Homelessness in Anglo-American History
Vagabonds, waifs, strays, beggars, loafers or “loafters,” gamins, drifters, rovers, wanderers, waywards, transients, gypsies, bawdy-baskets, tinkers, rogues, itinerants, hobos, tramps, the people out of doors, vagrants, cony-catchers, the mudsill class, street people, downand- outers, ne’er do-wells. The string of names that have been attached to those who find themselves temporarily unhoused is long. They tell us a lot about how homeless people have been seen throughout history.
But history has been written by those who can afford pen and paper, and have time and a quiet place to sit down and use them. That means lots of stories have never been told. Author Kenneth Kusmer has rummaged through the National Archives of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, vagrancy dockets of county prisons in the 1790s, state statutes, colonial law, police reports, church bulletins, union pamphlets, early newspaper editorials, the memoirs, biographies and autobiographies of people who were homeless — anything he could get his hands on — to ferret out that history. Everyone who cares about how we in this country see and have seen homelessness should at least browse his book, Down and Out, On the Road. We can report here only a fraction of what he has uncovered.
One of the first people to write in detail about American life was a Frenchman who became a farmer in Pennsylvania. J. Hector St. John deCrevecoeur’s Letters From an American Farmer were written in 1774. It’s heartbreaking to read his description of our country as it was then. “We are,” he says, “a people… united by the silken bands of mild government… No country ever was so flourishing and happy as to have no poor… But this country is famous for taking care of those we have.”
But the truth is that by the time he wrote those words, this country had already seen over 100 years of homelessness. Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620. Only 20 years later, “vagrant persons” were listed among those Boston police were ordered to arrest on sight.
From that point until now, at virtually every moment in our history, from 10 to 20 percent of us have found ourselves either slipping into poverty, or trying to climb back out of it. As author Kusmer so powerfully notes, “No group was immune from falling into the homeless class, because no one was completely safe from the uncertainties of a largely unregulated capitalist economy. Whether black or white, immigrant or native-born, the homeless were drawn from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds and occupations. Given the right combination of unfortunate circumstances, homelessness was a condition that could happen to almost anyone.”
Those movements — upward or downward — have always been closely tied to the direction the economy is taking. Demobilization of Civil War troops in the spring of 1865, for instance, saw a surge of soldiers from the front and newly freed slaves. And after October 1929, the Great Depression produced a surge of newly homeless who became the impetus for homelessness finally making its way onto the national agenda.
Until that time, homelessness had been seen as a “local” problem, to be solved by police departments and churches. In the earliest years of the colonies, “poor relief” copied the Elizabethan code of 1601, holding the parish, county or town responsible for the poor within its boundaries. Both in England and the U.S. well into the nineteenth century, “parish relief” was the way homelessness was addressed. (“Faith based charity,” then, is hardly a new idea.) Those who didn’t have strong family, church, or town ties were “warned out,” as it was called — forced to move on and out of town. A town could deny all responsibility for caring for anyone they had “warned out.”
Attitudes towards homeless people have stayed stubbornly similar from earliest times to today, as many of this newspaper’s vendors can tell you. The tendency to “look away,” for instance, or to hide the homeless from sight by warehousing or “warning them out” runs deep in our culture. This impulse to look away is so common and so powerful that we have to assume homeless people inspire in the housed a tangle of emotions causing discomfort and fear: not of the homeless themselves, but a fear in the beholder that there they could be, if economic conditions fall just the wrong way because of the “vagaries” (an interesting word) of the marketplace.
If Kusmer’s research shows how much our national response to homelessness has consisted of either looking away or driving away, a constant response on the part of government has been, repeatedly, to study it. As early as 1796, The Society for Bettering the Conditions of the Poor in England set itself the task of making “inquiry into all that concerns the poor and promotion of their happiness a science.” We have been “making inquiries” ever since. Charles Booth was famous for his extensive Life and Labour of the People of London in 1889. Henry Mayhew actually interviewed street people about how they lived and supported themselves. The articles he wrote telling their stories were widely read. They were collected in London Labour and the London Poor. You can still read those stories, and learn how the homeless scraped some cash together before the invention of the returnable can.
William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, wrote In Darkest England in 1890. As his title suggests, the housed and comfortable saw the “land” of poverty and homelessness as if it were another country — as far away as England saw Africa, which they called “the dark continent.” They read these accounts as they would read travel books: to learn about people from some other place. This is a paradox, but true; the housed liked to “visit” the homeless in books; they did not want to look at them in person.
The third national impulse after looking away, or endlessly “studying” the homeless rather than helping them toward self-sufficiency, has been to classify them. Both English law and the Anglo-American legal tradition began by defining “vagrants” as unemployed workers, passing the earliest Vagrancy Laws around the year 1349. In time, the laws covered beggars, jugglers, minstrels and thieves, and in the U.S. in the nineteenth century, what were called “characters” — paupers, runaway slaves, prostitutes, and gamblers.
Why this rage to classify? Simply, to draw a divide between the voluntarily homeless (which bums, hobos and tramps were presumed to be), and the involuntarily homeless (displaced workers, elderly, disabled and the like); to distinguish between what were called “deserving” and “undeserving” homeless. Always the impetus was the same — to punish or at least ignore the voluntarily, able-bodied homeless, while aiding those who were not.
Deciding what category a person fit into seems to have been a full-time job for lots of bureaucrats, who decided, at various historical moments, that the homeless were all foreign- born, all union organizers (and therefore subversives), or all criminals.
In times when unemployed workers have banded together for political action, they have referred to themselves as “on tramp,” defiantly embracing the derogatory term they knew would be put on them. In Chicago, for instance, unemployed ironworkers and cigar makers who were referred to as “tramps” replied, “We don’t work because there is no work,” reminding their critics “Christ was a tramping vagabond too.”
Who has historically responded with most understanding to those who find themselves homeless? The working class has been more sympathetic than the affluent. In the nineteenth century, servants in wealthy homes slipped food stolen from their bosses’ kitchens into the hands of the homeless. Racial minorities have been kinder than whites; Catholics more kind than Protestants, since Catholic tradition has always embraced mendicant (begging) monks.
In fact, one enduring problem is that our country was founded by English Puritans, who saw idleness as a sin. In largely Protestant England, “sturdy beggars” in early centuries had been beaten, deported; even mutilated and hanged. The colonists settling New England brought those harsh attitudes with them. Although people not able to care for themselves were seen as part of the community and thereby thought to be the responsibility of good Christians, the “wandering poor” were believed to have broken the bonds of community and rejected God’s commandment to work. “Noe idle drone bee permitted to live amongst us” pronounced Massachusetts Bay Company’s first governor, John Endicott in 1629.
That hatred of the “sin of idleness” has complicated attitudes ever since. In 1859, Samuel Smiles published Self-Help. A hymn to the virtues of “boot straps,” this hugely popular book cemented the conviction that poverty was the fault of the impoverished. For most of the nineteenth century, wandering vagrants were arrested and sent to jail, where they were typically forced to walk ‘round and ‘round on a treadmill, a giant wheel that has to have felt like walking up a set of stairs for hours at a time, and getting nowhere. Prison guards carried a screw to adjust the speed of the treadmill; thus, they became known as “screws.”
Governments have always worked hard to minimize the connections between the country’s economy and political situation, and the numbers of homeless citizens. But the historical evidence for those links is massive and irrefutable. The easiest way to prove how powerful that link turns out to be is by constructing a time line. I have extracted some of the highlights-or should I say lowlights-from the history Kusmer reports, focusing especially on Boston and New England (though Kusmer covers the entire country), and stopping with the 1970s not because Kusmer does (he carries his survey up to the present), but because most of us will be familiar with events of the past twenty years.
1658 Plymouth Colony is the first to pass a law establishing a house of corrections for vagrants, rebellious children, and stubborn servants who refuse to work.
1675 King Phillip’s War (the Indian Wars) disrupts Massachusetts and Rhode Island’s countryside, forcing settlers from their farms. They become homeless on the streets of Boston, where Bostonians complain “the sin of idleness doeth greatly increase.”
1699 Massachusetts moves to suppress “Rogues, Vagabonds, Common Beggars and other Lewd and Disorderly Persons” by allowing towns to establish workhouses where inmates could be whipped if they refused to work.
1713 The colonies finally distinguish between paupers and vagrants, requiring that vagrants be kept at hard labor while in jail. Those who resisted were to be punished “by whipping on his or her naked back.”
1729 Scotch-Irish immigrants arriving by boat to Boston can’t find jobs. Selectmen order 49 destitute inhabitants of one ship arriving from Ireland to leave town at once. In Philadelphia, a law is passed allowing police to expel indigent migrants from outside the city or from Europe. Six years later another law limits public welfare of any kind to legal residents of the city only.
1734 New York newspapers complain “many beggarly people wander about the streets.” In response, the next year the city builds its first combination “Poor House, Work House, and House of Correction” to house them.
1730s Philadelphia, New York, Providence and Boston experience a widening gap between rich and poor. Ex-servants, apprentices, runaway servants and runaway slaves-all those who preferred freedom at any cost-make up much of the homeless population.
1760-1820 By working in family units, combining farming on leased land with small-scale home manufacturing or picking up odd jobs as itinerant workers, many, especially immigrants, are able to raise themselves out of homelessness.
1796 There is a swell of “vagrants” in New York after the British lose the American Revolution and leave the city. Overcrowding in the jails and workhouses leads officials to place many “vagabonds” in the city almshouse until a new four-story building is built to house them.
1820s An increase in homelessness, especially in the small but growing cities. We can tell how many homeless there were by checking court records for “vagrancy convictions.”
1840s-1850s Towns set up in each police station a “tramp room” for the homeless. Officials in some cities start recording the number of persons sleeping there. The estimate is that 10 to 20 percent of families experience homelessness at some point during this period. Kusmer reports that “between the mid-nineteenth and the midtwentieth century, a substantial proportion of the American public joined the ranks of the ‘down and out’ at some point in their lives. Although we will never know exactly how many homeless people existed,” he admits, “their numbers must surely be measured in the millions.”
1857 A major economic depression in the U.S. increases the homeless population in every city.
1850s-1870 Women make up a significant number of those who are homeless. By the end of the century the U.S. will pass “mothers’ pensions” laws to assist indigent women and children.
1850s Immigrants, especially Irish escaping the potato famine in Ireland, make up a large share of the homeless population.
1865 After the Civil War, the Charity Organization Society (COS) tries to replace the “tramp rooms” with a system of privately run shelters. Men are required to submit to a “work test” before getting food or lodging. Charity officers join forces with the police to try to stop street begging. Two-thirds of those in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Illinois prisons are veterans.
1870s Homelessness emerges as a national issue as the numbers increase dramatically, partly as a result of post-Civil War displacement, partly because of a bad economy and poor job opportunities.
1870s With the rise in railroads, a new category of homeless, “the tramp” emerges; some younger men out for adventure, some displaced workers.
1879 The COS (Charity Organization Society), taking the lead in social welfare reform, pushes work, believing that tramps are voluntarily idle and therefore a bad model for citizens to see, showing “that it was possible to survive in industrial America without work or discipline.” They institute in Boston the first “wayfarer’s lodge,” the first genuine shelter for the homeless. It also serves breakfast, in exchange for required work.
1894 In another economic downturn, “Coxey’s Army,” a large group of unemployed men, travels to Washington, D.C. to petition the government for assistance.
1900-1910 Native-born homeless now outnumber immigrants, who have mostly assimilated into American life and culture.
1900s Forcing the “wandering poor” to “move on” no longer works, since another group is likely to come to town on the next train. This causes discomfort to many residents of towns, who start, incorrectly, to blame the waves of immigrants. Younger social workers try to promote a more humane approach to homelessness, but no change takes place until the Great Depression forces the federal government to become involved.
1945+ The face of homelessness changes, as aging homeless men become confined to skid rows in the inner cities, where the homeless become more “invisible” to their fellow citizens, and issues of homelessness are dropped from the nation’s agenda.
1960s-1970s During “urban renewal” most old lodging house districts and skid row hotels in the cities are demolished, increasing homelessness again.
1970s A younger, more diverse population of “street people” draws attention back to the problem that has never gone away.
Susan