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Neither Tramp Nor Hobo: Images of Unemployment in the Art of the Ashcan School

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Alexis L. Boylan
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This short notice, entitled “When a ‘Hobo’ Works,” which appeared in the New York Times, July 13, 1912, might seem overwrought to contemporary readers in its definitive nature. The need to delineate work and nonwork, however, was quite serious business for Americans in the first decades of the 20th century. During this period, as evidenced in newspaper and journal articles, legislation, and popular culture, there was growing apprehension about the perceived differences and slippage among the ideas of the tramp, the hobo, the vagrant, the unemployed worker, and the worker. Most of this conversation was directed toward defining work and nonwork for men — specifically for white men. Tramping came to be viewed as an affliction of both mind and body, with writers, politicians, and reformers seeking to define the tramp and then theorizing how to put these newly codified bodies to work.

Some of the most complex images of joblessness from this period were produced by the Ashcan school of artists, who frequently portrayed jobless men in their paintings and drawings. The Ashcan school, a group of six realist painters who lived and worked in New York City from 1900 to the First World War, established a national reputation as radicals rebelling against what they argued was a conservative artistic community woefully out of touch with modern American life. Ashcan artists depicted what they claimed to be the realities of the city around them — busy streets, shopgirls, ethnic communities, construction workers, and prostitutes, as well as tramps. John Sloan's The Coffee Line, 1905 (Figure 1), is typical of the kinds of images that Ashcan artists produced. The scene is a snowy winter's night in New York with a band of men in line to get a free cup of coffee. Jobless men are the stars here; unwitting leads in Sloan's slice of New York City life. The painting did much to communicate nationally a visual image of the tramp in New York City; it won honorable mention in 1905 at the Carnegie Institute International Exposition and was then exhibited in Chicago; Spartanburg, South Carolina; Dallas; and Seattle.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 30 , October 2005 , pp. 433 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2005

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References

I thank the Gender Studies Reading Group at Lawrence University for their suggestions concerning this project, specifically Gina Bloom and Christian Grose. Elizabeth Lee and Micki McElya also read drafts of this essay, and I truly appreciate their time and effort.

1. “When a ‘Hobo’ Works,” New York Times, 07 13, 1912, p. 18Google Scholar.

2. Women and children were often excluded from the discussion of tramping. The main exception to this was the debate over how boys slipped into the lifestyle of tramping. Numerous articles described how boys, if left unattended, could be susceptible to older men who would initiate them into a life of travel, begging, and stealing. See, for example, Flynt, Josiah, “How Men Become Tramps,” Century Magazine 50 (10 1895): 941–45Google Scholar.

3. It is important to note that the conversation about tramps was one that was dictated by regional understandings. Tramping in the West had different social connotations than tramping in East Coast urban areas. For the purposes of this discussion, I focus on discussions of the “tramp problem” in the urban Northeast.

4. Elzea, Rowland, ed., John Sloan's Oil Paintings: A Catologue Raisonne (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991), 1:67Google Scholar.

5. See Monkkonen, Eric H., ed., Walking to Work: Tramps in America, 1790–1935 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Wormser, Richard, Hoboes Wandering in America (New York: Walker, 1994)Google Scholar; Cresswell, Tim, The Tramp in America (London: Reaktion, 2001)Google Scholar; Kusmer, Kenneth L., Down and Out, on the Road: The Homeless in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Depastino, Todd, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. The major exception to this is Depastino's study, which provides interesting commentary particularly of Jacob Riis's photographs and of what he terms “The Comic Tramp” (Citizen Hobo, 47–49, 152–61Google Scholar).

7. See Roediger, David, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991; rept New York: Verso, 1999), 55–60Google Scholar.

8. I am using the term “nonspectacle” intentionally because so many scholars have viewed the Ashcan school and their images of urban space as spectacle. What I wish to highlight here is the way in which, compositionally, Ashcan artists order and integrate the figure of the tramp into the fabric of urban life. Just as they create spectacle in so many of their paintings, in their paintings of jobless men they use those compositional tools to a different end. For more on the spectacle in Ashcan art, see Yount, Sylvia, “Consuming Drama: Everett Shinn and the Spectacular City,” American Art 6 (Fall 1992): 87–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Fairman, Deborah, “The Landscape of Display: The Ashcan School, Spectacle, and the Staging of Everyday Life,” Prospects 18 (1993): 205–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. This evaluation of the Ashcan school can be see in most evidently in Zurier, Rebecca, Snyder, Robert W., and Mecklenburg, Virginia M., eds., Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York (New York: National Museum of American Art in association with W. W Norton, 1995)Google Scholar.

10. See for example, Adams, Henry, “John Sloan's The Coffee Line,” Carnegie Magazine 57 (11–12 1984): 19–24Google Scholar. Art historical claims of Ashcan political and social radicalism are also discussed in Doezema, Marianne, George Bellows George Bellows and Urban America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 1–6Google Scholar; and Goldin, Amy, “The Eight's Laissez Faire Revolution,” Art in America (07–08 1973): 42–49Google Scholar. See also Zurier, et al. , Metropolitan Lives, 45Google Scholar.

11. Between 1870 and 1910 middle-class self-employment dropped from 67 to 37 percent (Bederman, Gail, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

12. Painter, Nell, Standing at Armageddon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 295Google Scholar.

13. See Rosenberg, Charles's “Sexuality, Class, and Role in Nineteenth-Century America,” American. Quarterly 35 (05 1973): 131–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and his Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, ed. Mangan, J. A. and Walvin, James (New York: St. Martin's, 1987Google Scholar).

14. Bederman, , Manliness and Civilization, 12Google Scholar.

15. It is important to remember, as Bederman has noted, that while this was a period of substantial gender fluctuation, the underlying assumptions of male power and authority remained constant (Manliness and Civilization, 11Google Scholar).

16. For more on African American and ethnic tramps, see Kusmer, , Down and Out, 164–66Google Scholar; and Depastino, , Citizen Hobo, 64–65, 76–77Google Scholar. For the connections between masculinity and whiteness at the turn of the century, see Bederman, , Manliness and CivilizationCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. Cresswell makes the argument that the tramp was, in his words, “made up” in the 1870s in part as a response to changing visions of the West and because of railroad systems. He argues that “a number of categorical strategies conspired to make up the figure as a super-mobile masculine figure.” While I agree that the tramp as a category of man gets codified in this period, I assert that this construction has much more to do with specific apprehensions about labor and gender, and less to do with the psychic trauma for Americans of losing the frontier (Tramp in America, 13Google Scholar; see also Depastino, , Citizen Hobo, 9–11Google Scholar).

18. The major exception to this, not surprisingly, was labor literature. What is interesting, however, is that while this literature places an emphasis on the criminality of the capitalist system as opposed to the individual in regard to the causes of tramping, there remains a fixation on defining the boundaries of work and nonwork. See Davis, Michael, “Forced to Tramp: The Perspective of the Labor Press, 1870–1900,” in Monkkonen, , Walking to Work, 141–70Google Scholar.

19. “Roosevelt to Help Hobos,” New York Times, 02 14, 1908, p. 1Google Scholar.

20. In terms of charting this pathology, it is important to note that most discussions from this period clarify that when they are speaking about nonworking men, they are excluding the population of the jobless who suffer from alcoholism. As one contemporary critic wrote, “A love of liquor brings more men and women into trampdom than anything else, and until this fact is more conscientiously recognized there can be no thorough treatment of the tramp.” The man who drank was afforded special consideration and was seen as suffering less from poverty as from a debilitating dependence on liquor (Flynt, , “How Men Become Tramps,” 945Google Scholar).

21. Ladislas, , “Testimony from Vagabondia,” New York Times, 12 8, 1907, p. 10Google Scholar.

22. The authenticity of this letter as having been written by a true vagabond, of course, cannot be ascertained. Nonetheless the letter reveals the narrative of control typical to this argument about tramping.

23. See Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 47–58Google Scholar.

24. The most famous author of this period to take up this idealization of the jobless and traveling man is Jack London. Whereas authors such as Mark Twain present tramps and hobos in their work, it is London who writes of the tramp in the industrial and urban world of the turn of the century. He himself wandered for a few months, and that experience provided the foundation for The Road (1907), a tale of his travels and the people that he met. He then wrote several lighthearted short stories that featured tramps. See Etulain, Richard W., ed., Jack London on the Road: The Tramp Diary and Other Hobo Writings (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1979), 1–28Google Scholar.

25. This figure would later be epitomized by Charlie Chaplin's cinematic character “Little Tramp,” who likewise wore the costume of an oversized, tattered suit and made audiences laugh at his guileless charm. See Cresswell, , Tramp in America, 130–71Google Scholar.

26. Hales, Peter B., Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839–1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 200Google Scholar.

27. This was the section of New York City that Riis refers to as “the Bend.”

28. In fact, in his own telling of meeting this tramp, Riis writes that he was “smoking his pipe on the rung of a ladder … in the busy labor of a score of rag-pickers all about him.” The tramp was, in short, originally surrounded by people and part of an urban context, but these ragpickers are excluded from the final photograph (Riis, Jacob, How the Other Half Lives, ed. Warner, Sam Bass Jr [1890; rept. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970], 54Google Scholar).

29. For more on tramps and women, see Cresswell, , Tramp in America, 92–97Google Scholar.

30. It is also worth noting that the story which accompanies this illustration does not describe the tramps as threatening to women in the city but rather describes women as easy marks to direct begging because they are sympathetic to the tramps. The ominous tone of the illustration is all the creation of the artist, not the narrative (Flynt, Josiah, “The City Tramp,” Century Magazine 47 [03 1894]: 711–13Google Scholar).

31. Henri, Robert, “Insurgency in Art,” Literary Digest 40 (08 23, 1910): 814Google Scholar.

32. Sloan, John, Gist of Art (New York: American Artists Group, 1939), 205Google Scholar.

33. The scene was described quite differently in the Craftsman: “The scene of ‘The Coffee Line’ is Madison Square on a bitter, blustery night in winter when the shivering unemployed are forming a ragged waiting line in the rear of a hot coffee wagon. Startling in its fidelity, the picture displays Sloan in one of his most tense and dramatic moods. It is as great a depiction of our big cities as Stephen Crane's unforgettable prose sketch entitled ‘The man in the Storm’ or one of Gorky's poignant little masterpieces.” The reference to Crane and Gorky reveals the dramatic predisposition of the critic. The Craftsman was a leftist magazine, and the critic interprets the painting quite liberally (Barrell, Charles Wisner, “The Real Drama of the Slums, as Told in John Sloan's Etchings,” Craftsman 15 [02 1909]: 563Google Scholar).

34. “Says Tramps Fill the ‘Bread Line’,” New York Times, 06 9, 1908, p. 7Google Scholar.

35. It is also noteworthy to consider that tenements were primarily housing projects for immigrants, yet Bellows does not indicate in any way the ethnic identity of the men. He visually works against that kind of compartmentalization.

36. Snyder, Robert W. and Zurier, Rebecca, “Picturing the City,” in Zurier, et al. , Metropolitan Lives, 97Google Scholar.

37. Rosenweig, Roy, “Reforming Working-Class Play: Workers, Parks, and Playgrounds in an Industrial City, 1870–1920,” in Life and Labor: Dimensions of American Working-Class History, ed. Stephenson, Charles and Asher, Robert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 159Google Scholar.

38. “For Better Hoboes,” New York Times, 09 22, 1907, p. 8Google Scholar.

39. Sloan, plays out a similar dynamic in Nursemaids, Madison Square (1907)Google Scholar. In this scene, also in a park with benches filled with jobless men, three women horse around in the middle of the path, making a small scene. Men on the benches look up in this painting, but it is hard to read anything beyond a mild amusement.

40. John Sloan diaries, May 10, 1909 (John Sloan's New York Scene: From the Diaries, Notes, and Correspondence, 1906–1913, ed. St. John, Bruce [New York: Harper and Row, 1965], 311Google Scholar).

41. I thank Elizabeth Lee for encouraging me to tease out this argument.