Colin's blog

Reading the guide book to New York City made me realize just how different the dissemination of information was in the 1930s, and the effect that it had on the way people perceived, dreamed about, and romanticized cities. Today, we can learn about the basic statistics of any city in an online encyclopedia, virtually cruise the streets on Google maps, find the best restaurants and places to go on yelp, or even meet people with common interests on Facebook before arriving (Not that I recommend that at all). But back then, the allure of great cities like New York was spread by word of mouth, or by artists like F. Scott Fitzgerald who romanticized it in literature and from films that used the city as their backdrop. People who were curious enough would have to go there to find out for themselves, rather than looking up videos on Youtube or the travel channel.


These guidebooks were the start of the proliferation of information about travel destinations that is so accessible to us today. The guide employs a strategic and effective mix of useful factual information, poetic prose romanticizing the city, great illustrations of the city, and beautiful black and white photography of various neighborhoods and landmarks. It notes in the preface, “This volume is a detailed description of the communities and points of interest in all the five boroughs of New York City. It attempts, also, to indicate the human character of the city, to point out the evidence of achievements and shortcomings, urban glamor as well as urban sordidness”. The book also features quotes by famous people to entice prospective tourists, such as this one by Henry Hudson: “It is as beautiful a land as one can hope to tread on”. The guide highlights some of the points of interest such as the New York Public Library, Coney Island, Central Park, the World’s Fair grounds, and Wall Street. Equally, it notes  the human character of the city, including the high society types like the Astors, Woolworths, Phipps’, and Rockefellers, as well as the ethnic neighborhoods of Harlem, Chinatown, and Brooklyn.

A perfect illustration of how the guide seeks to mix factual information with a depiction of the urban glamor and urban sordidness of New York, can be found in a passage that reads, “In the city, night workers, their footsteps sharp, irregular on the quiet streets, return home. A water wagon rolls by. Bands are still playing in half a dozen night clubs. In the Upper East Side, in the Upper West Side, in the Gashouse and Hell’s Kitchen, in Chelsea and Greenwich Village, the faint and broken ringing of the alarm clocks come to the empty street. Another day, another dollar. Don’t forget to tell the laundryman not to starch my shirts! Slowly the air between the buildings fills with light…The boy who came to be a writer is waked in his mid-town room and dresses for his shift on the elevator. In Chelsea the girl who came to be an actress launders her stockings. The boy who was going to Wall Street sprawls on his bed, wincing as each cry cuts into his dream of the smell of fresh hay and warm milk…Night draws to a close. Bands are still playing behind closed doors of a half dozen night clubs.”(P.51) The guide book seems to present the same romanticized stereotype of New York that is prominent today. A restless mixing pot of various cultures, with endless attractions to see. A place where everybody has big dreams, and opportunities and vice are abundant. Although there is no challenge in acquiring any sort of information on any given city these days, at least certain romanticized versions of cities still exist in our culture.

Agee and Berkowitz present two very different propositions for how America became infected with the travel bug. Agee argues that Americans have been instilled with a sense of restlessness that has inspired us to put our homes in the rearview mirror for as long as we have been Americans. Whereas Berkowitz sees the rise of travel and tourism in America as a result of management’s concession of paid vacations to salaried and wage-earning workers, and a calculated effort by the government to stimulate the economy, Agee argues, “Whatever you may think, we move for no better reason than for the plain unvarnished hell of it. And there is no better reason.”(Agee P.44)
 
Agee does seem to be concerned with the flourishing economy that rose up from the American roadside, but he is writing about the boom period of the 1920s, before the Great Depression. He romanticizes the experience of being on the road, immersing oneself in the various pockets of American cultures in different areas of the country. Reminiscent of a 1920s Anthony Bourdain, he writes about the challenge of getting a proper barbeque sandwich, and the importance of the hot dog as an American symbol. Agee writes about the advent and economics of the American roadside camp as if he is the authority on the subject. To him, the American roadside camp is the ultimate symbol for the growing American leisure class. He writes, “For the tourist camp is one sound invention that the American roadside has contributed to the American scene. And as an invention it is more satisfying than the hot dog.”(Agee P.52) Both the hot dog and the tourist camp serve as perfect American symbols, because they are both accessible and universal across various classes, and perfectly pragmatic.
 
Berkowitz describes many of the vital factors that led to the institutionalization of the travel habit as an American past time. He acknowledges the movement for paid vacations and the promotion of travel by the railroad and hospitality industries that began in the mid 1800s and grew until the turn of the century as essential to the creation of the leisure class. However, he credits the Great Depression as a perfect storm of interests in American travel as the turning point, writing, “The crisis of the depression was ultimately responsible for completing the transformation of tourism into a mass phenomenon. As the 1930s progressed, management’s desire to secure industrial peace and labor’s increasing militancy and consumerist ideology brought about a frenzied expansion of paid vacations to a majority of wage earners. At the same time, the New Deal-era interest in promoting social harmony and in encouraging new consumption practices to revitalize the economy compelled business leaders and government officials on both the local and the national levels to intensify their tourism promotional activities and spread vacationing beyond its formerly middle and upper-class base.”(Berkowitz P. 187) 
 
The desire for both industry and government to stimulate spending during the Great Depression reminds me of 9/11 when President Bush asked the country to be patriotic by going to the mall and spending, spending, spending. We can credit the period that Berkowitz described as the origin of our consumer culture today. We have gotten to the point that when our massive consumer culture, now fueled mostly by credit and debt, slows down just a little bit it can cause a national economic crisis itself.

Nathaniel West serves up a hilarious parody-satire, and it is a good deal of fun as Fred Marsh points out. While it certainly does evoke the same sensibility, and twisted sense of humor as Voltaire's Candide, it also evokes the sensibility of a different body of art. I could not help but think of American cinema from the early 1900s, and particularly the Great Depression, that depict dead-pan, downtrodden characters, such as Charlie Chaplin, and the Groucho Brothers, that simply cannot catch a break. Chaplin depicted the tramp, always trying to catch a break, and the Marx brothers depicted a grim future of the country through their comedic portrayal of the failure of our government. These Vaudeville films always relied on the misfortune of the protagonist for the enjoyment of the audience. Although these films were meant to serve as comedic relief during the Great Depression, they can be almost depressing when viewed in retrospect, because the viewer sees what a dark sense of humor people enjoyed at the time. Also, as Marsh points out in his article the narrative relies on the spectacle of Pitkin’s physical pain for the reader’s kicks. Pitkin buys into the American Dream, and believes that he can rise to the upper crust of society by his own bootstraps. This is a common theme that we have seen characters exude, even when the idea seems so unrealistic in relation to their situation. Ultimately, after struggling, and failing to to be a good, successful, blue blooded capitalist, “His whole life stands for the ideals of the Fascist National Revolutionary party bent on restoring the lore and legendry of the plain American people and ridding our fair land of sophistication, Marxism, international capitalism and other sinister alien forces and elements.”, against his own wishes.(Marsh) Pitkin’s life seems like one of the most harsh existences one can imagine, just like that of Candide. At least Candide was able to retire to the cultivation of his garden, but Pitkin is subjected to a legacy in death that he did not want, which is a pretty twisted end. The conflicting thing about stories like A Cool Million and Candide, is that the reader feels a sense of guilt for genuinely enjoying and being amused by the protagonists’ misfortunes. Ultimately, I think that this form of parody, utilitizing severe violence as comedy, provides effective commentary on the time periods that they deal with. The prevailing sense of optimism that the American Dream was still alive, and that people could overcome the rampant poverty during the Great Depression was largely false. The marketing of this idea to the American people only served to delude the impoverished people that clung to it, and West provides a powerful counter-balancing effect to the works of people like Horatio Algers.

This year Charles Willeford, an American author, published his memiors, I Was Looking For a Street, which chronicle his time as a migrant teenager traveling the railroads during the Great Depression. He grew up in Los Angeles in a middle class family. He describes his class status, saying, “I don’t think we were rich, or anything close to that, but we were well-to-do…We had a full-time Negro cook, and we ate big dinners at night.”(P. 3)

After losing his mother to T.B. he moved in with his grandmother. However, after the stock market crash in 1929, his grandmother was housing additional extended family, and the young Willeford felt himself becoming a burden to the household. Although the economic circumstance of the family, and the country at large, caused the young willeford, just barely a teenager, to venture outward-bound, the reader gets the feeling that he also yearned for a certain sense of adventure that we heard about in the documentary about hobos we watched in class on Tuesday. He writes, “I left home and went on the road. I wasn’t alone. For the next few years there were thousands of boys my age riding freight trains to nowhere. But no one can ever tell me I didn’t have a happy childhood.”(P. 45)

Having largely been raised middle class the young Willeford had to learn the ways of the hobo quicly in order to adapt to his surroundings. He learned a lot of vital advice on the road such as when he explains, “When I first hit the road, a bum in Colton, California, had told me that a man should always have a destination of some kind in his mind, even though he had no real plan and knew in his heart that he was going nowhere.”(P. 59) Little tricks like this helped Willeford learn how to trick himself into believing he had an inckling of direction and purpose, and fooling the authorities, so as not to be arrested. He went beyond simply creating a false destination though, making an entire fictitious back story including a new name for himself, Jake Lowey, which he got from his one-eyed uncle. Willeford’s first hand account of what it was like to grow up on the railroads of the South Western United States is very interesting, and fits perfectly into the body of work that we have been reading and discussing. Ultimately, the reader sees that growing up on the road is not so much different from growing up anywhere else. Willeford, or Jake Lowey, makes a few friends who realize that their odds of survival are much better in a group, and learns how to navigate the social circles of the work camps. He seems to encourage the reader to embark on their own journey, writing brief sentiments such as, “As long as a man leaves everything behind, including his money posessions, and clothes, he will have no regrets when he begins a life somewhere else. “(P. 18)
Although, growing up homeless, and alone on the road during the Great Depression would have been a horrowing experience, Willeford seems to embrace the adventure, and exude a sense of pride for accomplishing the feet. His optimism radiates in passages such as this one: “If I could learn how to drive a car I could go to Miami Beach, maybe, and drive a taxicab. Or I could go to San Francisco, or Seattle, or Alaska. Why not Alaska, that is, If I could get a good used Navy pea jacket first. My possibilities were limitless. One man alone, without responsibilties, has got a fighting chance in this world; and it was, indeed, a wonderful world.” (P. 146) All in all, It is a great story, and I highly recommend reading the book.

Tom Kromer’s Waiting For Nothing provides an interesting contrast to the other narratives we have encountered. We have come across both bleak and uplifting approaches to the travel narratives of Depression-era America, but Kromer offers up a semi-autobiographical account that does not romanticize the hobo’s experience in the way that the other narratives have made a point to do(Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Wild’s Double-Crossing America, Guthrie’s Bound For Glory). Instead, Kromer details the struggle of a stiff to merely survive on a daily basis, from meal to meal, and from flop to flop, with no sort of goal or hope for the future. He describes an almost appocolyptic view of the country and of human nature in the face of crises. As the title suggests, he is “Waiting For Nothing”. He does not seem to have any sort of hopeful view for his future or the future of the country. Kromer’s book is a much grittier, and sobering view of the life of the hobo in the 1930s, than we have previously encountered.
 
The opening Chapter illustrates a man pushed to the margins of his own notions of right and wrong, struggling with his own middle class morals, in the face of the extreme necessity to survive. The stiff contemplates and plans to mug a stranger on the street with a stick to rob him for money to eat. Ultimately, he is unable to abandon his morals to go through with the attack, and is ashamed that he was considering doing so, and that he did not have the courage to do what it takes to survive, until the stranger angrily insults him for asking for money to get something to eat. It is clear that such sacrifices of his morality have taken a toll on his sense of identity when he writes, “I am starved, too, and I ought to starve. A guy without enough guts to get himself a feed ought to starve.”(P. 6) As many Americans were forced out of their homes it seems that they shed a part of their identity when they left their environment, such as when Momma Joad burns her families treasured documents in The Grapes of Wrath. His stark description of himself staring at the well to do nibbling at expensive chickens while he nearly starves to death on the other side of the window is one of the most graphic images illustrating the failure of capitalism, presented in the pieces we have read.
 

Woody Gurthrie declared in one of his songs, “I ain’t got no home, I’m just a wondering around. And I aint got no home in this world anymore”. However, he provides an account of his journey from Texas to California, which provides an interesting Depression-era travel narrative, but with an optimistic, youthful twist that makes the reader feel like Woody Gurthrie is truly at home on the road.(Source)
 
Although he faces the same dire circumstances, including starvation, as the thousands of other migrants workers, he presents his story in an uplifting way, which reminds me of Huckleberry Finn. Unable to continue living in the shrinking Texas town of Pampa, plagued with the Dust Bowl, Woody begins his travels. Before hitting the road he briefly reminisces about the town he is leaving behind him, saying, “Good ol Pampa. I hit here in 1926. Worked my tail off ‘round this here town. But it didn’t give me anything. Town had growed up, strung itself all out across these plains. Just a little old low-built cattle town to start with; jumped up big when the oil boom hit. Now eleven years later it had up and died.”(P. 191) This journey undoubtedly went on to become an important inspiration for his lyrics that would go on to become the unofficial anthem of Okies and migrants throughout the nation. It becomes clear from reading his autobiographic story, why so many migrants were able to identify with his music. He exemplifies how many places he had been, and how many people he had met, when he writes, “I had seen thousands of men that looked the same way, and could usually tell by the color of the dirt[ on their faces], where they were from”. (P. 195) It goes to show how well he understood his surroundings, including the people and the settings of the mass migration during the Great Depression.
 
Guthrie displays his easy-going mentality that he adopts towards his unfortunate situation when he writes, “Where was I going? I was going to California. What for? Oh, just to see if I couldn’t do a little better.(P. 194) His acceptance of the circumstance he is dealt, and his embracement of the migrant lifestyle serves to inform much of his music. His recollection an anecdote from the road-“We were four guys out, trying to get somewhere in the world, and the roar of that little engine, rattly, knocky, and funny as it was, had a good sound to our ears. It was the only motor we had. We wanted more than anything else in the world to hear it purr along, and we didn’t care how people laughed as they went around us, and throwed their clouds of red dust back into our faces”. (P. 196)-could easily have been the inspiration for the song, Riding In My Car. It seems that Guthrie truly enjoyed being on the road and living for the brief moments of triumph, and pleasure, rather than concern himself with the grim future that lay ahead out west. 

“An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion in the Thirties” by Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor is a fascinating account of the various migrations that took place in the different regions of America during the Great Depression. I was interested in the fact that it brings different narratives to light that we have not yet explored in depth, such as those in the south. Dorothea Lange prefaces her photographs with an description of the climate of the country, saying, “Indeed, in the face of industrial collapse of 1929, millions of Americans sought refuge in recoil to the land from which they had sprung. Now our people are leaving soil again. They are being expelled by powerful forces of man and of Nature”. (P. 14)
 
The photographs that are presented in An American Exodus provide a visceral element to the narratives that we have been reading about already, and to ones that we have not covered such as those in the American south. She describes the nature and effect of their collaboration, stating, “We use the camera as a tool of research. Upon a tripod of photographs, captions, and text we rest themes evolved out of long observations in the field. We adhere to the standards of documentary photography as we have conceived them”. (P. 15) Her recognition of their adherence to standards of documentary photography “as we have conceived them” makes the reader/viewer wonder how many creative liberties she took in staging her photographs in order to convey her desired effect. However, despite the debate over the integrity of the work of the photographers working for the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration (Source), the combination of photographs and quotations of the subjects provide the viewer/reader with a unique window into a period of American history, and more specifically into the lives of a marginalized group of migrants, living on the fringes of society.
 
I was particularly interested in the narratives described by the photos and text that chronicled the migrant farmers from the south, particularly the African Americans that had been freed from slavery, but still struggled to find a way to make a living by farming the land. The most disappointing fact brought to light by the piece concerning the migrant farmers in the south, was that as a result of the eroded plantation system that once kept them enslaved, the land was now ruined. Arthur F. Raper is quoted in An American Exodus in 1937, saying, “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”.  This helps to explain the mass exodus of southern African American migrant farm workers relocating to urban cities in the north. A couple, born into slavery, on an abandoned twenty-eight-family plantation was quoted commenting on their disenfranchisement after the abolition of slavery, saying, “I remember when the Yankees come through, a whole, passel of em hollerin, and told the Negroes you’re free. But they didn’t get nothing cause we had carried the best horses and mules over to the gulley”. (Greene County, Georgia/July 1937)  Lange’s photo of the couple is an arresting image, but it gets its power largely from the context that the text provides. Another interesting use of text and photography, which illustrates how the two complement each other in An American Exodus, employs a quote by the President’s Committee on Farm Tenancy that states, “The committees examination of the agricultural ladder has indicated an increasing tendency for the rungs of the ladder to become bars-forcing imprisonment in a fixed social status from which it is increasingly difficult to escape”. (P. 24) The quote is accompanied by a photo of a dilapidated staircase, with broken steps, to symbolize the broken rungs of the agricultural system.
 
The piece also details the influx of migrant farmers in California, forced westward from the Draught Bowl. It confirms the hostile climate that the migrants arrived in California to, described by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. It highlights the reaction of the Police Chief of Los Angeles’ reaction to these unemployed migrants, pointing out that “His remedy, reflecting initiative but stretching legal authority, was to overawe and thus impede the human influx by stationing Los Angeles policemen at the ports of land entry to the state, even to its farthest corners.”(P. 130) 

The articles by Asch and Pyle document both writers’ desire to get out on the road and document the experiences that were somewhat alien to their comfortable lifestyles, but common to so many others in Depression-era America. Both of their accounts provide interesting insight into the climate in America, because the narrators are not experiencing the hardships, they are merely there to document the struggle of others. Pyle documents the draught bowl of 1936, but places it in the larger context of the entire nation that was experiencing a state of biblical ruination, writing, “I had just seen the ruination of our great land. The beautiful valleys and hillsides of Tennessee washing away to the ocean, leaving a slashed and useless landscape. The raw windy plains of western Kansas, stripped of all life, a one time paradise turned into a whirlpool of suffocation. And the vast rolling Dakotas, where huge herds once grazed with the freedom of birds, now parched and cramped and manhandled by man and the elements into a bed of coals.”(Pyle 50)
 
Both pieces exude this feeling that the financial crisis has brought about the end of an era, and that the country is changing dramatically, in both its physical landscape and the mentality of its citizens. Asch alludes to this paradigm change by describing his experiences in Detroit. His travels there allow him to experience first hand the fall of the automobile industry, which helped at one time to define American prosperity. Pyle describes the change in the dynamics of a community in a Montana cattle town prior to the Depression, stating, “You could leave a gold watch, and fifty dollars, and a jug of whiskey, and a sack of tobacco on the table. When you came home the whiskey and the tobacco might be gone, but the fifty dollars and the gold watch would always be there.”(Pyle 54)   Moreover, the reader gets the feeling from the two pieces that the citizens of the areas affected by the depression generally feel tense, and hostile towards one another. Asch points out the hostility that exists between the co-workers in the auto plants, towards their superiors, the suspicion of the executives towards a reporter, and the hostility that the police treated him with, simply for being a stranger in town, stopping him on the street and telling him, “There ain’t no charge. But Hamtramck is no place for tourists and we don’t see no reason for you to be hanging around.”(Asche 263)
 
Both pieces end with a Hollywood ending, describing the pleasures of traveling for a living, and seeing the vast country. Both authors leave the reader with a reminder that although the Great Depression affected a large portion of the country, there were still many Americans still living well, and some traveling not out of necessity, but for pleasure. Pyle describes the advantages of traveling during this time, in his response to the question of whether or not he was tired of traveling after a long time. He replied, “The answer is an honest no, though it isn’t impossible that 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 ameans of excape. 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."(Pyle 468)

Frederic I. Carpenter wrote an article John Steinbeck: The Philosophical Joads, about the cultural significance of The Grapes of Wrath, and the importance of the philosophical ideas expressed by Steinbeck in the novel. He qualifies The Grapes of Wrath as a classic American novel, not simply for its massive, and lasting, popularity, but as an essential critique of American life. He places Grapes alongside other great American novels such as Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Huck Finn, and Babbitt, noting that they all function to provide keen philosophical insight about American life, while still appealing to a mass audience. He defines the role of classic novels, writing, “Novels that have become classics do more than tell a story and describe characters; they offer insight into men’s motives and point to the springs of action.”
 
The Grapes of Wrath, like the other classic novels mentioned above, preserved in text, a time in American history, and was able to both capture, and influence, the sentiment of the nation. As a result, it has become a timeless work of art that serves as an integral piece of American culture. Carpenter goes on to assert that, The Grapes of Wrath serves to “Preach a positive philosophy of life and to damn that blind conservatism which fears ideas”. After reading the novel for the first time, I agree that despite the many bleak situations, and sentiments, depicted in the novel, that Steinbeck ultimately is communicating an optimistic and hopeful message about the human condition, despite his criticism of the failures of capitalism in America. I believe that statement also explains the discourse about Steinbeck’s intention to promote communism within the novel. Rather than attempting to advance any agenda, Steinbeck is attempting to explore different ideas uninhibitedly, and denounce a conservative approach to discredit ideas without exploring their merit. Jim Casey provides the possibility for these ideas to be discussed and explored in the narrative. Moreover, because Casey is no longer a preacher in the story, it allows for a discourse between him and the other characters, where they are able to challenge the ideas presented by the Casey, which they would not be able to do if he was still a Preacher.
 
While Carpenter notes the importance of the interpretive inter-chapters that Steinbeck employs to communicate abstract ideas in the novel, he focuses on the character of the preacher Jim Casey as Steinbeck’s primary tool to “interpret and to embody the philosophy of the novel.” In addition, he alludes to Steinbeck’s use of Jim Casey as a vehicle to communicate and transform the philosophies of other acclaimed American writers through the character, and influence the narrative and the reader. Carpenter explains the effectiveness of this method, as an essential factor in the novel’s success, saying, “The ideas of John Steinbeck and Jim Casey…continue, develop, integrate, and realize the thought of the great writers of American history. Here the mystical transcendentalism of Emerson appears, and the earthy democracy of Whitman, and the pragmatic instrumentalism of William James and John Dewey. And these old philosophies grow and change in the book until they become new. They coalesce into an organic whole. And, finally, they find embodiment in the character and action, so that they seem no longer ideas, but facts. The enduring greatness of The Grapes of Wrath consists in its imaginative realization of these old ideas in new and concrete forms. Jim Casey translates American philosophy into words of one syllable, and the Joads translate it into action.” 

To contrast some of of the travel narratives that we have been reading about in “The Grapes of Wrath”, and discussing in class, I thought I would highlight some true stories of travelers who took to the road by choice, rather than by circumstance. Wikipedia makes the distinctions between Bums, Hobos, and Tramps, stating that “A hobo is a migratory worker or homeless vegabond, often peniless. The term originated in the Western—probably Northwestern—United States during the last decade of the 19th century. Unlike tramps, who worked only when they were forced to, and bums, who didn't work at all, hobos were workers who wandered.” The Joads clearly fall into the Hobo category along with the thousands of other families who fled the mid-west during the dust bowl, in search of work.

I would like to share the stories of two tramps that I found noteworthy. I recently read a memoir called “I Was Looking for a Street”, by Charles Willeford, who grew up in Los Angeles during the Great Depression. With both of his parents dead, he lived with his grandmother along with many other kids. Sensing that he was becoming too much of a burden for his grandmother to handle, financially, he took to the railroads and headed out on the road. It’s a fascinating coming of age/travel story, where he describes his discovery of the hobo/tramp culture, learning how to navigate the railroads, Depression-era America, and childhood. His story makes the reader realize that for the many kids traveling by themselves at this time, growing up was something they were forced to do to survive. He stays in the desert, abandoned prisons, work camps, and tent cities. He shares his first experiences getting drunk, losing his virginity, and making his friends on the road.

Another interesting true story of a tramp on the road in America, is that of Chrisopher McCandles, which was popularized by John Krakauer’s book, “Into the Wild”, and Sean Penn’s film of the same name. I saw the movie when it came out in 2007, and found McCandles’ story inspiring. After graduating college from Emerson University, he decided to donate all of his money to charity, and hit the road with nothing but the clothes on his back and minimal supplies. Although his story takes place long after the Great Depression, it is clear that he was inspired by the romanticized vision of traveling the country with nothing but a deep curiosity driving him to explore. I would highly recommend both “I Was Looking For a Street” and “Into the Wild”. They are both great travel stories that exhibit people who had the courage to leave home without a destination, aside from the road itself. 

In Chapter 12, after the Joads have packed up and left their hometown, John Steinbeck writes about one of the most classic American symbols of being on the road-Route 66. Route 66 only existed from 1926 to 1985, but it still remains a timeless, romantic symbol of an American right of passage. Taking a road trip along Route 66, where the destination is the trip itself. It provided the setting for countless travel novels that took place in the Great Depression. Steinbeck describes the infamous road, writing, “Highway 66 is the main migrant road. 66-the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map, from Mississippi to Bakersfield-over the red lands and the gray lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the Divide and down into the bright and terrible desert, and across the desert to the mountains again, and into the rich California valleys.” (Steinbeck 118) Route 66 connected the states, and symbolized the freedom to travel willfully and directly throughout the country. It helped to unify the various regions of the United States, and provide a home for travelers whose only home was the road itself. Steinbeck continues to describe the importance of Route 66 to the people in motion during the depression, saying, “66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there. From all of these the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.”(Steinbeck 118) The Mother Road also created an economy for the travelers who were forced to flee their homes. The Wikipedia page for the highway states that the highway “Supported the economies of the communities through which the road passed. People doing business along the route became prosperous due to the growing popularity of the highway.” Although the famous highway once known as the “Main Street of America” no longer exists, it still serves as an inspirational symbol for Americans and foreigners who dream of taking a romanticized journey by car across the nation in the spirit of those who called the Mother Road home. 

Double-Crossing America by Ronald Wild provides an interesting perspective on Depression-era America, because it is from an outsider’s perspective. Wild elects to bring his family to the United States on a road trip, securing a job writing about it by, “Being the only English writer to visit America without being dazzled by New York and Hollywood.”, guided by the mission of documenting what it is to be “Unhurried travelers, writing about America from the ground up.”(Wild 12). It is interesting that he feels the need to inform the people of his native England about the real America, and create the distinction between the America portrayed in media and entertainment, the America of the metropolitan cities, and finally the “real America” devoid of its romanticized stereotypes and preconceived imagery from the period.  He seeks to disprove the myth created by English newspapers and magazines that “Most Americans are film-stars, gangsters, or ruined Stock-Exchange gamblers on their way downwards past the thirty-second floor.”(Wild 12) However, despite his attempt to capture the real America from the ground up, his experience is hardly normal in contrast to the Americans who were forced to rebuild their lives from the ground up, and travel the country in search of work. His family vacation, in a Covered Wagon brand trailer, and with a German Fraulein in tow, reads more like a romanticized, gimmicky, English television comedy version of Depression-era America. 
 
He certainly spends a great deal of time writing about the cult popularity of trailers and the diverse uses that they serve in American culture. From serving as sites where children were born on Route 101, to “love-nests”, to murder scenes, to dressing rooms for Hollywood stars. He makes the reader believe that the trailer, an American icon, can serve as a microcosm for American culture. From low-brow to high-brow, and from functional to superfluous, the trailer is a ubiquitous part of American culture. In the 1930’s, the trailer served as homes to American families who needed to have a family home on wheels, to be able to scour the country for work, as well as luxury dressing rooms for movie stars to pass time in. The trailer transcends the glitzy stereotypes of American life that were presented over-seas, and the gritty truth of American life “from the ground up” in the 1930s.