Homeward Bound: hobo

Romancing the Hobo – S.Cullen 2009

It has been posited that the word hobo comes from the two words homeward bound, referring to displaced soldiers left to roam the country after the American Civil War 1. The origins of the word hobo are ambiguous and varied, and like the individual of whom it is meant to define, the word has no clear root/route. The hobo, as distinguished by Dr. Ben.L.Reitman (1879-1942 Chicago anarchist and sometime ‘hobo’), is referred to as being the individual who works and wanders (while the tramp dreams and wanders and the bum drinks and wanders) (Anderson: 87).
If the origin of hobo indeed comes from homeward bound – rather than Hoe Boy, “Ho, boy!”, or “Haut Beau”2 – then what does this tell us about notions of home and migration? Do the origins still apply during the Great Depression when there was another influx of travelling workers in the United States and Canada? What does it mean to be a hobo who is leaving one’s dwelling or home, rather than returning to it? What of today’s hobos? I will attempt to address some of these questions in this paper.
Although the life of the hobo was difficult, and there is no ignoring the set of circumstances (war, economic crisis, etc…) from whence he/she usually came, there is also a romantic, and anti-conformist perception of the lone person who walks/travels and wanders – from the American cowboy to the pedestrian touring of the Wordsworths in the UK towards the end of the eighteenth century.
Cyclical unemployment in the US and economic downturns directly caused men and women to travel in search of work well before the end of the Civil War saw thousands of others doing the same (Depastino:5). New opportunities because of economic expansion were also periods of cross-country travel in search of work, such as the lumber and mineral frontiers in the west, and the mass expansion and building of the railways. Chicago in the early part of the twentieth century and especially around the time of the Depression, being the railway centre in the United States, became the crossroads for those travelling for work: Sociologist Robert E. Park wrote of Chicago in Anderson’s book The Hobo: “A changing population of from 30,000 to 75,000 homeless men in Chicago, living together within the area of thirty or forty city blocks, has created a milieu in which new and unusual personal types flourish and new unsuspected problems have arisen” (Editor’s Preface in Anderson: xxiv). This area of Chicago became known as Hobohemia, at the centre of which was Bughouse Square, the rendezvous for the thinker, dreamer, poet, artist, writer, revolutionist and chronic agitator – also known as the Hobo (Anderson: 8)
By putting their own ideas of ‘home’ on display in the city, as well as while on the road and rails, the swaggering counterculture of Hobohemia defied, unsettled, and transformed the American’s idea of ‘home’; a nineteenth-century set of domestic ideals, as well as the new realities of urban industrial (Depastino: xviii). The New Deal of the 1930’s meant that mass suburban homeownership because a political and social goal. The Hobo was at the front of public consciousness, and each time he appeared he signaled a crisis of home (Depastino: xix). ‘Home’, as specific locality, and as imagined, is imbued with moral meaning, and normative values. Homelessness, a product of the idea of ‘home’, is therefore a threat to moral behaviour (Creswell: 110). It is for these reasons that there is a process of Othering applied to transient types who are deemed ‘homeless’, such as the hobos themselves.
This poses some questions about hobos. If hobos are in fact homeward bound then surely this implies that they perhaps have a ‘home’ somewhere. Does this ‘home’ exist in a specific locality? Is ‘home’ the destination? Does a hobo ever make it ‘home’? Is ‘home’ imagined? Is the hobo always at ‘home’; movement being ‘home’?
Perhaps the hobo is a sort of ‘mobile home’, with the aid of his or her feet and the boxcar (Perhaps the occupier of the current mobile home (“wheel estate”) is the new hobo!). Well known walkers, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, often met ‘travelers’ while walking in the UK countryside. As stated in some of her walking and touring writing, Dorothy had an attraction, and perhaps even envious curiosity towards itinerant women (“certain classes of traveler”). These women were foreign to her own situation, but symbolized a desired independence from a restrictive home environment. For Dorothy the safe enclosure of domesticity was both the snug nest and the grave (Jarvis: 173). On a Scottish tour exploring Loch Etive, Dorothy and William met “a company of tinkers” who were using kilns as their sleeping quarters. Dorothy states: “They made a romantic appearance…When we had landed at the other side we saw them, after having begged at the ferry-house, strike merrily through the fields, no doubt betaking themselves to their shelter for the night” (Jarvis: 173). Writer, and poet Meena Alexander, has written about Dorothy having “a knife-edged existence between changefulness that could grant freedom from entrapment and a displacement so radical that it could uproot and destroy” (quoted in Jarvis: 173). This type of ‘knife-edged’ existence is not uncommon in the literary world. Both Thoreau and Jack London, and to an extent Jack Kerouac, used traveling/tramping as an intellectual experience; as willed philosophical acts, from perhaps a privileged perspective (Monkkonen: 4).
Geographer Edward Relph discusses the “drudgery” of place in his book Place and Placelessness. It is no wonder that a tension exists between the mobile and the sedentary; home and the homeless.

“Drudgery is always a part of profound commitment to a place, and any commitment must also involve an acceptance of the restrictions that place imposes and the miseries it may offer. Our experience of place, and especially of home, is a dialectical one – balancing a need to stay with a desire to escape. When one of these needs is too readily satisfied we suffer either from nostalgia
and a sense of being uprooted, or from the melancholia that accompanies a feeling of oppression and imprisonment in a place.”

(Relph: 42)

Wanderlust and the act of migration is an intrinsic and instinctual characteristic to who we are as human beings in the same way that ‘nesting’, settling down in one location, and attachment to homeland are. As seen in the case of “Buffalo Scotty” who at 15 was lured by the sound of the railroad being built near his US farm, the urge to get away from ‘home’ and to see the country, was overwhelming. Scotty asked permission from his father to go and see the construction, to a resounding ‘NO’. The more he asked the more staunch his father’s negative response became: “At last, one afternoon in August, I was mendin’ the fence in the lower cornfield, the wind kept blowin’ the engine’s whistle over the hills, an’ every time them whistles came I felt my own steam risin’. At last I quit work. I just stood and listened. An’ about one minute later I was a hobo for life – wid legs cuttin’ air!” (Sneider: 219). Wanderlust is often thought of as something one can’t help, a desire that does not go away, something that is in one’s blood.
Yi-Fu Tuan sees space as being something experienced by having the room to move. Having the room to move implies a freedom, which in turn implies space (Tuan: 52). Being on the move therefore gives one a sense of freedom.
There is a massive history of human migration in all parts of the globe. Migrations occur all the time as well as during times of upheaval, or change. The hobos of the United States and Canada are just one example of this phenomenon. The innocence of this proposed origin on their name, homeward bound, is a far cry from the way they were often perceived or treated. Nonetheless, the hobo has become somewhat of a character or archetype in a similar way to that of the jester or harlequin. It cannot be forgotten that their labour supply was a necessity during industrial expansion in the US and Canada.
Since it was approximately sixty-five years between the end of the civil war and the beginning of the great depression it is not surprising that the origin of the abbreviation “Ho.Bo.” has not referred back to the original term homeward bound. We no longer see the hobo walking down the road carrying his ‘bindle’ (a stick with a fabric sack full of personal belongings tied to one end and carried over one shoulder). But questioning the meaning of his name can help us understand the sociological implications of labels and how labels and meaning change over time.3
To end, a quote from Robert E. Park:

"In its pure form the desire for the new experience results in motion, change, danger, instability, social responsibility. It is to be seen in simple form in the prowling and meddling activities of the child, and the love of adventure and travel in the boy and man. It ranges in moral quality from the pursuit of game and the pursuit of pleasure to the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of ideals. It is found equally in the vagabond and the scientific explorer.”

(R.E. Park and H.A Miller, Old World Traits Transplanted p.27, quoted in Anderson: 82)

1 “Early observers concluded that the tramps were war veterans, fired with unquenchable and irresponsible wanderlust acquired during the war” (Monkkonen:6)
“Bo is short for hobo. I read recently where an endeavor was made to trace the origin of the work to the American Civil War. When soldiers walking through the country were asked where they were going, they would reply, “Homeward bound.” This became abbreviated to hobo” (Roddan:50)

2 “Hoe Boy”, the salutation “Ho, boy!:, and “Haut Beau” (Depastino: 65) are the most commonly referred to origins of hobo. Other suggested ideas as seen on Wikepedia and elsewhere on the web are: the city of Hoboken, New Jersey, a terminus for railway lines; “Homeless Boy”; “hopping boxcars”; the Manhattan intersection of Houston and Bowey.

3 (Like the hobo, unfortunately in this case, this paper has no concrete root or route, and tends to wander. SC 2009)

References

Anderson N 1923 The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man University of Chicago Press, Chicago, USA

Cresswell T 2004 Place: A Short Introduction Blackwell, Oxford, UK

Depastino T 2003 Citizen Hobo: How a century of homelessness shaped America University of Chicago Press, Chicago, USA

Jarvis R 1997 Writing and Pedestrian Travel Macmillan Press, London, UK

Monkkonen E.H (ed.) 1984 Walking to Work University of Nebraska Press, USA

Relph E 1976 Place & Placelessness Pion Limited, London, UK

Roddan A 2005 Vancouver’s Hobos Subway Books Ltd, Vancouver, Canada (Originally published by First United Church, Vancouver 1931 and titled God in the Jungles)

Schneider J.C ‘Tramping Workers, 1890-1920: A Subcultural View’ in Monkkonen E.H (ed.) 1984 Walking to Work University of Nebraska Press USA

Tuan Y 1977 Space and Palce Edward Arnold Ltd, London, UK