Grapes Wrath the Depression Era

Grapes Wrath

The Depression Era as Seen Through the Grapes of Wrath

The Great Depression marks a modern nadir for the social and economic conditions persisting in America. A perilous intersection of corporate collapse, inclement drought conditions in the Midwest and a sustained period of poor stewardship had left the country in ruins, inflicting poverty and suffering on all of its most unfortunate inhabitants. Among them would be the independent farming population that subsisted on the promise of its relationship with the land. Indeed, this notion of homesteading that had engineered America's western expansion and fostered the so-called American Dream of self-sufficiency and self-propriety was at this juncture truly dead. The need for a greater communality, therefore, pervades the literature and cinema of this time. There may likely be no greater document to this condition than John Steinbeck's landmark 1939 novel, the Grapes of Wrath. The Joads, the emblematic family at the center of the preeminent Dust Bowl narrative, would be followed on their journey from the drought-devastated heartland of Oklahoma to what were believed to be greener pastures in California. The hopelessness of this trek and the ultimately tragic reality waiting for the Joads in California would help to capture a single family as a microcosm of the broken dreams and empty promises of America. The book is a stunningly blunt and realistic portrayal of the lives which Americans endured through the Depression Era.

That the novel was produced so immediately in the wake of the events which inspired it is indicative both of the remarkable impact which Steinbeck's text had on the American consciousness and of the degree of urgency which accompanied its presentation to the world.

Its eloquence as a statement to the way that many Americas were living would be accompanied by its unflinching consideration of the Joad's desperation as embodying all that had failed in America as a whole. Only modest research on the author is necessary to reveal the special insights which helped him to deliver a work of such masterful honesty. The evidence is found in the 1962 speech which suited the author with perhaps the most highly coveted recognition in any field. Here, a speaker tells that "John Steinbeck, the author awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in the little town of Salinas, California, a few miles from the Pacific coast near the fertile Salinas Valley. This locality forms the background for many of his descriptions of the common man's everyday life." (Frenz, 1) Quite so, the struggles, the suffering and the almost unfounded hope which persisted in individuals would be revealed to the author in his own surrounds.

Through the Joads, Steinbeck summons his own disenchantment with the promised land, represented by the state of California. A seeming haven of resources, natural beauty and personal opportunity, it would nonetheless prove itself to be a support beam to the inequality and exploitation that were otherwise inescapable in the United States. The novel demonstrates that California is little more than an opportunity to be exploited in a new context. For families that had descended from an American pioneer spirit, being forced to surrender family farms and to subsist as laborers under corporate agricultural operations in California would seem a direct contradiction to that which they had been bred to seek and to value. The labor abuses and personal hardships endured by the Joads and the hundreds of other families which littered the pathway to California would suggest that the destination at journey's end presented only another side of the same story. The poor would remain poor and, as the martyrdom of the Joad family suggests, this would be so in the face of an industrialized society with little interest in raising from the dirt those which it had trampled.

The emotionally charged presumptions in this view help to reveal the commitment which Steinbeck showed to capturing the despair and toil of his subjects. Thus, "in order to evoke the emotional response which allowed his social criticism to flourish, Steinbeck fortified his book with solid realism. For two years prior to the publication of the Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck spent his time with a group of migrant workers making their way towards California. Travelling and working with the laborers, Steinbeck found the heartfelt material in which to base his book." (Cordyack, 1) This shows in his gritty but sympathetic portrayal of the American working class.

This is an idea which illuminates perhaps the most important of parallels between the national experience during the Great Depression and the experience that the film portrays through the Joads upon their arrival to California. Namely, the capitalist system which has brought much pride and affluence to America's industrialists, and which somewhat questionably proclaims the opportunity for all to rise through an effective manipulation of the system, is the clear and declared enemy of the Grapes of Wrath. The inhumanity which is demonstrated by the banks and the bulldozers which reinforced them, or the absence of compassion exhibited in attending police officers and corporate farm-masters are symptomatic of a larger system which, through its encouragement of competitive profitability, inherently demands that such be achieved to the consequence of some other party's loss of opportunity. Thus, capitalism would be conveyed in this film as a force inherently demanded and stimulating inequality as well as essentially and intentionally hindering the ability of the desperate and hopeful to achieve even the pride of human equality. The tribulations awaiting the Joads in California are illustrative of the failure of America's economic system to protect its meek from the destructive greed of its strong.

And it is perhaps for that very reason that the work was received with some degree of controversy. Naturally, its socialist implications did not necessary sit well with conservative American leaders at that time, earning Steinbeck a label by some as nothing less than un-American. Naturally, this only helps us now to be assured of the economic hypocrisy conspiring to the destruction of America's economy. Indeed, we can see today that "Steinbeck did not distort the conditions that refugees from family farms faced when they reached California in the depression years. Despite the outcry of those who found the book too harsh on the good citizens of California and Oklahoma, the fictional Joad family encountered obstacles that were real enough and experienced by many in both places." (Thompson, 165)