LisaG's blog

I’m pretty sure I gasped when I opened the first of the WPA guides that I was taking a look at for the last Travel Habit assignment. I had opened up tabs on my browser for Philadelphia, New York, North Carolina, California and some others hoping that I would see the differences in the books based on region. For some reason I totally forgot about our previous discussion in class, about the amount of writers commissioned for The Federal Writers’ Project and the degree to which these guide books analyze a state.

The Federal Writers’ Project resource page says the American guide book series was “designed to produce a comprehensive look at the country by state and aid in fostering a sense of national pride during a difficult time in U.S. history. In addition, the hope was that the guides would promote tourism by serving as a motivation for people to visit other areas by car.” It doesn’t surprise me that a group of writers could manage to produce a 750 page book on the history, geography and cultural background of Philadelphia or over 800 on New York’s metropolitan area. The idea of having the books be used as a motivation for tourism is what surprises me the most, perhaps because I am used to the trivial travel guides and resources available today.

However, although the guidebooks are largely factual and it’s difficult to think of someone using them as an actual guide to touring a city, there are certain portions of the writing where the attempt to lure travelers to certain areas is clear. One of the selling points noticeable in the New York City guide is the diversity of the neighborhoods, ethnically and culturally. Where there is a reputation for a neighborhood’s tendency to be dangerous the guide will dispute the negativity. When describing Chinatown, for example, the opening paragraph of its historical passage directly addresses and repudiates the argument: “New York’s Chinatown is trying to live down a myth; a myth kept alive by the sightseeing companies that pile tourists into Chinatown buses, transport them to prepared points of interest, and frequently prime them with tales of mystery and crime.”

I think my favorite part about the guide books though, is how they are written. They are not specifically marketed toward any one person; they simply provide factual information, maps and a history of the states they are written for. The nature of the books themselves is probably the reason for this. The purpose of them was to promote a sense of national pride and plant and market merely the idea to travel and experience the country. It allows the guides to be beautified history lessons authored by talented writers.


P.S. please note the hatin' on NYU on page 133 of the New York City guide!

We’ve had many discussions in “The Travel Habit” centered on authenticity and I don’t want to beat a dead horse but the readings on the tourism habit during the thirties, specifically “Being Elsewhere,” lead me once again to question the difference between tourism and authentic travel. The article points out that the advertisements courtesy of the depression era community-advertising movement typically focused on the “easy and inexpensive,” the “relaxing and restorative” (198) with places like Southern California promoting themselves as an all-in-one vacation which drew my attention to modern ways of travel.

I’ve always found myself denouncing going on vacation to an all-inclusive resort or going on a cruise. My response, when asked why I tend to disapprove, has always been along the lines of “why would I pay hundreds of dollars to be confined to a boat or a beach with small bouts of time where the resort or cruise specifically allows me to wander off?” The idea of cruises and resorts like that seem contrived and fake. I am half-Dominican and sometimes when people learn this tidbit they tell me about how they went to Punta Cana, one of the most popular resort towns in the country. Now, that’s all good and well and I always respond in a positive way but that means the same thing to me as someone who says, “I went to Mexico for Spring Break” which we all know means the person did nothing at all to find out about Mexican culture. This is own of the differences between true travel and tourism that the article points out: tourism acts a commodity whereas travel is about experience. Travel in the 30s was seen as a package to be purchased and the same idea applies here. “We can’t expect people to travel of their own volition… We not only have to paint the lure of travel but we have to follow through to show them… how worthwhile it will be, tell them exactly what to see and do when they get here” (199).  

But is it possible to have a true travel experience, especially when traveling to a country whose language you do not speak? Traveling today, we use sites and travel guides like Lonely Planet to try and find ways to experience a location’s true culture as a local might do. But one always has to question what they’re missing out on by screwing the tour guide book they bought and wandering off on unchartered, non-Zagat-rated or Lonely-Planet-approved territories. Having a true travel experience is time consuming, difficult to plan (if it is possible to plan at all), not guaranteed and impossible to truly define. This draws us back to the lure of the all-inclusive resort and the cruise experience where someone pays to say “I’m going to Alaska” or “I’m going to the Greek Islands” without having to be responsible for the trip itself.

Two of my favorite passages from A Cool Million come ten pages apart at the end of the satirical look at what being optimistic about the American dream brings about. Both Shagpoke Whipple and Chief Satinpenny of the Native American tribe in the book are radical characters. Whipple, a former United States president –who never seems to be recognized throughout the book as one of the country’s leaders by any character—shows how naïve truly believing in the payoff of hard work and optimism can be. He is a supporter of only the “good” hardworking American capitalists like Henry Ford and wary of class warfare. After he visits the “Chamber of American Horrors, Animate and Inaminate Hideosities” (where a woman and her children die on the street after failing to make a good investment), Mr. Whipple gives Lem a convoluted mini-lecture on what the difference between good and bad capitalism is, “the parasites and the creators” (166). “What I am getting at, is that Capital and Labor must be taught to work together for the general good of the country. Both must be made to drop the materialistic struggle for higher wages on the one hand and bigger profits on the other.” Yet, while the hypocritical Whipple preaches this, we can’t help but remember the bank he ran at the beginning of the novel and the loan he took from the Pitkins which crippled their family.

Chief Satinpenny is as hypocritical as Whipple when it comes to his take on capitalism. Before he lead the invasion on the coal mine which left Lem skinned, he gave a speech on the wastefulness of the white capitalists to rile his tribe. “In what way is the white man wiser than the red? The paleface came and in his wisdom filled the sky with smoke and the rivers with refuse. What, in his wisdom, was he doing?... He was making clever cigarette lighters... He was making paper bags, doorknobs, leatherette satchels” (156). Whipple later asks Lem where the chief obtained his weapons and whiskey and when Lem is unable to answer we know why Whipple’s smile arises: Satinpenny had to purchase and utilize the products of American capitalism in order to raid the ranch in his attempt to defeat it. His first name, Israel, also connects to Whipple’s own inspirational speech at the end of the book (where Lem is used as a hero for his National Revolutionary Party).

In that speech Whipple denounces international capitalism and uses Lem as a martyr for being destroyed buy the enemies of American capitalism. Lem, who was comically dismantled throughout the book did not die in vain, says Whipple, but instead is an example of what every American citizen should be: hard-working and honest. “Of what is it that he speaks? Of the right of every American boy to go into the world and there receive fair play and a chance to make his fortune by industry and probity without being laughed at or conspired against by sophisticated aliens” (179).

I don’t mean to disregard the readings for this assignment in my post but I’m writing this on the same day that NYU held a walkout in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street so it’s hard not to draw parallels (or repudiate the presence of similarities) between what is going on during our Great Recession and what drove many of the Marxist ideas during the Great Depression. Even though authors like John Steinbeck were not advocates of Marxist ideology, they supported the New Deal, the help it could provide, had their reasons and their own suggestions. This is where I find fault in the protesters of Occupy Wall Street.

I am certainly not against activism when it has a clear set of feasible demands or when it’s a downright revolution circa the Tahrir Square protests, but the NYU walkout (much like that of “Take Back NYU!” who no one but the class of 2012 will remember now) and those protesting in Occupy Wall Street are too disjointed to be taken seriously. Obama’s jobs bill is currently being altered to include a new 5% tax on those who make more than 1 million which should satiate the group a bit but their demands are lengthy and fragmented. Their fight is for everyday Americans, the “99 percent” of the country and the ever shrinking middle class. I’m all for fighting social inequality but the protestors have no planned agenda and no organizer. Instead they are a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%,” according to their website. I want them to find a way to adequately voice their opinions and formulate some serious demands but I just don’t see it happening. Instead, 700 people get arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge; there are riots in Union Square or a silly unfocused walkout akin to the just-as-ridiculous protests of Take Back NYU! circa 2009.  

Something Cornel West said made me think a little differently about it (and what he said would have rung true during the Great Depression as well): “You’re talking about raising political consciousness so it spills over all parts of the country, so people can begin to see what’s going on through a set of different lens, and then you begin to highlight what the more detailed demands would be.” The protests are meant to raise awareness and more people and unions are joining the fight every day so I am curious to see what comes of the occupation. Perhaps what our generation is missing are the authors like Steinbeck and Kromer who told the story of the down-and-out or took a stand to propose some solutions. 

I really enjoyed reading all of Waiting for Nothing for this week’s class. Tom Kromer writes about the depression in a much different way than many of the other authors we have read so far this semester. Even the novelists and journalists who had experienced life as a “stiff” themselves lacked the vulgarity and abrasiveness that can be found in Kromer’s text. All of the works we’ve read so far have been pretty dismal but there is some sense of hope in all of them. The Grapes of Wrath found it in the Weedpatch Camp, Bertha saw beauty in the wanderlust of her fellow “sisters of the road,” etc. Kromer’s work is much grimmer because there is a lack of hope in any of the characters we meet in the stories. Each chapter is filled with death and sacrifices made by Tom and other homeless men and women without any sign of improvement in their lives. However, there is solidarity at the most basic level (when Yvonne and Tom make stew on Christmas Eve, for example) along with Kromer’s struggle with honesty and integrity.  
 
Kromer’s dark work overlays a personal struggle to keep personal and moral values alive when faced with a battle to stay alive. The Kromer of the book –which the author notes is meant to be autobiographical save for a few stories (259)—is constantly struggling over what plans of action will get him his basic needs. Tom often doesn’t even realize he is so intent on keeping his morality intact. He is unable to follow through with robbing the bank and when he meets the stiff who uses “dummy-chucking” to get money from women on the street Tom says, “Why can’t I do what this stiff does? I have as much brains as he has. I have the imagination, too. But I cannot do it. It is the guts… There is no use talking. I will never have the guts to do that” (93). This is where I think Kromer does his best work, keeping his main character (i.e. himself) in a covert and constant toil with what it means to be good.
 
I appreciate the book as well because it doesn’t have an extreme political agenda. Kromer attacks the “coppers” and often says things about showing restaurant managers or the “guys in the dough” what he would do if he had a “gat” but when he speaks of a working class revolution he seems to take no stock in it, saying it’s more pertinent to meet people’s physiological needs than to worry about politics. “You can stop a revolution of stiffs with a sack of toppin’s… When a stiff’s gut is empty, he hasn’t got the guts to start anything. When his gut is full, he just doesn’t see any use in raising hell” (72). It’s this “primitive fight for existence” –as the afterword notes—that makes the book so beautiful.

Both Woody Guthrie and “Box Car Bertha” while traveling throughout the United States found beauty and distorted consistency in their nomadic lifestyles. The transient lifestyle, although partially driven by the need for work and economic stability is also motivated by a desire to see and feel what life is like elsewhere. Both authors make note of this sentiment.

Although Box Car Bertha was a fictional character who noted that some “Sisters of the Road” are “seized” with this “wanderlust”, her creator, Ben Reitman, is also noted for seeing the beauty of drifters. In the afterword of Sister of the Road, it is noted that Reitman himself was a hobo at various times of his life. “He saw the people he lived and traveled with as simply people, no worse, no better than anyone else. He was a man who was acutely aware of his own weaknesses, but he showed no desire to mimic the “respectable” society that disdained the people among whom he chose to live his life” (201). This feeling of wanderlust and a need for a stronger connection with other travelers is also what seems to have driven the author and photographer pairs of last week’s focus (along with their monetary compensation, of course). Guthrie similarly says that he’d “been pretty proud about bumming” (201).

Leading a nomadic lifestyle hasn’t completely diminished from American life. New York and other cities today have their own version of the 30s transients. Here we call them “crusties” and they’re usually found downtown at Washington Square or Tompkins Square parks. They too are typically a younger crowd who has been seized with the wanderlust that Box Car Bertha speaks of. A village local, Steven Hirsch, started a blog interviewing these travelers and although they don’t seem to be on any sort of job hunt (many are quoted on saying they have no desire to fully integrate back into society) they do show a desire to experience a happy, natural life. Kayla, one of the women interviewed by Hirsch says,"I gave it a shot. I did what everyone told me would make me happy. Got an apartment. Got a job. I wasn't happy, so I started traveling. I haven't stopped since... I've tried to settle down. Can't do it. I'd just rather sleep under the stars."

Also, check out this NYT article on the New York nomads.

I was excited to explore some travel readings that juxtaposed text with images for this week’s assignment. The Evans/Agee and Lange/Taylor pieces were of particular interest to me since some of the images are very iconic and we’ve been both mentioning them and using them for our posts since the start of the semester. It was great to read some of the text that accompanies the images we know so well. There was such a stark contrast between the way the two pieces were written. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men stands out amongst all of the travel pieces we’ve read so far. Agee starts by addressing one of their subjects, Fred Ricketts, and it reads like a novel. I got the feeling that I was reading a fiction piece that begins with a personal letter: “Down in front of the courthouse Walker had picked up talk with you, Fred, Fred Ricketts (it was easy enough to do, you talk so much; you are so insecure, before the eyes of any human being).” Compared to the readings of Caldwell, Asch, Anderson, etc there’s just such a difference there. It’s so much more personal that he is speaking to a specific person instead of the report-like feel of the others.

Besides the dissimilarity in writing style, there was also a great distinction in the photography techniques of Lange and Evans. Dorothea Lange’s photographs are self-proclaimed documentary images: “We use the camera as a tool of research… We adhere to the standards of documentary photography as we have conceived them” (15). However, although both she and Walker Evans shot people and their living and work environments, Lange’s images have the look of being crafted (I’m thinking particularly of the image titled “Hoe Culture”). Evans’ photos, even though they are very personal and up-close to the subjects seem more candid than Lange’s. In the text of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee questions how objective the camera can be, saying the camera is “a weapon, a stealer of images and souls, a gun, an evil eye” (362). Photographs are an evil eye in a sense, they cannot be objective. Every photographer in choosing what to shoot favors something over another, cropping certain aspects of what’s in sight out and leaving what they want in the frame. This is a personal choice and thus every image is subjective in at least that way. The Trilling article, "Greatness with One Fault in It," praises the photographs of Evans because of how candid they seem. “Evans’ pictures are photographic in the sense that people mean when they say ‘merely photographic,’ they are very direct, they even appear to be literal, and how the moral quality gets into them I do not exactly know.”

For the readings for today’s assignment I wanted to pick continuations of two of the authors we began our travel studies journal with, Anderson and Asch and then a third that was more city focused than the two, Hickok. I’m glad I did because I noticed a trend. Depending on the place the author was traveling to, be it city or an area in the countryside, they chose different ways of analyzing how the depression hit and different ways of interacting with the people who lived there. It may seem obvious but I hadn’t noticed the differences before reading the three in conjunction with one another.

Anderson, in Puzzled America, visits mining towns and interacts with the workers who he sees in a simpler way than Hickok sees the people in New York for example. “It may be simple love of manhood in self and in other men… There is something distinct and real separating them now from the defeated factory hands of the cities. They are not defeated men” (18). I hate to use the term “American Dream” because it is difficult to define but, if we give it the definition of a will to live a happy life based on hard work and success it would seem that the coal miners here still have it in mind. Anderson calls them “pathetic and at the same time magnificent” for their pride in their struggle to live.

When people living in New York are described however, they are written about as living with a certain sort of shame. This is consistent throughout the Asch and Hickok readings. While riding a bus home from his experience traveling, Asch declares the trip to be over when he gets to New York. Although he mentions and is aware of the homelessness and effects of the depression in New York, he describes the people with whom he rode the bus as being shameful of their position. “They hid their faces, or they always began the conversation by saying this was the first time they had ever used such cheap transportation; then they began to brag” (266). Hickok also describes the city as being “half awake” as to what was happening at the time.

I’m still trying to figure out if this distinction between the ways people were dealing with the depression depending on location is simply because of the opinions the authors had of the areas already. If Asch hadn’t been from New York and already had a negative opinion of its elite would he have noticed those living in Hoovervilles in Central Park instead? Or was the American Dream dying in New York?

It’s difficult to imagine that a certain decade of this country’s history is not entirely consistent in its representation. A decade that was less than a century ago, when multiple forms of media were present to document and report on it is still fuzzy today. I read Keith Windschuttle’s “Steinbeck’s myth of the Okies” from the course’s The Grapes of Wrath bibliography page because I want to explore something from the disputing side of the Steinbeck novel. And that’s precisely what Windshuttle tries to prove: The Grapes of Wrath was just a novel. He, like many literary critics, is agitated by the work being taken as 100 percent fact, as a direct report on what Steinbeck observed in his travels during the time period.

One of his main problems is that Steinbeck completely misrepresents the “Okies” who migrated to California to find work. First off, the Dust Bowl would not have affected the Joads as much in Oklahoma because the most severely affected areas were “half of Kansas, eastern Colorado, and the west Texas/New Mexico border country” (2). Okies also left for California both before the Dust Bowl and after, so the Joads exodus was nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, most of them were successful in their migration. By 1940, 83 percent of adult, “Okie” males were “fully employed, a quarter in white-collar jobs and the rest evenly divided between skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled occupations” (6).

Now, while I was reading this article I admit that I was slightly upset. I’m sure we all felt a special connection to the Joads and to read that their story was falsified isn’t a great way to follow up the completion of the book. However, towards the end of the argument I snapped back into my original support of the novel. Windschuttle continues to complain about the misrepresentation of route 66 (the it-was-basically-a-modern-highway, what-exodus? spiel we discussed in seminar) and about the Joads. Apparently the people on the road didn’t travel in multi-generational packs but in small immediate families like Steinbeck reported for The Harvest Gypsies. They were mostly younger families looking for a better opportunity (6).

Windschuttle blames the Old Testament and Steinbeck’s Marxist views for the novel’s misconceptions but this is where I veer from agreeing with him altogether. Clearly there is political undertone in The Grapes of Wrath. I doubt any reader would miss that. The book’s ending with the break-up of the Joad family and the new family-like group formed on the utopic Weedpatch is obviously somewhat Marxist in nature. That’s precisely the reason Steinbeck makes the Joads thirteen members deep in their travels. He parallels the Exodus to exaggerate their journey and what he witnessed while reporting. That’s where Windschuttle’s argument gets the better of him. The Grapes of Wrath is just a novel and I’m reticent to say Steinbeck knew his novel was going to be taken as fact. What author is cocky enough to predict their work will be on the bestseller’s list for over a year? Steinbeck wanted to represent that 17 percent of the working class that didn’t find success in California, the families shown in the Dorothea Lange images that Windschuttle so easily brushes off.

Note: I'm not sure if the link to the Windschuttle article will work if you're not connected to the NYU network, but you can search for it on BobCat if you're interested!

Reading through The Harvest Gypsies, one can see Steinbeck’s respect for and desire to tell the full story of a family of migrant workers. Connections can be made between what he reports in the first three chapters of The Harvest Gypsies and the story of the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath. He is very persistent in saying that it doesn’t take long for a family to enter into a community of farmers thinking positively and completely turn around to barely being able to drag themselves out of bed after only a couple of months. One man, described in The Harvest Gypsies tries to accompany his family by digging and creating a makeshift toilet but “he will only do things like that this year. He is a newcomer and his spirit and decency and sense of his own dignity have not been quite wiped out” (27).

He also notes the families’ desire to settle down again once they are in California and to discontinue their movement, “to acquire a little land again and to settle on it and stop their wandering” (22).  This notion is carried on into the story of the Joads who at the beginning of chapter 16 are said as having taken on “movement as a medium of expression” (163). Rose of Sharon, however, tells Ma a story only a few paragraphs later about a dream she holds that her and Connie “wanna live in a town” and Connie is “gonna study at home, maybe radio, so he can git to be an expert an’ maybe later have his own store” (164). It’s the return to normalcy that both the Joads and the families who first enter their camps and begin putting their children into schools and digging latrines for themselves crave.  

But the tractors have ruined the Joads and the families reported on in The Harvest Gypsies. “They have jumped with no transition from the old agrarian, self-containing farm… to a system of agriculture so industrialized… the migrant has no contact with the growth cycle” (23). Since this is where the migrant takes pride in his doing, his life begins to unravel and it worsens with the death of family members (as the Joads begin to experience even before they reach the West Coast), the only thing driving the men to work and keeping hope alive during the depression.

This week’s issue of The Economist caught my attention. While I might not always peruse through my roommate’s copy of the magazine, the cover image was the Dorothea Lange photo shown to us on the first day of The Travel Habit. The cover also announced a 14-page report on the “Future of Work.”

A section of the jobs report called “My Pleasure” reminded me of a question I had been asking while reading the first dozen or so chapters of The Grapes of Wrath: what is satisfying work? What is honest work? And how has this changed in the time between the Great Depression and the Great Recession?

John Steinbeck, a clear supporter of the working class, beautifies the image of the hard-shelled, rough around the edges farmers of the time and it’s no question that the banks of the time are the monsters of the novel. As early as page 9 of The Grapes of Wrath, the driver who picks up Tom Joad says, “Been swingin’ a pick or an ax or a sledge. That shines up your hands. I notice all stuff like that. Take pride in it.” And when describing what the “tenant man” says to the owner of the land: “We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it… That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it” (33).  There is no question that this suffering, ruggedness and hands-on relationship with their work are why many writers went out to travel with migrant workers during the Great Depression to begin with (which we noticed when reading the introductory assignments for last week’s class).

But what is satisfying work today? The Economist notes that “the idea that work can be a source of positive pleasure is spreading” into new fields. There has been a rise in under-30s in rich countries seeking work at not-for-profits and jobs that have a social purpose for a lower salary than they might have otherwise. While jobs assisting the “time-poor new rich” often pay more than these non-profit organizations (i.e. a head butler can make up to $250,000 a year and a private secretary up to $150,000 according to The Economist) there does not seem to be an exodus towards this type of work, especially in the largely unemployed global youth (read the whole article here). Personally, as I’m sure almost all of the Gallatin population would say, I would much rather work at a non-profit than be someone’s private secretary for twice the pay. I’m not sure if that means my soon-to-be college degree makes me too proud or that I seek to find satisfaction in my wok. Perhaps it’s a combination of both.

Is there a difference between truly traveling and touring and sightseeing as Erskine Caldwell suggests in Some American People? I don’t think it’s possible to give a definitive answer on something as subjective as differentiating between the various levels of “travel” but I can support his theory based on personal experience. I don’t mean to go off spewing tangential anecdotes but while I was studying abroad I spent ten days in Greece split between Athens and the islands of Paros and Santorini. While it blew my mind to walk around the Athenian acropolis, be feet from the Parthenon and look down into the Theatre of Dionysus if asked about my trip to Greece I will undoubtedly tell the story of my trip to Naoussa, Paros. Here my roommate and I stumbled into a quaint café to take cover from the rain and spent the entire day hanging out, discussing our countries respective economic crises and having Ouzo and seafood provided to us by the Coast Guard and other locals who were surprised to see young American tourists during low-season. It isn’t that seeing the ruins of Ancient Greece didn’t have an effect on me but it was the connection to people so different from me that really had an impact on my travels. That’s what Caldwell means when he says, “Merely to see things is not enough; only the understanding of man’s activity is satisfying” and it’s the same reason why movements like Couchsurfing have become so popular. Of course, my study abroad Spring Break is not comparable to the traveling done during the Great Depression but the idea behind the experience is the same. I may be judging his book a little too harshly based on its introduction, but Roland Wild doesn’t seem to understand that what matters is the connection between person and place, the extra effort needed to have a true traveling experience. He makes a grand deal of choosing to “ignore Hollywood” but why not explore it just as well? Why not find out what exists behind its superficiality? The Wild reading certainly threw me off the most. While Anderson, Asch and Rorty—albeit their contrasting views on FDR, the New Deal and the lower class migrant workers—seemed to be submerged in their travels for serious personal reflection and a discovery of the root of the problems causing the Depression, Wild’s trip was a family vacation whim turned book deal. Where does that leave him on the road? Is he a tourist? Or is he part of the elite group of “believers” like Anderson and Asch?