Hobo's Slouch Hat

Hobo's Slouch Hat

The visual image of the hobo as we know it today began to solidify around the end of the nineteenth century.

The tramp's cudgel was replaced by the bindle, a bundle of belongings tied up on a stick (which could still be used as a weapon).

Patched suit coats or work clothes replaced the tramp's traditional suit of rags. And where the tramp had been skinny, the ancient attribute of the very poor, the hobo had a more normal appearance.

The derby began to be replaced by softer felt hats, which happen to allow for more individual expression in their shaping.

Still beyond the limits of respectable society, and still not to be trusted, the hobo nonetheless became less sinister.

By the 1890s, Hobo-dom was becoming an institution. Larger organizations – flophouses, missions, and employment agencies – appeared in hobo home bases like Chicago and San Francisco. The Industrial Workers of the World (the "Wobblies") focused on direct action in pursuit of immediate improvements for labor. Both approaches fit well with the hobo's uncertain lifestyle.

But freight trains are dangerous, and there was still hardship and violence along the rails too. The men who traveled this way received harsh treatment from stay-at-home citizens, from law enforcement, and sometimes from each other.

Public opinion was noisy in its condemnation of the hobo as a dirty, lazy criminal. For men who traveled to find work, or at least worked enough to keep traveling, that stung.

Some pushed to give their way of life more positive associations. A "Hoe Boy" – a man with a hoe – is eager to work. Fraternal organizations and codes of road ethics supported a more positive image and promised to ease the way for the traveling laborer. Hobo conventions added entertainment to the more serious efforts.

With the tramp scares of the 1870s safely past, a gentler comedic element could also surface. Cartoon hoboes were sometimes actually plump – especially when lounging on park benches. Tramps and hoboes were shown in the attire of the businessman or the swell – top hat on head, suit coat, flower in lapel, cane over arm – but hopelessly wrecked: hat crushed, collar sprung, shoes gaping, and everything hilariously patched.

And in the popular mind, the weather-beaten but hard-working hobo, mostly honest and always enduring, claimed space alongside the dangerous, shiftless vagrant.

Curator's note: When I read this label in draft to my mother, a native Vermonter, she immediately mentioned Jimmy Hall, a hill town neighbor who is legendary in our family for his readiness to keep his word, whatever the cost, and his hard-working ways. And, she said, "He was always ready to help."

These are frontier virtues, still prominent in the discourse of a state largely organized along pre-industrial lines.

And, come to think of it, they exemplify the ideal of the American hobo, in his own estimation and in the view of those who look back fondly.

—David Hammond