A hundred years ago, it seemed as if everyone wanted to be a hobo, at least if you were listening to the radio. Carl Sandburg’s 1927 American Songbag featured a whole section of hobo songs presenting the bum as a beau ideal. Children, most of whom would never see the inside of a boxcar, grew up singing “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum!,” recorded first by Harry McClintock in 1928 and repopularized by the New Christy Minstrels in the 1960s. Along with loads of other songs, it celebrated the paradoxical appeal of the rails and the open road: freedom allied with loneliness and destitution. John Lee Hooker’s “Hobo Blues,” Jimmie Rodgers’s “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride,” and Merle Haggard’s cover of Rodgers’s “Hobo’s Meditation” would become landmarks of the genre. The album cover of Haggard’s I’m a Lonesome Fugitive (1967) depicts him climbing aboard a freight car, a look of consummate fulfillment on his face.

Dreams of a tramp utopia, once termed “hobohemia,” produced classics of Americana.¹ Recorded in the 1920s by McClintock, the rollicking hobo anthem “Big Rock Candy Mountain” envisions an itinerants’ paradise where cigarette trees bloom and streams of alcohol trickle down the rocks. It has since been recorded or performed by dozens of folk, pop, and country musicians, including Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Bing Crosby, Tex Ritter, Johnny Cash, Roger Whittaker, the Highwaymen, and the Nashville string band Old Crow Medicine Show. Its sly salute to sin has become a hallmark of this particular form of counterculture: Wallace Stegner named a novel after the song, and it features prominently in the Coen brothers’ satirical adaptation of the Odyssey set in the American South, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), itself an homage to an earlier hobo film, Preston Sturges’s 1941 Sullivan’s Travels.

The contradictory nature of the hobo, a character without home or possessions who embodied good-natured liberty and a gap-toothed joie de vivre, gave rise to a persistent sense of envy. As a result, Woody Guthrie’s fictionalized 1943 autobiography, Bound for Glory, exaggerated the extent of his riding the rails, and he would lean heavily on the bindle stiff gospel throughout his life and career, disappearing for weeks at a time after telling his wife he was going out for cigarettes. In one song he claimed, “I ain’t got no home in this world anymore”; in another he described the afterlife of a “Backdoor Bum”; in yet another he denounced “Old Man Trump,” the president’s father and Guthrie’s landlord in Brooklyn, for “racial hate.” His most famous song, “This Land Is Your Land,” remains an impassioned denunciation of private property and a hymn to the “freedom highway,” its pointed lyrics encouraging wanderers to flout the law:

As I went walking I saw a sign there,
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.

Shortly after arriving in New York City in 1961, Bob Dylan cast himself as Guthrie’s protégé, devouring Bound for Glory “cover to cover like a hurricane” and identifying so strongly with his mentor that he told a public relations flack at Columbia Records, his newly acquired label, that he’d made his way across country to the Big Apple in hobo fashion as if it were a career qualification. His 2004 memoir recalls the exchange:

“How did you get here?” he asked me.
“I rode a freight train.”
“You mean a passenger train?”
“No, a freight train.”
“You mean, like a boxcar?”
“Yeah, like a boxcar. Like a freight train.”
“Okay, a freight train.”

Dylan was a latter-day fabulist in the mold of Mark Twain, calling himself a “migrant worker” and claiming that he’d once worked for a circus. In fact he rode to New York in the backseat of an acquaintance’s ’57 Impala. Yet in his early days his impulse to establish street cred as a tramp was so intense that he told the folk singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who suspected the younger singer of borrowing from Guthrie, that he had “learnt…songs from various hoboes he met on the road.” Elliott drily noted, “I didn’t argue about it.”

These colorful anecdotes, alongside the hobo songs Dylan began writing or performing (“I Am a Lonesome Hobo,” “Only a Hobo,” and “Freight Train Blues”), are reflections of the conflicted national character already present in Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road”—“Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road…the world before me”—and of course “Song of Myself,” our euphoric yawp to individualism, independence, self-reliance, and the worship of oceanic open spaces:

I tramp a perpetual journey (come listen all!)
signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods….
Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you
You must travel it for yourself.

As with the troubadours who followed, the Good Gray Poet hints that the rewards of the road and its journey to self-awareness may come at the cost of poverty and isolation.

High-spirited songs often cast hobo life as upbeat and fancy-free, but literary works on the theme were likely to involve grim accounts of penury and abuse: in Jack London’s 1907 memoir, The Road, a forerunner of Jack Kerouac, he describes getting picked up for vagrancy in Erie County, New York, and subsisting on bread and water while serving on a chain gang. John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939) were based in part on a series of articles he wrote in 1936 for The San Francisco News, “The Harvest Gypsies,” about the lives of migrant laborers who followed the harvest during the Great Depression. Capturing the dangers faced by these antiheroes as they dodged railroad police wielding billy clubs or ranch managers with guns, these accounts immersed the reader in the subjective sensory musk of the experience: the smoke of barrel fires, the pungent character of the slang, the desperate sweat of a Yankee Doodle strain of nostalgie de la boue.

What these distinctly American stories do not address, however, are the hard-to-discern economic and environmental forces that drove people from their homes and onto the rails and roads in the first place. Historians have long identified the aftermath of the Civil War as the origin, when homeless or wounded veterans looking for employment formed a “great army of tramps.” Some reach back further, interpreting colonial America as a “surplus” population from the old country, sent to the New World as a “solution to…the homelessness crisis of Tudor and Stuart England.”²

The Dust Bowl and the Great Depression have been seen as a major impetus behind the mass migrations of the 1930s, but less attention has been paid to the depression and the dust bowl of the 1890s and the wave of farm failures they produced, their boom-and-bust years signaling catastrophes to come. For that we have Robert Suits’s The Hobo: A History of America’s First Climate Migrants, a modern reassessment of the long road this country has traveled toward climate disaster and homelessness. In this punctilious work, we learn that hoboes were far from the simple stereotypes of the carefree, careworn, or hapless wanderers of song and story. They were, in fact, some of the hardest-working people out there.

According to Suits, the idea of the hobo (the etymology of the word is uncertain) emerged as soon as there were coal- or steam-powered engines. During boom years, migrant workers provided the muscle to serve the massive industrialized agriculture machine that settlers began busily erecting in the Midwest and the Great Plains as soon as they arrived on the scene. Manual labor was essential in what he calls our “climatically unstable hinterlands,” largely because early forms of mechanization, such as horse- or steam-powered threshing machines, left gaps in the system that could be filled only by human hands.

During good years, it was hoboes who were reaping, binding, winnowing, and threshing the American wheat crop. The low population density of the Dakotas, Kansas, and Oklahoma meant there were not enough farmers or resident laborers living in the Great Plains to perform necessary work. While some estimates put the number of homeless people in the early 1900s at half a million, from 1870 to 1930 there were between 100,000 and 200,000 itinerant workers—and this at a time when “migrant work, homelessness, and radicalism intertwined,” Suits writes. Around 1910, 100,000 were laboring in the intensive wheat-growing areas of Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Kansas while tens of thousands worked as lumbermen in the North Woods of Wisconsin and Minnesota. Thousands more worked in mines in Illinois, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and throughout the West. There were few in the South, where white supremacy held sway and labor was supplied mainly by sharecroppers. Hoboes were largely men, although 3 percent were women performing domestic labor, cooking and sewing for agricultural crews or in lumber camps. Small numbers of women also worked wheat harvests—a fact that male journalists found surprising.

Hoboes defined themselves as homeless, migratory, and seeking work. “Chasing the harvest,” they called it, looking to distinguish themselves from “tramps” or “bums” who eschewed labor and were perhaps stationary, hunkering down in towns or cities and presumably begging or stealing to get by. Communities and property owners paid little attention to such distinctions, even as employers desperate for migrant labor begged in newspaper advertisements for hands to bring in the crops or work coal seams.

The moment migrant laborers were no longer wanted, communities turned on them. Suits tells the illustrative story of the hoboes’ shifting fates in the Dakotas and the Northern Plains of the 1890s. The first year of the decade was relatively poor for wheat; 1891 was a record harvest. The following year promised to be even better, with grain fattening on reliable rains resulting from atmospheric lows and with little in the way of hail, floods, or damaging winds. In 1892 the bumper crop was so heavy that employers began panicking at the need for hands to haul it in.

Farmers greeted trains that year, offering “harvest hands” more than two dollars per day plus room and board (women were offered only two dollars a week to feed the men), and for the first time the railroads themselves reduced or waived fares on major trunk lines in an attempt to lure “teachers, businessmen, and even circuit court judges”—hoping to abet the transport of lucrative carloads of grain. That year there were barely enough workers to complete the harvest before it spoiled. Farmers and their hobo workforce produced 70 million bushels of wheat, “one for every citizen in the United States.”

The year 1893 was a different story. A drought year, it was a “nightmare,” Suits says, followed by year after year of drought, the worst period until the 1930s. At the same time, the price of wheat fell owing to a global wheat glut and an economic depression. Once-valued itinerant laborers were cast adrift, dismissed as lazy and shiftless and increasingly seen as a threat to towns and families. Where once “harvest hand” was an affectionate term for newborn babies, “tramps” were now denounced as dirty drunks. Newspapers reviled them in moral terms, hinting at fears that tramp life offered, in Suits’s words, “a haven for homosexuality and nonnormative behaviors” that would imperil women and children. The drought alone didn’t cause this violent shift in rhetoric, but the surplus of workers engendered by boom-and-bust eventually incited violence against homeless men. “The increasing suspicion of the harvest hand,” Suits argues, arose from “climatic conditions and the economic and penal systems around them.”

What emerges as a theme in The Hobo is the sheer nastiness of townsfolk, police, railroad bulls, and farmers themselves in dealing with the “tramp problem,” a viciousness baked into small-town attitudes since the Puritans gave shape to our national identity, with its moral superiority and hostility toward outsiders. “Police turfed hoboes from cars, criminals shot and beat them for their earnings, and on top of all that, farmers increasingly saw hoboes as employees and adversaries rather than friendly faces at the dinner table,” Suits writes. Even when they were working, they were suspected of loose morals and alcoholism.

In 1913 an editorial in The Mirror, a newspaper published by Minnesota’s Stillwater State Prison, described harvest hands who expected “a large drink of whiskey every morning,” two lunches carried to the field, and a “quart bottle of beer at dinner.” Not perhaps unreasonable for people doing hard labor in the fields from dawn to dusk—“killing work,” one called it—but the gracious meeting of these needs by a “Bohemian farmer” suggests how different self-righteous American pieties regarding alcohol and abstinence could be from somewhat more relaxed European attitudes. The writer noted that experienced hands returned to the same Bohemian settlement year after year: “The best harvest hands are hoboes, they do the work; but to keep them with you, they have to be treated according to their standard. The hobo’s idea of a good time is to have plenty of things to drink.”

The volatility of responses to harvest workers gave rise to a movement to unionize. In the 1910s Joe Hill, a so-called Wobbly, took up a popular vaudeville song, “Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay,” and recast the lyrics to promote the Industrial Workers of the World, which also adopted “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum!” as its anthem. In Hill’s version a worker drops his pitchfork, accidentally on purpose, into the cogs of the thresher machine, producing an unholy racket and a work shutdown: “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!/It made a noise that way.” It was an early version of what we would now call monkeywrenching.

Organizing strikes virtually every year, the IWW managed to raise harvest hand wages to four dollars per day in some parts of the Dakotas by 1917, but its actions became pitched battles between town vigilantes, ad hoc militias, and union organizers. Eventually the gains were threatened by increasing farm mechanization and a federal crackdown during World War I, when threats to the national food supply were characterized as antiwar and union “agitators” were swept up and arrested. Despite their obstreperousness and resistance to organization, hoboes were nonetheless involved in most of the major labor actions of their time. “The heart of our trouble today,” wrote one such radical, “lies in our having allowed private ownership in the big industries of the country.”

For many hoboes, wheat farming occupied summer and fall, lumbering the winter, but felling trees won them no respect either. Robert Frost’s early hobo poem in North of Boston (1914), “The Death of the Hired Man,” adopted the farmers’, not the laborers’, perspective, and his ambiguous response to vagrants is evident in a later work, “Two Tramps in Mud Time”:

Out of the woods two hulking tramps
(From sleeping God knows where last night,
But not long since in the lumber camps).
They thought all chopping was theirs of right.
Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
They judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax
They had no way of knowing a fool.

Arguably a bit hulking himself, Frost grudgingly acknowledges the tramps’ “need” as a “better right,” but he keeps on chopping, insisting that his purpose, “to unite/My avocation and my vocation,” is higher. The poet known for his dialogues chooses not to give them a voice.

Suits is at his sharpest when writing about the North Woods of Wisconsin, the legendary Big Woods that stretched across thousands of acres of the great Northland. He grew up among the scars concealed by a canopy of second growth,

wounds that have barely begun to heal…. You can see the past…in how nearly every tree is the same size; there were no old oaks or maples on my childhood street. Each of them, without exception, was not yet a century old.

Eloquent on the risks of felling massive trees and skidding logs down frozen rivers, he dissects an economy that relied on “raw” human kinetic energy to convert forests into lumber, with men functioning as metabolic engines, working shirtless in the freezing cold as they burned off enormous meals of five, six, or eight thousand calories a day. “A 1910 estimate of power use in the timber industry,” he says, “combined with what we know about camp food suggests humans probably supplied around a third of the total power,” itself perhaps an underestimate. Not surprisingly, Suits notes, hoboes often compared themselves to “draft animals,” lamenting the “horse work” they were required to perform.

Such labor was rewarded with disgusting living conditions: bunkhouses furnished with dirt floors, no ventilation, and verminous blankets. Men like those in Frost’s poem took to the roads searching for better conditions. P.K. Small, a lumberjack interviewed by a federal investigator, was missing half of his nose and had broken a hand, a leg, and a shoulder in various skidding accidents but said he dreaded the bunkhouses the most. Monotonous meals of salt pork or salt beef were filled out with bread or potatoes; drinking water was unsafe, with men sharing a common cup; typhoid fever, smallpox, and influenza were rampant. Accidents were greeted with shrugs. “A drowning did not even slow up the work,” according to a lumberjack in Wisconsin. “The drive had to go on.” Another man, ill with tuberculosis, said, “I got to keep on going till I drop. Every night I think I’m going to die.” Broken limbs and amputations were not uncommon, but there was no recourse for the maimed: private insurance policies excluded lumbering, along with mining and construction work. Such men generally ended up indigent, living in almshouses or begging for food.

The land was also broken: “The woodland that built most of the cities and towns of the Great Plains, from Chicago to tiny farmsteads in Montana, still has yet to regenerate fully, more than a century later.” Towns in the Northland with economies once dependent on lumber were left to shift to other forms of income or simply disappear.

Hoboes themselves began to vanish. Tractors and increasingly sophisticated forms of automation took their places on farms, and the North Woods were logged out by 1920. Lumberjacks moved on to lay waste to the Pacific Northwest and the pine forests of the South, and there, too, mechanization began replacing human labor. Successive union strikes helped to establish an eight-hour workday in northwestern lumber camps and mills, but by the 1950s the chainsaw took the place of axes and handsaws, and cars made commuting to lumber jobs possible for family men.

By the mid-twentieth century, the Great Plains were growing “wheat sick,” with yields depleted by years of monoculture. To meet the needs of farmers raising fruit in California and the sugar beets that were replacing wheat in the Midwest, families from Mexico were recruited in the border states, with some moving north to handle the beet crop. Asked by Congress why they were relying on immigrant labor, farmers admitted that Americans didn’t want to do manual labor anymore. Immigrants, meanwhile, found conditions as dirty, dangerous, and exploitative as the hoboes had and were likewise subjected to punitive violence, now embedded in the federal response of ICE.

There is no “clean end” to the history of hoboes, Suits says. Migrant manual laborers still fill what he calls “the interstices of the fossil economy,” the places where human hands are indispensable: they labor in slaughterhouses or in construction jobs or as pickers “in the vast warehouses of online retailers.” In fields, they tend and harvest apples, apricots, avocados, blueberries, carrots, cherries, chiles, grapes, lettuce, melons, mushrooms, raspberries, strawberries, and tomatoes. Yet these workers, “now racialized,” who fill grocery shelves are unceasingly devalued, with Republicans calling for “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” at their national convention in 2024.

The capitalist system that produced and took advantage of hoboes is still visible today in the new hobo camps—tent cities under highway overpasses where the migrant poor, some 40 percent of whom are working (often two or three jobs), find temporary shelter. If today we were to ask, “O brother, where art thou?” the answer would be simple: a car in the Walmart parking lot. Even if you have a full-time job there, at the base pay of fourteen dollars an hour it would be impossible to afford housing or basic needs. Meanwhile, so-called right-to-work laws limiting union membership in twenty-six states have crippled organizations that might once have lobbied for higher pay and better conditions.

Suits acknowledges that the hoboes’ way of life was shaped by agricultural forces that no longer hold sway. But he points out that we nonetheless inherited from a previous century our heartless attitudes toward homeless and migratory workers and the rhetoric we use to revile them. The number of homeless people in the US, more than 745,000 as of 2025, is “roughly equal” to what it was then, even though the overall population has tripled. Yet the contempt for those who perform our killing work remains a testament to the nature of American generosity. There’s no hallelujah about it.

No one, it seems, envies the hobo or the homeless anymore. Dylan, our great troubadour of the open road, continues to lead a wandering life, restlessly touring year after year. He was scheduled to perform in Las Vegas in 2016 when the Nobel Committee announced that he’d won the prize for literature. He said nothing about the honor to his audience that night and did not respond to the committee for weeks. For an encore, though, he sang a Frank Sinatra song, perhaps an homage to his humblest idols:

I’m sentimental, so I walk in the rain
I’ve got some habits even I can’t explain
Could start for the corner, turn up in Spain
But why try to change me now?