The exact number in this
wandering class is not known. The railroad companies have
estimated that at a given time there have been 500,000 hobos
trying to beat their way from place to place. Unquestionably a
large percentage of the 23,964 trespassers killed and of the
25,236 injured on railway rights of way from 1901 to 1904
belonged to this class.
It is not alone these drifters, however, who because of their
irresponsibility and their hostility toward society became easy
victims to the industrial organizer. The great mass of unskilled
workers in the factory towns proved quite as tempting to the
propagandist. Among laborers of this class, wages are the lowest
and living conditions the most uninviting. Moreover, this group
forms the industrial reservoir which receives the settlings of
the most recent European and Asiatic immigration. These people
have a standard of living and conceptions of political and
individual freedom which are at variance with American
traditions. Though their employment is steadier than that of the
migratory laborer, and though they often have ties of family and
other stabilizing responsibilities, their lives are subject to
periods of unemployment, and these fluctuations serve to feed
their innate restlessness. They are, in quite the literal sense
of the word, American proletarians. They are more volatile than
any European proletarian, for they have learned the lesson of
migration, and they retain the socialistic and anarchistic
philosophy of their European fellow-workers.
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