Mine Eyes Have Seen...and I'm Still Confused

               Grapes of Wrath is the story of the Joad family and their hardships during the mid-1930’s when they lost their family farm in Oklahoma and are forced to migrate to Central California in search of a new life.  The Joad’s are a fictional family based on the real-life Oklahoma diaspora during the Great Depression.  After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the Great Plains of the United States suffered series of droughts over the next 10 years.  Those droughts, along with improper dry season farming practices created the conditions which led to a period known as the Dust Bowl.  The dry and too frequently plowed soil became air borne during wind storms known as “black blizzards” where black clouds of dust blotted out the sun and covered the plains.  These weather conditions made it impossible for the small-scale farmers to compete with the large operations.  The environmental problems were made worse by the economic downturn caused by the Great Depression.  The family farms, who had taken out loans to keep their operations running, were unable to turn a profitable harvest and many of them lost everything when their properties were foreclosed on by the banks. 

The estimates are that between 400,000 and 2,500,000 people were displaced from the area of north Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and New Mexico.  Many of these people ended up in California, specifically the Central Valley, having come to seek agricultural work.  They were met by a population which was not welcoming and looked down on them for being uncivilized.  The term “Okies” was used in a derogatory way to describe this migrant population even when they were from a different southern Great Plains state besides Oklahoma.  They lived in make shift camps known as “Hoovervilles” where they built their houses out of trash or anything they could find.  These camps were named after President Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) who many blamed for the economic conditions created during the Great Depression.  Some of the migrants made their way to government labor camps which were set up to ease the humanitarian crisis.  Eventually, the “Okies” were able to assimilate and intermarry with the local population, and now many of the people of the Central Valley are descended from these migrants.

I read this book for the first time two years ago because I was feeling regret for not spending enough time with my grandparents while they were still alive and not really knowing a big part of my family’s history.  My father’s side of the family came from north Texas and Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl and settled in Shafter.  My grandmother actually lived in one of the labor camps which is described in the book.  My mother’s side of the family were settled Californians who had lived here since at least the late 1800’s.  The tension in the book between the displaced Okies and the native Californians is something I remember seeing and hearing in the disapproving tone and comments of my maternal grandfather when talking about my dad’s side of the family.  In fairness to Bud Hand, my parents divorced when I was too young to remember and his allegiance was obviously to my mother, but I still felt there was an air of contempt for the uncouth farmers of the southern plains. 

As the story goes on, I felt at home with the dialogue between the Joad’s and their people.  It reminded me of Sunday afternoons in East Bakersfield and summer camping trips where my family and their friends would speak in improper abbreviated words with a country drawl that was not spoken in other parts of my life.  This manner of speech gives the impression these people are unintelligent and unsophisticated, but my experience has been they are extremely resourceful and knowledgeable in real skills and trades.   They are easy to dismiss as dumb, but if we take a moment to think about what it took for family of farmers to cross half the continental United States in a car built in the 1920’s which they converted to a truck and filled with all their possessions, people, and animals, it’s hard to come away without being impressed.  That took real skill, knowledge, and courage.

Important takeaways

               There are some Marxist undertones throughout the book where the characters are in a constant conflict of workers vs. land owners and banks.  Steinbeck himself was a member of the American Communist party and this definitely comes through in the book.  My natural instinct when I hear these communist ideas is to write off anyone who espouses them as uninformed or dangerous.  In this case, I try to frame Steinbeck’s work in an understanding of the time it was written.  In the 1930’s the communists still hadn’t murdered 100 million people all over the world and the labor unions still hadn’t won many of their legal battles that later improved the lives of the workers.  Also, I have the first-hand experience of seeing native Californians openly disrespect the people of the Dust Bowl and their descendants.  Because I know he got so much right, I can forgive Steinbeck’s inability to predict the future.

               As we see the Joad’s and the other Oklahoma families face a continuous cascade of unnecessary hardships, all of which are driven by capitalist greed, it seems these people are drawn closer together and a revolutionary spirit is starting to smolder.

Pg. 158

And this you can know—fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.

…For here “I lost my land’ is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate—“We lost our land.” The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one.  And from this first “we” there grows a still more dangerous thing: “I have a little food” plus “I have none.” If from this problem the sum is “We have a little food,” the thing is on its way, the movement has direction.  Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours.  The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side-meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand.  The night draws down.  The baby has a cold.  Here, take this blanket.  It’s wool.  It was my mother’s blanket—take it for the baby.  This is the thing to bomb.  This is the beginning—from “I” to “we.”

               If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself.  If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive.  But that you cannot know.  For the quality of owning freezes you forever into “I,” and cuts you off forever from the “we.”

               Since the book was published in 1939 when these events were still in progress, it is likely Steinbeck actually believed a proletariat uprising would occur.  We know now that didn’t happen and that these people just intermarried, assimilated, and also changed the existing culture of the Central Valley.  While it doesn’t seem likely now that a murderous farmer uprising was going to topple the industrial farming operations of Kern, Tulare, and Kings counties, the breakout of World War II gave everyone something else to focus on and ended the Great Depression. 

               Steinbeck further spells out the animosity between the Okies and the native Californians in a real human way:

Pg. 296

There in the Middle and Southwest had lived a simple agrarian folk who had not changed with industry, who had not farmed with machines or known the power and danger of machines in private hands.  They had not grown up in the paradoxes of industry.  Their senses were still sharp to the ridiculousness of the industrial life.

               And then suddenly the machines pushed them out and they swarmed on the highways.  The movement changed them; the highways, the camps along the road, the fear of hunger and the hunger itself, changed them.  The children without dinner changed them, the endless moving changed them.  They were migrants.  And the hostility changed them, welded them, united them—hostility that made the little towns group and arm as though to repel an invader, squads with pick handles, clerks and storekeepers with shotguns, guarding the world against their own people.

               In the West there was panic when the migrants multiplied on the highways.  Men of property were terrified for their property.  Men who had never been hungry saw the eyes of the hungry.  Men who had never wanted anything very much saw the flare of want in the eyes of the migrants.  And the men of the towns and of the soft suburban country gathered to defend themselves; and they reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad, as a man must do before he fights.  They said, These goddamned Okies are dirty and ignorant.  They’re degenerate, sexual maniacs.  These goddamned Okies are thieves.  They’ll steal anything.  They’ve got no sense of property rights.

Finally, in what I think is the hardest hitting passage of the entire book he makes the strongest case for revolution:

Pg. 366

               This little orchard will be a part of a great holding next year, for the debt will have choked the owner.

               This vineyard will belong to the bank.  Only the great owners can survive, for they own the canneries too.  And four pears peeled and cut in half, cooked and canned, still cost fifteen cents.  And the canned pears do not spoil.  They will last for years.

               The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land.  Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce.  Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten.  And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.

               The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all.  Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground.  The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be.  How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up?  And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit.  A million people hungry needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.

               And the smell of rot fills the country.

               Burn coffee for fuel in the ships.  Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire.  Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out.  Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

               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 people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed.  And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath.  In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

               The title, “Grapes of Wrath” is revealed here to be a reference to the Battle Hymn of the Republic:

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;

His truth is marching on.”

               The hymn refers to the “vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored,” as a metaphor to the institutions where evil is cultivated.  In the case of the Civil War this could be understood as the institution of slavery.  The term “He is trampling out” means God, or the righteous who are doing his will, are defeating the forces of evil which are implementing the evil institutions.  Through the Union Army, God “hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword” against the Confederates and the institution of slavery.

               In this last passage, Steinbeck calls the injustices committed on the Okies the “grapes of wrath” and says their souls are growing heavy with these injustices, “growing heavy for the vintage,” which they seem prepared to trample out.  This is clearly revolutionary talk insinuating the oppressed people of the southern great plains, forced off their lands and pushed out west, only to be discriminated against and further oppressed, are primed and ready for bloody revolution.  Thankfully, that uprising never came.

               I started this book with the hope to learn more about my history.  As is more frequently the case these days, I realized the more I learn, the more I become aware of what I don’t know—which is overwhelming.  The older I get the less fixed I become in my opinions.  Were the banks wrong for forcing the small operation farmers off their land? Or, were they justified in carrying out the interests of their shareholders?  Were the native Californians wrong for their mistreatment of the displaced Okies?  Or, were their fears about the negative effects of such a large migration of outsiders justified?  Yes, probably, to all of these questions.  Life is complicated and messy.