Hoboes

Hoboes, or tramps, were unskilled workers that traveled across America in large numbers between 1870 and 1940 seeking employment. Almost exclusively white, fluent English speakers, and overwhelmingly male, they often rode illegally on freight trains between cities and rural areas, where they found jobs in construction, on the railroads, or on farms. Sacrificing the respectability of settled male gender roles in exchange for freedom from social responsibility, hoboes were either demonized as hypermasculine predators who threatened the family or romanticized as freedom-loving wanderers. Yet their labor was critical to the expansion and consolidation of America's industrial economy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

For the few middle-class men that experienced hoboing, train riding and manual labor served as a rite of passage into a muscular and adventurous masculine world—an initiation [Page 211]into a “strenuous life” that rejected the genteel and artificial overcivilization often criticized in the Progressive Era. Most hoboes, however, were young working-class men, and hoboing was integral to traditions and practices of young working-class manhood. Although working-class hoboes performed unskilled labor, their mobility continued an earlier pattern of artisan life in which journeymen in the skilled crafts of printing and railroading traveled between apprenticeship and craft employment. Hoboing also preserved settled jobs for working-class fathers and husbands, who were often threatened by industrial layoffs, and provided some unattached men an opportunity to accumulate capital or escape family conflict or claims of paternity.

Many aspects of hobo life challenged masculine gender conventions. Urban “hobohemias” fostered a nondomestic bachelor subculture of single residence hotels and flop houses, saloons and cheap restaurants, second-hand clothing stores, burlesque shows, and prostitution. Public perception usually associated hoboes, who lived in urban “jungles” or in rural camps, with tasks commonly considered feminine: laundering shirts to kill lice and cooking mulligan stew (made from whatever was handy) in tomato cans. While many hoboes remained single for economic reasons, some found in hoboing a space for engaging in homosexual relations. Some hoboes created a group identity outside of the economic and cultural mainstream, including publishing a monthly newspaper, The Hobo News/Review.

Public fear of hoboes resulted in the passage of Tramp Acts (vagrancy statutes) in the 1870s. Directly derived from the southern Black Codes used to control the freedmen's movement and re-establish white supremacy in the aftermath of the Civil War, these laws disciplined the male labor force into a large and impersonal work culture; undermined workers' self-conceptions as independent artisans; and demonized those who refused to adapt. Tramp laws also helped reinforce the relegation of middle-class women to the domestic sphere by implying that they needed to be protected from these unattached men.

Because their lifestyle defied acceptable male behavior in multiple ways, hoboes stood on the margins of society. Their freedom from the new American industrial social order appeared either as effeminate or disreputable and threatening. By the 1920s, however, their challenge to social conventions had been recast by the actor Charlie Chaplin and others into a romanticized or comic image. The iconography of the hobo thereafter became established in American popular films, cartoons, and literature as representative of a long American tradition, stretching from Huckleberry Finn to Dean Moriarty (in Jack Kerouac's On the Road), fantasizing a masculine escape from domestic and corporate fetters. In this idealized form the hobo powerfully contributed to popular constructions of masculinity.

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