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Well it seems as though our class has come to the end of our journey in The Travel Habit. We’ve seen many pictures, read many stories, and voiced a lot of our opinions and angles on each. Never is it more fitting to look once further at the nostalgia end of things by reading the WPA guides in a world many of in our family can remember with near precision.
 
At home this weekend, I decided to bring my laptop over to my grandparents to show them what the roaming writers during the Depression thought about their summer home.
 
“When I first saw the place, I wouldn’t have described it any differently,” said Louis San George (my Grandad), 93, of the Ocean County Jersey Shore point, Long Beach Island, “thirty years later, it barely looked any different.”
 
Both my Grandad and my Grammy (Grandpa and Grandma to you!) were both lucky and successful enough to, in the early 1960’s, purchase a small cottage-type summer home on the sliver of sandbar off of the New Jersey mainland, known as Long Beach Island. L.B.I., as many now know it, is still one of the last bastions of non-uniformity along the Jersey Shore; only someguidos.
 
“It was the early 60’s when we first came down to look at places. We didn’t know what we wanted but we knew we wanted a place like this,” said my Grammy, 90, a mother of three boys including my Dad.
 
Like described in tours 35a and b in the New Jersey guide, Long Beach Island comes to life staged in all its sandy, Norse fishing village glory. Congruent with the times, the WPA guide for this little outcropping of civilization provided people like my grandparents with a jumping-off point from which to begin their search for a second, more sea-faring home.
 
“They would speak with such candor and eloquence, we couldn’t help but make some of the same trips. They embellished a little bit, but nevertheless, they were the ones that first pointed it out to us,” said the grandmother of her four well-vacationed grandkids.
 
There were still chicken coops and cottages in the 60’s when my grandparents made their purchase of little more than a plot of sand, and now, the island stands as a hub for both the wealthy and the middle class during the nice months, still complete with the meager ever-present landmarks from an island’s past not much older than the WPA guides themselves.
 
My grandparents were living the very American dream so vividly absent from 1930’s America and so clear in each of our readings this semester. And oddly enough, they only knew about the place that would be their new home and live out that dream because of the very depression that caused so much turmoil and destroyed so many families. Without the Federal Writers' Project, not only would many people been out of a much-needed job, but so many families might have been out of a future.
 
“Had we never seen those beautiful pictures, we might never have even heard of the place,” said my Grammy.
 
The W.P.A. guides were more than just a jobs for Americans when work was scarce, they were the modern mappings of the future golden years of America.

Many of us have gone away from home for long periods of time; whether it be to the comfort of a breakfast-in-bed five-star suite or off to band camp to rekindle our long lost love of flutes (sorry). No matter the case, each of us has come back with experiences that marked the trip with an emotional connection to the place and time that helps categorize its very memory (and I’ve never been to band camp and I don’t play the flute, by the way). Unfortunately for most of us, however, the memories are marked with the same Fortune 500 company logos that we see every day here in NYC. Sunoco gas station here, Lowes theatre there; they are the cookie cutter rest stops. For Agee and Berkowitz, the image of the road was far different
 
The birth of tourism in 1930’s saw the inception of a burgeoning giant – the United States travel industry. At the hand of the paid vacation and cheap(er) cars, Americans taking to the road became a booming attraction with the helpful introduction of WPA guides, writer’s tales from the road, and even a motion picture or two for the lucky middle-classer. What it meant to ‘see’ America was changing, and for the many who took onto the ‘socialist’ notion of being paid to have fun outside of the office, they would pave the way for the capitalist engine to take a different form that those of us in the here and now see the result of all too much; the corporate roadside.
 
For the many stalwart capitalists formerly against the frivolous notion of paying employees for vacation time, the sight of tourists quickly became a positive one. As Berkowitz notes, these businessmen capitalized on tourism’s fruits as a ‘”strategy for economic development,” making the development of roadside attractions into a solid financial investment. Though nothing new for us, Agee saw the beginnings of the McDonalds/Denny’s/Cinnabon conglomerates; for him, disguised as popsicle stands, automobile camps, and an authentic homegrown America. Now, there’s no escaping the uniformity that is our highway system during our own quests for Walden-like, organic authenticity. Is it any different, though?
 
So, is traveling America’s highways the same as it once was? –Of course, unquestionably not. But what becomes of the new American road and what can it still mean for the middle-class American? For one, it means that in order to find a mom and pop, you’ve got to travel off of Route 66. But we asked for it. We consume McDonalds. We embrace it. The roadside America that we see on our journeys far and wide is the product of our insatiable appetite for both the obvious, food, and for the familiar. For better or for worse, it’s these companies that have made the American hoping to consume freedom just another American consumer. “I’m lovin’ it?”
 
Though it may be as American as apple pie, if I see one more Roy Rogers on my next roadtrip….
 
…I’m going to stop there and get bacon melt cause that shit is delicious.

Reading A Cool Million by Nathanael West is like watching the Saw movie series; you see the main figure broken down and dismembered, but hey, at least you get a laugh out of it.

West’s A Cool Million hits on a theme we’ve been getting at with our recent Guthrie Bound for Glory and Kromer Waiting for Nothing pieces, and that is the recognition of the failed American Dream. Changing course from Guthrie’s fictitious hyperbole and Kromer’s complete despair, A Cool Million epitomizes the coalescing literary balance of reality’s tragic humor.

A Cool Million’s Lemuel Pitkin, the short novel’s protagonist, is the young boy caught in the middle of many of the book’s agonies as he is the anti-Horatio Alger; i.e. the boy who’s fallen and can’t get up. He sets out on the advice of his admired elders to make money to save his family home from being repossessed. But this isn’t the story of a young scout making his fortune through hard work and sheer determination like Horatio, but rather of the one Lem each of us has in our lives; the friend who trusts everyone and everything, tells you that they love you but then smashes your heart to pieces on limo ride to prom by saying she slept with the entire offensive line. Just me? Sorry.

Throughout the story Lem trusts the insight of his elders, especially the weird Mr. Shagpoke Whipple who leads him in the wrong direction nearly every single time. Lem’s lack of consciousness and awareness of the greed and deceit of others is astounding and truly makes the story. Lem loses his money, over and over, but he loses his eye, his teeth, his thumb, his leg and his scalp, but never his blind hope; the same cannot be said for his dignity. All in all, Lem’s mishaps seem to occur in a very well-defined microcosm of society, so much so that it lacks the breadth of depravity many of our previous works display. West’s Lemuel seems to represent the harshness of living rather than the harshness of Depression U.S.

After losing track of Whipple and being “shot at several times,” Lem makes his way over to catch a train bound “northeast.” There we see the tried individualism of Lem’s situation wrapped up in West’s comical black humor.

“Unfortunately, all his money had been lost in the opera house fire and he was unable to pay for a ticket. The conductor, however, was a good-natured man. Seeing that the lad had only one leg, he waited until the train slowed down at a curve before throwing him off.”

It’s situations like these that are affronts to Horatio Alger where I lose the ‘call to action’ fervor that pieces like Kromer’s and Steinbeck’s are able to mobilize so well. The individualized plight and accompanying humor of West’s piece serves to bring the troubles of life into the forefront, but lacks the powerful agency to make it a tour de force in an era of Dorothea Langes and Woodie Gutries. Where West engages his audience in hackneyed views of life, he loses the magnitude of the Depression and its impact on the landscape for all.

 Was Tom Joad gay? Do you know that for sure? Why shouldn’t he be? Why couldn’t he be? As a red-blooded American, Tom Joad, the bastion of masculinity, is now gay. How do we feel about that? 
It’s no secret, many writers who went on the road in the 1930’s were in search of more than the sights and sounds of the American pastoral, many were in search of finding themselves. Tom Kromer, in his depressing Depression account of his travels throughout the United States, chose to engage in gay sex for money, but gay sex none-the-less. Even though it was out of necessity, Kromer’s steamy chapter was stricken from the original publication for its explicit content.
 
Have many things changed? Besides the cliché Brokeback Mountain of recent memory, little has challenged the masculinity of the man, and the less-than-masculine perception of the gay male. What does this masculinity perception do? Well, for Tom in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, emasculation is something he and his family are all too familiar with. Tom and others like him survived along the paternalist structure of tenant farming; depending on another man for his and his family’s livelihood. What became of Tom? He with the help of Casy, were able to form a new masculine ideal; one that brought together the masses, fought against unfair landowners, and birthed a shared commitment to traditional and fair labor. Heroically, Tom is forced to work for his cause from afar, as police have deemed him an outlaw, operating outside of the acceptable and punishable by imprisonment or worse. He’s a rabblerouser. A bastard. A red.
 
This neo-masculinity of the 1930’s that Tom Joad exemplifies so well, is something nearly every schoolchild in the nation can say they’ve read on their literary checklist (or at least on SparkNotes). It’s a story every man wants to identify with and one every man wishes he could be; a resilient outsider ready to do anything for his family and for his people to make things just. Now. What if Tom was gay? How would Tom have acted differently? Would any of us even know who Tom Joad was? I think this is a point Steinbeck doesn’t address for this simple reason; it shouldn’t and doesn’t matter.
 
When has a gay man or woman not been grouped into a categorically discriminated whole? When has GLBT community not felt oppressed because their rights as Americans were being abused? Tom Joad’s cause is the cause of so many Americans, one that breaks from conventional wisdom to shine the light on a quandary so egregious that a great literary work on the subject can be run every curriculum in the nation for generations to come. Reshaping false perception to fit reality, that is Steinbeck’s intention.
 
The simple invisibility of gays during the Depression-era exemplifies the need accept that there were gays inevitably interspersed within the worker’s rights movement. With governors, representatives, and other public officials bashing gays one week and coming out the next, there’s no reason to perceive Tom as anything; gay or straight. We, of course, have coded him along with other strong men to immortalize his figure in the name of strength, fortitude, and tough for all the right reasons. He’s the hero. He’s the man. He’s a man. His is the same fight so many Americans face every day of our lives. Not just Jack Kerouac.
 
When will we accept Tom Joad was gay? Only until we accept that the plight of the minority affects the identity of every American; the identity of us all.

Waiting for Nothing could not be a better name for Tom Kromer’s helpless, hopeless depiction of 1930’s Depression America.  Kromer’s journey taking him across the country, spoke volumes about the struggling masses exposing – what Stephen Colbert would say – the ‘truthiness’ of their plight and the adherence to the facts many in our class have been waiting for. I would argue, however, that the reason so few have ever even heard of such a great work, is because of that very ‘truthiness’ fact. The Steinbeck’s and Guthrie’s of the world made their mark because they brought the poor to the masses, something Kromer does not accomplish for most.

In telling his tales of “Stiffs” getting in fights, disrespecting the police, and constantly waiting for their next meal, Kromer is able to artfully show his readers what is at stake in Depression United States. Lives. Many of them.  Families of them. Charity is hard to come by, and hunger is life’s only constant. Sound familiar? If so, that may be because we read depression Grapes of Wrath in middle school, seen glimpses of depression in pictures from Dorothea Lange, heard depression from musicians like Woody Guthrie, and maybe even saw it by enjoying the cinematic hit, Oh Brother Where Art Thou? Though well written and most true to events that took place on the ground, Kromer’s Waiting For Nothing fails to show much more than blanketed depravity, and therefore, has garnered far less exposure than others in his field. After all, depression is depressing and unless someone is giving it to you in visual, harmonic, or literary beauty, you just don’t want to hear about it.

Ostensibly, there is need for more cohesion of thought when producing a travel novel. What succeeds in Kromer’s depiction of Depression-era United States lies in the absoluteness of his cause: to find out what it is truly like to have no money, no work, and no hope. What lacks in his dozen-or-so chapters is a sense of direction or even one of progress. This is the obvious point of Kromer’s written word as no self-respecting book would name itself, Waiting for Nothing, and end up waiting for something. Unfortunately, this does not do authors like Tom Kromer very well, as the proliferation of their very important thoughts and experiences never make it as far as the Hollywooded-up bombshells like Grapes.

What is more important to stenographers of the Depression –Fidelity to the facts (something even Kromer admits failing to wholly do), or creating a narrative for storytelling attractiveness? I would argue, men and women like Steinbeck and Lange, though less truthful, are able to get more of their message across to more people and over more generations than the likes of Kromer for their storytelling abilities. The mind of a Stiff is vital to our conception of unemployed men of the time, but how does this depiction help if a 21 year old NYU student has never even heard of your name? Works like Waiting for Nothing hold exceptional places in our travel discourse, but couldn’t they affect so many more if they held exceptional places in our conventional literary discourse as well?

Woody Guthrie is a creature of his time. His journey out of Dust Bowl Oaklaholma made him the unofficial figurehead of the Okies’ struggle to find work and keep hope alive, while at the same time, revolutionizing the music and recording industries. In Guthrie’s Bound For Glory, the reader is taken alongside the author into the depths of poverty and hunger of Depression/Dust Bowl U.S.
 
Guthrie was never one to shy away from provocation, and caught substantial flak for his relations with communist organizations during America’s ‘Red Scare’ period. Rarely though, were his works taken affectionately to those who had money. Guthrie was a man of his word, and his word spoke to the hoards of displaced and aching families through music and writings. Bound For Glory is an exposé of personalities and experiences while on the road in the 1930’s, complete in a tight autobiographical bundle.
 
I loved hearing Woody in true dialect. He wrote and spoke like his fellow Okies and therefore, entered his readers into a space where nearly no one of the time could. Rarely in activist/causal writings are readers able to hear maladies and other goings-on from a local; a person whom has both firsthand sight and the vocabulary to describe atrocities happening at home. Readers see ethnographers, biographers, sociologists, etc., and never the words directly from the horse’s mouth. In my opinion, this makes Guthrie’s interactions and contemplations in Bound For Glory all the more astounding.
 
In clear hyperbole, Guthrie inks what I see as the most telling of all his thoughts in his “Off to California” chapter. Guthrie writes:
 
“…Just what in the hell has gone wrong here, anyhow? I’m not a very smart man. Maybe it ought to be this way, with the crops laying all over the ground…There’s enough here in the fround to feed every hungry kid from Maine to Florida, and from there to Seattle.”
 
Guthrie is attempting to appeal to the masses by immersing himself in Okie-think. Of course, there is not even close to enough crop rotting on the ground to feed the hunger of millions of Americans, but the depravity and over-simplification is exactly what makes his ideas respectable and durable across space and time. Should Guthrie had decided to stray from his roots and approach his experiences from the role as an academic or even as a sympathizer, his words would lose their power; their valor.
 
He was the voice of the downtrodden American migrant worker. Nothing was more important than the necessity for food, and nothing less distressing than the senseless waste of bare necessities.

It’s no secret that members of the working class saw their wages, wealth, and status' decrease during the Great Depression. These men, women, and children, many of whom have lived in America for generations, were plum out of luck. However, there was a great difference between the northern poor and the southern: sharecropping.
 
I was immediately drawn to the Caldwell piece detailing the lives of sharecroppers – both their plight and hopelessness – but strayed a bit from Goodwin’s critique of her and Bourke. Clichés are clichés, but if there was ever a time when pictures are worth a thousand words, Caldwell’s line of photos takes the cake. I am a big proponent of hyperbole to promote a good cause and Caldwell dances perfectly across the line of genuine dismay and over-embellishment to a “T.”
 
Critiqued for being closer to the side of fiction than fact, Goodwin doesn’t hold back about his beliefs of journalistic integrity by saying the technique in which Caldwell and Burke wrote captions for their stories, “serves to compound two fictions.” Now, understandably, Goodwin has justice in saying that there are standards authors and documentarians have responsibility to enjoin picture and complete truth, but what people like Goodwin choose not to see is the importance of a writer’s vision when telling a story. Goodwin might argue that there should be no story, but it is just such dire circumstances that someone one their side, fighting for their cause.
 
As outlined by Caldwell and Bourke, sharecropping is no easy system; worse yet, it’s not even a fair one. What land each family is able to work is quickly sucked of nutrition from overuse, and soon turns into a system of indentured servitude with no end in sight. I would ask Goodwin, “what of this requires any less effort from writers and photographers to pull people up than the effort by the owners of land to push people down?” And, if you find this system to be unjust like many others and I do, why wouldn’t you fight fire with fire? Instead, Goodwin tears Caldwell and Bourke down for improving lighting and inputting strong, meaningful prose in hopes of helping to gain public support for changing the system.
 
All of this week’s pieces were strong, moving photographic depictions of what it means to be a depression-age American, and in my opinion, the more, the merrier. Photos can be doctored, photos can be misused, but when showing the firsthand experience of  Americans toAmericans leads to shocking criticism, it means somebody’s doing something right.

The vast majority of us travel for rest, relaxation, to see the world and for pleasure (in Southeast Asia). We go along with our party-picture-laden college digital camera and we capture images of beauty; pieces of the trip we want to remember and preserve for our family, our friends, our children (not yet). Asch, Hickcock, and Pyle don’t have a digital camera. They don’t have a necessary destination. They are not on vacation. Their relationship to their journey is one of pen and paper, tire and road, despair and more despair. They aimed to capture the many depressing, harsh realities along the journey, and show the future day-trippers of our time just how our earlier Americans once lived, and hopefully, got by.

Frankly, sad is the day that anyone has to read such powerful, but horribly depressing pieces. The three effectively display poverty, social unrest, and government’s (lack of) effective intervention in 1930's America. Asch seems to come away with a piece of himself missing. His words are laden with depression and angst, seemingly getting nothing but misery out of his trip into hell. Though his takeaway is left definite but unfortunate, Asch still does well to his audience by providing a personal endgame: vast and udder depression. At the end, Asch was just left with nothing but sadness; something easily passed on to his audience. Both Hickcock and Pyle leave their view quite open-ended and unfinished, something that could have been more personally addressed.

What Pyle and Hickcock do succeed in, lies in the outside debate over what the true purpose of displaying distress sans alternatives. There are two tacks to take: One being the fact that personal accounts when in the field may be more beneficial to the inactive reader because of their human element; or secondly, that without personal input, the writer’s audience is able to have more of a individualized, personal stake in remediating and understanding the disparate relationship between (upper) middle-class readers, and their fellow impoverished Americans. Maybe the purpose is just that; to think about it for yourself.

By the time Asch, Hickcok, and Pyle’s word got around about the (literally) fruitless 1930’s, our populous was just thankful to be out absolute poverty and into a war that (again, literally) rallied the troops (sorry for the literally-s). Our nation was now gripped by war-industry but also a much higher marginal tax rate compared to that of the robber baron early-20th Century. Did the people feel Asch’s depression and shift the debate? Did Pyle and Hickcock’s observations fundamentally shift the American conscience in favor of the poor?

Unfortunately, we may owe the end to the depressing thirties not to any writer or any traveler. Our devastating amount of poor was only matched by Europe’s devastation post-WWII. What came of a devastated Europe? – A marauding world power known as America. So was it the conscience of a few that changed the lives of many? Yes. But unfortunately for so many of us it wasn’t Nathan Asch who brought us back from the brink, it was that bastard, Hitler.

Sitting at the dinner table, rarely do many of us NYU’ers have to worry about staving off the next hunger pang, riot, or epic flood. Rarely is also the day when any of our lovely women need to suckle milk to others in order to keep others alive. These instances are luckily, not (quite) our reality.

More Americans are in poverty since the passage of the Civil Rights Act with almost one out of seven living below the federal marker. With a bit of our own new, New Deal underway, we look back to Grapes for a window into how the family operates under the ultimate in stressful situations. Does money equal happiness? –Maybe. However, does poverty equal familial implosion? –The Joads show us, no.

Throughout their journey across the vast plains and deserts of our lower-48, the Joads encountered problem after problem, most times at the hand of law enforcement and farm owners. Though this spurs great tumult amongst the family and many others, their home base remains being with each other even while seeing men like Casy and Connie leave their ranks. This commitment to family is a noble endeavor, and one most of our families (including my own) are not able to achieve even with all the money in the world.

In their piece, “Growth of Family in The Grapes of Wrath,” co-authors Britch and Lewis detail the ways in which family togetherness has been the abiding force behind the Joads’ solidarity through seemingly insurmountable times. In their own words;

"if ever the mettle of the American spirit has been tested and found strong, it has been so with the Joads."

The family, Britch and Lewis would argue, has been a glue that hasheld the family - and the larger whole – together. The two state;

“As proud as it is of its pioneering background, the family is not a Joad but a unit--a we--made up of several singular "I's" who answer to the name if Joad.”

The family is the most fundamental unit of social organization, according to Britch and Lewis, and is the basis for the novel’s progeny of ground-up law, enforcement, and education. In fact, in order for Tom to help his family at the end of the novel and beyond, his assistance will be under the arc of helping to organize strikers; an indirect way of helping Joads through a direct way of helping the proletariat.

This is Steinbeck’s focus; the smallest unit of individuals’ cohesion - the family –  amasses in a way that at its most basic level, is done in an effort to help their very own survive, but at the same time, is prodding the powers-that-be along the path toward justice, fairness, and a means for all out of severe plight. What Britch and Lewis point out, is that Steinbeck worked tirelessly not simply to show the devastation inflicted upon and by individuals due to horrific events during a trying time in our history, but also how out of great sorrow, one can learn a great deal about steadfastness and how unifying the smallest measure of societal interaction can lead to the advancement of all.

We just don’t know how good we have it.

Hot, sweaty, desperate, sick, dying, dead. Migrant workers of California have been working themselves to the bone ever since the days of Steinbeck, and still do to this day. The Joad family journey may be remarkable to many of us, but for the millions still fighting for fair wages and fair conditions in the California labor force, it is the mundane and everyday and only getting more competitive.

In the Joads’ day, “Okies,” – the term many times used derogatorily to refer to the streams of migrant workers coming out of the Midwest  – drove across the open plains and through arid desert in order to find work for themselves and their families. Signs entering California would read, “No Niggers or Okies,” posted on the sides of roads to dissuade prospective families with the waiting opposition and oppression ahead of them. Today, California’s Pa and Ma Joad have been replaced with migrants looking for work that go by a different name and equally demonized name, “Mexicans.”

Illegals, aliens, and illegal aliens as they are most commonly referred, come north into the California fields and construction sites from all points south in Mexico and beyond. Unlike the Joads, many of them come alone or with a close friend, sending whatever money they can back to their ailing families while others still come together as a closely-tied family unit. These men and women, numbering some 2.5 million in California and nearly 12 million nationwide, operate under a wild-west type of labor system not too dissimilar to the days of The Grapes of Wrath. Because there is so much supply for labor, many do not have any type of regular working schedule. They wait out on corners at four in the morning looking for a scrap of a day-job any employer can throw them for a measly wage.

When it comes to feeding your family, many will resort to drastic measures. In the incident involving Casy, Tom, and a local deputy, Casy is carted off to take blame for a large fight and the ‘family’ is further fractured. This is a life not too dissimilar to those working in the U.S. illegally. When caught, existing families in America are often split up, sending one father back across the border while mother and child stay with one less income to support the lot. Many argue that because many of our present day migrant workers are committing a fundamental crime against American labor by taking jobs that could be available to American citizens; they therefore have no standing and cannot compare with the Dust Bowl, Depression era refugee. These men, women, and even children need our help.

 Not one person should defend the practice of crossing our border illegally from the north or south, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t understand and care. Our fear of the ‘other’ and of the different has scared many Americans so much that they forget the journey many of their parents and grandparents had to take in the search for jobs. Though many of the men and women of Dust Bowl era Oklahoma embarked on their journey to California as American citizens, they did so out of dire necessity, not because they were born in the United States. The advertized jobs may have well been in Mexico for how long the journey took from the Midwest to California, and it’s no coincidence that California was a ceded territory from the once sprawling Mexican state. National origin simply has no basis for discussion when your family is starving to death; anything that can be done, will be done.

These migrant workers from Mexico and elsewhere represent the Joads in all of us; they leave home for a land with promised royalties, but become victims of the system due to their absolute need of work. That necessity is what drove them and spurred many of our parents on to this great land. Out of that need, unfortunately, come abuses at the hand of bosses with complete rule and power. Unquestionably, our country cannot support tens of millions of illegal immigrants working, and many times, living under the table, but our path forward cannot be dictated by the misleading demagoguery of drug cartels, crime, and skin color. Before we can move into a reasonable debate we need to see these relative comparisons between our history, and the history of our closest neighbors.

They come out of need and stay because they have no way back. Let us help the unemployed find work in this country, but let us also understand the plight of the faceless workers of America and gain a minimum standard of rights for the people that help drive the economy for us all.

There are times in our history that repeat themselves and there are times when history is repeated. In 1930’s America, the Depression that began with the stock market crash of 1928 continued on into the “dust bowl era;” a time when nationwide catastrophes seemed to call each other up to discuss the next time they wanted to stage a disaster. Though the debate on how societally organic each of the two events were remains in political contention, what did not help the migrant workers of the dust bowl - like the Joads of Steinbeck’s  Grapes of Wrath ­– were the money-owning interests’ power to tamp down their own negative returns, while at the same time, crushing the families they once fought for as customers. It’s a problem we willfully practice to this very day, and before long, the whole of us will be looking for opportunity in the West, though it may no longer be in this country.

Early on in Grapes, revered author John Steinbeck, takes his readers and his protagonists on a trip of necessity in one as old as time; the journey away from absence in search of abundance. On the results end, the equation is simple; no work + family expenses = need to find other work to support family. To the Joads and many other Americans of the 1930’s Midwest, this was their reality. Though today, working class families experience many of the same hardships, it was neither their’s nor the Joads fault. The dust bowl gripped the region unlike anything ever seen before ‘till now, but it wasn’t the loss of crops that forced the journey; like today, it was the banks.

In late-summer and early-fall of 2008 Americans once again saw the power that is the United States financial system with the collapse of Bear Stearns, and the eventual bailout of our largest ‘big banks.’ Side-bets made by only the biggest banks and investment houses, called derivatives trading, used individual investors’ money to make larger and larger profits for the already largest and most profitable. The result? – A crash of monumental proportion and a mirror image of Depression/Dust Bowl U.S.

Frankly, I don’t believe many of us have read Grapes since high school or beyond, but I was floored by the incredible similarities between today’s mess, and the weary times of the 1930’s. Banks are taking over family homes, people are living directly out of their cars, and somehow, the biggest banks seem to be doing just fine. To this day, their balance sheets display record quarterly profits. In the desperate search for work, lines of people in their Sunday best wait outside unemployment offices the same way old jalopies parked themselves on the sides of Route 66, hoping for just a chance at a new beginning. Even the perils of being without healthcare hits home when Granpa Joads falls ill and dies on the side of road. Effectually, it’s even illegal to be poor when you’re dead – if you can’t afford a burial site, it’s illegal to bury any cadaver no matter what the person means to you. How did we treat our own people like this? Are we any better today?

Crashes like these disproportionately affect the poor – everyone knows that. What so few of us realize is that the Grapes of Wrath sequel playing out right before our very eyes – when money gets tight, the powerful banks are more likely to tighten their belts, forcing the pinch upon their once beloved customer. Bank of America – a primary but not unitary culprit in our most recent implosion – needs to enhance lending so the people’s lives they helped to destroy can afford to hire more jobs, help others regain home ownership, and get the workers back to doing what they love to do for themselves and this country; work. We’re all a little weary about our future, but until our biggest banking institutions are properly regulated and split up, we will continue to enter and re-enter our cycles of boom and bust. Individual stewardship of one’s own family can only go so far, but with appropriate political pressure, we can hopefully, finally, allow the dust to clear and enter a new era of supporting the American Worker.

IN travel, those of us who are able to escape our homes, backyards, and city streets; go on the road, in the air, and across the sea to find out more about ourselves and the rest of humanity – at least, according to Caldwell, that’s what we ought to be doing.

Author Erskine Caldwell writes of his travels in one year from 1934 to ’35; all along the way, documenting his casual interactions with locals from gas stations in Kansas, to hamburger flippers in Illinois and what he absorbed along the way. On his cross-country journey spanning such time and place, Caldwell does well in exemplifying the everyman that every man could and should be during his travels across the America – one that is social, inquisitive, caring and above all, not on a particular path. Traveling.

To Caldwell, traveling is something more than taking a trip, more than seeing monuments, more than even the destination itself – to him as long as the frame is there, the masterpiece will paint itself. The man who travels, according to Caldwell, “is a stranger who gains a sympathetic understanding with the people he encounters.” It’s those encounters that he shares with his readers that define what it means to be a traveler, and to see how the rest of our fellow Americans live. 

Though we live in a world three quarters of a century removed from Caldwell’s Some American People, and even further from it’s rural, country life, his words speak to new generations of economically depressed Americans; the 99ers. These men and women aren’t from a pro football team, and no, their age is not about to cross into triple digits. Not too dissimilar to those roaming for work and means to feed their families, these unemployed men and women whom have been so for 99 weeks and can no longer receive their federally capped unemployment benefits. They are the hardest hit by our current economic downturn.
           
Their struggle lies not in heuristically finding themselves like Erskine Caldwell and the lucky few of us that still have a job, but in penny pinching, tightening their belts, and every other tired saying about being strapped for cash. These are our fellow Americans. They want to work. They want to provide for their families. Their unemployment rate doesn’t hover at a nationwide 9.6%; instead, their rate is at 100, every day, for the last two years. They are our brothers and sisters, and their immediate economic pain is our future agony. How will we help?

While in 1934 Marysville, Kansas, Caldwell sets that future out ahead of us while conversing at a gas station. The attendant, Bill, struggles to stay afloat amidst crippling depression. Though he is the man that owns the pump, and still has his job, selling a half-gallon of petrol every few hours means near zero profit for him. The same is true for our beloved unemployed. The less money they have to spend on the basics, the less each and every one of us is able to take home to our families and ourselves. The current unemployed are the life-blood to our own standards of living. The ditch is deep for the 99ers and the rest of the benefit-receiving unemployed; so deep, in fact, that we seldom see their calls for help and distress that could soon come knocking on our very own door. The journey, no matter how enriching, is not a luxury for many of us – it is the only way they and their families find work and have a roof over their heads.

Like Caldwell, those of us who can, must see how the other half really lives by traveling and meeting the great distressed in this country. Only then can we understand ourselves and the great project that is America – in Caldwell’s words, only then will we “come close to humanity”