly through the skys/And arrive quickly in Seguin’).93 As these examples show, US transiency was a more heterogeneous experience than is encapsulated by the frontier hobo archetype. Although my lamentable Spanish prevents me from a thorough examination of corridos, it is nevertheless my hope that Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos will begin a conversation about the diverse literary and cultural productions of early twentieth-century hobohemia and related transient subcultures. This is particularly important, as I discuss in the book’s Conclusion, in a twenty-first century context in which transiency is becoming the norm for an increasingly large number of impoverished and often racially-othered groups, including climate refugees, asylum seekers and people who are problematically designated ‘economic migrants’.

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chapter 1

From Tramp to Hobo

The Representation of Postbellum US Transiency

Highway, by-way, many a mile I’ve done; Rare way, fair way, many a height I’ve won; But I’m pulling my freight in the morning, boys, And it’s over the hills or bust; For there’s never a cure When you list to the lure Of the Wan-der-lust.

Robert Service.1

The hobo works and wanders, the tramp dreams and wanders and the bum drinks and wanders. Ben Reitman.2

In Bret Harte’s short story ‘My Friend the Tramp’ (1878), an unnamed narrator encounters an Irish tramp who claims to be in search of employment. When the narrator brings him home to build a wall in exchange for food, however, the man finds excuses as to why he cannot work. The tramp charms the narrator’s family by telling tales about his life and by finding elaborate excuses for not being able to perform different tasks. ‘Worruk’ is his comic refrain, spelt phonetically to depict an Irish brogue: ‘Ay, but it’s worruk that’s good for me; give me worruk, and it’s all I’ll be askin’ fur’.3 Although the narrator calls him ‘one of the biggest scamps in the world’, his charm makes him an endearing and lovable rogue along the lines of the picaresque novels of seventeenth- and eighteenth century Europe (p. 191). More than charm, however, it is the tramp’s quality of laziness that resonates through many later representations.4 In order to provide necessary background for the readings that follow in subsequent chapters, this chapter will trace a historical overview of cultural representations of transiency, noting how images of tramps and hobos alternated between an emphasis on comedy, as in the Harte example, and a concentration on the threat posed by tramps to US society. In either 24

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type of portrayal, however, laziness was the tramp’s predominant quality. Following this discussion, I outline how the hobo and tramp became the focus of more sober sociological study, although the emphasis would remain on their alleged lack of a work ethic. Finally, I will discuss how hobohemians sought to push back against negative portrayals found in earlier representations through what I call the ‘frontier defence’ of transiency. However, by using this defence transient writers and organisations constructed the hobo as a heroic white male, which created its own idealisations and exclusions.

1.1  Comedy and Danger: Representing the American ‘tramp’ Identity can consist of a shift from verb to noun. Such was the case for ‘tramp’, which first described the action of walking but later came to describe itinerants who perambulated without money, either as beggars or in search of work.5 The tramp figure predates the ‘hobo’ by several centuries and, unlike the later term, is transatlantic in nature, emerging in the UK before being exported to the US. As I will now describe, the tramp was depicted as either a helpless, bumbling character, or as a threat to property and the family. One characteristic that both depictions shared was that they framed the tramp as lazy. A refusal to labour in the capitalist economy, at least in a permanent way, was a key element of the tramp archetype. The tramp was a stock character on the nineteenth-century transatlantic stage, first in British music hall and then in US vaudeville. Utilised by a range of performers, tramp acts usually involved the figure’s laziness, pretentiousness, or drunkenness. Vaudeville tramps were played as dangerous, often seeking to rob innocent citizens on the road or at home.6 As Tim Cresswell notes, vaudeville portrayed tramps according to a series of recognizable signs: ‘Unshaven faces, hats, bulbous noses, ill-fitting clothes, and odd-sized shoes were all part of the tramp identity. Silly walks, behaviour that tended to act against the intended outcome of an action and general clumsiness were part of the act’.7 Similar tramp figures had been played in British music hall during the late nineteenth century.8 On both sides of the Atlantic, the tramp was coded as a white man. For example, when AfricanAmerican vaudevillians Bob Cole and Billy Johnson produced A Trip to Coontown (1898), which was the first musical created entirely by black artists, the play’s sole white character was a tramp called Wayside Willie.9 One of the most successful stage performers in the US was Nat Wills, who played a character called ‘The Happy Tramp’ from the 1890s until

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1917. Wills blacked out his teeth as a stereotypical indication of poverty, and arrived on stage in a boxcar to connect his character to hobohemia.10 He performed a variety of material, including dancing, parodic songs, jokes, and stories, which sometimes involved racist content.11 The humour often centred on the laziness of his tramp persona, as shown by the title A Son of Rest that Wills gave to a 1903 anthology. Other material involved the comic recitation of the death of tramps as reported in a fictional transient newspaper, the ‘Happy Tramp’ being bitten by a dog, and jokes about alcoholism.12 While Wills did on occasion lampoon corporate capitalism, a greater proportion of his humour targeted wives, overweight (and skinny) girlfriends and mother-in-laws, making him a ‘champion of irresponsible bachelorhood’ among his audience of working class men.13 In 1909, he recorded a song called ‘The Traveling Man’ (Victor B-6919, 1909), in which he narrated the creation of ‘The Happy Tramp’. The song describes him travelling with a vaudeville company across the US and Canada, illegally catching freight trains in a way that conflates his real life and tramp persona. Illness among the cast leaves Wills having to take on more and more of the roles; by the time they reach Nova Scotia, so many cast members have dropped out that he is forced to change the act by performing for the first time as ‘The Happy Tramp’. At this point the tune switches to ‘Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! The Prisoner’s Hope’ (1864), a Civil War song in which the refrain ‘Tramp, Tramp, Tramp’ is a verb but which here becomes a noun: ‘they put me on to take his place and made me play a/ Tramp, tramp, tramp, I tramped to Boston/Ethan Proctor heard of me/ When I sang for them one day/They engaged me right away,/That’s how I became ‘The Happy Tramp’, you see’. Wills engages in self-mythmaking regarding his persona, linking the creation of the ‘Happy Tramp’ with the war to reunify and reconstruct the nation. The ‘Happy Tramp’ found echoes in the Heart Newspaper’s turn-ofthe-century ‘Happy Hooligan’ cartoon, allegedly created by Frederick Burr Opper, which featured a good-natured but unlucky tramp dressed in rags and wearing a tomato can on his head, who falls fouls of society despite being essentially good (Figure 1.1).14 The character repeatedly tries to help strangers out of a sense of naive goodness, but events typically result in him being taken to jail by an overzealous policeman. ‘This was’, according to Jeffrey Brown, ‘a new permutation in the evolving image of the comic tramp … conceiving of the tramp as an underdog was a direct confrontation of dominant cultural forms’.15 More conventional was the fact that Hooligan was drawn with simian qualities indicative of the late nineteenthcentury stereotypes of the ‘Irish’ tramp.16 Happy Hooligan was adapted as

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Figure 1.1  Frederick Burr Opper, ‘Happy Hooligan’ in New York Journal (11 March 1900). Public domain image taken from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Happy_Hooligan_(March_11,_1900).gif [accessed 21 June 2022]

six live action films between 1900 and 1903, several unofficial theatrical productions, and an animated cartoon from 1916 to 1922.17 According to Todd DePastino, during the 1920s Opper cleaned Hooligan up as part of a larger shift towards more sanitised representations of tramps: ‘losing his tattered rags (though not his tomato can hat) and gaining a natty bow tie, clownchecked jacket, and smooth black pants without patches. By the 1930s, this once grotesque tramp had acquired a home, a dog, and a white picket fence to go along with his heart of gold’.18 This change was not enough to save the strip, which ended in 1932, probably because the Great Depression called for a less sanguine representation of poverty. By the 1930s Happy Hooligan, like everyone else, had little to be happy about. A turn-of-the-century tramp who would make the transition to the Great Depression more successfully was ‘Weary Willie’, a lazy and inept tramp figure which began in Britain and became well known in the US. ‘Weary Willie’ was so common a transatlantic phrase that it was adopted as the name for one of the hapless tramps in artist Tom Brown’s comic strip, which served as the front cover for the British magazine Illustrated Chips.19 The adventures of Willie and his friend Tim typically involve them constructing elaborate moneymaking schemes, including highway

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robbery (Illustrated Chips, 26 Sept 1896) and being con artists (Illustrated Chips, 17 May 1902). Their incompetence invariably leads to the failure of these schemes and the reinstitution of social order. In 1898, the UK-based photographer James Bamforth made a one-minute film entitled Weary Willie, in which the eponymous Willie seeks, through his objectionable behaviour, to remove members of the public from a park bench so that he can have it to himself.20 The figure would be adapted in the 1930s by US performer Emmet Kelly, whose serio-comic version would be the most famous ‘Weary Willie’ of all. Kelly’s act embodied the unlucky, down-at-heels tramp, browbeaten, like most of his audience, by the Great Depression. Stage and cartoon tramps influenced an even more famous tramp persona: that created by Charlie Chaplin who, like Weary Willie, made the journey across the Atlantic and from stage to screen with his famous ‘Little Tramp’ or ‘Little Fellow’. A performer in British music hall, Chaplin was familiar with the stock features of the tramp stereotype. Chaplin adopted many of these features for his Little Tramp, including top hat, ill-fitting trousers and bow-legged walk. Despite his films being created in the US, Chaplin’s character was portrayed as more of a British tramp than an American hobo. This was noticed by at least some audience members since, in an early example of fan-art, Chaplin impersonator Billy West created a film called The Hobo (1917) in which West, dressed in an outfit copied from Chaplin’s Little Tramp, emerges from riding the rods underneath a freight train, an infamous way to travel for the US hobo, having set an alarm clock to let him know when the train would arrive. Chaplin clearly enjoyed this gag since he copied it in The Idle Class (1921/22). In Chaplin’s version, however, the tramp emerges from beneath a passenger train, which suggests that the British Chaplin was less familiar with hobohemian modes of transport than his American imitator.21 In his autobiography, Chaplin famously called the Little Tramp ‘a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure’, a description which aligns the character with what in Chapter 2 I call the literary vagabond, and which notably does not involve him being an itinerant labourer.22 Roland Barthes has stated that ‘Chaplin has always seen the proletarian under the guise of the poor man’, while Raoul Sobel and David Francis have influentially argued that Chaplin’s character is not an actual tramp except when explicitly named as such.23 Yet the fact that The Little Tramp is sometimes homeless and at other times housed, spends time in jail, as well as the variety of jobs that he performs, are all consistent with the life of a transient worker. Over the course of dozens of short films and several full-length features, the tramp works as a farmhand,

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day labourer, cart puller, ditch digger, janitor, waiter, in a tailor’s shop, is shanghaied onto a ship as an unwilling sailor, and, famously, works on a factory production line in Modern Times (1936). Like many of his stage forebears, however, he is an incompetent worker whose inability to perform basic tasks is the source of much humour.24 The audience is encouraged to sympathise with his travails because, unlike Happy Hooligan or the early version of Weary Willie, he evinces personal sadness at his various knockbacks. Chaplin’s tramp is reminiscent, as Kelly’s Weary Willie would be, of the ‘Sad Clown’ Pierrot figure of commedia dell’artre, with whose sufferings the audience is encouraged to empathise or relate.25 While audiences have typically seen Chaplin’s tramp as an innocent character, his walk, constant itching and sex-obsessed antics tell a different story. Many of his early films, such as Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914), revolve around desired or imagined romantic predicaments. The tramp has sex on his conscious mind, ogling a nude statue in His New Job (1915), as well as his unconscious, dreaming of being the master of a harem in His Prehistoric Past (1914) and of being tempted by scantily clad nymphs in Sunnyside (1919). While chasing the Sunnyside nymphs the tramp suffers an injury to his rear end that prevents him from sitting down, while in The Tramp (1915) he looks down into his trousers as if feeling pain in his crotch and, being unable to sit down, puts a bush inside his trouser pocket, near his penis, presumably as some kind of balm. These incidents in Chapin’s films are, I argue, a representation of the consequences of sexually transmitted disease. Specifically, the Little Tramp’s uncomfortable movements, involuntary kicking, inability to walk without a cane and near-constant itching are all indicative of syphilis; his trademark walk, for example, slapping his feet on the ground, is reminiscent of the ‘tabetic gait’ that results from untreated syphilis.26 Chaplin was familiar with syphilis because it had destroyed his mother’s sanity.27 It was also a disease commonly associated with tramps.28 Charles Maland argues that Chaplin moderated the tramp’s libidinous aspects in response to criticism from middle-class audiences and, in 1916, the National Board of Censorship.29 Despite this, the character remained sufficiently obsessed with sex to produce a disturbingly pederastic moment in which he dreams of a flirtatious, vampish angel, played by 12-year-old actress Lillita MacMurray, in The Kid (1921), a scene which apparently did not trouble the good people of the National Board of Censorship.30 Such moments indicate a darker side to Chaplin’s character, by which I mean both the Little Tramp and Chaplin himself, and speak to some of the cultural concerns about tramps that had been in place since the nineteenth century. ***

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As Cresswell rightly argues, nineteenth-century social commentators ‘sought to encode the bodies of tramps as pathological, as diseased and genetically unsound … tramps were metaphorically a pathology in the wider social body’.31 Tramps were not only associated with venereal disease but also with a metaphorical political disease, radicalism, that was infecting the body politic. One of the earliest tramp novels, Lee Harris’ romance The Man Who Tramps: A Story of Today (1878), portrays tramps as a hidden society of foreign radicals, a ragged-trousered mafia who exploit conflicts between labour and capital with the aim of overthrowing capitalism. Having failed to foment revolution in France, these radicals journeyed to America and became tramps, where ‘upon this prolific stock was soon grafted the dangerous communism of France … Then the tramp ceased to be merely a nuisance; he became a terror’.32 Employing the language of disease, Harris depicts his communistic tramps as a ‘pestilence which permeated society, and threatened the very life of the nation’ (p. 21). The novel claims that tramps have a secret code by which they communicate, written as signs on gateposts to indicate, among other things, whether the occupants of a particular house are easy marks (p. 24). Similar assertions would be made by later writers, including some tramps.33 In the context of the 1870s United States, such claims contributed to what Kenneth L. Kusmer refers to as ‘America’s first “red scare”’.34 Walt Whitman was similarly troubled by tramps. In ‘Poem of the Road’ (1855), sometimes titled ‘Song of the Open Road’, he had idealised tramping as a transcendental experience: I think heroic deeds were all conceived in the open  air, I think I could stop here myself, and do miracles, I think whatever I meet on the road I shall like, and   whoever beholds me shall like me, I think whoever I see must be happy.35

For the early Whitman, who had been a tramp printer in his youth, travellers are ‘happy’ because their tramping is voluntary. The road makes ‘heroic’ deeds possible in a way that is impossible when static or indoors. Meeting strangers while tramping is a jovial, convivial experience, since ‘whoever beholds me shall like me’. What the road represents is, of course, freedom: ‘From this hour I ordain myself loosed of limits and imaginary lines,/Going where I list – my own master’.36 Whitman’s representation of the road as a symbol of absolute liberty would be a significant influence

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on later writers, including Vachel Lindsay and Jack Kerouac, as well as the genre of the Road Movie. Despite his reputation as the poet of democracy, however, Whitman’s road is not open to everybody: ‘Come not here if you have already spent the best of yourself;/Only those may come, who come in sweet and determined bodies,/No diseased person – no rum-drinker or venereal taint is permitted here’.37 Associated with alcoholism and venereal disease, the tramp is barred from Whitman’s bodily-fascistic transient community. In 1879, an older Whitman expressed concern about the condition of real tramps in ‘Tramp and Strike Questions’, a lecture that was never given but was later published as part of Specimen Days and Collect (1882). The eponymous tramps and strikes are, he writes, ‘Two grim and spectral dangers – dangerous to peace, to health, to social security, to progress’. He bemoans the wealth gap between rich and poor, noting that the US was beginning to adopt European levels of inequality. He concludes that ‘If the United States, like the countries of the Old World, are also to grow vast crops of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, nomadic, miserably-waged populations, such as we see looming upon us of late years – steadily, even if slowly, eating into them – like a cancer of lungs or stomach – then our republican experiment, notwithstanding all its surface-successes, is at heart an unhealthy failure’. The diseased tramp bodies of ‘Poem of the Road’ have become the diseased political body. The road has lost its lure and now represents the failure of democracy, the potential results of which are ‘dynastic overturns, bloodshed, days, months, of terror’ akin to the days of the ‘The French Revolution’.38 Following the turn of the twentieth century, later commentators continued to worry that tramps represented a hidden army of potential revolutionaries. In 1916, for example, Charity Organisation Society secretary Frank Laubach ominously claimed that ‘When the hour of reckoning comes which shall determine whether or not we are to have a sanguinary class struggle, the number and power of our vagrants, who have been trained by years of harsh experience to live lawlessly and irresponsibly, will have much to do with deciding our fate’.39 In addition to these perceived political dangers, US newspapers portrayed tramps as a threat to the virtue of innocent (white) womanhood. Much print was devoted to the threat that tramps represented to women, who were allegedly at risk of assault whenever a poor stranger turned up at their door.40 So great was this apparent danger that the Chicago Tribune infamously, and only half-jokingly, suggested ‘putting a little strychnine or arsenic in the meat and other supplies offered to tramps’.41 Similarly, the folk song ‘Jay Gould’ (circa 1907) alludes to the widespread hatred of hobos and tramps: ‘Ole Jay Goul’ said, before he died,/ He’d fix a way fer

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hobos to ride./Said, “Ride on the bumpers, en’ ride on the rods,/En’ trust your life in the han’s uv God!”’42 The wealthy Robber Baron Jay Gould’s solution to hobos on his trains is to tell them to ride the rods and trust in God, ironical code for allowing them to die while performing an extremely dangerous manoeuvre.43 The song accepts the likely death of many tramps with light humour.44 Tramps fared little better in the labour press or with writers sympathetic to the cause of workers. In the late nineteenth century, craft unions such as the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) disregarded transient workers and did not seek to organise them, which left a gap that the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) would exploit upon its founding in 1905. ‘There has never been’, Nels Anderson wrote in 1923, ‘an effective permanent organisation among hobos’ because ‘The very nature of the hobo mind resents every kind of discipline that any form of organisation would impose. He is by circumstance, tradition and temperament an individualist’.45 This line of thinking can be traced back at least to Karl Marx, who in 1852 used the term ‘lumpenproletariat’, meaning ‘proletariat-in-rags’, to include: the foul and adventure-seeking dregs of the bourgeoise … vagabonds, dismissed soldiers, discharged convicts, runaway galley slaves, sharpers, jugglers, lazzarone, pickpockets, sleight-of-hand performers, gamblers, procurers, keepers of disorderly houses, porters, literarti, organ grinders, rag pickers, scissors grinders, tinkers, beggars – in short, that whole undefined, dissolute, kicked-about-mess that the Frenchmen style “la Boheme”.46

Or la Hoboheme, perhaps. This ‘refuse, offal and wreck of all classes’, Marx continues, played a reactionary role in the ascent of Louis Bonaparte III as autocrat over the French state, providing him with ‘the only class upon which he can depend unconditionally’, a mob that could be bribed easily and who were ready to go out onto the streets in support of dictatorship.47 This framing of tramps as a reactionary bulwark became the orthodoxy among labour writers and thinkers. ‘Socialists’, Socialist Party leader Victor Berger noted in 1911, ‘have a prejudice against the submerged part of the proletariat’ because the tramp ‘furnishes strikebreakers and deputy sheriffs in economic struggles and furnishes floating voters at different elections’.48 Seen as the force behind strikes by conservative writers and as strikebreakers by traditional unions it seemed, to paraphrase the title of infamous ‘yegg’ (hobo criminal) author Jack Black’s autobiography, that tramps simply could not win.49 For the radical propagandist Lucy Parsons, the answer was simple: since they could not be part of a union movement, the tramps’ most useful

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function was to blow themselves up. In 1884 Parsons wrote ‘A Word to Tramps’, in which she argued that tramps ‘need no organization … In fact, an organization would be a detriment to you’. Instead, transients driven to the brink of suicide after being turned out of employment should ‘Stop!’ Rather than discouraging self-destruction, however, she asks them to also take out a member of the bourgeoise: ‘each of you hungry tramps who read these lines avail yourselves of those little methods of warfare which Science has placed in the hands of the poor man, and you will become a power in this or any other land. Learn the use of explosives! [italics in original]’.50 The highest aspiration for a tramp is to become a suicide bomber. By 1905, however, Parsons had clearly changed her mind, since she was one of the founding members of the IWW, the primary object of which was to organise footloose workers, tramps and hobos.51 By the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, the IWW and the International Brotherhood Welfare Association (IBWA) had fashioned a new identity for hobos, one that involved dropping the prefix ‘lumpen’ and reframing them as fully-fledged members of the proletariat.

1.2  Laziness and Unemployment: Transiency as a Site of Study Julia Leyda argues that mobility as a result of capitalist economic failure, which she calls ‘negative mobility’, first ‘preoccupied America’ during the Great Depression.52 In fact, in the decades leading up to the 1930s writers had already made increasingly serious attempts to understand impoverished transients. These attempts began as social investigation by writers who sought to get close to tramps and hobos, sometimes by living ‘on the road’ themselves. Efforts became more rigorous during the first quarter of the twentieth century, coinciding with the birth of sociology as an academic discipline. This shift to more serious study was concomitant with an increased understanding of the role that unemployment, a concept that did not exist in the nineteenth century, played in creating transiency. A greater focus on economics led to more sympathetic analyses. However, early twentieth-century accounts still emphasised the individualism of transients, including their psychology, in dismissive and problematic ways. The earliest attempts to study tramps were from casual observers, most of whom continued the tradition of emphasising laziness as the cause of tramping. Allan Pinkerton, founder of the notorious strikebreaking ‘detective’ agency that bore his name, wrote with sympathy for tramping labourers, having previously been one himself. In Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives (1878), an account of the role of his agency in suppressing

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workers during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, Pinkerton rhapsodises on tramping: ‘If you walk, what a new world has opened! … What drinking of deep, pure draughts from sparkling springs and from old, mosscovered buckets … What quaint villages … waving fields, cattle-covered meadows, and wooded hills. What sunrises; what sunsets; what splendid skies; what storms; and then, what rare sunshine again’.53 As this description indicates, Pinkerton’s idealised tramp belongs in the country and far away from industry. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, he argues that ‘hard times’ are responsible for an increase in the number of transients, and that they are not deserving of ‘severe measures’ (p. 66). Yet while tramps merit sympathy, strikers are ‘venomous reptiles’ seeking to impose communism on the US (p. 249). He says that tramps do not cause strikes, but rather, like ‘vultures scenting prey’, they exploit them (p. 266). Describing a riot in Pittsburgh, he claims that ‘hundreds of thieves, communists, and tramps, too cowardly to fight, but just shrewd enough to be on hand for prey, were ready to take advantage of any opportunity, and were soon among the mob, urging its members to greater excesses’ (p. 261). For Pinkerton, tramps are lazy scavengers who are ready to take advantage of any slip-up in capital’s surveillance and management of labour. Muckraking photojournalist Jacob Riis, whose politics were far more progressive than Pinkerton’s, agreed that tramps were inherently lazy. Indeed, while Riis blames poor housing for the dire condition of many of the working poor, he has little compassion for tramps. In How The Other Half Lives (1890), he refers to ‘the tramp’ of New York City’s The Bend slum area as ‘the unclean beast of dishonest idleness’, and an ‘abomination’ who ‘skulks’ among ‘the ash-barrels of the city’.54 He describes the migratory habits of transient workers, who leave the city for work on the railways or harvesting during the warmer months and ‘return in the fall to prey on the city’ (p. 57). He claims that tramps are characterised by laziness and a love of alcohol: ‘next to idleness, the tramp loves rum’ (p. 57). In an oft-cited moment in the book, he offers to pay a pipe-smoking rag-picker ten cents to sit for a photograph. The man agrees but, aware that his pipe has caught Riis’ attention, puts the implement in his pocket, saying ‘it was not included in the contract, and that it was worth a quarter to have it go in the picture’. Riis comments: ‘The man, scarce ten seconds employed at honest labor, even at sitting down, at which he was an undoubted expert, had gone on strike’ (p. 58). His sardonic use of the term ‘strike’ and his reference to the man being an ‘expert’ at sitting down suggests that the lazy tramp is asking for extra money because he wants something for nothing. In his autobiography The Making of an American (1901), Riis describes how

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he spent time as a transient worker, but he attempts to distance himself from other tramps by showing how he won his wife, Elizabeth, through hard work, including as a railroad labourer. It is through hard work that he makes himself, a Danish immigrant, into an American, according to the ideological terms of the book’s title. Those who refuse to work as hard are undeserving of sympathy and should be inculcated with ‘habits of industry’ at ‘farm schools’.55 Riis takes his disciplinarian approach so far that he even advocates against soup kitchens on the basis that free food allows tramps to ‘take it easy’ and avoid work (p. 337). Slumming investigator Walter Wykoff, a middle-class graduate of Harvard University, likewise emphasised tramp laziness. In ‘A Day With a Tramp’ (1901), an article written after he had published his two volumes of undercover social investigation, The Workers, an Experiment in Reality: The East (1897) and The Workers, an Experiment in Reality: The West (1898), he claims that tramps and hobos are characterised by an unwillingness to work. The article tells the story of a meeting with a man who has become disillusioned with labour, and whose tramp status Wykoff presents as an internal moral struggle. After weeks of unemployment, the man is losing the habit of industriousness, a situation which, like Riis, Wykoff blames on informal charity. In a convenient development, Wyckoff and the tramp travel towards the man’s home town, and then a human ‘drama’ unfolds: ‘Was he man enough to hold fast to his chance [of steady employment] or would he allow himself to drift?’, the author asks.56 The tramp wins his struggle, presumably thanks to Wykoff’s improving influence, but the article leaves unsolved the problem of the millions of other idle and potentially idle future tramps. The work of Josiah Flynt Willard, who wrote under the name Josiah Flynt, was particularly influential on popular understandings of the hobo, perhaps because he had the perceived authority of having lived as a transient worker. When Jack London came to write The Road (1907), he dedicated it ‘To Josiah Flynt, The Real Thing, Blowed in the Glass’ [italics in original]’.57 In fact, Flynt’s time on the road was relatively brief (8 months), and he would only later return to freight-hopping with a pass, having been employed by the railroad as a special agent to spy on and catch tramps, and also to gauge how efficiently the railroad police were doing their jobs. As befits this employment, his book Tramping With Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life (1899) presents itself as a form of top-down surveillance, opening with a letter from an American ambassador, Andrew White, who claims that the book is ‘of great value’ because of the light that it shines on ‘a great and powerful criminal class’.58

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Like earlier writers, Flynt insisted that tramps were lazy drunkards whose tramping was entirely voluntary. Writing that ‘the tramp is, in a certain sense, the maker and chooser of his own career’, he denies that economics is a factor: ‘That the American tramp is the result of the fluctuations of the labor-market, as some claim, I do not believe. The American tramp does not want work, as a rule’.59 Having spent time in Germany, where he earnt a Ph.D, he adapts the German term Wanderlust and argues that tramps are attracted to transiency because of a ‘love of wandering’.60 He argues that wanderlust is a ‘disease’ that affects young boys who, rather than being punished, ought to be ‘pathologically treated by medical men’.61 Flynt’s wanderlust thesis would be influential in discourse around tramping, primarily with novelists, memoirists, poets and journalists. While at times sympathetic, Flynt also portrays tramps as less than human, referring to them as ‘human parasites’ and conflating them with criminals more generally (p.ix). Utilising contemporary language around degeneration, he refers to tramps as ‘degenerate Americans’ who are ‘the victims of a pure and simple laziness handed down from generation to generation until it has become a chronic family disease’ (p. 30). Yet he also writes positively about transient life, arguing that tramps have a higher than average willpower, self-control, stoicism, and intelligence. Flynt claims that criminologists are often deceived in their studies because ‘Many times and in many cases the criminal is a little cleverer than the people who are examining him’ (p. 20). Using the recently-coined term ‘hobo’, he argues that a ‘true hobo’ is the best kind of tramp, and that his ‘success in vagabondage depends largely on distinct and indispensable traits of character – diligence, patience, nerve, and politeness’ (p. 138). This more positive aspect of his representation appealed to later authors, notably London. A mixture of dehumanisation and admiration, then, Flynt’s writings are also some of the earliest representations of the ‘hobo’ as a tramp set apart by superior personal qualities and lifestyle. Unlike the later image of the hobo promoted by the IBWA, however, for Flynt the hobo makes it a point of principle to obtain a living without working. The stereotype of the lazy transient proved tenacious even when evidence to the contrary was available. Perhaps the clearest example of this is that of John James McCook, Professor of Modern Languages at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, who, having made one of the first studies of tramps, ignored the evidence of his own survey for over a decade. In 1891 McCook wrote to forty city mayors across the US, providing each of them with 150 blank one-page surveys, which he requested be filled out by city authorities upon the institutionalising of a transient seeking temporary

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accommodation. He received 1349 responses to his ‘Casual Lodgers or Tramps’ survey, which then formed the basis for a series of articles and lectures over the next ten years. He also sent out a second survey, this time to police stations, to be filled out upon the arrest of vagrants. In his subsequent writings, McCook followed previous authors in stating that people become tramps to avoid work. In an 1893 article, claiming that ‘Neither the tramp’s age nor his health … is a bar to successful labor’, he notes with disproval that ‘a third’ of tramps ‘took to the road … within twenty-four hours after their last real job of work; nearly half of them within a week, a four-fifths of them within four weeks of its close’. Although 82.8 per cent of those surveyed said that they took to the road due to a lack of work, he perceives ‘admirable candor’ only in the small number who claim that they were ‘tired of work’ or ‘wanted to take life easy’. His use of the term ‘candor’ implies that he only believes these latter claims, which in turn implies that he does not believe the vast majority of his respondents who had given different answers.62 Continuing to ignore his own evidence, in 1895 McCook wrote that ‘nearly always through mushy, soft hearted kindness, or ill judged, misdirected charity, they [tramps] make the discovery that they can get enough to eat and drink and wear and even to gratify the still grosser animal instincts … though doing nothing, or nothing more serious than odd jobs’.63 He made several recommendations for the reduction of vagrancy, including ‘Don’t let people make the fatal discovery … that they can live without work’.64 Eventually, however, McCook realised, at least in part, that he was wrong. This change of mind came in a series of articles entitled ‘Leaves from the Diary of a Tramp’, publications which focus on his correspondence with a long-time transient called William Aspinwall, also known as ‘Roving Bill’. In these articles McCook quotes from Aspinwall’s letters: ‘My tramp friend, Roving Bill, is constantly urging in his letters that the greater proportion of the tramp population are … men “out of work”…’. Having previously denied this, and despite several other instances in which he mocks and patronises Aspinwall during ‘Leaves from the Diary of a Tramp’, by 1902 McCook had come to realise that Roving Bill was correct. ‘I must confess’, he admits, ‘my earlier impressions were against the theory of any connection whatsoever between tramping and trade’ but after examining statistics which show there were greater numbers of men on the road during periods of economic downturn, he was now ‘inclined to a different view’.65 This shift in McCook’s thinking, whether prompted purely by statistics or also by his correspondence with Roving Bill, is emblematic of a wider turn-of-the-century shift towards an emphasis on un- or underemployment

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as the main cause of tramping. By 1915 this meant, as Kusmer notes, that ‘sympathetic statements about the homeless were the norm, not the exception’.66 This more sympathetic view was concomitant with a move towards more rigorous academic studies, at least compared to the impressionistic social observation of Wykoff and Flynt. In 1911, for example, Alice Solenberger’s One Thousand Homeless Men, which Cresswell calls ‘The first systematic survey of vagrancy in the United States’, was published posthumously.67 In contrast to Flynt, Solenberger states that ‘the most potent’ cause of vagrancy ‘is the seasonal and irregular character of employment in a good many trades and occupations’, especially in the Midwest.68 She rejects the wanderlust thesis, claiming that most ‘homeless men drift into tramp life not because of an instinct to wander’ but because ‘they become accustomed to this manner of living and are later unwilling or unable to abandon it’ (p. 211).69 As this suggests, she retains a moralistic emphasis on idleness. While her discussion of precarious employment leads to a structural understanding of how idleness first emerges, for Solenberger ‘the question will always be how to keep him [the tramp] at work’ (p. 154). One proposed answer, intended for those vagrants who are ‘lazy by temperament’, is ‘compulsory labor colonies … where habits of industry may be inculcated’ (p. 183). Sympathy, it seems, would only stretch so far. Competing with economic theories of vagrancy were the Social Darwinists. Charles Davenport, Director of Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, advocated a theory of racial nomadism to explain transiency. For Davenport, tramps lacked an inhibitory mechanism to repress wanderlust: ‘Nomads, of all kinds, have a special racial trait – are, in a proper sense, members of the nomadic race. This trait is the absence of the germinal determiner that makes for sedentariness, stability, domesticity’ [italics in original].70 Arguing that ‘a tendency to periodicity [wandering] is an inheritable trait’, he claims that ‘the nomadic impulse depends upon the absence of a simple sex-linked gene that “determines” domesticity’.71 Having allegedly found a gene for domesticity, it is then straightforward to assert that transients are not domestic, since, as discussed in the Introduction, the tramp’s supposed lack of family connections was a longstanding stereotype. Davenport’s excessive claims did not find many followers, and later academic studies tended to focus on nurture rather than nature to explain transiency. Yet while they changed the mechanism – culture, rather than genes – through which traits are passed on, later researchers did retain Davenport’s concern with inheritability. Carleton Parker’s studies of vagrancy combined an awareness of economic conditions with an interest in behavioural psychology. In his role as

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Executive Secretary for the State Immigration and Housing Commission of California, Parker prepared a report for the Governor of California, Hiram Johnson, on the labour unrest that had led to the killing of workers and police during the infamous 1913 Wheatland hop riot. In this report he showed concern for the working conditions in the hop fields while condemning the activities of the IWW. Parker would later become Head of the Business Department and Dean of the School of Business Administration at the University of Washington, where he continued his investigations into the labour situation in the American West, writing articles that were posthumously compiled into book form as The Casual Laborer and Other Essays (1920). Influenced by Sigmund Freud, Parker claims that hobos suffer from an inferiority complex, and that strikes are ‘The most notable inferiority compensation in industrial life’.72 The supposed negative habits of hobos included ‘laziness, inefficiency, destructiveness in strikes etc’, resulting from ‘a sort of industrial psychosis’ (p. 53) as well as from the ‘wander instinct’, which is ‘a stereotyped mental disease’ (pp. 162–163). These psychic illnesses are not inherent but are present in the hobo population due to their living conditions and way of life, which is forced upon them by the need to move around for work (p. 86). ‘Each year’, he argues, finds the hobo ‘physically in worse disrepair, psychologically more hopeless, morally more bitter and anti-social’ (p. 121). Seen in this light, migratory labourers should not ‘be studied as isolated revolutionaries, but rather as, on the whole, tragic symptoms of a sick social order’ (p. 88). Fixing this social sickness requires improving workers’ lives and labouring conditions. Summarising the IWW’s outlook as ‘in its simple reduction, a stomach philosophy’, he argues that ‘Had food and shelter been sufficient, the revolt tendencies might have simmered out’, although he also notes that ‘It is unfortunate that the scientific findings of our social condition must use words which sound strangely like the phraseology of the Socialists’ (p. 103 & p. 123). Parker’s work utilises behavioural psychology to understand strikers and hobos rather than, as in the work of Flynt and others, to control or condemn them. However, his patronising analysis removes all rationality and agency from striking workers, pathologizing countercultural and anti-capitalistic action as mental illness.73 During the first two decades of the twentieth century, investigators shifted from demonising hobos and tramps to seeking to understand them. Yet these attempts were framed by middle-class assumptions and expectations, particularly regarding the desirability of what Max Weber famously called the Protestant work ethic. For these investigators, capitalism was an unquestionable good, and tramps and hobos represented a potential

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threat to its hegemonic philosophy of hard work. This was the context in which many US transients sought to organise themselves into a counterculture. As the final section of this chapter will show, they attempted to speak back against demeaning portrayals of transiency and to explore radical ideas aimed at creating a new society. Despite its often revolutionary discourse, however, much of hobohemian culture remained wedded to conventional notions of race, gender and the work ethic. This created what I term the ‘frontier defence’: the argument that transient workers were a second wave of pioneers, responsible for creating the modern US, who possessed American-exceptionalist qualities of self-reliance, individualism, and a desire for freedom. This defence, which I discuss in more detail in Chapter 5, gendered and racialised the hobo as a white, single American male, creating the popular image of the hobo that persists to this day.

1.3  Hobos, Tramps, and Bums: Transient Self-Representation Transient workers created several organisations with the aim of coordinating themselves for better working conditions and for recognition from mainstream US culture. Among these were the IBWA, founded in 1906 by the ‘Millionaire Hobo’ James Eads How, which established a series of ‘Hobo Colleges’ to provide accommodation and education for transient workers. The largest college was in Chicago, run for a time by Dr. Ben Reitman, Chicago’s notorious ‘clap doctor’, who was also the former stage manager for (and lover of) the anarchist orator Emma Goldman. Distinguishing it from more traditional seats of Higher Education, Roger Bruns depicts Reitman’s hobo college as ‘part community center, part debating forum, part ego trip, part educational institution’, although exactly how this description differs from a typical University setting is unclear.74 According to visitor Harry Beardsely, the college ran ‘courses in law, for workers, economics for workers, public speaking, English composition and literature’, Friday nights were ‘devoted to labor history and debates’, while Sunday was ‘open forum night’.75 During the law classes ‘the hobos are taught their status in the various states and cities, and informed of new legislation that affects them’, especially the various tramp and vagrancy laws (p. 12). The college even ran a debate night between a three-person team of hobos and a team from the University of Chicago, a debate which the hobo team won.76 The IBWA also carried out its mission to inform and educate through its monthly street publication the “Hobo” News, which was produced from 1915 until at least 1923 (and, following a split in the IBWA, briefly under

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the title Hobo World from 1923 until at least 1924), and which was sold not just in the US but also in England, Scotland, Ireland, Japan and Sweden.77 In the US, the paper was distributed by hobos as they moved across the country; sellers kept a portion of the sales for themselves, a model that is used by street publications to this day.78 In contrast to the mockery of tramp comedy or the demonisation and pathologising of middle-class investigators and sociologists, the “Hobo” News provided a platform for transients to demonstrate their intelligence, agency and humour. They wrote articles on hobo life, short works of fiction, poetry, jokes and opinion pieces. The “Hobo” News campaigned against vagrancy laws, giving arguments that would eventually be echoed by the US Supreme Court in 1972 when it declared those laws unconstitutional.79 The paper also campaigned for socialistic and progressive political reform in other areas, including advocating for a ‘living wage’.80 While the paper was written with a male audience in mind and did contain a number of sexist jokes, by the early 1920s it featured an increasing number of female authors. It also gave space to Kittie Solomon, whom I discuss in Chapter 4. However, the “Hobo” News reinforced rather than challenged hobohemia’s racial exclusions, featuring occasional racist humour as well as writing for an assumed white readership.81 As mentioned above, the IWW also tried to organise hobos as a class. While the IBWA sought socialistic reform within the systemic of representative democracy, the IWW, known by their nickname ‘the Wobblies’, advocated for the overthrow of existing capitalist institutions and their replacement by a syndicalist model of worker self-organisation. Another key difference between the organisations was that the IWW was first and foremost a union. Founded in 1905, the IWW were successful in organising transient labourers, especially in the Midwest and West, who had been ignored by traditional craft unions. The union gained a reputation for being able to organise disparate and multi-racial coalitions of workers, most famously during the 1912 ‘Bread and Roses’ strike and the pre-WWI free speech fights. The Wobblies contributed to the cultural aspects of hobohemia through their newspapers Industrial Worker and Industrial Solidarity, which featured, among others, the humourist Matti Valentinpoika Huhta, also known as T-Bone Slim, who is the main focus of Chapter 6. As well as being a newspaper columnist Slim was also a songwriter – music being another medium through which the IWW spread its message in the fields, mines, camps, and hobo jungles. Indeed, the Wobblies became known as a ‘singing union’, and their ‘Little Red Songbook’ was a common sight among transients. Their most famous songwriter, Joe Hill, achieved fame

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beyond the IWW following his infamously unjust trial and execution in 1915. Hill’s songs were satirical takes on employers, the capitalist system and, in the case of his well-known ‘The Preacher and the Slave’ (1911), religion. In this song, which he wrote to the tune of the popular hymn ‘In the Sweet Bye-and Bye’, Hill coined the phrase ‘Pie in the Sky’ to encapsulate the promises of organisations like the Salvation Army, parodied as ‘The Starvation Army’, which assured workers that they would receive everything that they deserved in the next life, but which offered no practical help in this one.82 In using humour to get their revolutionary message across, Hill and Slim contributed to the cultural milieu of hobohemia as one in which hobos would withstand hardship with a wry, cynical outlook.83 Unlike the other unions of the day, which barred membership not only to hobos but also to women and people of colour, the IWW was openly multiracial. Its position was that racial discrimination was not only wrong in itself but also that it weakened the working class by causing division. Indeed, it was this tactical aspect of racism that concerned the Wobblies most, which may in part explain why the union struggled to recruit non-white members. A notable exception was Ben Fletcher, a black IWW leader who was friends with T-Bone Slim and whose contribution to labour history has been overlooked until recently.84 In addition, while women and families found prominent organising roles within the union, the IWW’s iconography idealised the muscular bodies of white men to the exclusion of black, female and disabled workers.85 As a result, even if the reality was that the IWW did involve (relatively) significant numbers of female organisers, its contribution to the representation of transiency within hobohemia remained steadfastly conservative during the period under consideration. Both the IWW and IBWA advocated for hobos on the basis that they were workers. To do this, they made a distinction between hobos and other kinds of transients. Such distinctions had been made in casual ways since the late nineteenth century. In 1898, for example, former transient E. Lamar Bailey asserted that ‘A hobo is a better sort of man than a tramp’ since while the latter ‘has no higher aim than to exist and to “have a little fun” occasionally, avoiding responsibility and restraint’, the former, having more ‘self-respect’, is merely ‘out of work’ and ‘forced to the road by circumstances’.86 For Bailey, a hobo is a worker while a tramp seeks to avoid labour. Mainstream society, he writes, should treat the two with distinction, for while ‘You can hardly save a tramp: he is too far gone … The hobo may be saved’ through charity and, in the longer term,

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employment.87 Bailey’s argument anticipates the ways in which ‘tramp’ and ‘hobo’ would soon become sites of contested meaning. During the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, the two terms were used interchangeably by most writers of transiency, including Leon Ray Livingston and Jack London. But by around 1920 most writers, and probably most transients, had adopted a distinction along the lines of that credited to Ben Reitman by Nels Anderson: ‘The hobo works and wanders, the tramp dreams and wanders and the bum drinks and wanders’. Anderson also cites Irwin St John Tucker, who like Reitman was for a time manager of the IBWA’s Chicago Hobo College: ‘A hobo is a migratory worker. A tramp is a migratory non-worker. A bum is a stationary non-worker’.88 Many hobos added static workers to this list, whom they called the ‘homeguard’: a derogatory term which implied that stationary workers do not face the same dangers as those who operate on the front line of the war between labour and capital. The IBWA aggressively promoted Reitman’s tripartite distinction, particularly in the pages of the “Hobo” News, where it is repeated ad nauseum for propagandistic effect. In order to maintain this ideological distinction between hobos, tramps and bums, the organisation went to great lengths to overlook the reality that all transients had periods in and out of work, periods of movement and stasis, as well as the fact that many of them drank and, when necessary, begged. Despite these contradictions, so many transients adopted the distinction that it became a dogmatic assertion within hobohemia.89 The IBWA’s progressive politics notwithstanding, the Reitman–IBWA distinction was fundamentally conservative because it sought to humanise hobos at the expense of tramps. Rather than seeking redress or political change on the basis of a shared basic humanity, the definition implied that a person’s worth could be measured by their labour. This created a hierarchy of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ tramps, with only the former group warranting respect, recognition, and support. This typology left the tramp and the bum as despised and dehumanised figures. In advocating for the rights of the hobo, the IBWA were prepared to leave some fellow Americans without rights. Indeed, the fact that tramps and bums remained (deservedly) without rights was an integral part of hobo self-assertion. It was through their dissimilarity from supposedly less-worthy transients that many hobos made a claim for citizenship. For its part, the IWW constructed a version of the hobo as a worker on the capitalist frontier. The union idealised the hobo as a second wave of pioneer, adopting frontier mythology of rugged independence, manliness and rebellion. ‘The nomadic worker’, claimed one Wobbly writer in 1914,

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has a ‘cheerful cynicism’ and ‘frank and outspoken contempt for most of the conventions of bourgeois society’, which makes him ‘less servile than his fellow worker’.90 Many later writers and historians would uncritically adopt the image of the heroic pioneer hobo in implicit or explicit contrast to the tramp and bum, as well as to women or transients of colour.91 In part the idealisation of the hobo allowed transient workers, who had been portrayed as lazy or inept in most mainstream representations, to feel a sense of superiority. But it also had a more practical aspect: since it was a term for someone who crossed state lines without visible means of support, ‘tramp’ was a designation that many transients wished to avoid for legal reasons. It must be noted, however, that while the IWW and IBWA had apparent success in promoting ‘hobo’ as a privileged term within the transient community, the police remained indifferent to the distinction. Whether they called themselves hobos or tramps, transients were just as likely to be arrested for vagrancy or trespassing on the railways.

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Part II

The Vagabond and the Tramp

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chapter 2

In Search of Experience: Vagabond Travel Narratives

But the lives I’ve lived and suffered paid me more than poverty: They paid me in the golden coin of song; They paid me in Song’s golden coin … those days were never lost. If I had died a hundred deaths it well were worth the cost; For I beheld America – Her sunrise kissed my brow, – I learned to sing the miracle of living here and now!

Harry Kemp, ‘Experience’ (1920)1

how is a poor man to ascend Vesuvius?

Lee Meriwether, A Tramp Trip; How to See Europe on Fifty Cents a Day (1886).2

In British–American author Francis Hodgson Burnett’s novel Vagabondia: a Love Story (1884), a group of relatively poor young people, whom the narrator terms vagabonds, try ‘to enjoy themselves in sheer defiance of circumstances’ by living a bohemian existence in London.3 In treating life in a ‘light-hearted, perhaps light-headed fashion’, the denizens of Vagabondia set themselves against the bourgeois standards of those they call the Philistines.4 This insistence on enjoyment despite a lack of wealth is, I claim, the defining characteristic of the modern vagabond. Having been a legal category since Late Medieval and Early Modern times, by the late nineteenth century the vagabond had evolved into a bohemian literary type.5 Poets and novelists including Bliss Carmen, Richard Hovey, and William Locke exploited the romance of the literary vagabond figure, as did authors of travel narratives, some of whom styled themselves explicitly as vagabonds.6 In her discussion of female European Orientalist travel writing, Dúnlaith Bird states that although vagabondage represented ‘an alternative economy of travel’, it has been ‘largely neglected in travel 47

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writing theory’.7 Indeed, vagabond travelogues have been overlooked by both literary and American studies, presumably because vagabonds travelled internationally and so do not fit the American Exceptionalist legacy of the hobo. Yet vagabond travelogues represent an important genre of US travel writing, one which had a significant influence upon writers of hobo memoirs. The vagabond travel narrative, as a subset of US travel literature, developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Key figures in its development, as I will show, were Ralph Keeler, Lee Meriwether, and Harry Franck. Vagabond travel writing combines the travelogue with the slumming narrative.8 Its authors are typically white men who choose temporary impoverishment, either for the spectacle of travelling without money or, as I discuss in relation to Vachel Lindsay, for reasons that are more esoteric. Vagabonds travel to acquire what I call ‘experiential capital’: a term that designates the accumulation of experience, as in the conceit of Harry Kemp’s poem in the first epigraph to this Chapter. The vagabond explicitly sets themself apart from the sightseeing tourist, who looks but does not truly see the lands through which they travel. Unlike touristic travel writing, vagabond travel narratives concern themselves with witnessing the life of ‘the people’. The vagabond’s lack of money means that they experience fatigue and hunger. Yet the difficulties of travelling without money are handled lightly in vagabond narratives. The struggle to acquire experiential capital leads to many instances of what I am calling, taking my inspiration from the British Board of Film Classification, ‘mild peril’.9 This peril, which is easily overcome, provides the vagabond travelogue with narrative tension and humour. This contrasts with European female vagabonde travel writers for whom, according to Bird, ‘personal danger’ is ‘a distinguishing feature’.10 The vagabond uses white privilege to get by. This is the vagabond travel narrative’s primary contradiction, since the spectacle of a lack of class privilege is covered over by another form of privilege that the vagabond rarely acknowledges. The more spiritual vagabond travel writers also set themselves against modernity, as symbolised by cities, industrialism, and the train. This anti-modernity contrasts with the writings of hobos, who tend to idealise the train as both enabling (illicit) travel and as a danger to be overcome. The vagabond’s uneasy relationship with the hobo is most clearly elucidated in the writings of Vachel Lindsay, who attempts to separate himself from transient labourers but whose work, as I will argue below, also shows a reluctant solidarity with them.

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2.1  Sightseeing without Money: Ralph Keeler, Lee Meriwether, and Harry Franck The first third of Ralph Keeler’s autobiography Vagabond Adventures (1870) describes his life when, as a young child in the 1840s and early 1850s, he ran away from home, slept rough, and obtained work in a blackface minstrel troupe. As its title suggests, Vagabond Adventures emphasises the fun of being a transient rather than its difficulties or risks.11 Though there is obvious danger involved in being a homeless child, the tone of Keeler’s reminiscences is light and humorous.12 He emphasises that he was a joyous and hopeful youth: ‘This utter recklessness I can scarcely understand now. It requires, I suppose, more years and experience than I had then to learn the knack of despairing’ (p. 67). He feels companionship with nature, as when he sweeps the remains of his meal of crackers into the river as food for ‘my fellow-vagabonds, the minnows’ (p. 69). Poverty teaches him the value of frugality, and he wonders ‘whether it is not better to devote half of one’s energies in learning to live on a very small income than to devote all of one’s energies in struggling and waiting miserably for a very large income’ (p. 98). Keeler also describes his career as a child blackface performer. Minstrelsy was a theatrical form that enabled him to use the structural privilege of whiteness, as well as what Eric Lott calls the ‘interracial identification’ inherent in minstrelsy, for economic gain.13 The power dynamic inherent to this theatrical form is clear in Keeler’s description of Ephraim, a free black man who followed the company from town-to-town until they agreed to take him on as a baggage carrier. Ephraim is described as ‘one of the most comical specimens of the negro species’ (p. 139). Though Keeler admires the man’s loyalty, this admiration is based on Ephriam’s willing subservience to his white employers. Keeler’s white privilege provides him comfort and a sense of superiority. Indeed, since as David R. Roediger rightly notes, ‘blackface minstrels were the first self-consciously white entertainers’ [italics in original], it is Keeler’s time as a blackface performer that constructs him as a white man, one whose poverty sits alongside the independent spirit that whiteness had come to connote.14 This independence, which contrasts with Ephriam’s servility, establishes Keeler’s vagabond constitution. Keeler eventually leaves the troupe and travels to Europe, where he disguises himself as a Handswerkburshce, ‘the knight-errant of the bundle and staff’, and attempts to live without an income (p. 249). He delights in the activities that can be undertaken for free, including the parks, gardens,

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galleries and boulevards of Paris, which were ‘as free to me, the vagabond stranger, as they were to the greatest Prince’ (p. 261). He feels particular satisfaction in having these experiences for free. Though Keeler keeps his tone light-hearted, he also describes being unable to afford food, as well as smoking and even visiting the Paris morgues to distract from his hunger (p. 264). These difficulties represent the vagabond’s struggle to acquire what money would make easy, but they also bring additional pleasure upon the acquisition of experience. Keeler concludes Vagabond Adventures by drawing an explicit contrast between his book and tourist guidebooks: ‘there are means and modes of travel unknown to the guide-books … there are cheap ways for the student and man of limited means to see and learn much for little money’ (p. 272). While Keeler contrasts Vagabond Adventures with tourist guidebooks, his work was in fact a precursor to the vagabond travelogue, a prototype for a new type of guidebook that would become popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. *** Although Keeler references travel writing at the end of Vagabond Adventures, his book is structured as an autobiography rather than a guide. In addition, his lack of money was real and not simply a stunt for the benefit of attracting a readership. Lee Meriwether’s A Tramp Trip; How to See Europe on Fifty Cents a Day (1886), by contrast, was the first vagabond travelogue whose author chose temporary impoverishment and then attempted to travel abroad without money for the spectacle of the attempt. By doing so, Meriwether created the first US vagabond travel narrative. A slumming travelogue in which its author disguised himself as a tramp, A Tramp Trip is a mixture of different writing modes, consisting of a report into the labour conditions of Europe, which he submitted to the US Secretary of the Interior, text that originally appeared in several newspapers, and original material written exclusively for the book. Unlike a touristic travel narrative, A Tramp Trip concerns itself with investigating the wages (p. 150), costs of living (p. 70), and housing conditions (p. 29) of the European working classes. While undertaking this social investigation, Meriwether also attempted to sightsee on a small income. In addition to reporting on European labour conditions, A Tramp Trip is a guidebook for vagabond travellers. Meriwether gives ‘hints on pedestrianism’ for those among his readers who ‘care to make such a trip in person’ (p. 272). He provides a list of ‘Rules for Tramp Tourists’ (italics in original), which include ‘Look as shabby as possible’ and ‘feign absolute ignorance’ of the local language (p. 48). The book concludes with several blank pages

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headed ‘Travel Journal’ for those who wish to make notes on their own journeys. This indicates that the author intended his book to be taken abroad, much as tourists would take the popular Baedeker travel guides on their foreign trips. Indeed, A Tramp Trip sets itself up as a rival to the Baedeker series, which recurs in the narrative as a representative of traditional tourism. For example, Meriwether notes that while the Reichstag building is ‘interesting’, the fact of its being ‘ordinary-looking’ means that it is ‘not “starred” by Baedeker’ and, as a result, most tourists pass by without noticing it (p. 241). He criticises the Baedeker series for shaping the tourist experience as inauthentic: rather than being alive to the real Germany in front of them, Baedeker readers seek the sights that correspond to their guidebooks. At Pompeii, Meriwether states that ‘the opera-glass, red-book people’, who are more interested in their books than the ruins around them, spoil the landscape for the vagabond (pp. 40–1). The tourist feels ‘no emotion, no sentiment, no romance … He is only careful to check off what he sees, that he may not mistake and waste time over the same sight again’ (p. 113).15 He refuses to describe the main sights of ancient Rome in detail, since ‘They are fully described in the guidebooks’ (p. 61). In contrast to the tourist, who takes the train and so misses out on important experiences, Meriwether walks. When walking, he says, ‘You can make your own time schedule … That old castle on the hill to the right looks interesting. From the train, if seen at all, it is only a glimpse; but the pedestrian sallies gayly forth, ascends the hill at leisure’ (p. 274). Such vagabondage enables the traveller to, in masculinist language, ‘penetrate below the surface’ to see the real life of the countries visited (‘Preface’, p. 9). The central questions of A Tramp Trip, which would become the central questions of the vagabond travel narrative more generally, are How can X be afforded? and, if it cannot be afforded, How can the author achieve or acquire X in the absence of money? Typically X is food, shelter, or some kind of cultural pursuit that the tourist would be able to obtain easily but which requires frugality or ingenuity for the vagabond. Meriwether pays close attention to the details of his finances, as when describing himself ‘living on ten or twelve cents a day’ and seeking out meals that cost ‘three and a half to four and a half cents’ (p. 180, p. 184). He takes pleasure in this frugality: ‘How we enjoyed that frugal meal!’ (p. 111). Unlike for the workingclass Keeler, however, these pleasures are made possible by Meriwether’s privileged position as a man who received a regular stipend from the US government. While his temporary lack of money does cause some inconveniences, A Tramp Trip never suggests that its author is approaching genuine starvation, and so the threat of poverty remains slight.

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The acquisition of X often leads to mild peril. For example, Meriwether expresses a desire to climb Mount Vesuvius in order to visit the site of Pompeii but notes that ‘The stick renter charges for the use of his stick, the strap-bearer for his strap, the chair-carrier for his muscle and chair and altogether, one hundred and sixty lire will hardly more than cover the trip. With such figures how is a poor man to ascend Vesuvius?’ (p.  31). This question encapsulates the vagabond’s struggle to sightsee for free. The solution is for Meriwether to climb Vesuvius without aid, to take his own food with him, and to sneak into Pompeii at night. Having achieved this, he decides to sleep inside the petrified Roman village, but is woken by a guard who promptly arrests him: ‘I was lodged in jail, and the next morning brought before an officer of justice, charged with the heinous crime of sleeping in the dead city of Pompeii’ (p. 35). As the hyperbole of ‘heinous crime’ might suggest, he did not face serious legal jeopardy in this incident: despite having endangered culturally important archaeology, he is let off with a simple reprimand. The lack of true risk makes this sequence of events appear humorous. The use of humour to undermine the seriousness of apparent danger, the mildness of the peril, as it were, becomes a standard feature of US vagabond travel narratives, at least those written by white men, who typically face few consequences for their actions. A Tramp Trip is marred by problematic sexual and racial attitudes, including behaviour that would, in another era, have landed its author once again in jail. For example, Meriwether makes frequent comment on the women and young girls that he sees in Europe, as when he describes, with amazement and relish, witnessing ‘a comely lass of thirteen or fourteen’ undressing in front of him in the one-room home of a bricklayer and his family (p. 30). He also feels compelled to note a woman selling pears who keeps the fruit inside her dress and has to lift the front of the dress up to sell one to him (p. 169). Later, an Italian fruit merchant takes him in for a night. The merchant’s daughter, Bettola, whom Meriwether describes as a ‘fair young creature’, sings and plays the piano for him: ‘As the soft vowels floated to my ears my right arm somehow got itself around Bettola’s waist. I bent over, my cheek touched her silken hair, my soul rose to heaven’ (pp. 76–80). Although Bettola’s father puts an end to this unfolding sexual assault, Meriwether is still permitted to stay in their house, presumably because such behaviour was not unusual for men towards young girls. A Tramp Trip is not only problematic for its author’s attitude towards women; the author also displays a high degree of racial prejudice. Meriwether refers, for example, to the ‘villainous faces’

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of Arabs (p. 22), as well as to a ‘swarm of Turks’ who crowd onboard a ship ‘like monkeys’ (p. 183). Giving the lie to the idea that travel broadens the mind, he says ‘I do not think Mohammedans regard their mosques as very sacred’ (p. 192). He also states a common belief that climate affects the character of a people, and that if a white man were to spend too long in Italy, he would adopt stereotypical Italian traits such as laziness and loss of ambition (p. 37). Although his opportunities to use racial privilege are somewhat limited by his European itinerary, there is no doubt that for Meriwether vagabonds are white Anglo-Saxon men.16 This racial aspect of the vagabond narrative would be greatly enhanced by Harry Franck who, unlike Meriwether, turned the writing of vagabond narratives into an occupation.17 *** If Ralph Keeler created the prototype for the vagabond travel narrative and Lee Meriwether turned it into a sub-genre, then Harry A. Franck was the first US author to make a career by framing himself as a vagabond travel writer. Franck published more than twenty autobiographical travel narratives during his lifetime, including A Vagabond Journey Around the World (1910), Vagabonding Down the Andes (1917), Vagabonding Through Changing Germany (1920), and A Vagabond in Sovietland (1935). As these titles indicate, being a ‘vagabond’ was a brand that marked Franck’s practice as a travel writer. In his first book, A Vagabond Journey Around the World, he attempted to show that it was possible to circumnavigate the globe without money using a combination of ingenuity and bravery. In fact, as I will now argue, what the book shows is that the solution to travelling without money was to use the racial privilege that had accrued to the figure of the vagabond. In other words, race became a kind of capital for the capital-less vagabond. A Vagabond Journey Around the World exploited public interest in stories of global circumnavigation. In each of the famous stories of a protagonist travelling around the world, they are set a challenge that makes the journey difficult and its completion impressive. In Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) and the journalist Nelly Bly’s Around the World in Seventy-Two Days (1890), the challenge was to complete the task within a prescribed time frame. Later global circumnavigators made the challenge more demanding, even to the point of absurdity. For the journalists John Foster Fraser and J. Willis Sayre’s journeys, undertaken in 1899 and 1908 respectively, the challenge was to travel on a bicycle or using only public transport.18 In the widely-reported but probably apocryphal

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story of Harry Bensley’s 1908 trip, the challenge was to circumnavigate the globe without money, pushing a pram, wearing an iron mask helmet, and to attain a wife during the journey.19 Seen in this context, Harry Franck’s 1904 attempt to travel around the world without money seems tame. Indeed, there is no sense in A Vagabond Journey Around the World that the author expected to find sufficient mileage, so to speak, to build a career. In the book’s Preface he says that he made the journey partly as preparation for becoming a language teacher, and partly because a friend had bet him that such an undertaking could not be completed. Putting the blame for his enthusiasm down to ‘wanderlust’, he states that he also has a desire to ‘observe the masses’.20 He claims that he took only 104 dollars with him, much of which was used to purchase film for his Kodak, the camera providing the book with many images to corroborate the journey, including a small number of the author himself (see Figure 2.1). For Franck, being a vagabond brought many advantages. Like Meriwether, he claims that by travelling without money he will see ‘many corners unknown to the regular tourist’ (p. xiii). The superficial glance of the tourist misses many things, such as the racially diverse nature of India (p. 349) or the fact that manual labourers have surprising talents like being able to play the piano (p. 359). Despite referring to one group of tourists as a ‘cackling, beBaedekered tour’, however, he does acknowledge that the vagabond is often indistinguishable from the tourist (p. 52). In Egypt, for instance, he joins the back of a group of tourists as they walk to the Valley of the Kings, blending in with them and hoping that he is not asked to produce a ticket. He talks his way into the Tomb of the Kings by conversing in Italian with a police lieutenant, ‘who was so delighted to find that he could converse with me without being understood by the surrounding rabble, that he gave me permission to enter, in face of the gate tender’s protest’. Once inside, he takes ‘silent leave of the party’ of tourists, clambering up the ‘precipitous cliff of stone and sand’ at the side of the valley, an activity that the ‘official party’ of tourists perceive as the action of ‘some madman at large’, but which enables him to enjoy a view ‘that spread out from the rarely visited spot’, and which ‘might well have awakened the envy of the tourists below’ (p. 227). Franck expects his readership not only to enjoy his ability to see for free that for which the ‘cackling, beBaedekered tour’ must pay, but also to enjoy the lengths that he goes to experience a superior view. To acquire such experiences for free, the vagabond must undergo occasional suffering. This includes fatigue and hunger (p. 9), as well as being forced to decide between spending limited funds on food or lodging, not having the money for both (p. 81). In Marseilles, Franck spends a night

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Figure 2.1  Photographs from Harry Franck, A Vagabond Journey Around the World (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1910), p. 298.

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sleeping, or rather trying to sleep, in a freezing boxcar with a group of tramps: ‘After a couple of hours of shivering on the icy floor of the car, we crept out and took to tramping up and down the streets and byways – that most dismal experience, known professionally as “carrying the banner” – until daybreak’ (p. 97). He passes ‘long, hungry days’ in which he is tempted to sell his Kodak camera for food, a temptation that he resists. His lack of funds forces him to be frugal and to make careful note of his expenses (p. 12). It leads him to take occasional work, including as a cattleman in the United States and, in Colomo, as a clown (p. 287). It also leads him to steal food when he is starving (p. 401). Franck’s frugality, ability to withstand suffering, and successful resistance of the temptation to sell his Kodak are each meant to indicate his resilience and moral fortitude. In addition to hardship and hunger, the vagabond faces various forms of risk. For example, Franck is told of the dangers of tramping in North Africa (pp. 108–9) and is urged to carry a weapon on his trip (p. 122), which he refuses to do. In Palestine he is told that it will be ‘impossible’ to walk from Jerusalem to Jaffa, while in Burma he is told that it is too dangerous to walk from Rangoon to Bangkok, but he undertakes both excursions on foot anyway (p. 182, p. 387). He justifies his latter decision by claiming that it will give him bragging rights among his fellow vagabonds: ‘the truest satisfaction of the Wanderlust is to explore the world by virgin routes and pose as a bold pioneer in the rendezvous of the “profession” ever after’ (p. 388). Despite seeking out inherently risky journeys, Franck uses humour to undercut the perceived sense of danger. For example, in many countries Franck hears calls for him to take the train rather than walk. This reaches a comic apotheosis when a group of concerned citizens in the Lebanese town of Bhamdoon, hearing of his plan to walk over 100 miles from Beirut to Damascus, refuse to allow him to leave until they have banded together to buy him a train ticket. He flees from these wellmeaning do-gooders with alacrity: ‘With one leap I sprang … into the street and set off at top speed down the highway, a screaming, howling, ever-increasing but ever more distant throng at my heels’ (p. 124). In putting himself into this ridiculous situation, Franck turns himself into an entertaining spectacle. In another incident, being unable to pay the fare to travel by ship from Suez to Sri Lanka, he steals aboard and hides in a lifeboat (p. 242–244). This location enables him to overhear private conversations among the passengers: ‘With night came the passengers, to lean against the boat and pour out confidences. How easily I might have posed as a fortune-teller among them during the rest of the voyage!’ (p. 244). He is confident enough that this action does not involve genuine danger

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to make himself known to the captain, after which he is given manual labour to perform onboard for the remainder of the trip.21 For Franck as for Meriwether, the peril is only ever mild. Vagabonding Around the World makes race a key factor in vagabondage. The vagabond is, according to Franck, a ‘white man of peripatetic mood’ (p. 251). Punning on his name, when he gets East of Europe the author repeatedly refers to himself as a ‘Frank’, a term that emphasises his white, Western European credentials. Like Meriwether, he is explicitly racist when discussing Arabs, whom he refers to as a ‘jabbering multitude’ (p. 174), and he also uses anti-Semitic language in referring to a Jewish man as a ‘greasy, grovelling Jew’ (p. 179). He claims that being a vagabond in the tropics, also termed a beachcomber, is popular among poor white men because it means that they can assert power and status that is denied them at home: the vagabond, he says, ‘loves to strut about among reverential black men in all the glory of a white skin; it flatters him astonishingly to have native policemen and soldiers draw up at attention and salute as he passes’ (p. 261).22 Franck makes use of racial privilege on numerous occasions. For example, he and a group of fellow travellers are treated as people of importance by white officials in Chittagong: ‘we came as near to forgetting for the nonce that we were mere beachcombers’ (p. 373), he states. On occasion, his racial privilege works against his status as a vagabond, as when, having discovered that a native official will not sell a third class steamship ticket to a white man, he passes as an Arab to get the ticket (p. 230). Similarly, in Ceylon he is told by his fellow whites that he should stop looking for work because doing so ‘will destroy the prestige of every white man on the island’ (p. 280). Despite this, he continues to make use of his racial ‘prestige’. For example, when suffering from hunger in India, he uses his white skin to pass as a food inspector in order to get something to eat (p. 350). Although Franck presents this incident as an example of his ingenuity and willingness to bluff, it also demonstrates the extent to which his survival as a global vagabond traveller was dependent upon the layers of racial privilege inherent in being a white American in the early twentieth century.23 Another racialised term that Franck uses is ‘hobo’. In Europe, he compares US and European tramps, finding the former to be more go-getting (pp. 10–11), better-fed and less held back by state bureaucracy (pp. 27–29). Beyond Europe, however, the term hobo becomes racial rather than national: for Franck, that is, being a hobo means having Anglo-Saxon skill and intellect. Chapter 14, which is entitled ‘Three Hoboes in India’, is an extended description of a journey that Franck makes with an American

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called Marten and an Englishman named Haywood. Since the chapter title includes an Englishman under the term ‘hobo’, it is clear that to be a hobo means to be a white man with certain characteristics.24 These characteristics include shrewdness and an ability to bluff, qualities that enable the men to talk their way onto trains for which they have not all bought tickets, as when Marten announces to a native ticket collector: ‘“Do you think that sahibs travel without tickets?”’, to which the frightened man responds by ‘mumbling an apology’ (p. 295). The supposed bravery involved in such an incident is in fact an example of racial privilege, with Marten and the other white men having the implicit backing of the British Empire and the US government behind them. In Burma, Franck and his white companions, being without the means to purchase a ticket, decide to ‘beat’ a train to Chittagong. This trick, common among the hobos of North America, is much easier to do in Burma, according to Franck: ‘With a half hour to spare, we struck off through the bazaars and, munching as we went, picked our way, along the track to a box-car a furlong from the station. In an American railroad yard the detectives would have been thickest at this vantage point, but the babu [derogatory term for Hindu] knew nothing of the ways of hobos’ (p. 367). The men’s ease, signified by their leisurely stroll through the bazaar, ‘munching’ on goods that they presumably pilfer as they move through, symbolises the superiority of the ingenious white hobo over the native ‘babu’.25 It is not simply the train they ‘beat’, but the inferior natives as well.

2.2  Spiritual Vagabonds: Stephen Graham and Vachel Lindsay While vagabond narratives often have a comic tone, for some authors vagabondage was a more serious occupation. For Stephen Graham and Vachel Lindsay, who I will refer to as spiritual vagabonds, this lifestyle had a mystical quality about which they were compelled to evangelise. For them, vagabondage was a means to a better kind of existence. As spiritual vagabonds, they travel without money for the purpose of self-discovery and improvement. They seek to escape the deadening effects of bourgeois life by keeping away from cities, trains, and other people. As a result, the spiritual vagabond’s critique of modernity is more sustained than that which exists in the work of Keeler, Meriwether and Franck. This critique encompasses tourism, which to the spiritual vagabond represents the commodification of the world’s most beautiful and secluded places. Unlike the writers discussed so far in this chapter, who acknowledge their kinship with tourists even while they disavow their motives and methods, the

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spiritual vagabonds Stephen Graham and Vachel Lindsay recoil in horror at any similarity between their travels and those of the tourist. Similarly, while Franck is happy to utilise the term ‘hobo’ for the purposes of racial solidarity and discrimination, Graham and Lindsay see the hobo as a representative of modern work practices and, as such, as being in direct contradiction to their own journeys. Nevertheless, it is impossible for even a spiritual vagabond to avoid the trappings of modernity, including the need to earn a living and the existence of other people who are doing the same. As a result, Graham and Lindsay’s vagabond writings are in tension with their own spiritual aims. Stephen Graham was a British travel writer whose books about Russia advocated the benefits of extreme solitude in nature and frugality as means to spiritual growth. His first journey to Russia was aimed at escaping the modernity of London: ‘I went to Russia to see the world, to see new life, to breathe in new life. In truth it was like escaping from a prison’.26 A mixture of travelogue and visionary revelation, his early work idealises Russia as a primitive country which, being untouched by the corrupting influence of modernity, was an ideal place to undertake a journey of spiritual vagabondage. In his first book, A Vagabond in the Caucasus (1911), he portrays Russia as a land in perfect harmony with itself. Staggeringly out of step with historical reality, and writing as the country was in-between revolutions, he depicts a ‘Happy, rude, contented Russia’ (p. 107). In search of what he considers primitive landscape, he describes the territory around Mount Kazbek: ‘Far distant peaks looked immense and elemental, like chaotic heaps awaiting the creation of a world’ (p. 155). This description, supported with an accompanying photograph of an isolated, people-less mountain, (Figure 2.2) encapsulates Graham’s aim as a spiritual vagabond. For him, awe-inspiring landscape is not simply beautiful, but also suggests the remnants of a world before modernity. To travel to Russia is to travel into the past. This ‘elemental’ realm is disappearing, and yet as the second part of his sentence indicates, its ‘chaotic heaps’ may yet, he hopes, re-form into a new creation. He idealises the Russian peasantry along similar lines: ‘Here each man was of the crude, rough material out of which civilizations are made. Here was a passion for simplicity; everything was elemental, original … Yes, here were the beginnings of things’ (pp. 240–241). Not yet a civilisation, Russia for the early Graham exists in a pre-modern condition, one which enables his vagabondage to become spiritual. A mixture of styles, A Vagabond in the Caucuses at first concerns itself with the practicalities of tramping, including the importance of frugality (p. 12, p. 160, p. 301–308). The book becomes more philosophical when

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Figure 2.2  Photograph of Mount Kazbek from Stephen Graham, A Vagabond in the Caucasus: with some notes of his experiences among the Russians by Stephen Graham (London; New York: The Bodley Head and John Lane Company, 1911), p. 156.

its author tramps in the countryside, as if the action of walking allows space for reflection and contemplation: ‘The pathos of the present time is that it is breadth with length, infinite breadth, and that our scene is only one point on an infinite line. The Present Time is everywhere at once. Its duration is but for an instant, a minute, an hour, but its content is universal’ (p. 143). Evincing a strong Nietzschean influence, the book ends with a Zarathustra-esque tramp in which Graham describes himself, using the third person, as ‘the youth’ (pp. 288–296).27 In allegorical mode, he describes the youth’s walk along an eternal road, during which he encounters pilgrims and hermits who try to dissuade him from his journey. It is a journey of self-growth: ‘He awakened, or rather he and himself awakened, a self below himself had awakened’ (p. 291). Upon reaching the top of a mountain, the author, referring to himself, states: ‘The conqueror stands with his foot upon the mountain’s brow, and all the kingdoms of the world lie beneath him. He has risen as a sun upon his own world, the dawn whereby he sees his life has come’ (p. 297). This spiritual section, in which Graham fantasises that he is somehow an imperialistic ‘conqueror’

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of the mountain, is oddly out-of-place with the rest of the book, which concerns itself with more mundane vagabond elements like the cost of living. Graham would expand the spiritual focus of his writings in later publications, so that it would become a distinctive feature of his early vagabondage. Published the following year, Graham’s A Tramp’s Sketches (1912) is a more philosophical discourse on the nature of tramping. Although it relates a journey that he took ‘along the Caucasian and Crimean shores of the Black Sea, and on a pilgrimage with Russian peasants to Jerusalem’, the book is more abstract than descriptive.28 Organising chapters by theme rather than place, A Tramp’s Sketches concentrates on its author’s spiritual development. Graham does not focus on the details of everyday survival in the manner of Keeler, Meriwether and Franck. Instead, he devotes the book to promoting tramping as an alternate lifestyle, one fit for humanity’s Nietzschean elite. To justify the vagabond lifestyle, he rewrites the Biblical allegory of the prodigal son into a tramp origin story: ‘Imagine that whilst the prodigal son sat at meat with his father and their guests, there may have come to the door a weary tramp begging food and lodging’ (p. 103). The father and elder brother refuse the tramp food, but the prodigal son recognises him as a ‘brother wanderer’ and allows him to partake of the meal (p. 103). The elder brother says that the tramp must work for his food, a type of ‘counsel’ that has, according to Graham, ‘endured, and is accounted wise’ (p. 104). Graham advises against this partial hospitality, arguing that one can never know whether a stranger is merely one of the ‘ordinary men who would be ready to do a morning’s work for their bread’ or whether he is one of the ‘Gods in disguise … souls whom if we could recognise in their celestial guise we should worship’ (p. 104). Demanding work in advance also denies the tramp the chance to volunteer for work, and thereby deprives him of the chance of ‘giving in return’ (p. 105). ‘True hospitality’, Graham states, ‘is a sign of the brotherhood of man, and the open threshold symbolises the open heart. Inhospitality is the sign that man will not recognise the stranger as his brother’ (p. 105). He advocates for the meal freely given: ‘It ought to be possible for man to wander where he will over this little world of ours and never fail to find free food and shelter and love. I know no greater shame in national development than the commercialisation of the meal and the night’s lodging’ (p. 106). Graham believes that ‘true hospitality’ was once plentiful, but that it has become commodified in the form of hotels and lodging houses. A return to true hospitality would enable men to better themselves by becoming vagabonds.

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There would, however, be a danger in this lifestyle becoming too plentiful: ‘The tramp does not want a world of tramps – that would never do’ (p. 57). Instead, such a life is for ‘only a few, the pioneers’. Graham does not state explicitly what these tramps are ‘pioneers’ of, and his use of this term highlights one of the contradictions of his position, a contradiction similar to that felt by William Wordsworth following his publication of poetic portrayals of England’s Lake District that inspired millions of subsequent tourists. A ‘pioneer’ is someone who blazes a trail for others to follow, and yet Graham, like Wordsworth, does not want a ‘world of tramps’. In writing a book that romanticises the vagabond, he knows that he will encourage others. But if too many people adopt this lifestyle then the quiet places where the vagabond can contemplate will become busy and, presumably, commercialised. He attempts to resolve this contradiction by claiming that such a path is only open to the ‘rebels against modern life’ (p. 57). These rebels, he claims, are prophets of a new world: ‘the portents of the new era, the first signs of spring after dark winter; some of us, the purely lyrical spring flowers; others the prophetic dynamic, spring winds – who blowing, shall blow upon winter, as Nietzsche says, “with a thawing wind”.’ (pp. 372–373). The reference to Nietzsche makes Graham’s vagabond both elitist and visionary. Referring to himself, Graham says that he is not simply a ‘dilettante literary person’ but is rather ‘a rebel and a prophet’ of a new order. This new order requires a new kind of literature, and so Graham predicts the development of an original genre of spiritual vagabondage. This ‘new literature, the literature of pioneering and discovery, the literature of ourselves’ is more than a ‘commercial product’ and it will make canonical authors such as Shakespeare ‘necessarily subordinate’ (p. 371). The spiritual vagabond narrative will be, he claims, ‘the school which prepares for the stepping forth on the untrodden ways’ (p. 371). This ‘new literature’ must oppose itself to commercialism and must ‘separate off and consecrate the beautiful’ (p. 372). It will not ‘oppose the machine’, but only take ‘from it the service necessary for our physical needs, in no case being ruled or guided by it’ (p. 372). His hope that society can make use of mechanically-produced conveniences without being ‘ruled’ by them might suggest that Graham is hopeful of a communist revolution, but in fact, like most vagabond writers, he was a political reactionary. His attitude to ‘the machine’ is emblematic of his approach to modernity generally, and of his engagement with modern publishing specifically. In writing a commercial book, he hoped to find a way out of commercialism. At no point does he acknowledge this to be a paradox, and yet the book’s ending suggests that

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he was aware that he needed a way to resolve it. His resolution was to find a vagabond who was, unlike himself, entirely separate from and untainted by modern life. Two-thirds of the way through A Tramp’s Sketches, Graham pairs up with another traveller, an unnamed man who refers to himself as ‘the seeker’ (p. 276). Suffering from amnesia, this man has no idea who he is or where he came from. This lack of ties to the modern world makes the seeker a case study for Graham’s ideal vagabond. The seeker compares himself implicitly to Socrates when he describes how he travels the world questioning his ‘fellow beings’ about ‘the world’ and ‘themselves’, finding a vast ‘ignorance’ and an overbearing pride in ‘their little knowledges and of the matters they could explain’ (pp. 287–288). He says that he learnt to love all the unknown people of the world, and that when he did so he ‘felt like a god – just as when the sun learned to warm, he knew that he was a sun. I became like a sun over a little world, and people who did not understand basked in my light and heat’ (p. 288). The appearance of a god-like amnesiac who fits the role of spiritual vagabond better than Graham is so convenient that it is necessary to be sceptical that this person existed. Either way, the seeker provides a textual resolution to the problem of Graham’s connection, via publishing, to the world of commercialism. By partnering with someone who is mentally and physically apart from modernity, as narrator Graham could be an observer, rather than a flawless embodiment, of the spiritual vagabond archetype. Observing the seeker, Graham writes that the ideal spiritual vagabond must be an undeveloped adult: ‘There is in him, like the spring buds among the withered leaves of autumn, one never-dying fountain of youth. He is the boy who never grows old’ (p. 238). The spiritual vagabond’s eternal youth is a positive for Graham because it is indicative of a capacity for wonder. Finding a childlike true believer is for him a structural need, since it is a pattern that would repeat itself when he encountered the US poet Vachel Lindsay. *** Vachel Lindsay has been overlooked by literary scholarship and studies of the hobo. His reputation as a poet has suffered because his medievalist outlook is a poor fit for the hegemonic construction of US American Literature as modern and fully independent of European literary traditions, as well as because of an understandable backlash against his most famous poem, ‘The Congo’.29 It is unsurprising that Hobo Studies scholars have also passed over him, since he repeatedly states that he kept away from freight trains and hobos during his travels around the US.

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He attempted to keep apart from hobos, seeing them as representatives of a corrupted modernity, to better preach what he called the Gospel of Beauty. This gospel was a message that, according to Robert Sayre, ‘Beauty could only be produced in a society which was itself beautiful, in its values, common aspirations, and civic forms and functions’.30 Lindsay brought this message to America’s rural poor because urban industrial workers, including hobos, had been starved of beauty so long that they would be unable to recognise it. In 1912, Lindsay undertook a tramp from Springfield, Illinois, across Colorado and into New Mexico. He did so with the intention of giving out copies of a broadside in which he claimed to be the preacher of a ‘new religious idea’ known as ‘“the church of beauty” or “the church of the open sky”’. This ‘Gospel of Beauty’ proclaimed the need for the rural poor to ‘wander over the whole nation in search of the secret of democratic beauty’ and to discover what artistic or craft-based talent they possessed, talents that their rural poverty had prevented them from uncovering. This could be as ‘devout gardeners or architects or park architects or teachers of dancing in the Greek spirit or musicians or novelists or poets or storywriters or craftsmen or wood-carvers or dramatists or actors or singers’, a list that indicates Lindsay’s emphasis on arts and crafts. Readers were then to return ‘to their own hearth and neighborhood … and strive to make the neighborhood and home more beautiful and democratic and holy with their special art’.31 In addition to handing out copies of this broadside, Lindsay offered to give ‘sermons’ on the topics of ‘(1) The Gospel of the Hearth. (2) The Gospel of Voluntary Poverty. (3) The Holiness of Beauty’.32 He also intended to read his poetry in exchange for food and lodging, as the title of his self-published volume Rhymes to be Traded for Bread (1912), which he also took on this journey, indicates. He was fully committed to this credo, laying it down in his utopian fantasy The Golden Book of Springfield (1920), a text in which he imagined how his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, would look a century after being regenerated by a colony of inspired artists and craftspeople. Lindsay intended for his poetry to uplift the rural poor so that they might uplift America. Appropriate for this mission, he felt, was a medievalist poetic style and depiction of a mystical landscape. Rhymes contains a series of poems, entitled ‘The Magical Village’, about a village that contains witches, fairies and goddesses, as well as bushes that bring forth spice and a fireplace that burns eternally, even after the house that once surrounded it has crumbled away. Two other poems idealise the medieval figure of Galahad as a teacher who must ‘Awaken again/Teach us to fight

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for immaculate ways among men … Till the leer of the trader is seen nevermore in the land’ (‘Galahad, Knight Who Perished’, lines 6–8; 17–18) and ensure that the spirit of ‘Galahad be born in every boy’ (‘Formula for a Utopia’, line 6). In contrast to the Feudal Age, capitalist America is corrupted by the trader, whose ‘leer’ indicates his greedy, dishonourable intentions. The trader is in league with political leaders, who in another poem Lindsay portrays as part of a corrupt industrial system, involving ‘Iron Chicagos and our grimy mines’, in which ‘weary men’ are ‘ground by machines that give the senate ease’ (‘To the United States Senate’, lines 47–48; 51–54). The result is that America’s ‘poor’ are starved of beauty, becoming ‘Ox-like, limp and leaden eyed’ (‘The Leaden Eyed’, lines 7–8). The poor are conscious of this lack of beauty. In ‘The Lamp in the Window’, Lindsay narrates a poem from the perspective of a peasant who lights her lamp in the hope that it will be seen by ‘some wild man’ who ‘passes by/Bearing wise parchments from old cities grim’ (‘The Lamp in the Window’, lines 40–43), a ‘storm-blown boy’ who can ‘bring us laughter round our roaring stove/To show us why we sow and why we reap’ (lines 26–31). Lindsay saw himself as this ‘storm-blown boy’, a preacher who could bring joy and wisdom with his Gospel of Beauty. He advocates art as the panacea for America’s social ills: ‘Go plant the Arts that woo the weariest/Bold arts that workmen undersand [sic]/That make no poor men and keep all men rich/And throne our lady beauty in the land!’ (‘To Those that Would Mend These Times’, lines 1–8). In the following poem, he adds crafts to his proposed solution: ‘Go plant the crafts that give a deep delight/To all who make, to all who use and see’ (‘To Those That Would Help the Fallen’, lines 1–4). He also imagines that the personified figure ‘Lady Beauty’ would send seven dragons of Art across America, creating what he calls, in the poem’s subtitle, an ‘Esthetic Utopia’ (‘The Woman Called “Beauty” and Her Seven Dragons. A Poem for Those who would Build an Esthetic Utopia’). Much as Graham framed Russia, Lindsay saw the US countryside as being relatively untainted by modernity. Hope was only possible in the countryside, which is why, as his poem ‘On the Road to Nowhere’ indicates, he intended to stay there long after other travellers had turned back to the city. This poem begins as a series of aggressive questions to a tramp who may have been on the road for hedonistic rather than spiritual reasons: ‘Were the tramp-days knightly/True sowing of wild seed?/Did you dare to make the songs/Vanquished workmen need?’ (‘On the road to Nowhere’, lines 9–12). Such travellers always ‘find the nowhere road/ Dusty, grim and slow’ (lines 19–20), grow ‘ashamed of nowhere/Of rags

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endured for years’ and hurry back to the city, ‘pierced with mammon’s spears’ (25–28). Lindsay, however, is one of the ‘few fanatics’ (29) who keep to the road, which is designated ‘nowhere’ both because it is utopian and an end in itself: Oh nowhere, golden nowhere! Sages and fools go on To Your Chaotic Ocean, To Your Tremendous Dawn. Far in your fair dream-haven Is nothing or is all * * *33 They press on, singing, sowing Wild deeds without recall!

(‘On the Road to Nowhere’, lines 41–48.)

This poem, which concludes Rhymes to be Traded for Bread, encapsulates Lindsay’s sense of himself as a true believer in the gospel of voluntary poverty, someone who is prepared to keep to the nowhere road when others have abandoned it. In reality, however, he did abandon his journey: he wired his parents for money to pay for a train to California instead of walking the rest of the way. He similarly struggled to reconcile his intentions with the reality of life on the road in his prose account of tramping, a book of letters entitled Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (1914). The book begins by outlining the rules that he had intended to keep during his tramping: The actual rules were to have nothing to do with cities, railroads, money, baggage or fellow tramps. I was to begin to ask for dinner about a quarter of eleven and for supper, lodging and breakfast about a quarter of five. I was to be neat, truthful, civil and on the square. I was to preach the Gospel of Beauty. (Adventures, p. 8.)

As these rules make clear, Lindsay intended to keep away from modernity, money, and ‘fellow tramps’. As a spiritual vagabond, he saw each of these as harmful to his mission to preach the Gospel of Beauty. This mission was a hyper-individualised one, in which he expected to arrive in the countryside like a prophet of old, ‘penniless and afoot’ (p. 10; italics in original). Yet, as I will now discuss, fellowship drew him to others on the road, both during the manual labour that he undertook and in the moments of kindness and solidarity that he experienced. Although he represents Kansas as a Jeffersonian paradise ‘practically free from cities and industrialism’, Lindsay could not escape the work culture created by the modern capitalist economy and facilitated by the railroad (p. 12). For example, when he does encounter a train being cleaned

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and refilled with water by workers in an engine shed, he describes it as a ‘sleek brute in its stall, absorbing all, giving nothing’ (p. 21). The engine’s apparent selfishness is indicative of the industrial mindset. He sets out to avoid trains, being willing to approach a wheel-less boxcar that he finds in a grove only because ‘It was far from the railroad’ (p. 14). Off road rather than on it, Lindsay justifies sleeping in the boxcar by describing it as ‘repentant and converted’, as if it were a sinner who had finally seen the light (p. 15). There is evidence of the railroad everywhere, and the author uses trainlines for navigation by walking along them. He jokes that he will become a political ‘candidate’, winning the ‘tramp vote’ by offering a platform ‘that railroad ties should be just close enough for men to walk on them in natural steps, neither mincing the stride not widely stretching the legs’ (p. 31). He also sees traces of the railroad economy in the fact that he finds it more difficult to get free lodging in Kansas than in Pennsylvania and Georgia because there he must compete with ‘the multitudes of tramps pouring west on the freight trains – tramps I never see because I let freight trains alone’ (p. 29).34 Despite his disavowal of transient workers, Lindsay is continually taken for one. Strangers frequently ask him if he is going West for the harvest; this ‘inevitable question’, as he calls it, becomes a comic refrain repeated throughout the early parts of the text (p. 24, p. 28, p. 32, p. 36). Since performing hard labour seems to go against his calling as a poet, he repeatedly answers in the negative, on one occasion replying: ‘I have harvested already, ten thousand flowers an hour’ (p. 32).35 Eventually, however, he meets a farmer who had spent several years as a hobo: the man ‘argued down my rule to travel alone’ by explaining to Lindsay that ‘there was a peculiar feeling of understanding’ among transient workers. Throwing aside his individualistic intentions for a time, he declares ‘That night was a turning point with me. In reply to a certain question I said: “Yes, I am going west harvesting”. (p. 37; italics in original). After finally saying yes to harvest work, he encounters a solidarity and fellow feeling at odds with his individualistic vagabondage. For example, when walking in the rain along the Santa Fé railroad, he meets a train section gang sheltering in a shack: ‘Two period heads popped out, “Come in, you slab-sided hobo,” they yelled affectionately. “Come in and get dry”’ (p. 43). The interracial train gang, which consists of four ‘white men’ and ‘four Mexicans’, see Lindsay as a fellow transient, and in responding to their call to enter the shack he reluctantly recognises himself as a ‘“slab-sided hobo”’.36 This moment of interpellation changes how Lindsay feels about himself, hobo workers, and the railroad more generally. He takes work shocking

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wheat and describes the labour as an ecstatic experience: ‘It is glorious to work now. The endless reiterations of the day have developed a certain dancing rhythm in one’s nerves, one is intoxicated with his own weariness and the conceit that comes with seizing the sun by the mane, like Sampson’ (p. 73). The rhythms of work have become like the rhymes of dancing or poetry. He experiences pride at having ‘made an acceptable hand’ (p. 83) and feels that he ‘came nearer to being a real harvester every day’ (p. 95). Breaking his rule against money, he accepts his wages as being well-earnt: ‘I have good hard dollars in my pocket, which same dollars are against my rules’ (p. 62). He also changes his mind about railroads, writing that ‘In the East the railroads and machinery choke the land to death and it was there I made my rule against them. But the farther West I go the more the very life of the country seems to depend upon them’ (p. 52), providing an unconvincing justification for his change of heart.37 In effect, becoming a hobo puts a temporary pause on his vagabondage. In his poem ‘Kansas’, which is reproduced in the text, he rhapsodises about work and his fellow workers: Yet it was gay in Kansas A-fighting that strong sun; And I and many a fellow tramp Defied that wind and won. And we felt free in Kansas From any sort of fear, For thirty thousand tramps like us There harvest every year. She stretches arms for them to come, She roars for helpers then, And so it is in Kansas That tramps, one month, are men.

(‘Kansas’, p. 80, lines 13–24)

As well as overlooking the children and women who worked in the fields, the poem’s reference to tramps becoming ‘men’ relates to the experience of many hobos of being welcomed by farmers during harvest time, and then dismissed and even driven out once the harvest work was done. Lindsay shows that he understood that the transient’s welcome and recognition as a fellow citizen was fleeting. His reference to ‘thirty thousand tramps like us’ shows the speaker’s identification with the hobo harvester, which is a marked shift from Lindsey’s previous intention to keep away from tramps. Elsewhere he notes the importance of the harvest work, using the firstperson plural to include himself in the description: ‘We poor tramps are

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helping to garner that which re-establishes the nations’ (p. 75). The work is not simply good for the individual: it is the stuff from which nations are built and rebuilt. Unfortunately, Lindsay learned the wrong lesson from his time as a labourer. In the book’s epilogue, he portrays his experiences as a form of spiritual growth for the downtrodden worker. As if many of them did not already do so during harvest time, he calls upon ‘city laborers’ to ‘go to the fields’: ‘The harvests are wonderful. And there is a spiritual harvest appearing’ (p. 111). Reframing the real harvest as a spiritual one, he calls upon disgruntled workers to ‘Forget the street-cars, the skyscrapers, the slums, the Marseillaise song’, aspects not just of modernity but of working-class solidarity. There is an explicitly reactionary politics involved in such forgetting. Written after his journey was complete, this ‘Proclamation’ reestablishes Lindsay’s individualistic vagabondage in place of the fellow feeling that he had briefly experienced. Lindsay continued his active forgetting by creating a manifesto for spiritual vagabondage. In A Handy Guide for Beggars (1916), an account of a later journey through the American South and East to New Jersey, he created a guidebook for those who would go tramping for reasons of self-development. Written in a lyrical, Medievalist style, the book enacts a kind of literary Jeffersonianism. In contrast to Adventures, in A Handy Guide Lindsay portrays himself as entirely alone in his vagabondage: ‘I am the sole active member of the ancient brotherhood of the troubadours’.38 Suffering real hallucinations, he describes himself as having spiritual visions.39 In order to avoid the troublesome solidarity of his earlier book, he portrays the human beings he encounters as figures, capitalising their names as The Man Under The Yoke (p. 7), Conductor Roundface (p. 22), and Lady Iron-Heels (p. 105). This makes his journey seem as much allegorical as it was real, and also renders the people important only in their relation to him, the book’s Everyman figure. Falling back on his earlier mode of description, he once again portrays the hobo as a creature of industrialism: ‘The modern tramp is not a tramp, he is a speed maniac. Being unable to afford luxuries, he must still be near something mechanical and hasty, so he uses a dirty box-car to whirl from one railroad yard to another … He is a most highly specialized modern man’ (p. 97). For Lindsay, the hobo is a product of a Taylorite tendency toward the specialisation of work. By stating that ‘The modern tramp is not a tramp’, Lindsay separates the hobo (‘modern tramp’) from the vagabond (‘tramp’). In a nod to his previous experiences of solidarity with harvest workers, he also states ‘I should have disliked them [hobos] more’ (p. 97). Nevertheless, he

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proudly engages in an act of anti-solidarity that distinguishes him from these modern tramps. While he is splitting wood in a homeless mission, Lindsey’s fellow workers, whom he also describes as ‘boxcar tramps’, ask him to engage in soldiering, an act of resistance also known as slowing down. Refusing, he states ‘I chopped a little faster for this advice’ (p. 118), a moment of anti-solidarity that is intended to display his upright morality and work ethic.40 He also represents himself as being too noble to act as a hobo would, as when he tells a train conductor that ‘it was beneath my dignity to crawl into the box-car, or patronize the blind baggage’ (p. 27), although at times during his journey he is once again forced to walk along train lines (p. 184). Rather than portraying himself as a reluctant worker, in A Handy Guide Lindsay depicts tramping as a bohemian spiritual experience. He frames deprivation as being key to his journey, with hunger bringing a quasireligious bliss: ‘People would have fed this poor tramp, but I love sometimes the ecstasy that comes with healthy fasting’ (p. 101). He tries to maintain his rule against money, claiming that bad luck befalls him when he breaks it: ‘money is a hoodoo on the road. Until a man is penniless, he is not stripped for action’ (p. 116). For Lindsay, being ‘stripped for action’ is a spiritual cleansing that comes from voluntary poverty. The spiritual vagabond is not a worker but a ‘sort of begging preacher’ (p. 143), operating in a tradition that stretches back to ‘Tramp Columbus, Tramp Dante, Tramp St. Francis, Tramp Buddha’ (p. 20). The benefit of tramping is to defamiliarize civilisation: as when, upon a return to town after being in the countryside, he anthropomorphises objects in a manner reminiscent of Karl Marx’s famous commodified table in Das Kapital: ‘A chair is a sturdy creature. I wonder who captured the first one? Who put out its eyes and taught it to stand still?’ (p. 36). Time away from such objects allows Lindsay, and presumably other spiritual vagabonds who follow his guidebook, to discover a wonder in the everyday, leading to very different conclusions from those of Marx. *** Vachel Lindsay met Stephen Graham in late 1919, when the latter saw the former perform his ‘Higher Vaudeville’ poetry in New York.41 ‘It is not surprising’ that the two men ‘quickly struck up a rapport’, according to Graham biographer Michael Hughes, since ‘Lindsay’s credo … closely resembled that of his new friend’.42 They met again in London in 1920 and discussed taking a tramping journey together in the US, eventually deciding to walk through Glacier Park, across the Rocky Mountains and

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into Canada. Each saw in the other a fellow traveller on the lonely road of the spiritual vagabond. However, while Lindsay was ‘a thoroughly otherworldly character given to fits of rapture and excess’, Graham, while he ‘shared much of his friend’s enthusiasm’, was ‘more attuned to the commercial possibilities of his forthcoming tramp’.43 Graham arranged to write updates of their journey for the New York Evening Post and, in contrast to the Nietzschean religiosity of his earlier work, ‘had to make sure his sketches were light and humorous’ in order ‘to appeal to the paper’s readership’.44 Graham later published these in book form as Tramping with a Poet in the Rockies (1922), a text that focussed on the apparent wildness of his travelling companion as much as of the landscape. Tramping with a Poet represented the culmination of Graham’s shift away from the mode of the spiritual vagabond toward that of the mainstream travel writer.45 In direct response, Lindsay wrote a book of poetry, Going-to-the-Sun (1923), which described their tramp in more idealistic terms. The contrast between these books indicates that Lindsay was seemingly unaware that Graham had developed more commercial motives than showing the world the spiritual benefits of the vagabond lifestyle. Following what he saw as the tragedy of the Russian Revolution, Graham was in search of another primitive landscape in which he could get away from the trappings of civilisation. In Tramping with a Poet, he portrayed the American West as an ideal, unspoiled landscape akin to those of Classical Antiquity: describing their summit of the Great Divide, he wrote ‘The waterfalls hung like the gardens of Babylon. An opal lake below us changed and waxed in iridescent glory and caused whispers of rapturous interest … we slept in a thicket and were made music to by the nymphs of the seven waterfalls of Shadow Mountain’.46 The book’s illustrations, drawn by Vernon Hill, utilise a primitivist style that emphasises America’s supposedly primal nature (see, for example, Figures 2.3–2.7). He also represented Lindsay as the epitome of a primordial Americanness, which Graham problematically associated with America’s non-white peoples. He describes his companion as looking like ‘a true dwarf or old man of the woods from the page of a fairy-book’ (p. 110), also referring to him as ‘Huckleberry Finn’ (p. 221). In Graham’s racialized portrayal, Lindsay has ‘drunk deep of the primitive spirit in Christianity, and is very near to children, negroes, Indians, and the elemental types in men and women’ (p. 66). Intoxicated by the climb, Lindsay ‘punctuates most of his remarks with a wild native yell – “Whoopee Whuh!”’ as they travel along (p. 43). Apparently playing up to Graham’s racially charged primitivism, Lindsay mimicked African-American dialect (p. 165).47 The pair felt a transatlantic

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Figure 2.3  Press photograph of Vachel Lindsay with Stephen Graham. Public domain image taken from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Vachel_ Lindsay_with_Stephen_Gwynne.jpg [accessed 23 March 2021]. NB: Stephen Graham is incorrectly named as ‘Stephen Gwynne’ in this file.

Figure 2.4  Illustration from Stephen Graham, Tramping with a Poet in the Rockies (London: Macmillan and Co, 1922), p. 47.

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Figure 2.5  From Graham, Tramping with a Poet, p. 21.

Figure 2.6  From Graham, Tramping with a Poet, pp. 150–151.

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connection based not only on their status as spiritual vagabonds but also because of their supposedly shared racial heritage. Graham expressed the difference between them as resulting from America’s greater racial heterodoxy. The hobo represented another point of difference between these transatlantic friends. Having distanced himself from hobos in his previous work, Lindsay now emphasised his connection to them by discussing his time as a harvest labourer.48 Graham reports Lindsay’s recounting: ‘He had taken to the road to regain his self-respect. He had gone without any money, and in the hospitality and kindness of the farmers he had won a personal faith in the common man and a reliance which was not merely on success. When he harvested in Kansas for two dollars fifty a day, that wage was like millions to him’ (pp. 38–39). Lindsay sings ‘Hallelujah I’m a Bum’, a hobo song that Graham describes as ‘a disreputable song, belonging no doubt to that disreputable past of his when he hiked and begged and recited his poems to farmers’ (p. 23). The scene of Lindsay singing this ‘disreputable song’ emphasises both the hobo and Lindsay’s Americanness. Having been unwilling to count himself a hobo when he was among fellow Americans, when he is with the English Graham Lindsay adopts the hobo as an American Exceptionalist figure. Lindsay’s eccentricity, including his near constant declamation of poetry, becomes the narrative’s chief spectacle (p. 63). This spectacle, Graham knows, will interest the readers of the Evening Post more than descriptions of their journey, the mild peril that they encounter (p. 51, pp. 91–92, pp. 105–107), or the beauty of the Rocky Mountains.49 In Going-to-the-Sun (1923), a poetry volume that he described as a ‘sequel’ to Graham’s Tramping with a Poet, Lindsay gave a contrasting account of their journey.50 In the Preface, he expressed surprise ‘that so much Lindsay’ ended up in Graham’s book, and stated that he was not, in fact, ‘always singing hymns’ during their journey (pp. 2–3). A talented artist, Lindsay drew the book’s illustrations, which accompany each poem, as counterpoints to Hill’s images in Tramping with a Point (compare Figures  2.7 and 2.8).51 In contrast to Graham’s representation of him, Lindsay rarely mentions Graham in his poems. Instead, he focuses on the visionary effect of the landscape, particularly of the mountain that the native tribes once named Going-to-the-Sun. Several poems personify the sun, repeating lines as if performing an incantation, including ‘the center of the sun was but his eye’ (‘The Mystic Rooster of the Montana Sunrise’, line 3; ‘The Mystic Unicorn of the Montana Sunset’, line 3), and the name Going-to-theSun itself. The illustrations for these poems, which are accompanied by

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Lindsay’s own system of hieroglyphics (Figures 2.9 and 2.10), are Blakeian imaginings of the images created by looking at the sun at different times of day. Taken together, the images and poems create a sense that Glacier Park is a mystic landscape: a world of magical roosters, unicorns and dragons. Going-to-the-Sun Mountain is ‘an outdoor temple for the singer and the rover’ (‘The Boat with the Kite String’, line 18), a place where time is of no importance: ‘another year is done/Or another thousand years, what does it matter/On the mountain peak called “Going-To-The-Sun”?’ (‘The Pheasant Speaks of His Birthdays’, lines 22–24). These representations overlook, of course, both the reality that the park is a constructed space and its recent history of native removal.52 Lindsay produced another illustrated volume of poetry based on a tramp trip through Glacier National Park, this time one that he took with his wife, Elizabeth. He called it Going-to-the-Stars (1926), putting the book explicitly in conversation with Going-to-the-Sun. In the book’s introduction, he gives an admiring account of Graham, one which suggests that

Figure 2.7  From Graham, Tramping with a Poet, p. 108.

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Figure 2.8  Illustration from Vachel Lindsay, Going-to-the-Sun (New York; London: D. Appleton and Company, 1923), p. 1.

Figure 2.9  From Lindsay, Going-to-the-Sun, pp. 12–13.

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Figure 2.10  From Lindsay, Going-to-the-Sun, pp. 30–31.

his former companion was never far from his mind. Lindsay continued to overlook Graham’s commercial motivations: ‘We [Vachel and Elizabeth] sent him letters pledging devotion. With even more emphasis, we thought of him as guide, philosopher, and friend when he crossed the Canadian line … He is the man with Wesley’s motto, ‘The world is my parish’; the man with a globe in his head’.53 Other poems in this volume represent the road as a hideout and spiritual quest: ‘When I take the free road again/I will hide from the rich forever,/Like an under-the-desert river,/The better to learn the ways of the Giver’ (‘Old, Old, Old, Old Andrew Jackson, lines 269–272). 32 years before Jack Kerouac would predict a ‘rucksack revolution’ in Dharma Bums (1958), Lindsay prophesises ‘a separate race’ called ‘the young’, who would seek, en mass, to find themselves in the wilderness: ‘Who are these boys and girls on horseback/Who go by next day,/ The horses loaded for camping,/No guides to lead the way?’ (‘These are the young’, lines 49–55). These lines represent a hopeful vision of an America more in touch with nature, the result of the next generation taking up his call to create the Gospel of Beauty. Lindsay’s reference to age is significant, since at 47 he was beginning to feel too old to embark upon such journeys himself. Notably, indeed, he did not write another work of vagabondage,

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although in later years he pined for the freedom of his earlier tramps, speaking often of taking ‘another begging trip’.54 The failure of America to take up his Gospel of Beauty affected Lindsay deeply, and he suffered from years of depression and paranoia, symptoms that were enhanced by ever-increasing levels of debt. He continued to suffer hallucinations which, unlike in earlier years, he was unable to fashion into productive creative visions. Due to a combination of these factors, Lindsay killed himself aged 52, bringing his spiritual vagabondage to a definitive and terrible end.

2.3 Conclusion Vachel Lindsay’s anti-modernity led him to reject the hobo as a figure too closely connected to industrial work practices. Despite this, many published hobo and tramp narratives were influenced by the vagabond travel genre. This influence carried over in a wish to sightsee without money, or a desire to avoid becoming a wage slave by working as little as possible, in writers like Bill Quirke, William Henry Davies, Harry Kemp, Henry Herbert Knibbs, David Grayson, Bart Kennedy, ‘Windy Bill’ and Roger Payne.55 The vagabond travel narrative has continued into the Twenty-First Century, with numerous books, magazines and websites making use of the term to mean travelling on a small budget and, like the vagabonds discussed in this chapter, setting themselves explicitly against traditional tourism.56 As the following chapter will make clear, Jack London also saw transiency as a means to escape hard manual labour. Engaging directly with the railway, London’s The Road would become the most well-known tramp memoir. Despite his influence and fame, however, London’s bombastic road narratives have rarely been considered for what they show about the darker sides of transiency, particularly the dangers that the road held for young, vulnerable boys.

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chapter 3

Vulnerable Youth and Hobosexuality in the Works of Jack London and A-No.1

Behind My father’s cannery works I used to see Rail-squatters ranged in nomad raillery, The ancient men—wifeless or runaway Hobo-trekkers that forever search An empire wilderness of freight and rails. Each seemed a child, like me, on a loose perch, Holding to childhood like some termless play.

Hart Crane, from The Bridge (1933)1

In 1911, the writer Jack London received an invitation for a hobo ball. Given by an organisation known as the Social Science League, the event was to take place on 25 November at San Francisco’s prestigious Jefferson Square Hall, and it was clearly not for current transients. Illustrated with a humorous prison scene in which a swell and two tramps act out making an appearance at a fancy soirée, with another prisoner performing as the doorman bowing before them, the invitation was couched in mock hobo slang: Come fellers, dig up a dainty damsel and a quarter of a buck. All Flat-Heads and Scissor-Bills, Gay Cats and Blanket Stiffs are invited. Bulls, Gregs and Fuzzy-Tails will get their lamps on direct action. Political Mush-fakirs and overfed Prune-Princes will take their feet off the Pie-Counter and dance the grease off their guts. A creek full of white-line on premises. PUT ON YOUR BUM RAGS.2

Unsurprisingly, London did not attend this event.3 As a former transient who prided himself on being a ‘blowed-in-the-glass profesh’, he would have seen this invitation as an example of dilettantism.4 In his book of tramp experiences, The Road (1907), he makes frequent distinctions between skilled and experienced hobos, such as himself, and those who were known as gay-cats: ‘gay-cats are short-horns, chechaquos, new chums, 79

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or tenderfeet’. The ‘profesh’, in contrast, ‘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’. As several critics have noted, London goes to inordinate lengths to prove his status as a member of this transient aristocracy, claiming that he went straight from road kid to profesh: ‘I practically skipped my gay-cat apprenticeship’ (p. 285). Indeed, many critics have taken him at his word, noting the bombast but failing to look beyond it.5 And yet the book also demonstrates numerous moments of insecurity over the historical reality that London was a young and potentially vulnerable boy when he went out on the road (16 in 1892, 18 in 1894). The current chapter is about how he negotiates this vulnerability. By focussing on London’s self-presentation as a presentation to other men, I consider how his portrayals of heroic masculinity are also projections of anxiety and self-doubt. In doing so I offer a new focus for London Studies not simply on how he constructs a sense of fragile masculinity, which is hardly new, but also how that construction allows space for what Charmian London called her husband’s ‘womanside’. London’s tramp writings, which extend to fiction and non-fiction, represent an important part of his oeuvre because they form a space in which his vulnerability clashes most strikingly with his political and literary aesthetic of dominance. This chapter will argue that London’s tramp writings are haunted by the spectre of submission to the will of other men, including sexual submission. In The Road, he attempts to exorcise this spectre in two ways: first, by portraying himself as a ‘tramp-royal’; and second, by underplaying the potential dangers to which homeless boys were subject. After the publication of The Road, London struck up an acquaintance with an older hobo, Leon Ray Livingston, who was also known by his moniker of ‘A No.1’ and who wrote several tramp memoirs, including a fictional account of being on the road with London. Livingston’s books, which form the focus of one section of this chapter, demonstrate an obsessive concern with the fate of young boys, frequently portraying their author in the role of saviour. His texts are replete with hints about the sexual threats that homeless children faced, including abuse that Livingston himself suffered. A-No.1’s fictional book about his time with London, From Coast to Coast with Jack London (1917), is careful not to suggest weakness in his companion, though it does portray him as passive, with Livingston in the roles of teacher and protector. He sought to emulate London’s literary success, convincing the famous author to write a letter falsely claiming that they had been road partners. Critics have barely mentioned the Livingston–London relationship, possibly because A-No.1’s account of

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tramping with London is so obviously fanciful. Yet Livingston’s work highlights important themes that are an invisible presence in London’s accounts of tramp life. This chapter will, then, also examine London’s own representation of vulnerable youth in works other than The Road. In these lesser-known writings, London acknowledges the abuse of young boys, even their potential prostitution, while portraying their reasons for joining the road sympathetically. Richard W. Etulain asks ‘Why did London have so much difficulty producing first-rate fiction about his tramp travels?’ Etulain gives the problematically gendered answer that ‘The hobo was not an inspiring subject for teenage girls and coffee-table books’.6 Yet London did not struggle to write about other rough or unrefined subject matter that might also alarm the well-mannered girls of Etulain’s imagination. This chapter will provide an alternative explanation: despite his various attempts, London never successfully exorcised the spectre of submission in a way that fully acknowledged that he had, in fact, once been a gay-cat.

3.1  Dominance and Sexuality London operated according to an aesthetics of dominance. Influenced by Marxism, Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, he understood the world as a struggle for mastery. He portrayed this struggle as going on between racial groupings, between classes, and between individuals. In political terms, he adhered to AngloSaxon Socialism: a belief that socialism would overthrow capitalism, but only once the superior Anglo-Saxon had outbred, or perhaps conquered, the lesser races of the earth. Once this racial dominance was assured, the inequality fostered by capitalism would become intolerable and a socialist revolution would inevitably follow. For London, the struggle for dominance always had a sexual dimension, including between men. As literary scholars have noted, several of his key texts contain latent homoeroticism tinged with repulsion. For Jonathan Auerbach, London’s portrayal of Wolf Larsen in The Sea Wolf (1904) displays both attachment and aversion.7 Similarly, Scott Derrick argues that in both The Sea Wolf and Martin Eden ‘London employs a narrative teleology aimed at the construction of heterosexual masculinity to repress and marginalize a finally unacceptable and disruptive homoeroticism’.8 Less has been written about the homoeroticism of London’s own life. In a letter to Upton Sinclair, who had written a posthumous account of her late husband, Charmian London noted that few people understood

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his sexuality: ‘And whatever you [Sinclair] did leave out, was only what you could not, do not, know of Jack. Particularly about sex. But how could you know? You never saw Jack in a multitude of his phases: and you could not know what love, real love in its last, terrific analysis, meant to him in life and in death’. Emphasising that this reference to sexuality related to femininity, she wrote a PS at the top of the letter: ‘So few knew even the least bit about his many-sidedness. And it is not fair to him or to readers to leave out ANY SIDE OF HIM. His child-side, his womanside (I mean feminine side), his tender side, his love-side’ [capitalisation in original].9 Despite this admonition, most scholars and biographers have shied away from any suggestion that Jack London engaged in or thought about sex with men.10 To be clear: I am not claiming to possess definitive evidence that he did. As with Henry James, it is nigh-on-impossible to determine the sex life of a writer who has been dead for over a century and who would have been reticent to open himself up to homophobic persecution. For the literary critic, thankfully, conclusively determining such questions is not of vital importance in analysing his work.11 Nonetheless, it is useful to know that he was drawn towards men, and that this attraction had an eroticised element. London’s letters contain several flirtatious correspondences, including with his long-term friend Cloudesley Johns. Before meeting in person, the two began a correspondence in which they discussed books, exchanged writings, and critiqued each other’s work. In 1899, London wrote to John that ‘All my life I have sought an ideal chum’ who mixed a ‘brilliant brain’ with physical courage, and speculated that ‘From what I have learned of you, you approach as nearly as any I have met.’12 Five days later, he presented Johns with a mental image of his own nudity: I once rode a saddle horse from Fresno to the Yosemite Valley, clad in almost tropical nudity, with a ball room fan and a silk parasol. It was amusing to witness the countryside turn out as I went along. Some of my party, who lagged behind, heard guesses hazarded as to whether I was male or female. The women of the party were tenderly nurtured, and I hardly know if they have recovered yet, or if their proprieties rather have come down to normal.13

Though the image is partly intended to be humorous, London also seems to be flirting by encouraging Johns to imagine him not only as nude, but nude in a way that defies clear gender categories.14 The letter revels in its gender-bending dynamics, particularly the striking image of London riding naked holding a fan and silk parasol, and the fact that it is unclear to the people behind whether he is a man or a woman.15 Just in case he be

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thought unfeminine, though, he adds that he values ‘Virility in a man, first and always’. A week later, he concluded another letter by stating that an anonymous ‘unwelcome guest’ is getting into bed with him. Though it is unclear if this guest, about whom London states ‘He is such a fool’, is a human being or a pet, it is possible that he is trying to make Johns jealous.16 In any case, the two men later exchanged pictures, at which point London radically changed his tone.17 ‘Your chin’, he wrote disapprovingly, ‘I must confess I do not like. It belies the rest of the face which seems so strong. It almost has the touch of effemicacy [sic] about it which I so detest to see in men. And yet, from your letters I have always derived the opposite conclusion – that you were strongly masculine. It had seemed there was so much in you, of rudeness, roughness, wildness, hurrah-for-hell sort of stuff, such as I possess – a certain affinity you see. I can’t reconcile the two’.18 Perceiving effeminacy in Johns, London brutally shuts down the possibility of a homoerotic engagement between the two, though they would remain friends. For London, a connection between two men might be erotically charged, but he was suspicious of any man who took what he perceived to be a feminine position. In a love letter to his future wife, then Charmian Kittredge, London nervously admits that he has been longing for a ‘great Man-Comrade’ with whom he ‘might merge and become one for love and life’. This Man-Comrade ‘should love the flesh, as he should the spirit … be delicate and tender, brave and game; sensitive as he pleased in the soul of him, and in the body of him unfearing and unwitting of pain’.19 Charmian’s understanding response thrilled him, even more so because previously several other potential female lovers had been appalled by the same revelation and rejected him. Their later letters suggest that London finds Charmian to be the closest to a Man-Comrade that he is likely to achieve, having been disappointed by the effeminacy of Johns and others.20 Despite his desire for a man-comrade who was his equal, London also tolerated acquaintances who deferred to him as their superior. A clear example of this was Spiro Orfans (also Ophens), a fan who first contacted London in 1910.21 Starstruck, Orfans wrote that London and Christ were equal influences in his life.22 Despite the fact that they had only met once in person, in 1912 Orfans made his feelings clear: ‘I would like to see you more than I can tell you … I still love you in fact I love you more than ever’.23 Orfan’s submissiveness is conspicuous: ‘the first and last we spoke together was the sweetest I have tasted yet … it feels better to have a master than no master at all’ [underlining in original]. That London seemingly encouraged Orfans to think of him as his ‘master’ suggests that he also

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got something from the arrangement. Rather than being put off by such a declaration, a letter from the following year indicates that he had allowed Orfans to visit Glen Ellen: sounding fragile, Orfans wrote that he felt ‘normal’ and ‘better’ as a result of their conservation, and that London’s friendship was ‘my highest asset in life’.24 Though this might sound nurturing, his next letter suggests that during the visit London had accused Orfans of being a ‘coward’ on account of having a religious faith, an accusation which had the effect of making Orfans rethink his beliefs.25 That the London–Orfans relationship was based on a brutal, abusive dynamic is clearest from the way that the friendship ended. In 1915, Orfans wrote a polite critique of the racist content of London’s novel The Mutiny of the Elsinore (1914). The pair debated questions of race for several letters, and then Orfans, apparently growing in confidence, dared to mock London’s Anglo-Saxon protagonists in verse.26 Unable to withstand satire from one who had previously called him ‘master’, London wrote an excoriating response. Accusing Orfans of being a ‘fool’ with a ‘base heterogeneity of blood’, he threw his previous submissiveness back in his face. Accusing him of ‘fawning and lickspittling at my feet, kissing my hand, saying that you are a disciple of my great GodAlmightiness of intellect’, London expressed disbelief that now ‘you… proceed to get in and worry me, and challenge me’. Since such a ‘challenge’ was incompatible with their relationship, only instant submission could save it, and so the letter ends: ‘You weak, spineless thing. One thing remains to you. Get down on your hams and eat out of my hand. Or cease forever from my existence’.27 That London was prepared to give Orfens one more chance, albeit only if he debased himself like a pig, suggests that the friendship gave him something that he felt he needed: dominance over another man. Though there is no evidence that London had sexual relations with Orfens, or indeed any other man, the dynamic of mastery outlined above echoes the relationships that commonly occurred on the road between older men and young boys. These relationships were patterned along lines of dominance and submission, lines that were gendered in stereotypical ways in order to circumvent accusations of effeminacy on the part of the dominant partner. George Chauncey argues that within American working class culture before the 1930s, the terms homosexual and heterosexual, which suggest that one’s identity is dependent upon who one sleeps with, were uncommon. The extent to which a person was effeminate, or a ‘fairy’, depended instead on ‘a much broader inversion of their ascribed gender status by assuming the sexual and other cultural roles ascribed to

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women’, including submission. This allowed ‘many conventionally masculine men … to engage in extensive sexual activity with other men without risking stigmatization and the loss of their status as “normal men”.’28 On the road, the older male partner, known variously as a ‘wolf’ or ‘jocker’, could assert his masculinity by dominating – and abusing – a young boy, known as either a ‘punk’, ‘prushun’ or ‘gay-cat’. As Todd DePastino notes, the only stigma involved was for the weaker partner: ‘Many inside the subculture regarded involvement with a jocker as a sign of weakness or “femininity”’.29 Consequently, many abused former punks became abusers themselves in order to reclaim their sense of lost masculinity. Little wonder, then, that London denied being a gay-cat, a term that he also attempted to detach from any sexual connotations.30 It is notable that one of his self-appointed nicknames was ‘wolf’, a term that resonated with his experiences in Alaska but which also had sexual connotations that came from the road. To be a ‘wolf’ on the road was to be a master, which also meant to be a normal man. As Margot Canaday notes, ‘Since at least the turn of the century, homosexuality was considered a defining characteristic of vagrants, tramps, and hoboes’.31 Both adult homosexuality and man–boy sexual relationships were commonly acknowledged phenomena, and indeed were often conflated, as in this example from Josiah Flynt: ‘Every hobo in the United States knows what “unnatural intercourse” means, talking about it freely, and according to my finding, every tenth man practices it, and defends his conduct. Boys are the victims of this passion’.32 Hobo William ‘Roving Bill’ Aspinwall discussed male adult consensual homosexuality and the rape of young boys in his 1890s letters to Professor John James McCook, being equally disgusted by both.33 The sexual abuse of children, especially boys, featured in many articles, books, and films in the years after the publication of The Road.34 Although it generated less sensationalist newsprint, consensual sex between adults, as Nathan Bryan Titman argues, was almost certainly more common: ‘gay men’, as he puts it, ‘traveled in order to establish new homosocial groupings based on non-heteronormative desires’.35 For Heather Tapley, ‘hobosexual’ practices represent a queering of normative, capitalistic understandings of sex because they lack a clear, profitable goal.36 Jack London did not see it that way, however, and, as I will soon discuss, he spent a lot of homophobic energy denying that he was ever involved in non-normative sex on the road. First, however, this chapter will turn away from London briefly in order to demonstrate the extent to which sexual dominance and abuse were persistent themes in hobo narratives. To do this I will analyse texts by Leon

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Ray Livingston, otherwise known as ‘A-No.1, The Rambler’. Compared to London’s The Road, Livingston was relatively explicit about the abuse that young transient boys faced. Indeed, he focused somewhat obsessively on the fate of these figures, and repeatedly portrayed himself as a saviour of endangered youth.

3.2  The Figure of the Child in the Work of Leon Ray Livingston As an author, A-No.1 modelled himself on Jack London. Having observed London’s tremendous success as a novelist, journalist, and autobiographer, including his account of tramping in The Road, Livingston decided to become a writer himself. Giving himself the grandiose title of ‘America’s Most Celebrated Tramp’, he published twelve books about transient life, mostly memoirs but also several attempts at fiction. He claimed to have trademarked his hobo moniker and also self-published his works under the title of The A-No.1 Publishing Company, creating a letterhead in an attempt to make his ‘company’ seem larger and more established than it was.37 He introduced himself to London via letter in 1907, stating ‘Perhaps you might have heard of me,’ a phrase which indicates that they could not have been road partners in the 1890s as they were both later to claim (Livingston to London, 12 Dec. 1907). The pair corresponded several times and met in person on at least one occasion, in 1909 (see Figure 3.1). Livingston took advantage of his relationship with London, bragging to anyone who would listen about their purported travels and repeatedly asking his friend to write a fictional account of their life together, which he never did.38 A-No.1 did, however, persuade London to write a letter falsely claiming that they had known each other on the road, an item that he brandished whenever he could, and which he eventually reproduced as a badge of authenticity in From Coast to Coast with Jack London (see Figure 3.2). The fact that London lied in producing an autograph claiming that he had tramped with Livingston has been missed by London scholarship.39 Despite its largely fictional nature, A-No.1 shamelessly exploited his connection to London. He waited for less than two months after the author’s death to ask Charmian London for permission to write a book of fiction describing adventures on the road with her late husband.40 Though she apparently did grant permission, she also warned him: ‘You must be careful what you write about J.L now. If I were “nasty” and you said things I did not like, I could easily come out in print and say that J.L never hobo’d with you at all, etc. But I am not “nasty” and shall not “give you away”’ (C. London to Livingston, 10 June 1917). Charmain never did give him away, and this minor literary hoax passed without comment for over a century.

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3.2  The Child in the Work of Leon Ray Livingston

Figure 3.1  Photograph of Jack London and Leon Ray Livingston (‘A-No1’). Image taken at London’s home in 1909, later colourised by Martin Johnson and put onto a glass lantern slide. The inscription reads: ‘Poteau, Oklahoma. December 9th 1909. To Mr Martin Johnson. This is a souvenir of Jack London and A.No1. Yours truly, A.No1, The Rambler.’ Courtesy of California State Parks, 2022.

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Figure 3.2  Letter written by London claiming that he had hoboed with A-No.1. The text reads: ‘To my old pal, A.No.1: – In memory of old days on the Road together, & in hopes that your same old good luck will always be with you – Jack London. Glen Ellen, Calif., Sept 11. 1909.’ Jack London to Leon Ray Livingston, 11 Sept 1909, reproduced in Livingston, From Coast to Coast with Jack London (Erie, Pennsylvania: The A-No.1 Publishing Company, 1917).

While Livingston’s autobiographical works are a mixture of fact and fiction, he really was a well-known figure on the road. A 1907 edition of the Chicago Tribune cites a hobo with the name ‘A No [i.e number] One’, who claims to have his name ‘on every water tank between New York and Boston’, at a notorious banquet given at the Chicago hobo college.41 There may have been some truth to this claim. Anthropologist Susan Phillips has authenticated Livingston’s hobo moniker on walls in Los Angeles dating to the early twentieth century.42 His road fame was also noted by R. E. McNamara who, having spent time as a tramp in 1898–99, suggested to London that he might write a fictionalised account of Livingston: ‘You have no doubt heard of “A-No-1”, his moniker used to be seen from NY to Frisco, I’ve seen it in Canada and New Orleans and practically half the tramps I ever knew claimed acquaintance with him’.43 Livingston’s notoriety was due in no small measure to his penchant for self-promotion. His typical practice was to ride a train into a city and head straight for the local newspaper office, where he would inveigle local reporters to write a story on him, aided by a press release that he had prepared in advance.44 Apparently charismatic, Livingston was able to convince reporters that he was a ‘respectable’ tramp: that is, someone who regretted his descent into hobodom and who spent his days finding young boys on the road and convincing them to return to their families.

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Livingston’s brand was that of a moral, anti-romantic hobo. One advertising flyer stated that ‘The Author Has Carefully Avoided the Least Mention of Anything That Would be Unfit Reading for the Most Dainty Lady or Child’, while another had the notice ‘No Love Affairs’.45 Aware of the criticism that London had received for idealising tramping in The Road, Livingston was at pains to portray the negative side of existence as a hobo and to avoid accusations that he was trying to seduce boys into tramping. One newspaper, after advertising his first two books, suggested that he ‘devotes nearly every cent of his revenue in sending boys back to their homes and future usefulness’.46 This incredible claim is emblematic of Livingston’s brand. He even asked London to lie again by saying that A-No.1 had convinced him to quit the road, a request that London angrily rejected.47 Throughout his own writings, as I will now discuss, Livingston presented himself as a saviour of errant male youth. In his first book, Life and Adventures of A-No.1, America’s Most Celebrated Tramp (1910), Livingston admits that as a young runaway, he suffered physical abuse from older men. Having left home aged 11, he reached New Orleans by rail and signed up as a cabin boy aboard a ship bound for Central America. He received numerous beatings from the crew, though his account is careful to avoid mentioning sexual abuse.48 Sometime later, while still considering whether he would return home to his parents, he partnered with an older tramp, called ‘Frenchy’, whose actions made such a return unlikely. Attempting to convince Livingston to travel East with him to Florida, Frenchy enticed him with adventurous stories of his time as a highway robber: ‘He spun the tale so earnestly and so quietly that I never dreamed him to be anything but a genuine hero (according to my ideas of a hero at that time)’ (p. 33). Frenchy makes seductive claims for the excitement of the proposed journey to Florida and the ease of life in the sunshine state: ‘he told me that there were plenty of “lemonadesprings” and “rock-candy-mountains” and “cigarette groves” there’ (p. 33). These quotes are references to well-known late-nineteenth century phrases associated with transient pederasty, and their presence here implies a sexual dimension to the relationship between Livingston and Frenchy.49 The phrases most famously found expression in, and are commonly and incorrectly believed to originate from, the song ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’ (circa 1890s), which was based on several earlier folk songs and allegedly written by Harry ‘Haywire’ McClintock. One version of ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’ is a monologue from the perspective of a jocker who is attempting to seduce a boy onto the road with elaborate promises of a life of ease. The final verse, which is not in McClintock’s 1928 recording, shifts to the

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perspective of the boy as he refuses the older man’s attentions: ‘And I’ll be damned if I hike any more/To be buggered sore like a hobo’s whore/In the Big Rock Candy Mountains’.50 Livingston, by contrast, did not refuse his jocker’s advances, and the chapter ends ominously with the young man sitting on Frenchy’s knee and then being ‘put to bed’ (pp. 37–38). As evidenced by his reference to ‘The last kid I had’, Frenchy has been through a series of possessive relationships with young boys (p. 43). He behaves with a high degree of jealousy towards his new ‘kid’, threatening violence if Livingston is caught talking with any gay-cats (p. 35).51 After putting Livingston on his knee, Frenchy makes him swear an oath ‘never to associate with anyone in whose company I would be ashamed to pass my mother’s home in broad daylight. Amen’ (p. 38). Though presented as an example of moral uplift, the motivation behind the oath is sexual jealousy: when the pair part ways, Frenchy orders Livingston that he should ‘not travel with another partner under pain of death should he meet me’, with Livingston adding ‘He did not need to scare me for I knew how desperate he was’ (p. 46). Livingston says that he has repeated the above oath every evening before sleep. Although hyperbolic, this claim nevertheless suggests that Frenchy had a profound and lasting influence, an influence that is particularly clear from the fact that it was Frenchy who gave him his ‘A-No.1’ moniker. Stating that Livingston has been ‘a good lad while you’ve been with me’, Frenchy tells him that he must ‘try to be “A-No.1” all the time and in everything you undertake’ (pp. 44–45). As well as meaning that he should always try to do his best, the phrase ‘try to be “A-No.1” all the time’ suggests that he must also forget his name and previous life. Livingston’s interpellation as A-No.1 was thorough and he kept this moniker until his death. Frenchy’s abusive actions and conferring of a new identity on Livingston turned the young boy into a confirmed tramp.52 Aware of the suspicion of sexual abuse that could hang around the figure of the hobo, A-No.1’s persona was of a man with a mission to prevent boys from meeting his own fate. He diagnoses the problem of tramping to stem from ‘The Kid Tramp’ [emphasis in original] and, like Josiah Flynt and Charles Davenport, blames wanderlust for the problem of youth homelessness (p. 70). He presents wanderlust as an overwhelming force, akin to an addiction; after a brief return home, he admits in tragic tones that he cannot fight this force (p. 59). The end of Life and Adventures is structured around the narrator’s meeting with a boy of his own age, Tom, with whom he tramps across Columbia and whose painful death from a snakebite is presented as the inevitable result of wanderlust. Tom’s final words ‘were to tell his mother that he thought of her’ (p. 109), a pledge

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that Livingston attempts to keep. When he eventually finds his way back to the United States, he cannot bring himself to tell Tom’s mother that he is dead. In a highly sentimental scene, the mother tells A-No.1 of her heartbreak, and ‘the tears came streaming down my cheeks. I tried to be brave and deliver those only tokens of a wandering boy to his old widowed, lonely mother, but I couldn’t’ (p. 116). Unable to face upsetting the mother by speaking of Tom’s death, Livingston sets himself the unlikely task of returning all vulnerable boys to their mothers. This is the basic plot of several of his books, which re-tell the same narrative of the potential abuse of young boys at the hands of an older male hobo only for them to be saved by A-No.1, or an A-No.1 stand-in.53 In returning to this story repeatedly, Livingston seems to have been trying (and failing) to come to terms with his childhood trauma. *** In his fictional account of tramping with Jack London, A-No.1 treads a fine line. He is careful not to portray his deceased friend as an inexperienced gay-cat. Instead, From Coast to Coast with Jack London (1917) positions London as an apprentice learning from his master. The partnership began, according to A-No.1’s account, when London answered an advert that Livingston had placed in a newspaper asking for a companion to tramp his way across America. Displaying the initiative that was characteristic of his real-world literary persona, this fictional London secures a personal interview by waiting for Livingston while he was collecting responses to his advert from the post box. Livingston portrays London as ‘a youth of perhaps eighteen years’ with ‘no end of latent animal energy’ and ‘keen and penetrating’ eyes.54 London’s attitude to his prospective partner is that of ‘the dog who had adopted his master’ (p. 12). This phrase indicates the complicated dynamic that exists between the pair. On the one hand, London is the ‘dog’ while Livingston is his ‘master’, suggesting a relationship of dominance, but the reversal of expectations in the phrase ‘the dog who had adopted his master’ suggests that in fact Livingston has no choice but to accept the younger man as his travelling companion. The text makes it clear that the youth has some experience on the road but that A-No.1 has more: while London ‘had negotiated one complete transcontinental round trip’, Livingston possesses a ‘vast practical and otherwise experience, which I had acquired during the more than a half of a score of years which I had roughed it’ (p. 20). Although London is no gay-cat and therefore is unlikely to be sexually exploited by his partner, he lacks Livingston’s wealth of knowledge. The text maintains an awkward balance between

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experience and innocence throughout, sometimes showing London to be self-reliant and at other moments portraying him as being in need of aid. London is not the most vulnerable young man on the road. To show this, Livingston has the pair encounter a jocker and two punks: ‘the nasty tramp had induced the lads to run away from their homes. He promised to guide them to Texas where they would lead the life of cowboys. He proposed other crack-brained inducements for the youths to embark upon the lawless and degenerate existence of the wandering beggars of hobodom’ (p. 34). The term ‘degenerate’ is an implicit suggestion of homosexuality, while Livingston’s subsequent reference to the tramp’s stories as ‘lofty air castles’ (p. 34) fits the trope of the Big Rock Candy Mountain.55 London shoves the tramp from the moving train, a murderous and homophobic act to which the narrator gives his approval by referring to the falling man as a ‘detestable vagrant’ (p. 34). After the hobo has met his likely death, London lectures the young boys on the benefits of home (p. 35). Both London’s shove and A-No.1’s language indicate not only disapproval of sexual relations between tramps and young boys on the road, but also serve to dismiss any suggestion of a similar relationship between the protagonists. The above incident highlights the moral purity of their journey.56 Yet despite attempts to address homophobic concerns, their relationship is structured according to a pattern of protection and guidance which, as Peter Boag notes, was an important facet of jocker–punk partnerships.57 Indeed, Livingston saves London’s life after he is incapacitated with terror when a bull tries to kill them by dangling a coupling pin underneath the rods where the pair are situated. Instead of escaping, ‘Jack London lay helplessly paralyzed with fear’, forcing Livingston to grab ‘my mate by his coat’ and drag him to safety (p. 44). It is important that the danger emanates from a railroad bull rather than another tramp, as this removes any suggestion of sexual threat. Yet since self-reliance is a fundamental element of traditional masculinity, this section nevertheless emasculates London in the face of the phallic pin edging towards him. Livingston demonstrates his own superior masculinity by saving his ‘mate’, a significant phrase since it was well-known that London and his wife Charmian referred to themselves, in Darwinian terms, as ‘Mate–man’ and ‘mate–woman’. For Livingston’s sake, it was probably a good thing that London had died by the time this story was published, as it flatly contradicted the famous author’s hypermasculine persona. Although he portrayed himself as London’s mentor, London’s novels occupy a dominant position in Livingston’s writings. For example,

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From Coast to Coast refers to the Main Stem area in Chicago as an ‘abyss’ (pp. 77–83), an allusion to London’s slumming narrative The People of the Abyss (1903), and also to alcohol as John Barleycorn (pp. 79–80, p.122), a reference to London’s ‘alcoholic memoirs’ of that same title. Other Livingston texts adopt London’s phrasing, such as the references to ‘fairyland’ (From People of the Abyss) and ‘The Call of the Road’ [emphasis in original] in Life and Adventures (p. 28, p. 74).58 These references are linguistic doffs of the cap, acknowledgments that London’s oeuvre far outstrips Livingston’s own in terms of quality and popularity.

3.3  Tramping and Mastery in The Road A-No.1’s focus on the fate of young boys means that he represents the reality of sexual exploitation more openly than does London. Yet London’s The Road displays a great deal of anxiety that its narrator might be mistaken for a gay-cat. This is because for him masculinity was not a given but must be constantly proven through action, whether through adventuring, fighting, or work.59 London portrays himself as a ‘profesh’, a man who takes adventure in his stride and who demonstrates his masculinity by appearing superior to other tramps, by mastering hobo slang, and through his ability to tell stories. Yet the text’s representation of hypermasculinity co-exists with an anxious acknowledgment that London was a boy during his travels on the road – a boy who, at times, craved the recognition and respect of older men. The Road is both an incoherent and a light-hearted book. Partly as a result of their original publication as separate magazine articles, its episodic chapters do not progress chronologically but rather jump back-andforth across memorable incidents in London’s tramp career. Critics have tended to object to this aspect of the text. For Etulain, The Road fails the Aristotelian test of ‘unity’, while Arthur Calder-Marshall’s version of the text shifts the chapters around in order to correct the chronology.60 Nor are all of the chapters internally coherent: some, like ‘Confession’, contain a narrative thread that runs from the start to the finish while others, including ‘Bulls’, move between incidents that have a weak thematic link, producing a sense of one damn thing after another.61 As discussed in the Introduction, this structure represents transiency as an episodic existence, interwoven with experiences and a panoply of places, people and train-rides. As Paul Durica argues, the book’s arrangement represents a ‘tramping aesthetic … a textual simulation of the experience of tramping itself’.62 Incoherence, in other words, is the literary equivalent of drift.

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As well as critiquing the book’s lack of unity, based upon a traditional notion of autobiography, responses to The Road have taken aim at its lightheartedness. George Brett, the editor of Macmillan, urged London not to publish the book, while contemporary responses were often framed by a sense that London had not been serious enough about his topic, a lack of seriousness that indicated that he did not regret his time spent as a hobo (which, indeed, he did not).63 These responses have been echoed in more recent scholarly analysis, such as John Allen’s claim that London’s romanticisation of the road performed detrimental cultural work in encouraging more people to become hobos.64 In contrast to Allen, I do not see the purpose of criticism as evaluating literature according to its moral worth, or in making speculations about its possible impact upon readers. Instead, I will note that The Road’s episodic nature and what London called its ‘facetious’ tone have made it the paradigmatic road narrative.65 The Road’s influence is clear in the reproduction of its form and style in dozens of hobo memoirs, as well as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and the Road Movie genre. One reason that London adopted a non-serious tone was to demonstrate his status as a ‘profesh’; his tone suggests that as someone who has mastered the road, he is able to approach the topic lightly. The dangers of tramp life, particularly its sexual dangers, are kept to the margins. Instead, London focused on his ability to master the skills required to become a hobo, as well as the linguistic and storytelling abilities that served him well on the road and, he claims, as a novelist. The language of the road is a central element of London’s text. He writes that a desire to learn slang was a key motivation behind his decision to hop his first train. Having previously thought of himself as an adventurer for his exploits as a teenage oyster pirate (illegal oyster fishing), he is brought up sharply by listening to the talk of a group of road-kids: ‘It was a new vernacular. They were road-kids, and with every word they uttered the lure of The Road laid hold of me imperiously’ (p. 277). He feels a sense of inferiority at having never been on the road and in being unable to reproduce this ‘new vernacular’: These wanderers made my oyster-piracy look like thirty cents. A new world was calling to me in every word that was spoken —a word of rods and gunnels, blind baggages and “side-door Pullmans,” “bulls” and “shacks,” “floppings” 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 “lined” myself up alongside these road kids. I was just as strong as any of them, just as quick, just as nervy, and my brain was just as good.’ (p. 278)

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For London, mastering hobo jargon was a necessary stage in proving his masculinity, which he competitively equates with proving himself ‘just as good’ as the other boys. He reproduces the dialect of the road throughout the book, explaining the meaning of key terms for uninitiated readers. When writing earlier articles about the road, London had cross-referenced Flynt’s Glossary to tramp speech from Tramping with Tramps (1899).66 His dedication to Flynt at the opening of The Road also highlights the importance of slang through its use of a term from Flynt’s glossary: ‘To Josiah Flynt, The Real Thing, Blowed in the Glass’ [italics in original] (p. 186). A synonym for profesh, the phrase ‘blowed in the glass’ appealed to London because of its connotations of specialised industrial labour: just as a glass blower is a member of the aristocracy of labour, so Flynt and London are the aristocracy of the road. In his draft manuscripts, the most frequent change that London made to his text was to exchange a familiar word for a slang equivalent, suggesting a degree of anxiety in case his mastery of road language be insufficiently clear.67 As well as a master of hobo jargon, London presents himself as an expert storyteller. He explicitly links his ability to tell stories, or more specifically to lie, with his future career as a novelist: claiming that being a hobo turned him into a realist, he states: ‘I have often thought that to this training of my tramp days is due much of my success as a storywriter’ (p. 193). As a tramp he tells stories for a variety of reasons: for money, survival, comradeship and also to dominate others. He represents storytelling as an important element of hobo culture, as when he serves a kind of apprenticeship in a refrigerator car with eighty-four other hobos who tell each other stories, with the threat of being carried aloft by the crowd if the tale fails to please (pp. 269–270). Though this is a playful example, he nevertheless represents threat and danger as being constant elements of tramp storytelling. For this reason, the tales that he creates are often lies framed to conform to the prejudices of his audience (p. 193). The book’s first chapter, ‘Confession’, is structured around the telling of lies that are impressive in their inventiveness and the speed with which London conceives them. Held in police custody in Canada, he claims not to be a hobo but rather a sailor on his way to see his sister. Understanding the principles of what Roland Barthes would later call the ‘reality effect’, he produces vivid details of a trip to Rangoon to convince the officers of his credentials. When the police produce a sailor who had really been to Rangoon, he is forced to improvise: the sailor seems momentarily suspicious when London does not remember a temple that overlooks the city, so he invents an earthquake that had destroyed the temple in the intervening years (p. 196).

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The threat represented by the real sailor makes London’s quick-wittedness seem all the more impressive, and the incident has a humorous quality, as when he states ‘I had never hated a temple so in my life’, a comment that implicitly reassures readers that he will not ultimately be exposed as a liar. In fact, not only does London persuade the sailor, but he even manages to plant a false memory of having met a man called Billy Harper in Shanghai: ‘And then the miracle happened. The sailorman remembered Billy Harper. Perhaps there had been a Billy Harper, and perhaps he had been in Shanghai for forty years and was still there, but it was news to me’ (p. 197). In placing this memory into the sailor’s consciousness, the narrator exerts his intellectual dominance: the sailor’s willingness to accept that he had in fact met Billy Harper represents his submission to the power of London’s will. He penetrates the sailor’s consciousness and thereby proves himself the superior man. London presents himself as a dominating figure in order to annihilate The Road’s homoerotic potential, even if this desire to dominant also has a sexualised element. He portrays himself as being in competition with other hobos – not for work, but rather based on who can best demonstrate the skills that are required for life on the road. As its title suggests, the chapter ‘Holding Her Down’ makes dominance its key theme. As John Lennon notes, in this chapter London represents train-hopping as a struggle between individuals, one in which he comes out on top.68 London draws on Social Darwinism in his description of the process by which twenty tramps attempt to ride a train but are gradually caught and turned off by the guards: ‘the weeding out process had begun nobly, and it continued station by station’ (p. 206). Though his inherent superiority means that London is inevitably the last man standing, the chapter shifts focus quickly from his struggle with other tramps to his struggle against the guards. Lennon rightly notes that London is, in the end, allowed to stay on the train.69 Building on this, I would emphasise the importance, for the teenage London, of the recognition and respect that he receives from the guards and train crew. When the fireman (coalheaver) realises that London is still on the train, he states with ‘admiration in his voice’: ‘You son of a gun,’ is what he says. It is a high compliment, and I thrill as a schoolboy thrills on receiving a reward of merit. (p. 212)

Since victory is useless unless it is acknowledged, London’s desire to dominate the other tramps is also a wish for recognition from the train workers. As Michael Kimmel has noted, ‘Manhood is demonstrated for other men’s

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approval. It is other men who evaluate the performance’.70 London’s reference to himself as a ‘schoolboy’ complicates his representation of himself elsewhere as a grown-up, as being an impressive young man ahead of his years. Being ‘thrilled’ at receiving ‘a reward of merit’ turns him into a pupil, revealing his motivation not simply to achieve victory in a Darwinian struggle for mastery, but also to achieve a high status in the eyes of older men. Train-hopping is, then, an alternative form of education, one in which he wishes to impress the adult male worker, who plays the role of approving teacher in this scene. London’s search for recognition does not stop at trainmen, however, but extends to other hobos as well. London craves the respect of a tramp whom he will never see. He expresses a desire to meet a hobo “profesh” called ‘Skysail Jack’, whose mark he has seen carved on water-tanks in Montreal and Ottawa. Viewing Skysail Jack as a potential man-comrade, London wishes to catch up with him: he ‘chased [after him] clear across Canada over three thousand miles of railroad’ (p. 257). He states that it is a matter of pride to catch Skysail Jack before he reaches Vancouver: this he fails to do, however, and so pays homage to the tramp’s ability to evade him: ‘Truly, Skysail Jack, you were a tramp-royal, and your mate was the “wind that tramps the world.” I take my hat off to you. You were “blowed-in-the-glass” all right’ (p. 258). The name Skysail refers to the topmast sail on wooden sailing vessels: the skysail typically flies above the royal sail. Skysail Jack is, then, the topmost among hobos, above even London, the ‘tramp royal’, who is unable to catch him. Following this failure to find Skysail, he wonders wistfully what they might have done together (p. 259). Although the author’s statement that Skysail Jack ‘was from my own town’ (258) indicates that he could be one of London’s many alter-egos, there is evidence that such a person existed. Susan Phillips, with assistance from Joel Reinhard, recently discovered 16 mm documentary film footage taken by Robert Ranberg in 1969, in which the hobo monikers ‘Frisco Kid’ and ‘Skysail’ and the date 1894 are carved onto railway buildings in Red Bluff, California.71 The coincidence of the names and date with the content of The Road (London went tramping in 1894) suggests, though it does not conclusively prove, that these marks were carved by London, as ‘Frisco Kid’, and a real tramp known as Skysail.72 If so, then London’s references to Skysail Jack are more biographical than fictional. If the Skysail of the Red Bluff film is the same man, then London’s addition of ‘Jack’ to his name suggests a degree of self-identification, even though ‘Jack’ was a common generic nickname. Since the monikers are not written together, the Frisco Kid carving may have been written at a different time, perhaps

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in 1892 when London first tried his hand at tramping. Consequently, whether he ever met Skysail cannot be determined. Indeed, in The Road it is precisely Skysail Jack’s inaccessibility, his ability to outpace London, that makes him a model tramp: the ‘ideal chum’ whom the author claimed to have sought all his life. London is preoccupied by the possibility of failing to live up to his own standards, and one key sequence in which he is unable to construct his identity through heroic action features the violent abuse of children. In the chapter ‘Pictures’, the author describes talking with a group of gypsy travellers, whom he presents as a family relation of the American hobo: ‘We were kin – brothers. I knew enough of their argot for conversation and they knew enough of mine’. Despite this kinship, London highlights the racial difference of the gypsies, in particular the leader, who he orientalises as ‘the chief of the tribe, a man with narrow forehead and narrow-slitted eyes’ (p. 222). The man suddenly jumps up to punish two of his young sons for an infraction, a punishment meted out by means of a heavy whip. London describes the beatings in minute detail, noting ‘I caught myself with a start of surprise at the weight of the blow. The thin little leg was so very thin and little’ (p. 223). The second boy receives an even worse beating, one so severe that it un-sexes him: ‘His shrieks were shrill and piercing; within them no hoarse notes, but only the thin sexlessness of the voice of a child’. Reflecting on the fact that he has witnessed agonising scenes of death elsewhere in his life, London notes that those other scenes were ‘as merrymaking and laughter and song to me in comparison with the way the sight of that poor child affected me’ (p. 224). What affects him so deeply is, I argue, not the violence itself but the way in which it un-sexes not only the abused children but also London himself, who is here unable to assert his masculinity through heroic action. He fights with himself not to intervene, knowing that to do so would be potentially fatal, and yet not to do so would un-man him. The boys’ mother does intervene, however, becoming ‘Heroic’ in London’s eyes. She receives the worst beating of all, and he writes that when she receives a ‘welt’ across that face it ‘nearly did for me’, as he caught himself rising to intervene before a man next to him warns him to settle down, which he does (p. 225). While the mother becomes a martyr figure in this sequence, providing a kind of heroic domesticity, London remains a passive, frightened onlooker. Feeling a need to assert his masculinity, he claims that if the leader of the gypsies were alone then ‘rightly gladly would I have waded into the man’, claiming to be ‘confident that I should have beaten him into a mess’ (p. 225). This boast does not offset London’s inaction, however, and the author remains in the passive

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position of watching on while another man asserts his dominance. As if to counter his earlier shock and strong emotional reaction to the beatings, at the end of the sequence London affects carelessness: ‘Well, and what of it? It was a page out of life, that’s all’, a phrase that anticipates Kurt Vonnegut’s famous mantra ‘So it goes’. Yet this protestation is unconvincing: London had cared yet had been unable to act.73 As the above sequence indicates, the text is fearful that London will have to submit to the will of a stronger man and thereby lose his sense of masculinity. This is a particular problem during the chapters that deal with his time in prison. Arrested for vagrancy at Niagara Falls, he was sentenced to 30 days’ imprisonment after being denied his basic rights as a defendant. His arrest for vagrancy was unfair, he feels, because he had not in fact slept out in the district of Niagara Falls.74 He naively believes that he can explain this fact to the Judge: seeing that other tramp defendants are not given a chance to speak in their defence, he arrogantly assumes that his inherent superiority will allow him to do so. His Anglo-Saxon stock, he believes, will be sufficient protection: ‘Behind me were the many generations of my American ancestry. One of the kinds of liberty those ancestors of mine had fought and died for was the right of trial by jury’ (p. 233). But when his turn comes, London is told to shut up and sit down; like the others, he is powerless to prevent himself being given a 30-day sentence. His naivety continues after the sentencing: I’d show them. They couldn’t keep me in jail forever. Just wait till I got out, that was all. I’d make them sit up. I knew something about the law and my own rights, and I’d expose their maladministration of justice. Visions of damage suits and sensational newspaper headlines were dancing before my eyes when the jailers came in and began hustling us out of the main office (p. 234).

Both the legalistic terminology ‘maladministration of justice’ and the hyperbolic visions of ‘damage suits and sensational newspaper headlines’ frames this wish for revenge as a naïve fantasy. At the end of the chapter, the narrator realises that his treatment in being denied a trial was typical, and that his ‘American blood’ is no defence against the forces of capitalist civilisation: ‘I saw at last, clear-eyed, what I was up against. I grew meek and lowly’ (p. 242). He grows ‘meek and lowly’ because he comes to understand that his strength as a single individual is inadequate to the task of taking on a system of structural oppression. As a prisoner, London felt himself to be powerless when alone. Consequently, in prison he teams up with an older tramp whose experience

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proved invaluable, especially in acquiring a relatively comfortable position as a hall-man. The narrator strains to represent himself as the dominant partner: realising that the older prisoner could be useful, he positions the man as his prey: ‘He was my “meat.” I “cottoned” to him’ (p. 235). Making himself friendly in return for advice and protection, he makes a surprising claim about his sense of self: ‘Now it happens that I am a fluid sort of an organism, with sufficient kinship with life to fit in most anywhere’ (p.  235). An implicit acknowledgement that the teenage London made himself submissive to the older prisoner, this statement contradicts the book’s portrayal of its narrator as an essentially dominant and masculine figure. London attempts to counter to any suggestion of submission through his Darwinian register: like a successful species, he is able to adapt to his changed environment and thereby survive. Although the text is circumspect about what he needed to do, or what he promised that he would do, in order to survive, it is nevertheless clear that the older prisoner saw London, in fact, as his meat: ‘He had done much for me, and in return he expected me to do much for him’ (p. 252). His ‘pal’ expects them to team up upon release: ‘Were we not to be together always?’ (p. 256). London attempts to reassert his superior masculinity by revealing his intention to give the man the slip at the earliest possible opportunity. In addition, most of the chapter ‘The Pen’, which deals with his time in prison, focusses not on this awkward situation but rather on his favourable experience as a hall-man, as someone who is able to exploit his fellow prisoners much as, in the world outside, the capitalist exploits the worker (p. 252). Though London makes this explicit connection to capitalism partly for political reasons, the device also serves to distract from his own servitude to a more experienced partner. London fled from the tramp immediately after their release: ‘I’d have liked to say good-bye. He had been good to me. But I did not dare’ (p. 256). The phrase ‘I did not dare’ is the text’s clearest indication that the young London was afraid of the older man. While he does not portray the relationship as being explicitly sexual, he does imply the man’s homosexual desire: ‘He thought I was the real goods, liked me because I was not stupid, and liked me a bit, too, I think, for myself’ (p. 252). The staccato grammar at the end of this sentence indicates his hesitation at making even this implicit revelation, a hesitation that results from the homophobic legal framework of the day and the author’s own understanding of masculinity. For him, being a man meant being able to penetrate but never to be penetrated. Indeed, a fear of anal rape is discernible in his mention of the ‘unprintable horrors of the Erie County Pen. I say “unprintable”, and in

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justice I must also say “unthinkable.” They were unthinkable to me until I saw them, and I was no spring chicken in the ways of the world and the awful abysses of human degradation’ (pp. 248–249).75 Given that he graphically describes a man being beaten to a pulp, and that elsewhere he discusses an electric torture device used in prisons called a ‘hummingbird’, it seems likely that the ‘unthinkable’ nature of what he witnessed did not relate to the amount of physical violence involved, but rather that the acts did conceptual violence to London’s notions of masculinity.76 The term ‘unthinkable’ fits with established patterns in which anal sex (or, more likely in this context, rape) is a present absence in turn-of-the-century transatlantic culture.77 This portrayal of a potentially penetrable manliness makes The Road a key text in understanding London’s representation of vulnerable masculinity.

3.4  Youth, Abuse, and Domesticity in The Road and London’s Other Tramp Writings In The Road, London’s strategy to avoid discussing the harm done to male children extended to turning that group into one of the dangers of transiency. He portrays road kids as ‘wolves’ who are ‘capable of dragging down the strongest man’, which they often do for the purposes of robbery (p. 282). In Darwinian terms, he describes how a ‘pack’ of such kids hunted their ‘prey’, a drunken bindle stiff, only to be beaten to it by another, and older group of kids (‘baby wolves’) also hunting the same man (p. 284). The older kids take the prey, and London ruefully comments ‘it is the world primeval’ (p. 284). Such ‘primeval’ behaviour exemplifies his naturalistic perspective that civilisation is only a thin layer covering over humanity’s animal essence. Portraying road kids as less vulnerable is an important element of his strategy to avoid representing the likelihood of child abuse. He briefly acknowledges the existence of the prushun/ punk-jocker relationship in The Road, but only in order to deny having been part of one: ‘if he [a road kid] travels with a “profesh” he is known possessively as a “prushun.” I was never a prushun, for I did not take kindly to possession’ (p. 285). The strength of this denial reveals London’s anxiety regarding the danger of submission, which was not simply inherent in the physical abuse that a young man might suffer, but also in the psychic danger done to his sense of himself as a man.78 In his other tramp writings, however, he is less circumspect. In ‘Frisco Kid’s Story’ (1895), written when London was at High School and only a year after his transcontinental hobo tour, he indicates the abuse that young

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boys could suffer on the road. This short sketch, written (or overwritten) in a working-class dialect inspired by Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884), is a monologue from the perspective of a road kid, whose interlocutor is a middle-class father who is looking for his runaway son, Charlie. When the speaker acknowledges that he has seen Charlie, the father grabs his arm: ‘Don’t squeeze me like dat. Yer hurts, yer do, an’ wot der yer tink I am? A cheap guy?’79 Frisco Kid misreads the father’s action as an attempt at solicitation: the phrase ‘a cheap guy’ indicates that he believes that his interlocutor has taken him for a child prostitute. Though this in not in fact the case (the father has grabbed his arm from shock), the fact that this is his first assumption indicates that it is a common occurrence for older, middle-class men to search for sex among the San Francisco road kids. A sexual threat also looms over Charlie, whose description fits the feminised stereotype of the gay cat: the speaker describes Charlie as ‘so pritty an innocent like, jest as if he wuz a girl’ (p. 63). The repeated references to Charlie’s pretty, girlish face imply that he will soon be picked up by a middle-class punter or forcibly adopted by a jocker. To avoid either possibility, London has Charlie drown, which seems a less awful fate. The drowning scene links Charlie’s death to his trusting and feminised nature. He is convinced to swim naked in a river, unaware that the road kids watching him intend to steal all of his possessions: ‘I can see ‘m now wid his hand clapst behind hid head an’ his pritty face all smiles an’ laffin’, an’ his yaller hair flyin’ ev’ry way, like a girls. He wuz walkin’ out backwards from de san’bar. All of a sudden like, he struck a hole an’ went down’ (p.  63). Striking the anus-like hole sends girlish Charlie to his fate, his disappearance embodying the story’s homosexual panic. Charlie’s quick death, in other words, annihilates his queer potential. Charlie is too feminine to survive on the Darwinian road, at least not without being exploited by stronger and more masculine figures. In an unpublished 1897 article, also called ‘The Road’ (written 1897, first published 1970), London gives greater attention to the jocker–punk relationship. In this article he warns, as Livingston would later, that the road ‘entices romantic and unruly boys, who venture along its dangerous ways in search of fortune or in rash attempt to escape parental discipline’.80 He refers to the road as a ‘training school’ in which ‘innocent youth’ become ‘vicious and corrupt … vile and loathsome’, lamenting the fact that ‘we Americans … allow in our midst the annual prostitution of tens of thousands of souls’ (p. 75). His use of ‘prostitution’ here is metaphorical since he does not explicitly discuss the act of selling sex. Nevertheless, the following paragraphs show a concern that road kids are commonly taken up

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by older men. Despite being ‘cruelly treated’, the young boys show loyalty and even love to their jockers: The faithfulness of the ‘Road Kids’ for their teachers or “pals” and viceversa, is often pathetic. The self-sacrifice, hardship and punishment they will undergo for each other, is astonishing – a sure index to the latent nobility of soul which lurks within, dwarfed instead of developed. Poor devils! With the hand of society raised against them, it is the only opening through which the shrunken higher parts of their nature may be manifested.’ (p. 76)

For London, the jocker–punk bond is a ‘pathetic’ echo of normal loving relationships. The terms ‘dwarfed’ and ‘shrunken’ indicate the stunted growth of an ‘inner nobility of soul’, which here makes use of the only available (and sexually suggestive) ‘opening’. This description parallels the work of the sexologist Havelock Ellis, who blamed homosexuality on arrested development during adolescence. As suggested by the title of his book Sexual Inversion (1897), for Ellis, homosexuality was related to the abnormal appearance of femininity in men and masculinity in women. However, while Ellis suggested that inversion was caused by an ‘organic predisposition’, London blames environmental factors for warping normal desires.81 In a healthier environment, he argues, the instinct for love would be turned towards its proper targets in the form of familial and heterosexual love, but in the absence of these factors, the road kid projects his feelings onto his older tramp partner.82 Repeatedly rejected, this article remained unpublished during London’s lifetime, a fact which may have been a factor in his reluctance to discuss punk–jocker relationships in future tramp writings. *** Other tramp texts deal with the reasons that young boys leave home. In these works, London represented the home as a feminised domain from which the vigorous male youth must flee. In ‘And Frisco’ Kid Came Back’ (1895), a follow-up to ‘Frisco Kid’s Story’, the narrator tells of settling down with a kind-hearted, childfree couple who adopt him as their own. Like Huck Finn, the Kid feels constrained by what Pierre Bourdieu would call bourgeois habitus, which includes attempts to stop him smoking, to stop him swinging his shoulders while walking, as well as forcing him to sit through repeated readings of the Bible: ‘An’ w’en he’d read about dere sons, an’ de sons of dem sons, an’ de sons of dem sons, an’ all de udder sons beside, I’d pound me ear an’ snore’.83 The Kid states ‘I got homesick. I got ter t’inking of de road again’ (p. 67), a rethinking of normative

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expectations of what constitutes a ‘home’. For the Kid, home is associated with freedom from the constraints of polite society and so, like Huck Finn, he sets out once again for adventure and, presumably, acceptance. In The Road, London also portrays the family home as an overly feminised space. In the chapter ‘Pictures’, he tells tales of adventure to ‘two maiden ladies’ in whose bodies ‘life was low’ and ‘blood ran thin’ (The Road, p. 218). In contrast to their ‘narrow’ existence, London as a tramp represents ‘the lusty smells of sweat and strife’ (p. 219). Discussing this section, Lennon suggests that London separated ‘himself from what he viewed as the traditional laborer living a feminized “uneventful existence”.’84 I would add that despite their apparent prudishness, the ‘dear, sweet ladies’ thrill at the adventurous stories that London spins, which suggests that they too might benefit from facing the harsh realities and dangers of life of the road (p. 220). After failing to beg a meal from the owner of a construction company in the chapter ‘Confession’, London tells the man that if all tramps suddenly became diligent like him, ‘there’d be nobody to toss bricks for you’. While his cheeky remark provokes predictable outrage from the man himself, the narrator notices ‘a flicker of a smile in his wife’s eye’ (p. 192). As well as enjoyment of the young London’s cheekiness, this amused flicker is also an index of the ‘meek-faced’ wife’s suffering under the patriarchal domestic arrangements of turn-of-the-century America. Subject to her husband’s tyrannical nature, her mouth trembles as she weighs up whether or not to defy him by giving London something to eat (p. 191, p. 192). Her smile is, then, not only an involuntary response to boyish charm, but also a micro-rebellion against the arrangement of her life. Though he never portrayed a female hobo, London’s gendered representation of domestic life shows the damage that is done not only to male workers, but also to their wives. In his didactic short story ‘The Apostate’ (1906), London presents domestic life as tied to destructive capitalist work practices. The story is about a teenage boy, Johnny, who is so exhausted by alienated labour in a jute mill that he runs away to become a hobo at the end of the story. Mill work has ruined Johnny’s physique: ‘It was a twisted and stunted and nameless piece of life that shambled like a sickly ape, arms loose-hanging, stoop-shouldered, narrow-chested, grotesque and terrible’ (p.  166). A degenerated figure, he is unlikely to last long on the road. Yet even fleeting hobodom represents freedom and rest compared to the inevitable decline of his body at the factory and the demands placed upon him by family life. As DePastino notes, for the young white men who made up the majority of the tramp population, ‘hoboing was, to a degree, … [a] strategy for

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minimizing wage dependency’.85 In his article ‘The Tramp’ (written 1901, published 1904), which was also the basis for a series of lectures, London referred to the tramps’ abandonment of work as a ‘flicker of rebellion’, a phrase which suggests, like the wife’s smile in ‘Confession’, both the rebellion’s small size and its transitory nature.86 It is in a spirit of rebellion that Johnny, now the eponymous Apostate, feels a deep sense of peace in staring for hours at a tree and in thinking that he ‘Jes ain’t gonna do nothin’ (p. 163, p. 166). The story ends with him climbing into a boxcar and smiling to himself (pp. 166–167).87 Yet though London portrays Johnny’s reasons for abandoning his family sympathetically, there is also a hint that the teenager may have lost his sanity. Just before getting into the boxcar, Johnny lays in a field watching birds: ‘Once or twice he laughed aloud, but without relevance to anything he had seen or felt’ (p. 167). Though the domestic life of the home, and its corollary in the factory are presented as dehumanising, ‘The Apostate’ is at best ambivalent about the escape route that Johnny takes. In addition, though his mother is shown to be a kind and loving woman, the story’s representation of tramping is strictly gendered: there has never apparently been any time in which she has considered making a similar escape. Full of dangers as the road is for young boys, for London it is a space that excludes women entirely.

3.5 Conclusion For both Livingston and London, the road is a space of freedom but also, for young boys in particular, a place of threat. Livingston acknowledged the risk faced by boys on the road. Although he mostly avoided the explicit mention of sex, several of his books are structured around the possibility of sexual danger. Livingston styled himself as a saviour of homeless youth in such hyperbolic terms that one might wonder if he protested too much. Whatever the biographical reality, A-No.1’s brand as a tramp author relied upon a normative morality not often found in transient life writing. His account of travelling with London is careful not to depict his young friend as a gay-cat, yet Livingston still attempts to position himself as the master, even while his books defer to London’s style and phrasing. Though he would not have much of a literary legacy, A-No.1 did become something of a mythic figure in hobohemian subculture.88 In The Road, as this chapter has shown, London’s aesthetics of dominance conflicts with his own vulnerability. The text makes various moves to distract from any suggestion of sexual exploitation of road kids and their consequent unmanning. The author portrayed himself as a ‘tramp-royal’, a

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master of tall tales who was well-versed in road slang and who never served a hobo apprenticeship. Yet the book also shows his submission to older men, as well as his desire for their recognition. In a telling role-reversal, The Road makes road-kids a threat to older tramps. Somewhat in contrast, as I have shown, London’s earliest hobo writings are more open when it comes to acknowledging jocker–punk relationships. Despite a critical focus on masculinity in London Studies, his ideas of boyishness and vulnerability have been relatively underexplored. Future research might examine the relationship between youth and Queer sexualities in London’s work, including his children’s novel The Cruise of the Dazzler (1902), in which ’Frisco Kid reappears. Scholars may also wish to explore the relationship between London’s thoughts about homosexuality and his understanding of evolution. More generally, there is a need for further analysis into his representations of toxic masculinity, which seem, if anything, more vital today than they have ever been. Jack London’s assumption that the hobo was always male was shared by many writers. However, as Chapter 4 will now discuss, small but significant numbers of women not only existed on the road, but also wrote about their experiences in a variety of forms. In doing so, these women had to overcome barriers that did not exist for adult male transients. Like young boys they were forced to defend themselves from adult male hobos, but women also had to reckon with the moral disapproval that came with being labelled female tramps.

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chapter 4

‘That’s Why the Lady Is a Tramp’: The Hidden Story of Female Transiency

Then in a voice I had never heard, I had never heard, My only love to me: ‘One word, My lady, if you please! Whose is the child you are like to bear? — His? After all my months o’ care?’ Thomas Hardy, ‘A Trampwoman’s Tragedy’ (1904)

The reason that I wrote this story was that I was sick and tired of hearing other girls say who had hitch-hiked across the continent “and all the men were perfect gentlemen.”

Barbara Starke (Helen Card)1

In 1937, Babes in Arms debuted on Broadway with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart. Set in a fictional actors’ colony on Long Island, the musical tells the story of teenagers Val and Marshall, who are abandoned during the Great Depression by vaudevillian parents who leave town in search of employment. The pair encounter a 17-year-old female tramp, Billie, who has travelled from California looking for work. Threatened with being taken away by the local sheriff on the grounds of having no visible means of support, the teenagers decide to raise money by staging a play. In Babes in Arms’s Second Act, Billie sings about how much she enjoys the freedom of living as a tramp. The song, ‘That’s Why the Lady is a Tramp’, extolls the virtues of the hobohemian lifestyle: ‘I’ve wined and dined on mulligan stew/And never wished for turkey/As I hitched and hiked and grifted too/From Maine to Albuquerque’. While she notes that tramp life means missing out on upper-class cultural pursuits such as the 107

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‘Beaux Arts ball’, she defiantly declares ‘my hobohemia is the place to be.’ While this song is well known today, these particular lyrics are not. Babes in Arms was revised to become a film in 1939, and then rewritten in 1959 by George Oppenheimer. The latter rewrite changed the character of Billie from a homeless to a promiscuous middle-class woman: that is, to a ‘tramp’ in the other meaning of that term. The 1959 adaptation of Babes in Arms, in which Oppenheimer added lyrics for ‘That’s Why the Lady Is a Tramp’ that removed the references to mulligan stew and hobohemia, was tremendously successful and soon became the standard version, recorded by musical luminaries including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby and, more recently, as a duet between Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga.2 As a result of this history, the political meaning of several of the lyrics that Oppenheimer kept has been lost. For example, ‘I get too hungry for dinner at eight’ has a more serious implication in Hart’s original, sung as it is by a homeless and ‘broke’ teenager, who presumably misses meals on a regular basis, than it does when sung by Oppenheimer’s socialite. Likewise, while in the 1959 version the phrase ‘I like the theatre but never come late’ is a satire of middle-class pretentiousness, in Hart’s original the line is a reference to a tramp trying to stay dry and warm by keeping inside for as long as possible. Similarly, the line ‘I hate California, it’s cold and it’s damp’ makes more sense, particularly given the climate of northern California, when sung by someone who regularly sleeps outside, as in the original play.3 As the shifting meaning of this song indicates, the term ‘tramp’ is ambiguous when applied to women. Female tramps have faced a struggle on two fronts: first, the problems of homelessness and vagrancy faced by their male counterparts, and second the accusation that women on the road were prostitutes or possessed loose sexual morals. The current chapter is about how female transients fought back against this representation. The earliest reference in the Oxford English Dictionary to ‘tramp’ meaning ‘a sexually promiscuous woman’ is Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 play Anna Christie.4 Although it is likely that the term was used in this way for some time before O’Neill’s play, during my research I have found no gendered connotations for the term in the years before World War One.5 Just as the term ‘hobo’ would shift from being a synonym for tramp to, in the Ben Reitman-IBWA formulation, mean a footloose worker, in the first ten to fifteen years of the Twentieth Century the term ‘tramp’ as applied to women was more likely to signify homelessness than promiscuity. This may be the reason that of the four women writers under discussion in this chapter, three of them published before the end of World War One. During

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the 1920s and 1930s, as ‘tramp’ came to signify sexuality, female tramp writers were increasingly absent. This is why Stephanie Golden claims that female homelessness does not have a visible tradition.6 In fact, there is a tradition of female tramp writing, but it has been largely overlooked. Alexandra Ganser has examined women’s road narratives from the 1970s to the twenty-first century, arguing that these texts suggest ‘a possibility of escape [from] confining spatial structures through physical movement’ and also ‘demonstrate that gendered constructions of space and mobility impede and complicate any movement that transgresses discursively assigned spheres’.7 This chapter provides a pre-history to Ganser’s work, demonstrating how early twentieth-century transient women sought to escape from the gendered domestic sphere while encountering resistance from a patriarchal society, producing texts that explore what Ganser refers to as ‘confined mobility’.8 Since they did not fit ideological assumptions of domesticity, women on the road were treated with suspicion regarding their sexual conduct. Although as Heather Tapley argues, ‘prostitution, for the female hobo, works not as a fixed identity … but as a labor practice’, for most male observers a prostitute was something a transient woman was, not merely something that she did.9 For Frank Laubach, for example, ‘prostitute’ was a synonym for ‘the female kind of vagrant’.10 ‘Studies of “wayward” girls and women proliferated’, according to Christine Photinos, ‘in the second and third decades of the century’, the category ‘delinquent’ being created at this time to mean not only criminal behaviour but also what was considered sexual depravity.11 As Golden rightly notes, ‘the male outsider has been defined in terms of work and the female in terms of sexuality’.12 For some male writers, like Leon Ray Livingston, the potentially uncontrollable sexuality of female hobos was to be regulated and disciplined.13 For others, like Ben Reitman, it was to be celebrated. In his fictional autobiography Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha (1937), Reitman constructed a transient counterculture that anticipated the free love revolution of the 1960s.14 While some aspects of this counterculture are represented as being positive for women, for the most part the benefits of free love accrue to Reitman’s male characters. His women, including Bertha, are passive vessels into which men pour their lusts, and whom they can control for their own pleasure.15 Both Livingston and Reitman, then, viewed female transients through the prism of sex. In contrast, as I will demonstrate, in representations by female authors, sex was not the only or even the main aspect of transient life. While male writers obsessed about the sex lives of female tramps, either to celebrate their purity or free-spiritedness,

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female tramps wrote about sex as simply one aspect among many. This is despite the fact that several of them experienced sexual assaults on the road, assaults that two of the female authors downplay, either by suggesting only through inference or by brushing off with humour. Much of the fear whipped up during the late nineteenth-century ‘tramp scares’ related to the possibility that the male tramp would invade the home and assault helpless American women.16 The increase in transiency that took place during the 1930s, which included far greater numbers of women and families, created a fear in mainstream US culture that women on the road were not safe. This fear is manifest in the Hollywood movie Girls of the Road (1940), which begins with a montage of female tramps being murdered and with reports that hundreds of women are killed in hobo jungles every year.17 Responding to such dangers, many transient women chose to disguise their gender. Women dressed as men with regularity on the road, partly because skirts were impractical but mainly to hide from unwanted male attention.18 Cross-dressing could also be an assertion of non-binary gender identity, as it was for transgender mixed-race African American future civil rights activist and lawyer, Saint Pauli Murray.19 In 1931, Murray undertook a 24-day San Francisco to New York train-hop while dressed in men’s clothing.20 They wrote an account of this adventurous journey as a kind of slumming narrative, a short chapter entitled ‘From “Three Thousand Miles on the Dime in Ten Days”’ (1934), which was published in the influential volume Negro: an Anthology, edited by Nancy Cunard.21 The chapter does not mention cross-dressing, but it is accompanied by a picture of Murray in men’s clothing with the caption ‘Pete’.22 Although the image is of Murray, the chapter cites ‘Pete’ in the third person, as if he were a friend, while the narrator remains unnamed and their gender unspecified.23 The trainhopping trip is ostensibly undertaken because Pete’s mother is ill, though in fact it was Murray’s aunt who was unwell. This fact, along with a close reading of the chapter itself, indicates that the narrator and ‘Pete’ are two aspects of Murray’s self.24 ‘Pete’ is the more adventurous of the fictional pair: when the narrator hesitates about whether to catch a freight train for the first time, Pete declares, ‘we had the nerve’, utilising the first-person plural in a way that encompasses Murray’s capacious sense of gendered identity. The narrator wonders ‘how nervous Pete was. I couldn’t tell, for he sat there joking with the other bums like a veteran’.25 Pete is an idealised transient figure, fearless in the search for adventure. Pete represents the part of Murray that wishes to be brave in the face of a world that discriminates against people of colour, women, and that does not yet possess

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a language for those whose inner experience of gender does not align with the gender they were prescribed at birth. The chapter describes a struggle to hop freight trains and escape from the police, whom Murray gives the unusual term ‘dicks’ (p. 91).26 There are very few other examples of the railroad police being termed ‘dicks’ in writings by hobos and transients, which suggests that Murray chose this unusual word for its masculine connotations and to symbolise the coercive law of normative gender models.27 Declaring ‘We could see the dicks were hostile’, the narrator and Pete run after the train, which is gendered as female: ‘We had to grab her or stay behind … right in the face of a “dick” I caught the back end of a box car’. Catching the feminized train’s back end, they successfully escape from the hostile dick and the narrator ‘found myself lying on top of Pete underneath a car-load of hot new machines’ (p. 91). At the moment of successfully evading the representatives of traditional masculinity, the pair come together in a moment of sexually charged melding, hinting at a possible unification of these separate aspects of Murray’s selfhood. Hobohemia’s culture of adopted monikers allowed Murray to experiment with gender identity, trying on the male character of ‘Pete’ like a costume. Anticipating the famous work of Judith Butler, the conflation of slumming with gender-passing in ‘Three Thousand Miles on a Dime’ highlights that all gender is akin to drag. As Murray moved across America, they also crossed gender boundaries, putting the trans in transient, we might say. Seen in this light, some gender-passing hobos, including Murray, were harbingers of a transgender politics that has only become visible within mainstream Western culture in recent decades. Yet few activities are inherently radical or progressive, and it is important not to idealise such acts. Cross-dressing could also be a conservative move, since it could involve cis-gendered female tramps hiding their preferred gender from view, underlining the invisibility of women on the road. In this way, cross-dressing could maintain gendered assumptions of male (boxcar) and female (home) space. When visible as being performed by cis-gendered women, female transiency was a threat to patriarchal notions of separate spheres. One way that male authors attempted to contain the gender-bending possibilities of transiency was to focus in their works not on female hobos, but on the women who ran shelters for transients. These boarding-house managers are typically portrayed as kindly mother figures, as in the case of Old Boston Mary in Josiah Flynt’s Tramping With Tramps (1899), Mother Greenstein in Nels Anderson’s The Hobo (1923), Salt Chunk Mary in Jack Black’s You Can’t Win (1926), and Mother Delcassee in Livingston’s Mother Delcassee

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of the Hoboes and Other Stories (1918). In the latter book, the eponymous Mother, having been abandoned by her husband and thereby ‘denied the blessing of a home’, has set up a boarding house as a sublimation of her motherly instincts.28 Such conservative stereotypes sought to reassure readers that the concept of separate spheres still applied on the road even though, as I discussed in the Introduction, hoboing was itself an inherently domestic occupation. Another way that transient narratives could provide such reassurance was to feature male and female couples travelling together in order to reproduce traditional domestic relations on the road. Ethel Lynn’s The Adventures of a Woman Hobo (1917) is an account of a medical doctor who in 1908 was accompanied, or rather chaperoned, in a journey from Chicago to California by her husband, Dan. His presence is a reassurance, although not a guarantee, against sexual assault.29 Adventures of a Woman Hobo maintains traditional gender roles: when they stop in various camps and are taken into the houses of kindly strangers, it is Lynn who undertakes domestic chores such as cooking and cleaning while her husband seeks work outside (p. 55). The pair, who at first travel by bicycle, are treated as a novelty by train guards and hobos, telling the story of their adventures in exchange for food (p. 143, p. 148) and free freight train rides (p. 237, pp. 289–290), even at one point showing their marriage certificate to prove their respectability (pp. 87–88). While other hobos they meet are thrown in jail for vagrancy, including African Americans who are arrested and beaten by railroad bulls (p. 135, p. 259), the Lynns are released without charge (p. 139).30 Lynn portrays the journey as one of self-healing as she begins to recover from tuberculosis. She declares that her adventures have also strengthened ‘My belief in the inherent kindliness and unselfishness of the human heart’ (p. 295). Such a conclusion, which is possible only because of the Lynns’ relative privilege, overlooks the class and racial injustice which they themselves have witnessed. While the text hints at the degeneration in a woman’s ‘pride’ that being on the road might produce, Dan’s presence ensures that Ethel’s journey is, as the title puts it, an ‘adventure’ rather than a dangerous slide from gender, class, and racial norms. *** Historically speaking, the most obvious way that the road’s threatening gender possibilities were contained was simply by the absence of women from written accounts of transiency and from the legal framework that attempted to police it. From the creation of the ‘tramp laws’ in the late

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nineteenth century, as a legal term ‘tramp’ was gendered as male. In many States a person could only be arrested for being a ‘tramp’, defined as a person crossing state lines without visible means of support, if they were male.31 In these locations it was legally impossible to be a female tramp.32 This also meant that women were often not counted by official surveys. Consequently, it is impossible to gauge the number of female tramps during the ‘Golden Age of Tramping’.33 Analysing mainstream legal and cultural constructs, Tim Cresswell argues that ‘women on the road appear to have produced a categorisation problem … They were simply too deviant to contemplate’.34 According to hegemonic understandings of gendered space, female tramps were a legal and ideological impossibility. Yet despite the undoubted benefits of focussing on the forces that contained female hobos, Cresswell’s work on female tramps contains no writings by women, relying instead on Reitman’s fictional Boxcar Bertha.35 He concentrates on top-down categorisations of tramps, including women, in a way that reproduces the power relations of his original sources. This move is repeated by John Lennon, who writes that ‘authentic female voices writing of their own road experiences are noticeably absent’. Lennon dismisses Barbara Starke on the grounds that her narrative is more concerned with ‘the confining aspects of domestic space’ than ‘a working-class, train-hopping subculture’. To begin with, as this chapter will show, some women did write about their experiences within hobohemian subculture. Second, it is problematic to associate hobohemia exclusively with train-hopping, especially since Starke’s narrative concentrates on hitchhiking, an activity in which increasing numbers of male transient workers engaged during the 1920s and 1930s. Third, as the Introduction has noted, hobo jungles were intimately domestic spaces. Claiming that the ‘best resource on female train travellers’ are ‘police blotters’, Lennon correctly writes that the ‘ideological gaze’ of courts often did not recognise women as hobos.36 Yet in excluding female voices, Lennon repeats the ideological moves that he rightly critiques. Recent scholarship has also failed, as Heather Tapley notes, to develop ‘the female on the road as a practitioner of anti-capitalism, a predominant theme in (male) hobo typologies’.37 More problematically, however, Tapley also argues that ‘The female hobo is a palimpsest of sorts in that her existence is only distinguished once these layers of both hobo and bourgeois discourse are peeled back to reveal the disciplinary mechanisms responsible for her alleged historical stasis’.38 Like Cresswell, Tapley examines only Boxcar Bertha as an instance of a fictional female hobo, and so women’s voices are absent from her analysis as well. As these examples show, post-structuralist

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approaches to transiency focus almost exclusively on panoptic methods of control and consequently allow little room for agency or, in Scott Henkel’s terms, intrinsic or constituted power.39 Yet it is possible to go beyond these Foucauldian ‘disciplinary mechanisms’ by examining the writings of female hobos themselves. The current chapter will correct a scholarly imbalance by concentrating on the intrinsic power of transient women’s writing, including, in the example of Agnes Thecla Fair, an anti-capitalist female hobo. This is not an easy task, however. Published representations of transiency by women are rare and fragmentary. Though not discouraged from publishing to the same extent as African Americans and other people of colour, the fact that vagabonds, tramps and hobos were gendered as male did exclude women from creating self-representations to a significant extent when compared to men. Of the approximately eighty transient memoirs of which I am aware, only a handful are by women. The lack of primary source material written by women has had the effect of biasing historic scholarship on transiency. Nels Anderson, for example, referred to hobos as a ‘womanless group’, a statement that was untrue but which could be apparently supported by the lack of transient female self-representation.40 Early twentieth-century writers often portrayed women as being incapable of the ‘wanderlust’ that was supposed to drive men onto the road.41 In order to correct this absence of women from discourses of the road, the current chapter makes female transient self-representation central through an examination of the work of Dolly Kennedy Yancy, Anges Thecla Fair, Kittie Solomon, and Barbara Starke.

4.1  Dolly Kennedy Yancy: The Downwardly Mobile Tramp In 1909, having taken time to sign the inside cover, a 40-year-old woman called Margaret Cecilia Kennedy Yancy, who went by the name ‘Dolly’, deposited her memoir in the St Louis Public Library. Entitled The Tramp Woman: A Book of Experiences (1909), the text told of a recent period in Yancy’s life in which she made an un-American journey down the social ladder from the daughter of a wealthy politician into poverty and temporary homelessness. It is unsurprising that this book has never been discussed by scholars, since it was published locally rather than nationally and appears to have only one extant copy. Yet the fact that it has been overlooked is also indicative of an academic tendency to focus on male representations of transiency over those by women. In addition, Yancy’s aristocratic family background (her father was Michael Francis Kennedy,

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Senior, a wealthy politician from Charleston who had served two terms in South Carolina’s House of Representatives) might exclude her from some definitions of transient or tramp. Yet after being disowned by her family and husband, Yancy was left to fend for herself as a precarious worker in the US economy. The Tramp Woman tells her story of downward mobility, a journey from genteel river cruises at the start of the book, through various precarious and transient jobs as a stenographer that take her across the country, to a brush with poverty and a night spent on the streets without a place to sleep, during which she is propositioned by a city official from whom she had sought protection. Despite this incident, and in contrast to the portrayals of female transients in Livingston and Reitman, Yancy rarely discusses sex. Instead, The Tramp Woman concerns itself with the problem of how to maintain a ladylike appearance while living in poverty and travelling around without a permanent home. Yancy discusses the problem of clothing repeatedly, since she is aware that as a woman she will be judged by her appearance.42 Having been critiqued harshly by her husband and in-laws including, as I will show, the humiliation of having her sanity questioned in a newspaper, she portrays her movement as a form of self-definition. For Yancy, transiency is a feminist act that stems from her refusal to accept male domination. While her class background and the temporary nature of her situation means that The Tramp Woman has similarities with the slumming narrative genre, the fact that Yancy’s brief descent into poverty is involuntary means that she does not maintain the typical fearlessness of the slummer, who knows they will soon be back among their middle-class peers. While her downward mobility is short-lived, she does not know this in advance. Consequently, her memoir is characterised by increasing terror at what seems a free-fall into a social abyss.43 Written as a series of episodic diary-like entries, with tangential digressions to describe notable incidents, The Tramp Woman tells Yancy’s story of downward mobility. In addition to her signature, the inside cover contains a photograph (Figure 4.1) in which she strikes a refined pose that identifies her, looking into the middle distance while wearing spectacles and holding a book under her arm, as a writer. This image works to counteract the negative connotations of the book’s title and to imply that while she may have been a tramp, she is also a bourgeois intellectual. This image is echoed in the opening chapters, in which she works in a secure position as a private secretary in Charleston. One chapter describes her being invited by the Secretary and Treasurer of the Mississippi and Ohio River Pilots Society on a trip down the Mississippi on the steamship ‘Chester’. During

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Figure 4.1  Photograph of Dolly Kennedy Yancy on inside cover of The Tramp Woman: A Book of Experiences (St Louis, MO: Britt Publishing Company, 1909).

this trip Yancy, with the curiosity of an occasional journalist, becomes interested in work camps that are dotted along the side of the river. The workers who live there ‘are occupied in the construction of a railroad, and in some of these camps are women and children. Italian laborers and hoboes constitute the working crew, the hobo being in demand. I was told that the hobo, when he is not drunk, makes the best workman’.44 Yancy does not question the information she is given, including the ethnic separation of Italian workers from hobos, the latter term presumably referring here to US-born or Northern European workers.45 As this example shows, the early chapters of The Tramp Woman establish what should be a safe distance between its author and those lower down the class hierarchy, including hobos. Yancy observes the work and living spaces of working-class families from the relatively luxurious position of the steamship. Yet these early chapters serve as a starting point for her own downward journey. The book describes Yancy moving between a series of insecure positions, including as a housekeeper and stenographer. She wishes to become

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an author but finds stenographic work so ‘grinding’ that she is too tired to write (p. 32). When work dries up, she is forced to move around the country, hiking from Charleston to Augusta, Georgia by foot and staying in a series of motels (p. 43). When she does manage to get a job, the pay is often delayed. This leads to what she describes as ‘the diet problem’, which means that ‘I could not afford to eat food like mother “used to cook”’ (p. 29). In addition to suffering from a lack of good food, flitting between motels causes loneliness. ‘I am still trying to solve the problem of battling the world alone’, she states, ‘and I have come to the conclusion that something is wrong. There is something needed to make life comfortable, and it is not eating, work nor quiet alone’ (p. 30). Though she leaves the answer unstated, what is lacking in this transient existence is companionship. There are few women living alone in motels, and her gender makes it difficult to access the rough-and-ready companionship of the water-tank and freight train, since to do so might mean being taken for a prostitute or fallen woman. Describing her surroundings as ‘morbid’, she claims ‘I have had so many hard knocks and vicissitudes out of the ordinary, that I have become a veritable tramp through these accidents of fortune and misfortune’ (pp.  47–48). Having run out of money in Louisville, Kentucky, she is unable to pay her hotel bill and finds herself wandering the streets at night. She seeks help from a city official, who ‘tried to persuade me to spend the night with him. I declined the invitation and walked out into the night’ (p. 80). Though this incident is understated in the book, it is clear that Yancy refused to trade shelter for sex, instead choosing to spend the night outside. This brush with poverty, abuse and homelessness is brief, however, as around 1.30am she is successful in begging strangers for money to pay for a room. Hovering just above the social and sexual pit, she is ‘almost in a state of collapse’ (p. 84). Having been temporarily homeless and now considering herself a ‘tramp’, Yancy’s attitude to transients softens. Working as a typist at a hotel in St. Louis, she describes an encounter with a hobo in very different terms to her experience on the Mississippi steamship: ‘I was typewriting the menu cards to-day at the hotel when a real hobo wandered in and asked the proprietor for a coin’, which he earns by making ‘the prettiest paper roses I ever saw’ (pp. 87–88). As he does so he tells her several stories, which she listens to with interest. In contrast to her experience on the steamship, here Yancy is literally and metaphorically close to the hobo. While her phrase ‘a real hobo’ indicates that she does not consider herself a hobo, this encounter is nevertheless of two transients having a conversation while engaged in temporary work for the

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same employer. In contrast to the negative stereotype of hobo alcoholism repeated on the steamship, here Yancy reproduces the hobo’s stories in The Tramp Woman at length without comment or judgement. No longer physically or figuratively set apart, Yancy realises that she is, at least for now, on a level with the working poor. One aspect that sets her apart from male transients, however, is the need to take particular care of her appearance. Clothing is one of The Tramp Woman’s most repeated concerns, especially the issue of how to maintain and clean the single dress that Yancy owns, which she wryly refers to as ‘my “old pal”’ (p. 84). ‘It takes courage’, she states, ‘to wear a faded cheap blue linen dress the entire summer’ (p. 59). Her lack of good clothes is an economic barrier, as when she is offered work by a newspaper in Richmond, Virginia, ‘which would of necessity throw me in contact with the best people’, but she feels forced to decline: ‘how could I tell him [the editor] that I had but one dress to my back at the time’ (p. 45). Later she loses stenographic work on account of her ‘shabby appearance’ (p. 85). Having only one outfit, she says, makes it impossible for her to be ‘dignified’ (p. 53). It also limits her movement, since when she puts her ‘blue skirt’ in the laundry she ‘must stay indoors of necessity’ (p. 55). During this home confinement she becomes socially invisible. In Louisville, at the time she is forced to walk the streets, her clothes become ‘badly soiled’, leading her to describe herself as ‘shabbily dressed’ (p. 74). Notably, while neither Livingston nor Reitman discussed clothing in their fictional representations of female transiency, Yancy encounters other women, ‘two musical artistes’, who quickly understand the problem and buy her some fresh clothing: ‘Now I can go out of doors. I did not ask these young women for a “lift”; they understood’ (p. 90; italics in original). As a result of their own experiences living within a patriarchal society, these two women know something that, for all of their emphasis on sex, did not occur to either Livingston or Reitman: women are judged according to how they look. Yancy represents female solidarity as growing out of similar life experience. This solidarity may have filled the need for companionship that Yancy had expressed earlier in the book, since after its publication she would become an activist for female suffrage in Arizona and Washington State, including as the press secretary for the Women’s Suffrage Association of Arizona.46 The oppression of women had, however, long been at the forefront of her mind. Indeed, she had become a transient worker after being rejected by her husband and disowned by her in-laws. An 1897 article in the Abbeville Press and Banner, seemingly written at Dolly Yancy’s instigation, describes the breakdown of her marriage with Dr. W. B. Yancy

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shortly after their wedding. Dr. Yancy, the paper states, abandoned his wife for ‘reasons strange and mysterious’. The paper quotes Yancy as saying: ‘“I love my husband, and still care for him. All he needs is the ‘get up and git’ his wife has, and which she is noted for in all South Carolina”.’ However, Dr. Yancy’s father tells the paper that Dolly ‘is of unsound mind and reckless. He is not in favour of his son living with her longer’.47 While the exact circumstances of this breakdown are unknown, this representation of Yancy as being ‘of unsound mind’ is a stereotype that could be used against women who asserted themselves against their husband’s control. Yancy addresses this issue directly in The Tramp Woman: Some men in this town believe that women should be satisfied with shelter and grub, a monotonous diet at that, and then slave like—bow down to the brute that furnishes the feed. Opportunities for feminine independence are rare, and a good weapon to use against the unfortunate female who dares assert a right to do her own thinking … is to call her insane. (pp. 54–55)

Although she does not discuss her own marital situation in the book, it is clear from comparing this passage to the description of Yancy as ‘of unsound mind’ in the 1897 report that she is aware of how her in-laws have represented her. She knows that women who assert ‘feminine independence’ are called ‘insane’ by men who use such claims as a ‘weapon’ to maintain their dominant position. The Tramp Woman makes several references to people who have wronged Yancy, whom she calls ‘meddlers’ (p. 49) and ‘mean folks’ (p. 50), comments that might seem paranoiac without an awareness of the context of her marriage and abandonment. In context, however, both these references and Yancy’s decision to live as a transient female worker become assertive acts of independence from patriarchal control. Since her separation, she has ‘lived mostly in hotels’ (p. 1). She has done this, she says, because like many other transients she is ‘trying to ‘stake a claim’ to the divine right of being ‘let alone’, the right to think and work out their life problems in their own way’ (p. 1). More specifically, living in a hotel allows her to avoid the ‘annoying criticism and uncalled-for suspicions’ that attach to transient women (p. 32). Avoiding suspicion also means being constantly on the move, and so she claims ‘I have become like the firefly. I am always “on the wing”’ (p. 26). Although The Tramp Woman ends with the narrator receiving a promising job offer as a stenographer, without male protection in a patriarchal system she remains almost as vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the job market as the working-class families that she had observed from the Mississippi steamship.48

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4.2  Agnes Thecla Fair: Hobo Poet and ‘Rebel Girl’ Yancy’s reformist activism stands in contrast to the more radical activities of Agnes Thecla Fair (Figure 4.2), who did not call for the extension of the vote but for the abolition of capitalism. This politics was shaped by her class background: Fair claimed to have been a factory labourer from the age of seven and she apparently suffered a debilitating injury to her right hand, which caused it to wither.49 Despite her injury Fair worked a number of jobs, including manual work as a cleaner and office work as the editor of a labour newspaper.50 She was a talented organiser, setting up make-shift ‘underground’ hospitals for workers and establishing a ‘down and out’ restaurant by illegally siphoning gas for cooking from a mains pipe.51 Operating across Alaska, the Yukon and the Pacific Northwest, Fair was also an activist for a variety of left-wing political causes, most notably as a street speaker for the IWW. According to reports in contemporary newspapers, she moved around the country by hopping freight trains.52 A powerful orator, Fair was arrested during the notorious and successful Free Speech Fight that took place in Spokane, Washington, in 1909. The fight involved IWW activists deliberating getting themselves arrested for defying a ban on free speech that they (rightly) claimed was unconstitutional. The Wobbly strategy was to fill the jails so that the State struggled to pay to feed the prisoners. Fair’s arrest, along with those of other female activists including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, galvanised support in favour of the IWW. After her arrest Fair claimed to have been the victim of two attempted rapes by prison officers, writing in the Seattle-based Workingman’s Paper: The Socialist that three prison officers entered her cell, one of them declaring ‘“F – k her and she’ll talk”’, after which an officer ‘started to unbutton my waist, and I went into spasms which I never recovered from until evening’. Later, an officer hid in her cell disguised as a woman and again started to put his hands on her, at which point ‘I jumped out into an enclosure, screaming frantically and frothing at the mouth. Had not two of our [i.e. IWW] girls been arrested and brought in just then I do not think I would ever come to’.53 No police officers were charged; instead, her allegations led to the seizure of the 20 December 1909 edition of Workingman’s Paper in which they had been printed. Making productive use of these horrific experiences, in 1910 Fair published Sour Dough’s Bible, a poetry collection that contains a depiction of gendered violence.54 Her poem ‘The Men Behind the Bars’ portrays US prisons not only as fascistic tools of the capitalist system, as occurs in other IWW representations, including the poetry of Arturo Giovannetti and Ralph Chaplin, but also as places of sexual threat:

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Figure 4.2  Photograph of Agnes Thecla Fair, published in The Oregon Sunday Journal, 17 December 1916, p. 46.

When they have you in their grasp, To bang you against the wall, To turn the hose upon you Till faint you lifeless fall. The guards all grin like demons For a chance to drag around, By blackened silken tresses, Some young girl lost, but found.

Agnes Thecla Fair, ‘The Men Behind the Bars’ in Sour Dough’s Bible, pp. 33–34, (p. 33, lines 13–20).

The young girl, presumably based on Fair’s own experiences, is ‘lost’ in the sexist sense that women who have been raped have often been portrayed as being ruined, or even fallen. Yet the girl is also ‘found’, with the connecting word ‘but’ indicating a determination not to be destroyed by the experience. She is ‘found’ in a political sense of being a part of the movement for working class emancipation. Fair also writes: ‘The guards’ room of our

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prisons/Are dens of infamy bold’, a reference to the sexual crimes committed by the police against herself (lines 21–22). Her experience did not stop her activism, and Fair remained a member of what one newspaper called a ‘Female Hobos’ Local’ in Sacramento.55 She continued street speaking, becoming what another paper described as an orator ‘of well-nigh national repute’.56 Fair has been largely forgotten today, despite the fact that she played a significant role in important political events.57 In 1915, for example, when the well-known Wobbly songwriter Joe Hill was facing execution on a suspect charge of murder, she wrote to the Governor asking to take Hill’s place, telling him: ‘Owing to the fact that the I.W.W boys neither forgive nor forget, I will take Hillstrom’s place on the scaffold to protect you’.58 Inside this apparent offer of help lurked a non-too-subtle death threat. The strength of Fair’s feelings may have come from her and Hill being lovers; at the very least they were close friends, and Hill’s song ‘The Rebel Girl’ (1915) may be about Fair.59 The song establishes that working class women are more worthy of respect than women in the upper class, and redefines the meaning of good breeding: ‘There are blue blood queens and princesses/Who have charms made of diamonds and pearl,/ But the only and thoroughbred lady/Is the Rebel Girl’. This progressive class message sits alongside a more traditional representation of women as the helpers of men: ‘That’s the Rebel Girl, the Rebel Girl!/To the working class, she’s a precious pearl./She brings courage, pride and joy/ To the fighting Rebel Boy’.60 Similarly, Fair’s obituary, written after she apparently killed herself by jumping in front of an electric train, presents her as a ‘nurse and provider for the under dog’, emphasising her ‘feminine’ role as healer and carer.61 *** In contrast to these patronising representations that overlooked her work as a poet and orator, I will now examine Fair’s representation of transiency in her one collection of poetry, Sour Dough’s Bible (1910) and in other poems published elsewhere. I do not claim that Fair was an outstanding poet. But her representations are significant for what they say about the culture of US transiency as it affected women. A mixture of poetry and prose, Sour Dough’s Bible set itself up, with tongue slightly in cheek, as an alternative Holy Book for the wageworkers and prospectors of Alaska and Northwestern Canada, known as sourdoughs. Highly idiosyncratic, Fair’s poetry expresses a desire for the same freedoms given to men to travel and engage in comradely fellowship. The

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book is a cry of frustration at the limitations of class and gender under patriarchal capitalism. Like Yancy, as a young woman Fair had been unhappily married.62 The exact details of this union are unknown, but it seems to have influenced Fair’s view that marriage is a patriarchal institution. In 1907, which may have been before her conversion to left-wing politics, she published a poem called ‘Bruin’ in a Shreveport, Louisiana, newspaper. The poem expresses a fantastical wish ‘to be/a great big grizzly bear’, a life framed as being free from patriarchal control: ‘Back to my well built cave I’d go/And sleep for several days,/Far from that beastly biped, man,/ Who tries to change my ways’.63 The final line puns on the term ‘man’ meaning both homo sapiens generally and men specifically, a conflation that allows the poem to speak in a double code: one reading being that the speaker simply wants to be left alone by people, another implying her desire to escape sexist domination. In Sour Dough’s Bible, much of which is written in mock biblical language, Fair writes a feminist commandment concerning marriage: If you find you married a contented wage-slave, this alone shall be just cause for a bill of divorcement; lest thou be cast into poverty by him, where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. (‘Give Ye Them To Eat’ in Sour Dough’s Bible, pp. 35–36 (p. 36).)

In this radical reframing, divorce is the solution for women who marry men who are contented to be cogs in the capitalist system. The biblical ‘weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth’ parodies the Judeo-Christian tradition of commandments based around obedience to the patriarchal control of the God Father. Fair’s representation of divorce is notable for her combination of feminist politics and working-class radicalism: to keep their wives, men must not content themselves with being ‘wage-slaves’, a derogatory leftwing synonym for proletarian. ‘Give Ye Them To Eat’ also calls for compassion and solidarity towards transient workers: ‘Verily, I say unto you, if thou art a brakeman, thou shalt not harvest the harvesters; neither shalt thou kick them off or shoot them. Lest you, who know not the day nor the hour when you, too, shall be on the bum without a card; and they holding all cards shall retaliate tenfold’ (‘Give Ye Them To Eat’, p. 35). Since both brakeman and harvester are subject to the same market forces, there ought to be fellow feeling between them. This call for solidarity is inherent in Fair’s left-wing politics, but it is also a part of hobohemian subculture that is denied to women. Fair is aware of this, and her poem ‘Goldfield’ expresses envy at the easy companionship enjoyed by her male comrades:

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‘That’s Why the Lady Is a Tramp’ I would I were a man that I might say: ‘Hello, stranger! How are you today?’ That I might clasp his hand as man to man, And feel I’ve touched his heart, as only wanderers can. I would I were a man that I might put aside What’s called ‘good form’ and give to other tramps a greeting warm. Could I but reach the inner man while on my way, I know I would be happy all the day!

‘Goldfield’ in Sour Dough’s Bible, pp. 18–19 (p.19), lines 25–34

The speaker wants the privilege of knowing another’s heart, a privilege that the poem indicates is only permitted to men, who are able, by social convention, to relate to each other with an easy-going companionship. Women are expected to maintain ‘good form’, whereas male drifters can ‘give to other/tramps a greeting warm’. The poem highlights the importance of touch in creating phatic communion between strangers through the gendered Western tradition of shaking hands. Such touch is denied women, for whom physical contact is controlled within patriarchal notions of good feminine behaviour. At least, it is denied to most women. Sour Dough’s Bible also contains a panegyric poem entitled ‘Emma Goldman’, which focuses on the famous anarchist and free love proponent’s ability to move freely around the world as being her most admirable quality: What a wonderful, wonderful woman you are! You move the gates of heaven ajar. You leave New York on a Saturday night, You’re in Paree on Sunday bright. You go to Russia, you go to Rome; Like our West, you hold your own.

‘Emma Goldman’ in Sour Dough’s Bible, p. 49, lines 1–6.

Focusing on the movement of a prominent revolutionary, rather than on her politics, is unusual. Though explicitly in praise of Goldman, the poem has a tone of envy regarding her ability to traverse national borders with ease, being in New York on a Saturday and then in Paris to enjoy a ‘Sunday bright’.64 Following the publication of Sour Dough’s Bible, Fair continued to write poetry that concentrated on the ability to move as being an inherently feminist freedom. In a 1914 poem entitled ‘A Woman’s Place’, she writes: ‘A Woman’s place is any place/Upon the world’s wide map/And

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if some do not like our style/We should give a rap’.65 Playing on the double meaning of ‘place’ meaning both geographical location and status, Fair opts for the former over the latter. In an admittedly weak rhyme, she concludes the four-line poem by claiming that those who do ‘not like’ the concept of female emancipation should be punched (given a ‘rap’, presumably about the head), a playful use of symbolic violence that acts as a form of resistance to the structural and literal violence suffered by women under capitalist patriarchy.66

4.3  Kittie Solomon: ‘Queen of the Hobos’ Like Yancy and Fair, Kittie (sometimes Kitty) Solomon sought liberation through transiency. Unlike those earlier figures, however, she did not leave many extant materials, aside from one article, a few published letters, one newspaper interview and a photograph (Figure 4.3). These were published

Figure 4.3  Illustration from the “Hobo” News 1:7, October 1915, p. 7. From St Louis Public Library, scan taken by author.

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in the monthly street paper the “Hobo” News, which was an important platform for transient self-representation. Like most of the female transient writers in this chapter, she has never been the focus of scholarly research. Yet despite this obscurity, Solomon was a prominent female transient within the IBWA. In her first appearances in the “Hobo” News, she represented herself as a journalistic observer of hobos, but later asserted her right to be called a hobo, even in the face of male outrage. Known affectionately as the ‘Queen of the Hobos’, Solomon’s transiency was a means to educate herself about the world, an education that was often denied to women. As I will show, she represents the educative power of transiency as a form of female emancipation. The former wife of a bootlegger, Gus Solomon, Kittie Solomon had ridden the rails for two decades disguised as his son.67 Following the couple’s separation, she continued to ride freights, took up a variety of manual jobs, and became a street speaker.68 She also began selling and later writing for the “Hobo” News. Between July and September 1915, she wrote a letter and an article for the paper describing her experiences as a harvest worker in Southern Missouri. These two pieces are uncertain about whether Solomon is a hobo, or a journalist embedded among hobos. The reason for this hesitancy is that by 1915 the IBWA had begun to promote the term ‘hobo’ to mean a white male transient worker.69 By separating the hobo as a wage-earner from the tramp, the IBWA and others attempted to gender the hobo as male. This led Solomon to hold herself apart from her fellow transients in her 1915 writings, though a year later she would reverse this strategy. In the summer of 1915, Solomon travelled to Southern Missouri to pick berries and peddle copies of the “Hobo” News. The paper’s July edition printed a letter in which Solomon, living in a hobo jungle, wrote that ten days of rain had prevented the workers from harvesting. She describes her journey to the work camp, which involved a long walk along the rail line in Jasper and Newton County. During this journey she ‘gassed with the Gandy Dancers and Miners’ and presented herself as a journalist for the “Hobo” News, a position for which she would have received no pay, aside from the money made hawking the paper. The workers ‘all seemed delighted’, she claims, ‘to learn that we realised their condition’, and she asks the editors to send her more copies for this prospective market. Demonstrating knowledge from her years spent within transient subculture, she writes that she is ‘giving dancing lessons to the Gandy dancers and they sure do some fancy steps to the tune “It’s a Long Way to Pick Berries, It’s a Long Way to Go.” I can eat five meals a day since

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I am in the Jungles’ (HN, 1:4, July 1915, p. 10). Gandy dancing was a term for tamping down railroad sleepers, an action that involved twisting a long-handled shovel in a manner that looked somewhat akin to dancing. Like much other work on the railroads, this action could be accompanied by song, which helped the workers to keep in time and boosted morale. Solomon is able to teach a parodic version of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ because this is a version that she has learnt during her long years as a transient. Despite representing herself as a journalist, it is her exposure to hobohemia that endears her to the workers, who recognise her as one of their own. Two months later, the “Hobo” News published an article written by Solomon, entitled ‘In the Land of the Free – Hustling the News in the Jungles’, in which she recounted her experiences with the Missouri harvest. This experience, she writes, enabled her to ‘study the actual life of the hobo’, phrasing that again creates distance between herself as a woman and the hobo workers. Her description of the harvest labourers focuses on their varied ages and genders: ‘Among those was an old woman of seventy and her grandson, a boy of fourteen: a widow, who had five children to support; a young girl of sixteen; two boys of eighteen; two old men of seventy years; a man, wife and baby – the man an invalid; a young couple; a man and wife with two little girls; the others, like myself, hoboes’ (HN 1:6, Sept 1915, p. 12). Here Solomon includes herself among the ‘hoboes’, a term she uses to mean workers without a family to support. As well as reframing the term to be non-gendered, the detail she provides of the children, families and older people working in the harvest undermines the IBWA’s attempts to gender transient workers as male. Having set off with journalistic intent to study the hobo, she now represents herself as one: ‘I know these conditions well,’ she writes, ‘for I am in the same plight as these poor people, no money, no work and no food’ (HN 1:6, Sept 1915, p. 13). She describes the poverty of the jungle in pitying terms: ‘One day when I was eating my dinner of bread, potatoes and pork chops and coffee, when I threw away the pork chops the little children scrambled for the bones. This was more than I could stand, for I had nothing for myself and no hopes of getting a job’ (HN 1:6, Sept 1915, p. 14). Seeing her own dire situation in the condition of the children scrambling for bones, she is unwilling to maintain her journalistic identity. Although she would later appear in its pages as a subject, she never wrote for the “Hobo” News again. Within a year Solomon was asserting herself as a female hobo. An article in the August 1916 issue of the “Hobo” News, written by Max B. Cook under the title ‘Open Forum Under Fire’, is a feature on her life and activity as

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a street speaker.70 The piece recounts a speech that Solomon gave on the steps of the Old Court House in St. Louis, a location with historic significance as a former site for the sale of slaves and for the first hearing of the Dred Scott case. Her speech, printed copies of which she attempts to sell to onlookers, is entitled ‘The Evolution of the Hobo and the Uplift of Humanity’. She is heckled by the crowd, including by a proponent of prohibition whom she skilfully tricks into buying her a whisky. She handles the crowd with humour and demonstrates insider knowledge of hobo subculture through extensive use of transient slang, swearing, and by arguing the IBWA line that the hobo, unlike the tramp, is a worker, expanding the definition to include herself (HN 2:5, August 1916, pp. 12–13). She claims to have hoboed for 20 years: ‘I hauled coal as a man, smoked and chewed tobacco and gained the name of the Queen of the Hoboes. I’ve hoboed 7,000 miles in the last two years just for experience. And believe me, I got it’ (HN 2:5, August 1916, p. 13). Her sobriquet ‘Queen of the Hoboes’ is a term of respect, but also an indication of her exceptional status as a female transient. She claims to have ‘hauled coal as a man’ partly because she cross-dressed for many years, but also to indicate her ability to perform hard manual labour to the same level as men. Like the male vagabonds discussed in Chapter 2, Solomon represents her primary motivation for hoboing, which here refers to train hopping, as gaining experiential capital. The experience she gathers is a kind of liberatory education. Asked why she remains a transient, she replies: The question ‘why’ has kept me a hobo and it’s keeping a lot of others hobos… I always wondered why. I didn’t know. So I wondered. I have always wondered why one can’t see the electricity. And I have wondered about almost everything there is to wonder. And I have been always trying to find out – why? And that’s what most every other bo I know is doing. (HN 2:5, August 1916, p. 13)

Solomon represents transiency as a search for answers, a curiosity about the world that can only be satisfied by practical, first-hand experience. For her, hoboing is an intellectual endeavour. This is particularly significant given that the issue of female education and rights, the so-called, ‘Woman Question’, was being fiercely debated at this time thanks to the campaigning work of the Suffrage movement. Claiming to have been a street speaker for ten years following the split with her husband, Solomon tells the reporter ‘I talk to emancipate myself’. Using feminist language, Solomon frames her oratory and transiency as liberatory. This does not mean that she seeks to emancipate anyone other than herself, however.

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Indeed, she revels in telling the gathered crowd about her fundamental selfishness: ‘I ain’t telling you this’, she tells her audience, ‘because it’s going to do you some good. I’m talking because I’m an egotist. I’m for myself’. Solomon’s self-declared egotism contradicts mainstream constructions of women as male helpers. Refusing to do her male – or even her female – audience ‘some good’ is an act of female independence, which ironically might do her female listeners good because of the example that it provides. Balking at this assertion of selfhood, the crowd reacts by throwing eggs at Solomon who, Cook writes, is ‘a good dodger. She had ducked them before’. Having dealt with this kind of response from audience members previously, she is calm under pressure. While her assurance is admirable, the fact that she is forced to duck for cover indicates the risk involved in any assertion of female independence. She tells Cook ‘I’m a bad one’, satirically adopting the frame through which she is seen by her sexist audience. The eggs that pelt down on Kittie Solomon speak for the masculinist nature of hobohemia.71

4.4  Sexual Harassment on the Road: Barbara Starke’s Female Vagabondage These dangers could, of course, be more serious still, as the transient narrative of Barbara Starke demonstrates. Published as Born in Captivity: the story of a Girls’ Escape (1931) in the US and Touch and Go: the Story of a Girl’s Escape (1931) in the UK, the text is a story of ‘escape’ from the patriarchal expectations of a Girls’ School upbringing. Starke writes of taking to the road during the 1920s and hitchhiking across the US. While her narrative has received little attention from scholars compared to the likes of Jack London, both Christine Photinos and Joanne Hall have analysed her work in relation to the gendered expectations of the hobo. For Photinos, Starke presents herself as an ‘exception’ to the road’s gender binaries, ‘thereby leaving them – and the ideologies of race, class, and sexuality with which they intersect – intact’.72 For Hall, Starke’s ‘attempt to sidestep the category of degenerate female wanderer’ creates a ‘confused view of how best to represent her female hobo self’.73 Building on this work, I claim that Starke’s book does not present itself as a hobo memoir but as a vagabond narrative, which, as I argued in Chapter 2, is a distinct form of travel writing. She genders the literary vagabond as having a ‘feminine’ attitude to life. Yet she does not have access to the male privilege that enabled Harry Frank, Stephen Graham, and Vachel Lindsey to wander fearlessly around in search of experiential capital. As a result, she is subject

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to almost constant male attention and threats of sexual violence, which, in contrast to male representations of female transiency, she downplays and even portrays humorously. Her experience of sexual harassment is, like the air she breathes, ubiquitous and invisible. Both Photinos and Hall assume that Starke is the author’s real name. However, my research indicates that Starke was actually the pen name of Helen L. Card (Figure 4.4).74 Reviewing the book in 1931, several newspapers demonstrate awareness that Starke was a pseudonym, possibly having been given a press release to this effect, though they do not give her true name.75 Correspondence in the archives of the book’s UK and US publishers reveals Starke’s real identity to be Helen Card, and that the book is based on actual experiences.76 The fact that she used a nom-de-plume is understandable, given the prevalence of female sexual activity in the text. The disparagement that female transients could receive is apparent in a review of Starke’s book by Donald Mac Rae, who called it ‘fair writing for a female road-louse who learned her style in a college composition course’.77 The term ‘road-louse’ expresses disgust at the vulgar, sexualised nature of Starke’s narrative, while also patronising her ‘fair writing’ as having been learned in a ‘college composition course’. In a letter to her British publisher Jonathan Cape, Card addressed some the criticism that she had received:

Figure 4.4  Photograph of Helen Card. Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

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I wasn’t much excited until I began reading reviews, and hearing people’s comments. That was pleasant, very pleasant; except that people will confuse sex and sin, and in some cases seemed to think I had been vulgar, which I didn’t want to be. It’s the men that think this book sinful; the women accept it as a matter of course, and very joyful they are about it. They’ve written me a few letters  – ‘just like my life, except …’ and the tone of reviews written by women is much more understanding and enthusiastic than that of the men. The women don’t hold up their hands at my sex experiences; they know that such things are bound to happen and consider me very lucky … it’s men – and they’ve been writing of sex experience for centuries – who shake their heads over it. (Helen Card to Jonathan Cape, 30 May 1931)78

Card’s representation of sex as ‘joyful’ and herself as ‘lucky’ anticipates the development of sex-positive feminism. She notes the hypocrisy of men who, having accepted male writing about sex for centuries, deny women the same possibility: confusing, as she puts it, sex with sin. Yet this letter underplays the harassment to which she was frequently subject on the road. By portraying herself as ‘lucky’, at least in the eyes of her envious, non-transient female readers, Card accepts harassment as ‘a matter of course’ and ‘bound to happen’. As I will now demonstrate, this is also true of the book itself. Card presents Starke, her literary persona, as being drawn towards the road because of its promise of independence and sexual freedom. She presents these feelings as first manifesting through a youthful attraction to a male transient railroad worker who, when she was sixteen, wandered through her New England town: ‘The look of adventurous life had been grafted on to him, even to the neat and careless old work-shirts always open at the throat, his free walk, his independent head and blown-lookinghair’.79 In this idealised representation, the man’s easy-going carelessness and autonomy stand in contrast to the restrained and suffocating domesticity of the young girl’s life. Starke’s existence becomes even more oppressive when she is forced into a Girls’ Boarding school run by the YWCA, which the narrator quips stands for Young Women Captured Alive (p. 33). She decides to run away and hitchhike across the US, a journey which she represents as a cutting loose of restrictive social ties: ‘clothes would not matter nor possessions hamper. I would start from the bottom and erect my own scale of values’ (p. 35). In the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Vachel Lindsey, she sees possessions as hampering human development, as being a lure to entrap women into bourgeois domesticity: scorning her friend Dorothy for working in order to buy a pink hat, she exclaims: ‘That was just what we were supposed to do with the hours of life! We were supposed to do boresome work, and then buy pink hats with them!’ (p. 37).

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This rejection of patriarchal bourgeois norms is inspired by the literary vagabond archetype. Starke cites David Grayson’s genteel vagabond narrative The Friendly Road (1913), which ‘filled my mind with the luminous possibilities’ of transiency (p. 15). This reference is significant since, as I explored in Chapter 2, the vagabond does not seek solidarity with transient workers but cuts out alone in search of experience. However, in contrast to Grayson, Lindsey, Graham and others, Starke claims that the attitude of the vagabond is essentially feminine. Having struggled to learn economics from books, she associates exactitude with masculinity and then rejects both: she writes that ‘my brain found little use for the conscious and masculine terms with which economics is explained’. In contrast, she prefers ‘linking up personal experience and a consciousness of broad fundamental laws’, which she describes as being impressionistic yet truthful: ‘My conceptions were accurate, but not exact, a series of fascinating and interrelated pictures painted in colours of first-hand sensations and lines of relative proportions’. Calling this a ‘feminine and personal view’, she declares ‘I could take nothing for granted, but must see and sense and smell’ labourers at work before she could understand the relationship between labour and capital (p. 99). Like Solomon, Starke says that she travels to get educated, learning about topics such as strikes, poverty, and labour history (p. 111, p. 112, p. 244, p. 252). Her journey is also one of self-discovery, as it teaches her confidence, which she claims, somewhat unconvincingly, to lack (p. 186, p. 208, p. 219). Starke is touristic in seeking experience, and several times during her travels she is literally given tours, including of a slaughterhouse (p. 101). Yet like Lindsey and other literary vagabonds, she is deeply critical of tourists. Exploring the Manitou and Pike Peak Region at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, she notes with disapproval the postcards for sale, especially when the woman selling them cannot answer basic questions about the mountains. The cards, she implies, commodify the mountains and canyons, draining peoples’ natural curiosity: ‘It was a disappointment, now that I had broken away and encountered many people, to find how little wonder they had for life’ (p. 147). ‘Wonder’ is one of her commonly repeated terms (p. 179, p. 219, p. 242), being both a motivation for travel and the quality that sets her apart from typical sightseers. She encounters two ‘regulation tourists’ in Williams Canyon, women who warn her not to travel alone in such a ‘lonesome’ place. She treats their remarks with contempt, ‘feeling good in every fibre, glad I was solitary’ (p. 248). Experiencing a deep connection to the landscape, she looks down into the valley and observes ‘well-fed owners of sleek cars’ driving along the

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road and, cocooned in their automobiles, missing the essential beauty of the surroundings: ‘none heard the carol of those orioles high in the blue, and none saw the sun silver the white breasts of cliff swallows against the grey and green walls. But this has always been my secret, that I was happy, and lay back on my rock glorying in earth and air and sky’ (p. 249). She is glad when the ‘well-fed’ motorists drive away, because if they had stopped to enjoy the view, they would have spoiled her glorious solitude. The text contains several of these purple patches, in which Starke attempts to convey not only her intense connection to nature but also the sense of superiority that this connection gives her over others, particularly tourists. The response of the ‘regulation tourists’ to her solitary state is indicative of reactions that she encounters while travelling alone. Unlike the writers discussed in Chapter 2, Starke must undertake her vagabondage without male privilege. Unable to access the trope of the male wanderer, she adopts an easy-going attitude with men in order to gain access to experiences. Her youth often leads men to stereotype her as ‘innocent’, but she angrily denies this, stating that she could not ‘get along on the road’ if she were (p. 229). Indeed, sex appeal and youthful good looks are her passport. She is given lifts and accommodation by a variety of older men, most of whom expect sex in return. Although she does sleep with several of them, she does so only if she wishes to and if she is able to convince herself that she is not granting sexual favours in a direct transactional manner. To prove this latter point to herself and her readers, she often turns men down, rejections that are sometimes accepted (p. 154) but which at other times result in male aggression. Sexual harassment and assault are a constant background hum to road life, occurring no less than 16 times in the book’s 255 pages (p. 47, p. 56, p. 93, p. 104, p. 108, p. 110, p. 115, p. 123, p. 127, p. 128, p. 136, pp. 162–3, p. 165, p. 173, p. 231, p. 234).80 Starke notes that ‘Men evidently consider a “road-kid” fair game’, utilising a gender-neutral metaphor that positions her, like the young boys in London and Livingston’s narratives, as vulnerable prey (p. 56). Yet she presents herself as being capable of self-protection by saying ‘unexpected things’ that made men wonder ‘what weapons I concealed’ (p. 108).81 She also underplays the dangers, declaring ‘Very few men had actually laid hands on me’ (p. 173) and that she has not met any ‘bad men’ during her travels (p. 210). Incidents are often described euphemistically, as when she is picked up on the roadside by a farmer: ‘He, too, thought that getting a girl alone was just too good an opportunity and I had to insist on sitting in the back of the truck after a while’ (p. 110). Sometimes she does not name the dangers she fears, as when she does

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not give a reason for avoiding freight trains, leaving the reader to guess that such locations might be too great a risk (p. 135). She does not call her experiences assault, attempted sexual assault or attempted rape, although all three occur in the book. Incidents are often related humorously, as when she humiliates an undertaker who attempts to grab her by declaring what a spectacle he makes ‘chasing a girl all over the lot’ (p. 115), and also when she escapes another attempted assault by pretending to have a gun, ‘supressing a grin’ as the man drives off in fear (p. 123). Finding herself ‘low-spirited’ in Illinois by repeated attempts on her person, she declares that ‘the whole population was either batty or affiliated with some particularly vicious form of sex loneliness’ (p. 128). This comment jokingly deflects from the toxic masculinity that teaches men to see unaccompanied women as ‘fair game’. For Starke, sexual harassment was simply the way of things. It was such a common occurrence that it could not be made into a big deal, and it was not going to define her relationship with the world.82 She portrays harassment and assault as if they are naturally occurring dangers of travelling alone as a woman. While undoubtedly conservative, this attitude is also a necessary survival strategy that enables her to exist on the road without being debilitated by fear. Although she does not fear the real threat of men, she dreads an imagined threat from women. As Photinos has discussed, Starke’s narrative is comparable to Reitman’s in its anti-lesbianism.83 However, Photinos does not discuss the fact that this anti-lesbianism is for Starke a form of homophobic self-loathing, since the book’s early school chapters portray her as sexually experimenting with girls, experimentation that is riddled with fear and guilt. She describes leaving a dorm room in disgust after seeing two girls kissing, only to then immediately kiss a girl herself: ‘A moment of passion flared before we drew away from each other as wary as two strange terriers’ (p. 29). She is tempted by other women on the road, temptations that she describes in ambiguous terms. Driving in a car with a temporary road-companion called Hilda, she begins to think that her friend must be a lesbian from her ‘mannerism’, which reminds her of girls that she had known at school. Starke remarks ‘I had no good way to bring up the subject. Added to that was a little uncanny fear of the physical attraction she held for me, as two or three other girls had. When we drove down the dark hills toward home, there seemed to be a great deal unsaid between us’ (p. 132). The passive voice phrase ‘the physical attraction she held for me’ leaves the sentence’s subject and object ambiguous: it is unclear whether it is Starke who is attracted to Hilda or Hilda who is attracted to Starke. There is a queer or uncanny quality to this sentence, which both does and

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does not do its expected job of conveying meaning. Starke herself utilises the Freudian term ‘uncanny’, implying that female homosexuality is both like and unlike love between men and women. The ‘great deal’ that is ‘unsaid’ in the silence includes conflicted forces of repression, ideology, fear, and desire. In addition, she associates women with domesticity, which she represents as a trap to be escaped (p. 97). Yet she ultimately stays silent at the one moment in the book when speaking might have allowed another form of domestic relation, a lesbian relationship, that would have represented a queering of social ties rather than a temporary and incomplete withdrawal into solitary vagabondage. Starke’s book ends with the narrator accepting an office job and deciding to cease her wandering, yet the conservatism of this ending is undermined by its despair: ‘Now at the end of an office afternoon, I am wondering how much longer I’m going to stand it. How am I going to reach the ground and the sky again?’ (p. 255). She is uncomfortable in what she describes as the ‘net’ (p. 253) and the book ends with a sense of entrapment.84 The reader is left with an ominous sense that things may not work out well for the narrator who, for all of her dissatisfaction with conventional morality, was unable to find an alternative.85

4.5 Conclusion When men wrote about female transiency, they made sexuality the key element; in female narratives, by contrast, sex is one aspect among many, present but often dismissed or underplayed. Having been framed in newspapers as a woman of ‘unsound mind’, for example, Dolly Kennedy Yancy asserts that independence of thought and action is frightening to brutish men who wish to maintain control over women. For Yancy, as for several others discussed in this chapter, transiency was a feminist act. Similarly, Agnes Thecla Fair’s poetry discusses the freedoms given to men, enviously desiring not only the male tramp’s ability to move but also the fact that he is allowed a free-and-easy relationship with his fellows. In the little extant writing that we have of hers, Kittie Solomon also asserted that transiency was an act of self-assertion. Although she shows some early hesitancy as to whether to call herself a hobo, by 1916 she had adopted this designation and, more significantly, begun to portray her transiency as an intellectual endeavour. She encounters male hostility when she claims that she is out for herself, rather than conforming to patriarchal expectations of women as the helpers of men. Likewise, Barbara Starke/Helen Card journeys across America in order to learn about the world. She adopts a vagabond attitude

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of seeking experiential capital in the absence of financial capital. In contrast to male vagabonds, however, her gender is a barrier to her desired freedom of mobility. She learns to curry male favour in order to receive lifts and accommodation, actions that frequently lead to sexual harassment and, at times, attempted assault and rape. Starke adopts a pragmatic attitude to these incidents, seeing them as being too common to dwell upon. She uses humour to underplay their seriousness, and she portrays herself as capable of self-protection. Crucially, she also represents herself as possessing sexual desire, and so does not portray her virtue as something to be protected at all costs, especially not if the price of doing so would be to give up her freedom.

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Part III

The Hobo Transformed

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chapter 5

Between Hobohemia and Academia: Nels Anderson’s Double Voice

All the transient needs is a job, but surprisingly little is done about getting him one; instead, quite elaborate setups are devised to induce him to hold still while the professors have at him.

Nels Anderson1

In 1921, sociology student and former hobo Nels Anderson published a fictional short story in the “Hobo” News entitled ‘The Fall of Bill’. The tale is about a hobo, Bill, who becomes depressed after being refused food in a rich residential district of a city, presumably Chicago.2 The narrator states that ‘Bill quit his last job’, and that because of this ‘the sociologist would say he was unstable’.3 Yet, the reader learns, Bill actually left work so that an old war comrade could keep his job. The hypothetical sociologist’s conclusion of individual instability, based on superficial observation, would therefore be incorrect. Surprisingly given Anderson’s later status as a sociological authority on transients, ‘the academic prince of hoboes’, as Laura Browder calls him, this short story positions itself outside of the inaccurate assumptions of sociology.4 The narrative sides with Bill, who is conveniently saved by the appearance of a dog that gives him the will to continue living. Written in the lead-up to his influential treatise The Hobo (1923), ‘The Fall of Bill’ demonstrates that Anderson could shift his narrative position depending on his assumed audience. Crucially for this chapter, it also indicates that he held some of the scepticism towards sociologists that many of his hobo subjects expressed toward him. Indeed, an ambiguity about the nascent project of sociology, and his own place within that project, runs throughout Anderson’s early work, which is characterised by a duality of voice that distinguishes him from other hobo writers. For scholars of hobo subculture, Anderson is a vital historical source. Remarkably for someone who produced his main work on this topic as a Master’s thesis, he is probably the most cited authority on hobos. His book The Hobo provides invaluable material for analysis of hobohemia’s 139

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work patterns, sexual life and cultural productions.5 Anderson’s central thesis that the hobo was a frontier worker has proven particularly influential. As discussed in the Introduction, in the decades before Anderson’s book the hobo had been derided as, at best, a workshy wastrel and, at worst, a political and moral threat to US society. In an attempt to mount a defence to these charges, the IWW and others idealised their subculture according to the mythology of the frontier. For his part, Anderson termed the hobo a ‘belated frontiersman’.6 While he did not invent this trope, he made it academically respectable, and the frontier defence, as I call it, remains in common use among historians to this day.7 Anderson mounted his frontier defence as an addendum to the hobo/tramp/bum distinction being promoted by James Eads How’s IBWA and the “Hobo” News. For Anderson, the fact that the hobo laboured was evidence for his claim to citizenship in the American republic. While the European vagabond was characterized by laziness, the hobo’s Americanness was tied to his willingness to work. Anderson extended this nationalistic distinction to common explanations of transiency by rejecting ‘wanderlust’ theories as being inadequate in the United States. European vagabonds might move about due to a defect in their personality, but most US transients, especially in the Midwest and West, were looking for work. To travel for employment was American and to be admired, while wanderlust was European and suspect. The difficulty, for Anderson and others who promoted the hobo over the tramp, was the continued presence of the tramp on US soil. In this sense tramps and bums were a threat to American Exceptionalism because they represented both individual and social failure. Anderson gives them little sympathy especially, as I will show, when he suspects that their voluntary homelessness is underpinned by a pretentious pseudo-intellectualism that he sees as being alien to the United States. Previous scholarship has noted Anderson’s scepticism to wanderlust. For instance, John Allen cites Anderson to support his own contention that ‘tramp autobiographies over-emphasized wanderlust as an explanation’ for tramping.8 It is true that wanderlust theories overlooked crucial economic factors for worker transiency. Nevertheless, Anderson’s rejection of wanderlust theories was part of a wider cultural project, involving the IBWA and others, to raise the hobo to the status of a US citizen, while implicitly denying that citizenship to those who did not work. This aspect of Anderson’s work has been overlooked. Todd DePastino, Roger A. Salerno and Laura Browder have focussed on his ethnic and masculinist bias, arguing convincingly that his representation of the hobo was part of a broader cultural search for the archetypical white American male hero.9

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To my knowledge, the only scholar to connect Anderson’s American Exceptionalism to his privileging of work is Jeffrey Brown, who states that ‘Anderson is most interested in the hobo as a worker in a uniquely American environment. European vagabonds, he observes, are primarily of the “psychopathic type.”’10 Brown’s statement comes at the end of a short article and so this idea remains undeveloped. He does not explore the nationalism implicit in Anderson’s privileging of the US hobo over the European vagabond. Building on Brown’s work, the current chapter will provide such an exploration. In addition, and unlike previous scholarship, this chapter will utilise literary studies methods to analyse Anderson’s sociological and fictional writings. Since historians have dominated Anderson scholarship, questions of accuracy have been to the forefront while aspects of tone and language have been sidelined. By focussing on language and tone via detailed close readings, this chapter will provide new insights into Anderson’s ambiguous representation of hobos. Specifically, it will emphasize the duality of voice that characterises his work during the 1920s and early 1930s. This will demonstrate that The Hobo was not simply a book about hobohemia; it was also a product of hobohemia. The multi-voiced nature of The Hobo has been a site of critical contention, but scholars have often framed this aspect as a question of genre. For instance, Brown argues that Anderson ‘eschews’ the personal to create what is ‘a work of sociological analysis above all’, while Browder claims that Anderson’s book is ‘an autobiographical account of his life that has been cloaked in the language of sociology’.11 Neither critic acknowledges the layered, polyvocal nature of The Hobo.12 In contrast, I do not base my argument on genre – on what type of book The Hobo is or is not – but rather on qualities of voice, tone and narrative position. I argue not simply that Brown places too much emphasis on the sociological element of the book and that Browder places too much on the personal. To put it in the language of literary studies, I claim that Anderson’s early style is characterised by a duality of voice that mixes different modes, including the sociological and autobiographical, in conflicting and contradictory ways. As a result, his early work displays uncertainty not only towards his transient subjects, but also to the project of sociology itself. I will first analyse The Hobo, arguing that Anderson’s liminal narrative position complicated his thesis that hobos were driven to wander by purely economic motives, since it led him to focus on culture and to represent the hobo as a belated pioneer. The book’s dualistic narrative voice undermined his attempt to distance himself from his subjects. I will then discuss his pseudonymously written parody The Milk and Honey Route

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(1931), a neglected but important text for understanding his representation of transient workers in his early career. Written in the voice of an idealistic hobo called Dean Stiff, The Milk and Honey Route embodies the narrative uncertainty that is distinctive of his early style, as well as providing a space for its author to express scepticism toward both sociology and social work. First, however, I will discuss the importance of hard work in Anderson’s early life as a hobo, solider, and student.

5.1  Work and Education in Anderson’s Early Life Nels Anderson’s father emigrated from Sweden as a transient worker. Anderson claimed that ‘For my father, getting Americanized by this process of moving from job to job was a continuing adventure. He remembered later with pride how he learned to beat his way on freight trains’ (The Hobo, p. v). The father’s pride was also the son’s. His academic defence of the hobo as a worker began as a defence of men like his father, people who had learned to ‘beat’ trains and whose search for work, he claimed, turned them into US citizens. He states that ‘none of my family became a drunkard, gambler, or loafer’, terms of abuse that nonmigratory Americans frequently attached to transient workers, and which the IBWA typologized under the categories of ‘tramp’ and ‘bum’ (p. vii). Born in Chicago, later the site of his best-known sociological endeavours, Anderson spent a significant amount of time in the Main Stem, or ‘Hobohemia’ area of Chicago, on and around West Madison Street.13 He worked as a newspaper boy in the streets that he would later return to as an adult researcher. A ‘hobo family’, the Andersons moved back-andforth across the country, working out West and for a time stopping on a rented farm in Michigan (The American Hobo, p. xi). Though Anderson’s father wished for the family to settle on their own land, several of his sons, including Nels, left home to become transient workers upon reaching adulthood. Learning to beat freight trains like his father before him, as a young man Anderson criss-crossed the US to find work, taking various jobs including mule-driver, lumberjack, and miner. In Utah he was taken in by a Mormon family, who converted him to their faith, and encouraged him to attend high school and then the University division of Brigham Young Academy. He was older than the other students and, unlike most of them, funded his studies though manual labour, usually as a carpenter. He was keenly aware of his difference from the typical student: ‘I had not grown up in the world of childhood play, or teenage frivolity or of dependence upon parents. I did not feel at home among

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them, nor did I have much of a wish to’ (The American Hobo, p. 126). He would remain an academic outsider for most of his life. When the US entered World War One, Anderson was keen to volunteer. He joined the army in March 1918, departing for France in May and remaining in the country until July 1919. His war diary indicates that he saw hard work and an ability to endure hardship, both learned during his time as a hobo, as key facets of his identity. These qualities also set him apart, in a positive sense, from his fellow soldiers. Even though several aspects of army life, including drilling, did not suit him, he found the lack of comfort easy to withstand. For example, on 6 August 1918, he noted that his platoon were forced to sleep in barns: ‘It goes against the grain for some of the boys to sleep in barns but I’ve done it before’.14 The same held true for his work ethic. Bored and agitated any time that his division was idle, he repeatedly volunteered for extra tasks (p. 91, p. 102). His superiors noticed this keenness, promoted him and, to his disappointment, gave him a relatively safe job as a runner at regimental headquarters. Anderson’s nationalism was bolstered by his wartime proximity to different cultures. US soldiers, he wrote, always paid civilians for the food they took, in contrast to the German army who stole it (pp. 154–155). Similarly, captured German women would turn themselves over to the Americans after being ‘abused’ by French soldiers, since ‘They know that the yanks stand for a square deal’ (p. 170).15 He disapproved of France’s apparent tolerance of prostitution, claiming that in America ‘We are fighting these evils harder … To us social purity is a great national asset … I went to bed last night proud of my Americanism’ (p. 231). During his time in Germany, he wrote that ‘I have seen no tramps of the American style. Weary willies would be quickly disposed of in Germany. We need some of that kind of Kulture in America’ (pp. 175–176). The brutal German militarism that he disparages in the rest of his diary would be appropriate for those ‘tramps of the American style’ who, he claims, wander as a lifestyle choice. Later in his career, he would conflate the German tradition of the wandermann with the American bohemian tramp. Although in postwar years he would claim that there were no ‘American style’ tramps in Germany, the nationalism that characterised his war diary would remain important in his writings about US transients. After the war, Anderson took advantage of an army program to send soldiers to French Universities, spending sixteen weeks in Montpellier studying Political Economy and French. Upon his return to the US, his veteran status enabled him to enrol in the University of Chicago as a student of sociology where, once again, he was isolated from his middle-class

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fellows because ‘their values and outlook were so different from mine’ (The American Hobo, p. 165). Though he struggled with sociological theory, his work ethic and background impressed his professors, the noted ‘Chicago School’ sociologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess.16 He became inspired by their ecological approach, which sought to understand cities, particularly Chicago, as environments that were not unlike those found in nature. According to Park and Burgess, urban dwellers were forced into competition with each other along Darwinian lines, and those living in particular quarters within those cities, which they termed ‘natural areas’, would begin to take on similar qualities to each other.17 Theirs was, according to Salerno, a more personal, less moralistic and less quantitative sociology than that which had gone before: their methodology ‘emphasized the sense of human alienation and aloneness that appeared characteristic of urban life’.18 Park and Burgess’ ecological approach, which culminated in their famous ‘concentric zone model’ of the city, influenced Anderson to produce maps of Chicago’s Main Stem in The Hobo and to foreground the importance of environment in shaping hobo culture. Nevertheless, his attitude to transient workers differed from that of his Professors. In 1923, citing Anderson’s book The Hobo, Park argued that in the hobo, ‘Wanderlust, which is the most elementary expression of the romantic temperament and the romantic interest in life, has assumed for him, as for so many others, the character of a vice’. The hobo, Park claims, is ‘the bohemian in the ranks of common labor. He has the artistic temperament’.19 Despite what must have been a flattering citation from his former Professor, Anderson may have been irked by Park’s mis – or counter  – reading of his book The Hobo. Park’s bohemian hobo was at odds with Anderson’s itinerant worker, a difference that for Rolf Linder demonstrates the variance between Park and Burgess’ ‘romantic’ conception of sociology and Anderson’s understanding of the sociologist as a ‘craftsman  … the complete opposite of a romantic conception’.20 However, as I will argue in the following section, Anderson’s focus on culture complicated his attempt to portray the hobo as a worker. Anderson’s break came when attending a lecture by the notorious ‘hobo doctor’ Ben Reitman who, as discussed in previous chapters, ran Chicago’s IBWA Hobo College and would later author the fictional autobiography Boxcar Bertha (1937). During the question and answer session, Anderson ‘ventured into the discussion with an objection to his lumping hobos who migrate and work with tramps and bums, the chronic habitués of Madison Street’ (The American Hobo, p. 163). The typological discussion continued after the talk, and Reitman suggested that Anderson might conduct a study

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of Chicago’s Hobohemia, for which Reitman was willing to seek funds. A committee including Reitman, Park, and Burgess was established to oversee the project. Anderson embarked upon his investigations, which took him a year to complete, and which contained original research along with essays that he had originally completed as an undergraduate.21 Writing late into the evenings, his enthusiasm spilled over and the first draft of the report was 700 pages too long. Following revisions, Anderson submitted his report to Park and Burgess, who recommended not only that their student be awarded an MA but who also, to Anderson’s surprise, sent his study to the University of Chicago Press for publication where, following minor edits, it acquired the title The Hobo: the Sociology of the Homeless Man. In its first publication the book did not mention Anderson’s background as a former hobo, something that he would only acknowledge in his Introduction to the 1961 reprint.22 Anderson’s stated aim with The Hobo was to write an answer to the work of Josiah Flynt, and to combat stereotypes about hobos encapsulated in Tom Browne’s Weary Willie and Tired Tim comic strip. As I noted in Chapter 1, Flynt blamed wanderlust for tramping and explicitly denied that economics was a factor in the growth of transiency. Having been introduced to Flynt’s work as a student at Brigham Young Academy, Anderson recalled a seminar in which he was the only reader, his Professor, John C. Swenson included, to object to Flynt’s focus on ‘weary-willie tramps … Flynt had not included the hobos, that large population of goabout workers found mostly in the Middle West and West’ (The American Hobo, p. 128). The class laughed at Anderson, who at that time was unable to articulate his opposition adequately. Upon its publication, he sent The Hobo to Swenson, and noted in his autobiography that ‘The Hobo was my answer to Flynt’ (p. 170). Yet as I will now discuss, his attempt to counter wanderlust theories by focussing on work was problematic because of his insistence in using a version of the IBWA typology, his concentration on hobohemian culture, as well as his book’s multivocal narrative voice.

5.2  Culture, Economics, and The Hobo’s Frontier Defence The Hobo attempted to challenge wanderlust theories by focussing on economics and through concentrating on the ‘natural area’ of Chicago’s Main Stem or ‘Hobohemia’. The Main Stem, which Anderson reproduced as a map (Figure 5.1), was the location to which transient workers returned after completing a job, usually further West or South. It was where they could rest, spend some of their wages and, crucially, find another job:

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Figure 5.1  Map of hobohemia from Nels Anderson, The Hobo: the sociology of the homeless man. A study prepared for the Chicago Council of Social Agencies under the direction of the Committee on Homeless Men (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1961, text originally published 1923), p. 15.

Anderson writes that ‘Hobohemia brings the job-seeking man and the man-seeking job together’, the balance of this sentence implying that hobohemia represents a synergy between working men and the market (The Hobo, p. 12). His focus on a specific urban location, and on the hobo’s stillness rather than his movement, sets him apart from earlier tramp writers and social investigators, for whom movement was the key and defining feature of trampdom. He also states that ‘In spite of all that has been said to the contrary’, the hobo is primarily a worker (p. 41). To highlight this point, he reproduces a photograph of a job agency advertising work and free transport to the job (Figure 5.2). By connecting work and movement in this way, he contradicts earlier writers such as Flynt, as well as his own Professor, Robert Park, by emphasising that the hobo’s movement is a necessary part of earning a living rather than an attempt to escape the shackles of social responsibility. Indeed, the hobo is entitled to sympathy, Anderson suggests, when he is arrested for vagrancy for simply trying to get to his next job (p. 165). Anderson states that there are many reasons for transiency and that wanderlust alone is an insufficient explanation (p. 85). He also rejects psychological causes in the process of making a nationalistic argument. He notes that ‘studies of vagabondage in France, Italy and Germany have led to the conclusion that the vagabond is a psychopathic type’ (p. 70). While these findings may be true of those countries, he states, they cannot be applied to the United States. This is because ‘The American tradition of

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Figure 5.2  Photograph from Anderson, The Hobo, p. 34.

pioneering, wanderlust, seasonal employment, attract[s] into the group of wanderers and migratory workers a great many energetic and venturesome normal boys and young men’ (p. 70). These ‘energetic and venturesome normal boys’ are not only different from the psychologically damaged European vagabonds, but they also represent a continuation of a US frontier tradition of movement, hard work, and pioneering. This does not mean, however, that he associates tramping, in the IBWA-Reitman sense of wandering without looking for work, solely with Europe. Indeed, he states explicitly that ‘The tramp is an American product’ (p. 150). Rather, for him the European vagabond tradition has morphed on American soil into the various categories of hobo, tramp, and bum. Of these three, however, only the hobo has the pioneering spirit that is characteristic of the US. While tramps and bums are American, it is the hobo who represents the best of America. Anderson’s hobos are ‘belated frontiersman’ who have ‘played an important role in reclaiming the desert and in subduing the trackless forests’; the hobo, he states, ‘has been a great pioneer’ in aiding the development of

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‘New mining camps, oil booms, the building of a new town’ (p. 92, p. 108). His Introduction to the 1961 edition of The Hobo makes this frontier thesis even more explicit. He claims that ‘The hobo was American in the same sense that the cowboy was … The cowboy was a hobo type’ (p. xiv).23 He argues for the existence of a ‘second frontier, which also moved westward, two decades or so behind the first’ (p. xvii). As a member of the pioneer tradition, the hobo is worthy of respect, but his belatedness has left him a despised figure. Anderson’s suggestion that the second frontier ‘also moved westward’ is problematic for three reasons. First, it overlooks the drifting circularity of transient worker movement. Second, it excludes the north and eastward movement of many of the workers, especially those from Central America, South America, Japan, and China. Third, it carries an inherent masculinist bias. Nevertheless, his frontier defence has proven to be highly influential, including in its late twentieth-century reformulation as the ‘wageworker’s frontier’.24 Like the first wave of pioneers, Anderson suggests, the hobo is disconnected from mainstream US society, even while that society relies upon him to build up its fledging Western infrastructure and industry. Neither tramps nor hobos marry, he claims, nor do they take part in the ‘social life’ of the wider national community (p. 141, p. 154). Frank Tobias Higbie has disputed this analysis, noting that most transients did eventually settle down into a form of domesticity, while others had never entirely left: moving around for work and then returning to their families each winter.25 As already noted, Anderson himself was not only still connected to his family, but was actually following in a family tradition when he became a transient worker. Given that at the time of writing The Hobo he was in the process of settling down by attempting to cultivate an academic career, it seems odd that he would overlook the familial connections that hobos maintained. The reason that he chose to portray hobos as disconnected individualists is because the trope of the pioneer was crucial to his frontier defence. As I will go on to discuss, the connotations of rugged individualism associated with the pioneer figure complicated his attempt to portray the hobo as a worker who moved around out of economic necessity. It also leant a veneer of romance to the marginalised and exploited transient worker. Anderson claims that hobos ‘have a romantic place in our history … They have contributed more to the open, frank, and adventurous spirit of the Old West than we are willing to admit’ (p. 92). The effect of moving in between jobs, he states, was to increase the hobo’s level of independence and optimism (p. 74 & p. 211). He claims that transients are more intelligent than homeguard (i.e non-transient) workers, and are also less likely

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to be drug addicts (p. 72, pp. 67–69). While the bum, whom he considers to be the true homeless man, lives in ‘revolting’ conditions in the city and pays little attention to ‘personal hygiene’ (p. 136), hobos are domesticated and self-reliant, not needing a woman to keep their ‘jungles’ tidy and clean (p. 18).The jungles themselves are run in a spirit of ‘Absolute democracy’; an unwritten ‘code of etiquette’ ties hobos together according to principles of natural justice, with punishments agreed upon and dealt out to offenders in a spirit of community and cooperation (pp. 19–21). The jungle is the ‘nursery of tramp lore’, a place where young tramps learn how to become hobos and where more seasoned transients gather to share stories and advice (pp. 25–26). Hobos have developed their own dialect and slang, a language that changes regularly in order to sift the active hobos from the fakes, homeguards, tramps and bums (p. 99). The jungles are also, generally speaking, racially harmonious: ‘The jungle is the melting pot of trampdom’, he claims (p. 19). Adopting the famous ‘melting pot’ imagery of Hector St John De Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Anderson positions hobo jungles as being at the apex of America’s exceptional commitment to democracy and racial equality. In this idealisation it is in the jungle, rather than in mainstream society, where the USA’s founding principles finally become reality. In distinguishing between hobos and other transients, Anderson modified the IBWA typology to include five rather than three categories. At the top of his schema is the ‘seasonal worker’, who has ‘definite occupations in different seasons’. This is followed by ‘the transient or occasional worker or hobo’, who is ‘a transient worker without a program’. Next is the tramp, who ‘works only when it is convenient’. After this come the bum and homeguard, the bum including ‘the inveterate drunkard and drug addicts’ (pp. 89–99). These categories are not fixed, and so, ‘The seasonal worker may descend into the ranks of the hobos, and a hobo may sink to the level of a tramp’ (p. 95). Despite this acknowledgement, Anderson maintains the hierarchical logic of the IBWA distinction. However, his categorisation struggles to maintain the distinctiveness of its types. For example, he states that the seasonal worker ‘may be regarded also as the upperclass hobo’, while he also gives examples of transient bums (p. 89, n 2 & p. 98, n 50). Crucially, he is only able to maintain the tramp as a separate, lesser category to the hobo by excluding certain forms of labour from the category of ‘work’. Tramps do all kinds of odd jobs to survive, including selling joke and song books, as well as the “Hobo” News (p. 94). For Anderson, these forms of labour are insufficient to bring the tramp up into the category of hobo, presumably because they are not wageworkers. Since

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their work is not vital to the development of the industrial West, he does not subsume it into his frontier defence. This logic would also, of course, exclude many women. Like Carleton Parker, Anderson examines the culture of poverty created by environmental conditions. This cultural approach complicates his attempt to represent the hobo as a worker whose identity is routed in labour. Though he idealises hobo culture for its pioneering spirit, he also makes moralistic judgements. He claims, for example, that the hobo’s penchant for perpetual movement means that he changes location whenever he encounters a work-related or personal difficulty, rather than remaining to improve the situation. The hobo’s position outside of mainstream society, and particularly the lack of female influence, means that he is ‘egocentric’ and unable to cope with difficult situations (pp. 248–249). As Mark Pittenger argues, early twentieth century ‘culture of poverty’ explanations attempted to move beyond deterministic racialized understandings of class only to reinscribe determinism through ‘the idea of an isolated, savage, self-perpetuating underclass’.26 This is true of Anderson, who notes the demoralising effect of long-term unemployment which, he says, has a ‘particularly marked effect upon the unskilled labourer. His regular routine of work has been interrupted; habits of loafing are easily acquired’ (p. 64).27 Such ‘loafing’ will lead to ‘personal degradation’ and ‘the “bread line” at the mission’ (pp. 64–65). Though his focus on environment means that his analysis is less individualistic in apportioning blame for ‘idleness’ than earlier writers like Flynt, he maintains a moralistic sense that those who wait for hand-outs are loafers who need to be disciplined by a ‘regular routine of work’. In the absence of such a routine, ‘personal degradation’ will pull the seasonal worker and hobo down to the level of a mere bum. Anderson reserves his strongest criticism for the ‘hobo intellectuals’, whom he characterises as a foreign menace (p. 8). In the early twentieth century, Chicago had a thriving working-class intellectual community. Washington Square Park, just outside of the Newberry Library, was a popular location for street speaking, debate, and music. The space became known as Bughouse Square, the word ‘bughouse’ being slang for a lunatic asylum.28 He portrays Bughouse Square’s speakers as homeguard bums, who are on the lowest rung of his schema: ‘Few transients turn up here’, he claims, since ‘they do not have time’ (p. 9). Significantly, given his identification of hobos and tramps as American types, he states that ‘A polyglot population swarms here. Tramps, hobos – yes, but they are only scatteringly represented’ (p. 9). This quote assumes a difference between the ‘polyglot population’ and tramps and hobos, positioning the former as foreign

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and the latter as native-born.29 The verb ‘swarms’ aligns Anderson’s representation with a conservative tradition of de-individualising and dehumanising immigrants as a threat to the cultural integrity of the United States. Bughouse Square is dangerous in its foreignness, its subversive politics, and because it is a chaotic space wholly lacking in order: ‘Free-lance propagandists who belong to no group and claim no following, non-conformists, dreamers, fakers, beggars, bootleggers, dope fiends – they are all here’ (p. 9). These groups mix freely with children and families, providing a dangerous example in the ‘variety and violence’ of their ‘antipathies’ (p. 10). Like the chaotic square itself, the hobo intellectuals lack order. ‘Intellectuals,’ he claims, ‘just because they are highly organized and specialized, are very likely to become misfits outside of the environment to which they artificially are adapted’, a statement with which generations of University administrators would surely agree. ‘When’, Anderson continues, ‘added to this handicap, they lack the discipline which a regular occupation affords they are likely to become quite impossible’, (p. 75). Influenced by Park and Burgess, Anderson’s Darwinian analysis treats intellectuals as a species who need to adapt to changing surroundings or else exhibit the kind of deviant behaviours that he witnesses at Bughouse Square. Only a ‘regular occupation’ can provide the appropriate level of ‘discipline’ to prevent such behaviours. Rather than pursue such an occupation, however, some hobos indulge fantasies of becoming writers, drawn by ‘visions of a financial success that will put them on “easy street”’ (p. 189). In contrast to Anderson’s sense of his own work ethic, these wannabe authors see writing not as a form of labour but rather as a way to avoid it.30 He claims that most hobo writers are propagandists in the service of the ‘radical press’, a term which includes ‘I.W.W publications and the Hobo News’. (p. 190). In both their outlook and literary style, these publications serve as a ‘pattern’ for hobo authors, creating a circular and selfperpetuating hobohemian culture (p. 190). As a student Anderson had written a paper in which he argued that the ‘rebel press’, as he termed it, standardised literary products and limited the artistic potential of its contributors: ‘There is a monotony of tone and spirit throughout [hobo poetry] and to some degree we may call it a deliberate monotony. Much of this dead level may be traced to the influence of the press in standardizing the reaction of these men to their problems … They have cast their lot with a certain limited group and rarely do they rise out of it’.31 In order to construct this argument about ‘monotony of tone’, the student Anderson overlooked the humour present in much hobomemian cultural production.32 His hierarchical language indicates the extent to which he

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accepted a conventional understanding of ‘High’ and ‘Low’ literary culture. His slightly later work The Hobo contains a chapter on ‘Hobo Songs and Ballads’, in which he uses song and poetry as examples of the particular culture of the road. Producing a form of cultural history many decades before the advent of Cultural Studies, he provides commentary to illuminate the worth of the cited texts as evidence. He concludes that ‘Through poetry he [the hobo] creates a background of tradition and culture which unifies and gives significance to all his experiences’ (p. 214). Though he does not believe that the songs and poems have literary merit, he indicates that they do have worth to the sociologist. In portraying hobohemia as a hermetically sealed culture, and in distancing himself from hobo intellectuals and writers, Anderson positioned himself as an outsider to that culture. Given the prejudice that he had faced as a student, and which he would continue to face during his later career, such distancing was an understandable strategy. Nevertheless, The Hobo struggles to maintain a sense of distanced, sociological objectivity. Its narrative position, as I will now discuss, vacillates between dispassionate observation and providing insider knowledge. Anderson’s text is not only the first sociological book on hobos. It is also the most conflicted.

5.3  Inside and Outside Hobohemia: The Hobo’s Narrative Voice As Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have shown, the concept of objectivity developed in Western science through the gradual removal of authorial subjectivity from the topic of study.33 Similarly, Anderson attempted to remove his presence from The Hobo in order to make the book as objective as possible. For example, he uses passive voice when discussing his own actions: ‘a canvass of the Hobohemia hotels has been made’, ‘observation was limited to apparent defects’, ‘eye trouble was listed separately’ (p. 30, p. 127, p. 128). Removing himself from the narrative in this way flattened the book’s tone. Indeed, in his 1961 Introduction Anderson admitted that he felt The Hobo ‘seemed ordinary, a little naked, and lacking in literary style’ (p. xii). More than simply the result of its author’s fledgling status, this supposed lack of style was Anderson’s attempt to divert attention from his personal background and to position himself as an outsider to the culture that he was studying. This is particularly clear in moments in which he comes into personal contact with hobos and tramps and feels that it is necessary to use the active voice to describe the encounter. In these instances, he refers to himself as ‘The investigator’ (p. 148). On other

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occasions he uses the indefinite ‘an investigator’ or ‘an observer’, awkward phrases which falsely imply that the researcher might not have been Anderson (p. 52, p. 253). On one level, his use of the indefinite article indicates that he was unsure how to refer to himself. This is again understandable, since as a student he was new to academic study. His use of ‘an’ may also have been an attempt to sow doubt about who conducted the original research: the phrases ‘an investigator’ and ‘an observer’ suggest that he had a team of researchers, although he actually conducted the study alone. Whether or not this effect is deliberate, he also uses the terms ‘we’ and ‘us’ to make himself appear to be in the same social class as his readership rather than his subjects (p. 3, p. 138). Taken together, Anderson’s language serves to erase his background as a former transient worker and to promote himself as a (presumably middle-class) sociologist. In order to adopt the appropriate sociological distance, The Hobo also conformed to expected academic norms. This conformity included the use of maps, inspired by Park and Burgess’s ecological approach to urban studies; it included photographs, which are used as illustration rather than evidence; it included footnotes and endnotes, though these are presented in a somewhat haphazard manner, with some quotes not given footnotes and other footnotes being out of order (p. 87, p. 282, n 127). It also included making harsh judgements about transients that contrast strongly with the sympathy of his early story ‘The Fall of Bill’. Indeed, The Hobo is at its most judgemental when it is at its most sociological. For example, Anderson sums up workers who are ‘feeble-minded or restless types like the emotionally unstable and the egocentric’ with the label ‘industrially inadequate’ and announces that ‘Alcoholism decreases the economic efficiency of the worker’ (pp. 65–66). He utilises the language of political economy: ‘The efficiency of the homeless man as a worker and his chance of regaining his lost economic and social status depend upon his physical rehabilitation’ (p. 136). His Taylorite terminology gave the text a perspective that was, once again, distant from its transient subjects and closer to the academy to which he aspired. It also allowed him to keep his focus on the importance of work as a key facet of identity and thereby bolster his frontier thesis. However, the text’s sense of narratorial distance is contradicted by moments in which the author reveals his position as someone on the inside of hobo subculture. That is to say, Anderson’s status as a former hobo is a source of narratorial confusion. In a section describing hobo jungles, for example, he states:

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Between Hobohemia and Academia Accessibility to a railroad is only one of the requirements of a good jungle. It should be located in a dry and shady place that permits sleeping on the ground. There should be plenty of water for cooking and bathing and wood enough to keep the pot boiling. If there is a general store near by where bread, meat, and vegetables may be had, so much the better (p. 142).

Phrases such as ‘It should be’ and ‘so much the better’ give this passage a sense that Anderson is a transient providing advice to a new hobo. The tone is one of helpful, knowing and judgement-free guidance, in contrast to the Taylorite language used elsewhere. This and other sections in which he advises on the importance of frugality for life on the road (see, for example, p. 40) make The Hobo sound like a guidebook for greenhorn transients. Browder argues that The Hobo is a ‘hidden autobiography’ in which Anderson ‘used his personal experiences as research material while passing them off as his results from countless interviews with hobos’.34 This is an overstatement, as the hundreds of interviews that Anderson conducted during his research attest.35 A melange of the sociological and autobiographical, The Hobo contains multitudes, as Walt Whitman, panegyrist of the open road, might put it. Nevertheless, Browder’s claim is important in its foregrounding of The Hobo’s surreptitious autobiographical elements. A good example is a footnote in which Anderson admits that an earlier study he conducted ‘was made while riding freight trains from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Chicago in the summer of 1921. All the cases tabulated were cases in transit’ (p. 127, n 2). The scientific register and passive voice of the second sentence work to counter any suggestion in the first sentence that the author might have been riding freight trains as a hobo: it implies, though it does not state explicitly, that the journey was taken for the purposes of research. Anderson’s liminal position is also clear from his working methods, which at first utilised the approaches that he had been taught at University but quickly became more akin to his previous life as a hobo. His early attempts to approach the study in the manner of a University researcher were abject failures. After identifying himself as an investigator, he asked workers to fill out case cards on which were written a set of twenty-five questions. Talking about himself in the third person in another attempt to create distance, in one of his archival documents he comments that: ‘He was not long in learning that such a method was not practical, as the reactions of the men were generally negative. If he wasn’t regarded as an impossible intellectualist he was shunned and pointed out with suspicion to other transients’.36 Rethinking his strategy, he decided to conceal his true purpose. As a former hobo, he was able to use work talk as a way into conversations. Rather than

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asking questions, he would often think aloud to encourage reflection on the part of his interlocutor (The American Hobo, pp. 164–166). His method was random and unstructured.37 He would often bump into someone walking in the street and strike up a conversation, on at least one occasion being interrupted by another hobo whom he would then proceed to interview. He sometimes claimed to be a novelist, believing that the relevantly new profession of sociologist would not be understood.38 He would buy his interviewees coffee, and was not averse to interviewing men when they were drunk.39 His status as an aspirational student also meant that there were tensions between Anderson and his interviewees: either when they tried to patronise him by assuming greater knowledge of a topic, or when they attempted to use him as an amanuensis to produce a written transcript of their life story.40 Although he was not quite yet a professional sociologist, he no longer regarded himself as a hobo. Yet he still identified with the transient life, even writing one document of his own life story with the subject’s name given simply as ‘A’.41 This particular document is emblematic of research in which Anderson was both subject and investigator. The Hobo contains instances of irony, humour and free indirect discourse that complicate its author’s assertion of a lack of ‘literary style’. These small moments have either not been noticed by previous scholarship or have not been considered worthy of comment. Yet as well as providing journalistic colour, they show that Anderson’s attempt to remove himself from the text did not entirely succeed, and also indicate his liminal status within both hobohemia and academia. When he allows his more personal style to emerge, the writing is often arch, as when he refers to one of his transient subjects as ‘M Kuhn, of St Louis (and elsewhere)’ (p. 88). Anderson’s opinion of hobo intellectuals leads him to make critical statements such as ‘To the hobo who thinks, even though he does not think well, the lower North side is a great source of comfort’ (p. 10). He parodies the disingenuousness of many hobos when he notes that the soapboxer ‘John L’ has hired himself out as a freelance political speaker: ‘John carried credentials from both the Democrats and Republicans and he can plead the cause of either’ (p. 226).42 He recounts a nonreligious hobo who ‘gets saved every winter’ in order to have a warm mission hall in which to rest and eat: ‘This winter he got saved twice’ (p. 254).43 In one of his own research documents that he cites in The Hobo, Anderson uses free indirect discourse: Yes, Pete had plenty of good jobs, but something had always gone against him. At one place not long ago they wanted him to continue work in spite of the dust which was blowing everywhere. Another rude employer never spoke to him (or any other of the employees) politely.

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Between Hobohemia and Academia No one should work for a man like that. Upon another occasion the boss suggested reform of a certain habit—as if he had any right to tell an American citizen what he ought to do (p. 75).

A novelistic technique, free indirect discourse allows Anderson to get inside Pete’s mind while suggesting his own critical distance. The conversational ‘Yes’ implies that the question that Anderson had just asked Pete was about the good jobs from which Pete had walked away for apparently trivial reasons. The dependent clause ‘as if he had any right to tell an American citizen what he ought to do’ not only suggests Pete’s outrage but also, through its exaggerated rhetoric, indicates the narrator’s disagreement. As well as complicating his thesis that the hobo is first-and-foremost a worker, this example puts Anderson in the position of a sociologist disapproving of an apparently workshy transient, making him exactly the type of figure whom he had criticised only two years earlier in ‘The Fall of Bill’. In addition to long sociological passages written in the third person, The Hobo also contains two first-person accounts of nights that Anderson spent in flophouses (pp. 31–33). His authorship of these latter passages is both hidden and revealed, with his name mentioned but only in an endnote. In the body of the text, he once again uses passive voice to distance himself from the account, which was, he states, ‘adapted from a description of a night spent in “Hogan’s Flop”’ (p. 31). These accounts are significant because they embody the inside/outside stylistic dilemma that runs through The Hobo. Anderson establishes his difference from the hobos in the flophouse through his refusal of a free ticket to Hogan’s Flop from the organisers of a Bible Rescue Mission: ‘They offered me a ticket but I thanked them and assured them that I still had a little money’ (p. 31). Noting the terrible conditions inside the flophouse, he remarks ‘I awoke marvelling at the endurance of the man of the road’, as if he himself had never been one of them (p. 33). Yet he unintentionally suggests his familiarity with flophouses through his comment that ‘One man of fifty years or more had removed his shirt and trousers and was using the latter for a pillow. He had tied his shoes to his trousers which is evidence that he knew “flop” house ethics’ (p. 32). Both his ironic phrasing and the fact that Anderson knows that untied shoes are likely to be stolen indicates that he, too, was familiar with flophouse ‘ethics’. Likewise, the author finds a night in the bug-ridden flophouse intolerable, but is unwilling to leave until another hobo does so first: ‘I felt better. Someone else had weakened first. I got up and started home.’ (p. 33). Although his reason for being unwilling to leave first might be because he did not want to give away his status as an outsider, the phrase ‘Someone else had weakened first’

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indicates a masculinist pride that was characteristic of hobo subculture. As well as being unwilling to out himself as an outsider, Anderson was also concerned with proving himself a true and manly hobo. These sections also contain gallows humour, which the author claims was an important part of hobo subculture: ‘The characteristic hobo is an optimist who sees the humorous side of many an unpleasant or dangerous situation’ (p. 211). When describing the bugs in Hogan’s flophouse, he cites a tramp who claims that when the flophouse moved address ‘from Meridian street it wasn’t three days before the bugs got the new address and followed us’ (p. 31). Similarly, when discussing cheap hobohemian restaurants in which ‘the hamburger is generally mixed with bread and potatoes … the bread is usually stale … the milk is frequently sour’, he notes that ‘a steady patron reasons thus: “I don’t allow myself to see things, and as long as the eyes don’t see the heart grieves not.”’ (p. 35). The humour here lies in the willing suspension of awareness and in the formal nature of the idiomatic expression, which contrasts with the state of the restaurant itself. Taking the hardships of life easily and with dark humour is a way for transients to indicate their status as hobos. This cultural element, which can also be found in several other hobohemian cultural productions, complicates Anderson’s representation of hobos as being defined solely as frontier workers.44 This section implies that a hobo is not simply a worker, but also someone with a particular attitude and state of mind. Although Anderson generally underplays humour in The Hobo, in his follow-up parody The Milk and Honey Route it is to the forefront. Writing under the pseudonym ‘Dean Stiff’, which in hobo parlance means a professor–worker, he allowed himself free rein to portray the cultural elements of hobohemia that he was not able to discuss in detail in his sociological work. However, the implicit uncertainty of The Hobo’s narrative position is made explicit in The Milk and Honey Route, which is, I will now argue, a parodic work that cannot settle on the focus of its parody. This neglected text, which has been out of print since its initial publication, is crucial for understanding Anderson’s complex and contradictory representation of transient workers.

5.4  Strange Case of Dr. Anderson and Mr. Stiff: Ambivalent Parody in The Milk and Honey Route The Hobo sold well and established Anderson’s credentials as a writer on hobos, even if this was not quite the persona that he wanted. The book’s success encouraged him to complete a doctorate on the slums of New

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York during the late 1920s. Nevertheless, it received a lukewarm reception from transient writers. Ben Reitman, for example, believed that The Hobo contained ‘errors’ in pandering to a public stereotype of the transient as ‘a creature of his own making’.45 Similarly, the hobo W.D Lamb wrote a reply to a letter that Anderson had sent to the “Hobo” News, in which he had claimed that unemployment was not the sole cause of transiency: He says that when he himself was a migratory worker, he saw that ‘Unemployment was the cause of it all.’ But now, since he is a college student and a paid official of the city, he thinks he sees some other causes. How candid! Comment is unnecessary.46

Apparently in agreement with Reitman and Lamb, Anderson wrote that The Hobo ‘was never convincing to me’, giving several possible reasons, including that ‘perhaps it colored up too much the culture of the homeless in Chicago’ (Men on the Move, p. 1). His response was to write The Milk and Honey Route, which he claimed ‘was a parody. I cleansed my soul by transferring all the old emotions about The Hobo to one Dean Stiff’ (p. 2). Taking Anderson’s lead, critics have acknowledged The Milk and Honey Route, pseudonymously written by a hobo named Dean Stiff, to be a parody. What exactly it is a parody of, however, is less clear. For Mark Pittenger, The Milk and Honey Route mocks the ‘hobo discourse’ that preceded Anderson’s work, while Charles S. Peterson suggests that The Milk and Honey Route is a parody of The Hobo itself.47 This confusion is indicative of The Milk and Honey Route, which shifts the target of its satire throughout. At times mocking the idealisation of hoboing by transients, at other moments the book takes the side of those same transients to parody the social workers and sociologists, Anderson included, who tried to categorise them. The text ridicules psychological explanations of hoboing in a way that bolstered Anderson’s frontier defence even while it parodies Stiff’s idealisation of the pioneer hobo figure. The Milk and Honey Route was a space for the expression of ideas that Anderson felt could not be discussed in The Hobo, but making his ideas explicit did not make them more consistent. Todd DePastino claims that Anderson disguised ‘his authorship so well’ in The Milk and Honey Route that ‘few recognised his voice’.48 Yet the book does provide some clues that Dr. Anderson and Mr. Stiff were the same person. It has an introduction written by ‘Nels Anderson’, in which the sociologist vouches for Stiff’s authenticity as a hobo. He states: ‘I have never asked Dean Stiff his real name. I understand very well that in the world of which he writes names are of little import’ (p. xi). Stiff

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has many aliases, Anderson claims, and he himself has previously known him as Nick, of which Nels is a variant. Upon producing the manuscript, Stiff has left the area in search of work, asking Anderson ‘would I be good enough to read the proofs? And would I also collect the royalty checks and if he didn’t return, spend the money as I deemed best’ (p. xiii). The image of Anderson not only collecting royalties on Stiff’s behalf but also spending them provides a hint that they are the same person. It is, of course, impossible to determine how many readers took up this clue. Nevertheless, Anderson’s half-outing of himself as the real author of The Milk and Honey Route is suggestive of his approach to authorship more generally. DePastino’s comment that ‘few recognised his voice’ implies that there is a consistent Andersonian voice that a reader might recognise which, as the preceding section has argued, there was not. DePastino’s remark could apply equally to The Hobo, in which Anderson half reveals and half conceals his own origins. In fact, as I have been arguing, a double voice was the chief characteristic of Anderson’s early work, The Hobo and The Milk and Honey Route included. Despite its centrality to Anderson’s style, scholars have downplayed The Milk and Honey Route, often noting its existence before moving on to his more substantial works.49 For example, Salerno and Linder give the text one and two sentences respectively, Pittenger gives it half a paragraph, as does DePastino, who also does not mention that it is a parody, while neither Allen, Lennon nor Ferrell comment on it at all.50 In a moment of relative generosity, Kenneth Allsop devotes two pages to The Milk and Honey Route, although he also dismisses it as ‘a colourfully whimsy opéra bouffe’.51 In contrast to this scholarly neglect, I will now give the book sustained attention. In doing so, I will demonstrate that The Milk and Honey Route is crucial for understanding the dualistic nature of Anderson’s early work, especially his latent scepticism towards sociology. Presented as a guidebook for new or wannabe hobos, The Milk and Honey Route is inconsistently parodic, at times contradicting Anderson’s The Hobo and at other moments aligning itself with that earlier work. It is clear that readers are supposed to regard Stiff as an unreliable narrator who romanticises life on the road as when, for instance, he claims that ‘The jungle is very much the reverse of the main stem, being the hobo’s summer camp. For the sake of his health, the hobo must get out of the city occasionally’ (p. 18).52 In its comic idealisation of hobohemia, The Milk and Honey Route appears to set itself against The Hobo. It is overwritten in the manner that Anderson felt was common in literary discourse about transients: ‘It is not so easy to mow a mighty swath in the field of letters,

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but when one has something to say, even an amateur pen need not falter in the telling’ (p. v).53 The book also flatly contradicts Anderson’s earlier economic thesis: ‘The hobo is always born a hobo … Whether you were born on the farmstead or saw the light of day for the first time in a city tenement, it makes no difference’ (p. 13). Yet Stiff often agrees with Anderson’s analysis, as when he claims that Bughouse Square speakers lack integrity: ‘I have known soap-boxers to defend the Klu Klux Klan on one street corner and an hour later on the other side of the street damn the Klan and laud the I. W. W’ (p. 121).54 As in The Hobo, at times Stiff writes in a tone of straightforward, non-parodic guidance. For example, he provides advice about the placement of a jungle, which should be ‘convenient to the railroad but inaccessible to the highway. The auto tramp, and especially tramp families, should be kept out’ (p. 20). As well as echoing comments in The Hobo, this concern with the purity of hobo culture, especially as it relates to train-riding verses auto tramps, anticipates Anderson’s analysis in Men on the Move, which would later argue that the automobile put an end to hobohemia. Another similarity lies in Stiff’s idealisation of work as a key factor in shaping hobo identity. For Stiff as for Anderson, hobos are American because they work, while European vagabonds are shiftless: ‘the hobo never refuses a job if the conditions are right. Thus we can distinguish the American hobo from the vagrants of the old world. The American hobo is a critical selector of his jobs; his independence is often mistaken for laziness. The European vagrant is a chronic rejector of work; his laziness is often mistaken for independence’ (p. 104). The balance of the final two sentences, both split by semi-colons, indicates that hobos and vagrants are binary opposites. This neat typology makes the nationalism of The Hobo more explicit: the ‘independence’ of the hobo is an example of his Americanism. A pioneer who is confident in both his own abilities and in the US’ ability to provide further opportunities if he rejects the job being offered, the hobo represents the best of American self-respect and optimism. Despite these moments of agreement, Stiff himself demonstrates suspiciously vagabond sensibilities. His idealisation of tramp life is presented as European, both in his attitude to wanderlust and in his class-inflected language. Stiff is an egotistical transient intellectual of the type that Anderson had scorned in his earlier work. The hobo, Stiff claims, ‘is the aristocrat, impressing, convincing and enlightening by his mere presence. Since his contacts are many, his influence is great. Going about in his quiet and self-sufficient way, he sees life, he lives life. He is the candle that lights

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the world, but he is not conscious of his own brightness’ (p. 122). The extended, overblown analogy of the hobo–aristocrat gives Stiff’s outlook a stereotypical mediaeval-European quality. Like a British or continental Lord, the hobo has no responsibilities and can simply exude a ‘presence’ that impresses, convinces and enlightens. The hobo provides culture to ‘light the world’, akin to Cardinal John Henry Newman’s educated gentleman in The Idea of a University (1852). Such intellectual pretensions are literally and metaphorically foreign to Anderson’s conceptualisation of the US hobo. Stiff is also suspect because he is an aesthete. In his description of trainhopping, he advocates readers not simply to be safe but also to be stylish: ‘It would be folly to undertake here to tell you how to become a train rider. You will have to develop your own style. If you want to take your style second-hand from a book then you must be content to remain a second-class hobo’ (p. 26). Train-hopping requires flair, originality, and is an activity at which someone can either be good or bad: rather than an act of economic necessity, then, hoboing is a lifestyle. Stiff even gives fashion advice in a chapter entitled ‘What the well-dressed hobo should wear’. Based on performative aspects such as deportment and clothing, there is a way of being and of not being a hobo. The Milk and Honey Route does more than simply parody the idealisation of the hobo as a natural aristocrat: it also renders this tendency as European. Stiff associates his ideal hobo with the European tradition of journeymen wanderers, and in so doing advances a parodic version of the psychoanalytic wanderlust-focussed explanations of tramping that Anderson opposed. For instance, in claiming that true hobos are born rather than made, Stiff writes that ‘Possessing this prized instinct of the wandermann you will find this realm as orderly as a psychological maze’ (p. 14). He connects his idealisation of the hobo’s life to Europe through the mediaevalist terms ‘realm’ and ‘wandermann’. The latter reference to the European tradition of the ‘Happy Wanderer’, expressed using its German formulation, implies that hobo wandering is a lifestyle choice. In both a geographic and cultural sense, then, ‘wandermann’ emphasises the bohemian element of hobohemia. Stiff also claims that the true hobo writer ‘becomes identified with the spirit of the wander man, the Homer of ancient times, the Meistersinger of the Dark Ages, the roadside magic venders and vagrant storytellers of every century and every clime’ (p. vii). The allusions to classical Greece, vagrants, and magic vendors ‘of every century’ sets this argument against Anderson’s previous claim for the special conditions of US transiency, while the use of another German word,

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‘Meistersinger’, connects Stiff’s argument to a European city-guild tradition that did not exist in America. The hyperbolic language undermines Stiff’s credibility, at least in Anderson’s eyes, and implies that his European comparisons are inappropriate in the context of the United States. Though Stiff is parodied as an unreliable and idealistic vagabond, in places The Milk and Honey Route seems to agree with his parodic critique. The clearest example is in his representation of social workers and sociologists. Apparently getting his own back for years of classification of hobos by social workers, Stiff presents a typology of social workers by hobos. ‘Social workers’, he states, ‘may be grouped into three classes: (a) the psychiatric type, (b) the sociotechnic type, and (c) the psychoantic type. In the order named we will consider each type and the best method of approaching it’ (p. 61). This typology reverses the usual power dynamic of the social worker-hobo relationship, highlighting the arrogant assumption of superiority involved in devising such a system.55 The formality of the final sentence parodies the distanced tone of sociological works such as Anderson’s own The Hobo. Stiff goes on to suggest that each of the three types of social worker can be understood and then manipulated by the hobo. ‘The Psychiatric social worker’, for example, who ‘is trained to read your mind by the way you twirl your hat’, can be exploited by a hobo deliberately providing false clues about his hidden ‘inhibitions, sublimations, and complexes’ (pp. 61–62). Stiff advises his transient readership to use reverse psychology to lead the psychiatric social worker down a particular path: ‘You can play your part perfectly by being hesitant; for instance, whenever you start to answer her questions change your reply and start the conversation in another direction’ (p. 62). He states that while the psychiatric social worker looks for ‘kinks in your personality’, the sociotechnic type ‘looks for difficulties in your environment’: Where the psychiatric worker will say, ‘So, your mother was a virgin? Well, that’s strange,’ the sociotechnic worker will say ‘Well, well, so you were born in a shantytown?’ Then she will write in her little book, ‘Childhood: below the subsistence level.’ Where the first tries to prove that you are abnormal, the second is anxious to show that you are normal. Should the sociotechnic social worker be convinced that you are not normal she will have you bound for a nuttery before sunset, which with a hard winter coming may be all to the good. (p. 62)

The methods used to manipulate social workers vary according to their type. As the final sentence suggests, a hobo may wish to be incarcerated over winter, and therefore knowing which type of social worker he is facing will enable him to be placed in a warm ‘nuttery’. The final type, the

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psychoantic social workers, ‘are sticklers for rules. They believe you are a chronic work dodger and what you need is more work’ (p. 63). To manipulate this type, it is important to realise that they never expect ‘you to tell the truth’ and like ‘to catch you sometimes trying to cover up’ (p. 63). Knowing this, a hobo can make this type of social worker think better of him by appearing to be ‘holding back something to protect somebody’s good name. When you permit her to lead you into the trap you should swallow a couple of times and remind her, “Well, after all, he was my dad”’ (p. 63). Gender is another important factor to consider, especially when deciding how much of one’s education to reveal: ‘With the proper show of erudition you can get on with almost any lady social worker. If you have to meet the men it is better to play the humility game. Let them feel important’ (p. 63). Women respond to the shared humanity that hobos can express through education, especially as they may expect hobos to be ignorant, while men are arrogant and require a deferential attitude in order to get on their good side. In being explicit about the best ways to manipulate social workers, Stiff’s parodic guidance anticipates Dale Carnegie’s popular self-help treatise How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), which was published only five years later. This section may have been inspired by Anderson’s erstwhile hobo nemesis, Josiah Flynt, who, while describing criminalised transients, wrote that in ‘Many times and in many cases the criminal is a little cleverer than the people who are examining him’.56 In its suspicion toward social work, The Milk and Honey Route also recalls Anderson’s earlier short story ‘The Fall of Bill’. Stiff shares Anderson’s scepticism that hobos and tramps should be included in the category of homelessness: ‘Any harness bull can tell you where the municipal lodging house, or the “munie,” is to be found. I am starting with the munie because that is the city’s official welcoming center for the homeless. While you are not really a homeless man, you are included in that definition’ (The Milk and Honey Route, p. 45–46). This is a notable and surprising comment for an author whose most famous work has the subtitle The Sociology of the Homeless Man. Yet as he himself noted, Anderson was never convinced that his subjects were ‘homeless’ in the way that his Chicago Professors, and the Chicago social workers, believed: ‘I chanced to meet people who were interested in the problem of the homeless in Chicago. I had never thought of the hobo in this way, but in Hobohemia, his Chicago habitat, he was indeed among the homeless’ (The Hobo, p. xi). Anderson’s phrasing is telling, since being ‘among’ the homeless is different from being homeless. It indicates that he analysed transients under the category of homelessness in The Hobo because this

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was the sociological framework that Park, Burgess, and other Committee members expected him to use. The true homeless, Anderson believed, were the bums and homeguard, but in the city it became difficult for authorities to tell the difference. In The Milk and Honey Route, Dean Stiff argues that hobos can use this sociological mis-definition to their advantage: ‘The munie doctors’, who believe that the hobo is a homeless man, ‘are on the whole a rather crude lot of fellows, but if you learn their ways you can get almost anything you want’ (The Milk and Honey Route, p. 46). Accepting the official definition of himself as homeless thus works to the benefit of the hobo, who can get free medical treatment and a room over his head while in the city. Stiff is cynical about the Progressive-era search for absolute knowledge embodied in the figure of the sociologist. He parodies attempts to study hobo intelligence when he claims that bums and yeggs (transient thieves) are ‘the morons of Hobohemia’, whose ‘H. Q or Hobohemian quotient’ ranges ‘somewhere between 59 and 71’ (p. 33). Stiff’s adoption of sociological language is a kind of inverted slumming, a reversal of the power relations between the middle-class sociologist and their subject. The satirical ‘Hobohemian quotient’ calls into question the supposed objectivity of the social investigator, while also indicating the extent to which hobos felt themselves under scrutiny by forces that Michel Foucault would later refer to as ‘governmentality’. Indeed, Stiff portrays hobohemia as thronging with sociologists to such an extent that he advises readers never to beg from anyone carrying a briefcase, since ‘You may by chance meet a research expert or social worker’ (p. 91). Yet despite parodying the obsessive collection of data by researchers, The Milk and Honey Route concludes with a ‘Glossary of Hobo Terms’ (pp. 198–219) similar to that provided by several writers on this topic, including Godfrey Irwin’s American Tramp and Underworld Slang (1931). The Glossary is not parodic, and suggests that Anderson’s true audience is different to Stiff’s. While Stiff is writing for new and wannabe hobos, Anderson is aware that his real readership is likely to consist of non-transients.57 This duality of audience reflects the duality of the Stiff-Anderson voice. The contradictory positions adopted by The Milk and Honey Route are emblematic of Anderson’s early work, including The Hobo. Although Stiff’s idealisation of the road and his advocacy of wanderlust appears to be in direct opposition to Anderson’s economic approach, the two books share an ambivalence about the cultural aspects of transiency, the relationship between researchers and their hobo subjects, and their own narrative position. The Milk and Honey Route provided a space in which

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Anderson could expand upon the nationalist elements of his argument, making explicit what had been implicit in The Hobo’s frontier defence. Yet this only brought out the contradictory aspects of that earlier book more clearly. Stiff’s scepticism about sociology, including the sociological understanding of hobos as homeless, dramatizes the hidden tensions of Anderson’s other writings. The Milk and Honey Route provides a fresh perspective on the narrative voice in Anderson’s early writings: a voice that was not truly one, but truly two, to quote Dr. Henry Jekyll’s description of his relationship with Edward Hyde.58 The explicit duality of The Milk and Honey Route provides a key to understanding the implicit duality of The Hobo.

5.5 Conclusion Tainted by his association with hobos, Anderson struggled for acceptance from the academic community. Unable to get a permanent University position following the receipt of his doctorate in 1930, he worked for Franklin Roosevelt’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration for most of the Great Depression, the War Shipping Administration during WWII, and the American High Commission in Germany from the end of the war and throughout the following decade. In 1965, he was offered a position to teach sociology at Memorial University, Newfoundland, and two years later moved to the University of New Brunswick. This scholar of hobos, who had called for the recognition of transient workers on the basis of their essential Americanness, would never be accepted by the US academic community, only finally finding recognition in Canada ‘ten years after entering active retirement’ (The American Hobo, p. 183). He maintained the basic principles of his frontier defence throughout his later career, arguing in both Men on the Move and The American Hobo for the exceptional nature of US hobos, while continuing to focus on work as their defining characteristic. This was a less conflicted representation than in his early work, since it was based on nostalgia for an era that he believed had come to an end.59 In The Milk and Honey Route, Dean Stiff makes several references to his friend and fellow hobo writer ‘Sirloin Slim’: a reference to T-Bone Slim, who is the subject of my next chapter. Describing Slim as one of the prominent men of hobohemia, Stiff claims that he ‘was meant to be a poet’ (The Milk and Honey Route, p. 168). He uses a verse from the real Slim’s song ‘Mysteries of a Hobo’s Life (1921)’ as an epigraph to the book’s tenth chapter (p. 104). According to Stiff/Anderson, Sirloin Slim resisted

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having his photograph reproduced in The Milk and Honey Route because he enjoyed his ‘inconspicuous prominence’ (p. 168). As they moved in somewhat similar transient circles, at least for a time, it is possible that Anderson knew T-Bone Slim personally. Either way, his representation of Slim as having an ‘inconspicuous prominence’ closely matches Slim’s literary persona and, as I will show in the next chapter, his representation of, in both senses, transient fame.

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chapter 6

‘The Laureate of the Logging Camps’: Language, Food and Revolution in the Work of T-Bone Slim

Among all these contributors to the radical publications, there are few who might produce literature.

Nels Anderson1

The humor in the above is very delicate. To appreciate it, skip a couple of meals before reading T-Bone Slim2

On 15 May 1942, a corpse was pulled from New York City’s East River. The body was that of Matti Valentinpoika Huhta, a second-generation Finnish–American who had been working for the New York Rock Trap Corporation as the captain of the river barge ‘Casey’.3 A committed member of the IWW, Huhta was better known under his pen-name T-Bone Slim. From the early 1920s until his death, Slim (as I will now refer to him) wrote hundreds of articles for radical newspapers, most commonly in Industrial Worker, a weekly paper with a circulation of approximately 12, 000.4 He penned several songs and wrote two longer pamphlets, The Power of These Two Hands (1922) and Starving Amidst Too Much (1923). Slim was the most famous Wobbly writer during this period: the IWW printed adverts which proudly asserted that ‘T Bone Slim Has An Article Every Week in Solidarity’. So prominent was he that the IWW felt a need to assure readers that ‘There is a lot more in Industrial Solidarity and Industrial Worker than T-Bone Slim’s columns’.5 According to former IWW member Carl Cowl, ‘people used to buy the Industrial Worker to read’ Slim’s columns, which were particularly popular among hobos: ‘You used to hear in the jungles the latest remarks that T-Bone Slim said’ (cited in Juice, p. 21).6 His songs were sung in hobo jungles. Labour activist Stan Weir claims that hobos would write Slim’s phrases onto boxcars, giving his words a physical circulation as those boxcars made their way around the US.7 Little wonder, then, 167

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that fellow Wobbly Harvey O’Connor referred to him as ‘the laureate of the logging camps’.8 In 1932, an anonymous poet wrote a dedication that expressed a belief that Slim would be remembered ‘When boxcars are forgotten/As things men live without’.9 Despite these sentiments, his death went largely unnoticed and his reputation vanished without a trace. It took the Industrial Worker a full five months to print an obituary.10 In the following three quarters of a century, Slim’s name has been forgotten outside of his three most famous songs, ‘The Popular Wobbly’, ‘Mysteries of a Hobo’s Life’, and ‘The Lumber Jack’s Prayer’, though of these only ‘The Popular Wobbly’ has maintained a presence in popular culture, having been recorded by, among others, Peter Seeger (1963), and updated with Civil Rights-era lyrics by Candie Carawan (1960). For seventy-five years, no photograph of him was thought to exist, so even his face disappeared from the memory of radical activists and writers. This cultural and academic neglect would not have surprised Slim, who wrote frequently about the ideological nature of fame. As this chapter will show, a lack of traditional literary success was inherent to his political project. Aside from a 2019 article that I wrote as an early version of this chapter, there is no academic scholarship on Slim.11 As the poet Franklin Rosemont put it, ‘T-Bone Slim won for himself a total exclusion from academic histories and textbooks of American literature, a distinction legions of lesser writers, before or since, have found it nearly impossible to obtain’.12 This is in part the political exclusion of a radical who aimed at the overthrow of the capitalist system and its replacement with the democratic management of the workplace. Such radicalism has often been seen as anathema to art. Critics have apparently agreed with Nels Anderson’s comment, which I have used as an epigraph to this chapter, that ‘Among all these contributors to the radical publications, there are few who might produce literature… They prefer to ride a hobby and repeat familiar formulas’.13 Scholars often exclude explicitly politicised writing from the canon by categorising it as propaganda. However, this does not fully explain Slim’s academic neglect, since other political writers, such as John Steinbeck, have made it into the canon of American Literature, while the IWW’s Joe Hill is still remembered as a canonical political songwriter. Here I propose three further reasons. First, Slim’s reputation suffered because of his association with the IWW during a period of that union’s decline between the 1920s and 1940s. This phase of Wobbly history, one of government repression, internal splits over the Russian Revolution, and declining membership, is less romantic than the pre-WWI heyday, which contained notable  victories

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such as the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike (the ‘Bread and Roses’ strike) and the 1913 Patterson Silk Strike.14 Second, Slim died an obscure and probably accidental death, in contrast to Joe Hill’s famous martyrdom, which after 1915 became a cause célèbre for the IWW and the Left more generally. Third, Slim’s prose writings have not been reprinted in full since they were first published as newspaper columns, and his largest personal archive of notes was in private hands until recently. During his many years of obscurity, Slim’s torch was kept alive through the efforts of Franklin Rosemont, who produced a selected edition entitled Juice is Stranger Than Friction (1992), and whose introduction to that book represents the only published attempt to piece together the facts of Slim’s life. In 1962, along with his wife and fellow poet Penelope Rosemont, Franklin came into possession of Slim’s notebooks.15 He reproduced some of these writings in Juice, although significant sections remain unpublished.16 In 2016, Penelope alerted me to the fact that the archive, including the notebooks, newspaper articles and previously unknown photographs, was up for sale, and I in turn alerted the Newberry Library, which made the purchase and has since digitised Slim’s notebooks. I was then contacted by John Westmoreland, Slim’s Great Grandnephew, whose family possesses a second archive of notes, letters, and photographs. Since more of Slim’s writings are coming to light, there is now an opportunity for a long-overdue rediscovery and re-evaluation of the ‘laureate of the logging camps’. The details of Slim’s life are sketchy. A quiet and apparently shy man, he appears to have kept a low profile and only occasionally revealed his identity as T-Bone Slim to friends and fellow workers, most of whom knew him as Matt Huhta (though he went by other surnames as well, including Arlund). His columns reveal someone who had been a transient worker and who was familiar with jobs such as lumberjack, gandydancer, and barge captain. He makes references to riding on freight trains to undertake harvest work in the American West, as well as working in Chicago. Before he adopted this hobo life he had been living with his wife, Rosa, with whom he had had four children. He left his family in 1912 for a life on the road, and was divorced in 1915. While Rosemont suggests that Slim did not see his family again (Juice, p. 7–33), material in the Westmoreland archive shows that he continued to write to his family, sent (and asked for) money, and occasionally visited them in Erie, Pennsylvania. The folksinger Aunt Molly Jackson claimed to have met Slim at ‘a big seaman strike’ in New York, during which he told her a story in which hunger led him to knock a man down and steal his ‘clothes, watch and

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money’.17 Slim was then apparently arrested and spent time in jail. Aunt Molly composed her song ‘Cross Bones Scully’ (1939) based on Slim’s story, one verse of which describes him leaving jail: They locked me up for a year and a day For taking that old big shot’s money away, Now they turned me out about an hour ago, To walk the streets in the rain and snow. No clothes on my back, no food to eat, Now a man can’t live by just walkin’ the street.18

Aunt Molly’s story is unverified but the type of incident she describes is plausible. Slim’s articles hint that he was familiar with the inside of a jail cell.19 Prison was, of course, a common reality for many transient workers, whose status left them vulnerable to anti-vagrancy, trespassing, and other laws. Whether he ever spent time in jail or not, Slim certainly set himself against the institutions of mainstream US society. In the final verse of his song ‘Mysteries of a Hobo’s Life’ (1921), he reveals the effect that joining the IWW had upon him: I ran across a bunch of stiffs Who were known as Industrial Workers. They taught me how to be a man And how to fight the shirkers. I kicked right in and joined the bunch And now in the ranks you’ll find me, Hurrah for the cause – To hell with the boss And the job I left behind me.20

In a rare example of a scholar discussing Slim’s work, Todd DePastino interprets the line ‘They taught me how to be a man’ as being an ‘initiation into hobo subculture’ which was ‘simultaneously an exile from “civilized society” and an induction into manhood and class consciousness’. For DePastino, the IWW’s stated politics of gender and racial equality was contradicted by its iconography, which tended to idealise the white male form. Slim’s ‘They taught me how to be a man’ is therefore an example of the Wobbly tendency to conflate ‘class consciousness with virile masculinity’.21 DePastino is correct about Wobbly iconography, although Heather Mayer has more recently demonstrated that, despite the masculinist overtones of much of its propaganda, in the Pacific Northwest at least women and families played an integral role in the IWW.22 Furthermore, Slim’s own work is more complex than being a simple idealisation of masculinity. Though there are certainly some sexist passages, in his extensive prose writings, which DePastino does not examine, Slim makes few references

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to traditional notions of masculinity. Additionally, in Starving Amidst Too Much he discusses his use of the term ‘man’ in complex terms: And when I say ‘man’, they [his female readers] will know I mean a ‘worker’. According to my ideas about the fitness of things, a man, woman, or child working for a living is a ‘man’ viz – a horse is a horse whether it’s male or female. Why should I make distinctions? Why indeed? Thus. The beautiful and gifted young ladies of the south-side slaughter-house are organizing themselves into a debutante organization of the feminine uplift circle, with the avowed purpose of coaxing Armour and Swift etc, etc., to contribute a few pennies extra into their forlorn pay envelopes. No. I don’t see them as misses; I see them as workers doing work that would stagger a man. (But I do not see them getting a man’s pay).23

Slim’s universalisation of all genders under the term ‘man’ is admittedly problematic in its assumption of neutrality for maleness, and its potential to overlook the specific problems that female workers face, such as sexual harassment or the myriad of other issues affecting women. Nevertheless, his reference to not seeing women ‘getting a man’s pay’ despite ‘doing work that would stagger a man’ suggests that he respected female workers as being the equal of men, and that he was aware of gender disparity when it came to pay. For Slim, ‘man’ is not a biological term, so ‘being a man’ is something that was equally open to women. In addition, his reference to the ‘beautiful and gifted young ladies of the south-side slaughter-house’ who ‘are organizing themselves into a debutante organization of the feminine uplift circle’ parodies gendered language as a bourgeois technique to divide workers along the lines of gender by positioning women as genteel and delicate compared to men. It implies that the famous ‘separate spheres’ notion was a middle-class conceit, since working class women have long laboured alongside men, even if they have not received the same pay for doing so.24 For women as for men, the key is to organise in order to improve the condition of their ‘forlorn pay envelopes’. While they are certainly open to critique, Slim’s ideas about gender cannot be reduced to a straightforward lauding of ‘virile masculinity’; nor should they be limited to a single line in one song. This example shows the benefits of analysing Slim’s work as a whole, including his songs, verse, and prose. Such an analysis is the aim of the current chapter. Unjustly neglected, Slim’s work challenges the common mainstream stereotype of hobos and tramps as brutish through wit and verbal dexterity that assumes intelligence in his transient audience, and works to create a mode of literary genius that is communal rather than individualistic. As this chapter will demonstrate, he used puns, neologisms, and dynamic

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wordplay as an alternative to bourgeois language that he saw as providing cover for class exploitation by encouraging reader and worker passivity. His style, as I will argue, encourages readers to be active participants. His prose embodies a literary anarchism that encourages the individual to play an active role in the process of making meaning. In addition, he cultivated a persona that played with established notions of fame, power, and success, in order to undermine the individualistic concept of greatness. Finally, Slim’s persona is unlike that of other literary celebrities in that he repeatedly brings his body – and the bodies of his readers – into his work, particularly through his representation of hunger. He portrays the class struggle as a conflict over care for the body, especially in terms of who gets to eat the best food. I will first analyse his use of language, which he represents as creating something original from the stale morass of official bourgeois vocabulary. A political revolution, he implies, needs new words and phrases. Unlike the literary modernists, who tended to be middle-class and politically reactionary, Slim’s language would be accessible to, and indeed built from, the experiences of the working class. He termed his innovative literary style, taken from hobohemian subculture, ‘coagulated verbosity’.25

6.1  Culture and Language: T-Bone Slim’s ‘coagulated verbosity’ Slim defamiliarises upper-class ‘habitus’, including cultural practices and language, and in doing so renders the habits and dispositions of that class absurd. For instance, he goes to watch a film and, in an early critique of cinema’s ideological quality, notes that while the movie theatre is one of those ‘germ-breeding caverns of darkness and filth’ the film itself shows ‘scene after scene of unbridled splendour wherein a bunch of parasites cavorted regardless.’ He observes that the men have a habit of greeting women by kissing their hands: ‘At the slightest opportunity he would bend over gracefully to suck at a lady’s wrist. At first I thought he was trying to see what time it was by the lady’s wrist watch, and I would be of that opinion still if Shorty, who used to be up in society, hadn’t told me that the parasites have that habit because time hangs heavy on their hands – having nothing else to do’.26 Slim repeats the leitmotif of the man sucking at the lady’s wrist several times in this article, satirising upper-class cultural habits but also implying that the ‘parasites’, his usual term for the bourgeoisie, are a vampiric class. As this example indicates, his portrayal of culture is folded into an understanding of the exploitative nature of the capitalist system.

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The cultural aspect that he discussed most was language, which he represented as being a crucial element of class struggle. Specifically, he saw bourgeois language as an ideological weapon that kept the working class in its place. For example, in one article he describes the use of French and Latin on the menus of high-class restaurants: Are the parasites that extensively patronize these places taking this method of securing a higher education? Are they familiarizing themselves with the French tongue (in these eating houses) to the end that they may be able to order themselves a meal in Gay Paree after things get too hot for ‘em in this country? No, I don’t think so – rather, I believe the foreign tongue is used to tickle the vanity of a semi-simian-brainless dude and his open-faced consort, to insinuate to almighty labor that these dressed apes are superior beings; to cause a ‘1001 percent’ workingman discomfort; to emphasize to labor that he is not wanted here. (Starving, pp. 41–42).

Here Slim defamiliarises everyday signs as a form of cultural coding 34 years before Roland Barthes would do something similar in Mythologies (1957). He represents French and Latin as forms of social capital that exclude workers. His description of the upper class patrons as ‘dressed apes’ uses Darwinian imagery to indicate the essential, or at least the biological, equality of all human beings. Yet this equality is hidden by cultural forms of capital that ‘tickle the vanity of a semi-simian-brainless dude’ into thinking that he and his ‘open-faced consort’ are ‘superior beings’. The comic suggestion that French is used in posh restaurants so that the upper classes can ‘order themselves a meal in Gay Paree after things get too hot for ‘em in this country’ contains the implicit and ever-present threat (or promise) of a worker’s revolution that will put an end to all forms of inequality. For Slim, bourgeois language was a means to divide the working class. In one column, he discusses the connotations of the word ‘unemployed’: ‘Just why we call them unemployed is not clear, since the very word insinuates they had “slipped the yoke” (which, of course, they have not done)’. Imagining the effect of this term on labourers who do currently have work, he adopts the attitude that one of those labourers might take, asking ‘What right have they to be unemployed while others must work!’ The ideological effect of the term is to create resentment among the employed, who are led to believe that unemployment is permanent, a choice, and that those who are called unemployed must be lazy. To overcome this false impression, he provides alternative phrases with a characteristic mix of irony and seriousness: ‘call them retired workers, surplus-labor, former slaves, future-potentials, extra-help, ex-service-men, or shrdiu-zyxchr – anything

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but Unemployed’.27 Although many of these suggestions are tongue-incheek, they highlight that for Slim bourgeois language had run its course. ‘The alphabet’, he declares, ‘is now exhausted – catechism and prayer book comes next; cuss words are inadequate – the English language is sterile that way’.28 Yet even this exhausted, sterile language has ideological connotations and real political power. The US, he claims, is an ‘autocracy (out-talkcracy)’.29 This implies that the bourgeois class’s ability to control language – literally to out-talk workers – is one way that they have been able to maintain autocratic control. In order to combat the out-talkracy, a proletarian language is required. In passages reminiscent of Ambrose Bierce’s The Cynic’s Word Book (1906), Slim provides alternative dictionary definitions of words that seem harmless but actually hold significant ideological weight: Profit: The price ignorance pays greed for the privilege of starving in a world of plenty. Tear gas: The most effective agent used by employers to persuade their employees that the interests of Capital and Labor are identical. Charity: Throwing a life-preserver into a drowned man’s coffin. (Juice, pp. 154–155)30

These definitions ask readers to look again at everyday terms in order to see their true appearance as linguistic weapons in a war against the workers. Slim’s defamiliarisation of profit and charity frames them, in negative terms, as part of an exploitative system that provides the working class with starvation wages and then hands them a small and ineffective salve in the form of handouts. His reference to ‘ignorance’ suggests that it is the false consciousness of the workers in not opposing the profit system that enables their exploitation. His pithy description seeks to introduce these workers to the concept of surplus labour. In a different way, his definition of tear gas is aimed not at tear gas itself, which is unlikely ever to be seen in a positive light, but at the widely accepted notion that ‘the interests of Capital and Labor are identical’. He implies that workers who refuse to accept this idea, presumably by taking to the streets in strikes and demonstrations, are met with violence, euphemistically termed as persuasion, and forced to submit. In contrast to the pacifying effect of bourgeois language, Slim sought to create a language that was appropriate to, and constitutive of, a worker’s revolt. As the rest of this section will show, he also used puns, neologisms, invented literary references, colloquialisms, and irony to encourage his audience to become active participants in the process of reading and, from there, revolutionary action.

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Commenting on his inability to read an Argentinian newspaper, Slim remarks ‘strange, isn’t it, how words are meaningless unless given interpretation by the reader?’31 This apparently innocuous rhetorical question encapsulates his literary approach: he seeks to make his audience into active readers through verbal wordplay and the defamiliarization of everyday language and grammar. In one article Slim describes how he ‘finally decided to become a great writer – tamping ties is only a side line with me.’ He then outlines his writing process: Naturally I then proceeded to ‘concentrate’ – the idea was to get an idea. To concentrate you close one eye and look with the dark one. Finally, a crack appears in the darkness; that’s the idea, and people who get ‘em are called cracked. You continue looking until the crack widens; then before it can fade you grab a pencil and write it down. If you don’t do it ‘right now’ you’re liable to forget it and the emancipation would be delayed by just that much. I’m telling you it’s a careful business, this being a great writer. The idea, you see, will look something like this on paper: ‘No wonder the master class are well organized, there are so few of them!’ After writing that down you jot down some words this way: 1. Bucket; 2. time; 3. dinner; 4. too; 5. no; 6. valuable; 7. of; 8. to; 9. account; 10. waste; 11. on; 12. in; 13. it; 14. taking; 15. quit; 16. a; 17. to; 18. job; 19; only; 20. is; 21. a. (The trick is to make them make sense). With a pair of shears and little carefullarity you separate them on from the other and then keep on ‘switchen’ them around until they do make sense. This way for instance: Nos. 2, 20, 4, 6, 17, 10, 12, 14, 7, 21, 18, 19, 17, 15, 13, 11, 9, 7, 5, 3, 1. That ought to make sense. If you find that they make sense you may be sure we have stumbled upon a great principle of technique. Slim, ‘Stand Without Hitching’, in Industrial Worker 29 August 1923.

His tongue-in-cheek description of his writing process suggests that Slim may have been aware of the experimental cut-ups techniques of the poet Tristan Tzara, who published his Dadaist manifesto in 1920. It also anticipates the popularisation of such methods by William Burroughs. Influenced by crossword and other puzzles that he would frequently read in daily newspapers, Slim provides readers with his own puzzle, the meaning of which, ‘Time is too valuable to waste in taking of a job only to quit it on account of no dinner bucket’, cannot be determined without their active participation. He also creates a new term, ‘carefullarity’, to describe the care that he takes in the selection and ordering of words. As suggested by this neologism, Slim’s most common technique to encourage active readership was to combine old words into new. Sometimes he does this for the simple pleasure of play, but often the terms have an explicit political message. For instance, he refers to the wealth created by

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workers as their ‘perspirety’, emphasising the sweat that labourers translate into capital and the fact that they do not, in fact, become prosperous through their manual work (Juice, p. 68). Money, he states, was invented by the ‘phoneyseions’, combining ‘phoney’ and ‘phoenicians’ to indicate money’s fetishistic quality.32 In one of several attacks that he makes on mainstream newspapers, he terms their main banner ‘headlies’ (Juice, p. 96; italics in original), while his most famous neologism, ‘brisbanality’, was a term used to describe the writings of the conservative Hearstnewspaper columnist Arthur Brisbane.33 Though many of his neologisms are humorous, occasionally he combines words to invite pathos, as when he refers to the despair created by homelessness as ‘vagadespondia’, a playful rebuke to the bohemianism of the term ‘vagabondia’ as used by Francis Hodgson Burnett, Bliss Carmen and Richard Hovey.34 Whether aimed at generating a smile or a sigh, his neologisms ask readers to combine the ideas inherent in two otherwise separate words. Unlike bourgeois writing such as Brisbane’s, which is aimed at encouraging reader passivity, this technique requires the active participation of his audience in order to create meaning. While the bluntness of Slim’s combined words might imply an assumed low education level for his working-class readership, the invitation for them to become involved indicates his faith in their high intelligence, which is a point that I will return to later in this chapter. In addition to the numerous single-word neologisms that are scattered through his prose, Slim makes extended plays on words that push their meanings to the limits of logic. For example, in critiquing a mainstream newspaper’s claim that ‘abundance means prosperity’, he states: Bring out your best type, Stumpy … We’ll close debate. Never has there been a shortage of abundance in these United States. Rather, it has been a case of too much abundance – and ‘too much’ is not ‘enough’. Too much is too much (just what it says) and enough is less than too much. Too much is more than enough and enough is never too much. Sufficiency isn’t too much, but it is enough, so you can see yourself, enough is enough and too much is too much. Abundance is too much and not enough: hence it is a very ambiguous quantity to monkey with. Better stick to sufficiency – be it ever so elegant. (‘An Eighty Year Boy’, Industrial Worker, 13 October 1923).

This passage mostly consists of straightforward statements, such as ‘enough is less than too much’, that define words and phrases. However, as these statements accumulate the effect is to question their overall meaning, even while their standard denotations remain. The self-evidence of ‘Never has there been a shortage of abundance’ and the redundancy of ‘it has been a case of too much abundance’ combine to put the word ‘abundance’ through

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a dialectical process that implicitly parallels Karl Marx’s critique of capitalist accumulation. At the end of this process the word itself has become something new: ‘Abundance is too much and not enough’. The paradox of capitalist abundance is that it simultaneously provides ‘too much’ for the bourgeois class and ‘not enough’ for the working class, meaning that it ‘is a very ambiguous quantity to monkey with’. Slim translates dialectical materialism into comically absurdist language that aims to be accessible while not losing complexity. The slang phrase ‘to monkey with’ reminds readers of his working-class background and indicates that they, too, can realise the absurdity of starving amidst too much, to adopt the title of his pamphlet on the food industry. This combination of working-class dialect and absurdist wordplay is characteristic of Slim’s writing. His prose is highly ironic, even sarcastic. This aligns him with the attitude that Nels Anderson identified as being typical among hobos: the ability to withstand hardship with gallows humour. It makes him part of the transient community, and was probably one reason for his popularity in jungles and work camps. In one example Slim, talking about himself in the third person, discusses his recent experience at a work camp: ‘He [Slim] was down in Upper-Michigan … enjoying a 48-hour blizzard. The healthgiving qualities of a Michigan blizzard cannot be overestimated’. Parodying idealistic portrayals of tramp life, he terms Ontenagon, Michigan a ‘paradise’ whose ‘gentle waving hills’ can be enjoyed from a ‘lovely freight train’, satirising the notion that train-hopping could be a pleasure trip.35 His sarcasm is usually directed at the conditions under which transient workers lived and laboured. His use of parody and irony was more focused and successful than that of Dean Stiff, Nels Anderson’s transient persona, who was in all likelihood inspired by T-Bone Slim and who, as discussed in the previous chapter, was allegedly friends with a hobo writer known as ‘Sirloin Slim’. Irony was so prominent in Slim’s writings that several articles indicate that he has been criticised for being too sarcastic. These critics, he insists, ‘are mistaken…My sarcasm is just sour enough, and carefully compounded like felony or prescriptions’ [emphasis in original]. As well as being a deliberate and careful creation, his sarcasm binds the author to his readership: ‘And if I make it less sarcastic, my sarcastic readers will sour “on my efforts” and start wondering if the editor has lost his mind for printing it’ (Juice, p. 84). Though he (sarcastically) presents the rationale for his sarcastic tone as not wishing to lose his ‘sarcastic readers’, it was this tone that made Slim part of the community for whom he wrote. His sarcasm was not to be taken lightly, however. After discussing the detrimental effect

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of craft unionism on breaking up the solidarity of workers in the food industry, he wrote ‘In the foregoing I have intended no sarcasm – I am on the verge of hysterics because of my seriousness’ (Starving, p. 45). In denying being sarcastic, he rejects not sarcasm itself but rather the frivolousness that readers might mistakenly attribute to him because of it. His claim to be ‘on the verge of hysterics because of my seriousness’ encapsulates his general approach to writing. A paradoxical statement, the phrase indicates that laughter was his proposed remedy for dealing with suffering by giving that suffering political meaning. In a second example in which he gives a mock-denial of the sarcasm that was one of the chief attributes of his work, he claims ‘I’m not sarcastic – just a little blunt’ (Juice, p. 114). Bluntness was for him the main benefit of sarcasm, since it allowed him to cut through the obfuscations of bourgeois ideology in order to get at the truth of capitalist exploitation. Indeed, Slim’s bluntness may provide a new frame through which working-class writing might be analysed by literary scholars, who traditionally tend to privilege complexity and indirection, qualities by which working-class authors often (though not always) suffer. The directness of Slim’s language was a vital part of his political philosophy. Since his anarchism depended upon a vision of labourers organising society without the direction of political leaders, he needed to use words that were comprehensible to the working class. This was, he felt, in contrast to socialists and communists, whose vocabulary was aimed at an educated vanguard who would lead the workers. One article picks up on a phrase used by this leftwing intelligentsia: ‘“Coordination of collective action,” is the big word Harvard boys hung onto the neck of the One Big Union. You’ve got to be almost a contortionist to say it. However, it means the same as “Scat, capitalism”’.36 For Slim, ‘Scat, capitalism’ is the superior phrase, since it requires no linguistic contortions or, presumably, an IvyLeague education to be understood. After having given one of his many pithy aphorisms, he comments that ‘Many have strove (striven) to say that and failed – else it took a column, or half a day, or a ton of words’.37 He privileges brevity and, like Oscar Wilde, utilises the aphoristic mode as the most direct and succinct means to convey complex ideas. These include ‘I don’t believe there is necessity for a news censor. Editors have been very careful not to let any news get into the papers’, and ‘Only the poor break laws – the rich evade them’ (Juice, pp. 153–156). Both examples begin with a statement that readers familiar with Slim’s politics might have found surprising, and then proceed to turn these statements around to make a concise political point. As well as brevity, his style is characterised by colloquialisms, such as ‘infernal bow-wows’, ‘wishing ain’t ketching any fishes’

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and ‘mebbe’ (Juice, p. 35, p. 46 & p. 119). Speaking directly and in working class dialect makes his work accessible, but it also allows him to experiment with a variety of styles in a manner that is more typically associated with literary modernism than the radical or labour press. For Slim, accessible writing does not have to be formally conservative. He plays, for example, with a variety of registers, as when he begins one article in a mock-Biblical voice: ‘The text for [to]day’s sermon is taken from the ‘steenth chapter of Paddy’s ‘Pistel to the Mexicans and Bulgarians and sounds as follows: “Pity the employment sharks – don’t pity yourself.”’38 He would often adopt a popular literary mode as a conceit for a single article. For example, in ‘It Was Ghosts’ he uses Gothic tropes to describe a group of men approaching a labour camp: Why are we going in that particular direction, and why are our feet dragging as if some invisible shackle was weighing them down? Is it possible that we do not desire to arrive there too soon? What made the rest turn back? Were they frightened by something? … In this solemn moment, under a frowning sky, we approach the forbidding and forlorn hovel – hesitatingly expectant, half fearful, as to what terrible retribution may there await our discovery. A ghostly gleam, pale and yellow, stabs us in the eye. Ghosts! The darn thing may be haunted! Look! There it is again – in the window! A fellow worker, braver than the rest, creeps to the window and looks in. ‘My god, fellows there are human beings in there! “Tis a camp,’ he whispered, voice husky with emotion. ‘Tis the place we were shipped to.’ Haunted? Yes – by Labor. (Juice, p. 55)

He uses Gothic motifs such as darkness, mystery and suspense to defamiliarise the camp, with the narrator’s seemingly paranoid state emerging through his accumulated questions. The passage represents capitalism as the unseen force at the heart of the story, leading men to the labour camp against their will. Capitalism is a ‘terrible retribution’ in the lives of working class people. The men live in shacks, which are presented as haunted and terrifying structures. The narrator’s reference to the shacks being haunted ‘by Labor’ adapts Karl Marx’s famous opening from the Communist Manifesto. Working people have become ghost-like shells through the labour that they have performed, and their labour will become a haunting quality of the fetishised commodities that they produce. In contrast to the realist style common among IWW and proletarian writers, Slim’s experimentation moved beyond the bounds of realism into what Rosemont described as proto-surrealism.39 One article consists of a dialogue between Slim and a stone in a prison wall, who tells him ‘I’m in

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this wall until everybody gets the full product of their toil’.40 In another piece, he describes meeting a woman whose body consisted of ‘rosy lips’ and ‘nothing more’: ‘Ever see a pair of lips come floating through the air; about five feet from the ground – supported by nothing; no dress; no form; no face; no eyes, even; just a pair of scarlet lips, well matched?’41 This is also a rare example in which Slim discusses sex. The ‘scarlet’ of the woman’s lips suggests that she is a prostitute (a scarlet woman), and the prominence given to them by the invisibility of the rest of her body is highly suggestive. There is a hint of exploitation through her reduction to a pair of lips, much as factory workers were often referred to as ‘hands’ because as far as their employers were concerned this was the only useful part of their body, although this hint is overshadowed by the description’s eroticism. In another column he attempts to ‘yawn in print’, reproducing it as ‘etaoinshrdlu ?x!!oo**!?’: the first half of which being an in-joke, since ‘etaoin shrdlu’ was a nonsense phrase used by linotypists during the era of ‘hot type’ publishing (Juice, p. 106).42 This final example is also symptomatic of the way that he brings his physical body into his prose, which is an aspect that I will discuss in the final section of this chapter. Slim plays with language in fantastical ways, and shows his awareness of and difference from the literary modernists. In one article he discusses the importance of workers increasing their wages faster than the rate of inflation: If the cost of living yomps every time your wages yomp, keep on yomping. Don’t yomp your yob. Yomp your wages – and remember, the last yomp is best. He who yomps last yomps the farthest. But when you yomp, be careful not to bomp your bomp. If you bomp your bomp, it will raise a lomp on your bomp, and the bomp will thomp like a full-grown momp. You will gradually then slomp into the bomp, and the ‘gomp’ will notice your homp, curved like a cast-iron handle of a pomp. And you’re a chomp – a dry-rot stomp in the clomp of everygreen – omp! … (Pretty jazzy, Ed – a fist full of rhymes for the rising generation of poets.) (Slim, ‘Notes of the Class Struggle By Our Own Philosopher’ in Industrial Worker, 13 Oct 1923)

In a manner approaching the infamous literary style of Gertrude Stein, Slim’s accumulated rhymes parody the literary modernists, perhaps specifically jazz poets, whom he refers to as ‘the rising generation of poets’.43 Yet the article also indicates his similarity to this rising generation, particularly his ability to use words in ways that go beyond the utilitarianism of capitalist managerial discourse. To my knowledge there is little biographical evidence that Slim had read Stein or other modernists, but his awareness

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of modernism nevertheless seems clear. In making a brief reference to his own relationship to better-known experimental poets, he indicates the persona that he adopted throughout his career as a writer for the radical papers. This persona, as I will now discuss, was of a writer who was paradoxically famous and unknown, powerful and powerless, successful and yet, in traditional terms, a failure.

6.2  ‘T-Bone The Great’: Slim’s Representation of Fame, Power, and Success Matt Huhta’s persona, encapsulated under the hobo moniker ‘T-Bone Slim’, was the Wobbly newspapers’ most successful brand. Like all brands, it had a trademark (though not trademarked) image. Slim’s articles were often accompanied by a cartoon drawing of a man with hair sticking up at the front of his head like devil horns and eating a T-bone steak (Figures 6.1 and 6.2).44 The cartoon encapsulated the twin qualities of rebelliousness

Figure 6.1  T-Bone Slim cartoon that was printed at the head of many of his Industrial Worker columns. This example comes from Industrial Worker, 13 February 1926.

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Figure 6.2  A one-off cartoon that utilised Slim’s trademark image. From Industrial Worker, 28 April 1923. By ‘Retlaw’.

and hunger that were key to the Slim persona. As already noted, Slim was well known among radicals and hobos. Yet he was aware that this fame existed only within the circle of those who read Wobbly newspapers. Having what Dean Stiff/Nels Anderson called an ‘inconspicuous prominence’, he was simultaneously well-known and obscure, a paradoxical situation that he folded into his persona through frequent comments on the nature of fame. As I will now show, he built an alternative concept of literary success that depended not only on his own power as a writer but also on the ability of the working class to build a new society. Slim wedded his personal literary success to his faith in the coming revolution. In the absence of such a revolution, fame would not be worth the having. Slim asserted his fame in terms that were reminiscent of Walt Whitman, but unlike Whitman, Slim’s bombast was ironic. He uses a variety of selfaggrandising phrases, including ‘T-Bone The Great’, ‘the lustrous T-Bone Slim’, and ‘I, T-bone Slim, (elegant humorist and clean as hounds’ tooth)’45 This ironic self-aggrandising is further undercut by the context of the articles in which it appears. For example, he refers to himself as ‘I, even I, the inimitable immaculate T-Bone Slim’, in a column in which he is forced to get a job as a dishwasher – or rather, as he puts it, to ‘emancipate’ his future boss ‘from the drudgery of the sink’ (Juice, p. 43) (Figures 6.3–6.7). The trivial everydayness of this situation contradicts the

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Figure 6.3  Photograph of Slim in his early twenties. Newberry Library, Rosemont Collection.

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Figure 6.4  Photograph of Slim with his then-wife, Rosa Huhta, circa 1906. Newberry Library, Rosemont Collection.

deliberately pompous phrasing, creating bathos. Similarly, he notes that there is a movement to buy Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home, in order to preserve it for the nation, and asks ‘Wouldn’t it be a graceful deed if the I. W. W. would purchase one of Fegg Bros’ boarding cars (the home of

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Figure 6.5  Photograph of T-Bone Slim, Westmoreland Collection, circa 1930s. Used, with thanks, by permission of Cherie and John Westmoreland.

T-Bone Slim) … as a perpetual memorial … By the way, again – I request this be done after I am hung.’46 The image of the IWW buying a boxcar for posterity is humorous in its incongruity. It highlights the difference between a historic and mainstream hero, Jefferson, who lived in a mansion, and Slim, a prominent Wobbly hero, who has no permanent home. The reference to Slim being hanged indicates that he is aware of the fate of Wobbly heros, which is unlike that of Jefferson, who was able to die peacefully in his sleep surrounded by family (and his slaves, some of whom were also family). The difference between the two men’s fates comes down to Slim’s proletarian politics. Slim makes this latter point explicit in an article in which he contemplates his lack of mainstream success. He asks ‘a man’ if he ‘knows T-Bone Slim’, to which the man replies ‘“No thanks, I’m just after biting on one”’. After some prompting, the man ‘brightens up’ and says that he does know Slim, who he describes as a ‘“tramp lineman”’, to which the author adds

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Figure 6.6  Photograph of T-Bone Slim, Westmoreland Collection, circa 1930s. Used by permission of Cherie and John Westmoreland.

the sardonic comment, ‘such is fame’. He then imagines what would be the effect if he were to change his political positions: Now, if I were to say, ‘No man has the right to advocate slowing down on the job,’ the Literary Template, the Independent Prevaricator and the Miscellaneous Mandrell would carry extra special supplements in rainbow colors, announcing to the palpitating world that ‘our T-Bone Slim, 140 per cent American, once a poor boy, has now conquered the literary world (singlehanded) and stands today at the peak of his profession in the full glare of the envious eyes of such great writers as H. G. Wells and H. Bell Wright.’ T-Bone Slim, the giant of letters, in answer to the question, “Well, what do you say?’ replied, ‘Save your syllables and the sentences will do the rest.’ Yes, if I said no man should advocate slowing down, they would name their cigars and their streets after me. (Juice, pp. 62–3).

The passage parodies mainstream literary magazines, here given comic names, who raise authors up to the level of geniuses only if they advocate certain political positions. Slim writes in the style of one of these

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Figure 6.7  Photograph of T-Bone Slim, Westmoreland Collection, circa 1930s. Used by permission of Cherie and John Westmoreland.

magazines by positioning his alternative, more mainstream self in the mould of a rags-to-riches success story, one that would fit comfortably into hegemonic understandings of the American Dream. The inanity of such magazines is clear from the generality of the reporter’s question, ‘Well, what do you say?’, which is matched by Slim’s inane reply ‘Save your syllables and the sentences will do the rest’, a nonsensical Ben Franklinesque response that is given an air of profundity by its position in a literary magazine. He concludes the piece by refusing to advocate Taylorite work methods, concluding ‘Woe is me – no rainbow supplements’ (Juice, p. 63). Not prepared to betray his politics, he understands that mainstream literary success will always elude him.47 Slim mistrusts fame under capitalism since, as in the example just cited, it leads to the idealisation of individuals as leaders and a consequent pacification of the masses, who believe that their leaders are exceptional and more heroic than they are themselves. He mocks the notion of the individual genius in various ways, including by amending or deliberately

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misusing quotations from prominent figures such as William Shakespeare, who he calls ‘William Spearshake’, as well as John Locke, whose comment that ‘Some ideas which have more than once offered themselves to the senses have yet been taken little notice of ’’ Slim ironically insists is ‘no doubt’ a reference to the idea of ‘industrial unionism’ (emphasis in original).48 His irreverent treatment of heavyweight figures also includes Karl Marx, whom Slim refers to as ‘one of our rising young authors’ (Juice, p. 36). He was even more sceptical toward prominent politicians. Slim repeatedly parodies the process of idealisation by imagining himself as a great leader, satirising, for example, the Great Man theory of history by claiming to have led the ’49-ers into California.49 He grants himself enormous powers, as when he imagines arriving by plane to save a harvest crop from going rotten single-handed.50 He repeatedly states that he is on the verge of running for the Presidency, a manifestly absurd statement given the IWW’s stance against voting. He claims to stand on a political platform of ‘softer seats and rubber heels’ and also that he will not accept the VicePresidency: ‘it’s President or nothing with me, and if it’s nothing, I won’t accept it’ (Juice, p. 96 & p. 158). He also states that he had intended to run for Mayor of Chicago ‘but was held up on the eve of nomination by slow freights’, emphasising the unlikelihood of a hobo assuming political power (Juice, p. 153). By making these preposterous claims, Slim parodies the system of representative democracy, and indeed the very notion of representative power itself. He sees the idealisation of political leaders as leading to the anaesthetisation of the working class. Playing on his pen name, he tells his readers that ‘No great big heroic T-bone Slim or DillPickle Fat is going to prance into an industry and tell the children in the drill-press department, “Hear ye, hear ye, I now organise you into the “Yearnful Earners of the Universe.”’51 The mock-heroic language highlights the pomposity of political leaders or union bosses (‘Yearnful Earners of the Universe’ is a parody of the medievalism of craft union names) who assume that they can easily do for the workers what the workers have been unable to do themselves.52 Such leaders are dangerous because they mislead their followers and may become demagogues. This mistrust of success, fame and power under capitalism does not mean that Slim refrains from commenting on his own greatness. For instance, he compares himself to George Bernard Shaw, a writer whom he admired. Commenting on the fact that ‘Some misguided men have been trying to coax the world’s other great writer [Shaw] into this country’, he states that ‘This country ain’t big enough (nor broad enough) for both of us’. He then imagines Shaw ‘in this country, ducking around like

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T-B.S., trying to keep out of jail’, a vision that he intends ‘as a compliment to George’.53 Commenting on the seeming audacity of the TBSGBS comparison, he concludes ‘I’m naturally modest, I am!’ (Juice, p. 36). Elsewhere he expresses a hope that in sixty years’ time wage-slavery will seem as obscene as chattel slavery, and wonders whether he ought to ‘write an Uncle Tom’s Hovel about it?’54 This reference to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which Abraham Lincoln famously (and probably apocryphally) claimed had started the American Civil War, positions Slim as a potential instigator of a war against oppression. Though the change from Cabin to Hovel introduces a layer of irony to this claim, it is possible that he may truly have harboured such an ambition. It is certainly the case that he saw himself (and was seen by many others) as a leading literary voice in a struggle for working-class emancipation. But this struggle, as already indicated, would not be won by leaders or literary luminaries like Slim: it would be won or lost by his proletarian audience. For this reason, he connects his own greatness directly to that of his readers, stating ‘No one recognizes better than T-bone Slim the insignificant magnitude of the “world’s greatest writer”… A man is only great as a writer, if his readers are great. Never was, is or will be a writer greater than reader.’55 His greatness is an ‘insignificant magnitude’ if considered on its own. Rather than a quality of individual genius, greatness is a relationship between writer and reader. That relationship manifested as a real dialogue within the Industrial Worker, since numerous articles and letters were written to Slim in response to his columns and he also wrote occasional columns in response to correspondence that he had received.56 Reader responses were often published on the same page as Slim’s own articles in order to enhance the sense of the newspaper as a forum for public discussion. Slim insists that his audience, and working class people in general, are more intelligent than is commonly assumed, noting bruskly: ‘I am not in the habit of associating with ignoramuses’. (Juice, p. 52, emphasis in original). This was in notable contrast to Arthur Brisbane who, according to Art Shields, advised journalism students ‘not to overestimate the intelligence of their readers’.57 For Slim, the high intelligence of workers makes them worthy companions for the ‘world’s greatest writer’. His communal model of authorship empowers readers in a way that foreshadows Roland Barthes’ concept of the writerly text. It also imposes a responsibility on readers to be great, which for Slim is a distinctly political quality. Article after article exhorts his audience to join the IWW, to take part in political action, and ultimately to overthrow capitalism and build a fairer society.

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In the case that this were to occur, he would find himself as the leading literary figure in a worldwide revolutionary movement. If it does not happen, then his name and literary greatness will remain hidden. Slim would in all likelihood put his contemporary obscurity down to the continuation of capitalism. Slim’s earlier columns tend to be optimistic about the possibility of revolution. In a 1924 piece, he urges his audience to buy tickets for ‘the wake arranged for capitalism … Nothing like it ever pulled off before’ (Juice, p. 74). His later articles are generally more pessimistic about the prospects for change, and are often frustrated that his audience have not brought it about. In 1937, he writes that ‘the working class surely loves punishment’ (Juice, p. 125) and the following year he says that the proletariat ‘is pretty helpless … Well, not pretty, but helpless. They even have to be told to join the IWW’ (emphasis in original).58 The latter comment is significant because it encapsulates the paradox of his position as a leader within a supposedly leaderless movement, and of a model of communal authorship in a situation in which the readership is not acting as the writer wishes. In linking his greatness to that of his audience, Slim established a relationship of equals. Since his politics put inequality of wealth and power at its centre, he often required an antagonistic figure that he could criticise and mock. In some articles he picks prominent political leaders or columnists, such as Arthur Brisbane, to fill this role. In others he chooses his own editor. Although in reality his columns had only slight editorial interference, he playfully positions the anonymous editor (a position that was filled by many different people over the years) as a bourgeois figure who is concerned with maintaining traditional standards of decency and who is even, on occasion, a type of boss.59 The editor performs the function of interlocutor in articles that might reasonably be described as dramatic monologues. In one piece he reacts to an apparent question that the Editor has asked him (Juice, p. 82). In a column in which he claims to have mislaid his notes, he writes as if he and the editor were literally printing the newspaper together: ‘where in hell did I put that page 2? … I’ve got it editor, right here in my hand – you may start the press again’. The article goes on to argue that it is unfair that preachers in different dioceses get variable pay and suggests that ‘if the lord won’t come across with decent wages let him step out and save his sinners himself’. Aware of the controversial nature of this comment, Slim then makes an aside ‘what’s that, editor? You want to stop the press? (Juice, pp. 91–2) The editor is thus ironically positioned as a conservative figure who is willing to censor Slim’s more outlandish statements. In ‘Salvage’ he goes further and portrays the editor

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as a boss who he cannot imagine ‘trying to unload 40 tons of coal’, a task that Slim himself would have been familiar with as a dock worker.60 As in the Wobbly vision of the democratic management of the workplace, he suggests that editors, like bosses, should be elected every six months from rank-and-file workers.61 Since Slim wishes to be seen as an ordinary worker rather than a leader or boss, he emphasises, as the final section will discuss, what he saw as a common proletarian condition: his experience of hunger.

6.3  ‘Empty Stomach is the Revolution’: Hunger as Class Struggle For Slim, revolution was a conflict over care for the body, a healthy body being something that workers were unable to maintain due to their poverty. He emphasises that, like the majority of his readership, he is poor: ‘God knows, too much money never ruined the author of this screed’ (Slim, 1992, p. 40). His shoes are ‘dropping off’ due to wear and his lack of funds to buy replacements (Slim, 1992, p. 95). He refers, with typical gallows humour, to sleeping rough: ‘Woke up stiff all over – lumpy bed. I had inadvertently spread two sheets of newspaper in one spot’.62 The dark comedy comes from the reversal of expectations in the second sentence and helps to identify Slim with his audience. As already noted in this and the previous chapter, laughing at poverty was an attitude that Anderson had identified as being a key facet of hobo subculture. But Slim does not always emphasise the comedy of his personal suffering. In Starving, he portrays bodily ailments in a way that aligns him, like the workers in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), with the hogs in Chicago’s famous meatpacking district. After a discussion of packing town, in which he describes the slaughter of the pigs in minute and bloody detail, he notes ‘The other night when I got off the Harlem/Grand car, a “moving corral,” my hightop Peters waterproof-shoe was full of blood, and it didn’t come from a hog either – although I’m a hog for punishment’ (Starving, p. 53). The comparison of hog and worker is, of course, not original, but the image of Slim’s shoes being full of blood as he steps off Chicago’s L train is unusual in making his vulnerable physical form a key facet of his writing. Unlike Walt Whitman’s persona, in which the author’s body is a healthy and positive thing, for the more naturalistic Slim the body is under attack by the labour that he must perform to live. He portrays his body as being weak and suffering under the strains of capitalism, a representation which is also in contrast, as discussed earlier in this chapter, to the masculinist imagery of IWW propaganda.63 Extending this notion of capitalism as being physically harmful, he describes it as a growth: ‘It wasn’t such a bad boil when

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it started. It was such a pretty little thing! – not much more than a pimple. But look at it now. Ouch! … What shall we do, squeeze it and let the pus out or shall we cut out the “sugar”?64 His rhetoric of disgust, framing capitalism as a puss-filled boil, positions the profit system as something that needs to be cut away from the body politic before it causes fatal harm. Slim also produced a self-help guide entitled ‘Recipes for Health’ that contained eight rules for keeping well. These include ‘Good clothes’ and sleep, although he says that his overworked readership must be careful ‘not to fall asleep before you are in bed’. He also advocates changing jobs if the current job is harmful, arguing that ‘conditions can be made’ (Starving, p. 68). He adapts the individualistic self-help guidance that would appear in mainstream newspapers by adding references to employment and living conditions. Among his recommendations are ‘A well-balanced diet of pure, wholesome food’. As I will now show, he presents a lack of food, both for himself and his readership, as being the main motivation for class struggle. As noted in Chapter 1, Carlton Parker claimed that the IWW’s philosophy was ‘in its simple reduction, a stomach philosophy’.65 This was certainly true of Slim, for whom the search for food was a prominent theme. It was a deeply political search, tied to the unequal distribution of wealth. For Slim, the ‘Empty Stomach is THE revolution – the only kind workers have EVER known’.66 Noting that ‘Labor has a bad habit of getting hungry’ (Juice, p. 38), he claims that in seeking political change, the working class merely wishes to continue the ‘noble custom of eating’ (Juice, p. 135). He makes frequent reference, in articles and unpublished notes, to ‘ham and eggs’. Along with the T-bones that give him his name, this is the most commonly cited food in his work.67 Ham and eggs becomes shorthand for a simple meal that workers desire and deserve, but which they do not get. So prominent did this particular meal become, that when Slim wrote a 1924 column as the parodic opening of a romance novel, he called the lead character, a well-to-do gentleman, Mr Hammond Deggs (Juice, p. 70). This Dickensian naming strategy literally embodies food into the person of Mr Hammond Deggs, whose name expresses the fact that as a member of the bourgeoisie he can access good food easily. This simplification of the class system down to a struggle between those who are able to eat regularly and those who are not is a continuation of radical and IWW symbolism and iconography, a tradition in which left-wing cartoonists typically illustrated capitalists as pigs or obese men in bowler hats.68 In those cartoons, however, the emphasis is on the obesity of the plutocrats rather than the emaciation of the workers. In contrast, and with the exception of

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Mr Hammond Deggs, Slim’s focus is on the lack of food, and the consequent importance that it takes in the everyday life of the poor: ‘meal time’, as he puts it, ‘is an epoch in the history of today’.69 When a person is desperately hungry, of course, that sensation can become overwhelming. Slim portrays this in his poem ‘When Do We Eat?’ (1933), in which the title question is used as a refrain: ‘The Sun is shining as before. / When do we eat? / The rains come down, wet as of yore./ When do we eat?’70 The juxtaposition of the changing weather and the repeated question highlights that the external world is of little importance to a hungry person, who cannot see beyond the next meal. The problem of food is not merely a matter of quantity but also of quality. Slim critiques the system of industrial adulteration, arguing that synthetic food does not have the nutrition required for a healthy life. His pamphlet Starving Amidst Too Much is an analysis of the food system, in which he asks ‘It is a part of wisdom to preserve our food with poison? Is it a part of intelligence to squeeze the juice out of meats, and feed the pulp to workers?’ (Starving, p. 33) He concludes that ‘Under the Capitalist System of food distribution it is impossible to get pure, fresh foods for the home even, to say nothing about the hotels and restaurants’ (Starving, p. 37). His articles are full of implied critical remarks about synthetic foodstuffs, as when he reworks a common phrase to say that a man ‘don’t know which side of his bread is margarined’ and when he gives Mr Hammond Degg’s lover the name ‘Margarine Raisinpunk’ (Juice, p. 70).71 One of his most extended and explicit critiques of adulteration is his song ‘The Lumber Jack’s Prayer’: I pray dear Lord for Jesus’ sake, Give us this day a T-Bone steak, Hallowed be thy holy name, But don’t forget to send the same. Oh hear my humble cry, Oh Lord, And send us down some decent board, Brown gravy and some German fried, With sliced tomatoes on the side. Observe me on my bended legs, I’m asking you for Ham and Eggs, And if thou havest custard pies, I like, dear Lord, the largest size. Oh, hear my cry, All Mighty Host, I quite forgot the Quail on Toast,

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‘The Laureate of the Logging Camps’ —Let your kindly heart be stirred, And stuff some oysters in that bird. Dear Lord, we know your holy wish, On Friday we must have a fish, Our flesh is weak and spirit stale, You better make that fish a whale. Oh, hear me Lord, remove these “Dogs,” These sausages of powder’d logs, Your bull beef hash and bearded Snouts, Take them to Hell or thereabouts. With Alum bread and Pressed-Beef butts, Dear Lord, you damn near ruin’d my guts, Your white-wash milk and Oleorine, I wish to Christ I’d never seen. Oh, hear me Lord, I’m praying still, But if you won’t, our union will, Put pork chops on the bill of fare, And starve no workers anywhere.

(Slim, Truth, 08 January 1922).

This song, which was sold on coloured cards by the IWW, follows the tradition of Joe Hill’s ‘The Preacher and the Slave’ in parodying religion as promising ‘Pie in the Sky’ while failing to deliver in this life. It contains Slim’s most referenced foodstuffs, including T-bone steaks and ‘Ham and Eggs’, as well as more exotic, exaggerated meals such as stuffed quail on toast. Unlike Hill’s song, ‘The Lumber Jack’s Prayer’ also critiques adulterated food like hot dogs and alum bread, which are packed full of preservatives, and which the singer claims have ‘damn near ruin’d my guts’.‘Oleorine’ is a reference to margarine, which contains oil and was originally called oleomargarine. Oil had symbolic significance for Slim, who elsewhere refers to the United States as an ‘oleogarchy’, a pun that brings together the qualities of oil, synthetic food, and money (Juice, p.  131).72 Immediately after the lyrics of ‘The Lumber Jack’s Prayer’, he writes an ‘ANSWER TO THE PRAYER’ in which he claims that ‘the “old man”’ has informed him that He ‘has furnished plenty – plenty for all – and that if I am not getting mine it’s because I am not organised SUFFICIENTLY’, while both ‘Dogs, Pressed-Beef Butts’ and the capitalists are ‘products of the Devil’. God will not interfere with the squabbling of his children, he concludes, who ought to fight it out among themselves ‘along the lines of Industrial Unionism’.73

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As ‘The Lumber Jack’s Prayer’ shows, Slim included himself in his depiction of the hungry worker. Indeed, hunger was a key facet of his persona. He claims that he got the name ‘T-Bone Slim’ from beating his old ‘strawboss’ (foreman) to a pile of T-bone steaks on a particular job.74 Surely untrue, this story nevertheless reveals that food was a key driver of and an important metaphor for his political struggles. The cartoon image of him eating a T-bone steak shows the outcome of a successful revolt. Slim is permanently hungry, at times breaking off from the topic at hand to indulge his feelings about ‘jelly rolls – u, umh! – Cookies – haa-ah! – and bread (not so good) – yum yum’.75 This insatiable hunger is a comic aspect of his persona, as when he recounts that he once got into a heated argument in a work camp that was only resolved when ‘the supper bell rang’. In a knowing aside, he remarks: ‘You know how I am. I’m “no good” either on the offense, or defense during meal-time … the cook should have a peace medal’.76 But the reason for his hunger is not, in fact, funny. Slim went without food many times, as when he wrote in his notebook that his ‘breakfast’ one morning was composed of ‘several groanings in bed’.77 He blames this situation on capitalism, which when he was a baby even tried to destroy his access to his mother’s milk: When I, T-Bone Slim, was born into this world, the capitalist system, with a broad grin on its face, was there to meet me. I and my mother used to go out to do people’s washing for them – me hardly three weeks old. How I used to tremble lest she get her breast caught in the wringer and ruin my lunch (such as it was!). Baby, boy, and man have I been a slave! (‘T-Bone Slim Extends Himself To Discuss Education’, Industrial Worker 14 March 1923)

The image of Slim’s mother’s breast being potentially caught in the wringer represents the horror of poverty and unsafe work practices. The mangled breast is metonymic of the damage done to working-class bodies under capitalism. Though of course in reality he could not possibly remember such an incident if it had really occurred, in Slim’s imagining the resentment caused by the threat to his ‘lunch’ has stayed with him. Capitalism has thus become a variation on Sigmund Freud’s Father Figure, threatening violence to the son through his mother. As in the Freudian model, Slim seeks to overthrow the rule of the father (capitalism), although instead of seeking an end to the slavery of the unconscious, he wishes to no longer be a ‘slave’ to his hunger. This experience of being threatened with the removal of food, and the real experience of hunger, are for him defining class experiences. They are what divide proletarian consciousness from that of the bourgeoisie. This is why he writes, in a statement that I have used

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as an epigraph for this chapter, that his ‘humor’ is ‘very delicate’ so that to ‘appreciate it’ the reader must first ‘skip a couple of meals before reading’ (Juice, p. 37). His writing cannot be appreciated by the full-bellied bourgeoisie. Yet, as I will now discuss, although this paring down of the class experience to hunger meant that Slim’s writing had an immediacy that clearly appealed to his audience, it also presented theoretical problems for his analysis of political struggle. For Slim, food was linked to imagination and creativity. He argues that the fact that ‘the better class’ cannot think of a superior solution to poverty and hunger than souplines demonstrates their ‘bankruptcy for ideas  … their total eclipse of brains…Eat soup and you will think in terms of soup’.78 One problem, however, of ideas being generated by food is that the working class does not eat well. Slim encounters this problem himself when he claims that ‘The reader will notice how stale and flat my writing is. Cause? Sour stomach’.79 In an article with the telling title ‘You Can’t Think Sense When You Eat Poor Food’, Slim claims ‘Man thinks only that which he eats. (Now argue!) If he eats oats he thinks oat: that’s how important it is to organize and think veal steak smothered in tomatoes’ [emphasis in original], prefacing this comment with ‘One porkchop overthrows more bosses than a tubful of booyong’.80 Food can be a problem in the political realm since it is, he writes elsewhere, ‘Next to impossible to pronounce the word “revolutionary” when your face is full of pie’.81 Taken as a figurative (as well as a literal and comic) statement, this suggests that workers who are fed will no longer identify themselves with revolution. In one article he claims that ‘Our belly has been too full to “organize,” the past three years’.82 Too little food might mean an inability to act, while sufficient food may take away the desire: this sums up the theoretical problem of his insistence on parsing the class experience through hunger, which is ultimately a non-political or, we might say, a non-dialectical sensation. Hunger does not necessarily lead to an agreed set of interests among a group of people, an interest that would be needed for them to organise as a class. Hunger does not suggest a particular long-term political solution. Its temporary abatement might indeed be politically conservative, since hunger, like pain in Emily Dickinson’s poem, ‘has an Element of Blank – / It cannot recollect / When it begun – or if there were / A time when it was not – / It has no Future – but itself’.83 The immediacy of hunger partly explains the attitude of living-moment-to-moment that many writers observed about hobos, something which Vachel Lindsay had problematically portrayed as providing a quasi-religious bliss, as discussed in Chapter 2, and which Jack Kerouac would later depict as a zen-like

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attitude.84 In contrast to these two idealistic representations, Slim grew frustrated with the inability of his fellow workers to see beyond today. What he did not realise is that his own concentration on hunger played into that emphasis on immediacy.

6.4 Conclusion Some have speculated that Slim became an alcoholic toward the end of his life, and also that he was murdered.85 While both claims remain unproven, it is true that his final years were difficult. On 24 February 1939, for example, when he was 56 years old, Matti Huhta was charged with, and pled guilty to, one count of Disorderly Conduct, a fact which may indicate a lessening of control over his personal life.86 In the political realm, his dreams of revolution faded as the IWW shrank to a fraction of its previous size: as he noted poignantly in 1937, ‘We have the union, but no membership’ (Juice, p. 126).87 Furthermore, during the 1930s and early 1940s a fracture appeared between author and at least some readers over the topic of war in Europe. Although the IWW was generally opposed to WWII, it did not emphasise its resistance as it had done during WWI, partly because the union was by this time much weaker and partly because it did not wish to be seen as xenophobic. Slim, by contrast, wrote about little else, and his later articles expound an increasingly strident nationalism. ‘The point is’, he wrote in one piece, ‘England, not the United States is under attack … I have retained my pro-Americanism and will not step out to do battle for any foreigner’.88 To speculate slightly in the absence of direct proof, Slim’s nationalistic position may have caused a rift with his publishers, since his columns, which for the most part had run regularly in IWW newspapers since the early 1920s, suddenly failed to appear.89 Between July 1941 and his death in May 1942, his articles appeared in only 6 of 45 issues of Industrial Worker. This absence was so noticeable that other Wobbly contributors published open letters to Slim, some of which included replies that were allegedly by him but which appear to be fake, as if the Industrial Worker could not do without the T-Bone Slim brand.90 In one article that appeared on 20 September 1941, the real Slim claimed that his columns had not been appearing because he had been overworked.91 While this may have been true, there is some literary evidence that his stance on the war was also a factor in his diminishing publication in the Industrial Worker. On 14 June 1941, he wrote ‘It has been said that the great T-Bone Slim is slipping – and don’t I know it, that his present day catarrahal [sic] outbursts are as nothing compared to the time he had rheumatism? I subscribe

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to that viewpoint and can only mourn the fact that the IWW trusted the care of my head to a wrong guy. Plenty of fellow workers could take better care of it than I can’.92 Although he makes reference to illness, the fact that this passage concludes a piece in which he has outlined an anti-war stance suggests that illness is a metaphor rather than a literal cause of his readers’ perception that there has been a decline in the quality of his writing, and that this perception may in fact be related to his isolationist politics. The conceit here is that the author agrees with his detractors, which is unlikely to be true. However, Slim mourning the fact ‘that the IWW trusted the care of my head to a wrong guy’ indicates a breakdown with his audience, whom he sarcastically suggests might be able to ‘take better care of it than I can’. His communal model of authorship relied upon common interest and common views with his readers, a bond that he had maintained since the early 1920s but which by the end of his life seems to have been under strain. *** Having as a young man seen his father’s body pulled out of Lake Erie, and having written about drowning in numerous articles, Slim himself faced a mysterious end in Manhattan’s East River. His unexplained drowning may have been the inspiration for an execrable pulp novel called The Savage Streets (1956) by former NYC dockworker, Stalinist spy, and possible double-agent Floyd Miller, in which a philosophical wobbly character is murdered on the New York waterfront for uncovering a drug-smuggling operation.93 How much resemblance this novel has to Slim’s biography is yet another mystery of this hobo’s life.94 What we do know is that he was buried on New York’s Hart Island, America’s largest mass grave, which holds a million people who were too poor to afford a private burial.95 Run until recently by the secretive Department of Correction, for almost two centuries Hart Island was off-limits to the public.96 During World War II the island housed a workhouse for juvenile, elderly, and infirm prisoners, the inmates of which would have been the ones to bury Slim. He and the other dead are stacked unceremoniously: coffins are placed on top of one another, from three to five deep, with up to 150 people in each pit.97 The pits were dug and the coffins unloaded by Riker’s Island prisoners, disproportionally black, who received $1 an hour and who in some cases found the labour of burial so traumatising that they asked to be taken back to their cells.98 For many decades New York City’s most isolated and exploited workers, the kind of people for whom Slim had written, continued to labour over his bones.99 Yet this story has a twist.

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In 2012, Hurricane Sandy caused enormous devastation across New York City, accelerating the longstanding erosion of Hart Island. In 2018, large numbers of bodies from the potter’s field washed up on beaches in Long Island Sound, only a few miles from the Manhattan Waterfront where Slim worked, and which now contains some of the most expensive real estate in the world. New York’s poor had come back to haunt the neoliberal city that tried to forget them. This also serves as a fitting metaphor for Slim himself, who after 75 years is remerging from his cultural burial. T-Bone Slim Studies is just beginning. Future research could examine Slim’s portrayals of class, race, gender, war, humour, food, optimism, pessimism, the media, and many other aspects of early-to-mid twentieth century America. Further work can uncover more details of his patchy biography, while more may be discovered about his literary influences and his bilingualism. Scholars might consider whether Slim’s bluntness provides a model for analysing the writings of other marginalised workingclass authors. Beyond academia, artists and musicians may wish to utilise his prose, poetry, and song lyrics in their own work, as indeed some already have.100 Finally, Matt Huhta’s commitment to the cause of working-class emancipation should provide an inspiration to many activists and writers who seek social justice and greater equality in our own time. As he himself put it, ‘To make two blades of justice grow where none grew before – that is Beauty’ (Juice, p. 156). *** In 1933, Slim was invited to play at an open-air political meeting of New York City seamen, organised by the Communist activist Al Lannon, who ‘gave the singer a big introduction, expecting the singer to open with his well-known “Popular Wobbly.” T-Bone Slim began yelling at the crowd about “those fuckin’ bastards down in Alabama” who had framed the Scottsboro Boys. An embarrassed Lannon hustled the living legend away from the microphone’.101 In addition to providing anecdotal evidence of Slim’s irascible personality, this quotation is notable for his anger at the racial injustice of the infamous Scottsboro case at a time when many, perhaps most, white hobo writers subscribed to ideas of white supremacy.102 Hobohemia was to a large extent, like the US more generally, racially segregated. African Americans were effectively barred from producing written accounts, which has raced the historical image of the hobo as white. Yet as the following chapter will demonstrate, black musicians were comparatively freer to produce autobiographical and fictional accounts of early twentieth-century transiency.

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chapter 7

‘I’m a Hobo Myself Sometimes’: African-American Transiency in Black Vernacular Music

Yes, I wonder oftentimes Why they do not write a song To those mournful, lilting cadences they use Showing all the endless heartache Of the man without a home; Write a wanderer’s life and call it Hobo Blues.

1921 poem in the “Hobo” News1

Yeah, blues is a kind of a revenge. You know you wanta say something, you wanta signifyin like—that’s the blues. Like a, you know, we all fellas, we all had a hard time in life and [things] like that, and things we couldn’t say or do, so we sing it. Memphis Slim.2

In The Road, Jack London details playing cards with a group of hobos, including a man with whom the author had been in prison, whom he gives the racist epithet ‘coon’ and describes as ‘fat, and young, and moonfaced’.3 The men play cards, with the rules being that the loser has to go down a bank towards a river to fetch water for the winners. As the game progresses, the black man loses round after round, repeatedly sliding down the bank to collect water for his white competitors only to shortly have to repeat the process. London notes that the man ‘didn’t get angry’ as he loses an improbable number of games: in fact, ‘that moon-faced darky nearly died with laughter at appreciation of the fate that Chance was dealing out to him. And we nearly died with him what of our delight. We laughed like careless children, or gods, there on the edge of the bank’ (p. 227). This scene encapsulates the white supremacy for which scholars have rightly critiqued London.4 The black man serves the white men willingly, his laughter a sign that he passively accepts the racial hierarchy that ‘Chance was dealing out to him’. His action as a water-carrier resonates with the Old Testament curse laid by Joshua upon the Gibeonites, forever 200

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condemned to be ‘slaves, both hewers of wood and drawers of water’.5 The white men, homeless and generally powerless, are able to feel like ‘gods’ as they watch the actions of the man whom London describes as ‘our ebony cup-bearer’ (p. 228). Racial privilege provides them with power that is otherwise denied to the hobo, constructing them with the ideological power of whiteness.6 Indeed, as London notes elsewhere in The Road, the term hobo itself is denied to African-American transients, who were referred to as shines: ‘A “shine” is always a negro, so called, possibly, from the high lights on his countenance’ (p. 259). In 1901, Professor John James McCook had performed a similar erasure when he wrote about white hobos by using their road names but refused to name an African American transient, instead giving him the epithet ‘Connecticut Fatty’s shine’, as if a kind of informal slavery were in operation on the road.7 This kind of racial exclusion was common. As Heather Tapley puts it, ‘the African-American male has been denied the romanticized individualism (and mobility) associated with white men whose labour resulted in the same national and economic expansion’.8 By examining early twentieth-century vernacular music, the current chapter asks what was the experience of people like The Road’s African-American cup-bearer and Connecticut Fatty’s black companion, who have been written out of the historical image of the hobo. The chapter attempts this historical reconstruction through a focus on black vernacular music, more commonly known as folk and blues. It does so to argue not simply that African Americans were hobos, which is after all an ideological term, but rather that the blues in particular was a space in which black musicians could express their identity as hobos, or as people who engaged in ‘hoboing’, at a time when race was a barrier to that identity and those practices. As I will show, blues representations of hoboing are more sexually explicit, contain more examples of empowered women, and are more likely to acknowledge violence than do white hobo memoirs. I conclude that black vernacular music represents hoboing as a bleaker and more dangerous activity than that presented by its white literary chroniclers, one in which the threat of the chain gang looms large. Seeing hobos as black changes the image of hoboing that is popular in academic research and popular culture. In particular, black musical accounts of transiency emphasise violence in a way that white accounts do not. Affected by structural and state aggression, including racial segregation and white vigilantism, black hobos sing about violence permeating their everyday existence. This challenges the idealistic image of the hobo perpetuated within American popular culture. ***

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As both subculture and a specific urban area, hobohemia was racially segregated. Josiah Flynt, for example, explicitly denied that black people could be hobos, while cultural historian Todd DePastino has outlined ways in which Chicago’s Main Stem was informally reserved for ‘racially privileged’ white transients.9 In an unpublished 1917 manuscript entitled ‘Along the Main Stem with Red: Being an Account of the Hobohemians’, the Chicago Daily News journalist Harry M. Beardsley limited the racial privilege of the hobo to Anglo-Saxons. Adopting the IBWA-Reitman distinction between hobos and tramps, Beardsley argued for the worthiness of the hobo on the basis that he was a worker. Notably, he claims that all of America’s foreign-born hobos are from Northern Europe, rather than from what he describes as the ‘lazy’ races of Southern Europe. To Northern European immigrants, ‘Hobohemia is the realization of the American liberty of which they have read’, including the freedom to move and change jobs.10 Dismissing internal and external migration on the basis that these groups tend to settle when they reach their destination, he observes only small numbers of ‘Negroes’ and ‘Mexicans’ among the hobo population. From this, he concludes that ‘The warm-blooded peoples, it would appear, are temperamentally unfitted for Hobohemian citizenship’ (p. 18). In making a claim of worthiness for hobos, Beardsley racialises them. He denies hobohemian citizenship to Mexicans and African Americans, much as many white Americans would seek to deny these groups US citizenship. In contrast to these claims of segregation, historian Kenneth Kusmer argues that ‘the hobo jungle was seemingly one of the most racially integrated institutions in America’.11 There are certainly accounts to support this argument. Nels Anderson, for example, acknowledged that ‘The color line has been drawn in some camps,’ but went on to claim that ‘it is the general custom, and especially in the North, for Negroes, Mexicans, and whites to share the same jungle. The jungle is the melting pot of trampdom’.12 Song collector and former hobo George Milburn likewise asserted that ‘Among the hoboes, the Negro finds something approaching social equality. There is little, if any, discrimination against the dingy bo’ in the jungles’.13 Describing time spent in jungles near New Orleans, which he calls camp grounds, baseball writer Charles Dryden claimed ‘There is no color line on the old camp ground’.14 In the oft-cited opening to his partly-fictionalised autobiography Bound for Glory (1943), the singer Woody Guthrie observed: ‘I could see men of all colors bouncing along in the boxcar’, a symbol of working-class racial equality suggestive of his political ambitions.15 White progressives

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and socialists like Guthrie sought to counteract racial segregation by emphasising integration on the road. Providing a more nuanced representation, in his autobiography Black Fire (1994) the African American activist Nelson Peery portrays the road as a complex combination of segregation and integration. Describing a hobo jungle in Stockton, California during the Great Depression, Perry wrote ‘No one set up a Mason-Dixon line but blacks were on one side of the jungle, white and Mexicans on the other. In the area where the two groups merged, they all socialised’.16 Peery’s account is notable for how Mexicans are temporarily given the racial privilege of whiteness, and also for the ways in which the symbolic ‘Mason-Dixon line’ is both maintained and crossed at separate locations in the jungle. Incomplete and challenged as it may have been, the racially segregated nature of hobohemia had two effects on the publishing of hobo narratives. First, many writings by white hobo authors contain racist comments, jokes, or outright white supremacy.17 Second, while white hobos published approximately eighty memoirs before WW2 about life ‘on the road’, there is not a single book-length autobiography by a black author during the same period. In effect, there was a de-facto prohibition on early twentiethcentury African American transients telling their stories in print.18 The closest to a published black transient memoir from this time is white sociologist and music collector Howard W. Odum’s Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder (1928). This was the fictionalised biography of a black itinerant labourer and songster, John Wesley ‘Left Wing’ Gordon, whose music Odum had previously collected in Negro Workaday Songs (1926).19 While Odum claimed to have transcribed the book from listening to Gordon, Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder is in fact an act of ventriloquism: the narration, transcribed phonetically, is replete with blues lyric refrains, as if the singer was a mere cipher for limitless musical verses and Odum’s racialised imagination. The absence of early twentieth-century life-writing by African Americans has had the effect of making US hobo become entirely white in popular culture. An intriguing example of hobohemia’s literary segregation is William Attaway’s novel Let Them Breathe Thunder (1939), written by an AfricanAmerican author who is better known for Blood on the Forge (1941), a book about the Great Migration.20 Let Them Breathe Thunder’s protagonists are Step and Ed, two hobos who are referred to by another character as ‘white trash’ but whose racial identity is ambiguous.21 Having acquired train tickets but being without the money to pay for food, the men find themselves in the unfamiliar environment of a train restaurant car:

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‘I’m a Hobo Myself Sometimes’ Everything was so white. The people looked whiter than any I had ever seen before. Once I was in a restaurant in Detroit and a very black boy had come in walking hard on his heels. Everybody had looked at him. Now I glanced down at my hands to see if they hadn’t turned black. The waiter hadn’t served the black boy (p. 25).

Ed, who is the book’s narrator, senses that he does not belong in the train car. Although he and Step claim to be white throughout the text, here Ed’s sense of unease is given a racial dimension. The pair do not belong in any environment that is ‘so white’, with people who ‘looked whiter than any I had seen before’. On the one hand, Ed and Step’s designation as white trash make them part of a group of working-class Caucasian Americans who were designated as not entirely white.22 On the other hand, Ed’s memory of seeing a ‘black boy’ be refused service at the exact moment that he enters the restaurant suggests that he understands them to share a similar status and potentially, despite Ed’s whiter skin, a similar fate. Though presumably the check of his hands indicates that his skin is white, or white enough, the fact that he needs to check implies the slipperiness of racial categories. Later, when a ‘colored man’ is accused of having ‘shot a woman’s head off’ in the town in which they are staying, Ed and Step flee from the lynch mob along with the man in question (p. 211). In this they share the fate of thousands of African Americans who took to the road in fear of vigilante and official violence.23 The novel never reveals Ed and Step to be black, which has led some critics to assume that they are unambiguously white.24 Step even adopts racist language, referring to an African American waiter as a ‘darky’ (p. 33). Yet, as Erin Royston Battat rightly notes, ‘Living outdoors and working on farms literally and figuratively darkens’ the pair.25 Ed’s racial uncertainty and their fear of the lynch mob mean that, as Robert Fikes Jr puts it, the two men are ‘racially interchangable’ and ‘could reasonably have been made Black’.26 As someone who had been on the road himself, Attaway would have known the racial barrier that existed in writing about hobohemia for African-Americans. His solution was to write characters who appear white, even to the extent of using white supremacist language, but whose fears about segregation and experience of mob justice parallel those of African Americans. Attaway’s book is a rare example of the black transient experience in print, yet Let Me Breathe Thunder is only able to achieve this by passing. The novel paradoxically challenges and conforms to the prohibition on black hobo narratives. ***

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While African Americans were prevented from writing explicitly about their experiences as transients, this prohibition did not apply to music. Pre-WW2 black vernacular songs frequently discuss life on the road as experienced by African Americans. Though this a well-known and indeed famous aspect of the blues in particular, it has been little studied.27 However, as R. A. Lawson puts it, ‘the prewar blues … offer an opportunity toward remedying the problem of the historically inarticulate’.28 In particular for the purposes of this chapter, paying serious attention to blues lyrics undermines the constructed whiteness of printed hobo narratives. Until the publication of Paul Garon and Gene Tomko’s critical anthology What’s the Use of Walking if There’s a Freight Train Going Your Way? Black Hoboes & Their Songs (2006), African Americans, and black vernacular music, were overlooked within the field of Hobo Studies. As Garon and Tomko rightly state, in studies of hobo culture and history, ‘For the most part, African Americans are absent. A line here, a paragraph there, sometimes even a page or two, but that’s it’.29 The current chapter will build on Garon and Tomko’s work by examining songs by African American musicians who found, as in the Memphis Slim epigraph above, that music enabled them to speak of things that were otherwise forbidden. As the epigraph’s interpellative comment ‘we all fellas’ suggests, however, the representation of freedom in blues music was problematically gendered, although, as I will also discuss, some female musicians did sing back against this masculinist construction. Blues lyrics have been little studied by literary critics, partly because their frequent use of ‘floating verses’ challenges literary studies notions of originality.30 Another reason for this neglect may be that much of the meaning of blues is non-lyric: as Houston A. Baker, Jr puts it, ‘as phenomena named and set in meaningful relation by a blues code, both the harmonica’s whoop and the guitar’s bass can recapitulate vast dimensions of experience’.31 While accepting that this is only a part of the meaning of a song, the current chapter makes few musicological claims and will focus mostly on song lyrics.32 One benefit of isolating the lyrics is that it draws greater attention to them in a critical context in which they have been overlooked. This focus allows me to show that the lyrics of black vernacular music undermine the presumed whiteness of the hobo. Another benefit of this approach is to enable me to chart the development of ‘floating verses’. This term refers to the common stock of blues lines and phrases, often with no clear origin, which are re-used and, crucially, amended by different singers. As they make decisions to amend particular floating lyrics, musicians make implicit comments on those lines. They, or their songwriting

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partners or record company, may also claim ownership through these amendments: as Lynn Abbot and Doug Seroff note, ‘Within the tradition ownership of a song might be claimed by demonstrating a singular approach to, or treatment of, otherwise floating verses and phrases [italics in original]’.33 Blues lines are never isolated, but are part of a continuum of folk, blues, stage, and commercial lyricism. Finally, while blues scholarship has had a bias toward seeing blues songs as autobiographical, I treat them as representations that often use a fictional persona to explore the transient experience.34

7.1  Blues and the Folkloric Frame Between 1912 and 1920, 456 commercial blues songs were published in sheet music format, while 385 recordings were produced on grooved discs, cylinders, and piano rolls.35 After 1920 the ‘blues’, evolving from the term used by ragtime musicians to denote a slower tempo, was created as a musical genre in order to sell records to African-Americans.36 Whereas in the late nineteenth century Southern music had crisscrossed racial barriers as part of a common musical culture, by 1920 it had, according to Karl Hagstrom Miller, ‘developed a color line’ the rules of which were that ‘The blues were African American’ while ‘Rural white Southerners played what came to be called country music’. Separate black and white markets were created through a commercial strategy that Miller calls ‘segregating sound’.37 In 1920, black vaudevillian Masie Smith’s smash hit ‘Crazy Blues’ (Okeh 4169, 1920) convinced record companies that they could create a ‘Race Records’ market of music sung by and for black Americans. For the next 5 years, most of these race records were recorded by women, including Trixie Smith, Bessie Smith, and Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey.38 During this period, as Elijah Wald argues, ‘No one involved in the blues world was calling this music art. It was working class pop music.’39 The initial period of the recorded blues, during which the music was written in Tin Pan Alley by black and white composers, has often been overlooked on account of its commercialism, the multi-racial authorship of many of its songs, and the fact that most of its stars were women. Samuel Charters refers to this period as ‘the first commercial bowdlerization’ of the blues, even though none of the so-called ‘Country Blues’ musicians had yet been recorded, while more recently music writer Clinton Heylin has dismissed female vaudeville blues as ‘ersatz’.40 The musicological critique of commercial music has also been problematically gendered. For example, Alan Lomax claimed that ‘The blues have been mostly masculine territory’ because the

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life of a travelling blues singer ‘was too risky’ for women, who ‘did not live the blues’ due to being ‘sheltered and protected…from much of the brutalizing interracial experience their men knew’.41 Others have used formalist arguments to justify minimizing the contribution of blueswomen, such as Michael Taft’s claim that vaudeville blues, mostly performed by women, ‘do not conform to the poetic criteria of the blues’, by which he means an AAB stanza with a caesura in the middle of the line.42 Taft’s structuralist-inflected claim for medium specificity overlooks the fact that these ‘poetic criteria’ are the creation of folklorists and would not have been accepted by the earliest audiences of blues records.43 After the mid-1920s, record companies and white musicologists began to see the blues as holding a unique position as American folk music. The popular black musician W. C Handy’s influential book Blues: an Anthology (1926), co-produced with Abbe Niles, framed the blues as a form of folk music based around twelve bars and the AAB stanza, while Handy’s autobiography Father Of the Blues (1941) downplayed the music’s commercial beginnings.44 Partly inspired by Handy’s Anthology, during the 1920s and 1930s white song collectors including Lawrence Gellert, John Lomax, and his son Alan roamed the US, microphones at the ready, in search of the blues. They were seeking music that they defined as raw, pure, and untouched by either white or commercial influence, imposing a folklorist framework that Miller argues ‘did little to describe the musical complexity on the ground’ because it wilfully ignored repeated instances in which black musicians showed their awareness of, and evidence of having been influenced by, commercial music including Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, ragtime, minstrelsy, and ‘coon songs’.45 Folklorists presumed that AfricanAmerican culture in the South was hermetically sealed off from modernity, which they positioned as white.46 The black music created by this folklorist framework was termed ‘country blues’ by Samuel Charters and ‘downhome blues’ by Jeff Todd Titon.47 The folklorist framework sought out male singers overwhelmingly, which had the effect of pushing women to the margins of both the blues music industry and scholarship.48 In her seminal revisionist history In Search of the Blues (2007), Marybeth Hamilton argues that female vaudevillian blues singers were ‘described in identical terms in nearly every work of blues history. These women, so we are told, were popularisers, not folk singers … their gift was for glitz and titillation, not the raw truth-telling that was the blues at its most intense’.49 For the white connoisseurs who shaped how blues history would be told, urban-based female vaudevillians lacked the supposed authenticity of country bluesmen. Despite its commercial beginnings with

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urban-based commercial singers, the blues was reconceived as inherently primitive music.50 In order to maintain their presumed isolation from modern culture, black musicians were prevented from recording material other than the blues, despite often possessing a wide repertoire of musical styles.51 Furthermore, as Hamilton has shown, many of the male musicians who were recorded in the mid-1920s and 1930s, including Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell, and Charley Pattern, were portrayed by white folklorists and collectors as troubadours whose troubled souls expressed something essential about the black American experience and whose music was framed, as Hamilton puts it, as ‘the pure and unmediated cry of the masses’.52 The folkloric framework also influenced how historians and literary scholars interpreted the blues, as in Lawrence Levine’s 1977 assertion that blues music embodies ‘Negro folk culture’, and in Howard Baker’s overdetermined claim that the blues is an ‘ancestral matrix’ that conditions ‘Afro-America’s cultural signifying’.53 In contrast to Levine and Baker, and indebted to the work of Wald, Hamilton, and Miller, the current chapter does not establish a colour line between blues, folk, and commercial music, rejects formalist arguments that segregate male country/downhome from female urban blues, and does not attempt to define the blues as a standard of black authenticity by separating out what Miller calls ‘music made and music acquired by other means’.54 The blues was not a way to express the feelings of an entire people but a way for individuals to escape from the situation into which they had been born. Rather than troubled exiles doing deals with the Devil, blues musicians were talented professionals looking to get ahead.55 As Dave ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards put it when describing how the blues provided him with an escape from a life of agricultural labour: ‘I didn’t want to be in that field from sun to sun, can to can’t, can see to can’t see. I was going to make it with the guitar. I could make more money playing than picking cotton’.56 The blues was a popular commercial form performed by musicians seeking a better life.

7.2  Stole Rider Blues: Train-hopping, Freedom, and Male Sexuality Since in the 1920s and 1930s most blues musicians and audiences were black and working class, blues lyrics typically speak to the concerns of the black working class. One example is the experience of train-hopping, a working-class form of travel that has incorrectly come to be associated exclusively with the hobo. Notably, the term ‘hobo’ often emerges in

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black vernacular music as a verb rather than a noun: as an activity, trainhopping, in which someone engages, rather than an identity. Singers often ‘hobo’ rather than claim to be hobos. For example, ‘Sleepy’ John Estes and Hammy Nixon’s ‘Hobo Jungle Blues’ (Decca 7354, 1935) states ‘if you hobo through Brownsville’, Yank Rachel’s ‘Hobo Blues’ (Bluebird B-8768, 1941) refers to ‘ev’rytime I decide to hobo’, while in Washington ‘Bukka’ White’s spoken-word ‘Atlanta Special’ (Takoma B-1001, 1964), a woman called Aunt Ester tells the speaker ‘you don’t know nothin’ too much about hoboin’. Blues music oversees a loosening, if not quite a decoupling, of the term ‘hobo’ from the idea of the transient worker, in spite of the efforts of Nels Anderson and the IBWA to fix the word’s meaning in place, a loosening that may have led to the term ‘hobo’ being used as a synonym for someone experiencing homelessness in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Often blues songs use alternative terms, with musicians referring to themselves as wanderers or ramblers rather than hobos. But when hobo was used as a noun, it could still appear less essentialist, as in White’s virtuosic ‘Streamline Special’ (Vocalion 05526, 1940), in which he states ‘I’m a hobo myself sometimes’. African-American representations present hoboing as a temporary state (‘sometimes’), often engaged in to escape from trouble, migrate North, or to get a job as a transient labourer. Not all blues musicians sang about hoboing from experience.57 It is obvious that Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Willie McTell could not easily have ridden freight trains, with their literal blindness being a barrier to ‘riding the blinds’.58 Nevertheless, many blues musicians travelled by train to gigs, including playing in lumberyards, harvest camps, railroad gangs, and at local jukejoints. Although music was an escape from being a transient labourer, musicians often had to follow labourers around.59 In addition, musicians with record deals often still had to busk to earn a living, and in doing so they encountered a range of working-class people. Many musicians train-hopped and worked as transient labourers. Trainhopping was also a useful way for a gigging and recording musician to move around, as Sleepy John Estes’ ‘Special Agent (Railroad Police Blues)’ (Decca 7491, 1938) makes clear: ‘Now special agent, special agent, put me off close to some town/Special agent, special agent, put me off close to some town/Now I got to do some recording and I oughta be recording right now’. For low-paid black musicians, hoboing, in the verbal form of train-hopping, was often a necessary activity. Music was also an integral part of black working culture, including for the Southern African Americans who provided the transient labour force necessary for building levees and railroads, sometimes for wages but

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often as convict labour. Music was an important element of this labour: in particular, as Garon and Tomko note, the work song, which ‘supplied a rhythm for the work … helped pass time, and … provided an emotional outlet’.60 Typically sung a cappella, the music helped workers stay in time, something that was important for their communal labour to be effective but also something that could help workers resist Taylorite attempts to speed up. The break between lines in chain gang and railroad worker songs was typically the point at which labour, the swing of a hammer or the lifting of a rail, occurred. When blues singers adopted many of these earlier songs, this gap became the pause at the end of verse lines, filled by an instrumental refrain. Blues songs were also influenced by work songs in their content, many of which describe the travails of black labourers. For example, the folk song ‘John Henry’ represents an African American gandydancer who dies attempting to outpace a ‘steam drill’ that has been brought in to replace him. The song originated in the 1870s among black miners and railroad workers to commemorate the death of a chain gang worker called John William Henry. It then evolved into multiple genres: ‘Coal miners’, according to Scott Reynolds Nelson, ‘framed it in a familiar ballad tradition, convicts made it an early blues song, and trackliners turned it into a bragging song’.61 As both song and legend, John Henry’s death represents the dangers of railroad work and mechanisation more generally. Mississippi John Hurt’s blues track ‘Spike Driver Blues’ (Okeh 8692, 1929), for instance, which was based on the work songs ‘Take This Hammer’ and ‘Nine Pound Hammer’, is from the perspective of a trackliner who has decided to leave an East Colorado extra gang in order to avoid John Henry’s bloody fate: John Henry he left his hammer Layin’ side the road, layin’ side the road, layin’ side the road John Henry he left his hammer All over in red, all over in red, that’s why I’m gone.62

Scholars have noted the frequent use of railroad imagery in blues music, but most have connected this to the desire of African Americans to escape the South during the Great Migration.63 There are certainly many blues songs involving freight and passenger trains used for the purpose of migrating South to North, and sometimes North to South. But some songs also represent travelling to get a temporary job. In Peetie Wheatstraw’s ‘Jungle Man Blues’ (Vocalion 03231, 1936), for example, the singer refers to himself as a ‘hobo’ and states: ‘I’m gonna keep on traveling/Until I can find some work to do’. Wheatstraw claims that he does not want to be a

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‘jungle man’ much longer, implying a desire to settle down and stop living as a transient labourer. One reason to stop such work is that it is hard on the body, sometimes fatally as it was for John Henry. Walter ‘Buddy Boy’ Hawkins’ song ‘Working on the Railroad’ (Paramount 12558, 1927) describes labour on an extra gang, which ‘will give you the blues…wear out your shoes’ and force you to ‘work your hands till they sore’. Hawkins’ use of second person brings the audience into his narrative: he is aware that many of the workers who perform this backbreaking labour come from his black audience. Still, the hardships of having a job are typically less than the hardships of not having one. In ‘Blue Harvest Blues’ (Okeh 8692, 1928), Mississippi John Hurt sings about a labourer whom harvest time has caught ‘unprepared’, and who has not ‘made a dollar, bad luck is all I’ve had’. Describing himself as a ‘weary traveller roamin’ round from place to place’, he claims that ‘If I don’t find something, death will end me in disgrace’. Competition, as Barbecue Bob sings in ‘We Sure Got Hard Times’ (Columbia 14558, 1929), means that ‘You heard about a job, now you is on your way/Twenty mens out for the same job, all in the same old day’. Such work is not only competitive; it is, to use the language of twenty-first century economists, precarious: ‘We may work one week, but we got to lay off a month or two’, as Tampa Red puts it in ‘Turpentine Blues’ (Vocalion 1700, 1932). Similarly, Charley Jordan’s ‘Tough Times Blues’ (Vocalion 15681, 1930) describes working as a labourer on the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad, ‘Where I met them tough times blues/And I had to walk the railroad back’. These songs embody a sense of despair felt by workers whom the economic system treated as disposable.64 As it was for white workers, train-hopping could also be a means to escape a bad job. In ‘Sitting On Top of the World’ (Okeh 8784, 1930), for example, the Mississippi Sheiks’ Walter Vinson claims that he is ‘going to get me a freight train’ because ‘works done got hard’. The most common blues representation of train-hopping, however, is as a form of escape: from poor work conditions, familial responsibilities, or awkward romantic entanglements.65 For example, the freight train in Bukka White’s 1964 ‘Atlanta Special’ signifies the freedom of certain men to escape Southern sharecropping. The train travels past his grandfather’s field while a 15-yearold White is plowing, and the singer declares ‘I ‘cide to leave, I’d try the world’. Notably, the song’s gender dynamics involves White having a conversation with an older woman, Miss Ester, who tries to dissuade him from his wandering ways: ‘Aunt Ester ask-ed ‘would I know that train if I could hear it?’ She said, ‘You’re too young, you don’t know nothin’ too much about hoboin’. White responds to this challenge to his manhood

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by creating the sounds of the train bell with his guitar, a virtuoso display that demonstrates his maturity as a 15-year-old in the story, his talent as a guitarist, and which also acts as a demonstration of his power to move wherever he wishes, a power that the female Miss Esther evidently lacks. The singer then describes travelling as a transient worker to strip sorghum in Louisiana, where he once again hears the train whistle that symbolises his desire to move on: ‘When I hear that train blow, getting’ on I said I’m fixin’ to stop t’stripin ‘em.’ Although it is a later example, White’s ‘Atlanta Special’ dramatizes the restlessness of wandering men found in earlier blues songs. Male restlessness became part of a romanticised image of the wandering bluesman. The most conventional representations of transiency in blues come from two of the form’s most revered practitioners, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Willie McTell, whose deserved status as instrumentalists has shielded their lyrics from criticism, and whose songs portray hoboing as an form of gendered freedom. Both Jefferson and McTell adopt fantastical vagabond personas: they present themselves as wanderers who wish to have as much pleasure and as many different experiences as their limited capital will allow.66 For his part, Blind Willie McTell creates a fantastical persona in which hoboing is a means to reach and also to escape from various lovers. However, McTell’s songs are also an idiosyncratic mixture of sexual bragging and jealousy. In ‘Dark Night Blues’ (Victor V-38032, 1929), for example, he claims: ‘I got a fair brown in Atlanta/ Got one in Macon too/I got a fair brown in Atlanta/Got one in Macon too/I got one in Statesboro/Give me them old dark night blues’. However, when his woman shows interest in another man, McTell sings that he jealously ‘followed my brown/From the depot to the train’, demonstrating a hypocritical possessiveness considering his own philandering. Apparently unable to cope with a woman asserting her own sexual needs, McTell’s response is simply to leave: ‘Riding the PNP Special/Mama, and I’m leaving this town/Riding the PNP Special/Baby, and I’m leaving this town/ Say you didn’t want me/I’m a quit hanging around’. The train represents an easy way out of difficult romantic situations for McTell’s vagabond persona, who seeks pleasure and shies away from pain. Similarly, in ‘Old Rounder Blues’ (Paramount 12394, 1926), Blind Lemon Jefferson sings of travelling as an alternative to familial responsibility: I ain’t gonna marry, ain’t no need of settlin’ down Ain’t goin’ to marry, ain’t gon’ settle down I’m gonna stay like I am, gonna ride from town to town

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Making use of this gendered freedom, the singer visits a brothel, which is painted a tell-tale green: There’s a house over yonder painted all over in green There’s a house over yonder painted all over in green Some of the finest young women there a man most ever seen

As Nell Irvin Painter notes, working-class couplings have often had a more transitory quality, lacking the middle-class assumptions of stability than underpin the concept of romantic love.67 Stability was in even shorter supply for transients, of course, and so brief erotic encounters became the norm for many – black and white – who lived in such fashion. The nature of being a transient worker often meant temporary sexual relations or love affairs.68 In addition, as the work of Ann DuCille has shown, for many African-Americans the question of ‘coupling’ was even more fraught given that slavery had forced many African-Americans to have multiple partners, that following the American Civil War marriage had often been portrayed as a means by which blacks might integrate into bourgeois society, as well as the fact that several prominent twentieth-century accounts stereotyped black men as absent fathers.69 Despite such stereotypes, the freedom to travel as portrayed by Jefferson and others represented a positive shift in status from the era of slavery because such movement was an implicit statement of equality. Yet in most blues songs it is only men who attain this freedom through movement. Indeed, the static nature of women in many blues songs allows men to have multiple sexual partners by simply travelling around the country. For example, in Jefferson’s ‘Black Horse Blues’ (Paramount 12367, 1926), the singer wants to know the railway timetable so that he can understand how long he has to flirt before he needs to leave town: Tell me what time do the trains come through your town I wanna know what time do the trains come through your town I wanna laugh and talk with a long-haired teasin’ brown One goes south at eight and it’s one goes north at nine One goes south at eight and one goes north at nine I got a hour to talk with that long-haired brown of mine

Max Haymes claims that Jefferson’s lover is the one who is leaving him in this song, but the phrase ‘your town’ indicates that Jefferson, or rather the imaginary persona that Jefferson creates, is a stranger, someone who is looking to leave town after flirting as much as he can before the train arrives.70 An inherently transitory activity, flirting is ideal for Jefferson’s

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Figure 7.1  ‘Sunshine Special’ advert, Chicago Defender, 3 March 1928.

vagabond persona.71 Yet singers often do a lot more than just flirt. Indeed, in blues the image of the train becomes so closely associated with sex that it becomes a vehicle (literal and metaphorical) for the sexual imagination. In ‘Sunshine Special’ (Paramount 12593, 1927), Jefferson outlines a fantasy in which he owns a railroad and hires an extra gang of female labourers whose job is to pleasure him: ‘Bought me a railroad now, so that Sunshine Specials can run/Bought me a railroad now, so that Sunshine Specials can run/I got a gang of womens, man, they ride from sun to sun’.72 The double entendre of ‘ride’ is commonly used throughout blues music, linking the freedom and movement of the train to a sexual liberation that was denied African Americans during the era of slavery, and which in the Jim Crow South was often used as an excuse for extra-judicial lynchings.73 An advertisement for this record (Figure 7.1), printed in the African-American newspaper Chicago Defender, emphasises Jefferson’s supposed sexual prowess. It shows the singer embarking on a train, waving at a group of women who are either seeing him off or trying to get him to stay. The accompanying text reads: ‘He’s had a wonderful time – he’s sorry to go off and leave all

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those winsome sweeties – and they’re sorry to see him go, too. You know why!’74 Jefferson’s hyper-sexualised bluesman persona was more than biographical: it was marketable.75 As this example suggests, record companies exploited a primitivist assumption that black people were highly sexualised. During the first years of race records, this approach was not limited to men but also included the sexually explicit recordings and performances of blues queens including Ma Rainey and Mary Dixon.76

7.3  ‘I Feel Like Riding Too’: Female Hobos in Blues Music As already noted, for the first five years following its emergence as a commercial genre in 1920, ‘race records’ were typically sung by female vaudevillians. From 1925 on, the ‘blues’, as the form came to be known, was dominated by men whose song lyrics were replete with sexism. This sexism spilled over into blues representations of hoboing. For instance, in ‘Scarey Day Blues’ (Okeh 8936, 1931), McTell uses two sexualised train similes to describe his lover, who ‘shakes it like the Central, she wobble like the L&N’. This comic imagery indicates familiarity with riding trains, but its sexualised nature renders hoboing as an activity reserved for heterosexual men.77 Indeed, hoboing was often portrayed as a male refuge. For example, Son Bonds associates the jungle specifically with bachelorhood: ‘I’m a broken-hearted bachelor, traveling through this world all alone,/Use this railroad for my pillow, the jungle is my happy home’ (‘Old Bachelor Blues’, Decca 63661, 1938). Pink Anderson sings that after being jilted by his lover, the CC&O train on the Eastern seaboard is ‘the train to ride to pacify your mind’ (‘CC&O Blues’, Columbia – 14400, 1928), while in ‘Nashville, Tennessee’ (Victor 01886, 1936) Washboard Sam sings ‘this old boxcar rock me like a rocking chair’.78 Bumble Bee Slim’s ‘Hobo Jungle Blues’ (Vocalion 03418, 1936) describes a jungle in similarly peaceful, even idyllic, terms: ‘I can hear the whistle blowing, I can hear the water rolling/I can hear the bird is singing, I can hear the bells ringing’.79 Yank Rachel’s ‘Hobo Blues’, which features a harmonica mimicking the noise of a train whistle, describes a hobo jungle as a male heterotopia: Baby, an ev’rytime I decide to hobo I take the jungle to be my home Ev’rytime I would ‘cide to hobo Lord, take the jungle to be my home Now, you know I’m ‘on do just like a Prod’gal Son I’m going back home an’ acknowledge I done wrong

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Like Dean Stiff in The Milk and Honey Route, Rachel’s portrayal of the jungle as a ‘home’ undermines attempts to represent hobos as being homeless. The jungle is a domestic homosocial space, one in which the inhabitants are reasonably content. However, the nature of domestic contentment for transients is itself transient. Rachel’s reference to himself as the Prodigal Son indicates his intention to go ‘back home’, home this time meaning his permanent family residence. Travelling alone on freight trains makes the singer feel lonely and express regret about becoming a hobo. He determines to act differently in future, but rather than the stereotypical conservative ending of settling down with his family, he makes a surprising commitment: Lord, back home with my baby Go on just a-happy as I can be Girl, I’m back home with my baby I’m just a-happy as I can be But the next time I decide to hobo I’m ‘on have my woman right beside a-me

Rachel’s solution to bring his female lover with him on the road is presented as a surprise ending to the song because blues music typically represents women as staying at home while their men wander freely about the country. The most repeated example of this idea is present in floating verses that appear to have emerged from vaudeville and passed into race records. In 1912 Leroy ‘Lasses’ White, a white blackface minstrel performer, submitted the manuscript for a song called ‘The Negro Blues’.80 The song celebrated the ability of men to move around the country, leaving their women behind. The third verse ran: When a man gets blue he takes a train and, I said a train and, I mean rides When a man gets blue he takes a train and rides. But when a woman gets blue she hangs her head and cries.

(Leroy ‘Lasses’ White, ‘The Negro Blues’, 1912).81

These lines had a long afterlife.82 They reappeared in 1914 in an eightystanza song performed by an itinerant black musician called Floyd Canada, collected and published as ‘The Railroad Blues’ by white folklorist W. Prescott Webb in 1915.83 In recorded music they are first used in Trixie Smith’s ‘Freight Train Blues’ (Paramount 12211, 1924), a Tin Pan Alley blues written by Everett Murphy and Thomas Dorsey. The song is a woman’s fantasy about being able to ride a freight train along with the men: ‘Every time I hear it blowin, I feel like riding too’. The singer knows this is a fantasy, however, and the final verse sums up the supposed difference between male and female hobos, amending White’s lyrics only slightly:

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Figure 7.2  Advert for Trixie Smith’s ‘Freight Train Blues’, Chicago Defender, 19 July 1924.

When a woman gets the blues, she goes to her room and hides When a woman gets the blues, she goes to her room and hides, When a man gets the blues, he catch the freight train and rides

An advertisement for the song (Figure 7.2), published in the Chicago Defender, emphasised the contrast between the autonomy of the man leaping onto a train and the powerlessness of a woman on her knees begging him to stay. ‘Freight Train Blues’ was clearly a popular song, since it was covered six months later by Clara Smith and re-recorded by Trixie Smith with amended lyrics in 1938 (Decca 7489, 1938). The lyrics cited above were repeated with only slight amendments in several ‘Hill Billy’ and blues songs, including Jimmie Rodger’s ‘Train Whistle Blues’ (Victor 22379, 1930) and bluesman Peetie Wheatstraw’s ‘C and A Blues’ (Vocalion 1672, 1931), both of which amend the line from ‘she goes to her room and hides’ and instead, as in White’s version, have the women hanging their heads and crying. Although many floating blues verses are reused in this manner, the success of these particular lyrics suggests that the music industry saw gender stereotypes as profitable. Whatever the reason for their popularity, the lyrics hold out a popular notion of hoboing as heroic male freedom, while positioning women in a static, ultimately submissive position. Hazel Carby notes that the train became a contested symbol within blues music, possessing separate gendered meanings: freedom for men and abandonment and loss for women.84 Yet blues songs about train-hopping

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also have a tradition of female empowerment. Indeed, Trixie Smith’s song may have established a difference between the actions of men and women when they ‘get the blues’, but she also clearly stated that ‘I feel like riding too’. Similarly, one of the oldest and most famous blues songs, Elizabeth Cotton’s ‘Freight Train’ (written circa 1906–1907, released Folkways FG 3526, 1958), expresses the desire of a woman to escape her everyday life: ‘Freight train, freight train, run so fast/Freight train, freight train, run so fast/Please don’t tell what train I’m on/They won’t know what route I’m going’. This desire is very similar to that expressed in male blues. In ‘Mr Brakes Man (Let Me Ride your Train)’ (Columbia 14227-D, 1927), written by the African-American Tin Pan Alley composer Porter Grainger, Martha Coupland tries to persuade a train worker to let her ride so that she can return to her lover in Birmingham, Alabama.85 The song is a kind of seduction, especially when taking into account ‘riding’ as a common double entendre: ‘I want some lovin’ from my man/Mr. Brakesman, don’t you understand?’, she sings. Although this seduction relies on stereotypes of female sexual manipulation, the song nevertheless represents a working-class black woman for whom the freight train is the only realistic form of transportation across the United States. When she gets the blues, Coupland is prepared to do a lot more than sit in her room and hide. Memphis Minnie, real name Lizzie Douglas, created songs that challenged the stereotype of passive femininity found in work by male musicians. Memphis Minnie was not a vaudevillian ‘Blues Queen’ but rather a guitarist who played both urban Chicago and ‘Country Blues’, and who also wrote or co-wrote the majority of her songs. Like many of her ‘downhome’ male counterparts, however, she exploited vaudeville blues for material.86 For example, she rewrote Ma Rainey’s ‘Weeping Woman Blues’ (Paramount 12455, 1927) as ‘Chickasaw Train Blues (Low Down Dirty Thing)’ (Decca 7019, 1934). Rainey’s version was itself based on the African-American trio Ida Cox, Jay Mayo ‘Ink’ Williams and Lovie Austin’s ‘Chicago Bound Blues’ (Paramount 12056, 1923). ‘Chicago Bound Blues’ emphasises the pain felt by a woman who is abandoned by her male lover, and who wishes to ‘follow my daddy, but my feet refuse to walk’. As the lone singer, Cox bemoans the ‘Mean old fireman, cruel old engineer’ who ‘took my man away and left his mama standing here’. Rainey’s ‘Weeping Woman Blues’ challenges this gendered dynamic of the active man and passive woman when she sings that she is ‘going down South’ to ‘find my easy rider and brung him back at home’. Rainey also adopts Cox, Williams and Austin’s ‘cruel old engineer’ verse, adding a detail in the third line that increases the perceived insult:

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Lord, this mean old engineer, cruel as he could be This mean old engineer, cruel as he could be Took my man away and blowed the smoke back at me

After such an insult, listeners can understand Rainey’s decision to go searching after her man to ‘brung him back’. A year later Luella Miller’s ‘Frisco Blues’ (Vocalion 1202, 1928) reworked the lyrics again, reasserting the more traditional gender dynamic found in ‘Chicago Bound Blues’. Miller’s song discusses the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway (which, despite its name, operated in the South Central and Midwest US): I’m goin’ tell you people what the Frisco did for me one day; Tell you people what the Frisco did for me one day. It taken the man I’se lovin’, blowed that smoke back in my face.

Having been left behind in this stereotypical manner, Miller goes to the train yard, which raises the possibility that she might, like Rainey, follow her lover. Instead, however, she sings: Tell me, where was you when the Frisco made up in the yard? Aah! Where was you- Frisco made up in the yard? Lord, I was standin’ on the corner with a low an’ achin’ heart.87

Unlike Rainey’s more assertive protagonist, Miller stands and watches as the train pulls out of the depot. As these examples show, subtle changes to the content of floating verses had significant political effects, and these lines in particular had valence for female singers who either adopted the conservatism of Cox, Williams, and Austen or challenged it in the manner of Rainey. For her part, in ‘Chickasaw Train Blues’ Memphis Minnie developed these floating lyrics by reimagining the train as a promiscuous sexual rival who takes men away from women: I might tell everybody What that Chickasaw has done, done for me She done stole my man away And blow that doggone smoke on me (She’s a low down dirty dog). Ain’t no woman, like to ride that Chickasaw Ain’t no woman, like to ride that Chickasaw Because everywhere she stop She’s stealing some woman’s good man off (She’s a low down dirty dog).

Humorously setting up the train as a promiscuous sexual antagonist, Memphis Minnie turns the stereotypical gender divide regarding hoboing into a gender war waged against working class women to keep them

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in a passive position. The train smoke blown back at her, inherited from Rainey’s ‘Weeping Woman Blues’, now becomes an insult performed by a victorious, gloating rival. Although she claims that ‘no woman like to ride that Chickasaw’, the singer does in fact try to ride the train, but her gender proves an insurmountable barrier: I walk down the railroad track That Chickasaw wouldn’t even let me ride the blind And she stop picking up men, all up and down the line. (She’s a low down dirty dog).

Her use of ‘wouldn’t even’ indicates the singer’s outrage at the gender segregation practiced on this train, which is emblematic of the gender segregation practised in most representations of hoboing. Her anger is manifest in the humorous refrain that the train is a ‘low down dirty dog’. Given that the singer is unlikely to be genuinely angry at a mode of transport, the song is actually directing its anger at the inequality of freedom being given to transient bluesmen but denied to black women, particularly in music by male singers. Memphis Minnie discusses the gendered nature of transiency in several other songs, including ‘Outdoor Blues’ (Vocalion 1698, 1932), in which she portrays herself as homeless. In need of shelter for the night, the singer tries to enter a hobo jungle: Way down the lane, I thought I see’d a fire, Way down the lane, I thought I see’d a fire, ‘Fore I could make it there to warm my hands, the hobos had put it out.

While Paul and Beth Garon argue that Memphis Minnie’s representations of travel position her as being ‘beyond confinement’ [italics in original], I claim that the above lyrics, which to my knowledge do not appear in earlier blues songs, acknowledge that travel for female transients had barriers that did not exist for men.88 The fact that the hobos put the fire out symbolises the gendered nature of hobohemia: the male transients do not wish to have a woman join them and so disappear before she arrives. The song also hints at sexual impropriety, even prostitution, when Memphis Minnie describes herself as being naked: ‘I didn’t have on no clothes’.89 Despite these disreputable undertones, ‘Outdoor Blues’ finishes with the singer being taken in by an old lady who refers to her as ‘daughter’. This is both an act of female solidarity and a moment of traditional familial love. Nevertheless, the ending is ultimately conservative because it takes the female singer off the road and places her back in a traditional domestic space.

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This conservatism contrasts with Memphis Minnie’s more radical representation of transiency in her song ‘In My Girlish Days’ (Okeh 06410, 1941), which opens in 1917 with a young woman running away from home: I flagged a train, didn’t have a dime Trying to run away from that home of mine I didn’t know no better Oh boys, In my girlish days.90

Like male hoboes in blues songs, she uses the train for adventure. The first two verses make it clear that this adventure is partly sexual: Late hours at night, trying to play my hand Through my window, out stepped a man I didn’t know no better Oh boys In my girlish days My mama cried, papa did, too “Oh, daughter, look what a shame on you” I didn’t know no better Oh boys In my girlish days

Her parents attempt to ‘shame’ her for her sexual desire and the singer seems to accept their conventional morality by defending herself on the grounds that she ‘didn’t know no better … In my girlish days’, implying that she regrets both her sexual antics and her disobedience in running away from her parents.91 Yet by the end of the song the ‘girlish days’ refrain becomes ironic. The term ‘girlish’ suggests immaturity, but it also implies that the adventures described in the song are a necessary part of growing up. The final verse rejects the shame and regret being pushed by the singer’s parents: All of my playmates is not surprised, I had to travel ‘fore I got wise I found out better And I still got my girlish ways

For the singer, travelling was a way to become widely educated in a world that restricted female learning. Rather than be constrained, she claims that she ‘found out better’: that is, she found a better education on the road than in the Jim Crow South. She adopts a vagabond sensibility as outlined in Chapter 2, seeking out experiences even though she ‘didn’t have a dime’. The final line hints not only that she does not regret her wandering,

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but also that she has not entirely settled down now she is older, since she still ‘got my girlish ways’. The fact that she still has ‘playmates’, a term that suggests childishness but also a free attitude to sex, indicates that becoming ‘wise’ does not mean a rejection of her sexually assertive behaviour or vagabond sensibility. ‘In My Girlish Days’ reverses the stereotypical conservative ending to hobo narratives by refusing to condemn or reject her transient youth, and by implying that as an older person she may still not have settled into a conventional lifestyle.

7.4  Vagrancy and Racial Violence Yet despite its liberatory potential for movement and escape, transiency was extremely dangerous, especially for African Americans. In ‘Nothing in Rambling’ (Okeh 05670, 1940), for example, written just a year before ‘In My Girlish Days’, Memphis Minnie describes poverty and starvation on the road: ‘The peoples on the highway is walking and crying/Some is starving, some is dying’. She also depicts violence as a trivial, everyday occurrence: ‘I was walking through the alley with my hand in my coat/ The police start to shoot me, thought it was something I stole/You know it ain’t nothing in rambling, either running around/Well, I believe I’ll marry, O Lord, and settle down’. In this song her intention to stop rambling and ‘settle down’ is a direct response to police brutality. The song highlights the constant threat of violence faced by African Americans who are caught out in the open. Black transiency was a threat to white supremacy because it demonstrated that African Americans could act in ways independent of white control. While many well-known blues songs idealise the train as a way for men (and occasionally women) to move around the country and have multiple lovers, the blues also contains implicit and explicit threats of racial violence that are not present in the vast majority of white hobo life-writing.92 Rather than a straightforward vector of escape, in black vernacular music the railroad is also a locus of violence. Being caught by a train guard or railroad bull could mean mistreatment and prison for all hobos, but black hobos were particularly vulnerable. In the infamous Scottsboro Boys case, nine black men and boys, aged between 13 and 20, were falsely accused of rape by two white women with whom they had been sharing a boxcar while travelling between Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee in 1931. Caught by railroad police, the women sought to escape legal punishment and also the moral opprobrium that accompanied what John Lennon calls the ‘interracial boxcar’ by making false rape charges.93 They used racial privilege to make up for their lack of financial

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and gender privilege. In a notorious miscarriage of justice, the Scottsboro Boys were tried by an all-white jury and given sentences ranging from decades in prison to the death penalty.94 The cases were re-tried several times in what became a cause célèbre that was taken up by the American Communist Party and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Langston Hughes wrote a one-act play entitled Scottsboro Limited (1932), highlighting the racial and economic bias at the heart of the US justice system, which he published alongside poetry on the same topic. In one of those poems, ‘Scottsboro’ (1932), he summarised the case as ‘8 black boys and one white lie/Is it much to die?’.95 Amidst this fallout, the Scottsboro case was interpreted by some African-Americans as a warning against asserting their right to travel freely.96 Vulnerability to state-sanctioned abuse and violence, which is largely absent from the white romantic tradition of hobo memoir, is present in many black vernacular songs. One of the earliest examples of this vulnerability is ‘De Dummy’ (1908), which depicts violence meted out by railroad bulls to black transients: Got on de dummy, didn’t have no fare; Conductor axed me what I doin’ dere; Hit me on de head wid a two by fo’; Ain’t gwine ride on de dummy no mo.97

This song was sent to folklorist Eber Carle Perrow in 1908 by W. O Scroggs, a white man who recalled it from memory.98 Although Scroggs apparently heard the song performed by African-American ‘roustabouts’ (freight handlers) on the Mississippi river, the lyrics suggest that it originally comes from either the blackface minstrel or the ‘coon song’ traditions in which violence towards blacks was seen as humorously resulting from African-American stupidity.99 In this song, the ‘dummy’ is a pun, meaning a short rail line beside a main track that does not connect two cities, as well as the black transients themselves, who are dummies for getting on a train that will not take them where they want to go.100 Their lack of intelligence implicitly justifies the violence they receive, both in the verse quoted above and in an earlier stanza in which the men ‘Tried to go to Hebben on de tail ob a kite’ but fall and end up in Hell. The song’s comic nature, highlighted by Scrogg’s phonetic transcription, is an indication of the normative nature of racial violence in the early twentieth-century United States.101 Some Tin Pan Alley Blues also treat the threat of punishment for vagrancy with humour, as in Lonnie Johnson’s Jack Wood-penned

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‘Roaming Rambler Blues’ (Okeh 8497, 1927): ‘The judges all knows me, they knows me as a rambling man./The judges all knows me, knows me as a rambling man./When they put me in jail, I gets out on a ‘stallments plan.’ Such light-hearted treatment underplays the abuse and trauma that are prominent parts of repeated arrests for vagrancy for African Americans. But humour was not restricted to Tin Pan Alley: so-called ‘Country Blues’ also dealt with black transiency ironically. In ‘The Gone Dead Train’ (Paramount 13129, 1932), for instance, King Soloman Hill describes the easy life of a hobo in ironic terms: Lord, I once was a hobo I crossed many a point But I decided I’d go down the frog traveling light And take it as it comes (Spoken: I reckon’ you know the fireman and the engineer would too)

The song uses typical blues symbolism of the train as the hope for a new life, with the ‘frog’ referring to the equipment used to enable a train to change tracks. Like the train, the singer hopes to move in a new and presumably better direction. But Hill’s hope that being a hobo means ‘travelin light’ and taking life ‘as it comes’ is undermined by his ironic spoken assertion that the ‘fireman and the engineer would too’. This phrase implies that the train crew are likely to seek out black hobos and take them as they come, leading to their arrest and probable abuse by a racist legal system. Similarly, ‘Sleepy’ John Estes and Hammy Nixon’s ‘Hobo Jungle Blues’ warns black hobos to stay hidden in the boxcar: Now, if you hobo through Brownsville, you better not be peepin’ out Now, if you hobo through Brownsville, you better not be peepin’ out Now, Mr. Whitten will git you, and Mr. Guy Hare will wear you out.

The racial element of these lyrics is implicit, hidden, like the black transient, from any potential white observers (and the record company). Although ‘Brownsville’ is a real city, one well known to Estes, the choice of this location for the song nevertheless highlights the issue of colour. It implies that the hobos are black, especially since ‘brown’ was commonly used to signify light-skinned African Americans in vernacular music.102 As well as the fact that it is performed by a black singer, the song’s racial dimension is enhanced by the reference to the railroad bull ‘Mr Whitten’, or ‘White-un’, whose name provides the song’s racial contrast. This contrast highlights the danger that black (or brown) hobos are in if caught by white bulls. The generic nature of the name ‘Mr. Guy Hare’ suggests that he is just a ‘guy’, but also that, like a hare, he can run: he will chase and

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‘wear you out’. As Estes would later put it in the already-cited ‘Special Agent (Railroad Police Blues)’: ‘Now, them special agents up the country sure is hard on a man’. Adding to the terror is the fact that the agents often brought along bloodhounds, as depicted in Little Hat Jones’ song ‘Kentucky Blues’ (Okeh 8815, 1930): Well, I once a’ known a man, they called him Austin Jack, Stopped and put the bloodhounds right on my track, ‘Course the bloodhounds just could not catch my scent, Well, you know, they couldn’t tell where this Little Hat went. ‘Cause I left Seguin, people, I was just like a submarine. Well, here come the Santa Fe just puffin’ and flyin’, Ought to see me when I reached up and really caught them blind. They said, “That’s another long gone from Kentucky, Long gone, he done got away lucky. Cause you left Seguin, you just like a submarine.

This song portrays a successful escape from the bull Austin Jack and his attack dogs, a fantastical wish-fulfilment in which the singer is able to vanish ‘just like a submarine’. The song acknowledges that Little Hat ‘done got away lucky’, which implies that being caught is a frightening possibility for many black transients who do not get lucky. Being caught might involve throwing hobos off trains, as in Lane Hardin’s ‘California Desert Blues’ (Bluebird B6242, 1935): ‘Crossing that old desert, just like breaking the Hindenburg Line,/Now, if you get ditched off on that freight train, you know that will be the end of the line’, the pun in the final clause referring to a likely death from heatstroke or dehydration. More common, however, was being arrested for vagrancy and then being leased out to perform unpaid labour on chain gangs, working in mines and on railroads under constant armed supervision.103 Willard ‘Ramblin’’ Thomas’s ‘No Job Blues’ (Paramount 12609, 1928) portrays a man ‘walkin’ all day, and all night, too’, searching in the newspapers for a job but then ‘the policeman came along and arrested me for vag’. He is put to labouring in a mine, swinging a pickaxe ‘in the ice and snow’. Like Little Hat Jones, Thomas reaches for fantasy as a way out of his situation, dreaming of finding ‘another meal ticket woman, so I won’t have to work no more’, although how such a woman can get him out of prison is left unexplained. In a similarly desperate state, the speaker of radical union poet John Handcox’s song ‘Raggedy Raggedy are we’ (Library of Congress, 1937) uses the first-person plural to speak for a community of chain gang labourers: ‘Homeless, homeless are we/Just as homeless as homeless can be/We don’t

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get nothing for our labor/So homeless, homeless are we’. Unlike Jones and Thomas, Handcox’s speaker does not escape into fantasy, which leaves his text bereft of hope. Here homelessness is not connected to being a hobo or to hoboing, but rather to the unpaid, involuntary and generally unfree nature of the labour performed. Sometime between 1933 and 1937, an anonymous black man sang into the recording equipment of music collector Lawrence Gellert.104 The song Gellert collected, ‘Two Hoboes’ (1933–1937), tells of violence meted out to a black transient who killed a ‘old poor white man’ while trying ‘to make your getaway’, presumably from a lynch mob: Gonna buy me a 32–20, Ah, and a box of balls, Gonna kill that old nigger, If I have to kill them all. Oh, babe. Ain’t it hard in chain gang? Ain’t it a pity wearin’ chains? He worked me all of them sunshine days, And he worked me in the rain. Oh, babe.105

The casual nature of the violence represents racialised brutality as a widespread and common experience. The singer, performing as a white vigilante in the first floating verse cited above, claims that he intends to not only kill the black hobo but also to go on a murderous spree: ‘Gonna kill that old nigger,/If I have to kill them all’.106 The next verse, which is not intended to be part of a chronological narrative, portrays the hardships of chain gangs as exploitative labour performed in both the ‘sunshine’ and the ‘rain’. Like a Cubist painting, the song gives multiple perspectives on African-American transiency; its fragmented verses provide snapshots of life for black hoboes and vagrants, who faced the twin threats of vigilante aggression and abuse by a racist penal system. In light of such overwhelming structural violence, it is unsurprising that black hobos in blues turn to violence themselves.107 Troublingly, however, this violent energy is often sublimated onto the bodies of black women. Sylvester Weaver’s ‘Penitentiary Bound Blues’ (Okeh 8504, 1928), for example, depicts a convict ‘goin’ to the workhouse’ where ‘There’ll be rock walls around me, fertile land below/They is forever, got no other place to go’. The reason for his imprisonment is that he ‘Killed my triflin’ woman, folks, I done commit a crime’. Such personal violence is common in blues.108 Structural violence against black men is reconstituted in a

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domestic situation to become abuse by black men towards black women. Walter Davis’ ‘M. & O. Blues, No.3 (My Baby Called The Police)’ (Victor 23333, 1932) describes an ‘unruly’ woman calling the police on a man for reasons that are unstated, but are presumably because of domestic violence. The man then decides to ‘ride that M&O’ in order to escape from the law, although it is unclear whether this attempt will be successful. On occasion, however, blues music does discuss violence as a form of resistance to oppression. For example, having been prevented by ‘the police’ from riding a train in ‘Frisco Whistle Blues’, on the B side of the same record, entitled ‘Mean Conductor Blues (Paramount 12546, 1927), Ed Bell sings that on ‘That same train, that same engineer’ will still not allow him to ride. He wishes disaster upon the train and death upon those who prevented him riding: ‘I pray to the Lord that Southern train would wreck/I pray to the Lord that Southern train would wreck/Pray they kill that fireman, break that engineer’s neck’. Having committed the sin of racism, the train crew face divine retribution. The fact that it is God rather than the singer who murders the crew indicates the powerlessness felt by those who faced racist barriers to their free movement. Such is the power of Jim Crow that divine intervention is required to bring about a brutal form of justice. Since human beings are also capable of brutal justice, another legend who, like John Henry, recurs in black vernacular music, is the black outlaw ‘Railroad Bill’. The song that bears his name is probably based on the life of an African-American turpentine worker, Morris Salter, who resisted arrest for the unlicensed possession of a rifle that he had bought for self-defence against white vigilantes.109 Bidding defiance to the world, Morris went on a more-than two-year spree during which he led several gangs who rode and robbed freight trains, shooting at and in some cases killing railway policemen before dying in a dramatic 1896 shootout. ‘In the Railroad Bill songs’, as Burgin Mathews argues, ‘it is most often not Bill’s historical actions but the persona of the badman that is remembered and celebrated’.110 While white newspapers were terrified of Morris, the symbolism of the freedom of outlaws such as Railroad Bill ‘appealed to many African Americans, who fashioned terrible but powerful heroes out of criminals whose actions they could not approve of but nonetheless had to admire as alternatives to the silent complacency assigned African Americans in southern society’.111 Bill’s ‘badman’ legend was created in folktales and in numerous iterations of the song ‘Railroad Bill’.112 A 1909 version describes him as an uncontrollably violent outlaw who uses the train to get around the country, and compares him to antagonists in

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the recent Spanish–American war: ‘Railroad Bill ride on de train,/Tryin t’ac big like Cuba en Spain./En he’ll lay yo po body daown’.113 Martha Coupland’s ‘Hobo Bill’ (W144538-2, 1927) which, despite its title, is the first recording of a Railroad Bill song by a black musician, claims that Bill is ‘at home when he’s riding on the blind’. In ‘Railroad Bill’ (Vocalion 1464, 1929), Will Bennett sings from the perspective of a victim who seems to identify with the eponymous outlaw: Railroad Bill ought to be killed, Never worked and he never will, Now, I’m gonna ride, my Railroad Bill. Railroad Bill done took my wife, Threatened on me that he would take my life, Now I’m gonna ride, my Railroad Bill.

Feeling that the theft (or possibly murder) of his wife is a threat to his masculinity, the singer declares that he will take revenge not only on Bill, but on the world in general: Buy me a gun as long as my arm, Kill everybody ever done me wrong, Now, I’m gonna ride, my Railroad Bill. Buy me a gun with a shiny barrel, Kill somebody about my good-looking gal, Now, I’m gonna ride, my Railroad Bill. Got a 38. Special on a 44. Frame, How in the world can I miss him when I’ve got dead aim, Now, I’m gonna ride, my Railroad Bill.

While the song is seemingly about taking revenge on Bill, the singer identifies with his antagonist to the extent that he begins to act like him. Stating his intention to ‘Kill everybody ever done me wrong’ makes the singer sound like Railroad Bill, a sympathetic identification that frames Bill as both hero and nemesis. The refrain ‘Now, I’m gonna ride, my Railroad Bill’ puts the singer in a liminal position, as if he is both Bill’s victim and Bill himself. The phrase ‘Buy me a gun as long as my arm’ is an adaptation of the floating verse line ‘Buy me a ticket long as my arm’, which implies that the gun is a ticket to ride for both the singer and Railroad Bill.114 The song’s ambiguous narrative perspective demonstrates attraction and repulsion toward Railroad Bill, who is feared and admired for his ability to travel around Jim Crow America. Bill may have been a ‘bad man’, but his violent autonomy challenged white supremacy by showing black Americans fighting back.

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7.5 Conclusion In 1963, the song ‘Two Hoboes’ was rewritten by the white folk band The Journeymen (Capitol Records T-1951, 1963). This recording, performed in tranquil close harmonies, removed the lyrics relating to violence, as well as the racial slur ‘nigger’. Instead, it focused on picturesque representations in which the ‘Railroad looks so pretty’ because ‘Moonlight’s on the track’. It does include reference to a chain gang, but rather than describe the hardship of labouring in the sunshine and rain, as in the Gellert recording, this version describes hobos having ‘Run away from that ball and chain’. Since the song was no longer identifiable as being about black transients, the audience could assume that the ‘two hoboes’ were white. These changes were an attempt to create a more palatable and commercially viable product for the Folk Music Revival, which was at its height from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. While the Revival was a phenomenon that involved the ‘rediscovery’ of many black blues singers, it was almost entirely white in terms of audience.115 The Journeymen’s whitewashed representation must have appealed to subsequent listeners as well, since it has been covered multiple times by white artists, with a version even appearing as the soundtrack to the UEFA Champions League 2006–2007 computer game.116 The success of this sanitised vision is emblematic of the way that AfricanAmericans, and the racial violence they suffered, have been written out of the story of US transiency. Yet as the black vernacular music discussed in this chapter has shown, when black transients rode the rails, Jim Crow rode with them.

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Conclusion: The End of the Road? Transiency beyond the Hobo

On the road there are endless beginnings and few conclusions. Vachel Lindsay.1

The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. Carl Sagan.2

Transients are always disappearing and yet they never do. In 1907, Len De Caux nostalgically reported that ‘there are no tramps today’, adding the qualifier that he was referring to the harmless ‘Weary Willie’ or ‘droll tomato-can’ variety. What has replaced this transient type, who was ‘as free from malevolence as he was from steadfastness’, is the criminal ‘yegg’, who is a transient ‘bank-robber and burglar’.3 In 1918 the Minneapolis Tribune declared that in Montana, the ‘hobo has ceased to exist’.4 Picturesque more-or-less from inception, the hobo was often portrayed as being on the verge of extinction. This picturesque quality was symbolised in cultural representations by the death of individuals, in what I call the trope of the ‘Dying Hobo’. This trope appeared most commonly in song.5 For example, in ‘The Hobo’s Last Ride’ (circa 1920s), credited to A. L. Kirby, a hobo rides a freight train with the body of his longtime road partner, Jack, to whom he pledges that he will take ‘you back and bury you/In the churchyard with your kin’. The narrator reminisces on their good times together: ‘We’ve dodged the bulls on the C.B. & Q,/And the shacks on the Chesapeake./We bummed the Leadville narrow gauge/In the days of Cripple Creek;/We’ve coasted down through Sunny Cal/On the rails of the old S.P.,/And all you had, through good or bad,/One half belonged to me’.6 ‘The Hobo’s Last Ride’ is sentimental in its representation of friendship, and possible implied romantic love, between the two men. There are many other examples of songs from the perspective of dying or dead hobos, including ‘Hobo Bill’s Last Ride’ (Victor 22421, 1929) and ‘Hobo’s 230

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Meditation’ (Victor 23711, 1932), recorded by Jimmie Rodgers, as well as fellow yodelling country singer Goebel Reeves’ ‘At the End of the Hobo’s Trail’, ‘The Hobo’s Grave’ (both Champion 16139, 1930) and ‘The Hobo’s Last Letter’ (Champion 45194, 1931). Indeed, the ‘Dying Hobo’ trope was common enough to be parodied in ‘The Dying Hobo’, also known as ‘The Hobo’s Last Lament’ or ‘Little Streams of Whiskey’, a song that was first printed in 1909 but which Norm Cohn dates to the late nineteenth century.7 This song also describes a hobo dying aboard a freight train, overseen by his long-time road partner. Using floating lyrics that appear in alternate form in ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain’, the man declares that he is ‘going to a better land,/Where everything is bright/Where beefstews grow on bushes/And you sleep out every night’. But the song then undercuts the death scene’s apparent mawkishness: ‘The Hobo stopped, his head fell back,/He’s sung his last refrain;/His old pal stole his coat and hat/And caught an East-bound train’.8 The surviving hobo’s lack of emotion parodies the sentimentality of the ‘Dying Hobo’ trope. The picturesque hobo became the subject of renewed interest during the 1930s from music collectors and folklorists. George Milburn, for example, collected eighty-six road, blues and labour songs into The Hobo’s Hornbook: A Repertory for a Gutter Jongluer (1930). As the subtitle suggests, Milburn represented hobos as the US equivalent of wandering minstrels. ‘Tramps and hoboes’, he claims, ‘are the last of the ballad makers… imbued with the spirit of the medieval troubadours’.9 The term ‘last’ indicates that the songs have a picturesque quality, and he declares that ‘Both tramps and hoboes are anachronisms bound for extinction’.10 Similarly, IBWA member and ex-hobo Godfrey Irwin produced American Tramp and Underworld Slang (1931), a guide to the cant by the tramp whom Irwin claims ‘is passing’ from the American scene.11 Notably, Milburn contrasted his efforts as collector with those of folklorists ‘busied with mountaineers, Negroes, and cowboys’, and only one song that might be called a blues appears in his volume.12 As Laura Browder puts it, ‘The academic search for the truth about hoboes became tied up in the quest for the folk, for the primitive Anglo-American’.13 There was limited space for the AfricanAmerican hobo in this racialised quest. Irwin also notes, with women like Barbara Starke in mind, the increasing number of female hobos active during the Great Depression, whom he dismisses as ‘silk stockinged and bebloomered flappers’.14 For him, the tramp who was ‘passing’ was the lone-wolf male wanderer of legend. Milburn comments: ‘automobiles have made it possible for any college sophomore to bum the breadth of the continent. No especial determination or fortitude is required to qualify

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as a tramp nowadays’.15 The presumed qualities of determination and fortitude construct the old-time tramp and hobo as possessing positive personal qualities that are lacking in the contemporary (increasingly female) transient. These lifestyle qualities had been part of the discourse around hoboing from early in the century, including through Jefferson Davies’ organisation Hoboes of America (HoA). Davies had appointed himself ‘King of the Hoboes’ and, having previously worked with James Eades How, went on to break with him and run the HoA as a rival to the IBWA. The rivalry between Davies and How over who was the true ‘King of the Hoboes’ lasted until How’s death in 1930.16 Both organisations sought to provide assistance to transients in the form of accommodation, while the IBWA, as discussed in Chapter 1, also advocated socialistic political change. But the class politics of hobohemia began to decline in favour of a more individualistic lifestyle politics of ‘dropping-out’. From 1933 onward, the hobo lifestyle began to be promoted at annual Hobo Conventions held at Britt, Iowa, organised by the tellingly named ‘Convention of Tourist Union #63’ organisation, in conjunction with Britt’s civic leaders. The yearly events, which continue to the present day, are centred around the election of a Hobo King and Queen, who are chosen because of their supposed ability to embody desirable hobo characteristics.17 The Britt Convention attracted – and still attracts – a large number of visitors seeking a glimpse of ‘real’ legendary hobos. Such touristic events would have been anathema to the IWW, but that organisation was in steep (though not terminal) decline during the 1930s, replaced on the political front by the Communist Party of America, which had little time for the lumpenproletariat, and on the ‘transient front’ by Benjamin Benson’s conservative Hobo Fellowship Union (HFU). Seeing himself as a successor to How’s IBWA, Benson was not interested in advocating for political change, but rather sought to exploit the hobo’s legacy through his sensationalist newspaper The Hobo News (1936–1948).18 The Hobo News was nationalist, anti-communist, and contained frequent racist humour targeted against African Americans and others. Following the 1942 bombing of Pearl Harbour, it produced aggressive anti-Japanese racist material, including printing a ‘Jap Hunting Licence’ on its front cover, along with the comments ‘Open Season Now. No limit’.19 The paper also called for hobos to leave the railroads to get jobs in munitions factories to support the war.20 While the IBWA’s earlier “Hobo” News had been a campaigning paper, the HFU’s The Hobo News was a tabloid that set out to entertain rather than educate, as summed up by its tagline ‘A little fun to

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match the sorrow’. The paper embraced tramp stereotypes that harkened back to Weary Willie and Nat Wills, though it did insist, like the IBWA, that hobos were a superior transient type. Benson’s depoliticised hobo would find a legacy in many mid-to-late Twentieth-Century representations, including Roger Miller’s song ‘King of the Road’. Following World War II, the Main Stem areas of large cities were reframed into what commentators called ‘Skid Row’. Scholars and policymakers discussed Skid Row in terms of a ‘Culture of Poverty’: a kind of cultural essentialism which conservatives used to put the blame for the poverty of Skid Row on the residents themselves, and which socialists used to discuss structural factors of exclusion.21 Both groups agreed that the ‘Golden Age of Tramping’, and the subculture of hobohemia, was over.22 Transiency itself did not disappear, of course, but in literary representations at least was displaced into the increasingly affordable motor car. Automobile-based road narratives, which had been produced since the 1920s, finally became more common than hobo memoirs: to the point that, as Ann Brigham states, these narratives ‘participate in imagining, recreating, and interrogating the term and terms of mobility’, thriving on and attempting to manage ‘points of cultural and social conflict’.23 The most famous example, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), portrays a transitional moment in which hobos are being replaced by a new generation of ‘Beat’ or ‘hipster’ transients. The narrator, Sal Paradise, makes a series of transcontinental journeys across the United States, and on one occasion into Mexico, not to seek a job but as acts of rebellion against bourgeois conformity. He encounters old-time hobos, whom the novel represents as father figures for Sal, whose own father is long dead. In one sequence the narrator encounters an elderly jocker called Mississippi Gene in the company of a 16-year-old boy. Although Paradise’s companion Montana Slim is ‘all insinuation’ about the presumably sexual relationship between the pair, Paradise ignores this and considers Gene, who is white, as having ‘something of the wise and tired old Negro in him’.24 This problematic racialised comparison frames Gene as possessing a kind of ancient but savage wisdom, which he passes along to his punk but also to the willing Paradise. The narrator views him as a spiritual leader lovingly tending to his apprentice: ‘Gene leaned out of his Buddhistic trance over the rushing dark plains and said something tenderly in the boy’s ear. The boy nodded. Gene was taking care of him, of his moods and fears’ (p. 30). As well as misrepresenting the scene’s sexual exploitation, the narrator here combines the spiritual vagabond tradition of Vachel Lindsay with an idealisation of the picturesque hobo.25

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A crucial aspect of the hobo’s picturesqueness, of course, is the idea that he is dying out. Unsurprisingly, then, Paradise later meets a confused 60-year-old hobo, a ‘shriveled little old man’ who no longer possesses the faculties required for the road: ‘the poor little madman … poor forlorn man, poor lost sometimeboy, now broken ghost of the penniless wilds’ (pp. 103–104). The hobo had been in his prime years ago (‘sometimeboy’), but now is a ‘ghost’ haunting the American landscape, doomed to fade away and be forgotten.26 Paradise and Dean Moriarty, whose homoerotic yet intensely homophobic relationship is central to the book, pick up two hitchhiking hobos and frighten them with the speed of their car: one of the men ‘never took his eyes off the road and prayed his poor bum prayers, I tell you. “Well,” they said, “we never knew we’d get to Chicago sa fast.”’ (p. 236). This is an unlikely reaction considering that hobos would be used to the speed of freight trains, but it is contrived to symbolise the transition of the ‘road’ from railway to highway for a younger transient generation.27 The older hobos cannot keep up with the speed of modernity, a speed that Kerouac also attempted to represent through his allegedly ‘spontaneous prose’.28 The novel dramatizes obsolescent masculinity in the absent body of Moriarty’s missing father, based on the life and troubled childhood of Kerouac’s close friend Neal Cassady. Moriarty and Paradise undertake a journey ostensibly to find Moriarty’s father, a former tinsmith fallen into alcoholism and despair. The search fails, and so the father remains abstract (‘the sad and fabled tinsmith of my mind’, p. 180) and the symbol of a fading generation (‘It seemed to me every bum on Larimer Street maybe was Dean Moriarty’s father’, p. 58). What will replace the older generation are those who in Dharma Bums (1959) Kerouac termed the ‘great rucksack revolution’.29 Inspired by Kerouac, the television show Route 66 (1960–1964), as well as the new genre of the Road Movie, portrayed ‘the road’ – now firmly meaning the freeway rather than the railway – as a symbol of countercultural rebellion.30 The emphasis was on the road as liberatory, as in the films Easy Rider (1969) and Vanishing Point (1971), although both movies also portray the search for freedom as being ill-fated due to the violent narrowmindedness of mainstream US society.31 Traumatised by real-world violence, former Vietnam War veterans formed the Freight Train Riders of America (FTRA), an allegedly white supremacist group that became notorious following the actions of transient serial killer Robert ‘Sidetrack’ Silveria Jr. Jim Christy, a more pacifistic member of the rucksack revolution, fled to Canada to escape the draft, hopping freight trains to get over the border, becoming what he called, in his 1972 book

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of the same name, one of ‘The New Refugees’.32 In his subsequent publications, Christy adopted a literary vagabond persona to describe his years of wandering. As with the literary vagabonds discussed in Chapter 2, he repeatedly contrasts his journeys with those whom he dismisses as tourists.33 Taking repeated trips to Alaska, he considers himself a ‘pioneer’ according to the framework of Frederick Jackson Turner, and represents himself as being superior to ‘all the unemployed in the cities, or worse the young men toiling in factories or at dumb dead-end jobs for ridiculous wages’, since ‘in that northern land you are able to do as you please’.34 For all of the supposedly countercultural qualities of the vagabond, doing as one pleases aligns easily with a libertarian streak in mainstream US culture, one that would be picked up by popular musicians. In 1926, Stephen Graham wrote that ‘The musicians have not tramped enough’.35 This is not a statement that would have been easy to make later in the century, since in subsequent decades musicians became fixated with ‘the road’. In addition to penning songs about travelling, many white male songwriters, including Woody Guthrie, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Roger Miller, Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Boxcar Willie, the Rolling Stones, and Seasick Steve, assumed the identity of the countercultural drifter. As well as adopting this persona, several musicians also wrote songs in which the old-time hobo, their allegedly rebellious forefather, was either fading or had already faded away. Bob Dylan’s nostalgic ‘Only a Hobo’ (Broadside Records B-301, 1963), for instance, speaks of finding a homeless man dead on the streets, with the refrain ‘Only a hobo, but one more is gone’. ‘One more’ indicates that this man’s death is part of a process by which hobos are inevitably dying out as individuals and as a group.36 By 1978, songwriter John Prine could ask ‘Where Have All the Hobos Gone To?’ (‘Hobo Song’, Asylum Records 6E-139, 1978) with an assumption that his audience would understand this to be a rhetorical question. These male singers saw themselves as performing the last rites over the hobo, who represented their spiritual ancestor but whose death was necessary to make room for their own claims to outsider status.37 Rather than the folk musician or Rock-and-Roll star, what had significantly displaced the hobo in popular discourse, as suggested by Dylan’s song, was the figure of the ‘homeless person’. Although the term had existed for many years, ‘homelessness’ did not become a key sociological frame until the early 1980s, when the demolition of public housing, welfare cuts and economic policies of deindustrialisation lead to an enormous increase of people living on the streets of US towns and cities. Defining its subjects in terms of deficit, ‘homeless’ carries connotations of failure, particularly for

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men, who are still often expected to be breadwinners. It also defines a state of lacking not simply accommodation but also an ideological norm: the bourgeois home, which, as Amy Lang notes, is an idealised utopian space supposedly free from conflict or history.38 The term ‘homeless’ roughly equates to the IBWA-Reitman definition of ‘bum’: someone who neither works nor wanders, and who is consequently of little social importance.39 As neoliberal economics created a widening wealth gap towards the end of the twentieth century, there was increased cultural interest in voluntary transiency. Many ‘yuppie hobos’ adopted the lore of the hobo without any of the radical politics, supported by the 1977 founding of the National Hobo Association (NHA). Four years earlier, celebrity hobo ‘Steam Train’ Maury Graham had advocated in the US Congress for greater security on trains, surely the first time that a hobo had ever called for more railroad bulls.40 Similarly, a hobo called The Texas Madman states: ‘what keeps me going is a desire to exercise my federally protected … civil right to free movement … That’s what it says, expanded, in the United States Bill of Rights’.41 Far from seeking to overthrow the US state, The Texas Madmen sought its protection, even while performing the illegal act of freighthopping, presumably confident that his whiteness, maleness, and US citizenship would protect him. Such conservatism was typical of the yuppie hobos: the NHA publication Hobo Times (1987–2000) wrote about hobos as an example of the nationalistic doctrine of American Exceptionalism and even, in 1992, advocated voting for Republican Presidential candidate Ross Perot.42 One of the most prominent of these lifestyle hobos was Adman, so-called because he was an advertising executive who ‘hits the rails for a week every year or so’.43 For some, transiency and capitalism were no longer incompatible but mutually beneficial.44 The yuppie hobos soon came into conflict with a younger generation of transients known variously as ‘dirty kids’, ‘crust punks’, and ‘gutter punks’. Although many of these younger transients were fleeing personal problems, they were also inspired by the 1990s anti-globalisation and environmental movements and often aligned themselves with political anarchism.45 In contrast to the yuppies, these ‘crusties’ were influenced by punk, post-punk, and grunge music, including by Kurt Cobain who, in ‘Something In the Way’ (DGC, 1991), had sung about living underneath a bridge, ‘living off of grass, and the drippings from the ceiling’. At the NHA’s National Hobo Convention in Britt, the two groups repeatedly clashed, with the yuppies feeling that the crust punks were dangerous radicals and the crust punks feeling that the yuppies were sell-outs and the Convention itself a degrading theme park.46 By the time of writing this

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Conclusion, the natural effects of time have meant that the crust punks are now the dominant force both physically on the road and culturally beyond it, producing music by bands such as Days N’ Daze, This Bike is a Pipe Bomb, and the Rail Yard Ghosts, appearing in art photography such as the work of Mike Brodie and in Michael Joseph’s ‘Lost and Found’ series, producing a number of ‘How To’ guides for like-minded drifters, and operating utopian squatter communities such as Slab City in California’s Sonoran Desert.47 Though to a significant extent displaced by the various ‘punk’ terms, or by the more descriptive ‘train-hopper’, some transients do still use the term ‘hobo’.48 Two of the most prominent examples are Hobo Shoestring and Hobo Stobe, whose train-hopping videos on Youtube have hundreds of thousands of views.49 This popularity has not made hoboing any safer, however. In 2017, Hobo Shoestring’s hand was burst open by a train wheel following a fall, leading to the loss of two fingers, while in the same year Hobo Stobe was dragged underneath a train and killed.50 A sanitised cultural memory of hoboing, one that does not include severed fingers or fatal accidents, persists in US culture. One example is Alena Smith’s Tween Hobo (2014). Written for a young audience and beginning life as a Twitter feed, the book is the fictitious diary of a 12-year old girl with ADHD who runs away from home for a life on the road. Tween Hobo does not mention any of the dangers of transiency; instead, it offers up an entirely safe road trip for an otherwise vulnerable Tween, allowing her a secure space in which to pontificate complacently on issues such as poverty and death.51 In contrast to the crust punks with whom she would presumably be sharing the rails, for the narrator ‘it’s only fun to be a hobo if you can look good doing it’, a comment with which Dean Stiff might have agreed.52 Away from fiction, a similarly cavalier attitude to transiency is present during the South Dakota State University’s annual ‘Hobo Day’ convention, during which students dress up as hobos and take part in a parade, reminiscent of the hobo ball that Jack London had refused to attend in 1911. As obnoxious as they might be, such events are also not dissimilar to the NHA’s own National Hobo Convention. Multinational corporations have also bought into the sanitized hobo image. In 2016, an advert for the Subaru Outback motorcar saw a female car passenger watching an empty freight train and fantasising about riding it before being magically transported onto the empty boxcar. Soon joined by her male companion, the pair embrace as they watch the American landscape pass by. The woman is then woken from her reverie by her companion, and they drive toward the horizon while a voiceover informs the audience that ‘Great Adventures are still out there’. Here the hobo is an

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absent, even ghostly figure, not physically present but present in spirit. The advert suggests that riding freight trains may be impossible in the contemporary world, but that ‘Great Adventures are still out there’, presumably in the Subaru. The advert displays a disclaimer which states ‘Do not attempt to ride a freight train’, indicating an anxiety that this idealised portrayal may encourage real-life hoboing. Indeed, the advert faced calls for its removal for precisely that reason.53 Inspired by the same spirit as the Subaru drivers, the literary vagabond has remerged in the twenty-first century not just in literature, as mentioned at the end of Chapter 2, but also as the ‘digital nomad’. Websites such as Squat the Planet, Expert Nomad, Nomad List, Zero to Travel, and Location Indie advise wannabe travellers of the best places to live cheaply, and how to make money untethered to a specific location, either by adopting temporary work in a variety of locations or by working digitally from home, wherever that home happens to be. Increasing numbers of countries offer digital nomad visas that allow temporary residency status, attempting to entice well-paid homeworkers and freelancers.54 ‘The world’, as Zygmunt Bauman prophesized in 1995, ‘is retailoring itself to the measure of the vagabond’.55 The front page of the Nomad Wiki states that nomadism consists of ‘free camping, tramp lifestyle and sensible traveling’ but empathetically ‘No tourism’.56 Such travellers, who are typically white and either North American or European, represent the privileged inheritors of the literary vagabond tradition. Far less privileged are the tens of thousands of people who use illegal train-hopping to enter the United States from Latin America, or to enter Europe from North Africa or the Middle East.57 For them there has been no retailoring to fit their needs, but rather a hardening of barriers and the militarisation of national borders. Framed as ‘migrants’ rather than vagabonds or hobos, these people lack the cultural capital of whiteness, or a US or EU passport. Several journalists have connected the train-hopping of Latin Americans attempting to enter the United States with the similar activities of American tramps and hobos. Most prominent among these is Ted Conover, who after publishing Rolling Nowhere (1984), a slumming narrative about hobos in the late twentieth century, wrote another undercover work, Coyotes (1987), the subtitle of which is A Journey Through the Secret World of America’s Illegal Aliens. Discussing similarities between these groups, Conover states: ‘I met my first “illegal alien” while researching an earlier book on American railroad tramps … much more than the tired, aged tramps I had been sharing camp fires with, these people were the true present-day incarnation of the classic American hobo’.58 As he

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travels between Mexico and the US, tagging along with Mexicans as they attempt to cross the border illegally, Conover concerns himself with cultural difference. He portrays his companions as being primitive in their confusion about airports (p. 65), airplanes (p. 68), sliding doors (p. 88), maps (p. 118), KFC’s ‘Colonel Sanders’ logo (p. 130), freeway speed limits (p. 133), and the word ‘vacuum’, which they mistake for ‘fuck you’ (p. 184). He presents these differences comedically, with the humour aimed at the Mexicans’ apparent backwardness. Even though his nationality saves him from being beaten when his companions are caught, Conover portrays himself in heroic terms. Upon his return to the United States, he sees a ‘nice sedan, full of air-conditioned white people’ and wonders ‘What did I still have in common’ with them (p. 236). That the people themselves, rather than the car, are described as ‘air-conditioned’ represents white Americans as pampered, presumably unlike the author. At the end of the book, he reflects that he has become partly savage: ‘I thought about another border, the one existing between two cultures in the same country…I was on that border, I realized, and bound to stay there for a long time’ (p. 246). Failing to acknowledge his white privilege, he utilises the romance of this late twentieth-century borderland to adorn himself with the ideological trappings of the frontiersman. Less racially problematic representations of contemporary migrant transiency are Sonia Nazario’s Enrique’s Journey (2006) and Óscar Martínez’s The Beast (2010/2013). Both books focus on ‘La Bestia’, the trains that undocumented workers ride illegally to travel the length of Latin and Central America, up to the border of the United States, and which are to a significant degree controlled by armed narcotics gangs and people smugglers. A US Latin-American journalist, Nazario acknowledges her relative privilege compared to the people on whom she reports: ‘I knew I was experiencing only an iota of what migrant children go through. At the end of a long train ride, I would pull out my credit card, go to a motel, shower, eat, and sleep’.59 She refuses to adopt the heroic frontier stance. Nevertheless, her book contains a sense of conservative disapproval toward the migrant mothers who leave their children behind in order to seek work (and to send their family money) in the US: ‘For Latina mothers coming to the United States, my hope is that they will understand the full consequences of leaving their children behind and make better-informed decisions’ (p.xxv). Citing the neoliberal RAND corporation, she also claims that immigration to the US has caused public services to deteriorate and worsened poverty (p. 255 and p. 257). The implicit message is that the transients had better stay where they are.

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Martínez’s The Beast is a more politically radical take, focussing on the factors that push migrants to take the risks that Nazario condemns. For these people, he writes, the ‘journey is not migration, but escape’.60 What they are escaping is not simply poverty but also rape and murder, including death threats to leave the country before entire families are killed (p. 19). Unlike Conover’s incompetent Mexicans, Martínez’s protagonists are smart and resourceful, as when Paola, a young Guatemalan transexual, wards off potential rapists by apparently submitting but warning them that they need to wear condoms because she has AIDS; the men believe Paola’s lie and she escapes unharmed (pp. 27–28). Such resourcefulness is desperately needed, since the conditions faced by these train-hoppers are equivalent to a warzone: ‘We’re walking among the dead’, Martínez writes, ‘Killing, dying, raping, or getting raped – the dimensions of these horrors are diminished to points of geography. Here on this rock, they rape. There by that bush, they kill’ (p. 37). In order to survive such ‘horrors’, Latinx transients have become numbed to their own suffering, so that ‘at a certain level they know they’re victims, but they don’t feel that way. Their logic runs like this: yes, this is happening to me, but I took the chance, I knew it would happen’ (p. 73). Thousands of the transients are kidnapped, but nothing is done because ‘These are the kidnappings that don’t matter’ (p. 93).61 He also shows the people smugglers being ripped off by narcotic protection rackets, providing a systematic representation in which almost every person in the chain is subject to exploitation, including those who are themselves exploiting others (p. 94–98). In this way Martínez avoids demonising individual smugglers or, as in Nazario’s book, victim blaming. In a similarly bleak vein, Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) imagines a future in which transiency is the only mode of existence. Indeed, in this post-apocalyptic landscape it seems that those people who led lives on the move before the collapse are best placed to survive it. The book’s protagonists, an unnamed father and son, trudge along a series of roads in a post-nuclear-war setting, a literary naturalist world in which the struggle for survival is all encompassing and in which bands of cannibal gangs roam the country looking for victims. The father seeks to protect his son’s mental and physical health including, reminiscent of actions described by Leon Ray Livingston in Chapter 3, by keeping him safe from the threat of rape. Using a map the pair follow old freeways, as if through an instinctual memory of the world that has been lost.62 They meet an elderly blind man who gives the name Ely (a possible reference to Eli, a prophet in the Talmud and an Israelite Priest in the Hebrew Bible) and they ask him how long he has been on the road. He replies ‘I was always on

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the road’, indicating that he was a transient long before civilisation’s collapse. When they ask how he has survived, vulnerable as he is, he responds: ‘I just keep going. I knew this was coming’ (p. 179). Like a nihilistic version of an Old Testament seer, he tells them: ‘There is no God and we are his prophets’ (p. 181). Meaning has drained out of the world, yet the oldtime hobo remains to impart his wisdom. Reflecting the fact that everyone has now become transient, the book’s narrative moves from place-to-place in a fragmented manner (and often in fragmented, paratactical sentences) in a way that is similar to hobo memoirs. McCarthy’s novel indicates the power of the road’s ideological attachment within US culture. Even after the world has ended, the road abides. *** As Vagabonds, Tramps and Hobos has shown, the meaning of US transiency has never been fixed. It has also been far more diverse than the popular culture memory of the ‘hobo’ would suggest. Rather than the allAmerican heroic adventurer or worker on a second frontier, US transient writers and musicians have also been female, black, gay, and politically radical. Jack London and Nels Anderson constructed a hypermasculine image of the hobo, as an adventurer in London’s case and as a worker for Anderson, a legacy that has obscured the writings of female transients, the travels of African-Americans as captured in black vernacular music, and the homoerotic undertones of many hobo memoirs, including London’s own. Other transient groups have included literary vagabonds like Ralph Keeler, Lee Meriwether, and Harry Franck, who sought to travel without money in order to gain experiential capital, and who used their racial privilege to open doors that temporary poverty had otherwise closed. Spiritual vagabonds Vachel Lindsey and Stephen Graham established transiency as a nourishing contrast to modernity, a representation that has persisted into the twenty-first century. Female transients Dolly Kennedy Yancy, Agnes Thecla Fair, Kittie Soloman, and Barbara Starke questioned the gendered nature of the road through their representations of the joys and challenges of travelling while female. By around 1920 the IWW, IBWA, and others had successfully changed the meaning of the term ‘hobo’ within transient subculture to mean a superior kind of transient. Nels Anderson promoted the hobo as a type of labourer, although his representation has a distinctive double voice indicative of the distinct cultures of hobohemia and academia. T-Bone Slim also framed the hobo as a worker, one who ought to be organised into a revolutionary vanguard. Slim’s writing demonstrates the confidence that he held in the hobo’s intelligence, experimenting with

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literary styles in a way that was unusual for the labour press. For African Americans, however, the literary world was largely closed off during the ‘Golden Age of Tramping’. Instead, black transients made use of the newly-marketed genre of ‘race records’ to represent the transient experience, emphasising sexual adventure, female agency, and white supremacist violence in ways that distinguish their portrayals from white written accounts. Although the hobo has been stereotyped as an older, white male and celebrated by conservative writers and artists as a paradigm of US American individualism, the reality of transient representation was significantly more complex. Rather than fading away as in the trope of the ‘Dying Hobo’, new forms of transiency are likely to form and multiply as the result of ongoing and future capitalist and environmental crises. For the worst of reasons, the legacy of vagabonds, tramps, and hobos will remain relevant for many years to come.

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Notes

Introduction: Hobohemia and the Literary Imperative 1 Kenneth Allsop, Hard Travellin’: The Story of the Migrant Worker (Middlesex, England; Victoria, Australia: Penguin, 1972, first published 1967), p. xiii. 2 Roger A Bruns, Knight of the Road: a Hobo History (New York: Methuen, 1980). 3 The word ‘hobos’ can be correctly spelt with or without an ‘e’ and my sources often use both, so this book will contain quotes that use ‘hoboes’. My own decision to use the shorter ‘hobo’ was driven by a probably hopeless desire to avoid repetitive strain injury. 4 See Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: ‘The significance of the frontier in American history’, and Other Essays, edited by John Mack Faragher, (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1999). 5 As Tim Cresswell points out, mobility is movement with meaning, imbued with ideologies and cultural values. See Tim Creswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York; London: Routledge, 2006), p. 21. 6 The earliest example I have found of this term is an unpublished 1917 manuscript by the journalist Harry M. Beardsley, although the term is likely to have pre-dated this article. Beardsley’s manuscript predates the earliest reference to ‘hobohemia’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, which is 1923. See Harry M. Beardsley, ‘Along the Main Stem with Red: Being an Account of the Hobohemians, Including One Paul of Tarsus and a Guy Named Moses’ (March 29, 1917) in Ernest W. Burgess Papers, Box 127, Folder 1, Document 145, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. Nels Anderson collected this unpublished paper while a Masters student. 7 John R. Stilgoe, Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 3. 8 Susan Phillips, The City Beneath: A Century of Los Angeles Graffiti (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), pp. 17–32. Watertanks are a good example of what mobilities scholars Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller and John Urry call ‘moorings’. It is the static nature of the watertank stopping place that enables the mobility of both the stream train and their hobo passengers. See Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller and John Urry, ‘Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings’ in Mobilities 1:1 (2006), pp. 1–22 (p. 3). 243

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9 John Lennon, Boxcar Politics: The Hobo in U.S Culture and Literature, 1869–1956 (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014). 10 For example, Jacqueline K. Schmidt’s oral history of hobos does not feature a single interview with a woman or a person of colour. See Gypsy Moon (Jacqueline K. Schmidt), Done and Been: Steel Rail Chronicles of American Hobos (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996). 11 Heather Tapley, ‘The Making Of Hobo Masculinities’ in Canadian Review of American Studies 44:1 (2014), pp. 25–43 (p. 27). 12 Frank Beck, Hobohemia: Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Ben Reitman & Other Agitators & Outsiders in 1920s/1930s Chicago, ed. Franklin Rosemont (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2000, first published 1956), p. 98. 13 As Erin Royston Battat puts it, ‘these are discursive categories describing cultural types rather than social realities’. Erin Royston Battat, Ain’t Got No Home: America’s Great Migrations and the Making of an Interracial Left (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), p. 17. 14 See, among many others, James V. Werner, American Flaneur: The Cosmic Physiognomy of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Routledge, 2004); Jacob Edmund ‘The “Flâneur” in Exile’ in Comparative Literature 62:4 (2010), pp. 376–398; Aimée Boutin ‘Rethinking the Flâneur: Flânerie and the Senses’ in Dix-Neuf Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuxiémistes 16:2 (2012), 124–132; Urban Walking: The Flâneur as an Icon of Metropolitan Culture in Literature and Film, eds Oliver Bock and Isabel Vila-Cabanes (Wilmington, Delaware: Vernon Press, 2020). 15 On the picaresque, see Anna Cruz, Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Transgression and Subversion: Gender in the Picaresque Novel, eds. Maren Lickhardt, Gregor Schuhen, and Hans Rudolf Velten (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2018); Garrido Ardila and Juan Antonio, ‘The Picaresque and the Rise of the English Novel: Bunyan’s Mr Badman’ in Revue de Littérature Comparée 363 (2017), pp. 259–272. For a discussion of the contemporary picaresque, see Luigi Gussago, Picaresque Fiction Today: The Trickster in Contemporary Anglophone and Italian Literature (Leiden; Boston: Brill-Rodopi. 2016). 16 In contrast, scholarship within British literature has given sustained attention to the tramp and questions of vagrancy. See Celeste Langran, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); David Hitchcock, Vagrancy in English Culture and Society (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Luke Lewin Davies, The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and Alistair Robinson, Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 17 Although these groups have been labelled as ‘vagrants’ at various times. On British uses of ‘vagrancy’ to frame first-nations peoples in the US, see Robinson, pp. 174–181. 18 Another contemporary term that encapsulated the circular movement of ­seasonal labourers was ‘Rounder’, which fell out of favour as the term ‘hobo’

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gained ascendency during the early twentieth century. Rounder was and remained a term of abuse, as exemplified by a 1905 black vernacular song: ‘Well, they call me a rounder if I stay in town, and they say/I’m a rounder if I roam around/ I got it writ on the tail of my shirt: ‘I’m a nachel-bo’n/ Rounder and I don’t need to work./And so I ain’t bothered, no I ain’t bothered’. See Gates Thomas, ‘South Texas Negro Work Songs: Collected and Uncollected’ in Rainbow in the Morning: Publications of the Texas Folklore Society 5, edited by J. Frank Dobie (Dallas, Southern Methodist University Press, 1926), p. 154–180 (p. 166). In 1911 sociologist Howard Odum defined a rounder as ‘a worthless and wandering person, who prides himself on being idle’. In contrast to later masculinist definitions of the ‘hobo’, Odum says that a rounder can be male or female. Howard Odum, ‘Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry as Found in the Secular Songs of the Southern Negroes’ in Journal of American Folk-Lore 24:94 (October-December 1911), pp. 351–396 (pp. 353–354). 19 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London; New York; Oxford; New Delphi; Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, first published 1987, first published in English 1988); Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, 2nd Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Braidotti, Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Deborah Paes de Barros, Fast Cars and Bad Girls: Nomadic Subjects and Women’s Road Stories (New York: Peter Lang, 2004). 20 Alexandra Ganser, Roads of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women’s Road Narratives, 1970–2000 (Amsterdam: Brill, 2009), p. 34, pp. 163–181. Ganser also rightly notes that travellers’ routes are often along fixed lines and so are not rhizomatic in the manner described in A Thousand Plateaus. 21 For example, Jack Black states that his biography is like ‘the zigzag line that statisticians use to denote the rise and fall of temperature or rainfall or fluctuations of business. Every turn I made was a sharp one, a sudden one. In years I cannot remember making one easy, graceful, rounded turn’. Jack Black, You Can’t Win (Edinburgh, London, and San Francisco: AK Press/Nabat, 2000, first published 1926), p. 16. Similarly, today people experiencing homelessness are framed by researchers as following ‘pathways’ that take in periods of being housed, sofa-surfing and living on the streets. For more on the ‘pathways’ metaphor, see Suzanne Fitzpatrick, Young Homeless People (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1999), pp. 43–79. 22 Although most historians date US Vagrancy laws to after the Civil War, they were in existence in the early Republic, including as a way to manage the effects of Northern manumission. See Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan’s important work, Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic (New York: New York University Press, 2019). One notable difference in this earlier period was that the transient poor who were policed by vagrancy laws included significant numbers of women and African-Americans, as would later

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be the case again during the Great Depression. See O’Brassill-Kulfan, p. 52. Seen in this light, the ‘Golden Age of Tramping’, during which the overwhelming number of transients were single men, appears to be a historical aberration. 23 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995, first published in French 1975). p. 200. 24 The best-known label for this turn is the ‘new mobilities paradigm’: see Mimi Sheller and John Ury, ‘The new mobilities paradigm’ in Environment and Planning A 38:2 (2006), pp. 207–226; Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011, first published 2007), pp. 39–60; Sheller and Urry, ‘Mobilizing the new mobilities paradigm’ in Applied Mobilities 1:1 (2016), pp. 10–25. On potential applications of the new mobilities paradigm to the humanities and literary studies see, respectively, Peter Merriman and Lynne Pearce, ‘Mobility and the Humanities’ in Mobilities 12:4 (2017), pp. 493–508 and Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson and Lynne Pearce, ‘Introduction: Mobilities, Literature, Culture’ in Mobilities, Literature, Culture, eds Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson and Lynne Pearce (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 1–31. Cresswell challenges, rightly in my view, the supposed newness of the new mobilities paradigm, while Richard Randell argues that the new mobilities paradigm is in fact ‘a social systems paradigm constructed from a combination of complexity theory and systems theory’ and that it does not fit the Kuhnian model of a scientific paradigm. See Tim Cresswell, ‘Towards a politics of mobility’ in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28:1 (2010), pp. 17–31 and Richard Randell, ‘No paradigm to mobilize: the new mobilities paradigm is not a paradigm’ in Applied Mobilities 5:2 (2020), pp. 206–223 (p. 215). In an echo of Voltaire’s famous saying about the Holy Roman Empire, the new mobilities paradigm turns out to be neither new, nor a theory of mobility, nor a paradigm. Less bombastic descriptions for the recent interest in mobility are ‘mobility turn’ and ‘mobility studies’, both labels that have also been used by mobilities scholars. 25 Tim Cresswell, The Tramp in America (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), pp. 10–11. 26 Cresswell, p. 59. In the Afterward, Cresswell states ‘I do not want to give the impression that the tramps of the 1880s were completely the product of others’, although this disclaimer comes too late in the book to be followed up by any substantial analysis of writings by tramps themselves. Cresswell, p. 219. 27 Lennon, p. 56. 28 Lennon, p. 48. 29 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008) & Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, translated by Louise Bethlehem (London; New York: Verso, 2012). 30 Creswell, p. 53. 31 See, for example, Meridel Le Sueur, ‘Women Are Hungry’ in The American Mercury (March 1934), pp. 316–326, pp. (pp. 324–326). In his ‘34 Blues’ (Vocalion 02651, 1934), Charley Patton sings: ‘Fella, down in the country, it almost make you cry,/Fella, down in the country, it almost make you cry,/(spoken: My God, children!)/Women and children flagging freight trains for rides’.

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32 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London : Routledge. 1991, first published 1979), p. 19, p. 84. 33 Todd DePastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago; London, The University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 61. 34 Frank Tobias Higbie, Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880–1930 (Urbana and Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 176. 35 DePastino, pp. 83–85. 36 Lee Harris, The Man Who Tramps, a Story of Today (Indianapolis: Douglass and Carlon, 1878), p. 267. 37 DePastino, pp. 25–26. 38 Charles Ashleigh, ‘The Floater’ in The International Socialist Review 15:1 (July 1914), pp. 34–38 (p. 37). 39 Beck, p. 98. 40 Art Nurse, interview with Franklin Rosemont, 10 May 1987. In Newberry Library Rosemont Collection. 41 Frederick Feied, No Pie in the Sky: the Hobo as American Cultural Hero in the Works of Jack London, John Dos Passos, and Jack Kerouac (San Jose; New York; Shanghai: Authors’ Choice Press, 2000, originally published 1964), p. 81; DePastino, p. 84. 42 Higbie, p. 105. 43 Higbie, p. 99. 44 See, for example, Marilyn C. Wesley, Secret Journeys: The Trope of Women’s Travel in American Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). 45 Nelson Peery, Black Fire: The Making of an American Revolutionary (New York: The New Press, 1994), p. 92. 46 David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing: The Life and Times and Delta Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1997), p. 69. 47 T-Bone Slim, ‘Information’ in Industrial Worker, 10 April 1926. 48 Godfrey Irwin, American Tramp and Underworld Slang: Words and Phrases Used by Hoboes, Tramps, Migratory Workers and Those on the Fringes of Society, with their Use and Origins, with a Number of Tramp Songs (London: Eric Partridge Ltd, 1931), p. 33 & p. 113. 49 The IBWA’s concern for cleanliness extended to sexual health. Ben Reitman held classes on sexual hygiene at the Chicago hobo college and, risking arrest, distributed condoms. He was jailed twice for birth control advocacy: see Bruns, pp. 170–183. 50 Anderson, p. 18. 51 See William Aspinwall, Roving Bill Aspinwall: Dispatches from a Hobo in PostCivil War America, edited by Owen Clayton (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House Books, 2022). 52 Despite Aspinwall’s lack of interest in the topic, McCook’s ‘Leaves From The Diary of a Tramp’ series dedicated an entire article to train-hopping. See John James McCook, ‘Leaves from the Diary of a Tramp II: Train jumping  – A  Digression: Nature: The South’ in The Independent 53:2766

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(5 December 1901), pp. 2880–2888. From Yale University microfilm ­collection The Social Reform papers of John James McCook: a guide to the microfilm publication, edited by Adela Haberski French, assisted by Shirley Bergman Leibundguth. (Hartford, Connecticut: Connecticut Antiquarian & Landmarks Society, 1977). 53 This may have been a tradition inherited from the journeymen typographers known as ‘tramp printers’, whose number included a young Walt Whitman. Tramp printer pseudonyms tended to be less descriptive and more enigmatic than hobo names: examples include ‘Morningstar’, ‘Old Barney’ and ‘Beanbody’, although ‘Texas Jack’ would not be out of place in hobohemia. See, among others, Typographical Tourists: Tales of Tramping Printers, ed. Alastair M Johnston (Berkeley: Poltroon Press, 2012); John Howells and Marion Dearman, Tramp Printers: Adventures and Forgotten Paths once Traced by Wandering artisans of Newspapering and Typography (Pacific Grove, CA: Discovery Press, 2013). Nor was this aspect of transient subculture limited to the US. In England, nineteenth-century Irish navvies frequently used monikers, while Harry A. Franck notes that English tramps also used false names and, drawing on his experience of travelling around the world without money, even claims ‘that the same rule holds among bums the world over; you must never ask them personal questions, on penalty of being ostracized or even forcibly ejected’ Harry A. Franck, Footloose in the British Isles: being a desultory and not too serious account of sixteen months of living in England and peregrinating hither and yon through Great Britain (New York and London: The Century Co, 1932), p. 349. In Great Britain, those classified as ‘vagrants’ often used aliases as well. See Nicholas Crowson, ‘Tramp’s Tales: Discovering the Life-Stories of Late Victorians and Edwardian Vagrants’ in English Historical Review CXXXV:577 (December 2020), pp. 1489–1526 (pp. 1505–1506). 54 Ernest W. Burgess Papers, box 127, folder 1, document 9, p.1. 55 Ralph Keeler, Vagabond Adventures (Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co, 1870), p. 91. 56 Cassady’s train-hopping hobo asks himself, ‘What’s my name, what’s my name?’ [italics in original] as a means of putting words to the rhythm of the engine, but then realises that he actually has forgotten his name. Neal Cassady, The First Third & Other Writings (San Francisco: City Lights, 1981, first published 1971), pp. 144–145. See also William T. Vollman, Riding Toward Everywhere (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), p. 106. 57 In Who is Bozo Texino?, filmmaker Bill Daniels explores how monikers are adopted and continued through succeeding generations of railroad graffiti taggers, involving both hobos and railroad workers. See Who is Bozo Texino? (dir Bill Daniel, 2005). Both A-No.1 and T-Bone Slim had imitators who used the same name while on the road. 58 Anderson, p. 19. 59 George Dawson and Richard Glaubman, Life is So Good (New York: Doubleday, 2000), p. 318. 60 Peery, p. 99; Aspinwall, p. 55; Irwin, p. 85. In a similar vein to Irwin’s comment about storytelling for a handout, T-Bone Slim claims that ‘every time a hobo

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bums a cup of coffee he’s got to make a “Gettysburg Address” – nothing less. Orators are not all dead yet. They walk the earth.’ T-Bone Slim, ‘Republicans Say It’s Their Turn To Mismanage’, Industrial Worker, 05 October 1940. 61 University of Chicago, Robert Ezra Park Collection 1882–1979, Box 3, folder 3. 62 Bart Kennedy, A Tramp Camp (London; Paris; New York; Melbourne: Cassell; and Company, Limited, 1906), p. 23. 63 Anon, ‘Hobo Life According to Saltbrush Bill’ in “Hobo” News 9:12 (December 1921), pp. 5–6 (p. 5). 64 The ability to read and write was common among transients. McCook claimed that ‘only 9.94 per cent’ of tramps ‘can neither read nor write’, while bookseller Daniel Horsley wrote that if non-transients could eavesdrop on a group of hobos they would be surprised to ‘hear them discussing Wagner as a musical revolutionist, Bernard Shaw as a satirist, Frank Harris and Mencken and many others. They buy the books and…devour them with interest’. McCook, ‘A Tramp Census and Its Revelations’, p. 757; Daniel Horsley, ‘What the Hobo Reads’ in “Hobo” News 10:10,(October 1922), pp. 5–6 (p. 5). Adventure novelist and former hobo Louis L’Amour states that a cheap publication series known as ‘Little Blue Books were a godsend to wandering men’ and recalls being given a book, probably Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by a hobo while on a freight train. See Louis L’Amour, Education of a Wondering Man (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), pp. 9–10. ‘Steam Train’ Maury Graham, who travelled as a hobo in the 1930s and who later in the Twentieth Century would become a minor celebrity as ‘King of the Hobos’, states that most hobos ‘had no formal education, and yet they seemed among the bestread individuals I have ever known’. ‘Steam Train’ Maury Graham and Robert J. Hemming, Tales of the Iron Road: My Life as King of the Hobos (New York: Paragon House, 1990), p. 37. 65 Frank Laubach had a similar reaction, noting derisively that ‘writing poetry is decidedly chic among these “high-brow bums”, as the other vagrants call them [italics in original]’. He even blames transiency on increased literacy levels, claiming that ‘The diffusion of science, literature and art is giving the laboring class desires which no laboring man can satisfy without abandoning his steady work’. Laubach, pp.58–59. L’Amour put it more positively: ‘During the knockabout years the hobo acquired a literature of his own’. L’Amour, p. 11. 66 Jack London, The Road in Novels and Social Writings, ed. Donald Pizer (New York: The Library of America, 1982, text first published 1907), p. 193. 67 Cresswell, pp. 59–60 & p. 219. 68 As Stanley Fish puts it: ‘autobiographers cannot lie because anything they say, however mendacious, is the truth about themselves, whether they know it or not’. Stanley Fish, ‘Just Published: Minutiae Without Meaning [a critique of biography and biographical narrative]’ in New York Times, 7 September 1999. 69 Joel E. Black dismisses Livingston’s books as having ‘feigned an authentic representation of hobo life’. As scholarship on autobiography and life-writing has shown, however, authenticity is a problematic concept for the analysis of written memoirs. Joel E. Black, ‘A Crime to Live Without Work: Free Labor and

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Marginal Workers in Industrial Chicago, 1870 to 1920’ in Michigan Historical Review 36:2 (Fall 2010), pp. 63–93. (p.86). 70 Julie Rak takes a dissenting view, stating that ‘Autobiography must be thought of as a discourse rather than as a genre’. Arguing for the continued use of the term, Rak asserts that autobiography ‘marks the genealogy of a discourse about genre that has never quite operated as a master narrative’. Julie Rak, Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse (Vancouver; Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2004), p. ix & p. 32. 71 According to Roy Pascal, autobiography ‘imposes a pattern on a life, constructs out of it a coherent story’ and demonstrates ‘a certain power of the personality over circumstance’. Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), pp. 9–10. This and earlier autobiographical schemata have been critiqued by feminist scholars for excluding women, who, according to Laura Marcus, critics framed as being ‘incapable of the sustained self-study, and lacking in the continuous goal-directed identity, held to be necessary for autobiographical consciousness’. Laura Marcus, Auto/ biographical discourses: criticism, theory, practice (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 65. 72 One difference between early Christian writers and later autobiographers such as Ben Franklin is that Augustine’s journey is towards self-effacement through communion with God, whereas Franklin’s work attempts to establish an independent selfhood. Marcus makes the important point that ‘The claim that autobiography is a Western genre is of course refuted by researchers into autobiography in non-Western cultures, who have also broken with the limiting, and culturally self-serving, rules of the genre’. Marcus, p. 293. 73 Paul John Eakins, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2014, first published 1985), p. 3. 74 It is worth stating that this binary is potentially problematic because it is based on the policing of generic forms according to a patriarchal and Eurocentric tradition, even if it is meant to change the privileged term in that binary. As with all genres, the boundaries are culturally constructed and, at the very least, fuzzy at the edges. 75 When they are written by privileged white men, memoirs tend to focus on hidden or unacknowledged aspects of their lives, which are often of a salacious or ‘dangerous’ nature. 76 Alfred Hornung, ‘Out of Life: Routes, Refuge, Rescue’ in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32 (2017), pp. 603–23 (p. 605). Hornung’s examples include Jack London’s The Road, as well as contemporary migration and displacement narratives. 77 Harry Kemp’s Tramping on Life is an extreme example of this stream-ofconsciousness form, consisting as it does of a single chapter 438 pages long. See Harry Kemp, Tramping on Life: an Autobiographical Narrative (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922). 78 Galen Strawson, ‘The Unstoried Life’ in On Life Writing, edited by Zachary Leader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 284–301 (pp. 286–300). 79 Jeff Ferrell, Drift: Illicit Mobility and Uncertain Knowledge (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018), p. 13.

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80 Thomas had been an itinerant musician and sometime migrant worker: see Giles Oakley, The Devil’s Music: A History of the Blues (London: British Broadcasting Company, 1976), pp. 61–69. For more on ‘Railroading Some’, see Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 51–54. 81 Alfred Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’ (1842) in Tennyson: a Selected Edition, edited by Christopher Ricks (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 141–145 (p. 142, line 18). As Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson and Lynne Pearce put it, ‘mobile subjectivity is produced through a complex array of socio-economic systems and “more than human agencies” ’. Aguiar, Mathieson and Pearce, p. 10. 82 Anon, ‘No Matter Where You Go’ in Hobo Poems (St Louis, MO: John X Kelley and Chas Kruse, 1918), p. 12. 83 The most famous sedentarist philosophy is that of Martin Heidegger in his Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962, first published in German 1927). 84 David Harvey, The Limits of Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 166 & p. 381. 85 Sau-ling Cynthia Wong calls this the ‘autobiography of Americanisation’, which she contrasts with post-World War II Chinese immigrant autobiographies in which the narrators are to a degree ‘already Americanized’ before their journey to the United States. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, ‘Immigrant Autobiography: Some Questions of Definition and Approach’ (1991) in Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), pp. 299–315 (p. 306). 86 Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart (Seattle; London: University of Washington Press, 2002, first published 1943), p. 223. Subsequent references given in the body of this Introduction. 87 Bulosan refuses to consider himself a hobo on the basis that, in his view, hobos do not work. This seems a defensive if understandable reaction to hobohemia’s racial barriers. 88 This includes the Chinese (and to a lesser extent Japanese and Korean) workers who built the railroads that facilitated the capitalistic reshaping of the US West and subsequent creation of hobohemia. See two excellent collections of poetry discovered inscribed on walls at the Angel Island detention camp, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island 1910–1940, eds. Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung (Seattle; London: University of Washington Press, 1991, first published 1980) and Voices of Angel Island: Inscriptions and Immigrant Poetry, 1910–1945, edited by Charles Egan (New York; London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 89 Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 129. 90 Ngai, p. 132. 91 While corridos have been relatively neglected, there is a substantial body of historical research on labor in the US-Mexican borderlands. See, for instance, Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an AngloHispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940 (New York: Oxford

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University Press, 1987); Devra Wever, Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Richard Steven Street, Beasts of the Field: a Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769–1913 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); Mark Wyman, Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps and the Harvesting of the West (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), pp. 128–169, pp. 187–197, pp. 228–237. 92 Cited in and translated by Dan Dickey, ‘Corridos y Canciones de las Pizcas: Ballads and Songs of the 1920s Cotton Harvests’ in Western Folklore 65:1/2 (2006), pp. 99–136 (p. 105–107). 93 Cited in Dickey, pp. 108–109 (p. 109). Translated by Dickey and Carla Hagan.

1  From Tramp to Hobo: The Representation of Postbellum US Transiency 1 Robert Service, ‘The Wanderlust’ in Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (Toronto: William Briggs, 1912), pp. 123–127 (p. 124, lines 34–42). 2 Cited in Nels Anderson, The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man. a study prepared for the Chicago council of social agencies under the direction of the Committee on Homeless Men (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1961, text originally published 1923), p. 87. 3 Bret Harte, ‘My Friend the Tramp’ in Drift From Two Shores (Cambridge, Mass: Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1878), pp. 180–197 (p. 187). Subsequent references to this text are given in the body of this chapter. 4 In popular novels of this period, such as those of Horatio Alger, tramps were portrayed less endearingly. For Alger, as John Allen notes, tramps were typically foreign, lazy and sinister. See John Allen, Homelessness in American Literature: Romanticism, Realism, and Testimony (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 55–61. As a type who engaged in drink, gambling and theft, Alger’s tramps are a threat to the safety of the young homeless boys that populate his novels. Given Alger’s admitted pederasty, there is more than a little irony, even psychological projection, in this representation. According to Michael Denning, some dime novels, such as Frederick Whittaker’s Nemo, Kings of the Tramps; or, The Romany Girl’s Vengeance (1881), achieved more complex and contested allegorical representations. See Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (London; New York: Verso, Revised Edition 1998, first published 1987), pp. 151–166. 5 The Oxford English Dictionary gives circa 1395 as the earliest known use of ‘tramp’ as a verb, while 1664 and 1790 are the earliest known uses as a noun. See OED, tramp, n.1; tramp, v.1, both entries cited at www.oed.com, [accessed 15 November 2020]. 6 Tim Cresswell, The Tramp in America (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), p. 133.

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7 Cresswell, p. 143 8 See Steven Gerrard, ‘The Great British Music Hall: Its Importance to British Culture and “The Trivial”’ in Culture Unbound Volume 5, (2013), pp. 487–514 (p. 498). 9 For more, see Marvin McAllister, ‘Bob Cole’s Willie Wayside: Whiteface Hobo, Middle Class Farmer, White Trash Hero’ in Journal of American Drama and Theatre 14 (Winter 2002), pp. 64–77. Unfortunately, the play script does not seem to have survived in order to be analysed in greater detail. 10 Trav S. D (Donald Travis Stewart), liner notes to Nat M. Wills: The Famous Tramp Comedian (Archeophone Records, 2007), p. 10. Stewart has reproduced and updated these notes here: https://travsd.wordpress.com/2013/07/11/ stars-of-vaudeville-32-nat-m-wills-2/, [accessed 15 November 2020]. 11 See San Francisco Call (San Francisco, California), 29 September 1912, p. 28; Boston Post (Boston, Massachusetts), 3 April 1917, p. 6. 12 See Nat M. Wills, A Son of Rest: Monologues, Parodies, Stories, Jokes, Etc (Chicago: M.A. Donohue and Co, 1903), p. 13, pp. 18–19, p. 48. 13 Todd DePastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago; London, The University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 160. 14 Frederick Burr Opper, ‘Happy Hooligan’ in New York Journal (11 March, 1900). Jennifer Huebscher raises the possibility that the originator of ‘Happy Hooligan’ was another illustrator, Oscar Bradley, who had based his drawings on Fred J. Lowe, a vaudeville performer who styled himself the ‘Original Happy Hooligan’. See Jennifer Huebscher, ‘Who Was the Original Happy Hooligan?’ in Minnesota History, 66:3, (2018), pp. 113–117. Happy Hooligan may have been an inspiration for Norman Rockwell’s famous 1924 illustration ‘Tramp and Dog’. 15 Jeffrey Brown, ‘Situating The Hobo’ in The Chicago School Diaspora: Epistemology and Substance, eds. Jacqueline Low and Gary Bowden (Montreal & Kingston; London; Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), pp. 287–306 (p. 292). 16 DePastino, p. 166, figure 5.5. The strip also features African-American characters, who are drawn with exaggerated facial features according to the dominant racial stereotypes of the period. 17 See Kevin Scott Collier, Happy Hooligan: the Animated Cartoons, 1916–1922 (Burbank, CA: Cartoon Research, 2018). 18 DePastino, p. 166, figure 5.5. 19 The tramp had begun in the strip with the name Weary Waddles, so the decision to change to Weary Willie indicates a desire to tap into a pre-existing figure. This stereotype was clearly known to the illustrator, since another tramp with the name Weary Willie shares the front cover with Weary Waddles and Tired Tim. See Illustrated Chips, 16 May 1896. 20 See the film at https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-weary-willie-1898 online, [accessed 15 November 2020]. 21 His unfamiliarity with hobohemia may have been one reason that Chaplin hired ex-hobo Jim Tully, author of the bestselling tramp memoir Beggars of Life (1924), as a scriptwriter.

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22 Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1978, first published 1964), p. 146. 23 Roland Barthes ‘The Poor and the Proletariat’ in Mythologies, selected and translated from the French by Annette Lavers (London, Vintage, 2000, collection first published in French in 1957), pp. 39–40 (p. 39); Raoul Sobel and David Francis, Chaplin: Genesis of a Clown (London; Melbourne; New York: Quartet Books, 1977). Sobel and Francis’ argument is particularly problematic because it is based on an assumption that tramps are dirty, degraded and entirely isolated from society. See Sobel and Francis, pp. 159–165. 24 For the Little Tramp, as Peter Ackroyd puts it, ‘Work is boring. Work is futile’. Peter Ackroyd, Charlie Chaplin (London: Chatto & Windus, 2014), p. 77. On the relationship between the Little Tramp’s inability to hold down a job and notions of troubled masculinity, see Lawrence Howe, ‘American Masculinity and the Gendered Humor of Chaplin’s Little Tramp’ in Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon Through Critical Lenses, edited by Lawrence Howe, James E. Caron, and Benjamin Click (Lanham; Toronto; Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press, 2013), p. 61–82. 25 Chaplin explicitly describes the tramp as a Pierrot in My Autobiography, p. 208. 26 See Jenish Bhandari; Pawan K. Thada; Richard M. Ratzan, ‘Tabes Dorsalis’ [Updated 16 Oct 2020] in StatPearls [Internet] (Treasure Island, Florida: StatPearls Publishing, 2020), cited at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/ NBK557891/ [accessed 11 December 2020]. 27 Stephen Wiessman, Chaplin: A Life (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2008), pp. 15–19. 28 On the association between vagrancy and disease, see Kristin O’BrassillKulfan, Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic (New York: New York University Press, 2019), pp. 134–155 and Cresswell, p. 129. 29 Charles J. Maaland, Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 14–24. 30 The Little Tramp’s libido was not entirely dampened by his censors. In City Lights (1931), Chaplin repeats the joke from His New Job by gazing with desire at a statue of a naked woman. He must have liked this visual pun whereby an object is itself objectified. It is also worth noting the scene in Modern Times (1936) in which a work-crazed Little Tramp chases after a women whose blouse buttons, placed on her nipples, he intends to tighten with a wrench having, in his disturbed state, mistaken them for nuts. 31 Cresswell, pp. 112–113. 32 Lee Harris, The Man Who Tramps, a Story of Today (Indianapolis: Douglass and Carlon, 1878), pp. 19–20. Subsequent references are given in the body of this chapter. 33 See Leon Ray Livingston, Hobo Camp-Fire Tales (Erie, Pennsylvania: The A-No1 Publishing Company, 1911), pp. 10–13. In a good example of Livingston’s loose relationship with the truth, the front cover of this book claims to be the ‘Fourteenth Edition’ even though it had not previously been published.

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For further discussion of hobo code, see ‘They Also Believe in Signs: Tramps’ Ciphers’ in School Arts Magazine 22, pp. 546–547 (May 1923) and ‘Steam Train’ Maury Graham and Robert J. Hemming, Tales of the Iron Road: My Life as King of the Hobos (New York: Paragon House, 1990), p. 24. Paranoia about working class code dates back decades (at least) and crosses national boundaries: see British journalist Henry Mayhew’s mid-century concern with costermonger slang in his London Labour and the London Poor, Volume 1 (New York: Dover Publications, 1968, first published 1851), pp. 23–24. 34 Kenneth Kusmer, Down and Out, On the Road: The Homeless in American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 48–49. 35 Walt Whitman, ‘Poem of the Road’ in Leaves of Grass (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860, originally published 1855), pp. 315–328 (p. 318, stanza 12). 36 Ibid., p. 318, stanza 13. 37 Ibid., p. 323, stanza 37. 38 Walt Whitman, ‘The Tramp and Strike Questions’ (1879) in Specimen Days and Collect (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1882), pp. 329–330. 39 Frank Charles Laubach, Why There Are Vagrants: A Study Based Upon an Examination of One Hundred Men, doctoral thesis, Columbia University (New York, 1916), p. 7. 40 Cresswell, pp. 93–6; Joel E. Black, ‘A Crime to Live Without Work: Free Labor and Marginal Workers in Industrial Chicago, 1870 to 1920’ in Michigan Historical Review 36:2 (Fall 2010), pp. 63–93 (pp. 68–69). 41 Chicago Tribune 12 July 1877, p. 8. 42 Collected from ‘From East Tennessee; mountain whites; from recitation of F. LeTellier; 1907’ in Eber Carle Perrow, ‘Songs and Rhymes from the South’ in The Journal of American Folklore 26:100 (Apr-Jun 1913), pp. 123–173 (p. 168). 43 One estimate put the number of ‘trespassers’ killed on US railroads between 1888 and 1905 as 156,390, although the real figure may be nearly three times that number. See Frank Tobias Higbie, Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880–1930 (Urbana and Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 52. In the decade between 1929 and 1939, an estimated 24,647 people died while trespassing on railroad property. See Lennon, p. 137. 44 There is a racialised and racist version of this song, collected in 1915–1916, in which a man called ‘hobo Jawn’ expresses a wish to ‘fix it so no nigger could ride,/And all niggers what rides de rods/Got to put their trust in de hands of God’. See Newman Ivey White, Negro American Folk Songs (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1928), p. 374. 45 Anderson, p. 229. 46 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. Daniel De Leon (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr and Company, 1907, first published in German 1852), p. 41. 47 Marx, p. 41. 48 Victor Berger, cited in Higbie, p. 116. 49 Jack Black, You Can’t Win (Edinburgh, London, and San Francisco: AK Press/ Nabat, 2000, first published 1926).

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50 Lucy Parsons, ‘A Word to Tramps’ in The Alarm (Chicago) 1:1 (4 Oct, 1884). Republished in 1886, this article became a damming piece of evidence in the Haymarket trial, in which six innocent labour organisers, including her husband Albert Parsons, were found guilty and later executed. As a woman, Lucy Parsons was treated as ‘legally incompetent’. Carolyn Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons: an American Revolutionary (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2012, first published 1976), pp. 93–94. 51 On Parson’s political evolution, see Ashbaugh, p. 206, p. 211 & p. 218. 52 Julia Leyda, American Mobilities: Geographies of Class, Race, and Gender in US Culture (Berlin: Transcript-Verlag, 2016), p. 12. 53 Allan Pinkerton, Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives (New York: Carleton & Co, 1878), p. 29. Subsequent references are given in the body of this chapter. 54 Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957, first published 1890), p. 42. Subsequent references are given in the body of this chapter. 55 Jacob A. Riis, The Making of an American (Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2003, from the text published in 1906, text first published in 1901), p. 260. Subsequent references are given in the body of this chapter. 56 Walter A. Wykoff, ‘A Day With a Tramp’ in A Day With a Tramp and Other Days (New York: C. Scribner’s sons, 1901), pp. 3–40 (p. 38). 57 Jack London, The Road in Novels and Social Writings, ed. Donald Pizer (New York: The Library of America, 1982, text first published 1907), p. 186. 58 Andrew D. White, cited in Josiah Flynt, Tramping With Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life (New York: The Century Company, 1899), p. vii. 59 Josiah Flynt, ‘How Men Become Tramps: Conclusions from Personal Experience as an Amateur Tramp’ in The Century 50 (October 1895), pp. 941– 945 (p. 941 & p. 945). 60 Flynt, ‘How Men Become Tramps’, p. 944. 61 Flynt, Tramping With Tramps, p. 55. Subsequent references to this text given in the body of this chapter. In his autobiography, Flynt uses the term Die Ferne to refer to the need that he felt ‘to project myself into the Beyond – the world outside of my narrow village world’, which he states ‘was my trouble from almost boyhood until comparatively a few years ago’. Josiah Flynt, My Life (New York, The Outing Publishing Company, 1908), p. 11. 62 McCook, ‘A Tramp Census and Its Revelations’ in The Forum 15:6 (August 1893), pp. 753–766 (p. 755). All material related to John James McCook comes from Yale University microfilm collection The Social Reform papers of John James McCook: a guide to the microfilm publication, edited by Adela Haberski French, assisted by Shirley Bergman Leibundguth. (Hartford, Connecticut: Connecticut Antiquarian & Landmarks Society, 1977). 63 McCook, ‘Vagabondage: What Accounts for it’ in The Trinity Tablet 28:12 (25 June 1895), pp. 273–278 (p. 277). 64 McCook, ‘The Tramp Problem’, a paper read at the National Conference of Charities and Correction held at New Haven, Conn, May 1895, reprinted in Lend a Hand 15:3 (September 1895), pp. 167–183 (p. 177).

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65 McCook, ‘Leaves from the Diary of a Tramp VII: Increase of Tramping: Cause and Cure’ in The Independent 54:2780 (13 March 1902), pp. 620–624 (p. 620). McCook also claimed, however, that tramps are let go first by employers during an economic downturn due to their habits of drinking. He continued to argue that tramping was an easy life that men, once thrown out of work, found difficult to break. 66 Kusmer, pp. 62–63. 67 Cresswell, p. 81. 68 Alice Willard Solenberger, One Thousand Homeless Men: a Study of Original Records (New York: New York charities Publication Committee, 1911), p. 139. Subsequent references to this text are given in the body of this chapter. 69 Solenberger does in fact retain the wanderlust thesis, but only for a subdivision of tramps that she calls ‘the periodical wanderer’, citing Josiah Flynt as an example. Solenberger, pp. 221–222. 70 Charles Davenport, The Feebly Inhibited, Nomadism, or the Wandering Impulse (Washington, D.C: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1915), p. 25. 71 Davenport, p. 14 & p. 23. 72 Carlton Parker, The Casual Laborer and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), p. 51. 73 Nor was Parker alone. In 1917 Peter Alexander Speek argued that tramping leads to a decrease in ‘the ambition and hope’ necessary to make a productive worker and that such individuals require ‘medical treatment’ to inculcate a capitalist work ethic. See Peter Alexander Speek, ‘The Psychology of the Floating Worker’ in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 69 (1917), pp. 72–78 (p. 76 & 78). A similar argument is also made in Robert Gault’s ‘Pathologic Vagrancy’ (1914), which cites a statement by Judge William N. Gemmill of the Chicago Municipal Court, for whom tramps are an ‘army of defeat, from whom have departed hope, pride, ambition, courage, self-sacrifice and all other qualities which distinguish the human from the animal world … They all march under the one banner upon which is written in large letters the word Failure’. Cited in Robert H. Gault, ‘Pathologic Vagrancy’ in Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 5:3 (September 1914), pp. 321–322 (pp. 321–322). 74 Bruns, p. 177. 75 Harry M. Beardsley, Along the Main Stem with Red: Being an account of the HOBOHEMIANS, Including one Paul of Tarsus and a guy named Moses (29 March 1917) unpublished manuscript, in Ernest W. Burgess Papers, box 127, folder 1, document 145, p. 11. Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. Subsequent references to text are given in the body of this chapter. 76 See Nels Anderson ‘Debate, “Hobo College” v. students from the University of Chicago, Kansas Industrial Courts, April 12, 1923’, Ernest W. Burgess Papers, box 127, folder 5, document 138. 77 For addresses of international IBWA secretaries, who presumably acted as vendors, see the July and November 1920 “Hobo” News fragments held at the New York Public Library, *ZAN-T1543. 78 Diana George and Paula Mathieu, ‘Circulating Voices of Dissent: Rewriting the Life of James Eads How and Hobo News’, Unruly Rhetorics: Protest,

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Persuasion, and Publics (Pittsburgh, PA, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), pp. 128–145 (p. 139). 79 See Owen Clayton, ‘Who Said I Was a Bum?’ Self-Presentation in the “Hobo” News, 1915–1924’ in Representing Homelessness, edited by Owen Clayton. Proceedings of the British Academy 239 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 172–196. For more on the later use of US Vagrancy laws and the successful campaign against them, see Risa Goluboff, Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 80 “Hobo” News 2:8, Nov 1916, p. 9. The St Louis Public Library has digitised their copies of the “Hobo” News and made them freely available. See https:// cdm17210.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/hobonews/search, [accessed 25 November 2020]. 81 See Clayton, pp. 191–192. 82 The OED gives Hill’s song as the first reference for this phrase. See OED, pie in the sky, n. and adj, www.oed.com, [accessed 25 November 2020]. 83 As baseball writer Charles Dryden put it in his hobo memoir, ‘That I could laugh at all in those damp and dismal surroundings did much to comfort, strengthen and sustain me. A saving sense of the ridiculous is an important adjunct to the successful hobo’. Charles Dryden, On and Off the Breadwagon: Being the Hard Luck Tales, Doings and Adventures of an Amateur Hobo (Chicago: Star Publishing Company, 1905), p. 104. 84 See Peter Cole, Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly, Second Edition (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2021). 85 On the role of women and families in the IWW, see Heather Mayer, Beyond the Rebel Girl: Women, Wobblies, Respectability, and the Law in the Pacific Northwest, 1905–1924 (Corvallis, Oregon: Oregon State University Press, 2018). For a critique of IWW iconography, see DePastino, pp. 114–116. 86 E. Lamar Bailey, ‘Tramps and Hoboes’ in Forum 26 (October 1898), pp. 217–221 (p. 218). The earliest known reference to ‘hobo’ is from an edition of Washington’s Ellensburgh Capital newspaper dated 28 November 1889, though the term must have been in use for some years before. See the OED, hobo, n. In 1894, the Chicago Tribune speculated on the origin of the noun ‘hobo’ and noted that it had already acquired a variety of meanings when used as an adjective: ‘a crowd of tramps is today an army of hobos; a felt flat hat is a hobo skypiece; a wandering compositor is a hobo printer; a tough street is a hobo neighborhood, and so on ad infinitum’. Chicago Tribune, 5 June 1894. On the possible etymology of ‘hobo’, see William Sayers, ‘Contested Etymologies of Some English Words in the Popular Register’ in Studia Neophilologica 80:1 (2008), pp. 15–29 (pp. 16–19). 87 Bailey, pp. 220–221. 88 Both definitions are cited in Nels Anderson’s The Hobo, p. 87. 89 Ian Hacking refers to the way in which people slot themselves into dynamic, ever-shifting categories as ‘Making up people’. See Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (London; Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002, first published in 1986), pp. 99–114.

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90 Cited in Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology, edited by Joyce Kornblugh (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), pp. 66–7. The frontier defence occurs only periodically in the IBWA’s “Hobo” News. See Blondy Cal ‘The Hobo Poesy’ in “Hobo” News 11:1 (January 1923), pp. 8–9 (p. 8); A. W. Dragstedt, ‘What is a hobo?’ in “Hobo” News 11: 2 (February 1923), pp. 8–9 (p. 8). 91 Citing the IBWA’s “Hobo” News as proof, in 1971 historian Clarke K. Spence claimed that hobo, tramp and bum ‘have decidedly different meanings’. Clarke K. Spence, ‘Knights of Tie and Rail – Tramps and Hoboes in the West’, in The Western Historical Quarterly 2:1 (January 1971), pp. 5–19 (p. 6).

2  In Search of Experience: Vagabond Travel Narratives 1 Harry Kemp, ‘Experience’ in Chanteys and Ballads: Sea-Chanteys, TrampBallads and Other Ballads and Poems (1920), lines 19–24, p. 104. 2 Lee Meriwether, A Tramp Trip; How to See Europe on Fifty Cents a Day, 4th Edition (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2009, 4th Edition first published 1887, text originally published 1886) p. 31. All subsequent references given in body of the chapter. 3 Francis Hodgson Burnett, Vagabondia: a Love Story (Boston: James Osgood and Company, 1884; earlier version of the novel published as Dolly in 1877), p. 55. 4 Burnett, p. 8. 5 A number of sixteenth-century publications, including Liber Vagatorum, or The Book of Vagabonds and Beggars (1510), John Awdeley’s The Fraternitye of Vagabonds (1561), Thomas Harman’s A Caveat for Common Cursitors vulgarely Called Vagabonds (1567), treated the vagabond, also known as ‘masterless men’, as a social menace and an agent of the Devil. Those deemed vagabonds could be branded as a mark of their ownership by the State. Martin Luther wrote a short Preface to the 1528 edition of The Book of Vagabonds, in which he argued that vagabonds were characterised by the fact that they were not ‘truly poor’ but merely pretended to be so to attain alms. He claimed that ‘I have myself of late years been cheated and befooled by such tramps and liars more than I wish to confess’. Arguing that vagabonds are never local, he advised readers to be wary of ‘outlandish and strange beggars’ who arrive from other locations. See Martin Luther, Preface (1528) to Liber Vagatorum, or The Book of Vagabonds and Beaggars: with a Vocabulary of their language, edited by Martin Luther, translated by John Camden Hotten (London: John Camden Hotten, 1860, first published in German in 1510), pp. 4–5. For a classic account of vagrancy in Early Modern England, see A L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985). The countercultural tradition of vagabond travel narratives traces back to sixteenth-century ‘rogue literature’, as well as to later writers like Lord Byron, John Clare and Arthur Rimbaud. 6 See Bliss Carmen and Richard Hovey, Songs from Vagabondia (1894), More Songs from Vagabondia (1896) and Last Songs from Vagabondia (1900); William

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Locke, The Beloved Vagabond (1906). Arthur Rickett attempted to summarise the nineteenth-century vagabond tradition in his book The Vagabond in Literature (London: J. M. Dent & Co, 1906), which was the first academic study to construct the tropes of the literary vagabond. Vagabonds, Rickett claims, are wanderers with a certain ‘temperament’ and ‘spirit’ (p. vii), ‘natural revolutionaries’ who possess ‘an ingrained distaste for the routine of ordinary life and the conventions of civilisation’ (p. 3). 7 Dúnlaith Bird, Travelling in Different Skins: Gender Identity in European Women’s Oriental Travelogues, 1850–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 30–31. Bird argues that female European travel writers Olympe Audouard, Isabella Bird, Isabelle Eberhardt, and Freya Stark used vagabondage to extend the physical, geographical and textual parameters that had been used to define them as women. 8 One writer who used the ‘vagabond’ label for a narrative set in one location was the British journalist and playwright Oliver Madox Hueffer in his A Vagabond in New York (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1913). The spectacle of Hueffer’s book is seeing how a British writer, suffering poverty and for a time starvation, navigates the strangeness of this iconic US city. 9 Since death tends to prevent authors from fulfilling their contractual obligations, all peril in autobiographical writings is ‘mild’. But the danger in vagabond narratives tends to be mild in another sense also: the reader is rarely supposed to assume that their author was ever truly in danger. 10 Bird, p. 55. 11 His biography’s more brutal aspects are kept out of sight. Keeler implies that he ran away from home due to abuse; later, he encounters a young man who takes care of him and lets him sleep in his bed. It is likely that one or both incidents were sexual in nature, though the author is careful to avoid being explicit on this point. For more on sexual relationships between men and young boys on the road, see Chapter 2. 12 For example, he utilises a humorous operatic conceit to describe his snoring roommates in a hotel dormitory: ‘The baritone, that came to me through the darkness from some far corner…Then there was a deep bass – the real Mephistophelian hero of that opera of sleepers…The several tenors, distributed all round me a little too lavishly for the nicer harmonies of strict musical taste…running jealously ever and anon into a dishonest falsetto, as if with a professional wish to attract attention’. Ralph Keeler, Vagabond Adventures (Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co, 1870), p. 82. Subsequent references to this text given in body of the chapter. 13 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 130. And gender privilege also, since Keeler also describes dressing up as a girl on stage. 14 David R. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London; New York: Verso, 2007, first published 1991), p. 117. 15 He also critiques Mark Twain for giving bad advice in his A Tramp Abroad (p. 23). Meriwether notes the effect that this popular book has had upon real

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world travelling when numerous guides in Turkey claim to be ‘Far Away Moses’, who featured in Twain’s account (pp. 194–5). 16 He would put his racial views more explicitly when, aged 96, he published a speech that he had given to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, entitled Let us preserve the purity of the white race and keep the records of history straight: an address (St Louis, MO: Sons of Confederate Veterans, 1958). 17 Meriwether went on to become a lawyer and gave up writing travel narratives, although he did publish several autobiographical works. 18 John Foster Fraser, Round the World on a Wheel: Being the Narrative of a Bicycle Ride of Nineteen Thousand Two Hundred and Thirty-Seven Miles Through Seventeen Countries and Across Three Continents (London: Methuen & Co, 1899); J. Willis Sayre, This City of Ours (Seattle: J. Willis Sayre, 1936). 19 See Richard Alleyn, ‘Iron mask wager “was a fib” ’ in The Daily Telegraph, 1 January 2008. For a literary example of the global circumnavigation challenge leading to a narrative of vagabondage, see William Staats, A Tight Squeeze, or the Adventures of a Gentleman who, on a Wager of Ten Thousand Dollars, Undertook to Go From New York to New Orleans in Three Weeks, Without Money, as a Professional Tramp (Boston; New York: Lee and Shepard Publishers; Charles T. Dillingham, 1879). 20 Harry Franck, A Vagabond Journey Around the World (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1910), p. xiii. Subsequent references to this text given in the body of the chapter. 21 In a similar incident earlier in the book, Franck was caught having not paid his full fare to sail from Naples to Nice. He was released without punishment. See Franck, p. 76. 22 On the ‘beachcomber’ in British literature and culture, see Alistair Robinson, Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in NineteenthCentury Literature and Culture (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 195–217. 23 In a later work, Vagabonding Down the Andes (1917), Franck notes the contradiction of trying to be both a vagabond and a gentleman. Having stayed over in Bogota, Columbia, in preparation for walking to Quito in Ecuador, he worries that he has been affected by ‘dallying with the bourgeois comforts of civilisation’. Harry Franck, Vagabonding Down the Andes, being the narrative of a journey, chiefly afoot, from Panama to Buenos Aires (New York: The Century Company, 1917), p. 40. To tramp through the Columbian rainforest, he hires a cargador, whom Franck terms ‘Rain in the Face’, to carry his supplies. The supplies prove too heavy, however, and the man quits. After hiring ‘two feeble youths’ to carry most of his supplies, the author reflects that he ‘had already reduced to an absurdity the experiment of trying to mix the tramp and the gentleman. “A sahib”, said Kim, “is always tied to his baggage”.’ (p. 48). The citation of colonialist language (‘sahib’) highlights the paradox of the vagabond traveller who makes a spectacle of his lack of money while using his racial (and in this case, also financial) privilege to get by.

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24 He also meets an Irish Buddhist priest who states that he had been a ‘hobo’, a claim to which Franck raises no nationalistic objection. Franck, A Vagabond Journey Around the World, p. 361. 25 Notably, the men are only discovered on the train when an English officer finds them. See p. 370–371. 26 Stephen Graham, A Vagabond in the Caucasus: with some notes of his experiences among the Russians by Stephen Graham (London; New York: The Bodley Head and John Lane Company, 1911), p. 287. Subsequent references to this text given in the body of the chapter. 27 In his second book, Undiscovered Russia (1912), Graham references Nietzsche as an influence on his understanding of the intellectual elite embodied by the spiritual vagabond. See Stephen Graham, Undiscovered Russia (London; New York: The Bodley Head and John Lane Company, 1912), pp. 283–284. He also refers to tramps as ‘the orphans of kings’ (p. 272). 28 Stephen Graham, A Tramp’s Sketches (London; Edinburgh; New York; Toronto; Paris: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd, 1912), p. 7. Subsequent references to this text given in the body of the chapter. 29 As Robert F. Sayre put it in 1968, Lindsay is ‘somehow very remote from us. His Bible-belt rhetoric, his association with old lost causes like foreign missions and the Anti-Saloon League, or his seeming Sunday-school innocence are aspects of an abandoned provincial America most people at colleges and universities are glad to be rid of…Many readers would overlook Lindsay’s obvious weaknesses, however, were his work more centrally “modern”’. Robert F. Sayre, ‘Vachel Lindsay’ in Vachel Lindsay, Adventures, Rhymes and Designs (New York: Eakins Press, 1968), pp. 7–41 (p. 9). 30 Robert Sayre, p. 25. 31 Vachel Lindsay, ‘The Gospel of Beauty’ (1912) in Vachel Lindsay, Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (Memphis, Tennessee: Bottom of the Hill Publishing, 2013, book first published 1914), pp. 9–11. Subsequent references from this collection given in the body of the chapter. 32 Vachel Lindsay, Rhymes to be Trade for Bread (Self published, 1912), final page [text is unpaginated]. Subsequent references to this text given in the body of the chapter. NB: the poems in the original volume are typed entirely in capital letters. 33 NB: Asterisks in the original text are used as ellipses. 34 Later he walks on the rail ties to keep above the mud, noting that ‘Keeping company with the railroad is almost a habit’ (p. 39). 35 ‘The Santa Fe Trail’ (1914), one of his most famous and popular poems, presents the vagabond as being free to avoid work: ‘I am the tramp’, the speaker announces, ‘I nap and amble and yawn and look/Write fool thoughts in my grubby book,/Recite to the children, explore at my ease/Work when I work, beg when I please’. Vachel Lindsay, ‘The Santa Fe Trail: a Humouresque’ (1914) in Selected Poems of Vachel Lindsay (New York: Macmillan, 1963), lines 33–38, p. 31. 36 The letters indicate that his interlocutor wrote back expressing concern that he was undertaking physical labour in the fields. Lindsay replied: ‘Let me assure

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you that your letter will be heeded. I know pretty well, by this time, what I can stand, but if I feel the least bit unfit I will not go into the sun’ (p. 85). 37 He later jokes that the Mennonites he meets, who drive in cars and wear luxurious clothes in spite of their religious prescriptions against such things, are ‘keeping their rules against finery as well as I am keeping mine against the railroad’ (p. 58). 38 Vachel Lindsay, A Handy Guide for Beggars, especially those of the poetic fraternity. Being sundry explorations, made while afoot and penniless in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. These adventures convey and illustrate the rules of beggary for poets and some others (New York: The Macmillan Company Publishers, 1916), p. 161. Subsequent references to this text given in the body of the chapter. 39 Lindsey also suffered from seizures, which biographer Eleanor Ruggles characterises as being caused by epilepsy. Eleanor Ruggles, The West-Going Heart: a Life of Vachel Lindsay (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1959), pp. 323–324. 40 Later, when asked why he does not get a job, Lindsay responds that when he lived in the city ‘I wanted to paint rainbows and gild sidewalks and blow bubbles for a living. But no one wanted me to. It is about all I am fit for’ (p. 191). 41 Lindsay’s poem ‘William Booth Enters Into Heaven’ (1913) earned him $500 from Poetry magazine, and made him famous upon its publication. 42 Michael Hughes, Beyond Holy Russia: The Life and Times of Stephen Graham (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2014), p. 177. 43 Hughes, p. 180. 44 Hughes, p. 183. 45 This was the culmination of a process that had begun several years before with his publication of With Poor Immigrants to America (1914) and Children of the Slaves (1920). In the former book, Graham observes that US tramps are despised on the grounds that they do not work. In the latter, he follows William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to describe, with a mixture of racism and sympathy, the after-effects of the Civil War on twentieth-century race relations. Children of the Slaves focuses more on history than geography, marking a shift in Graham’s style toward the mainstream travel narrative. 46 Stephen Graham, Tramping with a Poet in the Rockies (London: Macmillan and Co, 1922), pp. 64–66. Subsequent references to this text are given in the body of the chapter. 47 Lindsay’s most famous poem is, of course, the innovative but highly problematic ‘The Congo’ (1914), in which he adopts a supposedly primitive African voice and rhythm. 48 Lindsay also criticised the masculinist ideology of hard work, stating that most Americans think ‘it is effeminate to take more than two week’s holiday’. Tramping with a Poet, p. 178. 49 Graham did not write another work of spiritual vagabondage following Tramping with a Poet, turning instead to mainstream travel narratives. He did, however, write a summation of what he had learned during his time as

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a spiritual vagabond, entitled The Gentle Art of Tramping (1926). Written with a humorous tone, the book argues that tramping is a temporary relief for the tired worker rather than a valid alternative lifestyle, as his previous works had suggested: ‘what a relief to cease being for a while a grade-three clerk, or grade-two clerk who has reached his limit’. Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping (London: Holmes Press, 2011, text first published 1926), p. 2. He portrays tramping as a form of slumming aimed at gathering ‘human experience’ (p. 180) and discusses the paradox of writing a book that commodifies the simple life: ‘Admitted that it is a vice of ourselves, we professional litteraires, we go and then partially spill over when we return, selling the wine of experience for so much’ (p. 208). Such commodification represents the only means of survival for the writer of vagabond travel narratives. 50 Vachel Lindsay, Going-to-the-Sun (New York; London: D Appleton and Company, 1923), p. 1. Subsequent references to this collection given in the body of the chapter. 51 Lindsay even claims that Going-to-the-Sun ‘is drawn, not written’ (p. 4). 52 Glacier National Park is ancestral land of the Blackfoot people, who suffered massacres and starvation at the hands of white settlers until they were coerced into ceding the land to the US government. 53 Vachel Lindsay, Going-to-the-Stars (New York; London: D. Appleton and Company, 1926), p. 8. Subsequent references to this collection given in the body of the chapter. 54 Ruggles, p. 430. 55 See Bill Quirke’s various articles in the “Hobo” News, now digitized by the St Louis Public Library. https://cdm17210.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/ collection/hobonews/search, [accessed 02 March 2021]; see also Bart Kennedy, A Man Adrift: Being Leaves from a Nomad’s Portfolio (London: Greening and Co, 1904); William Henry Davies, The Autobiography of a Supertramp (Llandysul, Wales: The Library of Wales, 2013, text first published 1907); Windy Bill (possible real name of Ben Goodkind), An American Hobo in Europe: a True Narrative of the Adventures of a Poor American at Home and in the Old Country (San Francisco: Press of the Calkins Publishing House, 1907); Henry Herbert Knibbs, Songs of the Outlands: Ballads of the Hobos and Other Verse (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914); Harry Kemp, Tramping on Life: an Autobiographical Narrative (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922); Roger Payne, Why Work? Or, the Coming “Age of Leisure and Plenty” (Boston, Mass: Meador Publishing Company, 1939). Grayson’s genteel travelogue The Friendly Road (1913) in turn influenced Barbara Starke, whose work I discuss in Chapter 4. Other genteel travel narratives include Sam T. Clover, Leaves From a Diary: a Tramp Around the World (Chicago: M. D. Kimball, Publisher, 1884); Hilaire Belloc, The Old Road: from Canterbury to Winchester (London: Constable and Company, 1904); Herbert Walsh, The New Gentleman of the Road (Philadelphia: Wm. F. Fell, Co, 1921).

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56 See, for example, https://expertvagabond.com/travel-blog/, [accessed 12 March 2021]; Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel (New York: Ballantine Books, 2016, first published 2002); Grant Lingel, Imagine: A Vagabond Story (Minneapolis: Langdon Street Press, 2009); www.vagabond.se/ [accessed 12 March 2021]. As in the examples discussed in this chapter, the majority of these contemporary ‘vagabonds’ are white. For more on the ‘digital nomad’, see the Conclusion.

3  Vulnerable Youth and Hobosexuality in the Works of Jack London and A-No.1 1 Hart Crane, ‘The River’ in The Bridge (New York; London: Liveright, 1992, first published 1933), p. 18 (lines 52–59). 2 Henry E Huntington Library Jack London Collection; San Marino, California, JL 3151. All subsequent references from this collection are given the prefix ‘JL’, while references from other collections at the Huntington are prefixed with ‘HEH’. 3 Charmian London’s diary indicates that she and her husband went to a charity dinner at the State Hospital that evening. See JL 225 LONDON, Charmian (Kittredge). Diary. 1911. A.Ms. 1 vol. 8vo. 4 Jack London, The Road in Novels and Social Writings, ed. Donald Pizer (New York: The Library of America, 1982, text first published 1907), p. 285. Subsequent references given in parentheses. 5 John D. Seelye, for example, notes that ‘London’s book is patent propaganda’ yet still describes his hoboing according to the logic of what I call the frontier defence (see the Introduction and Chapter 5 of this book): ‘As Turneresque as any frontiersman, London found his wilderness in a labyrinth of rails’. John D. Seelye, ‘The American Tramp: A Version of the Picaresque’ in American Quarterly 15:4 (1963), 535–553 (p.546). 6 Richard W. Etulain, ‘Introduction’ to Jack London on the Road: The Tramp Diary and Other Hobo Writings, ed. Richard W. Etulain (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1979), pp. 1–27 (p. 21). 7 Jonathan Auerbach, Male Call: Becoming Jack London (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 216. 8 Scott Derrick, ‘Making a Heterosexual Man: Gender, Sexuality and Narrative in the Fiction of Jack London’ in Rereading Jack London, eds Leonard Cassuto and Jeanne Campbell Reesman (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 110–129 (p. 111). 9 Charmian London to Upton Sinclair, no date (pre-1955). JL 10571. This is a Xerox copy of an original letter held at The Lilly Library, Indiana. 10 A notable recent exception is James L. Haley’s Wolf: The Lives of Jack London (New York: Basic Books, 2010). This book performs a valuable service in bringing questions of sexuality to the forefront of London scholarship, though Haley does tend to presume that London had a sexual relationship with George Sterling rather than attempt to prove it. There remains an

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absence of evidence around this biographical question, and one’s answer to it depends upon how one interprets that absence. Biographer Jay Williams discusses London’s sexuality briefly, and also provides a Queer Theory reading of The Sea Wolf. See Jay Williams, Author Under Sail: the Imagination of Jack London, 1902–1907 (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2021), p. xiii & pp. 106–108. 11 See Auerbach, pp. 178–226; Derrick 110–29; Burt Bender, Evolution and ‘the Sex Problem’: American Narratives During the Eclipse of Darwinism (Kent, Ohio; London: Kent State University Press, 2004), pp. 76–78. 12 Jack London to Cloudesely Tremenhare Johns, 17 April 1899. JL 12093. 13 London to Johns, 22 April 1899. JL 12094. 14 London also experimented with cross-dressing in his early short story ‘The Handsome Cabin Boy’ (1899), in which a male sailor fools the narrator into thinking that he is a woman. The narrator soon falls in love with the cabin boy: ‘How she had changed things! A neatly turned ankle on the cabin stairs, a twinkling slipper along the deck, a girl’s light laughter, a song at twilight, a – in short, the ineffable something of a woman’s presence.’ Jack London, ‘The Handsome Cabin Boy’ in The Complete Short Stories of Jack London, Volume 1 (Scotts Valley, California: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015), p. 436–439 (p. 438). 15 As Jay Williams points out, London also enjoyed dressing up in his future wife Charmian’s clothing. Williams, p. xiii. 16 London to Johns, 29 April 1899. JL 12095. 17 London sent Johns a photograph but Johns’ images seems to have been either a drawing or a painting. Photographs were a frequent form of flirtatious exchange during this time period. See Owen Clayton, ‘Flirting with Photography: Henry James and Photographic Exchange’ in History of Photography, 41:4, eds. Owen Clayton and Jim Cheshire (Nov 2017), pp. 329–342. 18 London to Johns, 29 July 1899, JL12105. 19 Jack London to Charmian London, 3 July 1903. JL 12429. 20 London’s most homoerotically charged short story, ‘The Heathen’, is a fictionalised portrayal of a Man-Comrade relationship, also involving the dominance of a white man over a Hawaiian native. 21 Spiro Orfans to Jack London, 30 November 1910. JL 16104. 22 Orfans to London, 18 March, 1912. JL 16107. This letter does not state a year but from contextual clues it is likely to be 1912. 23 Orfans to London, 9 June 1912. JL 16108. 24 Orfans to London, 13 February 1913. JL 16109. 25 Orfans to London, 8 August 1913. JL 16111. 26 Orfans wrote: You create a character who proceeds to the house tops and from there he beats his chest and yells something like this: Tweet, tweet, tweet, I am it, I am it, I am it, My hair is blond, my eyes are blue,

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Rickety, blickety, hoolabaloo A Prince to be sure and noble by birth To the rest of you, you scum of the earth.

Orfans to London, 24 February 1916. JL 16128. Also see correspondence JL 13006, JL 16122, and JL 16129. 27 London to Orfans, 22 March 1916. JL 13007. 28 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p. 13. 29 Todd DePastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago; London, The University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 88. 30 By the late eighteenth century, the word ‘gay’ was used to signify a female prostitute. This may have been an influence upon the term ‘gay-cat’. See the OED, gay, n. 31 See Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in TwentiethCentury America (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 99. 32 Josiah Flynt, ‘Homosexuality Among Tramps’ (1907) in Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume I, ed. Havelock Ellis (New York: Random House, 1940), p. 360. 33 See Roving Bill Aspinwall: Dispatches from a Hobo in Post-Civil War America, edited by Owen Clayton (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House Books, 2022), p. 179. 34 See, for example, P. Davis, ‘Child Labor and Vagrancy’ in Chautauquan 50:416–24 (May 1908); Towne Nylander, ‘Tramps and Hoboes’ in Forum 74 (1925), p. 230; Nels Anderson, ‘The Juvenile and the Tramp’ in Journal of Criminology and Criminal Law 14 (August 1922), 290–312; Charles Ashleigh, Rambling Kid (London: Faber, 1930); Clairette P. Armstrong, 660 Runaway Boys: Why Boys Desert Their Homes (Boston: Gorham Press, 1932); the film Wild Boys of the Road (dir William Wellman, 1933); Thomas Minehan’s Boys and Girl Tramps of America (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1934); Kingsley Davis, Youth in the Depression (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1935); George Outland, Boy Transiency in America (Santa Barbara, California: Santa Barbara State College Press, 1939). 35 Nathan Bryan Titman, The Drift of Desire: Performing Gay Masculinities through Leisure, Mobility, and Non-Urban Space, 1910–1945 (PhD thesis, University of Iowa, 2014), p. 32. 36 Heather Tapley, ‘Mapping the Hobosexual: a Queer Materialism’ in Sexualities 15:3–4 (2012), 373–390 (p. 376). 37 See Leon Ray Livingston to Charmian London, 18 Jan 1917, JL 9320. 38 See Livingston’s various requests, sometimes made more than once in the same letter: Leon Ray Livingston to Jack London, 7 January 1910, JL 9323; 10 December 1910, JL 9325; 7 September 1911, JL 9327; 17 October 1911, JL 9328. 39 The editors of the authoritative collection of London’s correspondence incorrectly state that the pair met in 1894, implying that they had been road partners. See The Letters of Jack London, Volume Three (Stanford, California: Stanford

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University Press, 1988), eds. Earle Labor, Robert Leitz, Irving Shepherd, fn 1, pp. 1047–1048. Russ Kingman goes further, explicitly asserting that they had been road partners. See Russ Kingman, A Pictorial Life of Jack London (New York: Crown Publishers, 1979), p. 235. 40 See Leon Ray Livingston to Charmian London, 18 Jan 1917. JL 9320. In this letter, Livingston thanks Charmian London for giving her permission, which suggests that his request must have been several weeks earlier. 41 See ‘Hobos Banquet and Bums Feed’ in Chicago Tribune, 21 May 1907. Although several hobos took his moniker, Livingston was presenting himself to newspapers as a ‘famous hobo’ at least as early as 1908, and it seems likely that he was the A-No.1 invited to this banquet. See ‘Famous Hobo Drops into City for Visit’ in The Despatch (Moline, Illinois), 2 July 1908. 42 Susan Phillips, The City Beneath: A Century of Los Angeles Graffiti (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), p. 22. 43 Robert Emmette McNamara to Jack London, 15 May 1915. JL 14637. McNamara assumed Livingston to be dead and did not realise that London was already acquainted with him. In The Modern Hobo (1913), Lou Light’s tramp companion draws his attention to A-No1’s mark, stating ‘the bo who made that mark on that water tank has bummed all over the world and you can see his sign in nearly every country’. Lou Light, The Modern Hobo: Ocean to Ocean (Santa Anna, California, Worden Printing Company, 1913), p. 25. 44 That this was his practice is clear from the near-identical wording in different newspaper accounts of Livingston’s life, most of which begin by telling how A-No.1 turned up at the office having recently ridden into town. See ‘A GENTLEMAN HOBO. Strange Story of “A No.1”, Who Claims Jack London as a Friend’ in Lynchburg, Va News, (2 April 1911); ‘Celebrated Tramp Visited Richmond’ in Richmond Palladium (16 July 1911); ‘A-No.1, The Rambler – World’s [Most] Famous Tramp Paid Fremont A Visit Saturday’ in The Springfield Weekly Republican (11 September 1911); ‘A.No-1 Comes to Rochester’ in Rochester News (3 September 1912). All newspapers available on microfilm in HEH Jack London Scrapbooks. 45 See flyer accompanying letter from Livingston to Charmian London, 20 May 1917. JL 9322; also see the advert for Hobo-Camp-Fire Tales at the end of Life and Adventures of A-No.1. 46 ‘World’s Most Famous Tramp Visits the City on Friday – Author of Books to Keep Boys from Being Tramps’ in Portsmouth Herald (26 October 1912). HEH JL Collection. 47 In response, London wrote: ‘If I should give this new reason you suggest, I’d be in a pretty pickle and a proved damn lair to all the world. I can go pretty far, but I can’t make a direct and palpable liar of myself. You are making a mistake in telling folks this fairy-tale’. Jack London to Leon Ray Livingston, 28 October 1911. JL 12413. London did not mind lying for A.No-1, but he did object to being caught doing so. 48 Leon Ray Livingston, Life and Adventures of A-No.1, America’s Most Celebrated Tramp (Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania: The A-No.1 Publishing Company, 1910), pp. 14–15. Subsequent references to this text given in parentheses.

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49 In 1896, the Boston Globe reported on the case of a young boy who had been lured to the road by a tramp: ‘They filled me up with stories of Rock Candy Mountains, Cigarette grove, Sandwich grove and all such places’. See The Boston Globe (Boston, Mass), 11 Feb 1896, p. 5. In 1889, the Hutchinson News (Kansas) wrote of a 13-year-old boy who had fallen in with a group of tramps: ‘In the vernacular well known among young toughs, High Bridge told his story to a reporter. He said that New York Red had induced young Morgan to accompany him as a tramp by visionary tales of rock candy mines and lemonade springs’. Hutchinson News (Kansas), 02 October 1889, p. 3. In the same year, the phrases ‘lemonade springs’ and ‘rock candy mountains’ are used by a newsboy who is considering taking time off to rest. The reporter who overhears them is startled enough to wonder ‘whether that boy simply picked that phrase up or whether he imagined it and is a poet in embryo’. See Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia), 28 July 1899, p. 8. See other references to ‘Rock Candy Mountain’ as a lure in Middletown Daily Argus (Middletown, New York), 23 April 1897, p. 5; The Allen County Republican-Gazette (Lima, Ohio), 03 October 1899, p. 3; and as a hobo song in The Indianapolis Star (Indianapolis, Indiana), 17 March 1907, p. 22. For references to ‘cigarette groves’, see Lewiston Evening Teller (Lewiston, Idaho), 30 April 1907, p. 7; Galena Weekly Republican (Galena, Kansas), 14 July 1911, p. 2; Leavenworth New Era (Leavenworth, Kansas), 11 March 1921, p. 4. A version of the phrase later appears in Thomas Wolfe’s 1935 short story ‘The Bums at Sunset’, in which a hobo mockingly (and in phonetic Irish brogue) tells a young boy that if he goes with his older partner, a jocker, ‘He’ll show yuh de – woild, I ain’t kiddin’ yuh! He’ll take yuh up to Lemonade Lake an’ all t’roo Breadloaf valley – won’t yuh, Bull? He’ll show yuh where de ham trees are and where de toikeys grow on bushes – won’t yuh, Bull?’ Thomas Wolfe, ‘The Bums at Sunset’ (1935) in The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, editor Francis E. Skipp (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), pp. 274–278 (p. 275–276). 50 Like most vernacular songs, there are multiple versions, while McClintock’s authorship is disputed. Livingston’s reference to ‘cigarette grove’ indicates his familiarity with an early version of the song, since this line appears in the 1928 recording as ‘cigarette trees’. See a version of the lyrics reprinted, with the references to anal rape omitted but still maintaining a sense of sexual threat, in George Milburn’s The Hobo’s Hornbook: A Repertory for a Gutter Jongleur (New York: Ives Washburn, 1930), p. 61–62. For more on the song’s influences and cultural legacy, see Hal Rammel, Nowhere in America: The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Other Comic Utopias (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990, p. 10 & pp. 26–27; Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 212; Graham Raulerson, ‘Hoboes, Rubbish, and “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” in American Music 31:4 (2013), pp. 420–449. 51 Like London, Frenchy defines a gay-cat as an amateur, a ‘loafing labourer who works maybe a week, gets his wages and vagabonds about, hunting for another “pick and shovel” job’ (p. 34).

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52 In The Trail of the Tramp, Livingston writes a note at the beginning of a chapter that describes a pair of jockers (whom he refers to as ‘plingers’) manipulating and kidnapping two young punks: ‘The actual experiences of the author, who when a young boy was at one time a plinger’s road kid, are embodied into this chapter and have been even far more revolting than herein described.’ Leon Ray Livingston, The Trail of the Tramp (Erie, Pennsylvania, The A-No.1 Publishing Company, 1911), p. 48. 53 Livingston’s third book, also his first work of acknowledged fiction, is entirely dedicated to this idea. The Curse of Tramp Life (Erie, Pennsylvania: The A-No.1 Publishing Company, 1912) is a portrayal of its narrator’s attempts to save a young, middle-class punk, Buford Braxton, from the clutches of a jocker known as Railroad Jack. Also see The Adventures of a Female Tramp (Erie, Pennsylvania: The A-No.1 Publishing Company, 1914), in which a jocker called Erie Jack searches for a punk to abuse. 54 Leon Ray Livingston, From Coast to Coast with Jack London (Erie, Pennsylvania: The A-No.1 Publishing Company, 1917), p.11. Subsequent references given in parentheses. 55 Sexologists often connected the terms homosexuality and degeneracy. This is particularly true of Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing’s Sexual Psychopathy: A Clinical-Forensic Study (1886). See Canaday, pp. 29–31. 56 From Coast to Coast with Jack London is morally didactic throughout. Although the pair hop trains illegally, they are willing to work and also act in a variety of other upstanding ways. This is the case even to their own detriment as, for example, when they agree to cover for a railroad worker whom they bribe for a ride on a train (pp. 73–74). When they do steal a boat, the companions are swiftly punished: coming down with malarial fever that forces them off the road (pp. 131–132). The moralistic aspect of Livingston’s narratives distinguishes his works from most tramp life-writing, as well as giving his accounts their justified reputation for unreliability. 57 Peter Boag, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 15–44. 58 London’s use of ‘Fairyland’ was itself taken from Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859–1885), though it is unlikely that Livingston was aware of this fact. 59 In ‘How I Became a Socialist’ (1903), he acknowledged the power of patriarchal ideology upon his sense of self: ‘To be a MAN was to write man in large capitals on my heart. To adventure like a man, and fight like a man, and do a man’s work (even for a boy’s pay) – these were the things that reached right in and gripped hold of me as no other thing could’. Jack London, ‘How I Became a Socialist’ (1903) in Jack London on the Road, p. 98. In John Barleycorn (1913), the key proof of manliness is treating other men to rounds of drinks in saloons. One price that London pays for his toxic masculinity is alcoholism. 60 Etulain, p. 18; see also the version of The Road reproduced in The Pan Jack London: Volume Two, ed. Arthur Calder-Marshall (London: Pan Books, 1964), pp. 269–382.

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61 The book’s illustrations are also weakly connected to the text itself: drawings and obviously staged photographs of a Jack London lookalike, they announce the book’s theatricality and its intention to emphasise adventure over serious social investigation. 62 Paul Durica, ‘“The Ragged Edge of Noneentity”: Jack London and the Transformation of the Tramp, 1878–1907’ in The Oxford Handbook of Jack London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp.471–489 (p. 483). 63 George Brett to Jack London, 17 June 1907. JL3099. See reviews in the Chicago Examiner, 29 December 1907, Minneapolis Tribune, 05 Jan 1908, and the Chicago Standard, 11 Jan 1908. 64 John Allen, Homelessness in American Literature: Romanticism, Realism, and Testimony (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), p. 95 & p. 109. 65 Jack London to George Brett, 28 Jan 1907. JL11088. 66 Years earlier, he had written himself a note to ‘get Josiah Flynt’s glossary to ‘Tramps and Tramping’. JL 1371, Wanderlust: [notes for study]. [pre 1901]. See Josiah Flynt, Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life (New York: The Century Company, 1899), pp.392–398. Also see London’s own list of ‘tramp vernacular’, JL 882, ‘Leith-Clay Randolph: [notes for tramp stories] [pre-1907]’. 67 See JL 758, ‘Holding Her Down’, p.355, p.358, p.362; JL 1047, ‘The Pen’, p.349; JL 1052, ‘Pictures’, p. 307; JL 1127, ‘Road Kids and Gay Cats’, typewritten manuscript. 68 John Lennon, Boxcar Politics: The Hobo in U.S Culture and Literature, 1869– 1956 (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), p. 74. 69 Lennon, p. 75. 70 Michael Kimmel, The Gender of Desire: Essays on Male Sexuality (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 2005) p. 33. 71 Susan Phillips, Thomas Chambers, and Javier Abarca, Tramp Directories, Noms-de-Road and Unwritten Codes: A Souvenir of Hobo Graffiti (Madrid: Urbanario, 2017), pp. 21–22 & pp. 89–105. The buildings also have a 1905 carving by A-No.1, making the Red Bluff buildings a veritable ‘who’s who’ of tramp monikers. My thanks to Susan Phillips for sharing this information with me. 72 One problem for linking The Road to the Red Bluff carvings is that the former’s dates are inconsistent. London writes that he was railroading across Canada in search of Skysail Jack on ‘9-15-94,’ but he then suggests that this was ‘October 15, 1894,’ a confusion of dates which is also present in the manuscript and published versions of the Cosmopolitan article ‘Hoboes That Pass in the Night.’ This seems to be a typo, and it is uncertain which date London meant. The date on the Red Bluff film, which is underneath a carving of Skysail and several other names (possibly the ‘Boo Gang’ mentioned in The Road, p. 258), is ‘10/16/94’. It is improbable that Skysail’s gang could have been in California and Montreal on consecutive days. If the Red Bluff marks are by London and The Road’s Skysail Jack, then the most likely month for London’s Canadian tramping is September.

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73 It is not a coincidence that the chapter ends with a sequence in which London and a group of white transients are served by a black hobo fetching their drinks, in what is an attempt to reassert both racial and gender dominance. I discuss this scene in more detail in Chapter 7. 74 London seems to have misunderstood vagrancy laws, which did not require an offender to sleep in a location in order to be arrested. 75 Joseph Noel claims that London, in a discussion about Rimbaud’s homosexuality, told him: ‘Sailors are that way too. Prisoners in cells are also that way’ Joseph Noel, Footloose in Arcadia: A Personal Record of Jack London, George Sterling, Ambrose Bierce (New York: Carrick & Evans, 1940), p. 224. 76 London told his publisher, ‘It is I who have taken the liberty of forestalling the objections you could not state’. Jay Williams comments: ‘You should be thankful, said the letter in between the lines. I could have been honest instead of sincere. As many a biographer has wondered, what exactly did he leave out?’. Williams, p.565. 77 John James McCook, for example, describes the practice of anal sex among tramps as ‘licentiousness of incredible horror and impossible of belief but for the concurrence of evidence’. John James McCook, ‘Leaves from the Diary of a Tramp V’ in The Independent 59:2772 (16 January 1902), pp. 154–160 (p.155). 78 In contrast to Louise E. Wright’s claim that ‘London’s definition of ­homosexual … depended on sex object choice rather than gender role performance’, I argue that for London being a man meant being the dominant partner. Louise E. Wright, ‘Talk About Real Men: Jack London’s Correspondence with Maurice Magnus’ in The Journal of Popular Culture 40:2 (2007), 361–377 (365). 79 Jack London, ‘Frisco Kid’s Story’ (1895) in Jack London on the Road: The Tramp Diary and Other Hobo Writings, ed. Richard W. Etulain (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1979), pp. 61–64 (p. 62). Subsequent references given in parentheses. 80 Jack London, ‘The Road’ (written 1897) in Jack London on the Road: The Tramp Diary and Other Hobo Writings, ed. Richard W. Etulain (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1979), pp. 69–79 (p.69). Subsequent references given in parentheses. 81 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion, Volume 1, 2nd Edition (London: F. A Davis Company, 1901, first published 1897), p. 191. 82 According to the journalist and playwright Joseph Noel, upon seeing a group of homosexual men in mascara during a 1912 visit to New York, London commented: ‘Wherever you herd men together and deny them women their latent sex perversions come to the surface. It’s a perfectly natural result of a natural cause’. Noel, p. 224. 83 Jack London, ‘And Frisco’ Kid Came Back’ (1895) in Jack London on the Road: The Tramp Diary and Other Hobo Writings, ed. Richard W. Etulain (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1979), pp. 65–68 (pp.66–67). 84 Lennon, p. 64. 85 DePastino, p. 69.

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86 Jack London, ‘The Tramp’ (1904) in Jack London on the Road: The Tramp Diary and Other Hobo Writings, ed. Richard W. Etulain (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1979), pp. 121–136 (p. 134). 87 A similar event occurs in Martin Eden, in which the character Joe Dawson becomes a hobo to escape the backbreaking labour of running a laundry business. 88 A-No.1’s legacy was commented upon by Nels Anderson, who noted that in the early 1920s other tramps were adopting his road moniker in homage. See Nels Anderson, The Hobo: the sociology of the homeless man. A study prepared for the Chicago Council of Social Agencies under the direction of the Committee on Homeless Men (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1961, text originally published 1923), p. 94, footnote 46. In The Milk and Honey Route (1931), writing under the pseudonym Dean Stiff and making a parodic reference to T-Bone Slim, Anderson also stated: ‘My friend, Sirloin Slim, claims that this character [A-No.1] never existed and that his monicker is just another pun of the road and should read “A No One”.’ Dean Stiff (Nels Anderson), The Milk and Honey Route: A Handbook for Hobos with a comprehensive and unexpurgated glossary, illustrated by Ernie Bushmiller (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1931), p. 37.

4  ‘That’s Why the Lady Is a Tramp’: The Hidden Story of Female Transiency 1 Barbara Starke (Helen L. Card), note on cover letter to Touch and Go manuscript. Author Files, Helen Card, Bobbs-Merrill mss, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. 2 Frank Sinatra sings the de-politicised version of ‘That’s Why the Lady Is a Tramp’ in the film Pal Joey (1957), the plot of which is entirely separate from Babes in Arms. The song appears during a scene in which Joey, a misogynistic, manipulative nightclub singer who at the start of the film has seemingly slept with an underage girl, seduces Vera Simpson, a wealthy socialite. At first Simpson, who worked as a stripper before her marriage, is offended by the term ‘tramp’, but as Joey’s song progresses, she reinterprets the term as a compliment to mean a woman who is free and unconventional. The song’s melody then becomes a leitmotif associated with Vera, who increasingly acts in a controlling manner towards Joey, thereby justifying his original designation of her as a tramp. 3 For the earlier lyrics, see Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Babes in Arms: Piano-Vocal Selections (New York: Williamson Music/Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation, 2013). The original script of Babes in Arms is held at the New York Public Library. My thanks to Dominic Symonds for his assistance. 4 See Oxford English Dictionary, ‘tramp, n.1’ www.oed.com/view/Entry/204 517?rskey=srCytW&result=1#eid, accessed 27th July 2020. Blues singer Star Page was known as the ‘tuneful tramp’, which was meant to signify the promiscuity of her musical persona.

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5 Earlier terms for a female transient included ‘bag’ (as in bag-lady) and ‘petticoat bum’. 6 Stephanie Golden, The Women Outside: Meanings and Myths of Homelessness (Berkeley, Lost Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1992), p. 135. 7 Alexandra Ganser, Roads of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women’s Road Narratives, 1970–2000 (Rodopi: New York, 2009), p. 14 & p. 19. 8 Ganser, p. 19. 9 Heather Tapley, ‘In Search of the Female Hobo’ in Atlantis 34.I (2009), pp. 58–67 (p. 64). 10 Frank Charles Laubach, Why There Are Vagrants: A Study Based Upon an Examination of One Hundred Men, doctoral thesis, Columbia University (New York: 1916), p. 71.12 11 Christine Photinos, ‘Transiency and Transgression in the Autobiographies of Barbara Starke and “Boxcar” Bertha Thompson’ in Women’s Studies 35 (2006), 657–681 (p. 659). 12 Golden, p. 97. 13 In his novella The Adventures of a Female Tramp (1914), Livingston portrays a dutiful wife, Nellie Palmer, who train-hops with her husband Frederick and new-born son Godfrey. The family are involved in a crash that kills Frederick and leaves Godfrey to be found and raised by a wealthy couple. Nellie follows her husband’s dying wish that she should ‘find baby Godfrey’, a statement which ‘became to her a holy command’ (p. 103). Following this patriarchal ‘holy command’ becomes her life’s work. She spends the rest of her days as a hobo, travelling across the country searching for her lost son. In a characteristically sentimental ending, Nellie does eventually discover her son, now a wealthy man, in a narrative reward for maintaining her spotless sexuality. See Leon Ray Livingston, The Adventures of a Female Tramp (Erie, Pennsylvania: The A-No.1 Publishing Company, 1914). 14 For decades scholars mistook Reitman’s text for an autobiography, until Joanne Hall conclusively determined it to be a work of fiction written entirely by Reitman. Reitman interviewed many transient women during his work as director of the IBWA’s Chicago hobo college and as a medical practitioner with expertise in sexually transmitted disease. Boxcar Bertha represents a combination of stories that these women told him, his own life story as a former hobo and stage manager for Emma Goldman’s national speaking tours, along with his own imaginative creation. See Joanne Hall, ‘Sisters of the Road? The Construction of Female Hobo Identity in the Autobiographies of Ethel Lynn, Barbara Starke, and “Box-Car” Bertha Thompson’ in Women’s Studies, 39 (2010), pp. 215–237. 15 Bertha’s promiscuity is driven by an extreme passivity that leads her to sleep with many of the men who show interest. For example, when she attains a position as housekeeper to a man called Lowell Schroeder, the man’s mother tells Bertha ‘gently, but quite casually and in a matter-of-fact manner, that he wanted me, and I spent the first of many nights with him’. As narrator, Bertha’s grammar indicates a lack of agency in her own sexual choices: the

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dependent clause represents her own dependency on male power, turning her sexual choice into a mere addendum of Mr. Schroeder’s desire. She enters into a relationship with Schroeder seemingly because she is expected to do so, and only ends the relationship when she realises that ‘he was tired of me’, actions that she repeats later in the book with other male characters. Ben Reitman, Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha, as told to Dr. Ben Reitman (Nabat/Ak Press, Edinburgh, London, and Oakland, 2002, text first published 1937), pp. 34–39. 16 Creswell, pp. 93–97. 17 Girls of the Road (dir. Nick Grinde, 1940). 18 For collected accounts of cross-dressing female hobos, see Wandering Women and Wandering Women 2 (Seattle, Washington: The Historic Graffiti Society, 2020 and 2021). 19 Along with Adelene Mac McBean, Murray was the first known AfricanAmerican to challenge Jim Crow racial segregation by refusing to sit in the coloured section of a Greyhound bus, some fifteen years before Rosa Parks, an act which McBean and Murray completed while passing as male. Later, Murray’s legal research was vital to the Brown vs Board of Education (1954) case that overturned the legal basis for the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ and dealt an ultimately fatal blow to Jim Crow, as well inspiring a landmark 1971 gender equality case that was brought by lawyer and future Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Murray became an ordained priest in the Episcopalian church in 1977 and was declared a Saint in 2018, only 33 years after their death. 20 Recent scholarship has identified Murray as transgender. I refer to Murray as ‘they’ to indicate transgender identity, though other scholars have used different pronouns. For a helpful if polemic outline of the debate around retroactive pronominal labelling, see Naomi Simmons-Thorne, ‘Pauli Murray and the Pronominal Problem: a De-essentialist Trans Historiography’ in The Activist History Review (30 May 2019), https://activisthistory.com/2019/05/30/paulimurray-and-the-pronominal-problem-a-de-essentialist-trans-historiography [accessed 12 August 2021]. 21 The title appears as ‘From “Three Thousand Miles on the Dime in Ten Days”’ [my italics], indicating that it was from a longer piece of writing. The original source was Murray’s diary. See Troy R. Saxby, Pauli Murray: a Personal and Political Life (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020), p. 50. 22 ‘Peter’ and ‘Peter Pan’ were two of Murray’s self-designated male nicknames. The first published writing in which Murray used the term ‘Jane Crow’, a concept that would later be picked up by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was a 1944 piece penned under the pseudonym ‘Peter Panic’. See Rosalind Rosenberg, Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 39; Simon D. Elin Fisher, ‘Pauli Murray’s Peter Panic’: Perspectives from the Margins of Gender and Race in Jim Crow America’ in Transgender Studies 3:1–2 (May 2016); Pauli Murray, ‘Little Man From Mars: He’s All Mixed Up’ in Los Angeles Sentinel (14 July 1944).

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23 Murray adopted the androgynous first name Pauli, rather than their more ‘feminine’ birthname Anna Pauline, for this first publication. They also insisted to the volume’s editor, Nancy Cunard, that their gender not be revealed. See Nancy Cunard to Pauli Murray, 24 August 1933, Box 102, Folder 1836, Pauli Murray Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass, hereafter cited as PMP. 24 In Murray’s personal photographic scrapbook, the image titled ‘Pete’ in ‘Three Thousand Miles’ is given the title ‘The Vagabond’ and is placed alongside other personae such as ‘The Dude’ and ‘The Crusader’. At the top of the images Murray writes that these were some of the identities that made up their ‘Id’. See seq 27, Pauli Murray Papers. Personal and biographical. Photograph album, ca.1919–1950, n.d. MC 412, 24vf. PMP. The scrapbook also contains an image of Murray clambering onto a freight train: see sequence 34, Photograph album, ca.1919–1950, n.d. MC 412, 24vf, PMP. 25 See Pauli Murray ‘From “Three Thousand Miles on the Dime in Ten Days” ’ in Negro Anthology, edited by Nancy Cunard (London: Wishart & Co, 1934), pp. 90–93 (p. 90). Subsequent references given in the body of the chapter. 26 ‘Dick’ meaning police officer is ‘originally and chiefly’ US American slang, according to the OED. See OED, dick, n.4. The British slang term ‘copper’ is also used in the article, though less frequently, which may have been added by Nancy Cunard, Murray’s British editor. 27 In her 1987 autobiography, in which Murray leaves out the fact of their crossdressing during this and other incidents, the word ‘dick’ is not mentioned. By the time of writing this book, Murray had adjusted their sense of gender to become more aligned with mainstream understandings and a female identity. See Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage (New York; London: Liveright Publishing, 2018, first published 1987), pp. 101–105. On Murray’s shifting sense of gender, see Rosenberg, Jane Crow; Saxby, Pauli Murray. 28 Josiah Flynt Tramping With Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life (New York: The Century Company, 1899), pp. 317–335; Nels Anderson, The Hobo: the sociology of the homeless man. A study prepared for the Chicago Council of Social Agencies under the direction of the Committee on Homeless Men (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1961, text originally published 1923) p. 183; Leon Ray Livingston, Mother Delcassee of the Hoboes and Other Stories (Erie, Pennsylvania: The A-No.1 Publishing Company, 1918), p.28. It is worth noting that Black’s Salt Chuck Mary handles stolen goods and so is a less passive character than the other ‘Mother’ figures mentioned. See Jack Black, You Can’t Win (Edinburgh, London, and San Francisco: AK Press/Nabat, 2000, first published 1926), p. 69–70, pp. 130–1. 29 Lynn faces sexual harassment on two occasions, both of which are when her husband is temporarily absent. Ethel Lynn, The Adventures of a Woman Hobo (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1917), pp. 76–77 & pp. 218–220. Subsequent references to this text are given in the body of the chapter.

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30 Another implicit fear within the book is that of racial mixing. At one point, Lynn notes that she is covered with dirt from freight-hopping, and declares with horror: ‘I more nearly resembled a negress than a white woman’ (p. 266). 31 Cresswell, p. 53. 32 Another legal restriction was the 1910 Mann Act, which made it illegal to transport women across state lines ‘for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose’. While ostensibly drawn up to combat so-called ‘white slavery’, in effect this law sought to restrict women’s movement yet further. It also had racial overtones and led to a disproportionate number of prosecutions against African-Americans, and against adult consensual sex more generally. For more, see David J. Langum, Crossing Over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). 33 Statistics from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration state that as of September 1934 there were 124,050 registered single male transients in the US, 26,877 families, and only 719 registered single female tramps. See Box 9, folder 149, Ben Reitman Papers, University of Illinois at Chicago Special Collections. Noting that snapshots of female transiency are all that exist, Cresswell cites statistics that 18.6% of people arrested for vagrancy in Philadelphia in 1874–75 were women, and that some social reformers estimated that between 5 and 15% of tramps were female. Cresswell, p. 39 & p. 97. According to Golden, there were at least 150,000 homeless women in the US in 1933. Golden, p. 143. 34 Cresswell, p. 109. 35 See Cresswell, pp. 87–109. 36 John Lennon, Boxcar Politics: The Hobo in U.S Culture and Literature, 1869– 1956 (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), pp. 25–26. 37 Tapley, p. 63. 38 Tapley, p. 66. 39 If power is intrinsic then, as Henkel rightly argues, ‘There are no situations where people are powerless’. Scott Henkel, Direct Democracy: Collective Power, The Swarm, and the Literature of the Americas (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), p. 7. 40 Anderson, p. 265. 41 Lynn Weiner, ‘Sisters of the Road: Women Transients and Tramps’ in Walking To Work: Tramps in America 1790–1935, ed. Eric H. Monkkonen (Lincoln, Nebraska & London, UK: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), pp. 171–188 (p. 173). 42 In a wider sense, of course, this concern for appearances is ultimately about sex, or at least sexual respectability. As the saying goes, everything is about sex – except sex, which is about power. 43 It is important to note that for Yancy the abyss was racialised. Becoming poor was, for her, meant in part to live uncomfortably close to people of colour. For more on this aspect of The Tramp Woman, see Chapter 7, endnote 17. 44 Dolly Kennedy Yancy, The Tramp Woman: A Book of Experiences (St Louis, MO: Britt Publishing Company, 1909, p.21. Subsequent references to this text

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given in parentheses in the body of the essay. To my knowledge, the only copy of this book is held at the St Louis Public Library, to whom I am most grateful for their assistance. 45 Chicago-based journalist Harry Beardsley made a similar distinction between Southern Europeans and hobos. See Chapter 7. 46 There are accounts of her activism in Arizona Sentinel, 1 February 1912; The Sacramento Bee, 10 Feb 1913; Tombstone Epitaph, 16 March, 1913. Yancy also seems to have worked as the promoter for mining interests. Troublingly, at least one organisation she chose to work with had a policy of racial segregation: see Mohave County Miner, 16 Mar 1912. 47 The Abbeville Press and Banner, 21 April 1897. 48 While the 1900 US Federal Census cites Margaret Yancy as ‘divorced’ and the 1910 Census gives her status as ‘widowed’, her 1952 death certificate gives her name as ‘Mrs. Dolly Kennedy Yancy’ and names her husband as Dr. William Lowndes Yancy. Although there is a slight discrepancy between this name and the one cited in the 1897 newspaper report, this evidence suggests that the pair never divorced, and that Dolly Yancy died first. See 1900 and 1910 United States Federal Census; Census Place Charleston Ward 4, Charleston, South Carolina; Dolly Kennedy Yancy death certificate, Division of Vital Statistics – State Board of Health, State of South Carolina, www.Ancestry.com [accessed 30 May 2017]. 49 Santa Cruz Evening News (Santa Cruz, California), 11 July 1913. 50 One newspaper claimed that she had also worked for several years as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner before joining the IWW. See The Spokane Press (Spokane, Washington), 2 Nov 1909. 51 Appeal to Reason (Girard, Kansas), 10 Feb 1917. There is an Agnes T Fair listed as working as a solicitor for the Pacific Mutual Life Company in 1903. See Tacoma City Directory, 1903. The fact that the Portland, Oregon City Directory for 1914 states that Agnes T Fair is an advertising solicitor based at the Portland labour press is suggestive that this is the same person as the radical poet and street speaker. Oregon tax records for that year indicate that Fair only paid $5 in tax, however, so presumably this was not a very successful business. See 1914 Portland City Directory and Umatilla and Morrow County, Oregon Directories, 1914. All records cited from U.S. City Directories, 1822– 1995. Provo, UT, USA: [accessed 6 August 2020]. 52 A 1913 notice in the San Francisco Bulletin claimed that Fair is a ‘girl tramp’ who rides the ‘bumpers’ into town. See San Francisco Bulletin, 27th Nov 1913. 53 Agnes Thecla Fair, ‘Miss Fair’s Letter’ in Workingman’s Paper: The Socialist (Seattle, Washington), 20 December 1909. 54 Fair’s experience as a victim of attempted rape explains why an otherwise radical feminist poet makes the speaker of one of her poems demand: ‘Give me for sweetheart the man of the hills,/Who protects womankind from the brute’. ‘Dust’ in Sour Dough’s Bible (Seattle: Trustee Printing Company, 1910), p. 13, lines 12–13. Subsequent references from this collection given in body of the chapter.

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55 Sacramento Bee (Sacramento, Calif), 1 March 1913. 56 Arizona Republican, 19 December 1914. 57 One notable and important exception is Heather Mayer’s excellent Beyond the Rebel Girl: Women and the Industrial Workers of the World in the Pacific Northwest, 1905–1924 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2018), pp. 35–48. 58 Salt Lake Telegram (Salt Lake City, Utah), 1 Oct 1915. 59 Mayer, p. 35. 60 Joe Hill, ‘The Rebel Girl’ (1915) in I.W.W Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent, 19th Edition (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014, originally published 1923) 61 Appeal to Reason (Girard, Kansas), 10 Feb 1917. 62 Appeal to Reason (Girard, Kansas), 10 Feb 1917. A 1904 letter by Fair to a San Juan newspaper indicates that she had travelled to Puerto Rico, though it is unclear if she was alone or with her husband at this point. In the letter Fair describes herself as having ‘traveled extensively’. See San Juan Islander, 12 March 1904. 63 ‘Bruin’ in The Times (Shreveport, Louisiana), 28 April 1907, lines 1–2 & 13–16. 64 Unknown to Fair, there is a tremendous irony in lauding Goldman for being able to move across national borders, since about a decade later she would become a victim of the Palmer Raids, which saw her jailed and then expelled from the United States. 65 Fair, ‘A Woman’s Place’ in Freedom’s Banner (Iola, Kansas), 10 October 1914. 66 In a similar vein, Alfred D. Cridge cites Fair as telling him that she was not worried about working men trying to ‘take advantage’ of her: ‘“None of the workingmen ever do,” she replied. “Some of the silk stocking chaps do once in a while. But I have a sharp tongue and a hat pin and know how to put any man down who gets foolish.”’. Appeal to Reason (Girard, Kansas), 10 Feb 1917. 67 The pair did have a son, Jesse E Solomon, as indicated by a missing persons letter that Kittie Solomon wrote in the “Hobo” News. See HN 3:1 (April 1917, p. 15). 68 This biographical information comes from an interview with Solomon in the “Hobo” News. See “Hobo” News 2:5 (August 1916). Subsequent references to this paper are given in parentheses in the body of the chapter. 69 See Owen Clayton, ‘Who Said I Was a Bum?’ Self-Presentation in the “Hobo” News, 1915–1924’ in Representing Homelessness, edited by Owen Clayton. Proceedings of the British Academy 239 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 172–196. 70 The article claims to be a reprint from the St Louis Republic. 71 Little else is known about Solomon, who disappears from the record. The “Hobo” News stopped publishing as early as 1923 (following a split in the IBWA, a rival paper called the Hobo World was produced from 1923 until at least 1924), and she does not appear again in its pages except in passing reference by other authors. 72 Photinos, p. 659. 73 Hall, p. 221.

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74 A Helen L. Card was born about 1907 in the village of Owego, Tioga, New York to Stella and Myron G. Card, the latter being registered as a farmer. By 1927, she was working as a stenographer in Binghampton, New York. These facts seem to fit what we know about Helen Card, but whether these women are the same remains uncertain. See Binghamton, New York, City Directory, 1927, as well as the 1910, 1915, 1920 and 1925 United States Federal Censuses for Helen L Card, www.Ancestry.com [accessed 14 August 2021]. 75 See Star Tribune, 24 May 1931; Oakland Tribune, 9 August 1931; Kansas City Star, 5 Sept 1931. The Sacramento Bee doubted that the book was written by a 19-year-old girl, while the Salt Lake Tribune noted that the work had ‘inconsistencies’. Sacramento Bee, 23 May 1931; Salt Lake Tribune, 14 June 1931. 76 See, in particular, Author Files, Helen Card, Bobbs-Merrill mss, Lilly Library, Indiana University. My thanks to the Lilly Library for their generous assistance. 77 Des Moines Register, 9 August 1931. 78 Correspondence file for Barbara Starke, JC G/1/8/30, Early General Correspondence Files 1931 sub-series JC G/1/8, Jonathan Cape archive, University of Reading Special Collections. My thanks to Penguin Random House for granting me permission to view this item. 79 Barbara Starke [real name Helen L. Card], Touch and Go: the Story of a Girl’s Escape (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934, first published in 1931), p.26. Subsequent references to this text are given in the body of this chapter. 80 It also occurs, albeit less frequently, in Starke’s novel Second Sister (1932). During a scene in which one of the protagonists, Lucy Cotter, sits crying on a park bench in New York City’s Central Park, she is approached by a man who asks her the trouble. She tells him that she has separated from her lover. Immediately seeing her as a loose woman and as an opportunity for some non-consensual touching, the man ‘suddenly grasped her, put a hand on her leg – and rushed off.’ Demonstrating the power of patriarchal ideology, Cotter blames herself for this incident: ‘had these men followed her, it must be a look about her. They wouldn’t do such things to those women who look so cool and scornful as they walk along or sit on the benches’. Barbara Starke, Second Sister (London: Jonathan Cape, 1932), p.168. 81 Wishing to be her own defender, she declares ‘I did not want to be protected’ by a man (p. 55); in order to protect herself, she occasionally wears men’s clothing (pp. 146–148, p. 175). 82 She does, however, become angry when men try to ‘seduce’ her (p. 136, p. 225), hating manipulation more than direct assaults. She tells one of her lovers: ‘I hate to have a man try to persuade me that I should be kissed or made love to …. I usually know when I want to.’ [ellipsis in original] (p. 228). 83 Photinos, p. 677. 84 Second Sister portrays Lucy Cotter, who seems to be a largely autobiographical character, working in a New York magazine office, creating advertising pages and taking dictation from her manager. The monotonous work depresses her and she fantasises about throwing her typewriter out of the window onto Lexington avenue far below: ‘She could see it clearly, the machine taking off

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the round, brown head of her employer in its flight, bumping on the roof of the low building next door, bouncing off to the sidewalk and killing off a few useless people there…’ Second Sister, p. 288. 85 In her letter to Jonathan Cape, Card describes having been fired from her office job after several months. See Card to Cape, 30 May 1931. By 1932, having briefly lived in New Orleans and scraping a ‘small living’ by ‘posing for the artists there’, ‘on the promise of work’ she had then travelled to England, where she also wrote Second Sister. Card to DL Chambers, 9 March 1932. By 1943, Card was working as a clerk in Woonsocket, Providence County, Rhode Island. See Providence Rhode Island City Directory, 1943, www.Ancestry.com [accessed 18 August 2021]. Clarke’s copyright entry for Second Sister also places her in Providence: see Catalogue of Copyright Entries, Part 1, Books, Group 1. New Series. Volume 30, for the Year 1933, Nos 1–147 (Washington D.C: Library of Congress Copyright Office, 1933), p. 175.

5  Between Hobohemia and Academia: Nels Anderson’s Double Voice 1 Quaker City Trumpet (Philadelphia), 1 September 1935, cited in Nels Anderson, Men on the Move (Chicago; Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1940), p. 36. Subsequent references to this text given in the body of the chapter. 2 Bill is named after Anderson’s older brother and shares some of his characteristics, particularly independence. Anderson had a habit of reusing the name Bill without revealing that this was his brother’s name. In Men on the Move (1940), he discusses a hypothetical hobo called Rickety Bill, an ‘independent hobo, not the kind to ship to just any job’ who he describes, in heroic terms, as possessing ‘the loose gate of a movie cowboy’ (Men on the Move, p. 9). For more on Bill Anderson’s independent qualities, see Nels Anderson, The American Hobo: an Autobiography (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975), pp. 47–48, p. 66. Subsequent references to this text given in the body of the chapter. 3 Nels Anderson, ‘The Fall of Bill’ in “Hobo” News 9:10 (October 1921), pp. 6–7 (p. 7). 4 Laura Browder, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), p. 185. 5 To cite only a few examples, see Kenneth Kusmer, Down & Out, on the Road: the Homeless in American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 117–118; Frank Tobias Higbie, Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880–1930 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), pp. 119–127; Todd DePastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 200–201. 6 Nels Anderson, The Hobo: the sociology of the homeless man. A study prepared for the Chicago Council of Social Agencies under the direction of the Committee on Homeless Men (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1961,

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text originally published 1923), p. 92. Subsequent references to this text given in the body of the chapter. 7 For example, twenty-first century historian Mark Wyman designates the West and Midwest of this period a ‘Second Frontier’, and, via Anderson, calls for the hobo to take his place in the ‘pantheon of western heros’, among ‘cowboys and Indians, explorers and entrepreneurs, first settlers and gunslingers’. Mark Wyman, Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps and the Harvesting of the West (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), p. 22 & pp. 275–276. Todd DePastino Rolf Linder and Eric H. Monkkonen also analyse the hobo through the lens of the frontier. See DePastino p. 63; Rolf Linder, ‘Nels Anderson and the Chicago School of Urban Sociology’ in The Chicago School Diaspora: Epistemology and Substance, eds. Jacqueline Low and Gary Bowden (Montreal & Kingston; London; Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), pp. 169–177 (p. 173); Eric H. Monkkonen, ‘Afterword’ in Walking to Work: Tramps in America, 1790–1935, ed. Eric H. Monkkonen (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), pp. 235–247 (p. 241). 8 John Allen, Homelessness in American Literature: Romanticism, Realism, and Testimony (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 166–167, n 12. 9 DePastino pp. 71–91; Roger A. Salerno, Sociology Noir: Studies at the University of Chicago in Loneliness, Marginality and Deviance, 1915–1935 (Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, Inc, 2007), pp. 95–104; Browder, p. 183. 10 Jeffrey Brown, ‘Situating The Hobo: Romancing the Road from Vagabondia to Hobohemia’ in The Chicago School Diaspora, pp. 287–306 (p. 304). 11 Brown, p. 304; Browder, pp. 178–181. 12 For Linder, Anderson’s ‘hybrid’ status as part-hobo, part-sociologist gives his work a ‘greater analytical and perceptual content’ than that of Josiah Flynt/ Willard. See Rolf Linder, The Reportage of Urban Culture: Robert Park and the Chicago School, trans. Adrian Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, first published 1996), pp. 130–131. 13 Robert Park, who emphasised culture in his analysis far more than did Anderson, apparently suggested the term ‘hobohemia’ to his young student. See Linder, ‘Nels Anderson and the Chicago School’, p. 171. Chicago’s hobohemia was also associated with the Dill Pickle club, which was run by former Wobbly Jack Jones and frequented by writers, artists, and former hobos. The club featured talks by Ben Reitman on topics including ‘The Favourite Method of the Suicides’, ‘Red Lights and Trafficing [sic]’ and ‘Satisfying Sexual Needs without trouble. Avoiding Venereal Diseases, Practising Birth Control, sidestepping “jams”, experiencing joy and romance in love, finding variety in monogamy’. Club visitors were greeted by a message at the entrance which read: ‘Step high, Stoop low, Leave your dignity behind’. 14 Nels Anderson, diary entry dated 6 August 1918, in Nels Anderson’s World War I Diary, ed. Allan Kent Powell (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2013), p. 76. Subsequent references to this text given in the body of the chapter.

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15 Anderson also wrote a humorous nationalistic poem, performed for his fellow soldiers, in which he bragged: We strung barb wire, we waded mire, We went and took the chance. We showed the Hun the way to run When Yankee lads advance.

See Nels Anderson’s World War I Diary, pp. 300–301, n 34. 16 As Gary Bowden and Jacqueline Low argue, the term ‘Chicago School’ is like a Swiss-army knife that can be turned to a variety of different functions. A retrospective label, it gained traction not because it described a coherent methodology, but rather because it was a brand that could ‘legitimate a belief in American exceptionalism’ and in ‘a distinctly American contribution to sociology’. Gary Bowden and Jacqueline Low, ‘Introduction’ to The Chicago School Diaspora, pp. 3–26 (p. 12). 17 Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1921), pp. 509–513; Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, The City (Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1925), p. 77. 18 Salerno, pp. 24–25. Mary Jo Deegan argues that the anti-statistical reputation of the early Chicago School overlooks its female members, especially Jane Addams. I would suggest, following Bowden and Low, that this heterogeneity signifies a lack of coherence in the term ‘Chicago School’ itself. See Mary Jo Deegan, Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1918 (New York, Routledge, 2017, first published 1988), pp. 33–54. 19 Robert E. Park, ‘The Mind of the Hobo: Reflections upon the Relation Between Mentality and Locomotion’ in The City, pp. 156–160 (p. 158 & p. 160). This article was originally published as ‘The Mind of the Rover’ in The World Tomorrow 6 (September 1923), pp. 269–270. 20 Linder, ‘Nels Anderson and the Chicago School’, p. 176. 21 The Hobo betrays its origins as a series of essays in the way that it introduces prominent hobos repeatedly in different chapters, as if the reader had not encountered them previously. 22 Discussing the forthcoming new edition of The Hobo, Anderson wrote to the editor of the University of Chicago Press that ‘I feel now I am old enough to review the author and answer questions I have so often dodged before’. The questions he had previously dodged were about his background as a hobo. Nels Anderson to the editor of the University of Chicago Press (unnamed), 21 November 1960, Box 36, folder 8, Ernest Burgess Papers, University of Chicago. 23 In the 1961 Introduction, Anderson explicitly counters the wanderlust thesis with his frontier defence: ‘if we use wanderlust to explain the hobo’s mobility, it would be difficult not to explain other types of mobility in the same way. On the American scene mobility was imperative, else the frontier would still be wilderness. It was a real asset for the hobo’ (The Hobo, p. xvii). He had also stated his opposition to wanderlust explicitly in his 1940 book Men on the

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Move: ‘Jeff Davis, who calls himself “King of the Hobos,” is convinced that many young men migrate because they are moved by the wanderlust. Various observers of this phenomenon have come to similar conclusions; recent studies of the problem, however, give little credence to the “inner urge” reasons for migrancy. There is a trend towards explaining transiency in terms of social or economic pressures upon the individual’ (Men on the Move, p.88). More certain of his position as a researcher by 1940, Anderson was able to dismiss wanderlust as the fanciful notion of hobo boosters such as Jeff Davis. Indeed, he portrays Davis as placing ‘on a pedestal a man [the hobo] who belongs to the past. The hobo belongs with the pre-Hollywood cowboy’ (p. 21). Davis’s nostalgia renders him an isolated figure, ‘sitting in his obscure headquarters in Cincinnati’, claiming ‘to speak for a million hobos’ while ‘there is none to gainsay his claim, nor does anyone seem to care much’ (p. 33). For more on Davis, see this book’s Conclusion. 24 Carlos A. Schwantes, ‘The Concept of the Wageworker’s Frontier: a Framework for Future Research’ in The Western Historical Quarterly 18:1 (1987), pp. 39–55. Schwantes does not acknowledge his debt to Anderson, though he does cite IWW sources who make use of the frontier trope. 25 Higbie, p. 99, pp. 104–105. 26 Mark Pittenger, Class Unknown: Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present (New York and London: New York University Press, 2012), pp. 58–59. 27 Anderson sums up his understanding of the relationship between environment and selfhood in Men on the Move, in which he states that ‘a man’s occupation becomes part of his personality’ (Men on the Move, p.10). 28 Writer Kenneth Rexroth, who spent time in Chicago’s hobohemia as a young boy, remembered Washington Park as ‘Bughouse Square, where every variety of radical sect, lunatic religion and crackpot health panacea was preached from a row of soapboxes every night in the week when it wasn’t storming’. Kenneth Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel (New York: New Directions, 1969, first published 1964), p. 137. 29 In fact, according to John C. Schneider, the number of foreign-born hobos was ‘substantial – between 22 and 55 percent’. John C. Schneider, ‘Tramping Workers, 1890–1920: A Subcultural View’ in Walking to Work, pp. 212–234 (p. 216). 30 Several footnotes describe the failed attempts of hobo writers to get published, suggesting that most of them lack not only rigour but talent. Nevertheless, Anderson is forced to admit that ‘A surprisingly large number of them eventually realize their ambition to get into print’, often in the “Hobo” News. (The Hobo, p.188). 31 Nels Anderson, ‘The Poet and the Rebel Press’, p. 12. Box 3, Folder 3, Robert Ezra Park Collection 1882–1979 in University of Chicago, Ernest W. Burgess Papers. 32 Many of the poems and songs that Anderson collected for The Hobo are humorous, as in the poem ‘A Story of the Jungles’ cited in my Introduction,

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a song called ‘Old Charity Soup is Here Again’ sung to the tune of ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home again’, and a parody of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’ entitled ‘The Dog’, in which a hobo tries to beg at the home of an elderly lady: But alas for me poor sinner, Just as I could smell the dinner, I beheld a savage bulldog that the lamplight flickered o’er. And the dog came snarling past her, Rushing fast and rushing faster, Making me regret I’d sassed her, as I’d hit out with a roar.

Anonymous, Robert Ezra Park Collection, Box 3, folder 3, Ernest Burgess Papers. 33 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge, Mass; London: Zone Books, 2007). 34 Browder, p. 178. 35 Though incomplete, the Ernest W. Burgess Papers contain over 100 interview notes by Anderson. See Ernest W. Burgess Papers, box 127, folders 1–5. 36 Ernest W. Burgess Papers, box 127, folder 4, document 115, p. 1. Notably, one photograph shows an empty jungle with the caption ‘A jungle camp – the “bos” hid from the camera’. The Hobo, p.10. Later in the book, Anderson reveals that he twice tried to intervene to get young punks away from their jockers: both attempts failed and were met with resentment and amusement from the punks themselves (p. 148). 37 This aspect of his method was following the personal style advocated by Robert Park. For more, see Linder, Reportage, pp. 80–82. 38 Burgess Papers, box 127, folder 4, document 110, p. 1. 39 Burgess Papers, box 127, folder 1, document 49, p. 2. 40 See Anderson’s interactions with Daniel Horsley and William H. Bauersfield in Ernest W. Burgess Papers, Box 127, folder 1, documents 22 and 23. 41 Burgess Papers, folder 1, document 36. 42 John L is John Laughman, who was famous in Chicago for his oratory. Kenneth Rexroth remembered him as ‘not only the king of Chicago soapboxers, he was probably the best the country ever produced, or Hyde Park or Glasgow either’. Rexroth, p. 141. 43 These quotations are not from Anderson but from an unnamed interviewee. 44 One example is the song ‘Hungry Hash House’ (1927): Oh, the beefsteak it was rare and the butter had red hair Baby had its feet all in the soup Oh, the eggs they would not catch, if you touched one it would hatch In that awful hungry hash house where I stay.

Charlie Poole, ‘Hungry Hash House’ (1927) in The Essential Charlie Poole (Proper Records, 2009). The liner notes claim that Charlie Poole wrote this song, but this is doubtful. 45 Ben Reitman, unpublished 1940 review of Men on the Move, in Ben Reitman papers, University of Illinois, Chicago.

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Notes to pages 158–164

46 Lamb also claims to have overheard Anderson say that some people are meant to be at the bottom of the social hierarchy and others are meant to be at the top. W.D. Lamb, letter to the editor, “Hobo” News, Vol 10, No 11, November 1922, p. 15. 47 Pittenger, p. 59; Charles S. Peterson, Foreword to Nels Anderson’s World War I Diary, p. xvi. 48 DePastino p. 193. 49 Anderson downplayed it as well. A copy of the book in Yale’s Beinecke Library has a handwritten note on the inside from the author, who states ‘This may not be good English but it was fun writing, Nels Anderson’. See The Milk and Honey Route: A Handbook for Hobos, Bradford H. Gray Collection in the History of Social Thought, Box 111, Beinecke Library, Yale University. 50 Salerno, p. 104; Linder, ‘Nels Anderson and the Chicago School’, p. 173; Pittenger, pp. 59–60; DePastino p. 193. 51 Kenneth Allsop, Hard Travellin’: The Story of the Migrant Worker (Middlesex, England; Victoria, Australia: Penguin, 1972, first published 1967), p. 233. 52 Dean Stiff (Nels Anderson), The Milk and Honey Route: A Handbook for Hobos with a comprehensive and unexpurgated glossary, illustrated by Ernie Bushmiller (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1931). Subsequent references to this text given in the body of the chapter. 53 In a 1924 article, Anderson reprinted a poem by Henry Herbert Knibbs as an example of the tendency towards idealistic representations of transiency: We are the true nobility; Sons of rest and the outdoor air; Knights of the tide and rail are we, Lightly meandering everywhere. Having no gold we buy no care, As over the crust of the world we go, Stepping in tune to this ditty rare; Take up your bundle and beat it, Bo!

H. H. Knibbs, ‘Ballade of the Boes’ (1914), reprinted in Nels Anderson, ‘The Juvenile and the Tramp’ (1923–1924) in On Hobos and Homelessness, ed. Raffaele Rauty (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 99–119 (p. 101). 54 Anderson’s notes indicates that he is referring to A. W. Dragstedt. See Ernest W. Burgess Papers, box 127, folder 1, document 25, p. 2. 55 In The Right to Work (1938), Anderson states that social workers were ‘used to dealing with unemployment in terms of the private charity bias and they brought with them into public service the traditional concepts about “worthy” people, sobriety, industry, patience, and gratitude’. Nels Anderson, The Right to Work (New York: Modern Age Books, 1938), p. 127. 56 Josiah Flynt, Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life (New York: The Century Co, 1899), p. 20 57 This also explains why The Milk and Honey Route is illustrated by the popular New York World cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller, whose drawings reproduce clichéd tramp tropes that would not have been out of place in the late nineteenth century.

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58 Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (New York; London: W. W. Norton and Company), p. 48. 59 In Men on the Move (1940), Anderson argues that the transients of the Great Depression, whom he terms migrants, are fundamentally different to the hobos of his youth, since they travel in family groups and their preferred means of transport is the car (pp. 27–33). In so doing, he essentialises hobos as single men who travel via the train. This aligns him with the trope of the Dying Hobo that I discuss in the Conclusion. Safely locked away in a discreet and dead subculture, the now extinct hobo was free to be idealised with less of the anxiety that had marked Anderson’s early books The Hobo and The Milk and Honey Route. In his autobiography The American Hobo (1975), he focusses on hard labour as a defining feature not only of hobodom, as in previous writings, but of working-class masculinity more broadly. In this late text, the road provides an escape from patriarchal control in the form of his father, but not from patriarchy as an ideological system.

6  ‘The Laureate of the Logging Camps’: Language, Food and Revolution in the Work of T-Bone Slim 1 Nels Anderson, The Hobo: the sociology of the homeless man. A study prepared for the Chicago Council of Social Agencies under the direction of the Committee on Homeless Men (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1961, text originally published 1923), p. 193. 2 T-Bone Slim, Juice is Stranger than Friction, edited by Franklin Rosemont (Chicago: Charles Kerr Company, 1992, article first published 1921), p. 37. 3 A barge captain was largely a nightwatchman, though Slim was also responsible for loading and unloading goods. 4 Nels Anderson, The Hobo, p. 191. Slim also wrote original articles for Industrial Solidarity and One Big Union Monthly, as well as, in the early 1920s, the proCommunist Duluth newspaper Truth. His articles were occasionally reprinted in the monthly Industrial Pioneer and in the Finnish-language IWW paper Industrialisti. Industrial Solidarity’s circulation figures in the 1923 hovered between 14,000 and 16,000, while in the same year Industrial Pioneer sold an average of 11,000 issues. See the two reports of Vern Smith, and Justus Ebert and J. D. Carliph, in Minutes of the Fifteenth General Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World, held at Emmett Memorial Hall, Chicago, Ill, November 12 – December 3, 1923 (Printing and Publishing Workers’ Industrial Union, No. 450, I. W. W, 1923). Copy accessed at the Labadie Collection, University of Michigan. 5 Industrial Pioneer, February 1926. Newberry Library, Franklin and Penelope Rosemont – T-Bone Slim Research Collection, Box 2, folder 28. 6 Wobbly Frank Lovell also recalls that sailors exchanged Slim’s sayings amongst each other. Frank Lovell to Franklin Rosemont, 7 March 1991, Newberry Library, Rosemont – T-Bone Slim Research Collection, Box 2 Folder 31.

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Notes to pages 167–170

7 Carl Cowl and Stan Weir, cited in Franklin Rosemont, ‘Introduction: Mysteries of a Hobo’s Life’ in Juice, p. 21. 8 Harvey O’Connor, Revolution in Seattle: a Memoir (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009, first published 1964), p. 67. 9 Anonymous, ‘Hobo Poet’ in Industrial Worker, 14 June 1932. 10 Anon, ‘T Bone Slim, IWW Humorist, Passes Away’ in Industrial Worker, 24 October 1942. One possible reason for the delay was that his comrades had been accustomed to Slim disappearing, as many transient workers would, for months on end, only to reappear some time later. This article revealed Slim’s real name in public for the first time. Slim’s obituary also appeared in the Hungarian– American IWW paper Bèrmunkas on 31 October 1942. See Newberry Library, Rosemont – T-Bone Slim Research Collection, Box 1, folder 27. 11 Owen Clayton, ‘Puns, Politics, and Pork Chops: The “insignificant magnitude” of T-Bone Slim’ in The Journal of Working-Class Studies, Volume 4, Issue 1 (June 2019), pp. 6–23. This situation is changing, however, thanks to an ongoing Kone Foundation-funded project entitled ‘T-Bone Slim and the Transnational Poetics of the Migrant Left in North America’, led by Kirsti Salmi-Niklander. See https://blogs.helsinki.fi/tboneslim/ 12 Rosemont, Juice, p.7. 13 Anderson, The Hobo, p. 193. For their part, Leftist literary scholars have accepted Alan Calmer’s 1934 claim that ‘the Wobbly literary movement was buried long ago. Its revolutionary heritage has passed on to the Communist men of letters’. Alan Calmer, ‘The Wobbly in American Literature’ in New Masses 12, 18 September 1934, pp. 21–22. 14 This later period is, for example, completely overlooked in the seminal 1979 documentary Wobblies!, while Lucy Parson’s biographer Carolyn Ashbaugh incorrectly states that the 1920 Palmer Raids ‘virtually smashed the organisation’. Carolyn Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons: An American Revolutionary (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2012, first published in 1976), p. 247. 15 These notebooks had been in the possession of Industrial Worker editor Fred Thompson, who reproduced some of the material as articles during the late 1930s. Most of the Newberry notebooks date from a period in which Slim did not publish, following a dispute with Ralph Chaplin, Thompson’s editorial predecessor. See endnote 89 in this chapter. 16 Rosemont continued to research Slim following the publication of Juice, collecting many of his original newspaper columns and coming into possession of three photographs. He intended to publish a subsequent book of Slim’s verse and songs, which would have been the first time that his image had been printed; however, Franklin died in 2009 before he could complete this project. Some of Slim’s images appeared in my article ‘Puns, Politics and Pork Chops’. I am currently co-editing, with Iain McIntyre, a new volume of Slim’s collected writings, forthcoming with the University of Minnesota Press. 17 Aunt Molly Jackson, interview with Archie Green circa 1957–8, Newberry Library, Rosemont – T-Bone Slim Research Collection, Box 2, Folder 28.

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18 Aunt Molly Jackson, cited in John Greenway, American Folksongs of Protest (New York: A.S. Barnes and Co, 1960), p. 264. The question of whether Jackson’s song is actually based on Slim is a matter of some debate, with the folklorist Archive Greene expressing a belief that her brother Jim suggested the title Slim rather than Scully. See Archie Green Papers, Folder 3205– 3217 and Folder 6429 at University of North Carolina (my thanks to John Westmoreland). However, in an interview with Green conducted sometime between 1957 and 1958, she asserts that the song is about Slim: Molly: …he said then he hadn’t slept in a bed for two months or more. Interviewer: Is this T Bone Skully who is telling you this story? Molly: No. They called him Slim. Interviewer: T Bone Slim? Molly: Yes and Jim named the song. My brother called it T bone scully. Interviewer: Well why did Jim change the name from Slim to Skully? Molly: I don’t know why. Interviewer: Oh we’d have to ask Jim some day.

Interview between Aunt Molly Jackson and Archie Green, circa 1957–8. Newberry Library, Rosemont – T-Bone Slim Research Collection, Box 2 Folder 28. 19 See articles ‘Gila Monster’ (Industrial Worker, 12 January 1923) and ‘Nothing Very Bad’ (Industrial Worker, 14 November 1923) in Newberry Library Collection. 20 Slim, ‘Mysteries of a Hobo’s Life’ in Little Red Songbook, 17th Edition (Spokane, Washington: Industrial Workers of the World, 1921). 21 Todd DePastino Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 114–116. 22 See Heather Mayer, Beyond the Rebel Girl: Women, Wobblies, Respectability, and the Law in the Pacific Northwest, 1905–1924 (Corvallis, Oregon: Oregon State University Press, 2018). 23 T-Bone Slim, ‘Starving Amidst Too Much’ (1923) in Starving Amidst Too Much and Other IWW Writings on the Food Industry, ed. Peter Rachleff (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2005), p. 56. Additional references to this text will be given in the body of the chapter. 24 Although many working-class men wished their wives to stay home, economic necessity made this difficult. A comic sketch in the “Hobo” News highlights that the notion of separate spheres does not apply comfortably to the working class: ‘First Able-bodied Male—Woman’s place is in the home. As I was telling my wife— Second Able-Bodied Male—By the by, Bill, what’s yer wife doin’ now? First Able-Bodied Male—Working in the cannery.’ Puck, ‘Woman’s Place’ in “Hobo” News 1:4 (July 1915), p. 11.

25 Slim, ‘T-Bone Slim Extends Himself To Discuss Education’ in Industrial Worker, 14 March 1923. 26 Slim, ‘The Stuff Heroes are Made of’ in Industrial Worker, 17 June 1922.

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Notes to pages 174–178

27 Slim, ‘I See, Says I’ in Industrial Worker, 27 February 1924. He also discusses this term in the third stanza of his nationalistic poem ‘Direct Action Better Than Political Words’: A million slaves they did import With tales of sudden riches, That “lies around and might be found In hills and highway diches.” And million native sons were then Declared as null and void; Their ancient dads, now transient lads, Were labelled “unemployed”. Slim, Industrial Worker, 22nd April 1939.

28 Slim, ‘The Best of a Bad Bargain is Plenty Tough’ in Industrial Worker, 2 April 1938. Recent research by Kirsti Salmi-Niklander and Lotta Leiwo has proven that Slim wrote in Finnish during his youth. This bilingualism would have given him a comparative perspective on the English language. See ‘Newspaper Symposium 2022: New Exciting Finds from the Archive’, 9 July 2022, https://blogs.helsinki.fi/tboneslim/2022/09/07/newspaper-symposium-2022/ [accessed 10 July 2022]. 29 Slim, ‘Why Arbitrate With Thieves for Carfare?’ in Industrial Worker, 1 May 1937. 30 NB: these definitions were taken from different articles and put together by Franklin Rosemont. 31 Slim, ‘Even Money’ in Industrial Worker, 22 December 1923. 32 Slim, Manuscript Notes (n.d), Newberry Library, Rosemont – T-Bone Slim Research Collection. 33 Card No 198308, ‘Brisbanalities’ in Industrial Solidarity, 11 January 1928. Rosemont says that 198308 was Slim’s IWW card number, though I have been unable to verify this claim. Rosemont, Juice, p. 22, fn 46. Like Rosemont, both Fred Thompson and George Milburn credit Slim with inventing the term ‘Brisbanality’. See Fred Thompson, Fellow Worker: The Life of Fred Thompson (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1993), p. 64; George Milburn in The Hobo’s Hornbook: a Repertory for a Gutter Jongleur (New York: Ives Washburn, 1930), p. 108. In a probably fictional interview by ‘Covami’ (Covington Hall), Slim is asked how he came to invent the word ‘Brisbanality’, to which he replies ‘I really don’t deserve the credit. The word really created itself’. See Covami, ‘Interviewing T-Bone Slim’ in Industrial Worker 31 May 1930. 34 MS Notes, Newberry Library. For more on ‘Vagabondia’, see Chapter 2. 35 Slim, ‘Those Hills You Said It’ in Industrial Worker, 14 May 1924. 36 Slim, ‘Politicians Will Squirm After the War’ in Industrial Worker, 5 April 1941. 37 Slim, ‘Rotten’ in Industrial Worker, 21 May 1927. Elsewhere he writes that ‘Theodore Dressler [sic] when he wrote the great “American Tragedy” used too many words. “Rush, Push” and – “Hush!” would have been sufficient’. MS Notes, Newberry Library. Slim’s privileging of brevity has parallels with Communist author and intellectual Mike Gold’s concept of ‘proletarian

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literature’, which should, Gold argued, use ‘As few words as possible’. Mike Gold, ‘Proletarian Realism’ (1930) in Mike Gold: a Literary Anthology, edited by Michael Folsom (New York: International Publishers, 1972), pp. 203–208 (p. 207). 38 Slim, ‘How the Mex did It’ in Industrial Worker 7 May 1924. He had already utilised this voice that same year in an article in which he rewrote the story of Jesus, given a hobo moniker, ‘Jerusalem Slim’, who is presented as a labour hero who fought against the moneyed class in the Temple. Unlike in the New Testament, however, Jerusalem Slim’s death is presented as the result of a tactical error and is stripped of any larger political or religious meaning. See ‘Don’t Threaten’ in Industrial Worker, 19 April 1924. 39 Rosemont, ‘Introduction’ in Juice, pp. 29–31. 40 Slim, ‘Rock of Ages’ in Industrial Worker, 30 April 1924. 41 Slim, ‘Bravely Do We Fear’ in Industrial Worker, 23 January 1924. 42 My sincere thanks to ‘beni’ for pointing this out to me, as well as for his earlier research for Franklin Rosemont, which I also found invaluable. 43 Slim lived in Harlem for a time and may have been familiar with work produced by Harlem Renaissance poets. This would be a fruitful avenue for further research. 44 Fred Thompson, who as sometime editor of the Industrial Worker had known Slim personally, wrote in his autobiography that ‘he did look surprisingly like that cartoon. I hadn’t expected it to be so lively a resemblance’. Fred Thompson, Fellow Worker, p. 63. 45 Slim, ‘Fish Tales’ in Industrial Worker, 29th July 1926; ‘Flirting with Eggsplosives’ in Industrial Worker, 22 September 1926; ‘Or Any Phase Of The class Struggle?’, MS Notes, Newberry Library. 46 Slim, ‘Sulphur and Molasses’ in Industrial Worker, 20 May 1922. 47 Sometimes Slim’s limited audience was a source of frustration: in one article he complains that he has spent years ‘preaching emancipation to the emancipated’. Slim, ‘A Survey’ in Industrial Worker, 4 October 1930. 48 Slim, ‘Capitalism Was a Great System Once’ in Industrial Worker, 19 April 1941; Slim ‘UNNOTICED’ in Industrial Worker, 22 August 1933. The (mis) quotation from Locke comes from his work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). 49 Slim, ‘Serene 1932’ in Industrial Worker, 12 January 1932. 50 Slim, ‘T-Bone Slim Takes to the Air, or, Saved in the Nick of Time: a Thrilling Story of the Harvest Fields’ in Industrial Worker, 13 September 1930. 51 Slim, ‘How to Get Rich Quick’ in Industrial Worker, 23 May 1931. 52 He writes elsewhere: ‘The working class has now been saved so many times in the last 4000  years that I lost count’. Slim, ‘Extra! T. B. Slim’s Golden Discovery Cures Everything!’ in Industrial Worker, 23 May 1936. 53 Slim’s articles show no awareness of Shaw’s flirtation with fascism and eugenics in his later life. 54 Slim, ‘Sulpher and Molasses’ in Industrial Worker, 20 May 1922. 55 Slim, ‘Sweet Charity’ in Industrial Worker, 18 August 1923.

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Notes to pages 189–194

56 See, for example, the wonderfully-named Slimbo Samberson’s article ‘An Answer To T-Bone’ in Industrial Worker, 18 April 1923; E. J. Mullins ‘Must Abolish Slavery to Preserve the Race from Raving Insanity’ in Industrial Worker 27 June 1923; T-Bone Slim, ‘Stories and Songs of the Struggle’ in Industrial Worker 10 Nov 1923; Petrus, ‘Knotty problems…’ in Industrial Worker 26 Jan 1924; Fred Larsen, ‘Intolerance is Bane of Radicals Asserts Writer’ in Industrial Worker 05 Jun 1926; V.C, ‘Hot Tip to T-Bone Slim’ in Industrial Worker 19 April 1941. 57 Art Shields, My Shaping Up Years: The Early Life of Labor’s Great Reporter (New York: International Publishers, 1983), p. 166. 58 Slim, ‘For a Virtuous Working Class’ in One Big Union Monthly (January 1938), p.32. 59 Fred Thompson stated that printing Slim’s articles without correction was ‘standard practice’ at the Industrial Worker. He also claimed to have instigated a practice of rearranging Slim’s fragments into what he considered coherent articles without changing the words themselves. Thompson, Fellow Worker, p. 63. 60 He refers to himself as a ‘horn-headed freight-handler’. Slim, ‘The Taste that Tells’ in Industrial Worker, 14 September 1929. 61 Slim, ‘Salvage, in Industrial Worker, 26 January 1924. 62 MS notes, Newberry Library. According to an acquaintance, Anna Shuskie, when Slim was working as a river barge captain ‘Mostly he lived right on the barge’, and ‘whenever he was in the city and not working on the barge he flopped somewhere in Skid Row.’ Anna Shuskie, interview with Franklin Rosemont, conducted 19 December 1987. See Newberry Library, Rosemont – T-Bone Slim Research Collection, Box 2 Folder 31. 63 For examples of Slim’s representation of his weak, failing or suffering body see, among others, ‘Golf’ in Industrial Worker, 3 October 1923; ‘Evolution’ in Industrial Worker, 26 September 1925; ‘The Trend’ in Industrial Worker, 14 August 1926; ‘It’s Like This’ in Industrial Solidarity, 29 July 1930. 64 MS notes, Newberry Library. 65 Carlton Parker, The Casual Laborer and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), p. 103. 66 Slim, ‘Forward’ in Industrial Worker, 2 January 1924. 67 The ‘ham and eggs’ trope did not originate with Slim. It had already appeared in Joe Hill’s songs ‘There is Power in a Union’ (1913) and ‘Ta-ra-ra-boomde-ay!’ (1914), as well as in other writings by hobo and working-class authors. 68 See Franklin Rosemont, ‘A Short Treatise on Wobbly Cartoons’ in Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2011, first published 1988), pp. 425–443. 69 Slim, ‘Stuff and Nonsense’ in Industrial Worker, 13 May 1922. 70 Slim, ‘When Do We Eat?’ in Industrial Worker, 10 October 1933. 71 Slim, ‘Etiquette’ in Industrial Worker, 19 December 1923. 72 It is worth noting that Slim has whale-oil in mind when he uses this term, though I would suggest that the term also encapsulates his feelings about synthetic food, which was never too far from his mind.

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7 3 Slim, ‘ANSWER TO THE PRAYER’ in Rebel Voices, p. 269. 74 Slim’s MS notes, Newberry Library. Former hobo Roy Brickle and author and songwriter James Stevens independently state that Slim was a camp cook: Brickle claims that this is how T-Bone got his road name, while Stevens implies it in his semi-autobiographical novel BrawnyMan (1926). See Roy Brickle, interview in Swiftwater People: Lives of Old Timers on the Upper St. Joe & St. Maries Rivers, ed. Bert Russell (Harrison, Idaho: Lacon, 1979), p. 115; James Stevens, BrawnyMan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), p. 146. Slim confirms that he ‘was a lumbercamp cook, and a good one too’ in his article ‘Another’s Sin’ in Industrial Worker, 20 September 1924. 75 Slim, ‘Short, Not Sweet’ in Industrial Worker, 5 April 1930. 76 Slim, ‘Another War Averted’ in Industrial Worker, 3 May 1924. 77 MS notes, Newberry Library. 78 Slim, ‘Notes’ in Industrial Worker, 19 January 1924. 79 Slim, ‘Even Breaks’ in Industrial Worker, 16 July 1921. 80 Slim, You Can’t Think Sense When You Eat Poor Food’ in Industrial Worker, 11 September 1937. 81 Slim, Hot Cakes and Honey’ in Industrial Worker, 11 June 1921. 82 Slim, ‘Boneyard’ in Industrial Solidarity, 31 August 1927. 83 Emily Dickinson, untitled (‘Pain has an Element of Blank’) in Selected Poetry of Emily Dickinson (New York: Doubleday, 1997), p. 155 (lines 1–4). 84 See Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums (London; New York: Penguin Books, 2006; first published 1959), pp. 99–101. 85 Pete Johnson, interview in Swiftwater People, p.282; ‘Introduction’ in Juice, pp.16–19. Rosemont also notes that we do not have ‘proof positive’ that the body pulled from the river in 1942 was actually Slim’s. 86 New York City Municipal Archives, Manhattan District 1 (Tombs), Docket 1115, 24 February 1939. Slim received a suspended sentence. Intriguingly, he gave his name as Joseph Hilger to the authorities. This pseudonym, which he also used to sign letters in the Westmoreland archive, suggests three things. First, and least surprisingly, Matt Huhta was reluctant to reveal his identity to the police, presumably because he feared political persecution. Second, he wanted to adopt a name that channelled the legend of Joe Hill, which indicates that he saw himself as the spiritual successor to the IWW’s most famous martyr. Third, his choice of ‘Joseph Hilger’ demonstrates his playfulness, since it was a name that had political and personal resonance for him but was unlikely to be picked up on by the authorities. The name Joseph Hilger, in other words, mocked those who claimed power over Matti Huhta. 87 During the 1920s and 1930s several of Wobbly papers were amalgamated due to falling circulation. By September 1938, the circulation of the Industrial Worker had fallen to 3,000. See Carl Keller’s report in Minutes of the Twenty-Third Constitutional General Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World, Sept 12–17 1938. Copy accessed at the Labadie Collection, University of Michigan. 88 Slim, ‘Better Stay Home and Fix Our Own Fences’ in Industrial Worker, 12 April 1941.

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Notes to pages 197–198

89 Slim had had several periods in which he did not publish for a few weeks or months, sometimes due to illness or having to travel for work. His longest period of absence from the Industrial Worker, however, was 2 and a half years between 10 Oct 1933 and 11 April 1936. This long absence appears to be because of disapproval of his writing, and possibly his position on the subject of Technocracy, by the then-editor Ralph Chaplin. I intend to do more research in this area. 90 See Old Nick, ‘Yours for the Works’ in Industrial Worker, 13 September 1941; Anon, ‘Yours for the I.W.W: Radiogram’ in Industrial Worker, 15 November 1941; Anon, ‘Yours for the IWW’ in Industrial Worker, 29 November 1941; Anon, ‘Yours for the IWW: From Slim in Industrial Worker, 6 December 1941; Old Nick, ‘Yours for the I.W.W’ in Industrial Worker, 18 April 1942. 91 See Slim, ‘Cheer Up, Worst Yet To Come’ in Industrial Worker, 20 September 1941. 92 Slim, ‘Produce for Use And Peace Will Come at Last’ in Industrial Worker, 14 June 1941. His decline and possible end also seems to be on Slim’s mind in ‘I Didn’t Know It Was Loaded’, in which he claims that ‘Fellow Worker “Nick” startled me out of my death rattle this very day’. Slim, ‘I Didn’t Know It Was Loaded’ in Industrial Worker, 27 September 1941. 93 Floyd Miller, The Savage Streets (New York: Popular Library, 1956). For reasons that are unknown, Floyd Miller did not send material related to The Savage Streets to his official archive. As he later confessed to the FBI, Miller had worked for the Stalin-aligned American Communist Party spying on Trotskyists, work that included a six-week stay at Leon Trotsky’s home in Mexico. His archive contains a letter which implies that he also worked for the FBI, though the extent of this co-operation is unclear. See John Schaffner to Floyd Miller, 6 February 1976, Box 14, folder 3, Floyd Miller Collection, Howard B. Gotlieb archive, Boston University Special Collections. 94 Saku Pinta has suggested that Slim may have been a victim of ‘Operation Underworld’, an undercover wartime collaboration effort between the mafia and US naval intelligence to clean up the New York waterfront. However, while the operation began among fishing fleets in March 1942, it only expanded to Slim’s area of the docklands around June 1942 following a mid-May meeting between intelligence officers and imprisoned mafia boss Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, by which time Slim was already dead. See Rodney Campbell, The Luciano Project: the Secret Wartime Collaboration of the Mafia and the US Navy (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1977), pp. 96–99. Nevertheless, as Pinta rightly points out, the New York docklands were still an extremely dangerous place in 1942. Saku Pinta, ‘Who Killed T-Bone Slim? Part II’, https://blogs.helsinki.fi/tboneslim/2022/05/12/whokilled-t-bone-slim-part-2/ [accessed 22nd May 2022]. 95 New York City Municipal Archives, Hart Island Burial Records (microfilm). Research by Cherie Westmoreland, John Westmoreland, and myself reveals that Slim was buried on 5 June 1942 as an ‘unknown white man’ in plot 161, section 1, grave 24 (death certificate 11399). He was never formally identified because, according to a letter from the Chief Medical Examiner to Slim’s

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sister Ida Huhta Ekola, such identification could only be performed in person by a family member, a task that Ida was unable to complete. He must have been informally identified, however, since the Medical Examiner’s report states ‘Possible name of Matt Valentine Huhta’ (see New York City Medical Examiner’s report M42-2690). It is probable, though not proven beyond all doubt, that Slim was the ‘unknown white man’. The NYC Municipal archives have post-mortem photographs of John Does from this period, though access is heavily restricted. It is possible that a photograph of Slim’s body is in this archive, which would enable official identification. However, in the limited time that I had with the collection I could not find it. 96 In 2014, a successful lawsuit against the City enabled a limited degree of access. For further information, see the Hart Island Project website: www .hartisland.net/ [accessed 12 May 2019]. 97 Slim seems to have anticipated this ending when he wrote of a future dystopian time ‘After capitalism is fully developed and civilization has reached its dizziest pinnacle’ when ‘there is left no place in which to tuck the dead’, meaning that ‘The graves should be dug deeper. Plant the dead two and three deep – sort of “stack ‘em up.” Square the tops of the tombstones – all of equal height so that we can build our HOUSE on the remains of the dead’ [capitalisation in original]. Slim, ‘From Murder to Re-Action’ in Industrial Solidarity 01 August 1925. 98 Video of New York City Council Meeting, 30 May 2019. https://legistar .­council.nyc.gov/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=690970&GUID=262BE200-F57E4599-8D89-2DCF56838C5D&Options=info&Search= [accessed 01 June 2019]. 99 New York City has recently changed the jurisdiction of Hart Island from the Department of Corrections to the Department of Parks and Recreation with the aim of improving the condition of and access to the island. 100 John Westmoreland has produced an album of his Great Granduncle’s songs entitled Resurrection, while artist Antti Männynväli held a 2020 exhibition of artworks in Helsinki, Finland, inspired by Slim’s writing. See https:// johnwestmorelandmusic.com/t-bone-slim and https://makeyourmark.fi/ gallery/exhibition/antti-mannynvali-the-word-of-t-bone-slim/ [accessed 05 September 2021]. 101 Albert Vetere Lannon, Second String Red: The Life of Al Lannon, American Communist (Boulder; New York; Oxford: Lexington Books, 1999), pp.45– 46. Albert Vetere Lannon is Al Lannon’s son and the account is based on audio recordings of his father. 102 One influence on Slim may have been his friendship with the prominent black Wobbly Ben Fletcher. According to Anatole Dolgoff, the pair ‘loved “to chew the fat” at the Old Hall on Coenties Slip’ in New York’s docklands. Anatole Dolgoff, Left of the Left: My Memories of Sam Dolgoff (Chico, Oakland, Edinburgh, Baltimore: AK Press, 2016), p.237. In a 1987 letter to Franklin Rosemont, Sam Dolgoff stated that Slim and Fletcher were ‘very close’. Sam Dolgoff to Franklin Rosemont 10th June 1987, Newberry Library Rosemont-Slim Collection, Box 1, Folder 10. This is not to say that Slim does not, on occasion, make racially problematic remarks in his articles, however.

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7  ‘I’m a Hobo Myself Sometimes’: African-American Transiency in Black Vernacular Music 1 Edward Connor, ‘Hobo Blues’ in “Hobo” News 9:3 (March 1921). 2 Cited in Alan Lomax, The Land Where The Blues Began (London: Minerva, 1997, first published 1993), p. 461. For the original recording, see The Association for Cultural Equity’s Alan Lomax online archive, Track 11, ‘Conversation with Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim, and Sonny Boy Williamson about the blues (I)’, https://archive.culturalequity.org/node/62084 [accessed 30 September 2021]. ‘Signifyin’, which is also written as signifyin(g), is an African-American wordplay trope by which, through their particular context, words represent more than their denotative meaning. For more, see Henry Louis Gates Jr, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 3 Jack London, The Road in Novels and Social Writings, ed. Donald Pizer (New York: The Library of America, 1982, text first published 1907), p. 227. Subsequent references given in parentheses. 4 One of the best discussions of London’s racism and racialism is Jeanne Campbell Reesman’s Jack London’s Racial Lives: A Critical Biography (Athens, Ga: University of Georgia Press, 2009). 5 Joshua 9, New American Standard Bible. This was a phrase that London cited throughout his career, including in ‘A Hyperborean Brew’ in The Faith and Men and Other Stories (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1904), pp. 27–66 (p.34); Burning Daylight (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913, first published 1910), p. 157; The Kempton-Wace Letters (London: Mills and Boon, 1903), cowritten with Anna Strunksy, p. 6. 6 Whiteness studies has demonstrated that whiteness, like all racial concepts, is a constructed category rooted in notions of power and class. See, among others, Valerie Babb, Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature (New York; London: New York University Press, 1998); What White Looks Like: African-American Publishers on the Whiteness Question, edited by George Yancy (New York and London: Routledge, 2004); Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York; London: Routledge, 1995); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass; London, England: Harvard University Press, 1998); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1992); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London; New York: Verso, 2007). 7 John James McCook, ‘Leaves from the Diary of a Tramp I: First Acquaintance’ in The Independent 53:2764 (21 November 1901), pp. 2760–2767 (pp. 2760–2762). 8 Heather Tapley, ‘The Making Of Hobo Masculinities’ in Canadian Review of American Studies 44:1 (2014), pp. 25–43 (p.38).

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9 Josiah Flynt, Tramping With Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life (New York: The Century Company, 1899), pp.108–109; Todd DePastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 78. 10 Harry M. Beardsley, ‘Along the Main Stem with Red: Being an Account of the Hobohemians, Including One Paul of Tarsus and a Guy Named Moses’ (March 29, 1917) in Ernest W. Burgess Papers, Box 127, Folder 1, Document 145, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. 11 Kenneth Kusmer, Down and Out, On the Road: The Homeless in American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 140. 12 Nels Anderson, The Hobo: the sociology of the homeless man. A study prepared for the Chicago Council of Social Agencies under the direction of the Committee on Homeless Men (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1961, text originally published 1923), p. 19. 13 George Milburn, The Hobo’s Hornbook: A Repertory for a Gutter Jongleur (New York: Ives Washburn, 1930), p. 249. 14 Charles Dryden, On and Off the Breadwagon: Being the Hard Luck Tales, Doings and Adventures of an Amateur Hobo (Chicago: Star Publishing Company, 1905), p. 95. 15 Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Limited, 1969, book first published 1943), p. 9. On the evolution of Guthrie’s racial politics, see Will Kaufman, Woody Guthrie, American Radical (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2011), pp. 145–165 16 Nelson Peery, Black Fire: The Making of an American Revolutionary (New York: The New Press, 1994), p. 114. 17 For example, Dolly Kennedy Yancy describes her tramp experiences in racial terms: ‘I want to get away from yelling coons, fiendish mosquitoes and impudent fleas’ (p. 49). In a hotel in Charleston, she hears ‘the fiendish yell of a coon’ out of her window. (p. 51) For Yancy, being a tramp meant being too close to people of colour. For other examples of racism in white hobo lifewriting, either described or perpetuated, see Dan Hennessey, On the Bum: Sketches of Tramp Life (Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius Co, 1926), pp. 37–38; Windy Bill (possible real name of Ben Goodkind), Windy Bill’s An American Hobo in Europe (San Francisco: Calkins Publishing House, 1907) pp. 96–98; John Peele, From North Carolina to Southern California Without a Ticket, and How I Did It (Tarboro, N.C: Edwards & Broughton Print Company, 1907); Bart Kennedy A Tramp Camp (London; Paris; New York; Melbourne: Cassell and Company, Limited, 1906), p. 88, p. 127, p. 155. On racism in the “Hobo” News and its successor paper The Hobo News, see Owen Clayton, ‘Who Said I Was a Bum?’ Self-Presentation in the “Hobo” News, 1915–1924’ in Representing Homelessness 239, edited by Owen Clayton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 191–192 & p. 195. 18 Even radical publishers bent to the segregationist logic of hobohemia, as when the leftist Vanguard Press insisted that Nelsen Algren remove an interracial love affair between a white hobo and a black woman in his antiracist proletarian

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novel Somebody in Boots (1935). See Ian Peddie, ‘Poles Apart? Ethnicity, Race, Class, and Nelson Algren’ in Modern Fiction Studies 47:1 (Spring 2001), pp. 118–144 (pp. 124–125). By 1957, the radical white author Alfred Maund felt able to write about a group of black hobos who encounter a white hobo travelling in a boxcar. See Alfred Maund, The Big Boxcar (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999, first published 1957). 19 The book is part of a Black Ulysses trilogy, which also includes Wings on My Feet (1929) and Cold Blue Moon (1931). For Odum’s earlier account of Gordon, see Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson, Negro Workaday Songs (Chapel Hill, NC; London: The University of North Carolina Press; Oxford University Press, 1926), pp. 206–220. For more on Odum, see Lynn Moss Sanders’ Howard W. Odum’s Folklore Odyssey: Transformation to Tolerance through African American Folk Studies (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2003). 20 When scholars have discussed Attaway, they have focussed on his more famous Great Migration novel Blood on the Forge; his first novel, Let Me Breathe Thunder, has received little critical attention. For example, despite analysing Blood on the Forge in some depth, Melanie Benson makes no mention of Attaway’s first novel in her 2008 monograph Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912–2002 (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. 2008). The same holds true of Cynthia Hamilton’s article ‘Work and Culture: The Evolution of Consciousness in Urban Industrial Society in the Fiction of William Attaway and Peter Abrahams’ in Black American Literature Forum 21:1/2 (1987), pp. 147–163. When they have acknowledged its existence, scholars tend to dismiss Thunder as being inferior to Forge. For example, it receives only a single sentence in both Robert Bone’s The Negro Novel in America (1966) and Bernard Bell’s The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987). Bone dismisses Let Me Breathe Thunder as a ‘run-of-the-mill proletarian novel strongly influenced by John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men’. Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966, 3rd Ed, text originally published 1958), p. 133; Bernard Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 1987), p. 168. 21 William Attaway, Let Them Breathe Thunder (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc, 1939), p. 63. Subsequent references in the body of the chapter. 22 On the term ‘white trash’, see White Trash: Race and Class in America, edited by Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). 23 Indeed, the book contains a higher degree of violence than is found in most white hobo narratives. Step rules Ed and a young Mexican boy whom they adopt through terror. Ed frequently prevents Step from acting violently towards others. The men flee, as already mentioned, from a mob at the end of the novel. In addition, violence towards women seems pervasive in the working class culture depicted in the text. The novel also hints at child ­sexual abuse.

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24 James Young claims that the most interesting aspect of Thunder is ‘that its principal characters are white’. James Young, Black Writers of the Thirties (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), p. 226. Similarly, Bernard Bell unambiguously refers to the novel’s protagonists as ‘two white hoboes’. Bell, p. 168. Alan Wald describes the book as ‘an “on-the-road” novel featuring white migrants’. Alan Wald, Exiles From a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 2012), p. 282. 25 Erin Royston Battat, Ain’t Got No Home: America’s Great Migrations and the Making of an Interracial Left (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), p. 32. 26 Robert Fikes Jr, ‘The persistent allure of universality: African American authors of white life novels, 1890–1945’ in Western Journal of Black Studies (1996), 21:4, pp. 221–226 (p. 224). 27 Angela Y. Davis states that historians ‘studying the African-American past rarely turn to blues history’. Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holliday (New York, Vintage Books, 1999, first published in 1998), p. 44. 28 R. A. Lawson, Jim Crow’s Counterculture: The Blues and Black Southerners, 1890– 1945 (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), p. 11. 29 Paul Garon and Gene Tomko, What’s the Use of Walking if There’s a Freight Train Going Your Way? Black Hoboes & Their Songs (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2006), p. 5. Also see examples of blues music in Iain McIntyre’s anthology On the Fly! Hobo Literature & Songs, 1879–1941 (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2018). 30 The concept of authorship, upon which the legal construct of copyright relies, depends upon an individualised and capitalistic concept of originality. For more on authorship and originality, see Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’ in Textual Strategies, edited by Josue V. Harari (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell, 1979), pp. 141–160; Peter Jaszi, ‘Toward a Theory of Copyright: The Metamorphoses of “Authorship”’ in Duke Law Journal (April 1991), pp. 455–502; Richard Terry, ‘Plagiarism, Imitation and Originality’ in The Plagiarism Allegation in English Literature from Butler to Sterne (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010). On the influence of blues in American Literature, see Steven C. Tracy, Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the bluing of American Literature (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 2015). 31 Houston A. Baker, Jr, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: a Vernacular Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 6. 32 For an analysis of rhythm in blues, see Robert Palmer, Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago’s South Side to the World (London; New York: Penguin, 1982, first published 1981), pp. 63–66; for a musicological discussion of Thomas ‘Georgia Tom’ Dorsey, see Michael W. Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); for an excellent musicological study of pre-1920s blues, see Peter C. Muir, Long Lost

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Notes to pages 206–207

Blues: Popular Blues in America, 1850–1920 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010); for a musicological analysis of creativity and the use of sources in blues, see David Evans, Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (Berkeley: Da Capo Press, 1982); also see Tracy’s musicological discussion of the blues in Hot Music, pp. 12–44. 33 Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, ‘“They Certl’y Sound Good to Me”: Sheet Music, Southern Vaudeville, and the Commercial Ascendency of the Blues’ in American Music 14:4, New Perspectives on the Blues (Winter 1996), pp. 402–454 (p. 412). 34 Examples of this autobiographical bias include Max Haymes’ claim that Blind Willie McTell’s song about looking at women in his ‘Travelin’ Blues’ (Columbia 14484-D, 1929) is evidence that he may not have been ‘totally blind’, Luigi Monde’s argument that Blind Lemon Jefferson’s songs represent ‘the outspoken verbalization of a compressed and repressed signifier acknowledging the condition of blindness’, and Giles Oakley’s idealistic assertion that Jefferson ‘is almost the archetype of all bluesmen, living the rough life that is grimly portrayed in his songs…endlessly on the move, but at the same time full of humour and rugged independence’. Haymes, pp. 278–279; Luigi Monde, ‘The Language of Blind Lemon Jefferson: The Covert Theme of Blindness’ in Black Music Research Journal 20:1 (Spring 2000), pp. 35–81 (p.61); Giles Oakley, The Devil’s Music: A History of the Blues (London: British Broadcasting Company, 1976), p. 128. Acknowledging that McTell, Jefferson and other blues musicians created personas removes the need for them to have personally experienced everything about which they sing. This is particularly helpful for songs such as Jefferson’s ‘Lectric Chair Blues’ (Paramount 12608, 1928), in which the singer details his own execution. 35 See Muir, pp. 12–15. 36 On ‘Tempo di Blues’, see Abbott and Seroff, p. 418. 37 Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 2. Strategies for marketing ‘local’ music were first developed for international markets, then US immigrant markets, and finally for selling to white (as ‘Hillbilly’ or country music) and black Americans (as the blues). For more on record companies’ search for new markets, see Miller, pp. 157–214. 38 For more on some of the lesser-known ‘Blues Queens’, see Daphne Duval Harrison, Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (New Brunswick; New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1993). 39 Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (New York: Amistad, 2004), p. 15. 40 Samuel Charters, extract from ‘The Poetry of the Blues’ (1963) in Walking a Blues Road: a Blues Reader 1956–2004 (New York; London: Marion Boyers, 2004), p. 107; Clinton Heylin, It’s One For the Money: The Song Snatchers Who Carved Up A Century of Pop & Sparked a Musical Revolution (London: Constable, 2016), p. 14. 41 Lomax, pp. 358–362.

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42 Michael Taft, Talkin’ to Myself: Blues Lyrics, 1921–1942, New Edition (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), p. xv. Assuming the AAB stanza to be the only correct blues lyric format, in this seminal anthology Taft amends blues songs as he transcribes them: ‘all refrains which do not conform to the blues couplet structure, and all nonblues stanzas in the vaudeville songs… have been left out of these transcriptions’. Taft, p. xvi. He also marks the caesura ‘at the traditional syntactic point in the line, regardless of where the caesura actually falls’, creating an ‘“ideal” caesura’ that overrides the recordings themselves. Taft, p. xix. These editorial choices are a misrepresentation of the diversity of black vernacular music. 43 Steven Tracy notes that ‘one pattern was not necessarily dominant’ during the period in which the earliest folklorists were collecting proto-blues music. Tracy, p. 41. 44 See Abbe Niles, ‘The Story of the Blues’ (1949) in Blues: an anthology, edited by W. C. Handy (New York; London: MacMillan Company, 1972, book first published 1926), pp. 12–19. According to Abbott and Seroff, in Father of the Blues Handy ‘conspicuously avoided mentioning the continuous barrage of professional blues-based activity that was ringing from the vaudeville theaters within earshot of his Beale Street office’. Abbott and Seroff, p. 434. 45 Miller, pp. 8–9. Coon songs often utilized the twelve-bar format, which may have evolved from an earlier British ballad tradition. See Muir, pp. 187–198. 46 A good example of how female-produced vaudeville blues has been neglected in comparison to male country blues is the fact that Blind Willie McTell was able to convince twentieth-century folklorists and historians that he had written the song ‘Dyin’ Crapshooter Blues’ when in fact it had already been recorded in 1927 by Martha Coupland to a melody composed by Porter Grainger. See Robert W. Harwood, I Went Down to St. James Infirmary: Investigations in the shadowy world of early jazz-blues in the company of Blind Willie McTell, Louis Armstrong, Don Redman, Irving Mills, Carl Moore, and a host of others, and Where did this dang song come from anyway? 2nd Edition (Canada: Harland Press, 2015), p. 19. 47 Samuel Charters, The Country Blues (New York; Toronto: Rinehart & Company, Inc, 1959); Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues: a Musical and Cultural Analysis, 2nd Edition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994, first edition published 1977). 48 Paul and Beth Garon note that ‘ “women’s blues” has come to denote Classic, vaudeville-style blues’, a style that has been ‘devalued’ in comparison to the male-dominated Country Blues. Paul and Beth Garon, Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues, revised and expanded edition (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2014, first edition published 1992), pp. 31–33. 49 Marybeth Hamilton, In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), pp. 6–7. 50 See, for example, Paul Oliver’s statement that ‘Frequently Blind Lemon Jefferson’s blues are termed “primitive,” and in the anthropological sense of being unlettered and untutored, they are’. Oliver goes on to claim that ‘there

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is not a trace of sophistication in Blind Lemon’s singing or playing’. Paul Oliver, ‘Blind Lemon Jefferson’ in Jazz Review 2:7 (August 1959). p. 11. 51 Miller, p. 227; Wald, p. 62; Titon, pp. 51–52; Heylin, p. 93; Lawson, p. 27–28; Muir, pp. 29–30; Evans, p. 109. In 1962 Samuel Charters made a film, The Blues, which gained a mythic status in part because it was never released commercially and was only shown to a small group of aficionados. The film enacted Charters’ claim that ‘the blues was lived in neighbourhoods’ by asking eight previously ‘lost’ male singers to perform old blues numbers even when, as in the case of ‘Pink’ Anderson, they did not know many such songs. Charters also recorded footage of singer Henry Townsend playing electric guitar but, presumably to maintain the primitive purity of his ‘Country Blues’ construction, this footage was edited out. See Searching for Secret Heroes: the Story behind Samuel Charters; Legendary Lost 1962 Film ‘The Blues’, Previously Unreleased (Document Records, 2020, The Blues originally filmed 1962). 52 Hamilton, p.8. One aspect of this ‘unmediated cry’ framing is the common notion that blues is apolitical. The ‘fiction of self-pity’, as Steve Garabedian puts it, ‘blinded white authorities to the fact of Black protest’ and limited their understanding of blues content to ‘pathos and partying’. Steve Garabedian, A Sound History: Lawrence Gellert, Black Musical Protest, and White Denial (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), p. 58 & p. 175. For an important collection of politically-inflected blues, see the material gathered in the 4-volume anthology Ain’t Times Hard: Political and Social Comment in the Blues (JSP Records, JSP77109, 2008). 53 Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978, first published 1977), p. 296; Baker, p. 2 & p. 5. 54 Miller, p. 280. 55 For example, ‘Country Blues’ star Blind Lemon Jefferson’s success enabled him to buy a $725 Ford and to put $1500, a significant amount of money during the 1920s, into a savings account. Robert Uzzel, Blind Lemon Jefferson: His Life, His Death, and His Legacy (Fort Worth, Texas: Eakin Press, 2002), p. 33. 56 David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing: The Life and Times and Delta Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1997), p. 45. 57 A blues musician may not have had the particular experience about which they were singing, but they were aware that someone in their audience could have done, and they could hear when the audience acknowledged the truth of a particular line in a cry of pain or pleasure. Like Southern Vaudeville before it, as a live experience the blues invited the participation of the audience, who would often shout and call out during regular pauses in the singer’s vocal delivery. The pause in many blues vocal lines encouraged a call-and-response interaction in live performances, as if the singer were posing a question for the audience to answer. For example, black Tin Pan Alley songwriter Thomas ‘Georgia Tom’ Dorsey described an audience listening to Ma Rainey: ‘She possessed her listeners; they swayed, they rocked, they moaned and groaned…

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Some woman screams out with a shrill cry of agony as the blues recalls sorrow’, while Sterling Brown wrote that Rainey ‘would moan, and the audience would moan with her’. Thomas Dorsey, cited in Harris, Rise of Gospel Blues, pp. 89–90; Sterling Brown, cited in Levine, p. 232. Similarly, Langston Hughes wrote a column for the Chicago Defender in which he described Memphis Minnie playing ‘down-home rhythm on the strings – a rhythm so contagious that often it makes the crowd holler out loud’. Langston Hughes, ‘Here to Yonder’ in Chicago Defender, 9 January 1943, p. 14. 58 In the introduction to the song ‘Silver City Bound’ (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1948), Leadbelly describes himself and Blind Lemon Jefferson riding on the cushions for free by playing for the passengers. For his part, Blind Willie McTell travelled, according to Michael Gray, ‘in safety and relative comfort, a whole level above the hobos’. Michael Gray, Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes: in Search of Blind Willie McTell (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), p. 214. 59 Uzzel, p. 36; Garon and Tomko, p. 36; ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards, p. 28. 60 Garon and Tomko, p. 63. 61 See Scott Reynolds Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, The Untold Story of an American Legend (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 93. 62 For more on ‘Take this Hammer’ and its relation to ‘Nine Pound Hammer’ and other variants, see Norm Cohen, Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong, 2nd Edition (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2000), pp. 571–582. 63 Hazel Carby, ‘It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues’ (1986) in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 471–483; Lawson, p. 88. 64 Despair could also be tempered with humour. In ‘Bad Time Blues’ (Columbia 14461, 1929), Barbecue Bob sings: ‘Some people say money is talking, but it won’t say a word to me’. 65 Unusually, in ‘The Army Blues’ (1942), Dave ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards seeks to escape from U.S army conscription by taking to the rails where Uncle Sam cannot find him. Although he adapts earlier floating verses to tell this story, in The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing Edwards confirms that this song was autobiographical. See Edwards, p. 135. 66 This kind of representation was also common in the newly-created and segregated genre of ‘Hillybilly’ or ‘Country’ music. See, for example, Richard Burnett and Leonard Rutherford’s ‘Ramblin’ Reckless Hobo’ (Columbia 15240-D, 1928), which portrays a hobo who decides to ‘have some fun’, including by having romantic liaisons with a variety of women as he moves around the country. 67 Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 18. 68 In ‘Pennsylvania Woman Blues’ (Paramount 12968, 1930), Six Cylinder Smith sings that after his job ‘Working in the steel mills baby, handling red hot steel’ is over, he must leave to seek work elsewhere: ‘I’m going away baby, won’t be back till fall’.

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69 See Ann DuCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 4–5, 14–15 & DuCille ‘Blacks of the Marrying Kind: Marriage Rites and the Right to Marry in the Time of Slavery’ in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies: Black Marriage 29:2 (2018), edited by Ann DuCille, 21–67 (50–53). See also Hortense J. Spillers’ influential essay ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’ in Diacritics: Culture and Countermemory: The “American” Connection 17:2 (1987), 64–81. 70 Haymes, p. 230. 71 Adam Phillips, On Flirting (London; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994), xvii–xix. 72 The line ‘bought me a railroad’ dates to the pre-blues era. See Howard Odum, ‘Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry as Found in the Secular Songs of the Southern Negroes’ in Journal of American Folklore 24:93 (1911), pp. 255–294 (p. 282). 73 The pun ‘easy rider’, as used to describe a person with loose sexual morals, had existed since at least the era of ragtime. Another example within the blues is Blind Willie McTell’s ‘Stole Rider Blues’ (Victor 21124, 1927). Black vernacular music often made use of a ‘double voice’ in which lyrics, including sexual puns, could have separate meanings for black and white audiences. Of course, some white listeners would also pride themselves on being in on the joke. 74 For more on the advertisement of Race Records in the Chicago Defender, see Mark Dolan, ‘Extra! Chicago Defender Race Records Ads Show South From Afar’ in Southern Cultures 13:3 (Fall 2007), pp. 106–124. 75 Jefferson’s persona was also likely the inspiration behind Sterling Brown’s poem ‘Odyssey of Big Boy’ (1927), one stanza of which runs: Done took my livin’ as it came, Done grabbed my job, done risked my life; Train done caught me on de trestle, Man done caught me wid his wife, His doggone purty wife…

Sterling Brown, ‘Odyssey of Big Boy’ in The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown (Chicago: TriQuarterly Books, 1980), pp. 20–21 (stanza 11, p. 21). For more on Brown’s musical inspirations, see Lorenzo Thomas, ‘Authenticity and Elevation: Sterling Brown’s Theory of the Blues’ in African American Review 31:3 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 409–416. 76 See DuCille, The Coupling Convention, pp. 73–74. 77 The metaphor could be reversed to apply to men as well, as in George Torey’s ‘Married Woman Blues’ (American Record Company, 7-08-57, 1937) in which the singer describes himself as ‘like a broken down engine, ain’t got no driver wheel’. 78 Anderson’s lyrics are floating verses. For example, the line ‘Cause if you ride that train it will satisfy your mind’ also appears in Trixi Smith’s ‘Railroad Blues’ (Paramount 12262, 1925). 79 Nelson Peery describes jungles in a similar way: ‘I’ll be gone, because all I want is to run away from everything. I know why hoboes hobo – ramble this

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country – searching for peace within themselves, no worry and no regrets. It can be found only in what these savages call the jungle.’ Peery, p. 66. 80 Abbott and Seroff claim that White ‘Obviously…had to have overheard [italics in original]’ these lines ‘in the streets and vaudeville theaters of Dallas’s emerging African American entertainment industry’, but they do not offer any evidence to support this claim. Abbot and Seroff, p. 410. 81 Cited in Abbot and Seroff, p. 409. Having been the first blues to be published as sheet music, in 1913 the song was condensed and released by Bush and Gerts publishers as ‘The Nigger Blues’. The lyrics just cited were included in the publication in a slightly amended format. See a digitisation of this publication at The Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection, John Hopkins University, Box 153, Item 182, https://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu/collection/153/182 [accessed 14 January 2020]. 82 For other versions of these lines not mentioned here, see Cohen, pp. 447–448 & p. 448, n. 8. 83 W. Prescott Webb, ‘Notes on Folk-Lore of Texas’ in Journal of American Folklore 28:109 (July-September 1915), pp. 290–299 (pp. 291–295). 84 Carby, p. 477. 85 For more on the little-known Porter Grainger, see Harwood, pp. 193–198. 86 As David Evans puts it, blues musicians would often use commercial phonograph recordings as ‘jumping-off points’ for their own songs. Evans, p. 121. 87 Demonstrating the ubiquity of ‘floating verses’, an earlier incarnation of these lines had appeared in Ed Bell’s ‘Frisco Whistle Blues’ (Paramount 12546, 1927) just a few months after the release of Rainey’s ‘Weeping Woman Blues’. Bell sings ‘Honey, where were you when the Frisco left the yard?/Where were you when the Frisco left the yard?/I was on the corner, police had me barred’. In contrast to Miller, what prevents the male Bell from jumping aboard the Frisco is not personal inability but the actions of the police, a difference that keeps his presumed masculine independence intact. The gender stereotypes under discussion in this chapter are often maintained by small changes to the lyrics of floating verses. 88 Paul and Beth Garon, Woman with Guitar, p. 263. 89 While hobo jungles have typically been represented as male spaces, they would often be visited by female prostitutes. Memphis Minnie was herself a sex worker on occasion. Paul and Beth Garon, Woman with Guitar, p. 178. 90 It is unclear whether Memphis Minnie wrote this song alone, co-wrote it, or whether her husband Ernest Lawlors created the lyrics. Since many blues musicians used floating verses and improvised original lyrics as they performed, I consider performance to be a separate text to the written lyrics, which means that the question of original authorship is not of vital importance. For more on the confusion around Memphis Minnie’s songwriting credits, see Paul and Beth Garon, Woman with Guitar, pp. 77–79. 91 This song may be partly autobiographical, since Lizzie Douglas did frequently run away from home as a teenager. See Paul and Beth Garon, Woman with Guitar, p. 37.

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92 For Adam Gussow, racial violence ‘Helped to form what I call a “blues subject,” who then found ways, more or less covert, of singing back to that everhovering threat.’ Adam Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2002), p. 4. 93 John Lennon, Boxcar Politics: The Hobo in U.S Culture and Literature, 1869– 1956 (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), pp. 131–156. 94 For more on the Scottsboro Boys, see James Goodman’s Stories of Scottsboro (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). For more on the Left’s response, see Battat, pp. 15–24. 95 Langston Hughes, ‘Scottsboro’ in Scottsboro Limited, Four Poems and a Play in Verse (New York: The Golden Stair Press, 1932), lines 3–4, no pagination. 96 See Peery, pp. 12–13. 97 Cited in Eber Carle Perrow, ‘Songs and Rhymes from the South’ in The Journal of American Folklore 26:100 (Apr-Jun 1913), pp. 123–173 (p. 171). 98 See W. O. Scroggs to Eber Carle Perrow, Nov 27 1908, Eber Carle Perrow collection of Southern ballads, 1908–1909. MS Am 1576 (3), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass, http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn3:FHCL.HOUGH:4723699 [accessed 16 October 2019]. The song was modified and recorded by several artists, including Bessie Tucker in 1928. 99 For more on ‘coon songs’, see Miller pp. 41–50 & pp. 124–142. 100 The fact that this train has a ‘conductor’ is, of course, a contradiction if the train is riding a ‘dummy’ rail: a contradiction which is probably explained by ‘De Dummy’ containing floating verses from earlier songs. 101 For more on this song and its variants, see Cohen, pp. 485–490. 102 See Levine’s discussion of colour in blues, pp. 286–290. 103 For more on the convict lease system, see Joe William Trotter, Jr, Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019), pp. 53–59. 104 Gellert is a controversial figure because of his focus on protest music and because of questions about the authenticity of his material. Bruce Conforth argues that the material Gellert collected is ‘protest’ music only in a broad, implicit and non-institutional sense, and also that Gellert occasionally assisted with the creation of songs that he collected. Bruce Conforth, African American Folksong and American Cultural Politics: The Lawrence Gellert Story (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2013) p. 115–145. Steven Garabedian, in contrast, claims that Gellert ‘was a sincere broker in the cause of racial justice and radical change’ and that ‘the Gellert archive is credible’. Garabedian, p. 14. Conforth and Garabedian engage in a lively public dialogue in the comments section of a review of Conforth’s book: see https://solidarityus.org/site01/atc/174/p4334/ [accessed 30 October 2019]. I do not wish to engage in the controversy about Gellert’s politics, which are not relevant to my argument, or about if and how many songs he may have assisted in creating, especially as notions of authenticity in vernacular music are problematic. Nevertheless, the acapella recording of ‘Two Hoboes’, held in the

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Gellert collection at Indiana University’s Archives of Traditional Music, is compelling evidence that this is a song that Gellert collected, especially when combined with D. K. Wilgus’ assertion that the song has variants elsewhere. See D. K Wilgus, ‘From the Record Review Editor: Afro-American Tradition’ in The Journal of American Folklore, 85:335 (Jan-Mar,1972), pp. 99–107 (105–106). Indeed, my own research has indicated that ‘Two Hoboes’ shares several verses with the song ‘The Negro Bum’ as found in song collections by both Howard Odum and George Milburn. See Howard Odum, ‘Folk Song and Folk Poetry as Found in the Secular Songs of the Southern Negro – Concluded’ in The Journal of American Folklore 24:94 (OctoberDecember 1911), pp. 351–396 (p. 353); George Milburn’s The Hobo’s Hornbook: A Repertory for a Gutter Jongleur (New York: Ives Washburn, 1930), p. 249. The ‘Two Hoboes’ recording indicates shows that the equipment failed several times; the final album version cleaned up these malfunctions by using multiple cuts. Digitised copies of these two recordings are now available at http://umpressopen.library.umass.edu/projects/a-sound-history/resource/ two-hoboes-10-17800-side-2-item-1 and http://umpressopen.library.umass .edu/projects/a-sound-history/resource/two-hoboes-10-17800-side-2-item-2 [accessed October 2021]. My sincere thanks to Steve Garabedian for pointing me to these recordings. For more on parallels between the Gellert material and the recordings of other song collectors, as well the accusation of ‘coaching’, see Garabedian pp. 142–149. 105 Gellert released an album featuring the ‘Two Hoboes’ recording in 1970 and re-released it in collaboration with Rounder Records in 1973. The album notes state that Gellert made the recordings in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, but do not specify locations for particular songs. See Negro Songs of Protest: Collected by Lawrence Gellert, 33rpm, Rounder 4004 (1973). 106 By the time of this recording, similar lyrics had already appeared in Julius Daniels’ 1927 song ‘Ninety Nine Year Blues’ (Victor 20658-B): ‘Bring me my pistol, three rounds of ball,/I’m gonna kill everybody whopped the poor boy along’. 107 This is also portrayed in Ralph Ellison’s short story ‘Hymie’s Bull’ (1937), in which a railroad bull’s attempt to beat a white hobo leads to the hobo killing the bull in self-defence. This begets yet more violence when the police use the white hobo’s actions as an excuse to crack down on African American train-hoppers. As Ellison’s narrator puts it, ‘Most of the time, they don’t care who did it, because the main thing is to make some black boy pay for it’. Ralph Ellison, ‘Hymie’s Bull’ in Flying Home and Other Stories (New York; London: Random House, 1998) pp. 82–88 (p. 83). 108 Angela Davis notes the ubiquity of domestic violence in blues songs performed by women. See Davis, pp. 25–37. 109 Larry L. Massey, The Life and Crimes of Railroad Bill (Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2015). Massey outlines other men who might have been the basis for Railroad Bill, though Slater seems the most likely candidate. See Massey, pp. 19–21.

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110 Burgin Mathews, ‘“Looking for Railroad Bill”: On the Trail of an Alabama Badman’ in Southern Cultures 9:3 (2003), pp. 66–88 (p. 80). 111 Mathews, p. 72. 112 For more on the relationship between the black outlaw folk hero and the post-emancipation ‘badman’ figure, see John W. Roberts, From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. 171–219. 113 ‘From Alabama; Negroes; recitation of Mrs. C Brown, 1909’ in Perrow, ‘Songs and Rhymes from the South’, p. 155. 114 For more on the floating line ‘a ticket as long as my arm’, see Haymes, pp. 35–36. A version of this line appears in Ma Rainey’s ‘See See Rider Blues’ (Paramount 12252, 1925). 115 The Folk Revival saw the blues as an alternative to the commercial music of its own time. For later bands including the Rolling Stones and The Grateful Dead, the blues also served neatly as Rock and Roll’s origin myth. 116 ‘All the way from New Orleans’, which is a line from the song as recorded by Gellert, is also used by Bob Dylan in his ‘Blind Willie McTell’ (Columbia CSK 4042, 1991) in a characteristic (for Dylan) moment of love and theft.

Conclusion: The End of the Road? Transiency beyond the Hobo 1 Vachel Lindsay, A Handy Guide for Beggars, especially those of the poetic fraternity. Being sundry explorations, made while afoot and penniless in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. These adventures convey and illustrate the rules of beggary for poets and some others (New York: The Macmillan Company Publishers, 1916), p. 203. 2 Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York: Random House, 1994), p. xiv. 3 Len De Caux, ‘The Disappearing Tramp’ in The Nation 84:5 (1907), p. 5. 4 Minneapolis Morning Tribune, 1 July 1918, p. 10. 5 It appears in poetry and prose as well. Leonard M. Van Wingerden’s poem ‘The Hobo’ (1925), for example, portrays a hobo worker who ‘though this summer/ In the harvest fields he sweat’, cannot find a roof over his head during a freezing Christmas Eve night. The final verse portrays his death in a lengthy and sentimental manner: ‘Weak and hungry, faint with fatigue/For a moment losing hold,/ Weary eyelids close; a moment, and the little fire is cold’. M. Van Wingerden, ‘The Hobo’ in Industrial Worker, 26 December 1925, p. 3. For a prose example of the ‘Dying Hobo’ trope, see Sam T. Clover, Leaves From a Diary: a Tramp Around the World (Chicago: M. D. Kimball, Publisher, 1884), pp. 137–139. 6 George Milburn, The Hobo’s Hornbook: A Repertory for a Gutter Jongluer (New York: Ives Washburn, 1930), pp. 131–133. 7 Norm Cohen, Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong, 2nd Edition (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 369.

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8 As with most vernacular songs, there are multiple versions. These particular lyrics appear in “Hobo” News 3:3 (June 1917), p. 6, under the title ‘The Hobo’s Last Lament’. The “Hobo” News itself printed an alternative, three stanza version entitled ‘The Dying Hobo’: see “Hobo” News 11:2 (February 1923), p. 15. See the St Louis Public Library online archive: https://cdm17210.contentdm .oclc.org/digital/collection/hobonews/search [accessed 19 December 2021]. 9 Milburn, pp. xi–xvi. 10 Milburn, p. xviii. For more recent iterations of the picturesque dying hobo, see Michael Williams and Dale Maharidge’s photobook, The Last Great American Hobo (Rocklin, Ca: Prima Publishing, 1993) and Mary Gauthier’s song ‘Last of the Hobo Kings’, which is about Maury Graham (Lost Highways Records, 2007). 11 Godfrey Irwin, American Tramp and Underworld Slang: Words and Phrases Used by Hoboes, Tramps, Migratory Workers and Those on the Fringes of Society, with their Use and Origins, with a Number of Tramp Songs (London: Eric Partridge Ltd, 1931), p. 12. 12 Milburn, p. xvi. The song is ‘The Negro Bum’ which, as discussed in Chapter 7, shares lyrics with songs collected by Howard Odum and Lawrence Gellert. The Hobo’s Hornbook also contains a song with what Milburn calls the ‘arbitrary’ title of ‘The Wanderer’s Blues’. See Milburn, p. 249 & pp. 275–276. Milburn’s monoracial approach contrasts with that of poet and ex-hobo Carl Sandburg, whose collection The American Songbag (1927) contains sections on blues and ‘Mexican Border Songs’. Noting the multi-racial mixture of his material, Sandburg calls his book ‘an all-American affair…rich with the human diversity of the United States’. Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, 1927), p. vii. 13 Laura Browder, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 176–177. The British journalist and travel writer John Foster Fraser wrote about the hobo, spelt ‘hobbo’, who ‘looks you with his grey-blue Saxon eyes, and tells you he’s as much a man you are, and says ‘guess I wouldn’t take off my hat to the President, for I reckon I’m good as is, anyhow”.’ The ‘AngloSaxon’ eyes of the ‘hobbo’ and his unwillingness to defer to the President symbolise the freedom and self-confidence that Foster perceives to be a racial birthright. John Foster Fraser, Vagabond Papers (London and Newcastle-onTyne: Walter Scott Publishing Company, 1902), pp. 106–107. 14 Irwin, p. 14. 15 Milburn, p. xviii. 16 As Rolf Linder notes, ‘Choosing a King of the Hoboes…only makes sense, of course, if it is a prize for the pureness of life-style’. Rolf Linder, The Reportage of Urban Culture: Robert Park and the Chicago School, trans. Adrian Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, first published 1996), p. 132. 17 For a list of Hobo Kings and Queens, see www.hobo.net/hobokingsqueens .html [accessed 30 December 2020]. 18 Though they are homophones and did share some contributors, Benson’s paper should not be confused with the earlier IBWA publication the “Hobo” News.

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19 The Hobo News (February 1942), New York Public Library [microfilm] *ZAN-10159. 20 The Hobo News (July 1941), NYPL. 21 See Oscar Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1975, first published 1959); Michael Harrington, The Other America (New York: Collier Books, 1993, first published 1962); Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case For National Action (Washington, D.C: Office of Policy Planning and Research, US Department of Labor, 1965). 22 There were numerous reasons for the end of the ‘Golden Age of Tramping’, including changes to welfare following World War II, mechanisation of agriculture, increased use of cars by migrant workers, greater reliance on Mexican ‘guest worker’ labour and the end of steam-powered trains, which removed the need for the watertanks by which hobos had gathered. 23 Ann Brigham, American Road Narratives: Reimagining Mobility in Literature and Film (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2015), p. 4. On earlier automobile narratives, see Lynne Pearce, ‘A Motor-Flight Through Early Twentieth-Century Consciousness: Capturing the DrivingEvent 1905–1935’ in Researching and Representing Mobilities: Transdisciplinary Encounters, eds. Lesley Murray and Sara Upstone (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), pp. 78–98. 24 Jack Kerouac, On the Road (London; New York: Penguin Books, 1991, first published 1957), pp. 25–28. Subsequent references given in the body of the chapter. 25 The spiritual aspect of the hobo is enhanced further in Dharma Bums (1959), whose narrator Ray Smith portrays transiency as a zen-like activity. See Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums (London; New York: Penguin Books, 2006, first published 1959). For a more recent example of spiritual vagabondage, see Wayne Iverson, Hobo Sapien: Freight Train Hopping Tao and Zen (Bandon, OR: Robert D. Reed Publishers, 2010). 26 Kerouac also represented the hobo figure in this manner in his essay ‘The Vanishing American Hobo’ (1960). See Kerouac, ‘The Vanishing American Hobo’ in The Lonesome Traveller (London; New York: Penguin Books, 2000, first published 1960), pp. 148–157. 27 Emblematic of this shift, Paradise twice fails to jump freight trains and ends up taking a bus and hitchhiking. Similarly, Moriarty tells a story, based on a real-life incident that happened to Neal Cassady, of being accidentally left alone as a child on a freight train by his negligent father. See Kerouac, On the Road, p. 19, 101, pp. 139–140. In Cassady’s autobiographical version, the father left the freight train to get the son a drink, but Kerouac’s Moriarty states that his father was drunk, a change that Kerouac made in order to represent the father as more neglectful and Moriarty himself as more of a victim. See Neal Cassady, The First Third & Other Writings (San Francisco: City Lights, 1981, first published 1971), pp. 90–92. 28 See Kerouac, ‘Essentials of Spontaneous Prose’ in Black Mountain Review 7 (Fall 1957), pp. 226–228.

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29 Kerouac, Dharma Bums (London; New York: Penguin Books, 2006; first published 1959), p. 83. 30 For more on the road movie and 1960s counterculture, see Katie Mills, The Road Story and the Rebel (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006). 31 A similar example is Hunter S Thompson’s book Hell’s Angels (1966), which concludes with Thompson being assaulted. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), the narrator laments the loss of the promise of the 1960s, and indeed the road-trip itself, which has become a nihilistic drug-fuelled journey that (repeatedly) ends in Las Vegas, a city which symbolises the commodification of 1960’s idealism and individualism in the service of corporate capitalism. See Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels (New York: Random House, 1966), pp. 324–326 and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: a Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (London: Harper Collins, 2003, first published 1971). 32 See Jim Christy, The New Refugees: American Voices in Canada (Toronto, Ontario: Peter Martin Associates, 1972). 33 See Jim Christy, Rough Road to the North: a Vagabond on the Great Northern Highway (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2019, originally published 1980), p. 3, p. 26, p.180. 34 Christy, Rough Road, p. 2 & p. 7. 35 Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping (London: Holmes Press, 2011, text first published 1926), p. 116. 36 Dylan’s representation is complicated by the fact that he recorded this song under the pseudonym ‘Blind Boy Grunt’, a name that is presumably supposed to sound like a black blues singer but which is rendered absurd by Dylan’s distinctive vocal style. 37 One musician who sought to preserve the hobo tradition was Bruce ‘Utah’ Phillips, whose various albums and the 100-episode radio show Loafer’s Glory: The Hobo Jungle of the Mind (1997–2001) interpret hobo and working class history through a folklorist lens. See www.thelongmemory.com/loafers-gloryepisodes [accessed 05 January 2021]. 38 As Lang puts it: ‘the meaning of home reaches far beyond the domestic setting…home signifies refuge from the exigencies of the market world. It stands as the antidote to history, a utopian site in which “changes never come”.’ Amy Lang, The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006, first published 2003), p. 12. 39 Under neoliberalism, policing and city planning policies have been adopted to remove the ‘New Homeless’ citizen from large cities, especially those cities whose economies rely on shopping and tourism. The disappearance of public space from such cities means that there is no place where those labelled ‘homeless’, who in the US are disproportionately people of colour, are permitted to exist. Although US vagrancy laws were declared unconstitutional in 1972, other measures, including the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, local behaviour orders and ‘zero tolerance’ or ‘broken windows’ policing, as well as the demolition and gentrification of former Skid Row areas, created a hostile

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environment that increased transiency by moving those labelled ‘homeless’ on from cities where they might be seen by shoppers and tourists. In response, tent cities have become semi-permanent features of US roadsides, out of the way rural areas, and of relatively liberal (or laissez-faire) cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. Tent cities are only semi-permanent because when such encampments do threaten to become permanent, local authorities typically destroy them. For more on tent cities, see Teresa Gowan, Hobos, Hustlers and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco (Minneapolis; London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2010); Don Mitchell, ‘Tent Cities: Interstitial Spaces of Survival’ in Urban Interstices: the Aesthetics and the Politics of the In-Between, edited by Andrea Mubi Brighenti (New York: Routledge, 2016, first published 2013), pp. 65–85. 40 ‘Steam Train’ Maury Graham and Robert J. Hemming, Tales of the Iron Road: My Life as King of the Hobos (New York: Paragon House, 1990), pp. 177– 180. For an excellent analysis of Graham’s autobiography, see Mary Paniccia Carden, ‘The Hobo as National Hero: Models for American Manhood in “Steam Train” Maury Graham’s Autobiography’ in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 11:1 (1996), pp. 93–108. 41 ‘The Texas Madman’ in One More Train to Ride: The Underground World of Modern American Hoboes, edited by Cliff Williams (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 3–12 (p.10). 42 Todd DePastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago; London, The University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 262–264. 43 See ‘Adman’ in One More Train to Ride, pp. 154–157 (p. 154). 44 A good example of the late twentieth-century commodification of the hobo is the growth of a market for ‘Hobo Nickels’. Hobo nickels are coins that are sculptured into artworks, often featuring a face in profile, the result of a practice that was allegedly begun by hobo artists in the early twentieth century. Many of these coins were originally ‘Indian head nickels’ featuring faces of Native Americans, which were sculptured over and changed into profiles of hobos, as if to replace the Indian with the hobo as a quintessentially American icon. Delma K. Romines’ 1982 book Hobo Nickels sought to establish hobo nickels as an artwork and had a significant impact on the creation of a numismatic art market for these pieces. See Delma K. Romines, Hobo Nickels (Newberry Park, CA: Lonesome John Publishing Co, 1982); Adolph Vandertie and Patrick Spielman, Hobo & Tramps Art Carving: An Authentic American Folk Tradition (New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., 1995). 45 Ferrell, pp.108–109. A famous example is that of Christopher McCandless, whose story has been told in Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996), and which in 2007 became a Hollywood movie of the same name. For McCandless’ own account, see Back to the Wild: The Photographs and Writings of Christopher McCandless (St. George, Utah: Twin Star Press, 2011). For more on crustpunks, see Hobo Lee’s magazine series There’s Something About a Train, which was published 1992–2004, and has been reprinted by Microcosm Publishing (Portland, Oregon).

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46 These generational tensions are discussed in Sarah George’s documen tary Catching Out (2003) and in John Lennon’s ‘Too Dirty to be a ‘Bo? Gutterpunks, Hobos, and Subcultural Negotiations of Identity’ in Youth Subcultures: Exploring underground America, ed. Arielle Greenberg (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007), pp. 213–222. 47 Mike Brodie, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Twin Palms Publishers, 2012) and Tones of Dirt and Bone (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Twin Palms Publishers, 2014); www.michaeljosephphotographics.com/lostand-found [accessed 05 January 2021]; Josh Mack, The Hobo Handbook: A Field Guide to Living by Your Own Rules (Avon, Mass: Adams Media, 2011); Brooke Willett, How To Be a Hobo (New York: Free Press Publications, 2016); Matthew Derrick, The Anarchist’s Guide to Travel: a Manuel for Future Hitchhikers, Hobos, and other Misfit Wanderers (USA: Sunnyslope Press, 2017). 48 See, for example, Eddy Joe Cotton, Hobo: A Young Man’s Thoughts on Trains and Tramping in America (New York: Harmony Books, 2002). 49 See www.facebook.com/Hobo.Shoestring/; www.youtube.com/channel/ UCj54ygjMXmDVVcBZ1xOIh7g; www.youtube.com/user/hobestobe [accessed 05 January 2021]. Other examples of transient self-publishing online include Brian Cray and ‘Brave Dave’. See http://briancray.net; www.youtube .com/watch?v=sAV_vbwr_d0&list=PL2MsK78bhCNA6GVLlzD795czRUZ QphvG_ [all accessed 06 January 2021]. 50 A parallel subculture has emerged of older van-dwellers who, unable to maintain the costs of a home due to the lack of a sufficient welfare system in the US, live in mobile homes that enable them to take temporary jobs in a variety of post-industrial locations. See Jessica Bruder’s journalistic expose Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018) and the semi-fictional film adaptation Nomadland (dir Chloé Zhao, 2020). For an example of a younger van-dweller narrative, one which fits my category of vagabond travel memoir, see Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road From Debt to Freedom (Las Vegas, Amazon Publishing, 2013). 51 Most egregiously, Tween Hobo speculates that if ‘Anne Frank had not died in the Holocaust’ she ‘would have been a #Belieber’ (italics in original); that is, a fan of the pop star Justin Bieber. See Alena Smith, Tween Hobo: Off the Rails (New York: Gallery Books, 2014), p. 17. For a less frivolous and tone-deaf representation of contemporary female transiency published for a young audience, see Charles Forsman and Max de Radiguès’s graphic novel Hobo Mum (Fantagraphics, 2019, originally published 2015). 52 Tween Hobo, p. 24. 53 http://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/2016/08/18-operation-lifesaver-opposesnew-subaru-commercial, [accessed 06 January 2021]. 54 And even, at the most privileged end of the spectrum, wealthy investors looking to stow their capital in offshore locations. See https://nomadcapitalist .com/ [accessed 22 May 2022].

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55 Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 2004, originally published 1995), p. 95. 56 https://nomadwiki.org/en/Main_Page [accessed 05 January 2021]. 57 See BBC News, ‘Freight trains: The new immigration front line?’ (27 August 2017) www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-41055938/freight-trains-thenew-immigration-front-line, [accessed 06 January 2021]. 58 Ted Conover, Coyotes: A Journey Through the Secret World of America’s Illegal Aliens (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), p.xvii. Subsequent references given in the body of this Conclusion. See also Conover, Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes (New York: Vintage, 2001, first published 1984). 59 Sonia Nazario, Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with his Mother (New York: Random House, 2006), p. xxii. Subsequent references given in the body of this Conclusion. 60 Óscar Martínez, The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail, translated by Daniela Maria Ugaz and John Washington (London and New York: Verso, 2013, originally published in Spanish in 2010), p. 1. Subsequent references given in the body of this Conclusion. 61 Martínez highlights the contrasting value of human life when he states ‘An agent dies, and the FBI comes screaming in. It’s quite another thing when a migrant dies’. Martínez, p. 168. 62 Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Picador, 2009, first published 2006), p. 133 & p. 229. Subsequent references given in the body of this Conclusion.

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Index

African-American vernacular music, 200–229 gender, and, 215–222 violence, in, 201, 222–228 Anderson, Nels, 16, 17, 43, 114, 139–166, 168, 177, 182, 191, 202, 209 Dean Stiff alias, 158 early life of, 142–144 ‘The Fall of Bill’ (1921), 139, 153, 156, 163 The Hobo (1923), 15, 16, 32, 111, 139–141, 144–158 The Milk and Honey Route (1931), 157–165, 216 working methods of, 154–155 A-No.1. See Livingston, Leon Ray Aspinwall, William, 15, 17, 37, 85 Attaway, William Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939), 203–205 autobiography. See life writing automobile-based road narratives, 109, 233. See also, Kerouac, Jack, On the Road (1957) Babes in Arms (play, 1937), 107–108 Barthes, Roland, 28, 95, 173, 189 Big Rock Candy Mountain [song], 89, 231 Big Rock Candy Mountain [trope], 89, 92, 269 Black, Jack You Can’t Win (1926), 32, 111 blackface minstrelsy, 49 blues the folkloric frame, and, 206–208 blues, the. See African-American vernacular music Brisbane, Arthur, 176, 189, 190 Britt Hobo Convention, 232, 236, 237 Bughouse Square, 150–151, 160 Bulosan, Carlos, 21–22 bum, 43, 142, 147, 149, 150, 164, 236. See also hobo/tramp distinction Burnett, Francis Hodgson, 176 Vagabondia: a Love Story (1884), 47 Card, Helen. See Starke, Barbara Cassidy, Neal, 16 Chaplin, Charlie, 28–30

His New Job (1915), 29 His Prehistoric Past (1914), 29 Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914), 29 Modern Times (1936), 29 The Idle Class (1921/22), 28 The Kid (1921), 29 The Tramp (1915), 29 Christy, Jim, 234 Conover, Ted, 238–239 corridos, 22 Cresswell, Tim, 7, 18, 25, 30, 38, 113 cross-dressing, 110–111 crust punks, 236 Davenport, Charles, 38 Davies, Jefferson, 232 degeneration, 36 DePastino, Todd, 12–14, 85, 104, 140, 158, 159, 170 Dickinson, Emily, 196 digital nomad, 238 domesticity, 38. See also hobohemia [subculture], as domestic space Douglas, Lizzie. See Memphis Minnie drift, 19–21, 93 Dying Hobo [trope], 231, 234, 242 Dylan, Bob, 4, 235 Ellis, Havelock Sexual Inversion (1897), 103 Estes, ‘Sleepy’ John, 5, 16, 209, 224 experiential capital, 48, 128 Fair, Agnes Thecla, 120–125 family. See domesticity female transiency. See gender, transiency and flaneur, 5 floating verses, 205, 216–220 Flynt, Josiah, 145, 146, 150, 163 ‘Homosexuality Among Tramps’ (1907), 85 Tramping With Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life (1899), 35–36, 95, 111

339

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340

Index

Folk Music Revival, 229. See also Dylan, Bob Foucault, Michel, 7 Franck, Harry A., 129 A Vagabond Journey Around the World (1910), 53–58 frontier defence, 16, 40, 43, 140, 146–149. See also Anderson, Nels, The Hobo (1923) Ganser, Alexandra, 6, 109 Gellert, Lawrence, 226 Girls of the Road (film, 1940), 110 Goldman, Emma, 40, 124 Graham, Stephen, 59–63, 70–74, 129, 132, 235 A Tramp’s Sketches (1912), 61–63 Tramping with a Poet in the Rockies (1922), 71–74 travels with Vachel Lindsay, 70–78 A Vagabond in the Caucasus (1911), 59–61 Grayson, David, 78, 132 Guthrie, Woody, 4, 235 Bound for Glory (1943), 202 Hamilton, Marybeth, 207–208 Handy, W. C, 16, 207 Harris, Lee The Man Who Tramps: a Story of Today (1878), 13, 30 Harte, Bret, 24 Higbie, Frank Tobias, 13, 14, 148 Hill, Joe, 168, 169, 194 ‘The Preacher and the Slave’ (1911), 42 hobo [noun], 7, 36, 57, 108, 149 as attitude and state of mind, 157, 160–161 hobo code, 30 hobo colleges, 40 hobo ‘jungles’, 4, 14–15, 149, 153, 159, 167, 177, 202–203, 215, 220 hobo monikers, 16, 111, 169 Hobo News, The [Benjamin Benson paper], 232–233 “Hobo News” [periodical], 4, 14, 17, 43, 40–41, 125–129, 139, 140, 149, 151, 158 hobo/tramp distinction, 36, 43, 125, 128, 140, 147, 149, 202 hobohemia [location], 13, 142, 145, 202 hobohemia [subculture], 4–5, 12–17, 140, 141, 149, 157, 160, 233. See also Bughouse Square as domestic space, 13–16, 103, 149, 216 fictionalising impulse of, 16–18, 95 gender and, 15, 22, 220 humour and, 42, 157, 177, 191 publishing and, 17–18 race and, 149 racial integration, in, 202–203

racial segregation, and, 13, 41, 199, 202, 203, 232 racial violence, in, 222–228 sexual abuse, in, 85, 89–91. See also Big Rock Candy Mountain [trope]; transiency, gender and sexuality, and, 13, 84–85 hoboing [verb], 128, 201, 208 homeguard, 43, 148, 149, 150, 164 homelessness [category], 163–164, 235–236 hospitality, 61 How, James Eads, 40, 140, 232. See also International Brotherhood Welfare Association Hutha, Matti. See Slim, T-Bone IBWA. See International Brotherhood Welfare Association immigrant life writing, 21–22 Industrial Solidarity [newspaper], 4, 41, 167 Industrial Worker [newspaper], 4, 167, 168, 189, 197 Industrial Workers of the World, 4, 13, 32, 33, 39, 41–44, 140, 151, 160, 167, 168, 170, 192, 232. See also Slim, T-Bone gender, and, 42, 170, 191 race, and, 42 intelligence. See transiency, intelligence and International Brotherhood Welfare Association, 4, 14, 21, 40–41, 43, 125, 127, 140, 142, 144, 147, 149, 202, 209, 232, 236 IWW. See Industrial Workers of the World Jackson, Aunt Molly, 169 Jefferson, Blind Lemon, 208, 209, 212–215 Keeler, Ralph, 16 Vagabond Adventures (1870), 49–50 Kennedy, Bart, 17, 78 Kerouac, Jack, 196 Dharma Bums (1958), 77, 234 On the Road (1957), 94, 233–234 Lennon, John [scholar], 4, 7, 96, 113, 159, 222 life writing, 18–19 Lindsay, Vachel, 19, 63–78, 196, 233 Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (1914), 66–69 Going-to-the-Stars (1926), 75–78 Going-to-the-Sun (1923), 74–75 The Golden Book of Springfield (1920), 64 The Gospel of Beauty, and, 64–77 A Handy Guide for Beggars (1916), 69–70 identification with ‘hobo’ workers, 67–69, 74 mental illness, and, 69, 78

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Index Rhymes to be Traded for Bread (1912), 64–66 travels with Stephen Graham, 70–78 Lindsay, Vachel, 129, 131, 132 literary vagabond, 28, 47 Little Tramp. See Chaplin, Charlie Livingston, Leon Ray, 16, 18, 43, 80, 85–93, 109, 133, 240 as self-promoter, 88 correspondence with Charmian London, 86 correspondence with Jack London, 86 From Coast to Coast with Jack London (1917), 80, 86, 91–93 Life and Adventures of A-No.1, America’s Most Celebrated Tramp (1910), 89–91 Mother Delcassee of the Hoboes and Other Stories (1918), 111 London, Charmian (née Kittredge), 81, 83 London, Jack, 15, 18, 19, 35, 43, 78, 79–85, 133, 237 ‘The Apostate’ (1906), 104–105 correspondence with Cloudesley Johns, 82–83 correspondence with Spiro Orfans (also Ophens), 83–84 The Cruise of the Dazzler (1902), 106 domesticity, in, 104 dominance, and, 81, 83–84, 96 ‘And Frisco’ Kid Came Back’ (1895), 103 ‘Frisco Kid’s Story’ (1895), 101–102 Martin Eden (1909), 81 masculinity, and, 83, 93, 100 The Mutiny of the Elsinore (1914), 84 racism, and, 81, 84, 99, 200–201 The Road (1907), 79, 93–101, 104, 200–201 ‘The Road’ (1897), 102–103 The Sea Wolf (1904), 81 sexuality, and, 81–83 Social Darwinism, and, 81, 96, 101 Lynn, Ethel The Adventures of a Woman Hobo (1917), 112 Main Stem. See hobohemia [location] Martínez, Óscar The Beast (2010/2013), 239–240 Marx, Karl, 32, 70, 177, 179, 188 McCarthy, Cormac The Road (2006), 240–241 McCook, John James, 15, 38. See also Aspinwall, William ‘Leaves from the Diary of a Tramp’ (1902), 37 McTell, Blind Willie, 208, 209, 212, 215 memoir. See life writing Minnie, ‘Memphis’, 5, 16 Meriwether, Lee A Tramp Trip; How to See Europe on Fifty Cents a Day, 50–53

341

Milburn, George The Hobo’s Hornbook: A Repertory for a Gutter Jongluer (1930), 202, 231 mild peril, 48, 52, 56–57, 74 Miller, Floyd The Savage Streets (1956), 198 Miller, Roger, 3, 235 Minnie, 'Memphis', 218–222 Murray, Pauli, 110–111 National Hobo Association, 236 National Hobo Convention. See Britt Hobo Convention Nazario, Sonia Enrique’s Journey (2006), 239 neoliberalism, 236 nomad, 6, 38 nomadology, 6 O’Neill, Eugene Anna Christie (1922), 108 Odum, Howard W. Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder (1928), 203 Opper, Frederick Burr ‘Happy Hooligan’ cartoon, 26 Parker, Carleton, 192 The Casual Laborer and Other Essays (1920), 38–39 Parsons, Lucy ‘A Word to Tramps’ (1884), 33 Peery, Nelson, 14, 17, 203 Phillips, Bruce Duncan ‘Utah’, 16, 311 picaresque, 5, 24 picturesque, the, 34 Pinkerton, Allan Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives (1878), 33–34 poststructuralism transiency and, 7–8, 113–114 primitivism, 71 race. See transiency; race and; transiency‘race and Railroad Bill [song], 227–228 Rainey, ‘Ma’, 215, 218, 219 Reitman, Ben, 40, 43, 134, 144, 147, 158, 202 Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha (1937), 109, 113 Riis, Jacob, 21 How The Other Half Lives (1890), 34 The Making of an American (1901), 34–35 Rosemont, Franklin, 168, 169, 179 Rosemont, Penelope, 169 Roving Bill. See Aspinwall, William

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342

Index

Scottsboro Boys, 199, 222–223 Shaw, George Bernard, 188 Sinclair, Upton The Jungle (1906), 191 Skid Row [concept], 233 Slim, T-Bone, 6, 13, 41, 42, 165–199 body, representation of, 191 cartoon image of, 181, 195 experimental style, 175, 181 fame, and, 184–187 food, representation of, 197 gender, and, 170–171 habitus, and, 172–173 intelligence, representation of, 176, 189 Juice is Stranger Than Friction (1992), 169 language, and, 173–179 ‘The Lumber Jack’s Prayer’ (1923), 193–195 ‘Mysteries of a Hobo’s Life’ (1921), 170 persona, 181–191, 195 The Power of These Two Hands (1922), 167 sarcasm, and, 177 Starving Amidst Too Much (1923), 167, 171, 193 ‘Smith, Alena Tween Hobo (2014), 237 Social Darwinism, 38 social investigation, 33–40, 50. See also Anderson, Nels, working methods of parody of, 164 Solenberger, Alice One Thousand Homeless Men (1911), 38 Solomon, Kittie, 41, 125–129, 132 Starke, Barbara, 129–135, 231 lesbianism in, 134–135 representation of sexual harrassment and assault, 133–134 Touch and Go: the Story of a Girl’s Escape (1931), 131–135 Stiff, Dean. See Anderson, Nels subcultures [concept], 12 surveillance, 7–8, 35 tramp [noun], 7–8, 26, 25–26, 142. See also transiency as threat, 25, 30, 31 comedy and, 25–29 invisibility of women, 112–114. See also transiency, gender and laziness and, 25, 26, 38 meaning promiscuous woman, 108 representation of, 25–40 tramp [verb], 25, 26

tramp laws, 7, 113. See also vagrancy laws tramp printers, 30, 248 transiency. See also tramp [noun] as a site of study. See social investigation gender and, 107–136, 212–222, 232 immigration and, 22–23 intelligence, and, 36, 148, 163, 164. See also Slim, T-Bone, intelligence, representation of Irishness and, 24, 26 race and, 26, 38, 49, 57–58, 67, 71, 112, 116, 140, 150, 200–229 syphilis and, 29 unemployment and, 34, 36, 37–38 venereal disease and, 30, 31 transient [noun], 6–7 vagabond [legal concept], 47, 259 vagabond [noun], 128, 129, 132, 133, 140, 212, 235 as a European type, 140, 141, 161 vagabond travel narratives, 48–50, 235 frugality and, 49, 51, 54, 59 in the Twenty First Century, 78. See also digital nomad politics of, 62 race and, 53 social investigation, and, 48, 50 spiritual vagabonds, 48, 58–78 tourist narratives, contrast with, 48, 50, 51, 54, 132 vagabond/hobo distinction, 48, 59, 69, 70 as a European type, 147 vagabonde [female] travel writers, 48 vagrancy laws, 7, 21, 41, 44, 99, 170, 223, 225. See also tramp laws vagrant, 6 wanderlust, 21, 36, 38, 54, 56, 114, 140, 144, 145, 161, 164 Weary Willie, 27–28, 143, 145, 230, 233 whiteness [concept], 49 Whitman, Walt, 30–31, 154, 182, 191 ‘Poem of the Road’ (1855), 30–31 Specimen Days and Collect (1882), 31 Willard, Josiah Flynt. See Flynt, Josiah Wills, Nat, 25–26, 233 Wykoff, Walter ‘A Day With a Tramp’ (1901), 35 Yancy, Dolly Kennedy, 114–119 yuppie hobos, 236

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Recent books in this series (continued from page ii) 182. MARIANNE NOBLE Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature 181. ROB TURNER Counterfeit Culture 180. KATE STANLEY Practices of Surprise in American Literature after Emerson 179. JOHANNES VOELZ The Poetics of Insecurity 178. JOHN HAY Postapocalyptic Fantasies in Antebellum American Literature 177. PAUL JAUSSEN Writing in Real Time 176. CINDY WEINSTEIN Time, Tense, and American Literature 175. CODY MARS Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War 174. STACEY MARGOLIS Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America 173. PAUL DOWNES Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature 172. DAVID BERGMAN Poetry of Disturbance 171. MARK NOBLE American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens 170. JOANNA FREER Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture 169. DOMINIC MASTROIANNI Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature 168. GAVIN JONES Failure and the American Writer 167. LENA HILL Visualizing Blackness and the Creation of the African American Literary Tradition 166. MICHAEL ZISER Environmental Practice and Early American Literature 165. ANDREW HEBARD The Poetics of Sovereignty in American Literature, 1885–1910 164. CHRISTOPHER FREEBURG Melville and the Idea of Blackness 163. TIM ARMSTRONG The Logic of Slavery

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162. JUSTINE MURISON The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature 161. HSUAN L. HSU Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature 160. DORRI BEAM Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth Century American Women’s Writing 159. YOGITA GOYAL Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature 158. MICHAEL CLUNE American Literature and the Free Market, 1945–2000 157. KERRY LARSON Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature 156. LAWRENCE ROSENWALD Multilingual America: Language and the Making of American Literature 155. ANITA PATTERSON Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernism 154. ELIZABETH RENKER The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History 153. THEO DAVIS Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century 152. JOAN RICHARDSON A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein 151. EZRA TAWIL The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance 150. ARTHUR RISS Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature 149. JENNIFER ASHTON From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century 148. MAURICE S. LEE Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–1860 147. CINDY WEINSTEIN Family, Kinship and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature 146. ELIZABETH HEWITT Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865 145. ANNA BRICKHOUSE Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere 144. ELIZA RICHARDS Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle 143. JENNIE A. KASSANOFF Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race

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142. JOHN MCWILLIAMS New England’s Crises and Cultural Memory: Literature, Politics, History, Religion, 1620–1860 141. SUSAN M. GRIFFIN Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction 140. ROBERT E. ABRAMS Landscape and Ideology in American Renaissance Literature 139. JOHN D. KERKERING The Poetics of National and Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature 138. MICHELE BIRNBAUM Race, Work and Desire in American Literature, 1860–1930 137. RICHARD GRUSIN Culture, Technology and the Creation of America’s National Parks 136. RALPH BAUER The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity 135. MARY ESTEVE The Asethetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature

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