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osprey_archerThomas Minehan’s Boy and Girl Tramps of America blew my tiny mind. It’s exactly the book I wanted Nels Anderson’s Hobos and Homelessness to be: an in-depth, up-close look at the lives of young tramps during the Great Depression (Minehan did his fieldwork from 1932-1934), rich with anecdotes and details about life on the road.
Minehan learns, for instance, that when begging, it’s best to “to ask for just a little. Hit a guy for a nickel or a couple pennies and he’ll give you a dime. Hit him for a dime and he’ll give youse a stony stare.” In the same vein, another boy advises, “I always ask if there isn’t something I can do for a meal or a piece of bread… The chances are she doesn’t want to be bothered having me work and if anything to eat is handy she will give it to me and say never mind the work.” He ought to know: he once got a whole raisin pie that way.
Begging is also the best way to get clothes - although you can also steal them off the clothesline, if you’ve got to, after dark is the best time for that. Any tramp who has been on the road for six months, Minehan reckons, has probably been forced into a little petty thievery - not least by the fact that relief agencies never give out clothes, only needles and threads and patches.
And the road’s damn hard on clothes, for all that the kids try to take care of them. Minehan notes one clothes-conscious young man’s routine as he prepared to flip a train: “Ole removed his tie and put it in his pocket, turned his coat and cap inside out to protect them from the inevitable soot, pulled the collar of his cleanest shirt down, his outer shirt and coat collar up, and fastened both with a large safety pin.”
But inevitably clothes are worn out by the dirt of the railway cars, the necessity of being out in all weathers, and the fact that tramps wear their clothes day and night with only occasional chance to wash them. And they really do wear all their clothes; you might carry a spare pair of socks and underwear in your pocket, but only greenhorns carry a bindle. (So much for the hobo costumes in Halloween costume books!)
For all that, though, “the condition of road rags worries either boy or girl just as much as high school clothing styles worry more fortunate youngsters. A boy is self-conscious about a dirty face, long hair, a fuzz-covered chin; a girl will be ashamed to appear on the streets in too poor clothing. Proud of a new pair of shoes or a new cap, a boy will strut, a girl will preen and bridle. If he is old enough to shave, a boy likes to carry a razor.”
There are, Minehan notes, a fair number of girls on the road, “dressed in overalls or army breeches and boys’ coats or sweaters - looking, except for their dirt and rags, like a Girl Scout club on an outing.” But it’s a hard life for a girl: the relief agencies where boys can go for food and a bed, whoever scant and hard, send girls directly to jail. Girls on the road are thus almost forced into prostitution - although Minehan does meet one girl who has taken up burglary instead. Occasionally girls leave home with a boy - sometimes it’s sort of a Romeo-and-Juliet thing, their families tried to break up the relationship but instead the kids ran away - but “the majority left home not in company with a boy, but with another girl.”
Naturally I was fascinated by this tidbit, but Minehan doesn’t expand on it. We do, however, get quite a lot of information about male homosexuality: Minehan notes, “One of the first lessons that a boy learns on the road is to beware of certain older men,” who will try to bribe them with tobacco and bananas or lure them to some dark corner of the railway yard and force them.
I could go on. I haven’t mentioned the time that Minehan and company get locked up in jail for the night and sleep on the floor while the actual criminals get beds in cells, or the fantastic hobo jungles he visits, like the river cave converted into a snug winter den. Or Peg-Leg Al, who lost his leg in an accident flipping a train, and made himself a new one out of two-by-fours; or Blink, who lost his eye when a live cinder flew in it. Or the food! God, the Dickensian food in the relief stations: the soup “thin, watery, lukewarm, tasteless, and served without even stale bread, and never with soda crackers. A portion equals a small cupful.”
But at some point there is nothing left to say, except that this book was a fascinating glimpse of a whole new world for me, and if you have any interest in the Depression or tramps then it’s well worth reading.
Minehan learns, for instance, that when begging, it’s best to “to ask for just a little. Hit a guy for a nickel or a couple pennies and he’ll give you a dime. Hit him for a dime and he’ll give youse a stony stare.” In the same vein, another boy advises, “I always ask if there isn’t something I can do for a meal or a piece of bread… The chances are she doesn’t want to be bothered having me work and if anything to eat is handy she will give it to me and say never mind the work.” He ought to know: he once got a whole raisin pie that way.
Begging is also the best way to get clothes - although you can also steal them off the clothesline, if you’ve got to, after dark is the best time for that. Any tramp who has been on the road for six months, Minehan reckons, has probably been forced into a little petty thievery - not least by the fact that relief agencies never give out clothes, only needles and threads and patches.
And the road’s damn hard on clothes, for all that the kids try to take care of them. Minehan notes one clothes-conscious young man’s routine as he prepared to flip a train: “Ole removed his tie and put it in his pocket, turned his coat and cap inside out to protect them from the inevitable soot, pulled the collar of his cleanest shirt down, his outer shirt and coat collar up, and fastened both with a large safety pin.”
But inevitably clothes are worn out by the dirt of the railway cars, the necessity of being out in all weathers, and the fact that tramps wear their clothes day and night with only occasional chance to wash them. And they really do wear all their clothes; you might carry a spare pair of socks and underwear in your pocket, but only greenhorns carry a bindle. (So much for the hobo costumes in Halloween costume books!)
For all that, though, “the condition of road rags worries either boy or girl just as much as high school clothing styles worry more fortunate youngsters. A boy is self-conscious about a dirty face, long hair, a fuzz-covered chin; a girl will be ashamed to appear on the streets in too poor clothing. Proud of a new pair of shoes or a new cap, a boy will strut, a girl will preen and bridle. If he is old enough to shave, a boy likes to carry a razor.”
There are, Minehan notes, a fair number of girls on the road, “dressed in overalls or army breeches and boys’ coats or sweaters - looking, except for their dirt and rags, like a Girl Scout club on an outing.” But it’s a hard life for a girl: the relief agencies where boys can go for food and a bed, whoever scant and hard, send girls directly to jail. Girls on the road are thus almost forced into prostitution - although Minehan does meet one girl who has taken up burglary instead. Occasionally girls leave home with a boy - sometimes it’s sort of a Romeo-and-Juliet thing, their families tried to break up the relationship but instead the kids ran away - but “the majority left home not in company with a boy, but with another girl.”
Naturally I was fascinated by this tidbit, but Minehan doesn’t expand on it. We do, however, get quite a lot of information about male homosexuality: Minehan notes, “One of the first lessons that a boy learns on the road is to beware of certain older men,” who will try to bribe them with tobacco and bananas or lure them to some dark corner of the railway yard and force them.
I could go on. I haven’t mentioned the time that Minehan and company get locked up in jail for the night and sleep on the floor while the actual criminals get beds in cells, or the fantastic hobo jungles he visits, like the river cave converted into a snug winter den. Or Peg-Leg Al, who lost his leg in an accident flipping a train, and made himself a new one out of two-by-fours; or Blink, who lost his eye when a live cinder flew in it. Or the food! God, the Dickensian food in the relief stations: the soup “thin, watery, lukewarm, tasteless, and served without even stale bread, and never with soda crackers. A portion equals a small cupful.”
But at some point there is nothing left to say, except that this book was a fascinating glimpse of a whole new world for me, and if you have any interest in the Depression or tramps then it’s well worth reading.
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Date: 2020-11-27 10:08 pm (UTC)If you have not seen William Wellman's Wild Boys of the Road (1933), it is extremely germane to this conversation, including the fact that one of its three teenage protagonists is female, and the existence of this book is extremely germane to me, because Wild Boys of the Road was one of the first pre-Codes I saw and still one of those holy shit movies—it pairs beautifully with Wellman's Heroes for Sale (1933), which I saw also at the same time—and therefore I shall look for Minehan's study. I have a copy of On the Fly! Hobo Literature & Songs 1879–1941 (2018) and recommend it, but I hadn't read this one.
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Date: 2020-11-28 05:08 pm (UTC)I was watching a pre-Code movie the other day - 42nd Street, a musical with no particular pretensions to realism - but at the same time, the more pre-Codes I see, the more I feel that they do take place in the real world, and after the Code comes in many movies take place in some sort of alternate universe. Sometimes a very beguiling alternate universe! But not one that maps very well onto reality.
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Date: 2020-11-28 09:24 pm (UTC)That's Beggars of Life (1929), which is fair because it's also directed by Wellman about young runaways. I've never written about Wild Boys of the Road partly because it blew me away so strongly the first time I saw it, but it's about three adolescents—two high school best friends and the same-aged girl they fall in with early on—who leave home to find work for their families and instead find a lot of what Minehan describes. They make it as far as the girl's aunt, who welcomes them with genuine warmth; but she's a prostitute and gets busted by the police before she can do more than offer the exhausted kids a slice of cake. They ride the rails from city to city, run out everywhere they arrive. They steal anything they can get their hands on, mostly to eat or wear. They become part of a beautifully communal jungle composed entirely of other children and adolescents and the cops crack down on that, too. One of the boys loses a leg in a railyard accident. Another girl they're traveling with gets raped when caught alone by an adult (and since it's a pre-Code movie, as soon as the other kids find out what's happened, they murder the rapist without reprisal and the girl is not moralistically disposed of). There's a happy ending by the skin of the New Deal's teeth, but a lot of violence first and a lot of bitterness and a lot of justified anger from the young hobos who know that their country has failed them. The acting from all three principals is terrific: Frankie Darro in particular is electric, but Dorothy Coonan is tough and delightful (they meet cute when she gives Darro a bloody nose for busting into her boxcar) and never once seen in women's clothes. Not having read Minehan, it reminded me of Felice Holman's The Wild Children (1983), a children's novel about the besprizorny of the early Soviet Union which I have actually not read since elementary school but which made a serious impression on me at the time. I own it on a DVD of Wellman pre-Codes, but basically anywhere you can find it, check it out. I love it and I've been wanting to write about it since 2008.
the more pre-Codes I see, the more I feel that they do take place in the real world, and after the Code comes in many movies take place in some sort of alternate universe. Sometimes a very beguiling alternate universe! But not one that maps very well onto reality.
I agree one hundred percent that you can see the difference even in pre-Code musicals or movies where the plots are otherwise completely batshit. I cherish any Code-era film where reality gets in, even if just for a scene or a second, but I really want the alternate history where the Code was never enforced at all. I am sure I have complained about it before: we're still living in that hangover of white picket fantasy and look what it's done for the country.
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Date: 2020-11-30 11:50 pm (UTC)A few clever Code-era directors can create films set in reality (I always think Ernst Lubitsch is good at this - he directed in Hollywood but he wasn't originally American, which probably helps) but a lot of them just seem to throw up their hands and not even try.
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Date: 2020-12-01 12:51 am (UTC)My God, good for Netflix. Go for it!
A few clever Code-era directors can create films set in reality (I always think Ernst Lubitsch is good at this - he directed in Hollywood but he wasn't originally American, which probably helps) but a lot of them just seem to throw up their hands and not even try.
I maintain that a surprising percentage of reality sneaks through into noir, because it is an anxious rather than an aspirational genre and therefore it has leeway to show systems that fail and people that fuck up and that's part of what interests me so much about it even if far too often it still has to tidy up much of the morality at the end, but, yeah: there are writers and directors where if they tried, the PCA squashed it (cf. Crossfire (1947), one of the rare cases where I didn't need access to an archive to read the censorship memos thanks to Google Books), and I do think there were a great many who didn't even.
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Date: 2020-11-30 11:47 pm (UTC)You got cases like that at the B'town State School for the Feeble-Minded, as it was called. People who weren't in the least mentally handicapped, but were dumped there.
... I think how the police are used now is part of that same thing--I mean how they're expected to handle domestic situations and mental illness crises and drug overdoses and homeless encampments, and their one tool is a hammer, and a hammer isn't what the situations call for.
... Like societally we haven't really come to terms with the fact that we have an intractable homelessness problem, or that the nexus of mental illness and substance abuse can make people's problems and situations VERY hard to address.
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