GLR May-June 2024

ESSAY On the Road to Hobohemia W ILLIAM B ENEMANN

T HE FIRST TIME a stranger placed his hand on Jack Worby’s thigh, Jack was not entirely sure what to do. He was seventeen, an orphan who had been shuttled among various foster homes and reform schools, but now he was on his own and on the road in Buffalo, New York, con fronted with a situation he had never faced before. The stranger seemed nice enough, gentle and reassuring, Worby later wrote, and “when he kept endearing me with his words and caresses I began to get a queer sensation which I could not for all the world of me account for. It was a sort of soothing thrilling feel ing which seemed to urge itself on as soon as he touched me. It seemed as if I didn’t want him to take his hand off my thigh and when at last he did take it off I had a feeling of utter loneliness. I had never experienced anything like this before and the fact that I was with a man made it all the more difficult to explain.” Jack Worby was one of the hundreds of thousands of young men who took to the roads and rails of America in the decades between the end of the Civil War and the onset of the Great De pression of the 1930s. They called themselves tramps or hoboes

tramp—well, because of the life that was in me, of the wander lust in my blood that would not let me rest. ... I went on ‘The Road’ because I couldn’t keep away from it; because I hadn’t the price of the railroad fare in my jeans; because I was so made that I couldn’t work all my life on ‘one same shift’; because— well, just because it was easier to than not to.” Most Americans were aware that men of Jack London’s ilk were adrift across the country, men who had stepped away from the obligations of steady employment in order to travel by hitch hiking or by leaping onto moving freight trains. To some ob servers of a more romantic bent, these men were kin to the bohemian artists and writers in Parisian garrets or in the base ment apartments of Greenwich Village—hungry by choice, un employed by design, bravely marching to a different drummer. The special community that those tramps created became known by the portmanteau word “Hobohemia,” and while life on the roads and rails was often cold and rough, tramps during this early period could depend on a surprisingly sympathetic network of community support during their wandering. Police stations often allowed tramps to sleep overnight in unlocked cells or even in hallways, and a knock at the back door of many homes at mealtime could secure a “poke-out” (a meal wrapped in an old cloth or newspaper) or even a “set-down” (an invitation to eat at the family table). From its inception, Hobohemia was overwhelmingly male and white. For all the pæans to the joys of the open road, “The Road” for many Americans was neither joyful nor open. Women traveling alone were assumed to be of easy virtue and were subject to harassment. There were female hoboes, but their number was so small that when Bertha Thompson’s Sister of the Road: The Autobiogra phy of Boxcar Bertha was published in 1937, it shocked and fascinated the nation. Not until years later did sociol ogist Dr. Ben Reitman admit that he was “Bertha Thomp son,” and that the book was a work of fiction based on the lives of the few hobo women he had been able to inter view. The true number of women on The Road is impos sible to calculate because they were intentionally excluded from most surveys (their number was assumed to be statistically in significant), and because some women traveled undetected, dis guised as men for their own safety. The Road was home to a relatively small number of men of color, primarily Blacks fleeing the restrictions of the Jim Crow South, or, especially in the Southwest, Latinos. In the hobo “jun gles” (outdoor gathering spots at the edge of town), all races were usually welcome to gather around the campfire and share in communal meals—so much so that the jungle was referred to as “the melting pot of trampdom”—but the police were not like wise equitable in their treatment of vagrants, and a person of color who knocked on a back door at dinner time was likely to

or ’boes. Poets and sociologists called them vagabonds. Cops called them vagrants. The Industrial Workers of the World called them a successful anarcho-syndicalist society. Many peo ple called them bums. Their numbers would soar during eco nomic downturns like the Wall Street crash of 1873 or the Panic of 1893, but there was always a core group who were on the road, not because they could not find a job, but because they had been restless and unhappy in the places they came from. Novelist Jack London wrote of his reasons: “I became a William Benemann is the author of Men in Eden: William Drummond Stewart and Same-Sex Desire in the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade and Un ruly Desires: American Sailors and Homosexualities in the Age of Sail .

TheG & LR

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