Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 27

Journalism of the 193(ys

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and extraordinary circumstances. Extensive use of descriptive detail
was called upon in a narrative style that was often Spartan and
straightforward. Presenting a sense of realism was the goal,
although Wilson left it to the readers to figure out the social and
ethical implications of that reality.
Like Wilson, Anderson employed a rigorous objectivism in
examining the disenfranchised of rural America in the Thirties. In
his 1935 book. Puzzled America (also published in The Sherwood
Anderson Reader, 1947), Anderson told of the plight of poor farmers
in the hills of Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and
northern Alabama. In a lean writing style, Anderson described
farmers leaving the hills to find employment in the cities, only to
have to return upon finding no jobs available. Anderson related in
graphic detail lives of quiet desperation in the hills: little food, no
money, farm soil dissipating with every passing year, three or four
families living on thirty or forty acres of land (Anderson, 1947, pp.
642-648).
Anderson's style of reportage hinged on being an effective
listener. He not only observed America in his travels, but he also
listened to his downtrodden subjects as they discussed their lives.
This technique found its fullest treatment in a story from Puzzled
America called "Please Let Me Explain," where Anderson picked up
various hitchhikers and listened to their accounts of the Depression
experience. A 65-year-old hitchhiker told of once being a successful
wheat farmer in the West, only to lose everything when he could not
pay his bank debts as the price of wheat fell. With his wife dead
and his adopted children living with poor relatives, the hitchhiker
said he had become a "common workman" whom no one would hire
because of his age (p. 657). Another hitchhiker—a hungry, shabbily
dressed young man embittered by his failures in life—told Anderson
that the only way out of the Depression was to pass a law compelling
the extermination of the poor and unemployed of America. When
Anderson reminded the hitchhiker that he would be among the first
to be killed, the young man replied: "I know, but you see I haven't
succeeded. I don't believe that I ever will succeed. I might as well be
put out of the wajr" (pp. 661-662). What on the surface appeared to be
an obscure conversation with one of life's losers became emblematic of
the guilt embedded in the national psyche.