Report from the Interior (14 page)

The war is over. American soldiers are coming home from Europe, large ships are plowing through the icy waters of the Atlantic, steam whistles are blasting in celebration, and as the Sunset Division pulls into port, the deck is thronged with uniformed men, hundreds of soldiers gesturing wildly to the exuberant crowd that waits for them on shore. It is 1919, and the boys who sailed over there are landing back here, the armistice has been signed, the Great War is history, and down below, in the bowels of the ship, a gang of soon-to-be ex-soldiers is singing loudly while a small group plays craps on the floor. Money is being lost and won, the dice are clattering on the hard surface, and in steps the squad sergeant with an apologetic smile on his face, telling the boys to knock it off because the
old man
has ordered bunk inspection in an hour. A drawling Texan remarks that if anyone ever says the word
inspection
to him again, he will gladly plug him with his six-shooter, and moments after that the soldiers are talking about their postwar plans. The sergeant, a stocky and amiable fellow who has clearly won the respect of his men, says that he intends to get some kind of construction job, that working in the Engineering Corps has been a
swell experience
and he means to make the most of it. One of the soldiers says: We’ll be reading about you in the newspapers, I bet. Mr. James Allen is building a new Panama Canal—or something. To which Allen replies: You can bet your tin hat that Mr. James Allen won’t be back in the old factory.

It is 1919, but the film you are watching was made thirteen years later, which was no doubt the worst year of the Depression, and since you have learned a thing or two about American history by now, you know that just before the film was shot, in the spring and summer of 1932, the Bonus Army was camped out on the Anacostia Flats, in the southern part of Washington, D.C., a group of thirty thousand people, nearly all of them veterans of the war, who had descended on the capital in support of a bill sponsored by Congressman Wright Patman that proposed to allow veterans to cash in their one-thousand-dollar war-bonus certificates that year instead of having to wait until 1945, as the current law then stipulated, and with these desperate, unemployed men lingering month after month in their wretched camp of tents and cardboard shacks, they became an ever-growing embarrassment to the Hoover administration. The Patman bill was passed by the House but voted down by the Senate, which led to some small but angry battles between members of the Bonus Army and the local police, which in turn convinced Hoover that it was time to get rid of this horde of ragged, left-wing beggars, this legion of so-called Forgotten Men. He chose the United States Army to do the job for him, a grotesque political choice—commanding soldiers to use force on other soldiers, an irony so cruel that most of the country was revolted by the action—and it is curious to note that among the principal players in this drama were Douglas MacArthur, the army chief of staff, Major Dwight Eisenhower, MacArthur’s aide, and Major George Patton, the three men who went on to become the most widely known American generals of World War II. Against Eisenhower’s advice (
I told that dumb son of a bitch that he had no business going down there
), MacArthur took charge, instructing Patton to place a unit of tanks on the outskirts of the camp, and on July twenty-eighth, in full uniform, with every one of his many decorations displayed on his chest, he led the force that evicted the Bonus Army from its miserable shantytown, pushing out the interlopers at gunpoint as dozens of shacks burned to the ground. A little more than a hundred days after that, Hoover became a one-term president, voted out of office in Roosevelt’s landslide victory.

After the postwar parades with the marching bands and the giant American flags, the film cuts to a shot of a speeding train, and for several seconds it is unclear where the train is going, as if the locomotive charging along the tracks is no more than an abstract representation of time in motion, the abrupt and furious passage from Then to Now as the world of Now propels itself into the future. Forget the war. The war is over, and no matter how many died over there in muddy, blood-filled trenches, Now belongs only to the living.

Another cut, this time to the train station in a town called Lynndale, evidently a smallish spot on the map, a nondescript American somewhere, and standing on the platform are four people: a middle-aged woman in somber, conservative clothing, a pretty young blonde, a minister wearing a clerical collar, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a black hat, along with an older man in a suit and tie with a straw boater on his head. The middle-aged woman asks the blonde if she thinks he will be wearing his medal (one assumes that
he
refers to her son), and the girl responds, Why, of course he will, but a moment later the train comes to a halt and out steps Sergeant Allen, dressed in a standard civilian suit—no medal, no uniform, nothing to suggest he has just fought in a war. After a joyful, welcoming embrace from his mother, Allen shakes the girl’s hand, dispelling any notion that she might be his sister, girlfriend, or wife, saying that he never would have recognized her, and the girl, whose name is Alice, tactlessly replies that he looks different, too, adding that she misses his uniform, which made him look taller and more distinguished, thereby telling him that he has been reduced to the rank of nobody, no matter how many medals he might have won overseas. To make matters worse, the minister, who turns out to be Allen’s older brother, enthusiastically informs him that Mr. Parker, the gent in the straw boater, is going to take him back into the factory, and as Parker pumps Allen’s hand and slaps him on the back, he confirms that Allen’s job has indeed been saved for him.
You’ve done your bit, and your boss isn’t going to forget you.
All well and good, but after listening to Allen’s remarks on the ship, we already know that he has no intention of returning to his old job at the factory. The film has been running for approximately three minutes, and already you can see the cloud gathering around James Allen’s head.

A homecoming dinner at the
old place,
a stuffy, nineteenth-century house with cluttered interiors, Alice nowhere in sight, just the three members of the Allen family: weak-minded, indulgent Ma; prissy, sanctimonious brother Clint (a smooth-talking bore with the off-putting habit of folding his hands together while he speaks); and rough-and-tumble Allen, burning with ambition, ready to take on the world. Discord erupts within seconds. Clint mentions Mr. Parker’s kind and generous offer, and Allen immediately tells him that he doesn’t want the job. Both Ma and Older Brother are stunned. Laughing in response, Allen explains that the army has changed him, and he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life answering a factory whistle instead of a bugle call, he wants to do something
worthwhile,
and he can’t imagine himself being cooped up in a shipping room all day.

Nevertheless, not wanting to disappoint his mother, Allen reluctantly returns to his old job at the Parker Manufacturing Company,
THE HOME OF KUMFORT SHOES
, but his heart isn’t in it, his mind isn’t in it, and day after day he spends his lunch hour loitering around the construction site of a new bridge, often losing track of the time, often late in reporting back for the afternoon shift. His discontent finally spills out at another family dinner when his brother tells him how disappointed Mr. Parker is by his performance at work and Allen defends himself with an impassioned speech about wanting to make a new life for himself, telling Clint and his mother that the cramped and mechanical routine at the factory is even more stultifying than the army and that he needs to go somewhere, anywhere, where
I can do what I want.
In an abrupt turnaround, his mother relents, giving him her blessing to strike out on his own, and when Clint objects, she brushes off Reverend Pious with a simple, transparent declaration of maternal support, the anthem of all good mothers:
He’s got to be happy,
she says,
he’s got to find himself.

According to Allen, construction jobs are available in New England, and a moment later a map is displayed on-screen, a map of New Jersey as it turns out (the same New Jersey in which you are watching the film), accompanied by the sound of a fast-moving train, another fast-moving train, and then the map dissolves into an image of that train, which in turn dissolves into another map, showing Connecticut … Rhode Island … and Boston.

Allen is alone in the cab of a heavy construction vehicle, sitting behind the wheel of what appears to be a large steam shovel—indicating that he has found the work he was looking for and all is right with the world. A man comes up to him, the foreman, the crew boss, the person in charge, and tells Allen to knock it off, he has some bad news for him. They’re cutting down, he says, and two men will have to go. Without expressing much concern or surprise, Allen hops off the machine and says,
All right.
You are impressed by how calmly he takes this setback, this arbitrary dismissal, booted out through no fault of his own, but Allen looks confident, still full of hope for the future, a man ready for anything.

Another map, this one beginning with Boston, then tracing the journey of a ship headed south, steaming down the Atlantic coast and into the Gulf of Mexico, where it finally stops at New Orleans.

Looking a little the worse for wear, clothes shabbier now, a two-day stubble of beard darkening his face, shoulders beginning to droop somewhat, Allen walks into a factory to apply for work. He has traveled north, he has traveled south, and after all those miles he is exactly where he started—or struggling to get back to where he started, for now he is unemployed, and he would gladly accept a job similar to the one he called
stupid
and
insignificant
after he came home from the war. Can you use a good man? he asks the boss, and the boss replies: Last week I could have used you, but I’m full up now. Allen shakes his head, bunches his right hand into a fist, and then softly, ever so softly, lowers that fist onto the table, not wanting to lose control of himself, not yet at the point of complete desperation, but that fist is a sign of rapidly diminishing hope, and when he turns around and walks away, he looks like a man who has run out of ideas.

Again the map, and again the sounds of the fast-moving train. Allen is on his way back north, zeroing in on the unlikely town of Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

There he is, dressed in overalls and a work shirt, driving a logging truck down a road that cuts through a tall pine forest. Allen turns to the man sitting beside him and says he’s just filling in for a few days. Believe me, he continues, I’m glad to be working again. It’s my first job in a long time. Oshkosh is only a temporary reprieve, then, a deceptive pause that has bucked up Allen’s spirits for a little while, but it is clear now that no permanent jobs are to be found anywhere, that no matter how far Allen travels to look for one, he will always come up empty, and indeed, when the next map shows him on his way south again, moving toward St. Louis, with the sound of the locomotive belting forth its now-familiar melody, all has suddenly changed, for when the camera reveals the source of that melody, Allen is not sitting in a crowded carriage with other passengers, the train he has taken turns out to be a freight train, and he is alone, sleeping on the floor of a boxcar. The optimistic war veteran who was going to make his mark building the next Panama Canal has turned into a vagabond who rides the rails, a penniless drifter, a forgotten man. Yes, the action is supposedly taking place in 1919, but in fact it is 1932, and you realize now that you are watching a story about the Great Depression, a story about what it means to live in a country without work.

Allen walks into a pawnshop holding something in his hand, an object too small to be seen. He looks like a bum now. Ragged clothes, unshaven face, a creased and dented hat. The proprietor asks him what he wants, and Allen opens his hand, showing him a military medal. How much can you give me for the Belgian Croix de Guerre? he asks, but rather than name a price, the proprietor gestures to Allen with his finger, beckoning him to have a look inside the glass case sitting on the counter. Allen looks, and what he sees are medals, dozens of medals similar to the one he is holding in his hand, scores of medals, too many medals to count, each one representing the hard-luck story of a future member of the Bonus Army, and without saying a word, Allen nods his head in resignation, looks down at his own medal in the palm of his hand, and leaves. He might have fought for America in the war, but now he is a citizen of the country of Hard Luck.

One more map, following Allen’s progress eastward out of St. Louis, but this time it is displayed in silence, with no accompanying sounds of the ubiquitous train, and as the map fades away in a slow dissolve, Allen is shown walking along a set of railroad tracks, which accounts for the silent map, since he is traveling on foot now, approaching the camera in a full frontal shot, a solitary figure in the middle of nowhere, and you note that his stride remains strong and determined, that in spite of the lumps he has taken the man is not yet defeated, but still, for all his courage, he nevertheless looks tired and hungry, apprehensive, lost, and there is something strange about the expression in his eyes, you feel, something stunned and battered, as if Allen can’t quite believe what has happened to him, as if, somewhere during the course of his travels, he has been struck by lightning.

He checks into a flophouse, fitting accommodations for a castoff in the country of Hard Luck, a large room filled with silent, down-and-out men—beds fifteen cents, meals fifteen cents, baths five cents—and before long Allen is talking to a grizzled customer named Pete, a guy who seems to know the ropes, which Allen candidly admits he does not. Pete decides he is hungry and asks Allen what he would say to a hamburger, to which Allen replies: What would I say to a hamburger? I’d shake Mr. Hamburger by the hand and say, Pal, I haven’t seen you in a long, long time. His sense of humor is still intact—which you take to be an encouraging sign, proof that Allen is far from done. According to Pete, the man who operates the lunch wagon down the road is a
soft egg,
and chances are they’ll be able to mooch a couple of burgers from him. Off they go to the lunch wagon, and just as Pete predicted, the counterman gives in to their request—reluctantly, perhaps, but the soft egg can’t bring himself to turn away the hungry men, and he tosses a couple of patties onto the grill. Allen’s eyes light up. A joyous, expectant smile spreads across his face, and as he puts a toothpick in his mouth (getting his mouth primed for the food?), he gazes at the sizzling meat as though he were looking at a beautiful woman. Not Mr. Hamburger—Miss Hamburger.