KenK's blog

“While it lacks a certain sophistication common in the larger American cities, yet beneath its surface calm throbs a pulse of activity peculiarly Philadelphian… the City of Penn claims justly a record of solid accomplishments not only in the arts and sciences, but in industry and commerce.”

These are a few of the lines that were written in the opening paragraph of the Philadelphian guidebook.  The description struck me as odd in so far as it seems to paint a bit of a gloomy picture for Philadelphia; as if to say, “though you might of heard Philadelphia is not so great, Philadelphia is actually great because….”

But why would someone who picked up a book about Philadelphia be so inclined to have this preconceived notion that Philadelphia is a city not worth seeing?  Granted it is not as glitzy as New York, nor the Nation’s Capital in Washington D.C., but Philadelphia has a ton of rich history and would seemingly be one of the first places people of America would and rightfully should want to see.

It seems from this article that the man writing it felt that he needed to justify Philadelphia.  That he was writing to an audience that was unconvinced that Philadelphia was worth seeing and that he needed to justify its allure, especially in the face of larger and more important American cities. And he does so with gusto, almost even going overboard with a flowery and romantic description.

More so than describing places, these guides needed to convince people to go to these places.  They had to make them sound exciting and make readers believe that you couldn’t see what you could see in the places they were describing anywhere else.  People may have been inclined to say “I’ve seen what cities are like in New York and I’ve seen the colonial history in Boston” but these books were meant to show that each city had a uniquely different culture that you NEEDED to see firsthand.  Sure you may have heard a busy street in New York but have you heard the sound waves of an “a million titan tongue” crash against the bronze statue of William Penn. Nowhere else could you see the staid manner of the original Quakers still impressed upon the city’s character, nor did any other city do a better job of preserving Colonial architecture in brick and stone, at maintaining the misted glory of its yesterdays.

“[The American people] worked up in their blood a species of restiveness unlike any that any race before has known, a restiveness describable only in negatives...We are restive entirely for the sake of restiveness.”

In the “American Roadside”, James Agee characterizes the American public as nomadic and natural to the road.  He describes how the hot dog, which was becoming a popular roadside food, is “an American institution if there ever was one (Agee 53)” and how “the roadside took the ice cream cone to its bosom (Agee 53)”. Indeed he almost sounds like later writers such as Kerouac and like the Levis go forth campaigns we discussed in class that mythologize and idealize the road trip and seeing America. To Agee it seemed that the American was born to ride and that traveling is almost something idiosyncratic to the American people, that it is something that is an integral part to what defines Americans as different from their non-Americans.

But is this idea that Americans are naturally restive, more so than other cultures, possibly true? Was it an inherent restiveness that drove and continues to drive America to the road today?

In contrast with Agee’s romantic assertion Shelley Baranowski in “Being Elsewhere” explains how mass tourism “was the result of the accretion and confluence of decades-long developments (Baranowski 186).”  Indeed American tourism arose through the “maturation of an aggressive and sophisticated promotional apparatus for tourism (Baranowski 186).”  She discusses how the American wage earners were in fact “unlike their European counterparts (Baranowski 186)” in that they rarely asked for paid vacations. To her it was not inherently “American” to travel but only became so once the working class developed a taste for it in response to “years of being subjected to advertising and propaganda campaigns that repeatedly confirmed the value of the leisure class’s definitions of the “good life” (Baranowski 193).”

It wasn’t that the American “got into the automobile and found it good (Agee, 53)”, as Agee asserts, but rather the American was consistently nudged by the American government and community driven associations until he finally believed that he was defined by this yearning to travel and see national parks and the sea shores etc…  The automobile and the vast American landscape presented the American government with an unbelievable and unprecedented economic and marketing opportunity. All it had to do was convince the average American that this was something he wanted to do. By contrast no single European counterpart possessed the same level of cultural and even climate diversification as America. As such they faced a greater obstacle to convincing people to travel and ultimately never placed the same significance on travel and “restiveness” as a defining trait of their culture the way that America did.
 
 

In A Cool Million, poor Lemuel, the hero, can’t seem to outrun trouble.  Despite the urges of Shagpoke Whipple that “[America] is a land of opportunity and the world is an oyster” it is very clear to the readers that this is not the case and that America is  not the land of opportunity that the rich seem to believe it is.  Moreover, America is not a land where people will be willing to help you out.  This much is clear from the fact that Lemuel is constantly hoodwinked out of the money he owes, how his home is sold for the mere profit it could bring an antique collector Asa Goldstein and used as a patsy in Mr. Hainey’s scheme. Further despite being the victim of crimes Lemuel is often treated as a villain and expected of being a criminal because he is poor.

Yet despite all this Lemuel never turns to go home. He in fact cannot because his home is no longer intact.  Despite the fact that there was no hope in New York Lemuel stays because traveling offers hope. Eventually he goes to California once again at the urging of Mr. Whipple despite the fact that experience has taught him he should avoid advice from Mr. Whipple and go home.  If you are on the road and in trouble you at least have the hope that one day you will make it back home, that you will eventually reach the “holy land” and redemption.  This is a theme Steinbeck touched upon as well, as the Joads continued to travel towards California despite the fact that the other migrant workers had told them that California is not the dream land they had been led to believe.

While using his satire to inspire sympathy in the situation of the migrant workers, West also uses his satire to criticize the way the other writers are blaming outside sources.  Interestingly, Shagpoke blames the Communists and Wall Street, two opposing forces that represented opposite sides of the spectrum.  If the communists are evil and Wall Street which represents capitalism and democracy are evil what it is good?

Shagpoke tries to answer this question with the National Revolutionary Party, also known as the Leather Shirts. It is fitting that he becomes the leader of this group, being that throughout the story he has been making empty promises to Lemuel.  Like he did for Lemuel in the beginning of the story and in jail Shagpoke makes empty promises of a better world and finds scapegoats for the problems befelling himself and others but provides no concrete plan to improve matters.  He comes to represent many of the writers and the revolutionaries of the time who demanded change but provided no rational recourse for what kind of change should be implemented. Ultimately Shagpoke’s revolution leads to a dictatorship built on a false martyr in Lemuel who really didn’t seem to believe in any of Shagpoke’s political ideaology.

“The people were moving about, moving about. It seemed to Cass that no one knew why.  Sometimes it seemed to him that men were all, somehow, blind; that they went from city to city in darkness. (Algren, 320)”

This sentence by Nelson Algren in “Somebody’s Boots” embodies what we’ve been reading all semester about the migrant workers and traveling writers trying to tell their story. Whether it be the bums in Waiting for Nothing, college drop outs or the young teens leaving home it seems like the road was littered with people who were traveling in hopes of finding a better situation but with no real idea where and when that situation would come. In addition to that writers reporting the depression were lost when they went on the road as they were no longer in the familiar America they and the world had known, an America that was now governed by a regime that was lost, looking for an answer as to how to lift their citizenry out of its worst depression.

For the migrant workers even having a plan prior to leaving didn’t matter. The Joads, in the Grapes of Wrath, seemed just as lost as the other destitute people we have been reading about despite their grand plan of finding a better life in California. California was merely a mirage, a last ditch hope that things would work out. Those who were returning from California that the Joads encounter while were merely at a stage of being lost just beyond that of the Joads as the dream of California had been shattered leaving them to realize that they had nowhere to go, and that for all this time they were essentially roaming around lost looking to somehow inevitably find a place they could call home.

Many of the writers were also lost as well.  They had been drifting in their lives oblivious to what was going on before heading out on the road.  Once on the road they found themselves lost, unfamiliar with what they were seeing: a bizarre America where there wasn’t hope and a man couldn’t make his way merely by having dream and a drive to work hard enough to achieve that dream.

In this vain America itself was lost as the government and citizens flailed to define what America was.  People were starving and beginning to lose moral and the government was absolutely lost unable to even fathom of ways to feed those who were hungry and boost the morale of the downtrodden. The government was so lost that Americans and even some within the government itself began to question the democracy and capitalism that had made it a world power and to think maybe it would be better off as a communist regime.

In Waiting For Nothing, Tom Kromer gives a horrifying yet refreshingly honest view of the Great Depression.  Unlike the writings of the intellectuals such as Sherwood Anderson, Asch and Steinbeck Kromer writes from the viewpoint of the actual hobo. As opposed to these accounts where readers are forced to read intellectual’s perceptions of those suffering the depression (in Grapes of Wrath readers actually need to read these perceptions as part of a greater narrative), readers of Waiting for Nothing see how the hobo’s felt and viewed their situation themselves.

Kromer is particularly good at portraying how the hobo skeptically observes true human nature.  In Chapter 1, despite being bought steak dinner, the hobo narrator still characterizes the man buying his dinner as boastful and realizes that the man is using him in order to raise his own profile as a good person. This is something almost everyone in the situation would notice, as it is human nature to suspect a person have an ulterior motive and not be 100% grateful.  In Chapter 4 he does a great job of describing the shame of being a heterosexual male trading sexual favors for food and board and how when hungry enough and shamed enough a man will do anything. In Chapter 5 he craftily describes the thought processes and subsequent actions of the wealthy man on the date and the owner of the fancy restaurant as well as the hobos tactical actions to force them into making “generous” donations. Outside observers may praise these men for their generosity, but in reality they have the selfish human tendency to believe that bums are in their pitiful situation due to their own laziness.

Komer’s use of short sentences read very well like quick thoughts; as if the reader is in the scene having these thoughts as they are happening.  They give the reader a much more honest view of “life as a hobo” without the obvious agenda the intellectual writers all seem to have. The frenetic style Kromer uses is actually achieves somewhat similar results to the spontaneous prose writing one of my favorite writers, Jack Kerouac. Though Kerouac’s stories are much different than Kromer’s in that they are not tails of despair (and his writing is far less gramtically correct), they are similar in that Kerouac writes to give his reader as honest a depiction as possible of what his narrator (which is usually a fictional character based loosely around himself) is thinking throughout the story.

You particularly appreciate this style of writing when you read Kromer’s letters from the road in an afterword written by Arthur Casciato and James West III.  His writing is eloquent and well thought out, in stark contrast of the short and fragmented writing throughout the novel, which makes this way of writing far more difficult.  It is more shocking that such a well-versed individual was actually relegated to being a bum and really speaks to how desperate the times were.

“Pulling from Alamagordo over to Las Cruces was one of the hardest times I’ve ever had. The valley highway turned into a dry, bare stretch of low lying foothills, too little to be mountains and too hilly to be deserts. The hills fooled me completely (Guthrie, 198).”

In reading Woody Guthrie’s “Bound for Glory” I could not help but notice the tone of optimism he has at the beginning of the trip. As he’s leaving Texas he is a wide eyed optimist believing that his misfortune was merely a result of “wrong place and wrong time” and that he can simply just pick up and go to California, where everything will just automatically work out.  He simply believes that he can just go to California, that it is merely a “right nice day for hitting the road (191)” as if he hadn’t even put much thought into the decision.

Once he starts traveling however, he very quickly begins to realize that the route he needs to travel is not as simple as he naively believed.  Along the way he learns what it means to be hungry and that most people don’t want to help a strange traveler, even one that is willing to work for money/food such as Guthrie.
Some of the strangers are even looking to take advantage of travelers who are in a more precarious desperate situation such as the way the mechanic took advantage of the four boys.  Often on the trip he is left in the cold and as the trip progresses he becomes “weaker and emptier (201)”.

Just as the hills had fooled him completely, the notion that he could merely just go to California had done the same thing. Traveling is not the carefree easy task and though there are some nice people willing to help along the road, for the most part, traveling could involve an arduous journey.
There is a silver lining however, as throughout the story the people he is traveling with are willing to help him.  It is the other travelers who he is able to hitchhike with and the old man who gives him advice about whom to solicit help and food from in Almagordo (202).  Wheeler is the one who gets him a soda and a candy bar when the two of them are riding the rails together.

The traveling gives these people a sense of shared purpose which in turn unites them and brings them closer together. It allows them to see a bit of themselves in each other which causes them to sympathize with each other and ultimately help each other reach their actual goals as if they were family.

In American Exodous Paul Taylor makes the astute observation that even since the time of de Tocqueville there was a “residential separation between those who organized business undertakings and the working populations of the day (Lange and Taylor, 131)." The rich had a difficult time understanding the plight of the poor because they were indeed separated from the poverty and understood it as a statistic as opposed to an actual real-life story.

It is precisely because of this that these writers felt the need to hit the road and tell the story of the impoverished: so that the rich and middle class that had become so used to this separation dynamic could in fact see the suffering with their own eyes. This in fact was the ingenuity of these picture textbooks because they forced the upper classes to apply the statistics they knew to the depressing individual stories and pictures and say to themselves, “Wow now multiply this by hundreds and thousands.”

Taylor’s mention of de Tocqueville’s quote, “[the rich’s] object is not to govern that population but to use it… (Lange and Taylor, 131)” is also interesting in that it explores questions such as who is really ruling America and if the “Democracy” that has come to almost define America is working.  Though vilified by many of the road writers we’ve been reading, for the most part the rich were perfectly law-abiding and upstanding American citizens.  People may even argue that they were exemplifying American spirit, being true embodiments of Adam Smith’s capitalist idea that the greatest outcome comes from individuals pursuing what is in their own best interests. Wouldn’t the founding fathers (especially Alexander Hamilton) agree that this is how the greatest good could be accomplished?

With this quote de Tocqueville and now Taylor are making the observation that America, though claiming to be a land of equality, is in fact not a democracy of equals but instead an oligopoly indirectly ruled by the wealthy.  The rich, despite not officially ruling the poor, ultimately have power to influence politics (that the poor do not have) that de facto make them the rulers. As such they have a responsibility properly rule the poor (was this not the thesis of John Locke's second treatise which provided a basis for the American Revolution?: The Colonists had the right to revolt because the British were not properly ruling in the best interests of the colonists).

Though not as noble as the true idea of democracy, this fact that the rich de facto rule the poor is not the problem.  Instead, the problem stems from the fact that America ignores this power dynamic and renders the rich as NOT responsible for the poor they are in fact ruling. The upper classes goal is to “use” the lower class because that is what is in the upper classes’ best interest, and because they are officially “equal” the upper class owes nothing to the lower class in terms of wealth sharing.

But how exactly do you implement wealth sharing? Herein lies the debate most the liberal writers were having at this time.  While some argued for a socialist system where the working class indeed ruled, the new dealers believed that appropriate wealth sharing could be accomplished within the framework of capitalism via a more active government that de facto made the wealthy more responsible for the working class. Though history points to the New Deal being a success (and communism for the most part being a failure) this is an issue even in today’s world, as Obama is calling for the wealthier to be taxed more heavily, while the wealthy for the most part rebuff the request on the basis that they should not be responsible for paying for bailing out the government especially when government spending is not being geared towards benefiting their needs.     

“I should know for a long time these men, women and children…America is too vast.  There are too many stories to tell.”(Anderson, 5)

With these sentences Anderson is making the observation that because he is a traveler and not someone actually experiencing the scenes he is describing he (and by extension his writing) cannot fully comprehend the pain and suffering he was seeing.   It is an interesting insight into the theme of travel.  Many travelers often “delude” themselves into believing they are traveling “to see the world” and other cultures, but with this statement Anderson is expressing his opinion that true traveling, which is defined by this notion of truly seeing the world and understanding other cultures, is only accomplished through an “authentic experience”.  This is something that cannot be achieved without a significant time and culture commitment to actually become one of the inhabitants of the place you have travelled to.

To Anderson traveling is an almost religious experience. An experience defined by the action a traveler takes to understand the places and people he is encountering. With this statement he is emphasizing that even with his visiting to the mines where the poor folk work and by living in a decrepit abandoned mansion, he cannot possibly achieve the desired goal of travel as he cannot accurately report on the entire country while also staying in one place long enough to havetruly “traveled” to it.    

By contrast, Pyle seems to define the short and erratic excursions he is making as the true definition of traveling, in fact describing himself as a constant traveler “who is the only solvent person in America who literally has no home” (Pyle, 463, 467). Indeed he glorifies in how he would never of known that Pocohontas was buried in England and never would have ridden with a long-unseen cousin dragging redwood… had he been sitting by a desk. He takes pride in the fact that he has travelled by every form of locomotion and that he has not spent a Christmas at home in four years.  While he seems to agree somewhat with Anderson that to truly understand a place you need to spend time there (specifically, at the end of the chapter he makes reference to the fact that in reality “individually we have talked to nobody”(Pyle, 468), he seems to not be of the opinion that this is vital to true traveling.  

To him travel is a life style.  It is being a state of confusion that allows you to learn things you never possibly could at a desk.  It allows you to have adventures such as his excursion on an Italian Crab fishing fleet, or the time he didn’t wash his face for four days. His idea of travel seems to be a bit more realistic of what travel ultimately is for us, an escape where we get to learn tidbits of different cultures and accumulate adventures and memories we ultimately cherish.

“Timothy said angrily, “No we ain’t got no car. We sol’ our car. Had to. Run outa food, run out ever’thing… An’ if you’re hungry enough, they don’t have to pay nothin’ for it. An’ – we was hungry enough.” (293)”

Through this conversation, Steinbeck is making an astute observation about the nature of the automobile and the centrality it came to play for American families in the 1930’s.  Despite the fact that many of these families were poor, they still had the car, the hope that they could still travel and escape to a better place.

Though the automobile had come into existence 30-40 years (maybe even more than that) prior it is at this point that it becomes a staple of families, an item almost everyone has and that you only get rid of when you absolutely have to.  In the 1930’s it came to truly represent an escape, that no matter how lousy your situation was you could always get up and go. In fact when Tom asks the Wallaces if they have a car “both were silent, and Tom looking at their faces saw they were ashamed (293).” Not having a car was the ultimate level of desperation. It meant you had no hope or that despite being blessed enough to live in an era where this technology was available, you were still too pathetic to take advantage of it.  Even today almost every family has a car. People remember their first car, and often relate the event of purchasing their first car as a momentous coming of age occasion.

And Steinbeck chooses to introduce Timothy and Wilkie at this point as part of his illustration that the illusion of California as the “holy” land (in keeping with the Exodus theme Steinbeck parallels to) is in fact a myth. At least on the road no matter how bad things were on the road there was always hope of travel and hope of getting to a better place.  Once in California though, the dream is shattered and the Joads are “at the end of the road” so to speak.

Furthermore, Steinbeck has Wilkie recount that he saw the car on sale for $75 (whereas they had sold it for $10) to reinforce the idea that those who are more well off are taking advantage of the downtrodden. Even in the “holy” California big business exploits the working man. There is no escape for the migrant workers who ultimately need to sell their one scrap of hope just to prevent themselves from starving to death.

“In the evening a strange thing happened: twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all (193).”
 
In Chapter 17 Steinbeck spends the chapter describing the migrant worker communities that are developing on the road.  Essentially, these communities would become their own tribal societies, their own microcosms with their own rules, folkways and elders.  It actually reminded me of when I was younger and I’d go visit my cousin’s bungalow colony. Like these tribes, my cousins bungalow colony, a group of 30-35 families from all over the country, came together to become a sort of extended family.

I still remember they even used to have these massive barbeques where all the families would sit around, the elders with the elders, parents with the parents and the children with children at the children’s tables.  It didn’t matter that many of the families came from different areas and backgrounds, or that some of the families were of different faiths, or that some were wealthier than others.  Everyone was there to have a good summer.  When a grandparent passed away other families chipped into help.  They’d make meals and offer to pick up the family’s older children from the respective sleep away camps.

When conflicts broke out people didn’t fist fight, but certainly words would be had to overcome the difference.  I never heard of an instance of it, but I’d imagine if someone had truly crossed the line they would be ostracized by the rest of the community, just like within these road families.

What I found so ironic about these summers was that very few of these families kept in touch. When they’d return from the winters in their other lives they’d embrace and catch up on all the major events that happened during the year.  It was as if they weren’t even friends, let alone family during the year but all of a sudden were brothers during the summer. 

Looking back, I think it was the bungalow colony that tied them together. It was their connection to the place and that it represented a united goal of having a great relaxing summer that allowed these otherwise unrelated families to bond into their own little society.  So too, the shared home of the road and the ultimate goal of reaching California that it represented allowed these familial tribes to form overnight, for essential strangers to live amongst each other as if brothers.

And like the bungalow colony, where the summer would end after the great relaxing time had been had and the families would go their separate ways, so
too I get the impression that when these families actually reach California and achieve the goal they’ve all been striving for, they will go their separate ways, to their real lives.  
 

“Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, some of them were angry because they hated what they had to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold (Steinbeck, 31).”

With this phrase it seems as if Steinbeck is sympathizing with the land owners and bank representatives who he characterizes as having the unbearable task of forcing these struggling people to relinquish their homes and livelihood.  I find this particularly strange considering that the book jacket of the version I am reading described The Grapes of Wrath as “a portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless”.  Steinbeck’s wording however, seems to imply as if there is no conflict, or rather he is complicating the conflict by saying that it is more of a forced “survival of the fittest” conflict rather than a conflict of a powerful upper class repressing a lower class.  Yes people are in conflict, but they are not happy about being conflict.  Most the bankers and landowners needed to make excuses. They needed to either “[hate] the mathematics that are driving them” or “[worship] the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling.” And for the most part they hide behind the bank or company who insists that they take such action.

“[The bank] breathes profit; they eat the interest on money,” The company men tried to explain to the tenants.  This is the conflict Steinbeck is referring to. It was not a conflict of “man versus man” or the American rich versus the American poor, but rather it was a conflict of “Americans versus Situation”.  Moreover, Steinbeck uses a sad and defeated tone throughout the chapter and the book as a whole to embody that we the Americans were losing this conflict, that we were allowing the situation to defeat us, to force us to ruin the land and perhaps more importantly ruin the lives of fellow Americans.  

In this sense the men were truly slaves. The bank and company men who were relatively speaking blessed by their circumstances, were not free to make their own choices the way Americans were supposed to be free, even if some of those company men were proud to be slaves to such cold and powerful masters, they were slaves non-the-less. Americans were losing the conflict to maintain their freedom and unity as Americans in the harshest of situations.

Perhaps this explains how the war ultimately ended the depression (and even why there was such a feeling that a war would end the depression during this era).  Aside from economic activity it generated, it changed the situation.  It shifted the conflict from “Americans versus the Situation” to “Americans versus Fascism” a truly tangible enemy Americans could rally against as opposed to mythical Evil bank and the horrible situation the United States faced in the depression.

In several of the introductions that were assigned, the theme of hope among the American people was explored.  However, the writers seem to have vastly different opinions about this hope and whether or not it is good for or even permeable amongst the American people. Both Sherwood Anderson and Nathan Asch seem to have been of the opinion that hope is a good thing.  As Anderson wrote at the end of his introduction to “Puzzled America”, “There is a willingness to believe, a hunger for belief, a determination to believe (Anderson, xvi).”  Though Anderson observed a lack of hope, he noted that there was a desire to believe. That like the two sisters who wanted to believe that G-d would save their dying father, so too the American people wanted to believe that America could reclaim its glory.  Furthermore, Anderson called for more belief, using this work to encourage America to “show that there is belief here that we can (Anderson, xvi).”

Asch, though a bit more skeptical echoed this sentiment that hope is good in “The Road” where he acknowledgement, “[s]till for all [the slogan ‘All Americans are born equal’s’] falseness, it’s still better than no slogans at all, better than… [believing that all] they were born for is to die someday (Asch, 10).”  This statement, however seems to be of the notion that Americans already have hope that despite the fact that things are bleak and that justifiably people could abandon hope, they still believe that things will get better, that even the most pitiful of people could turn his fortunes around with just a bit of hard work. He too was calling for people to hope, however using fellow Americans as proof of its possibility to believe in a better future.

James Rorty, in “Where Life is Better”, seems to be of the same opinion of Asch, that the American people have a tremendous amount of hope despite their pitiful position.  He however, takes the opposing view of both Asch and Anderson that having hope is a good thing, instead  describing the American hope he encountered as “an addiction to the make believe” that disgusted and appalled him so much” (Rorty, 13).  Rorty believed that the optimism was a part of the problem.  That Americans out of sheer laziness and softness would rather believe that a better day was coming rather than enacting change to better their own life.

Through their reports on what they were seeing, these writers were in fact expressing their political views. They seemed to have felt that they NEEDED to do this, to provide guidance to a lost nation, perhaps even more so than describe what was actually happening.  Whereas Anderson and Asch expressed a need to continue hoping and pressing, and that for all its problems the United States was still the greatest nation in the world and that would ultimately return to prosperity, Rorty expressed that hope was merely an obstacle to reality and that in order to achieve true justice and prosperity America needed a new revolution.   
-Ken K