The Idle Crowd: Seattle's 1877 Moral Panic over 'Street Loafers'

Whence do they come, those idlers in the streets who, wandering in single rank or gathered into groups, are confounded with the busy, and never seen for what they are until something happens to call them there? They astonish us by their presence and the problem of how they are able to live at all—idling not being a profitable investment of one's capital. Men and women who, one would suppose, had enough to do to keep things straight, gather into compact masses of gaping idleness at every unusual occurrence, every trifling accident, and pass hours staring at the sight. Masterless men, surely, they must be; yet evidently they are not their own masters, so far as having the upper-hand of circumstances goes. Women without home or duties, for all that dress and appearance and the betraying wedding ring would seem to point to both, are mere idlers cumbering the ground which others till, and living as best they can on food which they only help to consume, taking no trouble to create or prepare. These multitudes of idlers to be collected together in the streets of any large town at a moment's notice have always seemed to us to be the oddest phenomenon of our social life. Men with the need and marks of work written on every square inch of their person and attire—why are they not at their bench, in the factory, the foundry, the ship-yard, at the anvil, at the loom? Or, if they belong to none of these trades and are of that queer, nondescript class which seems to have no settled occupation, and one can well believe no settled home—which calls itself generally the class of 'handy men,' ready for jobs of any kind and living on the disregarded crumbs of labor—how is it that they give so much time from their scratching on the surface of the great field of work, and spend in street sight-seeing the precious jewel to humanity called time? Who can tell? All we know is that, like vultures gathered to the carcass, not the least event can happen in the streets out of the run of ordinary daily traffic—a horse cannot fall, a new kind of hurdy-gurdy cannot grind out a familiar tune, a mountebank cannot go through tricks that were stale a hundred years ago, nor Punch repeat a pantomime known by heart to all but the rising generation—but the idlers are gathered in crowds; and for them at least, all the duties of life are suspended for hours to come.