Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck - Research Paper Example

? Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath is, on the surface, a story about a poor family harshly affected by the Great Depression and the Dustbowls that struck Oklahoma farmers. Not looking for much more than a place to call home and the dignity of work, the Joad family heads off for California where they believe they will be able to start a new life for themselves. Several members of the family are lost, either to death or to despair, as they struggle for and against union formation and the oppressive culture they find in California. The book ends with little hope for a better future and much of the family lost. There is a much deeper meaning to the story, though, as Steinbeck harshly criticizes American culture during the dustbowl years of the 1930s. Within this novel, Steinbeck argues that American society is driven by the individualistic society that had developed, characterized by the capitalistic ‘monster’ of economic profit, its extreme focus on the needs and desires of the individual much to the detriment of all but the very rich. Even when this highly individualistic environment works to one's benefit, Steinbeck argues that those who profited actually lost something invaluable and irreplaceable in the process. While it is frequently believed that the problems faced by the individual farmers of the 1930s were caused primarily by natural causes such as the droughts and subsequent dust storms which stripped the land of nutrients, Steinbeck and others like him were attempting to prove that nature was only a small portion of a larger problem that had been growing for years. “The drought of the mid-thirties – the worst in a century – only worsened conditions for the working people of the region, an area where unemployment was higher than the already soaring national average” (Gregory, 1989, p. 14). Rather than just the droughts, Steinbeck suggests through his story that the driving force of the economic collapse, and the problems faced by the Joad family in the story, are the result of America's individualistic system itself. This system is represented within his book by the banks, the landowners and several characters' incessant need for profit at any cost to others. It is this attitude and climate that Steinbeck means when he refers to the ‘monster’. To understand how this mechanism works, it is necessary to examine how the system affected Tom Joad and his family, such as the impact and purpose of the corporate handbills scattered throughout the dry country, how the dried up and stripped land itself became a driving force, and how these circumstances came together to contribute to the further exploitation of the migrant worker. Along the way, Steinbeck makes some allusions as to how to beat the system. Steinbeck first describes the monster in chapter five, revealing its strong relationship and dependency on the capitalistic system. In this chapter, Steinbeck presents a hypothetical dialogue taking place between a starving tenant on the verge of losing his land and the wealthy landowner who is evicting him. In this exchange, Steinbeck highlights the changing values of the country from one of collective solidarity to one of extreme individualism as society free falls into pure capitalism. The tenant farmers argue, “It’s our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours. That’s what makes it ours – being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not paper with numbers on it.” (Steinbeck, 1961, p. 33). Ignoring the farmers as easily as they once ignored the Native Americans, the owners respond (truthfully) that it isn’t even the owners' decisions whether or not to evict their tenants since the banks are now controlling the owners' welfare. The banks, which are not run by men but are themselves controlled by bigger companies off in the east that “has to have profits all the time … When the monster stops growing, it dies” (p. 35) are a convenient edifice against which the tenant farmers can hurl themselves while having no effect on the protected wealth of those owners who have invested in them, enabling the owners to escape any sense of guilt while following their own personal aspirations. By replacing specific people to attack with non-specific corporate entities, there is no one for the tenants to strike against and therefore there is a strong encouragement for those who have not yet 'bought into' the concept to convert to an individualistic mindset. Like so many other tenants, the Joads found themselves without a home, without a hope and without a livelihood thanks to the incessant demands for individual fulfillment made at a higher point in the social chain. The family feels flight is the only option remaining open to them, yet each member of the family approaches the impending flight in their own way. “Connie’s individualist solution to the mass displacement and impoverishment of his people is a hope falsely held out for all, but available only to a few mercenaries. We also see the same impulses working in Al, suggesting that the younger generation is being lured into self-destruction” (Cunningham, 2002). Without this force of capitalism working on them, the Joads would likely never have left the community of their farm, Connie perhaps would never have considered abandoning his family to pursue individual dreams and the family unit would not have been destroyed by the forces of change and oppression that they encountered within the timeline of the novel as they would have been more inclined to pull together to achieve a common good. Yet even in their new homeland of California, where history doesn't exist, the Joad family unit continues to find themselves in opposition to the individualistic powers that be. According to Cletus Daniel (1981), California agriculture had been run for decades by the type of corporate cooperatives Steinbeck writes of in his book, each one dedicated to division and the individual wealth of its stockholders. These organizations were in full operation by the time the real-life families arrived as the corporations moved to take over Oklahoma land. As is factually noted in Steinbeck’s novel, these corporate giants, in an effort to squeeze out the smaller farms, deliberately drove up the prices of fruit, forcing many small farms to destroy it when the market prices weren’t high enough to justify the cost of harvesting (Rothbard, 1995). The concept of looking out only for oneself is presented in heartbreaking detail as the characters of the novel are forced to stand by, starving, as they watch the fruit being destroyed rather than volunteering to harvest what they could eat. “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 trucks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange” (Steinbeck, 1961, p. 348-9). Because the entire focus is on individual profit, any attempt at reaching a common good is thwarted on the vine as it is reasoned that other individuals should only benefit from their own efforts and assets. Within this system of heightened individualism, there is paradoxically no room for the individual to develop. Despite his best efforts to reform himself, Tom is continuously restricted and oppressed by the corporate monster that is still sucking the land dry. Seeing his family evicted off of their land with no new jobs or opportunities available, Tom must violate parole in order to survive under his more communal value system that dictates he must help watch out for his family unit. Seeing the injustice of the fruit destruction in the face of starving families in California, Tom is frustrated in his attempts to find stability and joy for his own family. However, he goes beyond the individual mindset even here as he finds it impossible to exist under the system of exploitation and wanton destruction he encounters, not only of the fruit of the land, but of the children of the people as well. It is clear that the land is not the driving force behind the novel because it is not possible to show that the land itself has controlled the characters on any social level. Toward the beginning of the novel, the impression is that the land drives the characters, but this impression is short-lived. The dust bowls occurred because the farmers living on the land abused it by growing too much cotton, stripping it of its nutrients and leaving it bare to be blown away by the winds. This idea is reinforced when one of the characters tells a truck driver, “The property is the man, stronger than he is. And he is small, not big. Only his possessions are big – and he’s the servant of his property” (51). However, the deeper driver of this action is the need to remain independent, the desire for greater individual profits, without concern for the greater welfare and without awareness of the loss of independence and individual freedom. Ironically, the more possessions one has in Steinbeck’s story in the pursuit of individualism, the more one has to lose and the more of a slave one becomes to his possessions. In the description of the fat man with mean eyes who owns millions of acres in California (205), the migrant workers eventually realize that while he has material comfort, he lives in persistent fear of others and of death. This alienates him from the rest of the world and destroys his own peace of mind. In similar fashion, the middle class characters, the shopkeepers and vigilante troops, wage a battle with themselves, on one hand recognizing that their own property is at risk to the migrant workers, who might be willing to perform a service at a lower cost than themselves, yet also unable to side with the migrants against the forces that own them, the bankers and wealthy class that provide their income. In order to retain their positions in society and the freedom to pursue their own interests, men, especially those in the middle and upper classes, find themselves serving as slaves to those above them. More than the land, it was the open invitation, the unrealistic promise of the handbills, that drove the characters in their actions. According to Cletus Daniel (1981), protection of property and their pursuit of individualism were the fundamental reasons why California growers actively enticed the Mexican workers who preceded Okies like the Joads into their land. These workers were attractive because illegal migrant workers could easily be deported if they proved to be troublesome. Although American citizens could not be so easily disposed of, the color of their skin enabled them to blend with the migrant workers and 'accidental' deportations were common. This vulnerability was expected to keep poor farm workers controllable, but when they began forming labor unions and initiating strikes against the oppression, the growers began looking elsewhere for less troublesome workers (Ruiz, 1987). Growers began actively recruiting displaced tenant farmers of the Plains and the Midwest to California by distributing handbills full of empty promises. It was the same promise that drew the migrant workers and the growers themselves, the American dream of home, health, work and happiness. Unfortunately, only the landowners benefited in this situation as the Oklahoma migrants found themselves not only homeless and helpless but the middle class found itself threatened with the incoming flux of workers willing to do the same work for less pay, workers who couldn't be so easily deported. Because of their enforced acceptance of below subsistence level income, migrant workers were exploited tremendously throughout the novel and in reality. However, Steinbeck does not go so far as to indicate that this was done out of any malicious drive to harm others or deny their own individualism. Instead, it emerged from a mistaken belief that violence and control was the only means by which personal property could be protected. This is the message carried through Jim Casey. This character continuously tries to convince Tom and others that breaking the strikes, while helping themselves in the present, will only make things worse in the future by further weakening an already shaky position. When facing the vigilantes, Casey valiantly attempts to make them understand how they are contributing to the starvation of children. Rather than attempting to incur greater resistance by offering physical violence, Casey tries to convince both sides of the argument that they are all victims to the same monster. The same individualism that is working to destroy the migrants can also be turned against the vigilantes that are now upholding it. He tries to help them understand the forces at play as a the first step to overcoming it, and then explains how it is only through working together to ensure human needs and concerns are met for all, such as ensuring that no child starves as a result of the practices one is engaged in (Pizer, 1988). Through Casey's efforts, it becomes possible to understand that it is the individualist philosophy which is misguided because of its focus on profits, on property and on retaining possessions rather than leaving room for broader human concerns and providing everyone with a chance at happiness. Casey is only one of the ways in which Steinbeck works to show that the individualistic philosophy as it had been interpreted and enacted needed to be changed as well as how it needed to be changed. In making these changes, he argues that the more significant problems of the 1930s could be addressed. In his introduction of the monster of individualism, Steinbeck begins to suggest that as it is something that was made by men, it is also something that can be changed by men: “We’ve got a bad thing made by men, and by God that’s something we can change” (41). As long as it is allowed to continue unquestioned and unexamined, Steinbeck indicates not only that revolution will come, but that it must come as a result of the neglect and exploitation that can occur. As the starving people watch the fruit being destroyed rather than distributed, Steinbeck explains, “In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage” (349). As the novel progresses through the misadventures of the Joad family and their friends, Steinbeck continues to encourage resistance to the poor treatment of the poor within his own society – do not contribute to the starving of children, do not take part in the oppression of an entire class. He also encourages the middle class to cooperate with the oppressed to change the system before it can be used against them. Although many things have changed since the 1930s that work to help the poor and keep them from being so oppressed – free lunch programs for children in school and welfare assistance for those who do not earn a decent wage on their own –Steinbeck was right to encourage his readers to look more deeply into the social systems and philosophies they were supporting such as the concept of individualism. Welfare is not able to overcome many of the issues that are still causing problems today, people continue to be underemployed and unable to attain higher wages or better employment because they do not fit in with a predefined, ‘acceptable’ definition and the ‘monster’ is still loose, still able to wreak havoc on any class it chooses to target, currently the middle class once warned. People have become more disconnected than ever in recent years, making it even more likely that those with power and money can force others to do what they find objectionable simply by appealing to their sense of individual freedom while what is considered objectionable becomes ever more distant and removed. References Cunningham, Charles. (2002). “Rethinking the Politics of The Grapes of Wrath.” Cultural Logic. Vol. 5. Daniel, Cletus E. (1981). Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870-1941. Ithaca: Cornell UP. DeMott, Robert. (1997). "’Working Days and Hours’: Steinbeck’s Writing of The Grapes of Wrath.” The Grapes of Wrath: Text and Criticism. Eds. Peter Lisca with Kevin Hearle. New York: Viking: 526-539. Gregory, James N. (1989). American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California. New York: Oxford UP. Pizer, Donald. (1988). “The Enduring Power of the Joads.” John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House: 83-98. Rothbard, Murray Newton. (1995). Making Economic Sense. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute. Ruiz, Vicki L. (1987). Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950. Albuquerque: U New Mexico P. Steinbeck, John. (1939). The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 1961. Read More