History in The United States
Hitchhiking became a common method of traveling during the Great Depression, when many people sought work and had little money, much less their own automobile. Hitchhiking was given tacit acceptance by the Federal government during those years, when the Federal Transient Bureau dealt with the large number of unemployed persons who were migrating to among areas of the country to find employment. Transients were promised a room and a hot meal at camps set up by the bureau around the country as long as they could get to them. The bureau operated such camps until it closed its doors in 1936. During those years, thumbing rides around the country was an accepted fact of life.
Problems arose as a result of random hitchhikers obtaining rides from random drivers. Warnings of the potential dangers of picking up hitchhikers were publicized to drivers, who were advised that some hitchhikers would rob the driver who picked them up, and in some cases murder them. Other warnings were publicized to the hitchhikers themselves, alerting them to the same types of crimes being carried out by drivers. By 1937, fourteen states had passed laws giving a “thumbs down” to hitchhiking, and more than half the states had done so by 1950. Nonetheless, hitchhiking was part of the American psyche and many people continued to stick out their thumbs, even in states where the practice had been outlawed.
Read more about this topic: Hitchhiking
Famous quotes containing the words united states, history in, history, united and/or states:
“Steal away and stay away.
Don’t join too many gangs. Join few if any.
Join the United States and join the family
But not much in between unless a college.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“History in the making is a very uncertain thing. It might be better to wait till the South American republic has got through with its twenty-fifth revolution before reading much about it. When it is over, some one whose business it is, will be sure to give you in a digested form all that it concerns you to know, and save you trouble, confusion, and time. If you will follow this plan, you will be surprised to find how new and fresh your interest in what you read will become.”
—Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911)
“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“By intervening in the Vietnamese struggle the United States was attempting to fit its global strategies into a world of hillocks and hamlets, to reduce its majestic concerns for the containment of communism and the security of the Free World to a dimension where governments rose and fell as a result of arguments between two colonels’ wives.”
—Frances Fitzgerald (b. 1940)