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COFFEEHOUSE CULTURE -- Issue 2

THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD -- PART TWO

It had all been a dream. An American dream. The land of opportunity, the land of the free, the land where Mr. No-One could become Mr. Someone. And, like most dreams, it had burst to reveal a reality that no one wished to experience. In a blink of an eye it had all turned to sand. And nowhere was that more literally the case than in the Great Dust Bowl that extended over southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and northeastern New Mexico. As Wall Street crashed in a rain of falling bodies, in the Dust Bowl the winds blew and blew.
...The Great Depression that gripped the United States in the 1930s was and is one of the defining moments in modern world history. In a stroke it changed American society so radically that its repercussions are still being felt. In an immigrant society that defined itself by nationality, suddenly there were new social groupings, based on economics. In the cities unemployment was an epidemic as trailing queues of ragged, poverty stricken victims lined up for handouts of just about anything. Soup kitchens boomed but that was about all that did. In the ruins of America’s industrial and commercial infrastructure, little stirred. But, while the government fretted and fumed and tried to reverse the trends, it did so in the sure knowledge that America’s great wealth was based not on the commodity and stock markets but on the rolling farmlands that stretched endlessly away into the horizon.
...But in the Dust Bowl the winds blew and blew. It was just a bit of bad timing. But, what bad timing.
...They called it America’s Bread Basket. Originally it had been cattle country but following the First World War millions of acres had been ploughed and sown with wheat. It was, perhaps, strange to create any kind of basket in an area that received less than 20 inches (.5 m) of rain a year but with ‘modern’ intensive cultiva-tion methods, the horticulturalists told the sceptical farmers, it was clearly sustainable. As the teens made it into the 20s, the land was farmed and farmed intensively and fortunes were made on the showering crops of golden grains. No one, however, was looking to the future.
...When, in the early 1930s, the region experienced a severe drought lasting several years, the results were devastating. The once rich soil had become thin and granular and, without the water-retaining roots of the native grasses to anchor it, unstable. When the heavy spring winds hit the dessicated landscape, they simply carried it away with them. The ‘black blizzards’ that blotted out the sun for days at a time, that carried the fields away, that piled up the fine soil in drifts, could kill. Lost in a swirling sandstorm, vision was impossible, breathing was a labour and survival was in the hands of God — but, at least, you usually got buried for free.
...As the winds stripped the soil from the face of the earth and piled it up against empty barns and outhouses, the population cowered indoors eeking out a meagre existence from a dwindling backlog of prosperity supplies and hoping for a change for the better. But they hoped in vain. With each arid year that passed existence became more of a trial. Thus was the scene set for one of the great migrations of modern America.
...In the early to mid 1930s, thousands of families left the area. In normal economic conditions, many would have headed into the cities seeking work in the growing industrial centres that were developing. But these were not normal times. And the options were limited. At the height of the Great Depression, there were few areas in the great US of A that had not fallen victim to economic collapse.
...One exception that offered the inducement of constant sun, arable land and immediate work was the fruit growing area to the west of the Rocky Mountains. With hankerchiefs over their faces, they piled all their belongings onto flatback trucks, land and immediate work was the crammed their families into the cabs or draped them over the furniture and headed west. The great migration, captured in all its desperate poverty and insecurity in Steinbeck’s masterpiece, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, changed the face of America. For out of the migration came the labour movement, the assent of trade union power and the States’ first encounter with what would become a prevailing obsession for the next 70 years — communism.
...Although the Monterey peach farms were a common goal of many of those who had been disenfranchised by the great winds down south or by the economic crash in the cities, not all had the wherewithall to get there fast. For many, it was a case of ‘hard travelling’ as they walked or ‘rode the rails’, jumping onto moving trains out of sight of the ever vigilant conductors, to cling precariously to the undercarriage of the wagons, from hobo camp to hobo camp on a trail that meandered through a ‘green and pleasant land’ on its way to the Californian sunshine.
...It was, however, and this is about the best that can be said of it, a colourful lifestyle. With their belongings tied in hankerchiefs hanging from sticks over their shoulders, their picturesque poverty displayed in patched and ragged clothing, their romantic starvation showing in deeply etched, characterful faces and deep dark eyes, they defined a national trag-edy that had the makings of a myth. Linked by their home-lessness, their unemployment, their mobility and their desolation, the hobos became an idealised social group that would provide grist for the creative mill for many a decade to come.
...Myths are, however, just that. Merely facades behind which reality lurks. And reality in this case was a frightful monster, almost too terrible to behold. Life on the open road was, at best, a precarious existence. But it could also be a brutal experience. Pushed to the edge of desperation, desperate people tend to do desperate things. And the road offered succour not only to those rendered destitute and desperate by the big winds down south but also to those on the run from the law, to thieves and scoundrels, to mountebanks and carpet-baggers with their glib tongues and cunning plans, to the feckless and the social misfits and to the crazies. In the camps that started to spring up along the main routes followed by the transient hobos, violence was a frequent occurrence.
...Relying for transport on the railway system that criss-crossed the vast country, the hobos also fell victim to the railway guards, conductors and brakemen who would probe the underside of the cars with long sticks to dislodge any early hangers on. And, if they didn’t get away fast, would often beat them viciously, a deterrent that rarely worked. On the more prosperous lines there were billy club swinging ‘Bulls,’ company police, who were not above swooping through the odd migrant camp and beating everyone therein senseless.
...The hobos’ life style was defined both in myth and in reality by the rail system and the great locomotives that hauled freight along the endless steel tracks that covered America. The locomotive is a powerful and evocative symbol. For many of those who had previously been tied to the land, the lonesome sound of a train whistle in the distance was, they thought, the closest they would ever get to going anywhere. But they could, at least, dream of faraway places.
...It would not be long before the locomotive would assume a whole new iconographic position in the equation. ‘Riding the rails,’ was much more than merely riding the freight trains across the empty spaces of middle America. The whole life style of the hobo was hung around the railway infrastructure. The journeys ofthe freight trains started from a goods yard and ended in a goods yard and that is where the hobos tended to hang out. That was where the camps were, even when -- as in California -- they did not need to be. And a freight wagon, covered or uncovered (there was always tarpaulin) made for sleeping quarters that were almost luxurious to those with no home.
...And already, in the blues of those original hobos, the Negroes, and, later, in the folk music of the white radicals, the locomotive would be given all due credit. Indeed, it would become, ultimately, an almost universally accepted symbol of the times and the milieu. Even the names of those original privately-owned lines live on -- the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe, the Union Pacific, the Baltimore and Ohio and the famed Rock Island Line, a section of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. And the trains themselves -- the Sunshine Special, the Panama Limited, the Cannonball, the Dixie Flyer and the St. Louis Belle.
...But if the lifestyle might seem a colourful one, that is only because we cannot handle the brutal reality. Sure it was exciting trying to outwit ‘the Man,’ avoiding the clubs and the fists, But it was a dangerous life. Making that break from cover, that dash towards the accelerating locomotive as it headed around a bend creating the perfect blindspot; the jump, grappling with steel and wood to find something to hold onto and a foothold; clinging to the sides, back, roofs and undercarriages of the freight cars. All that was fraught with dangers. And as for hanging on there, hour after hour, in all weathers . . . . The tales were legion of those who had missed their footing, lost their grip or had simply fallen into an exhausted sleep and been mangled beneath the great steel wheels. Colourful but dangerous. But, hey, it was not a life style choice they had made. The life style had been imposed on them -- most of them, anyway -- and few would have picked the poverty and physical danger option if the choice had been up to them.
...For some of them, a few, the freedoms of the open road, ofhaving no Bossman breathing down their necks, of the unknown adventure waiting around the next corner, of the new places and people outweighed the dangers and the insecurity. But the majority were California bound.
...They were however, a disillusioned crowd. For most had lost everything they had had, all of their prosperity, all of their security, all of their relationships, all of their dreams and aspirations, had simply been blown away. This was not the way the Great American Dream was supposed to happen. This .nightmare of transience, unemployment, deprevation, starvation, of cold winds and colder rain, of violence and brutality, it would not do at all. But in California there would be work and regular food and the opportunity to reassemble the family and make a home.
...But the reality was not quite like that. Reality rarely is. Steinbeck’s masterpiece is called ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ There is no mention within its pages of anyone having a jolly good time but the ‘wrath’ in the title might have given that away. And if there was a lot of ‘wrath’ around, it is not surprising. Life as a migrant worker was no peach. Even if you could get to pick them you could not eat them. But getting to pick them was hard enough. It was an employers’ market and exploitation was extreme. Living in shanty towns not much different from the hobo camps on the road, just a stones’ throw from the railroad tracks that had brought them here, in the same poverty, the same destitution, little seemed to have changed.
...There was work here; the orchards and fruit farms of the rich green Californian valleyswere about the only sector within the American economy that was booming. There were just far too many people for the available jobs. It was an employers’ market and blatant exploitation was the order of the day. Soon even those who had jobs could barely afford to put bread on the table as wages were cut and cut again in the true knowledge that there was always someone who was more desperate and would work for less money.
...An employers’ market it might have been but the workers had one thing on their side -- numbers.
...They took what action they could, picketing the farms demanding a living wage while all the time defending the jobs they were no longer doing against the blacklegs whose desperation was such that they would do the work for the offered pittance. There was violence at the gates as worker attacked worker. The farm owners tried bussing the blacklegs through the picket lines and there was more violence. Then they tried bringing in the heavies -- more violence. And still the blockade went on.
...The confrontation may not have been the first, the longest or the bloodiest -- in fact, the first organised workers’ organisations had appeared in the 1860s -- but it was certainly the most influential. How that came to be is a story in itself. Like much of this tale it is a story of action, reaction, over-reaction and hysteria.
...As they confronted the Boss-man and came away bruised and beaten, it became clear that organisation was needed. And some jolly songs to unite them all in a sub-marseillese hysteria of popular revolution. What, after all, is a revolution without some rousing anthems?
...Enter Woody Guthrie. He had been blowin’ down that long dusty road since 1927. And he was damned if he was going to see his hobo brethren ‘treated thisa way.’