HOMELESSNESS

Poor people without permanent shelter have always had a presence in the United States, and the homeless were much noticed on the edges of growing cities or riding the railroads during the nineteenth century. But Hooverville shantytowns and migrant Okie families driving West during the Depression brought unprecedented national attention and federal intervention to the problem of homelessness. Even during the Depression years, however, the experience of the homeless was not uniform and aid programs were far from comprehensive. Public response to the homeless alternated between antagonism and empathy.

In the late 1920s there were already increasing numbers of homeless people in community shelters. When the Depression hit, many of the newly unemployed headed to cities looking for jobs, overwhelming municipal lodging houses and private agencies. In 1931, for example, the number of homeless using shelters in Minneapolis increased fourfold over the previous year. Local and regional response was mixed, but certain patterns emerged. Cities could be more or less lenient in enforcing settlement laws, which mandated prior residency for relief and the return of potential public charges to their state of legal residence. In practice, though, few cities offered more than a night's shelter and a meal for nonresidents. In the Deep South, transients could be arrested and sent to work on chain gangs, and the few cities that had municipal shelters for the local poor excluded African Americans from them. Chicago expanded separate services for the homeless of both races, and a 1931 protest of the homeless in New York City led to improvements at the municipal lodging house. Still, much of the additional shelter was provided by private organizations like the Salvation Army. Religious missions provided shelter regardless of residency status, though they required that the homeless attend religious services. Small charities started soup kitchens and breadlines for anyone who was hungry.

Contemporary depictions of the homeless portrayed those waiting in breadlines as iconic victims of the nation's economic ruin. Though single women were frequently absent from the lines and rarely represented, they made up an increasing, though still small, percentage of the conservatively estimated 1.25 million unattached (i.e., not in families) homeless tallied in a 1933 census of 765 cities. The standard social work policy was to send transient women back to the residence of their families or husbands, so some homeless women avoided urban aid agencies. Many traveled on trains dressed in men's clothes, though this did not insure their safety. As "Boxcar" Bertha Thompson recalled, female hobos, like their male counterparts, took to the road for lack of money and the desire for freedom.

More visible was the increasing number of beggars. It became untenable to enforce anti-begging laws when some poor people deliberately tried to get arrested for the shelter of a lockup and when the increasing number of newly unemployed semi-skilled and white-collar workers elicited public sympathy. Most visible, perhaps, were the homeless who rode in boxcars and set up hobo camps or "jungles" at junctions and in cities. In 1932, World War I veterans traveled by train to Washington, D.C., and set up a large shantytown that swelled with those who supported their demand for advance payment of war bonuses. When President Herbert Hoover sent the U.S. Army to route this "bonus army" of the country's "worthiest" poor, public opinion turned even more against him.

The increasing number of homeless children—an estimated one-fifth of the homeless population was nineteen or younger—also attracted the attention of advocates. Many of these youngsters left home so as not to burden their families, which often were already disrupted or on relief. In 1932 a coalition of welfare advocates urged the Senate to pass a federal homeless program that would, in providing relief for the transient homeless, save the character of America's children.

In May 1933, President Roosevelt established the Federal Transient Service (FTS) as part of the Federal Emergency Relief Act. FTS was designed to provide aid for homeless people who were ineligible for local relief because they had not lived in any given state for more than the year required for settlement status. FTS eventually established programs in every state except Vermont. The service allotted the most money to California, which, with 4.7 percent of the nation's population, handled 14 percent of the nation's transients. FTS ran shelters that provided food, clothing, and medical care to residents, as well as work training and education programs to some who stayed for long periods. FTS also started camps in rural areas where homeless men were assigned public work and conservation projects, such as flood control and park improvement. Many camps and centers were partly self-governed and staffed by residents. FTS also paid for rooms in boarding houses or YMCAs to accommodate transient women, and the agency allotted apartments and relief payments to families; as Harry Hopkins, director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, wrote, "shelter care for families was taboo." FTS left the issue of integration and equality up to local practice. Many urban FTS centers were segregated, and in the South separate black shelters were, according to a 1934 FTS report, "not quite equal to those provided for the whites."

In 1935, FTS was phased out because, according to Hopkins, transients had "to be recognized as being no different from the rest of the unemployed." The end of FTS marked a general shift away from direct relief and toward work-related and constituency-specific New Deal programs. However, only about 20 percent of the unemployed transients formerly housed by FTS were able to get jobs with the Works Progress Administration; few young transients were eligible for the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Resettlement Administration's forty-five camps for migratory workers could not meet demand. Meanwhile, the number of homeless people increased in the latter half of the decade as factories closed and tenant farmers were displaced. Moreover, between January 1938 and October 1939, eight states increased residency requirements for relief. Few states allowed settlement status to carry over until acquired in another state so that typically those who moved were ineligible for aid. In most cities, overwhelmed private shelters and police stations led to increased hostility towards transients. Some communities, especially in the South and West, used extralegal means, such as border patrols, forced removals, and unwarranted arrests, to keep the homeless out.

John Steinbeck's portrayal of a transient farm family's struggle for survival in The Grapes of Wrath (1939) raised public sympathy for the homeless, though it did not address the majority of the homeless population, which lived in cities, and the dis-proportionate number of homeless African Americans and Mexican seasonal workers. A month after the premier of John Ford's 1940 film version of Steinbeck's story, a House committee began hearings on interstate migration of the destitute, but the advent of World War II shifted its focus to an investigation of defense migration. As many of the homeless joined the army and found employment in war industries, relief programs were reduced and city shelters closed; those homeless who remained were left to the missions, casual employment agencies, and skid row hotels. It was not until 1969 that the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the residency requirements for benefit eligibility. Homelessness would not recapture the national attention it had during the Depression until the late 1970s, when it was thrust to the fore as a result of deindustrialization and urban renewal.

HOMELESSNESS

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