The False Solution to Homelessness
A radical critique of the 1909 railroad industry's plan to solve unemployment by mass imprisonment.
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.
Jas. S. McCrea, president of the Pennsylvania railroad system, has begun an agitation of the 'tramp evil.' He bases his appeal upon humanitarian considerations, and not on the annoyance of a railway man at the ever-present hobo stealing a ride. Part of McCrea's remedy consists in keeping a card index of tramps and a system of keeping them in prison. McCrea's scheme will succeed, he doubtless thinks, by making the hobo's life so disagreeable that he will go to work. There are now more men willing to work than there are jobs for. If all the tramps became all at once work-crazy, they would only shove others into idleness as fast as they got jobs. McCrea would pump dry the ocean of disemployment by either pouring it back into itself, or bottling it up in jails. Beggary is an institution in all nations in which opportunities to work are fenced up and monopolized. If lands held for speculation—agricultural, mining, city lands—were so heavily taxed that they would have to be used or given up to those who would use them, we should have a renewed era of building and a revival of industry. Gradually the tramp evil would be cured. The tramp is a man out of work; as long as many must be out of work, he who adopts that profession helps ease the competition on those who still struggle. The tramp is an industrial safety valve.
“McCrea would pump dry the ocean of disemployment by either pouring it back into itself, or bottling it up in jails.”
Written over a century ago, this editorial identifies the structural causes of homelessness that still plague Tacoma today: the monopolization of land and a labor market that cannot provide for all. The author rejects criminalizing the unhoused, pointing out that jails do not create jobs—a sentiment that resonates sharply in current debates over public space and shelter.
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