The American Dream

Election-year rhetoric, television, and fan magazines have made us forget the greatness of America. These five stories are presented as a reminder.

What, We Worry?

When in 1903 — or was it ’04? — my mother and father came to the United States from the old country, their dream was not unique. Steady work and schooling for the boys, who were born during the following decade. He was a tailor, a quiet man. She was a seamstress, nimble of finger and mind. He was easy, seeking no more than his due. She was feverish, seeking something more. Though she was skilled in her craft, her spirit was the entrepreneur’s. Out there, somewhere, was the brass ring. This was, after all, America.

When my father became ill and was unable to work, she made the big move. Out west, to Chicago. She had a tip: a men’s hotel up for sale … 1921. It was hard work, but she toughed it out. She was a hotelier, in business for herself. She was May Robson, Apple Annie, making it. These were no apples she was selling; she was a woman of property. They were pretty good years, the twenties. But something went wrong in ’29, something she hadn’t counted on. The men she admired, the strong, the powerful ones, the tycoons (she envisioned herself as a small-time Hetty Green), goofed up somewhere. Kerplunk went her American dream.

My mother’s gods had failed her; and she, who had always believed in making it, secretly felt that she, too, had failed. Though the following years didn’t treat her too unkindly, her fires were banked. Her dreams darkened. She died a bitter, cantankerous old woman, who almost, though never quite, caught the brass ring.

Failure was as unforgivable then as it is now. Perhaps that’s why so many of the young were never told about the depression, were, as one indignant girl put it, “denied our own history.”

During the Christmas bombings of North Vietnam, the St. Louis cabbie, weaving his way through traffic, was offering six o’clock commentary.

“We gotta do it. We have no choice.” “Why?”

“We can’t be a pitiful, helpless giant.

We gotta show ’em we’re number one.”

“Are you number one?”

A pause. “I’m number nothin’.” He recounts a litany of personal troubles, grievances, and disasters. His wife left him; his daughter is a roundheel; his boy is hooked on heroin; he loathes his job. For that matter, he’s not so crazy about himself. Wearied by this turn of conversation, he addresses the rearview mirror: “Did you hear Bob Hope last night? He said… “

Forfeiting their own life experience, their native intelligence, their personal pride, they allow more celebrated surrogates, whose imaginations may be no larger than theirs, to think for them, to speak for them, to be for them in the name of the greater good. Conditioned toward being “nobody,” they look toward “somebody” for the answer. It is not what the American town meeting was all about.

Yet, something’s happening, as yet unrecorded on the social seismograph.

There are nascent stirrings in the neighborhood and in the field, articulated by noncelebrated people who bespeak the dreams of their fellows. It may be catching. Unfortunately, it is not covered on the six o’clock news.

In my new book, American Dreams: Lost and Found, which will be published by Pantheon Books, are many American voices, captured by hunch, circumstance, and a rough idea. There is no pretense at statistical “truth” or consensus. There is, in the manner of a jazz work, an attempt, of theme and improvisation, to recount dreams, lost and found, and a recognition of possibility. Here, from American Dreams, are five of those voices.

The American Dream Retrospective:

Sen. James Abourezk

He has been a senator from South Dakota. He had decided not to stand for re-election. It is Saturday afternoon… two days before Halloween, 1977. We’re in his office in the Senate Office Building, Washington, D. C. He and Sen. Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio have been conducting a 13-day filibuster against a bill deregulating the price of oil.

As Sam Rayburn said, if you want to get along, go along. That’s the philosophy of most people around here. Very few people here stand for something. They have taken public-opinion polls to heart. There’s nothing wrong with polling, but it’s something else when you start calculating on every single little issue: How am I gonna be cute on this? How am I gonna gimmick this one up so I can go back home and not get in trouble? There are very few guys around here who are not afraid to get in trouble-on anything.

They’re afraid to commit themselves because there’s a yahoo out there raising all sorts of hell. It’s more important for them to be in office than to do something while they’re there. Instead of politicians, they’ve become technocrats, reading poll signs wherever they go.

They’re sitting there. Their calculation has become so finely tuned, so technical, that they’ve forgotten what the public really wants. The public doesn’t want this shit. Carter got on national television and said: “We’ll have to sacrifice because we’re gonna run out of energy one of these days.” Hell, everybody knows that.

It’s a finite resource. Why does it always come that 200 million people sacrifice and 50,000 at the top are never called upon to sacrifice? What kind of shit is that? The public doesn’t know the details of the energy program. It’s too complicated. But they can smell a rat.

Today, I don’t think you can accomplish any more inside than you can out. The only victories you’re allowed to win here are marginal ones. It doesn’t mean a goddamn.

The 13-day filibuster Howard Metzenbaum and I conducted was, in a sense, a soldier’s small mutiny, a takeover. We lost, as all such takeovers do, but the issue attracted the country’s attention. That’s the purpose of a filibuster. I know of the pressures on us from our peers, from the outside. The Washington Post denounced us. I did it because Pete Stavrianos, my administrative assistant, challenged me: “When I asked you to run again, you said it didn’t matter much whether you were here or not. If you can stop those bastards from deregulating natural gas, you’ll have done more than you’ve done in your entire eight years in Congress.” So I said: “Why not?”

I had about a thousand letters, telegrams, phone calls, from around the country. It lost because we got no cooperation from the White House. The vice-president came down on the last day of the filibuster and conspired with the majority leader to break it.

One thing I watched very carefully during the natural-gas debate — the heavy concentration of advertising on television by Exxon. Do you know where it was concentrated? In Washington, D.C. Heavier than around the country. Senators are sitting there thinking: “My God, my constituents are watching this stuff.” It started seeping into these guys voting on the floor here every day. And they didn’t know it. They were taken by the commercials.

My father came from· Lebanon. He landed in South Dakota in 1898. He was a pack peddler. My dad was very grateful to America. He was a very, very poor farmer in Lebanon. That’s the reason he left. It’s a beautiful country, except that they were dirt poor.

In 1910, after he’d saved enough money to buy a buggy and a horse, he bought a store. In 1920 he opened another one. He went bankrupt two or three times during the depression. He always gave credit to the people who lived there, Indians and non-Indians alike. The Indians were the only ones who paid him back. The whites didn’t. (Laughs) He always said: “Make sure nobody goes hungry.”

As a kid, who had dreams? I was eating. Three meals a day. I wanted to be a storekeeper like my dad had been. My parents were uneducated. They couldn’t read or write English, but they could read and write Arabic. My father became reasonably successful for a small-town merchant. He wound up owning a couple of stores and a small ranch. It was on an Indian reservation, Rosebud. You’re somewhat blinded, being so close to people. I suppose I was somewhat of a racist when I grew up. I patronized the Indians, spoke down to them. I grew up with Indian kids and went to school with them, but I always thought Indians are inferior to us with lighter skins. I only found out in later years, when I went to college, what I was like.

We were always told there was an American Dream, where people have a right to be treated equal. I know that just doesn’t happen. According to the advertising campaign, as long as you let the people who are running this country run it, you can experience the American Dream. You’re gonna stay out of jail, you’re not gonna get in trouble with The Man, if you just let him do what he wants. I don’t think the dream exists. The privileged can always manage to get a law passed to legalize whatever it is they want. They’ve found ways not to go to jail when they take property or rights away from somebody else. City or farm, it doesn’t matter.

I understand precisely what the oil companies wanted in deregulation of gas. They wanted to plunder the public purse. If I were an oil company president, I would probably be doing the same thing. What I didn’t understand was that people who were here, ostensibly representing the public, my fellow senators, would go along with it. We have a government that is ostensibly run by the people, for the people. It’s not true. We have a government run by the establishment, for the establishment. If there are some droppings left over for the people, well and good. No more than droppings.

One of these days those resources are gonna run out. There will no longer be an abundance. You will see the United States, 50 years from now, in the same condition as underdeveloped countries, fightin’ over fewer and fewer scraps. You’ll see the economic, social, and political system changing. The system we now have operates solely on the basis of greed. It works fairly well when there’s enough, so that even the greedy are satiated. But when we run out, there’s gonna be a catastrophe. There’ll be a violent political upheaval. There’ll be a change in our system, probably toward socialism. Those people who abhor the word, the idea, if their foresight were not foreclosed by greed, could change the system, could avoid socialism or whatever may come down the road, by some means where rights were balanced more evenly than they are today. It could be fascism, too.

I’m pessimistic as to my vision of the American Dream. It can’t be fulfilled as long as the few have the power to over-whelm the many.

The ones who run this country are the multinationals, the banks, the Fo’rtune Five Hundred. It also comes together at a point. There’s a commonality of interest. They don’t need a conspiracy. How many banks need to sit down and discuss how much they have to charge for interest rates? How many oil companies need to sit down and discuss how to distribute oil and how much to charge? No need.

If the American people really knew the facts, they could make a fair judgment. You gotta trust ’em. But newspapers and the radio present issues superficially at best. In television you hardly get a story longer than two or three minutes. How the hell can you present an issue in that time?

The buzzer sounds. He must go to the floor in 15 minutes. He sighs.

I’d like to see an America where so much power was not in the hands of the few. Where everybody’d get a fair shake. The establishment wants uneven odds. It’s marking the cards. Even though you’re a better poker player than somebody else, you mark the cards to make damn sure you don’t lose.

Maybe the Indians knew it all along. They smelled it way back. Know what they say? Custer had it coming. (Laughs)

Jill Robinson

She is the daughter of a former Hollywood film producer.

Growing up in Hollywood was the only reality I knew. To me, a studio head was a man who controlled everyone’s lives. It was like being the principal. It was someone you were scared of, someone who knew everything, knew what you were thinking, knew where you were going, knew when you were driving on the studio lot at 80 miles an hour, knew that you had not been on the set in time. The scoldings the stars got! There was a paternalism. It was feudal. It was an archaic system designed to keep us playing let’s pretend, make believe.

They had doctors at the studios: “Oh, you’re just fine, honey. Take this and you’ll be just fine.” These stars, who influenced our dreams, had no more to do with their own lives than fairies had or elves.

My mother was of upper-class Jewish immigrants. They lost everything in the depression. My father tried to do everything he could to revive my mother’s idea of what life had been like for her father in the court of the czar. Whether her father was ever actually in the court is irrelevant. My father tried to make it classy for her. It never was good enough, never could be. She couldn’t be a Boston Brahmin.

Russian-Jewish immigrants came from the shtetls and ghettos out to Hollywood: this combination jungle-tropical paradise crossed with a nomadic desert. In this magical place that had no relationship to any reality they had ever seen before in their lives, or that anyone else had ever seen, they decided to create their idea of an Eastern aristocracy. I’m talking about the kind of homes they would never be invited to. It was, of course, over-done. It was also the baronial mansions or the dukes’ homes that their parents could never have gotten into. Goldwyn, Selznick, Zukor, Lasky, Warner. Hollywood — the American Dream — is a Jewish idea.

In a sense it’s a Jewish revenge on America. It combines the Puritan ethic — there’s no sex, no ultimate satisfaction — with baroque magnificence. The happy ending was the invention of Russian Jews designed to drive Americans crazy.

It was a marvelous idea. What could make them crazy but to throw back at them their small towns? Look how happy it is here. Compare the real small towns with the small town on the MGM back lot.

There’s no resemblance.

The street is Elm Street. It’s so green, so bright, of lawns and trees. It’s a town somewhere in the center of America. It’s got the white fence and the big porch around the house. And it’s got three and four generations. They’re turn-of-the-century people before they learned how to yell at each other. It’s everybody sitting down to dinner and looking at each other, and everyone looks just wonderful. No one is sick. No one’s mad at anyone else. It’s all so simple. It’s all exactly what I say it is.

The daughter is Judy Garland when she believed in Aunt Em. The boy is Robert Walker before he realized he was gonna drink himself to death. And love and marriage would be innocence and tenderness. And no sex.

The dream to me was to be blonde, tall, and able to disappear. I loved movies about boys running away to sea. I wanted to be the laconic, cool, tall, Aryan male. Precisely the opposite of the angry, anxious, sort of mottle-haired Jewish girl.

I wanted to be this guy who could walk away from any situation that got a little rough. Who could walk away from responsibility. The American Dream, the idea of the happy ending, is an avoidance of responsibility and commitment. If something ends happily, you don’t have to worry about it tomorrow.

The idea of the movie star, the perfectlooking woman or man, who has breakfast at a glass table on a terrace where there are no mosquitoes. No one ever went to the bathroom in movies. I grew up assuming that movie stars did not. I thought it was terrible to be a regular human being. Movie stars did not look awful ever. They never threw up. They never got really sick, except in a wonderful way where they’d get a little sweaty, get sort of a gloss on the face, and then die. They didn’t shrivel or shrink away. They didn’t have acne. The women didn’t have menstrual cramps. Sex, when I ran across it, in no way resembled anything I had ever seen in the movies. I didn’t know how to respond.

I think the reason we’re so crazy sexually in America is that all our responses are acting. We don’t know how to feel. We know how it looked in the movies.

I hated the idea that I was bright. There was a collision between bright and pretty and seductive. I wanted to be one of those girls the guys just wanted to do one thing to. I wanted to be one of those blonde jobs. That’s what they used to call them — jobs. A tall job. A slim job. Somebody you could work on.

I wanted to be Rhonda Fleming or Lana Turner. I refused to see what the inside of their lives was like. They didn’t see it either. It was carefully kept from them. My God, look at the life. Getting up at 5:30 in the morning before your brain has begun to function, getting rolled out in a limousine and having people work on your body and your face. Remember, they were very young people when they came out here. Imagine having all your waking life arranged all the time. They became machines. No wonder the sensitive ones went insane or killed themselves.

The studio had the power. The studio would hire the fan club. The head of the club was on the star’s payroll. The star was usually not even aware of where the money was going, to whom, tor what. The whole thing was manufactured. Fame is manufactured. Stardom is manufactured. After all these years, it always comes as a surprise to me.

The thing that affected me most doesn’t exist anymore. It’s easy to forget how gorgeous and unreal that land was. Oz was not designed by art directors. Oz was just a copy of how it looked when you came from the East and first saw California. If you compare Dorothy’s first vision of Oz, when she walks out that morning, it was exactly how I feel whenever I come home to California after I’ve been out East. There’s nothing like the color. Can you imagine what it must have been tor those people coming out there? Technicolor is a copy of what was actually California.

I remember lying in my bed in this beautiful castle house in the hills. All through the windows were these bowers of jacaranda trees with purple flowers, and the sun was shining. My husband called and said President Kennedy had been shot and killed. My image came from A Tale of Two Cities. I thought: “They’re gonna tear the place apart.”

They, the country, the people. The people I saw in newsreels, March of Time movies, where there’d be crowd scenes. I never thought of people as individuals, but just those crowd scenes. The extras. They’re gonna get goddamn mad, the extras, and they’re gonna tear the fucking place apart. It was all movies.

Out of the corner of my eye, I knew there were people watching who seemed smarter than we were. These would be the writers, who were cynical. They didn’t believe it was all gonna work out all right. They didn’t believe all movies were wonderful. I sensed this coming. I think the snake in the Garden of Eden was my growing awareness. The reality was always there. I chose not to see it. The thing that terrified me most was my own intelligence and power of observation. The more I saw, the more I tried not to see. So I drank too much and took as many drugs as I could so as not to see.

Couldn’t bear it, the reality. Couldn’t bear to feel my father was wrong. Couldn’t bear the idea that it was not the best of all possible worlds. Couldn’t bear the idea that there was a living to be made. That punishment does not always come to those that deserve it. That good people die in the end.

I think we’re all skidding away; we’re destroying. California is just a little bit of it. The more bleak I become, the more — l live in Connecticut, okay? I read somewhere Connecticut has the highest incidence of intestinal cancer in the world. I think that’s because we eat ourselves alive there. We’re filled with despair, and it just rots us away, Where I live looks exactly like the MGM back lot idea of a small New England town. There’s no pressure in Connecticut; it’s all okay. Nobody is working much, there aren’t many jobs, a lot of businesses are failing. But it looks so sweet. It looks endearing. During the blizzard you would have thought that Currier and Ives came in there. That several people I know lost everything they own in that goddamn endearing blizzard, nobody really thinks about that. It looks like the American Dream.

Coleman Young

The mayor of Detroit.

We came to Detroit from Alabama in December of ’23. We lived on the Lower East Side, which was the major ghetto at the time.

I was a good student and arrogant. At St. Mary’s I became scout troop leader. We went on an excursion, but I was turned back from the island because I was black. This was the first conscious anger I felt. After that, I became more alert. That’s probably part of my history in becoming a radical. I had so many rebuffs along the way.

When I finished St. Mary’s, I was among the city’s top ten and entitled to a scholarship. Some brother friar comes along, looks at me in puzzlement, and says: “What the hell are you, Japanese or somethin’?” I said “No, brother, I’m colored.” He took my paper and tore it up, right there in my face. I went back to public schools. That was the end of me and Catholic church.

In ’35 or ’36 I got into Ford as an electrical apprentice. They didn’t have any black electrician at Ford. I was assigned to the motor building, and there I heard talk about he labor union. I’d go around William’s barber shop, where I got my haircut, and it tuned out to be a hangout for black UAW organizers. And all kinds of philosophy and arguments over who was the greater man, Booker T. Washington or Frederick Douglass or Du Bois.

I knew three aspects of black life. I knew the working-class part. I knew the slicker, the gambler. There was also a middle class that I became alienated from. My mother and father were both light skinned. Blacks in the early days in the South took their values from the whites. The admonition was: always marry someone lighter than you so you’ll be whiter. That’s a way of escape.

Before I went to Ford and started messin’ around with all those labor guys and thought I was goin’ to college, I was pledged to a black fraternity. It was a society, exclusive-type club, light-skinner. They were the social dictators of the college age group. I was invited to a dance, a signal honor. I took my friend to the dance with me, a dark guy. The black society people, the elites, we called ’em, took on the mannerisms of whites. They danced stiffly, not naturally. Everybody’s dancin’ naturally now. (Laughs) My friend was the best dancer there, havin’ a regular ball. The guys resented Frank and were mad at me for bringin’ him. He was too dark. We wound up in a fight, and that was the end of me and black society.

If these kind of people were going to college, fuck college. I didn’t want to be a gambler and shoot dice all my life. So I got involved in the labor movement and for the first time hearin’ a philosophy that made sense to me: unity between black and white.

By ’37, I’m a member of the union, very subterranean. At that time Ford had a goon squad. They called ’em service men. They couldn’t be distinguished from the workers. One of the first things we did when we organized the plant: made ’em put those in uniform so you could tell ’em.

They’d be in greasy old overalls, and they’d count how many minutes you sat in the goddamn can. The work was so rough, guys got old before their time. If you were workin’ at 45, you were lucky, ’cause when you slowed down the production line, out you went. You’d go to the toilet, not to take a shit, but just to rest. There was no door, no privacy. I’ve seen guys go in the damn toilet and get five minutes’ sleep. The way they did it: they’d take a newspaper and learned how to tap their feet while they were sleepin’. The service guy comes through and sees him with the paper and tappin’ his feet and figures he’s awake. It’s funny what humans can do to survive.

They put a guy across from me, a big son of a bitch, musta been about 280, six foot three. He knew I was union and kept baiting me. There was a conveyer line that ran between my rollin’ machine and his. I had a steel pipe that I used to clear the machine when it became jammed. This guy zeroes in on me. If he got his hands on me, there is no way in hell I could have survived. I could see he starts across the line at me. I picked up that damn steel pipe and laid it across his head. I stretched him out on that damn conveyer, and it carried him and dumped him into a freight car. (Laughs) It didn’t hurt him that much. Five, six stitches and a few lacerations. They ran my ass outa there. (Laughs) Officially, I was fired for fighting. The real reason was my union activity.

I went to the post office and began to organize a union. There was a six months’ probationary period. Son of a bitch let me work 5 months and 29 days and fired me. I was a volunteer organizer for UAW. Worked on the Sojourner Truth housing protest. In and out of several jobs, had to eat. I went in the army February 1942.

They set up this Jim Crow Air Forces OCS School in Tuskegee. They made the standards so damn high we actually became an elite group. We were screened and superscreened. We were unquestionably the brightest and most physically fit young blacks in the country. We were superbetter because of the irrational laws of Jim Crow. You can’t bring that many intelligent young people together and train ’em as fighting men and expect them to supinely roll over when you try to fuck over ’em, right? How does that go? Sowing the seeds of their own destruction. (Laughs)

After the war, back in Detroit, I became an international rep for the United Public Workers Union, which was eventually run out of the CIO as subversive. It included the garbage men, the hospital workers, all city workers. The same guys I negotiate with today. (Laughs)

I came from the East Side; so I knew everybody in Detroit. Detroit was a pretty small place and then grew suddenly. Most of the guys who became leaders came from my neighborhood. Another thing made me better known. The red scare was on, the witch-hunt. The House Un-American Activities Committee came to town. These guys would come to a city, terrorize it, put a goddamn stool pigeon on the stand. He rattles off a list of names, and that person is fired, hung in effigy, blacklisted.

I was called before the committee. I told them if they want to talk about un-American activities, I’m prepared to do so. Lynchin’, the poll tax. We just got it on. (Laughs) The damn thing was broadcast, and everybody in the city heard it. It was as big as the World Series. We had the National Negro Council down and local 600 of the UAW. We were the first group to go on the attack. The next stop was Chicago, where you guys kicked ’em in the ass a little bit more. They just went downhill from there. It was all over the front pages. They were sayin’ I was a surly witness. But that single incident endeared me to the hearts of black people. Fightin’ back, sayin’ what they wanted to say all their lives to a southern white.

I’m 60 now, and I’d like to produce a cadre of young people, black and white, who can carry on this work. It’s not guaranteed. It would be a big mistake for anyone to believe that the great American Dream is apple pie and a happy endin’. It ain’t necessarily so. The whole goddamn thing could go up in smoke. Reconstruction teaches you that, right? It’s a continuous struggle all the time. The minute you forget that, you wind up on your ass.

(He laughs softly, a sudden remembrance) Had I stayed in Catholic school,

I would probably have become an altar boy. I would like to have been one. St. Mary’s is a beautiful, old German church. It’s truly an architectural gem. I was 14 when I was last there. You come back as mayor for the 175th anniversary of the Sisters of the Holy Name. The altar’s much the same. The nuns prepared a chair for me on the altar, a big chair, like a throne. (Laughs) I’m sitting on it. That’s the highlight of my life as mayor. It impressed me more, thinking back to my childhood, than sittin’ down with Henry Ford or President Carter. (Laughs) My American Dream. (Laughs)

Jessie De La Cruz

A one-family dwelling in Fresno. A small, well-kept garden is out front. She has six grown children; the youngest is 21. She is active in National Land for People.

The American Dream for me is owning a piece of land. Something you can call home, where you can stay in one place all the time, raise a decent family, build a community. Where you have a job all the time, and nobody’s gonna fire you. My mother’s dream was having a house, but she got sick and died in 1930.

I musta been almost eight when I started following the crops. Every winter, up north. I was on the end of the row of prunes, taking care of my younger brother and sister. They would help me fill up the cans and put ’em in a box while the rest of the family was picking the whole row.

In labor camps the houses were just clapboard. There were just nails with two-by-fours around it. The houses had two little windows and a front door. One room, about 12 by 15, was a living room, dining room, everything. That was home to us.

Eight or nine of us. We had blankets that we rolled up during the day to give a little place to walk around doing the housework. There was only one bed, which was my grandmother’s. The rest of us slept on the floor. Before that we used to live in tents, patched tents. Before we had a tent, we used to live under a tree. That was very hard. This is one thing I hope nobody has to live through. During the winter the water was just seeping under the ground. Your clothes were never dry.

My husband was born in Mexico. He came with his parents when he was two and a half years old. He was irrigating when he was 12 years old, doing a man’s work. Twelve hours for $1.20. Ten cents an hour. I met him in 1933. Our first year we stayed in the labor camps.

We followed the crops till around 1966. We went up north around the Sacramento area to pick prunes. We had a big truck, and we were able to take our refrigerator, my washing machine, and beds and kitchen pots and pans and our clothing. It wasn’t a hardship any more. We wanted our children to pick in the shade, under a tree, instead of picking out in the vines, where it’s very hot. When I picked grapes, I could hardly stand it. I felt sorry for 12— , 13-year-old kids. My husband said: “Let’s go up north and pick prunes.”

We stopped migrating when Cesar Chavez formed a union. We became members, and I was the first woman organizer. I organized people everywhere I went. When my husband and I started working under a signed contract, there was no need to migrate after that.

We made plans of how we’d set up our own little school for preschool children and the older children could be taken into town to attend public school. I came up with the idea of having our own rest home for the elderly. The Chicano people who couldn’t work anymore and needed to be taken care of. A clinic was discussed, too.

A friend of ours said: “I’ll rent you six acres.” We started farming those six acres. We were out there from morning till late, on our hands and knees, planting tomatoes. There was the risk of a cold wave coming and killing our plants. So we had to use hot caps.

One day we had finished planting and said “Tomorrow we’ll put the hot caps on.” They’re cap-shaped papers, with wire. Around two or three o’clock I heard on the radio — I always carry a little portable — I heard the weather was gonna be 23 degrees. It was gonna kill our plants. I was scared. I ran back to the group and said: “Hey, it’s gonna freeze tonight; we’re gonna lose our plants.” Right away we started putting the hot caps on.

We put dirt around it to hold it down. We had them by the thousands. It was very windy and very cold. We started out there on our hands and knees. I was crying. It was beautiful. I’m not calling it beautiful, my crying. But to have little children five, six years old helping us, because they knew how important it was to save those plants. The wind was very strong; it was just ripping those paper caps off of our hands, and you could see them rolling. (Laughs) We ran out of caps. Okay, each of us got a hoe and started pulling dirt over our plants, very gently. We covered all of them. We came home; it was dark, cold, and wet.

The next morning we were all anxious to find out what had happened during the night. Oh, it was great to go out there and remove the dirt from those plants and watch ’em shoot straight up like anything. We saved every one of ’em. It took hard work to do it.

If it had been one of the big growers, what would have happened? The farmer would just go out there and look and see all the dead plants, and he’d say: “Oh, what the heck.” He’d go home and forget about everything. He would get on his pickup, push a button, lift up a telephone, and call the nursery: “Bring over this certain amount of thousands of plants and call the workers; okay, plant them over again.” That’s his way of farming.

We’re in very marginal land. We survive by hard work and sacrifices. We’re out of the Westland district, where the government supplies the water. There’s acres and acres of land that if you got out there you can see green from one end to the other, like a green ocean. No houses, nothing. Trees or just cotton and alfalfa. It’s land that is irrigated with tax-payers’ money.

These growers that have been using this water signed a contract that they would sell, within ten years, in small parcels. It’s not happening. If the law has been enforced, we would be out there right now.

It’s the very, very best land. I worked it there. You could grow anything: tomatoes, corn, cantaloupes, vegetables, bell peppers. But they just grow one or two crops, because they just don’t want to hire any people. They have big machines that do the picking. Instead of planting a few acres of one crop and a few acres of another, they just go to one crop. What they’re looking at, when they see the land and the water, all they can see is dollar signs. They don’t see human beings out there.

These farmers aren’t thinking about putting food on your table. They’re thinking how much money they’re gonna make per acre. They’re putting a lot of chemicals and pesticides into the soil in order to have a bigger yield of crop. They call it — what? — progress? With their progress, they’re gonna kill the whole planet. Even themselves. In the not too long.

They’re thinking: “Well, I’m alive. I’m gonna enjoy life. I’m gonna have millions of dollars.” We’re thinking about our future generations. My children, my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren. We want a place for them. We don’t want them to end up with land that won’t grow things.

There are some big companies, individuals, who own land not only in California but in Arizona, Mexico, all over. They don’t even know anything about the land. They know nothing about farming. They don’t even live on the farm.

A big meeting here in Fresno, that was my first public appearance. I was nervous. I looked around, and there were all these big growers. And these big businessmen that had stores out in the vacation areas up in the mountains. They were there because they were against raising wages for women. I heard my name, and I got up there. My knees were shaking. (Laughs) I got up before these microphones, and I looked around and saw my notes. The only thing I said out of my notes was “Ladies and Gentlemen.” I said, “My name is Jessie de la Cruz, and I’m here as a farm worker.” And then I started.

I said “We are forced to go out and work in the fields alongside our husbands, not through choice, and not because I love to be out in the sun working so hard ten hours, but because of the need. Us women have to go out there and help support our families.” And I said: “I have six children my husband and I raised, and we never had to go on welfare.” Oh, they applauded. Good for you. Oh, it was great that I never had to go on welfare. And I said: “These men here who are growers and businessmen and restaurant owners, if they pay higher wages, they could just close down the welfare doors.” Oh, I felt in the pit of my stomach, right there in the pit of my stomach, pain. It was a hard ball right there. I forgot what I was saying, and my hands were behind me. And I hear somebody in our group say: “Go on, Jessie, tell ’em, tell ’em.” And I said: “What I’m gonna tell you is not something I read. It’s something that’s engraved in my heart and in my brain because it’s something that I’ve lived and many other farm workers’ families have done the same.” So I went on and on and on. (Laughs) I was congratulated, but for about three or four days, there was a pain right here, a sore spot in my stomach. But I managed to tell ’em off. (Laughs)

How can I write down how I felt when I was a little child and my grandmother used to cry with us ’cause she didn’t have enough food to give us? Because my brother was going barefooted, and he was cryin’ because he wasn’t used to going without shoes. How can I describe that? I can’t describe when my little girl died because I didn’t have money for a doctor. And never had any teaching on caring for sick babies. Living out in labor camps. How can I describe that? How can I put into writing when I’m testifying about things that are very deep inside? About seeing all these many people that have their little children killed in the fields through accidents? It’s things that are a feeling you can’t put into words.

I’m making. It’s hard work. But I’m not satisfied, not until I see a lot of farm workers settle on their own farms. Then I’ll say it’s happening.

Is America progressing toward the better? No, the country will never do anything for us. We’re the ones that are gonna do it. We have to keep on struggling. I feel there’s going to be a change. With us, there’s a saying: La esperanza muere al ultimo. Hope dies last. You can’t lose hope. If you lose hope, that’s losing everything.

The only thing that makes me sad is that this change didn’t come about until I was old. I wish I was 30, 35 right now, where I knew I’d have many more years. I’m the sort of person that will not sit back in a rocking chair when I get older and just feel sorry for myself. There always has to be something to do. There always is if you want to do it.

Dora Rosenzweig 94

It’s a bungalow in Los Angeles, neat and tidy, in a green and pleasant section of the city. Though she has occasional difficulty moving about, she lives by herself and likes it. Her daughter, who is the older of two married children, frequently visits her.

I was one of 14 children, the only child among adults. I was born in 1885, in Russia, a small Jewish ghetto near Pinsk, a shtetl. Talk of America was in the air. My father had gone there. My two older sisters were growing up and needed a dowry; so he went there to save money. In the meantime, our house burnt down; so my mother decided we should all go to America.

In Chicago, 1891, the sidewalks were wooden except for fancy streets. It was the greatest pleasure to look under the sidewalk because once in a while you found a penny. Streets paved with wooden blocks was a blessing for the poor people. When you couldn’t buy coal, you went at night and dug up the blocks.

I became very interested in reading. Before Jane Addams, whom I came to know and love, a group of young women started a settlement in the ghetto. My father thought they were going to make Gentiles out of us. I had to cross the street to avoid them. My girl friends didn’t have such pious fathers and went in there. I liked the candy, but what I liked best, they’d come out with books.

One day I defied my father, was welcomed, and got a book. By stealth I’d go there, and that was really the beginning of my Americanization.

When I was 11, my father began to talk about me going to work as a seamstress. My mother was interested in my education. She was proud of my learning English and wanted me to be a school-teacher. That was the heights. In Russia a woman didn’t amount to much. So there was trouble in the house. By the time I was 12, I got so tired of the arguments that I got a job as a cigar maker. Rather than be a seamstress, which I hated, I’d make cigars, like my brother.

I got into a group of older immigrants, interested in social questions, and began to go to lectures. I met my husband that way. I met people who were interested in the labor movement. Working conditions were terrible, even at the American Tobacco Company where I worked, tops. The toilets were on the same floor where 400 people worked. Open. That’s the beginning of my interest in the union, the Progressive Cigar Makers.

When I was 16, my mother died and I left home. I lived with strangers. No Jewish girl lived with strangers, no matter how miserable the house was. It was my key to freedom. They called me anarchist, they called me Bolshevik, but I never joined anything. I was always very curious and went through all the lessons I could get in order to learn what it’s all about.

I heard about free love. It scared me. This was when I was about 19. It was in the air, this search for freedom. Two girls furnished a two-bedroom rear apartment and asked me to live with them. Whoever heard of three girls living together? This was 1905. You know what it is? Prostitution. The sister I moved away from prophesied that I’d have four bastards. Why she took four, I don’t know. If ever there was a naive, innocent set of three girls, you can’t imagine.

I always felt I was the equal of any man. I could think like a man. I could step on the sidewalk without help. I didn’t have to have a man to hold my arm or open the door. We’d go to the theater. I’d pay my own way. I like the young feminists today. (Laughs)

There was a terrible depression in 1903, 1904. There were many strikes. The Haymarket riot — of when? 10, 15 years before? — had a profound effect on us. In one strike we saw the police bring out the fire hoses and knock down peaceful marchers who were just protesting.

I met my husband at a friend’s house. He. worked as a tailor and was very interested in literature. He’s also of a large family, 13.

Jewish girls didn’t go to work after they were married. My mother-in-law was scandalized. What will the neighbors say? I said: “To hell with the neighbors.” I rebelled against religion, too. I was the hippie of my age. (Laughs)

My husband hated his work, and I hated mine. We wanted to get out of the shops, and I wanted a family. We liked the country life and decided to become farmers. We wanted to homestead. In the early 1900s the railroads wanted settlers in the West, for freight. For $32, you could go from Chicago to the coast. By 1909, it was all: “Go west, young man, go west.”

The Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota was thrown open for settlers. They took it away from the Indians. They had a lottery. My husband won a ticket, but he doesn’t want to be separated from his friend, Charlie. So they came back to Chicago. On the train they heard about oceans of land in Montana. Whoever comes gets the land. So they came to Scobey, Mont.

I remained in Chicago to augment our income. He built a 12-by-20 shack. I joined him in August 1910. I got off the train, and there was my brown-complected husband, sunburned, with overalls and a red kerchief, Nobody told me there was only nine inches of rainfall a year, and that the country was subject to prairie fires. (Laughs) In August there was no grass; it was just yellow. It was blazing hot. I thought: “My God, I’m in the Sahara Desert.”

The air was so clear. I thought I could reach up and take a star. It was beautiful. Everything was new. The neighbors were simply wonderful. The first morning a horseman stops near the door, Mr. Larson from three miles away. “Simon, I want you to come for threshing.” I said: “Can I come along?” He says: “Come, be our cook.” I could make gefilte fish, challa, but cooking for 25 Montana farmers … (Laughs)

He tells me the menu: potatoes and ham. I had never cooked it. I asked my husband: “Where are the potatoes?” He said: “You have to dig ’em up.” (Laughs) And bake biscuits, too. I had never baked biscuits. Mr. Larson said it was a wonderful meal.

Our salvation was the neighbors who lived two miles away. Pious Methodists. If not for them, I don’t think we could have survived. Mrs. Watts was my mother, my counselor, my everything. When my husband had accidents, they’d come help us. She knew folk medicine. At threshing time everybody helped.

Whenever the crop was in, my husband had to freight it 75 miles. He’d be gone about a week, and I’d remain alone. We were talking about going west, farther west. Why? I was hungry for people. I was hungry for the family. I wanted my daughter to go to school. By that time I had another child. The school was six miles away, and I was terrified that my daughters would grow up illiterate. How do you send a little girl in Montana winters to school so far away?

We came back to Chicago. For years we ran a summer resort in Michigan, where I was a square peg in a round hole.

I span almost a century. When I look back upon it, the worst thing was sanitation. Babies died the second year of their lives, usually from poisoned milk.

They called it summer complaint. There was smallpox, there was diphtheria, there was typhoid. These diseases have been wiped out. Although we eat poisoned food, we breathe bad air, we live longer than we did. Children don’t die as frequently.

Life at that time was hard, hard, hard. Now it’s much easier. When my mother found a washboard, she didn’t know what to do with it. Now I have a washing machine.

We are enjoying creature comforts. Don’t forget: I remember candlelight. When we first got gas, it was for special occasions. I lived from that to TV, to the man on the moon.

I have a childish theory about the life-lessness of the moon. Don’t laugh. I think there were people on the moon who became so sophisticated that they began to do what we’re doing. First, it was the gun. Then it was the bomb. Instead of killing piecemeal, it kills thousands. Hiroshima. Now they have the H-bomb, and they’re talking about a neutron bomb. I believe the people on the moon found the ultra-ultra weapon to destroy life, and it became a burnt-out planet. A childish thought, maybe, but if we keep going like this … I don’t worry about it. I won’t be here. (Laughs)