Chapter One

The Problem of the Homeless in American History

PHOTOGRAPHS OF SOUP LINES AND destitute farm families making their way to California during the Great Depression have been indelibly etched on the American imagination. Long before the 1930s, however, the homeless were an important element on the American scene. Known during the colonial era as "the wandering poor," "sturdy beggars," or simply as vagrants, the home less first became noticeable in the late eighteenth century, then grew significantly in number after 1820, when urbanization and industrial development began to take hold in the young nation. By the 1840s and '50s, municipalities were setting aside rooms in police stations for overnight lodging of the destitute, and organized charities began to grapple with the problem of the homeless for the first time.

Homelessness emerged as a national issue in the 1870s. During that decade the homeless population increased dramatically in size and assumed a distinctive form. A new, more aggressive type of homeless man emerged--the tramp. Tramps rode the railroads without paying, joined together in threatening bands, and frightened farmers while incurring the wrath of law enforcement officers. In the cities, meanwhile, the number of destitute persons forced to stay overnight in privately run shelters or police station "tramp rooms" increased, while those who were not completely penniless sought accommodations in cheap lodging house districts like the Bowery in New York.

During the post-Civil War decades, some of the homeless went "on the road," while others gravitated to the cities. There was considerable overlap between the two groups, but those who traveled in search of work (or, sometimes, adventure) were generally younger than those who remained permanently in one locale. This dual aspect would continue to define homelessness until the 1940s, when the effects of war and structural changes in the economy led to a sharp decline in the number of persons riding the rails. After 1945, homelessness would undergo a drastic change as an aging population of destitute men became confined, for the most part, to the deteriorating skid row areas of cities. Homelessness, which in the 1930s had reemerged as an important national issue, now reverted to what it had been before the Civil War--a strictly urban problem. Even in the cities, the homeless became largely invisible to all but the police. The lack of concern for this impoverished group made the skid rows ripe for urban renewal, and in the 1960s and 1970s most of the old lodging house districts in American cities were demolished.

The level of significance we ascribe to homelessness very much depends on how the term is defined. In conducting the first census of the homeless in 1933, sociologist Nels Anderson identified a homeless person as "a destitute man, woman or youth, either a resident in the community or a transient, who is without domicile at the time of enumeration. Such a person may have a home in another community, or relatives in the local community, but is for the time detached and will not or cannot return." This succinct definition recognized that a homeless person could be either a permanent resident of a community or a traveler, that the condition of homelessness could either be voluntary or involuntary, and that family relationships were significant in determining whether or not a person became homeless. All of these aspects are important for understanding the phenomenon historically.

Counting only those "without domicile," however, implies that only persons literally without a roof over their head, or forced to sleep in public or private shelters, are genuinely homeless. Such a restrictive definition seriously underestimates the level of homelessness in society. People sleeping outdoors are difficult to count, and even diligent investigators will miss many, as census enumerators discovered in 1990. Anderson's definition also sidesteps the fact that homelessness is often a transitory condition. A person can be temporarily domiciled at one point yet still be functionally homeless. Recent studies have shown that many persons living on the street or sleeping in shelters are able, from time to time, to find accommodations with family or friends. These arrangements are almost always temporary, however, and in most cases such individuals are back on the street in a relatively short time. The best contemporary estimates indicate that for every person in a shelter or on the street on a given night, three or four times as many have been homeless at some point during the previous year. Finally, the word "domicile" itself is open to varying interpretations. Too narrow a definition artificially understates the size of the homeless population. Until the 1970s, it was common for destitute men to rent six-foot-square cubicles in skid row hotels. Quite properly, people living in such circumstances were always considered homeless, as were those in the 1930s and earlier who survived by building makeshift structures in shantytowns.

In the past as today, a flexible definition of homelessness that takes these factors into account makes the most sense. Homelessness has assumed a variety of forms throughout American history. Especially during the industrial era, many homeless persons took part in tramping or worked as seasonal laborers (sometimes called hobos) during part of the year. Others traveled little and lived for decades in the poorest sections of cities, surviving on intermittent wages from odd jobs, begging, and occasional meager support from family members. Homeless women, especially, have always been more likely to live for long time periods in one city. What all these groups shared was the lack of a fixed abode, an impoverished lifestyle, and, in most cases, weak or nonexistent family support.

How the term homeless is defined brings up the far more difficult question of how to measure the level of homelessness at different times. Impressionistic evidence strongly suggests that homelessness was relatively insignificant prior to the 1730s but increased substantially in the late eighteenth century and again in the 1820s. This initial growth of the homeless population took place primarily in the nation's small but growing cities. The main source of data on the homeless during this period, however, consists of records of vagrancy convictions. While it is safe to assume there is some correlation between the number of people charged with vagrancy and the size of the entire homeless population, vagrancy convictions may also be influenced by the size and function of the police force, as well as by the attitude of the authorities toward the homeless. This is especially true for the period prior to the 1840s, when police forces were modest in size and still organized around the informal constable-watch system. Vagrancy incarceration data provide valuable insight into the social characteristics of the early homeless population, but they are much less useful for estimating the size of this outcast group.

In the 1850s, officials in some cities began recording the number of persons who lodged overnight in police station rooms for the homeless. Because those who stayed there did so voluntarily, this is a much better general source for estimating the level of homelessness at the time. Extrapolating from statistics of men who stayed in these facilities, historian Eric Monkkonen has plausibly suggested that between 10 and 20 percent of American families in the late nineteenth century had at least one member who "had experienced the hospitality of the police station." There were, however, many other places where the destitute could sleep besides the station house "tramp rooms." As an estimate of families' experience with homelessness, then, the figure of 10-20 percent is probably conservative. Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth century, a substantial portion of the American public joined the ranks of the "down-and-out" at some point in their lives. Although we will never know exactly how many homeless people existed, their numbers must surely be measured in the millions.

Homelessness fluctuated in relation to a variety of factors, but even at low points the number of destitute persons without shelter was substantial. World War II marked an important turning point in this regard. During the three decades following the war, the usual cyclical pattern disappeared, and homelessness receded to its lowest level since the mid-eighteenth century. The postwar decline proved temporary, however, as mass homelessness reemerged in the late 1970s. Although the homeless population today is not nearly as large as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is still much closer to the historic "norm" than was true of the skid-row era of the 1950s and '60s.

Numbers alone cannot adequately convey the significance of homelessness as an aspect of American civilization. Especially during the industrial era, uncertainty about who was or might become homeless magnified the impact of homelessness well beyond what any isolated "head count" could measure. In addition to those who actually became homeless, there existed a substantially larger group--family members, friends, and fellow workers --who today would be described as an "at-risk" population. In his study of the homeless of the postindustrial era, sociologist Peter Rossi notes that the line between the "literal homeless" and impoverished individuals with homes is often tenuous. Today, of course, there is at least some public assistance available to the destitute. The vulnerability of the poor was even greater during earlier times, when government aid to the impoverished was almost nonexistent. For urban manual laborers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, an awareness of the porous line between the down-and-out and the working poor profoundly influenced their understanding of the emergent industrial order and their precarious place in it.

Although not everyone feared falling into homelessness, by 1900 most Americans were in some way affected by the phenomenon. The increased mobility of the homeless, who after 1870 were as likely to travel by train as on foot, potentially brought the specter of homelessness to the doorstep of every family in the country. The homeless were more visible, and far more assertive, during the industrial era than at any other time in American history. Prior to World War II, tramps and beggars could scarcely be avoided. Most Americans regularly encountered people begging for a handout, either at their back doors or on street corners, and stories about the homeless were common in magazines and daily newspapers.

Despite its pervasiveness as an aspect of American history, homelessness has received relatively little attention from scholars. Social mobility studies, despite their claim to represent "history from the bottom up," have always ignored the underclass of homeless people. Few of the myriad histories of specific communities, works that have enriched our understanding of the American past in so many other ways, even acknowledge the existence of the homeless. If mentioned at all in general histories of the United States, tramps and beggars are usually categorized as simply another effect of the business cycle.

The homeless cannot be traced in city directories or manuscript census schedules, traditional sources for documenting social change at the local level, since almost by definition these were persons who had broken loose from settled society. To ignore such a large group of destitute people, however, presents an incomplete--and in some ways quite false--view of the evolution of the American social order over the last two centuries. Who were the tramps and beggars? How did they become homeless? What were their lives like? With whom in society did they interact? Answers to these questions, hopefully, can help to reclaim an important part of the American experience.

Equally important to the history of the homeless is the public's response to this impoverished group. No other element of the population, with the exception of African Americans, has generated such strong reactions over such a long time period. Attitudes toward work, idleness, inequality, and benevolence have all been connected in some way with the homeless, who in different guises have represented alienation and failure in a society that has long worshiped upward mobility and success. To some extent, this was true almost from the beginning of American society, as evidenced by the early passage of harsh antivagrancy laws and the construction, in the eighteenth century, of the first workhouses for the "idle poor."

Homelessness did not spread uniformly to all parts of the country at the same time. On the eve of the Civil War, much of the South and many rural areas in the North had managed to avoid the "plague" of homeless persons already commonplace in Philadelphia, New York, and other northern cities. That was one reason that so many people were shocked when they first encountered vagabonds riding the rails in the 1870s. Especially to farmers and residents of small towns, these newly assertive homeless men were deeply subversive of the established order, still rooted at that time in the Protestant ethic. "He is at war in a lazy kind of way with society," an 1875 New York Times editorial on the tramp declared, "and rejoices at being able to prey upon it." This was a mild statement compared to the vitriolic commentary about "criminal, lazy vagabonds" that would pour forth from the press during the next decade.

In every age, the homeless have been anathema to many Americans because of their alleged laziness, but the tramps of the 1870s and '80s also threatened another core American value: community control. Of unknown origin and designs, the homeless suddenly appeared in communities across the country, sleeping in barns, pestering citizens for handouts, and leaving as mysteriously as they arrived. Prior to the Civil War, the "wandering poor" were few enough in number that town officials could usually control them. But forcing the homeless to "move on" became futile when the next train only brought more vagrants to their community. The class dimension of homelessness presented yet another cause for anxiety. The tramp came into prominence at the same time that freewheeling entrepreneurs like Jay Gould and Jim Fisk were amassing their ill-gotten gains. Both types seemed to indicate a betrayal of the ideal of a society where there was a direct relationship between work done and benefits received.

Urban beggars and train-riding vagabonds were visible signs of the breakdown of local control that accompanied the rise of urban industrial society in the nineteenth century. Those who responded most antagonistically to the homeless refused to accept this explanation. Instead, they sought scapegoats, the most convenient of whom were the waves of immigrants pouring into the country. Prior to World War I, a common theme in the literature on the homeless was that they were foreigners who had not assimilated American values. Initially, there was an element of truth in this image. In the mid-nineteenth century, the foreign-born, especially the impoverished Irish, made up a disproportionate share of the homeless population. By the early twentieth century, however, this stereotype was out of step with the facts. An increasing majority of the homeless were native-born, and few of the new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe ever became tramps or beggars. Whatever its causes, homelessness was an indigenous phenomenon, not something imported from the outside.

The tramping phenomenon and the responses to it must be understood in the context of the industrialized, increasingly organized society that came into being in the post-Civil War decades. As giant enterprises, routinized factory work, and a new bureaucratic management structure emerged, the distance between the ideal and the reality of the American values of self-help and individualism began to widen. The new industrial system placed severe limitations on workers, forcing them into rearguard strike actions in an attempt to retain as much control over the work process as possible. Forced layoffs were not the only cause of homelessness; rather, unemployment operated in conjunction with a host of other factors influencing the lives of workers. Economic depressions, automation, and industrial accidents could all lead to homelessness. Workers, aware of the inherent instability of the economy and more prone than the middle class to suffer because of it, came increasingly to sympathize with the homeless class. They realized that they might have to join it, whether they wanted to or not.

It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that all the workers who became tramps did so because they had no alternative. Many young workers voluntarily left their jobs and took to the road, either because they sought jobs elsewhere or because they had decided to temporarily "opt out" of the industrial system. The memoirs of more than two dozen former tramps indicate that, for many, their experience represented an incipient rebellion against the new work disciplines and institutional strictures of industrial society. While riding the freights, transients congregated in hobo "jungles," camps strategically located within walking distance of railway terminals but outside the jurisdiction of town police. One appeal of this environment was release from the constraints of a rapidly modernizing social system. At a time when youths unable to obtain an education saw only dead-end factory labor ahead of them, tramp life, at least as a temporary expedient, could be attractive, despite its acknowledged dangers and inconveniences.

The rebellious aspect of tramping was fundamentally different from attempts to preserve "traditional" peasant values in an industrial environment, a subject that has become a staple of ethnic and labor history during the past 30 years. Tramping, in fact, seemed to have something in common with what one historian has identified as the anarchist streak in the American character. Coxey's Army of 1894 and the Bonus Marchers of 1932 illustrated some of these qualities. By adopting extralegal forms of government, both of these groups carried forward a tradition long associated with the American frontier, where communities often preceded formal government. The hobo jungles, with their unwritten rules of conduct, reflected a similar mentality. African Americans had other reasons for going on the road. For a young, impoverished black man of the post-Reconstruction era, escape via the freight car was one means of rebellion against the white South still open to him, and the lifestyle of transients was surprisingly free of overt racism.

Regardless of the racial background of the homeless, it is somewhat misleading to categorize them as unemployed. The homeless have usually been intermittently employed, often at low-paying "odd jobs." Throughout the American past, including the immediate post-World War II era, such work usually involved unskilled manual labor. Since the 1960s, service jobs in restaurants, hotels, or offices have been more common. Historically, unskilled workers have been overrepresented among the homeless, but homelessness was something that could and did happen to Americans from a wide variety of educational and occupational backgrounds.

The railroad-riding tramp was a new phenomenon of the post-Civil War period, but urban vagrants and beggars have existed as long as there have been cities in America. Like the tramps, their numbers grew dramatically in the late nineteenth century. This trend coincided with the development of specialized areas in cities, later known as skid rows, where the homeless were able to find temporary shelter in "cage" hotels or crowded dormitory-style lodging houses. In the 1950s, skid rows came to be identified with elderly homeless men, but this had not been the case earlier in the century. Prior to the 1920s, most lodging-house occupants were relatively young men who survived through a combination of casual labor, begging, and seasonal work in the farmlands and forest areas of the upper Midwest. The "main stem" (as the lodging house district was called by those who lived there) was usually situated in the most run-down section of the city, often adjacent to the red-light district. Nevertheless, to some extent the cheap lodging houses, noisy saloons, and second-hand clothing stores located there provided a protective environment for the down-and-out.

Prior to the 1870s, women made up a significant fraction of the homeless population of urban America. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the world of the homeless had become an overwhelmingly masculine realm. This was not because women were less at risk to become homeless; indirectly, the same forces at work creating male homelessness could and did have an impact on women as well. Rather, it was mostly a consequence of the gender ideology of the Victorian era, which assumed that women were weaker and less able to care for themselves than men. As sociologist Theda Skocpol demonstrated in her pathbreaking study, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, this mentality led to the establishment of numerous institutions to assist indigent women and children and ultimately to the passage of protective labor legislation and "mothers' pensions" laws in the early twentieth century.

Men were much less likely to receive charitable help of this nature. Regardless of unemployment, accident, or illness, they were expected to be the primary breadwinners. Success manuals of the day repeatedly argued that financial achievement resulted from the development of "masculine" traits. Part of the extraordinarily hostile reaction to tramps and beggars in the late nineteenth century was outrage over the fact that these outsiders had seemingly rejected male responsibility by embracing a vagabond lifestyle free from the bonds of marriage and family.

From the colonial era to the early twentieth century, municipal officials and mainstream charities often exhibited barely concealed contempt for the homeless. Beginning in the 1840s, organized charities sought to separate the "worthy" poor from the growing hordes of urban beggars. After the Civil War, the Charity Organization Society attempted to replace the police station facilities with the more controlled environment of privately run shelters, where homeless men were required to submit to a contrived "work test" before receiving food or lodging. Charity officers also joined forces with the police in an attempt to suppress street begging. At the turn of the century, younger social workers began to promote a more humane approach to homelessness. No significant change in the treatment of the homeless would take place, however, until the crisis of the Great Depression led the federal government to become involved for the first time.

The views of reformers and social welfare experts, however, were not always shared by ordinary citizens. Class, ethnic, and religious differences led to wide variation in the way the homeless were treated. During every period of American history, the working class was probably more sympathetic to the homeless than people of higher economic strata. In the nineteenth century, domestic servants often provided the homeless with food pilfered from their employers, and in some immigrant neighborhoods beggars were considered objects of sympathy, not derision. Despite their own difficult financial straits, racial minorities were also more willing to assist the homeless.

Even at the height of the antitramp hysteria, the societal response to the homeless was not totally negative. There were a great many "sentimentalists," as Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner derisively called them, who believed that it was immoral to withhold food from the destitute until their character was investigated. Concerned citizens set up soup kitchens and dispensed free bread during depressions, carrying on a tradition that dated to the late colonial period. Despite constant admonitions against "unscientific almsgiving," many middle-class persons were also prone to give to beggars.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the negative impression of tramps and beggars conveyed by organized charity leaders was also out of step with the image of the homeless man as popularized in various entertainment media. Writers like William Dean Howells and Josiah Flynt introduced new perspectives on the homeless to their readers, helping to undermine some of the old stereotypes. By the eve of the Great Depression, the mainstream image of the tramp in middle-class literature and magazines was milder, but no closer to reality than the earlier, vicious stereotype had been. With its nostalgic overtones, the new image deflected attention from the real problem of homelessness, which continued to exist and even grow during the "prosperity decade" of the 1920s. In contrast, the tramp persona in media favored by the working class, such as vaudeville, music, and early motion pictures, was more likely to contain a subtext critical of the new industrial order. The image of the homeless man served many functions for many audiences.

As both social fact and cultural icon, the homeless receded from public consciousness after World War II, and, except for the social scientists who studied skid-row conditions, they would remain largely forgotten until the late 1970s. Only then did the unexpected emergence of a younger, more racially diverse population of "street people" again draw attention to a problem which had never really gone away, but only changed form, many times, over the centuries.

Excerpted from Down & out, on the Road by Kenneth L. Kusmer. Copyright © 2002 by Oxford University Press. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

The Problem of the Homeless in American History	p. 3
The Origins of Homelessness in Early America	p. 13
The Emergence of the Tramp, 1865-1880	p. 35
Tramps, Trains, and Towns, 1880-1915	p. 57
Organized Charity, Social Workers, and the Homeless	p. 73
Who Were the Homeless?	p. 99
On the Road	p. 123
In the City	p. 147
A Changing Image: The Homeless in Popular Culture, 1890-1930	p. 169
From Tramp to Transient: The Great Depression	p. 193
The Forgotten Men, 1935-1975	p. 221
A New Homeless?	p. 239
Appendix	p. 249
Notes	p. 251
Index	p. 321
Table of Contents provided by Rittenhouse. All Rights Reserved.

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Down and Out, on the Road The Homeless in American History

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