Bill Murray Wants to Play

Bill Murray on a piano
Ham on wry: Parodying holiday schmaltz in last year’s A Very Murray Christmas. The Kennedy Center will honor Murray with its Mark Twain Prize for American Humor on October 23.
Courtesy Netflix

You are standing on a corner in New York City, waiting to cross the street. Lost in thought, you aren’t paying much attention to the world around you. Suddenly, a man puts his hands over your eyes and says, “Guess who?”

Nobody’s played this game with you since elementary school. It would be alarming, except that the voice is familiar. You can’t quite place the speaker, but you’re pretty sure he’s a friend.

You whip around and see, much to your surprise … international film star Bill Murray. He is taller than you expected, and his shirt is wrinkled. You sputter, groping for words, unable to process the unlikelihood of this situation. Bill grins, leans in close, and quietly says, “No one will ever believe you.”

Variations on this story began to circulate widely around 2010. Sometimes it happened in New York, sometimes in Austin, Texas, or Charleston, South Carolina. Sometimes Bill wasn’t blindfolding people with his fingers — instead, he was stealing a french fry off somebody’s plate or grabbing a handful of popcorn from a stranger at a movie theater. But the punch line was always the same, underscoring that this encounter was an eruption of surrealism on an otherwise ordinary day, meant to be enjoyed for a few flickering moments: “No one will ever believe you.”

For years, it was unclear whether this was something that Bill Murray actually did, as part of a personal campaign to make the world a better, odder place, or whether it was an urban legend that had grown large enough to have its own zip code. Asked point blank about it in a magazine interview, Bill artfully managed not to unravel the mystery. “I’ve heard about that from a lot of people,” he said. “A lot of people. I don’t know what to say. There’s probably a really appropriate thing to say. Something exactly and just perfectly right.” Bill considered the rhetorical tightrope he was walking, and then he smiled: “But, by God, it sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Just so crazy and unlikely and unusual?”

Back to School

The neighborhood kids are back in school, and productivity is in the air. The little boy next door, Charlie, who knocks on our door and asks for a popsicle, has been red-shirted. He was due to start kindergarten this fall, but his parents held him back, which pleases me. He’s good company for one so young, conversant on a variety of topics, plus has the good sense to know when it’s time to go home, a quality lacking in some adults I know. Like most blessings, Charlie was a surprise. His parents believed their child-bearing years were past; then along came Charlie, to their amazement and our delight. We wanted another child in our lives, and there’s no kid more enjoyable than one you can send home at suppertime.

It’s quiet with the neighborhood children back in school. My wife is with them, manning the library, toting the barge of literacy and healing the twin diseases of sloth and ignorance. My dalliance with formal education ended 24 years ago, but I still feel a delicious rush of freedom each September, the way a convict must feel the day he is escorted to the prison gate and released. I am a fan of knowledge, but have always pulled against the traces of mandatory learning, preferring the self-directed variety.

There is a grimness to education these days, with legislators daily checking its pulse, scanning for tumors, and examining its entrails. I could not bear to be a teacher, having to earn the approval of our nation’s dimmest species — the common politician. Mrs. Conley, my fourth-grade teacher, would not have tolerated this vulgar intrusion into the sacred chapel of her classroom, and I look for our educators to organize any day now, throw off their shackles, and send the politicians packing.

I watch the children stand at the bus stop up the hill from our home. I hear the bus before I see it, slowing to make the corner at our house, its tires humping over the curb, into our yard, then back over the hump and into the street, up the hill past three houses before stopping at the curb. The children step onto the bus with a lightness I never felt as a child on my way to school. I saw a documentary once of coal miners entering a black and joyless hole to begin their day’s labor, and it reminded me of every day I spent at school.

The children step onto the bus with a lightness I never felt as a child on my way to school.

Charlie’s mother works as a nurse twice a week, and Charlie spends those days with his 87-year-old great-grandmother, who sets aside time each day for “school.” She teaches him the alphabet and a dab of math and then sits him on her lap and reads a story. I don’t know what he does after that. He might rot his mind on television for all I know, but I do know the word school has a pleasant association for him, and he can’t wait to go.

My granddaughter is not yet two, but I’ve already told my son and daughter-in-law, both of whom work, that she can ride the bus to our house after school. She will have just been with my wife in the library, and then the baton will be passed to me.

We’ll start with milk and cookies and then chew on her day, her reporting the triumphs and tragedies, me listening¸ giving grandfatherly nods in all the right places. We’ll lace up our boots and go for a hike in Mrs. Blanton’s woods across the road from our house, making our way to the creek, watching for deer, keeping an eye peeled for the bald eagle that has made its home a few miles up creek. I’ve seen it three times now, working the creek in search of supper. In the deep pools, we’ll watch the waterbugs dance across the surface. We’ll skip rocks, throwing sidearm — three, four, five skips — and then head home past the Helbigs’ pasture, stopping to watch the horses chomping the grass down to dirt.

There are all sorts of things one must learn, only some of which are taught in school.

May/June 2016 Limerick Laughs Winner and Runners-up

Boy laying in the grass with his dog

The boy really never was sicker,
’Cause Grampa was not one to bicker.
When he begged for a puff:
“Take 10 since you’re tough!
And here, taste my hundred-proof liquor!”

Congratulations to Rebekah Hoeft of Redford, Michigan! For her outstanding limerick, she wins $25 and our gratitude for this funny and entertaining poem describing Harold Anderson’s Sick of Smoking (above). If you’d like to enter the Limerick Laughs Contest for our next issue of The Saturday Evening Post, submit your limerick through our online entry form.

Rebekah’s limerick wasn’t the only one we liked. In nor particular order, here are some of our other favorite contest entries:

A lit pipe, a boy, and his pup
Were out in “the bush,” hiding up.
Boy took a deep toke
Of that tobacco smoke
And fell down as his dinner came up.
—William Fountain, Carlsbad, California

This young lad with an early desire
To try out Granddad’s burley ‘n’ briar
Took only one puff
And deemed it enough
To cause him to surely expire!
—Clarice Piantedosi, Attleboro, Massachusetts

“Little Boy Blue,” just thirteen,
Part man and part boy — in between —
Thought just for a joke
He’d puff on pipe smoke,
And now he is “Little Boy Green!”
—Cheryl Burney, Royal Oak Michigan

Doctors have charged me a fee,
Saying naps will revitalize me.
It’s advice that seems sound,
So henceforth I’ll be found
Every afternoon — prone to agree.
—Paul Richards, Peoria, Illinois

‘What happened to my buddy Luke?’
Thought trusty ol’ pal, Marmaduke.
‘I want to get close,
But something smells gross.
Not the smoke — my pal reeks of puke.’
—Edward Perley, Downingtown, Pennsylvania

After consulting his dog “Lucky Charm,”
He surmised, ‘what the heck could it harm?’
The laddie got ripe
After puffing his pipe,
And he tripped without leaving the farm.
—C.T. Carney, Knoxville, Tennessee

Oh, what I would give to redo
My last couple moments or two?
For sure no more smoking,
And I am not joking,
Because down here, I don’t like the view.
—Norma Wilt, Cincinnati, Ohio

Here lies a naughty young snipe
Who decided to swipe daddy’s pipe.
Off to smoke it he went;
Now he doth repent,
And the tears from his cheeks he doth wipe.
—Brandi King, Riverdale, Michigan

I hadn’t tried smoking as yet.
Some puffs would be great — I would bet!
But then things spun around,
And I fell on the ground!
So next time — an e-cigarette!
—Brian Federico, Clyde, New York

Storm-chasing on Vancouver Island

From Vancouver, we ferry to Vancouver Island on Canada’s Pacific coast and then drive west on the Pacific Rim Highway, which bisects the island on a winding two-lane road walled by trees on both sides. It’s drizzling, clouds and deep fog nest on the treetops, and a mist drifts eerily across the road, hovering over the glassy panes of still ponds and filling in the open space between mountain passes. Every now and then, a waterfall bursts from the stone-walled sides of tall, sheer hills.

Soon, we are far enough beyond civilization that there are no stores of any kind — the last one we see is out of everything but chocolate bars and crackers — and the radio dissolves into static but for one station that gives a running weather forecast. Tropical storm warnings with gale-force winds at 48 knots, the report says in monotone. Continued rain and storms, with hurricane-force winds expected on the north coast.

“Yes!” I say. “We’re going to get it just right!”

Toni, my wife, looks doubtful, still not 100 percent sold on this excursion. She supposes that maybe there is a reason ours is the only car we’ve seen on the road in the last half-hour or so, and the last ones we saw were headed in the opposite direction.

“I’m telling you,” I say. “It’s going to be great!”

image
Watch your step:At the Lennard Island Lighthouse near Tofino, a sign marked with skull and crossbones warns tourists not to get too close to the water. (Shutterstock)

Between October and early March, 10 to 15 fierce tempests a month gather and roll from across the Pacific, unimpeded by any landmass until they crash on the shores here. Sailors know the coast as the “Graveyard of the Pacific,” and chronicles of disasters and survivor stories fill volumes.

When we arrive in Tofino, the town on the coast, I feel reassured: There is no threat of sunshine in sight.

“Oh, a storm is coming all right,” one of the porters promises as we pull into the Wickaninnish Inn, a lodge built into a rocky promontory, whose floor-to-ceiling windows are tempered to withstand 100 mph gusts so guests can look into the heart of the storm without flinching. “It’s a little early for check-in. It’s a nice time to take a walk on the beach.”

“What about the storm?” I ask.

“Oh, we have at least half an hour yet.”

Down on the beach, people stroll in yellow rain slickers, and dogs chase balls and Frisbees. The sea is churning. The sky looks six shades of white and gray, and I can feel pressure in my ears. Surfers in their wet suits look like black bobs on the surface of the water.

We get back inside the hotel ahead of the storm. Rain pelts the windows and taps the roof, strong and steady, and then builds into a real torrent, billions of little beads dropping from the sky. The water’s surface whips into a creamy brown foam, and enormous swells heave and then roll in long seams into waves that explode on the boulders, sending bursts of spume a hundred feet into the air. The wind cuts the crest of the waves like a scythe and slings foam and water. Across from the beach are tiny islands with huge sitka spruce trees so strong that the wind can’t bend them. Everything begins to look like an impressionist painting up close. The susurrations of the water are amplified by a rumbling, a sound of thunder that comes from the sea itself, which we can hear even from within the cozy safety of the lodge, thanks to a pipe that carries the sound in from outside.

Toni says, “This is amazing.”

Once, Tofino was even more remote. The area’s first inhabitants were a First Nations people, the Nuu-chah-nulth. Later came fishermen and loggers, and in the 1960s, Henry David Thoreau disciples and other retreatists discovered the place. In 1970, the Canadian government established the Pacific Rim National Park, a 200-square-mile preserve, and then finished paving a road, Highway 4 (aka the Pacific Rim Highway), which made Tofino considerably more accessible. The early tourists were mostly campers, fishers, and RV adventurers — people who liked their holidays rustic. Today, the 1,875 residents receive about a million visitors a year, though most of them come in season for the water sports and whale watching, not for the storms. In November, the area has a quiet and pleasant off-season feeling, with the summer tourist shops closed and other places keeping irregular hours.

When the Wickaninnish Inn opened in 1996, its ­cedar-sided building, along with furnishings from recycled old-growth fir, western red cedar, and driftwood, and natural stone tile floors covered by wood sisal carpets, all let the 75-room inn fit the setting. But “the Wick,” as it’s called, was intended as an experience for people who take their rustic neat, without the rugged. Let’s call them (or us, as the case is) the Pampered Traveler — people who appreciate a good double-soaking tub, heated floors, private ocean-facing balconies, in-room fireplaces, and a four-star, full-service spa. An elegant restaurant is perched just beyond the reach of a seething surf channel that’s illuminated at night, to keep you close to the austere experience even as you sip some luscious British Columbia white wine.

Construction was no mean feat. Each massive post of the restaurant is mounted on a steel saddle connected to a concrete post that is anchored deep into the surrounding bedrock. Pairs of 5-foot-wide panes knit by narrow mullions give guests a 260-degree view of awe-inspiring weather in awesome digs.

The Wick inspired similar ventures, among them Long Beach Lodge, Pacific Sands Beach Resort, and Clayoquot Wilderness Resort. They have their critics, who see the luxury trend as antithetical to the roots, if not the ethos, of the place.

For people who live for this, there’s nothing like a good thrashing from 80 mph winds and 4 inches of rain in an hour. “You know you’re alive,” one resident said of the storms. “You feel the wind in your face, taste the salt on your lips.”

image
A humpback puts on a show: One million visitors come to Tofino each year for watersports and whale watching. (Shutterstock)

Somewhat paradoxically, it’s also an intoxicatingly serene experience, a soothing kind of spectator sport. At night, the storm lingers with a firm wind, and when we open the sliding door on the balcony, only a faintly briny breeze comes in, so we let the fireplace burn, keep the door open, and sleep to the tunes of the surf.

The next morning, it’s teeming again. We’ve planned an interpretive walk with a nature guide on the Wild Pacific Trail that winds along the oceanfront. It is almost redundant, I imagine, to add that it’s a rain-or-shine appointment.

It’s like watching fireworks. With each explosion, you hope the next one will be bigger, brighter, and more sustained.

By the time we meet our guide, Bill McIntyre, a slash of pink fills a gap between billowing white clouds. “We have blue sky!” he shouts. “The winds have changed direction.” A biologist who was the chief naturalist to the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve for 25 years, he points out eagles’ nests, explains the science behind the weather, and tells shipwreck stories. Then the crisis passes. The wind returns. A good drenching downpour ensues, which we watch from within the protected cover of the coastal rain forest. Below, the water heaves with awesome force. It makes our guide giddy.

image
All wet: The constant drip, drip, drip of water pierces the silence at the rain forest in Pacific Rim National Park. (Courtesy Wickaninnish Inn)

“Whoo-eee!” he cries out as a wave rolls into a boulder with a powerful explosion. Then another, and another. “Look at that! Look, look, look at that one! Pow!”

It’s like watching fireworks. With each explosion, you hope the next one will be bigger, brighter, and more sustained. We loop around to a lighthouse, where a skull-and-crossbones sign warns people not to go beyond, and there stands some lunatic with a camera and a death wish on the boulders with waves crashing at his feet. Bill calls to him to suggest that he might want to back up a little. “Oh, I have a lot of experience,” he calls back. “I’m all right.”

“Idiot,” Bill says to us. “One wave will wash away all that experience.” So we stand for a little while with morbid curiosity, though nothing hideously entertaining follows. Then, with almost violent suddenness, the storm passes and the sky turns blue, as if all the rain rinsed the white out. And when the wind stops, the forest makes a lot of dripping sounds.

When it’s time to go, we refill the tank and get a bag of nuts from a convenience store for the four-hour drive back across the reserve en route to Victoria, the island’s only real city. The shining sun is a shimmering reminder of how lucky we were to experience two storms.

Later, after we come home, a friend says she also was in Tofino once during storm season. “It’s a magnificent place,” she says. “But we had no luck at all. The whole time there was barely a cloud in the sky.”

Granddad’s Ballgame

When my Granddad was just a boy, to hear him tell it, there were only three things he ever wanted to do in his life. One was to get the girl who lived on the farm catty-corner to take a shine to him. Another was to see the world, or at least some part of the world outside Indiana. The third was to make a ballplayer out of himself.

Now by the time he left school, truth be told, he hadn’t made a whole lot of progress. The neighbor girl, Katie Lee, had taken to a chaste courtship with an older man, though Granddad reckoned that arrangement would prove temporary, on account of the wife everyone knew the man had back in town. The farthest Granddad had yet ventured was down to Bean Blossom for a couple of FFA get-togethers, which showed him so little of the world he deemed it statistically insignificant.

Baseball, though, that was going right nicely. He was no bona fide professional, but he could swing a bat as well as any of the boys on his local team, and played the infield a fair bit better than that. The way he figured, a baseball career could give him a leg up on his other two goals.

His own daddy felt otherwise, and used to tell him that the world needed ditch diggers too, and that there weren’t anything wrong with that honest profession. Granddad didn’t have much choice but to listen while under that roof, but once the consumption took his parents in the spring of ’41, they didn’t have much say in the matter, and the last ditch Granddad dug was to bury his folks on the family plot out back of the farmhouse.

Now in those days, to hear Granddad tell it, the only way to get a tryout with a real ball club was to get your reputation known. Even bona fide professionals didn’t make all that much money back then, not like it is these days. Baseball was more like a good summer job, but you still had to make your wages in the offseason. Men came home and pumped gas, worked the farm. Pick the right day, you could buy a soda from a fella who spent the summer in the big leagues. The team bosses were making their money, but …

Sorry, where was I? So Granddad was no dummy. He knew he had the talent to stick, but every town for miles had a half-dozen players as good or almost there.

Lucky for him, that winter Japan sent a mess of planes out over Pearl Harbor, and the country reacted right quick. Men his age from all over were finding themselves sent off to fight, but Granddad was 4F on account of a fallen arch in his right foot. The country reckoned he was better used getting paid not to grow corn on the family plot, so as to keep prices from cratering, giving him plenty of time to try to practice his swing. He made a point of playing on every team that would give him a fair shake, switching teams when he had to so he could play every day, just so he might catch the eye of traveling scouts fixing to replace all the ballplayers called up to active duty. He did a lot of talking, too, spreading a few tall tales among the other players, hoping something might be memorable enough to stick.

Before he could consider himself a real ballplayer, he felt like he needed a real ballplayer nickname. To Granddad, there was something romantic in the notion that a man could play one game without footwear and be known as “Shoeless Joe” for generations to come. He thought names like “Pie” Traynor or “Hippo” Vaughn were memorable enough, but he had a tiny bit of spare tire about his belly and didn’t want anything that might draw questions about his figure. He liked the ring of something like Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown, but felt a nickname that literal required a degree of sacrifice to which he couldn’t quite cotton.

He told my Daddy years later that he would have liked something along the lines of old “Vinegar Bend” Mizell, if he’d been around then, until Granddad learned its origin was nothing more exciting than the name of an Alabama town near where Wilmer Mizell came into the world. Granddad hailed from the less colorfully monikered locality of Franklin, which was his Christian name already and seemed rather redundant.

Pardon me, I’m digressing rather a bit.

Anyhow, Granddad rightly subscribed to the notion that a man can’t well give himself a nickname, but he saw no reason why a man couldn’t try to get one from others. So he tried his hand at leading his teammates in the direction of something suitable, trying to earn one with, what’s the word, affectations. No matter how well he played, his teammates never suggested “One Sock” Wilson, or “Sleeveless Frank” Wilson, and his attempt to earn the “Eye Patch” Wilson moniker earned him nothing but a welt from an inside fastball he didn’t see coming.

All through the summer of ’42, Granddad hit like one of them metronomes, steady as they come. Teams come through town on barnstorming tours, and teams gone home talking about the shortstop from down in Franklin County. Not much power, but the man could get on base and range like a jackrabbit, though he was developing a bit of a reputation as a colorful character on account of his affectations.

Now as Granddad always told it, the first weekend in August, the whole county had itself a big tournament to show off the local boys for a mess of big league scouts who were trying to fill up their minor league farm teams with some young players, on account of how many regular players were off playing on Uncle Sam’s team. Mostly the whole county turned out too, and Granddad had never played ball in front of so many folks. He spied that Katie Lee was there with her daddy instead of her beau, tipped his cap to her, and winked as he sprinted out to the field, but he lost her when the park kept on filling.

They didn’t play the national anthem at ballgames in those days, so the crowd never really stood still while they was waiting for the game to start. By the time it did, there was so many curious folks, they had to line up around the edge of the field. Granddad’s squad even paid the players a little taste of the gate, on account of the bigger crowd, which in his eyes counted as making him a bona fide professional for a change.

Good thing he crossed that off his list, he used to say, as once the game against the boys from Brookville got underway, Granddad wasn’t having himself much luck. Whether it was the sight of the neighbor girl, or knowing all them scouts were there, or the flashbulbs from the local news reporters, he couldn’t focus himself. He wasn’t alone neither; the umpire lost track of the count Granddad’s first time up, but it just let him badly miss at four pitches instead of three. Next time up, he tried to pull back his swing too late and sent the ball just a few feet straight up into the air and straight back down again into the catcher’s mitt.

The other players on his team fared a bit better, so Granddad looked all the worse by comparison, but the team was winning. Granddad liked to win as much as anybody, but he was no dummy, and he knew the rest of the boys looking good when he didn’t wasn’t going to be much use to him. Their pitcher, Lefty McCullough, was striking out so many Brookvillers that Granddad hadn’t even got a chance to make a play at short.

Come the ninth inning, the fellas from Franklin was up by just one run, and McCullough’s arm was starting to tire. He hit one batter, then gave up a roper that put men at the corners with two out, and the biggest farmboy in Brookville at the plate, swinging the biggest bat most folks in the county had ever seen.

That boy hit the ball hard but low, what Granddad used to call a wormburner, a situation shouldn’t have given him much trouble. Wouldn’t you know it, the ball found a pebble on its way to see Granddad and hopped up like a grasshopper. He had to stretch to his left to corral it, and it spun him halfway round before he could make the throw to first off his back foot.

Now, any man watching would have called it a bad throw, seeing as it sailed so wide off first that old Tommy Bennett could have grown eight feet high and still not been able to reach far enough. Granddad was rightly mortified, even more when he saw the ball heading toward the crowd and spied a spectator moving right into its path.

Those folks who didn’t see the man get hit sure did get to hear it, seeing as the ball smacked the side of his skull and knocked him straight over like a tenpin.

The crowd, as you might expect, flocked to the spot to see just what happened, and check if the man could get his wits back about him. Even the umpire called time once there was enough commotion that the players couldn’t fairly concentrate.

Now, what Granddad had no way of knowing at the time was that the man he’d nearly sent to old St. Peter’s doorstep was in the process of absconding with a pile of purses he’d unhelpfully collected from women as he worked his way through the stands, using a penknife to cut the straps and carefully removing the rest. When the crowd figured out the thief’s plan, largely on account of the dozen handbags that fell when he did, Granddad found himself treated to a proper round of applause.

To be fair, he never actually claimed he meant to hit that man and save several ladies from difficult circumstances; he just didn’t see any reason to disabuse anyone of that notion. Especially when people saw fit to rush the field and lift him up on their shoulders, or when the future Katie Lee Wilson gave him a peck on the cheek on account of his rescuing her pocketbook.

They finished the game as a formality, but mostly people forget the result. They remembered “Bull’s-Eye” Wilson, and people told the story of that perfectly timed throw round these parts for a long, long while.

Figuring the publicity might draw a few fans, the St. Louis Browns gave Granddad a spot on one of their farm teams, seeing as the war kept better players otherwise occupied for a few years, and gave him his chance to see more of America. As good a hitter as he was for a boy from Franklin County, he never quite measured up to the bona fide professionals, and spent most of his two summers as a ballplayer sitting on the bench. After his deal with the government as concerned his farm, Granddad had gotten right used to drawing some money without having to do much for it, and always said he got paid to watch games from the best seats.

Now he’s gone, I have to tell I never quite knew how much of Granddad’s stories were monkeyshines, or how many really were truthful. To hear him tell it, though, he sure did hit the bull’s-eye on life, and there ain’t no denying that.

News of the Week: The Big Bookstore, Bad Comments, and the Life of the Little Red-haired Girl

Welcome to the Last Bookstore

Customers in front of the Last Bookstore
The Last Bookstore

Josh Spencer was a talented athlete who was hit by a car while on his moped several years ago. It left him a paraplegic, forcing him to completely rethink his life. What did he do? He opened up a bookstore in Los Angeles called The Last Bookstore, a clever name since so many bookstores have closed in the past decade or so (though, thankfully, independent bookstores seem to be making a comeback as the big chains struggle). It has become one of the largest indie bookstores in the world, and from what I see at the website, it’s one I could browse in for days. Actually, I’d probably move in there if he let me.

Spencer and his store were featured at The Atlantic last week, along with this great short documentary by Chad Howitt.

So Long Comment Sections?

I have a love/hate relationship with the comment sections on websites. I love the idea of them, and I frequent a few that are still civil and normal and enjoyable. But at the same time, I see too many comment sections — most of them, actually — that are sick and disgusting and rude and are frequented by some of the most evil people in the world. You’ll see these people on political sites, general news sites, YouTube, and even Amazon, where you’d think the comment section would be better. It all comes down to moderation. There’s no reason why we can’t have comment sections, but many sites don’t want to bother to police them.

But I guess it doesn’t matter because many comment sections are going away. NPR has just gotten rid of them, following in the steps of places like Reuters, Popular Mechanics, The Verge, The Week, and Recode. Some of these sites got rid of comments because of the aforementioned horrible commenters, but some sites are getting rid of them simply because the conversation has moved to Facebook and Twitter. Because, you know, people are more civil on social media. Ahem.

Don’t worry, The Saturday Evening Post still has a comment section! We have the best readers and we love seeing comments here! (This is your cue to leave a comment at the bottom of this column.)

RIP Donna Wold, Jack Riley, Steven Hill, and Irving Fields

If you’re a regular reader of Peanuts, you know Donna Wold. Or at least you know the character based on her. She was Charles Schulz’s inspiration for the Little Red-Haired Girl, the one he could never have. (They dated for a while, and he proposed, but she eventually married a firefighter.) Wold passed away earlier this month at the age of 87. She had four kids of her own, many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and 40 foster kids, several of whom she named after Peanuts characters.

Jack Riley was probably best known as Dr. Hartley’s neurotic patient Mr. Carlin on The Bob Newhart Show, but he also appeared on Seinfeld, Friends, Rugrats, Married … With Children, Night Court, and a million more shows. Riley passed away in Los Angeles at the age of 80.

If you were a fan of Mission: Impossible or Law and Order, you’ll remember Steven Hill. On the former he played Daniel Briggs, the leader of the IMF for the first season, before Peter Graves took over as Phelps. On Law and Order he played District Attorney Adam Schiff for 10 seasons. Hill was also in the Navy during World War II and was an acclaimed stage actor. He died earlier this week at the age of 94.

I never knew that the reason CBS let him go from Mission: Impossible was because he took time off because of his Jewish faith, which eventually led to filming conflicts.

Irving Fields? He’s actually one of the more fascinating entertainers of the past several decades. A pianist and songwriter, he wrote songs like “Miami Beach Rhumba,” which became a standard and was used by Woody Allen in Deconstructing Harry. His albums had titles like “Pizza and Bongos” and “Bagels and Bongos,” and he appeared on several variety shows in the ’50s and ’60s. He also wrote songs performed by Dinah Shore and Guy Lombardo.

But the most interesting thing about Irving Fields is that, even though he passed away at the age of 101, he was still performing in New York City clubs and lounges until just a few months ago. CBS did a nice profile of Fields in January.

Fields was so with it he even wrote a song about YouTube:

This Week in History: First Televised Major League Baseball Game

The first televised game aired August 26, 1939, on a new station, W2XBS, which later became WNBC-4. Around 3,000 people watched a doubleheader between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Cincinnati Reds at Ebbets Field. It wasn’t what we see today. There were only two cameras, there was no instant replay, and this was decades before people dressed as hot dogs raced each other.

This Week in History: Hawaii Becomes the 50th State

For many years I thought that Alaska was the 50th state. I have no idea why I thought this, but in fact Hawaii became the 50th state on August 21, 1959. Book ’em, Danno.

For the record, Alaska became the 49th on January 3, 1959.

Truman Capote
Truman Capote, 1959
(Photo by Roger Higgins, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

This Week in History: Truman Capote Dies

I recently watched the two movies based on Truman Capote’s reporting on the Clutter family murders that eventually became his groundbreaking book In Cold Blood. Capote, from 2005, is the darker, more serious movie, with a terrific performance by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. But 2006’s Infamous is really good too. It has more lighter scenes than Capote, and while Hoffman gave a great performance as the writer, Toby Jones somehow becomes Capote. Both movies are well worth seeing.

Capote really was never the same after that book. He wrote many articles and essays (and his book of letters is really fantastic), but he never wrote another major book. I grew up knowing him as that guy on The Dick Cavett Show or The Tonight Show. Sometimes he was obviously out of it, and it was a rather sad end when he died on August 25, 1984, at the home of Johnny Carson’s ex-wife Joanne. He was only 59. It was a sad end and much too young, but it’s worth remembering that he actually was a great writer.

Oh, if you’re interested in owning his ashes, they’re coming up for auction.

The Beatles dressed in Spanish uniforms; Post cover
Spanish Beatles
Photo by Bill Francis
August 27, 1966

It Was 50 Years Ago Today (Actually, Tomorrow)

This is a new regular feature, where I’ll look back at what The Saturday Evening Post had on its cover 30, 50, 75, 100 years ago. This week in 1966 — August 27, to be exact — the Beatles graced the cover in funny costumes, along with stories about whether or not we could stop Soviet missiles, the sordid trial of Candy Mossler, and a piece on whether or not prayer is “phony.”

It’s interesting that even though it said “The Saturday Evening Post” in small letters at the top, the logo for the magazine was just “POST.” But everyone knew what magazine it was.

 

For the Love of Bananas

Hey, here’s another thing that happens on August 27: it’s Banana Lovers Day. This is not to be confused with National Banana Day, which is celebrated on April 15. You’re allowed to like bananas on that day but you can’t love them. (April 15 is also Tax Day, but I assume the two events are unrelated.)

Here’s a recipe for banana bread with toasted walnuts. I’ve never understood the combining of bananas and walnuts in recipes, so I make mine without them (the walnuts, not the bananas).

Here’s a recipe for banana sunflower cookies, which makes me realize that I’ve never had a banana-flavored cookie. Banana bread? Yes. Banana cream pie? Yes. Banana split? Yes. But I’ve never had a banana cookie. But it’s not the most creative way to eat bananas. That award might go to these grilled bananas with buttered maple sauce and almond toffee.

Next Week’s Holidays and Events

U.S. Open starts (August 29)

Sick of rained-out matches? This year a new roof debuts on Arthur Ashe Stadium, as well as a new Grandstand court.

Why you should say “rabbit rabbit” on September 1

Say those words (or a variation, like “rabbits” or “rabbit rabbit rabbit”) on the first of every month and you’ll have good luck all month long.

National Emma M. Nutt Day (September 3)

You’ve probably never heard of her, but she was the very first female telephone operator, a position she held for over three decades. Women in that position had to be single and have long arms.

Against Her Self-Interest: An Anti-Suffragist Admits Her Mistake

“There will be no more domestic tranquility in this nation if woman suffrage comes,” said Alabama Congressman J. Thomas Heflin in 1913. “Pandemonium will reign.” To the women fighting for the right to vote in the 1910s, such arguments were not surprising. Men made all sorts of wild claims about the “catastrophe” that would follow an amendment granting women the right to vote.

And so did some women. Anti-suffrage women — anti’s for short — usually came from a background of privilege that didn’t require them to work. They were not only self-serving, though. As social leaders, many of these women were dedicated to philanthropy and promoting reform, but they achieved their results without entering the world of politics and didn’t feel as though they were working against their own self-interest.

Mrs. Josephine Jewell Dodge, for example, established the National Association Opposed to Women Suffrage. But she also set up a free childcare center to serve working mothers in an impoverished section of New York. Mrs. Annie Nathan Meyer was a co-founder of Barnard College. Yet she believed that women, were they allowed to vote, would “lose their womanly qualities” in their pursuit of careers.

Kate Douglas Wiggin, author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, worked to promote the welfare of children and launched the first free kindergarten in San Francisco. But she told a Congressional committee on women’s suffrage, “If woman is as strong as she ought to be, she should be called continually in council to advise, to consult, and cooperate with men wherever her peculiar gifts are valuable. If she enjoys and uses these rights and privileges, she does not need the ballot.”

Opposition to women’s suffrage collapsed when the 19th Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920. Many of the anti’s moved on to other causes. But some, like Eleanor Franklin Egan, a former war correspondent for the Post, changed their minds about suffrage.

In “Women in Politics to the Aid of Their Party,” Egan admitted she’d been wrong to oppose women’s suffrage. And she’d been wrong about the women who had done the hard work of winning her rights, and who were now working hard to win victory for their political parties.

 


Women in Politics to the Aid of Their Party

By Eleanor Franklin Egan

Excerpted from an article originally published on May 22, 1920

I happen to be one of the vast majority of women who had nothing whatever to do with the long struggle which is to result in the Nineteenth Amendment. If I had any feeling at all with regard to suffrage for women, it was a feeling of opposition. I did not believe the average woman would accept the responsibilities that go with active and direct participation in government and was afraid the privilege would be exercised chiefly by a few zealots and a class of women whose qualifications for responsible citizenship are too limited to make them desirable as contributing factors in the conduct of the country’s affairs. I thought there were enough undesirables already enfranchised, and permitted my imagination to dwell on the danger of adding to their ranks rather than minimizing this danger, and thinking principally of the good which might be accomplished by providing reinforcements for the ranks of the politically intelligent and righteously inclined. I knew that if the vote were thrust upon me — as my kind of woman was in the habit of saying — that I should use it, but I believed I should do so reluctantly and with a feeling that I was discharging a serious and disagreeable obligation rather than taking advantage of a precious privilege.

The trouble with me was that I did not think far enough. My vision was restricted by old-fashioned conservatism and prejudice, and in common with millions of other women in the country I ran eventually into a blind alley of platitudinous argument on the subject and stayed there while the procession went by.

How Will the Women Vote?  

I am not proud of my record of indifference, but on the contrary am inclined to be somewhat regretful when I consider that the women engaged in organized opposition to this most momentous movement in the history of social progress have been able always to use me and my numerous kind as convincing examples to point their contention that women did not want to vote and were being railroaded into politics by a fanatic and clamoring minority. I feel like apologizing to the women of the combat battalions who have done all the fighting and who now bear all the scars.

What I did not observe from my blind alley of conservatism was that the millions who were not being heard from, those of the great mass who never are heard from, were watching the progress of events with a deep concentration of thoughtful attention. If this were not true, the great mass would not now be so intelligently prepared to discharge the duties and so willing to accept the burdens of complete and responsible citizenship. While the doughty old suffs were engaged in storming and undermining the stronghold of man’s most sacred monopoly, they were at the same time lighting up the dark in the minds of their sisters with luminant shafts of political information and inquiry into social conditions which women, given the power, could help to improve — the result being that the average enfranchised woman of today not only rejoices in her new privilege but knows definitely why she rejoices.

To be sure, there are still a few who think in terms of opposition and declare that nothing can ever induce them to go to the polls; but they are a negligible quantity, and so far as my own observation goes are usually of the soft and mentally lazy type which modern progress is very rapidly rendering obsolete. They have few troubles of their own and take very little interest in the troubles of others. The only consciousness they have is class consciousness, and they do their thinking as a rule within the narrowest possible limits. They can never do the great causes of forward-looking humanity any real harm.

When the Nineteenth Amendment goes into effect, there will be 27,000,000 women voters! And there are 17,000,000 of us even now! This being according to the statistics relied upon by the women’s division of the Republican National Committee. Is it any wonder the men want to make a magic that will induce us to line up and declare ourselves? Unless they can gauge the degree of purely partisan allegiance for which we can be counted upon they are likely to make some fatal mistakes in their party management.

I do not mean to imply that women as a rule have not made their choice of party. They have; and it is an interesting fact that, regardless of what her husband’s politics may be, a woman usually begins by declaring adherence to the political faith of her father, the difficulty being that she adheres with reservations which denote in her an incorrigible independence. Very few women failed to register and vote in the 1919 elections, and of course they had to enroll on one side or another. But there is considerable doubt expressed as to whether any woman can be depended upon to stay put and to place party allegiance above personal preference as to candidates and conviction as to policies.

In the city of New York, the women voters enrolled are unequally divided among the Socialist, the Democratic, and the Republican parties, with the Democratic Party considerably in the lead; but the 1919 enrollment offers no assurance to anyone in the present situation. …

Much Work but No Plums

I talked with a number of women who are actively engaged in the service of the party and who devote practically their entire time to the work. When I mentioned the splendid privilege of equal participation with the men in party activities and benefits, I got a shock. It was like touching a live wire which one had every reason to believe was perfectly insulated, only to discover that it was not. I supposed of course that women in close touch with the party organization would at least pretend to be fully satisfied with the position which had been so skillfully outlined for them. But they do not; not among themselves at any rate. I was to learn that when a woman becomes a seasoned politician of the professional type; she is seasoned with the same seasoning that seasons men, and begins to think in terms of control through patronage and all that sort of thing. Some of these women displayed as clear a conception as any man could have of the vast system of rewards by which parties are supposed to be held intact, and it was a sore point with them that, though they were granted equal liberty with the men to work themselves to death for the party if they wanted to, they were not to expect to be among those present when it came to the distribution of its plums. They might help build the fences, but they must keep out of the orchard. All of which line of talk goes to show that the men have made a great mistake. They never should have given in. They should have kept the women where women belong.

It is a fact that the women of New York are not talking about anything now but politics and candidates. For more than four years they kept up a steady flow of conversation about the war, and every woman — from those who shine at the top of the social ladder to those who cling to its bottom-most foothold — was engaged in some kind of war work through which, all unconsciously perhaps, she was developing a sense of personal importance in the general scheme of things. With the war finished, these same women now plunge headlong — and with thankfulness in their hearts, no doubt, for something interesting to do — into the maelstrom of political discussion and competition. The arena of political combat used to be an island of unrighteousness wholly surrounded by brass rails, bottles, bartenders, and beer; but, along with the bottles, politics has been transferred to the home.

It may be that the men of the country are taking some interest in the political situation, but to the casual observer it looks as though the women were assuming the lion’s share of responsibility for it. This may be due to a number of things, but primarily I think it is due to the fact that men are capable of harboring thoughts and beliefs that they can get along without expressing. If political discussion should suddenly be forbidden, women would drop out of politics overnight. It is just that it is so grand to be something definite and effective, not to say dangerous! My, how women do enjoy being dangerous!

Yet curiously enough — make no mistake about it — a vast number of women are intelligently interested in and really anxious to understand the problems that confront us. I said, to begin with, that the women of the great mass — and it would be folly to pretend that the average woman has a trained and analytical mind — the women of the great mass are thoughtful about it all and closely attentive to the serious consideration attending their citizenship. And I believe this. On the other hand, a great many women have all the time there is unless they happen to be terrifically busy doing something equally as unimportant as anything else they might be able to do. And that is another variety.

Take me, for instance, sitting here writing this article, with a political tea which I promised to attend going on at the house of a friend not three blocks away. Every afternoon somebody one knows — or somebody who knows somebody who has met somebody one knows — invites one to a political tea in the interest of some candidate. And as for dinner parties, there is no such thing anymore. A dinner party is just another kind of political meeting. And the way the telephone is kept going makes life one continuous jangle. Perfect strangers call one up at all hours to ask one to sign a petition for this, that, or the other candidate; to contribute to a fund; to attend a meeting; to lend one’s house for a tea; to do a bit of canvassing; to become a member of a committee; to buy a button; to read something or other in some magazine about someone in particular; to write a letter to the newspapers; to do any one of a thousand things.

Ellie Krieger’s Asian Shrimp Cakes with Avocado Wasabi Sauce

Asian Shrimp Cakes with Avocado-Wasabi Sauce

(Makes 4 servings)

“These shrimp cakes are ambrosial! Each bite starts with a crispy panko crunch that’s contrasted with the creamy, citrusy, subtly tingly avocado- wasabi sauce, and leads you to chunks of succulent shrimp seasoned with toasted sesame oil and ginger. They can be served as a main course, perhaps along with the Asian Slaw, or served as a pass-around dish at a party. Be sure not to make them any larger than indicated here, to ensure that they cook through properly.”

Shrimp Cakes

Toast sesame seeds in small dry skillet over medium-high heat, stirring constantly, until they are fragrant and begin to pop, about 1 minute. Set aside to cool. In large bowl, stir together shrimp, ½ cup of panko, bell pepper, scallion, toasted sesame  seeds, egg, cilantro, sesame oil, ginger, lime juice, salt, and black pepper until just combined. Place remaining ½ cup panko in shallow bowl or rimmed plate. Divide shrimp mixture into 12 mounds. Shape each mound into round patty about 2½ inches in diameter. If mixture seems overly moist, stir in more panko a tablespoon at a time. Coat each patty well with the remaining panko. Place cakes in the refrigerator for 20 to 30 minutes to firm up. Heat canola oil in very large nonstick skillet over medium heat. Cook shrimp cakes over medium-low heat, until golden brown on both sides and cooked through, about 5 to 6 minutes per side. The shrimp cakes may be refrigerated or frozen at this stage. To serve, dollop each with 1 tablespoon of Avocado-Wasabi Sauce.

Avocado-Wasabi Sauce

(Makes ¾ cup; 4 servings)

Halve, pit, and peel the avocado. Mash together avocado, lime juice, wasabi paste, and salt with fork until smooth. Taste, and mix in more wasabi paste if needed. If not using immediately, refrigerate as quickly as possible.

Serving size: 3 cakes and 3 tablespoons sauce

Nutritional Info

Per serving:

Sign on the Dotted Line

A newly-web couple signing their marriage licenses
The Marriage License
Norman Rockwell
June 11, 1955

Always a stickler for authenticity, Rockwell asked an engaged couple to pose for The Marriage License. He also asked a former town clerk, Jason C. Braman, to pose as the city official. Rockwell knew the old man was still mourning his wife, who’d died just a few months earlier, and thought sitting for the painting might lift Braman’s spirits. Rockwell’s plan worked. When the issue was published and neighbors asked if he was the man on the Post cover, Braman delightedly offered to autograph their copy.

This cover displays Rockwell’s genius for capturing the drama in everyday scenes. He contrasts the dark municipal office and its shelves of dusty books with the woman’s sunny dress and the promise of bright sunlight coming in the open window.

And he used the solitary old clerk to emphasize the hopefulness of the young couple. The effect was so ideal that Rockwell once pointed to the handsome bridegroom and said, “That is what I would have liked to look like if I had had the opportunity.”

Why You Should Stop Bussing Your Own Table

Out of the corner of my eye, I watch as the harried mother of two at the next booth struggles to hold a squirming toddler under one arm while balancing two trays of the mess they’ve all made on the other arm. At the garbage area, she awkwardly sorts trash into one container and recyclables into another.

Then I get up, leaving the remains of my meal on the table. I turn to catch her expression as I walk out the door. Yup, she’s glaring at me the way my kindergarten teacher did when she would ask if I was in the habit of writing on the walls with crayons in my own home.

You see, I don’t bus tables in fast food restaurants. I’m not a lazy person, though I’m sure the young mother would disagree. I’m also not a slob. It would be easy enough to scoop up my garbage and sort it at the trash receptacle. But I believe that if I’ve paid for my meal, the fee should include the cleanup. If I do the cleanup, then I’m working for the owner of this grease joint.

And I don’t work for free.

The idea that customers should clear their tables is nothing less than corporate greed dressed up as moral obligation.

Put another way, my lassitude toward restaurant hygiene is actually altruistic. There’s a Chinese expression, “that’s his rice bowl,” which refers to employment that someone depends on. If I clean up after myself, I’m taking away a perfectly good rice bowl from someone else.

The idea that customers should clear their own tables is nothing less than corporate greed dressed up as moral obligation — similar to the fake environmental concern of hotel management when they leave a card on the bathroom sink that says, “Please save our planet — reuse your towel.”

(Here’s actual copy from an online ad from a company that prints those cards: “By using our towel and sheet cards, your property will save over $6.50 per occupied room per day. Hoteliers report saving 5 percent on utility costs.”)

Let’s stop giving fast food restaurants a free pass. Respect the rice bowl. I agree to pay a fair rate for service, but I expect to be served!

News of the Week: Gibson Fired, Gawker Bought, and Gale Ducky Comes Home

Please Don’t Kick The Writers

There’s an old saying in Hollywood: “Never kick a writer.”

Okay, I made that up, but it should be a saying in Hollywood (actually, not kicking anyone anywhere should be your default position). It’s something Criminal Minds star Thomas Gibson is thinking about today. He was fired from the show for kicking writer Virgil Williams during a disagreement while filming an episode of the show that Gibson was directing. Gibson had been on the show since its 2005 debut.

According to The Wrap, this isn’t the first time that Gibson displayed bad behavior on the set. This was only the last straw.

By the way, please note that Gibson was not the guy on Will & Grace. That was Eric McCormack. Gibson was on Dharma & Greg. A friend of mine confused the two recently.

Univision Buys, Shutters Gawker

I won’t link to the site because I don’t want to give them any more publicity and traffic than they already get, but it’s worth noting that Gawker was bought this week by Univision. The site was put up for sale after they lost a court case to Hulk Hogan and were ordered to pay $140 million to the former wrestler. Univision is buying Gawker for a reported $135 million, and I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that the amount is very close to that legal judgment.

According to The New York Times, the only other bidder for Gawker was Ziff-Davis.

Gawker.com will cease operations next week. RIP Gawker. Well, maybe not the P part of that.

RIP Kenny Baker, John McLaughlin, Arthur Hiller, and Fyvush Finkel

I don’t know if Kenny Baker is a “household name,” as one TV anchor put it this week, but the character he played certainly is. Baker played R2-D2 in six Star Wars films, as well as in the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special in 1977 and on The Muppet Show. He also appeared in many movies, including The Elephant Man, Amadeus, Flash Gordon, and Time Bandits.

Baker died at the age of 81.

WRONG! That’s how many people will remember veteran talk show host John McLaughlin, from his own use of that word on The McLaughlin Group and from the very, very funny Saturday Night Live sketch in which Dana Carvey said it and McLaughlin’s other famous phrase, “Bye-bye!”

 

McLaughlin passed away from cancer on Tuesday. He was 89.

I watched The McLaughlin Group last Friday night, and it was the first time he had missed a taping of the show in 34 years. He provided a voiceover for the stories, but you could tell he was very ill (they had to use subtitles so you could understand what he was saying). Did you know he was once a Jesuit priest?

Arthur Hiller passed away Wednesday. He had a rather interesting career as a director, helming the massive hit Love Story in 1970 as well as Silver Streak, The Americanization of Emily, The Out of Towners, Plaza Suite, The In-Laws, and Author! Author!, part of which was filmed about a block from where I’m typing this in my hometown. His last film was something called Pucked, starring Jon Bon Jovi, which he made in 2006.

He also directed several TV shows in the ’50s and ’60s, including Gunsmoke, Playhouse 90, Climax!, Wagon Train, Thriller, Perry Mason, The Rifleman, Naked City, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents; and he was president of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1993 to 1997.

Hiller passed away Wednesday at the age of 92.

Fyvush Finkel — what a great name! — passed away this week, too, at the age of 93. He appeared in movies like Brighton Beach Memoirs and Nixon, but you probably remember him from is role as Douglas Wambaugh on the TV show Picket Fences, for which he won an Emmy.

One thing I didn’t know: Finkel co-starred in the 1998 reboot of Fantasy Island, playing one of the travel agents (along with Sylvia Sidney) who brought people to the island for Malcolm McDowell’s Mr. Roarke character. Wow, I don’t remember that role at all, and the reboot itself is something I only vaguely recall.

Bye-Bye! The Nightly Show

Comedy Central seems to be falling apart since Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert left. No one seems to quote The Daily Show anymore since Trevor Noah took over (I have to admit, I think I’ve watched it twice since Stewart left), and no one seemed to watch the replacement for The Colbert Report either.

Which is probably why, this week, the network canceled The Nightly Show with Larry Willmore. It’s odd that the show will be canceled immediately (the final show aired last night), right in the middle of an election season. You’d think they’d want to keep it on the air at least until November, but maybe they think The Daily Show is enough for now.

Bye-Bye! 100 Macy’s Stores

I still shop at Macy’s, so I hope the store near me isn’t on the list of the 100 Macy’s stores that are going to close.

What’s going on? Is everybody buying their clothing at discount stores and online now? Apparently, many see the closings as a good thing. Motley Fool calls it “brilliant,” and after the closings were announced, Macy’s stock was up 16%.

Hello Again Gale Ducky!

This is my favorite story of the week.

The Troiano family of Hampton, New Hampshire, used to have a large rubber duck in their yard that would sometimes float in puddles and attract the attention of people going by. That was until five years ago, when someone stole the duck.

Here’s where the story takes a turn. A few months after the duck was taken, the family started to get not only postcards from the duck but also photographs of the duck in famous places around the world, including Austria, Kuwait City, Panama, and in planes, on trains, and even on many famous beaches. Someone even set up a Facebook page so the family and others could follow the adventures of Gale Ducky.

The plot took another turn this week when … well, I’ll let you watch this video from WMUR that explains what happened next:

Now that’s one story that deserves to go viral.

Today Is National Hot and Spicy Food Day, For Some Reason

Sure, this seems like a good idea, having National Hot and Spicy Food Day in the middle of August, when it’s 89 degrees and humid in many places. That would be like having National Strawberry Ice Cream Day in the middle of January.

Actually, I just checked — National Strawberry Ice Cream Day is in the middle of January. Never mind.

If you can stand the heat and don’t want to get out of the kitchen, here’s a recipe for Baked Barbecue Chicken — Spicy Southern Style. Here’s one for a spicy Shredded Chicken Salad, and if you really want to deny that it’s still August, here’s one for chili from Emeril Lagasse.

And you can wash it all down with some cool Red Tea Lemonade, because hey, it really is still summer.

Upcoming Events and Anniversaries

Olympics closing ceremonies (August 21)

It airs on NBC at 8 p.m. ET. Here’s where the medal count stands.

Sacco and Vanzetti executed (August 23, 1927)

The March 1927 issue of The Atlantic had an intriguing look at the murder and robbery case.

Mount Vesuvius erupts (August 24, 79)

Scientists still don’t know exactly how many people died when the volcano erupted.

Leonard Bernstein born (August 25, 1918)

The composer and conductor’s official site has a ton of great information.

Charles Lindbergh dies (August 26, 1974)

From The Saturday Evening Post a couple of years ago, a re-examination of the famed aviator’s life.

 

A Little Food and Drink

Hors d’oeuvres

They both brought bacon-turkey wraps, but his was heightened with baseball mustard while she had horseradish dijon instead. Their yogurt was Greek, their hummus garlic-infused. Both had celery and carrot sticks, but he ignored the celery while she looked at the carrots as if they were plagued. For dessert they had green apples and a small bar of chocolate. They ate in the same refectory where, to the best she could recall, they had never talked.

One afternoon, she forgot her chocolate and he swept in to rescue her by breaking his own bar in half. She accepted it, only to frown as the first piece melted on her tongue.

Milk chocolate, she said, is a cardinal sin.

Her tone was piquant and that night, as she hovered over leftover pizza, she regretted the remark; preparing her oatmeal the next morning, she decided she would take lunch on the quad. But he ambushed her, appearing in the hall with a bar of chocolate that was 70 percent dark. She frowned again and hated herself for it, but he didn’t mind. He liked a challenge. Day after day, he returned with a new bar.
The chocolate became darker and her frowns became smaller until, one Friday afternoon, he offered a small slab of 100 percent pure cocoa butter unadulterated with vegetable fat, and the frown disappeared entirely, to be replaced with a smile that revealed the spinach in her teeth.

Aperitif

At the Indian buffet, she was sloppy with her butter chicken, while he spooned basmati onto his dish before carefully adding chicken masala on top. He followed it with rogon josh and a tandoori chicken drumstick before wiping the rim of the plate clean. On their second trip to the trough, she was fastidious with her dal and imitated the way he folded his naan. Before they left, he introduced her to gulab jamun: balls of cake nestled in syrup that smelled like a rose.

They went for a nightcap at the bistro where he worked as a garde-manger. She liked her stouts while he favored ciders that were dry. They each drank their preference, but on the second round, he tried a Guinness and she had a Crispin. On the third round, she suggested they mix the two and was so proud of the result that he let her believe this was the first Black Velvet in the history of the world.

When they woke the next morning, he fixed a breakfast of epic proportions while she made her father’s famed concoction for eliminating hangovers, an unholy mixture of tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce, cinnamon, cough syrup, and Coke. He drank it without alarm, an act which she venerated more than his homemade hollandaise or medium poached eggs or the way the entire meal, as might be expected, was arranged on the plate with a delicate touch.

First course: Soup

After graduation, they spent the summer backpacking through restaurants. He had a legendary metabolism, but she was not so blessed. He acted upon her as a roux: By September, she was buying new pants because she now quivered when she moved. He didn’t mind because he had been trained to make gravies that coated the back of a spoon. He loved the way she had congealed.

Eventually they ran out of money and he turned to elaborate dinners, all of which were improvised on the spot. Eating well demands eating what’s fresh, he told her. It’s pointless to plan a meal in advance.
By spring, her vitamins were in his cupboard and her milk of choice (skim) was in his fridge. She found work writing slogans, and he appeared at noon bearing turkey wraps and a charming grin. After becoming apprentice to a patisserie, he embarrassed her with a birthday tortierre served by singing friends. In his father’s house, they ate Dublin coddle and drank whisky that burned her throat. The following week, he served her parents a banquet of Polish food, during which her mother declared that she now believed in reincarnation because she was certain she had eaten these exact pirogues in her youth.

On their first anniversary, she arrived to find the apartment smelled of curry. The table was furnished with a buffet, and he presented her with a plate of basmati, chicken masala, and one carefully folded naan. They mixed stout with cider and toasted each other with ornate steins. His attention to detail was so absolute that she should not have been surprised when she discovered the ring in the mulligatawny. Yet she reacted as if it had appeared by magic, and when she threw her arms around his neck, she half-expected him to, like any illusion, completely disappear.

Second course: Fish

There was sole at the rehearsal dinner and halibut the next day, but the extravaganza so distracted her appetite that she was famished by the time it was done. On the plane, she made the grave error of ordering one of everything the airline had to offer. For 12 hours, she knelt in the bathroom of their honeymoon suite while her new husband tried to communicate with a doctor en español. For days she could eat nothing but bread and salmon without the skin and the occasional tablespoon of paella, which he was eating at every meal.

Back home, there followed so many celebrations that she could not distinguish between the herring of an April morning and the grilled shark of an August night. The mussels might have been a midnight snack, and if the barbecued trout was dusted with snow, that was either because of Christmas or Valentine’s Day or both. The next meal she truly remembered was the one she didn’t eat at all: He left her a message asking her to buy kibble, even though, until that day, they had never owned a dog.

Her turkey-wraps were replaced with elaborate club sandwiches, pieces of lemon meringue pie, and beef empanadas. At dinner (when he was home for dinner), it was Around the World in Eighty Meals, with kabuli palaw and shorba and Swedish meatballs in a peppered sauce. His legendary metabolism left him unchanged, but she began buying new clothes, despite the fact that she (and only she) walked the dog twice a day. She took antacids and anorectics and caffeine pills. Nothing helped, and at lunch meetings, as she sat with clients, she ordered salads and picked at them with a fork.

The dog became sick after eating macadamia nuts; he became sicker after he got into the grapes. But it was the dark chocolate that ended him. Milk chocolate may be a sin, but to dogs it can be a saving grace. After throwing out the chocolate with the kibble, her husband announced a prohibition on all cocoa for the rest of their days. She began to sneak chocolate as if it were heroin, but when a bar fell from her bag, he fell into a fury that made her repent.

The very next day, while lunching with a client who was in from Baton Rouge, she ordered a salad and spent all her time sliding cucumber slices through the field of green.

Thank God you’re not an eater, said the client. Food just makes it that much harder to get drunk.
He ordered a martini and she, after a moment’s pause, ordered a stout, the first she hadn’t mixed with cider in almost 17 months. She became reckless with a second drink and than a third. It was happy hour; then it was last call. She had the foresight to tell her husband she was out with friends but not to have dinner. She didn’t eat again until, back at the client’s hotel, they ordered room service and enjoyed an indulgence of oysters while lounging on the rumpled bed. An hour before dawn, she had black coffee from the all-night café across from the hotel. By sunrise, she was drinking a batch of her father’s famous hangover cure, and by noon she was treating her husband to an elaborate brunch of coddled eggs, bacon, hot coffee, rye toast, and strawberries whose shape remembered a heart cleaved in two.

A few weeks later, he came home with cider and stout, only to learn she could no longer drink. He found her drinking fortified milk and arranging a meal plan with a regimented number of vegetables, grains, and meat. His culinary skills had never seen a better challenge. Six months later, an average night consisted of him stewing fruit while she indulged in non-fat frozen yogurt. Privately, usually when she was in a doctor’s waiting room, she looked online at the menus of restaurants in Baton Rouge and imagined a life of grits, chicken creole, and Sazerac slings.

Her body stayed healthy and her breasts became milk-plump. For the first year, she spent hours being devoured whole and watching the baby with care. Once the little girl switched to solid food, it became clear she had none of her father’s appetite. The girl ignored her carrots and preferred chocolate as dark as licorice gum.

Third course: Roast

He became the sous-chef, leaving her to concoct meals of canned soup, freeze-dried noodles, and imitation cheese. The girl became a student and the mother slipped into an era of packed lunches, during which she seemed to spend all her time arranging juice boxes and removing the crust from cheese sandwiches. There were hundreds of pudding cups, thousands of celery sticks, a million tiny raisins. It was never enough. She shopped, prepared, ate, recycled, composted, shopped again. Relief came in the three hours before her lunch break and the four hours after; she felt a slight dismay when a meeting came with a platter of blueberry muffins, as if the baked goods were interfering with a few blessed moments of peace.

She enjoyed the office parties, mostly because of the beer, and it was at a retirement celebration that she learned of the opening for a new liaison with some clients down south. She proposed herself even as her supervisor offered her a piece of the store-bought carrot cake that had been acquired for every departing office worker since the dawn of time.

On her first trip to Baton Rouge, she was welcomed by colleagues who took her out for fried chicken and reported, upon compulsion, that the man who drank more than he ate had changed professions. Someone thought he might have gone overseas. She spent the rest of the meal picking at the collard greens. Later, in the hotel, she ordered oysters and ignored the calls from home.

She brought home cookbooks with the intent of introducing her family to things like gumbo, jambalaya, and rice with sausage gravy. But her husband demurred: The spices in Cajun cooking, he said, would make his stomach hurt. His iron constitution was finally starting to fade. He was cutting down on all meat and made plans for a garden so he could make organic meals. He promised to plant roses: He could use them to make syrup for homemade gulab jamun.

Her new cookbooks went onto a high shelf; she had herself transferred to different accounts and vowed not to think of Southern cuisine again.

They spent a year without alcohol and another without sugar; their daughter spent six months not drinking milk. It was the age of dieting. Doctors told him to give up gluten. Coffee was prohibited, and salt was declared the devil’s curse. They inhaled protein shakes, licked cinnamon sticks, and popped echinacea. His body continued to revolt, and he decided it was so rich in toxins that the only cure was a cleanse. For 10 days, he would consume nothing but a witch’s brew of lemon juice, maple syrup, water, and cayenne pepper.

On the second day, he had chest pains and a persistent cough. Two nights later, he slept for 13 hours, and the day after that he complained of headaches, nausea, and cramps. On the eighth morning, he collapsed while measuring out the lemon juice; by the tenth day, mother and daughter were alleviating their anxiety with potato chips from the vending machine in the hospital’s hall.

Tests revealed an ailment no amount of juice, syrup, and pepper could defeat: He had a tapeworm almost nine feet long. His legendary metabolism had not been supernatural, after all; tapeworms can live in the body for years. No one knew how long he had been a living, breathing meal.

Dessert

Surgery was performed, but in the aftermath he contracted an infection that invaded his lungs. The sickness was bad; the food was worse. Salisbury steak, tough as sinew, was served with slushy peas and a gelatinous dessert the shade of watered-down blood.

Night after night, she took her daughter home and lay in the dark thinking of the spearmint phlegm that dribbled out of him when he coughed. She began to spend more time in the kitchen, that home away from home inside the home. At last, one morning, her daughter woke to find her mother lost in a wasteland of cookbooks and dirty pots. Her daughter asked for breakfast, but the new cook just looked at her with the gaze of a calf who has learned the definition of veal.

Either get ready for school or help. Food doesn’t make itself.

They swept into the hospital laden with containers, cutlery, and paper plates. They swept his nightstand clear and set up a buffet of curry, rice, and rogon josh. She instructed her daughter on how to arrange the plate and wipe the rim so the whorls of her fingertips turned red with sauce. They passed the meal beneath the patient’s nose. The fumes raised his heartbeat, increased his blood pressure, and brought tears to his eyes. Mind won out over matter, or perhaps appetite over illness, and though his throat was clogged with mucus, he opened his mouth to taste what his wife had made. She fed him as an infant, spoon by spoon, and then finally presented her masterpiece: She had made gulab jamun from scratch.
Roses! he exclaimed.

She had done well, but it wasn’t enough. He was buried with the taste of syrup still on his tongue.

Digestif

The food they had made furnished the funeral table: his Irish clan and her Polish rodzina mourned at the buffet. The widow watched the guests slop food onto their plates, stricken by the thought of the thousands of meals that lay in her path. So many menus, one of which would almost certainly involve the taste of oysters and a description of Southern cuisine. But, as her husband had always said, it was pointless to plan meals too far in advance. Her daughter arrived with a paper plate, but she said she couldn’t possibly think of food; in fact, she was already thinking of the morning ahead and what she would make for their first breakfast alone.

Fear of FERA: A New Class Struggle during the Great Depression

The crisis created by the Great Depression was like nothing the United States had ever seen, and the federal government had to scramble to create programs that addressed the nation’s problems. FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, for instance, put young men across the U.S. to work on important, useful, long-lasting projects. But many programs of the time were both more controversial and less successful.

With an unemployment rate that reached as high as 25 percent, state and local welfare systems that had been established primarily to deal with “the unemployable” — the blind, the deaf, orphans, the aged — were faced with a growing population of educated, experienced, but unemployed adults. In 1932, President Hoover established the Federal Emergency Relief Administration to help states create new unskilled jobs in local and state government and get people back to work.

But by 1935, FERA had grown into something that looked more permanent, was a drain on taxes, and simply wasn’t improving the situation. What’s more, as Dorothy Thompson argued in “Our Ghostly Commonwealth,” FERA was leading to a new class struggle — “not the class struggle according to Marx — not the workers against the capitalists, but the working against the workless, the haves against the people they support.” And it was creating the same type of social and economic environment that had allowed Adolf Hitler to seize power in Germany.

 


Our Ghostly Commonwealth

By Dorothy Thompson
Excerpted from the article originally published July 27, 1935

There exists in the United States, alongside our so-called normal social and economic life, another commonwealth, a ghostly one — ghostly because it is largely invisible to those who are not its members, and ghostly in the vague uneasiness which its haunting presence provokes. It is a commonwealth of people who live in a separate world of their own.

They are not isolated in some distant state, on some reservation set aside for them, but they live in the midst of us, in our cities and villages, in our very streets. They can vote — although it is suggested in some states that they should not — they look like the rest of us; they have the same desires, the same needs, the same urges. But not exactly, and always decreasingly, the same hopes. They belong to the same trades, professions, crafts, and skills as the rest of us, and, on the whole, to the same races, although there is a larger proportion of Negroes amongst them than in the other society, our own society, and a slightly larger proportion of Mexicans and Filipinos. There are mechanics and farmers, engineers and executives, lawyers and journalists, artists and teachers, laborers and musicians, dancers and actors, miners, carpenters, stonemasons, clerks, stenographers. They are, indeed, a pretty fair cross section of the United States. There are stockbrokers amongst them, and former $50,000-a-year men, and sharecroppers who never in their lives have handled more than $100 a year in cash money. And lots and lots of children. Curiously, there are, proportionately, rather more children amongst them than the rest of us have. They constitute between one-sixth and one-seventh of our population, because, all together, their number is around 20 million, and the experts tell us there are an additional 25 million potential members of their society.

They are the people on relief.

But the people on relief are not usually referred to as “people.” The society in which they live has a nomenclature of its own, as well as a social and economic organization of its own. They are usually referred to as “clients” or as “cases,” and, in groups, as a “case load.” Thousands of them live in barracks, under the supervision of Army officers, but they are not soldiers. They and many of the others work, and at all sorts of tasks: construction, manufacturing, transportation, education, building, mechanics, drafting, moving pictures. They play instruments, sew clothes, manufacture mattresses, till farms, but they do not work at jobs, but on “projects.” They work, but most of them do not receive wages, but “budgets,” and the amount which they earn is not decided according to their merits, but according to their minimum needs — as determined for them by careful investigation. They produce all manner of things, from iron cots and refrigerators to pictures and plays, but they may not sell anything they produce.

Their lives for 10 years back are investigated, recorded, catalogued, and cross-catalogued. More is known about them than about any other part of the population — about their race, and skills, work histories, diseases, even about their personalities — but the knowledge is in the files of state and federal government agencies, and is not part of the public awareness. In so far as the rest of our society is conscious of them, the attitude is a combination of bad conscience and hostility, and of this attitude they are also aware — and repay it, on their part, with a feeling of frustration and hostility.

Limitations of Local Relief

The poor have long been the charges of state, county, and township governments. But possible taxation for such purposes was severely limited. And the whole mentality of local poor administrators was awry. To them, the destitute were so because they were simply misfits. It was, in essence, their own fault. The attitude was embodied in some New England states by laws which disfranchised recipients of public relief. The local poor-law authorities were trained by tradition and experience to take care of the ne’er-do-wells, the village idiots, the aged, the infirm, the orphaned. But they were not prepared for a program of relief for Thomas Smith, able-bodied, aged 35, six years ago receiving a salary of $25 a week and a so-to-speak house owner, meaning that he had a house “worth” $5000 on which he had a $4000 mortgage; four years ago cut to $20; three years ago cut to $12, and unable to pay the mortgage; two years ago dismissed because of “lack of business,” and today totally without resources.

President Hoover, with the experiences of the war, the Belgian relief, the all-European campaign against typhus, the 1930 drought, and the Mississippi flood behind him as justification, believed that there was sufficient goodwill, energy, and organization power in the American people to deal with the administration of this problem on a local and largely voluntary basis.

But the analogy with the war and with President Hoover’s previous great relief administrations was fallacious in one important particular. The war, the postwar starvation, the drought, and the Mississippi flood were catastrophes which affected all parts of the population. People starved in postwar Belgium because there was actually no food. Everybody starved. The good and the bad, the poor and the rich, the deserving and the undeserving. In the war, the banker’s son needed bandages as well as the truck man’s. And the Mississippi rose upon the just as well as upon the unjust, upon the efficient as well as the unlucky. There was solidarity of action because there was solidarity of distress.

No such solidarity of experience exists between the employed and the unemployed. But one thing which President Hoover foresaw has come to pass. Many of the fortunate, being isolated from any participation in the troubles of the unfortunate, except to pay for them, are developing a callousness and hostility toward them which aggravate the whole social situation, and which no amount of press releases from the publicity bureaus of the various relief administrations can dissipate. This country is dividing into two classes — the employed and the people on relief. A genuine class struggle is emerging, but it is not the class struggle according to Marx — not the workers against the capitalists, but the working against the workless, the haves against the people they support.

The Working and the Workless

This is reflected in almost every conversation which one may have with people whom the depression has not touched severely. The Long Island ladies who are indignant that they cannot get a handy man to help lay a carpet; the newspaperman who has kept his job securely all through these last five years; the employers of cheap labor who can’t find men at prices they can afford to pay. Being cut off from the problem, which is isolated behind a bureaucracy, they generalize from their own experience, and there are plenty of experiences to bear them out. They see the relief problem in its bulk and implications only in the un-quieting growth of the extraordinary budget.

In the great cities, in the winter of 1932, the attempts at local relief had certainly broken down. The local charities were bankrupt. Milkmen could not deliver milk, because their cars were overturned and the milk looted. Grocery windows were smashed. There were riots. Gangsters joined the ranks of the unfortunate, and racketeering was coupled with destitution. There was a clamor from all quarters that something should be done.

And President Roosevelt came in, surrounded by youth and social indignation, pledged to action, and a lot of it. And gallantly flinging back their locks from their foreheads, and with a smile cheery and brave, this administration gathered the whole kit and caboodle of the destitute to its bosom.

Since then it has been exceedingly busy trying to bounce many of them off again.

The federal government had no more experience than anyone else in being an eleemosynary institution. It had vast quantities of goodwill, optimism, and idealism. It was manned with as attractive a crowd of people as ever were got together in Washington; for eagerness and earnestness, youth and enthusiasm are extremely attractive qualities. It is probably the most literate administration that this country has ever had since the early days when politics was believed to be a gentleman’s profession, and it is certainly the most talkative. It is also probably one of the most truly representative of administrations, for it shares practically all the illusions of the typical American intellectual. It believes that any action is better than none; that the scientific attitude is synonymous with being willing to try anything once; that economic reform can be interpreted in terms of social uplift; and that the lion and the lamb can be brought to lie down together by persuasion.

This is preeminently the administration of goodwill — on all sides. But the good, says the proverb, die young. It is the wise who die of old age.

A Sympathy All-Embracing

This administration has been truly encyclopedic in its sympathies. It has tried, in the midst of depression, to raise wages and preserve profits. It has encouraged monopolies and sought to protect labor. It has advocated high prices and the protection of the consumer; [Secretary of State] Mr. [Cordell] Hull wants to restore international trade, and so does [Secretary of Agriculture] Mr. [Henry] Wallace, but meanwhile Mr. Wallace scales down production to domestic consumption. It believes in inspiration and in the expert.

Now, the same ambivalence of feeling dominates the relief program. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration is accurately described by one word in the title, and somewhat accurately by another. It is almost “Federal,” and it is certainly “Administration.” But no one whom I have been able to find in the whole organization, whether in Washington or in the field, believes that it is “Emergency.” On the contrary, its members are convinced that we are settling down to deal with a permanent problem, and they are directing policy with this in view. It is not relief. It is — or intends to become — a system of employment and, as such, should be no more relief than the check I hope to get for this article.

The destitute, in the mind of this government, have a right to support. But there is something humiliating about the exercise of this special right. Therefore, work must be provided for them. But the work must not interfere with private industry. The relief worker must be free, but in order to live on his budget, he must be controlled. The relief worker must not be insulted, but the public must be scrupulously protected. The problems of the immediate present must be met. The problems of a distant future must be met. The chief aim must be to provide immediate projects to meet the needs of the individual unemployed; the chief aim must be to construct lasting works of public importance. Every destitute person in the country must be relieved, but the taxpayer must not be overburdened.

Benevolent Serfdom

I am amazed that some people consider that the work-relief system is a form of socialism. Go out and look at it, and you see that it is actually a new form of benevolent serfdom. I say “benevolent” because almost all the people in administrative positions from top to bottom are full of human kindness, full of sympathy. They are not well-paid themselves. They work extremely hard. They are, for the most part, vigorously honest. And most of them know that this system will not work in the long run. Some of them foresee its extension into a universal program of production for use, a sort of nationwide EPIC. Others believe that the government must openly compete with private industry and gradually expropriate it. They should observe that no country yet has managed to edge its way into socialism. Others believe that such a system can only be integrated with the rest of society by political means.

Now, the political means of integrating such a society with the rest is fascism. It is, as far as I know, the only political means which has been pragmatically successful.

Germany, from 1925 onward, built up a system of work relief very similar to this one. In fact, it is the only parallel which I can find in a study of social service in European countries. It had the same sort of projects — subsistence farms, unemployed production for unemployed, and in the Voluntary Works Corps, an organization not unlike CCC. It did not, under this system, stabilize the social order. The resentment of the unemployed against the state was prodigious.

According to the classes from which they came, the younger elements flocked to the extreme right or the extreme left. They furnished strong support for Hitler. And when he came into power, he took over the whole system. It was literally ready-made for him. He reorganized it along military lines. He put the workers in camps into uniforms, and the social workers, to a large extent, as well. He kept the system and changed the psychology.

Now the subsistence workers are not pariahs of the social order but are hailed as its pillars. They are the builders of the New Germany. They have parades. They are drilled, exercised, trained. Arrangements are made to keep many of them permanently in this status. And a vast propaganda machine with the whole field to itself is busy persuading them that they like it.

Well, perhaps they do. But would we?


 

President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 7034 less than three months before this article was printed, establishing the more ambitious and unconventional Works Progress Administration. Like FERA, the WPA was accused of promoting communism, socialism, fascism, corruption, and political favoritism. But its results are difficult to argue against: 651,000 miles of roads, 124,000 public buildings, 800 airports, and 124,000 bridges built or improved; 225,000 public concerts presented; 475,000 works of art and 276 full-length books created; plus public swimming and wading pools, utility improvements, and over a billion school lunches.

FERA was dissolved in December of the same year.

Read Dorothy Thompson’s “Our Ghostly Commonwealth” in its entirety.

Our Ghostly Commonwealth

Originally published on July 27, 1935

There exists in the United States, alongside our so-called normal social and economic life, another commonwealth, a ghostly one — ghostly because it is largely invisible to those who are not its members, and ghostly in the vague uneasiness which its haunting presence provokes. It is a commonwealth of people who live in a separate world of their own. They are not isolated in some distant state, on some reservation set aside for them, but they live in the midst of us, in our cities and villages, in our very streets. They can vote — although it is suggested in some states that they should not — they look like the rest of us; they have the same desires, the same needs, the same urges. But not exactly, and always decreasingly, the same hopes. They belong to the same trades, professions, crafts, and skills as the rest of us, and, on the whole, to the same races, although there is a larger proportion of Negroes amongst them than in the other society, our own society, and a slightly larger proportion of Mexicans and Filipinos. There are mechanics and farmers, engineers and executives, lawyers and journalists, artists and teachers, laborers and musicians, dancers and actors, miners, carpenters, stonemasons, clerks, stenographers. They are, indeed, a pretty fair cross section of the United States. There are stockbrokers amongst them, and former $50,000-a-year men, and sharecroppers who never in their lives have handled more than $100 a year in cash money. And lots and lots of children. Curiously, there are, proportionately, rather more children amongst them than the rest of us have. They constitute between one-sixth and one-seventh of our population, because, all together, their number is around 20,000,000, and the experts tell us there are an additional 25,000,000 potential members of their society. They are the people on relief.

But the people on relief are not usually referred to as “people.” The society in which they live has a nomenclature of its own, as well as a social and economic organization of its own. They are usually referred to as “clients” or as “cases,” and, in groups, as a “case load.” Thousands of them live in barracks, under the supervision of Army officers, but they are not soldiers. They and many of the others work, and at all sorts of tasks: construction, manufacturing, transportation, education, building, mechanics, drafting, moving pictures. They play instruments, sew clothes, manufacture mattresses, till farms, but they do not work at jobs, but on “projects.” They work, but most of them do not receive wages, but “budgets,” and the amount which they earn is not decided according to their merits, but according to their minimum needs — as determined for them by careful investigation. They produce all manner of things, from iron cots and refrigerators to pictures and plays, but they may not sell anything they produce.

Their lives for ten years back are investigated, recorded, catalogued, and cross-catalogued. More is known about them than about any other part of the population — about their race, and skills, work histories, diseases, even about their personalities — but the knowledge is in the files of state and federal government agencies, and is not part of the public awareness. In so far as the rest of our society is conscious of them, the attitude is a combination of bad conscience and hostility, and of this attitude they are also aware — and repay it, on their part, with a feeling of frustration and hostility.

But the human animal can get used to anything, and an increasing number of them have got used to this curious world created for them. It is a world where the all-powerful functionary, the boss, is the social worker. It is the social worker whom they see when they finally make up their minds to go and apply for relief. It is the social worker who visits their homes and asks a great many questions. It is the social worker whom they deceive about the ten shares of stock which they are wistfully holding for a rise, or about the $100 which is still in the bank, or about the fact that the 17-year-old son has a part-time job. It is the social worker who calls later to see whether the money is really being spent for milk for the children and not hoarded or squandered on cigarettes. Behind the social worker is a vast bureaucratic machine, with which the social worker — oftenest a woman — must herself grapple when anything comes up which is not in the exact schedule — when the children’s teeth need filling, for instance, or another baby is coming along. The social worker is the facade and the chief pillar of the whole system.

No Wages — a “Budget”

The social worker — and the postman. The postman brings the relief check and the post card telling the client to report for work. But at the new work office another social worker receives them and there is more cross-questioning and more cataloguing. What work did they do last? And before that? And before that? Again the names are filed, and each of the possible occupations cross-catalogued with a view to discovering a project which might use the client’s services. Is there a project needing a valve grinder? An automobile finisher? No. But perhaps the automobile finisher can do common house painting, the valve grinder dig ditches. A fortnight or so passes. Then perhaps the client or the case has work, but not a job.

The project may be a long way off. How about transportation? Ask the social worker. And then the pay. The worker is not paid where he works. Still the check comes by mail — the budget check — so much for milk, so much for other food, so much for utilities, so much for clothing. Still the rent is paid — not by the worker, but by the relief authorities, directly to the landlord. The worker is not a real worker; he is a relief worker. The landlord who gets the relief check knows it; the neighbor who observes the visitor knows it; the grocer from whom he gets his food knows it, because in many communities this part of the payment is in the form of a grocery order, and in others the relief worker is forced to trade at certain stores which carry everything on the list. The social worker calls at the stores, too, occasionally, to see whether the worker — the relief worker — is really buying vitamin-rich food, and not ginger ale.

And above all, the worker knows it. He knows it because the conditions of his work, the standards of efficiency, the hours, and the pay are not normal conditions, standards, and hours.

Yet, there are advantages. If the relief worker has belonged before to one of the lowest groups of American labor, there are great advantages. If he has been an occasional or a seasonal laborer, he has more security than he ever has had. His new employer cannot fire him. The budget is very low — it averages $22 a month per family for the whole country, plus certain perquisites, such as medical care from a panel of relief doctors, food, clothing and household goods from the surplus-commodity warehouses, but even at that it may be as much as he has ever had. If he is a Southern Negro agricultural laborer, or a Mexican worker in the Imperial Valley, often it is actually more in cash. And his feelings toward the social worker are mixed. Often he is furious — a social worker’s life is by no means roses. Sometimes social visitors have been stabbed, slashed, and even shot at by furious clients. But they look after the families. The money goes farther, being carefully apportioned. The relief worker can’t make debts — on pain of going off the rolls. He can’t spend money for amusements. “How did you manage to get that radio?” “What have you done with the money for vegetables?” “I am told that you were here last week — or there. How did you pay for that?” He has no contact with other workers not on relief work. Bit by bit his social contacts, as well as his work contacts, come to be amongst the other cases. He settles down into the routine. He begins to think of himself as a permanent member of a certain caste, a permanent citizen of this curiously infantile world. And if he is ambitious he hopes to rise inside this world, for it has opportunities too. A former white-collar worker may become a social worker himself — there are not enough trained social workers for this new order — or a stenographer in the vast offices, a foreman on a construction job, a full-time draftsman making plans for others.

From place to place in these United States, the pattern varies, but only slightly. In Chicago — unless the system has been changed in recent weeks — he gets no cash, but a grocery order. Here he may pay his own rent, and there it is paid for him. On public works, under the PWA, he may be paid on the job. The deviations, however, do not change the main pattern of the society. He may hear that relief is higher in this place than it is in that, and move. He may figure that a single man alone has a better chance in the shelters and camps for relief transients, and leave his family behind him, knowing the relief will go on at home just the same. He may set out energetically to look for a job — a job that is not a “project,” a job which is part of the busy, working world. But there are not a great many jobs, and he soon finds that the employers look sour when he admits that he had been on relief. The employers prefer men who have not been out of work long; prefer men who have had enough savings or family support to keep them going; fear demoralization and the rusting of old skills. Soon he is back in the old routine, back in the bosom of the social worker, back in the world where he is a child again — a child with a minimum degree of security, a minimum of responsibility, and no future other than a continuation of the present.

Our Human Waste

Thousands of children are born into this world and know no other. Thousands and thousands of young people, finishing school, pass into it, never having worked for wages in their whole lives. Although industries throughout the country report increased productivity and increased employment, the size of this ghostly commonwealth changes curiously little. Looking at it, as I have done, from one city to another, one has a strange feeling of permanence — and yet yesterday it was not there.

This caste, this society of charges, this world which speaks in terms of setups and breakdowns, case loads and clients and projects, is not the result of a plot, of a conspiracy — not even of a conspiracy of the social workers. It has come into being because of an almost innumerable number of factors. Not all of these clients belong in the exact technical sense of the term to the unemployed, not all of them are the victims of the great economic catastrophe of the last five years, which is worldwide in its scope and worldwide in its causes. One suspects — what the old-line charity workers have long known, and what the statisticians have been patiently telling us for many years — that the passing of the great pioneer period, the closing of the frontiers inside our country, the end of free land, the emergence of big industry, the centralization of capital and manufacture, science applied to agriculture and technics, the importation — in the past — of cheap labor from all corners of the Earth where labor was cheapest, the great surge of construction and exploitation which opened this country and made its riches and its power in a phenomenally short period of time, have also thrown upon the nation’s scrap heap an enormous mountain of waste — exhausted mines and soil, stripped prairies and forests, huge factories to manufacture things which people very doubtfully want. And amongst this wastage, vast numbers of human beings.

Unemployables We Have Always With Us

Factories may be abandoned, old railroad lines become hidden in grass, but human beings live — live even at incredibly low levels — and when the level is too low, they organize, protest, riot, follow demagogical leaders, and in other ways become apparent and menacing. And above all, they reproduce themselves. Their children appear in the schools, ill-fed, unkempt, difficult to educate and to train. In times of prosperity, the exceptional well-being of the majority blots this group out of the picture. They are kept decently out of sight by neighborly efforts, by community chests, charity organizations, county almshouses, church aids. They are called “unemployables,” and probably this country has had for years more than a million such.

In five different cities, old-line charity workers told me that they had observed, prior to 1929 and at the very peak of prosperity, that applications for charity were increasing rather than diminishing. The experts knew the reasons. One does not have to go through the mountainous reports of this most statistical of all administrations to find out what is and has been going on. The commission appointed by President Hoover which published the report on Recent Social Trends in the United States pointed out as clearly as anyone since what was happening. It showed that although there had been no increased crop acreage in this country for 15 years, and although the agricultural population was steadily decreasing, agricultural production had increased in the same period 50 percent, and production per worker 52 percent. It pointed out that it took more than twice as many man-hours to produce a ton of coal in 1911 as it took in 1929; that in the automobile industry one man was seven times as productive in 1927 as he was in 1904. They might have added that only a few years ago, 30,000 men in Akron produced 30,000 tires in a day, and that now 13,000 or 14,000 men can turn out 84,000 tires. The Hoover Commission predicted the cotton-picking machine which is now a fact, and which will be capable of replacing 2,000,000 Southern laborers, whites and Negroes, in foreseeable time.

The old-line charity workers, observing increased demands for help in the midst of prosperity, knew that new industries were no longer taking up the dislocations caused by improved technique in the old ones. From 1899 to 1914, out of every 1,000 workers, 21 were replaced by machines, but at the same time 149 new jobs were created by new industries. But between 1922 and 1929 — the prosperity years — out of every 1000 workers, 49 were replaced by machines and only 45 new jobs were created. The process since then has immensely accelerated with the depression and the timidity of new enterprises.

What the depression did was to add to this lowest group hundreds of thousands of people who, in prosperity years, never dreamed that they could reach such a level. I have met on relief rolls men who, six years ago, were earning $10,000 a year. Home owners, carriers of relatively heavy insurance policies, architects who once had fine contracts, artists who, six years ago, were getting $1,500 for a picture, minor movie actors who thought that one successful secondary role spelled a secure future. Hundreds of former salesmen, minor executives, and thousands and thousands of white-collar workers. Skilled workmen whose trades had moved to other localities and who continued to believe that business would pick up again. Men and women from stranded communities, where the factories have closed or the mines shut down because prices have fallen. Sometimes they moved in the old flivver in search of a promised land, but where conditions actually were better, others had had the same fine idea and gone there too. California, one of the richest states in the Union, is so crowded with transients from the East that the legislature has been considering a law of doubtful constitutionality which would close the borders against all immigrants unable to support themselves.

It may truthfully be said of some of these people that in time of prosperity they did not exercise sufficient thrift. But is the fault entirely theirs? Our whole production mechanism in the prosperity years was geared to high-pressure salesmanship. There was pressure from all sides to persuade men and women of limited means to mortgage their futures. On the relief rolls are thousands who purchased houses in 1926 and 1927 at immensely inflated values and with extremely heavy mortgages, who today have lost their entire equity and have no roof over their heads.

One Question — Many Answers

Others, with no knowledge of investment, put their money into common stocks without realizing that in the stock market the little man is invariably caught. He always buys high and has to sell low. Today these victims of the depression and their own former optimism walk about on relief projects like men in a daze. They still are not sure what hit them. If they are not utterly discouraged, if they think at all, they look about for an explanation. The Communists have one; the Socialists have one; Father Coughlin has one, and Huey Long. They say: “It’s the system.”

I have heard these words before. I heard them everywhere in Germany in 1930 and 1931. Precisely those words. It was the time when the German democracy, unknown to most German democrats, was tottering into its grave.

If they listen to Senator Long, the system is the concentration of wealth. If they listen to Father Coughlin, the system is the international bankers. If they listen to the Communists, the system is the whole of bourgeois society. But they listen least, perhaps, to the Communists. The Communists appeal to workers. But they are no longer part of the great body of workers. They are cut off from working ranks. Their vigor is dissipated. Communism is revolutionary; it demands control. It seeks to conquer the state. They, on the contrary, are not learning to conquer the state, but to make demands upon it.

The form which our treatment of this great group of vastly various elements has taken was again partly predicated by social and political conditions and by the state of public opinion.

No federal government in the Western world was less prepared to receive the victims of economic catastrophe than ours, either technically or psychologically. In all Western European countries nets had long been spread to catch those whom economic life dropped from its pay rolls. Everywhere else there was some plan or other of unemployment insurance. It might have been merely the Ghent system of compensation through subsidized trade union funds. But such a system was out of the question in the United States, where the American Federation of Labor has never been able — and one suspects not even very desirous — to organize the unskilled, and which has in its membership many monopolistic groups, and as much rugged individualism as elsewhere in American life. Both the German and the British contributory systems were rejected by public opinion, which hated the very idea of a dole as un-American and humiliating, and which was often completely uninformed as to the nature of unemployment insurance. There was the realization, too, that in all countries the insurance systems had broken down, had had to undergo constant revision; the very just criticism was made that there was no single case to be found throughout the world in which the actuarial basis proved to be valid, for the hazards of unemployment, unlike the hazards of illness, death, fire, or accident, are quite unpredictable. In all countries with unemployment-insurance schemes, the man or woman who remained unemployed for a period of from 26 to 52 weeks — depending upon the previous stability of his employment and the number of premiums he had paid — eventually reached the relief rolls, the actual dole, in spite of the insurances.

Something to Break the Fall

Nevertheless, the insurance schemes were a net to break the victim’s fall at the outset. They provided him with a breathing space in which to seek new work; above all, they kept him for a few months, at least, in the community of his fellows. Furthermore, they set up a permanent, impersonal, and nonpolitical mechanism for dealing with a situation. The workman or small-salaried employee in Britain who loses his job, if he has paid 26 contributions to the insurance fund, has the right to collect 26 weekly payments, and in proportion as he has paid into the fund, many more. There is no investigation beyond establishing the fact of his previous employment and his present lack of work through no fault of his own. He cashes the benefits as simply as one would cash a check. He is not a case. Thus, from the outset, there is a differentiation between the man who is out of work because he is a drunkard, or an epileptic, or otherwise maladjusted, and an able-bodied, competent citizen who is the victim of an economic catastrophe. Even when these benefits are exhausted, he can continue for another 26 weeks on other benefits frankly subsidized by the government. Only now he is subjected to a means test which investigates his resources. But if he is found to be without means, the payments continue in the same way and on the same level. And only when these are exhausted does he have to fall back upon local charity, upon the social worker.

Limitations of Local Relief

Complicating the American problem further was a decline in the authority and prestige of local governments, due to a system in many respects obsolete, and to political corruption. The poor have long been the charges of state, county, and township governments. The idea that charity has been chiefly a function of private agencies is an illusion. Private agencies, such as the community chests, which have to raise money by private subscription, make of necessity a considerable noise, but traditionally the destitute have been cared for by local taxpayers. But possible taxation for such purposes was severely limited. And the whole mentality of local poor administrators was awry. To them, the destitute were so because they were simply misfits. It was, in essence, their own fault. The attitude was embodied in some New England states by laws which disfranchised recipients of public relief. The local poor-law authorities were trained by tradition and experience to take care of the ne’er-do-wells, the village idiots, the aged, the infirm, the orphaned. But they were not prepared for a program of relief for Thomas Smith, able-bodied, aged 35, six years ago receiving a salary of $25 a week and a so-to-speak house owner, meaning that he had a house “worth” $5000 on which he had a $4000 mortgage; four years ago cut to $20; three years ago cut to $12, and unable to pay the mortgage; two years ago dismissed because of “lack of business,” and today totally without resources.

President Hoover, with the experiences of the war, the Belgian relief, the all-European campaign against typhus, the 1930 drought, and the Mississippi flood behind him as justification, believed that there was sufficient goodwill, energy, and organization power in the American people to deal with the administration of this problem on a local and largely voluntary basis. He foresaw the danger resulting from the isolation of a large part of the community from the rest. He knew that voluntary committees of local people would have only one interest — the reabsorption of the unemployed in actual economic life and the ending of their own jobs. He foresaw that any bureaucracy has a vested interest in its own continuance. He believed that the best talents of every community could be summoned for patriotic purposes to give of their time and their abilities to end the condition. He knew that voluntary committees of leading citizens would use all sorts of legitimate pressure upon their friends to create jobs for the wards whom they would be anxious to get rid of. He believed in the neighbor rather than in the social worker. He saw the fight against destitution conducted with the élan of the war. He believed in the complete exhaustion of local resources before the federal government should step in.

Actually, a network of committees was created throughout the country, which, in great numbers of communities, functioned admirably in the alleviation of destitution, and which were often far abler to distinguish the deserving and the undeserving, or, in more precise terms, the economic case from the social case, than many case workers from outside the community can do.

But the analogy with the war and with President Hoover’s previous great relief administrations was fallacious in one important particular. The war, the postwar starvation, the drought, and the Mississippi flood were catastrophes which affected all parts of the population. People starved in postwar Belgium because there was actually no food. Everybody starved. The good and the bad, the poor and the rich, the deserving and the undeserving. In the war, the banker’s son needed bandages as well as the truck man’s. And the Mississippi rose upon the just as well as upon the unjust, upon the efficient as well as the unlucky. There was solidarity of action because there was solidarity of distress.

No such solidarity of experience exists between the employed and the unemployed. But one thing which President Hoover foresaw has come to pass. Many of the fortunate, being isolated from any participation in the troubles of the unfortunate, except to pay for them, are developing a callousness and hostility toward them which aggravate the whole social situation, and which no amount of press releases from the publicity bureaus of the various relief administrations can dissipate. This country is dividing into two classes — the employed and the people on relief. A genuine class struggle is emerging, but it is not the class struggle according to Marx — not the workers against the capitalists, but the working against the workless, the haves against the people they support.

The Working and the Workless

This is reflected in almost every conversation which one may have with people whom the depression has not touched severely. The Long Island ladies who are indignant that they cannot get a handy man to help lay a carpet; the newspaperman who has kept his job securely all through these last five years; the employers of cheap labor who can’t find men at prices they can afford to pay. Being cut off from the problem, which is isolated behind a bureaucracy, they generalize from their own experience, and there are plenty of experiences to bear them out. They see the relief problem in its bulk and implications only in the un-quieting growth of the extraordinary budget.

In the great cities, in the winter of 1932, the attempts at local relief had certainly broken down. The local charities were bankrupt. Milkmen could not deliver milk, because their cars were overturned and the milk looted. Grocery windows were smashed. There were riots. Gangsters joined the ranks of the unfortunate, and racketeering was coupled with destitution. There was a clamor from all quarters that something should be done. And President Roosevelt came in, surrounded by youth and social indignation, pledged to action, and a lot of it. And gallantly flinging back their locks from their foreheads, and with a smile cheery and brave, this administration gathered the whole kit and caboodle of the destitute to its bosom.

Since then it has been exceedingly busy trying to bounce many of them off again.

The federal government had no more experience than anyone else in being an eleemosynary institution. It had vast quantities of goodwill, optimism, and idealism. It was manned with as attractive a crowd of people as ever were got together in Washington; for eagerness and earnestness, youth and enthusiasm are extremely attractive qualities. It is probably the most literate administration that this country has ever had since the early days when politics was believed to be a gentleman’s profession, and it is certainly the most talkative. It is also probably one of the most truly representative of administrations, for it shares practically all the illusions of the typical American intellectual. It believes that any action is better than none; that the scientific attitude is synonymous with being willing to try anything once; that economic reform can be interpreted in terms of social uplift; and that the lion and the lamb can be brought to lie down together by persuasion.

This is preeminently the administration of goodwill — on all sides. But the good, says the proverb, die young. It is the wise who die of old age.

A Sympathy All-Embracing

This administration has been truly encyclopedic in its sympathies. It has tried, in the midst of depression, to raise wages and preserve profits. It has encouraged monopolies and sought to protect labor. It has advocated high prices and the protection of the consumer; [Secretary of State] Mr. [Cordell] Hull wants to restore international trade, and so does [Secretary of Agriculture] Mr. [Henry] Wallace, but meanwhile Mr. Wallace scales down production to domestic consumption. It believes in inspiration and in the expert.

Now, the same ambivalence of feeling dominates the relief program. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration is accurately described by one word in the title, and somewhat accurately by another. It is almost “Federal,” and it is certainly “Administration.” But no one whom I have been able to find in the whole organization, whether in Washington or in the field, believes that it is “Emergency.” On the contrary, its members are convinced that we are settling down to deal with a permanent problem, and they are directing policy with this in view. It is not relief. It is — or intends to become — a system of employment and, as such, should be no more relief than the check I hope to get for this article. The destitute, in the mind of this government, have a right to support. But there is something humiliating about the exercise of this special right. Therefore, work must be provided for them. But the work must not interfere with private industry. The relief worker must be free, but in order to live on his budget, he must be controlled. The relief worker must not be insulted, but the public must be scrupulously protected. The problems of the immediate present must be met. The problems of a distant future must be met. The chief aim must be to provide immediate projects to meet the needs of the individual unemployed; the chief aim must be to construct lasting works of public importance. Every destitute person in the country must be relieved, but the taxpayer must not be overburdened.

Evolution of a Bureaucracy

And whatever happens, a record must be left: A record of every case, of every administrative and work-project setup; of every racial, occupational, sex, and age group breakdown.

But not, I trust, of every nervous breakdown.

The way in which the administration of relief has developed has been partly due to the situation and agencies that existed when the administration began; partly — and very importantly — due to the personalities who came into power, who had many contradictory viewpoints, all of which, through various bureaus, received expression; and partly due to the wind of public opinion, to which the administration, as a political body, is naturally susceptible.

In a succeeding article I shall attempt to show that the contradictions in program which one observes in the field of operations are due to fundamental contradictions in attitudes and philosophies at the source. But the program, as a whole, has also been strongly influenced by attempts to satisfy a critical and not very well-informed public opinion with a strong moral attitude. Originally, the FERA plan, as dictated by law, provided for grants in aid to the states. Relief was to be state planned and state administered. But as the contributions of the federal government increased, the responsibility of the federal government for how the money should be spent also increased. The man who pays is invariably the boss. So it followed that the program came to be largely dictated by Washington. But to dictate a program, even for a country as vast as this, with wide variants in population, wage scales, and local conditions, demanded the setting up of standards and a considerable rigidity of rules. This carried with it, logically, the creation of a centralized bureaucracy. Since this bureaucracy was suspected of being a political organization and possibly, therefore, corruptible, it was necessary to keep most rigorous records, with which, if necessary, to confront the critics, and this increased overhead. Meanwhile, a public isolated from the ramifications of the problem, which were being handled by “experts,” kept veering around in its attitudes. The original opposition to the dole led to the development of the work program. But as the public begins to realize that a work program is infinitely more costly than straight relief, opinion is turning, and today the conservatives who, two years ago, attacked the dole are all for it.

The federal government, having got itself into the administration of unemployment relief in the states, is finding that the problem of dealing with all the destitute is being dumped upon its doorstep. Not only the unemployed but the lame, the halt, and the blind — old Aunt Agnes, whom the family is sick of supporting, the oldest native inhabitant, the widows whose state-pension funds have become exhausted. The invitation to come in and visit Santa Claus has been universally accepted, not only by the cases themselves but by the communities, and it is necessary constantly to flourish a big stick in order to get the states to appropriate funds. The big stick, as far as the states are concerned, is more funds — is, indeed, not so much a stick as a bait.

But the indigent from social rather than economic causes — the so-called unemployables — are definitely being returned by the federal government to the counties, which have not taken them back with enthusiasm. For one thing, they claim that their charges have been spoiled by federal relief. Then there is a quarrel between counties and federal-state administrations as to what constitutes an “unemployable.” The counties claim that a blind man with one leg can sell pencils on the street — ergo, is, if he becomes a charge at all, the problem of the federal-state administration. The federal-state shifts the man energetically back upon the counties.

Work Projects for All and Sundry

Unemployment relief. That is how it started. Destitution relief is what it became. Work relief is what it is trying to be, and already is in many communities.

It is not relief, as such, but the rigidity of federal control and the intention of putting back to work, within a year, some 3,500,000 heads of families, which has immensely complicated the problem from all angles, financial, administrative, programmatic. For, as we have seen, these unemployed are a cross-section of our economic life, belonging to all trades, professions, and skills. Can public works absorb them? The answer is no. You cannot make a mechanic or a ditch digger out of a violin player. You can only ruin a violinist and a lot of ditches. Therefore, says the federal government, one must create a work project for violinists. You cannot even make a domestic servant — with a good chance of a real job in many communities — out of a stenographer. Therefore, you must retrain some stenographers and make work projects for others. Can you put a former movie cameraman at work canning beans? No, says the relief administration, and puts him at work on a project filming other projects for the publicity department of the administration.

Meanwhile, what are you to do with whole populations which are stranded? With the lumbermen and coal and copper miners from the Northern Michigan peninsula, for instance? Here the mines are so deep that the owners cannot mine the minerals at the merest subsistence wages, except above the world-market price, and in many counties 70 percent of the people are on relief. Shall the government go into copper mining at a loss in order to give these people work? Or move them onto subsistence farms? And if it does, will the miners be happy or successful farmers?

Putting 3,500,000 men and women from all walks of life to work inside an otherwise competitive economic system simply means setting up a special social order for them parallel to the one in which the rest of us live. And this is precisely what is being done. Given the thesis, the procedure is logical. But what will be the eventual social results?

Since the unemployed are being put to work for the unemployed, on projects which must be financed and maintained by the state, you have a social order in which the taxpayer is really the absentee owner. He is in more than one respect absentee, for the great bulk of unemployment relief in the South is supported by the Northeastern States.

Since the work of this society must not conflict with the work of the other society to which it runs parallel, you have a rigid suppression of actual wages to a subsistence level, and a shutting out of its products from any but its own market. Since the taxpayer must always be considered and relief payments are not subsistence if left to the untrained spending of the recipients, you have the budget system and social workers’ control.

Benevolent Serfdom

In this system, the government is a bad employer. It is bound to be. This administration believes in the right of workers to organize, to bargain collectively, and to strike. How about these workers? They have tried it in some states — in Michigan, for instance — and they have been kindly but firmly dealt with. But it is extremely difficult to explain to a man who is working that he isn’t really a worker.

The government is a bad employer, secondly, because it is impossible to make adjustments on the spot and at the moment when difficulties occur. The various projects operate under a set of rules. If something comes up not in the rules, the lower instance must consult the higher, and the higher a still higher.

I am amazed that some people consider that the work-relief system is a form of socialism. Go out and look at it, and you see that it is actually a new form of benevolent serfdom. I say “benevolent” because almost all the people in administrative positions from top to bottom are full of human kindness, full of sympathy. They are not well-paid themselves. They work extremely hard. They are, for the most part, vigorously honest. And most of them know that this system will not work in the long run. Some of them foresee its extension into a universal program of production for use, a sort of nationwide EPIC. Others believe that the government must openly compete with private industry and gradually expropriate it. They should observe that no country yet has managed to edge its way into socialism. Others believe that such a system can only be integrated with the rest of society by political means.

Now, the political means of integrating such a society with the rest is fascism. It is, as far as I know, the only political means which has been pragmatically successful.

Germany, from 1925 onward, built up a system of work relief very similar to this one. In fact, it is the only parallel which I can find in a study of social service in European countries. It had the same sort of projects — subsistence farms, unemployed production for unemployed, and in the Voluntary Works Corps, an organization not unlike CCC. It did not, under this system, stabilize the social order. The resentment of the unemployed against the state was prodigious.

According to the classes from which they came, the younger elements flocked to the extreme right or the extreme left. They furnished strong support for Hitler. And when he came into power, he took over the whole system. It was literally ready-made for him. He reorganized it along military lines. He put the workers in camps into uniforms, and the social workers, to a large extent, as well. He kept the system and changed the psychology.

Now the subsistence workers are not pariahs of the social order but are hailed as its pillars. They are the builders of the New Germany. They have parades. They are drilled, exercised, trained. Arrangements are made to keep many of them permanently in this status. And a vast propaganda machine with the whole field to itself is busy persuading them that they like it.

Well, perhaps they do. But would we?

Olympic Covers

Sprint, scull, and soar your way to Olympic history with these classic Post covers commemorating Games of the last century.

cover
College Man’s Number, 1904

This Olympic hopeful’s number may indeed come in, providing he can heave this hammer far enough afield.

cover
Rowing Team
J.C. Leyendecker
August 6, 1932

On this August 1932 cover, J.C. Leyendecker accurately predicted the future, placing the U.S. men’s eight rowing team on the winner’s pedestal a week before the finals. The only bronze they wore that year came from the sun.

covers
Hurdlers
May 4, 1935

A year in advance of the 1936 Berlin Games, these Olympic hopefuls hurtle and hurdle for a chance to compete on the world stage. It might be their last chance: After 1936, World War II pre-empted the Games until 1948.

cover
Eleventh Olympiad
J.F. Kernan
August 8, 1936

In J.F. Kernan’s last Post cover, an Olympic sprinter channels the strength and speed of the eagle as he prepares to represent America at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

cover
Sculling Race
August 15, 1936

This Olympic single sculler had best grit his teeth and grind those delts with a tad more gusto if he hopes to reach the podium.

California Gold Prospects: Olympic Hopefuls on 1983

Some group is always calling for a boycott of the Olympic Games, but it rarely actually happens. Backing out of the 1980 Olympics in response to the Soviet war in Afghanistan was a rare instance of follow-through by more than 60 nations, including the U.S. Of course, that left many a yearning athlete high and dry on glory, followed by a difficult four-year wait for the next opportunity — if that opportunity still existed.

Three years later, the Post highlighted a number of athletes — some of whom had been favorites to win in 1980 — with their eyes set on the 1984 U.S. Olympic Team. Four of them went on to strike Olympic gold at the Los Angeles Games the following year.


The California Gold Rush of 84

By S. Lamar Wade

Excerpted from an article originally published on July 1, 1983

The gold rush of ’49 was but a Sunday afternoon stroll in the park compared to the upcoming gold, silver, and bronze rush of ’84 for medals at the Los Angeles Olympics. The hurdles on the road to the Olympics are many. For most athletes, blood, sweat, and tears are just a starter, but for those who are burning with Olympic fever, no hurdle is too great to overcome. Some will be back again in ’88, but for others, it is their final opportunity to satisfy the dream of standing in the winners’ circle.

Rowdy Gaines: 1980s Loss

In line for enough medals at the 1980 Moscow Olympics to make him the most renowned swimmer since Mark Spitz, Ambrose (Rowdy) Gaines saw his hopes go down the drain with the American boycott. Along with them went his concentration and boyish enthusiasm.

“I couldn’t believe the United States would actually stick to it,” says this Auburn University graduate from Winter Haven, Florida. “I felt cheated, oppressed, and unwanted. I still think the boycott was a stupid decision; it proved nothing.” Rowdy Gaines, at 24, continues to dream his Olympic dream. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m getting too old, burned out. I think about all my colleagues who didn’t have a chance to swim and turned to earning a living, and I ask myself if I’m not wasting my time. But swimming is what I want to do the most.”

Having used up his college eligibility, Rowdy still trains with coach Richard Quick at the University of Texas. Here, in the pool at Austin, is where he established his world records in both the 100- and 200-meter freestyle events. And if this training results in victories over the American competition of Chris Cavanaugh and Rich Saeger in the U.S. Trials, June 25–30, 1984, at Indianapolis, he will face Jorg Woithe of East Germany and Michael Gross of West Germany, top contenders in the Olympics.

“It’s been tough the last three years,” says Rowdy. We ‘older’ swimmers were supposed to have reached our peaks in 1980. Hopefully, that won’t turn out to be true.”

[Gaines won three gold medals at the 1984 Games, in the men’s 100meter freestyle and as part of the men’s 4 x 100 freestyle team and 4 x 100 medley team.]

Mary T. Meaghers Postponed Dream

When Soviet military troops rumbled into Afghanistan in 1979, the reverberations jarred the life’s dream of 15-year-old Mary Terstegge Meagher of Louisville, Kentucky. Mary T., as she is known by her colleagues, became one of the athletic-career casualties of President Jimmy Carter’s retaliatory American boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.

Bitterly disappointed, she had no more than nicely rearranged her goal and rekindled her spirits when an Associated Press reporter phoned with the results of the Olympic swimming competition and told her she could have beaten their times — and wanted to know how she felt about that.

“I felt like hanging up the phone and crying,” she confesses.

In fact, Mary T. nearly quit swimming altogether. But she decided to plunge ahead for the 1984 Olympics. And her “comeback” has already made quite a splash. She has won an NCAA championship, set world records in both the 100- and 200-meter butterfly events, and has emerged as one of America’s brightest hopes for ending the domination of East Germany in her sport.

[Meagher won three golds at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, in the women’s 100-meter and 200-meter butterfly and swimming the butterfly leg of the women’s 4 x 100 medley. She competed again in 1988 and brought home a silver and a bronze medal.]

Mary Lou Retton All 93 Pounds

It’s a long way from the coal-mining community of Fairmont, West Virginia, to Texas. But Mary Lou Retton, a ninth-grader at Houston’s Northland Christian School (having left at home her parents, three brothers, and sister Shari — an All-American gymnast at West Virginia University), has come much further in her training since the days she tried to emulate the Soviet crowd pleaser Nelli Kim at the local gym.

Mary Lou’s Texas training, in fact, has unearthed a load of gymnastic talent that, at age 12, has earned her the No. 1 senior-class ranking in the nation. And hopes are high that she will be one of the United States’ most productive natural resources in the 1984 Olympic Games. Standing a scant 4’10” and weighing but 93 pounds, her performances combine speed and amazing acceleration with a force that has caused gymnastic experts themselves to flip. Though she believes vaulting and floor exercises to be her best events, an innovative maneuver on the uneven bars has already been named for her.

Mary Lou credits her refinement to coach Bela Karolyi, the Romanian tutor responsible for the stardom of Nadia Comenici in the 1976 Games, before he defected to America in 1981 and opened a gymnasium in Houston. Here, under the eye of this technician, Mary Lou has improved her fundamentals, and here she has benefited from working out with fellow-student Dianne Durham, ranked No. 2.

With Mary Lou Retton, chances are good that coach Bela Karolyi will again strike Olympic gold — only this time for the United States.

[At the 1984 Games, Retton brought home the gold medal for the women’s individual all-around — plus two silvers and two bronzes to boot.]

Boldens Bold Dash

Born premature, asthmatic, and clubfooted, Jeanette Bolden’s leap from life’s starting block was anything but spectacular. For the first 4 of her 23 years, this world-class sprinter was forced to wear corrective braces.

Today, some track experts give her an excellent chance of capturing the 100-meter gold medal in 1984. To do so, she first must qualify in the Olympic 100-meter-dash trials next June in Los Angeles. Jeanette, undaunted, has overcome even bigger obstacles.

She not only had to wear corrective braces as a youngster, but several times during grade school, she was rushed to the hospital with asthma attacks so severe her life was close to the finish line.

At age 12 she was sent to Sunair Home For Asthmatic Children at Tujunga, California, for nine months. It was there that she had an introduction to sports — first swimming, then branching out to running.

“The more I ran, the more people began taking an interest in me,” she says. “And in 1977, after I beat some pretty good people, I no longer had to hide anything. I just wanted to keep on running.”

Not surprisingly, her favorite passage from the Bible, which she studies avidly, is found in the Book of Isaiah: “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”

[Bolden brought home gold in 1984 as a member of the women’s 400-meter relay team.]


You can read the original article, “The California Gold Rush of ’84”, here.