To what degree homeless men are employable, to what degree some of them are partially employable, and to what extent the whole group is unemployable is a question that cannot be finally answered.[31]
The problem of the homeless men is variously interpreted. The courts and the police are interested in them as offenders. As offenders, they are generally recidivists; to the social worker and the missionary they represent a body of men who have no purpose or direction.
One mission worker says:
A few of them can hold their own. They manage to work most of the time and pay their way, but most of them are “broke” some of the time and some of them are without money all the time. They are always making resolutions and never keeping them. They don’t seem to have any stiffening in their backbone.
However we may classify this group, the fact remains that we have here a great body of persons, probably more than a million in the United States,[32] and that they furnish a problem that seems to be ever present. It is, as we shall see later, a great heterogeneous group, unorganized and incapable of being organized. They have been gathered from every walk of life and for a thousand different reasons find themselves in this class. There are restless and normal boys and young men who are out in the world for adventure and whose stay in the class is more or less temporary; there are able-bodied men of more mature age who are either wholly self-supporting or are self-supporting most of the time; and there are old men who are too aged and infirm to work and too proud to surrender themselves to an institution. There are the physically incapacitated and the mentally inadequate who are more or less dependent and are likely to continue so, and there are many types of persons who are the victims of lingering diseases or who are addicted to drink or drugs and are not able to hold their own. All these are making the best struggle that their wits, their strength, and their opportunities permit to get a living. Some of them are in the group by choice and have their minds clearly made up to climb out, others hope to get out and strive to but never will, and yet others never have any such visions.
RELATIVE NUMBERS OF DIFFERENT TYPES
An estimate has already been made that the number of homeless men in Chicago range from 30,000 in the summer to 60,000 in the winter, reaching 75,000 in periods of unemployment. Any attempt to state the numbers of the different types of homeless men can be little more than a guess. The difficulty is the greater because individuals are continually passing from one group into another group. One man in his lifetime may perchance have been, in turn, seasonal laborer, hobo, tramp, home guard, and bum.
The public generally fails to distinguish between these types. The group of bums, beggars, and petty thieves, often mistakenly thought of as representative of the homeless men’s group, probably does not exceed in Chicago a total number of 2,500. The number of the home-guard type, the stationary casual worker, has been placed at 30,000, the summer population of Hobohemia on the basis of the number of permanent guests at lodging-house and hotel, and the number of registered voters among the homeless men.[33] The number of tramps who visit Chicago each year can only be roughly estimated at 150,000,[34] or an average of perhaps 5,000 at any given time. The migratory worker, including both the seasonal laborer and the hobo, number on the average around 10,000 and reach a total of 300,000 or more persons who come to Chicago for the winter or to secure a shipment to work outside the city. In periods of economic depression the numbers of homeless men in Hobohemia are swollen with men out of work, the majority of whom for the first time have been turned adrift on the “main stem.”
FOOTNOTES:
[29] The term “punk” is an instance; it had a special meaning at one time but is beginning to have a milder and more general use and the term “lamb” is taking its place.