The Railroad Tramp and the American Cultural Imaginary
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THE RAILROAD TRAMP AND THE AMERICAN CULTURAL IMAGINARY By CHRISTOPHER WYLIE LENZ A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2013 1 © 2013 Christopher Wylie Lenz 2 To my parents 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe gratitude to numerous people who have given me invaluable advice and encouragement throughout this endeavor. I first want to thank my director, Susan Hegeman, for her guidance, insight, and patience. The members of my committee—Phil Wegner, Kenneth Kidd, and Jack Davis—similarly offered feedback that helped shape my project. Other members of the English Department faculty contributed to my scholarly and professional development in various ways, as well: Raúl Sánchez, Robert Ray, Terry Harpold, Marsha Bryant, Leah Rosenberg, and Brandy Kershner. I count myself fortunate to have encountered so many wise and generous peers at the University of Florida. Nicole LaRose, Mike Mayne, Patrick McHenry, Christina Van Houten, Wes Beal, Regina Martin, Emily McCann, Mark Tabone and others—most of them associated with the Marxist Reading Group—worked to maintain and nurture a vibrant intellectual community, and I am the better for my association with them. In particular, Steph Boluk has been a cherished colleague, collaborator, and friend since I began my doctoral studies. Away from UF, the Society for Utopian Studies provided a stimulating and supportive forum in which to work through my ideas. Throughout my graduate career, I benefited directly from the labor of those who ensure that things happen as they should. Graduate Assistants United’s tireless efforts have made UF a better place for graduate employees to work and study. Without the English Department’s tolerant staff—Melissa Davis, Kathy Williams, Carla Blount, Janet Moore, and Megan Amos—I doubt I would have managed to negotiate the myriad bureaucratic obstacles I encountered along the way. Most crucially, I have been sustained by my loved ones. My family—my parents, Bette and Don, and my brother Andrew—has consistently maintained faith in my 4 abilities, even when I tried to argue that such faith was misplaced. Of course, I cannot imagine having seen this thing through to the end without Rachel’s day-to-day love, companionship, and support. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 9 2 THE SAVAGE TRAMP ........................................................................................... 43 3 THE AMERICANA HOBO ..................................................................................... 132 4 THE CRITICAL TRAMP ........................................................................................ 221 5 THE UTOPIAN TRAMP ........................................................................................ 307 6 CODA: TOWARD A TRAMP PEDAGOGY ........................................................... 358 WORKS CITED ........................................................................................................... 385 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 401 6 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy THE RAILROAD TRAMP AND THE AMERICAN CULTURAL IMAGINARY By Christopher Wylie Lenz May 2013 Chair: Susan Hegeman Major: English “The Railroad Tramp and the American Cultural Imaginary” argues that competing representations of the railroad tramp reveal submerged cultural contradictions attendant to valuations of work, mobility, technology, domesticity, and citizenship. The tramp figure traverses multiple forms and genres, emerging as a trope in the wake of the Civil War and persisting to the present day. Thus, I build my argument on an analysis of a wide variety of texts by Jack London, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, and Frank Capra, as well as lesser-known figures such as Edward Anderson, Tom Kromer, Ben Reitman, Charles Ashleigh, and William Wellman, and even anonymous cultural producers. Such texts situate the tramp around the edges of the national picaro and isolato narrative traditions, implicating the figure in on-going, ideologically diverse projects that seek to define the American character. While R.W.B. Lewis has argued that an Adamic conception of this character—with its insistence on a self-invented hero, free from the weight of European history, imbued with Emersonian optimism and innocence—prevailed in the literary and philosophical discourse of the antebellum period, I present the railroad tramp as a vital figuration through which to interpret America’s postbellum, postlapsarian condition, and I use this figuration to 7 theorize utopian and pedagogical models that imagine alternative subjectivities. Steadfastly unconvinced, unreconstructed, and undomesticated, the tramp defamiliarizes modernity’s promise of technological and economic progress even while deriving his extralegal agency by repurposing that definitive technology of American capitalist enterprise, the railroad. Whether portrayed positively or negatively, the figure articulates the profound ambivalence that accompanies the ascendancy of the free labor ideal, demanding a critical reconsideration of the notion that citizenship should be framed exclusively in terms of productivity. In sum, the tramp functions to “decenter wage labor in our conception of life under capitalism,” to borrow Michael Denning’s phrase. This function remains as relevant to the current moment of economic and political crisis as to those of the Gilded Age or Great Depression. 8 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Freight train rides are parables. —William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere The title of an article published in Vice magazine in October of 2012 announced the “Death of the American Hobo,” thus eulogizing a figure that many had likely presumed long since interred. The author, Aaron Lake Smith, a young and hip New Yorker who also serves as the publication’s senior editor, begins the piece by rhapsodizing about the mysterious allure of the railroad, asserting that as “the last truly American place, untainted by the regrets of modern progress,” it embodies “several hundred years of America’s daring and rugged spirit” (112). He goes on to imagine that in his isolation at Walden Pond Henry David Thoreau (whom Smith labels a “proto- hobo”) must have taken comfort in “the sound of the train whistle echoing through the woods in the dead of night,” and that the presence of near-by tracks “steeled his will to the task at hand and reminded him that while he was alone, he was still a part of humanity” (113, 112). Of course, this speculation ignores the fact that Walden contains passages explicitly decrying the railroad’s negative impact on the nation and its people—“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us” (60)—but it still makes good rhetorical sense to call upon such a paragon of American romanticism and authenticity in service of a tribute to a technology that Smith now finds so archaic, uncomplicated, and pure. Smith then recounts the details of his own train-hopping journey to the 2012 National Hobo Convention in Britt, Iowa, an event first held in that location in 1900 and recurring there more-or-less annually since 1933.1 Starting in the late 1880s, a loose association of itinerant workers half-jokingly dubbed Tourist Union No. 63 by its 9 members had organized a yearly reunion and, in an effort to generate publicity, a group of city boosters from Britt offered to host the event in their tiny young town at the turn of the century. Since its revival during the Depression, the event has drawn at times thousands of vagabonds and onlookers to Britt every year. As new generations discover the thrill and financial advantage of stealing rides on freight trains, younger riders continue to attend the event, hoping to connect with hobo history and mingle amongst surviving examples of “a dying breed.” On arrival, however, they likely take notice of what Smith, with palpable disappointment, describes as something more akin to “the ambiance of a hippie craft fair than a Depression-era Hooverville” featuring “a conspicuous absence of people who looked like real hoboes who had spent any considerable amount of time on the tracks” (117). Smith came looking for a bona fide manifestation of an iconic—and impoverished—American figure, but found only a simulacrum in the form of “‘hobos at heart’ (a euphemism faux hobos invoke to describe themselves)” who “seemed to have commandeered the convention,” having arrived in their RVs and driven away almost all of “the authentic hobos” (119). The Convention had gone “mainstream,” he complains, using much the same language that a music fan might when a favorite indie band signs to a major label after having been “completely sanitized” (118). Following the arrest of one of the few satisfactorily genuine transient attendees for the crime of urinating on a fence, Smith decides that he has “had enough. Disgusted by the petty paternalism of Britt and with the convention, it was time to leave.” With apparently