Sophie Maarleveld's blog

The place I know best in the United States is New York City, so I decided to check out the WPA guide for our glorious city. I was most interested in reading about the areas that I have come to know pretty well, neighborhoods that have historically been known as "ethnic", home to many immigrants. Chinese New Year in Chinatown c. 1940

The first section I read is about New York's Chinatown, which I was particularly interested to read considering the class about Chinatown I am taking this semester. I was surprised that the guide described Chinatown as a relatively safe and clean area, contrary to the opinion of many other New Yorker's at the time. Over the decades after the guide was written, Chinatown did become the playground of many gangs, and today diners concerned about the cleanliness of the kitchens in which their food is prepared usually give Chinatown a miss. The neighborhood was described as concentratedly ethnic and incredibly vibrant and the author suggests various shops and types of food and restaurants to readers. Chinatown was also much smaller at the time, not stretching north of Canal street and not even east of Bowery.

Though the guide does mention the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the author does not explain that the Act made it difficult for Chinese to come to the US, and those who were able to, were primarily men. Many Chinese men had left their homes and families in China to make money in America and upon arrival faced racism and permanent alien status. After the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in the late 40's, there was a flood of immigration from China and New York's Chinatown began to grow beyond the four or five blocks it had encompassed. It is difficult to say how accurate the guide's depiction of Chinatown is.

Though I expected this section the guide to be written with a more prejudiced tone, and the author suggested Chinatown as an interesting place to visit, there was something culturally voyeuristic about the section.

Lower East Side pre-hipstersI also checked out the section on the Lower East Side, which is most fascinating because of the changes this neighborhood has undergone. The Lower East Side had for over a century a highly concentrated immigrant population, with inhabitants from all over eastern and western europe. upwards of 80 thousand Jews gave the LES the world's largest Jewish population. The neighborhood was full of gangs, and people stuck to their own kind. The author points out that several famous Americans rose from the slums of the LES, such as Alfred E Smith, 4 time governor of New York.

In the decades since the guide was written, the LES has changed drastically, even though the rows of tenement buildings still exist and garments businesses still line Orchard street. Part of the LES became populated almost entirely by hispanics and latinos, and the lower part of the LES has melted into and become part of Chinatown. Today apartments in many parts of the LES demand high rents and hipsters roam the streets and the only immigrants left on the LES now are the Fukinese and other Chinese. The Jews are almost completely gone, save a few old family businesses, and even the hispanic and latino community has been replaced by young professionals and artists.

I was surprised by the coverage of these areas in the guide. These are two areas that might appeal to tourists today, but I had thought that in the 1930's no one would be interested in touring New York City's slums. The sections on Chinatown and the Lower East Side were relatively objective, and focused more on the merits of the area as opposed to the reasons one wouldn't want to visit them. The picture painted by these sections is very clear and easy to imagine, and I only wish that I could see what these neighborhoods had really been like almost 80 years ago.

Generic RoadsideThe Great American Roadside described by James Agee seems a wondrous and timeless thing to the reader, however, if one really considers his or her own experiences on the never ending asphalt roadways that crisscross the country, the reality of the roadside today is much less quaint. At the time Agee was writing, the various roadside industries that people had cashed in on, such as restaurants, automobile and tourist camps, motels and popsicles, were relatively new. In the decades since Agee's experiences on the road, the American roadside has become like everything else in America - standardized, franchised, unoriginal.How often when we take road trips do we see family owned businesses along the highways? And how often do we see fast food chains and service station chains and motel chains? The American roadside has been taken over completely by chains of any and every sort.

If small family owned, original businesses do exist, they are on smaller highways and roads that connect smaller towns or are traveled less often. In fact, corporate America has cashed in on the American traveler's nostalgia for the old original roadside. There are plenty of chains of "family restaurants" along the roadside that try to give patrons a sense of good old fashioned American family values, like Hoss's Family Steak and Sea House that grosses around 70 million dollars a year.

Though readers today can identify with Agee and his experiences, is traveling in America at all the same as it was? How much does the roadside affect and shape our road trips? And even if the restaurants and gas stations and motels along the road aren't all chains, does that really change how we experience the places? After a while a diner is just another place to eat mediocre hamburgers, a gas station is just another place to fill up, a motel is just a bed. Agee doesn't really address this issue in his piece. He describes the rise of roadside industry, tells the stories of certain business owners, provides us with figures and statistics, stresses the importance of roadside infrastructure. However, he doesn't specifically explore how the traveler's experience of these places defines his journey or vacation. Perhaps not that much has changed after all. After several hours on the road our eyes glaze over and our backsides begin to ache and any rest stop offers a place to rest and refuel, but that it. After all, whether roadside stops are owned by massive corporations or have been run by several generations of the same family, do they really aim to offer anything else?

Extreme Stereotype: West could have used this!Nathaniel West's A Cool Million is anything but your run of the mill Depression era proletarian novel. In fact, it not only satirizes proletarian novels, but also pokes fun at the "American Dream" and the belief that American society operates on the basis of merit and that anyone can be socially mobile. West's tone drips with sarcasm and even at times disdain, and I have to say that though the novel's brutality is at time quite humorous, I think it's possible that Nathaniel West may have gone too far.

A Cool Million was modeled on Horatio Alger's novels from earlier in the century, in which optimism is lauded and America is one happy meritocracy. However, West's novel warps Alger's model, and so many misfortunes befall the relentlessly optimistic protagonist, that one would expect him to give up, yet the he doesn't and finally ends up toothless, limbless, scalpless and dead, having accomplished none of his original goals. Though the reader does not easily identify with the protagonist Lemuel Pitkin, he ends up so mutilated and having lost so much, that one cannot help but feel slightly angry at the author...did he really have to inflict such pain upon his character?!

West was also criticized by many critics for having satirized racists and certain political and social factions too much. Throughout the novel he slanders Jews, Italians, Blacks, Communists, Facists, Chinese...you name it, he criticizes it. But at some point do his jabs cease to be funny? Do his satirically racist remarks actually hit a nerve? Is it possible that West wanted them to? Personally I found his sarcastic racism amusing at first, but after a while it got tiresome. I got his point, but his desire to satirize got in the way of telling the story....though, now I think about it, maybe his whole point was simply to expose and make fun of all these prejudices, not in fact to tell a story at all. After all, A Cool Million doesn't really have much rising action, a climax or even much of a conclusion.

I did a little bit of research on Horatio Alger that proved to reveal some interesting details. Apparently after attending Harvard Divinity School he took a position at a Unitarian Church but resigned a couple years later because he had had inappropriate relationships with some teenage boys! In fact church official wrote to the hierarchy in Boston complaining that "Horatio Alger, Jr. has been practicing on [the boys of the church] at different times deeds that are too revolting to relate." Nevertheless, they are related: "gross immorality, and a most heinous crime, a crime of no less magnitude than the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys ... which he neither denied or attempted to extenuate but received it with apparent calmness of an old offender – and hastily left town on the very next train for parts unknown". He later moved to New York City and spent time working at the Newsboys' Lodging House and spent a great deal of time with the newsboys themselves. It was this gritty reality that prompted him to begin writing his stories about young hard-up boys.

I wonder if Nathaniel West knew about this when he modeled his novel after Alger's stories, and if so, was he satirizing more than just the eternal optimism of Alger's characters???

Sacramento Tent CityPart of what makes this class so relevant is the current economic slump the United States is experiencing, similar to, but not as grave as the Great Depression. With each photograph of or story about the Depression, I have looked for parallels between that time and today. Fortunately as of now times are not as severe, but maybe people have been struck just as hard as the dustbowl farmers and others the Depression left homeless.

In many Depression-era novels and memoirs there is a focus on a gravitation towards the West, especially California. California became home to many migrant workers living in "Hoovervilles" set up across the state. An article on a news web blog I discovered details the dire situation of the increasing number of homeless in California today and the Hooverville-like tent cities that have sprung up. One city in which many residents have experienced the lash of the economy is Sacramento.

Along the American River in Sacramento an already existing group of tents inhabited by the chronically homeless has grown into a tent city after the city's rate of "newly homeless" rose 15% from 2007 to 2008. Many of the new residents of Sacramento's tent city have been laid off construction jobs, others from truck driving and selling cars. Most lived in middle class neighborhoods, made middle class salaries and would never have expected to find themselves on the street. Many of those interviewed admitted they have children and other family members who don't even know they are living in a tent. One man was quoted saying he looks for work most of the week, but there is no work to be found...sound familiar? He also said that many people won't hire him when they discover he is homeless. Is there more stigma surrounding the homeless today than there was during the Depression?

The population of tent city has fluctuated between 200 and 500 people, which may not be comparable to the expansive Hoovervilles. And the size of today's tent cities are not the only thing that varies from the Depression. The amount of aid the state is giving it's homeless as well as the amount it pledges to give in the coming months will provide much greater relief to the homeless than the New Deal and government camps were able to. The city of Sacramento plans to improve the area the tent city is located in and provide those living there with better standards of living and the state plans to allocate 2.4 million of money received from the federal stimulus package to the homeless in Sacramento.

But Sacramento is not the only city in California where many have found themselves homeless and living in tent cities. In fact the situation is reportedly worse in other cities. But are residents of California as aware of the increasing number of homeless in their state as residents were during the Depression? Are the tent cities springing up more or less visible than the Depression-era Hoovervilles? Whether they are or not, the homeless have certainly been noticed by people in positions to help.

.Tom Kromer's memoir Waiting For Nothing is a stark, hopelessly poignant account of the author's years as unemployed and homeless, and I can choose to comment on any of a myriad of anecdotes and portraits painted by Kromer, yet I was most affected by his descriptions of his experiences in the church-run missions. When I think of charity and the Church, I imagine compassion for all men and unconditional acceptance, yet Kromer's experiences and the experiences of countless other homeless people in missions during the Depression paint a very different picture.

The homeless were forced to sit through long sermons in order to obtain a bed for the night and were fed stews Kromer described numerous times as "slop" and "swill" and in which a man once found an overcoat button. Kromer also repeats several phrases along the lines of "All mission stiffs (mission workers) are the same. They are all bastards". Though any homeless man was guaranteed a meal and could hope for a bed in a mission, it was so low on the list of the stiffs that it come right before starving. Having to eat and sleep in a mission was certainly no treat, and Kromer recounts that men were often treated cruelly by the staff. At the end of the memoir Kromer lies in a mission bunk bed crawling with lice and watches another stiff in the throws of death. When Kromer asks one of the mission staff to call and ambulance or assist the man, the mission worker treats the entire situation as a nuisance, an inconvenience. He writes, "If all this stiff needed was a glass of water to save his life, he would croak anyway. Nobody in this mission would give him a drink of water".

At what point does a man become unworthy of the compassion of the Church?! There is nothing that resembles true charity or compassion in the descriptions provided by Kromer; rather there is a sense that these missions provide "food" and a place to sleep to the homeless because they have to, not because they should or want to, but because they feel a burdening sense of responsibility!

So what do these "missions" say about the state not only of the Church, but also of the entire nation during the Depression? It is certainly not surprising that the homeless found that little sympathy or compassion came their way from those who had employment, food and money, however when even the organizations that exist for men to turn to in times of crisis treat human beings as animals, that is when the state of the nation is gravely apparent. Then United States has certainly not experienced a period like the Great Depression since, so the effect of the severe economic crisis can be take into consideration when examining the state of church-run charities during that time and comparing them to today. However I still cannot help but ask myself what changed? Did the decrease in the number of the homeless make them less unappealing after the depression? Did people come to their senses and find it in their hearts to care about the fates of other human beings? I doubt it. I'm sure it all comes down to money in the end: the government and the church now have more money to contribute to their charities and programs, therefore overall conditions (including staff) have changed for the better.

America from a BoxcarReading selections from Ben Reitman's Boxcar Bertha got me thinking about traveling as a hobo. Until now, we've focussed primarily on travel for leisure (tourism) or for work (documentary photographers and writers) or to get to a place where one might find work (migrant workers). However, we haven't paid much attention to people who live the hobo life and travel as a hobo, not because they have to, but because they choose too.

The stories Bertha tells the reader about her life and the stories of others that she relays do often come across as tales of the unfortunate and down and out, but at the same time, many of Bertha's stories indicate that she and her mother and many of her companions chose the hobo life, because they felt it suited their ideals. Within that life, travel played a great role. Though Bertha moved around from one job to another, it is apparent that it was not her dire need for a job, but rather her wanderlust that blew her from one end of the country to the other. Hitchhiking and riding the rails was a part of her experience and being a "hobo" or homeless actually facilitated acting on her desire to move around. For so many, travel is considered a luxury because one must take time off from a job or school, fork up sums of money for transportation and accommodation and food. Yet if one has no life to worry about leaving behind, if one travels like a hermit crab or snail with everything he needs and owns on his back, travel becomes a freer experience, one of many possibilities. Yet society condemns people like Bertha and her hobo friends...why? Do we all secretly envy their detachment? Their free spirit?

This got me thinking about people who travel the country by hitchhiking and riding the rails today. Author William Vollmann wrote a collection of personal essays published in 2008 titled Riding Toward Everywhere, recounting his experiences illegally riding the rails around the United States and the people he met for whom it was a way of life. Vollmann had been interested in the life of train-hopping hobos for some time, and finally teamed up with a friend who had been riding the rails "for sport". The two acted as a team, Vollmann the people person hanging out with drunks and bums, asking questions about their lives and the shady American homeless underground, and his friend as the expert on train-hopping. Vollmann writes about massive hobo tent towns, a rail-riding gang known as the FTRA (supposedly violent and crazy, though Vollmann never really discovers anything of substance about it) and the thrill of riding in boxcars. He seems to conclude that this may be part of the reason so many people train hop, however the experiences of a writer with a family, home and plenty of income from his books who chooses to ride the rails to find adventure, cannot really be compared with those of true rail-riding hobos.

Bertha and Vollmann do however, have something in common - an adventurous nature, wanderlust, a desire to speak to people and experience the grit and hardship of America and Americans. We can learn from their example that travel does not have to exist within the organized and expensive and even legal boundaries that we believe it does (not that they are condoning crime and neither am I). They are both encouraging themselves and others to think outside the box (maybe by traveling in one!).

.One might expect all Depression era photo-documentary work to be similar, however the juxtaposition of the various texts and images presented by Agee, Evans, Lange, Taylor, Caldwell, Bourke-White etc prove otherwise. It is also interesting to note how the images and texts paired together in each piece complement each other.

Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor's American Exodus, combines the observations of a social scientist and those of a photographer to produce a work that is poetic, yet not to the extent that one might expect. Lange's photographs, poignant and beautifully composed, fall into place alongside Taylor's lyrical, yet matter-of-fact prose. Taylor's explanation of his opinion concerning statistics is the perfect explanation of the book's style. Lange and Taylor certainly make no effort to romanticize or dramaticize the lives of migrant workers and farmers during the 1930's and 40's, however Taylor's text is not clinical. It does not focus on numbers and statistics, but rather on the individuals affected by the Depression. As Taylor points out, he was criticized for this, however it is clear his effort was not intended to give readers a statistical overview of the Depression era, now to make any generalizations. Both Lange and Taylor realize the importance of the fact that the artist and writer not misrepresent their subjects and that they must represent only their subjects. That said, their work does provide truths about the time, but it also provides the reader with a story and a face to humanize the experience.

I found Caldwell and Bourke-White's You Have Seen Their Faces to be quite a different experience than Lange and Taylor's work. I did appreciate the foreword and the exploration of the idea of the book in which photographs and text are equally important, especially the quote of one critic, "The roles of text and illustration are completely reversed...the pictures state the theme of the book, whereas the prose serves as illustrative material" (V, Caldwell, Bourke-White). However, I felt that this was the case more in Lange and Taylor's work than in Caldwell and Bourke-White's. Though the latter duo provided striking images, that provoke emotion and contemplation, the text was rather dry, and though it explained the reasons for the plight of the people portrayed, it did not provide the same poetic sense of tragedy that Taylor was able to. That being said, Caldwell's text provides the reader with important background information that it is difficult to garner from Taylor's work.

In reading these pieces and viewing the photographs, the intricacies of representation keep coming to mind. A photograph may speak a thousand words, but just as the writer can express whatever he wants with his pen, so may the photographer manipulate her art form. But we have no way of knowing whether Dorothea Lange or any o the other photographer's candids were actually candids. Also, even if the subjects weren't coached or manipulated at all, the mere angle of the camera, the light of the time of day at which the photo is taken, can so completely change the message of the photograph. Were Depression era photographers purposefully and artfully constructing their pictures? I would say it is even more likely that they were aware of, if not in charge of every detail in a photograph, simply because photography was a much slower process at the time. Photographers could not simply click away as they do today, hoping that one in a hundred frames will provide them with the message they are hoping to send.

Roadtrip Circa NowThe traveler today is no longer the same as he was 50, 60 or 70 years ago. Today the sight of a traveler on an interstate highway with a car loaded with camping gear is not suspect, but rather commonplace. Yet what the pieces of Adamic and Asch so clearly illustrate, is the manner in which the traveler was received during a time like the great depression, and what it meant to be traveling.Roadtrip Circa Then

In Adamic's "Girl on the Road", the narrator, the hitchhiking girl he picks up and all the characters in the girl's stories, give us an idea of who was on the road during the depression and what the people on the side of the road, such as restaurant owners, inhabitants of small towns, gas station attendants etc, saw in these travelers. No one took to the road to simply explore, though Hazel admits to being awed by the landscape of Arizona and other parts of the country she passed through. It seems that anyone on the road had a purpose. Either they were heading west in search of opportunity, as was Hazel and the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath, or they are on the road to do a job, such as the journalist narrators of Adamic and Asch's pieces and the truck drivers Hazel encounters. And all of the characters in these pieces convey a desire to find or return to a place they can call home, or at least feel comfortable in.

There is a sense of loneliness and melancholy that pervades these accounts, revealing that life on the road, regardless of the impetus behind it, was difficult emotionally and separated people from one another. It is clear from the reception Adamic's narrator and Hazel receive at the restaurants they stop at and from their brief encounter with the law, that people noticed travelers, that they found each stranger passing through suspicious. Asch also confronts this problem when the Hamtramck police interrogate and harass him simply because he is an outsider, and therefor suspicious. Today, even in some of the most remote places in America, travelers are received very differently, because the reasons people take to the road have changed somewhat.

In the 30's it seems that people feared and disliked travelers because in general they were broke and often running away from something or toward something. Before the depression it wasn't common for people to move around the country for work, and all of a sudden towns and businesses along the main interstates were seeing thousands of people drive by and probably not profiting from them as much as they would expect. Today people who travel the country may be broke, but some speed along the highways in pursuit of leisure, to experience America up close, and gas station attendants, roadside restaurants and small towns along the highways never know what to expect from the stream of people that pass through, but at least it is no longer a sight that distresses people.

.The conclusion on the Grapes of Wrath, is to me the most intriguing scene of the novel. Not only does it leave the remaining Joad family members possessionless and stranded in a flood, it also leaves a Rose of Sharon suckling a starving man and smiling "mysteriously" (455). One reaction I had to this ending was disappointment, for the fates of the Joads remain unknown. The other was surprise at Rose of Sharon's actions - not only that the young girl, who throughout the novel has been portrayed as rather self-centered, is offering her swollen breast to a stranger to keep him alive, but also that she smile mysteriously. Her smile, reminiscent of the all-knowing smile of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, directed at whom or what, we know not, was particularly compelling. The ending of the novel has been criticized and praised by many literary critics, and these criticisms and more postulations are explored in Martha Heasley Cox's article "The Conclusion of The Grapes of Wrath: Steinbeck's Conception and Execution".

According to Heasley Cox, the ending of Steinbeck's novel has been criticized as some of his worst writing. However, she also reveals that many critics were unaware of the fact that throughout the process of writing The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck kept a journal, from which it is clear that Steinbeck had imagined and prepared the end of his novel from early in it's inception. His characterization of Rose of Sharon throughout the novel was a purposeful lead up to the final scene, in which she has been compared to the Madonna, the Great Mother and many other mythical, religious and historical figures.

Knowing that Steinbeck had this purpose as he wrote the novel, I have, in retrospect, considered the characterization of Rose of Sharon, and why her final act in the novel contradicted her character for most of the rest of the book. Heasley Cox also explores this question, stating that many literary critics found, ""Thematic significance in Rose of Sharon's act, saying that it "symbolically transmutes her maternal love to a love of all people"; that it symbolizes "the main theme of the novel: the prime function of life is to nourish life"". One cannot forget that Rose of Sharon, who has prepared for the birth of a child and a life as a mother, has now found herself without a child at all, and all the nurturing and maternal energy she has stored within herself needs an outlet.

But why does Steinbeck end the novel here and not follow the Joads until they die or find work and a home? Would the novel go on forever? According to some literary critics quoted by Heasley Cox, ""It is fitting that the novel ends with the Joads wiser and more experienced, but still with no sense of belonging, no permanence in the country, no home of their own"; "Steinbeck ends his book on a quiet note: that life can go on, and that people can and must succor one another"". These analyses of the final scene of The Grapes of Wrath are right on the mark, in my opinion. The Joads' journey is one of a lifetime, and Steinbeck had to leave them somewhere, so why not at this point, in which several of the themes of the novel are embodied in the actions of Rose of Sharon? In addition, Rose of Sharon's mysterious smile across the barn could be directed at us, the readers, symbolizing the mystery of life, and the mystery that even at that moment of crisis, enshrouds the futures of the Joads.

Modern MigrationI was inspired by The Grapes of Wrath and by our class discussion, to explore migration to cities (similar to migration in America during the Great Depression) in other continents. Though we may never see car/trucks with mattresses on the back speeding down the highway in America anymore, the phenomenon of migration to cities for the purpose of finding a better and more prosperous life, is still common in many poor countries around the world.

I have chosen to focus on Mali, one of the world's poorest countries, in which farmers and others living in rural areas are greatly affected by the unpredictable West African climate. There have been numerous year when rainfall decreases and Malian farmers find themselves in similar situations to the farmers of SouthWest during the American Great Depression of the 1930's, when the farmland of that region became a dustbowl. In these cases, mass migration towards Bamako in particular, and other smaller cities has ben documented. Malian farmers leave their homes to earn money as laborers and support their families, many of whom have remained on the farms. These farmers hope to return during the rainy season to profit from the regeneration of their land.

However, in Mali mass migration has been regular during dry seasons for over two centuries, and in America, especially the America of the 30's portrayed by Steinbeck, mass migration was a new phenomenon. So why was migration so uncommon before the depression? One possible answer is that the United States is not afflicted by the same severe weather patterns as West Africa, and people have less of a reason to leave their homes. Another answer is that Americans have never been displaced by war in their own country (except perhaps some during the civil war and revolution), whereas Malians have been migrating to escape violence for hundreds of years. Another possible reason is that the US economy was, until the Depression, relatively stable, and remained stable for years after. The Malian economy is very weak, with over 80% of Malians relying on the agricultural system for income.

Another question that must be posed is why have Americans, especially farmers such as the Joads, been able to come out of the depression with greater determination to not let such an economic catastrophe touch them again? And why have Malians been migarting to and from cities for centuries, without changing the pattern? Certainly technology plays a great role in this, as does climate (once again) and the fact that the US government even during economic depressions, has still had more resources to devote to jump starting the economy than a country like Mali.

So America was lucky, and we look back at the Depression as a dark time in our history, when so many were displaced and unemployed and generally miserable. However we ought not to forget that the Great Depression exists in perpetual forms throughout the world today.