The Freedom of Conscription: Tramps Outcast on the Road

In popular depictions from the turn of the twentieth century, the Tramp was simultaneously admired and reviled. Tim Cresswell and Todd Depastino have characterized this multivalence as representing their outsider situation within conflicted responses to emergent mobilities. Tramp stories by Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Vachel Lindsay, and sociologist Josiah Flynt complicated the stereotype, however. For these writers Tramps face a tough choice, either submit to the grueling and dehumanizing subsistence permitted by the labor economy or opt out and take up the free but dangerously marginalized life of the road. Thus, the Tramp road becomes, paradoxically, a pleasure space, educing free-wheeling escape from a blighted system, yet also a prison of forced mobility that lays bare its utter inescapability. Legislators, meanwhile, exhibited no qualms about conscripting the homeless, especially black men, to work on the roads without investing in any means to integrate them into communities where they could get off the road and prosper. Theodore Dreiser would disclose those ways that the paradox of the Tramp reflected deep misgivings in the discussions of a prospective national road system, and he gives the lie to any idea of social progress built on mass disenfranchisement. He was not alone in celebrating the pleasures of the migrant road, yet its repulsive lessons of inescapable exclusion, corrupt governance, polluted environments, and labor exploitation crystallize into a nettling disillusionment that, as proved true for all these examples, was preferable to ignore than address.