Road Tramp Blues

HARD TRAVELLIN' by Kenneth Allsop. 448 pages. The New American Library. $7.95.

Is the 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 man?

Speaking as an informed outsider, British Journalist Kenneth Allsop suggests that Americans have never quite made up their minds on the answer. Their ambiguous feelings about hoboes, he says, are nurtured by deeper ambiguous feelings about themselves. "The shock trooper of the American expansion, the man with bedroll on back who freelanced beyond the community redoubts," was "a wild and recalcitrant wayfarer, bothersome to the settled citizen." But he was also "a unique and indigenous American product," and the settled citizen secretly envied him. Something inside every proper American, says Allsop, reponds to the haunting echo of a train whistle or a harmonica chorus of Road Tramp Blues.

Allsop's well-researched study--a matching piece to his earlier book, The Bootleggers--often seems as rambling as its subject. Like its heroes, it travels at a leisurely pace. But by and large, its heroes are amiable men to travel with. Even the self-righteous Allan Pinkerton, whose railroad detectives were the bane of post-Civil War hoboes, was a tramp once himself, and he never quite got over it. While the Pinks were running down the men they called "miserable communistic outcasts," Pinkerton himself felt compelled to confess "an irrepressible impulse to go a-tramping" again. He went so far as to argue that the Bible is "full of illustrious in stances of tramping"--including the wanderings of Jesus Christ.

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.

He marshals grim details to demonstrate that no man 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 a child away with him on the next train out."

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.

Now the romance has largely disappeared from the road. 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 if the old is intolerable, infertile, or just too stalely famili .."

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