Dust to Dust

I’d been to the book’s geographical setting, California’s densely agricultural San Joaquin Valley, because my parents a few years before had selected Highway 99—the same road that Steinbeck’s fictional Joad family follows as they lurch from one tragic mishap to another in their rickety Beverly Hillbillies mobile—as the quickest route for a family trip to San Francisco. I had seen no sign, in the late 1950s, that any people like the Joads had ever existed: no ragged tent-camps with starving, cruelly exploited inhabitants subsisting on vegetable gleanings; no abandoned boxcars that entire multi-generational families called home. By then, the farmworkers were all of Mexican descent, Cesar Chavez’s people.

The Okies, as they were called by us Los Angelenos because they hailed from such contiguous Southwestern states as Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas, filled an entirely different demographic niche in Southern California two decades after the publication of Grapes. They were the twangy hayseeds who worked defense-industry jobs around Los Angeles and oilfield jobs in Bakersfield, lived in VA-financed postwar tract developments, and adhered to flamboyant strains of Pentecostal Christianity that were the diametric opposite of the cynical religious skepticism that marks Grapes’s jailbird-on-the-lam protagonist, Tom Joad, and his mentor, the defrocked preacher and Steinbeckian Christ-figure Jim Casy (JC—get it?).

The Okies I knew of when I was growing up were also diehard political conservatives of the quasi-John Birch variety who wouldn’t have gone for the cornpone Marxism that Steinbeck put into the mouths of Tom Joad and his rebarbative mother, Ma Joad, the family matriarch. (She’s symbolic, so Steinbeck didn’t give her a first name.) Ma Joad regularly spouts pithy hick-dialectic in Grapes, such as, “If we was all mad [at the evil capitalist growers] the same way .  .  . they wouldn’t hunt nobody down.” The Okies believed in revolution, all right: the Reagan Revolution. They were the backbone of support for Reagan as both California governor and president of the United States. To this day, the Okie-culture-saturated San Joaquin Valley is California’s main “red-state” region.

As time rolled on, it became clear to everyone except English teachers that Steinbeck had gotten everything wrong in The Grapes of Wrath, perhaps deliberately. He was even off on Dust Bowl geography, having the Joads begin their California-bound trek in Sallisaw, in eastern Oklahoma, near the Arkansas border, where they have lost the family farm thanks to evil banks and evil machines such as tractors. In reality, the Dust Bowl of the early 1930s in Oklahoma was confined to the state’s western panhandle.

Like the Depression photographer Dorothea Lange, who was so infatuated with the picturesque primitivism of her iconic “migrant mother” in the pea-picker camp that she neglected to obtain the woman’s name or permission to take her picture, and like Woody “This Land Is Your Land” Guthrie, whose homespun collectivism was mainly popular with East Coast intellectuals, Steinbeck viewed the Okies through a lens clouded with sentimentality, fashionable leftist ideology, and an insistence on seeing only what he wanted to see. This was, perhaps, to be expected: Steinbeck himself came from an upper-middle-class family in Salinas, California, and his only hands-on contact with Okies consisted of having interviewed a few of them for some newspaper articles.

In 1989, James N. Gregory, now a history professor at the University of Washington, published American Exodus, an exhaustive and sympathetic study of Okie culture in California. Gregory points out that many Okies were far from the barely literate rural victims that Steinbeck made them out to be. They were actually part of a huge demographic migration of people from the Southwest to California during the first half of the 20th century in search of better jobs and a better life. Only about half of the Depression-era Okies hailed from rural areas, Gregory points out, with the rest coming from towns and cities. Many were white-collar or industrial workers.

In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck paints the Joads’ journey west as an Exodus-like saga of lugubrious misery that seemed to take weeks, if not months—with elderly grandparents and even the family dog dying along the way. In reality, Gregory notes, the road (Route 66) was a state-of-the-art highway for its time and the journey could be easily accomplished in three to six days. Most of the migrants were young families who spent their nights in tourist courts, not camped by the side of the road like the Joads. About half of the Okies and other Southwesterners settled in cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego and never picked a single crop. Only about 70,000 of the 315,000 people who migrated from the Southwest to California during the 1930s ended up in the San Joaquin Valley, where there was, in fact, a labor shortage, not the oversupply that Steinbeck accused the growers of manufacturing in order to drive down wages.

And although there was genuine misery in some of the migrant camps, conditions “were not uniformly horrible,” writes Gregory. Most Okies enjoyed a better standard of living than what they had previously endured. Many of them also quickly moved out of farm work into better-paying jobs in the oil industry and, when World War II broke out, in the burgeoning Southern California defense plants. In fact, by the time The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, followed by John Ford’s acclaimed film version in 1940, the worst was pretty much over for the Okies.

How many of Steinbeck’s misrepresentations were intentional is hard to say. His last major book before his death was his 1962 bestseller, Travels with Charley, in which he narrates a purported nonfiction account of the three months he had spent criss-crossing America two years earlier in his makeshift camper, sleeping under the stars with his beloved poodle as his only companion. In fact, when veteran journalist Bill Steigerwald attempted to retrace Steinbeck’s odyssey in 2010, he discovered that Steinbeck had made a good deal of it up. As Steigerwald wrote in Dogging Steinbeck (2012), Steinbeck had actually stayed with well-off friends or in upscale resorts and hotels, including a four-day rendezvous with his wife at San Francisco’s posh St. Francis Hotel, omitted from Travels with Charley. Elsewhere, Steigerwald points out that Steinbeck, who took no notes and kept no journal during his three-month ramble, simply invented places where he said he had stayed and colorful characters he claimed to have met along the road.

Steinbeck’s problem wasn’t so much that he was a liar—although that was a problem—but that he was a romantic, willing, as a writer, to bend a recalcitrant reality to conform to what he thought it should be. He was smitten by romance yarns about the travails of knights errant, naming his Travels with Charley camper “Rocinante” after Don Quixote’s horse, and his writing study “Joyous Gard,” after Sir Lancelot’s castle in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. He patterned several of his novels, not just Grapes of Wrath, on those books’ picaresque trajectories. 

With the Okies, he saw a chance to tell a romantic on-the-road tale that he could also invest with high tragedy and left-wing social significance. He could write vividly about Oklahoma dust storms that turned “the sun .  .  . as red as ripe new blood.” The trouble was that Steinbeck had likely never seen a dust storm, and the people he wrote about couldn’t have seen one. Steinbeck had no clue as to what those people could have been thinking about in real life. But he wasn’t one to let the truth interfere with what he wanted to write. 

Charlotte Allen is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.