I'll tell you why we can't go home - because our folks are poor. They can't get jobs and there isn't enough to eat. What good will it do you to send us home to starve? You say you've got to send us to jail to keep us off the streets. Well, that's a lie. You're sending us to jail because you don't want to see us. You want to forget us. But you can't do it because I'm not the only one. There's thousands just like me, and there's more hitting the road every day. You read in the papers about giving people help. The banks get it. The soldiers get it. The breweries get it. And they're always yelling about giving it to the farmers. What about us? We're kids! Go ahead! Put me in a cell. Lock me up! I'm sick of being hungry and cold. Sick of freight trains. Jail can't be any worse than the street. So give it to me!
That's from "Wild Boys of the Road," a 1933 movie directed by William Wellman. It's about a group of kids who've left home during the Great Depression to find work. Along the way they are starved, beaten, raped, arrested, and mangled by trains - it's a pretty hard movie for 1933.
It is also a fairly accurate movie. During the worst years of the Great Depression, it's estimated that over a quarter million kids were roaming the country via freight train. That's on top of the army of adult hobos riding the rails. The adults were treated badly and the kids were treated worse.
It's often assumed that hoboing originated and then died out with the Great Depression, but it had been around long before that, rising up after the Civil War and declining around World War One, due to the popularity of the automobile and "car tramps" (hitchhiking).
People road the rails for various reasons over the years, and had different names attached to their inclinations. An old saying goes "A bum drinks and wanders, a tramp dreams and wanders, a hobo works and wanders." The word hobo is thought to have come from the term "hoe boy," migrant agricultural workers who followed the harvest via freight train. They were poorly paid and poorly treated, so much so that the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) managed to organize a lot of them during the years leading up to "The Great War." For awhile they had a union and the "thousand mile picket line," which didn't please growers any, so they got the IWW banned - labeled as "agents of the Kaiser." Which was another reason hoboing went into decline, the universal exploitation they faced on the rails where they were attacked by the police and railroad employees, who often charged a fee (and often at gunpoint) to ride the fright trains, and by the low wages, poor quarters, and terrible pay offered by the farmers. With the Great Depression and 25%+ unemployment, people took to the rails again in droves.
The kids were out there because they didn't want to be a burden on their parents or because their parents had asked them to leave - there were just too many mouths to feed. A few were out merely for the adventure, like always, but they were a distinct minority.
With our "Great Recession" in full swing, homelessness is again on the rise. You won't see many kids riding the rails (I hope), but you'll find them in the shelters or waiting for a ride near the onramps. Will they be treated any better than they were in 1917 or 1932? That's up to the rest of us.
Photo: "Family who traveled by freight train. Washington, Toppenish, Yakima Valley," Dorothea Lange, 1939 (FSA/Library of Congress).
