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<\/a><\/p>\nHarper New Monthly Magazine in 1895 described the hobo as a “wandering unemployed person, a stealer of rides on freight trains, a diner at the back door, eternally seeking honest work” to earn a living. \u00a0“The true hobo,” Nels Anderson wrote in 1923, “was the in-between worker, willing to go anywhere to take a job, and equally willing to move on later.” \u00a0His occupation “made mobility a virtue.” Each hobo responded to a different series of preceding events from\u00a0their former lives, and “each arrived in \u00a0Hobohemia\u00a0by a different route.”<\/p>\n
Hobohemia in Chicago provided the itinerant workers with lodging, medical facilities, cheap restaurants, employment bureaus, and commonly met their needs, especially for fraternization with women and medical treatments for disease. Hobos were not “homeless” as misrepresented by an editor for University of Chicago publications who presumed, as did many, that all hobos were ne’er-do-well vagrant tramps and imposed the subtitle on Nels Anderson published work (1923).<\/p>\n
Hobohemia, one contemporary observed. “constitutes a city within a city–a distinct culture with its own institutions–economic, recreational, religious, and educational.” Hobos had high\u00a0literacy rates and were addicted to newspaper sports pages as well as left-wing political tracts and traditions of protest song. Chicago\u2019s Hobohemia actively supported education including a Hobo University with a regular faculty. The “red card” carrying Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) with headquarters in Chicago’s Hobohemia was identified as a hobo organization. \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n
INTRODUCTION<\/h3>\n
Nels Anderson was born in Chicago in 1891. His father was an immigrant and qualified bricklayer and his mother from Swedish immigrant parentage. The family was Mormon and gave birth to twelve children. With the father\u2019s trade in demand, the family followed the construction jobs traveling around the country. As Nels described it, he belonged to a migratory \u201chobo family\u201d beating its way across the country always in need of making a self-sufficient living in a fluid \u00a0economy<\/p>\n In 1901 the family returned to Chicago and settled in the vicinity of the \u201cmain stem\u201d at Halsted and West Madison Streets. \u201cWe were slum dwellers, which I learned years later.\u201d Money was tight, the family skilled at buying cheaply on the Westside. Hobohemia was home turf, a place of vivid boyhood memories. Nels plied the street trades befriending clerks in flophouses, friendly policemen, and prostitutes who paid him to run errands. (See his account in \u201cThe Mission Mill<\/a>\u201d).<\/p>\n After Chicago, Nels moved around as a transient laborer, served in the Army in WWI, did some college work at Brigham Young University in Utah. In 1921 at age 32 he returned to enter the M.A. program in Sociology at the University of Chicago, and supported himself as a full-time male nurse in an asylum.<\/p>\n At the University, Nels background was unique. A social class difference separated him as an outsider from the professors and students at the elite university. His chosen research topic was the Hobo, a scandalous topic among his peers. \u00a0They assumed\u00a0he must know other disreputable characters and would have a pernicious influence in the classroom, disqualifying him for recommendation to a teaching position.<\/p>\n Revealed by archival documents,\u00a0Nel’s mentor Robert Park spent no more than fifteen minutes talking with him about the dissertation and asked no questions. An additional irritant with Park must have been that Nels professed no interest in becoming a \u201ctoady\u201d of the current academic practices. He listened rather than took notes in class, and his “unscientific” methodology was to talk with residents in his comfort zone of Hobohemia, a technique now called \u201cparticipant-observation.\u201d<\/p>\n When Park declared his interest in publishing the M.A. thesis with the University Press, with no substantive changes, Nels laughed thinking it was not a publishable piece. \u00a0Why Park recommended publication, beyond the reality that as general editor of the sociology series he needed a first publication, remains unclear. \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n Political comedy functions by caricature, lampoon, satire–pricking the hot air of narcissist self-exaggeration and flatulent official pronouncements from the ambiguities and complexities within a person\u2019s experience. In U.S. magazines and newspapers in the later 19th century, editorial cartooning on politics and culture\u2013local, national, international\u2013became a popular comic art form.<\/p>\n By means of a talented caricaturist and snappy caption, the target of the cartoon received instant recognition in the eyes of a gleeful beholder. A grandiose subject of current interest was diminished to grossly earthy dimensions through laughable humiliation and perverse mockery and ridicule. Raw and unforgiving, cartooning democracy cultivated the \u201cart of ill will.\u201d Nothing and no person was sacred, immune from graphic scorn as a damned \u201cfool\u201d\u2013a vain buffoon, maker of their own gullible foolishness.<\/p>\n \u201cStop them damned pictures\u201d Boss Tweed of the Tammany Hall political machine is reported to have said after seeing Thomas Nast\u2019s cartoon, \u201cWho Stole the People\u2019s Money.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t care so much what the papers say about me. My constituents can\u2019t read. But damn it, they can see pictures.\u201d<\/p>\n Three essential characteristics made for the successful magazine and newspaper cartoon presentation.<\/p>\n One, minimal reflection required. The ridiculed target was instantly recognized and the satirical message immediately understood abetted by brief captions. Nothing seemed more absurd to respectable, hard-working Americans than extending privileges to \u201clazy\u201d hobos and tramps, whatever their sob story.<\/p>\n Two, laughter, mirth, and humiliation, exposing the ludicrousness of vanity and self-righteous propaganda of an adversary were more effective weapons than historical physical confrontation, banishment, dungeons, even jails. Cartooning was effectively combat of a different order.<\/p>\n Three, a direct correlation between the numerical frequency of the appearance of a cartoon subject in print media\u2013city hobos and tramp–and its importance in the immediate lives of the viewing audience. Political comedy fit in the vulgar American slang genre of \u201cbullshit\u201d\u2013\u201cmoney talks bullshit walks\u201d\u2013first appearing in the later nineteenth century, and prospering since. \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n “Hobohemia\u201d on West Madison Street in tramp jargon was \u201cthe main stem\u201d for “Knights of the Road.” With the rise of Chicago as a national railroad center in the later nineteenth century, the inner city became the central location and clearing house for seasonal traveling workers riding the rails to seek employment in every section<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n\n
HOBO AND TRAMP:\u00a0PHOTO GALLERY<\/h3>\n
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NELS ANDERSON, THE HOBO<\/em> (1923)<\/h3>\n
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NELS ANDERSON: ESSAYS (1923-1928)<\/h3>\n
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HOBO COLLEGE CHICAGO (1916-1922)<\/h3>\n
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HOBOS\u00a0AT HULL-HOUSE (1907-1914)<\/h3>\n
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HOBOES THAT PASS\u00a0IN\u00a0THE NIGHT (1907)<\/h3>\n
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WHAT RACE MAKES\u00a0THE BEST HOBO (1892-1911)<\/h3>\n
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TRAMPING WITH\u00a0THE TRAMPS by PROFESSIONAL VAGRANTS (1893-1901)<\/h3>\n
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MAKING\u00a0AN EXEMPLARY TRAMP (1902-1925)<\/h3>\n
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TRAMPING\u00a0IN CHICAGO (1890-1909)<\/h3>\n
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TRAMPS AND HOBOS (1880-1909):\u00a0POPULAR CARTOONS<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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