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Book Review
| Frank Tobias Higbie, Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880–1930, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2003. pp. xvi + 255. US $18.95 paper.
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| This is a good book, and a timely one. Frank Higbie takes us into the world of the hobo in the American Midwest during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Higbie's subject is the millions of young, predominantly white, immigrant and American-born men who supplied the labour for seasonal industries such as crop harvesting, logging and construction. Long romanticised in popular culture — today there is a National Hobo Association with a website and newsletter catering for middle-class would-be hobos — the original 'hobo' wandered to find work, and was often distinguished from the 'tramp', who only worked to wander, and the 'bum', who neither worked nor wandered. |
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Higbie works systematically though his story, which he refuses to separate into rural as distinct from urban history. Initially he surveys the general economic and social context, tracing the networks that linked country and city and along which the grand disorganised parade of seasonal workers perennially wandered. The 'urban islands in the sea of farms' that catered for the travelling labourers all had low rent neighbourhoods that were generally known as the 'main stem'. Chicago's main stem was so large and distinctive it was known as 'Hobohemia'. Far from a world apart from urban communities, Higbie shows that farm, factory, small town and metropolis were integrated in myriad ways. Indeed, the rich Midwestern resources fed industries then at the centre of world economic change; industries that would have been impossible without the hobos who ever flowed from city to country and back again. |
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The title of, and tension within, the book derive from the paradox in that the hobo was essential to the great economy, but his necessarily footloose condition also made him a social outcast. The hobo was both familiar and a stranger, both linked to the communities through which he constantly moved and homeless, both economically central and socially marginalised. After mapping the economic and cultural geography of the hobo, the author analyses the ways in which the seasonal workers were seen through the misty, mystified eyes of contemporary social investigators, convinced there was something wrong with these men. Higbie forensically (and amusingly) steps through the records, separating the great deal that these sources tell us about the middle-class investigators from the glimpses they supply of hobo reality. |
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Empirically rich, even dense, theoretically sharp, yet jargon free, the three remaining chapters look at hobo society (including the lives of female hobos and the gay subculture on the road), hobo politics and class conflict (with a focus on the organising efforts of the IWW), and finally the philosophies or consciousness of the hobos themselves, a theme centred on their 'manliness'. |
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The treatment is neither romanticised nor crude. Hunger, cold, beatings, robbery, alcoholism, gambling, whoring and criminalisation were never far away in the chaotic, often corrupt and oppressive conditions under which these essential outsiders worked. Yet their movements were also structured by the seasons, job opportunities, and their family and community relations. Moreover, they developed their own transcendent values and forms of mutuality, protest and resistance. As individuals and as members of social movements, Higbie echoes E.P. Thompson in insisting that hobos 'were active in shaping their own experiences'. |
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If I was to complain, I might wish Higbie had thought a little more of the reader unfamiliar with the more general context of this period in US labour history. If pressed, I might also have preferred a more explicit answer to the question of the contribution the hobo made to the general development of US labour relations. Everywhere in the developed world at this time, the safe incorporation of dangerous labourers within expanding industrialism came at the cost of class concessions. In Australia, for example, it led to compulsory arbitration and the state working with craft union interests to positively promote a tamer form of unionism in competition with the wild aims of the Industrial Workers of the World. In the US, it pulled concessions such as the establishment of state employment bureaus, as Higbie frequently observes along his way but doesn't systematically reckon up |
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But I wouldn't complain about this fine book. A well researched and carefully nuanced study, with exceptionally well integrated illustrations, the book is also timely. The original hobos faded away between the onrush of mechanisation, the exhaustion of natural resources and the end of the railway boom, on the one side, and the stabilisation, regulation and unionisation of the workforce on the other. The progressive collapse of these stabilisers since the 1970s has now seen the explosive re-emergence of part-time and casual work, most of it low skilled and low paid. With employment insecurity back big time, the present also calls for a supportive ethic between needy marginalised strangers on the road; for a 'transient mutuality — as Higbie terms it — that will help today's proliferating urban hobos to get by. |
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| University of New South Wales |
CHRISTOPHER SHEIL | |
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