RIDING THE RAILS: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression

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RIDING THE RAILS Teenagers on the Move During
the Great Depression
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• At the height of the Great Depression, two
  hundred and fifty thousand teenage hoboes were
  roaming America.

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Why Did They Leave Home?

1. Some left home because they felt they were a
   burden to their families
2. Some fled homes shattered by the shame of
   unemployment and poverty.
3. Some left because it seemed a great adventure.

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• With the blessing of parents or as runaways, they
  hit the road and went in search of a better life.
  

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Public perceptions of the road kids differed

• There were people who saw the American pioneer
  spirit embodied in the young wanderers.
• There were others who feared them as the vanguard
  of an American rabble potentially as dangerous as
  the young Fascists then on the march in Germany.

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• By summer 1932, the "roving boy" had become a
  fixture on the American landscape.
• The occasional girl was sighted too, mostly
  passing unrecognized in male garb.
• Girls especially never took the decision to hit
  the road lightly, for they knew they were
  stepping into a world filled with danger.

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• It was the same for young African-Americans, for
  whom the beckoning rails could be doubly perilous
  should they lead into towns where the color of
  their skin would make them outcasts.

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• Girls traveled in pairs or threes, sometimes with
  a boy-friend, and not infrequently with a tribe
  of 10 or 12 boys.

Thomas Minehan, author of Boy and Girl Tramps of
America, estimated that 10 per cent of those he
met were girls.
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• Minehan described "Kay," who was 15 "Her black
  eyes, fair hair, and pale cheeks are girlish and
  delicate.
• Cinders, wind and frost have irritated but not
  toughened that tender skin.
• Sickly and suffering from chronic
  under-nourishment, she appears to subsist almost
  entirely upon her finger nails which she gnaws
  habitually."

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• Eighty-five per cent of the white youths said
  they were seeking work
• For the African-Americans the percentage was even
  higher at 98 per cent.
• Fifty percent of the African-Americans had been
  unemployed for two years or longer.

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Were these teenagers bums?

• Not unless you want to classify a massive
  section of the remainder of the country's
  population as such.

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• It was a thrill to ride the top of a boxcar
  running across the Great Plains or to catch the
  blinds of a famous flyer like The Twentieth
  Century Limited.
• It was also a ride accompanied by constant danger
  that could turn deadly in an instant.

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It Was Dangerous!

• The Interstate Commerce Commission's annual
  reports show that during the years 1929 to 1939,
  24,647 trespassers were killed and 27,171 injured
  on railroad property.
• Since railroad agents placed the percentage of
  minors at one third, there can be no doubt that
  thousands of young nomads met a gruesome fate on
  the rails.

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• Hospitals treated transients only if they were
  seriously ill.
• They suffered diseases due to exposure, lack of
  cleanliness, vermin, contagion or infection.
• Ill-clad and undernourished, sometimes days would
  go by without food.

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• "I was hungry all the time. Dreadfully hungry,"
  remembered John Fawcett. "I'd never been hungry
  before. I went two or three days without anything
  to eat. In a short time on the road, I lost 15 to
  20 pounds. Your hunger hurts physically."

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• In summer, boys followed the harvests in the
  West.
• A young hobo might start with the hay harvest in
  California and the Rocky Mountain states in early
  summer.
• Later on there was corn and wheat in the
  Mid-West and in the early fall, hops, berries
  and fruits in the Pacific North-West.
• Winter could be spent in the cotton fields of
  Texas and the South-West.
• In early spring, a harvester might drift into
  Southern California for the vegetable and citrus
  crops.

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Franklin D. Roosevelt Saves Them

• Before the close of his first month in office,
  Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an act creating the
  Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC.)
• Unemployed and unmarried men between the ages of
  18 and 25 were eligible to enroll.
• They were to be paid 30 a month, of which 25
  was to be sent directly to their needy and
  dependent families.

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• So urgent and volatile did the administration
  view the youth crisis that the first camp was set
  up on April 17, 1933 just 12 days after the CCC
  was officially inaugurated.
• By early July, 250,000 young men were settled in
  1,468 forest and park camps.

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• "As there's no single answer to why boys leave
  home, there's no single answer to what will keep
  them there after and if they go back," said
  one case worker. "But if I had to make such an
  answer it would be jobs. Just that.
  Honest-to-goodness jobs that would let a fellow
  feel that he's a man, running his own life."

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Another Difficult Chapter In The Lives Of These
Boys

• Those jobs would only come when the Great
  Depression ended as the country prepared for war.
  
• In 1942, even as the CCC camps were winding down,
  thousands of "Depression Teenagers," who had
  served in FDR's "Tree Army," were on their way to
  Europe and Africa to fight.

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• As trains carrying troops and materiel crossed
  the country day and night, the occasional rider
  was still glimpsed in a boxcar door or sitting on
  the catwalk.
• It was the end of the last hobo era.
• The boys and girls who rode the rails had gone to
  war.

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• Riding the rails was a rite of passage for a
  generation of young people and profoundly shaped
  the rest of their lives.
• Self-reliance, compassion, frugality, a love of
  freedom and country are at the heart of the
  lessons they learned.
• Their memories are a mixture of nostalgia and
  pain their late musings still tinged with the
  fear of going broke again.
• At journey's end, the resiliency of these
  survivors is a testament to the indomitable
  strength of the human spirit.