Florala's blog

As I began reading the WPA guide to Maryland: The Old Line State, I was first struck by this bizarre and declarative definition.  “The Old Line State”?  As it turns out, Maryland supposedly got the nickname, “The Old Line State” from George Washington who was proud of the Maryland Line Troops. I have absolutely no idea what the Maryland Line Troops were, and have the hardest time imagining armies tromping around my hometown, but this is why I loved reading this guide to Maryland.

Did you know that in the 1800s, Baltimore (according to the guide it is pronounced, Bawlamur, which is still accurate to this day) was second only to New York City as port of entry for immigrants arriving from Europe.  I had no idea! What a fun fact (and this guide is full of fun facts)!  This makes sense because Baltimore is a town of neighborhoods celebrating their individual heritages such as Hollandtown (pronounce Highlandtown) or Germantown, and of course the sizable Little Italy.  These are what people miss when they come to visit Baltimore and are turned off when it isn’t the kitchy touristic town they were hoping for.  Too bad they didn’t read the WPA guide before they visited and they would know how amazing Maryland is.

Also, I had no idea that my town, Catonsville, was originally named Johnnycake (there’s an elementary school called Johnnycake elementary where kids are stabbed, I know that), named after an inn that was famous for its cornbread!  What great reasoning for naming a town.  But wait, there’s more.  I had heard a rumor that the church behind my house (if you cut through my neighbor’s yard) was where John Wilkes Booth went to school, and the guide has confirmed this! 

Another fantastic thing I read was that, “To the true Northerner, the accents of a Marylander have a pronounced suggestion of a Southern drawl, while to a Virginian and Carolinian, the Marylander’s pronunciation may frequently be tainted with the harshness of the Yankee tongue. “  When I was in Florida and Alabama this summer everyone thought of me as such a Yank and considered Maryland to be a far Northern state, while many people in Maryland consider themselves to be quite southern (maybe because of our customs). 

When reading about Baltimore, they discuss available accommodations, which are “119 hotels and tourist homes, auto and trailer camps in auto homes.”  I wonder where these auto and trailer camps were, because today, camping in Baltimore would just be immensely dangerous, but a funny site.  Yes, times have changed. See here, “…Baltimore’s relative purity is owing not to indignation but to indifference. Sin does not flourish because there is little demand for it.”  There’s a description that went out the door when “The Wire” came on television.

But yet there are so many amazing quotes that encapsulate Baltimore. “BALTIMORE (20 alt., 804,874 pop.) proud, self-sufficient, sits beside the Patapsco river, looking nostalgically to the South but turning to the North for what it takes to make a bank account grow…. Baltimore may be an ugly city, but it is charming in its ugliness… [Then when talking about Baltimoreans] Resentful of alien criticism, they reserve to themselves the right to curse the city’s shortcomings with might and main”.   I wish I had read this before, when I was living as a proud Marylander and Baltimorean.  I also wish I knew who penned these accurate phrases.  Make me a WPA writer too!

I am currently taking another course, in which we are looking in to what makes Chinatown unique, and as a result, what makes America what it is. We have been examining what it is that makes us culturally American, and many believe it lies in our history and the fact that almost all of us are immigrants.  This seemed to me to be lacking in some way, but I think that James Agee has given me the answer.  It lies in Americans’ restlessness and desire to travel and know what other parts of the world are like.  When immigrants came to America, they didn’t know what they would find, but they were willing to try to improve their lives. We are risk-takers, intrigued by the possibilities, travelling to new lands.   

It is just this that entices us to ride across the country, examining different regions and landscapes.  Unlike a journey to Europe where most is laid out for you – the hotel you will sleep in, the art and sites you will see, the culture you will experience – an American road trip is much less organized.  While driving, you and your family may become fatigued and will likely come across an auto camp (then prosperous enough to be deemed like a “cash crop”).  A spontaneous decision can be made to stay the night, and all will be well.  It is the spontaneity that enlivens the American road trip – perhaps the essence of the American road trip - and I think it comes down to the billboard.       

A perfect example is the “Wall Drug” billboards, which were created in 1931 to convince people to come to Wall, South Dakota.  I’ve heard about these billboards since I was a kid, as my parents were convinced by the billboards to stop in Wall Drug, where they purchased a gigantic moose hat, and ever since they have collected everything moose.  Basically, for hundreds of miles there are signs on the highways stating “800 miles to Wall Drug – FREE ICE WATER!”  A gimmick, sure, but hey, Wall Drug is still one of the largest tourist attractions in the north.  Without the billboards and the freedom of the open road and your own car, Wall, South Dakota would be a very different place, and the classic American road trip wouldn’t be the spontaneous adventure it is. 

A Cool Million is the tale of a young boy of fifteen who sets out to make enough money to save his mother’s house, but end up losing not only the house, but also his teeth, and eye, a leg, a thumb, his scalp, dignity, and finally his life.  What amuses me so much, however, is the way in which Nathanael West ridicules the Horatio Alger story while having lived a sort of Horatio Alger story himself.  Born to a Jewish family, he resented his heritage and the way in which he was tormented for his ethnicity. While he failed high school, through cunning he forced his way into Brown, and while he was rejected from all fraternities he became a famous author.  True, in the end he was unfortunately killed in an automobile accident at the age of 37, but he accomplished what many work towards their whole lives, and he started out poor no less. According to the article by Walden, West believed that the way to success was through “cunning, craft, power, fraud, and aggression” and in many ways these were the methods West used to reach the top.  Cunning and fraud were used to get into college, power came with a degree from Brown, and craft can clearly be seen in his numerous published works, which might have brought him to the top.  Shagpoke Whipple would have been proud.

There’s no doubt that Nathanael West seems somewhat unhappy.  At least we can say that he is unhappy with the “American Dream” and the ways in which it is propagated. In thinking about his personal unhappiness, however, I came to wonder how much the stereotypes and racism were necessary and how much was true racism self-hatred.  His disdain for his own heritage and the way in which he portrays stereotypical minorities is quite jarring and I don’t know if they were exactly crucial to the point he was making.  All of these terrible things would have easily happened without mention of the evil Chinaman who sells innocent porcelain-skinned American girls into prostitution, or brutal ‘Indians’ who scalp people and Southerners who are brainless and run amok lynching folks.  It seems to me that the story would have worked perfectly well without these stereotypes, as that is not exactly the point of the Horatio Alger story. 

Additionally, I thought it was interesting that while West hints at the cause of the extreme poverty plaguing the nation in his story, he doesn’t exactly talk about the extreme widespread poverty in the country, but makes it seem as though there is poverty because Lem just can’t get a break and because New York City is full of scumbags.  It seems to me as though this novel could have taken place at any time in the past hundred years, not just during the Depression.  Doesn't it seem as though A Cool Million is simply a sarcastic and pessimistic complaint about life in general? 

After learning about the hobo culture of the Great Depression in the 1930s, I thought I would examine hobo culture today.  A first difference in the hobo lifestyle definitely lies in the severity of the poverty that people such as Tom Kromer experienced.  Since the 1930s our country has set up countless systems, non-profits, and organizations to help people out of a life of poverty – not to say that it is entirely effective.  Today there is an acceptance among many (not everyone) that sometimes poverty is out of your hands and that assistance is needed. 

However, today a culture of poverty remains, but in a different way.  One of my classes recently discussed the term “hipster” and how it is used in society today.  Mainly, it has a negative connotation of pretentious posers, or at least this is one of the conclusions we came to.  A hipster lives the “bohemian” life, emulating the lifestyle of the hippies of the 1960s, and often lives a life of modest means, whether necessary or desired.  What interests me is the intersection of the hobo lifestyle with the hipster life.  They seem to be clumped into one group today, but contradict each other somewhat.  One article I found describing Portland, OR described it as the “town of hoboes and hipsters”.  Another person, referring to some vile drink, says only “cheap bastards, hobos, and hipsters (ok, a little redundant there) make it a point of honor to drink this stuff”.  And yet another website even created the game ‘Hipster, Hobo or in a Band?’, where you guess which is which.  No, these writers are not sociologists or anthropologists, but somehow it is evident that in many people’s minds, hipsters are very much linked to hobos.

If you ask me, I think it all comes back to the romanticized notion of life on the road, livin’ off the land.  Mix in a little revolution from the 1960s, a privileged upbringing and voila!  A hipster is made.  The laissez-faire hobo lifestyle portrayed in movies and pop culture sucks us all in, including myself.  In fact, there is still a strong hobo community today and current estimates state that there are around 20,000 people living the hobo lifestyle today!  They have symbols and secret codes to indicate safe places to sleep and even have hobo conventions! There are many such conventions, but the National Hobo Convention is held every August in Britt, Iowa.  (If you want to support the convention you can buy a lightweight fleece fest with the NHC insignia, for the very low price of $50.)  The organizing, fundraising, and publicity of these hobo conventions seems to tell me that it isn’t just the hipsters who romanticize the hobo lifestyle, but all of those who remember or yearn for a simpler time.  Yet, I wonder what Tom Kromer and his fellow stiffs would think of hipsters and hobos today…

Tom Kromer’s “Waiting for Nothing” is reminiscent of Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath”, told in vignettes, but instead of chronicling one families trial and tribulations, focuses on one man’s struggles.  Most chapters begin with Tom’s hunger and then later focus on how he will go about finding some sort of sustenance and shelter.  He is quite descriptive in the things that he eats, unlike in “Grapes of Wrath”.  He describes how he makes his stew and how he goes about purchasing the ingredients.  He describes what it feels like to sleep on a bench during a cold night – sheltered by an old newspaper except for the air coming from below through the cracks in the bench.  He does whatever he must in order to find food and a place to sleep, and even one time goes home with a wealthy transsexual man.  The reader can understand Tom’s plight through the details provided, but aren’t necessarily compelled to pity Tom, as he doesn’t seem to dramatize in his narration as Steinbeck often does.  Tom struggles day after day, but his story is of him getting by.  He comments on the difficulties that families face, such as the families waiting in the soup lines or living in the garbage jungle, but he moves about on his own, uninhibited, simply getting by. 

There are many intriguing stories in his journey, however.  I was most intrigued by the ways in which Tom and his fellow ‘stiffs’ tug on the heart strings of others.  In the first chapter a man gives Tom a full steak dinner just to make himself look good to the other customers.  As Tom is finishing his dinner, another man comes up to him and gives him enough money for a ‘flop’ that night.  Tom comments on the ways in which these men deal out their charity, the first quite publicly and the second without need for recognition.  Kromer doesn’t seem to necessarily look down upon the first man, but certainly respects the second more. This sort of distinction between the ways in which people gave charity is interesting. Another chapter describes the way in which ‘stiffs’ would act out a scene to tug at the heart strings of women waiting for a bus.  They would purchase a donut only to leave it on the curb in sight of these women, and later act pathetic when they pick it up and eat it, earning over $2 with this scam.  Scam or not though, these men (and they seem to be mostly men in Tom’s story) are truly hungry.  The story turns from charity in a well-lit town, to death from starvation in a ‘flop’ at the end (not to mention the horrifying image of a bed swarming with lice).  But no matter what, Tom tells an intriguing and seemingly honest tale of living day-to-day in search of “three hots and a flop”.

Boxcar Bertha andHungry Men, by Ben Reitman and Edward Anderson respectively each allow new perspective into the lives of transient people in the 1930s and 40s.  While most have us have read The Grapes of Wrath and have probably learned of bread lines and the great migration to California, many have never heard of the people who chose to travel as bums, seeking adventure.

In fact, it doesn’t seem to be all that rare.  In both Reitman and Anderson’s pieces, we find that a great deal of the people living on the road and relying on “the Muny” were people seeking freedom and some fresh air.  Often they had legitimate reasons for leaving their homes, or as in Bertha’s case, had been travelling for most of their lives, and they became used to this lifestyle, and felt no need to change.  In fact it makes sense that many people were rebelling against the harsh realities of living and working in factories in cities, where there was already an abundant amount of poverty to begin with.  Socialism and communism go hand in hand with the idea of “going back the earth” and these ideas are common in Anderson’s and Reitman’s writings as well.  In fact, in one part, Bertha even lives in a commune and leaves her daughter in the care of these people. While ideas of communism only existed in Steinbeck’s writing to those looking to ban it, it is accepted and discussed freely in Anderson and Reitman.

Another common theme is the access and abundance of social work and federal aid.  We all know that Social Work came to exist in the time of the Great Depression, but I had no idea of the extent to which the organization and structure existed for these migrants, and how many were already milking the system.  It was interesting to see the way in which Bertha finds her place helping others, using her knowledge of their lifestyles to her benefit. The way Reitman told Bertha’s story was interesting in how it felt like the story could have been told in the 60s or even today.  She simply wasn’t ready to be a mother and loved the life on the road.  She says, “The rich can become globe trotters, but those without money become bums.”

I chose to read/view ”Have You Seen Their Faces” before reading any critiques of the work.  Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White organize their ‘photo-text’ starting with a selection of photographs by Margaret Bourke-White which are also accompanied by captions written by both authors.  After the photographs comes an essay on the social, economic, and political climate in the ‘struggling South’.

The presentation of the photographs and text lead the viewer and reader to assume that what they view on paper in photographic evidence and in the captions is the truth.  The captions are phrased in ways that make it seem as though Bourke-White and Caldwell have taken quotes from these individuals who are captured on film.  In fact, the authors pulled these captions from thin air, essentially taking all credibility that they had and throwing it away.  Instead of giving a voice to these ‘pitiful’ and ‘suffering’ people, they took their voices away and dramatized their plight, often in stereotypical and embarrassing ways – “They keep coming along like watermelons in the summertime.”

Not only were the captions falsified, but Margaret Bourke-White additionally dramatized the photographs, adding false lighting and staging her pictures.  While she “operated the equipment with a remote shutter release and flash control” and felt that this method “imprisoned [people] on a sheet of film before they knew what had happened”, there is nothing honest about her portrayal.  Perhaps people would argue that the subjects of the photos already knew that there was a camera focused on them, but there is so much intrusion and production when one comes into another’s house, sets up cameras and expects people to act as though all was normal.  It is unrealistic.

Erskine Caldwell’s narration as well is over the top and dramatized, portraying the plight of these people in a way that seems like a “living newspaper”.  It “provides a picturesque impression of living conditions in the deep south” according to James Goodwin.  I absolutely agree.  Even if I didn’t know of the fictitious quality of the photographs and captions or the authors’ lack of consideration that documentation rather than fiction was ideal in making a point, I wouldn’t have been able to respect Caldwell’s flowery writing.  His writing makes people living in the South seem pitiful and pathetic and is entirely patronizing.

This all being said, I think the photographs were aesthetically beautiful and the writing poetic.  If someone was to take it all as fact and ignore how insulting it is to people in the South, they would surely be persuaded to sign up to fight along-side Caldwell and Bourke-White.

It is true that tourism thrived with the invention of Ford’s Model-T car, but it really wasn’t until after WWII that mass tourism came to exist in the United States.   The people travelling in the 1930s were at least middle-class with the extra funds to a) own a car, b) purchase fuel for this car, and c) have a decent job that provides its employees with paid vacation.  This being said, not very many people went around the country during their paid vacation with their families in their station wagons, visiting mining towns or impoverished Southern states.  I found Anderson’s “Puzzled America” to be fascinating in this way. I had read about the Great Depression before, but most authors spoke about migrant workers travelling to California or the impoverished conditions in homes.  Anderson speaks of the politics and thoughts going through people’s minds during the late 1930s, in areas that I have much familiarity with, especially the South.

This past summer I lived with my grandmother, Erma Nell (in the photograph taken near to where she lived), who grew up in rural Alabama and now lives in what we call L.A. - Lower Alabama.  It was an eye-opening experience, which made me aware of my prejudices and expectations of Southern people and Southern states.  Interestingly enough, it seems as though many of these prejudices existed in the 1930s, but we still have this strange fascination with the South.  I love the way Anderson describes it.

“It is intangible and illusive – this feeling for the South and all it stands for.  You have it or you haven’t.  You can’t put your finger on what arouses it in you.  It must be born in you or come down into you from a grandfather or grandmother.  Each of these Southern States has its own individuality, but there also is this other thing, the Southland.  Well she isn’t perfect.  She is opinionated, headstrong, not so beautiful now. But you adore her.”

The South is an interesting place, where farmers work hard, and a great majority is poor.  They live more like the miners – close to nature- but farther separated from the big cities, whereas the miners know that the coal which they mine goes to fuel big factories.  My grandmother was born into a farming family and worked hard on the farm from as early as age four, picking cotton and peanuts.  This need to work often doesn’t allow people to go to school.  As Anderson puts it, “it is long-continued ignorance that breeds cruelty.”  He accepts and acknowledges the ways in which the North sees the South, but for once allows Southerners to have a voice through his writing, and we in turn find out that the Southerners feel very similarly to those in the rest of the country.  Our assumptions about people we don't know are foolish, and we did it then, and still now.

This investigative journalism, in the form of a road-trip, done by Anderson seems to be ground-breaking, and ties perfectly in with what is happening today with the uneducated extremist right, who seems now to be the majority in America.  It is this type of travelling that separated the travelling writers and artists from the travelling majority. 

On August 21, 1939 in Kern County, California, the book The Grapes of Wrath was banned from the Kern County Public Library for a great many reasons, but the one that stuck out to me was that, “Steinbeck chose to ignore the education, recreation, hospitalization, welfare and relief services, unexcelled by and other political subdivision in the United States made available by Kern County to every person resident in Kern County,”.  It is true that California as a state was forced to absorb thousands of people who had little or no money to pay for the public services that they were receiving.  Marci Lingo states that, “in the five-year period 1935 to 1940, after a good number of Okies had already arrived, the population of Kern County grew 63.6 percent. The real number of new residents was 52,554. Fresno County to the north experienced the next most significant growth, but the rate of increase in that county was only 23.7 percent. (15) Given this extraordinary growth, it's no wonder that residents of Kern County felt invaded and that adequate housing and other facilities did not exist.”  Additionally, there is, “ample evidence that Kern County attempted to meet the health needs of these migrants, perhaps not out of altruism but out of fear of epidemics” and it was reported that, “49 percent of the cases admitted to Kern General Hospital in 1937 and 1938 were out-of-state patients, including 43 percent of the births, and that the federal government's contribution to the cost had been 'paltry.' (18) In 1939 Stein reported that the cost of 75 percent of the Okie babies born at Kern General Hospital was absorbed by the county".

If you followed all this, it does seem that Steinbeck failed to mention all that the State of California and the federal government were doing for the migrant workers.  It was, in fact, in the years following WWI and during the Great Depression that the area of Social Work came about.  The people of Kern County, incensed that their county was portrayed in a negative light, perhaps had the right to be. 

Books are generally banned for ridiculous conservative reasons (in my opinon).  Some examples include the Merriam Webster dictionary, “which was banned in a California elementary school in January 2010 for its definition of oral sex. ‘It's just not age appropriate,’ a district representative said.”  Others includeThe Diary of A Young Girl by Anne Frank, which was banned in Virginia “for ‘sexually explicit’ and ‘homosexual’ themes, as well as  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, which was banned because of its rape-scene and because it is “anti-white”.  These books are chosen to be banned for reasons of conservative opinion.  I don’t believe that Kern County had the right to ban The Grapes of Wrath from the Kern County Free Library, but at least they had a reason that was based more in fact, than simply in ideology. 
   

As Steinbeck describes migrant workers in the 1930s in his piece, Harvest Gypsies, it is hard to believe that over 70 years have passed since its publication.  Just as was needed in the 1930s, today migrant workers flock to California with the same desire to find work and feed their families.  They are still need, and yet hated.  Without the help of migrant workers, the crops of farmers would surely rot, but there seems to be no shortage of migrant labor.  Just as soon as one population of migrant workers become organized enough to fight for fair wages, they are pushed out and replace with a new population.  The threat of organization is a serious one because, as Steinbeck says in Their Blood is Strong, “if they are allowed to organize they can, simply by refusing to work, wipe out a season's crops…"  Before the ‘okies’ there were Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, and Mexicans.  And with each group of migrant workers there were their children.

As their parents travelled across the country in an effort to clothe and feed them, thousands of children were taken away from their schools and communities.  Of this, Steinbeck says that “there is still pride in the family. Wherever they stop they try to put the children in school.  It may be that the children will be in school for as much as a month before they are moved to another locality.”  However, for most children school is a place of misery.  Just as their parents are looked upon with disdain, children are also scorned.  “The better dressed children shout and jeer, the teachers are quite often impatient with these additions to their duties, and the parents of the ‘nice’ children do not want to have disease carriers in the schools,” (Steinbeck, 29).  Today there is still a stigma associated with the children of migrant workers, not to mention the practical difficulties of getting an education while moving so often.  In the 1960s that the federal government began programs to help the migrant worker and their families, but even before then, in 1935, the US. Department of Health and Human Services began Aid to Families with Dependent Children.  Today there are special programs in states like California which states that there are 200,000 children enrolled in California public schools, who are the children of migrant laborers and another 97,000 enrolled during the summer months.

The great depression not only affected children, but also families and marriages.  As men went west in search of work, their wives were left behind and by 1940 there were 1.5 million women living apart from their husbands.  Divorce rate fell because of the need for two incomes, but marriage rates fell as well.  It was because of the migration and increase in travel that families suffered, but in many instances, such as in The Grapes of Wrath, families became tight-knit in their fight for survival.

For this week’s blog, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to share and comment on a radio story I heard recently on American Public Media.  It embodies the stories told in Steinbeck’s great American novel, The Grapes of Wrath, and addresses everything that we have talked about in class thus far, but with the benefit of first-hand knowledge. 

Phil Tobin was six years old when he, his father and uncle left Maine to find work out west. When the local sardine canneries closed and, soon after, his father’s grocery store as well, they had no choice but to head for California. Along the way they painted mailboxes for ¢25. Tobin’s job as a six-year-old was painting the flag on the mailbox red.  He says that things were going pretty well for him, his father and uncle, until they hit Oklahoma – nobody wanted their mailboxes painted in Oklahoma.  They lived out of their Bouncin’ Bessie, as he refers to it, and he got to stretch out in the rumble seat. But when they reached Oklahoma, he remembers going hungry for days, stealing food and gas, and the way they were treated.  They themselves were the vagabonds and bums.

It was when they reached Indio, California that they found work picking cotton, and it was here that he met his friend John.  John would stand at the ends of the cotton rows and talk to the workers.  Tobin considered John a friend, stating that he and his father and uncle were running scared, not knowing who to trust.  But everyone trusted John. They visited him often in his tar-paper shack [see photo], which to Tobin is luxurious since everyone else he knows sleeps outdoors or in and under their cars. It was because he considered John a friend that he noticed one day when he wasn’t there. 

“He wasn’t in the cotton fields picking and I said to my dad, I said, where’s John? Is he sick? And he said, well no, he’s writing. And I said, what does that mean? And he said, well he’s a writer. And I had never heard the word writer before and I said well, what’s a writer dad? And he said, well a writer is a man that tells stories.  It hit me right then and there.  I thought how in goodness is John gonna make it if John doesn’t pick cotton and he just tells stories?”

Yes, the friendly John in the cotton fields was John Steinbeck, the great American writer. 

Tobin didn’t find out about this until much later however, since he didn’t learn to read until he taught himself whilst stationed in Korea during the war.  Later, his cousin, a professor and also a Tobin, is tutoring him so that he can go to college and he gives Tobin The Grapes of Wrath to read [this all makes more sense if you listen to the story].  Tobin tries to read the book, but after reading the first few pages, he just can’t.  He is reminded of those hard times and doesn’t want to revisit them.  While flipping through the pages though, he spots his name, Tobin [pg. 429].  He mentions this to his cousin, who replies, “yes I asked John about this [long story short, turns out he knew Steinbeck] and John said that he met two men and a child from Maine named Tobin. 

As it happens, the Phil Tobin we hear in this story today, at age 78, is the Tobin in the story The Grapes of Wrath.  He, his father and uncle picked cotton, oranges, plums, hops, pears, potatoes, and then apples in Walla Walla, Washington, where my own grandfather lived from 1916 until the 1940s.  It makes me wonder who else we might know that were incorporated into stories during these times.  It could be my family, it could be yours, and how would they feel about it? Having this time in their lives put on display for the world to see as “the harsh reality”.  Tobin came to terms with it and used it as a means of teaching his children and grandchildren about this time in his life, but how do others feel about their trials and tribulations being put on display? And do they even know about it?

In “Puzzled America”, Sherwood Anderson introduces himself and his objective, which is to understand America and Americans “now” in the 1930s. He acknowledges his understanding of the poverty that plagues many Americans, yet he quickly changes his tone to talk about his ‘well-to-do friend’.  Anderson admits right then and there that he is a product of wealthy individuals. Without their prosperity, he could not be the artist and writer that he is.  He and his ‘well-to-do friend’ are struck by the vast wealth that can be found in America, and yet the ‘well-to-do friend’ implies that there is a “good deal of nonsense about all of this poverty”. This gap remains today, not only in the sense of wealth, but also the obliviousness that still exists.  

This past year, my aunt (who lives in a wealthy suburb of D.C.) was chatting with her neighbor about health care in the U.S.  As they discussed the notion of a national health care plan, he commented, “Do you honestly know anyone without health care?”  Certainly there are people living without healthcare, but he does not associate with them. It is this astounding blindness that Anderson brings to light.  Just as Anderson wants to take this man out of his house to wander with him and meet different people in America, I want to pull this man from his cushy Montgomery County home into inner-city D.C. and pull his blinders off.  How is it that even today, over 70 years later, as we are bombarded by the media and provided with seemingly endless information, there is still such a gap of understanding between those who are ‘with’ and those ‘without’?

Additionally, Anderson claims that “We do not want cynicism, we want belief.”  A visceral demonstration of this determination to believe in democracy and the leaders of democracy can be seen through America’s involvement in World War II, which aided in pulling the U.S. out of its depression. But what about this time around? Have we put aside cynicism and decided to strengthen our belief in democracy in an effort to pull the U.S. out of its depression? Is it even conceivable that Americans could put aside cynicism and choose optimism? What would happen to the media conglomerates fueled by fear mongering, or Dilbert? Anderson states, “We have got this rich land and this people rich with this new hunger for belief.” But, what once was a country rich with natural resources is now a country dependent on the oil and resources of other nations.  Thus, as our natural resources are increasingly depleted and we become increasingly disillusioned by the U.S. government and the idea of America as the leading super-power, I wonder where this 'belief' that Anderson describes will come from that can pull our nation out of the recession.