Some books are overrated. The Grapes of Wrath is not. It is the most brutal of all great works, and it has the most poignant ending of any book I’ve ever read. At its heart, it is a book about the way that financial interests and big business on the coasts of this country affect the little guy. In this particular case, we’re talking about the Dust Bowl tenant farmers of Oklahoma and the migrant workers of California. It was Chapter Five (pdf) that taught me about the merciless logic of banking, and it also taught me about the importance of someone in government having a willingness to look out for the little guy. After having read that chapter, I never had to wonder again why so many people from Middle America look askance at me for growing up in the New York metro area. New York is where Wall Street is, and Wall Street?
Some of the [land] owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold.
And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshipped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling.
If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank—or the Company—needs—wants—insists—must have—as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them.
These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time. Some of the men were a little proud to be slaves to such cold and powerful masters. The owner men sat in the cars and explained. “You know the land is poor. You’ve scrabbled at it long enough, God knows.”
The squatting tenant men nodded and wondered and drew figures in the dust, and yes, they knew, God knows. If the dust only wouldn’t fly. If the top would only stay on the soil, it might not be so bad.
The owner men went on leading to their point: “You know the land’s getting poorer. You know what cotton does to the land; robs it, sucks all the blood out of it.”
The squatters nodded—they knew, God knew. If they could only rotate the crops they might pump blood back into the land.
Well, it’s too late. And the owner men explained the workings and the thinkings of the monster that was stronger than they were. “A man can hold land if he can just eat and pay taxes; he can do that.”
And the owner men explained the workings and the thinkings of the monster that was stronger than they were. “A man can hold land if he can just eat and pay taxes; he can do that.”
“Yes, he can do that until his crops fail one day and he has to borrow money from the bank.”“But—you see, a bank or a company can’t do that, because those creatures don’t breathe air, don’t cat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money. If they don’t get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat. It is a sad thing, but it is so. It is just so.”
And so the tenant farmers had to get off the land because their farming was no longer profitable. And there was no mercy from the faceless monster back in Manhattan that was driving the logic.
So, why is it that all but two of the Democrats who voted against the Wall Street reforms today come for the southern half of this country? How did the South become the best friend of Wall Street? What happened to the sons and daughters and grandchildren of the Dust Bowl Okies? Did their preachers tell them that what’s good for Wall Street is good for the country? Did their minds get poisoned by talk radio? Why on earth would Tom Joad vote for a politician who sticks up for the banks?
Men walkin’ ‘long the railroad tracks
Goin’ someplace there’s no goin’ back
Highway patrol choppers comin’ up over the ridge
Hot soup on a campfire under the bridge
Shelter line stretchin’ round the corner
Welcome to the new world order
Families sleepin’ in their cars in the southwest
No home no job no peace no restThe highway is alive tonight
But nobody’s kiddin’ nobody about where it goes
I’m sittin’ down here in the campfire light
Searchin’ for the ghost of Tom JoadHe pulls prayer book out of his sleeping bag
Preacher lights up a butt and takes a drag
Waitin’ for when the last shall be first and the first shall be last
In a cardboard box ‘neath the underpass
Got a one-way ticket to the promised land
You got a hole in your belly and gun in your hand
Sleeping on a pillow of solid rock
Bathin’ in the city aqueductThe highway is alive tonight
But where it’s headed everybody knows
I’m sittin’ down here in the campfire light
Waitin’ on the ghost of Tom JoadNow Tom said “Mom, wherever there’s a cop beatin’ a guy
Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries
Where there’s a fight ‘gainst the blood and hatred in the air
Look for me Mom I’ll be there
Wherever there’s somebody fightin’ for a place to stand
Or decent job or a helpin’ hand
Wherever somebody’s strugglin’ to be free
Look in their eyes Mom you’ll see me.”The highway is alive tonight
But nobody’s kiddin’ nobody about where it goes
I’m sittin’ downhere in the campfire light
With the ghost of old Tom JoadCopyright © Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP)
Somehow, Bruce says it even better than this.
That is an excellent question that a lot of Southern progressives still haven’t gotten to the bottom of. First of all, a lot of the descendants of the Dust Bowl Okies are in Southern California, and some, a few, have become well-off.
But for this corner of the southern half of the country, there have been a number of changes. Regional banks that evolved into huge national banks (Bank of America; Wachovia, now part of Wells Fargo, SunTrust, BB&T) now have a lot of employees unlike the small local banks of the 1930s. As people moved off the farms over the past 80 years, they moved into accounting, insurance, real estate, banking, stockbrokerages,real estate. Companies like Fidelity placed data centers in places other than Boston. A large proportion of people now have an employment stake in the financial services industry. I suspect that that is true of Florida, Texas and Georgia as well, less true of Mississippi and Alabama. To a great extent, the cotton plantation has changed into the information plantation. So that accounts for a lot folks.
Republican networking in churches in the South has been so aggressive that a lot of very religious people who are compassionate no longer go to any church. And the mainline churches are increasingly dominated by the country club Republican set. So that is a factor.
And in rural areas, 24/7 talk radio and its spinoff into an exclusive audience for FoxNews has a lot of working class folks and small business owners corralled into mindless support of “free markets”.
Finally, the politicians that campaign reasonably locally act unhinged on the national stage. And some depend on strong Republican votes in other races to ensure their re-election. And this put Democrats in similar districts under the gun to be me-too.
It is striking who did vote for the bill rather than who didn’t. Kissell, Shuler, for example. McIntyre was sort of alone with the Republicans this time.
Finally, it is not Tom Joad who is voting for these representatives. Tom Joad either doesn’t vote or still votes for more liberal Democrats if he can. It is those two or more notches economically above Tom Joad who vote for the Republicans. Even Oklahoma is not longer the abode of Okies in the sense of the independent and tenant farmers of the 1920s agricultural depression and the 1930s Dust Bowl.
The situation today is not limited to farmers. In 2001-2003, IT professionals had to leave the profession. Today, teachers, policemen, firemen are being kicked out of their jobs with little prospect of continuing in their profession. All sorts of manufacturing workers are long gone. And middle managers are feeling the hot breath of unemployment on their necks. Yet they still operate out of old political models.
Good post.
But I still don’t understand how the sons and daughters of tenant farmers came to be so economically conservative in such a short time.
There is a strange gaping hole in the South where populism used to lie.
It’s the same in the Plains states, but at least they have the credit card industry and Berkshire Hathaway to explain it.
I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like voting for Wall Street should play well anywhere outside of the tri-state area, and even here it seems like a risky proposition.
There is populism in the South, but it’s of the nativist variety and swings from party to party.
The current sons and daughters of tenant farmers are mostly African-American Democrats. And they have folks like G. K. Butterfield and James Clyburn in Congress. The I-95 corridor to Florida, which forms the images of the South for a lot of people runs through their districts.
It’s the grandsons and granddaughters of tenant farmers who should be the FDR Democrats. To a great extent, the sons and daughters of tenant farmers moved to towns and cities with the prosperity that came from the New Deal. They worked in newly relocated manufacturing plants or found niches in the rapidly emerging white-collar middle class. Those who didn’t remained in one of the extractive industries – agriculture, logging, mining. Some were smart enough and hardworking enough to create large prosperous farms, subsidized by federal agricultural programs.
So how did these folks and their children become economic conservatives? When they bought into patriotic conservatism after Goldwater, and during the Cold War Goldwater’s appeal was mainly patriotic conservatism – liberty as opposed to Communist oppression. When they bought into that, the South was shedding an institution of oppression – segregation. But opposition was framed as taking away liberty from the states; enough people bought that to re-elect the Dixiecrats who switched to the Republican Party. But even those who voted Republican weren’t economic conservatives. They still looked to state government to bring in new industrial plants and create jobs.
The patriotic conservative bent moved the South to Richard Nixon’s column and would have done so without the dogwhistle racism of the Southern Strategy. It moved ethnics and Catholics to Richard Nixon’s column as well. Even Republicans still looked to Washington for help with economic issues and while the ideologues in the Nixon administration were undermining the Great Society programs, in the South folks who later would vote against them were benefitting from them. And with the liberal opposition to Vietnam, the military folks in the South became more Republican out of the patriotic conservative frame.
The economic conservative line started being pushed in the local chambers of commerce in the early 1960s through personal networks’ distribution of tracts paid for by the Hunt family of Texas. James J. Kilpatrick, then a segregationist, retired from the Richmond News-Leader and started writing a column called the “Conservative View” that soon began incorporating some of William Buckley’s and David Lawrence’s conservative ideas, including anti-New Deal rhetoric. These were widely read in the middle class.
Beginning in the 1960s, middle class Republicans from outside the South were relocated to Southern towns and cities as managers, accountants, or technical staff in new or relocated manufacturing plants. They were generic Republicans and brought respectability to the Republican Party after a hundred years of one-party rule in the South. Because of their jobs and class, they also brought conservative business values.
But it was that old patriotic conservative Ronald Reagan (from GE Theater) who transferred conservative economic ideas and anti-government attitudes to the masses — in the South and outside the South. And they stuck harder in areas that were more patriotically conservative – because of their framing as against “socialism”. And in 1980, those area were the South, the Midwest, and the Intermountain West. And given the presence of so many military installations in the South (the legacy of Democratic pork from longterm Southern Democrats like Mendel Rivers of Charleston SC), that framing worked more here than elsewhere. And then Bill Clinton halfway legitimized it in his triangulation strategy after the 1994 “Gingrich Revolution”. At which point Southern Republican politicians sought to make a name for themselves by copying Jesse Helms and Newt Gingrich. And their competition drove the Republican Party in a more and more economically conservative direction until you reach the apotheosis of Grover Norquist.
As that occurred, the anti-tax crowd gained more influence among folks who were having their wages squeezed and felt powerless to change corporations. But through their representatives they could get financial relief by having their taxes lowered. But the Republicans never delivered to promised tax cuts to those people; their financial anxiety was too politically valuable.
Pardon for the long comment, but I was thinking as I wrote it (what verbally one calls “thinking out loud”) and am puzzled too at the economic turn in the South’s conservatism. Which seems to be strongest among those who are benefitting from the government, such as subsidized farmers, high-tech engineers at Huntsville, AL, IT workers at the EPA in RTP, and so on.
Nice link of the history, political culture, occupational and social networks and clusters. Both posts were a pleasure to read and very informative.
You raise a great question though…why are engineers and accountants and other professionals making their living off of direct and indirect federal contracts so rabidly conservative?
Are they that insecure in their economic and social position? Are they that racist or just plain uncomfortable with people who don’t look like them and share the same background?
I used to see it all the time when I consulted in the Dulles Corridor in Northern Virginia.
My Granddad could have been Tom Joad’s best drinking buddy. He was born in Montana in 1900, moved back to Oklahoma when he was a boy (Great-Grandpa was running sheep on the cattle range), punched cattle, got married, had kids, settled in Ponca City, and managed against all odds to find a job as an auto mechanic in 1935, so missed out on California by a fly’s whisker. He was an FDR Dem until 1968, then voted for Nixon, who played on his fears and dislikes, and never voted Dem again. Like a lot of folks. At the point when he flipped, Oklahoma was prosperous; now its not; the 2010 fears are the same as the 1968 fears but lots stronger. BTW, Okies don’t think much of Steinbeck’s book for the same reason Blacks have problems with folk like Alan Lomax. Meant well, didn’t get it.
Okies probably don’t like the book because it portrays Okies as pretty hardscrabble people, largely uneducated, and the dupes of smarter, more sophisticated folk.
On the other hand, maybe the rumor that Okies don’t like the book is fabricated.
Fox News before Fox News.
Boo,
Nah, it’s more a question of outside looking in. I feel more or less the same way about Rodgers & Hammerstein. On the other hand, Woody Guthrie says things like what Steinbeck is saying but says it from the inside out. Steinbeck doesn’t get the Okie speech right and speech is all poor folks really own.
Kern County, BTW, is out in California and I daresay that the class of folks that made up its Board of Supervisors hated Steinbeck. Folks out in California were getting killed for a whole lot less back then. The Republican business class out there had bounties on labor organizers in the 30’s.
Yes, if you know that ‘home’ was Salinas, then you know that the book was banned in California, not Oklahoma. I was referring to Steinbeck’s quote.
I’m stuck in Kern County and I’d have to say not much here has changed. This is one of the most conservative places in the state. Republican country all the way, the vote ratio is very bad-over 80% vote republican. One of the poorer areas in the state…yet people here continue to vote republican all the way….why?
Tom Joad would have voted for Eugene Debs, the socialist. The speech you and Springsteen quote is, in fact, reminiscient of Debs’ speech about “wherever there’s an underclass, I am of it.”
I don’t think Joad would think much of either the Dems OR the GOP.
No doubt, but why doesn’t Debs’s style of pissed off populism have any resonance at all in the South right now? When Wall Street tanks in historic terms and people lose half of everything they own, and foreclosures are through the roof, and people are living in cars in the Southwest, then why is the safe vote to stick with Chase Manhattan? I don’t get it. Tarheel Dem does a lot to explain some of the changes over the years, but why didn’t the collapse change things this year?
It’s complex but I think in this case it’s perhaps mostly the fact that democratic administrations are ipso facto illegitimate, plus the fact that politicians favor unpopular “special interests” all the time and then lie about it or pretend they didn’t or brazenly demagogue the issue. I can’t explain Boehner who apparently needs to leave the masters of the universe clam-shell once in a while.
Why doesn’t Debs’s style of pissed off populism have any resonance in central and western Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, northeastern Ohio, and other areas in which the labor movement was and is still strong?
Debs’s style has been tagged as “communist agitator”. It comes with a taboo (in the truest sense).
Anywhere in America you can be a pissed off populist, but not in that way. The South is no different in this except that Southern workers are more skeptical of the labor movement.
And there is yet another historical explanation about the South. The Democratic Party in the South in the one-party days had a business wing and a farmer-worker wing. Most of the progressive Democratic politicians in the South after World War II came out of the business wing; most of the diehard conservatives came out of the farmer-labor wing (with a few notable exceptions, such as pro-labor Olin D. Johnston and arguably Bill Clinton). The Blue Dog Democrats still come out of the business wing of the Democratic Party; indeed where Democrats control government in the South such as in North Carolina it is the business wing that is in power. And they defer to Democratic business owners, who support their campaigns. And are sensitive to doing anything that might be interpreted as anti-business.
Bill Clinton was pro-labor when he needed votes. As president he fucked labor.
I’ve never been able to make myself read The Grapes of Wrath. It’s just a little too close to home. My grandfather rode out the Depression and the Dust Bowl in rural, southwestern Oklahoma. He managed to hold onto his farm mostly because he was too damned stubborn to leave. Some of the family went to California. Some of them came back a generation later, some did not. In either case the stories have some very grim chapters.
I blame thirty years of carefully crafted, ruthlessly propagated right wing propaganda for the change in attitudes. When I was a kid I heard about how the New Deal and the Civilian Conservation Corps brought us back from disaster. When I was a teenager I heard how folks like my grandfather made it through by helping each other. Nowadays I hear they made it because they were tough and they didn’t give up, and all that New Deal stuff is what ruined our government and turned it into some kind of socialist entitlement machine.
As I was growing up, my Dad taught me that there were always two sides to every story. You listened to both sides and you made up your own mind. Education, literacy, math and science were the keys to making something of yourself.
Fifteen or twenty years ago he started listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio and gradually his attitudes began to change. As his health began to fail and he grew increasingly housebound, he started spending more and more time with the TV parked on Fox News, and the change accelerated. That was one of the hardest things to deal with in his last year or two. On top of the health crises and all the rest, he turned in to a wingnut right before my eyes.
The highway is alive tonight with the yelps of Joe Klein.
It’s not surprising that the children of the poor, or the poor themselves for that matter, have short memories of the past when they become richer. Edgar Lee Masters put it well in Spoon River Anthology: