A Political Companion to John Steinbeck

Chapter 1. Revolutionary Conservative, Conservative Revolutionary? John Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath

Revolutionary Conservative, Conservative Revolutionary? John Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath 19 IN 1939 JOHN STEINBECK finished The Grapes of Wrath, his sixth novel.1 It is, among other things, a political saga about the Joads, an imaginary family of heavily indebted tenant farmers who are suddenly evicted from the land that their forebears had seized from Indians and Mexicans and then proudly cultivated.2 Rather than remain in Oklahoma and become servile machine tenders, the family decides to purchase a used jalopy and head for California. The male members of the family envision the West as a pristine Eden, with abundant and fertile land and without heartless bankers who bedevil small farmers. The women, however, fear that even in California “lobos” (southwestern slang for wolves) roam. The women’s worries prove well founded. After arriving in California, the family confronts an impersonal agricultural economy that treats wage laborers as throwaway tools. The family further discovers a political system that openly sides with the wealthy and that denies the rural have-nots their rights of free speech and assembly. Police and middle-class vigilantes harass the Joads and thousands of other transient harvesters who have little food and clothing and no permanent dwelling place. Steinbeck uses the Joads as a case study with which to illustrate the fate of a larger group of down-on-their-luck Americans. He sprinkles sociological commentary throughout the story, in which he elaborates on the economic processes prompting the cruel behavior. Owners of enormous farms, needing pickers quickly for very brief harvesting seasons, lure the recently dispossessed to fields with promises of lucrative wages.3 Then, when the number of workers exceeds the number of jobs, the owners pay less-thanCHAPTER 1 Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh 20 Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh subsistence wages and impose harsh working conditions. Once the harvest is over, local police and health inspectors expel the field hands from the local community, purportedly to preserve order and to maintain community cleanliness for the permanent residents. Having helped big businesses protect their profit margins, the itinerant families find themselves “on the road” again, homeless, hungry, without work, and without a political home. During their trek, the Joad family gradually grows smaller. The grandparents die of age and heartbreak. Frustrated, three younger adult males individually abandon the family. One, having killed a vigilante in a burst of righteous anger, hides in a marsh. Another, having read popular magazine ads about career opportunities, deserts his pregnant young wife in order to find his fortune. The third, finding life outside Oklahoma too bewildering, simply leaves the family at the roadside and vanishes in the forest. By the novel’s closing, only the indefatigable altruism of Ma Joad and her daughter, Rose of Sharon, holds the family together. Malnourished, Rose delivers a stillborn baby in an unused railcar, which the family soon must abandon because of a drenching rain and coming flood. To escape the gully washer, the family members climb a hill. But the waters continue to rise. Atop the hill, the Joads discover a frightened, hungry child and father in a dilapidated barn. Spurred by a tacit sense of responsibility to humankind , Rose overcomes her adolescent bashfulness and breast-feeds the man, who lacks strength enough even to raise his head. Cradling the stranger, Rose gazes into the air and “smiles mysteriously.”4 And then the story ends. Steinbeck’s literary depiction of the seemingly endless sufferings caused by what today are called agribusinesses immediately generated controversy. On the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Honorable Lyle Boren of Oklahoma declared, “I cannot find it possible to let this dirty, lying, filthy manuscript go heralded before the public without a word of challenge or protest.”5 Boren was not the only nationally renowned politician to take a stand. On the wireless, both the president and the first lady defended the accuracy and value of Steinbeck’s novel.6 Meanwhile, many local officials in California, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas denounced the book for its fueling of class hatred and undermining of respect for private property and property owners. In some farming communities in the Midwest and on the West Coast, citizens either compelled municipal governments to remove the book from public libraries or destroyed copies in bonfires. Lobbied heavily by California’s big businesses, the Federal Bureau of Investigation gathered Revolutionary Conservative, Conservative Revolutionary? 21 information on Steinbeck...