However, a counter-mythology hides in the shadow of the Eads Bridge. While most St. Louisans know James Buchanan Eads, his grandson James Eads How is consigned to the margins of even local history, where if he is remembered at all it is as an eccentric curiosity. In 1898, the younger James attained celebrity for spurning his inheritance to the family fortune and living as a shabbily dressed itinerant worker. After the death of James’s father that year, a nationally circulated article announced that “the millionaire grandson of James B. Eads has given up luxuries and a palace in St. Louis for plain living and missionary work in the slums of the city.” The press faithfully reported on the young man’s charitable acts for the next ten years, when newspapers began to call him the “millionaire tramp.” James spent his adult life riding the rails, looking for temporary manual labor and dipping into his funds only to finance his mutual aid society, the International Brotherhood Welfare Association (IBWA).
Initially, the IBWA was known for the “Hobo Colleges” that it established across the Midwest, with active operations in St. Louis, Chicago, and Cincinnati. A Harvard man, James organized and sometimes taught classes on law, public speaking, and history to the train-hoppers who happened to be in town en route to their next job. Asked why he spent his time teaching wandering laborers when he could have been lavishing in luxury, James would repeat what he had allegedly said to the mayor of St. Louis when he requested that all $20,000 of the inheritance from his father go to the city’s poor instead – “Whose money is this? I didn’t do anything for this.” James decided that his family fortune rightfully belonged to members of America’s most precarious workforce, the temporarily employed and constantly traveling class known then as “hoboes."
While no historian has concluded why James felt that this particular population possessed the best claim to his millions, his decision makes a certain sense considering his family’s businesses. James’ father, James Flintham How, was an executive of the Wabash Railroad, one of the most succesful railways in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Midwest. Wabash connected Ohio to Kansas City, stretching north to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It’s likely that from an early age James heard about an underclass of men who illegally stowed away on the company cars, denying his father’s side of the family their train fares and his mother’s side their bridge tolls.
Railroads deployed police as well as public sentiment to vilify migrant workers and prevent them from taking money out of the company pocket. James undid quite a bit of Wabash’s efforts in 1915 when his mother died, leaving him in possession of his full inheritance. The tramp king immediately put his money toward what would become his seldom-cited contribution to radical American literature, a monthly magazine called the Hobo News.