America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (6 page)

The Depression was no financial shock to me. I didn't have any money to lose, but in common with millions I did dislike hunger and cold. I had two assets. My father owned a tiny three-room cottage in Pacific Grove in California, and he let me live in it without rent. That was the first safety. Pacific Grove is on the sea. That was the second. People in inland cities or in the closed and shuttered industrial cemeteries had greater problems than I. Given the sea a man must be very stupid to starve. That great reservoir of food is always available. I took a large part of my protein food from the ocean. Firewood to keep warm floated on the beach daily, needing only handsaw and ax. A small garden of black soil came with the cottage. In northern California you can raise vegetables of some kind all year long. I never peeled a potato without planting the skins. Kale, lettuce, chard, turnips, carrots and onions rotated in the little garden. In the tide pools of the bay, mussels were available and crabs and abalones and that shiny kelp called sea lettuce. With a line and pole, blue cod, rock cod, perch, sea trout, sculpin could be caught.

I must drop the “I” for “we” now, for there was a fairly large group of us poor kids, all living alike. We pooled our troubles, our money when we had some, our inventiveness, and our pleasures. I remember it as a warm and friendly time. Only illness frightened us. You have to have money to be sick—or did then. And dentistry also was out of the question, with the result that my teeth went badly to pieces. Without dough you couldn't have a tooth filled.

It seems odd now to say that we rarely had a job. There just weren't any jobs. One girl of our group had a job in the Woman's Exchange. She wasn't paid, but the cakes that had passed their salable prime she got to take home and of course she shared so that we were rarely without dry but delicious cakes. Being without a job, I went on writing—books, essays, short stories. Regularly they went out and just as regularly came back. Even if they had been good, they would have come back because publishers were hardest hit of all. When people are broke, the first things they give up are books. I couldn't even afford postage on the manuscripts. My agents, McIntosh and Otis, paid it, although they couldn't sell my work. Needless to say, they are still my agents, and most of the work written at that time has since been published.

Given the sea and the gardens, we did pretty well with a minimum of theft. We didn't have to steal much. Farmers and orchardists in the nearby countryside couldn't sell their crops. They gave us all the fruit and truck we could carry home. We used to go on walking trips carrying our gunny sacks. If we had a dollar, we could buy a live sheep, for two dollars a pig, but we had to slaughter them and carry them home on our backs, or camp beside them and eat them there. We even did that.

Keeping clean was a problem because soap cost money. For a time we washed our laundry with a soap made of pork fat, wood ashes and salt. It worked, but it took a lot of sunning to get the smell out of the sheets.

For entertainment we had the public library, endless talk, long walks, any number of games. We played music, sang and made love. Enormous invention went into our pleasures. Anything at all was an excuse for a party: all holidays, birthdays called for celebration. When we felt the need to celebrate and the calendar was blank, we simply proclaimed a Jacks-Are-Wild Day.

Now and then there came a bit of pure magic. One of us would get a small job, or a relative might go insane and enclose money in a letter—two dollars, and once or twice, God help me, five. Then word would fly through the neighborhood. Desperate need would be taken care of first, but after that we felt desperate need for a party. Since our clothing was increasingly ratty, it was usually a costume party. The girls wanted to look pretty, and they didn't have the clothes for it. A costume party made all manner of drapes and curtains and tablecloths available.

Hamburger was three pounds for a quarter. One third of that weight was water. I don't know how the chain stores got so much water in the meat. Of course it cooked out, but only a fool would throw the juice away. Browned flour added to it and we had delicious gravy, particularly with fresh-gathered mushrooms or the big black ones we had gathered and dried. The girls shampooed their hair with soap root, an onion-shaped plant that grew wild; it works too. We rarely had whisky or gin. That would have ruined the budget. There was local wine—and pretty good too; at least it didn't kill us. It was twenty cents a gallon—take your own jug. Sometimes we made it ourselves with grapes the vineyardists let us pick. And there you had a party. Often we made them quite formal, a kind of travesty on the kind of party we thought the rich gave. A wind-up phonograph furnished the music and the records were so worn down that it could be called Lo-Fi, but it was loud.

I remember one great meat loaf carried in shoulder high like a medieval boar's head at a feast. It was garnished with strips of crisp bacon cut from an advertisement in The Saturday Evening Post. One day in a pile of rubbish behind Holman's store I found a papier-mâché roast turkey, the kind they put in window displays around Thanksgiving. I took it home and repaired it and gave it a new coat of paint. We used it often, served on a platter surrounded with dandelions. Under the hollow turkey was a pile of hamburgers.

It wasn't all fun and parties. When my Airedale got sick, the veterinary said she could be cured and it would cost twenty-five dollars. We just couldn't raise it, and Tillie took about two weeks to die. If people sitting up with her and holding her head could have saved her, she would have got well. Things like that made us feel angry and helpless. But mostly we made the best of what we had because despondency, not prosperity, was just around the corner. We were more afraid of that than anything. That's why we played so hard.

It's not easy to go on writing constantly with little hope that anything will come of it. But I do remember it as a time of warmth and mutual caring. If one of us got hurt or ill or in trouble, the others rallied with what they had. Everyone shared bad fortune as well as good.

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 only 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).