A Very OK Podcast
Episode 57: “The Grapes of Wrath”
April 21, 2026
Episode Transcript
(upbeat music playing)
Trait Thompson: Hello, and welcome to A Very OK Podcast. My name is Trait Thompson, and with me, as always, is Dr. Bob Blackburn. And Bob, it’s great to see you again today. How are things going in your world?
Dr. Bob Blackburn: Well, they’re going very well. It’s been a beautiful spring, and no severe weather in my neighborhood. I know we’ve had it around. I was supposed to go to an event today of an unveiling of a statue down at the FAM museum on the river, and they canceled it because there could be thunderstorms. And I was thinking, wait a minute. They scheduled it in April, and they never thought about severe weather in Oklahoma in April. But anyway, they canceled it because of that severe weather. I was just kind of chuckling about that.
Thompson: It’s a little bit different in today’s day and age because if we, hey, we know so much technologically about when weather is going to come. So we do a lot of preemptive canceling these days, especially when there are snowstorms. Or we might get an inch of snow. But we also, we also know the damage that storms cause and being out in them. So I kind of go back and forth as to whether we’re a little bit too reactive on some of these things, but, you know, safer, better than sorry, I think is the way to go there.
Blackburn: Well, some of the deadly tornadoes have taught us to be overly cautious, and it’s not a bad thing.
Thompson: For sure. And I wanted to let everyone know because I know they all want to know, Bob, that you and I got second place together in our Rotary Club pickleball tournament. And we got beat by the same couple that beat us, like it’s a husband and wife couple. And we ascended all the way to the final bracket, and I’ll be darned. I thought we were, I thought we would have a better chance this year. But they are formidable.
Blackburn: They are, but we got seven points.
Thompson: Yes, we did get seven.
Blackburn: So that’s my mental consolation prize. Yes, we got thrashed, but we got seven points.
Thompson: Yes, if we could take that home, if there’s any sort of thing as moral victories in pickleball, we won a moral victory for that one. But it was a lot of fun playing with you in that tournament. We had some good competition in there, and it’s good camaraderie and a good opportunity to get to know people, and it’s a good club to be a part of. So, I was very happy to get to play in that with you.
Blackburn: Well, thank you for that invitation.
Thompson: Well, let’s get into our topic for today, and so I want to bring in our guest, and we are going to be talking about The Grapes of Wrath today. And as you all are aware, our topics this year, in 2026, are revolving around Route 66. And of course, it’s the 100th anniversary of Route 66 this year. And I thought, we have to talk about The Grapes of Wrath, because it’s such a seminal novel in American history. John Steinbeck is one of those classic American authors, and then also the movie is a very important classic movie in American history. So, and all revolving around this route out to California. So I want to introduce our guest, who’s going to be with us for the entire time today, and that is Elizabeth Anthony. She was born and raised in Oklahoma City, and she makes her living as a film historian, researching, writing, and lecturing about classic movies. She is the founder and author of RealClassics.com and president of Real Classics, LLC. Elizabeth runs the day-to-day technical, administrative, and creative operations of both. She also lectures on classic film and works as a freelance researcher and consultant on classic movie-related projects around the United States. Her projects include work as a curator for the Oklahoma at the Movies exhibit at the Oklahoma History Center, as research associate on the Hollywood biography, Victor Fleming, American Movie Master, as supervisor of 75th verification at the 75th Annual Academy Awards, and as producer of Moving Images of Oklahoma, a documentary showing how the state has been portrayed in film. She recently retired from refereeing middle and high school field hockey after 17 years. Elizabeth, welcome into the podcast, and I’m so curious about this field hockey. I mean, middle and high school field hockey, huh?
Elizabeth Anthony: Yes, it’s, well, first of all, thanks for having me. Field hockey is an unusual sport in Oklahoma. There aren’t too many schools that play, and as a result, there aren’t too many people who know how to referee it. And so for 17 years, I played, and then I coached, and later I refereed. But, you know, you’re trying to keep up with the 16-year-olds, and every year I get a year older, and every year they stay the same age. So it wasn’t a fair fight. And after 17 years, I had to pass it off to somebody else. But anyway, yes, I got my exercise that way for several years.
Blackburn: Trait, before we get too far in the topic that I want to tell one little anecdote about Elizabeth. Of course, I’ve known her for over 20 years, probably 30 years. But we were planning the Oklahoma History Center, and we were raising money as we were trying to finish it. We weren’t sure how much money we’d have to do all the things we wanted. But one of the my goals was to replicate what the California State Museum had done on depicting the image of California in film, and they had it there at the Golden State Museum. So I said, man, I’d like to have that. And I think there’s was about eight or nine minutes long, but that was on my list of things I wanted. Well, finally got the point, we were going to be able to afford it, but it was getting late. So I called Elizabeth and I knew she had a website called Real Classics, and Real Classics was, featured movies. When I started looking at her website, and The Silent Man, is that the name?
Anthony: The Quiet Man.
Blackburn: I was almost right, thank you. They changed the title at the last minute, right? But anyway, Quiet Man with John Wayne. Great movie, and she had analyzed that. That’s one, my dad and I used to watch that movie together. I’m third-generation Irish American, and we just love it. So anyway, I said, Elizabeth, I need your help. I got a little bit of money, didn’t have a lot, but I said I’d like to do a little documentary on the way Hollywood has depicted Oklahoma. Well Elizabeth took that broad description and came back with an outline of breaking Oklahoma history’s image down into things like lawmen and outlaws, the oil patch, the land runs, women, and just on and on with these different themes and went out and found the movies, got the clips of the movies, and put together and did the post editing and production, wrote the script, got James Garner to narrate it. She did all of this for this little bitty budget that I had that was not... And I remember the first cut she showed me, it was like 16 minutes. I said, Elizabeth, I need something closer to ten. Well, she said, okay, you tell me where to cut. And I couldn’t figure out any place, but it was all so good, and so we had that on display when we opened this museum in November of 2005, and it was up for many years. And it’s still to me, a masterpiece on the way Oklahoma’s image, and of course, we’re going to be talking about that today with The Grapes of Wrath, of course, but that took it into the bigger really audience of people going to the movies.
Thompson: Well, and I know that exhibit, along with the rock and roll exhibit, were two of those initial ideas that led to OKPOP, and obviously.
Anthony: And this was actually before that. So, 2005, Dr. Bob had kind of organized the new museum, and the first gallery was what he called the Images of Oklahoma gallery. So his thought was, confront people with what they think they know about Oklahoma, and then let them go through the museum and learn the truth about Oklahoma. And so the best way to confront people with what they thought they knew about Oklahoma, was to show them all the movies they had grown up watching, where they thought they knew about. So it was mostly people who, or movies that were about Oklahoma, set in Oklahoma, or had a character who was from Oklahoma. So we kind of confronted people with that up front, and with this documentary Moving Images of Oklahoma, and then they went and learned the truth.
Blackburn: Well, as you can tell, Elizabeth is smarter than I am, and she has a better memory.
Thompson: Well, before we get into our conversation about The Grapes of Wrath, I do want to give a bit of disclaimer for our listeners out there. I want to say, first of all: spoiler alert. So if you haven’t read The Grapes of Wrath or you haven’t watched the movie yet, maybe you want to go do one of those things before you listen to this episode. I will say that I read the book in high school, and I don’t remember much about it, but when I circle back to it, I’ve started walking in the mornings, and I needed something to do with my time other than I walk in the dark because it’s before I come to work. And so I started listening to The Grapes of Wrath on audiobook, and it was 21 hours long. It’s a long listen, but it’s great. The book is great. The movie is great. Go watch them and enjoy. Watch, read, and enjoy. I will say, so spoiler alert there, I will also say that I know sometimes parents listen to these podcasts with your kids, and there will be occasionally some adult themes that we may talk about that come through in the book. There may also be some language. When I quote the book, I want to quote the language in the book because I think the author deserves that. And so, just fair warning to all of you out there who may be listening.
Blackburn: You know, if I might add a disclaimer, Trait, is that this is personal to me. First time I read the book, first thing I thought of, my grandma and granddad, Jesse and Effie Turley, who helped raise me, were tractored off of their sharecropping farm in Arkansas in 1925, came to Oklahoma to pick a cotton crop. So they were on the road, a Model T truck, you know, seven kids loaded on the back with the dogsm and, you know, the few things grandma could take with her. Came to Oklahoma, made enough money with the cotton crop to stay. Got a job laying pipeline so my granddad didn’t have to go to California, but he had to go West. And he was looking for hope and a better life for his kids, and out of all of his family, he was the only one that stuck it out in Oklahoma. And the first four kids, high school education, last for all higher education— successful executives, educators, television personality. And so this is a personal story for me, the strength of being willing to pick up and the pain of having to leave behind your family and your church and what’s familiar to you and and cutting the connections with the land that has been part of who you are. So for me, it’s emotional and personal, as well as historical and interpretive.
Thompson: Before we jump into talking about some of the economic conditions around which the book was written, I thought it might be good, we can give a little summary of the plot of what’s going down here. And so, the book starts out with Tom Joad, who has been recently released from prison in McAlester. He is hitchhiking his way to get back home, and he finds out that his home was no longer there.
Anthony: His home in Sallisaw.
Thompson: His home in Sallisaw.
Anthony: In Sequoyah County.
Blackburn: Near Sallisaw.
Anthony: Which is in far eastern Oklahoma, near essentially where I-40 meets the Arkansas border.
Thompson: Right. Yes, exactly. And so he finds out his family is no longer there. As Bob said, they had been tractored off their land. They were living with Tom’s uncle. And when Tom gets reconnected with them, he finds out that they are all planning this trip to California. They received, there are handbills that are circulating, which are basically advertisements that say, come work in California. Lots of work to be had, great wages to be earned. And it was this promised land of we can get out to California, we can earn some money. Throughout the book, Ma Joad is continually talking about that, the white house that she’s going to get and the orange groves, and it’s going to be all better if they can just make it to California. Obviously, they, a good part of the book is their journey out to California on Route 66 and the people that they meet along the way. And then it’s the hardships that they encounter when they find out the reality of what California is isn’t what they had hoped it would be, and some of the treatment that they receive out there as migrant farmers in a place that nobody wants them. So that’s a short gist of the book. Did I get that essentially right?
Blackburn: That’s good.
Anthony: Yes. In the context of movies about Oklahoma, I usually put this in the context of, road trip movies or drive-through movies. There are lots of movies where people are driving through Oklahoma, and you do get the first about 20 or 30 minutes of the movie in Oklahoma. But pretty quickly they get on the road and they’re driving through, and then once they’re out of Oklahoma, then they’re going through New Mexico and Arizona, etcetera. So but, you know, Rain Man, they drive through Oklahoma. Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, they drive through Oklahoma. There are lots of movies in which people are driving through Oklahoma, and this kind of fits into that same category.
Thompson: Yeah, and I would say too that even though a good part of the book and the story takes place in Oklahoma, not much of the movie was actually filmed in.
Anthony: That is true. We can get to that.
Thompson: So, Bob, let’s talk about what’s going on in the 1930s in Oklahoma? We mentioned this in some other podcasts that we’ve done, but this particular story revolves around a sharecropping family in far eastern Oklahoma. What’s happening in the world of agriculture and in sharecroppers that’s causing this migration?
Blackburn: Yeah. Just make a couple of points here. One, Oklahoma is a land of immigrants. So people have come to Oklahoma, other than some of the Indian tribes, removed forcibly, of course, but coming to Oklahoma, looking for a new opportunity, looking for the, you know, the promised land, looking for opportunity, jobs, better soil, better land. And initially it seemed to work. So, starting in the 1890s, people are coming to Oklahoma because of the land runs, and you could get 160 acres if you stayed on it and made some improvements. After five years, you got title, and once you had title, you could borrow, you could start developing and doing well. Well, in eastern Oklahoma, the Indian Territory, most of the land was allotted in severalty to Indian citizens, but many Indians did not want to farm. And so that led to a sharecropping, a tenant-farming culture in eastern Oklahoma. Whereas western Oklahoma was almost all owner-owned land. And because they got, they broke the cycle of poverty by getting the land and then doing better.
Generally, the next generation would be better educated, better clothed, go off to high school, perhaps college, professions. But in eastern Oklahoma, you had this persistent culture of tenant farming and sharecropping. So you didn’t own the land. And typically it was a variation on the old plantation system based on slavery. If you own people in chattel slavery, you’d use them to farm your land for you. Well, no longer we have slavery, but a substitution was, well, let’s have this tenant farming, sharecropping. So you make a deal with a family that has very few options but wants to stay in the community. So if someone had been in Cherokee County or Atoka County for two or three generations now, by the 1920s and ’30s, you wanted to stay. It was your church. It was your family, your cousins around the corner, people you knew you could count on, no social safety net at the time. And so leaving was a traumatic experience for those folks. But what happened is that sharecropping is a destructive process. You’re destroying the land, especially with cotton, and the cash crop of the 1920s and ’30s, in eastern Oklahoma especially, somewhat even central and southern Oklahoma, was cotton. Cotton is awful for the land. Two or three plantings of cotton, and suddenly, if you can’t add some nitrogen, your production just nosedives.
Thompson: Yeah, and I want to tag onto that real fast, because I grew up on a cotton farm, and we would always rotate our cotton fields with either maize or wheat, so that we made sure that those nutrients would get replenished back in the soil before we went back with cotton again. I remember asking my stepdad why we did that. And, by the way, for those of you out here, my very first job was on our cotton farm, walking the cotton rows, chopping cotton for a dollar an hour. So that was, when I was in elementary school and when I was young, 105 degrees in Texas, we would set our water jug at one end of the row, walk half a mile down to the end of the row, and then come back, and then we could get a drink of water again. And our job was to chop the weeds out of the cotton patch. Now they have, like, Roundup-resistant cotton, so they just spray it all. The cotton stays alive, and the weeds die. But that’s how I grew up, and I’m very familiar with cotton fields. And it is, it sucks the nutrients out of the ground, and they talk about this in the book about how, you know, some of the attitudes were, get what you can get, make the money that you can make, and then get out of there.
Blackburn: Yeah. Well, the second part of my story is that from 1898 to 1918, in American history books, where they’re talking about agriculture, they refer to that time period as the golden age of agriculture. Farmers had never done as well. They would never do as well since in terms of parity. What would a bushel of wheat, what would a pound of cotton buy in the marketplace in terms of parity? Those were the golden years. And in Oklahoma, the rains came back in ’96 and ’97. So we were getting good rains, typically in eight- or nine-year cycles. The rains were good. The railroad network, more railroad miles laid in Oklahoma from 1900 to 1910 than all the other decades combined. So the railroads are going to these little communities where you can make a little bit more money, because there were more cotton gins, because it could be ginned and put on the railroads. And so this golden age of farming encouraged farmers to expand, buy maybe a little more land or to buy some more equipment. And it encouraged those landowners who weren’t farming it to get the best profit out of the land. And that meant if they could afford a tractor, which you could, Fordson tractors were very popular in the 1920s. Henry Ford, what he did for Model Ts, he did for tractors. So you can get a Fordson tractor, and suddenly one laborer could farm as much as three or four families, and so suddenly they don’t need so many tenant farmers, they don’t need sharecroppers. They can get more profit out of the land by mechanization. And so when you say tractor it off, that’s kind of what they’re referring to because tractors were very popular. And then the landowners, and in the book it’s very clear it’s a, this is a class struggle as much as anything in John Steinbeck’s version. But people were really leaving.
Like my grandparents couldn’t make a middle-class living on their 30-some acres and sharecropping other land there in Howard County, Arkansas. So here they come to Oklahoma, thinking they can do better. Well, a lot of people didn’t even think, well, I can’t do better in Oklahoma because times are hard there too. So the Arkies from Arkansas, the Texans who were leaving, people in Kansas, Missouri were coming off the farms and going out for a variety of reasons. But they all thought, well, the place where we can really find an opportunity now is going to be California because it was booming, and they saw in the movies. These people were going to movies in the ’20s. So, you’re seeing movies in California, and it looks pretty inviting, beautiful weather, and, you know, the palm trees and the orange groves. And there was this image that’s where we need to go. It was be like 19 or 1849, in the gold rush or 1859 and the silver rush in Colorado, or more recently, let’s go to, you know, southern Arizona, where, you know, life is good. And so people had these ideas of where you should migrate, and we’re a nation of migrants. We’ve all come from someplace else, a little bit of tradition of picking up and going. And that’s what was happening at the time. And as the economy worsened for farmers in the ’20s, the Great Depression started for farmers in the ’20s, not the ’30s. The stock market crash hurt the banks, which meant they had to call their loans, if they could. And times were tough, and it got worse in the ’30s, of course, with overproduction, cotton down to $0.03 a pound cost two-and-a-half cents to pick it, if you have to hire pickers. So they had you and your brother to sit there and chop and pick. But if you had to hire, you couldn’t do it. It wouldn’t make any money to cover the seed and the cultivation and the chopping and all the things you have to do.
So people were on the move in Oklahoma. Many went to Oklahoma City. You could find jobs in the packing plants or in the industrial district. They could go to Tulsa, work in the oil patch. But a lot of those farmers didn’t have those skills. They didn’t have the education. So the one hope that they had was, let’s get in the jalopy and make it to California.
Thompson: Go ahead, Elizabeth, and I want to talk about in the movie what you see, and you see, and some of this imagery is in the book, too, is Sallisaw is portrayed as sort of this dust-ridden place that is very affected by the Dust Bowl, and that’s always bothered me because that wasn’t the case.
Anthony: So the first thing to know is that the first chapter of The Grapes of Wrath is about dust. So Steinbeck organized his book sort of in separate chapters about the Joad family. But then he has all these tangential chapters about sometimes other families, about economic conditions, and the atmosphere. And there’s a whole chapter about a turtle that’s trying to cross the road.
Blackburn: And selling used cars.
Anthony: So there are all kinds of, but the very first chapter is about dust, and it’s about the dust in Oklahoma. And obviously, so, we have the drought in the 1930s in Oklahoma, unquestionably. And if you’re getting 10 or 15 inches less of rain a year, that has a bigger impact in the Panhandle, where they only get about 20 inches of rain a year, than it does in eastern Oklahoma, where they were averaging more like 40 inches of rain a year. So the Dust Bowl happens in western Oklahoma, especially in the Panhandle. And so you don’t have dust, and the Dust Bowl as the principal driving factor for people leaving eastern Oklahoma. It’s more the economic conditions of sharecropping and the way the prices fell, and they couldn’t make a living sharecropping anymore. So it’s important to remember that the Panhandle, which is where the Dust Bowl was, most of those people were not sharecroppers. Most of those people were actually landowners. They were taking advantage of the homesteading process, where I believe if you staked your claim and you had a five years that you had to improve the land, and then you could own it. But in that time period, a lot of people were taking out loans, you know, for farm equipment or their seed or whatever else they needed. So a lot of the homesteaders were in debt, but they were still in debt as land owners, where they had something to mortgage. They had something to own. And so, when you look at the statistics about who actually left, it was not mostly the people in the Panhandle in the Dust Bowl. It wasn’t the Dust Bowl that drove people out of Oklahoma. It was the economic conditions more in eastern Oklahoma. So, something like 25 percent of the population in the Panhandle actually left. It was a much higher percentage of that sharecropping population in eastern Oklahoma.
Thompson: Yeah. As far as natural conditions are concerned, I was surprised to learn that flood and fire were the conditions that tended to dry people out in eastern Oklahoma, where natural conditions were concerned. And so, but the imagery. So in the movie, those scenes of the swirling dust, and it’s piled up against the fences and all of the, I mean, it’s very impactful.
Anthony: Absolutely. And so let’s start with the beginning, which is the novel comes out in about March of 1939, and it’s almost instantly a bestseller, but it’s also almost instantly controversial. Oklahomans didn’t like it. Californians didn’t like it. And there were lots of people who didn’t like it for other reasons. So, it had language issues. We’ve talked about, you gave your disclaimer. I’m not going to say the words, but the S word, as in Sam, is in it. The F word, as in Frank, is in it. The N word is in it. There are lots of language issues, not to mention taking the Lord’s name in vain, which was still a very big deal in the 1930s. And so from a religious perspective, there were a lot of people who didn’t like this novel, the story. And so the movie was going to be controversial just by virtue of the fact that it was an adaptation of this novel that was so controversial.
Thompson: And I’m going to add one more thing that people got upset about. They saw communist overtones.
Anthony: Absolutely. And that’s part of the anti-religiosity. So the political structure in the United States was a lot more open in the 1920s and ’30s. We had communism, and it was openly communist, and we had all kinds of different, we didn’t have this two-party system that was exclusively a two-party system. There were lots of people in between and on the fringes.
Blackburn: And socialists in the Oklahoma Legislature.
Anthony: That’s right, and the Klan was practically a political party. So there were all kinds of, politics was a lot harder to label, if you will. And the differentiation between communism and socialism was, and in the minds of a lot of people now, obviously, the economists are going to tell you that this isn’t exclusively it. But one of the big things was the anti-religious component of communism.
And so when you have this character, Jim Casy, who is a preacher, but he’s kind of a fallen preacher, and he admits his sins, and how he liked sinning, and some of those things. A lot of people saw that as very anti-religious. And then even, you know, there’s a scene in which he prays, or he’s asked to pray over the death of one of the characters. And he says, well, I don’t need to pray for the dead guy. You know, he’s doing fine. We need to pray for the living, you know?
Blackburn: You know, I think it’s irony, a lot of irony too is because a lot of the dialog from Ma and Tom and especially Casey, it would probably follow more fundamental Christianity than a lot of the established religions of the time. Help thy neighbor. Love others. Do unto others. And this whole theme of Jesus and charity, to me, helps define this book. To me, I’m inspired by that.
Thompson: Well, and I’ll tell you, Casy was one of my favorite characters in the book.
Anthony: Okay.
Thompson: When I reread this, I loved his, I don’t know. Tom would get on to him throughout the book of continuing to make these long speeches. And Casy’s a man to me who’s sort of, he’s trying to figure it out. He’s trying to figure out where he fits in all of this. He knows, he doesn’t feel like the traditional Christianity that he’s grown up with kind of fits the times anymore, And he’s trying to figure out, he knows that there is love. He knows that there is community. But how does that all fit together? And this is one of the quotes from the book. “Maybe all men got one big soul everybody is a part of. Now. I sat there thinking it and all of a sudden I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it.” And this is that idea that we are all a part of the same... we’re same the same planet, the same community. And even Paul talks about this in the New Testament, that if my leg hurts, then the rest of the body hurts. And I think that’s what Casy is getting at, too, is listen, we’re all in pain here. Something bad is happening here in our country, and some people are ignoring the fact that when a bad thing is happening to a group of people, it’s actually happening to all of us.
Anthony: So it’s important to remember that Steinbeck is openly socialist. Right? And his idea is that these farm workers who are being taken advantage of need to organize, and the irony is that these are the migrants who are coming, the Okies that are coming from Oklahoma and Arkansas, and Missouri, etcetera. They are part of the rugged American individualism who have been used to making it on their own. And they are not naturally inclined to organize amongst themselves and create a union or go out on strike or something like that. And you get, Tom Joad has a quote when he’s talking to one of the organizers who’s saying, hey, you know, we all need to work together and go out on strike to get the wages up. And Tom says, look, my dad just had meat for dinner, you know, for the first time in however long. You think he’s going to give up his meat so that some other fella can eat too? You know, you’re asking a lot. So it didn’t work is the long and the short of it. All these migrants, and I think the estimates are somewhere between 300,000 and half a million migrants migrated to California out of these this kind of Okie category during the Depression, especially in the later years of the Depression. And it wasn’t that all the organizing and everything that people were trying to do to help them didn’t actually work. And what ended up helping them was World War II and getting jobs and all the aircraft factories and other stuff that was happening in California at the time, where there was actually employment that they could do and make a a living wage.
Thompson: Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in one of her syndicated newspaper columns, she wrote this, “Now, I must tell you that I’ve just finished a book which is an unforgettable experience in reading. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck Both repels you and attracts you. The horrors of the picture, so well drawn, make you dread sometimes to begin the next chapter, and yet you cannot lay the book down or even skip a page.” And you know, there were, as we talked about, there were groups across the country who were very antagonistic to this book, but there also, there were also people, and Eleanor Roosevelt is a good example of this, of people who felt like the book had a good message to it, and we’re trying to shed a light on things. In fact, I read in my research when they were making the movie, the producers went out and they said, is it really as bad as Steinbeck makes it out to be? And so they sent some of the producers out to go do some research and to find out. And the producers came back, said, no, it’s worse. And so, this really was a terrible condition that he was portraying.
Anthony: Absolutely. The movie, like I said, the novel comes out, I think, in March of ’39. It’s a bestseller by May. And Darryl Zanuck, who is head of production at 20th Century Fox, decides that he wants to do this film adaptation, but he knows that it’s controversial. And so he gives it a pseudonym, and he calls the movie Highway 66, so that people aren’t distributing copies of the script outside of the channels of people who are supposed to see it. And when they’re out filming it, nobody knows that they’re making The Grapes of Wrath because he’s afraid of the controversy of it. So they actually make the film. Think of how fast all this is going. The novel comes out in March of ’39. It’s a bestseller by May. They make the movie, I think, in October and November. It takes him about 40 days to make the film, and it’s released in January of 1940. So it is happening boom, boom, boom. And I think it’s maybe shortly after the movie is released that it wins the Pulitzer Prize.
So there’s a huge amount of attention around the novel and the film at this time. And so people who haven’t seen it or read it are going to the movie and they don’t, even if they don’t know anything about it, they know it’s controversial. Right? The controversy is everywhere, and that helps drive up the book sales, and it also helps the movie as well. Now, it’s interesting, some of what I’ve read about the book sales in Oklahoma, this book was banned in several places. It was burned. You know, they literally did ceremonial burnings in some communities of this book, but not in Oklahoma, and the truth is that everybody in Oklahoma wanted to read it. They wanted to see what the rest of the country was seeing and how Oklahoma was being portrayed. So the high book sales in Oklahoma, and libraries had waiting lists of people to read it.
Blackburn: And the reviews, the newspapers are all positive at the time.
Anthony: So it’s interesting that we didn’t really ban The Grapes of Wrath in Oklahoma, and we weren’t burning it. Everybody wanted to see what everybody else was talking about. Congressman Lyle Boren called the novel a “damnable lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind.” Tell us what you really think, Lyle.
(laughing)
Anthony: Point out his personal background there, too, though.
Thompson: Well, you may have to help me with that. I haven’t done a lot of research into Lyle Boren. Okay, so, well, Dr. Bob can tell us about his offspring, but Lyle Boren was a congressman from Oklahoma, and he gave a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, January 24, 1940, and he’s talking about how he is the son of tenant farmers in Oklahoma. He says, “I stand before you today as an example, in my judgment, of the average son of the tenant farmer of Oklahoma, of America. If I have in any way done more in the sense of personal accomplishment than the average son of the tenant farmer of Oklahoma, it has been a matter of circumstance, and I know of a surety that the heart and brain and character of the average tenant farmer of Oklahoma cannot be surpassed and probably not equaled by any other group.” So he was personally lumping his personal story as being the son of a tenant farmer into this denunciation of the depiction of tenant farmers in The Grapes of Wrath.
Now, unfortunately, most of the most eloquent people who denounced The Grapes of Wrath hadn’t actually read it. Well I’ve always contended because George Nigh and I had a running conversation that went on for 40 years about The Grapes of Wrath because I’ve loved it so much. He despised it. But, I always told George, I said, George, in terms, you have to look at The Grapes of Wrath as art. It’s not history, it’s art. And I said, John Steinbeck, one of the greatest writers of all time, uses metaphors and descriptive language and just moving rhetoric. In the movie, John Ford makes a classic movie, Academy-Award winning with these great roles. I said, that’s great art. Yeah, I know it might have offended some people who saw themselves in it, but the uplifting story of Ma Joad and the strength of a Tom Joad in his willingness to carry on, I said, these are themes that we should be celebrating. And George would never agree with me.
Anthony: Well, but the way I describe it is that Oklahoma has a love-hate relationship with The Grapes of Wrath. On the one hand, Oklahomans are depicted as poor, uncouth, and uneducated, and they don’t seem to be bothered by it. But on the other hand, they’re courageous, stoic, and in the face of tragedy, they’re generous and resilient. And it’s hard to argue that those qualities aren’t assets. So on the one hand, you look at the surface of the characters, and there’s a lot to criticize, but when you get into the substance of the characters, there’s a lot to admire. And the challenge is, you’ve got to get past the surface in order to get to the substance, and there were a lot of people who never got past the surface of the characters.
THOMPSON: In 1957, it was the 50th anniversary of the state of Oklahoma, and James Burge, who is the director of the Oklahoma Semi-Centennial Exposition, invited John Steinbeck to come to Oklahoma and attend the exposition and the celebration in Oklahoma City. And, George Nigh, as you mentioned, was not in favor of that at all. In fact, he pitched quite a fit about it. In an interview with Voices of Oklahoma, George Nigh said, “I thought that song,” he was talking about the song “Oklahoma!” that he wanted to be our state song, “That’s the excitement around the world about our state. I’m tired of John Steinbeck. In fact, I took privileges of the floor in the semi-centennial for the State of Oklahoma. They invited John Steinbeck to be the guest of honor. The guy who wrote The Grapes of Wrath, the guy who put Oklahoma, gave it its image to this day holds us back. I took privileges of the floor, and I said, ‘I can’t believe he’s going to be guest of honor.’” In fact, I can so picture George Nigh now. In 1957 at our 50th celebration, and he says they withdrew the invitation. Other information I’ve got is that Steinbeck declined it, said he couldn’t make it to the semi-centennial, but he expressed his well-wishes for Oklahoma and said Oklahoma had come a long way since those years of the Great Depression. And going toward to your point, Elizabeth, later in 1957, Governor Raymond Gary named Steinbeck an Oklahoma booster, and he wrote Steinbeck and said, “There has been much misunderstanding about The Grapes of Wrath, as you suggest, much of this has been among people who were told by someone else that their pride had been injured. They accepted someone else’s judgment rather than reading your book.”
Anthony: And they bragged about it at the time that they hadn’t read the book. Because remember, with the language, there is a lot of sex in this book. There’s a lot of, I’m going to call it bodily functions in this book. There are a lot of reasons why it was described as vulgar and lewd. You know, not just that people had differences with the politics of it, but some of the physicality of it was controversial at the time. And so, there were a lot of people who were bragging that they hadn’t read this book because it was considered a dirty book.
Thompson: And with that, let’s take a quick break.
Announcer: If you love Oklahoma stories, history, and the people who shaped our state, you’ll want to mark your calendar for Saturday, May 2. The Oklahoma Historical Society is hosting the 2026 Oklahoma History Symposium at the Oklahoma History Center, and this year’s theme is Milestones in Oklahoma History.
This one-day event brings together scholars, authors, educators, students, and history lovers from across the state for a full day of fascinating presentations and conversations. You’ll hear talks on everything from Indigenous history and sovereignty to Oklahoma Black communities, civil rights law, women’s history, oil booms, and the Vietnamese refugee experience in western Oklahoma. This year’s keynote speaker is the Honorable Glenn English, former US representative and retired CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, sharing the remarkable story of how rural electrification and broadband transformed Oklahoma. There will be book signings with acclaimed authors, symposium exhibitors, networking opportunities, and local food trucks throughout the day. And the best part, it’s completely free and open to the public.
So if you’re looking for something interesting and uniquely Oklahoma, make plans to spend your Saturday at the symposium. Visit okhistory.org/symposium and register now for the 2026 Oklahoma History Symposium, happening May 2 at the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City. And we’ll see you there!
(upbeat music playing)
Thompson: And, we’re back. I want to jump into a conversation. Of course, we’re talking this whole year about Route 66, and Steinbeck coins this term, the Mother Road. And I want to read a quote from the book. “Highway 66 is the main migrant road. Sixty-six, the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map from Mississippi to Bakersfield, over the red lands and the gray lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the divide and down into the bright and terrible desert and across the desert to the mountains again and into the rich California valleys.” There’s also a quote that says, “66 is the path of people and flight. Refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership to the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what richness is there. From all of these, the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. Sixty-six is the Mother Road, the road of flight.”
Blackburn: Beautiful words. He had such a way of describing, descriptive writing, and quite an artist.
Thompson: Bob, this is one of the most descriptive books I’ve read in terms of, I mean, sometimes you can just really feel like you’re standing there in that moment because he describes the landscape. He’s so good at describing the features of the people. But Elizabeth, he kind of gets the route of 66 a little bit wrong. He says Mississippi to Bakersfield.
Anthony: That’s right. We know, in Oklahoma, that Route 66 comes into Oklahoma from far northeastern Oklahoma, kind of the Miami area, and comes down through what we would consider now sort of the route of I-44, which runs parallel, down to Oklahoma City, and once it hits Oklahoma City is when it heads basically due west. So if you’re in Sallisaw, which is, far eastern Oklahoma, which is more near where I-40 hits the Arkansas border, it’s not Route 66 between Sallisaw and Oklahoma City. Once the Joads get to Oklahoma City, then they’re on Route 66. But prior to that, it’s not Route 66.
So, a lot of people criticize the film for its, for being geographically challenged. We already talked about that Sallisaw was not the Dust Bowl of the Panhandle. And then the route of Route 66, they pull out. They’re immediately on the road, and the first road sign you see is Route 66, Oklahoma. And then you see the signs for the city limits of Sallisaw. Well, wait a second. You know, we’re not there yet. And you also see the city limit sign for Checotah, which is also, we’re not on Route 66 yet, but then they get to Oklahoma City. And so part of the challenge here is that John Steinbeck didn’t actually visit Oklahoma before he wrote The Grapes of Wrath. He visited with the migrants, the Okie migrants who were in all these camps in California, but he hadn’t been to Oklahoma. And it was a little bit the same thing with the producers of the film. They were making a movie of the novel. They weren’t making their own Oklahoma travelog, if you will. And even though they did send a second unit to do some atmosphere photography in Oklahoma, most of it didn’t actually get used, and none of it involved the principal actors. So if there are any scenes in the film in which you can actually identify the actors, like, oh, that’s Henry Fonda or oh, that’s Jane Darwell, then, you know it’s not a scene that was filmed in Oklahoma because none of those people came to Oklahoma.
Thompson: From what I can tell, the only scene actually filmed in Oklahoma was their truck going through Sayre in front of the Beckham County Courthouse.
Anthony: And so this was another question I was going to ask both the you, is there is a shot where theoretically they are going through Route 66 in Oklahoma City. It’s identified as Oklahoma City. Now, we know that Route 66 through Oklahoma City, at least in this era, was basically on Northwest 23rd Street or Northeast 23rd Street to Northwest 23rd Street. But the landscape at the time, anyway, this one shot that they’ve got, has got maybe a seven- or eight-story building in it, which is pretty good for a depiction of Oklahoma, even though we know at this point in the ’20s, we had some skyscrapers going up. And, but there are two stores that are identifiable in terms of their names on the background of the shot of Oklahoma City, and it’s Levine’s and Berlin’s Smart Shoes. And so I was trying to figure out if anybody out there has done any research on the history of retail in Oklahoma City, and they can tell us whether there was a store called Levine’s or a store called Berlin’s Smart Shoes, because theoretically, the second unit did come through Oklahoma City and shoot the, basically they had the vehicle, you know, they were driving the vehicle around to shoot atmosphere. But I don’t know if this shot that’s labeled Oklahoma City was really Oklahoma City.
Thompson: I want to say, it wasn’t.
Anthony: Okay.
Thompson: I want to say that Albuquerque stood in Oklahoma City. I did a little Googling earlier today because I also read that the Pony Bridge, the Bridgeport Bridge, was in the film, and I I didn’t see that in the film either. The only scene that I seen for sure was Beckham County Courthouse and Sayre in front of that. And you’re, 100% right. Of course you’re the expert, and I’m not. But everything that was filmed of them traveling was second unit.
Anthony: That’s right.
Thompson: And in fact, I read that they paid different cars along Route 66, $5 a car, to kind of drive back and forth and create this look of the traffic going west.
Anthony: Well, they had the migrants and they wanted the Joads’ vehicle not to be the only vehicle looking like this on the road. And there were other vehicles, so they paid them to stop and wait and to create a shot that was kind of a caravan, which you can see in the film, which is the Joads’ vehicle, along with similarly over-laden jalopies, as the term was in the time.
Thompson: Elizabeth, John Ford was an interesting choice for the director of this movie. John Ford was pretty conservative in his politics.
Anthony: I think that’s a, call it a post-modern labeling of John Ford. So, first of all, John Ford was a contract director for 20th Century Fox, and he was making movies lickety-split. As a matter of fact, this was the third movie that he made with Henry Fonda in 1939. He had made Young Mr. Lincoln and Drums Along the Mohawk. And then in the fall, then they made The Grapes of Wrath. So John Ford was making movies pretty quickly, and he did have some say so in the films that he made, but he was also assigned a lot of things that weren’t necessarily his cup of tea. And of course, now most remember John Ford for his Westerns, but this is clearly not a Western.
So anyway, John Ford, he came from a family of Irish immigrants, and his parents had come to the United States after one of the potato famines, I think in the 1850s or something like that. So he was actually born in Maine, and he had this affinity his whole life for the Irish people, because he was one of them, and he came from this big Irish- Catholic family. And so when he heard the story of The Grapes of Wrath and read the book, he related to it not as a story about the Okies from Oklahoma, but as a story of the Irish, and how the Irish had been treated when they first came to the United States and some of the circumstances that had driven them here.
Blackburn: English landowners in Ireland.
Anthony: Yeah, exactly. So that was John Ford’s take on this story and why he related to the material in a way that he didn’t really relate to some other material that he did in some other filmS. So, but that was his attraction to it. But it’s interesting to know that the driving force behind this movie was not John Ford. It was Darryl Zanuck who was the head of production at 20th Century Fox. He’s the one who bought the rights to the film. He’s the one who brought in Gregg Toland to do the cinematography. He brought in Richard Day to do the art direction, and they were inspired by the films, the photographs of Dorothea Lange, and the lithographs of Thomas Hart Benton. And so Darryl Zanuck was the one who was putting the team together so that, because John Ford was still filming Drums Along the Mohawk, and he only had like a four-week break between finishing that film and starting this one.
So, John Ford, what he brought to the film was his ability to get performances out of these actors and the pacing of the film. So this is actually a long movie for its time. Now, you know, yes, Gone With the Wind was almost a four-hour movie, and that was 1939. But most movies in the 1930s and 1940s were about 90 minutes long and sometimes less. And so for a movie to be two hours and 10 minutes long was unusually long for this time period, and it was not that the script was so much longer than any other script. It was the deliberate pacing that John Ford chose to apply to it, and this came out of his background as a silent film director, because in the silent film, you did a lot more storytelling with visuals than you did with dialog. And so the opening shot of Tom Joad, you know, walking and the silhouette along the road, that’s storytelling visually, you know? And that was part of what John Ford was really good at.
The other thing that he was good at was, having come from a big Irish family, he understood family dynamics, and he was able to add a lot of humor, which helps lighten the burden of the subject matter of this film when you have little bits of humor and family dynamics, you know? And for example, there’s the dance scene at the, one of the government camps, which is one of the nicer places that they stay. And Tom Joad’s sister Rose of Sharon is pregnant. And so she’s sitting on the side, she can’t really dance, and he comes up behind her, and he just kind of teases her. You know, that wasn’t in the script. That was the kind of thing where John Ford was like, look, here’s your sister. She’s pregnant. She can’t get out there and dance, you know, have some interaction with her, you know, that kind of thing. So just little things that helped lighten the mood at certain moments that give the audience a break from the depressive components of the story.
Thompson: Steinbeck was paid $70,000 for the rights to the film, and when he signed over the rights, he also had a clause that they could not change the tone of the film, or the tone of the book, when they were making the film. In other words, they had to keep the content there. Now there were some things in the movie that they could not depict. In other words, they couldn’t refer to Rose of Sharon’s pregnancy just right out.
Anthony: As such, right?
Thompson: They couldn’t refer to Muley as being insane. That was one of the things.
Anthony: So the vocabulary word there is touched. I’m touched. Do you think I’m touched?
Thompson: You know, that vocabulary was actually in the in the book as well. Associate producer and writer Nunnally Johnson said, about the ending of the movie, because the ending is different than the book. It says, “There had to be some ray of hope, something that would keep the people who saw it from going out and getting so drunk in utter despondency that they couldn’t tell other people it was a good picture to see. Steinbeck agreed on the necessity for a more hopeful ending.”
Anthony: Well, and that’s typical of Hollywood at the time. Right? And remember, the reason the whole world liked Hollywood movies in this era was because they were hopeful and optimistic. And, I bring up Gone With the Wind again. A lot of people think that the last line of Gone With the Wind is, you know, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” But it’s not. The last line of Gone With the Wind is “After all, tomorrow is another day.” You know, Scarlett O’Hara, the man she loves has just left her, you know, but she’s going to go home to Tara, and everything’s going to be all right, because after all, tomorrow is another day. I can’t think about this today. I’ll think about this tomorrow, you know? So, Hollywood wanted people to want to come to the movies, and the way to make them want to come back was to give them hopeful endings. And that was what Hollywood was really good at, and that’s part of what made Hollywood movies so popular around the world.
So, in terms of who made the decision, Nunnally Johnson, who was the screenwriter who adapted the screenplay, he is the one who basically rearranged the end. And as Trait mentioned, I think 21-hour audio book was a 600-word, I mean, a 600-page book. So it was a long book. There was no way you were going to get all of it into the two-hour film. And so they, first of all, cut out a lot of the peripheral stuff and stuck to the Joad characters. There were a lot of other characters in the novel who basically get left out. But they also focused on what Nunnally Johnson thought was the heart of it, which was the Joad characters, and Ma’s effort to hold the family together. That was what he really felt was the heart of the movie. And really, if you want to criticize things a little bit here, in the novel, Ma Joad is kind of the protagonist. You know, we start by meeting Tom Joad and him coming home, but throughout, you know, Tom Joad goes away two-thirds through the novel, and Ma Joad is still there all the way to the end. So it’s, in many ways, a very female-centric story. And when it gets adapted to the film, it becomes a much more male-centric story. Ma Joad is still there, she’s a great character, but, and part of this too, is the dynamic that Henry Fonda is a star and Jane Darwell is a character actress, you know, and so if Henry Fonda is the star, then his character is going to become more significant than Jane Darwell as the character actress. So that’s part of the dynamic there, too.
Thompson: Well, I want to talk about this, Bob. You and I have talked about this a little bit, but I agree with you. I think Ma Joad is the glue that holds both the book and the movie together. Ma Joad is the one who is bound and determined that they are going to be together as a family. And in fact, there is a time when they’re making their way on Route 66, where, they’ve joined up with another family for a little while. It’s the Wilson family. And the Wilsons’ car breaks down and Tom says, hey, me and Casy are going to stay here and fix this car. The rest of the family, you guys keep going. And when you get out to California, we’ll come find you. And Ma, she picks up a jack handle, and she says, we are not separating. If you want to come, try and beat me up, Pa, you can do it. But we’re not doing it. We are going to stay together as a family. And here’s a line, it says, “The eyes of the whole family shifted back to Ma. She was the power. She had taken control.” And Ma says, “All we got is the family unbroke, like a bunch of cows when the lobos are ranging, stick all together. I ain’t scared while we’re all here. All that’s alive. But I ain’t going to see us bust up.” And she is the one, you know, and Noah, when Noah leaves, which is Tom’s brother. When they get to California, he just sort of walks off the riverbank, and we never hear from him again, but he doesn’t come talk to Ma about it. I think he knows better.
And then later on, Tom is the one, saying, I’ve got to separate. I’ve got to leave while they’re in California. And Ma keeps saying, no you don’t, no you don’t, no you don’t. And she finally relents and says, okay, you can go. But she’s such a powerful force in this book in a time when men were the ones who ran the family, and you can almost see Pa as kind of defeated. And this is a time when men’s value was in the work and what they provide, and their ability to provide for the family. So Pa, he’s not able to provide for the family. So, he’s kind of a whipped man. And Ma steps in and says, here’s how it’s going to be. And at one point in the book, Paul says, “Seems like times has changed. There was a time when a man said what to do. Seems like a woman is telling now.”
Anthony: Absolutely, and that, the ending of the film. So again, just like people get the, remember the ending wrong and Gone With the Wind, they remember the ending wrong with The Grapes of Wrath, too, because they think that Tom leaving is the end of The Grapes of Wrath, but it’s actually not. It’s Ma and Pa getting back in the truck with the little kids, Ruthie and Winfield, and Rose of Sharon, and driving on to the next job to work. And so you get this shot through the windshield of the truck where Ma is talking to Pa, and she gives her little line about how, we’ll go on forever, Pa, because we’re the people, and that’s actually a line that comes— it’s modified a little bit—but it comes from much earlier in the film. I’m sorry, much earlier in the novel, it’s, you know, like chapter 20 or something from the novel where she says that. But what not only Johnson did was take that line from the middle of the novel and move it to the end to give it that kind of “tomorrow is another day” kind of hopefulness because Tom has just left, and Ma’s family is falling apart. And her goal all along has been to try to hold them together. But she’s still optimistic, and she’s still got this idea that, you know, we’ll go on forever, Pa, because we’re the people.
Blackburn: I think that would have resonated with Americans too at the time, the way that Will Rogers resonated, Woody Guthrie, “This Land is Your Land.” It’s almost a paraphrase version of “This Land is Your Land.” And I think it was just brilliant writing, and she delivered it. A little bit more about her as an actress, what else did she do? She was so perfect for that role.
Anthony: So, Jane Darwell was a character actress who was under contract to 20th Century Fox. She played lots of different parts in those films. She played lots of rural parts, which is obviously why she got cast in this movie, but she was a motherly figure to Shirley Temple. Remember, the big star for 20th Century Fox in this era is Shirley Temple. So, you know, everybody is in a Shirley Temple movie. So, Jane Darwell is that motherly figure, a matron, I think, at the orphanage in one of Shirley Temple’s films, and also a cook in the house where she’s helping take care of Shirley Temple in a different film. So she had this maternal component to her, but she really, you know, was one of those people who grew up in a family that was relatively middle class, well-to-do, who looked down on this acting profession. And so, she changed her name in order not to embarrass her family when she went into acting. And I think she didn’t make her first movie until she was in her 30s, but she really became so well known in the 1930s and ’40s for these character actor parts that she was playing.
So after she plays Ma Joad, then she plays a very different character in The Ox-Bow Incident, which is another Western with Henry Fonda, where she’s essentially helping lead a lynch mob. Right? So she goes, so she had some forcefulness to her character. And then I always like to tell people that her final film was, Walt Disney brought her out of retirement to play the bird woman in Mary Poppins. So when they sing the song, when Julie Andrews/Mary Poppins sings the song about “Feed the birds, tuppence a bag” in Mary Poppins and they show the shot of the bird woman sitting on the steps feeding the birds, That’s Jane Darwell, and that’s her final film performance in 1966 or ’67.
Thompson: And she won an Oscar for her portrayal of Ma Joad.
Anthony: She did, and so she won. So the film got about seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and Best Picture that year actually went to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, which is a great film, very different from The Grapes of Wrath, but a great film. And so, Henry Fonda was nominated. Jane Darwell was nominated in terms of the actors in and performances. John Ford won for Best Director. He would win again the following year. He had back-to-back Best Director Oscars for How Green Was My Valley, which is another fantastic film. And then there was also nominated, I think, for screenplay and cinematography and art direction. So the two Oscars that it won were Jane Darwell for Supporting Actress and John Ford for Best Director.
Blackburn: Elizabeth, if someone wants to watch the movie now that they listened to this podcast, where can they find The Grapes of Wrath?
Anthony: Really, we’re lucky that The Grapes of Wrath is one of the greatest films of all time, and so it’s pretty readily accessible. So in 1997, the American Film Institute created its list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time, and The Grapes of Wrath came in at number 23 on that list. So it’s available on DVD, it’s available on Blu-ray, it’s available for streaming. Most of the streaming services, like Amazon or YouTube, where you can pay a couple bucks and stream a film, have access to The Grapes of Wrath. So it’s pretty readily accessible, and it’s a great movie.
And the thing to know about, we’ve talked about how controversial the the film, I’m sorry the novel was, and the film was too, but the film is much more kid- appropriate than the novel. So you had something in place at the time in Hollywood called the Production Code, which was a self-censorship mechanism, where basically the government and the churches were threatening to boycott and censor Hollywood in the 1920s because things were getting really racy. And so the big studio heads got together and said, okay, we’re going to censor ourselves because we don’t want to be censored by the outsiders. And so they wrote a rule book called The Production Code, and they said, okay, these are the things we’re going to do, and these are things we’re not going to do. So kisses aren’t going to last longer than three seconds. Married couples sleep in twin beds. These are all the four-letter words you can’t say. These are all the ethnic slurs you can’t use, you know? So they were trying to clean up their act. And, so the film doesn’t have the sex, it doesn’t have the language, it doesn’t have, the only toilet reference, and there are a lot of toilet references in the novel of The Grapes of Wrath, the only toilet reference in the book is actually one where, actually you weren’t allowed to show a toilet on television, in movies at this time period. Literally, you couldn’t show a toilet. So they have this scene where Winfield and Ruthie, they get to the government camp where there’s actually toilets, and they’ve never seen a toilet before, but we as the audience aren’t allowed to see the toilet. So Ruthie and Winfield, they sneak into this bathroom right, where they got this thing they’ve never seen before. And one of them pulls the chain, and there’s this big, loud noise of the flushing sound, and they come running out as if they’ve broken something or something, which tells us, as the audience, that clearly they’ve never seen, you know, a plumbed toilet before, and this is a new experience for them. And in the novel, I think it’s, Grandpa and Uncle John who get to experience the toilet for the first time.
Thompson: Well there’s also, grandma falls asleep in the toilet in one of the gas stations on the way out there as well. But I don’t think that one’s actually a toilet.
Thompson: Is it an outhouse?
Anthony: I think it’s an outhouse.
Blackburn: Trait, if I might make one other recommendation to our listeners who like this story, if they read The Grapes of Wrath, read it more than once. The first time you read it, you’re pulled by the narrative. What’s going to happen? You start caring about these people. Go back and read it a second time, third time. By the fourth time, you start appreciating the language, the structure, the descriptive language that Steinbeck uses. You see the art coming out of it. The first time you read it, you’re reading a story. You need to get to the art. So I would encourage people to actually study it, use it in their book clubs, pull it back out, read it again if they haven’t seen it since high school. It’s the kind of book people need to read every five or 10 years through life.
Thompson: Yeah, I agree. Like I said, this was a book that I had not read since high school. When I was in high school, I had no life experience, no context, no understanding. So I don’t remember it being a big impact on me, except as a high school boy, the very end of the book being like, oh, you know, very off-putting. But as I read it just a few weeks ago, it hit me in completely different ways, and I agree with everything that you’ve said. And even the ending, I think has a bit of poetry and dignity to it that I didn’t see when I was younger.
Blackburn: I have a photograph of that scene.
Anthony: So there was a play version that was written in the 1940s, I believe. No, I take that back. Steppenwolf, in about 1988, did an adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath as a play, and they restored, if you will, the ending, which a lot of people had forgotten about because they’ve been watching the film for so many years. They restored the original scene of the ending in the boxcar, with Rose of Sharon essentially feeding a starving man. She’s just lost her baby as a stillborn baby.
Blackburn: Spoiler alert there.
Thompson: And I have to say, it’s in a barn. It’s not in the boxcar. They moved out of the boxcar in the book because of the flood.
Anthony: That’s right.
Thompson: So Ma takes Rose of Sharon, and they move, they find a barn on higher ground, and that’s where they find the man who is starving.
Anthony: And so there are two more things I’m hoping we get to here. One of them is the title, and the other is the story of the community camp in Oklahoma City. So the great irony is that the Joads go from Oklahoma, and they go through Oklahoma City, and they’re on their trek, and they are staying at all these migrant camps, and a lot of the locals don’t like them. You know, there’s all this violence against the migrants in the migrant camps, and at one point they’re going to burn out, you know, the migrant camps. But then they get to this government camp, right, which has the toilets, which has the dance floor, which has wooden platforms for them to put their tents on and things like that. And it’s seen as kind of like the, you know, the Ritz-Carlton of the migrant camps.
But the irony is that Oklahoma City had one of the earliest versions of this camp, and it was not put together by the federal government and the, what we think of as the New Deal relief programs that that most of the California camps, I think there were about 15 of these camps in California eventually, mostly from like 1936 to ’40 kind of time period. But Oklahoma City had a community camp that was actually put together by members of the Oklahoma City community, and it started much earlier in terms of the social services that were happening in this kind of riverside district, the area along the river in Oklahoma City, which was prone to flooding. And so that’s why most people who were going to actually build a structure didn’t build there, because especially in 1923, you know, we had this terrible flooding in Oklahoma City, where that whole area got wiped out. But that was an area in the teens and ’20s where the immigrant populations were coming to live in Oklahoma City, and so it was the focus of a lot of the social services for the Methodist women, the Episcopal women. The Kiwanis Club had built a friendship center down there. It was sort of the focus of a lot of the social services that were being done for the immigrants. And then when the Okies started coming in for the migration, the farmworker migration, then some people in Oklahoma City got together and said, hey, we’re going to have disease. We’re going to have all kinds of other people if we don’t figure out how to better organize this area of town to accommodate these people. And I think Dr. Bob knows the the story of that a little better.
Blackburn: Just to add a few details. Good description. Albert McRill was the city manager. He took the lead in this and would write about it. If someone wants to read about community camp, it’s an entire chapter in a book called And Satan Came Also. That’s probably where you first read it. A great book has been reprinted with footnotes. But Albert McRill is one of my heroes. When I talk about people who take care of others and Oklahoma City history and give back, Albert was a very successful, businessman, became city manager, reformed city manager, fighting organized crime, and organized crime controlled Oklahoma City politics up to that point. And he really fought back, and he wrote a book about all of that. But community camp was really there because thousands of families were living in the river valley, and they were living in caves, tin shacks, cardboard, and they wanted to do something about it, and city government in a very conservative state, says, we’ve got to do something to help these people, and they did. That’s one of my favorite stories. Thanks for bringing that up.
Anthony: And it was a public-private partnership, if you will, because there were a lot of the churches. And like I said, those civic organizations like the Kiwanis Club who were already doing social work in that part of town. And so when the city said, hey, we’re going to try to coordinate here, then you had like the Methodist women who were helping teach the schools and the Episcopal women who were helping with the meals and the kinds of things that they were doing at the community camp. So now then what we get, and this is pretty early on, this is, I think 1932 about when this effort really starts in Oklahoma City. And so the federal government eventually looks at this and says, this is a good model. We need to try to implement this in some other places, but then you get the pushback from the people who say, wait a second, you start building the Ritz-Carlton of migrant camps here in Oklahoma City, and people are going to want to stay, right? You know, and we don’t want these people here. So it’s, you know, the attitude in Oklahoma City evolves.
It starts from a good place, but it evolves the same way that it eventually does in California. And the reason the Californians hate The Grapes of Wrath is because of the way that they’re depicted as being, you know, to call them unwelcoming is an understatement. Right? The violence with which they went after some of these Okies and people in pretty destitute circumstances who did not find a welcoming group when they got to California, and even found workers and farmers associations that were taking advantage of them.
Thompson: Just one example from the book. “Well, Okie used to mean that you was from Oklahoma. Now it means you’re a dirty son of a bitch. Okie means you’re scum. Don’t mean nothing itself. It’s just the way they say it. But I can’t tell you nothing. You got to go there. I hear there’s 300,000 of our people there and living like hogs, because everything in California is owned. There ain’t nothing left.” And that was a scene right after the Joad family gets to California in Needles, and there’s a migrant who is going back to Oklahoma from California. And another scene where they stop at a gas station and the gas station attendant talks to his coworker and they say, “Well, you and me got sense. These goddamn Okies got no sense and no feeling. They ain’t human. A human being wouldn’t live like they do. A human being couldn’t stand it to be so dirty and miserable. They ain’t got a whole lot. They ain’t a whole lot better than gorillas.” And so, yes, without welcoming.
Anthony: Without the gorillas, that part is in the movie as well. So, the other thing I wanted to make sure we got to was the title of the book and where it comes from. So a lot of people will recognize The Grapes of Wrath as being a line from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and I’m going to apologize in advance and hope the post-production can substitute a real version of this, but the lyrics are (singing) “mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He has trampled out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He has loosed the faithful lightning of His terrible swift sword. His truth is marching on.” And then the chorus that everybody knows. “Glory, glory, hallelujah!” Okay, so the key there, is that this Civil War-era battle hymn, right? The “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and it’s 100% a Union battle hymn. Right?
Thompson: It’s an anthem for the Union.
Anthony: The Confederates were not singing it. We’re not seeing this, but the gist of it is God is angry. God is angry about what is going on here, and God is going to do something about it. Right? So that’s, the title here is John Steinbeck invoking, not just a call to action, but a vehement call to action with the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” And the other thing he’s doing, because he actually, the first edition of the book had the music and the lyrics of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” printed on the inner, whatever they call it, the inner cover of the novel. Right? He wanted that there. And the reason was because he was being accused of being a communist, not just a socialist. Remember, one of the big differences between communism and socialism is this anti-religiosity of communism. He wanted to establish that he was not communist, that he was just a socialist. And he wanted to do that by putting the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and using that title as the title of the novel, because when he was first writing it in 1936, ’37, he had called it The Oklahomans. Right? And so it got changed. The title got changed from the Oklahomans to The Grapes of Wrath. And part of it was this, the thematics of having this, God is angry. God is going to do something about this. It’s our job to help. You know, just like in the Civil War. It was written in the context of slavery. God is angry about slavery. He’s going to do something; we’re going to help, similar kind of thing, but also not to negate the religiosity of it. And it was also kind of a thing, the saying, I’m not a communist, you know, this is not a communist book.
Thompson: Well, Elizabeth, we’ve come to the end of our time here, and I know we could sit here and talk for the next two hours about this and probably barely take a breath, but I just want to say thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing your insights with us. I learned a lot today, and I hope everybody will take this as an opportunity to go check out the movie and the book for themselves.
Blackburn: Thank you, Trait. Well said.
Thompson: Well, we will wrap this up and thanks, everybody for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
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Thompson: You’ve been listening to A Very OK Podcast, hosted by Trait Thompson and Dr. Bob Blackburn. The podcast is produced by the Oklahoma Historical Society. Visit us at okhistory.org, and find us on social media by searching for @okhistory. I encourage you to purchase a membership to OHS to help us continue our mission to collect, preserve, and share Oklahoma’s unique and fascinating history.
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