Boxcar Politics Quotes

“After the South’s surrender at Appomattox, the railroad was summoned to unite the North and the South with the West. The bloody attempt to dissolve the Union had failed, and as the new nation looked for a unifying symbol that would move them away from the “total war” that claimed the lives of more than six hundred thousand people, the railroad was heralded for its symbolic value for a fractured nation: it was big, powerful, ordered, and mobile. If the nation was a healing body, then rail lines would become its veins pumping life through its wounded extremities. As William Everdell states in his book The First Moderns, “we call ‘modern’ everything that happened to any . . . culture after it had built its first railroad.” With the introduction of the transcontinental railroad, the United States, still recovering from its self-inflicted wounds, was staking its future to this technology that would be a vehicle of change, solidifying the nation’s standing in the modern world.”
― John Lennon, Boxcar Politics: The Hobo in U.S. Culture and Literature, 1869-1956

“For northern speculators, the railroad was a tool that would connect northeastern interests with any place in the country; towns, cities, and factories could spring up wherever tracks were placed. The South, though, resisted the homogenizing effects of the railroad whose interests were clearly favorable to the northern elite. Regardless, whether one lived in the North or the South, railroads made the world “flatter,” and both sides wanted to control its physical, economic, and ideological reach. As William Thomas points out in The Iron Way, an examination of railroads during the Civil War, the North and the South were hybrids of each other, both building their respective societies by connecting them by rail to the broader transatlantic world. With slave labor bought by southern railroads, the hope was that train tracks would expand slavery throughout the country, promoting a southern philosophical view of localized mobility throughout the West. But while the North and South knew the future was to be found at the end of railway tracks, the North was more advanced in its preparation when the cannonballs began raining down on the battlefield.”
― John Lennon, Boxcar Politics: The Hobo in U.S. Culture and Literature, 1869-1956

“This differing philosophical view of right-of-way for lines is significant when it comes to the creation of the hobo population. The southern view of maintaining short lines within individual states localized the mobility of citizens within states — including the homeless populations. A woman, for example, could not easily get on one train in Tennessee to visit her son in Alabama; she would have to get on and off a variety of rail cars to make her way across state lines. Likewise, an itinerant worker in Georgia, upon hearing of a job in Virginia, would not be able to hop a train and quickly make his way to fill that position. The northern view of the national right-of-way of railroad tracks, however, allowed for individuals to travel across state lines more easily — for those with a ticket and for those without.”
― John Lennon, Boxcar Politics: The Hobo in U.S. Culture and Literature, 1869-1956

“Prior to the Civil War, southern states refused to connect their lines with the North. Believing that railroads were state issues, they declined corporations the right to control track in more than one state. Consequently, there were hundreds of “short lines” (tracks from approximately ten to one hundred miles long), and the trains running on them had particular local flavors and identities, used mostly by residents to receive mail or to make it — slowly — to other parts of the state. Built with a variety of gauges, the lines were meant to be distinct, rejecting the uniformity of the northern states.”
― John Lennon, Boxcar Politics: The Hobo in U.S. Culture and Literature, 1869-1956

“Others relegated the female train rider as a sexual deviant who was, as one male hobo stated, an "angular-bodied, flint-eyed, masculine-minded travesty upon her sex.”
― John Lennon, Boxcar Politics: The Hobo in U.S. Culture and Literature, 1869-1956