Steinbeck's myth of the Okies.(John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath)(Critical Essay)

John Steinbeck performed a rare feat for a writer of fiction. He created a literary portrait that defined an era. His account of the "Okie Exodus" in The Grapes of Wrath became the principal story through which America defined the experience of the Great Depression. Even today, one of the enduring images for anyone with even a passing familiarity with the 1930s is that of Steinbeck's fictional characters the Joads, an American farming family uprooted from its home by the twin disasters of dust storms and financial crisis to become refugees in a hostile world. Not since Dickens's portrayal of the slums of Victorian England has a novelist produced such an enduring definition of his age.

According to Penguin Books, which produced a very handsome series of paperbacks to mark the centenary of his birth this February, Steinbeck's novels still generate a combined sale of around two million books a year. Originally published in 1939, The Grapes of Wrath remains a widely studied text in both high schools and universities, and the 1940 John Ford film of the book still enjoys healthy sales on videotape and frequent reruns on classic movie shows on cable television. The story that these various audiences hear goes like this:

Dust storms and bank foreclosures during the Great Depression forced a mass migration of hundreds of thousands of small landowners and sharecroppers from the American southwest, especially Oklahoma, Arkansas, and east Texas. Enticed by false advertising, impoverished farming families loaded their possessions onto ramshackle automobiles and pickup trucks to brave the thousand-mile journey westward to California where they hoped to revive their fortunes and regain their livelihood on the land. This American version of Exodus faced its own Sinai crossing in the Arizona desert, where many vehicles broke down or ran out of gas. Those who survived the hazardous passage to the promised land, however, found the large corporations that controlled Californian agriculture used the rapidly growing number of migrants to continually beat down harvest wages. Police and vigilantes set upon those who complained or resisted, especially if they were suspected of being "reds" or Communist agitators. The Okies ended up landless, homeless, and impoverished, forced to watch their children starve in a land of plenty. Folk singers like Woody Guthrie, in his Dust Bowl Ballads, expressed their bitterness and anger: "I'm goin' down the road feelin' bad. Lawd. Lawd. And I ain't gonna be treated this-a-way."

Although it is about the experiences of the fictional Joad family, The Grapes of Wrath was always meant to be taken literally. Borrowing from John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy and other works in the realist or documentary genre of the time, Steinbeck interspersed his fictional chapters with passages that gave a running account of the prevailing social, climatic, economic, and political conditions. Steinbeck himself had researched the living conditions of the Okies for a series of newspaper articles he wrote for a San Francisco newspaper, and, soon after his novel appeared, its tale was confirmed by the publication of America's most famous work of photographic essays, Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor's American Exodus, which traced every step of the Okie's tragic journey across the country. In other words, Steinbeck's book was presented at the time as a work of history as well as fiction, and it has been accepted as such ever since. Unfortunately for the reputation of the author, however, there is now an accumulation of sufficient historical, demographic, and climatic data about the 1930s to show that almost everything about the elaborate picture created in the novel is either outright false or exaggerated beyond belief.

For a start, dust storms in the Thirties affected very little of the farming land of Oklahoma. Between 1933 and 1935, severe wind erosion did create a dust bowl in the western half of Kansas, eastern Colorado, and the west Texas/New Mexico border country. While many Oklahoma farms suffered from drought in the mid-1930s, the only dust-affected region in that state was the narrow panhandle in the far west. Steinbeck wrote of the dust storms:

 
   In the morning the dust hung like fog, and the sun was as red as ripe new 
   blood. All day the dust sifted down, and the next day it sifted down. An 
   even blanket covered the earth. It settled on the corn, piled up on the 
   tops of the fence posts, piled up on the wires; it settled on roofs, 
   blanketed the weeds and trees. 

But nothing like this happened anywhere near where Steinbeck placed the Joad family farm, just outside Sallisaw, Oklahoma, part of the cotton belt in the east of the state, almost on the Arkansas border. In the real dust bowl, it is true that many families packed up and left, but the historian James N. Gregory has pointed out that less than 16,000 people from the dust-affected areas went to California, barely six percent of the total from the southwestern states. Gregory blames contemporary journalists for the ...