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75 years after Steinbeck's 'Grapes' the makers-takers fight goes on

As we approach the 75th anniversary of the publication of "The Grapes of Wrath," we are as concerned as ever with the subject of the increasing gap between the very rich and the other 99 percent of us. Due to our current Snapchat- and Twitter-sized attention spans, it seems unlikely that anybody under the age of 30 will read Steinbeck's 455-page call to arms against poverty and corporate greed, which is a shame.

Scholars of American culture have long disagreed on the issue of society's duty to the poor. In the early 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated individual freedom, telling readers to "do your thing," but he revealed his frustration at having to worry about those in poverty. In "Self-Reliance," he refutes the "foolish philanthropist," asking: "Are they my poor?"

In fact, the New Testament is pretty clear on this — yes, they are your poor, and they are always with you. The Bible consistently offers rewards for those who open their hands "wide" to those in need, and punishments for those who do not. Yet the tension in American letters and politics between the conflicting notions that a society must take care of its poor and that the poor should not be coddled remains as much an issue today as it was for the 19th-century transcendentalists.

We still embrace both the American dream of the individualist who wants to march to the beat of his own drummer (Thoreau, not Emerson) and the American dream of Walt Whitman who states that "the greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists . . . vast fortunes, with its sad, sad soil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land ... where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough."

"The Grapes of Wrath" ought to appeal to both sides of the political spectrum. A book that glorifies the hard-working individual as hero, that calls out to Americans to help each other in times of great need and to the American government not to allow its poor to starve, Steinbeck's novel remains as raw and unflinching as it was when it was published. Steinbeck gives us a stark vision of what happens if you don't feed your children (they die), what happens if corporations take the land from the people (families break apart), and what happens when working people stand together (they hope).

Seventy-five years after "The Grapes of Wrath" was published, praised, banned and burned for depicting Big Business as oppressive and violent, the fight goes on between those who believe that the American dream means that all citizens have access to the health care they need and those who believe that welfare creates, as Rep. Paul Ryan might say, "takers, not makers."

From the "The Grapes of Wrath" to "Margin Call," Walt Whitman to Occupy Wall Street, Americans are brought up as short by corporate greed as they are by extreme poverty. While we differ on policy, we don't (for the most part) differ in terms of our values. As a whole, we don't believe in allowing our children to go hungry, we are troubled by the homeless, and we are offended when corporations that have profited at the expense of its investors are bailed out for the sake of the economy.

Call me a dreamer, but I think we could all do with a dose of the passion against and reminder of the real poverty and corporate greed that Steinbeck depicts: piles of oranges rotting as the pickers' children go hungry; storekeepers driving up prices as hungry sharecroppers split their too-small helpings of food with their equally hungry neighbors; low wages that get halved and then halved again.

"The Grapes of Wrath" reminds us of a kind of American poverty that we can scarcely fathom today. However, as politicians insist that welfare creates a "poverty trap," and seem more interested in waging war on the war on poverty than on poverty itself, it's useful to recall what preceded welfare, food stamps, and minimum-wage standards before concluding that these programs have failed.

Jill Jones is a professor of English at Rollins College in Winter Park.

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