SamChamp's blog

 
What I find most interesting about the WPA Guides is how they try to manufacture a sense of excitement in normal, somewhat dull places to boost tourism. I suppose that the goal of the WPA was just that, to boost tourism. Not only did the government want people to venture and spend money across the country to equally stimulate the economy, but they wanted Americans to be proud of their country again. They wanted people to see all the types of lifestyles in the United States in order to unite people. Thus, with a sense of unity and greater content among the people, people would be happier with the government and it’s policies.
 
Coming across the WPA Guides, I excitedly rushed to the section of New England and Connecticut, as that is where I’m from. I quickly found the towns bordering mine being highlighted in the guides, and what I found was very interesting but also a bit elaborate. When I think of my hometown and the towns surrounding it, I think of it as simple and comfortable but in no way do I think of it as terribly exciting or a hotspot destination. In fact, there is very little to do where I’m from. People are happy in their simple lives, even though the days are predictable and mundane. However, if I had just read the WPA Guide about Connecticut and hadn’t lived there, I would have thought it was a hopping place! The guide speaks of exciting deep-sea fishing, whaling, sailing, pirates, gold mining, treasure hunting, ammunition plants. Of all the activities on this list, I have only sailed in Connecticut. It also talks about all the attractions lining Post Road, which runs down the south-western coast of Connecticut, a road which I drove on nearly every day. It talks about how on the Post Road in Fairfield there is a tavern where George Washington spent the night on October 16, 1789, as if that would cause people to want to travel from around the country to Fairfield.
 
Personally, I would not recommend that people take time to travel to Connecticut when taking into account how many other great places in America there are to see. I enjoyed growing up there, and perhaps I take Connecticut for granted but it is not a hot spot for tourism in any way. However, I am impressed with the guides. It seems that the WPA put a great deal of time, effort, and money into them judging by how thorough and lengthy they are. I don’t doubt that they greatly helped in boosting tourism, but I feel as if they generate a false sense of pride in people regarding their country. Tourists will see beautiful landscapes wherever they go, but should this make them proud to be an American functioning under the government of America? This is the point that is subject to debate.

 
“They have the money to spend but not on the marble foyers of their forefathers. Their money is dedicated to motion; the cars in cabin camps are not cheap cars” (Agee, 47).
 
For the duration of this class we have talked about the migration of the poor whose lives have been drastically changed by the Great Depression and their struggles to get by. The interesting thing about the readings included for this post is that they tell us that migration, specifically car travel, was a hot travel “destination”, if you will, that families on any end of the economic spectrum would enjoy and cherish. Berkowitz puts the growth of this fad into figures, noting that, “while tourist spending in relation to national income averaged 2.96 percent during the twenties, it averaged 3.94 percent during the ensuing years of economic decline, reaching as much as 4.37 percent in 1935”(Berkowitz, 185). These percentages may seem low, but the growth in them over the few years is astounding.
 
One reason for the growth of travel especially among the middle class, as Berkowitz points out, is due to the expansion of paid vacations. Ironically, it was during this time of national economic crisis that executives at companies decided that paid vacations were necessary in helping their employees to rejuvenate and return to the workplace more happy and efficient. You would think that these vacations would effect the productivity of the manual work laborers greatly but most of the time these lower ranking laborers would never obtain paid vacations. Executives thought it was the “brain workers” who needed breaks instead of the “hand workers” which seems very unjust and counterproductive to say the least.
 
What did they do with these vacations? They explored the country! I found a great website here that notes what exactly they would do, where they would go, and where they would take shelter. Be sure to check out the interesting pictures of the traveling life back then.
 
Regardless of whether they were poor, comfortable, or rich, families across America took to the road. Agee describes that the automobile “became the opium of the America people” (Agee, 44). From the 1930’s through the 1960’s, families spent their vacation times touring the vast American roads and highways, discovering the truth about their country and the people in it. I remember throughout my childhood, the fall-back story that my mother’s family, a well-off middle class family, would always recall was their road trip during the 1950’s across America. They repeatedly describe the great times they had visiting landmarks such as Yosemite, Yellow Stone, Route 66, and the Grand Canyon. I have been told many times to be jealous that my aunts and uncles once stood in four states at one, each momentarily with a limb on the borders of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. Exhilarating, I know. 

“…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. Both must be made to realize that the only struggle worthy of Americans is the idealistic one of their country against its enemies, England, Japan, Russia, Rome and Jerusalem. Always remember, my boy, that class war is civil war, and will destroy us”(West, 166-167).
 
As seen by the struggles of Lemuel Pitkin in Nathaniel West’s A Cool Million, everyone is at war with everyone else. West tells us that in order to make a life for yourself during the Great Depression in America, and arguably in the present time as well, you need to look out solely for yourself. You need to lie, cheat, steal, hurt, and even murder to get what you need to survive, and you cannot trust anyone in the process.
 
Lemuel Pitkin receives false hope from the ex-president Mr. Whipple who tells him that it is the honest in America who succeed. Pitkin tries to be a young Ford or Rockefeller throughout the book based on this advice, trying to make fair deals and help others to get by. This ultimately gets him greatly taken advantage of by everyone he encounters, which results in the continuous loss of all his money, losing an eye, going to jail and losing all his teeth, getting his leg removed, and ultimately being murdered at the end. We hoped throughout the book that his honesty and moral superiority would pay off at the end somehow, but in fact it is what caused his death.
 
We hope throughout the book that all Pitkin’s selfless actions to help and save Betty Prail will bring them both happiness at the end. His actions do, although indirectly, save Betty from the foreign prostitution ring, but they don’t do anything to save himself. This is not to say that West is telling us that helping other people is bad, he is just noting that in these financial times of crisis, those actions will do nothing to help the person who does them and will most likely end up harming them individually as that action was taken place instead of a selfish one to help themselves succeed.
 
We are living in a time where greed, selfishness, and cheating pay off, according to the Huffington Post article Greed in the Economy. Surviving is about putting your own individual interests far above those of society, according to The Daily Beast article The Human History of Greed. People want to change this nature of society, as seen by the Occupy Wall Street protests, but they don’t know exactly how or what to do to change it. I wonder though, that if everyone hypothetically had the opportunity to be a top Wall Street executive, would they take actions to help society or themselves? I do not know the answer to this question. To be honest, I don’t even know what I would do.
 

“In a slow glissade his stomach caved in and turned half-way over-it seemed for one moment that he had no stomach at all, only a head going up like a balloon, buzzing and bounding through space up and up, till it burst in a bubble of blackness and left him standing with his back braced tensely against the bricks of the wall”(Algren, 327).
 
I want to take advantage of this open topic blog post to write about something that has sparked my interest from the last couple readings. I am sure I am not just speaking for myself when I say that I have never felt the type of pain referenced in the quote above. The extent of my going without food would have to be painfully enduring a day of fasting for the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur. This makes me feel guilty, even spoiled, that I take for granted something as vital and necessary as food, and that I have it in such abundance when those, in the present time included, do not.
 
I think it is important to step out of your element and try to comprehend how drastically different your lives would be if you were lacking, or in short supply of, food.  We would not be students, roommates, friends, if we didn’t have food. Instead, we would spend all of our time and limited energy trying to obtain food. We would have no belongings, as they would have all been given up over time to pay for food in some way. And if it was this hard to obtain food for yourself without money, imagine trying to provide for a family. All time and resources would be in providing food, shelter, and clothing, leaving no other time to work to progress your life into a different and more successful stage. Read this article and view the pictures to get a better idea of how far people would go to get what they needed. 
 
With the knowledge of how many people lived like this during the Great Depression, how could farmers destroy excess food that they didn’t sell? Algren writes, “They’re puttin’ stink-oil on the grab-cans now. That guy won’t find even crap left clean”(Algren, 323). We also saw examples of this in The Grapes of Wrath, where farmers don’t only throw out the extra food, but they destroy them, burn them, and poison them. How could someone do this knowing that families were starving? It is one thing to throw out the food they didn’t sell instead of give it to the poor, but then to poison it in the dumps is completely absurd. They did this in the efforts to prevent the prices of produce from lowering, thinking that if people could obtain produce from trash then the worth of it to people paying would go way down.
 
At times like these, people have to work together. One life is not worth more than another, but one life is worth more than that of a business. We need to stop working for our own selfish corporation, and work for mankind. But when problems are so vast, everyone needs to be on board with a solution. An individual can hardly fix anything, as frustrating as this may be. I know that I will be extremely frustrated this coming Saturday when I will be joining my family for Yom Kippur. At sundown I will take my first bite of food for the day and will be extremely grateful for it, yet I will know that there are millions of others out there who would be more grateful for it than me. 

“They do not talk. They do not even think. They only stand in line and wait. It does not matter how long. At first it matters, but after a while it does not matter. They are not going anywhere. When they have taken this stuff home and eaten it, they will be just as hungry as before. They know that. These babies will keep pounding their fists against their mothers’ breasts. Tomorrow they will have the same hollow sound” (Kromer, 66).
 
In other stories we have read, people have a multitude of problems about traveling, supporting their families, finding work, etc. The difference about Waiting for Nothing is that there are only three problems that reside within the individual: food, clothing, and shelter. Tom Kromer has accepted the fact that there are no jobs to be had. He says, “I am tired of walking the street all day long asking for work. They laugh at you for asking for work”(Kromer, 57). He has given up, and since he has no family to support he does any task possible to support himself.
 
The interesting concept in this memoir is that when you are stuck in such a terrible corner in which you can’t provide for yourself, you lose your sense of right and wrong. Anything that you can do to feed yourself, clothe yourself, or house yourself is the right thing to do, the ends justify the means. When Kromer is planning to stick up a bank he says that, “In the drawers in front of them are piles of bills. There are plenty of piles. One or two of them will keep me for life. I will not have anything to worry about. I will be fixed for life. What have I got to lose? Nothing. What have I got to live for? Soup and stale bread, that is what I have to live for. That is what I have to lose”(Kromer, 58).
 
We all live within the confines of laws and ethics but that is because we all have a lot to lose in our lives, whether we realize it or not. Kromer, and all the other “stiffs” in the book and at the time, have nothing to lose and nothing to live for. The worst thing that could happen if he gets caught stealing is he will go to jail where he will have bed, warmth, and food. Kromer even asks a cop to lock him up in the book without doing anything wrong just so he could get out of the cold.
 
Not only does he lose his sense of law, but his sense of his own morals. In the book, Kromer prostitutes himself out to a gay man just in order to be bought a meal and to have a nice bed for a night. He swallows his sense of pride by begging for money, free meals, and something to keep him warm. Although it is hard for him to go through with most of these things, his growling stomach trumps everything. In Waiting for Nothing, Kromer teaches us that when in such a time of desperation, the only things that matter are food, clothing, and shelter. It doesn’t matter how you obtain them, as long as they are obtained. These three issues seem to miniscule to us on a day to day basis, but imagine losing the opportunity of having just one of them and how much that would change your life. Now take that thought and imagine losing all three, and step inside Kromer’s shoes. 

“Where there is a free-speech or labor fight or unemployed demonstration, there’s where I belong” (Reitman, 170).
 
The most interesting and surprising thing to me about Ben Reitman’s Sister of the Road is how Box Car Bertha can keep her compassion, sympathy, and kindness throughout all the hardships she experiences and witnesses. She claims to be a hobo with no notion of the justice system, saying that criminals “all seemed natural to me, an attitude given me by my mother, to whom nothing was ever terrible, vulgar, or nasty”(Reitman, 7). She endures many terrible experiences throughout her young life including jail, the death of her idolized mother, witnessing the death of her good friend Jordan, hunger, and homelessness. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, she devotes her life and labors to helping women migrants. She takes any job at any government or philanthropic agency that she can get, working to help poor women get jobs, money, shelter, support, relocation, etc. She is widely acclaimed in the agencies for her great work, but ends up getting fired from each position because of her past criminal record that she neglected to inform on her application. One director fires her saying, “you’ve been doing splendid work here, and you helped build up our organization so that it is a credit to the South, but what would we do if some newspaper got hold of this and said that the chief of the Female Transient Bureau had been a jailbird, an associate of thieves?”(Reitman, 176). This doesn’t deter Bertha, as she finds other jobs helping migrant women and does the best she can before she is fired yet again.
 
There is an underlying message in this story about the ineffectiveness of the criminal justice system. The system aims to rehabilitate criminals and introduce them back into society as moral and good beings, but then once reintroduced into society, it is hard to accomplish one’s goals. It is the government that supports these goals of the justice system, yet it was the government agencies who fired Bertha for her criminal record, despite her excellent performance and working ethic. How can the government try to prep these criminals for rehabilitation and then not allow them the opportunity to do good? The most ridiculous thing here though is the reason that Bertha went to jail in the first place: because she was pregnant and would not get married.
 
However, despite an unfair and ineffective bureaucracy, Bertha has an inextinguishable desire to help women. She does not give up in this plight despite the multitude of hardships that get in her way. Should she be denied this opportunity just because she served a few months in jail? In America you can’t tell a person who has served time in jail from a person who hasn’t, and this is fine because we trust that if someone is released, then they have changed and are no longer a menace to society (assuming that they were in the first place). All I know is that someone like Bertha who is working tirelessly for humanity should not be denied her right to do so, even though someone like Bertha would not give up working for humanity anyway. 

Dorothea Lange’s visual book An American Exodus is different from any other book about the lives of people during the Great Depression because it actually puts faces to the names. I believe that visual art can evoke feelings of sympathy, empathy, and compassion more so than a book can. That is why Lange’s visual novel was so evocative and influential; it made things a lot more personal. Instead of reading fictional tales of people, such as in The Grapes of Wrath, or just reading true stories, these photographs made people empathize more with certain situations and made things more relatable to everyone.
 
In prefacing her series of photographs, Lange writes, “many whom we met in the field vaguely regarded conversation with us as an opportunity to tell what they are up against to their government and to their countrymen at large. So far as possible we have let them speak to you face to face. Here we pass on what we have seen and learned from many miles of countryside of the shocks which are unsettling them”(Lange and Taylor, 15). Lange is an artistic messenger, disseminating what she has learned from troubled people to the country at large. She discusses the loss of employment people endure due to improved technology noting that, “the tractor’s as strong against us as the drought”(Lange, 13). She discusses how the changes to sharecropping and tenant farming have severely limited the possibilities of the American worker even more so (an overview of the history of sharecropping and tenant farming in this article). She also discusses the migration of agricultural workers having great difficulty finding work. She notes that many went Westward but a great amount fled to urban centers looking for industrialized jobs, but that they most likely returned to urban areas. She discusses the inequality gap emerging between blacks and whites as blacks moved to cities and experienced harsher living circumstances while whites moved from cities to rural areas.
 
She quotes Alexis de Tocqueville who notes, “If men are to remain civilized, or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased”(13). Not only is this referring to the white/black inequality, but mainly to the inequality between business owners and the working population. This gap brings greater social and economic disparities throughout the general population. Tocqueville thinks that if these disparities are evident in a society, then men are not civilized and they will continue to remain uncivilized if it persists. Civilization will only become truly civilized when men’s decisions are made to benefit a society and a culture and not an individual.
 
The image of Lange’s that resonates most with me is the picture of an old white woman standing on the porch of her large plantation house that looks abandoned. She tells Lange that “the collapse of the plantation system, rendered inevitable by its exploitation of land and labor, leaves in its wake depleted soil, shoddy livestock, inadequate farm equipment, crude agricultural practices, crippled institutions, a defeated and impoverished people”. Farming was the backbone of American industry. Yes because people bought these crops every day to feed their families, but also because of the huge amount of people that the industry employed. Without being able to employ these workers, people cannot afford to buy produce, and the industry and the employees go to ruins. At this time, people were looking for the quickest way to advance themselves. Yet they overlooked the severe implications that their decisions would have on the future of their country and countrymen.
 
 

“In this place, civilization has become a disease. The towns are disease towns” (Anderson, 17).
 
Anderson’s two chapters from Puzzled America, “At the Mine Mouth” and “The Price of Aristocracy” explain the two different classes of people that made up society during the Great Depression. Within the two chapters, Anderson illustrates how the aristocratic class lazily and selfishly dominated the overwhelmingly numerous poor class and how the rich were responsible for the misfortunes that they endured. In “At the Mine Mouth”, Anderson discusses the overwhelming poor class and how all aspects of their lives are determined by the rich. Anderson discusses the opportunities that could be available to everyone in America when he says that, “It is a country of vast wealth. Millions have been drawn out of American earth. There are great lakes of oil under the ground. Gas spurts up, and down in the ground are untold millions of tons of bedded coal-untouched as yet.”(Anderson, 8). He notes the possibilities available to the common man, but that they don’t have the resources to take advantage of them. If only the rich could help them get along and work for reasonable pay, but the rich are only concerned with their own wealth. Anderson quotes a man who says, “Sure, I am in debt. I am at work now, but they pay me nothing but scrip. We haven’t had anything in our house but a little fat pork and some beans. For fat pork they charge me nineteen cents in the company store, but if I had money I could buy it at nine cents a pound in one of the free stores”(Anderson, 9).  Workers were put more and more in debt for working, since their companies severely overcharged them for goods and let them pay with credit instead of stores who only accepted cash. This brought even greater profits for the owners, and even worse poverty for the workers.
 
In “The Price of Aristocracy”, Anderson talks about the owners and how they live lives of leisure while raking in huge earnings. He notes how the aristocrats became extremely detached from their own industries and didn’t have to know anything about it to make money. He says, “They were-must have been-oddly separated from the land itself. If you set up as an aristocracy, that’s the price you pay. You are bound to be separated from the land itself; if you do not work the land yourself, with your own hands”(Anderson, 27). Owners had no knowledge of labor, they just had the urge to exploit and make money.
 
This shows the hard truth of the time. It shows that working hard has no bearing on your success. The only thing that has a bearing on your success is luck, specifically, what family you are born into. If your father was wealthy, then you will be too. If your father was poor, then god help you during the Great Depression. Therefore, the American Dream, at least during this time, was a complete myth. It was most likely invented by these high-class owners and politicians, to keep Americans looking for work. They made people think that if they endured poor wages and worked hard, that they would rise to the top-not true. I don’t think that this was as true starting after the onset of War World 2, but we all can see examples of this in today’s world. And this thought has me scared for the vast majority of youths in America today.

 
“If a body’s ever took charity, it makes a burn that don’t come out. This ain’t charity, but if you ever took it, you don’t forget it” (Steinbeck, 316)
 
The above quote is said by Annie Littlefield, who is one of the women that Ma Joad talks to on her first day at the new camp. Annie is trying to explain to Ma that under their living circumstances, it is very important not to accept charity from another person. She says that when people give charity, they then gain leverage over that person. The receiver is forever in debt to the giver and under desperation, the receiver will do anything necessary to receive contributions in whatever form. She justifies these thoughts by recalling a past horrific event: “We was hungry-they made us crawl for our dinner. They took our dignity. They-I have ‘em!...Miss Joad, we don’t allow nobody to build theirself up that-a-way. We don’t allow nobody to give nothing to another person”(316). Annie says that instead, people should contribute things toward the camp, and then the camp will distribute the offerings to the people.

At first, this seemed like very odd advice for people who live in these Hoovervilles. You would think that charity would be most important during such a desperate time as this. People should be able to rely on each other and share necessities during these times. But when economic conditions are so bad as they were in the Great Depression, these assumptions go out the window. People are looking to take the actions that bring them the most personal benefit. Having goods such as food gives people an advantage over everyone else who’s going hungry. They can get away with exploiting people by having them do unruly tasks for them, leading to great humiliation.

And in their distribution of resources and aid, the self-governing organization in charge of the camp has succeeded. Through the rest of the book, Steinbeck proves to us how an organization based on human trust for common benefit is a much better enforcer then say, the police. Before the police came into the camp, the inhabitants are much better off and are a lot more safe. However, the most trouble comes when the police roll in (ie-the murder of Jim Casy). People in general do not like authority forces. Therefore, when everyone is on an equal playing field and when everything if for communal benefit, we are much better off.

In researching this, I came across an article advocating for the abolishment of the police force. The writer describes that the police “are the standing army the Founding Fathers warned against. In the United States, they are the most dangerous gang operating and they do so under the color of law”(Anthony Gregory, Lewrockwell.com). He argues that actual crimes are almost never prevented by the police, that the police actively encourage violent crime, and that the police routinely violate people’s rights. It is interesting to read his arguments but in my opinion the writer is wasting his time. There is no way that the abolishment of the police force is a realistic idea. Steinbeck would say that in times of crisis, you should rely on your neighbors instead of your governing body but that police is still vital in keeping general peace among the public. 

“Our people are good people, our people and kind people. Pray God some day kind people won’t all be poor. Pray god some day a kid can eat. And the associations of owners knew that one day the praying would stop. And there’s the end.” (239)
 
I want to focus on Chapter 19 during this post, which is one of the most insightful in the book regarding truths about the human condition. The chapter dives into the idea, at length, that humans are fundamentally greedy. Humans, specifically Americans and more specifically Californians, do what is best for themselves to benefit their own situations. Therefore, when humans are owners of businesses, they can never be trusted.
 
Steinbeck stops the plotline of the novel in this chapter and tries to focus in on this idea. He discusses how Californians stole the land from Mexicans and took advantage of everything they had, while kicking them off their properties and stealing their resources. As seen in this article, Americans tried to move Mexicans from California again during the Great Depression. They became targets of discrimination and were forced off the land yet again by taking jobs that many thought should be saved for Americans. Mexicans were undoubtedly greatly affected by the depression but they were treated not only as if they didn’t have the right to a job, but also as they weren’t worthy enough of a job in America.
 
He also talks about how landowners want workers, but that they exploit them and don’t give them standard human benefits. He also talks about how these owners provided a shortage of necessities to their workers that made it extremely hard to survive. These shortages include wages, food, shelter, and generally employment. However Steinbeck also describes, briefly but vividly, that owners need to act this way to survive in their environment.
On page 232, he says that, “…those farmers who were not good shopkeepers lost their land to good shopkeepers. No matter how clever, how loving a man might be with earth and growing things, he could not survive if he were not also a good shopkeeper. And as time went on, the business men had the farms, and the farms grew larger, but there were fewer of them”. In this Steinbeck justifies the actions of owners, although not condoning it. He speaks of the injustices they commit, yet then also rationalizes their actions by saying that if they don’t act the way they do, then they will fail as well. He says that you cannot be a good human as well as a good shopkeeper and that you either have to exploit or you will be exploited. Is this really the truth in a capitalist society? Do owners need a bad conscience in order to succeed. Perhaps back then because the opportunities were so slim and one needed to be greedy. However, I hope this isn’t the truth today and I don’t believe it to be so in most industries, but perhaps I am just being naïve. 

“But this tractor does two things- it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The people are driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think about this.” (Steinbeck, 151).
 
From the first sixteen chapters of The Grapes of Wrath, we can tell that the one thing not missing from the society presented is will. Through the tough times, man’s will to work, be productive, and provide for their family and country has not been diminished. At the beginning of chapter 14, Steinbeck talks of this hunger in men that cannot be satiated. He describes that men have “hunger for joy and some security, multiplied a million times; muscles and mind aching to grow, to work, to create, multiplied a million times. The last clear definite function of man-muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need- this is man”(Steinbeck, 150). What has been diminished, however, is their opportunity to accomplish these goals in the unfortunate society that they inhabit.
 
At the end of chapter 16, Pa Joad meets a man who tells him the truth of what his family will find in California- no work. He says that the state is advertising for many more jobs then they have, leading for people to rush to California to obtain them but to no avail. Although saddened by this news, the Joads remain optimistic and continue their travels in the hopes that they will have better luck. But why such a sudden change in employment? How can there not be jobs to be had and money to be made by driven individuals? What can this be attributed to?
 
Apart from the stock market crash, these decreases in employment rates were due to the ongoing industrial revolution that was taking place. Men started to be replaced by machines on the assembly line and in the fields. Eventually, these machines would actually create jobs but we don’t see this happening in the novel. As seen in the quote at the top of the post, people had a very conflicted relationship with these technologies. The tractor, for example, “turned” the land and increased productivity on the fields and plantations, but it also replaced working men who would make money from these jobs to support a family. Inventors were creating an abundance of these machines which put the common American worker more and more in the dumps. Therefore should we think positively or negatively about the creation of these machines? Perhaps they were good for society in general, but it was just bad timing when they were invented. Regardless, the inventions were detrimental to thousands upon thousands of families at the time when they were most vulnerable. 

“I want belief, some ground to stand on. I do not want government to go on just being a meaningless thing, I do not want life to be so stupid-so silly”.
 
It is interesting to think that the era of traveling cross-country across America started at a time when the country was at it’s worst. Everyone was suffering, in one way or another. The poor were homeless and could not provide for themselves, savaged only by the streets and handouts. The rich, not so similarly, suffered from feelings of guilt and remorse. Therefore you would think that people would stick to themselves and try to better their own situations during a time like this. But instead, people gained the desire to travel the American landscape to view and sympathize with the situations of everyone else. Everyone else who had little to nothing in common with the travelers themselves except one thing: they were all suffering from a common cause. Anderson describes that when people go through poor personal economic times, they are more alive and aware to others. Caldwell defines a traveler as a “stranger who gains a sympathetic understanding with the people he encounters”. He notes that common sufferers are inclined to help each other out and discover the vastness of the suffering. Thus, people took to the roads.

On the road, travelers would act as sociologists. They would travel to learn. They would see and discover different people as well as their activities, soon realizing that every single area in the country has it’s own background and customs. On top of that, they saw the vast and diverse American landscape. What the introduction by Sherwood Anderson made perfectly clear is that the one thing that people yearned for across the country was belief. Belief, primarily, that things would change. I think that this finding is what drew all the authors of traveling books of the thirties to write their novels. They tried to capture this essence of belief that was inside of everyone, and they wanted to prove that that belief would never be extinguished. They wanted to bring these stories to people for everyone to learn about others’ travels. Foreigners would learn about the tough times being endured by Americans. Americans would read stories of people with similar troubles and it would refresh them somewhat to see parallels within the stories and events that they themselves experience. Authors wrote sad tales, but these tales of troubles and perseverance would often uplift the reader and common American. And this was the true beauty in their literature; that they could bring stories of troubles that are relevant and similar even to today’s world, inspiring people of any nation and any era to believe in the future.