PUTTIN’ IN WORK: SEARCHING FOR THE WORKING-CLASS ROOTS OF ILLEGAL PUBLIC NAME-WRITING
Graffiti art is big business. Since its public emergence from New York City’s working-class slums in the early 1970s, it has risen to become the fastest-growing art movement in recent history. In the process, it has spawned an entire industry dedicated to the lifestyle and supply of graffiti culture and in turn has distanced itself considerably from its working-class roots. With the rise in popularity of graffiti art, the original name-writing tradition and its forms seem to have gone extinct under the layers of paint. This begs the question: Is there any evidence of a continuation in the pre-graffiti art, public name-writing tradition in the working class?
KNOWLEDGE OF SELF
To begin our search to answer the question at hand, we must understand public name writing and its connection to the working class. To do that, we must first understand the development of working-class self-identity over the last century. For many cultures, membership in their respective working or labor class carried with it the promise of anonymity among the masses. Undistinguished in your community, your social status would be based on your vocation. This practice can be seen in Eastern culture within the Hindu caste system, as well as the Western European feudal societies. These vocationally classified groups established trade guilds that served as social circles for the families of those who performed these occupations. Built over long periods, these guilds had established within them prestige systems that allowed the members of the various trade opportunities for recognition among their peers based upon the notoriety of their skills (Gombrich 1936). This recognition helped to reinforce the worker’s self-identity and his connection to his group. Children would apprentice under their parents learning the various skills and techniques for their craft. For later generations of Europeans, this vocational identity translated into identifiable surnames such as Carpenter, Gardener, Farmer, and Wheeler.
From the late Victorian era and continuing through the Second Industrial Revolution, the mass immigration of rural populations from Europe to smaller more densely populated urban areas in America occurred. Agricultural and trade workers took jobs in factories when advancements in automation replaced the need for them in fields and trade shops. Former trade workers could no longer expect recognition for their skills. Their identities as craftsmen had been replaced by their status as employees. This classification would now dominate one’s self-identity within the working class, creating an immense shift in social dynamics for the migrating rural labor population. And after a century of immigrants had settled, the urban American cities were overpopulated with nameless masses attempting to make a better life for themselves. Within these cities, small densely populated communities formed along ethnic and economic lines, and these communities would grow and become marginalized.
From those working-class families came generations of children whose self-identities would be formed from a different set of values and influences than previous generations. These children would be some of the first to experience what we consider to be one’s childhood, in the respects of a defined set of time when one’s growth and development are considered to be carefree and protected (Booth 2008). Whereas in previous years, children and young adults would be expected to work in either homestead or trade, these children were growing up during a time when they were being phased out as part of the workforce and the hours of their menial day were to be replaced with unstructured free time. This contributed to the decline of the apprentice systems established in previous centuries. This change occurred over roughly 70 years, spanning from just after the Civil War until the end of the Great Depression. The dramatic changes had a range of causes, including the presence of a substantial adult workforce and the push to combat newly defined child labor abuses. In the years following, a focus on teaching American children the basics of reading, writing, and math would serve as an additional separating influence on the working-class self-identity, as more children of workers were educated at younger ages and for longer durations.
This educational push led to some of the earliest examples of public name writing, which can be seen in photographs taken in New York City, as part of a newspaper exposé of the deplorable living conditions in tenement buildings. These photos, taken between 1905 and 1915, show evidence of signatures written on the walls. The signatures appear to be written by children and young adults. These children were poor and spent the majority of their time on the street where they wrote their names. Most likely, the names on the walls in those photos are examples of the children practicing their newly learned writing abilities on the walls with chalk. These signatures could be washed clean from the wall so no mark remained. In some photos, however, names appear to be applied with paint and tar leaving a more permanent reminder of the act. Within these areas, a system of prestige would develop that allowed the young people to be recognized for their ability to mark up their names and they could expect notoriety, and the respect of their peers in an area where their names were written.
THE SELF-MADE MAN
The rise of celebrity fame culture, which consisted of popular vaudeville entertainers, professional athletes, and the subjects of stories such as Wild West heroes and outlaws, helped to shape the use of public name writing as a tool for creating self-identity. These celebrities benefited from the promotion of their names and likenesses on posters and handbills that circulated throughout the streets. Furthering this culture of fame was the rising ethos of the American dream, which in theory allowed anyone to make a name for themselves through hard work and ingenuity. Most of these individuals had once been poor themselves and through diligent practice of skill had risen into a new social class, that of adored celebrity.
Primarily, their influence served as a beacon for those who were beginning to seek something more than the anonymity of their socioeconomic class. The idea of being famous now permeated the quest for self-identification in the working class, as fame was attributed to wealth, prestige, and skill. As this practice progressed, the street-level promotion of a name became the way to inform the public of a star’s arrival. As the process of self-promotion began, writers’ feelings of personal worth and ability would rise, giving them a boost in self-confidence.
RENAMING
For many young people in these working-class urban areas during the early 20th century, life within their communities entailed a connection to street-level practices that served as rites of passage or initiation for young people as they began developing their self-identities. One of these practices involved accepting additional identities or nicknames within separate social groups. This practice is called ‘renaming’ (Kohl 1972). The practice can be traced back to earlier societies where calling someone outside of their given name was intended to “put a knick in one’s good name” or reputation, and is the basis for the term “nickname.” This act, which was an attempt to disrespect or disparage the recipient, would come to be embraced by working-class poor populations. No longer considered to be attacks on identity, nicknames became exceedingly popular. Those who participated in the resulting renaming practices accepted identity as a fluid condition, easily flexible for different social situations. A given name is a name that is bestowed on a person by family or peers. For example: Robert Davis is referred to by his parents as Robert at home, yet his classmates call him “Bobby” at school, and his friends call him “Bob D” on the block. Each social group has its preferred name for Robert; he is the same person physically, yet he has three distinct identities within his community. A more current form of renaming is the chosen name. The chosen name is a self-identity created or selected by a person, not one given to them by family or peers. More akin to a stage name, this persona is the projected self-identity of the individual. As renaming became more popular, the nicknames themselves changed in nature straying further from the root names and entering into the realm of fantasy. The chosen name is at the heart of the search for the working-class’ self-identity and its roots in the public name writing tradition, as it is this form of renaming, that the early writers eventually selected to promote.
WORKING-CLASS HEROES
The freight train moniker writings are most likely the catalyst for urban public name writing in major US cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York, where the writing practice would eventually take hold. Freight train moniker writing is the earliest documented public name writing form. Its earliest practitioners were a mix of Civil War veterans turned wayward train-hopping hobos who stowed away on rail cars following seasonal work, whose story was explored in the 2005 documentary Who Is Bozo Texino? A hobo lifestyle is transient by nature and limited human contact is a preference, so in traveling alone from place to place, one’s former identity is lost. These hobos would travel under an alias, creating a “road identity” that they would use for identification on their travels–these names would serve a different purpose later. The hobos would however congregate seasonally, in hobo jungles, which were makeshift camp communities outside of towns and near railway tracks. Any hobo was welcome to join. There, a competitive singing and storytelling contest would be held, with the winner taking a collected pot of food and money. (Daniel 2008). American author Jack London rode the rails and marked his name, “Cigaret,” and his travels served as the inspiration behind his 1907 classic novel, The Road, which helped to introduce hobo culture to America.
Along the way, hobos created a system of slang and symbols that communicated various information to each other, information such as locations for work and trains with high security. A prestige system soon developed in which writers who were able to stow away successfully on a train car would then write their moniker along with the date and a starting location inside the car. The writing could be viewed by other stow-aways, or the rail workers, to whom the name writing was a taunt, that is until the practice spread to the outside of the train cars in the early 1900s. In the years that followed the Great Depression, rail workers themselves revived the practice when the numbers of those participating in hobo culture dwindled after World War II.
Important evidence in support of this theory can be drawn from the many hobo jungles that formed along the outskirts of major U.S. cities before and during the time of the Great Depression. The moniker tradition had been active for over 60 years at this time and most of the moniker writers themselves would have frequented these jungles as ports of call and could have easily spread the writing culture into the surrounding communities. The defining characteristics of freight moniker writing are a chosen name, and basic stylized writing, with a location and date as accompanying details. These names also came to have cartoon character renderings attached to them. Major American cities would have been hubs on freight train lines of the day and each of those marked trains would have traversed the outskirts of these cities where the most marginalized communities lay (Gastman 2006). While there is no known preserved documentation of this occurring, this writing system created along the rail lines somehow carried into these cities.
PUBLIC NAME-WRITINGS’ SPREAD
Additional evidence of the moniker writing’s direct influence on the spread of public name writing into working-class urban areas can be seen with observation of some forms of public name writing, such as the forms documented in Herbert Cole’s Golden Boy As Anthony Cool. Cole observed that the writers in New York had several known ways in which they wrote their names, and suggested a procession of different generations of writers that would reach back at least three decades as the point of influence. Cole noted that what he was documenting in New York during the early 1960s was not new and that there seemed to be numerous layers of names indicating a history of the practice, in the primarily poor/working-class sections of the city. Similarities can be found in the way information has been arranged within some of the writers’ designs. They include the use of chosen names, and associative devices used to show affiliation, location, and dates. Additionally, simple cartoon characters also were noted as being seen with the names. This mirrors the information written by the moniker authors on the side of freight cars, giving significant credence to the theory that the writings made were way off the sides of the trains and onto the walls of the cities. This theory coincides with oral histories of public name writing’s beginnings in Los Angeles, where Latino youths are said to have picked up the practice as early as the 1920s, with their first primary tool for writing being shoe shine daubers and the tar from nearby the railroad tracks. The Latino graffiti movement had developed its distinct form of practice as early as the 1950s.
By the time public name writing was introduced to the masses just before the early 1970s, the tradition Cole observed on the East Coast had undergone little aesthetic changes. Most names were still primarily written simply and legibly. These names, still devoid of significant typographic styling, followed the tradition of writers before them. Writers in New York and Philadelphia had not yet developed the distinct hand styles that are now attributed to those cities but had developed a range of associative devices, which allowed the writer’s areas to communicate specific information. Using the associative devices “Of,” “With,” and “From,” in conjunction with their names, writers could inform readers of their affiliations and base locations. By using the devices B.K.A. and A.K.A. in conjunction with their name writers could connect one identity with another. Writers also incorporated a way of stacking words to make a longer name, which would be two names that began with the same letter. Both names were written using a large single letter to begin both words. Also, by incorporating numbers into their names they could delineate between separate generations of writers like, “Snake I” or “Snake II”. Later forms of association developed merging a location, such as a street number, with a chosen name, to create what most consider a modern graffiti name, such as, “Taki 183.”
IT’S THE NEW STYLE
Chosen names like Taki 183 symbolize a shift in public name writing on the East Coast, as the emphasis soon switched to more complicated displays, which removed all erroneous information besides the names. At this time, the prestige system of previous writing generations was still intact in NYC. However, soon simply writing your name up a lot would no longer be sufficient to be recognized as a “real writer.” In New York, the shortening of the name was a precursor to the eventual evolution of the tradition that occurred between 1970 and 1977. Within seven years, writers in NYC would pioneer the use of spray paint to create multi-dimensional images, creating what is commonly referred to today as graffiti art (Chalfant and Cooper 1984). Graffiti art involved a more intricate understanding of typography and color theory in addition to the ability to master the use of spray cans and markers to create elaborately stylized letters.
The scale of this development resulted in a boom in the popularity of the practice, both among working-class and urban middle-class youth, and engrained this newer form of public name writing in the public mind. Soon after, hip-hop culture would begin to be recognized by the general public, and along with hip-hop’s rise in popularity, this form of public name-writing would spread around the globe. While many older practitioners of the name-writing tradition held no connection to hip-hop culture, by the mid-1980s it was seemingly impossible to distinguish that the two had ever been separate, as many of the tradition’s newer practitioners had begun writing after the time graffiti art had been accepted as visual elements of hip-hop culture. Graffiti art captured the attention of gallery owners and art critics who heralded the arrival of the practice as a major art development. In turn, many writers who had honed their painting skills on the sides of train cars in the subway began participating in gallery shows that displayed graffiti artists.
At the same time, writers were beginning to improve on some of the original forms of one-dimensional signatures in Philadelphia. Philadelphia writers developed a set of scripts that was indigenous to the area, creating more elaborate ways to do signatures which ultimately yielded some eleven various styles of writing that are still present today. They are referred to as Philly Style and include associative devices, characters called “wickets,” and dates (Powers 1999). This more elaborate form of signature writing maintained the original name writing forms, while simultaneously pushing the boundaries of the typography. In Philadelphia, the struggle to maintain the prominence of the hand style over the masterpiece remains today.
In Washington, DC, writers in the Southeast section of the city maintained the original public name writings’ stylistic nuances, including associative devices, well into the 1990s, much longer than any other city. Leading some observers to dub this writing “Go-Go Graffiti,” named for the regional style of music that the young people who wrote the names listened to. One of the major contributors to this movement is a writer named COOL “DISCO” DAN, whose name has appeared throughout the city since 1984. His style is reflective of the original public name writing style that dominated in the pre-graffiti art days. Other writers like COOL CALM CHUCK and R.E. RANDY,
attempted to merge the original signature style with the newer multi-dimensional graffiti art. Both CHUCK and RANDY used the double-stacked first letter form of writing their names; in addition, both frequently used a two-dimensional first letter to begin their names.
ALL ABOUT THE SKILLS
By the late 1980s, the prestige system of the original name-writing culture was ultimately overshadowed by the system attached to graffiti art, which required mastery of the spray can, multiple letter styles, and genuine artistic ability to create the dazzling displays that were catching the public’s attention. In many cities where public name writing had flourished in the previous decades, the prestige system and cultural etiquette that governed graffiti art replaced the importance of the basic street-level signatures. It was now quality over quantity. The original tradition’s values had been replaced with a whole new prestige system, which was developed to accommodate a growing number of practitioners. No longer would a name sit undisturbed for years on a wall without fear of it being painted over by another writer. The need to paint better than the person you were going over was the new rule. A focus on style and elaborate design had given the tradition’s practitioners a new outlet for exerting their self-identity (Austin 2001).
Widespread interest in graffiti art after the mid-1980s ushered in newer generations of writers who did not come from the same working class as previous generations. As the 1990s began, upper-class suburban youths across the United States picked up a spray can. As these writers became more involved in the tradition, many further developed the concept of graffiti art and took it in different directions. Above all, a focus on abilities and techniques came to the forefront of the culture. Following the lead of mid-1980s graffiti legends like Crash, Pink, and Dondi, some writers took their work into galleries. Still, others created businesses that were associated with graffiti art (Felisbret 2008). Because of its aesthetics and its gaining marketability, graffiti art enjoyed a larger acceptance from the cultural elite than earlier forms of public name writing. This led to graffiti’s use as a marketing tool for a range of products, including apparel, video games, and high-end art supplies. These ventures continue to appeal to businesses that cater to the upper class by essentially selling bottled rebellion.
THE QUESTION REMAINS
The popular acceptance of graffiti art separated the public name-writing tradition from its working-class roots. It would seem that its fate is indicative of many youth culture creative outlets. In music and fashion, one can see the similarities in how rap music and punk fashion have been separated from their rebellious working-class roots and placed in neat packages ready for sale. The tradition’s aesthetic style has been commodified and its use for marketing products has further removed it from the importance of the original intention, which is the street-level creation and maintenance of a public identity of one’s choosing. But the question remains: Is there any evidence of a continuation in the pre-graffiti art, public name writing tradition?
In Washington, DC, the “go-go graffiti writers” of the 1980s kept original name-writing forms alive long after their importance had been usurped by graffiti art’s popularity in other regions. I have documented the current practice of original forms of public name writing. These acts are committed not by teenagers seeking to create a public identity for themselves, but by adult telephone company service techs whose job it is to regularly service the company’s equipment.
These signatures can be found on the interior doors of residential phone service NIB boxes, which are located throughout the city. These boxes are locked, and can only be accessed by phone company employees, suggesting the intended audience is other service techs, not the general public. In documenting this, I identified more than 25 different names that appear in NIB boxes located in the Northwest section of Washington, DC. In late November 2010, a chance interview conducted with an NIB tech, who agreed to speak to me about the practice, on the condition that he remain anonymous, yielded interesting information.
“T,” as I will refer to him, is a 16-year veteran phone company employee, who has serviced boxes for two companies, both Verizon and its predecessor, Bell Atlantic. T informed me that he had seen names written in the NIBs throughout his career and that he had witnessed the presence of names in boxes throughout the city and in neighboring Prince George’s County for the better part of two decades. Additionally, he stated that the NIB boxes I had viewed were newer boxes installed within the last 12 years and that older boxes existed with names and dates written in them. These name writers did not attempt to emulate the multi-dimensional, highly stylized graffiti art of the last 40 years, instead, their signatures are reminiscent of the forms Herbert Cole witnessed in NYC in the early 1960s. Some dated names in the boxes I documented range over 10 years suggesting a prestige system similar to the one found in the earlier name-writing culture. Indicating the practice is not new, and can be directly connected to the original forms of public name writing.
The public name-writing tradition was born amidst poverty and toil. Its earliest practitioners sought to leave a sign of their existence during times when control of one’s self-identity was a luxury few could afford. Once the tool of a neglected working class, public name writing is now nearly a century and a half old, and exploded into a worldwide phenomenon known as graffiti art. Since that time, it has evolved from a street-level writing system used to create and maintain self-identity, into a bonafide art movement present in every corner of the globe. In the process, it has spawned a lucrative industry for art dealers and companies producing graffiti-related products. Yet, even as graffiti art is becoming increasingly high-end, the public name-writing tradition continues to be practiced in its original form by groups of working-class people, who remain far removed from the contemporary street art culture.
REFERENCES
Gombrich, E.H. (1936). Weltgeschichte von der Urzeit bis zur Gegenwart (A Little History of the World). Vienna: Steyrermuhl – Verlag. p. 157
Cordsaro, William A. (1997). The Sociology of Childhood.California: Pine Forge Press, Sage Publications Company. p. 4
Kohl, H. (1972). “Golden Boy as Anthony Cool.” New York City: The Dial Press. p. 31
Daniel, B. (Producer/Director). (2005). Who Is Bozo Texino? [Documentary]. USA: Microcosm Publishing. p. 53
Daniel, B. (2008). Mostly True. Bloomington: Microcosm Publishing. p. 26
Gastman, R., Sattler, I. & Rowland, D. (2006). Freight Train Graffiti. New York: HNA Books. p. 87
Chalfant, H., & Cooper, M. (1984). Subway Art. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd. Pg.10
Powers, S. (1999). The Art of Getting Over. New York City: St. Martins Press. p. 45
Austin, J (2001). Taking The Train. New York: Columbia University Press p. 238
Felisbret, E (2008). graffiti New York. New York: Abrams p. 298
