Kirsten's blog

If advocators of vacation wanted employees to get back to nature, they definitely got that in Mississippi. The state’s WPA Federal Writers Project guidebook spends a lot of time describing the culture of the people—or rather, the culture of the farmers. Almost all of the “White Folkways” section centers around the farmers. The section opens, “A farmer people with a mental background of furrowed hot fields and a hope for rain, we Mississippi white folk are both dependent on and modified by the sporadic blessings of forces that we cannot control” (8). What a person reading this guidebook might glean is that Mississippi revolves around nature—its people are extremely invested in the land and the weather. For someone working in an office building all day, this mindset probably seemed quaint and desirable. These people “mostly just piddle[d] about, studying the wind and sky and earth—watching for signs that bewilder our agricultural colleges but prove the grace which nourishes our faith in next year’s crop” (10).  Their means were modest, but they were clearly happy; furthermore, they were attuned with nature, making their land an ideal vacation spot for someone cultivating a “travel habit.”
 
However, there is a darker side to Mississippi’s guide book beyond the humble, land-dependent farmers; it is a dark side expected of any Southern state at the time: racism. Of course, it’s still unsettling, but we have seen countless examples in this time period of this racism. In fact, several of the movie clips we watched in class featured caricatures of black people. The writer seems invested in making very large generalizations about African Americans; for instance, he claims that “[t]he Mississippi folk Negro neither lays up monetary treasures not invests in things of tangible value. He spends money for medical and legal advice, a virtue that undoubtedly would bring him praise but for the fact that he has never been known to take anyone’s advice about anything” (22). The writer treats African Americans like some kind of foreign species, as if he’s observed them in their natural habitats and can now accurately report on them. The tone is very skeptical throughout (“Yet, his greatest joys, religion and getting baptized, are free”) (22). The very fact that the “folkways” section is split into “White” and “Negro” shows that the writer of this guide believed that African Americans must be reported on, but it’s as if he does so begrudgingly. His treatment is certainly different than that of the humble, superstitious farmers.

One of the arguments for vacation in the 1930’s was that “’Americans should be taught to play; to realize that vacation is a necessity…that to commune with nature better fits one for the strenuous business life. A vacation is a builder of health, mind, body, and soul…it is as vitally necessary as their diet or their morning daily dozen’”(Berkowitz 188). What noble aspirations the idea of the vacation started out with! As we all have probably experienced, family vacations generally don’t do a whole lot for one’s health, let alone their sanity.
 
James Agee seems to agree. He describes “a second-class commercial hotel, whose drab lobby and whose cheerless rooms you can see with your eyes closed” (Agee 45). This place “has just what you need for a night’s rest, neither more nor less” (47). This does not sound like a vacation that builds the mind, body or soul. Furthermore, vacations can be bad for a person based on the foods they eat alone. Generally, people eat out for every meal, which is certainly unhealthy. Agee elaborates on some of the foods of the road, claiming that “the roadside has produced its own sub-industry in the so far generically nameless commerce of distributing frozen sweets stuck to little wooden sticks by passing them out from trucks stationed at traffic-congestion points” (53). He goes on to condemn food stands just as harshly. Food is another example of how vacations certainly do not build health, as the fervent vacation advocator argued.
 
This idealization is not an unfamiliar concept—the vacation, especially its conception, sounded like a great idea. Some, however, Berkowitz tells us, did not buy into the idea—they instead took advantage of their required vacation days by moonlighting another job or building their home. They simply did not know how to vacation, or saw it impractical. Employers feared that “their employees would do nothing, thereby squandering the opportunity for rejuvenation that would make them more efficient workers” (Berkowitz 194). However, wouldn’t staying at home, simply not working, be just as rejuvenating as going away? That would perhaps be even less tiring. Furthermore, some employees might become accustomed to the vacation lifestyle and dread their work even more when they must return.
 
I’m not saying that I’m opposed to vacations, but I certainly think that some of the argumentation for them when the idea was first being introduced in America was a little too oversimplified and idealized. Vacations are great, but perhaps do not serve the purposes that 1930s employers thought they would.

Nathanel West’s A Cool Million is certainly a strange text. Its protagonist, Lem Pitkin, is simultaneously very fortunate and unfortunate as he constantly loses various body parts and but also is subject to many “lucky accidents,” such as his false teeth and eye falling out and therefore scaring away the Maharajah (131). However, one of the most peculiar aspects of this text is its narrator.
 
Initially, the novella seems to be written in a typical third person omniscient. However, small hints begin popping up that this narrator serves a different role. When describing Mr. Whipple’s nightly routine of lowering the flag and giving a speech, the narrator tells his reader, “Shagpoke lowered the flag for which so many of our finest have bled and died” (72). This description does not necessarily stray completely from a third person omniscient point of view, but it stands out nevertheless. Typically, this type of narration is one without opinion, but this message is very obviously patriotic. Furthermore, it refers to “our finest,” which is certainly a first person voice. There we can assume the narrator is American, so we begin to wonder: is he a neighbor of Shagpoke’s? Why does West include this strong emotional description? Judging from the rest of the novella, it’s not a genuine pledge of patriotism; perhaps is a sarcastic comment on patriotism. In putting this part of the sentence in first person, it stands out, and maybe West used a different tone in order to call attention to the ridiculousness of the blind patriotism that some Americans have.
 
Another instance in which West’s narrator lapses briefly into first person is when the narrator describes the outfit that Betty must wear when she is sold into prostitution, something which he does, he says, “for the benefit of my feminine readers” (94).  Once again, the small bit of first person sticks out. Is it, similar to the aforementioned instance, a bit of satire? Perhaps West is once again using a change in narrative voice to call attention to the ridiculousness of sexism; after all, he is reciting this in the context of a brothel in which every prostitute is dressed as a certain type of American—a ridiculous concept. It could be, too, that this is an innocent statement that in the 1930’s would not seem sexist in any way—I could not glean from my external readings whether or not West was particularly sexist or misogynist, as many writers of the period were. Either way, the first person catches the reader off-guard, calling attention to the bizarre situation following the statement (i.e. Betty’s grotesquely American attire), which once again comments on the excess and extreme patriotism of some Americans.

As we all very well know, thousands of people roamed the country during the Depression looking for jobs. In Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited, we see the desperation and great lengths that some went to in order to secure a job. Consequentially, for some the Depression became an era of new identity.
 
Some, such as Boxcar Bertha, road the rails and assumed the identity of a vagrant, succumbing to wanderlust. Others, like Tom Kromer, left behind the college education they had in order to pursue a life on the road. Conroy’s narrator assumes a new identity in order to try to get a job. A man looking for workers asks him, “’Where did you ever handle a rivet hammer?’” To which he replies, “’I worked for the Pittsburgh-Detroit Steel,’ even though he “had never been a riveter” (241). In this case, the taking on of a new identity was crucial. Usually, expression of identity is associated with individuality and expression of personhood; however, in this case, it is method of survival. The narrator adapts himself in order to fit what kind of person is needed; he becomes a chameleon, adapting to his environment.
 
For others, the same desperation of the Depression that forced Conroy’s narrator to adapt his identity for survival allowed for a more overt expression of true identity. In both The Disinherited and Waiting for Nothing, we see depictions of cross-dressing men picking up homeless men as prostitutes. These men had money in a time of economic disparity; therefore, if they offered said money, desperate people would accept it no matter what. Because they had money and were giving to men they were interested in, they were able to dress as women if they wanted. Their money gave them a freedom that other’s didn’t have, and they used it to express their identities. Money equated to freedom, and because they had money, no one could persecute them for dressing as women because there were so many homeless men desperate to obtain their next meal in any way possible. These crossdressing men were completely opposite the men looking for work—instead of adapting themselves to survive, other people adjusted to these men in order to have a meal and a place to sleep. They were being adapted to instead of adapting themselves.

The first aspect of Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing that the reader notices is its realism. It is not overly sentimental or gruesome; Kromer reports life as a “stiff” in a way that only an experienced person could. Unlike our past readings, the reader gets a sense that this is the “real” story—Kromer does not try to induce pity or sympathy. This frankness is probably due to the fact that he was not an outsider looking in, such as Asch or Anderson; because of life as a stiff, he does not pity himself and his writing reflects his emotional background.
 
Kramer’s realism nearly becomes ironic when he discusses his friend, Karl. Karl is a writer, and “he is always hungry…it is not his fault he is always hungry. It is that nobody buys the stuff he writes. He writes of starving babies, and men who tramp the streets in search of work. People do not like such things” (67). Kromer writes of the very same things, and even some things even more gruesome. Yet, clearly his work is published. Perhaps America as a whole was not ready for such realism at the time. We saw in Margaret Bourke-White’s photos a dramatic portrayal rather than a more realistic one—perhaps the public saw the melodramatic shadows and knew that Bourke-White’s portrayal was exaggerated, and therefore preferred her work to more realistic depictions. Or perhaps Tom Kromer was just luckier than his friend Karl. Either way, it is difficult to imagine that Karl’s descriptions could have been more haunting and engrossing than those of Kromer.
 
One particularly tragic and gut-wrenching passage is in Chapter Six, when Kromer witnesses a mother leave her baby on a park bench so someone else will take it. Once again, we see Karl, who “thinks this is something new and something awful, this woman leaving her baby in the park because she cannot feed it” (75). Kromer tells us, though, that “Karl is soft-hearted. That is nothing. I have seen worse than that. I know that that is nothing” (75). This moment is when the reader truly realizes how difficult and widespread the Depression hit. The fact that not only must a woman leave her newborn baby on a park bench to give him or her a better life, but that this occurrence is an ordinary one. Kromer is cold and callous, but Karl is not; perhaps Karl’s writing is more sentimental and emotional, unlike Kromer’s. Perhaps that is the reason that Kromer got published—his realism is haunting and moving. 

When we read excerpts from Caldwell’s “Some American People,” we found that wealthy Americans really didn't know how to travel. Traveling requires living on the bare essentials and, for those with money, giving up a way of life that they might be accustomed to. Box Car Bertha shows us that a life on the road is not for everyone.
 
Box Car Bertha is certainly a unique character, especially during her time. A radical, she advocated for birth control 20 years before the pill was approved by the FDA.  Just a few pages in, the reader begins to get a sense that she was different than most people in the Depression, and the reader begins to realize that in order to be a hobo, one has to be different. The “girls dressed just like the boys,” women hoboes were “almost always alone,” and one might go without a “half-dozen” meals at a time (9, 13). But Box Car Bertha never once complained about her situation—it is clear that she loves to travel. Additionally, she is accustomed to this lifestyle—for her, it seems, it simply goes along with traveling.
 
Box Car Bertha’s adventures got her into trouble, though—she recounts several instances in which her hobo past lost her a job. The traveling lifestyle was an undignified one, and it was clear that most Americans looked down upon it. Traveling—i.e. “real” traveling, not simply a leisurely vacation—began to become associated with being a hobo, which was a lower class of people, or at least, that’s the picture that Bertha paints for us. It prevented a person from obtaining a good job, and that person was looked down upon by society. In Bertha’s case, though, that did not matter. She wanted to live on the road and that was it. Wanderlust consumed her. Consequentially, she severed many ties, from jobs to her very own daughter. She pays hardly any mind to those things, though—she wanted to travel. This passion is inspiring, but at the same time, seems limiting. To be passionate to the point of wearing blinders is detrimental to a person’s well-being; it is a life without balance. For Box Car Bertha, it took many years to find this balance and overcome the all-consuming power of wanderlust.

“This is the place where anybody may come without an invitation and, before the day is over, be made to feel like one of the home-folks.” –Erskine Caldwell on The South (1)
 
Right from the start, Caldwell evokes the friendly, neighborly spirit that is so unique to The South. However, he quickly contrasts this sunny picture with a fact of the 1930’s—The South took a relentless beating from the Depression. The very land from which they made their profit became unreliable and sharecropping “force[d] families to live in buildings that are detrimental to health” and “deprive[d] children of adequate education” (6).
 
In a time when all the workers were equally struggling to cultivate enough crops to provide for their families, one might expect them to become more competitive and willing to do whatever it took to make ends meet, even if it meant elbowing out their neighbor. However, we must keep in mind Caldwell’s opening idea—the people of The South are a unified community.  Accordingly, Caldwell tells us that “there has appeared the first sign of hope…There has been talk, from one end of the South to the other, of joining with other tenant farmers to tae collective action against the institution of sharecropping” (7).  Instead of turning against one another so that they might make more to profit their bosses, the people of the South turned toward each other and banded together to solve their collective problem. They recognized that sharecropping was “ruinous because the system itself is not a collective venture but one of personal profit” (46). We can see that it was the unique community dynamic of The South that created the call for unionization. Despite the fact that they were hit the hardest by the Depression, Southerners recognized that they needed to rely on each other to ameliorate the woes bestowed upon them by the system of sharecropping.
 
This Southern ideal of community is manifested not only in Caldwell’s writing but also in Margaret Bourke-White’s photo captioned, “Just sitting in the sun watching the Mississippi go by.” This photo caught my attention because the men all wear amused or in some way content expressions. They are in the midst of a very tough time for America and The South, but they sit together by the river and appreciate each other and nature. The photo invokes a scene of men talking nonchalantly relaxing, of simply enjoying each others’ company. It is this notion—the value placed on the fellow Southerner and a strong community—that held the South together through such a tumultuous time.

(Attached video is the "Anitques Roadshow" appraisal for a Margaret Bourke-White photo--I know there have got to be some "Antiques Roadshow" junkies among us.)

In Pyle’s chapter on the “the drought bowl” in 1936, he says, “The whole United States seemed to be tortured and wounded in varying degrees with drought, and heat, but in the bowl, there was complete destruction” (49). This statement reminded me of my summer in Texas. Every night, the news would tell us we had set a new record for number of consecutive over-100-degree days. Everyone was saying that it was the worst drought we’d seen in North Texas since the dust bowl. Pyle’s section on “letting the cattle go” also rang true to present-day—at home, cattle sales were running twenty-four hours a day because very few ranchers could afford to feed their cattle and had to sell their livestock (51). The scariest part of it all, though, was the number of fires we saw. A spark from a farmer welding his fence could cause a massive grass fire. My friends in a nearby neighborhood had to evacuate their homes.
 
I began thinking about these events as they relate to the 1930’s and to travel. One startling connection was that I know many people who have become “migrant workers” of sorts. In 2008, a huge manufacturing plant in my hometown shut down and hundreds of people lost their jobs. I know a man who moved to South Carolina for work, only seeing his family a few times a year because they stayed at home in Texas (luckily, he was able to find a job closer to home two years later). I know of another man who left his family behind and moved to an island no one in the community had ever heard of.  It wasn’t only this plant shut-down that caused people to travel to find work—Rick Perry’s infamous education cuts caused one man I know to move to Damascus, Syria for a job as a school counselor.
 
Perhaps conditions in present-day are not near as extreme as those of the 1930’s, but it seems that history is repeating itself in a way. In both cases, extreme drought and job losses have caused devastation in the community. I have seen people move away from the homes they’ve known their entire lives in order to find work, just as the migrant workers did in the 1930’s and as “Denver” went to the oilfields in Pyle’s account. Drought and economic downturn go hand-in-hand in agricultural societies, and the number of similarities I find between my hometown and the “drought bowl” of the 1930’s is eerie. However, we are fortunate enough that none of the farmers have given up their farms, and the members of our community don’t have to go to the same extremes as some in the 1930’s. 

In The Grapes of Wrath, much of the Joad family’s story is framed by the food that they consume. Taking place during a time when food was often hard to come by, these details feel natural. One particular food, or rather, drink, that comes up again and again is coffee.
 
Coffee, to the reader, seems to keep the Joads going. As the men are feverishly shoveling mud in the midst of a giant rainstorm, “[t]he women [fill] the coffee pots and set them out again” (601). Even though Ma Joad and Mrs. Wainwright are preoccupied with the birth of Rose of Sharon’s baby, they still make the time to refill the coffee pot. Because this level of attention was paid to the coffee, it seems that it is essential for these men to have coffee to persevere.
 
When buying groceries at the peach orchard, Ma includes coffee in her essential food items. After she’s paid with all their day’s money—one dollar—for her groceries, she asks the shopkeeper if she can have some sugar because “[w]e got no sugar for the coffee. My boy Tom, he wants sugar” (513). The grocer refuses because he’ll get fired for giving it to her on credit; however, she insists because Tom wants sugar for his coffee.  For Ma, it seems that coffee holds the family together. Considering the amount of anxiety she suffers when thinking of splitting up the family, we can perhaps interpret her preoccupation with coffee as a way to keep her family bonded. They all come together to drink their coffee. Coffee seems to be one of the only constants between their lives in Oklahoma and their lives in California—this is perhaps why Ma so greatly cherishes coffee.
 
Ma also takes pride in her coffee. The manager of the government camp first comes to their tent and Ma tells Pa that he “said he didn’t get good coffee so often, an’ smelt our’n” (418). Ma hangs on to coffee as a nice thing in her life—so much has deteriorated, both in the sense of physical objects and of quality of life. But her coffee is still as good as ever. Furthermore, she offers coffee to all visitors—it is yet another way to link her to others, whether they are her family or kind people passing by. We can see that Steinbeck uses coffee as a unifying and bonding symbol; in this time of extreme hardship, the Joads have coffee all along the way.

After the Joads set out on the road in The Grapes of Wrath, a series of unfortunate events begins to unfold. The first major event, more tragic than unfortunate, is when Grampa dies. The family, although upset, continues on with their migration. Grampa’s death, however, can be seen as the first separation of the family. They are without the backbone of their family, and they do not have time to endure the grieving process; they must instead learn to adapt to their altered family unit.
 
The second separation, or rather, prospect of separation, is when Rose of Sharon lays out the plan that she and Connie have devised to “live in a town” (224). Ma’s immediate reaction is rejection; she says, “We don’ want you to go ‘way from us…It ain’t good for folks to break up” (225). In light of Grampa’s death, it is clear that Ma is completely closed to the idea of further breaking up their “gathered family” (228). It is shortly after Rose of Sharon’s confession that the car breaks down and Tom proposes separating the family so that they can continue their travels until it is fixed. Ma says that she “ain’t a-gonna go” (230). She argues that they have “[n]othin’ but the folks. We came out an' Grampa, he reached for the shovel-shelf right off. An’ now, right off, you wanna bust up the folks” (230-1). She clearly fears what might happen if they break up the family—she even implies that they could lose another family member. She fights with Pa on the matter, proving that tensions are high. The family is already stressed and upset, and Ma cannot handle the idea of further separating them.
 
This issue can even be seen in today’s American culture. A University of Maryland Baltimore County study found that  “family separation during migration has a negative impact on the educational success of children that goes beyond the problems experienced by all migrants.” These children have a higher high-school drop out rate. It can be ascertained that these children, separated from their families, feel emotional trauma that is distracting from school, causing them to fall behind and in some cases, drop out. 

In John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad meets his old preacher, Jim Casy, just after leaving prison. However, Tom Joad quickly learns that he’s “[j]ust Jim Casy now. Ain’t got the call no more. Got a lot of sinful idears—but they seem kinda sensible” (27). With the character of Jim Casy, Steinbeck seems to be making a statement on the loss of faith during the Depression. When even the preacher, formerly a “Burning Busher,” stops believing in religion, that marks a sign of hopelessness (27). Although some have compared Jim Casy to a Christ figure, I am not completely convinced; however, I do believe that he embodies the state of religious belief in the Great Depression.
 
In the Depression, we see that many people, including the Joad family, became more self-reliant. Many of them had no choice—they lost their jobs and had to invent a solution for themselves to survive. The Joad family is just one example of the families that packed up and moved West. They abandoned all that they had known and set out on their own path. Jim Casy does the same thing in his spiritual journey. He says, “’What’s this call, this sperit?...It’s love. I love people so much I’m fit to bust, sometimes.’ An’ I says [to myself] ‘Don’t you love Jesus?’….’No, I don’t know nobody named Jesus. I know a bunch of stories, but I only love people.’…I can’t be a preacher no more because I thought it an’ I believe it” (32). Jim Casy is not ashamed or embarrassed by the fact that he gave up his job to lead a life of what most consider to be sin. He simply began thinking more independently and deciding his own future. The same concept applies to the lifestyle of the migrant workers in the Depression. They unabashedly left what they knew behind; they were taking control of their own futures because it was simply what they had to do.
 
Furthermore, Casy consistently insists and reminds Tom Joad that he is no longer a preacher; it is as if he does not want to look back on his old life. Similarly, we can imagine that many in Great Depression did not want to remember what their lives had formerly been. In a financially insecure time, one can reap no benefit from looking back on the past. This concept is yet another explanation as to why so many set out on the road during the 1930’s—they recognized that America was a different place, and they moved on physically so as to move on culturally.

In Puzzled America, Sherwood Anderson observes, “…we have been talking of government, of unemployment. Of what else do men speak nowadays? It comes into every conversation. What’s going to happen? What about Roosevelt? Will he make good? Wil he go to the right or left?” (xii). From this statement, we can derive an air of desperation and anxiety. Anderson claims that America is in a constant state of worry over employment and economy, and consequentially, its citizens have become desperate (a sentiment not unlike today’s America, where reports have been turning up showing jobs fair attendance in the thousands). Anderson makes this notion tangible when describing a person he saw rummaging through a garbage bin—an image that tells us that this man has no other choice.
 
From this desperation comes urgency. In Where Life is Better, James Rorty claims, “…the failure of the unemployed to demand and secure relief or employment sufficeient to maintain a decent living standard is the most serious, the most crucial of all our failures as a people” (28).  The only solution to improving the downtrodden times is to act drastically, but, Rorty says, most “will take the easiest way out” because it is “the ‘American’ way” (30). Rorty chastises America for not feeling his same sense of urgency to improve their lives. He even cites an article from Harper’s Magazine explaining that Americans should be protesting and revolting; he calls for urgency that reaches this extreme degree.
 
Most Americans, though, did not begin to revolt or defy their government; instead, many began to travel. It is perhaps that sense of urgency that drove some Americans to set out and become migrant workers, or even simply to travel across the country in any way they could. The government certainly seems to have felt this same sense of urgency; they saw the new tourism industry blooming and began to urge Americans to travel across their country. The travel ads found from the time period are much more demanding than other ads; instead of selling travel to Americans, it commands them to travel, most advertisements donning the phrase, “SEE AMERICA" (pictured). It seems the United States Travel Bureau knew that Americans would need this sense of urgency, and accordingly, placed pressure on its citizens to explore the nation.