The Music In (and Behind) THE GRAPES OF WRATH

In his journal entry from June 20th, 1938, Steinbeck notes that he is struggling to keep the frantic feeling out of his writing, and he wants to play The Swan, the 13th movement from Carnival of the Animals by the French compser Camille Saint-Saëns (9 October 1835 – 16 December 1921).

Listen to The Swan (Le Cygne):

In Chapter 23, the inter-chapter on the simple forms of pleasure found on the road and in the migrant camps, Steinbeck mention two pieces for fiddle that would have been played at dances like the ones given every Saturday night at the government camp.

“Chicken Reel”:

“Cowboy’s Lament” (this version by Roy Rogers and Dale Evans):

THE GRAPES OF WRATH: Okies On the Road to the Promised Land

As the Joads drive further West, they begin to encounter not only other croppers heading to California, but also ragged people returning from the state to try to make it back home after finding the conditions in California hard and unwelcoming. The handbills promising work to migrants turn out to be a scam, and the Joads cling hard to their dream of picking oranges and living among lush fruit trees.

A handbill advertising work for migrant workers, like the one Pa Joad carries in his pocket.

Chapter 18:

While bathing in the river, Tom and Noah encounter a man and his son returning from California who tell less than a rosy story about what they encountered:

“What the hell! You never been called ‘Okie’ yet.”

Tom said, “Okie? What’s that?”

“Well Okie use’ ta mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it means you’re a dirty son-of-a-bitch. Okie means you’re scum. Don’t mean nothing itself, it’s the way they say it. […] They’re so scairt an’ worried they ain’t even nice to each other” (205-206).

A billboard discourages migrant workers and other unemployed travelers to turn back or try elsewhere.

Photographs of families loaded into jalopies on the road, like the Joads:

"Okies," or those who fled west from Oklahoma to California, sometimes faced charges of vagrancy, like the Joads in chapter 16.

Okies arrive in California.

This photograph by Dorothea Lange shows a Mexican family of migrant workers on the road as well.

An Interview with Steinbeck

Listen to a 1952 radio interview with John Steinbeck as he revisits the land and talks about the novel, then and “now” (i.e., in 1952). What did we learn from the Great Depression?

Croppers, The Dust Bowl, and Pretty Boy Floyd

Croppers (Sharecroppers)

In Chapter 2, the truck driver who gives young Tom Joad a ride talks about the croppers being pushed off the land by landowners, foreshadowing Joad’s return to his family’s house pushed over by a tractor.

Sharecropping was an old system in which landowners allowed tenants to work a parcel of land. As payment, the landowners received a fixed portion of the harvest, and the tenants were able to keep and/or sell the rest to support themselves.

The Dust Bowl

From the very first chapter, the landscape of Oklahoma becomes a central character in Steinbeck’s novel. Published in 1939, the novel is set during the latter part of the Great Depression during The Dirty Thirties (also called the Dust Bowl), when a combination of drought, extensive farming without crop rotation, severe dust storms (sometimes called “black blizzards”), and high winds plagued the Great Plains (mainly Texas, the panhandle of Texas, and neighboring parts of Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico), stripping the top soil and wreaking major agricultural and ecological damage.

Regions Affected by the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.

A farmer and his two sons run to take cover from a dust storm, or black blizzard (Photo by Arthur Rothstein, 1936).

 

 

 

A dust storm approaches a prairie town.

 

Dry topsoil carried by high winds blacked out the sun and moved over the landscape, sometimes as far east as New York.

 

High winds and overworking the land blew the once-rich topsoil of the Great Plains clear to the Atlantic Ocea.

 

 Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd (Feb. 3, 1904 – Oct. 22, 1934)

The infamous bank robber "Pretty Boy" Floyd was something of a hero for those who had lost their land to big banks.

 

An Oklahoma native, Floyd’s criminal exploits earned him a reputation around the country along with other famous outlaws at the time, including figures like Bonnie and Clyde. Floyd was first arrested at the age of 18 for stealing about $3.00 from a local post office; three years later in 1925, he was arrested for payroll robbery, and did five years in prison. When paroled, he vowed he would never see the inside of a prison again. He sometimes paired up with other outlaws and committed a series of bank robberies that earned him his nickname. The police hunted Floyd across state lines, sometimes arresting him for smaller crimes such a vagrancy. Floyd and one of his associates were suspected of orchestrating the Kansas City Massacre, in which four officers were gunned down. In October of 1934, Floyd was finally gunned down in an apple orchard in Ohio after being pursued by local police and FBI agents all the way from New York.