Chapter Five turns to the figure of the hobo as constructed by Nels Anderson, a former hobo who became a member of the influential ‘Chicago School’ of sociology. It argues that Anderson’s early writing, in particular The Hobo (1923) and The Milk and Honey Route (1931), projects the hobo as a distinctively American figure, separate from the supposedly European tramp because of his commitment to hard work. I argue that The Milk and Honey Route is crucial to understanding Anderson’s The Hobo. Both books contain a distinctive double voice that not only speaks to their author’s position as a hobo-turned sociologist, but also expresses scepticism towards the project of sociology itself. In making this latter argument, the chapter pays attention to Anderson’s tone and language. Making use of literary close reading, I argue that his early style is distinguished by a voice that mixes different modes, including the sociological and autobiographical, in conflicting and paradoxical ways. While earlier scholars have noted Anderson’s ambiguous representation of hobos, this chapter demonstrates that he was equally ambiguous about the sociologists who studied them.

In Chapter One, I outline a brief history of the representation of US transiency from the postbellum period into the early twentieth century. I explore how the term ‘tramp’ developed as a term of moral and legal exclusion to describe the mobile poor, who were felt to be opting out of the capitalist work ethos. I show that while the tramp had been a figure of mockery in popular culture, during the late nineteenth century the problem began to be treated more seriously by a range of proto-sociological figures. In the early twentieth century, investigators increasingly accepted a connection between vagrancy and unemployment, and representations became less hyperbolic as a result, although no less tainted by class bias. Finally, the chapter shows how the term ‘hobo’, constructed to mean a transient wage-worker, was developed by the IBWA, the IWW and others to fight back against the cultural meaning and legal implications of the term tramp, creating what I call the ‘frontier defence’ of transiency. However, this defence had problematic connotations and exclusions based on gender and race.