2026 Spring Read: Okies Never Refused Food

Okies Never Refused Food
by Jane Holwerda

Hello, Radio Readers! I’m Jane Holwerda in Dodge City, Kansas, weighing in the American classic The Grapes of Wrath. Alluding to both the New Testament book of Revelations and the American abolition song The Battle Hymn of the Republic, the phrase “grapes of wrath” promises justice for those who suffer and to those who caused it. And so John Steinbeck’s novel open our 2026 Spring Read: “Route 66—A Hundred Years of the Mother Road.”

Steinbeck had spent much of the “dirty ‘30’s,”the 1930s, the Great Depression, observing and researching farm laborers, migrants who had fled drought and dust clouds in the American south and Midwest. He documented their struggle for the good life in a region where work was transitory, labor cheap, housing a truck bed, and food scarce. He witnessed their struggle to understand how in Steinbeck’s homeland, California, the promised land of milk and honey, they were surviving at the whim of weather and farm managers, and by chasing crop cycles.

He said he wanted “to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Depression and the plight of the worker]” (qtd in Brittanica, https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Depression).It was his way, I think, to shine light on a very dark pit of human suffering…that of Americans, families, displaced, denigrated, unemployed, sick, hungry, and dying because of a failed and broken national economy.

So, driven to call attention to such gross social injustice, and after a couple of years to review and organize notes collected over several years talking with and observing migrants in camps and fields, then months of preliminary writing, he completed his fifth novel in just 100 days. Published in 1939, The Grapes of Wrath was a top-selling book and won a Pulitzer.

Portraying labor unions and collective housing in positive lights made Steinbeck’s novel very popular with readers concerned with the “plight of workers.” Grapes of Wrath also incited haters who burned and banned it as communist propaganda, claiming its portrayal of employers and bankers as abusive profiteers was libelously wrongminded. Then, as now, one citizen’s facts are another’s surreality.

Some of the most memorable conversations I’ve shared in about Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath happened when I had the honor to facilitate discussions in Kansas communities under the auspices of what was then known as the Kansas Humanities Council. At that time not many remembered the Dust Bowl or the Great Depression from their first-hand, lived experiences of course, but many offered family and community stories of lost farms, kin, and neighbors, of making clothing from flour sacks and other ways of making do and reusing, of wanderers looking for work and asking for food, and of sharing even the most limited resources.
The ending of the Grapes of Wrath to some has been a controversial ending, where Rosasharn, deserted by her husband, her baby stillborn, with her parents’ encouragement, offers her lactating breast to a starving man to suckle—this didn’t provoke shock, maybe some embarrassment, but mostly just nods of understanding.

Afterall, in what kind of world is it shocking to feed the hungry, insure shelter, and to help each other? As Rosasharn’s mother says, no one in their family, Okies they may be, ever “refus[ed] food an’ shelter or a lift on the road to anybody” (qtd in Shillinglaw, On Reading The Grapes of Wrath).It’s what good people do.

From Dodge City, Kansas, I’m Jane Holwerda for High Plains Public Radio Radio Readers, celebrating “Route 66 - One Hundred Years on the Mother Road”-- with you.