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How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America
University Of Chicago Press
July 2005
On Sale: July 8, 2005
350 pages
ISBN: 0226143791
EAN: 9780226143798
Paperback
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Non-Fiction
In the years following the Civil War, a veritable army of
homeless men swept across America's "wageworkers' frontier"
and forged a beguiling and bedeviling counterculture known
as "hobohemia." Celebrating unfettered masculinity and
jealously guarding the American road as the preserve of
white manhood, hoboes took command of downtown districts and
swaggered onto center stage of the new urban culture. Less
obviously, perhaps, they also staked their own claims on the
American polity, claims that would in fact transform the
very entitlements of American citizenship. In this eye-opening work of American history, Todd DePastino
tells the epic story of hobohemia's rise and fall, and
crafts a stunning new interpretation of the "American
century" in the process. Drawing on sources ranging from
diaries, letters, and police reports to movies and memoirs,
Citizen Hobo breathes life into the largely forgotten world
of the road, but it also, crucially, shows how the hobo army
so haunted the American body politic that it prompted the
creation of an entirely new social order and political
economy. DePastino shows how hoboes—with their reputation as
dangers to civilization, sexual savages, and professional
idlers—became a cultural and political force, influencing
the creation of welfare state measures, the promotion of
mass consumption, and the suburbanization of America.
Citizen Hobo's sweeping retelling of American nationhood in
light of enduring struggles over "home" does more than chart
the change from "homelessness" to "houselessness." In its
breadth and scope, the book offers nothing less than an
essential new context for thinking about Americans'
struggles against inequality and alienation.
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