carol's blog

wpa map

The WPA guides cover so much territory it's a little mindboggling, especially when you take into consideration that each guide seems to range from 500-800 pages long, depending on the size of the state. My first thoughts on briefly looking through a few guides (Rhode Island, Montana, and New York) were that the guides were incredibly thorough and well organized. The index itself can be considered a short text, in some cases. I can't deny that each guide contains interesting, detailed information on the history, location, climate, annual events and the such. The guide painstakingly draws out the current situation on hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions, different neighborhoods, maps. This definitely shows the national effort to attract as many tourists as possible to help the economy. I can't imagine how long it would have taken the people involved with the project to put all of this information together just for a single state. One thing that I noticed was that the Rhode Island guide had a "Notations for the Use of this Book' section. A two-page description on why certain parts were included: "The Essay Section of the Guide is designed to give a reasonably comprehensive survey of the State's natural setting, history, and social, economic,and cultural development...The State Guide is notonly a practical travel book; it will also serve as a valuable referencework." Maybe it's because I haven't been reading the right travel guides but these WPA guide seems to go above and beyond the average travel guide to give as accurate of a portrait of whichever state. And of course, I can't not mention that impressive, still aesthetically inspring posters that were produced by the artists that were supported by the government. The national park posters have forever been immortalized in my memories from a cross country road trip I took with my family for two months. We must have visited about a dozen national parks, and because I had a little bit of an obsession with post cards, I still have many of the mini version of WPA posters that advertised the wonders of America's tourist attractions. With posters like the one shown above, I can be convinced of anything. Including visiting tourist traps and taking my vitamins.

tourist camp

Dinner time is close and when hunger strikes, it's hard for anyone to concentrate. I suppose it's never a good idea to work hungry. However, the description of the Roadside food was good enough to keep my attention. The gumbo, thick with crab meat, the Bar-B-Q sandwich (who knew it was the roadside slang for roast meat, not "real" barbeque), doughnuts, jambalaya (deeply spiced meat, rice and tomatoes), creole pralines all sound so wonderfully delicious. However, like all things we call American, they are all rooted in another land. It seems a lot of food we consider American are all but mutations and/or migrants from elsewhere. But the tourist camp, is a truly American invention that came about in during the depression. An economical way for tourists to be on the road and stop somewhere without having to spend much.  Agee writes, " the tourist camp is one sound invention that the American roadside has contributed to the American scene. And as an invention it is more satisfying than the hot dog" (The American Roadside, p. 52). The tourist camp allowed restless people to bombard the roads with their automobiles. These camps were important because people were restless, restive, the automobile was a "hypnosis," the automobile that had become "the opium of the American people." (p.44) It was the means which made the possibilities of travel limitless. And with the cabin camps and automobile camps all around, judging from Agee's article, if you owned a car, there was no reason not to be on the road. However American automobile travel seems to have been according to Agee, in Being Elsewhere, Berkowitz writes that travelers from abroad were just as taken to the American Road, "the crisis of the depression...completed the transformation of tourism into a mass phenomenon." (p.187) The attraction to the automobile was because of the comfort it provided the traveler, the level of familiarity that was now accessible on the go. Tourists could now travel without a location in mind and escape came from the drive itself. John Jackle writes, "travel by automobile was a way of escaping the everyday" (The Tourist). The escapism feeling comes from the many different aspects of driving a car: the speed (the faster you drive, the smaller your field of focus), the mechanical act to distract from all else, and of course, the scenery. The moving image caught in the frame of the window, watching the scenery pass by is just as hypnotic as the driving itself.

Lemuel Pitkin is a hopeless case of blind optimism. Following in the footsteps of Candide, the protagonist in this novel is someone the readers cannot possibly admire, or like, or even sympathize with. There were many moments where I literally spoke out loud because of the absurd events that occurred all throughout. With Lem, it is a constant disbelief in the choices that he makes and the cruel violence that he endures. In class on Thursday, we discussed that he is a personification of America to a degree. M.A. Klug writes, Lemuel Pitkin is "a parody of an American innocent, he is without motive, direction or character...In his emptiness he waits to be formed...He has no life; he merely gets caught in episodes" (Nathanael West: Prophet of Failure. p. 22). I feel that this character is a satire of all the protagonists we have read so far in fiction. Lem is unluckier than Acel in Hungry Men, Algren's McKay in Somebody in Boots, Kromer's Waiting for Nothing, even Tom Joad from The Grapes of Wrath. After having read all of these, it seems that most of the fiction is episodic. In the end, the times were so bad that the daily struggle to survive just became another story. There was little hope for something better ahead, no purpose in traveling (though many did) besides the reason to go somewhere. This may seem like a bleak interpretation but I feel that the Great Depression emphasized the undeniable futility in religion and the structure of a government. After all, again and again, we read about the hypocrisy of the preachers in various works of fiction, the catch-22s of working and starving slowly or not working and starving quick. Although A Cool Million was definitely humorous unlike most other we have read, it was never light. I think my greatest problem with the novel was that the content was so thick with satire, the optimism of Lem is very much overshadowed by the blatant pessimism of Nathanael West. I have this problem where if I read a book that is too infused with any sort of genre, be it melodrama, comedy, or in this case, satire, I tend to see the author sitting at a desk writing it. This was especially true of West because I had looked up images of the man and this short novel was just too one-sided in my opinion. I wonder if West truly believed life to be just aimless episode after episode of bad luck.

travelin by car

There are many reasons why people make the decision to travel but I would have to say the unpredictability of a trip is one of the main factors that encourages travelers to take the leap. Asch writes, "when you decide to see America, you start out from a point...and go in any possible direction - all of it is America - and stop off anywhere at all and watch people and talk to people." (The Road). What was especially intriguing about Asch's introduction to The Road was that he chooses to write on America, with no specific place or subject in mind. I first felt that without some sort of idea of what to concentrate on, his trip could be very unproductive. However as I read on, I realized that although Asch begins by explaining that the four-month-long bus trip started off to explore write about America, he is essentially writing about travel. The differences of mode of transportation in terms of "home-ness" rings true to me. The car is the most home-like and the train is formal, while every vibration can be felt on a seat of a bus. What had never occurred to me was the difference in the way we relate to strangers on a bus or a train, Asch points out that "you're likely to put on airs and to lie" on a train because you can never truly relax. Although I'm sure the train was considerably more formal years ago, this still feels true today. This past summer I took the train about a dozen times altogether traveling in South Korea and there is definitely a less casual atmosphere than being on a bus.

Algren

At the Jesus-Feeds-All mission, Cass is able to chop some wood for a meal (described as "a kind of diarrheal brown gravy"). More interesting than the establishment was the way Algren describes the people already there. Once inside, he finds himself among "a dozen other ragged once-men" (Somebody in Boots). The fact that he calls the bums as once-men, made me reflect back on the documentary on teen runaways when one of the men who had hopped on freight trains as a teenager was explaining the circumstance of his departure from home. He says that the first time he saw his father cry was the day the man had lost his blue-collar job at a metal factory. Although it had been a simple job, it brought him dignity and pride because it put food on the table for his family. Once he had lost that, it was as if he had lost everything. The idea of a job having so much weight on a person, often the man of a household, seems to have had a great importance during the depression, no matter what kind of job it was. In Tom Kromer's autobiography he wrote, "My father never hoped for anything better in this life than a job, and never worried about anything else but losing it". This seems to be an accurate depiction of many of the fathers during the thirties. And once the unemployment rate skyrocketed, many of the men went on the road seeking work. Without an occupation, they had lost something, a part of their identity, the pride they took from being able to feed a family.

Further on in the reading, I felt very bad when I laughed out loud at having read that Cass' fall had been broken by a very pregnant woman. But the scene lost its humor almost immediately as I read on about the blood darking the blue cloth and the pungent smell that spread through the room. I have to say, that this reading made me cringe during the last few pages. "The floor became a cess pen, running with blood, stinking of urine...too dazed to turn her head or too weak to lift it, [the pregnant girl] vomited down her own breast. Pieces of stuff dribbled down the corners of her mouth." (pg. 336) Algren describes the grotesque all too well, as well as the physical pain of hunger and the heavy weight of his guilt. The man with no-nose, the diarrheal food, the vomit, Matches' delirium, the run in with the "bulls" was a little too much to read having just finished Waiting for Nothing.

risking a lot for a ride

Kromer writes in the autobiography section of Waiting for Nothing that he began his days as a "stiff" catching rides on trains because it "got me where I wanted to go, which was never more definite than 'east' or 'west.'" Without any money, shelter or hope for a better future, Tom Kromer writes about the everydays in that era that were filled with people who are caught in dire circumstances with no way out. He writes, "Where are they going? I do not know. They do not know. He hunts for work, and he is a damn fool. There is no work. He cannot leave his wife and kids to starve to death alone, so he brings them with him. Now he can watch them starve to death. What can he do? Nothing but what he is doing." Kromer's clear, straight-to-the-point writing style was intriguing to read. It is incredibly personal and revealing but his words are neutral in terms of evoking emotion, the events are described as I imagine they actually happened. I can't say that 'detached' is the right word for describing Tom Kromer's semi-autographical novel although I do think it is one aspect of his writing that struck me the most. The novel is written from a perspective of a man who has passed this life and can reflect back and recount his experiences without getting caught up in the emotional aspect. He can write about the shameful, humiliating things that he has endured to survive without hesitation it seems because this is a man with nothing to lose.

The possibility of death no longer seems to be a mystery to the narrator, Kromer writes of it repeatedly and so nonchalantly its almost as if the experiences that he has gone through have been so terrible that death no longer seems to be a frightening thought but rather expected. Kromer describes the stiffs as though they are already dead, "the tombstones are men. The epitaphs are chiseled in sunken shadows on their cheeks" (Waiting For Nothing, ch. 10). Perhaps due to this, many of the stiffs are not given names. It does not matter because they are all fated to die soon, the narrator does not identify individuals much by their names but their identity is created more in terms of physical descriptions. Death is something too common to ignore, and on the other hand, too common to get caught up by the death of others. In Mary Obropta's analysis of Kromer's Waiting For Nothing, she writes that "chooses to reinforce the horror of death" through his illustrations of the death he encounters. However, I think that through the repetition, he is not emphasizing the horror of death but how unavoidable it was, and ultimately making death seem as the common, ordinary thing that it was in the time of the depression for a wanderer. His novel is stripped of any elaboration, romanticism of the hobo's life, and tells the good and the bad as simply as it happened. He wrote in the autobiography that he had no hope of getting Waiting for Nothing published, he "wrote it as he felt it" and I think that sentiment permeates throughout. By the end of the novel, nothing has changed really. There is no more hope than there was in the beginning, and without hope for a better future, what do you wait for?

everyman in everytown

In its time, An American Exodus was a pioneering effort to combine words and photographs. The texts of 1939 have been maintained to preserve the "truth and vividness of contemporary observation" with both text, quotes, and photographs, the collective provide an accurate true portrait of the people and "not what we think might be [the photographed person's] unspoken thoughts. This is in great contrast to Caldwell/Bourke-White's You Have Seen Their Faces. Although the book was created with good intentions, to get the word across for the sake of the people affected greatly by the depression, there is something very problematic with manipulating the reader through fictionalized quotes and manipulated photographs. There is a false sense of sympathy evoked and it can give way for the readers to feel as if these real life people who are suffering can simply be written off as if they were characters in a novel rather than the empathy that gravitates toward the people captured in Lange and Evans' photos.

Four years prior to An American Exodus, Ilf and Petrov traveled the vast country as a part of their journalistic aspirations for Pravda, an influential journal. Their work was light-hearted and described America truthfully to a certain degree. From the outsider's point of view of a country in just two months, their work is highly problematic because it not only tries to encompass a large amount of diverse places in a short two months but the two illustrate a superficial account of a country and their people. Of course, they do not do this on purpose and I suppose a lot of people do this when they travel abroad for some time. However, as a well known duo, their portrait of America was not only one of the few on the subject of America, it served as an active comparison between communism and capitalism.

James Goodwin wrote that  "the automobile also seemed to offer salvation for some among the midwest's small farmers seeking escape from drought and crop failure," (The Depression Era in Black and White: Four American Photo-Texts) which makes Ilf and Petrov's American road trip a little problematic. As stated in the foreward, at the height of the Great Depression, these two journalists were had not yet felt the full blow of Stalinist terror, the famine, the poverty. Therefore this road trip, while humorous, makes it almost insensitive that they choose to write about certain things in the manner that they do. On the other hand, Dorothea Lange was able to captures the images of people "who were not in control of life around them but who endured life." (An American Exodus). The images are informed and thought out, as opposed to Ilf and Petrov's point and shoot style.

After reading Girl on the Road by Louis Adamic, the thing that puzzled me was the writer's perception of this girl he has picked up. Why did he do it to begin with? It seems for a moment, he could have felt very bad for the girl and decided to pick her up on a whim, but he doesn't ditch her somewhere and he buys her food. For a person who makes so many kind gestures to this stranger, he seems to have no interest in her story. I think that his choice to pick up this poor girl was mostly out of his desire for adventure. The short story begins with Adamic saying that there was no one on the road for miles.  He writes, "when the wind occasionally lurched into me with great force and threatened to swerve me off the road, I almost enjoyed the sensation I experienced." In travel, we are driven by the unpredictability of what may come from every decision that we make. People travel(ed) to get a chance to have a story worth telling, even if it was someone else's. The hitchhiker has a lot of pride and energy for someone who had her share of bad luck. It seems that telling her story to the writer, a stranger with a car, she was almost justifying her bad experiences with the fact that it now made a good story to tell. You get the sense that she wants to tell her story, that she is proud of it, in a way. Although she had had money, two lovers and lost it all, she has an air of optimism in what awaits her in Baltimore. Maybe the success of a trip depends on the story that comes from it.

Steinbeck's map of america

I had just finished The Grapes of Wrath when the bus pulled into Philadelphia. The sun was setting, I'd sat motionless for hours, and the image of Rose of Sharon's oh-so-mysterious smile was fresh in my mind. Needless to say, I was in a very strange mood. I wandered around the 30th St. Station stretching out my numb legs, which didn't feel like my own. While waiting for someone to pick me up from the station, I quietly repeated quotes to myself that had gotten stuck in my head while doing toe-touches. My friend came shortly after and from the train station we walked to his house, better known as "the Barn" among Swarthmore locals and rightfully so. It looked like an abandoned barn painted clumsily with white and blue. Being away from home and spending the weekend at a suburban house gave me some time to reflect on the mother figure in The Grapes of Wrath because of that strong imagery at the end of the novel. Because of the circumstances, Ma Joad comes out as a leading figure throughout while Pa self-admittedly takes the backseat. And of course, as we discussed during class, The Wrath of Grapes has been described as ultimately the growth of Rose of Sharon. It is perhaps due to the fact that the person who brings home money usually is granted a sort of authority but if there is little to no money being contributed, other means for defining authority in a household are found. Therefore the ability to nurture, care, and make quick decisions become more important during the hard times, it is (almost stereotypically) so that the mother figure becomes the new head of the family. As the reader, we see this happen in the Joad family but the mother figure is not a singular entity that applies to the few female characters in the book, it is also seen as a theme that applies to a bigger portrait of the novel. Lorelei Cederstrom writes, "the Great Mother is a force for change in the individual and society" (The 'Great Mother' in The Grapes of Wrath). This quote makes the ending even more enigmatic than I had first assumed. When I read that mysterious smile of Rose of Sharon, I thought that perhaps this was a sign of hope. The baby had died but at least some kindness (albeit strange) had come of it. However, this made me rethink the ending as perhaps as a sign of hopelessness. The man was far from saved and the future of the remaining Joads was uncertain. The uncertainty no longer pointed toward an optimistic life for the Joads. The figure of the mother certainly signified change but as Cederstrom wrote, it could involve "rebirth or death, growth or destruction for both are in her domain."

Grandma's death doesn't come as a big surprise. I had a slight suspicion when she wasn't waking up and sleeping with her mouth wide open. The journey Westward in Chapter 18 reminds me of the good ol' days of when I would play Oregon Trail (for nostalgia, click here) and the family members would drop one by one. I guess what did surprise me at first was the Joads' willingness to keep on going towards California even though they encounter so many that warn them against it. At first, I thought it could  be their naivete but then I realized they just have no other choice. They have to move from their home in Oklahoma because it is no longer a home and the only other option they have is to find a new location where they can stay together and perhaps continue their agricultural lifestyle. I suppose California sounds good in theory. Or at least on handbills. Each chapter in this book brings me to a new level of familiar uncomfortability; in the scene where the children stare at the stew from pot to plate, I feel that same unease when a homeless man watched me inhaling a falafel on a park bench. Reading about the woman who gets her knuckles shot off with her fingers "hanging on strings against her palm" (ch. 20) makes my teeth grit automatically.

What really gets to me is the hostility for the outsiders who have come to work in California. It is not only the non-native workers who are outcast and ridiculed but the fellow mid-west man in search of some means to get by. In Harvest Gypsies, Steinbeck writes that although the migrant workers are necessary, they are hated. What I found most interesting was that I forgot to consider the fact that these Okies (and Arkies, too) were land-owners once. They had experienced the pain of watching their land dwindle and die and get taken away by some anonymous source. "They are descendants of men who crossed the middle west, who won their lands by fighting, cultivated the prairies and stayed with them until they went back to the desert. And because of their tradition and their training, they are not migrants by nature. They are gypsies by force of circumstance." (pg. 22) It seems obvious now, that the family, of course, would have had much grief about leaving their land but it happened so quickly and so unhesitatingly that I disregarded the weight of their situation. The apathy of the contractors, the cops, and other Okies is striking.

On a different note, I was surprisingly amused by the events described in these last few chapters. I only realized as I was explaining to a friend what happened: a man is caught planting a secret garden carrot and turnip seeds on someone else's land, a neighbor gets angry the Ma Joad for making stew, the Joads are shocked when they realize Ma Joad was keeping mum about grandma's death because the "fambly hadda get acrost" (ch.18) the desert first. Done the right way, The Grapes of Wrath could be a hoot. Maybe.