Book Review: The Grapes of Wrath

In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck writes about the failure of markets.

The novel follows the Joads, a multigenerational family driven from their Oklahoma farm during the Dust Bowl.

Tom Joad, a convicted felon, is the novel's moral protagonist. His mother, Ma Joad, is its spiritual one. She provides stability that markets, employers, and governments can't or won't. While the men spend much of the novel trying to reason their way through an irrational world, Ma simply keeps the family moving. She becomes the de facto leader not because she understands the system, but from recognizing that survival depends on relationships rather than logic.

Most fiction, no matter how bleak, offers some hope. Steinbeck does not. The Joads’ circumstances steadily deteriorate as they are crushed by forces too large and impersonal to confront. Throughout the novel they are constantly “figuring” – trying to understand who is responsible and what decision might reverse their fortunes.

I. Agency

The Joads were used to dealing with tractable problems. Even a drought, however destructive, had a visible cause. The new world they enter is different. Again and again, the characters search for someone to blame, only to discover that no one appears to be making the decisions. The owners are distant, dispersed, and often entirely anonymous.

A bank isn’t like a man. Or an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn’t like a man either. That’s the monster. Sure, cried the tenant men, but it’s our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours. That’s what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

This loss of agency is mirrored by the transformation of the farm itself. Steinbeck contrasts the tractor with the horse, but his point is not simply nostalgia for an older technology.

And when a horse stops work and goes into the barn there is a life and a vitality left, there is a breathing and a warmth, and the feet shift on the straw, and the jaws champ on the hay, and the ears and the eyes are alive. There is a warmth of life in the barn, and the heat and smell of life. But when the motor of a tractor stops, it is as dead as the ore it came from. The heat goes out of it like the living heat that leaves a corpse.

The tractor is more efficient, but it severs the relationship between the worker and the land. Steinbeck spends much of the novel describing an early form of technological alienation. In his world, machines reorganize the world around themselves while simultaneously displaying labor. Difficult to measure qualities, including knowledge, dignity, and care, are deemed economically irrelevant and therefore ignored.

The same process occurs for ownership. Farming becomes a financial arrangement rather than a relationship between a person and a place. Crops are measured in dollars, land is evaluated according to principal and interest, and harvests are bought and sold before they are planted.

Those who understand the land but fail to understand finance lose their farms to those who understand finance but may know nothing about the land.

II. Coordination

The novel’s second major economic failure is one of coordination. Everyone goes west for the same tautological reason: because everyone is going west. Broadly distributed handbills advertise abundant work in California, resulting in far more workers arriving than the farms could possibly employ. Each landowner benefits because an oversupply of labor drives wages down.

In private conversations, each family's decision to move west seems rational. Collectively, those decisions create fierce competition, collapsing wages, and civil unrest. The Joads (and everyone else like them) become victims of a coordination failure.

This is why landowners and contractors fear organization so deeply: workers negotiating alone must accept whatever wage is offered, while workers acting together can bargain for a better deal.

If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into “I,” and cuts you off forever from the “we.”

The Grapes of Wrath describes an economy in which abundance coexists with deprivation. The Joads drive past miles of fertile land populated by starving families. There is enough for everyone, but no mechanism capable of bringing them together.

III. Reciprocity

Against these failures, Steinbeck presents another kind of institution. Ma Joad, the migrant communities, and the government camp function according to principles of reciprocity rather than optimization. They succeed because they preserve the agency and dignity of the people who participate in them.

Steinbeck's framing of charity is striking. One woman recalls accepting food from the Salvation Army while her family was starving. The experience relieved their hunger in exchange for humiliation.

“If a body’s ever took charity, it makes a burn that don’t come out. This ain’t charity, but if you ever took it, you don’t forget it. Las’ winter; an’ we was a-starvin’—me an’ Pa an’ the little fellas. An’ it was a-rainin’. Fella tol’ us to go to the Salvation Army.” Her eyes grew fierce. “We was hungry—they made us crawl for our dinner. They took our dignity. They—I hate ‘em! [...] Mis’ Joad, we don’t allow nobody in this camp to build theirself up that-a-way. We don’t allow nobody to give nothing to another person. They can give it to the camp, an’ the camp can pass it out. We won’t have no charity!”

Steinbeck’s doesn't object to generosity per se. He objects to a form of generosity that converts favors into social hierarchy. That is the difference between charity and reciprocity; charity creates division between haves and have nots, while reciprocity binds people together.

This is also why Ma's character succeeds in keeping the family together while other institutions fail. She prioritizes a sense of collective identity doling out attention, care, or sacrifice based on who needs it most.

IV. Accountability

The conditions Steinbeck describes, written less than a century ago, can seem almost unthinkable in America today. Yet the economic structures described in the novel feel familiar. The tractor and distant bank have become the computer and the algorithm.

Today, we are told that the algorithm determines what we see. Just like Steinbeck's bank, everyone involved may object to the outcome while continuing to perform the role assigned to them. Responsibility becomes so dispersed that the system appears to act on its own.

Modern techno-capitalism has magnified the failures Steinbeck observed. Instead of handbills, we have newsfeeds that jettison information around the world in an instant, causing labor and capital to herd toward the same increasingly crowded opportunities. Like the tractor, digital technology increases productivity while weakening the relationships that once gave work meaning and stability. Metrics become more precise while the human qualities they fail to measure become easier to ignore.

The modern system is larger, faster, and more opaque than the one the Joads are confronted with, but it possesses the same defining characteristic: it produces outcomes that nobody appears to be in charge of, but which affect everyone.

The Joads are gripped by helplessness, spinning inside of a system that can't be turned off. Their tragedy is not that they are merely mistreated. It is that there is no person resonsible; it's a sort of blind, dumb horror that is too stupid to know the damage it's causing.

“But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me.”

“I don’t know. Maybe there’s nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn’t men at all. Maybe, like you said, the property’s doing it. Anyway I told you my orders.” “I got to figure,” the tenant said. “We all got to figure. There’s some way to stop this. It’s not like lightning or earthquakes. We’ve got a bad thing made by men, and by God that’s something we can change.”

V. Redemption

This is Steinbeck’s narrow opening for hope.

Systems made by human beings can be remade by human beings, but it requires seeing them clearly and being willing to tear them down and start over.

The market failures in The Grapes of Wrath are ultimately failures of human organization. The institutions designed to coordinate society became detached from the people they govern, while smaller systems built around mutual obligation rose in importance.

These smaller systems are less efficient and harder to finance. They are also the only ones in the novel that work.