Hobos had their own magazine, The Hobo News, and their own slang with thirty different words to indicate different kind of hobos, bums and vagrants. They had organizations such as the IWW (the Industrial Workers of the World) and the IBWA (the International Brotherhood Welfare Association) that organized yearly meetings. Although the IWW was ridiculed by the bourgeois as an acronym for “I Want Whiskey” or “I Won’t Work,” it was actually a radical trade union of socialists, anarchists and others who were opposed to the moderate policies of the AFL, the American Federation of Labor. The IBWA was a less politicized organization, focusing more on education and mutual aid. There were colorful characters such as “The King of the Hobos” and “The Millionaire Hobo.” The last, a wealthy philanthropist called James Eads How, started the IBWA and also founded Hobo Colleges in Chicago, St. Louis, and other cities around the Midwest and East Coast. There, hobos could learn the rudiments of social sciences, work on their oratory talents, or even get grades in economic science.[42]
The heyday of the hobo was the three first decades of the twentieth century, when exploding industry and agriculture needed thousands of workers. Hobos laid railroad tracks in the expanding West, felled trees in Oregon and Washington, picked fruit and helped with harvests from Dakota to Missouri. They traveled by catching rides on freight trains, moving to wherever there was work. Every big city, especially Chicago and New York, had its own so-called bohemia, a neighborhood with flophouses, brothels, saloons, pawnshops, and employment offices. These were the golden days in the history of homeless, according to Cohen and Sokolovsky. Hobos were never truly broke, could always easily find new jobs, and were idealized and romanticized by the population. Anderson mentions alcoholism and other anti-social behavior in his study, but hobos were never viewed as problematic and needy cases. But with the end of ‘20s and the onset of the Great Depression, jobs disappeared and wages plummeted. The once-bustling bohemia changed into a rundown neighborhood. At the depth of the crisis, the number of homeless reached record levels. In a 1933 census, one and a half million were counted.[43]
“It is sad to listen to the noises of a street that had its spirit broken,” writes historian Bendiner about New York’s hobohemia, the Bowery.[44] “It is pathetic to see beggars where rebels once shouted, sang and whored.”
THE GROWTH OF HOMELESSNESS IN THE ’80S
The economy started the bumpy road to recovery in 1936, and the millions of jobless slowly found their way back in the workforce aided by Roosevelt’s New Deal. The war industry absorbed the last unemployed. The booming post-war economy and Truman’s Fair Deal reduced the national numbers of homeless to maybe a few thousand. Truman introduced legislation to help returning veterans—the G.I. Bill of Rights, the Veteran Administration, Social Security, and pension plans—and laid the foundations for what was later to become Medicare. The few thousands who still roamed the streets could be sheltered in churches, missions, and an abundance of cheap hotels.
Beginning in the late ’70s, the ranks of homeless started to swell again, only to explode in the early ’80s. It became clear that it was a new and huge problem. People pointed to the Reagan administration as the main culprit, as it steadily cut social programs and mental health care. The reality was much more complicated.
One of the best analyses appeared in 1994 in the publication The Homeless,[45] written by sociologist Christopher Jencks, who had already made a name for himself as a deep and pragmatic thinker with his book Rethinking Social Policy.
According to Jencks, deinstitutionalization of mental health care, a tightening of the labor market, the disintegration of traditional family structures, budget cuts for social programs, the crack epidemic, and finally the worsening housing market caused the most vulnerable people to cross that thin line from extreme poverty into homelessness.
The number of people with mental health problems among the homeless is remarkably high. In Rossi’s study of the homeless in Chicago, it appeared that 30 percent of the homeless had been institutionalized in the past.[46] Jencks estimates that one third of the current homeless population would be in an institution were the pre-Reagan health policies still in effect.
The deinstitutionalization of psychiatric care is a long process that had already begun in the ’50s. New medicines appeared on the market that made outpatient treatment possible.[47] Some patients benefited from this treatment more than they would have from a lengthy isolation in an asylum. For others, however, it had disastrous results. In more progressive psychiatric circles, mental hospitals were considered repressive government institutions.[48] According to this school of thinking, mental disorders did not exist; rather, mental health was a relative concept that existed only in a certain social and cultural context.
At the introduction of Medicaid and SSI in the ’60s and ’70s, patients began to enter federal hospitals or private clinics that received Medicaid and SSI payments directly, which state-run hospitals did not. Sufficient care was not taken, however, and many patients were declared cured and sent packing. At the end of the ’70s, progressive forces successfully lobbied for the restriction of involuntary commitment, and many more of the mentally ill were released into the streets. Federal and local governments with increasingly tight budgets welcomed these developments.
Then came the drastic budget cuts of the Reagan administration. Between 1981 and 1983, the eligibility standards to receive federal disability benefits were severely tightened. About three hundred thousand people, among them roughly one hundred thousand with mental problems, were dropped from the rolls. Most of them did not find work and wound up on the streets. According to Jencks, “this assault on the disabled was one of the low points of modern American social policy.”[49]
Rising unemployment caused a new wave of homelessness. In the early ’70s, there were one million unemployed single men living below the poverty level. By 1984, this population of the potentially homeless had risen to three million, of whom one third were black.[50]
These growing numbers of poor have been exacerbated by the disappearance of jobs requiring unskilled labor. A new wave of Latino immigrants, partly caused by the civil wars in Central America, put even more pressure on the labor market. According to anthropologist Kim Hopper, 279,000 jobs disappeared in New York alone due to outsourcing to low-wage countries, international competition, deregulation of labor laws, and automation.[51]
Over time, the American economy has changed from an industrial to service-oriented one. According to Hopper, the number of service-oriented jobs rose 60 percent in the period from the early ’70s to the late ’80s while industrial jobs decreased by 15 percent. The remaining industrial jobs required higher levels of education or experience.
Those able to find jobs were confronted with lower wages due to competition on the labor market: a new wave of legal and illegal immigrants, mostly Latinos and Asians, were willing to work eighty hour weeks in sweatshops.
Day labor also became harder to get. There used to be many places in Manhattan—the Meat Market district, the Bowery, 125th Street in Harlem—where early morning job seekers assembled. There they were picked up by middlemen who brought them to the docks, the construction sites, and the freight terminals where extra hands were always needed. These informal recruitment places for temp workers have all but disappeared.
42
Anderson,
43
Cohen and Sokolovsky,
45
Jencks wrote two articles in the
47
Tranquilizers such as Librium and Valium, neuroleptica and anti-psychotics like Haldol, Leponex (Clorapine) and Largactil (Thorazine).
48