Moving Pictures Suggested To End The Tramp Evil
James Forbes, Hobo Expert, Proposes Also the Equipment of Every Village Police Department and Railroad Station with a Mendicant “Rogues’ Gallery” to Help Stamp Out the Nuisance
Sunday Magazine posted this article from the August 13, 1911, edition of The New York Times’s Sunday Magazine. It is horrifyingly offensive.
Mr. Forbes declares that there are certainly 250,000 tramps and professional beggars in this country, if not many more; that the number is growing every year in spite of the heavy killing and maiming of vagrants every year by the railroads. The jails and penitentiaries are being filled with them, he says, as they move on down grade from begging and petty thievery to the crimes of arson, safe-breaking, and murder. Mr. Forbes declares that the army of trampdom is recruited by thousand every year from the homes of respectable and often well-to-do parents in small towns. Boys respond to the call of the road, the call of the world and of adventure, and soon they are the slaves of “kid-snaring” professional tramps, made to beg, and beaten until their spirit is gone.