Road to Freedom attracted far too many people like that for Sam to hang around long—though he enjoyed the company of many of these eccentrics and remained friends with them throughout life. Those anarchists in Road to Freedom who were not crazy (and to be fair that was most of them) were difficult to organize—like herding cats. Sam had the idea of a regional anarchist convention so that groups of whatever stripe would have an opportunity to express their views and know each other. “Not possible,” said one comrade who liked the idea in the abstract. “The Italians do not believe in conventions and the two Jews are not on speaking terms.”
Road to Freedom was a debating society made impotent by its lack of structure. The place was not for him. He wanted to put his energy into things that matter, such as the fight against Capitalism and the domination of the State. These institutions he felt in his bones. He had no illusions he would be successful, but the struggle was what mattered to him. That struggle was best accomplished through revolutionary unions that had economic impact, that organized workers at the point of production, that had the power to demand changes in the System. Van agreed that Sam was not a Road to Freedom type. “You are an anarcho-syndicalist. You are an IWW, a Wobbly!”
“What’s their address?”
8: With the Wobblies – On the Bum – Chicago
So Sam became a Wobbly—an anarchist Wobbly—the rest of his life. He joined and founded other groups as well, but his sense of belonging, his deepest affection, his love for the IWW never abated—even as the One Big Union faded to a few old-timers such as himself. The reasons were social as well as ideological. He joined as a young man, a “working stiff” in Wobbly terms, sometime in the early- to mid-1920s—his early membership probably overlapping with his time at Road to Freedom. The Wobbly greeting, their term of respect was “fellow worker,” and he found fellowship there indeed. It was his passage into true adulthood and his time of personal liberation.
His early days with the Wobblies coincided with a return to his life on the bum, to the way he had lived when he skipped out as a boy to San Francisco on his way to Shanghai. “I became a migratory worker—a working hobo.” These men worked on “railroads and waterfronts, in lumber camps, canneries, steel mills, factories, farms, construction camps, hospitals, hotels, restaurants.” At the time automobiles were not within reach of poor men, and roads had not evolved into an efficient nationwide network. These men had but a single means of getting from job to job: to hit the rails. They led a hard, lonely life. They were the foot soldiers in the vast army of manual labor that made America run during a time when technology had not fully revolutionized modern life and abject wage slavery was not yet exported to China. Disdained by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), they were prime candidates for IWW recruitment.
Sam explains, “There is a world of difference between a working hobo as a migratory worker and a derelict, a hobo as a non-working vagrant, an aimless wanderer sleeping in box cars, abandoned shacks near railroad freight yards, a panhandler, subsisting on handouts begged from passing people, leftovers scrounged from restaurants and markets”—though at times Sam did some of that, short of panhandling. “But the working migratory hobo is a rebellious cuss.… The lumberjacks, the ‘harvest stiffs,’ the ‘gandy dancers,’ the itenerant laborers and so many other migratory workers who have fought for ‘a place in the sun’ have surely earned a heroic place in the American labor movement.” They were Sam’s kind of men, which explains why skid-row held no disgrace or terror for him.
Neither were the hobo “jungles” a jungle, if by that we mean a lawless place of fear, brutality, and tooth and claw predation. They were simply more or less established campsites near freight train terminals where the men congregated around fires that burned into the night in order to share food, blankets, and human company.
Throughout my years growing up, his hobo life having faded into his retreating youth, Sam would recite/sing this little ditty, with an impish expression:
They flopped in the jungle together,
The Hosier, the Wise Guy, and John,
The Wino, the Dino, the Ding Bat,
The Gazuni was also around…
I forget the rest and never knew who these guys were, only that Sam relished this long-forgotten bit of doggerel.
“People cooperated and helped one another,” Sam always said, and there were unwritten but strict rules of etiquette and behavior concerning privacy, belongings, and food portions. People organized themselves. A good example is the Fraser River railway strike in Canada that began in March 1912, about which Wobbly poet and martyr Joe Hill wrote several songs, including “Where the Fraser River Flows.” By April 2, eight-thousand men were on strike and work had ceased on 397 miles of construction line. The unskilled immigrant workers were demanding strict enforcement of the Provincial Health Act, a nine-hour day, and a minimum wage of $3 per day. The Wobblies who organized the strike were migrant workers. It was natural that the camps they and their fellow strikers constructed to feed and shelter themselves were a more tightly organized version of the hobo jungles. In his definitive book about Joe Hill, William Adler quotes an eye-witness journalist who called the isolated camps, strung over four-hundred miles of Canadian forest, “socialistic, egalitarian societies in miniature.”
Also, remarkable for their time, the hobo jungles run by the Wobblies were free of racism. In The Messenger (a black radical publication) of July 1923, George S. Schuyler claimed that, “There was no discrimination in the ‘jungles’ of the I.W.W. The writer has seen a white hobo, despised by society, share his last loaf with a black fellow-hobo.”
Sam made his way, he said, “by stealing rides on railway box cars, and ‘shipping out’ as a gandy dancer (or track maintenance man, a pick and shovel guy). The railroad provided free transportation to the job site, sleeping quarters, dining facilities, meals and bedding.” Not a bad deal considering the times. But Sam was sometimes a bad boy. “I remember shipping out from New York City to Hornell, New York, near Buffalo, on the Erie Railroad. When we arrived we were given a ‘nose bag’ (lunch to be eaten on the job)…practically all of us would-be employees, ignoring the pleas of the foreman to return, took our nose bags and simply disappeared.”
Work was not usually a scam. The job he most hated was at the Montgomery Ward depot in Rochester, New York. Ward at the time was the world’s largest mail order house. Packages and crates of all sizes were piled high as a small hill in the center of a wide warehouse floor. Radiating from the pile, like the spokes of a gigantic wheel, were lanes labeled for the States of the Union. Sam’s job was to load packages onto a huge wheel barrel, push it to the end of a lane, unload, and return to the pile to reload. A foreman drove him and the other men like horses.
Working when he had to, drifting here and there, Sam immersed himself in the IWW, which has been described by many historians as an organization in irrevocable decline at the time he joined, its back broken by Red Scare persecution—most especially the imprisonments and crackdowns of the Espionage Act (1917) and Sedition Act (1918). Hundreds of men were given long terms in Federal prisons: Leavenworth Penitentiary—“hells 100 acres”—being especially notorious. We must add to that outrage the forced deportations of radical immigrants under the auspices of Attorney General Palmer and his protégé, J. Edgar Hoover. And then there were the “patriotic” initiatives of private citizens: the lynchings and other forms of abuse orchestrated by those with vested interest in seeing Wobblies dead. The McCarthy witch hunts of the post-World