During the 2012 Holiday Season, I listened to, and then read John Steinbeck's
Grapes of Wrath in anticipation of the Santa Cruz Big Read, which inspired me with the following book review posted in
SCPL Staff Picks.
According to Steinbeck scholars, the Grapes of Wrath is the most
thoroughly discussed novel in 20th century American literature. But a
reading in the 21st century can enable us to have deeper discussions,
such as the practice of bank foreclosures and their aftermath. Lured by
the promises on handbills, the foreclosured Joad family took Route 66 to
come to California from Oklahoma. Their hope to make a decent living
was soon dashed by California farmers’ obsession with finding the
cheapest labor to assure maximum profit. As one of the governing rules
of the free market, it caused the oversupply of labor when the Dust Bowl
swept across the prairie lands in the 1930s, a phenomenon not unlike
1849’s Gold Rush and today’s fragile globalized economy. During the
process, much of the established infrastructure has been sold or
destroyed, from farming to manufacturing, from banking to information
services and technologies.
In addition, the book dissects some weakness in human nature, i.e.,
self-preservation and self-protection in the face of threatening
competition, thus the antagonism between the haves and the have-nots,
and the affluent locals and the Okies. The government aid in the form of
Weedpatch Camp, a New Deal agency, was simply too little to help
numerous displaced and needy migrants. The traditional trust in family
as a helping unit became unreliable. Poor migrant families came to the
painful realization that they could get help only from their fellow poor
migrants. But such a realization is only relative, for there will
always exist a new conflict between early settlers and those who arrive
later. Even in the case of the Joad family, they enjoyed a temporary
superior status on a cotton farm, “The Joads had been lucky. They got in
early enough to have a space in the boxcars. Now the tents of the
late-comers filled the little flat, and those who had the boxcars were
old- timers, and in a way aristocrats.”
The Grapes of Wrath is a powerful reading, especially in its
portrayals of hardy but resourceful characters like Tom and Ma, so as to
provide us with glimpses of hope. Confronted with a penniless future,
the Joads and Wainwrights celebrated a new union for their son and
daughter. After the mourning of her stillborn baby, Rosasharn lost no
time nursing back another human life.
