Hoboes and Tramps :: Unemployment Poor Essays

Hoboes and Tramps Hoboes and keep ones nose to the grindstones represented significant figures in the Statess history. The phenomenon of Hobohemia, the world of seates that was subject to its own indoctrinations, tells us much around the social and cultural climate of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Moreover, in examining the others of society, we gain a farthest better perspective of what circumstances modernist writers were working under. A bum is delimitate as a migratory worker who is usually unskilled. Although a tramp is basically defined in the same manner, a certain specialization exists. It is often said that the difference lies in the fact that a hobo wandered and worked, a tramp wandered and didnt work, objet dart a bum, another sympathetic term, neither wandered nor worked. Becoming widespread in the depression of the 1890s, the term hobo may have come from the slogan for farmhand, hoe-boy, or the phrase for correct man , homo bonus, or from simply yelling Ho Boy while on the lane.1 The most important aspect of the rise of hoboes and tramps was the advent of railroads and the skill to move to different parts of the country. After the Civil War, many veterans were verboten of work, restless, and displaced therefrom, they set out to travel and find new means for a better invigoration. Described as a tramp army, these early vagrants were not viewed positively by the general public. Many Americans were unfamiliar with the problems associated with wage labor, primarily unemployment. Therefore, the tramps were not regarded as people who were simply out of work and face for a new job, but at times as savages and symbols of evil.2 As the nineteenth century came to a close, many of the tramps had already been on the road for close to twenty years. Their endless pursuit for a better life became in itself a way of life known as Hobohemia. other distinction between tramps a nd hoboes is seen at the turn of the century. Tramps represented the earlier migrants in the post-Civil War times, while hoboes were tramps who had lived a large part of their lives as vagrants, thus interacting with other hoboes and forming a type of sub-culture that was independent, organized and at times political.