Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

  That, the lyric explained, was the preacher’s message to the ‘starvation army’ to divert them from ideas of gaining ‘the world and its wealth’.

  Few of Hill’s songs were so bitingly good but they served their immediate tendentious purpose: to hearten and weld together men without protection or rights, to stimulate them to rise against oppression, and they were scribbled quickly to fit urgent occasions, and fitted to a current popular tune or a mission hymn everyone knew.

  The run-of-the-mill Wobbly verse was often stilted and solemn, but these lowborn manual labourers were their own rhymesters and poetasters, worker-buskers and tramp troubadours, and the IWW was nothing without its song. It became the ‘singing organization’ it was by competing on the street corners of Spokane with the Salvation Army tambourine-and-cornet troupes. The IWW soapbox teams lined up their own bands and roared out their ‘abolition of the wage system’ gospel to the idling crowds of loggers, hobos, bums and unemployed around the tenderloin district.

  In cells in Fort Leavenworth and in country lock-ups, in the Italian copper mine country of Michigan and in South Carolina knitting mills, in the iron ranges of Minnesota and the cattle ranches of Old Mexico, in the Pullman car-building shops and in the forest camps at Little Fork River, in the seamen’s local in the Brooklyn yards and in Tenant Farmers’ Association halls in the South, in the Republic Steel Corporation tenements and on the Kansas corn plains, around water towers and in jungle camps from Cincinnati to Seattle, in freight trains and in coast-to-coast trucks - throughout all of proletarian America the IWW anthems and jingles spread like brush fire in those years between 1906 and 1917.

  It seemed as if the inner door had been broken down.

  The IWW philosophy and rubric were radiantly artless: direct, not political, action; sabotage ‘to push back, pull out or break off the fangs of Capitalism’; class war; an industrial union state and a new world order. Just that.

  They were dealing with the worker of the economic level at which, in the words of Dublin Dan Liston, a Wobbly barkeep in Spokane, ‘he hasn’t got a pot in which to spit or a window to throw it out’. Their delegates and organizers were ordinary labouring blanket stiffs who preached the doctrine in the gondolas and in the orchards and in the track-laying camps where they themselves were working, and they put into the hands of the politically ignorant ingenious techniques.

  The IWW started unemployed unions, chain picketing, foreign language leaflets, sticker campaigns, go-slows and sit-downs, car-caravan demonstrations, free-speech soapboxing, and it put into the members’ throats bloodthirsty songs of revolution, all the new weapons of revolt.

  It got to workers who felt to have fallen from grace in the American success theology, to be beyond the salvation of unionism orientated to city crafts. The IWW ‘job delegate system’ was based on the maxim that ‘he who travels lightest travels fastest’ and aimed at reaching agricultural and industrial workers scattered over vast territory.

  This army of moving agitators worked through from the Mexican border in the New Year and closed the book on the recruiting drive in the Canadian provinces in the late fall. The opening campaign for the IWW Agricultural Workers’ Organization in 1915 is described by one of the job delegates: ‘With pockets lined with supplies and literature we left Kansas City on every available freight train, some going into the fruit belts of Missouri and Arkansas, while others spread themselves over the states of Kansas and Oklahoma, and everywhere they went, with every slave they met on the job, in the jungles or on freight trains, they talked IWW, distributed their literature and pointed out the advantage of being organized into a real labour union.’

  In the face of pick-handle brigades, town marshal commandos with shotguns, and turn-outs of troops, the obscure agitator-poets and migratories (as the farmers knew them) used The Little Red Song Book as the empyrion, and they blew on smouldering discontent and fanned the flames.

  They had inflammable material to start on, especially among the producers of raw materials, those native-born Americans ‘working out’ away from their homes and the others - fully half of them - who were newly arrived immigrants with nothing more permanent than a mission cubicle as base. During its first decade, when the IWW rampaged through the land, America was a giant sweat-shop. When 800 dollars was officially accepted by cost-of-living studies as being the absolute bottommost of subsistence for a worker’s family, one in every ten had an income of less than 300, and half the working force received less than 750 dollars a year. Then, a third of the thirty million work force were in the unskilled category which was either spasmodically or totally migratory, and unemployment in all trades passed the thirty-five per cent mark.

  For those at work the kind of pay available in, for instance, the steel industry was less than eighteen cents an hour for nearly fifty per cent of employees, and twenty per cent were worked on a seven-day week and twelve-hour-day basis. In a typical Chicago slaughterhouse in 1912 more than half of the men were taking home a weekly income of six dollars and thirty-seven cents.

  When Woodrow Wilson said in 1913 ‘Don’t you know that some man with eloquent tongue, without conscience, who did not care for the nation, could put this whole country in flames, don’t you know that this country from one end to the other believes that something is wrong?’ he meant it as a warning.

  The Wobblies agreed with his general contention, and tried to tip on the fuel. When the IWW was being attacked for being unpatriotic at the outbreak of war, a Wobbly leader said: ‘If you were a bum without a blanket; if you had left your wife and kids when you went West for a job, and had never located them since; if your job had never kept you long enough in a place to qualify you to vote; if you slept in a lousy, sour bunkhouse, and ate food just as rotten as they could give you and get by with it; if deputy sheriffs shot your cooking cans full of holes and spilled your grub on the ground; if your wages were lowered on you when the bosses thought they had you down; if there was one law for Ford, Suhr and Mooney, and another for Harry Thaw; if every person who represented law and order and the nation beat you up, railroaded you to jail, and the good Christian people cheered and told them to go to it, how in hell do you expect a man to be patriotic?’

  At that time Parker wrote: ‘American industrialism is guaranteeing to some half of the forty millions of our industrial population a life of such limited happiness, of such restrictions on personal development, and of such misery and desolation when sickness or accident comes … The casual migratory labourers are the finished product of an economic environment which seems curiously efficient in turning out human beings modelled after all the standards which society abhors.’

  By this time the old anti-tramp psychosis had been able to find political justification. The tramp as a vague, disreputable menace had taken on the red glare of revolutionary treason. He was identifiable as a Wobbly, a striker, a pacifist, a malefactor opposed equally to the war and to the wage system, to Middle-town codes and to capitalism, to the inalienable right of the employer to use scab labour and to the cash nexus which made the United States great. Now that he had a badge, he had confirmed himself in the role of an enemy to be routed and destroyed.

  In the posthumous 1920 publication of Parker’s The Casual Laborer was printed an appreciation of him by Herbert E. Cory, which had appeared in 1918 in the University of California Chronicle, praising Parker for being a ‘new frontiersman’ out in the hopfields and mines and lumbercamps, studying the transient Wobblies. The value of the panegyric is what it reveals about the paucity of knowledge of and interest in migrant work-men, even though they had been teeming through the country for twenty years and had become intrinsic to the economy.

  (It was an indifference, or solipsism, which continued. In 1926 Dr Harry Jerome undertook for the National Bureau of Economic Research an inquiry to determine the relationship of shortage and surplus of labour to immigration and emigration. Migration and Business Cycles did not add much more than questions. It was a piece of detection without cl
ues. The general seasonal character of the construction industry is a matter of common knowledge, but,’ confessed Dr Jerome, ‘for quantitative measures of seasonal changes in the numbers employed in construction, we have been forced to rely upon estimates pieced together from fragmentary data obtained from various sources.’ The hobo worker was still, for all the official records cared, the invisible non-man.)

  Parker’s documents resemble those of an anthropologist back from studying some rum, outlandish tribe, recusant and savage, which indeed is how he did regard them - but, to his credit, as the product of a stupid, neglectful society. Parker’s purpose, although he was outraged by the exploitation of the migrant worker, was to warn middle-class America that it was creating not only a new class of canaille but, worse, of bonnet rouge from whom might be expected dire acts.

  But, he stressed, what else could be expected? ‘As the Harvard biologist words it, nurture has triumphed over nature, the environment has produced its type.’

  It had taken a very long time for this to be recognized in the cloisters of university departments and in the official corridors of Washington, but even now the dismay lacked some essentials. Parker’s reference to the radical hobo’s ‘euphoria’ and his martyr’s pride in his ‘stack of crowns of thorns’ does not take into account the qualities of what Lerner calls the ‘vernacular hero’ when he is discussing ‘the literature of a bookless world’. Here he is meaning the tall tales of the bigger-than-life heroes around whom young America weaves its wish-fulfilment fantasies: the mountain men, the cow-punchers, the Paul Bunyon lumberjacks, the Pony Express drivers, the ‘Forty-Niners, the river gamblers, the outlaws, the Casey Jones railroad men, the John Henry tunnel-drillers, most of whom were ‘organic to the growing energies of the South and West, although some were the detritus of a kind of lumpen-campfollower of the country’s growth’.

  The hobo may often have been this lumpen-campfollower, and was beyond doubt the detritus, yet he was actually part of the atmosphere which the others blew around themselves like smoke from a dragon’s nostrils - ‘the noise an expanding culture makes as it struts and boasts, puffing its chest a little out of cocky assurance and overbrimming energies, and a little out of the insecurity that needs reassurance. The material out of which this legendry was shaped was the everyday stuff of living; the form it took was the yarn and ballad; the setting was local, in hamlet or city, logging camp or ranch or mining town; the proportions were heroic; the mood was mock-epic; the type image was the hero who was also a bit of a charlatan and a cutter of corners, conscious of his own comic vulnerabilities.’

  28 Agitators and pork-chop philosophers

  We were like the old Wesleyan preachers, only we were preaching the gospel of discontent to a boxcar congregation. Old Wobbly

  The Wobbly had a political purpose which, while unsubtle as a crowbar, set him separate from the rest of the lumpenproletariat he mixed with. The government understood this when it stigmatized the IWW as a rabble of 200,000 subversives (the Federal figure: probably twice the movement’s actual 1917 peak).

  Reitman, an anarchist intellectual, has given his view of an observer at the eighth IWW convention that most of the delegates ‘knew as much about the real labour movement as they did about psychology, and that they cared little about the broad principles of freedom’, and, marvelling at the big things the IWW had done in its short career, he said to himself: ‘God! Is it possible that this bunch of pork-chop philosophers, agitators who have no real great organizing ability or creative brain power, are able to frighten the capitalistic class more than any other labour movement organized in America? … Are these the men who put a song in the mouth and a sense of solidarity in the heart of the hobo? … And as I looked at the delegates and recounted their various activities, I felt that each one could say, “Yes, I’m the guy.” And then I wondered how they did it.’

  They did it by means of passion and a removal, out there in the offing of industry, from desk policies and bargaining. Their slogans were unequivocal, cocksure: ‘A general strike! Tie up all industries ! Tie up all production!’ and ‘Arise! ! ! Slaves of the World! ! ! No God! No Master! One for all and all for one.’ and ‘Kick your way out of wage slavery’ - they were spread by sticker (the Silent Agitator), chalked up on water towers and factory gates, and printed in Solidarity and pamphlets. (But even the iww, it seems, drew a line. The secretary of Local No. 57 regards first with disfavour, then as a raving lunatic, Yank in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, when he bursts in the office roaring: ‘Dynamite! Blow it offen de oith - steel - all de cages - all de factories, steamers, buildings, jails - de Steel Trust and all dat makes it go … Dat’s what I’m after - to blow up de steel, knock all de steel in de woild up to de moon. Dat’ll fix things!’)

  The IWW did not originate their singing style any more than they invented the ‘flying delegate’, for both were old established in radical movements which had long preceded them. What the IWW did was to emphasize their necessity in a union which had to be a fisher of men in rough tidal seas. But they were not strong enough for the weapons wheeled up against them. Mass sedition trials during the war - the ‘Big Pinch’ - put hundreds of Wobblies in jail, and Federal suppression of the IWW led to wider purges of all radicals, which netted Wobblies who had escaped the first sweep: in California alone between 1920 and 1924 more than 500 Wobblies were indicted.

  It broke the back of the IWW. In 1919 Haywood admitted openly that the organization had been shaken ‘as a bull dog shakes an empty sack’.

  But the contents of the sack had not been lost. Joyce L. Korn-bluh has pointed out that the movement laid the groundwork for trade and industrial unionism in the 1930s and 1940s, and although The Little Red Songbook was bowdlerized, the songs had already flown the coop and were on the wing everywhere.

  Many of the Wobbly songs had immediately entered the general fund of the nation’s folk tradition. A song such as Pie in the Sky, carried by hobos through the land, and deposited with other prisoners in jail houses, with local customers in town bars, with factory workers in union halls, quickly was everyone’s property. It was part of the reciprocal action of American song, for it got extended lease on small town radio shows and on commercial recordings by hillbilly stars like Carson J. Robison, Frank Luther and Vernon Dalhart in the Depression Thirties, when ‘pie in the sky’ became a catch phrase of increased application.

  This is a process which has continued, especially in the South where, as was mentioned earlier, authentic hobo songs or derivations, quasi hobo songs and imitation hobo songs, and songs in this tradition about rovers, railroaders and autobums, un-wittingly transmit through juke box and receiver the old Wobbly attitudes - a peculiar virus of anarchy to find chronic in this most inoculated of commercial bloodstreams.

  Perhaps it was above all its song which caused this small, shortlived movement to be loathed and feared more than any other political organization, including the Communist Party. Its voice broke through everywhere. To the tune of Annie Laurie people sang

  When in One Union Grand, the working class shall stand

  The parasites will vanish, and the workers rule the land.

  To Take it to the Lord in Prayer they sang:

  Stiffen up, you orn’ry duffer

  And dump the bosses off your back.

  To Sunlight, Sunlight, they sang:

  No master class shall wine and dine while we on swill must eat We’ll take the things we helped create and give ourselves a treat.

  And to Barney Google they sang:

  Come on, all you workers and we’ll organize so strong

  That the capitalist system will soon be on the bum

  So join the Wobblies, Join the Wob, Wob, Wobbly band.

  The intense, exalted comradeship had the frame smashed from around it, but the spirit did not entirely expire. The Republican Senator William Borah, of Idaho, who wanted the IWW leaders summarily slaughtered, said in public, blankly, with a puzzlement he could not conceal: ‘It is someth
ing you cannot get at. You cannot reach it … It is a simple understanding between men.’

  Part Five

  Goths and Vandals

  Behold, the hire of the labourers which have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.

  James 5:4

  29 The black shadow

  She say ‘Will you work for Jesus?’

  I say ‘How much Jesus pay?’

  She say ‘Jesus don’t pay nothing.’

  I say ‘I won’t work today.’

  Hobo to Salvation Army Girl in The Swede From North Dakota

  Below the Dakota Bad Lands, where not a blade sprouts in the geological freak show of clay and rock configuration, is suddenly more of the Mid-West Wheat Belt.

  This is the great granary, 300 miles wide and striding 1,000 miles from Oklahoma up to the Canadian border, in summer a tawny Mediterranean, an inland sea always swaying with waves and audible. The wheat plain is as big as the covering sky, leonine yellow to the other’s metal blue, sometimes crossed by scampering clouds and cloud-shadows, but boundlessly, desolatingly, null and empty of all but itself and the traveller.

  As twilight softens the raw lines of the highway searing on and on across mingled sky and stem, there is for the first time a disturbance in the vacancy. Between Pine Ridge and Martin on Nebraska’s Northern rim can be seen squadrons of combine harvesters circling the plains in the gathering night, tails of dust coiling behind them as they chew through the ripe winter-sown wheat.

  It looks like a tank battle on desert, jousting charges of scarlet machines on a tourney ground as large as the azimuth. As the light dies, the combines’ headlamps snake about the shrinking blocks of standing corn, and trailers loaded with the bushels joggle through the glare of floodlights.