THE HOBO

THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE HOMELESS MAN

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

THE BAKER AND TAYLOR COMPANY, NEW YORK

THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, LONDON

THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA, TOKYO

THE MISSION BOOK COMPANY, SHANGHAI

THE HOBO

THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE
HOMELESS MAN

By NELS ANDERSON

A STUDY PREPARED FOR THE CHICAGO
COUNCIL OF SOCIAL AGENCIES UNDER
THE DIRECTION OF THE COMMITTEE
ON HOMELESS MEN

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO · ILLINOIS

COPYRIGHT 1923 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PUBLISHED MAY 1923

COMPOSED AND PRINTED BY

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, U.S.A.

[v]

The present volume is intended to be the first of a series of studies of the urban community and of city life. The old familiar problems of our communal and social life—poverty, crime, and vice—assume new and strange forms under the conditions of modern urban existence. Inherited custom, tradition, all our ancient social and political heritages—human nature itself—have changed and are changing under the influence of the modern urban environment.

The man whose restless disposition made him a pioneer on the frontier tends to become a “homeless man”—a hobo and a vagrant—in the modern city. From the point of view of their biological predispositions, the pioneer and the hobo are perhaps the same temperamental type; from the point of view of their socially acquired traits, they are something quite different.

The city, more than any other product of man’s genius and labors, represents the effort of mankind to remake the world in accordance with its wishes, but the city, once made, compels man to conform to the structure and the purposes he himself has imposed upon it. If it is true that man made the city, it is quite as true that the city is now making man. That is certainly a part of what we mean when we speak of the “urban” as contrasted with the “rural” mind. In any case, it is true that within the circle of these two tendencies, man’s disposition,[vi] on the one hand, to create a world in which he can live, and, on the other, to adapt himself to the world which he himself has created, all, or most all of the problems and the processes are included with which the student of society is positively concerned. These processes go on, and these problems arise everywhere that men, coming together in order to live, find themselves compelled to carry on a common and communal life. In cities, however, and particularly in great cities, where social life is more intense than elsewhere, the processes produce new and strange effects, and the problems are more poignant and pressing.

A changing population of from 30,000 to 75,000 homeless men in Chicago, living together within the area of thirty or forty city blocks, has created a milieu in which new and unusual personal types flourish and new and unsuspected problems have arisen.

If the city were to be identified, as it sometimes has been, with its mere physical structure, its buildings, streets, street railways, telephones, and other communal efficiencies; if the city were, in fact, a mere complex of mechanical and administrative devices for realizing certain clearly defined purposes, the problem of the city would be one of engineering and of administration merely. But this takes no account of human nature; it takes no account of what we have come to refer to in industry as the “problem of personnel.” At least it seems to assume that the individual men and women for whom these organized agencies—economic, social, and political—exist, and by whom they are conducted, remain, in all their varied associations and[vii] relations, practically the same. Recent observation, on the other hand, has led to the conclusion that human nature, as we ordinarily understand it, while it is based on certain fundamental but not clearly definable human traits and predispositions, is very largely a product of the environment, and particularly the human environment in which the individual happens to find himself. That means that every community, through the very character of the environment which it imposes upon the individuals that compose it, tends to determine the personal traits as it does determine the language, the vocation, social values, and, eventually, the personal opinions, of the individuals who compose it.

It is the purpose of this and the succeeding studies in this series to describe the changes that are taking place in the life of the city and its peoples, and to investigate the city’s problems in the light of these changes, and conditions of life generally of urban people. For this reason, this study of the “homeless man” has sought to see him, first of all, in his own habitat; in the social milieu which he has created for himself within the limits of the larger community by which he is surrounded, but from which he is, in large part, an outcast.

It is interesting to notice that within the area of his own social environment, the hobo has created, or at least there has grown up in response to his needs, a distinct and relatively independent local community, with its own economic, social, and social-political institutions.

It is assumed that the study here made of the “Hobohemia” of Chicago, as well as the studies that are being planned for other areas and aspects of[viii] the city and its life, will at least be comparable with the natural areas and the problematic aspects of other American cities. It is, in fact, the purpose of these studies to emphasize not so much the particular and local as the generic and universal aspects of the city and its life, and so make these studies not merely a contribution to our information but to our permanent scientific knowledge of the city as a communal type.

Robert E. Park

[ix]

The Committee on Homeless Men was organized by the Executive Committee of the Chicago Council of Social Agencies on June 16, 1922, to study the problem of the migratory casual worker. Its members included men and women in contact with the problem of homeless men from different points of view.

Mr. Nels Anderson, a graduate student in sociology in the University of Chicago, was selected to make the study. Mr. Anderson was already thoroughly familiar with the life of the migratory casual worker. He had shared their experiences “on the road” and at work, and had visited the Hobohemian areas of many of the large western cities. In the summer of 1921, he made a study of 400 migrants. Early in 1922, through the generous assistance and encouragement of Dr. William A. Evans, Dr. Ben L. Reitman, and Joel D. Hunter, he began a study of homeless men in Chicago, in connection with a field-study course at the University of Chicago.

The assumption of this study by the Chicago Council of Social Agencies, in co-operation with the Juvenile Protective Association, enabled an enlargement of its scope.[1]

The object of this inquiry, from the standpoint of the Committee, was to secure those facts which would enable social agencies to deal intelligently with the problems created by the continuous ebb and flow,[x] out of and into Chicago, of tens of thousands of foot-loose and homeless men. Only through an understanding both of the human nature of the migratory casual worker, and of the economic and social forces which have shaped his personality, could there be devised any fundamental program for social agencies interested in his welfare.

Earlier studies of the migratory casual workers in the United States have been limited almost entirely to statistical investigation. In the present inquiry a more intensive study of cases was decided upon in preference to an extensive statistical survey. For the past twelve months Mr. Anderson lived in Hobohemia, and in a natural and informal way secured upward of sixty life-histories, and collected, in addition, a mass of documents and other materials which are listed in Appendix B. Mr. Anderson has had, in certain parts of the field work, the assistance of C. W. Allen, L. G. Brown, G. F. Davis, B. W. Bridgman, F. C. Frey, E. H. Koster, G. S. Sobel, H. D. Wolf, and R. N. Wood, students in sociology at the University of Chicago, and has utilized the results of past studies of this subject by students in the department.

The Committee on Homeless Men held many meetings which were devoted to outlining the plan of investigation, to reports upon the progress of field work, and to the drafting of the findings and recommendations which appear as Appendix A.

The Committee and the author are indebted to the social agencies and to the many persons who co-operated in furnishing data for this investigation. They desire also to express their appreciation to Professor Robert E. Park for the inclusion of this[xi] volume as the first of a series of studies on the urban community of which he is editor, and for his services in the preparation of the manuscript for publication.

[xii-xiii]

[xiv-xv]

[xvi-1]

HOBOHEMIA, THE HOME OF THE HOMELESS MAN

[2-3]

A survey of the lodging-house and hotel population, supplemented by the census reports of the areas in which they live, indicates that the number of homeless men in Chicago ranges from 30,000 in good times to 75,000 in hard times.

We may say that approximately one-third of these are permanent residents of the city. The other two-thirds are here today and gone tomorrow. When work is plentiful they seldom linger in the city more than a week at a time. In winter when jobs are scarce, and it takes courage to face the inclement weather, the visits to town lengthen to three weeks and a month. From 300,000 to 500,000 of these migratory men pass through the city during the course of a normal year.

A still larger number are wanderers who have spent their days and their strength on the “long, gray road” and have fled to this haven for succor. They are Chicago’s portion of the down-and-outs.

[4]

Every large city has its district into which these homeless types gravitate. In the parlance of the “road” such a section is known as the “stem” or the “main drag.” To the homeless man it is home, for there, no matter how sorry his lot, he can find those who will understand. The veteran of the road finds other veterans; the old man finds the aged; the chronic grouch finds fellowship; the radical, the optimist, the crook, the inebriate, all find others here to tune in with them. The wanderer finds friends here or enemies, but, and that is at once a characteristic and pathetic feature of Hobohemia, they are friends or enemies only for the day. They meet and pass on.

Hobohemia is divided into four parts—west, south, north, and east—and no part is more than five minutes from the heart of the Loop. They are all the “stem” as they are also Hobohemia. This four-part concept, Hobohemia, is Chicago to the down-and-out.

To the men of the road, West Madison Street is the “slave market.” It is the slave market because[5] here most of the employment agencies are located. Here men in search of work bargain for jobs in distant places with the “man catchers” from the agencies. Most of the men on West Madison Street are looking for work. If they are not seeking work they want jobs, at least; jobs that have long rides thrown in. Most of the men seen here are young, at any rate they are men under middle age; restless, seeking, they parade the streets and scan the signs chalked on the windows or smeared over colored posters. Eager to “ship” somewhere, they are generally interested in a job as a means to reach a destination. The result is that distant jobs are in demand while good, paying, local jobs usually go begging.

West Madison, being a port of homeless men, has its own characteristic institutions and professions. The bootlegger is at home here; the dope peddler hunts and finds here his victims; here the professional gambler plies his trade and the “jack roller,” as he is commonly called, the man who robs his fellows, while they are drunk or asleep; these and others of their kind find in the anonymity of this changing population the freedom and security that only the crowded city offers.

The street has its share also of peddlers, beggars, cripples, and old, broken men; men worn out with the adventure and vicissitudes of life on the road. One of its most striking characteristics is the almost complete absence of women and children; it is the most completely womanless and childless of all the city areas. It is quite definitely a man’s street.

West Madison Street, near the river, has always been a stronghold of the casual laborer. At one[6] time it was a rendezvous for the seamen, but of late these have made South Chicago their haven. Even before the coming of the factories, before family life had wholly departed, this was an area of the homeless man. It will continue to be so, no doubt, until big businesses or a new union depot crowds the hobo out. Then he will move farther out into that area of deteriorated property that inevitably grows up just outside the business center of the city, where property, which has been abandoned for residences, has not yet been taken over by businesses, and where land values are high but rents are low.

Jefferson Park, between Adams and Monroe and west of Throop Street, is an appanage of the “slave market.” It is the favorite place for the “bos” to sleep in summer or to enjoy their leisure, relating their adventures and reading the papers. On the “stem” it is known as “Bum Park,” and men who visit it daily know no other name for it. A certain high spot of ground in the park is generally designated as “Crumb Hill.” It is especially dedicated to “drunks.” At any rate, the drunk and the drowsy seem inevitably to drift to this rise of ground. In fact, so many men visit the place that the grass under the trees seems to be having a fierce struggle to hold its own. It must be said, however, that the men who go to “Bum Park” are for the most part sober and well behaved. It is too far out for the more confirmed Madison Street bums to walk. The town folks of the neighborhood use the park, to a certain extent, but the women and children of the neighborhood are usually outnumbered by the men of the road, who monopolize the benches and crowd the shady places.

[7]

The thing that characterizes State Street south of the Loop is the burlesque show. It is here that the hobo, seeking entertainment, is cheered and gladdened by the “bathing beauties” and the oriental dancers. Here, also, he finds improvement at the hands of the lady barbers, who, it is reported, are using these men as a wedge to make their way into a profitable profession that up to the present time has belonged almost wholly to men.

South State Street differs from West Madison in many particulars. For one thing there are more women here, and there is nothing like so complete an absence of family life. The male population, likewise, is of a totally different complexion. The prevailing color is an urban pink, rather than the rural grime and bronze of the man on the road. There are not so many restless, seeking youngsters.

Men do not parade the streets in groups of threes and fours with their coats or bundles under their arms. There are no employment offices on this street. They are not needed. Nobody wants to go anywhere. When these men work they are content to take some short job in the city. Short local jobs are at a premium. Many of these men have petty jobs about the city where they work a few hours a day and are able to earn enough to live. In winter many men will be found in the cheap hotels on South State, Van Buren, or South Clark streets who have been able to save enough money during the summer to house themselves during the cold weather. State Street is the rendezvous of the vagabond who has settled and retired, the “home guard” as they are rather contemptuously referred to by the tribe[8] of younger and more adventurous men who still choose to take the road.

The white man’s end of the south section of Hobohemia does not extend south of Twelfth Street. From that point on to about Thirtieth Street there is an area that has been taken over by the colored population. Colored people go much farther south, but if there are any homeless men in the “Black Belt,” they are likely to be found along State Street, between Twenty-second and Thirtieth. The Douglas Hotel, in this region, is a colored man’s lodging-house.

To the south and southwest are the railroad yards. In summer homeless men find these yards a convenient place to pass the night. For those who wish to leave the city, they are the more accessible than the yards on the north and west. The railroad yard is, in most places, one of the hobo’s favorite holdouts. It is a good place to loaf. There are coal and wood and often vacant spaces where he can build fires and cook food or keep warm. This is not so easily done in Chicago where the tramp’s most deadly enemy, the railroad police, are numerous and in closer co-operation with the civil authorities than in most cities. In spite of this, hobos hang about the yards.

On the north side of the river, Clark Street below Chicago Avenue is the “stem.” Here a class of transients have drifted together, forming a group unlike any in either of the other areas of Hobohemia. This is the region of the hobo intellectuals. This area may be described as the rendezvous of the thinker, the dreamer, and the chronic agitator.[9] Many of its denizens are “home guards.” Few transients ever turn up here; they do not have time. They alone come here who have time to think, patience to listen, or courage to talk. Washington Square is the center of the northern area. To the “bos” it is “Bughouse Square.” Many people do not know any other name for it. This area is as near to the so-called Latin Quarter as the hobo dare come. “Bughouse Square” is, in fact, quite as much the stronghold of the more or less vagabond poets, artists, writers, revolutionists, of various types as of the go-abouts. Among themselves this region is known as the “village.”

Bohemia and Hobohemia meet at “Bughouse Square.” On Sundays and holidays, any evening, in fact, when the weather permits, it will be teeming with life. At such times all the benches will be occupied. On the grass in the shade of the trees men sit about in little groups of a dozen or less. The park, except a little corner to the southeast where the women come to read, or knit, or gossip, while the children play, is completely in possession of men. A polyglot population swarms here. Tramps, and hobos—yes, but they are only scatteringly represented. Pale-faced denizens of the Russian tearooms, philosophers and enthusiasts from the “Blue Fish,” brush shoulders with kindred types from the “Dill Pickle,” the “Green Mask,” the “Gray Cottage.” Free-lance propagandists who belong to no group and claim no following, non-conformists, dreamers, fakers, beggars, bootleggers, dope fiends—they are all here.

Around the edges of the Square the curbstone orators gather their audiences. Religion, politics,[10] science, the economic struggle, these are the principal themes of discussion in this outdoor forum. Often there are three or four audiences gathered at the same time in different parts of the park, each carrying on a different discussion. One may be calling miserable sinners to repent, and the other denouncing all religion as superstition. Opposing speakers frequently follow each other, talking to the same audience. In this aggregation of minds the most striking thing is the variety and violence of the antipathies. There is, notwithstanding, a generous tolerance. It is probably a tolerance growing out of the fact, that, although everyone talks and argues, no one takes the other seriously. It helps to pass the time and that is why folks come to “Bughouse Square.”

To the hobo who thinks, even though he does not think well, the lower North Side is a great source of comfort. On the North Side he finds people to whom he can talk and to whom he is willing to listen. Hobos do not generally go there to listen, however, but burning with a message of which they are bound to unburden themselves. They go to speak, perhaps to write. Many of them are there to get away from the sordidness of life in other areas of Hobohemia.

Grant Park, east of Michigan Avenue, is a loafing place for hobos with time on their hands. They gather here from all parts of Hobohemia to read the papers, to talk, and to kill time. For men who have not had a bed it is a good place to sleep when the sun is kind and the grass is warm. In the long[11] summer evenings Grant Park is a favorite gathering place for men who like to get together to tell yarns and to frolic. It is a favorite rendezvous for the boy tramps.

The section of Grant Park facing the lake shore is no less popular. Along the shore from the Field Museum northward to Randolph Street the homeless men have access to the lake. They take advantage of the unimproved condition of the park and make of the place, between the railroad tracks and the lake, a retreat, a resort, a social center. Here they wash their clothes, bathe, sew, mend shoes.

Behind the Field Museum, on the section of the park that is still being used as a dump for rubbish, the hobos have established a series of camps or “jungles.” Here, not more than five minutes from the Loop, are numerous improvised shacks in which men live. Many men visit these sections only for the day. To them it is a good place to come to fish and they spend hours gazing at the water and trying to keep the little fish from biting.

The hobo has no social centers other than the “stem,” and the “jungle.” He either spends his leisure in the “jungles” or in town. The “jungle” ordinarily is a station on his way to town. Life revolves for him around his contacts on the “stem,” and it is to town he hies himself whenever free to do so.

Few casuals can give any reason for the attraction that the city has for them. Few have ever considered it. The explanations they give, when pressed for reasons, are more or less matter of fact[12] and center in their material interests. Other motives, motives of which they are only half conscious, undoubtedly influence them.

The city is the labor exchange for the migratory worker and even for the migratory non-worker who is often just as ambitious to travel. When he is tired of a job, or when the old job is finished, he goes to town to get another in some other part of the country. The labor exchanges facilitate this turnover of seasonal labor. They enable a man to leave the city “on the cushins.” This is the lure that draws him to the city. Hobohemia brings the job-seeking man and the man-seeking job together. Migrants have always known that a larger variety of jobs and a better assortment of good “shipments” were to be had in Chicago than elsewhere.

The termination of the seasonal occupations brings men cityward. They come here for shelter during the winter, and not only for shelter but for inside winter work. This is the hobo’s only alternative, provided he cannot go to California or to one of the southern states. The dull routine of the inside job, which seemed so unattractive in the springtime, looks better with the falling of the temperature.[13] We may add, also, that many of the men who are attracted to the city in winter are not particularly interested in work. There are, however, among the improvident tramp class, “wise virgins” who save in the summer in order to enjoy the life of a boarding-house during the winter.

The hobo often goes to town for medical attention. For the sick and injured of the floating fraternity Chicago is a haven of refuge because of the large number of opportunities found here for free treatment. The county hospital, the dispensaries, and the medical colleges are well known to these men. Many get well and go their way, others get no farther than the hospital—and then the morgue.

A man whose income is limited to a few hundred dollars a year can do more with it in the large city than in a small town. In no other American city will a dollar go farther than in Chicago. It is not uncommon to find men living in Hobohemia on less than a dollar a day. Large numbers make possible cheap service, and cheap service brings the men.

Not only the extent, but the nature of the problem of the homeless man is revealed by a study of his numbers. In Chicago all estimates are in substantial agreement that the population of Hobohemia never falls below 30,000 in summer, doubles this figure in winter, and has reached 75,000 and over in periods of unemployment.[2]

[14]

These numbers, while large, are only between 1 and 2½ per cent of Chicago’s population of nearly 3,000,000. Homeless men, however, are not distributed evenly throughout the city; they are concentrated, segregated, as we have seen, in three contiguous narrow areas close to the center of transportation and trade.

This segregation of tens of thousands of foot-loose, homeless, and not to say hopeless men is the fact fundamental to an understanding of the problem. Their concentration has created an isolated cultural area—Hobohemia. Here characteristic institutions have arisen—cheap hotels, lodging-houses, flops, eating joints, outfitting shops, employment[15] agencies, missions, radical bookstores, welfare agencies, economic and political institutions—to minister to the needs, physical and spiritual, of the homeless man. This massing of detached and migratory men upon a small area has created an environment in which gamblers, dope venders, bootleggers, and pickpockets can live and thrive.

The mobility of the migratory worker complicates the problem of the missions, police, and welfare agencies. The mission measures its success not only in numbers of converts but in the numbers of men fed and lodged. The police department, on the contrary, alarmed by the influx of hobos and tramps in response to free meals and free flops, has adopted a policy of severity and repression for the protection of the community. Welfare agencies, opposing alike the demoralizing results of indiscriminate feeding and lodging, and the negative policy of the police, favor a program of organized effort based upon an investigation of the needs of each individual case.

[16]

In the city, under ordinary circumstances, the homeless man gathers with his kind. Even so he is very much alone and his contacts with his fellows are relatively formal and distant.

City life is interesting but full of danger. Even in a world where the conditions of life are so elementary, prudence dictates a certain amount of reserve and hence formality and convention in the relations of men. The flophouse and the cheap hotel compel promiscuity, but do not encourage intimacy or neighborliness. On the outskirts of cities, however, the homeless men have established social centers that they call “jungles,” places where the hobos congregate to pass their leisure time outside the urban centers. The jungle is to the tramp what the camp ground is to the vagabond who travels by auto. It has for the hobo, perhaps, greater significance, since it becomes a necessary part of his daily life. The evening camp fire for the tourist, on the contrary, is a novelty merely, an experience but not a necessity.

Jungles are usually located in close proximity to a railroad division point, where the trains are made up or where trains stop to change crews and engines. Sometimes they are located near a “tank town,” where occasional stops are made for water or fuel. Not infrequently they are near the intersection of railroad lines. In the South, and on the West Coast, jungles are often located along the highways. This is due to the fact that many men go South in winter[17] not to work but to escape the rigors of the northern climate. The railroad for the time being has no attraction for them and they are content to stroll abroad, seeing the country. In the West, where men frequently carry bedding and cooking equipment, they can camp anywhere. It is easier for them, therefore, to leave the railroad and venture along the highways.

Accessibility to a railroad is only one of the requirements of a good jungle. It should be located in a dry and shady place that permits sleeping on the ground. There should be plenty of water for cooking and bathing and wood enough to keep the pot boiling. If there is a general store near by where bread, meat, and vegetables may be had, so much the better. For those who have no money, but enough courage to “bum lumps,” it is well that the jungles be not too far from a town, though far enough to escape the attention of the natives and officials, the town “clowns.”

Jungle camps may be divided into two classes—the temporary and the permanent, or continuous. Temporary jungles are merely stop-over or relay stations inhabited intermittently by the men of the road. Men temporarily stranded in a town usually seek a secluded spot at the edge of a village, not too far from the railroad, where they may while away the time without being molested. Men on the road look for places where other men preceding them have camped. There they are likely to find pots and kettles in which to cook food or wash clothes. At points where trains stop frequently, making it possible for men to get away at any time, the population of a temporary jungle is likely to be larger and more permanent.

[18]

The continuous or permanent jungles are seldom deserted, at least in summer. There is usually someone there to keep the fire burning and usually there are men or boys occupied at various tasks—cooking, washing or boiling clothes, shaving, sewing, bathing, and reading.

Women are often found in the areas of the cities where the homeless men congregate but not in the jungles. Here is an institution where the hobo is his own housewife. He not only cooks his own food, but has even invented dishes that are peculiar to jungle life. Chief among these is “mulligan” stew. “Mulligan,” or “combination,” is a “throw together” of vegetables and meat. There are certain ideal mixtures of vegetables and meat, but the tramp makes “mulligan” from anything that is at hand. Onions, potatoes, and beef are the prime essentials. Some men become adept at frying and roasting over camp fires.

The hobo who lives in the jungles has proved that he can become domesticated without the aid of women. He has established the habit of keeping his clothes and person clean. It is not difficult to select from a group of transients the men who have just come from the jungles. Their clothes will be clean and even bear evidence of jungle sewing. Overalls that have seen service will be bleached almost white from numerous washings. The hobo learns here the housewife’s art of keeping pots clean and the camp in order. The man who cannot, or will not, learn these few elementary principles of housekeeping is likely to fare ill in the jungle.

If it is a warm day some men will be sleeping. They may have been riding trains all night or have[19] found the night too cold for sleep. A daily paper from an adjoining town may be going the rounds. There may be newspapers from different cities brought in by men traveling different directions. Travelers meeting this way have much of common interest to talk about and conversation is enlivened with discussions of questions of concern to “bos.” The jungle is always astir with life and movement, and the hobo enters into this life as he does no other. Here he turns his back on the world and faces his fellows, and is at ease.

Absolute democracy reigns in the jungle. The color line has been drawn in some camps, but it is the general custom, and especially in the North, for Negroes, Mexicans, and whites to share the same jungle. The jungle is the melting pot of trampdom.

The average man of the road has had a variety of experience and not a little adventure. In the jungles there is always an audience for anyone who wants to talk, whether of his thoughts, his experiences, or his observations. There is plenty of opportunity to tell stories. The art of telling a story is diligently cultivated by the “bos” in the assemblies about the fire. This vagabond existence tends to enrich the personality and long practice has developed in some of these men an art of personal narrative that has greatly declined elsewhere. Many of them develop into fascinating raconteurs in the literal as well as the literary sense of the term. Talk in the jungle is of the open road and the day to come, and in that there is sufficient matter to occupy them.

Jungle populations are ever changing. Every hour new faces appear to take the place of those that have passed on. They come and go without ceremony,[20] with scarcely a greeting or “fare-you-well.” Every new member is of interest for the news he brings or the rumors that he spreads. Each is interested in the other so far as he has something to tell about the road over which he has come, the work conditions, the behavior of the police, or other significant details. But with all the discussion there is seldom any effort to discuss personal relations and connections. Here is one place where every man’s past is his own secret.

Only in the case of very young boys or sick men and sometimes old men is there any effort to learn something of the individual’s past. Men will brush elbows in the jungles for days and even weeks without ever learning one another’s names. They live closed lives and grant others the same privilege.

In every permanent camp there is likely to be a permanent group that makes the camp its headquarters. Sometimes these groups are able to take possession and exploit the transient guests. The I.W.W. has at times been able to exclude everyone who did not carry the red card of that organization. As a rule, however, the jungle is extremely hospitable and democratic.

The freedom of the jungles is, however, limited by a code of etiquette. Jungle laws are unwritten, but strictly adhered to. The breaking of these rules, if intentional, leads to expulsion, forced labor, or physical punishment.

Exclusive camps are usually the result of the efforts of the older residents to enforce discipline. Most “jungle buzzards,” men who linger in the jungles from season to season, take an interest in the running of things. For the most part they are parasitic, begging food from others, but they are generally on the alert to keep the place clean and orderly.

The following description of a day in the jungles was written by a migratory worker, a man who knows the life from years of experience. His narrative presents a faithful picture of an average day in an average jungle.

A Day in the Jungles

The part played by the jungles as an agency of discipline for the men of the road cannot be overestimated. Here hobo tradition and law are formulated and transmitted. It is the nursery of tramp[26] lore. Here the fledgling learns to behave like an old-timer. In the jungles the slang of the road and the cant of the tramp class is coined and circulated. It may originate elsewhere but here it gets recognition. The stories and songs current among the men of the road, the sentiments, the attitudes, and the philosophy of the migratory laborer are all given due airing. In short, every idea and ideal that finds lodgment in the tramp’s fancy may be expressed here in the wayside forum where anyone who thinks may speak, whether he be a jester or a sage.

Suspicion and hostility are the universal attitudes of the town or small city to the hobo and the tramp. Accordingly, the so-called “floater” custom of passing vagrants on to other communities is widespread.[6] The net effect of this policy is to intensify the anti-social attitude of the homeless man and to release and accentuate criminal tendencies. The small town is helpless to cope with the situation. As things are, its action perhaps cannot be different. Agriculture, as it becomes organized upon a capitalistic basis, is increasingly dependent upon seasonal labor, in harvesting crops for example. The report of the Commission on Industrial Relations states:

[27]

Hobohemia is a lodging-house area. The accommodations it offers the homeless man range from a bed in a single room for fifty cents to location on the floor of an empty loft for a dime. Lodging-house keepers take thin profits but they serve large numbers. There are usually more men than there are beds, particularly in winter. An estimate indicates that all hotels are full from December to May. During the rest of the year they are likely to be filled to two-thirds of their capacity.

Chicago has known three types of cheap hotels: the so-called “barrel-house,” the welfare institution, and the business enterprise. The first, the barrel-house, was a rooming-house, saloon, and house of prostitution, all in one. Men with money usually spent it in the barrel-houses. There they found warmth and companionship. They would join the circle at the bar, buy drinks for the crowd, and have a good time. Men who were afraid of being robbed placed their money with the bartender and charged against it the drinks purchased. As soon as they were overcome by drink they would be taken upstairs to bed. The following day the program would be repeated. A three- or four-hundred-dollar stake at this rate usually lasted a week. Not infrequently the barrel-house added to its other attractions the opportunity for gambling.

The barrel-house is a thing of the past. Its place has been taken in part by hotels like the Workingmen’s[28] Palace; the Reliance; the New Century, owned and operated by the Salvation Army; the Rufus F. Dawes, owned and maintained by General C. G. Dawes; the Popular Hotel, owned and maintained by the Chicago Christian Industrial League. In places of this sort, charges are small, usually not enough to cover operating expenses.

The Rufus F. Dawes and the Workingmen’s Palace are both large, fire-proof structures, clean and modern, constructed originally for other purposes. Like all paternalistic, quasi-charitable institutions, however, they are not popular, although the charges for a room and bed are hardly sufficient to cover the operating expenses. This is the second type of lodging-house.

The pioneers in the cheap hotel business in Chicago operated on a commercial basis were Harvey and McGuire, the founders of the well-known Harvey-McGuire hotel system. Harvey, an evangelist, in his work with the “down-and-outs” had learned the evils of barrel-houses. He went into a partnership with McGuire, a man acquainted with the rough side of life. After a number of years the Harvey-McGuire system went out of existence. McGuire went into the hotel business for himself and now owns a number of cheap lodging-houses. Harvey sold his interests to his nephew and went back to evangelistic work. The nephew went into partnership with Mr. Dammarell. There are eight hotels in the present Harvey-Dammarell system with a combined capacity for lodging 3,000 men. The Ideal opened in 1884, probably the oldest men’s hotel in the city, originally known as the Collonade, at 509 West Madison Street, is an example of the type. The Mohawk, the most[29] modern men’s hotel, is also the property of the Harvey-Dammarell system.

The men who run these hotels do not claim to be philanthropists. Mr. Harvey has defined the situation. He says:

Different types of hotels attract different types of men. The better class of workingmen who patronize the Mohawk, where the prices range from forty to seventy cents, wear collars and creased trousers. The hotel provides stationery and desks. Hotels where the prices range from twenty-five cents to forty cents are patronized by a shabbier group of men. Few of them are shaven. Some of them read, but most of them sit alone with their thoughts. In some second-class places a man is employed to go the rounds and arouse the sleepers.

In the twenty-five-cent hotels, the patrons not only are content to sit unshaven, but they are often dirty. Many of them have the faces of beaten men; many of them are cripples and old men. The exceptions are the Popular and the Rufus F. Dawes, where the price is twenty cents or less to be sure, but the guests are more select. Since these places are semi-charitable, they can force certain requirements upon their patrons.

[30]

The term “room” is a misnomer when applied to a sleeping apartment in a cheap hotel. These rooms have been aptly termed “cubicles,” and among the patrons they are known as “cages.” A cubicle is usually from 6 to 8 feet in width and from 8 to 12 feet in length. The thin walls, composed of steel or matched lumber, are usually about 8 feet in height. A wire netting over the top admits air and prevents the guests climbing from one cubicle to another. The furnishings are simple; sometimes only a bed, sometimes a bed and a chair, and in more expensive places a stand. They are not constructed either for comfort or convenience; lighting and ventilation are usually bad. But they are all they were intended to be: places for men to sleep with a limited degree of privacy.

A canvass of the Hobohemian hotels has been made with a view to learning the approximate mobility of the hotel population. Few of these hotels are prepared to make any but general statements, though some of them have made an effort to get the facts. The consensus of opinion of hotel clerks is that the greatest turnover is in the cheapest hotels. Better-class places like the Acme, the Ironsides, and the Workingmen’s Palace have a large proportion of permanent guests. The permanent guests, those who remain two or three months or more, range from a third to a half of the total number of roomers. Many of the older hotels have permanent patrons who are seasonal but regular. Others never leave the city.

“Flophouses” are nearly all alike. Guests sleep on the floor or in bare, wooden bunks. The only[31] privilege they buy is the privilege to lie down somewhere in a warm room.

The following account is adapted from a description of a night spent in “Hogan’s Flop”:

Hobohemian restaurants serve meals for a half or a third of the prices current in the Loop. In some of these lunchrooms the charges are so low that one marvels. However, the food is coarse and poor and the service rough and ready.

The homeless man is as casual in his eating as he is in his work. He usually gives all the restaurants a trial. If he has any money when meal time comes he generally does a little “window shopping.” He meanders up and down the street reading the bills of fare in the windows. The Hobohemian restaurants know this and accordingly use window displays to attract the roaming patron. Food is placed in the windows, cooking is done within sight of the street, but the chief means of attraction are the menus[34] chalked on the windows. The whole window is sometimes lettered up with special entrées of the day. Some of these bills of fare are interesting.

Gus’s place on South Halsted Street near the Academy Theater, July 28, 1922, displayed the following:

The same day the James Restaurant on Madison Street near Desplaines advertised the following under the caption, “A Full Meal for Ten Cents”:

One eating-house on West Madison Street is “The Home Restaurant, Meals Fifteen Cents and Up.” This is a popular appeal. Restaurants frequently advertise “Home Cooking,” “Home Made Bread,” “Home Made Coffee,” “Doughnuts Like Mother Used to Make.”

[35]

At meal time, especially at noon, scores of men flock into these eating-houses. The men, a noisy and turbulent crowd, call out their orders, which are shouted by the waiters to the cooks who set out without ceremony the desired dishes. Four or five waiters are able to attend to the wants of a hundred or more men during the course of an hour. The waiters work like madmen during the rush hours, speeding in with orders, out with dirty dishes. During the course of this hour a waiter becomes literally plastered with splashes of coffee, gravy, and soup. The uncleanliness is revolting and the waiters are no less shocking than the cooks and dishwashers. In the kitchens uncleanliness reaches its limit.

But what is the opinion of the patron? They know that the hamburger is generally mixed with bread and potatoes, that the bread is usually stale, that the milk is frequently sour. There are few who do not abhor the odors of the cheap restaurant, but a steady patron reasons thus: “I don’t allow myself to see things, and as long as the eyes don’t see the heart grieves not.”

The hobo seldom dresses up. If he does it is evidence that he is making an effort to get out of his class. When he does buy clothing, either rough clothing or a good “front,” he finds his way to places where new clothes are on sale at astonishingly low prices. The seasonal laborer’s outfitters handle a very cheap grade of goods. Much of it is out of date and either shopworn or soiled. Cheap clothing stores are not peculiar to Hobohemia, but here they cater to the wants of the homeless man.

[36]

Clothing exchanges, which is a polite term for second-hand clothing stores, are numerous in Hobohemia. There are many of them along North Clark Street and west of Clark on Chicago Avenue. These establishments make a specialty of buying slightly worn clothing, sample suits and overcoats from broken lots, which they sell at remarkably low prices.

Second-hand clothing stores are not entirely monopolized by the hobo trade, but the veteran hobo knows of their existence and he knows how to drive a bargain.

The cobbler who deals in shoes, both second-hand and new, as a sideline, gets his share of the Hobohemian trade. Coming off the road with a roll, the hobo is likely to invest in a whole outfit—shoes, suit, and overcoat—only to sell them again in a few days when he is broke. The second-hand dealer meets him both ways, coming and going.

Pawn shops are not typical of Hobohemia. They are usually located in that region just outside the limits of the lodging-houses, a sort of border land between respectability and the down-and-outs. Not that the hobo is unwilling, when he is broke, to put anything valuable he happens to have in “hock,” but usually he does not happen to have anything valuable. Still there are men who make a practice of carrying a watch or a ring upon which, in case of need, they can raise a few dollars.

Pawn shops are, to a limited extent, clothing exchanges. They are places where the hobo does much of his buying and selling of tools, fire arms, leather goods, jewelry, and like articles of that sort.

[37]

Commercialized entertainment has had difficulty in getting a foothold in Hobohemia. The movie has firmly established itself on the border land, where it may be patronized by both the transient and the resident population. The movies put the admission fee at ten cents. As a matter of fact, there is one on South Halsted Street which charges only a nickel. The pictures shown in these houses have usually passed from the first-class theaters through the various grades of cheaper houses until finally they arrive here much out of date, badly scarred, and so scratched that they irritate the eyes.

Vaudeville and burlesque have become fully established on the South Side. Certain of these theaters cater to “men only.” Advertisements of “classy girls,” “bathing beauties,” or “fancy dancing” have a strange attraction for the homeless and lonely men.

Many men in the Hobohemian population do not patronize either the movie or the burlesque. Those who do are sometimes merely looking for an opportunity to sit down in quiet for an hour. Some theaters, in recognition of this fact, extend an invitation to the audience to “Stay as Long as You Like.” This draws a great many men, especially in cold weather.

Chicago has several barber colleges in close proximity to the “stem.” Four of them are located on West Madison Street and most of them are so situated that they can attract men who are willing to submit to the inexperienced efforts of students.[38] Students must have practice, and here are men, who as they themselves say, can stand it.

The cheap rooming-houses do not always offer facilities for shaving, so they are willing to sacrifice themselves in the interest of education and art. If they are fortunate they may be served by a Senior, but they always are in danger of falling into the hands of a Freshman. Hair cuts cost ten or fifteen cents. This is governed by the law of supply and demand. The colleges must have patrons to keep the students busy. The lady barber flourishes in Hobohemia. The hobo, at least, seems to have no prejudice against a razor being wielded by feminine hands.

Hobohemia has its bookstores where new and second-hand books are sold. The “Hobo Bookstore,” sometimes called the “Proletariat,” located at 1237 West Madison Street, is the best known. This place makes a specialty of periodicals of a radical nature which are extensively read by the “bos.” A large line of books on many subjects are sold, but they are chiefly the paper-bound volumes that the transient can afford. The “Radical Book Shop,” located on North Clark Street, is popular among the intellectuals who pass their time in “Bughouse Square.”

The saloon still lives in Hobohemia, though with waning prestige. The five-cent schooner and the free lunch of pre-war days have passed, but the saloons are far from being dead. One can still get a “kick” out of stuff that is sold across the bar, but[39] the crowds do not gather as before prohibition. Formerly, men who got drunk were kept inside, today they are hustled outside or at least kept out of sight. As the saloon has lost its prestige, the bootlegger has gained, and the “drunks” for which he is responsible parade the streets or litter the alleys.

Fruit and soft drink stands and ice-cream cone peddlers are in evidence since prohibition. Enthusiastic and persistent bootblacks swarm in the streets and Gypsy fortune-tellers who hail every passer-by for the privilege of “reading” his mind, and, perhaps, in order to turn a trick at his expense.

Standards of living are low in Hobohemia. Flops are unwholesome and unsanitary. Efforts have been made to improve these conditions, but they have not been wholly successful. The Salvation Army and the Dawes hotels have improved the lodging-houses. But the municipal free lodging-house has been opposed by the police on the ground that it was already too popular among casual and migratory workers. The same may be said of any other effort to deal with the problem from the point of view of philanthropy.

The only other alternative would seem to be to encourage the migratory workers to organize to help themselves. This is difficult but not impossible, but the history of these efforts is another chapter in the story of Hobohemia.

[40]

A man who is conservative can live in Hobohemia on a dollar a day. If he is not too fastidious he can live for sixty cents, including a bed every night. Sleeping in a ten-cent “flop” and sticking to coffee and rolls, he can get along for fifty cents. Old men who do not move around much will live a long time on “coffee-an’,” which they can get at the average restaurant for a nickel. The man who is reduced to “coffee-an’,” however, has touched bedrock.

Every man who enters Hobohemia is struggling to live above the “coffee-an’” level, and the various devices that are employed in accomplishing this are often ingenious. This business of wringing from chance source enough money each day to supply one’s insistent wants is known on the “stem” as “getting by.” “Getting by” may mean anything from putting in a few hours a day at the most casual[41] labor to picking a pocket or purloining an overcoat. It includes working at odd jobs, peddling small articles, street faking, “putting over” old and new forms of grafts, “working” the folks at home, “white collar” begging, stealing, and “jack rolling.”

In spite of all that has been said to the contrary, the hobo is a worker. He is not a steady worker but he earns most of the money he spends. There are migratory casual workers, who spend three or four months each year in a Chicago lodging-house, who never look to the public for assistance. They know how much money they will need to tide them over the winter, and they have learned to spread it thin to make it reach. Casual in their work, they are conservative in their spending.

There are others who are never able to save anything. No matter how much they bring to town they soon spend it. For these the odd job is the likeliest means of livelihood. In a city like Chicago there are almost always opportunities for men who are content to take small jobs. Every restaurant must have dishwashers and waiters. Every hotel needs porters; every saloon or pool hall employs men to do odd jobs. Petty as these jobs are and little as they pay, men not only take but seek them. One man who has been twenty years on West Madison Street is working as night clerk in a lodging-house; another does janitor work at nights and loafs daytime; still another has been for some time a potato peeler in a Madison Street restaurant.

Men who spurn steady jobs in favor of petty ones with pay every night sometimes do so because they[42] hate to leave the street. Often it is because they are not properly clad or have no money to pay their way.

In the eyes of the law, peddling in Chicago, at least, is not begging.[9] Nevertheless much of the peddling in the streets is merely legalized begging. Usually the articles offered for sale are cheap wares which are disposed of for whatever “you care to give.” Not infrequently the buyer gives four times what the article is worth. There are hundreds of cripples in Chicago who gain a livelihood by selling pencils or shoestrings. Many of these are homeless men. Pencils bought for thirty-five cents a dozen retail for a dime, or whatever the purchaser cares to tax himself. A peddler’s license is a protection against the police and serves as a moral prop to the beggar.

A peddler of shoestrings and pencils usually measures his success by the number of sales made in which no change is asked. He expects to be overpaid. Sometimes he persuades himself he is entitled to be overpaid. The business of “getting by” by “touching hearts” is usually spoken of as “work.” A peddler who works the North Side will say: “I didn’t work yesterday; the day before I made three dollars and eighty-five cents.” This man considers himself a real cripple, because he has locomotor ataxia. He is incensed when he meets a one-armed peddler, because a man with one arm is not a real cripple. Real cripples should have first consideration. An able-bodied man who begs when[43] broke is beneath contempt. That is “panhandling” and an able-bodied “panhandler” is always considered despicable.

Many peddlers live in Hobohemian hotels, and spend their leisure on the “stem.” When they go to “work” they take a car. Some of them have regular stands. Not infrequently a peddler will assume to monopolize a position in front of a church or near the entrance of a factory where girls go and come. Beggars have a liberal fund of knowledge about pay days. They know the factories where the workers, when they have money, are “good.”

The chief difference between peddling and street faking is one of method. The peddler appeals to the individual; the faker appeals to the crowd. The faker is a salesman. He “pulls” a stunt or makes a speech to attract the crowd. The peddler is more than often a beggar. It requires considerably more initiative and force to play the rôle of a street faker than to peddle.

Almost any time of the day at some street corner of the “stem” one may see a faker with a crowd around him. His wares consist perhaps of combination sets of cuff buttons and collar buttons, or some other such “line.” Success depends upon the novelty of the article offered. A new line of goods is much sought after and a good street faker changes his line from time to time. Many fakers are homeless men. Numbers of the citizens of Hobohemia have tried their hand at some time or other at this kind of salesmanship. Those who are able to “put it over” generally stay with the work.

[44]

Peddling jewelry is one old device for getting money, but it is not too old to succeed. There are men who carry with them cheap rings or watches which they sell by approaching the prospective buyers individually. Sometimes they gather a crowd around them but that rarely succeeds as well as when they work quietly. A faker may sit beside a man in a park or approach him on the street and proffer a ring or watch or pair of eyeglasses for sale cheap, on the grounds that he is broke. Sometimes he will pretend that he found the article and would like to get a little money for it. Often he will tell of some sentiment connected with an article that he is trying to dispose of. A man may have a ring that his mother gave him and he will only part with it on condition that he might have the privilege of redeeming it later. If he thought he could not redeem it he would rather starve than part with it, etc. Hobos are often the victims as well as the perpetrators of these fakes.

Few of these tricks are new but none of them are so old that they do not yield some return. They probably owe their long life to the proverbial identity of fundamental human nature wherever it is found.

One of the most ancient and universal forms of deception is the fake disease. In Hobohemia a pretended affliction is called “jiggers” or “bugs.”

An ancient ruse is to feign to be deaf and dumb. A man who played “deaf-and-dumb” worked restaurants, drug stores, groceries, and other places of business. He would enter the places and stand with cap in hand. Never would he change the expression of his face, regardless of what was said or done. When spoken to he would point to his ears and mouth until he received some money, and then he would bow. If there was a chance of getting something, he would never leave a place unless he was in danger of being thrown out. An investigator followed him for two hours before he learned he was neither deaf nor dumb. Three months later he met the same man working the same graft in another part of the city.

“The hat trick,” as it is sometimes called, is a popular means of “getting by.” On a Sunday, a holiday, or indeed any evening, the streets of Hobohemia are likely to be enlivened by men who have a message, haranguing the crowds. They may be selling papers or books on the proletarian movement. In any case, most of them terminate their speeches by passing the hat. Few speakers spend their eloquence on the audiences of Hobohemia without asking something in return. It must not be assumed that these men are all insincere. Many of them are, but most of them are in the “game” for the money it yields. One of these orators is conspicuous because his stock[46] in trade is a confession that he is not like the other speakers. He admits that he is out for bed and board. He will talk on any subject, will permit himself to be laughed at, and jollied by the crowd, but when he passes the hat he usually gets enough for another day’s board.

The missions attract men who are religious primarily for profit. Many who are really sincere find it more profitable to be on the Lord’s side. Nearly every mission has a corps of men who perform the “hat trick” by going from house to house begging old clothes or cash or whatever the people care to give. The collector’s conscience is the only check on the amount of money taken in. Some missions divide all cash collections with the solicitors. Sometimes the collector gets as much as fifty cents on the dollar.

The exploitation of children is as old as the history of vagrancy. Even the tramp has learned that on the road boys may be used to get money. A boy can beg better than an older man, and frequently men will chum with boys for the advantages such companionships give them. Boys who are new on the road are often willing to be exploited by a veteran in exchange for the things they can learn from him.

There is a type of tramp who lives on his bad reputation. He may have been sent away for the sake of the family, or have fled for safety, or he may have gone voluntarily to start life anew. Seldom does he succeed, but family pride stands between him and his return. He capitalizes the fact that his family does not want him to return.

[47]

Such a man resides on South State Street. He comes from a good family but his relatives do not care to have him about. He is fat and greasy and dirty; he seems to have no opinions of his own; is always getting into people’s way and making himself disagreeable by his effort to be sociable. His relatives pay him four dollars a week to stay in Chicago. On that amount, with what he can earn, he is able to live.[10]

Another man raises funds now and then when he is broke by writing or telegraphing that he is thinking about returning home. His return means trouble. His requests for assistance are a kind of blackmail levied on the family.[11]

Most interesting among the beggars is the man, the well-dressed and able-bodied individual, who begs on the strength of his affiliations. These are the men who make a specialty of exploiting their membership in fraternal organizations. Labor unions are very much imposed upon by men who carry paid-up cards but who are temporarily “down.” The organizations as such are not appealed to as much as individual members. It is hard for a union man who is working to turn away a brother who shows that he is in good standing with the organization.

Of late the “ex-service-man” story has been a good means of getting consideration, and the American Legion buttons have been worked to the limit. Most of the men who wear parts of a uniform or other insignia indicative of military service have[48] really seen service and many have seen action, but a great many of them have heard more than they have seen.

There are men who make a specialty of “working” the charity organizations. Some of them are so adept that they know beforehand what they will be asked and have a stereotyped response for every stereotyped question. These men know a surprising amount about the inside workings of the charitable agencies and they generously hand on their information to their successor. They usually know, for example, what material aid may be had from each organization. A typical case is that of Brown.

[49]

Nearly every homeless man “goes broke” at times. Some of them do not feel that a trip to town has been a success if they return to the job with money in their pockets. On the other hand, they do not feel that they have had their money’s worth unless they remain in town a week or two after they have “blown in.” As they linger they face the problem of living. They may have friends but that is unusual. The homeless man used to get advances from the saloon keeper with whom he spent his money. Such loans were often faithfully made good, but they were just as often “beat.” Prohibition has put an end to that kind of philanthropy.

Many of the men who visit the city intermittently loaf and work by turns. These men often beg but they do not remain at it long, perhaps a day or so, or until disgust seizes them. Often when they beg they are drunk or “rum-dum.” As soon as they are sober they quit. Sometimes they succeed in attaching themselves to a friend who has just arrived with a “roll.” But living at the expense of another migrant quickly palls. Soon they will be found scanning the “boards” for free shipment to another job. They disappear from the streets for a season. As soon as they get a “stake,” however, they will be seen again treating the boys and swapping stories on the “main stem”; if not in Chicago, then in some other city. It is the life.

The more interesting types are those who live continuously in the city and are broke most of the time. Some of them have reduced the problem of “getting by” to an art. The tramp who only occasionally goes “broke” may try to imitate these[50] types but he soon tires of the game and goes to work. The chief classes of beggars are the “panhandlers” and the “moochers.”

The “panhandler” can sometimes extract from the pockets of others what amounts to large sums of money. Some “panhandlers” are able to beg from ten to twenty dollars a day. The “panhandler” is a beggar who knows how to beg without loss of dignity. He is not docile and fawning. He appeals in a frank, open manner and usually “comes away with the goods.” The “moocher” begs for nickels and dimes. He is an amateur. He goes to the back door of a house or hotel and asks for a sandwich. His appeal is to pity.

The antagonisms between beggars and peddlers are very keen. The man who carries a permit to peddle has no respect for the individual who merely begs. Nevertheless, some peddlers, when business is slow, themselves turn beggars. On the other hand, the man who begs professes to consider himself far more respectable than the peddler who uses his license as an excuse to get money. This is the language and opinion of a professional: “Good begging is far more honorable than bad peddling and most of this shoestring and lead pencil peddling is bad. I am not going to beat around the bush. I am not going to do any of this petty grafting to get enough to live on.”[12] These antagonisms are evidence of a struggle for status. When a peddler denounces the beggars he is trying to justify himself. His philosophy, like most philosophies, is an attempt to justify his vocation. The same is true of plain beggars. Most of them are able to justify their means of “getting by.”

[51]

Hobos are not clever enough to be first-class crooks nor daring enough to be classed as criminals. Yet most of them will steal something to eat. There are men who are peculiarly expert at stealing food from back-door steps—pies or cakes that have been set out to cool, for example. There are men who wander about the residential areas, in order to steal from back doors. Some men follow the milkman as he goes from door to door delivering milk and cream, in order to steal a bottle when the opportunity offers. A quart of milk makes an excellent breakfast.

Stealing becomes serious when men break into stores and box cars. It is not what they take but what they spoil that does the damage. This is the chief complaint of the railroad against the tramp. In the country the tramp is often destructive to the orchards he visits. He will shake down more fruit than he can possibly use and dig up a dozen hills of potatoes to get enough for a “mulligan.”

“Jack rolling” may be anything from picking a man’s pocket in a crowd to robbing him while he is drunk or asleep. On every “stem” there are a goodly number of men who occasionally or continually “roll” their fellow-tramps. Nearly every migrant who makes periodical trips to the city after having saved his earnings for three or four months can tell of at least one encounter with the “jack roller.” Scarcely a day goes by on Madison Street but some man is relieved of a “stake” by some[52] “jack” who will, perhaps, come around later and join in denouncing men who will rob a workingman.

The average hobo is often indiscreet with his money, and especially so when he is drunk. He often displays it, even scatters it at times. This is a great temptation to men who have been living “close to their bellies” for months. As unpopular as the “jack roller” is among the tramps there are few who would overlook an opportunity to take a few dollars from a “drunk,” seeing that he was in possession of money that someone else was bound to take sooner or later.

During the cold winter months the problem of “getting by” becomes serious. In the spring, summer, and fall hobos can sleep in the parks, in vacant houses, on the docks, in box cars, or in any other place where they may curl up and pass a few hours in slumber without fear of disturbance. But finding “flops” in winter usually engages the best effort a “bo” can muster. Besides food and shelter, the[53] hobo must manage in some way to secure winter clothing. Above all he needs shelter, and shelter for the man without money is not easy to find in the city.

The best scouting qualities the average man can command are needed to get along in winter. There are many places to sleep and loaf during the day, but the good places are invariably crowded. For sleeping quarters police stations, railroad depots, doorways, mission floors, and even poolrooms are pressed into service. It is not uncommon for men who cannot find a warm place to sleep to walk the streets all night. This practice of walking the streets all night, snatching a wink of sleep here and a little rest there, is termed, in the parlance of the road, “carrying the banner.” He who “carries the banner” during the night usually tries to snatch a bit of sleep during the day in places he does not have access to in the night time. He may go into the missions, but in cold weather the missions are crowded. They are crowded with men who sit for hours in a stupor between sleeping and waking. In almost every mission on the “stem” there are attendants known as “bouncers,” whose duties during the meetings are to shake and harass men who have lost themselves in slumber.

Lodging-houses are also imposed upon by men who have no money to pay for a bed but who loaf in the lobbies during the day. Most lodging-houses make an effort to keep men out who are not guests. Fear is instilled into their hearts by occasionally calling the police to clear the lobbies of loafers. All who dare spend their leisure time in the public library, but the average tramp, unkempt and unclean from a[54] night on the street, cannot muster sufficient courage to enter a public library.

The missions and other charity organizations play an important part in supplying the cold-weather wants of the tramp. They usually make it a point to get on hand at the beginning of winter a large supply of overcoats, or “bennies,” and other clothes that are either sold at moderate prices or are given away. Such clothes are usually solicited from the public, and the men on the “stem” believe that they are entitled to them. Hence each man makes an effort to get what he feels is coming to him. When winter comes they begin to bestir themselves and concoct schemes for securing the desired amount of clothing to keep out the cold. During the winter time many of these men will submit to being “converted” in order to get food and shelter.

Competition between homeless men in winter is keen. Food is scarce, jobs are less plentiful, people are less generous, and there are more men begging. Many of the short-job men become beggars and a large number of those who are able to peddle during the summer likewise enter the ranks of the beggars. As beggars multiply, the housewife is less generous with the man at the back door, the man on the street also hardens his heart, and the police are called on for protection.

“Getting by” is a game not without its elements of fascination. The man who “panhandles” is getting a compensation that is not wholly measured by the nickels and dimes he accumulates. Even the peddler of shoestrings likes to think of “good days” when he is able to surpass himself. It matters not by what means “the down-and-out” gets his living; he manages to find a certain satisfaction in the game. The necessity of “putting it over” has its own compensations.

No group in Hobohemia is wholly without status. In every group there are classes. In jail grand[56] larceny is a distinction as against petit larceny. In Hobohemia men are judged by the methods they use to “get by.” Begging, faking, and the various other devices for gaining a livelihood serve to classify these men among themselves. It matters not where a man belongs, somewhere he has a place and that place defines him to himself and to his group. No matter what means an individual employs to get a living he struggles to retain some shred of self-respect. Even the outcast from home and society places a high value upon his family name.

Several old men on West Madison Street are living on mere pittances but are too proud to go to the poorhouse. They much prefer to take their chances with other mendicants. They want to play the game to the end. As long as they are able to totter about the street and hold out their hands they feel that they are holding their own. To go to an institution would mean that they had given up. Dependent as they are and as pitiful as they look, they still have enough self-respect to resent the thought of complete surrender.

[57]

In the game of “getting by” the homeless man is practically sure sooner or later to lose his economic independence. At any time (except perhaps in periods of prolonged unemployment), only a small proportion of homeless men are grafters, beggars, fakers, or petty criminals. Yet, all the time, the migratory casual workers are living from hand to mouth, always perilously near the margin of dependence. Consequently, few homeless men have not been temporary dependents, and great numbers of them must in time become permanent dependents.

This process of personal degradation of the migratory casual worker from economic independence to pauperism is only an aspect of the play of economic forces in modern industrial society. Seasonal industries, business cycles, alternate periods of employment and of unemployment, the casualization of industry, have created this great industrial reserve army of homeless, foot-loose men which concentrates in periods of slack employment, as winter, in strategic centers of transportation, our largest cities. They must live; the majority of them are indispensable in the present competitive organization of industry; agencies and persons moved by religious and philanthropic impulses will continue to alleviate their condition; and yet their concentration in increasing numbers in winter in certain areas of our large cities cannot be regarded otherwise than as a menace. The policy of allowing the migratory casual laborer to “get by” is, however, easier and cheaper at the moment, even if the prevention of the economic deterioration and personal degradation of the homeless men would, in the long run, make for social efficiency and national economy.

[58-59]

TYPES OF HOBOS

[60-61]

Why are there tramps and hobos? What are the conditions and motives that make migratory workers, vagrants, homeless men? Attempts to answer these questions have invariably raised other questions even more difficult to answer. Homeless men themselves are not always agreed in regard to the matter. The younger men put the blame upon circumstance and external conditions. The older men, who know life better, are humbler. They are disposed to go to the other extreme and put all the blame on themselves.

From the records and observations of a great many men the reasons why men leave home seem to fall under several heads: (a) seasonal work and unemployment, (b) industrial inadequacy, (c) defects of personality, (d) crises in the life of the person, (e) racial or national discrimination, and (f) wanderlust.

Chief among the economic causes why men leave home are (1) seasonal occupations, (2) local changes in industry, (3) seasonal fluctuations in the demand for labor, and (4) periods of unemployment. The[62] cases of homeless men studied in Chicago show how these conditions of work tend to require and to create the migratory worker.

1) The industrial attractions of seasonal work often make a powerful appeal to the foot-loose man and boy. A new railroad that is building, a mining camp just opening up, an oil boom widely advertised, a bumper crop to be harvested in Kansas or the Dakotas fire the imagination and bring thousands of recruits each year into the army of seasonal and migratory workers.

This case shows the steps by which a stationary seasonal worker becomes a migratory worker. It indicates how easily and naturally the migrant may sink still lower in the economic scale until he spends his winters in Hobohemia “feeding at the missions.”

2) Local changes in industry dislocate the routine of work of the wage-earner. The timber in certain regions gives out, mines close down when the ore is[63] exhausted or when prices drop, or in the reorganization of an industry a branch factory may be abandoned. Under these circumstances, certain workers are compelled to look elsewhere for employment. Those who are free to move naturally migrate. The following case is that of a migratory worker who with the passing of the West finds it difficult to make the necessary adjustment.

3) Seasonal fluctuations in the demand for labor accompanied by the seasonal rise and fall in wages have greatly affected the ebb and flow of workers.

4) Periods of unemployment throw hundreds of thousands of men out of work. But the effects of unemployment are not ended with the passing of the period of business depression. The majority of men, it is true, return to work with their economic efficiency little if any impaired by the stress and strain of uncertainty and deprivation. But upon thousands of men the enforced period of idleness has had a disorganizing effect.[14] The demoralizing effect of being out of work is particularly marked upon the unskilled laborer. His regular routine of work has been interrupted; habits of loafing are easily acquired.[65] The path of personal degradation may lead to the “bread line” at the mission, and from there to panhandling in the Loop.

Every year thousands of men fail in the struggle for existence. For one reason or another, they cannot, or at least they do not, keep the pace set by modern large-scale industry. These men are “misfits,” industrially inadequate.

The majority of individuals, commonly regarded as industrially inadequate, are probably feeble-minded or restless types like the emotionally unstable and the egocentric and fall into the group of defective personalities to be considered later. Other causes of industrial incompetency are (1) physical handicaps due to accidents, sickness, or occupational diseases; (2) alcoholism and drug addiction; and (3) old age.

1) The workers in certain industries are exposed to dangerous dusts and gases. The printers have learned the risks of their trade and endeavor to cope with them. Other industries have taken steps to[66] eliminate industrial hazards. Many transients are miners who go from one job to another exposing themselves to different dangers.

Other industries also have their victims.

Many men in Hobohemia have limbs or parts of limbs missing, or bent and twisted bodies. These are victims of industrial or non-industrial accidents.

2) Alcoholism decreases the economic efficiency of the worker and so tends to depress him into the group of homeless men. Before prohibition the[67] saloon had no better patron than the homeless man. In Chicago today bootleggers and blind pigs in the vicinity of the “stem” thrive upon the homeless man’s love for liquor.

Drinking is responsible for keeping many men on the road. One man said that he left home because he had too many drinking friends. He has been on the road for several years but wherever he goes he finds other drinking friends. An old man refuses to live with his children in the country because he cannot get his “morning’s morning” while with them. They have written him time and again but he does not answer.

Drug addiction likewise decreases the industrial efficiency of its victims. Drug addicts among homeless men seldom are transient. Those who are transient are often cocaine users who are able to do without the drug for considerable periods of time. Not infrequently “coke heads” or “snow-birds” are found among the hobo workers. When on out-of-town jobs, they are prone to go to town occasionally to indulge in a cocaine spree much as a “booze-hoister” indulges in a liquor spree. When their money is gone they return to work and do not touch the “snow” for weeks or months. Users of heroin or[68] morphine are not able to separate themselves from the source of supply for so long a time.

Because of the secret nature of the practice, the extent of drug addiction among homeless men is unknown. Men who use drugs are loath to disclose the fact to anyone but drug users. The drug addict employs every scheme to keep his practice a secret whereas the drinking man strives to share his joy with others. The fear of being discovered drives many addicts from the circle of their family and friends and many of them drift into the homeless man areas where they enjoy the maximum seclusion.

Drug users need as much as three or four dollars a day, and even more, to supply their wants. As a rule they are physically unfit to earn a living. They[69] cannot live as the hobos do because the average hobo does not have money enough to buy drugs. They may be forced to live in cheap hotels and to eat in cheap restaurants but only to save money to satisfy the craving for “dope.” Drug addicts wander very little except to make rapid trips from city to city. The drug addict tends to become a criminal rather than a migratory worker. Their natural habitat is the great city.

3) Many old men in the tramp class are not able to work and are too independent to go to the almshouse. Some of them have spent their lives on the road. These old, homeless men usually find their way to the larger cities. Unlike the younger men they have no dreams and no longer burn with the desire to travel. Many have been self-supporting until they were overtaken by senility. It is pitiable to see an old man tottering along the streets living a hand-to-mouth existence.

This case is typical. During the summer time, when it is possible to sit outdoors in comfort, numbers[70] of old men may be found in groups on the pavements or in the parks. In winter they are too much occupied seeking food and shelter.

The physically handicapped and industrially inefficient individuals are numerous among the homeless men. The handicap is, in part at least, the reason of their presence in that class. Competition with able-bodied workers forces them into the scrap heap.

Psychological and sociological studies of vagabondage in France, Italy, and Germany have led to the conclusion that the vagabond is primarily a psychopathic type.[16] The findings of European psychopathologists are, of course, the result of case-studies of beggars and wanderers in these countries and cannot without reservation be accepted for the United States. Undoubtedly there are large numbers of individuals with defects of personalities among American hobos and tramps, but there are also large numbers of normal individuals. The American tradition of pioneering, wanderlust, seasonal employment, attract into the group of wanderers and migratory workers a great many energetic and venturesome normal boys and young men.

William Healy, for several years director of the Psychopathic Institute of Chicago, sums up the relation of mental deficiency to vagabondage in these words:

Dr. Healy’s observations were made primarily with juveniles, but he adds cautiously a conclusion as to the explanation of adult vagabondage:

The proportion of feeble-minded is popularly supposed to be higher among the migratory and casual laborer than in the general population. In the earlier studies, only the most obvious cases of mental defect were noted. Mrs. Solenberger by common-sense observation or medical examinations found only eighty-nine of the one thousand men she examined to be feeble-minded, epileptic, or insane.[18]

In recent years mental tests have been given to small groups of unemployed men, in which the types of the hobo, tramp, and bum were well represented. Knollin found 20 per cent of the 150 hobos he tested feeble-minded.[19] Pintner and Toops examined two groups of applicants at Ohio free employment agencies by standardized tests other than the Stanford revision of the Binet-Simon. Of the 94 men taking the tests at Columbus, 28.7 per cent were diagnosed as feeble-minded. Of the 40 unemployed men examined at Dayton 7.5 per cent were assigned to the feeble-minded[72] class.[20] Glenn R. Johnson gave the Stanford revision of the Binet-Simon tests to 107 men out of work in Portland, and found 18 per cent feeble-minded, i.e., under twelve years mental age.[21] As he had expected, he found the proportion of inferior intelligence lower than that of the 62 business men and high-school students upon which Terman had standardized his tests for adults, but he also found among hobos a higher percentage of superior adults. He found also that the higher the intelligence of the individual the shorter the period of holding a job among the unemployed. The testing of an unselected group of 653 men in the army by the Stanford revision of the Binet-Simon tests affords an interesting opportunity for a comparison with the results of the Portland study.

This comparison would indicate that the intelligence of the unemployed is not lower, but, if anything, higher than that of the adult males tested in army camps. Apparently other factors than intelligence are decisive in determining whether an individual is employable or unemployable, or whether he makes or fails to make an adequate adjustment in the normal routine of industrial organization.

The defects in personality commonly found in the cases of homeless men studied in Chicago are those noted by the students of vagabondage and unemployment, namely, feeble-mindedness, constitutional inferiority, emotional instability, and egocentricity. In a survey of 100 cases of unemployment which had[73] been received as patients in the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, Dr. Herman M. Adler found that 43 fell into the class of paranoid personality (egocentricity). The next largest group of 35 cases was assigned to the class of inadequate personality (mentally defective or feeble-minded). The remaining cases, 22 in number, were diagnosed as emotionally unstable personality. An analysis of the months employed per case showed that the emotionally unstable group averages 50 months to each job; the inadequate group 24.7 months to each job; and the paranoid group 20.6 months to each job.[22]

Mental Capacity of Army Group and of Portland Unemployed as Measured by Stanford-Binet

Many individuals not feeble-minded find their way into the group of casual and migratory workers[74] by reason of other defects of personality, for example, emotional instability and egocentricity. Among transient laborers the very great turnover cannot be entirely accounted for by industrial conditions. Much of their shifting from scene to scene is indicative of their emotional instability and restlessness.

In hard times when work is scarce and wages are low, voluntary quitting of jobs is much less than in good times. Hobos are easily piqued and they will “walk off” the job on the slightest pretext, even when they have the best jobs and living conditions are relatively good. Hobo philosophy is disposed to represent the man who is a long time on the job as a piker. He ought to leave a job once in a while simply to assert his independence and to learn something else about other jobs. The following case shows the relation of instability and egocentricity to labor turnover:

[75]

A survey of the so-called “intellectuals” of Hobohemia reveals a group of egocentric and rebellious natures who decry most things that are. Intellectuals, just because they are highly organized and specialized, are very likely to become misfits outside of the environment to which they artificially are adapted. When, added to this handicap, they lack the discipline which a regular occupation affords they are likely to become quite impossible.

The intellectuals are frequently egocentric. They are obsessed by some peculiar point of view. As egocentrics they are in conflict with the rest of the world. Their cry is often a lament and just as often a justification or defense.

A study of individual cases seems to indicate that there is a large proportion of inadequate personalities among homeless men. The following cases indicate the variety of ways in which personal defects lead to a migratory existence which lands them eventually at the bottom of the social scale.

Crises in the life of the person, as family conflict, for example, the feeling of failure, disgrace or embarrassment, the fear of punishment for the commission of an offense may cause a man to desert home and community. With the severance of family and social ties the man or boy is all the more likely to drift aimlessly from place to place, and at last perhaps find himself permanently in the group of migratory and casual laborers.

Conflict at home forces many men and boys into the group of homeless men. Not infrequently boys run away from home because of difficulties with their[78] people. One youth says that his father tried to tell him “where to head in at,” and he “wouldn’t stand for it.” Another boy could not get along with his brothers who were older than he. They tried to “boss” him.

Many men in Hobohemia manifest no inclination to wander but are as completely cut off from their home associations as are the migrants. These men of the “home guard” types may have had trouble with their parents or with their wives.

Deaths in a family will sometimes turn a person out into the world and he may drift into the hobo and tramp group.

Embarrassing situations often make it easier to leave home than to remain and face the criticism or sympathy of the public. On the road, a man is more or less immune to attacks upon his self-consciousness and self-respect, for his relations to other persons are loose and transient and he has no status to maintain. The opposite is true in his home town where his every act is known.

The following case shows that a sense of failure and fear of ridicule may force a boy to leave his home community:

Other individuals began their migratory career by fleeing from the consequences of some offense. If the offense is of such gravity that the consequences seem to outweigh the advantages of remaining in the community, then flight is the natural course.

In certain situations racial or national traits cause discrimination in employment and so result in a descent from regular to casual work. So far as selection for employment is adverse to the Negroes they tend to recruit the ranks of homeless men. During the war, a much higher proportion of foreign-born of German origin was observed on West Madison Street than had previously been reported. Interviews with certain Russians on the “main stem” in the spring of 1922 suggest that the public disapproval of Bolshevism had reacted unfavorably on the chances for employment of this nationality in the United States.

[82]

Wanderlust is a longing for new experience. It is the yearning to see new places, to feel the thrill of new sensations, to encounter new situations, and to know the freedom and the exhilaration of being a stranger.

Wanderlust is a wish of the person. Its expression in the form of tramping, “making” the harvest field, roughing it, pioneering, is a social pattern of American life. The fascination of the life of the road is, in part, disclosed in the following case-study.

[83]

The longing to see the world is often stimulated in a boy by reason of the experiences of some relative or friend whom he admires. One boy went on the road because of the influence his uncle had upon him. The uncle did not advise him to leave home, in fact, he did not know very much about the boy. But the uncle had been to war, and had traveled in China, Alaska, and South America. The boy had to go on the road to become disillusioned. He now knows that his uncle is a plain tramp and that he himself has become a hobo.

A visit to the “jungles” at the junction of any railroad or at the outskirts of any large city or even small town reveals the extent to which the tramp is consciously and enthusiastically imitated. Around the camp fire watching the coffee pot boil or the “mulligan” cook, the boys are often found mingling with the tramps and listening in on their stories of adventure.

[85]

To boys the tramp is not a problem, but a human being, and an interesting one at that. He has no cares nor burdens to hold him down. All he is concerned with is to live and seek adventure, and in this he personifies the heroes in the stories the boys have read. Tramp life is an invitation to a career of varied experiences and adventures. All this is a promise and a challenge. A promise that all the wishes that disturb him shall be fulfilled and a challenge to leave the work-a-day world that he is bound to.

No single cause can be found to explain how a man may be reduced to the status of a homeless, migratory, and casual laborer. In any given case all of the factors analyzed above may have entered into the process of economic and social degradation. Indeed, the conjunction of several of these causes is necessary to explain the extent and the nature of the casualization and mobility of labor in this country. Unemployment and seasonal work disorganize the routine of life of the individual worker and destroy regular habits of work but at the same time thousands of boys and men moved by wanderlust are eager to escape the monotony of stable and settled existence. No matter how perfect a social and economic order may yet be devised there will always remain certain “misfits,” the industrially inadequate, the unstable and egocentric, who will ever tend to conflict with constituted authority in industry, society, and government.

The description, however, of these causes of vagabondage—(a) unemployment and seasonal work,[86] (b) industrial inadequacy, (c) defects of personality, (d) crises in the life of the person, (e) racial or national discrimination, (f) wanderlust—is a necessary condition to any solution of the problem of the homeless man. A program is remedial and not preventive that does not grapple with the fundamental causes here revealed. These causes have roots at the very core of our American life, in our industrial system, in education, cultural and vocational, in family relations, in the problems of racial and immigrant adjustment, and in the opportunity offered or denied by society for the expression of the wishes of the person.

[87]

The term “homeless man” was used by Mrs. Alice W. Solenberger in her study of 1,000 cases in Chicago to include all types of unattached men, tramps, hobos, bums, and the other nameless varieties of the “go-abouts.”

There is no better term at hand than “homeless men” by which the men who inhabit Hobohemia may be characterized. Dr. Ben L. Reitman, who has himself traveled as a tramp, in the sense in which he uses the word, has defined the three principal types of the hobo. He says:

St. John Tucker, formerly the president of the “Hobo College” in Chicago, gives the same classification with a slightly different definition:

[88]

M. Kuhn, of St. Louis (and elsewhere), a migrant, a writer, and, according to his own definition, a hobo, in a pamphlet entitled “The Hobo Problem” gives a fairly representative statement of the homeless man’s explanation of his lot.

Nicholas Klein, president of the “Hobo College” and attorney and adviser to James Eads How, the so-called hobo millionaire, who finances the “Hobo College,” says:

Roger Payne, A.B. and LL.B., who has taken upon himself the title “hobo philosopher,” sees only one type of the wanderer and that is the hobo. The hobo to him is a migratory worker. If he works but does not migrate, or if he migrates but does not work, he is not a hobo. All others are either tramps or bums. He makes no distinction between them. The hobo, foot-loose and care-free, leads, Mr. Payne thinks, the ideal life.

Although we cannot draw lines closely, it seems clear that there are at least five types of homeless men: (a) the seasonal worker,[27] (b) the transient or occasional worker or hobo, (c) the tramp who “dreams and wanders” and works only when it is convenient, (d) the bum who seldom wanders and seldom works, and (e) the home guard who lives in Hobohemia and does not leave town.[28]

Seasonal workers are men who have definite occupations in different seasons. The yearly circuit of their labors takes them about the country, often into several different states. These men may work in the clothing industries during cold weather but in summer are employed at odd jobs; or they may have steady work in summer and do odd jobs in[90] winter. One man picks fruit in summer and works as a machinist in winter. He does not spend his summers in the same state nor his winters in the same city but follows those two occupations throughout the year.

The seasonal worker has a particular kind of work that he follows somewhere at least part of the year. The hotels of Hobohemia are a winter resort for many of these seasonal workers whose schedule is relatively fixed and habitudinal. Some of these who return to the city regularly every winter come with money. In that case, they do not work until next season. Others return without money. They have some kind of work which they follow in the winter. The hobo, proper, is a transient worker without a program.

[91]

A hobo is a migratory worker in the strict sense of the word. He works at whatever is convenient in the mills, the shops, the mines, the harvests, or any of the numerous jobs that come his way without regard for the times or the seasons. The range of his activities is nation wide and with many hobos it is international. He may cross a continent between jobs. He may be able in one year to function in several industries. He may have a trade or even a profession. He may even be reduced to begging between jobs, but his living is primarily gained by work and that puts him in the hobo class.

The hobo group comprises the bulk of the migratory workers, in fact, nearly all migrants in transit are hobos of one sort or other. Hobos have a romantic place in our history. From the beginning they have been numbered among the pioneers. They have played an important rôle in reclaiming the desert and in subduing the trackless forests. They have contributed more to the open, frank, and adventurous spirit of the Old West than we are always willing to admit. They are, as it were, belated frontiersmen. Their presence in the migrant group has been the chief factor in making the American vagabond class different from that of any other country.

It is difficult to classify the numerous types of hobos. The habits, type of work, the routes of travel, etc., seem to differ with each individual. Some live more parasitic lives than others. Some never beg or get drunk, while others never come to town without getting intoxicated and being robbed or arrested, and perhaps beaten. One common characteristic of the hobo, however, is that he works. He usually has horny hands and a worker’s mien. He aims to live by his labor.

As there are different types of homeless men, so different varieties of this particular brand, the hobo, may be differentiated. A part of the hobo group[93] known as “harvest hands” follows the harvest and other agricultural occupations of seasonal nature. Another segment of the group works in the lumber woods and are known as “lumber jacks” or “timber beasts.” A third group is employed in construction and maintenance work. A “gandy dancer” is a man who works on the railroad track tamping ties. If he works on the section he may be called a “snipe” or a “jerry.”

For every vocation that is open to the migratory worker there is some such characteristic name. In the West the hobo usually carries a bundle in which he has a bed, some extra clothes, and a little food. The man who carries such a bundle is usually known as a “bundle stiff” or “bundle bum.” The modern hobo does not carry a bundle because it hinders him when he wishes to travel fast. It is the old man who went West “to grow up with the country” who still clings to his blanket roll.

While the word “tramp” is often used as a blanket term applied to all classes of homeless and potentially vagrant or transient types, it is here used in a stricter[94] sense to designate a smaller group. He is usually thought of, by those familiar with his natural history, as an able-bodied individual who has the romantic passion to see the country and to gain new experience without work. He is a specialist at “getting by.” He is the type that Josiah Flynt had in mind when he wrote his book, Tramping with Tramps. He is typically neither a drunkard nor a bum, but an easy-going individual who lives from hand to mouth for the mere joy of living.

The distinctions between the seasonal worker, the hobo, and the tramp, while important, are not hard and fast. The seasonal worker may descend into the ranks of the hobos, and a hobo may sink to the level of the tramp. But the knowledge of this tendency to pass from one migratory group to another is significant for any program that attempts to deal with the homeless man. Significant, also, but not sufficiently recognized, is the difference between these migratory types and the stationary types of homeless men, the “home guard” and the “bum.”

[96]

The seasonal worker, the hobo, and the tramp are migratory types; the home guard and the bum are relatively stationary. The home guard, like the hobo, is a casual laborer, but he works, often only by the day, now at one and again at another of the multitude of unskilled jobs in the city. The bum, like the tramp, is unwilling to work and lives by begging and petty thieving.

Nearly if not quite one-half of the homeless men in Hobohemia are stationary casual laborers. These men, contemptuously termed “home guards” by the hobo and the tramp, work regularly or irregularly at unskilled work, day labor, and odd jobs. They live or at least spend their leisure time on the “main stem,” but seldom come to the attention of the charities or the police, or ask alms on the street. Many of them have lived in Chicago for years. Others after a migratory career as hobos or tramps “settle down” to a stationary existence. This group includes remittance men, often the “black sheep” of families of standing in far-off communities who send them a small regular allowance to remain away from home.

The tendency for the casual worker to sink to the level of the bum is illustrated by the case of “Shorty”:

[98]

In every city there are ne’er-do-wells—men who are wholly or partially dependent and frequently delinquent as well. The most hopeless and the most helpless of all the homeless men is the bum, including in this type the inveterate drunkard and drug addicts. Old, helpless, and unemployable, these are the most pitiable and the most repulsive types of the down-and-outs. From this class are recruited the so-called “mission stiffs” who are so unpopular among the Hobohemian population.

Many of the terms which are epithets picturesquely describe special types of homeless men. The popular names for the various types of tramps and hobos are current terms that have been picked up on the street as they pass from mouth to mouth. Some of them are new, others are old, while all of them are in flux. Names of types are coined by the men themselves. They serve a while and then pass out, giving place to new and more catchy terms. Change is characteristic of tramp terminology and tramp jargon. Words assume a different meaning as they are extensively used, or they become too general in their use and newer terms are invented. Many of the names by which types are designated were at first terms of derision, but terms seem to lose their stigma by continued use.[29]

Among tramps who seldom if ever work are those who peddle some kind of wares or sell some kind of service.

[100]

The following classification is taken from a narrative work by “A No. 1, The Famous Tramp,” who claims to have traveled 500,000 miles for $7.61. His books are more or less sensational and are not popular among many tramps, because they say the incidents he relates are overdrawn.[30]

The Rating of the Tramps by “A No. 1”

The beggar is one who stands in one place. He supplicates help by appealing to the pity of the passers-by. The moocher is an individual who is somewhat more mobile than the beggar. He moves about, going to the houses and asking for food, clothing,[102] and even money, if he can get it. The panhandler is a beggar of a more courageous type. He hails men on the street and asks for money. He does not fawn nor whine nor strive to arouse pity. Dr. Reitman says: “The only difference between a moocher and a panhandler is that the moocher goes to the back door while the panhandler goes to the front door.”

The beggar types may also be divided into the able-bodied and the non-able-bodied. The non-able-bodied beggars are more numerous in the cities. They are forced, because of their handicaps, to remain where the greatest number of people are. Some handicapped beggars, however, are able to travel with marvelous speed over the country. These non-able-bodied types go by different names according to their afflictions.

The Hop Head is an interesting type. He is usually in a pitiful condition, for he has small chance, living as he does, in the tramp class, to get money to buy “dope.” Frequently he resorts to clever and even desperate means to secure it. One type of dope fiend is the Junkie. He uses a “gun” or needle to inject morphine or heroin. A Sniffer is one who sniffs cocaine. More frequent than the drug habit is the drink habit.

The tramp class has different types of predatory individuals and petty or even major offenders:

[103]

Among other types of tramps are:

From the point of view of abnormal sex relations there are several types of tramps:

From the economic standpoint, migratory workers are employables and unemployables. Between the extremes there are individuals of every shade of employability. The ability of a man to support himself is presumed to be related to his ability and to his opportunity to work. The tramp problem has been interpreted first of all as an unemployment[104] problem, but this does not take account of the unemployables.

First of all, there are the physically handicapped, the crippled, the blind, the deaf, and the aged, and many who are too fat or too puny or too sickly to do heavy manual work. Perhaps a half of the whole group in a city like Chicago are physically handicapped to a greater or less extent.

Second, the psychopathic types include many irresponsible and undependable persons found in the population of Hobohemia. These either cannot hold a job, or do not care to; they have other ideals. They could, no doubt, do some sort of work but most of them would have to be supervised.

To what degree homeless men are employable, to what degree some of them are partially employable, and to what extent the whole group is unemployable is a question that cannot be finally answered.[31]

The problem of the homeless men is variously interpreted. The courts and the police are interested in them as offenders. As offenders, they are generally recidivists; to the social worker and the missionary they represent a body of men who have no purpose or direction.

One mission worker says:

However we may classify this group, the fact remains that we have here a great body of persons,[105] probably more than a million in the United States,[32] and that they furnish a problem that seems to be ever present. It is, as we shall see later, a great heterogeneous group, unorganized and incapable of being organized. They have been gathered from every walk of life and for a thousand different reasons find themselves in this class. There are restless and normal boys and young men who are out in the world for adventure and whose stay in the class is more or less temporary; there are able-bodied men of more mature age who are either wholly self-supporting or are self-supporting most of the time; and there are old men who are too aged and infirm to work and too proud to surrender themselves to an institution. There are the physically incapacitated and the mentally inadequate who are more or less dependent and are likely to continue so, and there are many types of persons who are the victims of lingering diseases or who are addicted to drink or drugs and are not able to hold their own. All these are making the best struggle that their wits, their strength, and their opportunities permit to get a living. Some of them are in the group by choice and have their minds clearly made up to climb out, others hope to get out and strive to but never will, and yet others never have any such visions.

An estimate has already been made that the number of homeless men in Chicago range from 30,000 in the summer to 60,000 in the winter, reaching[106] 75,000 in periods of unemployment. Any attempt to state the numbers of the different types of homeless men can be little more than a guess. The difficulty is the greater because individuals are continually passing from one group into another group. One man in his lifetime may perchance have been, in turn, seasonal laborer, hobo, tramp, home guard, and bum.

The public generally fails to distinguish between these types. The group of bums, beggars, and petty thieves, often mistakenly thought of as representative of the homeless men’s group, probably does not exceed in Chicago a total number of 2,500. The number of the home-guard type, the stationary casual worker, has been placed at 30,000, the summer population of Hobohemia on the basis of the number of permanent guests at lodging-house and hotel, and the number of registered voters among the homeless men.[33] The number of tramps who visit Chicago each year can only be roughly estimated at 150,000,[34] or an average of perhaps 5,000 at any given time. The migratory worker, including both the seasonal laborer and the hobo, number on the average around 10,000 and reach a total of 300,000 or more persons who come to Chicago for the winter or to secure a shipment to work outside the city. In periods of economic depression the numbers of homeless men in Hobohemia are swollen with men out of work, the majority of whom for the first time have been turned adrift on the “main stem.”

[107]

The occupations that select out of the foot-loose males in our population the most restless types are:

1. Agriculture or crop moving.—When the crops are ready to be garnered labor must be imported at any cost. The leading crops in these seasonal demands are grain harvesting, corn shucking, fruit picking, potato digging, beet topping, cotton picking, hop picking, etc. If a man follows the wheat harvest, he may be occupied from the middle of June when the crop is ready in Oklahoma until November or December when the season ends with threshing in North Dakota and Canada. Workers who pick fruit may remain in one locality and have some kind of fruit always coming on.

2. Building and construction work.—Next to crop moving the building trades and construction jobs make the heaviest seasonal demands upon the labor market. Railroad construction, ditch digging, and similar occupations are generally discontinued during the winter. Carpentry, masonry, brick and concrete work are only carried on with reduced numbers of men through the cold months.

3. Fishing.—Salmon fishing on the Pacific Coast and oyster fishing on the Atlantic Coast are also seasonal industries. In the fishing industry, as in other seasonal occupations, there is a demand for experienced workers that cannot always be had when most needed.

4. Sheep shearing.—Sheep shearing is a skilled trade. Thousands of men are needed to harvest the[108] wool crop each year and these men are forced to become migratory. The shearing season, like the harvest, moves from border to border during a period of three or four months. In the Southwest the sheep are sometimes clipped twice a year. The shearing jobs are usually short but lucrative.

5. Ice harvesting.—Formerly the ice harvest furnished employment to an army of men for two months or more during the winter. Ice-manufacturing plants have diminished the demand for natural ice, though ice cutting still furnishes winter jobs for many men.

6. Lumbering.—Working in the lumber woods and in the saw mills is not now so much of a seasonal job as it was when the industry centered around the Great Lakes. The industry has gone West or over the border into Canada, where, with the longer winter season and improved facilities, it operates almost all year. It is not necessary in Washington, Oregon, and California to wait for the snow to begin work in the woods as in Michigan and Wisconsin in the early days.

Certain occupations not essentially seasonal have a tendency to contribute to migrancy. In many metal mines a man’s health will not permit him to work long. He leaves and goes into some other mine in the same or a different district where the danger is not present. A miner tends to become a migrant for the sake of his health. There are other industries in which hazards exist that force workers to become transient.

The American hobo has been a great pioneer. New mining camps, oil booms, the building of a town in a few weeks, or any mushroom development[109] utilizes a great many transient workers. After a flood, a fire, or an earthquake, there is a great demand for labor. The migratory worker is always ready to respond. It is his life, in which he finds variety and experience and, last but not least, something to talk about.

In seasonal and casual work, as in all types of industry, a process of selection takes place. Great numbers of men are attracted into seasonal occupations because of the good wages offered. But only those remain who are content to migrate from one locality to another in response to the demands for labor. The average man soon realizes that in the course of a year seasonal work does not pay even if fabulous wages are received for short-lived jobs. The man who continues as a migratory worker is likely, therefore, to be a person who is either unable to find or unable to hold a permanent job. Some workers become restless after a few weeks or months in one place. Seasonal and casual work seems to have selected out these restless types and made hobos of them.

Migratory workers have a certain body of traditions: they know how to get work; what kind of work to look for; when to look for certain kinds of work, and where certain work may be found. They fall in with the seasonal migration of workers and drift into certain localities to do certain jobs; to the potato fields, the fruit picking, the wheat harvest.

The hobo worker finds his way to out-of-town jobs more often than to city work. Upon leaving an out-of-town job he is likely to return to the city in[110] order to locate another job out of the city or even out of the state. This tendency of the foot-loose worker to drift into the city has turned the attention of the employer to the city whenever he needed help. Both the worker and the employer have been attracted to the city in an effort to solve their labor difficulties. Intermediate agencies spring up to bring together the jobless man and the man with jobs to offer. Employment agents, congregating in the Hobohemian sections of the city, convert those areas into labor markets.

Chicago is probably the greatest labor exchange for the migratory worker in the United States, if not in the world. Probably no other city furnishes more men for railroad work. In days past, when so many new railroads were being built, there were great demands for men in the West, and it was not uncommon to get a 1,000-mile shipment any time in the year. One is still able to secure free shipments of from 400 to 600 miles.

There are more than 200 private employment agencies in Chicago. There were, on August 14, 1922, 39 licensed private agencies of the type patronized by the homeless man. Eighteen of these were on Canal Street, thirteen were on West Madison Street, and the rest in close proximity to that area. In addition to these there are many agencies not operating on a commission basis which hire men for a private corporation and are maintained by that corporation. As such they are not licensed nor does the law affect them.

No figures are at hand to show how many men these private agencies place during the year. Their records are not merely inadequate; they are a joke.[111] In fact, few of them keep records that list all applicants, all men placed, jobs registered, etc., though the state law definitely declares that this must be done.

The inclusion of the non-fee-collecting agencies will raise the number from 39 to over 50. If each agency sends out, at a low estimate, 10 men a day, and if each operates 300 days a year, a total of 150,000 men are placed in jobs annually. Over 57,000 men in 1921-22 were placed by the free employment agency. Many of these homeless men have access to other private agencies than those situated on the “stem,” and often they prefer to go to such agencies. If 100 of these agencies furnished jobs to 2 homeless men a day for 300 days a year, we would have an additional 60,000. About 250,000 homeless men pass through the Chicago employment agencies every year.

Employment agencies fall into two classes—the public, or those operated by the federal government, the state, or the municipality and those conducted under private management. The private agency is the pioneer. It was not only the outgrowth of a certain condition in the labor market but it was the reason for the creation of the public employment bureau.

The idea is becoming general that employment offices have a social responsibility. They have duties to the applicants, to the employers, and to the public that are more than economic; more than a business of selling jobs to jobless men. It is a responsibility that is not imposed upon the ordinary business man and that has no prominent place in the code of business ethics.

[112]

The private employment agencies that cater to the homeless men are chiefly located on the West Side. The 1919-20 Report of the Illinois Department of Labor[35] shows that during that period there were 295 licensed private employment agencies in Chicago. As we noted above, about fifty of these serve the homeless men. Most of these fifty agencies are located along Canal Street opposite the Union Depot, or along Madison Street between the Chicago River and Halsted Street. Some of these operate the year round, while others come and go with the seasons, opening up in prosperous times and going out of existence when the demand for labor falls.

A few of the private agencies are fairly well equipped; that is, they have desks, counters, telephone, chairs or benches, and a waiting-room which in cold weather is kept warm for the patrons. Others, the majority, have very little equipment, perhaps a chair and a table in a single, bare room. They keep no books other than what they carry in their pockets. For the average small labor agent an office is only used as a place to hang the license. He gets his patrons by standing on the street and soliciting. The other private agents are playing the rôle of man catcher, and he must do the same if he would succeed.

There are two types of private labor agencies—the commission agencies, and the boarding or commissary agencies. The commission agency is the pioneer job-selling institution which survives by charging a fee to the employer who seeks workers, or by charging a fee to the applicants, or by charging both. Usually they charge both the applicant and[113] the employer, and formerly their prices were governed by the demand for jobs, on the one hand, and for workers, on the other. (If the competition is for workers they can raise the price charged the employer. If jobs are scarce they can raise the price charged the applicant.) The boarding and commissary agency charge no fee for the job. Their profit is made in keeping the boarding-house for the men they hire.

In the past it was proverbial that better shipments could be had from the private agencies in Chicago than from any other city. A few years ago the Chicago agencies were shipping men to all the big jobs within a radius of from 500 to 1,000 miles, and men would come to Chicago from 500 to 1,000 miles in one direction to be sent by the agencies to work on some job equally as far in another direction. These long-distance interstate shipments have been the chief factor in the prosperity of the private agencies. High prices were charged for the long shipments but the men were willing to pay them whether the job was good or not in order to secure free transportation west or south or east. The long shipments are not so numerous at present and the high fees are no longer permitted.

The migratory worker resents the idea of being obliged to pay for the privilege of securing work. In every program that the hobo has advocated to change society he has made reference to the “labor shark.” The hobo worker is never disappointed to find that the job has been misrepresented by the agency. Nor is the agency surprised if the applicant does not go to work when he arrives on the job.

The state has been forced into the employment business because of the problems presented by private agencies. The public employment agency in Chicago has not displaced or even seriously affected the private employment agency. It is still only in the experimental stage, a laboratory in which the employment problem may be studied.

There are three public free employment offices in Chicago: one at 116 North Dearborn for skilled workers, one at 105 South Jefferson Street for unskilled workers, and one at 344 East Thirty-fifth Street, chiefly for Negro workers. The homeless man is chiefly interested in the Federal and State Labor Exchange located at 105 South Jefferson Street. However, the central office on Dearborn Street, which specializes in skilled and permanent employment, attracts two or three hundred homeless men a day, mainly from South State Street. This office is careful not to send out on jobs “dead line men.”

Probably four or five times as many men are placed by the private as by the public employment agencies. It seems paradoxical that the migratory worker should patronize the private labor agent whom he regards as an exploiter and a parasite rather than the free employment office, yet there are good reasons for his behavior.

In the first place, the office of the public agency, although little more than a block away, is not on the “main stem.” Strangers in the city find their way to the “slave market” without difficulty but may never become aware of the existence of the free employment office. A migratory worker likes to do a little “window shopping” before he takes a job. He likes to go along the streets reading the red or blue or yellow placards announcing jobs and shipments until he has made up his mind. The signs and scribbled windows of the private agency are maneuvers of salesmanship. The public agency has no such signs on the outside. The men must go inside to see the blackboard upon which the jobs are written.

Further, the public agency is in duty bound, as the private agency is not, to keep records and to get certain information from the workers who apply for[116] jobs, and from the employers as well. The men who patronize these agencies dislike the “red tape” of the public agency; they are often unwilling to be catalogued and given a number, or go through the other formalities so necessary for efficiency. The decisive reason why the migratory worker patronizes the private agency is because it carries a better class of jobs. Jobs involving interstate shipments are usually given to the private agencies, partly because it is customary, and partly because they know how to solicit such contracts for labor. It is difficult for a man to get an out-of-state job in the public agency since it is more or less local in its jurisdiction. The private agencies attract the hobos also because they make no effort to see that he goes to work after he has been sent. Indeed, it is to their advantage if he does not go to work, for then they have the chance to send another man. The public agency makes an effort to “follow up” the applicants and to “keep tab” on them. The hobo worker shies from such solicitous treatment.

Mr. J. J. Kenna, chief inspector of private employment agencies, believes that the private agencies should be obliged to do likewise. He wrote in his report to the State Department of Labor in 1920:

[117]

Nothing would do more for efficiency in the employment office business than to compel the private agencies to keep as efficient records as the public bureau. The spirit of competition so prevalent in the private agencies is not present in the public labor bureau. The public agency stands complacently on the side, never entering the struggle to get jobs and men together. It is too much of an office and too little of an agency.

The public and private agencies operate upon diametrically opposing assumptions. The assumption of the public agency is that the man once placed will remain so long as the job lasts, and a large proportion of their jobs, especially in the Dearborn Street office, are for “long stake” men. A man’s record, his qualifications, are taken and he is sent out to the job with the notion that he will work steady. The private agencies, on the contrary, assume that few of these men will remain long on the job; that they may stay ten days or two weeks and seldom longer than three months. The public agency with an eye to permanency may be expected to move slowly in placing men on jobs, whereas the private agency will send anyone to any job that he says he can do and that he is willing to pay for.

The casualization of labor, in spite of its concern to place men permanently, has a tendency to attract “home guards,” i.e., men who do not care to leave the city and yet do not want steady work. They may work from a day to a week, then they return for another job.

[118]

The following are a few of the names taken at random from a list of men who had been given ten or more jobs by the Federal and State Labor Exchange between March 1, 1922, and August 15, 1922 (five and one-half months):

The records show hundreds of similar instances. Some men have been sent to as many as forty or fifty jobs during a period of six months and few stayed with a job more than a month or two.

John M. is a casual laborer. He is one of a type that works by the day, is paid by the day, and lives by the day. Don. D. Lescohier has described the characteristics of the casual workers:

[120]

The demoralizing effect of a period of unemployment upon the migratory and casual worker is indicated in an interview given to the investigator by Mr. Charles J. Boyd, general superintendent of the Illinois Free Employment Offices in Chicago.

The hobo is not unfamiliar with strike jobs. Corporations, when forced to the wall in a labor crisis, often come to the “stem” for their strike-breakers. By offering alluring wages and the assurance[121] of security, they are able to attract from ranks of even the casual workers enough men to keep the plants running. Labor agencies of this kind are not popular on the “stem”; neither are the men who hire out as strike-breakers. But in spite of this stigma they survive as during the railroad strike in the summer of 1922. These railroad agencies crowded even to the heart of the Madison Street mart and eventually forced the private agencies to deal in strike jobs.

Strike-breakers or “scabs” are of four varieties: (1) men who are innocently attracted to the job (it is generally charged that this was the case in the Herrin affair); (2) men who are “too proud to beg and too honest to steal”; (3) men who have a grudge against some striking union, or against organized labor in general; and (4) men who hire out as bona fide workers but really “bore from within” and in the language of the radical “work sabotage.”

All the problems of the homeless man go back in one way or another to the conditions of his work. The irregularity of his employment is reflected in the irregularity of all phases of his existence. To deal with him even as an individual, society must deal also with the economic forces which have formed his behavior, with the seasonal and cyclical fluctuations in industry. This means that the problem of the homeless man is not local but national.

The establishment during the war of the United States Employment Service gave promise of an attempt to cope with the problem nationally. The curtailment of this service since 1919 through inadequate[122] appropriations has prevented its functioning on a scale which the situation demands.

The emphasis upon the development of a national program means no lack of recognition of the service of local employment agencies. They are indispensable units in any effective plan of nation-wide organization. The bureaus and branches, in Chicago, of the Illinois Free Employment offices are now co-operating with the United States Employment Service.

The accumulated experience of the local employment agencies will be valuable not only in the future expansion of the national employment service, but in pointing the way to the next steps to be taken locally in dealing with the homeless man as a worker. The officials of these agencies have learned that the problem of adjusting the migratory casual worker in industry involves human nature as well as economics. A conviction is growing that in connection with, or in addition to, the public employment agency designed to bring together the man and the job, there is need of a clearing house which offers medical, psychological, and sociological diagnosis as a basis for vocational guidance, after-care service, and industrial rehabilitation.

[123]

THE HOBO PROBLEM

[124-125]

No extended study has ever been made that would afford an adequate index for the physical fitness of homeless men. Municipal lodging-houses, jails, hospitals, and other institutions have collected certain data. But such information is indicative of the physical and mental condition of those only who have become problems of charity or correction. They do not represent the whole group of homeless men. However, it is evident from these studies that a large proportion of the entire group is below par physically. They indicate at least that defective individuals are comparatively numerous among hobos and tramps.

Mrs. Alice W. Solenberger found that two-thirds of her 1,000 cases were either physically or mentally defective. Of these, 627 men and boys were suffering from a total of 722 physical and mental deficiencies.[41]

She tells us that of the 222 more or less permanently handicapped, 106 men had been entirely self-supporting before their injuries while 127 were entirely dependent after injury.

A careful study of 100 homeless men made in the Municipal Lodging House of New York City by F. C. Laubach showed the following defects:[42]

Laubach’s 100 cases were selected from more than 400 men. They represented the 100 who remained longest to be examined (perhaps the 100 the least able to get away). He found 28 per cent able-bodied[127] while Mrs. Solenberger reported 37.3 per cent without observable defects. That this per cent of defectives is high for more unselected groups will be shown by the following extract from the report of the Municipal Lodging House of New York City for 1915.

This investigation showed that in a lean year, when many men were out of work, a large proportion of the lodging-house population is composed of handicapped men. The physical condition of 400 tramps interviewed by the writer is not so much in contradiction as in supplement to the foregoing studies.[44] Only men in transit were tabulated. Nearly all of them were the typical migratory workers or hobos. Observation was limited to apparent defects that[128] would hinder in a noticeable manner the working capacity of the men.

Subtracting those who could be classed mentally defective, we have but forty-one persons who were apparently physically handicapped. It will be noted that the percentage of the aged is considerably lower than the previous tables show. The same is true of the maimed and injured. They were all men who were able to “get over the road.” One of the maimed men had lost an arm while the two others had each lost a foot.

Eye trouble was listed separately because these were ailments that were passing. Three of the men had weak eyes and this condition had been aggravated by train riding and loss of sleep. One man had been gassed in the army and his eyes suffered from the wind and bright light. Only one man admitted that he was suffering from a venereal disease.

Both men suffering from tuberculosis were miners. Both had been in hospitals for treatment. One of them was in a precarious condition. The men listed as oversized and undersized might be properly considered physically handicapped. Two of them were uncomfortably fat while the other two were conspicuously under weight and height.

[129]

Often the seasonal work sought by the migratory worker is located in out-of-the-way places or with little or no medical or sanitary supervision. Sometimes there are not even tents for the men to sleep in. Life and work in the open, so conducive to health on bright, warm days, involves exposure in cold and stormy weather. In the northwest, where rain is so abundant that workers suffer considerably from exposure, strikes have even been called to enforce demands for warm, dry bunkhouses.

In addition to the exposure to the elements there are other hazards the migratory and casual workers run. On most of his jobs, whether in the woods, the swamps, in the sawmills, or the mines and quarries, in the harvest, on bridges or on the highways, the hobo faces danger. Since he is in the habit of working only a few days at the time, a well-paying, hazardous job appeals to him. The not infrequent accidents are serious since few of these foot-loose men carry insurance.

Seasonal labor generally consists of hard work like shoveling or lifting and carrying heavy loads. Only men who can do hard work are wanted. Not much so-called “light work” aside from a few jobs in kitchens, in stables, or about camps is open to the transient. Many homeless men are not physically able to do eight or ten hours’ hard labor without suffering. They are often weak from eating poor food or from dissipation. Even if they go on a job with their minds made up to remain one or two months they are often obliged to leave after a few days. Often the hobo works on jobs where there is no medical attention. Sometimes, where the job[130] includes large numbers of men, a physician is hired to go from camp to camp. He is usually known as a “pill peddler” and all he pretends to do is give first aid to the injured and treat passing ailments. Serious cases he sends to the hospital.

Big industrial organizations usually carry some sort of medical insurance and in some cases accident insurance. This system of workingmen’s compensation for industrial accidents is maintained sometimes by fees taken from the pay of the men, sometimes entirely by the employer. The accident compensation, the hospital, and medical privileges apply only to ailments and injuries caused by his work.

The food the hobo receives on the job is not always palatable, nor does it always come up to the requirements of a balanced diet or the caloric needs of a workingman. In the business of feeding the men, considerable exploitation enters which the men are powerless to prevent. The boarding contracts are often left to boarding companies that agree to feed the men and furnish bunks for prices ranging (since the war) from five to eight dollars a week. For the privilege of boarding the workers, they agree to keep the gangs filled. Often in the West the men furnish their own beds, but private “bundle beds” are passing. Some companies furnish good beds, but the general rule is to supply a tick that may be filled with straw and a couple of quilts which are charged to the worker until he returns them. These quilts and blankets are often used again and again by different men without being cleaned during a whole season.

Several boarding companies maintain free employment agencies in Chicago, well known to the hobo[131] and generally disliked. The chief complaint against them is that in hard times, when men are plentiful, there is a tendency to drop on the quality and the quantity of the food. In such an event the monotony of the menu and the unsavory manner in which food is prepared is a scandal in Hoboland. However, all complaints against boarding companies are not due to bad food. Poor cooking is another ground for much dissatisfaction. Efficient camp cooks are rare and too high priced for the average boarding company.

The hazards the homeless man takes while at work in the city are far less than on the seasonal out-of-town work. The health problem of the transient “on the stem” is nevertheless serious. It is not so much a problem of work conditions as of hotels and lodging accommodations and restaurants.

The cheap lodging-houses and hotels in Chicago are under the surveillance of the Chicago Department of Health. The department has done much to keep down contagion and to raise the standards of these places. Infectious diseases have been more rare here than in hotels in the Loop. These hotels survived the influenza epidemics as well as any in the city. There has been a gradual rise in the standards of health and sanitation of the hotels and lodging-houses, but just how much this is due to the watchful care of the Department of Health cannot be said. Other factors, such as business competition, may also have entered in to improve conditions.

In many respects the cheap workingmen’s hotels still fall far below the standards set by law. Indeed, if all of them lived up to the letter of the law in every[132] respect, many would find it unprofitable to operate. These hotels are in buildings that were erected for other purposes, buildings that cannot be adequately made over to accommodate comfortably hundreds of men.

The problem of ventilation is present in the older hotels for men. In some corners, in hallways and isolated rooms, there is never any circulation of air. The smells accumulate from day to day so that the guest on entering a room is greeted by a variety of odors to which each of his predecessors has contributed.

The following statement of an investigator indicates what is one of the most objectionable features of the cheap hotel.

With respect to wash basins and bath facilities the condition is no better. Many do not even have hot water. In some places from twenty to forty men use the same wash bowl.

The Department of Health has taken an active part in the campaign against vermin, and co-operates whenever a complaint is made. Their task seems hopeless since the patrons are so transient and so frequently carry vermin from one place to another. The very buildings are often breeding places for bedbugs, lice, and roaches.

[133]

If the homeless man becomes sick or injured while at work he likely will be cared for by the hospital maintained by the industry. But he is in dire distress when he has no job and is in need of medical attention. Occasionally men without funds go to private physicians and not infrequently they get free treatment, but the traditional and easier method of meeting such situations is to go to an institution. Chicago, with its numerous hospitals and medical colleges, is a Mecca for the sick and the afflicted of the “floating fraternity.” Homeless men come sometimes several hundred miles for treatment to this great healing center of trampdom. They have no scruples against entering an institution as a charity patient. To them it is not charity, but something due to the sick.

Venereal disease and ailments growing out of venereal disease play a considerable rôle among the tramp population. The Chicago Health Department on the basis of the medical examination of inmates of the House of Correction estimates that 10 per cent of the homeless men are venereally infected.[46] This is double the rate of infection found in drafted men.[47]

The transient does not take venereal disease seriously. He takes no precautions to protect himself after exposure. Necessity forces him out on some job where he must work, sometimes even in an[134] active stage of infection. Often he tries to treat himself with remedies recommended by druggists or friends. Once the transient submits to treatment in a hospital or by a physician he will seldom continue it after the active stage of his case has been passed.

Along the “stem,” sex perversion is not infrequent and occasionally from such contacts infections occur. Embarrassing as it is for the homeless man to apply to a hospital or clinic for treatment for social disease, it is doubly so when thus infected. That such cases are not numerous is true, but they do exist, and they provide an answer to the pervert who holds that homosexuality is safe from disease.[48]

Practically all homeless men drink when liquor is available. The only sober moments for many hobos and tramps are when they are without funds.[49] The majority, however, are periodic drinkers who have sober periods of a week, a month or two, or[135] even a year. These are the men who often work all summer with the avowed purpose of going to some lodging-house and living quietly during the winter, but usually they find themselves in the midst of a drunken debauch before they have been in town more than a day or two. Rarely does one meet a man among migratory workers who does not indulge in an occasional “spree”; the teetotalers are few indeed.

The homeless man on a spree usually drinks as long as his money lasts, and then he usually employs all the devices at his command to get money to prolong the debauch. For the time being he will disregard all other wants. After he sobers up and finds himself sick, weak, and nervous, his plight is a sad one. He has no appetite for the only food he is able to buy and the food he craves he cannot afford. He is too weak and shaky to work, and too disheartened to beg. In summer he can go to the parks or the docks and sleep it off. Getting drunk in winter means more or less exposure for these men, and their sobering up not infrequently takes place in the hospital—or in jail. In view of these after-effects, drinking is more serious for the homeless man than for any other.

Chronic or periodic drunkenness with its accompanying exposure leaves a stamp on the constitution of the homeless man that is not easily erased. It aggravates any latent weaknesses that he may have, and if he does not go to the hospital after a debauch with lung trouble, nervous diseases, heart trouble, or rheumatism, he is at least lowering his resistance to these and other diseases. The man who survives best spends long periods on the job and only occasionally visits the city.

[136]

When the amount of exposure, the extent of dissipation, and the malnutrition that falls to the lot of the homeless man are taken into consideration, it is remarkable that he is as free from sickness as he is. The fact that he is outdoors much of the time may have something to do with this.

Disease, physical disability, and insanitary living conditions seem to be, as things are, the natural and inevitable consequences of the migratory risk-taking and irregular life of the homeless man. These effects of his work and life upon his physical constitution will be considered by many the most appalling of all the problems affecting the hobo and the tramp. Municipal provision and philanthropic effort have been and will continue to be directed to the treatment of his diseases and defects and to the improvement of his living conditions. The efficiency of the homeless man as a worker and his chance of regaining his lost economic and social status depend upon his physical rehabilitation. A clearing house for the homeless man when established should, therefore, include as one of its activities facilities for diagnosis of the needs, medical, vocational, social, of each individual.

The living conditions of the homeless man, although revolting to the public, are intolerable to him, chiefly as a symbol of his degradation. Lodging-house sanitation and personal hygiene are of minor import, in his thinking, as compared with working conditions, or, for that matter, with the problems of his social and political status, to be discussed in the next two chapters.

[137]

Tramping is a man’s game. Few women are ever found on the road. The inconveniences and hazards of tramping prevent it. Women do wander from city to city but convention forbids them to ride the roads and move about as men do. One tramp who had traveled 8,000 miles in six months said: “I even saw two women on the road, and last summer I saw a woman beating her way in a box car.”

Tramping is a man’s game. Few pre-adolescent boys are tramps. They do not break away permanently until later in their teens. How does the absence of women and children affect the life of the migratory worker? What difference would it make if tramps traveled like gypsies, taking their women and children with them? How does the absence of women and children affect the fantasy and the reveries and eventually the behavior of the homeless man?

The majority of homeless men are unmarried. Those who are married are separated, at least temporarily, from their families.[50] Most homeless men in the city are older than the average man on the road and would be expected, therefore, to have had marital experience. They are content to live in town while the younger men are eager to move in the restless search for adventure and new experience.

[138]

The homeless man has not always been homeless. Like most of us, he was reared in a home and is so far a product of home life. He enters upon the life of the road in his late teens or early twenties. He brings with him, as a rule, the habits and memories gained in the more stable existence in the family and community. Frequently it has been his conflict with, and rebellion against, that more stable existence that set him on the road.

Most of these men have mothers living. If their mothers are dead, they speak of them reverently. The mission workers often direct their appeals to these early memories, “the religion of our mothers.” The only correspondence that some homeless men carry on is with their mothers. Some of them only write one or two letters a year but these are letters home. In most of the missions there is a sign with the inscription, “When Did You Write to Mother Last?”

Other women may, and sometimes do, exert a wholesome influence upon him. He is often profoundly touched by the women of the missions who stand on the street corner and plead with him for his soul’s sake. Young and attractive women invite more attention because of their sex than their message. Though he may have little or no interest in the religious appeal, feeling for these women is generally idealized and wholesome. The missions have learned the value of young and attractive women and employ them extensively as evangelists.

Women in places where the hobo has worked or boarded, generally older women, frequently take a[139] mother’s interest in him. “Mother” Greenstein, who keeps a restaurant on South State Street, is the idol of a great many “bos.” She never turns a hungry man away. She is known far and near by tramps and hobos. Many men know her by reputation who have never seen her.

Another woman who has become well known to many homeless men is “Aunt” Nina S. She kept a rooming-house for years and always gave any man who came to her in winter some place to sleep. She could always find room. Her only compensation was the good will of the homeless man.

When the tramp works he usually goes out on some job where there are no women. He may spend six months in a lumber camp and not see a woman during all that time. He may work for a whole summer, along with hundreds like himself, and never meet a woman. Sometimes there are women on such jobs, but they are generally the wives of the bosses and have no interest in the common workers. Children in such families frequently strike up a more intimate acquaintance with them. The only company[140] for such a man is men, and men who are living the same unnatural life as himself.

There are jobs open to the homeless man that are more wholesome. Sometimes he finds himself in communities where he is neither isolated nor an outcast. The tramp is not often interested in small-town or country associations, because they generally tend to terminate seriously and he does not want to be taken seriously. If he has the money to spend, and he usually has while he is working, he can meet women, but he meets them in town when he has leisure. He may have a hundred reasons for going to town, but the major reason, whether he admits it or not, is to meet women. The types of women he meets depends upon his personality, his taste, and his purse. In this he is like the soldier or the sailor.

The younger hobos, especially those who are on the road and off again by turns, are able at times to save money and put on a “front.” These younger men are frequently able, therefore, to get into the social life of the communities in which they find themselves. When they are in town with money to spend they “go the limit” while it lasts, and then they go out to work and save up another “stake.” Usually they have a number of women on their correspondence lists. As they go from one city to another they make new acquaintances and forget the old friends. Usually they are as transient in their attachments to women as to their jobs.

Many of these younger men ultimately settle down, but they do not always have the ability to make permanent attachments though they may try again and again. They invariably seek greener pastures. Wherever they are, they will be found[141] “burning the candles at both ends.” As long as they are young and attractive they have little difficulty in finding girls who are willing to assist them in scattering their cash.

Among these are the show girls who sing or dance in the cheap burlesque theaters on South State and West Madison streets. Thousands of hobos, who never can hope to come in personal contact with chorus girls, throng the cheap playhouses of Hobohemia. The titillations of a State Street vaudeville are vulgar and inexpensive. The men, many of them, at least, would not and could not appreciate a higher grade of entertainment.

The hobo has few ideal associations with women. Since most of them are unmarried, or living apart from their wives, their sex relations are naturally illicit. The tramp is not a marrying man, though he does enter into transient free unions with women when the occasion offers. There are many women in the larger cities who have no scruples against living with a man during the winter, or for even a year or two, without insisting upon the marriage rite. They are not prostitutes, not even “kept women.”

[142]

The tramp who succeeds in living in idleness with a woman in such a companionship considers himself fortunate. The woman who can find a man like M. is often content, provided he is faithful to her, although she prefers a man who can be depended upon to earn a little money. The women who enter these free unions have the least to gain and the most to lose. The general experience of women who keep their “men” is that when they are in the direst need the men will desert them; on the other hand, when the men are in need they will return.

A certain class of detached men makes a practice of getting into the good graces of some prostitute for the winter. The panderer is not a characteristic tramp type, but certain homeless men are not averse to becoming pimps for a season. These attachments between homeless men and prostitutes are often quite real. Some of them even become permanent, others last a year or two, but most of them are only of a few months’ duration. While they do persist they are often more or less sentimental.

Most hobos and tramps because of drink, unpresentable appearance, or unattractive personality, do not succeed in establishing permanent, or even quasi-permanent, relationships with women. For them the only accessible women are prostitutes and the prostitutes who solicit the patronage of the homeless man are usually forlorn and bedraggled creatures who have not been able to hold out in the fierce competition in higher circles.

These women, otherwise so isolated and so hard pressed by their exigent wants, do not live on the[143] “main stem,” but adjacent to it. They are conveniently located so that even the “floater,” who comes to town with a few months’ savings, has no trouble in finding them. The upper-class prostitutes keep men on the street getting the business for them. Pandering is an art, and many of these pimps have become adept in catching the men who come to town with “rolls.” Only a small part of the commerce of the homeless man is with the “live ones.” He usually has so little money that he is forced to bargain for the attention of the lowest women that walk the streets.

Men with “rolls” are scarce in Hobohemia. One man met on West Madison Street said: “I came in last night with $380 and now I’m flatter’n a pancake. I didn’t even get a pair of sox. Hallelujah! I’m a bum.” He was still too drunk to realize the situation, but next day he was uncertain whether he had been robbed by a woman or by a “jack roller.” He did not even know whether he had been robbed or had lost his money. He had worked all winter and spring on a ranch near Casper, Wyoming, and had come to town with a trainload of cattle.[51] It is seldom that the second-rate prostitute gets hold of so much money.

From these “second raters” the tramp is doubly liable to infection. Most of them have been diseased at some time while some of them are infected all the time. More than one-third of them, according to Dr. Ben L. Reitman, of the Chicago Health Department, are constantly spreading infection. The homeless man is well aware of the risk he runs when he patronizes the prostitute, but he does not realize the gravity of the danger.

[144]

All studies indicate that homosexual practices among homeless men are widespread. They are especially prevalent among men on the road among whom there is a tendency to idealize and justify the practice. Homosexuality is not more common among tramps than among other one-sex groups. In the prison and jail population, the authorities are forced to wage a constant warfare against it. The same condition prevails also in the navy or merchant marine, and, to a lesser extent, in the army.[52]

Among tramps there are, it seems, two types of perverts. There are those who are subjects, in the words of Havelock Ellis, “of a congenital predisposition, or complexus of abnormalities.” Ellis contends that certain individuals, different temperamentally and physically from the rest of us, are not attracted by the opposite sex but are easily attracted by their own sex. Most of them are men who have developed from childhood feminine traits and tastes, and they may be regarded as predisposed to homosexuality. The second group is composed of individuals who have temporarily substituted homosexual for heterosexual behavior. Most of these perverts by conversion are men who, under the pressure of sex isolation, have substituted boy for woman as the object of their desires. This is chiefly because boys are accessible while women are not.

The boy does not need to remain long in hobo society to learn of homosexual practices. The average boy on the road is invariably approached[145] by men who get into his good graces. Some “homos” claim that every boy is a potential homosexual. This is without doubt an exaggeration as well as a defense, for not all boys are subject to persuasion. Sometimes boys will travel alone or with other boys to avoid the approaches of older men. Often boys will refrain from traveling with adults, even well-behaved adults, because they realize that they will be under suspicion. It is not uncommon to hear a boy who is seen traveling with an older man spoken of as the “wife” or “woman.” It is only natural that many boys fear to be alone with adult tramps.

Many devices are employed by them to place the lad in their debt or under their protection. If methods of persuasion do not work, force is sometimes used. One man gave a brakeman a dollar to put a boy off the train at a lonely siding. Another man learned which direction a certain boy was traveling and followed him from town to town, “accidentally” meeting him at each place. The lad was without funds, and so was the man, but the latter was able to beg and usually had a “lump” when he met the boy and he always divided. Another man led a boy a mile or so out in the country to a place where he[146] claimed he had worked during the previous year and where he knew they could both get something to eat.

Another common ruse is to take a boy to a room or a box car to sleep. The man suggests that he knows a clean car in a safe place with plenty of straw or paper on the floor. In a big city the boy is often enticed to a room for the same purpose. There are many cases on record in the Chicago courts.[53]

Josiah Flynt, who was familiar with tramp life, seems to be of the opinion that most boys are forced into the practice. However, it does not seem probable that force is so extensively employed as is sometimes believed. These accounts serve as a defense reaction on their part, yet we cannot say that such forced initiations do not occur. But even those who at the outset were the victims of “strong arm” methods often become reconciled to the practice and continue it. Often they become promiscuous in their relations and many of them even commercialize themselves.

[147]

Writers on the sex behavior of men and boys often refer to the relationship as it exists among tramps as a sort of slavery. By slavery is meant that boys are held in bondage to men and forced to steal and beg for them. This condition may exist in isolated instances but it is not general. It is even suggested by some authorities that there exists some sort of organization among tramps through which boys have been “caught” and kept in servitude. The best evidence that such an organization does not exist is the fact that perverted sex practices are frowned upon by the tramps themselves.

The court records show, however, that not infrequently boys are held in rooms, or taken to lonely buildings, or out on the lake front, or in the parks, but the case that gets into court is seldom one in which both parties were free agents. If there is slavery in these latter cases it is slavery to their passions, or to a state of mind growing out of their habits and their isolation.

The duration of an intimacy of this kind in the city is seldom more than a few days. On the road, however, the “partnership” may last for weeks. Whereas, out of town the pair can travel as companions aiding each other, in the city they can get along better alone. It is difficult for partners to remain together long in the city, especially if one has money and the other none, or if one drinks and the other does not. Living in a metropolis is a problem the tramp can solve better alone.

Tramp perverts argue that homosexual intercourse is “clean” and that homosexuals are less liable[148] to become infected with venereal disease. The Vice Commission of Chicago, in its report for 1911, states that homosexual individuals “are not known in their true character to any extent by the physicians because of the fact that their habits do not, as a rule, produce bodily disease.”[54]

It is also urged by perverts that in the homosexual relation there is the absence of the eternal complications in which one becomes involved with women. They want to avoid intimacies that complicate the free life to which they are by temperament and habit committed. Homosexual attachments are generally short lived, but they are real while they last. Sometimes a man will assume a priority over a boy and will even fight to maintain it. The investigator during his study of this phase of the tramp problem made two unsuccessful attempts to step between men and their boys, or “lambs.” In one case his interference was resented by both the man and the boy, but in the other it was rather enjoyed by the boy, though he would not be separated from his “wolf.”

The investigator met S., a veteran “wolf” on Madison Street. When he was asked why his face was so badly bruised he said that he and another man had fought over a boy. “He was trying to get my kid into a room with him.” He claimed that he hit the man and ran but that he was arrested. He was held over night in the Desplaines Street Station on a charge of disorderly conduct, but was discharged the next morning. What hurt him most was not the night in jail or his bruised face but the fact that the other man had left town with the boy.

[149]

In his sex life, as in his whole existence, the homeless man moves in a vicious circle. Industrially inadequate, his migratory habits render him the more economically inefficient. A social outcast, he still wants the companionship which his mode of life denies him. Debarred from family life, he hungers for intimate associations and affection. The women that he knows, with few exceptions, are repulsive to him. Attractive women live in social worlds infinitely remote from his. With him the fundamental wishes of the person for response and status have been denied expression. The prevalence of sexual perversion among the homeless men is, therefore, but the extreme expression of their unnatural sex life. Homosexual practices arise almost inevitably in similar situations of sex isolation. A constructive solution for the problems of the sex life of the homeless man strikes deeper into our social life than this study can carry us.

[150]

Where are we to place the hobo as a citizen? What is his actual status as a member of society or as a functioning unit in the state? Where does he stand in relation to organized society and its laws and its mores?

The public dismisses these questions by assigning the hobo and the tramp to the class of “undesirables.” This reaction of the public is, of course, emotional and superficial, based partly on the shabby and unkempt appearance of the men of the road and partly on their reputation as beggars, vagrants, drunkards, and petty thieves. Any study of the homeless man as a citizen must go farther and take into account such factors as nativity, naturalization, and patriotism; legal residence and the right and opportunity to vote; obedience to law; and his political aspirations.

Students of hobos and tramps have been struck by the fact that the great majority of homeless men are native-born Americans. Mrs. Solenberger found that of 1,000, 623 were native born. Of the 400 tramps interviewed by the writer during the summer of 1921, only 61 were foreign-born and 23 of these had taken out naturalization papers. From these and other studies it appears that from 60 to 90 per cent of hobos and tramps are native born.

The tramp is an American product. The foreign-born in this group are chiefly of the older immigration. Among these, Englishmen, proverbial as[151] “globe-trotters,” are conspicuous. The number of homeless men from the newer immigration is small, and the individuals who are found in the tramp and hobo group seem often out of place.

One test of patriotism is military service. The writer found that of the 400 he interviewed, 92 had seen military service. This figure is high, since there were only 183 men of the whole group between the ages of twenty and thirty-four. These men were listed in 1921 and would include many who were not in the draft age when the allotments were drawn in 1918. There were of the 400, 58 who were probably under the draft age in 1918. When we consider the proportion of physically and mentally unfit, it seems that this figure is high.[55]

What is the status of the hobo as a voter? He seldom remains in one place long enough to acquire legal residence. His work, because of its seasonal character, often takes him away from his legal residence just at the time when he should be there to register or vote. Whether he has a desire to cast his ballot or not, he is seldom able to do so.

A canvass of thirty-five Hobohemian hotels in Chicago has shown that about a third of the guests are voters. In March, 1923, there were 3,029 registered voters from these hotels, which have a total capacity of 9,480. Many of these, though they are in the city only in winter or for a few weeks at[152] a time, manage to maintain a residence here and, if they are in the city during an election, they vote.

Charges are even made that tramps and hobos sell their votes, that they often engage in “repeating.” There is not as much ground for such charges as one would expect. The average tramp does not have the courage to take the chances that the “repeater” must expect to run. He realizes also that he is always under more or less suspicion even when he is going straight, and this serves as a brake.

Homeless men as a group make much of the fact that they are excluded from the ballot, and they remind all who have the patience to listen that the exclusion is unjust because they perform an important and legitimate function in the labor world. They seem to protest against their exclusion more than to demand the ballot. One man said that he did not know if he would vote if he had a chance, “but it’s the principle of the thing.”

The International Brotherhood Welfare Association has repeatedly stood for some form of universal suffrage that would permit migratory workers to vote, regardless of the length of their residence in a community.

[153]

Forty-eight of the 400 homeless men studied by the writer claimed to have voted in the presidential election of 1920.

One man said that he beat his way 1,000 miles to cast his ballot. Most of the 48, however, had voted because at election time they were living in or near their legal residence. What was the attitude of the 352 who did not vote? The following are the reasons given (with reference to 1920 election):[56]

There were 28 men both ineligible to vote and indifferent to the ballot. The group of 54 who had no desire to vote included men who were at home, or near their legal residence, and could have voted had they been interested. The two listed as disfranchised[154] were both men who had been dishonorably discharged from the navy. Both were under twenty-one and had enlisted under the pressure of wartime enthusiasm. One of these was not interested in voting and the other said that the vote was a joke anyway.

The migratory worker is not saddled with responsibility for law and order. As he makes his way about the country, he is unincumbered. He has nothing to lose and nothing to protect but his person, and that he protects best by constantly moving. The homeless man has no interest in common with the settled man of the community who has attachments and property, and at whose expense he often lives. The migratory worker, for a time, may be physically a part of a community, but he actually does not become absorbed into its social life. The wanderer who fails to win a place in the life of a community often takes his own course. This course is sometimes in harmony with the interests of the community, but more often counter to them, and he fails under the surveillance of the law.

To the tramp and the hobo the police are the guardian angels of organized society, created to protect the community against criminals and migrants. To him there are two varieties of police—civil and private. The uniformed upholder of the law, the civil police, is given the uncomplimentary epithet, “harness bull.” The plain-clothes men are called “dicks,” “fly cops,” and “stool pigeons.” The private police who protect the property of the railroad are held in even lower contempt.

[155]

The chief job of the “dicks” is to keep the “bos” off the trains. The private police are unpopular, not only among homeless men, but also among the employees of the railroads. Brakemen and switchmen will often aid tramps in their effort to avoid the police. Railroad police must often contend with a lack of co-operation by the civil police. The town police, or “town clown” as he is called, may order the tramps to leave on the “next train,” while the railroad police may be making every effort to prevent their riding the trains. The town police are not anxious to fill the jail; they prefer that the transients move on; they reason that the railroad should take away what the railroad brought.

The railroad policeman shows results, not by the number of convictions as the civil police, but by his ability to keep at a minimum the number of offenses against railroad property. His endeavor is to put fear into the hearts of all trespassers on the right-of-way. He becomes a hunter of men, not to seize and detain them, but to pursue and terrorize them. He is to the railroad property what the scarecrow is to the cornfield.

Railroad police sometimes drive men off fast-moving trains by throwing stones or shooting at them. Not infrequently they catch and maltreat a tramp; however, they are seldom able to get hold of a veteran tramp. The inexperienced man or the boy is more likely to be caught. These means of putting fear into men do not stop tramping. As they become fearful of the railroad “bull,” they become more cautious, and the “bull’s” problem is increasingly difficult.

[156]

To migrants the railroad is “the tramp’s traditional highway.” The tramp, however, expects opposition from the railroad police and even from the train crews; nevertheless he measures his success as a “boomer” by his ability to outwit this opposition. Encounters with the railroad police are a favorite theme of conversation in the “jungles” and along the “stem.”

One man tells of being held in Hutchinson, Kansas, on suspicion:

Youths in their first adventures on the road accept with zest the conflict with the private police. A[157] student who made a practice of “working the harvest” each summer gives the following statement:

A man, prominent in Hobohemia as a soap-boxer, recites this experience out of a great number that he has had with railroad and other private police.

These stories are typical of those that any experienced tramp can tell.

The private police “talks by hand” because it is the most practical method at his command. The argument of the club coincides most admirably with the mood he is in when on duty searching trains and keeping trespassers off railroad property. He[160] is a hunter and the tramp is his prey. If it is a game to the police, it is no less so to the tramp. One lad who had been caught a time or two said: “I get a lot of ‘kick’ out of riding trains out of a place when I know the ‘dicks’ are trying to keep me off.”

When a town has a railroad policeman who is “hard,” the fact is soon noised about. A few years ago, Galesburg, Illinois, was known throughout the country for the “bad” colored policeman who guarded the yards. The hobo who could tell a story of an encounter with the big “nigger bull” had an exploit to be proud of. For some time Green River, Wyoming, boasted a “hard bull” known to the “floating fraternity” as “Green River Slim.” As the reputation of a “bad” policeman travels ahead, so the information about his tactics and methods. Where he may be found, how avoided, how he watches the trains, are usually common knowledge to the average “bo” before he reaches a town.

The Hobo News for April, 1922, reprinted an article “The Hobo; a Real Problem to the Railroad,” by T. T. Kelihor, chief special agent of the Illinois Central Railroad. The article was given space in the News in order that the hobos might see how the “bulls” regarded them. It was followed by a caustic criticism from the editor who charged that the writer “like the rest of his fraternity cannot distinguish between Hobos and Bums and Tramps and Yeggs.”

The amount of property the tramp actually steals and destroys is not known. He probably is blamed for more damage than he does. Those who speak for the hobo class claim that most of the goods stolen from cars is taken by train crews who shield themselves by pointing to the tramp, who is already an outlaw as far as the railroad is concerned, because he steals rides. Aside from the loss of property, Mr. Kelihor calls attention to the great loss of life attributed to tramping.

The loss of life and limb on account of hobos riding trains and trespassing on the right-of-way, and the consequent financial and economic loss to the country and the railroads, is appalling. The reports for all railroads during 1919 show:

[162]

And during 1920:

How many of these persons killed were actually hobos, perhaps even the railroads could not say. To the railroad officials anyone is a trespasser on railroad property who is not a patron or an employee. On the other hand, all the instances of tramps killed or injured on the railroad are not recorded.

In a communication of August 2, 1922, to the Homeless Man Committee, W. P. Riggs, chief special agent of the American Express Company, says in part:

J. H. Hustin, Jr., superintendent of property protection for the New York Central Railroad, writes the committee as follows:

The average man on the street, or the average housewife, sees in the tramp either a parasite or a predacious individual. The average man may admit that there are many migratory men who would work, but he feels that most of them will not, and that they have neither permanent habits nor good intentions; they need to be watched. If the public opinion decrees that the town needs to be protected against tramps, it is the duty of the police to do it. There seems to be a relation between the pressure that the police bring to bear on the tramp and the pressure that the tramps impose upon the community which is reflected in the pressure the residents place on the police. In towns where vagrancy has become a problem, the police are very energetic in keeping down the number of apparently idle men.

In small towns, especially railroad towns, through which many tramps move, the police are “hostile.” A policeman in a Wyoming town on the Union Pacific Railroad asserts: “We’ve got to be hard on these fellows or they will eat us out of house and home in a week.” In the larger towns the police are sporadic[164] in their harshness. Men of the road will ask one another about the attitude of the police in certain cities. “Omaha was good the first part of the winter,” reported a man in a circle about a camp fire, “I think I’ll go to Chi this winter if I don’t go to the Coast. I heard they were pretty easy on them there last winter.” Again, “I was in Chicago the most of the winter. They are all right there if you stay on the ‘stem.’” “How has K. C. been lately? I haven’t been there for five years.”

The average hobo will often avoid certain towns because he has heard that the “bo” will not be well received. He will sometimes go to a town even when he has heard of its drastic method of treating the transients. A “hard” police force and a drastic policy of repression do not keep tramps away. It selects out those who are willing to run the risk. Timid and inexperienced men are kept away, but the daring and veteran tramps who cause the police the most trouble are not so readily frightened off.

The police do not regard the tramp as a serious offender. If he steals, it is generally for something to eat or to wear. Every man on the road steals potatoes or green corn from the nearby fields, or fruit from the neighboring orchard, or chickens that stray within reach of the jungle.

Tramps will boast about what they will do when times get hard and cold weather crowds them. “I won’t starve. I worked all summer, and I won’t go hungry this winter.” This man was “broke” in spite of a summer’s hard labor in the harvest fields. His earnings quickly went for drink. He did get hungry, and his clothes were torn to tatters before spring, but he did not break in any windows as he had[165] threatened. There are “crooks” among the tramps, but not so many as might be supposed. The average tramp does not possess the courage to be a first-class crook.

Warden Wesley Westbrook, of the Cook County jail, supports this estimate of the tramp as an offender:

But whether a major offender or not, the fact is that the homeless man is almost always liable to arrest as a vagrant. He is marked as a potential offender. He always faces the possibility of being arrested on suspicion. Where the ex-convict is harassed by the authorities because they have his record, the tramp is often held because they do not have his record. Often migrants are taken from freight trains and transported many miles to the scenes of some offense only to be turned loose. Often they are held for days in local jails until they can prove an alibi or their identity can be established. For them there is no redress.

The status of the homeless man in the courts is not high. Again and again men are arraigned before the judge for vagrancy, fighting, drunkenness, begging, petty stealing, and other minor offenses. Any policeman can walk along West Madison Street any day and see some man or perhaps a dozen who could[166] be arrested on some charge. If all policemen did this the jails would be full and the police courts in which these cases are tried would be continually overflowing. Only the most conspicuous cases are arrested. Those are numerous enough to keep an average judge busy in an average police court.

The judge who sits in the Desplaines Street police court, where more tramps are arraigned than in any other court in Chicago, faces sometimes as many as 100 men whose cases must be disposed of within a few hours. One morning the investigator visited Judge LaBuy’s court in the Desplaines Street station and saw more than fifty cases of vagrancy, disorderly conduct, drunkenness, etc., disposed of in less than half an hour. There was little material at hand by which the judge could arrive at a just decision, consequently he disposed of the cases with only that evidence that was apparent. Apparently neither the needs of the individual were being met nor the demands of justice satisfied.[57]

The experiences of the tramp or hobo in the police court do not increase his respect for the law and the administration of justice. He finds the administration of justice a mechanical process. At the points where the law touches his life it has lost every trace of the human touch unless it be the brutal “third degree” or the traditional “sixty days.” The courts sometimes put fear into his heart but they do not reform him.

What status as a citizen does the hobo wish? His attitude toward the police and his reaction toward the civil authorities that represent organized society seem to be tempered with antipathy. Most of the[167] songs he sings are songs of protest. The organizations to which he allies himself are antagonistic to things as they are.

In many ways, the migratory worker is “a man without a country.” By the very nature of his occupation he is deprived of the ballot, and liable when not at work to arrest for vagrancy and trespassing. The public ignores him generally, but now and again pities or is hostile to him. With no status in organized society, he longs for a classless society where all inequalities shall be abolished. In the I.W.W. and other radical organizations, he finds in association with restless men of his own kind the recognition everywhere else denied him.

[168-169]

HOW THE HOBO MEETS HIS PROBLEM

[170-171]

Like other communities, Hobohemia has its eminent persons. In the flux and flow of the life on the “main stem” certain individuals are conspicuous. They are for the most part the soap-box orators, the organizers and promoters of utopias. These men are the most loved or the most hated of all the Hobohemian celebrities. They are either overwhelmingly approved or are unsparingly condemned as grafters and parasites. But whether exploiters or benefactors they are centers of interest. They are powers. Among the many men of this group are: James Eads How, Dr. Ben L. Reitman, John X. Kelly, Michael C. Walsh, Daniel Horsley, and A. W. Dragstedt.

Outside of these leaders of the migratory workers are mission workers, like Charles W. Langsman, of the Bible Rescue Mission; and John Van de Water, of the Helping Hand Mission; and Brigadier J. E. Atkins, of the Salvation Army, which is neither a mission nor a church.

It has been the policy of the Baptist Church on North LaSalle Street and the Immanuel Baptist Church on South Michigan Avenue more than other churches to feed homeless men. Dr. Johnston Myers is pastor of the latter church, and probably the most talked-of minister in Hobohemia when times are hard. Dr. Myers is contrasted by homeless men with the Greensteins on South State Street. “Mother” Greenstein’s “bread line” is known the country over.

These or their counterparts may be found in any city where hobos gather.

[172]

How, a man of wealth and education, renounced all to share the lot of the hobos. He is not an imposing personality, but he is a kindly, ingratiating, almost saintly man. He is a dreamer and a visionary with a program for reforming the world. Every cent that he does not spend for doughnuts and twenty-five-cent flops goes to the “cause.” He hopes that other millionaires will see his good works and imitate him.

How is a bachelor in his late forties. According to rumor, which he neither affirms nor denies, he has two college degrees, one of them in medicine. He plans soon to enter a college for a year to study law, so as to be the better prepared to promote the interests of the International Brotherhood Welfare Association and the “Hobo College.” The I.W.W. believes the world will be reformed by organization and direct action first, and education second. How puts education first. He hopes to establish a central hobo university to which the numerous hobo colleges in the large cities will be feeders.

To How the hobos are a “chosen people” who have been denied their own. They will come into their own in time. All his repeated failures to build up a strong organization of migratory workers have not shaken his faith in his vision. How still believes that hobos and millionaires will sooner or later work together in harmony to construct the House of Happiness for humanity.

With the exception of James Eads How, “the millionaire hobo,” Reitman is known to more migratory workers than any other man in the country. [173]Several years ago, while he was roaming casually over the United States, Reitman was dubbed by the papers the “King of the Hobos.” This title was well earned by more than twenty years on the road, including two or three tramps around the world.

His own description of himself given to the papers several years ago still holds:

The only modification that he would make today is that he has settled into the routine of his profession. He still lectures at the “Hobo College.” He still intercedes for hobos and guarantees their bills in case they do not make good. He is still a refuge for the sick and afflicted and not a day passes that he does not treat some down-and-outer free. He is still a reformer but he has lost that “lean, hungry look” of his hobo days, and since he owns a Ford, the hobos charge him with being an aristocrat.

John Kelly has been associated with James Eads How for more than fifteen years. Before he met How he was a curbstone orator. Beating his way from city to city, he has talked in the “slave markets” of every metropolitan city in the United States. He has been jailed many times for his “soap-boxing,” and has often been forced to leave town between the suns because of free-speech fights. He has often beaten his way 1,000 miles to be present at a hobo convention and to participate in the demonstrations of the hobo against the upper strata of society.

[174]

Kelly is still an organizer, though he is not an enthusiastic or hopeful one. He still has faith, but he is no longer the staunch advocate of democratic hobo organizations he formerly was. Years of bitter experience have taught him that the average hobo will not stand up under any responsibility. At one time he was an I.W.W. soap-boxer, but he no longer believes that the “Wobblies” are doing anything for the hobo, and he frankly tells them so.

From a champion of democracy, he has swung over to an advocate of benevolent autocracy. He is still active in the “Hobo College,” but is often at variance with How and opposes him bitterly on some issues.

How, an idealist, has never learned that the ordinary hobo organization is almost sure to fail if left to manage itself. “But,” says Kelly, the organizer, “they’ll never succeed. They will never be cured of quarreling over trifles. They have got to be saved by some other method than their own power.”

Walsh has long been a factor in the hobo life of Chicago. At present he is the head of a struggling organization of workers known as the United Brotherhood of American Laborers, which seeks to organize workers around an insurance program. Walsh designates himself “Journalist and Lecturer, Founder of the Famous Hobo College,” “The Society of Vagabonds,” and “The Mary Garden Forum.” He further styles himself, not without reason, a graduate of the “University of Adversity.”

Left an orphan at an early age, he began wandering, working casually at his trade as an iron-worker.[175] He traveled extensively over the United States and went abroad as a tramp worker and a beach-comber. In 1906-7, becoming interested in the problem of the down-and-outs, he conducted the Liberty Hotel in Seattle for the unemployed. Later in San Francisco he was again active in the interest of the unemployed. Still later he joined James Eads How in St. Louis and aided in organizing the “penniless men of his own city.” In 1915 he came to Chicago and organized the “Hobo College.” Other hobos say that the “college” had been in existence years before Walsh arrived on the scene, but that he did play a part in making it popular.

Walsh, as president of the “college,” was able to attract the assistance of many leading citizens. He won the services of Mary Garden, who took special pride in singing there occasionally. He has been active among the unemployed, and at one time attracted considerable public notice which got him into disrepute with the local police.

Walsh has also sought the limelight as a lyceum and chautauqua lecturer. His subjects dealt with the various aspect of the hobo problem. Walsh, like many of the hobo celebrities, only sees in the tramp problem one cause, and that is, unemployment. “Give the boys plenty of jobs and there will be no tramps.” This is a popular interpretation among the tramps themselves.

Daniel Horsley is a bookseller. His establishment, at 1237 West Madison Street, is called the hobo bookstore. The place is known as the “Proletariat”[176] to the men on the “stem.” Here many men who have no other address receive their mail. Says one man, “Where is —— lately, Dan?” “I don’t know, but I suppose he is on his way to Chicago. I have had some mail for him for two weeks.” The men meet their friends at the “Proletariat,” or they leave things there for safekeeping. They all know Mr. Horsley, and he has the good will of all the “bos.”

Horsley has been somewhat of a hobo himself, as the following excerpt will show:

Dan’s work is selling books and periodicals but he gets his recreation by mounting the soap box occasionally. He is a devout student of Marxian economics, and he likes nothing better than to talk economics to an audience of workers. At the “Hobo College” he is known as “professor,” and he gives lectures there now and then on economics, or his other favorite topic, current history.

[177]

The Hobo News has printed a number of his articles on economic subjects. His writing, like his teaching and soap-boxing, is along Marxian lines. He has little patience for anyone who sees things differently. His hobby is education, and the book business gives him a chance to get to the homeless man and all other workers the kind of literature that he thinks will start them thinking.

Mr. Dragstedt is one of the numerous ex-secretaries of the “Hobo College” for the year 1922-23. As secretary of the “college,” it was his business to attend to the finances of the institution and to manage the programs. It is the secretary’s job to find speakers for various occasions, and to advertise the meetings. In short, the secretary must be a diplomat and an executive. Dragstedt has all the earmarks of a good hobo secretary.

Born in Sweden some forty years ago, he emigrated to this country and settled in Montana before he was out of his teens. He did not remain settled long, but went here and there in search of work until he developed into a regular hobo. He has worked at nearly all the migratory occupations and has seen nearly all the states of the Union. He is now one of the seasoned veterans of the floating fraternity. He is getting over his passion for travel, but he has not yet learned to settle down. He still likes to feel that he is free to go whenever the notion strikes him, although for a year or so he has not gone very far from the city.

Dragstedt is a man of wide and varied experience, but he seldom can be persuaded to talk about himself.[178] He did his bit in the late war and went as far as France. Most hobos who have been across like to tell about it, but not he. But Dragstedt talks. He has ideas and he talks about them. He has a great many ideas, some of them consistent and others not, but they keep him occupied and he is generally keeping someone else interested. He is a type of the hobo intellectual.

As a high brow, Dragstedt is a poet of no mean ability. His poems either protest against the “system” or idealize tramp life. He is also an artist. The walls of the “Hobo College” are adorned with samples of his workmanship such as cartoons and decorated placards. He has an ambition to become a cartoonist, but he is a hobo, and hobos are men who will not apply themselves. He has two or three scenarios that might be developed into fair picture plays, but he will not go back to them to polish them up. This calls for more application than he cares to give. In this, again, he is a hobo, but he does not grieve about that.

Recently, Superintendent Langsman celebrated his twentieth spiritual birthday. For twenty years he has been connected with the Bible Rescue Mission. Before he became converted, to use his words, he was an “ordinary bad man of the street.” He has lived the life of the tramp. He knows hobos from the human side. He knows their weaknesses, their temptations, and their trials. For twenty years he has worked with them to aid them. Hundreds of men have been lifted out of the quicksands of a[179] transient and aimless life by him, while he has inspired thousands to make an effort.

In his official capacity he is the superintendent of the Bible Rescue Mission. He is also vice-president of the midwest district of the International Mission Union. To the men on the street he is known as “Charley.” No mission man in Chicago is better known.

The Bible Rescue Mission is the only one that feeds men the year around. Mr. Langsman feels that hungry men need food just as much in summer as in winter. To him feeding is an evidence of the spirit of Christianity. Because of this policy of feeding, he has been severely criticized by the homeless men themselves and by missions. Many of the “bos” say that “Charley” has a “doughnut philosophy.” They maintain that religion is not worth much if it can only get into a man’s heart through his stomach. These criticisms come back to Superintendent Langsman, but they have not changed his policy.

One of Langsman’s hobbies is a homeless man’s picnic each year. When “Charley” stages a picnic it is a gala day for West Madison Street. All the “boys” come out for a ride to the country in trucks furnished by various firms and to eat sandwiches provided by the churches.

The Helping Hand Mission at 850 West Madison Street is essentially a family mission with Sunday-school, parents’ classes, and other auxiliary activities. It does not, however, neglect the homeless man. Superintendent John Van de Water, for the last eight[180] years superintendent of the Helping Hand Mission, is one of the few practical men in the mission work. Throughout the winter his organization feeds, upon an average, 100 men a day. However, no one is fed who will not work. He operates a wood yard and any able-bodied man who asks for aid is given a chance to work. His is the only mission that has such a test.

Mr. Van de Water does not care for converts that must be “bought” with doughnuts and coffee, and he has little patience with the missions imposed upon by men who become converted only for a place to sleep or something to eat. He is in favor of concerted action among missions, because where they work separately they lay themselves open to exploitation.

The homeless man is often an ungrateful individual, but Mr. Van de Water feels that more than a fourth of the men aided really appreciate the help they get. Many men prefer the mission floor in cold weather to the floor in the “flophouse,” which is seldom scrubbed.

Most exploited and least loved by the hobos is the Salvation Army. But the Salvation Army does more for the hobo than any other agency. In every city of the country it is the “good Samaritan” to the down-and-outs. Not only is it interested in working upon the hearts of men, but it seeks to help people to walk alone. One of the pioneers in this program of practical salvation is Brigadier J. E. Atkins.

Brigadier Atkins, a native of Wales, enlisted with the Salvation Army forty-three years ago. He was[181] sent to this country in 1886 as a worker at the time when the first split occurred in the ranks. At that time he was a regular officer in the ranks, and later became a division officer. Before the war he was placed in charge of the Salvation Army industrial work in Denver, Kansas City, and Des Moines.

He entered the army as a chaplain, and was assigned to the first division. He was attached to “Young Teddy” Roosevelt’s organization, and as a consequence saw considerable action. In this capacity he spent twenty-one months overseas, serving with his organization in all its major offensives. Twice he was gassed, and, as a result, his voice has been permanently impaired.

Since his discharge from the army, Brigadier Atkins has been in charge of the four Salvation Army hotels for men in Chicago which cater to the superior class of homeless men. These hotels are operated on the usual Salvation Army business-like basis. The policy is to make them pay their way, if possible, but not to charge prices greater than the commercial hotels. It is the Atkins aim to give all the service that is consistent with the price: to keep the price as low as possible, and to keep the places clean and orderly. He is insistent on getting clean, sober guests in the Army hotels, and no apparently clean, sober man without funds need go away. The contrary is said to be true by many “bos,” but they are generally men who have been “found out.”

This is what Dr. Myers has done with a typical, forbidding, gray-stone church, the Immanuel Baptist Church, at 2320 Michigan Avenue. For twenty-seven years he has been pastor of this church, and all that time he has been adhering to the Immanuel plan outlined above. For ten years previous to his coming to the Immanuel Church, he was pastor of the Ninth Street Baptist Church of Cincinnati, where he followed this scheme of serving humanity as well as God.

Dr. Myers is a practical religionist. He is bringing religion out of the clouds, and has made it an everyday, functioning affair. In his mind it does not hurt a church to have a kitchen in the basement nor to operate a restaurant in the building. His church serves an excellent meal for thirty cents. Many of the workers in the automobile salesrooms and the students from the medical college near by are in the habit of taking lunch at the church.

Most of the churches in the business area have closed their doors, but the Immanuel Baptist is more conspicuous today than ever before. The business men on the street are proud of it. They contributed recently to help rebuild it after the steeple had been blown down by a gale. The church does not serve its members as it used to, because most of the families have moved away and now most of its congregation is composed of homeless men.

Dr. Myers does not try to preach to the men, nor does he try to use the material aid he gives as a means of coaxing men to become converted. He[183] does not believe in such conversions. He and his staff have learned that the average homeless man cannot hold money. The men who apply know this too. “Johnston Myers will feed anyone but it is pretty hard to get any ‘jack’ from him.”

Few hobos enter Chicago who have not heard of “Mother” Greenstein. For years Mother and Father Greenstein ran a saloon on South State Street. It was a barrel-house and the “bos” flocked to it when they had money. It was one of the few saloons in that area that was on “the square.” Among the hobos it is asserted that “Mother” is the richest woman in Chicago. But her wealth has not changed her habits. She reared a family of seven children, and most of them have gone through college and into business for themselves. The Greensteins are proud of their family, but no less proud of their work. With the coming of prohibition, they closed the saloon and opened a restaurant on the corner of Ninth and State streets.

The place is known as “Mother’s Restaurant,” and it is one of the few places in Hobohemia that has the right to write “Home Cooking” on the window. Day after day “Mother” is on the job, cooking steaks and chops and French-fried potatoes, while “Father” waits table and serves at the bar. Mother lives in her work. She is proud of her kitchen, and she likes to serve hungry men. The hobos say no chef in the Blackstone or Drake can prepare more savory dishes. The Greensteins did not earn their reputation by serving hungry men who could pay[184] their way, but by serving the penniless and hungry at times when it is hard for hungry men to get food.

A sign is painted on the wall outside the restaurant: “Mother’s Restaurant. Don’t Go Hungry. See Mother.” Last winter another sign placed in the window read: “Attention! Starting Monday, Dec. 20 [1921], ‘Mother’ Will Serve Hot Coffee and Rolls Free ... from 5 A.M. to 7 A.M.” Some mornings the bread line at 901 South State Street contained as many as 500 men who were out to get a bowl of coffee and something to eat, but none were ever turned away. There is always plenty of bread and plenty of coffee, and good coffee, too.

The hobos do appreciate “Mother.” The old-timers of South State Street swear by her.

This rapid sketch of a few persons in the Who’s Who of Hobohemia gives a picture of the local leadership among the homeless men. All these persons, and many others who embody either the aspirations of the hobos or the organized religious and philanthropic impulses of the larger community toward the migrant, must be taken into account in any fundamental policy and program for his welfare. All these leaders are dealing with the homeless man as a human being, that is, with his personal needs, his memories, and his hopes. Working with these leaders, the social agencies may secure both insight into his attitudes and wishes and his co-operation for his own well-being.

[185]

The homeless man is an extensive reader. This is especially true of the transients, the tramp, and the hobo. The tramp employs his leisure to read everything that comes his way. If he is walking along the railroad track, he picks up the papers that are thrown from the trains; he reads the cast-off magazines. If he is in the city, he hunts out some quiet corner where he may read. The tramp is a man with considerable leisure, but few books.

The libraries are open to them, but comparatively few use them. Public libraries are generally imposing structures and, dressed as he usually is, the tramp hesitates to enter them. Dan Horsley, who is a newsdealer and runs a bookstore on West Madison, in an article in the Hobo News for October, 1922, writes:

There are men in the hobo class who are not deterred by these scruples. Some of the most persistent users of the library have been initiated during the winter time when they were forced inside for shelter. The newspaper reading-room of the Chicago Public Library has become for them a favorite retreat during the cold winter days. It is also a good resting place in the hot summer months.

Lodging-houses sometimes have reading-rooms in which guests may find the local newspapers and[186] current periodicals. Such reading material is usually extensively read and much thumb-marked. Most lodging-houses and rooming-houses do not provide reading matter for their guests. Seldom does a tramp throw away a paper. He passes it on to someone else, and after it has served its usefulness as reading matter, he may use it at night for a bed either in a “flophouse” or a park, along the docks, or in box cars.

The hobo reads the daily papers but does not indorse them. He looks with disapproval upon the so-called “capitalist” press. If he belongs to the radicals he is sure that the press is against him. But in spite of this he reads it. He reads it for the news.

Radical papers, to be sure, are steadfast in their efforts to promote his interests and champion his cause, but it is a cause that is so well known to the homeless man that it has lost its novelty. There are many radical papers. Among them are the Weekly People, the Truth, the Industrial Solidarity, the Worker, the Hobo News, the Liberator, the Voice of Labor. These are not printed primarily for the homeless man, but have a wide circulation among the so-called “slum proletariat.”

The homeless man reads a certain amount of religious literature, but little of it is perused in the spirit hoped for by the mission worker or street evangelist. He reads it because it is handed to him and it kills time.

Short-story magazines are popular. Next to short-story magazines would come railroad or engineering journals and other magazines dealing with popular mechanics.

[187]

Sex stories are, of course, popular. The tramp has a preference for books of adventure and action. Jack London is the most widely read of novelists among the “bos.” Books on mechanics, How to Run an Automobile, Uses of the Steel Square, Block Signal Systems, Gas Engines, have a wide sale.

Works on phrenology, palmistry, Christian Science, hypnotism, and the secrets of the stars, etc., are of perennial interest. Joke books and books explaining tricks with cards or riddles, detective stories, and books in the field of the social sciences are surprisingly popular. Bookstores patronized by tramps keep in stock special pocket-size editions of works on sociology, economics, politics, and history. The radical periodicals recommend books to the serious-minded hobo reader. Following is a list from the Hobo News:

Among the books recommended for the proletariat in the I.W.W. literature list for April, 1922, are the following:

These books are kept in stock at the I.W.W. headquarters and extensively sold and read by the intellectuals. Soap-box orators get fuel for the fires they seek to kindle from books of this sort. It is common knowledge on the “stem” that one can tell the books a speaker reads by the opinions he expresses and the programs he favors.

The hobo who reads sooner or later tries his hand at writing. A surprisingly large number of them eventually realize their ambition to get into print. It is not unusual to meet a man of the road with a number of clippings in his pocket of articles he has contributed to the daily press. Most of the great dailies have columns that are accessible to the free-lance writer, and the pages of the radical press are always open to productions of the hobo pen. Most of these contributions are in the form of letters to editors. One man who writes many such letters proudly exhibited an article recently published in the Chicago Daily Tribune. It was signed “F. W. B.” He explained that these letters stood for “Fellow Worker Block.” That was his nom de plume.

The hobo writer does not concern himself with letters alone. A number of them are ambitious to become novelists, essayists, and even dramatists. Some of these men have manuscripts that they have carried about with them for years in search of a[189] publisher. One such author, an old man, said: “I have material enough together to write a book. All I want is to get someone to help me organize it. I want someone to go over it with me. You see, I never had much schooling and my grammar is not very good.” Another man carried about a great roll of manuscript which purported to be a “society novel.” It was entitled The Literary in Literature. It was written in lead pencil and represented the accumulated effort of several years. When the mood struck him, he added a chapter or a paragraph. Before the last page had been written, however, the first was so badly dimmed from being carried around that it could not be deciphered.

Some hobo writers have visions of a financial success that will put them on “easy street.” One man offered to share the proceeds from the publications of a series of essays on economics if the investigator would typewrite it. “Why, this will bring thousands of dollars,” he said. “If I can only get a publisher interested, but,” he added, “they don’t seem to care for live subjects.”

Another hobo writes songs and has the same difficulty with publishers. He still feels, after hundreds of failures, that he will eventually get into the limelight.

The hobo writer who plies the pen for the love of it is not unusual. One man has been working on a play for several months. He cannot get anyone interested, but that has not quenched his enthusiasm. Another man spends most of his leisure on the north side of Hobohemia, writing fantastic paragraphs. They are interesting and amusing. He does not try to publish them. He writes them because he[190] enjoys it. Most numerous of the hobo writers are the propagandists and dreamers. They are the chief contributors to the rebel press. Many of them care to be identified with no other. They are not artists nor do they write for gain. They have little patience for the writer who lives for the so-called “filthy lucre.”

But whatever their motive, most of these hobo writers, for the want of a better medium, become contributors to the radical press. Without them radical sheets like the I.W.W. publications and the Hobo News would not appeal to the homeless man. The radical press in turn serves as a pattern by which hobo writers fashion and color their literary productions.

The Industrial Solidarity is a typical I.W.W. paper. It comes nearer than any other I.W.W. paper to reflecting the mind and the spirit of the average hobo. It is a six- or eight-page weekly and sells for five cents. It is published in Chicago from where it is distributed to individual subscribers or in bundles to the peddlers or newsdealers.

The issue of July 1, 1922, contains the following articles:

According to the I.W.W. literature list for April, 1922, the following periodicals are issued regularly:

“Wobbly” papers are extensively used as lesson sheets. Solidarity has one long article of this character which is an analysis and criticism of craft unionism. Finally, there are several communications from[192] members on the road and four or five editorials on questions of the day.

The Solidarity is only one of a number of I.W.W. publications, but the most important as far as the hobos are concerned. The organization maintains a publishing company of its own, the Equity Press, which is situated at the I.W.W. headquarters in Chicago.

The Hobo News, published in St. Louis, contains sixteen pages and carries no advertising. It is published monthly and sells for ten cents. It is distributed, like Solidarity, by bundle orders or subscription.

The July, 1922, issue of the Hobo News has the following contents:

[193]

No class of men are in a better position to know life than the migratory population. These men have a large fund of experience, but they do not seem to have developed any sense of the relative values. With all this experience and with all these contacts with life, they are not able to interpret it. The intellectuals are obsessed by the class struggle, and instead of writing literature, they prefer to repeat the formulas and play with the mental toys which the doctrinaire reformers and revolutionists have fashioned for them.

We cannot say therefore that the radical press in monopolizing the hobo pens has robbed art. Among all these contributors to the radical publications, there are few who might produce literature. Many of them do not have patience to write literature nor the courage to formulate a new idea. They prefer to ride a hobby and repeat familiar formulas.

Writers who do find themselves do not remain in the hobo class. Others have the ability to rise, but because of drink or drugs are unable to do so. These men may find a place on the staff of one of the radical papers. They may even aspire to an editorship. Such a goal is not uncommon among the intellectuals. The Hobo News is one paper that the hobo writer likes to be identified with because it is more than a doctrinaire propagandist sheet. It maintains some literary features, and every issue has one or more articles or poems that portray hobo life.

[194]

Much so-called hobo verse which has found its way into print was not written by tramps, but by men who knew enough of the life of the road to enable them to interpret its spirit. The best hobo poems have been written behind prison bars. Many of the songs of the I.W.W. have been written in jail.

The poetry most popular among the men on the road are ballads describing some picturesque and tragic incident of the hobo’s adventurous life. The following by an unknown author illustrates the type. Here is an incident told in the language of the road in a manner that every “bo” can understand and appreciate.

The Gila Monster Route

The following ballad by Harry Kemp, the “tramp poet,” describes a situation that is familiar to those who know Hobohemia. Many men in the tramp class, to escape cold and hunger, have yielded to a similar temptation.

The Tramp Confession

Many men have seen charms in the life on the road; Walt Whitman and Vachel Lindsay are or were tramp poets. For men who cannot endure the security and the tyranny of convention, this care-free existence has an irresistible appeal. The following swinging poem by H. H. Knibbs vibrates with the call of the road.

Nothing to Do but Go

“Away from Town,” by Harry Kemp, is a vivid picture of the springtime yearning that the hobo feels to be off to the country after spending the winter in the city’s slums. Not all tramps who feel, with the passing of winter, the urge to move, are enticed from the “gaunt, gray city” in search of “country cheer,” but a goodly number love the grass and shade and a season in the “jungles.” It is the same call that makes truants of school boys and fishermen of staid business men.

In spite of its transient charms, the life of the tramp is a hard one. It is fine to be free, but it is good to have a home. The hobo likes freedom, but is not satisfied to be an Ishmaelite. His speeches and his poetry are filled with protests against the social order which refuses to make a place for him; against the system that makes him an outcast.

The following poem entitled “The Dishwasher” was written by Jim Seymour, the “Hobo poet.” The second half, omitted here, is a prophecy of the overthrow of the “system.”

Arturo Giovannitti won his reputation as a poet by a poem in blank verse which pictures the monotony of prison life. “The Walker” was written in jail, as was “The Bum,” the poem by which Giovannitti is best known among the hobos. As an I.W.W. and a radical, his writings breathe the spirit of protest. “The Bum,” the first three verses of which follow, is an eloquent tirade against religion:

In the following poem, by an unknown writer, “The Bum on the Rods and the Bum on the Plush” states the case of labor against capital in the language and accents of the hobo:

[203]

The following verses are taken from a selection written by Henry A. White, who is a veteran of the road and for many years connected with the publication of the Hobo News. It is entitled “The Hobo Knows.” In it one can detect an unfamiliar note of resignation, the resignation of an old man who has hoped and struggled, and learned.

The poets who have written best about the tramp are those who have recorded their reflections on their own life and his. Robert W. Service sees in “The[204] Men That Don’t Fit In” a great group of wanderers who move here and there in response to an imperious wanderlust.

There are men in the tramp class who are always chasing rainbows, always expecting to “strike it rich” sometime and somewhere. Bill Quirke, for many years contributor to the Hobo News, gives expression to this sentiment in the poem, “One Day; Some Way, I’ll Make a Stake.” This poem was[205] written a few months before Bill was killed by an automobile in California. From the heart of it we quote:

In the Hobo News of August, 1921, Charles Thornburn records his reflections while he contemplates the empty, beaten faces of the men of the “stem”:

“The Wanderer” is from the pen of Charles Ashleigh. It is said to have been written in jail. It is a justification, not complete, of the hobo principle of living for the day and by the day, of enjoying[206] the sweets of life, if they can be secured, and of avoiding its problems.

The hobo characterizes the district where the employment agencies are located as the “slave market.” Louis Melis, prominent in Hobohemia as a soap-boxer, has written a poem entitled “The Slave Market” from which the following verses have been taken:

The Slave Market

There are many types of tramp songs but most conspicuous are the songs of protest. The I.W.W. have done much to stimulate song writing, mostly songs of the struggle between the masses and the classes.

Most hobo songs are parodies on certain popular airs or on hymns. One can easily determine when certain songs were written if he knows when certain popular airs, to which they are fitted, were the rage.[208] The tunes most used by the tramp song writers are those that are so well known that the song may be sung by any group of transients. When the songs are parodies on hymns there is usually a note of irony running through them. The following is called the hobo’s “Harvest War Song.” It was written by Pat Brennan and is sung to the tune of “Tipperary.”

Joe Hill, whose real name was Joseph Hilstrom, holds the place of honor among the I.W.W.’s as a song writer. Before his death he was one of the most enthusiastic of the I.W.W. organizers. His execution in Utah in 1915 has not lessened his popularity among[209] the “Wobblies.” Most of his songs are parodies. “The Tramp” is a parody on the old tune: “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp; the Boys Are Marching.”

“The Preacher and the Slave,” also written by Joe Hill and sung to the tune of “Sweet Bye and[210] Bye,” is especially popular among the malcontents because of its attack upon religion:

The “Portland County Jail” is one of the few songs of the road that does not wear out.

The characteristic hobo is an optimist who sees the humorous side of many an unpleasant or dangerous situation. The average seasoned “bo” with full stomach and money in his pocket can enjoy to the full the never-ending series of happenings on West Madison Street. If there is nothing else, he can be amused at the other man’s predicament. Many of these humorous experiences have found their way into poetry.

The hobo is ironic even in the face of death. The following poem, by an unknown writer, caricatures the contrast between the sentiment and the reality of the hobo’s existence.

[212]

The Hobo’s Last Lament

A. W. Dragstedt, a prominent personality in Chicago’s Hobohemia, is a man who goes and comes[213] when he pleases. According to hobo custom, he goes to the country each summer, but he usually spends his leisure in town. He is an optimist. The following two verses were written at a time when he was down but not downhearted.

“No Matter Where You Go” is a humorous presentation of the futility of wandering. Where to go next when the hobo wants to move is always a problem. Usually the “bo” gives an unfavorable report of the district he has just left.

In song and ballad the hobo expresses life as he feels and sees it. Through poetry he creates a background of tradition and culture which unifies and gives significance to all his experiences. His ballads of the road and his battle songs of protest induce a unanimity of sentiment and attitudes, the strongest form of group solidarity in the hobo world.

Through the universal language of poetry the homeless man bridges the chasm of isolation that separates him from his fellows. In song and ballad he communicates his memories and his hopes to men everywhere who, fascinated by his experiences, perceive in them only a different expression of the human wishes of every person.

[215]

“Killing time” is a problem with the homeless man. The movie and the burlesque are the only forms of commercialized amusements within the range of his purse. Even these are only patronized infrequently and by a few. For the vast majority there is no pastime save the passing show of the crowded thoroughfare. Most of them spend their leisure time shuffling along the street reading the menu cards in the cheap restaurants, or in other forms of “window shopping.” Sometimes they stray out of the “stem” into the Loop. Perhaps they will go to the parks and lie on the grass, or to the lake front where they may sit down and look out on the water.

The homeless man, as he meanders along the street, is looking for something to break the monotony. He will stand on the curb for hours, watching people pass. He notices every conspicuous person and follows with interest, perhaps sometimes with envy, the wavering movements of every passing drunk. If a policeman stops anyone on the street, he also stops and listens in. If he notices a man running into an alley his curiosity is aroused. Wherever he sees a group gathered, he lingers. He will stop to listen if two men are arguing. He will spend hours sitting on the curb talking with a congenial companion.

During the summer, time hangs heavier on the hobo’s hands than in winter. In cold weather, he is usually hard pressed to find food and shelter. If the inclement weather overtakes him without funds[216] and jobless, and this is generally the case, he is absorbed with the problem of “getting by.” He is driven to his wits’ end to find a warm place to sleep at night and a comfortable place to loaf during the day. It often takes a whole day’s scouting to find a place to sleep at night and food enough to appease his gnawing and growling stomach.

There are homeless men who have time on their hands even in winter. They are those who have the rare ability to save enough in summer to live in winter. The parks are no longer inviting. The soap-box orators have either gone out of business or are forced indoors. The hobo follows them and, where he can afford it, helps to support them inside much as he did in the open. He spends more time in the movies and burlesques and will sit for half a day at times watching one show.

Listening to speeches is a popular pastime in Hobohemia. Nothing, unless it is reading, occupies so much of the homeless man’s leisure time.

Hobohemia knows but two types of speakers—the soap-box orator and the evangelist. The evangelist has been longer on the job. Religious speakers are usually associated with established organizations, or they represent mission groups of which there are many varieties on the “stem.” There are evangelists who adhere to no faith or creed. They are “free lances,” as most hobo speakers are, only their message is a religious one. Few of these latter take contributions, and seldom do they essay to make converts in the sense of having a following. They are enthusiasts driven into the streets with the irresistible[217] urgency of their message. In Hobohemia, where time hangs heavy on the hobo’s hands, there is an audience for every message.

In a later chapter[64] the rôle of the evangelist in the life of Hobohemia is considered; here we are interested in the soap-box orators whose message is secular rather than other-worldly. The man on the soap box is a reformer or a revolutionist, seeking to change conditions. The missionary, on the other hand, is seeking less to change conditions than to change mankind. This is the basis of the conflict between their rival doctrines. The soap-boxers may contend with each other concerning what is best for the down-and-out in the here and now, but they are unanimous in their opposition to the “sky pilots” and the “mission squawkers.” They maintain that it is more important to enjoy life here than to live on the prospect of joy hereafter. They have lost patience with the preacher because he only promises “pie in the sky when you die,” and they want the pie now.

The men and women who bring religion to the tramp in Hobohemia have taken root in the life of the “stem.” Their street singing, their preaching and praying, although little heeded by the hobo, would be greatly missed if absent. But the missionary, transplanted from another area of life, remains more or less of an alien. The soap-box reformer is no less of an institution and he is, moreover, native to the soil. He is closer to the actual life and mundane interests of the homeless man. He stands on the curbstone and publishes his opinions on the great questions of the day in a positive and convincing[218] manner, and his ideas are generally couched in language that the man on the street can understand. The hobo’s intellectual interests revolve about the problem of labor. The soap-box orator is the hobo’s principal source of information on this topic.

Soap-boxers are “free lances” most of the time. Either they are out of harmony with all organizations or no organization has been willing to adopt them. Those who make street speaking a profession are a great deal like the ancient sophists. They are able to plead one cause today and a different cause tomorrow. Their allegiance is to be had by any group that can make the proper bid. With some of them the inducement must be a financial one, while others are interested only in ideas. If the idea attracts them they will take up the new angle of the subject with the same enthusiasm that they did the old. In this respect they are influenced by public opinion. They love to harangue the crowds but they like to have the crowd on their side.

Soap-boxers usually take themselves seriously, though their audiences do not always do so. They take themselves seriously in spite of their frequent and often abrupt changes in positions on the issues they discuss. They are usually made to explain these changes, and these explanations, if not always logical, are usually sincere. They invariably give their best thoughts on the subject they discuss. Whatever they have gleaned from the available sources they are striving to express in language that is live and understandable to the man on the street. These efforts to clear the issues, to spread propaganda[219] or whatever it may be called, is termed by the soap-boxers, “education.”

Not all the “stem” intellectuals who assume the burden of educating the proletariat use the soap box. Many of them wield the pen. The latter are, in the main, free-lance writers, and most of their productions are tinctured with “red.” But they are generally able to catch the ear of the down-and-out, whether he is a hobo or not. The writings of these cloistered radicals, who are striving to bring the chaotic proletariat to a unity of the faith, provide the soap-box pulpiteer with facts and ideas which he interprets and passes on to his curbstone audience in the shape of poems, songs, articles, and essays. The writers provide, for them, an abundance of material out of which the orators build their castles. Most of these literary radicals are optimistic about the success of their efforts to “get the worker’s mind right,” and thus prepare him for the new order. The masses must be educated, but the soap-boxer, whose burden it is, must himself be educated, and that is the job of the writer who works behind the scenes.

Just how much education the Hobohemian proletariat gets from this speaking and reading is not easily estimated. They learn something about the class struggle, industrial organization, and politics. Sometimes an observation on science or literature or art will fall from a speaker’s lips, but most of these observations are new only to the stranger in the class. The old-timer, however, hears only old ideas restated; or, at best, new facts and figures interpreted to support old ideas. It is like a game with a limited number of pieces and a limited number[220] of moves. Sometimes, to be sure, a speaker endeavors to serve “science” to the “floating fraternity.” Lectures on biology, psychology, sociology, or economics may be heard any evening or holiday during the summer. Most of these lectures go over the heads of the audience, and it is questionable whether the speakers have sufficient background to speak intelligently of the sciences they are attempting to expound.

This effort to educate the proletariat is, nevertheless, not altogether without results. It gives men something to occupy their minds. It gives them some understanding of their common interests; creates a certain amount of solidarity and, perhaps, best of all, “kills time.” Some speakers realize this and declare that the soap box is primarily a kind of entertainment. One man makes it a point to try to amuse his crowd as well as to “instruct” them. “You’ve got to keep ’em interested. You have to amuse them and make ’em laugh before you can get any ideas into their heads. Whenever things get dry, I leave an opening for a drunk or someone to ask me a question or crack a joke, and interest picks up again.”

Just as there are certain unwritten laws that are found in the jungle camps, so there are unwritten laws that the soap-boxer observes. Regardless of how much they differ in their schemes, they are seldom personal in their opposition to one another. Soap-boxers behave toward one another when not on the box much as lawyers do when they are out of the courtroom, and even while on the box they consider one another’s interests. For example, a speaker in resigning the rostrum to his successor will frequently close with some such statement as this: “I’d like to talk longer on this subject but there are other speakers here and they have something to say that you might like to hear.”

The practice of taking up personal collections is looked down upon by most curbstone speakers. They feel that the soap box should not be exploited. Collections are not always approved by the audiences.[223] Some men label their speeches “lectures” and “pass the hat” on the ground that they have spent years in getting the information. When they “perform the hat trick on the ‘simpoleons’ [simpletons]” they regard it as a compensation for the rôle they play as educators. They chew fine the complex intellectual food so that it may be taken up by the untrained and unlearned. But unpopular as is the practice of collecting money, it is not a barrier. The audience is exceedingly tolerant toward the hat-passer and more so if he has a good “line” of talk, or if he is handicapped.

Most men who talk to Hobohemian crowds make their living by selling some kind of literature. Sometimes they sell pamphlets they have written themselves, or they sell pamphlets or periodicals on a commission. Getting money in this way is not unpopular among the soap-boxers. It is a practice that is rather favored, for it is the best way of getting the down-and-out to thinking, and if the soap-box orators are united on any one thing it is this: that the proletariat must be educated.

One of the favorite methods of distributing literature is to sell it from the box. Enthusiastic persons in the crowd often buy a paper and pay for several others to be distributed from the box. Sometimes a man will take the stand and dispose of a hundred papers or pamphlets in a few moments by persuading those who have money to buy for those who have none.

A man who entertains the “slum proletariat” need not be without status because he lives by street speaking. Most of them either directly or indirectly earn their living in this way, though many of them would not admit it. If a man can plead the cause[224] of the under dog to the satisfaction of the man on the street, if he has a philosophy that pleases the crowd, and if he can present it in an attractive manner, very few resent his passing the hat.

So with all their contentiousness the soap-box orators manage to keep on speaking terms, and rather informally turn favors to one another. Seldom do they “knock” one another, and seldom do they crowd one another away from a corner or place one another in embarrassing positions. In this they have gone farther toward reaching a unity of purpose than the various mission groups who compete on opposite corners for the same crowds.

It must not be thought that soap-boxing is a game that is without its tricks. There are tricks for getting the crowds, tricks for holding the crowds, and tricks for exploiting the crowds. Speakers do not like to be the first one up on the box, nor do they like to be the last one up when the crowd has become tired. If a man wants to pass the hat, it is to his advantage to get the first chance at the crowd. Men will do considerable jockeying to get on the box just when they think it will be to their advantage.

Street speakers who stand before the same audiences one or more times a week throughout the year tend to wear out. Some of them are resourceful enough to find something new to say, but others find it difficult to say old things in a new way, so they are likely to fall into the habit of repeating themselves. Sometimes they try to keep from growing stale by speaking in as many places as possible, but since their audiences are limited to the Hobohemian[225] population they are always talking to a number who have heard them say the same things before. After a speaker has made the rounds of all the corners he is forced to get a new “line.”

Some men, however, persist in delivering old thread-bare messages in their old, well-worn way. The speeches of some men are so well known that the only interest is one of curiosity. The crowd listens to see if anything was left out. The hobby of one free-lance speaker is Henry George and the Single Tax. To the crowd he is the “P and P” man, because he usually ends his speeches by selling copies of Progress and Poverty at “cost.” Everyone who has been in town long enough to become acquainted with the principal soap-boxers is familiar with this man’s “line,” but usually he hears him again, partly, perhaps, because of his apparent sincerity.

Most soap-boxers, when they find themselves growing stale, are able to change. B’s hobby for a long time has been a speech on birth control, which he followed by selling some books on sex, but he wore this subject out and recently changed to a speech on superstition at the close of which he sells literature of an anti-religious nature. Another speaker whose speech on patent medicine and quack doctors finally lost its novelty is now talking on birth control. Another has gone from trade unionism to the Ku Klux Klan. An old-timer on Madison Street said of a certain speaker: “That man used to be with the I.W.W.; then he went over to How’s organization and now he’s free lancing.” “What is his line now?” is a question that is commonly asked in regard to a soap-box pulpiteer. They are expected to change.

[226]

In search of variety and for financial reasons, free lancers of ability hire out as campaigners for the political parties. “Where is John L. now?” asks one man. “Oh, he’s up in Wisconsin campaigning for Senator LaFollette. Last month he was in Missouri stumping for Senator Reed.” John carried credentials from both the Democrats and Republicans and he can plead the cause of either.

The rôle of the soap-boxer, like that of the ancient sophist, is that of instructor or entertainer. Men go in search of these curbstone gatherings. On Sundays and holidays the crowd expects them. Homeless men who have a job in the city during the week spend the Sunday on the “stem” partly in order to hear the evangelists and soap-boxers. It is their life. They like to see old friends on the street, but they like especially to see familiar faces on the box.

The open forum is a place, usually indoors, where persons may gather in formal meeting to discuss topics of interest. It is usually a winter retreat for the soap-boxers and their followers. In order to maintain a forum it is necessary to hire a hall and govern themselves by some sort of organization. The “Hobo College” is probably the most conspicuous open forum in Chicago. It is but a branch of a chain of “colleges” that are maintained in the larger cities of the country by the wealth of James Eads How, the “millionaire hobo.” It has operated in Chicago nearly every winter since 1907. Scarcely a soap-boxer in Chicago has not at some time been associated with this institution. Many of them at some time have either been officers or[227] leading lights of the “college.” The I.W.W. generally maintains a hall where a forum is conducted during the winter, though it does not offer the variety of discussion and subjects that the “college” does.

The forum is far from being a harmonious nestling ground for hibernating soap-boxers. It is rather a veritable battle ground of contending factions. These advocates of the “new society” who agree and disagree so smilingly in the open often become caustic and bitter in their attacks when forced to share the same hall. There close association generates factions and cliques. There are always the “ins” and the “outs.” New leaders are ever getting the chair, and old policies are constantly replaced. The “Hobo College” for the winter of 1922-23 had no less than six secretaries in as many months and three complete “house cleanings.”

The order of procedure at the “Hobo College” is practically the same as in most of the open forums. Meetings are held on the afternoons or evenings at set dates, or there is a regular program of a certain number of meetings a week. On Sunday two meetings are often held. Meetings and programs are advertised in conspicuous places. The meetings are so arranged that there is time at the end of the principal speech for criticism, remarks, or questions from the floor, after which the speaker has an opportunity to defend himself. If distinguished visitors are present, they are usually called upon. Meetings at the “Hobo College” are different from most forums in that they usually terminate with a lunch.

The open forum has some advantages over the street meetings. The group is more select and less transient. A subject for discussion is viewed from[228] various angles by different speakers who have come at least partially prepared. On the soap box the problem of disciplining the crowd is left entirely to the speaker. Once he loses their interest they either harass him or desert him. In the forum the audience is honor bound to remain until the speaker has finished. In the open forum speakers may be invited who are supposed to lend a certain distinction to the occasion. No one can lend distinction to a soap box. Not the least advantage of the forum over the soap box is that most of the audience can participate in the meeting. The disadvantage is that it is not so accessible and hence becomes exclusive.

The question is often asked, “How do soap-boxers get initiated into the game of outdoor speaking?” For most of them the answer is, “In the open forum.” In the open forum the beginners, the aspirants, learn to take part in the discussions. They learn here to find words to express themselves. In the forum they take sides and learn to defend or oppose propositions, and they learn to order and present their thoughts.

The forum has been described as a refuge for the hibernating soap-boxer. It is more than a refuge; it is a study center. It is to the free-lance speaker what a summer school is to the teacher; an opportunity to relax and “polish up.”

Soap-boxers all say that they have enjoyed more liberty in Chicago than in most cities. Chicago police have always taken a generous and liberal attitude toward the curbstone forum. A man who has been prominent in several free-speech fights says:

[229]

The rôle of the soap-boxer is to make hobos think. He succeeds to a greater extent in this than we realize. In his efforts to hold his audience for half an hour he throws off a great many ideas. Much of this ammunition is fired in the air, but not all of it. What he actually does is to keep the minds of his hearers on objective things. Otherwise their thoughts would turn inward, and for the homeless man introspection is not a pleasant pastime.

It is probably true that the soap-box orator makes no permanent impression on his audience. He does, to be sure, give voice to some ill-defined sentiments in which all are agreed. But no practical unanimity is ever achieved. This agitation starts no mass movement. There has never been an effective permanent organization among hobos. The very nature of the hobo mind resents every kind of discipline that any form of organization would impose. He is by circumstance, tradition, and temperament an individualist.

What of the soap-box reformer and revolutionist? Is he a menace or merely a joke? The curbstone orator is not an agitator in the ordinary sense of that word. He is merely a thinking hobo. In him the homeless man becomes articulate. It is something to these outcast men to hear in these curbstone forums the reverberations of their own unuttered thoughts. It is something to the homeless man merely to have a voice.

[230]

The hobo is an individualistic person. Not even the actors and artists can boast a higher proportion of egocentrics. They are the modern Ishmaels who refuse to fit into the routine of conventional social life. Resenting every sort of social discipline, they have “cut loose” from organized society.

For them there is only the open road which offers an existence without discipline, without organization, without control. To the restless and dissatisfied the life of a vagabondage is a challenge, the most elementary way by which men seek to escape from reality.

Out of this unrest, efforts have arisen through which the hobo has striven to materialize his dreams. Among the organizations initiated or promoted by migrants are the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.), the International Brotherhood Welfare Association (I.B.W.A.), the Migratory Workers’ Union (M.W.U.), the United Brotherhood of American Laborers, and the Ramblers.

The I.W.W. was formed in Chicago in July, 1905. Its headquarters are here and its conventions have almost invariably been held here. Chicago has been favored by the migratory radicals because it is a transportation center, and because of its tolerant attitude toward street speakers.

Theoretically, the I.W.W. is an organization of all industrial workers, but it has been most enthusiastically supported, however, by the hobos. It was conceived in the “stem,” and cradled and nurtured[231] by the floating workers. The hobo has always been identified with it and, in the West, has played a militant rôle in fighting its battles.