Hoboes

Kirkus Reviews

History in the Howard Zinn school, with working people taking the fore, finally acknowledged for their contributions in settling the frontier. The Western history many people schooled before the 1970s grew up with is an affair of steely-jawed Anglo pioneers and stalwart but inconveniently located American Indians. The more comprehensive version that has followed allows for "Navajos and Klickitats, African Americans and Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Hindus, Filipinos, and Puerto Ricans, among others." This view shows that the West developed less by individuals than by a 19th-century version of the military-industrial complex, with railroad rights-of-way and resource concessions to the public domain. Historian Wyman (The Wisconsin Frontier, 1998, etc.) situates a sturdy narrative on this ground, writing principally of the migrant agricultural workers who came from all over the world to work the factory fields. The relationship between workers and owners was never easy, he writes. At points there were too many workers and not enough work, at others seasons in which labor was so scarce that, as one 1884 federal report put it, "Farmers have been compelled to take what help they could get, whether they were white or Chinamen, nor has it been a strange sight to see in California women and children labor in the fields." Thus the origins of imported labor from Mexico, a matter that reverberates in the current cacophony over immigration. The migrant worker, or "western hobo," had three things in his favor: the likelihood of a crop's being ruined if not harvested quickly, lack of a large labor pool in the West and rail lines to take him wherever he needed to be. The owner had money, the police, theArmy and much more. In their contending powers, and in strikes and massacres, lie forgotten episodes that Wyman ably covers. A vigorous, well-written multicultural history of the West as it really was. Agent: Deirdre Mullane/Mullane Literary Associates

Publishers Weekly

Historian Wyman offers a richly detailed study of the thousands of workers who followed the booming railroads west during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to pick, prepare, and load crops, from cotton, wheat, and hops to apples, beets, and oranges. These transients moved about the country, often accompanied by their families, who worked as well. They endured generally low wages, backbreaking labor, and awful living conditions-mitigated only slightly in the 1910s, for the select few who could afford automobiles and were thus granted greater mobility. Periodic efforts to unionize, especially by the radical Industrial Workers of the World, were invariably met with hostility. Wyman's extensive research translates into readable, often moving prose with details that illuminate the lives of previously obscure people and reveals a surprising ethnic and racial diversity among this often-overlooked group. The author of several books, Wyman has become a leading source on the American West and here makes a case for a more complex narrative of the region, one that ought to include hoboes in the list of "Western heroes," along with "cowboys and Indians, explorers and entrepreneurs, first settlers and gunslingers."
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Library Journal

Hoboes is a welcome addition to the migration and labor studies of Wyman (history, emeritus, Illinois State Univ.; Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–1930). The radical agricultural change that accompanied the building of western railroads through sparsely populated regions attracted an army of workers to harvest an enormous number of crops. Wyman details how the railroads were the means by which workers as well as crops were moved from place to place and how such "hoboes and tramps" came to occupy the lowest rung of the social order. Political movements such as the "burning of the bindles" in 1918, when workers burned their own blankets to force decent bedding from their employers, are covered here. VERDICT With broader historic sweep than recent sugar-beet industry and migrant-labor studies (e.g., Kathleen Mapes's Sweet Tyranny: Migrant Labor, Industrial Agriculture, and Imperial Politics and Jim Norris's North for the Harvest: Mexican Workers, Growers, and the Sugar Beet Industry), Wyman's book is highly recommended for both academics and the general public as a scholarly yet accessible history of a rather neglected topic of the American West.—Nathan E. Bender, Laramie, WY

The Barnes & Noble Review

Turn the title around for this fact-heavy historical narrative of the American West. It's less about hoboes than about the new agricultural frontier that came about with the rise of the railroad. Between the Civil War and the early automobile -- think from Mark Twain's San Francisco to The Joads' overloaded jalopy -- the West developed into America's garden. As tracks were laid across the land, irrigation projects boomed with them. The once-dry landscape began to yield its cornucopia, with different regions specializing in all sorts of crops. Kansas became the breadbasket and King Cotton moved west into Texas and Arizona. With northwestern hops, brewers no longer relied on Europe, and sugar beets from Colorado replaced foreign cane. Picked clean of most of its gold, California gave up new treasures: almonds, grapes, citrus fruit, peaches, apricots, and berries.

Trains (with eventual improvements in refrigeration) delivered produce across the country, and farms grew exponentially, way beyond the Jeffersonian ideal of land worked by family and friends. Agriculture expanded where there were no towns or people, and into this labor gap stepped the hoboes of lore, but also an array of immigrants from around the globe. Scandinavians flocked to northwestern states, Mexicans came across the border into Texas and California, and Asians worked up and down the Pacific coast.

Wyman, a historian of labor and the West, relies on a wealth of public documents, regional histories, and personal testimony to give voice to these forgotten men (women and children joined in later years). While landowners bemoaned labor shortages, they also encouraged a vast oversupply. Conditions were usually poor, and the work seasonal, with long travel between harvest areas. Hence the worker with his stick bearing his bundle ("bindlestiff") tramping across a country ever hostile to his presence. Wyman appreciates the pressures on farm owners as well, especially with shortages created by WWI. The arrival of the automobile also changed a lot about the labor supply, but it's easy to see the relevance of this fine study for today, when cheap labor continues to spill into the country, dividing American opinion. An untold chapter in American labor history: solid if unexciting.

--Thomas De Pietro