I used to run into Dale Maharidge in the Sacramento Bee newsroom after midnight in the 1980s. We bitched about editors and talked about hobos.
A "bum reporter," as one of his Bee editors backhandedly called him, Maharidge and photographer Michael S. Williamson worked seemingly full-time through the '80s, much of it on their own dime, documenting the journey of America's dispossessed and working poor for the Bee, Life magazine and their own books.
I knew hobos, having grown up in a railroad town, where jobless men traveling through Roseville knocked on my mother's kitchen door -- and my grandmother's a generation before -- to beg for food. Hobos were a presence for as long as I could remember. Kids were warned to stay away from "them." In the years between America's Bicentennial and the Reagan Revolution, I used to fish, drink and smoke with neighborhood juvenile delinquents in the "hobo jungle" near the train trestle a few blocks away from my house.
In the Bee newsroom, as freight trains rumbled through the city a block away, I listened as Maharidge told stories of hobos like Montana Blackie, Crazy Red and No Thumbs, rapt in the star-fucked way that a 21-year-old covering high school sports listens to an older reporter who jumps freight trains and camps with hobos and gets to write about it -- a fellow college drop-out in thread-bare white T-shirts and workmans' pants, a wiry mash-up of Woodie Guthrie and the street-dog newspaperman in the 1930s movies mold who gives a shit for the people he writes about.
And, suddenly, so much for romantic newspaper stories. What began as tales of hobos on the rails morphed into a saga of America's new underclass on the road:
Blue-collar people from rusting steel towns and shuttered factory towns migrating for work, living in tents, sleeping in cars.
Economic nightmare dawned; the clock read Morning in America.
Flash forward three decades, past NAFTA, the tech bubble, the housing bubble, the looting of Wall Street:
Today's American underclass includes families and people like you and me, many in peril of losing their homes, who rely on food banks and struggle for work.
The middle class is an endangered species.
There is mourning in America.
I recently called Maharidge at his home in New York City, where he's a professor of journalism at Columbia University, for another middle-of-the-night chat, to talk about his and Williamson's new book, "Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression," and the 30 years they have covered America's dispossessed and working poor, a career Maharidge calls "The Third-World Beat in America."
Maharidge, 54, and Williamson, 53, have been a team ever since they met racing out the door to cover a fire. It was clear then and even more so today that their respect and affection for each other transcends newsroom camaraderie. Theirs is a relationship of the trenches. Maharidge: a blue-collar guy from industrial Ohio, whose biggest fear is losing everything, just like the people whose stories he tells, whom he befriends. Williamson: an orphan and foster child who grew up in trailers, eating sugar sandwiches, just like many of the people who allow him to photograph their lives in the worst of times.
They won a Pulitzer Prize for their 1990 book, "And Their Children After Them," a continuation of James Agee and Walker Evans' 1941 book, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," about the rise and fall of king cotton in the South.
"Someplace Like America" is Maharidge's seventh book. He is working on a book about his father, and teaches the fall semester at Columbia. Williamson works at the Washington Post, where he continues to capture the stories of poverty in America.
The last time I spoke with Maharidge was in early 2010. He was driving from Northern California to Arizona to interview Joe Arpaio, the flamboyant sheriff, for "Someplace Like America." I had called seeking advice and encouragement for a magazine story I was writing about being a jobless food critic living on food stamps. This time, I was armed with even more insight into his work: I spent most the past year homeless, living in my car and looking for work. Maharidge mentions me on page 174 of "Someplace Like America," where I read that Maharidge has more journalist friends who are hard-up for work, and one of them lives in a homeless shelter. On the telephone, Maharidge mentioned one of his students, a young woman who can't find a job; she's on the brink financially and emotionally.
What do you call the kind of journalism you do?
It's the Third-World Beat in America. When you say the poverty beat, it tends to make people think of, "Oh, homeless people and people who don't want to work." It's more encompassing than that. You go down to the food bank in Sacramento and you're gonna find people who have full-time jobs, who budget well and who the last week of the month they're hungry.
Most people want to have jobs and they don't have jobs. Even people here in New York City who make, you know, what sounds like good money are hurting.
We did not meet working homeless when we started this. Working homeless is so common now it's like, "What else is new?"
New Orleans, in particular, is a key study of that. The rents went so high there's people who have a choice: pay for rent or eat. And so they end up squatting. You have these thousands of squatters in New Orleans.
"Someplace Like America" covers 30 years: revisiting people and updating some stories from your first book, "Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass." You also tell the stories of the working poor today -- the single mom with three jobs, the woman in Kansas City renewing her life through urban farming, the man who joined the Masons because he was looking for community, all the Katrina survivors. What is the face of poverty 30 years into your work?
We found in the new material that the people we're writing about, more than ever, ordinary people can see themselves in the mirror when they look at these characters.
One thing Michael and I have noticed -- and I can speak for him because we talk about this all the time. About a week ago he said, "It used to be people would be out doing something that 20 years ago would have been embarrassing: begging for a job or begging for food." Now he says he finds people all the time who are like, "Everyone knows I'm screwed."
So it's almost like the barrier of pride that we saw years ago -- people are still proud but it's not embarrassing to be in a situation that's bad because so many millions of people are in it.
Why do you tell these stories?
The book's about hope. The book has a strange uplift, to me at least. People are trying. People are making themselves stronger. It's not a downer.
I think we're gonna come out of this. Even in Apocalypse the sun comes up the next morning. Think about between 1931 to 1939 into 1940. The world did not look like a very good place. We've been here before. We've been through shit before. We had a lot of good years in this country and now we are facing a river of shit. But it doesn't mean the world's going to end. It doesn't mean that because you lost your job you're going to be in this state forever. We move on and we rebuild. That's the message of the book.
We see ourselves in our stories and our culture either in songs or in books. It helps get dialog going. The whole reason for doing all this is we have to get a dialog going in this country about what kind of country we want to be. Do we want to be a country for hedge fund managers? Or do we want to be the country that I grew up in, that you grew up in, that's a little more egalitarian, has a little more of a chance to make it?
You say hope. Does this mean we're seeing recovery?
It's a new economy; we have to figure a whole new way out. This recovery? For who? I don't know anybody who's recovered. People who were working, a lot of my friends, they took furloughs and pay cuts. Salaries haven't gone back up. You lose 7 percent of your salary, you've got a mortgage and kids, that'll kill you.
The Great Depression was really two great recessions. There was no recovery in the middle of the Great Depression, but they called it that. And that's kind of where we are now.
We're not acknowledging that there's a fundamental horror going on. Yeah, there's been some jobs. I think it was 200,000 jobs in the last monthly report. Yeah, well, it takes 125,000 jobs just to keep up with population growth. We had about 75,000 jobs created for the 23 or 24 million people who are either jobless or underemployed. At that rate it'll take 40 years to reemploy everybody.
I think it's great that there's an uptick, but what kind of jobs are they? They're service-sector jobs. Nowadays they run your credit report. You want to flip burgers at McDonald's? You got a bad credit report because you lost your job and you lost your house and you went bankrupt? They wouldn't hire you. It's insanity.
I'm hoping to get the dialogue going because, man, we've got to start yesterday.
You met the Alexander family in 1983. They were were among the newly dispossessed, the new timers you met en route to "Journey to Nowhere." Jim, a Vietnam veteran and welder from Michigan who said he once "lived high off the hog," is shown in a picture holding a gun, suggesting, perhaps, he'd use it to feed his family. Later, Bonnie sent you a letter saying, "We decided we'd go back to school and make something of ourselves." Through a series of jobs, they "diversified our abilities so that if it got soft in one area, we could switch." Their story sounds prophetic then and familiar today. Why do the Alexanders stand out for you?
Man, we met them in the tent in Texas; they were hurting. Jim and Bonnie, they were down at one point to a few potatoes, and that's what they were going to have for dinner. What's great about them was that they were so wonderfully ordinary. They had it all, and they fell off the bottom rung. And to go back and find them 26 years after we met them and to see how they had learned from that experience -- what a powerful story of survival. Unfortunately, Bonnie had died just a few months before I tracked the family down.
They are your prototypical American family who works hard, doesn't want anything for nothing and just got whacked. And they're still getting whacked. They're a wonderful success story but the son, Matthew, is 37, 38, he has to go to Iraq and Afghanistan every couple of years to do a tour of duty. He lost his job. He joined the national guard, and you know that story. His story epitomizes the quandary of America. Is the military going to be our only employer for a lot of these people? And it is, unfortunately. People should have more options, not just military or starving.
When you reunited in 2009, Jim Alexander's son says you came back into their lives at a time when his dad was depressed and questioning whether his choices 30 years ago had hurt his family. Even now that he's built own home and raised his two children, Jennifer and Matthew?
That family went through hell. In my book, Jim's a hero to me for pulling his family out. Those kids got good grades in school. They're good people. He has great grandkids now. He didn't go off drinking and vanish. He didn't melt down. He bucked up and he and Bonnie made it happen for those kids. That is to me, it's like, it's a story of family. It's a story of love. I'm impressed by those people.
Jim has been wondering, "Did I fuck up?" No. He didn't fuck up. I was there. I don't know what I'd have done if I were him. There was no work in Michigan. They went to Texas and it fell to shit there. There but for the grace, you know? And that's why their story their story is so powerful to me. We get in these situations in our lives and we don't know we're making a bad decision. But, you know, you make the best decisions you can at the moment you're in. And, you know, it goes to shit. And then what do you do? You deal.
Where does the story end between you and the people you write about?
I stay in email touch with Jennifer and Matthew Alexander. It's been some pretty intense emails. It's weird, this journalistic thing that we do. It's not a friendship per se, like, "Hey, let's go have beers, let's talk about our life." But we're connected and I'm gonna write about it. It's a reporter-subject relationship, but it's a pretty intense one. It's like a personal thing at this point because we've shared something. It's been a journey for all of us.
Do you worry about getting too close to be objective?
You've gotta get close. You can't phone this kind of story in. I'm very much get out there and feel it with people. You can interview homeless people or people who've ridden freight trains and write a pretty good story about them. But going out there and being an eye-witness, a roving eyeball and ear, that's the best kind of journalism. That's how you're gonna convey what's really going on with real people. You've got to get close enough to hurt.
How do you deal with the hurt?
I submerged. After the '80s, I had to get away from this. I wrote it publicly: I'm not gonna cover this anymore. I can't do it anymore. By the early '90s I was basically off the radar.
You write in the new book that you "hiding from the world on the quiet campus" as a journalism professor at Stanford University in the 1990s. What was scary?
Oh, demons. The people, they become, they inhabit your head. I'm doing these blog shows for the book, and I don't have to look at my notes for a lot of them. I remember their stories, 25, 28 years later, their names, their, details, every moment around them.
You can't talk to people like this -- and unless you're a really cold son of a bitch -- and not carry some of the weight. And I can't help it. I can't remove myself and say it's only a job, another hard sob story, whatever. Can't do it.
I tend to like the people that I write about. Some of the stories in the book, you notice, I've been going back to them for years. It's very personal. I feel like my friends are in trouble when I'm writing about them. It's touching everybody today. It ain't easy.
How do you measure success or satisfaction?
You never know who's reading your stuff, and sometimes, it's Bruce Springsteen who calls and that's great and wonderful and it's a whole other story. Sometimes Michael and I have both had these calls I'll never forget. After "Journey to Nowhere" came out we had a call from a guy who was some kind of executive somewhere. He said, "I read your book and it changed my life. I'm working in a soup kitchen now and helping people."
It's not like an investigative story where someone's in jail. My job is to make people think and to be aware. For the Bee, the Hunger in California project that me and 13 other reporters worked on, I know we had an influence on the state raising the minimum wage.
"Journey to Nowhere" sold fewer than 7,000 copies, but one of those ended up in Bruce Springsteen's hands. In 1995, Springsteen released two songs inspired by the book, "Youngstown" and "The New Timer," and he wrote the forward to "Someplace Like America." How did that first phone call go?
Oh, that's never a bad day when Bruce calls. It came at a time when Michael and I were both coming out of the woods of the 1980s. It got us back on the story. The timing of that -- we were meant to get back on the road and do it. That was the power of Bruce.
"Youngstown." In 299 words, he condensed 10,000 of my words and got the spirit and the message of those people. I knew Bruce was great, but witnessing it on that level -- wow. That's a realm, that's Bruce's realm.
You lived in your truck when you moved from Ohio to California looking for a job as a newspaper reporter in the 1970s. For The Third-World Beat in America, that sounds like on-the-job training while looking for a job. How do you prepare for that gig?
As Michael says, it's the school of life. We plunged right in. It was a lot harder than I ever would have imagined. Suffering. Freezing. Struggling with no money. We took a lot of vacation time, a lot of weekends; a lot of that was without pay. We did the first book on a $7,500 advance, and that barely covered our mortgages. We even dipped into our savings. When we did that big trip across the country, we bought that old car. We lived in that old car. We never stayed in a hotel, not once. Michael won an award for his hobo pictures from Nikon. That $500 kept us going.
I grew up hearing the Great Depression stories, how people were screwed, taken advantage of. My parents didn't have any power. They were really poor when they were young, they were abject Great Depression, no-food kind of poor in the '30s. So when I became a journalist, I had the power to tell these stories. And it was a big motivating factor, just as Michael's background is. Michael grew up truly poor, with his mother dying when he was 11, the orphanages and foster homes and all the horror that he went through. So both of us, you know, we had some sense of what the other side is like.
What have you learned about people through your work?
People are stronger then you think. Look, when you're confronted with shit, a river of shit comes at you, you know, you have a choice: you can buck up and deal or you can, you know, you can let it get you. You can't let it get you. The people that I'm meeting, you know, they're survivors. They're trying to find a way in this crazy, fucked-up thing that's happened. My god, I'm in awe of that.
What have you learned about yourself through your work?
I've always been terrified, ever since I started covering this stuff, of losing everything. I know shit can happen. I know how easy it is to slip. It's not that far for any of us. I have lived a holy terror of, you know, having to confront these things myself. What would I do? Goddamn, you know, it's on my brain, in the forefront of my thoughts all the time. I don't know, I don't know what -- I hope I can be as strong as them. That's all I can say.
