Great Depression

Review: This Tender Land

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This Tender Land, William Kent Krueger. New York: Atria, 2019.

Summary: Four orphans fleeing the Lincoln Indian Training School due to a crime of self-defense embark on a journey to and on the Mississippi to find a relative they hope will provide a home and shelter.

Albert O’Banion and his younger brother Odie were orphans sent by family to live, by special arrangement, at the Lincoln Indian Training School. For the most part it was a brutal existence under the cruel headmistress, Thelma Brickman, known as “the Black Witch” and her grifter husband, and under the brutal strappings (and worse abuse) from Vincent DiMarco, who took care of the grounds. There were glimpses of kindness from Herman Volz, who secretly ran a still with mechanically clever Albert, and from a teacher, Cora Frost. They were also close to Mose, one of the Indian students, with whom they communicated by sign because his tongue had been cut out as a child

Cora Frost had the boys do some work for her. Her daughter, Emma, who suffered “fits,” took to them and Mrs. Frost was on the point of adopting them when a tornado hit, killing her beneath the wreckage, sparing Emma, who instead joined the boys under “the Black Witch.” At this point Odie is convinced that God is the shepherd who eats his sheep one by one, the Tornado God who takes away those you love. Things come to head and lead to the narrative that fills the rest of the book. Odie discovers the truth about the disappearence of an Indian boy. It has to do with DiMarco, who in turn sets out to kill Odie, pushing him over a cliff. A projection saves him and he grabs the strap hanging at DiMarco’s waist, which had inflicted so much hurt, pulling DiMarco over the edge, to his death.

Now a murderer, he must flee. His brother Albert, Mose, and Emma join him and they become “the Four Vagabonds” on their own journey down the Mississippi, reprising Huck Finn. A canoe left at the Frost place conveys them down the Gilead, then the Minnesota River to the Mississippi. Their goal, as improbable as it is, would be to make it to St. Louis, where Albert and Odie have an Aunt Julia with a big home and heart, hoping she will take them all in.

Traveling the river, they elude the manhunt on land to find the “kidnappers” of Emma, who is traveling willingly with them. For some strange reason, the Brickmans are focused on her. The remainder of the story traces their journeys on the river and their encounters both with the worst and the best of human beings during the summer of 1932, deep in the Depression. They pass through Hoovervilles and shanty towns. They take up with a traveling revival, whose Sister Eve discerns the special gift latent in Emma’s fits. The others discover more of themselves as well, from the site of a terrible slaughter of Sioux that sends Mose on a vision quest, to Albert, who realizes his mechanical gifts, and to Odie, who discovers what he really wants, which connects to his full name, Odysseus.

In the backdrop of all of this is the vast landscape of Middle America, heartbreakingly beautiful at times. It is the place of the forced subjugation of Native Peoples, represented by Indian schools who sought “to kill the Indian to save the man within.” It’s the place of contrasts between conspicuous wealth and bereft families traveling across the land hoping for a new start, often finding hopes dashed.

Amid all this are the four, bound together to protect one another and especially Emma. Despite the tensions between Albert and Odie, the mechanic and the storyteller, Albert is committed to look out for his younger brother. There are touching scenes of nights when it was safe when Odie played harmonica and told stories under the vast starscape, encouraging them all.

William Kent Krueger has given us not only a Huck Finn story but also an odyssey, leaving us reading breathlessly to discover whether they will find the home they are looking for or will be captured by the wicked Brickmans. For Odie, it is a spiritual odyssey as well as we wonder whether he will bitterly believe to the last only in the Tornado God or find some measure of grace. This finely written work was the first of Kreuger’s I’ve read. It won’t be the last.

Review: The Forgotten Man

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The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes. New York: MJF Books, 2008.

Summary: An account of the Depression years, focusing on why the Depression lasted so long, and the impact it had on so many different kinds of “forgotten men” and women.

Many accounts of the Depression have focused on the magnetic leadership of Franklin Roosevelt, creating work programs, declaring bank holidays, and seeking to give hope to the “forgotten man.” Amity Shlaes also considers various forgotten people, but asks the searching question of why the Depression lasted so long.

We are introduced to an impressive array of characters, many who recur as central figures throughout the account. There is the brain trust around Roosevelt, the “best and brightest” of his generation, who conceived of a variety of social and reform programs, mostly ineffectual: Harold Ickes, Raymond Moley, and Rex Tugwell. We meet the entrepreneurs and business people who find themselves on the wrong side of a government crusade against business, from Andrew Mellon to electrification pioneers Samuel Insull and Wendell Willkie, to the Schechter Brothers, kosher poultry wholesalers prosecuted for violating regulations of the National Recovery Act, and ultimately vindicated in court.

There are a variety of colorful figures, from Father Divine, a cult leader teaching Black self-sufficiency, John Llewellyn Lewis, a strong labor leader, David Lilienthal who headed up the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federalized effort to bring electric power to the South and “Bill” Wilson, the Wall Street alcoholic who founds Alcoholics Anonymous and in the 1930’s writes AA’s Big Book.

The book is basically an argument that the reason the Depression lasted so long was that the financial tinkering, taxation, and New Deal programs and over-reaching attacks on business “forgot” the people who made the country prosper. It recognizes the value of public works efforts like the WPA, the foundations of which were laid in the Hoover administration resulting in important infrastructure development that both put money into and facilitated the economy.

The book raises important questions about the role of government in economic downturns, arguing a classic conservative line that an activist, interventionist approach may prolong an economic downturn. Yet it also reflects the pressure a government faces from those suffering the most to “do something,” to appear to have not forgotten the little guy.

I personally found the work a tough read because it tried to follow so many threads, so many figures in a chronological account that at time the narrative felt like a lot of disparate stories and events strung together rather than the cohesive and compelling accounts the best historians render.

In the end, a global war lifted the country out of the Depression. Shlaes leaves us wondering if it needed take that long.

Review: Cannery Row

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Cannery Row

Cannery Row, John Steinbeck. New York: Penguin Books, 1992 (originally published 1945).

Summary: Steinbeck’s Depression-era narrative of the residents of Cannery Row, eking out an existence on society’s margins, and forming an unlikely community in the process.

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”

Steinbeck had me at this first sentence and drew me in with his ensemble of oddball characters–Henri the painter who has been building a boat for seven years; Lee Chong, the grocer whose emporium has a little bit of everything from every when; Doc, the marine biologist who collects marine life for research, and functions as a kind of doctor for the bodies and souls on the Row; Dora, the madam of the Bear Flag Restaurant where sailors and others could get far more than a sandwich from her girls; Mr. and Mrs. Malloy, who turn an abandoned boiler into their home; and Mack and the boys of the Palace Flophouse, whose exploits drive the narrative of this book.

For the most part, this is a group scraping by during the Depression. Mack and his boys might be described as “discouraged workers” taking odd jobs or even working a stretch at the canneries–just enough to get by and buy some cheap whiskey (“Old Tennis Shoe”) from Lee Chong. Eventually the boys get the idea to throw a big party for Doc, a sad man who listens to music as he reads at night unless he has a lady friend in, but who cares for delinquents, girls from Dora’s who get “in trouble,” and anyone else in need. The party ends up a comedy of errors. There is an elaborate tale of borrowing Lee Chong’s decrepit Model T, nearly getting run off an old captain’s property until they heal the captain’s dog, drink up his whiskey with him, and clean out a pond full of frogs they plan to sell to Doc to raise money for the party. The night of the party, Doc is recovering from finding a young girl’s body and doesn’t arrive home until the morning, to find his lab trashed, his record albums broken, and the remains of the party everywhere.

A pall settles over Mack, and the boys, indeed over the whole Row. Doc lashes out and busts up Mack’s mouth. But the boys are undeterred, and plan another party, at Doc’s place, of course, and all the residents get involved. How it all ends, I will leave for you to discover.

Behind the madcap exploits of Mack and the boys and their interactions with other denizens of Cannery Row, one gets a sense of what it was like for those on the margins to eke out a life during the Depression, how hard and sometimes tragic it was. This strange set of characters somehow help each other survive. Doc, the best off and most educated, shares the hopelessness of this group, finding a beautiful young girl dead in the water and finding himself unable to help a young delinquent he’d befriended. Like the others, he anodizes the pain in alcohol when books, music, young women, and his marine expeditions are not enough.

In the end, what seems to get them all through are the relationships, the bonds they form with each other in this crazy assemblage of humanity. There is no thought here of the possibility of a deeper Relationship or a Higher Purpose that can make sense of life. Nevertheless, this group of people faced with the challenges of their lives,  decides they must celebrate a birthday, and in doing so that there is some meaning, some worth to their existence, because you never care about or celebrate something without worth.