The New Pilgrim's Progress: An Odyssey of the Unemployed

MAY, 1931

BY ROBERT WHITCOMB

I

AFTER several months of riding freight trains, joining bread lines, sleeping in jails or Salvation Army ‘flophouses’ or box cars, I began to realize that Wall Street had crashed and that unemployment was a national problem. At first I had no idea of the magnitude of the disaster; I saw it all purely in terms of my own personal difficulties. All that I knew was that I had been fired out of an unsatisfactory newspaper job in a suburb of New York City and would have to look for another berth.

After I had failed to find work in New York, I decided to ‘hit the road’ south and try my luck elsewhere. It struck me then as a particularly happy solution of my problem and I made a gay start. I had seventeen dollars in my pocket and was leaving no dependents behind me. All I needed to do was to support myself. If I could earn enough to pay for my meals and lodging, I could keep going indefinitely until I found steady work. When I went broke, I thought, I could stop wherever I happened to be and pick up expenses by doing odd jobs — fixing fences, mowing lawns, hoeing gardens, running errands, washing dishes. I would not even balk at such manual labor as working on a railroad section or on the highway, or digging ditches, picking fruit, shocking wheat, chopping trees — anything the world would pay for.

United States Highway No. 1, which runs along the Atlantic Coast from Maine to Florida, was thronged with pedestrians in January of 1930 when I set out upon it, headed south. There was a sprinkling of adventurers, most of them posing as hatless college boys with Boston bags. Some were disappointed office workers on their way from New York to Miami. A few were obviously just graduating from the Boy Scouts and were indulging their Wanderlust. Nine tenths of them, however, were workmen in overalls. By the time I came to the short-leaf pines and open spaces south of Richmond, I had talked with a number of these men and learned that many were heads of families forced away from home by unemployment. Among them were skilled laborers,— carpenters, plasterers, operators of machines,— most of them willing enough to forgo their union status if they could only find some sort of work at any sort of wages. All of these wanderers were trying to ‘hitchhike ’ their way along, but it was a discouraging business; their numbers had spoiled the sport, and most of them were doing more hiking than hitching.

Copyright 1931, by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.

On the northern edge of South Carolina my eyes were opened to a new aspect of the situation. As I came abreast of a patch of pine woods a red-faced man stepped out of a parked car and demanded to know where I was going. I asked whose business it was, whereupon he brandished a six-shooter and threatened to show me the inside of the county jail. Somehow I managed to conciliate him, and as his wrath subsided he explained that so many ‘ bums ’ were traveling through that citizens had to watch their property. For the first time I realized the dangers of being a stranger, particularly a stranger on foot. Later I learned that the wise vagrant is aware of this peril and prepares himself to meet it when it arises. I ran across one young hobo who carried a copy of the New Testament in his pocket for the sole purpose of impressing those officers of the law who chose to search him.

I rode through South Carolina and Georgia in one lucky lift and then made for New Orleans. By this time I had exhausted my slender resources and found myself walking the streets of a strange city without a penny to my name. I had definitely joined the ranks of the ‘down-and-outers.’ This last was a subtle shift which I hardly noticed at the time. I was young, husky, and willing to work; like Mr. Micawber, I felt that something was bound to turn up. Besides, I was experiencing the same sensations which an explorer must feel when he ventures into unknown territory: I was curious to catch a glimpse of human nature in the raw and see for myself how men treated their less fortunate fellows. So, humbly, hopefully, I applied for work. As failure followed failure, I fought against the thought that my outlook was desperate.

If I had purposely planned to test my chances under the most unfavorable circumstances, I could not have hit upon a worse place than New Orleans at this time. I had arrived in the city at the height of that hysterical season which they call Mardi Gras. From all the corners and hollows of the earth tourists and sight-seers were pouring in, and they were followed by a ragged army of hoboes, bums, street fakers, and touts who converged upon the city from every point of the compass. While the carnival reigns it is always a problem for the New Orleans police to keep an eye on pickpockets, and this year the depression had made their task doubly difficult. Crowds of jobless outcasts shuffled through the streets. The authorities made up their minds that unemployment was not to be tolerated. A general clean-up was chronicled in the newspapers and every day hundreds of unfortunates were literally kicked out of town. Scores of others were arrested on the charge of ‘no visible means of support’ and were herded into the lice-ridden cells of Parish Prison. So rigorous were the police that laborers walking home from work were occasionally picked up and forced to spend a night in jail before they could prove their residence, their solvency, and their employment.

I had already had several brushes with the police and I knew their attitude. ‘No visible means of support’ is the club they use in sending many an innocent victim to jail for weeks on end. So far I had escaped this penalty, and on one occasion by a very narrow margin. I had tried to get out of town before I was thrown out, but was turned back in a freight yard by a pugnacious railroad detective. Fortunately, he let me off with a surly warning. ‘Don’t let me lay eyes on you again,’ he said, shoving me by the shoulder. ‘You’ve got too damn much nerve, out seeing the country while respectable people must pay their way.’ So I began to realize what I was in for.

At this juncture I heard that men were wanted on the banana wharf, unloading the heavy bunches of fruit at thirty-five cents an hour. I applied, only to be told that the jobs had all been taken. As I turned to leave the place, I observed a ‘No Smoking’ sign and put my pipe in my pocket; but a ‘copper’ had seen me and came running up excitedly. After so many weeks of tramping about, I presented anything but a prepossessing appearance: my clothes were baggy and covered with mud, and I was sadly in need of a shave. The cop gave me one quick glance and launched into a flood of abusive language. Then he asked me a lot of personal questions. I tried to answer courteously, but I might better have saved my breath. He was one of the kind to whom ‘orders is orders,’ and since I had been caught smoking on the sacred banana wharf of New Orleans there was nothing for it but that I must be arrested for investigation. While we were waiting for the patrol wagon, a well-dressed man in the company of a woman passed by smoking a cigarette; my captor politely informed him that smoking was not permitted.

This was the first time I had ever been arrested and it gave me my first introduction to a ‘bull pen.’ I was thrown into a large cell crowded with nearly a hundred prisoners of all shades and conditions — drunks, ‘dopes,’ Negroes, fops, old men, burly and surly brutes, all waiting to face the judge in the morning. Among them were skilled mechanics whose only crime was unemployment. The place was brilliantly lighted and it seethed with cursing, vomiting, snoring men who slept all over the floor. As I surveyed this pirate’s crew, I tried to pick out the hardened criminals from the mere down-and-outers, and I could not. I was beginning to feel a mental kinship with these underdogs whose circumstances had placed them outside the law.

My sympathies were particularly aroused by one old man with ragged clothes and matted hair who sat on a concrete bench, his head sunk in his hands. Now and then he opened his eyes wearily at some fresh disturbance. By easy questioning I learned some of his history. He was a Florida carpenter, and at one time he had had a home of his own and money in the bank. The collapse of the land boom had paralyzed the building trades, and the depression which followed had ruined him. With his home wiped out and his savings all but exhausted, he had been compelled to hit the road with his tool bag. The last of his money was soon spent and there was no carpentry work anywhere. The only employment he found between Florida and New Orleans was in the pine forests, and that was too strenuous for him. A younger man jumped quickly into the vacancy he left. Finally he wearied of his heavy tool kit and threw it away. He kept drifting, walking almost every step of the way. He slept by the road, begging food at stores and homes. When he reached the city, he was arrested for vagrancy and now he seemed to think that he would be sentenced to thirty days. Although he dreaded the intolerable conditions of the New Orleans jails, he welcomed the thought of being released from the responsibility of getting food and carrying on.

When my case came up, I was lucky to get a ‘floater’ — a discharge with a warning to leave town within a few hours. Meanwhile I had heard about the Llano del Rio Colony in western Louisiana, near Leesville, which is run as a coöoperative venture. There, I was told, I could earn food, clothing, and shelter; they had no unemployment. I determined to go there. Being a young and husky worker, I was accepted without any cash payment for membership, and I soon discovered that many a young hobo took advantage of this hospitality to winter in the colony for his keep. I came to the place with high hopes, but I left it feeling that I had witnessed the failure of a communistic experiment on American soil.

II

Fifteen years ago Llano was organized on a mud flat which was at that time the site of a deserted lumber camp. Since then hundreds have joined it and left it, but the population still manages to keep ahead of the original group. Everybody except the youngest children works eight hours a day, receiving no money but sharing all things in common. Everyone eats in the community dining hall, cafeteria style. The work, which is not strenuous, allows for a wide range of aptitudes. There are a farm and a garden, a sawmill, an ice plant, a printing shop, a laundry, a general store, a tailor shop, a shoe shop, a library, and a garage. There are also a dance hall, an orchestra, and a rudimentary theatre.

The colonists think of the outside world as tottering and the capitalistic system as about to crash. While I was there the weekly newspaper printed a front-page open letter to President Hoover from the Llano dictator, George T. Pickett, informing him that the ‘Llano Way’ was the only way to solve national unemployment, and that given the land, the equipment, and proper leadership, the army of the unemployed could soon be supporting itself without money. One gathered that Mr. Pickett knew who could supply the leadership.

In spite of the brave spirit of most of its people, Llano is an unhappy place. A cloud of drab desolation seems to hang over it. Everyone is ill clad in patched, secondhand clothing. While I was there most of the men were wearing suits from a shipment of drivers’ uniforms which had come from R. H. Macy’s in New York. Their food is extremely plain, the staples being rice, sweet potatoes, and gravy; so unvarying is the diet that one of the school children named these three delicacies as the principal products of the state. The community is full of elderly Middle-Western farmers who have sunk their last dollar in a Llano membership and are depressed by the feeling that they are married to the place, for better or for worse, until death do them part. Even the children are a joyless lot. The older ones work in the fields during half of each day in a special ‘Kid Kolony,’ and they struck me as being the most vulgar and obscene little ragamuffins that I had ever met with. The workers’ councils and the dictatorship of the fiery little manager are very suggestive of Soviet Russia; in their so-called psychological meetings they wage bitter battles over petty questions of authority. I soon lost whatever enthusiasm I had worked up over their ideas, and in the end I left before I was kicked out.

From Llano I hitch-hiked to Fort Worth, Texas. I had now grown utterly despondent. Wherever I went I encountered the same stagnation of business. I had come two thousand miles in search of work, and the only things I had to show for my pains were tattered clothes and empty pockets. Moreover, my seedy appearance now made it almost impossible for me to get any lifts from motorists; when I signaled to a passing car, the driver would give one look at me and step on the gas. I had become a suspicious character. This drove me to ‘hopping’ my first freight; it was either that or walk.

Hitch-hiking is a lonely business, but freight riding is full of companionship in misery. I was plunged at once into the mysteries of professional hobodom and learned to think in terms of railroad divisions, ‘brakies,’ ‘shacks,’ ‘dicks,’ ‘bulls,’ and ‘red-ball’ and ‘manifest’ expresses. I grew accustomed to approaching groups of hoboes as one of them, exchanging information about rumors of construction jobs and the intricacies of railroad yards. Little by little I came to realize that riding freights is like an exciting game, with the lost goals symbolized at best by a term in jail and at worst by an amputated leg or an unmarked grave in potter’s field.

From Fort Worth I started toward Oklahoma City by rail, but was stranded off the main line in Shawnee along with a tall lad of twenty who said he came from Arkansas. As we camped in a ‘jungle’ around a fire, waiting for a train to pass, he told me his story. When he left school, he had gone to work on pipe lines in or near the oil fields. Then, considering himself a man with a trade and a future, he married a girl from his home town. Shortly afterward the pipe line was finished and he had to look for another job; meanwhile the effects of the Wall Street crash were being felt in the Middle West and there was no work to be had. Leaving his wife with her people, he set out to look elsewhere and he was now on his way to the oil fields at Oklahoma City. For several weeks he had been traveling without money and had had very little to eat. He appeared to be almost starving and devoured ravenously some bread that I gave him; indeed, that was what had set him talking about himself.

We rode the same train that night. Every few minutes he would mutter hopelessly that if he did n’t get something to do pretty soon he would rob somebody. He felt, and made me feel, abjectly depressed. At dawn, as we approached the city with its hundreds of pumping oil wells, his manner changed. ‘Listen to them rigs!’ he exclaimed with enthusiasm. Just then he spotted a long pipe line running along the ground as far as we could see in the semi-darkness. ‘They’re laying a line. Come on — you can get a job, too.’ He hopped off. For some reason I stayed where I was and kept on west into the city, but the memory of his hollow face with dark rings under the eyes and of his toes just coming through the holes in his shoes remained with me; I could not forget him even in the months of misery that followed when I heard the same story, with variations, over and over again.

In Oklahoma City crowds of overalled and heavy-booted men stood about in the streets. I asked them what chance a man had in the oil fields. They told me that all the jobs had been filled long since, but that men were still pouring in from all over the world because they had heard about the oil boom. The city, they said, had been maintaining bread lines for local men out of work, but was unable to do anything for the army of ‘foreigners.’ Later that same day I rode west out of Oklahoma City, wondering how my young friend from Arkansas had fared and hoping that his unusual enthusiasm had won him a place where others had failed.

III

At El Reno, Oklahoma, my next stop, I was held up several days by a railroad detective who had developed peculiar methods of his own for dealing with hoboes. At every railroad yard where valuable freight pauses temporarily, detectives are stationed to guard the property; but it is not an easy thing to do, for some of the yards are miles long. This bull at El Reno is an elderly man who takes the responsibilities of his job very seriously. By firing a pistol into the air, he frightens all the free ‘passengers’ off the freights as they pass through. This, as it happens, works a great hardship on the town, because the hungry men collect there in large numbers, begging food; and if they cannot beg it they steal it. Once a week, however, the detective has his day off, and then all the accumulated hoboes hop the same train.

That gathering at El Reno, which soon numbered several dozen, gave me some opportunity for observation. We were collected in the jungle off the railroad property, beside a muddy river. The weather was cold and rainy, the farmers were hostile, and we were lonely, idle, and depressed. There was no food, and therefore no cooking. Nobody knew just when the train would come that would be unguarded, so we hated to go away, even to get food, for fear of being stranded there another week. Conversation was at low ebb, but surged up sporadically, usually about wheedling meals from kind-hearted people, a little about the new oil fields at Hobbs, New Mexico, and other topics such as train routes, prize fighters, murders, or socialism.

In the group were a few old-timers who looked upon work as vulgar, and several horny-handed day laborers who were plainly stamped with the selfrespect of men who know all about the dignity of labor. Then there were two admirably built young fellows in black sweaters, whose faces were almost the same color. They were sheet-metal workers from West Virginia. Being laid off, they tried to get into the Navy, but failed. Now they were going through to California, where they knew a foreman in a steel mill. They had not washed since they left West Virginia, had scarcely eaten, and had had only one good sleep — in a box car. They were dead broke, but kept going on their nerve.

Another man, bound for Hobbs, was an experienced oil-field worker who said he was married. He carried a suitcase tied with a rope over his shoulder and had an overcoat slung over his arm.

Later, when everybody in the jungle dashed out to climb aboard the same freight, I saw this overloaded man trip on the overcoat and go heels over head, just missing the wheels. But he scrambled up, and he and I made the same car. There was nowhere to hide, so we clung to opposite sides between two box cars. The conductor, passing over the top, spotted the pair of us and literally climbed down on top of me. He was one of the few really mean railroad men that I encountered. It seemed necessary to his honor and dignity to kick me off the train, and by kick I mean kick, for he used his heel and ground it into my shoulder. Somehow I managed to hold my grip until the train had gathered speed; then I induced him to let me stay on until the first stop, when he saw to it that all of us were again stranded.

Shortly afterward, when we had caught another freight and were nearing Amarillo in the Panhandle of Texas, hoboes kept jumping on at each small division until our box car had accumulated fifty-odd. As our numbers increased our spirits rose and we gave vent to much smart talk. The President was roundly flayed as the prime cause of all evil, and a member of the train crew who stuck his head in at the side door was just as roundly booed. At one point the railroad tracks ran parallel to the highway and we passed one of those ‘Forward America’ signs with its catchwords painted in huge letters: ‘Business Is Good — Keep It Good.’ Every man jack of us guffawed uproariously. We knew how to take a joke, even when it was on us.

I traveled for several divisions into New Mexico with one of this group. He was a six-foot Hollander, a plasterer by trade. Until a month prior to the time I met him he had been the affluent owner of an automobile; he had toured almost every state in the Union with his wife and daughter. Now he was willing to take any kind of job that would pay for his meals and leave him a dollar to send home — and he could n’t find it. He looked over every town through which we passed for construction work. When he was hungry he felt that the only honorable thing for him to do was to ask fellow plasterers for a stake; this he did without hesitation, because when he was working he had often helped others in the same way. He could no more go into a bakery and ask for bread than he could go into a bank and ask for money. Endowed with a strong personality, he was taking defeat philosophically. In the course of my wanderings I met hundreds of such men; they were fighting for their very lives in the face of weather hazards and a constant fear of the police, with their minds tormented by thoughts of their hungry families at home.

As we pulled into the small railroad town of Vaughn, New Mexico, we saw a carnival in full swing. This gave Dutch the bright idea that we might stage a prize fight and earn a stake. This would never have occurred to me in a million years, but with the proposition before me I accepted. We soon learned, however, that the carnival already had its quota of fighters. Then Dutch saw a plasterer’s mixing board tied to the back of an automobile and nothing would do but that we must wait for the owner to appear; a plasterer might know of some work. When he came he turned out to be one of the carnival fighters. He knew about a temporary job for Dutch, but none for me, so I left them engaged in earnest conversation about plastering and fighting. Hoboes do not part sorrowfully; they have already parted too many times with too many people. But I remember Dutch particularly because, since I was still fresh at the game, these early impressions struck deep, because he really was a fine example of a simple man, and because he and I had made a freight together when all the other ‘boes’ missed it.

The example of Dutch trying so tenaciously to follow his trade and getting a break at last put new heart into me and led me to make further efforts to follow mine. I had started out by dropping into newspaper offices wherever I had gone, but had long since given it up as hopeless. Invariably the newspaper men to whom I told my story had turned me down. They said that my story was n’t news, but I think their real reason was that they did n’t believe me. Now, however,

I resolved to try my luck again. In Albuquerque I called upon the ScrippsHoward State Tribune and was overjoyed when they gave me a front-page three-column head on the double ground that hoboes were interesting material and that the paper’s advertisers were constantly being approached by them. The city editor called it ‘a good yarn,’ and to him it might just as well have been fiction. Nevertheless, I was encouraged, and I applied at many a newspaper office thereafter; but only in a few scattered cases did my fellow journalists show any interest in me.

IV

All the details of my wanderings up to this point are still indelibly fixed in my mind. The manner of life into which circumstances had thrust me was totally new; every little incident was an exciting adventure and made a lasting impression upon me. But now the novelty was beginning to wear off. I had passed my apprenticeship, I had learned the ropes, I had become a professional hobo like any other. The incidents attending the getting of food or the catching of freights, which had once made me glow with hope or fear, were now all in the day’s work; I accepted them as a matter of course. The romance was gone and my mind dwelt more and more upon the hard realities of my situation. I felt more keenly the gnawings of hunger and the biting cold. The accumulated effect of endless days and nights spent in weary tramping about with insufficient food and sleep was beginning to tell upon my strength. The hopelessness of it all crushed my spirits, and my brain seemed to go sluggish and soggy. Urged onward by necessity, I kept going from place to place, weary in body and mind, meeting everywhere the same demoralization of business, until, when I reached the Pacific Coast, I had taken the full measure of the economic paralysis that held the richest nation in the world bound and prostrate.

Even now, as I look back upon it in calm retrospect, I cannot trace the exact, route of my vagabondage during those last dreadful months. The days, painfully monotonous, wove themselves into a monstrous nightmare in which time, places, people, and events were merged in an endless stream of dull horrors. I have tried, in thinking back over it, to bring order out of this chaos, but I cannot. Only a few disjointed episodes remain distinct and clear, like notes of distant chimes heard above the roar of New York’s traffic.

I recall an experiment I undertook in Raton, New Mexico, a seemingly prosperous small city with a rudimentary daily newspaper. I tried to get work in every possible way of which I had ever heard. I applied at hotels, garages, churches, factories, stores, and at the office of the City Clerk and the Chamber of Commerce. I canvassed private houses for odd jobs. There was simply nothing to be had. One hotel was about to hold a convention and there were to be some temporary jobs in connection with it, but the manager would not consider anyone who did not live in Raton. At the Chamber of Commerce they informed me that if there were any work it would be given to local men, many of whom were already listed. And then, by chance, after a hungry morning, an aviator passing through town offered me the price of a meal for carrying his bag, which I did, although I had the feeling that he was merely helping me and would not have had his bag carried otherwise. This was the only job I found, although I canvassed the town with vengeful thoroughness in an effort to convince myself that nothing vital was wrong with me.

I have a vivid recollection of my arrival in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in the teeth of a May snowstorm. Along with a dozen others, I had spent a cold night riding in a box car. We had lain on the floor in that attitude peculiar to hoboes — knees curled up, the right hand between them, and the left arm crooked under the head to serve as a pillow. How I could sleep in a lumbering freight train with the weather around zero, I can’t say; but that is what I seem to have done. My wardrobe consisted of a sweater, a blue shirt, a pair of trousers, socks and shoes; no hat, no underwear, and nothing really warm except the sweater. I remember how we shivered off at Cheyenne. We made for a boiler room and slept right next to the boiler until ordered out.

I remember, later, coming into the Mojave Desert from San Bernardino. It grew hotter and hotter until the temperature reached 120 degrees. There was a road job at Bagdad, between Barstow and Needles, and I got a place working on the bridge gang. The foremen showed no pity for our suffering in the intense heat. We drank gallons of water every day, and sweated and vomited until we were weak. To avoid the sun as much as we could, we started work at four in the morning. Even at night it was too hot to sleep, and I had to give it up at the end of a week. During that one week I saw dozens of hoboes, fresh from the road, eager to try their hand. They had plenty of warning that they could not last, but work was too scarce to pass it up without a try. I saw several quit, deathly sick, while eager men, their noses up at the rumor of jobs, jumped into the vacancies. I have heard about the beggars in Italy, aggressive, dodging labor, but I have seen the American beggar fighting for his self-respect at 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

Every city through which I passed in the South and West was overrun, not only with local men out of work, but with itinerants traveling through. On the whole, these itinerants were willing enough to earn their way, but since they could not they were forced to beg. Hoboes get their food in diverse ways, by asking for nickels and dimes on the main streets or ‘stems,’ by soliciting at private houses, by begging for food directly at bakeries and grocery stores, or by offering to work in restaurants. I often found proprietors of restaurants, large and small, so hounded by these men that they would n’t even let me peel potatoes in exchange for something to eat. Countless times when I applied at hotels for dishwashing or porter’s work, an indignant manager would tell me that I looked young and husky enough to get a steady job; if I offered to explain how hard I had tried to secure just that, the manager always thought I was lying.

Over the Sierra Nevadas, in California, I saw unemployment in its most naked stage. For that is the land of milk and honey, and tales of its mild winters and its golden opportunities had drawn thousands of wanderers from other states. It is also the land of the ‘bindlestiffs’ — old or middle-aged men who carry their blanket rolls on their shoulders and sleep out of doors the year round. The state swarms with them. You can scarcely travel a mile along any main road in California without seeing several bindlestiffs picking up their beds and walking. The Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Imperial Valleys are infested with them. The rivers are lined with their camps. As on the Atlantic Coast, where I saw a double stream of men coming and going to and from the mythical paradise of Florida, so on the Pacific Coast I witnessed the same phenomenon. Every main-line freight has its cargo of West-bound hopefuls or East-bound cynics.

In Modesto I heard that a canning factory was to open the next morning to preserve a large shipment of peaches, the first of the season. The town was agog with the news. I was on hand at 7.30, half an hour early, but so were several thousand others, both men and women. A full crew had already been picked. The bindlestiffs were congregating about the fruit centres to rush the farms at the first sign of a ripening crop. In Fresno, the raisin town, their bedrolls were hanging by the hundreds all around the railroad station and the local water tank.

Urged blindly on, I shunted here and there along the California coast from San Diego to Eureka, in the redwood belt. I stayed a month in San Francisco and then took a trip to Seattle. Conditions, I found, were just as bad in Washington and Oregon as elsewhere. I thought of getting on board a ship, one bound for New York if possible, but many sailors were stranded ‘on the beach’ in every port and my chance of getting a berth was practically nil. So I came back a thousand miles to San Pedro, the harbor of Los Angeles, and slept for a week in a clean box car on a railroad siding. Laborers west of the Mississippi think nothing of traveling a thousand miles for a few weeks’ work. For example, there was a rumor of new railroad operations near Klamath Falls, Oregon; on the Mexican border I talked with laborers who had heard of it and were ready to set out for Oregon at the first word that construction was actually to begin.

I remember that I got a ‘workaway’ on a White Flyer steamer, washing dishes from San Pedro to San Francisco. There I spent a night in jail and almost got a job as counterman in a chain restaurant. Failing this, I hitch-hiked back to Pedro, picking up a dollar in some newspaper office along the way. My nice, clean box car was still on its siding and as I crawled into it it seemed almost like coming home again. The thought released a flood of fond memories, and as I lay on the floor I took sober stock of my situation. For ten weary months that seemed ten years I had done everything that a man could do to find employment, and I had failed. I could no longer believe, as I had feared at one time, that the trouble sprang from some inadequacy of my own character or abilities. No, the fault was not mine. Mysterious forces which no one understood had paralyzed the entire nation, and I was just one among millions of helpless victims. It was no good trying to go on. Without more ado I resolved to return to New York. Three weeks later I stepped off a moving van on the Manhattan side of the Holland Tunnel with fifty cents of the San Pedro dollar in my pocket.

The metropolitan newspapers were full of stories about unemployment. Economic articles were invading the Sunday feature sections and the literary reviews, and even the poets were singing about it. Nobody, however, seemed to know anything about the human side of unemployment. As if a conspiracy were afoot to hide the truth by subtle distortion, all the newspapers referred to the unemployed as ‘the idle.’ Well, maybe they were, but I doubt it. For ten months I was one of them and during that time I worked temporarily in gardens, in printing shops, in newspaper offices. I carried bricks, shoveled snow, worked on the highways, washed dishes, peeled potatoes, ‘ shelled ’ garlic, cooked ‘ hamburgers.’ I was a packer, a checker, a tally man, a mess boy aboard ship. I mixed lime, covered doughnuts with sugar, acted as stevedore on the Seattle docks, planted corn, cucumbers, and other vegetables too numerous to mention. I helped a carpenter build an addition to a small house, scraped a motor boat, tinkered with Fords, fixed typewriters. And between whiles I was always on the move. Thus it was to be ‘idle’!

For me, all this is now a bad dream from which I have waked, but for countless others it remains the grimmest of realities. And as I walk about New York in a good ‘front,’ with neat clothes and a clean white shirt, I can still seem to taste the peculiar flavor of mush and molasses; I can still catch the strains of the ‘Prisoner’s Song,’ hear the pounding of locomotives, and feel the coal dust in my eyes.