You Cannot Avoid Politics When Teaching "Grapes of Wrath"

I’ve been having a blast this summer, teaching a six-week Literature and Culture course.  Titled “American Dreams,” I was heartened when I saw colleagues had taught such diverse texts as Allen Ginsberg’s Howl or Toni Morrison’s Beloved.  I was seriously tempted to use Ginsberg, but decided to use Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans instead.  I had a struggle reading Beloved, so Sula wound up on the reading list instead.  We just finished Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, and my course is culminating with John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

Years ago, there was a pernicious attempt by Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) in student government at the University of Iowa to refuse student activity funds to any group which was deemed “political.”  Partisan groups like College Republicans or University Democrats had been denied funds for years under a very narrow definition of “political:” any group which worked for the election of candidates in an election was considered “political.”  The CR’s and UD’s were okay with that, since they are funded by their state parties.

However, the YAFfers wanted to rewrite the regulations so that ANY discussion of ANY public policy issue was “political,” and that ANY group which conducted such discussions would be ineligible for student activity fee funding.  That change would have put various Palestinian advocacy groups, as well as student groups representing Chinese students from both the mainland and Taiwan, and many others, out of business.

The YAF effort failed, but it is emblematic of how many right-wingers want to shut down any and all “political” discussions as a way of suppressing dissent.  I had a Patch user write to the president of Kirkwood College to complain that I am teaching “politics” in my “English” class.  While it is absurd for an uncredentialed person to presume to tell any college faculty member what is acceptable in an “English” class, “politics,” broadly construed, is impossible to keep out of any class where discussion focuses on argument, use of evidence, interpretation of literature, or the intersections between literature, history, and culture.

I wanted to challenge my students with a 400+ page novel.  I wanted them to see how Steinbeck alternated expository passages about the Depression, dispossession of tenant farmers, and the conditions in California migrant camps with his saga about the Joad family.  Steinbeck himself said of Grapes that he wanted to expose the “bastards” who caused the Great Depression, and in his address at the Nobel banquet, said, “(The writer) is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.”  Steinbeck was blunt: a person who does not believe in the perfectibility of humanity has no business being a writer.

Then there is Grapes of Wrath itself.  Just after meeting Tom upon his return, Ma Joad warns him to not follow in the footsteps of Pretty Boy Floyd.  How do you avoid "politics" when telling students who Floyd was, how he, John Dillinger, or Clyde and Bonnie were heroes to many Americans for robbing banks?  Look at Ma's vision of collective action when she tells her son, “Tommy, don’t you go fightin’ ‘em alone.  They’ll hunt you down like a coyote.  Tommy, I got to thinkin’ an’ dreamin’ an’ wonderin’.  They say there’s a hun’erd thousand of us shoved out.  If we was all mad the same way, Tommy—they wouldn’t hunt nobody down—“

Tom’s final speech to his mother, when he flees after killing the man who killed Jim Casy, is one of the classic moments in all of literature, as he tells Ma where she will see him again: “I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look.  Wherever’s they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.  Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there.  If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready.  An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.”

I cannot help choking up every time I read and share the last chapter of Steinbeck’s great novel.  The scene of her saving a starving man is poetic, powerful and redemptive:  “For a minute Rose of Sharon sat still in the whispering barn.  Then she hoisted her tired body up and drew the comfort about her.  She moved slowly to the corner and stood looking down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes.  Then slowly she lay down beside him.  He shook his head slowly from side to side.  Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. ‘You got to,’ she said.  She squirmed closer and pulled his head close.  ‘There!’ she said.  ‘There.’  Her hand moved behind his head and supported it.  Her fingers moved gently in his hair.  She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.”

Steinbeck’s novel has been the target of censors since its publication: Steinbeck’s description of the travails of the Joads is harsh and unremitting.  His critiques of the capitalist system which drove them off the land and into a life of migrant labor are uncompromising.  Sure, I could have kept “politics” out of my literature class this summer by not teaching Grapes of Wrath.  But if Steinbeck believed in human perfectibility, then I believe in my students being capable of becoming mature, engaged adults.  I could not cheat them of the opportunity to read one of the greatest American novels written.

That would have been cowardly, and a betrayal of my obligation to my students as their teacher.