Tramp Subculture - Questions from History

The movement, inspired by the hoboes of Jack London's autobiographical novel The Road, called itself "tramping."

As the movement's participants saw it, the oppressive grime and smoke of proletarian life called for a return to their country's forests in the little free time that their work week allowed. But the rather small and civilized forests, surrounded by factories and rails and divided up among private owners and state authorities who were not always sym-pathetic to passers-through, called on the tramp imagination to conjure up still farther-flung imagery.

They rechristened the rivers, valleys, and hills of Czechoslovakia with grand names taken from the wide expanses of other continents. In the midst of a region that had just been carved up into smaller states with intensified border control, the tramps turned their attention to the wider world, denouncing national chauvinism as they sang songs - mostly of their own invention - about wandering Canadian woodsmen, American Indians, Latin American campesinos, the islands of the Pacific, and the wilds of Africa.

The movement's most prominent participants wrote popular adventure novels, painted striking scenes of nature, and created entirely new musical genres.

The movement survived an economic depression, police repression under four successive political regimes, and, under the most recent regime, the privatization of much of the land where its adherents had camped and tramped. Its political leanings shifted with time - initially formulated in a leftist spirit, it was later suppressed by Communist authorities, and many came to see it as a practice of resistance to Communist rule; then, in the de-politicized 1990s, it was widely seen little more than harmless fun.

But its legacy is anything but socially irrelevant. The tramping movement represents one of the first modern subcultures of Czech and Slovak society. It also disrupts stereotypes about back-to-nature movements as primarily bourgeois affairs, as it reveals a specifically working-class attitude toward the modern meaning of "na-ture," which it saw as the antithesis not primarily to commerce and con-sumption, but to machines and labor.