4. Grapes of Wrath (3)

It is said that the literary press just didn’t get John Steinbeck. He seemed all over the place.

But Warren French, in his Reference Guide to American Literature, maintains that the diversity found in Steinbeck’s work is a consistently “developing vision of man’s relation to environment.” In that sense, he reckons, Steinbeck was a Modernist, citing Maurice Beebe’s definition of modernist sensibility, as defined by “its irony, its implicit admiration for verbal precision and understatement." 

In 2010, in a school like Gallatin School of Individualized Studies, we take it for granted the freedom granted to us by the legacy of the Modernists, Steinbeck included.

Take my story. Raised in India post-liberalization, in a country crashing head-first into globalization, I was raised to have an inherent distrust of the Government. After all, the Government got us in a place where no longer the country could afford the Government. So poor was India in 1990 that we had to mortgage our gold reserves to secure supplies of food, lest the country starved. In the following years, as India opened up, it seemed change could not happen fast enough.

And boy, India changed. I, raised amidst cities sprouting, roads filling up with cars and Indians getting more confident, had little empathy for the public services. When finally Oliver Stone’s Wall Street came to our cable channel, India collectively chanted, “greed is good.”
 
But soon, the Indian story became inevitability. As urban India began settling in its newfound prosperity, I came to New York in 2007. A New York, in the words of Hans Van Der Broek, protagonist of Joseph O’ Neil’s bestselling novel, making a million bucks “was essentially a question of walking down the street — of strolling, hands in pockets, in the cheerful expectation that sooner or later a bolt of pecuniary fire would jump out of the atmosphere and knock you flat.”

A year later, it would all crash.
 
Greed ain’t longer good, if you ask me. If it wasn’t for the modernists, and I’d write novels for a living, the critics wouldn’t have given me a dime.

Thank God for 2010.

Charles Dickens’ famous Christmas morality tale, A Christmas Carol, features in it’s middle, during Scrooge’s encounter with the Ghost of Christmas Present, a scathing indictment of the Victorian practice of “workhouses.” These were institutions set up for the London poor where the homeless were given hard beds, meagre food and backbreaking labor to keep them off the streets and out of sight of polite society. Early on in the story, when confronted with poverty before his face and presented the opportunity to alleviate it, Scrooge cries in his curmudgeonly way “Are there no workhouses?” During his encounter with the Ghost of Christmas Present, the Ghost introduces Scrooge to two allegorical children who are orphaned and will soon be dead. Scrooge meekly asks if they have any family who may alleviate their suffering. Disgusted with Scrooge’s meagre compassion, the Ghost throws his earlier words back in his face, embracing the children and bellowing “Are there no workhouses?”

In John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the road is the workhouse. Rather than being the secret to American greatness, the road in this story is a prison. It is the place society has shuffled off those it feels it does not need so that they will not clog up the public square, or the courthouse. The refrain of those people who encounter the migrant Okies is that they should go. Go away. There is no work here. There’s no place here. Get back on that road. Get out of my sight.

And the road, like the workhouse, is the only option for the dispossessed. At each new place some reason to leave presents itself early and forcefully. The burning of Hooverville. The starvation at the weed patch. Tom’s second murder. Each leaves no choice but to return to the road.

And the road, it seems, is poisonous.

The longer the family remains on the road, the longer the great tribe of dispossessed farmers remains on the road, the more the family, or the tribe, begins to rot. The conditions will destroy the weak of constitution, like grandma and grampa. The hard life will drive away those who, rightly or not, think they can have a better life alone and settled, like Connie and Noah.

The road is poisonous to this group of people. It will kill them, and their tribe, and their way of life. The life of the sedentary farmer, who farms his own land and lives off it, will vanish, at least for a time. It will be returned to, but by those who are taking the example of this destroyed people, not its rightful heirs. Those will all have died or become the other type of people. The type the system appears to want. Consumers, if we want to inject an air of politics into the discussion.

But I don’t think The Grapes of Wrath is a story about politics, though the language occasionally indicates a political symptom and a political cure. I think this is an essentially moral story. It is a story, like A Christmas Carol, about compassion. All the polemic language that caused the right of the time to repudiate the book as communist propaganda, and the left to embrace it as an endorsement, is rather a broad appeal to basic human compassion.

These people are starving. People shouldn’t starve. But when saving people from starving requires the sacrifice of that which people deem necessary to their own survival, rightly or not, they will come up with excuses why these people, perhaps, should starve. They’re not really people. There aren’t really all that many of them. Many more might starve if they didn’t. But the fact remains that people are starving, and capitalists and communists alike can agree that people shouldn’t starve.

It is strange to finish a novel as episodic as ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ because you feel as if you are only leaving the stage but that the performance will continue on infinitely.  There is nothing left for the reader to do, and the same stream of hardships will continue to fall on Ma, Pa, Rose of Sharon, and Uncle John, the last remaining members of the Joad clan.  And the future doesn’t look too bright for Ruthie and Whitfield either, with the next generation symbolically confirmed into this cycle with Rose of Sharon’s stillborn child.
 
Perhaps it is due to his own extremely contemplative writing style, but Christopher Isherwood, in his review of ‘Grapes’ in 1939, criticizes the book as overly propagandistic, not leaving “the final verdict, the ultimate synthesis…to the reader.”  The reader is told by Steinbeck how to see these workers in a fairly matter-of-fact manner.  ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is not about the inner turmoil and emotions of a particular character; it is, instead, a story of the hardships faced by a class at large. 
 
‘Grapes’ exists, as we have discussed in class, in a liminal state between fact and fiction: fiction based on fact, taken as fact.  This bizarre categorization obviously has ramifications for the reader: how do we look at ‘The Grapes of Wrath;’ should the plaints of Steinbeck’s farmer class be equivocated with the real-life economic troubles of the late 1930s?  Isherwood, while recognizing the talent of Steinbeck’s work, criticizes ‘Grapes’ for this exactly.  The Joad family becomes more than their characterizations; they are every migrant worker family in California.
 
I agree with Isherwood in thinking that perhaps the didactic nature of ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ makes is less delectable to read, but I think about who would have read it circa 1939: certainly not the Joad families of the time.  It was perhaps necessary to cloud the line between description, propaganda, fact, and fiction to alert those with the leisure time for reading to begin to comprehend the situation.  If painted as entirely fiction, ‘The Grapes’ could have been brushed aside and ignored, but, I think, it is the questionable veracity of the hardships portrayed in the novel that make one question his or her own actions all the more.

Sitting at the dinner table, rarely do many of us NYU’ers have to worry about staving off the next hunger pang, riot, or epic flood. Rarely is also the day when any of our lovely women need to suckle milk to others in order to keep others alive. These instances are luckily, not (quite) our reality.

More Americans are in poverty since the passage of the Civil Rights Act with almost one out of seven living below the federal marker. With a bit of our own new, New Deal underway, we look back to Grapes for a window into how the family operates under the ultimate in stressful situations. Does money equal happiness? –Maybe. However, does poverty equal familial implosion? –The Joads show us, no.

Throughout their journey across the vast plains and deserts of our lower-48, the Joads encountered problem after problem, most times at the hand of law enforcement and farm owners. Though this spurs great tumult amongst the family and many others, their home base remains being with each other even while seeing men like Casy and Connie leave their ranks. This commitment to family is a noble endeavor, and one most of our families (including my own) are not able to achieve even with all the money in the world.

In their piece, “Growth of Family in The Grapes of Wrath,” co-authors Britch and Lewis detail the ways in which family togetherness has been the abiding force behind the Joads’ solidarity through seemingly insurmountable times. In their own words;

"if ever the mettle of the American spirit has been tested and found strong, it has been so with the Joads."

The family, Britch and Lewis would argue, has been a glue that hasheld the family - and the larger whole – together. The two state;

“As proud as it is of its pioneering background, the family is not a Joad but a unit--a we--made up of several singular "I's" who answer to the name if Joad.”

The family is the most fundamental unit of social organization, according to Britch and Lewis, and is the basis for the novel’s progeny of ground-up law, enforcement, and education. In fact, in order for Tom to help his family at the end of the novel and beyond, his assistance will be under the arc of helping to organize strikers; an indirect way of helping Joads through a direct way of helping the proletariat.

This is Steinbeck’s focus; the smallest unit of individuals’ cohesion - the family –  amasses in a way that at its most basic level, is done in an effort to help their very own survive, but at the same time, is prodding the powers-that-be along the path toward justice, fairness, and a means for all out of severe plight. What Britch and Lewis point out, is that Steinbeck worked tirelessly not simply to show the devastation inflicted upon and by individuals due to horrific events during a trying time in our history, but also how out of great sorrow, one can learn a great deal about steadfastness and how unifying the smallest measure of societal interaction can lead to the advancement of all.

We just don’t know how good we have it.

In the latter part of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck hits upon an aspect of American agriculture that, as a student of environmental and agricultural studies, I find incredibly relevant to this day. Ranting again about generalized aspects of American life as an aside to the story of the Joads, Steinbeck writes:
 
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
 
The way Steinbeck describes the actions of the agriculture giants, the way they purposely destroy part of their (already ripened) crop in order to keep prices up, suggests a view of food that only considers it as a commodity, just like cars or toaster ovens. This is incredibly alarming, since it’s FOOD. Even more alarming is the fact that similar practices have always gone on since the publishing of this book, right up to the present.
 
Anyone remember Olean, also known as Olestra? It’s a fat substitute approved by the FDA in 1996, and it was supposed to allow people to eat greater amounts of food while getting less calories from it. In other words, the food industry actually found a way to increase the amount of food people can consume, so they can sell them more food. Essentially, we’re buying more food than we need so we can go through the motions of eating more often. Meanwhile, people who can’t afford to eat empty calories, or any calories for that matter, starve. Growing food isn’t about feeding people to the makers of Olean. It’s just another product to package and sell as much of as possible. The scariest part? Despite the unprecedented 20,000 complaints about Olean to the FDA concerning unpleasant side effects AND the banning of the additive in many other countries, Olean is still used in a good amount of foods still sold in the U.S.  
 
Steinbeck speaks as truly today as he did in 1939. The smell of rot fills the country.

SOURCES:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olestra
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/5415/olestra_is_this_fat_substitute_making.html?cat=51

In their essay entitled Growth of the Family in the Grapes of Wrath, Carroll Britch and Cliff Lewis address the transformation and progression of the Joads as a family unit as they make the journey west. Two concepts in particular I found interesting; first, that which is introduced by the Brooks Adams quotation: “Resistance to innovation indicates, in the eye of nature, senility and senility is doomed to be discarded... That nation thrives best which is most flexible, and which has fewer prejudices to hamper adaption.” Adaption is a concept crucial to the discussion pertaining to travel, and I will come back to this in a moment…

Second intriguing point…the Joads’ evolution from “I to We,” not only within their immediate family, but among the entire “family” of migrants as well. Though the role of this attitude as being critical to the success of their survival is the central idea developed by Britch and Lewis, it sparked my curiosity as to whether the difficulty in successfully achieving such an evolution is so great that many avoid traveling with groups and prefer to go alone or with few comrades.

Returning to the first point, I find it imperative to notice the extent to which the Joads must willingly travel outside their normal societal and/or familial roles in order to adapt to the nature of their travels and the troubles they encounter along the way. The men, sometimes willfully and sometimes not, begin to perform tasks considered “women’s work,” while the most apparent example of role reversal is exhibited through Ma. Her strength, support, and insistence on keeping the family together as an efficient unit essentially render her the definition of “the matriarch.”

Taking up such a role, though sometimes tiring or seemingly futile, can lead to a strong sense of self- worth, which Britch and Lewis note as an equally significant component in successful travel and adaptation: “Finding self-worth through sharing and cooperating with kin and outsiders is what keeps the Joads…from falling apart as a family and failing as migrants.” Even the children, regardless of their likely egotistical nature (being as young as they are), also serve the family core by performing chores like gathering fruit. Though they sometimes express discontent at these kinds of chores, we can easily imagine the bestowing of responsibility giving them a sense of pride, perhaps a sense of being “grown up.”

Like the children who have, for the most part, abandoned their selfish individualistic notions, so must the other members of the migrant “family” if they are to achieve their dream of surviving the journey and successfully reaching their destination. This leads me back to the second point mentioned earlier – the transformation from “I to We.” Britch and Lewis, as well as Steinbeck, seem to find this progression essential to keep a family together through travel and its obstacles, yet certainly acknowledge it is difficult.

On that note, I wonder if the theory can be reversed… Do people so often “up and leave” alone or in small groups because of how demanding it is to sacrifice individual desires for the sake of the whole? Traveling alone eliminates the necessity to think about, much less do anything for, someone else. It allows one to choose the pace and path of the journey, and certainly allows for some serious introspection. Yet if we follow the notion that self-worth is acquired through self-sacrifice (shown very clearly through Ma, whose “capacity to care marks the measure of her self-respect,” according to Britch and Lewis), wouldn’t the lone traveler feel very little personal growth despite his or her journey?

In “Steinbeck’s Myth of the Oakies” Keith Windschuttle attempts to deconstruct John Steinbeck’s venerated work of travel fiction. He asserts that, “Although it is about the experiences of the fictional Joad family, The Grapes of Wrath was always meant to be taken literally.” He doesn’t spend much effort in trying to back up this claim, but instead glosses over the point and continues on to illustrating the ways in which Steinbeck’s novel was a highly exaggerated account of the era.
 
To begin with, he takes issue with the association of the dust bowl with Oklahoma, citing meteorological and historical records showing that while other areas of the United States were ravaged by dust storms, Oklahoma merely suffered intense droughts. He cites historian James N. Gregory in postulating that that the contemporary media sensationalized the Californian emigration wave by also casually equating the dust bowl with the exodus.
 
Following this, he examines government census data from the era and compares that to Steinbeck’s estimation of the size of the movement, pointing out that the migration was of a much smaller scale than that mentioned in the book, and moreover that the trend had actually begun in the 1920s, and the major rush wasn’t seen until the 1940s with an influx of workers seeking employment in the burgeoning industries that supplied the war effort.
 
He then brings up Steinbeck’s political persuasions, claiming that Steinbeck’s approval of the New Deal was ironic given that the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933—a part of the New Deal legislation—was what prompted landlords to consolidate their property holdings and evict tenant farmers. He doesn’t go into specifics on the mechanics of how this worked, but instead goes on to cite James N. Gregory’s works again in an attempt to prove the migrant workers were not intentionally duped by pamphlets, but instead were much better informed of the difficulties they faced in moving out to California.
 
Windschuttle’s essay continues on in this fashion, mixing various seemingly reliable sources with fairly transparent conservative political spins. The highly political tenor of his prose is really a shame, considering how much of the information could be genuinely interesting insofar as it would provide a grounded, more realistic contrast to Steinbeck’s vision of the era. As it stands, it seems like a series of crude, conservative talking points pitted against the classic author’s much more eloquent writings—even if the author did have leftist political motivations. Windschuttle could have really benefitted from spending more time mulling over the merits of artistic license. 

Frederic I. Carpenter wrote an article John Steinbeck: The Philosophical Joads, about the cultural significance of The Grapes of Wrath, and the importance of the philosophical ideas expressed by Steinbeck in the novel. He qualifies The Grapes of Wrath as a classic American novel, not simply for its massive, and lasting, popularity, but as an essential critique of American life. He places Grapes alongside other great American novels such as Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Huck Finn, and Babbitt, noting that they all function to provide keen philosophical insight about American life, while still appealing to a mass audience. He defines the role of classic novels, writing, “Novels that have become classics do more than tell a story and describe characters; they offer insight into men’s motives and point to the springs of action.”
 
The Grapes of Wrath, like the other classic novels mentioned above, preserved in text, a time in American history, and was able to both capture, and influence, the sentiment of the nation. As a result, it has become a timeless work of art that serves as an integral piece of American culture. Carpenter goes on to assert that, The Grapes of Wrath serves to “Preach a positive philosophy of life and to damn that blind conservatism which fears ideas”. After reading the novel for the first time, I agree that despite the many bleak situations, and sentiments, depicted in the novel, that Steinbeck ultimately is communicating an optimistic and hopeful message about the human condition, despite his criticism of the failures of capitalism in America. I believe that statement also explains the discourse about Steinbeck’s intention to promote communism within the novel. Rather than attempting to advance any agenda, Steinbeck is attempting to explore different ideas uninhibitedly, and denounce a conservative approach to discredit ideas without exploring their merit. Jim Casey provides the possibility for these ideas to be discussed and explored in the narrative. Moreover, because Casey is no longer a preacher in the story, it allows for a discourse between him and the other characters, where they are able to challenge the ideas presented by the Casey, which they would not be able to do if he was still a Preacher.
 
While Carpenter notes the importance of the interpretive inter-chapters that Steinbeck employs to communicate abstract ideas in the novel, he focuses on the character of the preacher Jim Casey as Steinbeck’s primary tool to “interpret and to embody the philosophy of the novel.” In addition, he alludes to Steinbeck’s use of Jim Casey as a vehicle to communicate and transform the philosophies of other acclaimed American writers through the character, and influence the narrative and the reader. Carpenter explains the effectiveness of this method, as an essential factor in the novel’s success, saying, “The ideas of John Steinbeck and Jim Casey…continue, develop, integrate, and realize the thought of the great writers of American history. Here the mystical transcendentalism of Emerson appears, and the earthy democracy of Whitman, and the pragmatic instrumentalism of William James and John Dewey. And these old philosophies grow and change in the book until they become new. They coalesce into an organic whole. And, finally, they find embodiment in the character and action, so that they seem no longer ideas, but facts. The enduring greatness of The Grapes of Wrath consists in its imaginative realization of these old ideas in new and concrete forms. Jim Casey translates American philosophy into words of one syllable, and the Joads translate it into action.” 

In the last class we had an interesting discussion about Steinbeck’s intention and what it means to be a “communist” or a “socialist”, we discussed the value of the family and the greater community and what Steinbeck was truly fighting for. While it would be impossible for us to know, there is an aspect of this discussion that, for some reason, got the whole classroom fired up. I would venture to throw yet another approach into the mix. We have discussed a lot of “Romanticism,” and I think it is crucial to Steinbeck’s writing and the argument of what is paramount to him.
 
To be clear, the Romanticism that I speak of is not the colloquial description of the ideal, or a lovable fantasy, but the Romanticism of the Shelley/Frankenstein era – the return to the Natural.
 
As we discussed in class, this idea of the natural is just another way for Steinbeck to show his resistance to organized theology (whether it be religion, government, etc).
 
McEntyre, in her discussion of Casy in Steinbeck’s Men of Nature  as Prophets says,
 
"The idea of the holy has expanded for Casy since his rejection of the church. It springs from an awareness of nature honed and trained by his frequent retreats, his attitude of receptivity, and a habit of mind that links what he knows of the unconscious natural world to a deepening intuition about the ways of human nature. To be in the wilderness "without no campin' stuff" is to be in more direct sensual contact with the earth than those for whom the multilayered insulations of clothing and shelter dull the raw sensate experience of nature. Casy's reflection here also traces a line of thinking that begins in Christian typology and ends in a rejection of that tradition in favor of a universalistic mysticism removed from the claims of any institution. Like Emerson, the transcendentalist who left his pulpit and went out among the people, and like Thoreau, who turned eccentricity to high purposes, Casy opens his heart to a wider calling than the pulpit afforded--to return to the earth and live close to it and the people who till the soil and to learn from them:

'I ain't gonna baptize. I'm gonna work in the fiel's, in the green fiel's, an' I'm gonna be near to folks. I ain't gonna try to teach 'em nothin'. I'm gonna try to learn. Gonna learn why the folks walks in the grass, gonna hear 'em talk, gonna hear 'em sing. . . . Gonna lay in the grass, open and honest with anybody that'll have me. Gonna cuss an' swear an' hear the poetry of folks talkin'. All that's holy, all that's what I didn' understand'. All them things is the good things.'"
 
Casy’s distinct rejection of all things organized reflects Steinbeck’s own view which he presents as an option for real people (readers) to get out of the “grind.” Yet Steinbeck goes a step further to not only present this way of thought as a way out, but instead to declare this way as the best way to deal with reality. By setting up the events at the end of the book as a way to elevate Casy to the ideal, Steinbeck portrays his perspective as the one that has worked for him. It is a cause so noble, it is worth dying for. The philosophy lives on in Tom Joad and while the person is dead, it is the ultimate metaphor for the return to nature, since it is an out of body experience. For Steinbeck that opportunity to free Casy and himself from the confines of organization, to return to the natural, was the answer. One of the main themes of the book, in my eyes, is what is really left when everything is gone? Is it family? Is it this greater sense of community? I think Steinbeck would argue that the nuclear family unit, expanded to the greater community, is just another facet of the return to Naturalism. It is the connection with all things, that can only be realized once everything is lost.
 
Casy’s natural metaphors and prophesying leaves McEntyre to refer to him actually as a Prophet.  Casy’s death is different from all of the others in the novel as it is violent and almost voyeuristic. It is particularly informative to watch the evolution of Casy’s purpose as he comes and goes with the Joad family and as they deteriorate as a unit and become something else entirely. To extend it even further, I think each member of the Joad family represents groups of people  in society, and value chains, and the way they interact with Casy is representative of a social movement in conversation with transcendentalism. Ma’s relentlessness to hold the family together, while she has her rejection of religion, Tom’s furthering of Casy’s mission, Pa the hardworking “American” fellow, Uncle John who lives in constant guilt, Rose of Sharon, the young girl torn between her cross-roles in society as a young girl and a homemaker with nothing  - all of these dynamics are relatable because they are representative of true dynamics in America, real people who struggle in similar ways that have to deal with the loss of everything. 

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In Louis Owen’s article The Culpable Joads: Desentimentalizing the Grapes of Wrath, the author reveals how artfully Steinbeck keeps the characters of the book at a distance from the reader.  Steinbeck inserts a chapter on used cars or the history of the Hooverville, whenever he knows the reader will start to feel an emotional connection to the characters.  I agree with Owen, that Steinbeck is trying to maintain objectivity.  Everyone reading a book will sympathize with different characters, and like and dislike different parts of the book.  What Steinbeck does, is try to limit the amount that this can happen to the end of achieving objectivity.  Personally, I have found that in reading this book, I often wonder why I’m reading; I can honestly say I have at most a mild curiosity to see what happens to them.  Why I read the book is because I want to understand the zeitgeist of the times.  I again agree with Owen that the break-up chapters give a worldview of the Grapes of Wrath, that aids in contextualizing the events in the novel.

Notably the Joads never look at the big picture.  Rose of Sharon is scolded for crying over Connie and what will happen to her.  Ma forces her to stay in the present, and focus on the daily chores.  Likewise Uncle John and Pa do not want to think about the big picture, that there’s no work in California, and insist upon just plodding along.  Al one could say is even worse.  He’s always talking about girls, at least Pa and Uncle John focus on the bigger picture of finding work.  In some ways the Joads gain culpability as in Owen’s title because of the break-up chapters.  Where there actions seemed like good effort, and their failures like it wasn’t there fault, in all honesty if they looked at the bigger picture they could have avoided several missteps.  One example is the offer to travel to the northern part of California to find work.  The reality and bigger picture was that there was no work where they were, and people had told them about the floods.  So, how much of their own misery are the Joads responsible for?
http://www.travel-studies.com/travel-habit/grapes-of-wrath-bibliography

Forbidden Fruit: The Banning of The Grapes of Wrath in the Kern County Free Library by Marci Lingo centers on the controversy over John Steinbeck’s classic depression era novel and the reaction that followed after the book was banned.  The article goes into depth about the rationale for and results of the banning of The Grapes of Wrath at Kern County Library. Lingo explains that the book and the subsequent banning had many varying effects, "While the banning attacked the intellectual freedom and the right to read that underpin library ethics, the issues that led to the ban and the consequences of it touch on social, economic, and political realities." Outlawing The Grapes of Wrath from the library violated basic protected constitutional rights. However, Lingo draws most of her attention to the social, economic, and  political effects of The Grapes of Wrath and the ban had on society.

The Grapes of Wrath exposed many social problems that existed in California. The novel displayed many societal issues that were not prevalent in literature. This includes two infamous scenes where Rose of Sharon delvers her child in a boxcar and another where Rose offers her breast milk to a malnourished man. These scenes exposed a life where the migrant workers did not receive acceptable healthcare and no access to any hospitals.

Much of The Grapes of Wrath highlighted deep seeded economic problems. The novel effectively demonstrated how many families were powerless to an economic environment over which they had no control. Additionally, many migrant workers were willing to work for less money. Thus, California farmers benefited from cheaper labor but their current employees were forced to work for less or loose their jobs. The Grapes of Wrath failed to mention that with the influx of migrant workers, the rate of taxation for schools increased 200 percent and the cost of libraries dramatically increased.
In the end, the banning of The Grapes of Wrath was purely a political move. The main supporter of the ban was Stanley Abel who acted as a puppet for the Associated Farmers. The foundation of the valley’s politics was supported by corporate agriculture. Thus, since The Grapes of Wrath supported fair wages and unionization for the migrant workers, the Associated Farmers viewed the book as a threat. Thus, to curtail its influence and repercussions, the Associated Farmers used Stanley Abel to push forward a resolution against the novel.  The aftermath that followed became a political fight between the Associated Farmers and Stanley Abel against The Grapes of Wrath and the Kern County Free Library.

On August 21, 1939 in Kern County, California, the book The Grapes of Wrath was banned from the Kern County Public Library for a great many reasons, but the one that stuck out to me was that, “Steinbeck chose to ignore the education, recreation, hospitalization, welfare and relief services, unexcelled by and other political subdivision in the United States made available by Kern County to every person resident in Kern County,”.  It is true that California as a state was forced to absorb thousands of people who had little or no money to pay for the public services that they were receiving.  Marci Lingo states that, “in the five-year period 1935 to 1940, after a good number of Okies had already arrived, the population of Kern County grew 63.6 percent. The real number of new residents was 52,554. Fresno County to the north experienced the next most significant growth, but the rate of increase in that county was only 23.7 percent. (15) Given this extraordinary growth, it's no wonder that residents of Kern County felt invaded and that adequate housing and other facilities did not exist.”  Additionally, there is, “ample evidence that Kern County attempted to meet the health needs of these migrants, perhaps not out of altruism but out of fear of epidemics” and it was reported that, “49 percent of the cases admitted to Kern General Hospital in 1937 and 1938 were out-of-state patients, including 43 percent of the births, and that the federal government's contribution to the cost had been 'paltry.' (18) In 1939 Stein reported that the cost of 75 percent of the Okie babies born at Kern General Hospital was absorbed by the county".

If you followed all this, it does seem that Steinbeck failed to mention all that the State of California and the federal government were doing for the migrant workers.  It was, in fact, in the years following WWI and during the Great Depression that the area of Social Work came about.  The people of Kern County, incensed that their county was portrayed in a negative light, perhaps had the right to be. 

Books are generally banned for ridiculous conservative reasons (in my opinon).  Some examples include the Merriam Webster dictionary, “which was banned in a California elementary school in January 2010 for its definition of oral sex. ‘It's just not age appropriate,’ a district representative said.”  Others includeThe Diary of A Young Girl by Anne Frank, which was banned in Virginia “for ‘sexually explicit’ and ‘homosexual’ themes, as well as  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, which was banned because of its rape-scene and because it is “anti-white”.  These books are chosen to be banned for reasons of conservative opinion.  I don’t believe that Kern County had the right to ban The Grapes of Wrath from the Kern County Free Library, but at least they had a reason that was based more in fact, than simply in ideology. 
   

The final pages of Steinbeck’s seminal work, The Grapes of Wrath have long been controversial, with literary critics and scholars having poured over their meaning and suitability for decades. Some, such as Charles Poore have argued that the conclusion of this masterwork could not be more suitable, while others such as Pat Civici, Steinbeck’s long-time editor have argued the conclusion is too abrupt or even unfitting for the work as a whole.     
 
In the aftermath of her stillborn birth, Rose of Sharon chooses to give life to her fellow man, emphasizing the importance of the collective organism of humanity and the natural symbiosis that is the only means through which life can exist. In this way, Rose of Shannon's act of offering her breast to the starving man is an act of survival, not of kindness, as Martha Heasley Cox states in her essay, The Conclusion of the Grapes of Wrath: Steinbeck’s Conception and Execution, “in their ultimate need, Rose of Sharon and the starving man exchange what each has to share. Taking comfort from the stranger she gives him life.” From this perspective, the conclusion of the work can be seen as a reflection on the progression of the work as a whole, with the formerly silly and somewhat self-focused Rose of Sharon coming to the rational realization that it is only through collective cooperation that she can preserve her own self-interest.
 
Steinbeck said of his own conclusion in a letter to Civivi, and as relayed through Cox’s paper, that “it must be a stranger, and it must be quick…The giving of the breast has no more sentimental value than the giving of a loaf of bread.” Steinbeck goes on to say that his novels conclusion has no deep or triumphant climax and is not meant to have one, “except by implication and the reader must bring the implication to it.” Taking this stance Steinbeck defends his decision not to build up his conclusion in a more definite way, for in doing so he could only undermine the profound survival mechanism embedded in this final act. The novel ends without a savior but rather with a starving man and Steinbeck seems to suggest in his “Diary of a Book” that to do anything else would invalidate one of the central messages of the work as a whole, namely group survival.

Or that’s at least what Keith Windshuttle, author of Steinbeck’s Myth of the Okies would have us believe. 

The facts are pretty convincing too. Windshuttle debunks just about every fact written in Grapes of Wrath. He begins by letting us know that there was no dust bowl in Oklahoma, just a drought. Then he tears apart the Okie Exodus: it was about 70,000, not 200,000, and they had been traveling west for years. And the conditions were hardly that bad. Some even got a white little house on the edge of town.

Anything, everything; from the amount of family members to the length of the trip to California was proven false. Near the end of his diatribe against the dirty lying book, he makes this remark: “Why it became the story that defined the Great Depression for America is a question that still calls for an answer.”

What he forgot was that it’s still a darn good story.

The Grapes of Wrath is the gorgeously written tale of a family dissolving due to hard times. Even if you haven’t met anyone who is exactly like Ma Joad or Casey, the characters are all still knowable and lovable. The tale of their demise is not only enthralling, it is heart breaking. The book also follows similar lines as the Odyssey and Exodus. Who can resist the retelling of an old story?

Is it important if it’s true? Probably. Did Steinbeck intend to lie? I doubt it. To me, it seems like Steinbeck wrote about what he saw. If the farmhands said that 300,000 immigrants from the midwest were flooding California because of the dustbowl, I bet that’s what he wrote. Exaggeration always weaves its way into the telling of the tale. It makes it more interesting and exciting. Whereas statistics may tell you that, no “the Okie migration was a success story by almost any measure...Eighty-three percent of adult males were fully employed, a quarter in white-collar jobs and the rest evenly divided between skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled occupations. About twenty percent earned $2,000 or more a year,” the people Steinbeck was able to see and record in 1938-9 could have been in entirely different situations. As a human, you can only see a teency tiny zoomed in portion of the world. Statistics show certain facts while real, human expressions might show something very different. Steinbeck’s biggest mistake was not in telling the tale of the Joads; it was in his certainty that this was a much grander phenomenon than he was able to see.

“The women are divided between those who have no relationship to the earth, land, or a natural life and those whose lives demonstrate the many faces of the archetypal feminine. The female counterparts of the machine men are defined by the objects with which they surround themselves…” (Cederstrom).
 
Continuing on my discussion of women in The Grapes of Wrath, I was reading the article “The 'Great Mother' in The Grapes of Wrath,” by Lorelei Cederstrom. This article delves more into the symbolism of the strong and matriarchal women in this novel. This novel has themes that are all extremely tied to the earth, and themes tied to family as demonstrated by the constant struggle of the matriarchs to keep their families safe, well, and happy in a difficult time. By the end of the novel, it becomes clear that the theme of the strong woman and the theme of connection to the earth are actually best described as an amalgamation of the two. The book is heavily reliant on the theme of “Mother Earth” or the “Great Mother.” This is most clearly seen in the final pages of the novel, which are rather unexpected and strike me as a very poignant and interesting way to end this long travel novel of struggle and hard times. The scene where Rose of Sharon feeds her breast milk, while she is barely strong enough to sit up, with a dying man (a stranger), is a scene with beautiful imagery, containing elements of the long poetic prose included by Steinbeck in the inner chapters, and showing the truth of what Ma Joad and other characters have been trying to accomplish the whole time: safety for family, connection with others to make a larger community/family, and helping those who need help when you can.
 
“Throughout the novel, patriarchal culture and its attitudes give way to manifestations of the presence of the archetypal "Great Mother."” (Cederstorm). Ma Joad and Rose of Sharon personify the “Great Mother:” powerful, ever-present, fertile and giving. They communicate without words, knowing what they must do. We get an “iconographic image of the Great Mother: "Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. 'You got to,' she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. 'There!' she said. 'There!' Her hand moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously” (Steinbeck, 619). The haunting power of this image indicates the presence of a powerful archetype…this archetypal gesture and mysterious smile are…the fitting conclusion to the novel, for it is in this affirmation of the power to give life and to take it, to nourish even while surrounded by the death and destruction she has wrought, that the full power of the Great Mother is evident.” (Cederstorm). This also shows how all women are connected by the “Great Mother,” when Rose of Sharon and Ma Joad communicate without saying a word, to save the poor dying man  after the birth and death of Rose of Sharon’s baby:

“Ma’s eyes passed Rose of Sharon ‘s eyes, and then came back to them. And the two women looked deep into each other. The girl’s breath came short and gasping. She said “Yes.” Ma Smiled. “I knowed you would. I knowed!” She looked down at her hands, tight-locked in her lap" (Steinbeck, 618).

Also on a slightly separate, but final note, it is amazing to me how John Steinbeck could preserve the reality of the topic he was writing about in this work of historical fiction. He was really with people like this, and his perceptions of the real life people who inspired these characters lead him to write these amazing stories, many of which he may well have observed while on the road. I think it is important to recognize that this story is especially amazing due to the fact that it isn't entirely fictional, but drawn very much from real life.

(Dorthea Lange).