The best laid schemes's blog

As I read through various WPA guides, I was surprised at how inclusive they were, and how they were all so much more than guidebooks. While modern guidebooks might offer a very brief history of a place, or mention its politics, they are much more focused around tourism, with everything in them tying back to what might be of interest or of use to the tourist. The WPA guides read more along the lines of artifacts of state pride. They offer in depth history lessons, cite positive and negative attributes, mention the lives, activities and personal anecdotes of the locals, and admit deficiencies. I found the New Jersey guide to be quite interesting as it is a state that today does not have a very wide-reaching reputation as a tourist destination. While yes, I have seen a few commercials sprinkled across television inviting people to visit NJ’s beaches in the past few years, in general New Jersey has a bad reputation as being anything but “the garden state.”
Looking back to the WPA guide, it seems New Jersey was already best known for its factory lined un-scenic highways. With such a reputation the writers of the guides had a lot to counteract and to prove about the beauty contained in New Jersey, emphasizing that much lies beyond the highways which most who pass through New Jersey never take the time to leave. Even the introduction addresses the state’s critics, stating “This story of New Jersey is a cause for pride to those who love the state, but must also give pause to those who can be critical at the same time. Its beauty and romance, its ugliness and the commonplace have been preserved in an unusual balance by the collaborators in the evaluation of the State.”
The guide emphasizes New Jersey’s diversity, noting that, though “it is often called the Garden State, with equal reason it might be labeled the Factory State or the Commuter State,” and I might add, today, the Shore State, as I think The Jersey Shore is now the state’s biggest draw. In emphasizing this variety, the guide does not however focus on the beauty and ignore the less appealing characteristics. Instead it looks to acknowledge what is positive about the aspects usually regarded in a negative light. It talks about how ingenious the road design in New Jersey is, how most travelers never leave the highway, because unlike other less well designed road systems that force slow going and transfers, “it was New Jersey that pioneered with the cloverleaf intersection to sort unceasing streams of traffic. Roads have been laid so straight and broad that the long-distance autoist speeds across the State, seeing little except a landscape of reinforced concrete and billboards, although many pleasant villages and quiet country lie a little way off the main highways.” This is something that definitely holds true today. The other thing about New Jersey’s reputation for its roads is that it was used as a corridor between New York City and Philadelphia, and so many that passed through were merely commuters; New Jersey typically was not the destination in itself.
Reading through the history section, I learned that New Jersey was originally comprised of two separate provinces—East Jersey and West Jersey, now North and South Jersey—and I found this very interesting, because this divide continues to be seen today, but without any thought given to its origins. While today North and South still hold onto some animosities, they are more pride based, but back when it was being settled the differences were still firmly rooted in lifestyles and systems of belief. New England Puritanism was “stamped upon the eastern province, which was to become the urban manufacturing area, while the western province…concentrated on agriculture and adhered largely to the Quaker faith. Although the two provinces were united under a single government in 1702, fusion has never been completed.” This history lesson and notion of ongoing divide, while very interesting, is again something that would not be written in a guide book today. Modern guides would only emphasize the positive, and the attractions, while these guides were more inclusive, and seem to me to be more pieces of state memorabilia than anything else. The guide does, however, offer some practical information as well, and here it is extraordinarily thorough. After outlining possible modes of transportation to the state, the guide focuses on the driving trend and offers detailed information on what motorists will need to know while driving through, from the gas tax to the speed limits and traffic laws.

In all of the articles we read concerning tourism in the 1930s I found the concepts of isolation versus human social interaction to appear again and again. The two opposing urges seem to have coexisted and were reflected in the different forms of lodging available to automobile tourists of the time. In describing the different forms of accommodation, the extent to which they are social or private and isolating are key factors. It is interesting that the venues that are the most social fall on opposite ends of the spectrum—the high end hotel which emphasizes public spaces, and the least expensive and least luxurious option—camping. In between are the motel, which emphasized private space over public and allows visitors to unload directly from the parking lot to their room, and the log cabins which stand alone and offer the same direct path to the automobile without the visitor having to navigate public spaces or interact with fellow travelers. In the social realm, hotels and campgrounds had completely different atmospheres yet both facilitated interaction. “Hotel design emphasized the public spaces: large entrance lobbies, lounges, dining rooms, coffee shops, bars, ballrooms, and meeting rooms” (Jakle 165) and had cramped private spaces. Camping was entirely focused on the shared space as well. It “was a form of social interaction. Not only was the family strengthened through mutual experience, but its members were presented with the opportunities to meet strangers, breaking the inward focused circle imposed by the automobile as mobile social container” (Jakle 152). In comparison the motel offered greater anonymity, “Tourists…could come and go without constant scrutiny” (Jakle 166). The cabin offered a similar feel of inscrutability, one could come and go noncommittally, find just what they needed for the night and no more, and all “with a privacy your hotel could not furnish—for this night this house is your own” (Agee 47).
The automobile itself was in fact an isolating vehicle, people travelled along within an enclosed space, with four walls around them protecting them from interaction with fellow travelers and locals, and even distancing them from the land they were crossing, the country which they had set out to see. As Jakle quotes one traveler “We hardly knew our location ourselves; yet, at least for the moment, we were an integral part of every mile we covered…the essence of it we had with us in the four walls of our car. Our companionship was complete” (Jakle 150). It is as if it became more about the traveler than about where they were traveling or what they were seeing. Much is the case today; so much of the focus is on being able to report back what we have seen to gain cultural capital that we forget to really take in the sights in the moment. So often I see tourists who are far more worried about capturing the perfect picture to remember a place by, but never take the camera away from their eye long enough to experience the place firsthand. While today we prove ourselves by how far away our destinations are, in the time of automobile travel, people looked to prove themselves with the actual distance they had traveled. “To travel long distances, even in relative comfort, was still an accomplishment requiring some stamina and some skill” (Jakle 151). More social forms of travel would have been to an extent the train, but more so the bus, where fellow passengers grew to know each other along the course of the journey. Even here though, the emphasis was on the journey itself rather than on the places experienced. People socialized with their fellow travelers, but still did not make the time to get to know the locals.

Nathanael WestAfter reading Nathanael West’s A Cool Million, I think that the only way to really describe my reaction is unsettled. I’m disturbed, bewildered, and at the same time a little bit in awe. The book was definitely unlike anything we’ve read so far. It was satire, and it was blunt, and unemotional, but not in the strong way that the novels like Boxcar Bertha or Waiting for Nothing were. It was tragic and yet did not inspire empathy but just disgust. It reminded me a little bit of Vonnegut, and the way he tells outlandish tales as if they were reality, in a dry and satirical manner. Reading through the various incidents, I felt like I was reading a book of fairytale nightmares, tales gone wrong and taken on a dark and twisted route. There is the boy who must give up his mother's cow (à la Jack and the Beanstalk), the beautiful girl who is orphaned and must live with an ugly evil stepmother and evil stepsisters in her foster home (Cinderella) and this is just in the first few pages.
As the book continues, the protagonist finds his fairy godmother, or in this case an ex American President who appears at strategic moments to offer pep talks and spout American ideals and myths of success. The otherworldly realm of the book becomes more and more exaggerated as the painfully naïve and innocent protagonist becomes dismantled piece by piece, sequentially losing parts of his body which get closer and closer to his core. It begins with the pulling of his teeth, a protruding portion of his body, somehow still external and replaceable. Next is the loss of his eye, still an outer component which can be replicated and faked. After this the dismemberment comes to the level of flesh and he loses his thumb, then an even more significant body part, a limb, his leg. Next we move to the realm of his mind and intellect, and his scalp is removed. Finally he is struck to the core with a shot to the heart ending his life.
Throughout his slow disassemblement, which incredibly is only a small portion of the ills that befall him, he continues to pursue his ‘American dream’ to make a fortune, finding the fortune that comes out of each piece of bad luck—the loss of his eye gets him his first job (which then turns out to be a scheme which lands him unknowingly guilty in jail), the missing eye and fake teeth revolt a would-be customer when he finds himself enslaved in a house of prostitution, and his eventual freak status sans teeth, eye, leg and scalp score him a spot in an entertainment act, on the stage of which he is ultimately shot. His death brings the ultimate luck of making him a martyr, saving his mother, his childhood friend, and his wise protector and advisor. This reminded me of the level of optimism that Ilf and Petrov wrote about Americans possessing and found to be so irritable in their piece on the great American road trip.
While all of this is clearly part of a political satire and in no way intended to be a fathomable story, the frank manner in which it is all recounted, and the level of injustice which is done to this horrendously clueless man is nevertheless disturbing to digest. I think the most frustrating part about the whole thing is not the number of unjust incidents that befall young Pitkin, but the fact that throughout it all he never really wisens up, never stops trusting, and never takes a stand for himself.

Workers in Construction on the Golden Gate Bridge

Both of the protagonists in Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing and Conroy’s The Disinherited, are educated men who find themselves wandering the country—in the first case entirely on the bum, and in the latter in search of work. For both men, it seems that their education should have some benefit, should somehow set them apart and give them an edge or an advantage, but both find out rather quickly that on the road formal education is not the kind that matters. It is not how learned you are that will help you survive, it is only how clever and literally street smart you are.

            After the men that Conroy writes about escape a run in with a policeman thanks to the quick thinking of a circus barker they have encountered, they are faced with this truth, that formal education is meaningless without quick thinking. “The barker reminded us that his nimble wit had saved us all from disaster, and we were not disposed to argue with him. ‘If you can learn to think just a second faster than the other guy, young fellow,’ he said to me, ‘you’re just as good as wearing diamonds right now. If you can’t, all the education this side of hell will never make you anything but a slave to somebody else who can think a little faster than you.’” Conroy’s narrator learns just as quickly that his education is not the type of knowledge he needs in order to find work either. In addition to the street smarts required to survive, his job search requires him to lie, to fake his experience and knowledge of machinery and manual labor in order to get hired and get by.

            Kromer’s protagonist finds the meaningless of his education firsthand, when, after being arrested, he plans out his plea in court, thinking he will impress the judge with his knowledge of the legal system. He sees the whole scenario as it will play out, “‘Your honor,’ I will say very polite, ‘I am guilty, with mitigating circumstances’…‘Explain the mitigating circumstances,’ he will say” (29), and then he imagines he will explain the whole situation, beginning with the national crisis, the necessity of beggary for a bum, and the hardship faced in this life, and this will get through to the judge and sway him. This of course is only wishful thinking however, and the judge passes over him like all the rest, like Conroy’s character learns, it is the quick thinking that counts, and here, our narrator was just too slow, he never even got out his words. Studied and rational thinking will not work here, only quick wit and cunning can pull the bum ahead. The indignation Kromer’s narrator feels at not being able to speak is compounded by the fact that he is educated, and feels that this should set him apart as the creed of America would lead us to believe. “Maybe they can pull this on some of these stiffs with no education, but they can’t pull it on me. I have got a good education. I’ve had good jobs in my time. I had privileges then, and I got privileges now” (29). Only he doesn’t, once on the street as a bum, the stiffs are demoted to a status below that of a human. As they search for a meal and a warm place to sleep, their necessities become more and more survival oriented, they become animalistic in nature, and so society begins to treat them as animals.

The notion of death is represented in a very interesting light in Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing. On the one hand, every moment in the entire book is about avoiding death, it is about survival in the most basic sense of the word. Every action, every encounter, every motivation comes out of the basic instinct to live, to find food and warmth, and to make it long enough to wake up just one more day. On the other hand, however, every time death enters into the book, it is regarded as a form of relief, a means of final escape. When the man in the mission commits suicide by shooting himself, the narrator comments, “After a guy bumps himself off, he don’t have any more troubles. Everything is all right with him” (42). This man makes suicide look like the most pleasant option, better than freezing nights or mission houses, and mission slop. The other stiffs are jealous of this man’s guts, they don’t have the same nerve, and wish they did. “He bumped hisself off because he’s got the guts to bump hisself off” comments one stiff, “We are afraid to bump ourselves off” (41). (The unsettling nature of this sentiment is amplified by the fact that Kromer apparently attempted to commit suicide at one point himself, as implied in the dedication and stated in the afterword).
In a later scene, when a man dies waiting in an unmoving soup line, again his death is almost a source of envy—he no longer has to wait. “He is stretched out on the concrete, and dead as four o’clock” the narrator tells us, “I can see that this stiff is lucky. There will be no more waiting for him…all he needs now is a hearse and six feet of ground, and they will have to give him that. That is one thing they will have to give him. And it will not make any difference how long he has to wait for it” (88). Finally, by dying, this man has forced “them” to take notice, to give him what he needs. Whereas he was denied food, shelter, and a means to live, by dying he will finally be given what he needs. Society is set up as more willing to take care of the dead than help the living survive. It is as if the problem might be solved if all the stiffs were just to die, to disappear, and so when they do they are rewarded by finally being shown the care they would have needed to survive. This notion is reflected again, when the narrator discusses the double standard at play between the stiffs’ rights and the cops’ rights, “We kill one of these bastards, and we stretch. They kill one of us, and they get a raise in pay” (117).
This theme of death as release and relief occurs again and again, but remains juxtaposed to the rest of the novel which is all about doing anything it takes to survive, to live. While death is the logical way out, there is also some inexplicable will to live at play. When a boy is crushed by a train after an unsuccessful attempt to catch a ride, our narrator first appreciates the relief, “his troubles will soon be over” (122). However, even for him, there seems something unnatural about this sentiment, as if life was more evident in this young body, and merited a more of a chance. It is not only envy that he feels at the death, he still had a human gut reaction, “It is hard enough to watch anybody die…even when I know he is better off dead. But a kid is different. You kind of expect a kid to live” (122). This inexplicable appreciation of the chance to live is expressed as the illogical, irrational emotion to have. “A stiff might just as well be dead as on the fritz. But just the same I am glad I am here” (107).
The final scene of the novel fully expresses the contradiction of death, as it is portrayed as offering both the triumph of freedom and yet representing defeat. As the old stiff coughs away in his mission bunk, our narrator grants him his freedom, “I guess a stiff has got a right to make as much noise as he wants to when he is croaking…why should he care?” (125). But at the same time as he is finally free to do what he pleases, and is on the border of relief, he is succumbing to life on the fritz, it can never be just a phase he went through, but it will swallow him and define him at his last. “He is alone. The fritz has made him alone. He will die alone” (125). This seems to be the ultimate reason to struggle on, to beat life on the fritz no matter how bad it gets and what a relief death might seem, it is more important to be stronger than these imposed circumstances, to beat them, and to survive just one more day, to eventually die on your own terms. This is the ultimate form of waiting for nothing, waiting for the nothingness of death, but waiting so that it can happen on your own terms.

When I came to the note at the end of Box Car Bertha, I couldn’t help but be upset by it. While everything in the book seemed too good to be true, and while I had gone into it knowing that it was a work of fiction, I had still been taken in to an extent by Bertha’s attitude, her acceptance, and her overpowering wanderlust. But as soon as the suspension of disbelief was broken by the afterward, “In this, the fourth time that Boxcar Bertha has been reissued, we feel obliged for the first time to make it plain that this is in fact a work of fiction,” I still felt betrayed. This feeling was only emphasized by the fact that I realized that the work had been presented, in its first three incarnations, as an autobiography, connected to a real person. It is even titled “Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Box Car Bertha” and cited “As told to Dr. Ben L. Reitman.” In this sense, the work is completely manipulative and demeaning to the people who were actually struggling through this period.
Bertha manages to relay her story without a moment of whining or complaining or pity-seeking, maintaining a proud front and strong character, but none of this seems so admirable in an imagined character. She looks back at her hobo childhood as a fun adventure, noting that “there weren’t many dolls or toys in my life but plenty of excitement.” She portrays her lack of early schooling as trivial, as she says “I learned my first spelling from the names on the boxcars…I learned numbers by counting the cars on long freights.” She then talks about her mother opening a boarding house, as if it was the simplest thing in the world for a homeless mother of four to pick up and do. In her adult life she attains job after job, never souring on good deeds and working as a woman, helping other women, as a “sister of the road.”
All of the events she takes us through in her life trivialize the plight of the real homeless in the depression, those struggling helpless and desperate. The only indication we have are statistics thrown in, facts that seem shocking to Bertha, like the idea that “Three-fourths of the transients, men and women, started migrating to seek work…four percent only gave desire for adventure as their reasons. Only four percent appeared, also, to be habitual hoboes. A new order, certainly, from that of the old hardboiled sister of the road who chose the road for adventure and freedom in living and loving!” Even these comments about the sad state of things are tempered with the ideas that in some way these people are just not of the same caliber as the fun-loving adventuresome hoboes, and perhaps they could take more of this sort of attitude and be happier. Another such comment comes when Bertha says “certainly our hoboes and our sisters of the road need a place in the sun…why should they not hunt out the most pleasant spot for sojourn if employment is not available?” Again, this seems to me to be saying, ‘well, as long as they’re not working, they may as well be enjoying themselves, so all these migrants should just stop complaining.’ This sort of fictional portrayal is far more damaging than the others we have encountered. Though the others may have been manipulated in other ways, at least the aim was to draw attention to the trouble, whereas this image gives people an out, a way to ease their guilt and turn away by imagining it’s really not so bad after all.

Photos by Walker Evans (left) and Ilf and PetrovAfter reading through this week's selections, and looking through the accompanying photographs, I found that the style of the photographs very much corresponded with the style of the writing. I saw the two extremes in the approaches taken by Ilf and Petrov in Ilf and Petrov's Great American Road Trip, which felt very unsentimental to me, and the emotional and elaborate approach of Agee and Evans in Let us Now Praise Famous Men. While the first seemed to be very factual, based on concrete observations and experiences relayed simply and straightforwardly, the other hid its narrative in declarations of emotion, feeling, and heart wrenching descriptions. The accompanying pictures fell in line with these approaches. Evans' pictures were very personal. Each photo showed either people or their direct place of habitation. They show close ups of pained, tired, and strong faces. They show individuals and families and convey personal hardships and feelings. Ilf and Petrov's photos by comparison hardly contain a single human form. They are of arbitrary locations—a street like any other, a gas station like any other, a crowd like any other. The only portrait is of a content and happy looking boy, an image that does not hold the ideological message that Evans' portraits do. Ilf and Petrov set out to find as broad an image of America as they could. Ultimately they found that America could not be summed up as just one cohesive thing, but still, their aim was toward the generic, and that is what their photos portray. Agee and Evans' work is as far away from generic as possible, not even addressing a general audience, but speaking directly to the subject, stating that the purpose is not toward art “worthy of The Saturday Review of Literature,” instead it must be true to the subject, and include the Anticlimax which “which happens in life of course, over and over again.” Evans' photos reflect this approach, he captures something unique about each subject, describing the lifestyle and personality particular to whomever lives in the room he captures, or whoever possesses the face he isolates.

As I read through the selections of writers on the road, I noticed that this classification, this mission of being one of the “writers on the road” was something that each and every writer felt strongly identified by. The writers did not simply convey what they saw as a third party observer as a journalist would do today, they inserted themselves, and their task of documentation into the text. Each piece has at least one or two self-reflexive moments, where their being a writer works its way into the story. The writers themselves become main characters in the stories they tell; they are the linking thread, tying together the disparate places visited across the country, and so often their task becomes a driving force in the action of the narrative. While it is common for writers to insert themselves, and relate a story from the first person perspective, I found it particularly characteristic of these writers to go beyond that level of “I” and to convey how their being a writer shaped their encounters and interactions.
Louis Adamic goes so far as to use his task as means to help a tough and proud girl he takes along the road with him. The story he writes is about Hazel Leyton, a down and out young woman he picks up on the side of the road who along the way shares the story of her life with him. The two discuss his occupation and his task, “and you’re goin’ ’round the country for a magazine, writin’ things up…Gee, I wish I was a writer. I bet I could write a hot story” the girl tells him. He has decided to write about her before he even hears the real facts about her life, and he tells her so when she refuses to accept money from him, too proud and strong to take a handout. “‘You see, I’m a writer and having you in the car gives me an idea for a story.’ ‘About me?’ ‘Yes, or about a girl like you…there’ll probably be a chance of selling it to some magazine; and if I sell it—’” he tells her how it would only be fair to give her compensation for her contribution. Knowing she will be the subject of his work prompts her to further tell her story, supplying the details for him to fill in. Later, it also allows him to get her to take his money as it can no longer be considered charity. In this way his being a writer affects the way in which the encounter plays out and its outcome, and including these elements becomes a way to be as accurate as possible. It offers a sort of validity to the story he tells, lending it authenticity through the level of unveiled truth.
This sense of truth and validity is what these documentary writers were all aiming for, and so it makes sense that the Argonauts tell their story through the lens of setting out to see the world and to write about it, even including the details of their book deal arrangement, and Asch tells of the trouble he encountered gaining full access into the factory and of the warm reception by his polish family into their home as opposed to the icy interrogation from other townspeople. Pyle and Anderson give their back-stories, alerting the reader to any possible bias based on the human lens through which the story is being told.

The Biblical references in the Grapes of Wrath are nearly ubiquitous. The doctrine however is of a new religion, it is about loving one’s fellow man, standing beside him, and joining together to become greater together. “‘Two are better than one, because they have good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lif' up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up’” (418) Tom quotes to Ma, recalling the words of the book’s ‘preacher’ Jim Casy, “‘if two lie together then they have heat; but how can one be warm alone? And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him, and a three-fold cord is not quickly broken.’”(418) Brasch writes that this speech is taken from the Old Testament, from a preacher who “reflects on the obstacles to happiness especially as they are related to labour and wealth.” That phrase can also be applied to the novel, where the characters are able to find happiness in themselves and their families and their fellow down and out compatriots, but where the issues of work and pay strip them of the comforts of true contentedness. Steinbeck’s message, however—as he relays through the ever contemplating and talking Jim Casy—is “that there is more consolation in the warmth and comfort of another human being than in all the consolations of religion and transcendental philosophy.”
Casy is the vessel Steinbeck chooses to spread this message of human connectivity, compassion, and togetherness. Casy is none too subtly made to evoke Jesus, from his initials—J.C.—to his quest in the wilderness, to his sacrificial nature. He even goes so far to spread his word, to organize his fellow human beings into a unit, that he must sacrifice himself to death, to benefit the cause. After his death his ideas stick around, they become implanted in Tom who resolves to follow in his footsteps and continue the work he did while alive. Casy’s view is meant to be decidedly different from that of Jesus. “I ain't sayin' I'm like Jesus” the preacher even clarifies, “but I got tired like Him, an' I got mixed up like Him, an' I went into the wilderness like Him...I got thinkin' how we was holy when we was one thing.” (110) Thus Casy begins to formulate his own system of belief, set up contrary to established religion which he has renounced preaching. “No, I don't know nobody name' Jesus. I know a bunch of stories, but I only love people ... Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe ... it's all men an' all women we love; maybe that's the Holy Sperit--the human sperit—the whole shebang” (32-33). “His voice was not one of affirmation and consolation,” Brasch tells us “he was a skeptic. And he most certainly was not Jesus Christ. Casy was the despairing man of God who found a little comfort in the pleasures and actions and humour of men.” What he does find is the idea that men do not have individual souls, they each have a piece of a much larger soul, and each piece is “no good 'less it was with the rest, an' was whole” (418).
Brasch views this message as Steinbeck’s critique of the American economic system with its emphasis on individual effort, success, and reward. He sees the system as having turned its back on a segment of the population who must find their leader, their way of life, and complete their exodus out of the darkness and into the land of milk and honey—or grapes and oranges as it may be. As Brasch says, the novel recounts “the history of ‘God's chosen people’ as they struggled from the Garden of Eden to the Promised Land.”

After our class discussion about the contention surrounding the validity of the story told in The Grapes of Wrath, I was curious where modern day historians and sociologists—removed from the moment—stand in terms of the truth of what went on at the time. After reading through some of the course documents, it seems that the debate continues, with some writers still acknowledging the novel as a social account and document of the time, and others pointing out long lists of inconsistencies with fact.
Paul McCarthy writes that “The Grapes of Wrath can be read not only as fiction but as a social document of the time: a record of drought conditions, economic problems, the sharecropping life. Not separate from the fictional, this level or record is a vital aspect of it.” The problem with this statement is that it is not backed up nearly as well as the article which I read which derailed this theory, and pointed out all of the deviations between fact and Steinbeck’s fiction. “The Grapes of Wrath was always meant to be taken literally… Steinbeck's book was presented at the time as a work of history as well as fiction, and it has been accepted as such ever since” acknowledges Windschuttle, however “an accumulation of sufficient historical, demographic, and climatic data about the 1930s show[s] that almost everything about the elaborate picture created in the novel is either outright false or exaggerated beyond belief.”
Windschuttle then goes through a long list of inconsistencies, starting with the fact that the dust storms did not, in fact, severely affect the region of Oklahoma in which Steinbeck places the Joad family, though it did sweep through other Midwestern states, and Oklahoma did suffer a severe drought. (Personally, this distinction does not seem to take away any validity to Steinbeck’s story, and seems trivial.) Windschuttle goes on to reveal that while some did leave Oklahoma during the depression and migrate, the vast majority of these migrants were not farmers, but city workers. “Between 1935 and 1940, only thirty-six percent of southwesterners who migrated to California were from farms. Some fifty percent of these migrants came from urban areas and fitted occupational categories such as professionals, proprietors, clerical/sales, skilled laborers, and semi-skilled/service workers.” These migrants then headed for the California cities, primarily Los Angeles. “Of the two major destinations for agricultural workers, the San Joaquin Valley attracted 70,000 and the San Bernadino/Imperial Valley region 20,000 migrants. This fell considerably short of their demographic portrait in The Grapes of Wrath: ‘And the dispossessed, the migrants, flowed into California, two hundred and fifty thousand, and three hundred thousand. Behind them new tractors were going on the land and the tenants were being forced off.’”
Windschuttle also takes issue with Steinbeck’s explanation of the tractors and banks pushing people off the land. “Ironically, for someone whose politics have been described by his several biographers as a ‘typical New Deal Democrat,’ Steinbeck identified the wrong culprit,” he explains, “In two separate studies of the plight of southern tenant farmers in the 1930s, the historians…have blamed not the banks but the agricultural policies of the New Deal itself.” FDR’s 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) forced landlords to decrease their cotton acreage, and offered subsidies to landholders, who were then able to evict their sharecroppers and consolidate their land for efficiency. “It was government handouts, not bank demands, that led these landlords to buy tractors and decrease their reliance on tenant families”. Thus it was true that the number of tenant farmers declined greatly from the 30s to the 40s, but perhaps those in The Grapes of Wrath can find no one to blame because Steinbeck was pointing his finger in the wrong direction.
Though these inconsistencies with fact, along with the many others Windschuttle identifies—many migrants stayed in hotels rather than along the road, many had heard concrete information about work from family members already in California, and had precise destinations, rather than going simply off of a handbill, etc.—are reasons why Steinbeck’s work cannot be held up as social document, I don’t think that they diminish the powerful effect of the book, which at its root is based in the human experience, not merely the circumstances. Any reader should know that the book is fiction, and should not be held up as fact, but I think that the problem is that it is so well written, so engaging and moving, that as readers we want to believe in it as much as possible. And though maybe we cannot draw facts from it, and I can see why such misleading data would be troublesome to the Californians it portrayed in a negative light, whether these travesties happened to these particular people, or to this number of people is less important than that these things occurred to someone, at some point, and the feeling, the heartache, and the devastation are all too real to be imagined.