Tramps | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

The tramp or hobo (the tramp's name for himself) refers to a wandering foot traveler, often a vagrant, thief, or beggar with no fixed abode or destination. The term hobo, originally a migratory American worker hitching rides on freight trains, has disappeared as modern society increasingly controlled the outcast individuals who chose the itinerant or homeless life.

In the 1870s, American Civil War veterans and immigrants swelled the ranks of unemployed boys and men traveling from job to job, and the "tramp menace" alarmed newspaper editorialists and civic leaders concerned about the growing number of homeless vagrants descending on towns and cities. Tramps were often driven from town or sentenced to the jail or the workhouse for vagrancy; even skilled craftsmen, such as itinerant or tramp printers, were unwelcome in small towns. Allan Pinkerton, the legendary American detective, warned of the danger tramps posed in his 1878 book Strikers, Communists and Tramps. But tramps found in the new railroad system mobility to seek work in harvests, lumberjacking, mining, or construction projects.

Hostility to the independent tramp may be found as early as St. Benedict's rule in 535 A.D. against the girovagi or wandering monks for whom religious life was but a pretense, and who led their liveswithout restraint or obedience to church authority. The Elizabethan Poor law of 1603 also condemned England's wandering, sturdy beggars, as did early American courts. By 1700 Boston selectmen, for example, warned migrant strangers or vagabonds to leave town and refused them public charity.

By the Victorian era the hobo had become a fixture in the American circus; perhaps the most famous hobo clown was Emmett Kelly (1898-1979), who portrayed Weary Willie the Hobo on television and in films such as The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). In silent movies, Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp was his signature character in seventy films such as The Kid (1921) and The Gold Rush (1925). Another famous tramp clown was Red Skelton's television character Freddie the Freeloader in the 1950s and 1960s. In the theater of the absurd, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1954) portrayed two pensive tramps on a country road musing about the nature of human existence. American literature celebrated the romantic hobo or tramp life, from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1884) to Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac's On The Road (1957) and Dharma Bums (1958), as well as in folk music by the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW or Wobblies) and troubadours like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Harry Kemp (1883-1960), the hobo poet, wrote autobiographical poems and narratives about his tramp adventures. But other works documented the grim reality of the hobo life, as in Jack London's The Tramp (1911) and George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).

During the Depression of the 1930s, the number of tramps increased dramatically as more than a million homeless men, women, girls, and boys rode the rails and lived in hobo jungles in search of work or adventure. By that era, reformers such as Father Edward Flanagan, who opened the Workingmen's Hotel and Boys' Town in Omaha, and Dorothy Day, who established the Catholic Worker Movement in New York, addressed serious social problems associated with tramping. By the 1980s homelessness was recognized as a major social issue in the United States when a rapid increase in people without adequate housing reached one million. Many of these contemporary tramps are young or mentally ill, unlike the older white alcoholic men found earlier in skid-row flophouse hotels.

The movies Boxcar Bertha (1972) and Ironweed (1987) celebrate female hoboes. Hollywood featured hoboes in socially conscious movies, Wild Boys of the Road (1933) and Sullivan's Travels (1941), and later in Joe Hill (1971), Emperor of the North (1973), and Bound for Glory (1976). Most tramp songs glorify the freedom of the open road and the autonomy of the hobo life while overlooking its chronic poverty, hunger, violence, and insecurity.

The bum, a sedentary beggar who avoids work, is a variant of the tramp or hobo. This derogatory name originated in the German word bummler, or loafer. In the 1860s it meant a foraging soldier, and later to loaf, beg, or wander like a vagabond or tramp. By the 1890s it referred to a hobo hitching a ride on a freight train. In the 1920s it came to mean ejection from a saloon via the bum's rush, or inferior quality as in a bum job. By the 1960s it referred to resort habitués such as the beach bum or ski bum. Today, however, the tramp tradition survives in the annual National Hobo Convention at Britt, Iowa, and in the memory of men and women who last rode the rails in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Brevada, William. Harry Kemp, the Last Bohemian. Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, Bucknell University Press, 1986.

Flynt, Josiah. Tramping with Tramps. Montclair, New Jersey, Patterson Smith, 1972.

Gray, Frank. The Tramp, His Meaning and Being. London, J. M.Dent, 1931.

Orwell, George. Down and Out in Paris and London. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1933.

This is the complete article, containing 832 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page).