=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE= Footnotes have been placed at the end of their respective chapters. THE HOBO THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE HOMELESS MAN THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS THE BAKER AND TAYLOR COMPANY, NEW YORK THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, LONDON THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA, TOKYO THE MISSION BOOK COMPANY, SHANGHAI THE HOBO THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE HOMELESS MAN BY NELS ANDERSON A STUDY PREPARED FOR THE CHICAGO COUNCIL OF SOCIAL AGENCIES UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE COMMITTEE ON HOMELESS MEN [Illustration: (Publisher colophon.)] THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO · ILLINOIS COPYRIGHT 1923 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PUBLISHED MAY 1923 COMPOSED AND PRINTED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, U.S.A. EDITOR’S PREFACE The present volume is intended to be the first of a series of studies of the urban community and of city life. The old familiar problems of our communal and social life--poverty, crime, and vice--assume new and strange forms under the conditions of modern urban existence. Inherited custom, tradition, all our ancient social and political heritages--human nature itself--have changed and are changing under the influence of the modern urban environment. The man whose restless disposition made him a pioneer on the frontier tends to become a “homeless man”--a hobo and a vagrant--in the modern city. From the point of view of their biological predispositions, the pioneer and the hobo are perhaps the same temperamental type; from the point of view of their socially acquired traits, they are something quite different. The city, more than any other product of man’s genius and labors, represents the effort of mankind to remake the world in accordance with its wishes, but the city, once made, compels man to conform to the structure and the purposes he himself has imposed upon it. If it is true that man made the city, it is quite as true that the city is now making man. That is certainly a part of what we mean when we speak of the “urban” as contrasted with the “rural” mind. In any case, it is true that within the circle of these two tendencies, man’s disposition, on the one hand, to create a world in which he can live, and, on the other, to adapt himself to the world which he himself has created, all, or most all of the problems and the processes are included with which the student of society is positively concerned. These processes go on, and these problems arise everywhere that men, coming together in order to live, find themselves compelled to carry on a common and communal life. In cities, however, and particularly in great cities, where social life is more intense than elsewhere, the processes produce new and strange effects, and the problems are more poignant and pressing.