The New York Times saw tramps as expressions of primal sloth and savagery or as relics of Civil War camp life, and the terms for tramps and bums came out of the war; but poets were more perceptive. The numbers of tramps struck Walt Whitman as an omen of American decline: “If the United States, like the countries of the Old World, are also to grow vast crops of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, nomadic, miserably-waged populations such as we see looming upon us of late years—steadily, even if slowly, eating into us like a cancer of lungs or stomach—then our republican experiment, notwithstanding
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