Not Your Grandfather's Depression

Sacramento's tent city, a semi-permanent encampment in a small triangle of land between the American river, the Amtrak rail line, and Interstate 80, has been racking up a lot of national news coverage lately, partly because of efforts by local citizens to help meet some of the needs of the people who live there. I first saw the tent city about five years ago when I started spending time along the river. It was smaller then, but the number of smaller camps one finds in the weeds and brush along the immediate riverbank indicate that it has been around for some time.

It's easily spotted by the abundance of blue tarps covering tents, although drivers on 80 probably are too busy making sure they're not wiped out by someone passing on the right to pay much attention.

Way, way back, in the 1930s, Sacramento was home to an equally famous tent city, at that time associated with the railroad because in those days it was somewhat easier to get around by hopping freights in search of work. And California was a magnet for those in search of work back then. Woody Guthrie stopped in, prefering to spend his time in the camp, singing to those who were forced to live there. It made sense, because those people were not only his subject matter, but his favored audience.

Nowadays, people tend not to ride the rails, mostly because the railroads have done all they can to make it impossible. Container shipping, where entire truck trailers are loaded onto flatcars, eliminates the need for empty boxcars, which were always the favorite mode of hobo travel. Nevertheless, according to a news segment I saw on our local Fox affiliate, channel 40, people, alerted by news coverage of the aforementioned private initiatives to provide food, clothing, medicine and other comforts to residents of the tent city, have been streaming in from distant cities like Seattle and Chicago in hopes of finding a place where being homeless isn't considered a crime.

In the Depression, homeless campers were likely to be invaded and assaulted by the local American Legion or other groups of vigilantes, self-appointed to protect the public morals as well as the free-enterprise system. Typically, this meant wading into the tents with clubs, bats, sticks or other weapons and beating people senseless, or to death.

That doesn't seem to be happening now, perhaps because it wouldn't look so good going out over the national news.

However, Sacramento's new mayor, Kevin Johnson, is said to be considering ways of getting rid of "the problem."

At this point, nobody is suggesting that the AIG executives who pocketed $165 million in taxpayer dollars fork over some of that "bonus" for the good of their fellow Americans.

It seems like a nice idea though.