Hitch-hiking in The Nation
Webified by Bernd Wechner - Please respect his efforts and avoid plagiarism (namely uncredited copying of this page).

On September 19th, 1923, The Drifter ran an article that introduced a new type of traveller, one who begs lifts by the side of the road. He calls them "hitch-hikers", placing the term in quotes, suggestive of the tentative use of a word that has not yet found its way into the common language, that has only recently been coined. That first historic article is presented here. 
 

The Nation September 19, 1923 In the Driftway THE Drifter feared that the romance of the road was gone forever. In all ages wayfaring had been wildly or quaintly adventurous. He thought of the Canterbury Pilgrims, the wandering players of Scarron, the traveling journeymen of the Rhine and Elbe, the stage-coach jaunts of all his friends in Dickens and elsewhere and despaired. In a high-powered car a friend had driven the Drifter to Boston. There were "road-hogs" and "speed-hounds" and traffic-cops of varying temper. The road-houses were spuriously elegant; the food was conventional and dear. No, said the Drifter to himself, it is all over. Maybe hoboes have a little fun and adventure - maybe.  *  *  *  *  * HE knows better now. You must stay away from the National Highways and Boston Roads. Somewhere in northern Vermont, with the Adirondacks towering beautifully on one side and the Green Mountains no less beautiful on the other, the Drifter drove a Ford sedan over a white, sandy ribbon of road that wound in wild gyrations in and out of the hills, took breathless turns and unexpected leaps, and finally writhed its way into the tiny capital of Montpelier where under a Lilliputian gilded dome the State senate still deliberates by the light of gas lamps. The Ford sedan, named Susie, hopped and skidded in the sand and flew over rather than on the road. Inns were advertised at crossings in faded lettering. But when you got to them there was nothing to be had. A long, unshaven, lanky individual would gaze lugubriously at the Drifter and his friend. He had pork. "What else?" the Drifter asked. "Pork," the hirsute gentleman replied with dull finality. Here hunting dinner was high adventure. You lost your way. From afar you spied a sign. "Ah," you exclaimed and stepped on the gas so that poor Susie quaked and trembled. You came up to the sign. It said: "Pigs for Sale."  *  *  *  *  * SUCH incidents smack of the roads of old. And if there are neither pilgrims nor wandering minstrels, there are "hitch-hikers." Suddenly, some hundreds of feet in front of Susie, who was northward bound, appeared three figures who were at once lithe and stalwart. The Drifter stopped and beheld three young women - dusty Valkyries in gray knickers and sweaters and thick stockings, stout-booted, with small gay caps, knapsacks and cameras slung over shoulders shapely even under the rough, knitted stuff. They wanted a lift. They were New York girls on a vacation determined to beg lifts - that is the method of the "hitch-hiker" - to Montreal. One of them was communicative. "We've had good luck. If our luck holds we'll be hitching into Montreal tonight in time to catch a ferry for Quebec. No, we don't often sleep at inns. Usually there's a Y where we can stop nights. There are thousands of us, of course. Hitch-hiking is always done by twos and threes. We know girls who have hitched all the way to California. There's little trouble and most motorists are pretty good to us. It's a great way of seeing the country." The roads full of "hitch-hikers"! Unless human nature has changed - it hasn't of course - there begins here a life of the road full of romantic and gallant and even brilliant adventure. Even a humble Ford car can rattle through fabled mountains and meet dryads on the way. THE DRIFTER

Seven weeks later there appears a follow-up to that original article, a kind of rhetorical retort. It looks to me as if the Drifter, is writing under the pseudonym The Hiker, attacking his own earlier article, as if to demonstrate the two sides of one argument. Of course things may be just as they appear, a reader having written in under the pseudonym The Hiker. The facts are lost somewhere in the mists of time, and the style of this column was not such as to provide us with any clue, as if revelling in the mystery it generates. 
 

The Nation November 7, 1923 In the Driftway "TO THE DRIFTER: SIR: I have been chewing a cud of protesting reflection upon your discovery of romance on a Vermont road. To you, dull, settled city-dweller as you evidently are, an inn with no food but pork, and three city girls stealing rides far from home constitute Adventure, Romance, Mystery. You remind me, sir, of the people who talk of the beautiful Zanzibar landscape after reading Mr. Stodard's travel books.    *  *  *  *  * "ROMANCE is not to be found in a Ford car. The automobile is almost as deadly an enemy of adventure as the telephone and the radio. All of these horrid instruments destroy loneliness, and there can be no romance, no adventure, no mystery, no poetry - none of the things which make life worth living - without loneliness. Company destroys the individual. Solitude alone is creative. Can you imagine Shelley whizzing along the Bay of Naples in a crowded touring-car and writing `I could lie down like a tired child'? With ear attuned to that jump in the motor he would never have noticed that `The City's voice itself is soft like Solitude's.' Can you conceive Keats stepping back into his car after five minutes in a museum and penciling `Thou still unravished bride of quietness,' or blind Milton listening to an impatient honk-honk-honk? No automobilist would think to write `Bare, ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang'; he never hears the birds except when he stops to pick up a hitch-hiker.    *  *  *  *  * "I would not deny all virtue to the automobilist. Now that he has polluted the roads he may as well be used. There is no longer any pedestrian pleasure in a white ribbon of road; instead of stretching one's legs into the long, relaxed stride that comes as a rest after uneven country one must step uneasily, with ear tense and muscles ready for the jump across the ditch when such city-folk as you scoot past. I have no protest to make against those who use you, who wait at the hill-top or the railroad crossing, the only points where you slow down, and demand a lift. But I pity those who think of this as romance. We who have done it know better.  *  *  *  *  * "HITCH-HIKING is no thoughtless expression of the untrammeled pioneer, but one of the most desolate of the exact sciences. From the point of view of the dull motorist it may have an element of adventure. Even the girls who sleep at the "Y" must be exciting to those victims of civilisation, like yourself, who know only the type that ride in automobiles and sleep in hotels. But from the point of view of the pedestrian all automobilists fall into dead categories. There is no use hailing a car with two young folks of opposite sexes on the front seat, even though there be five unoccupied places in the rear. There is no use trying to stop a driver who wears goggles; they are all flinty-hearted. A lone man hiker need never trouble to hail a car with only men inside and a lone girl hiker wastes time in appealing to women. It takes a quick eye to a appraise a car and its occupants before it has passed forever - whether one had best appeal to the driver or to the woman (or in these days man) beside him or her, how much room there is behind, and whether one had best ask a lift only to the next village or admit that one has fifty miles to go. Like all sciences it seems fascinating to the amateur. but it becomes dull and disappointing after a little experience. The automobilists are so uninteresting.    *  *  *  *  * "THERE is romance, there is adventure, there is mystery for the hiker afoot who, with an all-sufficient pack upon his back, is free to desert roads and even paths, can cross any stream and scale any mountain, and follow any inviting vista without consulting the blue-book. Those Adirondacks and Green Mountains which look so beautiful to you from the road - what do you know of them now? You might as well say that you understood candy because you had gazed at it through a plate-glass window. Mountains must be climbed as surely as candy must be tasted. But what is the use of explaining this to you? Probably you are old, rheumatic and dyspeptic.  "THE HIKER"