Perhaps our reading of American industrial and labor history has largely missed the stories of “Hobo John,” “Railroad Bill,” Peetie Wheatstraw, “Toledo Slim,” and many of the other working-class and lumpen Americans featured in this book. In On the Fly! Hobo Literature and Songs, we find the voices of scores of left-out, thrown-down, marginalized, and oppressed harvest hands, railroaders, and other freed-up workers who were crucial to the westward expansion of capitalism but nonetheless periodically fell out of the capitalist system. Hundreds of thousands of mostly homeless “bindlestiffs,” “fruit tramps,” and railroad and migratory workers, all of them “illegal travelers,” went “on the bum” during intermittent capitalist expansions and depressions from the 1870s through the 1930s.
A few studies have told the story of those who sought jobs, left jobs, organized unions, and sometimes stole from people in small towns all along the railroad lines running from America’s industrial...
