Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the American West (review)

Once just grist for the mills of amateur historians, the saga of tramps and hoboes in America between the Civil War and the Great Depression has in recent years drawn the interest of serious scholars who have contextualized it in patterns of homelessness, the dislocations of industrialization, social reform agendas, the evolution of skid row, and cultural mindsets around work, home, and deviance. Mark Wyman now brings an exhaustive description of the agricultural development of the trans-Mississippi West and the labor-intensive harvesting of seasonal crops at a time when farm machines had yet to replace people and when countless thousands of acres of ripening produce, often far distant from population centers, required harvest-time crews much larger than growers normally had available on site.

To the familiar scenario of gritty boxcar tramps and communities as eager to drive the men off after the harvest as they had been earlier in welcoming them, Wyman now adds a stunningly kaleidoscopic panorama of regional diversity, manifold harvesting processes, and a heterogeneous labor pool, particularly recent immigrants. Men dominated harvest crews virtually everywhere, but not uncommonly women and children picked cotton in Texas and berries and hops in Washington or pulled and topped sugar beets in Colorado, the youngsters' small fingers especially vulnerable to injury from spiky plants or sharp tools. American-born whites and northern European immigrants dominated the wheat harvest from Kansas to the Dakotas. American Indians picked hops in Washington and cotton in Arizona. Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, and even East Indian Hindus and Sikhs found their way to the fields and fruit orchards throughout California and the Northwest. Mexicans came up to the harvests early on and steadily gained favor among many growers, easily given to stereotyping, who believed they were physically best suited for stoop labor. Organized efforts to improve working conditions and wages became more frequent in the early twentieth century, ranging from the go-it-alone solidarity of Japanese crews to the broad appeal of the Industrial Workers of the World. Advancing farm mechanization, population fill-in, and the widespread adoption of the automobile brought the era to a close in the 1920s. By that time, Mexicans predominated in the harvesting jobs still available throughout the West, often now settling in communities near agricultural centers and finding employment opportunities year-round in nearby areas.

Wyman draws on admirable research in newspapers, company documents, government reports, and state and local records. His notes display impressive familiarity with the secondary literature. A caveat is in order, however. Inexplicably, he arranges the book by regional agro-systems and eschews providing a closing chapter with some interpretive overviews. Readers interested in the physiology and peculiar harvesting requirements of sugar beets or long-staple cotton will easily find their way, but as the discussions of labor shortages, the efforts of growers to meet them, the kinds of laborers they preferred, the conditions in the fields, the relational dynamics among harvest hands and local communities, and other pertinent issues all get re-introduced from region to region and crop to crop, readers will be hard pressed to discern broader patterns and trends and thereby to gain the perspective needed to integrate this remarkable story most profitably with the larger history of the American working class.