In The American Roadside, James Agee discusses the roadside cabin camps which first took-off during the 1930’s. This immediately caught my eye as an interesting subject, especially in relation to the role of cabin camps relative to traditional large scale hotels. Last summer I worked as an economic consultant and briefly conducted some industry research into hospitably revenues on a macro-level. Much in keeping with Agee’s presumption that the cabin camps were here to stay, I found that motels and microtels actually make up a majority of hospitality revenues and profits in the United States today. So why did the microtel succeed? Well, I think Agee hits on most the main reasons in his piece.
 
The first is that there are few barriers to entry and relatively low overhead required, at least back in the day, to start a cabin camp. As Agee says, you might come across one such cabin camp with “a small clean room, perhaps twelve by eleven feet. Typically it’s furnished with a double bed…a table, two chairs, a small mirror, and a row of hooks in one corner and a half opened door to a toilet in the other.” (47) Agee then goes on to say that it was not uncommon for such cabins to be furnished out of “an old chicken coop” (50) or the like, with many having been cheaply yet practically constructed. Moreover, Agee stresses how such establishments often used their own profits to fuel expansion, perhaps adding more cabins, a dinner or a fueling station, all built up in an efficient and cost effective manor. This low cost and convenient service model, one large-scale hotels such as Radisson and Hilton had a hard time following, turned out to be incredibly attractive to motorists, leading many such firms to buyout or invest in their own microtel lines.     
 
Secondly, as Agee stresses in his piece, the demand was extraordinary, with the mass appeal of the automobile people were no longer chained to train lines and major cities, or even small towns, they could drive anywhere the road could take them and oftentimes saw little need to deal with the headaches of driving into a town and checking into a large hotel. The cabin camps, or modern day motels, offered convenience, accessibility, and in the 1930’s a tremendous degree of independence in which you got your own little roof, all to yourself for the night.
 
Finally, Agee makes the point that cabin camp owners could easily construct a few more cabins once the initial camp was in place at relatively low cost. This made the cabin camps uncommonly scalable for the industry, as additional cabins could be added and converted with relative ease as needed, a level of flexibility completely foreign to large scale hotel planers.
 
In conclusion, I think the accuracy and astuteness with which Agee presents the cabin camp movement is remarkable. The idea of cabin camps is distinctly individualist and appealing to many Americans, and Agee did a remarkably job of describing its appeal and recognizing its potential.     

Nathanial Asch’s The Road: In Search of America, is a multi-faceted mosaic of life and struggle in 1930’s America. Through the personal retelling of his journey across America, Asch is able to convey the conditions and sense of hopelessness that existed at the time, both from his own observations and the conversations he recounts with those he met along his journey. Pyle in his piece, Home Coming also delivers to the reader a tremendous sense of loss – driving home the point that just a few years prior things were different, better, and that life used to be full of optimism. Moreover, Hickock in her piece presents a fundamentally broken and overstressed governmental system. All of this leaves the reader with a sense, and I think a right sense, of the tremendous sense of entrapment people must have been feeling at the time. None of the three writers mentioned above offer any sort of real solution to the problems and conditions they describe, leading me to believe they didn’t see one, and thus that the people didn’t see one either.    
 
In One Third of a Nation, Hickock draws out the individual, much like Asch does, in order to paint a broader picture of what people were feeling. By zooming in on individual and emotionally potent cases, Hickock makes the Depression real and overwhelming in the extent of the problems it contained. Her depiction of struggling relief workers trying to deal with an under funded system, and the poor souls in need of relief are truly moving.
 
Both Asch and Hickock paint a portrait of an increasingly foreign America, where signs saying “no work here” hang in windows and people wander about in hunger and distress. This paints a picture of alienation which must have been painful for many Americans during the great depression. In speaking to with grandmother, who herself grew up during the depression; one of the points she continually mentioned was the utter sense of isolation that she felt at the time. In here retelling, she said that the members of her small town community banded together to help each other however they could, but that there existed a sense that the country had become in a way foreign, like “the old country” with limited opportunities and in many cases struggle to meet the most basic necessities of life. Moreover, there was a feeling of isolation from the broader country, like the whole thing was braking down. This is a sentiment expressed in all three of the works mentioned, especially Hickock and Asch, lending a particularly clear view into what many people were really felling in America during the 1930’s.

Want to live with a moral obligation every time we pass a bum on the street, a wallet stuffed with cash and credit cards safely in our pocket?
Read Tom Kromer’s Waiting For Nothing.

No, Tom ain’t homeless because he does not want to work. Neither is he because he is an alcoholic or a drug addict. His mind and heart seem in the right place, and believe me, he wouldn’t hurt you either.

He just can’t make ends meet. Yes, in the United States of America.
 
In the United States of America that was built on a promise: The promise of an opportunity to live without limitation, create one’s own destiny. The Indians were ousted, a country premised on freedom was built: “A frontier land where families had their own acres, own gun, own conscience,” in the words of New York Times columnist, Anand Giriharadas. 

Yet, the cold iron benches, the pouring rain, the filth and the constant hunger that accompanies our protagonist, forcing Kromer to literally wait for nothing and take comfort in the emptiness and morbidity of it all, run parallel to what our subconscious has been conditioned to think.
When else, even amidst the media blitz our lives occur, have we experienced such travesty of the human life. For example, when the man in the missionpops himself with a gun, the narrator writes, “After a guy bumps himself off, he doesn’t have any more troubles. Everything is all right with him” (42) Death seems a relief; a pleasant aberration after the wallows of what is life for Kromer and his ilk.

No wonder this book is hard to find. Even Google, a crusader of free information, doesn’t carry it in its online catalogue. I wonder why.  

It is said that the literary press just didn’t get John Steinbeck. He seemed all over the place.

But Warren French, in his Reference Guide to American Literature, maintains that the diversity found in Steinbeck’s work is a consistently “developing vision of man’s relation to environment.” In that sense, he reckons, Steinbeck was a Modernist, citing Maurice Beebe’s definition of modernist sensibility, as defined by “its irony, its implicit admiration for verbal precision and understatement." 

In 2010, in a school like Gallatin School of Individualized Studies, we take it for granted the freedom granted to us by the legacy of the Modernists, Steinbeck included.

Take my story. Raised in India post-liberalization, in a country crashing head-first into globalization, I was raised to have an inherent distrust of the Government. After all, the Government got us in a place where no longer the country could afford the Government. So poor was India in 1990 that we had to mortgage our gold reserves to secure supplies of food, lest the country starved. In the following years, as India opened up, it seemed change could not happen fast enough.

And boy, India changed. I, raised amidst cities sprouting, roads filling up with cars and Indians getting more confident, had little empathy for the public services. When finally Oliver Stone’s Wall Street came to our cable channel, India collectively chanted, “greed is good.”
 
But soon, the Indian story became inevitability. As urban India began settling in its newfound prosperity, I came to New York in 2007. A New York, in the words of Hans Van Der Broek, protagonist of Joseph O’ Neil’s bestselling novel, making a million bucks “was essentially a question of walking down the street — of strolling, hands in pockets, in the cheerful expectation that sooner or later a bolt of pecuniary fire would jump out of the atmosphere and knock you flat.”

A year later, it would all crash.
 
Greed ain’t longer good, if you ask me. If it wasn’t for the modernists, and I’d write novels for a living, the critics wouldn’t have given me a dime.

Thank God for 2010.