Introduction: Who Was the Tramp?

Summary

In Social Problems, published in 1883, economist and social theorist Henry George assesses the various threats plaguing the United States during the fraught period now known as the Gilded Age. Many of the dangers he decries will look relevant to the modern reader's eyes. Among them, environmental collapse due to industrial waste and trenchant poverty are at least as pressing to Americans now as they were in the nineteenth century. However, one of the most severe problems among these social ills may appear out of place to readers today: the ‘tramp’, the wandering vagrant type that confounded legal authorities near the turn of the century. Indeed, to George, tramps stand out as not one problem among many but the pre-eminent threat to democratic society. ‘Consider this terrible phenomenon’, he observes, ‘an appearance more menacing to the Republic than that of hostile armies and fleets bent on destruction’ (179). George continues in his text to outline an origin story for tramps that highlights their close relation to the tumultuous social context of the Gilded Age more generally. ‘In the beginning’, he writes, ‘[the tramp] is a man able to work … but who, not finding opportunity to work where he is … [is] driven by those imperative needs to beg or to steal’ (179). Although George saw job shortages as the underlying problem, he understands tramps to be imminent threats in their own right. Forced onto the road, the tramp ‘becomes a vagabond and an outcast – a poisonous pariah, avenging on society the wrong that he keenly, but vaguely, feels has been done him’ (179). In this presentation, the tramp is an agent of destruction. George was hardly alone in figuring the tramps as ‘hostile armies’, however. According to Richard Wrigley and George Revill, by the time Social Problems was published tramps had already become ‘the moral panic of the nation’ (262), distinguishing them from among the larger population of the poor that swelled in late nineteenth-century America.

By far the most influential American economist of his time, George is but one prominent voice among many clamouring for a solution to the so-called tramp problem. For readers in the twenty-first century, however, the tramp may appear to be a poor representation of the problems attending both migration and homelessness.