Dogging Steinbeck: America the Mostly Beautiful, Parts 2 and 3
In 2010 I retraced the 10,000-mile route John Steinbeck took around the country in 1960 and turned into his iconic road book “Travels With Charley.”
Following Steinbeck’s cold trail in the fall of 2010 I raced alone – and doglessly -- in my Toyota RAV4 from Long Island to the top of Maine to Seattle to San Francisco to New Orleans and back to my home south of Pittsburgh.
My 2013 e-book “Dogging Steinbeck” describes the America I found along what I call the Old Steinbeck Highway and explains how I discovered that, as I like to say, “Travels With Charley” was a “literary fraud.”
(Though it had been marketed, sold and taught for 50 years as a true account, I proved that “Charley” did not deserve to be considered a work of non-fiction but was actually a highly fictionalized and dishonest account of Steinbeck’s iconic journey.)
Here are Parts 2 and 3 of Chapter 21 from my book that describes the big, empty, rich, beautiful, friendly, clean and quiet — and much less politically divisive — 2010 America I saw. Part 1 is here.
Steinbeck’s 'Soft' America
Steinbeck didn’t like a lot of things about Eisenhower America and pointed out many of them. Many of his complaints were just the personal opinions of a grumpy old rich fart. He didn’t like comic books, rock n’ roll, local radio or paperback books.
But he also didn’t like interstates, standardized motel rooms, plastic, manufactured food and other mundane or magical things that were making life safer, healthier, more convenient and more affordable for the traveling masses.
He also worried about more important issues – suburban sprawl, the polluted rivers and the rings of junked cars and rubbish he saw around cities. He railed against the depravity and hatred of segregation and racism that was practiced publicly without shame or legal consequence by millions of Americans.
And he noted that on his long road trip he had not met many “real men” of conviction or found many people with strong opinions about anything except sports. Talk radio and the new digital media would end that national shortage of opinions over the next 50 years.
Though it was ultimately cut by editors, in his first draft of “Travels With Charley,” when he was in San Francisco, Steinbeck noted that the American people he had talked to about politics weren’t specific about their likes and dislikes. They were against things like communism and were in favor of nebulous and subjective abstractions like “the American Way of Life.”
“I am interested in the American way of life,” he wrote cagily. “Is it the Way described in Harper’s Bazaar or Vogue? Is it the way of Playboy or Reader’s Digest? Is it one thing or many?” He asked if “The American Way of Life” meant the same to the West Virginia coal miner, the Tammany Hall ward heeler, the Negro … in the South or the John Bircher in Santa Barbara.”
Then he wrote, “The truth is, the American Way of Life is a mystique. To suspect it at all is sacrilege crossed with treason. I found that those who hold the Way most dear, become very uneasy when asked to explain or describe it.” That deadly critique of the mindless American flag-waver was cut from the first draft as well.
Though it seems Steinbeck was being tough on his country and his people in “Travels With Charley,” he really wasn’t. He had pulled most of his punches. In private he was extremely disappointed by the country he had found. He was “angry and demoralized,” according to Jay Parini in his “John Steinbeck, a Biography.”
Steinbeck thought Americans had become morally, physically and spiritually flabby. They were too content, too comfortable. They had too many things and wanted still more, and they were taking the great country their self-reliant and industrious ancestors had built down the road to national decline.
He spilled his true feelings in an often-quoted July 1961 letter to his editor at Viking Press, Pascal Covici, which he wrote while he was struggling to finish “Travels With Charley” and trying to sum up what he thought ailed America:
And the little book of ambulatory memoirs staggers along, takes a spurt and lags. It’s a formless, shapeless, aimless thing and it is even pointless. For this reason it may be the sharpest realism because what I see around me is aimless and pointless—ant-hill activity. Somewhere there must be design if I can only find it. I’m speaking of this completed Journey now. And outside of its geographical design and its unity of time, it’s such a haphazard thing. The mountain has labored and not even a mouse has come forth. Thinking and thinking for a word to describe decay. Not disruption, not explosion but simple rotting. It seemed to carry on with a weary inertia. No one was for anything and nearly everyone was against many things. Negro hating white. White hating negroes. Republicans hating Democrats although there is little difference. In all my travels I saw very little real poverty, I mean the grinding terrifying poorness of the Thirties. That at least was real and tangible. No, it was a sickness, a kind of wasting disease. There were wishes but no wants. And underneath it all the building energy like gasses in a corpse. When that explodes, I tremble to think what will be the result. Over and over I thought we lack the pressures that make men strong and the anguish that makes men great. The pressures are debts, the desires are for more material toys and the anguish is boredom. Through time, the nation has become a discontented land. I’ve sought for an out on this—saying it is my aging eyes seeing it, my waning energy feeling it, my warped vision that is distorting it, but it is only partly true. The thing I have described is really there. I did not create it. It’s very well for me to write jokes and anecdotes but the haunting decay is there under it. Well, there was once a man named Isaiah—and what he saw in his time was not unlike what I have seen, but he was shored up by a hard and durable prophecy that nothing could disturb. We have no prophecy now, nor any prophets.
Some paragraph.
Maybe Steinbeck was having a bad day. But those were damning and sweeping conclusions about America, particularly for someone who had seen so little of it on his trip and during the previous 20 years.
That same summer of 1961, in a letter to Adlai Stevenson filled with a great deal of geopolitical advice, Steinbeck wrote, “What I saw on my trip did not reassure me. This could be the shortest lived great nation in history. Once the accidents of geography and raw products are withdrawn or equaled, we seem to have no resources, no versatility, and worst of all – no interest.”
These pessimistic private thoughts were not new. Steinbeck held them long before he started his road trip. “The Winter of Our Discontent,” his last novel, was about American immorality as he defined it.
Steinbeck tempered his pessimism about the country before he died. In 1966, when he wrote the text for the photo book “America and Americans,” he griped about hippies, lamented the rise of pragmatic and situational morals and complained that gallantry and responsibility had been replaced by a culture of goldbricking, bribery and cheating. But he predicted that in the long run our restless energy would save us from self-destruction and America and its people will “persist and persevere.”
It turned out Steinbeck had the future of America dead wrong in 1960-1961. His fear that it was a rotting corpse and that Americans had become too soft and contented to keep their country great and strong was off by about 178 degrees.
Fifty years later, despite being stuck in a deep but temporary economic ditch, the country was far wealthier, healthier, smarter and more globally powerful and influential than gloomy Steinbeck could have imagined.
Its air, water and landscapes were far less polluted. And, most important, despite the exponential growth of the federal government’s size and scope and its meddling reach, America in 2010 was also a much freer place for most of its 310 million citizens.
Libertarians and Democrats and Republicans who seek to protect and maximize individual freedom and still believe the Constitution is a document worth upholding to the letter have good cause to worry and complain.
America’s bloated welfare/warfare/security state has diminished the civil liberties of every citizen. The federal government’s 40-year war on (some) drugs has spawned gangs that kill each other over drug turf at the same time the drug war has filled our prisons with nonviolent offenders who shouldn’t be there.
But ask women, blacks, Latinos and gays how they’re doing today. Their personal and public lives are much freer and richer in opportunity than they were in 1960, when it was illegal for unmarried women to buy birth control pills, inter-racial marriages were outlawed in more than a dozen states and just being gay was a crime.
The virulent racism and bigotry being displayed without shame for weeks on the streets of New Orleans in 1960 – which would be repeated across the South and elsewhere during the decade – is extinct in Obama America.
Racism has not disappeared. But it is no longer legally, politically, culturally, socially and morally sanctioned in an increasingly colorblind society where 86 percent of people say they approve of marriage between white and blacks compared to about 5 percent who said they did in 1960.
Steinbeck would still find plenty to moan or fret about in today’s America. But other improvements he could never have envisioned, but would heartily cheer, include the virtual end of censorship, stronger protections for the accused and the liberalization of divorce laws. I’ll bet he’d appreciate GPS and the lower income tax rates on the rich, too.
You don’t have to be a libertarian to know there’s plenty of work still to do to free up the personal and economic lives of Americans. But since 1960 the transportation, energy, communications and financial industries have been deregulated and liberated from the worst kinds of government rules that limited consumer choice, protected established businesses from competition and made everything from air travel, electricity and mortgages more expensive for the masses.
Steinbeck might not like it that unions no longer have the power they once did in the private sector, or that sex and violence and stupidity are the rocket fuel of mass culture. He’d probably rail against smart phones and Wal-Mart and Fox News and Facebook. And if he really did learn the lessons of Vietnam before he died, he’d hate the bloody foolish war making of the Bush and Obama administrations.
America’s not as free as it should be and never will be. But there’s no denying that today our society is freer and more open than ever to entrepreneurs, new forms of media, alternative lifestyles and ordinary people who want to school their own kids, medicate their own bodies or simply choose Fed Ex instead of the U.S. Post Office.
America According to New Yorkers
In 2008, as the American economy plummeted into the Great Recession and Barack Obama was riding the Hope and Change Express to the White House, Bill Barich decided to drive across America. Barich’s book about his road trip, “Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck’s America,” was inspired by a re-reading – as an adult – of “Travels With Charley.”
Barich, a California native in his late 60s, has written for the New Yorker, authored eight books and lived in Ireland for about a decade. He wanted to see if Steinbeck’s gloomy prophecy about the decline of America and his concern about the moral flabbiness of its people was finally coming true.
He didn’t retrace the Steinbeck Highway. For about six weeks he crossed the waist of America from New York City to San Francisco, roughly on U.S. Route 50, which meant he, like Steinbeck and I, saw a whiter, more rural, more Republican small-town America.
Barich thought Steinbeck’s private opinion of an America in decay was distorted because Steinbeck was depressed, in poor health and spent too much time alone on his “Travels With Charley” trip, which is a laugh I’ll address a few dozen paragraphs from now.
But Barich took most of the author’s other critiques of 1960 America more seriously. He told the New York Times he thought Steinbeck’s “perceptions were right on the money about the death of localism, the growing homogeneity of America, the trashing of the environment. He was prescient about all that.”
It’s no surprise Barich, an expatriated liberal writer exploring the conservative heart of Red State America, agreed with Steinbeck’s sociopolitical and cultural complaints. For 50 years Barich, Steinbeck and their fellow travelers have set sail into the hinterlands from New York City with the same cargo of elitist clichés about what’s wrong with America.
Not to stereotype their views too unfairly, but folks like Barich instinctively believe a caricature of Flyover America. They believe the country west of the Hudson and east of the Hollywood sign is overpopulated, over-sprawled, over-malled, devoid of culture, polluted, ruined by national chains and strangled with congested freeways.
Barich made no effort to hide his cultural and political biases. He decried “the pernicious malls and ugly subdivisions” he said were a permanent, unfixable part of America. He also agreed with Steinbeck on some negative points, including that Americans were “frequently lax, soft, and querulous, and they sometimes capitulated to a childish sense of entitlement.”
As for Barich’s politics, they were as predictable as a New York Times editorial. He made the obligatory complaint about America’s “divisive (i.e., conservative) talk-show pundits.” He repeated the insulting but common fable that whenever hinterland conservatives criticize Barack Obama or Big Government in Washington they are parroting one of Rush Limbaugh’s “latest proclamations that consciously stoke the fear and paranoia of Americans.” He also mocked Sarah Palin and the white Middle Americans who came to worship her at a Republican rally in Wilmington, Ohio. …
Like all stereotypes, the Hollywood/Manhattan stereotype of America and its Flyover People is based on reality. But its main ingredient – besides its premise of moral, cultural and intellectual superiority – is exaggeration. Take over-population. Sure, big cities are densely populated. That’s kind of what great, dynamic, productive urban centers are supposed to be. That’s how they generate economic wealth and new ideas.
But anyone who drives 50 miles in any direction in an empty state like Maine or North Dakota – or even in north-central Ohio or Upstate New York – can see America’s problem is not overpopulation. More often it’s under-population. Cities like Butte and Buffalo and Gary have been virtually abandoned. Huge hunks of America on both sides of the Mississippi have never been settled.
From Calais in Maine to Pelahatchie on old U.S. 80 in the gut of Mississippi, I passed down the main streets of comatose small towns whose mayors would have been thrilled to have to deal with the problems of population growth and sprawl. In a dozen states, I cruised two- and four-lane highways so desolate I could have picnicked on them.
If anyone thinks that rural Minnesota, northwestern Montana, the Oregon Coast, the Texas Panhandle or New Orleans’s Upper Ninth Ward have been homogenized, taken over by chains or destroyed by suburban sprawl and too much commercial development, it’s because they haven’t been there.
It’s a 50-year-old myth that America has been conquered and homogenized by national chains. It wasn’t close to being true in 1960, when Steinbeck was worrying about corner groceries being wiped out by A&P, the largest restaurant chain in the country was Howard Johnson’s and Holiday Inn of America was three years old.
Today restaurant and motel chains cling to interstate exits, where the heavy traffic is, and they clone themselves in the upscale suburbs. But try to find a Bob Evans, a Holiday Inn Express or a burger joint with a familiar name in a small town or in the sticks. You better like McDonald’s or Subway, because in most of the Zip Codes I was in those were your only choices – if you were lucky.
The America I traveled was unchained from sea to sea. I had no problem eating breakfast, sleeping or shopping for road snacks at mom & pop establishments in every state. The motels along the Oregon and Maine coasts are virtually all independents that have been there for decades.
Here’s a post-trip stat I saw from the American Hotel & Lodging Association that didn’t surprise me a bit: Of the country’s 52,215 motels and hotels with 15 units or more, 22,200 are independent – i.e., not affiliated with a chain. You can go the length of old Route 66 and never sleep or eat in a chain unless you choose to. Same for U.S. Route 101 in Oregon and Northern California.
Steinbeck, like many others have since, lamented the loss of regional customs. (I don’t think he meant the local “customs” of the Jim Crow South or the marital mores of the Jerry Lee Lewis clan.) Pockets of regional culture are not as concentrated and isolated as they once were, which is a blessing for the median national IQ and the English language, but they’re not extinct and there are many new pockets.
I didn’t go looking for Native Americans, Amish, Iraqis in Detroit, Peruvians in northern New Jersey or the French-Canadians who have colonized the top edge of Maine. But I had no trouble spotting local flavor in Wisconsin’s dairy lands, in fishing towns along Oregon’s coast, in the redwood-marijuana belt of Northern California, in San Francisco’s Chinatown and the cattle country of Texas.
As for the demise of local dialects, it too is exaggerated by those who find such culturally backward things quaint and worth preserving. In Maine, Texas and Louisiana I met white Anglo-Saxon Americans whose accents were so heavy I wasn’t always sure they were speaking English.
In the last 10 years, I’ve had the same experience in the Mississippi Delta, southern West Virginia and the hollers of eastern Kentucky, where I met a proud hillbilly who’d be debunked as a cruel 1930s stereotype if he appeared in a movie. (He kept his ex-wife in a converted chicken coop and had two sons in prison, one for murder.)
Pittsburgh’s steelmaking jobs may have disappeared, but its distinct working-class accent hasn’t. Just listen to a C-SPAN call-in show for a random hour and you’ll hear distinctive American accents that half a century of TV has done nothing to soften.
Again, not to generalize, but the New York-Hollywood elites believe in a cultural caricature. They think the average Flyover Person lives in a double-wide or a Plasticville suburb, eats only at McDonald’s, votes only Republican, shops only at Wal-Mart and the Dollar Store, hates anyone not whiter than they are, speaks in tongues on Sunday and worships pickup trucks, guns and NASCAR the rest of the week.
Those stereotypes are alive and well in Flyover Country. But though I held radical beliefs about government, immigration and drugs that could have gotten me lynched in many places, I never felt like I was in a country I didn’t like or didn’t belong in. Maybe I didn’t go to enough sports bars, churches and political rallies.
Yes, Americans were materialistic as hell. They could afford to be, thanks to the incredible democratization of wealth and luxury that’s occurred in the last 50 years. Hundreds of millions of Americans were enjoying the kind of lifestyle that only 1-Per-Centers like Steinbeck could afford in 1960.
Steinbeck – and ex-pats like Barich living like lords in Ireland – have a lot of nerve complaining about the greedy materialism of America’s commoners when they themselves already have every material goodie they need or want.
The hundreds of ordinary Americans I bumped into were real, not made up and not composites. They were unique, hard-working people who were living longer, better, richer lives than Steinbeck could have dreamed.
Unlike Steinbeck, who met one unlikable, sour, grammatically challenged person after another (or said he did), I met a procession of happy, friendly saints. I’m not a touchy-feely guy. And I know that as an old white guy by myself I was a threat to no one. But I was treated so well, I fell in love with every other American I met. For five minutes, anyway.
“Dogging Steinbeck” is for sale at an Amazon site near you.