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REVIEWS
| Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America. By Todd DePastino (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. xxv + 325 pp. Photographs, illustrations, notes, index. Cloth $32.50/Paper $20.00).
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| Citizen Hobo makes a significant contribution to our understanding of homelessness and domesticity in the century after the Civil War. In this rich cultural history, Todd DePastino explains how out of the Civil War and industrial capitalism an army of footloose hoboes constructed a countercultural movement grounded in migratory work, mutual aid, masculinity, and whiteness. Reformers, intellectuals, and elites feared the subversive effects of such workers. How these two groups interacted and understood each other (and themselves) drives the narrative of this story. From the Gilded Age to the present, DePastino argues, private and public repression of the "homeless" was sparked by cultural crisis around home, sexuality, and citizenship. |
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Citizen Hobo is organized into four parts. Parts one and two, the most detailed of the four, draws on hobo newspapers, song, and autobiographies as well as ethnographies, dime novels, and the mainstream and labor press to reconstruct the lives of Progressive Era hobos. Mostly young, single, and male, these hobos by necessity and choice hopped the rails in search of seasonal jobs and relief, using their wits, each other, and their labor as their primary means of survival. Many were skilled workers and included famous figures such as Jacob Riis, Ben Reitman, and Jack London. Women and nonwhites were by and large excluded from this hobo community. Hobos divided their time between the road and the urban "main stems" that offered cheap rooms and leisure activities. Whether in the jungles (hobo camps on the road) or in urban lodging districts, the lives of these migratory workers challenged mainstream "beliefs in private nuclear families, moderate domestic consumption, and steady work"(91). |
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