In the years following the Civil War, a veritable army of homeless men swept across America's “wageworkers' frontier” and forged a beguiling and bedeviling counterculture known as “hobohemia.” Celebrating unfettered masculinity and jealously guarding the American road as the preserve of white manhood, hoboes took command of downtown districts and swaggered onto center stage of the new urban culture. Less obviously, perhaps, they also staked their own claims on the American polity, claims that would in fact transform the very entitlements of American citizenship. This book tells the epic story ... More

In the years following the Civil War, a veritable army of homeless men swept across America's “wageworkers' frontier” and forged a beguiling and bedeviling counterculture known as “hobohemia.” Celebrating unfettered masculinity and jealously guarding the American road as the preserve of white manhood, hoboes took command of downtown districts and swaggered onto center stage of the new urban culture. Less obviously, perhaps, they also staked their own claims on the American polity, claims that would in fact transform the very entitlements of American citizenship. This book tells the epic story of hobohemia's rise and fall, and crafts a new interpretation of the “American century” in the process. Drawing on sources ranging from diaries, letters, and police reports to movies and memoirs, it breathes life into the largely forgotten world of the road, but also shows how the hobo army so haunted the American body politic that it prompted the creation of an entirely new social order and political economy. The author shows how hoboes—with their reputation as dangers to civilization, sexual savages, and professional idlers—became a cultural and political force, influencing the creation of welfare state measures, the promotion of mass consumption, and the suburbanization of America. This retelling of American nationhood in light of enduring struggles over “home” charts the change from “homelessness” to “houselessness.”