America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

by John Steinbeck

  Relief came along and was welcomed. We got some food—blocks of cheese and canned Government beef. I remember the beef well. It tasted like boiled laundry and had about as much food value. Private enterprise processed it from Government-bought cattle. They processed the hell out of it and at that time a rich beef essence went on sale. We ate the boiled laundry from which it probably came.

  When WPA came, we were delighted because it offered work. There were even writers’ projects. I couldn’t get on one, but a lot of very fine people did. I was given the project of taking a census of all the dogs on the Monterey Peninsula, their breeds, weight and characters. I did it very thoroughly and, since I knew my reports were not likely to get to the hands of the mighty, I wrote some pretty searching character studies of poodles and beagles and hounds. If such records were kept, somewhere in Washington there will be a complete dog record of the Monterey Peninsula in the early Thirties.

  All over the country the WPA was working. They built many of the airports we still use, hundreds of schools, post offices, stadia, together with great and permanent matters like the stately Lake Shore Drive in Chicago.

  By that time some business was beginning to recover and it was the fixation of businessmen that the WPA did nothing but lean on shovels. I had an uncle who was particularly irritated at shovel-leaning. When he pooh-poohed my contention that shovel-leaning was necessary, I bet him five dollars, which I didn’t have, that he couldn’t shovel sand for fifteen timed minutes without stopping. He said a man should give a good day’s work and grabbed a shovel. At the end of three minutes his face was red, at six he was staggering and before eight minutes were up his wife stopped him to save him from apoplexy. And he never mentioned shovel-leaning again. I’ve always been amused at the contention that brain work is harder than manual labor. I never knew a man to leave a desk for a muck-stick if he could avoid it.

  Meanwhile, wonderful things were going on in the country: young men were reforesting the stripped hills, painters were frescoing the walls of public buildings. Guides to the States were being compiled by writers’ projects, still the best source books on America up to the time they were printed.

  A fabulous character named Hallie Flanagan was creating a National Theatre. And playwrights and actors were working like mad for relief wages. Some of our best people grew to stature during that time. We might still have a National Theatre if some high-minded Senators had not killed the whole thing on the ground that Getting Gertie’s Garter was an immoral play.

  In Pacific Grove we heard that business was improving, but that hadn’t much emphasis for us. One of the indices of improvement was that the men who had begged the Administration to take over and tell them what to do were now howling against Government control and calling Mr. Roosevelt highly colored names. This proved that they were on their feet again and was perfectly natural. You only tolerate help when you need it.

  The factories were slowly coming to life again and the farmers were as optimistic as farmers can be, which isn’t much. And then the weather gods reared back and let us have it. The rains simply went away. A weather map of 1934 is a dismal history—dry, poor, drought, arid—West, Middle West, Southwest—the great meat, cereal and vegetable area of the nation, shriveled and desiccated and cracked. Cows were racks of bones and pigs were shot to stop their hunger squeals. The corn came up and collapsed.

  Prohibition had been repealed by then and crudely painted signs went up everywhere: “You gave us beer. Now give us water!” On the great plains, the root carpet of buffalo grass had been long plowed away and the earth lay bare and helpless under the sun. When the strong winds blew, the topsoil rose into the sky in gritty clouds, put out the sun and then drifted back against houses and fences like dark snow. Photographs taken then show our richest areas looking like moonscapes, desolate and frightening. Cattle died or were shot, and people fled to save themselves, abandoning everything they could not carry. They ran to the fringes of moisture—California, Oregon and Washington, where the cold of winter would not be an added problem. America was like a boxer, driven to the floor by left-hand jabs for a seven count, who struggles to his feet to catch a right-hand haymaker on the point of his chin.

  In the early days of the migration, some groups got trapped by other kinds of weather. For example, about three thousand, encamped in King’s County, California, were caught in a flood. They were huddled and starving on high ground surrounded by water and mud-logged fields.

  I had a friend, George West of the San Francisco News, who asked me to go over there and write a news story—the first private-enterprise job I could remember. What I found horrified me. We had been simply poor, but these people were literally starving and by that I mean they were dying of it. Marooned in the mud, they were wet and hungry and miserable. In addition they were fine, brave people. They took me over completely, heart and soul. I wrote six or seven articles and then did what I could to try to get food to them. The local people were scared. They did what they could, but it was natural that fear and perhaps pity made them dislike the dirty, helpless horde of locusts.

  The newspaper paid me some money and about that time I had a little windfall so I went to live with these migrant people, traveled back to their home base to see why they were leaving it. It wasn’t philanthropy. I liked these people. They had qualities of humor and courage and inventiveness and energy that appealed to me. I thought that if we had a national character and a national genius, these people, who were beginning to be called Okies, were it. With all the odds against them, their goodness and strength survived. And it still does.

  In Pacific Grove a part of our social life was politics; we argued and contended and discussed communism, socialism, labor organization, recovery. Conversation was a large part of our pleasure and it was no bad thing. With the beginning of recovery and the rebirth of private business, strikes began to break out. I went to see them to find out what it was about, felt them, tasted them, lived them, studied them and did quite a bit of writing about them. Fantastically, a few people began to buy and read my work even when they denounced it. I remember one book that got trounced by the Communists as being capitalist and by the capitalists as being Communist. Feelings as always were more potent than thought.

  And feelings in the Thirties ran high. People were not afraid to express them as they have become recently. If you believed a thing, you shouted it. We lived or at least talked excitement.

  We discussed what was happening in Europe. Hitler was rising on the despair of defeated ex-soldiers, Mussolini riding up on Italian poverty and confusion.

  And in America maybe we were weary too. We had been up and down too many times in a short period. We have always had a tendency in confusion to call for a boss. A baseball scandal, a movie difficulty with morals, and we yell for one man to take over. Oddly enough we always call him a Czar, but, fortunately, so far we have never let him get very big.

  But in the Thirties when Hitler was successful, when Mussolini made the trains run on time, a spate of would-be Czars began to arise. Gerald L. K. Smith, Father Coughlin, Huey Long, Townsend—each one with plans to use unrest and confusion and hatred as the material for personal power.

  The Klan became powerful, in numbers at least. In Pacific Grove, KKK was painted in huge letters on the streets and several times a small red card was slipped under my door which read, “We are watching you,” signed “KKK.”

  The Communists were active, forming united fronts with everyone. We had great shouting arguments about that. They were pretty clever. If you favored justice, or the abolition of poverty, or equality or even mother love, you were automatically in a united front with the Communists. There were also Lovestoneites and Trotskyists. I never could get them straight in my mind except that the Stalinists were in power in Russia and the others were out. Anyway, they didn’t like each other. The Stalinists went about with little smiles of secret knowledge and gave the impression that they had sources of information not available to ordinary people. It was onl
y later that I realized this was not so. We were all united in a dislike for dictators (Stalin was not a dictator if you were properly educated in dialectics).

  When the stunning news of the Hitler-Stalin pact was printed, I came on one of my Communist friends in the street. He began shouting before I got near him: “Don’t ask me. I don’t know, God damn it. They didn’t tell us.” As it turned out, the Kremlin didn’t tell the American Communists anything. Someone told me later they didn’t trust them.

  Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: “After the revolution even we will have more, won’t we, dear?” Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picnickers on her property.

  I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn’t have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.

  During the early years of the Thirties, my literary experience was unfortunate, but not unique. Every time a publisher accepted one of my books, he went bankrupt. One book was accepted by one publisher, printed by a second and issued under a third. But it didn’t sell anyway. I began to feel like the Typhoid Mary of the literary world. But as the Thirties progressed, a little solvency began to creep in on me. I remember when a story of mine called The Red Pony was bought by the now defunct North American Review. They paid ninety dollars for it. I didn’t believe there was that much money in the world. The pure sparkling affluence of it went to my head for weeks. I couldn’t bear to cash the check, but I did.

  By 1936 the country must have been on the upgrade. When a writer does well, the rest of the country is doing fine. A book of mine which had been trudging wearily from publisher to publisher was finally bought and brought out by Pat Covici. It sold well enough so that it was bought for motion pictures for three thousand dollars. I had no conception of this kind of dough. It was like thinking in terms of light-years. You can’t.

  The subsequent history of that book is a kind of index of the change that was going on. The studio spent a quarter of a million dollars having my book rewritten before they abandoned it. Then they fired the man who had bought it in the first place. He bought it back for three thousand and later sold it for ninety thousand dollars. It shows how values change. But I still think of that original three thousand dollars as about as much money as there is in the world. I gave a lot of it away because it seemed like too much to be in private hands. I guess I wasn’t cut out for a capitalist. I even remained a Democrat.

  During the Depression years and the slow recovery, the world of gadgets called science had passed us by in Pacific Grove. One of our friends owned a Model T Ford, high ceiling, cut-glass vases, a fairly dangerous vehicle since its brake band was gone and the reverse band had been moved over to the high-low-forward drum. It could be used for emergencies if we could come by a quart of gasoline.

  I had at one time come by a radio, tickler and crystal affair with headphones. But sitting tapping my foot to music or laughing at jokes no one else could hear caused my wife to threaten divorce. Now in my growing affluence I bought a magnificent secondhand radio for fifteen dollars. Architecturally it was a replica of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, lacking only gargoyles. The set itself was good and still is. Now we had access to the great world of music and particularly to news. We gathered close to the speaker because a nearby X-ray machine had a way of coming on at the most vital times. On this set we heard Mr. Roosevelt’s fireside chats, listened to the doom tones of Gabriel Heatter and the precise, clipped reporting of H. V. Kaltenborn. But also we heard the recorded voice of Hitler, a hoarse screaming and the thundering Heils of his millions. Also we listened with horror to the mincing sneers of Father Coughlin. One night we got Madison Square Garden, a Nazi meeting echoing with shrill hatred and the drilled litany of the brown-shirted audience. Then a dissenter’s voice broke through and we could hear the crunch of fists on flesh as he was beaten to the floor and flung from the stage. America First came through our speaker and it sounded to us very like the Nazi approach. Lindbergh was proposed to ride the White Horse, which must have saddened him. We had also heard the trial of the man who had stolen and murdered his baby.

  Prosperity had returned, leaving behind the warm and friendly associations of the dark days. Fierce strikes and retaliations raged in Detroit, race riots in Chicago: tear gas and night sticks and jeering picket lines and overturned automobiles. The ferocity showed how frightened both sides were, for men are invariably cruel when they are scared.

  The Spanish War split America’s emotions. The people we knew favored the Republic. We could not see how justice could be on the side armed and supplied by Hitler and Mussolini. We watched with dismay while our Government cut off supplies to the Loyalists and forced them to turn to the Russians for help. It was a crazy time that came to us through that great episcopal radio.

  Shirley Temple, then a little girl, was denounced by the Dies Committee for sending money for medical aid to Loyalist Spain. And I had one hilarious experience because I also had contributed toward an ambulance. Everyone knows at least one telephone joker. Ours was a woman who loved to call the zoo and ask for Mr. Bear. One day I answered the phone (oh! yes, we had a telephone by now). I thought it was our joker because the voice said: “This is the Monterey Herald. You were denounced before the Dies Committee today. Would you care to comment?”

  And I, still thinking it was the joker, replied: “What’s good enough for Shirley Temple is good enough for me.”

  But it was true. I had been denounced for giving money for medical aid to Spain. My reply got printed all over and apparently the committee didn’t think it as funny as many others did. They wouldn’t even answer my wire asking to be heard. But from then on I was a Communist as far as the Dies Committee was concerned. It was at this time that everyone was a Communist or a Fascist depending on where you stood.

  My books were beginning to sell better than I had ever hoped or expected and while this was pleasing it also frightened me. I knew it couldn’t last and I was afraid my standard of living would go up and leave me stranded when the next collapse came. We were much more accustomed to collapse than to prosperity. Also I had an archaic angry-gods feeling that made me give a great lot of my earnings away. I was a pushover for anyone or any organization asking for money. I guess it was a kind of propitiation. It didn’t make sense that a book, a humble, hat-in-hand, rejected book, was now eagerly bought—even begged for. I didn’t trust it. But I did begin to get around more.

  I met Mr. Roosevelt and for some reason made him laugh. To the end of his life, when occasionally he felt sad and burdened, he used to ask me to come in. We would talk for half an hour and I remember how he would rock back in his chair behind his littered desk and I can still hear his roars of laughter.

  One night at John Gunther’s apartment in New York I met Wendell Willkie, who was running for the Presidency. I liked him very much, although I was opposed to him politically. He seemed a warm and open man. Very late at night after a number of whiskies I brought up something that had always interested me. I asked him why he wanted to be President. It seemed the loneliest and most punishing job in the world. He rolled his highball glass slowly between his palms and stared into it. And finally he said: “You know—I haven’t the slightest idea.”

  I liked him even more then. He didn’t give me any bull.

  The strange parade of the Thirties was drawing toward its close and time seemed to speed up. Imperceptibly the American nation and its people had changed, and undergone a real revolution, and we were only partly aware of it while it was happening.


  Now war was coming. You didn’t have to be an expert to know that. It was patent in every news report, in the clanging steps of goose-stepping Nazis. It had been in the cards since the first German put on his brown-shirted uniform. The practice wars—Ethiopia, Spain, the Ruhr, the Czech border—we had watched with paralyzed attention. At any early moment it could have been stopped—or could it? America knew it was coming even while we didn’t believe it. We watched the approach of war as a bird helplessly watches an approaching rattlesnake. And when it came, we were surprised as we always are.

  But the strange designlike quality of the Thirties continued to the end. It was as though history had put up markers, dramatic milestones at either end of the decade. It started with the collapse not only of financial structure, but of a whole way of thought and action. It ended with perhaps the last Great War.

  A few weeks ago I called on a friend in a great office building in midtown New York. On our way out to lunch he said, “I want to show you something.”

  And he led me into a broker’s office. One whole wall was a stock exchange trading board. Two young men moved back and forth swiftly filling in changes, rises, falls, buying, selling. Behind an oaken rail was a tight-packed, standing audience, clerks, stenographers, small businessmen. Most of them munched sandwiches as they spent their lunch hour watching the trading. Now and then they made notations on envelopes. And their eyes had the rapt, glazed look one sees around a roulette table.

  Making of a New Yorker

  NEW YORK IS the only city I have ever lived in. I have lived in the country, in the small town, and in New York. It is true I have had apartments in San Francisco, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Paris, and sometimes have stayed for months, but that is a very different thing. As far as homes go, there is only a small California town and New York. This is a matter of feeling.