The Grapes of Wrath and California History
Book: The Grapes of Wrath
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The Joad Family is the main character in the novel of John Steinbeck entitled The Grapes of Wrath. The said novel was published in the spring of 1939 during the Great Depression. The Joads in the novel portrayed the migrants of California. From Collins and Steinbeck point of view, the migrants of California can be compared to "Jeffersonian yeomen" who aspire to gain their respective small farms.Jeffersonian Yeomen, historically, however, did not succeed in their goal.
It was the farms owned and mange by the businessmen of San Francisco that ruled the rural economy of the state. Its big agricultural output was favored by the "goldrush" which permitted the growing of "cash crops" in the urban markets and the mining camps of San Francisco (David Igler & Davis, 2002).It was in 1935 and 1939 when the great depression happened in California.
The migrants came from Missouri, Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma; the lower Plain states of the southwest. The number of migrants by that time was about 300,000. They were caked "Okies". In the Grapes of Wrath, it was the Joads who migrated to California. The thirteen members of the family rode in one vehicle which includes even the grandparents and their grandchildren.Along the way the grandparents as well as the in-laws and uncles died. It was the fifty-year old Ma Joad who was left to lead the group in their journey.
Tom Joad, son of Ma Joad and an ex-convict also played a significant role in the story. They join the thousands other migrants in their quest for better opportunities in California.. In The Grapes of Wrath, the Joads migrated to California to seek for employment. They left the almost "perfect" and "peaceful" Weedpatch Camp because of the misfortunes that happened in their homeland. Dust storms occurred in Oklahoma and they had suffered financial crisis.Based on California history, the migration can be explained by several factors.
The farms in Oklahoma and other states affected by the depression became unprofitable due to drought that happened in their land. There was low economic activity and widespread unemployment by that time.Tenant farmers were evicted by the landowners as a consequence of the New Deal Agricultural Adjustment (AAA). These programs had forbidden farmers to plant grain or cotton in exchange of cash. New Deal Programs inevitably had effects that went beyond the farm economy, through the recovery of the agricultural sector was the administration's primary aim. Some agencies attempted to reorient the rural social structure, making it possible for laborers and tenants to live with dignity and even become landowners.Relief agencies operating in rural America improved public buildings and transportation facilities, hired unemployed people, maintained institutions, and enriched lives.
And the New Deal undertook a revolutionary-and successful- effort to electrify the countryside. More federal activities were undertaken in response to the Dust Bowl, an ecological crisis that beset the Great Plains with especial severity.Government agencies promoted conservation, retired highly erodible acres from farming, resettled some victims on more viable lands, and provided sustenance for others (Danbom, 2006). The use of machinery which produces greater efficiency also contributed to the said eviction.Moreover, a big percentage of farmlands was destroyed by the great dust storms that occurred in the mid-1930s. Since then, poverty stroked Oklahoma.
The Okies decided to move to California to be able to survive. They were encouraged by the "word-of-mouth campaign" by their friends and relatives.They were inspired by the information from other people that they could earn high salary in California by simply picking cotton and fruits. Moreover, transportation from Oklahoma to California was not a problem by that time (Orsi, 2001).I. The migrants moved to California because they believe that they will be able to find a brighter future there.
Aside from the effect of the Great Depression in the life of the Okies, the mass migration was also brought by false advertising.In October 1929, the stock market of the United States fell and California was affected. This incident had caused California to suffer acutely because California oil shares which are the most active sectors in the 1920s had collapsed and many investors suffered. The depression also hit California but the economy recovered in the year 1934 and 1937 (Eymann & 2004).It was then when California needed many laborers in the cotton fields. Indeed California offered high salary during those times when the number of cotton plantation in California was multiplied.
A need for thousands of harvesters of crops had commenced especially in San Joaquin Valley.They had a problem of labor shortage not unemployment that is why high salary was offered to those Okies who were employed to pack meat, cement clay, railroad and even ice manufacturers. The salary that California offered was twenty to fifty percent higher than the salary of Okies in their homeland. Due to the nature of their work, the migrants had chosen to settle in one place with their children.IV. In the novel and in historical reality the migrants are hoping to find a better life in the fertile fields of California.
They are expecting that when they reached "the promised land" they will be employed and earn high wages. They had believed that when they reach their destination, life will become easier.They will "simply" work in the cotton fields and harvest fruits and earn a big amount of money.
They will raise their children there and all of them will not starve and will be able to gain bright future in California. They hoped to revitalize their wealth and recover their source of revenue on the landV. When they had reached their destination, they found themselves as victims there. Work was inadequate, salaries were small, and they were disliked, refuse to be accepted and suppressed by the residents. Their endeavors to upgrade their lives were branded as Communism, a system much disliked and feared by many Americans of the time.
(John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath By Lee Cusick)Agricultural workers were not covered by Social Security, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage and the National Labor Relations Act. The New Deal was primarily a political response to the Depression, and unlike farm owners, the migrants had little political influence.While California Growers obtained federal price supports for some products, legally enforced marketing orders for others, and massive government expenditures for irrigation projects, migrant laborers received a small, poorly funded camp program that never got beyond the "demonstration" stage (Harvest of Gypsies).Grower satisfaction with the Okies was short-lived.
The flood of migrants in 1937 had created an embarrassing oversupply of labor, and the squalor of their camps refelected on the industry. In 1938 it became apparent that the Okies were politically embarrassing as well. They were democrats, supported Culbert Olson, and displayed firm loyalty to the New Deal.They also disrupted the strong Republican hold on rural communities, a fact that led to the formation of the California Citizen's association (CCA), which, like the Associated Farmers, fronted for banking, oil, railroad, real estate, and insurance interess allied with the agribusiness community.The CCA, detrmined to attack the New Deal and Olson through the migrants, launched a publicity campaign that, as Walter Stein has pointed out, went a long way toward creating a popular view of the Okie in California as "degenerate, degraded loser in the American struggle for survival."Like migrants of the 1920s, nearly half settled in metropolitan areas, primarily Los Angeles, the Okies were quickly absorbed.
The rest, however, turned north to the San Joaquin Valley where they sought work in the complex, industrialized agricultural system. Ineligible for relief for a year because they were new to the state, they accepted the low wages that the Mexican work force would not, and in a short time almost completely displaced the Mexicans as California's harvest laborers.When the Okies became eligible for unemployment relief, the state relief administration under Gov. Meriam cut off relief payments if work was available in an agricultural harvest, forcing them into the old relief, harvest labor, relief cycle that essentially subsidized low farm wages.Important distinctions between the Okies and traditional harvest labor were not only that the migrants were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants but also that they sought permanence. They settled in Central Valley towns, sent their children to the local schools, and registered to vote.
Their poverty could not be ignored.Living in shocking conditions in tent camps along irrigation ditches, they exposed the exploitation of farm labor in California's peculiar agricultural system and became a highly visible burden in local communities, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley (The Great depression Chapter 21).A year later, the labor surplus of the Depression had been transformed into an extraordinary wartime shortage of workers.
Migrants who were not subject to military service found well-paying jobs in California's booming shipyards, aircraft factories and other defense plants. The Joads and their fellow Okies ultimately found economic salvation, not on the small farms they dreamed of owning, but in urban industry fueled by billion of federal defense dollars (Steinbeck, 1988).VI. The story of the migrants fit California History due to the efforts of Steinbeck and Collins who "actually lived" at California gathering information to capture "true scenarios" in California. Steinbeck stayed at Weedpatch Camp for several days, talking to residents, attending camp committee meetings and dances, and watching Collins tactfully promote his concept of limited and guided elf-government.Steinbeck and Collins travelled in the old bakery truck to nearby farms and ditch-side migrant settlements, and the author read the manager's regular reports to the Resettlement Administration's regional office in San Francisco. The reports, which included social and cultural observations on migrant life and individual anecdotes sometimes told in Okie dialect, were extraordinary documents.
The News had already published excerpts from them, and Steinbeck eventually mined them for the material for The Grapes of Wrath. In 1936 he used them to get beneath the surface of migrant life, to understand the deep despair and hopelessness that poverty and homelessness had created (David Igler; Davis, 2002).
Danbom, D. B. (2006).
Born in the Country: A History of Rural America Johns Hopkins University Press.David Igler, C.,; Davis. (2002). The Human Tradition in California: Rowman; Littlefield.Eymann, M., ;, C.
W. (2004). What's Going On?: California and the Vietnam Era: University of California Press.Orsi, R. R.
W. B. a. R. (2001). The Elusive Eden McGraw-Hill.Steinbeck, J.
(1988). The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath Heyday Books.
Author: Russell Ransom
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