NINE
The geographically and ethnically uneven distribution of American violence and disorder to the end of the nineteenth century can be explained by three sets of factors, one cultural, one racial, and one demographic. Cultural beliefs and habits, like southern sensibilities about guns and honor or the Irish penchant for aggressive drinking, help explain why some regions or groups consistently had higher rates of murder and mayhem. Racism was important both because it encouraged and exacerbated conflict with minorities, such as the Indians, and because it contributed to the economic marginalization of black men and restrictions on Chinese immigration. Then there were local and regional variations in population structure, notably the age and gender imbalances on the nonagricultural frontier. Through a combination of pooled biological tendencies, widespread bachelorhood, and male group dynamics, these produced more drinking, gambling, prostitution, quarreling, carrying of weapons, and other traits associated with bad ends. The ensuing high level of violence was like a passing epidemic. It raged for a time in heavily male frontier regions and then subsided as the migrant population became more balanced.
This is, I trust, a persuasive model consistent with historical and scientific evidence, the laws of probability, and common sense. The one obvious qualification is that the last factor, regional variation in population structure, diminished in importance after about 1890, the date popularized by Frederick Jackson Turner as the closing of the frontier. Whether and precisely when the frontier actually closed has occasioned the expenditure of much scholarly ammunition, Turner's words having on America's historians roughly the same effect as population imbalance on its society.1 This, at least, is clear: western regional gender ratios continued to decline rapidly during and after the 1880s and 1890s, as shown in Figure 9.1. The east-west gender polarization of the American population, so apparent in the two decades before and immediately after the Civil War, had become muted by the early twentieth century.
Which is not to say that single male migrants and their problems disappeared from American society. Overseas immigration remained voluminous and disproportionately male; the national gender ratio remained high, peaking at 106 in 1910; and pockets of bachelor laborers could be found all over the country.2 Many, perhaps most, of these surplus men moved continuously in search of work. The search might take them from orchard to city to lumber camp to oil town to hobo jungle to copper mine to wheat field and back to the city again. They were not frontiersmen in the conventional sense of remote western pioneers and settlers, though many spent at least part of their working lives in the developing West. Such men were common enough in the antebellum era, working on projects like canal construction, but their real heyday was from the late 1860s to about 1920.
Migrant Labor and the Urban-Industrial Transformation
These were the years of America's transformation into an urban and industrial nation. In 1860 most Americans still lived on farms or in small towns connected by meandering dirt roads. They labored with plow and churn and hand tools to produce agricultural and artisanal products for an economy in which the value of farm output still exceeded that of factories. The Civil War that was about to engulf them was fought by farmers, field hands, and craftsmen who had grown up in a casual, small-scale world.3
Sixty years later that world was as dead as the men who had fallen at Antietam. By 1920 most Americans lived in large towns or rapidly growing cities connected by nearly 300,000 miles of railroads. They labored with the help of machinery powered by steam, electricity, and other inanimate forms of energy, the consumption of which had increased seven times since 1860. The Great War of their era was fought with divisions as regimented and mechanized as the new industrial order.4
The urban-industrial transformation could not have occurred without an infrastructure, the expanding web of tracks, bridges, roads, canals, docks, warehouses, sewers, and telegraph lines that knit the system together. Nor would it have been possible without a continuing flow of raw materials, fuel, and food for the factories and the cities. All of this was provided by a floating army, half a million or more strong, of itinerant workers who built and fed modern America. Now vanished and largely forgotten, they were overwhelmingly male and single and under forty and were commonly, if not quite accurately, called tramps.'
The primary means by which tramps traveled to their farflung work was the interurban rail network. Largely completed by the mid-1880s, the main lines connected hubs like Chicago with vast grain and timber lands that required seasonal workers. When they were not laboring in the countryside or working on the railroad itself, these itinerant men often returned to what they called the main stems, the low-rent city neighborhoods near the marshaling yards where lodging houses, greasy spoons, used-clothing stores, pawnshops, missions, soup kitchens, employment agencies, saloons, burlesque houses, and brothels could be found in abundance. The main stem of any city was in effect a non-Chinese Chinatown, a place where homeless, single men spent the winter months, collected information about job prospects, and blew off steam and wages.6
The main stems were located chiefly in northern, midwestern, and western cities. Few were in the South, a region that floaters tended to avoid because it had fewer cities, railroads, jobs, lodging houses, and other prerequisites of tramp life. The South also had a reputation for penal abuses. A tramp who caught the eye of the local sheriff could find himself in the county jail on a vagrancy charge and then leased out as a convict laborer. The work camps, where the annual death rates ranged from under 5 to as high as 40 percent, were hell on convicts though cruelly useful for developing the South's lumber and mineral resources and building its roads. The one offsetting attraction of the South was its milder winter, which emboldened some tramps to make a seasonal pilgrimage to such coastal cities as New Orleans, St. Augustine, and Jacksonville. The snow-birds had to be extremely cautious, however, "for the jails in the South are mankilling holes in many and many an instance."7
Black men who traveled about the South in search of work had to tread even more carefully. Few prospects awaited them in southern towns and cities, where the demand for black labor was for female domestics. But there were jobs to be had on large plantations, in lumber and turpentine camps, sawmills, mines, mills, and railroad and levee construction sites. This rural-versus-urban pattern of opportunities for black men and women created local gender imbalances and separated family members. It also put migrant workers at grave risk, for white anxieties about race were focused on peripatetic black men. A local black resident who had a little property and for whom whites would vouch was relatively safe, but a black stranger accused of vagrancy or petty theft was likely to be condemned to hard labor, or worse. Although lynchings of black men are usually understood as a universal southern phenomenon, they were, like other forms of violence, unevenly distributed. The counties with the highest numbers of lynchings were those with high levels of black transiency and a thin and scattered white population fearful of those whom they called "strange niggers."8
Outside the South most tramps were white and native-born. Those born abroad came mainly from the English-speaking lands of northwestern Europe. Their familiarity with the language contributed to the widespread impression that tramping was an essentially American phenomenon, although in fact the Irish, long identified with itinerant construction work, were consistently overrepresented in tramp surveys. So were unskilled or semiskilled workers. Teamsters, hostlers, graders, field hands, and other manual laborers were the ones most likely to ride the rails in search of work. Skilled and white-collar workers drifted in search of jobs only during serious depressions, when the number of homeless itinerants sharply, if temporarily, increased. Conversely, when wars broke out and the demand for soldiers and war workers grew, the number of tramps noticeably declined.9
A Dangerous Subculture
The floating army was a subculture in several senses of the term. Its members were socially marginal, shared traits like maleness and bachelorhood, spoke a common argot, and gravitated toward the ghettoized and gender-segregated main stems. But it was a special and highly unstable kind of subculture, one that was constantly expanding and contracting and one in which its members participated with markedly different degrees of persistence and enthusiasm.
Veteran men, the "repeaters," "revolvers," and "blowed-in-the-glass tramps," formed the core of the subculture. They were the homeless, long-term migrants who called themselves "profesh," short for professionals, and claimed to be proud of their calling. "It's habit forming," one hobo explained; "it's a disease . . . you piss out a boxcar once, you're hooked." When most people think of hobos or tramps, it is this sort of sentimentalized figure who comes to mind.10
But for most men tramping was a temporary expedient, a means of acquiring a first job, replacing a lost one, or earning a small stake. For others it was a way of escaping routinized work. The novelist Sinclair Lewis called them a cheerful pariahdom, restless young men with bundles and black sateen shirts who would suddenly light out and drift from state to state. "They are not permanently tramps," he observed. "They have home towns to which they return, to work quietly in the factory or the section gang for a year—for a week—and as quietly to disappear again.""
All of which sounds fine, opportunistic, adventuresome—in a word, American. To believe this, however, is to believe a fiction. Life in the floating army was cruel and precarious, especially if it became extended. The longer a worker stayed on the tramp the more likely he was to be maimed, imprisoned, diseased, or killed.
The worst danger was the railroad itself. Tramps got around by "flipping" —stealing rides on trains. They clambered into, between, on top of, and even under the cars, a risky technique called riding the rods. They usually made their moves in darkness, lowering the chance of detection but increasing the risk of a misstep and fall onto a rolling guillotine. In one five-year period, 1901-1905, nearly 24,000 railroad trespassers were killed in accidents and another 25,000 were injured. Many of the injured became single or double amputees, known among tramps as "halfies," and were reduced to a life of begging and penury.12
Those who left the rail yards with their bodies intact were by no means safe. The lumbering, mining, and construction industries to which they flocked were dangerous and unhealthful. John Fitzmaurice, a journalist who wrote a classic account of life in the lumber camps, estimated that in Michigan alone in the logging season of 1884-1885 about 3,000 of the 40,000 loggers became ill. Another 3,000 were injured and 60 were killed outright, dispatched by blows so crushing that pocket watches were flattened and their works reduced to small fragments. Conditions were equally bad in the northwestern lumber camps and mills, where men lost arms to unshielded saws and counted lost fingers beneath notice.13
Worse yet were the mines, smoke- and urine-filled pits where men were cheaper than timber and every bit as replaceable. They perished in cave-ins, were electrocuted when their tools touched uninsulated high-voltage wires, and were blown to bits by dynamite. At times supervisors had to puzzle out who and how many were dead by checking the living against the payroll.14
Lung diseases plagued miners and tunnelers. The best known of these, silicosis, afflicted men who blasted and drilled through granite, sandstone, or anthracite coal. Just how devastating silicosis was and with what indifference its victims were treated is illustrated by the Hawk's Nest incident. This involved a hydroelectric tunnel drilled beneath Gauley Mountain, West Virginia, between March 1930 and September 1931. Within five years at least 764 of the 5,000 workers had died of silicosis. Their deaths could have been prevented by wet drilling, a simple technique in which streams of water were used to suppress airborne dust. But wet drilling was as much as 50 percent slower, and Union Carbide and its contractors stood to save money if the work was completed quickly. Though the power drills had hose attachments, the tunnel workers, mostly black migrants, had to drill and excavate without water, surrounded by clouds of silica dust so thick that they could not see more than a few feet. Respirators were issued to the engineering staff when they went into the tunnel but not to the migrant crews. It was as if the workers were used and discarded.15
Even in industries like agriculture, where the risks of trauma and occupational disease were not particularly high, migrant workers perished at rates much higher than would be expected of men in the prime of life. From 1906 through 1913 Japanese consular officials kept track of deaths among the Issei, the Japanese immigrants in California. The influx of wives and picture brides was only beginning to transform the Japanese population, which in those years still consisted mostly of unmarried men in their twenties and thirties who lived in primitive agricultural work camps. The average death rate of Issei aged fifteen and older was at least 11.3 per thousand per year, a rate roughly 50 percent higher than men of comparable age in the general population.16
Four percent of the Issei deaths were suicides. I know of no comparable estimate for non-Japanese migrant workers, although there is eyewitness medical testimony that suicide by opium overdose was widespread among Chinese laborers too sick or injured to work and much anecdotal or newspaper evidence of suicides among white floaters. Tramps pitched themselves off buildings, swallowed cyanide, hanged themselves from trestles, or blew their brains out by railway embankments. The drink-anything alcoholism of skid-row tramps can be understood as a kind of slow-motion suicide of those past caring about early death. These sad ends were, in one sense, to be expected, given the mass of empirical research showing that suicide is most common among unmarried and socially isolated men.17
The risk of homicide was also high, judging from the fragmentary statistics for the end-of-tracks towns in which railroad work crews squandered their wages. Julesburg, Benton, and the other railroad construction sites were the most murderous places in the United States, worse even than the mining camps and cattle towns. It seems that many of the supposedly accidental deaths of railroad trespassers were really acts of negligent manslaughter or homicide committed by railroad police who threw tramps off trains. Other undetected murders were perpetrated by "yeggs," roving criminals who slugged train-jumping workers returning from the harvest, stole their wages, and tossed their bodies onto the tracks.18
Exploitation and Counter-Exploitation
Theft and robbery were facts of life in the floating army. Though most men were interested in honest employment and took to the rails for the purpose of finding it, there were among them those who did not hesitate to steal if the opportunity arose, including hard-core tramps who disdained all work and specialized in panhandling and theft. Snoring drunks, henhouses, and melon patches were favorite targets and so, for obvious reasons, were the contents of railroad boxcars. Train jumpers rifled crates and boxes looking for portable or edible objects, often damaging the rest or burning them for warmth. Sometimes the fires got out of control, sending whole boxcars up in smoke.19
This posed a dilemma for the railroads. On the one hand tramps were a useful pool of itinerant labor. They worked in railroad construction and maintenance crews and provided the means of picking, harvesting, and extracting the commodities the railroads profitably hauled from place to place. In this sense the fares lost to trespassers were really a means of subsidizing the transportation costs of the labor that made railroads possible in the first place.
On the other hand pilferage and damaged equipment were serious problems. By the 1890s railroad officials had concluded that the nuisance cost of tramps outweighed their labor value, which was declining as more and more of the infrastructure was completed and as seasonal work in the West and Midwest was taken over by local laborers. They beefed up their private security forces and dispatched burly men with guns and truncheons to deal with the tramps, who hated the railroad bulls and did everything in their power to avoid them.20
Municipal police likewise changed their policies toward tramps during the 1890s. Prior to that decade it was common for police stations to lodge tramps at night, admitting them to sleep on the floor or in unused cells, providing a little soup or bread and, on occasion, mandatory vaccinations, though the indignant tramps swore they had recently been "scraped." Nineteenthcentury police were in the business, as the historian Eric Monkkonen puts it, of managing the "dangerous class" of which tramps were a part. Sensibly enough this management entailed rudimentary welfare services as well as selective repression in the form of arrests. However, reformers like Josephine Lowell and Theodore Roosevelt objected to police lodging because it crowded the station houses with verminous and supposedly idle men without requiring any work from them. During the 1890s they were able to shut down or substantially reduce police lodging operations. From the early twentieth century on police officers, apart from mercifully arresting the odd gutter drunk to keep him from freezing, abandoned their welfare functions and concentrated on crime suppression and traffic control.21
This reorientation meant that the police were increasingly in an adversarial position vis-a-vis the tramps. When citizens became anxious about the presence of homeless, unemployed men, as happened in San Luis Obispo County, California, after 1895, the police responded by stepping up arrests for vagrancy and petty theft. Concern for economy led to chain gangs both to offset the cost of the prisoners' board and to discourage the presence of other tramps, who were imagined to be incorrigibly lazy.22
Tramps saw the matter differently. Vagrancy laws and chain gangs were to them a form of legalized slavery, an unjust punishment for the crime of being temporarily out of work. Their unemployment itself was often of an illegal nature. Private employment agents, "labor sharks," were known to sign up men for attractive jobs, pocket their finders' fees, and ship the men off to remote destinations where the jobs either did not exist or were inferior to the ones advertised. A common variation on this racket was the three-gang system. Collusive contractors kept one crew coming, one working, and one going by quickly firing the newly hired workers, splitting the fees with the employment agents who kept sending a fresh supply of victims. The extreme of exploitation was achieved by a South Dakota sheepman named Kunnecke, who made a habit of hiring floating herders. He worked them for six months or a year and then, to avoid paying their wages, murdered them and buried their bodies.2'
The frustration of irregular employment and rage against employer abuses had political consequences. In 1894, in the depths of a severe depression, the Populist businessman Jacob Coxey led a contingent of several hundred unemployed men in a march on Washington. The aim was to petition the government to finance road building and other relief measures. Coxey's was only one of seventeen different "armies" of unemployed men to begin marching on Washington that year, but his was the best known and came to symbolize the movement. The last major west-to-east men's protest march in American history, Coxey's Army was but a shadow of the wild seventeenth- and eighteenth-century frontier insurrections. It was easily suppressed—Coxey was arrested by police and charged with damaging the Capitol's grass—though not before his ragtag marchers had managed to arouse a good deal of fear and had secured for themselves a place in the hard times of American history.24
A similar feat was achieved by the Industrial Workers of the World. Founded in 1905, the IWW was a revolutionary anticapitalist union that drew most of its members from the ranks of unskilled and itinerant workers, principally the loggers and miners and bindle stiffs who endured the hard life of western labor camps. The chief organizer of the IWW, the one-eyed William D. "Big Bill" Haywood, understood their world only too well. Before he became active in the union he had been a bunkhouse miner, cowboy, prospector, surveyor, thresher, farmer, and saloon poker dealer. Haywood and other IWW organizers played upon the grievances of the floating army, including the fact that few men could afford to marry. At first they enjoyed considerable recruiting success, despite police harassment. By 1917 the union had 100,000 members and hobo train jumpers carrying red IWW cards were a common sight. But the IWW's strong opposition to American involvement in the European war made the organization unpopular and vulnerable. Concerted action by vigilantes and government officials disrupted its leadership and put more than 2,000 members behind bars. The IWW survived the persecution but never recovered anything like its prewar influence and strength."
Part of the IWW's problem was its reputation for industrial violence and sabotage, a reputation based on its class-war rhetoric. Whether or how the IWW delivered on its threats is another matter. "No Wobbly," points out the historian Joseph Conlin, "was ever proved to have committed an act of violence." Sabotage, when it occurred, most often took the passive-aggressive form of slowdowns, a tactic implicit in the IWW motto "Good pay or bum work." When IWW members were actually involved in violence it was more often as victims of mob action than as perpetrators of radical terror.26
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that tramp terrorism was a myth. It did exist, though as a result of spontaneous, uncoordinated actions and not as a revolutionary conspiracy. One victim was John Ovenbeck, a farmer in Friendship, Wisconsin, who in unfriendly fashion refused food to hungry tramps. They returned to his barn later that night and slashed the throats of three of his cows. Ovenbeck found a note jabbed on one of their horns: "Remember us when we call for something to eat again." Other tramps in a mood for vengeance set fire to straw, hurled rocks at "horstile" train crews, and shot it out with interloping brakemen.27
The most dreaded form of tramp crime was the robbery and murder of isolated rural dwellers. Waldo Cook, who published the first systematic study of homicide in Massachusetts, summarized one such case:
Allan J. Adams killed Moses B. Dickinson November 25, 1875. Dickinson was a farmer who lived alone outside Amherst town. Adams came along tramp fashion and was hired by Dickinson to do farm work. The murder was done with an axe, and the motive was robbery. Adams was of native stock, lazy, and of very low type of character. He was a cider drinker.
There was not then and is not now any consensus as to how common serious criminal behavior was among tramps, cider drinkers or otherwise. One study of three Montana counties for 1895-1915 is at least suggestive, however. Beaverhead, the county that consistently had the highest rate of arrests for major crimes, was the one most heavily dependent on large numbers of seasonal workers for cutting hay. It was common for floating laborers to use aliases, changing their names as often as once a month when the paymaster opened a new time book. "This was the custom," remarked one who had changed his own name three times, "as so many who went out there were just one jump ahead of the sheriff."28
Though hinting at a tramp-crime connection, this evidence in no way proves that a majority of itinerant workers engaged in serious crimes of robbery and vengeance. It is quite possible that some drifters were accused and convicted unfairly, singled out for convenient and ritualistic prosecution, so many virgins tossed into the volcano to appease the criminal-justice gods. Several towns in Ohio and Indiana dispensed with judicial trappings altogether and subjected unlucky tramps to "timber lessons," vigilante gauntlets organized by local boys and men. "I came out of the scrape with a rather sore back," wrote Josiah Flynt Willard, who was forced to run through Oxford, Indiana, under a barrage of blows and stones. "One of my fellow-sufferers, I heard, was in a hospital for some time. My other companion had his eye gouged terribly, and I fancy that he will never visit that town again."29
Tramps, in short, were suspect men picking their way through a social minefield. Their talk in the rail-yard jungles, as they ate their mulligan and drank coffee made from reused beans, constantly turned to the question of "horstiles"—those train crews, sheriffs, railroads, towns, and states that were to be avoided. Stay out of "Lousy Anna," they warned one another, but the "Milk and Honey route" in Utah was all right. The Mormons were generous and would usually give a hobo a break.
Tramps had their own signs, cryptic symbols chalked on gates and barns and water tanks, which gave detailed directions through the local minefield to those able to read them. An X or a rotund female figure followed by three stick children meant a kind woman, good for a handout—hence the expression that someone is a mark. But a C warned of a cheap town, linked circles the handcuffs of hostile police, and a 6 a possible sixmonth term in jail. A comb, its teeth signifying a dog, warned tramps of lurking canines, while a slanted stick figure scrawled in haste meant "run like hell."30
Clambering out of the Social Pit
In retrospect the floating army had "run like hell" chalked all over it. Although itinerant work may have been a reasonable choice for a young man just starting out or for an unemployed man trying to ride out hard times, it was a guaranteed dead end for anyone who tried to make a career of it and a trip to potter's field for those who stayed too long. Social historians have long noted the paradox that, despite nineteenth-century Americans' habit of moving restlessly from place to place, the surest route to wealth and power was staying put. To set down roots in a community, or at any rate in one that was not in irreversible decline, was to acquire access to valuable information about jobs and investment opportunities, to make friends and gain trust, to meet potential spouses, and to have a chance to accumulate the credit and property that made family life possible.31
The one notable exception was the foreman who had charge of the bachelor work crews. Though often on the move, he generally earned enough to support a family and, as was common practice on ranches and in lumber camps, could live with his wife in separate quarters. This situation invited jealousy, or at least unfulfilled longing. "She was a young, smiling, good-natured woman who treated everybody nice," Teddy Blue Abbott recalled of one foreman's wife; "the whole outfit was in love with her."32
And doubtless focused on her in their sexual fantasies. Relegated to life in a succession of bunkhouses, the transient workers had to make do with masturbation, pornography, occasional trips to the brothel, or even a pimp-supplied "ding-fob," an inflated, life-sized rubber woman of Japanese manufacture. Nor were homosexual liaisons unknown. They occurred in bunkhouses and main stems and boxcars and were most frequently observed between veteran tramps, called jockers or wolves, and their companion adolescent boys, often runaways, known as punks or prushins.33
The primary heterosexual outlets were prostitution and harvest unions. Harvesting of hops and berries was among the few activities that attracted substantial numbers of female workers, including mill hands and prostitutes from nearby cities. The men and women loaded boxes during daylight and frolicked after dark. "Hop dances are all the go every night," wrote a tramp named Bill Aspinwall, "sometimes Sunday included. Some dances are Respectable; others free and easy." The revels spilled over into nearby saloons, from which the harvesters reeled, penniless, to sleep it off in fields and ditches. Others took advantage of the temporary availability of women to shack up. "A great many [hobos] gets a wife very suddenly about these times and build a shantie in the woods," Aspinwall continued. They kept house for a while but inevitably parted with "black eyes, sore Heads and may be an arest of both, three months in jail or work house." More marital burlesque than marriage, these harvest unions were clandestine, alcoholic, abusive, and mercifully brief.34
It is possible to think of these misadventures in Darwinian terms. Aside from temporary cohabitation and heterosexual prostitution, with its remote possibility of an unaborted pregnancy, the tramps' sexual outlets were all biologically sterile. Hands, mouths, anuses, and dingfob vaginas provided release but no offspring. From an evolutionary perspective this sterility, together with the hazardous character of work and life on the road, made a tramping career genetically and personally suicidal, something against which both sexual and natural selection operated.
The shrewder and better educated saw the futility of the floating army and got out quickly, suffering no detriment in later life. The Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and the actor Clark Gable were hobos. So was the writer Jack London, who quit tramping and went back to school, glad to have escaped what he called the Social Pit. Another survivor was Francis McCredy Hutchinson, an educated young Philadelphian who traveled to Minnesota in May 1871 to work as a chainman and rodman on the Northern Pacific Railroad. Homesick and troubled by financial worries, Hutchinson did not much like the world in which he found himself. In his journal he described his room in St. Paul as
a regular hole in the wall. The dimensions would have barely sufficed for a bachelor mosquito, let alone one of the genus homo ... On the floor was a filthy apology for a carpet, a war scarred wash stand which from appearances might have been run over with a curry comb, a superannuated chair, a miserable bed upon which was linen of very questionable purity, while the walls were frescoed with the blood of man's particular enemy the fiendish "Bed Bug."
What Hutchinson did not say, and what reveals a great deal about his background and outlook, is that by tramping standards these were good accommodations—better than the usual lousy barracks or communal flop on damp newspapers on a lodginghouse floor."
Hutchinson did not mind life in the open summer air, especially when his crew supplemented its diet with black bass and pike and wild strawberries. But there was always the danger of sudden storms, stinging hail, and the ever-present annoyance of mosquitoes and fleas. Biting insects bothered him almost as much as the drunken antics of the railroad crews, whom he judged the most depraved men in existence. He stuck it out until February 1872, returned to Philadelphia, did one last stint in the West as a surveyor and railroad tie inspector, then quit the transient life for good in 1873, settling down to become a journalist for the Philadelphia Record.TM
Bruce Siberts was a twenty-two-year-old farm boy who, on the evening of 8 July 1890, climbed into a baggage car in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, and embarked for the "land of adventure." He found it in the form of three drunken tramps who chased him and another young traveler on top of the boxcar, yelling that they would throw them under the wheels. One of the three pursuers smashed into an overhead viaduct and was hurled screaming from the train. The other two tramps got off at the next stop, but Siberts and his companion went on, afraid they might be arrested and charged with murder.
Siberts learned any number of lessons over the coming months, among them how to delouse clothes by setting them on an anthill and why it was a good idea to stay out of saloons. After a year of sleeping in hay and oat shocks and drifting in a world of chiselers, drunks, whores, and tin-horn gamblers, he was ready to settle down to cattle and horse ranching in the Plum Creek region of South Dakota. He worked at that calling for fifteen years, married in late 1905, sold his ranch and stock, and moved with his wife to Oklahoma, where he accumulated 8,000 acres.37
Hutchinson and Siberts were young men who never closely identified with the subculture of transient workers and who got out while the getting was good. Sometimes whole groups of men were able to escape. Bridgeport, a Chicago neighborhood originally called Hardscrabble, was first settled in the 1830s by Irish navvies digging the Illinois and Michigan canal. Irish canal workers were then known, and deservedly so, as the wildest laborers in the United States. But the men who stayed in Bridgeport were able to create the foundation of something different and much better. They built a stable ethnic community that by the late nineteenth century was socially and demographically normal, peopled with workers, priests and policemen, ward heelers and widows, wives and servant girls, as well as the inevitable criminals and toughs. Into that community was born Richard J. Daley, the son of a sheet-metal worker and a native Bridgeport woman, who would in his time rise to become mayor of Chicago, Democratic Party kingmaker, and arguably the most powerful politician in the United States.38
What was good for the Bridgeport Irish was good for society, or at any rate reductive of crime. Riotous behavior and urban felony rates declined in the late nineteenth century, a trend usually ascribed to the deterrent effect of better and more numerous police or the psychological consequences of the urbanindustrial transformation with its character-shaping apparatus of factories, time clocks, whistles, and bureaucratic rules. But such a change required residential stability. For men to be subject to systematic police scrutiny and industrial discipline as well as the restraints of married life, they had to be settled in one place, not on the road sleeping in barns, working irregularly, and changing their names as they shuttled in and out of the main stems. The new factory order may well have molded the character of the persisters, as the historian Roger Lane has argued, but it is hard to see how it affected the floaters. Charlie Chaplin understood this. He called the protagonist of his film Modern Times (1936), the one who passes unscathed through the gears of the huge machine, the Tramp.39
Sober Professor, Drinking Rover
Not everyone who did a stint in the floating army managed to get out and stay out. We know from police lodging data, vagrancy arrests, and other institutional records that thousands of men, and a much smaller number of women, continued to tramp about even when times were good. We also have memoirs and letters from a handful of articulate tramps who tried to explain why they stayed in the floating world even after they had become acquainted with its dangers.
The most detailed of these is a twenty-five-year correspondence between John James McCook and William "Roving Bill" Aspinwall. McCook was an Episcopal priest and a professor of modern languages. Deeply religious yet cosmopolitan in outlook, he knew a dozen languages, married and fathered eight children, taught at Trinity College, served as the pastor of a parish in East Hartford, Connecticut, and in 1890, as if he had nothing else to do, began the most systematic study of tramp life ever undertaken in the United States.
McCook left no stone unturned. He investigated itinerants who wintered in the Hartford almshouse, followed homeless men and mapped their begging routes, and visited tramp jungles, saloons, and lodgings with a photographer in tow. In November 1891 he sent questionnaires to the mayors of forty cities, asking that they be passed on to those in charge of the charitable or police institutions where tramps were housed. He received 1,349 replies from fourteen cities, data he mined for a series of magazine articles on the tramp problem. He also drew on interviews and correspondence with numerous tramps, of whom Aspinwall was the most thoughtful.
Aspinwall, like McCook, had served in the Union Army in his youth, but there the similarities ended. Aspinwall was a wanderer who made his money by mushfaking, or mending umbrellas, and by repairing clocks and sewing machines, doing seasonal farm work, and occasionally working in woolen mills. A proud man, he did not beg unless he was desperate or received an unsolicited offer of money or food. Something of a loner, he usually walked alone to his work—in the photograph his leather shoes are so warn and dusty as to be almost white—although he sometimes rode the rails, slept in boxcars, and associated with other tramps. Certainly he knew enough about the subculture to send McCook long and at times Rabelaisian accounts replete with descriptions of down-and-outers, vote sellers, and sodomites. One wonders what went through Reverend McCook's mind as he read all this.40
Aspinwall professed to enjoy the road and the free and leisurely life it offered. On beautiful spring days, he wrote, he liked to find a secluded spot in the woods, lie in the shade of a friendly tree, listen to the birdsongs, and then sleep for hours—"such sweet sleep, such nice dreams ... I often think God intended man to live as the Indians used to—all the land common property. What happy times if we was all in the woods together!"
McCook analyzed these sentiments in near-Freudian terms. We are all, he wrote, yoked with the habits of civilized life. We are taught to believe that goodness and happiness consist of doing our daily tasks, eating regular meals, going to bed in the same place, rising at the same time, wearing certain kinds of clothes, behaving respectably. "Religion gives its awful sanction to this theory," McCook observed; "habit fortifies it; successive generations of what we call civilization even creates an instinct which makes us think, or at least say, we like it." But when someone like Aspinwall made the discovery—McCook characteristically called it a fatal discovery—that it was possible to turn away from all this, hit the road, go anywhere, get along, associate with anyone, and drop all responsibilities, then it was hard to go back to the settled routine.41
There was more to Aspinwall's story, however, than atavism, the tripping of some hunter-gatherer switch deep in the recesses of his brain. Bill Aspinwall was an alcoholic. Despite his professed love of the roving life, he did occasionally try to settle down and work at steady jobs but dissipated his earnings in drinking bouts. He admitted to McCook that he would be wellto-do if it were not for his drinking, which had begun in the army. In his later years, when he lived in a series of veterans' homes (a safety net not available to most tramps), he was still fighting his battle with the bottle.42
Aspinwall was also a victim of industrial downturns. One of his more ambitious attempts to settle down and open a repair shop in Pittsburgh in 1893 was doomed by bad timing. The severe depression that hit that year forced him to close the shop for want of business and sent him back on the road where he observed a huge increase in wandering, unemployed men. McCook came to the same realization, noting a large increase in the number of lodgers during depression years. Although McCook originally believed that drink was the primary cause of tramping, he had second thoughts and concluded that it was chiefly due to the intertwined effects of drinking and the business cycle.
McCook's mature views were subtle and command our attention. He understood, of course, that drinking dissipated savings. Men blew their stakes on drunken sprees, sometimes pawning the coats on their backs, and then either had to stagger back to work or, if too sick and exhausted, apply for a ticket to the almshouse. He was not alone in this judgment. Other observers, including young Harry Truman, a $30-a-month timekeeper for the Santa Fe Railroad, saw exactly the same thing. Truman noted sadly that the hobos were paid off every two weeks on Saturday night in a saloon so that they would drink up their wages and return to work on Monday morning. East and West, inside and outside the subculture, there are dozens of accounts of the spree pattern and its ill effects on itinerant men. They corroborate McCook's own survey findings, which indicated that 63 percent of his large sample of tramps and casual lodgers was intemperate.43
But McCook discovered something else, that liquor put men at a much higher risk of unemployment when hard times hit. He interviewed the personnel managers of twelve large firms in Hartford, eight of which had drinking men and tramps in their employ. He was told that when business fell off and the payroll had to be cut, the first to go were the drinkers, then the single men, then married men last of all. This industrial triage meant that tramps, most of whom drank and almost all of whom were single, faced double jeopardy. First laid off and last rehired, they had to move on in search of work again.44
Tramps, in brief, were in a predicament similar to that of gold miners, Plains cowboys, Chinese laborers, and deep-water sailors, yet another group of expendable laborers floating on a male frontier. Itinerant workers could and often did spend long periods working in isolation and sobriety, accumulating wages that, if saved and spent judiciously, promised a way out. A stake could mean tuition, tools, a down payment on a shop, or even a small farm—the dream that animates George and Lennie, the doomed hobo protagonists of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1937). But too often the stake was lost in the steamy confines of a main-stem bar or in the arms of a prostitute. "A man can't get along without that—it's God's arrangement," explained one Irish drifter, still patronizing whores at the age of fifty-eight.45
The physical and psychological effects of sprees were cumulative. Alcohol-related malnutrition, tremors, liver and venereal diseases, and related health problems diminished a man's ability to work and the likelihood he would be hired or, if hired, kept on the job. The string of drunken binges also encouraged a defeatist attitude that became more pronounced as—if—he grew older. "Booze put me on the bum," explained one derelict alcoholic, an ex-carpenter and union member who ended up on Chicago's West Madison Street in the early 1920s. "Now, I'm here and I'm too old to be good for anything, so why not keep it up?"46
Victorians viewed this sort of fate as a matter of defective character and moral weakness. They had a point, or rather half of one. A lack of discipline and future-orientation might explain why some individuals and not others succumbed to vice and languished in the floating army, but they ought not blind us, as indeed they did not blind thoughtful contemporaries, to the systematic, profit-driven, and corrupt character of the vice industry. The political economy of the lumber towns, for example, was simply that of the cattle towns writ larger. Saloons and brothels relieved the timber workers of their accumulated seasonal wages and circulated the money, politicians turned a blind eye, and the marshals (when not busy running their own whorehouses, as in Bay City, Michigan) simply tried to quell the worst violence and keep the boys quiet on Sunday and out of respectable neighborhoods. Where they really kept them, intentionally or otherwise, was in the cycle of work and spree.47
The exploitative process was transparent when employers cut out the middlemen and went into the drink business for themselves. The precedent was set by antebellum canal companies that sold whiskey to their Irish crews, subtracting the cost from their wages and effectively keeping alcoholic workers tied to the job. This practice had terrible consequences; one observer put the life expectancy of the hard-drinking navvies at eighteen months. For sheer ruthlessness, however, it is hard to match the record of the western railroad contractor who set up a saloon at the end of the tunnel his men were drilling. When they ran out of money, he accepted their bank checks at a discount of ten cents on the dollar.48
The nineteenth-century revolution in alkaloidal chemistry presented new possibilities for exploiting workers. "At every company store," complained Big Bill Haywood, referring to the southern turpentine and lumber camps, "cocaine, morphine, and heroin are sold. The workers, once addicted, cannot think of going away from their source of supply." Social conservatives had their own reasons for deploring such practices, especially the sale of cocaine to black laborers. In 1909 Harris Dickson, a municipal court judge in Vicksburg, Mississippi, went so far as to state that anyone who deliberately put cocaine into a Negro was more dangerous than a person who would inoculate a dog with hydrophobia. Setting aside the racist trope, there is no reason to doubt the point of Dickson's investigations, that some railroad and levee construction companies knowingly sold dangerous and addictive drugs to their work crews, acting out another variation on the theme of the expendability of migrant labor.49
Prohibition
Evangelical women and men regarded entrepreneurial vice, above all the liquor industry, as a hydra-headed evil. The drink business was, in the powerful if mixed metaphor of the Reverend Mark Matthews, moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly, "the most fiendish, corrupt and hell-soaked institution that ever crawled out of the slime of the eternal pit."50
In the years from 1890 through 1917 Evangelical leaders like Matthews found new allies in the rising generation of Progressive reformers. Though the Progressives resembled the Evangelicals in several important respects and were often motivated by moral and religious convictions, they cast their criticism of the liquor industry in cooler scientific terms. They pointed to the growing body of evidence that drink ruined health and lowered life expectancy, reduced industrial safety and efficiency, contributed to unemployment, poverty, and crime, triggered domestic beatings, and disrupted family life.
The ill effects of drink may have been concentrated in the lower classes, but the Progressives argued that the costs were ultimately borne by everyone. An inebriated fur trapper in the Rocky Mountains was one thing, a drunken switchman or hung-over section gang on a busy railroad quite another. Urbanindustrial America paid for drink in the form of more and costlier accidents, more police, and higher outlays for prisons, almshouses, hospitals, asylums, and other institutions filled with the human debris of alcoholic excess. Drink produced profit and labor-control advantages for the few, misery and disorder for the many, imposing social losses that efficiency-minded Progressives and a growing number of business leaders calculated and emphasized as grounds for coercive change.SL
Progressives were equally sensitive to irresponsible corporate behavior, of which the big distillers and brewers were guilty on several accounts. Notorious for corrupting legislatures and buying votes, they had also created a distribution system that practically guaranteed abuse. By the late nineteenth century brewers owned 70 percent or more of the saloons in the United States, a move calculated to provide a steady outlet for their products, much the way oil companies would later franchise gas stations. The brewers' expectations put pressure on the saloonkeepers to keep the product moving. Given the intense competition, they could accomplish this only by selling liquor to the underage and the already soused or by harboring vice activities to attract more customers. In New York City saloons took advantage of an 1896 revision of the state licensing code to add bedrooms and become, technically, hotels. What these new bedrooms were used for soon became apparent and aroused a storm of indignation, as did the notorious drink-sex-flop "barrelhouses" of the Chicago main stem. Saloons had always been centers of male vice, but sharp competition made the problem conspicuously worse in the two decades before World War I.52
These well-publicized abuses did much to bring the liquor question to a head. Not all Progressives embraced prohibition. McCook, for one, favored a system of fixed-profit municipal liquor monopolies and reformatories for drunkards. But a combination of social and political pressures—the saloon scandals, the lobbying of the Anti-Saloon League and other grass-roots organizations, the enfranchisement of women, and the war itself, with its patriotic fervor, pressure for grain conservation, and backlash against all things German, including beer—created an irresistible momentum for the root-and-branch solution of national prohibition. The Eighteenth Amendment and its enabling legislation, the Volstead Act, took effect in January 1920, although many parts of the country were by then already dry through state and local legislation. National prohibition lasted almost fourteen years, until December 1933, when a combination of skillful and well-financed wet propaganda, concern over gangsterism and bootlegging, the Depression and Democratic ascendancy, and an urgent need for tax dollars brought about repeal of the amendment.
The once popular and politically useful myth that Prohibition turned America into a nation of speakeasy-going drunkards has been exploded by historians and alcohol researchers. There is widespread agreement that per capita alcohol consumption dropped by half or more as a result of Prohibition, that alcoholrelated diseases sharply declined, and that urban wage earners spent billions of dollars less on drink, using the savings to purchase such durable consumer goods as automobiles. "Prohibition," sums up John Burnham, a historian who led the revisionist charge, "was substantially successful.'"'1
But was it substantially successful in liberating itinerant workers from the work-spree cycle? Here the answer must be a tentative no. Resistance to prohibition laws, as Burnham himself has observed, was most widespread among tramps and other irreligious, lower-class, and mostly single men who resented the Protestant do-gooders and their crusades against liquor, gambling, prostitution, pornography, and other bachelor vices. These men often came from cultures that approved of drinking and had acquired a taste for alcohol themselves. "Blind pigs," or low-rent speakeasies, flourished in and around main-stem neighborhoods, giving tramping men easy access to alcohol while they wintered in cities. When Nels Anderson, a secondgeneration hobo turned sociologist, studied Chicago's main stem in the early 1920s, he promptly discovered that tramp teetotalers were few and that alcoholism and spree drinking were still widespread problems, Prohibition or no.M
When bootleg liquor was unavailable there were other ways to get high. Floaters drank rubbing alcohol, bay rum, vanilla extract, and the ever-popular Sterno, a dangerous vestige of Prohibition that persisted into the 1930s and beyond. "Drinking this fluid results in a physiological and neurotic degeneracy which is as disastrous as narcotic addiction," wrote one observer. "Individuals habituated to 'smoke' ordinarily do not return to the comparatively mild effects of whiskey or beer. There is nothing, moreover, which the 'derailer' will not attempt to consume, lacking his favorite, canned heat." The most extreme alternative was a mixture of two parts milk to one part kerosene. When boiled, skimmed, cooled, and drunk the result was "an efficient loss of all control of rational processes and behavior."" Whatever good Prohibition did for the nation as a whole it was of no help to tramps who persisted in this sort of intoxication. They were not merely dissipating their wages. They were headed over a cliff.
The End of the Floating Army
Yet the hard-drinking, train-jumping, jungling workers were disappearing by the early 1920s. "The hobo," summed up Anderson, looking back over this period, "was on his way out."56 Why, if not for reforms like prohibition, did this decline occur?
One answer is that the jobs created by the building of the urban-industrial infrastructure were self-liquidating. When the main rail lines were completed, the tunnels dug, and the dams built, all that was required was maintenance crews, not massed gangs of laborers. There was still a demand for harvest and other seasonal help, but as the western populations began to grow naturally more of these jobs were taken by nonmigrating workers such as teenagers, students, or local men and women looking to earn additional income. The automobile, which became increasingly common during the late 1910s and especially during the 1920s, made it much easier for these laborers to travel to their jobs. Commuting, not freight hopping, was becoming central to American workers' lives.
Technological change altered labor demand in other important ways. Combines reduced the need for field hands during the harvest rush by two-thirds or more. Steam shovels replaced ditch diggers, chainsaws replaced axmen, and refrigerators replaced tramps who had once eked out a living cutting blocks of ice. In 1879 a man with a strong back and a willingness to travel could count on finding temporary work somewhere, but by 1929 the demand for unskilled migrant labor had greatly diminished or was being met by local workers."
Then came the Great Depression and with it a huge jump in the number of transients. By August 1932 as many as two million homeless persons were roaming America, including 200,000 children. The volume of those riding the rails was a fever chart of hard times. On the Missouri Pacific the number of trespassers observed on or ejected from trains rose from under 40,000 in 1929 to nearly 280,000 in the crisis year of 1933 before tapering to 100,000 in 1937.58
The men who hopped freights and the families who took to the road in battered flivvers during the 1930s were quite distinct from the old-style tramps. The new wanderers were desperate economic refugees with little realistic hope of finding industrial jobs, while the hobos of thirty years before could at least count on a variety of work, some of it, as in the lumber camps, comparatively well paying. Nor were the itinerant job-seekers of the 1930s attuned to the tramp subculture. The most famous Depression-era refugees, the Okies who streamed into California, were anything but bindle stiffs. They came in families, planned to relocate permanently, and had no intention of becoming lifelong migratory workers. They settled near rural towns and cities, tried to send their children to school, and, when the family breadwinners followed the harvest, did so from a residential base.59
The Federal Emergency Relief Administration and other government agencies were able to provide some help to homeless Americans during the 1930s, but what really ended the crisis was the reabsorption of the unemployed into the war economy or the armed forces in the early 1940s. It then became clear how completely the male tramp's world, or at least the economic underpinnings of it, had vanished. There were still migratory agricultural workers, but these were increasingly families with cars and sometimes trailers who followed the harvest and were in no way dependent on the railroads or wintering in the main stems. The main-stem neighborhoods had themselves changed. They were not so much urban dormitories for working men as they were skid-row slums, home to aging pensioners squeezed by inflation, disabled men on relief, and an assortment of alcoholics, blood sellers, panhandlers, and other derelicts kept on the move more by their arrest records than by the seasonal rhythms of labor.60
Before 1900 it was possible for homeless American men to lead lives that were socially marginal but economically useful. They harvested crops and cut down forests, herded cattle, built railroads, opened new mines. "Such labor granted them a place in the economy while allowing them to remain on society's edges," Peter Marin writes, "an option rarely available to women save through prostitution."M This mixed status—necessary workers, troublesome pariahs—explains the peculiar, almost schizoid, response to itinerant unskilled workers: why railroad officials alternately let them ride and threw them off trains, why towns tolerated them at harvest time but later administered timber lessons, why police stations functioned as both tramp hotels and prisons. Even the Chinese bachelors, one of the most despised groups in Victorian America, were regarded as an important labor asset by western landowners and magnates.
A hundred years later the situation had changed dramatically. Most jobs required skills, regular hours, and a sedentary, disciplined style of living. The demand for casual day laborers either had disappeared or was being met by immigrants. In these circumstances men who lacked homes, families, education, sobriety, and alarm clocks were economically and socially marginal. In the eyes of the public they were not only superfluous but dangerous as well. For all his problems the late nineteenthcentury tramp could at least lay claim to having built industrial America. Fairly or unfairly his late twentieth-century counterpart, the homeless urban man, is widely viewed as just another threat to tear it apart.