Little Tramp: I stabbed a train porter in the abdomen to acquire this necktie.

Well-dressed hobos were apparently a very serious problem in the New York region in the late nineteenth century. At least that’s the story that was being pushed in an article entitled, “Our Dude Tramps,” in the August 21, 1895 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. These ruffians, who previously were content to cover themselves in cast-off rags, had suddenly become narcissistic and were mugging decent folk for their cuff links and cummerbunds. Somebody needed to billy club these tramps into submission before they started to look too handsome. An excerpt:

“These tramps are getting too particular in the matter of their clothes. Formerly they used to go around sort of careless like, with their toes getting the benefit of the sunshine and their hats ventilated with accordion tops and flags of truce flying from the usual place, to signify that they were peaceable. But now, affected with the prevailing rage for living above their station, they insist on being clothed like dudes.

One of them terrified a farmer’s wife into convulsions by wearing a monocle when he went to the door to ask for pie and a bottle of claret. And twice within the week they have held up citizens of New Jersey and compelled them to undress, right down to the buff, in order that they may wear their clothing. The last sufferer was waylaid on the marshes near Newark, and was stripped to his undershirt, a pistol placed over his eye overcoming his natural modesty as to disrobing in this public manner, and he was left a prey to the mosquitoes which in that region surpass turkeys for size and hyenas for voracity.

Then in Bloomfield a tramp stole a swimmer’s clothes and caused him to be chased as a wild man. If the tramps keep on doing that sort of thing much longer they may get themselves disliked.”