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You tramp!
By adamg on Mon, 03/19/2012 - 8:29am
Who knew? "Tramp" is defined by a Massachusetts General Law (specifically, Chap. 272, Sect. 63):
Whoever, not being under seventeen, or a person asking charity within his own town, roves about from place to place begging, or living without labor or visible means of support, shall be deemed a tramp. An act of begging or soliciting alms, whether of money, food, lodging or clothing, by a person having no residence in the town within which the act is committed, or the riding upon a freight train of a railroad, whether within or without any car or part thereof, without a permit from the proper officers or employees of such railroad or train, shall be prima facie evidence that such person is a tramp.
Of course, what good is a law without some punishment to back it up? The very next section sets out the base penalty for being a tramp:
A tramp shall be punished by imprisonment in the house of correction for not more than thirty days.
The section after that instructs mayors and selectmen to hire "special police officers" to round up tramps.
The online version doesn't specify when the legislature codified its definition of "tramp," but one suspects it was during the Depresssion.
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Comments
I Tramp, You Tramp, We All Tramp for Vagrancy
These laws were really common when the "tramp" arose as a thing a person (generally a male) could be after the successive economic crises of the 1870s and 1890s. Large numbers of displaced and/or dispossessed combined with the completion of the transcontinental railroad to create a new kind of vagabond: the "tramp". Many people, including self-proclaimed "hobo" (and doctor, self-styled proto-sociologist, and anarchist) Ben Reitman, divided the world of tramps up into three more specific yet still broad classes:
The hobo: a traveller who does work (when he can find it).
The tramp: a traveller who does not work.
The bum: a man who neither travels nor works but is sometimes called a "tramp" (often prone to inebriation).
The railroads afforded hobos and tramps the ability to wander from coast to coast, which made them suddenly highly visible and the subject of a great deal of consternation among polite society. There was something of a hysteria around tramps, portrayed as murderers, rapists, and thieves. They were perceived as a threat to decent people in decent communities across the country. That image softened a bit later, with new imaginings of harmless tramps in popular culture (Chaplin, comics, etc.).
One of the really interesting things about these laws is that they often criminalized not acts but identities. This one does the same, focusing more on the classification of an individual as "a tramp" less than any particular criminal acts. That's why Tim Cresswell (in his book, The Tramp in America) and others suggest that the real threat tramps were perceived to pose to society was in their apparently aimless wandering and their refusal to participate in sedentary, committed community life. They were viewed as marginal and transgressive (particularly the women who wound up on the road) and were often badly handled as a result of these laws.
For a great account of the rise of the "the tramp", check out Cresswell's book. It discusses the circumstances under which these laws were created and describes some of the controversy surrounding tramps in local and territorial governments at the close of the nineteenth century.
New England towns have been
New England towns have been worried about what we would call tramps since long before the railroad. As far back as the late 18th centuries these towns would engage in "warning out" travelers who seemed to have no means of support. This was related to the welfare system of the day. Communities were obliged to provide assistance to their members, including public assistance when they fell on hard times. But this obligation meant that they were generally strict about policing who was and was not a member of the community.
We do similar stuff today.
We do similar stuff today. Many town-based public housing benefits are limited to existing residents of the town.
Are you sure of that?
Are you sure of that?
I am
When I help clients apply for housing, I find that this is the case in many communities.
But then there's also the state housing list, where you apply and then might be told that they have a home for you in Pittsfield. You don't know anyone there, don't drive, have a job here, and your kid has tons of appointments at Children's. The shelter you're in required that you get on all the housing lists possible. So you decline the Pittsfield offer, which means they take you off all housing lists for a year. This might be what you're thinking of.
Tramps, not Vagabombs.
There have been anti-vagrancy laws for centuries, of course, and we have the tradition of the "vagabond" in Europe. But the "tramp" is something different that absolutely did not exist until the railroad. These laws specifically address "tramps", not vagrants in general.
Is there ANY way we can use
Is there ANY way we can use this to outlaw Charity Muggers? PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE
Amen on that!
They're the human equivalent of urban pigeons, but more aggressive.
Most are already violating laws
Misrepresenting the group they're collecting for, impeding flow of traffic, being in the roadway when not in a crosswalk crossing the street, etc. -- there are many laws they could nail them on. The city doesn't actually care though.
GAHHH
They were out in FORCE yesterday. I walked down most of Boylston in the Back Bay and it was just awful. Grrr.
The next section states:
All tramps will be marked with a tattoo in the area just above their buttocks for identification purposes. Hence, the tramp stamp.