Vancouver braced for a ‘Hobo Army’
On July 28, 1908, readers of the Vancouver World received the startling news that a “Hobo Army is Headed This Way.”
The warning came from Vancouver police chief Rufus Gardner Chamberlin, who was trying to talk city council into building a bigger jail. According to Chamberlin, the word was out in the hobo jungles across the continent that Vancouver had a shortage of jail cells.
“Four hoboes were sentenced to ( jail) terms this morning and three of them claimed San Francisco as their last resting place,” the World reported. “When the ‘bo’ army learns that a place is short of jail accommodation, it heads that way.”
The warning was total bunk, and council rejected the police chief ’s request. But the local cops remained leery of “the hobo element.” On Oct. 6, the World reported that police had arrested a dozen hoboes, and nine had been sent to jail.
“Papers published in cities that are in the habit of shipping their undesirables to Vancouver are desired by the police to publish this news,” the World noted.
Hoboes had been a favourite bogeyman for the police, politicians and the press since the term first started appearing in newspapers in the 1890s.
Its first use in the World was on Aug. 11, 1891, when the paper reported “a hobo was ordered out of Nelson. He went to Ainsworth, was ordered out of there, returned to Nelson and was put gently on the railway track and told to go away.”
The term “hobo army” dates to 1894, when Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey proposed to put thousands of unemployed men to work with a “Good Roads Bill.”
Coxey wanted the federal government to spend $500 million on infrastructure across the U.S. His idea found a lot of support among workers who were struggling after an economic recession hit in 1893.
Up to 10,000 people went to Washington, D.C. to join a protest march on May 1, 1894. Many were unemployed, and had hopped freight trains to get to the capital. Papers dubbed the marchers “Coxey’s Army,” and then “the Hobo Army.”
Coxey was arrested after he tried to read his bill on the Capitol steps, and his army dispersed back to whence they came.
But hoboes, or homeless people, remained a fixture of the North American landscape though the Second World War. Vancouver had several hobo jungles in the 1930s Great Depression, including one by the city dump on the False Creek Flats.
The West Coast was popular with hoboes because of the mild winters. Author Jack London bummed across the continent in the 1890s, and said Vancouver was “the greatest ‘hand-out’ town on the continent.”
“Whenever he ‘hit’ Vancouver he found that when the pangs of hunger forced him to look around for a meal, the citizens had no hesitation in granting his request,” the World reported after London’s death in 1916. “Not so in other towns, London used to say. He used to be looked over very sceptically and it was about ‘50-50’ whether he got a meal or not.”
Newspapers would resurrect the image of a Hobo Army from time to time, often when activists organized marches of the unemployed.
On Jan. 14, 1908, 800 “hungry, out of work and thinly-clad men” marched to city hall in St. Louis to demand work. St. Louis mayor Rolla Wells promised to do what he could and the march ended peacefully.
A little over a week later Chicago radical Dr. Benjamin L. Reitman organized a march of several hundred hoboes in the Windy City, but the reaction of the authorities was much different — the police came out swinging, engaging in street fights with marchers and dispatching Reitman to jail. Believe it or not, hoboes were somewhat organized at the time — there was a national hobo organization called the Unskilled Migratory and Casual Workers Association.
The politics in the hobo world could be intense. Reitman was denounced as a “fake tramp” and deposed as head of Chicago’s hobo party on March 31, 1908 after he started having an affair with famed anarchist Emma Goldman.
“This Reitman says he was a hobo for 18 years,” said hobo Cincinnati Fat in a speech reported by the Chicago Tribune. “I don’t believe it. To be a full-fledged hobo a man must hit the road every so often. Now spring is comin’ and it is the time to hit the road. What is he doin’? Bumming around Minneapolis with this Goldman woman and stirring up trouble for the police.”