Or if single men they were detained in jail, usually a one-night cool-off in the cell, then directed to scram in the morning, perhaps embarked at gun-point on an outgoing freight. Or in some cases towns adopted the ‘hobo express’ system: of packing a collection of hobos into trucks and hauling them to the county or state line, where they were dumped and told not to come back.
Or if a town was under particularly heavy bombardment from migrants, a posse met every incoming train, rounded up the tramps as they jumped off and put them back on as it pulled out - not a custom which pleased the railroads but their complaints were countered with the reply that if the railroad brought them in the railroad should ship them out, the belief being that a tough reception committee at every stop would sharpen the railroad’s vigilance against free riders.
Or in towns where it was seriously believed that the highways and railroads were conduits of a new breed of cut-throat and thief, all arriving migrants were arrested, finger-printed and held until a check had been made with the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation - a method which, if producing few sensational captures of wanted men, was thought guaranteed to frighten off strangers with criminal records.
Governor Lewelling’s reminder of the personal liberty guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen on American soil was, forty years later, in even more decrepit neglect. The tightening barricades had the immediate effect of shifting men off the railroads and on to the highways, where there was a slightly better chance of getting through. But the ‘cracker’ refugees from the Dust Bowl states were not freight riders; all their families and boxes were stacked on the steaming, shuddering wrecks which crawled along the roads to the ‘object’ state of California. So California, netting few at the railroad depots, decided to stop the migrants at the road state line, and the border blockade, or ‘bum blockade’ as it was more generally known, was carried on from November 1935 to April 1936.
The blockade was initiated not by the state but by the city of Los Angeles. When the Federal Transient Service, which had been taking some of the load of destitute travellers, decided to liquidate there was consternation. California was then in the Thirties receiving thirteen per cent of all transients in America and, it was bewailed, local communities and Los Angeles in particular would be overrun by packs of vagrants. The Los Angeles police, according to McWilliams, went ‘wildly hysterical’. The first step was the creation of an emergency body with the roundly biased title of the Los Angeles Committee on Indigent Alien Transients, headed by James E. Davis, Chief of Police, which ‘proceeded to establish some sixteen border patrols located in counties hundreds of miles removed from Los Angeles …
‘Some 125 policemen stationed at these various points of entry stopped all cars that looked as though they might contain “un-employables” and turned them back. When a court action was brought in the U.S. District Court by the American Civil Liberties Union, to test the constitutionality of this procedure the Chief of Police detailed the head of his celebrated “Intelligence Squad” to “work over” the plaintiff in whose name the action had been commenced. Not only was the plaintiff himself intimidated, but his wife and child were threatened and browbeaten by police officers … and ultimately the plaintiff was “induced” to drop the action.’
Los Angeles police justified the ‘bum blockade’, irregular and unconstitutional though it was, as protecting women and children in the city from forays of criminals or potential criminals -and they added the imaginative blood-curdler that they might also be carriers of disease.
The move appears to have enjoyed popular support, from of course transients of the previous generation who were dropping the bar on transients of this generation. This was a particularly monstrous illogicality even in a nation which based its success formula on getting there first, and awarding the prizes to the fleet and the strong.
Decidedly there were many who did not approve of these illegal and callously strong-arm methods of staving off the desperate poor and, apart from the civil rights campaigners, there were objections in the press. In a Survey Graphic article, ‘Rolling Stones Gather No Sympathy’, January 1939 - eight months, incidentally, before Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath aroused national shame and anger - Victory Weybright addressed attention to the point that California had been made by migrants: conquistadores, forty-niners, Chinese coolies, hobo field hands and, finally, the drought refugees. If the American pioneer tradition still counted for anything, he submitted: ‘Localities with defensive barriers cannot be allowed unwittingly to “Balkanize” a nation that has built its cities and peopled its farms by the greatest mobility of population any nation has ever known… Or else, our vital American system will decay.’
The blockades lost in the end and the migrants moved in but this came about less from public revulsion against such police state ‘walls’ than by the blockades themselves. They did not fail from want of trying.
Governor Floyd Olson, testifying in December 1939 before the Senate Civil Liberties Committee, reported that twenty-seven Californian counties had taken steps to ‘regulate’ the inter-county movement of workers - the attempt by the association of Californian land owners and agriculturists to control migrants in and out of the crop zones.
This was an authoritarian extreme not reached in any other state but in 1936 Colorado also, briefly and unsuccessfully, set up a border blockade, the pretext being that it was to ward off alien Mexicans making for the beet fields but which quite certainly was aimed at hard-up drought families.
Apart from this during the meagre years of the Thirties state after state hardened its restrictions to ensure that it was not going to be the one to take up the slack of the population. Sumptuary legislation - if not by the state, by counties or municipalities - was enacted to disqualify border-crossers from the benefit of public relief, and the period of legal settlement, where-under a man was eligible for public work, was raised in a number of states.
This multipartition of the United States, with border patrols and cash tests for residence, was a curious and distant divergence from Washington’s Land of Promise, where ‘the poor, the needy and the oppressed of the Earth’ could ‘repair thither and abound … with milk and honey’. The milk and honey route was spiked with tank traps, and, as the repetition monotonously displays itself, was then found not to provide holy security for those so hemmed around. As Brown and Cassmore showed in their 1939 WPA research on migratory cotton pickers in Arizona, having made the migratory worker as unwelcome and uncomfortable as possible, the local farmers then panicked because of shortage of seasonal field hands.
‘Arizona residents, with normal short-sightedness in this respect,’ the report says, ‘dislike the cotton workers because of their poverty characteristics for which Arizona is itself at least partly responsible. Though Arizona’s most valuable crop cannot be harvested without them, the migratory cotton pickers are everywhere regarded as pariahs.’
McWilliams understands this when he attributes the ‘roundabout and delayed’ general recognition of the industrial revolution in agriculture, and its terrible havoc upon the millions of little people made redundant, to the invisibility of the migrant. (And Michael Harrington, twenty-five years later, drew attention to this continuing invisibility, both geographical and social, of the poor of the Great Society.)
In previous periods, McWilliams observes, when the bulk of America’s migrants were single men, they occasionally made themselves conspicuous: as when they descended in droves from boxcars to harvest the Middle West wheat, when they huddled in long lines outside the winter soup kitchens, when as in California in 1914 they marched to Sacramento as part of Kelley’s Army of the Unemployed.
‘In moments of acute crisis the tramp became an ominous symbol: the shadows merged to form clouds. But the clouds always dissolved, somehow, and we forgot about the shadowy figures along the roads and in the jungle camps.’
The invisibility of the early Dust Bowl refugee was partly the nature of the migration, partly sham
e, partly self-protection. The Okies and the whipped families from the other Great Plains states did not cluster on freights, nor converge upon soup kitchens, nor amass in protest demonstrations. They could be seen, flittingly, limping in their Tin Lizzies and trucks along the highways. But at nightfall they vanished: into some squatter’s bivouac in the wayside thickets out of sight of the local harness bulls and property-jealous citizens, around the bend of a river, in a patch of woodland.
If they had any money at all for slightly better stop-over accommodation it was in the cheapest auto courts and tourist camp sites, again where they misted away. Even today when present in force in a township or district for the fruit picking season, the migrants’ hut compounds are at the edge of the parish where their poverty and foreign ways cannot cause offence to the civic delicacy of the residents.
Even if the harvest force for that bailiwick is trawled in from the local skid row, the farmers’ lorries have been through, loaded up with their human cargo and dropped them for all the daylight hours in distant fields long before the businessman and his family have finished breakfast and emerged into the morning air.
11 The curse of our Yankee nation
What did hobo say to tramp?
‘Night’s a-comin’ an’ leaves gettin’ damp.’
What did hobo say to bum?
‘Git any cornbread, save me some.’
American children’s chant
The tramp has remained an ominous symbol, always solidifying blackly when times are bad. The Joads and their kind could have wandered for ever along the pit galleries of American life, never identified as a particular and altered phenomenon, had it not been that the compass needle flickered inside them toward the West as the direction-finder always had in the American promise, and they had gone like migrant birds to the illusory summer.
The pariahs themselves, even in the Thirties, had not many channels of communication to the public at large, but here and there have occurred men on the road with the ability to get down on to paper the situation of the mutlsill and outcast, and the average countryman’s reflex action as he came across the skyline.
A John Mclntosh of Rochester, New York, published two poems in the Labor Standard in 1876 and 1877 which have rarity value as a direct dispatch from the hopeless job-hunting hundreds of thousands who were then silently enduring. The first is a dialogue between an Old Farmer and a Tramp:
Old Farmer:
A tramp! a tramp! sic! Ponto! seize him !
Call out folks, it will please ‘em…
I guess he’s a vile Communist, Jim!
The squire, I vum, must take car of him…
What in thunder do you fellers mean?
To think that we are so plaguy green,
As stand to be robbed by you durned tramps;
A lot of poor, ragged, mean city scamps.
Tramp:
Poor and ragged, I think you said,
Right; and we come for a little bread,
To help us along our weary way,
Asking for labor from day to day,
That is the reason we’re here, you see,
Forced from the city by poverty …
We canvassed the city through and through,
Nothing to work at, nothing to do;
The wheels of the engines go no more,
Bolted and barred is the old shop door…
Farmer:
What! rob us? hear the old villain, Jim
We’ll be murdered, too, by the likes of him.
And yet they will ask for food and drink,
Guess you ain’t quite so bad off’s you think.
I say to you as I allus say:
No man need starve in Ameriky.
The second, The Tramp - The Scamp, appeared nine months later:
Oh! what will be done with the tramp - the scamp!
The curse of our Yankee nation
A nuisance is he,
And a mystery,
Defying interrogation …
Oh, what shall be done with the tramp - the scamp!
Our national poor relation?
A riddle is he,
And perplexity
Defiant of legislation …
Elsewhere, in Garland’s A Son of the Middle Border is reflected the anti-tramp feeling which was growing, with particular vehemence in the Eastern states where the industrial flotsam washed thickest out from the city limits, and where in the small family farms there was no need for the transient harvest crews of the West.
In 1881 Garland is tramping penniless in rain without glint of a job. He is refused shelter at a farmhouse: ‘A sudden realization of the natural antagonism of the well-to-do towards the tramp appalled me.’ At a cottage he is repulsed by an old woman who says sharply: ‘We don’t feed tramps.’
He joins up with his brother. They find the residents ‘suspicious and inhospitable … hostile contempt. No doubt these farmers, much beset with tramps, had reasonable excuse for their inhospitable ways, but to us it was bitter and uncalled for.’
That is an understandable reaction, the feeling of the ‘loss of identity’ invariably referred to by any middle-class writer or social scientist experimenting with plumbing Jack London’s abyss; it is more sympathetic than the slightly irritating description by Tally of ‘the systematic unkindness’ with which he is greeted by seven housewives as he goes begging down a ‘dingy block’. Having thrown bricks at one back door and at the woman’s dog, he manages to scrounge some food at his next call, and this, he says, ‘made up for the harsh treatment accorded me, and my sensitive spirit was appeased’. It does not seem to have occurred to his sensitive spirit that during this depression the working-class families he was panhandling were probably almost as hard-up as he was.
But in reasonable times as well as bad there has always been a cold harshness shown by small town America to the wayfaring stranger. Stephen Graham, an Englishman who crossed with a shipload of Russian emigrants in 1913, found that the hospitality extended him as a writer with credentials vanished when he ‘put pack on back and sallied forth merely as a man… Little is given anonymously in the United States.’
Indifferent to the hardships of a tramp, ‘they do not look on the stranger as a fellow-man but as a loose wheel, a utility lying rusting in a field… No one is good enough for the American till he has “made good”.’ Refused lodging by farmer after farmer between Williamsport and Scranton, he tells a storekeeper that he considers the harbouring of travellers a Christian duty. ‘They don’t feel it so about here,’ is the reply.
Graham continues: ‘America has more tramps than any other country except Russia’ - but whereas the Russian tramp is ‘a gentle creature’ the American is ‘often a foul-mouthed hooligan … an enemy of society’.
Out West, he is told, it is different. There, as in former times, every farmhouse has open door and free table to the tramp, and no one is more welcome for he brings news and stories of personal adventure; he might even be persuaded to work in the fields. But the tramp in the East has suffered ‘in the heartless commercial machine, he got out of it only by luck, and his hand is against every man. He has cast over honour, principle and conscience.’
According to Graham the farmer’s experience is of being ‘robbed, assaulted and insulted, his property damaged, barns set on fire, crops in part destroyed by wilfully malicious vagabonds’. So all strangers are turned away. In Russia a pilgrim-tramp had told him: ‘When we leave this world to get to Heaven we all have to go on the tramp, and those find shelter there who sheltered wanderers here.’ Graham continues: ‘But Americans will not be judged by that standard. The early Christians received strangers and often entertained angels unawares, but the modern American is afraid that in taking in a strange tramp he may be sheltering an outcast spirit. Once tramps were angels; now they are rebel-angels.’
Graham’s nibble at tramping was too perfunctory to provide dependable evidence of overall conditions, yet without realizing it (one suspects) he hit upon t
he truth in speaking of the American’s fear of ‘sheltering an outcast spirit’. For this is indeed how the tramp was seen: an anarchic pagan interloper threatening by his example a precarious existence sustained only by containment within a rigid frame of discipline and duty.
Chaplin illuminates further the woebegone and impossibly ambiguous position of the outcast spirit. He describes how he and a friend booked up with one of Chicago’s ‘slave market’ employment agencies for a construction project at East St. Louis, free transportation laid on. From there they went on to Amarillo, Texas, to find field work, ‘two raw recruits in a vast army of harvest workers’, and flitted from job to job from the Texas Panhandle through Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota and the Dakotas, learning ‘how the underdog was forced to live’. He continues: ‘Throughout the entire trip we were compelled by poverty to steal rides on freight cars. Nothing we could do about that. Between jobs we would sleep in haystacks or nearby boxcars. That was illegal also … During spells of bad weather, the farmer would stop feeding us or fire us outright. Most of the stiffs were working for a winter stake without which they would be “on the bum” all winter. With the going wage at a dollar-and-a-half or two dollars a day, it was not easy to acquire a stake.’
Between the harvest workers themselves the relationship was one of suspicion and distrust. ‘We shared the policy of dog-eat-dog with the human pack who preyed upon us, the “shack” and the judge who shook us down for stealing rides, and the farmers who haggled pennies when it came time to pay off and sometimes refused to pay at all.’
Hard Travellin Page 13
