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I chose to investigate the WPA guide entitled “Here’s New England: A Guide to Vacationland,” since I grew up in Connecticut and currently live in New York (not part of New England technically, but close in proximity and interesting in contrast). The guide seemed particularly directed towards those residing in cities (specifically New York City) who would desire to experience something more pastoral, overtly historical, and peaceful – a satisfying compliment to the bustling modernity of commercial, industrialized areas.

I found the format of the guide rather telling of the type of vacationing most people were doing or wanted to do at this time. It is presented in the order of towns one would follow if traveling by automobile with the intention of seeing many places in a relatively short period of time. This coincides with the travel habit described in our previous readings. Similar to the tone of a tour guide (“And on your left you have…, and coming up on the right we can see…”), the descriptions are interspersed with reminders that the typical reader is driving along a particular route that will allow him to see all of these places in a particular sequence. The leisurely ease of travel is also expressed through the writing style, which makes certain never to mention anyone “driving” or putting forth any effort; rather phrases such as “this road will take you” or “you will then be brought” are used, as if the road itself is guiding the reader on an uncharted, “natural” adventure.

I grew up in a small suburb of the city of Danbury, Connecticut. It was interesting to read about Danbury’s two points of appeal at the time this WPA guide was written: its hat factories, and its hosting of the annual Danbury Fair. At this time these two features drew many tourists (especially the Fair which was quite famous). The guide also mentions its Main Street, which apparently was “Western Connecticut’s busiest marketplace” (I’m not sure if this still holds true), as well as its numerous public swimming and picnicking locations. These attractions are still going strong today, though some of their appeal has manifested itself in a different way.

The hat factories, for example, are no longer really in use, but remain a point of pride for the city and are likely still included in modern guidebooks. The Danbury High School sports teams use “The Hatters” as their name, and the city is often referred to as “Hat City,” for example. The Danbury Fair no longer goes on, but the mall built on the fairgrounds is called “The Danbury Fair Mall.” Old pieces of carousels and other fair equipment are used to decorate the mall as well as other places in the city. Main Street is still incredibly busy and families and tourists frequent the recreational areas.

 I’m sure this pattern is not at all uncommon. Attractions are likely to remain the same (or similar) over the decades, but the reasons for their appeal are inevitably subject to change. The concept of the “attraction-that-once-was” is kind of strange, but I’m glad it exists and thrives. People seem just as willing to travel to an area that once was home to a no longer existing attraction, as they are to find an existing one.

Michael Berkowitz introduces his piece with a paradox: why did the conditions of the Great Depression not only bring a decline in income and jobs, but an increase in tourism? (“Increase” is even a rather weak term for the incredible leisure travel boom of this period) How could this kind of spike occur during such difficult times?

Just before the Depression hit, paid vacations were on the rise. Employers wanted their workers to take some time off, rejuvenate, and come back ready to work twice as hard. These vacations were originally only granted to corporate employees whose brains were thought to need more rest than the bodies of wage laborers. I’m not sure if this attitude ever truly changed, but employers realized the granting of vacations to their wage laborers would “purchase” their loyalty and “subvert organization.” This makes particular sense when considering the attitude towards socialism and communism during this time.

These vacations, however, were not for sitting around the house. Employers figured if their employees were simply hanging around town, they might as well be at work. So people were encouraged to get out of town and see a bit of America. This worked in perfect conjunction with the federal government’s “community promotion” efforts, which in turn worked well with advertising companies, local businesses, etc. Thus we can see the beginnings and evolution of what Berkowitz nicely phrases as “the cultivation of the travel habit.”

My attention was caught by the concept of “not knowing how to take a vacation.” It makes perfect sense; why would middle-class workers have any reasonable level of familiarity with something previously reserved only for the higher-ups? This seems like a slightly humorous idea, but now that I think of the informational rest stops found near state lines or the brochures available in bookstores, I wonder if people today have made much progress. Travel guides line the shelves at Barnes and Noble, explaining exactly where to go and how to get there and what will be there waiting for you. It is kind of absurd that something so meticulously planned could at all coexist with the adventure or spontaneity often associated with travel.

As Jakle and Agee make clear, however, such travel planning may not have even been so necessary, as the automobile and motion itself became addictions, and the road in itself a destination. “Tin can tourists” harbored obsessions, not with experiencing new places, but with “covering long distances quickly.” Agee compares car travel to a “hypnosis” or “opium.” The “cocoon-like” automobile created a private traveling bubble; “travel became a series of social events contained within the car.” In other words, it became familiar and ultimately boring. So people traveled at night or on back roads to renew some excitement, and went camping.

I loved Jakle’s description of the appeal of camping: “limited hardships gave meaning to travel.” Even if traveling was in certain respects becoming too familiar, it still had that romantic charm of the simple life – “soft primitivism.” Some people obviously liked this idea but didn’t like the dirt and the bugs and the use of trailers increased. The cabin camps discussed by Jakle and Agee served as a nice middle ground between a tent and a motel. I think the central appeal of all of these types of lodging, even of the ever-increasing roadside restaurants, lay in the idea of “escaping reality.” This is further supported by the nature of tourist spots, which were made to create a “privileged” atmosphere normally alien to the tourists themselves (who were primarily working/middle class). Traveling and tourism allowed people to access what Jakle terms “worlds remote in terms of time and space.”

It is surprisingly easy to speak a hell of a lot, and to actually say very little. This fact is used and abused by individual politicians, entire governments, and everyday folks alike. Nathanael West does a pretty great job of demonstrating this in his satirical piece A Cool Million. One of my favorite instances of this can be seen early in the novel, when the narrator is talking about Nathan “Shagpole” Whipple and his famous line, “Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs,” (71). This phrase comes with the elusive atmosphere of an “adage,” but the meaning is ridiculous. It supposedly means “Don’t let the pleasures of the body cause you to spend too much money” – but there is no association at all, is it simply some epic, deeper meaning attached to random words arranged to sound like something significant.

The way Whipple gives his speech (for which only a lone boy scout unwillingly shows) is also obviously satirized in its patriotic tone to the level of being, quite frankly, cheesy. He uses phrases like “gorgeous folds” and “tattered fragments” and “clouds of war,” which are just far too perfect examples of the sentimental tones often adopted in political speeches to make everyone feel satisfactorily sympathized with.

I am curious to learn a bit more about the general public’s reaction to this book, as it is clearly satirizing many of the picture-book American images that were essentially shattered during this period. I thought it was striking (and kind of fantastic) that the “hero” and “heroine” of the novel both follow the stereotypical journey away from their small towns into the big city, but in the most twisted ways possible. Lem finally ends up with a pegleg and a missing eye and gets shot in the chest, while Betty is kidnapped and sold into “white slavery” (I like the specification that it is white slavery, just in case we got confused…). It’s such a great slap in the face for the age-old “American Dream” of the poor kid who stumbles through some rough times, yet comes out on top with “a cool million.”

I feel a lot of people realized during this time that the idea of the “American Dream” sounded more like a nice story to bridge the incredible gap between socioeconomic classes than a reality; West expresses this rather artfully. I love the last scene in the book, where Lem is being celebrated in honor of him being a true “American boy.” It is the ultimate culmination of the ironic nature not only of the novel but of the reality of the times.

What comprises the romanticism so often tied to traveling? We have read various accounts of travel inspired by a desire to abandon stale or unpleasant circumstances, or to set out on an adventure, or to record the faces and stories of those who are doing so. Something that has been stirring in the back of my mind as I read through these tales and recordings is the question of how much the romanticism of travel played a part in driving these writers and photographers out onto the open road.
 
This is not at all to discredit the incorporation of field study into one’s work; it is of course both admirable and significant that these documenters went out and sometimes quite literally lived the lives of the people they documented in order to obtain a certain perspective. Compared to those who sat inside, satisfied with the information provided in newspapers or through hearsay, this is pretty remarkable. My question, though, is whether they would have done the same if the primary act involved was not traveling, but something less – to use the term once more – romantic.
 
Would any of them have willingly lived in a slum, or gone without food, or subjected themselves to any of the other grizzly conditions of those they were supposedly documenting, for the sake of their photographs or writing? More specifically, would they have gone to such extents if travel were in no way a part of it?
 
Incorporating the element of travel into the “roughing-it” lifestyle is significant. Perhaps through physically detaching ourselves from a specific place, we feel detachment from regular societal norms and needs is slightly more tolerable. It all comes together to build this temporary fantasy of getting back to our “roots” or basic necessities, though I think this fantasy would soon fall apart if we remained in one place. If we are on a road trip, for example, we have no problem skipping a few showers or meals, or getting sunburn, or sleeping in a car; even if it actually isn’t that great in reality, it’s part of the “experience,” and we will laugh about it later or maybe even right then and there. We’ll smoke a bunch of cigarettes and eat a cheeseburger from a roadside diner for breakfast that we paid for with money from under the passenger seat.
 
But if we aren’t traveling? I don’t think many of us would settle for missing a shower or skipping a good night’s rest. There wouldn’t be a box labeled “the romanticism of travel” for us to throw all of those crappy situations into. Maybe it is because our desire for necessities is closely tied to our desire for a home; we don’t need luxuries when we travel because we had them before we left and we’ll have them when we get home again. Inevitably the travel-centered conversation will bring us to the question of “What is home?”, but I think that’s for another entry.

The aspect I found most eye-catching in Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing was his use of language; not only in the context of the pieces we have been reading thus far, but also in its possible interpretations concerning its authenticity. His usage of the appropriate “lingo” of his subjects, namely the train-riding hoboes and the various human manifestations of the conditions of the Great Depression he encounters throughout the short episodic chapters, was not particularly surprising. As we have seen in The Grapes of Wrath and other selections from this time period, the writer/documenter, assumingly for the sake of poignancy and realism, often incorporates terms and speech styles representative of the way people “really” expressed themselves. However, we have – as an offshoot of this common feature – engaged in a discourse concerning the accuracy and decency of such a representation. There is always a rather stark contrast between the writing style of the documenter and the supposed speaking style of those being documented. Thus an inherent imbalance is created that can either be viewed as a literary craft, juxtaposing romantic jargon with clean prose, or as a somewhat insulting dichotomy between the down-and-out farming or hitchhiking folks and the educated writer trying to make a profit off his delicate retelling of stories he will never truly understand.

The interesting thing with Kromer is, however, that he is playing the part both of the documenter and the documented, as he himself is hopping the trains and begging on the streets for a cigarette. He is writing about people in the soup lines, but only as the person standing right behind them, waiting his turn. He writes of men sleeping in the lice-infested mission bunks, but only as the person sleeping in the bunk next to them. The jargon he conveys through his dialogue (“What’s he wanna bump hisself off fer? There ain’t nothin’ to bump yerself off fer…” 41) is carried fluidly throughout his narrative (We are only a couple of hungry stiffs, and we are on the make for a beef stew… 79). Through this narrative style he creates a true sense of authenticity.

But how authentic is it? The piece is full of moments where he hesitates in acting like a “true” bum, where his sense of dignity, perhaps even superiority over the other “stiffs” rings clear. We know that he came into this lifestyle after three years of college (where he did a research project that concluded being a bum essentially implied laziness and a desire for easy money); he seems therefore to be floating in this weird limbo that fuses the lifestyle of a homeless man with the attitude and pride of a middle-class citizen. And regardless of the authentic atmosphere created by his writing, we must for a moment wake from its spell and question whether or not the authenticity in itself is merely a crafted ploy to draw an audience.

Something that has intrigued me long before taking this course (and continues to do so) is the question of what motivates us to travel. Let me note that when I say “travel,” I am including both the initial motivation to up and leave, as well as the factors involved in perpetuating continued travel once it has begun, i.e. life on the road. I have grown more curious about this recently, mostly because many of our readings exist in the context of necessity; economic conditions of these times drove many people out of their jobs, out of their homes, and away from the places they knew in search of something better. However…and admittedly I am going to be playing devil’s advocate a little in this post… I am wondering if, without this “necessity” to leave, many would not have reached the same level of self-discovery and introspection we so often find in these recordings.

I am also wondering if some of these travelers (and I mean the hoboes, the train-hoppers, all that…not the families held up in shacks or living on the street in one particular town) cannot help but “fall in love” – at least a little – with the romantic atmosphere of travel which we have been mainly associating with the stagnant readers/viewers. In Reitman’s record of Box Car Bertha, as well as in the Guthrie and Anderson pieces, there are numerous comments made concerning the “authenticity” of hoboes. In the Guthrie piece, Sister Rosa remarks, “I know that you are sincere in your coming here, and I can plainly see that you are not one of the kind that travels through the country eating free meals when you can get work,” (209). Bertha recalls her mother snapping at a hobo when he called her “lady,” saying, “You’re a professional bum. Only the professionals on the road call me lady,” (12). In the Anderson piece Acel speaks of the hoboes: “They don’t know what it’s all about, these bums. I talk to them, and all they can think about is where they’re going to get their next lump or sack of tobacco. A revolution never will start among a bunch of bums,” (192).

So how many of these hoboes, disguised among those who have truly escaped economic hardship and are striving toward new life, were surfing the wave? How many of them started out with some sort of noble foundation and realized, after going from place to place where people all seemed to be suffering just the same, that hitching free rides and living free of responsibility might be the more appealing option? And what kind of image did this give the other travelers and hoboes? It seems that these people, who speak of being down and out, who shake their fists at the unaffected and the wealthy and the government, have among themselves quite a few who are pretty false. Though I’m sure there were those who were just plain scared or unwilling, almost every piece we’ve read has mentioned a hesitant driver picking up hitchhikers, or a store owner careful not to be stolen from – this can’t all be without reason. I just believe it’s important to explore these potentials for two reasons: first, we have been reading almost entirely from the perspective of the travelers, the migrants, the hoboes, etc., and never from that of the truckers or the gas station attendants. Second, because of the argument brought up in the last class stemming from the review of Agee’s writing – how much, out of guilt or for whatever other reasons, were these people able to escape moral or ethical scrutiny because of their “pitiful” lifestyles? And how many of those people realized this, and used it to their advantage?

Two equally fascinating yet very different collections of Depression-era photo-texts: You Have Seen Their Faces, by Caldwell and Bourke-White, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by Agee and Evans. Supporters of each of these works criticized the respective “opposing” piece; meanwhile Alan Trachtenburg suggests (in the foreword of You Have Seen…) we should “see these two imaginative works less as antagonists than as coinhabitants of the same historical and cultural space,” (viii).

Both pieces certainly have an individual beauty to them, distinctive styles that are sometimes very human, sometimes rather haunting. In You Have Seen Their Faces, the photography of Bourke-White is something far beyond an art form to accompany the written text; in fact, most of the time it seems to lead the piece itself through its intense visual representations of themes. Before reading about the children and teenagers who are unable to attend school because of the demands of the farm, we are presented with a photograph of a boy in overalls tending to the land, wearing a mixed expression of fatigue and concentration. Following the collection of pictures whose subjects are both white and black – subjects who, regardless of color, show their discipline and their struggles through the same squinted eyes or forehead lines – we read Caldwell’s discourse on “race relations in the South,” (vi).

Of course, these photographs could, as Trachtenburg points out, be viewed as “excessively theatrical and manipulative” when compared to the almost impossibly natural and nonintrusive work of Walker Evans (vii). Lionel Trilling praises Evans’ photographs in his review of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, entitled Greatness With One Fault in It:
“The superiority of Evans to all this (the impreciseness of photography) could no doubt be described in technical and aesthetic terms, but what always immediately strikes me about his work is its perfect taste, taking that word in its largest possible sense to mean tact, delicacy, justness of feeling, complete awareness and perfect respect. It is a tremendously impressive moral quality,” (100).
Evans seems to have avoided putting his photographic subjects on the museum-like display so typical of the art form; it would be especially hard to avoid rendering the subject as object when dealing with an atmosphere already heavy with a gritty despair so intense it sometimes feels naturally “theatrical.”

The almost inevitably condescending relationship between the documented and the documenter, while having seemingly been dodged by Evans, catches hold of Agee – the “one fault” to which Trilling’s title alludes. In class we have been discussing this troublesome tightrope on which all of these Depression-era documenters must balance: how does one approach such a situation? The artist or writer, who is (obviously) better off than his subjects in that he is capturing them by camera or pen and not out there working on the fields with them (for the most part), stands in a very interesting position when doing this recording. Furthermore, with this awkward class tension looming in the background, the documenter must properly represent these people – he must be their faces, their voices, and their stories. How do you emulate the speaking style of a farmer through writing without making him sound uneducated? How do you photograph a thinning mother with her dusty children without presenting them as pitiable stereotypes?

It isn’t easy work, and can often lead to results something along the lines of Agee’s writing, as criticized by Trilling. It seems Agee, because of his guilt and through his attempts to respectfully depict his subjects, has taken it too far and has put them on this kind of moral pedestal – as hard working, disciplined people made of rock who, wiping their brows after another day of struggle, can at least find solace in that they “can do no wrong.” As Trilling explains, Agee writes, “of his people as if there were…no flicker of malice or meanness, no darkness or wildness of feeling, only a sure and simple virtue, the growth, we must suppose, of their hard, unlovely poverty,” (102). Through failing to “see these people as anything but good,” Agee unfortunately defeats his original purpose and really is in fact showing less respect in that his guilt and pity for them ring strong.

Yet as I said before, avoiding such a tendency certainly is difficult; I wonder, when it comes to written documentation, if such a thing is even possible?

Hickok, Adamic, and Pyle each are travelers, setting out on their journeys for various and with various goals, and recording them in their respective writings: One Third of a Nation, My America, and Home Country.

The travels of Hickok originate through her role as an investigator for Harry L. Hopkins, who is the administrator of FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Administration), and her task to develop confidential and sometimes completely anonymous reports on “one third of a nation” and their struggles. As we read through her accounts, however, it becomes clear that her originally observation-based investigation, for which she was directed to report “her own reaction, as an ordinary citizen,” develops into a chain of intense emotional encounters into which she is inescapably drawn. Her reports are filled with vivid imagery, yet rather than telling long, descriptive tales of one or a few people like many Great Depression writers, she provides us with an experience much closer to flipping through a photo album than reading a book. This is not to say it is any less effective; it is, perhaps, more effective in its ability to show the reader (whether we are aware of this effect or not) the great number of people and places affected by this period of time, yet simultaneously makes us recognize those masses and statistics each as individual people, each with their own eviction problems or smaller mouths to feed. Thus we are able to understand the gravity of the situation as a whole, while comprehending the personal plights of those suffering (reminiscent of the zoom-in, zoom-out effect creates by Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath).

Adamic is also a writer, but introduces himself and his travels in a very different way. As we realize is to emphasize the pathetic state of the hitchhiking girl brought to the story soon after, he begins in a state of pleasure, making note of what we might consider small luxuries, concerning his recent stay in Cleveland, his warm clothes, and heated car. Unlike the Hickok piece where we have no choice to sit and chew her direct ties with those affected by the Depression, Adamic seems to have no connection to it whatsoever – and then, bam! He (and we) are hit with a face-to-face encounter with a little poster girl of the times, tattered, beaten, broke, abandoned, the like. He feeds her, buys her cigarettes, drives her hundreds of miles and gives her some money for the road; among all of this she tells him her story, likely without any realization she would be part of a story the minute she entered his car.

In Chapter IV of Home Country, Pyle retells the tales shared by those stuck in the drought bowl; inserted among these stories are intensely descriptive paragraphs describing, for example, the damage done by the grasshoppers. In Chapter XXXI, he speaks of the extent and the depths to which he has traveled over the years, almost to the point of boasting, yet then brings us back down by revealing his motivations to travel.

Which is the point where these three pieces seemed most to overlap. Though the first steps for each writer are rather different, as well as the level of interaction with faces of the Depression, it seems all three experience the strange tinge of sadness that comes with interrelating with others through travel. Hickok seems to be stuck in a revolving door of struggle after sorrow, and it is hard to imagine some of her passion is not rooted in her frustration with her inability to somehow aid each person she encounters. The end of Adamic’s piece is certainly traced with some detached sorrow, or perhaps sorrow as a result of detachment. His experience with the hitchhiking girl is a poignant one, and regardless of how short their time together may be (relatively speaking), Adamic (and I) both feel it is cut a little short.

Yet thus is the inherent nature of bonds created while traveling; as Pyle explains (or rather almost admits) in the conclusion of Chapter XXXI:
“…some of these days we might come to hate the impermanency of travel. I’ve tried to figure out myself why we haven’t tired of it. And my conclusion is that our travel is a means of escape. We don’t have to stay and face anything out. If we don’t like a place, we can move on. If something happens that isn’t pleasant, we can leave and settle it later by letter, or just let it go forever. Stability cloaks you with a thousand little personal responsibilities, and we have been able to flee from them.” (468)

The impermanence of travel may allow one to “escape,” yet also can prevent one from allowing established connections to flourish and grow into the deep-rooted relationships granted by stability. If the traveler (when taken to the farthest reaches of the term) has no true “home” but the road – no “place to hang his hat,” as Pyle writes – even returning to the place once called home becomes nothing more than a mere visit. What was long ago the perfect embodiment of stability is now just another stop along the way…


(picture is one of mine, just something I took from behind the windshield when driving on the highway)

In their essay entitled Growth of the Family in the Grapes of Wrath, Carroll Britch and Cliff Lewis address the transformation and progression of the Joads as a family unit as they make the journey west. Two concepts in particular I found interesting; first, that which is introduced by the Brooks Adams quotation: “Resistance to innovation indicates, in the eye of nature, senility and senility is doomed to be discarded... That nation thrives best which is most flexible, and which has fewer prejudices to hamper adaption.” Adaption is a concept crucial to the discussion pertaining to travel, and I will come back to this in a moment…

Second intriguing point…the Joads’ evolution from “I to We,” not only within their immediate family, but among the entire “family” of migrants as well. Though the role of this attitude as being critical to the success of their survival is the central idea developed by Britch and Lewis, it sparked my curiosity as to whether the difficulty in successfully achieving such an evolution is so great that many avoid traveling with groups and prefer to go alone or with few comrades.

Returning to the first point, I find it imperative to notice the extent to which the Joads must willingly travel outside their normal societal and/or familial roles in order to adapt to the nature of their travels and the troubles they encounter along the way. The men, sometimes willfully and sometimes not, begin to perform tasks considered “women’s work,” while the most apparent example of role reversal is exhibited through Ma. Her strength, support, and insistence on keeping the family together as an efficient unit essentially render her the definition of “the matriarch.”

Taking up such a role, though sometimes tiring or seemingly futile, can lead to a strong sense of self- worth, which Britch and Lewis note as an equally significant component in successful travel and adaptation: “Finding self-worth through sharing and cooperating with kin and outsiders is what keeps the Joads…from falling apart as a family and failing as migrants.” Even the children, regardless of their likely egotistical nature (being as young as they are), also serve the family core by performing chores like gathering fruit. Though they sometimes express discontent at these kinds of chores, we can easily imagine the bestowing of responsibility giving them a sense of pride, perhaps a sense of being “grown up.”

Like the children who have, for the most part, abandoned their selfish individualistic notions, so must the other members of the migrant “family” if they are to achieve their dream of surviving the journey and successfully reaching their destination. This leads me back to the second point mentioned earlier – the transformation from “I to We.” Britch and Lewis, as well as Steinbeck, seem to find this progression essential to keep a family together through travel and its obstacles, yet certainly acknowledge it is difficult.

On that note, I wonder if the theory can be reversed… Do people so often “up and leave” alone or in small groups because of how demanding it is to sacrifice individual desires for the sake of the whole? Traveling alone eliminates the necessity to think about, much less do anything for, someone else. It allows one to choose the pace and path of the journey, and certainly allows for some serious introspection. Yet if we follow the notion that self-worth is acquired through self-sacrifice (shown very clearly through Ma, whose “capacity to care marks the measure of her self-respect,” according to Britch and Lewis), wouldn’t the lone traveler feel very little personal growth despite his or her journey?

In Chapters 17 through 20 of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, instances portraying the opposition and discrimination toward the masses of farmer-migrants continue to grow in frequency and intensity. Derogatorily referred to as “Okies” (directly referencing migrants originating from Oklahoma, but used to categorize any poor farmer-migrant from the southwestern United States), the migrants are shown facing the harsh reality of a state of people who quite frankly do not want them there at all.
More than the literal treatment of the Okies by the residents of California and the authorities, the significance and influence of labeling a certain group of people with a rather simple geographical name struck me as particularly interesting.
In reading a little more about the term “Okie” on the Oklahoma Historical Society’s website (http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/O/OK008.html), it is quite clear (though it can already be assumed through Steinbeck’s writing) the “Okies” were titled as so due to certain negative traits (poverty, lack of hygiene, etc) that only exacerbated their already negative image in the eyes of Californians (who, whether they had ever seen an “Okie” or not, did not want them coming into the state and possibly rising up).

These attitudes are certainly demonstrated in The Grapes of Wrath, where attaching a simply term to a massive group of people renders the “us versus them” argument seemingly more valid. Even the police officer who speaks with the Joads refers to “Oakies,” and I’m sure whether or not the Joads were from Oklahoma would have little bearing on this title.

The use of a name like this – note it is not simply a slang word but a reference to a place or region of origin – in order to reference to a group of people (albeit often a group of people extending beyond the actual reaches of that place) can be seen throughout history and today (though perhaps on a lesser scale in the sense of hostile reactions).

So what’s in a name? What images are conjured by the term “New Yorker” or “Southern Boy” or “Californian”? Just earlier today I heard someone on the street mention a “Middle-Eastern dude,” though this information was irrelevant to the story being told. Even offbeat references that don’t necessarily carry such heavy stereotypical connotations are often used to imply information about a person without stating it directly. Take a second to think about the first ideas or images that would enter your mind if your friend said some of the following lines in the context of various stories:
“I went to a club last night with my friend Randy, this Alaskan dude…”
“My new room mates seem pretty cool. There’s this one kid from Philly who…”
etc.

Taking it a little further…is this kind of terminology always negative? When is it negative, and when is it positive? When do areas exhibit a "hatred for the stranger," as Steinbeck calls it in The Harvest Gypsies, as opposed to love or fascination? As pertaining to travel, when thinking back to my own experiences abroad, it seems these kinds of labels can be rather unifying, or give one a sense of pride, once away from the original location. I was living in Japan for the past year or so, and it was interesting to meet people who, for example, might feel a little awkward being referred to as “the New Yorker” or “the Texan” in certain places in America, yet boasted these nicknames as their own once they were walking around Tokyo. We travel to discover new places, to escape our usual surroundings, or find new homes. Yet simultaneously we often carry a piece of our origins all the way to our destinations and beyond, and migrate towards those who have left behind a home located near ours.

Before beginning a discussion on Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, I would like to recall the writing of Anderson in Puzzled America, particularly his discourse concerning belief. I was rather intrigued by his idea that one of the primary components, perhaps even the very foundation of belief is not belief itself but the human “willingness” and “determination” to believe. I feel I am not alone in struggling with the term belief, as it of course is not something we can reach into the air and grab, put it inside a jar with a lid for study and close observation. It is something very human, yet something rather supernatural. It exists in drastically fluctuating quantities yet never seems to be entirely absent. It at times seems something we seek, at other times something we create.

Thus I continue mentally toying with this strange and familiar idea, and how it is coming to seem more closely braided with travel than I previously thought. Likely due to my own failure to delve deeper into either concept in the past, I had always thought of travel as something quite physical, belief something spiritual…

Perhaps they are, at times, one in the same?

Steinbeck bases the central journey (the central physical journey, that is; I am not suggesting this is the only significant “journey” of the work) on what I would certainly identify as belief. The Joad family is able to leave their farm, their livelihood, and their deep connection to the land, to forge toward the promises (which are shaky at best) awaiting them in California – a decision rooted in their belief. This metaphysical concept almost seems more tangible in its reliability than the material items surrounding it, such as the pamphlets promising work on the western coast, or the used cars being sold at inflated prices to the families heading there.

Existing in irony not only to Casy’s Jesus-like nature, but to the conventional ties between belief and piousness, Casy’s discussions of his newfound definitions of the human and the holy are also reminiscent of Anderson’s thoughts on belief. Casy explains in Chapter 4:

I says, 'What's this call, this sperit?' An' I says, 'It's love. I love people so much I'm fit to bust, sometimes.' . . . . I figgered, 'Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,' I figgered, 'maybe it's all men an' all women we love; maybe that's the Holy Sperit-the human sperit-the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of.' Now I sat there thinkin' it, an' all of a suddent-I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it.

Casy, once a religious man, has redirected his belief from the supernatural – of which he currently sees little evidence in these times of great hardship – to the human beings around him, who are constantly demonstrating that “hunger for belief” observed by Anderson, which in itself is something very holy. We as the readers can feel our own belief going in a similar direction as we continue to read; we are constantly presented with images of people relying on the human capability for good (such as the family with the trailer but no car who wait for rides, or the meeting and subsequent camaraderie between the Joads and the Wilsons), even in the face of the human capability for greed and unkindness.

I have been thinking about this juxtaposition of belief to travel, as it has made its significance evident through various sources. Though the literal act of travel – one foot before the other, mile after mile in a car or on a bus – is physical, how strongly is it tied to something nonphysical like human belief? Certain similarities can definitely be drawn. Say we were to view travel as a journey toward some kind of geographical goal, often tied to personal goals (or perhaps simple curiosity), its value built deeply in the experience of reaching the destination, with little proof of any kind of fruition until that destination is reached. Could we say that belief is rather similar, its value mostly comprised of our drive to reach it, and the people, places, and ideas we encounter along the way?

In the introductory chapter of Puzzled America, Anderson expresses the struggle he is experiencing in the role of the writer. Throughout the selection he juxtaposes the concrete and the metaphysical, the harsh habit of finding bliss through ignorance, versus the inescapable need to feel what our fellow man feels with all of our being. His own incapability to “take the impersonal tone” drives him to set forth on his own travels, to witness with his own two eyes the toils of the Americans set back by economic crisis. Yet the same journey enabling him to “see and talk with such people” simultaneously presents him with greater and more puzzling contradictions.
I am particularly drawn to his discussion of the cyclical paradox existing between the class of writers and artists who, by common assumption, would perhaps be sickened by those who maintain their “extravagance” even during such dire times. Meanwhile one may assume the “well-to-do man” cannot level with the lower classes; Anderson writes, “I have always, when broke, been more alive to others, more aware of others.” Yet there exists a strange and generally unspoken symbiotic relationship between these two groups. Anderson’s rhetoric – “Where would we writers, painters, sculptors, etc., be if there were no people ready to throw money away?” – remains pertinent in the midst of our own current economic misfortune. It is particularly visible in New York City, where the omnipresent, stereotypical image of the struggling artist, writer, or other form of independent creator is just as alive and breathing as the actual members of the “class.”
The assumptions are strikingly similar as well. The self-sufficient New York City artist, writer, musician, etc., by and large is “expected” to view the higher-ups – those without struggle to pay their rent or keep a job – with some sort of contempt. However in reality those “yuppies” are quite often the only ones with the financial ability and personal need (which I will discuss in a moment) to properly support and perpetuate the creative career. Of course there are exceptions (the artists in Union Square, for example, many of whom sell their work for relatively cheap prices), but for the most part I would argue there are few members of this “creative class” (if you will) who would not prefer to sell their paintings or novels at prices mainly conceivable only by the very people who they shake their fists at – whom Anderson so aptly describes as those “this long depression has not very much touched.”
Referring back to Anderson’s realization he is more “alive” and “aware” when on the lower end of the financial scale, there exists a reciprocal attitude among this “untouched” class. Perhaps in order to emulate the tangibility one experiences as an actual member of the suffering class, the well-to-do want their extravagant habits to consist of the art of the artists and the writings of the writers. In other words, they want to envelop themselves in the emotions, creativity and longings of these artistic classes in order to experience a liveliness and awareness, which is otherwise unfamiliar and unattainable. To put it in layman’s terms, the “touched” need the “untouched” to buy their work at higher costs and without regard for literal need or practical use, while the “untouched” need the work of the “touched” in order to experience a deeper connection with the rest of humanity.