Marking the 70th anniversary of the publication of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, today The Oklahoman had a story — front page — about the evolution of the term “Okie” from slur (intentional or perceived) to proud label of strength against adversity. A sidebar story looked at reactions to the book through history.
Quoted in the article (and this really impressed me, so credit where it’s due), was Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a native “Okie” who now lives in San Francisco. They mentioned her book, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie, which is certainly appropriate for the topic at hand, but she’s a radical lefty (the subtitle of her site is “feminist, revolutionary, historian”), so getting a plug in The Oklahoman was unexpected (by me, anyway).
OPUBCO also produced a video about the how residents of Sallisaw, Oklahoma — where Steinbeck’s fictional Joad family was from — feel about the use of their town in the book (see below). The Dust Bowl didn’t hit Sallisaw much, and I suspect the town was used because of the emotional resonance of its name. Anyway, many of them are still miffed about it, and profess not to like the book or film, though it’s doubtful they’ve read it since a teacher in the video seems to indicate that they are not made to read the iconic novel, and can substitute another Steinbeck work. That way it’s much easier to continue to perpetrate the myth that Steinbeck was maligning poor folk from Oklahoma.
Anyway, it’s worth a look at the graphically enhanced online feature that expands the sidebar story from the dead tree edition into somewhat broader overview of the book’s history of controversy and acclaim.
I’ve thought a lot about the depression and dust bowl era lately, since that was the last real flowering of radical activity in this part of the country…I think we may have forgotten as a state and a people how bad it really was. I stumbled onto some radical dust bowl poetry by Kansas poet Kenneth Porter (a friend and fellow traveler of Oklahoma’s Oscar Ameringer)…
Here’s a sampling:
“Comrades of ruined lands in Asia, Europe,…:
Salud!
We have known the dictatorship of the drought,
the sun’s brazen knuckles, the dark-shirted dust-storm,
the shrapnel of hail, and the gnawing of borers
like Fascist Fifth Column;
the dust swirls in a gas-cloud, heads fall under guillotine-jaws,
lie shattered beneath aerial bombardment;
but the lines hold—
the parapets of irrigation-ditches notch the sky-line,
palisades of trees rise high and green.
The wheat will crack the blizzard’s manacles
(your fetters, too, shall split),
shake off the gagging dust
like the hempen sack of a Fascist murder-gang….
And travelers from soft, green lands who gaze
from Pullman windows and lament to see
black blizzards joining with the white Blitzkrieg
of winter over fields where wheat was sown
six months before—O pitying pilgrims, know
that still, beneath the smothering pall of dust
and rigid mail of sterile ice and snow,
the young wheat stiffens for an upward thrust.”
and much more in the same vein. It makes me sad to think that teabagging is what passes for mass action here these days, since the plains were once so radical.
I’ve thought a lot about the depression and dust bowl era lately, since that was the last real flowering of radical activity in this part of the country…I think we may have forgotten as a state and a people how bad it really was. I stumbled onto some radical dust bowl poetry by Kansas poet Kenneth Porter (a friend and fellow traveler of Oklahoma’s Oscar Ameringer)…
Here’s a sampling:
“Comrades of ruined lands in Asia, Europe,…:
Salud!
We have known the dictatorship of the drought,
the sun’s brazen knuckles, the dark-shirted dust-storm,
the shrapnel of hail, and the gnawing of borers
like Fascist Fifth Column;
the dust swirls in a gas-cloud, heads fall under guillotine-jaws,
lie shattered beneath aerial bombardment;
but the lines hold—
the parapets of irrigation-ditches notch the sky-line,
palisades of trees rise high and green.
The wheat will crack the blizzard’s manacles
(your fetters, too, shall split),
shake off the gagging dust
like the hempen sack of a Fascist murder-gang….
And travelers from soft, green lands who gaze
from Pullman windows and lament to see
black blizzards joining with the white Blitzkrieg
of winter over fields where wheat was sown
six months before—O pitying pilgrims, know
that still, beneath the smothering pall of dust
and rigid mail of sterile ice and snow,
the young wheat stiffens for an upward thrust.”
and much more in the same vein. It makes me sad to think that teabagging is what passes for mass action here these days, since the plains were once so radical.