Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley': Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley'

by Bill Steigerwald

  There’s something else obvious about America that’s never pointed out by the media: The states and counties and cities and villages and crossroads are filled with smart, good Americans who can take pretty good care of themselves. They prove it every day. People in Baraboo and Stonington and Amarillo know what’s best for them. They’ll adjust to whatever changes that come.

  Maybe their towns will gradually disappear like Alice or dry up and blow away like Bagdad or suffer a slow de-industrial death like Butte. Maybe their towns will stay frozen in time, like Saltese or Williams, or reinvent themselves as lively tourist traps like Monterey or Livingston. Maybe they’ll strike it rich on oil and gas and boom like North Dakota or get the next Subaru plant. Whatever happens in their local worlds, they’ll figure it out locally. Usually without any media attention or “help” from Washington, D.C.

  As I drove the Steinbeck Highway, it was obvious many important changes had occurred along it since 1960. Industrial Age powerhouses like Rochester, Buffalo and Gary had seen their founding industries and the hordes of humans they employed swept away by technological change and the destructive hurricane of global capitalism. Small towns like Calais, Maine, had lost people and jobs, and vice versa.

  New Orleans had shrunk by half, and not just because of Katrina. The metro areas of Seattle, San Francisco and Albuquerque had exploded and prospered in the digital age. The populations of the West Coast and the Sunbelt had expanded. The South had shed its shameful system of apartheid and its overt racism, as well as much of its deep-rooted poverty and ignorance. The Northeast had bled people, manufacturing industries and national political power.

  Change is inevitable, unpredictable, un-stoppable, disruptive, often cruel to individuals and towns in the short run but steadfastly beneficial to American society in the long run. Nevertheless, it was clear that a great deal of what I saw out my window on the Steinbeck Highway had hardly changed at all since Steinbeck and Charley raced by.

  He saw more farmland and fewer forests than I did, especially in the East. But in many places almost nothing was newly built. Many farms and crossroads and small towns and churches were frozen in the same place and time they were eons ago, particularly in the East and Midwest.

  In Maine the busy fishing village of Stonington was as picturesque as the day Steinbeck left it. He’d recognize the Corn Belt and Redwood Country and the buildings if not the people of the Upper Ninth Ward. And at 70 mph whole states – North Dakota and Montana – would look the same to him except for the cell towers and the McDonald’s and Pilot signs staked out at the interstate exits.

  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 shortage of opinions over the next 50 years.

  Though it was ultimately cut by editors, in his first draft, 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 d
efined 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 whites 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 to electricity, stocks 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. “The faces tilted up to her were as vacant as those of stoned kids at a rock concert, absent of any emotion except surrender,” Barich wrote. He was not exaggerating about the adoring crowd. But he was being unfair and unbalanced.

  I happened to attend a Palin rally in 2008 – her first one – as a journalist. The day after her selection as McCain’s VP, on a blisteringly hot August Saturday, she appeared with him at a minor league baseball field 20 minutes from my house south of Pittsburgh. It was like a rock concert – for 10,000 desperately hopeful middle-aged Republicans.

  Hanging on a cyclone fence taking photos, I got close enough to Palin to see the dark ring of sweat on her collar as she shook hands and hugged babies. The crowd was totally nuts for her, especially the women. No one cared about John McCain or what Palin said in her stump speech, which was word-for-word what she had said on TV the day before. They had clearly come to cheer and hope – and yes, adore.

  Barich didn’t attend a Barack Obama campaign event on his trip. But every little dig he made about the Palin rally and the Republican crowd’s embarrassing enthusiasm for their unprepared heroine also could have been said about the hopers &
dreamers packing a typical Obama rally. Not that Barich would have ever considered making fun of Obama’s idolaters.

  Though politically predictable, Barich wasn’t a total Steinbeck yes man. He pointed out that the author missed some positives about America – for example, the vast wildernesses that had been saved and “the potential rewards of new technologies.” But Barich concurred with many of Steinbeck’s complaints about Americans not being able to handle their hard-earned glut of affluence and comfort.

  Barich characterized his fellow countrymen as “friendly, well-intentioned, good humored, kind, and generous, but also loud, aggressive, clumsy, gullible, and poorly educated.” Naturally, he said he preferred Europe’s older quieter, gentler, more sophisticated – i.e., more socialist – societies, where “pernicious malls” and “divisive” talk shows aren’t so free to disturb the order of things.

  That’s fine what Barich thought. He paid his commentator’s dues. He drove the hard miles. So he got to throw his conventional liberal wisdom and biases around in his book. Like Steinbeck’s book and this one, his account of what he saw and thought was purely subjective. It was filtered by his previous experiences, worldview, values and politics and was subject to the randomness and serendipity of the road. All obvious stuff, but it’s rarely noted and always worth repeating in our ruthlessly subjective universe. It’s something Steinbeck pointed out as well in “Travels With Charley.”