Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America

by Todd DePastino

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

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

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American, Poverty

351 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Todd DePastino is the author of BILL MAULDIN: A LIFE UP FRONT (W.W. Norton) and editor of WILLIE & JOE: THE WWII YEARS (Fantagraphics Books). He teaches at Waynesburg University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania."

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

For anybody wondering how folklore of hobohemia morphed into morality tales of Skid Row bums and ultimately into the clinical lexicon surrounding homelessness, this book does an incredible job of tracing an American fascination with "life on the road."

[Marvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Summer 2003 issue of Iowa Heritage Illustrated focuses on Iowa and the Midwest as the source of abundant food that its best citizens found ways to share with the rest of the world. Many of us in the Midwest, however, are unwilling to admit that the fruits of such abundance have been far from equally shared even within our own communities. Particularly in the years from the end of the Civil War to the end of World War I, much of the Midwest’s agricultural abundance relied on the labor of underpaid hired men and migrant, seasonal workers. In fact, as late as 1920, farm laborers ‘working out’ for wages on nonfamily farms represented a larger portion of the American labor force than miners of all kinds. Yet those workers remain largely invisible in the historical record, mostly because their transient status meant that they have not been seen as integral parts of particular communities and because they left few records of their lives and work.

Two new books begin to correct that oversight: Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880–1930, by Frank Tobias Higbie; and Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America, by Todd DePastino. Perhaps the most striking thing about both books is how they take readers inside a very unfamiliar world, but also show us how much that world was an integral part of more familiar rural and urban experiences.

Indispensable Outcasts is grounded more in the lived experience of transient workers on farms and railroads throughout the Midwest and Great Plains and in the forests and Iron Range of northern Minnesota. Higbie focuses on those workers’ relationships to the communities and economic conditions within which they worked. Hobo workers, he shows us, were not aimless drifters. Instead, they were in rational pursuit of economic opportunity, and they served critical needs for seasonal labor in the communities through which they passed and in which they worked. Nor was the life of hobo workers characterized by some idealized form of freedom from all constraints and dependence on others. “The supposed independence of the road,” Higbie found, “turns out to have been structured by a distended network of advice, assistance, and care . . . predicated on a vague but real ethic of mutuality.”

Such understandings shatter stereotypes of hoboes that many of us have absorbed from popular culture. Higbie devotes some attention to how those stereotypes arose and what they say about the mostly middle-class commentators who spread them. But that myth making is more central to Citizen Hobo. Where Higbie’s work shatters the stereotypes, DePastino plays with them to help us understand hobo culture and, just as important, to show how middle-class culture has been shaped by being alternately threatened by and strangely attracted to a subculture that operates apart from traditional understandings of home and family. The second chapter in each book is devoted specifically to identifying the biases in accounts of tramping by Progressive Era social scientists, journalists, fiction writers, and other observers. DePastino continues to include in nearly every chapter analyses of images of homeless people from a wide range of cultural venues, including vaudeville, novels, photographs, cartoons, music, and film.

Higbie followed hobo workers across the rural areas and small towns of the Midwest; he includes a fascinating account of a free speech campaign by members of the Industrial Workers of the World in Sioux City in 1915. For DePastino, “hobohemia” culture is found more in the “main stems”: neighborhoods in urban centers such as Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, and Seattle filled with cheap lodging houses, employment agencies, restaurants, bars, pawn shops, and theaters catering to hoboes who were between jobs. In Minneapolis in 1922, for example, private and public employment agencies found work for 130,000 men.

Both books use many of the same sources, and there is considerable overlap, but the focus and goals are quite different. If Indispensable Outcasts seems more grounded in the actual experiences of hobo workers, Citizen Hobo is more attentive to change over time, and it brings the story of homelessness up to the present. Both shed new light on a much misunderstood part of our history.

[Steve Barrera · Rating 5 out of 5]

This fascinating book is a cultural history of hobo life and homelessness in the United States, from the late 1800s into the current era. As author Todd Depastino explains it, the "hobo" arose after the Civil War when men, many of them veterans, followed work on the expanding Western frontier. In other words, they were itinerant laborers. The developed their own "hobohemia" subculture that rejected bourgeois life for a free-wheeling, whites-only masculinity, in the spirit of Walt Whitman's idea of the "Open Road." As the frontier closed, hobohemia became entwined in socialist politics, was subsumed into popular culture through vaudeville and film, and ultimately was extinguished by the unrelenting tide of industrial progress and the rise of the modern suburban ideal of domestic life. Today, instead of "hobos" we have the "homeless" - a term that emphasizes the social alienation of a deprived underclass. Little trace of the romantic notions of a life on the open road remain (though you might check out the recent film "Nomadland"). Depastino writes in an easy and engaging style, that just barely hints at his academic background, and he does bring up racial, gender and class politics, but not in an overbearing way. I learned a lot of interesting and unexpected details about American history, and also got a good sense of an overarching story of the undomesticated American citizen through the social eras. A great read and highly recommended.

[Renata · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply fantastic. Much more than I was expecting -- it's really an American History book starting in the Gilded Age and covering the historical ideas of "home," from the early American definition as "productive land" to the suburban/nurturing vision of home. With this theme woven throughout, the author exposes the impact that varying cultural conceptions of "home" had on homeless people and housing policy.

Covers the racial history of homelessness, including extensive focus on how homelessness, as originally conceived in post-Civil War society, was a crisis of "white manhood" and was the subject of intense academic and political discussion as to how to remedy the crisis.

Here are a couple of paragraphs toward the end of the book that capture the author's take on the research:

"What separates the postwar studies of homeless 'disaffiliation' from their contemporary counterparts, however, is the positive valuation that radical ethnographers give to their subjects' 'antisocial' behaviors and countercultural ideologies. Sociologists like Bahr and Caplow definedthe skid row community as illegitimate because its members did not 'go along with the rules' and lived 'beyond the reach of organized society.' Liberal scholars and journalists of the 1980s and 1990s tried to counter this characterization by emphasizing homeless persons' normative desires for regular work and nuclear family life. Radical ethnographers returned to the basic categories of skid row studies, but instead of interpreting homeless persons' 'disaffiliation' as pathological, attempted to explain their subjects' deviance as rational responses to traditional instutions and ideologies that have failed American society as a whole."

...

"The recovery of the 'Citizen Hobo' after World War II was achieved only through the creation of a political economy and social policy that elevated the nuclear family ideal to a social imperative. Today the consequences of this achievement continue to weigh heavily upon us. Even in our postmodern era, which ostensibly recognizes the diversity of home ideals, poor people who reject or are rejected by the nuclear family face a gruesome existence where the protections and immunities of citizenship do not include housing.... For the homeless, winning citizenship means struggling not only for shelter, but for 'home' differently defined. For however it is imagined, the American home remains an essential means for gaining access, belonging, inclusion and power.

[Joshua Gates · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hobo culture has withstood the test of time and has it roots in the 19th century. Not every Unionists or Confederate could rejoin society. The single males took to boxcars in search of work. This book found at one of the many libraries in the DC area and since hobos practically surround all the major metro entrances I wanted to better understand the question why. I found that hobohemia as Todd DePastino labels it is a unique set of ideologies. For example according to DePastino, hobos are inclined to share with someone else who is less fortunate and all they ask in return is that they remember who helped them. This is by far different than what I have encountered. But then again DePastino makes a clear distinction between tramps and hobos. I was especially intrigued by recent Harvard graduates joining skid row and the inverse, tramps and hobos receiving jobs at reputable companies, firms, institutions, and newspapers. When you can't afford to pay Harvard and your parents are worse off financially because they did not have a good crop what else is there to do for a bright minded 22 year old male? As DePastino describes it, they enter hobohemia with a refreshing disgustful acceptance. Females also enter hobo society, however their roles are significantly different.

A compelling book about the culture and function hobos and their earliest ancestors the tramps have in society.

[Joe Blow · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really excited to read this and had been waiting a while to buy it. But.... it turns out to be a snooze-fest, it is just plain boring. I wanted to know about Hobo's and their life but in turn I got how and why homelessness came to be. Now to some of you that may sound interesting, but the way it reads it is not. I had high hopes but I ended up on skid-row with this one. It reads like a textbook.

[Allison Hawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting look at the hobo culture to be sure. The book was well researched and provided a wealth of information. However, the last two sections of the book (dealing with modern homelessness) felt rather added on and made some rather random leaps, like they were an afterthought compared to the previous parts of the book. Overall, an interesting read, though.

[Travis Howard · Rating 3 out of 5]

At times too much "study material" but eye opening none-the-less. I never knew this was an actual way of life in American culture - it was in fact a movement.