America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

by John Steinbeck

  In the years leading up to 1861 the North and South growled and argued, compromised and were split again, muttered and grumbled toward war. New territories were layering and thrusting themselves, preparing to be states; and the border extended westward with quarreling over whether the new states should be slave or free. This was just a way of deciding on one kind of economy or another. Slavery had little to do with it except to give the differers an emotional platform. And the slaves, except as vehicles for that emotion, had nothing whatever to do with it.

  In the dreadful war that ensued, the slaves were never taken into consideration; and after years of destruction and death, when the great Proclamation of Emancipation was issued it was timed and announced, not as an instrument of freedom, but as a military measure designed to confuse and dismay the already tottering South. We do not know what Lincoln would have done or could have done to smooth the way of transition had he lived on. What did happen was dreadful. Millions of slaves, blinking and helpless, emerged into the blinding light of freedom, and they were no more fitted or prepared for it than a man would be who after a lifetime spent in prison was forced into the complication, the uncertainty, and the responsibility of the outside world. If time could have been allowed for training, for transition; if the South had been able to understand that the change was necessary and inevitable and had put it into motion locally and slowly, the story might have been different. But emancipation was forced on the South and the white Southerner found himself surrounded by a vengeful, savage, and untrained enemy. He no longer had any responsibility for the Negro. He had only to consider self-defense and the protection of his family and his neighbors.

  Southern Americans have throughout our history shown a gift for the military. They fought the Civil War with incredible bravery and ingenuity, and held out with pure spirit against the overwhelming Northern superiority in numbers, equipment, and supplies. When they were finally defeated and the slaves were freed against their will, they reacted as a military nation will when it is beaten, surrounded, occupied, and infiltrated. They invented a new kind of guerrilla warfare and went right on fighting. Their secret and close-knit orders were designed to keep a constant pressure of terror on the bewildered and angry Negroes. Preserving “law and order” meant keeping a tight and ferocious rein on the Negroes through the armed strength of law-enforcement officers of the whites’ own choosing, and at the same time making the laws to be enforced—particularly those laws which denied the blacks access to the making or changing of the laws. And Southern representatives to the Northern government developed techniques of minority control through the infiltration of legislative committees, while their brilliant use of the filibuster closed off nearly every avenue of investigation and change.

  The efforts of the Southerners were vastly successful; the amendments to the Constitution guaranteeing the Negroes their freedom and their right to participate in government were completely annulled by local custom, law, and law-enforcement officers, so that for nearly one hundred years Negroes, who often outnumbered the whites, were neither enfranchised nor free. Schools, neighborhoods, professions, and white facilities were closed against them. Infractions of the law drew one kind of punishment for Negroes and another for whites, while any organization designed for the self-protection of the Negro was mercilessly broken up and scattered by the law when possible, and by secret terror tactics when the law did not suffice. For slavery there were substituted the servitudes of debt, of need, of ignorance, and the constant reminders of inferiority. It is true that Negroes were free to go away if they wished to and could; and many did, only to find that the North, which had fought for their emancipation, would not accept them save on the same terms as those the South applied.

  During Reconstruction, when many Negroes were elected to the state legislatures in the South, they voted for things they had never had; and among these was education. In the few short years of Negro participation in the Reconstruction of the South more school laws were written than at any time before or since; and when the black legislators were kicked out of office and disenfranchised by the growing power of the whites, these laws were removed from the books. Such was the rage of the whites that the very word “school” seems to have come under a ban, and many Southern schools, which had once been very fine, slipped into a shadow from which they have not yet emerged. It’s a crazy thing; the whites denied themselves candy for fear someone else might get some!

  When the war was over, my Great-Aunt Carrie, a tiny woman of whalebone and steel, daughter of that same Dickson who had gone to Palestine to convert the Jews to Christianity, this wee woman carrying a little satchel of contributions from her neighbors in Leominster, Massachusetts, went South and opened a school for Negro children. She was as tough as her father had been. No sooner had she opened her school and assembled a class of pickaninnies than the Ku Klux Klan burned it down; she opened another and kept the children in at night, and the white-robed horsemen fired through the walls while the children and Great-Aunt Carrie lay on the floor. With the little black kids helping her, she raised a sandbag defense inside the building, and cooked grits in the school fireplace to feed herself and her charges. Her spirit never gave out, but her money did; and the grits ran out, too—for, while Negroes crept near late at night bringing what food they could scrape together, the Klan soon closed that gap, and finally, weak from starvation and weighing less than her smallest charge, Aunt Carrie capitulated and retreated with her flag flying. It must be admitted that the Southern gentlemen did not disarm her; she marched away carrying her weapons—a Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, and McGuffey’s First Reader.

  Now, a hundred years later, American Negroes are surging toward the equality we promised them and did not give them in 1867, and that surge was started by four things, three of which Aunt Carrie was allowed to take away: religion, art, and learning. The fourth thing she did not have, but the Negroes have it now: economic importance and impact. Negro leaders are for the most part educated, literate, thoughtful, and experienced men. The thrust of the movement, based on religion, has almost the discipline and force of religion itself. And Negroes now have access to the wealth and to the ability to distribute it; businessmen all over the country have finally come to see that what is bad for Negroes is eventually bad for business, and so for America.

  In the constant pressure of the Negro causes, some thoughtless people ask, “What are they after? What do they want?” It’s very simple. They want exactly the same things other Americans want—peace, comfort, security, and love. The human wants everything he can conceive of and, as through education and understanding his concepts grow broader, he will want more and different things—perhaps even better things.

  There is no question that Negroes will get their equality—at law; not as soon as they should, but sooner than pessimists believe. But legal equality is only the smallest part of being equal. It is one of the less attractive of human traits that everyone wants to look down on someone, to be better than someone else; and, since this is symptomatic of insecurity, humans in general do not seem to be very secure. The hurt in the Negro and the deep-seated suspicion of the white is matched only by the fear and suspicion of the white toward the Negro; and while there remains any vestige of such feeling, true equality cannot be achieved.

  Some years ago, a very intelligent Negro man worked for me in New York. One afternoon through the window I saw this man coming home from the store. As he rounded the corner, a drunk, fat white woman came barreling out of a saloon, slipped on the icy pavement, and fell. Instantly, the man turned at right angles and crossed the street, keeping as far away from the woman as he could. When he came into the house I said, “I saw that. Why did you do it?”

  “Oh, that. Well, I guess I thought if I went to help her she was so drunk and mad she might start yelling ‘rape.’ ”

  “That was a pretty quick reaction,” I said.

  “Maybe,” he said; “but I’ve been practicing to be a Negro for a long time.”


  I have written at such length about this problem because any attempt to describe the America of today must take into account the issue of racial equality, around which much of our thinking and our present-day attitudes turn. We will not have overcome the trauma that slavery has left on our society, North and South, until we cannot remember whether the man we just spoke to in the street was Negro or white.

  Genus Americanus

  MEMBERS OF a classless society must work out changes in status levels without violating their belief that there are no such levels. In an aristocracy this problem is solved and the changes are in effect rather than in name. In America, and perhaps in Russia, the reverse is true. In name we are classless, while in practice the class structure is subtle, ever-changing.

  The American Revolution was different from the French Revolution and the later Russian Revolution in that the revolting American colonists did not want a new kind of government; they wanted the same kind, only run by themselves. If they had been a united and cohesive polity, they might well have wanted a king—but their own king. Americans did not come by the theory of government by the common man all at once; that growth was gradual and is still going on. We want a common candidate but an uncommon office holder.

  What Americans did discover earlier than most of the world was that ability had nothing to do with birth. Of course we have to some extent overdone this, as we often do; a national leader was required to be of log-cabin background, even if he had to invent the lowliness of his own ancestry and upbringing. But here again our paradoxical tendency took charge: we had learned to distrust inherited position, property, and money, but we quickly proceeded to admire the same things if self-acquired. When we revolted against the old country and set up our own stalls, we were careful to eliminate the hated symbols of aristocracy—titles, honors, inherited prerequisites. But since every man wants admiration and perhaps some envy, we had only money and possessions to admire and envy. The rich in America of the middle period may have been cursed and disparaged, but they had chosen the one way to be noticed.

  The aristocrats our ancestors remembered and loathed invariably kept their positions and paid their expenses through landholding. The greater the aristocrat, the larger the landholding. It was natural that our early settlers tried to emulate the people they detested and perhaps envied. In open, untenanted America, apart from the royal colonial grants some men did accumulate enormous pieces of land through seizure, purchase, or chicanery. Because of the debilitating effect of some crops such as cotton, large areas were required to make the land show profit. Later, with the development of farm machinery it became possible for very few men to farm very large tracts. The only difficulty lay in increasing taxes, the cost of machinery and fertilizer, and that new thing in the world—overproduction: too much food, with the resulting drop in prices, came to haunt large farmers. The need to borrow and the advantages of corporate organizations made the huge farms into factories, owned mostly by banks or stock companies. Great holdings owned by one man or family became fewer and fewer, so that where once there were many estates as large as provinces, at the present there are very few; and the ones that do survive are almost museum pieces.

  The world dearly loves the figure of the American capitalist: the hated robber baron, Mr. Moneybags, slopping up champagne fermented from the blood of the workers; feared and revered Uncle Sam in striped coat and a great dollar-sign belly, a crude, almost bestial figure. The curtain countries, Iron and Bamboo, particularly love this figure. Sometimes the “Capitalist” carries bombs or tanks and doubles as a warmonger, the soulless maker and seller of destruction. Any inspired protest against America is bound to have this figure in effigy. In the course of the pageant he is either burned or hanged. Unfortunately he doesn’t exist anymore, and we miss him. The great robbers, fat, free-spending, vicious, top-hatted, and glittering with precious stones—the Diamond Jim Bradys, Lucky Baldwins, Leland Stanfords, with their pretty women, fast horses, and baronial mansions—were rich and proud of it, and they gloried in showing the world how rich they were. In the latter part of the last century these vital, boisterous figures were at once our curse and our ornament—and then something happened, and they disappeared. The railroad barons, the oil barons, the iron and copper barons became giants, were hated, were admired—and disappeared.

  The giants of money were usually the sons of poor men who clawed and grappled their way to great fortune, driven by memory of poverty and hardship. Quite naturally, they protected their children from the experience which had been the driving force, and since there was no government approval or backing of individual families, the second generation of great wealth as a rule went to pieces in weakness, self-indulgence, and stupidity. A few families have continued in power through money, but they are rare. Most of the descendants who have remained rich are protected by trust funds and safeguards, which amount to about the same thing as entailment did in the old country and are designed to keep the grubby little hands of the sons out of the pot of the fathers. A goodly number of our earlier self-made millionaires even entertained dynastic notions. From the banks of the Hudson River to Nob Hill in San Francisco we can still see their efforts—castellated fortress-like seats, sometimes of shingle, with arrow slits, sally ports, barbicans—which, far from holding off enemies from without, could not even defend against creeping decay from within. When the flame of the founder was gone, only a wreathy smolder remained, and, without the stern defense of the trust fund, went out altogether.

  Today there are probably more and much richer men than ever before; but far from boasting of their wealth they live almost like fugitives, secret and shy. No doubt the income tax and the ways of circumventing it have made them timid. We know about our tycoons only when they are giving something away, and their gifts and foundations are usually a means of keeping their money out of the hands of the tax collector.

  Today, instead of the old, highly visible capitalist we have the corporation—one of the strangest organisms in the present world. It may manufacture goods for sale, operate mines, manipulate money, bore oil wells and crack the product into usable components, produce steel, copper, nickel, or tungsten, operate farms, or it may purchase the products of other corporations and distribute them; but its purpose is always to make money.

  The corporation, to exist at all, must be efficient, must produce its product or perform its function for a minimum of cost and a maximum of profit. Since the most costly ingredient of any business operation is labor, the early corporations tried to keep labor costs at a minimum.

  They settled in areas where labor, because of its competition with itself, was cheap. When workingmen began to organize, to pit group action against the employing agent, the corporations fought tooth and nail against the growing organization of labor. Every expedient was used to overcome or bypass organized labor—hiring of the hopeless and the ignorant, lockouts of labor unions, even armed defense and retaliation—a kind of civil war within the business structure.

  We can all remember the warfare: company thugs against union goons; the riots, the murders, the wreckage; and particularly the loud and piercing charges, on the one hand that labor was treasonable to business, and on the other that fat, cold-hearted capitalism was exploiting the workingman and requiring enforced poverty for its purposes.

  Shares in the early corporations were held by few investors, and those usually in upper financial brackets. The shareholders were against socialism certainly—but they were much more against no dividends. The warfare against organized labor was costly, as all wars are; and furthermore, the workers willing to accept the wages and conditions required were so ignorant, inept, and inefficient that production costs went up and profits went down. Also, as Americans generally acquired more money they bought shares in the more efficient corporations, so that the whole nature of the ownership changed and broadened. Gradually, the fat cartoon figure of Capitalism with a dollar sign on its distended vest ceased to be accurate. Shareholders became increasingly a cross
-section of lively Americans. And it was early discovered that eleven men each with a hundred shares could outvote one man with a thousand. The shareholders ask one simple question: Is the corporation making money, or isn’t it?

  With all its power in the economy, its influence through the economy on states, governments, and nations, the great corporation has remained almost morbidly sensitive to criticism. A few letters critical of a product or a policy can and often do cause a nervous and fearful meeting of the board of directors and a sharp self-examination. Bad publicity, as every corporation head knows, can cause a fall-off in sales which automatically stirs up a hornets’ nest among the stockholders. Therefore these giants spend great sums on public relations.

  In America we have developed the Corporation Man. His life, his family, his future—as well as his loyalty—lie with his corporation. His training, his social life, the kind of car he drives, the clothes he and his wife wear, the neighborhood he lives in, and the kind and cost of his house and furniture are all dictated by his corporate status. His position in the pyramid of management is exactly defined by the size of his salary and bonuses. The pressures toward conformity are subtle but inexorable, for his position and his hopes for promotion to a higher status are keyed to performance of duties, activities, and even attitudes which make the corporation successful. In the areas of management, sales, and public relations, the position of the corporation man is secure only from one stockholders’ meeting to the next; a successful revolt there may sweep out whole cadres of earnest men and replace them with others.

  By reason of the simplicity of its end—making money—the corporation is much more efficient than any existing government. As my friend Ed Ricketts put it, “If General Motors or Du Pont or General Foods should form an army, no national army could last against it for a moment.” To a fairly large extent a public army’s purpose is just to stay in existence at all. We have found in the past, on entering into conflict, that the public professional army is not very well prepared. A great corporation, on the other hand, if its purpose were to win a war, would devote its total energy to that end with maximum speed and efficiency and a minimum of waste. “What public army,” Ed Ricketts said, “could stand against such versatility and singleness of purpose?”