The term hobo was used to describe homeless people who moved around in order to find temporary work in the United States during a cycle of depressions between 1879 and 1939. The term was often conflated with the terms tramp and bum. Contemporary uses of the word are rare. Similar people are now most often called homeless or migrant workers. The most famous definition of the hobo is said to originate from the Chicago anarchist Ben Reitman who stated that a hobo moves and works, a tramp moves and doesn’t work, and a bum stays still and does not work. It is unclear from where the name originates. Some claim that it is derived from the name hoe boy—an agricultural worker. Another theory is that hobo is a derivation of the Latin homa bonas (good man).
Despite such attempts to differentiate hobos from tramps, contemporary observers tended to refer to the mobile homeless as tramps and hobos interchangeably. Most were male, white, and American-born, but there were significant numbers of black and female hobos as well. In 1911 one researcher suggested a population of 350,000 hobos. A 1906 estimate put the population at 500,000.
Hobos and tramps were most likely to travel alone either on freight trains or on foot. Because such train travel was illegal, it was also extremely dangerous. They would travel between, on top of, or underneath carriages. As they often had to get onto the train while it was moving, they were frequently injured or killed in the process. Railroad police were also known to deliberately throw hobos off moving trains. Estimates of annual death and injury to hobos and tramps ran as high as 5,000. Hobos most often worked in construction, agriculture, and mining. Indeed, the newly industrialized agriculture of the American West depended on the ability of migrant laborers to follow harvests from apples in Washington State to beets and grapes in California. Others followed the wheat harvest through the Midwest from Kansas to the Dakotas.
Between jobs hobos would gather on the outskirts of urban areas alongside railroad tracks in places known as hobo jungles. They would also use police stations, lodging houses, "flop houses" (a place offering very cramped, cheap lodging for transients, usually men), and missions. These would normally be located along an area called the Main Stem—a part of town associated with lodging for the homeless as well as employment agencies, cheap cafes, and soup kitchens.
Following the recession of 1879 hobos were subjects of a moral panic known as the tramp scare. They were generally represented as being foreign-born, lazy, and politically subversive. Newspapers called for them to be jailed, forced into work camps, sterilized, or even killed. Eugenicists believed them to be members of an "inferior" racial group who favored a nomadic lifestyle. By World War II (1939-1945) the term hobo had been replaced by the term migrant, which had been used in the 1930s to refer to those displaced by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in the American South and Midwest. Since World War II people who would have been called tramps or hobos in the early part of the twentieth century have been referred to most often simply as the homeless. Indeed, the earlier figures of hobos and tramps became romantic figures. Charlie Chaplin, Jack Kerouac, and others used the hobo figure to question some of the assumptions about "normal" life in the United States.
