Hoboes, homeless and such during WW2?

[filfoster]

View attachment 53567

What kind of jacket is that?

 

[SurfGent]

I

What kind of jacket is that?

I don't know. I googled some fun pictures for visual stimulation. But now that I look closer at the photo the jacket on the gentleman in question is interesting

 

[MikeKardec]

View attachment 53566

My father was an occasional hobo between the year of this painting (1924) until the early 1930s. Like many others he was in his teens and twenties at the time. Here's a couple of his quotes on the subject -

"For years there had been a surplus of labor in the United States, but it was largely unrealized because so many were constantly shifting jobs. There were at least four or five men for every job, but with the constant turnover some of them were working all the time; when the Depression came it was like a game of musical chairs. Those who had the jobs stayed with them and the others were left adrift in a country without work. During the knockabout years the hobo acquired a literature of his own. . . . Among the songs best remembered, although there were hundreds now lost, were 'Halleluya, I'm a Bum,' 'The Bum Song,' 'The Dying Hobo' and 'The Big Rock Candy Mountains,' The Hype Song' and a few others.... Among the poems known by many were TOLEDO SLIM, THE GIRL WITH THE BLUE VELVET BAND, the well known FACE ON THE BAR-ROOM FLOOR, DOWN IN LEHIGH VALLEY, and THE LURE OF THE TROPICS, dozens of others."

And -

"To properly understand the situation before the Depression one must realize there was a great demand for seasonal labor, and much of this was supplied by men called hoboes. . . . [A] hobo was a wandering worker and essential to the nation's economy. . . . Many hoboes would start working the harvest in Texas and follow the ripening grain north through Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska into the Dakotas. During harvest season when the demand for farm labor was great the freight trains permitted the hoboes to ride as the railroads were to ship the harvested grain and it was in their interest to see labor was provided. Often this lot of wandering workers were mixed with college boys earning enough money for school or working to get in shape for football. Some simply drifted because they enjoyed the life, the work in the open fields, the variety of towns and experiences and the chance to see the country. By and large these harvest workers were Anglo Saxon and Irish . . . but three was a good mixture of blacks and immigrants of European extraction. Latinos were rarely seen except in the Southwestern states. . . . The Depression hoboes had little of that carefree cheerful attitude of the earlier hobo. They were serious, often frightened men. They had come from towns where work was no longer available, and were, as we all were, seeking work."

He always felt that one of the best descriptions of hobos catching trains was Jack London's epic ride in "Holding her Down." It's specific to hopping a fast passenger rather than a freight but it's a great little article - http://london.sonoma.edu/writings/TheRoad/holding.html

 

[LizzieMaine]

 

[Stanley Doble]

Here is a graph of the US unemployment rate from the Depression to the end of WW2. Note that unemployment peaked in 1933 and the depression was ending by 1934. Then came the Roosevelt Recession in 1937 -38 when the government deliberately killed the economy to prevent another boom/bust cycle. Unemployment dropped steadily into the war years and hit a low of 1.2% in 1944. At that time anyone who wanted a job wouldn't be out of work for long. In the war years late 1941 - 1945 there was a social stigma attached to any man who was not in the armed forces or at least working in a war industry unless he was obviously too old, crippled or in bad health.

 

[p51]

Still looking into whether there were laws against people being unemployed or not if they couldn't be drafted during the war. I am sure I remember, years ago, hearing there was such a law somewhere but can't recall the context of that now.
I have a feeling that welfare programs were stretched pretty thin in the war years for those who genuinely couldn't work...

 

[sheeplady]

The unemployment figures are striking. Imagine sitting in a row of 12 people, and 3 of you are out of work.

As a teen, I used to read a magazine for homesteaders, and one of the things many of those writers emphasized was during the Great Depression 30% of Americans lived on farms, such that most people knew someone who lived on a plot of land where you could grow food. (Unless of course, you lived in the dust bowl, but they were ignoring that...) Now it's less than 2% of the population lives on a farm, leaving Americans with very little escape if times got tough, or so they argued.

I always felt like countering that with, "well, a lot of farmers lost their farms too, it wasn't guaranteed that having a farm meant you could pay your bills."

 

[LizzieMaine]

Still looking into whether there were laws against people being unemployed or not if they couldn't be drafted during the war. I am sure I remember, years ago, hearing there was such a law somewhere but can't recall the context of that now.
I have a feeling that welfare programs were stretched pretty thin in the war years for those who genuinely couldn't work...

Basicially if you could get to a job, there was a job for you -- these were the days when a one-armed man found a job playing left field for the St. Louis Browns. The US was essentially at "full employment" by the end of the war. The WPA and CCC were shut down in 1942 because there was no longer any need for them.

There was never a direct law saying "work or fight" during WW2 -- the War Labor Board heavily regulated those who had jobs, and most labor unions took a "no strike" pledge for the duration. But there *was* such a law during WW1, and it wasn't particularly successful.

What you may be thinking of is the situation with the 1946 coal and railroad strikes, in which President Truman threatened to draft striking railmen and miners into the Army unless they went back to work. This was the beginning of the Administration's unfavorable relationship with labor, and it generated a lot of bitterness on all sides. Truman in 1950 nationalized the railroads under control of the Army to break another strike, a move which likely cost his party the 1952 election.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Now that we have exhausted the subject of hoboes how about the homeless? During WW2 the housing shortage was acute especially in areas where war industries were booming. Probably the worst was California home of the largest aircraft plants plus a number of shipyards, and sea ports . People converted large houses to apartments, put living quarters in attics and garages, the government bought thousands of trailers and set up temporary trailer villages to house war workers.

In Canada the government built thousands of "wartime houses" 1 1/2 story 2 bedroom saltbox style prefab houses. At the beginning of the war they delivered a complete house with a couple of 5 ton trucks. Later they got trailers and delivered a house with a truck and trailer.

They were meant as temporary housing but many of them are still in use, and have been expanded and renovated to modern standards.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The housing shortage was chronic in parts of the US between 1944 and 1949 or so, especially in the Northeast, along the West Coast, in the industiral Midwest, and around the Washington DC area. One of the more creative solutions was the use of military surplus Quonset huts, which could easily be set up on any open lot. Another was the rise of mass-produced suburban housing developments patterned after Levittown.

Up here, houses built in the late 1940s are notorious for their fast, shoddy construction and use of second-rate materials. I grew up in a house built in 1949, and was amazed by the fact that the roof boards were repurposed billboards and road signs, which could still be read from the attic side. Many of these houses were built on landfill, created by throwing any kind of available debris into swampland, marshes, or other undesirable real estate. Our house stood on such a lot, and has been steadily sinking since it was built. After living there for fifty years, my mother is resigned to the fact that the cellar will nearly always be seeping water, and that anything wooden stored down there will rot very very fast.

There were concerns about housing even before the war. In 1941 the FHA introduced the "Homes For Defense" initiative, which provided low-interest loans to homeowners who would use the money to carve their houses into apartments for defense workers. My town is full of old Victorian houses which were apartmentized thru this program, and remain apartments today, but it didn't have to be a large house to qualify. Promotional materials for the program suggested that even a moderate sized house could be divided up if the homeowners were, say, willing to live solely on the downstairs floor and give over the upstairs to tenants.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

The shortage of housing led, especially in the industrial towns, to a sort of "time sharing." Factories worked three shifts around the clock, and people slept that way. Three families (or similar domestic arrangements) would all live in a single apartment, using the beds and couches in shifts. This had a special postwar consequence. Everyone was employed, there wasn't much to spend your money on since consumer manufacturing had pretty much stopped, so people socked their pay into bank accounts. After the war, that money came out and fuelled the great postwar spending binge.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Bonds and taxes, bonds and taxes, that's the way to beat the Axis."

 

[BlueTrain]

There were laws that were essentially aimed at people who were not working. Those were the vagrancy laws that most communities had. The aim of the laws were not so much to make people work as they were to make people simply go somewhere else. It was a simple and straight-forward way of dealing with a given problem. Most people really don't care if someone else doesn't have a job or a roof over their head or enough to eat. If there really people like that, it's just their own fault. Not everyone feels that way, of course, but it sure seems like most do. And as soon as one such law is declared unconstitutional or repealed, another one is passed to take its place, just worded a little differently.

It turns out that such laws have a long history in the Western world and I suspect that only rarely have any of them been passed to satisfy a labor shortage. There has also been a long-standing distrust and dislike of anyone who doesn't have a home, that is, a house or other fixed address. You sometimes see news accounts that mention someone "of no fixed address," and right away you assume the worst. Gypsies have that problem in Europe and in the Americas. And sometimes, the original inhabitants of a place, the "natives," which in the Americas are what we call Indians, are people to be pushed out of the way because their lifestyle in most cases doesn't meet our Western European standards of how people ought to live. Besides, we want the land.

It really is a rough world and rougher than most of us realize in ways we choose not to see.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

In medieval Europe there was a class of people called "sturdy beggars." These were people with no visible disabilities who begged rather than working. They were commonly expelled from towns or put in forced labor. If a town was besieged the sturdy beggars and other undesirables were expelled en masse to conserve resources. Often they were stuck between the town walls and the besieging armies and starved there. Rough world, indeed.

 

[MikeKardec]

There has also been a long-standing distrust and dislike of anyone who doesn't have a home, that is, a house or other fixed address. You sometimes see news accounts that mention someone "of no fixed address," and right away you assume the worst. Gypsies have that problem in Europe and in the Americas. And sometimes, the original inhabitants of a place, the "natives," which in the Americas are what we call Indians, are people to be pushed out of the way because their lifestyle in most cases doesn't meet our Western European standards of how people ought to live.

I suspect that this was an aspect informing a great deal of European/Middle Eastern history. I'm going on the theory that for a long time the real power was the lords who were agricultural land owners and tied to their food production and the serfs they could harness for the higher powers in time of war. Originally, the cities were just markets and the traders who lived there had less political clout than the land holders. I wonder sometimes if this isn't why a lot of Old World cities have avoided sprawl, they were crowded into defensive positions, like the intersection of two rivers, and the farms owned by the local aristocracy also hemmed them in, farm land that had greater clout in the feudal system than the city land.

The land owners could make exchanges with some governments and each other using the currency of long term obligation, intermarriage, land swaps, serfs and officers used as defensive or offensive troops, as well as money. And those serfs might have served the landowner for generations ... all their lives were rooted in the land to an extent barely understood these days.

The city people, the traders, the craftsmen, the bourgeoisie, didn't have land but the had MONEY. Eventually, as cities grew in importance, they acquired more and more of it, even as the landowners slowly branched out into industry which was also rooted to the land and its resources. The trader's money was often not worth as much as the landowners assets but it was PORTABLE. If you've been tried to (and thus loyal to) "the land" (whether you like it or not) for 1000 years, then people with the capacity to move (and take their money with them) are scary. They don't have the same loyalties you do. They will NEVER be bound to the same obligations you will and thus will never have the same values. If they are highly mobile, like the Gypsies, or semi mobile and follow a religion not bound to that same land, like the Jews, then they are highly suspect ... you don't have to love your system to know that they would have vastly different values and thus be utterly unreliable to the system you were a part of.

I think that throughout history many people who's assets were locked in and local, even after medieval, feudal, or whatever, times have suspected those who weren't part of the system. Even if they were poor. Movers can steal and vanish into the night and never be the worse off for leaving. Luckily, the system has been changing for so long that we are losing the last subconscious aspects of it but I wonder if those same subconscious aspects didn't lead to the Communists suspicion of the bourgeoisie, the Nazis suspicion of the Gypsies and Jews, and our own concerns of vagrants. The last, dying remnants, of a time and a system that has been dying for 500 years.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Vagrancy laws, well into the 1960s, were among the most arbitrarily-applied laws of the time. If you weren't of the favored ethnicity, religious, or political persuasion, you were much more likely to be escorted to the town line on a vagrancy charge. Such laws were also usually worded in such a way that you didn't even actually have to *do* anything to be considered a "vagrant." You didn't even have to be broke -- you just had to be someone a given cop didn't like. And interestingly, there was an explosion in vagrancy cases after the war, especially in the West and South, which had nothing to do with being broke, and everything to do with being suspected of being an "outside agitator."

It wasn't until the 1970s that these laws were declared unconstitutional.

 

[BlueTrain]

Yes and no on European history. Feudal society did not end at the same time everywhere and even in a single country, patterns of landownership could differ dramatically from one end of the country to the other. The first settlements in this country, meaning north of Mexico, all of which were established within a few years of one another in New France, New England and Virginia, and in New Mexico (north New Spain!), tended to mirror conditions at home as much as they could. But that was 400 years ago.

Europe is not such a large place but a lot of people live there. They still manage to raise enough food in most of those countries to feed themselves. So land use is more efficient; it has to be. You drive through the United States and you might get the impression that most of it is just sitting there unused. That's part of it.

The other part is that they have in most places managed to control development in such as way to create good living conditions for the people. So it is correct there is less sprawl than there is here, though there is some. But people just live differently. They have their birth rates under control, for better or worse. In the past, the "surplus population" came to the United States. There is also less mobility in Europe than there is in the United States and given current conditions there, it might get worse, with borders going back up that weren't there when we visited year before last. We drove through three countries without once being stopped. That might change. But I'm not so sure the city and country differences you mention hold so true, although the country people always tend to be more conservative and in a good way. The city people certainly didn't move around any more than the country people. Anyway, they have had so many wars in the last 400 years that a lot of the old things are gone. World War II was not the worst war Germany has had, you know.

 

[ChiTownScion]

Vagrancy laws, well into the 1960s, were among the most arbitrarily-applied laws of the time. If you weren't of the favored ethnicity, religious, or political persuasion, you were much more likely to be escorted to the town line on a vagrancy charge. Such laws were also usually worded in such a way that you didn't even actually have to *do* anything to be considered a "vagrant." You didn't even have to be broke -- you just had to be someone a given cop didn't like. And interestingly, there was an explosion in vagrancy cases after the war, especially in the West and South, which had nothing to do with being broke, and everything to do with being suspected of being an "outside agitator."

It wasn't until the 1970s that these laws were declared unconstitutional.

Actually I was serving in weekend "bum court" in Chicago as appointed counsel through the 1980's. City loitering ordinance violations were always dismissed/ non-suited: the guys were locked up for the night, given a meal and a warm place to sleep, and then let go- usually after breakfast. They'd only be held if there was an outstanding arrest warrant on another criminal charge. There were homeless shelters, rescue missions, etc. which could have offered services to the homeless, but there were some street people who preferred not to go that route.

Might have seemed a bit arbitrary and capricious, but the general thought that it was better than allowing them to freeze on the street all night. A Federal injunction finally ended the practice. Since no one ever actually went to trial on the charges no other remedy would have resolved it. The law was an anachronism by that time, and each of the corporation counsels (city prosecutors) assigned to the court couldn't dismiss the charges fast enough. And I don't think that the judges who sat in that court on a rotating basis were all that keen on slamming the downtrodden: I can remember a few of them reaching into their own pocket and giving a buck or two to each of the men "for bus fare home."

In the 90's, the city enacted a "gang loitering " ordinance. One judge had the courage to dismiss about twenty consolidated cases involving the charge, and the city (for political reasons) decided to appeal. That one went to the US Supreme Court: the original judge flew to Washington to watch oral arguments with all of the enthusiasm of a kid who'd been handed World Series tickets. His dismissal ruling was affirmed.

 

[p51]

I guess I started wondering about all this because I know that someone the locals considered to be a coward or draft dodger would sometimes get the living [bleep] stomped out of them in a back alley or lot somewhere, during WW2.
I have talked with people who were exempted from service during the war and most have told me they have to explain many times why they weren't in the service (usually to mothers of soldiers, one told me). Even cops would walk up and ask to see their card. Those who worked in heavy industry, I've been told, didn't get hassled as much because I guess that people assumed that you could do more for the war effort with a rivet gun than a machine gun.
I'd have thought that someone who just decided to drop out of society, draft dodger or not, would have met a similar fate as those who people thought were trying to skate out of serving.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles in 1943 were sparked by incidents of servicemen mercilessly attacking young Mexican-American men who were conspicuously dressed in outlandish civilian clothing. The resentment was both racially driven and by the fact that these young men weren't in uniform, and led to a number of copycat attacks in other major cities. Los Angeles actually prohibited the wearing of zoot suits in public as a consequence of these riots.

Eleanor Roosevelt publicly deplored the racism that drove these attacks, and for her trouble was labeled a Communist, for about the 9000th time, by the ultra-right-aligned Los Angeles Times.

That said, "Why aren't you in uniform?" was a very common response sneered at any able-bodied civilian man who started popping off about how the war ought to be fought, or who had the temerity to complain about suffering some petty inconvenience due to wartime conditions.


Jack Cass, deferred civilian: "Second front in Europe? Hmph! Who needs it!"
Fellow Subway Rider: "Yahh, tell it to Sweeney. An' why ain't you in uniform?"

Jack Cass: "Aw, give out, baby. Just one more cuppa coffee."
Waitress: "OPA regulations, bud. An' why ain't you in uniform."