filfoster
One Too Many
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What kind of jacket is that?
I don't know. I googled some fun pictures for visual stimulation. But now that I look closer at the photo the jacket on the gentleman in question is interestingWhat kind of jacket is that?
Still looking into whether there were laws against people being unemployed or not if they couldn't be drafted during the war. I am sure I remember, years ago, hearing there was such a law somewhere but can't recall the context of that now.
I have a feeling that welfare programs were stretched pretty thin in the war years for those who genuinely couldn't work...
There has also been a long-standing distrust and dislike of anyone who doesn't have a home, that is, a house or other fixed address. You sometimes see news accounts that mention someone "of no fixed address," and right away you assume the worst. Gypsies have that problem in Europe and in the Americas. And sometimes, the original inhabitants of a place, the "natives," which in the Americas are what we call Indians, are people to be pushed out of the way because their lifestyle in most cases doesn't meet our Western European standards of how people ought to live.
Vagrancy laws, well into the 1960s, were among the most arbitrarily-applied laws of the time. If you weren't of the favored ethnicity, religious, or political persuasion, you were much more likely to be escorted to the town line on a vagrancy charge. Such laws were also usually worded in such a way that you didn't even actually have to *do* anything to be considered a "vagrant." You didn't even have to be broke -- you just had to be someone a given cop didn't like. And interestingly, there was an explosion in vagrancy cases after the war, especially in the West and South, which had nothing to do with being broke, and everything to do with being suspected of being an "outside agitator."
It wasn't until the 1970s that these laws were declared unconstitutional.