Life on the Rails

            One night in May, 1932, three hundred unemployed World War I veterans waited in the Union Pacific freight yard, three hundred miles outside their home town of Portland, Oregon, to hop a freight train – the first in their expedition to Washington D.C.[1] The freight train blew by them at fifty miles an hour.[2] Eventually, after a day of bickering with Union Pacific officials, the veterans finally persuaded the railroad officials to hook on extra stock cars to the next freight out.[3] Thus, began the first train ride in the journey of the Bonus Expeditionary Forces (B.E.F.) to the nation’s capital. Upon arrival in East St. Louis, Illinois, however, the B & O railroad refused the B.E.F. transportation, and standoff took place in the yards. The publicity generated by front page coverage in many major newspapers triggered a mass movement of other unemployed World War I veterans to take to the rails and join their brethren in Washington D.C.[4]

            These World War I veterans were not the first to come up with the idea of hopping on board freight trains as a means of free transportation. George Dodge, an odd-job man, recalled seeing vast numbers of “poor people” who “followed the railroad” in search of work during a severe economic depression in 1876.[5] At the same time people were experiencing increasing unemployment in the post-Civil War era, the United States, railroad networks were rapidly expanding, and extending westward. At the beginning of the Civil War there were 30,000 miles of track; by 1900 there were 193,346 miles.[6] Railroad expansion placed new destinations, opportunities, experiences and possibilities within the grasp of most Americans. Those who could not afford to pay fare for a passenger train could take their chances by hopping a freight train – and many did. Of those who did, emerged a group almost exclusively comprised of men who adapted a lifestyle founded largely on travel by freight trains. These men were generally referred to as hoboes. A survey of interviews collected by various writers during the New Deal era, "American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1940" in the Library of Congress’s American Memory gives us an idea of the hobo culture that sprung up along railroad tracks across the United States.

If we examine the terminology hoboes used to make class distinctions among themselves, we can get a sense of what motivated them and how they sustained themselves. Hank Simms, a miner born in 1852, said that those who were called “hoboes” in the 1930s were known as “Overland Johns” during the 1870s and 1880s in the American West. These men were typically highly skilled miners, lumberjacks, and carpenters, who worked hard and lived off their trades. Overland Johns had itchy feet and were not content to ply their trade in any one place for a very long time: if they got bored with their job, they would pack up their gear and move on down the road.[7] According to John E. O’Donnell, a writer for the Federal Writers Project, there were essential two types of hoboes. One type he referred to as a “hobo,” a traveler who “was a periodical bum who works today and takes to the road tomorrow.” The other type of hobo O’Donnell identified as a “yeag,” a professional tramp who “would starve to death before lowering himself to honest labor.”[8] A “yeag” could be a poet or a song-writer. Frank DeSoto, a former hobo and sign painter, recognized another kind of hobo that he termed as a “buzzard,” who was either “too lazy or too timid to beg on the street [or] at backdoors,” and were content either to live off of leftovers or to get their food from the “more callous beggar,” usually by carrying wood, build a fire, etc.[9] In sum, hoboes generally classified themselves by their willingness to work, the legitimacy of their occupation, and the degree of their preference of work to leisure. An “Overland John” had more in common with a “yeag” than a “buzzard,” because both the “Overland John” and the “yeag” were highly skilled and competent with the only real distinction between the two being the legitimacy of their respective occupations and the leisure it afforded them, whereas the “buzzard” performed the most menial of tasks and displayed very little motivation for anything other than travel.

            Despite the class distinctions among hoboes, they all were travelers and their principle mode of transportation was the freight train. Boarding was not always an easy task. As we have seen in the standoff between the Portland contingent of the B.E.F. and the B & O, railroad officials took measures to discourage non-paying passengers. If hoboes could not board a freight train while it was stationary in a yard, then they had to gain transport while it was moving – and this could be quite dangerous. Hoboes developed different strategies for boarding trains. Since hopping on board a moving freight train was much easier when it was moving slow, one trick was to find a spot along the tracks where an uphill grade or a bend would cause the train to slow down.[10] Catching a “fast freight” was much more hazardous, requiring skill and intimate knowledge of hand and foot holds on various types of cars. Harry Kemp described catching a fast freight with heavy wind and driving rain:

I made a run for it in the rapidly gathering dusk. I grabbed the bar on one side and made a leap for the step, but missed with one foot, luckily caught on with the other, or I might have fallen underneath ... And [I] was aboard, my arms almost wrenched from their sockets.[11]

In courting the physical risks involved in hopping a train, hoboes had to be crafty and sure with their hand and feet to avoid injury. Part of the hobo lifestyle incorporated these elements of excitement and danger.

            Once on board, hoboes had to make themselves as comfortable as possible and make the best of the ride. A box car was the car of choice, especially for the long-haul, because it afforded shelter that could not be found in a stock car or a gondola. Hoboes often slept in box cars, and had to be careful that they did not lay their heads too close to the end walls because one could bang his head if the engineer suddenly released the throttle.[12] According to Harry Kemp, to get some sleep on cold nights hoboes would crawl into a box car, close the side door, and huddle up together, and rely on the “animal heat” of their bodies “to allay the cold.” Kemp noted although this arrangement caused the air to become “sickeningly thick” and rent with snoring and muttering, it was preferable to opening a side door and letting in the cold. Also, with such sleeping arrangements, the men had to be mindful to secure their few belongings on to their bodies or underneath their heads out of the fear that one of their fellow lodgers might rob them.[13] In sum, train travel was not without its hazards: hoboes constantly needed to be aware of the motion of the train as well as other men. They relied on each other out of necessity but regarded their mates with a wary eye. Hoboes were generally tough and self-reliant birds on a train – they had to be.

            When they were not spending the night in a box car, hoboes often disembarked in rural areas and lit out for a “jungle.” Jungles were hobo camping grounds nearby the tracks, close to water, and usually outside of town limits “so that the town marshall has no jurisdiction over them as has a sheriff.” Frank Desoto tells us that in large cities, as a rule, there were not any jungles because “the hobos congregate in some certain part of town as suits their purpose which of course is begging for money, cheap saloons and eating houses.”[14] Once in camp, the hoboes took the opportunity to attend to their personal chores, and here displayed some of their resourcefulness. Lice were a constant source of agitation, and to get rid of them the well-groomed tramp would take off his clothes one piece at a time and boil them. Harry Kemp learned how to “shave with the aid of a broken bit of whiskey glass,” and once witnessed “one old veteran of the road” shaving another by rubbing his face with the rough side of a brick. For eating, they might use old tomato cans hammered flat for plates, and fingers, pocket knives or chips of wood for utensils. The activities in a hobo jungle were not always confined to attending to basic needs. Kemp recollected a time when the camp leader stole a keg of beer and as he put it: “Needless to say, there was a roaring good time in the jungle that night, and several fights.”[15]

            Perhaps the chief activity in a hobo camp revolved around arranging the procurement and consumption of food. Often hoboes in the jungle would pool their resources to provide for a common meal, which usually meant trekking into town and working, stealing or begging for food.[16] Frank Desoto recalled how his buddy, who had a flair for salesmanship, would solicit bakers and grocers with offers of making “good signs cheap,” and return to the jungles laden with makings for Mulligan Stew, which consisted of whatever meat and vegetables were available. Sometimes, this method did not always work because a town had become “bummed out,” which meant the townspeople had been saturated with beggars and become hardened by it. DeSoto elaborated that this was a common condition in towns located at “most division points and subdivision points of railroads.” One strategy they devised to combat a town that had been bummed out was to assign each man to a certain shop and to bum specific food items of little value so as to minimize their presence by minimizing their contact.[17] In a sense, hobo jungles were functioning communities. And despite constant turn over of its membership, some kind of continuity seems to have been maintained.

            Most hoboes did not always beg or steal to get by, and many applied their talents towards gainful, even if brief employment. Mr. Edward Barney, a newspaper editor in New Hampshire, recalled hiring tramps as typesetters for the Canaan Reporter, a local newspaper. These men set type by hand, and by the 1930s this skill had become all but obsolete due to the spread of modern machinery. Barney summed up the tramp printer this way: “He was an indifferent typesetter. First of all he was a tramp; secondarily a typesetter. We hired them out of pure pity, not because they were of any use to us.”[18] Starbuck Perry, a ship’s mate, recollected taking on half a crew of hoboes out of San Francisco and had a hell of a time “trying to make sailors out of them.” Like Mr. Barney, Perry come to the conclusion that hoboes were not happy being confined working in one place for any length of time.[19] Harry Kemp fit this pattern, at least while he was a hobo. He remembered how he was “not above doing occasional work while in transit on the road,” and would work as a farm hand or a fruit picker for one or two weeks at a time.[20] Generally speaking, hoboes between the depressions of the 1870s and the Great Depression of the 1930s, seem to have been able to find temporary employment or day labor to support their itinerant lifestyle. They were not, by and large, men  unwilling to work – they simply did not want to spend their entire lives working. Hank Sims summed up this attitude towards work by commenting in 1938: “There was none of this sucking around like you have now, and a man didn't hang onto his job like a priest to a parish. Every once in a while we just drug down our pay on principle, and went down the road to a new job.”[21]

            The hobo life-style that evolved with the expansion of the railroads after the Civil War can best be described as living on the edge. In fact, the railroad itself cut the edge of technology and innovation in transportation, and greatly contributed to the hobo life-style. Hoboes made class distinctions among themselves according to one’s skill and willingness to adapt to challenges presented by living on the road. Travel by freight trains was another form of living on the edge as there was always an element of physical danger and risk involved either in the form of falling, fellow hoboes or railroad dicks. Hobo jungles were located on the outskirts of towns bisected by railroads and frequently outside the jurisdiction of towns’ authorities. Thus situated, hoboes were free to engage in behavior that would not be tolerated in a more structured community. The flip side of this arrangement was that there was no one to keep predators in check – and they did not call their campsites “jungles” for nothing. While hoboes in jungles did on occasion cooperate in joint ventures, a man had to be resourceful and look out for himself. Because most hoboes were transient workers, they lived on the edge of social legitimacy in varying degrees according to the value of their trades and occupational skills. In a sense, hoboes were rugged individualists without a particularly strong work ethic who lived on the fringe of American social norms, values and conventions.