braininavat's blog

In reading through some of these guides, I was immediately struck by the incredible difference between these and modern tourism publications. Modern publications are much more about flash and advertising, whereas these offer a rather dry and comprehensive overview of the history and culture of various cities. As Christine Bold mentions inThe WPA Guides: Mapping America, these guides are partially responsible for building the stereotypes that now surround many American cities. After all, one of their functions was to document and demarcate the cultural lines of the various towns.
 
I imagine that it is partially due to the efforts of the WPA that modern tourist publications are less comprehensive. Of course the argument can easily be made that in the Twitter era, people looking to visit Los Angeles would go cross-eyed if travel guides included sections on the Santa Fe and Pacific Railroad price wars of the late 1800s. Since the publication of these guides, travel bureaus have learned that such topics do not hold the attention of the average traveler. Though since the Twitter generation is also the Google and Wikipedia generation, history or railroad buffs could just as easily access this more comprehensive data if they so pleased.
 
Additionally, one might just as easily make the argument that owing to the popularity of these guide books over the years, the general American consciousness has absorbed a certain amount of knowledge about the various US cities, albeit in a more generalized form. Though comprehensive, the heart of the WPA guides helped with cultural branding for the various towns, and with this cultural branding ingrained in the American consciousness, modern advertisements can play to their audience with a sort of shorthand.
 
One of the more successful modern guidebook series is the Not for Tourist guides. They offer much more information than the 30-second “Come to California!” TV spots or the hotel-lobby brochures, but are also much less comprehensive than the gargantuan tomes of the WPA guides. They are clear and concise. In the reading selections for last week it was noted that one of the reasons for the success of motels was their sheer convenience and lack of pretense. Though the WPA guides set the bar high in terms of pure volume of information, they also branded the cities, and with this cultural branding it allowed tourism bureaus to focus on what they needed to sell about their city. Travelers do not necessarily want to know all there is to know about their destination—a couple pertinent facts and a few points of interest are all the casual traveler needs. While it may have been necessary in the 1930s to lay a foundation of knowledge for the new practice of tourism, the modern traveler needs a sense of spontaneity to their adventure, and these comprehensive tomes simply would not do.

For this week, Agee writes about the boom of the tourism industry, and what seems to be the birth of the road trip. Berkowitz examines the associated phenomenon of vacationing as a pastime seeping into the public consciousness.
 
Agee is very hit and miss in his analysis of the phenomenon—claiming the advent of the motel is the death knell of the hotel being the most egregious hyperbole in his piece— but overall provides valuable insight into the rise of tourism. One of the more fascinating aspects of his piece is the list he provides of yesteryear’s titans of tourism—some of which have stuck around and some that haven’t. The development of motels was an obvious ramification, but noting their trajectory was enlightening. The burgeoning of the fast food industry with the spread of hot-dogs and the like was less obvious but makes sense in retrospect, especially with the prevalence of 7-11s. As for the success story of the roadside stands, I believe theirs is no longer a feasible business model. Having fairly recently taken a tour of the outlying United States, I believe I can make this assessment with a degree of anecdotal confidence. To be sure, from time to time one might find roadside stands advertising small quantities of produce, but these have been largely displaced by supermarkets. The stalls that dot the modern interstate are largely devoted to handmade trinkets and sometimes sundries, and occasionally fireworks, and I sincerely doubt that any of these stands will grow into resorts. The argument may be made, of course, that 7-11s and their ilk are the spiritual successors to these roadside stands, and while it may be a valid point, the concept of a roadside stand exists as a very particular expression of Americana culture.
 
Berkowitz spills his ink illustrating how the middle class’ newfound thirst for tourism formed a sort of feedback loop. While many people traveled seeking work, selling travel to the upper and emerging middle classes created economies based around travel, employing travelers. He also mentions how a common knowledge emerged in American business culture around this time that mental labor required stints of rest and relaxation, whereas manual labor was simple and merely required a night’s rest. Of course this practice eventually spilled over from the white-collar circles into the blue-collar crowd, largely due to the development of tourism as an American institution.
 
Motels found their success in travelers on a budget who cared more for the exploration than the comfort. This is still largely true, but for longer trips a night or two in a slightly more upscale room makes a grand difference. Based on personal experience I’d venture to assert that after about two weeks on the road, one develops a sort of sixth sense for judging the quality of motel while driving by. 

(Image is mine)

A Cool Million is the unfortunate story of Lemuel Pitkin, who sets of with the utmost candor and spirit to make his fortune, only to be met at every turn with absurdly poor fortunes. He is nobly inspired to help ease his mother’s financial woes, and under the tutelage of the racist nationalist ex-president is slowly hacked to bits and martyred for a cause he was never tremendously fond of.
 
Both the style and substance of the book struck me as similar to that of Voltaire’s Candide. Both stories are very fast-paced, and tell the tale of a young protagonist facing ever-increasingly horrifying problems with great aplomb. The tales are also both highly satirical, with A Cool Million poking fun at a great many facets of the American lifestyle. For instance, the racism of the novel is so overbearingly blatant and the characterization of Mr. Whipple so brash one can be reasonably confident it’s meant entirely in parody (although Poe’s Law is certainly applicable). The central joke is of course the absurdity of the American Dream. Pitkin literally gives himself to the cause and the one who seems to profit from it is the almost völkisch fascist of Mr. Whipple. In this supposed American utopia, women are regularly treated as nothing more than playthings and whores, law enforcement is brutal and at the mercy of Tammany Hall-style corrupt lawyers and judges, the macho Western cowboy is a greedy, violent psychopath, and the Southern recruits to Mr. Whipple’s new world order lynch a friend of the party because they mistake his race. Obviously, none of these things are desirable in the utopian land of opportunity.
 
Lemuel Pitkin is abused throughout the book for others’ gain, but his enterprising spirit seems to manage to constantly turn lemons into lemonade. While he may have had his teeth pulled out, losing his dentures saved him from unsavory relations with an Indian john. He is hired to his final post specifically because of his physical deformities, and he finds his joy in life during this period by reading the newspapers that are used to beat him for the show. There’s something to be admired in his constantly irrepressible spirit, but by the end of the story it all seems so utterly absurd. Contrasted with all the other readings for the class thus far, the upshots of which have been utterly bleak, there’s a sort of peace to be found in Pitkin’s unassailable resolve. Sure, his life was horrifying by any metric, and perhaps Nathaniel West sought out to poke fun at the idea of limitless composure, but in the midst of his ridicule, Pitkin’s hopefulness came off as rather appealing. While the world may be horrible, it is the only one in which one exists, and therefore the only one at present possible. Pitkin always tries to make it his best of all possible worlds.  

It seems many of the people studied in this course have been compelled to travel due to tragic circumstance, but there are those who go for other reasons. The journalists and intellectuals set out as a response to a rising tide of poverty and despair, but in doing so they are seeking “the voice of the people.” As journalists, it is their professional obligation to listen to the populace, but this is not a career chosen lightly, so one might well imagine that this search for the vox populi is on some level a quest of self-discovery as well. It is the importance of this aspect of travel I wish to stress.
 
Seeing the world has a number of obvious benefits. Exposure to foreign peoples and ideas produces educated, cultured, and worldly citizens, but travel has benefits beyond greater social understanding. In the documentary we watched in the last class, many of the boys riding the rails did so in search of work, but one of the boys cited his motivation as adventure. 
 
The essence of traveling is pure adventure—it’s a compulsion to see not seeking greener pastures, but rather new hues of green never seen before. Traveling forces introspection. Being away from home means that even the smallest of decisions and habits cannot rely on routine. The phrase, “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone,” is most often said in a negative context, but forcing oneself to live without familiar comforts forces reflection on why one has what one has. Obviously, living out of a backpack makes one realize how much sheer stuff one can live without, but this experiences begs a more important question: what can’t one live without. Until put to the test, it is shockingly difficult to see who or what one will miss. Homesickness crops up in bizarre and unexpected ways, offering the traveler clues as to what they find truly important.
 
That said, when I travel, I sort of cheat. I have a jacket covered in patches accrued from countries and events from across the globe. In this manner, I carry with me grounding; a sort of map of my past travels that doubles as a compass that always points to where I come from.  It is important to seek out new experiences not just for their sake, but for how these new experiences—and the process of seeking them—can inform one’s past.

(Original Photo)

Waiting for Nothing follows a starving man through a series of first person vignettes, depicting the brutal conditions of the Great Depression. The character goes through a great many ups and downs, from having a stranger buy him a steak to being beaten by police, from a failed bank robbery to sharing coconut pie with a friend. He even gives himself to a wealthy transsexual in return for some temporary relief from the harshness of living on the street.  Throughout everything, he is constantly hungry—searching for his next meal. It is because of this drive that he turns to the church.
 
There are certain parallels to be drawn between the “mission stiffs” and the man in the grey suit who first buys a steak dinner for the main character. The man in the grey suit buys the steak but announces it loudly enough for the rest of the restaurant to overhear his magnanimity. The mission seems to serve a similar purpose—that of stroking the egos of those who are giving the aide. The food serves as a trap, and they make the starving men sit through extensive sermons and conversion attempts, though only the newly poor apparently fall for the tricks. As soon as one man makes a snide remark, the pastor brands him as an agent of the devil and casts him out into the cold—hardly turning the other cheek.
 
In the climax of the story, the mission workers try to turn a blind eye to a dying man, and when the main character tries to rouse them, he is similarly greeted with threats of expulsion. Not to be deterred, he does the right thing and insists on summoning medical care, but the victory is ultimately hollow as the doctors pronounce the dying man’s case hopeless, and they do nothing more than load him onto a stretcher. This scene plays out just after the main character proclaims his disbelief in a higher power, reasoning, “If there is a God, why is such as this? What have these men done that they live like rats in a garbage heap? Why does He make them live like rats in a garbage heap?”
 
The world in which this man exists is hungry, bleak, and hollow, but he remains steadfast and fatalistic. As he put it, “all [a man] can do is try to keep his belly full of enough slop so that he won’t rattle when he breathes.” So much for salvation.

It’s striking how many travel narratives involve running afoul of lawmen. The song “Big Rock Candy Mountain”—a song about a sort of hobo nirvana—talks about cops with wooden legs and empty boxcars (so the police can’t catch you and you can still travel around). Boxcar Bertha claims that, “Police and pinches, jails, bughouses, and joints seem to have been always a part of [her] life,” Anderson’s characters in Hungry Men casually deride “the bulls,” and the land owners in The Grapes of Wrath use the police to terrorize the Oakies. Perhaps its due to the fact that the main focus of the materials discussed in this course deal with the travels of hobos and vagabonds, who, having to steal and cheat to survive must necessarily aggravate policemen. However, I do not believe this to be the whole truth. I think there is a quality intrinsic to travel stories that sets up protagonists in opposition to the law.
 
One of the most exciting and romantic themes in all these adventures is that of freedom.
 
Having no real home can also mean that the world is your oyster. Easy Rider, rebellious bikers go on a sort of spirit journey, answering the call of the open road. In Thelma and Louise, the eponymous characters spend most of their time out on the lamb, and they are hardly vagabonds. In the most extreme cases we have John Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde or Mickey and Mallory in Natural Born Killers, whose travels are in a sense spurred by pointedly illegal activities. If it can be said that travel stories are on some level freedom—about exploring the world to discover oneself and breaking free from the shackles of society, then (for better or worse) the trappings of society must fall away. Though the rule of law is ostensibly seen as a good thing, in a real sense absolute freedom exists in direct opposition to obeying rules. The police, then, become an icon of the oppressor, and the vagabond or rebel, even in cases where they are cast as psychotics or malcontents, by contrast become freedom fighters and emblems for liberty. 

People tend to trust their eyes. Despite the capabilities of modern technology to manipulate images to the whim of the editor, there persists a notion that seeing is believing. However, photography is a manipulation from the ground up.
 
Long before Photoshop existed, pictures were painstakingly developed by hand. Photographers would have to spend hours in darkrooms, carefully dodging and burning and agitating their film in order to produce an image to their liking. In fact, there was a period in the early 1800s—the very beginning of photography—where the practice had almost metaphysical associations. Having to real frame of reference for the technology, some writers explained it as “nature drawing itself.” Of course the idea of nature drawing itself is a bit misleading, but the process is much more like drawing than many people are willing to admit.
 
In the photo-book You Have Seen Their Faces, Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White take this notion to something of an extreme. Whenever a picture is taken, the choice of subject matter alone conveys a certain meaning. Photographing the downtrodden masses makes a sort of point unto itself. Beyond this, composition of a shot conveys information to the viewer without specifically stating it.

Pyramidal compositions, for instance, convey a sense of solidity; having a subject’s head above geographical center of a composition indicates calm or importance, below center creates disquiet, and dead center suggests aggression. With these visual queues in mind, one can see that Bourke-White’s images are stylized and set out to make a point. In addition, Caldwell invented dialogues to serve as captions for the photographs, furthering the fiction contained in the publication. Though Caldwell had his background in the fiction world, he wanted to use photographs as a way to verify the authenticity of his stories. It should be apparent, however, that photographs can't verify the authenticity of prose. A great degree of imagination goes into their fabrication as well.
 
In the foreword, Alan Trachtenberg addresses this, claiming the work’s “detractors are simply mistaken. They miss the fictionality of the work and see its deviations from objective fact…as wicked distortions” (vii). To his mind, the authors’ artistic flares served to explore a greater truth about the state of the Depression era South, and I am inclined to agree. After all, it is the role of the artist to hold up a mirror to society so that society might see itself in a new light. The public is far too trusting of the images presented to them, but objectivity is the realm of journalists, not activist artists.

There are many common myths about travel, some truer than others. When one thinks of travel, images of the open road and adventure spring to mind, but the fact of the matter is there’s very little uniformity to adventuring. There are many adventurers, and each has many different stories to tell.
 
In Pyle’s “Home Country,” there are several travelers discussed. The first man is Denver Williams, a cowboy by trade who, beset by drought and grasshopper infestations is forced to turn to the oil fields for a living. He earns decent wages but keeps returning to his cattle-herding lifestyle. In a sense he’s professionally migratory to begin with—grazing his cows across open plains—but when he must leave his cows to work on the oil fields he is stationary. The fact that he keeps returning to the open plains is indicative that Denver enjoys his meanderings. He enjoys traveling when it is on his own terms and given a limited scope. We are also introduced to the author, discussing how he never rests his head in one place for very long, and purposefully cultivates a vagabond lifestyle. Though he later continues to tell stories of his more interesting exploits, amongst his opening statements, he snidely remarks:

When I started I weight 108 pounds, had two bad colds a year, felt very tired of an evening, and was cared to death at meeting strange people. But now, after five years and 165,000 miles of travel, I weight 108 pounds, had two bad colds a year, feel very tired of an evening, and am afraid of people. Travel is indeed broadening. (463)

Congruently, the author mentions an assortment of close acquaintances he maintains throughout the nation, simultaneously bragging about his worldliness, mentioning his unease over relationships, and lamenting the fact that he hasn’t anyone with whom to discuss the good old days. This theme of loneliness is a common threat throughout travel stories, though the particular expression of this loneliness varies greatly from adventurer to adventurer.

In “The Road,” Asch talks about seeking companionship from a taxi dancer—a woman rented as a dance partner, though in the context of the story it seems there exist some more deviant undertones to the arrangements. In fact, when Asch is strongly propositioned, he turns down the offers of drinks and merriment for simple conversation.
 
Each traveler has their own take on the nature of travel, informed by their circumstance and interest, but despite their relations, it would seem traveling is an ultimately solitary undertaking. 

In “Steinbeck’s Myth of the Oakies” Keith Windschuttle attempts to deconstruct John Steinbeck’s venerated work of travel fiction. He asserts that, “Although it is about the experiences of the fictional Joad family, The Grapes of Wrath was always meant to be taken literally.” He doesn’t spend much effort in trying to back up this claim, but instead glosses over the point and continues on to illustrating the ways in which Steinbeck’s novel was a highly exaggerated account of the era.
 
To begin with, he takes issue with the association of the dust bowl with Oklahoma, citing meteorological and historical records showing that while other areas of the United States were ravaged by dust storms, Oklahoma merely suffered intense droughts. He cites historian James N. Gregory in postulating that that the contemporary media sensationalized the Californian emigration wave by also casually equating the dust bowl with the exodus.
 
Following this, he examines government census data from the era and compares that to Steinbeck’s estimation of the size of the movement, pointing out that the migration was of a much smaller scale than that mentioned in the book, and moreover that the trend had actually begun in the 1920s, and the major rush wasn’t seen until the 1940s with an influx of workers seeking employment in the burgeoning industries that supplied the war effort.
 
He then brings up Steinbeck’s political persuasions, claiming that Steinbeck’s approval of the New Deal was ironic given that the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933—a part of the New Deal legislation—was what prompted landlords to consolidate their property holdings and evict tenant farmers. He doesn’t go into specifics on the mechanics of how this worked, but instead goes on to cite James N. Gregory’s works again in an attempt to prove the migrant workers were not intentionally duped by pamphlets, but instead were much better informed of the difficulties they faced in moving out to California.
 
Windschuttle’s essay continues on in this fashion, mixing various seemingly reliable sources with fairly transparent conservative political spins. The highly political tenor of his prose is really a shame, considering how much of the information could be genuinely interesting insofar as it would provide a grounded, more realistic contrast to Steinbeck’s vision of the era. As it stands, it seems like a series of crude, conservative talking points pitted against the classic author’s much more eloquent writings—even if the author did have leftist political motivations. Windschuttle could have really benefitted from spending more time mulling over the merits of artistic license. 

In this week’s selections from The Grapes of Wrath and The Harvest Gypsies, Steinbeck mentions the plight of the foreign migrant workers before the events of the dust bowl. Chapter 19 discusses the unease of the ruling class over the influx of farmers, hypothesizing that at the core of their unrest is the knowledge that their ancestors were once the invading force, and that by virtue of farming the land had made it their own, and taken it away from Mexico.
 
The similarities between the plight of the “Okies” and of the modern Mexican laborer strike me as eerily similar. Both groups come from miles away seeking their fortune, often skirting the law to do so. Both are utterly at the mercy of the wealthy agriculturalists and have relatively little to call their own. Of course with the laws as they currently stand, immigrant laborers can be deported, whereas those fleeing the ravages of the Dust Bowl could not be subjected to such treatment. As he phrased it in Harvest Gypsies, “with this new race the old methods of repression, of starvation wages, of jailing, beating and intimidation are not going to work; these are American people” (23). Though many of the migrant laborers do work illegally, the prevalence of the practice has fostered a generation of US-born citizens with non-citizen parents, thereby creating a new class of people deeply invested in improving the conditions of these immigrant workers. Their advocacy is even powerful enough to garner a public show of support from significant cultural figures, like filmmaker Robert Rodriguez’s “special message for Arizona,” which humorously indicted the state’s recent toughening stance against immigration—while simultaneously promoting his upcoming film.
 
Though Rodriguez and Steinbeck are by no means equivalent in their cultural clout, there is something to be said about that the worker’s rights movements each having something of a voice in a popular medium of the era. The contrast between the two methods is also somewhat telling. While Steinbeck embarked upon a pilgrimage of sorts and wrote a classic piece of literature, Rodriguez made an intentionally schlocky exploitation/slasher/action film and peppers in a few jokes about the miserable conditions of the working class. Perhaps this blasé attitude is symptomatic of the hyper-saturated modern public media consciousness, or perhaps it’s more due to the fact that obesity is the new starvation. Malnutrition is the new problem for the working poor, not starvation. Partially due to the success of the sort of factory farming that cropped up during the dust bowl era, we have no problem producing more calories than the global population burns (unless you’re a farmer buying Monsanto seeds intentionally designed to falter so you have to buy new seeds—rather like the rigged cars sold in the novel).

There is a long history of storytellers creating flawed protagonists, and with good reason. Without conflict or room for a personal journey, the characters would become entirely one-dimensional and uninteresting. However, many of Steinbeck’s characters in The Grapes of Wrath are either unrepentant or may even embrace their basest nature. Tom is unrepentant for killing a man, and Casy makes grand moralistic speeches despite his sordid history with young girls in his own congregation. It isn’t unusual for characters to be flawed, but it is somewhat jarring for characters to claim the moral high ground despite (or perhaps even owing to) their particular flaws.
 
When telling Tom of his loss of faith, Casey says, “There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing.” (p16). These words indicate a sort of moral nihilism utterly unbecoming of the characters, who instead seem to aspire more toward a humanistic and collective aim, perhaps better phrased by Casy when he muses, “…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.’” (p17). The difference between the two sentiments is striking. One might be quick to jump on the statement that virtue and sin are nonexistent, interpreting that as a claim that right and wrong do not exist either. Given the context of the characters’ obvious preoccupation with morality, this would seem to be false. Instead it seems that striving for the common good is its own secular sort of virtue. The communistic overtones to this line of thinking are clear—perhaps to the point of being distracting since communism itself carries with it such tremendously heavy connotations, particularly in the United States.
 
However, despite this populist theme Steinbeck does not directly demonize the corporate elites. While his choice of subject matter certainly leads the reader to sympathize with the poor farmers, and he takes particular care to vilify the grossly opportunistic and vulture-like car salesmen, Steinbeck also says of the banks and stern landlords they were, “caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling.” (p21). So even when writing of the elites, the author takes the time to mention that the American aristocracy was in no way uniform, and even the coldhearted individuals who, by all appearances, harbored nothing but wickedness for the poor were afforded a modicum of understanding. The overarching message thus far seems to be that everyone is flawed, but the collective does not have to be flawed if the collective strives against it.

In Some American People, Erskine Caldwell writes, “Travel should not be confused with sightseeing and touring… In its true meaning, a traveler is a stranger who gains sympathetic understanding with the people he encounters. It is not necessary for the traveler to have wealth; the most satisfactory travel is sometimes done by means of foot and freight car” (Caldwell, 9). Asch reiterates this sentiment, dismissing cars as too insular and trains as too luxurious, preferring instead to share a rough bus ride with his fellow voyagers. While some of the authors disagree with the assertion that the mode of transit plays an important role in their journeys, there is a common thread woven throughout the stories—an interest in the people encountered along the way. As James Rorty phrased it, they sought to discover, “the ‘feel’ of the country as a whole; to exhibit not so much the statistics as the people whose current dilemmas the statistics fail to adequately express” (Rorty, 9).
 
Travel stories are amongst the oldest told, from Gilgamesh to the Odyssey, but while the ancient epics recount fantastical quests and chronicle heroic challenges, many more modern narratives show the influence of uncertain times. In times of desperation like the 1930s, real life acquires a tenor of distress and may seem lacking in discernible focus. Undertaking a quest gives one purpose. Of course an enterprising spirit may seek adventure, but real life does not have a particular destination. In the case of these authors, they set out on a quest to find the voice of the American people.
 
This pilgrimage to find the holy grail of the American Voice is, of course, beset by a number of very real trials. The authors all seem to struggle in defining what the emergent character of America is. They all describe the country as a tremendously varied and vast landscape populated by many different sorts of people. Many of these people are severely downtrodden, while others live in notable luxury, but regardless of their disposition there appeared to be, as Sherwood Anderson noted, a yearning for belief. Anderson wrote of two girls who yearned to believe in the divine so they might comfort themselves during a time of loss. Asch wrote of a coal baron who so strongly believed in himself that he decried the news reports of poor working conditions as false and sensationalistic. Rorty decried this yearning for belief itself, insisting that less than five percent of Americans were even remotely conscious citizens and that he, “encountered nothing in 15,000 miles of travel that disgusted and appalled [him] so much as this American addition to makebelieve” (Rorty, 13).
 
While the epic heroes sought mythic artifacts, these travel writers sought to find the ethereal core of America; and just as in the epic poems, the journey proved more important than the destination.