Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880-1930

The Working Class in American History

by Frank Tobias Higbie

Often overlooked in labor history, the hoboes who rode the rails in search of seasonal work nevertheless secured a place in the American imagination. Frank Tobias Higbie weaves together history, anthropology, gender studies, and literary analysis to reposition these workers at the center of Progressive Era debates over class, race, manly responsibility, community, and citizenship. Combining incisive cultural criticism with labor history, Higbie illustrates how these so-called marginal figures were in fact integral to communities and to cultural conflicts over class, masculinity, and sexuality. He draws from life histories, the investigations of social reformers, and the organizing materials of the Industrial Workers of the World to present a complex portrait of hobo life, from its often violent and dangerous working conditions to its ethic of “transient mutuality” that enabled survival and resistance on the road.  Frank and compelling, Indispensable Outcasts  examines hoboes within the sprawling story of American labor while meditating on writing history from the bottom up and the ways a fascination with personal narrative can color a historian's work.

Genres: Labor, History, Nonfiction, School, Economics, American History

280 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2003

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

I used information from this book too in my Labor History article.

[Marvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Summer 2003 issue of Iowa Heritage Illustrated focuses on Iowa and the Midwest as the source of abundant food that its best citizens found ways to share with the rest of the world. Many of us in the Midwest, however, are unwilling to admit that the fruits of such abundance have been far from equally shared even within our own communities. Particularly in the years from the end of the Civil War to the end of World War I, much of the Midwest’s agricultural abundance relied on the labor of underpaid hired men and migrant, seasonal workers. In fact, as late as 1920, farm laborers ‘working out’ for wages on nonfamily farms represented a larger portion of the American labor force than miners of all kinds. Yet those workers remain largely invisible in the historical record, mostly because their transient status meant that they have not been seen as integral parts of particular communities and because they left few records of their lives and work.

Two new books begin to correct that oversight: Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880–1930, by Frank Tobias Higbie; and Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America, by Todd DePastino. Perhaps the most striking thing about both books is how they take readers inside a very unfamiliar world, but also show us how much that world was an integral part of more familiar rural and urban experiences.

Indispensable Outcasts is grounded more in the lived experience of transient workers on farms and railroads throughout the Midwest and Great Plains and in the forests and Iron Range of northern Minnesota. Higbie focuses on those workers’ relationships to the communities and economic conditions within which they worked. Hobo workers, he shows us, were not aimless drifters. Instead, they were in rational pursuit of economic opportunity, and they served critical needs for seasonal labor in the communities through which they passed and in which they worked. Nor was the life of hobo workers characterized by some idealized form of freedom from all constraints and dependence on others. “The supposed independence of the road,” Higbie found, “turns out to have been structured by a distended network of advice, assistance, and care . . . predicated on a vague but real ethic of mutuality.”

Such understandings shatter stereotypes of hoboes that many of us have absorbed from popular culture. Higbie devotes some attention to how those stereotypes arose and what they say about the mostly middle-class commentators who spread them. But that myth making is more central to Citizen Hobo. Where Higbie’s work shatters the stereotypes, DePastino plays with them to help us understand hobo culture and, just as important, to show how middle-class culture has been shaped by being alternately threatened by and strangely attracted to a subculture that operates apart from traditional understandings of home and family. The second chapter in each book is devoted specifically to identifying the biases in accounts of tramping by Progressive Era social scientists, journalists, fiction writers, and other observers. DePastino continues to include in nearly every chapter analyses of images of homeless people from a wide range of cultural venues, including vaudeville, novels, photographs, cartoons, music, and film.

Higbie followed hobo workers across the rural areas and small towns of the Midwest; he includes a fascinating account of a free speech campaign by members of the Industrial Workers of the World in Sioux City in 1915. For DePastino, “hobohemia” culture is found more in the “main stems”: neighborhoods in urban centers such as Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, and Seattle filled with cheap lodging houses, employment agencies, restaurants, bars, pawn shops, and theaters catering to hoboes who were between jobs. In Minneapolis in 1922, for example, private and public employment agencies found work for 130,000 men.

Both books use many of the same sources, and there is considerable overlap, but the focus and goals are quite different. If Indispensable Outcasts seems more grounded in the actual experiences of hobo workers, Citizen Hobo is more attentive to change over time, and it brings the story of homelessness up to the present. Both shed new light on a much misunderstood part of our history.