THE SOAP BOX AND HOBO OPINION
Soap-boxers all say that they have enjoyed more liberty in Chicago than in most cities. Chicago police have always taken a generous and liberal attitude toward the curbstone forum. A man who has been prominent in several free-speech fights says:
The free-lance speaker is a great help to the police in this town. It’s easier to handle these crowds when they have someone to listen to. When a man gets restless, it gives him something to think about. If you don’t believe it just go into a town where the soap-boxer is suppressed and see how bitter the “bos” are.
The rôle of the soap-boxer is to make hobos think. He succeeds to a greater extent in this than we realize. In his efforts to hold his audience for half an hour he throws off a great many ideas. Much of this ammunition is fired in the air, but not all of it. What he actually does is to keep the minds of his hearers on objective things. Otherwise their thoughts would turn inward, and for the homeless man introspection is not a pleasant pastime.
It is probably true that the soap-box orator makes no permanent impression on his audience. He does, to be sure, give voice to some ill-defined sentiments in which all are agreed. But no practical unanimity is ever achieved. This agitation starts no mass movement. There has never been an effective permanent organization among hobos. The very nature of the hobo mind resents every kind of discipline that any form of organization would impose. He is by circumstance, tradition, and temperament an individualist.
What of the soap-box reformer and revolutionist? Is he a menace or merely a joke? The curbstone orator is not an agitator in the ordinary sense of that word. He is merely a thinking hobo. In him the homeless man becomes articulate. It is something to these outcast men to hear in these curbstone forums the reverberations of their own unuttered thoughts. It is something to the homeless man merely to have a voice.