Men
off the Road
by Gertrude Springer
Photographs by Lewis Hine
September 1934
There was a little experience
to go on. The Rev. W. E. Paul of Minneapolis had demonstrated
that cast-off men may be salvaged by work and steady living
and the community profit thereby (see Taking the Work Cure at
Medicine Lake, by Morris Lewis, Survey Graphic, January
1934, page 30). While none of the 200 federal transient camps
now in operation over the country follows the Minneapolis pattern
exactly they all, to some extent, stem from it. Most of them
were pioneer projects set going under conditions that were themselves
a test of the stamina of the men.
In
New Jersey, for instance, the first camp was set up last November
by a gang of six transients under a leader, in an open bathing-pavilion
full of last year's dead leaves, with little equipment to start
with beyond a heap of picnic tables, a couple of pails and an
abandoned milk can. Water had to be carried half a mile. In
New York a gang of twelve men broke through the February snow
in Bear Mountain Park to a disused shack and with others who
came later built from the ground up a convenient, well-planned
camp, a permanent useful feature of state property. At a camp
site on property owned by the State Department of Mental Hygiene
the "pioneer detail" of twelve had to seek shelter from the
winter storms in an abandoned railroad station until it could
throw up its own barracks. Yet within five months these same
men and others like them had completed a water and sewage system
adequate to serve the purpose which the state proposes ultimately
to make of the property. "Give us time and material," says the
director, "and we'll build anything from a three-legged stool
to a battleship. We've got the talent, but you mustn't crowd
us."
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Not all transient men go to
the camps, partly because there are not camps enough, but chiefly
because they are not as adapted to camp life as it has so far
developed. On the whole there is a pretty effective screening-out
of unlikely material in the treatment centers. Chronic hoboes,
men in bad physical condition from disease or disability, youngsters
out for a lark, none of these are counted good camp timber.
For them, as for transient families, there are other methods
of treatment. The old hoboes do sometimes get to camp, but they
do not as a rule stay very long—it is not their kind of
a show; they have to give too much for what they get. No man
goes to camp without a frank, unadorned explanation of just
what he will get there and what he will be expected to give
in cooperation, work and decent conduct. No man goes against
his will though most of them, it must be admitted, go more from
curiosity about "this new racket" than from conviction
that it will be good for them. They've heard that before and
it makes them laugh.
The
camps are clean, orderly and rough. Every man has a decent bed
in an airy bunk-house and an outfit of workclothes, underwear
and shoes. To wash himself he takes his turn at a basin or shower.
He does a regular tour of duty at kitchen-police and washes
his own clothes with such facilities as may be. Assigned to
a work-squad he puts in from four to six hours a day. Regularly
he sits down to "three squares."
As an unexpected visitor I
ate dinner with the men at Camp Roosevelt in Bear Mountain Park.
We had roast beef and potatoes, string beans, cold slaw, canned
pineapple, bread, butter, coffee and milk—with seconds
for anyone who said the word. At Camp Haledon in New Jersey,
again an unexpected visitor, I ate for supper a thick slice
of bologna, creamed potatoes, beet and onion salad, stewed apricots,
bread and butter and iced cocoa. Food-costs for camps in the
eastern states run from twenty-one to thirty-five cents a day,
not counting supplies received intermittently from the Surplus
Relief Corporation.
Outside
of working and meal hours and "lights out" there are no rules
about time. A certain amount of recreation is stimulated by
a leader but the men take it or let it alone. The younger ones
take it. The older ones just sit or lie on their beds. Some
of them read. A few putter around at projects of their own.
A man at Camp Greenhaven, New York, who once had a glamorous
adventure in Central America has decorated the tops of stone
walls with bits of stone and cement to represent Mayan ruins
as he remembers them. At Camp Roosevelt a man who has sailed
the seven seas works endlessly perfecting, with such scraps
of material as he can pick up, a model of a ship that once brought
him luck.
Many
of the camps have attempted formal educational activities without
too much success. These men have broken completely with school
and its ways, but they like educational movies and they like
the discussion of current events with a good leader. Simple
vocational courses are most popular if they can be tied to the
practical doing of something or other.
At
one camp a course in radio resulted in strangely contrived receivers
all over the place. At another, after a course in motor mechanics,
all sorts of abandoned wrecks of cars were dragged into camp
and out of them was triumphantly constructed a weird looking
vehicle which by some miracle actually runs.
But these are not the things
that determine the holding power of a camp and its influence
on the men. Work is the real medicine of the camp and on the
quality of its work projects hang its results. Busy-work is
no good. Leaf-raking does not fool these men. Work without the
incentive of a final achievement which they can visualize in
advance does not hold them. Given useful, constructive work,
calling for personal ingenuity, with definite measures of progress
and a modicum of outside appreciation they will toil tirelessly
and enthusiastically.
