Hobbes's blog

Steinbeck's vivid imagery of the people and places in The Grapes of Wrath is sharp and unforgiving. But what is especially poignant is his description of the deteriorating landscape and growing confrontation between the people of the land and the landowners. In a weary and conversational tone, he decries in Chapter 5 the move by banks to take back and literally clear off the land and its residents for the growing of cotton. The land, the residents claim, is "their" land because they have raised crops from it, toiled on it, and lived on it—a Lockean notion indeed. It is heated to the point where the last standing men draw their guns and await their fates. Yet, the tractors come, push over the dainty structures the people call their homes, and "rape" the land. Steinbeck has tied together the two concepts of reclaiming land and rape that the imagery is jarring and ugly. All the while, there is a clear disconnect between the interests of the farmers and the landowners.

 

The men who drove in their covered cars (a nod to the luxury of the wealthy and their secretiveness) are not concerned about the plight of their tenants: they merely expect financial returns. In describing the typical set of landowners, he observed that "all of them were caught in something larger than themselves" (31). This larger thing is the "system," the established expectations of wealth—how to get it and what to do with it—and the structural underpinnings of financial institutions: they are meant to make money; serving the people is secondary. Because of the distance—physically, socially, and financially—the owners are able to carry out their wishes with little remorse. It would be "mean" to take back land in a time when lands are dusty people are hungry; that is why they rely on the veil of the bank to conduct these operations of bulldozing and cotton planting.

 

In social psychology, displacement of responsibility falls under the larger concept of moral disengagement. The "robot in the seat" of the tractor is concerned with his own survival, the livelihood of his family. He is an orderly—he is commanded from higher up and simply does what he is told. He may be clearing the land of his friends, but he is making significant money doing it, and he is given the tool needed to do it: the ravenous tractor. "Joe Davis' son," if he had a choice, probably would not want to destroy the lives of family friends. But because a legitimate authority—the bank—accepts responsibility for the consequences of that behavior, his responsibility is transferred to the mighty, faceless bank. The robotic, zombie-like tractor and its driver are the tools by which the owners can act in their best interests.

 

"Where will they go?" is the recurring question in this chapter. The owners can only shrug. The bank, however, has no sympathy, because it is not human. While it is made up of people, it operates in one concerted direction. While Steinbeck calls them machines at first, they are merciless creatures: "they breathe profits; they eat the interest on money" (32). The banks and owners invested in the land are interested in making maximum profit, while the people struggle to make ends meet. To them, the decline of the land is not their problem. To the people who have lived on that land, though, it is a problem only until they are forced off the land and told to go elsewhere. But where will they go?

I have to admit that taking a road trip across America was one of the items on my bucket list—an item I happily crossed off this past May. The American road trip belongs in the category of quintessential college travel experiences, along with backpacking across Europe or South America. But what is so spectacular about it is that it is perhaps cheaper and more readily experienced than the typical backpacking journey: flying to foreign lands, holing up in hostels, and being generally very frugal (except when it comes to alcohol).

 

In our age of globalization, the American road trip experience today is perhaps less exciting. It is neither difficult nor expensive. Traveling from coast to coast today is a relatively quick and potentially uneventful affair. My friend and I went from Los Angeles to New York in seven days, with much time to spare taking detours, visiting national parks, meeting friends, and seeing landmarks. What Nathan Asch hints at in his foreword is that travel is the only way to experience America—to the see the contrasts in lands, people, and customs—or to find work. That makes sense because at the time, the America of the 30s was a very different one from that of today.

 

Modern America, for the most part, no longer lives in isolation. With immigrants still settling in every town and city and America's own born and raised following their dreams of moving to big cities, the cultural divisions between the North, South, Midwest, and the Pacific have blurred tremendously. Those wishing to travel almost a century ago did not benefit from the consumable technology of air travel, the Internet, cell phones, and GPS. Deciding what to see—in Asch's case—meant visiting libraries or speaking to locals. Building my road trip's itinerary and following it through was effortless and almost trivial in a hyper-connected. On some nights, we decided which town to make our stop and then proceeded to book a motel room on our phones to get the best rate—while still in the car. Who would have thought of that!? 

 

Everything, it seemed, was too easy for us. But thanks to technology, we were flexible. Yet, even with the luxury of traveling with a trailer, Roland Wild's mission to cross America with his family seemed impossible. Initially, nothing was favorable about their living conditions—it was just too cramped for "three-and-a-half" human beings. For the Wild family, making do with their situation and continuously improving it was a challenge they appeared to defeat. In Erskine Caldwell's "Advertisement," there is strong caution against individuals who travel but must find home wherever they go. Hilariously, Caldwell derides the Massachusetts traveler who complains about the lack of seafood during his journey to the Southwest. Alas, despite my own efforts to not be an American when I travel abroad, I must still have the creature comforts of Internet access, the occasional Western meal, and running water. But these are lesser demands than those of my domestic road trip: always knowing my current location and having the ability to find restaurant, lodging, and landmark information in seconds.