After the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in Southern California in 1876, white speculators set out to transform the small Mexican town of Los Angeles into what they termed the “Eden of the Saxon Homeseeker”—an opportunity for white families to achieve the dream of homeownership in land newly cleared of Native inhabitants. As historian Kelly Lytle Hernández writes, one thing that stood in the way of this vision was the figure of the tramp.
Hernández writes that the industrialization and nationalization of the economy in the late nineteenth century meant that large numbers of men were frequently thrown out of work. Many of them took to the roads and rails, freaking out elite and middle-class white Protestants, who generally viewed married, settled life as the foundation of a successful society. Some of the earliest US sociologists created the field of “trampology,” warning that hobos represented a threat to the vigor of white America.
In LA, tramps were a seasonal issue. Men who worked in agriculture and forestry often retreated to the cities and towns of sunny southern California for the winter. Some joked that, during the offseason, they invested their summer earnings in “houses and lots”—houses of prostitution and lots of whiskey.
In 1882, Los Angeles Times owner Harrison Gray Otis complained that the city was “infested with vagrants.” Otis and other city boosters followed the guidance of trampologist Josiah Flynt, who warned that “the evils in low life are contagious, and to be treated scientifically they must be quarantined and prevented from spreading.”
Hernández notes that this was a somewhat different project than “protecting” white society from Mexican, Native, Black, and Asian itinerant workers, which was often accomplished through segregation and straightforward violence. As part of the racial group that “belonged” in LA, Anglo-American and Western European-born hobos were only a threat because of their failure to adopt middle-class norms.
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So “quarantining” tramps from acceptable society meant arrests for crimes like making a public disturbance or sleeping on the sidewalk. Starting in the 1880s, the city and county each built a series of increasingly spacious jails—and then proceeded to fill them well above capacity each winter. About 90 percent of the jailed population was white men.
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Hernández writes that anyone convicted of a misdemeanor in LA County was subject to forced labor. Begging or drunkenness could mean a week to a couple of months on a chain gang, grading and paving roads, fixing bridges, hauling debris, and otherwise helping to construct the fast-growing city.
Officials noted that maintaining the chain gangs cost more than the city would otherwise have paid for the work. But, as the Times put it in 1904, “if it diminishes the annual influx of vicious tramps to Southern California it will be cheap at any price.”
In reality, unemployed workers kept flowing into LA and other cities in the region each winter, a trend that only ended when World War I turned single men who might otherwise have been hobos into soldiers.
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