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    Steinbeck's Bitter Fruit: From the Grapes of Wrath to Occupy Wall Street
    Steinbeck's Bitter Fruit: From the Grapes of Wrath to Occupy Wall Street
    Steinbeck's Bitter Fruit: From the Grapes of Wrath to Occupy Wall Street
    Ebook147 pages2 hours

    Steinbeck's Bitter Fruit: From the Grapes of Wrath to Occupy Wall Street

    By Thomas Fensch

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    About this ebook

    John Steinbeck observed the plight of the dispossessed --the Okies--during the Great Depression and then wrote the epic Novel, "The Grapes of Wrath." The first half of "Steinbeck's bitter fruit" details his observations of the Depression years of the 1930s--the second half shows how close we may still be to the dark decade of the 1930s .The "bitter fruit" in the title are the grapes in "The Grapes of Wrath".
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateSep 15, 2014
    ISBN9780990718147
    Steinbeck's Bitter Fruit: From the Grapes of Wrath to Occupy Wall Street
    Author

    Thomas Fensch

    Thomas Fensch has published 40 books in the past 50 years--his first three were published in 1970. He has published five books about John Steinbeck; two about James Thurber; two about Dr. Seuss; the only full biography of John Howard Griffin, the author of Black Like Me, and a variety other titles.

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      Book preview

      Steinbeck's Bitter Fruit - Thomas Fensch

      author

      Introduction:

      Steinbeck … and Faulkner

      IN 1936, JOHN STEINBECK published In Dubious Battle, a novel based on union organizing attempts and subsequent—and often violent—anti-union backlashes in the rich and fertile agricultural lands of California’s central valleys.

      He was then asked by the editors of the now-defunct San Francisco News to write a series of articles about the plight of the migrants, refugees from Oklahoma and other Dust Bowl states, flooding into California by the hundreds of thousands. Steinbeck’s seven-part series, later re-published in book form as The Harvest Gypsies, was a savage indictment of conditions in California and the treatment of what some simply called fruit tramps, once-proud Okies then resigned to doing nothing more than day-to-day crop picking.

      Steinbeck used the factual articles from his San Francisco News series in his epic novel, The Grapes of Wrath. After two false starts, he finally found his focus and began The Grapes of Wrath; his articles from the San Francisco News were inserted into his novel to prove, to validate, his fiction. The title (suggested by Steinbeck’s wife) came from a phrase in Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic. Lyrics from that hymn were printed on the end papers of the first edition of The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939.

      The themes in each are vividly apparent—and vitally important:

      Union organizing activity and anti-union sentiment in In Dubious Battle;

      Poverty and literal starvation in the San Francisco News series;

      Homelessness, joblessness, hunger, poverty, discrimination and the greed of the banks in The Grapes of Wrath. Indeed, the Joads could not really comprehend why they were thrown off their Oklahoma farm. Even as meager as the topsoil was, it was their land—their dirt— their soil. Except it wasn’t—it belonged to the bank, an inhumane creature somewhere far out of their reach. They couldn’t reason with the bank; couldn’t negotiate with the bank; couldn’t even find a human representative of the bank.

      And so the Joads by the thousands piled into jalopies and trucks of all sorts, many barely running, and trekked to California, the land of sun and oranges, except the California of the 1930s was a cruel hoax—the Joads found crop picking day wages so low they could not feed and support themselves.

      That was John Steinbeck’s 1930s.

      And no one, in California, in Washington, D.C., or elsewhere, had a clue how the Great Depression would end. It finally did—on December 7, 1941—when Japan attacked the Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor. A day that will live in infamy, President Franklin Roosevelt called it the next day, when Congress declared war on Japan. Every man and woman who was physically able entered the armed services; plants appeared across the nation to supply war materiel; automotive assembly lines were re-tooled to build tanks, aircraft and other much needed armament. Suddenly workers were needed everywhere.

      By the end of the war in 1945, old antagonisms were often—but not always—forgotten. But comparatively few of the Dust Bowl refugees ever returned to the mid-west.

      That was then.

      Now—73 years after Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath—we have joblessness, homelessness, poverty in America, some starvation (although we hope, not as pervasive as during Steinbeck’s day) and the greed of the banks.

      All back with a vengeance.

      The articles in the second half of this book—and these are but a sample; there are many, many more such articles—reveal how close we may be now to Steinbeck’s moral vision of the 1930s.

      As examples: Republican Governors and Republican legislatures in Wisconsin and Ohio passed anti-union labor bills in 2011, only to discover they vastly overreached. Residents in Wisconsin mounted a massive voter-recall petition to force Governor Scott Walker out of office; voters in Ohio also mounted a massive voter recall petition; they could not so easily ouster Ohio Governor John Kasich, but could vote to void the Ohio anti-union laws.

      The major banks and the stock market very nearly brought economic ruin to the country in 2008 and the nation has yet to recover. More and more homes are underwater—homeowners owe more than their homes are worth. Many homeowners throughout the country have simply walked away from their mortgages and abandoned their homes.

      Joblessness rose; poverty rose; finally Occupy Wall Street simply appeared and grew and grew; across the country and, in fact, around the world.

      Since Google is now a verb, you can google Occupy Wall Street and find screen after screen of articles about Occupy Wall Street—its growth, implications, and future.

      Would John Steinbeck of the late 1930s approve of Occupy Wall Street? I suspect we can safely say so. Would he really be surprised at the homelessness, joblessness, poverty, hunger and the greed of the banks today? It is all as he saw it then—only the year dates have changed.

      And where is novelist William Faulkner in all this? In one simple and succinct quotation:

      The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

      John Steinbeck’s moral vision of the 1930s

      Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is tramping out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

      He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible quick sword: His truth is marching on.

      — Battle Hymn of the Republic Julia Ward Howe

      printed on the end papers of The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

      One |

      In Dubious Battle

      JOHN STEINBECK WAS BORN in Salinas, California, February 27, 1902. He attended Stanford University, sporadically from 1919–1925, taking courses in Marine Biology and literature but failed to graduate. He held various jobs including working in a sugar factory in Salinas, as a caretaker of an estate in Lake Tahoe and eventually traveled to New York City to work, building the original Madison Square Garden. He also got a job as a reporter on the old New York American.

      He was hopelessly out of his element. They gave me stories to cover in Queens … he later said, … and Brooklyn and I would get lost and spend hours trying to find my way back. He became emotionally attached to the individuals he was supposed to be writing about; the editors transferred him to the federal courts beat, but that was even worse—Steinbeck had little knowledge of the courts system. He was fired. He attempted free-lancing in New York with little success and returned to California by freighter in early 1926.

      He began publishing novels in 1929, just as the Great Depression hit. His first three, which were commercial failures, were all published by firms which ultimately went bankrupt. Steinbeck’s first novel, Cup of Gold, a fictionalized biography of the pirate Henry Morgan, was published by the firm of Robert M. McBride & Co. Lewis Gannett, the critic, wrote that his first book sold only 1,533 total copies, because few critics bothered to review it when it was published, two months after the beginning of the Great Depression.

      His second book, The Pastures of Heaven, did little better. Published in 1932 by the firm Brewer, Warren and Putnam, it earned Steinbeck $400. Neither his first nor third book earned more than the publisher’s advance of $250.

      Although Steinbeck probably did not realize it at the time, 1933 marked the beginning of his sustained success as a professional, salable writer. He published two short stories, which would later become parts of The Red Pony, and his third book, To a God Unknown, found a publisher, this time the firm of Robert O. Ballou, in New York, but only 598 copies were bound and shipped to bookstores.

      Then his luck began to change. Pascal Covici, a Chicago bookseller and publisher chanced to read his first three books and decided to publish Steinbeck. One of the first books Steinbeck remembered reading as a child was a version of the King Arthur stories. He became enchanted with the King Arthur saga throughout much of his life; his fascination led to two books, Tortilla Flat and, much later, his own re-telling of the Arthurian saga, unfinished during his lifetime, but published posthumously in 1976, as The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights.

      Tortilla Flat, published in 1935, is a clear retelling of the King Arthur story, set in Depression-era California. The chapter titles are almost identical to the earliest versions of the King Arthur saga; Danny’s house, the adventures of the paisanos and the dénouement of Steinbeck’s novel reflects the original saga.

      Tortilla Flat was an immediate hit for Steinbeck’s new publisher, Pascal Covici. It allowed the firm Covici-Friede some welcome financial breathing room. The book won the annual Gold Medal awarded by the Commonwealth Club of California for the best work by a native Californian. The film rights were sold and eventually resold before the film version was ever made. (MGM released the film version of Tortilla Flat in 1942. In the book Steinbeck and Film, Joseph Millichamp called the film an unreasonable sepia-toned sham that could have only been made in Hollywood.)

      Readers were vastly amused (although critics ultimately less so) by Steinbeck’s portrait of the paisanos (he had known such people in and around the Salinas-Monterey Bay area) and his mock-heroic style. Chapter nine, about the neighbor lady Sweets Ramirez and the vacuum cleaner given her as a gift, by Danny, the leader of the paisanos and his friends, shows Steinbeck at his most droll.

      But once accepted as an accomplished novelist, John Steinbeck refused to be pigeon-holed and refused to follow one book with another of the same type (although he did follow Cannery Row, published in 1945, with the sequel Sweet Thursday, published in 1954).

      His next book was In Dubious Battle, which brought him even more fame

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