The Ghost of Tom Joad: Guns and Populism of the Left

• In Event: Work/Force: Exploring the Politics of Work, Violence & Terror in Popular Culture

Abstract

In 21st century America, the gun symbolizes militant populism of the right but the gun was once a powerful tool for popular labor organizing and populism of the left. Interrogating the use of firearms in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939) reveals how guns played a role in resisting corporate terrorism and fighting for socialist democratic ideals. This conference paper returns to this important and popular work of literature to explore why guns were accepted as a tool for socialism, labor organizing, and resistance in the 20th century yet are often reviled by populists on the left in contemporary politics?

As Steinbeck researched, wrote, and published his novel, California politics were exploding. Upton Sinclair unsuccessfully run for governor. Carey McWilliams published the influential Factories in the Fields. The Associated Farmers of California (representing growers and their financial backers) lobbied to criminalize picketing and used guns to keep workers in line in the fields. The Nation called the Associated Farmers “organized terrorism in agriculture.” Believing that the Grapes of Wrath could substantively affect contemporary politics, forces on the right worked extensively ban the book (as well-documented in Rick Wartzman’s Obscene Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath). This conference paper treats Steinbeck’s novel as a political treatise by focusing on how the characters use guns to assert freedom, challenge the legitimacy of law, and resist terrorism. I supplement this careful analysis of the text with research in political science on Steinbeck (e.g. Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh and Simon Stow’s A Political Companion to John Steinbeck) with relevant history of the time to argue that Steinbeck’s novel functions as an important reminder that the populist left once took up arms – without apology – and interrogate what light that insight sheds on our current polarization on the role of guns in American politics and society.

Author

• Susan P. Liebell, Saint Joseph's University