Continuing our theme of responses to the Great Depression of the 1930s, this month’s highlighted items focus on the responses of young men and women to the economic pressures they and their families faced.

Boy hopping freight train, Dubuque, Iowa

Many young people left home to search for economic opportunity (and sometimes adventure) on the open roads of America. In the early 1930s an estimated 250,000 youth left home and hitchhiked or rode freight trains from town to town struggling just to find a place to sleep, enough food, and clothing. Many localities adopted a policy of no tolerance for vagrants and forced any non-resident to move on within twenty-four hours. Thus panhandling or begging brought the risk of being thrown out of town, jailed, or fined. Young women did not take to the road as often as young men, but contemporary reformers estimated that girls made up about ten percent of the youth on the road during the Depression.

In 1932 and 1933 Thomas Mineham, a sociologist from the University of Minnesota, dressed in shabby clothes and traveled the rails with the teenage boys and girls he was studying. This excerpt from his 1934 book, Boy and Girl Tramps of America, was drawn from his conversations with the young transients about how they developed and shared strategies for surviving as they moved from town to town. In the process he copied down diary entries from two youths Blink and Simple Sam.  The homeless teenagers developed their own communities and language and often kept notes in order to pass information along to one another is reflected in these diary entries.

Riding the rails or hitchhiking across the country has often been romanticized, but the transients of the 1930s confronted many dangers, both physical and psychological. Many lost limbs or injured themselves jumping on or off moving freight trains, saw themselves as social outcasts, or lost faith in society when railroad detectives, policemen, or judges treated them as criminals. African American youths faced even greater dangers from attack, accusations of rape, and possible lynching as was the case for the Scottsboro Boys.

As the numbers of young people riding the rails and hitch-hiking obviously increased, reformers, sociologists, and psychologists began noticing and publicizing the problem. A 1932 article in The Ladies Home Journal dramatized the problems faced by the young transients and local communities, which had been overwhelmed by their presence:

Two hundred thousand unwanted, homeless boys — with a scattering of girls — are wandering about the United States, meagerly fed, scantily clothed, being told endlessly to “move on.”

No use to go home — even of they could get there — for home offers even less in sustenance than the open road. No jobs to be had regularly. Few beds to sleep in, except the hard ground in the tramp “jungles” along the railroad tracks.

In July 1934, a study of homeless youth in Spokane, Washington challenged the prevalent opinion that a desire for adventure motivated the youth’s migrations. They noted:

While such cases are numerous enough to be regarded as important, the data of our researchers strongly indicate that a much larger number of transient boys have left their home communities in the face of extreme poverty induced by unemployment conditions, untoward domestic conditions arising partially from the same source, and an urge to relieve parents or relatives from the burden of support of a 15 to 20 year old unemployed boy. We are also convinced from these data that the number of boys who have virtually no home to which to return is fully as great as the number of those purely out for adventure.

While government programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corp helped relieve the problem somewhat, the youth interviewed by Mineham in the 1930s and by Errol Lincoln Uys for his 2003 documentary and book Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression, indicate that all too often young people had to rely on one another and the generosity of strangers to make it through tough economic times.

ASHP’s Young America project archive has a number of additional images, articles and excerpts of oral histories related to the theme of youth on the road.