“Of the 2,000 who were given a medical examination, 775, or 39 per cent, were diagnosed as suffering from alcoholism. According to Dr. James Alexander Miller, these ‘figures probably do not represent by any means the number of individuals who were alcoholic ... but rather indicate only the number who manifested acute evidence at the time of investigation.’”—From the Report of the Advisory Social Service Committee of the Municipal Lodging House, pp. 9-22. New York: September, 1915.
Here we have in a few words a cross-section of the drinking population among the homeless men in New York where conditions are not materially different and where the population is essentially the same as in Hobohemia.
CHAPTER X
SEX LIFE OF THE HOMELESS MAN
Tramping is a man’s game. Few women are ever found on the road. The inconveniences and hazards of tramping prevent it. Women do wander from city to city but convention forbids them to ride the roads and move about as men do. One tramp who had traveled 8,000 miles in six months said: “I even saw two women on the road, and last summer I saw a woman beating her way in a box car.”
Tramping is a man’s game. Few pre-adolescent boys are tramps. They do not break away permanently until later in their teens. How does the absence of women and children affect the life of the migratory worker? What difference would it make if tramps traveled like gypsies, taking their women and children with them? How does the absence of women and children affect the fantasy and the reveries and eventually the behavior of the homeless man?
The majority of homeless men are unmarried. Those who are married are separated, at least temporarily, from their families.[50] Most homeless men in the city are older than the average man on the road and would be expected, therefore, to have had marital experience. They are content to live in town while the younger men are eager to move in the restless search for adventure and new experience.
THE TRAMP AND HIS ASSOCIATIONS WITH WOMEN
The homeless man has not always been homeless. Like most of us, he was reared in a home and is so far a product of home life. He enters upon the life of the road in his late teens or early twenties. He brings with him, as a rule, the habits and memories gained in the more stable existence in the family and community. Frequently it has been his conflict with, and rebellion against, that more stable existence that set him on the road.