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Title: Overview: The Grapes of Wrath Novel, 1939 American Writer ( 1902 - 1968 ) Other Names Used: Glasscock, Amnesia; Steinbeck, John Ernst, Jr.; Source: Literature and Its Times: Profiles of 300 Notable Literary Works and the Historical Events that Influenced Them. Joyce Moss and George Wilson. Vol. 3: Growth of Empires to the Great Depression (1890-1930s). Detroit: Gale, 1997. From Literature Resource Center. Document Type: Work overview Full Text:

Born and raised in California, John Steinbeck portrays in many of his writings the beauty and agricultural promise that attracted thousands to that state during the Great Depression. He also examines the social tensions resulting from the rapid growth in this state. The Grapes of Wrath focuses on the plight of newcomers who, promised plentiful jobs as farm workers, instead find themselves competing desperately for few jobs at rock-bottom wages.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

Great Depression

Most Americans think of the Great Depression as beginning with the stock market crash of 1929. For some, however, like dry farmers in the southern Plains states, it started earlier. Dry farming—agriculture without irrigation—had boomed in the region since the railroad arrived in the late 1800s. Wheat and corn were the favorite crops, and wheat prices soared with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. But farmers in Europe returned to their fields when the war ended in 1918, and American wheat exports dropped. Suddenly American farmers were getting much less for their crops. In the 1920s, an agricultural depression set in, contributing to the more serious economic downturn that followed.

Throughout the 1920s, farmers struggled to keep their farms going. Some had bought new land and equipment during the war years, thinking that the good prices and high demand were going to continue. Others had taken out mortgages on property. Many (like the fictional Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath) rented their land from a landlord, usually a bank that had taken the property when an earlier owner couldn't pay off a mortgage. Whether bound by loans, mortgages, or rent, many farmers in the 1920s faced mounting debts that were growing harder to pay. Just maintaining the payment schedule was worrisome and often difficult, and most hoped that better days were around the corner.

Instead, the whole economy took a nose dive beginning with the stock market crash in October 1929. The already low prices farmers were paid for their crops sank even lower as the entire nation plunged into economic depression. The landlords and banks, in trouble themselves, now pressed harder than ever for the money the farmers owed them.

Dust Bowl

At this critical point, nature, too, added to the farmers' troubles. From the early days of settlement through the 1920s, rain had generally been plentiful in the Plains states. Beginning in 1931, however, six years of severe drought struck the region, quickly draining its groundwater supply. In addition, poor farming practices were taking a heavy toll on the land. Overgrazing by livestock, failure to rotate crops so that fields could recover, allowing animals to graze on the crop stubble instead of plowing it back under—these and other practices had robbed the soil of nutrients.

Without mountains or even many trees to provide cover, the Plains region has always been very windy. Now, in the hot, dry weather, the winds helped evaporate what little water was left in the soil. As the farmers tried to grow their crops in the poor, dry earth, it turned to dust. The winds picked up the dust, creating huge black clouds that darkened the sky for miles. A part of the natural ecosystem, such dust storms were not new to the Great Plains. During the 1930s, though, worsened by the farmers' abuse of the soil, they struck harder and more often than ever before. Fences, equipment, trucks, even whole buildings could be covered in a matter of hours. And when there were no storms, the constant winds piled the dust in deep drifts. Soon, the whole area—over 5 million square miles, from North Dakota to Texas, from Arkansas to New Mexico—became known as the Dust Bowl.

The worst storms in the Dust Bowl happened in a roughly four-hundred-mile-wide circle. Centered on the Oklahoma panhandle, this circle included parts of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, New Mexico and Colorado. But the dirt blizzards affected the whole eastern half of the nation as well. Bad storms in 1933 and 1934 dropped dust as far east as New York and Philadelphia. The worst of all came on Sunday, April 14, 1935, “Black Sunday,” when thick, black clouds hid the sun over the Plains states. In hours, temperatures plunged fifty degrees in some places.

Okies

The harsh conditions of the Dust Bowl squeezed everybody, but they hit the small farmers hardest. Those who owed money on loans or mortgages couldn't pay when crops failed year after year. They lost their land to the banks. And the banks, which now owned more land than ever before, had to wring every penny of profit out of it. It was cheaper to have one man with a tractor visit many farms than to allow families of tenants to operate them. So the banks “tractored” the families off the land, as happens to the Joads in the novel's early pages. Often this meant literally driving a tractor through the home of the protesting family to make them leave.

Thus, thousands of families, already ground down by years of poverty and hardship, now found themselves homeless as well. For most, the future appeared bleak, but word spread that unlimited opportunity awaited in the far west, in the golden state of California. As Grampa Joad puts it, “'Course it'll be all different out there—plenty work, an' ever'thing nice an' green, an' little white houses an' oranges growing all around” (Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, p. 141).

This tempting vision was reinforced by the appearance of numerous leaflets sent out to the stricken Plains region by California growers. The leaflets commonly stated that thousands of workers were needed at such-and-such a farm or orchard. Packing everything they could into their old cars or trucks, selling the rest at a loss, the homeless families began a great migration westward. Between half a million and a million people made the journey between 1933 and 1940, one of the biggest mass movements in U.S. history.

Like the Joads, nearly all took Route 66, which runs from Oklahoma City almost 2,000 miles straight west, through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to California. They optimistically called it the “Mother Road,” but upon reaching California their joy died quickly. Instead of steady jobs, they found hostility and exploitation. Dirty from living in cars and tents, uneducated, and having their own seemingly peculiar ways and customs, they were despised and often attacked by local people. No longer were they farmers or landowners. Nor were they even seen as respectable citizens. Instead, since many came from Oklahoma, all were scornfully labeled “Okies,” and the makeshift community camps they lived in were called “Okievilles.”

Growers and Migrants

The Okies had been farmers, familiar with the ways of the land, but they met an entirely new kind of agriculture in California. Instead of small family farms raising a variety of crops and animals, California agriculture was increasingly dominated by large, single-crop farms run by corporations. By 1935, 10 percent of the farms grew over 50 percent of the total crops produced in the state.

Work for these single-crop growers was pretty much limited to a short period at harvest time, when the crop had to be picked. These were the “jobs” promised in the leaflets, which the Okies thought were year-round, full-time positions. That assumption was wrong, for California agriculture needed migrant labor, workers for brief jobs who would then travel to the next job. While corn and wheat can be harvested by a single farmer with a tractor, California crops like fruits and cotton required large teams to pick them by hand quickly, before spoilage set in. The workers followed these crops, moving on to a new farm as its crop grew ready for picking. Outside of harvest time, there was no place in the economic system for them.

Exploitation

Earlier migrant workers in California had included Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and Mexican immigrants. Whatever their origin, California's migrant workers were at the mercy of the growers. Outsiders, often homeless and desperate for work, migrants usually arrived in numbers greater than the available jobs. At no time was this surplus of workers greater than with the influx of Dust Bowl refugees.

The growers had hoped for such a surplus when they sent out the leaflets, which might advertise for perhaps 800 workers when there was work for only 500. Several thousand men might see the leaflets and respond. More workers meant lower wages—and thus higher profits for the grower. Early in their journey west, the Joads meet a ragged, dirty man who has returned from California and warns them. “The more fellas he gets, an' the hungrier, less he's gonna pay” (The Grapes of Wrath, p. 244). The man's wife and children have died of starvation and disease; by the end he is willing to work “jus' for a cup a flour an' a spoon a lard” (The Grapes of Wrath, p. 245).

Attempting to Organize

Like other migrant workers before and after them, the Okies tried to organize labor unions that would help them stand up to the growers. Steinbeck portrays such attempts, and the growers' responses, when the Joads find work at a peach orchard where, unknown to them, other migrants are on strike. As the Joads arrive, they are escorted by police past some shouting people and into the camp. Tom Joad, in some ways the novel's central character, sneaks out of the orchard to discover what is going on. He finds out that the men and women he'd seen earlier were striking workers. Tom comes across his old friend Jim Casy, now the strikers' leader. Their peaceful meeting is then broken up by two club-wielding policemen, one of whom kills Casy with a blow to the head.

The episode shows how local institutions of power like the police worked on the side of the growers. Such incidents were not uncommon. In 1938, for example, a mob headed by a local sheriff burned down an Okie migrant camp in Kern County, a leading farming area where antimigrant feelings were especially strong. The penniless migrants, by contrast, had only their own unity on which to rely. But this unity was tenuous. With so many hungry, the growers could always find those desperate enough to work, even if it meant going against a strike. For example, the Joads are offered the same wage—five cents a box—that the strikers had demanded. Once the strike is broken, Casy tells Tom, the wage will go back down to two-and-a-half cents. The growers were willing to pay the higher wage for a short period in order to break the strike.

Federal Camps

Upon taking office in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched a comprehensive agenda of government programs to combat the Depression. Called the New Deal, these programs included new federal agencies designed to create employment opportunities and to improve the lot of workers and the unemployed. Among the many such agencies, the one that most directly touched the Okies' lives was the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Operating under the authority of the Department of Agriculture, in 1936 the FSA began building camps in California in which the homeless migrants could live. Ten such camps were finished by the following year, and Steinbeck visited several in his research for The Grapes of Wrath. In the novel the Joads stay at one, the Arvin Sanitary Camp, also called the Weedpatch Camp, in Kern County.

The FSA camps were meant not as permanent homes, but as models for the larger growers to use in building similar living quarters for the migrants. Far from luxurious or even comfortable, they provided only basic necessities: rough shelter, and “sanitary units” in which to shower, wash, use the toilet, and do laundry. The growers, however, generally failed to build actual living quarters for the migrant farm workers, so many of them ended up staying in the camps for longer periods than was originally intended.

The Novel in Focus

The Plot

Tom Joad, about thirty, is hitchhiking home to his family's Oklahoma farm after being paroled from prison, where he was serving a sentence for killing a man (though he acted in self-defense). While on the road, Joad hooks up with a former preacher, Jim Casy, who also is returning to the area after a long absence.

On reaching the Joad farm, they find it and neighboring farms strangely deserted. Told that the family is with Tom's Uncle John, they find them at his place and soon learn that the Joads and other local families have been “tractored off” the land by the banks. The Joads are packing their truck to leave—like others, they have heard that sunshine and plentiful work are waiting in California. Before they leave, they go into town to sell their remaining farm equipment, horses, and furniture for the paltry sum of $18. It was far less than the goods were worth, but they had no choice.

It is agreed that Jim Casy will come with them, which makes thirteen in all: Grampa and Granma Joad, Uncle John, Pa and Ma Joad, Tom, his older brother Noah and teenage brother Al, their pregnant sister, Rose of Sharon, and her husband, and the youngest children, Ruthie and Winfield. After slaughtering their two remaining pigs and salting down the meat in barrels to preserve it, they set off early the next morning. At the last minute, Grampa refuses to leave the land and has to be drugged with a big dose of cough syrup. That night, as the Joads camp out with the Wilsons, another uprooted family whom they have befriended, Grampa dies of a stroke.

Traveling together, the two families reach California, but soon after they cross the border Mrs. Wilson falls ill and Mr. Wilson insists that the Joads go on by themselves. The trip has taken its toll on Granma Joad, who never recovered from her husband's death. As they cross the California desert at night, Granma dies. Ma Joad, who has been caring for her, hides her death from the others until the family is safely across the desert.

Their money nearly gone, the Joads reach a migrants' camp (an “Okieville”) near Bakersfield, the major city at the southern end of California's fertile San Joaquin Valley. Men in the camp have been unable to find work. A man representing a grower arrives, however, and says that he'll be hiring many pickers shortly, further north in the valley.

He mentions the tempting wage of thirty cents an hour—but when Floyd, a new acquaintance of Tom's, tries to get the man to put it in writing, the man grows angry. He summons his companion, a deputy, and accuses Floyd of being a “red.” The deputy harasses Floyd, then tries to arrest him. When Floyd hits him and runs, the deputy shoots and hits a nearby woman. As he is about to shoot again, Casy knocks him out. More deputies arrive. They arrest Casy, and the sheriff warns the migrants that they must leave.

Hearing of the federal camp at Weedpatch, the Joads go there and find a place in the crowded facility. There they find temporary respite from the harshness of life on the road, but work in the area is scarce and their money is running out. Leaving Weedpatch Camp, they head north and find a job picking peaches at an orchard where other workers are striking. The strike had come about when the grower had halved the workers' wages, to two-and-a-half cents a box. Casy, released from jail, is leading the strike. Tom is with him when the police raid the strikers and kill Casy; Tom, enraged, kills one of the policemen and goes into hiding. The family leaves the orchard, smuggling Tom out under a mattress.

They find work picking cotton, camping in an empty boxcar that the grower has provided as living quarters. While Tom hides in the bushes nearby, Ma brings him food. But when Ruthie brags that her brother killed a man, Ma tells Tom that he must go before he is found. Tom says that he wants to try organizing other migrants, as Casy was doing when he was killed. Ma gives him a few of her hard-earned dollars before he departs.

Just as the cotton harvest is ending, heavy rains begin. During the rains, Rose of Sharon gives birth, but her baby is born dead. Soon the rains flood the boxcar floor and the family has to pile up their belongings and perch on the pile. Ma Joad insists that they get out of the wet boxcar. They wade through the torrent to the highway and find a barn. Inside are a boy and his father. The father is starving because he has given all his food to the boy, who begs the Joads for food to feed his father. The destitute Joads have nothing to offer—until Rose of Sharon gives the starving man milk from her breast, milk her body had produced for her dead child.

“I” and “we”

The Grapes of Wrath addresses problems that concerned the whole nation in the period of the Depression: poverty, economic injustice, and the rights of workers against those of employers. In his approach to these issues, Steinbeck draws on a literary tradition with roots deep in American history, a tradition whose ideas go back to early American writers like Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Steinbeck uses Jim Casy, the former preacher, to present these ideas, and then has Casy pass them on to Tom Joad.

Casy, the former preacher, quit preaching because his beliefs no longer fit in with those of the church. Yet he continues to consider himself a religious man. Instead of believing in a Holy Spirit separate from humanity, he has come to believe that somehow all of humanity together makes up the Holy Spirit. As he tells Tom, “Maybe that's the Holy Sperit—the human sperit—the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of” (The Grapes of Wrath, p. 31).

Putting financial profit ahead of this “one big soul” goes against Casy's new beliefs, which is why he becomes a labor organizer. By contrast, working for society's common good becomes in Casy's eyes a religious aim:

I got thinkin' how we was holy when we was one thing, an' mankin' was holy when it was one thing. An' it got unholy when one mis'able little fella got the bit in his teeth and run off his own way, kickin' an' draggin' an' fightin'. Fella like that bust the holiness. But when they're all working together, not one fella for another fella, but one fella kind of harnessed to the whole shebang—that's right, that's holy.(The Grapes of Wrath, p. 105)

Even employing others for your own profit (“one fella for another fella”) goes against this view of what is “holy.”

Such ideas clearly clash with the traditional American values of free enterprise and individualism. Charges of being a “red” (a socialist or communist) have been commonly leveled against labor organizers, playing on the nation's traditional distrust of socialist ideas to fight against the labor movement. For example, when Floyd tries to hold the employer to his promise, the man accuses him of “talkin' red, agitatin' trouble” and then has him arrested (The Grapes of Wrath, p. 339). While Floyd was merely trying to obtain a written agreement, in some ways Casy's ideas do in fact have strong elements of socialism.

So did Steinbeck's, for The Grapes of Wrath is indeed a radical political document, a warning against the dangers of unrestrained capitalism. The wrath of the title refers to the anger of people who have lost even the basic necessities of survival. Their wrath threatens to overthrow those who possess society's wealth. “If you who own the things people must have could understand this,” Steinbeck writes in a short descriptive chapter, “you might preserve yourself.... But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into the `I' and cuts you off forever from the `we'” (The Grapes of Wrath, p. 195). Thus Steinbeck's novel attacks the very cornerstone of capitalism, the idea of ownership itself.

Sources

Steinbeck dedicated The Grapes of Wrath to his wife, Carol, and to Tom, who lived the novel. This Tom refers to Tom Collins, whom Steinbeck met in 1936. In August of that year, Steinbeck was visiting the federal camps for the migrants in California's Central Valley, doing research for his newspaper articles. Collins was in charge of Weedpatch Camp, which Steinbeck later featured in the novel. He was also the model for the sympathetic and understanding camp manager in the book, Jim Rawley. Through Collins's tireless efforts, and aided by the plentiful notes Collins kept, Steinbeck gained great insight into the migrants' world.

The character Jim Casy, too, has qualities in common with Tom Collins. Like Casy, Collins had a religious background, having trained as a priest. As a friend described him, “There was always something about Tom of the missionary. He had that ... look in his eye, a way of smiling when you talked. You knew he had your better interests at heart” (Parini, p. 179). Also at Weedpatch was Sherm Easton, head of the camp's governing committee. According to a later manager of the camp, Easton and his family were the models for the Joads. Yet the Joads clearly sprang largely from Steinbeck's imagination, perhaps as mixtures of people he had met in his travels or seen elsewhere.

Reception

Steinbeck's attacks against capitalism provoked outrage, as did his portrayals of circumstances in both Oklahoma and California. A congressman from Oklahoma, for example, called the book “a lie, the black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind” (Parini, p. 236). Growers in California claimed that it was unfair to them. School boards across the country banned it, claiming that it was obscene. It was not only banned but also publicly burned in Kern County, California, where much of it is set.

Yet within a few weeks of its publication, The Grapes of Wrath shot to the top of the bestseller lists and stayed there; it was 1939's top seller. Eleanor Roosevelt, the president's wife, praised it publicly and defended Steinbeck against his attackers. In 1940, the book won a Pulitzer Prize, and it is considered largely responsible for Steinbeck's 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature. Taking its place as a classic of American literature, it has since sold an estimated 15 million copies. An even wider audience has been introduced to the Joads through director John Ford's highly praised 1940 film adaptation.

The Grapes of Wrath, of course, also drew public attention to the plight of the migrants. Its success gave Steinbeck a national voice, and he used it. It also won him several meetings with President Roosevelt. In the end, though, what put a halt to the Okies' nightmare of poverty was the same thing that ended the Depression as a whole: the nation's entry into World War II in 1941.

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR