The 'Vagrant' Scourge of 1878
A Victorian-era editorial attempts to pathologize poverty and social instability in frontier Seattle by blaming 'tramps' and theft for the city’s growing pains.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The great and growing evil of tramps is attracting much attention in the Eastern States, but no more than the importance of the subject demands. Vagrants have multiplied with a rapidity which is alarming. In parts of the country where a few years ago there were only a few dozens, there are now hundreds and thousands. On the subject of vagrancy generally, a good deal of valuable information may be derived from the Annual Report of the Chief Detective of Massachusetts. Two amateur tramps were sent out by him last summer to study the ways of the real tramp. They spent three weeks traveling about the State in company with vagrants. All these tramps subsisted principally and almost wholly by theft. Of the entire number encountered by these two amateurs in their travels, only two manifested any desire or even willingness to gain an honest living by work. This class of scoundrels infests every section of the habitable globe. There are three distinct types of the American tramp: the restless spirits that keep constantly on the wing, subsisting by theft and begging as they go; the vagabond who dresses well and lives independently upon the earnings of depraved women; and, last, the lowest species of lazaroni that exist in any other country, shocking reflections upon humanity—who swarm about squaw brothels and kindred localities. Seattle has its full quota of the latter classes. There are at least twenty men in this city who have no visible means of support, yet dress well and have more or less money, procured from the sources mentioned; and the lazaroni who swarm around the dens are more numerous still. Carlyle says there are only three ways of sustaining life—to work, beg or steal. And as these fellows will neither work nor beg, it is reasonable to suppose they maintain their existence by theft—or graver crimes. The sorry spectacle of a street in the heart of a town of four thousand inhabitants, on which it is unsafe to travel after 9 o'clock, is here presented, and yet the authorities seem powerless to check the evil.
“The sorry spectacle of a street in the heart of a town of four thousand inhabitants, on which it is unsafe to travel after 9 o'clock, is here presented.”
This 1878 editorial captures the classic moral panic used to frame urban homelessness and economic displacement as a failure of character rather than a failure of systems. Just as the writer sought to blame the 'unnatural' idleness of the transient for Seattle's lack of safety, contemporary discourse still often obscures the underlying economic conditions of housing insecurity with similar dehumanizing rhetoric.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.