Emaciated from lack of food, James Eads How collapsed at Cincinnati’s Union Station on a summer day in 1930. Few people paid him any mind. They had schedules to meet and trains to catch.
And after all, he was just another hobo — a person with an inconvenient tendency to collapse from hunger in public places. Someone would come along to help him.
Eventually, someone did. An agent for Travelers Aid International noticed him slumped against the wall. He asked if he needed any help. How looked up and said slowly, almost apologetically, “You would be very kind to notify attorney Nicholas Klein.”
He was taken to Klein’s home, and a doctor was summoned. Two weeks later, on July 22, 1930, How died of pneumonia and starvation.
How was dubbed by the press the “Millionaire Hobo,” the man born into the most extraordinary wealth and luxury the Gilded Age had to offer, only to reject it in favor of living on the streets.
Time magazine’s account of his death in its Aug. 4, 1930 edition repeatedly referred to him as an “old man.” He was 56. And in a way, he was this newspaper’s great-great grandfather. Seen in that light, he started quite an impressive family.
Every street newspaper throughout the world — from Street Roots in Portland to The Big Issue in London to Fedél Nélkül in Budapest — follows in the steps of How and his Hobo News.
Arguably the first street newspaper, Hobo News was founded by How under the auspices of the International Brotherhood Welfare Association, the nonprofit organization he also founded.
How published the newspaper (“Of the hobos, by the hobos and for the hobos”) from 1915 until his death in 1930.
He disliked the word “hobo” and often set it off in quotation marks. However, he resigned himself to it being part of the popular vocabulary of the time.
“We have got it, and we are going to make it respectable,” he explained in his second issue in May 1915.
True to his word, How and his team delivered a monthly newspaper that amplified the voices of the poor and told their stories.
The monthly paper averaged 16 pages per issue and was written by How and numerous independent contributors — many of whom were writers experiencing unsheltered homelessness themselves.
British author W. Somerset Maugham contributed a 600-word article titled “How to Become a Writer.” Other notable bylines included socialist activist Eugene Debs and feminist anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre (the latter’s work was published posthumously because she died three years before the first issue came out).
Nina van Zandt Spies also contributed articles. She was the widow of journalist August Spies, whom she met and married while he was awaiting execution for his alleged role in Chicago’s Haymarket Riot of 1886.
Although the paper was mostly two columns of plain text, there were front-page illustrations and occasional other artwork.
A piece from the February 1917 edition reflected the newspaper’s tone:
“A poor, nutty, half-starved hobo, about 65 years of age, bent and twisted and scarred by the system, called on the mayor of this city, and according to the reports, had half a brick in his pocket. Of course, he was arrested — for carrying concealed weapons, we suppose, and sent to the observation ward. It would be a good thing if some of the politicians, officials and police were there to keep the poor devil company.”
That same issue reported that the Hobo News had achieved second-class mail status.
“This doesn’t mean that the Hobo News is a second-class paper,” an editorial explained. “Not by a long shot. We are going to make it first class in every respect, and where we can see room for improvement, we welcome advice and criticism.”
There was definitely room for improvement in the Hobo News’ coverage of women and people of color — or the lack thereof.
To combat the stereotype of homeless people as lazy and unworthy of assistance, the paper often presented an idealized image of the unemployed and homeless. In the process, it ignored systemic issues faced by people of color, such as discrimination, police brutality and state-sanctioned violence.
Women, too, and social issues surrounding sexism and gender-based violence were also usually sacrificed to the newspaper’s prevailing narrative.
How recognized — rather defiantly — that Hobo News wasn’t for everyone. “If you do not like this paper, give it to someone else who has more sense,” How told readers in the fourth issue.
Throughout its run, the Hobo News was a tireless champion of the poor and an unrelenting foe of the social and economic forces that created mass poverty.
“There is no excuse for poverty in these, the latter days,” the paper opined in that fourth issue. “How can you excuse poverty in a land that produced 1,000 million bushels of wheat, 1,200 million bushels of oats and 3,000 million bushels of corn to feed 90,000,000 people? The problem of production has been solved, and we have everything in abundance. Yet the poor starve and are in misery. Why?”
The Hobo News also had its lighter side. Take Miss Fluffy.
“The paper has a department in which ‘Miss Fluffy’ answers questions of deportment,” How reported in the first issue. “Lizzie, who confesses to a soft passion for a ‘gandy dance,’ who unfortunately doesn’t know how to tango, is advised to consult a horseshoer and have his feet mated.”
However, Miss Fluffy was a minor feature. How primarily wielded the newspaper as a cudgel against the very class privilege that enabled him to publish it in the first place.
His father was James Flintham How, vice president and general manager of the Wabash Railroad. Eliza Eads, his mother, was the daughter of James Buchanan Eads, a successful civil engineer and inventor who had built the Eads Bridge — the first bridge across the Mississippi River in St. Louis.
Even as a child, How showed early discomfort with wealth and privilege, disliking the attention of his parents’ domestic servants. He studied theology at Meadville Theological School, a Unitarian school in Pennsylvania.
He gained a reputation at Meadville for donating much of his allowance to the poor while he lived on just the barest of necessities. “I have not earned it, it is not mine,” he wrote later.
How went on to study at Harvard and Oxford. At the latter, he joined George Bernard Shaw’s Fabian Society and became a vegetarian. He started but never completed medical school. Still, How was known for the rest of his life among many members of the homeless community as “Doc.”
He spent most of his family fortune and the tolls for Eads Bridge on his work with the homeless. He founded Hobo News with money from his mother’s will.
In addition to Hobo News, How created what he called “hobo colleges” in several cities — offering food and lodging as well as basic lessons in social science, industrial law, public speaking and other subjects designed to improve people’s lives.
Lectures were often delivered on the streets.
Paradoxically perhaps, How didn’t always avoid the trappings of wealth. Six years before his death, he married Ingeborg Sorenson.
They lived in a 2,400-square-foot home with four bedrooms, three bathrooms, four fireplaces and a private library in the upscale Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Their neighbors included such luminaries of the period as Raymond Chandler, Anaïs Nin and Woody Guthrie.
The home, built in 1925 and designed by architect Rudolph Schindler, is currently valued at $2.5 million and was designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 2007.
How was nonetheless unhappy. He always regarded wealth as a sort of inherited genetic illness. Sorenson wasn’t happy at the house either.
She reportedly detested the way How entertained poor and homeless people in the parlor and prepared them Mulligan stew in the fireplace (even though he was a vegetarian and never ate it himself).
Sorenson left him after two years of marriage, although the divorce decree didn’t become final until right before his death. Time magazine reported that she was “hopeless of getting a dower share in his inheritance.”
Not only did he not partake of Mulligan stew, How insisted on living on plates of pea soup. According to Time magazine’s account of his death, it was the pea soup that did him in.
The doctor who examined him attributed his death to exhaustion caused by self-starvation. As How lay dying, his lawyer offered him a bed, but he reportedly insisted on a mattress on the attic floor.
After his death, a second paper supposedly picked up the mantle of Hobo News and published it from 1936 to 1948 in New York City. However, records of that paper are sketchy, and its existence remains apocryphal.
Legend also has it the latter Hobo News was replaced in 1948 by the Bowery News, but those accounts are also murky.
Most of the original Hobo News was never thoroughly archived. The New York Public Library has 19 issues ending in 1923. The St. Louis Public Library has 63 issues, starting with the first issue.
Although it has been out of circulation for 105 years, echoes of the Hobo News reverberate well into the 21st century as street newspapers continue to produce media that are catalysts for individual and social change.
And some of the content published in Hobo News sounds eerily fresh.
“The magazines and newspapers are full of dope about the war in Europe and the suffering of the armies, but you hear very little about the Grand Army of the Unemployed, so small that the newspaper and magazine writers cannot see them,” George Fenton wrote in May 1915.
That same issue, John X. “Jungle Cook” Kelly pondered what life would be like in 100 years.
“Sometimes I wonder what people will say 100 years from now,” he wrote 150 years ago. “They will dig up our skulls to find out if they were ever clear through. Perhaps some of our poor skulls will wind up in a museum as relics of the days when working men and women fed the world and starved themselves and built houses but slept in lumberyards and box cars.”
Thus, the hobo’s journey continues.
Information for this article was researched through archived editions of the Hobo News as well as contemporaneous sources on the newspaper and its founder James Eads How.
St. Louis’ archives of Hobo News can be found online at https://bit.ly/3LIy0kQ.
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This article appears in November 5, 2025.