Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America Review

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(More customer reviews)I saw this author on C-Span's Book TV and was captivated by the way he described the homeless "hobohemia" counterculture of the early 20th century. The excerpts he read and the enthusiasm he conveyed for his subject convinced me that this would be a book worth buying. As I soon found out, and as another reviewer has said, "Citizen Hobo" is so much more than a history of homelessness. It is a "tour-de-force," a historical pageant that compresses what the author said was 10 years of research into a little over 300 pages.
"Citizen Hobo" tells a great epic. After the Civil War, large-scale changes in the economy put millions of "tramps" on the road in seach of work. These men eventually created their own culture that DePastino calls "hobohemia." While many Americans romanticized hobohemia and even embraced the hobo life as a liberation from the "rat race" of capitalism, government officials and politicians like Franklin Roosevelt tried to figure out ways to get hoboes to settle down. During the Great Depression and World War II period, these leaders created new welfare programs and forms of prefential treatment intended to encourage white men to get married, buy a house, have kids, and conform to the "American way of life." (After reading this book, you will never think of Roosevelt's New Deal or the GI Bill in the same way again!) These programs poured so much money into suburban cookie-cutter homes during the 1950s and 1960s that little was left over for apartments and lower-cost housing in the city, a failure that contributed to the homelessness crisis of the last twenty years.
This is just the bare outline of a story which is so richly textured and multi-dimensional that the reader can get lost in the fascinating details. But DePastino knows just when to pull the reader back and show the big picture again. His writing is beautiful and elegant, not a zippy read that can be dispensed with quickly, but a deep and thoughtful narrative with lots of great anecdotes and analyses along the way. His examinations of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" and "Dharma Bums" are masterful, as are the stories he tells about Walt Whitman, Jack London, Charlie Chaplin, Woody Guthrie, Bill Mauldin, and many others. Although DePastino covers the economic and policy angles on the problem, his first love is obviously culture, especially literature, music, and movies. While the other reviewer wanted to run out and listen to Guthrie, Dylan, and Springsteen after reading the book, I wanted to watch the movies that "Citizen Hobo" discusses, like "Modern Times," "Sullivan's Travels," and "Easy Rider."
DePastino is convinced, and he has convinced me, that homelessness is woven into the fabric of American life and that to address homelessness means changing, yet again, the rights of American citizenship.
This is a great book. Let's hope we don't have to wait 10 years for another from this author!

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In the years following the Civil War, a veritable army of homeless men swept across America's "wageworkers' frontier" and forged a beguiling and bedeviling counterculture known as "hobohemia." Celebrating unfettered masculinity and jealously guarding the American road as the preserve of white manhood, hoboes took command of downtown districts and swaggered onto center stage of the new urban culture. Less obviously, perhaps, they also staked their own claims on the American polity, claims that would in fact transform the very entitlements of American citizenship.In this eye-opening work of American history, Todd DePastino tells the epic story of hobohemia's rise and fall, and crafts a stunning new interpretation of the "American century" in the process. Drawing on sources ranging from diaries, letters, and police reports to movies and memoirs, Citizen Hobo breathes life into the largely forgotten world of the road, but it also, crucially, shows how the hobo army so haunted the American body politic that it prompted the creation of an entirely new social order and political economy. DePastino shows how hoboes—with their reputation as dangers to civilization, sexual savages, and professional idlers—became a cultural and political force, influencing the creation of welfare state measures, the promotion of mass consumption, and the suburbanization of America. Citizen Hobo's sweeping retelling of American nationhood in light of enduring struggles over "home" does more than chart the change from "homelessness" to "houselessness." In its breadth and scope, the book offers nothing less than an essential new context for thinking about Americans' struggles against inequality and alienation.

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