Steinbeck, Guthrie, and Springsteen: From the Politics of the Frontier to the Politics of Sharing

Samuele F.S. Pardini Elon University

It wasn’t the Indians that were important, nor adventures, nor even getting out here. . . When we saw the mountains at last, we cried—all of us. But it wasn’t getting here that mattered, it was movement and westering . . . The westering was as big as God, and the slow steps that made the movement piled up and piled up until the continent was crossed. —, “The Leader of the People”, in The Long Valley)

Over the years has had the good fortune to be transposed by particularly brilliant and talented artists from its original novel form into two different media: popular music and cinema. In the case of music, this transformation occurred twice. In addition, brought the novel to the big screen in 1940 in a highly acclaimed version that gained him an Oscar for Best Director while Jane Darwell also won for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Ma Joad. The movie version was nominated for several more Oscars, including Best Picture, and Steinbeck himself loved Ford’s version of his book to the extent that he later remarked, quite tellingly as we shall see, that ’s interpretation as Tom Joad made him “believe my own words” (Ford). Equally impressed by the movie was Communist folksinger and writer , who first praised the movie on the pages of People’s World the day after he saw it in a New York City movie theater, then adapted it to musical form in his Dust Bowl Ballads record of 1940. A second musical adaptation occurred in 1995 when used the character of Tom Joad for his mainly acoustic titled The Ghost of Tom Joad.

774 Samuele F.S. Pardini

In spite of (or because of?) what is habitually considered its author’s confused, at times even reactionary politics and its largely middlebrow aesthetics, The Grapes of Wrath has shown a remarkable longevity and flexibility since it was first published in 1939, managing to appeal to artists of the caliber of Ford, Guthrie, and Springsteen whose politics and aesthetics are judged equally populist as Steinbeck’s but more progressive and grounded than his. Although quite different from one another in many respects, beginning with the genre they deal with, Steinbeck, Guthrie, and Springsteen share a thematic concern with the politics of the frontier around which The Grapes of Wrath and the songs in question revolve. At the symbolic- social level that I am interested in exploring in this study, such a concern is visible in the use these three artists make of water and water imagery, which reflects the transformation of the masculine and individualist politics of the frontier of The Grapes of Wrath into the inclusive, class-based, and rights-based differentiated politics of sharing that is espoused by Guthrie and Springsteen. Essentially, Steinbeck re-proposes the divisive hegemonic culture of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier tradition without transforming the political value of the culture such a tradition established. On the contrary, Guthrie and Springsteen subvert such value in order to invoke a politics of inclusion. That is to say, Guthrie and Springsteen resolve Steinbeck’s conflict between his politics and the cultural views that water makes manifest at various key moments in his novel. In order to illustrate critically this point, this essays charts the evolution of the politics of the frontier in The Grapes of Wrath and how it develops into the politics of sharing of Guthrie’s and Springsteen’s musical transposition and adaptation of it by focusing on three elements: The female figures of the novel (especially Ma Joad), Guthrie’s two-part rendition titled “Tom Joad I” and “Tom Joad II” respectively, and a selected group of songs by Springsteen: “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and “Across the Border” from 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad and “Black Cowboys,” “Matamoros Banks,” and “Maria’s Bed” from the 2005 album Devils & Dust, songs that were written at the same time as The Ghost of Tom Joad. A reading of the novel’s final scene in the light of these songs suggests that Steinbeck’s and Springsteen’s concept of the frontier ultimately appears as the frontier of the imagination and the utopian power of their art rather than a mere geographical construct.