Analysis and Detailed Overview of the Problem of Homelessness - Book Report/Review Example

Running Head: SPACE, PLACE AND LANDSCAPE Representation of Space, Place and Landscape in Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" [The s Name] [The Name of the Institution] Representation of Space, Place and Landscape in Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" Homelessness emerged as a national issue in the 1870s. During that decade the homeless population increased dramatically in size and assumed a distinctive form. A new, more aggressive type of homeless man emerged-the tramp. Tramps rode the railroads without paying, joined together in threatening bands, and frightened farmers while incurring the wrath of law enforcement officers. In the cities, meanwhile, the number of destitute persons forced to stay overnight in privately run shelters or police station "tramp rooms" increased, while those who were not completely penniless sought accommodations in cheap lodging house districts like the Bowery in New York. During the post-Civil War decades, some of the homeless went "on the road," while others gravitated to the cities. There was considerable overlap between the two groups, but those who traveled in search of work (or, sometimes, adventure) were generally younger than those who remained permanently in one locale. This dual aspect would continue to define homelessness until the 1940s, when the effects of war and structural changes in the economy led to a sharp decline in the number of persons riding the rails. After 1945, homelessness would undergo a drastic change as an aging population of destitute men became confined, for the most part, to the deteriorating skid row areas of cities. Homelessness, which in the 1930s had reemerged as an important national issue, now reverted to what it had been before the Civil War-a strictly urban problem. (Conquergood , 2001) Even in the cities, the homeless became largely invisible to all but the police. The lack of concern for this impoverished group made the skid rows ripe for urban renewal, and in the 1960s and 1970s most of the old lodging house districts in American cities were demolished. The level of significance we ascribe to homelessness very much depends on how the term is defined. In conducting the first census of the homeless in 1933, sociologist Nels Anderson identified a homeless person as "a destitute man, woman or youth, either a resident in the community or a transient, who is without domicile at the time of enumeration. Such a person may have a home in another community, or relatives in the local community, but is for the time detached and will not or cannot return." This succinct definition recognized that a homeless person could be either a permanent resident of a community or a traveler, that the condition of homelessness could either be voluntary or involuntary, and that family relationships were significant in determining whether or not a person became homeless. 1 All of these aspects are important for understanding the phenomenon historically. (McNally, 1999) Counting only those "without domicile," however, implies that only persons literally without a roof over their head, or forced to sleep in public or private shelters, are genuinely homeless. Such a restrictive definition seriously underestimates the level of homelessness in society. People sleeping outdoors are difficult to count, and even diligent investigators will miss many, as census enumerators discovered in 1990. Anderson's definition also sidesteps the fact that homelessness is often a transitory condition. A person can be temporarily domiciled at one point yet still be functionally homeless. Recent studies have shown that many persons living on the street or sleeping in shelters are able, from time to time, to find accommodations with family or friends. (Millstein, 1998) These arrangements are almost always temporary, however, and in most cases such individuals are back on the street in a relatively short time. The best contemporary estimates indicate that for every person in a shelter or on the street on a given night, three or four times as many have been homeless at some point during the previous year. Finally, the word "domicile" itself is open to varying interpretations. Too narrow a definition artificially understates the size of the homeless population. Until the 1970s, it was common for destitute men to rent six-foot-square cubicles in skid row hotels. Quite properly, people living in such circumstances were always considered homeless, as were those in the 1930s and earlier who survived by building makeshift structures in shantytowns. 2 In the past as today, a flexible definition of homelessness that takes these factors into account makes the most sense. 3Homelessness has assumed a variety of forms throughout American history. Especially during the industrial era, many homeless persons took part in tramping or worked as seasonal laborers (sometimes called hobos) during part of the year. Others traveled little and lived for decades in the poorest sections of cities, surviving on intermittent wages from odd jobs, begging, and occasional meager support from family members. Homeless women, especially, have always been more likely to live for long time periods in one city. What all these groups shared was the lack of a fixed abode, an impoverished lifestyle, and, in most cases, weak or nonexistent family support. (Jones, 2002) How the term homeless is defined brings up the far more difficult question of how to measure the level of homelessness at different times. Impressionistic evidence strongly suggests that homelessness was relatively insignificant prior to the 1730s but increased substantially in the late eighteenth century and again in the 1820s. This initial growth of the homeless population took place primarily in the nation's small but growing cities. The main source of data on the homeless during this period, however, consists of records of vagrancy convictions. While it is safe to assume there is some correlation between the numbers of people charged with vagrancy and the size of the entire homeless population, vagrancy convictions may also be influenced by the size and function of the police force, as well as by the attitude of the authorities toward the homeless. This is especially true for the period prior to the 1840s, when police forces were modest in size and still organized around the informal constable-watch system. 4 Vagrancy incarceration data provide valuable insight into the social characteristics of the early homeless population, but they are much less useful for estimating the size of this outcast group. Homelessness fluctuated in relation to a variety of factors, but even at low points the number of destitute persons without shelter was substantial. World War II marked an important turning point in this regard. (Bronner , 2002) During the three decades following the war, the usual cyclical pattern disappeared, and homelessness receded to its lowest level since the mid-eighteenth century. The postwar decline proved temporary, however, as mass homelessness reemerged in the late 1970s. Although the homeless population today is not nearly as large as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is still much closer to the historic "norm" than was true of the skid-row era of the 1950s and '60s. 5 Numbers alone cannot adequately convey the significance of homelessness as an aspect of American civilization. Especially during the industrial era, uncertainty about who was or might become homeless magnified the impact of homelessness well beyond what any isolated "head count" could measure. In addition to those who actually became homeless, there existed a substantially larger group-family members, friends, and fellow workers -who today would be described as an "at-risk" population. In his study of the homeless of the postindustrial era, sociologist Peter Rossi notes that the line between the "literal homeless" and impoverished individuals with homes is often tenuous. (Cassady , 2001) Today, of course, there is at least some public assistance available to the destitute. The vulnerability of the poor was even greater during earlier times, when government aid to the impoverished was almost nonexistent. For urban manual laborers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, an awareness of the porous line between the down-and- out and the working poor profoundly influenced their understanding of the emergent industrial order and their precarious place in it. 6 Although not everyone feared falling into homelessness, by 1900 most Americans were in some way affected by the phenomenon. The increased mobility of the homeless, who after 1870 were as likely to travel by train as on foot, potentially brought the specter of homelessness to the doorstep of every family in the country. The homeless were more visible, and far more assertive, during the industrial era than at any other time in American history. Prior to World War II, tramps and beggars could scarcely be avoided. Most Americans regularly encountered people begging for a handout, either at their back doors or on street corners, and stories about the homeless were common in magazines and daily newspapers. (Hunt, 2003) Despite its pervasiveness as an aspect of American history, homelessness has received relatively little attention from scholars. 7 Social mobility studies, despite their claim to represent "history from the bottom up," have always ignored the underclass of homeless people. Few of the myriad histories of specific communities, works that have enriched our understanding of the American past in so many other ways, even acknowledge the existence of the homeless. If mentioned at all in general histories of the United States, tramps and beggars are usually categorized as simply another effect of the business cycle. 8 The homeless cannot be traced in city directories or manuscript census schedules, traditional sources for documenting social change at the local level, since almost by definition these were persons who had broken loose from settled society. To ignore such a large group of destitute people, however, presents an incomplete-and in some ways quite false-view of the evolution of the American social order over the last two centuries. Who were the tramps and beggars How did they become homeless What were their lives like With whom in society did they interact Answers to these questions, hopefully, can help to reclaim an important part of the American experience. Equally important to the history of the homeless is the public's response to this impoverished group. No other element of the population, with the exception of African Americans, has generated such strong reactions over such a long time period. Attitudes toward work, idleness, inequality, and benevolence have all been connected in some way with the homeless, who in different guises have represented alienation and failure in a society that has long worshiped upward mobility and success. (Berrigan, 2000) To some extent, this was true almost from the beginning of American society, as evidenced by the early passage of harsh antivagrancy laws and the construction, in the eighteenth century, of the first workhouses for the "idle poor." Homelessness did not spread uniformly to all parts of the country at the same time. On the eve of the Civil War, much of the South and many rural areas in the North had managed to avoid the "plague" of homeless persons already commonplace in Philadelphia, New York, and other northern cities. That was one reason that so many people were shocked when they first encountered vagabonds riding the rails in the 1870s. Especially to farmers and residents of small towns, these newly assertive homeless men were deeply subversive of the established order, still rooted at that time in the Protestant ethic. "He is at war in a lazy kind of way with society," an 1875 New York Times editorial on the tramp declared, "and rejoices at being able to prey upon it." This was a mild statement compared to the vitriolic commentary about "criminal, lazy vagabonds" that would pour forth from the press during the next decade. 9 In every age, the homeless have been anathema to many Americans because of their alleged laziness, but the tramps of the 1870s and '80s also threatened another core American value: community control. 10 Of unknown origin and designs, the homeless suddenly appeared in communities across the country, sleeping in barns, pestering citizens for handouts, and leaving as mysteriously as they arrived. Prior to the Civil War, the "wandering poor" were few enough in number that town officials could usually control them. But forcing the homeless to "move on" became futile when the next train only brought more vagrants to their community. The class dimension of homelessness presented yet another cause for anxiety. The tramp came into prominence at the same time that freewheeling entrepreneurs like Jay Gould and Jim Fisk were amassing their ill-gotten gains. Both types seemed to indicate a betrayal of the ideal of a society where there was a direct relationship between work done and benefits received. Urban beggars and train-riding vagabonds were visible signs of the breakdown of local control that accompanied the rise of urban industrial society in the nineteenth century. Those who responded most antagonistically to the homeless refused to accept this explanation. Instead, they sought scapegoats, the most convenient of whom were the waves of immigrants pouring into the country. Prior to World War I, a common theme in the literature on the homeless was that they were foreigners who had not assimilated American values. Initially, there was an element of truth in this image. In the mid-nineteenth century, the foreign-born, especially the impoverished Irish, made up a disproportionate share of the homeless population. By the early twentieth century, however, this stereotype was out of step with the facts. An increasing majority of the homeless were native-born, and few of the new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe ever became tramps or beggars. Whatever its causes, homelessness was an indigenous phenomenon, not something imported from the outside. References Berrigan Ted. 2000. "The Art of Fiction LXI: Jack Kerouac." Paris Review 43: 60-105. Cassady Carolyn. Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg. New York: William Morrow, 2001. 154-62 Bronner Stephen, and Douglas Kellner, eds. 2002. Critical Theory and Society: A Reader. New York: Routledge. 139-44 Conquergood Dwight. 2001. "Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics." Communication Monographs 58: 179-94. Hunt Tim. 2003. Kerouac'S Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction. Hamden, CT: Archon. 209-16 Jones James T. 2002. A Map of Mexico City Blues: Jack Kerouac as Poet. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 310-18 McNally Dennis Sean. 1999. Desolation Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. New York: Random House. 78-86 Millstein Gilbert. 1998. Review of On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. New York Times, 5 Sept., 34. Read More