THE CIVIL AUTHORITIES AND THE TRAMP
The average man on the street, or the average housewife, sees in the tramp either a parasite or a predacious individual. The average man may admit that there are many migratory men who would work, but he feels that most of them will not, and that they have neither permanent habits nor good intentions; they need to be watched. If the public opinion decrees that the town needs to be protected against tramps, it is the duty of the police to do it. There seems to be a relation between the pressure that the police bring to bear on the tramp and the pressure that the tramps impose upon the community which is reflected in the pressure the residents place on the police. In towns where vagrancy has become a problem, the police are very energetic in keeping down the number of apparently idle men.
In small towns, especially railroad towns, through which many tramps move, the police are “hostile.” A policeman in a Wyoming town on the Union Pacific Railroad asserts: “We’ve got to be hard on these fellows or they will eat us out of house and home in a week.” In the larger towns the police are sporadic in their harshness. Men of the road will ask one another about the attitude of the police in certain cities. “Omaha was good the first part of the winter,” reported a man in a circle about a camp fire, “I think I’ll go to Chi this winter if I don’t go to the Coast. I heard they were pretty easy on them there last winter.” Again, “I was in Chicago the most of the winter. They are all right there if you stay on the ‘stem.’” “How has K. C. been lately? I haven’t been there for five years.”
The average hobo will often avoid certain towns because he has heard that the “bo” will not be well received. He will sometimes go to a town even when he has heard of its drastic method of treating the transients. A “hard” police force and a drastic policy of repression do not keep tramps away. It selects out those who are willing to run the risk. Timid and inexperienced men are kept away, but the daring and veteran tramps who cause the police the most trouble are not so readily frightened off.
The police do not regard the tramp as a serious offender. If he steals, it is generally for something to eat or to wear. Every man on the road steals potatoes or green corn from the nearby fields, or fruit from the neighboring orchard, or chickens that stray within reach of the jungle.
Tramps will boast about what they will do when times get hard and cold weather crowds them. “I won’t starve. I worked all summer, and I won’t go hungry this winter.” This man was “broke” in spite of a summer’s hard labor in the harvest fields. His earnings quickly went for drink. He did get hungry, and his clothes were torn to tatters before spring, but he did not break in any windows as he had threatened. There are “crooks” among the tramps, but not so many as might be supposed. The average tramp does not possess the courage to be a first-class crook.
Warden Wesley Westbrook, of the Cook County jail, supports this estimate of the tramp as an offender:
I am convinced that the tramp does not have the courage to be a criminal. He will steal something to eat or wear, and he may steal a door mat or some article he may sell for a quarter to get a coffee-an’; or, if he is drinking, to get the price of a pint of whiskey. But tramps do not become criminal in the serious sense. They make noise and threats sometimes but I have found them an easy group to get along with. It takes considerable courage to break into a house or to hold a person up and the tramp will not do this. He seems to think that he can get a living easier and with less risk.
But whether a major offender or not, the fact is that the homeless man is almost always liable to arrest as a vagrant. He is marked as a potential offender. He always faces the possibility of being arrested on suspicion. Where the ex-convict is harassed by the authorities because they have his record, the tramp is often held because they do not have his record. Often migrants are taken from freight trains and transported many miles to the scenes of some offense only to be turned loose. Often they are held for days in local jails until they can prove an alibi or their identity can be established. For them there is no redress.
The status of the homeless man in the courts is not high. Again and again men are arraigned before the judge for vagrancy, fighting, drunkenness, begging, petty stealing, and other minor offenses. Any policeman can walk along West Madison Street any day and see some man or perhaps a dozen who could be arrested on some charge. If all policemen did this the jails would be full and the police courts in which these cases are tried would be continually overflowing. Only the most conspicuous cases are arrested. Those are numerous enough to keep an average judge busy in an average police court.
The judge who sits in the Desplaines Street police court, where more tramps are arraigned than in any other court in Chicago, faces sometimes as many as 100 men whose cases must be disposed of within a few hours. One morning the investigator visited Judge LaBuy’s court in the Desplaines Street station and saw more than fifty cases of vagrancy, disorderly conduct, drunkenness, etc., disposed of in less than half an hour. There was little material at hand by which the judge could arrive at a just decision, consequently he disposed of the cases with only that evidence that was apparent. Apparently neither the needs of the individual were being met nor the demands of justice satisfied.[57]
The experiences of the tramp or hobo in the police court do not increase his respect for the law and the administration of justice. He finds the administration of justice a mechanical process. At the points where the law touches his life it has lost every trace of the human touch unless it be the brutal “third degree” or the traditional “sixty days.” The courts sometimes put fear into his heart but they do not reform him.
What status as a citizen does the hobo wish? His attitude toward the police and his reaction toward the civil authorities that represent organized society seem to be tempered with antipathy. Most of the songs he sings are songs of protest. The organizations to which he allies himself are antagonistic to things as they are.
In many ways, the migratory worker is “a man without a country.” By the very nature of his occupation he is deprived of the ballot, and liable when not at work to arrest for vagrancy and trespassing. The public ignores him generally, but now and again pities or is hostile to him. With no status in organized society, he longs for a classless society where all inequalities shall be abolished. In the I.W.W. and other radical organizations, he finds in association with restless men of his own kind the recognition everywhere else denied him.