Art Related to Hobo Life


During the Depression, photographers, novelists and songwriters portrayed the travels of teenage hoboes and other migrants.  These works of art helped to shape Americans' understanding of people's experiences on the road.   



Young Boy, 1935  Walker Evans (1903-1975) 
Westmoreland County, PA


"Dad traveled from Ellwood City, Pennsylvania to Albuquerque, New Mexico...One job Dad had on a farm, he made $3.00 a day in silver and the owner would take him back to town at night where he had a room for $1.75 a week.  He walked a mile to work in the morning and he learned to store silage as there were no silos then and put up hay without balers."  Leah R. Rogan for Ralph R. Strouse, Ellwood City, Pennsylvania 
  
 
To document the economic conditions in rural America during the Great Depression, the U.S. government employed a team of photographers through the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), led by Roy Stryker.  These photographers--including Gordon Parks, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and John Vachon--took over 250,000 pictures between 1935 and 1943.  This body of work is now archived at the Library of Congress and the often published images are familiar to many Americans.  Here are two examples of images that Dorothea Lange took of migrant workers in California for the FSA in 1935.        
   
      
  











   




Eighteen-year-old mother from Oklahoma,
now a California migrant

From its debut, The Grapes of Wrath became the definitive story of the "Okie Exodus" of the Great Depression.  Written by John Steinbeck (1902-1967) and published in 1939, the novel follows an Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, as they make their way out of the dustbowl and head west in search of work as fruit pickers in California.  The book was an overnight success, but its sympathetic depiction of the migrant workers also provoked immediate controversy. 


Folksinger Woodrow "Woody" W. Guthrie (1912-1967) became one of the best known of the young hoboes who rode the rails during the Depression.  His family moved from Oklahoma to Texas in 1927 after his father went bankrupt, his mother was institutionalized, and his older sister died in a house fire.  Following the 1935 "black Blizzards"--dust storms and drought that ravaged over 50 million acres in the southern Great Plains--Guthrie joined thousands of refugees traveling west to California.  Guthrie died in 1967 from Huntington"s disease, the same disease that had forced his mother into an institution.



In Woody's autobiography Bound for Glory he describes his travels:  "I could see men of all colors bouncing along in the boxcar.  We stood up.  We laid down.  We piled around each other.  We used each other for pillows.  I could smell the sour and bitter sweat soaking through my own khaki shirt and britches and the work clothes...We looked like a gang of lost corpses heading back to the boneyard."

Woodie Guthrie fell in love with the American landscape while on his journey west.  Performing in migrant camps, he wrote many of the 1,000 folksongs to give voice to his fellow downtrodden travelers.  His song "This Land Is Your Land," which expresses the splendor of the country was originally written in 1940 as a retort to Irving Berlin's 1938 song, "God Bless America."  Guthrie felt Berlin's song ignored the unbalanced distribution of land and wealth in the United States.  Guthrie changed the line "God blessed America for me" that appeared in each verse to "This land was made for you and me" in 1944.