Often overlooked in labor history, the hoboes who rode the rails in search of seasonal work nevertheless secured a place in the American imagination. Frank Tobias Higbie weaves together history, anthropology, gender studies, and literary analysis to reposition these workers at the center of Progressive Era debates over class, race, manly responsibility, community, and citizenship. Combining incisive cultural criticism with labor history, Higbie illustrates how these so-called marginal figures were in fact integral to communities and to cultural conflicts over class, masculinity, and sexuality. He draws from life histories, the investigations of social reformers, and the organizing materials of the Industrial Workers of the World to present a complex portrait of hobo life, from its often violent and dangerous working conditions to its ethic of “transient mutuality” that enabled survival and resistance on the road. 

Frank and compelling,Indispensable Outcasts examines hoboes within the sprawling story of American labor while meditating on writing history from the bottom up and the ways a fascination with personal narrative can color a historian's work.

   Introduction i

1. "Like the Flock of Swallows That Come in the Springtime":
   The Uneasy Place of Hobo Workers in Midwestern Economy
   and Culture 25

2. Retelling Life Stories: Floating Labor and the Terrain of
   Progressive Era Social Investigation 66

3. Reassessing the "Floating Laborer": The Social Geography of
   Work and Community in the Upper Midwest 98

4. The Hobo, the Wobbly, and the "Battle of Mitchell": Unionization
   and the Politics of Community in the Wheat Belt 134

5. "We Thought of Ourselves as Men after Awhile": Mutuality,
   Violence, and the Apprenticeship of the Road 173

   Conclusion 205