Lessons From the Great American Novel

Their goal is to keep us apart. But shared literature means shared values. I'm not giving that up.

A few years back, my husband discovered the Great American novel.

We are big fans of the library, particularly for our bookworm son, and on a trip to the library he had picked up The Great Gatsby for himself. One night he looked up from it and, with a somewhat bewildered expression, said This is really good.

It is, I replied.

He told me that one paragraph in particular stunned him. How did Fitzgerald think up that description? How did he find those words? A good question. It's the same question you'd ask Monet or Rembrandt or Van Gogh - how did you think to use that color, that brush, that stroke?

There are other novels like that, you know. I said. You probably read them in high school. You read Grapes of Wrath, right?

He shrugged. (He was not the best student in high school.)

And, because my copy was donated long ago, so began my online search for the full text of Chapter 14 of the Grapes of Wrath.

And yes, I remember the exact chapter.

The great owners, striking at the immediate thing, the widening government, the growing labor unity; striking at new taxes, at plans; not knowing these things are results, not causes. Results, not causes; results, not causes. The causes lie deep and simple—the causes are a hunger in a stomach, multiplied a million times; a hunger in a single soul, hunger for joy and some security, multiplied a million times; muscles and mind aching to grow, to work, to create, multiplied a million times.

~John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Squatters along the highway near Bakersfield, California; Dorothea Lange, photographer, Library of Congress

I must have been 16 years old when I read that chapter the first time. It's just a few pages, really. Less than 1,000 words. No plot, no story - an essay tucked into a novel about inequality and dignity and fortitude.

But even then - with just 16 years under my belt - I recognized the power of those words. I remember my eyes welling up in Miss McCoy's class as I read them. I can smell and see that moment in that room now, more than 30 years later.

I read and re-read and re-read that chapter again and again until I had almost memorized it: THE WESTERN LAND, nervous under the beginning change. The Western States, nervous as horses before a thunder storm. The great owners, striking at the immediate thing...

Whether you consider it a chapter, an essay, a poem - however you categorize it, the central core is "need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action." The need of one man multiplied a million times, and shared a million more, creates the only power that will cause the great owners to shudder.... because it leads to massive, systemic change.

And of course, that change is what the great owners fear.

Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here "I lost my land" is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate—"We lost our land." The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one.

~John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

I found the chapter for my husband, and before giving it to him I read it again myself - then again, and again, and again. And again, just like 30 years ago, my eyes welled up with the power of it all.

The Grapes of Wrath was written in 1939, but it could have been written in present day. Some things are constant.

Great owners. Great inequality. Great poverty. Great suffering.

And the need for Great Owners to keep the people from seeing that their suffering is collective, no matter what flavor that suffering might be.

Yesterday, in her excellent substack The View from Rural Missouri, Jess Piper wrote about The Great Gatsby – a book she taught six times a day for seven years straight. She talked about how characters Tom and Daisy “smashed up things and creatures” and “retreat back into their money and let others clean up the mess they had made” – and how we are seeing the same behavior from the billionaires today. And I knew exactly what she was talking about, because I remember Gatsby from reading it in Miss McCoy’s class, just before reading Grapes of Wrath.

So I told her this story, of my husband finding Gatsby on his own and being enthralled by it. I shared with her my love of Grapes of Wrath, and how those words speak to me today just as powerfully as they did when I was 16.

And then she reminded me: This is why we read the canon. We need a shared experience.

And of course, she’s right.

I knew what Jess was talking about – with Tom and Daisy’s vast and monied carelessness – because I had read Gatsby, too. And because I read it, I had a shared framework – together with an empathy born not of shared lived experience but of shared imagination.

We learn empathy by being in someone else’s shoes – even if we only get there via the pages of a novel, or from a painting, or from a poem, or from a song. There’s a reason artists and authors are feared dissidents. They allow people to sit next to one another, to empathize with one another, even if they are physically millions of miles apart.

That is power, friend.

It’s why the banning of books, hamstringing of education, protests against social and emotional learning, vilification of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, white-washing of history – they all have their roots in this age-old fear:

Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other.

Friend, Grapes of Wrath is one of the most frequently banned books, even today. The motivations and strategies of the Great Owners of today are not so different than those of the Great Owners of 1939.

They need to keep us apart – and drive as much of a wedge between us as they can. Not because it furthers any collective American interest.

Because keeping us apart furthers their interest.

If their goal is to keep us apart, our goal needs to be to bring one another together. We fight back in the simplest and most elemental of ways. We empathize. We lift others up. We read, and remember, and share messages that foster this collective identity.

We see Joe Biden doing that on the stump more and more – talking about the Great American comeback – allowing us collectively to be the protagonists in this fantastic success story. We see him reminding us of our shared history – reminding us that when Americans come together, there’s nothing we can’t do.

I don't think we're seeing the end of it. I think it's the beginning.

And, once again, you can see the nervousness under the beginning change.

Nervous, like horses before the storm.

Let's get to work.

P.S. If you haven't read Chapter 14 in a while, scroll to the bottom after the actions to see the full text. You won't be disappointed.

Small Deeds to Do for May 14, 2024

Here’s the part where – if you are so inclined – we roll up our sleeves and engage in what I like to call Action Therapy. Each Tuesday I share a Small Thing to Read, a Small Event to Attend, and a Small Call to Make. You can tuck these actions into your week with ease – and know that you’re doing something today to make tomorrow better.

A Small Thing to Read:

Much ink has already been spilled about the most recent NYT polling results that – at least at first glance – look pretty awful for Biden. But with polling (as with most things) the devil is in the details, and we need to look more closely at the actual data.

Lucky for us, Jay Kuo of The Status Kuo, has done so with this excellent piece.

As he says, rather than simply “ignoring the polls” he:

prefer[s] … to question the polls and their methodologies and call them out on why they are non-predictive and how they have been misused to create electoral agita. In doing so, I hope to arm readers with actual arguments and data that they can absorb and perhaps even transmit to others whose hair may be on fire. Telling the fire-setters to ignore the polls, when none of the media ever does, is unlikely to prove effective. Explaining, on the other hand, that the poll they may be citing is an outlier, and not to be taken at face value for the following reasons, is a far more informed and productive path, in my view.

Go check it out at The Status Kuo.

A Small Thing (or two) to Attend

Wednesday at 8pm ET: RSVP for the final Powering Progress education series event -- Persuasion to Power: Using Words that Win with Anat Shenker-Osorio this Wednesday, May 15 at 8pm ET/5pm PT. Anat is principal and founder at ASO Communications and in this session, she’ll be providing expert guidance on “mobisuasion” -- the art of mobilization and persuasion. Learn how to navigate messaging around hot-button topics and specific issues from one of the best in the biz.

Thursday at 7:30 ET: Join Jessica Piper (and yours truly) for the Blue Tennessee monthly meetup!

Blue Tennessee is Every State Blue’s most recent expansion. We build grassroots communities that create a funding floor for Democratic state legislative nominees, making sure no Democratic nominee (and no voter) is left behind. We’re so, so excited to have launched in TN, and for this month’s meeting are thrilled to be joined by Jessica Piper and Dale Roy Robinson of Field Team 6, as well as some excellent TN state legislative candidates. You should come! I’ll save you a seat. Register HERE.

A Small Call to Make: H/T Jessica Craven!

As always, Jessica has a lovely description of why this call is important. This one just emerged today, and I agree with her that we need to speak with one voice here:

Today I’m making an exception to my rule of keeping Israel/Palestine calls out of this particular newsletter. I’m doing so because I’m making an assumption. That assumption is that we are generally agreed that holding back offensive weapons from Netanyahu to discourage him from using them in Rafah is a good move on Biden’s part, both morally and politically.

That being agreed upon, (I hope), Republicans are now teeing up a vote on a bill that would enable them to go around President Biden and send the bombs anyway. It’s heartless, yes, but also performative—they know Biden will veto it. Still, they’re trying hard to make themselves look like the “good guys” and to divide Democrats over it. For that and other reasons the Democratic leadership team is urging everyone in its caucus to vote against it.

I am, therefore putting a call about it in here. I think it’s important that a) Republicans know that we see what they’re doing and don’t approve of it, and b) Democrats know that we support them in voting no and have their backs.

Here’s the script:

Hi, I'm a constituent calling from [zip]. My name is _______.

I know that a Republican-led bill called the Israel Security Assistance Act will reach the floor tomorrow. It ties the hands of the president in a Republican effort to score political points at home. I want the Congressmember to oppose it.

[If GOP add:] First, I support the President’s decision to withhold these offensive weapons. Bombing Rafah will not make Israel safer or bring home the hostages any faster. Also, I really don’t appreciate the Republican party’s wasting time on messaging bills like this when there is serious work to be done helping Americans. Please ask the Congressmember to get their priorities straight! Thanks.

[If Democrat add:] I support the President’s decision to withhold these offensive weapons. Bombing Rafah will not make Israel safer or bring the hostages home any faster. I hope the Congressmember will support him.

Also please ask the Congressmember to prioritize funding the Affordable Connectivity Act! This is really important to me. Thanks.

And one final “thing to read.” Enjoy, friend. I’ll see you in a few days’ time.

JOHN STEINBECK
“CHAPTER 14 (THE GRAPES OF WRATH)”

THE WESTERN LAND, nervous under the beginning change. The Western States, nervous as horses before a thunder storm. The great owners, nervous, sensing a change, knowing nothing of the nature of the change. The great owners, striking at the immediate thing, the widening government, the growing labor unity; striking at new taxes, at plans; not knowing these things are results, not causes. Results, not causes; results, not causes. The causes lie deep and simple—the causes are a hunger in a stomach, multiplied a million times; a hunger in a single soul, hunger for joy and some security, multiplied a million times; muscles and mind aching to grow, to work, to create, multiplied a million times. The last clear definite function of man—muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need—this is man. To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam; to take hard muscles from the lifting, to take the clear lines and form from conceiving. For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you may say of man — when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back. This you may say and know it and know it. This you may know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the market place, when prisoners are stuck like pigs, when the crushed bodies drain filthily in the dust. You may know it in this way. If the step were not being taken, if the stumbling-forward ache were not alive, the bombs would not fall, the throats would not be cut. Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live—for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died. And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live—for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken. And this you can know—fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.

THE WESTERN STATES nervous under the beginning change. Texas and Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas, New Mexico, Arizona, California. A single family moved from the land. Pa borrowed money from the bank, and now the bank wants the land. The land company—that’s the bank when it has land—wants tractors, not families on the land. Is a tractor bad? Is the power that turns the long furrows wrong?

If this tractor were ours it would be good—not mine, but ours. If our tractor turned the long furrows of our land, it would be good. Not my land, but ours. We could love that tractor then as we have loved this land when it was ours. But this tractor does two things—it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The people are driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think about this.

One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and I am bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here “I lost my land” is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate—”We lost our land.” The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first “we” there grows a still more dangerous thing: “I have a little food” plus “I have none.” If from this problem the sum is “We have a little food,” the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours.

The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side-meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It’s wool. It was my mother’s blanket—take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning—from “I” to “we.”

If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into “I,” and cuts you off forever from the “we.”

The Western States are nervous under the beginning change. Need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action. A half-million people moving over the country; a million more, restive to move; ten million more feeling the first nervousness. And tractors turning the multiple furrows in the vacant land.

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