No 153 - Today's "Grapes of Wrath"

 For no particular reason, I recently picked up John Steinbeck’s classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath. It was first published in 1939, and I last read it maybe 40 years ago. Now, passage after passage leaps out at me as illuminating certain constants in American social dynamics that we can see repeating themselves today.

I experience afresh the gut-wrenching tale of an Oklahoma family, the Joads, escaping their Midwest dustbowl smallholding, not only because of the drought but because they are literally bulldozed out of their homes by massive, impersonal, uncaring corporations (sound familiar?). They become refugees: harassed, exploited and vilified at every turn as they try desperately to find work on Californian fruit-farms (sound familiar?). Yet the farms completely depend on such seasonal workers to operate at all. Meagre rewards beckon, but death and marginalisation are more often the ‘fruits’. And what is such a situation likely to yield, Steinbeck argues, but eventual wrath? In between yards of dialogue in ‘Okie’ argot, authorial interpolations constitute a coruscating critique of capitalistic practice at the frontiers of poverty. Plus ça change…

Here are some choice passages (references are to my Pan edition).

 

. “And some of the [new] owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshipped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said: The Bank – or the Company – needs – wants – insists – must have – as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them.” [p.36]

Steinbeck is wise enough not to homogenise the oppressors, and the psychological insight is acute. The overall situation has only ramified: for ‘mathematics’ read AI; for ‘Company’ read Silicon Valley, or ‘the internet’, weaving nets we must all be affected by, trapped into using it, without fully understanding how any of it works.

 

. “The great owners, striking at the immediate thing, the widening government, the growing labour unity; striking at new taxes, at plans; not knowing these things are results, not causes … The causes lie deep and simply – the causes are a hunger in a stomach, multiplied a million times … hunger for joy and some security, multiplied a million times; muscles and mind aching to grow, to work, to create, multiplied a million times … If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself.” [p.159-61]

In other words, Steinbeck anticipated, from radical inequality would arise only violence, a revolution, a civil war. As history has shown a hundred times over, and will certainly do so again: just multiply Steinbeck’s notional figures by a factor of 100. And if you don’t address the “oranges of the problem” (as the Tangerine Tosser put it recently), consequences are likely to be terrible.

 

. “… And with all the wars – God knows what price cotton will bring. Don’t they make explosives out of cotton? And uniforms? Get enough wars and cotton’ll hit the ceiling.” [p.37]

And who exactly is making money out of all the present warmongering (ask Francesca Albanese)?

 

. “Well, California’s a big state.

            It ain’t that big. The whole United States ain’t that big. … There ain’t room enough, for your kind an’ my kind, for rich and poor together in one country, for thieves and honest men. For hunger and fat. Whyn’t you go back where you come from?” [p.128]

There are the constants of American history: the classism, the othering and blanket denigration, the selfishness, the exclusion – even of white fellow-citizens. At other points in the novel, the immigrants are denigrated as animal, as a plague, as criminal, as pollution, as disease. Sound familiar? The ‘colour’ of today’s asylum-seekers may be different, racism more paramount, but the dynamic is eerily similar.

            The hopeful riposte is the hoary old American myth:

 

            “This is a free country. Fella can go where he wants.

            “That’s what you think! Ever hear of the border patrol on the California line? Police from Los Angeles – stopped you bastards – turned you back. Says, if you can’t buy no real estate we don’t want you. Says, got a driver’s licence? Let’s see it. Tore it up. Says you can’t come in without no driver’s licence.”

The borders may have shifted to the Rio Grande– or maybe there are no longer any borders – but attitudes repeat, and ICE’s methods, their disdain for documentation and bodily integrity alike, are not new. Nor was it new even in the Dustbowl years of the novel: one character is old enough to recall much the same treatment being inflicted on the Cherokee, iconic of the continent’s original inhabitants. "Land of the free" – sure, but only for some; giving the lie to the constant refrain by every party these days, that “the American people”, subscribing to “American values”, are somehow monolithic. Steinbeck shows there has never been such unity or agreement, however noble the ideal.

 

. “[W]hen I hear a business man talkin’ about service, I wonder who’s getting’ screwed. Fella in business got to lie an’ cheat, but he calls it somepin else. That’s what’s important. You go steal that tire an’ you’re a thief, but he [a salesman] tried to steal your four dollars for a busted tire. They call that sound business.” [p.129]

Time and again in the novel, the Joads encounter what Steinbeck suggests are fundamentals of capitalistic ‘business’: issuing false advertising, screwing the vulnerable if you can, buying a car for ten dollars and selling it for seventy-five, believing that mendacity is both necessary and acceptable. Anything different, independent or egalitarian (’socialist’ in current Republicans’ absurdly frightened characterisation), such as the so-called ‘Government Camp’ the Joads discover, is subjected to police harassment and violent raids by sponsored thugs. Sound familiar? As one character says: “I’m learning one thing good … If you’re in trouble or hurt or need – go to poor people.” Don’t bother knocking at Elon Musk’s door.

 

I could go on. If you haven’t done so before, do read The Grapes of Wrath. It’s long, and offers no hopeful solutions, but it’s profoundly humane, affecting and timeless.

Photo:Wiki.