The Hobo Code

My library will be starting our new year with a local musician presenting the history and songs of railroads and hobos. As a result, I have been poking around the internet and our district book collection for interesting info I can use to start promoting it to pique interest. While the terms hobo, tramp, and bum are sometimes treated as interchangeable, there are distinctions. A hobo is a traveling worker, a tramp is a wanderer who doesn't work, and a bum doesn't travel and avoids work at all costs. It is thus quite an insult to label an honest hobo as a tramp or a bum.

One particularly interesting item I have found in various sources is the Hobo Code attributed to the 1889 National Hobo Convention of Tourist Union #63. I present it here with my commentary in italics.

1. Decide your own life, don't let another person run or rule you. This is the root of liberty.

2. When in town, always respect the local law and officials, and try to be a gentleman at all times. I strive to be a decent individual. I can only seek to avoid officials and their enforcers as necessary to prevent needless conflict they invariably instigate on encountering a free individual.

3. Don't take advantage of someone who is in a vulnerable situation, locals or other hobos. This is in line with the non-aggression principle and the golden rule.

4. Always try to find work, even if temporary, and always seek out jobs nobody wants. By doing so you not only help a business along, but ensure employment should you return to that town again. The State makes it difficult to abide by Rule 2 and 4 simultaneously. The underground economy may be the only option remaining to the free individual.

5. When no employment is available, make your own work by using your added talents at crafts. I wonder how feasible this still is when so many states want to license, tax, and control everything they can. But it could be a path to underground economy entrepreneurialism.

6. Do not allow yourself to become a stupid drunk and set a bad example for locals' treatment of other hobos. I drink the occasional beer, but drunkenness in others irritates me, and I don't enjoy being drunk.

7. When jungling [camping] in town, respect handouts, do not wear them out, another hobo will be coming along who will need them as badly, if not worse than you. Good advice in general. Don't be a moocher.

8. Always respect nature, do not leave garbage where you are jungling. Or, as campers say, pack it in, pack it out.

9. If in a community jungle, always pitch in and help. I have no idea whether I would enjoy the company of hobos, but I would be willing to lend a hand where I could in a shared camp. In a more settled situation with a more complex economy, I still think the market is a better solution than an ad hoc communal system, but to each their own, and it doesn't hurt to lend a hand.

10. Try to stay clean, and boil up [clean your laundry] wherever possible. No problem. I wish some of my library patrons followed this advice though.

11. When traveling, ride your train respectfully, take no personal chances, cause no problems with the operating crew or host railroad, act like an extra crew member. Train crews don't need more crew, and they don't like passengers, so just don't be a problem that they would notice.

12. Do not cause problems in a train yard, another hobo will be coming along who will need passage through that yard. Common sense. Don't be a jerk.

13. Do not allow other hobos to molest children, expose all molesters to authorities, they are the worst garbage to infest any society. Agreed, although if I ever happen across the waste of carbon who molested my friend's daughter, he won't live long enough to see any authorities.

14. Help all runaway children, and try to induce them to return home. Why are they running away from home, though? Perhaps that should be asked.

15. Help your fellow hobos whenever and wherever needed, you may need their help someday. If you need no other incentive, there's this pragmatic self-interest.

16. If present at a hobo court and you have testimony, give it. Whether for or against the accused, your voice counts! I'd trust a hobo court far more than a government court, that's for sure.

I'm not sure the hobo life of hopping freight cars for migratory labor is really an option here as 2020 rolls around, but most of the hobo principles make a fair bit of sense in everyday life, especially Rule 1. The internet and cryptocurrency are making it ever easier to break free from the shackles of the State, too. Is it possible to live the hobo code from home? Maybe. Still, there is a sort of nostalgia to the nomadic life, and soon we may be able to combine the two while living free without permission.

I'm off to dive into the strange world of hobo signs now.

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