Here's a timely excerpt from my new novel project, Search for Blue, now being composed. This passage, written in the monologue style of an ole mountain feller, pertains to what happened to our America during the 1930's:
. . . But in October of '29 the whole damn thing just stalled out, real sudden like, stone-cold dead in its tracks, or so it seemed at the time.
By that time, marauding, machined-up manufacturing and rabid farming had stirred up a dust bowl in the wide prairies and a cloud of manifest debilitation over our formerly manifested destiny. Monetary manipulation absconded the bold thrust of old-fashioned capital-driven progress; frantic philandering pushed quaint front-porch watch-the-world-go-by domestic tranquility into a ragged soup line.
1920's roaring jibber-jabber got lost in 1930's Depression regression. The country had shifted from financed euphoria to unemployed stuporia.
And so in the election of '32 we rolled Mr. Roosevelt into the White house on a Democrat wheelbase of socializing progressivism; The new President, formerly a well-connected and very shrewd governor of New York, wasted no time in arm-twisting the nation right on over into his New Deal to put people back to work.
Because now it was time for work. The stock market's whirligig blown-up speculatin', ticker-tape chaisin' had elevated itself out of the realm of real-world responsibility. America had reached its peak of riches; now it was time for us to be constrained to some long-neglected corrections. Do not pass Go and do not collect $200. Maybe a coupla bucks if you're lucky.
As the dust of dystopia settled, some forlorn Americans pined for the good ole days. Ah, they said, those were the days. Wish we'd seen it coming!
It didn't take them New Dealers too long to figure out that what was needed was some guvmint programs to get people working again, and fast.
Congress, shell-shocked by the deadening thunder of an American business-industrial dynamo self-destructing, got themselves hellbent on a string of programs to shorten--if not eliminate--the lengthening unemployment lines. Their legislating fervor reached way, way far--even as far as somewhere over the rainbow--and so they set themselves to lay hold of the pot of gold!
But when that legendary vessel was recovered, it turned out to be--not a pot of gold, but--a soup pot, and a damn-near empty one at that. So they set themselves to re-filling that pot at the end of the rainbow, although not with gold. There wasn't, by that time, much of the precious yellow stuff around. They had to begin filling the empty rainbow pot with . . . soup!
Out on the street, maybe while waitin' in line for the soup, Joe Blow--or maybe it was Jane Doe--came up with a name for the collection of work and improvement programs that Congress was dishing out: "alphabet soup." Take a gander at this list: FERA, FCA, NIRA, PWA, FFMC, CWER, AAA, EBA, FDIC, FHA, NRA, NLRB, RA, REA, SEC, SSA, TVA, to name just a few, and we'll certainly not fail to mention the two work outfits destined to be the most productive in our present scouting-out-the-land, search for Blue expedition: CCC and WPA, which is the easy way of sayin' Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration.
Since Mr. Roosevelt had proclaimed we had nothing to fear but fear itself, one of Congress' first assaults against the dreaded enemy actually took aim at that "fear itself."
In an inspired idea to nullify the power of that fret-falootin' enemy attitude, our lawmakers scrambled the word "fear." They appropriated the letters. . . f, e, a, and r, reassigned them to a nobler cause, and came up with the Federal Emergency Relief Act of 1933, which came to be known as: FERA!
That was one of the early servings of the alphabet soup; it got ladled into the bowls and cups of millions of unemployed Americans.
Most of the work was cranked up in the urban districts; city folks were much more dependent on the system than country folk. Out on the farms, people might be broke, and they might be deprived of some of the so-called necessities of modern life, but at least they had some ground out back to scratch a few seeds into the good earth and thereby harvest unto themselves some corn, beans, or potatoes to serve at dinner time. They might even still have a hog or two or a cow or at least a few chickens peckin' around to have for some future supper time embellishment.
All that said, the farm folks did have their share of the alphabetizing bonanza that Congress was serving: AAA, FCA, FFMC etcetera etcetera. One way or another, everybody got a little help.
Back in that day and time, most men could still wield a shovel or a hoe. Even if they hadn't done much with such tools as that, they or their kin were probably close enough to the land to at least know something of how to handle an implement.
As it turned out, a lot of them programs that the New Dealers came up with did involve shovels and hoes and rakes and such.
But some serious planning was required along the way:
My my, how times have changed!
Or have they? We might still yet have serious conservation work to do in this country. Take a look around. We might need a few improvements, here, there and yon. Have you ever planted a tree?
