When John Steinbeck set out to title to his 1939 novel about an impoverished family of sharecroppers who migrate to California in the hope of finding a better life, he ultimately chose a phrase from Julia Ward Howe’s 1861 poem “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” His choice was significant and highly symbolic. Though Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath for an America that was dramatically different from Howe’s, like Howe he was deeply concerned with the country’s future and the plight of the oppressed. In the 1930s, the United States was faced not with a civil war but with economic disasters of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, a postwar disillusionment in God and country, labor strife, and fears about the incursion of communism. Given these conditions, Steinbeck could easily have written an unremitting condemnation of agribusiness’s exploitation of migrant workers and of American capitalism at large. He could have issued an unambiguous call for a radical, leftist revolution. Instead, by choosing as his title a phrase from Howe’s poem, Steinbeck did not align his novel and himself with the period’s radicals; rather, he embedded the work within an American tradition, one that invokes faith and justice in the pursuit of social reform.

Howe composed her poem with the marching songs of the Civil War in mind. While visiting a Union Army camp near Washington, D.C., in 1861, she overhead soldiers singing Thomas Bishop’s “John Brown’s Body,” one of many Union marching songs that took as its subject a soldier’s assurance of life after death. Lines in the first stanza, for instance, proclaim, “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave;/ His soul’s marching on!” Bishop’s own lyrics had first been laid over another song, “Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Us?” This work, a spiritual composed by William Steffe in 1855, asks, “Say, brothers, will you meet us on Canaan’s happy shore?” The tunes and their themes of unfailing faith and sure justice were incredibly popular during the war, but Howe’s lyrics were and remain the most popular of all. They create a vivid portrait of unswerving and inescapable divine justice, as the familiar first stanza illustrates:

As it does in the twenty-first century, the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” remained in Steinbeck’s time a symbol of the American spirit; the work was sung and quoted not only during times of war but also at political conventions, inaugurations of elected officials, and labor strikes. About a quarter century after Steinbeck wrote his famous novel, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., quoted the song in a few of his speeches.

Although today many Americans view the song simply as patriotic, when we examine it within the context of the Civil War, we can also see that it participates in the tradition of protest literature. The hymn was sung by Union soldiers who believed that their cause—abolition—was just and of vital importance to the country’s future. Though they were fighting against their countrymen, their protest was patriotic, for it was born out of a love for their country, a desire to make the nation more just by bringing freedom to the oppressed and enslaved. So convinced were they of the rightness of their cause that they believed they were carrying out the very will of God by fighting in the war, an idea captured succinctly in this passage from Unto a Good Land: A History of the American People:

Thus the “fateful lightning” that Howe describes in the “Battle Hymn” is not simply an act of God that will strike the country; rather, the soldiers themselves become the lightning as they carry out God’s will.

When Steinbeck set out to draft his novel in 1938, the United States, as it was during the 1860s, was embroiled in social unrest, and people at both ends of the political spectrum were calling out for justice and seeking a way to accomplish it. Slavery had been abolished more than seventy years before, but in the intervening period the rise of industrialism and its technological advancements had widely stratified the classes. A small number of agriculturalists, industrialists, and financiers had amassed incredible wealth while more and more workers, many of them immigrants who had come to the United States in search of a better life, had slid into poverty.

The death and destruction of World War I had also left a sort of spiritual malaise hanging over the country. The “lost generation,” the young men and women who had fought in and grown up during the war, and whom Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald so vividly captured in works such as The Sun Also Rises, In Our Time, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night, seemed to have little to believe in. Modern warfare—with its protracted, tedious battles and large-scale, seemingly senseless carnage—had proven to be a decidedly unromantic venture, and many of these men and women could find no reason to believe in their country or God, or to subscribe to any sort of traditional morality.

Shortly after the war, the first Red Scare—nationwide fear that communists, socialists, anarchists, and other radicals were preparing to overthrow the U.S. government—took place. It likely began as a result of demobilization and the slowdown in production after the war: when workers in war industries were let go at the same time that soldiers were returning home from Europe, widespread unemployment, underemployment, and labor unrest followed. At first the brunt of the hostility toward radicals was felt by the Socialist Party, whose platform advocated for workers, and the International Workers of the World, a prominent labor union. The leader of the Socialist Party, Eugene Debs, was tried (and imprisoned) under the Espionage Act of 1917 for attempting to incite treason and mutiny, and the power of the IWW was systematically curtailed by legislation. When a series of strikes and riots ensued across the country in 1919 and multiple bomb plots were uncovered, fear reached the level of hysteria; citizens and government intelligence agencies set about rounding up and arresting or deporting anyone suspected of having communist ties or sympathies. The furor subsided in 1920 as, out of concern that the “Red hunters” were overzealously pursuing suspected communists and violating civil rights in the process, public opinion turned against them, but the memory of the panic was slow to die out.

When the Great Depression hit after the stock market crash of 1929, further disillusionment and social unrest ensued. As stock values on the New York Stock Exchange declined to one-fifth of what they had been in 1929, more and more businesses, banks, and factories closed. With less income, businesses and families spent less, thus accelerating the economy’s downward spiral. At the height of the Depression, nearly one-fourth of the U.S. workforce was unemployed, and it would not be until the outbreak of World War II that the country’s economy would begin to recover.

The Dust Bowl, an ecological disaster brought on by overcultivation and an extended drought, only exacerbated the economic turmoil. Throughout the previous decades, overcultivation had left the soil susceptible to erosion, and when a regional drought hit in the early 1930s, large regions of farmland in Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas were rendered unusable as the soil dried up and was blown away as far as the East Coast in enormous dust clouds. With no means to support themselves, farmers and their families were, like Steinbeck’s Joads, forced to abandon their homes and migrate to areas in other states where work was rumored to be more plentiful, such as Steinbeck’s Salinas Valley in California.

The journeys these families undertook were difficult, and once they arrived at their destinations, many found far less than they had hoped for. The sudden influx of migrant workers in California meant further job shortages, and migrants often found themselves living in slums with poor sanitation and little protection from the elements. Those migrants who did find work were often exploited by their wealthy employers, who took advantage of their employees’ desperation by offering little pay and denying basic labor rights. Rather than realizing their dreams of owning land and homes, as the Joads hope to do in the opening chapters of The Grapes of Wrath, many migrants, like the Joads and the people around them, faced malnutrition, starvation, and even death.

The Depression, which many leftists took as a sign of capitalism’s inherent instability, also helped swell the ranks of the American Communist Party and the Socialist Party at the same time that it pushed the right to embrace more and more conservative politics. As the conservative Liberty League was creating propaganda that cast President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal as socialist, actual socialists, communists, and other leftists were claiming that, because Roosevelt’s initiatives were less than a complete overhaul of the American economy and political system, they were simply not enough. As the Depression wore on, workers became more and more frustrated with their lot. With the help of the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act and the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which together gave workers the right to join unions and engage in collective bargaining, they began to band together to demand better wages and improved working conditions. Between 1933 and 1939 alone, union membership more than doubled in the United states, from 3 million to roughly 6.5 million. Strikes, too, became more common and, occasionally, violent.

As a longtime resident of the Salinas Valley in California—a prosperous agricultural area that achieved an almost mythical reputation during the Dust Bowl as a place where the American Dream was not a dream but a promise—John Steinbeck observed all of these national and regional disturbances with acute interest, concern, and trepidation. While working on local ranches as a young man during the early 1920s, Steinbeck had witnessed firsthand the harsh conditions under which migrant workers labored, and though many at the time blamed the migrants themselves for the squalor in which they lived, as Rick Wartzman explains in Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” Steinbeck took another view:

Many people aside from Steinbeck were outraged by the injustices of the agribusiness industry, but, as Wartzman writes, Steinbeck was “the most articulate and powerful of the finger-pointers” (5).

Steinbeck was already thoroughly familiar with the conditions of the lives of migrant workers when he set about writing The Grapes of Wrath in 1938. He had spent the previous year writing a series of articles, titled “The Harvest Gypsies,” on the Dust Bowl migration for the San Francisco News, and in the course of writing the articles he had visited the agricultural areas where migrant workers were employed and the settlements where their families lived in tents and makeshift shelters. As he had during his days on the ranches, he witnessed deep poverty, poor sanitation, illness, and malnutrition, and the articles he wrote paint a tragic portrait of the fate of migrant workers at the hands of the modern agribusiness.

Despite his experience, however, Steinbeck had a great deal of difficulty writing a novel about the migrants. In December of 1937, he began writing “L’Affaire Lettuceberg,” a satire about displaced workers in California, but he eventually scrapped this work because, as he wrote to his agent, he believed it was “a bad book because it isn’t honest”:

Beginning work on The Grapes of Wrath, he fretted that he would replicate the mistakes of “Lettuceberg.” A journal entry from the first month of the novel’s composition reveals that Steinbeck’s main goal for himself was “honesty”:

What sort of truth was Steinbeck searching for?

Like the characters of other protest novels of the period, the characters in The Grapes of Wrath suffer largely at the hands of their fellow human beings. The Dust Bowl, for instance, though a natural disaster, was instigated by the unsustainable agricultural practices of people. The Joads and the other migrants they meet are exploited by landowners, banks, and unscrupulous used-car salesmen. The young, pregnant Rose of Sharon is abandoned by her husband, and Noah Joad also abandons his family. The problems created by human beings, the novel suggests, can equal or even exceed those inflicted by nature. Unlike Howe, who makes people the mere servants of God’s will, Steinbeck, by granting such great power to people, makes it clear that only people will be able to execute justice.

Steinbeck’s purpose, and the truth he was seeking, can be found in the treatment of character in the novel. As he did with “Lettuceberg,” Steinberg wanted The Grapes of Wrath to be a true novel, and to some extent it can be read as a sort of representative, although fictional, account of the very real migrant problem in California and the general plight of the worker in the United States. The characters represent not only the people Steinbeck encountered in his own life in Salinas Valley but also, more generally, all of the tired, downtrodden, exploited, and oppressed. Consequently, the novel is not about any particular one of the Joads, and no single family member is more important than any of the others. As Cynthia Burkhead explains: “The thematic emphasis of The Grapes of Wrath is on the importance of the group rather than the individual and is mirrored by Steinbeck’s treatment of characters in the novel. There is no one character that is the story’s hero” (70).

Despite this emphasis on the power of people, Steinbeck takes care to make each of his characters vivid, fully developed, and dynamic. He takes care to make all the characters understandable to the average reader, and, to avoid prejudicing the reader, he makes them neither entirely saintly nor entirely villainous. Each is simply human, and the transformation each undergoes suggests that justice is not simply a political matter but also one of personal growth and reform.

Tom Joad, a convict paroled from prison, is introduced as a selfish, out-of-control man with shallow desires. However, as he lives in community with his family and, later, other migrants and workers, he becomes more responsible and increasingly selfless. When the Joads encounter the Wilsons, for instance, it is Tom who, with the help of Al, repairs the Wilsons’ car, and it is Tom who takes revenge on the man who kills Casy and then goes into hiding to protect his family. Still, in line with Steinbeck’s communitarian vision, Tom’s development is not wholly his own; rather, it is tethered, from the very start of the book, to that of another character, the Reverend Jim Casy. It is perhaps the fallen Casy who speaks most deeply of the two cornerstones for reform in the American tradition: faith and justice. Casy, who no longer holds his post as a preacher because of his repeated sexual relations with the women of his parish, reflects the lost faith and decline in traditional American morality that Hemingway and Fitzgerald captured during the 1920s. Although he is aware of his failings, he is unable to overcome them and live a Christian life. Still, although he is unable to maintain his congregation, Casy does maintain a belief in the importance of community, as can be seen when he says: “Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe … it’s all men an’ all women we love; maybe that’s the Holy Sperit—the human sperit—the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of” (24). By the end of the novel, Tom has adopted Casy’s view. When he returns from hiding, he tells his mother that “a fella ain’t no good alone” (570) and that, if he is killed, he’ll live on “in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry” (572). Through his personal reformation, he becomes a symbol for political reformation. As Burkhead notes:

Through Casy and Tom, Steinbeck seems to suggest that, although traditional religious beliefs are no longer tenable, faith has not disappeared altogether. As Burkhead explains, “Disconnected theories of souls and sin have congealed into solid ideas about justice and about how collective action is necessary to achieve this justice” (72).

The development of Ma Joad and the other characters supports Casy’s and, eventually, Tom’s notion of community. While at the novel’s beginning Ma is devoted to her blood family, by the end she counts other migrants, even if they are strangers, as part of her family. She is more than just an individual; in her hardship she takes on a leadership role, at first within her family and then within the larger community. Finally, like Ma, Casy, and Tom, Rose of Sharon undergoes a similar transformation in the face of tragedy. After being abandoned by her husband, Connie, and giving birth to a stillborn child, she is still able to put aside her own misfortunes and help a man dying of starvation by offering him milk from her breast. As R. Baird Shuman writes:

Unlike during the nineteenth century, in which a writer like Howe could believably claim that God has guaranteed justice, the disillusionment that resulted from World War I meant that reform had to be undertaken in the absence of a sure faith in God and country. Steinbeck finds this faith in humankind. So, although the callousness of one person or an entire group of people can do great harm—as when Connie abandons Rose of Sharon and vigilantes kill Casy—we also find in The Grapes of Wrath evidence of the redemptive powers of community. The Wilsons and the Joads offer one another mutual assistance, Casy willingly dies for a cause he believes in, and Rose of Sharon breast-feeds a starving stranger. All of these acts demonstrate that, although there may be no divine justice, people can realize their own justice through selflessness, camaraderie, and understanding. In his introduction to Working Days: The Journals of “The Grapes of Wrath,” 1938-1941, Robert DeMott explains: “The Grapes of Wrath … advances a belief in the essential goodness and forbearance of the ’common people,’ and prophesies a fundamental change to produce equitable social conditions” (xxii).

Reading Steinbeck’s 1962 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, we can see that, twenty years after The Grapes of Wrath was published, the author’s vision of humankind’s power and responsibility was undimmed:

In his introduction to the 2006 Penguin edition of The Grapes of Wrath, DeMott explains that Steinbeck chose his novel’s title because the phrase belonged to a march, an anthem even, and he meant his book to be the same: an anthem in “our own revolutionary tradition” (x). This is not, however, the revolution that the conservatives of the 1930s feared and for which their leftist counterparts longed. As we can see from the way Steinbeck worried about writing an “honest” book and from the manner in which he developed his characters, he meant his novel to be a thoroughly American and patriotic one—one that, like Howe’s poem, would make social reform not a political matter but a matter of nonpartisan justice and personal reform. Like Howe, Steinbeck was concerned not with political problems so much as with epidemic injustices and the country’s need for some sort of faith to see it through those injustices and work toward correcting them.

Despite all of his care, however, Steinbeck’s conservative critics viewed the novel with suspicion, especially its treatment of labor issues. With the panic of the Red Scare still fresh in their minds and sometimes violent labor strikes regularly in the news, more than a few reviewers saw the novel as an unpatriotic condemnation of American capitalism. Just as in The Grapes of Wrath the Californians are wary of a united uprising of hungry migrant workers, so the novel, with its depictions of the power of united workers, raised fears in some readers. At one extreme, the book was accused of being a call to arms and communist propaganda, and it was banned and censored in more than a few U.S. states.

In spite of complaints from conservatives and leftists that the The Grapes of Wrath is socialist or not socialist enough, the revolution that Steinbeck calls for, built upon a demand for dignity and justice for all, ultimately resists classification. As David Minter remarks: “To read Steinbeck as a realist, a naturalist, or a proletarian novelist is to misread him… . He values social movements, including strikes and protests in the name of social justice, but he values them even more in the name of loyalty to life” (233-35). Steinbeck’s understanding of faith and justice encompasses both the political and the personal realms, and upon close inspection The Grapes of Wrath is revealed to be a remarkably balanced novel: for every character who abandons someone, there is another who holds a family together. For every person who loses faith, there is another who reclaims it. It is perhaps for these reasons that The Grapes of Wrath ultimately triumphed over its detractors, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and playing a large role in Steinbeck’s receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. If any doubt still remains, there is also Steinbeck’s own denial that “the novel was ever intended as a social record or a work of protest … its focus was ’streams in man more profound and dark and strong than the libido of Freud’” (Ruland and Bradbury 282).

Works Cited