[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 137 (Thursday, October 17, 2002)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1924-E1925]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          THE GRAPES OF WRATH

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                            HON. BARBARA LEE

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, October 16, 2002

  Ms. LEE. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank Congressman Farr for organizing 
this tribute to John Steinbeck and this celebration of The Grapes of 
Wrath. When Steinbeck created the Joads, he created a portrait of the 
American family at a moment of crisis but also a moment of great 
strength. His words still resonate, and we still face many of the same 
challenges: America still has its Hoovervilles. But California is still 
a land of dreams and promises. I have chosen for my selection, a 
portion of chapter nineteen, describing the arrival of generations of 
migrants into California, their hoped for promised land. I am happy to 
join my colleague in celebrating reading and celebrating this classic 
novel.

                            Chapter Nineteen

       Once California belonged to Mexico and its land to 
     Mexicans; and a horde of tattered feverish Americans poured 
     in. And such was their hunger for land that they took the 
     land--stole Sutter's land, Guerrero's land, took the grants 
     and broke them up and growled and quarreled over them, those 
     frantic hungry men; and they guarded with guns the land they 
     had stolen. They put up houses and barns, they turned the 
     earth and planted crops. And these things were possession, 
     and possession was ownership.
       The Mexicans were weak and fed. They could not resist, 
     because they wanted nothing in the world as frantically as 
     the Americans wanted land.
       Then, with time, the squatters were no longer squatters, 
     but owners; and their children grew up and had children on 
     the land. And the hunger was gone from them, the feral 
     hunger, the gnawing, tearing hunger for land, for water and 
     earth and the good sky over it, for the green thrusting 
     grass, for the swelling roots. They had these things so 
     completely that they did not know about them any more. they 
     had no more the stomach-tearing lust for a rich acre and a 
     shining blade to plow it, for seed and a windmill beating its 
     wings in the air. They arose in the dark no more to hear the 
     sleepy birds' first chittering, and the morning wind around 
     the house while they waited for the first light to go out to 
     the dear acres. These things were lost, and crops were 
     reckoned in dollars, and land was valued by principal plus 
     interest, and crops were bought and sold before they were 
     planted. Then crop failure, drought, and flood were no longer 
     little deaths within life, but simple losses of money. And 
     all their love was thinned with money, and all their 
     fierceness dribbled away in interest until they were no 
     longer farmers at all, but little shopkeepers of crops, 
     little manufacturers who must sell before they can make. Then 
     those farmers who were not good shopkeepers lost their land 
     to good shopkeepers. No matter how clever, how loving a man 
     might be with earth and growing things, he could not survive 
     if he were not also a good shopkeeper. And as time went on, 
     the business men had the farms, and the farms grew larger, 
     but there were fewer of them.
       Now farming became industry, and the owners followed Rome, 
     although they did not know it. They imported slaves, although 
     they did not call them slaves: Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, 
     Filipinos. They live on rice and beans, the business men 
     said. They don't need much. They wouldn't know what to do 
     with good wages. Why, look how they live. Why, look what they 
     eat. And if they get funny--deport them.
       And all the time the farms grew larger and the owners 
     fewer. And there were pitifully few farmers on the land any 
     more. And the imported serfs were beaten and frightened and 
     starved until some went home again, and some grew fierce and 
     were killed or driven from the country. And the farms grew 
     larger and the owners fewer.
       And the crops changed. Fruit trees took the place of grain 
     fields, and vegetables to feed the world spread out on the 
     bottoms: lettuce, cauliflower, artichokes, potatoes--stoop 
     crops. A man may stand to use a scythe, a plow, a pitchfork; 
     but he must crawl like a bug between the rows of lettuce, he 
     must bend his back and pull his long bag between the cotton 
     rows, he must go on his knees like a penitent across a 
     cauliflower patch.
       And it came about that owners no longer worked on their 
     farms. They farmed on paper; and they forgot the land, the 
     smell, the feel of it, and remembered only that they owned 
     it, remembered only what they gained and lost by it. And some 
     of the farms grew so large that one man could not even 
     conceive of them any more, so large that it took batteries of 
     bookkeepers to keep track of interest and gain and loss; 
     chemists to test the soil, to replenish; straw bosses to see 
     that the stooping men were moving along the rows as swiftly 
     as the material of their bodies could stand. Then such a 
     farmer really became a storekeeper, and kept a store. He paid 
     the men, and sold them food, and took the money back. And 
     after a while he did not pay the men at all, and saved 
     bookkeeping. These farms gave food on credit. A man might 
     work and feed himself; and when the work was done, he might 
     find that he owned money to the company. And the owners not 
     only did not work the farms any more, many of them had never 
     seen the farms they owned.
       And then the dispossessed were drawn west--from Kansas, 
     Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas 
     families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Carloads, 
     caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty 
     thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. 
     They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless--
     restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do--to lift, to 
     push, to pull, to pick, to cut--anything, any burden to bear, 
     for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like 
     ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land.
       We ain't foreign. Seven generations back Americans, and
       We ain't foreign. Seven generations back Americans, and 
     beyond that Irish, Scotch, English, German. One of our folks 
     in the Revolution, an' they was lots of our folks in the 
     Civil War--both sides. Americans.
       They were hungry, and they were fierce. And they had hoped 
     to find a home, and they found only hatred. Okies--the owners 
     hated them because the owners knew they were soft and the 
     Okies strong, that they were fed and the Okies hungry; and 
     perhaps the owners had heard from their grandfathers how easy 
     it is to steal land from a soft man if you are fierce and 
     hungry and armed. The owners hated them. And in the towns, 
     the storekeepers hated them because they had no money to 
     spend. There is no shorter path to a storekeeper's contempt, 
     and all his admiration are exactly opposite. The town men, 
     little bankers, hated Okies because there was nothing to gain 
     from them. They had nothing. And the laboring people hated 
     Okies because a hungry man must work, and if he must work, if 
     he has to work, the wage payer automatically gives him less 
     for his work; and then no one can get more.
       And the dispossessed, the migrants, flowed into California, 
     two hundred and fifty thousand, and three hundred thousand. 
     Behind them new tractors were going on the land and the 
     tenants were being forced off. And new waves were on the way, 
     new waves of the dispossessed and the homeless, hardened, 
     intent, and dangerous.
       And while the Californians wanted many things, 
     accumulation, social success, amusement, luxury, and a 
     curious banking security, the new barbarians wanted only two 
     things--land and food; and to them the two were one. And 
     whereas the wants of the Californians were nebulous and 
     undefined, the wants of the Okies were beside the roads, 
     lying there to be seen and coveted: the good fields with 
     water to be dug for, the good green fields, earth to crumble 
     experimentally in the hand, grass to smell, oaten stalks to 
     chew until the sharp sweetness was in the throat. A man might 
     look at a fallow field and know, and see in his mind that his 
     own bending back and his own straining arms would bring the 
     cabbages into the light, and the golden eating corn, the 
     turnips and carrots.
       And a homeless hungry man, driving the roads with his wife 
     beside him and his then children in the back seat, could look 
     at the fallow fields which might produce food but not profit, 
     and that man could know how a fallow field is a sin and the 
     unused land a

[[Page E1925]]

     crime against the thin children. And such a man drove along 
     the roads and knew temptation at every field, and knew the 
     lust to take these fields and make them grow strength for his 
     children and a little comfort for his wife. The temptation 
     was before him always. The fields goaded him, and the company 
     ditches with good water flowing were a goad to him.
       And in the south he saw the golden oranges hanging on the 
     trees, the little golden oranges on the dark green trees; and 
     guards with shotguns patrolling the lines so a man might not 
     pick an orange for a thin child, oranges to be dumped if the 
     price was low.
       He drove his old car into a town. He scoured the farms for 
     work. Where can we sleep the night?
       Well, there's Hooverville on the edge of the river. There's 
     a whole raft of Okies there.
       He drove his old car to Hooverville. He never asked again, 
     for there was a Hooverville on the edge of every town.

     

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