Transients created what was arguably the first counterculture in the modern United States, known as ‘hobohemia’. This Introduction argues that hobohemia was a literary subculture, the fruits of which included fiction, poetry, autobiography, sociology, journalism, and popular music, including works produced by women and African-Americans. The material examined by this book, much of which has been forgotten or neglected, demonstrates that hobos were not the all-American, white, straight, male hyper-individualists that they have been seen as by much twentieth-century popular history. As well as laying out the argument and structure of the book, the Introduction argues that Hobohemia was a subculture that privileged storytelling, and that the popular genre of hobo memoir emphasises drift as a key aspect of the transient experience.

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.

Chapter Six focuses on T-Bone Slim (real name Matti Valentinepoika Huhta), a second-generation Finnish-American hobo who became the IWW’s most popular and influential writer. In hisnewspaper columns and songs, Slim represented the hobo not only as a worker, as Anderson had, but also as the revolutionary vanguard of a post-capitalist society. He parodies mainstream and conservative ideas about work, hobos, and the working class more generally. He challenges the common stereotype of hobos and tramps as being unintelligent through wit and verbal dexterity that assumes intelligence in his transient audience. He uses puns, neologisms and dynamic wordplay to involve his readers in the process of making meaning. In doing so, he creates a mode of literary genius that is communal rather than individualistic, and which in turn allows him to challenge mainstream understandings of literary success. The chapter shows how Slim brings his body and the bodies of his working-class readers into his writing by representing hunger as a defining class experience.

In chapter 5, I describe how participants in the 1916 debates used the law of nations as it existed at the time, and the dominion and constitutional law of the British Empire to deliberate the justifications for war and for conscription. The languages of these debates included, for example, arguments about the preservation of White Australia, about the need to protect Australians’ civil liberties, and about the unequal claims made on the different classes of Australian society as a result of the First World War. The persuasiveness of uses of international legal language in 1916 depended on speakers’ abilities to navigate the complications of Australia’s colonial nationalism. Speakers made sophisticated arguments about the duties of the Dominion of Australia to the British Empire on the one hand, and to its own emerging nationhood on the other.

American political and literary discourses in the Great War era were infused with revolutionary rhetoric. In 1912, the major-party nominees for president as well as the Socialist candidate, Eugene Debs, promised revolutionary change.In 1914, many initial commentators on the war, whether Vachel Lindsay or radicals of The Masses magazine, recognized its class-war implications. Even as President Wilson led an intervention seeking regime change in Central Europe, the antiwar Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) sought industrial-democratic regime change at home. While the February revolution in Russia was widely applauded by Americans, the November revolution led by the Bolsheviks sharply divided US opinion. Ten Days That Shook the World, by American journalist John Reed, not only defended Lenin’s methods but encouraged their application in the United States. But counterrevolution held the upper hand in the country, as IWW leaders were sentenced to long prison terms and other radical groups were suppressed in the postwar Palmer raids. Upton Sinclair’s novel Jimmie Higgins both deplored the ill-conceived 1918-19 US military intervention against the Bolsheviks and grieved the loss of a legal, parliamentary path to social democracy in the United States.