The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn The Machine Shall Make You Free Others are packing our car for the trip out of our workaday world and into Vacationland. I am sitting here, calmly thinking how...
...The auto workers, the steel workers, the clothing workers, when they sit down at the bargaining table, do not think just about money...
...Even every filling station at which we stop, every restaurant at which we seek refreshment will exhibit something that is new and lively...
...Working people and farmers didn't go at all...
...Along with homes, our economy contemplates roads to move on and places of escape from the hum of labor...
...This is something of enormous importance...
...In a sense, nature had provided them with a sort of vacation even in the old days...
...I am sitting here, calmly thinking how wrong most people are in their ideas about life...
...Now the idea of a vacation for everyone has become a matter of national policy...
...No workingman or his family dreamed of such a thing as a vacation...
...So, without thinking much about the matter, people say: "We use machines--so we are mechanized...
...They stayed put and worked--and that was that...
...The farmers whom I know spend their winters--or a good part of them--in Florida...
...I shall be rejoicing in every twist of the way, every brook, every garden, every birdsong, every new or old house that looks good...
...Along with wages, unemployment insurance, severance pay and old-age security, they make provision for a time of rest in midsummer...
...But now all is different...
...When Senator Neuberger wrote his New Leader supplement about national parks, forests and waters [NL, February 20], recreation for the millions was one of the main things he had in mind...
...I shall not write one word unless I feel like it...
...At the present time, almost everyone in America takes some sort of vacation...
...Things were that way until less than a hundred years ago...
...And this thing has developed almost entirely within my memory...
...It means, among other things, that each one of us takes a whirl, once a year, at a fresh sort of experience...
...But I shall be thinking of none of these things when we take to the road tomorrow...
...Our imagination is jolted, our sympathies widened, our understanding enriched...
...If the Northerner goes south and the Southerner north, if the Westerner comes east and the Easterner finds out about the West, it is all to the good...
...No mere laziness or lack of work could equal in emotional satisfaction the poking about here and there in the barn or along the fences or back in the woodlot to see how things were coming along and what needed doing...
...And when we reach our vaea-tion spot...
...But only a small minority of us had formed the habit of migrating to the mountains or shore or any other sort of vacation place...
...The rich, of course, moved to their great summer places or set sail on their yachts...
...When the factory system first came in, these people toiled 12 or 14 hours a day six days a week...
...They could sleep late and spend the short daylight hours tinkering around the place...
...While one set of machines hems us in, another set provides a way out...
...But when I speak of the revolution in our summer habits, it is the great population of our cities and towns that I have in mind--especially the millions of employes in factories, mills and transportation systems...
...I am willing to take the affirmative side in a debate on the proposition that the machine is the great liberator...
...In winter, they had a quiet time...
...I intend to lie down on the sand and watch the sails and the clouds float by...
...All of us depend increasingly on machines, autos, airplanes, telephones, labor-saving devices...
...It was not regarded as a hardship...
...When I was a boy, only a few people went on vacations...
...And if they died of tuberculosis, that was the will of God...
...More and more, we are told, people live in cities or, at any rate, in metropolitan centers...
...A couple of families will crowd into one car--and off they go...
...I frequently run across articles lamenting the artificiality of our present world...
...Any family which has a car can take to the road and share the delights of Yellowstone, Glacier or Yosemite...
...When Charles Dickens came to this country in the 1830s, he told just how things went...
...We see different landscapes, different people, another way of life...
...Aristotle foresaw that role for it, and the old boy was right...
...They are as much at home in the semi-tropical Southland as anyone from New York or Chicago...
...It is an acknowledgement that the wage-earner is something more than a hand, that he is a man, that he has as much right as anyone to a quiet time of leisure with his family...
...We are livelier persons and better citizens because we have rolled along the road outside of our regular orbit...
...This stipulation is written into the agreement largely with the workingman's family in mind...
...They were better off than many others...
...Vacation time is provided for in most of our current union agreements...
...That was the way life was...
...Even the farmers have experienced a great change...
Vol. 39 • July 1956 • No. 28
