By Gerald Haslam

Grapes of Wrath: A Book that Stretched My Soul

We ALL went barefooted in 1952, so I literally hotfooted it over scorching sidewalk up Chester Avenue to the Oildale branch of the Kern County Library, a small, tree-shaded building that stood like an oasis in my desiccated hometown. Fifteen years old, I had seen the movie version of The Grapes of Wrath, hurried to the library, and searched the fiction stacks for a copy of the novel. Not finding one, I asked a librarian for help. She eyed me for an uncomfortable moment, then asked, “What do you want with that book?”

“I was planning to read it,” I stammered. She was a slim, stern woman who we kids suspected wore a wig, so we were certain she was baldheaded. Behind her back we referred to her as “Chrome dome.” “Yes,” she snapped, “I suppose you were,” her voice rich with implications. We stood for what seemed a long time and I shifted my weight from foot to foot. Then she added, “You’ll need a note from your parents to check out that book.”

“Okay,” I replied, relieved. That would be easy.

“We keep those books here,” she added, dipping her chin.

That explained it. Every kid in Oildale had heard that a cache of dirty books was stored within that high checkout desk near the door.
The Grapes of Wrath was published to wide critical acclaim on April 14, 1939. By the end of the month, Viking Press was shipping 2,500 copies a day; the number would grow to 10,000 in the summer when it was the nation’s best-seller. It won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and, of course, John Steinbeck was in 1962 awarded a Nobel Prize. Over 14,000,000 copies have now been sold, according to the Steinbeck Research Center at San Jose State University, including translations in at least twenty-six languages.

As far as I know, it did not win any awards in Kern County, and denunciations of the novel, as Steinbeck biographer Jackson Benson points out, “would come from editorials, and from the podium and pulpit.” They sure would. W. A. Camp, then president of the Associated Farmers of Kern County, asserted, “we were attacked by a book obscene in the extreme sense.” Given the xenophobia of the time and place, anything that didn’t actively praise Kern County was apt to be judged offensive, and The Grapes of Wrath spent few words extolling the region. In my hometown, as in the rest of California, opponents scored the novel not only for its “obscenity” but for its asserted lack of truth and for its “communistic” slant.

The novel had been banned from the fall of 1939 until early 1941 by Kern County’s Board of Supervisors, who pointed out that “John Steinbeck chose to ignore the education, recreation, hospitalization, welfare and relief services made available by Kern County.” The ban caused the offending volume to be removed from the shelves of public and school libraries, but the book continued to be sold in local stores. While more self–serving than most, local supervisors were by no means unique in interpreting Steinbeck’s novel only as social realism, and flawed social realism at that.

Purposely misreading the story was a common ploy and a publication of the Associated Farmers complained that Okie migrants “most certainly … are not the degenerate group that Steinbeck presented in his pleas for sympathy for them.” In a pamphlet published by the same group, J. T. Miron asserted, “I can think of no other novel which advances the idea of class war and promotes hatred of class against class . . . than does The Grapes of Wrath.” On the floor of the House, Congressman Alfred J. Elliot (D-Tulare) perhaps summarized opposition when he declared, “It is the most damnable book that was ever permitted to be printed.”

As it turned out, Kern County was already the scene of an anti-Okie movement when Steinbeck’s novel was published. As the hub of the migration, Kern had severely strained public services — especially health and education. Resentment grew and many local citizens, themselves in tough economic binds, felt besieged. While unthinking dislike of the migrants was common, more than a few focused their animosity on the labor system of corporate agribusiness, which required a large work force of mobile poor. It slowly became clear that big agribusiness was benefiting at the expense of migrants and burghers alike.

In the rest of the state, and the rest of the country for that matter, most people either were unaware of the continuing stream of desperate Okies or simply ignored them. Great floods that began to inundate the Central Valley in January of 1938, however, at last threw the plight of struggling Okies into high relief. Reporters flocked to the swamped ditchbank communities and Hoovervilles; newspaper coverage forced this state’s general public to recognize the migrants’ plight. What resulted was a great outpouring of compassion and help from many.
A more ominous response, however, emerged because the sweetheart relationship between agribusiness and rural communities — some of which were virtually company towns — had begun to break down. A February 23, 1938, editorial in the Bakersfield Californian pointed out: “Every Californian must be concerned over a situation which creates an army of migrant laborers who are left without employment … it would appear that if the grower is directly advantaged, indirectly he and all the other permanent residents of the state are disadvantaged.”

Kern County high rollers — including Alfred Harrell, publisher of the Californian — sensing that the economic status quo was in jeopardy, formed the Committee of Sixty to deal with the “peril to every working man and woman . . . in the migrant labor and relief problem of Kern County.“ Steinbeck’s novel had dramatically increased national interest in the plight of the migrants so, as Walter Stein explains in California and the Dust Bowl Migration, “with public interest focused on the Okies, growers’ organizations coalesced with the state’s economy bloc to launch a major campaign against the migrants.” The Committee of Sixty soon evolved into the ultraconservative statewide California Citizens Association.

By the time I entered the Oildale library thirteen years later, the fuss had largely died down, but the novel was still un–officially taboo. Even in my house, as it turned out. To my astonishment, my parents refused to write a note for me. That was a first. When I asked why, my mother simply said, “It’s a filthy book and I won’t have you reading it.”

Since I had already read — or read selected underlined passages of — certain minor classics that passed from teenage boy to teenage boy in those days, that dual refusal guaranteed that I’d peruse The Grapes of Wrath as soon as possible.

I was working weekends then on a farm, so I had money of my own. After school Friday, I rode a city bus four miles into Bakersfield, where I purchased for twenty–five cents a paper–back copy of the novel. I carried it to the fields with me when I went to work early Saturday morning and was able to complete the forbidden novel during spare time that weekend while irrigating on a spread between Arvin and Edison.

It turned out not to be the erotic tale I had anticipated, but I wasn’t disappointed. Its message about the human spirit hit me where I lived. The great, the ennobling theme of Steinbeck’s work — we are a human family, together in this, and collectively we can transcend life’s challenges — reached into me and stretched my soul. I was enthralled.

At fifteen I was titillated by the mere word “breast.” Nonetheless, the novel’s controversial final scene in which Rose of Sharon suckled a starving man seemed so appropriate, so religious, that it was not sexually provocative. It was, in fact, a little frightening because I sensed that it was dealing with something portentous.

More to the point, unlike Silas Marner, The House of Seven Gables, and the other books I was required to read in high school, The Grapes of Wrath dealt with people and places I recognized. A couple of miles from the ranch where I worked, on the rise above Caliente Creek, was the spot where the Joads had first sighted the Valley, where Pa Joad declared, “I never knowed they was anything like her.” Ruthie and Winfield would have been about my age; I might have dated her, played ball against him. For the first time in my life I had encountered significant literature about something real.
But there was more. Although I then dwelled in a class–conscious society among Joads and their relatives, although I had chopped cotton with families that still lived in broken–down cars, although I had more than once accompanied my own father on picket lines and had heard us referred to as “Oildale Okies,” the book conveyed absolutely no social message to me at the time.

Perhaps it was because I was in the midst of it, so no perspective presented itself. There were poor folks who didn’t get enough money, rich folks who didn’t get enough sex, and folks in the middle who didn’t get enough of either: so what? I didn’t yet understand corporate agribusiness or peonage or exploitation; I didn’t realize that the San Joaquin Valley was already the richest farming area in the world or how important a poor, malleable, mobile work force was to that reality. All those things I learned only much later. As a result, I seemed to read past the very material that had so outraged the Associated Farmers, the Committee of Sixty, the California Citizens Association, and the state chamber of commerce, among others.
I asked several neighbors — themselves ex-migrants — about the novel and can recall that Mrs. Pruett, who lived next door, snapped something like “That Steinbeck” — the name hissed with deep scorn — ”and his nasty words! Decent folks don’t talk thataway.” Mr. Clay’s eyes flared, and he said something that I can paraphrase as, “That sumbitch oughta mind his own damn business.” Buford Roy Daniels, one of my fellow irrigators, had an unambiguous opinion: ’That Steinbeck guy’s full of it.”

None had read the book, and neither had anyone else I talked to in Oildale or on the ranch where I worked. No one I asked had anything good to say about the novel or its author, but no one ever mentioned agricultural economics or unions or sedition either. I heard those things three years later, along with considerable praise for The Grapes of Wrath, when I was a student at Bakersfield Junior College. No, everyone I queried in 1952 alluded to foul language, to nasty scenes, to demeaning characterizations. Even a lady I met who taught in the elementary school at Edison, and who had actually read the book, said, “It was well-intended, I’m sure, but so raw.”

I seemed to have read a different novel. The characters in The Grapes of Wrath talked just like Buford Roy Daniels, like Mr. Clay and Mrs. Pruett, like the Bundys, the Haggards, the Purvises and the Hillises with whom we lived and socialized. But Steinbeck’s Joads were an economic notch below those good people, in part because our Oildale and Arvin friends had already begun to make it in the Golden State by the time I knew them: They were working, they were buying houses, their kids were attending school. Earlier hardships remained unrevealed because they did not seek pity.

But scars remained, and the word “Okie,” used injudiciously, could lead to mayhem. While the term could be traced as far back as 1905, Ben Riddick of the Los Angeles Times popularized its use during the migration. Eventually it became a generalized pejorative in California. Sometimes its use was amusing: 0ildale guys called farm kids Okies while they, in turn, were called the same thing by their Bakersfield neighbors who, of course, were often termed Okies by big-city cousins in L.A. It meant country, it meant bumpkin, it meant someone we’re better than, and it could cost you your teeth if you weren’t careful. More than a few migrants actually blamed Steinbeck for having popularized both the word and the stereotype, but that was nonsense.

Not until the summer after I read the novel did I encounter someone who would talk about its social reality and local impact. Jimmy Fix was my father’s age, a member of the Democratic Central Committee and a dedicated union man. He was from an old Bakersfield family, and he dripped disdain for the town’s power structure. “As long as those knotheads could exploit the Okies without any trouble for themselves, they did. Once people caught on and gave those big money boys some hell, though, the big shots pretended they were patriots saving the state, and the [Bakersfield] Californian was right in the big middle of it. They did everything they could to make things rough on those poor people.

“But there were a lot of good folks around here — teachers, doctors, just plain working folks — who were trying to help. They didn—t have the connections or the money those high powers did, but at least they were trying to do the right thing. When Steinbeck’s book was published, the Californian did everything in the world it could to attack it, but there was a code: you avoided social or economic threats because those were areas you didn’t want discussed at all except on your own terms, so if you did talk about them you damn sure didn’t mention big agribusiness, you talked about a threat to small farms, to the American Way of Life, to people’s daughters, crap like that, and you equated any dissent with communism.

“Naw, the plan was to convince people who hadn’t read the book, and probably wouldn’t, that it was dirty, morally corrupt, to let them become unofficial censors.”

Despite such revelations, my first magical reading of the novel had convinced me that its greatest power was not social and political but mythic and spiritual. The social and political references are for me a bonus and a compelling dimension, but they have never seemed primary. The book does not pretend to be an accurate history of the Okie migration, but it is indeed an accurate evocation of the human spirit’s resiliency. Steinbeck’s art exceeded documentation, so you must go to his book for truth, not facts.

Thirty–five years after initially reading Steinbeck’s great novel I was speaking to a friend named Clyde Nance who, with his parents, had migrated to California during the thirties. “We didn’t look like The Grapes of Wrath,” he smiled, “no mattress on the car, but we were sure glad to get to Salida outside Modesto. My father got a job driving in grape stakes for Gallo for fifteen cents an hour. A little later he got a better job at another farm, it paid two bits an hour. One month he brought home a hundred dollars.

“I tried to explain to my son what that means — four hundred hours of work — but I couldn’t. It’s all too different nowadays. They are and I guess I am. We’re Californians. But I haven’t forgotten.”

“Steinbeck would understand,” I said.

“You reckon?” he grinned.

“I reckon.”