Wolfe begins by depicting the social impacts of the South's railroad system and then dramatizes the introduction of the automobile in a small city in North Carolina. Fitzgerald presents an old Ford as the symbol of a stable, conservative Georgia culture. Lewis portrays well-developed railroad travel from rural Minnesota to the East coast while he captures a town's fascination and obsession with new automobiles and trucks. Porter gives glimpses of train and car travel in Texas. Gray shows both the widespread availability of cars in agricultural regions of Washington state, and that region's dependency on the railroad, along with the Westerners' fascination with the New York City street scenes and sounds. Frost gives anecdotes of Pullman-car travellers, and reflects some New Englanders' hostility to modern progress. Lardner describes a vacation trip by train from Chicago to Florida, and then local travel at the resort towns. Colón depicts a Puerto Rican stowaway's migration by steamship to New York.
In New York city, the infrastructure has become quite complex. Norris traces the accumulation of options as the taxi and the subway become available and commuting becomes routine. Dos Passos describes a city with layers on land from the elevated trains to the subway, and various types and sizes of ships on the rivers. Sandburg's images include railroads, wagons, and motorized vehicles in Chicago, and trains across the midwestern countryside. Pound gives poetic images of the Parisian "Metro."
Finally, boys' (and girls') books by Stratemeyer and his "Syndicate" dramatize the development and use of nearly every new way to travel from the early 1910s, and focus on airplane adventures, especially after Lindbergh's flight to Paris in 1926
Author: Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938)
Title: Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life
Date: 1929
Systems: Train, auto
Context: 1910s and earlier, North Carolina
Throughout the novel, Wolfe's elaborated, impressionistic descriptions of train rides, like his descriptions of nature, symbolically bring setting and character together. Oliver Gant, father of the main character, Eugene, arrives at Altamont, North Carolina in 1886, "The train rattled on over the reeking earth. Rain fell steadily. A brakeman came draftily into the dirty plush coach and emptied a scuttle of coal into the big stove at the end. High empty laughter shook a group of yokels sprawled on two turned seats. The bell tolled mournfully about the clacking wheels. There was a droning interminable wait at a junction-town near the foot-hills. Then the train moved on again across the vast rolling South" (Ch. 1). Tom Cline, the engineer on 36 which "bucked helplessly like a goat, her wheels spun furiously on the rails" in the spring damp, notices that "the starlight glimmered faintly on the rails" (Ch. 14). In 1912, Eugene becomes aware of a "weird combination of fixity and change" which is highlighted by his memories: "There was one moment of timeless suspension when the land did not move, the train did not move, the slattern in the doorway did not move, he did not move." He imagines the woman's actions after the train had passed and recognizes that the passing landscape exists after he has moved on (Ch. 15).
Adventures and escapes by rail are frequent in the early chapters. Brother Steve made a two-day fling in Knoxville after he flunked out of school (Ch. 5). Eugene's mother, Eliza, and the kids went to the St. Louis Fair in 1904, taking the street-car in Altamont to get the train. They see the locomotive exhibition, "the greatest monsters he had ever seen, whose wheels spun terrifically in groves, whose blazing furnaces, raining hot red coals into the pit beneath, were fed incessantly by two grimed fire-painted stokers" (Ch. 5). Oliver takes his "last great voyage" to California for seven weeks (Ch. 7). Eugene and his father visit his sister and her new husband, passing through the "sleepy junction of Spartansburg, the ride in the dilapidated daycoaches that ran to Augusta" (Ch. 12). He takes the night train with his mother who seeks a cure for her Bright's disease, in his berth "watching the shadowy and phantom South flash by" (Ch. 13). Both generations of the Gant family move freely by rail throughout the South; even though they are middle class, they are by no means wealthy.
Upon Oliver's return to Altamont we get a luxurious account of riding the street car, which has "a warm electric smell and one of hot burnt steel." Wolfe combines a booster's litany on the modernity of the city with flashbacks of Oliver's youth in the Civil War: "The car paused briefly at the car-shed, in sight of its stabled brothers. Then it moved reluctantly past the dynamic atmosphere of the Power and Light Company, wheeling bluntly into the gray frozen ribbon of Hatton Avenue, running gently up hill near its end into the frore silence of the Square" (Ch. 7).
One of Eugene's childhood memories is of the grocery wagon horse which ran along the alley ruts at 11:03 each day; once he fell and it stepped on his head "drawing the wagon beyond Eugene's body, and stopping." It left the "mark of the centaur" (Ch. 4).
Automobiles arrive. "A 1910 model, four-cylinder, seven-passenger Hudson, with mounting steady roar, shot drunkenly out from the station curbing, lurched into the level negro-sleeping stretch of South End Avenue." One M.D. has a Buick roadster, the other a Hudson. The judge watches as, "Bouncing tinnily down the coiling road that came through the Gap from the town, a flivver glinted momently through the trees" (Ch. 14). The town's millionaire has a Packard (Ch. 15). Older brother Luke drives his father's 1913, five-passenger Ford, "purchase of an inspired hour of madness, occupant now of half Gant's conversation, object of abuse, boast, and anathema. It was before every one owned a car. Gant was awed and terrified by his rash act, exalted at the splendor of his chariot, appalled at its expense. Each bill for gasoline, repairs, or equipment brought a howl of anguish from him; a puncture, a breakdown, a minor disorder caused him to circle about in maddened strides, cursing, praying, weeping." [Still sounds familiar.] The father envies his son's sexuality: "How do you feel when she gets out of an automobile at two o'clock in the morning after grunting in the dark with some damned travelling-man" (Ch. 18).
At fifteen, Eugene and school mates travel to Charleston: "Now, by night, he was riding once more into the South. The day-coach was hot, full of the weary smell of old red plush.… The boys, bored, paraded restlessly to the car-end for water. There was a crushed litter of sanitary drinking-cups upon the floor, and the stale odor from the toilets" (Ch. 26). At sixteen he courts a twenty-one year old woman whom he sees off for what turns out to be the last time: "He went with her to the station on a hot mid-afternoon. There was a smell of melted tar in the streets. She held his hand beside her in the rattling trolley.… He passed the old one-legged gateman on the station platform very easily, carrying his baggage. Then he sat beside her in the close green heat of the pullman until the train should go. A little electric fan droned uselessly above the aisle" (Ch. 31).
In the final chapter, the ghost of his recently-deceased brother asks, "'Do you know why you are going or are you just taking a ride on the train?'" (Ch. 40).
Edition used: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957.
Critical comments: Richard Walser, "Thomas Wolfe's Train as Symbol," Southern Literary Journal, 21:1 (Fall 1988): 3-14.
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
Title: "The Ice Palace"
Date: 1920
Systems: Automobile, street-car, train
Context: Contemporary, Georgia and Minnesota
The opening scene in Tarleton, "in southernmost Georgia," has Sally Carrol Happer looking at Clark Darrow's "ancient Ford."
The car was hot - being partly metallic it retained all the hear it absorbed or evolved - and Clark Darrow sitting bolt upright at the wheel wore a pained, strained expression as though he considered himself a spare part, rather likely to break. He laboriously crossed two dust ruts, the wheels squeaking indignantly at the encounter, and then with a terrifying expression he gave the steering-gear a final wrench and deposited self and car approximately in front of the Happer step. There was a plaintive heaving sound, a death-rattle, followed by a short silence; and then the air was rent by a startling whistle.
The drive to the local swimming hole goes through the town "where the dusty road became a pavement." Aside from walking shoppers, the way is hindered by "a drove of low-moaning oxen [which] were being urged along in front of a placid street-car." Sally Carrol is engaged to Harry Bellamy who invites her up to Minneapolis for the winter carnival. The all night Pullman is very cold, a premonition of the social atmosphere which will drive her back to Tarleton. On the Pullman she orders an extra blanket from the porter, and tries unsuccessfully to get warm. On the way to the diner for coffee she notes that the snow filtered into the vestibules: "It was intriguing, this cold, it crept in everywhere." She notices the white landscape and solitary farmhouses; as the train nears the city, "The long wires of the telegraph-poles doubled; two tracks ran up beside the train - three - four; came a succession of white-roofed houses, a glimpse of a trolley-car with frosted windows, streets - more streets - the city." Once in St. Paul, Sally Carrol rides in the Bellamy's chauffeur-driven sedan, and wishes to follow the small boys who are "hitching sleds behind grocery wagons and automobiles." The ride to the ice palace is by sleigh, and Sally Carrol worries that the horse is cold, but Harry claims that he likes it. Sally Carrol gets lost and bewildered in the ice palace and decides not to stay in the North. The final scene echoes the first, as she watches "a very ancient Ford" again, back home.
Edition used: James M. Mellard, ed. Four Modes: A Rhetoric of Modern Fiction. New York: Macmillan, 1973.
Author: Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
Title: Main Street
Date: 1920
Systems: Train, motor car, boat
Context: 1911 to 1920, Minnesota
Lewis' ironic brief Preface sets the tone for how the setting is presented in the novel. "Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters.… Our railway station is the final aspiration of architecture." This tone is picked up in Dr. Will Kennicott's speeches when he is using the wonders of his home town, Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, as part of his courting of Carol Milford: "And we've got seven miles of cement walks already, and building more every day! Course a lot of these towns still put up with plank walks, but not for us, you bet!" (Ch. 2). It turns out that Gopher Prairie has unpaved streets which, in the rain, "become a muddy expanse from concrete walk to walk" and nearly impossible to cross (Ch. 4). The wonderful world features "cheap automobiles, dollar watches, and safety razors" (Ch. 22).
The narrator, Will, and other citizens are absurdly enthusiastic about the automobile. "A Ford or Overland goes to the movies faster than the St. Paul trolley"; the Paige which the Kennicotts take from the Gopher Prairie train station is as fast as those Marmons in Minneapolis (Ch. 3). The Ford and Buick garages are "the most energetic and vital places in town" (Ch. 4). Throughout the novel we hear of Ford delivery wagons, lumber wagons, and so on. Will's car, clearly an important part of his ability to get to his patients, is rhapsodized:
The car was a monster at rest after furious adventures. The headlights blazed on the clots of ice in the road so that the tiniest lumps gave mountainous shadows, and the taillight cast a circle of ruby on the snow behind. Kennicott was opening the door, crying, "Here we are, old girl! Got stuck couple times, but we made it, by golly, we made it, and here we be!…" (Ch. 15).
After a trip to California to preserve the Kennicotts' marriage, Will returns with babble about car models, dealerships, and "the advantages of the ball-gear-shift" (Ch. 34). In addition to riding in motor cars, Will and others are involved in the technical details of their maintenance. Will gets a new piston (Ch. 5) and worries that poor performance is caused by carbon build up so he needs new rings (Ch. 33). Motoring is one of Will's five "hobbies" (others include Carol and hunting), and he "nursed his two-year-old Buick even in winter, when it was stored in the stable-garage behind the house. He filled the grease-cups, varnished a fender, removed from beneath the back seat the débris of gloves, copper washers, crumpled maps, dust, and greasy rags" (Ch. 16). In the winter, in Minnesota, however, the town becomes "motor-paralyzed" so the doctor must often rely on his sleigh (cutter) (Ch. 7) or a "clumsy high carriage" (Ch. 8). At one point twenty people take a bob sled ride to the lake for an outing (Ch. 17).
In a short-lived moment of boosterism, just after the end of the First World War, Gopher Prairie tries to attract businesses from the outside world. They get one taker - a factory which makes wooden automobile wheels (Ch. 35).
Carol, the city person, (with some help from the narrator) soon grows disenchanted with this zeal, as she does with the personal and general politics of the small town. Main Street is "cluttered with electric light poles, telephone poles, gasoline pumps for motor cars, boxes of goods" (Ch. 4). When her marriage is nearly on the rocks she fantasizes about his car running off a slippery road while he is making house calls (Ch. 24). Later she walks out of town with a poetic young man she vaguely flirts with but they are caught in the lights of her husband's car and given a ride back home; she becomes acutely aware of "riding in a squeaking old car" (Ch. 33).
The railroad is the pathway into and out of Gopher Prairie. After their honeymoon, the newly-married Kennicotts, "an obviously prosperous man and a black-haired, fine-skinned girl whose pumps rested on an immaculate horsehide bag," ride from Chicago:
Under the rolling clouds of the prairie a moving mass of steel. An irritable clank and rattle beneath a prolonged roar. The sharp scent of oranges cutting the soggy smell of unbathed people and ancient baggage. This is a way train, and there is no smug Pullman attached to the train, and the day coaches of the East are replaced by free chair cars, with each seat cut into two adjustable plush chairs, the head-rests covered with doubtful linen towels…. There is no porter, no pillows, no provision for beds, but all today and all tonight they will ride this long steel box… they go to sleep curled in distorted attitudes, heads against the window-panes or propped on rolled coats on seat-arms, and legs thrust into the aisle.… The smell grows constantly thicker, more stale.
They arrive (after several pages of similar descriptions) "at a squat red frame station, the platform crowded with unshaven farmers and with loafers - unadventurous people with dead eyes." There's a welcoming party and the brakeman helps her down to the platform (Ch. 3). Much later, after the California trip, they are not met and have to wait in the station "among huddled German women with shawls and umbrellas, and ragged-bearded farmers in corduroy coats… the stench of sawdust boxes which served as cuspidors"; they miss the hotel bus and, after the Ford taxi they call spins out on the ice, they have to walk to town (Ch. 34).
The railroad tracks are "the natural highway for pedestrians on the plains," and Carol walks along them to nearby Plover Lake and admires the wild flowers (Ch. 12). She walks with her young son on the same path and meets up with her erstwhile lover, Erik, where they sit, symbolically, "on a heap of discarded railroad ties, oak logs spotted with cinnamon-colored dry-rot and marked with metallic brown streaks where iron plates had rested" (Ch. 29).
Trains are the way out of town:
Trains! At the lake cottage she missed the passing of the trains. She realized that in town she had depended upon them for assurance that there remained a world beyond. The railroad was more than a means of transportation to Gopher Prairie. It was a new god; a monster of steel limbs, oak ribs, flesh of gravel, and a stupendous hunger for freight; a deity created by man that he might keep himself respectful to Property, as elsewhere he had elevated and served as tribal gods the mines, cotton-mills, motor-factories, colleges, army.
It's not the same in the East, where people can't remember a time before the railroad, while in the midwest in the 1860s and 1870s investors made great profits by knowing where the stations would be, and where the railroad could ignore a town and slay it. Young kids know "whether No. 32 had a hot-box last Tuesday, whether No. 7 was going to put on an extra day coach," and they know the company's president's name. The trains, not the motor car, was "their romance, their only mystery besides mass at the Catholic Church." Previously Gopher Prairie had been more important as a division point with a roundhouse and repair shops; now all they have left are two resident conductors with fancy uniforms and, "the most melodramatic figure in town," the telegraph man. Will, but not Carol, knows when trains are on time or late - she just notices their passing out of town to somewhere else (Ch. 19). She looks over railroad folders when she begins to become anxious about her psychological isolation (Ch. 20). The disgraced school teacher whom she had supported (Ch. 32), and Erik leave on the train; his banishment is punctuated by the whistle which told her "it was all over" (Ch. 33).
Early in the book Carol imagined the past history of boats on the Mississippi river valley, as "she heard again the startled bells and thick puffing of high-stacked river steamers wrecked on sand-reefs sixty years ago. Along the decks she saw missionaries, gamblers in tall pot hats, and Dakota chiefs with scarlet blankets.… Far off whistles at night, round the river bend, plunking paddlers reechoing by the pines, and a glow on black sliding waters" (Ch. 1). Incidentally, Carol and Will take a rowboat ferry across the Minnesota river at Mendota, near where the High Bridge crosses the Mississippi (Ch. 2).
Lewis makes sure we understand how general are these circumstances. "Nine-tenths of the American towns are so alike that it is the completest boredom to wander from one to the other. Always, west of Pittsburgh, and often east of it, there is the same lumber yard, the same railroad station, the same Ford garage, the same creamery, the same box-like houses and two-story shops" (Ch. 22).
Edition used: New York: Signet Classic, 1961.
Author: Katherine Ann Porter (1890-1980)
Title: "Old Mortality" In Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Date: 1936
Systems: Carriage, train, automobile
Context: 1885 to 1912, Texas
As the main character, Miranda, grows up, she sees the changes in her world and her family until she can gain independence and distance. Incidentally, Porter uses travel as part of the setting. In "Part I: 1885-1902," Aunt Amy elopes by carriage; Uncle Gabriel's courtship is conducted by train and stage. "Part II: 1904" has a cab ride when Miranda visits Uncle Gabriel and his second wife in New Orleans. The central scene in "Part III: 1912" starts in "the stuffy aisle of the sleeping-car" where Miranda meets her older cousin, Eva. The intimacy of the setting and the length of the trip let them converse for the whole evening, longer than they had ever before. Eva, a politically active suffragette, challenges Miranda to expand her horizon, to put some substance behind her vague aspirations such as wanting to become an "air pilot," an unlikely trade for a woman. When they arrive at the station the next morning, Miranda's father picks them up in his car. The final scene has her older relatives telling old family stories, but Miranda can't hear above the "noisy motor," and she uses the tension between being present yet absent to decide that she "did not want any more ties to this house."
Edition used: New York: Signet, 1962.
Author: Zane Grey (1872-1939)
Title: The Desert of Wheat
Date: 1919
Systems: Automobile, train, airplane
Context: 1917-1918, Washington state, New York city
The war against the "Wobblies," the I.W.W., comes to the Columbia River valley during the First World War, and the patriots assemble anti-union vigilantes and help defeat the Hun. After opening with an appreciation of the beauty and bounty of Washington wheat country, Kurt Dorn, the hero, sees the dust from a big, closed motor car owned by Mr. Anderson to whom he owes a lot of money. Throughout the novel, the named characters use drivers rather than driving themselves about. Cars are surprisingly available; the country roads are smooth, while Spokane's streets have asphalt (Ch. 4, 5). A federal agent motors through "the Bend," where Kurt's farm is, looking for I.W.W. operatives (Ch. 5). Anderson, his daughter Lenore, son Jake, and Nash, an I.W.W. person, go through the Bend country, "the big car hummed like a droning bee and seemed to cover the miles as if by magic" (Ch. 7).
The I.W.W.'s main tactics are sabotage and arson. In a pretty good car-and-train chase, a car passes Anderson's and throws phosphorous bombs into the dry wheat fields. The effort to pursue is stopped when Nash uses some kind of device which leads to "a violent shaking of the car, followed by sharp explosions, and silence" (Ch. 7). Nash later kidnaps Lenore and takes her to Wheatley. Kurt pursues - hiring a car and driver at Glencoe for a rapid trip to the Wheatley railroad station where, among other things he steals his father's cash from the I.W.W.s (his father is selling out) and hops a freight to Adrian (Ch. 9). The open boxcar he gets on is filled with I.W.W. men, so he hops out to hire another car which finally catches up with Nash and Lenore in Anderson's car. He shoots out a tire, wrecks the car he's driving, fixes Anderson's tire and drives the rescued woman to her home (Ch. 10).
A general motif in the book is an attempt to keep the West morally pure, and to keep the corrupting East at bay. The railroad is a conduit for this effort. A major scene in the middle of the book involves harvesting Kurt's wheat in the face of field fires. Wagons, following the 24-horse combines, take the grain to a warehouse by the railroad (Ch. 13). At the rail yard, Kurt's allies and the I.W.W. gang fight after the grain is torched; the I.W.W. people escape on a freight (Ch. 14). Grey spots the story with technical details, particularly about economic conditions: "The loss of wheat would fall upon Kurt. In the haste of that great harvest and its transportation to the village no provision had been made for loss. The railroad company had not accepted his wheat for transportation, and was not liable" (Ch. 15). The defeat of the I.W.W. by Anderson's vigilantes also takes place in a rail yard. They capture the I.W.W. leader, Glidden, hang him over the tracks, and herd the rest of the I.W.W. gang into an empty cattle train for exile to the east - that train goes under Glidden's swinging body. Another conspirator, a ranch owner, is ushered into Anderson's car, also driven by the body, and then forced to sell his ranch (Ch. 22).
Kurt and Lenore fall in love and resolve to marry. But he resolves to join the army to fight the Germans. [Pro-German leanings of the I.W.W., and Kurt's German background are ongoing motifs in the story.] He takes the train for army duty, and writes back with a Westerner's impressions: "New York is an awful place - endless, narrow, torn-up streets crowded with hurrying throngs, taxicabs, cars, and full of noise and dust. I am always choked for air" (Ch. 25). Father Anderson, bringing the severely wounded Kurt back home, also portrays the city to his neighbors:
I rode down Fifth Avenue on one of them high-topped buses with seats on. Talk about your old stagecoach - why, these 'buses had 'em beat a mile! I rode some in my day, but this was the ride of my life. I couldn't hear myself think. Music at full blast, roar of traffic, voices like whisperin' without end, flash of red an' white an' blue, shine of a thousand automobiles down that wonderful street that's like a canyon! An' up overhead a huge cigar-shaped balloon, an' then an airplane sailin' swift an' buzzin' like a bee. Then [sic] was the first airships I ever seen (Ch. 30).
Earlier in the book, Lenore's wish to see the Washington landscape is such that "nothing but an airplane would satisfy me today" (Ch. 6). If her father has never seen one, her fascination must have come from magazines and newspapers.
Edition used: New York: Harper Collins, 1991.
Author: Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Title: Selected Poems
Date: 1913-1947
Systems: Pullman, auto, airplane
Context: 1910s to 1930s, New England
Frost plays with the perspectives of being inside trains and trying to make sense of the passing scene. In "A Passing Glimpse" (1928), "I often see flowers from a passing car / That are gone before I can tell what they are." The poet names what the flowers aren't , and then concludes that "Heaven gives its glimpses only to those / Not in position to look too close," there's an advantage in not being able to stop the train. "On the Heart's Beginning to Cloud the Mind: or, From Sight to Insight" (1936), he looks from his "lower berth" at the midnight Utah desert and this "surface flight" lets him see through the "wreaths of engine smoke" to the "human pathetic light / That was maintained against the night."
The other point of view appears in the companion poem, "The Figure in the Doorway: or, On Being Looked at in a Train" (1936). Here a man who collapsed in his isolated cabin watched the passing train, especially the dining car, as his only entertainment aside from tending his garden. In an earlier poem, "New Hampshire" (1923) an Arkansas traveller is amazed that the Pullman porter turns down the bed.
"The Egg and the Machine" (1928) shows a frustrated rural man who kicks the tracks and imagines that "His hate had roused an engine up the road." He wishes he had sabotaged a switch to wreck the train, but it is too late. After the train passes, with its "scalding squirts" (of oil or steam) and "a roar that drowned the cries / He raised against the gods in the machine." He follows the tracks of a turtle to her nest where he imagines tossing her eggs at the next train engine which "will get this plasm in its goggle glass." A related criticism, in "The Grindstone" (1923) a "Father-Time-like man" puts a slowing load on the grindstone, a metaphor for the earth in orbit, is "like coming to a sudden railroad station."
Frost playfully allegorizes America as the result of an overheated car in "A Serious Step Lightly Taken" (1942). Travelling between "two burs on the map" with "the dot in front of a name" in search of a house advertised for a dollar down. "With two wheels low in the ditch / We left our boiling car / And we knocked at the door of a house we found, / And here today we are." The final stanzas point to the three hundred year history of the country. "The Middleness of the Road" (1947) points out that "the mineral drops that explode / To drive my ton of car / Are limited to the road," and have no way to explain "the universal blue / And local green" of nature.
Many of Frost's poems look wistfully to a rural past. "Directive" (1947) takes us up a deserted road where "the wear of iron wagon wheels" is likened to glacial tracks. The speaker imagines the owner from twenty years ago who went on the path with a "buggy load" of grain over a "ladder road," or corduroy.
"The Wright's Biplane" (1936) is the only airplane poem we could find. The plane should be called the First Motor Kite, and the pun on right/Wright is suggestive.
Edition used: Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955.
Author: Ring Lardner (1885-1933)
Title: "Gullible's Travels"
Date: 1916
Systems: Train, boat
Context: Contemporary, Chicago to Florida
This humorous account of a trip Mr. Gullible and his wife take from Chicago to Palm Beach, Florida is dominated by Gullible's cynicism about the quality of hotels, beaches, and trains, and the ever-increasing cost of the trip. The first morning on the train gets the couple to Cairo, Illinois, which he thinks is Venice because the bridge is so close to the river - they speculate on whether the bridge is safe, whether the train has slowed down to give "the fish a chance to get offen the track… It's against the law to spear fish with a cowcatcher this time o' year." After breakfast they go to the car called the "sun parlor. It was a glassed-in room on the tail-end o' the rear coach and it must of been a pleasant place to set and watch the scenery." Unfortunately it's filled with a "gang o' missionaries" who toss Bibles out the back at every crossroads, "for the southern heathen to pick up and read." The engineer stops at a station "every few minutes"; "if he run past it without stoppin' the inhabitants wouldn't never forgive him." Gullible speculates that people in these towns turn out in force for a contest to count the number of passengers: "The losers has to promise to work one day the followin' month. If one fella loses three times in the same month he generally always kills himself."
While his wife is napping in "our apartment," Gullible talks with a man from St. Louis about whether it has rained ("or else the sprinklin' wagon run shy o' the streets"), about friends in the railroad business (one "generally stands on the fourth or fifth car behind the engine"), and about the exclusiveness of Palm Beach ("They leave everybody in now"). His anxious wife becomes nervous when the train goes around curves, but "As long as the track curves, the best thing the train can do is curve with it." They arrive late at St. Augustine, but still get a train to Palm Beach. Gullible speculates that there are more stations between those two cities than between New York and San Francisco, "And our train stopped twice and started twice at every one"; even so, by fudging the time table they arrive ten minutes early.
The street-car from the hotel to the beach "was part bicycle, part go-cart and part African," later called an "Afromobile." Like the other ways of getting around in this story, the Gullibles talk almost constantly about perceived dangers and genuine costs.
At the end of the vacation, they take an overnight boat trip to Fort Pierce and Rockledge for the train to Daytona. The boat frequently runs aground; the stay at Fort Pierce is expensive and discouraging, partly because the town has no sidewalks but only sand between the boat dock to the hotel.
Edition used: Gullible's Travels, Etc. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965.
Author: Jesús Colón (b. 1901)
Title: "Stowaway," In A Puerto Rican in New York.
Date: 1961
Systems: Ship
Setting: 1916, San Juan, Puerto Rico to Sandy Hook, Latino perspective
Colón's memoir recalls his unpaid passage to New York. As a sixteen-year-old stowaway, Colón must spend his voyage on the S.S. Carolina below decks, so his story provides an effective counterpoint to travel writing from a tourist's point of view. For instance, Colón plans his passage with a friend on the crew. He must sneak on board, carry no luggage, and sequester himself "uncomfortably" inside one of the linen closets.
Sensory perception of travel changes depending on one's status: paying passenger, crew member, illegal immigrant. Where the tourist relates what is seen, Colón can tell us only what he hears. Packed in with the linen, he can hardly see, let alone rhapsodize. As the ship departs San Juan harbor, he hears "the clanking of chains as the anchor was hoisted. After a little while I listened to the metallic noise of the propellers as they started their enormous metal four leaf clovers circling in the waters of San Juan Bay. The third shrill whistle of the ship gave me the sign that we were finally getting away from the dock."
Colón does imagine what the view might be like from on deck. But the fantasy view of his native island incorporates a historical view as well:
In my mind I could see that the Door of San Juan, centuries old with its gate surrounded by old granite blocks that had grown indefinite in color, would now be looking at the ship. This very door had also seen the wooden vessels of Ponce de León, one of Puerto Rico's first Governors, passing by and the powerful galleons of pirates like Drake, Morgan and Cumberland, about whom I so fondly read in my childhood.
Colón's voyage fuses with these earlier voyages and the colonial history of his island. His trip, however, reverses the direction of conquest; he is the contemporary Puerto Rican colonial taking New York by stealth.
Once rousted out of the linen closet, Colón is put to work washing dishes. He comments on the rapid pace he must keep - "it was simply a question of quantity against quality in dishwashing...it took me a few days to get my skin accustomed to the pain produced by the steam they called warm water, used on ships to wash dishes in those days." He is promoted "into the class of overworked bus boy," and eventually the steward offers him a permanent job on the ship - "thirty dollars a month, room and board. One day off when we come to port." But Colón has other plans. Once the ship drops anchor, he slips gratefully off the S.S. Carolina. He informs us that this same vessel was eventually "sent to the bottom of the Caribbean by a German submarine."
Edition used: New York: Mainstream, 1961. Reprinted in American Mosaic: Multicultural Readings in Context. Barbara Roche Rico and Sandra Mano, editors. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
Author: Charles Norris (1881-1945)
Title: Bread
Date: 1923
Systems: Train, automobile
Context: 1900 to contemporary, New York city
Norris traces a quarter of a century's changes in New York city's transportation Systems, and emphasizes the effects on business, social, and family life - all from a professional woman's perspective.
After taking a stenography course near the turn of the century, Jeanette Sturgis rides the elevated train from her mother's flat at 93rd street to downtown for her first job. The spring brings out horse buses, the reappearance of hansom cabs, and open automobiles. An "electric hansom cab" had been stuck in the snow for four days. The main public system is the green omnibus drawn by three horses abreast (Book I, Ch. 3).
Book II is set in the 1910s. Jeanette takes her first ride on the newly opened subway. Her suitor wows her mother and herself by hiring a taxi, "an unexpected luxury," for an evening at a fancy restaurant and then a show. Her boss in the publishing business has a Pope-Toledo, which goes along with his extravagant life style at Riverside Drive (Ch. 2). After she marries Martin Devlin they visit the commuter town of Cohasset, Long Island, by taking the trolley to the 34th Street ferry, and then the train. "It was indeed hot, but the vistas up and down the river as the ferry-boat blunted its way toward the Long Island shore were all of cool pinks, palest greens and lavenders in the late summer afternoon…" (Ch. 4). They eventually move to Cohasset from which Martin commutes to Manhattan. At one point, it takes Jeanette two uncomfortable hours to go across Long Island to visit her sister in Freeport by steam train to Jamaica where she has to change trains (Ch. 6). The wealthier Cohasset people, such as the doctor, have automobiles which they use to go to the yacht club and to social events (Ch. 5); another acquaintance has a "brass-fitted motor car" with "flickery acetylene lamps" (Ch. 7).
The final Book takes place in the early 1920s after Jeanette and her husband had been estranged for nearly a decade. She has returned to the publishing company and is now the executive in charge of the Mail Order Department. One anchor in her life is her sister, husband, and kids whom she visits at Cohasset on many Sundays. The 5:00 train back to Pennsylvania Station is packed: "Even the outbound trains during the morning, which were never more than comfortably filled, stopped at every station along the line, no matter how insignificant. It took ten minutes longer to get to Cohasset Beach on Sundays than on any other day of the week…" so the regular 19-minute trip takes 45. In the intervening years, Cohasset has paved roads, and the dilapidated wooden station is replaced with a concrete one; a successful real estate developer has a limousine and chauffeur. At the station are "shabby, waiting Fords," the taxis. The automobile has come to the suburbs, so on the quiet Sunday, "every now and then there came the vibrant hum of a passing motor car." Jeanette's niece, in high school, talks admiringly about her boyfriend's Stutz and another girl's Marmon (Ch. 2).
Jeanette and her niece take the "thundering subway" to visit Miss Holland, a former co-worker of hers, who lives near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. During the visit Holland articulates the case for equal pay for equal work between women and men; as part of her argument, she refers to the hundred thousand women during World War I who "were employed by the railroads to perform the work which men formerly did before they went into the army. Women cleaned locomotives, tended stock-rooms of repair shops, sold tickets, took charge of signal stations, worked as carpenters, machinists, and electricians" (Ch. 3).
Jeanette's husband is reported to have a motor-car agency in Philadelphia which "indicated success" (Ch. 2). In an effort to see if the conflicts she feels about whether her career has been as valuable as the marriage and family she didn't stay with, she goes to visit him over Thanksgiving. She gets a chair-car reservation from Penn Station; at Manhattan Transfer she considers turning back, but stays on. She gets out of the overheated parlor car at Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, where she takes a taxi to the Bellvue-Stratford hotel. A brief walk and she's at Martin Devlin Motor Cars where he sells "Parrotts." The salesman gives her the pitch: "'Shift here is automatic … cylinders … compression … hundred-and-eighteen-inch wheel-base … equipment just as you see it, … rear tire extra … rides like a gazelle…" He's still going on while she is trying to find out where Martin is. After he shows up and recognizes her, he even begins a pitch, "This is a fine car you handle; its lines are really very beautiful.'" Jeanette, being quite level-headed, notices that she "'never heard of the Parrott before'" (Ch. 4). Her treat is to meet his wife and kids; he picks her up in a Parrott with a liveried chauffeur for the drive to his suburban, Jenkintown home, talking up the car along the way. "Their own vehicle was but one link in a long chain of nimble bugs with glowing antennæ which crawled hard upon one another along the winding course." Talk at dinner includes a lot of gossip about the Cohasset families, praise of his children, motor cars, the future of the automobile industry, and traffic laws - in short, issues that Martin is concerned about (Ch. 5).
Unlike the comfortable ride to Philadelphia, the train ride home is crowded; she has to sit in the coach, not the chair-car; her hatbox is in the aisle and people stumble into it; "There were cinders embedded in the plush covering of the seat, the car was badly ventilated and smelled of warm, crowded humanity"; she can't get into the dining car. At Newark a driving rain puts streaks of water down the "dirty window-panes," and the train has a long wait in the tube under the Hudson river. Once in Manhattan the taxi she takes skids on the wet pavement (Ch. 5). Presumably the discomforts, both emotional and logistical, that accompany leaving Manhattan complement some of her other reasons for staying in Manhattan and pursuing her career.
Edition used: New York: E. P. Dutton.
Author: John Dos Passos (1896-1970)
Title: Manhattan Transfer
Date: 1925
Systems: Automobile, train, subway, steamboat, trolley, and others
Context: 1910s, New York city
Dos Passos' New York cityscape is filled with details, precise locations in time and space, quoted newspaper headlines, brand names, characters from most of the social scale. He gives a fine sense of the layered city - the "clatter of L trains overhead" (Ch. 1: 1) and the subway beneath: "[e]lbows, packages, shoulders, buttocks, jiggled closer with every lurch of the screeching express" (Ch. 2: 2). On the ground the "grinding rattle of wheels and scrape of hoofs on the cobblestones" (Ch. 1: 2), "[a] few rattling sounds of cabs and trolleycars squirmed in brokenly through the closed windows" of a hotel (Ch. 1: 4), the "two endless bands of automobiles that passed along the road in front of the station" (Ch. 2:3) and buses "crowded into line like elephants in a circusparade" (Ch. 2: 4). "Glowworm trains shuttle in the gloaming through the foggy looms of spiderweb bridges, elevators soar and drop in their shafts, harbor lights wink" (Ch. 3: 3). Even further above: "Drifts across the sky a dirigible, bright tinfoil cigar misted with height, gently prodding the rainwashed sky and the soft clouds" (Ch. 3: 4).
We find the same layered effect on the water as well. Two returning veterans "passed under Brooklyn Bridge. There is a humming whine of electric trains over their heads, an occasional violet flash from the wet rails. Behind them beyond barges tugboats carferries the tall buildings, streaked white with ships of steam and mist, tower gray into sagged clouds." The Mauretania's "relentless hull" comes into the harbor "like a skyscraper" (Ch. 3: 1); from the boat deck of the Volendam a band below is playing "O Titin-e Titin-e," and on the surface "Red ferryboats, carferries, tugs, sandscows, lumberschooners, tramp steamers drifted between him and the steaming towering city that gathered itself into a pyramid" (Ch. 3: 5). Harbor specialists and people in the shipping industry recognize the boats as they come in and leave (e.g., Ch. 1: 3, 2: 2).
While sights and sounds dominate these descriptions, odors also come through. Ellen, one of the main characters, walks through Central Park and is noticed by a young man in a straw hat in a red Stutz roadster. On the Washington Square bus, "It smelled of gasoline and asphalt, of spearmint and talcumpowder and perfume from the couples that jiggled closer and closer together on the seats of the bus" (Ch. 2: 1). Later a rowdy group mills near Columbus Circle: "A smell of rainy pavements mingled with the exhausts of cars and occasionally there was a whiff of wet earth and sprouting grass from the Park" (Ch. 3: 4).
The novel starts with a young man arriving by "ferryship" in New York, "the plank walls of the ship closed in, cracked as the ferry lurched against them." He walks between coal wagons toward yellow streetcars" (Ch. 1: 1). Later another arrival who isn't quite sure it's New York after avoiding danger from the freight car he was on looks "Southward beyond the tracks" and thinks of the image of "'The Gay White Way'" (Ch. 1:4). After World War I., several characters are financially ruined and escape, one couple by boat to Europe, another by train to Calgary (Ch. 3: 5). The final chapter follows a disillusioned young man on empty streets (no trolleycars) to a ferry with only a horse and wagon aboard. The dawn rises on Brooklyn "rubbishpiles" - "The sun shines redly through the mist on rusty donekyengines, skeleton trucks, wishbones of Fords, shapeless masses of corroding metal." He gets a lift in a huge furniture truck, going only "'Pretty far'" (Ch. 3: 5).
(Manhattan Transfer, by the way, is on the way to Penn station - in this story a married couple changes trains there on their way to an Atlantic City honeymoon.)
Edition used: Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953.
Author: Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
Title: "Chicago" and other poems
Date: 1916
Systems: Railroad, urban street
Context: Contemporary, Chicago
"Chicago" (1916): The famous opening lines, echoed at the end, describe the city as "Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler."
"Limited" (1916)
I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains of the nation, Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people. (All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall pass to ashes.) I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he answers: "Omaha."
Somewhat condescending in the middlewestern perspective of the traveler - the opening lines sound like phrases from advertisements.
"Jazz Fantasia" is spoken to the musicians who should, among other images, "cry like a racing car slipping away from the motorcycle-cops, bang-bang!" The final line evokes the roots of jazz, "Now a Mississippi steamboat pushes up the night river with a hoo-hoo-hoo-oo … and the green lanterns calling to the high soft stars … a red moon rides on the humps of the low river hills.… Go to it, O jazzmen."
"Blue Island Intersection"
Six street-ends come together here. They feed people and wagons into the center. In and out all day horses with thoughts of nose-bags, Men with shovels, women with baskets and baby buggies. Six ends of streets and no sleep for them all day. The people and wagons come and go, out and in. Triangles of banks and drug stores watch. The policemen whistle, the trolley cars bump: Wheels, wheels, feet, feet, all day. In the false dawn where the chickens blink And the east shakes a lazy baby toe at tomorrow, And the east fixes a pink half eye this way, In the time when only one milk wagon crosses These three streets, these six street-ends It is the sleep time and they rest. The triangle banks and drug stores rest. The policeman is gone, his star and gun sleep. The owl car blutters along in a sleep-walk.
In "They Have Yarns" from The People, Yes, (1936) Sandburg says that the people have yarns "Of a mountain railroad curve where the engineer in his cab can touch the caboose and spit in the conductor's eye" which is echoed in "Of the man who killed a snake by putting its tail in its mouth so it swallowed itself, / Of railroad trains whizzing along so fast they reach the station before the whistle."
Edition used: Louis Untermeyer, ed. Modern American Poetry: Mid-Century Edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1950.
Author: Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Title: "In a Station of the Metro"
Date: 1916
Systems: Subway
Context: Contemporary, Paris
Pound's most famous "Imagist" poem depends on the title for its Context:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.
Impressions of the Parisian subway are captured by suggesting a parallel between the passengers and the image from nature. The influence of Japanese poetry, e.g., haiku, shows in both the poem's brevity and the striking juxtaposition of images.
Edition used: Louis Untermeyer, ed. Modern American Poetry: Mid-Century Edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1950.
Author: Edward Stratemeyer (as "Victor Appleton" and others) (1862-1930)
Title: Boys' and girls' book series
Date: 1910-1930 and beyond
Systems: Motorcycle, motorboat, ship, airplane, dirigible
Context: Contemporary, East coast
Bibliographical note:
Stratemeyer and others in the "Stratemeyer Syndicate" developed a major industry of series fiction in the Horatio Alger tradition. While many hundreds of titles and a couple hundred million books were printed, libraries tended not to include them in their collections, and relatively few titles are in rare book rooms scattered across the country. Two still-famous series, the detective stories about Nancy Drew by "Carolyn Keene" (from 1929) and the Hardy Boys by "F. W. Dixon" (from 1927) continue to be produced, updated, and reprinted.
The series of most interest for this study include Motor Boys by "Clarence Young" (1906-1924), Motor Girls by "Margaret Penrose," Tom Swift by "Victor Appleton," and Ted Scott by "Franklin W. Dixon" (1927-1943). The detective stories routinely use all modes of travel, as the notes on Don Sturdy and the Port of Lost Ships illustrate. While the Tom Swift series became speculative fiction about space travel in their post World War II manifestation (e.g., Tom Swift [Jr.] and his Rocket Ship, 1977), in the 1910s and 1920s, they showed Tom adapting or inventing existing technologies from the motor cycle and the electric runabout ("the speediest car on the road") in 1910, to the electric locomotive ("two miles a minute on the rails") in 1922. The attitude in these books is of distanced admiration; we do not often go under the hood to see details either of how it's made or how it's operated.
Tom Swift's early airplane stories tend to focus on stunt and exhibition flying, based partly on the exploits of Glenn Curtiss. However, especially after the Lindbergh flight (May, 1927), more attention was paid to commercial passenger, air mail, and cargo flights across America, the world's oceans, and, in the Ted Scott stories, across every continent. Tom Swift's machines seem to be cobbled together fancifully. Dizer's account of the machine in Airline Express notes that, "Since no plane could reliably fly across the country in a day, Tom came up with a unique solution. The passengers took their places in a pullman-type coach which was fastened to an airplane by clamps…. [In Chicago] a fresh plane was attached to the coach and the plane continued to Denver." The Sky Train system uses a powerful plane to haul gliders which are dropped off at various locations across the country. As the series titles show, there's an occasional dirigible thrown in. The plots of nearly all these novels involve rather wealthy lads whose inventing, detecting, and touring are hobbies, not a way to earn a living; most take place or at least start in upstate New York or nearby states.
Don Sturdy in the Port of Lost Ships by "Victor Appleton" (1926) is a typical, early novel. Don is a wealthy lad who, through a network of family and friends, becomes involved in an almost endless chain of adventures. In this novel the first chapter leaves Don and Fred Turner in mid-air when their motorcycle's brakes fail and they are plunged over a cliff … into the sea, where they are rescued by a nineteen-year old in a passing motorboat. Sturdy recites some of his biographical highlights including the one where he went over the North Pole in an airship (Ch. 2). Then, the motorboat is run over by a drifting coal barge; it does not sink, and the lads are able to drag the motorcycle up from the sea floor, dry it off and ride away (Ch. 3). Once the major adventure, to explore the Sargasso Sea, is set up, they take the train to Washington (Ch. 5), then board a clear-bottomed, scientific vessel. "[T]he moment of starting off on a voyage had not lost its thrill for [Don]. He loved the crowds on the dock, the deep note of the whistle, the first shudder of the boat beneath his feet as the engine at the heart of it began to throb the prelude to the journey" (Ch. 8).
Thrills, crashes, and escapes end every chapter. Many involve new vehicles, driven by teenagers. Even after this installment is over, "This Isn't All! Would you like not know what became of the good friends you have made in this book? … On the reverse side of the wrapper which comes with this book, you will find a wonderful list of stories which you can buy at the same store where you got this book."
Of more recent vintage (and available in public libraries) is the Nancy Drew mystery, The Clue in the Old Stagecoach by "Carolyn Keene" (1950). Nancy gets hold of a letter from a nineteenth-century relation who took his stage coach out West in the face of the railroads in the 1870s. We get some historical notes on the Concord [Massachusetts] Stage, built during the War of 1812, and on the toll collection on turnpikes and bridges in that era. Nancy drives a convertible, and gets into minor automotive adventures such as asking directions at a gas station and becoming stuck in the mud. The stagecoach is eventually dug up to become part of a historical exhibit. The Hardy Boys' Mystery of the Flying Express by "Franklin W. Dixon" (1970) deals with a commuter hydrofoil on its maiden run between Bayport and Providence. The hydrofoil service is new competition for small boat owners, railroads, and bus companies, so the boys are hired to help protect the boat. Frank Hardy, the older brother, briefly rehearses the history and physics of hydrofoil travel (invented by Enrico Forlanini in 1906). On the path of the saboteurs, the boys and their allies use their own fancy motorboat, their chum's old jalopy, a rented four-seat airplane which Frank pilots, and a rented motorcycle. Perhaps significantly, one of the opponents drives a foreign sports car. As with other series, close calls and minor mishaps punctuate the chase.
THE TOM SWIFT SERIES by Victor Appleton (selected titles)
"Tom Swift, known to millions of boys of this generation, is a bright ingenious youth whose inventions, discoveries and thrilling adventures are described in these spirited tales that tell of the wonderful advances in modern science" (Promotional page, ca. 1926)
TED SCOTT FLYING STORIES by Franklin W. Dixon
"No subject has so thoroughly caught the imagination of young America as aviation. This series has been inspired by recent daring feats of the air, and is dedicated to Lindbergh, Byrd, Chamberlin and other heroes of the skies" (Promotional page, ca. 1926).
THE AVIATION SERIES by John Prentice Langely
"Here is an intensely exciting series on a topic of world-wide interest - Aviation. Every day one hears of new stunts accomplished by pilots. With the passing of each year new records in altitude and long distance are made. In these stories Amos Green and his chum, Danny Cooper, accomplish all the thrilling deeds of the air that have been done before only by hardened veterans. Moreover, backed by the mysterious 'Mr. Carstairs' they succeed in doing stunts new to the history of aviation. You'll find them vastly exciting" (Promotional page, ca. 1926).
Editions used: New York: Grosset & Dunlap.
Critical comments: John T. Dizer, Jr. Tom Swift® & Company: "Boys' Books" by Stratemeyer and Others. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1982; Carol Billman. Secret of the Stratemeyer Syndicate: Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, and the Million Dollar Fiction FactorThe Sy. New York: Ungar, 1986.
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