"You can't ride on my train."
You would think they were Jim Hill or Morgan
coming along with a brake club in hand,
condemning the poor, hungry devil
who is trying to move to another place
where he may get work and a chance to live.
-Nils H Hanson
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Monday August 2, 1915
From the International Socialist Review: "Among the Harvesters," Part 2
In yesterday's edition of Hellraisers, we republished part 1 of an article by Nils H. Hanson on life among the wheat harvesters. Today and tomorrow we will present parts 2 and 3. The campaign is now on to organize these men into newly formed Agricultural Workers Organization. Today we learn of the perils of riding the rails, chasing a job from place to place.
From the International Socialist Review of August 1915:
AMONG THE HARVESTERS
By NILS H. HANSON
[Part 2.]
There is always a summer rush of thousands of men who come from east, and west, from north and south to earn some money in the grain belt. For a while the railroads are almost friendly and "riding" is rather easy during April and May while we flock toward the golden middle states. Hundreds may often be seen riding on one train. I was one of a bunch of one hundred and twenty-five men—all going east for the Kansas harvest.
[Continued below.]
[Continued from above.]
FEEDING THE MEN.
At first John Farmer sees the big flocks come with a rather pleasant look upon his face, because he knows that the more men that come the less he can hire men to work for. He knows that it is supply and demand that regulates wages when men are unorganized. But when they continue to arrive his face begins to change. He realizes that the wholesale advertisements about a "bumper" crop have caused altogether too many men to move in his direction. The hell-of-it is that most of them are broke and have to eat. Then comes the problem of feeding the men who harvested the crops last season and who have gone hungry most of the time since then.
Then the town marshals and railroad bulls get busy to prevent any more men from landing. The railroads send out iron rules to their crews advising them that brakemen will be fired for transporting any more "hoboes." All easy riding is stopped and in order to get a ride the harvesters have to travel in numbers so that they can force the train crews to take them along.
With some of the railroad men any kind of a union card entitles a man to a free ride; others refuse to recognize anything but a trainman's card. If our brother railroad men realized that the man he puts off in the snow-covered mountains or sun baked desert is an unemployed human being, a victim of the present social system, perhaps fewer of them would greet us with, "You can't ride on my train." You would think they were Jim Hill or Morgan coming along with a brake club in hand, condemning the poor, hungry devil who is trying to move to another place where he may get work and a chance to live.
"His train," murmurs the "bum," as he walks down the track, the track which he and his comrades have laid sometime before. And he hopes that the man who threw him off may too some day face the same fate along the "big, open road."
The vigilantes soon got busy in the different towns and drove out the men for whom there was no work. At Caldwell, Okla., these armed brutes, led by a preacher, beat up several members of the I. W. W. and gave fellow worker Wilson and another would-be farm hand thirty days for vagrancy, the law that can always be used against the workers.
I happened to be in Salt Lake City at the time of the Joe Hill hearing, May 28th, and I heard the pleas put up by both sides. In company with thirty others I left the court room thoroughly convinced that Joe was innocent of the charges and that if he is convicted it will be because he is a member of a revolutionary organization, and the author of the I. W. W. song book.
~~~~~~~~~~
SOURCE
The International Socialist Review, Volume 16
-ed by Algie Martin Simons, Charles H. Kerr
Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1915
https://books.google.com/...
ISR Aug 1915
https://books.google.com/...
"Among the Harvesters" by Nils H. Hanson
https://books.google.com/...
IMAGES
Harvest Workers, Riding the Rails,
International Socialist Review, Aug 1915
https://books.google.com/...
History of 400 A. W. O. by E. Workman, 1939, Cover
https://archive.org/...
Don't Buy a Job, IWW sticker, Silent Agitator,
Employment Sharks
http://www.folkarchive.de/...
See also:
History of the "400" A. W. O.
-by E. Workman [Walter T Nef], February 1939
One Big Union Club of New York, N. Y.
(Source also for image of cover.)
https://archive.org/...
Note: E. Workman was actually
Walter T Nef per several sources
including this one:
http://www.abebooks.de/...
For more on Walter T Nef and
the founding of the AWO:
https://books.google.com/...
Shall Freedom Die?
166 Union Men In Jail for Labor
IWW, about 1917
(Walter T Nef was one of the 166.)
https://en.wikisource.org/...
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Nearer My Job to Thee by Joe Hill (Tune)
Nearer My Job to Thee
by Joe Hill
Nearer my job to thee,
Nearer with glee,
Three plunks for the office fee.
But my fare is free.
My train is running fast.
I've got a job at last.
Nearer my job to thee.
Nearer to thee.
Arrived where my job should be,
Nothing in sight I see,
Nothing but sand, by gee,
Job went up a tree,
No place to eat or sleep,
Snakes in the sage brush creep,
Nero a saint would be,
Shark, compared to thee.
Nearer to town! each day
(Hiked all the way.)
Nearer that agency,
Where I paid my fee,
And when that shark I see,
You'll bet your boots that he
Nearer his god will be,
Leave that to me
(First appeared in the Seattle edition of
the Little Red Songbook, about 1913/1914.)
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