On the seventy-fifth anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath

Southern Illinoisan, April 1, 2014

When John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath first appeared seventy-five years ago this month, it was both a popular and critical success, selling more than 400,000 copies in its first year and winning the National Book Award for 1939. With the release of director John Ford's brilliant film adaptation in 1940, Steinbeck's story secured its status as a classic.

To research his book, Steinbeck had toured California shantytowns, or “Hoovervilles,” where migrants—often called “Okies” because so many came from Oklahoma—lived and witnessed the economic exploitation and social discrimination they faced.

The novel focuses on the Joads, a family of Oklahoma farmers who are among the hundreds of thousands of Midwesterners forced off their land by the twin disasters of economic depression and drought. The bank's foreclosure on their farm tears asunder the traditional values that had sustained the Joads--community and their close connection to the land. Along with Jim Casy, an itinerant minister undergoing his own crisis of faith, the family loads what belongings it can on a truck and heads west on Route 66 toward California and the hope of finding work and a new life.

As agents from the banks come to force the tenants from the land, they explain that the banks “breathe profits; they eat the interest on the money. If they don’t get it, they die the way you die without air. . . . The bank is something else than men. . . . It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”

Being forced off the land leaves Pa and Grampa psychologically unmoored. Grampa dies almost as soon as the family leaves while Pa, unable to support his family, finds himself lost and disconsolate. Traveling westward, Ma increasingly provides leadership, her status being based more on the value of family.

On the road, the Joads meet other migrants, with whom they share supplies, company and conversation. In one discussion, they compare their own situation with that of William Randolph Hearst who, as one Okie says, owns a million acres. Reverend Casy comments, “If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems he needs it ‘cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he’s poor in hisself, there ain’t no million acres gonna make him feel rich.”

Out of these interactions, the family discovers a new sense of community in their encampments along the way west. As travelers stop by the roadside for an evening, “a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream. . . . In the evening, sitting about the fires, the twenty were one.”

But there is no “golden time” in California, as the number of migrants creates a labor surplus and allows large landowners to keep wages low and prevent workers from organizing.

For Casy and Tom Joad, this emerging concept of community becomes politicized and embodied in the idea of a labor union. As Tom explains Casy’s vision, “one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul an’ he foun’ that he didn’t have no soul that was his’n. Says he foun’ he jus’ got a little piece of a great big soul.”

For Ma, the notion of family expands to embrace a vision of community, especially as her own family unravels, with the deaths of Grampa and Granma, and the desertions of son Noah and son-in-law Connie. “Use’ta be the fambly was fust,” she explains. “It ain’t so now. It’s anybody. Worse off we get, the more we got to do.”

The book concludes on a bleak note with Casy murdered, the workers’ strike broken, daughter Rose of Sharon’s baby stillborn, and the family caught in a flood. In the abandoned boxcar where the Joads seek refuge they come across a starving elderly man, and Rose of Sharon breastfeeds him. This scene, in which Rose of Sharon, who has been the most self-centered character throughout the book, offers to a stranger the milk intended for her baby signifies the ultimate survival of the community, bringing together Ma’s expanded notion of family and Casy’s idea of one great big soul.

Seventy-five years after its original publication, when countless families have once again been victims of foreclosure and the Supreme Court has ruled that banks and other corporations are, in fact, people, Casy’s vision that each person’s “little piece of a soul wasn’t no good ‘less it was with the rest, an’ was whole” still serves as a timely reminder.