‘How can a man put down roots in the San Joaquin Valley when there’s not an inch left for him, when he can’t own land ? The migration across America has been glamorized but the Dust Bowl refugees weren’t glamorous. They were victims of, a product of, an increasing rootlessness in American life.
‘They were not deeply rooted people themselves. They were easily shaken loose from that Oklahoma country and although the dream of the West, of California, drew them here the big men had already carved it up. These refugees became like the leaves of autumn that are blown by the wind, like the dust that drowned them out. Once sand is blown by the wind it makes little ripples and then the dust cloud gathers in volume and velocity. The sense of community disappears.
‘Once you start moving you roll; once the tap-root is severed, you roll.’
The radio programme of Spanish-language pop requests - ‘for Margate Trujillo’, ‘for Angel Otobe’, ‘for Victor Astro’ - clattering out across the café tables is sponsored by the First National Bank of Walsenburg, which is offering, the disc jockey excitedly bays, ‘A deposit service for people who do not wish to keep large sums of money in the house overnight.’
This seems a diploma test of salesmanship for it is hard to believe that it is a decision many of the occupants are wrestling with. All round, styptically beautiful, are the snow-coned peaks of the Sangre de Cristo and Culebra ranges of the Southern Rockies, a set of stupendously incongruous grandeur for the fly-blown litter which is this Colorado town which once dug more than two million tons of coal a year out of the foothills.
This is now a Mextown, a ‘pocket of poverty’. On the outskirts along rutted dirt roads - Maple Street, Pine Street - higgledy-piggledy among the weed patches and scrub, are shacks of adobe and packing-case planks, dribbling away towards the rusted gates of closed mines and slag-tips whiskered with grass. In Main Street paint flakes off empty shops and office buildings, and at every corner squat groups of men on the broken sidewalks, squinting under straw brims through the brilliant mountain air at nothing.
The Spanish came early, the first time fifty years after Columbus under Captain-General Francisco Coronado, a Conquistadore band in search of the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola; later Mexican homesteaders settled and the town was named Plaza de los Leones. Coal mining began to boom after the railroad arrived, and then came the reinforcements, whites from Georgia, German settlers led by Fred Walsenburg for whom the town was renamed. At the clamorous, grimy climax Walsenburg and Huerfano County were the prosperous homes of 18,000. From then, in 1930, it sank to 7,867 and, says a redevelopment report, ‘the largest part of the labour force continues to be unemployed’. Cause: ‘… decline in coal mining, production and agriculture, business depression, weather conditions and labour disputes, and new substitute industries have not come in … a running down of facilities and buildings, deterioration, obsolete public utilities, apathy and despair, and outright suspicion of any group advocating change.’
Out-migration completed the death and the emptiness. Between interviewing dark young girls with swarms of children and old scrawny men, Mrs Haynes in the Welfare Office seems unable to conjure even any official hope: ‘King Coal has long abdicated but most of the unemployed miners who’ve hung on here will still regard the area as a coal mining centre. They’re not ready to accept the fact that their living has gone for ever and won’t come back.
‘The county has lost two-thirds of its population. All the Italians and the Slavs cut their losses and moved on. The only job left for the Spanish-Americans is ditch digging. We’re left with the elderly, the incapacitated, the illiterate.’
Where did the others go ?
William H. Metzler, an agricultural economist at the University of California at Davis, says: ‘In California we had a lot of miners come in who didn’t make the grade here, who couldn’t find the land to get dug into. They became bindle stiffs and wanderers, a special class of people who have never become part of the community.
‘In America there is a myth about movement. Well, it’s ninety per cent myth and not enough reality. Mechanization, efficiency, profits - they are put first, before people. Crops are sacred. Workers are cheap. If they go hungry nobody gives a durn about them.
There is a gradual depositing that goes through all the states, people who are being pushed out of the plantation system and drifting into the migration stream, a distributing agency which is in perpetual motion. I don’t see it stopping for a long time, not while there are unskilled cut-price labourers and the farmers want a kind of hobo peasantry.
‘The drifters and floaters and derelicts are part of the system. It destroys people. The fellow here in this country who isn’t able to move up gets pounded down into the pavement. You can destroy people by developing so much competition, by developing a society in which there is bitterness and animosity, instead of one that is democratic and sound.
‘Yet at the same time, I honestly believe that the migrant farm workers are happier than the growers in this part of the country. They are a friendlier and happier group than the agribusiness operators who’ve made a million and have to go on to make the next million, and are worried about it because they grab harder and sweat more, and their tenseness and unhappiness increases. They have got in a rat race and don’t know how to get out of it.
‘The migratory workers are the last free folk we have. They are the last free Americans. They’re staying outside organized society; they’re against regimented society. Even when a farmer finds a good man, wants to keep him and offers him a monthly salary and a house, that worker often packs his bag in a few weeks. He feels he has got into something he hasn’t figured on.
‘His future may be guaranteed for the rest of his life but he doesn’t want to get up every morning in that same confounded little house and go through that confounded routine every day. Even if this farmer is a good guy, the migrant doesn’t want to be obliged to him because he wouldn’t be a free man any more.’
Leaning over the desk of the Cedar Lake Motel on U.S. Highway 97 at Chemult, Oregon, on the edge of the Winema National Forest, Ray Haynes says: ‘We see a lot of people who just flunk about. You’d be surprised. You know - people who just go from job to job, going from place to place, get a few dollars and then walk out.
‘This sorta people, they’re never satisfied, always looking for greener pastures. There’s one guy I see going through town every year, with whiskers and long sideburns, carrying a bedpack and a few tools, he told me he’d been in every state in the Union six times. We get even young girls through, they’ll work for us for a month and then move on, to a café or something: they like working in these truckstop cafés where the truckdrivers shoot the bull with the waitresses and maybe take them along.
‘Now last spring we had a family stop one night, in a panel-door truck with one of those U-haul trailers, a guy with a wife and two kids. He said he was a cement-finisher from Spokane and they were heading for California. He said “My gosh, cement finishers get twice the money down there and there’s a heap of work, so I figured we might just as well go there.” Well, two weeks ago on a Sunday afternoon I said to my wife, “Here’s a repeat customer, I bet you four bits.” It was that same guy, the cement finisher. He said he’d been down there in Los Angeles seven months and all he’d got was ulcers, and they were heading North.
‘See what I mean? They look over the fence and figure the pastures are greener, if they keep going, but those people will always be broke. They’ll get that bumming habit and end up like the bums who drop off from the Southern Pacific freights just across the road and hit the town.
‘Now even whole families get up and quit their jobs with nothing else in view. Government welfare has a lot to do with it. They figure they can always be fed.’
Up and down the aisles in the South State Street chapel the preacher is prowling predatorily to and fro under the black letters on the wall: All We Like Sheep Have Gone Astray; We Have Turned Every One To His Own Way: And The Lord Hath Laid
On Him The Iniquity Of Us All.Isaiah 53:6. He is exhorting the 200 worshippers at the noontide service to come forward and be saved.
‘Dear friends, you’re stubborn,’ he shouts furiously. ‘The impenitent, rebellious sinner winds up in the lake of fire! God’s been real good to you, Real Good. You should be in that lake of fire Right Now !’
An old man - or perhaps he is not all that old - with shorn white head hinged down on the white fuzz of his chest, bursting like ivy through the tear in his Hawaiian shirt, snores a bubbly beery snore.
‘Make a break for it! Make Jesus your friend and you’ll no longer be lonely! Make a break for it! Yessir, you’ll never know real joy until you do.’ Several heads turn, without concealment, to look at the clock and check how long to go before the soup can be got at. ‘Wouldn’t it be something if someone offered to die for you ? Man, wouldn’t that be something ?
‘But wait until the grim reaper comes your way. You can’t pass the buck. A lot of you guys think you can. You can’t pass the bucket either, friends. You may kick that bucket tonight. Get up out of your seat and come down the aisle and be saved.’ No one moves. ‘The Lord knows all about you. Oh, yes, boy, he’s known every little thing about you since the second you were born. You can’t spring anything new on my heavenly Father. He loves you and he wants you to know him.
‘The devil’s a burner and a crook and a thief, and he’s the one who’s broken up everything in our lives. He’s out to kill you and he would today if he could and if the Lord’s hand didn’t stay him.’ The Lord’s hand moves the clock to midday. The preacher ends abruptly, appearing neither uplifted nor cast down by the non-committal blankness of the congregation which, as suddenly electrified into motion, including the snorer, is flooding through the door to the soup kitchen, to which access has been gained through the turnstile of nominal atonement.
In the lobby, as the army of black and white, young and old, but all in the uniform of overworn work clothes, shuffles urgently by, Dick McCalum, the assistant superintendent of the Chicago mission, watches them as a production manager might watch the assembly line, falcon-eyed for the alcoholic flaw. He has a face reminiscent of Norman Vincent Peak’s: shaven smooth as a mushroom, spectacles alert with a mica-like glitter which suggests that mercy is not promiscuously squandered upon this alterant flock.
‘It’s estimated that there are five million homeless men in the United States,’ he says. ‘Sometimes you’d think we had ‘em all here. Most of them here wouldn’t be accepted in the established church, but all the same we aren’t a welfare agency. Our purpose is to get out the Gospel. Just as God sends missions to foreign lands, he sends out the Gospel here to men who have drifted out of society.
‘A good many of these are non-conformists. They’ve deliberately opted out. Their line of least resistance is to say “I don’t need you or anything.” A lot of them are weak-willed individuals all the same. They don’t hold a job because they have no purpose in working except to exist. They’re content to rest, to go into taverns, buy a few drinks and feel like a big shot for a moment.
‘They idealize themselves. They think there’s romance in being on the road. They’re picture-book heroes in their own mind, that’s the only way they can make something of themselves, by seeing themselves as gallant, bold individuals and by thinking they’re showing their families that they’re really roughing it out.
‘The trouble is that life’s too easy here in America. In Europe and countries where food is hard to come by every crumb of bread is of value. Here they scoff at it. Everywhere else in the world you have to struggle for existence. Here you can go anywhere and make it.
‘There’s a spirit of unrest in America. These men figure the world owes them a living and without making any effort to get out of the rut they’re in they just drift around, by bus or hitchhiking, or freight train, expecting to have it handed out to them.
‘We treat them here like gentlemen. If they have any gumption at all they want to get over the hump and we try to help them, to make them feel they are somebody. But a lot see themselves as tied down to the drudgery of factory machines and can’t take it. They don’t think about tomorrow. They just stop fighting. They’re not ashamed about that. They don’t see themselves as humble. They see themselves as big shots. Big shots on skid row.’
Part Eight
The woods are full of wardens
Travel on, there is help for you. You will come to a good
place; there is plenty
The man in the vision of Patience Loader, on the Mormon
Trail, 1856
The little hobo standing under a sad street lamp with his
thumb stuck out - poor forlorn man, poor lost sometime
boy, now broken ghost of the penniless wilds.
Jack Kerouac: ON THE ROAD
36 The American spectre
I have no plans
No dates
No appointments with anybody
Jack Kerouac: Mexico City Blues
From the Top o’ the Strip cocktail lounge of the twenty million dollar Dunes Hotel, the frail and rickety anatomy of Las Vegas is laid naked. At night at street level the Strip’s four miles of gyrating, throbbing neon are an electrical firestorm in gold, kingfisher green and vermilion. Downtown the massed bulbs of the gambling joints, the Golden Nugget and The Mint and Diamond Jim’s, throw a cold livid glare bright as summer noon. All shudder together into an hallucinatory metropolis. But from this daylight eyrie Las Vegas can be seen to be a half-pint shantytown, a village of flimsy pre-fab shells behind the gargantuan sign superstructure.
Below, the gimcrack little fruit-machine parlours and bars fry in a sun like a laser beam. In the Dunes - which offers ‘ankle-thick wall-to-wall carpeting’ and for the Dome of the Sea diners a ‘diaphanous blonde mermaid harpist providing seascapes in music while floating’ - piped show tunes seep through the artificially dimmed and chilled air. This is the latitude travelled by Sam Landy, the Professor of Chance and peripatetic gambling man.
He is dapperly dressed in yellow silk shirt with monogram on the pocket, blue slacks, black suede shoes and a minuscule gold watch with snaky gold strap; he has shiny grey hair and moustache, and a beautiful tan soaked up from many a costly resort-in-the-sun. Ignoring the coffee poured out for him, Sam Landy stares musingly and unseeingly toward the biscuit coloured horizon where, at Frenchman’s Flat, they test atomic devices.
‘I’m known as the Professor of Chance,’ he explains, ‘because I give humorous lectures about gambling to Rotarians and the Lions and Women’s Clubs, see? My father intended me to become a rabbi, and I went to theological college for four years in Chicago, where I was born. I quit. I didn’t like the importance attached to money in the clergy. I didn’t want any part of that atmosphere.
‘I went to the University of Illinois and became a physical education instructor, but - this was in the Thirties - jobs were hard to find. Finally I went to work in a horse parlour, a bookie shop. It was just a job as far as I was concerned. I wasn’t interested in the gambling, never, never.
‘But one day they needed extra help on the Kentucky Derby and they found I had a natural talent. Natural. It was just there. They trained me as a dice croupier. I worked myself up to be the top craps and blackjack dealer in the country. It wouldn’t be right to say I like the life: I love it. Love it. I had the natural instinct. If you move your eyelid I can tell what your next bet’s going to be; I can tell from the way you handle your chips whether you’re winning or losing.
‘There’s an epitome to every situation. I wanted to work all over America in the top places. I’m nomadic by inclination. When gambling was illegal I worked the casinos everywhere, Ben Martin’s Riviera Club just across Washington Bridge, in New Jersey, which was the top gambling place in the land, and in a gambling boat outside the three-mile limit off the California coast. I dealt in a place in Washington DC where I played with the top ambassadors and statesmen, and I’ve worked in Hollywood and Miami Beac
h.
‘A lot of people think that because this is your profession, and you work Miami and Las Vegas, that you must be gangster, a hoodlum or racketeer of some sort. Let me tell you something, I’ve lived a very clean life. I don’t smoke or drink or gamble - not with my own money. What I like to do is to get up and go, not because I have some place in particular to go, but just to see if I can make it to the top in the next place.’
Sandy Lehmann-Haupt is a young record engineer who at this moment in this Greenwich Village pad is in the middle of tailoring a television series which will re-create the capricious career of jazz through all its periods and fads. Sitting among mounds of LPs and old 78s of Count Basie and Mildred Bailey and Willie the Lion Smith and Bix Beiderbecke, he recalls his arrival in New York by bus, but not a Greyhound.
‘There was this whole bunch of us out in San Francisco who’d just sort of floated in from all directions’ he says. ‘We thought we’d have a kind of mobile party right across to the East. Somebody found a bus, it was a 1938 International Harvester school bus which had been used as living quarters by a family, and we all chipped in and bought it.
‘We spent a long time getting it the way we wanted. There were seven of us, two writers, an ex-Army lieutenant, a philosophy student, a couple of painters and myself, and it was a team job. We painted that bus from back to front in phosphorescent colours and we painted everything in it - even the fridge was covered in collages.
‘We decided to film the trip, so we built a platform on the back, and put a bench, a motorcycle mount and an old barbershop chair for panning shots. We sawed out a hole in the roof and fenced round an area for a mattress. I spent two months fitting the bus throughout with an intercom system, stereo and reels of taped jazz.
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