Fracture

by Philipp Blom

  Among the vice presidents of the Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals responsible for publishing the journal were some of the most influential British intellectuals of their day, including feminist and pacifist Vera Brittain, Labour activist and publisher Leonard Woolf, Brave New World author Aldous Huxley and his biologist and philosopher brother Julian, mathematician and social critic Bertrand Russell, and science fiction writer H. G. Wells. The anonymously authored Handbook of Marxism, published by Gollancz in 1935, sold thirty-three thousand copies before the year was out. Other popular titles were Walter Brierley’s novel The Means-Test Man, which narrated a week in the life of an unemployed miner in Derbyshire, and George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England, a critical analysis of the Liberal Party’s failure to respond to the new social and economic challenges of the twentieth century.

  From his comfortable tax exile in France, the comic genius Wodehouse found his own way of reflecting the revolutionary rumblings at home. In Thank You, Jeeves, Bertie Wooster is once again in a “spot of bother”: the irreplaceable butler has given notice, unable to abide his employer’s cacophonous love affair with a banjolele, according to Bertie a fashionable cross between banjo and ukulele. Without Jeeves, he finds, he is the helpless victim of every daft idea that pops into his head. More disquieting, the butler he has hired as a replacement is not to be trusted: “A melancholy blighter, with a long, thin, pimple-studded face and deep, brooding eyes. . . . Outwardly he was all respectfulness, but inwardly you could see that he was a man who was musing on the coming Social Revolution and looked on Bertram as a tyrant and an oppressor. . . . He said nothing, merely looking at me as if he were measuring me for my lamp-post.”18

  The Blackpoolization of the World

  AS J. B. PRIESTLEY HAD NOTED, not everyone was feeling the immediate effects of the economic slump. For the middle classes in southern England especially, the situation was actually improving, with the newer and more consumer-oriented sectors of the economy showing clear signs of growth. Over the decade of the 1930s, three million new houses were built in the suburbs of London and the Home Counties; the number of cars in private ownership doubled; telephones, radios, vacuum cleaners, and other household appliances were becoming a common sight; department stores and early supermarkets, such as Woolworths and Marks & Spencer, opened many new branches.

  But despite this regional prosperity, the Wodehouse universe was vanishing, a victim of the fundamental change in social attitudes. Despite the unemployment, even in the south, despite real deprivation and hardship, working people resisted entering domestic service. The potential Jeeveses of the 1930s preferred to eat kippers and dry bread washed down with tea rather than attend to the whims of those whom their parents’ generation would have regarded as their “betters.” Positions such as “gentleman’s gentleman,” footman, maid, or cook had employed millions in the past, making possible an easy domestic and social life for all who had enough to spare. A society without servants had seemed unthinkable.

  There were still people in service in the 1930s, of course, but their numbers were falling steadily. A study found that in London in 1931, there were more women in domestic service than in any other industry, but numbers had dropped by a third since 1900, and wherever they could women were now choosing work that gave them more personal freedom; most of those asked, in fact, said that they would prefer almost anything else to being in service. The same was true in other, more deprived areas. A Ministry of Labour survey in the northwest of England found that of 380 unemployed single women under thirty, prime candidates for a life below stairs in some well-off household, only four were prepared to go into service. In the Lancashire town of Preston, of 1,248 women interviewed, only eleven would consider it.

  Something in British society had changed—subtly, but irrevocably. At least in some parts of the country, an increasingly modernized, industrialized economy was offering other, better employment opportunities for working-class people. The life of a domestic servant was rigidly circumscribed. Bad pay, hard work, long hours, and little privacy were the rule; domestic staff were expected to be single, with maids having to put up with the iron rule of “no gentlemen callers.” A factory job or a position as a sales assistant or clerk paid not much better, but the hours were regular and people were free to do as they pleased during their leisure hours. Increasingly, factory and clerical workers also received a week’s unpaid holiday every year.

  There was another change in attitude, too, one that the war itself had provoked. In a strongly class-bound society such as Britain’s, those who had been in service had often felt a considerable degree of pride in serving and being associated with a great family or a prominent gentleman or lady. Here the experience of the war had caused a profound shift in emphasis. While the idea of a “lost generation” still haunted the imagination of the privileged, working-class attitudes had been profoundly changed by the perceived incompetence and remoteness of the upper-class officers. Whether or not it was a fair reflection of the strategies and decisions of Britain’s High Command, the image of the working-class Tommy “lions” led by stupid and stubborn upper-class “donkeys” had persisted in the popular imagination. The democratization resulting from mass production methods and life in an industrial economy went hand in hand with, and also encouraged, a fading respect for those on top of the pile.

  This is very much the attitude Jeeves harbors toward his master, Bertram Wooster, the quintessential upper-class twit. Jeeves is of course too professional ever to breathe even the slightest hint of this to his employer, but he knows that though Bertie holds the purse strings and the social connections, there is no question of who is really the superior man, or of who would be lost without whom. Wodehouse was using a convention as old as comedy itself, that of the clever servant and his numbskull master, seen in plays from Aristophanes to Molière, but this time, in the real world, the game really appeared to be up. Jeeves might remain in his position for reasons of his own, but there could be no doubt that a man of his abilities would have other opportunities in the future.

  On his journey through England, J. B. Priestly described this same change by sketching the three “countries” he had encountered:

  There was, at first, Old England, the country of the cathedrals and minsters and manor houses and inns, of parson and squire. . . . It has long ceased to earn its own living. . . . Then, I decided, there is the nineteenth-century England, the industrial England of coal, iron, steel, cotton, wool, railways; of thousands of rows of little houses all alike. . . . To the more fortunate people it was not a bad England at all, very solid and comfortable.

  And on top of these two, or next to them, was another country entirely:

  The third England belonged far more to the age itself than to this particular island. America, I supposed, was its real birthplace. This is the England of arterial and bypass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars. . . . It is a large-scale, mass-production job. You could almost accept Woolworths as its symbol. Its cheapness is both its strength and its weakness. It is its strength because being cheap it is accessible. . . . In this England, for the first time in history, Jack and Jill are nearly as good as their masters and mistresses. . . . Jack, like his master, is rapidly transported to some place of rather mechanical amusement. Jill beautifies herself exactly as her mistress does. It is an England, at last, without privilege. Years and years ago the democratic and enterprising Blackpool, by declaring that you were all as good as one another so long as you had the necessary sixpence, began all this. Modern England is rapidly Blackpooling itself.19

  The seaside town of Blackpool was a popular tourist resort for the working-class people of northern England and Scotland; their sixpences bought them entertainment, cheap goods, and a new kind of identity free from deference to “the toffs.” Though these factory workers and shop girls could hardly be said
to be forming a new elite, they were carving out spaces where social hierarchy was determined by the number of sixpences in your pocket—in other words, by how much money you had. Birth and breeding, the great protectors and promoters of “sound” but dim chaps like Bertie Wooster, had begun their final decline into irrelevance. As Priestley had seen, the Americanization of the ancient English hierarchies was under way.

  Elsewhere, too, new elites were taking over from the old, more swiftly and in some cases more violently. In the Soviet Union and Italy, and to a lesser extent in other dictatorial states such as Hungary, societies were being forcibly remade in a new mode, not necessarily more egalitarian, but certainly not based on ancestry or upbringing. The Russian aristocracy had long since fled, swelling the ranks of impoverished journalists in Paris and taxi drivers in New York. Now the bourgeoisie, always small, was in retreat, with coveted positions reserved for those of impeccable working-class descent. In Germany, the Nazis were the new arbiters of social standing; the grand old Bildungsbürgertum or upper bourgeoisie, which had driven the country’s rise all through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, had now been pushed aside, and in the universities, in business, in the arts, and in other positions of public prominence, party loyalty was the only thing that counted.

  The new situation brought opportunities to many who would once have been excluded from any possibility of advancement, and they naturally took advantage of it, too often ignoring—or even enjoying—the concomitant loss of status for others less politically compliant or less favored by race or birth. Ironically, in America, “Americanization” was hardly progressing at all. So severe was the Depression in the United States that the old elites, albeit of money rather than birth, not only maintained but even solidified their positions of power. They were white, of course, and few yet thought to question this. The Depression was driving America’s black people ever further down the economic (and thence social) scale. For the most part, they were less likely than ever to be able to accumulate the necessary sixpences.

  ·1935·

  Route 66

  Our recent transition from rain-soaked eastern Kansas with its green pastures, luxuriant foliage, abundance of flowers, and promise of a generous harvest, to the dust-covered desolation of No Man’s Land was a difficult change to crowd into one short day’s travel. . . . Wearing our shade hats, with handkerchiefs tied over our faces and Vaseline in our nostrils, we have been trying to rescue our home from the accumulations of wind-blown dust which penetrates wherever air can go. It is an almost hopeless task, for there is rarely a day when at some time the dust clouds do not roll over.

  Caroline Henderson in a letter to a friend, June 30, 1935

  ON SUNDAY, APRIL 14, PEOPLE IN AMERICA’S CORN BELT DREW A SIGH of relief. There had been dust storms recently, terrible, choking, malicious blows that covered everything in sight with a gritty residue, but this morning was clear and bright and it was a relief to see the sun once more. Then, as the morning wore on, the breeze died down and the light changed to a glowering bleak glare. Birds began to twitter nervously.

  The cloud appeared on the horizon, like a black band as far as the eye could see. It grew quickly, preceded by thousands of screaming birds. The storm that now descended upon the farming villages and towns was like nothing anyone had ever seen or felt before. When it finally swooped down on houses and their inhabitants, it was a raven-hued wall: furious, a hundred feet high, total, roaring, blinding blackness. Black Sunday, as this catastrophic storm came to be called, rained three hundred tons of dust in one afternoon and left the formerly fertile prairies looking like a baked desert of sand dunes and certain death.

  It was the hardest day in a succession of natural catastrophes, a final blow to the hopes of hundreds of thousands of farmers who had toiled for decades to build better lives in what had once been described as a paradise, with soil as thick and rich as chocolate dropping from the blades of the plows. Farmers had been encouraged to come here and to make the land their own, and hundreds of thousands had wagered their futures on the Great Plains. In 1916, as the United States had become involved in the war, there was an army to feed, and the stock market was fueling speculation in grain.

  Farmers in the fertile lands of Kansas, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico responded by working harder and producing more to feed the hungry market. As affordable tractors and combine harvesters appeared, farmers invested heavily in the new miracle machines, taking out loans to finance the equipment’s purchase price, which was far higher than their annual profits. But it was worth it. With a team of horses, a farmer could plow three acres a day. With a tractor, he could return home much less tired and satisfied, having done a daily average of fifty acres. A combine harvester could bring in the wheat from five hundred acres within a fortnight, delivering neat sacks of grain in a row next to the huge swaths it cut into the field. But the farmers soon found that there were unexpected costs attached. Whereas earlier the expense for harvesting one acre had been nothing but the labor and the horses’ feed, it stood now at four dollars for gasoline and supplies. As long as grain prices remained high, farmers could make a living. After the war, however, after several good harvests had filled the grain silos of the speculators, prices followed the laws of the market and began to decline. The farmers responded by breaking new soil to increase production. In parts of Kansas, the surface in agricultural use jumped from two million acres in 1925 to three million acres five years later; in other regions the fields doubled in size. The virgin soil was rich. More good harvests followed.

  Most farmers worked around the clock in shifts, and while the machines cast a metallic glint in the brilliant sun by day, at night tractors and combines crept across the plains like giant glowworms. The earth would be made to produce ever bigger yields. The weather was kind. Abundant rain and sunshine translated into record harvests, and every day thousands more acres were brought under cultivation.

  Then, in 1931, the rains stopped coming. It was nothing out of the ordinary at first, then puzzling, then concerning. A poor harvest was followed by another, smaller one. The sun withered the crops in the fields, turning them whitish gray and rustling in the wind long before they were ripe. The unforgiving heat parched and cracked the soil, and as field after field of wheat and corn turned arid, the topsoil began to dance in the air in the circular dust storms that had always visited these plains.

  Like a black wall: A dust storm approaches a settlement.

  The wind drew unusual amounts of dust into the air this time, though, and farmers soon understood that this was a result of their land cultivation. Not only were millions of acres under cultivation, but the pull of demand and the development of new agricultural machines also meant they had been cultivated in a different way. Traditional horse-drawn plows had dug deep into the earth, turning large, heavy sods in their entirety, like a blanket on a bed. The modern “sodbusters” were faster and considerably more efficient. Each tractor could pull several rows of disks that cut into the soil superficially, breaking the top layer into finer crumbs. There was less resistance that way and a huge gain in speed, and the depth of the broken earth was still sufficient for sowing. Now, as the crops were failing, the chopped-up topsoil offered no resistance to the uplift of the winds.

  As temperatures rose higher with every passing year, another kind of storm arrived. Black blizzards carried huge clouds of dust over hundreds of miles. In 1933 thirty-eight such storms were recorded, the next year fewer. Then they returned in force. By 1936 there would be five dust storms per month, carrying with them the precious fertile soil. A storm in May 1934 lifted up 350 million tons of dust from the fields of Montana and Wyoming and pressed them east, into the Dakotas. By the evening, six thousand tons of dust were showering down on Chicago, supported by winds of 110 miles an hour. The storms moved on to Boston, New York, Washington, and Atlanta, even covering ships almost three hundred miles out from the East Coast.

  The storms devoured everything in their path, and they wer
e dangerous. Children wandering out into the blast and car drivers who had lost the road in clouds of dust so thick they could not see their hands in front of their face were found days later, suffocated. Cattle left outside would suffer the same fate. Cows would grind their teeth to the gums in order to extract some blades of grass from the desert before dropping dead. “In a rising sandstorm cattle quickly become blinded,” wrote photographer Margaret Bourke-White, one of a growing number of press people sent to cover the catastrophe. “They run around in circles until they fall and breathe so much dust that they die. Autopsies show their lungs caked with the dust and mud.”1

  Wild animals were also affected. Fish choked to death in the remaining puddles of water under a layer of acrid dust; dead birds, field mice, and rabbits were strewn over the plains, the survivors so disoriented that they could simply be picked up without resistance. In 1934, the government began to destroy thousands of head of cattle, giving grim labor and a few dollars to destitute farmers as they set about butchering their investments in the future.

  Evangelists and self-appointed prophets proclaimed the end of the world and the second coming. At home and in church, people began to debate whether this was the end of days, as prophesied. With grave faces they quoted Deuteronomy 28:24: “The Lord shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed.” Ada Watkins, a Kansas farmer, had drawn a hopeful conclusion: “I guess the good Lord is going to lead us out into the promised Land again,” she said.2

  By 1935, few were so hopeful. For the farmers, the storms were now dictating every aspect of their lives. They windproofed their houses as well as they could, but after every blow they had to shovel the dust out by the bucketload. Their food was saturated with dust, and their water left grit between their teeth. Most were reduced to beans and cornbread for lunch, for dinner, and for the next breakfast. At night, farmer Avis Carlson settled into a dreary routine: “A trip for water to rinse the grit from the lips. And then back to bed with washcloths over our noses. We try to lie still, because every turn stirs the dust on the blankets. After a while, if we are good sleepers, we forget.”3