LINCOLN HIGHWAY and THE GRAPES OF WRATH, road trips to American Dreams- 1939's Great Depression, all is lost but the road ahead, 1954's post-war boom straight ahead

I recently learned that The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s 1939 classic, is now a banned book. It is more than ironic that a book celebrating American grit in the inhumanly gruelling time of the Great Depression is banned in 2022, a time of unprecedented national hardship. In Grapes, The Joads, a family of tenant farmers, flee their Oklahoma home amid drought, poverty and bank foreclosures that make survival untenable. There is no hope in the Dust Bowl and, like thousands of others, they’ve seen handbills advertising jobs in California.  

The story begins as Tom Joad, paroled from prison, where he was incarcerated for a homicide in self-defense, is hitch-hiking home. He meets a preacher, who he remembers from childhood, and they travel together. Tom finds the farm home deserted and goes to his uncle’s, where the family is staying after the banks evicted all the farmers. Tom’s family is loading what possessions remain into a Sedan-truck, when he arrives. The farm repossessed, they have no option but to seek work in California. Although leaving Oklahoma would violate his parole, Tom decides to risk it. He and the preacher, Casey, join the family road trip. 

Is The Grapes of Wrath banned for it’s vision of hard-working Americans abandoned by business, government, religion  and the law?  In that desperate time, the survival of the family was questionable. Steinbeck was probably branded a Communist for his pro-union stance opposed to legally sanctioned union busting. (Is it a coincidence in 2022 that politicians who believe government should serve the needs of people, as well as business are often labelled “socialist?”)

I recently read Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles and found some insightful parallels to The Grapes of Wrath.  As the novel opens Emmett Watson, like Tom Joad, is newly paroled from prison for an accidental homicide, though his prison is a juvenile reformatory. The kindly warden who drives Everett home, like Joad’s preacher, says he had bad “luck,” but that he is a good man with his whole life ahead of him. But, like Joad, Emmett is young at 18 to be the head of the family, guardian of his 8-year old brother Billy. Both Tom Joad and Emmett Watson had fathers who were “broken by the land.” 

A big difference is that Emmett’s journey begins in 1954, not the Great Depression and Nebraska is a fertile place.  Emmett’s dad was not an experienced dirt farmer but an educated man from an old Boston family with money. As Emmett sees his father’s books and stacks of unpaid bills, he mulls over who he was. He knows he turned his back on the East from some quest to get back to the Earth and became a “piss poor farmer.” A man broken in spirit, not just financially.  Besides his failure with the farm, he lost his wife, the boys’ mother, who disappeared for parts unknown. When Emmett meets the banker, who seems to have already taken over the property, the man says his father left nothing and suggests it’s better for Emmett to move on.  The 1954 Studebaker bought with his own money from carpentry work, is his alone. He refuses to concede his car and grudgingly, the man lets it go.

Though the farm has been repossessed, Emmett doesn’t actually have to leave Nebraska. And the banker may have had his reasons, he later learns, for making him think otherwise. Then he finds money hidden in the car hidden by his dad. There’s a housing boom in the West,with the money, Emmett can go to Texas and build houses. Until he’s settled, he figures his brother could continue to stay with Sally, the banker’s daughter and his friend, until he’s settled. He can take the Lincoln Highway across to Texas. But Billy won’t stay behind and wants to go to California, where he’s traced their mother’s possible whereabouts. Emmett’s okay with California, which also has a housing boom.  He can take the Lincoln Highway to route 66 (the Joad’s road). 

The next morning ready to go, they see two inmates from the reformatory, Duchess and Wooley, who escaped in the Warden’s trunk. Everett, like Joad, worries his parole could be endangered if he’s involved with them. He agrees to drop them at the bus station. But Duchess, theatrical and completely unpredictable is a grifter and Wooley, “differently abled” scion of a blueblood New York family, have another plan.

Like the Joads, Emmett and Billy’s road proves a highly circuitous path to a new start. The inheritors of the Joad Family trip have an eccentric “family” of individuals in their Studebaker.  All are as desperate as Everett for their own reasons. Driven to his limits, trying to stay on course, the ten-day trip takes him from Nebraska, to New York’s Adirondacks, to New York City sites–a hidden hobo settlement, a bawdy house, the Empire State Building and Time Square’s culture of theatrical down and outers.

Emmett’s hard luck beginning, unlike the Joads, has more fluid less fateful consequences. Good and bad occur in equal measure, one often becoming the other. It’s partly the post war optimism founded on the industrial prowess that won WW2. The motley group  on Emmett’s road trip are related in American individualism, a kind of self-invention that was a post-war credo. With sly humor and sympathy, Towles makes you care about the stakes in unexpected turns of situations.

Steinbeck’s viewpoint of  American resettlement wasn’t just pessimistic but based on facts. There was a huge Hooverville of unemployed homeless in New York’s Central Park, and such encampments currently exist with the the wreckage of lives during the pandemic. Everyone in Emmett’s car has an individual plan for fulfillment, even Sally, who joins to get off at San Francisco. Bred to be a housewife and sick of constant cleaning and cooking, she wants a paying job in her future. They want to get on, not just exist.

What may seem an odd parallel in these stories is the link between Rose of Sharon, the naive pregnant teenager in Grapes and Billy Watkins. An adult by the end of the novel, she provides hope for mankind’s continuance, when she offers her breast milk to a starving stranger (after her mother agrees. That is enough to get the book banned).  Lincoln Highway provides redemption through the precocious Billy.  He finds postcards their mother sent,hidden by their father, which point the way to a possible (though maybe not probable) reconciliation. Unlike Emmett, Billy is a believer in the magic of life, the value of serendipity and the meaning of heroes and their journeys. Throughout the book, when bad things happen, like a theft from a fallen preacher, Billy’s faith continues. Unlike the preacher in Grapes who loses his faith, Billy’s preacher has lost his moral compass.

On the Joads’ journey, there is the fateful deaths of members of the family. There are  confrontations with a business model which guarantees starvation for migrants fortunate enough to find work. There are big corporate farmers in collusion with police and state law enforcement authorities.  In Lincoln Highway authorities seem fair and even understanding. The only public agency that offers relief from exploitation for the Joads is the New Deal agency, which offered decent conditions and protection from police harrassment, if not work or food.

In 2021, when Lincoln Highway was published, it delivered an enjoyable, even heart-warming fable of a more promising time. In 1954, America’s “can-do” culture offered promise to innovative people with skills and ideas. Fortunes were made, the standard of living rose. In the 60s, it looked like there was no ceiling to human advancement–business, sciences, arts. Now in 2022, we are aware of human limitations. As creatures on a degraded planet, we suffer from lack of a universal will to reclaim our habitat and risk human survival.  In our country, economic inequality seems institutionalized in our corporate business estates. We certainly need inspiration in these times.

Is Grapes banned, because there’s too much similarity to a world ahead, if the country and the world doesn’t change course?  Too much reality for kids in a pandemic, trying to escape with mind-candy on phones?  No one wants young people to suffer. Yet this book is both a cautionary tale and a story with an inspiring sense of hope in the human will to survive, The grit of the Joad family is tremendous.  I also believe Lincoln Highway highlights the perils of self delusion of an era, where puruing money and comfort were all. The sense of young Billy was a touching avowal of the existence of goodness and purpose. 

I think these books should be taught together. And no book should be banned. Religious  values and the dignity of man are at the core of Grapes of Wrath.  Similarly, I see Jung or Joseph Campbell in Lincoln Highway.  These two viewpoints are not incompatible. 

S.W.