Rural Work in the Midwest, 1850–1950

As Anderson knew from first-hand experience, the so-called “hoboes” were part of a system of migration that provided labor to the pressing tasks of the North American West between the 1850 and 1950. They extracted minerals, harvested crops, and built the infrastructure of Euro-American political and economic control. The complex and shifting seasonal labor market of the western US drew together a diverse workforce: farm owners, homesteaders, and farm laborers mingled with displaced industrial workers, men who migrated from one side of the country to the other seeking work, as well as criminals, marginally employable drunkards, addicts, and disabled men. In today's shorthand, they were the “working poor” and the “underclass.” To be certain, in the early years seasonal rural workers were very often young men scouting out new lands which they later purchased. As David Schob noted in his classic study of hired hands on the Midwestern frontier, however, despite the romantic aura of pioneering these early farm laborers nevertheless contended with difficult employer relations. Neither were they simply local “rural folk.” Digging canals through open farm country, Irish and German immigrant laborers often took harvest jobs. As grain production spread across Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota in the 1870s, an early migrant stream followed the harvest from south to north.¹³

Although the circulation of labor was not solely regional, this article focuses on the Midwest and Great Plains where a relatively defined pattern of labor migration developed around rail, timber, mining and wheat harvesting. Consider the yearly cycle of work migration, circa 1910: Winter was the slack season for many migrants. They retreated to the larger cities where they lived on accumulated earnings, or pieced together odd jobs. Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Omaha, and Sioux City, Iowa, all housed wintering migrants. Other migrants returned to family farms and homesteads. Still others took logging jobs in northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota where the winter snow and ice facilitated timber harvesting. In the spring, railroad and farm work picked up at the same time that lumber work trailed off. Summer provided more or less constant work, with the wheat harvest season beginning in June in Texas and Oklahoma, reaching the Dakotas by late July and following northward into Canada. Threshing began in October and could last until late November depending on weather conditions. Corn, potatoes, sugar beets and other crops provided alternative agricultural employment in the fall, while railroad work (and rural surface road construction increasingly in the 1920s) helped farmers and city-based laborers piece together a living.

The circulation of labor was facilitated by the dense rail network throughout the region and the services of private labor agents. Even fairly remote locales had daily passenger rail service, and (more importantly) frequent freight service. As often as not, migrants traveled by stealing rides on freight trains, a practice tolerated by the railroad companies in part because their employees profited by extorting fares from “trespassing” hoboes. Private employment agents, known derisively by laborers as “job sharks,” charged fees ranging from $1 to $10 for jobs and transportation to the hinterland. Progressive reformers and radical laborers attacked this system as exploitive, and by World War One many states had instituted free public employment agencies with mixed success. Laborers' memoirs, the records of state regulatory agencies, and contemporary newspapers detail the variety of abuses in the private system ranging from high fees, to nonexistent jobs, to bribery, and physical abuse. These same sources indicate that laborers often were able to manipulate the system to their own ends, especially using free transportation vouchers to finance travel.¹⁴

Over the course of the 1910s and 1920s these labor market patterns were changing in ways that rank-and-file workers often were able to perceive. The steam shovel was a major culprit as the mechanization of construction—and especially ditch digging—undermined a crucial part of the seasonal round of work. The end of the railroad-building boom during the 1914 depression had a similar effect, as did the exhaustion of high quality timber and iron resources in the upper Midwest. For a time, mechanization in the wheat harvest actually increased demand for labor as it allowed farmers to expand their wheat fields. But this too would change as the combined harvester-thresher became common in the southern Great Plains by the late 1920s. Although farmers in the Dakotas were slower to adopt this new technology, migrants could no longer count on earning their winter stake from the wheat harvest. Similarly, a generation of intensive logging in the region's pine forests forced the timber industry to shift its major facilities out of the upper Midwest by the years of the First World War. Nevertheless a series of strikes in 1936 and 1937 brought union representation to many northern lumber camps. The CIO claimed to represent 4,000 lumber and sawmill workers in its 1946 negotiations with employers in Duluth.¹⁵

The super-heating and subsequent collapse of the American economy that accompanied the war and immediate postwar years (1916–1921) marked a decisive reorientation of labor markets. As in other sectors, the cut-off of European migration along with increased production brought remarkable increases in wages and commodity prices. Perhaps most importantly, the wages of farm laborers and industrial laborers increased at the same rate between about 1910 and 1921. However, farm wages did not bounce back as quickly as urban wages from their collapse during the 1921–1922 depression, and they remained static while industrial wages rose between the early 1920s and the 1940s.¹⁶

The reason for this divergence is not easy to explain. Farmers argued that low commodity prices undermined their ability to pay high wages. Radicals suggested that the suppression of the IWW eliminated that particular brake on exploitation. Most likely both causes, along with a shift toward southern labor (be it Mexican, African American, or Appalachian), contributed to this dynamic. As opportunities for rural-industrial employment declined, the familiar cycle of lumber, wheat, and construction work became less viable in the Midwest, but the process took some time to complete. Meanwhile, the availability of inexpensive used automobiles, and the expanding network of rural highways, created a more decentralized and less visible migration. As the geography of job opportunity shifted, the figure of the hobo dropped out of social science discourse. In due time new migrants would take the hobo's place in the labor reserve and in the social scientific imagination.

Life Stories and the Social History of Migration

Nels Anderson's unusual path to the academy suggests how our understanding of internal migration is deeply connected to individual life histories and to the emergence of state-sponsored investigation and regulation of the labor market. Embedded within Anderson's sociological narrative—itself a kind of hidden autobiography—are the partial life stories of men and women he met in Chicago's Hobohemia. Life history was by the early 1920s a standard investigative strategy in sociology, reflecting a broader move toward empirical field work across the social sciences. In 1912 University of Chicago sociologist William Thomas had laid out a research protocol for the study of immigrant and African American cultures, drawing heavily from anthropology, designed to guide the research of young sociologists. His multi-volume work with Florian Znanieki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America foregrounded sources such as family letters and life histories in order to track the reorganization of immigrant society in America. As historian Dorothy Ross suggests, Thomas's work carried two competing messages. On the one hand, empirical fieldwork suggested cultural relativism because subjects were described as much as possible in their own words. One the other hand, Thomas strove for what he called “an empirical and exact social science ready for eventual application,” a science of social intervention.¹⁷

The same was true of several other major Progressive Era social investigations such as the US Commission on Industrial Relations which made wide use of life histories to document conditions of hobo workers. Even the US Census, as social historians have explained, is structured on assumptions about family, class, and race.¹⁸

More than mere numbers, the Census and other social investigations told stories about the American population. The case of the hoboes is particularly instructive in this regard. Anxieties over the growing power of capital, the closing of the frontier, and the gulf between middle-class Americans and the increasingly foreign-born working class often found purchase in debates about tramps, hoboes, and excessive turnover of factory labor. In each of these debates, life stories proved to be vital evidence illustrative of various, sometimes competing, claims about society. For present-day historians, however, these documents can be misleading.

Consider the life stories of three laborers, the first two gathered by the US Commission on Industrial Relations in 1914, and the third a memoir written in the 1970s. Norman Daniel was born in New Orleans around 1880, labored in the Rocky Mountain West, and served with the US Army in the Philippines. Between 1913 and 1914 he followed migrant work from the Gulf of Mexico to North Dakota and back to Kansas. He worked on railroad extra gangs, as a harvest hand, on an excavation crew, and he begged for nickels and odd jobs on the streets of St. Louis and Kansas City. Encountering Daniel in the 1914 Kansas wheat harvest, investigators concluded, “This man appears to be on the verge of falling into the hobo class” (see map 1).

The Norwegian immigrant Andrew Hanson also traveled widely in search of work. Arriving in the US around 1904, Hanson went directly to work on the Iowa farm of fellow Norwegians, and afterwards entered the floating labor population. He worked on construction sites in Colorado, as a roundhouse laborer in Minnesota, as a farm laborer in North Dakota, as a railroad and dock laborer in Minnesota, and as a lumberjack in Minnesota and Washington (see map 2). Cheated by employers and robbed by drinking buddies, Hanson was broke when USCIR investigators interviewed him in Olympia, Washington, where he was filing a complaint with state labor officials. Of Hanson, they concluded, “All hope gone—believes that he does not amount to anything. Ambition is gone; willpower is weakened . . . He is sorrowful, even when drunk.”¹⁹

The life story of a third migrant laborer suggests a wider range of life possibilities. Andrew Devich was the fifth son of his Croatian family to immigrate to the US. Greeted by his older brother upon arriving in Duluth in 1913, Devich received a set of work clothes and a job in a lumber camp. He shifted regularly between lumber and mining work in northern Minnesota. During a miner's strike he traveled to North Dakota to work in the wheat harvest. After World War One, he went “on the ‘bum'” with a friend, riding in freight cars as far south as New Orleans before returning north to central Illinois where he found work through “lumberjack friends” in the coal mines. Later he went to Chicago, worked for two years in a steel mill, and boarded with a Croatian family. On the advice of a fortune teller, Devich returned to northern Minnesota, found work in the iron mines, and settled into the Croatian community where he would marry and raise a family.²⁰

Progressive Era observers would have considered each of these three men “floating laborers,” hoboes, or perhaps even tramps. Their movement from one job to the next was often spontaneous and uncontemplated. The life stories of Daniel and Hanson detailed manipulation by unscrupulous employers and employment agents, and the dangers of alcoholism. As part of a larger body of life histories they became raw material for both the USCIR report and popularizations of the Commission's findings.²¹

As Devich's life history suggests most clearly, however, laborers' migration patterns were linked to family strategies, community ties, and the (often vague) goals of individual young men. Indeed, all of these cultural issues, in addition to location and volume of work, impinged on laborers' experiences on the labor market.

As the range of experiences in migrant life histories suggests, it is difficult to define the “typical” migrant. With no census category for “floater” or “hobo” it is necessary to piece together information from a variety of sources. It is clear that laborers working in highly seasonal industries (perhaps the best proxy for “hoboes”)²²

were demographically similar to the population of the upper Midwest. Most were literate; a majority were US-born with Scandinavians and Germans constituting the largest immigrant groups. Italians, Mexicans, Eastern Europeans, Japanese, and African Americans also worked in laboring occupations in the region. Although the vast majority of laborers were classified as white and male by the Census, ideas about racial, national, and gender differences are central to understanding laborers' experiences and their place in American society. Broadly speaking, employers and laborers alike considered US-born men of Northern European ancestry, Americanized European immigrants, and recent Northern European immigrants to be “white men.” In turn, white Americans lumped together Southern and Eastern European immigrants as “foreigners,” but usually spoke of African Americans, and Japanese separately. Mexican laborers were sometimes considered “white” and sometimes as a separate national group. Because racial and ethnic categories were in flux, idiosyncratic designations were not uncommon. In various locations Finns, Greeks, Italians, and others might be considered “black men” or from “a dark race” by local white residents.²³

Summarizing in 1915 the findings of his investigation for the US Commission on Industrial Relations, Peter Speek noted that the difference between white men and foreigners was based more on “mode of living than the racial differences underlying these terms.” He characterized a white man as “an extreme individualist, busy with himself and looking [out] for himself only.” Foreign laborers, Speek observed, were “more sociable” and had a “higher sense of comradeship” with those of their own nationality.²⁴

These broadly held distinctions among laborers, however, did not always dictate how workers of different racial and ethnic origins interacted. Despite the segregated hiring patterns of large employers, the racism of many “white men,” and the desire of some immigrants to work with their countrymen, labor shortages routinely forced employers to mix men from different origins.

Employers had conflicting notions about the relative value of “white men” and “foreigners.” A 1913 report on railroad labor camps in Wisconsin, for instance, noted that “Foremen almost invariably testify that a hobo gang can do four or five times the work of a gang of Greeks or Bulgarians, and that is one of the reasons why the ‘white men' get more pay.” However, the downside to employing whites was their tendency to quit after short periods at work, whereas immigrant laborers tended to stay on for the entire season.²⁵

Some lumber company officials favored immigrant workers for similar reasons. The general manager of a Michigan lumber operation told a government investigator that “foreigners have a firm purpose to earn money, to save, either to buy land here or to send money to the old country.” In contrast, he opposed hiring US-born lumberjacks because “they are the lowest type of natives, the better type do not go to the woods, they are working in the cities, or building up independent small enterprises.”²⁶

The relative “steadiness” of workers had much to do with the labor market structures that brought them to the work sites spread across the North American continent. In his study of immigrant labor bosses and workers, Gunther Peck reveals how large mining and railroad employers relied on ethnic intermediaries to provide a steady supply of workers. Known as “padrones,” these intermediaries connected their countrymen with work, helped them negotiate international borders, and created a network of communication between workers in North America and communities abroad. Peck argues that padrones essentially created the market in immigrant workers by recruiting men abroad, financing their travel to North America, and provisioning laborers at the point of production. Despite their control over their countrymen, padrones were never able to institutionalize their power and often lost their businesses to rival padrones, corporations, or to government intervention. Railroad and mining employers had a hand in creating the myth and reality of padronism by granting immigrant middle-men exclusive rights to jobs in specific locations. Even when padrones were not involved, railroad employers attempted to segregate work along national and racial lines, for instance, designating Italians and Bulgarians to different tasks, or by housing African American workers in separate accommodations.²⁷

Immigrants or African Americans brought to remote work sites with little connection to surrounding communities often were reluctant to quit their jobs on the unsure chance of better employment down the line. However, neither were they prisoners to their jobs. For instance, correspondence between railroad companies and a Japanese padrone revealed that many Japanese workers destined for track labor skipped out on their contracts for better paying work on rival roads, and in lumber camps.²⁸

Being a “white man,” whatever the content of that identity, tended to make life a bit easier for laborers. For instance, African American migrant Harry Haywood found that although white hoboes might befriend him, his skin color made him an easy mark for the exploitation of railroad crews.²⁹

Similarly, “white” men working in “foreign” gangs often found preference with foremen and other white workers. The New Zealand-born Len De Caux saw how his Anglo-background set him apart from the “foreigners” in his work gang. “The American bosses barked at the Italians like top sergeants,” he noted in his memoir. “If they condescended to relax with them, it was in the manner familiar to me of ‘superiors' patronizing ‘inferiors,' and would sooner or later include a sharp reminder not to presume.” In contrast, the “drifter who came into camp for a meal more than a job, if he was white and spoke American” was treated with “some social equality.” De Caux concluded that the message was “You may be a bum or a dumb punk, but at least you're one of us.”³⁰ Interestingly, similar treatment also could come to immigrants with education and the other markers of middle-class status. Dominic Ciolli immigrated from Italy with his parents as an infant and helped pay for his medical school tuition by working on a railroad gang. Having acquired his job through middle-class friends, and with an unusual degree of education for a track worker, Ciolli was able to observe his fellow Italian laborers from something of a distance. He lived and ate with his “white” foreman, and was spared the abuse of immigrant padrones and American bosses alike.³¹

As the sugar beet sector emerged in the Midwest, many of these dynamics of racial segmentation of the labor market were revisited, this time with Mexican and Mexican-American workers as the primary labor force. Prior to 1920, Mexican workers had concentrated in major industrial centers like Pittsburgh and Chicago where they worked in foundries, railroad and highway construction, and packinghouses. US Department of Labor investigator George T. Edson estimated a total of about 50,000 Mexicans worked in the booming sugar beet industry during the late 1920s concentrated in the central Great Plains and Michigan with smaller but growing numbers in Iowa, North Dakota, and Minnesota. Like other rural workers, these sugar beet laborers found temporary jobs harvesting tomatoes, corn, grain and hay when their beet fields did not require tending and, as historian Zaragosa Vargas argues, many found their way into more steady industrial employment on railroad crews, in packinghouses, and in manufacturing.³²

As with European immigrants, American employers had their notions about the innate character of Mexican workers. Taking them to be peasants from an undeveloped country, employers praised Mexican workers as docile and fatalistic, “peaceable and healthy persons” who would benefit communities by taking the “place of riffraff and irresponsible strangers” who formerly worked in seasonal agriculture. Mexican men also seemed well suited to the harsh conditions of American industry, according to George Edson. “The men, although not muscularly as strong as northern Europeans nor as active and big, show a greater endurance at work in extreme heat, disagreeable odors and nerve-wracking noises than most other races.”³³

However, employers and supervisors did not always act upon occupational, racial, and ethnic stereotypes; rather, they employed them selectively to make sense of their cosmopolitan workforce, and to divide and discipline workers when it suited their purposes. The fluidity of the labor market—that is, the relative ease with which workers could quit and find another job—militated against over-strict segregation. At the same time, immigrant laborers with sufficient English language skills could use their ethnic ties to find work on a “foreign gang,” or hire out American-style as a “white man.”

The elaboration of categories—migratory laborer, hobo, tramp, and bum; white men and foreigners—served the end of terminologically stabilizing the seasonal labor force. This was as true for working-class people who struggled to make a livelihood in the cosmopolitan workforce as it was for the government and welfare functionaries who classified workers in order to rationalize the provision of services. In the hands of social scientists, however, classification took on a much more direct political valence. The goal of the US Commission on Industrial Relations investigation of “floating labor,” according to Selig Perlman's research protocol, was to find ways to make the “stable unionism” of the AFL work among migrants (this despite the fact that no AFL union had ever suggested an interest in organizing migrant workers).³⁴

Implicitly this meant undermining the bases of IWW support. Social investigations, and especially the published reports that went along with them, assisted emerging state employment bureaucracies by creating the appearance of understanding (and therefore the possibility of control). With the state as a moral middleman in the labor market, radical unionism would be unnecessary. Yet the appearance of state knowledge was less the result of categories per se than the powerful stories with which those categories resonated.

Household Subsistence and Rural Work

The relative “steadiness” of workers was closely connected to households and communities in ways that were not always understood by Progressive Era investigators. Although seasonal migrants were often cast as “homeless men,” samples of manuscript censuses and other sources suggest that the image of the seasonal laborer as radically cut off from family and community are overdrawn. For instance, surveys of 32,000 wheat harvest hands taken between 1919 and 1921 found that eighty percent had homes to return to after the harvest. Although this statistic might be read in the negative, that twenty percent of the harvest labor force was truly “homeless,” it also suggests that homelessness is not the only story.³⁵

Instead what we are seeing is the dynamic interaction between community and the labor market in three important ways. First, the social scientific discourse on migrants placed them outside of communities by virtue of their transience. In this sense, concepts of community and its opposites were linked to modernization narratives highlighting the supposed loss of community through migration, urbanization or proletarianization.³⁶

Secondly, local law enforcement authorities, reformers, and government agencies often deployed the concept of “community” against migrants who were considered disruptive outside elements, especially when holding out for higher wages. Just as full citizenship was contingent upon such factors as sex, race, and length of residence, the laboring man without property could hardly refuse work without also marking himself as outside of the community.³⁷ Many Progressive Era observers of labor issues believed that vagrants were a threat to the community because they undermined workers' commitment to wage labor, and along with it “normal sex,” that is monogamous heterosexuality. As freelance social investigator Josiah Flynt noted, “the menace of the tramp class to the country seems to me to consist mainly in the example they set to the casual working man,—the man who is looking around for an excuse to quit work,—and in the fact that they frequently recruit their ranks with young boys.”³⁸ The health of the community, according to this view, required workers to have jobs and men to have families.

In a very different way, communities also could provide laborers with an important margin of freedom from the labor market. Family groups, friends, and subsistence activities like gardening, hunting, and fishing allowed men and women to remove themselves from the labor market temporarily.³⁹

The boundaries of racial and ethnic communities cut the labor market in two directions. On one side, group identity helped structure the experience of work. Employers and labor contractors used race and nationality to direct particular workers to particular types of jobs, and workers themselves used ties of kinship and community to find employment and sustain themselves. On the other side, community could serve as a refuge from the labor market.⁴⁰

Rural households and farm families played an important role in this process as they carefully negotiated their integration into labor and commodities markets. Midwestern farms had always been deeply involved in commodity markets; but the vagaries of weather and prices, along with the cash-poor nature of rural economic life, meant that farm families carefully balanced production for home consumption with production for the market.⁴¹

This balancing act was complicated by the fact that farms are both workplaces and households. As Jon Gjerde has noted, “Although Americans have tended to romanticize the equality made possible by the family farm, they have remained less cognizant of the disparities within it. Ironically, whether or not free land made people free, it promoted a dependence and reliance within families that tended to trap certain members—such as children—in protracted subservient relationships.”⁴² Wives and children labored under the authority of the male household head, and the general understanding was that family members ought to work hard for the good of the whole family. Unlike urban middle-class homemakers, farm women spent their days hauling firewood and water for cooking and washing, tending gardens and often directing poultry and dairy businesses that fed the family and brought in revenue.⁴³

As farm families confronted what Hal Barron calls the “Second Great Transformation” of rural life, conflicts arose between farm operators who embraced new agricultural methods and those who resisted change, or were too poor to afford modern improvements. So-called “progressive farmers” looked to state agriculture colleges and county extension agents to learn about fertilizers, new machinery and hybrid crops. Typically the more prosperous and market-oriented farmers, progressive farmers tended to attribute farm failures to individual ineptitude rather than structural economic causes. Community conflicts grew as progressive farmers turned to mechanization, opted out of neighborhood labor-sharing arrangements, and hired fewer laborers. Less prosperous farmers suffered doubly from these changes since they had relied on community labor to bring in their own crops, and on the extra cash from harvest jobs to make ends meet. Nor could they match the productivity of the mechanized, progressive farms.⁴⁴

Ultimately, the progressives won out in these community disputes, but during the early twentieth century, farm families were often still working through the contradictions of rural modernization.

Laboring work intersected this negotiation between households and markets in two ways. First, hired hands were members of families negotiating the tension between self-sufficiency and market-orientation. The earnings of farmers' sons and daughters helped sustain the home sphere at the same time that their families' reliance on wage labor tied them closer to farming-as-a-business. Secondly, whether they were from a different ethnic group or simply ill-mannered, hired laborers represented the incursion of the outside world into the moral and economic structure of the farm household. As Hamlin Garland wrote of the man his father hired to help on the farm for a season, “Jack came from far lands, and possessed . . . unusual powers of dancing and playing the fiddle. He brought also stirring stories of distant forests and strange people and many battles.” In contrast to the hired man Jack who was simply mysterious, the temporary harvest hands were “the wild and lawless element,” and “strange nomadic fellows, which the West had not yet learned to call tramps.”⁴⁵

Even those farm men who left home to work for wages could become problematic. When Erick Berdahl returned to his family's Iowa farm after winter work in a lumber camp during the 1870s, for instance, his mother was shocked and dismayed by the rough language and manners her son learned among the lumberjacks.⁴⁶

Within the farm household/workplace, hired workers often faced the same expectations as family members. This is especially evident from the experience of women hired to work on larger operations where they assisted with household chores such as cooking and washing. At times, women were expected to work as part of a family group, as was the case when a Nebraska farmer filed an application for farm help with the US Employment Service saying he needed a “man, wife and two boys.” The wife's wages were “to be included in the husbands and duties as a housewife.”⁴⁷

Unmarried single women hired out as kitchen workers, especially during the harvest. Lorena Hickok recalled how she had to get up at 3 AM in order to set the stove fire and prepare breakfast for a harvest crew, and worked non-stop for three days. “I was a squirrel in a sweltering cage, running frantically round and round in a wheel, never getting anywhere,” she wrote in an unpublished memoir.⁴⁸ Young boys hired out were often treated as apprentices, compensated with room, board and occasionally new clothes, or paid half of a “man's wages.” For instance when the fifteen-year-old Harvey Raymond ran away from an abusive apprenticeship with a lumber jobber he felt fortunate to find shelter with a farmer who paid him in food and clothing for fifteen hours of work each day.⁴⁹ Adult hired men received better pay than women and children, when the latter were paid at all, but all were expected to labor in the context of the family economy. Itinerant harvester Jack Maloney remembered that it was best to quit a harvest job if you had to work with neighborhood men. “If it was a bunch of home guards there, the smart thing for you to do was get the hell out, you know, because they were working for fame and glory and you were out there to make a payday,” he told interviewers.⁵⁰ The hours of labor could be long on farms precisely because laborers were expected to finish working only when all the chores were done, not at a specified quitting time. Robert Saunders, a St. Louis man who hoboed for several years before settling down recalled that the practice often was “to work from ‘can to can't', i.e., from the time you can see in the morning, until you can't see in the evening.” This left little time for leisure and implied that the farmer hired the laborer rather than the laborer's time.⁵¹

Despite these disparate expectations of farmers and their hired workers, it is worth remembering that the categories farmer and worker were not always so distinct. Instead, following Mary Neth's analysis of farm families, we might think of the bulk of the working population of the upper Midwest as orienting themselves to a wide range of opportunities to “get by” or “make do,” that is to earn a living for themselves and their families. Farm owners, for instance, often worked for wages themselves, or hired out their teams of horses to construction crews and neighbors with larger farms. Likewise, because employment in most industries was irregular and unreliable, workers often sought to escape wage labor by taking up farming, hunting, fishing, and other subsistence activities.⁵²

Many others with limited resources tried their hands at farming the rocky soil of the Wisconsin and Minnesota cutover regions. Although the land was inexpensive, it had also been ravaged by logging. They often found the stumps difficult to clear and the soil good for little more than hay and garden crops. As the US Immigration Commission discovered, cutover farmers regularly supplemented their farm income with wage labor in logging, mining, railroad and road construction, and crop harvesting, as did members of Native Americans communities in the region.⁵³ Similarly, workers-turned-homesteaders tried to balance residence requirements of the Homestead Act with the need to earn cash to pay for improvements to their land. They often worked for wages in agriculture and construction, at times disqualifying their claims because federal land agents expected homesteaders to work exclusively on their farms.⁵⁴

Despite the growing divergence of farm and factory wages in the 1920s, working people continued to cycle back and forth between agricultural and nonagricultural work. Although labor historians tend to focus on the industrial hubs of Chicago and Detroit, the Midwestern countryside was dotted with small industrial towns like Sheboygan, Wisconsin, Austin and Albert Lea, Minnesota, and Ottumwa and Sioux City, Iowa. Employers in these towns were happy to employ hard-working farm people who were themselves in dire need of extra cash, as Minnesotan Cheri Register recounts in her family memoir Packinghouse Daughter.⁵⁵

However, these workers did not turn their backs on the countryside permanently. When industrial jobs disappeared in the Great Depression, rural work once again became a refuge and an opportunity for poor workers. A survey of the poorer farming areas in the Great Lakes region registered a large number of wageworkers becoming farm operators between 1930 and 1935, and attributed the increase to unemployment. “Some of these families already owned land which was farmed by their families while the family head worked elsewhere. Since he had lost the job that was the chief source of family income [in 1930], he was classified as a farmer [in 1935],” a footnote in the report explained. “The ‘farm' which was formerly only an incidental source of income—a place to live, to grow a garden or truck patch, and perhaps to pasture a cow or two and to raise a few chickens—became the family's sole source of income and subsistence.”⁵⁶

Scattered evidence suggests that rural work remained an important source of income for poor families through the 1940s, especially for women and young people, even as federal farm labor programs imported laborers from abroad. A nationwide survey by the US Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE) found that the number of workers in seasonal farm labor shifted from a high of nearly 2.4 million in September 1939 to a low of just over 1 million in March 1940 (twenty percent of the total were in the Midwest while more than half were in the South). A second BAE study found that even in the full-employment years of World War Two large numbers of working men were shifting between manu facturing and agriculture, while many working women shifted between domestic service and agriculture. A study of the tomato and strawberry harvests of western New York state in 1945 found that although recently laid-off industrial workers from Buffalo and other cities “were loath to shift immediately to work in the fields at farm wage rates” while they could stay home and get unemployment compensation, women and children from these families were not so disinclined. Due to the steady work of war years, the report noted, “industrial workers' families have found it less necessary than before to supplement their factory earnings with agricultural employment.” However a study based on Bureau of the Census population surveys in 1945 and 1946 suggested that about twenty percent of the US farm workforce shifted regularly between farm and nonfarm employment.⁵⁷

Homesteading, fishing, hunting and harvest work represented opportunities to “make do” in the context of an irregular, and often disadvantageous, wage labor market. Instead of seeing distinct classes of farmers and workers, we might view all of these people as part of the same flexible labor force that often found the line between making do and losing out not at the center of commodity and labor markets, but at their margins.

If wage work helped to sustain rural households by supplementing inadequate farm incomes, what did work in the countryside mean to urban workers? In the early twentieth century, urban society increasingly associated the countryside with economic decline, isolation, and poverty. The Country Life Movement and state agricultural colleges, for instance, decried the poverty and inefficiency of American farms, and advocated increased mechanization. Likewise, for urban workers in more stable occupations, seasonal laborers themselves were a physical and figurative reminder of why class, or at least craft, organization was necessary. For example, during the height of the 1915 IWW free speech fight in Sioux City, Iowa, union steam fitter Edward Ashland urged compassion for the Wobblies arrested and confined to an outdoor prison. As Ashland wrote to his fellow craft unionists, the seasonal laborers who supported the IWW were “the necessary product of conditions under which they have been raised. They were taken out of school at a tender age, and all the physical development they got was hanging onto the handles of a plow, and the most inspiring scene before their eyes was the rear end of a mule, and now reduced to premature old age, with vitality sapped and form bent earthwards, [their] ambition [is] blasted and hopes blighted.” While Ashland's was a call for compassion, radicals from diverse perspectives considered hoboes part of a lumpenproletariat that posed an active danger to the interests of more organizable class fragments. Victor Berger considered floaters to be a pool of strikebreakers and easily-bought votes. William Z. Foster, who was certainly in a position to know having been a hobo himself, once called the unorganized “human parasites” and the “real enemy of labor.”⁵⁸

Others considered the seasonal rural work associated with hoboes as part of a longer tradition of pioneering opportunity in America, although they did not necessarily endorse the floating lifestyle. “Leave the city before you are too poor to get away,” intoned the immigrant daily Skandinaven in March 1909, “for life in the cities is becoming harder year by year.” Pointing to the numerous Norwegian farmers in the Midwest, the paper declared that many had “won their farms by way of the farm-worker route, and they have no regrets.”⁵⁹

To be certain, much of this romantic rhetoric ignored the changing realities of country life and beat against the tide of popular attitudes. As a Polish newspaper in Chicago noted of a 1911 meeting to promote colonization of government land in Oklahoma, “Although those present eulogized life on the farm, no concrete decisions were made.”⁶⁰ Despite these qualifications, some immigrants still hoped to establish farms and escape wage labor altogether, and more than a few succeeded.

Whether or not they wanted to farm, many young men who went west remembered it as a difficult but transformative rite of passage. As the poet Carl Sandburg wrote of his hoboing experiences, “I was meeting fellow travelers and fellow Americans. What they were doing to my heart and mind, my personality, I couldn't say then nor later and be certain. I was getting a deeper self-respect than I had had in Galesburg [his hometown], so much I knew. I was getting to be a better storyteller.” Coming of age also had a political component, if memoirs and oral testimonies are to be believed. Many future liberals and radicals first came into contact with militant, class-conscious workers while working in the countryside or riding in freight cars. (This includes well known radicals like Ray Dunne and Ralph Chaplin, lesser known activists like Sam Swanson, Walter Harju, Robert Saunders, Anton Johannsen and Henry McGuckin, ex radicals like labor historian Philip Taft, who was an IWW activist in his youth, and others: Minnesota governor Karl Rolvaag and even Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas).⁶¹

Indeed men of various political stripes and class backgrounds used tales of their tough times on the road as a way to impress friends and family, and to establish their manliness.

What is more, this was not necessarily a heterosexual manliness. The countryside was also a place for men to forge intimate relationships with each other. As a middle-class economist concluded of the so-called floating laborers, “there are social dangers which a group of demoralized, womenless men may engender under such conditions [that are a] greater menace than the stereotyped ill effects of insanitation and malnutrition.”⁶²

Indeed, a significant, but unknowable, proportion of seasonal laboring men may have chosen their occupation because it fit with their sexuality. The memoirs of former seasonal laborers frequently mention unwanted sexual advances quickly rebuffed.⁶³ But for those who preferred to accept such advances, life as a hobo could be rich indeed. As an 18 year-old man told sociologist Nels Anderson, he had never encountered homosexuals until he went to Kansas to work in the wheat harvest. After several encounters, and a struggle with what we would call today his sexual identity, this man became a strong advocate for homosexuality and a regular on Chicago's Madison Street, off-season home to many rural workers.⁶⁴

Thus the countryside was a space in which urban working-class men confronted difficult social and personal issues. It was a cultural space for coming of age, regardless of whether the central issue of their coming of age was class politics, sexuality, or both as was often the case. But if the hard knocks of seasonal labor in the countryside seemed to make men out of boys, we can also peel away the narrative layer of stoic masculinity to reveal an undercurrent of painful memories of hunger, injury, fear and shame of being an outcast. Reflecting on his first reading of Henry McGuckin's autobiographical manuscript, for instance, IWW leader Fred Thompson explicitly linked the pain of outsider status to the experience of traveling in the countryside. Thompson felt that support for the union sprang “from a consciousness of kind, born not of books, but of the very unpleasant sense of singularity when on a summer day one walks through a small town with a winter overcoat over one arm, knowing he will need it to keep warm that night, even though it marks him as a pesky go-about meanwhile.”⁶⁵

In short, while time as a “floater” may have been a manly rite of passage, the space of the countryside provided experiences of solidarity and its inverse. It appears that for many, the most important lessons of the transient community were not so much how to be a tough guy, but why powerlessness is so unpleasant.

The Countryside and Working-Class Formation

This brief exploration of hobo workers' place in working-class formation suggests some of the problems with traditional approaches to labor history that look to one industry, one community, and one workplace as the nexus of emerging class identities and social structures. Sociologist Sonya Rose has dubbed this the “quintessential worker problem”: historical narratives based more on ideal types than lived experience.⁶⁶

The countryside holds a special place in the traditional narrative of proletarianization. The destruction of the preindustrial, rural world is the implicit counterpoint and requirement to the notion of an emergent working class so familiar to modern labor historians. The experiential outlines of this rural world are often vague, but they are always radically different from industrial life. As the home base for those entering the industrial workforce it must be a degraded society with limited resources. However, as the counterpoint to industrial society it must be all that modern life is not: family-centered, cooperative, self-sufficient, and—perhaps most importantly—not dominated by industrial time-discipline. In this model, the countryside is symbolic of the destructive power of capitalist industrialization and potential for a different way of organizing society.⁶⁷

Although US labor historians identify urban areas with the process of class formation, most synthetic treatments of working-class history evoke rurality as the key counterpoint to the familiar, history of proletarianization. Bruce Laurie's Artisans into Workers opens with Noah Webster noting that each eighteenth century American was “a husbandsman in summer and mechanic in winter.” They were “the epitome of self-sufficiency and versatility,” Laurie states, “independent yeomen farmers as adept at mending a rake or cobbling a shoe as at plowing a field.” But the emerging market economy would soon “erode self-sufficiency and remake yeomen, artisans, and their children into workers dependent upon wages.”⁶⁸

Similarly, Harry Braverman's powerful work Labor and Monopoly Capital identified the radical separation of rural and urban life as the starting point of proletarianization: “The population of cities, more or less completely cut off from a natural environment by the division between town and country, becomes totally dependent upon social artiface for its every need. But social artiface has been destroyed in all but its marketable forms. Thus the population no longer relies upon social organization in the form of family, friends, neighbors, community, elders, children, but with few exceptions must go to market and only to market.” This is one of the clearest statements of labor history's underlying assumption of unidirectional class formation: the ever-tightening rings of the “universal market” force people out of self-sufficiency and into the labor market where they have fewer cultural resources to resist capitalism's reformation of social and economic relations.

Although few labor historians would embrace such a stark vision of class formation today, the drama of modernization continues to exert a gravitational force on our attention. In part this is due to the profound influence of early sociologists, often through the evidence in their empirical studies, on the discourse of social history. But it is also a result of the compelling interpretations offered by the founders of the New Labor History. Echoing E.P. Thompson's work on the emergence of modern time-discipline, Herbert Gutman identified the defining element of American history as the recurrent influx of rural, non-industrial migrants. More than mere labor power, Gutman argued, migrants brought with them “whole cultures” that had to be industrialized. Where European societies went through this painful process only once, “the American working class was continually altered in its composition by infusions, from within and without the nation, of peasants, farmers, skilled artisans, and casual day laborers who brought into industrial society ways of work and other habits and values not associated with industrial necessities and the industrial ethos.”⁶⁹

To be sure, were he writing today Gutman would likely drop the characterization of immigrant cultures as “preindustrial,” just as historians no longer use the earlier and more pejorative term “premodern.” Writing in the late 1980s, immigration historian John Bodnar called for a less sweeping approach to the everyday culture of immigrants in America that would replace a “linear progression” of assimilation with “a continual dynamic between economy and society, between class and culture.” However, Bodnar also considered the real drama of immigrant life to be an urban story.⁷⁰

Similarly, in his discussion of unskilled labor in the Progressive Era, David Montgomery dismisses the idea that immigrant laborers were “an archaic vestige of preindustrial society.” Like Bodnar, Montgomery evokes the dynamics of the capitalist world system in which interactions between an industrialized core and a rural periphery are key to the process of class formation. For the European or Latin American peasant, just as for the African American sharecropper, Montgomery writes, “modernization thus appeared on the periphery more as an alien, destructive force than as an integrated pattern of growth.”⁷¹ It is only after this disintegrating process that rural people are remade into modern workers, a process that is irreversible in large part because modernization has destroyed the rural homeland.

In his fascinating new study of Guatemalan immigrant workers in North Carolina, Leon Fink evokes the drama of modernization in order to complicate and contextualize our understanding of that drama within an ongoing global economic dynamic. The 1995 strike of Highland Maya immigrants against an anti-union poultry processing company, Fink writes, “suggested a most dramatic confrontation between what Joseph Schumpeter called the ‘creative destruction' of market capitalism and the social organization of one of the hemisphere's oldest cultures.” But as Fink shows in The Maya of Morganton, with their direct links to the civil-war ravaged Guatemalan countryside and their tenacious organizing campaign, these workers are both “communal” and historical.⁷²

Similarly, the life histories of hobo workers like Nels Anderson reflect the complexity and contingency of working class life in the era of industrialization. The child of workers-turned-farmers, Anderson easily shifted between industrial and agricultural labor in his early life. The “hobo migration” was a passing phenomenon closely linked to a particular period in North American industrial and agricultural development, just as Anderson's own experience as a hobo was a passing phase in his life. We might be tempted, therefore, to agree with the notion that working class history runs only in one direction, from the country to the city. After all, the depopulation of the countryside is a well-known fact of twentieth century history. Doing so, however, would confuse a geographic transition with the emergence of a working class. Although those who left the countryside also often left behind the family farm and the family business, they rarely shook the desire for independence they associated with farm ownership. In much the same way that immigrant small business owners emerged from working class communities often to return after failure,⁷³

American working people were reluctant to let go of the dream of escaping the labor market. Ironically, this dream could nurture support for progressive as well as conservative political movements. Even celebrated radicals like William Z. Foster and Vincent St. John found their way briefly or permanently into farm ownership. Whether the countryside was a safety valve or a pressure cooker depended very much on when and why you looked at it.