Puzzled America
by
[Scribners, $2.50]
SHERWOOD ANDERSON has always possessed a faculty for understanding people who work with their hands. Miners, farmers, mill workers, and laborers have been his companions from early childhood. Now, in this book, he is back once more among them, visiting their homely villages in the South and Middle West, trying to extract from their impassioned stories the essence of their inmost feelings about the depression. ‘The stories,’ he writes, ‘look at me out of the eyes of men and women. They shout at me.’ For the most part they are stories of suffering and defeat, articulating the plight of large sections of the population which have been left behind in the march of progress. Yet into each one there has crept of late an encouraging note: ‘The outstanding, dominant thing now in almost all of the Americans I have been seeing is this new thing, this cry out of their hearts for a new birth of belief.’
In times past, says Mr. Anderson, the rural sections of this country have been woefully neglected. There has been a reckless waste in potential power, in forests, in streams, in the soil itself; but most tragic of all has been the waste in human lives. And this in a land of plenty, in a land of milk and honey — a land which to-day should be filled with well-fed, beautifully housed men, women, and children. Certainly these poor whites, these hillbillies, these little tenant farmers of the backward areas, are not inferior to the dollar-aristocrats of the cities. ‘Often they bear proud old names. They got beaten in the economic struggle. That’s the plain, simple story.’ And now, although puzzled as much as ever, they are turning with renewed hope to a government which has manifested a desire to give them another chance. ‘The minds of the people are fixed upon Roosevelt. Their hopes are in him.’ They realize that he is doing his best to help them, and accordingly they are willing to be patient and wait. ‘Be quiet. Wait!’ they say. ‘Don’t push.’
Already certain of the New Deal’s constructive enterprises are having a salutary effect upon the spiritual welfare of the nation. The TVA, for example, is putting men back to work at labor they love. It is minimizing in the minds of the engineers the value of money and advancement in comparison with the joy to be derived from simply creating. Then there are the CCC camps, which, as Mr. Anderson says, are actually a kind of ‘man-making process.’ Using as raw material the lost generation of young men to-day, these camps are moulding a sturdier, more robust type of manhood for tomorrow, They are arousing in our American youth something of the old pioneer spirit of coöperation which factory work and city clerkships have allowed to lie dormant.
Puzzled America is, in short, a reasonably optimistic book. Parts of it may seem a little too lavishly sentimental. And parts, too, may betray the fact that the author is himself as much puzzled by present conditions as any hillbilly or farmer or laborer he could have met in the course of his wanderings. Nevertheless one is inclined to feel that reading these simple and unpretentious pages is the next best thing to seeing and hearing for oneself.
DONALD MACCAMPBELL