Word: hobo
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...hobo simply the American loser, a blot on a successful nation's personnel record? Or is he the last of the rugged individualists, a folk-hero relic of the frontier, a living rebuke to contemporary organization...
Trigger-Twitchy. To Allsop the hobo was largely a product of economic forces; he was an "exiled industrial worker" who would have stayed home in the first place if he could have found a job. The ranks of hoboes swelled during periods of depression-the 1870s, the 1930s. The men who rode the rails in the early part of the 20th century, says Allsop, were almost always migrant workers...
...would take to the road for any reason but dire necessity. In the heyday of rail travel, there were homicidal "cinder dicks" like trigger-twitchy Jeff Carr, who operated out of Cheyenne, Wyo., and got his kicks by galloping along a slow-moving freight taking pot shots at hoboes with his six-gun. Those who survived ran into a different danger in trackside camps. Homosexuality was rampant, and Allsop insists that The Big Rock Candy Mountain, the hobo's anthem, is really "a homosexual tramp serenade," one of "the 'ghost stories' the accomplished seducer spins to entice...
Prize & Praise. In the end, however, Allsop has to admit that economic necessity by no means explains why men take to the road. Within the hobo there usually lurked a slightly mad Huck Finn-a fellow with his own restless ideology. He was a tough, radical, reckless, sardonic character who was a hardbitten distant cousin to Walt ("I tramp a perpetual journey") Whitman...
...Gone are the days of the fraternity, when messages from Dick the Stabber, Wingey Ed and Denver Flip might be found scribbled on every railroad water tank. The decline of the railroad, the rise of the mechanized farm, and the welfare state have just about finished off the career hobo as a mass phenomenon. But he still flourishes in the national mythology. And his descendants live, says Allsop, in the hippies "on the lam from the daily grind," in the restless American who prizes and praises his ultimate freedom of choice, "the right to move on to new ground...