Scholar Follows Hobo Trail to Customs, Language of Bygone America

A hobo was a person who wandered and worked; a tramp wandered and wouldn’t work; a bum couldn’t wander and wouldn’t work.

Those definitions come from Lynn Adrian, an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Alabama, who has completed a study of the subcultures of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

She said the hobo life ended for the most part in the 1930s, but it spawned terms that added spice to the language.

Reefers, for instance, were refrigerated railroad cars. Jungles were hobo camps on the side of railroads. A lump was a lunch hobos were given to take away and eat. A sit-down meant they were invited to eat with the family, a prized invitation.

There were about 10 names for lice, including crumbs, cooties and seam-squirrels. The term buggy, often used to mean crazy, comes from lice and the feeling that one’s head is crawling.

Hobo Language

Hobos gave us bull for a policeman, cush for easy as in riding on a cushion inside a railroad car, collar for getting arrested, and on the lam for fleeing. Chi for Chicago, K.C. for Kansas City, Philly for Philadelphia and Minnie for Minneapolis come from hobos.

Hobos usually went by nicknames. Since injuries were common, some names stemmed from physical problems. Blinkies were those who had lost an eye. Lefties were those who had lost an arm.

“The way you spoke identified you as a part of the subculture,” Adrian said.

Hobos would leave large pots in their jungles for other hobos. A hobo would bathe in the nearest source of water and use the pots to “boil up,” boil his clothes.

Carrying the banner meant walking all night to keep from being arrested.

Migratory Work Force

Adrian said hobos formed a migratory work force, unskilled or semiskilled, working in such jobs as harvesting, lumbering, railroad track repair and construction.

Women hobos sometimes were harvesters or cooks, or just chose to travel, usually disguised as men and always wearing pants, because that’s the only way to ride trains.

The hobo subculture primarily was in the Midwest and West, with some in the East. Hobos tended to stay away from the South because of chain gangs and strict enforcement of vagrancy laws. There also was a ready pool of unskilled labor in the South.

There was de facto segregation in the hobo jungles, but blacks and whites sometimes traveled together, another reason for avoiding the South in that era.

Most Under 30

Adrian said most hobos were under 30, after which they tended to settle down unless they were stricken with wanderlust. In 1924, she said, there were nearly 2 million hobos.

Almost every major city outside the South had a hobo college that served as an educational forum, a gathering place and a source of information about social programs and train schedules. The colleges were sponsored by the International Brotherhood Welfare Assn.

Hobo colleges faded in the 1920s and the subculture all but died in the 1930s, she said, because there was less need for the kind of labor hobos did and because there was a large population base everywhere and no need for traveling workers.

Changes in Trains

In addition, she said, trains became faster and more streamlined and therefore harder to ride, while the automobile brought more hitchhiking.

Hobos, she said, were part of the working-class culture, not Skid Row bums or street people.

Delving into the hobo subculture, she said, “was like researching the hole of a doughnut; you have to go all around it.”

Much of the material she examined came from the National Archives, the Library of Congress and the library at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Adrian said she also found material in copies of hobo news publications.