Citizen Hobo

How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America

Todd DePastino

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780226143798
  9780226143781
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226143804
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In the years following the Civil War, a veritable army of homeless men swept across America's "wageworkers' frontier" and forged a beguiling and bedeviling counterculture known as "hobohemia." Celebrating unfettered masculinity and jealously guarding the American road as the preserve of white manhood, hoboes took command of downtown districts and swaggered onto center stage of the new urban culture. Less obviously, perhaps, they also staked their own claims on the American polity, claims that would in fact transform the very entitlements of American citizenship.

In this eye-opening work of American history, Todd DePastino tells the epic story of hobohemia's rise and fall, and crafts a stunning new interpretation of the "American century" in the process. Drawing on sources ranging from diaries, letters, and police reports to movies and memoirs, Citizen Hobo breathes life into the largely forgotten world of the road, but it also, crucially, shows how the hobo army so haunted the American body politic that it prompted the creation of an entirely new social order and political economy. DePastino shows how hoboes—with their reputation as dangers to civilization, sexual savages, and professional idlers—became a cultural and political force, influencing the creation of welfare state measures, the promotion of mass consumption, and the suburbanization of America. Citizen Hobo's sweeping retelling of American nationhood in light of enduring struggles over "home" does more than chart the change from "homelessness" to "houselessness." In its breadth and scope, the book offers nothing less than an essential new context for thinking about Americans' struggles against inequality and alienation.

PART I

THE RISE OF HOBOHEMIA, 1870-1920

“THE GREAT ARMY OF TRAMPS”

Long before he became famous as a pioneering photojournalist and slum reformer, Jacob Riis was a tramp. Riis first arrived to America in the spring of 1870, a twenty-one-year-old Danish immigrant with empty pockets but great ambition. For the next three and a half years, Riis walked and rode over thirty-five hundred miles in search of work, traveling back and forth between the metropolitan areas of New York, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Chicago. While on the move, Riis improvised shelter—“rarely the same for two nights together”—stealing sleep in hay wagons, sheds, barns, open fields, and graveyards (because “brownstone keeps warm long after the sun has set”). While in the city, Riis lodged day-to-day when he could, taking to doorways, parks, and, in at least two instances, police station lodging when money ran out. For food, Riis scavenged and begged, searching out “windfall apples,” knocking on back doors, and even, on occasion, hunting rabbits and squirrels, in order to eat the meat and sell the pelts. Of course, Riis also sold his labor. By the time he launched his career as a Bowery beat reporter, Riis had worked as a carpenter, coal miner, farmhand, railroad tracklayer, dockworker, steamship sailor, sawmill hand, factory operative, drummer, peddler, brick maker, telegrapher, and house servant. Not one of his jobs lasted for more than six weeks; most lasted for only a few days. “The love of change belongs to youth,” Riis explains in his autobiography, “and I meant to take a hand in things as they came along.”¹

Whether from the love of change or the pinch of hunger, Jacob Riis had joined a growing body of young male workers who, in the years following the Civil War, traveled far and often in search of wage labor. In 1870, when Riis entered this migratory labor stream, most Americans were unaware of what Riis called “the great army of tramps” flocking to American highways. It would take a Wall Street crash in September 1873 and five subsequent years of bankruptcies, wage cuts, layoffs, strikes, and mass unemployment—the first international “great depression”—to thrust the tramp army to the fore of public consciousness. With thousands, perhaps millions, on the road, newspaper editors, charity workers, and government officials across the nation asked the question “What shall we do with our tramps?”² “There is perhaps no problem in social science that is just now more pressing,” declared the New York Times in 1875, “than what to do with the great and increasing army of mendicants who . . . from their mode of life, have gained the name of ‘tramp.’”³

In responding to this problem, America’s opinion and policy makers were not generous. Rather than offer charity, they called for mass arrests, workhouses, and chain gangs. Some advocated more creative solutions. On July 12, 1877, the Chicago Tribune advised “putting a little strychnine or arsenic in the meat and other supplies furnished to tramps” as “a warning to other tramps to keep out of the neighborhood.”⁴ Another paper proposed flooding poorhouses with six feet of water so that tramps would “be compelled to bail” or drown.⁵ Justifying such extreme measures was the dean of Yale Law School, Francis Wayland, who delivered a widely circulated paper on tramps before the American Social Science Association in September 1877. “As we utter the word Tramp,” Wayland declared at the outset of his address, “there arises straightway before us the spectacle of a lazy, shiftless, sauntering or swaggering, ill-conditioned, irreclaimable, incorrigible, cowardly, utterly depraved savage.”⁶

Although revealing little about actual tramps themselves, such expressions of fear and loathing tell us much about middle-class perceptions of crisis in the Gilded Age. Tramps stood at the center of a swirling vortex of concerns about the new corporate industrial order coming into being after the Civil War. Americans in these years saw the rise of large-scale manufacturing and mass production, the spread of railroads and continental markets, and the creation of strict workplace hierarchies based on a universal system of wage labor. As the pace of industrialization quickened and economic power became concentrated in fewer hands, pitched battles erupted between capital and labor over not only the fruits of production, but the very destiny of industrial civilization itself. Tramps were both victims and agents of the new economic system, itinerant laborers clinging beneath the speeding freight train of industrial capitalist expansion. Because they seemed strange and placeless—“here to-day and gone tomorrow”—tramps served as convenient screens onto which middle-class Americans projected their insecurities, anxieties, and fantasies about urban industrial life.⁷

Tramps, of course, wrestled with their own insecurities, though middle-class descriptions of tramp life hardly mentioned them. Tramping was an expression of the new social and economic relationships coming to dominate American life in the Gilded Age. Increasingly dependent upon wages and decreasingly secure in their jobs, working people the nation over faced the threat of poverty, dislocation, and the shattering of their customary patterns of life. In the face of these changes, some workers took to the road and, in so doing, collectively gave rise to a new modern problem of homelessness that would command the attention of private and public officials for generations to come.

Because the alarm raised by the tramp crisis of the 1870s reverberated halfway into the twentieth century, charting the emergence of this first tramp army is crucial to understanding the subsequent history of American homelessness. What exactly was new about the great army of tramps? How did Gilded Age tramps differ from previous generations of homeless vagrants? Where and how did they travel? Why did some poor Americans hit the road while others stayed put? And how did tramps get by once they found themselves, as Jacob Riis did, “on the tow-path looking for a job”?⁸

As for the larger culture, what was its response to this new tramp army? How did middle-class observers explain its rather sudden appearance? What logic, conscious or not, governed middle-class nightmares about “savage” tramps? And why did the tramp crisis become such a flashpoint in the larger struggle over the destiny and meaning of the new industrial America?

THE MAKING OF AMERICA’S TRAMP ARMY

In what one commentator called “a happy innovation of language,” Americans in 1873 coined the word “tramp” to describe the legion of men traveling the nation “with no visible means of support.”⁹ Previously, the noun had denoted “an invigorating walking expedition” or, during the Civil War, “a long, tiring, or toilsome walk or march.”¹⁰ Stressing mobility, the new usage also signified a sense of novelty, as if older terms such as “vagrant” or “vagabond” were somehow inappropriate to the moment.

But despite the innovation of language, neither homeless migration nor the fearful responses to it were new to American life in the Gilded Age. Long before the tramp crisis of the 1870s, poor men and women traveled in search of work and relief, often encountering fear and hostility instead. Indeed, court records from the earliest English settlements in America abound with references to the “strolling” or “wandering” poor. Seventeenth-century English colonists had left a country that itself was awash with “vagabonds” and “masterless men”: displaced laborers drifting in and out of urban centers. A flourishing literature of “roguery” that purported to catalog the various deceits and depredations of these wayfarers kept the sense of crisis alive, while new draconian penalties for vagabondage—whipping, branding, and hanging among them—set the standard for cruelty. The problem was so urgent that propagandists for colonization such as Richard Hakluyt even urged the establishment of English settlements in America in order to relieve the mother country of its vagrant and “surplus” population. British America, in a sense, was founded as a refuge from, and solution to, the homelessness crisis of Tudor and Stuart England.¹¹

A highly mobile people themselves, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Americans harbored the Old World’s suspicions of wandering strangers and took vigorous measures to suppress the transient poor. “Masterlessness” remained a major problem in the New World as the vagabond population swelled with escaped slaves, runaway servants and apprentices, and a host of others recently released from bondage. Those with skills or money usually gained residency or “settlement” when they moved to a new town, while indigent migrants were often “warned out” and physically removed beyond town limits. Settlement laws, which remained in effect until well into the twentieth century, protected towns not only from the responsibilities of poor relief, but also from the exotic and unwanted cultural influences that often accompanied wandering strangers. The tightly regulated towns of colonial New England, for example, frequently banned newcomers who carried religious convictions, political ideas, or moral standards that departed from community norms. Transients judged to be particularly dangerous, in either the criminal or cultural senses, could be deemed “vagabonds” and subjected to the grisly punishments customary in England. Pillorying, branding, flogging, or ear cropping often awaited those migrants who could not give “a good and satisfactory account of their wandering up and down.”¹² Like the laws of settlement, vagrancy statutes legitimized and facilitated the mobility of better-off transients while discouraging and criminalizing the movement of the poor.

These laws, strict as they were, proved ineffective in the face of the market and transportation revolutions of the 1820s and 1830s, which unleashed new streams of poor migrants throughout the country. Some of these migrants sought the new employment opportunities afforded by the Jacksonian economy. Young single men poured into and out of such inland boomtowns as Rochester, New York, for example, finding seasonal work along the Erie Canal. These unattached and highly mobile workers made up 71 percent of Rochester’s adult male workforce, filling the city’s burgeoning workshops, boardinghouses, barrooms, and streets. The rowdy subculture they created alarmed Rochester’s more stable middle-class residents. Caught up in the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening, reform-minded citizens launched temperance crusades and other organizations to impose moral order on this floating army of workers.¹³

While the commercial revolution set new groups of migrants in pursuit of opportunity, it also dislocated those farmers and artisans bankrupted by the new wildly competitive economy. Rural families scrambling for cash to pay rents, debts, or taxes swarmed into urban centers such as Philadelphia and New York on the promise of wage labor. Testifying to the frequent failure of these cities to make good on that promise was a newly refurbished urban institution: the almshouse. No longer able merely to “pass on” or “warn out” shelterless paupers, antebellum civic leaders sought to control and rehabilitate the vagrant poor in regimented caretaking institutions.¹⁴

The vast majority of those we might now call homeless, however, managed to avoid whatever care the almshouse afforded by earning their subsistence in the economy of the streets. Indeed, when antebellum commentators talked of the “vagrant mode of life,” they denoted not homelessness per se, but the casual labor that poor city dwellers increasingly pursued. Peddling, scavenging, begging, prostitution, petty thievery, gambling, and any other “disorderly” public activity that threatened or “injured” the moneymaking potential of urban real estate all fell under the legal purview of vagrancy. By 1860 entire neighborhoods of the propertyless poor, like New York City’s notorious Five Points in lower Manhattan, became known as “vagrant” districts not only because of their degraded housing conditions, but also because of their illegal street economies. That relatively settled neighborhood residents could be deemed vagrants attests to the enduring and multifaceted nature of vagrancy in nineteenth-century America.¹⁵

As these historical precedents suggest, the tramp crisis of 1873–78, while eclipsing everything that had come before in its breadth and intensity, was not entirely, as one journalist claimed in 1877, like “a thunder-burst from a clear sky.”¹⁶ Indeed, the great army of tramps was in many ways merely another variation on the old, if ever-changing, theme of American homelessness stretching back to the days of colonization. Gilded Age tramps, like their homeless predecessors, took to the road because of dislocation and unemployment or because of new opportunities resulting from economic expansion. Just as propertyless migrants in the early nineteenth century encountered an array of law enforcement and charity officials bent on punishing, incarcerating, or rehabilitating them, so, too, did late-nineteenth-century tramps. Indeed, tramps of the 1870s inspired a whole new generation of vagrancy laws and workhouse disciplines. But, also like earlier vagrants, most tramps found temporary refuges of their own in working-class neighborhoods and the casual labor economy.

Middle-class perceptions of crisis in the Gilded Age also mirrored earlier panics over vagrancy. The factors generating concern about the “vagrant mode of life” in the antebellum period also fueled the tramp scare of the 1870s: the struggles between the propertied and unpropertied over the uses of public space, fears about the growth of a propertyless proletariat, and anxieties about the loss of traditional social controls in American cities. Viewed from one perspective, the rise of America’s great tramp army in the 1870s proves nothing more than the biblical adage “the poor you have with you always.”

But, to borrow again from Scripture, American homelessness was a house of many mansions, and the great army of tramps possessed numerous features distinguishing it from previous groups of the migrant poor. As the term “tramp” suggests, what struck Gilded Age Americans most about the new homeless army was its stunning mobility. Jacob Riis’s constant shifting back and forth between and within metropolitan regions was not unusual. Unemployed men of the 1870s routinely traveled hundreds of miles at a stretch. Even in a nation where over half the population changed residences every ten years, such extreme mobility caused...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I : The Rise of Hobohemia, 1870–1920
• Part II : Hobohemia and Homelessness in The Early Twentieth Century
• Part III : Resettling The Hobo Army, 1920–1980
• Part IV : The Enduring Legacy: Homelessness and American Culture Since 1980
• Notes
• Index