The only other alternative would seem to be to encourage the migratory workers to organize to help themselves. This is difficult but not impossible, but the history of these efforts is another chapter in the story of Hobohemia.
CHAPTER IV
“GETTING BY” IN HOBOHEMIA
A man who is conservative can live in Hobohemia on a dollar a day. If he is not too fastidious he can live for sixty cents, including a bed every night. Sleeping in a ten-cent “flop” and sticking to coffee and rolls, he can get along for fifty cents. Old men who do not move around much will live a long time on “coffee-an’,” which they can get at the average restaurant for a nickel. The man who is reduced to “coffee-an’,” however, has touched bedrock.
An old beggar who lingers about the Olive Branch Mission on South Desplaines Street claims that if he were guaranteed forty cents a day he could get on nicely. This would give him a bed every night and, as he says, a good bed is sometimes better than a meal.
The daily routine of this old man’s life rarely takes him beyond the limits of a single block. On the south side of Madison Street, between 62 Desplaines Street and the Transedes Hotel, he is at home. All else is, for him, the open sea. When he ventures beyond the limits of this area into outlying territory he plans the trip the day before.
There are perhaps a hundred old men on South State and West Madison streets whose interests and ambitions have shrunk to the same unvarying routine and the same narrow limits.[8]
Every man who enters Hobohemia is struggling to live above the “coffee-an’” level, and the various devices that are employed in accomplishing this are often ingenious. This business of wringing from chance source enough money each day to supply one’s insistent wants is known on the “stem” as “getting by.” “Getting by” may mean anything from putting in a few hours a day at the most casual labor to picking a pocket or purloining an overcoat. It includes working at odd jobs, peddling small articles, street faking, “putting over” old and new forms of grafts, “working” the folks at home, “white collar” begging, stealing, and “jack rolling.”
WORKING AT ODD JOBS
In spite of all that has been said to the contrary, the hobo is a worker. He is not a steady worker but he earns most of the money he spends. There are migratory casual workers, who spend three or four months each year in a Chicago lodging-house, who never look to the public for assistance. They know how much money they will need to tide them over the winter, and they have learned to spread it thin to make it reach. Casual in their work, they are conservative in their spending.