Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America [Hardcover]

Todd DePastino (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0226143783 | ISBN-13: 978-0226143781 | Publication Date: September 30, 2003 | Edition: 1

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.

In this eye-opening work of American history, Todd DePastino tells the epic story of hobohemia's rise and fall, and crafts a stunning new interpretation of the "American century" in the process. Drawing on sources ranging from diaries, letters, and police reports to movies and memoirs, Citizen Hobo breathes life into the largely forgotten world of the road, but it also, crucially, 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. DePastino 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. Citizen Hobo's sweeping retelling of American nationhood in light of enduring struggles over "home" does more than chart the change from "homelessness" to "houselessness." In its breadth and scope, the book offers nothing less than an essential new context for thinking about Americans' struggles against inequality and alienation.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This vivid narrative succeeds in provoking new questions about the role of homelessness in shaping American history."

(Brad D. Lookingbill The Historian )

"DePastino offers a fascinating look at a little-known sector of the laboring class that often did not work. In so doing he contributes to a welcome trend in which historians are redirecting attention from the workplace to the community in order to understand more fully the texture of working-class life."

(Evelyne Savidge Sterne American Historical Review )

From the Inside Flap

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.

In this eye-opening work of American history, Todd DePastino tells the epic story of hobohemia's rise and fall, and crafts a stunning new interpretation of the "American century" in the process. Drawing on sources ranging from diaries, letters, and police reports to movies and memoirs, Citizen Hobo breathes life into the largely forgotten world of the road, but it also, crucially, 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. DePastino 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. Citizen Hobo's sweeping retelling of American nationhood in light of enduring struggles over "home" does more than chart the change from "homelessness" to "houselessness." In its breadth and scope, the book offers nothing less than an essential new context for thinking about Americans' struggles against inequality and alienation.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 350 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (September 30, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226143783
• ISBN-13: 978-0226143781
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #260,165 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I teach and write history with a special expertise in disaster, carnage, mayhem, and misery. If it's the history of peaceful, well-adjusted, mainstream, or successful people or groups that interests you, you'll probably want to look elsewhere. I'm drawn to the down-and-out, the forgotten, and the doomed. I should probably get this checked.

In addition to my teaching and writing, I'm also the co-founder of the Veterans Breakfast Club, a non-profit that gathers veterans together with their friends, families, and neighbors to share stories from their time in the military. Right now, our focus is on WWII veterans, and we regularly host 500 veterans and others at breakfasts around Pittsburgh. I'm getting quite an education at our breakfasts, which you can follow on my blog.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great on Book TV, Better in Print, January 22, 2004

By 

Samuel M. (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Hardcover)

I saw this author on C-Span's Book TV and was captivated by the way he described the homeless "hobohemia" counterculture of the early 20th century. The excerpts he read and the enthusiasm he conveyed for his subject convinced me that this would be a book worth buying. As I soon found out, and as another reviewer has said, "Citizen Hobo" is so much more than a history of homelessness. It is a "tour-de-force," a historical pageant that compresses what the author said was 10 years of research into a little over 300 pages.

"Citizen Hobo" tells a great epic. After the Civil War, large-scale changes in the economy put millions of "tramps" on the road in seach of work. These men eventually created their own culture that DePastino calls "hobohemia." While many Americans romanticized hobohemia and even embraced the hobo life as a liberation from the "rat race" of capitalism, government officials and politicians like Franklin Roosevelt tried to figure out ways to get hoboes to settle down. During the Great Depression and World War II period, these leaders created new welfare programs and forms of prefential treatment intended to encourage white men to get married, buy a house, have kids, and conform to the "American way of life." (After reading this book, you will never think of Roosevelt's New Deal or the GI Bill in the same way again!) These programs poured so much money into suburban cookie-cutter homes during the 1950s and 1960s that little was left over for apartments and lower-cost housing in the city, a failure that contributed to the homelessness crisis of the last twenty years.

This is just the bare outline of a story which is so richly textured and multi-dimensional that the reader can get lost in the fascinating details. But DePastino knows just when to pull the reader back and show the big picture again. His writing is beautiful and elegant, not a zippy read that can be dispensed with quickly, but a deep and thoughtful narrative with lots of great anecdotes and analyses along the way. His examinations of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" and "Dharma Bums" are masterful, as are the stories he tells about Walt Whitman, Jack London, Charlie Chaplin, Woody Guthrie, Bill Mauldin, and many others. Although DePastino covers the economic and policy angles on the problem, his first love is obviously culture, especially literature, music, and movies. While the other reviewer wanted to run out and listen to Guthrie, Dylan, and Springsteen after reading the book, I wanted to watch the movies that "Citizen Hobo" discusses, like "Modern Times," "Sullivan's Travels," and "Easy Rider."

DePastino is convinced, and he has convinced me, that homelessness is woven into the fabric of American life and that to address homelessness means changing, yet again, the rights of American citizenship.

This is a great book. Let's hope we don't have to wait 10 years for another from this author!

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Giving Voice to the American Experience of Homelessness, January 2, 2004

By 

John Young (Pittsburgh, PA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Hardcover)

When I finished Mystery Train and Ranters & Crowd Pleasers by Greil Marcus, I found myself dazzled by the breadth of the author's knowledge and his ability to connect ideas. I also wanted to run to my shelves of CDs and albums to re-examine Marcus's primary sources, to hear the music I already knew in dynamic new contexts.
I was no less creatively and intellectually energized by Todd DePastino's Citizen Hobo. DePastino's subject is American homelessness, not the cultural gravity of pop music a la Marcus. Citizen Hobo, though, is quick to view the issue not only through traditional scholarship, but also through literature, dime store novels, letters, the underground press and songs, material that brings DePastino's stories to life. By the time I finished Citizen Hobo I wanted to re-read On the Road and The 42nd Parallel, dive into some Whitman and Frost and burn my own CD compilation of songs about hoboes and home, spinning off from Springsteen, Dylan and Guthrie. I offer that as high praise.
As for the primary theme of DePastino's work, it's not easily summarized. Make no mistake that this is a rich, academic text that assumes a strong understanding of post-Civil War American history and political ideologies. Still, the narrative is crisp, engaging and eminently readable. Citizen Hobo traces the metamorphosis of hoboes from white men who followed the roads to work in the late 1800s to the modern men and women of various backgrounds who have become both homeless and "houseless." In doing so, DePastino delves into American racism and sexism, the failures and successes of capitalism in providing genuine opportunities for all, public perceptions versus the realities of homelessness, and the politicizing and artistic celebrations of "hobohemia." If there's one overarching idea it's that American notions about the homeless have too often been oversimplified, ideologically charged or based on erroneous information. Citizen Hobo gives individuals back their various unique and compelling voices by presenting the subject of homelessness in all its complexity.
I'd go on, but I'm distracted by thinking about which of Lou Reed's New York songs better represents DePastino's depiction of 1980s homelessness - "Dirty Boulevard" or "Xmas in February." Read Citizen Hobo and prepare to be inspired to rethink your own perceptions of the homeless and re-explore your own touchstones of the American experience.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great on Book TV, Better in Print, January 22, 2004

By 

Samuel M. (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Hardcover)

I saw this author on C-Span's Book TV and was captivated by the way he described the homeless "hobohemia" counterculture of the early 20th century. The excerpts he read and the enthusiasm he conveyed for his subject convinced me that this would be a book worth buying. As I soon found out, and as another reviewer has said, "Citizen Hobo" is so much more than a history of homelessness. It is a "tour-de-force," a historical pageant that compresses what the author said was 10 years of research into a little over 300 pages.

"Citizen Hobo" tells a great epic. After the Civil War, large-scale changes in the economy put millions of "tramps" on the road in seach of work. These men eventually created their own culture that DePastino calls "hobohemia." While many Americans romanticized hobohemia and even embraced the hobo life as a liberation from the "rat race" of capitalism, government officials and politicians like Franklin Roosevelt tried to figure out ways to get hoboes to settle down. During the Great Depression and World War II period, these leaders created new welfare programs and forms of prefential treatment intended to encourage white men to get married, buy a house, have kids, and conform to the "American way of life." (After reading this book, you will never think of Roosevelt's New Deal or the GI Bill in the same way again!) These programs poured so much money into suburban cookie-cutter homes during the 1950s and 1960s that little was left over for apartments and lower-cost housing in the city, a failure that contributed to the homelessness crisis of the last twenty years.

This is just the bare outline of a story which is so richly textured and multi-dimensional that the reader can get lost in the fascinating details. But DePastino knows just when to pull the reader back and show the big picture again. His writing is beautiful and elegant, not a zippy read that can be dispensed with quickly, but a deep and thoughtful narrative with lots of great anecdotes and analyses along the way. His examinations of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" and "Dharma Bums" are masterful, as are the stories he tells about Walt Whitman, Jack London, Charlie Chaplin, Woody Guthrie, Bill Mauldin, and many others. Although DePastino covers the economic and policy angles on the problem, his first love is obviously culture, especially literature, music, and movies. While the other reviewer wanted to run out and listen to Guthrie, Dylan, and Springsteen after reading the book, I wanted to watch the movies that "Citizen Hobo" discusses, like "Modern Times," "Sullivan's Travels," and "Easy Rider."

DePastino is convinced, and he has convinced me, that homelessness is woven into the fabric of American life and that to address homelessness means changing, yet again, the rights of American citizenship.

This is a great book. Let's hope we don't have to wait 10 years for another from this author!