Review of The Grapes of Wrath (1940) by Donald W — 23 Sep 2009

This movie should be seen by everyone in Oklahoma. I saw it while I was a freshman at OSU. We had to watch it for our English class. When the book Grapes of Wrath came out people in Oklahoma didn't like it because it made everyone in Oklahoma look like ignorant hicks.

Most Oklahomans are also very conservative and didn't like being associated with the left wing politics in the book. They prefer Merle Haggard's Okie From Muskogee image. The movie didn't have the politics of the book and Henry Fonda and the rest of the actors portrayed the Okies as ordinary people down on their luck.

What still bothers native Oklahomans was that the book and the movie placed the character's farm outside of Sallisaw Oklahoma. Sallisaw is west of Fort Smith Arkansas in eastern Oklahoma and is not on Route 66 as shown in the movie.

This made it look like the entire state of Oklahoma was over taken by the dust bowl. The dust bowl was only in far western Oklahoma. John Ford over simplified the cause of the western migration of the Okies.

The movie implied that these people had been on the land 50 to 70 years. The truth was that these people had been homesteaders that had come to Oklahoma 25 to 30 years before and bought cheap land that U.

S. government had taken from the Indian tribes in the 1890's. In the years before World War I there was lots of rain and western Oklahoma became over populated. During the first World War the wheat fields in France became no-man's land between the Allies and the Germans.

Wheat prices went up and the Oklahoma farmers made lots of money. After the war wheat prices fell and farmers started falling deeper and deeper into debt. Unfortunately they were bad farmers using techniques from the east that destroyed the western prairie.

When the 22 year drought cycle returned the the 1930's the top soil blew away creating the dust bowl. When banks began failing during the depression the banks began foreclosing on the loans. Ford used the collapse of the sharecropping system as the explanation for the farmers being forced off the land.

The movie has some good road side scenes of Route 66 and uses downtown McAlester Oklahoma to double for Oklahoma City. There is a shot of the Court House in Sayre Oklahoma that is on Route 66. The movie shows how a small number of handbills advertising jobs in California started the mass migration of unemployed from Oklahoma to California.

Once the story gets to California the story gets into the subject that Steinbeck knew about. The intolerance the Californians had toward the Okies. They didn't realize that these were the last settlers of the last western migration that had begun at the end of the Revolutionary War.

The original settlers in California had been from the north and had been Pro-Union Republicans, these new settlers were Southern Democrats. The movie shows how the Californians thought they were some kind of Communist sympathizers and Union agitators.

The Californians treated them like second class citizens. In the end the movie uses a U.S. Government camp to leave the impression that the solution to the problems of human suffering can be solved by the Government.

This was the typical attitude at the hight of the New Deal in 1940. By the time the movie came out the Okies were being absorbed into the expanding military-industrial complex in support of World War II.