FREE-LANCE VERSATILITY
Street speakers who stand before the same audiences one or more times a week throughout the year tend to wear out. Some of them are resourceful enough to find something new to say, but others find it difficult to say old things in a new way, so they are likely to fall into the habit of repeating themselves. Sometimes they try to keep from growing stale by speaking in as many places as possible, but since their audiences are limited to the Hobohemian population they are always talking to a number who have heard them say the same things before. After a speaker has made the rounds of all the corners he is forced to get a new “line.”
Some men, however, persist in delivering old thread-bare messages in their old, well-worn way. The speeches of some men are so well known that the only interest is one of curiosity. The crowd listens to see if anything was left out. The hobby of one free-lance speaker is Henry George and the Single Tax. To the crowd he is the “P and P” man, because he usually ends his speeches by selling copies of Progress and Poverty at “cost.” Everyone who has been in town long enough to become acquainted with the principal soap-boxers is familiar with this man’s “line,” but usually he hears him again, partly, perhaps, because of his apparent sincerity.
Most soap-boxers, when they find themselves growing stale, are able to change. B’s hobby for a long time has been a speech on birth control, which he followed by selling some books on sex, but he wore this subject out and recently changed to a speech on superstition at the close of which he sells literature of an anti-religious nature. Another speaker whose speech on patent medicine and quack doctors finally lost its novelty is now talking on birth control. Another has gone from trade unionism to the Ku Klux Klan. An old-timer on Madison Street said of a certain speaker: “That man used to be with the I.W.W.; then he went over to How’s organization and now he’s free lancing.” “What is his line now?” is a question that is commonly asked in regard to a soap-box pulpiteer. They are expected to change.
In search of variety and for financial reasons, free lancers of ability hire out as campaigners for the political parties. “Where is John L. now?” asks one man. “Oh, he’s up in Wisconsin campaigning for Senator LaFollette. Last month he was in Missouri stumping for Senator Reed.” John carried credentials from both the Democrats and Republicans and he can plead the cause of either.
The rôle of the soap-boxer, like that of the ancient sophist, is that of instructor or entertainer. Men go in search of these curbstone gatherings. On Sundays and holidays the crowd expects them. Homeless men who have a job in the city during the week spend the Sunday on the “stem” partly in order to hear the evangelists and soap-boxers. It is their life. They like to see old friends on the street, but they like especially to see familiar faces on the box.