Henkel, "A Seditious Proposal" in The Grapes of Wrath: A Reconsideration

A Seditious Proposal

Scott Henkel State University of New York at Binghamton

The assertion of and resistance to authority pervades The Grapes of Wrath. This conflict in John Steinbeck’s novel is often subtle, as when Tom Joad persuades a truck driver to disregard the trucking company’s dictum in sticker form, “No Riders,” by saying that “sometimes a guile be a good guy even if some rich bastard makes him carry a sticker” (GOW 11). On the other hand, the conflict is also blunt at times, as when the “local people whipped themselves into a mold of cruelty [and then] formed units, squads, and armed them—armed them with clubs, with gas, with guns” (GOW 283). Over the course of the novel, the contentious mood often erupts violently, leading to a revolutionary situation. But, as Charles Cunningham correctly writes, “because we do not see the revolution—even though it is said to be inevitable—there is still doubt as to what it might be” (par. 48). The ambivalence of the novel’s political intervention contributes to its richness; however there is sufficient evidence to speculate about what Steinbeck calls “the upheaval.”

The “great owners,” Steinbeck writes, “must lose their land in an upheaval” even though they know “the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands, it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry they will take by force what they need” (GOW 238). What can readers know about the con-tent of this upheaval? While definitive answers are unlikely, there are contextual clues, historical references, and a trajectory of thinking that culminates in Tom’s famous soliloquy as the novel draws to a close. In this speech, Tom is grappling with the means of an impending upheaval and the ends it will serve. Though his soliloquy is tentative, this hesitance is due to the fact that these means and ends are complex, not because he lacks ideas about what needs to be done. Although no critic has suggested that the speech is radical or incendiary, I will

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argue that Tom’s soliloquy is a seditious proposal for a general strike, a revolutionary act waged to expropriate the corporate farms and to bring that land under the democratic control of its workers.

Sedition traditionally has been defined as speech that criticizes or seeks to undermine the state. Also, sedition is normally framed in a negative sense: radical criticism is rarely received warmly by its target, a fact that accounts for the outrage that Steinbeck’s novel has caused over the seventy years since its publication. But the traditional interpretation of sedition is too limited for a satisfactory critique of The Grapes of Wrath, so I use that term here to express a multimode resistance to authority, whether that resistance is to the authority of the state, or to authoritarian ideas about class, race, and gender. A reinterpretation of sedition is especially valuable when readers consider The Grapes of Wrath, where the borders between corporate and state authority, for example, are unstable.1 Charles Cunningham is persuasive when he points out that early scholarship on The Grapes of Wrath emphasized its class elements and excluded its racial dynamics, whereas recent scholarship has done the reverse (par. 3). By looking through the lens of sedition, new interpretations can show how the novel advocates resistance to various modes of authoritarian ideas. The novel suggests that an end to unjust systems of corporate agriculture, racial oppression, and gender inequality must begin with a series of challenges and that the content of those challenges must necessarily involve sedition. In the sense that I use the term, sedition is the criticism of authority that justifies a radical change.

This essay also argues that as The Grapes of Wrath depicts the migrants’ dilemma, their plight escalates toward what Jacques Derrida calls “the revolutionary situation”: the moment when a general strike continues past the point of being deemed illegal (“Force of Law” 268). Derrida builds his argument around a reading of Walter Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence,” in which Benjamin analyzes the general strike. These two authors help to establish a context for the novel, but unfortunately Benjamin and Derrida are silent on questions of sedition. A rereading of The Grapes of Wrath based on this criteria, therefore, provides an opportunity to extend Benjamin and Derrida’s analyses. Questions of sedition also shed new light on the political intervention that The Grapes of Wrath suggests, leading to the possibility to speculate about the content of Steinbeck’s predicted upheaval, especially as Tom grapples with it in his soliloquy.


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A Revolutionary Situation

Particular kinds of violence in The Grapes of Wrath place the novel in a revolutionary context. In “Critique of Violence,” Benjamin uses two rather general but useful categories: “[a]ll violence as a means,” Benjamin argues, “is either lawmaking or law-preserving” (287). When used as an end in itself, Benjamin suggests, violence “forfeits all validity” (287), which is to say that it loses any possible claim on being just. If violence is used as a means to some ends, on the other hand, readers can question whether those means and ends are justified. Such questions lead to Benjamin’s categories: when used as a means, violence is either lawmaking when it founds new laws and institutions or law-preserving when it enforces existing laws and institutions.2 For example, the moment in Chapter Sixteen when Ma Joad usurps Pa’s role at the head of the family is lawmaking because her coup founds a new institution, namely, a family reorganized along matriarchal lines. However, in Chapter Twenty, the threatened violence of the vigilantes is law-preserving because it enforces de jure and de facto laws which keep the migrants out of Tulare “‘till the cotton’s ready,” at which point the “goddamn Okies” are expected to return, to work, and then to leave promptly (GOW 279). The violence of the vigilantes when they murder Casy is also law-preserving—such violence enforces de facto laws about class hierarchies and de jure laws about property. Therefore, because it is filled with lawmaking and law-preserving violence, the context of the novel indicates an unstable social and political order, one characterized by the potential for both substantive change and severe repression. Because either of these options may result in violence, both contexts must be examined in order to understand the potential trajectory of Steinbeck’s predicted upheaval.

The very presence of lawmaking violence indicates revolutionary potential. Any resistance to authority is a challenge, of course, but lawmaking violence is a radical challenge, one intended to replace one authority with another or to bring about a change in the nature of authority itself. Derrida builds upon Benjamin’s term lawmaking violence to argue that “the operation that amounts to founding, inaugurating, justifying law, to making law, would consist of a coup de force, of a performative and therefore interpretative violence that in itself is neither just nor unjust and that no justice and no earlier and

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previously founding law, no preexisting foundation, could, by definition, guarantee or contradict or invalidate” (“Force of Law” 241).

Derrida is partially correct: “by definition,” new law—or a new system of laws—is not judged by what it has swept away. The ideas of this new law are not born after the coup de force, however. Because this is the case, we can judge it by the content of its sedition. In a broader sense, if we are to judge any change, whether reformist of revolutionary, we must point to some justification, some compelling reason why a particular system should be changed. If Steinbeck’s predicted upheaval were to be truly revolutionary, it would have to found new law in the sense that Derrida intends; if it is to be judged a just upheaval, it must be accompanied by an act of sedition, which could be used to determine whether the upheaval is justified. Without a claim to justice, such struggles are nothing more than exercises to determine which side can muster a greater degree of force.

In order to begin thinking about the upheaval, it is useful to point out that in The Grapes of Wrath, lawmaking violence often involves land expropriation. Expropriation and lawmaking violence may be coupled, but they are not synonyms: expropriation can simply be stealing, but when the commodity in question is land, expropriation brings an opportunity that is unique. Stealing food does not allow the thief to found new law—this only comes when the expropriated object is land. There is a history of lawmaking violence and land expro-priation among the Joad family and among the Oklahoma migrants as a whole. For example, Steinbeck notes that some of the migrants’ grandparents helped to expropriate North American land from the British when he has Ma Joad claim that “Grampa’s grampa, he fit in the Revolution” (GOW 307). In addition, some of the migrants’ grandparents and parents also expropriated Native American land (GOW 36). In these cases, land is expropriated, but this is more than stealing because this expropriation paves the way for founding new law. Furthermore, this newly founded law can be judged, and it can be challenged.

The most extended example of land expropriation comes at the start of Chapter Nineteen. In this intercalary chapter, Steinbeck writes that “[o]nce California belonged to Mexico and its land to Mexicans; and a horde of tattered feverish Americans poured in.”


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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. [‘ ‘ ‘ ] Then, with time, the squatters were no longer squatters, but owners. (GOW 231)

Thus, Steinbeck demonstrates that with sufficient force, an act of expropriation can become codified in law. But these settlers do not expropriate Mexican land for just reasons—they do it because they can, because they have a greater degree of force. This is the law of the jungle, a situation where the will of the strongest always prevails. Therefore, as Derrida cites from Pascal, “thus being unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just” (239). The use value of nationalist myths like Manifest Destiny comes into focus here: myths about exceptionalism and romantic adventuring seek to justify the naked expression of power. These myths often cover the will of the strongest with a veneer of justice.

But there is also a moment in The Grapes of Wrath when the will of the strongest also serves just ends. We do not see an upheaval that brings the system of corporate agriculture to its end. We see neither Paine nor Marx, neither Jefferson nor Lenin (153). There is no coup d’etat, but there is a coup de force in the sense that Derrida uses that term. In “From Patriarchy to Matriarchy: Ma Joad’s Role in The Grapes of Wrath,” Warren Motley observes that when Ma takes control of the family, a change in the family itself occurs. Motley characterizes this change as a “shift” (397), but this characterization misinterprets Ma’s act. A better description would be a coup de force, the violence that Derrida argues founds new law, in this case, a matriarchal law for the family. Unlike the violence that expropriated the Mexican land however, Ma’s coup is coupled with an act of sedition, a justification for her action.

When readers are introduced to Ma Joad, Steinbeck notes that she is at the “citadel of the family,” in a “strong place that could not be taken” (GOW 76). Ma is strong, but she is not yet the sovereign authority of the family—that role is Pa’s. Even before her coup, however, she makes important decisions for the family, as when she decides to include Casy in the family’s trip to California, in open

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defiance of Pa’s authority (GOW 104). Pa is concerned about space in the truck, about stretching their meager resources beyond what they can allow; she challenges him in the name of communal, inclusive values. Ma is also prepared to use force when she sees a reason to do so. Therefore Ma defends Rose of Sharon from the verbal attack of the Christian zealot Mrs. Sandry (GOW 320). When it would not make sense to use force, however, as when the vigilantes threaten the family on the road to Tulare, Ma refrains—she does not let Tom raise a jack handle to the vigilantes (GOW 279). In short, Ma is smart, strong, and prepared to lead her family.

Just before the Joads enter California, as they are traveling along Route 66 with Ivy and Sairy Wilson, the Wilsons’ car breaks down, and the group faces a crisis: they could all remain together, or they could follow Tom’s proposal for the rest of the group to go ahead, while he and Casy remain behind, fix the car, then join the rest later. Pa advocates the split—in the name of efficiency and a quicker route to wages. The plan seems to be a pragmatic one, and all are agreed that the group should split—except Ma. “I ain’t a-gonna go,” Ma says (169). Pa responds,

‘What you mean, you ain’t gonna go? You got to go. You got to look after the family.’ Pa was amazed at the revolt. Ma stepped to the touring car and reached in on the floor of the back seat. She brought out a jack handle and balanced it in her hand easily. ‘I ain’t a-gonna go,’ she said. [Pa responded,] ‘I tell you, you got to go. We made up our mind.’ And now Ma’s mouth set hard. She said softly, ‘On’y way you gonna get me to go is whup me.’ She moved the jack handle gently again. ‘An’ I’ll shame you, Pa. I won’t take no whuppin’, cryin’ an’ a-beggin’. I’ll light into you. An’ you ain’t so sure you can whup me anyways. An’ if ya do get me, I swear to God I’ll wait till you got your back turned, or you’re settin’ down, an’ I’ll knock you belly-up with a bucket.’ […] Pa looked helplessly at the group. […] The eyes of the whole family shifted back to Ma. She was the power. She had taken control. (GOW 169-170)

This radical change in power relations is more than a “shift.” The revolt at which Pa is amazed results in “control” over the family—therefore this act is best characterized as a coup. Ma’s coup de force is not bloody, nor is it a fight between enemies, but it is decisive. This is


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lawmaking violence: when Ma replaces Pa at the head of the family, the characteristics and contours of authority are remade. Ma’s coup results in a new law for the family: rather than a family based on a patriarchal ideology and norms, Ma’s control is matriarchal. Rather than a decision-making process like Pa’s, which privileges expe-diency, even if it means separation, Ma’s decision-making process favors solidarity, even if it means a delay in starting to work.

Looking at the specific sedition enables readers to judge whether Ma’s coup de force is justified. She has a rationale for her use of force—to keep her family together—and the novel strongly signals that Ma’s rationale is just. The novel repeatedly reinforces that community is favored over narrow self-interest, indeed that solidarity is the key to the Joad’s survival. Moreover, although Ma challenges Pa’s authority to keep the community intact, she also does so for practical reasons: two people alone are more vulnerable, and even the larger of the two split groups would be weaker without Tom and Casy. The will of the strongest therefore also serves just ends: Ma’s force is used to do what she sees as right.

Ma’s coup points to the value of reinterpreting sedition in multimodal ways. Ma usurps Pa’s authority by force much in the same way that a coup d’etat supplants the government of a state. But this is not a coup d’etat—this is a coup against a patriarchal ideology. Obviously, patriarchy as such is not defeated in Ma’s coup, just one patriarch. Furthermore, Ma’s coup is significant, but it needs to be defended: later in the novel, at the Weedpatch government camp especially, Ma cedes some decision-making power to Pa and the other men. Even in these situations, however, Ma retains the ultimate control, deciding, for example, when to leave Weedpatch in order to find work (GOW 351).

The way in which Ma challenges Pa foreshadows the sedition of Tom’s soliloquy and her coup foreshadows the economic and political upheaval to come. While Tom’s ideas are gathered from many people and experiences, Ma’s coup is the only successful revolutionary act in the present action of the novel, the only act that Tom witnesses that profoundly transforms a given situation or system. As such, it is perhaps the single event that contributes most to Tom’s thinking about the potential upheaval that is predicted for the California growers and for the migrant workers.

But the potential for this upheaval is mitigated by the degree to which the authorities in The Grapes of Wrath fight to maintain their

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positions of power. The extensive presence of law-preserving violence indicates that the various authorities in the novel fear a radical change and that they are prepared to defend against it. Although Pa knows that he is beaten by Ma and offers little resistance, other authorities in the novel are not as pliable. The state and corporate authorities are acutely aware that they preside over an unstable situation, and therefore, in order to maintain their control, they frequently express their authority violently. In fact, the Joads are refugees from various expressions of law-preserving violence, from the caterpillar tractors that enforce de jure laws about land ownership to the deputies and vigilantes who burn the Hoovervilles to enforce de facto racial and class segregation. The expression of law-preserving violence is very intense in The Grapes of Wrath, however. Many times this violence goes beyond the force necessary to preserve the law, and therefore it has a dubious claim on being just—primarily because it demonstrates a cruelty that could be characterized as the use of force as an end in itself, a situation that Benjamin argues is always unjust.

But even though the law-preserving violence in The Grapes of Wrath goes beyond just limits, it would be incorrect to argue that there is no logic behind it. The law-preserving violence that frequently appears in the novel arises out of an important historical context. Michael Denning, in The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, argues that the

roots of The Grapes of Wrath lie in the great 1933 strikes of Mexican, Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese farm workers, led by the Communist organizers of the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union [CAWIU]. These crop-wide strikes began with the spring pea harvest and continued throughout the summer, culminating in the cotton fields of the San Joaquin Valley; they were the largest strikes in the history of American agriculture and the great majority succeeded in winning wage increases. (GOW 260)

Although the CAWIU produced its share of failures, it did succeed in radicalizing a workforce and, as Denning points out, winning real improvements for the workers. But while these strikes won important reformist goals like getting higher wages, they also brought a palpable sentiment for more radical changes, a sentiment that was stoked by the


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proliferation of strikes and revolts in the decades previous to the time in which The Grapes of Wrath takes place.

Although its power was curtailed by the 1930s, the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies), also had been organizing vigorously in the California fields in the first two decades of the 20th century. The IWW openly advocated replacing capitalism with a system of workplace democracy, and they eventually became the first union to have a significant support base among the agricultural workers of the time. For example, IWW agitators played a significant role in the Wheatland Riots, which Carey McWilliams calls “one of the most significant episodes in the history of migratory labor in the West” (Factories 154). Using a tactic similar to the flyers that enticed the Joads to migrate, the owners of the Durst hop ranch near Wheatland advertised jobs throughout California and Nevada and attracted about 2,700 workers when only about 1,500 jobs were available (McWilliams, Factories 158).

When workers at Wheatland called a mass meeting to discuss their grievances, which included wretched living conditions and no access to food other than at the company store, they were met with a sheriff, a district attorney, and a posse of deputies. After the police attempted to arrest a strike leader and one of the deputies fired a shot into the air, a riot ensued in which the district attorney, a deputy, and two workers were killed, and many others were wounded (McWilliams, Factories 161). The posse fled, but they were replaced by four companies of National Guardsmen. “Feeling that they had a revolutionary situation to cope with,” McWilliams writes, “the authorities were panic-stricken and promptly launched a campaign of wild and irresponsible persecution” (Factories 161-162). In what McWilliams calls a “reign of terror,” IWW members “were arrested in every part of the state,” and, although there is no accurate number of arrests, McWilliams speculates that “the total number of arrests ran well into the hundreds” (Factories 162). Incidents like the one at Wheatland contributed significantly to IWW lore, and, as Melvyn Dubofsky writes, in “some fevered minds, IWW ‘subversion’ ranked with German imperialism and Russian bolshevism as an immediate danger to national security. Indeed, so feared were the Wobblies that probably no group of labor agitators before or since has as suddenly or disastrously experienced the full wrath of state and national authorities” (ix).3

In addition to the CAWIU strikes and the Wheatland Riot, David Montgomery writes that other large-scale labor actions of the era

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included “five city-wide general strikes between September 1917 and April 1918: in Springfield, Illinois; Kansas City, Missouri; Waco, Texas; and two in Billings, Montana” (98). In 1919 alone, an estimated 4,160,348 workers participated in some form of strike action (Montgomery 99) and “control strikes,” in which workers made some degree of control over the workplace a strike demand, “persisted at high levels, while the phrase ‘workers’ control,’ seldom heard before that time, became a popular catchword throughout the labor movement” (Montgomery 99). Similar general strikes in Seattle in 1919 and in San Francisco in 1934 further cemented the idea that labor could muster a significant degree of force and inspire ideas for radical change. There can be no doubt that the general strikes of the first three decades of the 20th century in the United States were part of Steinbeck’s lexicon, and it would be surprising if Tom Joad did not know about them as well.

As such large-scale strikes suggest, the idea of significant changes in the control of the workplace were not limited to labor radicals. As Jeremy Brecher points out, even the “moderate” Harry Ault, the editor of the Seattle Union Record, said “I believe that 95 percent of us agree that the workers should control the industries. Nearly all of us agree on that but very strenuously disagree on the method. Some of us think we can get control through the Cooperative movement, some of us think through political action, and others think through industrial action” (120). There is evidence that Steinbeck also favored the idea of increased workers’ control over the means of production. In a letter to John Barry, collected as part of Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, 1938-1941, Steinbeck writes,

every effort I can bring to bear is and has been at the call of the common working people to the end that they may eat what they raise, wear what they weave, use what they produce, and in every way and in completeness share in the works of their hands and their heads. And the reverse is also true. I am actively opposed to any man or group who, through financial or political control of means of production and distribution, is able to control and dominate the lives of workers. (DeMott 152)

On the question of labor strikes in general, Steinbeck expressed his partisanship in another letter to Barry, stating, “I am not in favor of


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ending those strikes that have done so much harm until the abuses, on the part of the employer groups which have caused the strikes, are removed” (DeMott 151). There were important schisms between the industrial workers and the agricultural workers of the time, but Montgomery’s point is well taken: the idea of worker control spread in the early decades of the 20th century, and it was helped along by books like The Grapes of Wrath. Because this is the case, one can see why the state authorities and the corporate farmers in the novel would feel threatened; this context contributed to an atmosphere where they had some reason to doubt whether their way of life had much of a future.

But just because such ideas circulated, it does not mean that they were about to be realized. When faced with the possibility of radical change, the authorities responded with vigorous law-preserving violence. Facing a workforce that so openly defied the authority of the owners and bosses, the “local people whipped themselves into a mold of cruelty [and then] formed units, squads, and armed them—armed them with clubs, with gas, with guns” (GOW 283). These forces were mustered in the name of protecting a way of life, certainly, but not one that they owned, exactly. The “men who were armed did not own the land, but they thought they did. And the clerks who drilled at night owned nothing, and the little storekeepers possessed only a drawerful of debts” (GOW 283). Nevertheless, with what they think is their future at stake, the vigilantes, as well as the police and the hired corporate security guards, fight viciously.

Steinbeck provides both small and large-scale examples of law-preserving violence. In Chapter Nineteen, for example, readers see the slow, quiet taking of land—what Steinbeck calls “secret gardening” (GOW 235)—repressed by law-preserving violence. When a migrant had quietly planted some carrots and turnips on an owned but unused plot of land, he is punished: “one day a deputy sheriff asks him,”

Well, what you think you’re doin’? I ain’t doin’ no harm. I had my eye on you. This ain’t your land. You’re trespassing. The land ain’t plowed, an’ I ain’t hurtin’ it none.

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You goddamned squatters. Pretty soon you’d think you owned it. [‘ ‘ ‘ ] We got to keep these here people down or they’ll take the country. (GOW 235)

This is an attempt at land expropriation in microcosm—a slow, silent upheaval. This solitary migrant sees an opportunity to feed himself, so he takes what he needs. There is more than a little logic and justification to his action. He sees land that no one is using; therefore, in his need, he attempts to make a living for himself, to take control over his own means of survival. This is against property laws, certainly, but there is a justice that would be served by allowing him to tend his small plot of land.

The deputy, however, sees property laws being violated, and he correctly sees the larger picture. Such small-scale gardening is an avenue to larger acts of expropriation. If this deputy is to do his job, if he is to preserve the law, he must destroy this secret garden. To preserve the laws of property and agricultural profit, every little expropriated plot of land must be destroyed because the proliferation of small expropriated plots would present a great threat to the owners of that land, to the law that codifies those property rights, and to capitalism itself. In this sense, the small act of a deputy kicking over this small plot of land has a great significance. It is a kick that deters a radical thought: that those who work the land own it. The deputy is right: if small plots of land like this one were to go unprotected, these workers would take the country.4

Law-preserving violence is most dramatically displayed in the strike in which Casy is killed. Casy finds work at the Hooper Ranch after his separation from the Joads, and he finds that the Hooper Ranch is a corporate dystopia: it is militarized, ruthless, and exploitative. Men with guns patrol outside the workers’ tiny shanties, workers are bilked out of wages, and the company store sells its products well above the prices at the town grocery, which is miles away. Without knowing, the Joads enter the Hooper Ranch while Casy is leading a strike outside the ranch’s gate. Before Casy is reintroduced in the novel, one of the guards reports that the “State police got [the front gate to the ranch] in hand. They’re runnin’ the hell outa them smart guys” (GOW 377). Referring to Casy by his build, the guard says that “I heard they’s a long lean son-of-a-bitch


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spark-pluggin’ the [strike]. Fella says they’ll get him tonight, an’ then she’ll go to pieces” (GOW 377-378).

This is, of course, exactly what happens. When Tom finds Casy, he is in a tent with the other strike leaders. They hear a noise outside and flee, but the guards run them down.

‘That’s him. That shiny bastard. That’s him.’ A short heavy man stepped into the light. He carried a new white pick handle. [. . . ] The heavy man swung with the pick handle. Casy dodged down into the swing. The heavy club crashed into the side of his head with a dull crunch of bone, and Casy fell sideways out of the light. ‘Jesus, George, I think you killed him.’ ‘Put the light on him,’ said George. ‘Serve the son-of-a-bitch right.’ The flash-light beam dropped, searched, and found Casy’s crushed head. (GOW 386)

The next morning, workers at the Hooper Ranch wake up to find that the strike is indeed broken. Such violence has preserved the only law that the Hooper Ranch knows, and it signals that any resistance to the will of the corporate farmers will be met with brute force. The workers also wake to find that Casy’s prediction (GOW 383) has come true: once the strike is broken, the wages are cut in half, from five cents per box of peaches picked and carried to two and a half cents (GOW 394).

The Hooper Ranch, with its corporate structure, can tolerate no revolt, can tolerate no challenge to the owners’ authority. Killing a strike leader is a strategy: if the “spark plug” of the strike can be taken out, the theory is that a strike will fail. This does not have to be the case, but the strategy works well at the Hooper Ranch. Under threat to their profits, the owners of the Hooper Ranch respond violently. But the significance of the strike also goes beyond seeking a more just distribution of profits. The question is control—in other words, not just determining the amount of wages, but also determining who gets to set the wage rate.

The owners of the Hooper Ranch want exclusive control over all decisions at the ranch; they want to retain the right to define the law on their land. A strike that forces the wage rate up would both cut into the ranch’s profit and, importantly, would cede a measure of control over the ranch to the workers. Such a result would fracture, to some degree, the hierarchical order of the corporate farm. Perhaps more importantly, a small but successful strike would point a trajectory

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toward greater worker demands, a greater amount of sedition, a greater degree of control over the Hooper Ranch—perhaps to the point where we might call these acts an upheaval. But the will of the growers—the law of the Hooper Ranch—is preserved by killing Casy. Tom, quite rightly, wonders whether such a law is worth preserving.


Such lawmaking and law-preserving violence is, as this essay argues, indicative of an unstable order, one characterized by the potential for both significant change and severe repression. These events weigh heavily on Tom, and they contribute to his thinking about Steinbeck’s predicted upheaval. As a result of being driven from Oklahoma to California, from the Hooverville to the federal Weedpatch camp and to the corporate Hooper Ranch, and ultimately to the dark cave in which he delivers his soliloquy, Tom has seen enough to decide that a broad resistance to authority is necessary. But where is this trajectory leading Tom, and what does it tell us about the content of the upheaval?

Ma’s coup de force and Casy’s strike shape Tom’s thinking about the means of the upheaval, and his experiences in the Weedpatch camp and the Hooper Ranch shape his thinking about its ends. The Hooper Ranch is clearly an example of what not to do, and as such, is valuable to Tom. Conversely, as Cunningham suggests, Tom is “[i]nspired by the [Weedpatch] federal camp, with its self-govern-ment, democracy, and non-authoritarian discipline” (par. 43). At Weedpatch, the “people make their own laws” (GOW 296), auto-nomously governing themselves. There are no state police at Weedpatch, no overseers with guns, no owners to drive down wages—but there is no work, either. The camp is run democratically, with elected committees, and without any input from the corporate farmers. But even though it is far more egalitarian than the corporate farms, the camp committees are divided along gender lines, proscribed in the performance of traditionally gendered labor, and readers have no reason to suspect something other than an exclusively white community in the camp.5 While the democracy in Weedpatch is not satisfactory, it is an important first step toward a system governed by what C. L. R. James calls “the power of human association for


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common purpose” (60). In the Weedpatch camp, nascent democratic decision-making processes replace the authority that comes from police guns and vigilantes’ clubs. Yet the relative peace, democracy, and proper bathrooms at Weedpatch are trumped by the fact that the Joads cannot find work nearby and therefore cannot live a sustained existence. Ma’s indisputable logic—“we can’t eat no toilets” (351)—forces the Joads to leave to look for work.

The Joads’ experiences in the federal Weedpatch camp and in the corporate Hooper Ranch, then, are foils that shape the ends of the upheaval, and these experiences prompt Tom to make his seditious proposal. In the opening of his soliloquy, Tom tells Ma,

‘I been thinkin’ how it was in that gov’ment camp, how our folks took care a theirselves, an’ if they was a fight they fixed it theirself; an’ they wasn’t no cops wagglin’ their guns, but they was better order than them cops ever give. I been a-wonderin’ why we can’t do that all over. Throw out the cops that ain’t our own people. All work together for our own thing—all farm our own lan’. (GOW 418)

The radicalism of Tom’s proposal is subtle, but palpable. These lines contain Tom’s sedition, his rationale for why the tyranny of the corporate farms ought to be replaced with a more just system. There are several clues here about the content of the upheaval, and readers can use this sedition to question whether that upheaval is just. To “throw out the cops” and to replace them with “our own people” would require a significant coup de force—the cops would not be thrown out easily. As Derrida points out, this would be a coup de force that would pave the way for founding new law, for founding institutions where order is protected by “our own people.” Furthermore, to “[a]ll work together for our own thing” would be a radical shift from a corporate dystopia. To “do that all over” is a seditious proposal. (GOW 418)

While he has respect for the New Deal programs that made places like the Weedpatch camp possible, Tom puts his finger on an idea that goes beyond the state. Tom is not just thinking about the proliferation of Weedpatch-like farms: he is thinking about expropriation “all over,” and he sees the government camps as merely a limited model for the ends he seeks (GOW 418). What Weedpatch symbolizes—a direct democracy in the making, a test ground for a cooperative

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community—is far more important to Tom’s vision than government intervention. The authority of the federal government, while slight at Weedpatch (limited in its presence to Jim Rawley, the camp manager), would come crashing down on Tom and his fellow workers if they were to expropriate that land. If provoked, one can imagine that the federal government’s benevolence might come to be seen as noblesse oblige, with its paternal dark side and potential for repression. So, more precisely, Tom is inspired by the nascent democracy of the Weedpatch camp, not by the fact that it is government-run.

Instead, it seems more likely that Tom is speculating about a broad resistance to the authority of the corporate farmers and the authority of the state, to the capitalism that exploits them and to the domination that keeps them on the wrong side of the law. In fact, Tom imagines resistance on a large scale: “I been wonderin’,” he tells Ma, what might happen “if all our folks got together an’ yelled, like them fellas yelled, only a few of ‘em at the Hooper ranch” (GOW 419). Tom sees the limitations of small-scale resistance—the weakness of the strike at the Hooper Ranch is that there were “only a few” strikers. In order to realize the proposal that Tom is mulling over, “all our folks” would need to participate. Tom observed what happens when a strike without sufficient force is crushed: at the Hooper Ranch, for example, wages were cut and workers were in a worse situation than before the strike. Tom is suggesting that in order to be successful, a strike needs a great degree of force. Furthermore, Tom does not just want better wages and working conditions though he would no doubt welcome those improvements. He is hoping that “all our folks” would get to “farm their own land.” Tom wants complete control of the land, not just concessions from an employer.

We can imagine how the corporate farmers, their vigilantes, and the state authorities might respond to the question of “why we can’t do that all over.” The land is owned, and corporate farms do not give up land freely. “Doing that all over” would require widespread acts of expropriation because there “were no homesteads to be claimed, no free lands awaiting settlement. The price of good farmland [. . . ] was utterly beyond the reach of the average migrant family” (McWilliams, “California Pastoral” 483). In order to achieve the ends that Tom seeks, land would need to be expropriated from its current owners, the corporate farmers who terrorize Tom and his fellow workers. This is what Steinbeck calls “the great fact”: “when property accumulates in


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too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need” (GOW 238). There is little evidence to suggest that Tom would like to form militias like the growers do, which would be one means of taking the land by force. Rather, as his critique of the limited strike at the Hooper Ranch suggests, Tom is contemplating the idea of a general strike, a revolutionary coup de force waged to expropriate the corporate farms and to bring that land under the democratic control of its workers.

Even though we do not see the “upheaval” in the present action of the novel, such significant foreshadowing, Ma’s coup, Casy’s strike, and Tom’s seditious proposal suggest that the revolutionary general strike is the means and democratic control over the land is the end that Tom has in mind. Tom is therefore considering what Derrida calls the “revolutionary situation”: the moment when a general strike continues beyond the point of being deemed illegal by the state. The general strike, Derrida argues, “exercises. . . the right to contest the order of existing law and to create a revolutionary situation in which the task will be to found a new law, if not [. . .] a new state” (“Force of Law” 269). This is a situation that mirrors, on a much larger scale, Ma’s seditious act against Pa. But depending upon who can leverage the greater degree of force, either a general strike would be put down by the law-preserving violence of the police and the vigilantes, or the wrath of the migrants and the force of greater numbers would make the strike a success. In the latter case, the strike’s lawmaking violence would provide the conditions for the production of more just institutions, ones in which the cops might be thrown out and everyone might get to farm their own land. Both outcomes are within the narrative logic of The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck suggests that there will come a time when “all the gas, all the rifles in the world won’t stop” hungry people from taking control of the land; he also writes that the owners are “soft” and the migrants are “hard,” but these judgments are mitigated by the fact that the forces behind the owners—the police, the hired guns, the vigilantes—are not so soft (GOW 238, 233).

But Tom’s seditious proposal is just that—a proposal. He has ideas about the means and ends of the upheaval, but he has no detailed blueprint to follow. Tom is only starting to work out the rationale for these changes. He is only beginning to speak seditiously. With no real organizing experience yet, he may not even be aware of the gravity of

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his proposal. But he does know that radical changes are necessary, and he is working out the seditious rationale for those changes in his soliloquy. Perhaps one reason that Tom “ain’t thought it out clear” (GOW 419) is because he is bumping up against the fact that the ends he wants must be accomplished with forceful means. Even the founding of more just political and economic systems, Derrida reminds us, implies acts of violence to the current systems. Derrida argues that “democracy would be precisely this, a force (kratos), [. . . ] having the power to decide, to be decisive, to prevail, to have reason over or win out over [. . . ] and to give the force of law [‘ ‘ ‘ ] and thus the power [. . . ] of the people” (Rogues 13). Even a bloodless expropriation of land from the corporate farms would still be a form of violence against those corporate farmers.

But mounting no resistance is simply not an option for Tom—he has faced too much tyranny to acquiesce. Like Derrida, Tom is considering the difference between the force that would be seen as just and an unjust violence. That Tom is not in a position of authority has no bearing on whether such violence is legitimate—officially sanctioned violence can be as unjust as any other form of violence. Furthermore, for Tom, the ends do not justify the means—he never uses force except when threatened. In his mind, therefore, a revolutionary general strike is both defensive and productive: he wants to end the domination that he and his fellow workers face and to found a more just, more democratic system.

Yet in evaluating such violence, it is necessary to stress the questions of justice that Benjamin and Derrida raise, namely how to distinguish between those acts of violence that a reader would always judge to be unjust and those that a reader would judge to be justified. One hopes that a justified act of violence, such as a general strike waged to end a system of corporate agriculture, might replace that tyranny with a more just system of land management. But it would be simplistic to think that a single upheaval would solve the problems that Tom and his fellow workers face: there is always struggle for justice. It would also be simplistic to suggest that a revolutionary general strike would be an unambiguous act. As Derrida writes, moments of revolutionary potential “are terrifying moments because of the sufferings, the crimes, the tortures that rarely fail to accompany them” (“Force of Law” 269). Tom may not articulate these com-plexities directly, but it is not beyond the pale to suggest that they are


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precisely the problems that stop him from thinking it out clear (GOW 419). Tom wants to begin to work toward a better world, where the cops are thrown out, yet where there is more peace, creating a world where people have a greater degree of control over their destinies. But although he seeks a less violent world, Tom is not so wide-eyed to believe that force is never necessary.

Therefore, Tom has made the decision at the end of the novel to dedicate his life to his vision of a more just society even though the byproducts of his means are potentially problematic and the ends he seeks are not quite concrete. But the problem of inexact ends is a symptom of Tom’s commitment to democratic control. As opposed to authoritarian rule, in which future plans are dictated by a particular authority and are therefore more predictable, democratic control over the land would introduce a great degree of difficulty to foresee how that land would be used. Therefore, Tom’s seditious proposal is couched in the language of possibility not certainty, just like Timothy Wallace’s words were while he and Tom worked together on Tom’s first full day at Weedpatch: “maybe if we can gove’n ourselves, maybe we’ll do other things” (297). These words ring in Tom’s head, and they echo the words of the committee directing the Seattle general strike of 1919:

Labor will not only SHUT DOWN the industries, but Labor will REOPEN, under the management of the appropriate trades, such activities as are needed to preserve public health and public peace. If the strike continues, Labor may feel led to avoid public suffering by reopening more and more activities. UNDER ITS OWN MANAGEMENT. And that is why we are starting on a road that leads—NO ONE KNOWS WHERE! (Montgomery 99, emphasis in original)

Like these union organizers, Tom intuits that it is impossible to predict the precise result of his acts. In other words, even though he cannot predict with much certainty what the exact parameters of a more democratic society might mean or be, he finds it necessary to imagine and work toward those inexact ends. One wonders about the degree to which Tom would be successful in agitating for the complex task of organizing general strikes and whether lawmaking violence or law-preserving violence will prove to be the greater force in Tom’s world. Regardless of his success, Tom’s seditious proposal for a

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revolutionary general strike may chart the contours of a deeper, more meaningful conception of democracy, one in which autonomy and collective organization are able to leverage their power to check the authoritarian violence that is so prevalent in The Grapes of Wrath.


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Notes 1 As Marci Lingo points out in a recent essay about the censorship of the novel, corporate interests are expressed in law, and state interests are protected by corporate violence: the “political structure” of Kern County, Lingo points out, “supported the corporate agricultural interests that predominated in the valley” by passing, for example, “‘emergency’ ordinances allowing the Associated Farmers to muster vigilante groups in the event of an emergency—a strike, for example” (356, 357). The “Association” is mentioned prominently in The Grapes of Wrath (238-239, 294-295)—as its name implies, it is a trade alliance at the pinnacle of corporate authority: it sets wage restrictions for all the farms, and police and vigilantes enforce its will. When workers strike, such an “emergency” clearly harms the Association’s interests. When its legal and quasi-legal muscle is used to repress strikes, it protects the interests of the state as well. For more information about the censorship of The Grapes of Wrath, see Rick Wartzman, Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. 2 Benjamin’s terms are consistent for both de jure and de facto laws. In this essay, I refer to both the laws of the state, enforced by police, and to customs and traditions like the myths of racial superiority which privilege “native” Californians to migrants, “laws” that may not be codified by legislatures but which are nonetheless enforced by ideology and, at times, by force. Additionally, Benjamin adopts two terms from Georges Sorel: the political general strike, which seeks to supplant one government for another, and the proletarian general strike, which seeks to abolish the state (291). I am skeptical of Sorel’s categories of strikes because they are not multimodal: they do not consider forms of authority other than the state. Although it is a flawed argument, Sorel’s Reflections on Violence informs both Benjamin’s and Derrida’s thinking. 3 Steinbeck puts praise for the IWW into the mouth of an old picker in one of his other novels about California farm workers, In Dubious Battle. In a novel that does not exactly praise labor organizers, the old picker says, “‘Course, the Wobblies done some good” (72). 4 The examples in the novel indicate that expropriation can either be just or unjust. It is difficult to find justice in the stealing of Mexican land. On the other hand, Ma Joad knows Purty Boy Floyd and his mother, and she insists that Purty Boy “wan’t a bad boy. Jus’ got drove in a corner” (367). In Robin Hood fashion, Purty Boy Floyd would expropriate from the rich and redistribute to the poor. As Woody Guthrie sings, “It was in Oklahoma City / it was on a Christmas Day. / There come a whole carload of groceries / with a letter that did say. / ‘Well you say that I’m an outlaw / you say that I’m a thief. / Here’s a Christmas dinner / for the families on relief’” (Guthrie 187). 5 Cunningham correctly criticizes The Grapes of Wrath for all but ignoring the fact that in “the 1920s, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were the majority [in the southern California fields], with a significant Filipino minority” (par. 14). While Grapes does not mention Mexican workers except to say that their lands were expropriated by white settlers, it is important to point out that Tom would be working alongside many Mexicans and that one very important event that motivated their migration was the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917, in which the revolutionaries explicitly fought not only to end an authoritarian regime but also to expropriate lands for communal use. For more information about the agrarian elements of the Mexican

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Revolution, see Ricardo Flores Magón, Dreams of Freedom, Adolfo Gilly, The Mexican Revolution: A People’s History, and John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution.

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. “Critique of Violence” in Reflections. New York:

Schocken, 1978. Brecher, Jeremy. Strike! Boston: South End P, 1997. Cunningham, Charles. “Rethinking the Politics of The Grapes of

Wrath.” Cultural Logic (5.1) 2002. <http://clogic. eserver.org /2002/cunningham.html>. 20 October 2002.

DeMott, Robert, ed. Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, 1938-1941. New York: Viking, 1989.

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1996.

Derrida, Jacques. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority.’” Acts of Religion. New York: Routledge, 2001.

———. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.

Dubofsky, Melvyn. We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1969.

Flores Magón, Ricardo. Dreams of Freedom: A Ricardo Flores Magón Reader. Eds. Chaz Bufe and Mitchell Cowen Verter. Oakland: AK Press, 2005.

Gilly, Adolfo. The Mexican Revolution: A People’s History. New York: New P, 2006.

Guthrie, Woody. The Woody Guthrie Songbook. Eds. Harold Leventhal and Marjorie Guthrie. New York: Gosset and Dunlap, 1976.

James, C. L. R. Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. Lebanon, NH: UP of New England, 2001.

Lingo, Marci. “Forbidden Fruit: The Banning of The Grapes of Wrath in the Kern County Free Library.” Libraries and Culture. 38 (2003): 351-377.

Lisca, Peter and Kevin Hearle, eds. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Viking Critical Edition, 2nd edition. New York: Viking, 1997.


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McWilliams, Carey. “California Pastoral.” in The Grapes of Wrath. ed. Peter Lisca and Kevin Hearle. New York: Penguin, 1997. (469-489.)

———. Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California. Berkeley: U California P, 1999.

Montgomery, David. Workers’ Control in America. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.

Motley, Warren. “From Patriarchy to Matriarchy: Ma Joad’s Role in The Grapes of Wrath.” American Literature 54 (1982) 397-412.

Sorel, Georges. Reflections on Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1999.

Steinbeck, John. In Dubious Battle. New York: Penguin, 1992. Wartzman, Rick. Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning

Of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Philadelphia: Public Affairs, 2008.

Womack, John. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1970.

Henkel, "A Seditious Proposal" in The Grapes of Wrath: A Reconsideration

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