Why the Joads (and 300,000 others) are homeless

The Grapes of Wrath deals with a family of farmers who had once been able to make a living farming the plains of Oklahoma. The Joads remember a time when the family patriarch, grandfather Joad, had owned the land. Three generations of Joad’s had made a living off of this same land. Through the Joad’s own language, and the editorial/poetic language of the short interchapters, we get a variety of reasons why this living is no longer viable. We hear, for instance, in the first part of the novel, about the “cats” which have replaced farm laborers: these are caterpillar tractors with huge arrays of ploughs which can plough thousands of acres in only a few days. These same acres used to take dozens of men, women, and children months of hard labor using smaller tractors or even horse-drawn ploughs, planters, and harvesters, providing incomes sufficient to support farming families. The Joad’s and Steinbeck’s narrator also refers to the bank’s role in pushing people off of their farms without clearly identifying the process involved.

* * *

There is a bigger picture: a long-term, slow, grinding away at property ownership of small farmers across the country which helped to produce this enormous dislocation of 300,000+ farmers and their families. Part of the problem had its origins in the economy of small farms, which almost always exist on debt: farmers need large amounts of capital to buy seed and pay for planting. This debt is a constant of farm life, and is usually paid back at harvest time, allowing small scale farmers to continue planting and harvesting year after year. Most of the debt was owed to local banks, in tune with the needs of the farming communities, and tolerant of the cyclical needs of their clients.

* * *

As long as a reasonable scale was maintained and nature cooperated, farmers got by using low-tech equipment, such as horse- or ox-drawn ploughs and the help of extended families at crucial times during the year such as planting and harvest time. But a series of bad years, bad economic turns, bad weather, drought, or biological blight could easily push a farm family into such great debt that the local bank could not afford to carry it, and the loans were called in by the banks, often reluctantly, and the property owned by the farmers fell into the hands of the bankers, who would then sell the property in order to recoup some part of the loss the bank had suffered.

Sudden downturns in the economy were one common factor which could, and often did, lead to the ruin of farms. When a farmer decides to take out a loan to produce a crop, whether the crop is wheat, corn, meat or dairy products, both the farmer and the bank are assuming there will be a market for those products once they are harvested. But in an economic downturn, such as the string of depressions and recessions that hit the US in the 1870s, the 1880s and the 1890s, the pools of buyers for farm goods often would dry up, and the farmers would end up with no one to sell their goods to, leaving them unable to pay off their debt to the banks, debts they had taken on on the assumption that the market would not suddenly disappear. The normal cycle of boom and bust which had plagued the nation from the time of the Civil War up to the beginning of the First World War often claimed farms and deprived their former owners of their property and livelihood. But banks were usually locally run, small-scale institutions, in touch with the farm cycle; and so the damage was limited, and usually only badly run farms, or particularly unlucky farmers, were forced into foreclosure and lost their land. This long-term, slow, grinding out of farmers often led to larger farms, a consolidation of farm property into the hands of fewer and fewer farmers, as the surviving farmers would buy up the property of the failed farms in order to increase their holdings and in the hopes of lowering their own personal risk by applying an economy of scale to increase their profits.

* * *

Two huge changes, however, took place between 1914 and 1930: the disastrous effect of World War One on farm life in the US, and the change in the attitudes and practices of banks. Taking these two changes in order, World War One started out looking very promising for farm profits. New markets opened up in Europe as the farm economy there dried up due to the fighting, but also the US government began encouraging farmers to produce more crops than ever before because they needed to feed the military to support the war effort. Farmers were encouraged to take out loans to buy new high-tech farming equipment and to increase the sizes of their farms and the productivity of individual acres. Expecting this huge demand to continue, farmers extended themselves, borrowing enormous amounts of money to buy the new equipment and to increase the acreage under cultivation. But when the war ended, the government contracts disappeared, European farms started up again, and the bottom fell out of the farming industry, leaving huge numbers of US farmers with crops they could no longer sell and in more debt than they could possibly support. We are used to thinking of the Great Depression as a phenomenon that started in the 1930s, but for the farming community, the depression started in 1919 when the war-time demand for farm goods suddenly dried up leaving individual farmers with enormous debts they had no way of paying off. The economic boom of the “Roaring 20s” did not extend to the farming community, and the farming economy rapidly deteriorated throughout the boom years.

* * *

The second big change has to do with the nature of the banking industry. Prior to the First World War, bankers thought locally. Profits a bank could make were limited and slow. Debt, other than farm debt, was rare and most people in the United States only resorted to loans for such things as startup costs for businesses. The average American considered personal debt a shameful thing and avoided it. Consumers did not buy on credit, but saved money for purchases, or did without. The idea of using credit for ordinary purchases swept the nation in the 1920s and suddenly consumer debt became a huge force in the US economy. Banks began to think of debt as a kind of commodity which could be traded and speculated upon. In addition to this, bankers themselves began speculating on commodities, stocks, and bonds and began taking bigger and bigger risks with the money their depositors had entrusted to them. Prior to the 1920s, banks had made money slowly, depending on interest gathered from small loans to gradually build their funds and provide enough profit to continue functioning. Banks would benefit the community and the community in turn would gradually grow in prosperity and in return provide wealthier depositors and demand more and more business and farming loans.

* * *

Once the economic boom of the 1920s began, a mood of greed which had swept the nation, of the possibility of getting rich quickly by means of riskier and riskier speculation, also swept the banking industry. As bankers entered the speculative market place of the 1920s, their outlook turned more towards profit from distant sources, the stock market and land speculation, and they became less and less concerned with the local cycles of agriculture, and less tolerant of the farmers’ problems. They began to foreclose greater and greater numbers of farms, selling the land to corporate farms and even retaining foreclosed land and farming it themselves. Farmers, who had owned their own farms and had managed to eke out a small living for their families, were permitted to stay on the farms, but now as share-croppers and tenant farmers working for the banks or for corporate farmers.

* * *

This is the condition of the Joad family at the beginning of The Grapes of Wrath, where the farming community of land-owning small farmers had been transformed into a community of tenant farmers. The Joad’s grandfather had owned the land, but the family no longer owns its land at the beginning of the novel. They had entered the ranks of growing numbers of tenant farmers. These tenant farmers were still needed to farm the land until the technology changed: a change documented by Steinbeck in the first half of the novel. The innovation of the caterpillar tractor, a gigantic machine capable of pulling huge high-tech ploughing and harvesting machines, suddenly made the tenant farmers, with their horse-drawn or small tractor-drawn ploughs, obsolete; and a single man could plough and harvest acreage that previously had required the labor of dozens of farming families. It was this technological change, coupled with the economic and meteorological changes that applied the final coupe de gràce to so many of the small farmers of the grain-belt, driving them off the land and forcing them into a migratory existence.

A Few Words

The English Department of Maybeck High School has collaborated to produce this blog for the use of its students and faculty to provide a forum for the discussion of John Steinbeck's Novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Any links and material on the blog are assumed to be within the fair use provision of US copyright law, and will be removed if objections are mounted by copyright holders.