GLR May-June 2024

sumptions was firmly in place. The concept of “teenager”—a distinct transitional stage between child and adult—did not de velop until the 20th century. Before that, working-class boys (and girls) were expected to take their place in factories or on farms as soon as their formal education ended, and few attended school beyond the eighth grade. Moreover, at the end of the 19th century, the legal age of consent in some states was as young as nine years old. Clearly, it was a different world. In 1947, America’s radio airwaves were filled with folksinger Burl Ives’ recording of “The Big Rock Candy Moun tain,” a song about a hobo paradise of lemonade springs and soda-water fountains, with a lake of stew (and of ginger ale too), where the cops have wooden legs, the bulldogs have rubber teeth, and jails are made only of tin. Like many popular folks songs, it is a sanitized version of a ballad that originally had rather dark overtones. “The Big Rock Candy Mountains” was first recorded by Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock in 1928, though he claimed to have written it in 1895 during his hobo days in Louisiana. The lyrics originally referred to the tall tales that jockers would tell young boys in hopes of luring them to a life on The Road. “[T]he ambition of every real hobo,” McClin tock explained in a recorded interview, “was to snare some kid to do his beggin’ for him, among other things. They used to tell the kid fairy stories about the lemonade springs and the Big Rock Candy Mountains and so forth.” But before recording his song, McClintock felt he needed to censor the lyrics to make them palatable for the general public. “I wanted to clean this song up—it wasn’t a parlor song originally.” McClintock referred to his extremely popular 1928 recording as “the clean version.” Given how the song has been revised and expanded, cen sored and appropriated by various singers over the years, there is now no way to reconstruct with certainty McClintock’s un recorded, unclean version, but a variety of surviving lyrics pro vide a good idea of what may have been sung around the campfires in the hobo jungles of 1895: One sunny day in the month of May A burly bum came hikin’ Down a shady lane through the sugar cane He was lookin’ for his likin’. Oh, a farmer’s son, he was on the run To the hayfield he was boundin’. Said the bum to the son, “Why don’t you come

begin to age out, feeling it was time to leave the push and join a group of men. The boy gangs varied from a loose gathering of pals traveling together seeking adventure to “a highly organ ized machine that has secret codes, pass words, signals, and pre arranged plans of action.” Jack London had a healthy respect for boys traveling in a push. “Road-kids are nice little chaps,” he wrote, “when you get them alone and they are telling you ‘how it happened’; but take my word for it, watch out for them when they run in pack. Then they are wolves, and like wolves they are capable of dragging down the strongest man.” § W HILE YOUNG BOYS WERE TRAVELING in packs, college students were being offered a different form of education. In 1915, Pro fessor Robert Park of the University of Chicago suggested a new direction for their Department of Sociology. He proposed “a laboratory or clinic in which human nature and social processes may be most conveniently and profitably studied.” Those social processes would include alcoholism, drug addic tion, homelessness, prostitution and homosexuality—topics until then handled primarily as moral or legal issues, and largely ignored by academia. The new curriculum was intended to im merse his students in the lives of society’s marginalized com munities, with the goal of finding solutions to the problems those communities encountered. One of the most successful graduates of the Chicago pro gram was Nels Anderson, whose dissertation on hoboes was rushed into print by the Department as an example to the pro gram’s funders of what might be accomplished by a close analy sis of often-neglected social problems. Anderson was a former tramp himself, and so was able to quickly gain the confidence of the men he wanted to interview. He confirmed what Josiah Flynt had written decades earlier about the sex lives of hoboes. “All studies indicate that homosexual practices among homeless men are widespread. They are especially prevalent among men on the road among whom there is a tendency to idealize and

To the Big Rock Candy Mountains?’ ... So the very next day they hiked away, The mileposts they were countin’ But they never arrived at the lemonade tide In the Big Rock Candy Mountains. The punk rolled up his big blue eyes, And he said to the jocker, “Sandy, I’ve hiked and hiked and counted ties, But I ain’t seen no candy. I’ll be God damned if I hike any more To be buggered sore like a hobo’s whore In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.”

Haywire Mac’s blue-eyed farmer’s son would not have been alone on The Road after spurning his jocker. Boys, too, trav eled in “outcast’s clubs,” a band of juveniles that was known as a “push.” Members of a push might range in age from about ten to sixteen, but by the time a boy reached his mid-teens he would

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