National transgressions: Representing the mobile, boundary-busting American during periods of major economic crisis

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NATIONAL TRANSGRESSIONS:
REPRESENTING THE MOBILE, BOUNDARY-BUSTING AMERICAN DURING
PERIODS OF MAJOR ECONOMIC CRISIS

by

Deborah E. R. Hanan

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

May 2011

Copyright 2011 Deborah E. R. Hanan

ii

DEDICATION
To James W. McLaughlin and Daniel O. Parr, and the stories their wanderings inspired.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
While writing this dissertation often felt like a solitary and isolating process, I
could not have completed a project of this magnitude without encouragement and
assistance from family, friends, colleagues, confidantes, advisors, foundations and
institutions. This list is lengthy but appropriate, and so it is with great pleasure and
sincerity that I honor their contributions here.
I am grateful for the generous financial and institutional support of the University
of Southern California Provost’s Office, the Annenberg Foundation and Annenberg
School of Communication and Journalism. In addition, support from the Stark
Foundation made it possible for me to research rare and ephemeral archival holdings at
the Newberry Library and the Richard J. Daley Library (University of Illinois at
Chicago), as well as the Smithsonian Museum of American History and the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C. I also want to thank the California State University
Chancellor’s Office, the Sally Casanova Memorial Fund, Dr. Jose Galvan and California
State University Los Angeles for encouraging me to pursue a doctorate and awarding me
an incentive fellowship, research grants and other research opportunities. Without the
above support, it is doubtful that my doctoral ambitions would have been realized.
I owe a sincere debt of gratitude to each of the members of my dissertation
committee. Sarah Banet-Weiser, the chair of my committee, engaged with my ideas from
the beginning, introducing critical questions and challenges that sharpened my focus and
made this project far more meaningful. She also offered effective strategies for managing
its prodigious scope, and suggested a structure for presenting the findings in a cohesive

iv

manner. I am also eternally grateful for her advocacy on my behalf, which led not only to
additional financial support and recognition, but also to my overall success in completing
the program. I also thank committee member G. Thomas Goodnight, whose insights and
genuine interest in my work were immensely valuable and comforting. I admire his
tremendous compassion for humanity, as well as his intellect and commitment to
interdisciplinarity, philosophy and the generation of new ideas. I have enjoyed our
conversations, and hope we will share many more in the future. Before attending USC,
and long before asking him to join my committee, I had followed the work of film and
cultural historian Steven J. Ross, who greatly influenced this dissertation. I especially
want to thank him for his guidance and suggestions, which transformed this project into a
more consequential contribution, and a potentially more accessible and compelling
manuscript for interdisciplinary and general audiences. I am also pleased to acknowledge
the insights, advice, support, trust and respect given to me by Jonathan Taplin, whom I
am honored to call my mentor, champion, and friend. Because we share the belief that the
world-making activities of artists do matter, our conversations regarding aesthetic
revolutions, capitalism and socio-political change – as well as the independent avenues of
art and entertainment, and the intersection they share in American culture – have been
very inspiring. I thank him for his insights regarding this project, particularly his input on
the Long Depression. I also appreciate his introducing me to Bob Kaminsky, whose
contacts at the Library of Congress were very useful to my onsite research. For these
reasons and many more, Jon will always have my utmost respect and gratitude.

v

Thank you to all the archivists, curators, conservationists, reference librarians, and
cultural producers who helped me during the research phase of this project, and who
oversaw the collections I examined at the Chicago Historical Society; The Newberry
Library; University of Illinois at Chicago Special Collections; The Library of Congress
Music, Prints and Photographs, Manuscript and Folk Life divisions; and the Smithsonian
National Museum of American History Archives Center and Special Collections. I offer
special thanks to Martha Briggs and Alison Hinderliter (Newberry Library); Peggy
Glowacki (UIC Special Collections); Sara Wila Duke, Jonathan Eaker and Jennifer
Cutting (Library of Congress); and Lilla Vekerdy and David Haberstitch (Smithsonian
National Museum of American History). I also thank documentary filmmaker Ron
Lamothe for generously sharing his behind-the-scenes experiences regarding the films
Into the Wild and Call of the Wild, and his insights into how the Christopher McCandless
story was re-imagined and mediated for popular consumption.
I must also acknowledge the support I received from Dr. Marita Sturken and Dr.
John Ramirez. Prior to entering USC, I had the good fortune to work with Marita as her
summer research assistant. During that time, we talked a lot about communication theory
and visual culture, and her support and guidance were instrumental not only to being
accepted into several doctoral programs, but also in joining the Annenberg community
and receiving a USC Provost fellowship. In addition, John Ramirez, my CSU
Chancellor’s doctoral incentive mentor, has been a trusted advisor, confidante and good
friend for over seven years. He continues to provide me with professional support,
information and guidance specific to pursuing a position within California’s public

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university system – all invaluable to strategizing my future professional options at this
time of state university budgetary challenges.
Sincere appreciation goes out to all the faculty, administrators, and colleagues
who aided my enjoyment and completion of this odyssey. Foremost among them is my
former Cinema and New Media advisor Anne Friedberg, whom I admired greatly. Anne’s
passing was a great loss to all of us who had the good fortune to know and study with her,
but her influence on my work and research interests lives on to this day. In addition,
Larry Gross not only served on my qualifying committee and provided departmental
support, but also played a pivotal role in convincing me that USC Annenberg would be
the right fit for my interests. Thank you to Dean Ernie Wilson, Chris Smith, Nick Cull,
Michael Cody, Peter Monge, Janet Fulk, Patti Riley, Rebecca Weintraub, and David
James, who all gave well wishes along the way and helped create a collegial and
professional environment in which to work and study. Gratitude must also be extended to
administrators Anne Marie Campion, Christine Lloreda, Imre Meszaros, Carol Kretzer
and Donna McHugh, who make doctoral life at Annenberg so much easier and painless.
My awesome cohort and other colleagues have also been vital sounding boards, and their
friendships have made this journey quite entertaining and memorable. A special note of
appreciation goes out to those colleagues whose stimulating and enlivened conversations
over the last six years have helped influence the direction of this dissertation – Sasha
Costanza-Chock, Drew Margolin, Don Waisanen, and Cindy Shen. Thanks also to
Marcia Dawkins, Carlos Godoy, Carrie-Anne Platt, and Cara Wallis for the good humor
and practical advice they generously offered at different stages along the way.

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Finally, I want to acknowledge the significant contributions of my family, partner,
and friends. To my mother, Dolores McLaughlin Hanan, I offer my deepest thanks and
love for endowing me with the understanding that being an artist does not have to conflict
with higher education – an insight that was never extended to her or any other working
artists in our family. Her decision to pursue a graduate degree late in life, and then enter
teaching, forged a path that I could duplicate and take to the next level by becoming the
first on either side of my family to earn a doctorate. I share this accomplishment with her
and my father, David Hanan, who instilled in me a voracious appetite for knowledge and
the confidence to storm any gate. In every way possible, my partner, best friend and
closest advisor Maggie Parr has supported and encouraged this journey, and sacrificed
incalculable amounts of energy, time, and personal focus in the process. She is a great
artist and intellectual, an editor par excellence, a beautiful and kind person, my number
one fan; and (as everyone who knows us will attest) I am quite fortunate to share my life
and this accomplishment with her. I end by thanking the rest of my posse who have led
“Dr. Rocker’s” cheerleading squad, including my longtime friend Julie Anderson, who
has always been a source of inspiration and was my writing partner throughout the final
year of this project; my writing coach and poetic comrade Adele Slaughter, who got me
through several tough periods of writer’s block; and the rest of my inner circle, whose
keen insights, late-night discussions, laughter and fellowship kept me sane throughout
this whole process – Gary Cross, Diana Flores, Faith Frank, Geri-Ann Galanti and
Donald Sutherland, Vicky Hamilton, Anastasia Hanan, Adesh Kaur, Janeen Schreyer,
and Amy Tahani-Madain.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION ................................................................................................................. ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................... iii
LIST OF FIGURES ..........................................................................................................x
ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................... xiii
CHAPTER 1: MAINTAINING THE IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT THROUGH
CRISIS
Introduction............................................................................................................. 1
Approaching America’s Exceptional Queerly Transgressive Empire.................... 4
Key Terms, Contested Meanings ........................................................................... 8
Operationalizing the “Popular” ................................................................ 8
Operationalizing “Transgression” .......................................................... 12
Operationalizing “Ideology” ................................................................... 15
The “So What?” Factor: Representation and Reality .......................................... 17
The Promiscuous World of Critical Cultural Media Studies................................ 19
Artifact Selection ................................................................................................. 27
Chapter Synopses ................................................................................................. 29

CHAPTER 2: CONSTRUCTING AN “EXCEPTIONAL” IMAGINED
COMMUNITY
Nation as Representation ...................................................................................... 32
Myth, Ideology and the Enigmatic Millennial American ..................................... 38
Geography and Ideology: The “Heretical Geographies” of America’s Nomads . 41
Nomads and Empires: Unregulated Mobility and Imperialism ............................ 43
Transgression as Ideology: Constructing America’s Deviant/Hero ..................... 50
Representing America’s Intersections of Power .................................................. 54
The “Tramp”: America’s “Everyman”? ............................................................... 56

CHAPTER 3: THE LONG DEPRESSION (1873-1893)
Introduction............................................................................................................60
Nineteenth Century Aftershocks: An American Interregnum ..............................62
The Allegorical American and the Growth of Mass-Distributed Media ..............66
Civilizing the Popular Arts:
In-Home Diversions and the American Bourgeoisie ................................71
“Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!”: From Hero to Zero to Men Most Feared....................75
America’s Imperial Horizon: The “Tramp” and Modernity’s Frontier ................80
Averse Virility and National Identity ....................................................................94

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“The Tramp… Exposed!”: Typology and Popular Representations ...................101
Conclusion ..........................................................................................................116

CHAPTER 4: THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1929-1939)
Introduction..........................................................................................................119
Historicizing the Great Depression: “Creative Destruction” and the Nation .....121
Hitting the Road in the 1930s .............................................................................125
Entertainment Technology and the Great Depression ........................................130
Taxonomies of Difference: Social Darwinism and the “Deserving Poor” ..........132
Illustrating the Peripatetic Allegorical American During the 1930s ..................134
Hallelujah, I’m A Bum (Or Maybe Not) .............................................................141
Synopsis ...................................................................................................142
Troubling Terms and the Characters That Maintain Them ................................146
Bringing the “Forgotten Man” Back Into the Fold .............................................158
Political Palliatives ..............................................................................................162
Americans On the Move: Resurrecting the Peripatetic White Male ...................173
“On the Road” Adventures and Masculine Initiations ........................................178
Wild Boys Of The Road .......................................................................................181
Containing the Transgressions of America’s Peripatetic Youth .........................184
Conclusion ..........................................................................................................188

CHAPTER 5: THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS (2000-2010)
Introduction .........................................................................................................191
Cowboy Capitalism’s Rough Ride Into the Millennium ....................................193
Myth and Masculinity in David Fincher’s Fight Club ........................................195
Home, Place and Ideology ..................................................................................202
Losing It: Modern Privileges, Postmodern Subjects ...........................................205
America’s Propertyless Millennial “Everyman” and the Lure of “The Wild” ...214
Theodicean Nightmares: The Allegorical American as Apocalyptic Avatar .....223
Off-White: Constructing
Peripatetic Allegorical American Hybrids in The Riches .......................229
America Up In The Air: Myth as Ideology .........................................................246
Conclusion ..........................................................................................................255

CHAPTER 6: EPILOGUE: MONITORING THE PERCEIVED PULSE OF
A DISLOCATED NATION/EMPIRE ..........................................258

BIBLIOGRAPHY .........................................................................................................270

x

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Themes of Westward Expansion and the Urban Unknown 70

Figure 2: Bonheur, Lenox and Gooch’s “Gentle Faces” 74
Figure 3: Illustrating the Path from Hero to Zero 78
Figure 4: Tucker and Benedict’s “Alone and Foresaken” 79
Figure 5: The Peripatetic American and a New Imperial Order 81
Figure 6: “The Poor Old Tramp” 83
Figure 7: Close-up: “The Poor Old Tramp,” central figure,
W. J. Morgan & Co. Lith. 84

Figure 8: Buffalo Bill Cody – Maintaining the Crisis 85
Figure 9: Close-up: “The Poor Old Tramp,” central figure,
J.H. Bufford’s Son Lith. 90

Figure 10: Close-ups: “The Poor Old Tramp’s” left quadrant vignettes 91
Figure 11: Close-ups: “The Poor Old Tramp’s” right quadrant vignettes 92
Figure 12: America’s Weary and Regretful Wanderers 98
Figure 13: America’s Menacing “Tramps” 100
Figure 14: Pestering the “Weaker Sex” 101
Figure 15: Constructing a Subculture: “Tramp in Mulberry Street Yard”
and photographer Jacob A. Riis 104

Figure 16: Illustrating “The Criminal Out In the Open” 107

Figure 17: A Friend of Labor 109

Figure 18: Cover of Frank Bellew’s The Tramp… Exposed! 110

Figure 19: The Visual Satirist: Frank Bellew 113

Figure 20: Frank Bellew’s Visual Aid of “Tramp Types” 115

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Figure 21: Jack Warren’s Problem of the Unemployed 135

Figure 22: Politically Subversive, Persuasive, and Possibly Foreign 137
Figure 23: Hallelujah I’m A Bum: Acorn, Hastings, and Bumper 143
Figure 24: Hallelujah I’m A Bum: Bumper and June/Angel 144
Figure 25: Hallelujah I’m A Bum: Treason by Reason of Insanity 145
Figure 26: Hallelujah I’m A Bum: Title Sequence 149
Figure 27: Hallelujah I’m A Bum: America’s Mobile “Everyman” 155

Figure 28: IWW Song Handbook: Fanning the Flames of Discontent 157
Figure 29: Heroes for Sale: Theatrical Trailer Opening Sequence 160

Figure 30: Heroes for Sale: The Patriotic Peripatetic American 161
Figure 31: Heroes for Sale: Documenting Mobility, Dispossession and
“The American Way” 168

Figure 32: Hallelujah I’m A Bum: “Cut that radical stuff” 171
Figure 33: Wild Boys of the Road: Eddie’s Dad Loses His Job 182
Figure 34: Wild Boys of the Road: Containing America’s Youth 183
Figure 35: Wild Boys of the Road: Re“placing” America 186

Figure 36: Wild Boys of the Road: Wild Boys, Wild Girls, and the
Fork in the Road to National Recovery 187

Figure 37: NBC Jansing Report: Depression-Era Dorothea Lange Montage 208

Figure 38: NBC Jansing Report: Constructing the Millennium’s Peripatetic
Allegorical American 209

Figure 39: NBC Jansing Report: “Old Glory” 209

Figure 40: NBC Jansing Report: Racing and Erasing Dis“placement” 210
Figure 41: Into the Wild: Revisiting Tropes from the Past 215

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Figure 42: Into the Wild: Casting an American Supertramp 215
Figure 43: Into the Wild: U.S. Flag Cameos 217
Figure 44: Into the Wild: Penn’s American Christ 220
Figure 45: Carnivàle’s Apocalyptic Avatars 229
Figure 46: John “Eddie” Izzard 232
Figure 47: Framing America’s “White Gypsies” 233

Figure 48: The Riches: Television’s American Traveller Hybrid 239
Figure 49: The Riches: Dahlia Reading The Power of Myth 245

Figure 50: The Riches: Marketing the Opportunities Dis“Location” Offers 246
Figure 51: Up in the Air: “This Land is Your Land” 253

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ABSTRACT
This dissertation investigates how embodied tropes of mobility and transgression
have circulated in U.S. entertainment media when apprehensions over employment,
housing, and the economy have dominated the national psyche. It assesses America’s
“crisis in representation,” in which competing ideals of unfettered liberty and sedentary
acquisitional culture vie for dominance within the ideological collective. More
specifically, this project focuses on unregulated white male mobility and transgression:
boundary-busting characteristics that have served as cornerstones upon and against which
an “exceptional” archetypal American character has been constructed. Assessing popular
illustrated, television and film constructions of “dispossessed by choice” Americans (e.g.
“tramps,” “hobos,” “white gypsies,” Travellers, bourgeois adventurers, and carnies), I
discuss the ways in which nomadic white males have been represented as both standard
bearers of an American esprit de corps and principal violators of the nation’s ideological
geographies. I examine mass-distributed products circulated during the Long Depression
(1873-1896), Great Depression (1929-1939) and Global Economic Crisis (2000-2010) as
artistic, historical and political economic artifacts. In so doing, I demonstrate how
representations of the peripatetic allegorical American have reflected a variety of
ideological interests and fostered an ongoing debate concerning the nation’s competing
ideals of unfettered liberty and sedentary acquisitional capitalism.
As an interdisciplinary project, this study builds upon and responds to existing
discourses in media cultural studies, American studies, cultural geography, sociology,
political science and cultural history. Transgressing more orthodox applications of queer

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theory, I explore this critical theory’s application to geopolitics by considering the
“impossible object” of the American project and deconstructing U.S. identity into two
distinct subjectivities. I do this to argue that understanding America’s imagined and
narrated community requires that it be examined through both its national and imperial
symbolic caches. By examining how embodied tropes unique to the American collective
have evolved over time, I am suggesting an analytical model for charting the perceived
health and wellbeing of the nation in relation to the perceived lifecycle of the empire.

1

CHAPTER 1
MAINTAINING THE IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT THROUGH CRISIS
Introduction
The United States is a political experiment founded in contradiction. Reflecting
that contradiction, the American collective has been distinguished by its allegiance not
only to paradoxical ideals (unfettered liberty and sedentary acquisitive order), but also its
late nineteenth century commitment to evolve as both an empire and a stable, bounded
nation. These conflicting influences, which mark America’s “exceptional” status as a
realized yet impossible object, have historically been expressed as a “crisis in
representation” in both the national symbolic and U.S. media products featuring the
peripatetic allegorical American – constructions of a geopolitical subjectivity that have
helped maintain a balance between these competing ideals and agendas.
1
Embodied in
nomadic white male figures such as the “tramp,” “hobo,” “drifter,” “white gypsy,” and
“carnie,” the peripatetic allegorical American has also provided a provisional index of
values and belonging by which both insider and outsider status have been measured.
Additionally, when the nation is in crisis, these mobile and transgressive figures offer a
focal point around which the collective may consider and debate its “exceptional”
identity and its maintenance of competing ideals.

1
“Crisis in representation” is used here to denote the unsettled and precarious nature of American identity.
Prevalent in postmodernist and culturalist discourse, the phrase is most often used to acknowledge the
semiotic and multivalent nature of human interaction and social worlds. George E. Marcus and Michael
M.J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). A construct developed by Lauren Berlant, the “national
symbolic” refers to the “communally held collection of images and narratives [which make] the national
subject or citizen at home in ‘America’.” Lauren Gail Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy:
Hawthorne, Utopia and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 57. A fuller
discussion of the “national symbolic” is woven throughout this dissertation.
2

This dissertation was designed to examine representations of America’s
peripatetic white males during three periods of major transformation and economic crisis
– the Long Depression, the Great Depression, and today’s Global Economic Crisis –
when sedentary acquisitional culture and national cohesion have been at their most
fragile, and the nation’s unique ideological ecology most imbalanced. These eras are also
significant because they coincide with major technological advances that introduced
radical challenges to maintaining the nation’s imagined community, and because they
have been associated in U.S. media products with the beginning, height, and end of
empire.
I have examined representations of the peripatetic allegorical American during
these periods to underscore the incongruous, precarious and unstable nature of America’s
national symbolic and (more specifically) its embodied signifiers. During the nineteenth
century, U.S. mass distributed media’s nomadic white male emerged as curious
personification of a multicultural, rooted, and capitalist society. Clearly, this figure is not
without limits, yet he symbolically became synecdoche for a nation founded on
boundaryless exploration and mobility for every citizen. As such, his construction has
traditionally functioned to maintain a “crisis in representation” by not only interrogating
and confirming the solvency of the American experiment, but also underscoring the
provisional affinity the individual maintains with the collective.
As practiced in the United States, acquisitional capitalism has been the through
line connecting the individual to the collective, mobility to settlement, and transgression
to the norm. In this economic framework, the individual labors for (and engages with) the
3

collective through the symbolic exchange mechanism they both share. In this schema, the
individual’s unregulated mobility within capitalism is both literal and metaphoric. At the
literal level, capital gives access to modes of transportation and the power to wander
without restriction or reprisal. At the metaphoric level, material acquisitions (and the
fixed structures that house them) provide a means by which ontological advancement
(movement) can be charted within the system’s class hierarchy. In this system, the
compulsion to transgress pecuniary levels, push past class boundaries, and strive for
“upward” mobility are framed as normative drives and ideals. U.S. media often reflects
this logic by presenting the peripatetic allegorical American as one whose unregulated
mobility and transgressive impulses cannot be suppressed, even when the system that
enables such acts is perceived as gravely dysfunctional and/or broken.
What I suggest is innovative about this dissertation is its investigative focus on
white male mobility and transgression as the chief constitutive elements of U.S.
“exceptionalism” and identity. Additionally, by disentangling the American nation from
its empire, I am proposing that any consideration of this collective’s imagined and
narrated community must be assessed at the level of both the national and imperial
symbolic. By examining how embodied tropes unique to the American collective have
evolved over time, I am suggesting an analytical model for charting the perceived health
and wellbeing of the nation in relation to the perceived lifecycle of the empire.
Ultimately, this dissertation is designed to stimulate discussion over whether or not the
“exceptional” feature of unfettered liberty (i.e. mobility and transgression) is still relevant
to constructing today’s allegorical American, or if portrayals of such a unique,
4

transgressive and boundaryless character are anachronistic and nostalgically driven in the
context of contemporary economic logics and network environments.
Approaching America’s Exceptional Queerly Transgressive Empire
There is no prospect for revolutionary change in the traditional sense of the word (i.e.
radical, centralized and speedy overturning of the social order). Consequently, we need to
consider more pragmatically how reform is to be achieved.
– Chris Barker, Making Sense of Cultural Studies

En unas pocas centurias, the future will belong to the mestiza. Because the future
depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more
cultures. By creating a new mythos – that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the
way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave – la mestiza creates a new consciousness.
– Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

As a communication scholar, I am motivated and informed by two intellectual
movements: media cultural studies and queer theory. Having spent the majority of my
working life as a cultural producer in music, the communication arts, film, television, and
themed entertainment, my views of cultural production reflect both tacit and empirical
knowledge that what originating authors and creative laborers produce within industrial
economic settings does matter. In keeping with this position, my post-graduate
scholarship has been aligned with and greatly influenced by the interdisciplinary/anti-
disciplinary project of media cultural studies and its central axiom that popular culture is
a site where power relations are continuously being defined, maintained, challenged and
negotiated.
Although this dissertation is concerned with how certain constitutive elements of
American “exceptionalism” have been represented to maintain both a nation and empire
in crisis, I have heeded Chris Barker’s admonition to avoid designing studies that attempt
to “identify the ‘bad’ ideology within commercial culture and the ‘good’ spaces of
5

resistance within authentic popular culture.”
2
I support his proposition that searching for
distinctions between commercial and popular culture is an anachronistic pursuit in the
late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when what is “popular turns out to be
consumer culture,” and “‘cultural resistance’ is located to some considerable extent
within consumer culture.”
3

Derrida’s deconstructionist approach to language, experience and identity, as well
as the French continental philo-political strain of post-structuralism that became
popularized as queer theory in the 1980s, are compatible with the cultural studies
paradigm, and have also considerably influenced my work. While Derrida probed the
deferred meaning and fostered misunderstanding that is engendered whenever an
abstraction (sign or symbolic code) is used to communicate another abstraction (e.g.
identity or subjectivity),
4
philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, along with
post-structural feminists foundational to the development of queer theory (e.g. Judith
Butler and Eve K. Sedgwick), developed critical frameworks that explain how language,

2
Chris Barker, Making Sense of Cultural Studies (London: Sage Publications, 2002), 69.

3
Ibid.

4
Derrida proposed that the arbitrary signs/codes for all phenomena (including identity) reduce that which is
lived, observed, felt, etc. down to an economical and comprehensible synthesis of impressions upon which
a common basis for understanding is built. However, at best, these signs can only crudely approximate that
which they are meant to signify. Thus, Derrida argues that, through the written word, humanity abandons
the impetus to communicate “absolute experience” by turning to the approximations made by those “trace”
elements of signification that lead to the constant deferral of meaning and eradication of the unique
individualized experience. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(London: John Hopkins University Press, 1976), 27-73.
6

taxonomies, and categorical reasoning interface with power to construct various
subjectivities.
5

For many years, I have been convinced that deconstructionist approaches to
identity (queer theory in particular) have been largely underrated for their revolutionary
and revelationary potential, especially in terms of assessing the full range of affinities
impacted by the processes of naming. While queer theory has often been confined to the
margins by its most vocal supporters in sex, gender and sexuality studies, my intent here
has been to develop a study that would “transgress” the limits currently imposed on queer
theory by exploring the “exceptional” construction of a national identity formulated in
hybridity, excess, and infinitude. In so doing, I align myself with the strain of queer
theorists who reject others’ attempts to intellectually marginalize this theory within the
academy. This includes cultural anthropologist Robert J. Wallis, who has argued:
Despite the contemporary meaning of ‘queer,’ queer theory (e.g. De Lauretis
1991; Butler 1994) is not solely about gender relations or constructions of
sexuality. Indeed queer is not restricted to explorations of homosexuality, gender
or sex. It begins by disrupting all forms of normativity…. Indeed, a growing
number of researchers are adopting a queer location, looking towards greater
awareness and deconstruction of our backgrounds in metanarrative and dualism.
6

5
Michel Foucault’s most recognized work on the theory of discourse regimes and the “power to name” is
found in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, in which he reveals the linguistic mechanisms by which
sex and sexual differentiation reinforce the ways that power relations get reenacted across various domains.
Both Butler and Sedgwick built on these Foucaultian assertions, proposing anti-essentialist axioms that are
politically designed to dismantle the absolutism and actualizing power of identity labels. Michel Foucault,
The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books,
1990); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge,
1999); Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004); and Eve K. Sedgwick, The
Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

6
Robert J. Wallis, Shamans/Neo-Shamans: Ecstasies, Alternative Archaeologies and Contemporary
Pagans (New York: Routledge, 2003), 12-13.
7

Like Wallis, I am interested in queer theory’s potential to uncover alternative ways of
being and making meaning of the world around us. At a macro-level, my decision to
focus on the contested constructions of the mobile and transgressive American comes out
of an ongoing interest to contextualize the American subject in relation to queer
theoretical propositions concerning identity. It is also driven by a desire to explore post-
modernity’s ascendancy as late modernity’s “rupture” – a breach that not only makes the
“exceptional” subject a possibility, but also makes constructions like “nation” and
“national identity” challenging at best.
7
Building on my previous research regarding late-
century representations of the taxonomically defiant gender variant in English-language
films,
8
in this work I have continued my investigations into the persistently conflictual
relationship the U.S. maintains with boundary-busting personas by identifying the ways
in which the peripatetic allegorical American has been constructed as one who can fluidly
move in and out of normative culture. By examining these representations of American
identity as they manifest during periods of major national crisis, I want to draw attention
to the subject-related anxiety that all identities provoke because of their precarious nature

7
While “radical modernists” and “extreme postmodernists” have both argued that postmodernism
represents a complete epochal severance from and disavowal of the modernist agenda, I align with scholars
like Anne Friedberg and Jim McGuigan who have framed postmodernism as an inevitable fracture that
occurs in modernity due to the modernist’s self-reflexive impulse to chronically revise and renew. For
Friedberg, the “rupture” is really a “tear” brought about by virtually experienced mobility and sensation, in
which a postmodern sentiment of “being in the moment” (a state without history or consequence) renders
all experience and identification constructed and provisional. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema
and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). For McGuigan, modernity “was
never a single, reified object in any case: there were always alternative positions and internal contradictions
and struggle” that are clearly consistent with postmodernism’s ongoing engagement with the “dialectic of
differentiation.” Jim McGuigan, Modernity and Postmodern Culture: Issues in Cultural and Media Studies
(Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006), 48.

8
Deborah E. R. Hanan, “Unmasking the Invisible: The Construction of Gender Variant Characters in Late
20
th
Century American and British Cinema (1992-2002)” (master’s thesis, California State University Los
Angeles, 2004).
8

and the provisional “place” they provide. This approach echoes Judith Butler’s
observations about identity and its always becoming yet never fulfilled nature, in which
any designation of self involves “an anxiety… a fear. A fear of loss. A loss of place. A
loss of identity. So, even when we have our identity, and we play our identity,
somewhere [we] know that it is possible to lose the identity.”
9

Key Terms, Contested Meanings
Like any investigator interested in examining how ideology informs and circulates
within popular media, I first had to clarify how I would operationalize the slippery
constructs of “popular” media, “transgression,” and “ideology,” particularly within the
context of various discourses, epochs and commercialized frameworks. Towards that end,
I began by addressing the question of what exactly constitutes “popular” at this historic
juncture – a period when the media industry’s construct of the “mass” and “national”
audience has been re-conceptualized to accommodate an ever-expanding collection of
discrete “niche audiences” consuming within a globalized marketplace.
Operationalizing the “Popular”
When it comes to mediated entertainment, “popular” culture is most often used to
describe that which is comprehensible, appealing or accessible to a large segment of the
public. For those whose perspectives align with Arnoldian, Leavisian, Marxist and/or
dialectical materialism, “popular” entertainment has come to designate some kind of
formulaic, manipulative, untrained, or lower order of expression. While openly

9
Paule Zajdermann. Judith Butler: Philosophe en tout Genre, part 1 of 6. [Video online] 2006.
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/judith-butler/videos/philosopher-of-gender (accessed December 12, 2010).
9

embracing this derogatory view of the popular has fallen into disfavor over the last forty
years, it still holds sway within medium-specific disciplines (e.g. fine arts, cinematic arts,
literature, and music) as well as certain communication and media studies circles whose
emphasis is on mass communication.
Among those most associated with this view, and by far the most influential in
prompting an opposing response in the form of cultural studies, were Theodor Adorno,
Max Horkheimer, and their colleagues in the Frankfurt School. Disturbed by how media,
mythological narratives and iconography helped fascism temporarily triumph over
Europe, and equally troubled by the way “the culture industry’s” reduced America’s
artistic landscape down to a handful of standardized and saleable expressions, this group
of European intellectuals developed a political economic framework that positioned
ideology, rather than aesthetics, as a central focus for studying culture. In so doing,
cultural productions designated as “popular” were no longer conceived as an irrelevant
area of study – although, through the dialectical lens of the Frankfurt School, it was
understood as an arena with very deterministic features.
I find many aspects of the Frankfurt School approach appealing: its emphasis on
ideology, the contextualizing of cultural production, and its interest in studying how an
undifferentiated “mass” is constructed through unifying narratives. However, I disagree
with this perspective’s assumption that the less popular, aesthetically obtuse or
inaccessible production is somehow a “higher” and non-manipulative form of expression.
While as a skilled musician and artist I may respond to most popular entertainment media
as products lacking complexity, innovation, or virtuosity, I still argue that it is absurd to
10

conflate widespread desirability and accessibility with aesthetic inferiority, or
(conversely) to presume avant-garde or experimental artistry and its expressions are any
less unskilled, vacuous or manipulative.
At the other end of the spectrum, I have found more recent assertions framing
contemporary popular culture as “the people’s culture” to be overly nostalgic, and naïve
to the ways in which capital has intersected with mediated entertainment for over one
hundred fifty years. With its overemphasis on active audiences, media populism tends to
ignore or dismiss more critical assessments of the “prosumer” subject/laborer,
10
and often
falls prey to the pitfall of correlating simulated activity with civic engagement and
agency. In an attempt to discredit the deterministic auteur and economic theories of the
popular – frameworks that have routinely denied the polysemic and transactional nature
of communication – media populism has tipped the scales of intellectual inquiry in the
opposite direction by encouraging investigative designs that focus on audience
hermeneutics and interactivity at the expense of interrogating originating authors, texts,
and the influence of socio-political and economic contexts on production.

Most
distressingly, many studies informed by this approach have helped promote an overeager

10
A term first coined in 1980 by futurist Alvin Toffler, “prosumer” has since been liberally applied in
scholarly and popular discourses to describe all “new” media users and their activities – from producing
“experiential messaging” and home videos to tweeting and rating manufacturer’s products. However, in
The Third Wave, Toffler introduced the term to describe a new kind of subject – one who emerges after
society returns to a pre-industrial relationship with labor, or a “production for use” economy.
Conceptualizing economic transitions as successive “waves,” Toffler identified the “First Wave” of human
economies to be agrarian culture, in which a “production for use” operated outside a symbolical economy
because the labor done for oneself was unpaid. While the Industrial Age’s “Second Wave” largely replaced
“production for use” with “production for exchange” and/or sale, in the “Third Wave” (post-industrial
culture), corporations and governments return to a “production for use” framework, extracting and realizing
the economic value from tools and information that can turn the public into more productive “prosumers.”
Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam Books, 1980).
11

agenda to declare the “death of the author” – a figure that is still (for better or worse) very
much alive and actively laboring, communicating and encoding messages that continue to
circulate worldwide. Like critical culturalist Jim McGuigan, I too have been troubled and
frustrated by popular culture and cultural studies projects that “drift into an uncritical
populist mode of interpretation” by conflating acts of corporate-enabled media
prosumerism to democracy and progressive interests, while ignoring the ideological
positions that are being advanced through original content circulating in the culture.
11

In this work, I have positioned myself centrally along the spectrum bookended by
these two polarizing views of the popular, arguing for a critical and semiotically
informed, yet non-deterministic approach. Rather than assigning any intrinsic aesthetic or
political value to the category, I use the term “popular” to simply mean those
entertainment products that have enjoyed widespread distribution, consumption or
exposure.
12
Additionally, while I reject the idea that some decisive factor (be it economic,
technological or rhetorical) compels all receivers of popular entertainment to passively
consume hegemonic nutrients fed to them through the culture industry, I also believe that
contemporary techno-economic and socio-political conditions heighten (not lessen) the
need to assess the role played by originating authors and texts in the distribution of
worldviews and the construction of individual and collective identities. Although this is

11
Jim McGuigan, Cultural Populism (London: Routledge, 1992), 244.

12
I acknowledge that “widespread” is a difficult notion to quantify across time periods and various
mediums. In this study, I have used it to identify nineteenth century published illustrated text products that
were distributed both regionally and nationally, twentieth and twenty-first century films that have been
distributed nationally, and cable television series that have enjoyed a minimum audience of 3,000,000
viewers.
12

not a radical or unpopular perspective among critical cultural media scholars, it is one
that has frequently been obscured or suppressed by studying popular entertainment solely
through the lenses of agency, reception and/or meaning making at the level of audiences.
While I do not deny the polyvalent or dialogic nature of messaging, I have
centered this investigation on popular media producers’ “depression-era”
13
encodings of
the allegorical American for two reasons. First, examining the messaging encoded into
original artistic content can yield valuable information about the personal, technical,
economic and socio-political conditions that foster such expressions, and the degree to
which ideological content and contestation can circulate in “mainstream” artifacts.
Second, the economics of popular entertainment operate on the logic that what is deemed
“popular” is that which reflects the emotional pulse of a significant target market or
population. I propose that the kinds of representations popular cultural producers use to
tap into that pulse when the nation is at its most unstable make it possible to chart the
degree to which constitutive elements of a nation’s character can be exacerbated or
subdued to reflect sentiments circulating among the body politic.
Operationalizing “Transgression”
In the simplest of terms, transgression is used in this study to mean the conscious
act of breaching boundaries. As such, it is centrally tied to mobility, making any
discussion of one without the other unsatisfactory. Transgression affirms limits and
confirms possibilities that are not otherwise conceivable within existing borders of

13
I use the term “depression-era” to extend far beyond its more common associations with the Great
Depression. In this study, I use it to denote historic and contemporary periods when a condition of
protracted major economic crisis defines the national climate.
13

knowledge and experience. It is a condition that blurs the distinction between “self” and
“other,” and defines (among other things) trespassing into unknown or restricted
territories and ontological states, and/or compounding two or more previously discrete
and dissimilar phenomena or constructs.
Additionally, in this study, transgression is never “value neutral,” nor is it
necessarily tied to enlightened or “progressive” interests. It is first and foremost a
consciously subversive breach that reflects one’s willingness to exceed (and challenge)
existing boundaries and norms of the worldview that has initially shaped and positioned
them. As such, transgression is inherently ideological. Seen from this perspective, all new
social and cultural revolutions (be they economic, technological, artistic, theistic, secular
or otherwise) involve some form of ideological transgression that articulates a deviation
from both social and political norms.
Over forty years ago, Stuart Hall made the observation that “political deviance
does not figure prominently in the study of deviant behavior.”
14
He reasoned that this was
due to the blurring of boundaries between social and political domains, in which any
challenge to the status quo could be potentially cast as a political act. Focusing
exclusively on groups that gained visibility after the 1960s, Hall identified “political
deviants” as those who maintain socially deviant attitudes and lifestyles, and whose
political aims code their unorthodox lifestyles, attitudes, relationships and activities as
outside the boundaries of normative political conflict. When challenging authority, these

14
Stuart Hall, “Deviance, Politics, and the Media,” in Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove
and Michèle Aina Barale (New York: Routledge, 1993). Reprinted from Deviance and Social Control, ed.
Paul Rock and Mary McIntosh (London: Tavistock Publications, 1974), 62. Citation is to the Routledge
edition.
14

“politically deviant” groups remain marginally positioned, as compared to more powerful
and recognizable subordinated groups. Hall suggested that this allows them to retain
more radical perspectives, because they are not subjected to the hegemonic negotiations
of “reform” to which more powerful recognized groups agree and submit.
15

This dissertation addresses Hall’s observation that the politics of deviant behavior
has been (and, I argue, continues to be) a neglected terrain in scholarly discourse. His
proposed socio-political formulation of deviancy is applicable to constructions of the
mobile white male transgressor as a national and imperial icon around which the political
project of the U.S. has been culturally debated. From this perspective, American cultural
producers’ constructions of nomadic white males as deviant and/or pathetic can be
assessed as socio-political inscriptions of that debate.
16
As contrasted to the politics of
containment conveyed by constructing a weakened, criminal or perverse figure,
alternative representations of the peripatetic white male as a heroic, rebellious
“insider/outsider,” political force, and/or ideological maverick suggest that cultural
producers have also used this figure to advance perceptions that the nation’s uniqueness
lies in its ability to not just tolerate but foster unregulated mobility and fully liberated
minds, bodies, and souls.

15
Ibid., 62-67.

16
Over the last hundred and sixty years, many of these cultural producers and prominent figures self-
identified as “knights of the road,” including Walt Whitman, Jack London, Mark Twain, John Dos Passos,
Eugene O’Neil, Jack Dempsey, Jack Kerouac, Woody Guthrie, Tom Waits, Johnny Burnette, Harry
“Haywire Mac” McClintock, Robert Mitchum, James Eads Howe, Joe Hill, Ben Reitman, Art Linkletter,
Burl Ives, Eric Sevareid and Chief Justice William O. Douglas, among others.
15

During periods of major upheaval and economic crisis, these representations of
social and political deviancy have not only enjoyed great popularity, they have also
contributed to the dual encoding of mainstream entertainment products that, in the past,
have helped maintain America’s “crisis in representation.” As discussed in chapters three,
four and five of this dissertation, the ever-expanding spectrum of these nomadic media
tropes has allowed the mobile and transgressive allegorical American to stand as both
promoter for and detractor against the dominance of acquistional sedentary culture.
Operationalizing “Ideology”
Currently, there exists no single satisfactory approach to examining how
ideological transgression circulates in entertainment media. This is primarily due to the
prominent interpretations of “ideology” that circulate in academic discourse –
interpretations that are tied to more critical assessments of how “false beliefs” become
naturalized to perpetuate inequitable power relations. Despite the term’s revolutionary
origin as a way to explain how the processing of sensory information forges perceptions
of our materialized environment,
17
the most sustained and influential assessments of
ideology’s relationship to media inverts this dialectic, arguing instead that our interaction
with the material environment constructs our perceptions of the world. From this critical
perspective, ideology works to (in Althusser’s words) “ensure subjugation” by assigning
meaningful identities to subordinated subjects – roles that help justify both the power
relations being perpetuated and the material conditions in which subjects find

17
Coined during the French Revolution by the transgressive “renegade aristocrat” Destutt de Tracy,
idéologie was originally conceptualized as a discipline that could not only challenge the notion of
“objective Truth,” but also explain how sensory perception of the world results in constructed ideas
experienced as “reality.” David Hawkes, Ideology (New York: Routledge, 2003), 59-61.
16

themselves.
18
In Louis Althusser’s often-cited model of ideology, media communications
constitute one of five “ideological state apparatuses” (ISAs) that help cultivate
perceptions of reality in favor of the ruling class. From this perspective, ideology is
animated as a stable, self-perpetuating creator of worlds which (through its ISAs)
continually constitutes and reproduces subject positions that can insinuate or
“interpolate” any individual into its dominion. For decades, this deterministic model has
been a prominent decrypting mechanism that scholars have used and debated when
addressing ideology in relation to media entertainment.
In this dissertation, my application of ideology is more in line with that originally
deployed by Destutt de Tracy in the late eighteenth century. De Tracy developed the
concept to describe how collectives’ conceptual frameworks are used to decode and make
meaning of the world around them. As such, ideology provides a cohesiveness of
consciousness that helps stabilize the collective through shared perceptions.
Operationalizing ideology in this way assumes that the construct is not exclusive to a
particular economic system or worldview. It also opens up the range of decoding and
meaning-making frameworks that can be examined through ideological analysis. In so
doing, it can yield a greater understanding of the communicative principles of cohesion
that not only predate complex economies, but also arise long after a ruling elite and/or
geographic regime has toppled, or that center on a perceived “essential” trait or

18
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation),” in Lenin
and Philosophy and Other Essays, Part 2, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971),
127-220.
17

commonality believed to exist worldwide.
19
Finally, by focusing on the function of
ideology in the production of affinities and “objective Truths” – which Destutt reminds
us are non-existent outside the mind of the collective – we are better positioned to assess
the vitality and potential contributions of non-dominant interpretive frameworks that have
developed alongside capitalism, globalization, and the forced containment of labored
affiliation implied in the metaphor of a “net-work” society.
The “So What?” Factor: Representation and Reality
Today, the nation faces many of the same economic and socio-cultural conditions
that contributed to the rise and resurgence of peripatetic populations in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Engaged in another long and costly war that has fractured
the landscape along ideological, regional and color (red and blue) lines, the U.S. is once
again forced to confront many of the same challenges it faced after the Civil War. These
challenges are based on a confluence of familiar factors that have previously gnawed at
the foundations of America’s empire: economic displacement, shrinking resources,
technological advances, perceived degradation of white male privilege, heightened public
awareness of alternative lifestyles, home mortgage collapse, world-wide banking failures,
and mass-distribution technologies that make the dissemination of information faster and
more widespread than previously experienced.
As discussed in chapter five, contemporary media characterizations of
propertyless white males have expanded to include more of what David Morley has

19
For example, consider the interpretive frameworks of reality maintained by the Mbuti (Congo), the
¡Kung (Kalihari), the Sarmatarians (Poland), the Maori (New Zealand), Celtic Travellers (Europe and
North America), Roma Gypsies (Europe, Africa, Asia, Eastern Mediterranean, and North America), as well
as neo-nomads, neo-pagans, queer nationalists, bohemians and transcendentalists.
18

identified as “differentiated mobilities” – forms of mobility conceptualized in terms of
privilege lost and/or abandoned rather than mobility tied to compulsory wandering.
Stories of today’s mobile and transgressive allegorical American often center on the
adventures (and misadventures) of a heroic white male outlier who hits the road in search
of experiences transcending those enjoyed by a newly diversified and clearly shrinking
middle class. Many of these narratives are inspired by the accounts of real-world
dispossessed-by-choice populations whose stories have circulated through publishing,
broadcasting, cable and electronic media’s non-fiction and journalism outlets. Since the
late 1990s, as real-world interest in propertyless living, “new nomadism” and peripatetic
affiliation has grown,
20
representations of the peripatetic allegorical American in
entertainment media have expanded to accommodate contemporary conditions. This
figure’s mobility has recently re-appeared as the “migrant sage” (i.e. a “cyberhobo”
version of Tom Joad) who dispenses wisdom and condemnation of high capital to others
suddenly set adrift in a sea of widespread unemployment and global outsourcing. As the
sainted voice of conditions past, this figure is constructed as the embodiment of an
America lost that awaits resurrection.
As the demand for virtual nomads and digital and/or creative labor migrants
grows, so too does mobility’s connection to entertainment media.
21
While poverty, lack
of opportunity, fear, and undocumented “foreignness” still dominate the news accounts of

20
This includes those identified with the Voluntary Simplicity Movement members, or self-identifying as
mobals, globals, neonomads, technomads, cyberhobos, eco-nomads, RV Travelers, nomadic outlaw
motorcycle gangs, etc.

21
Entertainment properties aimed at the U.S. domestic market.
19

America’s migrating and “propertyless” populations, narrative themes of promoting
mobile, boundary-busting lifestyles are thriving in contemporary U.S. entertainment,
advertising, and the promotional rhetoric of “new” media technologies.
However, while the concepts of mobility and transgression seem to be
experiencing another symbolic renaissance through entertainment and marketing rhetoric,
it is not immediately clear whether the meaningfulness of these constructs still reflects a
collision between dominant acquisitional culture and the valorization of unfettered
mobility and boundary-busting. This project assesses the nation’s historically precarious
relationship with mobility and ideological transgression to consider if these constructs are
currently being deployed in ways that evacuate them of political intent and/or any
“exceptional” national affiliations. If so, I ask others to consider what this tells us about
the ways in which scholars and cultural critics should be approaching transgression,
normativity, identity, and resistance when examining mobility and boundary-busting in
contemporary contexts.
The Promiscuous World of Critical Cultural Media Studies
Recognizing the value that both objectivist and contextual avenues of
investigation have in determining the “so what” of expressive entertainment media, this
dissertation offers an admittedly limited attempt to wed formalist-aesthetic and socio-
historic or contextual approaches. By doing this, I have emphasized the perspective that
the importance of studying popular entertainment media is far more complex than the
story any single trajectory can tell. This utilization of seemingly incompatible approaches
aligns with the cultural studies agenda established by Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, David
20

Morley, Angela MacRobbie and others associated with the Birmingham School of the
late 1960s and early 1970s; as well as the one followed by contemporary media studies
scholars who are trying to bridge the decades-long gap between formalist-aesthetic and
socio-historic approaches. These include film scholars like Richard Dyer, who, in
assessing the ways in which such divisions have stunted cinema studies has argued:
Film studies should include physics and chemistry, technology, aesthetics,
psychology (of some sort), the sociology of organizations and consumption,
empirical study of producers and audiences, textual study of films themselves and
no doubt much else that we cannot yet envisage…. I want to insist that in
particular, the aesthetic and the cultural cannot stand in opposition. The aesthetic
dimension of a film never exists apart from how it is conceptualized, how it is
socially practiced, how it is received; it never exists floating free of historical and
cultural particularity. Equally, the cultural study of film must always understand
that it is studying film, which has its own specificity, its own pleasures, its own
way of doing things that cannot be reduced to ideological formulations or what
people (producers, audiences) think and feel about it.
22

While Dyer’s argument seems to center on encouraging film studies departments to adopt
an interdisciplinary agenda, it underscores the complexities of assessing an art form that
is not only endowed with its own language, codes and conventions, but also relies on the
languages, codes and conventions of other visual, aural and text-based arts. His
observations support the view that any analysis of a film’s encoding should acknowledge
the medium’s its intersemiotic or multimodal nature, and (at the very least) a modest
assessment of how the multiplicity of languages in film can work to support or undermine
what Stuart Hall has identified as the “preferred” or intended, hegemonic meaning.
23

22
Richard Dyer, “Introduction to Film Studies,” in Film Studies: Critical Approaches, ed. John Hill and
Pamela Church Gibson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 7.

23
Hall’s now famous encoding/decoding (or “circuit of communication”) model provides a framework for
understanding how meaning-making can occur at various moments, but initiates at the level of production
21

Although some may see this challenge as something that is specific to the
cinematic arts, in this dissertation I have used intersemiotic analysis to assess how non-
filmic products featuring multiple languages work to simultaneously produce unified and
independent (often counter) messages. For example, in chapter three I apply this method
to popular illustrated sheet music, a medium in which text-based lyrics, musical notation,
and illustration are coded in ways that both support and undermine the dominant ideals of
bourgeois domesticity. I argue that this coding is further complicated by the intended
aural performance of the work – as reflected in the choral arrangement and associated
gender-coded voice assignments.
While intersemiotic analysis can tell us much about the complexities and nuances
of messaging contained in multimedia products, contextual cultural narratology and
iconographic analysis are both useful in revealing the provisional nature of signification,
and how different symbolic codes work to propel the “world creating potential of
narrative.”
24
Describing how contextual cultural narratology is useful to deciphering
media narratives and assessing ideological, economic, and socio-political sentiments
brewing in a culture, Ansgar Nünning writes:
… [A]nalyses of the semanticization of narrative forms can shed light on the
unspoken assumptions, attitudes, and ideologies as well as on the values and

(authorship in the broadest sense) informed by the parameters of a particular medium. According to this
model, when the messaging completes the circuit (i.e. the moment of reception), social and cultural factors
come into play that impact whether or not any original authorial intent (i.e. “preferred” hegemonic
decoding) will be deciphered by the receiver. While I appreciate this model for its contribution to
understanding the complexities of producing messages within an industrial framework, I suggest that
conflating “hegemonic” messaging with authorial intent is an unsatisfying association that weakens this
model’s explanatory potential.

24
David Herman, “Narrative Ways of Worldmaking,” in Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary
Research, ed. Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co., 2009), 72.
22

norms prevalent in any given text, genre and period. Once narrative forms are
understood as socially constructed cognitive forces, narratives become valuable
sources for cultural history and cultural studies, because analyses of “their
narrative forms provide information about ideological concepts and world
views”.
25

Expanding on Anderson’s construct of “Imagined Communities,” Nünning has proposed
a model for narratology that recognizes cultural collectives as not so much “imagined” as
“narrated communities… forged and held together by the stories their members tell about
themselves and their culture as well as by conventionalized forms of storytelling and
cultural plots.”
26
I have found Nünning’s focus on constructivist narratology helpful in
assessing how cultural producers create worlds within a framework of the conditions that
foster them. This approach assumes that, for both creators of texts and the researchers
investigating them, any claims of “neutrality” lack veracity. Rather than suggesting there
is some kind of “hermeneutic (interpretive) closure” waiting to be uncovered,
27
the
critical constructivist views all objects of inquiry and their interpretations as fictive. As
such, the constructivist deciphers cultural narratives as a rhetorical way to not only
progress discussions concerning the maintenance and contestation of power, but also
expose the silenced “excluded dangerous meaning, echoes of resistance, and clips of

25
Here Nünning is quoting Gabrielle Helms introduction of “cultural narratology” as a subdiscipline, and
its interdisciplinary potentials above and beyond the analysis of literature. Gabrielle Helms, Challenging
Canada: Dialogism and Narrative Techniques in Canadian Novels (McGill-Queens University Press,
2003), 14. Ansgar Nünning, “Surveying Contextualist and Cultural Narratologies: Towards and Outline of
Approaches, Concepts and Potentials,” in Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Research, ed.
Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co., 2009), 64.

26
Ibid., 61.

27
Joe Kincheloe, “Fiction Formulas: Critical Constructivism and the Representation of Reality,” in
Representation and the Text: Re-framing the Narrative Voice, ed. William G. Tierney and Yvonna S.
Lincoln (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 60.
23

alternative realities” that are potentially being embedded by cultural producers and/or
perceived by the body politic.
28

When investigating visually laden cultural productions (as I have in this study),
formalists, visual anthropologists, and aestheticians will often approach these artifacts
through methods that are designed to assess their mimetic qualities. In this paradigm,
visual codes are treated as syntactical elements – an approach that helps maintain the
worldview that any concept that can be signified exists as an objective fact, and therefore
can be effectively captured and expressed. However, while understanding the
“grammatical” rules for visual encoding may be useful to the early training of visual
artists and those interested in the efficacy of visual rhetoric, applying this method would
be inconsistent with the epistemologies and concerns identified in this study.
Therefore, to decipher the visual encoding in the artifacts considered in this
project, I employed a combination of visual semiotics and iconographic analysis –
methods that complement the constructivist and contextual perspectives that thread this
investigation together. Using this two-pronged approach to the visual allowed me to chart
what I consider the “open” and “disguised” messaging in these artifacts, while also
providing a means to explore and discuss how intertextuality and cultural climates endow
visual codes with added layers of national myth and ephemeral meaning. Benedikt
Feldges’ work has been useful in this regard; specifically his “Four Codes of Visual
Language,” which provides an organic model of semiotics that not only recognizes the
sophistication of visual language, but also demonstrates how media helps maintain a

28
Ibid., 72.
24

“national visual language” by promoting certain images as provisionally “emblematic” of
a nation’s character.
29

While visual communication does play a prominent role in the artifacts I selected,
other languages embedded in these works required that I utilize additional methods of
analysis. Foremost among these is the text-based and spoken dialogue present in most
film and televisual products. Sarah Kozloff has argued that, as a site of inquiry, dialogue
has long been the ignored “step child” in film and media studies. She attributes the
neglect of dialogue, in part, to a post-sound attempt to elevate the visual over the aural
elements of film. She reads this impulse as a desire to emphasize the medium-specific
nature of moving image media so that the differences between the cinematic, televisual,
literary and theatrical arts appear greater than their similarities.
30

But Kozloff also believes there may be a more insidious agenda operating behind
obscuring the importance of dialogue in film and media studies, claiming it is a reflection
of the overwhelming influence of modernism and “objectivity” over the contemporary
academy. She also sees this as a way to marginalize and ignore what she frames as
“feminine” modes of communication within the medium. Kozloff supports her argument
by first discussing the false dichotomy of perception characterized as “objective” and
“subjective” knowledge. She then discusses how, from the modernist perspective, the
immediate and “objective” act of showing is deemed “superior” to the more time-

29
Benedikt Feldges, American Icons: The Genesis of a National Visual Language (New York: Routledge,
2008).

30
Sarah Kozloff. Overhearing Film Dialogue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 6-7.
25

consuming and “subjective” act of telling. Kozloff contends that this favoring of one kind
of communication act over another ultimately helps reify gender hierarchies:
My argument is that dialogue has been continually discredited and undervalued in
film because it is associated with femininity. To some it may appear far-fetched to
assert that gender stereotypes have unconsciously affected the evaluation of film
aesthetics by filmmakers, scholars, and viewers. But many of the “neutral” or
“objective” discussions of film aesthetics betray just such an undercurrent.
31

Whether or not one agrees with Kozloff that gender bias is at the root of this myopic
interest in the visual, or whether they believe (as I do) that the more easily decipherable
image helps prioritize its importance in schools that train professionals and analysts of a
globally distributed product, it is undeniable that most film and media studies programs
downplay (or completely ignore) the importance of dialogue and sound in audio-visual
narratives.
32
No matter where one is positioned in this debate, the fact remains that all
popular film and television projects begin as words on a page and (in the case of post-
silent era films) include the strategic incorporation of sonic terrains (e.g. dialogue, music,
and ambient sounds) as part of their messaging. This dissertation attends to the
significance of these terrains by considering the ways in which dialogue, lyric, music, and
ambient sound have helped to construct a mobile and transgressive allegorical American
during major national crises. To meet that objective, I turned to my training in textual
analysis and socio-cultural linguistic methodologies, as well as my decades-long training

31
Ibid., 13.

32
For example, a survey of eight cinema, television and media studies programs in California featured no
graduate courses specifically devoted to dialog and/or sound analysis, theory or criticism in their 2009-
2010 and 2010-2011 course offerings. Schools surveyed included USC School of Cinematic Arts and New
Media, UCSB School of Film and Media Studies, UCLA School of Film, Television and Digital Media,
CSU Long Beach School of Film and Electronic Arts, Academy of Art University School of Motion
Pictures, CalArts School of Film and Video, Chapman University Dodge College of Film and Media Arts,
and San Francisco State Cinema.
26

in music theory and orchestration to address the more salient aural moments that inform
this character’s construction.
While all cultural productions included in this study were subjected to the above-
mentioned methods, there was also a considerable amount of attention paid to the social,
political and economic climate in which these products were produced and circulated. In
observing the importance of understanding these conditions in cinema’s representations
and circulation of ideologies, Steven Ross has argued that scholars must include in their
analyses the “changing historical circumstances under which filmmakers and the film
industry operat[e].”
33
I agree, and believe this approach applies to all forms of cultural
production. Nonetheless, acquiring sufficient knowledge of the socio-political and
economic conditions associated with the three transformational periods in this study
represented a gargantuan task for me, as I am neither trained as a political scientist nor an
economist; nor do I have any personal experience or unmediated memory concerning the
Long and Great Depressions. Recognizing this limitation, I found it imperative to
familiarize myself with as many political and economic resources as possible (given the
time restraints involved) so that I could narrate a more faithful account of the eras being
considered and the conditions of production that informed the creation of relevant
artifacts.
When available, the personal and company records, as well as correspondences
and recorded interviews of cultural producers, were also examined. This material often
revealed the sentiments and stated intentions of their creators, their political and

33
Steven J. Ross, Working-class Hollywood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 267.
27

ideological proclivities, and the difficulties (as well as assistance) they encountered in
materializing these artifacts and bringing them to market. These documents, combined
with a foundational understanding of the surrounding political economic climate of each
period, played an important role in understanding the perceptions and responses that
cultural producers, their financiers, and (in some cases) governmental authorities held
towards the production, release, and circulation of the artifacts in question.
Artifact Selection
In a project that proposes to assess multimedia artifacts spanning one hundred and
forty years, six mediums and three national crises, it was paramount to devise a method
for limiting the objects of analysis. This required developing a scope of inquiry that was
not only manageable but also logical (in terms of comparison). I began filtering the
volumes of potential artifacts I encountered in my preliminary research by applying five
criteria. First, the artifact had to feature the peripatetic allegorical American as a central
figure. Second, the artifact’s content had to address American mobility and transgression
in relation to other American ideals (e.g. freedom, liberty, acquisition, choice, and the
“American Dream”). Third, the artifact had to have been produced during one of the three
“depression era” periods central to this research: 1873-1896, 1929-1939, and 1999-2010.
Fourth, the artifact not only had to be part of visual culture, it also had to feature
intersemiotic messaging (e.g. in the form of text, dialogue, lyric, music notation, recorded
sound, etc.). Fifth, the artifact had to circulated through an entertainment media channel
that was prominent during the eras identified, and it had to have enjoyed widespread
28

(regional or national) distribution. Only those cultural products that fit all the above
criteria qualified for the analysis applied in chapters three, four, and five.
During the investigative phase, I also sought out and examined hundreds of
cultural products that did not fully meet the above criteria. This aided in helping me
understand and better position the products chosen for analysis within the greater
repertoire of the peripatetic allegorical American. This part of the study began at local
film and music archives (e.g. the Margaret Herrick Library and the Grammy Museum in
Los Angeles), as well as university and non-profit archives whose holdings are accessible
through the Internet. However, the fugitive nature of many Long Depression artifacts,
and the valuable and rare nature of correspondences and memorabilia related to some
cultural producers and organizations meant that many relevant research materials would
not be available through these means. This limitation turned out to be a major benefit to
my research, because it compelled me to travel to Chicago (the birthplace of Hobohemia)
and Washington, D.C. to explore the vast holdings maintained by the Newberry and
University of Chicago libraries, the Library of Congress and Smithsonian’s National
Museum of American History. At these locations, I was able to access fragile and
uncatalogued materials, and meet with several research specialists, librarians, and
folklorists whose various expertise led me to holdings that might not otherwise been
discovered through keyword searches and the culling of sources cited in previously
published research. After amassing a substantial amount of material from these libraries,
local archives, and online, I narrowed my final selection of artifacts for in-depth analysis
by first applying the previously mentioned criteria, then selecting those artifacts that were
29

most richly encoded with commentary about American ideals and ideology, and most
emblematic of representational trends characterizing the peripatetic allegorical American.
Chapter Synopses
In chapter two, I discuss the foundations of this project, and identify those large
discourses that I am responding to in American studies, media studies, critical cultural
theory, cultural geography, and poststructuralism. I conclude this chapter by anchoring
the project to contemporary economic and socio-cultural conditions that make a study
like this more than a theoretical exercise.
In chapter three, I examine and consider as both artistic and economic enterprises
three forms of pictorial entertainment that were popularized during the Long Depression:
illustrated song sheets and paginated sheet music, illustrated magazines, and illustrated
quartos (marketed handbooks and pamphlets). Focusing on representations of the
allegorical American, I discuss prominent ways in which white male nomads were
constructed as both standard bearers for an American esprit de corps and principal
transgressors of the nation’s ideological geographies. This chapter begins with a
historical backdrop and overview of the period’s popular entertainment media, in order to
familiarize the reader with some of the political and economic grounding that informed
“tramp” representations and entertainment of the period. Focusing on the visual, textual
and sonic encodings in these “tramp” themed products, I discuss how conflicting
sentiments and anxieties towards white male nomadism and transgression were not only
exploited by the publishing and music industries, but also used to document competing
visions of an America in crisis and transition. The second half of this chapter assesses the
30

ways in which “tramp” caricatures potentially functioned to exercise/exorcise anxieties
provoked by three socio-political concerns: political divisions and economic instability,
rapid expansion and containment, and the creation of social scientific typologies for
American “subcultures.”
Chapter four begins with a historical sketch of the economic and political climate
of the nation during its second major national crisis: The Great Depression. Here I map
the expanding “taxonomies of difference” that emerged during this period and through
which various peripatetic populations were represented by cultural producers associated
with entertainment, government, universities, political organizations, non-profit agencies
and self-identified “knights of the road.” While other intersemiotic mediums and their
artifacts are discussed, the primary focus of this chapter is on select films produced
during this period. I analyze the artifacts in relation to further social fragmentation of the
culture through taxonomies that created hierarchies for peripatetic populations. Focusing
primarily on the figure’s most prominent manifestation, the “hobo,” I assess how the
peripatetic allegorical American was constructed during this more mature period of the
empire in ways that troubled the maintenance of America’s “crisis in representation.”
In the fifth chapter, I discuss constructions of peripatetic Americans at the turn of
the twenty-first century, and how mobility and transgression have been constructed in
relation to national identity during the contemporary Global Economic Crisis. I begin by
offering a brief overview of the conditions leading up to and defining the current crisis,
and then consider how national anxieties and sentiments regarding the crisis found
expression in new constructions of the peripatetic allegorical American in the mediums of
31

film, broadcast news, and premium cable television. I assess the meaningfulness of this
figure’s transformation from embodied “everyman” to an alter ego, an avataric twin, a
fraudulent insider, an “American Christ,” and an angelic sage watching over a nation
whose territorial and ideological center cannot hold.
In the sixth and final chapter, I offer a brief but detailed synopsis of the three case
chapters, and thread together all previous discussions into an argument regarding
America’s “crisis in representation” – a crisis that (I argue) has helped construct and
maintain a queerly “exceptional” national identity founded in paradoxical ideals. I ask
others to consider whether or not this representational crisis may have finally met with an
unexpected resolution through the mechanisms of new economic logics, digital
technologies, and micro distribution and niche marketing strategies. As part of this
discussion, I identify the ways in which “new” media enables virtual mobility and virtual
transgression while exorcising/exercising alternative subjectivity, and with it, a large
degree of what defines a discernable American identity. Finally, I suggest how this
research can be expanded upon to examine other ideologically-bound empires and de-
territorialized nationalisms.
32

CHAPTER 2

CONSTRUCTING AN “EXCEPTIONAL” IMAGINED COMMUNITY

Nation As Representation
Arguing that the construct of “nation” emerged when the view that territorial-
bound collectives share some kind of pre-ordained affinity began to diminish, Benedict
Anderson suggested that it is the pervasive power of mass-distributed media that
establishes and maintains political cohesion among spatially dispersed people.
34
This
constructivist approach to the nation as an “imagined community” centers on the
principle that, in the modern era, it is mass-distributed media that binds geographically-
dispersed people by identifying and circulating shared ideals, affinities, values, and other
cultural connections of a collective. In Anderson’s schema, national fraternity spreads
within and is reliant upon mass-distributed media for maintenance, because the “nation”
is itself an abstraction – a “cultural artefact” constructed from images and representations
that must continuously work with and compete against each other in defining parameters
of cohesion and allegiance. Identifying how this understanding of nation differed from
previous structuralist approaches, Anderson pointed to the role that symbolic production
plays in the maintenance of national bonds and allegiances:
My point of departure is that nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view
of the world’s multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are
cultural artefacts of a particular kind. To understand them properly we need to
consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in what ways their
meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound
emotional legitimacy.
35

34
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London: Verso, 1994).

33

While Anderson’s work was designed to historically contextualize and discuss how
capitalism and printed matter (e.g. newspapers and books) helped form and maintain
modern European nations and nationalisms, his model is applicable to any national
collective and its mass-distributed media. This is because his argument rests on the idea
that dissemination and simultaneous consumption of “objects of orientation” and “objects
of affiliation”
36
impose unifying conditions that profoundly impact how spatially
dispersed people come to understand fraternity and affiliation.
37

As Michael Denning, Enric Castelló and others have previously acknowledged,
Anderson’s initial publication of Imagined Communities in 1983 marked a “national
turn” in critical cultural scholarship
38
– one in which analyses of nations and national
characters transitioned from examining territorial and historic “facts” to assessing the
nation as a political proposition. By embracing Anderson’s de-territorializing and “de-
factualizing” of nations and national characters, then reframing these phenomena as
social constructs, scholars were freed to consider the role of popular media and
communication technologies in the forming, directing and maintaining of nationalisms.
This deliberative pivot towards poststructuralism, semiotics, discursive and rhetorical
explanations of nation formed natural intellectual alliances between those interested in

35
Ibid., 4.

36
Michael Schudson, “News, Public, Nation,” The American Historical Review 107, no. 2 (2002): [online]
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/107.2/ah0202000481.html.

37
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 36.

38
See Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004) 75-96, and Enric
Castelló, “The Nation as Political Stage: A Theoretical Approach to Television Fiction and National
Identities,” International Communication Gazette 71 (2009): 303-320.
34

deconstructing the citizen subject and queer theorists – those for whom discursive power,
identity, and subjectivity hold a particular fascination.
Liberated from having to discuss national formations by integrating a priori
assumptions concerning inherited territories and racial, ethnic, and/or religious affinities,
scholars could more productively explore and consider the development and maintenance
of hybridic, post-colonial nations. In so doing, some cultural theorists looked to Edward
Said’s explanations of dispossession and “Orientalism,” Gayatri Spivak’s account of the
“subaltern other,” and Homi K. Bhabha’s applications of “crisis in representation” to
explain the ways in which “Western” representations of “non-Western” nations engage in
a dialectical dance with national character.
39
Others examined discursive formations of
post-colonial “Western” nationalisms (e.g. Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the United
States), in which Lauren Berlant’s construct of the “national symbolic” becomes key to
discussing how a nation’s cache of self-representations are chronically subjected to
expansion and destabilization by competing interests in the collective. For these scholars,
much of the focus has centered on the production and maintenance of the intangible white
subject who stands both in defiance against and as synecdoche for America’s pluralistic
multicultural society.
An example of this kind of research at the level of American culture and practice
is Sarah Banet-Weiser’s The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, an ethnographically based

39
See Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination,
1969-1994 (New York: Vintage, 1995); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979); Gayatri
Spivak,“Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and
Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988), 271-213; and, Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration,
Homi K. Bhabha, ed. (London: Routledge, 1990).
35

investigation of national and international beauty pageants. Challenging the myth that
these pageants operate solely in the terrain of gendered and racial/ethnic power relations,
Banet-Weiser addressed how these spectacles have – through a glorification of
assimilation – been designed to negate any “identity crisis” that might be triggered by
multiculturalism and feminism. Instead of denying claims that the U.S. consists of a
multitude of competing interests, peoples and cultures, contestants perform “some sort of
idealistic resolution”
40
in which diversity is paraded, contained, and ultimately leached
out under the glare of celebrated uniformity. In conflating the female coded body with the
nation, these spectacles respond to America’s “moral panic over the current state of
national identity”
41
by presenting her (the contestant’s and the nation’s) diversity as
immaterial. Banet-Weiser characterized the nationalist functions of this particular
practice as a maneuver that ultimately serves to promote and maintain the United States
as a neo-liberal enterprise:
The pageant spectacularly performs every element of Berlant’s National Symbolic
or a collective national subjectivity: it is a site that constitutes icons and heroes, it
functions as a metaphor for the collective nation, and it offers a classic liberal
narrative as the appropriate life trajectory. In this sense, the pageant represents
what might be called the “political space of the nation,” representing a shift from
the conventional national realm of law and citizenship to a relation that links
“regulation to desire, harnessing affect to political life through the production of
‘national fantasy.’”
42

40
Sarah Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity
(Berkeley: University of Berkeley Press, 1999), 7.

41
Ibid., 9.

42
Ibid., 159. Here, Banet-Weiser is quoting Lauren Berlant, Anatomy of a National Fantasy, 20.
36

Both Banet-Weiser and Berlant have approached the representational “spaces” of nation
in ways that have been instrumental in the development of this project, which considers
the roles of “exceptionality,” mobility and transgression in constituting the national
subject. While in later writings Berlant used her proposal of a national symbolic to argue
for the construction of a reciprocal “queer symbolic,” in this work I suggest that the queer
symbolic – through the presence of a persistent transgressive thread in the nation’s
character – is a prominent feature already marking U.S. national fantasy.
Whereas Banet-Weiser’s work considers the construction of an imagined
American community at the place where the feminine symbolic convenes with race and
popular practice, others have approached U.S. nationalism through the lens of media
representation and the centrality of white masculine iconography in constituting the
allegorical American. My own work also extends and responds to scholarship that has
considered the centrality of the nation’s white male subject in producing and maintaining
a domesticated and/or settled vision of rebellious American identity. This includes
cultural histories and entertainment studies of the iconic frontiersman popularized by
nineteenth and early twentieth century cultural producers like P.T. Barnum and Buffalo
Bill Cody, and scholarship that considers how boundary-crossing frontiersman have
helped define American “exceptionalism” by taming the nation’s unsettled and boundary-
busting spirit.
43

43
Foremost among these are Bobby Bridger, Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull: Inventing the Wild West
(Austin:University of Texas Press, 2002); Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s West: Celebrity, Memory and
Popular History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000); and Louis Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William
Cody and The Wild West Show (New York: Vintage, 2005).
37

For Buffalo Bill historians like Louis Warren, Joy Kasson, and Bobby Bridger,
Cody’s frontiersman (a white man who transgressed past the boundaries of settled Euro-
American life to explore the unknown worlds of nomadic indigenous peoples) embodied
late nineteenth and early twentieth century ideals of the virtuous American male. This
figure made its most prominent debut to the rest of the world at the 1893 World’s
Columbian Exhibition,
44
and eventually, through popular print, music, television and
film, became emblematic of the “quintessential American whose virtues stemmed
through a regenerative nature rather than a decadent culture.”
45
According to Louis
Warren, the symbolic willingness of the iconic American (as embodied in Buffalo Bill
Cody) to both “spring from nature” and “white Indian” posturing to embrace
containment, harness technology and become a colonizing force in his own right,
represented to many “the triumph of civilization and the regeneration of white men and
the white race through frontier conflict and technological progress.”
46
However, while
Warren argues that Buffalo Bill was eventually perceived as a “lost” spirit who no longer

44
While Frederick Turner used the 1893 World’s Fair as an opportunity to announce the
successfulcontainment and modern civilization by Americans of the nation’s untamed frontier (in his
landmark address “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”), Cody was denied exhibition
space and had to position himself just outside the boundaries of the fairgrounds. Performing daily to record
audiences, Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show highlighted the nation’s not too distant past, incorporating
several elements of the nomadic cultures that Cody claimed had informed his own life. For additional
background on and analysis of William Cody’s contributions to America’s national symbolic, see Joy S.
Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s West and Bobby Bridger, Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull.

45
Louis Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 293.

46
Ibid., 226. Also see Linda Frost, Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in U.S. Popular
Culture, 1850-1877 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005), and John Springhall, “‘On with the
Show’: American Popular Entertainment as Cultural and Social History,” History Compass 2, no. 1 (2004):
1-5.
38

symbolized American identity in the modern age,
47
this figure secured an enduring
position within the nation’s symbolic arsenal as a mobile white transgressor whose
allegiance is to sedentary acquisitional culture. Initially portrayed as neither hostile to nor
reliant upon the trappings of sedentary culture, Cody’s character functioned to resolve
America’s “crisis in representation” by portraying the allegorical American as one who
willingly surrenders his transgressive and unregulated mobility for a more mature and
settled domestic order. Warren, Kasson, and Bridger all suggest that it is this construction
of the allegorical American that works to preserve the nation’s imagined community. I
respond by arguing that America’s imagined community is actually preserved by
maintaining (rather than resolving) the nation’s “crisis in representation” – a crisis that
positions transgressive unregulated mobility and sedentary acquisitional culture as
complementary ideals defining an “exceptional” national identity.
Myth, Ideology and the Enigmatic Millennial American
Reflecting on the unique contradictions that merge to form the American psyche,
H. Mark Roelofs has examined America’s “national character” in explicitly
psychological terms. Focusing on the nation’s “political mind,” Roelofs argued that while
ideology and myth can act in “mutually supportive” ways and are equally vital in
constructing a national character, the functions of one rarely overlap with the functions of
the other. During times of crisis, when it can be rationalized that the needs of the
individual should supersede those of the collective, the gap between these two
frameworks becomes irreconcilable. In other words, while ideology operates at the level

47
Louis Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 542.
39

of the individual by providing a structural logic for making sense of the world (i.e. “how
to act or get things done”), myth operates at the level of the collective by fostering social
unification.
48
As such, the purpose of myth is to provide the collective with expressions
of cohesion that tell us who we are and where we stand in relation to the rulers and the
ruled.
49

Roelofs’ critical assessment of how myth and ideology interact to form national
character is instructive for understanding media’s management of America’s “crisis in
representation” and its resulting construction of the allegorical American over the last
thirty years. Describing the primordial underpinnings of this crisis, he wrote:
The Revolution was fought in the name of liberty. In fact, it freed almost no one
not already then free. Its more signal accomplishment was to lock the American
people into a massive mythic, ideological framework of political consciousness
which at once endlessly tortured their aspirations and denied them the capacities
of achieving them.
50

Roelofs concluded that it is this “massive mythic, ideological framework” that holds the
“self” to the “other” during times of major national crisis, and to which media (and other
“system-sustaining agencies”) are most interested in maintaining.
51

Although Roelofs drew his conclusions in the late 1970s, during a time when
media corporations were nationally based and relatively medium discrete enterprises, his
assertion that the “barons” of media react to national crisis by “repersuading us… that our

48
H. Mark Roelofs, Ideology and Myth in American Politics: A Critique of a National Political Mind
(Little, Brown and Company, 1976), 40.

49
Ibid., 32-45.

50
Ibid., 237.

51
Ibid., 137.
40

true identity lies… in our aspirations, our myths” must be reexamined in the context of
the contemporary moment. In other words, is it still in the best interest of today’s media
“barons” to maintain national myths and aspirations when the economic landscape in
which they operate is largely defined by a globalized marketplace and “neo-nomadic” or
“new Bedouin” labor?
52
As Morley has noted about contemporary media and its role in
maintaining the nation and its associated myths:
[A]ny analysis of the role of the media in the construction of contemporary
cultural identities which assumes the existence of a unified and sedentary
population occupying a unitary public sphere, with the secure boundaries of a
given geographical territory, is unlikely to be adequate in understanding
significant aspects of our contemporary situation.
53

While Morley rightly recognized that a shift has occurred in how the contemporary media
landscape has complicated the meanings of “mobility,” the “public sphere” and the
“nation,” he has also acknowledged that the desire to congregate and find one’s place in
spatial territory still remains a prominent impulse. It is this impulse that continues to
inspire cultural representations of nation – representations that simultaneously serve to
articulate transgressive border-crossings by which individuals can understand their
subjectivity in relation to “insider,” “outsider,” “self” and “other.”
54

52
These terms, first appeared in an article discussing the corporate trend towards employing cyber-itinerant
laborers. Dan Fost, “Where Neo-Nomads Ideas Percolate: New 'Bedouins' Transform A Laptop, Cell Phone
and Coffeehouse Into Their Office,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 11, 2007, [online]
http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-03-11/news/17234112_1_bedouins-internet-access-office-depot (accessed
June 12, 2010).

53
David Morley, Home Territories: Media, Mobility, Identity (London: Routledge, 2000), 202.

54
Ibid., 212-45.
41

Geography and Ideology: The “Heretical Geographies” of America’s Nomads
While the scholars mentioned so far have considered the national symbolic in the
routine maintenance of the territorial-collective, critical theorist and cultural geographer
Tim Cresswell has addressed this same interest from the social construction of place and
the “heretical geographies” created by transgressive mobile populations. Arguing that
geography, ideology and transgression form a critical intersection through which all
human interactions pass and are understood,
55
Cresswell has challenged the conceptual
limits of spatial and geographic inquiry by suggesting that the exclusive purpose of any
classificatory system is to define and communicate territorial and/or spatially-defined
power. In other words, by positioning all manifestations as either “in place” or “out of
place,” structure, order and control are made possible.
At the time Cresswell began to explore this line of reasoning, Michel Foucault
had already persuasively argued that all taxonomic enterprises represent the flexing of
power through discursive practice. Building on this position, Cresswell’s contributions
exposed the geographic dimensions implicit in discursive interpellation, arguing that
every power struggle is a contest over who gets to taxonomically position subjects (i.e.
“in place” and “out of place”) within a particular space. Through this conceptual lens,
space (whether geographic, corporeal, or ontological) operates as both a constitutive and
generative component of ideology. An actor within a given space “is inserted into a
particular relation with ideology” which they can either choose to accept as “natural”

55
Tim Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
42

within a particular locale, or “react to [in] a way that is antagonistic” to and generative of
an alternative set of rules and identity claims.
56
In this formulation, ideology acts as a
stabilizing mechanism, but one that necessarily relies upon boundary violating activities
in order to define the parameters and spatial center of the power on whose behalf it
works.
Cresswell uses the term “heretical geographies” to describe those transgressive
experiences of space that simultaneously challenge and stabilize territorial hegemony.
However, as his studies on American and Western European nomadism reveal, decoding
spatial experience as heretically or morally constructed requires representation. In the
modern era, mass-distributed media fulfills this arbitrating “process of reaction and
definition” of space, which accounts for why it “constitutes a rich source of evidence for
[examining] the normally unstated relations between place and ideology.”
57

This dissertation embraces and extends Cresswell’s focus on heretical
geographies and media representation by examining how periods of economic, socio-
political and technological upheaval impact the constructions of unrestricted mobility and
transgression, and their relationship to American identity. My departure from Cresswell
is twofold. First, while his examinations focused on mass-distributed media’s contrived
and pejorative constructions of transgressive mobile populations that have been used to
bolster hegemonic authority, I consider the ways in which media constructions of mobile

56
Ibid., 11-17.

57
Ibid., 10.
43

transgressors have been used to reflect a complex national character.
58
Second, although I
agree with Cresswell that what warrants more examination is the important role of media
in the circulation of “positional ideologies” (or the worldviews that naturalize one’s
subject position within a culture), I am interested in interrogating “positional ideology” at
the level of nation (i.e. the worldview that naturalizes national identity as a subject
position). I also take this approach in order to reconsider the conventional wisdom in
positioning transgression as a marginal aspect within an imagined community, and to
draw attention to the instability of the construct of “nation” when evaluating it in the
context of contemporary logics and conditions.
Nomads and Empires: Unregulated Mobility and Imperialism
How reasonable is it to propose, as I do in this dissertation, that at the core of
American identity beats an ideological heart that is transgressive and nomadic? To
address this question, I have turned to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, whose “1227:
Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine” parsed out core features that define and
sustain nomadic nations.
59
In their attempts to stimulate a “revolution” of dynamic,
nomadic thought and identification, Deleuze and Guattari rejected the assertion of
sedentary superiority and focused instead on the warring strategies that differentiate
nomadic and sedentary cultures. Drawing on the analogy that compares how the strategic

58
Since 1996, Cresswell’s investigations into American and British media representations of “geographic
deviance” have included examining media constructions of hobos, tramps, New Age and Irish Travellers,
gypsies, immigrants, migrants, casual laborers, and Stonehenge hippie convoys.

59
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine,” in A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press,
2005), 351-423.

44

games of Chess and Go are played, they explained metaphysical differences
distinguishing sedentary and nomadic cultures in terms of individuated pieces and their
allowable movements through space. According to Deleuze and Guattari, these are
actions that are over-determined by either intrinsic (Chess) or extrinsic (Go)
circumstances.
For example, in Chess – as in sedentary culture – all pieces operate within a
severely regulated system. As such, the movement of any piece (i.e. individual) is
restricted by a heavily coded identity (i.e. subject position). Thus, all function submits to
the logic of a framework that assigns specific moves to fixed identities – mobility
assignments that are based on the intrinsically defined value of each individual piece. In
this framework, strategizing the acquisition, challenge, or stabilization of power requires
both a central authority’s intense coordination of all pieces’ (subjects’) movements, and
the maintenance of an enclosed territory capable of repelling an opponent’s penetrating
advances on all fronts. Therefore, in Chess (as in the real world of sedentary nations)
movements are informed by established conditions restricting potential outcomes in
advance of any circumstance. Deleuze and Guattari asked others to consider the
effectiveness and refinement of this strategy in comparison to that used in the game world
of Go and the real world of nomadic nations.
In the Go (nomadic) framework, individual pieces are understood to be uniform in
shape and capacity. As such, their movements are situationally or provisionally
determined, and individualization is not conflated with a fixed subjectivity that retains
meaning within a closed system and territory. As Deleuze and Guattari explained, Go
45

pieces (nomads) are individuated through encounters and circumstances; thus; the
subjectivity of any one piece (individual) is mutable. With neither identity nor function
fixed, the nomad (like the Go piece) is always subject to spontaneous, random and
extrinsic definition.
60

Rather than accepting that nomadism represents a more “primitive” system,
Deleuze and Guattari further argued that it is actually sedentary culture and its rigid,
intrinsically defined identities that reflect primitive social formations. As proof, they
pointed to the nomadic principles that have been used extensively to expand and build
empires, capitalist enterprises, and modernity’s “war machines” – arguing that even the
most resolute sedentary cultures must turn towards nomadic strategies if they are to
expand their authority or cope with irrational and/or exigent circumstances.
61

Deleuze and Guattari’s provocations about nomadism and sedentary cultures lead
to the question of how the paradoxical outcome of a stable yet ever-expanding empire can
be realized when the spatial relations that define sedentary and nomadic ideologies differ
so dramatically. As they suggested, one answer lies in the introduction (and
identification) of a non-nomadic yet still mobilized subject – one that acts as cultural
intermediary between these two opposing worldviews. Here, Deleuze and Guattari
distinguished the interactive function of nomads, settled populations, and migrants in the

60
Ibid., 352-354.

61
In relation to this assertion, it is useful to consider how both the Union and Confederacy employed
nomadic, anarchic “swarming” techniques during the Civil War. As a tactical strategy, “swarming” allowed
individual units to randomly and simultaneously converge on a territory from multiple, unmapped
directions, then disperse just as randomly, leaving no predictable patterns that an opponent could anticipate.
See page 99 of this dissertation for a fuller discussion on how fears of peripatetic laborers “swarming”
industrial spaces worked to inform media characterizations of “tramps” during the Long Depression.
46

maintenance of the empire, suggesting that this interactivity is the key to understanding
how the U.S. has maintained its ideological stability since the abolition of slavery and
large importation of Chinese laborers in 1868. By discursively differentiating the mobile
subject according to national affiliation, the U.S. was better able to rationalize its
inconsistent containment of unregulated mobility in a society that was premised on
universal, unfettered ontological movement.
Building on Deleuze and Guattari’s work, anthropologist Renaldo Rosaldo has
further reduced the differences between nomads and migrants to simply those “with”
culture (nomads) and those “without” culture (migrants). Rosaldo maintained that while
transgressive ideology and ceaseless mobility provide a core around which nomadic
peoples can converge, in the case of the migrant, the very process of immigrating away
from one’s culture strips away any unifying ideology that might potentially bind one
migrant to another.
62
Thus, the migrant’s experience is best characterized as the chronic
acculturation and deculturation of an invisible but necessary subject.
To answer the question of how the migrant subject works to resolve an expansive
empire’s imperative to maintain two paradoxical views of unregulated mobility, Deleuze
and Guattari argued that it is first necessary to understand how settled and nomadic
populations experience location in space. They proposed that it is necessary to consider
the conceptual framework through which these disparate populations come to understand
and experience movement. While settled populations experience movement as that which

62
Renato Rosaldo, “Ideology, Place, and People without Culture,” Cultural Anthropology 3, no.1 (February
1988): 77-87.
47

occurs between points of departure and arrival, nomadic populations experience points
(or locations) in space as simply the geographic and social world scenery one encounters
while in continual movement.
63
Therefore, as contrasted to the settled, the nomad views
movement not as a functional activity, but as a philosophical position and ideal.
Nomads deliberately and consciously repudiate the settled life; and their
distribution across the landscape and transgression of settled territories reflect an
ideological refusal to accept any assertions of control, territorializing, or regulating space.
As such, nomadic politics are defined by a complete rejection of regionally defined
authorities, territorially defined nations, or settled and “rooted” ideals, as well as the
pursuits that sustain them. Committed to a life based on heretical geographic moves,
nomads are always engaged in performing ontological alchemy on the construct of
“territory” – transforming it from its sedentary importance as a material fact and resource
into a medium that merely supports the act of moving through physical space. When
comparing the experience of mobility with that of settled and migrant populations,
Deleuze and Guattari explain that the nomad’s relationship with the earth is ephemeral:
With the nomad… it is deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the earth,
to such a degree that the nomad reterritorializes on deterritorialization itself. It is
the earth that deterritorializes itself, in a way that provides the nomad with a
territory. The land ceases to be land, tending to become simply ground (sol) or
support.
64

In contrast to the nomad, the migrant toggles between sedentary and nomadic experiences
of movement, standing as mobility’s crucible – a hybridic figure that potentially dilutes

63
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Treatise on Nomadology,” 380-381.

64
Ibid., 381.
48

any inherent paradox arising from trying to maintain the competing ideals of unfettered
liberty and sedentary culture. Unlike settled and nomadic populations, migrants’ moves
are a compulsory response to circumstances beyond their control (e.g. economic
displacement, social and political upheaval, natural disasters, etc.). For migrants, a life
spent in perpetual movement is neither an aspiration nor an ideal; it is a means to an end
that (in the best of circumstances) resolves in eventually being able to settle in a fixed
locale from which they will not be compelled to leave. The migrant’s politics are always
defined by this desire to “settle” and adopt a subject position that is fixed and visible.
With an identity that is always vulnerable to temporary nomadic and settled
reassignment, the migrant is forced to straddle two diametrically opposed experiences of
movement, thus embodying the possibility that inherent contradictions can coexist in the
service of building an expansive yet sedentary nation.
As viewed through the Deleuze and Guattari framework, it seems logical to
conclude that the more expansionist a nation becomes, the more its commitment to
sedentary culture is vulnerable to erosion. This is because only a transgressive and mobile
worldview can sustain an expansionist vision that seeks to dismantle and/or challenge a
nation’s own (as well as others’) territorial and cultural boundaries. Applying this logic to
the dynamics informing U.S. character since the late nineteenth century, any agenda to
territorially, culturally, economically, militaristically, and politically expand the empire
has required mechanisms that stimulate (rather than thwart) national identification with a
nomadic ideology.
49

David Morley has argued that media content and “new” media technologies can
both play a role in satiating any public’s nomadic inclinations, suggesting that these
mechanisms work to enable the formation of not only the virtually mobile rooted subject,
but also national subjects linked to and severed from a bound and “common” heritage.
Arguing that “communication technologies can function as disembedding mechanisms,
powerfully enabling individuals (and sometimes whole families or communities) to
escape, at least imaginatively from their geographic locations,”
65
Morley has maintained
that contemporary mobile technologies perpetuate the “differentiated mobilities” to
which Deleuze and Guattari refer, and other mobilizing experiences in which the walls of
the settled, the boundaries of nations, and the parameters of difference are all made
virtually penetrable. According to Morley, this immaterially experienced
“cosmopolitanism” strikes a reactionary (nationalistic and/or fundamentalist) chord not
only amongst populations whose interests have thrived under (and reigned) a settled
regime, but also those whose marginalization has been somewhat assuaged by the illusion
of subcultural unity and neo-liberal commodifications of the “other.” While new
technologies may allow for theoretical explorations of experience and worldviews,
reactionary populations interpret virtually transcending a bound, materialized life as only
a temporary suspension of the “physical and symbolic forms of cultural division,” and the
known realities that sustain the logic of being “in” or “out of place.”
66

65
David Morley, Home Territories, 149-150.

66
Ibid., 156.
50

Transgression as Ideology: Constructing America’s Deviant/Hero
Writing just after the events of September 11
th
, 2001, British sociologist Chris
Jenks proclaimed “transgression is truly a key idea for our time.”
67
However, despite this
rather enthusiastic proclamation, the majority of studies involving transgression
(including Jenks’) have been confined to studying behaviors of uniquely peculiar and
profoundly anti-social individuals. As such, historic inquiries into transgression have
devoted a tremendous amount of attention to the atypical behaviors of society’s least
persuasive ideological advocates (e.g. the pathologically criminal and/or “morally”
reprehensible). While sociology has probably been the most productive in terms of
generating research on transgressive “subjects,” its work has overwhelmingly framed
transgressors’ norm violations as largely circumstantial and/or inspired by some kind of
“situational exigency” requiring redress.
68
One explanation for why sociologists have
emphasized these approaches to transgression lies in the influence of Emile Durkheim.
As the founder of sociology as a discipline, Durkheim’s work focused on identifying the
“average” within social formations, reflecting his determination to uncover the causalities
of certain social “facts” that lead to disruptions in solidarity. Originally published in
1893, towards the perceived end of America’s Long Depression, Durkheim’s The
Division of Labor in Society laid out his proposition that industrial culture created
distinctive social divisions, partitions in the social fabric that (when exacerbated) lead to
alienation and “normlessness.” For this European intellectual, “normlessness,”

67
Chris Jenks, Transgression (London: Routledge, 2003), 208.

68
Neil Gross, “Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Twentieth-Century American Sociology,” in Sociology in
America: A History, ed. Craig J. Calhoun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 196.
51

transgression, and anomie were all implicated in one another. His persistent focus on the
“indirect utility” of “normlessness” eventually transformed into an overriding concern
with understanding the underlying causes for social “deviancy” (e.g. crime) and mental
illness (e.g. suicide).
69
These projects greatly influenced the ways in which transgression
has been addressed within the American academy.
In the wake of Durkheim’s contributions, much of sociology’s history has been
marked by work that attempts to identify norms within social formations, as well as the
causalities of deviant (or non-normative) behaviors, in order to design models for “re-
educating” and/or reintegrating normless populations. More often than not, this is the
kind of research that has worked to conceal the importance of ideological affinity in the
formation of transgressive collectives, including peripatetic-by-choice populations. Nels
Anderson’s The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man (1923) is a classic example of
this approach. Although it employed a groundbreaking thick-description method of
“participant observation” to explore the culture and characteristics of America’s “hobos,”
many of the ideological contours of Hobohemia were crushed under the weight of
Anderson’s over-determination to identify and mitigate the “unsettling” problem of
untethered men roaming the landscape.
70
Given Anderson’s background as a self-
identified “hobo” (and his own subsequent mockery of The Hobo seven years later),

this
approach was likely attributable to the direction given by his master’s advisor and mentor

69
Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. W.D. Halls (New York: Free Press, 1997).

70
Although The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man was Anderson’s master’s thesis, its
methodological contribution to the field of sociology earned it the honor of being published as volume one
of the University of Chicago’s famed Sociological Series.
52

Robert E. Park at the famed Chicago School, rather than a true ignorance of the
Hobohemian worldview.
71
Providing a social scientific set point through which the world
would come to understand America’s white male peripatetic-by-choice populations,
Anderson’s The Hobo downplayed the importance of this population’s ideology when
focusing on their “peculiar” and normless characteristics.
72
Among these, Anderson noted
“frontier resourcefulness” as a “hobo” trait that was admirable but lacking productive
value in a modern, industrialized setting.
Although Anderson claimed he spent years on the road as both a “tramp” and a
“hobo,” his studies were endowed with social psychological jargon that positioned white
peripatetic male populations as part of a wider “problem” of technological displacement,
migrant exploitation, and the new economic strategies involving casual labor.
73
By
obscuring the role of ideology in attracting white American males from all economic and
social levels to a life on the road, The Hobo failed to adequately explain why even those

71
Shortly after the publication of The Hobo, Anderson penned The Milk and Honey Route: A Handbook for
Hobos using the nom de plume Dean Stiff. Through the inclusion of commentary, cartoons, and “insider”
tricks and cant, Anderson was very forthright in revealing Hobohemia’s more bohemian and counter-public
features, while overtly critiquing the The Hobo’s failure to capture and paint a “true picture” of these
knights of the road. Dean Stiff, The Milk and Honey Route (New York: Vanguard, 1931).

72
These included embracing a fully nomadic, anarcho-libertarian, anti-sedentary and anti-acquisitional
lifestyle. This was reflected in Hobohemia’s glorification of masculinity, hard physical labor, and
subsistence or exchange economies. Perhaps the most socially challenging feature of this population’s
worldview was its embrace of master/initiate bonds, reflected in sexual rites of bodily penetration and
mono-gendered life commitments between older “hobo” jockers and their young punk initiates.
Hobohemia’s ability to distinguish sexed, sexual and gender identities from sexual acts directly contested
dominant culture’s conflation of sex, gender and sexuality – a biologically deterministic worldview that
arose at the end of the nineteenth century and dominated Western culture through most of the twentieth
century.

73
Noel Iverson, “Nels Anderson: A Profile,” Labour/La Travail 63 (Spring, 2009): 181-205, [online]
http://www.allbusiness.com/education-training/teaching-teachers-college/12349721-1.html (accessed
September 27, 2010).
53

with certain privileged economic and cultural status succumbed to “wanderlust” and
consciously transgressed norms that could support their heightened position in the
culture.
74
Anderson addressed these ideological omissions in subsequent writings,
including his autobiography The American Hobo, but not until his findings in The Hobo
had become “certified as expert knowledge.”
75
Ultimately, the “facts” contained in The
Hobo were used by government agencies and progressive reform movements to attract
public support for programs aimed at curbing “vagrancy” (i.e. wandering beggary) and
urbanity’s growing “homeless” problem. According to McCallum, The Hobo’s promotion
of a taxonomy that could reduce America’s white nomadic males to the social
scientifically contrived categories of “tramp,” “hobo” and “bum” not only progressed the
interests of an emerging sociological marketplace, but also installed this “triptych into the
‘common sense’ logic” of how to understand American nomadism today.
76

Once “vagrancy” with all its lamentable associations got attached to America’s
mobile white males, other characterizations were ascribed to them as well –
characterizations that, to varying degrees, persist today (e.g. shiftlessness, alcoholism,
drug abuse, predatory sexuality, violence, treason, criminality, emotional and mental
illness). As this dissertation discusses, these unflattering constructions were further
perpetuated by late nineteenth century social reformers like documentary photographer

74
As members with some inherent privileged status, perhaps the hobo’s primary transgression (and threat)
was his willingness to step outside the boundaries of his “insider” status.

75
Todd McCallum, “The Tramp is Back,” Labour/Le Travail (Fall 2005): [online]
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/llt/56/mccallum.html (accessed October 1 2010).

76
Ibid., par. 6.
54

Jacob Riis and sociologist-turned-journalist Josiah Flynt Willard, who helped create the
more pejorative characterizations of white American nomadism during the Long
Depression.
Representing America’s Intersections of Power
Cultural identity is inseparable from limits, it is always a boundary phenomenon and its
order is always constructed around the figures of its territorial edge.
– Peter Stallybrass & Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression

As confirmed by the work of Banet-Weiser, Berlant, Warren, and cultural
historians John Higham, Jackson Lears, and numerous others referenced in this study, it
is far from groundbreaking for me to argue that the allegorical American is a figure
around which the tropes of liberty, mobility, power, race, and gender all coalesce to form
a personified national identity. While Banet-Weiser’s work contributed to understanding
how the above matrix of tropes expanded America’s “national symbolic” during the
ascendancy of neoliberalism – a period when assimilation narratives of marginalized
gender and ethnic populations became representative of the nation’s unique promise –
others have focused on how cultural producers used the above personifying matrix to
discursively produce and maintain an American empire.
For example, in “America in Person: The Evolution of National Symbols,” John
Higham examined the personifying tropes in America’s national symbolic in order to
map the symbolic trajectory of the allegorical American from the nineteenth century into
the contemporary moment. In so doing, he revealed how the white female signifier of
Lady Liberty was displaced by George Washington – the less than satisfying (and
therefore short-lived) white male signifier of American heroism and stoicism – which
55

then ceded ground (in the illustrating hands of Thomas Nast and Frank Bellew) to the
more aggressive, enterprising, acquisitional “everyman,” Uncle Sam. In assessing the
meaningfulness of these transformations to the representations of an American empire
and a modern national spirit, Higham wrote:
By personifying universal, unchanging principles and the enduring bonds of
humanity, female symbols made Americans aware of the connections between the
nation-state and all of humanity, or between the nation and God or the nation and
family. Males on the other hand, characteristically symbolized great deeds,
achievements, initiatives. They dramatized action and change rather than
universal principles. They embodied the power of government and the active
propensities of the people….

All in all, Washington’s lasting achievement was the building of a national state.
For the project of molding a national character his image was far less
efficacious…. Where he appeared selfless and abnegating, Americans in the large
were acquisitive and aggressive. Where he stood for harmony and mediation,
theirs was a culture of enterprise and contention. Where he was rooted, they were
mobile. Washington had personified the male side of America magnificently in a
patrician age, when an elite culture still functioned as an integrative force in
society and supplied the lifeblood of an emerging nationalism. By Jacksonian
times, however, Americans wanted not just an exemplary hero towering above
them but an incarnation of the people, flaunting their rough edges and rejoicing in
their gritty vitality.
77

Other scholars, like Jackson Lears, have contributed to a broader understanding of
how liberty, mobility, power, race, gender have intersected with qualities like religion to
inform a personified U.S. nationalism in the modern era. Assessing representations that
circulated during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lears concluded that
newly introduced discourses and iconography helped shape an allegorical American that
could reflect the “rising significance of race” and “muscular Christianity” popularized in

77
John Higham, Hanging Together: Unity and Diversity in American Culture, ed. Carl J. Guarneri (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 35-39.
56

the U.S. during these periods. Lears argued that nationalistic imperatives appearing
during America’s Gilded Age were inspired by a reactionary desire to build a “racially
purified” male-identified polity in which “being an American’ increasingly came to mean
being a Caucasian,”

and a physically vital “white manhood” could reassert itself “against
the enervating impact of a desk-bound existence.”
78

Privileged by race and gender, the peripatetic white male is able to transgress both
geographic and social space in exceptional ways. Thus, from the founding of the
Republic, he has embodied the evanescent qualities of freedom and independence that
have not only distinguished the American experience but also fueled the U.S. economy.
However, as a repudiator of sedentary acquisitional culture, this figure has often been
conceived as the literal “bogeyman” threatening the white middle-class and its
dominance over American ideals and values.
79
Framed as a liminal figure in relation to
racialized and gendered American privilege, white male “tramps” and their offspring (e.g.
“hobos,” “drifters,” “wanderers,” etc.) have presented an alternate understanding of the
national spirit – one that is not affiliated with domestication, gentility and/or consumer
identification.
The “Tramp”: America’s “Everyman”?
I begin my analysis of popular representations of the peripatetic allegorical
American as he emerged from the Civil War, when the nascent empire entered its first

78
Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (New York:
HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), 94-95.

79
Douglas and Hoschna described the peripatetic wanderer in just such terms, in their popular 1907 song
The Hobo Man. See page 80 of this dissertation.
57

major transformational crisis – a period known as the Long Depression. It was during this
twenty-three year period (1873-1896) that the American “tramp” first entered the public’s
imagination through the mechanism of mass-distributed media.
80

As discussed in chapter three, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, an
aspiring U.S. empire endured a crisis of cataclysmic proportions. Years of a costly
military engagement, a failing economy (i.e. the 1873 Depression), unabated and ever-
growing socio-cultural divisions and hostilities between agrarian and industrial regions –
as well as the introduction of new production technologies and methods of transportation
– fragmented a North American polity that had been attempting to forge a nation from
several “united” states for over one hundred years. Among the most visible flotsam and
jetsam created by these conditions were ex-confederate and union soldiers –men who had
developed a unique sense of material impermanence and social detachment after
spending several years in outdoor encampments among mono-gender battalions.
Discharged from service with little or no governmental support, these men formed the
vanguard of America’s suddenly significant “strolling” and “propertyless” poor
81
– those
legions of the newly categorized “unemployed” forced to “tramp” America’s vast
landscape in search of work, food, and temporary shelter.
82
As ex-soldiering migrants,

80
Thomas identifies this media-instigated conflict as America’s first convincing projection of a colonizing
power – an event which (he says) his fellow historians have alternatively referred to “as a blow for empire;
as an act of economic aggression; as a bid for post-Civil War reconciliation; as the expression of gender
insecurity; and as a kind of national psychic outburst.” Evan Thomas, The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge,
Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898 (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010), 13.

81
Todd DePastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2003), 5-17.

82
Tim Cresswell, The Tramp in America (London: Reaktion Books, 2001).
58

they took to the roads and hopped the nation’s new rail system by the thousands, largely
in search of subsistence work as temporary agrarian laborers.
Alienated from an ascendant industrial order, these “bachelors of the road”
eventually became a united federation unto themselves – one that would advance an
alternative ideology to the one promulgated by America’s emerging bourgeoisie.
Identified and then marginalized as a subculture that provided a subject position that
many would later embrace, these men developed a worldview that merged principles of
anarcho-libertarianism and libertarian socialism. They also developed and maintained a
lifestyle premised in unregulated mobility, hard labor, hyper-masculinity, anti-
acquisition, and political, social and sexual transgressivity.
Popular accounts of the nation’s first “precariat” populations,
83
which were
labeled a “subculture” by dominant interests, helped construct and establish the category
“tramp” and (towards the end of the nineteenth century) “hobo” in the public imaginary –
two hotly contested classifications whose interchangeability (by the press and others) was
vigorously challenged. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, unattached white
peripatetic males became increasingly represented in mass-distributed media as marginal

83
A fairly recent identity to enter American academic discourse, “precariat” is a word that merges the
notion of precariousness with the status of held by the “flexible,” temporary and/or exploited laborer. In
2007, journalist Toshihiko Ueno was among several published observers to wrongly identify the term as a
“new Japanese word” used to signal globalization’s impact on Japan’s 51 million and growing “nonregular
contract employees.” Toshihiko Ueno, “‘Precariat’ workers are starting to fight for a little stability,” The
Japan Times (June 21, 2007): http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20070621f2.html. However, the
word actually originates in Europe among anti-globalization and anti-neoliberal activists and French
sociologists, who, in the wake of the “supposed ruins of the European welfare state, used la précarité to
identify the “unprotected temporary or seasonal workers as a new social class” – a class separate and
distinguishable from working (sedentary) poor and persistently unemployed populations. Mika Lahaque-
Manty, “Finding Theoretical Concepts in the Real World: The Case of the Precariat,” in New Waves in
Political Philosophy, eds. Boudewijn de Bruin and Christopher F. Zurn (London: Palgrave MacMillan,
2009), 105-106.
59

outliers whose flexible lifestyles made them ripe for narrative and political exploitation.
As a result, any ideological resistance they held towards domesticity, acquisition and
geographic fixity was subjected to idealization and romanticizing, as well as vilifying and
pathologizing through popular media and emergent mass distribution technologies.
Caricatures of America’s white nomadic populations reflected a national spirit
that was compatible with unsheltered living, fleeting economic opportunities, and the
hierarchical advantages of physical strength and eroticized aggression. Embodied in the
American “tramp,” these marginal men appeared as those who could undermine as well
as underwrite a geographically, economically, culturally and ideologically stable empire.
It is this white nomadic figure, which first emerged during the Long Depression, which
has informed all subsequent representations of the peripatetic allegorical American.
60

CHAPTER 3
THE LONG DEPRESSION (1873-1896)
Introduction
On the one hand America declares itself a land of freedom and opportunity, a
country which guarantees each person’s right to be different, to rise above the
crowd, to become uncommon. On the other it declares all its citizens equal: no-
one is privileged, no-one special; each is but a member of the common weal. The
two declarations meet in America’s most hackneyed phrases: “e pluribus unum”
[“from many, one”]; “liberty [for each] and justice [for all].” They each claim a
share of America’s most fundamental laws, the egalitarian Constitution and the
individualist Bill of Rights. And they confronted each other in America’s comic
archetypes from Brer Rabbit to Huck Finn to The Little Tramp.
84

A common theme circulating in popular U.S. media products during the late
nineteenth century centered on an individual’s “right” to transgress boundaries at will. As
a narrative vehicle emblematic of this “right,” the peripatetic white male American was
useful in reflecting diverse sentiments that many cultural producers (and their financial
underwriters) held towards the ideal of such unfettered liberty at the birth of empire. It
was at the beginning of this era, during the period known as the Long Depression, that the
“tramp” figure first emerged in U.S. media (ca. 1873), constructed in popular literary
forms and sheet music – the first mass-distributed product proffered by the American
music industry – as a uniquely American phenomena.
85
As such, the “tramp” not only

84
William Brooks, “Music in America: an overview (part 1),” in The Cambridge History of American
Music, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 30.

85
Exemplary of tramp-themed literary products were Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad and The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn, George M. Baker’s A Tight Squeeze, Josiah Flynt’s Tramping with Tramps and How
Men Become Tramps, and Lee O. Harris’ The Man Who Tramps: A Story of To-Day, as well as turn-of the
century novels like Horatio Alger’s Tony, the Tramp and W.H. Davies’ The Autobiography of a Super-
Tramp. The tramping white male was also frequently featured in popular illustrated magazines of this
period, including Puck, Judge, Rolling Pin, The Atlantic Monthly, The Century, Harpers New Monthly, and
Scribner’s Monthly.
61

helped brand U.S. cultural products with a distinctive thematic motif and narrative,
86
it
also insured the mobile and transgressive white American male a permanent place within
the national symbolic – or, as Lauren Berlant has described, the nation’s “traditional
icons, its metaphors, its heroes, its rituals, and its narratives [that] provide an alphabet for
a collective consciousness or national subjectivity.”
87

I begin this chapter by positioning popular constructions of white male mobility
first within the contexts of the U.S. Civil War, and then within the transformative period
of Reconstruction and the Long Depression – when the public was forced to endure the
growing pains brought on by industrialization, market panics, new technologies, and new
forms of social ordering and organization. Focusing primarily on intersemiotically
encoded products popularized during the years 1870-1896 (e.g. illustrated magazines,
handbooks and sheet music), I discuss how popular U.S. illustrators, lyricists, songwriters
and authors constructed the peripatetic American in ways that not only helped maintain
the nation’s “crisis in representation,” but also economically benefited the nation’s
emerging mass-distributed culture industries. I conclude by arguing that, taken together,
Long Depression “tramp” themed media products held the two pulls of the nation’s
paradoxical ideology in balance at a time when the U.S. was preparing to advance its
“exceptionality” to the rest of the world. I also suggest that, domestically, this figure
provided the American people with a provisional index of ideals, values and belonging by

86
For a fuller discussion on how transgressive themes eventually come to define and distinguish American
literature from its European competition, see Scott Bradfield’s Dreaming Revolution: Transgression in the
Development of American Romance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993).

87
Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of a National Fantasy, 20.
62

which both insider and outsider status could be measured and understood. In so doing,
media representations of the “tramp” functioned to exercise and potentially exorcise
anxieties the public held towards political and economic instability, rapid expansion and
containment, and the sudden identification of American “subcultures.”
Nineteenth Century Aftershocks: An American Interregnum
The post-Civil War years were marked by a new determination to reconstruct the
country and build a more “civilized” and unified America. But long after the war ended,
divisions persisted in the ideological struggle for cultural dominance between the North
and South, industrialism and agrarianism, old and new world allegiances, and barter and
consumer economies. Ultimately, these struggles influenced how the allegorical
American would be constructed when the U.S. was poised on the cusp of empire, a
transformational period ushered in by the Long Depression – the first and longest major
economic crisis faced by the tentatively stabilized union and burgeoning empire.
Initially identified as the “Great Depression,” the Long Depression refers to a
major economic crisis that was bookended by two events: the “Panic of 1873” and the
year-long depression that followed the “Panic of 1893.” While economists point to the
Panic of 1873 as the flashpoint that had (up until that point) triggered the longest
recession ever recorded in U.S. history,

there is less agreement as to when the Long
Depression ended, or whether or not it actually qualified as a depression at all.
88

88
According to the National Bureau of Economic Records (NBER), the U.S. economy began to contract in
May of 1873, which led to a recession that lasted sixty-five months. This “correction” of the economy
exceeded the nation’s next worst decline by almost two years (i.e. 1929 recession). NBER defines
“recession” events as periods when there is “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the
economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment,
63

Nonetheless, by most accounts, this period is largely recognized as the nation’s first
major economic depression, not only because U.S. products, services, and labor
experienced a major decline in value, but also due to mass-distributed media’s ability to
inform the public how impactful and widespread these devaluations were.
The declining value of American labor resulted in increased social and political
inequalities, as national “disengagement [with] human resources and physical capital”
intensified.
89
Newspapers and magazines unleashed numerous accounts of declining
personal incomes, banking failures, the newly identified phenomena of “unemployment,”
and a sudden stagnation in the growth of previously over-valued industries. Other
entertainment media products (e.g. sheet music, handbooks, novels, dime novels, penny
press, etc.) began reflecting these trends as well, adding to the way the nation’s cultural
landscape would reflect the importance of consumer capitalism to American identity and
the power the nation would wield in the twentieth century.

industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales” (www.nber.org/cycles/cyclesmain.html). While not
denying the devastation wrought by this period’s four major recessionary events, Depression economist
Elmus Wicker has questioned whether or not the era commonly referred to as The Long Depression (1873-
1896) was truly marked by depression features. Pointing to the lack of empirical data related to
employment, banking closures, or suppressed economic activity that reportedly occurred between 1870-
1890, Wicker has suggested that depression rhetoric was more likely a method for explaining away
continued and increasing socio-political tensions that might reveal an ideologically fragmented union.
Elmus Wicker, Banking Panics in the Gilded Age (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
29-31. For a fuller discussion of the economic fallout resulting from the Panic of 1873, see Clement Juglar
and Decourcy Write Thom (eds.) A Brief History of Panics in the United States (originally published in
1916, reprint New York: Cosimo, Inc., 2006) 93-101; and, Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Z. Aliber,
Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.,
2005).

89
In their preface, Chossudovsky and Marshall posit this experience of disengagement as a chief marker
distinguishing economic depressions from all other types of economic conditions and crises. Michel
Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall (eds.), The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of
the XXI Century (Montréal, Québec: Global Research Publishers, 2010), xix.
64

The recession that began in 1873 also exacerbated an already existing situation.
During the years immediately following the Civil War, many ex-soldiers did not return
home, either because their homes had been destroyed, survival was less assured, or they
were simply unwilling to return to a domesticated life. Instead, these men adopted a
nomadic, mono-gendered lifestyle that mirrored the fraternal, bellicose, rugged
conditions of the jungle life experienced during the war.
90
At first tramping by foot to
move from place to place, these men increasingly availed themselves of the new rail
system that, upon completion in 1869, connected one end of the country to the other.
Cresswell has observed that the “invention” of the American “tramp” (as well as the
empire) owed itself to this transportation technology and the hopes of potential expansion
the railroad first inspired:
The existence of people who came to be called tramps as a result of time-space
compression (notably the rapidly expanding railroad system that allowed them to
travel illegally over long distances in short periods of time), and the development
of communication and transportation technologies that facilitated the inclusion of
much of the United States into a global capitalist system (a system that was, and
still is, marked by rapid transformations from boom times to economic
downturns) were indissolubly linked. The incursion of agribusiness into the Great
West transformed the landscape and economy on a massive scale and produced
new movements of both capital and labor. When sociologists, eugenicists, and
others began to use the term ‘tramp’ they were referring to people whose lives
were made possible by this conflation of mobility options and economic pressures
that occurred for the first time in the 1870s.
91

As a direct manifestation of the kinds of time-space shifts the public experienced under
industrialization, and as a useful way to mitigate the labor problems caused by repeated

90
Jungle is the nineteenth century term used to refer to temporary outdoor encampments, usually located
outside towns and along train routes, where “tramps,” “hobos” and other “knights of the road,” informally
gathered to share food, water, rest, stories, information, and companionship.

91
Tim Cresswell, The Tramp in America, 38.
65

boom-bust cycles, the railroad became the infrastructural conduit for transforming the
nation into an empire – a mechanism that could quickly transport “tens of thousands” of
itinerant railroad building, crop harvesting, lumberjacking laborers (many of whom were
immigrants) across the country.
92

Although the heritage of these itinerants was as diverse as the nation itself, those
most known and represented for traversing the landscape via this new rail system were
the thousands of “rootless wanderers” that hailed from Northern European stock – single,
young to middle-age males who sought temporary or seasonal work as field hands,
lumberjacks, masons, printers, miners, general and unskilled laborers. These were men
who, during battle and most of America’s westward expansion, had not been considered
part of a deviant subset of the population, but rather were considered emblematic of
American identity and patriotism. However, as the economy worsened and labor
transformed into a “floating” commodity sold by individual workers, the roaming white
male became a more prominent feature on the U.S. landscape. During this American
interregnum – as the nation awkwardly transitioned from a provincial, nationalist nature
to a more cosmopolitan disposition in keeping with a major global power –
representations of the American “tramp” in mass-distributed media reflected the various
sentiments that such a transformation inspired, particularly in relation to mobilized labor,
male domesticity, racial, ethnic and gendered superiority, boundaryless expansion, and an
individual’s freedom to explore wherever and whatever they pleased.

92
Ibid., 23-47.
66

The Allegorical American and the Growth of Mass-Distributed Media
Among a growing list of published, U.S. made, mass-distributed entertainment,
two mediums benefitted greatly from and rose to prominence as a direct result of
lithography’s “Golden Age” (1870s): popular illustrated magazines and sheet music.
93

The popularity of these products among the American public gave cultural producers and
their financial backers significant influence over how mobility, boundary-busting and
U.S. character would be represented to the nation and the world. In the final years of the
Long Depression – once Frederick Turner had “officially” declared to the world that
America’s geographic frontier had been fully explored, conquered and tamed – these
mediums reflected a richly coded portfolio of peripatetic American stories and imagery
that not only accommodated and honored romantic visions of unfettered liberty and
boundaryless exploration, but also spoke to a cooperative, domesticated and “civilized”
worldview that could potentially promote America ’s imperial aspirations.
94
As this
chapter later demonstrates, publishers and distributors of these products – whose profits
depended on catering not only to diverse markets and expanding territories, but also to
the sensibilities of America’s growing bourgeoisie – used intersemiotic codes to satisfy
competing visions of an American identity that could straddle divergent positions, often
in a single product.

93
Other popular forms of mass-distributed during this time included penny press tabloids, dime novels,
etiquette guides, “human curiosities” handbooks and circus catalogs, and comic books.

94
In his now famous World Exposition address “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”
(1893), Turner declared that while “the frontier was gone” along with its “savage” and “primitive” ways,
“He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now
entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people,
the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.” National Humanities Center,
nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/gilded/empire/text1/turner.pdf (accessed Dec 18, 2010).
67

Some literary and visual culture scholars have identified the 1830-40s as the
period in which publishers of illustrated periodicals and other serialized literature began
catering to a more popular readership. For example, Cynthia Patterson has argued that
during this earlier period, “The American reading public in the major cities faced a
cornucopia of available reading material, including occasional handbooks, daily and
weekly newspapers, monthly magazines, gift books, annuals, serialized novels and
books.”
95
However, while Patterson has rightfully pointed to certain technological
advances in reproduction technologies and distribution mechanisms to explain the
increased availability of printed matter in select areas of the U.S. eastern seaboard, these
advances were not enough to declare that this material had achieved popular (i.e. mass-
distributed) status. Although the number of U.S. monthly magazine titles grew
throughout the century, it was not until the 1870s that a popular multi-regional readership
could be claimed and attended to by publishers.
96
This was due to the completion of the
transcontinental railroad and a concomitant decline in postal rates (ca. 1879), which
allowed the multi-regional mass-distribution of popular published matter to become
economically feasible.
97
Furthermore, even as the sentiment of “illustration mania”
gripped the country (as one writer for the Cosmopolitan Art Journal maintained in

95
Cynthia Lee Patterson, Art for the Middle Classes: America’s Illustrated Magazines of the 1840s
(Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2010), 14-15.

96
This was a direct result of improved mass-distribution channels and decreasing postal rates, the number
of monthly magazine titles produced in the U.S. increased from “280 to over 1,800.” The Guide to United
States Popular Culture, eds. Ray B. Browne and Pat Browne (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
2001) s.v. “American Magazines.”

97
Ellen Mazur Thomson, “Early Graphic Design Periodicals in America,” Journal of
Design History 7, no. 2 (1994): 114.
68

1857),
98
the full economic and political potential of such mania was not realized until
other advancements in photolithography and commercial advertising met these
reasonably inexpensive methods of distribution. Combined, these factors gave American
illustrators, writers, photographers, publishers and distributors of “tramp” themed
products unprecedented opportunities to communicate with the public, and a greater
opportunity to both reflect and help shape public perceptions of the nation’s character on
a much larger scale.
Nonetheless, one of the biggest challenges facing purveyors of mass-distributed
media was how to produce and market popular entertainment products in ways that could
appeal to an ideologically divided public, while still creating work that was both timely
and topical. This was an almost impossible challenge in the years leading up to the Civil
War, when ideological sensitivities were at their height. As Frank Mott observed about
any aspirations to produce and mass-distribute a national media product during this
period, “when the North and South were split asunder in 1861, a national magazine
became impossible for some years.”
99
Even years after the North had prevailed militarily
and politically, the public’s diverse responses to rapid industrialism, the waning influence
of agrarian culture, and the highly publicized, direct action politics of the period (e.g.
strikes, riots, demonstrations) likely sensitized many music and magazine publishers to
the risks associated with peddling overtly ideological media products to a mass-
distributed market. While mass-circulation publishers in the print media capitals of New

98
Frank Luther Mott’s A History of American Magazines, Volume II, 1850-1865 (London: Oxford
University Press, 1970), 192.

99
Ibid., 103.
69

York, Boston, and Philadelphia likely had little interest in offending the economically
viable populations in the victorious North – where industry, printing materials, modern
lithographic presses, and the bourgeois consumer were also more readily found – they
remained mindful of the profit potential in southern markets. This was often reflected in
the multilingual (e.g. visual, musical, and text-based) encoding and frequently
paradoxical messaging that appeared in several mass-distributed post-war artifacts
featuring America’s white peripatetic males.
Another important condition contributing to the creation of mass-distributed
markets was the cultural development of the “Golden Age of Lithography,” which began
in the 1870s with the introduction and widespread use of new lithographic technologies
and techniques such as steam and offset presses, chromolithography, and non-continuous
or “stippled” imaging. These advances enabled the mass-production of vibrant and highly
detailed images, and helped publishers build a national market for products that were
once exclusively designed for literate and ideologically uniform “niches.”
100
Visual
content (often produced by staff artists who worked for the magazines, as well as sheet
music publishers and lithographers) also had the ability to neutralize or at least
complicate the original creative intent of writers, composers, and lyricists. In the case of
popular magazines, illustrated printed material greatly influenced the success of

100
Although, as a market description, this term didn’t come into common parlance until the late 1980s, I
maintain that “niche” marketing has always been a feature of consumer capitalism. The free market’s
ability to stimulate a desire to consume is premised on the exaggerated connections its participants forge
between products and the signification of class, culture, gender, ethnic, and ideological (i.e. “niche”)
affinities, and/or individuated identities.
70

nineteenth century publishing giants – those whose circulation rates reached one hundred
thousand and above in the years between 1865-1885.
101

As more and more illustrated content got introduced into printed entertainment,
themes of Westward expansion and the titillating, ruthlessly paced spaces of new urban
centers offered a thematic way to avoid directly confronting, condoning, criticizing or
depicting the North’s rapid colonization and marginalization of Southern agrarian culture.
During this transformative period, illustrated narratives involving “Indian savages,”
frontiersmen, railroad expansion, the harsh wilderness, the Gold Rush; as well as the
sometimes unsavory, sometimes exciting exploits of urban hooligans, devoted bachelors,
and other “men of the world” struck a welcome chord with a nation grown apoplectic
from chronic discord and economic hardship (fig. 1).

FIGURE
1.
THEMES
OF
WESTWARD
EXPANSION
AND
THE
URBAN
UNKNOWN:
(L-‐R)
“Workmen
laying
the

new
railroad
track
on
the
night
of
September
5
th
,”
Frank
Leslie’s
Illustrated
Newspaper
(Sept.
24,
1881);

“Suspicious
Guests,”
Harper’s
Weekly
(Feb.
5,
1887);
“The
Cradle,”
The
Century
Illustrated
Monthly

Magazine
(Jan.
1883);
and
“Under-‐ground
life
in
New
York,”
Harper’s
Weekly
(July
12,
1873).
Illustrations

courtesy
of
the
Library
of
Congress,
News
&
Periodicals
Division,
American
Periodicals
Series.

101
These included the publishing houses of Harper’s Monthly, Harper’s Weekly, Scribner’s Monthly,
Century Magazine, Peterson’s, Scribner’s, Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly. Frank Luther Mott, A History
of American Magazines, Volume III, 1865-1885 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 6-7.
71

Illustrations were also used to market popular sheet music – a wing of the U.S.
publishing industry that experienced tremendous growth in the U.S. once copyright
protection was extended to include all genres of musical composition from “unauthorized
printing and vending.”
102
Initially reserved as a method for distributing classical works or
vocal “art songs,” the sheet music industry increased in size, thematic scope and
circulation when the economic advantages of publishing catalogs of popular “ground-up”
music became evident to music publishing giants like W.L. Thompson & Co., J.W. Smith
& Bro., Root & Cady, and Oliver Ditson & Co. By the end of the Civil War, popular
sheet music had matured into a well established, profitable and widely consumed aspect
of U.S. material culture, with over 250,000 titles available for sale in 1870.
103

Civilizing the Popular Arts: In-Home Diversions and the American Bourgeoisie
During the Long Depression, two key factors contributed to the continued growth
of late-nineteenth century popular sheet music: the triumph of industrial capitalism over
agrarian culture, and the concomitant rise of the American bourgeoisie. Both of these
developments ushered in a set of societal standards and ideals, many of which concerned
work, the consumption of leisure and the way American identity (and civility) should be
represented to a modernizing world. Musicologist Dale Cockrell has observed that “with

102
The American Economy: A Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Cynthia Clarke Northrup (Santa Barbara, CA:
ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2003), s.v. “Intellectual Property.” Prior to 1831, only art songs (i.e. formally constructed
poetically-based works) and classical or operatic compositions afforded claimants intellectual property
rights over musical creations.

103
Dale Cockrell, Nineteenth-Century Popular Music. In The Cambridge History of American Music, ed.
David Nicholls (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 184. For a more detailed discussion
on the rapid growth of the American popular sheet music industry during the Long Depression, see Russell
Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988).
72

northern victory came the ascendance of northern values and styles over southern” – a
condition that tempered the nation’s popular sheet music products with themes that were
solidly “of northern origin and aspect.”
104
For example, in addition to the more
universally enjoyed themes of hard work and romance, works by popular composers like
Henry C. Work (e.g. “Marching Through Georgia,” “Grandfather’s Clock,” and
“Kingdom Coming”) served to affirm the decidedly bourgeois ideals of “materialism,
timeliness, and, predictably, family, home, and religious values.”
105
However, a closer
examination of sheet music from this period reveals a more complicated and ambivalent
construction of these ideals, one that hinted at another divisive storm brewing on the
socio-political horizon – a battle in which defeat could either be framed in terms of
domesticated confinement or cooperative civility.
The home became ground zero for containing white middle-class America’s
inclination to explore commercial entertainment’s “heretical” or unstable geographies
(e.g. saloons, theaters, dance halls, etc.) and its more perilous and/or lurid pleasures. One
mechanism that enjoyed great popularity for domestic containment was the widespread
acquisition of “parlor pianos” by the American middle-class. This luxury was the
principle in-home diversion enjoyed by adult females and children during the late
nineteenth century, and simultaneously served to promote the “proper” values of
discipline and aesthetic cultivation to which most middle-class families aspired.
Commenting on the useful role parlor pianos and popular sheet music played in opening

104
Ibid., 182.

105
Ibid., 183.
73

up cultural avenues of power and place for women otherwise confined to the home,
Richard Crawford wrote:
In transforming their homes into artistic statements of sorts, women lavished
special attention on the parlor, where, in a middle-class setting, the appearance of
polished gentility masked a good deal of anxious striving. And two musical
industries, the sheet music and the piano trades, strove mightily to serve the
parlor’s refined ethos. Their mission was rooted in the assumption that, in
America as in England, parlor piano was a female activity. Piano music published
from the 1840s on may thus be seen as music for a feminine instrument, its
character shaped by the trade’s view of women’s musical taste and capacities.
106

In my survey of sheet music products produced during the Long Depression, it does
indeed appear that sheet music publishers catered to this primary market, and rarely
published sheet music that openly derided mothers, marriage, the comforts of home,
middle class ideals, or the family. Exemplary of publisher’s overt sensitivity to this
market segment is Bonheur, Lenox and Gooch’s “Gentle Faces,” whose lyrics instructed
listeners to appreciate marriage, children and the virtues of sedentary life. The publishing
giant White, Smith & Co. marketed the song with an illustration featuring a woman and
children at home around a parlor piano – a visual reminder to sheet music consumers how
central the music industry had become to maintaining middle class values (fig 2).
107

106
Richard Crawford, America’s Musical Life: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 236.

107
Featuring pianos in front cover illustrations (or in advertisements placed on the back or interior) when,
as in this case, such imagery holds no direct relevance to the lyric can be understood as a nineteenth
century deployment of “product placement” – a marketing convention found in several products I surveyed
from this period.
74

FIGURE
2.
Bonheur,
Lenox
and
Gooch’s
“Gentle
Faces,”
published
by
White,
Smith
&
Co
(1886).
Access
to

photograph
digital
image
courtesy
of
Chicago’s
Newberry
Library,
Driscoll
Collection.

I was able to find only a few exceptions to this trend of catering to female consumers.
One that was particularly outstanding for its overt attacks on domesticated life was James
Kelly and Thos. P. Westendorf’s “The Poor Married Man,” published in 1881 by the
well-known W.F. Shaw Co. (Philadelphia). Its sparse marketing included no illustration
that could potentially offset the meaning of the front cover declaration:
Man that is married to woman is of many days and full of trouble. In the morning
he draws his salary and in the evening behold it is all goeth. He riseth up clothed
in chilly garments of the night and seeketh the paregoric bottle, wherewith to heal
the colicky bowels of his offspring. He the bosom of the family – yet he himself is
seen at the gates of the city with one suspender. He cometh forth for a flower and
is cut down. There is hope for a tree when it is cut down that the tender shoots
thereof will sprout again, but man goeth to his home and what is he then? Yea! He
is altogether wretched.
108

However sensitive individual publishing houses may or may not have been in their
marketing towards female consumers and middle class households, these publishers knew
that, by definition, “popular” sheet music was distinguishable as a genre because it
reflected the everyday concerns, sentiments, conditions and events impacting the public.

108
In a subsequent song compendium, this quote was once again featured in association with “The Poor
Married Man,” this time attributed to an anonymous writer for the Nashville Banner. Songs and Ballads,
published in 1882 by Monadnock Music Co. in Hinsdale, New Hampshire.
75

Thus, popular songwriters, lyricists, illustrators, and publishers from this period produced
an impressive portfolio of sheet music whose themes centered not only on regional, racial
and ethnic “differences,” labor, lost frontiers and “over civilization,” but also gender
relations, women’s suffrage, Victorian ideals, and the domestication (or emasculation) of
white males.
109

The figure of the white nomadic male became a prominent trope for addressing all
of these issues in a way that could not only romanticize a boundaryless past and chastise
an uncivilized future, but also promote a sentimental “domestic realism” that dominated
American popular culture.
110
It is in this environment that the “tramp” emerged as the
Long Depression’s allegorical American, a character capable of maintaining the nation’s
“crisis in representation” during the nascent empire’s first major economic crisis.
“Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!”: From Hero to Zero to Men Most Feared
In the U.S. and throughout most of the nineteenth century, the term “tramp” was
used to describe the honorable movements of foot soldiers migrating from one site of
conflict to another. As exemplified in numerous Civil War era broadsides and song-
sheets, “tramping” themes were used to bolster heroic and victorious associations with
American soldiering on both sides of the ideological divide. A secondary use of “tramp”

109
Lears’ work concerning nineteenth century critiques of bourgeois “over-civilization” is particularly
relevant here. He suggests that during The Long Depression anxiety developed over whether dominant
culture combined with industrial capitalism had weakened and corrupted the American spirit, making the
Republic more vulnerable to collapse. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the
Transformation of American Culture 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 26-32.

110
Lears points to the rise and decline of “domestic realism” – a genre featuring strong women facing
difficult circumstances – as a demonstration of what happened when the promise of industrial capitalism
and sedentary culture collided with an overriding concern over modernism and emasculation. Ibid., 103-
107.
76

was as a substantive adjective for freelance craftsmen, tradesman, and other skilled and
unskilled laborers who migrated from town to town in search of temporary and/or
seasonal employment (e.g. tramp printers, sign painters, machinists, blacksmiths,
silversmiths, masons, miners, seamen, and field hands). Before the Long Depression era,
when cultural producers invoked the construct “tramp” it was mostly to reference the
term’s military and laboring connections. However, somewhere around 1873, the term’s
once-incidental function as a noun describing a “legion of men traveling the nation ‘with
no visible means of support’” began to predominate as the default definition in the U.S.
111

As a classificatory label, “tramp” became a catch-all term to identify male populations
whose lifestyles were marked by unauthorized and/or unregulated movements.
112

This shift in association from patriot to vagrant occurred just as the era of
continental expansion was coming to a close, and the nation was forced to reconsider
what unfettered liberty and boundary defiance could mean during major economic crisis.
Once they were labeled “tramps” – as opposed to frontiersmen, mavericks, adventurers,
or pioneers – peripatetic white males entered the social imaginary as a growing potential
“menace” of insider-outsiders, whose relationship with labor and the economy threatened
emerging ideals around property, work, marriage, and the consumption of luxury
acquisitions and maintenance of a sedentary lifestyle.

111
Todd DePastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2003), 5.

112
Although, in the twentieth century, this definition eventually expanded to include certain female
populations whose sexual relations could be classified as irregular, unauthorized, and/or transient (e.g.
prostitutes and women with multiple sex partners).
77

One way to chart this shift in the vernacular is to survey the published and widely
circulated illustrations that accompanied (and helped market) the text and lyrics of
popular magazines and sheet music during the latter half of the nineteenth century. For
example, while during the Civil War the lyrics to anthems such as George C. Root’s
“Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! (The Prisoner’s Hope)” frequently appeared alongside
illustrations linking the term “tramp” to justified national aggression, patriotism, liberty
and America’s raison d’état, end of century “tramp” songs revealed the emergence of a
newly identified subculture – boxcar hopping unskilled laborers with idiosyncratic
defects and traumas that hampered them from staying in one place, finding steady work,
sustenance, and/or a committed and “legitimate” companion (fig. 3).
113

A survey of popular sheet music produced between 1873 and 1876 reveals that
depictions of “tramps” during these early years of the Long Depression were often
designed to convey a downtrodden yet dignified remnant of an antiquated economic
structure – men and boys that were to be pitied and/or aided by the nation’s bourgeoisie
(for whom these products were largely produced). Lyrical encoding was often
complicated or reinforced by an additional layer of illustrated symbolism – an
intersemiotic maneuver used to convey that the tramping male psyche harbored an
unrequited longing to be a part of sedentary society.

113
The extremely popular Civil War song “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! (The Prisoner’s Hope)” was originally
published as a song-sheet in 1864 by Root & Cady, and reportedly sold over 100,000 copies in its first six
months of release. Dale Cockrell, “Nineteenth-Century Popular Music,” 181. Subsequently, it was
redistributed by a variety of publishers as “song sheets” and single-sided broadsides featuring different
battle scene illustrations. Originally written to inspire Union troops, the song’s melody and title were
appropriated for Confederate adaptations, Christian hymnals (e.g. “Jesus Loves the Little Children”), and
political anthems (e.g. Irish Nationalist’s “God Save Ireland”).
78

FIGURE
3.
ILLUSTRATING
THE
PATH
FROM
HERO
TO
ZERO:
(L)
George
C.
Root’s
broadside
ballad
“Tramp!

Tramp!
Tramp!
(The
Prisoner’s
Hope),”
(ca.
1864).
Digital
image
courtesy
of
American
Song
Sheets,
Rare

Book,
Manuscript,
and
Special
Collections,
Duke
University.
(R)
Ben
Chadwick’s
“Hobo
on
the
Hog,”

published
by
Chadwick
Music
Publishing
Co.
(1897).
Digital
image
courtesy
of
Lester
S.
Levy
Sheet
Music

collection,
John
Hopkins
University,
Milton
S.
Eisenhower
Library.

It is also worth noting that songs co-authored by married female lyricists (or
lyricists whose assumed names denoted that status) frequently portrayed the wandering
and tramping male in this way, as was most plainly exemplified in Mrs. L. L. Tucker and
Ed. H Benedict’s “Alone and Forsaken.” According to Tucker’s lyrics, there is no clear
motivation for why this “sick” “dishearted” and “weary wanderer” is “far from the dear
ones who gather at home,” as no promise of friendship, love or employment is associated
with his travels. His wandering is both visually and lyrically narrated in terms of exile
and abandonment, not in terms that would conjure romantic notions of white male
exploration of world’s unknown (fig. 4).
79

FIGURE
4.
Tucker
and
Benedict’s
“Alone
and
Forsaken,”
published
by
J.W.
Smith
Jr.
&
Bro.
(1875).
Digital

image
courtesy
of
Maine
Music
Box
“Vocal
Popular”
Collection,
University
of
Maine,
Bagaduce
Music

Lending
Library.

However, as the economic recession and the ongoing ideological tensions festered
without abatement, representations of white peripatetic males continued to transform. By
1876, and throughout much of the period referred to as “the Tramp Scare,” these rootless
populations bore less resemblance to the highly venerated soldiers, pioneers and
frontiersmen that formerly permeated the national symbolic. Instead, they were
increasingly portrayed as undesirable, insubordinate and fugitive elements that threatened
the cultural and political dominance of America’s emerging middle class, and therefore,
the safety of the nation.
With millions of unemployed white citizens and new immigrants roving about the
country, popular media expanded the metaphoric utility of the propertyless and rootless
“tramp” – in all his concurrent and subsequent manifestations (e.g. “vagabonds,”
“wanderers,” “rovers,” “drifters,” “hobos,” etc.) – into a creature to be feared; a modern
80

day “bogeyman”. At the dawn of the twentieth century, this figure actually gets labeled as
such in the song “The Hobo Man,” whose first verse reads:
When little boys and little girls in ages long gone bye/
Were naughty to their paws and maws, and used to howl and cry/
Then their parents they would tell that/
The bogeeman at night would put them in a bag with them disappear from sight/
And if it wasn’t bogies it was goblins or a witch/
That swallowed up bad boys and girls and never left a stitch/
But when paws and maws of modern days try to scare Tom, Dick or Anne
To Hist! they’ll say, chase away/
Here comes the Hobo man/
114

America’s Imperial Horizon: The “Tramp” and Modernity’s Frontier
As the nineteenth century came to a close, the once boundaryless frontier became
inescapably walled in by the limits of continental topography. Nonetheless, the impulse
to transgress externally imposed limitations had not been fully deactivated in the
American imagination. While the nation continued to deliberate over how much
individualism, unrestricted exploration of (and mastery over) new frontiers, property,
settlement, and a new economic order should define national character, cultural producers
continued to dimensionalize the “tramp” in ways that would directly link him to
modernity and industry. Through these latter associations, the “tramp” became a
phenomenon whose understanding of the new economy and mastery of the latest
transportation technology could be marketed as uniquely (“exceptionally”) American.
This was most defined for the public in Jay Hambridge’s illustrations for The Century

114
First produced and circulated as individual sheet music by Tin Pan Alley publishers M. Witmark & Sons
in 1906, “The Hobo Man” has since become most associated with Chas. Douglas and Karl Hoschna’s 1907
musical The Girl From Broadway.
81

Magazine, which compared the modern American freight-hopping “tramp” to the
primitive English walkabout “tramp” (fig. 5).

FIGURE
5.
THE
PERIPATETIC
AMERICAN
AND
A
NEW
IMPERIAL
ORDER:
(L-‐R)
A.B.
Waud’s
“The
Pioneer,”

published
in
Harper’s
Weekly
(January
11,
1868).
Digital
image
courtesy
of
HarpWeek.com.
“An

Acquisitive
Reformer,”
illustrated
by
Washington
Post
political
cartoonist
George
Y.
Coffin
(ca.
1875-‐
1896).
Access
to
photograph
digital
image
courtesy
of
the
Library
of
Congress,
Prints
and
Photographs

Division.
Jay
Hambridge’s
“A
Comparison
of
American
and
English
Methods
of
Tramp
Travel,”
featured
in

Josiah
Flynt’s
novel
Tramping
with
Tramps
(1893)
and
The
Century
Magazine
article
“The
Tramp
and
The

Railroads”
(1899).
Digital
image
courtesy
of
the
Library
of
Congress,
News
&
Periodicals
Division,

American
Periodicals
Series.

The development of America’s “tramp” character appeared to be responding to
two distinct but related anxieties being provoked by mobile white male populations of
this period. First, there was a persistent concern over how solidarity, social order and a
new empire could be maintained if the primary ideal defining the nation remained an
unqualified commitment to freedom, independence, and the sovereignty of the individual.
Second, there was an apprehension that the surplus labor roaming the landscape reflected
a systemic moral and social deterioration, initiated by the nation’s imprudent rush to
accept industrial capitalism’s greatest shortcomings in exchange for continual expansion
82

and individual prosperity.
115
Both of these concerns were commercially exploited in the
visual marketing of songwriter and publisher Will. L. Thompson’s “The Poor Old
Tramp.”
In 1877, W.L. Thompson & Co. marketed “The Poor Old Tramp” using two
remarkably similar but visually distinct covers. The discrepancies between these two
products can be explained in part by the fact that different artists from two prominent
lithographic firms (W. J. Morgan & Co. Lith. in Ohio and J. H. Bufford’s Sons Lith. in
Boston) produced the covers. However, the distinct visual encoding in each of these
products denotes such divergent messaging that it seems reasonable to question whether
the art direction was purposefully designed to satisfy regional markets that may have had
differing responses to this newly identified white male subculture.
The most obvious difference between the two products is the look and carriage of
the central figure. The “unstamped” cover (herein referred to as WJM) featured a rugged,
middle-aged and hyper-masculine man as the central character whose life the song
narrates. The “stamped” cover (herein referred to as stamped JHB) featured a fey,
weakened (almost androgynous), hunched-over youth as the song’s central character (fig.
6).
116

115
e.g. The floating or “waste” labor of under and unemployed workers, the disassembling of artisanal
practices and labor guilds, industrial alienation of workers, social isolation in urban centers, emphasis on
acquisition and private advantage, corruption, etc.

116
The WJM (W.J. Morgan & Co. Lith.) cover appears without a stamped request for “5,000 copies to be
sent immediately to Oliver Ditson & Co,” and the JHB (J. H. Bufford’s Sons Co. Litho) version includes
Oliver Ditson & Co.’s stamped request of W.L. Thompson & Co. to provide the dealer with 5,000 copies of
this song along with 5,000 copies of Thompson’s other popular composition “Drifting with the Tide.”
83

FIGURE
6.
“THE
POOR
OLD
TRAMP”:
(L)
“Unstamped”
cover
of
Will
L.
Thompson’s
“The
Poor
Old
Tramp,”

illustrated
by
W.
J.
Morgan
&
Co.
Lith.
for
W.L.
Thompson
&
Co.
(Cleveland,
OH,
1877).
(R)
“Stamped”

cover
of
this
same
composition,
illustrated
by
J.H.
Bufford’s
Sons
Lith.
for
W.L.
Thompson
&
Co.
(Boston,

MA,
1877).
Digital
images
courtesy
of
Johns
Hopkins
University,
Levy
Sheet
Music
Collection.

In the WJM version, Thompson’s “Poor Old Tramp” is a blonde, stocky and
muscular man in his prime. His hands are pulled tight against the body and hidden in the
pockets of a lapel-free “frock” coat, which (like his pants) are torn and tattered. His
“slouch hat” is designed with a semi-full crown and a “rancher’s” or “buffalo” brim
whose peak helps frame and draw attention to the figure’s skeptical gaze and tightened
mouth.
117
These costumed treatments emphasize a brooding or menacing expression on
the man described in the lyrics as “pitiless,” “friendless,” and “poor”.
118

The center frame, constructed from icicles and vines, forms a natural barbed-wire
barrier, visually containing and isolating this figure from the secondary vignettes. In the
background, smoke from a tall stack rises up into a darkened sky. Upon close inspection,

117
A “slouch hat” is a term used to describe a variety of men’s military and civilian headwear popularized
by both confederate and union soldiers during the Civil War. Made of wool felt, these hats were
constructed similarly to cowboy hats, with low crowns and medium wide brims. Uniquely American in
design, during the Civil War it was one of the few components of U.S. military apparel that was not
directly derivative of European styles.

118
The first verse of Thompson’s “The Poor Old Tramp” read: “I’m only a poor old wanderer, I’ve no
place to call my home; no one to pity me, no one to cheer me, as friendless and sadly I roam.”
84

given the height of the stack and the absence of any other detail, this appears to indicate
the presence of a train or industry. The land behind the figure is snow-covered and
barren, which in combination with the darkened sky offers some environmental rationale
for this “tramp” having transgressed past the collapsed remnants of a lodge pole fence in
the foreground (fig 7).

FIGURE
7.
Close
up
of
central
figure
produced
by
W.J.
Morgan
&
Co.
Lith.

The visual symbolism used to market the WJM version of “The Poor Old Tramp”
seemed to reflect the nation’s once primary identification with the ideals of liberty,
freedom and the individual, as well as popular anarcho-libertarian beliefs concerning the
importance of self-reliance in maintaining those ideals. Illustrated as strapping, seasoned,
and focused, the visage of this “tramp” communicates an individual who is still able to
seek out and successfully secure opportunity even in the gloomiest of circumstances –
surely a palliative message to many Americans of the time. In other words, even though
the lyrics recognize the harsh reality of his circumstances, this “tramp” conveys a sense
of mental and physical competency that would likely insure his survival. Unfettered by
85

property or companion, he is free to abandon unfruitful circumstances and seek out
opportunity in unknown terrains.
In the WJM version, this “poor old tramp” stands as both the expression of an era
and a national identity wedged between the instinctual, exploratory and individual pulses
of the Republic and a modern empire’s impetus to secure order and stability – a dialectic
commonly featured in popular entertainment of this period. For example, Louis Warren
has considered the way this dialectic informed the iconic imagery of Buffalo Bill Cody,
whose image entered the national symbolic by not only holding together “the
contradictions of a rapidly modernizing world,” but also merging a primitive frontier past
with a domesticated masculinity that was increasingly defining the modern era (fig. 8).
119

FIGURE
8.
BUFFALO
BILL
CODY
–
MAINTAINING
THE
CRISIS:
(L)
“Buffalo
Bill
Cody,”
photograph
by
Sarony

(ca.
1880).
Digital
image
courtesy
of
wikimedia.org.
(R)
William
Cody
and
family
(ca.
1880),
photographer

unknown.
Digital
image
courtesy
of
Billings
Sightseeing
Examiner,
examiner.com.

Like Thompson’s “poor old tramp,” Cody’s visual marketing worked to affirm an
America populated by rugged, hypermasculine individualists who triumphed over
adversity and survived the elements. However, just as Cody’s Wild West performances

119
Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill Cody: William Cody and The Wild West Show (New York: Vintage,
2005).
86

were always choreographed to resolve in a “settled domestic order,” Thompson’s lyrics
provided an equally neutralizing message that might correct any imbalance threatening
the nuclear Anglo-Saxon family and (by some accounts) the nation as a whole.
120

The unstamped (WJM) product’s contradictory messaging – which marketed a
song about a “poor old tramp” with an image of a clean-shaven, robust adult man –
mimics an internal juxtaposition in which Thompson’s “tramp” lyrically expresses a wish
“for a place by the fireside,” but is instructed by the song’s male-dominant chorus to
“tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp, old wanderer.” This melody and lyric
are designed in counter-point to the part assigned to the chorus’ most female-coded
voices (the sopranos). Furthermore, while the bass and tenor’s “tramp, tramp, tramp” is
also assigned to “altos,”
121
the melody is dropped three notes below the tenor line, and
technically falls within the range of the more ambiguously gender-coded contralto or
countertenor voice. The full line of “tramp, tramp, tramp… old wanderer” is exclusively
sung by the bass vocalists – the lowest ranging and most male-coded voices in the chorus.
Taking all the elements of the composition and its visual marketing together, the
song had the potential to inspire a variety of decodings, particularly concerning the
fragile economic and social ecologies upon which sedentary life and traditional dual-
gender relationships had been sustained. The central character’s ethnicity and “fit” stature

120
Ibid., 252. Warren notes that, despite the reality of Cody’s troubled marriage (which eventually ended in
a disastrous and costly divorce), his public personae and theatrical shows were strategically designed to
portray him as America ’s most stalwart defender of rugged, instinctual, individualistic masculinity, and
bourgeois ideals concerning the stable and sedentary status of the white family. Also see Louis S. Warren,
“Cody’s Last Stand: Masculine Anxiety, the Custer Myth, and the Frontier of Domesticity in Buffalo Bill’s
Wild West,” Western Historical Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2003): 49-69.

121
A vocal part that is, typically (but not always) assigned to female vocalists.
87

also suggest that he did not belong to some deviant “subculture,” but instead mirrored an
alternative route that many white American males were following in the pursuit of their
“unalienable right” to life, liberty and happiness during a major economic crisis.
Of course, reminding music publishers’ primary target market (i.e. middle class
females) that increasing numbers of unattached, fit white males were either being forced
or choosing to drop out of the nation’s available pool of “bread winners” had to be
unsettling. As Howard Chudacoff has discussed, another newly identified and highly
mobile male subculture had already become identified as a growing and corrosive
element of urban industrial culture: the “bachelor.” Charting the steady decline in
marriage rates from 1870 through 1890 and the concern over the epidemic of
“bachelorhood” that existed during the Long Depression, Chudacoff concluded that
“bachelors” comprised an “important and conspicuous segment of individual
communities in every region of the United States,”
122
stimulating fears of a potentially
contagious mono-gender lifestyle:
By the last quarter of the nineteenth century[,] the numbers and proportions of
men who were single may well have reached a tipping point, a juncture at which
those men who had postponed their own marriages served to “infect” other men
with similar sentiments. This “contagion,” when combined with the burgeoning
alternatives that the urban commercial culture was providing, diverted a larger-
than-might-be-expected cohort of marriageable men away from matrimony.
123

In this light, the peripatetic American’s construction as the “tramp” helped provide the
public with a non-ideological rationale for why an increasing number of American males

122
Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1999), 48-49.

123
Ibid., 73.
88

had opted for an alternative lifestyle rather than the one held as an ideal by the middle
class. The multi-dimensional way this figure could be constructed explained mobile,
mono-gendered lifestyles not only in terms of national character and survival, but also in
terms of personal defects and laboring class status – circumstances that could help rebut
any direct blame that might be levied at the bourgeoisie and/or the females and children
most impacted by this phenomenon. However, the “tramp” provoked additional public
anxieties and hysteria that were exacerbating at the time Thompson’s “The Poor Old
Tramp” entered distribution.
The WJM cover went to market just as the nation’s “Tramp Scare” was being felt
nationally,
124
and only months before industrial capitalism was forced to face its first
prolonged and violent challenge since the Civil War: the Great Railroad Strike.
Michael Bellesiles has argued that while the “tramp nuisance” was frequently highlighted
in the press between the years of 1870 and 1876, “the imagery of a tramp army with all
its connotations of warfare did not become common usage until 1877, when ‘tramp evil’
made its appearance”.
125
The “evil” to which Bellesiles refers is not the actuality of
“tramp” deviancy, but the mass-distributed media’s widespread decision to frame white
nomadic laborers as violent pathological criminals and “professional mendicants” or

124
Cresswell, Higbie, and DePastino all identify the mid-1870s as the beginning of the “scare,” when (as
Depastino notes) “thousands, perhaps millions, on the road,” compelled “newspaper editors, charity
workers, and government officials across the nation [to ask] the question ‘What shall we do with our
tramps.’” Todd DePastino, Citizen Hobo, 3-5.

125
Michael A. Bellesiles, 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently (New York: The New Press, 2010),
114.
89

beggars.
126
Anti-tramp rhetoric peaked in the summer of 1877, when newspaper accounts
declared that “tramps” involved in the strike were “floating” agitators that were most
responsible for the arson, theft, millions of dollars in property damage, and hundreds of
deaths that resulted from the forty-five day insurrection. Only three months before this
event, publishing giant and sheet music dealer Oliver Ditson & Co. decided to distribute
an alternative cover to “The Poor Old Tramp.”
While the J. H Bufford’s Sons illustration featured a central character of similar
ethnic stock to the WJM version (i.e. blonde Northern European), the JHB “tramp” was
quite thinner, much younger, and noticeably frailer than his symbolic rival. Bent over
from the cold, his ungloved hands are exposed and held in a near-prayer position. His
coat has lapels (a style associated mostly with the period’s middle class), which are
pulled up close around his ears. Neither the coat nor his pants are tattered and, although
illustrated as youthful, he appears quite worn and weary from the inclement conditions.
His “slouch hat” has a short crown and a slightly rolled brim, which lies open instead of
peaking at the front. This design element emphasizes the character’s worried and
frightened expression. His full, pursed lips add femininity to a visage that conveys
vulnerability, not resilience. He hardly appears to be a threatening force, or a figure with
which most American white males would likely want to identify (fig. 9).

126
Ibid., 120.
90

FIGURE
9.
Close
up
of
the
central
figure
produced
by
J.
H.
Bufford’s
Sons
Lith.
for
“The
Poor
Old
Tramp”.

While both covers positioned their “poor old tramps” within similar landscapes,
the icicle frame around this youthful drifter is far less prominent than the one detailed by
W. J. Morgan artists.
127
Also, in this version, the dark smoke rising in the distance clearly
comes from the chimney of a home. Unlike in the other image, in which the smoke
contributes to a darkened and ominous sky the “tramp” has left behind, the chimney
smoke here rises up to meet an illuminated sky, which forms a canopy of light over a
home of which this “tramp” is not a part. With these details in the background, the visual
narrative of this product offers no obvious rationale for why the “tramp” has left the
warmth and comfort of home or community to venture into what appears to be a cold,
unknown and barren future.
While both covers and vignettes included two seamlessly connected and
extraordinarily similar background and borders, their minor variances are also worth
noting in relation to the kinds of anxieties that peripatetic white males were provoking at
this time. For example, in the JHB illustration, there is the inclusion of a small child in

127
This is due to the vine’s thinner line work and more subtly illustrated icicles.
91

the bottom left corner – a little girl who does not appear on the WJM version. She is
positioned equidistant between her parents and the “tramp” character in the foreground.
Her body and line of sight are angled up towards the central figure as if running directly
to him. In this vignette, the seemingly weak and vulnerable “tramp” in the center imagery
is coded as a menacing threat by the family pet – a black dog that aggressively defends
the little girl, her parents and the property from this transgressing intruder. In contrast, the
WJM version features a dog that is rendered white and less aggressive, and the couple
featured are younger, more fit and without a child (fig. 10).

FIGURE
10.
Close
ups
of
W.
J.
Morgan
&
Co.
Lith.’s
(left)
and
J.
H.
Bufford’s
Sons
Lith.
(right)
illustrated
left-‐
quadrant
vignettes.

The contradictory messaging on the JHB cover – in which a young “tramp” is
visually coded as both vulnerable and threatening – prompts speculations about his
personality. Is this “tramp” an exile or a derelict? Is he a fugitive or a victim? Is he lost or
searching? In other words, is he a “tramp” by choice or circumstance? If by choice, then
is he mentally ill or just constitutionally incapable of making rational decisions that
would increase his chances of survival? Regardless of how individual readers might have
decoded this work and responded to these questions, the overarching sentiment coded
92

into this version of the song is an admonishment of a society that has allowed its youth to
become the “floating waste” of an industrial system. As compared to the WJM cover, the
JHB version critiques the politics of individualism by visually emphasizing progressive
collectivism’s ideal of social responsibility. This is evident in the comparisons of the two
vignettes that appear on the lower right quadrant of the cover. In the WJM version, the
landowner stands threateningly above the “tramp” intruder with club in hand pointed
downward, but easily lifted to strike. In the JHB version, the man is a father whose hand
is open and palm up, as if instructing or urging the youth to rise. In the other hand, he
holds what appears to be a cane or stick (unclubbed at the end) that is tucked back, and
pointed away from the intruder (fig. 11).

FIGURE
11.
Close
ups
of
right
quadrant
featured
on
the
WJM’s
(left)
and
JHB’s
(right)
“The
Poor
Old
Tramp.”

Higham has posited individualism and progressive collectivism as two necessarily
divergent yet fundamental political impulses informing an American identity whose
93

plasticity allows it to evolve and adapt to ever-changing conditions.
128
Freed from what
Geertz has identified as a unifying “primordial attachment,”
129
the ideology of liberation
emerges as the nation’s most important unifying principle “among individuals who had
lost through migration and competition any corporate identity.”
130
However, as
demonstrated by the Civil War, the inconsistently applied ideals of liberty, freedom and
autonomy could not (on their own) hold the nation together. Thus, according to Higham,
another “system of integration” and unification emerged, in which the nation’s
ideological framework was “refreshed” to incorporate and mirror the structuralist-
functionalist theories of organization gaining prominence during this period. Higham
describes this phase of U.S. identity as one of “technical unity.” In this arrangement,
citizenship was defined in relation to productivity and sustaining the nation as an
integrated whole. It is this perspective that informs JHB’s illustration of the “poor old
tramp,” in which the broken nomadic youth is reframed as a non-functioning component
of the nation that must repair or expel him in order for the system to survive.
Thus, amidst socio-economic anxieties over how mobility and transgression
should be understood in relation to the nation, liberty, moral and social deterioration, and
the growing pains of an aspiring empire, the alternate covers of “The Poor Old Tramp”
remind us that American cultural producers were harnessing and exploiting these

128
John Higham, Hanging Together: Divergent Unities in American Culture, ed. Carl J. Guarneri (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 3-22.

129
Geertz uses the term “primordial attachment” to describe “closed-system” affinities that preexist
individual choice (i.e. genetic lineage, kinship or ethnic heritage). Clifford Geertz, “The Integrative
Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States,” in Nations and Identities: Classic
Readings, ed. Vincent P. Pecora, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2001), 279-291.

130
John Higham, Hanging Together, 9.
94

apprehensions to some financial advantage. What is evident from this example and those
of other “tramp” themed products of this period is that multimodal messaging allowed for
more ambiguity in the decoding of the product by neutralizing any overt polarizing
message that might restrict its popularity. Stealthily encoding divergent or incompatible
perspectives into a single product gave larger audiences potential exposure to alternative,
emerging, receding and/or marginalized lifestyles and ideologies. While popular
entertainment products like “The Poor Old Tramp” were pivotal in helping build a
symbolic vocabulary for American mobility and transgression, other Long Depression
tramp-themed products also operated as vehicles that authors, illustrators, lyricists and
songwriters could use to critique the rising influence of the social sciences and its
identification of American “subcultures”.
Averse Virility and National Identity
For many Americans, the conspicuous growth of roaming and propertyless white
males presented a particularly troublesome development associated with industrial
capitalism. Eventually, American white males with little desire to participate in limitless
acquisition, settled communities or traditional marriage were identified as members of
several deviant “subcultures.” Their new identification as “tramps,” “vagrants,”
“drifters,” “bums,” “hobos” (and, towards the end of the century, “transients,”
“sociopaths” and “perverts”) marked the precarious position of privileged ethnic and
gendered status in the new industrial economy. Nonetheless, many white middle class
males still appeared to be willing to wander from traditional marriages and the confines
95

of home into these subcultures, “‘search[ing] for relief in intense experience’ that fed the
‘primitive’ component of their masculinity.”
131

While interest in “tramp” life may have initially arisen out of the government’s
failure to successfully integrate foot soldiers back into the mainstream, by the 1870s, a
widespread nostalgia developed for a lost masculinity that was thought to be uniquely
American – one associated with the frontier and the experiences of an austere and rugged
outdoor life that could be metaphorically embodied by the “tramp.” Kimmel has argued
that this expansion of national iconography and its subsequent exploitation by the
entertainment and culture industries was necessary to address the collision of a new
economic ordering and the nation’s first “crisis in masculinity”:
By the last few decades of the century, the realm of production had been so
transformed that men could no longer anchor their identity in their position in the
market. Now, new symbols were created, the consumption of which reminded
men of that secure past, before identity crises, before crises of masculinity.
Manhood had earlier meant economic autonomy – control over one’s own labor,
cooperative control over labor process, ownership of the product’s of one’s labor.
It had meant political patriarchy – the control of domestic and political life by
native-born white men whose community spirit and republican virtue was
respected in small-town life. And it had meant the freedom symbolized by the
West – vast, uncivilized, primitive – where men could test and prove their
manhood away from the civilizing influence of women. When these avenues of
demonstrating manhood were suddenly closed, it touched off a widespread
cultural identity crisis.
132

While he references a “widespread cultural identity crisis,” Kimmel is clear that all
Americans did not universally experience this crisis. Rather, it was specifically tied to the
nation’s white population, which had not only come to stand for the nation, but whose

131
Howard Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor, 225.

132
Michael S. Kimmel, The History of Men: Essays on the History of American and British Masculinities,
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 43.
96

productive role in the economy had been radically altered from independent artisan, shop
keeper, farmer, etc. to dependent, compliant and subordinate worker.
Compliance has been a particularly irksome concept for a nation whose
hegemonic populations fancied themselves rebels against an oppressive Old World order.
White averse virility had been explicitly linked to national character, reinforced through
the accounts of the Boston Tea Party, the founding of the Republic and the writing of the
Declaration of Independence, settler rebellions against the Mexican Empire, as well as
white agrarian interests in slave-holding states seceding from the Union. But the new
industrial production economy demanded compliance from all factions within American
society to function effectively – conditions that troubled rebellious and individualist
constructions of the allegorical American. Those who weren’t as open to these
transformations perceived that the nation’s values were being infected by a strain of
imported “feminizing” (Victorian) ideals that could potentially re-colonize the nation.
Increasingly, the allegorical American was being additionally coded by the “feminine
virtues associated with Victorian domesticity” and “the social gospel” – standards that
not only aided U.S. aspirations to succeed as a modern industrial empire, but also
demanded a “disavowal of individualism [and] faith.”
133
For those unwilling to accept
this social mandate, rootless outdoor living, homosociality, and refusing the “bonds” of
marriage became a viable way to sustain perceptions of averse virility for the white
hegemon. Nonetheless, even though “the concepts of bachelorhood and individualism

133
Susan Curtis, “The Son of Man and God the Father: The Social Gospel and Victorian Masculinity.” In
Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, eds. Mark Christopher Carnes
and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 72.
97

glide[d] together almost naturally,”
134
as America moved into the twentieth century,
associating oneself too fully with either concept became socially discouraged.
Discouragement often took the form of progressive “reeducation” campaigns and social
marginalization strategies – agendas that were also reflected in media products from this
period.
The Long Depression was rife with ambivalent messaging about American
mobility and nomadism, often encouraging authorized travel (e.g. Ike Brown’s “When
Do We Get To The Tunnel?” along with more sedentary inclinations and pleasures
associated with domestic life (e.g. Felix McGlennon’s “He Never Cares to Wander from
His Own Fireside”).
135
Popular sheet music often featured competing visions to Walt
Whitman’s commendations of a propertyless nomadic life, made popular in his “Song of
the Open Road”:
Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune—I myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Strong and content, I travel the open road….

My call is the call of battle – I nourish active rebellion;
He going with me must go well arm’d;
He going with me goes often with spare diet, poverty, angry enemies,
desertions….

Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!
Let the tools remain in the workshop!

134
Ibid.,10.

135
Ike Brown, “When Do We Get To The Tunnel,” I.S. Brown publisher, 1888. Felix McGlennon’s “He
Never Cares to Wander from His Own Fireside,”Frank Tousey’s Publishing House, 1892.
98

Let the money remain unearn’d! let the school stand! mind not the cry of the
teacher!
Let the preacher preach in the pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the
judge expound the law.

Mon enfant! I give you my hand!
I give you my love, more precious than money,
I give you myself, before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
136

Countering Whitman’s claims that the “best persons” were those “grow[n] in the
open air” were songs like Jackson and White’s “The Poor Forsaken Tramp,” Berger,
Amon and Straight’s “No Work,” and Crabtree’s “Only A Tramp”. In these and similar
songs, Whitman’s “Great Companions” on the road were used to remind the public of the
dangers, humiliations and hardships any white American male would face should his
peripatetic pursuits turn into a permanent, socially unacceptable lifestyle (fig. 12).

FIGURE
12.
AMERICA’S
WEARY
AND
REGRETFUL
WANDERERS:
(L-‐R)
“Poor
Forsaken
Tramp”
published
by

White,
Smith
&
Co.
(1877);
“No
Work,”
published
by
Mrs.
Pauline
Lieder
(1879);
and
“Only
A
Tramp,”

published
by
White,
Smith
&
Co.
(1880).
Digital
images
courtesy
of
the
Library
of
Congress,
Music
for
the

Nation,
American
Sheet
Music
collection.

136
Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road, Leaves of Grass (U.S. Edition, 1867) 225-237. Digitized
version of the original publication available online, Walt Whitman Archive
http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1867/poems/93.
99

The interest in discouraging “tramping” for white males was based in large part
on their privileged ranking in the culture – a status that allowed them to freely traverse
the public sphere with less bodily threat than their gendered, immigrant and ethnic
minority counterparts. Despite the likelihood that unrestricted roaming may have been
universally appealing, other segments of the population had always been at greater risk
for bodily injury when indulging in unregulated wanderings. This is because, throughout
most of U.S. history, the liberties of America’s indigenous peoples, females, elders, and
ethnic minorities have been subject to preauthorization, regulation, and revocation. Since
segregation, threats of violence and refusal of assistance already worked to curtail the
mobility of these groups, it is likely their nomadic inclinations posed less of a concern to
social reformers. White males became the central focus of “tramp” reform efforts
specifically because their mobile capital and recent labor demotion put them “at greater
risk” for permanently adopting this newly pathologized lifestyle. The fear was that these
“tramps” would menace settled communities, potentially disrupting the economy through
anarchistic attacks of “tramp armies” enacting swarming maneuvers,

spontaneously and
violently coming together to shut down factories, rail distribution systems, and other
capitalist interests.
137
These concerns were frequently featured in popular media of the
period (fig. 13).

137
Swarming refers to a military strategy in which units from multiple directions converge onto and
suddenly disperse away from a target. Swarming was used with varying degrees of success during the
American Civil War, which made the fear of its potential use by “tramp agitators” more palpable. For more
detailed descriptions on this strategy, see the Westpoint Military History Series’ The American Civil War,
ed. Timothy H. Donovan and Thomas E. Greiss (Garden City Park, NY: Square One Publishers, 2002).
100

FIGURE
13.
AMERICA’S
MENACING
“TRAMPS”:
(L)
James
Albert
Wales,
“Tramp,
tramp,
tramp
the
boys
are

marching,”
Harper’s
Bazaar
(Nov.
3,
1877).
(R)
T.
de
Thulstrup’s
Haymarket
Illustration
featuring
“tramp”

agitators.
The
caption
reads
“The
Anarchist
Riot
In
Chicago
–
A
Dynamite
Bomb
Exploding
Among
the

Police,”Harper’s
Weekly
(May
15,
1886).
Digital
images
courtesy
of
Library
of
Congress,
News
&

Periodicals
Division,
American
Periodicals
Series.

These kinds of visuals helped expand “tramp” associations in formidable ways
that could counteract images of the wretched peripatetic male also circulating in this era.
They drew the public’s attention towards another potential homegrown insurgency and
the fragility of a system that, during this period, benefitted very few Americans.
Caricatures of Long Depression “tramps” also developed negative associations related to
the survival of the American white family and, in particular, the safety of its females and
children.
138
Largely in response to the fear that urban environments made women and
children more susceptible to exploitation and harm, a spectacular (and sometimes
comically tinged) rhetoric blossomed during this period in which the “tramp” figure was
used to symbolize not only an “illogical” urban elitism, but also modernity’s threat to
sedentary culture and the inviolability of the home (fig. 14).

138
Dominant culture’s concern for the care and protection of females and children was far from universally
applied. The harm that could be visited upon non-white and lower class females and children rarely
inspired the kind of media characterizations kindled by potential white victims.
101

FIGURE
14.
PESTERING
THE
“WEAKER
SEX”:
(L-‐R)
Alfred
Kappes’
“The
Tramp,”Harper’s
Weekly
(Sept.
2,

1876);
Frederick
Opper’s
“Absurd,”
Puck
(Sept.
15,
1880);
and
Syd
B.
Griffin’s
untitled
illustration
for

“Willing
to
Work,”
Puck
(Oct.
2,
1889).
Digital
images
courtesy
of
Library
of
Congress,
News
&
Periodicals

Division,
American
Periodicals
Series.

“The Tramp… Exposed!”: Typology and Popular Representations
In the 1870s, nationwide expansion of anti-boundary busting sentiments
culminated in the enactment of anti-tramp laws and the emergence of a nuanced
taxonomy for peripatetic Americans that established this newly identified population as
an authentic, deviant “subculture” associated with the industrial era. However, in order to
enact laws that could regulate this “subculture,” clear definitions first had to be created
that would distinguish, by gender and nomadic lifestyle commitment, this population
from other Americans.
America’s anti-tramp laws were originally designed to prosecute men without a
home base who engaged in occasional beggary and “excessive mobility,” with many
states explicitly excluding “women, children, blind people, and local vagrants” who
engaged in similar behavior.
139
The exclusion of “local vagrants” reveals that the threat
“tramp” populations presented to settled communities was not the pestering of locals or
an offense to common standards of hygiene and decorum, but actually an ideological

139
Tim Cresswell, The Tramp in America, 53.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
ABSURD
Puck (1877-1918); Sep 15, 1880; 8, 184; American Periodicals Series Online
pg. 22
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Illustration 2 -- No Title
Puck (1877-1918); Oct 2, 1889; 656; American Periodicals Series Online
pg. 92
102

rejection of sedentary culture and a persistence to, in Cresswell’s words, “travel freely as
one’s own master.”
140

Popular newspaper and magazine contributors helped establish representational
differences that would distinguish “tramps” from other Americans – contributors like
renowned photojournalist Jacob Riis and author Josiah Flynt (Willard) – men whose
work, in many ways, buttressed a rising interest in sociology and its codification of
American “norms” and “subcultures.” Cresswell, Higbie, DePastino, and others have
already successfully demonstrated how much of Riis’ “photojournalistic fieldwork” was
dutifully contrived to proffer a vision of the “tramp” that was degenerate, pathetic,
unclean, violent, dangerous, sociopathic, alcoholic, and perverse. To make these
connotations believable, Riis claimed to have gained “insider” access to “tramp
subculture” that, prior to the publication of his work, had not been widely identified as
such.
Riis’ “Tramp in Mulberry Street Yard” is one of the first photographs ever
published of an American “tramp”.
141
Shot in 1887, the image eventually appeared in
Scribner’s Monthly (1889), and then in Riis’ popular 1890 collection of essays, How the
Other Half Lives (Charles Scribner & Sons, New York).
142
While not a trained
professional photographer, Riis was a committed reformer and unapologetic

140
Todd DePastino, Citizen Hobo, 31.

141
Ibid., 176.

142
This title still enjoys wide circulation, and was reprinted once again in 1997 by Penguin Classics, and
(most recently) in 2006 by the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan’s University
Library.
103

propagandist; an ideologue who knew how to advance a cause by successfully using what
Sol Worth and Larry Gross term the “sign-events” that comprise a photographic image.
In “Life vs. Art,” Gross has discussed how sign-events – or those symbols explicitly
presented with purposeful (as opposed to “transparent”) intent – are incredibly persuasive
elements within the context of traditional photography and documentary filmmaking.
143

This is because the rhetorical potency of these forms rests on the assumption that what is
presented has been “captured” by the lens is an event that has actually taken place in the
“real” world. Gross’ observations are particularly relevant in assessing “Tramp in the
Mulberry Street Yard,” which Riis presented as verification of the “tramp’s” existence,
and an objective record of the “rapidly changing” character, “squalor and degradation”
that Riis believed had marred the streets of New York during the Long Depression.
144

A former police beat reporter for The New York Tribune, Riis was notorious for
staging “in the field” photographs for maximum impact. In this case, verisimilitude was
achieved by selecting a real-world location (Mulberry Street) to feature his decidedly-
coded Appalachian primitive: a man sporting a ragged beard, a corncob pipe and worn
wool (or felt) “open dome” Calvary style hat.
145
The man, who was later identified in the
magazine and book caption as a “tramp,” is posed sitting on the rungs of an old wooden

143
Larry Gross, “Life vs. Art: The Interpretation of Visual Narratives,” Visual Communication 11, no. 4
(1985): 2-11.

144
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1890; New York: Penguin Classics, 1997), 56. Citations are to the Penguin edition.

145
Also known as the Missouri Meerschaum, this pipe was first introduced in 1869 and later popularized by
Missouri’s most famous native son, Samuel L. Clemens (aka Mark Twain). Algeo has argued that this
object has consistently operated as a trope for constructions of Appalachia as a primitive region of the U.S.
and stereotyped as a rural and anachronistic space in need of educational reform. Katie Algeo, “Locals on
Local Color: Imagining Identity in Appalachia,” Southern Cultures 4.4 (2003): 27-54.
104

ladder that leans precariously against a dilapidated roof structure (fig. 15). Riis’
accompanying essay offered no additional information about his subject, who appeared to
be merely an effective vehicle to exemplify the rising tide of urban decay and “moral
turpitude” sweeping through New York City. According to Cresswell, Riis publicly
admitted in his lectures that his photograph involved construction of this model as a
caricature, as he offered the man 10¢ to include the corncob pipe, for which the savvy
sitter demanded an additional 25¢ (i.e. two and a half times his 10¢ sitting fee). Riis
complied, but then subsequently referred to this model as “a tramp and a thief.”
146

FIGURE
15.
CONSTRUCTING
A
SUBCULTURE:
(L)
Jacob
Riis’
“Tramp
in
Mulberry
Street
Yard,”
(1887).
Digital

image
courtesy
of
authentichistory.com.
(R)
Photographer,
journalist,
author
and
social
reformer
Jacob
A.

Riis
(Pach
Bros.
Photography,
1904).
Digital
images
courtesy
of
the
Library
of
Congress,
Prints
and

Photographs
Division.

Reginald Twigg has theorized that Riis’ “moralizing” images are best assessed in
terms of their artistic performativity, arguing that “Riis’ effectiveness came from his
ability to co-articulate race, gender, and class identities – perform them – through his
text, and, by doing so[,] construct a narrative of ‘American’ identity based upon the

146
Tim Cresswell, The Tramp in America, 176-177.
105

mutually-reinforcing exclusions these categories produce.”
147
While Twigg’s argument is
most concerned with revealing how Riis’ photographs demonstrate technologies of
surveillance used by nineteenth century reformists to contain American females, raced
and ethnic populations, I suggest that this performative argument can also be extended to
consider how – through the careful selection, construction and posing of this individual,
and then subsequent identification as a “tramp” – Riis dramatized and helped discursively
produce this white male “subculture.” Further, his “performance” of this “tramp”
countered any potential positive associations that the allegorical American may have had
with rootless mobility and transgression.
Riis was not alone in his constructed exposés of American “subcultures.” During
the late 1880s through the1890s, it was common practice for newspapers to print
accounts of “investigative journalists” going undercover to expose the “truth” about
America’s more dangerous, exotic, and hidden practices, lifestyles and people. These
kinds of “insider” accounts or exposé narratives were auspiciously termed
“experiments”
148
by popular newspaper and magazine publishers, as they were
purportedly guided by “passionless fact.”
149
As “muckraking” and “experiment” features
enjoyed more popularity, published “objective records” of social problems and
“subcultures” became more sensational. Describing how the convergence of scientific

147
Reginald Twigg, “The Performative Dimension of Surveillance: Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives,”
Text and Performance Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1992): 305-328.

148
Michael Robertson. Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American
Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 95-96.

149
James Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, (Columbia, MO: University of
Missouri Press, 2005), 32.
106

rationalism and the public’s appetite for exposing “social problems” contributed to this
tone and the kinds of content circulating in this period, James Aucoin writes:
The press’s social role had changed as it grew into a mass medium with the power
to educate and persuade the American public, and press leaders accepted a social
responsibility that included exposing corruption, injustice, and abuse of power.
Moreover, the press had been affected by the nation’s growing appreciation for
rationalism and science. The public wanted facts from their newspapers, and
journalism was evolving into a profession based on social science with the
expertise to deliver objective, unbiased reports. While the coming era of
sensationalism in the press may have distorted the importance of individual news
stories, it was not contradictory to the press’s new role as a provider of facts.
150

The success of these kinds of exposés led to the publication of the most well cited and
popular book on the subject of the American “tramp”: Josiah Flynt’s Tramping With
Tramps.
151
Promoted as an auto-ethnographic account of “tramp culture,” Flynt’s written
and illustrated “trampology” defined and provided character sketches of American
“tramps” as criminals, shiftless, violent, and uniquely struck with an addictive appetite
for “wanderlust.”
152
Flynt’s account of “the criminal out in the open” exploited the
public’s increasing desire to read about the unsavory goings-on of an urban American
underworld that had already proven profitable in dime novels of the period. His accounts
of “tramp” life were illustrated by Jay Hambridge, whose artistic interpretation of Flynt’s
exclusively white male subculture was one populated by criminals, youthful trespassers,
and free-loading rail-riders (fig. 16).

150
Ibid., 28.

151
Josiah Flynt, Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life (New York: The Century
Co., 1893).

152
“Trampology” is the term Flynt coined to market and describe his studies. Josiah Flynt, Tramping with
Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life (New York: McGrath Publishing Co., 1969), 302.
107

FIGURE
16.
ILLUSTRATING
“THE
CRIMINAL
OUT
IN
THE
OPEN”:
(L-‐R)
Jay
Hambridge’s
“A
Tramp’s
Depot”;
M.

Trautschold’s
“Telling
Ghost-‐Stories;
and
A.
Z.
Baker’s
“Riding
on
the
Bumper’s”
(engraved
by
Charles

State).
Images
courtesy
of
McGrath
Publishing
Company.

Using the scientific pretense of calling his essays “studies” rather than stories, Flynt
further positioned himself within the increasingly popular discourse of scientific
rationalism by introducing his book with the following author’s note:
During my university studies in Berlin I saw my fellow students working in
scientific laboratories to discover the minutest parasitic forms of life, and later
publishing their discoveries in book form as valuable contributions to knowledge.
In writing on what I have learned concerning human parasites by an experience
that may be called scientific in so far as it deals with the subject on its own
ground and in its peculiar conditions and environment, I seem to myself to be
doing similar work with a like purpose. This is my apology, if apology be
necessary, for a book which attempts to give a picture of the tramp world, with
incidental reference to causes and occasional suggestion for remedies.
153

Flynt’s framing of himself and “tramps” as “parasitic” worked to his financial advantage.
The young author whose life was a “marvelous invention,” and whose writing style had
been described as “too literal for art and not quite literal enough for science,” secured
himself a position not only as a noted author and expert on America’s “Under World,”

153
Ibid., ix.
108

but also as a detective with the railroads, an international speaker, and a “well-merited
distinction as criminologist.”
154
According to Flynt, his association with the phenomenon
of tramping prompted one noted sociologist of the time to declare, “Flynt had the field [of
the “Underworld”] to himself; there is no one to take his place at present.”
155

While Riis and Flynt may have been the most known and influential cultural
producers in materializing the “American tramp” for the public, neither were the first to
commercially exploit the nation’s rising interest in (and concern about) classifying
peripatetic American populations as “subcultures.” In fact, several satirical entertainment
publications also integrated the public’s hysteria concerning the sudden identification of
this “subcultural menace” comprised of roving white males. For example, the illustrated
humor magazine Puck, which had become a major showcase for political cartoons,
presented the “tramp” not only as a modern fixture of American culture, but also as a
political liability and (at times) a political anti-hero. In so doing, the magazine helped
dimensionalize the “tramp’s” construction by framing him as both a social deviant and a
political deviant, whose de-legitimization made the character an even more potent force
for critiquing the system. This latter construction as political deviant was most prominent
in cartoons where the figure was used to voice opposition to government subsidies for the

154
Josiah Flynt, My Life: Josiah Flynt, Josiah Flynt Willard (New York: The Outing Publishing Company,
1908), 354.

155
Ibid., 353.
109

bank and railroad industries, and support for organized labor (fig. 17) – positions more in
keeping with the magazine’s liberal politics and working class readership.
156

FIGURE
17.
A
FRIEND
OF
LABOR:
(L)
Frederick
Opper’s
“Need
for
Caution,”
Puck
(Dec.
7,
1881).
Caption

reads,
“Look
out
fur
yer
loose
change,
Jim
–
here
comes
a
bank
cashier!”.
(R)
J.A.
Wales’
“A
Sympathizer

With
the
Strikers,”
Puck
(June
22,
1881).
Caption
reads
“Hold
on,
Bill,
whatcher
goin’
to
drink
–
that
ain’t

Union
Beer!”.
Digital
images
courtesy
of
Library
of
Congress,
News
&
Periodicals
Division,
American

Periodicals
Series.

Another example of material that approached the “tramp subculture” comically
was the quarto-sized handbook The Tramp: His Tricks, Tallies, and Tell-Tales with All
His Signs, Countersigns, Grips, Pass-Words, and Villainies – Exposed!, edited and
illustrated by the American satirist and comic illustrator Frank Bellew, along with “Chip
and A Bee” (fig. 18).
157

156
Dan Backer, “A Popular Medium” and “Mainstream and Elite Political Culture,” The Yellow Pages,
Comics: Uniting Mugwumps and the Masses: Puck's Role in Gilded Age Politics, (August 1996), American
Studies, University of Virginia [online] http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7EMA96/PUCK/home.html (accessed
January 10, 2011).

157
“Chip” was the pseudonym that Bellew’s son, artist Frank P.W. Bellew, often used to sign his work.
Frank Linstow White, “Fine Arts: The Artist’s Signature.” The Independent – Devoted to the Consideration
of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies, History, Literature, and the Arts (1848-1921),
October 27, 1892, 6. http://www.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/ (accessed February 4, 2010). “A Bee”
appears to refer to the anonymous narrator of the story who, upon entering the “secret” tramp society of the
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
NEED FOR CAUTION
Puck (1877-1918); Dec 7, 1881; 10, 248; American Periodicals Series Online
pg. 214
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
A SYMPATHIZER WITH THE STRIKERS
Puck (1877-1918); Jun 22, 1881; 9, 224; American Periodicals Series Online
pg. 273
110

FIGURE
18:
Cover
of
Frank
Bellew’s
The
Tramp:
His
Tricks,
Tallies,
and
Tell-‐Tales
with
All
His
Signs,

Countersigns,
Grips,
Pass-‐Words,
and
Villainies
–
Exposed!
(1878).
Image
courtesy
of
the
University
of

Chicago
Illinois,
Richard
J.
Daley
University
Library,
Special
Collections
and
University
Archives.

This anonymously-authored thirty-two page handbook was released in 1878 by
Dick & Fitzgerald, leading publishers of the period who also specialized in
“highwayman,” “detective,” marine and wilderness adventure dime novels, Blackface
Minstrel songbooks, self-improvement publications, as well as joke, game and party
books “aimed at the family, the home, and the parlor.”
158
According to Randall Cox,
much of Dick & Fitzgerald’s titles were anonymously penned; although in the case of
The Tramp… Exposed! it is unclear whether or not the author’s anonymity was due to
Bellew’s desire to remain uncredited, the publisher’s desire to limit remuneration and

“Red Rovers,” is designated “a bee” because of his willingness to work. Frank Bellew, ed. The Tramp: His
Tricks, Tallies, and Tell-Tales with All His Signs, Countersigns, Grips, Pass-Words, and Villainies –
Exposed! (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1878), 19.

158
J. Randolph Cox, The Dime Novel Companion: A Source Book (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing
Group, 2000), 85-86.
111

retain full copyright control, or the industrial mill structure that dominated the creation of
all popular publications from this period.
159

In Down and Out on the Road: The Homeless in American History, Kenneth
Kusmer uses The Tramp… Exposed! to discuss a larger body of counter subversion
propaganda that aimed to regain control over the propertyless masses after the Civil War.
Mapping the evolving discourses and media constructions of homelessness as they have
appeared throughout U.S. history, Kusmer argues that Bellew’s handbook helped
construct a conspiratorial and threatening image of a wandering male “guild” ripe for
revolt. Taking issue with various text passages in the handbook, Kusmer concludes that
The Tramp… Exposed! “bore a marked resemblance” to other counter-subversive
literature circulating during the Long Depression, which featured a central “divisive
symbol to challenge the theme of consensus” towards which the nation was heading.
160

Among the passages Kusmer quotes to forward this argument is one that reads, “For the
Tramps are a fearful power in this country at present, under a most perfect system of
organization, and ready at any moment, when the opportunity occurs, to hurl their power
at the throat of organized authority.”
161
However, this description is offered completely
without context, as if Bellew’s intent was to provide a rationale for the national hysteria

159
The vast majority of publishers associated with the dime novel industry structured production in a way
that would “subordinate” authors by replacing them with creative laborers (mostly females) working in
“fiction factories”. This resulted in a “shift from selling an ‘author’ who was a free laborer, to selling a
‘character’, a trademark whose stories could be written by a host of anonymous hack writers.” Michael
Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1998),
20.

160
Kenneth L. Kusmer, Down and Out On the Road: The Homeless in American History (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 50.

161
Frank Bellew, The Tramp… Exposed!, 20.
112

surrounding the “Tramp Scare” by offering some kind of advanced, ominous warning to
his readers.
I examined an original copy of Bellew’s The Tramp… Exposed!, and while I do
agree with Kusmer’s conclusions that a body of anti-tramp propaganda was widely
circulating during this period, by analyzing only the text of this particular product, he
makes a misleading argument. By focusing solely on the handbook’s text to suggest it
helped to pejoratively construct the homeless as a “national issue,”
162
Kusmer ignored (or
is unaware of) Bellew’s ideological proclivities or his reputation for producing satirical
illustrations – contexts that skewed the text in a completely different direction (fig. 19).
His analysis also failed to situate the narrative in the context of the promotional blurbs on
the front cover and the advertisements on the back – both of which clearly reflected the
kinds of material the handbook’s publishers were known to produce. Kusmer also
bypassed the dominant role that criticism and visual symbolism would have played in any
work by this renowned political satirist and comic illustrator.
163
Additionally, he
completely dismissed the fact that this title exclusively promoted other humorous joke
books on its front and back covers. These oversights result in a polemical and misleading
analysis of a product that, on deeper inspection, was quite obviously designed to critique,
not encourage, dominant culture’s unfolding “tramp” hysteria.

162
Kenneth L. Kusmer, Down and Out On the Road, 3.

163
Bellew’s books included The Art of Amusing, Smith's The Lines Are Drawn: Political Cartoons of the
Civil War, A Bad Boy's First Reader, Jeff Petticoats, and Joe Miller's Jests with Copius Editions.
113

FIGURE
19.
THE
VISUAL
SATIRIST:
(L)
Frank
Bellew’s
“The
American
Frankenstein”
depicting
the
corrupt

relationship
between
the
railroad
industry
and
the
U.S.
government.
Caption
reads,
“Agriculture,

commerce,
and
manufacture
are
all
in
my
power.
My
interest
is
in
the
higher
law
of
American
politics.”

New
York
Daily
Graphic
(April
14,
1874).
(R)
Bellew’s
“Untitled”
illustration
as
it
appeared
in
Harper’s

Bazaar
(Sept.
11,
1875).
Caption
at
bottom
reads,
“Tramp,
tramp,
tramp,
the
boys
are
marching.”
Digital

images
courtesy
of
Library
of
Congress,
News
&
Periodicals
Division,
American
Periodicals
Series.

A cursory glance at The Tramp… Exposed! clearly reveals the handbook’s literary
genealogy. On the front cover, a header banner touts the release of another Dick &
Fitzgerald “fun book” called Laughing Gas, described as “A book to make you happy,
and drive dull care away. Chock full of screaming yarns and stories. THIS BOOK is
indeed the JOLLY MAN’s COMPANION”.
164
The full-page advertisement on its inside
front cover also shows that The Tramp… Exposed! was designed as satire. The ad lists
five humorous titles published by the New York publishing house M.J. Ivers & Co.
165

One title stands out for its descriptive similarity to The Tramp… Exposed! – Bricktop’s
Put Through: A Comic Exposé of the Mysteries of Masonry and Odd Fellowship. This

164
Featured banner ad on the front cover of The Tramp: His Tricks, Tallies, and Tell-Tales with All His
Signs, Countersigns, Grips, Pass-Words, and Villainies – Exposed!

165
Inside back cover advertised the following titles: Flashes and Sparks of Wit and Humor By Our
American Humorists; Roaring Jokes for Funny Folks; Jolly Jokes for Jolly People; Put Through: A Comic
Exposé of the Mysteries of Masonry and Odd Fellowship; and Fun Let Loose.
114

title is promoted as humorous insider account of another mono-gender collective causing
concern in the culture at large and resulting in Anti-Masonry organizations and
propaganda campaigns. Both Put Through: A Comic Exposé… and The Tramp…
Exposed! played on the “experiment” device that used purported “insider accounts” to
sell newspapers and advance the careers of “subculture” documentarians like Riis and
Willard.
But Kusmer’s most astonishing oversight is his omission of any mention of
Bellew’s comically absurd illustrations – material that accounts for approximately fifty
percent of all printed matter in the handbook. Nor does he reference Bellew’s connection
to the burgeoning and radical transcendentalist movement. Even the most conspiratorially
minded would be hard-pressed to explain how this handbook’s cartoons aided in
rendering “tramps” or “tramp culture” as anything other than the imagined and ridiculous
constructs of sedentary culture’s collective imagination. Consider the handbook’s
descriptions and Bellew’s depictions of various tramp characters that inhabited the Red
Rover “brotherhood” (fig. 20). For example, there is Sam, who is described as having
once “been a deck-hand on a North River barge, and once thought he might become
President of the United States, he now hopes he may have a clam-cart of his own some
day.” This thinly veiled reference to “Uncle Sam,” whom Bellew is credited as being the
first to depict in illustration (ca. 1852), is used here to “poke” at the rhetoric and reality of
equal opportunity in the U.S. There is also the “Perfessor” (who continuously derides the
“holy capitalists”), the womanizing “abject Tramp,” and several other “all-devouring
border ruffians.” All of these characters contribute to Bellew’s comic tale about how a
115

“printer by trade” “raised on hope and hash” first drinks and “loafs” his way into a
“ragged, dirty unwholesome tramp,” then finally ends up married and living on a farm as
just another “respectable member of society.”

FIGURE
20.
Bellew’s
visual
aid
of
“tramp
types,”
featured
in
The
Tramp…
Exposed!
They
include
“The
Bully

Tramp,”
“The
Lubberly
Tramp,”
“The
Wholesome
Tramp,”
“The
Abject
Tramp,”
and
“Mrs.
Tramp.”
Image

courtesy
of
University
of
Chicago
Illinois,
Richard
J.
Daley
University
Library,
Special
Collections
and

University
Archives.

Bellew’s known association with Manhattan’s bohemian scene,
166
his friendships
with and admiration for American radicals Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David
Thoreau,
167
and his visual critiques of the enormous and corrupt influence that railroad
companies wielded over the U.S. government suggest that Bellew would hardly have
been a contributor to any anti-tramp sentiment circulating during this period. However,

166
The Literary World described this scene in “Our New York Letter,” (February 20, 1886), which
identified Bellew as one of several journalists, “artists, actors, lawyers, musicians and poets” who were
members of New York’s Bohemian Club – a group of “merry fellows” who “looked upon life as nothing
more as a jolly comedy,” and whose group motto concerning money was “sufficient for the day.” Stylus,
“Our New York Letter.” The Literary World: A Fortnightly Review of Current Literature (1870-1904),
February 20, 1866, 64. http://www.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/ (accessed February 4, 2010)

167
Bellew described his meeting and friendships with both men in, “Recollections of Ralph Waldo
Emerson.” Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science (1871-1885), July 1, 1884, 45.
http://www.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/ (accessed September 12, 2010).
116

what it does reveal is that the nomadic American had already become a potent trope that
cultural producers and scholars alike have used to explore themes involving
transgression, identity and the persistent appearance of propertyless and peripatetic
individuals in the U.S.
Conclusion
It was early on in the era known as the Long Depression that the “tramp” first
entered the national symbolic through mass-distributed media. This period was
distinguishable by considerable transformations brought about by major economic
upheaval and technological advances in communication media, transportation, and the
resultant widespread distribution of reproduced information and entertainment. It was
also riddled with anxiety and tensions over national identity in relation to the
meaningfulness of America’s founding ideals, the closure of the frontier, and the birthing
of an expansive yet geographically contained modern empire.
During this period, illustrated mass-distributed media (in the form of published
printed materials) became a prominent site where ideological positions could be quickly
disseminated, and the aforementioned apprehensions and conflicts safely considered and
discussed without bloodshed. Recognizing the potential value in representing these
concerns, cultural producers introduced into the national symbolic a figure whose
character strengths and weaknesses could be easily debated: the “tramp.” While this
figure may have initially been associated with U.S. patriotism and rugged masculinity,
unlike his cowboy and frontiersman trope predecessors, the “tramp’s” rootlessness and
unregulated mobility could be framed in multiple ways that would allow for an
117

entertaining airing of how many Americans felt about their nation and its inherent
ideological paradoxes. As the embodiment of the nation’s latent but active transgressive
and anti-sedentary tendencies, the “tramp” was constructed as both hero and foil in
visually and textually mediated narratives that (sometimes metaphorically, sometimes
directly) addressed America’s social and political divisions, its rapid expansion and
containment, individual and group responsibility, and the dominance of industrialism and
science in reordering society.
A survey of illustrated sheet music, magazines and entertaining handbooks from
the Long Depression indicates that the central focus of tramp-themed narratives
consistently focused on the character’s rootless and boundary-busting inclinations – traits
that were useful in maintaining a “crisis in representation” for a nation committed to
unfettered liberty, sedentary culture, and an expansive empire. The artifacts reveal that as
the economic crisis of the Long Depression continued, the number of tramp-themed
products increased. As this happened, multi-layered constructions of the roving white
male expanded, creating a national trope that was alternately constructed as the backbone
of the nation; a vital and necessary element in economic recovery; a tragic heroic figure
discarded and set adrift into a cold and uncaring future; a militant threat to the new
economic order; a deviant that could threaten the stability and safety of the family; and/or
an “exceptional” subculture in need of containment.
During this crucial period, when the nascent empire faced its most
transformational moment, dominant culture sought to establish stability and authority
through a containment of its domestic “free radical” elements. However, it was also
118

understood that in order to successfully make the transformation from post-colonial
nation to modern world empire, the U.S. would need to transgress its own boundaries,
expand its geographic reach, and exert more global influence – all while maintaining
domestic stability. One way to represent these two contradictory pulls of expansion and
containment was through tramp-themed narratives, whose central characters could be
coded in a variety of ways to help maintain the nation’s “crisis in representation” – a
representational crisis necessary for satisfying competing ideological trajectories the U.S.
relied upon for definition.
119

CHAPTER 4
THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1929-1939)
Introduction
After 1900, as the world economy began to stabilize and the nation edged towards
economic recovery, the propertyless white peripatetic male remained a prominent figure
in the cultural lore of the nation and the popular media products of the day. In many
ways, “tramp” portrayals maintained the representational trajectories first established by
cultural producers during the Long Depression – a consistency that continued to position
the “tramp” as pivotal in debates concerning social fragmentation, socio-political and
economic agendas, and unregulated mobility. However, with the introduction of sound
motion pictures, a new and powerful mass-distributed medium, another trope of
American nomadism and transgression began to overtake the “tramp’s” prominence as
the nation’s most recognizable peripatetic figure.
Although the “hobo” eventually became the character most associated with the
American labor movements of the 1920s-1940s, this figure was actually first introduced
in 1893 by Josiah Flynt, who used the term “hobo” in his writings as a synonym for
“tramp.” He codified this association in Tramping with Tramps glossary of terms (“The
Tramp’s Jargon”), which read: “HOBO: a tramp. Derivation obscure. Farmer’s
‘Americanisms’ gives: HO-BOY, or HAUT-BOY: a New York night-scavenger.”
168
As I
discuss in this chapter, this conflation of terms became hotly contested in the twentieth
century by members identifying with “tramp” and “hobo” subcultures, as well as by

168
Josiah Flynt, Tramping with Tramps, 394.
120

sociologists who studied them. But despite any assertions that these were distinct
classifications referring to two different subsets of peripatetic Americans, most cultural
producers of this era seemed uninterested in validating or maintaining such divisions.
In this chapter, I trace the maturing and continued expansion of transgressive
nomadic tropes within the national symbolic during the crisis that led into America’s
imperial midlife. Primarily focusing on the extraordinary utility of the “American hobo”
as a rhetorical device in publishing, film, and song, I discuss how this figure not only
exercised and potentially exorcised compounding social and political fragmentation and
friction, but also provided the U.S. with an internationally recognizable and relatable
“worker of the world.” I demonstrate how America’s white nomadic tropes persisted and
continued to expand in ways that not only helped grow mass-distributed entertainment
media industries, but also reflected shifting attitudes towards acceptable and non-
acceptable modes of mobility and boundary-busting activities and identification. I begin
this discussion with a brief historic review of the period leading up to and defining
America’s Great Depression, and some of the major transformations experienced during
this period. Focusing on popular hobo-themed products widely circulated between 1929-
1939, I discuss how media producers attached additional layers of meaning to the
peripatetic American in ways that worked to resolve the nation’s “crisis in
representation” when the U.S. empire was approaching its perceived mid-life, and when
national cohesion was once again threatened.

121

Historicizing the Great Depression: “Creative Destruction” and the Nation
One of the devastating effects of the widespread market speculation that led to the
stock market crashes of Black Thursday (October 24, 1929) and Black Tuesday (October
29, 1929) was that the nation’s “pools of speculators” lost faith in a market where
investors’ economic losses had more than tripled that of all the remaining currency in
circulation.
169
Despite joint attempts by President Hoover and Wall Street to restore
confidence in the market, these losses and their associated consequences were
emotionally and financially overwhelming for most Americans. Morris Dickstein has
argued that the “Depression Culture” that arose after these crashes rendered a once
economically naïve and optimistic public inconsolably bitter and despondent. With the
public’s spiritual and psychological health in such a despairing state, the primary
challenge facing America’s political and financial leadership was that the public was no
longer willing to take economic risks and invest in the unknown. Reflecting on this
dilemma, Morris Dickstein has remarked:
Psychological studies of the Great Depression have shown how economic
problems were complicated by emotional problems, since hard times, no matter
how impersonal their origin, undercut victims’ feelings of confidence, self-worth,
even their sense of reality. The psychological pain was exacerbated by the
American ethic of self-help and individualism, remnants of a frontier mentality –
the same dream of success, dignity, and opportunity that had inspired immigrants,

169
By October 29
th
, a major sell-off by investors caused the New York Times to announce that stock market
losses totaled $14 billion. Wigmore reports that, at the onset of Black Thursday, the amount of currency in
circulation was estimated to be somewhere between $4.4 and $4.6 billion. Barrie A. Wigmore, The Crash
and Its Aftermath: A History of Securities Markets in the United States 1929-1933 (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1985), 13 & 122. Edward Chancellor has divided the vast majority of these “pooled”
investors into the very wealthy (e.g. the Rockefeller, Stillman and Sinclair families), successful
entrepreneurs (e.g. Walter Chrysler, the Fisher brothers, William Durant), working and middle class Irish-
Americans (e.g. Joseph P. Kennedy, Charles Meehan, and J.J. Riordan), as well as substantial blocks of
female investors and numerous celebrities and entertainers. Edward Chancellor, The Devil Take the
Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation (New York: Plume, 2000), 203-204.
122

freed slaves, and natives alike. This made people feel responsible even when their
lives ran downhill.
170

Thus, the economic investment and spending spree that had marked the nation’s post-war
“boom” economy of the 1920s had, by the end of the decade, given way to a landslide of
failed market speculations, massive debt, deflation, drops in production, and a nagging
concern that some of these conditions could have been avoided had the American public
been more prudent in its accumulation patterns. By 1930, it could no longer be denied
that the country had entered a deep Depression. Earlier instabilities in the market, of
which the 1929 crashes were merely a symptom, had resulted in widespread foreclosures
and bank failures. More significantly, unlike previous economic crises – in which open
and available farmland and foreign trade may have offered glimmers of hope to a wary
public – persistent drought conditions, a decreased need for American products overseas
and massive unemployment eventually uprooted millions of Americans from their settled
communities and lives.
The mass migration of previously settled peoples, 2.5 million of them from rural
white Midwestern farming communities, renewed public debate concerning the “soul” of
American identity.
171
At the center of this debate was the nation’s unwavering

170
Morris Dickstein, “Depression Culture: The Dream of Mobility,” in Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s
Culture, ed. Bill Mullen and Sherry Lee Linkon (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 227.

171
The 1920s through the 1940s was a period of massive intra-state migration in the U.S. involving several
segments of the population. In addition to the out-migration of 2.5 million largely white farm laborers
(“Dust Bowl refugees) from Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico, there was also the
movement of an estimated 2 million African-Americans away from southern states to northern,
Midwestern, and western states; large migrations of southern professional, semi-professional and educated
classes to northern industrial states; and a half million Mexican-Americans who voluntarily repatriated to
Mexico in response to a hostile climate of U.S. nativism and the deportation of foreign labor. Henry S.
Shryock, Jr. and Hope Tilsdale Eldridge, “Internal Migration in Peace and War,” American Sociological
123

commitment to free-market capitalism (as expressed in the previous decade), and the
alienation that accompanied industrial productivity. Michael Steiner has described the
years of the Great Depression as an anatomizing period, in which self-described
“agrarians, distributists, decentralists, back-to-the-land and subsistence-homesteading
advocates” helped to create a regionalist discourse inspired by the desire to reestablish a
sense of national commonality outside the experience of industrial capitalist culture.
172

Others – from white Christian separatists to Black nationalists and immigrant rights
activists – believed that the soul and success of the American project had always been
mapped along religious, racial, and ethnic lines, and they formed collectives and
organizations to promote these beliefs. Still others, like the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO), the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and the Knights of
Labor, rejected such assertions, working instead to create a “culture of unity” in which
the soul of the nation was proposed to be America’s laboring (as opposed to investment)
class.
173

All of these attempts to identify the nation’s elusive “touchstone” of identity
responded to, and yet only served to deepen, already entrenched and newly erupting
divisions that were challenging the stability of empire. Whether by default or design,
American media’s creation and promotion of a national culture (e.g. radio programs,

Review 12, no. 1 (Feb. 1947): 27-39; and Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great
Depression: Repatriation Pressures 1929-1939 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974).

172
Michael C. Steiner, “Regionalism in the Great Depression,” Geographical Review 73, no. 4 (Oct.,
1983): 430-446, http://www.jstor.org/stable/214332.

173
Lizbeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), 332-344.
124

films, nationally-distributed publications) helped sustain and circulate these different
perspectives, and yet overwhelmed (and in some instances quieted) their potential to be
realized.
174
For example, Steven Ross has discussed how, during the silent-era,
Hollywood’s pro-labor creative community had produced numerous films advocating
radical ideological shifts for the nation (e.g. The Jungle, 1914; The Idle Class, 1921;
Greed 1925); but that eventually these themes were silenced by corporate dominance
over the medium and its intention to create a mass culture industry through the promotion
of a less divided (and more consumer friendly) America. Noting cinema’s shift from the
political overt art of the silent film to the politically covert sound motion picture, Ross
observed:
Although movies had attracted great numbers of people since 1905, it was not
until the 1920s that they became a genuine institution of mass culture – one that
reached all Americans regardless of their class, race, gender, ethnicity, or
geographical location. Consequently, movies grew even more important as
vehicles of propaganda and political suasion. Never before had so many people
from so many backgrounds seen the same films at roughly the same time; and
never before could so many people be influenced by what they saw and
experienced at the movies.
175

Even though synchronized sound in film was possible long before its inauguration in the
feature film The Jazz Singer (1927), its public arrival signaled an interest in building
more cohesion and acceptance of Bourgeois dominance by promoting “Anglo-Saxon

174
For more on U.S. entertainment media’s contributions to constructing a national culture see Michele
Hilmes, “Who We Are, Who We Are Not: The Emergence of National Narratives,” in Radio Voices:
American Broadcasting 1922-1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 75-96; and Lary
May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983).

175
Steven J. Ross, Working-class Hollywood, 176.
125

ideals” and the creation of a “model citizenry” to both citizens and newly arrived
immigrants.
176

Hitting the Road in the 1930s
Desperate for shelter and employment, hundreds of thousands of previously
settled Americans trespassed and converged on private and public property, squatting in
makeshift shantytowns located near the nation’s main transportation corridors, factories,
farms, and soup kitchens. These shantytowns became a central focus in the presidential
campaign rhetoric of 1932 when they were labeled “Hoovervilles” by the Democratic
candidate and his supporters, whose strategy was to attach the economic crisis directly to
the Republican incumbent, President Herbert Hoover.
177
Martin Carcasson has examined
the Hoover administration’s failure to successfully harness presidential rhetoric and
refute his opponent’s (and the media’s) claims that “Hoovervilles” were the direct result
of a “Hoover Depression,” concluding:
Although the criticism of Hoover was based loosely on the policies of his
administration, the attack waged by the Democrats in general and Roosevelt in
particular was aimed very much at Hoover's moral nature, motives, and reputation.
Roosevelt's strategy in the campaign was to attack, rather than defend, and to leave
Hoover ‘saddled with the Depression.’
178

176
Lary May, Screening Out the Past, 53.

177
The first shantytown of this nature appeared in Chicago in 1930, and was called “Hooverville” by its
occupants. That same year the New York Times helped popularize the term with an article entitled “Chicago
Jobless Colonize; Shanty Town Called ‘Hooverville’ has a ‘mayor’ on its ‘Easy Street.’” Suburban
Emergency Management Project, “Biot Report #6: What is a ‘Hooverville’?” (June 5, 2009) [online]
http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=626.

178
Martin Carcasson, “Herbert Hoover and the Presidential Campaign of 1932: The Failure of Apologia,”
Presidential Studies Quarterly, 28, No. 2 (Spring, 1998): 353.
126

In 1932, despite Hoover’s unsuccessful attempts to claim victories against the
economic crisis and its “temporary relocation” of Americans,
179
the proliferation of so-
called “Hoovervilles,” coupled with an unemployment rate that had climbed to 23.6% in
1932, helped Franklin Delano Roosevelt ride a landslide to victory.
180
According to
Tobey, Witherell and Brigham, the Roosevelt presidency staked an ideological claim
against the mobility of an increasingly agitated populace by quickly establishing policies
that could help resettle the nation and stabilize the empire:
The depression loaded Roosevelt's political rhetoric with negative imagery of
mobility. Veterans marching across the heartland for their bonuses in 1932, families
thrown out of their homes and off their farms by foreclosure, vagrants drifting
across the nation and clustering briefly in Hoovervilles only to disperse days later,
unemployed men leaving their families behind and moving from city to city looking
for work, slum families evicted for failure to pay rent, and families too poor to
support themselves separating into different public institutions: powerful, dramatic
images of household instability that testified to the nation's failure to modernize its
social compact. To produce a nation of stable households, Roosevelt led the New
Deal coalition to support home buying with the power of the state and settle the
American people in.
181

Despite Roosevelt’s championing a “modernized social compact” in which
“property” and “secure savings” were deemed “rights to be assured,”
182
FDR’s first full

179
Ibid., 357.

180
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Bulletin 2307: No. HS-29. Employment Status of the Civilian
Population: 1929 to 2002,” U.S. Census Bureau [online] http://www.census.gov/statab/hist/HS-29.pdf
(accessed January 2, 2011).

181
Ronald Tobey, Charles Witherell, and Jay Brigham, “Moving Out and Settling In: Residential Mobility,
Home Owning, and the Public Enframing of Citizenship, 1921-1950,” The American Historical Review, 95,
no.5 (Dec. 1990): 1419-1420.

182
Ibid., 1417. Roosevelt’s full statement read: “Every man has a right to his own property; which means a
right to be assured, to the fullest extent attainable, in the safety of his savings. By no other means can men
carry the burdens of those parts of life which, in the nature of things, afford no chance of labor; childhood,
sickness, old age. In all thoughts of property, this right is paramount.”
127

year in office (1933) marked the nation’s lowest point during the Great Depression:
unemployment reached an unprecedented 24.9%, and the previous two years of severe
drought in the farm belt dislocated even more Americans out of their settled
communities.
183
A brief respite occurred in 1934, due in part to increased domestic
spending initiated by Hoover before he left office, and (in great measure) to FDR’s
National Recovery Act. With the National Recovery Act in place, thousands of
employees were put to work by the federal government, which led to a drop in
unemployment of nearly three percentage points. However, in 1937, the nation
experienced another sharp decline that erased these modest gains and initiated another
recession. In response, the Roosevelt administration expanded liberal domestic spending
policies through “New” New Deal programs that focused on “compensatory public
spending.”
184
The primary concern was to mitigate the kinds of internal insurgencies that
had swept through European nations, and quell radical political factions (on both the right
and the left) that viewed the weakening economy as an opportunity for national
ideological redefinition. Characterizing the ways in which FDR’s institutional
progressivism responded to maintaining “rugged individualism” within the context of
increased social regulation and oversight, Steven Kesselman wrote:
Conservatives like Hoover (they called themselves the only true liberals)
maintained that the basis of democracy was liberty and that without economic
liberty no other liberties were possible. The choice seemed to be only between
absolute freedom and national regimentation. With the closing of the frontier,
however, and with the industrialization of society, the emphasis in liberal circles

183
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Bulletin 2307.”

184
John W. Jeffries, “The ‘New’ New Deal: FDR and American Liberalism, 1937-1945,” Political Science
Quarterly, 105, no. 3 (Autumn, 1990): 397-418.
128

changed from liberty, which they claimed could not exist in an era of economic
integration, to equality in the form of economic security. The emphasis switched
from political democracy to economic democracy, for economic democracy was
assumed to be an automatic characteristic of the frontier era. The emphasis, then,
switched from individual rights to social rights and individual responsibility, from
independence to interdependence. With the closing of the frontier, the era of the
self-made man came to an end. The question now was whether industrial man could
be free, as he was on the frontier, if government increased its control of his life to
make his expectations more secure.
185

Kesselman concluded that Turner’s Frontier thesis as expressed in the New Deal of the
1930s instituted a kind of ideological relativism that ultimately paralyzed any direct
challenges that might radically overhaul or interfere with the nation’s basic economic
structuring. In so doing, ideological contestations continued to fester, but were
increasingly absorbed within an emerging discourse of economically-based compromise,
in which ideological schisms could be reframed as the nation’s “exceptional” ability to
“tolerate,” recognize and “reward” difference.
Orchestrating this discourse on one end of the spectrum were social Darwinists
and industrial capitalists, who collectively worked to create a schema of “deservedness”
that could sustain the dominant social order and still inspire the vast majority of the
American people to embrace an ethos of hard work and consumer participation.
186
On the
other end of the spectrum was the FDR administration, which countered radical
overthrow of free market capitalism by responding to and attempting to ameliorate the
most immediate challenges impacting the lives of everyday Americans (e.g. food, shelter,
and employment). FDR’s New Deal also created institutionalized forums for discharging

185
Steven Kesselman, “The Frontier Thesis and the Depression,” Journal of the History of Ideas 29, no. 2
(Apr. - Jun., 1968): 264-265.

186
I elaborate on the details of this discourse beginning on page 132.
129

frustrations and inspiring hope through the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and
its direct funding of a socially conscious public art movement. In funding programs that
could employ the nation’s rhetorically persuasive creative class,
187
WPA artists (which
included the two hundred-plus “American Scene” artists whose murals graced California
schools, post offices, state capitol buildings, city halls and other publicly-owned locales)
became effective spokespersons for “change that would restore healthy social and
economic conditions in America, not revolutionary change that would create a radically
new society.”
188

New Deal policies not only transformed the federal government’s role in
addressing social, cultural, and economic concerns, but also its involvement in
technological innovations. The Works Progress Act of 1935 included progressive
economic reforms that reinforced the view that it was the federal government’s
responsibility to ensure that the U.S. lead the world in technological developments.
Although the U.S. had already revealed itself to be in technology’s vanguard, the WPA’s
private/public partnerships not only helped create a vast and sophisticated network of
roads, highways, bridges, air fields, but also an ambitious media communication system
(e.g. telephone lines, broadcast stations towers, etc.) that connected all corners of the
nation, and the nation with the world.

187
Programs included the Federal Arts Project, Federal Music Project, Federal Theatre Project, and the
Federal Writers Project.

188
Steven M. Gelber, “Working to Prosperity: California’s New Deal Murals,” California History 58, no. 2
(Summer, 1979): 98.
130

Entertainment Technology and the Great Depression
Technological innovations also revolutionized artistic expression and methods for
distributing those expressions. These developments not only encouraged more
widespread appreciation for emerging art forms like sound motion pictures; they also
gave private enterprise more opportunities to shape the cultural landscape and capitalize
on the mass distribution of new cultural products. However, during this period, profits in
the publishing industry would also experience significant erosion. For example, although
sheet music still enjoyed popularity, the flagging economy and increased diversification
of other cheap amusements (e.g. film, recorded music, and radio) led to a decline in its
profitability. While in 1928 individual sheet music hits sold “between 500,000 and a
million copies,” by 1931, selling 200,000 copies of a hit song would have been
considered “extraordinary.”
189
Similarly, while books, magazines and newspapers
remained popular diversions, by the 1930s, book sales had fallen nearly 52%, while
magazine sales dropped 15% and newspaper circulation fell 12% – figures that, along
with the loss of advertising revenue to radio, “ate away at the economic health of the
print trades.”
190

Defying the odds, and enabled by the new national communications
infrastructure, the radio industry experienced significant growth during the Great
Depression, becoming a central entertainment and information medium – with “radio

189
Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and its Business: From 1900 to 1984, Vol. 3 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988), 184.

190
David Welky, Everything Was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression (Campaign, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 2008), 10-11.
131

households” growing 14% between 1930 and 1933 (even though disposable income had
fallen almost 43%).
191
Radio’s ability to unite the nation by instantaneously transmitting
news and entertainment that could also be simultaneously consumed by literate and non-
literate populations was not lost on advertisers, who began redirecting advertising
campaign funds away from published print to broadcast radio.
192
Nonetheless, while
Great Depression audiences continued to tune in faithfully to their favorite serialized
radio shows and news programs, another more immersive entertainment diversion was
also capturing the American public’s imagination (and pocketbook): sound motion
pictures.
By 1929, nearly every small town in the nation had a movie theater, and most
theaters in the major U.S. cities had been renovated for sound film synchronization.
193
By
1930, the U.S. Bureau of the Census reported that U.S. film audiences generated 82% of
all spectator amusement revenues combined.
194
As a result of these developments, U.S.
film products – and the Hollywood motion picture industry that created the majority of
them – became dominant forces in directing and reflecting U.S. culture, and the prime
negotiators in mediating how the American socio-political and economic landscapes
would be represented in the Great Depression. Departing from early century socialist and

191
Douglas B. Craig, Fireside Politics: Radio and Political Culture in the United States, 1920-1940
(Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 17.

192
Ibid., 223-226.

193
F. Andrew Hanssen, “Revenue Sharing and the Coming of Sound,” in The Economic History of Film,
ed. John Sedgwick and Michael Pokorny (New York: Routledge, 2005), 91.

194
Michael Pokorny and John Sedgwick, “Warner Bros, in the Inter-war Years,” in The Economic History
of Film, ed. John Sedgwick and Michael Pokorny (New York: Routledge, 2005), 154.
132

“worker-made” films and their more critically reflexive themes concerning American
class-divisions and economic alternatives to free market capitalism, “major studios
shifted their attention toward building a broader audience,” in which tensions between the
classes were “supplanted by cross-class fantasy films that focused on harmony among the
classes.”
195
Thus, even though most movies from this period continued to be “grounded
in social realism,” escapist fantasies (particularly those involving intimacy between the
haves and have-nots) became a cultural salvo for audiences seeking distraction “from
their problems, reinforc[ement of] older values, and dampen[ing of] political
radicalism.”
196

Taxonomies of Difference: Social Darwinism and the “Deserving Poor”
Shortly after Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species was first published,
197
an
earlier work applying evolutionary theory of natural selection to human behavior gained
popularity among the nation’s elite. Sparked by the mid-nineteenth century musings of
Herbert Spencer, “social Darwinism” linked processes of adaptive biological
development with social phenomena (like financial success and poverty); suggesting that
a person’s ability to economically and socially compete, thrive, succeed, and wield power
directly reflected their overall “fitness” to survive. Spencer further reasoned that a
civilized society should not attempt to mitigate or undermine any “natural” order

195
Steven Ross, Working-class Hollywood, 176.

196
Steven Mintz and Randy W. Roberts, ed. Hollywood’s America: Twentieth-Century America Through
Film, 4
th
edition (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 17.

197
First published as On the Origin of the Species By Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured
Races in the Struggle for Life in 1859 (London: John Murray).
133

resulting from this “survival of the fittest” schema, arguing that to do so would lead to
society’s downfall. Noting what he observed as the progressive left’s altruistic and
philanthropic tendencies to rescue the socially, culturally and psychologically unfit from
“natural” extinction, Spencer wrote:
Mankind shows us, in conspicuous ways, the failures of adjustment that follow
changes in environing conditions – not so much the changes which migrations
involve, though these too are to be taken into account, but the changes caused by
the growth of large societies….

… Again, the conditions to which we must be re-adapted are themselves
changing. Each further modification of human nature makes possible a further
social modification. The environment alters along with alteration of the
constitution. Hence there is required re-adjustment upon re-adjustment. Once
more, such help to re-adjustment as would result from survival of the fittest if
individuals in most respects ill-fitted were allowed to disappear, is in great part
prevented. Indeed the imbecile and idle are artificially enabled to multiply at the
expense of the capable and industrious.
198

In the 1930s, those who promoted laissez-faire capitalism used Spencer’s words to justify
America’s prevailing social order by maintaining that ruling elites were “deserving”
individuals that were inherently more “fit” to dominate. Correspondingly, subjugation of
the lower and marginal classes was reasoned to be “natural, since their positioning
revealed they were intrinsically weaker, and less competitive and “fit” than their
“superiors.” Thus, these lower and marginal underclasses represented less viable strains
of humanity that (in Spencer’s words) should be “allowed to disappear.”
This perspective was frequently reflected in the published research of prominent
social engineers who defined the movements of America’s white peripatetic
“underworld” as a deviant and corrosive threat to the nation. Chief among them was

198
Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1881), 281-284.
134

Ernest Burgess, famed urban sociologist at the Chicago School, whose research (along
with that of Nels Anderson and others associated with the school) resulted in the
conclusion that “the hobos – those homeless migratory men – [were] a threat to city life
precisely because they [were] homeless (and men?) on the move.”
199
For these
investigators, the hobo’s “inability” (as opposed to refusal) to embrace the “higher ideals
of community” and attain the “American Dream” was at the core of their wanderlust.
200

As such, they were identified as social deviants who degraded the social and moral order
because they were outsiders who could move easily into (and find acceptance within) a
community, but were actually liberated and detached from it and its associated norms.
Illustrating the Peripatetic Allegorical American During the 1930s
Perceptions of the “hobo” as a social deviant that could disrupt the lives of
everyday Americans found expression among a few of the country’s more popular and
published illustrators of the era. For example, in “Problem of the Unemployed” (fig. 21),
cartoonist turned comic book illustrator Jack Warren (aka J.A.W. and Jack Alonzo
Vincent Warren) constructed a ragged and clearly labeled “hobo,” complete with a
bedroll dangling from his body, busting through an array of newspaper job listings.
“Problem of the Unemployed” offers a useful demonstration of how cartoonists often use
intersemiotic encoding to complete the messaging of their work. As “drawings designed
to make an editorial comment,” the images are often designed to be reliant upon “the

199
Steve Pile, Gerry Mooney and Chris Brook, Unruly Cities: Order/Disorder, ed. Steve Pile, Gerry
Mooney and Chris Brook (New York: Routledge, 1999), 12.

200
Ibid.
135

combination of realistic and symbolic images with words” to reflect what Lucy Caswell
declares are the “personal opinions of their creators, the cartoonists.”
201

FIGURE
21.
Jack
Warren’s
“Problem
of
the
Unemployed.”
Permission
to
digitally
photograph
original

illustration
courtesy
of
the
Library
of
Congress,
Prints
and
Photographs
Division.

Cartoon historian and curator Harry Katz is less convinced that published cartoon
content solely reflects the sentiments of those who create it, noting instead that after
1900, succumbing to the interests of powerful publishers and editors, “most editorial
cartoonists […] steered clear of controversy over foreign or domestic affairs, choosing to
instead promote American progress and prosperity.”
202
Katz’s assessment that most
editorial cartoons worked to promote a prosperous America seems to bear fruit with
Warren’s illustration, in which the content suggests that, in the midst of the Great
Depression, there was an abundance of high-paying jobs to be had that only societal
misfits were anxious to avoid.
203

201
Lucy Shelton Caswell, “Cartoons and Cartoonists.” History of the Mass Media in the United States: An
Encyclopedia (January 1998): 121.

202
Harry Katz, “An Historic Look at Political Cartoons,” Nieman Reports 58, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 45.

203
Library of Congress Prints and Photograph Division estimates the publication of this image in the
Pontiac Press to have been between 1930-1939.
136

One listing after another announces employers’ pleas that men apply for “steady
employment” paying anywhere from “$5 per day” to “any price.”
204
In the center, several
ads are interrupted by tears and text folded over from the opposite page. It is this text on
these small fold-overs – in conjunction with the secondary storyline being told in the
upper third of the cartoon – that suggests this figure is a social deviant unwillingly (or
unable) to strive for the “higher ideals of community” and the American Dream.
Furthermore, while the fold-over text may send an ambiguous message that Warren’s
“hobo” could be either uninterested or desirous of finding labor (e.g. “Hobo Convention
Over… back to work” and “Pan Handle Pete… work again”), the upper illustration –
which shows this same “hobo” with bedroll flying behind as he runs to catch a train –
makes clear this character is running away from work. This is a curious characterization
of the “hobo” which enjoyed significant popularity during the Great Depression, mainly
because one of the features that supposedly marked “hobos” as a distinct subculture from
that of “tramps,” “bums” and other “vagrant” populations, was their status as itinerant
workers. As reluctant as Warren’s “hobo” was to labor, his further characterization as a
disheveled deserter rendered this nomadic American a more fearful than formidable
figure.
During this same period, other popular illustrators, some of whom became
associated with America’s “cultural front”
205
– or what Michael Denning identified as the

204
The minimum wage set by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was twenty-five cents per hour or ten
dollars per forty hour of work (maximum standard). Jonathon Grossman, “Fair Labor Standards Act of
1938: Maximum Struggle for a Minimum Wage,” United States Department of Labor,
http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/flsa1938.htm (accessed January 6, 2011).

137

nation’s leftist, pro-proletarian cultural movement – constructed an alternative view of
America’s most infamous mobile “subculture.” These artists (e.g. Herb Block, Rollin
Kirby), along with high profile colleagues that were more supportive of the status quo
(e.g. C.K. Berryman), produced work suggesting that the peripatetic American’s true
nature was politically subversive, persuasive, and possibly foreign in origin (fig. 22).

FIGURE
22.
POLITICALLY
SUBVERSIVE,
PERSUASIVE,
AND
POSSIBLY
FOREIGN:
(L-‐R)
C.
K.
Berryman’s

“Blundering
Bolsheviks”
features
a
displaced
Trotsky
with
a
“tramp’s”
or
“hobo’s”
bindle.
Washington
Star

(Feb
26,
1930).
Herb
Block’s
“Special
Offers
Still
Open”
depicts
a
hobo
giving
a
sales
pitch
for
communism

to
a
confused
global
capitalist.
Chicago
Daily
News
(Feb.
25,
1930).
Rollin
Kirby’s
“Perhaps
His
Last
Trip
As

A
Trouble
Maker”
features
a
bindlestiff
(“tramp”
or
“hobo”)
making
his
way
to
both
the
Republican
and

Democratic
1932
national
conventions.
New
York
World
Telegram
(June
7,
1932).
Permission
to
digitally

photograph
original
illustrations
courtesy
of
the
Library
of
Congress,
Prints
and
Photographs
Division.

Emboldening America’s propertyless white nomadic males as threatening or
powerful members of either socially or politically deviant “subcultures” eventually
became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since the first identification of “tramps” in the Long
Depression, increasing numbers of propertyless and rootless white males started
identifying themselves as “hobos and bo’s,” “tramps,” and “knights of the road.” Some of
these individuals (e.g. hobo “kings” Dr. Ben Reitman and Jeff Davis) formed cultural,
social and “educational” organizations and, ironically, permanently located them within

205
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (New York: Verso, 1998).
138

(settled) institutions in what would become known as Chicago’s “Hobohemian”
district.
206
Other self-identified “men of the road” (e.g. Harry “Haywire” McClintock,
Jack London, Leon Livingston, and Eric Sevareid) advanced their individual cultural and
professional careers by recounting their “hobo” and “tramp” exploits in songs and novels.
Submitting to this taxonomy of difference, these cultural producers embraced racial and
gender-inflected terms like “hobo” and “tramp” – identities that allowed them to affirm
ethnic and gendered “superiority” over other mobile populations (e.g. immigrant laborers,
Celtic Travellers and Romani gypsies) while simultaneously creating the air of averse
virility through their subcultural status.
Of course, there was no factual foundation for any assertions that all propertyless,
laboring, peripatetic Americans were exclusively white and male. During the Great
Depression, significant numbers of American females and non-white males were also part
of the nation’s mobile citizenry seeking not only work, but also (for some) an alternative
and potentially more liberated way of life other than the one offered by dominant culture.
However, for “hobos” like Bertha Thompson (aka Boxcar Bertha) or American black
novelist Ralph Ellison, freight hopping and itinerant laboring was an inherently more
dangerous proposition. For example, Ellison’s biographer Harold Bloom writes that
before joining the ranks of the nation’s “hobos,” the youthful Ellison befriended a light-
skinned ‘bo named Charlie who schooled him in the dangers faced by black males
freight-hopping and “hoofing it” on the road. Illuminating only one of these dangers,

206
Also notable among this group of self-identified hobos was publishing magnate and Reitman friend,
James Eads How, founder of New York’s Hobo College and labor’s International Brotherhood Welfare
Organization.
139

Bloom recounts, “Riding the rails was difficult for a white man and even more dangerous
for a black person. Charlie warned Ellison to avoid Arkansas because, should he get
caught there, he could be imprisoned and put to work on a chain gang.”
207

While “hobos” of color risked arrest, conviction, and possible lynching in many
regions of the country, on the road females of all ethnicities faced other dangers,
including rape and sexual enslavement. Even so, these risks were not enough to stop
some of them from pursuing this socially and geographically transgressive lifestyle. The
legendary “Boxcar” Bertha Thompson confided to Ben Reitman about female hobos:
I have thought a lot about why women leave home and go on the road. I’ve
decided that the most frequent reason they leave is economic and that they usually
come from broken or from poverty-stricken homes. They want to escape from
reality, to get away from misery and unpleasant surroundings. Others are driven
out by inability to find expression at home, maybe because of parental discipline.
Some hobo their way about to far away relatives, or go to seek romance. The
dullness of a small town or a farm, made worse by long spells of the same kind of
weather, may start them off. Or some want better clothes. But others are just
seized with wanderlust. The rich can become globe-trotters, but those who have
no money become hoboes.
208

Despite the fact that during this period social reformers estimated the numbers of
propertyless peripatetic females to be between 5-15% – and that they, along with males
of color, were installing nomadic “heretical geographies” all across the North American
continent – for most popular illustrators of this period, the non-white and female “hobo”

207
Harold Bloom, Ralph Ellison (Broomall, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003), 21.

208
Dr. Ben Reitman, Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha (originally published in
1937, reprint Oakland, CA: Nabat/AK Press, 2003), 13.
140

had conceptually become what Cresswell has termed “impossible categories.”
209
This is
due, in no small part, to the narratives that had already been established around
unregulated mobility and transgression, and the connections made between this category
and the allegorical American.
Through decades of scientific and media representation, mobile white males had
already been firmly identified with the categories of “tramp” and “hobo,” associating
them with a distinct form of American rebellion – one that severed rather than stressed
“the relationship between whiteness and asset accumulation.”
210
In mapping how this
racialized relationship with acquisition has been consciously constructed from the
nation’s inception, and how it has fostered a covert form of white supremacy that
continues to circulate in contemporary U.S. culture, Lipsitz has argued:
Conscious and deliberate actions have institutionalized group identity in the
United States, not just through the dissemination of cultural stories, but also
through systematic efforts from colonial times to the present to create economic
advantages through a possessive investment in whiteness for European
Americans.
211

This “possessive investment of whiteness” to which Lipsitz has referred is a direct result
of the structural advantages given to European Americans who – in being bestowed with
the ambiguously defined yet markedly privileged identity of “white” – enjoy the ability to
accumulate property and the markers of upward mobility (e.g. education, health care, and

209
Tim Cresswell, “Embodiment, Power and the Politics of Mobility: The Case of Female Tramps and
Hobos,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24, no. 2 (1999): 184.

210
George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics
(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006), xiii.

211
Ibid., 2.
141

cultural visibility). Therefore, as the American bourgeoisie’s acquisitional and sedentary
ideals became increasingly dominant in defining the nation as a stable empire, “white”
remained firmly installed as the default signifier for a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic nation.
Hallelujah, I’m A Bum (Or Maybe Not)
At the height of Great Depression, America’s increased awareness of the extent
and diversity of its vagrant “subcultures” was reflected in the film classic Hallelujah I’m
a Bum (dir. Lewis Milestone, 1933). Lewis Milestone et al’s exploration of America’s
nomadic and transgressive urban “subcultures” was one of United Artists’ first forays
into sound motion pictures – a technical advancement that had ended or substantially
thwarted the public film careers of the studio’s highest grossing and most popular
founders (Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith).
212
It
was also the product for which film star Al Jolson elected to come out of his three-year
self-imposed retirement after starring in the hugely successful Warner Bros. box office
sensation The Jazz Singer (dir. Alan Crosland, 1927).
Hallelujah I’m a Bum plays a significant role in my analysis of cinematic
constructions of this period for several reasons. It was the first sound film to construct the
fictitious white American nomad as a central character. It also reflected the ideological

212
Silent film star and “America’s Sweetheart” Mary Pickford stopped working in front of the camera
shortly after the industry introduced sound. Despite starring in over one hundred silent films, Pickford only
appeared in five “talkies,” the majority of which were not successful. Similarly, Pickford’s one-time
husband and business partner Douglas Fairbanks never achieved the popularity that had catapulted him to
stardom during the silent era. After making only two sound films, D.W. Griffith, the most influential and
respected filmmaker in the U.S. during the silent-era, stopped directing. A fierce ideologue, Chaplin was
adamant that his most popular character, the “Tramp,” be exclusively rendered through pantomime.
Chaplin’s eventual transition to sound was slow and unfortunately timed (corresponding with his self-
imposed exile and the nation’s growing anti-communist fervor). As a result, he never achieved the same
level of success he once enjoyed during the silent-film era.
142

diversity among white peripatetic populations, while simultaneously refusing the
boundaries that sociological studies and “insider” accounts of “tramp” and “hobo”
subcultures had helped establish to distinguish one white nomadic population from
another. Finally, it portrayed unregulated mobility and transgression in ways that were
not necessarily socially or politically deviant. The following analysis of Hallelujah I’m A
Bum will discuss these three conditions and then compare them to other filmic artifacts
constructed in its wake.
Synopsis
The story centers on a likeable and popular New York City “bum” named Bumper
(Al Jolson) who falls in love with June (Madge Evans), the snobbish on again/off again
paramour of Bumper’s friend, patron and city mayor John Hastings (Frank Morgan).
213
In
the opening scene, the audience meets Mayor Hastings, who stumbles upon his old friend
Bumper while posing for a wilderness photo-op (fig 23). In rhyming dialogue, largely
associated with light or comic operas, the mayor and Bumper engage in a good-natured
tête à tête that introduces the film’s central debate: is it better for a man to have time on
his hands and the freedom to go where he pleases when he pleases, or is it preferable for
him to have an “honest job,” the comforts of home and the love of one woman?

213
Madge Evans also starred in another hobo-themed classic from this period, Pennies From Heaven (dir.
Norman Z. McLeod, 1936). In this film, Evans played Susan Sprague, a well-intentioned social worker and
love interest for Larry Poole (Bing Crosby), the “wandering troubadour hobo.” Frank Morgan – most
known for his role as the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939) – first utters the now
famous line “There’s no place like home” in Hallelujah I’m A Bum. The line is spoken when Bumper
rescues and returns the inebriated mayor to his home after a hard night of drinking.
143

FIGURE
23.
Acorn,
Hastings,
and
Bumper
get
ready
to
“dine”
in
the
jungle
outside
town.
©
1933,
Richard
K.

Polimer.
All
rights
reserved.

The first forty-five minutes of the film are devoted to building the character of
Bumper and his transient colleagues as popular and happy-go-lucky vagrants, and the
bourgeois mayor as a troubled, controlling and discontented man who envies Bumper’s
freedom. When Bumper stumbles upon June during one of his late night wanderings
through Central Park, these roles reverse, as the mayor gives himself over to irresponsible
bouts of public drunkenness, and Bumper explores the joys of sedentary domestication.
When Bumper first sees June, she has been devastated by Hastings’ accusations
that she has given one thousand dollars of Hastings money to an ex-boyfriend with whom
she is having an affair. What has actually occurred is that, through a series of unlikely
events, June’s purse, along with the thousand dollars, fell into the hands of Egghead (the
film’s “Red” hobo) – who swept it up inadvertently while cleaning streets for the city.
Hastings and June break up, and the Mayor loses himself to bouts of public drunkenness
and uncharacteristically irresponsible behavior (during which he turns to Bumper for
companionship).
144

June, distraught by the breakup, attempts suicide by jumping off a park bridge
into icy water, and Bumper (having never met June before) jumps in to rescue her. He is
able to revive her from unconsciousness, but when she awakes she has amnesia. Having
completely forgotten her name and everything about her bourgeois life of privilege, June
(now Angel) quickly falls in love with Bumper, her heroic savior, and decides that she
wants to spend the rest of her life with this “tramp” (fig. 24).

FIGURE
24.
June
awakes
as
Angel
after
Bumper
rescues
her
from
the
river.
This
scene,
which
featured
a

near
naked
Angel
clad
only
in
a
blanket,
became
the
focus
of
several
correspondences
between
Lewis

Milestone
and
MPAA
Production
Code
administrators.
©
1933,
Richard
K.
Polimer.
All
rights
reserved.

Bumper also falls in love with Angel, and decides that even though she is willing
to live outdoors with him, he must find her a place to stay. He willingly abandons his
carefree life for Angel’s companionship – first asking the Mayor for help in getting a job,
and then spending whatever money he earns to rent her a room and buy her sentimental
tchotchkes. By using the mayor’s letter of recommendation, Bumper secures a desk job
for himself and a janitorial job for his friend Acorn at Security Bank.
Now considered “traitors” by their outdoor cronies, Bumper and Acorn are forced
to face a “kangaroo court” comprised of non-working vagrants. Pleased with their
decision to labor rather than panhandle, union rabble-rouser Egghead, the film’s “red
145

hobo,” acts as Bumper and Acorn’s “defense attorney,” arguing that the two “traitors”
now “belong to us workers, not to you shirkers” (fig. 25). After Bumper admits that his
only offense is falling in love, the “case is dismissed” by “reason of insanity.” The once
happy-go-lucky mayor of Central Park disappears from vagrant culture, even eventually
abandoning his long-time companion Acorn so that he can spend all his “free” time
indoors with Angel.

FIGURE
25.
TREASON
BY
REASON
OF
INSANITY:
(L)
Scene
in
which
the
laboring
“red
hobo”
Egghead
and

Bumper
face
off
over
the
necessity
of
work.
(R)
The
kangaroo
court
jury
Bumper
faces
after
deciding
to

become
a
domesticated
working
man.
©
1933,
Richard
K.
Polimer.
All
rights
reserved.

To his friends, Bumper’s attraction to members of the bourgeoisie (e.g. Hastings
and June/Angel) is startling and hurtful. As Bumper kicks Acorn and Egghead out of
Sunday’s carriage so he can tour Angel around his “estate” (Central Park), he turns to the
two men and asks:
BUMPER: How do you like her, boys?
EGGHEAD: She dresses like a capitalist.
BUMPER: What about it? Some of my best friends are capitalists. [Turning to the
driver] Sunday, will you take Angel around the park?
ACORN: [watching as the carriage drives away] That’s the first time, Egghead, a
woman ever came between us.
214

214
Hallelujah I’m A Bum, DVD, directed by Lewis Milstone (1933; Los Angeles, CA: MGM Home
Entertainment, 2002).
146

The film climaxes when Bumper discovers that Angel is actually June, the girl
Mayor Hastings has been so despondent over losing. Bumper decides it would be best for
everyone if he sacrifices his own relationship with Angel by arranging for Hastings to see
her again. When Angel sees Hastings she is instantly cured of her amnesia, but then –
remembering she is June (Hastings’ snobby sweetheart) – is instantly repulsed by
Bumper, the mayor’s low class friend. Insulting the inferior accommodations that
Bumper has provided her, the mayor promises that everything will return to normal, and
the film ends with everyone’s initial identities and lifestyles firmly intact: June is back
with Hastings, and Bumper is back with Acorn and his vagrant posse.
Troubling Terms and the Characters That Maintain Them
Rockefeller's busy giving dough away/
Chevrolet is busy making cars/
Hobo, you keep busy when they throw away/
Slightly used cigars/
Hobo, you've no time to shirk/
You're busy keeping far away from work/

The weather's getting fine/
The coffee tastes like wine/
You happy hobo, sing/
"Hallelujah, I'm a bum again!"/
215

Hallelujah I’m a Bum relies heavily on rhyming dialogue and lyrical music to
unfold the narrative – an approach that was considered highly provocative and innovative
at the time. This is because the late 1920s through most of 1930s was a period when the
visual rhetoric of cinema momentarily ceded ground to sound. Hanssen has discussed

215
Lorenzo Hart’s lyrical adaptation of Harry “Haywire” McClintock’s hobo hit “Hallelujah I’m A Bum”
(as featured in the film Hallelujah, I’m a Bum).
147

how this transition gave filmmakers more expressive latitude in terms of articulating
more realistic, sophisticated and challenging content:
Silent plots were by necessity much simpler than sound plots; the lack of dialogue
meant that very complicated ideas and plot twists could not be communicated.
The cinematography was also different – wide-lensed views of the action
alternated with tight close-ups on the faces of actors. The gestures and facial
expressions that actors used were highly stylized – broad, sweeping movements
and widening or narrowing of the eyes would indicate anger, anguish, happiness,
and so forth, in ways that were recognized by contemporary audiences, but are far
removed from how people actually behave (which is essentially what sound films
show).
216

Inspired by new sound recording technologies, filmmakers often turned their attention to
dialogue, music and sound effects to propel plotlines that once were advanced
exclusively through art direction, cinematography, lighting, visual effects, staging,
pantomimic acting and intertitle sequences. On the one hand, this introduction of
recorded sound significantly helped transform this already beloved art form into “the
nation’s most popular form of commercial entertainment and one of the most powerful
weapons of mass ideology.”
217
On the other, the introduction of sound – particularly
dialog and lyric – made these products much more culturally specific, limiting the world-
wide circulation of early U.S. sound films at a time when the nation was experiencing a
great amount of inner turmoil and economic and political challenges.
218

216
F. Andrew Hanssen, “Revenue Sharing and the Coming of Sound,” in The Economic History of Film,
ed. John Sedgwick and Michael Pokorny (New York: Routledge, 2005), 91.

217
Steven J. Ross, Working-class Hollywood, 85.

218
Gerben Bakker, “The Economic History of the International Film Industry,” EH.net, February 5, 2010,
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/bakker.film.
148

Produced by United Artists, whose founders represented the apotheosis of silent
cinema, Hallelujah I’m A Bum relied almost exclusively on aural content to trouble
prevailing notions concerning “deserving” and “undeserving” populations and alternative
worldviews that were percolating throughout the nation. While the plot of the film was
structured to transform a nomadic protagonist into a patriot with heroic virtue, the film’s
merging of terms describing those living out in the open had to be confusing at best,
especially for self-identified “tramps,” “hobos,” and their ethnographers who were
arguing for subcultural differentiation. For example, the film begins with a title sequence
that juxtaposes portions of France’s beloved revolutionary anthem La Marseillaise

against a series of background graphics visually referencing nomadic characters that bear
no relation to the “bum” (or urban sedentary beggar) that the film’s title referenced (fig.
26).
219
This attempt at intertextual synonymity (i.e. “bum” :⇔ “tramp” :⇔ “hobo” :⇔
“radicalized patriot”) is repeated in the opening scene and throughout most of the film’s
construction, through dialog and lyrical reference.
220

219
La Marseillaise was written during the French Revolution and became France’s national anthem in
1795. Its worldwide recognition as a musical call to freedom led to its incorporation in countless numbers
of popular culture products, including the 1967 Beatles hit “All You Need Is Love”. The original anthem
included a call for citizens to take up arms against tyranny for the ultimate triumph of freedom and liberty.

220
While “tramps” and “hobos” are often conflated with one another because of certain overlaps in their
ideology and practices, most observers and members of these “subcultures” insist these are distinctly
different populations. Many have documented tensions between these groups, mostly based on each
other’s perceived willingness to comply to normative standards. In The Hobo’s Hornbook, Milburn
described tramps as highly secretive and suspicious of “outsiders,” while tramp commentators have insisted
that the hobo’s dual-identity as a nomad and a laborer makes him an industrial stooge.
149

FIGURE
26.
(L-‐R)
Title
sequence
from
Hallelujah
I’m
A
Bum.
The
sequence
depicts
a
bindlestiff
and
his
much

shorter
road
companion
(frame
1:
lower
right
corner),
followed
by
these
same
figures
making
camp
in
an

open-‐air
jungle
(frames
2
and
3).
©
1933,
Richard
K.
Polimer.
All
rights
reserved.

Despite the obvious (yet confusing) three-letter prefix coding of the central
character’s name (Bum-per) and the character’s association with various forms of
mobility,
221
the audience first meets Bumper not in the sedentary “bum’s” natural habitat
of the city, but in what is more accurately described as a “tramp” or “hobo” jungle – a
makeshift campsite usually located in a lush or forested area just outside an urban
enclave. In just a few filmic moments, the title and opening sequences undermine the
complex taxonomy that has been devised to consign rootless white males to the
categories of “bum,” “tramp,” and “hobo.”
This creative subversion not only stood in opposition to the ways in which men
affiliated with these “subcultures” distinguished themselves from one another, it also flew
in the face of subjectivities formulated by the influential Chicago School of Sociology.
These distinctions had already been summed up for the public in Ben Reitman’s well-
circulated declaration that “There are three types of genus vagrant: the hobo, the tramp,
and the bum. The hobo works and wanders, the tramp dreams and wanders and the bum

221
The most common use of the term “bumper” is as a reference for the impact-absorbing device attached
to the front or back of a car.
150

drinks and wanders.”
222
Through the Hobo College, Reitman (along with “Hobo
millionaire,” activist and publisher James Eads How) had developed a very close
relationship with sociologist Nels Anderson,
223
and his remarks distilled into two very
clear statements the complex taxonomy that Anderson created for hierarchically
stratifying propertyless white American males:
Although we cannot draw the lines closely, it seems clear that there are at least
five types of homeless men: (a) the seasonal worker, (b) the transient or
occasional worker or hobo, (c) the tramp who “dreams and wanders” and works
only when it is convenient, (d) the bum who seldom wanders and seldom works,
and (e) the homeguard who lives in Hobohemia and does not leave town....
224

With several pages devoted to demarcating the features of each of these five identities,
Anderson’s work was ultimately designed to support the approval of the Chicago Plan
for the Homeless Man, an elaborate municipal proposal designed to identify and
“adequately care” for the deserving homeless male while simultaneously containing the
mobility and transgressions – particularly the sexual transgressions – of the
“undeserving” vagrant.
225
Although Anderson did not explicitly make distinctions

222
Piers Beirne, The Chicago School of Criminology 1914-1945, Vol. II, The Hobo: The Sociology of the
Homeless Man, Nels Anderson (New York: Routledge, 2006), 87. Notably, although Reitman identified as
a hobo, he would not have qualified as such by this explanation. Reitman was quite “settled” in Chicago,
where he maintained a home (with wife Ida, as well as lovers Emma Goldman and Ana Martindale), a
medical practice on State Street, an educational (e.g. Hobo College) and cultural institution (e.g. Dill Pickle
Club). Roger A. Bruns, The Damndest Radical in the World: The Life and World of Ben Reitman
(University of Illinois Press, 2001).

223
Anderson was Chicago School’s famous “hobo investigator,” whose study on Hobohemia and hobo
culture introduced the application of participant-observation to the field of sociology. Considered
groundbreaking in terms of its methodology, Anderson’s thesis The Hobo was selected by the Chicago
School of Sociology to become its first published monograph in 1923. For more on the development of
Reitman friendship with How and Anderson, see Roger A. Bruns, The Damndest Radical in the World.

224
Nels Anderson, On Hobos and Homelessness (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998), 62-63.

151

between the “deserving” and “undeserving” vagrant, such progressive constructions were
clearly threaded throughout his work. Gwendolyn Mink & Alice O’Connor explain how a
merit-based, Darwin-inflected bifurcation of poverty has developed in the U.S. over the
past two hundred years:
Since the early nineteenth century, the mainstream public discourse on poverty
has distinguished between the “deserving” poor, who are poor through no fault of
their own, and the “undeserving” poor, whose poverty seems to derive chiefly
from low work motivations, moral failings, or “dependency on charity.”

… During the Great Depression, the extent of poverty throughout the nation made
the idea that poverty resulted from moral failings untenable. The federal
government provided citizens with relief, but “the dole” continued to elicit
criticism for encouraging idleness.
226

Contesting this formulation of deservedness, in Hallelujah I’m A Bum, “idleness” and
Bumper’s ability to leverage the respect of his equally idle peers is precisely why he
continues to receive the mayor’s charitable donations.
227
This is most evidenced in the
fourth scene when Bumper arrives in Central Park with Acorn. Like the Pied Piper,
Bumper whistles and all the “tramps,” “hobos,” “bums” and “gentlemen of leisure” come
running out of the park to greet him (a charismatic power that earns him the honorific
title as “Mayor of Central Park”). However, the film also implies a progressive
government’s role in encouraging idleness when, in the first scene, Bumper playfully

225
Ibid., 66-79. Several of Anderson’s recommendations included methods for detection and prosecution
aimed at addressing the “unwholesome” nature of “tramp and preshun” (or man and boy) relationships.

226
Lauri Umansky, “Deserving/Undeserving Poor,” in Poverty in the United States: An Encyclopedia of
History, Politics, and Policy, Vol. 2, ed. Gwendolyn Mink and Alice O’Connor (Santa Barbara, California:
ABC-CLIO, Inc.), 2004, 227-228.

227
The back-story behind Bumper and Hastings’ relationship is that Bumper once saved the mayor’s life
when he stopped a brick from hitting Hastings during a riot at Union Square. This reference is most likely a
nod to the violent labor strikes and rallies that occurred in Union Square from 1928-1930.
152

teases the mayor about the dynamics of their friendship, and reminds Mayor Hastings that
he is the one who continually commits the Spencerian sin of rewarding Bumper for his
idle and socially deviant ways. Conceding to Bumper’s point, the Mayor once again
offers him money for transportation, to which Bumper declines, saying that he and Acorn
always have transportation (i.e. stolen rides on public vehicles), which provokes a laugh
from all three men. In the next scene, Bumper and Acorn stow away first on the back of a
wagon-wheel caravan, and then on a train. In these scenes, the idle are constructed as
“deserving” and resourceful, traits by which Bumper emerges as the film’s hero above all
his peers and the powerful bourgeoisie, whom he even rescues from certain bodily injury
and/or death (e.g. rescuing Hastings during a labor strike and June from a suicide
attempt).
One explanation for the film’s blurring of vagrant identities may be found in the
inspiration the narrative took from Harry McClintock’s song of the same name. Since the
early 1900s, itinerant entertainer and International Workers of the World (IWW) member
Harry McClintock (a.k.a. Mac McClintock and Haywire Mac) had successfully
established himself as one of the nation’s most prolific and popular hobo balladeers. As
with many of McClintock’s songs, the origins of “Hallelujah I’m A Bum” have been
contested. Rumored to have originated with the scrawled musings of an incarcerated
vagrant,
228
like other hobo monikas its melody and structure were based on early folk
ballads, which, in the hands of men on the road, enjoyed many customized lyrical

228
George Milburn, The Hobo’s Hornbook: A Repertory for a Gutter Jongleur (Ives Washburn, 1930), 97.
According to hobo song folklorist Milburn, he received a note from an informant claiming that the song’s
lyrics actually originated “on the wall of a Kansas City jail cell where an old hobo, known as ‘One-Finger
Ellis,’ had spent the night, recovering from an overdose of rotgut whiskey.”
153

incarnations.
229
However, it wasn’t until McClintock claimed copyright in 1906 that the
song began to circulate outside “tramp” and “hobo” jungle campfires. His assertion of
intellectual property rights was confirmed in 1908, when the IWW published the song in
its third Wobbly songbook and credited McClintock as its composer.
230
While the success
of McClintock’s recordings may have extended the song’s longevity into the 1940s, ‘50s
and ‘60s, during the Great Depression it was the IWW’s circulation and use of the song
as a pro-labor anthem that propelled its initial popularity.
In true monika fashion, some of the IWW songbook editions featured alternative
lyrics and titles that underscored (what it argued was) the song’s pro-labor
connotations.
231
However, despite the high profile relationships that men like Harry
McClintock, Joe Hill and other self-identified hobos maintained with the IWW, political
connections between the Wobblies and the vast majority of individuals that identified
(and were identified by others) as “hobos” were overlaid with significant tension and
ambivalence.

229
Ibid., 33. A “monika” is a song in which only portions of lyrics are standardized. Typically, the first
stanzas are fixed, but its performance allows for impromptu lyrics to be added by anyone who wishes to
participate.

230
The IWW harnessed the political persuasiveness of music, annually publishing songbooks for
distribution at rallies and meetings that featured the songs of famed hobo radicals like Joe Hill, Ralph
Chaplin, and Harry McClintock.

231
For example, in the 1930s, the song was republished in the IWW’s Little Red Songbook as “Hellelujah,”
“Hallelujah, On the Bum,” and “Hallelujah! We’re All On The Bum,” with lyrical additions that read:
Twelve hours a day!/ Don’t you know any tricks?/ Two men could have jobs if you’d only work six!/. For a
more detailed history of McClintock’s contributions to the IWW and the organization’s attempts to
circulate its ideology through its appropriation of hobo lore and music, see Utah Phillips and Archie Green,
The Big Red Songbook: 250-Plus IWW Songs (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2007).
154

McClintock’s song was constructed as a parody of a popular reformist song of the
period (“Revive us Again!”), and in the song he satirically used the term “bum” to
lampoon the Salvation Army’s strategy of providing food while preaching the gospel to a
hungry captive audience of “bums.” In the song, the line “Hallelujah I’m A Bum” is
always placed in quotes after the songwriter first queries, “how can I work when there’s
no work to do?” and then reveals that railroad tycoon “Jim Hill, he’s a good friend of
mine.”
232
Thus, in McClintock’s song, the term “bum” is used to indicate that the person
singing the ballad is no such animal, but will “work” that angle for food if necessary.
233

McClintock’s insertion of quotes around the phrase was explicitly political, and was used
to stress how the lack of jobs forced men who wanted work to turn to reform
organizations (even those with which they ideologically disagreed) to beg for food. In
contrast, the film Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” used transient and vagrant terms
interchangeably – e.g. “hobo” “tramp,” “bum,” “gypsy,” etc. – which helped create the
illusion of a united front of mobilized and rootless Americans. In so doing, it not only
worked to deconstruct taxonomic hierarchies, but also gave the impression of a unified
mobilized front that was large in number, powerful and very American (fig. 27).

232
Sometimes McClintock changed this line to read, “Oh I like my boss, he’s a good friend of mine, that’s
why I’m starving out on the line.”

233
Lyrics as printed in Harry K. McClintock and Sterling Sherwin’s “Mac’s Song of the Road and Range,”
Southern Music Publishing Company (1932).
155

FIGURE
27.
America’s
mobile
“everyman”.
©1933,
Richard
K.
Polimer.
All
rights
reserved.

The blurring of boundaries between “bum” and “hobo” identification was not the
only example of how this film queered transient taxonomies. For example, the “bum”
protagonist first appears in a “tramp” jungle with his longtime companion Acorn (Edgar
Connor). In contrast to Bumper, Acorn is portrayed as feminine and child-like.
Profoundly short of stature, African-American and vocally high-pitched, Acorn’s
devotion and continual deference to his white traveling companion explicitly codes him
as Bumper’s preshun, and not merely another vagrant pestering the locals for pocket
change. As the film unfolds, many similarities appear between the character Acorn and
the preshun (or “apprentice tramp”) that George Milburn defined for the public only three
years earlier in The Hobo’s Hornbook:
The jocker trains a young boy in the arts and sciences of trampdom, and in
payment for his tuition the kid must serve as bread-winner (by thieving and
begging) and aide-de-camp…. The relationship between the jocker and his kid is
not dissimilar to that which once existed between the knight and his squire. In
return for the guaranteed protection of the older and stronger, the novice gives
156

absolute fealty. In the jungle camp he is not permitted to speak until spoken to,
but when the jocker signs him to do so, he begins his song.
234

Although close in age to Acorn, Bumper’s demeanor towards him is paternally
protective, and Acorn’s loyalty and devotion are absolute – just as Milburn describes in
the above passage. The uniqueness of this relationship provides the underlying
rationalization for Bumper’s remarks when he asks the mayor for a job:
BUMPER [to Hastings]: Oh, your honor, can you fix it for two?
HASTINGS [gesturing towards Acorn]: Why, is he in love too?
BUMPER: No, but he’d be awful lonesome without me.
Despite this preshun/punk coding for Acorn, Milestone’s blurring of “tramp,”
“hobo” and “bum” populations is not always consistent. For example, Egghead, the
political endowed “red hobo” is always singled out from most the film’s other happy go
lucky and seemingly apolitical “tramps and bums.” He is often heard chastising non-
laboring colleagues for failing to seek work or unify against the power elites (which he
calls “Plutocrats” and “Capitalists”). Though Egghead is constructed as an intellectual
filled with political fervor, Milestone never portrayed this communist sympathizing
“hobo” as either hero or charismatic leader. In fact, not only is he unable to inspire an
uprising, through script and casting this figure is ridiculed by his name (Egghead), and
further diminished by Harry Langdon’s demure stature and “high-pitched, slightly raspy
inflection.”
235
Notably, this “red hobo’s” politics are constructed as petulant, reactionary,
and not very saleable at the same time that the IWW was attempting to corral its own

234
George Milburn, The Hobo’s Hornbook: A Repertory for a Gutter Jongleur (Ives Washburn, 1930),
xviii-viv.

235
William Schelly, Harry Langdon: His Life and Films Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc.,
2008), 131.
157

cache of “red hobo” revolutionaries who could help “fan the flames of discontent” (fig.
28).
236

FIGURE
28.
FANNING
THE
FLAMES
OF
DISCONTENT:
(L)
IWW
Songs
handbook
cover
(26
th

edition,
1936)

featuring
the
phrase
“to
fan
the
flames
of
discontent”.
(R)
“The
Tramp,”
one
of
several
Joe
Hill
songs

featured
in
this
IWW
rally
handbook.
In
addition
to
Hill
and
McClintock,
the
handbook
also
contained

songs
and
poems
penned
by
other
self-‐identified
“hobos”
including
“National
Anathema,”
“Scissor
Bill,”

and
“The
Blanket
Stiff.”
Permission
to
digitally
photograph
artifact
courtesy
of
Chicago’s
Newberry

Library,
Rosemont
IWW
Collection.

Addressing the pressing economic and political concerns of the decade behind a
veneer of song, humor, romance and mistaken identity, Hallelujah I’m a Bum was the
first mainstream “talkie” to portray the diversity of mobile, propertyless and transgressive
subcultures circulating in the U.S. during the 1930s. As discussed, this is not to infer that
director Milestone maintained any fidelity to the actual features and worldviews that
supposedly distinguished peripatetic Americans one from another. Rather, it is to note

236
Despite the film’s weak portrayal of “hobo” politics, Lewis Milestone, the film’s Russian-born director,
would later be summoned to appear as a Communist sympathizer in front of the House Un-American
Activities Committee in 1947. Named by fellow director and fervent anti-Communist Sam Wood, the
original rumor was purportedly started by LA Times gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, although Milestone
never explicitly denied these accusations in front of the committee. Stephen Birmingham, “The Rest of
Us”: The Rise of America’s Eastern European Jews (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 345.
158

that, in 1933, UA studio heads were willing to take a gamble on recognizing the
magnitude of these populations, and frame their leader as a protagonist in a product
aimed at mainstream audiences. It took this chance the same year that the nation plunged
into the nadir of the Great Depression, when national unemployment reached an all-time
high of 24.9%, and an estimated two million adults and two hundred and fifty thousand
teenagers rode the rails.
237

Bringing the “Forgotten Man” Back Into the Fold
While Bumper and his entourage were constructed mostly as “leather tramps,”
238

train-hopping Americans often played central characters in other peripatetic-themed films
made between during this period. These characters were frequently constructed as heroic
white males deserving of public sympathy. For example, in films like Heroes For Sale
and My Man Godfrey the “hobo” protagonist was initially constructed as a downtrodden
“forgotten man” compelled by misfortune to roam, but was ultimately uncovered to be
“exceptionally” American in the dignity, charity and optimism he could still summon.
The construct of the “Forgotten Man” first entered the American imagination
during the Long Depression when, in 1883, Harper’s Weekly published a series of
articles titled What Social Classes Owe Each Other, by Yale social philosopher and free-
market advocate William Graham Sumner. In his essay “The Forgotten Man,” Sumner

237
This rate was even higher for nonfarm workers. In 1933, blue collar, white collar and other non-
agricultural workers experienced an estimated 37% unemployment rate. Gene Smiley. "Great Depression."
The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. David R. Henderson, ed. Liberty Fund, Inc. 2008. Library of
Economics and Liberty [online] http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GreatDepression.html (accessed
December 28, 2009).

238
“Tramps” whose primary mode of travel is by foot.
159

described a figure who is not the “wretched and miserable” soul whose “case appeals to
compassion” and “excites the emotion,” but as the “simple, honest laborer, ready to earn
his living by productive work.”
239
For Sumner, these men were “commonplace,” the
stalwarts of American liberty and the core of American society – men whose need for
employment had been drowned out by what he framed as progressive’s paternalistic
reform agenda intent on infantilizing the public. According to Amity Shlaes, the phrase
was exhumed in 1932 by Roosevelt campaign advisor Ray Moley who “inserted it into
the candidate’s first great speech,” upending Sumner’s original intended meaning to
ironically promote FDR’s progressive reform agenda.
240

The year after FDR’s famous “Forgotten Man” radio address, First National
Pictures released Heroes for Sale (dir. William Wellman, 1933), in which the text “The
Forgotten Man” was animated in the trailer as the film’s “hobo” protagonist Tom Holmes
(Richard Barthelmess).
241
Opening with the character’s back story (a wounded veteran
turned hobo junkie), the trailer asks audiences to consider if “Yesterday’s hero is today’s
forgotten man?” (fig. 29).

239
William Graham Sumner, “The Forgotten Man,” The Forgotten Man and Other Essays, ed. Albert
Galloway Keller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1907), 465-495. Text of original article available
online: http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/rbannis1/AIH19th/Sumner.Forgotten.html.

240
Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York: HarperCollins,
2007), 12-13. This radio address was given on April 7, 1932. Transcript available through the New Deal
Network [online] http://newdeal.feri.org/index.htm.

241
FDR’s radio address was given on April 7, 1932. Heroes for Sale was released domestically June 28,
1933 [imdb.com]. Transcript of address available through the New Deal Network [online]
http://newdeal.feri.org/index.htm.
160

FIGURE
29.
Heroes
for
Sale
theatrical
trailer
opening
sequence,
which
prominently
connects
the
film’s
hobo

junkie
to
U.S.
patriotism
and
Roosevelt’s
“forgotten
man.”
©
1933,
First
National
Pictures,
Inc.
All
rights

reserved.
Screen
capture
of
trailer
sequences
courtesy
of
Turner
Classic
Movies
online.

While in Hallelujah I’m A Bum peripatetic characters proudly asserted their
counter-cultural status through song, dialogue, celebratory gestures, in Heroes for Sale,
Tom and his rail-riding peers are frequently somber and often morose. As the hero
protagonist, Tom is constructed as an American “everyman,” a tragic figure forced into
mobility by circumstances out of his control. Despite his train-hopping, itinerant and
rootless ways, Tom summarily rejects any subcultural identification, insisting instead that
he and his compatriots are not “reds or hobos” but “ex-servicemen” who deserve
respectful treatment for their patriotism.
Throughout the film, Tom’s disposition is continually juxtaposed against
members of the ruling elite and the radicals that want to overthrow them. Regardless of
his unfortunate circumstances, Tom has a boundless charitable nature that leads him to
nobly sacrifice his body, fortune, home and family for others. In so doing, this character
stands as synecdoche for both a nation and an empire temporarily besieged by the ravages
of an uncooperative economy and individualistic greed (fig. 30).
161

FIGURE
30.
THE
PATRIOTIC
PERIPATETIC
AMERICAN
(L-‐R)
Incorporating
the
work
of
WPA
artist
Margaret

Bourke-‐White,
Heroes
For
Sale
featured
this
scene
as
part
of
a
one-‐minute
montage
depicting
wandering

unemployed
servicemen
traversing
the
nation
on
foot;
Roger
forgives
Tom
for
his
unethical
past
and
waits

out
the
rain
in
their
Tennessee
jungle.
©
1933,
First
National
Pictures,
Inc.
All
rights
reserved.

Towards the end, when his betrayer turned friend (Roger) makes the doleful observation
that, “The country can’t go on this way. It’s the end of America,” it is Tom, Wellman’s
peripatetic “forgotten man,” who is charged with delivering Roosevelt’s political
message of inspiration to the nation:
TOM: No. It may be the end of us, but it’s not the end of America. In a few
years it’ll go on bigger and stronger than ever.
ROGER: You’re the last guy in the world I’d ever expect to find was an optimist.
TOM: That’s not optimism, just common horse sense.
You read President Roosevelt’s inaugural address?
ROGER: Yeah
TOM: He’s right. You know it takes more than one sock in the jaw to lick
one hundred twenty million people

Heroes For Sale was not the only film of the period to uplift the nation by
promising to bring wandering white males back home. For example, in My Man Godfrey
(dir. Gregory La Cava, 1936), a formerly wealthy Harvard graduate turned hobo –
Godfrey (William Powell) – ultimately gives up his wandering life for the love of a
woman. In so doing, he returns to his rightful place with America’s idle rich, but not
before chastising them for their excessive waste during the height of the Great
162

Depression.
242
A twist on the theme of the “Forgotten Man” appears in Wild Boys of the
Road (dir. William Wellman, 1933), when middle class children are forced to hit the rails
and shift for themselves as young hobos because their hard-working families can no
longer afford to care for them. At the end of this moralizing narrative (detailed later in the
chapter), Eddie, the future of America’s bourgeoisie, is returned back to the home to
begin a more hopeful future. After nearly two decades of being presented as a shiftless
parasite (e.g. Happy Holligan), clownish (e.g. Weary Willie), and perennial loser (e.g.
Chaplin’s Little Tramp), in the 1930s the peripatetic allegorical American was
reintroduced to the nation as a heroic and selfless “hobo” through sound motion pictures.
Political Palliatives
The 1930s also witnessed another trend in constructing white nomadic characters:
his utility in reflecting and responding to the nation’s increased resentment towards
industrialized labor and its organization of everyday life. Whether by troubling the
equation of labored time = money, or campaigning outright for polemic political
positions, controlling the portrayal of the peripatetic white male was central not only to
strategizing symbolic revolutions waged by American communists, socialists, and
anarchists, but also to those who were interested in maintaining the power of industrial
capitalists.

242
Just after the perceived end of the Great Depression, a similar type of narrative unfolded in Sullivan’s
Travels (dir. Preston Sturges, 1941). In this popular road comedy, Sullivan (Joel McCrae), an untalented
but successful filmmaker, sets out to do a film with more “social significance” by fraudulently adopting the
personae of a hobo named Sully. Freight-hopping with his cross-dressed female companion – who is
simply referred to as “the girl” (Veronica Lake) – Sully and “the girl” transform into just another one of
America’s “forgotten men.” Towards the end, the film takes a dark critical turn, framing Sully’s rootless
white male peers as victims of extreme poverty and profound addiction, rather than a potent ideological and
political force.
163

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Social Darwinism was still being
used to explain and justify the array of unethical and nefarious acts committed by
America’s most notorious robber barons, as well as the culture of laissez faire monopoly
capitalism that defined U.S. manufacturing, transportation and banking industries in the
years coming out of the Long Depression and leading into the Great Depression.
Progressivism, which (in the previous century) had spiritually and politically funded the
American abolitionist movement, had emerged in large part as a direct rejection of
economic and social Darwinism and their ideological companion, anarcho-libertarianism.
Thus, at the dawn of the twentieth century, America’s most persistent champions of
expansion, liberty, freedom and the individual were those whose lives were also defined
by a ruthlessly uncharitable and Machiavellian approach to free-market capitalism.
After the Long Depression, industrial capitalists made major gains in
marginalizing non-acquisitional culture and replacing it with what William Leach has
called a “Land of Desire” – a space where conspicuous consumption supplanted
Protestant austerity, and a “democratization of desire” was equated with the promise of
ontological mobility.
243
Making such a structural conversion required the public’s
compliance to allow industrialism to redefine both societal and temporal-spatial
relationships. Tracing the genealogy of this compliance as it unfolded in mature industrial
societies, E.P. Thompson argued that these restructuring principles imbricated each other.
He explained that under an industrial capitalist world order, the family farm economy,

243
William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New
York: Vintage Books, 1993).
164

along with its divisions of labor and task-oriented relation to the “seasonal rhythms of the
countryside, with its festival and religious holidays,” fractured and gave way to a new
“production driven” regulation of everyday life.
244
This industrially-determined
worldview also produced new constructs – e.g. “owners,” “managers,” “employees,”
“unemployed,” “work time,” “leisure time,” “work place,” “sacred space,” “sacred time,”
“public” and “private,” etc. – designed to communicate functional boundaries for time
and space-defined behaviors. The compartmentalized reorganization of everyday life was
premised on the belief that most (if not all) human experience could be routinized for the
purposes of achieving optimum levels of functionality and production (the standards by
which all mechanized activities are measured). It was the tyranny of productivity that,
“through alternative bouts of intense labour and of idleness,” the unregulated nomad
threatened to transgress.
245
During the Great Depression, the nomadic “hobo” stood as
signifier for both the necessary floating work force on which a nation’s unstable
industrial-based economy relied, and the recalcitrant guardian of an old world order in
which “men were in control of their own working lives”.
246

Second wave progressives doggedly fought against industrial capitalism’s
influence on U.S. identity and values. However, ideologically, they had been the
beneficiaries of capitalism’s most promising feature: the ability for lower class whites to
access power by monetarily acquiring the means to transgress social and geographic

244
E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past &
Present 38 (Dec. 1967): 92.

245
Ibid., 73.

246
Ibid.
165

boundaries. At a time when collectivist-informed ideologies had much of the world
goose-stepping towards xenophobia, fascism, totalitarianism, tribalism and
supranationalism, progressives’ doctrine of social liberalism offered a uniquely American
approach to collectivism – one which could be used to support and ameliorate capitalism
rather than derail it. As it developed in the first third of the twentieth century, the promise
of social liberalism was premised on its presumed ability to transgress the vulgar binaries
of individual and group by arguing that an individual’s freedom to prosper and
experience life fully is only made possible when protected by the group.
Socialist, communist, progressive, and libertarian-socialist politics flourished in
the U.S. during the forty years bookended by America’s Long and Great Depressions. It
was also during this time that political parties with collectivist (not individualist)
platforms thrived and wielded their greatest influence. These parties included the
Progressive, Socialist, Social Labor, Farmer-Labor, Populist, Prohibition, National
Woman’s, American Workers and American Labor parties, which attracted millions of
supporters and created a formidable constituency poised to overthrow (or at least
marginalize) the industrialist and investment monarchy created by monopoly capitalism.
In 1912, responding to the Republican party’s alliance with the transportation, energy and
banking industries, former president Theodore Roosevelt – armed with disaffected voters
and a cache of Keynesian economic strategies – founded the Progressive party.
247

Overshadowing the achievements and popularity of more ideologically-challenging
parties, Roosevelt ran as the most successful third party candidate in the nation’s two

247
Alternately known as the Bull Moose Party.
166

hundred and thirty three-year history.
248
Although he was not elected, the Progressive
party’s negotiated stance with capital was perceived by the Washington Beltway as a
winning strategy for a nation not yet ready to abandon the promise that capital held for
middle and working classes. As a result, progressive “centrist” politics became a
dominant voice in shaping the nation’s social, judicial and political discourse for nearly
seventy years.
249

The public’s embrace of these political trends was reflected in trade union
membership, which (from 1915-1920) nearly doubled to reach its highest point of 5
million.
250
This trend was enabled by cultural producers who successfully used their
prominent “insider” status as self-identified hobos to fashion a public (and politically
recognizable) radical proletarian face on American nomadism – a characterization that
was perpetuated in the mainstream press and media during the Great Depression.
Although by the end of the 1920s trade union membership began to decline, the ensuing
economic crisis inspired another wave of political challenges that introduced more radical
individualist and collectivist ideas into the culture.
However, in the 1930s, the nation was leaning overwhelmingly towards political
and social collectivism in ways that, to some, seemed to contradict the American ideals of

248
Socialist Party presidential candidate and IWW founder Eugene Debs also garnered 6% of the popular
vote during this election – a candidate who (only seven years later) was imprisoned for sedition because of
his opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I.

249
Progressivism’s dominance in the twentieth century eventually waned with the ascendancy of the
conservative-libertarian inflected “Reagan Revolution,” a political brand which signaled an intent to
overthrow the progressives’ long-standing reign in American policy.

250
Robert VanGiezen and Albert E. Schwenk, “Compensation from before World War I through the Great
Depression,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Department of Labor.
167

rugged individualism and self-reliance. Despite FDR’s presidential campaign rhetoric
which railed against Hoover’s purported progressive over-tax and over-spend policies,
FDR’s greatest presidential achievement was his willingness to aggressively implement
even greater spending programs that ultimately thwarted potential communist and
socialist insurrections similar to those that had swept through most of Europe. At the
peak of the Great Depression, when official unemployment was reported to be at the all-
time high of 24.9%, and starvation, poverty and homelessness dominated the headlines,
Roosevelt halted the country’s momentum towards revolution by implementing several
populist-inflected projects under the New Deal. His “relief, reform and recovery” agenda
– which included setting up departments like Social Security Administration, National
Labor Board, Federal Housing Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, Fannie Mae
– functioned as a proverbial olive branch extended to an increasingly hungry, despairing
and agitated populace. These projects flexed the federal government’s a priori role in
preserving the America’s unique brand of unhampered capitalism by first acknowledging
its shortcomings, and then integrating domestic policies and programs that mimicked
socialism without openly endorsing its legitimacy.
Among the most successful of these projects in terms of meeting the mission of
economic relief, reform and recovery was the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

In
1936, when the WPA was in full force, the agency was hiring nearly 3,000 artists and
artistic craftspeople per month to help build a public culture that could compete and/or
supplement the efforts (and agendas) of the U.S. culture industries. At once critically
reflexive of social divisions and propagandizing for maintenance of the status quo, WPA
168

art programs were a continual source of controversy because of their power to fuel a
“cultural apparatus” that could arouse the masses.
251
During the Great Depression, the
mobile American became a prominent subject for many WPA artists associated with a
“cultural front” – photographers, documentarians, and painters whose experimentations
in social realism were perceived by some to be a politically charged rear-guard assault on
industrial capitalism. Appropriating popular revolutionary symbolism of the “proletarian
grotesque,” WPA artists like Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke White often
integrated into their work images of mobility in ways that reflected and fueled (rather
than assuaged) the public’s anxieties about the nation’s political and economic future
(fig. 31).

FIGURE
31.
DOCUMENTING
MOBILITY,
DISPOSSESSION,
AND
“THE
AMERICAN
WAY”:
(Top
Row)
Dorothea

Lange’s
“Towards
Los
Angeles,
California”
(1937);
“Twenty-‐Five
Year
Old
Itinerant,
originally
from
Oregon”

(1939),
and
“Napa,
California.
More
than
Twenty-‐Five
Years
a
Bindlestiff.”
(1938).
All
rights
reserved.

(Bottom
Row)
Margaret
Bourke-‐White’s
“At
the
time
of
the
Louisville
Flood”
(1937).
All
rights
reserved.

251
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century
(London: Verso, 1998), 44-50.
169

For the public, the economic instability of the Depression years stirred up
renewed interest in the power of collective bargaining. For example, according to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, after the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935,
the numbers of American workers claiming membership in trade unions continued to
increase through the Great Depression, jumping from 12.3% in 1930 to 27.6% by
1940.
252
This trend towards embracing collective action as a strategy to cope with the
ravages of industrial capitalism was repeatedly addressed and challenged in films of this
period, including Hallelujah I’m A Bum, in which Bumper’s character asks others to
consider a good and happy life without material culture. Bumper’s promotion of a
naturalist worldview is used not only to trouble a wage-based economy – from which
none of the bourgeois characters benefit – but also to challenge any alternative suggestion
that a more equitable method of monetary distribution would lead to happiness. Bumper
proselytizes this alternative way of experiencing the world through the Rodgers and Hart
song “What Do You Want With Money?”:
You got the grass/
You got the trees/
What do you want with money?/

You got the air/
You got the breeze/
What do you want with money?/

Look at the birds, here how they sing/
They have no rent to pay in the spring/
You own the world when you don’t own a thing/
What do you want with money?/

252
Robert VanGiezen and Albert E. Schwenk, “Compensation,” United States Department of Labor.
170

For one of the most popular entertainers of the period to issue this question at the peak of
the Great Depression was, at the very least, controversial. However, for the film’s hero to
find peace, happiness, respect and joy without wage-labor, acquisitions, or a
monogamous heterosexual relationship was politically subversive. Because it was
released a year and five months before the Hays Code took complete effect, Hallelujah
I’m A Bum was not subjected to the Code’s provisions limiting film content to that which
promoted the “correct standards of life.”
253

However, as economically subversive and socially transgressive as the film’s
underlying plotlines and character constructions may have been, Bumper’s anti-
acquisition, anti-capitalist stance was not portrayed as sympathetic with Marxism, even
though the American public’s interest in socialism and communism was increasing.
Those ideologies and their followers were constructed as being equally flawed, as
exemplified in the character of Egghead (Harry Langdon), the film’s “Red” hobo.
Portrayed as a petty and selfish agitator whose rhetoric is ultimately corrosive to any
collectivist ideology he espouses, Egghead fails to exhibit any of the traits by which a
hobo (a man who works and wanders) can be identified. He is the only one in Bumper’s
entourage to hold a steady job (a “slave for the city”), and at no point is it ever shown that
he actually lives out in the open among the other vagrants. However, in constructing
Egghead as the film’s “red hobo,” the narrative responds to and upholds a widely-held
assumption that hobos of the period were either socialist and communist sympathizers or

253
Although officially adopted by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association in 1930, the
Code was not put into full effect until July of 1934, when the industry created its own Production Code
Association to circumvent government censoring of films that were deemed socially, politically or sexually
provocative.
171

anarchist agitators – an assumption promulgated by the IWW and other self-identified
hobos (like Ben Reitman) who maintained those ideological affiliations (fig. 32).

FIGURE
32.
Bumper
warns
the
“red
hobo”
Egghead
to
“cut
that
radical
stuff.”
©
1933,
Richard
K.
Polimer.

All
rights
reserved.

The ideological differences between these characters are made explicitly clear
when Bumper discovers June’s missing purse and money turns up in Egghead’s trashcan.
Not realizing the purse belongs to the mayor’s sweetheart, Egghead justifies keeping it by
assailing the character of the “plutocratic hag” to whom the Cartier bag must belong. He
wants the money even though he hasn’t worked for it, simply because it belongs to the
aristocracy. But Bumper insists that the money is his and Acorn’s, and the two quarrel
over who should get it. (Notably, at no time during this scene does Egghead question
Acorn’s share in Bumper’s discovery, or argue for a two-way rather than three-way split.
It has clearly been established throughout the film that unlike “bums,” who are
characteristically defined by their solitariness, Bumper and Acorn’s relationship is like
that of a tramp and his preshun – or a hobo jocker and his punk – they are life
companions and share everything.) Once Bumper figures out that the money belongs to
Hastings’ sweetheart, he decides to find her and give it back. As this scene unfolds, his
172

once loyal park-living constituents get word about the thousand dollars and begin chasing
Bumper, Acorn and Egghead, demanding their “rightful” portion. The scene devolves
into an Eisensteinian montage with rapidly overlaid shots of vagrants spilling from every
corner of the park, demanding a cut of the money.
254
It climaxes when the threatening
mob encircles Bumper. Trying to defuse the situation, he opines, “we don’t want money
– money is a curse. It’s risky business and worse,” then breaks into song, condemning
his friends’ foolish preoccupation with the nation’s symbolic economy:
Friends, Rummies, Countrymen – well, anyway – jes’ friends/
We find a thousand dollars and friendship ends/
If you divide the thousand, what each one gets is a joke/
A little less than nothing – you’re better off just broke/
You got the grass. You got the trees/
What do you want with money?/
You got the air. You got the breeze/
What do you want with money?/
Look at the birds. Hear how they sing!/
They have no rent to pay in the spring/
You own the world when you don’t own a thing/
What do you want with money? What do you want with dough?/
Frankie, you got your shine-box/
Fritz you have got your fiddle/
Egghead, you got your principles, and you’re richer than Ford or Biddle/
You know you can’t take money – you know you hate the rich!/
Be consistent, Egghead, you stupid son of a – /
Which one of you isn’t happy right now?/
What do you want with money? What do you want with dough?/
255

At the end of this scene, Egghead concedes to Bumper’s point, saying, “Bumper is right,
money is a curse!” What is interesting in this scene is Bumper’s inversion of Egghead’s

254
Noted for his revolutionary incorporation of montage, the early twentieth century Russian filmmaker
Sergei Eisenstein sequenced rapidly edited shots from various angles to create a sense of chaos and
dissonance and to give the viewer a feeling of witnessing an event from everywhere at once.

255
Lyrics transcribed from Hallelujah I’m A Bum original shooting script. Lewis Milestone Papers, F.27,
Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
173

“Red” ideology through a seemingly innocent song about birds, trees, air and breeze.
256

Here, the film’s protagonist attacks both acquisitional capitalism and the prominent
ideologies poised to counter it at the time (communism and socialism), arguing that “you
own the world when you don’t own a thing,” but that when economic resources are
equally divided, “what each one gets is a joke.” Thus, as the film’s radical patriot,
Bumper promotes an ideology that transgresses the known worlds of consumption and
symbolic exchange, maintaining that the only way for his “countrymen” to achieve
happiness is to deny the “naturalness” of those constructs in their entirety.
Americans on the Move: Resurrecting the Peripatetic White Male
Both tramps and hoboes are anachronisms bound for extinction. It does not take a
particularly astute observer to see the imminent doom of the hoboes, the
migratory workers. A presage of it is found in the Middle Western wheat harvest,
for years the summer stomping ground of hobo hordes. As the harvest become
more mechanized the employment of hoboes has decreased, and for two years
now, like the buffalo herds before them, the hoboes have failed to come
through.
257

George Milburn, The Hobo’s Hornbook (1930)

…, the era of the hobo has not ended. People still live on the rails, moving about
by catching freights. They wait for trains under bridges or in wooded areas, sleep
in boxcars, and camp in jungles. They work at an array of temporary jobs. And
they possess many of the same character traits – they like to go their own way;
they do not live within the rules and restrictions of everyday society; they cannot
be tame.
258

Cliff Williams, One More Train to Ride (2003)

256
These portions of the verse are a nod to Harry McClintock’s legendary “Big Rock Candy Mountain,”
and the kinds of enticements the songwriter claimed “hobo” jockers would use to lure young punks into
sexual submissive situations and companionship.

257
George Milburn, forward to The Hobo’s Hornbook: A Repertory for a Gutter Jongleur (New York: Ives
Washburn, 1930), xviii.

258
Cliff Williams (Oats), forward to One More Train to Ride (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
2003), xiiv-xiv.
174

So neglected were the cultural offerings of what George Milburn considered to be
America’s most prolific balladeers, in 1926 the youthful author set out on a corrective
mission to document the lyrical bricolages and original ballads of eighty-six hobo songs
that had circulated in the “subculture” since it had first been identified. At the time
Milburn was writing, many of these melodic counter narratives were already familiar to
the culture at large. However, they had been reconstituted in ways that rendered them
ideologically benign, a reworking of intent that Milburn attempted to address in the
book’s introduction.
259

In his now classic compendium, The Hobo’s Hornbook, Milburn began by
asserting the important contributions he believed hobos had made in relation to U.S.
culture. He introduced the collection with the declaration that “Tramps and hoboes are
the last of the ballad makers. Not in the Tennessee hills, or among the Sea Island
Negroes, or in any other such arrested community is there a more vigorous balladry than
that which has been flourishing for the past fifty years in America’s peripatetic
underworld.”
260
Hyperbole aside, Milburn’s impulse to document the oral culture of this
“peripatetic underworld” was not an outsider’s attempt to exoticize the cultural
contributions of these white nomads. Like several of his contemporaries, Milburn’s own
life and literary career were greatly indebted to a zealous indulgence of wanderlust – an

259
Harry (a.k.a. “Haywire” and “Mac”) McClintock’s classic “Big Rock Candy Mountain” is a case in
point. Several folklorists and historians have already noted that the sanitized children’s version of this song
as it emerged in the late 1920s bore little resemblance to McClintock’s more provocative references to
same-sex sodomy between elder hobos (a.k.a. jockers) and their young male companions (a.k.a. punks or
angelinas).

260
George Milburn, The Hobo’s Hornbook, xi.
175

inclination that informed most of his career and the fictional as well as non-fictional
critiques he wrote of sedentary rural life and small-town America.
261

As a white American male coming into his own at the dawn of the Great
Depression, Milburn frequently railed against modernity and its technological
containment of roving and mobile masculinity. Undoubtedly, these sentiments informed
his earlier prediction that “tramp” and “hobo” cultures were “bound for extinction.” In
reasoning through what he believed to be the extinction of the “hobo,” Milburn blamed
the automobile’s increasing popularity and the industrial era’s technological control over
labor processes as the metaphorical culprits that were causing this subcultural
genocide.
262

By 1929, after the U.S. had completed its transcontinental highway system with
over 96,000 miles of “hard-surface” highways and roads, Americans registered nearly 27
million motor vehicles, and reported that they had driven “an estimated 198 billion miles
in that year alone.”
263
As a private form of mobility, automobiles made it possible for
floating laborers to bypass having to travel materially and emotionally unfettered. Multi-
rider vehicles enabled entire families comprised of any ethnicity, sex, or age to safely “hit
the road” – a fact that, at the very least, mitigated several potential transgressions
typically associated with mono-gendered cohabitation and travel (i.e. man/man and

261
Larry O’Dell, “Milburn, George (1906-1966),” Oklahoma Historical Society’s Encyclopedia of
Oklahoma History and Culture [online]
http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/M/MI018.html.

262
George Milburn, The Hobo’s Hornbook, xviii.

263
James J. Flink, The Car Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987), 141.
176

man/boy sexual relations), although it also introduced the possibility for other
transgressions associated with operating privately in public. For example, it not only
enabled the violating of dominant standards regarding public morality, it extensively
activated the American appetite to explore beyond what was known. Furthermore, its
windowed design made it possible for occupants to establish a private yet publicly
accessible area, introducing all the complicated issues of authority that a split domain
could invoke.
Thus, the automobile became a device for both containing and salvaging the
nation’s relationship with mobility and transgression. As a method of containment, it
provided authorities with a way to assess legitimate mobility (e.g. registered vehicles and
licensed drivers) and control the number of disgruntled laborers exposed to alternative
worldviews in the unregulated spaces of “hobo” and “tramp” jungles. Conversely, as a
technology enabling virtual transgression of the once stringently bifurcated public and
private spheres, automobiles provided a sovereign space where motoring adults and teens
could, among other things, transgress public standards, mitigate detection, potentially
“outrun” authorities and avoid prosecution. As revealed in such films as Wild Boys of the
Road (1933), this latter possibility was a prominent concern with film production code
authorities in the 1930s.
Unlike riding the rails, journeying by automobile demanded that a traveler engage
with (and thus legitimate) consumer culture. As an innovation that relied on the constant
renewal of consumed goods and services, traveling by car required passengers to
participate in the larger economy, both through the need for occasional mechanical
177

servicing and the continual purchasing of impermanent goods like gasoline, oil, tires,
batteries, etc. In the 1930s, these “necessities” were difficult to procure through other
economic forms on which unregulated travelers often relied (e.g. barter or “hours”
exchange system, trade, production and/or distribution cooperatives, and charity).
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the increased popularity of automotive travel (whether
for pleasure or work) led to the creation of thousands of new commercial enterprises. In
addition to maintenance-related commerce, financial transactions between entrepreneurs
and “auto mobile” populations occurred at other newly developed commercial locales
such as roadside cafés, drive-through diners, motels (a.k.a motor or cottage courts,
autotels and autels), and other enterprises geared towards serving patrons of auto/motor
camps, rest cabins and tourist parks.
By 1929, the automobile had become modernity’s answer for efficiently moving
large numbers of restless Americans and floating laborers from one locale to another
without radically disrupting the delicate social ecology that allowed sedentary,
acquisitional, capitalist culture to dominate and flourish. It also offered a better method
for tracking citizen drifters and their potentially surreptitious, untraceable, and anarchistic
moves about the country. Designed for specific terrains, transportation corridors and
routes, the car lessened the need for floating laborers to interact in their “off time” with
each other – potentially eroding any mutual dependency that could have developed
among men on the road. It also demanded that, either directly or indirectly, drivers get
licensed, follow rules of the road, and only drive in areas where their ethnic composition
matched their surroundings.
178

However, despite the option of regulated mobility, there still remained in the
white American male imaginary a lingering desire to unshackle his personal liberty from
the centralized and domestic authorities that could restrict his ability to explore and
trespass into the unknown. With the known world dissolving into a bleak and despairing
future, the impulse to give oneself over to the unknown seemed an appealing and
necessary initiation into manhood.
“On the Road” Adventures and Masculine Initiations
Met Pat Powers and some others from Churchill who gave us some grub and were
pretty nice to us. Crawled in a box car, but it was switched way over in the yard.
Jumped out and tore back to the Muskeg, dodging men and got in another
[boxcar]. This one worked. Rode all day and at ten in the night the train stopped
for the night at Mile 137. Walt got out and hiked 2 miles back to the station for
food. Rolled in our ponchos and slept on the floor. Quite cold and snowing.
Eric Sevareid, 1930

So reads the September 30
th
journal entry of seventeen-year old Eric Sevareid, written
just over halfway through a four-month, 2,300-mile journey with an older male
companion (Walt) from Minneapolis to Canada’s Hudson Bay.
264
Recounting the
adventure twenty years later in his book Not So Wild A Dream, the famous anchor and
journalist characterized this period of his life and the years that followed as a period of
both economic insurgency, averse virility and personal discovery:
We were in revolt. Not in the manner of many preceding academic generations,
not in any bohemian, individualistic sense of hating the smugness of middle-class
life and mores. We sought no escape for our personal souls in new art forms or in
any new concepts of emotional or sexual freedom. Those were minor matters to
us. We believed passionately in freedom for men and in the integrity of the human
personality, but we sought these ends, not by changing the individual, but by

264
Eric Sevareid Papers collection, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Box F, Folder “Canoe Trip
Log (Miscellany) 1930.” Journal entry dated September 28
th
, 1930.
179

changing his environment, the way society – meaning chiefly economic society –
was organized.

The key to life in our times, we thought, was the relationship of a man to society
in general and what a man did about it. To be otherwise was to be half alive.
265

Like other young, white, upper and middle-class males coming of age in the first three
decades of the twentieth century, Sevareid’s imagination had been captivated by themes
of rugged individualism and emancipated masculinity that defined the writings of Mark
Twain, Jack London, Walt Whitman and other transcendentalists, and made virtuous by
men like President Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir. Like his dear friends and fellow
“hobo” adventurers Chief Justice William O. Douglas and writer and broadcaster Lowell
Thomas,
266
Sevareid’s draw to the “open road” was directed by a need to confirm his own
averse masculinity, which he believed only the wilderness, freight hopping and jungle
living could provide. Sevareid’s journal is replete with excitement over and an obsession
about testing his own manhood, just as the literary protagonists had done in James Oliver
Curwood (Nomads of the North) and Ernest Thomas Seton (Arctic Prairie) – novels that
he and his companion read during their four-month exile from urbanity.
267

Testing one’s mettle “on the road” and “in the wild” appealed to many young
white males of this period who feared growing soft and complacent under the weight of

265
Eric Sevareid Papers collection, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Box 56, Folder 29, Not So
Wild A Dream condensed in Book-Reader: A Magazine of Book A (New York: Omnibook Inc., 1947), 8.

266
Douglas, the former Supreme Court justice and one-time vice presidential frontrunner (FDR’s 1938
ticket), and Thomas, the award-winning author of Lawrence of Arabia, were both card-carrying members
of Hoboes of America. William O. Douglas Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, General
Correspondence; Hoboes of America, Garnette Hamilton Collection, 1957-1987, Scrapbooks and
Clippings, Smithsonian National Museum of American History Archives Center.

267
Eric Sevareid Papers collection, “Canoe Trip Log.” Journal entry dated September 28
th
, 1930.
180

hearth and home. Even though males and females of all ethnicities responded to the call
of exploring the open spaces of America’s wilderness, and it was female participation
that turned the budding “conservation movement into a mass movement,” the space has
always been gender inflected in what Kimberly Jarvis has identified as “masculine
terms”:
Rugged and dangerous, wilderness experiences required physical strength and
endurance, which would counterbalance the effects of the more effeminate
modern urban life that many Americans believed threatened American
masculinity. Contact with wilderness in the form of the American frontier had
ensured the strength and development of the masculine American character.
268

For many Americans, entering the wilderness and exploring the unknown also
represented a return to the nation’s true spirit – a masculine spirit that had been partially
leveled (and, by metaphoric extension, castrated) by modernity in the name of imperial
progress. Nelson and Callicott maintain that, in the American imagination, the nation’s
relationship to the wild became inextricable – an interdependency that was integrated into
the national symbolic through the works of American landscape artists and
photographers. A place to secure the “virility of men” (and, by extension, the virility of
the U.S.), the nation’s untamed “wild” spaces added to the perception of America as an
“exceptional” space. Nelson and Callicott write:
Through the work of painters such as Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand,
Frederick Edwin Church, Thomas Moran, George Caitlin, and Albert Bierstadt
dramatic landscape painting became the visual embodiment of the Transcendental
wilderness idea; and the remnants of wilderness in America, which were long
gone in Europe, came to represent a new national identity for Americans…. As a
result, in the American mind wilderness was portrayed (conceptually and now

268
Kimberly A. Jarvis, “Gender and Wilderness Conservation,” in American Wilderness: A New History,
ed. Michael L. Lewis (Oxford University Press, Inc., 2007), 150.
181

literally – or, rather, visually) as a place of big dramatic, awe-inspiring,
monumental scenery – places that gave Americans a unique national identity.
269

While white middle class constructions of a young man’s life “in the wild” and “on the
road” (like the ones romanticized by Sevareid et al) remained popular in the literature of
this period, the more immersive medium of film was portraying a much darker vision of
these experiences for young people – one that was interwoven with class, gender, and
“keeping one’s place” even in the midst of economic and political chaos.
Wild Boys Of The Road
Operating as both a warning to teens and an indictment of the nation’s inadequate
welfare system, Wild Boys of the Road (dir. William A. Wellman, 1933) was a fictional
exposé of the hazards and tragedies faced by young teens riding the rails during the Great
Depression. In the film, Tommy Gordon (Edwin Philips) lives with his single
unemployed mom and needs to drop out of school to find a job. His friend Eddie Smith
(Frankie Darro) is a budding middle class playboy, complete with all the teenage hubris
and privileges of mobility (i.e. a car, and the assumption that he is in a position to help
others less fortunate). When Eddie approaches his father about helping Tommy’s family
financially, Eddie discovers that his father has been “laid off” from his job at the cement
company, and that his family has now joined the ranks of America’s poor. It is at this
early point in the film that the tone suddenly shifts from a Hardy Boys tenor to that of a
social problem narrative, with circumstances at first leveling the class distinctions

269
Michael P. Nelson and J. Baird Callicott, “Introduction: The Growth of Wilderness Seeds,” in The
Wilderness Debate Rages On: Continuing the Great New Wilderness Debate, ed. Michael P. Nelson and J.
Baird Callicott (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 6.
182

between Eddie, Tommy, and all the other “wild boys” (and girls) they meet “on the road”
(fig. 33).

FIGURE
33.
Eddie,
hearing
for
the
first
time
that
his
father
has
just
lost
his
job,
responds
with
shock
and

disbelief.
©
1933,
First
National
Pictures.
All
rights
reserved.

At first, Eddie thinks that by selling his most cherished possession (his roadster,
which he’s named Leapin’ Lena), there will be enough money to support the family until
his father finds a new job. He sells the car to a junkyard for only $22, and wanders away,
distraught over the loss. His father reluctantly accepts the money, but his son’s sacrifice
is not enough to keep the family going. Increasingly aware of just how dire the situation
has become, Eddie and Tommy decide that the best way they can help is to “be men” and
stop burdening their families with their welfare. Leaving home, they take to the rails and
become hobos, joining the millions of other homeless young and adult Americans
seeking employment.
On a train, Eddie and Tommy meet Sally (Dorothy Coonan), another homeless
teen bound for Chicago to live with her Aunt Carrie (Minna Gombell). When the trio
reaches their destination, they are immediately rounded up by police charged with
restricting the entrance of hundreds of thousands of unemployed men, women and teens
183

flooding into the city. Sally convinces them that she and the boys are only there to visit
her aunt, and they are released. When the three teens arrive at the aunt’s apartment, they
discover that she is a madam. Although welcoming and somewhat nurturing to the teens
(e.g. feeding them cake and milk and offering them a place to stay), her brothel is soon
raided, and they are once again homeless and roaming.
The characters live through many harrowing experiences, culminating in Tommy
losing half his leg to amputation as a result of a horrific train accident. Eddie steals an ill-
fitting prosthetic limb so his friend can remain mobile; but since the prosthetic is just a
window display and not customized for Tommy, it ends up restricting him further (fig
34). Nonetheless, the three are still compelled to move when the Cleveland police
eventually raid their “Hooverville” home.

FIGURE
34.
CONTAINING
AMERICA’S
YOUTH.
(L)
After
working-‐class
Tommy
falls
unconscious
on
the
tracks,

his
leg
gets
crushed
beyond
repair
–
an
image
deemed
by
the
censors
to
be
too
gruesome
to
pass

certification.
(R)
Tommy
trying
out
his
stolen
and
ill-‐fitting
prosthetic
leg.
©
1933,
First
National
Pictures.

All
rights
reserved.

Eventually, Eddie, Tommy and Sally make it to New York, where they find that
Tommy’s infirmity gains sympathy in panhandling. Hoping to earn enough money for
clothes to secure a legitimate job, Eddie accepts an offer by two men to deliver a note for
$5 payment. Unaware of its contents, Eddie gives a movie theater cashier a hold-up note
184

demanding money. Her screams alert the police, and Eddie and his two friends are
arrested.
The final scene takes place in a courtroom where Eddie and the other teens defend
themselves. Tired, hungry, and frightened, Eddie challenges the judge to “throw the
book” at him and put him in jail. Instead, the judge uses this moment as an opportunity to
condemn the conditions that created the tragedies these three teenage transients have
experienced. Offering to find jobs for each of them (even the now physically disabled
Tommy), the judge arranges for their release and promises that they will be reunited with
families and back home where they belong.
Containing the Transgressions of America’s Peripatetic Youth
In Wild Boys of the Road, the dangers of transgression and the subsequent need to
contain it are addressed in part by juxtaposing “good” regulated mobility (i.e. cars) with
“bad” unregulated mobility (i.e. train-hopping). Eddie’s loss of his beloved Leapin’ Lena
– a symbol of his safe, middle class life at home with his parents – is a wrenching scene,
designed to evoke sympathy from an already automobile-loving audience. Scene by
scene, the hunger, discomfort and dangers of unauthorized mobility vis a vis train
hopping are dramatized. Boys are beaten and injured, girls are raped, and, eventually,
Tommy loses his leg. Despite these misfortunes, the boys (and their boy-identified female
companion) bravely “soldier on,” tramping their worn and weary bodies from one site of
conflict to another.
Ultimately, Wild Boys of the Road served to contain the transgressive
potentialities of mobility, and re-direct its youthful characters back into their expected
185

societal roles. In the final courtroom scene, this agenda manifests in the culminating
speeches of Eddie, Tommy and the Judge – dialogue that is riddled with heavy-handed
moralizing and accompanied by overt visual signification:
EDDIE [TO JUDGE]: I'll tell you why we can't go home - because our folks are poor.
They can't get jobs and there isn't enough to eat. What good will it do you to send
us home to starve? You say you've got to send us to jail to keep us off the streets.
Well, that's a lie. You're sending us to jail because you don't want to see us. You
want to forget us. But you can't do it because I'm not the only one. There's
thousands just like me, and there's more hitting the road every day.

TOMMY [TO JUDGE]: You read in the papers about giving people help. The banks
get it. The soldiers get it. The breweries get it. And they're always yelling about
giving it to the farmers. What about us? We're kids!

EDDIE [TO JUDGE]: …Go ahead! Put me in a cell. Lock me up! I'm sick of being
hungry and cold. Sick of freight trains. Jail can't be any worse than the street. So
give it to me!

When the protagonists utter these lines at the end of Wild Boys of the Road, it is clear that
Eddie has hit rock bottom – a place that Tommy seems more familiar with and less
willing to accept. His dialogue is threaded with radicalization against a system that
unevenly distributes aid. Unlike the romanticized road adventures of the literary world,
the brutality of their initiation into manhood compels Tommy to admit that he and his
companions are just “kids” – the discarded remnants of a stolen future. And yet with each
promise the judge makes to return them to their families the differences between each
teen’s ability to remain mobile is heightened. Addressing Eddie first, the judge reframes
his transgression into the underclass as a fleeting moment of bad judgment. At first, he
proclaims, “Eddie, you’re in the worst position of all. You’re an enemy to society, and
I’ve got to keep you off the street”. However, after hearing Eddie’s tearful testimony, the
judge descends from the bench and approaches him to offer his assistance. Through the
186

judge’s (read dominant society’s) compassionate evaluation of Eddie’s circumstance, this
once delinquent teen turned hobo “enemy of society” is restored as simply another
American boy – whose “deserving” status is redeemed and promise of upward mobility
restored by his willingness to return to the place where he belongs (fig. 35).

FIGURE
35.
RE“PLACING”
AMERICA:
(L)
Hungry
and
tired,
Eddie
tells
the
judge
that
imprisonment
has
to
be

better
than
life
on
the
road.
(R)
The
judge
forgives
the
teenage
trespassers
after
each
gives
their
solemn

promise
to
return
to
their
rightful
place.
©
1933,
First
National
Pictures.
All
rights
reserved.

Things are not quite as promising for Tommy and Sally, whose mobility has been
consistently challenged. Younger than Eddie, Tommy’s loss of a limb thrusts him into
adult emancipation for which he is not prepared, but has no other choice than to accept.
Now disabled, he knows that his return home will be an unbearable burden on his single
working mother. As the judge notes when doling out his assistance to the teens, “Tommy,
we’ll have more of a problem with you, son. But I’ll make you one promise: we’ll find a
spot for you and you’ll be given a chance.” Here, Tommy’s “chance” is clearly
conditional to his acceptance of the “spot” he is assigned to hold.
Although Sally is constructed throughout the film as a rough and tumble orphan
who, prior to meeting Eddie and Tommy, had already successful “passed” and
transgressed the hyper-masculine world of Hobohemia, in the courtroom she is rendered
187

uncharacteristically silent and demure – traits that belie both her social invisibility as a
female and her willingness to contain herself as a subordinated subject. Sally’s
domestication as the female white orphan renegade is also a theme that appears in other
hobo-themed products of the period, such as Pennies From Heaven (dir. Norman Z.
McLeod, 1936), and the less successful low budget cross-class fantasy Girls of the Road
(dir. Nick Grinde, 1940). However, in comparison to the story arcs in these other films,
Sally’s concession to leave the road behind leads to little benefit for her, as the most the
judge can offer is placement “in some private home where [she] can do a little housework
for awhile.” Thus, while Wellman’s untamable working-class female is folded back into
her gendered place in society and her wildness contained, her future (like Tommy’s) is
rendered uncharacteristically bleak and insecure, and far less relevant to the future of
nation (fig. 36). Notably, the film’s message of returning back to one’s “place” is
delivered as part of FDR’s New Deal compact with the nation – a trajectory for recovery
that appeared to be explicitly endorsed by the administration through the featured
placement of the National Recovery Act (NRA) logo that visually bookends the film.

FIGURE
36.
WILD
BOYS,
WILD
GIRLS,
AND
THE
FORK
IN
THE
ROAD
TO
NATIONAL
RECOVERY:
(L-‐R)
In
the

final
scene,
Tommy
and
Sally
leave
the
courtroom
after
each
agrees
to
rejoin
their
“rightful
place”;
The

National
Recovery
Act
emblem
that
was
strategically
highlighted
in
the
courtroom
scenes
and
in
the
film’s

opening
and
closing
credits.
©
1933,
First
National
Pictures.
All
rights
reserved.

188

Conclusion
By the time the U.S. entered the Great Depression, mass-distributed media tropes
of the peripatetic allegorical American had already grown to include the “hobo” – a
uniquely American embodiment of unregulated white male mobility and transgression.
Like the Long Depression, the Great Depression was distinguished by considerable
transformations brought about major economic upheavals and technological advances in
transportation, communication media and entertainment – innovations that connected
most corners of the nation, and the nation with the rest of the world like never before.
While many of the concerns related to frontier containment had been somewhat mitigated
through auto-mobility, virtual transgression of time/space (radio), and cinema’s
construction of a national cultural export that had become desirable world-wide, the
economic and political climate often emphasized just how hemmed in America had
become in terms of economic opportunity and voicing opposition to the dominant order,
and the ways in which subjectivity had been assigned and the dynamics of difference
deployed.
As the empire prepared to enter what would eventually become its post-WWII
midlife, rootless, propertyless white male hobo-themed media became a prominent
vehicle for circulating and (mostly) containing alternative ideologies to American
capitalism and the dominant order. While a survey of illustrated magazines and other
printed materials from this period reveal a fairly balanced maintenance of America’s
“crisis in representation,” in which the “hobo” was constructed anything from political
troublemaker, ne’er do well, influential advisor, sage, to threatening deviant, popular film
189

– the most dominant entertainment medium of the day with the greatest global reach –
was far less equivocating. While IWW-affiliated cultural producers had constructed the
“hobo” as America’s proletariat revolutionary, and self-identified “hobo” authorities and
bourgeois adventurers strapped this character to the grill of American male emancipation,
filmmakers sympathetic to the progressive movement used the immersive medium of
sound motion pictures to bring the peripatetic allegorical American back into the
dominant fold of acquisitional and sedentary culture.
What the artifacts indicate is that, during this more mature period of empire,
America’s “crisis in representation” continued to be maintained. However, unlike in the
previous era, maintaining this representational equilibrium during the Great Depression
was challenged by competing modes of message delivery, in which the more immersive
and dominant form tended to favor one ideological trajectory over another (e.g. U.S.
cinema’s fairly consistent construction of the peripatetic white male’s unregulated
mobility and transgressions as more circumstantial than ideological). The one exception
to this trend in American cinema was Hallelujah I’m A Bum – a film production made by
a company whose filmmakers were populists (of all flavors) who were sympathetic to
and involved in promoting ideological alternatives.
When assessed in its entirety, Great Depression “tramp” and “hobo” themed
entertainment that primarily catered to domestic audiences (e.g. illustrated magazines)
allowed for a continued deliberation over the roles that unregulated mobility and
transgression would play in defining the nation. However, entertainment media that
served both domestic and international audiences (e.g. film) was more inclined to
190

representationally silence such deliberations by constructing the peripatetic allegorical
American as a “carrier” for an emulsified ideology in which unregulated mobility
(ontological, geographic, economic) was eventually tamed by “every man’s” natural
inclination to participate in a rooted, stable and socially organized empire.
191

CHAPTER 5
THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS (2000-2010)
Introduction
During the Long and Great Depressions, geography figured prominently in the
rhetoric of mobility, transgression, expansion and containment. In this context,
representing the peripatetic allegorical American as an embodied white male temporarily
freed from the constraints of sedentary culture and material accumulation functioned to
exercise and potentially exorcise anxieties concerning acquisitional culture and whether it
alone could sustain national cohesion. The federal strategy for staving off the inevitable
economic collapse that the nation experienced at the turn of the twenty-first century
largely involved dismantling and replacing America’s booming mid-twentieth century
production economy and replacing it with a speculation and investment economy
centered on a succession of bubbles.
270

As “speculative finance became a secondary engine for growth given the
weakness in the primary engine, productive investment,” bubbles provided a way to
expand an already mature economy without having to address the underlying causes of
market stagnation (e.g. rising consumer debt, marked drop in American salaries and
wages, huge federal deficit, and “an almost continuous negative balance of trade between

270
Between 1982 and 2010, bubbles that propped up a flagging U.S. economy were built on the premise
that even during periods of declining consumer wages, high unemployment and its concomitant conditions
of surplus production, profits could still be gleaned from monopoly-financialization and an “over-
production of capital.” This belief led to more than a decade of destructive economic “solutions” involving
leveraged buyouts, inflated energy prices, and ill-advised investments in hedge funds, junk bonds, high-
yield foreign securities, technology startup firms, an inflated real estate market and subprime mortgages.
John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (Monthly
Review Press, 2009).
192

the United States and other countries.”
271
While peddling products to the American
consumer may still have interested those who were unable to foresee an economic and
technological shift toward globalized production and distribution, by the end of the
1990s, deregulation and trade policies that steered America away from a manufacturing
economy towards a finance economy transformed the nation’s labor force from a potent
constituency into a political paper tiger. Prominent among these policies was the Clinton
administration’s signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which
not only permitted an unrestricted amount of imported goods to flow into the U.S. from
Canada and Mexico, but also allowed for an increased number of Canadian and Mexican
professional workers to be admitted into the U.S. for temporary employment. However,
what is the meaningfulness of the peripatetic allegorical American in the age of virtual
geographies and telesthetic knowledge? How do cultural producers construct a
distinguishable national character when perceptions of crises, bodies, interactions,
culture, “self” and “other” are no longer “bounded by rules of proximity”
272
but instead
mediated by “tools of conviviality,”
273
ordered anarchy and globalized labor pools?

271
Ibid., 18-51.

272
McKenzie Wark, Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events (Bloomington, Indiana
University Press, 1994), vii.

273
In coining the phrase “tools for conviviality,” Ivan Illich tried to rhetorically underscore how labor and
pleasure merge through technology. Writing in the early 1970s, Illich argued that humanity’s relationship
with tools is defined by a desire for increased productivity, and that post-industrial technology
advancements have been driven by an economically-funded imperative that “people need new tools to work
with rather than tools that ‘work’ for them.” He also suggested that technological trends revealed that as a
tool becomes simpler to use, it comes under increased control by those wishing to exploit its potential for
profit. While Illich’s solution was to design tools that could aid peoples’ ability to interact socially and
collaboratively, the development of contemporary “tools of conviviality” (e.g. the Internet and social
networking sites) has not thwarted tool-directed profiteering. Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality [online]
http://clevercycles.com/tools_for_conviviality.
193

Contextualizing these representations against the backdrop of recent political and
economic history is vital in mapping the ways in which the allegorical American is
experiencing rhetorical re-coding in the twenty-first century.
Constructions of this figure during the current Global Economic Crisis suggest
that one resolution has been to represent the mobile, boundary busting American along
the twin trajectories of myth and legend – two paths that are subject to the critiques
fostered by rational scrutiny and questions of plausibility. Here, the mobile and
transgressive American is postulated as an impossible ideal that can be universally
desired and admired, but not easily understood or experienced. A less prominent but still
notable alternative has been for cultural producers to revisit the “everyman” tropes of the
Long and Great Depressions, but enhance them by portraying the allegorical American as
an insider whose status has been queered by some corrupting influence or circumstance.
This portrayal delivers this figure back to a primordial state of being always and forever
without “place” – a condition that is more compatible to a postmodern future where
spatial boundaries are perceived as increasingly less relevant. The following discussion
examines these competing articulations of mobility and transgression as they inform
constructions of the millennial allegorical American, and how this character is being
maintained, deconstructed, reconstructed and/or rendered irrelevant in this contemporary
moment.
Cowboy Capitalism’s Rough Ride Into the Millennium
Nearly fifty years after FDR introduced the National Recovery Act – legislation
that (among other things) gave American workers the right to organize into unions – the
194

newly elected Reagan administration launched its first salvo against collective bargaining
and America’s stagnating production economy. Noted as one of “the most significant
events in 20
th
century U.S. labor history,”
274
historians and union organizers have pointed
to Reagan’s firing of over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers as a deathblow to a labor
movement that had been waging ideological war against the forces of industrial
capitalism for decades.
275
To many, Reagan’s bellicose positions seemed ironic,
considering he had served as president of the Screen Actors Guild and had campaigned
for FDR’s New Deal Coalition. But to those who elected him, liberal collectivism was
and needed to remain part of Reagan’s (and the nation’s) past. By the time that Reagan
was elected to the presidency, the U.S. had already begun its long downward spiral into a
protracted fourteen-month recession, an economic crisis initiated by widespread financial
speculation and debt expansion in the 1960s
276
and unabated stagflation (or “tepid growth
combined with high unemployment and rising prices”) in the 1970s.
277

274
James A. McCartin, “A Historians Perspective on the PATCO Strike, Its Legacy, and Lessons,”
Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal 18.3 (September 2006): 215-222.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/f3863j30641n2181. Also see Thomas L. Traynor and Rudy H.
Fichtenbaum, “The Impact of Post-PATCO Labor Relations on U.S. Union Wages,” Eastern Economic
Journal 23.1 (Winter, 1997): 61-72; and Michael Goldfield, The Decline of Organized Labor in the United
States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

275
Reflecting back on this period, former Communication Workers of America organizer and labor
journalist Steve Early asserted that Reagan’s firing of 11,345 PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers
Organization) members and their subsequent banning from future federal employment “was the biggest,
most dramatic act of union-busting in 20th-century America.” Steve Early, “An Old Lesson Still Holds for
Unions,” The Boston Globe, July 31, 2006 [online]
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/07/31/an_old_lesson_still_holds_f
or_unions/.

276
John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis, 19.

277
Ibid., 37
195

Armed with an ethos that some contemptuously referred to as “cowboy
capitalism,”
278
the Reagan presidency reignited America’s “crisis in representation,” and
(once again) an “exceptionally” rugged and expansionist national character emerged from
the space where the twin pulls of emancipatory and sedentary culture were held in
delicate balance. Riding into the White House on a laissez-faire platform of smaller
government, states rights, deregulation, less taxes and more “individual responsibility,”
the “Reagan Revolution” inaugurated nearly thirty years of reactionary economic and
social policies meant to defer the inevitable financial correction that recessionary
conditions demand. Ultimately, Reagan and his Republican and Democratic successors’
policies led America into what Foster and Magdoff have identified as “Depression
economics.”
279
It is during this period that the millennial allegorical American emerged
as a tragic mythical figure seeking liberation from the forces of acquisitional excess – a
construction that achieved full critical expression in the film Fight Club (dir. David
Fincher, 1999).
Myth and Masculinity in David Fincher’s Fight Club
Based on transgressive fiction writer Chuck Palahniuk’s novel of the same name,
David Fincher’s Fight Club darkly resuscitated the peripatetic white male of previous

278
The Nation, http://www.thenation.com/article/reagans-cowboy-capitalism. For a fuller discussion of
how “cowboy capitalism” has helped shape and inform U.S. economic policy over the last three decades,
see Edward Chancellor’s “Cowboy Capitalism: From Bretton Woods to Michael Milken” in Devil Take the
Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation (New York: Plume, 2000), 233-282.

279
A condition in which unemployment and cost of living increases, causing private spending to fall. In
addition, while demand fails to match either supply or productive capacity, in a depression economy, the
prices of goods and services do not decrease to encourage more consumption. John Bellamy Foster and
Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis, 182. For an additional overview of how “depression
economics” has come to define the contemporary moment, see Paul Krugman’s The Return of Depression
Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009).
196

economic crises in the character Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt).
280
Initially presented as a
sociopathic squatter, Durden holds mythic and spiritual power over other men,
particularly itinerant salesman Jack (Edward Norton), whom Henry Giroux has defined as
the film’s “neoliberal Everyman.”
281
In his capacity as Jack’s millennial jocker, Tyler
leads Jack on an excessively violent and homosocial tour of unbridled masculinity as
experienced in the jungles of generic urban decay.
282
Although later revealed to be just
one of the multiple personalities populating the dissociated mind of the narrator,

Tyler’s
sycophantic companion, Jack, is unmistakably reminiscent of the punks that inhabited
Josiah Flynt’s and George Milburn’s Long and Great Depression descriptions of “tramp”
and “hobo” culture.
283
As Tyler’s naïve “boy protégé” initiated into a culture of abjection
and violence, Jack initially finds comfort in Tyler’s anarchic, unsettled and mono-
gendered world, where acquisitions are just “the things you own [that] end up owning
you,” and a female companion is nothing more than a “predator posing as a house pet.”

280
Transgressive fiction refers to a literary form that has existed for centuries, but gained great popularity
in America during the late 1980s and 1990s. Its narratives are often considered shockingly grotesque and
“dark” because of their tendency to use instinctual drives (e.g. taboo sexuality, violence, anger, aggression,
etc.) to critique normative culture. In addition to Pulahniuk, other prominent authors associated with this
genre include William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jack Kerouac and Alice
Siebold.

281
Henry A. Giroux, “Private Satisfactions and Public Disorders: Fight Club, Patriarchy, and the Politics of
Masculine Violence,” Public Spaces, Private Lives: Beyond the Culture of Cynicism (Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2001), 55-80.

282
Though Pulahniuk has mentioned that the book was inspired by interactions he witnessed in Portland,
Oregon, the film was shot entirely in recognizable areas of Los Angeles, Century City, and San Pedro,
California. There is no mention of specific locales in the screenplay, which allowed these settings to stand
for American urban decay writ large. Christopher Probst, “Anarchy in the USA,” American
Cinematographer [online] http://www.theasc.com/magazine/nov99/anarchy/index.htm.

283
At the end of the film, it is revealed that the narrator has a dissociative disorder, and that both Jack and
Tyler are two of his “alters” or alternative personalities.
197

With mythic authority, Fincher’s Fight Club attempted to assault the foundation
of sedentary culture and reframe it as an enemy of the kinds of averse virility that once
linked Tyler’s “hobo” predecessors to the nation. Even the design of the DVD product
works to establish boundary-busting non-compliance as the presumed voice of a lost
American spirit. After the standard warning instructing viewers that they will be subject
to severe fine and penalty should they illegally distribute or copy the DVD contents, a
second warning from Tyler appears that delegitimizes any authority over intellectual
property it is meant to endorse. Further, Tyler’s text-only blurb challenges viewers to
reclaim their humanity by liberating themselves from the acquisitional pursuits that have
allowed sedentary culture to dominate American society:
If you are reading this then this warning is for you. Every word you read of this
useless fine print is another second off your life. Don't you have other things to
do? Is your life so empty that you honestly can't think of a better way to spend
these moments? Or are you so impressed with authority that you give respect and
credence to all who claim it? Do you read everything you're supposed to read? Do
you think everything you're supposed to think? Buy what you're told you should
want? Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex. Stop the
excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you're
alive. If you don't claim your humanity you will become a statistic. You have
been warned... Tyler.
284

While it was lauded by many film and cultural critics for its critique of high
capitalism run amok, Giroux has argued that Fight Club is less an interrogation of
capitalism and more an appraisal of the ways in which consumerism has been used to
domesticate and render America’s white males politically, socially and culturally
impotent. From Giroux’s perspective, Fight Club promotes an ideology that posits the

284
David Fincher, dir., Fight Club, DVD, with Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter
(Hollywood, CA: 20th Century Fox, Regency, 1999).
198

iconic American in a death match with consumerism capitalism, in which the film frames
the “violence of capitalism”
… almost exclusively in terms of an attack on the traditional (if not to say
regressive) notions of masculinity, and in doing so reinscribes white,
heterosexuality within a dominant logic of stylized brutality and male bonding
that appears predicated on the need to denigrate and wage war on all that is
feminine. In this instance, the crisis of capitalism is reduced to the crisis of
masculinity, and the nature of the crisis lies less in the economic, political, and
social conditions of capitalism itself than in the rise of a culture of consumption in
which men are allegedly domesticated, rendered passive, soft, and emasculated.
285

Giroux’s observation that the film moves from a “crisis of capitalism” to a “crisis of
masculinity” is useful in demonstrating how ideologically provocative entertainment can
still be riddled with messages that reify existing power relations (e.g. heterosexism).
However, what his analysis does not address is how portraying a crisis in either an
economic or gendered realm has meaning in rendering the allegorical American in the
twenty-first century.
Penning his observations at least fourteen months before the events of September
11
th
, 2001, Giroux (and others) would have been hard-pressed to presage how the
nation’s “crisis in representation” would inform all entertainment forms in its wake.
286

This single act – in which the “mobilized other” harnessed the full potential of “new”
communication technologies to successfully “swarm,” transgress and penetrate the twin
towers of advanced capitalism and globalization – not only initiated the longest and most

285
Henry A. Giroux, “Private Satisfactions and Public Disorder,” in America On the Edge: Henry Giroux
on Politics, Culture and Education (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 206.

286
While this essay appears in Giroux’s 2001 publication Public Spaces, Private Lives: Beyond the Culture
of Cynicism, it also has been posted on the web, which provided an authoring date of July 3, 2000,
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/FightClub.
199

expensive war in the nation’s history (rendering the world’s strongest and most equipped
war machine as profoundly ineffectual), it also became the metaphoric coup de grâce that
marked the perceived end of an empire already in decline. In that historic moment, the
allegorical American became both subject and object of an internal and external
deconstruction/reconstruction of nation that could no longer be deferred. Observing the
impact that such a transformation has had on developing contemporary film
representations of America’s allegorical identity, Martin-Jones writes:
After 9/11, North American cinema’s construction of national identity took on a
slightly different relationship to the past. In many ways the attack enabled
American cinema to continue to propagate a triumphal narrative. After all,
America was the aggrieved party and could easily justify retaliation. However, the
traumatic events of September 2001 also necessitated a reexamination of the
recent past. Many films produced or released since 9/11 allegorically relive this
trauma in order to work through national loss. Unable to directly represent the
attacks themselves, they explore national identity by focusing on an individual’s
attempts to regain agency after a recent trauma in their personal past.
287

Despite Martin-Jones’ observation that September 11
th
, 2001 marked a turning point at
which national feelings of powerlessness become exercised/exorcised through narratives
centered on personal trauma and individual agency, this kind of personal storytelling
approach may have actually begun earlier, when media producers started reflecting very
palpable anxieties about the nation’s economy.
288

At the turn of the twenty-first century, U.S. cultural producers began
incorporating storylines that critically considered the “exceptionality” of American

287
David Martin-Jones, “Renegotiating the National Past after 9/11,” Deleuze, Cinema and National
Identity: Narrative Time In National Contexts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2006), 156.

288
In addition to Fight Club, this included films like American Beauty (1999), Cradle Will Rock (1999),
Kiss the Sky (1999), American Psycho (2000), and The Family Man (2000).
200

identity and its troublesome reliance on consumption and containment. Fight Club
exemplified this trend in entertainment media, in which Americans’ presumed roles as
devoted shepherds and protectors of acquisitional capitalism came under interrogation.
Some film and television creators situated their narratives within the setting of the Great
Depression as a way to explain the unfettered nomadic instincts of Americans in crisis.
289

Others used the contemporary moment to examine the familiar, yet queer and (often)
dangerous appeal that unregulated mobility potentially holds for Americans.
290

These kinds of millennial counter-narratives are distinguishable from other stories
of personal trauma and individual agency because of their incorporation of what Lauren
Berlant identifies as the “national symbolic” – those “mental ligaments” or commonly
possessed “aesthetic and discursive ‘national’ objects” that bind disparate populations
into the imagined and narrated community of America. As she explains, these “mythic
national codes” are comprised of objects (e.g. the American flag, the Statue of Liberty,
and the Liberty Bell), locations (e.g. Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon, Alaska),
iconic characters (e.g. pioneers, hobos and cowboys), and legendary or historic American
figures (e.g. Davey Crockett, Daniel Boone, Buffalo Bill, George Washington, Abraham

289
U.S. cultural products set during the Great Depression that featured white male “tramps,” “hobos” and
“carnies” included films such as Oh Brother Where Art Thou (2000), Sea Biscuit (2003), Kit Kittredge: An
American Girl (2008), as well as cable series such as HBO’s Carnivàle (2003-2005) and AMC’s Mad Men
(2007-present).

290
U.S. cultural products set in contemporary times and featured America’s peripatetic “outsiders” included
films such as Nomad (2002), Big Fish (2003), Into the Wild (2007), Wendy and Lucy (2008), and Hobo
with a Shotgun (2010), and cable series such as The Riches (2007-2008) and Sons of Anarchy (2008-
present).
201

Lincoln, JFK, and Martin Luther King).
291
In this chapter, I suggest that cultural
producers’ repeated incorporation of the national symbolic into a story otherwise
designed as a narrative of the individual has potentially served to suture the collective
during this contemporary period of severe fragmentation – in which the only politics
deemed viable or authentic are those that are personally defined and experienced.
While the “Reagan Revolution” may have re-energized the nation’s interest in
Social Darwinism and the triumph of the individual over the collective, the national
symbolic still retained and made room for the allegory of the American “maverick.”
Sometimes agitator, sometimes reformer, always “outsider,” the “maverick” is coded as
detached from the everyday tribulations and machinations of the mainstream, yet
redeemed by their insights and altruistic contributions to the collective during times of
crisis. The “maverick” – a term also used to identify unbranded and/or renegade cattle –
is always marked by mobility, detachment and boundary-busting, as well as the degrees
of privilege that allow these traits to flourish. These markers have been explicitly tied to a
national ethos around which a U.S. character has become dependent, distinguishable, and
the reigning voice of modernity and Western culture. Thus, the figure has traditionally
been used to underscore the interdependency of the individual and the collective.
Implementing H. Mark Roelofs’ schema of the myth/ideology interaction, and
refreshing it to address the contemporary condition of technologically destabilized
geographies to which David Morley has referred, I propose that we have entered a time in

291
Lauren Berlant. “America, ‘Fat,’ the Fetus.” In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays
on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 103. Also see Lauren Gail Berlant’s
The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991).
202

which virtually-experienced liberation and simulated boundary-busting dominate as the
norm – dynamics which provide the structural logic for resolving the national “crisis of
representation” to accommodate the perception of an increasingly “placeless” allegorical
American at the end of empire.
Home, Place and Ideology
Cresswell has argued that the assumptions modern society maintains towards
“place” has always foreshadowed discussions of citizenship and who “rightfully
constitutes” a national subject.
292
In the U.S., these assumptions have historically been
complicated by the inconsistent values assigned to mobility and the freedom to transcend
one’s subject position. For example, throughout much of the 20
th
century, the pursuit of
material goods as a means to securing a “place” within the nation gave new contours to
the ways in which Americans came to understand the construct of “home.” “Place” and
“home” became interchangeable with a state of “settlement” – a terminological maneuver
that exceeded earlier associations with cultural heritage and geographic linkage while
underscoring the dominant influence of sedentary metaphysics in defining the nation.
Reflected in this vernacular shift, national belonging increasingly involved the
active pursuit of upward mobility by positioning the citizen subject within what
Cresswell has described as a “particular constellation of material things that occupy a
particular segment of space and have sets of meaning attached to them”.
293
Thus, in this
materially directed schema, American “stakeholders” became those whose pioneering

292
Tim Cresswell, “Place: Encountering Geography as Philosophy.” Geography 93, part 3 (Autumn 2008):
133.

293
Ibid., 135.
203

instincts had been channeled into intellectual, spiritual and economic explorations – i.e.
any journey that could be safely experienced within the structural confines of “home”.
From this point of view, the logic then follows: the bigger the house, the more personal
expansion its occupants were presumed to have experienced. Further, the more space one
fixedly occupied in the landscape, the greater the share of belonging and right to define
the regulations that governed activities taking place within that landscape.
Don Mitchell has suggested that sedentary culture’s transformation of the
landscape – from a space that one experiences to an inert territory that can be possessed
and controlled – was part of a larger shift towards neo-liberalism, an ideological
paradigm that reached its apotheosis at the end of the twentieth century. Lisa Duggan
frames attempts to liberalize the “unimpeded operation of capitalist free markets” as part
of an overall strategy “to cut back public, noncommercial powers and resources that
might impede or drain potential profit making.”
294
Despite any assertion that such
privatization works to foster community and contribute to national stability, Mitchell
suggests that the late twentieth century’s trend towards privatizing shared material spaces
(e.g. parks, forests, lakes, coastlines, communities, town squares, commons, etc.)
ultimately makes a national identity based on territorial affiliation impossible. Rather
than providing a basis for affinity, “landscape in the contemporary world functions as a

294
Lisa Duggan, “Introduction,” in The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the
Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), xii-xiii.
204

source of alienation” for those now deemed “out of place” by private, controlling
authorities.
295

For many Americans, the conflations made between “place” and “home,”
“property” and “citizenship” have informed their interpretations of what constitutes the
“American Dream.” However, writing in the midst of the Great Depression, James
Truslow Adams originally coined this phrase as a way to capture an aspiration whose
uniqueness was not founded in material acquisition, but rather in ontological mobility:
[This dream is] of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for
everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a
difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too
many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of
motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man
and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are
innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the
fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.
296

Despite Adams’ appeal to more transcendent principles, throughout the twentieth century,
material investments and the means used to acquire them became the key markers used to
signal the “exceptional” freedom, independence and individuality Americans had
acquired as U.S. citizens.
In the twenty-first century, the material world is being challenged by a new and
pervasive condition, brought on by diminishing resources, increased emphasis on
“knowledge” workers and information economies, digital and globally net-worked
environments, mobile communications, and the increasing popularity of entertainment

295
Don Mitchell, “Landscape,” in Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts (I.B. Tauris
& Co. Ltd., 2005), 51.

296
James T. Adam, The Epic of America (Little, Brown and Company, 1931), 404.
205

forms – all of which divert humanity’s attention from the corporeal and tangible world
towards the technologically mediated, simulated, disembodied, and virtual worlds of
“new” media.
297
As part of these conditions, a faux nomadic architecture has developed
in which virtual mobility and boundary-busting can finally be brought under control
through the fixed and well directed flow paths of the Internet Backbone, in which only a
handful of global network service providers (NSPs) control access to the “free” flow of
information. In this environment, Americans’ unregulated (virtual) mobility and (virtual)
transgression are rarely viewed as threatening as long as they remain mediated activities
transmitted through networked channels that can be monitored and dammed at any time
by state and private authorities.
Losing It: Modern Privileges, Postmodern Subjects
Capitalism [is] by nature a form or method of economic change and not only
never is, but never can be stationary [emphasis mine].
– Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

One of the more distinguishing features of the current Global Economic Crisis is
the way the dreaded word “depression” has been avoided in the rhetoric of the nation’s
authoritative economic and political accounts of the crisis. Only in 2008, long after “most
Americans already knew [the] downturn had been going on for some time,” was it
confirmed by the National Bureau of Economic Research that the nation had entered into
a globally experienced “recession.”
298
However, as more critical and international

297
Foremost among these are massive multi-player online role-playing games (e.g. World of Warcraft and
Guild Wars), virtual worlds, computer simulated and augmented reality environments (e.g. Second Life,
The Sims, Firefighter 360°), online communities, social networks and Internet dating sites.

206

economists and analysts added their voice to the discourse, there appeared be an increase
in the deployment of the “d word” in authoritative circles.
299
These individuals argued
that the U.S. had indeed entered a rare economic condition or, in Paul Krugman’s words,
a “third depression” in which joblessness and increased homelessness had met with the
neoliberal policies of “fiscal austerity” and full abandonment of the progressive agenda.

Most economists now acknowledge that today’s Global Economic Crisis was
rooted in recessions of the 1970s, but was exacerbated by deregulation policies in the
1980s; structural implosions of foreign economies, increases in debt and deficit spending,
the sudden rise and collapse of speculative bubbles during the 1990s; and the commodity
inflation, globalization of labor and markets, “institutionalized fraud” and manipulation
of financialized markets in the 2000s.
300
Still, despite any rhetorical attempts to stop the
bleeding of economic confidence, this historic buildup of failure to mitigate another
impending economic collapse finally came to its time of reckoning in 2008, when
comparisons of this contemporary crisis to previous economic depressions became a
journalistic convention after the collapse of the home mortgage industry.
301
In other

298
Chris Isidore, “It’s Official: Recession since Dec. ’07: The National Bureau of Economic Research
Declares what most Americans already knew: the Downturn Has Been Going On For Some Time,” Issue
#1: America’s Money Crisis, CNNMoney.com (Dec. 1, 2008)
http://money.cnn.com/2008/12/01/news/economy/recession/index.htm

299
See John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Circumstances;
Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, eds. The Global Economic Crisis, The Great Depression of the
XXI Century (Montreal: Global Research Publishers, 2010); and Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression
Economics.

300
Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, eds. The Global Economic Crisis, The Great
Depression of the XXI Century (Montreal: Global Research Publishers, 2010).

301
Goodnight and Green discuss the unsuccessful economic rhetoric of this period as one that attempted to
“refrain panic” by “normalizing loss” as a natural and “legitimate part of capitalism”. G. Thomas
207

words, even though economic indicators had for decades been pointing to the
inevitability of another major economic depression, it was foreclosure-driven
home“lessness”
302
of white Americans and the permeability of the nation’s territorial and
cultural boundaries that became the twin maypoles around which cultural producers
would first grapple with the future of an “exceptional” nation predicated in part on the
“creative destruction” that capitalism requires.
303
In the first decade of the twenty-first
century, the anxieties provoked by millennial home“lessness” and boundary-busting were
not only voiced in fictive narratives, but also in broadcast television and cable news.
Shortly after the nation and the world celebrated the historic election of America’s
first non-white president – an election that ushered in the promise of a new era defined by
“hope” and “change we can believe in” – several broadcast and cable news programs and
their online affiliates featured a series of “Tent Cities Spring Up” stories which
showcased the increasing phenomenon of American middle and working class
home“lessness” and material divestment. One such report, “The Last Resort,” aired

Goodnight and Sandy Green, “Rhetoric, Risk, and Markets: The Dot-Com Bubble,” Quarterly Journal of
Speech 96, no. 2 (May 2010): 129.

302
I use the deconstructive technique of incorporating scare quotes in the term home“lessness” to reduce
this construct to its core components related to property and the assignment of rank. This helps distinguish
this quality from other connotations generally associated with the term “homeless” (e.g. mental/emotional
illness, drug abuse, alcoholism, etc.).

303
Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction refers to the ways that economic growth relies entirely on
experiencing a continual refreshment of the marketplace through innovation. By necessity and design,
innovations destroy or devalue older segments of the economy. Cycles of creative destruction lead to
periods of laboring displacement and regional economic instability. This is because workers’ expertise,
skills and/or services are no longer deemed relevant, required or valuable. As these older market segments
fade, survival forces their associated laborers to “hit the road” or change to alternative professions that may
or may not be associated with the region of the country where they initially “put down roots.” This process
has presented a chronic and persistent threat to sedentary U.S. culture since the industrial age. Joseph A.
Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (first edition 1943, London: Routledge, 2006).
208

March 9
th
2009 on the NBC Nightly News segment “Signs of the Times,” which featured
a story about an overcrowded Tent City in Sacramento, California.
304
Chris Jansing’s
report began with the sound of a train leading into narration that proclaimed, “Along the
railroad tracks… a modern shanty town is swelling… hauntingly reminiscent of the
iconic photos of the 1930s and the Great Depression.” During this part of the setup, three
well-circulated Dorothea Lange photos documenting the Great Depression appeared,
establishing key associations that viewers could take away from this segment (fig. 37).
The report then delivered a series of short interviews with Sacramento’s newly
dispossessed. Focusing exclusively on white, former working and middle class
homeowners, the report was saturated with iconic imagery that worked to emphasize the
recent severing of America (and, by extension, the iconic American) from sedentary
culture (fig. 38).

FIGURE
37.
The
Jansing
report
included
this
montage
of
Depression-‐era
photos
taken
between
1935-‐39
by

photojournalist
Dorothea
Lange
for
the
federal
government’s
Resettlement
Administration
(later
called

the
Farm
Security
Administration).
©
NBC
Nightly
News.

304
[online] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F94f_Ycsjs.
209

FIGURE
38.
CONSTRUCTING
THE
MILLENNIUM’S
PERIPATETIC
ALLEGORICAL
AMERICAN:
(L)
Jansing

interviews
Jim,
a
former
homeowner,
now
itinerant
construction
worker
and
resident
of
Sacramento’s

Tent
City.
(R)
Corbin,
a
former
homeowner
who
once
“made
a
good
living
selling
cars,”
speaks
of
how
he

“never
considered”
that
he
would
ever
be
homeless
or
without
work.
©
NBC
Nightly
News.

Issuing the dire proclamation that tent city populations across the country were
growing daily, the camera scanned the field in which an American flag stood as the only
recognizable marker of an empire in decline. Walking through the debris, Jansing
reported, “Many of the stories here are heart-breakingly similar. Middle class Americans
living paycheck to paycheck, lose their job, then their house, then have nowhere to go….
It’s happening in Seattle too. Tent cities in Reno and Nashville. Sudden homelessness
brought on by unexpected shocking poverty.” Jansing’s reference to these other locales
and “unexpected shocking poverty” was visually overlaid with the image of a second
American flag and several clips of Sacramento’s white “shantytown” residents, all of
whom looked remarkably similar (fig. 39).

FIGURE
39.
“Old
Glory”
plays
a
central
role
throughout
Jansing’s
NBC
report
on
Sacramento’s
Tent
City.
In

the
final
frame,
the
American
flag
waves
in
isolation
against
a
decimated
landscape
at
sunset.
©
NBC

Nightly
News.

210

The report’s exclusive featuring of white dis“place”ment
305
was particularly
notable in light of a 2008 National Coalition for the Homeless report, which stated that
during this period 58.3% of Sacramento’s homeless population were people of color, with
57.3% reporting that they had been out of work for two years or more – results that also
reflected “the recent downturn in the economy and increasing unemployment rate
regionally”.
306
And yet the only person of color featured or included in the images
associated with NBC’s story was Sacramento’s African American mayor and former
NBA star Kevin Johnson – not the camp’s unofficial mayor (Rico Morales) or any of the
other “unsettled” non-whites associated with the site, who played a more prominent role
in local news coverage of this same story (fig. 40).
307

FIGURE
40.
RACING
AND
ERASING
DIS”PLACEMENT”:
(L)
Mayor
Kevin
Johnson
remarking
on
Sacramento’s

“dirty
little
secret”
in
the
Jansing’s
NBC
report.
©
NBC
Nightly
News.
(R)
During
an
interview
with

Sacramento
Bureau
chief
and
ABC7
local
news
reporter
Nannette
Miranda,
de
facto
Tent
City
Mayor
Rico

Morales
discusses
his
role
in
“trying
to
keep
peace,
organize,
[and
making]
sure
everybody
eats

everyday.”
©
ABC7
Newshour.

305
The term dis“place”ment is deconstructed here through scare quotes to emphasize the territoriality that
accompanies privileged dislocations from rank.

306
Julia Acuña and Bob Erlenbusch: “Homeless Employment Report: Findings and Recommendations”
(August 2009), Sacramento Ending Chronic Homelessness Initiative (August 2009). National Coalition for
the Homeless [online]
http://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/homelessemploymentreport/index.html.

307
ABC7 Newshour (KGO-TV San Francisco), “Tent cities pop up in area hard hit by the economy” (air
date March 10, 2009), reporter Nannette Morales [online]
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/state&id=6702913.
211

In this national report, Mayor Johnson was framed as the well-suited “outside”
authority visiting a tattered landscape littered with decaying white privilege: his vitality
and economic viability in contrast to his white counterpart’s (allegorical American’s) loss
of strength and privilege was difficult to miss. Even though never directly mentioned, the
tropes of nation, identity, privilege lost and bi-directional boundary-crossings of “place”
were still prominently featured for the decoding.
On March 6
th
, 2008, the Mortgage Bankers Association sent out a press release
reporting that mortgage foreclosures had hit an all-time high, with 54% of subprime
borrowers losing their homes in just one quarter of 2007.
308
While national broadcast and
cable news stories airing after March 6
th
, 2008 revealed an uptick in features covering the
“downward mobility” of dis“placed” white Americans, international news networks also
did their part to deconstruct/reconstruct the millennial allegorical American in the
shadow of a contemporary world economic crisis. For example, in the BBC news story
“Tent Cities Spring Up in L.A.” (March 16, 2008), Wendy Urquhart reported on one
encampment in Southern California’s Inland Empire – a story that incorporated many of
the same patriotic and Depression-associated imagery used one year later in Jansing’s
NBC report.
Urquhart’s story opened with a camera pan of several temporary shelters partially
framed by the transportation technology of a bygone era (a fast moving freight train). As
her narration started, the reporter’s tone was one of sympathetic objectivity, giving it a

308
[online] http://www.mbaa.org/NewsandMedia/PressCenter/60619.htm.
212

detached quality that bore some resemblance to the ethnographic-styled narrations of
older mid-twentieth century documentaries featuring “exotic” lost cultures. Reflecting on
what the reporter characterized as a sudden revelation of a “grim situation” that is “likely
to get worse before it gets better,” Urquhart opined:
This is the reality of the crisis in the U.S. economy. People who use to own their
own homes are living hand-to-mouth on land once occupied by those less
fortunate. In the last month, some 60,000 houses were repossessed, their
occupants forced out when they could no longer meet ever-increasing mortgage
payments.

Urquhart’s use of the phrases “hand to mouth” and “those less fortunate” helped to
distinguish those featured in this story from other transient populations, and signaled to
her viewers that these subjects had been stripped of (rather than barred from) privilege. In
other words, these subjects are Americans who have been “deterritorialized par
excellence.”
309
As land ceases to be anything but support for this population’s continual
(upward and downward) movement, these subjects are compelled to enter into what
DeLeuze and Guattari have described as a nomadic relationship with the terrain, in which
land becomes only a “factual necessity” and “relays along a trajectory.”
310
Constructed as
such, the allegorical American (as represented in the tent city subject) assumes an
undefined and, thus, unlocatable position in the twenty-first century. Unmoored from
earlier assumptions concerning stability, privilege and property, he is reconstructed as his

309
Gilles DeLeuze and Felix Guattari, “Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine,”
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. by Brian Massumi. (Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press, 2005), 380.

310
Ibid., 380-381.
213

earlier incarnation – the nomadic wanderer traversing across the uncharted landscape of
upward and downward mobility with no conclusive destination.
Further invoking the national subject, Urquhart’s observations about white
working and middle class propertylessness were punctuated by images of a U.S. flag,
weathered white faces, and the sound of a train whistling in the background.
311
Although
Urquhart’s report focused on the newly foreclosed who were “determined to get back on
track” – a theme consistent with much of the message contained in Jansing’s report – this
focus offered a very narrow representation of America's increased detachment from
sedentary culture than the one offered just two days earlier by her BBC news online
colleague, Rajesh Mirchandani. In “Tent City Highlights U.S. Homes Crisis,”
Mirchandani revealed that only a “small minority” of the population in the Inland
Empire’s tent city were there “as a direct result of the housing crash.”
312
Elaborating, he
described a “range of people here: whites, African-Americans, Hispanics, the old and
young including some with babies,” that took up temporary residence alongside indigent
disabled veterans, drug addicts, and newly released prisoners. In contrast to Urquhart, the
iconic American that Mirchandani constructed for the world at large was a
demographically diverse figure whose subjectivity on the world stage as an “American”
had been complicated by factors that helped sever U.S. national identity from earlier
associations with accumulation, stability and power. Queered by the forces of

311
Although this report also interviewed one non-white resident who had recently lost his home in the
suburbs, most of the journalistic narrative detailing the “shocking” conditions of working and middle class
homelessness involved scenes of white males, white females, and white children. Archived footage of this
broadcast can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnnOOo6tRs8.

312
BBC News, (air date March 14, 2008) news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7297093.stm.
214

globalization and potential irrelevance in the twenty-first century, this figure inspires a
new vernacular involving myth, resistance, nation and privileged hybridity to distinguish
the allegorical American’s presumably provisional dis“place”ment (home“lessness”)
from those indigent, mentally and emotionally disordered populations that (since the
“Reagan Revolution”) have simply been deemed “homeless.”
America’s Propertyless Millennial “Everyman” and the Lure of “The Wild”
Only four and a half months before “Tent City” stories engulfed the press,
director Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007) asked audiences to reconsider the seemingly
irrational state of the detached, youthful white “tramp” once featured on cultural products
like Thompson’s “Poor Old Tramp” (fig. 41). The film recounts the last two years of a
privileged young man’s life – a bourgeois adventurer turned “leather tramp”
313
who
dispossessed himself of all worldly possessions and personal ties

to become a fully
liberated nomad. Based on Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction account of Christopher Johnson
McCandless, Penn’s film remained faithful to the original novel, focusing almost
exclusively on McCandless’ life after his conversion to nomadism (fig. 42).
314

313
As the film explains, “leather tramps” are those who do the majority of their wandering by foot, as
contrasted to “rubber tramps” who own and use cars, motor homes, and bikes for their roaming.

314
Released in 1996, Jon Krakauer’s best-selling Into the Wild maintained that Chris gave away $24,000 of
his college fund, set fire to few hundred more, dumped his car and began his Odyssean wandering with
little more than a fake-fur parka, rifle, a few books and ten pounds of rice. Severing all ties with his family,
and rejecting several other opportunities for fraternal and personal intimacy along the way, Chris adopted
the name Alexander Supertramp and wrote that he’d enjoined a “climactic battle to kill the false being
within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution…. No longer to be poisoned by civilization…” Jon
Krakauer, Into the Wild (New York: Villard Books, 1996), 163.
215

FIGURE
41.
REVISITING
TROPES
FROM
THE
PAST:
(L)
Buffords
Sons’
illustration
of
Thompson’s
“Poor
Old

Tramp”
(1877).
(R)
Emile
Hirsch
as
the
ill-‐prepared
Christopher
McCandless
tramping
through
the
Alaska

wilderness
(2007).
©
River
Road
Entertainment.

FIGURE
42.
CASTING
AN
AMERICAN
SUPERTRAMP:
(L)
Hirsch
recreating
McCandless’
weeklong
visit
to
“The

Slabs”
–
a
“leather”
and
“rubber”
tramp
camp
and
performance
space
near
California’s
Salton
Sea.
©

River
Road
Entertainment.
(R)
The
real
Christopher
Johnson
McCandless
(aka
Alexander
“Alex”

Supertramp)
as
he
appeared
in
1990.
©
ABC
Evening
News.

In 1992, less than two months after McCandless’ death from apparent starvation
in the Alaska wilderness,
315
People magazine ran a feature that gave some insight into the
worldview of this modern-day “tramp”. Inspired in large part by the autobiographical
musings of Jack London, Henry David Thoreau and William Henry Davies (author of

315
Krakauer and Penn both suggested that McCandless’ starvation was due to his ingesting a mildly toxic
seed that, because of his weakened state, shut down his digestive system. However, this conclusion was
ruled out in the final report on the incident prepared in 1997 by biologist and department chair Dr. Thomas
Clausen at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Dr. Clausen discusses his findings in the 2007 documentary
Call of the Wild. Ron Lamothe, Call of the Wild. DVD. Concord, MA: Terra Incognita Films, 2007.
216

The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, after which McCandless renamed himself),
McCandless began documenting his own “on the road” emancipation from domestication
and acquisitional culture.
316
Fifteen years later, when large numbers of Americans were
experiencing discernible (and often forced) divestment from the lifestyle that McCandless
found so easy to abandon, Penn set about transforming the allegorical American’s erosion
of place and privilege from a potentially tragic account of recklessness and emotional
instability into a mythic tale of ideological resistance and spiritual renewal – a
construction that (along with Krakauer’s book) turned the dead hiker into a legendary
figure, inspiring tributes around the world.
317

Releasing Into the Wild on the crest of a collapsing economy, and using the
national mythic code of the stars and stripes as backdrop to promote an anti-acquisitional
nomadic ideology, Penn used McCandless’ story to tug at the fraying threads of privilege,
self-deception, naïve determination and irrational isolation that have colored the fabric of
American exceptionalism today (fig. 43).
318

316
Recounting one passage from a manifesto McCandless painstakingly scrawled during his final days, the
staff writer said, “He seemed to be strangely alienated from his former life, ready to cast his fate to the
whims of the wilderness. On a board in the bus he had scrawled, ‘… No phone. No pool. No pets. No
cigarettes. Ultimate freedom…. No longer poisoned by civilization, he flees, and walks alone upon the land
to become Lost in the Wild.’” Bill Hewitt, “End of the Trail,” People, October 5, 1992, 50. This article ran
in an issue with a cover story featuring “The World’s Richest Kids,” a story that focused on the restricted
world of the elite that “Isn’t just Baubles and Bodyguards” but one in which “They’ve Got to Say Please
and Finish Their Peas.”

317
As of August 1, 2010, a search for the combined key phrases “Chris McCandless Tribute” + “Into the
Wild” yielded 2,340 results that featured websites, videos, blogs, and social networking memorials. 37,400
hits resulted from a simple search restricted only to “Chris McCandless Tribute.”

318
The American flag as well as the stars and stripes leitmotif appears repeatedly throughout the course of
the film.
217

FIGURE
43.
A
small
sampling
of
the
numerous
cameos
the
U.S.
flag
makes
in
Into
the
Wild.
©
River
Road

Entertainment.

Undoubtedly cognizant of the maxim “the personal is political,” and sensing the
wisdom in representing a wounded, post-9/11 America through the lenses of personal
trauma and individual agency, Penn portrayed the dispossession of privilege and place as
a heroic and enlightened choice with universal appeal. Still, it must be noted that
McCandless’ choice to dispossess himself of his Oxford education, a significant college
fund, new car, two meddling parents, and a seemingly fit and healthy body could hardly
represent an American “everyman”. Nonetheless, in an interview with Charlie Rose, this
is precisely how the filmmaker chose to describe him, arguing that McCandless’ decision
218

to “strip” himself all things “fraudulent” was done to experience the “right of passage”
and “wanderlust that is exhilarating to everyone.”
319

While this construction comes from a filmmaker who is widely considered to be
one of the most political and liberal voices in U.S. cinema today, Penn’s venerating of
(and thus re“placing”) the youthful allegorical American as one who can choose a future
without the placeholders and footholds of acquisitional and sedentary culture actually
helps reify and reestablish the privilege when the material advancements of subordinated
populations are gnawing at their foundations.
320
Without directly addressing the
possibility that the film’s hero may have been tormented by mania or dissociative identity
disorder,
321
Penn frames McCandless’ seemingly irrational and antisocial behavior as a
requirement for transgressing the boundaries of the profane and entering the sacred – a
state that is proposed to be more in alignment with the nation’s true character, for which
the expansive and untamed Alaskan wilderness stands synecdoche. As the film’s

319
Penn’s enthusiasm for dispossession seems to contradict his views of material loss in other contexts. For
example, in 2005, the filmmaker financed a forty-caravan trek from Coachella (California) to New Orleans
(Louisiana) to build shelters for those “stripped” of their homes by Hurricane Katrina, and in 2010 he co-
founded a relief organization to relocate those made homeless by Haiti’s devastating earthquake. Charlie
Rose, “A discussion about the film ‘Into the Wild’ – with Eddie Vedder and Sean Penn,” What’s on
Charlie Rose, September 21, 2007, [online] http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/8705.

320
Constructions of other wandering, anti-acquisitional and disconnected American characters produced
during this period – such as the female “hobo” in Wendy and Lucy (dir. Kelly Reichardt, 2008) and the
homeless African American virtuoso in The Soloist (dir. Joe Wright, 2009) – are not represented as viable
candidates for undergoing a similar kind of transformation, even though females and ethnic minorities now
number significantly among peripatetic American populations.

321
Either one of these conditions (and several others) could have accounted for Chris’ adoption of the
Alexander Supertramp identity (which, in real life, he used inconsistently); and his impulse to fully detach
from close friends and family, dispose of all worldly possessions (including those things that would have
been useful to his journey) and “hoof it” to Alaska in mid-April without proper equipment, skills or
wilderness training. Lamothe’s interviews with a former college roommate and townspeople who
McCandless had met along the way recount stories of manic and anti-social behavior that could be
associated with bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder.
219

narrative voice, McCandless’ sister, Carine, delivers this message of spiritual
emancipation, which she claims to understand but does not (or cannot) choose for herself.
Recounting Chris’ decision to wander away from the family dysfunction that had
emotionally shut them both off, Carine recounts:
I understood what he was doing. That he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd
and tedious duty of graduating from college, and now he was emancipated from
that world of abstraction, false security, parents, and material excess. The things
that cut Chris off from the truth of his existence.
322

Ultimately, Penn positions the audience to share and benefit from the “truth” of
Christopher’s existence by transforming him from a cynical and privileged youth to the
“American Christ” figure that Jim Sanderson identifies in the construction of The Grapes
of Wrath’s Tom Joad (dir. John Ford, 1940). According to Sanderson, the key to the
“American Christ’s” character is that as “hero, he must struggle” and “agonize” to attain
“universal consciousness” (fig. 44). Often this suffering involves the immersion of “self
in the other, nature.” As Sanderson explains, once construed as “close to nature, and thus
close to God,” the “American Christ” becomes an existential psychopath, “challenging
culture” and embracing “the terms of death.”
323
It is from this point that he is freed to
“work upward, rather than backward, passing ascending levels of consciousnesses,
through universal, Platonic ideals, and eventually enter the supreme idea, the oversoul or

322
Carine McCandless provided some of the more “family-sensitive” voice-over narration used in Into the
Wild, while Jena Malone, the actress who plays Carine in the film, provided the remaining narration.

323
Jim Sanderson. “American Romanticism in John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath: Horizontalness,
Darkness, Christ, and F.D.R.” Literature/Film Quarterly 17, no. 4 (January 1, 1989): 231-
244, http://www.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/.
220

the spirit.”
324
Cleansed of everyday and mundane urges, the “American Christ” becomes
a potential conduit for insights that can lead a troubled nation out of the wilderness.

FIGURE
44.
PENN’S
AMERICAN
CHRIST:
(Top)
Close-‐up
of
Jacques-‐Louis
David’s
Christ
on
the
Cross
(1782).

Image
courtesy
of
the
Web
Museum
of
Fine
Art.
(Bottom)
At
115
lbs.,
a
frail
Hirsch
helps
to
transform

McCandless
from
the
fictive
Alexander
Supertramp
into
the
mythical
“American
Christ.”
©
River
Road

Entertainment.

The construction of McCandless as a mobile American renegade who railed
against normative culture is not exactly a groundbreaking convention in U.S. cultural
products. In fact, one of the defining features of American storytelling is the development
of unique mobility genres – e.g. frontier, Western and road – in which moving freely
through vast open terrains is central to developing and explaining a character’s persona
and actions. Characterizing the function served by the mobile resister, Katie Mills has

324
Ibid., 232.
221

argued that tales of peripatetic characters incline audiences “to imagine new lives,” to
create their own “narratives of possibility,” and encourage them to believe that they too
can transgress past the boundaries that define their own subjectivities and experiences.
325

Free to roam away from despairing conditions, these wanderers are presumed agents of
destiny. As such, they are endowed with “a certain privilege of autonomy, introducing a
stranger’s viewpoint to a community, a perspective that is not weighed down with the
justifications of the status quo” or (for that matter) the social, political and economic
circumstances from which some real-world audiences would like to be liberated.
326

With the above possibilities in mind, it is notable that Penn’s film – which
constructed the allegorical American as a mobile messianic ascetic who advocates for
material divestment and resistance to settled life – was released in 2007, just as public
discourse began to center on impending economic collapse and the erosion of the
American Dream. By not including any special features containing news footage,
photographs, interviews, etc. that might humanize this “free spirit,” even the DVD
packaging worked to perpetuate the construction of McCandless as the martyred savior
for whom life only had meaning once he began to divest of it.
327

325
Katie Mills, The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving through Film, Fiction and Television (Carbondale:
IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006).

326
Ibid., 28.

327
Neither Into the Wild nor Into the Wild (Two-Disc Special Collector’s Edition) DVD product featured
news footage, documentary content, interviews or images concerning the life or death of Christopher
McCandless, despite the volume of material generated about him after his body was discovered.
Interestingly, at the same time Penn and crew filmed Into the Wild, a documentary about McCandless’ life
(Call of the Wild) was also being filmed. As part of his film, documentarian Lamothe revealed some of the
maneuvers Penn and his production team went through to impede and/or stop the documentary from going
forward.
222

While the martyred peripatetic loners in U.S. narratives have often been fashioned
and discussed by their creators as “prophets,” “saints,” and “visionaries,” Ireland has
argued that these figures often communicate the darker, solitary dimensions of
existentialism, “emphasiz[ing] the uniqueness and isolation of the individual’s experience
in a hostile or indifferent universe.”
328
Liberated from the possibility of divine or
community intervention, this figure is freed from having to seek answers rooted in or
bound to either a cosmic or world order in which the individual has no control or
relevance.
Endowed with a uniquely transgressive strain of sacred humanism, the American
nomad (as embodied in Christopher “Alexander Supertramp” McCandless) offers the
palliative of ideological defeatism for a nation in the midst of major structural
transformation. In this kind of portrayal, the millennial allegorical American no longer
finds it necessary to reconcile the paradoxes presented by the ideals of the limitless self,
unfettered liberty, and acquisitional sedentary culture. By divesting in all things material
(including his own corporeality), he is removed from the “universal class” of globalized
labor that potentially threatens his “place” in the new millennium.
329
However, by
rejecting the ideological paradox that has traditionally defined the nation, the allegorical
American maintains his “exceptionality” in a globalized future only by refusing to

328
Brian Ireland, “American Highways: Recurring Images and Themes of the Road Genre,” The Journal of
American Culture 26, no. 4 (December 2003): 480.

329
In using this term, I am attempting to draw attention to Laclau’s identification of a “limitless historical
actor” that can potentially dissolve the alienation of subjectivity that normally arises in a mechanized
industrial society. Here I use the term to trouble this assertion, and discuss the exploited “universal class”
of unpaid or underpaid labor upon which globalization and network society relies. Ernesto Laclau, “Power
and Representation,” in Emancipation(s), Radical Thinkers Series set 2, no. 19 (London: Verso, 2007), 84-
104.
223

participate, and by accepting that the nation (and thus his identity) is an impossible object
(and subject) in the new millennium.
Theodicean Nightmares: The Allegorical American as Apocalyptic Avatar
Like the montages in both Jansing’s and Urquhart’s news reports, some fictional
media products produced in the years leading up to and associated with the Global
Economic Crisis have also used Great Depression imagery and revisited earlier “tramp”
and “hobo” character constructions to explore American responses to national crisis.
Without attending to the major distinctions in these epochal moments in history, a
nostalgic narrative invoking the Great Depression helps remind audiences that the nation
has already overcome other doomsday scenarios – potentially allaying fears that the
present condition will be the proverbial nail in the nation’s coffin. Rather than ignoring
anxieties, these kinds of cultural products acknowledge national collapse as a real and
experienced event, but one that has been resolved, overcome, and comfortably contained
in the past. In addition, by situating reflexive commentary in historic contexts, creators
(and the media corporations that finance them) produce additional leeway to discuss (and
exploit) “hot button” issues circulating in contemporary culture while narrowing any
potential for alienating audiences.
Reflecting on the sudden upsurge in historically themed, nationally reflexive
narratives that have been green-lit since September 11, 2001, Spigel has observed:
Certainly after 9/11, the media’s will to remember was connected to the
resuscitation of national culture in a country heretofore divided by culture wars
and extreme political partisanship. For the culture industries, however, the turn to
history was not only connected to the resuscitation of nationalism; history was
224

also connected to the parallel urge to restore the business routines and marketing
practices of contemporary media culture.
330

Among the first media entities to capitalize on this trend towards a “will to remember”

was
the premium cable network Home Box Office Entertainment (HBO). In July of 2001,
HBO announced that it had decided to pick up and put into production the dramatic series
Carnivàle (2003-2005), a nostalgically reflective road noir created by a relatively
unknown writer named Daniel Knauf. Discussing HBO’s post-9/11 decision to produce a
visually sumptuous (and costly) show set in the Great Depression dealing with themes of
good versus evil and the ravages of economic devastation, HBO Entertainment president
Carolyn Strauss explained:
[The show] dealt with a lot of themes that were interesting to us, certainly in a
setting that was something we hadn’t seen before. I think Dan had a very
comprehensive vision and a really unique voice. And I think that the time that he
picked was very unique and certainly truly American, and yet it seemed to
resonate strongly with current times.
331

While the show’s themes may have resonated with current times, audience and critics’
reception to those themes was less resounding. Eventually cancelled due to poor ratings,
the Emmy award-winning and multi-nominated Carnivàle initially attracted a record 5.3
million viewers for its debut, and then maintained a respectable 3.5 to 4 million viewers
during its first season.
332
However, the series never received the kind of critical praise
generated by other, more comically tinged HBO products of the period (e.g. Sex and the

330
Lynn Spigel, “Entertainment Wars: Television Culture after 9/11,”American Quarterly 56, no. 2 (June,
2004): 240-241.

331
“Bonus Feature: Paley Museum of Television & Radio Panel Discussion with the Cast and Crew of
Carnivàle,” in Carnivalé: The Complete Second Season. DVD. (New York, NY: HBO Home Video, 2006).

332
[online] http://www.reference.com/browse/Carnivàle.
225

City and The Sopranos). Although aligned with the pathos of the era, Knauf’s decision to
focus on tragedy and destitution in a complex myth-based narrative led some critics to
characterize the series as “confusing” and “pretentious.”
333
More generous critics
recognized it as a “compelling” and “visually stunning” freak show that was too
demanding for audiences to follow.
334
Airing for 24 weeks, Carnivàle’s production costs
were reported to be “one of the most costly – if not *the* most costly – pattern-budget
ever invested in a weekly series in television history.”
335
It is striking that HBO gambled
any of its post-9/11 fortune on a nomadic troupe of boundaryless carnies and their
encounters with a wretched and sedentary America.
336

Set in the 1930s, Knauf’s snapshot of the U.S. in crisis tinkered with the concept
of the ideologically stable allegorical American by creating a dual-incarnate figure
fraught with irresolvable conflict. Appropriating Aryan Hindu myth, Knauf’s central

333
Tim Goodman, “HBO Wandering Down a Murky Midway with Confusing, Pretentious 'Carnivale',” San
Francisco Chronicle (Sept. 12, 2003) [online] http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/09/12/DD11641.DTL

334
Phil Gallo, “Carnivàle,” Variety.com (Sept. 12, 2003) [online]
http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117921817.html?categoryid=32&cs=1.

335
Dan Knauf’s responds to speculation regarding Carnivàle’s cancellation and the speculations over cost,
estimated at anywhere from $2-4 million per episode by fans and the press, figures to which he dismisses as
being too “low.” Mr. Knauf’s post to fans on the yahoo group “CarnivaleHBO” was reposted in its entirety
by liberalnurse on DemocraticUnderground.com, a website “was founded on Inauguration Day, January 20,
2001, to protest the illegitimate presidency of George W. Bush and to provide a resource for the exchange
and dissemination of liberal and progressive ideas.” Liberalnurse, “Daniel Knauf speaks regarding the
Cancellation of Carnivale,” Democraticunderground.com, Arts & Entertainment: TV Groups (May 12,
2005) [online]
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=267x2511.

336
Despite her declared enthusiasm for the show and commitment in 2004 to Knauf’s original six-season
plan to resolve the story (Bonus Feature: Paley Museum…), Strauss cancelled the series in 2005, telling the
Hollywood Reporter “We feel the two seasons we had on the air told the story very well.”
HollywoodReporter.com, “Big Tent Folds as HBO Cancels ‘Carnival’” (May 11, 2005) [online]
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/television/brief_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000913918 (accessed
January 25, 2008).
226

bifurcated plot follows the evolution and actions of two avatars who descend to earth
during the Great Depression – Brother Justin Crowe and Ben Hawkins – and their
relationships to inexplicable evil and suffering, mobility and transgression, providence
and volition.
337

While the series builds towards an the epic battle between these two figures, the
mystery and tension that provides the through line uniting Carnivàle’s narrative is located
in the show’s symbolic inversion of “commonly held cultural codes, values and
norms”
338
– a nod to the dynamics of the ancient pre-Lent ritual of carnivàle from which
the series and its fictional road show take their name. For example, by positioning Ben,
the working class fugitive-turned-carnie, as Carnivàle’s heroic defender of American
values (avatar of the light), and Methodist minister Justin Crowe as the supreme
villainous transgressor (avatar of the dark) with whom Ben is eternally linked, the series
reverses normative correlations linking ethics, morality, stability and avocation.
Furthermore, by framing the nomadic Ben, whose freedom is always in peril, as the hero
in the protagonist duo, Knauf advances the idea that mobility and transgression are not
only important in identifying the valorous allegorical American but also in righting an
“exceptional” nation turned on its head. A similar inversion transpires with the bourgeois

337
Also called avatara, an avatar is an incarnation of a Hindu deity that descends to earth during “moments
of great crisis.” In Hindu mythology, it is believed that Vishnu incarnates ten times, with Krishna and
Guatama Buddha being his eighth and ninth avatars (respectively). In his tenth and final incarnation as
Kalkin, Vishnu will return for a final time to rescue humanity from the collapse of civilization. Rachel
Storm, “The Avatars of Vishnu,” The Encyclopedia of Eastern Mythology (London: Lorenz Books, 1999),
pp. 132-141. For more details on the conscious construction of Carnivale’s avatar universe, see “Bonus
Feature: Magic & Myth: The Meaning of Carnivàle,” in Carnivalé: The Complete Second Season. DVD.
(New York, NY: HBO Home Video, 2006).

338
Barbara A. Babcock, The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1978), 14.
227

subject, which Knauf “carnivalizes” by creating an incestuous relationship between
Brother Justin and his sister Iris (Amy Madigan), and turning sedentary townspeople into
lustful savage zombies who attend “cooch shows.”
339

Knauf continuously experimented with symbolically inverting normative
constructions of the “grotesque,” not only in his fouling of the clergy, policing authorities
and the “townies” that torment the carnies, but also by portraying a troupe of nomadic
deterritorialized “freak show” itinerants as the only stable, regularly featured American
community. These kinds of symbolic inversions challenge audiences to reconsider
high/low formations within dominant culture, as well as the “Ideal-ich” or “everyday
hierarchies, structures, rules and customs [governing] social formation.”
340

A final example of the way in which Knauf inverts symbolic expectations in
Carnivàle’s twisted mystic universe is in the character he selects to voice the concerns of
contemporary audiences. For example, in a not so cryptically coded address related to
anxieties prominently circulating in 2003, Brother Justin voices conservatives’ worst
fears when he proclaims:
The clock is ticking, brothers and sisters, counting down to Armageddon. The
worm reveals himself in many guises across this once great land; from the
intellectual elite cruelly indoctrinating our children with the savage blasphemy of

339
An all-girl burlesque sideshow positioned off the midway and towards the back. “Cooch shows”
typically involved inexperienced strippers (often “townies” or girls only temporarily joining a road show)
who would strip down to a g-string for men-only patrons. The more provocative shows ended in a “blow-
off” (full frontal strip). In “Babylon” (epi. 1.5), Carnivàle plays an old mining town in Babylon, Texas
known for its abuse of carnies and (as later discovered) occupied by the “zombified” spirits of the men that
died there. Rita Sue’s daughter Dora Mae performs a “blow off” for the hostile miners, provoking a riot.
Shortly after, Dora Mae is found murdered and her body mutilated with the word “harlot” scrawled into her
forehead.

340
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1986), 183-184.
228

Darwin, to the craven Hollywood pagans, corrupting them in the darkness of the
local bijou, from the false prophets cowering behind our nation's pulpits to the
vile parasites in our banks and boardrooms and the godless politicians, growing
fat on the misery of their constituents. The signs of the end times are all around
us, etched in blood and fire by the left hand of god. You have but to open your
eyes, brothers and sisters. The truth is that the Devil is here.
341

Unlike Tom Holmes (Heroes for Sale) and Godfrey (My Man Godfrey), whose dialog as
the itinerant hero or “forgotten man” is deployed as a progressive vessel of hope for an
America in crisis, it is Carnivàle’s middle class “insider” turned demon prophet Brother
Justin Crowe (who happens to share his initials with another Western avatar-like figure)
who carries this unfortunate “state of the union” message to his flock. In so doing,
Carnivàle departs from both the feel good “tramp” and “hobo” narratives of the Great
Depression and contemporary dystopian dropout road adventures like Into the Wild.
Knauf’s strategy of having the single peripatetic protagonist split into two ideological
embodiments through which one can highlight rather than assuage anxieties harkens back
not only to the post-Kerouac transgressive fiction demonstrated in Fight Club, but also to
the dual encoding tactics used to market entertainment products during the Long
Depression. Furthermore, in contrast to Penn’s real man turned sanctified “tramp”,
Knauf’s construction of Ben and Brother Justin as conjoined avatars still invokes
religious savior mythology, but does so in a way that deconstructs the “American Christ”
as a fatalistic duo that can jointly represent what many perceived to be a hopelessly
divided America struggling to define itself in the new millennium (fig. 45).
342

341
Brother Justin Crowe addressing his flock in “The Day That Was The Day” (epi. 1.12), Carnivàle, HBO
(air date November 30, 2003).

229

FIGURE
45.
CARNIVÀLE’S
APOCALYPTIC
AVATARS:
(L)
Brother
Justin
and
Ben
Hawkins
as
featured
on
the

primary
marketing
image
used
to
promote
Carnivàle’s
second
season.
(R)
Brother
Justin
offers
Ben,
the

Eucharist
of
a
razor
blade
in
“The
Day
of
the
Dead”
(epi.
1.11).
©HBO
Video.

Off-White: Constructing Peripatetic Allegorical American Hybrids in The Riches
On March 12, 2007, just one year before the home mortgage industry announced
its dire predictions of foreclosures, The Riches (2007-2008) made its anticipated FX
network debut, garnering 3.8 million viewers.
343
Created, written and produced by
Dmitry Lipkin, The Riches was an original cable series about an American Irish Traveller
family (the Malloys) who attempt to break away from their clan and simultaneously

342
On November 23, 2003, the Pew Research Center released a summary report and analysis of both a
month long nation-wide “Values Survey” involving 4,000 (18+) respondents and a longitudinal study
involving 80,000 (18+) respondents conducted over a period of three years (2000-2003). The report found
that any post 9/11 unity that had grown as an “initial response to a calamitous event” had clearly “dissolved
amid rising political polarization and anger.” Andrew Kohut, “The 2004 Political Landscape: Evenly
Divided and Increasingly Polarized,” Pew Research Center for The People & The Press (full report),
http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/196.pdf; summary overview and report of findings http://people-
press.org/report/196/the-2004-political-landscape.

343
Anne Becker, “The Riches Premiere on FX Scores Solid Ratings,” Broadcasting & Cable (March 13,
2007) [online] http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/94873-
The_Riches_Premiere_on_FX_Scores_Solid_Ratings.php.
230

evade the law by assuming the identity of two dead wealthy “buffers” named the
Riches.
344

The series used Irish Traveller culture as a vehicle to critique acquisitional
sedentary culture and its distortion of American mobility and liberty. Even scholars who
have criticized the show for perpetuating the well-worn criminal stereotypes of Irish
Travellers appreciated the series’ frontal attack on the dark side of sedentary culture. For
example, while Kabachnik claimed the show did nothing to disrupt the “‘Irish Traveler
[sic] culture = crime’ formula”:
… The Riches do a nice, and oftentimes humorous, job at critiquing the superficial
veneer of the suburban gated communities that are so common in the U.S.,
revealing the attempts of many people to spatially isolate and remove themselves
from the larger community and the prominent, yet all too often overlooked in
television, class divisions found in American society.
345

Given this observation, Kabachnik’s main assessment – that The Riches was simply
another attempt to portray Travellers as “threatening ‘other’”
346
– seems an inadequate
analysis of a text that used sympathetic Traveller protagonists to highlight divisions
within American society. However, what the series did reveal was the inconsistencies in

344
Considered an ethnic minority throughout most of Europe, Travellers are Celtic nomads with families
claiming to have been on the continent since the 1600s (media accounts of Travellers in the U.S. surfaced
around 1865.) T.J. “A few Thoughts on the Language and Cultural History of the Irish American Pavee
(Travellers).” In Thomas Acton and Michael Hayes, eds. Counter-Hegemony and the Irish ‘Other’
(Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), 107-118. “Buffers” is a pejorative term commonly used
by Travellers to refer to settled populations native to a region. Less common is the older term “country
people” or (in Shelta/Cant/Gammon) monkeri hantel. Thomas Acton has argued that the phrase “country
people” is used to denote privilege and superiority over what they consider to be less sophisticated settled
populations (i.e. “country bumpkins”). Thomas Alan Acton, Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity
(Hatfield, UK: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1997), 12.

345
Peter Kabachnik, “The Culture of Crime: Examining Representations of Irish Travelers in Traveller and
The Riches.” Romani Studies 19, no. 1 (June 1, 2009): 59.

346
Ibid., 51.
231

how mainstream society constructs and determines its “threatening ‘others’” (e.g.
criminality, duplicity, drug abuse, violence, etc.) – inconsistencies that become all too
evident when that “other” is positioned inside the walls of gated communities like Eden
Falls. As Lipkin remarked about America’s seemingly capricious determinations of what
constitutes “insiders” and “outsiders”:
Yeah… these guys are con artists and they’re sort of outside of the mainstream.
And, as they’re entering into the mainstream of society they really discover that
being a lawyer or living in a gated community involves just as much conniving
and conning as it had being outside of the mainstream.
347

In addition, The Riches’ satirical exposé of the American Dream turned claustrophobic
nightmare rested entirely on observations that Lipkin and his co-creators made regarding
the vanishing “exceptional” character of American identity, particularly in terms of its
connections to boundary busting and mobility.
348
In The Riches, it is the character Wayne
Malloy who embodies the millennial allegorical American: an exceptional hybrid (half
Traveller/ half Buffer) who transgresses both nomadic and sedentary culture to “steal the
American Dream.” Largely through dialog and his weekly deployment of constitutional,
transcendentalist, and Enlightenment prose and verse, Wayne is framed as America’s
“everyman” – an individual who is never comfortable being locked “inside” any culture
or geographic locale.

347
Tava Smiley interviewed Jeremy Lipkin at the Fox Movie Channel World Premier of The Riches.
“Special Features: Fox Movie Channel presents ‘World Premier’.” The Riches: Season 1 (Disc 1). DVD.
(Los Angeles: 20
th
Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007).

348
In addition to Lipkin, key writers and executive producers for The Riches included Carnivàle writers
and co-executive producers Dawn Prestwich and Nicole Yorkin.
232

This “everyman” is also intertextually encoded as an incontrovertible transgressor
in Lipkin’s choice of casting Eddie Izzard in the role of Wayne Malloy. Izzard is well
known not only for his radical politics, but also for his activism and self-identification as
a “straight transvestite or male lesbian” (fig. 46).
349
As lead actor, executive producer for
the show, and lead consultant for shaping the character of Sam/Samantha (Wayne’s
heterosexual transvestite son), Izzard consciously and actively worked to draw
connections between queerness, individuality, American “exceptionalism” and
capitalism. Essentializing what he perceived to be the attractive elements drawing people
from all over the world to the U.S., Izzard told reporter Steve Gorman, America is “the
place where people came from monarchy systems and aristocracy systems to go and
make a lot of money or to practice religion and be really weird.”
350

FIGURE
46.
John
“Eddie”
Izzard.
Images
courtesy
of
(from
left
to
right)
©
Deirdre
O'Callaghan,
©
Ferdaus

Shamim,
©
People
for
the
Ethical
Treatment
of
Animals,
and
©
20
th

Century
Fox
Films.

349
“Eddie Izzard: The Tough Transvestite Who Can Take Care of Himself,” The Independent (May 23,
2004) [online] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/eddie-izzard-the-tough-transvestite-
who-can-take-care-of-himself-564108.html.

350
Steve Gorman, “Eddie Izzard Steals American Dream in TV drama,” Reuters UK Edition (March 12,
2007) [online] http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKN1239377820070312.
233

The Riches was not the first American entertainment media product to feature
Travellers or “White Gypsy” characters or themes.
351
For decades, newspapers,
magazines, novels, and a handful of documentaries, television dramas, and major film
releases have proffered imagined and (sometimes) romanticized characterizations of a
nomadic nation of Irish “grifters” who allegedly swindle their way through the South,
Southeast and Midwest United States. However, in 2002, one news story reignited
interest in this small, mysterious group of white American nomads. The nation-wide
manhunt for and subsequent arrest of a Traveller woman named Madelyne Toogood
made international headlines after she was videotaped beating her daughter outside a
Kohl’s department store in the small town of Mishawaka, Indiana (fig. 47).

FIGURE
47.
FRAMING
AMERICA’S
“WHITE
GYPSIES”:
(L)
Life.com
news
photo
of
Madelyne
and
husband

John
Toogood
(on
right)
leaving
her
arraignment.
©Scott
Olson/Getty
Images.
(R)
Feature
story
on
the

Toogood
arrest
that
appeared
in
People
magazine
October
7,
2002.
©People.com.

351
Recent or contemporary products include Traveller (1997), Chocolat (2000), Snatch (2000), Man About
Dog (2004), and television series and programs such as NBC’s Law & Order: Criminal Intent (epi. 2.21),
and Dateline NBC’s (“Dishonesty in America: All in the Family”).
234

What is most remarkable about the way the press covered the Toogood story is
that it received any prolonged coverage at all, especially given the degree to which
similar incidents occur annually in the U.S. Furthermore, although all press accounts
detailed the events leading up to Toogood’s arrest for felony battery of a child, an
overwhelming number of these reports were devoted to discussing her ethnicity and
nomadic lifestyle, and tying those features to criminal behavior. While much evidence
exists to substantiate Travellers’ more socially transgressive and larcenous inclinations,
not much else is known about this ethnic minority.
352

Like Amish and Mennonite societies, the Celtic Travellers of North America
353

are extremely insular – which, in some ways, has made them particularly appealing as
narrative vehicles for reassessing values during periods of economic crisis. For example,
Umble and Weaver-Zercher have discussed how the appeal of an alternative worldview
worked to heighten Amish representation and visibility in U.S. media during the Great
Depression, observing:
… the Depression did compel some [media] observers to reassess their views,
particularly as they witnessed the Amish ability to weather the nation’s most
brutal economic crisis. Indeed, one Depression-era commentator determined that

352
While a preponderance of British and U.S. news accounts concerning Travellers and Traveller
confidence games point to criminal activity as a way of life for these nomads, those who have studied and
attempted to document Traveller culture vehemently deny this characterization, suggesting that this is
largely based on ethnic stereotypes and fears associated with itinerant populations. See David Mayall,
Gypsy-Travellers in 19
th
Century Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); T. Foy Vernon,
with Mícheál Ó’hAodha, ed. American ‘Outsider’: Stories from the Irish Traveller Diaspora. (Newcastle,
UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007); and Thomas Acton and Michael Hayes, eds. Counter-
Hegemony and the Irish ‘Other’ (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006).

353
T. Voy Vernon, American ‘Outsider,’ 9. While commonly assumed to be Irish, Traveller populations
also include individuals of Scottish and Welsh descent. Traveller populations most often refer to
themselves as “Pavees,” while settled communities most often refer to them as “Travellers” and “Tinkers,”
and (in the U.S.) occasionally by the more derogatory term “Pikeys.”
235

the chief significance of the Amish lay in their communal self-sufficiency that, in
his view, rendered New Deal policies unnecessary.
354

Although contemporary conditions open up an opportunity for Travellers to pen and
share their worldviews and way of life, this culture is profoundly reluctant to share any
information with settled communities, and is almost exclusively maintained through oral
tradition. Thus, there has been a notable void in self-representation. This has led to the
continued perpetuation of dominant culture’s more unflattering stereotypes.
355

Additionally, because of Travellers’ extreme insularity and suspicion of “flatties”
(outsiders), settled communities’ fears of “white gypsy” criminality have been
exacerbated by the inability to track the actual number of Travellers roaming the U.S.
The largest Traveller enclave in the U.S. is believed to be Murphy Village, located in
North Augusta, South Carolina. However, even this is not verifiable since Travellers are
nomadic and (in contrast to the U.K.) not categorized as an ethnic minority in the U.S.
Those who have attempted to study U.S. Travellers argue that estimating the population
in Murphy Village or anywhere else in the United States is nearly impossible.
Nonetheless, at the height of Toogood hysteria (and perhaps in an effort to squash any
concerns that the nation was awash with “white gypsies”), Time magazine’s Amanda
Ripley estimated Murphy Village’s Traveller population at 3,000 and the overall U.S.

354
Diane Zimmerman Umble and David L. Weaver-Zercher, eds. The Amish & The Media (Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 2008), 13.

355
Several anthropologists, gypsologists and folklorists have noted this facet of Traveller society. Michael
Hayes has suggested that extreme poverty and illiteracy account for the lack of documentation (2006, 47).
T. Foy Vernon’s American ‘Outsider: Stories from the Irish Diaspora (which is written in both English and
Gammon/Cant) is one Traveller’s small attempt to document what has heretofore been passed on only to
fellow Travellers through the oral tradition.
236

population at somewhere between 20,000-100,000 – a wide variation which ended up
bringing even more unwanted attention to what Ripley characterized as Travellers’ “self-
contained, anachronistic universe.”
356

As contrasted to the thuggish portrayals that characterized Toogood’s and most
other Traveller stories in American media, The Riches offered viewers the most sustained
and dimensionalized portrayal of this clannish and secretive population to date. But it is
the worldview of these “off white” Americans – people who have always economically
interacted with, but otherwise kept themselves apart from sedentary culture – that was
really the centerpiece of Lipkin’s narrative that, week after week, critiqued sedentary
U.S. culture just as it entered its most vulnerable period. Moreover, by spotlighting the
existence of an alternative way of being that seems largely unaffected by either the
Global Economic Crisis or its corresponding dis“place”ment of white America, and
endowing its hero with a hybridic worldview that commits only to the limitless self, The
Riches proffered an “option” through which dislocation could be turned to advantage. In
other words, in The Riches, the allegorical American is fully embraced as a postmodern
subject, one who banks on the fluidity of identity to survive from one moment to the next.
In the pilot episode, audiences receive their first taste of Traveller culture, both
real and imagined. The scene opens at a high school reunion that Wayne Malloy (Eddie
Izzard) crashes with his teenage daughter Dililah (Shannon Marie Woodward) and son

356
Amanda Ripley, “Unwelcome Exposure,” Time.com (October 7, 2002) [online]
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1003381-2,00.html.
237

Sam/Samantha (Aidan Mitchell).
357
Constructed as masters in observing the behaviors
and vulnerabilities of Buffers, the Malloys chat with and charm dozens of unsuspecting
guests as they pickpocket the entire reunion before slipping out. Wayne’s eldest son, Cael
(Noel Fisher), waits in the RV to help them escape. Nearly an adult, Cael is particularly
skilled in traditional Traveller swindles, scams and illusions; and is committed to
maintaining his nomadic Irish American heritage.
As the story unfolds, the family commits several illegal acts before meeting up
with the children’s mother, Dahlia Malloy (Minnie Driver), who is being released from
the penitentiary. But before they arrive at the prison, a state trooper, who confronts them
as Travellers on a crime spree, momentarily detains them. Ultimately, they con the
trooper into releasing them. Meanwhile, Dahlia starts “jonesing” as she waits outside the
penitentiary, revealing that during her 18-month incarceration she has become a crystal
meth addict due in large part to her confinement and the flow of drugs plied on her by the
prison guards. After the family reunites, the Malloys head into the forest where Traveller
clan members await the arrival of their “Queen.”
At this point in the storyline, the criminal and troubling taint shadowing the
Malloys momentarily lifts through some strategic incorporation of pipe and fiddle Irish
folk music, and several classic continuity and cutaway shots that feature the Malloys at
play. However, this festive atmosphere is soon broken when they discover that, in her
absence, Dahlia’s psychotic cousin Dale (Todd Stashwick) has been named clan

357
In the series, young Sam is constructed as a child transvestite, whom self-professed transvestite, comic
and actor Eddie Izzard describes as “the conscience of the [Malloy] family.”
238

monarch. As king, Dale arranges a marriage between Ken, a “half-wit” member of the
Dannagan clan, and the Malloy’s daughter Dililah. Beaten for refusing to accept Dale’s
proposal for his daughter, Wayne absconds with the money he was forced to hand over to
Dale, and takes off with his family in the middle of the night to leave behind Traveller
life for good – or so he hopes.
Not long after they leave, the Malloys discover that word has spread across
several states that Wayne absconded with $40,000 from the clan. In one fated moment,
Travellers in Mississippi try to run the Malloys’ RV off the road, a maneuver that ends up
killing a couple (Doug and Cheirin Rich) who are driving across the country to start a
new life in Eden Falls, Louisiana. While the Malloys are devastated that their actions
resulted in the death of two innocent people, Wayne recognizes this event as an
opportunity to completely start a new life and leave their Traveller past behind
(something Dahlia and the kids are far less enthusiastic about). The pilot ends with the
Malloys assuming the identity of the Riches and heading off to fake their way through a
new sedentary life as buffers in the suburban, gated community of Eden Falls (fig. 48).
It is in the pilot’s bucolic homecoming scene that audiences are exposed to what
little is known about Traveller culture and society:

 It is organized monarchically, although succession is mandated through tacit
consensus, not the Divine Right of Kings.
 It does not recognize territorial authorities or regional governments.
 Affiliation is ethnically based.
 Loyalty to one’s clan and maintaining Traveller culture are requirements.
 Youth are initiated early in skillfully observing and earning the confidence of
settled communities.
 Marriages are endogamous, financial and clan-enhancing arrangements.
 Clan monarchs “tax” or skim off a percentage of all money and loot earned in
exchange for clan protection.
239

 The Traveller nation is a networked society that is geographically unbound yet
able to remain in communicative contact with one another through community
linkages.

FIGURE
48.
TELEVISION’S
AMERICAN
TRAVELLER
HYBRID:
(Top
Row)
Clan
members
welcome
“Dahling”

home
at
the
Traveller
jungle.
(Middle
Row)
Dahlia
shows
some
clan
children
the
ins
and
outs
of
3-‐card

monte;
Traveller
King
Dale
tells
Dahlia
that
Wayne’s
days
are
numbered.
(Bottom
Row)
The
Malloys’

Traveller
home;
The
Malloys’
(Riches’)
new
buffer
home.
©
20
th

Century
Fox
Home
Entertainment.

Revealing some of the more alternative aspects of Traveller culture, Dahlia’s
homecoming provides one of many moments in The Riches when audiences are asked to
identify with a group of Americans that not only deny the legitimacy of the U.S. federal
government and any state authority, but also organize around the unusual pairing of clan
monarchies and democratic consensus. Bound by a devotion to the family, clan, an
240

unbound Traveller nation, “cooperative norms,” and a “charismatic code” that “reinforces
reciprocity,” Travellers’ nomadic social organization is constructed as a perfectly
reasonable, relatable and attractive way for contemporary Americans to survive and
possibly thrive in the 21
st
century.
358
Reiterating the alternative ideological messaging,
many of the more controversial elements of Traveller culture (and the duplicity which
allows the Malloys to seamlessly enter sedentary life) are captured in Wayne’s recapping
monologue used to introduce every subsequent episode:
I’m Wayne Malloy. My family and I are Travellers. Our kind have been living in
this country for one hundred and fifty years. We’re not listed in the phonebook,
we don’t have social security numbers. We live off the grid. Some call us gypsies,
others call us thieves. Most, though, don’t even think that we exist.

I’ve got three kids, a boy, a girl, and ehhh… ummm… [referring to his youngest
cross-dressing child Sam/Samantha]. My wife, Dahlia, just got out of jail, on
parole. We took her home to the Traveler camp. The family gave her a warm
welcome. I, on the other hand, got a different kind of welcome. Sometimes it
takes a beating to realize it’s time to move on. So, with a loan from the family
bank, I packed up the RV in search of something better. It wasn’t that long before
the family tried to stop us. Fortunately, they stopped someone else instead, and
then they ran. Knowing that we couldn’t go back to our old home, we decided to
visit their new home, Eden Falls, as the Riches.

I’ve taken many things in my life, but I’m on my way to taking something I never
thought possible. The American Dream, I’m gonna steal it. Will the past ever
catch up with us? I don’t know. But I’ll be damned if I’ll go down without a fight.

The sentiments expressed in Wayne’s closing remarks mirror what many in the U.S. also
hoped to achieve before the collapse of the banking and financial system. Incorporating
the rhetoric of cynically tinged hope, the show exploits this sentiment by championing

358
This is very much like the dynamics that Strahilevitz describes in his discussion of millennial file-
swapping pirates. Lior Jacob Strahilevitz, “Charismatic Code, Social Norms, and the Emergence of
Cooperation on the File-Swapping Networks,” John M. Olin Law & Economics Working Paper No. 162
(2d Series), (The Law School: The University of Chicago) [online]
http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/files/162.ls_.file-swapping.pdf.
241

the wily American who can beat the system before it beats them. Reviewing The Riches
only two days before Lehman Brothers boldly declared that the subprime housing
meltdown and “turmoil in the market” would open up “various opportunities” from which
they could benefit, Boston Globe reporter Matthew Gilbert wrote:
[The show is] preposterous, and yet it's a fantastic premise for both an outsider's
anthropological look at suburbia and a cynical take on the lies of American
society. The Malloys are frauds, as they fake their way into upward mobility and
the trappings of legitimacy. They've stumbled onto the grid like a wily theatrical
troupe. But the people they fool -- a snippy neighbor who wants their RV off her
land, a macho businessman who uses photos of friends for target practice -- are no
less fraudulent in their way. The Malloys are merely the new pretenders in a
massive game of social pretend. And it's hard not to root for them.
359

Wayne’s ability to master U.S. culture’s “massive game of social pretend” and fool the
buffers stops with Aubrey McDonald (Deidrie Henry), the exceptionally smart “5 star”
paralegal who assists Wayne in his capacity as Doug Rich, in-house counselor for the
boorish shyster turned multi-million dollar land developer and financier Hugh Panetta
(Gregg Henry) and his Panco corporation. Highly astute and endowed with her own
exceptional powers of observation, Aubrey is one of several black characters who pick up
fairly quickly on the Malloys’ masquerade, and what James Scott would refer to as their
“hidden transcript” – the minority discourse that takes place “‘offstage,’ beyond direct
observation by powerholders”.
360
As Scott explains, hidden transcripts exist at all levels
of power, composed by the cryptic codes of paralinguistic cues (e.g. gestures, eye

359
Matthew Gilbert, “Stealing the American Dream is a family affair,” Boston Globe (March 12, 2007)
[online]
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2007/03/12/stealing_the_american_dream_is_a_family_
affair/.

360
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1990), 4.
242

contact, body posturing, etc.), speech, modes of address, and other discursive practices.
These are communicative elements that, combined, can make or break a convincing
performance. For minority or subaltern populations, hidden transcripts serve to exert
control over one’s subjectivity by shrouding resistance behind a veneer of
subordination.
361
As another outsider who has transgressed the boundaries that mark
“insider culture” (an African American para-professional female with an Irish surname),
Aubrey immediately recognizes what her dominant class colleagues literally cannot see:
the man masquerading as Doug Rich is a fraud attempting to (in Wayne’s words) steal
the American Dream. Aubrey’s decision not to reveal Wayne’s true identity helps form a
cohesive bond between them, one in which their hidden and public (or front stage)
transcripts can be communicated simultaneously and remain intelligible to both
themselves and the dominant culture which they appear to serve.
362

The construction of the allegorical American who relies on hidden transcripts to
successfully cheat and trespass (as opposed to labor) his way into power, privilege and
prestige is a particular popular theme of U.S. film products created over the last three
decades.
363
However, his incarnation as a nomadic “ethnic” white who has fraudulently

361
Ibid., 70-107.

362
Ibid., 134-135.

363
This includes films like Trading Places (1983), Weekend at Bernies (1987), Opportunity Knocks
(1990), Other People’s Money (1991), Boiler Room (2000) and Changing Lanes (2002).
243

trespassed into power has been far less common, and marks an interesting addition to
constructions of the allegorical American at the perceived end of empire.
364

Addressing the collapse of sedentary culture’s version of the American Dream in
“Been There, Done That” (epi. 1.3), Wayne (as Doug) addresses an angry mob of buffers
who have been forced to evacuate their homes after discovering that the American Dream
that Panco built and sold them sits atop a former military weapons site. Using his
“everyman” status to diffuse the riot, Wayne/Doug delivers a fatalistic monologue that
speaks to the metaphor of greedy capitalists building on unstable soil riddled with old,
undetonated military ornaments – a speech that is laden with double entendres about the
Global Economic Crisis and the survival of the nation:
Mr. Chambers, we're not interested in people or pets blowing up. I mean, I mean,
we're completely against anyone blowing up, I mean, even a little bit. But you
know sometimes-sometimes in your life, shit just happens, you know? You know
it does. I mean, you're just going along, living your own life, living in your house,
just minding your own business, suddenly, kapow! Your whole life explodes. Just
like in -uh, Well, but then, what are you gonna do? You gonna give up? You
gonna just call it a day? No. No, no, that's not what we do. No, we rally. We… we
turn it all around. Because we're Americans. We take those grenades and we turn
'em into lemonade. Because that's what distinguishes us from sand crabs. We keep
going. And I ask this of you because I ask nothing less of myself.

Wayne/Doug’s speech sardonically refreshes Tom’s Holme’s hopeful “takeaway” in
Heroes for Sale – “you know, it takes more than one sock in the jaw to lick one hundred
twenty million people” – by speaking in a jaundiced, sardonic style more in line with the
sentiments of a nation who has (as the episode title infers) “Been there, done that.”

364
Since 2007, U.S. cable networks have incorporated this theme of America’s fraudulent or transgressive
insiders in series such as Nurse Jackie, Mad Men, Dexter, Weeds, Californication, and Hung.
244

Rather than constructing the peripatetic white male as a relentlessly hopeful
wanderer, a rebellious “American Christ,” or a powerful yet purely imaginary
manifestation, Lipkin et al present the allegorical American as someone who is quite
common, and whose hidden ontology as a transgressor can never be fully immobilized. In
the world of The Riches, the millennial allegorical American is a hybrid: one that is free
to temporarily cash in modernity’s “wages of whiteness” for a marginalized ethnic
subject position operating on a globalized stage.
365
However, should the opportunity
arise, this individual can still move freely through the corridors of power and privilege.
Thus, Lipkin et al imply that the allegorical American survives in the new century by not
only refusing to fully assimilate or settle, but also rejecting the territorial authority of the
nation and affirming his resistance only in the hidden transcripts he shares with other
like-minded confederates.
Myth is overtly incorporated into The Riches, particularly the myth that good
fortune follows passion (and tragedy) – a belief that is foundational to Wayne’s (i.e.
America’s) ability to straddle fatalism and optimism. In the first episode, “Believe the
Lie,” The Malloys openly debate the veracity of this myth when Dahlia reads aloud
passages from Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth to her kids (fig. 49):

365
This is a reference to David Roediger’s examination of the construction and disbursement of white
identity in the U.S. (and its gradual application to Irish and Italian Americans). In his now canonical The
Wages of Whiteness Roediger reveals how racial discourse in the U.S. has been primarily used to
perpetuate, mitigate and shroud American labor and class divisions and tensions. David Roediger, The
Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991).
245

FIGURE
49.
Trying
to
make
sense
of
how
buffers
experience
the
world,
she
combs
through
their
belongings

and
comes
across
The
Power
of
Myth.
©
20
th

Century
Fox
Home
Entertainment.

DAHLIA: Hey listen to this, “When you follow your bliss doors will appear where
there would not have not doors before and where there wouldn’t be doors for
anyone else.” What the hell does that mean?

CAEL: I think it’s what we are doing here.

DAHLIA: Bliss?

SAM: What’s bliss?

WAYNE: Bliss is passion. If you live your life with passion, fortune follows you.

CAEL: Yeah, it works real well if its in a house behind a big ass gate.
WAYNE: Maybe we are following our bliss.
366

By proposing that the American Dream may in fact be “A Wonderful Lie” that the
allegorical American must now steal to possess – as The Riches marketing campaign
suggests (fig. 50) – the myth that Americans are endowed with an exceptional ability to
“take grenades… and turn ‘em into lemonade” sustains social unification and national
cohesion because it supports (rather than contradicts) the ideology of the individual and
the impetus to follow one’s bliss towards fortune. In other words, as the Riches’ next

366
Epi. 1.1.
246

door neighbor Nina (Margo Martindale) discovers before she joins the Malloys’ attempt
to return to nomadism, the “distressing ways of modern life” can only be resolved at the
level of the individual and one’s willingness to seize the opportunities that dislocation
offers – perhaps a reassuring message to those who fear they and the nation may hold
little relevance in a globalized and networked future.

FIGURE
50.
MARKETING
THE
OPPORTUNITIES
DIS”LOCATION”
OFFERS:
“They’re
Stealing
the
American

Dream”
and
“It’s
a
Wonderful
Lie”
promotional
campaigns
for
The
Riches
(Season
One).
©
20
th

Century

Fox
Home
Entertainment.

America Up in the Air: Myth as Ideology
Imagine for a second that you’re carrying a backpack… I want you to feel the
straps on your shoulders… You can feel them? Now, I want you to pack it with
all the stuff you have in your life. Start with the little things. The stuff in drawers
and on shelves. The collectibles and knick-knacks. Feel the weight as it adds up.
Now start adding the larger stuff. Your clothes, table top appliances, lamps,
linens, your TV. That backpack should be getting pretty heavy at this point – go
bigger. Your couch, your bed, your kitchen table. Stuff it all in… Your car, get it
in there… Your home, whether you have a studio apartment or a two bedroom
house, I want you to stuff it into the backpack. Now try to walk… Kinda hard,
isn’t it? This is what we do on a daily basis. We weigh ourselves down until we
can’t even move. And make no mistake – moving is living.
– Ryan Bingham, Up In The Air
247

So begins Ryan Bingham’s motivational speech in Up In the Air (dir. Jason
Reitman, 2009), thus far the most recognized motion picture to tackle the current
economic crisis and its impact on American mobility.
367
The film’s protagonist, Ryan
Bingham (George Clooney), is a contemporary nomad who, like his “tramp” and “hobo”
predecessors, lives outsides the boundaries and standards set by sedentary culture – a
culture that is once again threatened with total collapse. Acting in his job as “career
transition consultant,” Ryan is high capital’s prophet of doom charged with terminating
entire divisions of employees during corporate downsizing. As Ryan characterizes his job
as career executioner, “I work for another company that lends me out to pussies who
don't have the balls to sack their own employees.” However, it is in Ryan’s capacity as a
motivational speaker that this anti-hero protagonist is redeemed as the “individualist
hero” – the ideologically transgressive outsider who presents an alternative way of
understanding American’s relationship to accumulation of all kinds, including personal
relationships. Like his counterpart in The Riches, Reitman’s millennial allegorical
American is an advocate for “following your dreams,” rather than selling them out to the
highest bidder (or employer).
Will Wright has argued that a similar mythic persona informed the development
of another itinerant film hero, the American cowboy. According to Wright, the cowboy
hero is always constructed as an “individualist” and charismatic champion of the free
market and “market relations.” While it is potentially available to him, he “does not need

367
Reitman’s previous credits include Thank You For Smoking (2005), and the independent Oscar-winning
sleeper hit Juno (2007).
248

[or seek] dominant power.” He is a “disruptive” force through his lifestyle and belief
system, both of which threaten to “build a new social order [based] on constant
disruption”.
368
Like the classic individualist maverick that Wright references, Ryan
delivers (and defends) the consequences of free market capitalism;

and yet, in his own
life, he repels all the acquisitional and sedentary impulses on which such an ideology is
sustained and rationalized.
Similar to the Fight Club’s Tyler Durden, Ryan preaches that accumulating
possessions and personal relationships are soul-killing pursuits that rob people of their
ability to remain mobile. The only accumulation Ryan seems to endorse is the acquisition
of miles traveled. As a professional “termination engineer” operating in the worst
economic conditions the world has faced in eight decades, Ryan’s job keeps him “up in
the air,” migrating from one site of American economic collapse to another, and thus,
metaphorically “on the road” anywhere from “two hundred and seventy” to “three
hundred and twenty two days” of the year. In fact, he spends so much time “up in the air”
that American Airlines makes him a member of their most exclusive frequent flyer club,
an elite group of seven who have accumulated ten million miles with their airline. Ryan’s
billfold is full of corporate tributes to a nomadic lifestyle – preferred club member cards
for airlines, rental cars and hotel programs – which edge out the usual credit card suspects
typically found in American wallets and purses.

368
Will Wright, The Wild West: The Mythical Cowboy and Social Theory (London: Sage Publications Ltd.,
2001), 119.
249

Back in Omaha, Ryan keeps a vacant and sparse apartment that he only
occasionally visits when there is a lull in corporate downsizing. However, he treats this
space as if it were just another hotel, hanging the same small set of clothes in the
otherwise barren closet as he has done in so many other temporary shelters. It’s clear that
he invests nothing in this space. The apartment is devoid of any art, food, plants,
magazines, paperwork, or any signs of life that might animate his stark white lacuna. The
one reminder that any life has been lived in this space is a pizzeria menu on the
refrigerator, a model airplane in the bedroom, and the unexpected appearance of a
neighbor (and former sex buddy) who welcomes Ryan “home.”
While Ryan Bingham shares many features with other peripatetic media heroes
constructed during this and earlier economic crises, what makes Up in the Air so
markedly different is the role of mobile communications and network technologies in
grounding the film’s nomadic protagonist and dislocating his sedentary counterparts.
With far more detachment and effectiveness than HAL 9000 (the reactive AI technology
featured in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey), “new” communication
technology arises as Up in the Air’s primary antagonist, transforming from a helpful
socializing tool into a ubiquitous enemy – threatening to contain once and for all not only
the mobile American, but also the “American Dream” in all its dimensions.
As a central character in Up in the Air, communication and networking
technology stealthily transform from fairly benign sidekicks that enable social relations
(via mobile telephony and text messaging) to villains with the unmistakable power to
sever any relationship and render the American worker economically immobile and
250

without place. The always-present “smartphone” stands as synecdoche for the two-
headed monster of “new” technology. On one hand, it enables the itinerant Ryan the
ability to remain on the road in perpetuity, as he fulfills one job request and speaking
engagement after another. It also allows this free and untethered protagonist to keep one
foot in sedentary culture, by enabling him to maintain distant and intangible relationships
with his sisters and an equally detached sexual partner, Alex (Vera Farmiga).
Reitman’s decision to inscribe gender onto the strategy of using “new”
technology to ground Ryan and his itinerant colleagues is an interesting maneuver – one
that shares a common heritage with Long and Great Depression products featuring white
nomadic males. Building on early feminist theory that gender may be embedded in
technology, but turning away from the critique that this encoding is necessarily
androcentric,
369
Reitman’s narrative reflects more recent propositions put forth by
technofeminists like Judy Wacjman, who has argued that what becomes materialized
through technology is the gender relations and tensions already preexisting its
development.
370
Thus, Up in the Air interrogates the ongoing assumption that harkens
back to gender themes circulating in Long Depression media: that untethered mobility is
an inherently masculine (white American) ideal, and rooted domesticated settlement an
inherently feminine (white European) ideal.

369
Among those to first to suggest the inscription of “androcentric” bias on technology was Sandra
Harding, who asked others to consider how a realm “so deeply involved in masculine projects can be used
for emancipatory ends.” Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (New York: Cornell
University Press, 1986), 29.

370
Judy Wajcman, “Feminist Theories of Technology,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 34 (2010): 143-
152.
251

In Up in the Air, Ryan’s youthful female protégé and rival, Natalie Keener (Anna
Kendrick), is the one who wants to take the “career transition consultants” off the road by
utilizing the more economical solution that relies on “scripted workflows of firing
techniques,” “glocal”
371
downsizing, and the use of video conferencing and “termination
engineers.” In large part, Natalie’s advocacy of “new” media technologies is rationalized
in ways that will salvage sedentary culture by re-rooting America’s male “mobals.”
372

Explaining her proposed glocal termination program to Ryan and the rest of his itinerant
colleagues, she enthuses:
You can start the morning in Boston, stop in Dallas over lunch, and finish the day
in San Francisco. All for the price of a T1 line. Our inflated travel budget is
eviscerated by 85%. And more importantly, to you guys on the road, no more
Christmases in a hotel in Tulsa. No more hours lost to weather delays. You get to
come home.

As the naïve, Cornell-educated, twenty-something on the fast track to marry the “perfect
guy” who “really fits the bill… maybe have a kid, corner office by day” and a “Grand
Cherokee,” Natalie’s worldview is presented as antithetical to (as she calls it) Ryan’s
“bullshit philosophy” of “isolation… traveling… [and] cocoon of self-banishment.” To
Ryan, the communication technologies that Natalie proposes are the domesticating

371
Hired to help minimize the high costs associated with “on the road” termination consultants, Natalie
proposes that the “global must become local,” and launches an “new” media program to rid Ryan’s
company of its “inefficient” and “unnecessary overhead.”

372
Harm de Blij has proposed a taxonomy that contrasts “mobals” to their privileged counterparts
(“globals”) as well as the world’s vast underclass of rooted locals. He maintains that “Mobals are the risk
takers, migrants willing to leave the familiar, to take a chance on new and different surroundings.... They
move as highly trained professionals and unskilled workers, as doctors and domestic servants, as bankers
and bricklayers.” While de Blij exclusively applies this term to contrast transnational ethnic “others” to
their presumed counterparts (i.e. white Americans), I argue that he does so at the risk of objectifying
populations based solely on corporeal, economic, class, territorial and political assumptions that are shifting
at this historic juncture. Harm de Blij, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s
Rough Landscape (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6.
252

female’s final solution to his more self-determined and bliss-seeking proclivities. In the
end, Natalie’s desire to bring “the guys on the road back home” ultimately fails when it
becomes obvious that, as Ryan’s boss sardonically observes, “the new media front” needs
“some more thought.” Ryan’s fellow itinerant gal pal, Alex (whose name is gendered
male), also reinforces Reitman’s gendered inscription of “new” technology. Using text
messaging and roaming capabilities to present a nomadically inclined and enthusiastically
detached personae – or (as Alex characterizes herself) Ryan “with a vagina” – she is
eventually revealed to be just another bourgeois adventurer who occasionally leaves her
husband and children to work and have a fling on the road.
Throughout the film, Ryan preaches the optimistic myth that has buttressed the
nation since its early formation: misfortune and dislocation can lead to opportunity and
rebirth. This myth – which constitutes the cohesive substance which unites a nation
without homogeneity or “the dense fabric of tradition”
373
– is continuously voiced by
Ryan, whose job it is to (as he describes it) “ferry wounded souls across the river of dread
until the point where hope is dimly visible, then stop the boat, shove ‘em in the water and
make ‘em swim.” For those newly dis“placed” by Ryan, his affirmation – “Anybody who
has ever built an empire or changed the world sat where you are now…. The sooner you
trust the process, the sooner the next step of your life will unveil itself” – stuns many of
these dislocated workers into contemplative silence, and the audience is similarly left to
ponder where they may be positioned in any new empire or change in the future.

373
John Higham, Hanging Together, 63.
253

Like several of the previously mentioned cultural producers of this period,
Reitman et al anchored their narrative to the allegorical American by frequently drawing
on the nation’s symbolic cache of visual, dialogic, and aural codes. For example, the
film’s opening title sequence features a form of landscape Americana popularized in the
mid-20
th
century photojournalism magazines like Life (fig. 51). These aerial shots –
which feature the U.S. farm belt, its popular urban centers and more recognizable natural
locales – are aurally juxtaposed against Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings’ retro funk
rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land”. In their arrangement, this
classic American folk song is bookended by a 5-bar jazz funeral dirge of horns playing
George M. Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

FIGURE
51.
“THIS
LAND
IS
YOUR
LAND”.
(L)
Aerial
view
of
Levittown
(1948).
©
Tony
Linck/Life
Magazine

(image
courtesy
of
University
of
Illinois,
Chicago).
(R)
one
of
several
opening
title
shots
from
Up
in
the
Air.

©
Paramount
Pictures.

Reitman’s invocation of Guthrie at both the beginning and end of his film works
to suture Ryan’s character into the mythological landscape of other legendary American
nomads, while simultaneously allowing song (rather than solely Depression-era themed
photography) to tie the contemporary struggle to a previous era that has been highly
romanticized in U.S. media products. Noting the “Dust Bowl” songwriter’s national
254

symbolic appeal, David Hadju has remarked that Guthrie “functions as the embodiment
of gritty American authenticity, the plainspoken voice of a romanticized heartland.”
374
In
addition, the Dap Kings’ recoding of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” as a funeral march re-
reappropriates a major code associated with the national symbolic. Dating back to the late
1700s, “Yankee Doodle” is believed to have originated as an anti-colonist slur used by
Britons to pejoratively describe Anglo and Dutch colonists. Since that time, U.S. cultural
producers reappropriated the phrase (principally in song, but also in film and stage) to
inspire American nationalism.
375
In Up in the Air, the partial inclusion of the music with
which the phrase is most associated could be used not only to signal the allegorical
American, but also his potential extinction.
Reitman also drew on the national symbolic contributions of iconic American
film characters, specifically Tom Joad in the The Grapes of Wrath, to help complete
Ryan’s character arc from “everyman” to heavenly being. This connection is made
through the final scenes from each film through their lead character’s exiting monologue:
TOM: … I'll be all aroun' in the dark. I'll be ever'where—wherever you look.
Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a
cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad—
an' I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready.
An' when our people eat the stuff they raise, an' live in the houses they build, why,
I'll be there too.

374
David Hadju, “Folk Hero: A New Biography of Woody Guthrie,” The New Yorker (March 29, 2004)
[online] http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/03/29/040329crbo_books#ixzz0yLeVxPqr.

375
While the etymology of “Yankee” has yet to be confirmed, musicologists and folklorists who have
studied its appropriation in U.S. media products suggest that it was once used by the British to derogatively
reference Anglo and Dutch colonists. Less mysterious is the origins of “doodle” though to be a verbal
corruption of the German word dummkof, the equivalent of contemporary American slurs “doofus,”
“dunderhead” or “dolt.” Grammy Museum, “Music and Politics,” Los Angeles, January 25, 2008.
255

RYAN: Tonight most people will be welcomed home by jumping dogs and
squealing kids. Their spouses will ask about their day and tonight they'll sleep.
The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places. And one of those
lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wing tip passing over.

As compared to Tom – who promises to be “ever'where, wherever you look,” fighting
“so hungry people can eat,” a real political force and embedded in the national character
– Reitman’s construction of the mobile and transgressive allegorical American is literally
and metaphorically left “up in the air,” sustained only as a mythic aspiration of
modernity. Thus he becomes elevated to the status of an angelic anachronism, in which
any manifestation as a national “everyman” becomes an impossible characterization to
sustain in the future. Dislocated from a terrain in which mobility and boundary busting
once had meaning, his only option to remain “exceptional,” powerful and relevant is not
to “be there too,” but to make the ultimate nomadic transgression and take his “rightful”
place “among the stars.”
Conclusion
After the U.S. had become recognized by the rest of the world community as the
only remaining superpower, and the full impact of economic globalization and inequality
had finally reached U.S. shores, the national symbolic grew to incorporate new millennial
constructions of the peripatetic allegorical American. Introduced as a mental aberration
born out of white middle class male anger and frustration, the character fragments as a
phantom of crises past, mobile collateral damage of rapacious materialism, a modern
“American Christ,” an apocalyptic yet valorous avatar in a death match with a sedentary
alter ego, an “off-white everyman” able to transgress numerous subjectivities so he can
“steal the American Dream,” and an angelic sage watching over an unsustainable empire.
256

As trope for a nation less secure in its reputation to wield privilege as a “birth right,” the
mobile, boundary-busting allegorical American is represented as a character that is
compelled to confront his own fragile “exceptional” place in a world where mobility and
transgression are seemingly ubiquitous (albeit often virtual) characteristics.
As in the Long and Great Depressions, during this period, the millennial
peripatetic white male is used as a narrative device for interrogating core values that
underwrite America’s “crisis in representation.” Cultural producers in the prominent
popular mediums of film and premium domestic cable television must now consider this
figure’s meaningfulness to audiences that have been wed to a “net-worked” environment
– a simulated context where the factors defining expansion and containment, mobility
and settlement, transgression and conformity have become quite nebulous. In these
contemporary conditions, while constructions of the rootless, propertyless, peripatetic
white male may reflect some residual interest in mediating the discourse concerning the
value of unregulated mobility and transgression in defining the nation’s “exceptional”
character, by the end of the first new millennial decade, cultural producers appear to be
wrestling with the question of whether or not American identity holds any inherent
meaning whatsoever.
What contemporary popular media artifacts made during this period indicate are
that filmmakers, cable series creators, and print and broadcast journalists have begun
dimensionalizing the peripatetic allegorical American in ways that may be working to
resolve rather than maintain the nation’s “crisis in representation.” This representational
urge to resolve corresponds in time with festering concerns in dominant discourses
257

regarding the erosion of national boundaries, postmodernist attacks on the modernist
agenda, the queering of once-fixed subjectivities, virtual world-making, mobilized labor,
and heretical geographies that inevitably result from the trafficking and unregulated
migration of ethnic “others” deemed “out of place.” As Howard Zinn et al’s graphic
comic novel has also quipped about this period, after two centuries of rigorously denying
the existence of an American empire, authoritative voices in the culture are finally
acknowledging the nation’s imperial status, if only to declare that it is collapsing and
therefore no longer a viable threat to the world community.
376
As contributors to this
“decline discourse,” contemporary cultural producers have created products that attempt
to map the empire’s senior years in ways that make the nation seem profoundly fragile
and too weak or broken to recover. By the end of the first millennial decade, the
peripatetic trope is used to construct a narrative in which the white nomadic male is freed
to rise above his dependency on the nation and its vulnerable geographic and human
embodiment. It is this figure that potentially introduces the severing of mobility and
transgression from the national symbolic, and their simultaneous induction into what I
propose to be the “imperial symbolic” of a dislocated empire that can watch over (and
still benefit from) the remnants of a discarded embodied past.

376
Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki, and Paul Buhle, A People’s History of American Empire (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2008).

258

CHAPTER 6
EPILOGUE: MONITORING THE PERCEIVED PULSE OF A DISLOCATED
NATION/EMPIRE

This project has been premised on the assertion that U.S. media products have
traditionally reflected a “crisis in representation” involving the nation’s two ideologically
divergent trajectories: unfettered liberty and the continual expansion of the limitless self
(i.e. unregulated mobility and transgression), and the rooted promise of the American
Dream (i.e. acquisitional culture and sedentary order). I have argued that this
representational crisis has played a significant role in America’s national symbolic and
has been vital to maintaining what legal scholars Cates and McIntosh have identified as
the most “ideologically bound nation on earth.”
377
It is the nation’s commitment to
maintain this ideological ecology, and chart a course that demands of its citizens
allegiance to both freedom of the individual and national cohesion, that inspired Alexis
deTocqueville to describe the U.S. as an “exceptional” place. Since the founding of the
Republic, this challenging and extraordinary commitment has symbolically played out as
a representational crisis in America’s national symbolic.
Throughout this dissertation, I have examined the ways in which this U.S. “crisis
in representation” has been addressed in popular entertainment media to see if it is
possible to chart the perceived lifecycle of an ideologically-bound empire through tropes
that are unique to that dominion. This is not to assert that such a lifecycle actually exists
“out there” beyond the imagined/narrated community that constructs it. Rather, it is to

377
Cynthia L. Cates and Wayne V. McIntosh, “A Government of Laws and Not of Men: The Ubiquitous
Nature and Ambiguous Position of Law in American Culture,” in Law and the Web of Society
(Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2001), 30.
259

suggest that by focusing on (in this case) American tropes of unregulated mobility and
transgression that emerged during the nation’s birth as an imperial entity, and then
following their representational development through the nation’s most challenging and
transformative periods, it is possible to trace both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic
perceptions of the health and well-being of an empire that is bound solely by ideas.
Towards that end, in chapter three, the Long Depression era (1873-1893), I
identified and discussed popular media constructions of the peripatetic allegorical
American as embodied in the white male “tramp” – a character distinguished by an
“exceptionally” unregulated mobility that allowed him to transgress past what Cresswell
has distinguished as moral and/or normative geographies. In examining this character’s
dimensional intersemiotic representations as they appeared in illustrated magazines, sheet
music and handbooks, I argued that tramp-themed media reflected already circulating
anxieties that arose around the nation’s rapid expansion and containment, existing socio-
political divisions, and the increasingly dominant roles of industrialism and science in
structuring American life. These anxieties manifested in a dimensionalizing of this
character that allowed the “tramp” to be taken up as a patriot, a hero, an American
“everyman,” a social and political deviant, a primitive, a modern frontiersman, and a
member of an “exceptional” white subculture. Thus, while containment was a prominent
message encoded in several of these products, so was the “right” to transgress boundaries
at will in the pursuit of sustenance and/or white male emancipation from the domestic
sphere. These dual associations in the “tramp” maintained a harmonious balance in
representing the two ideological pulls defining the American project at the end of the
260

nineteenth century, and in so doing helped maintain the nation’s “crisis in representation”
as the U.S. was preparing to enter the world stage as modernity’s most influential and
powerful hegemon – a manifestation later to be termed by Michael Ignatieff as an
“empire-lite”.
378

In chapter four, I analyzed popular media artifacts produced and circulated during
the Great Depression years of 1929-1939, when the “tramp’s” prominence as the
peripatetic allegorical American became overshadowed by a new white “subcultural”
nomad: the American “hobo.” An assessment of the predominantly domestic-circulating
medium of illustrated magazines revealed that magazine illustrators expanded the
plasticity of the peripatetic allegorical American in ways that not only reified dominant
culture and the social order, but also voiced questions regarding their legitimacy and
authority when acquisitional sedentary culture was most destabilized, most ideologically
threatened, and most vulnerable to massive structural overhaul. However, as compared to
the tramp-themed imagery that was produced during the Long Depression, what was not
as evident in these products was the encoding of these contradictory positions into a
single product. Intersemiotic analysis of accompanying text revealed supportive rather
than contestational messaging of the imagery – a multimodal partnering that allowed
these images to be understood as editorial products with clear political commentary
intended for specific readerships. As the analysis turned toward sound film – the most
popular visual medium of the period – the artifacts suggested that the U.S. cinema’s

378
Michael Ignatieff, “America’s Empire is an Empire Lite,” Global Policy Forum (Jan. 10, 2003), [online]
http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/154/25603.html.
261

peripatetic allegorical American beat a clear path back into the arms of acquisitional
sedentary culture. With the rare exception of Bumper and his wayfaring peers in
Hallelujah I’m A Bum, the filmic peripatetic American was constructed as the unfortunate
fallout of the nation’s temporary economic setbacks. No longer portraying him as
dispossessed and mobile by choice, U.S. filmmakers refigured the socially and politically
deviant white male nomad as a “forgotten man,” and then “repatriated” him both as a
commonplace “everyman” and a true American hero. By obfuscating the important roles
of class, gender, and ethnicity in re-“placing” American cinema’s peripatetic populations
into settled conditions, social and political deviancy was narratively taken off the table as
a way to understand the unregulated and transgressive wanderings of America’s white
males – a message that was far more palatable to an increasingly adventurous, auto-
motive public.
The analysis and discussion in chapter five considered the peripatetic allegorical
American in the context of the first ten years of the contemporary Global Economic
Crisis. As this crisis is still ongoing, this analysis and discussion is acknowledged as
being necessarily incomplete. Even so, for at least the last ten years, popular discourse
concerning the perceived end of the American empire has been on the rise, as has the de-
centering of the white male in relation to the embodiment of nation.
379
By examining

379
Exemplary of this increase included well-circulated articles, postings and books such as William
Grieder, “End of Empire,” The Nation, Sept. 23, 2002; Gore Vidal, “Hail and Farewell: The End of the
American Empire,” Truthdig.com (April 16, 2007); Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and
Consequences of Empire (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2001); Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the
American Man (New York: HarperCollins, 2000); Sally Robinson, Marked Men: White Masculinity in
Crisis (Columbia University Press, 2000); Hua Hsu, “The End of White America,” The Atlantic (Jan./Feb.
262

film, broadcast television and premium cable narratives of this period, I assessed both of
these concerns as they informed contemporary constructions of the peripatetic allegorical
American and the nation’s “crisis in representation.” What the artifacts suggest is that
contemporary constructions are evolving to take this figure deeper into the transgressive
spaces where myth meets legend, where the outsider looking in becomes the insider
looking out, and in the liminal space where humanity and cosmos unite. Most of these
representations suggest that the peripatetic allegorical American will remain relevant long
past the perceived collapse of the nation he is designed to embody. However, no longer
charged with upholding the grand theories of a modern age or with maintaining
America’s “crisis in representation,” the nomadic white males of these cultural narratives
entered the new millennium disembodied from and/or queered by a corporeal world that
no longer serves them. De-centered from the norm, these characters survive by pushing
past the discursive limits of embodied power into the boundless and illusory terrain of
seraphic power; and in so doing, are positioned as (still) relevant to an ideologically-
bound empire that no longer prioritizes the maintenance of them or (by extension) the
nation.
In Emancipations, Ernesto Laclau has suggested that one of the most “distinctive
features” marking the end of the last century was “the rebellion of various particularisms
– ethnic, racial, national and sexual – against the totalizing ideologies which dominated
the horizon of politics in the preceding decades.”
380
Maintaining that the Cold War

2009); and Leon E. Wynter, American Skin: Pop Culture, Big Business, and the End of White America
(2002).

263

represented “the last manifestation of the Enlightenment” in which the pursuit of “global
human emancipation” was reduced to two options (the “free world” and “communist
society”), he insisted that the ideal collective would supercede these options and be
constructed without any internal boundaries and restrictions.
381
But in the twenty-first
century, as every society on earth is drawn (willingly and unwillingly) into a globalized
framework, the boundaryless ideal that Laclau articulates faces its biggest challenge. This
is because borders are necessary to not only defining the internal in “internal
boundarylessness” but also for identifying the containment that makes emancipation and
a free society meaningful. Thus, transgression (in all its formulations) is only possible in
the context of bound environments.
Like Laclau’s ideal collective, the U.S. project has been, from its inception, an
experiment in proving the proposition that the universal and the particular could coexist
to form a realized subject from the impossible object of a boundaryless nation. It was
premised on the axiom that a full and aggressive commitment to an exclusively
universalist or particularist framework would always result in the destruction of both. The
intent of this project has been to link the real tensions between these two frameworks to
the “symbolic equipment” cultural producers have rhetorically used to either stave off or
encourage what may be an inevitable resolution to America’s “crisis in representation.”
382

380
Ernesto Laclau, Emancipations (London: Verso, 2007), vii.

381
Ibid., 1-19.

382
Barry Brummett, “Burke’s Representative Anecdote as a Method in Media Criticism,” in Contemporary
Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, ed. John L. Lucaites, Celeste M. Condit, and Sally Caudill (New York:
Guilford Press, 1999), 479.
264

As Giroux reminds us, it is designed to reaffirm culture as a particular “form of political
capital” that can direct “all sectors of the global economy and usher in a veritable
revolution in the ways in which meaning is produced, identities are shaped, and historical
change unfolds within and across national boundaries.”
383

My interest in examining how the nation has been rhetorically embodied during
periods when the realized subject of the U.S. has been most imperiled is not the same as
being concerned with any perceived imperiled condition of what rhetoreticians might
describe as the “terministically” constructed population of white male Americans. Rather,
it is to deconstruct the nation as its own embodied subject in order to better understand
how the imagined/narrated community of the U.S. views the “metaphysical placing” of
itself when faced with epistemological uncertainty. By first deconstructing the U.S. into
its national and imperial subject positions, then further reducing the national subject to its
ideological underpinnings and the ways in which it has been animated in the figure of the
peripatetic allegorical American, I have proposed that it is possible to chart a pre-mortem
mourning of a perceived end of empire (or at least the end of an empire that has relied on
America the nation for definition).
Proposing to deconstruct the “matter” of the U.S. into two abstract subject
positions, and then study their equally illusory representations, is not the same as
suggesting that there is no experiential reality that accompanies these two constructs.
Attending to Judith Butler’s often overlooked observation that “to deconstruct matter is

383
Henry A. Giroux, Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 2000), 8.
265

not to negate or do away with the usefulness of the term,”
384
this project is a political
response to the real world constraints in approaching the “bodies” of nation and empire
through the lens of poststructural radical immateriality. In other words, the
communicative weight of deploying the constructs “U.S.” and “American” in real world
contexts does result in material consequences. However, within the collectives that unite
around these two constructs, there appears to be little agreement as to what either
formulation means, or what may contribute to their “survival” in the future. At this
transformative moment in history, the U.S. is experiencing a climate in which political
agents no longer appear willing to uphold the maintenance of the nation’s ideological
paradoxes, with powerful interest groups insisting on two single-path trajectories that (if
followed) are guaranteed to end in dissolution of the U.S. project. One suggests a
regressive commitment to extreme nationalism and economic protectionism (as
characterized in Tea Party and anti-immigrant “border” rhetoric). The other suggests a
futuristic commitment to a “post-racial,” “post-gender” “post-particularist,” and “post-
place” global village through the sanitizing and dematerializing mechanisms of “new”
media technology. I propose that both of these courses are a response to the diminishing
returns being realized by the nation’s “possessive investment in whiteness,” and an
awareness that the embodied power of the twenty-first century will likely possess
distinctly different physical characteristics than those represented by the allegorical
American.

384
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 30.
266

In his essay concerning the persistence of white supremacy that underpins the
allowing of the West’s “normative geographies” to be defined symbolically as white in
identity, Alastair Bonnett has argued that the “durability of whiteness is a function of its
close relationship with modernity” and the desire to naturalize European peoples as the
“biological” norm against which the rest of the world could be marked.
385
Therefore, as
an intangible category, white became synonymous with unprecedented power because it
could represent an unmarked body not vulnerable to being deemed “out of place.”
Ironically, as non-Western nations have grown in strength and population, the once
intangible symbolic power wielded by America’s white male subject has become
burdened by its own embodiment as a population now regarded “out of place” and of
marginal importance to a new world order.
The political experiment of America was not an imperial project concerned with
the maintenance of “white people” or its borders, but one that revolved around the
maintenance of ideological paradoxes and the expansiveness of ideas. Still, as Bonnett
points out, no matter how uncomfortable it may make many Americans today, the growth
of America’s empire was, from the beginning, framed as an affirmation of “white power”
over the marked peoples with whom it shared the continent and the rest of its domain.
This is why a geographically vast nation that hosts a consortium of marked peoples has
constructed as its heroic stalwart a highly mobile, boundary-busting white male.
However, the privilege and authority of this figure only has meaning (and is only useful)

385
Alastair Bonnett, “Whiteness,” in Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts, ed.
David Sibley, Peter Jackson, David Atkinson, and Neil Washbourne (London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.,
2005), 112.
267

to an ideologically-bound empire in the context of wielding power over material
geographies and physically embodied populations. What remains to be understood is
what happens to the ideologically-bound empire and its embodied power when
materiality starts to give way to the immaterial. Does embodied power simply disappear
or disunite, or does it adapt in ways that have yet to be fully understood?
Writing forty-three years before the Global Economic Crisis was officially
declared, Stuart Hall argued that “ideologies survive only if they are able to change,
transform, and amplify themselves so as to take account of, and integrate, within the
existing mental environment, new events and developments in social conflict”.
386
The
“netted” society emerged from academic, governmental and technological corners where
an embodied “white power” recognized the impossibility of sustaining such a construct in
the twenty-first century. Facing the reality that those individuals who identified with such
power were far less prepared to be rendered invisible, vulnerable or irrelevant as
compared to those marked “others” whose historic marginalization gave birth to
resilience, increased visibility, and reactive empowerment – the power that once
translated as “the white ideal is being re-imagined.” The cultural products in this study
suggest that, at this transformative moment in human history, this “ideal” is being re-
imagined in ways that dislocate “white power” from the body/nation and relocate it as an
“aspirational agenda” that anyone can adopt through consumption, emulation, and
rejection (rather than embrace) of their own embodied “otherness.”
387

386
Stuart Hall, “Deviance, Politics, and the Media,” 81.

387
Ibid., 112.
268

Based on these representations, questions arise as to whether or not a territorially
defined body politic and its “national symbolic” are even relevant in a globally
networked society. Under conditions where virtual mobility and virtual transgression are
perceived as universally enjoyed conditions of the “global village,” will U.S. cultural
producers continue to frame the freedom to transgress time, space and place as germane
to constructing an iconic American? In other words, despite humanity’s increased
containment and regulation behind walls of communication devices, surveillance, and
homebound labor, has the rhetoric of virtual mobility and transgression actually
immobilized populations and simultaneously rendered the transgression of one’s
subjectivity as something that is no longer uniquely American? If so, will the idea of
Americans’ “exceptional” ability to breach all geographic and ontological boundaries be
deemed anachronistic in the context of virtual environments and globalized labor?
Finally, as humanity continues to cede ground to new economic models and “net-
worked” technologies that enable and encourage virtual transgression of time and space
worldwide, is it possible that the allegorical American’s “crisis in representation” is in
fact heading towards resolution? If so, then should Americans and the scholars that study
them be turning their attention to whether or not U.S. identity has become something
entirely devoid of its spiritual glue, or if it maintains any meaning beyond allegiance to
the physical territory its citizens occupy?
Ultimately this model for studying the perceived lifecycle of the American empire
through media tropes that are uniquely reflective of its ideological foundations has
applications for tracking the perceived health and well being of other ideologically-
269

centered empires (e.g. economic, theistic, commercial, dispositional global mercantile,
etc.) and de-territorialized nationalisms (e.g. Diasporas, nomads, migrants, etc.). As
virtual geographies and hypermobility become more prevalent, it may be one of the few
viable ways left to monitor the pulse of the imagined/narrated communities of a
dislocated future.
270

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