Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder From the Frontier to the Inner City by David T. Courtwright

Author:David T. Courtwright [Courtwright, David T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9780674278714
Google: 3Mf6ngEACAAJ
Publisher: HarvardUP
Published: 1996-09-15T21:30:08+00:00

This reorientation meant that the police were increasingly in an adversarial position vis-a-vis the tramps. When citizens became anxious about the presence of homeless, unemployed men, as happened in San Luis Obispo County, California, after 1895, the police responded by stepping up arrests for vagrancy and petty theft. Concern for economy led to chain gangs both to offset the cost of the prisoners' board and to discourage the presence of other tramps, who were imagined to be incorrigibly lazy.22

Tramps saw the matter differently. Vagrancy laws and chain gangs were to them a form of legalized slavery, an unjust punishment for the crime of being temporarily out of work. Their unemployment itself was often of an illegal nature. Private employment agents, "labor sharks," were known to sign up men for attractive jobs, pocket their finders' fees, and ship the men off to remote destinations where the jobs either did not exist or were inferior to the ones advertised. A common variation on this racket was the three-gang system. Collusive contractors kept one crew coming, one working, and one going by quickly firing the newly hired workers, splitting the fees with the employment agents who kept sending a fresh supply of victims. The extreme of exploitation was achieved by a South Dakota sheepman named Kunnecke, who made a habit of hiring floating herders. He worked them for six months or a year and then, to avoid paying their wages, murdered them and buried their bodies.2'

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