20s / 30s slang? Doughboy, wobbly, pearldiver? Dos Passos?

Question

I'm reading Dos Passos' book, U.S.A. and encountering a lot of 20s/30s slang. What is a doughboy (a type of enlisted man?)? What's a wobbly? What's pearldiving? (is it dishwashing?)

Answer 1

DOUGHBOY

For us today, and maybe for all Americans who will follow, the Doughboys were the men America sent to France in the Great War, who licked Kaiser Bill and fought to make the world safe for Democracy.

The expression doughboy, though, was in wide circulation a century before the First World War in both Britain and America, albeit with some very different meanings. Horatio Nelson's sailors and Wellington's soldiers in Spain were both familiar with fried flour dumplings called doughboys, the predecessor of the modern doughnut that both we and the Doughboys of World War I came to love. Because of the occasional contact of the two nation's armed force and transatlantic migration, it seems likely that this usage was known to the members of the U.S. Army by the early 19th century.

WOBBLIES

The singingest union America ever had was the old Wobblies. Their official name was the Industrial Workers of the World, started in Chicago in June of 1905 by Big Bill Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners, and others who were dissatisfied with the lack of progress of the little old craft unions under Sam Gompers' American Federation of Labor....

They were a defiantly radical group, mostly anarchist-syndicalists of a sort, and they argued bitterly with socialists as to the value of trying to elect working-class congressmen. Their idea was to ultimately sign up all the workers in One Big Union, improve their conditions, and eventually call a general strike to decide who was going to run the world -- the workers or the bosses.

With every union card, they also handed out a little red songbook. The cover carried a motto: "To Fan the Flames of Discontent." Inside were the words to about fifty songs, usually parodies of well-known melodies -- pop songs of the day, hymns, or older tunes commonly sung....

The songs were roared out by Wobblies at meetings, on picket lines, in jails (where IWW men were often put by the dozens and hundreds), on freight trains through South Dakota (filled with migrant harvest hands for the wheat fields), or wherever Wobblies happened to meet. If the Salvation Army was preaching against them from one street corner, they might set up a soapbox on the opposite corner. When the Salvation Army band started up "In the Sweet Bye and Bye," Wobblies would use it to accompany their own singing of Joe Hill's parody, "Pie in the Sky"....

PEARLDIVNG

is dishwashing.  It also has a sexual connotation.