Jess's blog

There are many things you can read when looking at the WPA travel guides from the 1930s. I decided to narrow my scope to the WPA guide from my hometown, New York City. In  “New York city guide; a comprehensive guide to the five boroughs of the metropolis,” I read the sections on the West Side and Lower West Side, and discovered that many of the places I grew up around in the early 1990s are still very similar to how they were described in the 1930s.
 
Washington Market was the name of the playground I grew up going to that was across the street from Washington Market, which “the name [of] Washington Market [was] used to designate the entire wholesale produce section and city-owned Retail Market, a block square building…” (74). There is still a market there and is frequented by both neighborhood locals and tourists.
 
The interesting things were also learning new things about my neighborhoods history such as “the market section, comprising a world of its own, is the Syrian Quarter, established in the late 1880’s at the foot of Washington Street from Battery Place to Rector Street. A sprinkling of Turks, Armenians, Arabs, and Greeks also live there” (76). I never knew that there was a population like this in my neighborhood. Additionally I didn’t know that there was such a distinct population as to warrant it being called a ethnic “Quarter,” which incidentally begins basically at the doorstep of my childhood apartment (where my parents still live).
 
I decided to then take the opportunity to see what the school situation was like back in the day in my home city where I have gone to school my whole life. I looked up “performing arts” in “New York learns; a guide to the educational facilities of the metropolis”. On page 29, I found my high school, in its original form, that both me and my Uncle attended (he in the 1950s and me in the 2000s). “High School of Music and Art. Students with unusual artistic abilities have been provided with a school of their own. The purpose of the High School of Music and Art…opened in 1936 at the suggestion of Mayor F.H. LaGuardia…” for whom the school was subsequently renamed after, and was called when I went there, “is not to graduate artists and musicians, but to provide students with a background for professional instruction. Applications for admission greatly exceed enrollment, the school having set itself for a maximum of 1,800 students. Musical aptitude tests are required for admission.” (29). Oh how much things change (at the time Stuyvesant High school was still an all boys school), and yet how much they stay the same (I took that musical aptitude test to get into my high school in 2003).

(source).

Travel in the 1930s, the grandeur, the romanticism of the road, and wait, what is that you say? With pay even!? No wonder the 1930s started the tourism boom in America. Add on some snazzy ad campaigns, not so far removed from the ones they play with on earlier episodes of the TV show “Mad Men” when they are coming up with advertising campaigns for the Hilton Hotel chain. It is about luxury and living life without being in real life. Most highly promoted were the places that could boast “the fact that it was an all-in-one vacation destination.” (p. 198). A New Deal for Leisure discusses the ad campaigns that went along with this new tourism industry. Advertising, marketing and social research to serve these purposes also seems to have become a new  industry of major interest at this time: “in conducting these campaigns, community advertisers became the most prolific and skilled advertisers in the tourist trade. In using state-of-the-art- marketing surveys, professional advertising techniques, and a pioneering understanding of the importance of market segmentation, they had created a promotional apparatus that had regularly issued billions of advertisements in “class” and mass-circulation magazines as well as major metropolitan news papers.” (p.199-200). Ads from this time are now being “re-advertised” as works of art, sold for much more than they were ever intended to be worth on websites like AllPosters.com.(source).
 
In recent years there has been a push to travel in America and bring wealth back not just to Wall Street, but to “Main Street.” Politicians use advertising and marketing slogans to promote consumerism and tourism throughout America, which is especially important for the American economy in an age of globalization when it is so easy to travel the world without ever traveling your own country. I have not traveled much in my life, but the most I have traveled has been in the past year, and I went out of the country. Before that, I had never been out of the country, but I also rarely ever left my home state of New York. When reading John A. Jakle’s The Tourist, I was struck by the truth in his statements that still hold true about the romanticism and love of the automobile trip in America. Throughout the years since driving and infrastructure became simple to navigate, every generation has had iconic images, stories and dreams about a life changing road trip. About that coming of age story that one can only get while jumping impulsively in a car and traveling “the back-roads.” Though I grew up in New York City, I just got my drivers license and love “road trips.” In fact, the idea of doing a road trip with my friends was the main motive in learning to drive, “with automobiles came speed. And with speed came the impulse toward constant driving" (p. 146).
 
In a society where we want everything as quickly and conveniently as possible, we still go with the impulse to drive, for speed, and instant gratification. Decades later, the American population is still entranced with the Road Trip, traveling and the experience of going someplace. Though other travel industries, like the airline industry, have certainly taken a huge place in the tourism market, many still prefer to throw clothes in a bag and jump in the car. Personally, my favorite road trip fantasy is with my best girlfriends from childhood. In this daydream we have a cute, old, beaten-up, 1990s style car (for my own nostalgia's sake I suppose), and we drive it cross country, going to the most bizarre places on the way, having no road map, and blasting all the best “road trip” songs of the past 40 years. The soundtrack is what really makes that trip in my head. “Travel by automobile was a way of escaping the everyday,” and hey, for a city girl like me, it still is (p. 147).
 

In Nathanial West’s A Cool Million we see themes of the American dream parodied, much like optimism and society was parodied in Voltaire’s Candide in the age of the Enlightenment. I found this a really enjoyable and quickly paced read. “Mr. West's hilarious parody-satire is a good deal of fun. You will read it at a sitting and enjoy it. But like Candide it strikes a good many notes that sound a little too close to truth to make you altogether comfortable. And there is a good deal of that typically American humor of the comic strip and the vaudeville act—here part of the satire—which depends upon the spectacle of physical pain for its guffaws” (source).
 
I found that the themes of disillusionment and what the intellectual and artistic community did with this sentiment during the 1930s was explored extremely well here. Reading this novel after reading travel novels and somewhat documentarian style works this semester was truly refreshing. What this book does that the others, with their realism and attempts at appearing truly authentic, was get at the true feelings behind the discontentment in America, and the absurdity of American optimism. This relates very well to my post from last week about Woody Guthrie’s sentiments on the absurdity of certain American optimisms and propaganda (ie: the national anthem). His song “This Land Is Your Land,” is a commentary much like the novel A Cool Million. It is both critical of the systems of the time and full of social commentary.
 
The irony of both Guthrie’s song, and West’s novel is that the end message pokes fun at the American dream, as much as they both wished the American dream was possible. “For Lemuel Pitkin, although he never gets his cool million and is finally murdered, becomes the hero of the American Leather Shirts, the nation's martyr…bent on restoring the lore and legendry of the plain American people and ridding our fair land of sophistication, Marxism, …American “Know Nothingism” in modern form comes into its own. And the “Lemuel Pitkin Song” is the new national anthem” (source).
 
The author himself died young and in relative obscurity dispite the success of his other novels. “As disillusioned and frustrated as [West was]…West wanted desperately to believe in love, the American Dream…but life kept getting in his way" (source). West made it quite clear through this novel, that the “American Dream,’ was all but a propagandistic joke at the time: idealism at its very best…“in West's view of things, the average, honest American Boy is likely to achieve very little” (source).

When Woody Guthrie got “off the bum” and moved to New York, he marries a young Jewish dancer from Brooklyn, and began to write songs about the “real America” (“This Land is your Land”). He was then convinced to write a book about his travels. Guthrie was convinced by the provocative, socialistic, artists and political agitators in (mostly) Greenwich Village who starting the Folk movement with their love of Guthrie’s music, and feelings of finding a truly representative American music.
 
As I said in my last post about Guthrie: “Guthrie was ahead of his time socially and politically. He wanted to tell the real story of the road, in the real vernacular, just like he does in his music. He wanted to tell the American story in a way that was truly American, and that is what folk music is. Some reviews at the time put down his writing styles for its "Too careful reproduction of illiterate speech." (Library Journal quote via source). However, it is clear when reading it, he is not imitating a way of living, speaking or thinking. Just like his attempt to make a national anthem that was more representative of the America most people lived in, he wanted to write about an experience that most people could relate to at the time.”

(source) He wrote the song “This Land is Your Land,” as a new national anthem for the real “folks” out there. He thought “God Bless America” wasn’t representative of the American people especially in 1940 when he wrote this famous song. He was very political, and wrote many songs having to do with social and politial issues, but none are as clear and famous as this one: “"This Land Is Your Land," written in 1940 to tell Guthrie's countrymen that America belongs to the many and not the few” (source).

(source)
 
A Folk song is a song for the people, about the people and representative of the people. Guthrie felt this way about his music, and how music should be. Reading about him, his life, his carrer and his beliefs has been truly enlightening for me as a musican, and also on a personal level. When I was younger, I went to a very progressive school. We would have school meetings and all the different grades would present some sort of artistic work (performing or otherwise). The whole school though, would always sing at every assembly. There were a few songs that consistently repeated, and “This Land is Your Land” was one of them. The older we got at that school, the more we were expected to pass the knowledge of this song on to the younger students, and teach them the lyrics and little dances we made up. It was a community and participatory event that brought us all closer together. However, though I’ve always known the lyrics to this song, I never understood their meaning or ever gave them any thought.
 
Knowing what I know now about what Guthrie was trying to say with this song, and reading the lyrics carefully I understand that he was talking about the dire situations of people he had seen across America, and though he loved his country and wanted to make sure everyone felt a sense of belonging here, he was acknowledging the problems we were having doing that at the time. It was a form of social protest and a form of letting the government know that steps needed to be taken so that America was no longer leaving problems alone in order to keep an idyllic appearance for the country. 

“The “Stiff” idiom is, of course, authentic,” says at the end of his book and autobiography Waiting for Nothing (Kromer, 259). I really appreciated his honestly in the last part of the novel, in the chapter entitled “Autobiography.”  In light of last week’s investigation into the autobiographical nature (or not-so-autobiographical nature) of the texts and picture/text books, it is refreshing to read an author who is very honest about how truthful and reflective his writings are. He doesn’t lie about the writing: “save for four or five incidents, it is strictly autobiographical. Some of the events portrayed did not occur in the same sequence as I gave them, for I have juggled them in order to better develop the story” (Kromer, 259).
 
Considering the author and photographers last week had a blatant disregard for telling their audiences that their information was semi-fictional, and not totally biographical or observational of what they had seen out on the road while they were “on the bum” or pretending to be on the bum in order to capture the lives of those who really were “Stiffs.”
 
The term “Stiff,” and Kromer’s mention of it at the end of the “Autobiography” chapter intrigued me. I was wondering if he had somehow redefined the word, or just helped bring the term into popular speech and language.  Did he create the idiom in literature from what he heard as the popular vernacular, and make this statement as a way of showing his authenticity and that he really, and truly wrote this while on the bum, even though he is honest about his humble beginnings and how he worked hard to educate himself: “parts of the book were scrawled on…papers in box cars, margins of religious tracts in a hundred missions, jail, one prison, railroad sand-houses, flop-houses, and on a index fingers on a honest-to-God typewriter” (259).
 
I looked up the word stiff. As a noun it means firstly, “corpse.” The next definition is “a tramp, bum [or] a member of the working class; especially: a blue-collar worker.” Thirdly it could also mean “a stodgy or excessively decorous person: flop, failure.” (source). From all the various times that the twenty-eight year old Kromer wrote about various “Stiffs” in his recollections of his travels, you can see that he understands the various uses of the word “Stiff” and really wanted to bring the colloquial language into a novel that was not fully academic but not fully without academic information.
 
The truthfulness of Kromer’s stories, language, and writing and even statements about his writing makes me really respect him. He was from “working people” in coal mining towns. He worked hard “in glass factories and proofread on newspapers at nights while going through three years of college” (257). He did not go on the bum just to document the plight of those struggling like the authors of last week, he went on the bum because he needed to head “out for Kansas to make the wheat harvest” (258). I thoroughly enjoyed the down to earth, yet intelligent comments of life on the road that Kromer discusses in Waiting for Nothing.

Though both very much about the travel habbit around the United States, and the Dust Bowl and the West Coast, both Woody Guthrie’s autobiography Bound for Glory, and Box Car Bertha’s “autobiography” (which was really an amalgamation of experiences and people, as seen and heard by Dr. Ben L. Reitman), lead us back to New York City, where both these texts were encouraged to be written.

The involvement in progressive social movements that both authors (and their characters) have are extremely moving and interesting. They are all still so relevant today. It is amazing how little issues have changed. The issues that were controvertial at the time that these texts were written are still very much at the forefront of the American conciousness today.

Box Car Bertha is portrayed in Sister of the Road, by Reitman, as a woman who unintentionally provokes and pushes for womens rights even in the smallest ways. She begs to be treated fairly and goes to a women’s hobo convention in New York, leaving her baby in the care of a commune of other hobo women: “they were all happy that I was going to Washington to take part in the Bonus Army encampment and to the Women’s Hobo Convention. I asked no one to look after Baby Dear. The Colonists said nothing about it. She was a part of the colony and everybody felt they had an interest in her” (source). It is clear in passages like this that Reitman was pushing his socialist agenda by highlighting the socialistic and communal ways that children like Box Car Bertha and “Baby Dear,” were raised in. He was showing the advantages of a caring and supportive community, especially amongst those living on the outside of “respectable” society. He started a clinic for those with “Venerial Diseases,” and wondered around hobo camps to help keep those “on the bum” healthy. He also passed out profilactics to women like Bertha. This story is not the autobiography of one woman (Bertha herself was not even a real person) but the story of many women struggling for their rights, and for their lives in the 1930s. Bertha comes to New York City in the story, where much of the action takes place (see section about the Bowery Mission). She also winds up settling down there finally to raise her family. Reitman, also spent a great deal of time in New York amongst the socially progressive and aware artists and anarchists of the time.

In a review from “Time Magazine,” right after the book was published, in 1937, the reviewer discusses what Reitman says about Bertha, with surprisingly little judgement of the character or author. Reading this review it could have been a modern day review of the book. With the one exception, they clearly thought "Box Car Bertha" was a real person:
 
“Bertha's "first playhouse was a box car." Her progressive education began early: her teachers were labor agitators, I. W. W.'s, prostitutes. From their talk Bertha picked up her three S's: sex, strikes, socialism… [in the] cooperative colony run by radicals and conscientious objectors…she read William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Zola…she took to the road, fell in love with an anarchist…by the time she had made her first swing around the country she knew all the ropes. In Chicago, which she calls the woman hobo centre, she worked a while for a celebrated abortionist….Bertha…to appease her insatiable curiosity she became a prostitute, found the job unexciting…Bertha found herself pregnant, with two venereal diseases.” (source).

Though I had planned to discuss more about Woody Guthrie’s book, I will save that for another entry. The connection I wanted to make however, was that Guthrie, upon moving to New York, taking up residence and marrying a young Jewish dancer from Brooklyn, and writing a song about the “real America” (“This Land is your Land”), he was convinced to write a book about his experiences traveling through the 1930s in the Dust Bowl and to California. Like Reitman, and Box Car Bertha, Guthrie was ahead of his time socially and politically. He wanted to tell the real story of the road, in the real vernacular, just like he does in his music. He wanted to tell the American story in a way that was truly American, and that is what folk music is. Some reviews at the time put down his writing styles for its "Too careful reproduction of illiterate speech." (Library Journal quote via source). However, it is clear when reading it, he is not imitating a way of living, speaking or thinking. Just like his attempt to make a national anthem that was more representative of the America most people lived in, he wanted to write about an experience that most people could relate to at the time.

"You have seen their faces (1937), an immediately popular and highly praised lament over sharecropping in the south was hailed as the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” of tenant farming." (p. 177).
 
Throughout the readings insofar, we have been focusing on the dilemmas of white America for the most part during the Great Depression. We read the travel narrative of the Joads, in the Grapes of Wrath, and in that we hear the story of so many sharecroppers in (white) America, but the struggles of the African American sharecropper or citizen were never discussed. In these photo/text-books, I was most struck by the discussion and photos (and quotations) of the African American sharecroppers, in vast poverty in the South. This is a topic that I feel we hear and see less of in the mainstream media from that time period considering their economic and social situations were already abysmal before the Stock Market crash, but maybe the Great Depression spurred something.
 
Before the economic depression of the 1930s and the mass “this contemporary exodus [that] is our theme…” (source) “the south has been taking a beating for a long time, and the pain and indignity of it is beginning to tell” (source). Authors like Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, who wrote You Have Seen Their Faces, depicted a deep rural South of not just the poor white sharecroppers moving around, like the Oakies for lands of better opportunities but people with absolutely no social mobility: "it is foolish to ask a tenant farmer why he remains where he is. he does not move from farm to farm from time to time, but only rarely can he improve his status” (source).
 
These photographs depict and tell the stories of people who lived through many hardships, including slavery and racism, in addition to a further dive into poverty due to the depression. The authors and photographers looked and said, that “it can be seen any day now in the land and hungry faced of men. it means unrest,” which became the case not terribly long after the Great Depression, in the form of the Civil Rights movement just twenty or so years later (source). I think Caldwell and Bourke-White had great insight in seeing that this was a possibility approaching.
 

The photographs from this excerpt struck me most because of the quotes that they had with them. It was also one of the first times I had seen pictures of African American sharecroppers from this period and connected it to the struggles we hear about from white America at that time. Just like the Oakies and any other tenant farmers trying to find better opportunities: "the tenant farmer in the South is trying to hold onto a spinning world until by some means he is enabled to get a grip on a better way of life" (source).
 
The fact that we were looking at these photos and text books this week was really useful to get a sense of the time. I found that the statement made by Lange and Schuster Taylor in their book American Exodusreally rang true after looking through all the images offered...”this is neither a book of photographs nor an illustrated book in the traditional sense. its particular form is the result of our use of techniques in proportions and relations designed to convey understanding easily, clearly, and vividly” (source).

"Belmont, Florida. "Little brother began shriveling up eleven years ago.""

In the three pieces I read (Adamic, My America, "Girl on the Road", Asch, The Road, chapters 41-44, Pyle, Home Country), there was a common theme of exploration of different and new places, and what that exploration meant insofar as being able to tell the stories of the people from those places honestly and truthfully. All the authors concern themselves with telling the stories of the people of America, and not just some people, but a wider range than we have observed in the writing of this class so far. We hear about a vagrant woman in Adamic’s My America, "Girl on the Road,” and then we hear about life not just in the country and the dustbowl of America but also in the cities, which the writers admittedly feel “foreign” in: “Detroit was a foreign city…” (Asch, 256).
 
Pyle discusses the extreme poverty of formerly prosperous towns, fallen on hard times, not just due to the stock market crash but from a problem in the infrastructure in America. This problem in the infrastructure started in the early 1900s by creating a massive railway industry and bringing machinery that over-worked the land, leaving “the country…despoiled…” though, “the grass would come back in a year or two if they stopped farming, and springs would fill up again in a few years” (Pyle, 55). But that is easier said than done. People don’t want to wait years to escape poverty.  Pyle left the farmers and cattlemen to go to another city, Rapid City, where he ran into President Roosevelt, who was having a “drought party” (Pyle, 56). Pyle highlights the dissatisfaction and the disenchantment of the American people by observing the tentativeness of the clapping crowd of onlookers as President Roosevelt stood up. They wanted to have hope, and wanted to hope that Roosevelt would help them, but “it was as though they were saying with their hands, “we know we shouldn’t, but we’ve got to’” (Pyle 57).
 
Finally, the themes of hope and ambivalence are shown in Admic’s story in My America, by the end of the story, “Girl on the Road.” Though the girl through the story insists she isn’t as down and out as she appears, it is clear things are probably worse than they even seem for her. We see in the first few pages of this story, vagrancy, poverty, hunger, injury, and the two things that were popular ways to try to make someone who was down and out feel better: singing and food. While on the road in this story, the girl tells the author about her life between bouts of hunger and sleep. In the end the author tells her that he wants to write a story about her. She feels that he doesn’t know her, so she tries to explain her life better, but truly, just on observation and time spent, he knows her story, because it was the story of so many then. This does not diminish or make her personal struggles less authentic, but the way in which Admic presents this vagrant girl makes us feel like we know her far better than anything he could have written about the actual facts of her life. Admic helps her get cleaned up and asks her to write to him if she gets a chance: “Maybe you’ll get fixed up in Baltimore, maybe not. I’ll give you the money and my address. Eventually if you feel like it, write to me and I’ll tell you whether or not I sold the story [about you]” (Admic, 516).
 
For all of the girls talk about “turnin’ over a new leaf” (Admic, 516), and hopeful words about getting “off the bum sure’s anythin’’” (Admic, 506),  she never wrote to Admic, and he leaves us wondering if we are supposed to feel hopeful for her, and all the impoverished, traveling masses, or if we are supposed to feel like all is lost:
 
“I have not yet heard from her. Perhaps she lost my address and forgot my name. Or probably I did not break her spell of “hard luck” as she hoped I might have done. Or…God knows.”- Admic, 516.

“The women are divided between those who have no relationship to the earth, land, or a natural life and those whose lives demonstrate the many faces of the archetypal feminine. The female counterparts of the machine men are defined by the objects with which they surround themselves…” (Cederstrom).
 
Continuing on my discussion of women in The Grapes of Wrath, I was reading the article “The 'Great Mother' in The Grapes of Wrath,” by Lorelei Cederstrom. This article delves more into the symbolism of the strong and matriarchal women in this novel. This novel has themes that are all extremely tied to the earth, and themes tied to family as demonstrated by the constant struggle of the matriarchs to keep their families safe, well, and happy in a difficult time. By the end of the novel, it becomes clear that the theme of the strong woman and the theme of connection to the earth are actually best described as an amalgamation of the two. The book is heavily reliant on the theme of “Mother Earth” or the “Great Mother.” This is most clearly seen in the final pages of the novel, which are rather unexpected and strike me as a very poignant and interesting way to end this long travel novel of struggle and hard times. The scene where Rose of Sharon feeds her breast milk, while she is barely strong enough to sit up, with a dying man (a stranger), is a scene with beautiful imagery, containing elements of the long poetic prose included by Steinbeck in the inner chapters, and showing the truth of what Ma Joad and other characters have been trying to accomplish the whole time: safety for family, connection with others to make a larger community/family, and helping those who need help when you can.
 
“Throughout the novel, patriarchal culture and its attitudes give way to manifestations of the presence of the archetypal "Great Mother."” (Cederstorm). Ma Joad and Rose of Sharon personify the “Great Mother:” powerful, ever-present, fertile and giving. They communicate without words, knowing what they must do. We get an “iconographic image of the Great Mother: "Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. 'You got to,' she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. 'There!' she said. 'There!' Her hand moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously” (Steinbeck, 619). The haunting power of this image indicates the presence of a powerful archetype…this archetypal gesture and mysterious smile are…the fitting conclusion to the novel, for it is in this affirmation of the power to give life and to take it, to nourish even while surrounded by the death and destruction she has wrought, that the full power of the Great Mother is evident.” (Cederstorm). This also shows how all women are connected by the “Great Mother,” when Rose of Sharon and Ma Joad communicate without saying a word, to save the poor dying man  after the birth and death of Rose of Sharon’s baby:

“Ma’s eyes passed Rose of Sharon ‘s eyes, and then came back to them. And the two women looked deep into each other. The girl’s breath came short and gasping. She said “Yes.” Ma Smiled. “I knowed you would. I knowed!” She looked down at her hands, tight-locked in her lap" (Steinbeck, 618).

Also on a slightly separate, but final note, it is amazing to me how John Steinbeck could preserve the reality of the topic he was writing about in this work of historical fiction. He was really with people like this, and his perceptions of the real life people who inspired these characters lead him to write these amazing stories, many of which he may well have observed while on the road. I think it is important to recognize that this story is especially amazing due to the fact that it isn't entirely fictional, but drawn very much from real life.

(Dorthea Lange).

“I tol’ Granma we couldn’ he’p her. The fambly had ta get acrost…we couldn’ stop in the desert…”— Ma Joad,
Grapes of Wrath, 311.
 
In his article “John Steinbeck on the Political Capacities of Everyday Folk: Moms, Reds, and Ma Joad's Revolt,” Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh promptly asserts that in writing the Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck “encourages women to embrace their traditional roles as family and community caretakers” (Zirakzadeh, 595).
 
Up to this point in the novel, I see the women as the strongest and most surprising characters. They have what it takes to lead the family on to the west, and keep them together. They are the fuel in the engine. Without Ma Joad, there would be no crossing into California. The trip would have ended at the previous camp with the hostile police officer. Ma Joad, a woman, who at the time was supposed to stand by her man was showing that standing by a man for all those years is really like supporting him with every muscle in you. It made her strong, strong enough to handle even the worst tragedies. I don’t see Ma Joad as embracing of “traditional roles.” She is a family and community caretaker, but also provider, leader and certainly protector. Even Zirakzadeh concedes “by the novel’s closing, only the indefatigable altruism of Ma Joad and her daughter, Rose of Sharon, hold the family together” (598). But he still maintains that the women don’t do much besides what women were expected to do. Zirakzadeh sees the women of Steinbeck’s novel as fairly steryotypical, and does not see the progressive attitude about women that is most clearly conveyed in the text.
 
I think this can be best seen when at “Daggett, where the inspection station” was “…Ma lay rigid beside her [Granma]” (Steinbeck, 307). Ma Joad lay with the dead body of Granma in the back of the old truck because she knew that if she told the family they would fall apart before inspection and all they had done to get even that far would have been a waste; all the pain, suffering and loss would have been ruined by their knowledge of the dead woman in the back. They would not have been able to exempt themselves from inspection if it wasn’t for the fast thinking of Ma Joad who “climed heavily down from the truck…” saying that they had to go right away “Granma’s awful sick” (308). She knowingly lied to authorities, who were notoriously unfair and lawless themselves, to protect the family. She risked her own life and health when the inspectors questioned her wellbeing: “you don’t look so good yourself…” (308).
 
Finally feeling some sense of safety, Ma Joad can let her guard down for a minute to stop leading and protecting the family: “’thank God!’ she said. ‘The fambly’s here.’ Her knees buckled and she sat down” (311). She follows by telling the family she wanted to wait even longer, to protect them further, by not reveling the devastating news that they had lost yet another member of the “fambly.” But Ma Joad can only take care of those that remain, and because of this huge responsibility, has to push these sadder notions to the back: reserve emotion, be strong for her family.
 
 
Though Zirakzadeh suggests “Steinbeck's novel…obscures the ways that rural gender roles might oppress women, and depicts domestic housekeeping and maternal self-sacrifice as intrinsically rewarding,” (616) I think for the time and place that Steinbeck was writing about, the women are portrayed as the protagonists, the most intrinsic characters to the story, and the most engaging due to their strength and self-sacrifice. They do not pretend their jobs as matriarchs are easy, they bend and almost break throughout the text, but just because Steinbeck didn’t discuss the second wave of the women’s rights movement, and the identity of a woman independent from her family, man and home, does not mean he was not showing women in a whole new light. 



*the article mentioned in this posting can be found here.

Through the beautiful prose that weave in and out of The Grapes of Wrath, there is also an iconic narrative, and a beautiful description of almost every aspect of humanity. When in The Grapes of Wrath,Tom Joad runs into the (former) Reverend Jim Casey, when he is on his way back to his old home in the heart of the “Dust Bowl,” Casey is sitting under a tree (the only shade in sight), whistling then singing the old "pop song" of the time, “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.” This was when I was reminded of an old folk song my father used to sing me to sleep with when I was a kid.

 
It was “Tom Joad,” a ballad by Woody Guthrie, and it tells the whole story of The Grapes of Wrath.

That truck rolled away in a cloud of dust;
Tommy turned his face toward home.
He met Preacher Casey, and they had a little drink,
But they found that his family they was gone,
He found that his family they was gone.”- Woody Guthrie, “Tom Joad,” 1940 (http://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Tom_Joad.htm).

These kind of long, repetitive, storytelling songs became popular in the 1930s, and I can see why. With the abundance of homelessness, necessity for travel for work, and the back breaking work that had to be done, these songs could keep those on the road on track and focused. They were songs of travel and songs of remembrance for older, happier, times; just like the song Casey sings, that reminds him of his former days when he was a Reverend, before he became part of the disenfranchised masses. He includes his past, and the entertainment of the popular song to sing as we first meet him in the novel:

“Yes, sir, that’s my Saviour,
Je-sus is my Saviour,
Je-sus is my Saviour now.
On the level
‘S not the devil,
Jesus is my Saviour now.”- (Steinbeck, 25).
 
Families were separated, people disheartened and the Reverend had lost his faith. Songs, religious hymnals, pop-songs or folk ballads, just like the writing and photographs done in this time of great transition and unsettling migration, were ways that people in these dire circumstances made themselves feel better, and the artists picked up on folk traditions, like story-telling and the like to express the sentiment they experienced on the road at the time from the hungry and impoverished masses.
 
Families were splitting up, stories were getting lost in the shuffle. Folk songs like “The Ballad of Tom Joad,” were common and relatable amongst Americans at the time. Novels like The Grapes of Wrath, served to express to the educated and more privileged in America, the hardships that others were experiencing at the time. The song that tells the same story of the novel’s protagonist, reached the masses and brought them some relief and pleasure in both music entertainment, and in knowing that others all around America were going through the same disheartening circumstances.

“My line was that Hollywood and Chicago’s gangsters, had obscured the real America, and I am now more than ever convinced that that is the case.” - Ronald Wild
 
While trying to find the heart of America, it seems as if many of the authors realized something about themselves, they were looking for what was already known. They were looking for what was their preconceived notion of America so that they could document it. What they seemed to learn was that it wasn’t all Hollywood glamour or monuments in Washington, D.C. Many of them realized “there are no memorials, vistas, or landmarks anywhere between the Atlantic and Pacific worthy of going fifty miles to see” (Caldwell, 4). The best way to see the country and the people who made it at the onset of the depression when these writers “hit the road,” was by bus travel. According to Nathan Asch, “riding in a car is as if your own home were moving” (8). One never really got to meet the people and hear their stories, which Asch says they were always eager to tell. These stories presented in the forwards, and beginning chapters of the authors presented this week were those of old towns, with deep-rooted histories. Stories that could not be created for a movie, even stories that would not bring the optimistic attitude that the United States Government wished for it’s citizens at the time. There were stories of poverty, stories of cruelty, but they were all stories that were told by strangers to other strangers. They were not stories of the hardships suffered by strangers, but about their hopes and dreams, both for themselves and their families, but ultimately for America at the time: “there is no tradition of suffering…if the American can slogan, everyone is born equal…” there was at least the hope that there was an equal possibility that everyone would have the equal chance to strive (Asch, 10).
 
Asch, like many writers of the time, wanted not just to see the lavish homes that had not been effected by the stock market crash, but the true America. They wanted to “see [and document] much want and hear of many troubles, and still feel there is hope, there is a chance, there is a future. It’s what makes it possible to be happy while traveling in America.” (Asch, 11). The stories, the scenery, the brief but generous friendships, were worth more to these writers and travelers than any of the fancy mansions their society friends invited them to. They finally saw the real, bare bones of America.