Shared Pain
At the BBC Michael Goldfarb wonders Where are today’s Steinbecks?
He brings up the film, The Grapes of Wrath, as an example of the types of things that were coming out in the media during the Great Depression, and wonders why there doesn’t seem to be the same level and type of output today.
First off, as good as the film is, it is only half of Steinbeck’s novel. Every other chapter in the novel was reporting on the conditions in the country as the Joads were struggling in the main story. Steinbeck provided hard numbers to go along with the conditions of the fictional characters. He was a newspaper reporter most of his life, and he knew how to ask questions and report on the world around him. He was tied to reality as he wrote his fiction. He was writing what we now refer to as a docu-drama.
But the biggest difference is that very few people were isolated from the Great Depression. It was a long time before the programs of FDR took effect, as compared to the almost instant passage of the TARP bill to “save the financial sector”. Many of the “wealthy” were suddenly poor as result of the Depression, but they have been shielded in the GOPression. The people who would authorized a movie like The Grapes of Wrath, don’t understand how bad things really are, while Darryl Zanuck and John Ford did.
The pain is not being shared.
4 comments
Yes, people outside America are often shocked to hear that the poor here in America own their own motorcars, by and large. But that is not an option here, because we have no (zero) mass transit in 99% of America. Most of America’s poor, even most of America’s homeless, work, and to get to work you need transportation. In many cases (see homeless) the automobile also doubles as their home, since unlike in third world countries you can’t just set up shop on some vacant piece of ground and toss up a tin shed, thanks to that whole “rule of law” thing that, in its munificent glory, prohibits the rich as well as the poor from living in tin sheds on public lands.
The Joads lived on a farm. An automobile is cheaper than a horse — it needs little water, no food, and compared to a horse (which requires daily maintenance) it is relatively maintenance free. I am sure the notion that farmers had automobiles would have shocked Soviets in their collective farms, where the collective had a single truck to take the crops to market and haul supplies back, but in the wide open spaces of the American west, there really wasn’t an option. Either you had a car or truck, or you died. Pretty much how it was.
– Badtux the Mobility Penguin
Actually hundreds of skilled unemployed American workers moved to the Soviet Union to find work, and they helped to build up Soviet manufacturing.
Russians have never been travelers as a culture, because they have been basically agricultural until relatively recently. In those places where a car would actually be able to provide transportation, essentially the major cities, public transportation is readily available.
I never bothered to buy a car when I lived in Europe, and didn’t miss it. I was more than annoyed when I had to buy one upon my return to the US. They are expensive to own.
Indeed, cars are expensive to own. Less expensive to own than a horse, though. A horse needs daily maintenance, a car needs maintenance every 7500 miles or 12 months. American farmers embraced automation as soon as it became economically feasible to do so because even mules were expensive to maintain compared to even the clunkiest old Ford 8N tractor. And for getting crops to market and getting farm supplies to the farm, even the creakiest Model T pickup truck was less expensive to maintain than a mule-drawn wagon and the mules to pull it.
So for farmers, they’d almost certainly have at least a Model T pickup truck by the time 1929 came around, unless they lived close enough to a railhead that they could get their crops to market in a mule-drawn wagon in a timely manner, or were complete subsistence farmers who didn’t participate at all in the market economy other than perhaps one money crop per year to buy farm implements and other tools and supplies they couldn’t make or grow themselves. Then the rains stopped, and the crops blew away, and they had to go or starve…
Oh, yes, horses were a luxury after trucks and tractors became available. My first driving lessons were on a diesel tractor that belonged to the farmer that lived next door to us in Germany when I was in middle school. Starting it was a matter of hand pumping to increase the internal pressure to the point the engine would start.
Other equipment was powered by jacking up the back of the tractor and attaching a drive pulley to the outside of the right rear wheel and then putting a flat belt over it. It was dangerous as hell [no belt guards of any kind], but it worked, and had done for decades.
The biggest farmer in the village had a Percheron, but Max [the horse] never seemed to be used for anything useful, other than pulling a carriage in local parades.
If you are looking for sources of pollution, Max certainly excelled at that.
My paternal grandfather and a great uncle each kept a brace of horses long after they bought tractors, but their use was extremely limited, usually to the winter to pull cars out of ditches.