Book Review: The Grapes of Wrath

A Modern Mrs. Darcy reading challenge prompted me to read another banned book. To meet this challenge, I selected The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. According to a little research, The Grapes of Wrath has been banned for many different reasons to include foul language, sexual content, violence, promotion of labor unionization, communism, and much more.

The version that I read of The Grapes of Wrath was from a collection of John Steinbeck stories. It is 315 pages long and arranged into 30 chapters. Steinbeck had published this story in 1939. This is another book I am confident I should have read many years ago.

The story is about a family, the Joad family, who are forced to leave their home and migrate west. The reason they had to leave their home was due to the Dust Bowl. Because of these horrible conditions, they had to take out credit to continue to farm the land. At a certain point, the banks foreclosed on their land and they were kicked off. There were hundreds of thousands in the same boat. All of them were migrating west to promised opportunities.

As I read the book, I felt these families were being exploited every step of the way. As the families prepared to travel west, they were forced to sell much of their household goods. They had to sell things for a fraction of what they were worth. For goods they needed on the trip, they were charged rates above what would normally be charged. They were being gouged coming and going.

Throughout the book, they were harassed at every stop. Called, “Okies,” they were unwanted everywhere they went. These were families who were just trying to make ends meet. In their desperation, these families lived in Hoovervilles or migrant camps.

Dorothea Lange photograph of an Arkansas squatter of three years near Bakersfield, California (1935)

At least as the book made it sound, government agricultural camps were more humane. Also, know as the Weedpatch Camp.

When it came to work, the Joad family tried to find jobs wherever they could. The landowners and the farm association would rip off the workers by reducing what they would pay in wages. Families were not able to earn a living wage. The landowners also did everything in their power to prevent workers from unionizing and developing collective strength. Local police and private police were used to harass workers. As Steinbeck depicts it, there were many false arrests, camps were burned down, and workers were beaten sometimes to death.

Families were simply trying to live. A person trying to survive will endure quite a bit. What I find most fascinating is how this book mirrors the time we are facing today. Migrant workers are being exploited and harassed often by law officers such as Border Patrol and ICE. People trying to make ends meet are being demonized. Greedy business owners and CEOs are fighting hard to break up unions. People are easier to exploit when they are broken down to individual units instead of collective units.

While it was a piece of fiction, most fiction is based on some truth. If this is the case with The Grapes of Wrath, it shows another ugly side of American history. The Grapes of Wrath is another book that I recommend.

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