Most of us remember Tom Joad’s great speech toward the end of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, when Tom, with cops and skull-cracking union-busters on his heels, tries to explain to his mother that his perdition is irrelevant because “maybe like Casy says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one–and then–”
“Then what, Tom?” his uncomprehending mother asks. (Jim Casy is the Christ-like figure that ghosts over the novel like Oklahoma dust.)
“Then it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all around in the dark. I’ll be everywhere–wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beating’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’–I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build–why, I’ll be there.”
It is the voice of solidarity, a communion with needs and pains greater than one’s own, a willingness not only to walk in the other’s shoes, but to be the shoes–to be the soles–when the other has none. It was once the voice of America.
Steinbeck, an avid reader of the Bible and the newspapers–two sides of the same coin–didn’t entirely come up on his own with the words or their spectral cadences, which have a tradition behind them as far back as the Book of Ruth. Ruth tells Naomi, her mother-in-law who has lost everything: “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.”
Ruth’s words never cease to be quoted, but rarely so poignantly as when the South Carolina congressman Robert Brown Elliott invoked them–nauralized them as our country’s soul–at the end of a long speech in defense of the 1874 civil rights bill, to “Great applause,” according to the Congressional Record. The speech was delivered on a different kind of January 6.
For all the words’ power, Ruth was really saying nothing different from the Rembrandts’ famous theme song for “Friends” (“Il’ll be there for you”), or the Jackson 5’s take not long before them.
Closer to Steinbeck’s time–he wrote The Grapes of Wrath during the Depression–was Eugene Debs, the more eloquent Bernie Sanders of his day who five times ran for president as a socialist, once from prison. Woodrow Wilson, a thug in Princeton tweed, had put him there in 1918, near the end of World War I, after Debs had told audiences that they were “fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder.”
But it was at his trial three months later, addressing the jury, that Debs delivered his Ruthian closing: “While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal class, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” He got 10 years in prison for sedition. I’m not sure anyone saying those words in a Flagler courtroom these days wouldn’t run the risk of seeing their sentence doubled. (Harding commuted the sentence in 1921 but did not pardon him.)
The words of Debs and Steinbeck must have been rattling around somewhere in the mind of Lech Walesa when the former dockyard worker led the labor union revolt from Gdansk and founded Poland’s Solidarity movement, the mangonel that battered the Iron Curtain for a decade before it finally crumbled in 1989 and Walesa was elected president the next year.
The words were certainly in his speech when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, when his Soviet-shackled government wouldn’t allow him to deliver them in person: “With deep sorrow I think of those who paid with their lives for the loyalty to ‘Solidarity,’ of those who are behind prison bars and who are victims of repressions. I think of all those with whom I have traveled the same road and with whom I shared the trials and tribulations of our time.”
I think we have lost that sense of solidarity. When Steinbeck had Tom Joad speak those words most of the country was poor and his book was the biggest seller of 1939, the eighth biggest seller of 1940 (Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley was first). If The Grapes of Wrath were published only this year, I doubt it would get reviewed by The New York Times anymore than Emma Lazarus’s “New Colossus”–the poem engraved on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal–wouldn’t be denounced on the floors of Congress as an invitation to dregs from shithole countries.
It is more satisfying to blame the poor in the old Puritan tradition–poverty as divine reprobation, as punishment for not believing in Reagan and converting to the win-win Church of Steven Covey. It was around that time in America, those 1980s bonfires of vanities and borrowed splurging, of Ron Jeremy, Gordon Gekko and Antonin Scalia, that blame and judgment replaced solidarity, that grievances about what we think we’re losing snuffed out protest on behalf of those not lucky enough to have something to lose.
Judging from what makes good fodder for new laws, successful political candidacies and social media likes–that running referendum on our debased democracy–we normalize talk of concentration camps and mass deportation of migrants. We pass laws re-criminalizing vagrants and the homeless as in the days of Jack London. We decriminalize child labor and thankless work conditions as in the days of Lochner.
We criminalize women and doctors who abort, treat transgender people like lepers, stuff prisoners in the world’s biggest gulag, fire, blacklist and cancel people who speak their mind, protect assault weapons more than children’s books, and glorify born-again bigots. We have replaced compassion with indignation and made grievances the national default setting. We have become a fearful, wrathful country that thinks benevolence is a character weakness and clemency a crime. Tom Joad would recognize a lot of this America, but not its lost capacity to transcend itself, the capacity that so often redeemed this country from Gettysburg to Hyde Park to Grant Park.
If this country is to regain some of its old Colossus footing we need a little less Trump and a bit more Debs, a lot less Tucker Carlson and a lot more Tom Joad. We have precedent. Debs and Steinbeck are as American as Lazarus. A resurrection would be nice. Not having to believe in the impossible would be better.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
nbr says
Could not agree more
Wow says
I read that book as a senior in high school (not in class, on my own) and I’ve never forgotten it. They eased up the message in the movie, but people forget history to their detriment. When we believe that the rich and powerful want to help us, we’d do well to review history. The scene where they bury Grampa by the road … “an old old man nobody kilt him he just died” … I can’t get over that.
Rick G says
Exactly on point Pierre. Grapes of Wrath should be required reading in schools. Thanks for sharing this.
Ray W. says
Ditto for Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon.”
The examination of humankind’s capacity for self-delusion in the name of a falsely perceived greater “good” should be required reading for all students.
Nancy NICHOLS says
Pierre, thank you for this article and reminding us of the people who inspire us to be our better selves/better angels. The lack of empathy, sympathy, and kindness for those less fortunate (especially the hatred spewed by some of the right-wing “christian” nationalists) for our fellow travelors on this earth saddens me. We can do better as people, as a country and a society. If you have grievances, do something to make the world a more positive place (i.e. volunteer at a food bank, etc.) rather than letting your grievances drive you into negativity and anger.
Pogo says
@P.T.
With respect, we — ain’t me. I submit this is what is missing, i e., literally, this, not we. This is outrageous. That is immoral. It is illegal. A lie is a lie.
Thank you, for listening.
Stephen Playe says
That was beautiful and powerful. When we need to be reminded what we can and should be, you are there.
Thank you, Pierre.
Deborah Coffey says
Whew! A powerful and beautiful article, Pierre! Our local Moms for Liberty will now ban “Grapes of Wrath.” They’re afraid of everything that smacks of goodness and truth.
Sherry says
Thank you again and again Pierre! We need to be reminded that we are indeed our brother’s keeper each and every day.
Those that choose to judge and hate those who are struggling and oppressed should be ashamed. The heartbreaking reality is that millions of American are NOT ashamed at all.
Brynn Newton says
“I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.” – John Steinbeck, ‘America & Americans’ (Posthumous collection of letters and essays)
Ray W. says
Thank you, Brynn.
No political affiliation says
“And the highway is alive tonight
Nobody’s foolin’ nobody as to where it goes
I’m sitting down here in a campfire light
Searchin’ for the ghost of Tom Joad”
Ray W. says
Thank you so much for giving your voice to America’s capacity for solidarity, to transcend that which so often is employed by the vengeful among us to stifle that voice. I can’t confirm whether America has completely lost the will to solidarity, as you suggest. I can give thanks to authors such as Steinbeck, and to journalists of many stripes and persuasions, who strive to put into words the ideals that may improve the human condition.
I consider “The Grapes of Wrath” one of the great 20th century American novels, if not the greatest. The theme of solidarity is exemplified so many times, from a junkyard mechanic who gives away a crucial wrench to the Joads so that they may swap out a failed main bearing with a used one, to the long-distance trucker who pays for penny candy in a roadside diner, to the diner manager who sells a half-loaf a bread so the Joad’s may eat even if it means the diner might run out of bread that day.
But the plot is timeless. When the Joads leave their farmstead, the largely intact family consists of nine men and boys and four women and girls. Granpa Joad has to be dragged from his home, despair in his voice and manner. He soon dies, as does his wife. As the family’s careful plans, always teetering on the edge of disaster, slowly unravel, the men of the family fall by the wayside. Noah Joad, the deformed and intellectually disabled younger brother to Tom, simply walks into a river and lets the current carry him to his death. Uncle John, who hides a small sum of money from the family pot, leaves in shame after being found drunk. Connie, the pregnant Rose of Sharon’s husband, promises her dreams of a better life but disappears once things become difficult. Jim Casy, the preacher who tells of losing the calling, goes to prison. Tom, a murder parolee, leaves to avoid capture and to organize for the weakest among the throngs who are fleeing a broken past.
In the end, only Ma and Pa Joad, Rose of Sharon, the 10-year-old Winfield and his barely older sister, Ruthie, huddle in a boxcar at the end of a spur line. The family has all but disintegrated. Al, the teen son, leaves with a young woman he meets in the boxcar. Seven men gone. Pa surrenders his role as patriarch as Ma ascends to her role as matriarch. Rose of Sharon loses her baby. No money, no work, no food, no future, no solidarity, no community, no hope. Winter is here.
As what would today be called a Pineapple Express deluges the valley, a lake fills around the boxcar. The Joads see an interior waterline above their heads; they must leave the boxcar or drown. In a final act of despair, they break into a barn and find an emaciated man inside with his son. The son tells of his father repeatedly denying himself food so the son may eat whatever they can scavenge. Ma exchanges a glance with Rose of Sharon and orders everyone else out of the barn. She then gently encourages Rose of Sharon to offer breast milk; they both know they have found the rarest of all men, one who will die so his family may live. A gift of life in exchange for a faint hope for an always uncertain future.