Boy and Girl Tramps of America

BOY AND GIRL TRAMPS OF AMERICA

Susan Honeyman, Series Editor

BOY AND GIRL TRAMPS OF AMERICA

Thomas Minehan

Introduction by Susan Honeyman

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

Many thanks to Heidi Eichbauer and Allie Remm.

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

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Any discriminatory or derogatory language or hate speech regarding race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, class, national origin, age, or disability that has been retained or appears in elided form is in no way an endorsement of the use of such language outside a scholarly context.

Copyright © 2023 by University Press of Mississippi

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Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2023

∞

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022947193

Hardback ISBN 978-1-4968-4361-6

Trade paperback ISBN 978-1-4968-4362-3

Epub single ISBN 978-1-4968-4363-0

Epub institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-4364-7

PDF single ISBN 978-1-4968-4365-4

PDF institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-4366-1

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

CONTENTS

Editor’s Introduction, 2022

Author’s Introduction, 1934

1. The Seasons in the Life of a Boy Tramp

2. Before the Big Trouble Came

3. Why Did They Leave Home?

4. How They Travel

5. How They Get Food

6. How They Get Clothing

7. Where They Sleep

8. Their New Education

9. Sex Life

10. Religious Life

11. Political and Social Philosophy

12. Prestige Standards

13. Conversations

14. Two Diaries

15. Their Tribal Life

16. Vagabondage in the Past

17. Conclusions

Appendix: Data Concerning Young Vagrants

Glossary

Notes

Index

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION, 2022

In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy influentially positioned the ship at sea as a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion that bound a multitude of persons in micro systems of linguistic and political hybridity (4, 12). Such ships could contain the intensified suffering of abductees in the Middle Passage to enslavement, the hopes of merchant seamen, or, in the literary imaginations of authors and audiences ashore, they simultaneously accommodated naïve projections of democratic diversity. Capturing both anguish and idealisms, just as the ship contained a microcosm of preindustrial possibilities, the American boxcar would offer a site of intersectionality in which the cast-offs of industrial expansion, racial capitalism, and economic collapse meet. Intersecting vectors of class, race, gender, sexuality, structural inequity, and ideological oppression congregate on the rails. Thomas Minehan’s unique contribution is to direct our focus to the undertreated vector of age—how the young become castaways of communities, throwaways of the nuclear family, and a stigmatized migrant minority.

Minehan, a graduate student of sociology at the University of Minnesota, studied transient teens in the years when their numbers rose sharply during the Great Depression. Not satisfied with the quantitative methods available to him, he decided to travel alongside the boy and girl tramps in order to learn what the experiences of riding the rails meant to them. His observations and own journey included jail time, sleeping in freezing hobo jungles, eating in the inadequate soup kitchens available, running from violent authorities, and most importantly, hopping freights to observe the communion and desperation of the American boxcar.

Rather than writing scientific scholarship, Thomas Minehan ultimately completed a hybrid form more comparable to the work of today’s public historians or investigative journalists:

In conventional form I drew up my tables, analyzed the data statistically, worked a few correlations … I was following approved technique. Yet, the analysis was unsatisfactory. It seemed totally inadequate to say that 324 youths left home because the father was unemployed and unable to support his family. Less adequate it seemed to say that fourteen boys in need of shoes had to steal to get them or that nine hungry girls had to sell their bodies for bread. (xxi)

Instead, Minehan realized that an artist—not a scientist—was needed to achieve the balance, humaneness, and accessibility called for (xxii). The self-professed amateur rose to the challenge of his vision. Somewhere usefully ensconced between ethnography and exposé, he packed his book with details and testimony almost impossible to find elsewhere—about how these teen transients managed to travel, feed, clothe, govern, and protect themselves. His work also confirms what we now know about why young people leave home in the first place—rather than blaming storm and stress on adolescence itself, he corrects the runaway stereotype with an honest assessment of throwaway youth.

Tramp literature appealed to younger readers throughout the Progressive era, yet most Depression-era studies of hobo-life focus exclusively on adults, and primarily on white males. Minehan’s study carefully focuses on younger hoboes—providing rare glimpses into the lives of youth surviving on their own, forging new networks, philosophizing, and struggling against the hardships of hobo existence, not to be confused with the romance that seduced middle-class kids to go slumming for a spell in hobo jungles and boxcars. The tramp life as popularized in American culture provided coping narratives when needed, but it hid real challenges involved in negotiating the instability of homelessness, unemployment, and food insecurity. Parsing the differences, medical doctor and pimpologist Ben Reitman is often quoted as saying, There are three types of the genus vagrant: the hobo, the tramp, and the bum. The hobo works and wanders, the tramp dreams and wanders, and the bum drinks and wanders (quoted in Anderson, The Hobo 87). Most writers of tramp lit, hobo history, and scholarship on transience have distinguished these terms rigidly but without consensus. Though variably used, the general distinction follows that tramps travel by choice, hoboes for work and sustenance. Often the primary distinction between fictional and factual treatments of such wandering is that literary depictions romanticize the voluntary adventure, and sociologists have emphasized the duress of economic need. Boy and girl tramps of the 1930s used tramp and hobo somewhat interchangeably, agreeing only on one thing—they, the young ones riding the rails, were categorically NOT bums. The clear divide between their subculture and that of the careerists points to the necessity of studying their unique experiences.

Young hoboes were prevalent enough during the Depression to have their own category in the vernacular of tramps. Coffin and Cohen include gazooney in their collection of jungle slang to describe a kid-tramp, one who is below the age of eighteen or nineteen (284). And yet, this demographic has historically been hidden by a persistent refusal to recognize that young people are particularly at risk. Almost a century later, the United States has the highest poverty rate for children in the industrialized world. Even before the welfare reforms of 1996 plummeted more American youth deeper into poverty, Gregg Barak would describe our denial and failure of compassion:

When most people, for example, think personally about the homeless, rarely do such images come to mind of the realities of teenage runaways, lacking marketable skills and financial resources, selling their bodies to the highest urban bidders. Similarly, people do not often think about homeless children, most of them abused or neglected, as sleeping in abandoned buildings without heat, electricity, and running water. Finally, most people hardly, if ever, think about homeless mothers exchanging sexual services for roofs over their children’s and their own heads. (10)

Not to mention that these mothers doing survival sex work might be teens too. The very persons who are most at risk are those we will into the periphery of our awareness. As a corrective, work like Minehan's can serve as a much-needed visibility project, bringing throwaway minors back into focus for communities steeped in denial.

At the time of its first publishing, field-founding hobo and researcher Nels Anderson reviewed Boy and Girl Tramps of America as not altogether accurate, which, to be fair, may have as much to do with when he rode the rails as any other factor (Anderson Book Review, 659). In his Juvenile and the Tramp, published ten-years before Minehan first hopped a freight, Anderson claimed unequivocally that The American tramp class is practically a one-sex group. Few women ever enter it (Anderson, Juvenile 290). By the time Minehan began his investigation, these proportions had changed, and his pointedly inclusive book is in part still relevant because of how much documentation he dedicates to the voices of female hoboes, who had never been quite as invisible as Anderson believed, just underrepresented, but would be tramping at a sharp increase in the 1930s with the rising proportion of younger throwaways looking for work. J. F. Lennon wrote, in his review of Minehan, Few, if any, other contemporary writers got anywhere near so close to the 200,000 or 300,000 young tramps roaming the United States at the height of the Depression. No other literary source looked at American life at this time deliberately and directly from the angle of the vagrants themselves (265). If merely for the sake of Minehan’s being in the right place at the right time to capture voices that would otherwise be lost to researchers today, his work holds unique value. Riding the rails at the height (1929–33) of a sharp influx¹ of youth tramps, Minehan interviewed 1,465 young people, slept in hobo jungles and jails, learned the ropes at shelters and soup kitchens, chronicling what he witnessed, even borrowing two diaries to copy what he could without suspicion.

Those in literary tramp studies may find his work refreshingly inclusive when measured up against the vast American array of underdog picaresques. Scott Herring writes of the earlier tramp literature tradition,

Progressive Era writers had contributed to a growing body of sensational literatures on tramp expeditions that surveyed the mysteries of modern urbanism. The anonymously published Young Sleuth and the Millionaire Tramp; or, Diamonds under Rags (1895), Stephen Crane’s An Experiment in Misery ([1894] 1966a), Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903), Walter A. Wyckoff’s The Workers: An Experiment in Reality (1897), William Dean Howells’s An East-Side Ramble (1896), Josiah Flynt’s Tramping with Tramps ([1899] 1972), and Hutchins Hapgood’s Types from City Streets (1910) are but a few of the many dime novels, short stories, fictional reports, urban sketches, picturesques, yellow journal articles, and personal biographies that relied on themes of tramping to launch muckraking critiques over industrialization, urbanization, and widening gaps between the working, middle, and upper classes. (Herring, 76)

In addition, John Allen identifies over forty tramp titles from between 1890 and 1940 that sometimes romanticized homelessness by representing the author as an intellectual, usually an observer of other tramps and the tramp lifestyle (95, 152). Certainly, adventurous slumming² had an appeal among young readers in earlier decades, but tramping was no longer a novelty hobby for middle-class kids by the 1930s. And though it is possible that Minehan’s embedded reports may have been influenced by a similar romanticized slumming, his book does not sentimentalize unemployment, houselessness, food insecurity, the elements, or, most uniquely, the experience of transience from the perspectives of young people.

Depression-era railway bulls found no millionaire tramps and probably very few vacationing hoboes. If anything, Minehan’s contribution is important to students of American literature and youth history in order to make clear that the teen transients of 1929–1933 were riding the rails out of necessity—at great risk, searching for work, underfed, underclothed (shoes especially were a problem), and underinsulated. Their reasons for leaving home were far less idyllic than those of their literary heroes. Those who work in childhood studies, across the disciplines, will find that compared within the larger context of writing about youth, Minehan’s account is remarkably unsentimental about the most sentimentalized people in our culture. From historians and archivists, we can learn the value of embedded gems throughout—statements we cannot know for certain are verbatim, but are presented in such a preponderance of richness as to merit reading and re-reading. As historian Donald W. Whisenhunt put it, The spice of the book, of course, is his inclusion of conversations with and among the young tramps (xix). And those of us in the humanities have plenty of experience interpreting relevancies from sources overlooked by social scientists as unfit data for quantitative analysis.

Ultimately, the book’s weaknesses are also strengths. As transdisciplinary work, it has no clearly delineated niche. Like other interdisciplinary work, it can get overlooked in the less traveled space between science and art, which makes it more valuable in terms of covering less-treated subjects. Today’s readers, who are relatively accustomed to genre-bending memoirs and journalistic research by public intellectuals, will appreciate discovering that precedents and imitations abounded in the 1930s as well. David Peeler explains,

Minehan’s investigative efforts represent an important aspect of the intellectual atmosphere of the 1930s, one that emerged in some unusual quarters. During a social crisis such as the Depression, it is understandable that sociologists would be drawn into field work like Minehan’s. But a remarkable thing about this decade is the frequency with which non-sociologists abandoned their usual pursuits and imitated the efforts of sociologists. Authors such as Erskine Caldwell, Sherwood Anderson and Nathan Asch left behind their fiction for projects similar to Minehan’s; they forsook novels for what they assumed to be the straight reporting of facts about Depression America. Lacking investigative training and without much dedication to the rules of evidence, they seldom produced pieces with the rigor found in Minehan’s dissertation work. (quoted in J. F. Lennon, 266)

Where Minehan might wax purple or linger too anecdotally for scientific practice, he succeeded at capturing a hybrid disciplinary and artistic opportunity that fit the populist pragmatism unique to Depression-era subcultures. And he succeeds at hybridizing art and science, with a democratically accessible finished product that could paint what I had seen, record what I had heard. And I was not even an amateur craftsman. Yet, for the sake of the homeless thousands of boys and girls, I decided to try (Minehan, introduction xxii). He might not master either role separately, but the sum in this case is greater than the parts, especially for new readers removed by generations from the subjects in this study.

Voicing the twenty-first-century zeitgeist in sociology toward popularizing and patronizing urban ethnography, Loïc Wacquant captured the failings of the trend as sanitizing, dichotomizing, and romanticizing accounts of poverty, which could slip into sociologically colored ‘human-interest’ storytelling in which rationalism gives way to sentimentalism, reportage trumps analysis, and witnessing smothers theory (1526). Though valid criticisms that highlight compromises to authenticity, they reduce the context of such work with another false dichotomy—overlooking the rich sources between and beyond rationalism and sentimentality. Inter-disciplinary scholarship can combine empirical and humanist representations with greater impact for a wider audience.

Within this more holistic context, the popular subgenre provides significant comparisons. One need only compare Jessica Bruder’s far-reaching Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century with its diluted but Oscar-winning film adaptation, Nomadland (2020), to have a sense of how appropriative slumming can reduce factual observations of seasonal-laboring, houseless but not homeless rubber tramps quite quickly to little more than a road-trip flick. Whereas the book leaves consumer capitalism and Amazon’s CamperForce program laid bare for reader critique in numerous directions, the toothless film offers barely any hint of the book’s historical and economic contextualizations, which effectively show significant similarities between Depression-era and current-day transience (Bruder, 74–76, 142). And yet, the film is no doubt attracting readers who would not have otherwise sought out the book.

Both Minehan’s and Bruder’s work is written for a popular audience, illustrating expanding poverty and houselessness in time periods following unregulated business, extensive growth in wealth and poverty, decreased mobility, deprioritized inequities, and rampant exploitation. That Minehan is urgently relevant to understanding current crises is evident not just in this economic sense but also because he kept the focus on the more invisibly affected, the young. Of recent conditions, Yvonne Marie Vissing and colleagues warn: If we continue to follow historical and current trends, we can anticipate more poverty, more homelessness, more severe situations for children’s development, more people needing help as social structures become designed to keep people out instead of letting people in as a way to curb skyrocketing government expenditures. It could become normative if we don’t change our definitions, methodologies, and paradigms for understanding and addressing family homelessness (39). Likewise, Minehan’s work suggests that many families chose kicking out a teen rather than making the family houseless, so the challenges boy and girl tramps face are not simply family problems.

They themselves are not the problem either. As Garbarino and colleagues, and later research confirm, we need to "move away from considering running away as an effect of adolescent troubles to running away as a cause of adolescent troubles (47). And, consistent with contemporary research on throwaway" kids, Minehan’s research demonstrates that running away is also a result of troubles at home. Throwaway kids in boxcars are on their own as a solution to their family problems.

Even during the Progressive years in which kids might have read books like The Box-Car Children (Warner, 1924) about temporary orphans indulging in quaint exercises of self-sufficiency until their wealthy, loving patrons can find them,³ the general public understood the actual dangers of boxcar living. Tramping lite could be depicted as a great adventure—an early equivalent of car-camping—testing survival skills without risk, and building character, but being young on the rails was far from idyllic. Theodore Caplow would write in 1940, Between ten and twenty thousand illegal train riders are apprehended daily on American railroads. Between two and three thousand were killed every year between 1920 and 1938, and a somewhat greater number injured (731). The primary reason for taking such risks was, of course, economic. Most of Minehan’s informants refer to times before the trouble, when they had families and homes. Frank Tobias Higbie describes the common economic pressures within families: Young working-class women struggled with competing expectations to contribute income to family and to spend it on consumer goods. Similarly, working-class sons who hit the road could be a boon to their families when they sent money home from distant jobs or a burden when they returned home unemployed and broke (Higbie, 49). However, Minehan’s third chapter and tables 9–16 in his appendix demonstrate that even during the Depression, economic duress was not the only reason for riding the rails young.

Historically young drifters suffer from the assumption of troublesome adolescence—those going through it are presumed to be ungratefully running away from the safety and provisions of a loving family home, which is as untrue as it is widely unquestioned. Even where poverty is not a factor, girls are often unsafe at home. Minehan makes this point in a separate article he wrote on Girls of the Road: Had home been a real home for her, the girl would not have taken to the road (316). Teens rarely leave home without good reason, and their options leave them with little to run to (Flowers, 107). A girl tramp merely chooses one risk over another: The great size of our country, and the favorable attitude of our people toward adventuresome exploits has given the runaway boy an accepted place in our folklore … American communities, however, tend to deal harshly with their runaway girls. The popular belief is that it is ‘unnatural’ for a girl to set out for herself (Myers, 189). As we see in Minehan, authorities are more likely to arrest female hoboes than boys, and their policies treat the boys worse than they treat the men. So even where hobo studies and tramp literature idealize the boxcar as an equalizing space, we can see fallout between the lines. And it bears overfamiliar patterns.

In a moving boxcar, all hoboes might be equals, though sheer physical might, the color of one’s skin, or perceived gender would frequently test and expose the biases of the ideal. A freight car packed with unticketed riders of many stripes could stop anywhere along the lines if necessary, and all the cruel hierarchies of the larger society could brutally intersect on these margins of communities all over the United States. Such dangers were reportedly so much worse in the South⁴ that most hoboes would choose the deathly cold of winter stays in the North rather than stay for long in the heavily policed, antivagrant sundown towns throughout Old Dixie states.

Minehan records multiple perspectives on racial inequities, risks, and violence, but strangely absent is any mention of the framing of nine black teenagers riding the rails in 1931, three years before the publication of Boy and Girl Tramps, and two years before Minehan would first hop a freight to study young transience himself. In The Interracial Boxcar, John Lennon situates the Scottsboro Nine case as one that allows us to explore ways that worker solidarity within the boxcar can be eviscerated along racial and gendered lines—an argument initially used by activist and radical organizations who passionately reasoned during the trials that the nine African Americans, the white male accusers, and the two white females were all workers victimized by a capitalist system that used racial instigations to keep the working class in a perpetual fractured state (132). From today’s sadder-but-wiser perspective, race, class, and gender privileges make it difficult to generalize, but the case allows us to see contrasts that Minehan and others swept out of view.

In its intersectionality, the Scottsboro case provides the most publicized event in boxcar politics as a window