Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 28

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Popular Culture Review

Anderson continued to experiment with documentary
journalism in his 1940 book. Hometown, which was commissioned as
part of the "Face of America" series featuring photographs by Farm
Security Administration photographers. Here, Anderson paid tribute
to the small-town America of the Thirties, utilizing extensive
conversations with storekeepers, newspaper editors, neighbors,
farmers, judges, sheriffs, schoolteachers, and numerous other
characters. Detailed description again came into play in order to
paint an accurate picture of small-town life. The material in
Hometown has a more romantic flavor to it than the gritty realism of
Puzzled America, but Anderson's depiction of rural poverty pulls few
punches:
In every American town ... there is a section beyond the
railroad tracks where the poor live. We in the towns
also have our slums. In the summer and fall the men
who live down there manage to pick up a day's work
now and then but in the winter there is nothing doing.
There are a half dozen children in the family and the
mother tries to keep things going by doing the washing
for our well-to-do families. You will see her on bitter
cold days hanging out a wash. Her hands are blue with
cold. In the houses the children huddle about the one
stove in the kitchen, wood and coal to be bought, shoes
for the children. It is a long winter for that family. The
woman who is hanging out the washed clothes is a
proud one. She'll work her arms off, she says, rather
than go on relief (Anderson, 1940, pp. 72-73).
The exploitation of small-town factory workers also was
examined in some detail in Hometown, with Anderson chronicling the
debasement of human dignity in the name of increased productivity.
At one point, Anderson discussed a speed-up in production that had
been ordered by management at a small mill in a North Carolina
town. After repeatedly being harassed by an e fficiency expert hired
to time production speed, the workers turned the mill into a scene of
sudden violence: "Men and women, made nervous and half hysterical
by the presence of the man with the stopwatch timing all their
movements, suddenly picked up stools and sticks. Women with