Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 114

no

Popular Culture Review

millennium its evolution is ongoing. But in order to gain a clearer understanding
of its everyday dynamics, we must cast our glance backward yet again, this time
into the recent American past. Following are two excerpts from the first-person
account of life during the Great Depression by Lloyd Soyez, a retired Kansas farmer:
When I graduated from high school in ‘36, a farmhand made
two dollars a day, so I went out to Idaho, working the potato
harvest and topping beets. Hard hours, but I made five dollars
a day. I come back with seventy bucks in my pocket...
And:
In ‘39 and ‘40, before I went overseas, I helped build highway
one fifty. It was all shovel and wheelbarrow work for thirty
cents an hour. I made two-forty a day, and I’d take my road
money and help the folks out: buy a sack of apples or a case of
pork and beans.
While not every child of the Depression shared Soyez’s experiences, most lowerand middle-class Americans who came of age during the nineteen-thirties will
bring a measure of empathy to his plain-spoken reminiscences. Countless American
urban children also knew what it was like to work for two dollars a day and help
support the family in tough times.
For most young people of today, of course, work is no longer a matter of
physical survival. As veterans of the Great Depression like Lloyd Soyez never tire
of reminding us, very few contemporary kids know the meaning of hard, sustained,
manual labor. In fact, in a world defined by what Marshall McLuhan familiarly
called the extensions of man—TV, the telephone, the automobile, the Internet—
the ontological relationship between work and the human body it s e lf has changed,
perhaps for all time.
When the French religious philosopher Simone Weil toiled in Renault
automobile factories in France during the 1930's she recorded a memorable phrase
often spoken by her co-workers: The trade is entering the body. She interpreted
this to mean that under certain circumstances work constitutes a lorm of ph\ sical
sacrifice, the human equivalent of Christ's spiritual sacrifice when, on tlie day of
His Passion, thorns and nails entered His body. Weil was no sentimental, starryeyed liberal. Like George Orwell, she made an heroic attempt to “de-class” herself
by becoming a working person and sharing the Dickensian on-the-job conditions
in French factories during the bleak and bitter thirties. And like Orwell, who
chronicled the struggles of the French and English working class in books like