by Jay Thiemeyer

“A castle for some, a prison house for others, home structures and regulates human activity in ways that model and articulate the social relations governing the larger community. Societies riddled with persons deemed ‘homeless’ are, by definition, societies in crisis.”

Our society is such a society in crisis. Though it is no longer front page news, the population of homeless continues to grow. It grows invisible from its usualness.

	Citizen Hobo by Todd DePastino Univ. of Chicago Press 2003 (pbk) 352 Pages ISBN: 0-226-14379-1

The effort locall, to address the crisis, the much-ballyhooed ‘10-Year Plan to End Homelessness,’ appears based as much in political rhetoric as in reality. It derives, in fact, from Bush’s nationwide campaign to address homelessness. Complete with credible figurehead, pomp, and cuts to funding for federal programs for those same homeless. Pure Bush.
Citizen Hobo, a fascinating, passionate, thoroughly researched, highly original effort, provides perspective. There is no better place to begin for a real sense of what today’s homelessness is about and what the 10-Year Plan stands to contribute. To separate the rhetoric from the real.

It is an absorbing combination of literary essay, labor/class analysis, and cultural history. The first chapter begins with Jacob Riis’s personal account of tramping the U.S. in the early 1870s prior to the cataclysmic depression of ‘73, following work.
Subsequent chapters follow a literary trajectory through Whitman to Ben Reitman, John Dos Passos, and others to depict the halcyon days on the road of free labor, tramp migrant workers like Riis, through the demise of hobohemia.

Dos Passos called the passing of the hobo heyday, the epic of his time, post-WWI, the bridge from the early republican ideal of Whitman to the assembly line civilization of Henry Ford. The book proceeds to FDR’s ‘Forgotten Man,’ to the ‘man in the gray flannel suit,’ right on up to today. The kids you see in the Square; the men lined up just west of the Burnside Bridge every night. The suits you may see at the Homeless Connect events volunteering for a day, returning to a job which cringes at the homeless’ impact on downtown business. And those, especially women, you don’t see.

DePastino’s more recent coverage is, in fact, the most inviting. Discussing Bill Mauldin’s depiction of Willie and Joe, the GI’s who came into uniform straight from the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and before that the more hoboesque transient program, which attempted to reintegrate ‘wild youth’ riding the rails, tramping. The CCC emerged because its predecessor was too transient. Their camps resembled hobo jungles! Family and patriotic values sold better and provided the moral ground of the CCC.

The use of captioned photos in Citizen Hobo very effectively illustrate his arguments and provide a capsule-tale in themselves. The Aryan boy from the CCC camp so similar to the German JugenBund; the picture of Willie in his gray flannel suit pushing the baby carriage, a harried look on his face, running into Joe leaning against a poolroom doorjamb. “How’s it feel to be a free man, Willie?” The old ‘wild boy’ tramping the country, so feared by mainstream America, meeting up with his alter-ego leaning against a door jamb. Willie got assimilated by means of the GI Bill to white suburbia, the land of anomie, anxiety, suicide.

A distinguishing feature of Citizen Hobo is the attention paid to gender and race. For example, “The massive strike wave that swept through California’s agricultural valleys in 1933 and 1934...was largely the work of Mexican, Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese farm laborers, none of whom had been part of the main stem’s ‘white’ counterculture [of Wobbly folklore]...
“The hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants [for example], who poured into the harvest fields of the Southwest after WWI had been invited to solve a crisis that was not only one of labor, but also of race.”

In discussing urban renewal, too, the sequestering of singles and nonwhites in the former skid rows is described thusly: “Skid row bums were failing to take their rightful places as citizen-homeowners [in post-war America], stubbornly resisting the efforts of those who, over the previous three decades, had struggled to reintegrate white floaters back into the polity. For skid row social service professionals, the mission now was to complete the task, to solve the modern problem of homelessness once and for all...“The first step toward solution was the demolition of cheap lodgings, a step that corresponded neatly with the goals of the urban renewalists.”

Citizen Hobo will prompt you to revisit old favorites like Dos Passos’ USA trilogy and Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory, with its collectivist, interracial social model represented by the hoboes on the boxcar; or films like Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels and Capra’s Meet John Doe(Walter Brennan’s hobo says it all: “You get money in the bank and they got ya! You’re finished! You’re life’s over! Pretty soon, you’ll be dining in restaurants, drinking tea...” In the uncut version, the hobo won out. But Hollywood would have none of it. The matinee idol won the gal in their version, family and conformity won the day and the era. (At least in the media).

The themes of conformity, normalcy, and domesticity, epitomized by the post-WWII emergence of white suburbia, parallels the Wobblie/hobohemian trace. Just as the overweening question regarding the 10 Year Plan remains: Is it just regulation of the poor, as Francis Fox Piven called it; just more containment of ‘the dangerous class,’ the great unwashed, the folks who historically have been most easily demonized as being “undeserving” and therefore rightly subjected to categorical quarantine in programs and housing projects?

Or is it, as so many good people protest, about inclusion and honoring diversity? Giving people freedom to choose a way of life outside the mainstream?

A good adjunct to Citizen Hobo is Down and Out, on the Road by Kenneth Kusmer, 2002. With these two studies, a progressive perspective is highly possible.

Jay Thiemeyer is a local writer and poet.