America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

by John Steinbeck

  As the swamps were drained and the black odorous mud exposed, it became known that this land was rich beyond belief. And Salinas became rich, the richest community per capita, we were told, in the entire world. I suppose this was true. Certainly we Salinians never questioned it even when we were broke. It was a town of wooden frame houses, the trading center of the valley, the social center of the whole world as we knew it.

  The social structure was a strange and progressive one. First there were the Cattle People, the First Families of the Salinas Valley, gentry by right of being horsemen and dealing in gentry’s goods, land and cattle. Theirs was an unassailable position, a little like that of English royalty. Then Claus Spreckels came from Holland and built a Sugar Factory (in capitals) and the flatlands of the valley around Salinas were planted to sugar beets and the Sugar People prospered. They were upstarts, of course, but they were solvent. The Cattle People sneered at them, but learned as every aristocracy does that not blood but money is the final authority. Sugar People might never have got any place socially if lettuce had not become the green gold of the Valley. Now we had a new set of upstarts: Lettuce People. Sugar People joined Cattle People in looking down their noses. These Lettuce People had Carrot People to look down on and these in turn felt odd about associating with Cauliflower People. And all the time the town stretched out—the streets extended into the country. Farmland became subdivisions. Salinas became five thousand and then ten thousand. Enthusiasts thought that twenty thousand was not too high a mark to shoot at. We had a brick high school and a National Guard armory for dances. And we had the rodeo in the summer to attract tourists.

  This celebration had started as a kind of local competition. One’s uncles and even athletic aunts entered the roping contests. The ranch-men from the valley in the foothills rode in on saddles decorated with silver, and their sons demonstrated their skill with unbroken horses. Then gradually the professionals moved in and it became “show business.” A working cowman hadn’t time to attain the circus perfection of the professionals and soon even the wild horses and the Brahma bulls were imported, and cowboy clowns, who moved from show to show, took the places of the sons of Lynches and Abernathys and Bardins.

  I remember Salinas best when it had a population of between four and five thousand. Then you could walk down Main Street and speak to everyone you met. Tom Meek the policeman, and Sheriff Nesbit, Jim Bardin, Mr. Pioda, manager of the Sugar Factory, and any one of a multitude of Hugheses. The generations of Portuguese and Swiss and Scandinavians became American so that the names of Tavernetti and Sveresky and Anoitzbehere and Nissen no longer sounded foreign to our ears.

  I wonder whether all towns have the blackness—the feeling of violence just below the surface. Of course it was the only town I knew. Are they all full of dark whispers? There were whispers of murders covered up and only hinted at, of raids on the county funds. When the old court-house burned down it was hinted that the records would have been dangerous to certain officeholders. It was a blackness that seemed to rise out of the swamps, a kind of whispered brooding that never came into the open—a subsurface violence that bubbled silently like the decaying vegetation under the black water of the Tule Swamps. I do not think Salinas was a gay place in those days. Monterey was gay but not Salinas. Maybe it was the wind beating every day on the nerve ends. Perhaps it was the months of high, sad, gray fog.

  People wanted wealth and got it and sat on it and it seemed to me that when they had it, and had bought the best automobile and had taken the hated but necessary trip to Europe, they were disappointed and sad that it was over. There was nothing left but to make more money. Theater came to Monterey and even opera. Writers and painters and poets rioted in Carmel, but none of these things came to Salinas. For pure culture we had Chautauqua in the summer—William Jennings Bryan, Billy Sunday, The World of Art, with slides in a big tent with wooden benches. Everyone bought tickets for the whole course, but Billy Sunday in boxing gloves fighting the devil in the squared ring was easily the most popular.

  Mr. Rowling, the violin teacher, tried for years to breathe life into a small orchestra but the town preferred to hear Joe Conner sing Irish songs. Now and then of course we were shaken loose. Once Tetrazzini came to Del Monte, eighteen miles away. We in grammar school learned the Italian words to “Santa Lucia,” written phonetically on the blackboard, and we journeyed to Del Monte, each one of us clutching a wilted bouquet of violets. We sang for her and threw our violets at her and went sadly home. She was a corseted, fat woman and she cried. I don’t remember that she sang. Perhaps our singing threw her and maybe she was laughing, not crying.

  One section of Salinas was called Kidville—a district where the less prosperous lived and procreated violently. Kidville kids were kind of “across the tracks.”

  Andy was a Kidville kid, one of the nicest boys I ever knew. A quiet, lonely boy who went about by himself and yet loved to be with others. No matter how early you got to the West End School yard, Andy would be there, squatting against the wooden fence, waiting. Andy was a boy who walked about early in the morning. In any kind of excitement you would see Andy on the sidelines, silent but present. If men talking privately said, “Get that kid out of here,” that kid would be Andy. All of us were in love with the fourth-grade teacher, it turned out Andy most of all, but as usual Andy was quiet and inward.

  We had excitements in Salinas besides revivals and circuses, and now and then a murder. And we must have had despair, too, as when a lonely man who lived in a tiny house on Castroville Street put both barrels of a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the triggers with his toes. That morning Andy was not first in the schoolyard, but when he arrived he had the most exciting article any Salinas kid had ever possessed. He had it in one of those little striped bags candy came in. He put it on the teacher’s desk as a present. That’s how much he loved her.

  I remember how she opened the bag and shook out on her desk a human ear, but I don’t remember what happened thereafter. I have a memory block perhaps produced by a violence. The teacher seemed to have an aversion for Andy after that and it broke his heart. He had given her the only ear he or any other kid was ever likely to possess.

  We had many of what are now called characters in Salinas. Looking back it seems to me now it was solid characters, but at the time I thought everyone lived that way.

  There was Hungry Anderson, who was known to be a tight man with a dollar. He and his wife lived about a mile out of town. He got his name on an occasion when he had some carpenters working on the roof of his house. At noon it took them about six or seven minutes to get down off the roof, and by the time they did, Hungry had eaten their lunches. He explained that when they were late, he had thought they didn’t want to eat. He was called Hungry Anderson from that day on, and people began to say he was a miser. To prove that he wasn’t he bought a shiny Chalmers automobile, but his instincts were too strong for him. He kept the car in a shed in town and came in with his horse and buggy, motored about town, put up the car and trotted back to his farm.

  We had a man who wore long hair and looked very distinguished. We had heard that it was because the tips of his ears were clipped, a common punishment for stealing sheep.

  And we had misers, lots of misers. Heaven knows what they were, but we needed misers, perhaps with visions of counting gold pieces and hiding treasures. In those days many transactions were carried out in gold. Paper was highly suspected simply because it was unusual. One of our rich men used to sweat with nervousness when he had to pay a bill in gold. Paper saved him considerable painful emotion because it didn’t really seem like money to him.

  We had, however, one whooping dolager of a miser who gave us a great deal of pleasure. Of course now I know he was nuts, but then it was a different thing. He and his wife and his daughter lived in a dark little house in an apple orchard right in town. He was reputed to be a miser. My father had a feed store at that time and this man used to buy five pounds of middlings, which is somewhere between fl
our and bran. Every week he bought middlings and apparently that is all he bought. That is what the family ate, middlings and apples.

  First the daughter died and a year later the wife died. The doctor who signed the certificates was said to have said, four times removed, that they had died of starvation. And now our miser was living all alone in his dark house in his dark orchard.

  Naturally he was a pushover for us kids. We used to creep up close to his window at night and peek in at him sitting beside a kerosene lamp writing in a big ledger. Every once in a while he would stand up and make a speech to no one at all. We could hear his voice and see his gestures but could not make out his words. Then we discovered a delightful thing. If he sat still too long we could stir him up by knocking gently and in a ghostly manner on the wall. He would leap to his feet and deliver great speeches, waving his arms and shaking his fist while his face contorted with emotion and saliva dripped from his mouth. If we worked him over for quite a while, we could sometimes get him rolling on the floor. There was always something to do in Salinas.

  Then one day he was gone and we were very sad because we thought he had gone away. But he hadn’t. He was inside there and in about ten days somebody found him and the coroner had to take him away in a rubber blanket and spray the house with creosote.

  Well, gold fever ran through us. We dug holes at the roots of every apple tree in his orchard. We got a window open and searched the house, holding handkerchiefs over our noses. The big ledger was there and we could make out sentences like “Go good god goodly like liver line god do devil darn dawn.” It didn’t make any sense except to a psychiatrist and they hadn’t been invented. Anyway we tried to find secret hiding places, rapped on the walls and even took up some floor boards. Finally we had to give it up. Then a distant relative looked in a place we had neglected, under the sink in the elbow of the U-trap. He found a flour bag containing eight thousand dollars in gold. I still get the shudders when I think we might have found it. It would have changed our whole lives and our parents’ lives.

  Salinas had a nice balance of lodges—Elks for the gay men, Woodmen of the World, Knights of Pythias and, later, Knights of Columbus. We were a Masonic family, my father a Mason and my mother an Eastern Star. My father was a medium Mason, not as high a degree as some and higher than many. There must have been some ceremonies that were semipublic because I can remember clearly Louis Schneider, the local butcher, red-faced and short and fat and with a handlebar mustache. I can see him now sitting on a throne, I think it must have been of the order of the Royal Arch. He wore a royal robe with an artificial ermine collar and on his head was a golden crown studded with gems about the size of half chicken eggs. Louis’ blue serge trouser cuffs and box-toed shoes were the only unregal things about him.

  Salinas had a destiny beyond other towns. The rich black land was one thing, but the high gray fog and coolish to cold weather which gave it a lousy climate created the greatest lettuce in the world, several crops a year and at a time when no other lettuce in the United States matured. The town named itself The Salad Bowl of the World and the refrigerator cars moved in a steady stream out of the railroad yards toward Chicago and New York. Long packing sheds lined the tracks and the local iceman who had used to bring a fifty-pound block on his shoulder for ice cream made a vast fortune.

  The need for labor became great. We brought in Filipinos to cut and chop the lettuce and there were interesting results. No Filipino women were allowed in and the dark, quick little men constantly got into trouble with what were called “white women.” The Filipinos lived and worked in clots of five or six. If you had a fight with one, you had six on you. They bought automobiles cooperatively by clots and got women the same way. The wages of five or six mounted up and they could afford to buy themselves a pretty fair communal woman. For some reason this outraged the tender morals of certain of our citizens who didn’t seem to be morally sensitive in other directions. There used to be some pretty fine gang fights in the poolrooms of Market Street of a Saturday night.

  In addition to the Filipinos for chopping the lettuce, the cutting and packing sheds required labor. Women and men to prepare the lettuce for the crates, and icers and nailers. These were migrant people who went from one place to another as the crops came in. There were a great many of them and they worked, some by the hour and some by piecework.

  Eventually, as was inevitable, these people decided that they wanted to have a union. It was happening all over and they didn’t want to be left out. The owners yelled that communists were behind it all, and maybe they were. Nobody ever proved anything one way or another, but the union got formed. I guess wages were pretty low and profits pretty high. So, now [that] they had a union, the shed people made demands for higher wages and when they were refused, went on strikes.

  Now what happened would not be believable if it were not verified by the Salinas papers of the time. A man suddenly appeared, went to the owners and the sheriff and announced himself as an expert in handling strikes. He must have been a commanding figure. The sheriff turned the situation over to him.

  The General took a suite in the Geoffrey House, installed direct telephone lines to various stations, even had one group of telephones that were not connected to anything. He set armed guards over his suite and he put Salinas in a state of siege. He organized Vigilantes. Service-station operators, owners of small stores, clerks, bank tellers got out sporting rifles, shotguns, all the hundreds of weapons owned by small-town Americans who in the West at least, I guess, are the most heavily armed people in the world. I remember counting up and found that I had twelve firearms of various calibers and I was not one of the best equipped. In addition to the riflemen, squads drilled in the streets with baseball bats. Everyone was having a good time. Stores were closed and to move about town was to be challenged every block or so by viciously weaponed people one had gone to school with.

  Down at the lettuce sheds, the pickets began to get apprehensive.

  The General sat in his guarded suite at the Geoffrey House issuing orders and devising tactics. He may have believed that Salinas was in danger of being annihilated. I have no way of knowing. Suddenly he issued the information that the Longshoremen of San Francisco, a hundred miles away, the most powerful and best disciplined union in the State, were marching on Salinas, singing “The Internationale.” A shudder of excited horror ran through Salinas. Orders were issued from Headquarters. The townsmen marched to the outskirts determined to sell their lives dearly. The sheriff seems to have become a kind of runner for the General.

  Then a particularly vigilant citizen made a frightening discovery and became a hero. He found that on one road leading into Salinas, red flags had been set up at intervals. It was no more than the General had anticipated. This was undoubtedly the route along which the Longshoremen were going to march. The General wired the governor to stand by to issue orders to the National Guard, but being a foxy tactician himself, he had all of the red flags publicly burned in Main Street.

  All might have gone well if at about this time the Highway Commission had not complained that someone was stealing the survey markers for widening a highway, if a San Francisco newspaper had not investigated and found that the Longshoremen were working the docks as usual and if the Salinas housewives had not got on their high horse about not being able to buy groceries. The citizens reluctantly put away their guns, the owners granted a small pay raise and the General left town. I have always wondered what happened to him. He had qualities of genius. It was a long time before Salinians cared to discuss the episode. And now it is comfortably forgotten. Salinas was a very interesting town.

  It is a kind of metropolis now and there must be nearly fourteen thousand people living where once a blacksmith shop stood in the swamp. The whole face of the valley has changed. But the high, thin, gray fog still hangs overhead and every afternoon the harsh relentless wind blows up the valley from King City. And the town justifies the slogan given it when it was very young . . . Salinas is!
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  The Golden Handcuff

  HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED how attempts to write about San Francisco invariably turn into autobiography? And could it be that she is such a personal even subjective city that, once you know her, you can never again sort out which is San Francisco and which is you? One advantage of this confusion of identities is that she never gets dull. There are as many San Franciscos as she has lovers and she has many. I am one and I have known her on several levels.

  Being born in Salinas, I do not recall as a child ever using the name San Francisco. She was The City, and I guess by that we meant all cities, which isn’t a bad evaluation for a kid.

  My first knowledge of The City was derived from my Uncle Joe Hamilton, who came from King City and ascended the Acropolis to work on the old San Francisco Wasp. At least that’s what he said. He also said he had sat in the chairs once occupied by Mark Twain and Bret Harte. I was a little kid then and I learned The City from Uncle Joe on his infrequent visits.

  I figure that Julius Caesar was stabbed near the arched entrance of the old Ferry Building, that Market Street led under the Arch of Titus, past the Forum which was of course the Palace Hotel, and went thence up the Capitoline or Nob Hill. It was obvious that Joan of Arc was burned in Union Square with her eyes fixed on the Fairmont, that Moses went up Twin Peaks to receive the Tables of the Law. You may understand that through my uncle’s star-dusted eyes, I knew The City quite well before I ever went there.

  My second level did not diminish the first although it was different. My mother was a lady with a high church attitude toward culture. She always knew what she liked and, to a surprising degree, what she liked turned out to be art. As a medium-sized kid I was taken to The City to be blooded with culture.

  Music in Salinas was George Rowling on piano and his nice sister working away on a sweet and sour violin and never getting it sawed through, plus Joe Conner singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and “The Rosary.” You must admit it was pretty heady to fall without preparation into Caruso, Melba, Tetrazzini, Scotti and the rest of that fantastic band of Archangels. And then a little later I saw, heard and felt Eleonora Duse and even though she played Ghosts in Italian, it didn’t matter. Even at that age it seemed to me that she brought something to the theater that was lacking in our seasonal Chautauqua or the Salinas High School’s version of Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh. There was no conflict of interests. Salinas was Salinas but The City was magic.