“To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. . . .”

The opening of The Grapes of Wrath invokes the strange beauty of a dying world, leading to a powerful story about a family’s struggle to survive the haphazard events of history, bad luck, and capitalism. The Grapes of Wrath, which deserves mention as a candidate for the coveted title of “The Great American Novel”  according to my assessment, portrays capitalism’s capacity of warping the human soul to such a state of callousness that I suspect it puts anything Karl Marx wrote to shame. It’s an intensely political and historical work, yet it never degenerates into the unbearably polemical.  Granted it starts off a bit slow, but ultimately I found myself hooked by the end of the novel, and deeply caring about the characters and the story’s outcome to the point where certain scenes haunted my dreams and nightmares long after I had finished the book. It is the perfect book to read in this faltering economy, showing us just how bad things could really become and helping me realize how lucky I am just to have a part-time job that allows me to pay for shelter and put food on the table.

Set during the Great Depression, the novel follows the desperate Joad family who plan to leave their home and travel to California in order to find work after losing their property to the bank as a consequence of the dust bowl. After their long odyssey across the American west, California fails to be the utopia the Joads hoped for, proving more hell than heaven as the local landowners exploit the desperate situation of the migrant workers who are slowly starving to death with few work prospects to relieve their suffering, and who are therefore willing to work for unfair wages to feed their families. The Joad family arrives to live in unsanitary conditions, face belligerent cops sent to keep the migrants in their place , class prejudice from the local population, death in the family from sickness, and starvation. The cast of characters includes a former preacher turned political radical, Tom Joad (the light-hearted eldest son with a quick temper who is on parole from prison for killing a man in self-defense), Pa Joad (the patriarchal figure who loses his status as the head of the family once he is unable to provide for them in California), Ma Joad (the matriarchal backbone that keeps the family together, despite all their troubles), Al Joad (a son of Pa and brother to Tom, who is a playboy flirt that thinks only of women and cars), Rose of Sharon (the selfish sister pregnant with a baby that she’s will be born deformed due to malnutrition, her own sins, and her family’s sins), and so many others.

Although written as a contemporary novel by Steinbeck, I would argue that to today’s reader it has the quality of historical fiction. This book would fit comfortably not only in a literature course, but in a history class. It provides a wonderful literary portrait of the times: life in the Hoovervilles, the dust bowl (an often ignored and forgotten part of our history, which I had never even heard about until college), and even anachronistic pejoratives like “okies” (a derogatory name for the migrants coming from other states to California, which I hadn’t known about until reading this novel.) The only other novel that I’ve read to tackle the subject of the dust bowl is the excellent  young adult verse novel, Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse. Nevertheless, despite its usefulness as a fictionalized historical narrative, it still possesses all the hallmark characteristics of good literature in its own right, with wonderfully written prose, powerful symbols strewn across the story, allusions to the Bible, and well-developed characters that take us through an enthralling plot.

The novel is an attack on big business capitalism, especially the greedy selfishness it produces within individuals. While not being portrayed as actual characters, the landowners are shown to love money for money’s sake, depicted as out-of-touch with the land and not knowing what lands they even own. They know only the profits they make from it. The novel speaks of the problems of wealth and land falling into the hands of a few, which as the novel implies is what can happen in a capitalist system. The selfishness of the landowners trickles down into the middle-class managers of the individual farms who enforce the oppression of the out-of-luck starving migrant workers in order to save a few bucks. It’s not a matter of big dollars; as Steinbeck shows the managers literally nickel-and-dime the workers, cutting five cents here, two cents there, which would really make no difference to the ultra-rich landowners, but a huge difference to the workers’ ability to provide food for their families. They pay astronomically low wages simply because they can. They landowners rig the system so that they own food stores on the premises of their farms and own the canning companies for the produce that is picked. So the money they do have to pay out to the workers returns back to them when the workers then have to spend it to feed themselves.

Through the characters of Jim Casy and Tom Joad, Steineck suggests the solution to such exploitation is unionism, the collective. Only through the collective can people stop the evils of the world. In fact, Casy suggests the evils of the world (all the crimes) stem from need; people will steal and murder not out of evil, but because they are unable to fulfill their basic needs any other way. Jim Casy is a Christ figure. He even share Jesus Christ’s initials. He is the radical Christ of the Bible primarily interested in the plight of the poor and downtrodden, believing that heaven is to be found on earth and adopting socialist principles of cooperation as the greatest good. Like Jesus, he is sacrificed for the principles he preaches when he gets his head busted in during a strike he’s leading against a farm paying unfair wages. After Casy dies, in continuing with the biblical typology, Tom becomes a disciple to spread Jim Casy’s ideas of collectivism and the true source of evil in the world.

Nevertheless, I think it would be mistake to relegate the story to a mere political novel criticizing rampant capitalism. On a deeper level, it’s a story about the very nature of dehumanization and the strength people have to survive in the face of hopelessness. In this sense, while different on the surface, the Joad’s struggles in California share a kinship to Elie Wiesel’s struggles in the concentration camps. Much like we witness Wiesel lose his family members to the horrors of Nazi Germany, we watch the slow disintegration of the Joad family as it loses members throughout the course of the novel and reaches a point where the family is on the brink of destruction, with no money left for food, about to lose everything they still own to a flood (1). Many stories exist in literature about dehumanizing different ethnic groups, or races, or members of other cultures, but I think what makes this story so powerful is that its about dehumanizing and exploiting people of similar backgrounds (white farmers) who just happen to have bad luck and lost their farms.

The migrants are dehumanized because of the greed of others, the absolute refusal to see them as human beings with the same concerns and fears and hopes. The exploitation is calculated. By sending out the flyers to all the poor people in the dust bowl states, the big landowners have an infinite supply of starving workers to cut down prices for labor.

Dehumanization takes another form than just for exploitation. The local populace turns a blind eye to the plight of these migrants–these “okies.” They dehumanize the population not just so they feel comfortable exploiting them, but also so they need not empathize with their plight. Every time they come close to empathizing with them, their empathy turns to anger and fear. They constantly remark that they would never live in such conditions under any circumstance, and therefore the okies should be treated like animals because they must be like animals to accept such conditions, despite these critical people never having been placed into such hardships.

Steinbeck develops his themes even deeper by transcending the mere political and particular. Jim Casy’s message of collectivism is not just a method for fighting capitalist exploitation, but his radical philosophy is meant to suggest that human collectivity is the best way to solve any problem (the individual can do nothing, spitting in the face of traditional American wisdom that places a high premium on individuality and individual resistance.) Tom Joad is the perfect character to exemplify the problems of individual resistance. A man tries to stab him, and he protects himself by smashing the man’s head in, and he is thrown in jail for his trouble. He knocks a cop harassing the migrant population unconscious when they first arrive in California, and he almost gets arrested, except that Jim Casy takes the fall for him. Individual resistance is shown to be futile. The novel associates selflessness with the downtrodden migrants, while selfishness is associated with individual good. They are selfless because only by helping each other and sharing their meager resources can the poor hope to survive, while individual greed is the very definition of selfishness, of which the landowners exemplify. Jim Casy tells the Californian farmers who are trying to break up his strike that the consequences of their greed is the death of children through starvation. He tells them the truth. The system they have devised so a few extra nickels and dimes can be saved is leading to starving children. He gets his brain’s smashed in for his troubles; they silence what they don’t want to hear. Steinbeck connects these ideas of collectivity and selfishness to a larger American tradition; I think, he particularly has Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in mind. A more organic connection to the land and the food supply can be established only when we realized how all of humanity is connected and intertwined; the landowners have become so selfish, so disconnected with their fellow man, that they also have become disconnected to the properties they own.

The desperate situation of the times transforms the social roles within the family with Ma Joad, the matriarch, taking over the reigns from Pa Joad who is emasculated by the whole experience, no longer able to support his family and too lost in his thoughts to make decisions. This leads to the powerful image at the end of Roshasharn breast feeding a starving stranger in a barn, symbolizing both the state of the male family heads in California who can no longer support their family and have literally become like helpless babies and also symbolizing a kind of rebirth and hope that this sick and dying individual might survive thanks to the breast milk. It also highlights women’s strength as the backbone that saves the family from complete ruin. Steinbeck borrowed this final image from Valerius Maximus who recorded in The Nine Books of Memorable Acts and Sayings of the Ancient Romans the act of Pero, a dutiful daughter who secretly breast feeds her own father to prevent a death sentence from starvation.

Matt over at A Guy’s Moleskin Notebook doesn’t seem to have liked the book as much as I did. His main complaint is about the narrative interludes that rotate every other chapter (with a few exceptions) that feature the broader social landscape of the times in contrast to the Joad’s particular story about their family surviving the times. My introduction describes this fictional technique as “a contrapuntal structure, which alternates short lyrical chapters of exposition and background pertinent to the migrants as a group . . . with the long narrative chapters of the Joad family’s dramatic exodus to California.” The introduction goes on to point out it is a novel structured around juxtaposition much like Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Although I agree the contrapuntal structure slogs at times because it’s always easier to read a character-oriented story,  I found these interludes grew on me as the novel progressed, culminating in the powerful scene where  the landowners just incinerate and destroy a chunk of their crops to keep up prices, while the starving migrants watch in utter despair as all that food goes to waste. These interludes serve to foreshadow the misery of the Joads next location, while also underscoring the theme of the collective that is so important to the novel. While we might follow the Joads in the main story, it’s not just their story, but a story about an entire generation who watch their American dream disappear into the dust (quite literally). If not quite the greatest American novel, this is truly one work that deserves to be in the running, in my opinion.

Notes:

1. One important distinction, however, that should be made between the experience of Jews in Concentration camps and the experience of the migrants who lost their farms is even though the victims of the dust bowl didn’t have a lot of options and were driven to California by necessity, they still had some free choice in making their own decision about what to do next, while the Jews were forced into Concentration Camps by outside forces and due to institutionalized racial laws. Likewise, the migrants had freedom of movement and could choose where they traveled, while the victims of the Holocaust were forced to go where their oppressors put them and had their camps chosen for them. The main goal of the Concentration Camps was the destruction of all the Jews, while this wasn’t the goal of the California landowners who simply wanted a cheap source of labor.

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