Some history lessons from some odd places

From The Nation's reviews comes a reminder of the fifty year anniversary of On The Road by Kerouac and the centennial of Jack London's The Road. Read On The Road and it left me unimpressed. I have read a bit of Jack London besides Call of the Wild. Anyway, this post is about history in strange places.

In the years between 1907 and 1957 America changed radically--it became a world power and developed a full-blown mass culture--and those social and cultural changes are reflected in these two books. The Road depicts an industrial America in which hobos and tramps are an integral part of the system--"a reserve army of the unemployed," as Marxists have called it--who help keep wages down. On the Road describes a postindustrial America in which cars are everywhere, almost everyone can afford a car, a radio and a television, and the mass media shape the lives of American citizens.

Drive by that vacant field on Scatterfield just north of 33rd Street and realize that those cars everywhere came from there as well as the union wages that helped everyone afford a car. Ask yourself the last time you saw a hobo. For me, I was probably about ten years old and certainly less than thirteen. When was the last time anyone heard of anyone being arrested for vagrancy (outside of some of old Warners Brother's movie?):

The pivotal experience of his radicalization did not take place in the freedom of the open road itself but in the confinement of the Erie County Penitentiary, in New York, which he describes graphically in The Road. In 1894, after traveling under the radar for two months, he was arrested on charges of vagrancy and sentenced by a judge, without trial, to thirty days in prison.

Today's New York Times has an article How Ford Brought Power to the People under its Collectible Cars section about the the 1932 Deuce Coupe.

By the late 1920s Chevrolet had passed Ford, whose Model T had lingered too long, in sales. Chevy countered Ford’s new Model A of 1928 by introducing a “Six for the price of a Four” the next year. The ’32 V-8 was Ford’s counterpunch: it cost only $15 more than the Chevy Six and $35 less than a four-cylinder Plymouth.

Henry Ford’s other foe was the Great Depression, which drove the city of Detroit to bankruptcy, left half the local workforce unemployed and slashed car production to 15 percent of capacity. He hoped that an exciting new Ford might draw cash being hoarded under mattresses, driving the country out of the economic ditch.

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Six million Americans flocked to Ford dealerships on the Deuce’s announcement day. After an initial spurt of orders, harsh reality set in: most Americans couldn’t afford lunch, let alone installment payments, so Ford’s 1932 sales were barely half of the previous year’s volume. In desperation, Edsel rolled out a larger restyled car for 1933. Only 178,749 Deuce V-8s were manufactured during its 10-month production run. From 1931 through 1933, the three worst years of the Depression, Ford lost $125 million.