By Cayla Bartosz
John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath is, much like the characters it follows, more than the sum of its parts. The story follows the Joads, a migrant family who are forced to leave their home in Oklahoma to search for a stable livelihood in California. The novel’s intercalary chapters, detailing the plight of migrant farmers during the Dust Bowl, may seem irrelevant to the reader on a superficial level. However, as the narrative unfolds, these chapters weave together with the Joads’ storyline like complementary strings of thread, providing a wider social context for the trials that befall the Joad family throughout the story. Overcoming these obstacles, however, would never have been possible had it not been for the fellow migrants who helped the Joads along Route 66. The collective action in which the Joads partake to reach California carries over into their later tribulations, in addition to challenging the individualism of the landowners who seek to exploit them.
The first notable example of the Joads collaborating with fellow migrants on the road to California is when they stop for their first evening on the road. While setting up camp for the night, the family meets Ivy and Sairy Wilson, a migrant couple from Kansas. After Grampa, deathly ill at this point, passes away in the Wilsons’ tent from a stroke, Pa Joad offers to repay the Wilsons for their kindness. To this, they respond, “‘There’s no beholden in a time of dying,’ said Wilson, and Sairy echoed him, “‘Never no beholden,’”. This willingness to care for the Joads’ emotional well-being without receiving something in return directly contrasts how businessmen respond to the plight of migrant workers, as in the previous intercalary chapter, one responds to his customer’s struggle to afford a tire, “I can’t help what happens to you. I got to think what happens to me”. This sentiment displays the individualist mindset of those who benefit most from the migrants’ plight, and how this devaluing of others’ needs benefits them as they profit from the suffering of the poor.
A little while later, as Al Joad is driving the Wilsons’ touring car, the family is forced to stop to find a new con-rod bearing for it. Ivy encourages the Joads to leave them to deal with their own property, saying, “Now you jus’ pack up an’ get along. Me and Sairy’ll stay, an’ we’ll figger some way. We don’t aim to put you folks out none,” Pa Joad immediately shuts down this sentiment, responding, “We ain’t a-gonna do it. No, sir. We got almost a kin bond. Grampa, he died in your tent,”. Their resolution is to split up, with Tom, Casy, and Al taking care of the con-rod bearing, while the rest of the group heads up to a migrant camp to spend the night. The Joads’ resolution to help the Wilsons in their time of need, in spite of its inconvenience to their personal journey, displays an ingrained sense of selflessness that enables the other party to get where they’re headed, just as the Wilsons did for them.
The next chapter, an intercalary one, serves to reinforce the themes of collectivism prevalent in the Joads’ narrative on a wider scale. In the second sentence of Chapter 17, it mentions, “they scuttled like bugs to the westward; and as the dark caught them, they clustered like bugs near to shelter and to water,”. This continues a recurring motif throughout the novel of Steinbeck drawing parallels between migrants and animals, such as in Chapter 16 when he describes, “They were in flight out of Oklahoma and across Texas. The land turtles crawled through the dust and the sun whipped the earth, and in the evening the heat went out of the sky and the earth sent up a wave of heat from itself,”. This description of the migrants’ journey, paired right alongside that of a land turtle, serves to establish the insignificance of their plight, both on a grand scale and in the face of an apathetic establishment that seeks to exploit their misfortune by further driving them apart. However, this division is contradicted at a camp by the bond forged by the migrant families’ shared hardship and determination to provide for one another, just as the Joads and Wilsons did for each other; “the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream,” California’s eventual failure to live up to this dream, due to employers hiring desperate migrant workers for meager pay, eventually inspires the transformation of these feelings of hope into resentment and anger, leading many disenfranchised people, such as Casy, to go on strike to demand better wages.
Throughout the course of the story, the Joads’ golden image of California is slowly chipped away by their interactions with fellow migrants. One such example is when after the replacement of the con-rod bearing, the Joads strike up a conversation with a fellow migrant, on his way back from California, about the ulterior motives behind the sendout of the handbills advertising work, one of which is in the Joads’ possession; “This here fella says, ‘I’m payin’ twenty cents an hour.’ An’ maybe half a the men walk off. But they’s still five hunderd that’s so goddamn hungry they’ll work for nothin’ but biscuits,”. The utilization of this tactic by landowners in California displays a callous disregard for the well-being of their employees, to the point that they’re willing to force them to choose between poverty and starvation in order to extract cheap labor from them. This, coupled with the deaths of both Joad grandparents on the road, reflects the many sacrifices made by migrants in order to achieve a false dream.
This dissatisfaction with what California has to offer culminates in a strike that takes place at Hooper Ranch shortly before the Joads start working there. After Tom runs into Casy, on the lam after a previous run-in with police, he explains to Tom that they went on strike after the ranch owner lowered their salary from five cents a box to two and a half cents. He tells him, “Tell ‘em they’re starvin’ us an’ stabbin’ theirself in the back. ‘Cause sure as cowflops she’ll drop to two an’ a half jus’ as soon as they clear us out,”. Casy’s desire for the other ranch workers to know of the owner’s deceptions demonstrates an egalitarian commitment to workers’ struggles, one that ultimately costs him his life.
Ultimately, The Grapes of Wrath is a story about the plight of the working class amidst the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and as a result, the threat that the unity of disenfranchised people poses to the establishment is greatly emphasized. The community that the traveling migrants find in one another is what allows them to share the hope and resources necessary in order to complete their journey. In addition, the sacrifices they made to get to California made their discovery of the fallacies they were sold hit all the harder, culminating in their decision to take collective action and fight back, even if it costs them their lives. These actions take a selflessness their capitalistic landlords could never understand, “For the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I’, and cuts you off forever from the ‘we,’”.
