The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  (The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter Seventeen)

  And, finally, at saga’s end, comes the breath-stopping incident in the barn. Outside, are the torrential rains and floods. Inside, Rouse of Sharon, having lost her baby, offers her mother’s milk to the starving stranger. It is much like an olden Child ballad—the stunning last verse. And yet so natural.

  There were doubts expressed by friends who had read the manuscript. Why a stranger? Steinbeck knew why intuitively. The impulse was right, organically so. It fit like—well, the fingers on a hand, the limbs on a tree.

  This book is more than a novel about an epic journey in an overcrowded, heavy-laden old Dodge jalopy across Highway 66, across hot desert sands, on toward Canaanland, the land of milk and honey; and further on toward disillusion and revelation. It is an anthem in praise of human community. And thus survival. It is astonishingly contemporary.

  During a Minnesota farmland trip in 1987, my companion points toward a barren field that appears endless. There are vast spaces that offer the odd appearance of crowds of baldheads. The color—the pallor—is a sickly, sandy gray.

  “All those acres,” she says, “not a tree, not a blade of grass. Nothin’ to stop the wind from blowin’ across. When you lose the farm, they bulldoze the grove down. Our land is very vulnerable. It’s now dry and wide open to Mother Nature to do with as she pleases. There’s six inches of topsoil left. It used to be six feet. Multiply this—these white tops—by hundreds of thousands of acres, all of a sudden, with a dry spell and drought and a wind, you’ve got a dust storm. Will it happen again? People are beginning to talk about it.” Simultaneously, we mumble: “The Grapes of Wrath.” The drought of 1988 has underscored our mutual apprehension of the year before and the aching relevance of Steinbeck’s book.

  When asked, “What is the best novel you read in 1988?” the reply comes easy: The Grapes of Wrath. The third time around merely adds to its dimension. Dorothy Parker, at the time of its publication in 1939, called it “the greatest American novel I have ever read.” She’ll get no argument in these quarters.

  The eighties, we have been informed, are distinguished by a mean-spiritness that has trickled down from high places, by an ethic of every man for himself, by a disdain for those up against it. It reveals itself even in our idiomatic language: Victims are defined as “losers.” The word, with its new meaning, has become as common—and as popular—as “bottom line.” Since there is obviously no room for “losers” at the top, there is no bottom for them either. The Joads would indubitably have fallen into that dark recess; as millions of our dispossessed fall today.

  It isn’t that the thirties lacked for meanness spirit. God knows, the Joads and their uprooted fellows encountered it all the way. And then some. Aside from the clubs of the vigilantes, the maledictions of the big growers, and the stony cold of the banks, there were people like Joe Davis’s boy.

  As the caterpillar tractors rolled on and smashed down the homely shacks of the tenant farmers, they were driven by the sons of neighbors.

  The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was part of the monster, a robot in the seat....

  After a while, the tenant who could not leave the place came out and squatted in the shade beside the tractor.

  “Why, you’re Joe Davis’s boy!”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, what you doing this kind of work for—against your own people?”

  “Three dollars a day.... I got a wife and kids. We got to eat. Three dollars a day, and it comes every day.”

  “That’s right”, the tenant said. “But for your three dollars a day, fifteen or twenty families can’t eat at all. Nearly a hundred people have to go out and wander on the roads for your three dollars a day. Is that right?”

  And the driver said, “Can’t think of that. Got to think of my own kids.... Times are changing, mister, don’t you know?”

  (The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter Five)

  Fifty years later, the wife of the Iowa farmer tells this story. It had happened to her a month or so before our encounter: “When the deputy came out to take our stuff away from us, I asked him, ‘How can you go home and face your family?’ I happen to know he has an eight-year-old girl too. ‘How can you sleep tonight knowing that someday this could be you?’ He said, ‘If I didn’t do it, somebody else would be here. To me, it’s just a job.’ To me, that’s heartless people. I wouldn’t do that to somebody just because I needed the money.”

  Joe Davis’s boy has always been around. From his point of view, it’s quite understandable. It’s every man for himself, buddy. In the eighties, there is considerably less onus attached to his job. Who wants to be a “loser”?

  Yet, the Joads, for all their trials, found something else en route to California; and even before the trek began. We first meet Tom, just paroled from MacAlester pen.

  The hitch-hiker, stood up and looked across through the windows. “Could ya give me a lift, mister?”

  The driver looked quickly back at the restaurant for a second. “Didn’ you see the No Riders sticker on the win’shield?”

  “Sure—I seen it. But sometimes a guy’ll be a good guy even if some rich bastard makes him carry a sticker.”

  The driver, getting slowly into the truck, considered the parts of this answer. If he refused now, not only was he not a good guy, but he was forced to carry a sticker, was not allowed to have company. If he took in the hitchhiker, he was automatically a good guy and also he was not one whom any rich bastard could kick around. He knew he was trapped, but he couldn’t see a way out. And he wanted to be a good guy.

  (The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter Two)

  I ran into Sam Talbert, a trucker out of West Virginia, a few months before writing this introduction. “It scares me sometimes thinkin’ people are never goin’ to learn. I sometimes get to thinkin’ people’s gettin’ too hard-hearted. There’s no trust in anybody. Used to be, hitchhiking, you’d get a ride. Now they’re afraid they’ll be robbed, but people has always been robbed all their life. So it’s hard for me to pass up a hitchhiker.”

  Sam may be on to something. It’s not so much not learning as it is tribal memory that’s lost. A past, a history has been erased as effortlessly as chalk on a blackboard is erased. It’s easy to decry the young clod who says, “A Depression to me is when I can’t sit down on my chaise lounge and have a beer and this boob tube in my face.” Too easy, perhaps.

  The young Atlanta woman bites closer to the core of the apple. “Depression tales were almost like fairy tales to me. The things they teach you about the Depression in school are quite different from how it was. You were told people worked hard and somehow things got better. You never hear about the rough times. I feel angry, as though I were protected from my own history.”

  When World War Two ended the Great Depression and postwar prosperity, as well as God, blessed America, millions who had all their lives lived on the razor’s edge suddenly experienced a security they had never before enjoyed. It was much easier then to suffer amnesia than to remember the dark times of the thirties.

  It was so even for the sons and daughters of Okies.

  The exquisite irony has not been lost on Jessie De La Cruz. Her family of farm workers has been at it since the thirties. Her hunger has always been Okie hunger. “We worked the land all our lives, so if we ever owned a piece of land, we felt we could make it.” Perhaps that’s why Muley Graves, stubbornly, mulishly stayed on even though nothing remained but dusty old dust.

  Perhaps that’s why Jessie was so stunned by the forgettery of those who may have shared her experience, or whose mothers and fathers certainly did. “There’s a radio announcer here in Fresno. He always points out, ‘I was an Okie. I came out here and I made it. Why can’t these Chicanos make it?’ ” The man at the mike could be little Winfield, the ten-year-old kid of Ma and Pa Joad, Tom’s baby brother.

  An elderly seamstress, who has seen hard times all her lif
e, thinks this may be more than wild conjecture. “People fergits. I’ve know’d people lost someone in the war, they gits a little money an’ they fergits. I’ve know’d Depression people, they fergits so easy.”

  It wasn’t by chance that organizers of Cesar Chavez’s farm workers union, during the Delano grape strike of the sixties, often cited The Grapes of Wrath to “revive old passions for a new battle.”32

  “Finished this day—and I hope to God it’s good.” That’s how John Steinbeck ended his day’s work on October 26, 1938. The longhand manuscript was in the hands of others now. He had begun this job some five months before; but with constant interruptions—guests, all sorts of noise, pleas from hard-up strangers, urgings to help the abused farm workers—he had put in no more than a hundred working days.

  There is no evidence of any written outline; it was all in his head. In his mind’s eye, he envisioned the novel in toto, even to the final startling scene. Incongruous though it seems, a couple of other creative artists worked in this manner: Mozart and Fats Waller.

  Though he was already a success, self-doubt had him on the hip. Of Mice and Men had been acclaimed as a novel and was on its way to becoming a smash hit as a play. If anything, this added to his burden. His doing so well in the midst of so much misery and injustice was the hound gnashing at Steinbeck’s social conscience. He had been in the fields, he had worked them in preparation for this book; he had seen their faces. “The success will ruin me sure as hell.” Guilt was his unrelenting companion during those hundred feverish days.

  His diary is replete with self-denigration. “Funny how mean and little books become in face of such tragedies.” “I’ve reached a point of weariness where it seems lousy to me.” “I’m not a writer. I wish I were.” Yet an almost messianic urgency drove him on.

  Self-doubt be damned, he was part of that caravan; he was as much a pilgrim on the Joad hegira as Preacher Casy or Uncle John. Consider this entry in his journal, July 15, 1938: “It is the 35th day. In sixteen more days, I’ll be half through. I must get my people to California before then.” And there’s that damn desert ahead. “Get it done, by God, and they still aren’t across.” My people.

  There is nothing Pirandellian about this writing, nothing detached and ironic. His characters were not on the loose, searching out the author. They were on the loose, of course, but the author was their constant companion. He had become a member of their tribe.

  John Steinbeck had witnessed vigilantes and the town’s respectables bust a grape strike in the town of Delano in 1936. And bust more than a few heads. It was his home turf. He had seen the pinched features of the five thousand migrant families flooded out of Visalia. He knew, first hand, what was happening all along Imperial Valley. He was on his way to becoming an expert witness: working the fields, doing stoop labor. It was a job he sought.

  Fortunately, there was an administration in Washington that understood. President Franklin Roosevelt was surrounded by a circle of men who had something of a sense of history, something the blacks call a “feeling tone.” They knew that ways, yet untried, had to be found to meet the need: the restoration of a people’s shattered faith in themselves. They called on the skills of creative people to reveal the landscape, to touch the hearts and challenge the minds of America. Government agencies, new to the American experience, came into being.

  The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was one. Some of the most indelibly remembered photographs of the thirties were the work of artists, commissioned by the FSA: among them, Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, and Ben Shahn. The durable documentaries, The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River were produced by the FSA. The writer-director was the gifted film maker, Pare Lorentz, a friend and colleague of John Steinbeck.

  It was in fact one of these New Deal agencies, the Resettlement Administration (RA), that collaborated with the author in the work that subsequently became The Grapes of Wrath.

  Let C. B. (Beanie) Baldwin tell it. He was deputy director of the Resettlement Administration: “I got a call from John Steinbeck. He wanted some help. He was planning to write this book on migrant workers. Will Alexander and I were delighted.33 He said, ‘I’m writing about people and I have to live as they live.’ He planned to go to work for seven, eight weeks as a pea picker or whatever. He asked us to assign someone to go along with him, a migrant worker. We chose a little guy named Collins, out of Virginia.

  “I paid Collins’ salary, which was perhaps illegal. He and Steinbeck worked in the fields together. Steinbeck did a very nice thing. He insisted Collins be technical director of the film [of The Grapes of Wrath], this little migrant worker. And he got screen credit.”

  John Ford’s classic film is remarkably faithful to Steinbeck’s vision. Aside from Nunnally Johnson’s superb adaptation, it may have been the presence of Tom Collins on the set that assured such detailed accuracy. Woody Guthrie’s Dustbowl Ballads, a collection of eight memorable songs, were inspired not only by his own hard traveling but by the film, which he had seen before he read the book.

  Tom Collins became Steinbeck’s valued guide and companion, during all those workdays. It was he who offered folk wisdom; the inside and outside of the ways, customs, and reflections of these people. “Detail, detail, detail,” Steinbeck writes in his journal, “looks, clothes, gestures. I need this stuff. It is exact and just the stuff that will be used against me if I am wrong. Tom is so good.” Collins became the model for Jim Rawley, the migrant camp director in the book. He had himself managed one such camp. The second half of the book’s dedication is “To Tom, who lived it.”

  The hard truth captured in The Grapes of Wrath was corroborated several months later with the publication of Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Labor in California. It was the work of Carey McWilliams, the state’s Commissioner of Immigration and Housing: a rare public servant.

  Steinbeck had to have it just right; there was to be not even the slightest error. He knew that the powerful growers, represented by the Associated Farmers, would be infuriated by the book. They were. “The Associated Farmers have begun an hysterical personal attack on me both in the papers and a whispering campaign. I’m a Jew, a pervert, a drunk, a dope fiend.”

  In his journal, he tells of a friendly sheriff warning him against staying in hotel rooms alone. “The boys got a rape case set for you. A dame will come in, tear off her clothes, scratch her face and scream and you try to talk yourself out of that one. They won’t touch your book but there’s easier ways.”

  They did touch his book. They did more than that. On a couple of occasions, they burned it in his home town. Today, Salinas has named a library after him and the Chamber of Commerce takes pride in being “Steinbeck Country.”

  The battle is not quite over. Today, The Grapes of Wrath, the master work of a Nobel Laureate, is the second most banned book in our school and public libraries.

  It isn’t the language. The colloquial profanities are mild indeed, certainly by today’s standards. It must be something else. What? Perhaps the author has offered the reason: “I am completely partisan on the idea of working people to the end that they may eat what they raise, wear what they weave, use what they produce, and share in the work of their hands and heads.” Tom Joad’s vision was John Steinbeck’s vision; a subversive impulse in some quarters.

  If you were to choose the one episode that most disturbed the powerful, it may be the one that appears in the government camp sequence. After the Joads had left the wretched Hooverville, about to be burned down by the vigilantes, they came upon this place. As Tom checks in for the family, he is informed:“Folks here elect their own cops.... There’s five sanitary units. Each one elects a Central Committeeman. Now that committee makes the laws. What they say goes.”

  “S’pose they get tough,” Tom said.

  “Well, you can vote ‘em out jus’ as quick as you vote ’em in.”

  “...Then there’s the ladies. They keep care of the kids an’ look after the sani
tary units. If your ma isn’t working, she’ll look after the kids for the ones that are working, an’ when she gets a job—why, there’ll be others....”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake! Why ain’t there more places like this?”

  “You’ll have to find that out for yourself.”

  (The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter Twenty-one)

  That Steinbeck captured the “feeling tone,” as well as the literal truth, of a resettlement camp has since been underscored by the testimony of John Beecher, the southern poet. He himself managed such a camp for black sharecroppers in the Florida Everglades:

  “When the day came to open, we just opened the gate and let anybody in that wanted to come in. No references or anything like that. It was enough for us that a family wanted to live there. We didn’t hire guards either and nobody carried a club or a pistol in all that camp that held a thousand people.

  “We just got them altogether and told them it was their camp. And there wouldn’t be any laws, except the ones they made for themselves through their elected Council. The Council said a man couldn’t beat his wife up in camp. And when a man came in drunk, he was out by morning. They had to pay their rent and out of it came money for the nursery school. And they started a co-op, without a dollar in it that the people didn’t put up.

  “Some of the men and women on that Council couldn’t so much as write their names. Remember these were just country people off sharecrop farms in Georgia and Alabama. Just ordinary cotton pickers, the kind planters say would ruin the country if they had the vote. All I know is: My eyes have seen democracy work.”

  Let that serve as a brief resume of Chapter Twenty-one of The Grapes of Wrath.

  No wonder the Associated Farmers and their friends in Congress were so furious. (For the record: Of all the New Deal agencies, the Resettlement Administration, responsible for these camps, was the most bitterly attacked in Congress and in the press.) No wonder Peggy Terry felt otherwise.