The Grapes of Wrath

Published in 1939, John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath tells the story of the Joads, a farming family that migrates to California in search of work after being dispossessed of their Oklahoma farm amid the horrific drought that struck the Midwest during the 1930s (causing the region to be called the Dust Bowl). Centering on Tom Joad, the young adult son of Ma and Pa, the story may be read as his attempt to retain and rethink his manhood amid the emasculating circumstances of the Great Depression.

The Grapes of Wrath reflects the agrarian definition of manhood that had characterized American culture since the colonial period and had become codified in the republican thought of Thomas Jefferson. According to this definition, economic, political, and spiritual manhood were fully realized through agricultural work, land ownership, providing for one's family, and the self-sufficiency and personal independence that property ownership provided. By the late nineteenth century, small farmers in the South and West became increasingly alienated by rapid industrialization in the Northeast. With their growing dependence on credit and the increased risk of foreclosure, they came to view government policies as favoring bankers, industrialists, and wealthy landowners.

Steinbeck's novel suggests that these longstanding agrarian concerns were aggravated by the economic uncertainties of the Depression. The story opens as government agents remove the Joads from their farm. The family packs a jalopy and—in keeping with many other American travel narratives that associate westward travel with a search for freedom and manhood—heads for California to find agricultural work and retrieve their economic independence. Grandpa, deprived of the foundation of his manly identity and spirituality, dies at the outset of the trip, while Pa's diminished manhood causes him to lose decision-making authority to Ma.

In California, the Joads become migrant farm laborers, dependent on large landowners for their livelihood. Yet the resulting feeling of emasculation draws Tom Joad and other migrant workers together, fostering a new ideal of manhood grounded partly in their shared commitment to traditional agrarianism, but also in their emerging class consciousness, their concern for social justice, and their brewing resistance to the power of large landowners and government officials. Tom and other male workers find a model of this new kind of manhood in Jim Casy, a preacher whose call for class struggle eventually leads to his death at the hands of landowners' agents during a violent outbreak at one of the camps. Casy becomes a martyr to the cause, as his religiously charged initials imply. The novel closes as Tom, identified by the authorities as a troublemaker, leaves his family to heroically take up Jim's larger cause.

The Grapes of Wrath reflects the Great Depression's impact in disrupting older concepts of masculinity based on individualism and self-sufficiency and fostering more socially and politically radical notions grounded in collective class identity. The novel has assumed the status of a twentieth-century classic and remains widely read, and Tom Joad has been used as a symbol of the heroic male worker in songs written by Woody Guthrie in the 1940s and Bruce Springsteen in the late twentieth century. Steinbeck's vision of an essentially [Page 195]American agrarian manhood—radicalized and endangered but proud—therefore remains a powerful presence in American culture.

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