Hobo noun A professional tramp; one who spends his life traveling from place to place, esp. Hobo noun a homeless person; a tramp or vagrant. Hobo A hobo is a migrant worker or homeless vagrant, especially one who is impoverished. Homeless Illustrations. Hobo Illustrations. Popular Comparisons. Adress vs. Comming vs. Label vs.
Genius vs. Speech vs. Chief vs. Teat vs. Neice vs. Buisness vs. Beeing vs. Amature vs. Lieing vs. One particularly literate wayfarer insisted the term came from the French "haut beau. I sometimes joke that a hobo is a tramp on steroids.
Hoboes were by and large more organized, militant, independent, and political than their predecessors. The widespread use of the word "bum" after World War II signals the end of this colorful subculture of transient labor. Question: In urban areas hoboes gathered on the "main stem.
Can you describe this? What were hoboes looking for in cities, and why did they congregate there? DePastino: The hobo job circuit began and ended in cities like Chicago. Hoboes found jobs in harvest fields, construction sites, and mining and lumber camps through the employment agencies what hoboes called the "slave market" that lined West Madison Street and other urban neighborhoods in the Midwest and West.
The concentration of railroads in Chicago made West Madison the busiest labor exchange in the nation. After a job finished, hoboes either hopped a freight to another worksite—often on a tip—or headed back to the main stem, where they took the "stake" they had earned and "laid up" for as long as their stake held out. The main stem was where hobo culture really came to life.
On the job and on the road, hoboes were subject to their employers, the police, or the "railroad bulls" who patrolled the rails. But on the main stem, which was segregated from residential neighborhoods and mainstream business districts, hoboes were relatively free to flaunt their countercultural way of life. In addition to employment agencies and cheap hotels, the main stem hosted saloons, brothels, theaters, gambling houses, and the like.
The main stem was also where activists such as those in the Industrial Workers of the World IWW and other organizations maintained winter headquarters.
By World War I, main stems throughout the West had bookstores, reading rooms, lecture halls, and soapboxes where hoboes absorbed radical ideas about how they were destined to bring about the end of the wage system. Question: The excerpt we have here on our website is about the political organization of hoboes before World War I. Did hoboes have an impact on the broader political landscape of the time? DePastino: Hoboes, as you could imagine, had virtually no impact on the electoral politics of the day because citizens without permanent addresses did not have the right to vote.
Faced with this restriction, hoboes railed against ward and parliamentary politics as the opiate of the "homeguard" and instead advocated "direct action" against their employers to bring down the capitalist system. The IWW led this crusade to mobilize hoboes for the revolution. They were on the far left wing of a much wider political current that included the Socialist Party of America and that wanted to rewrite the free-market rules governing economic life and guarantee a measure of economic security and on-the-job power for all.
The IWW clashed with the Socialist Party for what it saw as the Party's naive belief in the efficacy of the ballot box to bring about the socialist future.
The IWW hoboes instead took their campaign first to the streets, launching boycotts against extortionist employment agents, and then to the fields, striking against employers. These actions were successful enough to elicit a fierce backlash from employers and the government that utterly destroyed the organization. In another sense, however, the crackdown against dissenters in general and the IWW in particular marked the beginning of a longstanding effort to resettle white men back into steady jobs and stable homes.
This attempt at "welfare capitalism" in the s did not entirely succeed, but it did provide a blueprint for later efforts. In the mids, hobos even formed their own union, Tourist Union 63, to avoid persecution along their travels.
Members of unions tended to attract less scrutiny while traveling in the s, with people assuming that they were traveling for work, and hobos took advantage of the protections offered to union members by having their own independent union. Ever since she began contributing to the site several years ago, Mary has embraced the exciting challenge of being a researcher and writer.
Mary has a liberal arts degree from Goddard College and spends her free time reading, cooking, and exploring the great outdoors. Huck is developing a new hobo code. In terms of the mythology surrounding the homeless, this is a big deal. Read about the romance of hobo culture and you'll find tons of talk about hobo symbols: a face on the side of a barn means the building's safe to sleep in; a caduceus on a doctor's door means the doctor will treat homeless.
But for hobos nowadays, that's all outdated. Huck is part of a project to revamp the code completely and make it more useful for the digitally connected hobo by creating a new set of symbols for things such as "Wi-Fi networks and free outlets. Conventional wisdom says the Internet and mobile technology keep us in our own little bubbles, isolated and insular.
And while perhaps that's true for those with homes, Quain says it's the opposite for hobos. For the itinerant homeless, traveling in groups makes sense for a bevy of reasons: safety, company and economies of scale, especially when it comes to digital devices.
Luckily for Quain and his ilk, the ubiquity of the Internet is making finding fellow "travelers" easier than ever. The curious can head to SquatThePlanet. Squatters have also enthusiastically embraced the mobile Internet as a means of sharing knowledge—often as a way to fight for their place amid urban real estate development.
Frank Morales is a former priest, former squatter and current activist with C-Squat, a squatter advocacy organization in New York. The group works with New York's homeless men and women who park themselves in unused, often crumbling buildings and fix up the structures in an attempt to turn them into permanent homes.
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