Part Two: The Tramp Printers: Union Vagabonds

I'm tired? No? Yeah, probably and soon we'll be president. How are you? Caitlin Durante? Who are your president? Caitlin Durante? Um? How am I? I'm good? I'm not spitting up blood still, so I've done a good job. I am. Did you also ask who are you? Yes? Okay, okay, us wanted to check you know, I'm a person. I'm just a person out here living in the world. Great, just the person. And we also have our Sophie with us, whose name

is Sophie. Hi, Sophie, I'm okay, living life excellent. Ian as our audio engineer on Woman Rode or three Music. This week we're talking about tramp printers, and we're grouchy because they're in a union that's racist, even though a lot of them are fighting against that racism. And I don't know when they won, and someone will tell me, and I'll be happy that they tell me. Anyway, go

listen to part one, both of you, Sophie and Kalin. Okay, bye, okay, see you and we are back okay, And now that you all listen to part one, we can talk about part two. So our apprentice has just become a journeyman and joined the International Typographical Union. The word journeyman and craft unions and gills and ship is literal. It's like wandering journey man, person who goes on journeys. And this was seen as an important part of becoming good at

any given trade. How can you be the master of a trade if you haven't been in a ton of different shops in different places that do things differently, right, M And I find that really interesting, And it's like, well, I spent my twenties wandering. Of course I find this interesting. So printers were expected to travel. Some caught the bug and stayed traveling and became tramps. Some learned some skills and then settled down and joined the Home Guard, choosing

a pension and stability over flexibility and freedom. What would you all pick? WHOA I would? I would probably journey for a while. Actually, I would probably just do what I do now, which is like journey some of the time, and then have a home base that I return to and stay. Yeah, you know, fair majority of the time. But then I'd be like, I'm bored, I need to go to Amsterdam and look at graffiti. Good call back, thank you. Yeah, you learned about that by going back

and listening to part one, so I appreciate that. Yes, So I don't know if that's an option to just be part time journeyman, part time sitting around or I bet you could do it. And that is how comedy works, right, you finish your apprenticeship? Yes? What time did you start your apprenticeship? And how much piss was involved? I was, I was the age of twelve as well as this standard the comedy god a piss Yeah yeah, they used they used to clean the stage. Yeah, clean your mouth

after bad jokes exactly. Yeah. Some people like here's a bar, so clean out your mouth, but comedians do it with their own pp and uh yeah, And so I was an apprentice for like probably three to four years and then um, then I became a Yeah I just want to comedy. Yeah it's good. Yeah, thanks, I'll be here all night. And where as I came in the side door. Okay. So the system has a lot of advantages, right this

like journeyman system, the tramp system, all of that. If workers went on strike in one place, they could go find other jobs while they were on strike somewhere, and you know, you go wander away. And so strike funds don't need to be quite so large as they might need to be otherwise because the workers are as reliant

upon the one individual income. It also meant that itinerant workers were always available to support any other labor action that needed bodies and it it's stitched together a social framework of the union as well, because there are always people in your shop, whether they traveled or not, with stories and news from elsewhere. Whether you travel or not, right, there's always going to be people showing up with news and showing up with different stories and different way that

things that things are being done in different places. It also is kind of the main way that the home guard would get a chance to take days off because nineteenth century not famously good for working conditions. Mm hmm. And I'm very biased about this because I sort of spent my early twenties living a tramp activist life where a whole bunch of us would go and travel around to wherever any given political struggle that like needed support needed people show up, and then like would go wander on.

And I think that inter weaving a traveling culture of tramps with folks who stay put and keep things consistent is a very good way to build a strong social movement as compared to like often it's presented this as this dichotomy, right where like, no, everyone must stay put and do hard activist work and never go anywhere, or all that matters is wandering around freely or whatever you know, I don't know I and and just to I like

it because it's both individualistic and community minded at once, Like, because the printers are free spirited roamers, right, and they do whatever they want in a community built, community maintained system of solidarity that they participate in and uphold um. And I feel like we're always presented with this idea that like doing what's good for the individuals, like counter what's good for the community, and I just think it's a shitty dichotomy that we should avoid whenever possible. Um,

that's my little philosophical aside. I agree, thanks, I can't be doing good work when I'm tired and hungry, Yeah, totally, and like going off and experiencing your best life and seeing the world and all that stuff, like, I mean whatever. Anyway, Yeah, And the way that people would see the world in this context is that they would tramp. This was not

a like high class way of travel. Specifically, most of them rode the rails, most of them road freight trains in classic American hobo form, and but they travel however, they could. Some never left the big cities that they were in, and they would like tramp by streetcar from

job to job. Uh. There was a whole crew called the Missouri River Pirates who rode rafts around the Missouri River, and they would like just catch catfish all day and be bobos and then like show up and print for a while, get a paycheck, go drink the paycheck, go

back to catching catfish. Others caught rides on freighters and worked literally all over the world, not necessarily directly through the union, but operating the same kind of concept just showing up and being a printer because it is a skilled it is a complicated skilled job that isn't demand all over the world because there's one form of technology that is now being used all over the world about

how to print. I started by like hyping out the list of places that American and Canadian tramp printers would end up. But I stopped because the only continent that I didn't include with Antarctica on the list. And they're a wild bunch. They sleep in barns, they sleep on

the floor of the printer's office where they're working. They would go drink the pub dry, they'd smuggle booze into work, and they'd have like fancy, like weird tricks where they'd be like, oh, this is my medicine, and they'd like have died all of their alcohol, like funny colors and ship okay, And they weren't a not all of them are the same. Some of them are totally sober, right, But they had this reputation that they overall earned of being rowdy and drunk and was still really good at

their jobs. And they also had a reputation for being incredibly well read and literate for remembering the most odd and arcane texts, and they would like stay up late and hang out and swap stories not just of like I don't know, drinking and wandering, but also opinions about politics and poetry and literature and like all of the like fancy stuff that these poor people shouldn't be talking about, right, And they a lot of them spoke a ton of

languages and would quote all kinds of like famous fancy people. They would like stay up late talking to the editor. They'd stay up late at the bar, or they'd stay up late in hobo jungles, which is um I literally no idea how common this type of terminology is, Like do you know what a hobo jungle is? No, when you're writing freight trains, which should just continue to self insert as much as possible in order so that everyone

thinks I'm cool. My granddad wrote freight road freight trains in the Great Depression, and then I wrote freight trains in the early aughts. I wasn't very good at it. I have no idea how good my granddad was, and never talked to him about it before he died. But so hobo jungles still exist. It is the place where everyone sleeps and hangs out while they're waiting to catch a freight train. And they're basically like encampments, and they're often in little patches of trees next to train tracks,

near the near the yard, near the train yard. And whoever is there. They might cook together. They might share food and drink and coffee and cigarettes. Um. They might tell terrible jokes. They also like getting people getting a fights and stuff too. It's not like perfect in utopian, but it's like interesting, right, and a lot of share camaraderie. M One historian Paul Fisher, talking about the tramp printers said, he said, mr to no man, expected no man to

accord him the same title. Had he been more democratic, he would have been an anarchist because it wasn't necessarily a political position that they were like this. You know. John Edward Hicks, who was a tramp printer himself, said that a tramp printer didn't own anything, never expected to, and wouldn't have known what to do with it if

he had. Like there's one story I read about a tramp printer like wins a bar in a card game against the bar owner, and so then he just makes all them drinks free for everyone all night, and then he gives the bar back to the bar owner because he's like, oh, I don't want to bar fucking tramp,

I want to travel. UM. I like that story. Yeah, And the only tools they traveled with was a Union card, the card the travelers card that said I'm in good standing with the Union, I pay my dues, I know how to print UM, a makeup rule, which is like a tiny little metal ruler that they used to separate lines of type and line gauges of various lengths. These were like the personal tools that they carried. Everything else

is supplied at the job. They also brought with them quadrats, which are little squared pieces of type that are used for spacing, and each one had a mark called a nick on one side, and they would basically gamble. Is just it's basically hot dice like hobos today and by today I mean twenty years go. And I was hanging out moral folks who did this. I would play a game called hot dice all the time. We just have

six sided dice and you play this nonsensical game. And so the tramp printers would roll their quads, and whoever had most of their quads land nick side up would win. Sometimes they'd win like who's buying the beer later? You know? Sometimes it was like who gets the nice or the loser buys the beer? And sometimes would be like who gets the nice job in the office today and who gets the shitty job? I feel like this is like

kind of their rock paper scissors, right. They were like, all right, who has the piss job and who has just got a clean with piss today? Yeah, and that was the winner because that was the best job. And a journalist at the time referred to them as broke poets with no coins but scraps of poetry in their pockets, which they would get drunk and recite. Franklin M. White, a printer, said that they quote sprinkled knowledge and literacy

as enthusiastically as Johnny spread his apple seed. I have met aunt printers who could recite Shakespeare, Wild Chaucer, Gibbon, and then et cetera. A bunch of other names I actually don't even recognize because I don't know all the nineteen century names. And okay, what have you ever played dungeons and dragons? I have not Okay, well it sounds like something I would do, but I haven't, Sophie. Yes, I would say that these are basically they're they're dungeons

and dragons, bards. There's a class in Paddington to format for Caitlin. Okay, so there's a bear in Paddington and there's some movies based on him, and probably in the first one he's mostly in one place. In the second when he travels around, I'm like, surely, I mean there, look, so it works with home alone and a bunch of others and five third act of Paddington two takes place on a steam train. Alright, yeah, traveling circus train if you will. And um, there's and and there's a lot

of hijinks. All right. Is there one character who travels all the time and reads poetry? Um? Can we make one up? Yes, that would be Paddington's cousin, Jobbo, the hobo. I was gonna say, Baddington is better and so yeah, that's yes. So it's just like Baddington from Paddington too. Yeah, that's the best way to for everyone out there to understand.

Thank you. Some bars they would show up and they'd pull out their measuring stick, Okay, they pull out their their measuring stick, they put it on the bar, and the bar keep would let them a stranger open a tab because they were also known for paying their fucking tab. They were good for it. And there was like a pool hall in Chicago called Jack O'Brien's that let tramps sleep on the pool tables. I know, that's funny. Get you get the jokes. I don't get. Brian of the

Daily Zeyegeist, Oh yeah, is that guy's pool table? Yeah? Yeah, another vampire who Actually I don't know the means of Jack's immortality. Vampism is always the first one that comes to mind. It works, I get it. He's a vampire. Sure, vampire, sure yeah. And let hobos tramp printers sleep on the pool tables or under the pool tables if people wanted

to play um. I like the idea of going into the pool hall and like someone's like fine, and it's like someone who's better at a job than I'll ever be at mine is just sleeping on the pool table, and it's like fine, and it just starts sleeping underneath the pool table, like playpool. Pretty cool, Like all good tramps, Caitlin, They did lots of crime. M yes, now we're talking.

Some of it was printing related crime, specifically counterfeiting with something that I was gonna say like plagiarism or probably that too. To be honest, there's a lot of like ways that people made money in early printing, just by being like, oh, yeah, no, I'm authorized to sell this best selling book by Twilight from me Margaret I wrote it, or Lord, that's my book for you. It's about vom pors. So anyway, okay, So they played plagiarized money m hmm.

And other times they just did regular crime, like stealing stuff to sell it, or pretending they were priests and giving speeches and then passing the hat. It was another way that they would make money. One tramp printer, actually several tramp printers did this, but one tramp printer whose name I got did this. When tramp printer was Magnificent Maureen of the Flying Trapeeze. Because eventually she quit typeset

into join the circus. There was a legendary king of the tramp printers, Peter bartlet Lee, and legendary in this way that like traveling cultures, and I think like lots of subcultures do this where someone's like legendary only within this circle, right, Like I doubt this was a household name to any degree, but at any you know, jungle or whatever, you probably knew people who had knew of Peter bartlet Lee, who wore a tailcoat and a wide

brimmed hat. Who would want who wandered the country looking for his lost wife because he had served in the Union Army and he came home to find no trace of his wife. He probably sucked and she just took off, but whatever, and he spent the rest of his life wandering before he eid in Nebraska, buried under a stone that reads and thus we die still searching. Oh that's sad, you know. Another tramp printer was the Duke of Wellington.

He spent the nineteen twenties trampion in Arizona. He was like the youngest son of some estate in England, right called Wellington's, and he was the youngest son. So imagine his surprise when basically like all of his older brothers and his dad die and they like call him home and like are like, you gotta go be the Duke of Wellington now. So it goes home and the estates in terrible shape. And so we kind of just like Bucks off right back to the US to keep tramp

printing because he's like this, I like it more. And then there were a whole bunch of other like fake nobility around as well, like people being like I'm the Prince of Wales or whatever, you know, just because they're like whatever. Okay, Yeah, that's the Sophie taking a hard stance against the Prince of Wales. Yeah, what do you

have against Wales? Nothing? I have the fact that they have to have a prince that isn't actually from Whales, that is the Prince of Wales that is now the King of England named Um and he's despicable, and I'm done. But I got it. It felt good. It felt really good. You know who else is lying is advertized, you know who has a monetary incentive to lie, but obviously isn't lying to you, dear listener. It's the podcast, the products

and services that support this podcast. And we are back and we're talking about how Margaret forgot that the King of England was the Prince of Wales. You forgot, but I didn't even know in the first place. I don't understand and appreciate people are or where they're from. So well, do you want to hear about Muskogee Red, Yeah, I do. Well. He was legendary in that same hobo way where you're

like legendary only amongst the tramps. He was. He was legendary for just being an old hobo who went everywhere, did everything, always drunk spent. People were like, he's worked in every printer's office in the West, and he's been in every jail in the West. One time, apparently he burned down the jail he was in because he didn't

want to be in it anymore. Oh yeah, And another time someone thought they found him dead, and a paper he had worked on before wrote a touching obituary about how he'd been found dead with half a bottle of whiskey because they really liked him, and they're like, oh, poor guy died, we'll write this obituary. Muskogee read shows up whole in the copy of the obituary and he's like, you know, this is touching, but I'm clearly not dead and you should have known it wasn't me because the

bottle was only half empty. Mm hmmm, because he because he drank a lot. I know exactly. Um I love that like so many just different like things are, Like, I'm a person's legendary because they can consume toxins, so many toxins. I've never seen that person without toxins. That's the legacy I want to leave behind. Yeah, which toxin you know? I'm I'm partial to whiskey myself. Um, I like a good tequila as well. Yeah, and don't forget about white claws, the most refreshing toxin of them all.

White glads are unfair and how not like alcohol they are. It's actually like, yeah, I know so, m hmm. The I t U wasn't the only union with trump workers. This whole concept, the journeyman system and also like even just like the travelers card where people could go around and work in any union shop they wanted, was actually

like fairly common throughout the nineteenth century. I start reading this whole book that's about why that's bad, Um, because it's something something Marxism, something, something undermining solidarity in the working class, something something, And I was really annoyed buy it, so I didn't read it. That doesn't really make me sound like a very good, trustworthy source. I read departs

about it about the international typographer typographical union. Okay, that's important, but a lot of different unions would have this kind of system. The Cigar Makers Union was another notoriously tramp heavy union, and it's also a strong union that a lot of union leaders came out of. Which is my counter argument of that book that I can't really argue against because I didn't finish, is that, yeah, Samuel Gompers came out of the Cigar Makers Union, and like, he's

a union leader guy. But the I t was one of the most itinerant work unions in the eighties, something like eight thousand printers. Any given year, we're tramping around by two more than six of the union took a

traveling card. So eighteen thousand people that year were like tramp printers because there's just so much print work available, Okay, And so it's also worth pointing out as far as I can tell, and this number would fluctuate constantly, but most of the time in the nineteenth century, it seems like the I t U was doing about of the paid printing in the US. So this wasn't like all of the printing, and I think that that even I'm

sure they wanted to be wider than that. I'm glad they didn't get wider than that because they were fucking racist, right. And but yeah, so this wasn't like all printers, right, this wasn't like the thing that every printer was doing. However, it was a specific system, um that should have been cooler than it was. So are they going to like just work get like a new They tramp for a bit, they show up in town, and then what do they do.

They go to a newspaper, They go to like a publishing house for like terature, like what what kind of So I think basically anywhere, but I think in the newspapers were like where it was in the most in demand because it was like the fastest turnaround. It was like every day you're doing a new thing. There actually used to be more newspapers per city than there are now. Hm. And because it was like so easy to do. And what you would do is you have your traveler's card,

which you actually have to apply for. It's not just like once you're in the Union you can just wander totally freely. When you're like, hey, I want to travel, they're like okay. And I don't know whether they like limited per year basically trying to make sure that there's

enough work for everyone or what. But then you show up a town, you go to a print shop, and the print shops boss has nothing to do with the hiring because it's a closed shop and the union has controls it, and they're like, look, as long as we get the job done, we control who prints here. And it helped that they were all really fucking good at what they do it right, and they were like faster

than most other people and stuff. And so you go and then you put it's called a sub board for a substitute, and you put your light card in or whatever, you put your name down, and then they basically say like, okay, we have we have extra work for this many people today, or like someone who's in the home guards like sick, I would love to take a day off, like I'm

going home, and tramp printers would work. Um, you were allowed to work for up to a month at a place without If you wanted to work more than a month, I believe you had to apply to be like okay, I want to be a regular printer here. Got it? Yeah, So they're just like temping, they're just like freelancing. Yeah, I mean it's yeah, it's kind of like the traveling nurse thing that happens in some ways because things that people always need health care and printed propaganda or whatever.

Mass media the main mass media at the time. So for a while, about the mid eight hundreds, about half the time up centers in the US were women. Out West in particular, the old rules didn't apply and more women ran papers or edited. More than two hundred papers out West in the second half of the nineteenth century were run by women. And the book I'm drawing from here the most is tramp Printers by Charles Overbeck that I mentioned last episode to quote from tramp Printers about

women editing papers out west. The female editors of the West varied from Katherine bag a thirteen year old publisher of The Bug Hunter in Tombstone, Arizona, to Renown suffrageteen year old. Yeah. Pretty, what was it The Bug Hunter? I think that basically, it's like when I had a zine when I was a teenager, got it okay? You know, So so Catherine Bag ran The Bug Hunter, and I think it was like, probably like these are the bugs

I found, you know. I love that. I know, sorry to interrupt, No, no, no, I mean I included his quote because I like that part so much to renown suffragist Abigail Scott Dunaway in Oregon, you know. So it's like ran the gamut of um of women printing. There was also a couple of women's shops. The Bohemian Women's Publishing Company of Chicago is all women. They ran a

popular weekly and employed fifteen women and girls. And they had all women's shops, probably because men were treating them like garbage and it's the piss that they were cleaning things with. Yeah, but you have to be respectful of the piss, you understand anyway. Sorry, Yeah, that was bad analogy. No, No, I'm made it worse. But all things surely come to an end. Not this episode yet, but the era that

we're talking about. So you've got the tramp printing thing where everyone is sitting type by hand all day and drinking and reciting poetry all night and writing freight trains and whatever. And they've been working the same machines that have been around since Guttenberg and then hot metal type

setting came around. The most amos and long lasting of these machines is the line of line of type machines which were invented in eighty four, which does several lines of type thus lino type at a time, and the operator picks away at a typewriter basically which assembles metal

forms which are then cast into lines of type. Thus hot metal typesighting and line of types are the main things that people use until the nineteen seventies had like literally in the in the nineteen sixties, some places were still using eighty year old machines because once again, this technology didn't change too fundamentally. For basically, until computers came around and the line of type machine killed a lot of jobs, hand type setting was was over, but it

didn't kill the union or the culture. And I at this point the union is not being evil. And the reason it didn't kill the the union is because these machines are fucking monstrous. The line of type machines have

se moving parts. As one printer Andrew Steve's put it quote, while no one action is particularly complex in isolation, their combination and this worrying, chattering, thirty pound hulk of moving parts with its pot of molten metal slashing around at five fifty degrees fahrenheit, you can be downright intimidating at first glance or on second or third m hmm, I'll say yeah, yeah, So the union printers learned how to

use them faster than inexperienced workers were able to. Basically like, as soon as these things are showing in the shop, the union printers were like, all right, it's ours. And more importantly than learning how to use them, they learned to fix them, which the bosses definitely did not know how to do. And since printing was even more centralized that before, the workers came out of it with more

power than before. So sorry, bosses. Folks who didn't want or couldn't learn the new machines often headed west, where Linotype took decades to reach. But change was inevitable, and a ton of printers just got real salty and we're like fun all this and quit printing, joined the circus, et cetera. Yeah, totally. Circus is always hiring. Apparently, always seem very easy in stories to run away and join the circus, but always like as a kid, I was like,

isn't involved, like being really good at something? Yeah, you have to be like an acrobat, yeah or something. I was referring to that one specific but Also, yeah, I'm like, how can you just like you've got to have skills taming lions others. I yeah, I don't know clowning anyway, No matter how far the tramp printers went ran out West, by the time of the Great Depression, line of type machines were ubiquitous, and the first golden age of the

tramp printer was over. More or less, The new printers, even the tramps, were less wild and less driven by wander overall, but the line of type machine printer wages went up dramatically because profits went up at the shops, the machines were stored in less dingy parts of the building, and basically the union printer's life got better. Life expectancy went up again, which is from forty one too. Yeah, I don't have the next number, but like yeah, like, um,

you know, incremental change positive. As long as you can get we could just get life expectancy to like pace our aging. That would work well for me. And I think this is kind of interesting to me because like most of the time unions, you don't hear about unions adapting to new technology incredibly well, you know, and like one day I'm gonna do an episode about the Luddites, who weren't actually mad at the concept of technology. They were mad at the concept of ending their way of

life that provided them the food that they ate. M you know. But but the Union conquered this new technology, which is funny because like the bosses were like, like, hey, this will finally break the Union, and it didn't, and partly because it was a giant machine with a pot full of five fifty degree molton lead. If you ran them at speed for too long, the melt pot could overheat and a bunch of molten metal would shoot out at the operator. And one printer said, quote, it didn't

burn you, it cooked you. That's what they called a squirt. Oh sexy, fascinating. Yeah, damn h. But now I want to talk about two influential tramp printers. Both are actually pretty cool stamp of they get the stamp of cool. People did cool stuff in messy ways. People are gonna be like, why did you advocate for such anyway? Whatever? Complicated people, everyone's complicated famous tramps. One's named Horace Greeley. Horace Greeley was a tramp printer. There's a whole town's

named after him. While there's one town at least it's called Greeley, Colorado, Okay, Horace Greeley, a poor as hell. And then as a as a scrawny teenager, maybe thirteen, maybe fifteen, depending on which book you read, he went off to become a printer. He spent twelve years as a tramp printer in the mid Atlantic, and then he moved to New York City. He founded the New York Tribune, which was the widest circulating paper in the country. He

became a politician at one point, he was a congressman. Actually, at one point he ran for president loss, but he helped found and possibly named the Republican Party. So it's completely possible that the guy who named the Republican Party

was a well he's a socialist. I'll get to that part, socialist, vegetarian. Anyway, the Republican Party was the less offensive party at the time, right, It's important understand about mid nineteenth century, and he was a radical Republican, which was the group that wanted an immediate end to slavery, in contrast with moderate Republicans like Lincoln, who were like, well, we'll get there. And he fought against the Republicans embracing the anti Catholic, anti immigrant, no

nothings into the party. He might have coined the fray is go West young man, But the Internet likes to argue about that. He was into like non communist socialism of the Charles Fourier utopian socialist variety that I don't totally understand, so I'm not going to try and explain right now. I was gonna say what, Yeah, I mean, okay, he was a socialist, but not in a way that

makes but not in a like Marxist way. Socialism was a lot more diverse in it, well, is a lot more diverse and interesting than people presented as um and in the nineteenth century that was like more open people understood. Socialism is a much more complicated field, got it. He was a universalist, which is like a Christian who believes everyone gets into heaven and is they tend to be the people who are like less assholes about it. M hmm. He was also like basically a vegan straight edge. He

followed it. I mean, I don't know, but he probably ate eggs and ship but he followed a diet of no meat, no alcohol, no caffeine, no tobacco. One downside of him he's using to prohibition. I'm like, not drinking rules, but telling another people they can't drink sucks mm hmm. But he actually politically worked against the people the parties of prohibition, like the know nothings, So he whatever, he

seemed all right some ways. He was very actively feminist, although in some ways of course he fell flat on that. But he gave a lot of speeches about the importance of like including women in labor unions and like all

of this kind of stuff. At one point, asshole racist New Yorkers, mostly Irish immigrants I think, had a race riot in the eighteen sixty three in response to the Civil War, and they were like, we're going to go get Greeley because he's a you know, anti slavery guy, and so they like were stormed his offices and most of the other editors and ship who were being called to be killed fled the city. But really was like,

and I'm not going to leave the city. And what he did is he's just like put on a hat and walked out of his office and walked through the crowd and no one recognized him. Huh. And yeah, there's all these statues of him around and like a lot

of history. Things that are like from like a pro America point of view were at him as like goodhearted but naive, which I think means he was a socialist and we don't know how to handle that because he's very important to us history, is like an incredibly important figure in US history, and so he was naive and that he didn't follow whatever system. He was the first president of the New York Typographical Union. He wrote editorial and support of women printers. He wasn't perfect. He did

a bunch of ship that wasn't great. He opposed divorce reform and women's suffrage. Interesting guy or as greeling tramp printer. I love that it's possible. The Republican Party was named by a sober vegetarian socialist hobo. Yeah, pretty cool. And if you want a cool lifestyle like sober socialist hobo, you can buy a cool lifestyle with lifestyle products like car heart. He love was work car cards. Is it true? That part is true? But I'm really not actually trying

to This isn't a free ad for car rds. This is me trying to make a joke. Please don't go out and buy car rards because of this. But instead listen to these ads or don't. You can press the fast forward button. I don't care. We are back. How did that have? Haitlyn? Any good ads in there for you? What were you most excited about? I well, let me tell you what I during that ad break, I logged onto carhart dot com. I bought myself a jacket. I got myself some some work pants, nice beanie, a beanie,

some gloves, all kinds, all manner of items. For a while, I actually still think there's a cool outfit. But for a while, the the um krusty traveler women's outfit of choice was you take a pair of car Heart overalls and you cut you cut it into a mini skirt and re set it into a mini skirts. Yeah it's yeah, I know it rules. Yeah, I'm like cool people do cool stuff that. Okay, thank you so much. A whole

episode on it, please and thank you. I would. I mean, I really want to At some point, someone's going to have to let me do an art exhibit, some fucking fancy gallery, and I want to like find all my crusty friends and get all of their clothes and like put them up and like pressed between glass of all the weird sewing that everyone does. Awes. I mean, if you have a fancy gallery, reach out to Margaret. Thank you. So you know who else was hobo? This isn't an

ad break. This is me trying to get back into the script. Tell me the father of American literature, Samuel Clemens a k A. Mark Twain. Oh hell yeah, that motherfucker well so. And actually I want to know because, like I, I had always heard like kind of mixed reviews on this guy. Right, Oh, I know nothing besides he wrote I'm pretty sure I wrote the screenplay for Hawk Finn starring Elijah Wood. Yeah, yeah, he was the screenplay guy. He's from nineteen nineteen nineties. Um, I don't

know when that movie came out. The actually the ninties, exactly, the fifteen forty one, I believe. Okay, Yeah, so Mark fucking Twain, he was a tramp printer and he is interesting. Like Greeley, There's still more I want to understand about him. And these ones got kind of the skim treatment. I didn't go out and read autobiography biographies about these people. I read like a ton of articles about them and tried to cross reference and try and figure out what's true,

but I didn't like really deep dive them. He's very American in his politics, but he basically gets more and more interesting and radical and leftist as he get older. He has this quote, there's no good government at all, and none is possible. Um, And that started in a sort of like kind of American libertarian is kind of way of like a free markets and government leave everyone alone whatever. But he was once again in it's kind of weird socialist e or confusing way. And I'm not

trying to call him a socialist specifically. He was like a markets guy for a lot of his life, but he wasn't a capitalism guy. Um. He didn't like welfare, but he also hated plutocrats and monopolies and capitalists. And he started off all stars and stripes America, rah rah rah, and said lots of not great stuff about a lot of stuff. He also once fought for the Confederacy for three weeks, but he did dessert, and I think fighting for three weeks and deserting was like kind of like

a cake or like a pie. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was the pastry chef and he poisoned them all. Now he Yeah, so it's like during the Confederacy. If he lived in the South and were white and a man, you were like expected to fight for the Confederacy or they'd like burn everything you've ever loved mm hmmm, including possibly you. And so he fought for three weeks and then he was like this and he uh, he fled

to I think to Nevada and whatever. He ended up anti imperialist and anti racist near the end of his life, and he would talk about how the Emancipation Proclamation set the black man free and the white man too, because basically how evil white people were being as a result of um the system of slavery. He was a tramp printer before he was a riverboat pilot. When he was a tramp printer, one time he decided to play a

prank on another tramp printer. So he got, I'm sure you've done this kind of prank before, Caitlin, Sophie, everyone's done this prank. You go get a whole lass, real human skeleton, and you put it in the guy's bed while he's sleeping, so then he wait, when he wakes up, he's sleeping next to or possibly Cuddlina realized yesterday to Jamie. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, well that guy who is actually Jamie Lost so aggressive.

First of all, you also like, just you have a real human scut I mean, there's just so many Yeah, because he's a ho, he's a tramp. So he's clearly not going to his own closet of skeletons. He clearly went to someone else's closet. Skeleton's probably a graveyard, went and got a skeleton. Can you imagine if he's just drunk and he's like, I got an idea, this is

this is my plan. Guys are guys, this will be hilarious. Yes, And then so the guy wakes up next to a skeleton and he's like, and he goes and he sells the skeleton for seven dollars and he gets good and drunk off of it. Nice jokes on you. Samuel Clemens, near the end of his life, he gets more and more radical. He spent his last days doing ship like writing pamphlets against various imperialists in his usual sarcastic tone.

In his essay The Conquest of the Philippines, Twain writes about a time when you a soldier's massa, heard some moros people in the Philippines by firing down on them from the ring of an extinct volcano, which is a thing that happened that he was responding to. Quote. The enemy numbered six hundred, including women and children. We abolished them utterly, leaving not only not even a baby alive

to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States. Headline death list is now nine hundred. I was never so enthusiastically proud of the flag till now. That's sarcasm. See that's it's different than actually might be sardonic. Sardonic sarcasm. What's the difference? We don't actually want to know, don't Yeah, tell the person sitting next to you, say, Margaret is a fool. She does not know the difference

between sarcasm and sardonatry. Sar dolla tree, which is like idola idolatry, only about the sardonic god. Kayla gerant me sardonic God. Thank you, Yeah, that sounds like an earnest Thanks yeah, sorry, Iman, thanks okay, good. I was a little concerned. Samuel Clements did more than just right against imperialism. He spent years as the vice president of the American Anti Imperialist League. Once he got money from his writing, he used it to pay for several black people's education.

He was friends with Helen Keller, the radical Socialist in IWW member who was also a disability rights icon mm hmm for sixteen years. By the early twentieth century, he left the Republican Party to do his own weird thing and referred to both Republicans and the Democrats as insane

and that each party was incapable. Each party was able to understand that the other party was fucked up, but neither party could see that they were sucked up, which isn't wrong, And I think this is still like, yeah, he supported the Revolution of nineteen Basically, I was like kind of expecting because like the stuff I've heard is that he the way he handles race is one very different from how people would try and handle race now, and to a lot of it was like not great, right,

and a lot of his writing and so I was like aware of a lot of that stuff, and I wasn't aware of this other stuff, and so I started doing this research about him. He supported the Revolution of nineteen o five in Russia, like wholeheartedly, especially the willingness to do violence against the czar. He had no time for liberal half measures. He wrote, quote, what is the Czar of Russia but a house of fire in the

midst of a city of eighty millions of inhabitants. Yet instead of extinguishing him together with his nest and system, the liberation parties are all anxious to merely cool him down a little and keep him. It seems to me that this is illogical, idiotic. In fact, suppose you had this granite hearted, bloody drawed maniac of Russia loosen your house, chasing the helpless women and little children your own, what

would you do with him? Supposing you had a shotgun? Well, he has loosened your house, Russia, and with your shotgun in hand, you stand thinking up ways of trying to modify him. When we consider not that not even the most responsible English monarch ever yielded back a single public right until it was wrenched from them by bloody violence. Is it rational to suppose that gentler methods can win

privileges in Russia? Mhm? And then final Mark Twain quote I'm gonna use for this is in two he said, let us abolish policeman who carry clubs and revolvers and put in a squad of poets armed to the teeth with poems on spring and love. So wow, I kind of like him, and he was a tramp printer. And then later at one point another writer, William Dean Howells asked Mark Twain, being like, how should I write about

tramp printers? And Mark Twain wrote back, hands off incomprehensible delay readers, oh um, and so here I am trying to whatever anyway. So interesting. Okay, So those are two of the two of the famous tramp printers. I guess the need that I didn't really talk about Mark Twain as a printer or any of that, but he did that for a while. That's that's what I got. Well, I think the takeaway there is that if you start out as a tramp printer, you're gonna go on to

do some interesting stuff. All of them did as long as they lived past. Yeah. There was a second wave, a sort of second golden age of the tramp printer after World War Two, when train type setters were in short supply, and it's a different thing. It was a different lifestyle. More couples where both people were tramp printers would travel with their kids in like RVs and ship tramps would stay at motels instead of on the floor

of the job. All night diners were placed replaced the dunes and the Second Golden Age ran up until the nineteen seventies, and it used the same union system, literally the same union, the I TU. They could show up at any printer, skip the personnel department and work whatever shifts they wanted, and the typographical union. It survived the move to line of type, but it didn't survive the

move to digital printing. The earliest electric type setting machines, the teletype setter or the TTS, were referred to by some people who are really excited about them. Some bosses. They were like, this is the electric man that sets type and doesn't strike. Uh. Some of the earliest applications

of computers. Actually it was to hook them up to these teletype machines to calculate hyphenation and justification settings, which were like kind of like the last skilled parts of some of the type setting, so the operators didn't need to be highly trained. Jobs got scarcer more and more journeyman decided to stick around and home guard rather than risk not finding a job in the next town over. And then phototype setting took over hot metal type setting.

And I could not easily tell you about phototype setting. And even though I've been vaguely involved in it at various points in my life, I don't know how to easily explain it, and I'm not great at understanding it. Okay, this means that you no longer have the squirt right, you no longer have the like if you do this wrong, hot lead will burn everything. So even more so now people don't need trained skilled people. Computers can't take over everything.

Editors of paper start coming out of the university system instead of off the shop floor. Even union shops stopped wanting tramp printers. One by one, they all stopped accepting the travelers card. By six tramp printing was over and the union was to the same year, it merged with the Communication Workers of America, ending its run as the oldest union in the US. With the death of the union, wages dropped and a hot metal compositor was getting two d dollars a week, which is about a salary about

seventy si I was a year in today money. By four years later, the same amount of work was forty seven thousand dollars a year, so it's like barely your your your wage got halved, um with the union gone. And I want to go out with a story about one more random cool tramp. This is a second Golden Age tramp, Big Marie Emery, one of the last tramp printers. She was over six ft tall. She was loud and

brash and cool as hell. She always blew her money on like fancy clothes and jewelry and ship but she didn't actually have that money, so she like pawned them the next day. Um, she'ld like wear them around, be seen in them, and be like, all right, never mind, go take them back. That is such a flex excited, she gave away money constantly to her down and out compatriots. The foreman asked what she could do. She like showed up at a shop as tramp part like, well, what

can you do because she's a woman or whatever. So she poked him on the shoulder and said, I can do anything a goddamn man can do except pissing a bottle mm hmm, which is very just Yeah. She liked to marry tramp printers who are about to die and then become their sole beneficiaries. Oh my god, she's amazing. Okay, Eschine would say, big sleigh. Uh. And so she lived large as best as she could off of you know that,

no shame. And to quote that Charles Overbeck book, The Tramp Printers quote, she continued tramping into the nineteen seventies, but the FBI came for her at seventy two in not in two, but when she's seventy two years old, alleging that she was drawing a deceased husband's checks from a Navy pension, social security off to other dead print printer husbands, her own social securities check and a full union wages as a proof reader, and using food stamps

to pay an undocumented worker to clean clear her trailer clean. Sorry, sounds legit to me. Yeah. Now the quote from Charles Verbeck ends a first class tramp to the end. Hell yeah nice. And that, dear listeners, specifically Sophie and Caitlin is the tramp Printers. Love it. Thanks for sharing, Thanks for um, Caitlin. Thank You're really so funny the entire time, which is why you are miractually the healthiest person on e I'm cured. Um, do you have anything you would

like to plug? Oh, just the same stuff as usual. Follow me on Instagram and Twitter, and I guess TikTok even though I barely understand it. At Caitlin Darante, listen to the Bechtel Cast, the movie podcast I do with Jamie Loft. As we're going on tour in um in the West coast of the US. We'll be doing shows in l A, So Francisco, Portland, and Seattle late January early February, and you guys also performing at s F. Sketch first, Yeah, that's the San Francisco show. That's so good.

Sketchy first, it's so sketchy. And guess what classic San Francisco movie we're doing. George of the Jungle. Yeah, you're welcome. Love that, um, Margaret, and you have a new book, would you like to plug that? Well, imagine it's called George of the Jungle, right, it's it's probably imagine if you believe that the government owed you a woman as a public service, and you were already there, I already do invited to move to an island where that would

be met. You're the government provides Just kidding, it's a trap. It's a prison. All of the men who believe that they are owed women as a public good are trapped on in Cell Island. And then our two protagonist title of the book must infiltrate infol Intel Island. And then now here's the title, escape from in Cell Island. It's preorderable. Yeah, I was gonna say where it can people pre order? And what can they get with that preorder? Tangled Wilderness dot org is the publisher, and you can get a

free poster if you pre order. And my gratitude not personally explained Magpie's gratitude, which is, yeah, exactly can't buy that? Well, you literally can. You can buy it, buy pre order in that book. But for everything that money can't buy, there's money. Yeah, And we'll be back next week with the story of Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff? Okay, by now, hi everyone. Hi. Cool People Who Did Cool

Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone Media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. H