Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America

Citizen Hobo makes a significant contribution to our understanding of homelessness and domesticity in the century after the Civil War. In this rich cultural history, Todd DePastino explains how out of the Civil War and industrial capitalism an army of footloose hoboes constructed a countercultural movement grounded in migratory work, mutual aid, masculinity, and whiteness. Reformers, intellectuals, and elites feared the subversive effects of such workers. How these two groups interacted and understood each other (and themselves) drives the narrative of this story. From the Gilded Age to the present, DePastino argues, private and public repression of the "homeless" was sparked by cultural crisis around home, sexuality, and citizenship.

Citizen Hobo is organized into four parts. Parts one and two, the most detailed of the four, draws on hobo newspapers, song, and autobiographies as well as ethnographies, dime novels, and the mainstream and labor press to reconstruct the lives of Progressive Era hobos. Mostly young, single, and male, these hobos by necessity and choice hopped the rails in search of seasonal jobs and relief, using their wits, each other, and their labor as their primary means of survival. Many were skilled workers and included famous figures such as Jacob Riis, Ben Reitman, and Jack London. Women and nonwhites were by and large excluded from this hobo community. Hobos divided their time between the road and the urban "main stems" that offered cheap rooms and leisure activities. Whether in the jungles (hobo camps on the road) or in urban lodging districts, the lives of these migratory workers challenged mainstream "beliefs in private nuclear families, moderate domestic consumption, and steady work"(91).

Not surprisingly, hobos at many turns faced public hostility and the gaze of reformers. In free speech fights and anti-vagrancy laws, they were denied their citizenship and subjected to arrest. Public fear of the hobo resulted from hobo otherness, as DePastino argues, but it also reflected the danger of hobos who rejected the trappings of homeownership, domestic life, and the bosses' rule. Hobo activities in vice districts and homosexual acceptance and practices also did little to bolster their image in the eyes of most homeowners, reformers, and elites. In response, hobos built a counterculture to legitimate their life of movement, claiming that citizenship in the age of industrial capitalism required not property or "home," but being a producer and living up to the nation's radial political traditions. Hobohemia, as their culture was called, was also grounded in militant solidarity and generosity, two values that stood in stark contrast to the individualism and acquisitiveness of the dominant liberal culture.

Hobohemia was particularly strong the Chicago and the West where hobos organized around these values to minimize wage dependency and exploitation. During the 1890s depression, hobos formed the 1894 Industrial Army that made its way to the nation's capital to demand unemployment relief. Hobo culture also influenced the shape and direction of two mutual aid institutions: the Industrial Workers of the World and the International Brotherhood Welfare Association. Through the IWW in particular, migratory workers put forward a revolutionary vision and practice that heightened mainstream fears of roaming wage workers. Tramps also surfaced in popular culture, with actors first playing hobos in theatre, much with the same spirit and effect as in minstrel shows, then in movies as with Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp.

Parts three and four trace the decline of hobohemia from 1920 to the present. The 1920s decline resulted from the repression of the First World War, mass consumerism, employer policies, and the growing use of cars rather than trains as a way to travel to and from seasonal jobs. Literature and radical discourses reflected this decline, though those without homes remained part of the social and cultural landscape. The forgotten men of the Great Depression provided a hobohemia revival of sorts in the Bonus Army and especially in the Civilian Conservation Corps whose camps and white, masculine imagery replicated earlier hobo living. DePastino argues, however, that white male hobohemia did not take the prominent role in the politics of the decade because the images of the cultural front put women, families, immigrants and workers of color on equal footing with white men.

Romantic memories of the road did, however, survive after the Second World War when federal programs, especially the GI Bill, and a tenuous class bargain between labor and capital provided economic and social incentives for homeownership and regular work. The Beats, male and female hippies, and movies such as Easy Rider celebrated an alternative to post war suburban conformity. Also challenging the suburban ideal were a dwindling number of urban bachelors living in skid rows which, the experts and popular culture proposed, provided shelter but not "homes." Skid row hotel rooms were often located in former main stem districts and increasingly fell under siege by redevelopment bulldozers which took one million rooms in the 1970s alone. As in previous sections, DePastino effectively links knowledge of the "homeless" to public policies aimed at containment. Unfortunately, DePastino does not discuss how hotel residents organized against their employers or urban redevelopment in the era, for such struggles continued a century of debate over citizenship, housing, and the rights of capital. The final chapter of the book examines the post 1980 demographic shift in the nation's homeless as they increasingly became men of color, women and children. The feminization of poverty and the politics of panhandling laws and other repressive ordinances illuminated the ways in which race, gender, and citizenship remained tightly bound to "home."

The second half of Citizen Hobo could have been more developed, and it was odd that the dramatic rise of "homelessness" during the Second World War is not covered. But otherwise Citizen Hobo is a well-written, engaging cultural history. Scholars of gender and race can gain much from DePastino's close read of the politics of homelessness. Citizen Hobo complements Frank Higbie's excellent social history of Midwest hobos, Indispensable Outcasts (2003), by providing a cultural framework for understanding how workers without "homes" have been understood and marginalized. Citizen Hobo will also be of interest to progressive, New Deal, and social and housing policy scholars. As DePastino shows, to understand the housing issue, we must also understand the ways culture in part legitimates who is a citizen, what is a "home," and how rights are constructed—from property rights to the right of having a roof over one's head if one chooses.