Amelia Bedelia's blog

Howdy, Ya'll: Even Jeff Foxworthy understands the importance of regional dialect.

When my New-Jersey-and-Chicago-raised parents first moved to middle-of-nowhere East Texas, they thought they had finally discovered hell on earth. The weather was terrible, the people were weirdly friendly, and, worst of all, they just couldn’t understand what anyone was saying—literally. Neither could I, until a few months of public school had gone by. It showed us all how much dialect affects the experience one gets out of a certain area—language can determine a lot about a place.

That’s one of the first things I noticed about the WPA Guidebooks; the didactic tone in the Massachusetts book sounds exactly the same as the New Orleans guide. Clearly this is a problem, as people in Massachusetts and people in New Orleans probably wouldn’t understand what the other was saying if placed in a room together. But the guides still held on to a local flavor by including different aspects of places within the guides. New Orleans has a section on cemeteries and a “Church Guide,” and religion and creepy ghost/homicidal maniac tales are certainly key ingredients of the South. Still, though, language distinguishes a region in a way little else can truly achieve—which is why I was thrilled to discover “glossaries” in the backs of some of the guides.

My favorite Texas-ism, which I’ve mentioned once before in a blog, means an extra affirmative “yes” or a resounding “no” when used in the negative. “That dog will hunt”: a key phrase to learn when journeying through the Lone Star State. For example: “D’ya think that rain’ll bring a tornado?” “That dog’ll hunt!” Alternately: “I need to drive to Dallas. Could I borrow your truck?” “That dog sure ain’t gonna hunt.” If you want to see the phrase in action, go see the movie Whip It (really, that movie is awesome) and listen very closely during one of the parental arguments.

But there are some equally great phrases to be found in the WPA guides. From Montana, I particularly enjoyed “close herdin” (cheek-to-cheek dancing—scandalous!), “crazy as a sheepherder” (self-evident), “’Tap ‘er light’” (parting admonition among miners) and “between hay and grass” (in difficult times). “Tignasse” (tangled hair), “wanga” (a spell) and “quartee” (half a five-cent piece) seemed to me the most colorful words from the New Orleans guide. Even Idaho has an interesting “Origin of Names” section detailing some amusing stories behinds its cities names. Midas was apparently “named for Midas in the hope that the feverish touch of prospectors would turn the place into gold. It did not.” Moscow, to answer Ilf and Petrov snarky remarks about American cities stealing names, was in fact named by a Russian with the “unbelievable name of Hogg.”

Some names of places also give insight into the region’s history. Raft River, for instance, is “so named because early settlers had to cross its mouth on rafts, inasmuch as beavers had filled the river with damns. Why the settlers did not cross on dams seems not to have been declared.” Most words from the New Orleans guide originate from French terms, displaying the city’s still evident French heritage. There are also several terms describing how many quarters white or black someone is (“griffe,” and “quadroon,” for instance) indicating the importance of race and the existence of racial mixing in the region. Montana’s language heavily alludes to weather and farming or mining expressions and occurrences, demonstrating the most prevalent and successful industries of the region.

America is undoubtedly a land of English speakers. But its diverse heritage and diverse geography create several very diverse native tongues. In the South and rural areas especially, it appears, language is manipulated into specific dialects that can sometimes be pretty difficult to crack. So kudos to the WPA for anticipating this phenomenon. I kind of wish I’d found them sooner—it took me fifteen years in Texas before I knew why people were always talking about whether or not their dogs would hunt.

Buy 'Em By the Bag: The first McDonald's, circa 1940, in California on Route 66.

Tourists are not cool. In general, the population—and especially college-age adults—tend to agree on this fact. There is a reason why no one wears a fanny pack. There is also a reason why “real” New Yorkers don’t visit Times Square or eat at Lombardi’s or smile on the subway. Because the word “tourist” implies fake—that terrible label of not knowing the REAL insert-popular-travel-destination-here. Part of that fakeness comes from the emergence of unified brands gentrifying America for the ease of tourists (i.e., Wal-Mart instead of the local deli) and the insulating bubble these comforting brands create around the wandering tourist. While reading our texts, I thought about things like Wal-Mart, and how increased travel in a population sometimes has the effect of blending everything together to create a “deadly uniformity” Jackle mentions. And what kills local flavor faster than anything? Fast food. This industry, along with the psychology of materialism and fast-paced leisure that tourism created, leads to the manic, visor-wearing tourist we know today.

I wasn’t sure exactly when fast food started, but Wikipedia confirmed that the increased popularity and affordability of cars (and, I would assume, the emergence of the paid vacation) led to the introduction of the drive-thru restaurant in 1921 that modern motorists know all too well. Welcome to America, White Castle! Even the diner cult contributed to a rise in fast food, but the first real “fast food restaurant” emerged in our very own New York City in 1912: Horn & Hardart’s Automat. The franchised restaurant came in the 1930s, when Howard Johnson’s standardized menus, signs and advertising for all their branches. Mmm, nothing tastes better than a uniform America.

Jackle notes that “speed exerted a tyranny.” This is true on and off the road—and in the kitchen. Sure, Americans were getting paid vacations, but Berkowitz explained that they weren’t too long. And in order to keep workers from being idle, companies urged employees to “go on vacation.” Berkowitz also notes that the 1941 United States Travel Bureau’s slogan was “Travel Strengthens America. It promotes the nation’s health, wealth, and unity.” It’s no wonder that by the second World War “Americans had come to view vacationing as more than a trivial diversion…[they] considered tourism essential to their personal pursuit of happiness.” Well, yeah, it seems like by that point not going on vacation would be downright un-American. And in order to both see America and eat during their one-to-two-week vacation, it seems obvious that travelers would resort to the drive-thru’s and fast-food chains the modern traveler knows so well.

Jackle mentions how “tourists rushed from destination to destination validating experiences.” This led to the theory that rushing through things like Yellowstone is not, in fact, the best way to experience them—hence, camping emerged as a new travel tradition. Jackle, in fact, recounts the birth of many anti-tourist ideals we have today: drive off the beaten path, commune with the Earth, avoid tourist groups. But the “consume, consume, consume” attitude stayed with America into the fifties—the emergence of leisure also marks the emergence of materialism. And consuming vast quantities quickly and effectively can also be traced back to the birth of fast food.

Today, we have things like the “Slow Food” movement, and cleverly-concealed maps so you “don’t have to look like a tourist.” Jackle, Berkowitz and even Agee (when we consider how fast food billboards claim the modern roadsides) all discuss the birth of tourism as an industry, something which I think also marks the death of travel. Since then, the nation has been unraveling fast food and the manic consumer attitudes created by the initial tourism advertising—we are still searching for the real America.

Read All About It!: West's narrative follows a sensational, hot-off-the-presses styleThe melodrama, sensationalism and stereotyped characters of Nathanael West’s A Cool Million tip their hats to a writing form popular in the days leading up to the novel’s publication in 1934: yellow journalism. I could almost hear the newsboys yelling while I read it, and the episodic nature of each chapter definitely made me wonder what headlines the New York Post would attribute to each blundering tale. “Pitkin Becomes Permanent Bonehead After Crazed Indian Massacre,” would work, perhaps, for the chapter when Lemuel’s bone becomes prominently displayed on his head. “Betsy Ross? More Like Betty Costs (But It’s Worth It)” for the passage recounting Betty’s kidnapping and forced prostitution. Yep, those papers would be flying from the presses straight to pedestrian hands.

Yellow journalism began in the late nineteenth century as an idea to make newspapers more entertaining and eye-catching to the general public. The term is associated with “muckrakers,” or investigative journalists who seek to expose corruption mainly in corporate America or government institutions. Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair are some of the first muckrakers in America, and their most notable publications include The Jungle, The History of the Standard Oil Compnay, and "Tweed Days in St. Louis." Many muckraker articles like these were published in McClure’s Magazine at the beginning of the twentieth century; the authors defamed the meat-packing industry, crooked politics, and corrupt economic practices.

A Cool Million contains many attributes of the journalistic style. Its characters are archetypal caricatures of real people: Lem, the stalwart American hero; Whipple, the persistent, determined patriot; and Betty, the beautiful, (at one point) virginal and pure American girl. Its tales are sensational, plunging in moments from the heights of Lem’s optimism (setting off with a solid almost $30) to the depths of tragedy and despair (getting robbed immediately and put in jail). This rollercoaster of exaggerated, unrealistic circumstances continues throughout the novel. Each chapter breaks with Lem’s spiraling bad luck or the comic-book like victory of the “bad guy.” Everything is seen in black and white, with Lem and his compatriots displaying the utmost “good” and characters like the man from Pike County, Wu Fong, and the fat Chesterfield-overcoat communist embodying the utmost evil. It’s enough to make you utter a guttural chuckle of, “Oh, ho ho,” while twisting the sides of your mustache.

The completely ridiculous sensational viewpoint brings the failures of the “American Dream” and West’s mocking of a particular American mindset into sharper focus. Everything in the novel is already polarized, and the characters often voice the most extreme views of a certain idea. Whipple, for instance, assures Lem, “I believe I once told you that you had an almost certain chance to succeed because you were born poor and on a farm…your chance is even better because you have been in prison” (West, 97). This satirical comment mocks the “American Dream” ideal of even the most disadvantaged members of society succeeding—it flips the sentiment to show that in Whipple’s extreme point of view, it is actually an advantage to be born impoverished. Lem’s incredibly annoying Boy Scout morals continually account for his guilt at receiving money he did not “earn.” He doesn’t want thousands of dollars for the diamond ring he procured; he wants thirty. He doesn’t want two dollars the store clerk gives him for discussing his mother’s decorating habits as he gazes at his old house in a storefront on Fifth Avenue; “he felt that he had not earned it” (103).

Well I say, for goodness’ sake Lem, take the damn money. West’s yellow journalism tale muck-rakes the scum of hypocrisy and dated ideals and throws it into the shining, pure face of Lemuel Pitkin, the American youth. Touché, Mr. West, touché.

You Go, Girl: Is Rosie the daughter of the powerful women of the Depression?The readings from Conroy and Algren illustrated an interesting theme that has reappeared in almost every text we’ve come across: the theme of a loss of manhood, and, subsequently, a rise of “girl power,” or the victorious championship of the tough, hearty American woman. Since The Grapes of Wrath, women have been showing their strength at a time when literature depicts men as helpless wretches at the mercy of the failed economy, violent police, or the unmerciful weather. Ma Joad fed the family and steered them to California in The Grapes of Wrath, while Pa and the other men sat in circles, drawing lines in the dust and thinking (except for Connie, who ran away). Rose of Sharon made the ultimate sacrifice to save a piece of mankind at the end of the novel, and it was the utter essence of her womanhood (her life-giving breast milk) that brought a man back from the brink of death. “Migrant Mother” is the image that still encapsulates the strength and suffering of the Depression decades later. And even “Boxcar Bertha” articulated a strange kind of independence from the past bondage of her sex—she lived her life away from her child, traveled like a man, and seemed to live almost as an equal to her male boxcar compatriots.

Bonny Fern’s letter to Larry in Conroy’s The Disinherited ironically highlights the impotence and failure on behalf of the man through Bonny’s own description of the women’s dependence on his money. Though a superficial reading of the letter reveals simply Larry’s mother and aunt’s incredible need for him to send money, a deeper reading reveals how Bonny’s words strip Larry of the classic role of “male provider,” essentially verbally castrating him on the spot. “Dad helped her all he could,” she writes of Larry’s mother, “but we…had to borrow two hundred…which must be paid back this summer in some way.” She describes their terrible living conditions, highlighting the “adapt-to-survive” attitude present in the women of The Grapes of Wrath, and even the photos of women setting up roadside camps as captured through Dorothea Lange’s and others’ lenses. The repeated trope of “Dad tried, but…” accents the continued failings of the husband’s ability to save his wife and female dependents. Bonny even suggests where Larry could find work, ending the letter with dubious hope, noting that perhaps he can get a job “if you don’t get crushed in the stampede when they go hiring.”

Algren’s Somebody in Boots begins with a disturbingly graphic description of men eating from garbage cans, and then from a mission kitchen. Eating meals is a distinctly “civilized” aspect of modern society, and mutilating the practice as Algren does achieves a barbaric, animalistic demeanor around the destitute men. They are completely dehumanized—one bum doesn’t even have a nose, and the frightening image Algren invokes is one that doesn’t even resemble a man. The men’s discussion of digging through garbage cans for food obviously suggests dog-like behavior, and the scene of men eating in the mission does not contradict the insinuation. Their “belching,” “retching,” and “swashing” indicate a wholly uncivilized affair, a kind of rabid feeding frenzy. The men are reduced to the most barbaric state of animal existence.

Maybe this is going a bit far, but it almost seems like this theme runs a parallel with the government’s failing on behalf of America. The American people depended on the government and banks supporting them, and they failed. The American woman depended on her man to support her, and he failed. So it seems the situation calls for an overhaul of both institutions, economic and chauvinistic. This article even claims women’s jobs weren’t affected by the Depression, and women in general (already gainfully employed) remained employed. Many down-on-their-luck women depicted in our readings, like the girl in Waiting for Nothing, end up selling their bodies as a means of support. Is this degrading, or is it, possibly, a form of liberation? Their men have failed them, so they are using their gender as a means to get by. I’m not saying this is truly liberating—partly I’m just playing Devil’s Advocate—but it’s an interesting question to ponder in the face of so many powerful female depictions.

Isn't it Ironic: A 1930s soup line like the ones Kromer stood in.

We’ve been reading many essays and excerpts about bum life over the past weeks and examining the truth behind the text. How do the made-up captions of Caldwell and Bourke-White add or, in my opinion, detract from the images of Depression victims? What guidelines do the ethics of style have about writing a semi-fictional “autobiography,” like Reitman did with Sisters of the Road? How can a well-educated, well-off artist pen stories or shoot photographs of dirt-poor farmers and hoboes without exploiting them and insulting them? The answer, I think, is found in Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing.

This book was harder to read than anything we’ve examined so far, including the gut-wrenching Grapes of Wrath. It’s hard to say exactly how he does it, but Kromer manages to take every ounce of romanticism, elitism and voyeurism out of his text. His use of straightforward language makes the book read almost like a news article: factual and devoid of artistic liberties. The humble, subtly gritty prose he employs demands trust from the reader. Repeated use of words and phrases like “stiff,” “bastards” and “on the fritz” make the text low, in a sense, and attainable to the common man. It reads like a counter-style to Agee’s complicated, artistic text in We Shall Now Praise Famous Men. He is a man possessing nothing, devoid of Ivy League airs or intellectual lies. He is simply telling you about his life without flattering himself, flattering the system, or flattering America.

On a deeper level, the stories he recounts are similarly gritty and self-conscious as his prose. In Chapter Four, he describes an encounter with a homosexual man known as Mrs. Carter. The area of male sexual exploitation and gay culture has been explored by none of the texts we’ve read so far, and Kromer’s willingness to divulge everything, to describe the absolute vulnerability of his lifestyle, is disarming. He makes no claim of high morality, but uses the gay man—and later attempts to use his roommate—simply as a means to the vital end: food and a place to sleep. His prose becomes more and more shamefaced as the chapter goes on, as though he is cringing as he recounts this mutual exploitation between Mrs. Carter and himself. His need to survive surpasses everything, and he ends on the eternally humble note, his vulnerability epitomized by his actual nakedness: “You can always count on a stiff having to pay for what he gets. I pull off my clothes and crawl into bed” (Kromer, 53).

The book is remarkably unvaried in its stream of anecdotes—as it progresses, the stories do not become more positive or more negative. They contain a constant level of horror and recount similarly terrible circumstances. There are occasional passages of relief—the image of Kromer, Werner and Karl eating cakes and pies, for instance—but these are kept in check by the reality of Kromer wearing a coat with a stain from a tuberculosis hemorrhage. Kromer cannot escape the reality of his life, and he does not allow the reader to either. But his amazing prose, factual, concise and clear, does not obviously invoke pity. He is merely stating the facts. The book ends with a terrifying account of a homeless man dying in the bunk next to Kromer’s. Mary Obropta notes that Kromer’s imagery helps reinforce the static nature of his text: “This layering, this repetition of stiff above stiff above stiff, is like the twelve chapters of waiting and waiting in Waiting for Nothing. There is no progression. There is no salvation. Again and again, there is only the dead body.”

The book has ended, and nothing has changed. There is no hopeful scene of humanity’s good will. There is no Rose of Sharon to save the dying man. There is no Boxcar Bertha epiphany and renunciation of wanderlust. There is nothing. The reader has waited for twelve chapters for Kromer to escape, to find relief, to get out--to have a happy ending. And they are left waiting.  

The Humor In Homelessness: A Seattle hobo in 2007

“Wanderlust” can’t be helped. At least, that seems to be part of what Ben Reitman’s Sisters of the Road was all about. Boxcar Bertha was a woman on the move, a traveler too thirsty to be quenched by any one city or home, an eternal dharma bum. When Bertha sets out on another adventure, she describes them using words like “unforgettable,” capturing in her descriptions some kind of freedom unattainable by those who are tied down, who do not travel—who have a home. Even when things seem stable in her life, she can’t handle being hemmed in by the normality. “My work was fascinating… Baby Dear was well and flourishing,” she writes. “But the old wanderlust was upon me.” And travel is the escape, the cure for the boredom that may overcome one stuck in any town for too long. Not that it is always pleasant, or voluntary—Woody Guthrie’s excerpt contains many accounts of almost fatal hunger and cold, and Boxcar Bertha hinted at perils like rape and other sexual harassment faced by a young woman traveling alone.

But at the same time there is still an irresistible attractiveness to the freedom of life on the road, completely separated from “The Man,” and a yearning for the solidarity shared by a group of people like the boxcar riders Edward Anderson writes about. This type of on-the-road camaraderie can be traced back to the camps of The Grapes of Wrath, and ironically places the hobo in an almost elitist position as a part of a group only few can claim membership to. These travelers, “rootless, dispirited, and responsible to no one” formed a definite “subculture,” as James Gregory points out in his foreword to Hungry Men. So in our modern day and age, when we have not yet reached another Great Depression, do these subcultures still exist? Do people romanticize the hobo lifestyle and claim unquenchable wanderlust like Boxcar Bertha? And if so, why?

They do still exist. In fact, the phenomenon of homelessness has spread from not just people who are forced into hobo lifestyles, but people who choose to be homeless. I think this is an idea hinted at in Boxcar Bertha—the idea that restlessness and wanderlust is simply in some people’s veins and they can’t help it. Google “homeless by choice” and you’ll find thousands of accounts from varying perspectives on this trend. This story details a sister’s tortured relationship with her “homeless by choice” brother, a boy raised in a middle class family who could have had a “normal” lifestyle, but instead hit the road at 18 and hasn’t been back since. He’s joined groups like The Rainbow Family of Living Light, an organization that vaguely reminded me of Home Colony in Boxcar Bertha. The brother’s choice has obviously brought much pain upon the family, and the sister says at one point, “He’s my brother, and I still love him through all of my disgust…. No one has the answers at this point. This odd breed of homeless individuals seems to be growing and thriving, presenting strange difficulties. After all, how do you get someone off the streets who chooses to be there?”

Here are more accounts from some homeless by choice: tips from a man who lives in his car to save money so he can pay off his credit card debt, weird accounts from a mathematics student who lived in the physics undergraduate lounge at Arizona State University, and more travel tips from a laid-off baggage claim attendant who now sleeps in airports. Why do these people do what they do? I must admit, I can see the appeal—not answering to institutions, living everywhere across America, traveling as you want to—but as Boxcar Bertha queried, I’m not sure if I ever really will understand restlessness.

Allie Mae Burroughs: An iconic image from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

A photograph is mysterious. It is real and tangible and unforgiving, by nature of its creation—we know a photograph happened. We see a person and we know they existed once, and that there was a moment in time when they looked exactly like the image on a piece of paper in front of us. But we also know only what we see, and are left somewhat in the dark unless text accompanies the photograph. The excerpts we read this week coupled photography and words in a new and revolutionary form for the 1930s. They chronicled the suffering and strife of many families of the Great Depression, and documented a country in the midst of great change. Many of them were canonized as an historical triumph, like Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The stories of the Depression alone were enough to cause a literary stir in the country, but by putting faces to the tragedies, by showing the public how tough Allie Mae Burroughs’ hard mouth looked, writers and photographers were able to communicate in a universal language: the language of image.

We have had many discussions in class about how works like The Grapes of Wrath and other travelogues we’ve read may have exploited the plight of the American people at this time. Many posts have already reflected on Agee and Evans’ milestone book or the influence of Roy Stryker, the head of the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration who hired many of our readings’ showcased photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. These figures were highly influential in this photojournalistic movement—but they were also despised by many subjects of their groundbreaking photos.

Fortune magazine didn’t publish the story that became Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, though they originally commissioned Agee and Evans to write a story about cotton sharecroppers. In 2005, the magazine published an article called “The Most Famous Story We Never Told” about Agee and Evans work in Alabama, and in order to do so, they interviewed the families Agee and Evans wrote about and photographed sixty-nine years earlier. And the families, universally, were displeased with the artists who had visited them many years before.

The article is truly fascinating after reading the excerpt—Charles Burroughs (the Burroughs were the Gudgers in Agee’s text) is still angry that his family never even got a copy of the book. He was only four when Evans and Agee came to stay with the family, but he can still remember the day they moved in. Laura Tingle (whose name was disguised as Ricketts, the family who was the subject of most of our excerpt), said, when asked what she thought of the two men, “What did I think? I didn’t think. I really wished they hadn’t a showed up…They told a lot of things that was wrong. They just said they was making pictures. They didn’t say they was reporters.”

Phil Burroughs, another son of the quintessential Depression icon Allie Mae Burroughs, said his father often spoke about the book, and always with anger. “It made him upset, it really did,” he said. “They were cast in a light that they couldn't do any better, that they were doomed, ignorant. How would you feel if somebody cast your folks, your parents, or your grandparents in that light?” But Phil’s son, Andrew, was in high school when the interview was conducted, and offered a different point of view. He spoke about how lucky he was to be able to go to college and play football instead of suffer like his grandparents. And he’s proud that his ancestors were chronicled in the book.

In an interview in 1963, Roy Stryker called photographs “the little brother of words” and emphasized how, though the FSA used photographs to catch people’s attention, the written word was still the dominant influence. And when asked about how the FSA photography project evolved, Stryker said, “I think [the photo project] was only primarily supplying [Tugwell’s] field people with tools to make the [Farm Security] program clear. And I must say that I think we strayed a long way from where we were supposed to start. And we did it like all things happen -- not exactly accidentally, but in spite of the good plans, the well-chosen words in the job descriptions and in the administrative order. We strayed because circumstances pushed us in this direction.”

Evans and Agee strayed too—in photographs and text. But they did not stray from the truth—the families of Hale County admit to the truth of the book. They just strayed from decorum because the circumstance pushed them. I understand the point of view of the displeased families of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. But there is a passage at the end of our excerpt that stands out to me because I think it shows how much reverence and admiration Agee and Evans had for their subjects, and how they understood their own power as chroniclers. And I think they knew that they probably could not depict the families in a way that would not make that generation despise them for exposing their hardships; but I think they also hoped the sacrifice of the family would lead to attitudes like that of Andrew Burroughs, the grandson, and leave the world in prideful awe of these humble people.

The passage reads as follows: “It is as if I were telling [Louise], good god, if I have caused you any harm in this…if I have so much as reached out to touch you in any way you should not be touched, forgive me if you can, despise me if you must, but in god’s name feel no need to feel fear of me…and these eyes, receiving this, held neither forgiveness nor unforgiveness…and it was I who looked away.”

Travel, by its very nature, implies a departure from a home, a migration towards the unknown, an impermanent expedition. But our readings so far have hinted at a different kind of travel, one that defines the verb in a nontraditional sense. The America of the 1930s was a broken America, ravaged by depression and drought, recuperating from its first World War and headed quietly into a second one. The phenomenon of the economic depression caused people to change their lives and values, as illustrated many times over in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. And it caused, I believe, a marked change in the idea of “home”—a departure, a permanent trip away from old values and old ideas of home.

Nathan Asch writes in his book The Road about a Polish family he stayed with in Detroit, and a much wealthier American family who also housed him. “I lived two lives in Detroit,” he says. But in each life Asch found a different home. Some might call his migrant wanderings homelessness—Pyle also refers to his travels by noting, “I am probably the only solvent person in America…who literally has no home.” But what is home? Is it a house and a car, mortgages and a front yard? I would argue that it is not. Home, like our government and economy and so many other American institutions, went through a major overhaul in the 1930s. With so many people hitting the road—the educated and solvent like Asch and Pyle to penniless sharecroppers like the Joads—the road became home. America became home.

Each travel writer we read this week discussed the qualities of the stalwart American people—their ability to persevere, and their willingness to open up to the writer, the questionable figure somewhere between a charitable voice box for the masses and an exploiting moneymaker. The writers found home in the people they met. They found the “Real America” and fell in love with it. Pyle discusses in “Vagabondism” how “we loved Arizona so much that when we crossed the Colorado River for the last time we could hardly talk for the lumps in our throat. We left Hawaii with broken hearts. We can hardly speak of the people of Sun Valley, Idaho without bubbling over.” He writes for pages about all the things he was given on the road, all the gifts he took away from travel—one being a godchild. In The Grapes of Wrath, the Joads (the opposite end of the spectrum from these writers, who were travelers by choice) encounter the same type of hospitality and poignant kindness from strangers across the country. So America, as a group, as a teeming mass of inhabitants, becomes home.

But perhaps this is romanticized. As Pyle notes, “there is no time for lingering disillusionment” in the “impermanency of travel.” I think, however, that is a crucial point in America’s ability to function at this point. The stories of the homeless told by Hickok, and the heart wrenching tale of Hazel recounted by Adamic illustrates how dire the circumstances were for so many Americans at this time. We needed illusion. Illusion was vital to the country being able to pull itself back up. And so we rallied around illusions. We rallied around our president, cheered him when he pulled himself up straight (as told by Pyle). We rallied around a romanticized view of the country. The whole world did, and immigrants like the Polish family in Asch’s story started pouring in, and again, America had to reevaluate home as home became more and more diverse. We rallied around each other. We started thinking of home not as a single family unit, our immediate kin, but as a whole of struggling workers, a camaraderie. We traveled from the “I” idea of family and home to the “we” idea of family and home. As a broken farmer tells Pyle, recovering from the Depression and Dust Bowl “took character, and free money, and straight shooting, and we don’t have the same things anymore.”

Even in our adoption of home as a broader idea, we created miniature homes in places more familiar to us. Asch’s discussion of New York is a good example of this. He has traveled the country and found home in hundreds of cities and families, but when he nears New York he is forced to see how familiar it is to him, how much it is his home. From “the pushcarts selling dollar thirty-five shoes” to “Union Square roaring out a protest” and “the feeling of something always dully shaking,” Asch encases New York in an idea of home we can still relate to today.

So what is home to us today? Did we hang onto this feeling of national home-ness? My answer is no. Our country slowly drifted towards antagonism between various parties, political and otherwise, and we lost our universal home along the way. But could we come back to it if times get tough? My answer is yes. America has changed greatly since the 1930s but human nature and its willingness to become a “we” has not.

(I wasn't sure how to add a caption to the video, but it's a video of New York in the 1950s set to the song "New York, I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down." I think there is a restless quality and negative view of the "I" that displays some of the attitudes of the country during the 1930s.)

Commerce, TX Cotton Belt Depot: From the Cotton Belt Railroad Symposium, paying homage to the St. Louis Southwestern Railway.

I finished reading The Grapes of Wrath for the second time in the early afternoon at the Starbucks across from NYU next to the Astor Place subway stop. It was loud, and the Beatles’ “Let It Be” was blasting over the dull roar of the caffeinated crowd. I felt tired by the Joad’s struggles, worn out by their hardship and aching for the tough times to come. I could almost feel the wetness of the endless rain, smell the damp hay in the old barn, hear the urging cries of Ma Joad pushing the family through the storm…

But I was in the Starbucks on Astor Place.

I finished reading The Grapes of Wrath for the first time several years ago in the late summer evening, on a couch in Commerce, Texas, an hour and a half away from anything that could be deemed a “major city.” It was quiet, and my mom was playing Carlos Santana in our kitchen and grilling peppers. The experiences, needless to say, were quite different. But no matter where I am when I finish The Grapes of Wrath, it always gives me the shivers—that tingle of solidarity and a deep realization of the history of Southern culture. Because the Joads unfailingly remind me, no matter where I am when I read about them, of the families I grew up with. The story takes place mostly in California, but the attitude of resilience and revolt, the cult of hospitality, and the instant camaraderie with fellow farmers invokes a strong Southern tradition.

In the middle of downtown New York City, it’s hard to imagine the silence and emptiness of where I grew up, but this will give you a pretty good picture (feel free to skip around, it gets boring). This isn’t a town where we live and die by the land—it’s more livestock country than farming country—but we are home to an agricultural college, and we share the connection to our dirt articulated in the Joad’s migration. Commerce can trace its roots back to a general store opened in 1864 by a man named Si Jackson. We built ourselves up thanks to the St. Louis Southwestern Railway, our cows and our cotton (thirty minutes outside of town lies the Audie Murphy American Cotton Museum). The town was originally known as Cow Hill due to—you guessed it—all the cattle ranches surrounding the area. Just outside town, a ranch called “Almost Heaven” epitomizes the love locals have for their land. We are the proud home of the oldest Bois d’Arc tree in the state, and hold an annual festival in September which boasts funnel cake, beauty pageants and crocheted pillows sold to commemorate this sacred gift. Indie rock artist Ben Kweller once wrote a song about us (it’s not that complimentary).

 I think there are many reasons why Southerners understand each other and bond together in the way the migrant workers in the Hoovervilles and government camps of The Grapes of Wrath did. The Joads can take the hardships because every year, without fail, the weather climbs to 100 by June and stays there for a month while the skies remain empty and bright. There’s absolutely nothing to do, so people become involved in things like hog-showing. Besides having dialects that are almost impossible to understand at times, local vernaculars often boast colorful phrases related to hunting, fishing, or farming. For example, “That dog will hunt,” means “yes” in Texan.

“Think it’ll rain by October?”

“That dog’ll hunt.”

And then, of course, there’s the hospitality, and the food. It’s just the law—even if you think so-and-so’s family is a bunch of snot-nosed brats, you still have to talk to them and give them a glass of sweet tea and some brisket if you’ve got it. Why? I’m not sure—I guess because there just aren’t that many families to grow up with. Tom Joad knew everyone he came across when he got back to Oklahoma because there’s no way to not know everyone in town when the town’s population hasn’t broken a thousand yet. But thanks to the counteracting cult of Southern bluntness—a characteristic Ma Joad’s hard, feisty exterior displays well throughout the novel—you can always tell so-and-so’s family that they are, in fact, snot-nosed brats, while you’re handing them the brisket.

Underneath all the bigger issues of socialism and government and economy and morality that saturate The Grapes of Wrath lies a small, subtle sub-theme: the beauty of Southern families. In many ways, the Joads fulfill all the terrible stereotypes of the South—the pregnant teenage girl, the uneducated farmer, the accent-ridden country rubes, the impoverished family—but in many ways they encompass all that is good in the South. They make it through with resilience, family values and a deep sense of their homeland’s culture. By the end of the book, the reader is impressed with their scrappy ability to survive, and convinced that any big-city folk would not fare nearly as well.

"We Can Take It!": Wilfred J. Mead's iconic image of the CCC, named after it's slogan.

I am not a happy camper.

I never have been. My family decided one year that it would be fun to camp for the Fourth of July (great idea guys, right when the temperature in East Texas breaks 100), so we struck out for Arkansas with our spray-on sunscreen and four-man tent. Boy, was I mad. Not only were we covered in each other’s sweat and dirt (it was a nice bonding experience), but we were also the only people in a tent! While we gasped through a ninety-degree night, generators from RV’s and movable mansions whirred air conditioning, television, and happiness into other camper’s “tents.” If Rose of Sharon gets a talking-to for crying a little under her awful circumstances, Ma Joad surely would have smacked me one had she been forced to put up with my camping attitude.

But camping is a great American tradition, and for those less wimpy than I, it’s actually quite enjoyable. Though camping in the traditional sense is hardly what the Joads are currently doing in California, the 1930s did mark the beginning of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a government organization founded in 1933 and terminated in 1942 that is responsible for building many popular campgrounds still around today. Roosevelt instated the program as part of the New Deal, and employed men usually in their late teens or early twenties. Conceivably, some of the students of this very class could have been part of the CCC.

Overall, it was a pretty good job. Employees lived in work camps and were paid $30 a month plus $25 to send to their dependents (this would have been a great job for any of the Joad men, especially that weasel Connie). They were initially enrolled for six months, but had the option of staying up to two years. The CCC worked on 300 types of projects, ranging from firefighting to picnic ground development. They are responsible for planting approximately three billion trees, a crucial conservation effort that helped stop the devastating erosion and heal the overworked land, two leading factors in the Dust Bowl phenomenon. Some even called them “Roosevelt’s Tree Army” (“The Creation of the CCC”).

But they didn’t just plant trees. A recent article in the New York Times talks about how the “CCC boys,” so nicknamed because some snuck in as young as 14, carried lilac bushes from home to plant around the barracks at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. The bushes are still there today (though the barracks are not) and a bronze statue helps inform visitors of the parks legacy. “Shirtless, ax at his side, [the statue] represents the swarms of workers — some 10,000 or more — that the corps provided to help develop the park in the 1930s,” the article says.

On a similar note, this article from the New York Times recounts a fascinating history of the famous “Central Park Shantytowns” of the 1930s. The descriptions of the various Central Park encampments bear a striking resemblance to Steinbeck’s pictures of Hoovervilles in The Grapes of Wrath. The article also does a good job of discussing the relationship between vagrants and authority figures at the time. One of the most interesting and poignant stories recounts how a judge suspended sentences for 22 unemployed men arrested for living in Central Park in 1931 and gave them each two dollars instead.

Finally, though it’s not exactly a campfire song, “Summertime” is an excellent song to listen to while reading the slower-paced parts of the novel. I find the lyrics ironically relevant, as the jazz standard was originally written as part of an opera in 1935.