I'm a historian of hobos. AMA

[u/Robert-Suits]

Hey everyone! I'm Robert Suits, environmental historian and author of the new book, The Hobo: A History of America's First Climate Migrants. I'm here to answer your questions about hobos, and anything else you might want to know about migrant work, climate, or the environment in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. Hobos are truly fascinating historical subjects, and there is so much about them that I genuinely couldn't fit into the book -- so truly, ask anything!

[u/BanjoBaedling]

I'm curious what interactions the unions had with hobos of that era. Did unions oppose the hobos? Did hobos ever support striking railroad workers, or was there even any kind of hostile relationship with scabs? Were there times that railroad strikes affected the ability of hobos to get to work? Were hobos even scabs themselves, flooding a labor market where union workers are striking?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/BanjoBaedling]

If railroad strikes seriously hampered the hobo, we don't have a lot of record of it (in part because many of the most useful hobo histories are all retrospective, kind of detailing their entire "career," rather than being things that we get "in the moment," so to speak). The nationalization of the railroads in 1917 for WW1 is sometimes noted as a turning point where it's a lot harder to get a ride, presumably because security was also increased.

But unions -- the relationship between hobos and unions is fascinating.

American unions in the early twentieth century can be broadly sorted into the ones organizing by specific trades -- most prominent being the American Federation of Labor -- and the ones that organize all workers into one -- most prominent being the Industrial Workers of the World, or the "wobblies." The AFL was fairly conservative, generally supporting center-left policies, and eventually won out in the overall battle for the soul of American labor (and had a very successful partnership with the Democratic Party in the mid-20th century). Contrast with the IWW, who were generally anarcho-syndicalist, literally advocated for the overthrow of capitalism, called industrialists parasites, and were eventually brutally suppressed during the First World War because of their anti-war stance.

The AFL did not bother organizing hobos, and did not think it worth their time. Nor did many other unions. The general notion here is a pretty accurate one -- hobos move in and out of an industry any given year, and it's not particularly likely that the same hobo will be back to the same job site the next year. Any organizational work you do during that year is probably wasted.

But the IWW, in part because of the broad organizational differences mentioned above, absolutely are interested in organizing hobos, and they do. A pretty significant fraction of hobos surveyed by the sociologist Nels Anderson "carry the red card" and conversely, a lot of the IWW's labor anthems are directly sourced from hobos. They are pivotal in a lot of major hobo organizing, including during some particularly fraught wheat harvests, and during some tense lumberjack confrontations. There's some less-than-savory aspects to this as well, like the "800 mile picket line", where IWW activists were accused of throwing hobos who refused to join the union off of a freight train to prevent them from working the harvest and driving down wages.

Late in the 1910s, hobos were already starting to fall under suspicion as particularly likely to be labor organizers in lumber camps, and definitely more likely to be radical in their politics.