What’s in a Name? The Never-Ending Riddle of the Hobo
By Stephen Wilson, one of our reporters abroad
'What's in a name! That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet...' laments Juliet to Romeo in Shakespeare's drama of desperate and doomed love. Well maybe quite a lot! How we name people or things can conjure up all kinds of negative or positive connotations depending not just on the meaning but the motives and way it is uttered not to mention the context.
But Juliet had a point. People can name other people in an innocuous manner by a speaker without any sense of malice or intention to inadvertently offend the person who is being addressed. The meaning of a word can lose its original meaning by the loss of context in which it grew or is used newly by a speaker. What is offensive to one person might seem a badge of honor to another. Just look at the word 'bum.' The way it is used by people carries very negative connotations of a homeless person who is lazy and shuns work. The phrasal verb 'bum about' means to be laze around and has lost the former connection with the homeless.
But the brilliant writer Jack Kerouac did not see anything offensive about this term and even named one of his books 'The Dharma Bums.' In his work Kerouac does not make a clear distinction between hobo and bum. They are practically synonymous. For instance just to cite one quote you can read:
'At nightfall I was lurking around waiting for my train. A bum was sitting in the doorway watching me with peculiar interest. I went over to talk to him. He said he was an ex-Marine from Paterson New Jersey and after a while he whipped out a little slip of paper he read sometimes on freight trains. I looked at it. It was a quotation from the Digha Nikaya, the words of Buddha. I smiled; I did not say anything. He was a great voluble bum, and a bum who didn't drink. He was an idealist hobo and said, 'That's all there is to it, and that is what I like to do. I'd rather hop freights around the country and cook my food out of tin cans over wood fires, than be rich and have a home or work. I'm satisfied. I used to have arthritis, you know, I was in hospital for years. I found out a way to cure it and then hit the road and I have been on it ever since' {page 100, The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac, Modern Classics/Penguin, London, 2007, originally published in 1959}.
In one sentence Kerouac refers to the ex-marine as both bum and hobo. And if you read Kerouac's 'The Vanishing American Hobo' the label is expanded to encompass an almost motley group of people such as the Russian poet Sergei Esenin, Benjamin Franklin, and John Muir. A hobo is no longer defined as just American but can be anyone anywhere. For Kerouac, a hobo was not just a homeless person who jumped freight trains, traveled and did all kinds of work but had embraced a distinct way of life at odds with any highly materialistic society obsessed with production-consumption values placed before the dignity of people.
This is not how everyone sees things. If you peruse certain dictionaries you can even find some that make a sharp distinction between hobo, bum and tramp. In an 'Urban Dictionary' you can find the entry: 'A hobo is an itinerant worker, a career which sprang up during the depression. A hobo, unlike a bum, or a tramp is more than willing to work, but misses it for a short duration in travel, the love of the journey above the actual destination. A bum is stationary, feeding off of those unfortunate enough to cross his path, a hobo merely travels from town to town, finding work when he can, but only for the sake of financing his next adventure. Never call a hobo a bum.' Well, Kerouac clearly makes this 'error.’ But many of those dictionaries reflect the negative prejudices of the people who write them rather than how hobos actually see themselves. During eras such as the depression hobos did not encounter so much widespread hostility, but by the 1959 this had all changed. Kerouac wrote in 'The Disappearing American Hobo' that while in Bruegel's time children danced around the hobo 'today mothers hold tight their children when the hobo passes through town because of what newspapers made the hobo to be - the rapist, the strangler, child -eater. Stay away from strangers, they'll give you poison candy' {page 34, The Disappearing American Hobo, republished by Penguin-Random House, London, 2018}.
A lot of ink has been spilled over the etymology of the word hobo. For instance, some speculate that the word is linked to their work as farm laborers where they were originally named because they frequently carried a Hoe. Another view suggests it was originally a greeting 'Ho Boy' like 'Hi Boy'. Another notion is that the word 'bo' comes from Irish Gaelic for cattle. Hobo was a shorted name for a cowboy or someone who herded cattle. One woman called Jean claims that 'I think that hobo is a shortened version of homeless boy. My dad and granddad hired hobos to help with crops on their farms'.
It is seems likely that we will never be able to convincingly track back the precise origins of this term. But one thing is certain is that the usage of this term predated the depression and can be traced back to 1888. And that hobos may have lost their jobs and homes following a devastating economic crisis where they had to keep on the move just to obtain work. Hopping on freight trains was a practical way of saving their income. Rather than being a freely chosen life style the depression of America in the 1930's forced people 'to take to the road.’ In taking to the road it made sense to live by a code of values where it was imperative to aid each other.
A kind of community of cooperation and assistance developed. As far back as 1889 there was even a hobo convention where hobos gathered to formulate an agreed code of values. One article declares 'Decide you own life. Don't let another run or rule you'. A hobo must not harm or abuse any other hobo and deceive other people.
Writers such as Jack Kerouac attempted to take those values further by suggesting it represented a new free life style. Being a hobo was like living a new philosophy similar to Zen Buddhism or some Christian monks who had turned their backs on consumerism. Kerouac and others even supported the notion of hobos creating a 'rucksack revolution' where life would no longer be a dull, dreary routine office job but a true affirmation of adventure. Not only was this an adventure but taking to the road was a means of developing your spirituality and becoming a better person.
Unfortunately, Jack Kerouac became disillusioned as the police began to crack down on him and other hobos. Kerouac wrote 'The American hobo has a hard time hobing nowadays due to the increase in police surveillance of highways, railroads, sea shores, river bottoms, embankments and the thousand-and-one hiding holes of industrial night {page 31 of ‘The Disappearing American Hobo'}.
We might express reservations of how Jack Kerouac views hobos as being too proud to have anything to do with a community. Yet we hear that hobos would meet up and assist each other and even used their own coded language to help each other. They might write in chalk on the ground outside a house a warning whether this householder should be approached for food or not. A cross indicated the owner of the house was a kind person who you could knock on the door while another sign warned the owner had a shotgun. The hobos were teaching the new homeless how to better survive by heating themselves up or the best ways to self-treat your own ailments. Jack Kerouac mentions how a hobo gave him advice on how to treat his phlebitis by drinking hot milk with honey. Kerouac states how he followed this advice and his phlebitis disappeared completely.
What emerges from research into hobos was how resourceful, creative and skillful they really were. Jack Kerouac and others grasped this fact. If anyone staunchly defended the dignity of the hobo and the homeless it was the American writer Jack Kerouac. This was a man who had spent years on the road meeting and living with hobos. Indeed he described himself as a temporary hobo.
For this defense of the hobo, Jack Kerouac had to endure the same humiliation and insults they suffered. Truman Capote—who did not understand his literary methods—stated he 'was typing not writing.’ Others derided him as 'a know-nothing bohemian,' or 'the latrine laureate of Hobohemia' and ' a slob running a temperature.' When I heard Kerouac being called this I liked him even more. What those people considered 'an insult' such as 'a bum' or in Russian Bomzhi ' {no regular place of residence} I would deem a compliment.
So what's in a name? Is it just words, words and words? Well, being called a bum did not upset Kerouac because he decided to keep to his own chosen meaning of it and defined it on his own terms. Unlike unimaginative people he could see the divine spark in any person.
And whether he is called a hobo or bum matters not. Kerouac was his own man! He was not ashamed to call one of his books 'The Dharma Bums.’