Some thoughts on economy, environment, and the religious roots of social justice in Grapes of Wrath

The story of Grapes of Wrath is familiar and modern:

Small farmers become victims of banks that pressure them off their homes to create larger farms for fewer owners. Immigrants leave their homeland with high hopes, but are disillusioned upon their arrival in the promised land (here, California) as they are disliked, manipulated, and underpaid.

Steinbeck is interested in financial incentives and systems that exacerbate inequality. Californian landowners continue to advertise fruit-picking jobs in Dust Bowl-stricken Oklahoma, hoping that more immigrants will come despite already-high unemployment so that the owners can pay labor even less. Strikes organized by the labor-class are ineffective because desperation is so wide-spread that it will not be too difficult for the owners to find strikebreakers. In depicting this system of injustice, Steinbeck refuses to point too aggressively at any one antagonist. Strikebreakers, landowners, and machinery operators are all depicted as acting rationally and even kindly. When one disgruntled man asks, “Who can we shoot? I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me.”  The answer provided is “I don’t know. Maybe there’s nobody.” This sentiment is a reflection of the modern economy where victims are everywhere, but, due to the complicated nature of the financial system, the victimizers are nowhere to be found.

While the book is primarily a polemic against economic and social systems that leave the immigrant poor powerless, it also contains a lament for the end of an intimate relationship between farmers and land. Machines used for industrial farming are described as “raping methodically, raping without passion” (16). There is alarm that people “ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread.” Reading Steinbeck’s fear of these industrializing developments causes a modern reader to wonder, what would he say now? In the past 80 years, our environmental concerns have magnified but also shifted. Steinbeck’s anti-machine views (which remind of Tolkien’s attitudes towards machinery in LOTR) seem unrealistic and almost obsolete now.

Part of the problem of industrial farming, according to the narrator, is that “the wonder goes out of work . . . and with the wonder the deep understanding and the relation . . . . For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor slat nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis.” (50).

Consistent with transcendentalist writing and philosophy, Steinbeck enthusiastically affirms the sacrosanct nature of man and earth (as above) while simultaneously critiquing organized religion. Religious people in Grapes of Wrath are depicted as judgmental (Mrs. Sandry’s is horrified at ‘hug-dancing’), superstitious and fearful (Rose of Sharon frets that her sins will affect her pregnancy), and hypocritical (the preacher Casy sleeps with vulnerable young women after spiritually charged camp-meetings). Despite this, it is obvious that religious belief infuses the whole book. Harold Bloom points out that ex-preacher Jim Casy is “a secular Jesus Christ”, going to jail in behalf of Tom and then later giving his life for the cause of workers’ rights. Bloom calls the passionate Tom Joad a “St. Paul of social rebellion.” Grapes of Wrath demonstrates how Christian symbols and narratives inform social justice ideology. The lyrics of Bruce Springsteen’s song The Ghost of Tom Joad show how Jim Casy and Tom Joad’s gospel of social justice has resonated with Americans.  

Tom said, "Mom, wherever there's a cop beating a guy
Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries
Where there's a fight against the blood and hatred in the air
Look for me, Mom, I'll be there

Wherever somebody's fighting for a place to stand
Or a decent job or a helping hand
Wherever somebody's struggling to be free
Look in their eyes, Ma, and you'll see me"

Just as Christ is in the midst of all gatherings of faithful believers (Matthew 18:20), so too, according to Bruce, Tom Joad is wherever someone is taking a stance against oppression.