haleh's blog

Henry A. Wallace

Over the course of the 20th century, two men did more to change the staples of the standard American diet than anyone: Henry Agard Wallace and Earl Butz. Wallace served as the Secretary of Agriculture from 1933 to 1940, the critical years of the Depression. He, under "Roosevelt's" Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, began the enlightened policy of subsidized farming--specifically, paying farmers not to grow crops. He advocated, at a time when millions of the country's citizens were out of work, starving, scrambling to find any means necessary to feed a family, the wasting of any remaining surplus: the arbitrary slaughtering and disposing of livestock, uprooting fields to destroy the crop. He, too, revolutionized agricultural genetics; his scientific advancements developed a hybrid corn that was to be the dominant corn crop grown in the country for decades, and a fast-laying chicken eventually responsible for producing almost all the eggs in the country. Decades later, Earl Butz (Secretary of Agriculture under both Nixon and Ford) restructured the New Deal policies, in times of relative American prosperity. Rather than regulate crop output, he advocated hyper-productivity, advising farmers to "get big or get out." Under Butz's direct influence, not only did surplus explode, but, thanks to the developments on Wallace's genetically-engineered food sources, the combination created modern industrialized farming: a few farmers ever-expanding, growing indestructible crops, resistant to the natural cycles and livestock so different from a natural form that a single animal literally cannot live nor function without human technology. And the result is, ironically, massive corporations driving the independent farmers out of business and off their land. Sound familiar?

Early American Farmhouse Dining Room The pages in A Cool Million that West devotes to describing the interior rooms of the whorehouse are not insignificant, especially in a relatively short novel. The rooms, and certainly when Wu Fong abolishes his "international" theme for a regional American theme, follow the stereotype of American houses in the respective regions, to the absolute detail. This article explains the Colonial revival phenomenon from the turn of the century to the 1930s, similarly documented in West's book with the removal of Lem's Colonial home from its stead and reassembled in the 5th Ave storefront window. For West, the rooms serve to expound his idea of the commodification of American history and culture, but ironically enough there has been, in recent years, a return to traditional American designs.

The article to which the picture above is linked tells of a couple in search of their "dream house," and found it in an 18th-century Connecticut farmhouse. Since then, the family has decorated with "folk art paintings and Early American antiques." From the floral stenciled runner in the dining room to the furniture, the house is a replica of its former self and an exemplary of 1800s New England.

Last year, the popular interior design blog apartmenttherapy proclaimed the "rustic farm look" the latest trend. Frequently, too, they post tips and furniture finds for transforming a room into a Spaghetti Western--including but certainly not limited to Navajo rugs and hand-hewn tables.

These returns to a traditional American design scheme are, if more genuine than West's lewd portrayals, a similar romanticizing, and inevitably turns the traditions into the same commodity.

Ticket Box Line 1939With every film we've watched in class dating from the Depression, the conclusion has been that the romanticizing of the hobo lifestyle, or the bums in central park, or even issues of race, were for the benefit of the upper class--those with jobs, those making more money than ever before, those benefiting from the Depression--those able to afford entertainment. But the 1930s and 40s were the proverbial golden age of Hollywood; films made during the Depression not only have become global classics but gave us some of the most remarkable actors the industry has seen. And the glamor about which we now reminisce was made possible by one simple fact: everyone was going to the movies.

Movies, almost above all else, perpetuated the American dream, lent itself as the perfect medium through which to inspire American optimism. Not only were the fabulous stories presented on the silver screen a chance for recession-weary citizens to escape, but the stories themselves often offered some message of achieving success, or of those living successfully. The Philadelphia Story, as the picture's article above explains, starring the trinity Carey Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and Jimmy Stewart, show the clash between the socialites and the bourgeoisie--only to have the beautiful socialite and struggling writer realize they're not so different, and people are merely people. Conversely, It Happened One Night, a 1934 screwball comedy starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, documents the adventure of a young heiress running away from her father in order to marry whom she pleases. She meets along the way Gable, an unemployed reporter, and the two squabble, starve, and hitchhike their way towards New York City.

These kinds of stories certainly were meant for escape and entertainment, but they also provided a place through which Americans could live out their own dreams, and remember what tied them so inexorably to their homeland. Even those, said the films, down-and-out, aren't suffering for nothing; their suffering was merely a transition before the realization of greatness. It was a dream in itself, the exact kind a beaten society craved. As Pauline Kael defined the interest in these lighthearted escapist films, suggesting the pictures presented "Americans' idealized view of themselves--breezy, likable, sexy, gallant, and maybe just a little harebrained." And certainly always bound for something better, be it love or money or simply happiness.

For me, encountering Jim Casey on every reading of The Grapes of Wrath, it is something like the familiarity Tom must feel, recognizing him under the tree. Though his participation in the narrative wanes as the Joads approach California, the first half of the novel rests heavily on the idea of Casey as a guide for the Joads. His status as the preacher remains in the family mindset, though Casey himself has given up his belief in God for a belief in the people instead. John Carradine as Jim Casey: The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

"'I figgered about the Holy Sperit and the Jesus road. I figgered, 'Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,' I figgered, 'maybe it's all men an' all women we love; maybe that's the Holy Sperit--the human sperit--the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of.' Now I sat there thinkin' it, an' all of a sudden--I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it,'" Casey tells Jim only minutes after their reunion. It's a dogma the Joads come to realize for themselves, if not on such a spiritual level then certainly on a physical one; ultimately, even Ma admits, they can only rely on each other, not even so self-contained as a single family but all the destitute as a single soul. It culminates, of course, in Rosasharn's final moment, allowing the dying father to drink her unused milk, but the concept is begun by Casey almost prophetically at the very beginning of the novel.

In this reading, I couldn't help but correlate Casey to Flannery O'Connor's Hazel Motes. Written a decade after Steinbeck's publication, the novel's protagonist, Hazel Motes, shows a spiritual perspective not unlike Casey's but wholly warped. Rather than rejecting God for the universality of men, Hazel rejects Christ for the isolation of man:

"'I believe in a new kind of jesus,' he said, 'one that can't waste his blood redeeming people with it, because he's all man and ain't got any God in him. My church is the Church Without Christ!'

She moved up closer to him. 'Can a bastard be saved in it?' she asked.

'There's no such thing as a bastard in the Church without Christ,' he said. 'Everything is all one. A bastard wouldn't be any different from anybody else.'"

Brad Dourif as Hazel Motes: Wise Blood (1979)

Both books, and both characters' philosophies, are poignant examples of how humans turn to or away from religion in times of crisis.

Soup Line Waiting for Nothing, in ways that the other readings so far haven't, I think touched upon not just the crisis or the plight of a whole people but the very real and individual experience of being hungry. Starvation is documented in all the works we've read so far, but Kromer barrages the reader with his hunger pains as relentlessly as the pains attack him. It reminded me--and certainly did the character of Karl, writing futilely of people as hungry as he is and none of it ever being published--of a novel by Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, aptly titled Hunger. Though Hamsun wrote four decades or so before the Depression, and only visited America in those years, never lived, his own experience parallels that of Kromer's and of all those displaced people "on the fritz." In the first few pages, Hamsun writes, "I stood up and searched through a bundle in the corner by the bed for a bite for breakfast, but finding nothing, went back to the window. God knows, thought I, if looking for employment will ever again avail me aught. The frequent repulses, half-promises, and curt noes, the cherished, deluded hopes, and fresh endeavors that always resulted in nothing..." Through the course of the narrative (it is less a story than a narrative of the narrator's inner thoughts), the narrator experiences precisely what Kromer, and what Woody Guthrie and the Joads and all fallen men experience: the point at which anything will be done for just something to eat, and the humiliation and degradation that inevitably follows. The reader wishes, as Kromer attempts repeatedly to find compassion in those far more fortunate than he and instead finds only scorn, that he succeed in his robbery of the bank. When Tom repeatedly laments he "hasn't got the guts," he means he hasn't yet broken from society's conventions, even when those conventions are very literally killing him, degrading him to less than human. It's the same circumstance Ma Joad describes when she says she knew Pretty Boy Floyd's mother, and he wasn't a bad kid. He was just made bad after being pushed so hard. We want, now, watching Hollywood romanticize Pretty Boy Floyd, or John Dillinger, or Bonnie and Clyde, for the robbers to succeed because they've pulled one over on the system that has forced them into criminal life. But when Tom doesn't, when he fails because he hasn't got the guts, and his gun is caught on his stupid coat lining, or when Knut Hamsun writes about vomiting up a dinner he bought with all his money because his stomach isn't used to food, it's impossible not to feel the despair and the same hopeless hunger.

Woody GuthrieMusicians are a nomadic people, and especially country and folk musicians. All musicians tour, but the folk singers, the truly bleak, know the open road is a stronger pull than any love of home. Woody Guthrie, as Reuss says, was one of the most "creative and dynamic folk artists of the pas generation..." Everyone, he suggests, is familiar with the name and/or works of Woody Guthrie. It's true, whether or not even knows it's Woody: Bob Dylan, for instance, drew much of his own song structure from Woody; "This Land is Your Land" is sung in American schools from the earliest years on. Where Woody found his genius, though, wasn't from the insatiable need for movement, he wasn't documenting the plight of a people, but rather he was suffering with them. He himself documents the struggle. Woody, to become the voice of the people, starved while they starves, and wanted nothing more than to play a few songs or paint a few signs for a meal. This familiarity with the people about whom he sings is exactly why his songs ring as true as they do, and why they hold so much appeal so long after their recording. It's the same familiarity Bruce Springsteen has with the working class, or Dylan offered to the discontent youth of the 60s. When Guthrie sings, "I ain't got no home in this world anymore," he means it. He isn't speculating or documenting, but speaking the truth: he really ain't got no home, he's "stranded on this hot and dusty road," looking for something better just like his audience. Marcus Carl Franklin as Woody: From "I'm Not There" Still, Guthrie, like the Joads and so many weary, beaten families heading West without any other options, isn't really beaten. In his writings and in his songs is the hope the displaced cling to; the hope that won't deter the Joads from plunging forward even when, along their way, there's sign after sign that California won't be the paradise they imagine. "I got up in a little while and looked around. First to the north of me, then to the south of me; and if I'd been using what you call horse sense, I would have gone north to the shacks that belong to the railroad and farm workers," Guthrie writes, and instead he heads south to the higher-class town; after all, he wants an honest job, not to beg for a meal, and there remains in all Americans the belief in the goodness and empathy of fellow Americans. It's precisely the message of "This Land is Your Land." "This land," Guthrie believes, "was made for you and me."

Dorothea Lange Americans are a migrant people; it's precisely the value upon which the country was founded, the move and migration in search of something better. I mentioned manifest destiny in my last post, and while it seems an eighth-grade Social Studies vocab word, it is, I believe, the summation of the American character. The "contemporary exodus," as Lange and Taylor refer to the migrant farmers of the depression, was perhaps contemporary and concentrated to the Depression, but it's analogues can be seen in every moment of American history. And its documentation, either also contemporaneous or retrospective, has been a crucial part of the history.

With documentation, however, are inherent dangers: one cannot possibly document everything, certainly not in a country as large and diverse as America. Even in the things one can document, nothing is concrete, everything is transient and changes often before the documentation is complete. Lange herself addresses briefly these issues, acknowledging, "We show you what is happening in selected regions of limited area. Something is lost by this method, for it fails to show fully the wide extent and the many variations of rural changes which we describe." She deflects appropriately by suggesting the "gain in sharpness of focus reveals better the nature of the changes themselves." Nevertheless, the issues remain, and beyond the issues of transience is still the relationship of documentation or reporting to art, and both to its subjects. James Agee is aware of the potentially exploitative symbiosis, and declares forthright, "Art... has nothing to do with life, or no more to do with it than is thoroughly convenient at a given time, a sort of fair-weather friendship, or gentleman's agreement, or practical idealism, well understood by both parties and by all readers." This, I feel, is certainly true of writing, of painting and film. Unfortunately, the most crucial tool of the documentation of the Great Depression was none of these, and instead was the photographic camera.

Photography, unlike other mediums and perhaps without corroboration, tends to be taken at face value. That is, the understanding between both parties, artist and audience, that art is not life but merely a reflection or facet of life in a certain moment, carefully constructed by the artist to express precisely what the artist wants to express, is often absent. This loss, I think, is occasionally fault of the artist, but much more so a fault of the audience. A camera, supposes the layman, he without practical knowledge on how a photograph is constructed beyond the press of a shutter, captures what is real, what is there. For, by definition, a camera cannot photograph what is not there, as a painter can add from his imagination to a still life or a film can be edited to juxtapose many scenes at whim. If this were the case, however, all that would be required of a photographer is that depress of the shutter, and anyone with any finger dexterity could be as genius an artist as any other.

Photographs, in fact, are edited in precisely the same way as all art. Before and after, with thing intentionally left out or added in, angles and lighting considered as much or more so than the subject itself. But we don't consider all art exploitative, or, if we do, we are willing to overlook it for the representation of a greater truth it provides. And that, I think, is the purpose of most documentations, certainly of the Great Depression and a displaced people: to show a larger truth through a focused perspective, to show a truth of a problem, and a problem that persists today, rather than an individual struggle or even a communal but passing hardship.

Image from Robert Frank's "The Americans" Louis Adamic's encounter with the girl "on the bum," as relayed in his "Girl on the Road" chapter of My America draws for me two interesting parallels of travel, and specifically of American travel. Within the narrative there are two travel stories: Adamic's own, leaving Cleveland for New York; and a girl struggling at the side of the road, on her way, we later learn, to Baltimore. Both journeys are, in many ways, similar. Both have made a tour of the country, an elliptical route and slinging now back to the East Coast/the Mid-Atlantic. But for me, hearing the girl, Hazel, tell her story and Adamic's passive reaction to it highlights the question of the relationship of artist to subject and of the American travel story itself.

I don't believe there's any exploitation of subject for art, between Adamic and the girl. He does no more and no less than most of the "good eggs," the "square shooter" truck drivers with whom Hazel made it to California and has returned. The fact of her story, that he will use her in a book, becomes secondary to his wish to help her with the gift of a few dollars. The exploitation, if one calls it that, is not in the relationship to an artist seeking a subject but inherent in their reasons for travel--Hazel's active necessity for travel and Adamic's passive desire to travel. A crucial part of the American dream, I think, is the unconscious knowledge that, as Nathan Asch says in the introduction to The Road, "When you're born you're not born to suffer." You can, when things get bad enough, when your land is taken or when your husband abandons you with nothing, leave. Hazel, like so many others, hears of the California promised land, and, unbeaten, sets out for the West. That in itself is as much the American story as the Capitalist ideal, rags-to-riches. The migration west not out of hopelessness but out of hope itself, an individual's manifest destiny, that we the Americans have the right to be there, and there it will be better. The truth of it, whether it's better or not, is ultimately irrelevant in the shadow of the strength of that belief.

America, too, has a long tradition of documentary artists. Not just with the Depression, but long after; photographers and writers looping a meta-path of the dispossessed in the attempt to document the truth of the struggle. Again, there is nothing, I think, inherently exploitative in that documentation. Observation is necessary, documentation is crucial. It is the journey itself that rings false for me. The truck drivers and Hazel are alike; both travel with both the weight and wings of the American dream on their backs. The truck drivers, in their constant motion, move towards a tangible destination, towards the end of their route, indefinitely, repeatedly. Hazel moves towards the promise of something better, towards an end for herself where she might settle. I have no doubt that she will move again if work proves impossible in Baltimore. Adamic, and those writers and photographers commissioned, or with a home (a settled "end") to which to return, make only a superficial, passive journey. They look for other people's journeys, for their destination is already reached.

Weedpatch Camp

Steinbeck's Weedpatch Camp is, for the road-weary Joads, a glimpse of a humanity they've lost with their home. For Ma, especially, the cement holding her "fambly" together, the time spent at the camp is the first step of civility and civilization the Joads find on their journey; the first chance of work, for Tom, and the first settlement of their own people that isn't transitory (moving either with the road or burned and re-built, over and over). "'Praise God, we come home to our own people,'" Ma says, and, "...now I ain't ashamed. These folks is our folks... Why, I feel like people again.'" Weedpatch camp seems, for the Joads and for the reader, almost too good to be true, after the relentless cruelty and hardship of the road, and the warnings of California from those failed pioneers.

But, it isn't. The community thrives, electing leaders democratically, delegating all roles to everyone, and bragging of their string band and Saturday night dances. Weedpatch Camp is, in fact, a real place: located just outside of Weedpatch, California, stands Arvin Federal Government Camp. The camp stands on land leased to the government, preserved to this day as the FSA (Farm Security Administration) answer to the hundreds of thousands of migrants moving into California. Hoovervilles cropped up as slums, civilians and police alike did all they could to drive the "okies" out of the state, out of work and out of finding work. The Camp, federally-owned and therefore beyond the jurisdiction of state police, provided a haven for traveling families, and Steinbeck's representation seems accurate. Laundry facilities and sanitary units including running hot water and showers were built; a library, a post office, and school were built for the families' use; jobs could, theoretically, be found within walking or short driving distance. Though few jobs paid over a dollar a day, a full week's rent in the camp cost only a dollar, and with all amenities close and provided, little of a family's income went to gas.

By no means, of course, was Arvin paradise. As the Joads found too quickly, a tent, no matter the company nor the amenities, is not a home. Still, those without other options, or those fortunate enough to have a job at all (DiGiorgio Farms offered jobs nearby to the destitute, and extorted them easily for their labor) stayed--some for as many as 22 years. Arvin exists today as a migrant camp, changed from "Arvin" to Sunset Labor camp, and known still colloquially as Weedpatch.

Neal Burton

There's something about America. Not its connotations, what it has represented and what it now represents, good and bad and the impossible in between. It's something that exists inherent in those who live here, born or immigrated, raised or still stumbling through a new city. And it's exactly what Nathan Asch finds: "Cotton country, oil country, the mountains and the mines, the Northwest woods, sheep and cattle, the iron country in northern Minnesota, the mills around Detroit don't seem to mix, don't seem to speak the same language. And yet they do. They are held by something... It's what makes for a certain look upon the face and a certain smile."

That, that essence of America, that's what I've been searching to categorize, to pinpoint and reproduce in my own writing. So far, my conclusions are as vague as Asch's, and significantly less eloquent in its admission of such. Still, I see it, this thing that mean America. A good singer-songwriter friend of mine from Seattle stayed with me last summer, after a brash decision to try to make it in New York. He couldn't -- he slept on my couch for free for eight weeks, and still only had the cash to live off Guinness and bar snacks -- and instead he grew his beard out and boarded a bus with his guitar and an extra shirt tied around his waist. From Brooklyn, he rode that bus down the Appalachians and through the Blue Ridge, towards the Rockies, and when he showed up on my doorstep again mid-Fall, the first thing he said was, "I haven't spoken to anyone in weeks, not really." But what came next were stories. They kept coming, he talked more than I'd ever heard him talk, and what he talked about was America. Somewhere in Indiana he'd hitchhiked from the bus stop to his scheduled venue, a bar twenty miles outside of town, picked up by a passing truck driven by a man who ranted the whole trip about homosexuals, the government, gun control, and his wife, only to wish my (gaunt, tattooed friend in tight jeans) a genuine "Best of luck," and offer a hearty handshake. The man was my favorite of the characters; there were the girls, so many girls in every state with nothing better to do than drink and chat up a passing guitarist, and there were the families, the bachelors, the businessmen all crammed in on his bus, no matter where he got on and off. 2008, from Brooklyn, New York, to Denver, Colorado, and all the way back, my friend Neal recounted to me his discovery of America, identical to Asch's own: that Americans are not just mill workers, or bigots, or the girls you fall in love with. They are full of Asch's so-called American slogan, "When you're born you're not born to suffer." Whatever you're born for, whatever you live for, it isn't the end. You can always grab a guitar, live off beer and bar snacks, and wander to meet people just like yourself.