Yet another suggestion I have seen put forward is that it comes from hoosegow (why? Hobos weren’t the only men put in jail) or from hoosier, meaning an inexperienced worker or rustic (no more convincing, I think). One more theory is that it began as the call ‘Hi, boy!’ of railway mail-handlers in the North-West when throwing out the delivery sacks.
A possibility which does not seem previously to have been examined - and it is as good as the foregoing - is whether the alteration from its root may not have been a deliberate jocularity based on the derivation of oboe. The original sixteenth-century French term for what had been the shawm was haulxbois or haultbois (meaning high wood). Shortened to hautbois, it was then anglicized to hautboy, hoboy, howeboie, hoeboy and how-boy. The similarity might seem too close to be ignored, especially as in German the word was hoboe, and there were many Germans among those early migrant lumberjacks and farm hands.
Alternatively it could, although neither have I found this suggested, have filtered into general use from Negro usage, for ‘boy’ (usually in mimicry of the white boss’s form of address) is commonly used among Negroes, and it was in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that there began the first big swell northward of Southern black field labour.
Perhaps the best solution advanced is that by Nicholas Klein, a one-time Hobo College president. Pointing out that the floating labourers had become an essential harvest force on the Western farms, he maintains that ‘the name originated from the words “hoe-boy”, plainly derived from work on the farm.
Whichever the case, by the 1890s the word hobo was generally known. It does seem a little strange then, that W. H. Davies’s The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, in the section concerned with his five years of hoboing around America from June 1893, constantly employs the words tramp or beggar. But it seems unlikely that the stilted speech Davies puts into the mouths of Brum, Philadelphia Slim and the rest has much relation to their actual style, and Davies, although undeniably a pro, is careful to underline his separation and superiority: the itinerant canal-builders at Chicago are ‘the riff-raff of America and the scum of Europe’, the Negroes he especially loathes and despises. Perhaps Davies thought the hobo too low class and inelegantly plebian. Nevertheless the word was without much doubt in wide currency at that time - like the hobo himself, carried and spread by the railroad and the railroaders, whom lexicographers consider the first American sub-group with a nation-wide cant and jargon. Hobo was soon everywhere and in its shortened form, ‘bo or bo, took on classless form and was direct, matey address up through the Thirties.
It was in the 1880s that the first discrimination began to be made, that the hobo was singled out - or, more accurately, was singling himself out - as a sub-species.
Jack London in two essays, ‘How I Became A Socialist’ and ‘What Life Means To Me’, published in 1903 and 1905 in The Comrade, a Socialist Party organ, and in an article ‘The Tramp’ for a 1904 issue of Wilshire’s Magazine, drawing upon his own experiences riding the rods with the bindle stiffs and road kids as an eighteen-year-old in 1894, makes the first careful differentiation between down-and-out transients and the hobo.
Feied points out that Poole’s Index yields not a single reference to an article concerning tramps or hobos in an American magazine in 1875. ‘That there were homeless men tramping the roads and making use of the rail lines before the ‘seventies and ‘eighties can hardly be doubted,’ he says, ‘yet it seems likely that until they became a problem scant attention would be paid to them,’ and there puts his finger on the cause of the flood of writing about the unattached man which was released by Bret Harte’s 1877 short story, My Friend, the Tramp, and which mounted through the 1890s.
It was the crash of 1873 and the subsequent depression which tossed three million men into vagrancy, and transformed the tramp into a burden and a threat. Before that the tramp was in any case a speck through the wrong end of a telescope, socially and geographically negligible, for his drifting circuit was through the Western mining towns and railroad construction redoubts.
Nor, even if he ever did encroach upon their consciousness, was he a fit subject for the Boston sociologist or belletrist. As long ago as 1859, Frederick Law Olmsted wrote: ‘Men of literary taste … are always apt to overlook the working classes, and to confine the records they make of their own times, in great degree, to the habits and fortunes of their own associates, and to those of people of superior rank to themselves … The dumb masses have often been so lost in this shadow of egotism, that, in later days, it has been impossible to discern the very real influence their character and condition has had on the fortune and fate of nations.’
Ginzberg and Herman ran into the same fog bank when delving for material for The American Worker in the Twentieth Century: ’… much of history is the history of the successes and failures of those who held positions of power and influence. But a dull silence prevails when it comes to the work and lives of working men and women.’ Thernstrom remarks, too: ‘One of the most glaring gaps in our knowledge of nineteenth century America is the absence of reliable information about the social mobility of its population, particularly at the lower and middle levels of society.’
This is a continuing lacuna. Laubach’s Why There Are Vagrants, published in 1916, remarked that ‘at last the world of “hoboes” has begun to attract notice in the front pages of the newspapers’ - because vagrants were becoming ‘envious and discontented’. The hundred homeless men he ‘studied’ were sorted into various personality categories, such as ‘childish or silly, low ideals, stupid, false pride, repulsive face, sarcastic, treacherous, vulgar’. Laubach’s nostrum was: ‘If we can eliminate drunkenness we may therefore greatly reduce vagrancy.’
In 1817 Edward Markham wondered wistfully if the literature of the future would ‘discover that the working man is the prince in disguise’. That same year Francis Hackett commented upon the ‘enormous gap between literate and unliterate America’.
In the Twenties Edwin Seaver in The New Masses, advised the critic to ‘take his nose out of the literary gossip columns and go to the Hoovervilles, to the Hard-Luck-on-the-East-Rivers, to the deserted mines and the impoverished fields, to the jungles outside our big cities, to the flophouses, to the charity dispensaries, to the empty warehouses where the homeless ones gather by stealth until they are chased out by the law - for it is here, and not in the library, that the strongest elements in our new literature are likely to come from. It is here that you may meet our future Gorkys, and not at your literary teas. It is here that you may meet our future poets and dramatists and novelists, not in the ranks of the cultured riffraff who no longer bother to talk about books.’
A dreamy thought, but either no one did venture into those dives, or the poets and dramatists weren’t there anyway. Looking with less Marxian fixity and a longer view, Aaron wrote in 1961: ‘Among the major American writers, only Walt Whitman addressed himself to the working man without inhibition or restraint, but no writer of stature in nineteenth century America had written “the Uncle Tow’s Cabin of Capitalism” or had ennobled the factory hand or the tenement dweller … Most of the nineteenth and nearly twentieth century attempts to deal with the “poor but honest” working man as a “prince in disguise” failed to convince, because the writers themselves were temperamentally and culturally too far removed from the proletarian’s world. Their books were more often than not merely well-intentioned slumming expeditions from which they returned exalted or depressed.’
One of the sparse number of clues to what was happening outside the literary tea salons - and particularly in terms of geographical mobility, so by deduction the lack of social mobility -is the estimate of Josiah Flynt, a hobo himself, who put on record a little sketchy anthropology of the ostracized tribe he helped form.
Flynt reckons that in the Nineties there was a railroad tramp population of about 60,000 men. Information about their way of life, and familiarity with their language and credo, were slow to seep through to the general
public because of that literary and journalistic primness of the time, but also because except when invading the towns on begging reconnoitres, their orbit was as separate as that of the Bedouins of North Africa.
When they rode a train it was not ‘on the cushions’ for normally they picked a freight as it left the yards and they travelled with the boxcar merchandise. When they disembarked they dropped off before too embarrassingly near a station and its detectives. When they rested they congregated in a fleabox hotel in a section of the town few respectable citizens ever saw; or in the jungle camp which still exists close to every American rail division point, and which has become a foundation as venerable and traditional as Main Street but as unknown to most locals as the Congo.
Pinkerton, it can safely be said, positively was not hopeful that there were future Gorkys in that jungle party his agent stumbled upon. What is of especial interest is that after so zestfully describing the ape-life of the deserted mine site, there is an abrupt switch into complacent sentimentality.
Soddened, grotesque, brutish and so on though all the tramps were, ‘all seemed as contented and satisfied with their fortune as though it was all they deserved and better than they expected’. And in his reference to another jungle in Philadelphia he says: ‘They fare well, and are apparently the happiest and jolliest dogs under the sun.’
There in a couple of sentences is vivid expression of the schizophrenia about the tramp which had long been developing and which now, with the 1890’s three million unemployed and a festering class enmity bursting into strikes and armed battles, was epidemic.
Thenceforth, having been reluctantly but inescapably accepted as an American institution, the tramp was recognizably there to be feared and romanticized, recommended for extermination and given a pat, to be seen alternately - or simultaneously - as a figure of fun and as a bird of prey.
Apprehension sounded louder than the laughs. It can be traced back to 1877, when a J. H. Morison in The Unitarian Review put in print the misgivings of the secure. He deplored the ‘sudden and fearful development of vagrancy within the last two or three years’.
It was a development which had been proceeding beyond the contracted horizons of the settled citizenry since 1865 when the Civil War’s end disgorged a legion of raggle-taggle demobbed soldiers, homes and background shattered, old jobs gone and in many cases health and limbs also gone, unable to relocate themselves in an altered labour market.
Land grants were made to ‘the boys’ but without achieving a painless back-to-normality, and the pre-war dribbles of jobless mechanics and restless ploughboys about the land suddenly billowed. Now that the warriors were out of uniform the patriots’ beam turned stony upon them. Mr Morison in his article demanded ‘stringent laws, made as they were in England five or six centuries ago, against “sturdy beggars”. Tramps who can give no satisfactory account of themselves,’ he pounded, ‘should be summarily condemned to hard work and coarse fare’.
Well, hard work was the elusive thing, and they were getting coarse fare already. The tramp as an individual had long been an Ishmael. In Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi is the ‘poor stranger, a harmless whiskey-sodden tramp’ who wanders into Hannibal, Missouri, in the 1840s. The tramp was wandering about the streets one chilly evening, with a pipe in his mouth, and begging for a match; he got neither matches nor courtesy; on the contrary, a troop of bad little boys followed him around and amused themselves with nagging and annoying him.’ Eventually, touched with shame by the tramp’s ‘forlorn and friendless condition’, young Clemens retires from the baiting. But later that evening the tramp is arrested - for what? - and locked up in the calaboose by the marshal. (He accidentally sets his straw bed alight: there is a terrifying description of the tramp burning to death, screaming, hands gripped around the cell bars, ‘a black object set against a sun, so white and intense was the light at his back.’)
The impression left by Twain is of hair-triggered community cruelty toward one unlike themselves, anl although that tramp’s incineration was his own fault it would not have been considered amiss later when numbers changed suspicion to fear. Mr Morison was, in fact, going easy on the sturdy beggars. Severer ‘cleaner America’ campaigners urged farmers’ wives not to burn them to death, merely to poison the criminal city scavengers wheedling grub at the back door.
10 A little strychnine or arsenic
‘Twas transportation brought me here,
Takes money for to carry me home.
The long steel rails that have no end
Have caused me for to roam.
They’ve caused me to weep, they’ve caused me to mourn,
They’ve caused me to leave my home.
To The Pines, a nineteenth-century banjo song
Crude advocacy of murder - like a public health drive to exterminate a plague of rats or flies - is not easy to swallow as credible now, but in its issue of 12 July 1877, the Chicago Tribune printed this advice to its country readership: The simplest plan, probably, where one is not a member of the Humane Society, is to put a little strychnine or arsenic in the meat and other supplies furnished the tramp. This produces death within a comparatively short period of time, is a warning to other tramps to keep out of the neighbourhood, keeps the Coroner in good humor, and saves one’s chickens and other portable property from constant destruction.’
The note of rough jollity therein does not detract from its serious intention. In the tramp scare of the late 1880s the Tribune’s savagery was not isolated. The depression of the 1870s, although of unprecedented grimness, was strange of its kind. During previous slumps and waves of worklessness, the jobless had piled up relatively locally and statically. Now there was a national railroad network and the penniless were foraging ever farther afield, either hunting work or just escaping from the stagnation of closed-down company towns.
Apart from the Yankee and Rebel infantry men who had kept on walking after the armistice, regiments of demobbed had branched away to the outpost construction jobs restarting after the wartime interruption.
The war itself had created work. It was the first in history in which troops and ordnance went on scale by rail, and accordingly the railroad itself was a military target. Bridges, track and rolling stock were shelled and blown up. The South was left with the rags of a rail system and the urgent rebuilding temporarily soaked up a fair body of ex-rankers.
There was a short hectic boom. The transcontinental link was made by the crashing hammers of Irish and ex-convicts and mule-skinners and men still in scraps of blue and grey uniforms thrusting inland from the East; and the Chinese and Mexicans thrusting inland from the West narrowed the divide until there came the epic spurt when a thousand tons of rail crossed ten miles of mountain in one day, and the final golden spike was driven in at the joining of the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific lines at Promontory Summit in Utah.
Up to 1873 there were railroad jobs anywhere for men who could swing hammers and stand the wear and tear. They lived in railcars, on Texas beef and locally shot buffalo meat. Three strokes to a spike, four rails to a minute - the graders ahead broke the soil and rock and made the bed, the ties and rails were dropped from the horse-drawn rail dolly, and the parts spiked and bolted into position. Just behind were the ‘hells on wheels’, the terminal point ‘roaring towns’ from which end-o’-track was fed with food and materials. These were the ‘semicolons of railroad history’, the short carnival pauses on the long grind forward, such burgs as Elko, Wells, Toano, Cisco, Truckee and Lakes Crossing, where the whores, faro table gypsters, land speculators and operators of six-d joints (dine-dance-drink-dice-dope-dames) swiftly sluiced in to meet the needs and whip the dollars of the gaugers and bolters and spikers.
There ‘Jay Cooke’s Banana Special’ (snide comment on the Cooke company’s advertisements of the tropically luxuriant vegetation which would lap settlers in Minnesota and the Dakotas) ran out of funds. The closure set sliding one of the worst American financial subsidences and for the rest of the
1870s railroad building - and industrial enterprise at large - shuddered to a halt.
Regardless in this wintery blackness of abrupt dismissal up in the wilds and nowhere to go, the American admiration of greed and grit was not dislodged. Josephson draws the picture of September 1873: ‘The settlers’ farms continued to fall under the hammer and hundreds of thousands of muscular, industrious laborers wandered the streets begging for bread.’ Yet belief endured : ‘… the laborious crowds in the cities were free to endure idleness or lowered wages; the digger of coal or of oil, the planter of corn and cotton, was free to accept such sums as were offered for his produce.’ The rich pillagers who had preempted railroads, ore fields and harbour rights were defended by the hungry jobless: ‘Well, sir, he is a smart man,’ while Jay Gould ‘roved through the West eyeing the ruined hulk of transcontinental railroads … the mighty fragments cast off, the disjecta membra of an industrial system’s agony.’
Big-spending and now spent-up construction men, firemen on strike and freight brakemen dumped by bankrupt or ailing lines, loggers with their axes hocked and miners without a market, all were heading all ways, to anywhere that rumour attributed pay packets, and for the first time these new unemployed began riding the trains they had themselves manned, or whose tracks they had laid, or whose trucks they had filled. The tramp was in a hurry, and as he began to steal his lifts on the freights he began to turn himself into the hobo.
That rhyme of Tudor England,
Hark, hark, the dogs do bark,
The beggars are coming to town.
was echoed in the siren of panic which reverberated through rural America. The Chicago Tribune’s helpful tip about how to poison off the wayfarer was not a quirky outburst.
The development of the tramp scare may be winnowed out from contemporary newspapers in all parts of the United States. On 6 August 1875, the Cincinnati Daily Gazette reported that: ‘The Legislature of New Hampshire at its last session passed a very severe law in regard to them [tramps]. For merely begging, any Justice of the Peace is authorized to put them to hard labor for six months at the county or town farm. If they cannot be profitably employed in those institutions, they are to be hired out to work for any citizen who may choose to bid for their services.’ The Daily Gazettes evident object in carrying this item was to indicate that Ohio might learn from New Hampshire’s ukase, and henceforth many states did pass similar laws.
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