Hobohemia on the plains: labor, leisure, and industrial discipline in Kansas City, 1873-1915
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Abstract
On the morning of June 9, 1925, a crowd of curious onlookers assembled near the intersection of Second Street and Grand Avenue in Kansas City, Missouri’s North End district to watch the washing away of a sleep bluff overlooking the Missouri River. For fifty years, the promontory colloquially known as “Hobo Hill” had served as a gathering point for the migratory workers who were variously derided as vagrants, tramps, and hobos. These men served as the primary labor source for industries such as logging, railroad construction, and, in the Midwest, the annual wheat harvest. However, for self-styled progressive businessmen like William Volker, whose company was the principal agent behind Hobo Hill’s removal, the throngs of hobos who passed through and wintered in Kansas City represented a social illness requiring municipal action. At the same time, the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) eyed the same group of itinerant workers as a population ripe for organization. Locally, these movements culminated in the formation of the Board of Public Welfare and the Agricultural Workers Organization (AWO), respectively. Recent works on American hobos have masterfully elucidated the relationship between transient laborers and the development of industrial agriculture, the rural communities of the Midwest, and federal welfare programs. The aim of this paper is to trace the evolving relationship between one down-season roost, Kansas City, Missouri, and its transient population in the decades prior to official organization under the AWO in 1915. It will incorporate the perspectives of social reformers as well as hobos themselves with the goal of elucidating larger changes in the public discourse around labor, leisure, and mobility, both social and geographic. Within Kansas City, the reform campaign effected a network of urban institutions to harness and reform the laboring life of transient men. Meanwhile, hobos themselves produced a remarkable body of songs and poetry that called for resistance to these institutions and defended the rights to leisure and mobility. Such texts were integral to the formation of the countercultural milieus known as hobohemias.
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Introduction -- Methodology -- Professional tramps and chronic loafers: the making of a hobo taxonomy in Kansas City's Press, 1873-1893 -- The war on idleness: the Helping Hand Institute and progressive labor education, 1893-1909 -- The jobless man and the manless job: the Board of Public Welfare and the Industrial Workers of the World, 1909-1915 -- Conclusion: migratory workers and scenery bums -- Bibliography
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M.A. (Master of Arts)