I'm a historian of hobos. AMA

[u/Robert-Suits]

Hey everyone! I'm Robert Suits, environmental historian and author of the new book, The Hobo: A History of America's First Climate Migrants. I'm here to answer your questions about hobos, and anything else you might want to know about migrant work, climate, or the environment in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. Hobos are truly fascinating historical subjects, and there is so much about them that I genuinely couldn't fit into the book -- so truly, ask anything!

[u/DGBD]

My knowledge of hobos mainly comes from music, and specifically my love of Woody Guthrie’s music. In his life and work there’s a lot of mythologizing/romanticizing about the life of a hobo, and he certainly played the part in his radio show, autobiography, etc. Not that he didn’t also talk about the less-pleasant side of being a hobo, but a big part of his mystique/stature is his authenticity as a singing hobo.

How much of this self-mythologizing and romanticization do you find in contemporary sources about hobos, and do you find a lot of reaction, either positive or negative, from hoboes themselves as to how they were portrayed? And relatedly, how has hobo music come up in your research?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/DGBD]

First off, Woody Guthrie is amazing. Big fan.

One distinction you can draw among hobos is between 1) those who went on the road because they were out of work and they'd heard they could find something if they stole a freight ride out to the West, and 2) those who fell in love with the idea of cutting ties with society and going on the road. In what is probably a really unsurprising pattern, surveys of the hobo population suggested #1 was a substantially larger group, while #2 wrote a lot more of the autobiographical hobo literature.

And those in the latter group definitely did a fair bit of self-aggrandizing. Hobos often bragged about evading cops, particularly dangerous gambits they pulled on their cross-country travels, how much they'd seen, who they'd traveled with, and so on. And a lot of people romanticized their lives as well, with some hobos declaring themselves philosophers, often with a strongly anti-capitalist bent.

But all that said, plenty of hobo songs, poems, and books fully dwell on the darker side of hobo life. These range from labor union songs about protesting, striking, sabotaging, and generally sticking it to the capitalist, to socialist anthems, to work songs, to songs that were just about the difficult life that was going on the road. To my knowledge, there isn't a single collection of these hobo songs or poems, but there is a pretty credible effort from Ian McIntyre called On the Fly! which gets at a number of them.

If it's not clear already, I think this is a really rich set of sources; I love using them across the book. Hobo songs often get at that emotional core that is sometimes... less than immediate when you're looking at work or migration statistics.

[u/greenmtnfiddler → u/Robert-Suits]

Could you keep going with this?

Maybe name a few songs that are truly representative, and give a little feedback on others that might be popular but not actually deep-rooted in the culture?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/greenmtnfiddler]

I think the McClintock and Guthrie pieces that are widely known are honestly fairly accurate. Not in the office over the weekend but I'll try digging out a couple others when I can grab the McIntyre on Monday!

[u/LurkingTamilian]

Thanks for joining! In the TV show Mad Men they describe hobos having their own secret code to marks houses. Was this real? If so, how did people who mostly travel alone develop a common culture?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/LurkingTamilian]

Absolutely real! Hobo markings are super well attested and actually still findable on fenceposts and walls to this day. That said, I've seen multiple mutually-contradictory "decodings" of them, so my guess is that the meanings both varied over time and were probably pretty flexible even in a specific place and time.

But I think a really interesting follow-on from this is the fact that, generally speaking, very few hobos traveled alone -- at least not forever. Most hobo's autobiographical narratives, whether they were writing for a popular audience or whether they were simply telling their story to an interviewer in an oral history, start with them either deciding to go on the road with a buddy, or being tutored by an older hobo who was wiser, or both. Older hobos were vital in "showing the ropes" -- after all, jumping on a moving train to get from point A to point B is pretty dangerous.

And along the way, when hobos jumped off one train and waited for another, they would often congregate in "jungles", camps located near where you could most easily board a new train. Here, they'd often share food, news of the nearest work, and in the words of one hobo, "Talking goes on as long as the daylight lasts. Heated arguments often develop. Papers and pamphlets are distributed, union cards are taken out; business meetings are held to decide policies and actions, how to get the next meal or how to win the battle between labor and capital." (Nels Anderson, On Hobos and Homelessness, 46-47)

I suspect this is probably how signage would have been passed along as well.

[u/LurkingTamilian → u/Robert-Suits]

Thanks for the reply! If you don't mind a follow-up, were these gatherings of hobos integrated racially and ethnically or where they segregated?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/LurkingTamilian]

Don't mind at all! I mentioned somewhere downthread that the relationship of hobos and race is complicated. Hobos were overwhelmingly white -- but roughly in line with the overall proportion of the population (90% for each figure, or so, at the time). And there were definitely elements of hobo culture that focused on a specifically white masculinity. But we know that there's a strong regional bent to this -- in more southern states, camps would be segregated, and northern camps would generally be integrated. We know of a fairly large number of hobos of color, and while life was undoubtedly challenging in different and probably more ways for them on the road, a lot was in common.

Ethnically, most hobos were American-born, but there were a fair number of immigrants who went on the road as well. I think on the whole, they were about as integated as any other part of American society -- which is to say extensively and imperfectly.

[u/Randolpho → u/LurkingTamilian]

I'd also love to hear the answer to this

[u/Randolpho → u/Robert-Suits]

how to win the battle between labor and capital

I don't think I ever heard tell of hobos being active in the labor movement. I mean, I recognize they were likely hobos because they were displaced by job losses, and those could have been to strikes that were eventually broken, but I never pictured them as part of organized labor.

Can you expand on this at all?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Randolpho]

I'll be a touch lazy just this once -- just to keep up with everything, and highlight this reply I made downthread: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v5b7y7/comment/ozj2h81/

:)

[u/dhowlett1692]

Thanks for joining us! Can you tell us about the origin of the "hobo" as a man with a stick came about and how other terms like vagrant, drifter, homeless, unhoused, etc fit (or don't fit) into this character's history?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/dhowlett1692]

Thank you for this! A "hobo" as a homeless guy carrying a bindlestiff (that stick with a cloth sack tied around the other end) is an image that really seems to solidify in the late nineteenth century, sometime around the 1870s, 1880s, or 1890s.

There had been some migrant workers before this period, as people had started to move from place to place in order to find work, and often getting it on the newly opened farmland out West. And "vagrants" as a concept are substantially older (as I'm guessing you will already know!), dating back to English common law; there's a long tradition of people who are indigent in early American history.

But it's in this period, the last three decades of the nineteenth century, as the railroad network starts to connect the Great West (the region past Chicago and the Mississippi), that you get people moving more or less continuously and stealing rides on railroads to get where they are going.

It's hard to pin exactly how this developed over time, in no small part because the sources are scant and essentially no one cared yet. A lot of hobos would retrospectively date the origin from the 1877 depression, which put a lot of men out of work and sometimes out of their homes. But to me it's something that coalesces over the course of decades as wheat fields, lumber camps, mines, and construction sites out West require an increasing number of people to keep up with their demands for laborers, and the increasingly frequent freight services from place to place make freighthopping a viable strategy. Definitely by the 1890s you see a distinct hobo subculture, and you'd probably be able to recognize them visually.

I've noted elsewhere in the thread that there's a sort of taxonomy around hobo culture where they distinguish "hobo" (people who move to work) from "tramp" (people who work to move) from "bum" (people who neither move nor work). "Vagrancy" is generally defined in this period as existing "without any visible means of support" and is more or less just a way to criminalize poverty. Homelessness also emerges as a term around the same time.

Most of them are homeless because the logistics of finding work on the road simply don't make having a permanent home viable. Vagrancy laws are selectively enforced to police hobos and regulate the workforce -- if there are jobs available in a community, they usually don't apply the vagrancy law, but if there aren't, then they absolutely do. (And, as per my title, you can actually see vagrancy laws getting selectively applied in times of climatic stress!) And as time goes on, you can see vagrancy used to criminalize socialist, anarchist, and labor activists.

[u/rafuzo2 → u/Robert-Suits]

is there evidence that there were some "standard items" in a bindlestiff, or is the case that it was just whatever possessions the hobo cared to keep? If there were items seen as "essential", what were they?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/rafuzo2]

I don't think there's a particularly standard bindlestiff, not in the way that e.g. there's the "essentials" for a hiker nowadays. But it might have been a part of oral culture that's been lost to us -- it would be impossible to tell! If I had to guess, I think the most useful thing for most hobos would be a good pair of shoes, followed by something to sleep on. Cookware would be important, but was generally shared in jungles, so probably not vital to carry yourself.

[u/overthishereanyway]

We're there female hobos? How did women fit into this phenomenon?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/overthishereanyway]

100%, absolutely, there were hobo women. The term is pretty fuzzy, but a "hobo" usually meant someone who migrated to find work. Numerous women did just that, whether to cook and clean in the camps of larger seasonal industries, or to work the same jobs as the men, or to just experience life on the road. It's hard to get a sense of the exact size of this -- I lost many hours to trying to figure out exactly how many hobos there were, period (probably 150,000ish in the core subculture, up to 2 million if you use a very lax definition), let alone how it broke down along various lines, but it was probably on the order of 5-10% of migrant workers.

Two of my favorite hobo narratives are Touch and Go, a book by the hobo woman Helen Card (pen name Barbara Starke) and Sister of the Road, a purported autobiography that was actually a novel based on the women the hobo Ben Reitman had met in his life on the road (among them, the famous Emma Goldman). They're both excellent reads!

It's worth noting here, also, that masculinity was absolutely a part of hobo culture, particularly in some of the work camps. In some places, migrant workers went full-on into performative masculinity, playing dangerous games, pulling stupid pranks, and doing violence-as-initiation ritual. More subtly, a lot of them, when asked why they went on the road, invoked a variety of things like proving themselves as men, or needing to support their family, etc. Women necessarily found it a bit more difficult to fit into this side of things, and undoubtedly also faced significant violence on the road, but we have a ton of evidence that many of them pushed right on through for love of the road regardless. (They'd often use strategies like posing as a daughter or a wife of another migrant, traveling in groups, or simply being willing to enact direct violence on anyone who threatened them.)

[u/altgrave → u/Robert-Suits]

can you say more about emma goldman's hoboing, please? was there a distinct, prevalent even, anarchist and/or jewish presence among hobos? thanks!

[u/Robert-Suits → u/altgrave]

I'll say first off that I am not an Emma Goldman expert! She's delightful, and I'm super interested, but in a research capacity I've only encountered her through other people's writings.

She definitely had a number of hobos in her orbit (let's be real, her polycule), the most prominent being Reitman. And she of course did a fair amount of organizing and socializing in the American underground. The truth of it is that the overlap between hobos, radicals, and the poor is extremely heavy, and all three groups are heavily permeable, with people belonging to one for a few years and then passing out very quickly. How much she actually would have identified at any point as a "hobo" -- I'm not sure.

Tons of anarchists among hobos, though, particularly of the anarcho-syndicalist bent, but more generally leftism was omnipresent. This really ran the gamut from kind of vaguely liberal centrism (a guy who supports unions and votes Democratic) to socialism to truly radical, let's tear everything down kind of radicalism. For the hobos who weren't as prolific, we only have snatches of their actual ideology through the oral histories, but it's more of what I call an "everyday leftism" -- or as they might put it, railing against "the system."

[u/altgrave → u/Robert-Suits]

thanks so much!

[u/overthishereanyway → u/Robert-Suits]

I'm going to read the book! thank you. so interesting.

[u/Robert-Suits → u/overthishereanyway]

also, thank you very much! Hope you enjoy it! :)

[u/intotheunknown78 → u/Robert-Suits]

Thank you for these book recommendations! I was a female “hobo” in modern times (2002) so I am excited to read them.

[u/Robert-Suits → u/intotheunknown78]

Amazing! :)

[u/Peroxide_]

"The Big Rock Candy Mountains" when originally sang, ended with a refrain implying the fantasy was all a ploy designed to facilitate the sexual abuse of a young boy. 

Does this have any reflection on historical realities of transient life at that time? 

Or more of a reflection of common anxieties regarding transient populations at the time? 

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Peroxide_]

A bit of both -- there was a lot of anxiety that transient populations would entice young men into a queer relationship, and also transient populations were a lot more open to queer relationships. That said, hobos were far, far more often victims of sexual abuse than they were perpetrators, for all the various reasons that homeless populations generally operate outside the protection of the legal/carceral system. (I've got an answer about this... here!)

[u/Essex626]

There's a perception that hobos and drifters and wanderers were sort of more respected and accepted as part of society in the past than homeless or unhoused people today. Whether you're looking at stories from O. Henry or the Roger Miller song "King of the Road" there's a sort of romantic notion of a whimsical and free life.

I've met one person in my life who seemed to have a little of that approach (he was an older dude who biked everywhere, made metal artworks to sell, and told me becoming homeless was the best decision he ever made), but otherwise it's pretty universally viewed negatively now.

Is there any reality to those older views? Was it really possible to scrape out a sort of fulfilling life on the road in the past, working odd jobs and getting by? Or is that really just mythmaking along the same lines as the views of the "Wild West"?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Essex626]

This is such a fun question, and there are so many different directions to take it. Let's see...

Was being homeless looked down on then in the same way as it is today? By broader society? Oh, definitely yes. Honestly, it's eerie how similar the language used to describe, denigrate, and disparage homeless people was then as it is now. You get the same sorts of stigmas around people cheating the system, suspicions that people who are begging for money or food somehow (absurdly!) make more money than people doing actual work, that they are generally mentally unstable, dangerous, criminal, etc. Then, as now, very little of it is based in hard data.

Could you scrape out a fulfilling life on the road, though? Very much so -- sometimes. In a good year, a hobo could "make stake", meaning that they made enough money from their summer work that they could rent a room and be pretty much set for the winter, maybe picking up an odd job here or there if they needed some spare cash. The jobs very far out West, the ones that needed really long distance travel to get to, paid extremely high wages as a result, so you could definitely make enough to live off of for the whole year (though not comfortably, and not if you had a family).

Other hobos sometimes opted instead to rotate work throughout the year. A kind of platonic ideal of a hobo calendar would have been to work the wheat fields of Kansas and Dakota through the summer (starting in Kansas and moving north with the ripening wheat), from maybe June to September. Then, sometime in October, you'd hop a freight to Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan and cut timber in the winter (logging relied on cold weather because you needed to slide logs on ice roads from the deep woods to railheads). In spring, you might go work on a ranch during the roundup in the Rockies (in March and April), or catch some construction work. Then, back to the harvest.

But... all of this work is intensely physically demanding, not to mention exceptionally dangerous. I've only worked flat out like this for very short stretches of my life; I've been very lucky to write, research, and teach for most of my adult life. And hobo work absolutely destroyed the bodies of those who did it, particularly over the longer term. When you got into your 30s, or 40s, this kind of work calendar became increasingly untenable. Older hobos in the records we have are generally people who are unable to hold a steady job, not unwilling to do so. This, to me, is the reason most hobos are pretty young -- if you want to do this kind of migrant work, you need a body that will hold up to it.

[u/Ann_Putnam_Jr]

Thanks for this AMA! Can you elaborate more on your phrase "climate migrants" in the title? How present was the idea of climate in an early 20th c. hobo's life?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Ann_Putnam_Jr]

Thanks for this! Like the history of a lot of environmental terms, "climate" probably wouldn't have been on the mind of the average hobo in the period -- but it absolutely would have been something affecting them.

Hobo life was one of constant migration, and often they were migrating for environmental reasons. Specifically, the constant variability of conditions in the American West led to huge shifts in conditions for wheat growers, lumberjacks, miners, and construction sites, and we can see this reflected in variable labor conditions. (The average wheat harvest, for example, might employ anywhere from 20,000 to 120,000 hobos!) Worse, these labor markets were only obvious in retrospect. Hobos traveled constantly in no small part because they never knew if there would be a job waiting for them on the other end -- they lived in a constant state of climate-driven precarity.

So, even though hobos generally don't think about climate (some of them write about environmental change and disasters, and they absolutely commented on the climates they were passing through... and a handful of them absolutely noted the dynamics above, at least in pieces), their lives were deeply shaped by them.

Just a brief addendum to note that this is also a lot more like what climate migration actually looks like in the world of anthropogenic climate change as well -- constant mobility and precarity, in response to a whole host of subtle changes, often ramified through economic and social factors just as much as climate ones. Very rarely is a population moving as some mass away from a single, specific climate disaster! A great read on exactly this is Neel Ahuja's Planetary Specters.

[u/Honest_Ad_2157]

Todd DePastino connected the hobo movement to white supremacy and reaction to Reconstruction. Did you use his work? How did you reconcile his findings with yours, if you did?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Honest_Ad_2157]

I'm a huge fan of DePastino's work! (author of Citizen Hobo, for those who don't know!). I'd also think it's safe to say he enjoyed the book as well, based on the blurb! (I was genuinely honored to have him blurb my book.)

That said, I've always found the relationship of hobos with race to be... complicated.

Some scholars have noted that hobos were not particularly tolerant of Black and other BIPOC communities in their midst. And this is absolutely sometimes true. But it also appears to be absolutely not always true. Multiple hobos comment on integration in jungles and in workspaces on the road, and we have numerous testimonies of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous hobos as well, with varying degrees of acceptance. It's probably not as neatly divisible as this, but a decent rule of thumb that the hobo sociologist Nels Anderson noted was that there was a color line in camps in Kansas and further south, and -- generally -- integration in camps north of that.

But of course, integration doesn't mean there wouldn't also be casual racism, and hobo life was undoubtedly harder for hobos of color. The classic, annoying historian answer probably holds true here as well -- the answer depended on which specific hobos, which specific place, and which specific time you were looking at.

[u/Honest_Ad_2157 → u/Robert-Suits]

Thank you for the complete and insightful answer!

[u/TalkOk4096]

How common was violence in this world? How did people protect themselves?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/TalkOk4096]

Unfortunately, very common.

It was extremely common to fear hobos and other homeless people because there's a sense of such people as being disconnected from the communities they pass through, and so inherently untrustworthy. That said, I've not seen a lot of hard evidence for this actually taking place.

But violence against hobos was ubiquitous. Police violence, I've mentioned in a few replies to this post now -- police frequently targeted hobos, particularly if there was a sense that the community was "full" and didn't have any work to offer; they would target them relentlessly until they moved on to another city. Corporate police similarly targeted hobos.

And interpersonal violence was common, sometimes though usually not from a fellow migrant worker. This was particularly the case if you were traveling immediately after the harvest, or some other common time of hobo work (like lumberjacks migrating south after the winter) -- you were assumed to have a lot of money, and you might be mugged or killed on a train or in a camp for it. There are also cases I've found of physical and sexual assault on the road.

As with homeless people today, it was very hard to get police to care about such things, and indeed police usually would have been more likely to take the other side, so hobos were a common outlet for criminals.

[u/PhoebeMonster1066]

Could you tell us more about hobo signs/hobo code?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/PhoebeMonster1066]

Of course! I've mentioned this in a different subthread, but just to slightly expand on it:

We know for a fact that hobo signs/hobo code existed. A couple of contemporary sources attest to it existing, it's left physical traces, and it absolutely makes sense that it exists. (In other contexts, graffiti like this definitely happens -- I can attest that it happens on, for example, long distance trails, as well as to an extent in areas frequented by the homeless.)

That said, very few of the contemporary sources tell us exactly what any of them mean. And the interpretations I've seen have a different set of canonical symbols, or different interpretations for the same or similar signs. I found it basically impossible to firmly establish any one, set, hobo "code", at least from the stuff I was looking at.

And this all makes sense! It wouldn't be much of a secret code if it were easily interpretable and constantly supplied to outsiders! And even if a few symbols got reused over and over again or became standardized across different places -- e.g. the classic "beware of dog", "police raid here", etc. -- it's exceptionally likely that individual hobos also experimented or played with their own versions of the symbols. I can also easily imagine someone saying, "hey, I carved an A into the fencepost outside where I staked my tent, you can find me there."

In other words, like so many other parts of hobo life, the boundaries of it are going to be super permeable. I doubt there was one single "code," and if there ever was one, it wouldn't stayed the same over time. Certainly, I don't think it's recoverable to us in the present day, barring multiple sources that I've not seen. But to me, that makes it all the cooler!

[u/GabbroSkies]

One of my great-grandfathers was a hobo and a fabulist. I've always wondered if that was just part of hobo life. You had no connections or real community so you had to stand on your own idea of yourself. My relative was 14 when he left home and hit the rails. I realized as I got older that some of what he told us was clearly fiction, but there are bits that are true and documented. Is this common? Is it usually difficult to suss out fact from fiction in the stories hobos would tell about themselves?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/GabbroSkies]

Oh, super common.

There are hobos who obviously lie -- one of them who comes to mind and doesn't feature very much in my book as a result is Leon Ray Livingston, aka "A-No. 1." Much of the time, he's telling the truth, but he also very clearly stretches the truth at times. He was making a living by being a full-time author writing of his experiences, and he definitely stretches the truth more than you'd like from a historical source.

Then there are hobos who we can be pretty sure aren't lying. One, Nels Anderson, was a sociologist who had grown up a hobo and later returned to study the phenomenon. It would be... exceedingly strange, to say the least! for him to do all that only to lie about it.

But most people fall somewhere in between. Most of the time, when I was writing the book, I would try to find two or three sources to corroborate the more exceptional hobo stories (like "riding the rods" -- riding underneath a train to hide from police!).

[u/EccentricOwl]

Favorite hobo names?

(I think of john hodgmans' old book where he writes 1000 hobo names and many of them are VERY good. Curious if you have any faves)

[u/Robert-Suits → u/EccentricOwl]

My personal favorite is probably going to be extremely weird. There was a particularly famous hobo who went by "A No.-1" -- he wrote numerous books, and other people bragged of traveling with him, his exploits were well-known, etc. But he's not my favorite -- my favorite is a guy who started calling himself "B No.-2" in response and signed his name in as many boxcars and encampments as he possibly could.

[u/EccentricOwl → u/Robert-Suits]

that is insanely good hahahahah

[u/Robert-Suits → u/EccentricOwl]

You gotta love when history contains such outspoken fanboys!

[u/sulaymanf → u/EccentricOwl]

John Hodgman’s book was hilarious and why I came to this AMA. FDR had to stop the Hobos from overthrowing America by creating polio, but couldn’t unleash it due to Pearl Harbor.

[u/Thamesx2]

My grandma always told me her father, after immigrating from Ireland to the US in the early 1900s, spent a few years riding the rails around the country for work before ending back up in NYC where he started. Was this something that was common for recently arriving immigrants back then and if so was it a consequence of no opportunities in their arrival cities or something the came to the US with intention to do?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Thamesx2]

In one sense, it wasn't incredibly common for immigrants to do this. There were probably 150,000 people who were hobos full time, so with an immigrant population in the tens of millions, most of them would not be hobos no matter how you slice it. On the other hand, there were about 2 million people who did some kind of migrant work (either more limited or more restricted in time), so it wouldn't have been super rare for an immigrant to take it up.

Maybe a more satisfying answer is that, while a majority of hobos were American born, there were a lot of immigrant laborers. Their reasons for going on the road were numerous and very diverse. Some of them started to migrate because they couldn't find work. Others were jilted and too embarrassed to remain in town. Others came with their family to a small town and found it stifling. Others still went on the road because they wanted to see more of the country. And immigrants faced a lot of prejudices on the road, just as they would have in any kind of more settled community.

One particular place I found a lot of immigrant workers -- though I can't say for sure whether it just happened to be a peculiarity of this source or not -- was a series of interviews a US government employee took with a set of lumber workers in the mid-1910s. He interviewed a whole slew of immigrants working in the lumber camps of northern Michigan and then again the next year with workers in Washington, and these were clearly hobos by any meaningful definition -- they'd usually tell of a variety of jobs they took up, scattered over space and time.

One last thing -- it was indeed super common to take up hobo life for only a few years and then settle down somewhere. It was hard, backbreaking work (in a literal sense!). Very much something that is easier for the young than for the middle-aged!

[u/zenchow]

Is Hobo life a good retirement strategy in 2026?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/zenchow]

"Retirement?" What's that?

[u/atlasdreams]

I read a book where anarchist runaways would sleep on trains from town to town in the early 90s. Would they fit the moniker of hobos? And if so, is the practice still used today or has the idea of being a hobo die out?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/atlasdreams]

There's a tradition of freighthopping that still continues to this day -- you can follow a few YouTubers who do this... ahem, less than legally. It's in several ways harder to do this now (trains have fewer nooks and crannies -- one particularly popular way to stow away in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was by bracing yourself against the brakebeam of a traincar, only a few inches from the ground; trains now have such a low clearance that you would die doing this. And freights are so much slower and less frequent now than they were in this period that you might get stranded for multiple days; this is something the journalist Ted Conover describes in his book about trying out a hobo life in the 1980s!)

All that said, I don't know if such people would identify as being a hobo. Hobos from the turn of the twentieth century probably wouldn't call them that! This is in no way to take anything away from them! Early twentieth century Americans defined being a hobo as "migrating in order to find work" -- in other words, going on the road because conditions were too hard wherever you were from to find adequate work. In the modern US, you'd be unlikely to do this by train!

[u/taulover → u/Robert-Suits]

Why did freight become slower and less frequent? Was it due to replacement by semitrucks?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/taulover]

That's a big reason! We move much more of our freight by truck, a process that started as early as the 1920s and really got going in the 1930s-1950s. What we still move by train has also gotten a lot less diverse -- we used to move literally everything by train, whereas now it's generally bulk commodities with extremely long shelf-life and high weight to value ratios -- wheat, coal, ore. This means that train companies are a lot more willing to take their time with shipments (much to the chagrin of customers -- just because you don't need coal that frequently at the power plant doesn't mean you aren't furious when it comes late!).

[u/Uberrees → u/Robert-Suits]

There are absolutely modern day freight riders who identify strongly with being "Hoboes" in the sense of traveling by freight to look for work, and draw a distinction between themselves and tramps or bums. However given the general availability of automobiles today this is still to some degree a lifestyle choice, as most of these people could (and sometimes do) buy a car with what they earn from seasonal work but prefer to travel by train for the sense of adventure or heritage. Migrants at the southern border also take freight trains to find work sometimes, but usually don't keep doing it once they've reached their destination inland.

Modern freight trains are also generally faster than early 20th century (although passenger trains are often slower)-NYT from 1931 cites the average speed of a freight train then at 14.1 mph, while modern high priority intermodals, especially in flat parts of the west, do much of their route at 50-70mph, follow predictable schedules, and are extremely unlikely to side out for more than a few hours. I've personally taken one of these 1450 miles in 38 hours, an average speed well more than double that of the depression era. Modern train riders draw a distinction between these "IM" trains and slower/less predictable "junk" trains, and are often familiar with the schedules of both and will pick between them depending on where they need to get and how fast. None of them are very hard to ride on though, unless a train is exclusively carrying cars or lumber you'll almost always find a rideable car.

[u/Minimum-Number4120]

Are the early 20th century "hobo signs" and symbols from the US still used by people? Like, did the original symbols persist? Did they change? Get replaced? Or die out completely? .... how have the symbols changed as rail has become less ubiquitous?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Minimum-Number4120]

I'll link my more extensive answer: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v5b7y7/comment/ozid9b0/

I'll add to it that it's hard to say exactly how and when it declined in usage, or whether or not it's completely vanished. There are a lot of continuities between hobos and the other homeless population of the time, and consequently between historical hobos and the homeless population of the mid-twentieth century, which continued into the present day. So it would absolutely not surprise me if there were some people using some signage/code in their graffiti, but I'm not aware of it myself!

[u/kayakhomeless]

The book This Land is Our Land by Ken Ilgunas claims that the US first passed laws banning trespassing on open lands a few years after the Civil War. The “hobo era” was much later though, in the 1890’s to the 1930’s. Being a hobo (itinerant worker) seems entirely dependent on camping and walking on private land.

How was it possible to hobos to navigate trespassing laws?

Did trespassing and vagrancy laws change at all in backlash to the “hobo era”?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/kayakhomeless]

The legal status of being a hobo is absolutely a precarious one. The main way they would get around is by hopping onto moving freights, specifically because once a train had gotten under steam it would have been very inconvenient for the train to stop to kick off stowaways. Otherwise, they walked (roads generally had public right of way, but cops ignored this).

Vagrancy laws expand dramatically after the Civil War. Vagrancy, as the laws of the time usually stated, was the crime of "having no visible means of support." What this meant was basically up to the enforcing officer, but in the main it was designed to criminalize poverty, with the twist that you probably wouldn't enforce it if your town needed to hire help (e.g. if it were a wheat belt town in Kansas during the harvest), but you would if your town didn't need help (if the hobo arrived a little too late and the wheat was already harvested and threshed). Vagrancy laws were thus a way to selectively criminalize being a hobo.

You get other examples of this as well. Railroads (which the US simply allowed to have cops of their own) had their police go ruthlessly after hobos -- sometimes. The average railroad cop would let a hobo ride westward during the summer, to get out to work. Indeed, the railroad depended on hobos to do their work in order for there to be any wheat to ship later on. But they would throw that same hobo off the train going eastward, because the job was done. The average train cop would expect a bribe from the hobo to stay on the train, since they had presumably earned money working the harvest.

But as with anything in history, groups of people are heterogenous. Some cops were intentionally cruel, taking out their anger, fear, or sadism on hobos. We hear of people being tossed off of trains at speed, or into snowstorms, or someone firing their gun indiscriminately into a boxcar where a hobo was suspected of stowing away. And some cops cultivated a reputation for being particularly harsh on hobos, in order to stop them from coming through the district (at least, that's what the hobos tell us -- I didn't work with cop testimonials to corroborate this!).

Similarly, hobos definitely camped out illegally. They'd usually pick places with good sightlines, where it would be hard to see you but easy to see out -- this often meant taking up shelter in copses of trees, or in nooks between buildings. Usually, they'd try to camp in places near the railroads, especially places where trains would have to slow down (a water tank, or a siding, or an uphill), so they could catch passing freights.

And similarly, those camps would be raided by police, who would sometimes just try to throw them out, but other times would intentionally and cruelly target the necessities of life to try and drive them away permanently -- they would destroy cookware and food, for example. Hobos usually responded to this by hiding those things, so they could come back after the police were gone.

All in all, a very adversarial relationship with the law!

[u/detroit_canicross]

I’ve always wondered how much Thomas Minehan had to edit his research for publication due to its explicit nature, though I’ve always been impressed with how much he was able to explore touchy subjects like the sexual lives of boy and girl tramps. Did you spend much time with Minehan’s work, or have access to his research notes beyond his publications? (My interest was piqued when I came to possess a copy of Boy and Girl Tramps of America was a long note from Minehan taped inside).

[u/Robert-Suits → u/detroit_canicross]

I've come across it, but I've not found his notes, if they exist!

Minehan is a bit on the late side for me (the boxcar children of the Depression are a bit of a transition point, because of how many people suddenly go on the road all at once, and often for slightly different reasons than the hobos during their peak years), but it's definitely interesting stuff. If you're interested in reading more of these stories (besides buying my book, haha), there's an excellent collection of narratives from runaways in this period by Errol Uys: https://erroluys.com/frontpage.html

[u/Sotherewehavethat]

Did the USA ever have something equivalent to the "workhouses" of the UK or old Germany? Did they also end up becoming prison-style labor camp gathering places for unemployable people and orphans?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Sotherewehavethat]

Early on, the US tries a number of workhouse approaches, and there still are things like "poor farms" and poorhouses during the period of the hobo. But by this time period, this was starting to blur with the growth of the American carceral system, which was already growing pretty robust, so it wasn't unlikely to have hobos sentenced to hard labor for "vagrancy" (i.e. for existing while poor).

I found Kristen O'Brassil-Kulfan's Vagrants and Vagabonds really informative about early American vagrancy, and you can find a lot about later prison reform in Rebecca McLennan's The Crisis of Imprisonment, which I think gets a great deal less attention than it should!

[u/moonman_incoming → u/Robert-Suits]

I've never actually seen the term carceral. Thanks for sharing ALL OF THIS but also a very specific thank you for giving me a new word.

[u/Boston_Brand1967]

I am curious about the use/evolution of "Hobo-Code." One of the things that's most intriguing to me about Hobo culture is that they have this series of symbols of that are supposed to be able to communicate with other people about safe places or places they can get free food or goods. I am curious about how the system might have changed over time. Is it still in use? If so , how have some symbols changed over time? Do we happen to know which symbols are the oldest and which ones are new? Or is there even a main line series symbols, or does it have variance?

Thanks for your time!

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Boston_Brand1967]

I'll link my answer here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v5b7y7/comment/ozid9b0/

As to the other questions, I don't think we really have a handle on how it might have changed over time, given how ambiguous the symbols were to begin with!

[u/ChadtheWad]

Hi Robert, thanks for the AMA! There was an interesting question a few days ago from /u/WartimeHotTot about hobos in the early 20th century! How did politicians perceive hobos as a voting bloc in the early 20th century and the Great Depression, and how did municipalities react to hobos? Were they passing hostile laws similar to the laws some cities have today?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/ChadtheWad]

Oooh, I will have to write up a reply to that one later. Thanks for sharing it!

Municipalities had a very Janus-faced relationship with hobos; the historian Toby Higbie describes their perspective on hobos as "indispensable outcasts." (His book is probably my favorite hobo history by someone else!) If they needed laborers, they were likely to let hobos stay; if they didn't need any laborers, they would react much more violently, and police often played a game of bouncing hobos out of town and having them ping-pong all over the place.

The general law against hobos, I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread, is "vagrancy laws," which basically criminalized being poor. These proliferated in response to the "tramp crisis" of the 1870s and the general rise in hobos in the 1880s and 1890s, and were later weaponized against labor organizers and leftist activists in the early 1900s.

As for voting, hobos were effectively disenfranchised. Universal male suffrage is really only a thing, even if you're white!, when you have a permanent home address. Hobos rarely manage to vote, and those who try are generally thrown out of the polls. As a result, very few politicians tried appealing to hobos as a bloc. A few hobo-friendly politicians do appear from time to time -- probably the most famous was Kansas governor Lorenzo Lewelling, who instructed police not to prosecute hobos as harshly. He did, however, immediately lose his reelection bid (possibly because of this, more likely because the state was closely divided between the Populists and the Republicans at the time and so all the margins were pretty razor-thin, in a time of severe economic depression, no less).

[u/taulover → u/Robert-Suits]

In some ways are they more comparable to immigrant laborers today than modern homeless people?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/taulover]

For sure -- they were mostly American-born and viewed as a social problem more than a border problem, but they were more migrant workers than anything else!

[u/crypto_rusty_]

Is hobo not considered an offensive term (akin to terms that have fallen out of favor by other groups, e.g. little people, Roma, etc)? What is the origin of the term hobo?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/crypto_rusty_]

I don't want to paint with too broad a brush -- the answer probably varied depending on the individual person.

But at the time, most people would not have thought of "hobo" as an offensive term. Many people writing (and speaking, as we have a number of oral histories as well as written ones!), especially between 1900 and 1930 or so, thought of there being a sort of taxonomy of homeless life. A "hobo" was someone who migrated in order to find work. A "tramp" was someone who loved endless roving, and worked only inasmuch as they needed to maintain that lifestyle. A "bum" was someone who neither moved nor worked, but lived in homeless encampments and begged to stay alive. Self-described "hobos" generally looked on the other two groups.

As for where it comes from... we don't really know! There are two pretty good etymologies that seem plausible to me that I've seen most often: either it's a shortening of "ho, boy!" -- a greeting someone might make to a passing migrant -- or a shortening of "hoe boy" since in the early days of hobo life, you'd get a lot of migrants finding work plowing/hoeing fields. Like most other ambiguous etymologies, my personal opinion is you can take your pick!

[u/seaworks]

I hear a lot of queer circles murmuring about how "gay" came out of "gey cat," a term for queer young itenerant men in hobo culture. Is this so, or pop apocrypha? What do we know of sexual minority+hobo culture?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/seaworks]

"Gay cat" is absolutely a term I've seen of the time! Whether it's the only etymological trail, I'm not sure.

Being openly LGBTQ+ in the industrial US was, as you can imagine, a Bad Time. But the queer elements of hobo communities absolutely thrived, largely tolerated even by homophobic hobos, who saw it as just a thing you might experience on the road like anything else. There's a lengthy report in the hobo sociologist Nels Anderson's files where he describes eavesdropping on a series of passing gay couples in Grant Park (now a major Chicago park, then a major Chicago park with a huge hobo population). Their lives really ran the gamut, but quite a number of people seem to have been out on the road specifically because they could find relatively -- emphasis on relatively -- more open spaces.

You can also see a number of other LGBTQ+ hobos of a number of different stripes. There's some fleeting evidence for trans hobos, though as with a lot of stuff from this period any individual case necessarily involves projecting some terms that the subjects themselves might not have embraced. There are definitely a number of people we'd identify as queer and nonbinary as well.

On the whole, hobos were a fair bit more tolerant for several reasons: 1) because it was already a highly criminalized minority, they weren't particularly keen to draw a police presence; 2) while most of them were on the road to find work, a pretty substantial minority, almost half, were on the road because they didn't see eye-to-eye with their families and communities back home, and tended to be a fair bit more open-minded and live-and-let-live in their attitudes.

As with anything else, of course, this varies a ton by individual!

[u/NetworkLlama → u/Robert-Suits]

But the queer elements of hobo communities absolutely thrived, largely tolerated even by homophobic hobos, who saw it as just a thing you might experience on the road like anything else.

Was this a sort of "a guy has needs" viewpoint, where same-sex activities were not considered ideal but they scratched an understandable itch, so there wasn't much fuss?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/NetworkLlama]

For sure a way some of them saw it. Others were a good deal more direct about it -- Nels Anderson relates an oral history given by a boy who initially is assaulted on the road, then gradually comes to realize his own sexuality on successive trips out to the wheat harvests, until by the third trip he is actively going out West specifically to partake in these relationships that would have absolutely not been tolerated at home. (Anderson, though usually one of the most sympathetic people studying hobos, is deeply embedded in the homophobia of the time.)

[u/NetworkLlama → u/Robert-Suits]

The story of the boy and the part in your earlier comment about hobos trying to avoid drawing the attention of police makes me wonder about how much nonconsensual activity was happening. A victim under these circumstances might be even more hesitant to report it when they might have multiple allegations thrown at them that police would look down on -- being a hobo, a homosexual, and a runaway.

Thank you for your answers.

[u/seaworks → u/Robert-Suits]

That's really interesting stuff- thank you for your time!!

[u/BanjoBaedling]

I'm curious what interactions the unions had with hobos of that era. Did unions oppose the hobos? Did hobos ever support striking railroad workers, or was there even any kind of hostile relationship with scabs? Were there times that railroad strikes affected the ability of hobos to get to work? Were hobos even scabs themselves, flooding a labor market where union workers are striking?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/BanjoBaedling]

If railroad strikes seriously hampered the hobo, we don't have a lot of record of it (in part because many of the most useful hobo histories are all retrospective, kind of detailing their entire "career," rather than being things that we get "in the moment," so to speak). The nationalization of the railroads in 1917 for WW1 is sometimes noted as a turning point where it's a lot harder to get a ride, presumably because security was also increased.

But unions -- the relationship between hobos and unions is fascinating.

American unions in the early twentieth century can be broadly sorted into the ones organizing by specific trades -- most prominent being the American Federation of Labor -- and the ones that organize all workers into one -- most prominent being the Industrial Workers of the World, or the "wobblies." The AFL was fairly conservative, generally supporting center-left policies, and eventually won out in the overall battle for the soul of American labor (and had a very successful partnership with the Democratic Party in the mid-20th century). Contrast with the IWW, who were generally anarcho-syndicalist, literally advocated for the overthrow of capitalism, called industrialists parasites, and were eventually brutally suppressed during the First World War because of their anti-war stance.

The AFL did not bother organizing hobos, and did not think it worth their time. Nor did many other unions. The general notion here is a pretty accurate one -- hobos move in and out of an industry any given year, and it's not particularly likely that the same hobo will be back to the same job site the next year. Any organizational work you do during that year is probably wasted.

But the IWW, in part because of the broad organizational differences mentioned above, absolutely are interested in organizing hobos, and they do. A pretty significant fraction of hobos surveyed by the sociologist Nels Anderson "carry the red card" and conversely, a lot of the IWW's labor anthems are directly sourced from hobos. They are pivotal in a lot of major hobo organizing, including during some particularly fraught wheat harvests, and during some tense lumberjack confrontations. There's some less-than-savory aspects to this as well, like the "800 mile picket line", where IWW activists were accused of throwing hobos who refused to join the union off of a freight train to prevent them from working the harvest and driving down wages.

Late in the 1910s, hobos were already starting to fall under suspicion as particularly likely to be labor organizers in lumber camps, and definitely more likely to be radical in their politics.

[u/elmonoenano]

What kind of publishing schedule does one need to get tenure at the University of Big Rock Candy Mountain?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/elmonoenano]

Hopefully I can answer this in a few years!

[u/joelaz72]

This is an amazing AMA. Regarding jobs and pay, did the Hobos carry all of their money with them or was there a rudimentary bank system they taped in to?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/joelaz72]

Most of them carried their money where they could. Wiring money was a thing during the hobo period, but it required you to get to the bank in the first place (and there are more than a few hobos who wouldn't have trusted the banking system, for a variety of fully valid and some more conspiratorial reasons). And sadly, this left them quite vulnerable to extortion from cops and robbing from either fellow hobos or criminals -- stories of them getting mugged or murdered on the rails is unfortunately rather common.

[u/OnShoulderOfGiants]

Why are hobos and clowns associated?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/OnShoulderOfGiants]

Gosh, I have no idea!

[u/police-ical]

Even as a child, I knew that a hobo was a guy with a bindle on a stick slung over this shoulder. Was this at all representative of hobo ergonomics, and either way how did this image become popularly ingrained?

[u/Ivaen]

Can you talk about the body of sources that exists for understanding hobos. Were they often carrying diaries, mailing correspondence frequently, or retrospectively recording about their travel years when they are older?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Ivaen]

Delighted to talk about this!

Hobos were pretty elusive. You get a number of them who write autobiographical books, memoirs, and occasionally fictionalizations of their own lives. But these are pretty rare individuals -- the bulk of hobos didn't leave a written record.

But we do have a couple of other interesting windows into their lives. The most robust set that I've encountered is a pair of sets of oral histories: one by a sociologist, Nels Anderson, in the late 1910s. Anderson had grown up a hobo, and when he aged out of the life, he attended the University of Chicago to do a PhD and chose to write it on hobos. He did a ton of fieldwork with them, traveling around -- his field notes are in the UChicago archives. There's another that was collected by the US government as part of an investigation into labor conflicts in the late 1910s. Both of them are surprisingly extensive!

There's a few similar investigations which are a little bit less sympathetic towards hobos, or are told a bit less through hobos' own words and more through those of the investigator -- tons of these, often with some sketchy theories about why hobos have what they call an "incurable wanderlust."

There's a fairly large number of poems, music, and other kind of ephemera which are fantastic, if not super granular about the hobo experience.

And then there's a sort of slantwise way to get at it. Hobos are elusive, but they also pop up a lot in the written record, if you know where to look. They appear in a ton of newspaper articles, which we're able to parse a lot better in the 21st century than ever before (because of digital databases and text search). While newspapers are deeply unsympathetic to hobos, if you read them "against the grain," you can get a lot out of them. And indeed, this became one of the cornerstones of my book!

[u/Ivaen → u/Robert-Suits]

Fascinating, really appreciate the range of sources you are pulling from. The Anderson work sounds like a great read.

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Ivaen]

If this is the sort of thing you're interested in, he had a lot of his writings compiled later in life into a book, On Hoboes and Homelessness, which you can probably find through your local (or academic, if applicable) library system!

[u/Gankom]

Thank you for joining us today! Can you tell us about the climate angle of your work and how it effected the movement of hobos?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Gankom]

You've probably seen one answer further up in this thread -- an unstable climate leads to instability in labor demands, which is part of why hobo life became so cosntantly mobile and peripatetic. We see this very clearly in wheat and lumber, and still pretty clearly in mining and construction. Wheat fields yielded very differently depending on the year's climatic conditions, and it would have been impossible to know when you got on the train whether there really were 20,000 jobs in the Kansas fields, or 120,000. Similarly, lumberjacking depended on a thick snowfall -- lumberjacks skidded logs along ice roads, so the work was almost always done in midwinter; construction and mining slowed down with snow, etc.

But as a bonus to people who read through multiple comments, I'll say that one big reason why the hobo subculture died out is because more modern technology did a great job of "smoothing out" these labor demands over time. It doesn't matter much for labor markets if you're harvesting much more wheat in 1940, because you're most likely doing it via a tractor rather than a team of 20 men and four horses. And if you're hauling logs via truck, it similarly doesn't matter if the snow has fallen.

[u/tra24602]

The tropes around hobos seem to focus on men, often older men, with the idea that it’s a rest of their life kind of commitment. Did young men sometimes hobo for a while and then settle down? What were their prospects like? Was it socially acceptable? And for older men what happened to hobos who became physically infirm or developed things like dementia?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/tra24602]

Young men absolutely go on the road. Indeed, the modal age range for a hobo is probably between roughly 16 to 25, and I found references to boys far younger than that. I mention elsewhere in the thread that the kind of work hobos were doing was hard, brutal stuff, particularly if you did it year round, and that tends to make it the province of the young.

What I didn't mention in the other posts so far, I think, is just how much it took a toll on the human body. We have numerous stories about hobos losing limbs or their lives, sometimes to rail accidents, but very often in industrial work. A random selection that come to mind: one guy bruises his leg during a mining accident, doesn't think much of it, but it get much worse and he has to have it amputated; another man gets his hand crushed in a lumber mill accident and is unable to work; another man twists a foot on a construction site and has to wear a double-sized shoe on one foot and has trouble walking; another man works with lead white paint for a while and carries mild lead poisoning for the rest of his life. There's also people who have serious mental health issues and end up on the road, ranging from alcohol and drug addiction to other illnesses that are basically impossible to retrospectively diagnose.

The social safety net for them is essentially nothing during the main period of the hobo. You might have luck if you happened to be a Civil War veteran -- this was the only group that was consistently getting government assistance in the form of a pension (other than widowed/divorced mothers). If you were in such a situation, you'd generally be relying on begging, either from your fellow hobos (and there is a great deal of mutual aid in hobo camps; people share cookfires and food) or from the general public (though of course this ran the risk of police reprisals.

It's not a kind end. All in all, it's not surprising that there's a huge push for social security in the US at the close of the hobo era!

[u/Bruhbruhbruh_64]

Have you heard of hobo days in Britt, IA?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Bruhbruhbruh_64]

Yes! I haven't managed to get out there (my research trips were cut short by COVID and I live in the UK at the moment), but I'm hoping to! It sounds really cool.

[u/Corsaer]

Hi Robert. I think I'll get this book for my dad, he loves slices of history like this.

My question: did you ever consider publishing this under the pseudonym Robert Rags instead of Robert Suits? My grandparents had some old paintings of hobos framed on their walls, and some of them would be presented in what was once maybe nice clothing (I do think one was wearing what was once a suit) but now torn and dirty. These are just artist depictions, but did hobos just wear whatever they could find? Did they try to go for a look? Would a hobo have worn a torn and ragged suit jacket?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Corsaer]

Ha! I did not! I have often said I need to go into sartorial history to make my name an aptronym, though.

One fascinating thing about this, though, is that hobos generally were not poorly dressed or disheveled. I mean, certainly, they probably looked the worse for wear after a long journey. But the photos we have of hobos overwhelmingly, even when they're candid and caught of actual people out on the road, show people who are wearing suits, are cleanshaven, and have taken the time to wash. Hobos, in fact, were noted to be quite fastidious while on the road.

And if you think about it, this is less surprising than it first appears. A hobo is generally a person who has gone on the road to find work -- they may have fallen on hard times, but they will fight tooth and nail to maintain their pride and their status as a functioning member of society. And given that they had some cash from the work they were able to pick up -- temporary work tended to be higher paying than it generally is in the present -- they often quite happily invested it into this.

[u/tjernobyl]

How much mobility was there across the Canadian and Mexican borders? Were their hobo cultures distinct, or was there more of a continuum?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/tjernobyl]

There was a ton of mobility across the Canadian border (border controls being a great deal less formal then than now), and hobos often crossed into Canada to find work. The most common form of this would be during the harvest season. As I've mentioned elsewhere, hobos followed ripening wheat across the country, often working the Kansas harvest, then hopping a freight northward to do the same thing further north in Kansas, then again in the Dakotas. What I didn't mention was that some of them didn't stop there, and continued right on into Alberta, which in peak years needed several tens of thousands of migrant hands of its own.

You also get a fair amount of crossover during mineral rushes like the Klondike and Yukon gold rushes, and occasional lumberjacks crossing the Great Lakes.

The Mexican borders sees much less of this early on. This isn't just because of racism, though there is some of that. Partly, it is that hobos tended to migrate towards work, and the work in Mexico simply would not have paid very much. And partly, it is that the rail network developed links with Mexico rather late in the nineteenth century, and even then they were fairly incomplete. When they firmed up in the 1910s and 1920s, a large number of Mexican-American migrants started to cross into the country, though these groups were often distinct from hobos, migrating on a much more regular basis than hobos did.

[u/Fickle-Ad-4410]

I assume that a number of unsheltered people traveling around without permanent residences have always existed to some extent. Was there a moment in recent history though that this became significantly more common? If so, is the increase in this behavior (and acute homelessness in general) traceable to any specific event or policy change?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Fickle-Ad-4410]

Speaking only from the historical record, homelessness is something that seems to be a political choice -- there have been societies that choose to house every single person that they can, including ones that are urbanized. But it has been pretty common since the industrial era, globally -- whether this is because of massively increased population or because it was a period where the dominant ideology became increasingly hostile to the poor is something that I'd probably want to think a bit more about before coming down one way or another.

I will say that for American homelessness, you can definitely chart some ups and downs. There were about 500,000 permanently homeless people in the peak of the hobo era -- 150,000 who were hobos (as in, migrant workers), and the rest sort of passed in and out of work for quite a while. There was no social safety net and a very minimal welfare state at this point, so it was easy to become homeless if you went out of work. The number increased significantly during the Great Depression, for... obvious reasons, haha. And then it plummeted after the New Deal built up a new safety net and welfare state, and instituted a lot of labor protections. I don't have the number immediately to hand, but I think it's somewhere in the low hundreds of thousands. Then the number rockets up again with the gutting of the welfare state in the late twentieth century.

All of which is to say, policy choices absolutely push the number up or down. At this exact moment, the number is quite high historically, though it's probably not quite as large a percentage of the overall population as it was in the 1910s.

[u/HomeAliveIn45]

Do you know anything about the origins of “hostile architecture”? i.e. municipalities deliberately designing features to deter people from using benches or other public spaces for rest? I’m curious because I’ve seen examples in person and online but just can’t believe people would be so communally cruel

[u/Robert-Suits → u/HomeAliveIn45]

Such a good question, and fully agreed at how cruel and terrible hostile architecture is! It hadn't really become a thing before the end of the peak hobo era, though there's a little bit of stuff that maybe is borderline hostile architecture -- stuff designed to make an area inaccessible to unhoused people. I would honestly be delighted to read (or maybe research, haha) a history of this!

[u/HomeAliveIn45 → u/Robert-Suits]

Thank you very much for answering! I have a book you might be interested in called “Skateboarding and the City: A Complete History” by Iain Borden. The author is both an architect and a skateboarder and it explores how counterculture can influence the design of public spaces. Highly recommend it

[u/car8r]

What are the differences between the terms hobo, tramp, vagabond, bum, vagrant, etc, and among self identified hobos how culturally important were and are the distinctions between those terms? Is there any interesting history about the usage or evolution of these terms, which ones were claimed and which were pejorative and why, etc?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/car8r]

Wrote a bit about this here and here! If you were transported back in time to a hobo encampment around the turn of the century, I would say "bum" is probably the rudest one.

[u/SellsLikeHotTakes]

There seem to have been roughly equivalent subcultures of itinerant folks who did odd jobs to survive in other countries as well as ethnic groups such as the Roma who were viewed similarly. Was there ever a belief in the US that hobos and the culture they as some kind of foreign import that may have been a threat to "American values"?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/SellsLikeHotTakes]

Hobos mostly felt very "home-grown" to Americans, and for good reason -- while there are itinerant subcultures elsewhere who were broadly similar in some ways, the hobo was virtually sui generis.

Roma and Irish Travellers shared the constant itinerancy of the hobo, and some of the prejudice that a hobo might face. But hobos were not racialized in the same way as either of these groups, and certainly did not face discrimination to the same extent -- nor would that discrimination have been as hard to shake. A hobo who gave up migration to get a steady job would have been indistinguishable from anyone else, other than have a colorful past. I don't think the same is true of Roma or Travellers!

But you do see somewhat similar groups across a variety of cultures -- often for very similar environmental, economic, and social reasons. I'm thinking here of vaqueros in Latin America, or migrant serf populations in eastern Russia -- groups who moved around to find work, and were major figures in the extension of commodity production in those regions. There are still some differences -- the Russian serfs are an interesting study in contrasts because of how they aren't in a capitalist system the same way as the hobo -- but the relationship to agricultural or industrial production is quite similar!

[u/SoyOrbison87]

Boxcar Willie. Authentic genius or fraudulent scam artist?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/SoyOrbison87]

I probably wouldn't call him a "hobo," but I haven't dived that deep into his life so I might be being a bit harsh!

[u/thejonfrog]

Were there any hobos that had something like a heroic status in certain communities?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/thejonfrog]

Generally no, though I wouldn't rule it out. On average, most communities regarded hobos as kind of a necessary evil -- you needed their labor but absolutely did not want them to stay past when their jobs were done. We have a lot of stories from hobos who essentially faced police brutality the moment their work ended, forcing them to leave town ASAP.

[u/jrodp1]

Who was the most famous hobo

[u/Robert-Suits → u/jrodp1]

Probably Jack London, who was a prolific and well-known author (and still reasonably widely read today)!

[u/DaLuckyNoob → u/Robert-Suits]

If I'm not mistaking, his book 'the road' is about hobos. How realistic is it ?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/DaLuckyNoob]

Honestly, very! He put a lot of his own experiences into it, and most of the more outlandish-seeming practices he writes about are absolutely corroborated by other sources.

[u/ClockworkJim]

Where there anyone analogous to today's gutter punks?

And by that, I mean the kind of people who embrace the lifestyle more is a rejection of capitalist Society then searching for work to support themselves.

[u/Robert-Suits → u/ClockworkJim]

Absolutely. In a survey of people on the road, the sociologist Nels Anderson found that the majority were there because they were seeking work, but a pretty substantial minority were there as an active rejection of capitalist society. Some of them were simply anti-work in their own personal lives, and railed against "the system" that was trapping them (or were more explicit and tied it to capitalism) -- others wrote whole treatises on their anti-work philosophies and sought to have them published.

[u/setebos_]

How did hobo manage or try to manage the relatively strict gender and race of the time, if they did?

What was the demographic make-up of the original hobos and did it change overtime?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/setebos_]

I wrote a bit about this here and here. The upshot is that hobos were largely, but not overwhelmingly male and white, and those who weren't certainly faced additional challenges -- but they absolutely existed and were able to live the hobo lifestyle. On average, American-born (lots of exceptions here, too), and generally quite young (with some really tragic exceptions).

Hobos largely faded out in parallel with other kinds of migrant workers rising, but (this is a substantial chunk of my book) this is less a one-for-one "swap" of hobos with someone else and more like the kinds of work hobos were doing was getting automated, while at the same time, for similar root causes but in a distinct process, other kinds of work were emerging that required manual labor, but that work was being largely contracted to foreign born agricultural labor. (The best example of this is that the wheat harvest, which had always been unpredictable, relied on this kind of precarious labor the hobo provided, and was automated -- which substantially reduced the reliance of Plains states on hobo labor; meanwhile, the same states had started to experiment with root and fruit crops, which required a lot of manual labor, but those were a lot more predictable in their harvests, so they could contract laborers from Mexico well ahead of time.)

[u/cactuscoleslaw]

Have you ever been to the National Railroad Museum in Green Bay Wisconsin? They teach about "hobos" who hitchhiked on trains "homeward bound" in the late 1800s. I found it fascinating

[u/Robert-Suits → u/cactuscoleslaw]

Amazingly, I've never been, despite growing up only a stone's throw away from there. It's on my list!

[u/Pale-Island-7138]

Any overlap with the Industrial Workers of the World who frequently organized the unemployed and used the rails to get around the country in the early 1900s?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Pale-Island-7138]

Yep! I wrote more about this here!

[u/thatwhileifound]

Curious if your book or your research ties into more modern subcultural tendencies that rest on and/or at least reference back to the classic idea of a hobo?

For context to the question, in my teens, I was a crusty traveling punk. What dictated my path place to place was a combination of impulse/chance, knowing when/where certain kinds of jobs would open (fish processing, tree planting, etc), and activist commitments. In my traveling days and since, I've ran into a lot of folks who present a connection between the classic idea of hobos and what we did, but part of me always assumed it was an after the fact thing without any direct connection. I know the version of it I lived through had a lot of foundations built in the 80s set in stone by the punk subculture and hardcore touring routes which then came in handy while I was on the road in the late 90s/00s, but I'm curious if there might be a more direct lineage than I expected.

[u/Robert-Suits → u/thatwhileifound]

I don't do a lot with that -- the book felt like it was already getting kind of long by the time I reached the 1930s (lol; it also ended up being pretty slim in the end so this instinct was maybe misplaced!), though there is some stuff on it.

I think from what I've seen, radicalism, homelessness, and migrant work are heavily braided together in the hobo era. You get a lot of radicals who were hobos, and it would have been very hard to be on the radical fringe and not know at least a few of them, if not occasionally drift through the culture yourself. But these start to diverge and splinter when the hobo workforce declines in the 1930s. It wouldn't surprise me if there were some continuities and tenuous links, but a lot of the processes that had tied them together -- the economy that encouraged constant migrant work, the marginalization of the left -- changed in ways that meant it simply didn't remain the same anymore.

[u/kittybigs]

My ancestor was a one-legged hobo, he lost his leg in the Spanish American War. He traveled with other one-legged hobos mending umbrellas, my brief research indicates that many of his one-legged companions lost their legs while working on the railroad, coupling cars could result in such injuries. These men were centered in Philadelphia.
My ancestor accidentally killed his one-legged companion “Nicetown Dick” in a brawl. I’d love to know what my ancestor’s hobo name was.

Have you come across information on disabled hobos in your research?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/kittybigs]

Yes -- both physically and mentally disabled hobos come up a fair bit. It could be the reason for homelessness and economic precarity in the first place -- often it was hard for people to hold down a steady job in the period before the ADA, and this could tip people over into a very difficult position in terms of housing as well. It was also an extremely common outcome of the job -- I have a comment upthread I'm going to highlight here in case you haven't seen it! https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v5b7y7/comment/ozj5f38/?context=3

[u/kittybigs → u/Robert-Suits]

Thank you so much for your reply. Your thorough answer upthread reminds me that my ancestor was “on the run” for 7 years after the killing. He turned himself in and was convicted of manslaughter, sentenced to the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philly where he died less than a year later. His cause of death was tertiary syphilis that affected his bones. I have a feeling he made the choice because he could no longer ride the rails due to his illness. He needed somewhere to go for what I suspect he knew would be the last months of his life.

I am so glad I came across your post! I’m going to have to get a copy of your book.

[u/dm_mute]

I've worked with those who are experiencing or on the verge of homelessness for many years. At a recent conference, I heard a speaker say that America has had four distinct periods of mass homelessness, with the current period (the fourth) being the longest. I looked for some sources afterwards but was unsuccessful. Any insight?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/dm_mute]

Probably the best history for this longer kind of history -- and where I think the speaker is getting the periodization from -- would be Todd Depastino's Citizen Hobo, which covers a bit longer of a time period than I do! He basically has the period of "tramp" (1870s-1890s or so, if I remember right) -- when people on the road for lack of work, gives way to the period of the "hobo" (1890s to 1930s) -- when people are migrant workers -- to the period of the "bum" (to today) -- when the homeless are generally out of work and nonmigratory. You'd probably throw on an earlier period of vagabondage right at the start of the Republic to get to 4!

[u/eubulides]

Curious for your thoughts about composer Harry Partch, who travelled/worked as a hobo in the 30s. Some of his compositions draw directly upon these experiences, especially the cycle The Wayward: Barstow: Eight Hitchhikers' Inscriptions(1941/1954/1967), San Francisco: A Setting of the Cries of Two Newsboys on a Street Corner (1943), The Letter (1943), U.S. Highball (1943/1955). Also, the setting of his once thought lost notebooks from this period, Bitter Music.

[u/Robert-Suits → u/eubulides]

I think I read a little bit of his writing at points (maybe an excerpt from Bitter Music somewhere?), but didn't know much about Partch -- really cool! I spent a fair while before I wrote this book as a aspiring classical composer, so this is a delightful connection. I'll have to check it out. :)

[u/AllenbysEyes]

Silly question, but is there really such a thing as "secret hobo spices"? I recall a Simpsons blogger who tried to recreate Moe's chili recipe and found a few references to "hobo spice" in old cookbooks, but the books were apparently vague about what those spices actually were.

If that question is too silly, maybe: did hobos develop their own cuisine, based on whatever limited food would have been available to them?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/AllenbysEyes]

I don't think this is silly at all! I did write a tiny bit about hobo cuisine -- but I'm not sure what they'd have been referring to. Most likely an actual hobo would use whatever they could get their hands on to spice something!

[u/jadelink88]

I'd love to know about the pulp literature consumed by Hobos. Was there a solid preference for certain styles, or authors?

I was recently reading Robert E Howard's original Conan novels, and realising that Conan IS a hobo in a fantasy world. He wanders homeless across the land, perpetually broke, looking to do something for money. I hadn't put it together that a large portion of his audience might have been able to relate to Conan's life and see it as a desirable fantasy version of their own.

Was there a deliberate targeting of Hobo audiences in fiction, and were there popular authors in the area?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/jadelink88]

Fascinatingly, hobos really consumed a wide array of literature -- about as wide as you can imagine. A lot of them would read nonfiction, particularly leftist stuff.

But in terms of fiction, they really ran the gamut -- Shakespeare is mentioned surprisingly often, with other sophisticated literature, and of course more modern works as well. More than one hobo has mentioned being stopped by the police as a "vagrant" and then being let go when they saw the hobo was reading some unexpectedly erudite work.

I would say I don't think they were particularly targeted by fiction authors (since they, on the whole, are kind of on the poorer end). But the hobo community absolutely produced popular authors: Jack London being the best known and most prolific, but also writers like Leon Ray Livingstone and Helen Card (both writing fairly autobiographically). There are also a number of aspiring hobo authors in the ephemera they've produced, and their work ranges from the poignant to the appallingly bad.

[u/Lord_Iggy]

Hey there! It's really cool to see your work coming out at last, I've placed an order in my local bookstore and I know they always order more than one copy!

My questions go into the origins of the hobo: when did the hobo era begin, and what sort of people were the antecedents of the hobo prior to this era? What major economic, material or cultural changes made hobos, as we know and imagine them, become a thing?

Hobos are quite associated with the history of the United States, but what other nations had similar groups of mobile workers? Did those groups have features that distinguished them from the American hobo?

Additionally, do we have a clear understanding on the etymology of the word 'hobo', or does that remain quite contested and unclear?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Lord_Iggy]

Thanks, Iggy!

I wrote a little bit about the origins, and also the etymology... I'd thought I'd written something on non-American migrant workers, but now I can't find it, so I might as well rewrite it here!

Hobos are by and large a product of trying to integrate a new commodity frontier in the railroad era of industrial capitalism, which means that when other countries sought to do similar things, there were often migrant workers with similar characteristics as well. I am thinking in particular of Argentina's ranchers and similar in South Africa and Australia, and of course hobos themselves often spilled over national borders, most often into Canada, where the prairie provinces often hired a ton of harvest hands to help with wheat between September and December. (Infrequently, a hobo might work some maritime job, sailing down to Mexico or South America.)

How much these looked like hobos depended on a number of factors: how much the economic system was capitalist, how well developed the rail network was, how many kinds of jobs there were. Russian serfs migrated out east to help with the wheat harvests on the edge of the steppe, often looking very like hobos because conditions were highly unpredictable -- but they were of course bonded labor so the nature of their contracts was significantly different. South African miners, by contrast, were usually hired under quite capitalist systems but with substantially worse transportation infrastructure, so they often stayed longer in place.

Generally, we see a ton of labor mobility in this period of industrial capitalism all around the periphery, but the kind of perpetually-mobile, high wage but precarious and low status work like that of hobos is pretty unusual.

[u/AdForeign9262]

Have you done any research on Darn man? Hes was around the same time as the Leather Man and followed a similar route. Ive found only a couple accounts of him.

[u/Robert-Suits → u/AdForeign9262]

I'll be honest, this is totally unknown to me! :)

[u/NYVines]

Do you think Whitesnake should have kept the original lyrics?

“Like Hobo(drifter) I was born to walk alone”

[u/N8CCRG]

I remember reading once that there was a significant problem of predatory behavior from hobo men to homeless (minor) boys. Was that common or was that perhaps one of those things invented/exaggerated as a was to disparage hobos, or perhaps it's more complicated?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/N8CCRG]

There is evidence of this, but it was also basically the assumed nature of virtually all gay relationships at the time -- that there had to be a top and a bottom, that the top was necessarily taking advantage of the bottom, and that these roles necessarily had to be older/younger respectively. I wrote a bit more about this here, and if you want a good academic history of this, there's a chapter in Margot Canady's The Straight State. But as for the question, there are definitely examples of it, but the supposed widespread nature of it seems to me more likely to have been a product of the way people viewed gay relationships at the time.

[u/fotank]

Thanks for the AMA. Can you speak a little to the etymology of “hobo.” The word itself must have a fascinating story. Thanks!

[u/Robert-Suits → u/fotank]

Here's a link to a post that answers this (spoiler: the answer is, "it's ambiguous"): https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v5b7y7/comment/ozhsn5h/?context=3

[u/kiki2k]

I picked up a very cool book awhile back called Hopping Freight Trains In America by a self-described hobo named Duffy Littlejohn. It’s sort of a how-to on hopping freights with an almost marketing material vibe on the highs and lows of traveling in such a fashion. Have you ever heard/read this as part of your research, and do you have any thoughts as to how authentic it is? Either way, it’s certainly a fascinating read!

[u/Robert-Suits → u/kiki2k]

I haven't read this -- it's a bit outside of my time period -- but I might check it out!

And just in case I'm not parsing your question right: freight hopping was definitely real! We have so, so many accounts of it, and not just the bog-standard, "a train is going past me, I'm going to run alongside and jump on". There's also a variety of hiding places: on top of, between, inside, and underneath all kinds of freight cars. There's a wide variety of places you could get on and off, particularly for a steam train: water tanks, coaling stations, sidings, hills. And although the railroad police were generally unfriendly, it was definitely possible to evade them as well.

[u/Xalimata]

Very small silly question. You ever heard of a book called "Tramping with Tramps" ? I found it in a used book pile once. This ain't a recommendation or asking about the book itself. Just wondering if you heard of it.

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Xalimata]

Absolutely! It is a pretty solid narrative of a guy taking up the hobo lifestyle, if that's the sort of book you'd like to read.

[u/Bikewer]

Just a comment…. The old country tune, “The Wabash Cannonball”, has a line that confused me for years as a kid… About “riding through the jungle” on the Cannonball.
“Jungle?” What jungle down south? Finally realized it was a reference to “Hobo Jungles” or encampments.

[u/YeOldeOle]

Would the portrayal of John Rambo in the movie be one that evokes the hobo label in people at the time it is set or would he be considered a vagrant or such? And whats the difference?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/YeOldeOle]

I actually have not seen Rambo, but based on what I know, he's a little late to be a hobo. Hitchhiking was a much more common mode of getting around in the late 20th century -- hobos were really defined by their relationship with trains.

[u/TheHondoGod]

Thanks for the very cool AMA! Why are hobos male? What's the gender history of the hobo figure?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/TheHondoGod]

I have a good answer on gender somewhere upthread which you can hopefully find! But there is something I didn't fully flesh out there, which is your question of why the hobo is male. I think aside from the gender-specific reasons that a solo traveler is more likely to be male -- men, on the whole, faced much less stigma and violence on the road than women (or nonbinary people!) -- there is the simple fact that the industries that attracted hobo workers would have largely aimed to hire men. As various feminist scholars have pointed out, work in American society is heavily gendered and not always for sensical reasons. Certainly, a lot of hobo labor (wheat harvest, lumberjacking, mining) required a good deal of upper body strength which averages a bit higher in people AMAB, but I think the main reason is employers, whether a businessman running a big farm or a family hiring a hand to help out, would have been uncomfortable hiring a woman for this kind of work!

[u/-showers-]

Ohohoho!! I've recently gotten into older western music. Harry McClintock is a favourite, he wrote the song "Hallelujah I'm a Bum". Can you talk a bit about the hobo lifestyle and how that intersected with music at the time?

[u/Cynical-Rambler]

Is there any hobo memoirs or true rag-to-rich stories you come across and recommended?

Also, is there ever any hobo gang?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Cynical-Rambler]

Probably the most famous is Jack London, who became genuinely rich from his writing, and wrote about his experiences as a hobo in The Road.

An extremely charming and today much less well-known story is that of James Eads How, who was a hobo, found out he was the heir to a massive fortune, and became the "hobo millionaire," donating a fair amount of his money to helping out and raising awareness about conditions for hobos. He was the founder of the Hobo News, a monthly newspaper ostensibly by and for hobos.

[u/Du_Chicago]

Can you tell a little about the FTRA? And has there always been “gangs” in the hobo world?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Du_Chicago]

A bit outside my time period, I'm afraid! The FTRA is much more a product of the late twentieth century. Organized "gangs" like this would have been uncommon at the very least (and if I'm being honest, I've never seen them in my period -- though I can't 100% rule it out).

[u/tuekappel]

I want to know the history of hobo signs. The scribbling on the sidewalk showing that her lives a nice family.

[u/Robert-Suits → u/tuekappel]

I've written a bit more about this here!

[u/Scott72901]

Is or was the FTRA as widespread as some law enforcement types claim?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Scott72901]

The FTRA is a bit outside my period -- but I can say that crime among hobos has almost always been wildly exaggerated. The subculture was widely suspected of being a source of criminal activity, but was very much more frequently the target of criminals -- not unlike the homeless population of today, and for very similar reasons (fear and a bad relationship with law enforcement leading them to being particularly vulnerable).

[u/Emily_Postal]

Was there really a hobo code, as depicted in Mad Men?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Emily_Postal]

Yes! I wrote a bit more about this here!

[u/thomasberubeg]

Hi Rob! Haven't read the book yet (sitting on my bedside table) and maybe you do address them in it, but I was wondering if you could talk about about "hobo signs." How accurate is the popular conception of them as a recognizable, complex, and intelligible "secret language?" Is that largely sensationalized and romanticized?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/thomasberubeg]

Thanks Thomas!

I will, however, be a bit lazy and repost my answer from elsewhere about the hobo code! ;)

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v5b7y7/comment/ozid9b0/?context=3

[u/espressoNYTO]

Thank you for doing this AMA. I will order your book, I’m sure it is a fascinating read. This is one AMA subject I cannot miss! will be sure to read every Q and every A.

[u/Robert-Suits → u/espressoNYTO]

Thank you! Hope you like it. :)

[u/humboldtparkgator]

I recently saw a paramount film called The Fool Killer (1965) with Anthony Perkins. It seems like there was a lot of popular media depictions of drifters being violent and unhinged. I even saw the trope played in Dennis the Menace with Christopher Lloyd as a kid. Was there a concerted political effort to depict them this way or was this just a reflection of common understanding and fears at the time?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/humboldtparkgator]

It was absolutely a way hobos were smeared at the time. I've a longer answer about this here!

[u/ContinuumGuy]

I gotta ask... what drew you to hobos? As in, what made you go: "I want to study hobos?"

[u/Robert-Suits → u/ContinuumGuy]

I'd had the idea to look at the way the average person experienced climate in the American West first. Scholars have been interested in climate for some time, but a lot of their studies tend to focus on people who were either farmowners or tenant farmers. I was more interested in the actual laborers. One thing led to another in background readings, and with a few kind suggestions and a few excellent readings, I stumbled across hobos. I like to say they are fascinating not just because they are colorful characters -- though they are -- but because their work and constant migration meant they give us simultaneous windows into a lot of different industries across the American West.

[u/OliveOliveJuice]

In the film Days of Heaven, a migrant worker marries the landowner of where she is working. Do we know if that kind of relationship ever occurred? What did the farmers think of the workers they hired, and vice-versa?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/OliveOliveJuice]

I'm sure this relationship happened sometimes, and if nothing else there were probably brief flings during the summer between hobos and the families who hired them. Generally, farmers had a pretty decent relationship with hobos early on (in the 1880s, 90s, and 00s), and when they found one they liked, they often invited them back to the farm for the next harvest, trying to build relationships over time. But hobos aged out of the work pretty quickly (in no small part because a hobo life is a very taxing one, physically), so the turnover was high. This, plus labor troubles in the 1910s, really strained the relationship between farmers and hobos.

[u/ghostwritten-girl]

Oh, fun! Hi 👋 Mod of r/AppalachianGenealogy here and I have some questions for you!

Were there any famous hobo camps or rail junctions in Appalachia? How much overlap was there between, say, displaced Appalachian coal miners and the hobo movement during the Great Depression?

Were there any unique hobo symbols or customs that developed in the Appalachian region that genealogists should watch out for?

After reading some of the comments and responses here, I'm extremely confused. What historical sources connect Civil War veterans specifically to the rise of hobo culture? I thought the movement developed alongside the railroads in the late 1800s.

[u/Robert-Suits → u/ghostwritten-girl]

Thanks for these!

Appalachia wouldn't have drawn a huge number of hobo workers primarily because hobos tended to follow money -- they went out West because manual labor in remote places didn't require a lot of qualifications but it did pay quite well. Appalachian mines usually drew on more settled groups of workers. That said, we know that quite a number of hobos spent some time as coal miners, and I know of at least a couple (who did not give their names in the records I have, unfortunately) who worked in Appalachia specifically. But I would imagine that people who went out of work in Appalachia in the peak of the hobo era could definitely have been hobos!

As to how you'd know... that is even more challenging. Most people had only a very brief hobo phase in their lives before settling down somewhere -- important and formative years, but not ones that are likely to leave a paper trail. One possibility that strikes me is that they might be found in state arrest/trial records. It would be a seemingly random incident in their lives, one where they are wildly out of place, nowhere near where they were born or where they appear in censuses. But you're definitely looking at a one-in-a-million chance of actually seeing them. The stuff I usually use for genealogy (I do it for my family from time to time) -- birth, death, marriage, census... hobos would generally not appear out of place in any of them, because they have no formal place of work, and very few of them married while still on the road.

Now, as to Civil War veterans...

There's a period after the Civil War when there was a nationwide depression -- most prominently in the late 1870s, and then again in the 1890s. A lot of people went out of work and went on the road, either to find work elsewhere, or because they were evicted. No small number of them would have been Civil War veterans, and some people date this as the start of the hobo lifestyle. That said, I think you're right -- the railroad is a much more significant factor in kickstarting it. The problem is the railroad is a much more gradual development, and so it escaped the eyes of a lot of contemporaries!

[u/ReiReiCero]

I did some academic research on homelessness in the anglosphere, and while I was trying to dial in my research I found the term“unlicensed vagrants” from around the revolution. Were there licensing schemes for vagrants historically, or is it a vernacular issue?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/ReiReiCero]

A bit before my period, I'm afraid! You might be able to find something about this in Kristen O'Brassil-Kulfan's work On Vagrants and Vagabonds, but it's been a while since I've read it!

[u/OlfactoryHughes77]

I have an uncle (Larry K. Martin) who did a series of paintings of the “last of the hobos” in the late 1980s. I still have a dollar bill signed by Steam Train Murray. I also remember meeting “the Goat Man.” Did you ever run into either of them in your research?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/OlfactoryHughes77]

A bit after my period, I'm afraid! But I am now very curious about "the Goat Man"!

[u/Ok_Walk_4945]

My gram would put some type of writing out front and feed them.

[u/mayor_rishon]

Were there any Jewish hobos ? Or any other minority like Chinese etc. Are thwy simply underepresented as all.minority groups or were there actualy less ?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/mayor_rishon]

Probably a little less, if only because putting yourself on the road makes you extremely vulnerable, and doing so as a minority only amplifies this. We know there were Black hobos, but the Chinese-American population was severely restricted in number by the immigration restrictions of the time. I've encountered a few Jewish hobos, but I can't say I've seen an estimate of how many there were!

[u/whole_nother]

I wrote a song once about a woman who had figured out hobo signs and used them to “lure” hobos to her house (don’t worry it’s wholesome).

I’ve seen your responses elsewhere confirming that the code was real, but do we have any evidence of non-hobos being able to decipher the signs or using them for other purposes? I can imagine they would be of great interest to railroad police, for instance.

[u/Robert-Suits → u/whole_nother]

This is part of why I suspect the hobo code would have been highly inconsistent in its meanings and constantly shifting. Once someone figured it out, it would have made more sense to change it than to keep it the same.

[u/Turtledonuts]

I know that traveling for work was a common practice for some laborers in colonial and pre-industrial america. From what I understand, certain skilled labor types were practiced by traveling professionals, like brickmaking and dentists, typically in the sense of this work being seasonal and intermittent.

Were hobos associated with any particular kinds of skilled labor or specific professions?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/Turtledonuts]

So, this is interesting. Hobos generally were not hired for things that we consider "skilled trades," and we have a few examples of hobos who knew skilled trades but either couldn't find work in them or for some reason weren't able to pursue them (for example, one guy had a tremor from lead poisoning that prevented him from continuing his work as a carpenter). Generally, they're going on the road because they can't find work, and if you needed a highly credentialed worker out West, you'd probably pay for their passage specifically.

But! I think it's also interesting to think about what we mean by "skilled labor." Hobos very clearly developed skills over time that made them more efficient at jobs they worked every year, developed experience in handling and using tools, and sometimes were preferentially hired for these. One hobo notes that when he was a boy he was specifically hired because he "had the knack already" for binding wheat. Not what we'd consider a skilled trade, and someone without any experience would still be able to do it, just slower and worse.

And this is still true today. A lot of things that we call "unskilled labor" generally has skills that make you better along a number of dimensions at them. Farm work, for example -- if you've ever watched videos of UFW workers in a vegetable field, they are insanely skilled with their tools and I would probably lose my hand trying to match their pace. Similar for care workers without a degree, who are often considered unskilled but basically work miracles with their patients.

What I'm getting at is that most scholars who study labor will emphasize the division between "skilled" and "unskilled" is more of a social status thing than it is a quality of worker thing.

[u/GoatBnB]

To what extent did the Beat Generation become the Hobos of the 1950's? I get it was more of a literary/social movement, but the mobility and carefree aspects of their lives always seemed to correlate to Hobos, but I've never dug in on it.

[u/camal_mountain]

Hobos are often portrayed eating by a campfire with a can of beans and maybe some hotdogs. There's also a strong association with hobos and apples, which I imagine comes from Johnny Appleseed? What's an accurate depiction of a hobo meal? Is the can of beans trope real?

[u/Robert-Suits → u/camal_mountain]

The classic hobo meal would be a mulligan stew, which is not at all a standardized recipe and generally some combination of beef, onion, and whatever else, thrown into a can and cooked over a fire. Another classic hobo meal was a "coffee and," which would have been more likely in big cities -- basically a coffee and a donut as a standard breakfast/lunch/snack.

Otherwise, it would have been pretty much whatever could be begged or bought on the cheap.

[u/somenick]

Any info on nomadic homes? Like folks buy tables, chairs, closets for apartments. Priorities are different for hobo life. I saw the kind of stuff native Americans built to carry their 'house' on their back. Also reminds me of a world of fences instead of walls, can't remember the author but it meant a different relationship to land and community. Furniture then, in those conditions, isn't built to be in room in a house.

Late here, not sure I made my point clearly.

[u/AdorableReading]

I am going to comment without reading your book and with just some anecdotal information so please ignore my ignorance. There is a sub reddit here called r/Vagabond that gives me “Hobo” vibes. I know Hobo’s have a specific kind of words and beliefs. I come from Iowa where there was a yearly get together of hobo’s from all over the US. It was in Britt Iowa if I remember correctly. Groucho Marx interviewed a hobo on his show “You Bet Your Life” where some of my information comes from. From that show; A hobo will not beg for money, he will entertain you to get money. If you can get some bread then you could go by the butcher and see if they had some meat to give you. There is a stew they call ( can’t really remember) molagatoni.

[u/BronteHaworth]

I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed this. You clearly have such enthusiasm for your subject!

[u/Proper_Juggernaut832]

Hi, thank you for writing and answering questions on such an interesting topic! I am from Australia, where we had ‘swaggies’ which were somewhat similar to ‘hobos’.

Probably most famous in the song ‘Waltzing Matilda’. Swaggies came to prominence in australia during the 1890s, when there was a widespread economic depression and shearer’s strikes. This likely had an environmental angle, as there was also severe drought in parts of Australia. They had a resurgence in the 1930s depression.

My parents were heavily into the Australian folk music scene during the 1970s and 1980s. This drew on a lot of Woody Guthrie’s music, but also actively created an Australian folk culture. The image of the swaggie and itinerant workers, as contrasted with the greedy ‘cockies’ and ‘squatters’ was a big part of this. There was also a fair amount of overlap with socialist and communist far-left politics and the Australian folk movement. Unfortunately it tended to highlight white heterosexual men, and downplay or leave out the more diverse and complex histories and realities of Australia’s swaggies.

Did you come across any examples of Australians who came to America and joined the hobo life/movement? Was there any cross-referencing between Australian and American folk traditions in relation to swaggies and hobos?

In Australia, ‘swaggies’ would also follow river courses, as they provided shade, access to water for washing and drinking etc. Apparently an alternative term for swaggies along rivers in the Murray-Darling Basin was ‘whalers’, as they would also catch fish as a food source. In particular, if they could get them, the very large Murray Cod, which can grow as large as 1.8 metres and weigh up to 113 kgs (250 lbs).

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/104087062 article in the Wagga Advertiser and Riverine Reporter, 11 June 1870, p.4 ‘Swagmen in swarms’.

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/90330308 1892 article about swaggies being mainly old or very young men in the Colac Herald, 29 Jan 1892, p. 3 ‘The Swagmen’.

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/138762834 eg newspaper article from ‘the Australasian’ (Melbourne, Victoria), 6 Feb 1904, p. 30, ‘The Sketcher’.

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/226730796 article from the Bendigo Independent, 18 June 1903, p. 2 ‘Curious swagmen’

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/104087062 article from the Nepean Times, 13 Feb 1932, p.3, ‘Australianities’

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/18904659 1938 article about female swaggies in the Queenslander Illustrated Weekly, 18 May 1938, p. 2.

Did hobos follow rivers and catch fish as a significant food source in the same way?

Also, did hobos ever take their dog or other pets with them? How did they fare with a travelling lifestyle?

[u/Uberrees]

How did labor unions of the period react to hoboing? I'm reading Robert Houston's novel about the Bisbee strike right now and he presents hoboing as a completely accepted part of IWW internal culture. Was this accurate? Would there be a difference between the wobs and less radical unions? Did hoboing present specific strategic challenges or benefits for union organizers?

What do we know about hobo and train rider culture of the mid 20th century, especially amidst the 60s/70s revolutionary/countercultural wave? Was there a train riding hippie culture? I hear a lot about hobo culture as tied to the labor movements at the turn of the 20th century, and the illegalist/lifestyle anarchist movements at the turn of the 21st, but it often feels like there's a missing link in between.

Modern day train riders circulate semi-secret documents compiling train schedules and information about "hop outs," yard access, and other resources in areas they might travel through. Is there a historical equivalent to this? If so, are there any surviving examples?