In the souls of the people...

I am not sure, but I wonder how rare it is to be able to identify a single book -- no, a single chapter -- as being formative in developing what one believes about the world.  I have heard libertarians talk about Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in that vein, and I have also heard some people talk about the works of Robert Heinlein like that, especially Stranger in a Strange Land, but outside these few, I think most people's influences are not so neatly identified.

For me, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was that book.  It is  not the best writing Steinbeck ever did (that honor goes to Of Mice and Men) -- it is too polemical, too pat in some ways. But I found it, correction, I still find it moving and influential.

For those not familiar with the book it can seem somewhat long and daunting.  (I notice a distressing trend in my kid's high schools to read relatively short books, such as To Kill a Mockingbird.  Not that To Kill a Mockingbird is not influential and important in its own right: my youngest is talking about it being a major influence on how he thinks.)  It tells two narratives: the tale of the Joads, a family misplaced from their Oklahoma roots, and the story of what happened to all of the migrant workers who came to California during the Depression.

It helps a little to understand the context with which I approached the book.  I was a teenage Roman Catholic at the time.  While in political terms these days Catholicism is know primarily for its opposition to abortion and gay rights, it had at that time a deep commitment to social justice, and to teaching care of others.  (I happen to think this very Christian of them, and wish some fundamentalist churches would do likewise.) By coincidence, shortly before reading The Grapes of Wrath, my church youth group had visited a migrant labor camp with gifts of clothing for the workers.  I had seen what their lives were like, and was appalled and angry.

It was in this frame of mind that I began reading the novel. The lives it described meshed with those I had seen of the workers in the migrant camp.  It resonated.

And then I hit the twenty-fifth chapter. It was a denunciation of the profit system, of the way economic disaster destroys everyone in its wake. Of how property is more important than people's lives. Steinbeck was, no doubt, a socialist, and it shows through every sentence in this chapter.

One would think that the farmers would be the villains in this scenario, but they are not.  They are caught up in the trap as much as the workers: the prices they are offered for the fruit is so low that they cannot afford to pick it:

The little farmers watched debt creep up on them like the tide. They sprayed the trees and sold no crop, they pruned and grafted and could not pick the crop. And the men of knowledge have worked, have considered, and the fruit is rotting on the ground, and the decaying mash in the wine vats is poisoning the air. And taste the wine—no grape flavor at all,  just sulfur and tannic acid and alcohol.

This little orchard will be a part of a great holding next year, for the debt will have
choked the owner.

And the result of this systemic failure is tragic:

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition---because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

I have lived a great deal since I first read this book.  Going to law school has taught me that there are many answers to the question of hunger and despair, not all of which I agree or believe will work or will result in any change.  It taught me that there are no right answers, and most of the time we are groping in the dark for solutions.

Law school taught me that we have a difficult time with the answers; The Grapes of Wrath showed me how important it is to ask the questions.