Colin Foral
Control of Labor and People: Imperialism and Hoboes
9(16) December 2009
History 670:Prof. Foster
V.I. Lenin understood the “economic essence of imperialism…” describing World War One
as an imperialistic, “annexationist, predatory,[and] plunderous,” war.1 The Great War has
alternatively been described as a war to end all wars.2 A conflict lies in one’s definition of
imperialism and its motivations. Should one use territorial expansion and control, economics,
politics, maritime/continental labels or informal measures to define imperialism? Or is
imperialism, as Lenin sees it, the result of monopoly capitalism? World War One is one result of a
new industrial age. Some other variables which have also changed include production, status of
labor and tools of imperialism. The new role of labour on the “the eve of the proletarian social
revolution,” is of specific importance to Lenin. 3
1 Lenin, V.I. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1939) 9
2 Often attributed to Woodrow Wilson in reference to the League of Nations and the Fourteen Points. See:
Wells, H.G., The War that will End War. (1914)
George, David Lloyd. “Speech to the House of Commons,” 11 November 1918 (London: Hansard, col. 2463)
3 Lenin, V.I. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1939) 1314
America also sees a shift in labor during this same industrial, imperialistic age as jobs
become increasingly mechanized and a industrial laboring class formed. American hoboes fulfill a
curious role in this new economy. Instead of becoming industrial laborers, they ride the rails in
search of seasonal, manual, often agrarian work. As an American industrial laboring identity was
being forged, hoboes function as a bridge between old and new: completing the work that has yet
to be mechanized, in rhythm with the seasons, as marginalized members of the American working
class who are studied and policed as others (recognizable as Americans) within the American
economy.
Lenin goes on to describe the “capitalist system” and “international relationships” which
allow international treaties to divvy the globe between powerful nations. The imperial age begins
on, “the eve of the proletarian social revolution,” where a “labour aristocracy” obstructs
egalitarian social relations. This is the industrial age where monopolies control production and
labor. Imperialism, to Lenin, is the monopolization of world power (economic, social or political).
In the 1860s, “capitalism has arrived at a stage when, although commodity production still ‘reigns’
and continues to be regarded as the basis of economic life, it has in reality been undermined and
the big profits go to the ‘geniuses of financial manipulation.” The critical change comes between
1860 and 1900 with a centralization of power and increasing control over the labour force.4
This big business control over industrial workers is not possible in seasonal, transient work.
The productive labor which predated the industrial labor force does not immediately disappear.
Instead, it adapts to the new era of monopoly capitalism. Farmers become capable of national
4 Lenin, V.I. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1939)
13,14,16,20,26,27, 31-46
production and employing a (transient) national workforce. The American continental empire is
connected by railroads. The rail lines carry both commodities and workers—according to the
seasons. The available work exists on the fringes of the American continental empire—in the rural
areas and to the west. The hobo occupies a liminal space between city/culture,
agriculture/industry, laborer/unemployed, producer/consumer.
The British Empire of the early 19th century also had a need for agrarian labor. The labor
force of British Mauritius sugar plantations was staffed with imported slaves. Richard Allen writes
about a demographic shift of labor in Mauritius from imported slaves to indentured Indian
workers. The slave trade brings the majority of workers between 1811 and 1827. In 1825 a tariff
and in 1834 abolition create a new labor environment, but the demand for workers remains. The
“modern system of indentured labour in 1834 and the suspension of Indian emigration on the
island between 1838 and 1842,” also change the labor market. Still, it is economically necessary
for Imperial Britain to supply workers for sugar cultivation. The colony’s early economy is sugar
production for British market. The Mauritius labor market could not sustain the growth, so
workers were imported from India, China, Comoros and Madagascar in order to meet the labor
needs of the colony and empire. Though the labels attached to these laborers (as slave, servant,
or worker) changed, their economic function and citizenship rights remained the same. 5
The society and economy changed because of the new immigrant labor force, “by the late
1850s Mauritius had become a classic plantation colony which produced almost seven per cent of
5 Allen, Richard B. “Capital, Illegal Slaves, Indentured Laborers and the Creation of a Sugar Plantation
Economy in Mauritius, 1810-1860,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History June 2008 (36,
2) 151-152
the world’s sugar.” The transition between 1810 and 1850’s sugar economy was not a “simple nor
a painless process,” nor was it caused by changes in British economic or political policy. Instead,
“domestically generated and controlled capital was central to shaping the colony’s social and
economic life during most of the nineteenth century and beyond.”6 The imported laborers were
responsible for creating a unique culture of Mauritius from Indian, Chinese, English and African
heritage.
The American continental empire also represents a diverse cultural spread. American
transient labor often consists of native born men. However, they traversed regional distinctions
and the rural-urban divide in their quest for work. Most hobo histories give hobo sociologist and
University of Chicago professor Nels Anderson credit for defining the field in the early 1900s until
the Great Depression. As good sociologists do, Anderson classified hoboes using the following
criteria. First, hoboes are seasonal, non-industrial workers. Hoboes are unfit as industrial laborers
due to inexperience, handicap, mental illness, addiction, personal crises, discrimination and
wanderlust. Wanderlust is hardly definable and differentiates hoboes from other non-industrial
labor. Anderson attempts a hobo demography in his native Chicago during the 1920s, “30,000 –
75,000 hoboes in Chicago, 75% are single men, 9% are married, 25% are “temporarily crippled or
maimed...” while 9% are “insane, feeble-minded, or epileptic.” Nels Anderson links transient labor
to seasonal labor markets as they exist in (Lenin’s) economic stage of monopoly capitalism.7
6 Allen, Richard B June 2008 (36, 2) 152-153
7 Anderson, Nels. The Hobo; the Sociology of the Homeless Man. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press 1923) 4,
61
Modern labor historian, Frank Tobias Higbie sees a bidirectional relationship between
hoboes and the American society/labor market spawned the lifestyle. To Higbie, the impact of
transient labor, “life experiences, the social danger they symbolized, and the conflicts that arose
from their actions were central to American culture, economy and politics.”8 Tobias’ hobo is a
marked laboring body which exists in both local labor and a broader national consciousness.
British colonial labor was absolutely marginalized in the metropole due (at least) to geographical
separation. What is not marginal is the impact which sugar plantation exports had on British
markets and diets. Higbie writes about a mobile, marginal hobo “culture different from the wider
culture…” which is “not so much a result of their isolation from society as a result of a tension
between their marginality and their similarity to the rest of society.”9 In the British colonial
example, there is a distinction between the Chinese, Indian and African imported labor and the
British hegemony.
According to historian Ann Stoler, Sumatra’s imperial plantation economy also relied on
imported labor. Success of Sumatra’s plantation economy is based in “a labor force that was
cheap, socially malleable, and politically inarticulate.” The metropole’s economy was linked to
colonial production in the capitalist monopoly age, “capitalist expansion depended not only on
Anderson, Nels. Men on the Move. (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press. 1940) 13
8 Higbie, Frank Tobias. Indespensible Outcasts.(Urbana: University of Illinois Press.) 20
9 Higbie, Frank Tobias. Indespensible Outcasts.(Urbana: University of Illinois Press.) 11
the industry’s access and control over land and labor but on the assurance that “its” labor force
would have only contingent access to estate lands and only limited access to any others.”10
Plantation industries worldwide (like Mauritius and Sumatra), “have reproduced the
conditions for their existence, rarely by transforming a particular population into a full-fledged
proletariat but more commonly by allowing—and more to the point frequently by enforcing—
some degree of self-sufficiency on the part of the laboring colonial poor,” through state and union
regulation.11 The hobo fulfils the same role in American non-industrial labor. Self sufficiency in this
case can be equated with wanderlust, that is a hoboes individual and changing control over
geography as well as some guarantee of non-industrial work in an industrial age.
The difference between hoboes and indentured servants, serfs or slaves is the seasonal,
transient nature of their work. Where the American South imported workers (distinguishable
from the American hegemony) for constant labor, hoboes followed the seasonal labor market
within the continental empire. They were only in debt to the economies of psychology, industrial
skills, or capitalism. Unlike the settler labor imported by colonies, there is little economic benefit
for seasonal labor which is tied to the land. When an Empire imported labor to satisfy labor
market deficiencies, the result was often an economic boom. After amassing capital and labor
“within fifty years the East Sumatran estate industry’s production of rubber, oil palm, tobacco,
tea, and sisal accounted for one-third of the export earnings for the Dutch East Indies, providing
10 Stoler, Ann Laura. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) 1, 5
11 Stoler, Ann Laura (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) 6, 12
many of the raw materials on which the expansion of industrial capitalism in Europe and America
was based.”12 Like Lenin, capital was exported to colonies in the form of investment and labor was
imported to the colony.
The continental and maritime empires constructed forms of labor control in order to
maximize their human investments. In America, vagrancy laws functioned to keep labor close to
work. In British India two forms of labor control were employed. First “outright coercion, legally
enforced through a penal sanction on indentured labor contracts…” there is a shift between 1920
and 1941 as “new priorities were given to establishing a resident labor reserve, local reproduction
of the work force through family recruitment, and permanent labor settlements offering the
semblance of village life.”13 The change in colonial policy might have been caused by outright
resistance by colonial labor.
Vagrancy laws, settler communities and indentured servitude combat the perceived
economic threat of labor transience. Hobos are molded into laborers by economics and
psychology. As stated above, colonial sugar production created a change in the British diet. The
consumptive capacity of colonies is just as important as their production. Sidney Mintz sees a
simultaneous economic process of consumption and production between Britain and its
Caribbean colonies, “once one attempts to put consumption together with production, to fit
12 Stoler, Ann Laura (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) 15
13 Stoler, Ann Laura (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) 204
colony to metropolis, there is a tendency for one or the other—the “hub” or the “outer rim”—to
slip out of focus.”14
Higbie’s concept of bidirectional relationship between transient, marked laboring bodies
and the American territorial empire is similar to Indonesian labor coercion. Coercion of labor has
an “extra-economic” facet, “the conflation of legitimate economic demands with political
insurgency and criminality as expedited the repression of labor movements throughout the First
and Third world—and Indonesia is certainly no exception.” In Indonesia, the “manipulation of
gender hierarchies was a primary instrument of labor control called upon by corporate and state
authorities alike.”15 In America, the primary instrument is vagrancy law. The unexpected cure to
labor transience is full employment caused by World War Two.
Historian/Anthropologist Sidney Mintz explores the relationship between consumption
and the binary oppositions of the Imperial world. Colonial laborers were not the primary
consumers of the sugar which they produced, “had there been no ready consumers for it
elsewhere, such huge quantities of land, labour, and capital would never have been funneled into
his one curious crop, first domesticated in New Guinea, first processed in India, and first carried to
the New World by Columbus.” Sugar plantations were the most distinctive aspect of the
Caribbean sugar economy, “first created in the New World during the early years of the sixteenth
14 Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin,
1985) xxvii
15 Stoler, Ann Laura. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) 209, 210
century and were staffed for the most part with enslaved Africans.” They are currently staffed by
the “descendants of Portuguese, Javanese, Chinese, and Indian contract laborers, and many other
varieties of human being whose ancestors had been brought to the region to grow, cut and grind
sugar cane.”16
Mintz’s link between consumerism and imperialism has something to say about identity in
an industrial world. Consumerism allows one to challenge their social status,
tobacco, sugar, and tea were the first objects within capitalism that conveyed with their
use the complex idea that one could become different by consuming differently…it is
closely connected to England’s fundamental transformation from a hierarchical, statusbased, medieval society to a social-democratic, capitalist, and industrial society.17
While citizens could define their citizenship through consumption, hoboes chose to defy social
norms through consumption. Sociologist Howard M. Bahr describes defines this phenomenon as
disaffiliation.18 The luxury goods which define imperial economies were shunned by hoboes for
more basic necessities. There is no household, workplace, vehicle or person to decorate as an
16 Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin,
1985) xxiv
17 Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin,
1985)xxiii, xxiv, 185
18 Bahr, Howard M. Skid Row: An Introduction to Disaffiliation. New York and London: Oxford
University Press. 1973 120-21
expression of status. Instead hobo status is defined by life experience and the physical appearance
of under-consumption, especially in reference to luxury goods.
Hoboes are continental migrants who follow the labor market. Imperial settlers and
colonizers are migrants who satisfy imperial and economic needs. David Arnold explores the
identities of settlers and capitalists. To Arnold, a settler is a capitalist with marketable skills while a
colonizer does not have capital, only basic laboring skills (like a hobo). There are three settler
functions: consuming, producing and civilizing. The method of control in British India consists of a
British settler “labour aristocracy that existed in 1893-1920s India [which] consisted of railway
workers.” These workers also functioned as an emergency militia police force. 19
Both the British maritime and American continental empires used labor colonies for
economic expansion and social control. In 1908, Edmond Kelly published a study titled The
Elimination of the Tramp by the Introduction into America of the Labour Colony System. Kelly
proposed permanent settlement and employment of unemployed and transient Americans.
Though the proposition was not enacted, the prototype and foundations for Kelly’s system was
the British Empire’s use of colonization.20
19 Arnold, David. “White Colonization and Labour in Nineteenth-Century India,” The Journal of
Imperial and Commonwealth History 11,2 (1983) 134, 145, 153-4
20 Kelly, Edmond The Elimination of the Tramp by the Introduction into America of the Labour Colony
System. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. 1908
An example of the British labor colony system can be seen in the middle to late nineteenth
century Natal. Instead of using national laborers, as Kelly proposed, the British imperial
government used migrant Africans and indentured Indians. The economic boom between 1860
and the 1880s was based on sugar plantations and imported labor. Racial categories come in to
play as migratory Africans and indentured Indians have similar functions with different rights.
Migratory African workers were a good temporary proletariat because they could be removed.
Natal Africans were productive farmers without European supervision. Indian indentured servants
were preferred labor, “foreign…separated geographically from their means of production.”
Transient workers were “considered ‘faceless’ and ‘notorious’ for committing much of the petty
crime on the coast. As immigrant bachelors they were thought to be particularly prone to the
perpetration of sexual crimes.” 21
Hoboes also had an unsavory reputation, but their racial/ethnic similarity to American
culture distinguishes them from imported Imperial labor. Hoboes have more in common with
Ulbe Bosma’s free white laborers. Hobo freedom comes from seasonal transience. This
experience, to Bosma, “was historically far from universal. Even in the age of mass migration
millions of European migrants went under state sponsored conditions or ended up in semiindentured conditions. The elegance of a world of economic freedom, which apparently implies
the free movement of labour, is a rare commodity in the real world.”22 One could quibble with the
21 Harries, Patrick (1987) 377-379, 382, 384
22 Bosma, Ulbe (2007) 117
possibility for unencumbered freedoms of economics or movement, every person is the prisoner
of myriad economic, social, political, or cultural (or seasonal) confinement. Hoboes are subject to
these same intangible constrictions, but the lifestyle may be as close to free movement of labor as
possible in the monopoly, imperial stage of industrial capitalism.
Race is a construct used by Imperial regimes to control labor. The function of race is to
classify and separate people. To Hatton and Williamson race begins with geography, the “third
world is “segmented by discrimination, language, and custom…long distance and high costs…
poverty” The third world separation, based in race, is occurs in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. This “social Darwinist mindset…” subsequent “racial taxonomy” and
emergence of “biological racism” is an artificial construction which is used by imperial powers to
control labor.23
The two forms of hobo classification come into play during this period. Within the hobo
community three groups exist: hobo, tramp, bum. Hoboes are men who travel in search of work.
Tramps do not travel, working sporadically in non industrial work such as panhandling. Bums
neither travel nor work. These distinctions have been present in hobo culture throughout the
twentieth century.
An external classification of hoboes was commissioned by the United States Council on
Industrial Relations and published Peter Speek in 1914. Speek compiled 100 life histories to
23 Bosma, Ulbe. (2007) 117-8
categorize hobos. Once again this classification was used to control labor as one section of Speek’s
work proposes, “Methods of Americanization.”24
Bosma allows a historian to understand taxonomy of both people and places as they are
understood by imperial regimes, “only around 1850 that the distinction emerges between white
settler colonies versus tropical exploitation colonies where white migrants were only
sojourners…” With the gold rush and Irish potato famine immigration increases and “…statistics
about intercontinental migration begin to appear in the early years of the age of mass migration,
as governments become aware of its significance and repercussions.”25 Peter Speek’s work is
evidence of the American continental empire’s awareness of migration and its impact on labor.
The early twentieth century saw a scholarly, political and popular attention turned towards
hoboes. 26
Scholarly interest in hoboes does not begin with Nels Anderson and the Chicago School of
Sociology. Ethnography and oral history were applied to understand the hobo lifestyle. Alice
Solenberger interviewed one thousand homless men, publishing in 1914. She would reinforce the
taxonomy of homelessness, “almost all 'tramps' are 'homeless men' but by no means are all homeless
24 Speek, Peter Alexander. A Stake In The Land.( USA: Harper & Brothers. 1921)
Speek was employed by the C.I.R. in 1914. A Stake In The Land is the result of his study.
25 Bosma, Ulbe (2007) 119
26 Scholarly Attention such as Nels Anderson. Political attention such as USCIR, See Ch. 2 Higbie.
men tramps.”27 Solenberger’s psychological characterization was not as permanent as Andersons, “the
homeless man may be an able-bodied workman without a family; he may be a runaway boy, a
consumptive temporarily stranded on his way to a health resort, an irresponsible, feeble-minded, or insane
man, but unless he is also a professional wanderer he is not a “tramp.”28 There were other studies
commissioned by the federal government, similar to Speek. The goal of the Country Life Commission was
to build community and standardize daily life. The “professional wandrer” had no place in this society.29
Ethnographic research was done by popular writers like Jack London’s The Road, his account of
Kelly’s Industrial Army in their march to Washington in 1894. John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley is an
account of his time on the road. 30 Ethnography, it could be argued is the basis for Anderson’s research as
well as he claimed to have ridden the rails in his youth.
27 Solenberger, Alice Willard. One Thousand Homeless Men.( New York: Survey Associates.) 1914 pg 87,
206
28 209 Solenberger, Alice Willard. One Thousand Homeless Men. New York: Survey Associates. 1914
29 Report of the Country Life Commission and Special Message from the President of the United States.
1909
30 London, Jack. The Road (Frederick Ellis 2007, 1907)
Steinbeck, John. Travels With Charley (Viking Press) 1962
Anderson’s work is also based on one very prominent informant, Ben Reitman.31 Modern historian
Roger Bruns has published a biography of Reitman as well as an ethnographic memoir/collection of stories
and poems.32 Some of the grander Reitman claims include Hobo (Syphilis) Doctor, operation of a Hobo
college, the Dil Pickle Club and his title: “King of the Hoboes.”33 Bruns follows hobo royalty through modern
“Hobo Conventions” in Britt, Iowa.34
Modern historian Todd DePastinio describes Reitman as “the flamboyant radical activist”
in his cultural history of homelessness.35 Boxcar Bertha is Reitman’s textual contribution to hobo
history. DePastino compares this” aprochaphal account of female homelessness [which] exploited
the lady hobo panic of the early depression,” to Steinbeck’s portrayal of Migrant Motherhood in
31 Anderson, Nels. The Hobo; the Sociology of the Homeless Man. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press 1923)
32 Bruns, Roger A. Knights of the Road: A Hobo History. (New York: Methuen.) 1980
Bruns Roger A. The Damndest Radical: The Life and World of Ben Reitman: Chicago’s Celebrated Social
Reformer, Hobo King, and Whorehouse Physcician. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press) 2001
33 Rosemont, Franklin (ed.) The Rise and Fall of the Dil Pickle: Jazz Age Chicago’s Wildest and Most
Outgragously Creative Hobohemian Nightspot (Charles H. Kerr Publishing) 2003
34 Bruns, Roger A. Knights of the Road: A Hobo History. (New York: Methuen.) 1980
35 Depastino, Todd. Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press 2003) 89
The Grapes of Wrath.36 Migrant motherhood was another facet to the hobo identity, especially
during the Great Depression. There is also a converse ribald masculinity which Higbie and
DePastino recognize.
The hobo identity is constructed starting with the turn of the century scholarly, political
and popular attention and it is being redefined by historians such as Burns, Higbie and DePastino.
Some key characteristics: sexual extremes, psychological defects, transience, agricultural laborers
with seasonal employment, white, male. The liminal space within the hobo identity is probably
what warranted taxonomy and further study by academics, the government and American
culture. The hobo acts as a bridge between the industrial and proto-industrial age. They use the
industrial rail lines to do agrarian labor. Working in the country and living in the city. Existing
within American culture without the marking of American worker or capitalist (as they would have
been recognizable in the early twentieth century.)
Bousma may well include the hobo identity with his “informal indenturship” in north
America. Still American transient labor is only one small part of larger “global migration flows.”
Bowsma’s scope includes state sponsored indentured labor, intercontinental (Russian) migration,
and “all types of informal indentureship in white frontier regions in western North America not as
an anomaly but more as one of the common features of migration history.”37
36 Depastino, Todd. Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press 2003) 216-218
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath (Viking Press) 1939
37 Bosma, Ulbe (2007) 120
The hobo identity is part of a “invented tradition” which defines America, Labor,
Capitalism and a small group of transient workers. Eric Hobswam and Terence Ranger describe
invented traditions through ritual, symbols and repetition. Traditions express a culture’s past and
create an ideology. The three purposes of invented traditions are “social cohesion,” “authority”
and “socialization.”38 One example of social cohesion and safety which the hobo tradition
expressed was the Jungle. Jungles were small camps on major rail lines, just outside of towns.
Hoboes would barter, eat, sleep, shave and socialize at these camps. Academics took note. The
Journal American Speech defined Jungle as, “a hobo camp along the railroad,”39 in 1935.
Social
cohesion, labor and authority would mix during the I.W.W.’s heyday. Joyce Kornbluh constructs an
educated hobo, “in the jungles, on the jobs, and while lounging around the I.W.W. hall, the I.W.W.
hobo frequently read avidly. Jack London was a favorite novelist and his book, the Iron Heel, was
popular. Works on sociology, economics, politics, and history were also widely read.“ While
hoboes read left wing publications, they also shared city space with other marginal populations,
“between jobs, hoboes gathered in certain city areas...to listen to lectures on biology, eugenics,
38 Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1983)
39pg. 17 Maurer, David W. “The Lingo of the Good-People.” American Speech Vol. 10, No. 1. (February
1935.) 17
psychology, sociology, politics, and economics.”40 The hobo tradition was linked with radical labor through
the I.W.W.
Queen Victoria invented tradition as a method of social control between 1857 and 1877 in
India. The Indian social structure could not recognize the queen as ruler until the preceding,
Mughal, regime had been desacralized. The British had to create a social order and nobility. The
queen asserted control with alignment of the Indian and British cultural and symbolic world
views. Without this process, there would be no Indian freedom. The Queen allowed Indians to
develop a recognizable “post-colonial identity.”41 There is a hobo identity which necessarily exists
with American society of the early twentieth century—it ends as migrant labor: Oakies, hoboes
and tramps become the poor working class homeless.42 The post-industrial hobo exists
somewhere between commuting and teleconferences.
Identity is used in revolutions. Carolyn Fick links Haitian revolution rhetoric to the French
and American revolutions. Haiti revolutionaries, “historicized the specific content they gave to
abstract eighteenth century Enlightenment ideas,” from natural, to human, to individual to “rights
40Kornbluh, Joyce Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology.( Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1964.) 40-41
41 Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds 208-209
42 Depastino, Todd. Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press 2003)
Bahr, Howard M. has more to say about homeless sociology and the skid row identity.
of all mankind.” While Lenin used revolutionary rhetoric, rebelling against “monopoly capitalist”
regimes, the American Revolution was against an “imperial mercantilist” regime, and the French
fought against “privilege, aristocracy, and monarchical absolutism.” The Haitian Revolution used
revolutionary Enlightenment ideology to redefined rights, freedom, emancipation, liberty,
equality, citizenship, independence.43 Hoboes redefined the meaning of liberty, to them American
freedom was satisfying wanderlust. In Haiti, it was Napoleonic slavery which “led to Haitian
independence and to a reformulation of citizenship and the nation, whose basic foundations lay
deeply embedded in the legacies and contingencies of the [French] revolution itself.”44
Traditions and identities can be used as modes of resistance. Hoboes resisted American
culture through disaffiliation. The Haitian revolution was born from an Enlightenment tradition.
Stoler expressed an distinction between “peasant and proletarian status [that] continued to feed
a myth of two distinct production systems.”45
Class is the mode of taxonomy and labor control used by Lenin, but historians have
broadened characteristics to include gender, ethnicity, religion, and race (among others.) The
German colony of Togo attempted to recreate the American Southern labor relations. German
43 Fick, Carolyn E. “The Haitian Revolution and the Limits of Freedom: Defining Citizenship in the
Revolutionary Era,” Social History 32,4 (2007) 394-5
44 Fick, Carolyn E (2007) 396
45 Stoler, Ann Laura. Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1985) 208
colonizers saw racial repression (as used in America) as a model for “control of ethnic minorities in
free agricultural labor in Germany.” The Germans imported Tuskegee Grads to train Togo citizen
colonizers. The Germans defined race in Togo, though the students did not “come to identify
themselves as ‘Negro’ at least insofar as they did not voluntarily grow cotton after graduation.”
The Germans would “further develop their program of coerced, but formally free, agricultural
labor.” 46
Race and danger are combined by French Algerian colonizers in the “declensionist”
environmental school of the 1850s until 1940. France’s, “attitudes and policies toward the
environment reflected broader colonial anxieties about climate, race, and the fate of European
‘civilization’ itself.” Race was used to defined “Arab nomads as ‘locusts,’” that hindered the
productive capacity of Algerian farms. Studies actually suggest it was Roman “over-cultivation,”
and the 1890-1940 French destruction of “Algeria’s extensive cork forests for profit,” which
destroyed the environment. But Imperial France combined race and colonization to propose a
new “Latin-Mediterranean race…” to “reestablish the greatness of North Africa…” “Discussions of
this new, essentially European race became prevalent in a variety of circles in the 1870s and 1880s
and came to be intimately linked to environmentalists’ concerns about the deforestation of North
Africa.”47
46 Zimmerman, Andrew. “A German Alabama in Africa: The Tuskegee Expedition to German Togo and
the Transnational Origins of West African Cotton Growers,” American Historical Review 110, 5 (2005)
1372, 1388, 1393-98
47 Ford, Caroline. (April 2008) 352
The case of Olaudah Equiano proves that an individual can also define their identity.
Equiano identifies as an African Igbo in the first nineteenth century slave narrative. He describes
Africa, the Middle Passage, and Slavery. This slave narrative would come to define the genre with
hallmarks of redemption, politics, and spirituality. This text is foundational to African Diaspora
studies. The account is questionable and probably invented for a political cause. Equiano later
claims South Carolina as birthplace, admitting that he “’invented’ his African past to heighten the
drama of his autobiography, bolstering its authenticity in the service of the abolitionist cause.”
Historian James Sweet is concerned with classification and taxonomy, “European taxonomies did
not readily accommodate the complexity of African self-understandings or group imperatives…
[or] the potential for identities to shift across space and time.” Does African culture “arrive” or
“survive” in North America?48
Identities are formed as imperial labor control. But the metropole and colony are one
voice among, politicians, academics, writers and cultural participants who are constantly
redefining the characteristics of any identity. Identity is fluid, “situational, dependent on claims
and attributions calibrated to constantly shifting sets of sociopolitical demands.” Remember the
multiple roles which Reitman held and the participant/researcher identities of Solenberger and
Anderson, London and Jacob Riis would also dress the part for access to the hobo community.
Identity and tradition create a community which is hindered by external social, economic
and political pressures. In Equiano’s case, “chronic instability rendered group ‘belonging’ more
48 Sweet, James C. “Mistaken Identities? Oulaudah Equiano, Domingos Alvarez, and the Methodological
Challenges of Studying the African Diaspora,” American Historical Review 114, 2 (April 2009) 280-282
elusive for Africans than for other Atlantic actors. Ultimately the imperative of collective
identification as an affirmation of self, along with the realities of social instability, had a profound
effect on how Africans…forged their identities in the Atlantic world.”49
The social instability which created hoboes was economic turmoil, psychological stigma,
industrial inferiority and structural homelessness. The social instability which paved the way for a
proletarian social revolution was monopoly capitalism and imperialism. Sweet explains how to
study marginal history. He disregards quantitative and collective analysis and favors, “a careful
examination of individual life histories might better reveal the actual processes by which people
retained old identities and added new ones.”50 Sweet echoes the Speek, Solenberger, and
Anderson in his individual analysis. Still the life histories will only be one part of the hobo identity
as it is understood by the state, academics and general population.
49 Sweet, James C (April 2009) 283, 285
50 Sweet, James C (April 2009) 305
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