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Steinbeck's myth of
the Okies
by
Keith Windschuttle
John Steinbeck performed a rare feat for a writer of fiction.
He created a literary portrait that defined an era. His account of the “Okie
Exodus” in The Grapes of Wrath
became the principal story through which America defined the experience of the
Great Depression. Even today, one of the enduring images for anyone with even a
passing familiarity with the 1930s is that of Steinbeck’s fictional characters
the Joads, an American farming family uprooted from its home by the twin
disasters of dust storms and financial crisis to become refugees in a hostile
world. Not since Dickens’s portrayal of the slums of Victorian England has a
novelist produced such an enduring definition of his age.
According
to Penguin Books, which produced a very handsome series of paperbacks to mark
the centenary of his birth this February, Steinbeck’s novels still generate a
combined sale of around two million books a year. Originally published in 1939,
The Grapes of Wrath remains a
widely studied text in both high schools and universities, and the 1940 John Ford
film of the book still enjoys healthy sales on videotape and frequent reruns on
classic movie shows on cable television. The story that these various audiences
hear goes like this:
Dust
storms and bank foreclosures during the Great Depression forced a mass
migration of hundreds of thousands of small landowners and sharecroppers from
the American southwest, especially Oklahoma, Arkansas, and east Texas. Enticed
by false advertising, impoverished farming families loaded their possessions
onto ramshackle automobiles and pickup trucks to brave the thousand-mile
journey westward to California where they hoped to revive their fortunes and
regain their livelihood on the land. This American version of Exodus faced its
own Sinai crossing in the Arizona desert, where many vehicles broke down or ran
out of gas. Those who survived the hazardous passage to the promised land,
however, found the large corporations that controlled Californian agriculture
used the rapidly growing number of migrants to continually beat down harvest
wages. Police and vigilantes set upon those who complained or resisted,
especially if they were suspected of being “reds” or Communist agitators. The
Okies ended up landless, homeless, and impoverished, forced to watch their
children starve in a land of plenty. Folk singers like Woody Guthrie, in his
Dust Bowl Ballads, expressed their bitterness and anger: “I’m goin’ down the
road feelin’ bad. Lawd. Lawd. And I ain’t gonna be treated this-a-way.”
Although
it is about the experiences of the fictional Joad family, The Grapes of Wrath was always meant
to be taken literally. Borrowing from John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy and other works in the realist or documentary genre
of the time, Steinbeck interspersed his fictional chapters with passages that gave
a running account of the prevailing social, climatic, economic, and political
conditions. Steinbeck himself had researched the living conditions of the Okies
for a series of newspaper articles he wrote for a San Francisco newspaper, and,
soon after his novel appeared, its tale was confirmed by the publication of
America’s most famous work of photographic essays, Dorothea Lange and Paul S.
Taylor’s American Exodus, which
traced every step of the Okie’s tragic journey across the country. In other
words, Steinbeck’s book was presented at the time as a work of history as well
as fiction, and it has been accepted as such ever since. Unfortunately for the
reputation of the author, however, there is now an accumulation of sufficient
historical, demographic, and climatic data about the 1930s to show that almost
everything about the elaborate picture created in the novel is either outright
false or exaggerated beyond belief.
For a start, dust storms in the Thirties affected very little
of the farming land of Oklahoma. Between 1933 and 1935, severe wind erosion did
create a dust bowl in the western half of Kansas, eastern Colorado, and the
west Texas/New Mexico border country. While many Oklahoma farms suffered from
drought in the mid-1930s, the only dust-affected region in that state was the
narrow panhandle in the far west. Steinbeck wrote of the dust storms:
In
the morning the dust hung like fog, and the sun was as red as ripe new blood.
All day the dust sifted down, and the next day it sifted down. An even blanket
covered the earth. It settled on the corn, piled up on the tops of the fence
posts, piled up on the wires; it settled on roofs, blanketed the weeds and
trees.
But nothing like this
happened anywhere near where Steinbeck placed the Joad family farm, just
outside Sallisaw, Oklahoma, part of the cotton belt in the east of the state,
almost on the Arkansas border. In the real dust bowl, it is true that many
families packed up and left, but the historian James N. Gregory has pointed out
that less than 16,000 people from the dust-affected areas went to California,
barely six percent of the total from the southwestern states. Gregory blames
contemporary journalists for the misunderstanding:
Confusing
drought with dust, and assuming that the dramatic dust storms must have had
something to do with the large number of cars from Oklahoma and Texas seen
crossing the California border in the mid-1930s, the press created the dramatic
but misleading association between the Dust Bowl and the Southwestern
migration.
It is true that many
people left Oklahoma for California in the 1930s. This was anything but a novel
phenomenon, however. People had been doing the same since before World War I, as the
southwestern states’ economy failed to prosper and as better opportunities were
available in other regions. Between 1910 and 1930, 1.3 million people migrated
from the southwest to other parts of the United States. In the 1920s, census
data show that about 250,000 of them went to California, while in the 1930s
this total was about 315,000. The real mass migration of Okies to California
actually took place in the 1940s to take advantage of the boom in manufacturing
jobs during World War II and its aftermath. In this period, about 630,000 of them
went to the west coast. It was not the Depression of the 30s but the economic
boom of the 40s that caused an abnormal increase in Okie migration.
Moreover,
most of the migrants who did leave Oklahoma in the Depression were not farmers.
Most came from cities and towns. The 1940 Census showed that in the period of
the supposed great Okie Exodus between 1935 and 1940, only thirty-six percent
of southwesterners who migrated to California were from farms. Some fifty
percent of these migrants came from urban areas and fitted occupational categories
such as professionals, proprietors, clerical/sales, skilled laborers, and
semi-skilled/service workers. Predictably, they had a similar distribution when
they joined the Californian workforce. Their favorite destination was Los
Angeles, which attracted almost 100,000 Okies between 1935 and 1940, with about
a quarter as many going to the cities of San Francisco and San Diego. Of the
two major destinations for agricultural workers, the San Joaquin Valley
attracted 70,000 and the San Bernadino/Imperial Valley region 20,000 migrants.
This fell considerably short of their demographic portrait in The Grapes of Wrath:
And
the dispossessed, the migrants, flowed into California, two hundred and fifty
thousand, and three hundred thousand. Behind them new tractors were going on
the land and the tenants were being forced off. And new waves were on the way,
new waves of the dispossessed and the homeless, hardened, intent and dangerous.
Steinbeck blamed the
banks for their plight. Rather than allowing small farms and tenant farmers the
right to exist, the banks fostered competition, mechanization, land
consolidation, and continual expansion. “The bank—the monster has to have
profits all the time. It can’t wait. When the monster stops growing, it dies.
It can’t stay one size.” He compared this inhuman imperative to the rights of
those who worked the land:
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 on it,
dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.
We’re sorry [say the owner men]. It’s not us. It’s the
monster. The bank isn’t like a man.
Ironically, for someone whose politics have been described by
his several biographers as a “typical New Deal Democrat,” Steinbeck identified
the wrong culprit. In two separate studies of the plight of southern tenant
farmers in the 1930s, the historians David Eugene Conrad and Donald H. Grubbs
have blamed not the banks but the agricultural policies of the New Deal itself.
In the early 1930s, some sixty percent of farms in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and
Texas were operated by tenants. However, during the Depression they found
themselves victims of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act,
which required landlords to reduce their cotton acreage. Fortified by AAA subsidies,
the landlords evicted their tenants and consolidated their holdings. It was
government handouts, not bank demands, that led these landlords to buy tractors
and decrease their reliance on tenant families. By 1940, tenant farmer numbers
had declined in the southwest by twenty-four percent.
In
The Grapes of Wrath, thirteen
members of the Joads’ extended family set out in the one vehicle, including
grandparents and grand-children. In two moving scenes, both Grampa and Granma
die en route. Along the way, in-laws and uncles also abandon them, leaving Ma
Joad, who is in her fifties, to try to keep the rest of the family together.
This entourage would have been demographically unusual. Rather than large
families extending over several generations, the most common trekkers from the
southwest to California were composed of husband, wife, and children, an
average of 4.4 members. Only twenty percent of households included other
relations. Most were young. Of the adults, sixty percent were less than
thirty-five years old. They were also better educated than those of the same
age group who stayed behind. In other words, they were typical of those who
have undertaken migration in every era, whether over the Rockies or across the
Atlantic: upwardly rather than downwardly mobile young people seeking better
opportunities for themselves and their children.
The
most comprehensive historical study of the background of the Okie migrants was
written by James N. Gregory in 1989. Its title, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in
California, indicates that the author did not set out to demolish any of
the myths generated by Steinbeck, Guthrie, and Lange. This, however, is what he
actually does accomplish, especially in his account of the motivations of those
who went to California. The Joads packed up and left for no better reason than
a yellow handbill Pa Joad found saying there were good wages and plenty of work
in California. According to later chapters of the novel, this was simply an
advertising ploy by the “great owners” of California to entice more men than
they needed to their harvest so they could reduce wages. Hence the Joads set
out for a region about which they knew nothing. To find work, they could only
wander helplessly from one location to the next.
Gregory
argues that the real migrants were much better informed than this. Most had
direct information about working conditions from relatives already there.
Two-thirds of Okies interviewed in the Salinas Valley had relatives living in
California before they came west. In two other surveys in Sacramento Valley and
Kern County, the majority of migrants said relatives or friends had been
instrumental in their decision to relocate. “All of this suggests,” Gregory
writes, “that the Dust Bowl migration was not an atomistic dispersion of
solitary families but a guided chain migration of the sort very typical for
both trans-Atlantic immigrants and rural-to-urban immigrants.” Some families
generated their own migration chains, sending out a teenage son or young male
relative to explore California before deciding whether to follow him. Gregory
provides examples of some young men who made several such exploratory trips
west during the 1930s.
In
the film of The Grapes of Wrath,
Steinbeck’s statement that people owned their land not because they had a piece
of paper but because they had been born on it, worked on it, and died on it is
given to the half-crazy character Muley Graves. His sentiments, and the
injustice of the dispossession behind them, resonate throughout the drama.
Again, however, these remarks bear very little relationship to the real farmers
of Oklahoma. American rural communities have rarely been populated by the
permanent, hidebound settlers that urban journalists and novelists have so
condescendingly assumed. Southwestern farmers in the early twentieth century
were highly mobile people who felt free to move about in search of better land
or even to leave the land for opportunities in town. At the 1930 Census,
forty-four percent of Oklahoma farmers and forty-seven percent of those in
Arkansas said they had been on their current farms for less than two years.
They were actually more mobile than the national farm average, where only
twenty-eight percent answered the same. A 1937 study by a sociologist found
that the average Oklahoma farmer moved four times in his working life, five
times if he was a tenant. The Joads, who had all grown up in the same place
where Grampa had fought off snakes and Indians in the nineteenth century, would
have been most unusual Oklahomans.
A
large part of Steinbeck’s success
with his reading public lay in his ability to merge deep, mythical concerns
with the American experience. One of the reasons why his Okie story defined the
era, while other Depression tales of poverty and hardship did not, was its
theme from Exodus. But, once more, this part of the tale had very little
historical authenticity. The road the migrants took was not a Biblical camel
track but the comparatively new national highway Route 66, which since the
1920s had provided a direct route from the southwest to the California coast.
Steinbeck treats the road more like a covered wagon trail than the fast, modern
highway it actually was. In reality, if their car was in good shape, an
Oklahoma family in the 1930s could make it to California in three days. Rather
than taking weeks while yarning about their hardship with other travellers and
singing folk songs around campfires, the real migrants slept en route in auto
courts (motels) for two or three nights. While some used the highway several
times in the 1930s to test job prospects, others did the same simply to pay
short visits to relatives. Gregory writes:
Ease
of transportation was the key both to the volume of migration and to the
special frame of mind with which the newcomers began their California stay. The
automobile gave these and other twentieth-century migrants a flexibility that
cross-country or trans-Atlantic migrants of earlier eras did not share. By
reducing the costs and inconveniences of long distance travel, it made it easy
for those who were tentative or doubtful, who under other circumstances would
have stayed behind, to go anyway. They went knowing that for the price of a few
tanks of gasoline they could always return.
Even if all they had
was an old jalopy of the kind that broke down, this by no means necessitated
the tragedy implied by Dorothea Lange’s photographs. Gregory points out that
farming families had a number of options to make money en route. Some of them
planned their journey to coincide with the Arizona cotton-picking season.
Others who were less well organized nonetheless found plenty of agricultural
employment along the way in the newly developed irrigation fields of the desert
state. In the 1930s, Arizona acquired thousands of new citizens in this way.
This version of the story, in which agricultural migrants had
many more active choices than the powerless victims of Steinbeck’s novel, was
also true of California. Although the state was hit particularly hard by the
Depression, with the unemployment rate reaching twenty-nine percent in early
1933, its economy bounced back comparatively quickly between 1934 and 1937. In
this period, Californian agriculture suffered not unemployment but labor
shortages. At the time, Californian growers needed thousands of harvesters for
their crops. In the San Joaquin Valley, cotton acreages quadrupled between 1932
and 1936. As a result, demand for cotton pickers soared and wages more than doubled.
From forty-five cents for one hundred pounds in 1932, the rate for cotton
picking rose to ninety cents in 1934 and one dollar in 1936. A new bout of
recession in 1937–38 reduced wages to seventy-five cents per one hundred
pounds, but this still paid twenty to fifty percent more than the going rate in
the southwest. In almost every other industry where low-skilled Okie
agricultural laborers sought work, such as meat packing, oil, cement, clay,
machinery, railroad, and ice manufacturing, Californian wages were twenty to
fifty percent higher than back home.
California
also had a much more generous unemployment relief system: $40 a month for a
family of four, compared to $10 to $12 a month in the southwest. Although
paying relief to migrants generated resentment among Californian taxpayers, it
was an important consideration for agricultural workers. It obviated the need
to follow the harvests up and down the state all year and allowed them to drop
their nomad status and settle with their children in one place, working part of
the year on the harvests, part in construction and similar laboring
occupations, and part on relief. The combined income from these varied sources
lifted them out of poverty, giving them a modest but decent standard of living.
The
social policy Steinbeck favored for them was quite different. He was part of a
group of west-coast writers and intellectuals who urged Washington to expand
the Farm Security Administration Camps funded under the New Deal. The Grapes of Wrath described a model
camp of this kind in the form of Weedpatch where the Joads stay for a while.
The author dedicated his novel to Tom Collins, a social worker who administered
one of these camps and who was one of his principal informants about Okie
customs and language. The FDA camps comprised orderly rows of tents with clean water and
sanitation. They encouraged the migrants to form self-management committees to
handle chores like garbage disposal and ablution block cleaning.
Most
Okies who went to the agricultural valleys, however, preferred other options.
“Little Oklahoma” or “Okieville” settlements sprung up on subdivisions on the
outskirts of larger inland cities like Bakersfield. For as little as $5 to $10
down and the same each month, migrant families could own land on which to build
their own houses. They constructed them of cheap building materials and they
initially had poor water supply and sewage disposal and no electricity. However
downmarket they might have seemed to other neighborhoods, who often resented their
presence, these typical Okie settlements were still a long way from either the
canvas lean-tos and abandoned railway carriages Steinbeck made his characters
inhabit in the novel, or the prim government camps he urged the New Deal to
provide for them. The great majority of real Okies voted with their feet and
went to the private market to buy their own land and build their own houses.
Rather than a tragedy, the Okie migration was a success story
by almost any measure. By 1940, well before the World War II manufacturing
boom transformed the Californian economy, a substantial majority of Okies had
attained the goals that had brought them west. 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, a sum that elevated them to middle-class
status after less than five years in their new state. While their average
incomes were beneath those of longer established Californian families, their
earnings were significantly higher and their unemployment rate significantly
lower than that of their compatriots who remained in the southwest. In short,
despite the Depression, California delivered on its promise.
It
should be emphasized, however, that the received story of the great Okie Exodus
was not entirely an invention. Instead of Steinbeck’s 300,000, there were
actually about 90,000 agricultural workers fitting the Okie category who
migrated to and settled in Californian farming valleys in the 1930s. While the
great majority of them prospered, a small minority did not. In 1937, when the
problem of migrant homelessness was at its worst, a Californian government
health survey estimated there were 3,800 of these families living in squatter
villages of the kind portrayed in The
Grapes of Wrath. This would appear to be the most accurate estimate of
the number of people who experienced what the Joads went through. This is not
an insignificant number, but neither is it a quantity that warrants being the
received image of the Great Depression. This number amounted to about five
percent of the dimension claimed by Steinbeck and gives a fair idea of the
scale of exaggeration his book has perpetrated. If this is so, it raises the
question: how did such a grossly false picture become so entrenched in the
popular imagination?
The
Okie myth owes its existence not only to the Old Testament but also to Das Kapital. Today, Steinbeck is
known as an admirer of Franklin Roosevelt, a friend of Lyndon Johnson, and a
patriotic supporter of the Vietnam War of the 1960s. In the 1930s, however, he
inhabited a west coast literary milieu that was much more Marxist than New
Deal. One of his friends in the early 1930s was Francis Whitaker, then a
leading figure in the Communist Party’s John Reed Club for writers. Through
Whitaker he met the organizers of the wave of strikes conducted by the
Communist-controlled Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union from
1933 to 1936. In these years, several young members of the John Reed Club and
the Young Communist League were regular visitors to the author at his cottage
in Pacific Grove.
At
the time, his west coast mentors also included the aging radical author Lincoln
Steffens and his wife Ella Winter. At the height of the Depression, Steffens
was one of a group of celebrated writers who produced the manifesto Culture and the Crisis in which they
announced their support for Communist Party political candidates. Steinbeck had
begun visiting the Steffens’ household at Carmel in 1933 where he was
introduced to George West, an editor at the San Francisco News, who later commissioned him to write the
series of newspaper articles that became the genesis of The Grapes of Wrath. After the Communist Party proclaimed the
Popular Front in 1935 to forge alliances with non-party identities and
movements, Steinbeck joined the League of American Writers, the organization
formed by the Communists to succeed its more militant John Reed Club.
Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol Henning, was a Marxist who took him to radical
political meetings in San Francisco throughout the time he wrote the novel. In
1937, the pair made what at the time was, for those intellectuals who could
afford it, an almost obligatory pilgrimage to the Soviet Union to inspect the
“new civilization” created by the Bolshevik regime.
These
kind of political connections were not especially unusual for a hopeful young
novelist in the 1930s. This was the “Red Decade” in artistic and intellectual circles
when many took Marxism and Communism seriously. The Great Depression had, for
some, shaken their faith in the market-based economic system; for others, it
had confirmed their belief in Marxist theory, which they equated with
modernism. Among aspirant writers, Marxism inspired a great deal of
experimentation in literary forms, including realist prose, newsreel formats,
proletarian novels, and books combining history, fiction, and documentary. Many
writers on the left regarded themselves as a “proletarian avant-garde,” waging
a “literary class war” against the establishment. They wrote novels, plays,
poems, and songs about the strikes and the political conflicts of coal miners,
steel workers, laundry hands, textile workers, and sharecroppers. One 1929 textile
strike in North Carolina alone produced four novels in the subsequent decade.
While much of this material was crude ideological cheerleading, some of the
better proletarian novels included Upton Sinclair’s Little Steel and Harriette Arnow’s Dollmaker. The movement especially affected the publishing
industry in New York. Many publishers, editors, agents, reviewers, and book
sellers sought to transform what they regarded as the spirit of the age into a
literary form.
Steinbeck’s
first commercially successful novel, In
Dubious Battle, was conceived and written within this atmosphere. This
book tells how a group of Communist union leaders organize a protracted strike
among agricultural workers in the Californian apple industry. The experience of
getting it published, however, soured the author’s attitude towards party
members. The manuscript was assessed and rejected by Harry Black, a Marxist
editor at Steinbeck’s publisher, Covici-Friede, on the grounds that it was
inaccurate and that its less than heroic portrayal of the strike leaders would
offend readers on the left. Steinbeck was reportedly furious because “some
cocktail circuit communist back in New York” had accused him of being
inaccurate. Later, the critic Mary McCarthy repeated Black’s sentiments that
the text was not sufficiently orthodox for a proletarian novel, a response that
generated a life-long enmity between her and Steinbeck.
Today, these quibbles over Marxist orthodoxy might seem like
splitting hairs. In Dubious Battle
is a grim and inelegant work, but it does toe the Marxist ideological line
fairly well, especially by preserving that theory’s central inconsistency: a
worker’s revolution is inevitable but needs a vanguard of activists to bring it
off. There was, however, a real disagreement between Steinbeck’s temperament
and the demands of the party. He had more faith in the ability of the workers,
rather than the party leadership, to manage their affairs. That is why, in The Grapes of Wrath, he endorsed the
idea of the migrant workers running self-management committees at the Weedpatch
FDA
camp. To apply a label that the author himself would not have appreciated, in
the great debate over Marxism within the American left during the period of the
Popular Front, Steinbeck was more Trotskyite than Stalinist. He was a
non-conformist Marxist who eventually became an anti-Communist in the Cold War
of the 1950s, a not unfamiliar American intellectual trajectory of the era.
Even
though the author’s more enthusiastic biographers would dispute calling him a
Marxist, the text of The Grapes of
Wrath makes it plain that he was both predicting and justifying nothing
less than a proletarian revolution in America. In one of his nonfiction
interludes he provides the rationale for the coming conflagration:
And
the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners
with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact:
when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion
fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force
what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds throughout all
history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great
owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the
number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was
directed at repression.
The development of
the capitalist system, he tells the reader, makes revolution almost inevitable:
The
tractors which throw men out of work, the belt lines which carry loads, the
machines which produce, all were increased; and more and more families
scampered on the highways, looking for crumbs from the great holdings, lusting
after the land beside the roads. The great owners formed associations for
protection, and they met to discuss ways to intimidate, to kill, to gas. And
always they were in fear of a principal—three hundred thousand—if they ever
move under a leader—the end. Three hundred thousand, hungry and miserable; if
they ever know themselves, the land will be theirs, and all the gas, all the
rifles in the world won’t stop them.
On their great trek,
this is a lesson that Steinbeck’s fictional characters learn as well. The
preacher Casy, who plays the novel’s prophet, muses over the meaning of the
exodus:
“They’s
stuff goin’ on that the folks doin’ it don’t know nothing about—yet. They’s
gonna come somepin outa all these folks goin’ wes’—outa all their farms lef’
lonely. They’s gonna come a thing that’s gonna change the whole country.”
By the end of the
book, Ma Joad, who was initially concerned to keep the family together and to
preserve their food and supplies for their own use, now identifies herself as
one with all the other poor and oppressed.
The
stout woman smiled. “No need to thank. Everybody’s in the same wagon. S’pose we
was down. You’d a give us a han’.” “Yes,” Ma said, “we would.” “Or anybody.”
“Or anybody. Use’ ta be the fambly was fust. It ain’t so now. It’s anybody.
Worse off we get, the more we got to do.”
In other words, the
Depression had taken the individualistic American farming family and turned it
into a proletariat with a new set of collectivist values. Many of Steinbeck’s
admirers claim that he is an observer of the human condition rather than the
proselytizer of a political position, but passages like the above are little
more than Marxist wishful thinking.
This was, in fact, widely recognized when the book was
published. Many Californians were outraged at a story they believed was a grotesque
misrepresentation that defamed their state. There were a number of
anti-Steinbeck public meetings organized and several angry pamphlets produced.
Steinbeck’s neighbor and fellow author Ruth Comfort Mitchell, wife of the
Republican State Senator, called one of these meetings in San Francisco where
she promised to write a reply to the libel and set the record straight. The
sentimental novel she eventually produced, Of Human Kindness, however, was hardly a match for her rival’s
ability to generate powerful literary mythology.
At
the time, Whittaker Chambers showed the most insight into why such a piece of
propaganda had become so popular. He contrasted the book with the film, arguing
that the latter brought out the essence of what was actually a great story.
Reviewing the film in Time in
February 1940, Chambers wrote:
It
will be a red rag to bull-mad Californians who may or may not boycott it.
Others, who were merely annoyed at the exaggerations, propaganda and phony
pathos of John Steinbeck’s best selling novel, may just stay away. Pinkos who
did not bat an eye when the Soviet Government exterminated 3,000,000 peasants
by famine, will go for a good cry over the hardship of the Okies. But people
who go to pictures for the sake of seeing pictures will see a great one. For The Grapes of Wrath is possibly the
best picture ever made from a so-so book… Camera craft purged the picture of
the editorial rash that blotched the Steinbeck book. Cleared of excrescences,
the residue is a great human story which made thousands of people, who damned
the novel’s phony conclusions, read it. It is the saga of an authentic U.S. farming family
who lose their land. They wander, they suffer, but they endure. They are never
quite defeated, and their survival is itself a triumph.
I think Chambers is
right. The Grapes of Wrath is
the only example of the proletarian novel to survive. Why it became the story that defined the
Great Depression for America is a question that still calls for an answer. Why
weren’t other novels from this genre and this period—stories of battles at
Carolina textile mills, Pennsylvania steel towns, or Appalachian coal mines—the
ones that did the job? The ultimate answer does not lie in the proletarian
novel or any other version of Marxist literary endeavor. The enduring appeal of
Steinbeck’s story—though not his book—is its application of a great Biblical
theme to the experience of an ordinary American farming family.
None
of this, however, has much connection to the history of the Great Depression or
the experience of the great majority of the Okies. Rather than a proletariat
who learned collectivist values during a downward spiral towards immiseration,
all the historical evidence points the other way. The many sociological studies
made over the last forty years confirm the same picture. In the 1940s and
beyond, the migrants retained their essentially individualist cultural ethos,
preserved their evangelical religion, and prospered in their new environment.
In popular music, Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads proved a bigger hit with
New York bohemians than with California Okies, who much preferred Gene Autry
and Merle Haggard. By the 1960s, the Okies and their offspring constituted an
important part of the conservative coalition that twice elected Ronald Reagan
governor of California.
From The New Criterion Vol. 20, No. 10, June 2002
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