The American Road Trip and American Political Thought by Susan McWilliams Barndt

Author:Susan McWilliams Barndt
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2012-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Tom responds by telling his mother that he met a man from California once, and that “he says they’s too many folks lookin’ for work right there now,” and that camp living is dirty and wages are low. “Oh, that ain’t so,” says his mother. “Your father got a han’bill on yella paper, tellin’ how they need folks to work. They wouldn’ go to that trouble if they wasn’t plenty work.”[37] Ma’s refusal to even consider the possible truth of what Tom is saying—a refusal that she and other members of the Joad family persist in making when others repeat Tom’s warning—illustrates exactly how strong the lure of the road is. Once the idea of going west has gotten into their heads, and they have convinced themselves that the benefits of going on the road will far outweigh the great trauma of leaving their home and possessions behind, the migrants refuse to admit the possibility that things might not be as great, in the end, as their greatest fantasies.[38]

As they go west, the Joads persist in adhering to their fantasies, even in the face of increasing information that California might not be the promised land, as promised—and that the road might not be the highway to heaven. They see dispirited families traveling back east, with horrifying tales of their lives in California. They get pushed off roadsides by the police. They confront hostile bureaucrats. They lose two members of their family—one disappears into the Arizona desert and the other dies just east of the California border—and they spend their last dollars paying for a burial. Yet the more they suffer and lose, the more they cling to the idea that they just need to go a little farther to make things right, and to achieve some kind of material abundance. “Jesus,” says Tom, “are we gonna start clean!” Then Tom “chuckles” and puts his foot on the gas.[39]

Most of the dramatic tension of The Grapes of Wrath comes from the slow-motion clashing of the Joad’s expectations with the realities of the American road.[40] But the road seems to win. Even when the Joads learn, eventually, that agribusiness interests had intentionally over-printed those seductive yellow handbills—the landowners, of course, had wanted to create a massive labor surplus so they could pay slave wages—the Joads keep on the road, albeit with a little more “bewilderment and lack of direction,” as Malcolm Cowley has described it.[41] They have, by this time, given so much up to be on the road that they see no alternative but to continue down it. Things just get worse and worse for the Joads, the longer they stay on the road. They find no relief in their economic deprivation. Their family falls apart. The novel culminates with a gargantuan flood that inundates the Joads’s most recent place of rest and the stillborn birth of Rose of Sharon’s baby. The Joads put the baby’s corpse in a box and send it out into the swirling flood waters; this generation’s

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